microsoft word fee-engelhard h u m a n i m a l i a 9:1 reviews margery fee so what do polar bears think about us? michael engelhard. ice bear: the cultural history of an arctic icon. university of washington press, 2017. xiii, 288 pp. pb. $29.95 us engelhard’s book fills a large gap. excellent books by ian stirling and andrew durocher on the biology and behavior of polar bears have been published recently, but the story of the white bear’s persistent ability to capture human imaginations has not, until now. been comprehensively tracked. engelhard is “more interested in attitudes than actions” (72), a focus that puts myths and mistakes before historical and scientific facts. nonetheless, this work of anthrozoology also contains many facts, both sobering and intriguing. engelhard’s expertise derives from his work as an alaskan wilderness guide, his graduate degree in cultural anthropology, and his many important nature publications. the book includes a circumpolar map, detailed footnotes, an index, a selected bibliography, and a list of important associations and websites. it is eminently scholarly, citing an impressive array of sources from icelandic manuscripts to master’s theses to records in german. that said, engelhard’s clear and easy style will appeal to general readers, as will the more than 160 well-chosen and often dramatic illustrations. margery fee --so what do polar bears think about us? 173 the book begins with a timeline that starts with the first documented hunting of polar bears around 8000 years before the present. an introductory overview is followed by the life story of knut, born in the berlin zoo in 2006, whose brief life attracted rockstar levels of attention. eleven chapters follow, organized by general themes examined in roughly chronological order, recounting stories of bears as early commodities, bears as “man-killers,” bears in circuses and zoos, bears in indigenous hunting cultures, bears as meat, bears as figures of spiritual transformation, bears as symbolic helpers and protectors, bears as icons of sexuality, bears in new-age totemism, particularly as symbols of climate change, and bears as tourist attractions. as engelhard makes clear in his introduction, the intersection of modern humans and polar bears has led to a depressing history of slaughter, beginning in the late nineteenth century, when whalers and sealers found themselves in the far north. polar bears provided meat, fur, and an extra income through sales of living animals to circuses and zoos, and pelts, skulls, teeth, and claws as exotic trade commodities. the bears were killed from boats and later, planes, or with traps that relied on the bear’s natural curiosity to attract them. in 1973, the “polar bear nations” of canada, the soviet union, norway (svalbard), the united states and denmark (greenland) signed the “agreement on the conservation of polar bears” to limit hunting, permitting it only for scientific study, in self-defence, or by indigenous hunters using traditional methods. the international union for the conservation of nature (iucn) polar bear specialist group first listed the bears as vulnerable in 2006 and reaffirmed this assessment in 2015. however, despite this judgment, the convention on the trade in endangered species (cites) — failed to ban trade in polar bear parts in 2010. writing a detailed cultural history covering a diverse array of cultures over a long period is a tough task. no real narrative through-line is possible here, given the many ways that polar bears have been represented—from snarling monster to wide-eyed children’s toy—and the array of locations where humans have encountered them, from bear pits to ice floes. engelhard describes himself as “a historian of world-views,” who believes “that invented attributes or incidents reveal our values and psychological needs even more clearly than purely historical records, because they require so much creative effort” (34). he deals with an astonishing array of creative and intellectual effort and his accounts, studded with engaging detail, will certainly inspire further reading. for example, londoners became familiar with polar bears after henry iii received one as gift from the king of norway; it was kept in the menagerie in the tower of london. chained by the neck, it fished for itself in the thames. polar bears were kept in the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 174 tower until 1808. engelhard argues that “in the 1610-11 theatrical season, polar bears could have starred in three shakespeare productions” (42). since theatre impresario philip henslowe and his actor son-in-law had a royal warrant to keep two white bears, this case is not implausible. given their owners, these bears certainly are early figures in a long history of performing bears, also carefully documented in the book, a history now nearly ended by animal rights activists. engelhard’s overview of paintings from the age of british exploration includes one representing a young nelson clubbing a polar bear with the butt of his rifle. humans exaggerate the danger of any animal that has attacked or killed a human although men kill far more polar bears than the reverse. early explorers did have frightening encounters with polar bears, to be sure, and managed to convey their terror to an audience eager for sensational news of far-off lands. herman melville, creator of another white threat, is quoted: “witness the white bear of the poles, and the white shark of the tropics: what but their smooth, flaky whiteness makes them the transcendent horrors that they are...?” (qtd. 76). edwin henry landseer’s “man proposes, god disposes” (1864) depicts polar bears on the wreck of one of the ships of captain sir john franklin’s 1845 polar expedition, tearing at a flag and snarling at a skeletal human rib cage. his overview of the representations of franklin’s and many other arctic expeditions not only documents the toll they took on the real polar bear population, but also highlights the racist conflation in many depictions of the inuit and the bears as equally savage or primitive. engelhard convincingly depicts how the polar bear reigns in what he calls a “geography of fantasy,” a requisite feature of arctic representations. once a terrifying and distant threat, the polar bear and the peoples associated with it were rendered familiar in the twentieth century for southern audiences in circuses, zoos, world’s fairs, photographs, and films. although primarily focused on western representations, engelhard also delves into indigenous beliefs and practices around polar bears. the inuit have always believed that polar bears have “isuma,” intelligence, and say that the polar bear taught them how to hunt seals. as engelhard notes, for them the polar bear “is but one strand in a web of kinship, competition, and obligation” (121). they hold a widespread indigenous belief that animals are more powerful than humans and deserve immense respect. for them, eating polar bear meat is a reaffirmation of community, and engelhard notes that their views should not be conflated with those of incomers with different perspectives. who knew that darwin credited someone besides alfred russel wallace with the independent discovery of the theory of evolution? james lamont deduced that polar margery fee --so what do polar bears think about us? 175 bears must have evolved from brown bears, since polar bears require a diet of fatty seals to survive the cold. thus, he reasoned, seals must have evolved first, and then polar bear then evolved from brown bears driven into the north by starvation or climate shift. indeed, recent hybrids between polar bears and grizzlies have been reported, and dna testing has revealed that this process of evolution and hybridization means the polar bear’s family tree is tightly integrated with that of terrestrial bears. and there is much more to learn and reflect on in this engaging book. judith still -putting derrida to work h u m a n i m a l i a 11:2 reviews judith still putting derrida to work sarah bezan and james tink, ed. seeing animals after derrida. lanham: lexington books, 2018. xxii + 250 pp. $105.00 (£70.00) (hc); $99.50 (£65.00) (e-book). this edited collection of 12 articles, plus an introduction, takes off from jacques derrida’s writing on animals — in particular a short section of his the animal that therefore i am. these few pages, setting up a naked derrida fixed by the gaze of his cat (a vision which does, it is true, form a kind of leitmotif in his long essay), have proved fascinating to many of the critics who refer relatively briefly to his substantial work on the human construction of “the animal.” perhaps there is something of an illicit, yet allowed (since he brings it up himself), thrill for the normally dry academic in imagining a revered philosopher caught with his trousers down — a little pussy staring at his sex, his penis, perhaps pondering the possibility of leaping and biting the temptingly dangling appendage. and here i am bringing it up again, ensnared in a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 224 tradition, however brief, commenting on what others have found important to comment on. few commentators (even very few of those whose métier is literary criticism), however, have taken seriously the literary quality of this autobiographical or autofictional scene. few have scented and worried the ways in which the linguistic and corporeal are carefully sutured and sundered in this encounter between a male human being and a female cat, although language and the body are such key elements in philosophical and everyday assertions about the alleged animal-human divide (and about sexual difference). robert young affirms derrida “was also a great writer fully aware of the literary dimensions and aspirations of his own work” (8), warning of theory’s “complex relationship to literature in its own forms of self-expression,” but sadly not all commentators are alert to this. it helps of course to make reference to the french, for example, in questioning the role of free indirect speech which is so much more common in francophone than in anglophone philosophy, the anglo tradition typically plainer in signposting any attempt to voice the opposing view under discussion. the introduction to the collection under review, for instance, repeatedly refers to “the animal” in derrida, and the possibility of critiquing this (e.g. p. xii). and yet derrida is almost always referring to a philosophical tradition which he is unpicking when he uses the term “l’animal” or, a slightly different set of stories, “la bête” — as suggested in a quotation from the animal that therefore i am on the previous page (“introduction” xi). gavin rae, in an essay that focuses on at least a few of derrida’s seminars gathered in the beast and the sovereign, also cites a good example of derrida’s challenge to the very notion of “the animal” (“the wolves of the world” 14). in relation to rae’s comments on sovereignty and wolves, as well as to other essays in the volume, i would add to the collective bibliography my own long study derrida and other animals: the boundaries of the human rather than elaborating too much here. a number of the essays in this collection are at their strongest in their analysis of a range of fascinating cultural productions (such as australian short stories, magritte, paleoart, chris marker’s films or black swan) — and individual essays may contribute importantly to the bibliographies of their particular author or artist. some of them are weaker in the way in which they set derrida to work (from the perspective of a derrida specialist). for example, josé alanis engages the reader in his very interesting account of abadzis’s graphic novel about the russian dog, laika, sent into space to die, and the way in which laika has been mourned. yet the article is haunted by classic presumptions about animal silence and the human ability to communicate, and thus tells us more about how human beings see themselves and their relationship to animals than about either dogs or indeed derrida’s writing on the animot. david huebert (writing on jack london’s fiction) is acute in his critique of other critics who emphasize judith still -putting derrida to work 225 sight over smell to the point of exclusion, and his introduction of the olfactory as part of the complex of senses is welcome. he does also acknowledge derrida’s references to, for instance, flairer, or the following of a scent in more than one sense, in the animal that therefore i am, although he is moved to critique derrida’s brief vignette of the cat’s piercing gaze because it does not focus on odor. (here i would be tempted to raise the issue of genre.) most surprising to me is huebert’s over-statement of “our” rejection of the olfactory as anal or bestial, and hence the revolutionary potential of “queering” by rehabilitating smell. there are so many references one could make to quite traditional accounts of food, love, or humor in order to query the argument that we humans do not take pleasure in sniffing. i shall randomly choose what i have on my bedside table at the moment: juliet blaxland’s relatively conservative country memoir the easternmost house. chapter 6 begins: “in the early morning, when the scent is low, you can smell the line of a fox as surely as if you had been born a foxhound” (105). she continues with the theme of the olfactory for a number of pages; i shall cite just a couple of sentences for flavor: “people always say that smell is the sense most evocative of memory […] the smell of mown grass or hay is often cited as the scent cliché most evocative of childhood, even though traffic and warm tarmac and air-borne junk food smells must be components in the scent-scene of the collective memory now” (106, my emphases). blaxland, amidst her wonderful lists of pleasurable suffolk perfumes from muck to hops to ponies, does lament that “we” do not talk more about what she calls the “smelltrack” (as distinct from soundtrack) of our lives (107), whether sea-breezy clifftops or london sausages. perhaps this plaintive note that smell is unfairly neglected is precisely a topos marshalled to highlight once again what derrida so patiently analyzes, the self-claimed specificity of the human for better (conceptual thinking) or even for worst (cruelty). similarly, another essay, an interesting analysis of affect (or lack of it) in philip k. dick’s do androids dream of electric sheep? by megan e. cannella, argues that today: the human experience is almost endlessly mediated by the pervasive influences of ever-evolving, ever-escalating technological ideologies. the omnipresence of technological mediation ostensibly haunts every aspect of human life in the twenty-first century, leaving animals, who are fundamentally free of this cult of technology, as the only true examples of pure emotion and empathy. (145) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 226 there is, however, a long history of excluding animals from “technology” — derrida focuses, for example, on heidegger as a key exponent of this ideological philosophical position. natural historians have argued that only man is a tool-using animal, then slipped to only man is a tool-making animal, and then only man makes and uses complex tools. boundaries are more slippery than they may seem at first. of course, all hangs on the question of definition — and readers may recall derrida’s early work on the definition of (the allegedly human-defining technology of) writing. the volume is then somewhat miss-sold with the back cover blurb promising that “[i]n taking up the matter of derrida’s treatment of animality for the current epoch, the contributors of this book each present a case for new philosophical approaches and aesthetic paradigms that challenge the ocularcentrism of western culture.” it is also hampered by poor copy editing, as there many typographical errors. however, there is a great deal to discover and enjoy. for instance, i found nicole mennell’s chapter on edward tyson’s “anatomy of a pygmie” both stronger in its use of derrida than some contributions, and also very interesting in its investigation of the early modern apeman boundary. works cited blaxland, juliet. the easternmost house. sandstone press, 2018. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. trans. david wills. fordham up, 2008. _____. the beast and the sovereign, 2 volumes. trans. geoffrey bennington. u chicago press, 2009-11. still, judith. derrida and other animals: the boundaries of the human. edinburgh up, 2015. young, robert. “theory, philosophy, literature.” french thought and literary theory in the uk. irving goh, ed. routledge, 2020. microsoft word beverly-meyer.pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 11:1 reviews jared beverly a theology of animality eric daryl meyer, inner animalities: theology and the end of the human. groundworks: ecological issues in philosophy and theology. new york: fordham university press, 2018. 224 pp. $115.00 hc; $32.00 pb; 31.99 e-book. eric daryl meyer’s inner animalities is an excellent examination of and challenge to the traditional status of animality in christian theological discourse, from early times to today. drawing on a number of scholars, such as derrida and agamben, meyer astutely unpacks the logical consequences of various theologies and engages his own theological imagination to better account for the animality of human beings. his book consists of an introduction, six chapters, and a conclusion, and the endmatter includes acknowledgments, endnotes, a thorough bibliography, and a helpful index. jared beverly – a theology of animality 161 the introduction outlines the contours of the debates on theology and animality. one of the goals of much of christian theology in the past two millennia is to distinguish “proper humanity” — the attributes of humans that normatively define humanity itself as an ideal along with the conditions that sustain it — from “human animality” — the attributes humans hold in common with other species (2–5). this distinction is important not only because it reinforces a divide between homo sapiens and nonhuman animals but also because it draws a dividing line within humanity itself. human animality thus poses a problem to christian writers who advocate “anthropological exceptionalism” (3), as they can’t deny the commonalities that humans and other animals share in reproduction, alimentation, elimination, etc. because the construction of this chasm between humanity and animality results in ecological “irresponsibility,” questioning the ontological status of this divide has profound ethical significance (7–8). meyer’s book provides analyses of how various theologians attempt to circumvent the problem of human animality and proposals for how theologians today might avoid such anthropological exceptionalism. the project proceeds in two parts: a historical part focusing mostly on figures from fourth-century christianity (gregory of nazianzus and gregory of nyssa) and a constructive part that creatively rethinks human animality. chapter 1 begins the historical portion of the book with a discussion of gregory of nazianzus. in gregory’s theological anthropology the mind (the properly human portion of the person) must tame and purify the flesh (the animal portion of the person); the possession and operation of such a mind institutes a division within the human itself but also between humans (who have a mind) and animals (who don’t). this anthropology is laid bare in gregory’s reading of the logos in john 1, which he associates with gnōsis (“knowledge,” a faculty of the mind) rather than zōē (“life,” which is far too close to zōon, “animal”) — a move that enacts “a subtle erasure of animality” (24). meyer, however, finds gregory’s excision of human animality incomplete, as, for gregory, fleshly existence was necessary to fill the earthly realm with praise of god to mirror the heavens’ praise. in addition, the animal part of the human is mutable, in contrast to the immaterial part, which is more stable; without this animal pliability, the purification of the human would not be possible. as a result, in spite of gregory’s disavowals, human animality is necessary for the provision of grace. chapter 2 turns to gregory of nyssa, whose “anagogical exegesis” of the song of songs directs the reader’s attention upward from the fleshly eroticism of the poem toward the immaterial god (42). as with the previous gregory, meyer finds gregory of nyssa’s attempts to excise animality from his anthropology to be ultimately unsuccessful. whereas gregory of nazianzus’s construction of humanity requires animal mutability, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 162 gregory of nyssa’s construction relies on desire, also found within the animal portion of the human. drawing on jacques derrida’s the animal that therefore i am, meyer shows that animality for gregory not an omittable waste but rather a supplement that fulfills the originary lack in proper humanity itself, providing the very desire needed to draw the soul to god. chapter 3 moves beyond the two gregories to show the diminution of human animality endemic in contemporary theological discourse. meyer examines a number of theologians from the past century or so, demonstrating their common tendency of classifying “openness to god” (variously defined and described) as a uniquely human capacity (59). meyer discusses karl rahner and wolfhart pannenberg in more detail in the second half of the chapter, drawing out rahner’s focus on “transcendentality” as the human/animal dividing line (70) and pannenberg’s argument for “exocentricity,” i.e., the human ability to go beyond one’s umwelt (77–78). all of these theologies represent an anthropology of human exceptionalism that harms nonhuman animals as well as disadvantages those humans who are deemed more “animal.” in part 2 (chapters 4–6), meyer turns from a historical analysis to a constructive argument, finding sites in biblical texts and theological traditions where the human/animal boundary can be blurred and challenged. he begins chapter 4 with an introduction to the work on animality by agamben, derrida, and deleuze and guattari and then proceeds with his argument that “human beings enjoy the greatest proximity to god in moments of commonality and connection with nonhuman creatures” (93). traditional theology has relied on genesis 1’s notion of the imago dei to imbue humanity with sovereign authority over animality, but meyer instead finds an alternative view of sovereignty in daniel 4. there, king nebuchadnezzar of babylon has to reckon with his mistaken and arrogant assertion of sovereignty as a human by being transformed into an animal by yahweh — a transformation that in meyer’s view “seems to function rehabilitatively” as he sees from an animal perspective (102). to further explore this animal perspective, meyer argues that in the “kingdom of god” that jesus announces the identity of a person is “determined from the perspective of the dispossessed” (106). drawing again from derrida and his discussion of his cat’s gaze, meyer imagines how various “dispossessed” nonhuman animals might view humans from their own perspectives. chapter 5 turns to the origins of human sin in the fall. in contrast to many traditional theologies that associate sinfulness with animality, meyer instead reads the fall in genesis 3 alongside agamben, viewing it as not an embrace of animality but rather a jared beverly – a theology of animality 163 disavowal of it, so that the fall of humanity is simultaneously the fall into humanity (128). the characteristics that come to mark human exceptionalism, such as the knowledge of good and evil, are in truth pretenses that separate the edenic humans from the animal community meant for their companionship. the first sin is thus an arrogant claim to a sovereignty that harms all animals — human and nonhuman. christianity’s solution to this dilemma, in meyer’s reading, is the “life” that the “logos” brings in john 1. in this view, jesus’s eternal life (zōē aiōnios) can be regarded as “animality without end” (144). jesus becomes human in order to show to humans their own animality. chapter 6 deals with the exclusion of animality in traditional christian eschatological imagination. for meyer’s purposes, because digestion and sexuality are biological processes associated with animals, theologians have imagined the resurrected human body with no need for food or sex and thus absent of these signs of human animality. meyer argues instead that eating and digestion are not dirty processes to be thrown out in the eschaton but rather are consistent with the practice of the eucharist. in the “eternal animality” of the eschaton (159) the sharing and consuming of flesh will occur freely among god’s creatures, including humans, but just as the partaking of bread and wine does not destroy christ, neither will this eschatological consumption destroy the resurrected creation. similarly, while sexuality is typically excised from the christian vision of heaven, meyer highlights the frequent use of marital metaphors in biblical texts used to portray union with the deity. as a result, meyer presents a resurrection in which animality is embraced and transformed rather than ignored or excluded. meyer’s conclusion returns to the “problem of human animality.” the destruction of the environment and the suffering of nonhuman animals are consequences of a construction of the self built on the rejection of one’s own animality. in order to rectify these issues, christian theology must turn away from its emphasis on human exceptionalism and learn to accept the animality of the human. my few critiques of this book stem more from desire for expansion than disagreement. for instance, as meyer introduces jesus’s criterion for judgment in chapter 4 as “solidarity with the dispossessed” (104), he repeats matthew 25’s distinction between the faithful “sheep” and the unfaithful “goats” but does not dwell on this animalizing figuration. how successful can jesus’s message of solidarity be if goats get the short shrift here? could this rhetorical use of caprine imagery affect the lives of real fleshand-blood goats? in addition, i find meyer’s case in chapter 5 for the fall as humans’ separation from animals persuasive, and i would be interested to see what he would make of a reference to the epic of gilgamesh, a possible parallel text in which the wild humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 164 man enkidu gains humanity but loses his connection to animality; could this strengthen meyer’s argument? finally, chapter 6’s discussion of eschatological sexual expression brings to mind many questions that could be explored further. considering the fact that the human guardians of companion animals often modify their sexual organs (through spaying or neutering), i wonder if these surgical procedures proceed as such into the afterlife or if the animal body reverts to a more original form. and what might this say about the relationship between humans and their pets, either way? perhaps a dialogue with theologies of trans and intersex perspectives might add to this discussion of eschatological sexual anatomy. furthermore, if the digestive function of humans and other animals in the resurrection means that “creatures consume one another” in eucharistic fellowship with one another and the divine (159), to what degree does this sharing occur sexually as well? is a human’s resurrected sexuality directed only to other humans and god, or to the rest of creation also? in the same vein, i wonder, how literally might one take the church’s marriage to the lamb (163)? these possibilities for further exploration aside, meyer’s book is a coherent and thought-provoking treatment of christian theology’s relationship to nonhuman animals and animality. his treatment of historical views and their connections to more recent theologies is informative, and he deftly shows how these theologies can be undone or imagined differently. i strongly recommend this book to theologians and biblical scholars looking for creative explorations of animals and animality in sacred traditions; additionally, animal studies scholars and environmentalists who may be unsure of the utility of christian traditions for the fostering of ecological justice will certainly find helpful resources here. this is a welcome contribution to the study of theology and animals alike. microsoft word cherry-traini h u m a n i m a l i a 9:1 reviews elizabeth cherry 19th century french animal protection, no longer a bête curieuse christophe traïni, the animal rights struggle: an essay in historical sociology. amsterdam: amsterdam university press, 2016. 206 pp. $99 hc. scholars have devoted extensive efforts towards documenting contemporary animal rights movements in western countries. we also know a great deal about early efforts for animal protection, especially in the united states and the united kingdom. in comparison, we know very little about early animal protection movements in france, and this book begins to fill that gap. contrary to its use of the term “rights” in the title, political scientist christophe traïni’s the animal rights struggle: an essay in historical sociology provides an in-depth look into the origins of animal protection movements in france, with some comparisons to early movements in the united kingdom. traïni uses archival research from the bulletins de la société protectrice des animaux (18551937), the french animal protection society, and the bulletins de la société française contre la vivisection (1884-1898), the early french anti-vivisection movement, to trace the elizabeth cherry -19th century french animal protection, no longer a bête curieuse 177 development of french animal protection movements in the 19th and early 20th centuries. in certain areas, traïni brings in comparisons with the british animal protection movement: “in order to better analyze the successive developments in animal rights campaigning this work, wherever possible, relies on a franco-british comparison” (9). instead of a fully developed comparative case, then, traïni states that “my objective when writing it was a more modest one: to convince the reader that the study of animal rights deserves much more attention than it has hitherto received” (9). primarily employing theories from sociologist norbert elias and alexis de tocqueville, traïni argues that activists in three different stages of these protection movements — early protection societies, early animal shelters, and antivivisection movements — used three different types of “sensitizing devices” to mobilize sympathizers. traïni defines sensitizing devices as “all the material support, the placement of objects, and the staging techniques that the militants exploit, in order to arouse the kind of affective reactions which predispose those who experience them to join or support the cause being defended” (15). the first two chapters provide an introduction to the general workings of norbert elias’s civilizing process, especially as it applies to animal industries of the time, such as slaughterhouses. this type of eliasian analysis of movements against animal cruelty will be familiar to readers of humanimalia, especially those familiar with the works of sociologists adrian franklin and lyle munro. the most interesting parts of the book, which contribute the most to our understanding of early animal protection movements in france, come in chapters three and four, where traïni brings to light several particularly french issues regarding animal protection. chapter three, “to act as an enlightened philosopher,” describes some of the early tactics of the société protectrice des animaux (or spa). (given the title of this chapter, one might think this chapter would discuss how the spa attempted to counter the cartesian philosophy of animals as unfeeling automatons, but descartes is not discussed in the book.) traïni details the seemingly counterintuitive campaign for eating horse meat conducted by the spa, as a way of demonstrating their “intellectualized relationship with the animal protection cause” (31). in france, people associated horse meat with pagan rituals, and thus it came to be banned by pope gregory iii in 732. since that time, horses developed a special status in society and came to be associated with nobility, and thus eating horse meat became taboo. why would the société protectrice des animaux argue for eating horse meat? in 1856, isidore geoffroy saint-hilaire, director of the société protectrice des animaux (also member of the french academy of sciences, director of the national natural history museum, and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 178 professor of zoology) argued that much of the french population was undernourished, and that horse meat, which was readily accessible and inexpensive, could help to feed the french masses. instead of being sent to a rendering plant or to unlicensed butchers who surreptitiously sold horse meat, legalizing horse meat would give horses “economic and nutritional added value” (32). despite some arguments against this from people within the société protectrice des animaux, the campaign was successful when an 1866 edict authorized and regulated the sale of horse meat for human consumption. in chapters three and four, traïni discusses how and why the société protectrice des animaux gave annual awards to people who developed inventions or apparatuses that facilitated the work of domesticated animals while reducing their suffering. these early protectionists viewed themselves as educators whose goal was to promote and guide others for the benefit of the entire community. they contributed to the “applied sciences” in the name of animal protection by giving awards for inventors of “a drinking bottle for helping horses swallow medicine, a collar to protect young chicks from being attacked by cats and other small predators, a spring-loaded trap to be used by clay pigeon shooters, and a new muzzle which was lighter and less likely to hurt the animal wearing it than previous designs” (29). in addition to these awards from the french spa, the british society for the protection of animals also gave awards to people who worked with animals on farms, as drivers, or even in butcher shops who treated animals with care and compassion, and to writers and artists who worked on projects of use to the bspa. they also targeted children by giving awards in schools. these awards, traïni argues, contributed to the “emotional economy which is the source of much of the satisfaction that activists derived from their involvement in the movement” (48). the benefactors who give these awards experience gratification when their beneficiaries, the awardees, make a show of gratitude. when these subtle encouragements failed, these animal protection organizations turned to repression and coercion, traïni argues. he shows how rspca inspectors and spa members also surveilled and intervened in animal cruelty. in france, spa members received a special card, later called a “diploma,” which allowed them to track down animal abusers and report them to the authorities. another useful element of the book comes from traïni’s wide-ranging sources of data in chapter six, “the rise in the power of tenderness,” where he employs archival data as well as literary examples to demonstrate how this new democratic era encouraged the development of compassion among youths and adults. children learned lessons on how to care for animals through children’s literature (such as anna sewell’s 1871 novel black beauty: the autobiography of a horse) and through their soft animal toys. adults elizabeth cherry -19th century french animal protection, no longer a bête curieuse 179 also learned how to take an animal’s point of view by reading poetry from robert burns, william blake, and samuel taylor coleridge, and the sympathetic figures of victor hugo’s literature, such as quasimodo, jean valjean, and gavroche, helped to develop their compassion for other people. hugo’s poem, “le crapaud” (the toad), both demonstrated and encouraged compassion for animals. companion animals no longer primarily served to show a family’s status in society, traïni argues. instead, they now served as another method for people to develop tender attitudes towards animals. in chapter seven, traïni outlines the beginnings of the early french anti-vivisection movement and develops a comparison among the three main stages of early french animal protection movements along their “emotional registers.” the earliest animal protection societies that fought against animal cruelty in public places (1840-1870) exemplify the “demopedic emotional register,” distinguished by “vigilance and pedagogical gentleness from animal welfare campaigners on one side, gratitude and pride from the penitent deviants on the other” (144). the shelter movement and movement to feed stray cats (1870-1890) occupy the “tenderness register” by making a display of their care for animals. finally, the antivivisection movement (1875-1911) created an “exposure register” because of their work to expose or unveil hidden acts of cruelty in laboratories. in this way, animal protectionists moved from attempting to develop compassion in others to working as avengers, confronting those who harmed animals. traïni also notes that around this same time, psychologists began to classify animal protectionism as a pathology: “certain individuals have an exaggerated affection for animals — zoophilia — to which they would sacrifice all human beings. antivivisectionists, who are mostly women, belong to this category of sick people” (153). throughout this chapter, traïni wonders why women might have been drawn to the animal protection movement, and offers thoughts like, “it seems reasonable to suggest that women activists were drawn to identify with the figure of the exploited animal by the fact that they themselves had experienced masculine domination” (134). unfortunately, traïni does not employ the work of ecofeminist theorists who have written extensively on this topic (such as carol adams or lori gruen), nor of sociologists who have studied women’s participation in the animal rights movement (such as rachel einwohner or emily gaarder). this chapter also includes a lengthy but tangential and temporally anachronistic critique of charles patterson’s book eternal treblinka, which does not add to the chapter’s overall argument. chapter eight, “a decreasingly wild nature,” does not fit with the rest of the book. it briefly begins with an overview of 19th century naturalists, and here it does employ some of traïni’s archival research. however, it then moves to late 20th century conservation movements, to late 20th century direct action against hunting, to early 21st humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 180 century animal rights and vegan movements, with little to no sources of data. moreover, it conflates a number of different movements, including wildlife conservation, animal welfare, animal protection, animal liberation, animal rights, and the particularly french antispeciesist movement. traïni’s book would have been better served by leaving out this attempt to bring his well-documented historical argument to the present day. traïni’s archival research is a great strength of the book. given that we know so little about the development of early animal protection movements in france, his welldocumented history adds a great deal to our understanding of these issues. he shows readers the particularities of the french case, as well as how they compare to similar developments happening in the united kingdom. the historical cases he presents are fully developed, with intriguing quotes that help readers to truly see the sentiments of the time. at the same time, traïni’s theoretical argument could have benefitted from more engagement with animal studies and social movement literature beyond elias and toqueville. we know their theories work to describe this time period, as they both wrote during and about this same period. given the breadth of his archival data, it is disappointing traïni did not explore whether and how newer social movement theories applied to this time period. theories of “moral shocks” might apply here, as traïni uses the term (26), describes how tactics “stir up emotions which were needed to fuel collective mobilizations” (69), and states that activists employ “novel shock tactics” (175), but we never see reference to the extensive research on moral shocks, nor to its theoretical origins (jasper and poulsen). similarly, traïni’s argument would have been aided by engaging with other sociologists who study emotions and animal rights activists, such as julian mcallister groves. the animal rights struggle: an essay in historical sociology provides a much-needed addition to our understanding of the development of early animal protection movements in france. readers seeking solid empirical examples of 19th and early 20th century french animal protectionists will be rewarded by this work. work cited jasper, james m., and jane d. poulsen. “recruiting strangers and friends: moral shocks and social networks in animal rights and anti-nuclear protests.” social problems 42.4 (1995): 493-512. microsoft word rooks-gregersdotteretal h u m a n i m a l i a 9:2 reviews isaac rooks “nature, read in tooth and claw” katarina gregersdotter, johan höglund, and nicklas hållén, eds. animal horror cinema: genre, history and criticism. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2015. 248 pp. $95.00 hc, $69.99 e-book. modernization and industrialization endeavor to minimize and control encounters with the non-human. consequently, many regard “wild animals” with romanticized, nostalgic delight. those aware of humanity’s impact on the environment may pity their planetary co-inhabitants, wishing to provide benevolent stewardship. conversely, the rarity and strangeness of non-domestic animals may enhance their abject reputation. people react with disgust at discovering vermin in or around their homes. on the rare occasions when animals kill or eat people, the media gawks in fascinated terror. both theriophilia and theriophobia are distorted perceptions. non-human creatures deserve protection and respect. this means acknowledging their difference from humans, differences that might make them unpalatable or dangerous. still, between –philia and – phobia, exaggerated dislike for animals poses a more obvious impediment to forging enlightened, responsible attitudes towards non-humans. isaac rooks – nature read in tooth and claw 209 it is therefore unfortunate that few scholars have devoted much attention to what katarina gregersdotter, johan höglund, and nicklas hållén call animal horror cinema, fiction films about extant animals terrorizing humans. whatever their differences, all these films, from revered classics to z-grade oddities, exploit people’s perceptions of animals’ frightful potential. animal horror cinema takes these movies seriously and considers the significance of their genre-specific representation of humanity’s relationship to the non-human world. the horror genre feels especially appropriate for engaging the anxiety-inducing conditions of the anthropocene. the editors draw clear parameters when identifying animal horror as a distinct subgenre. yes, films with mutant animals count (bring on the giant critters from 1950s b-movies). however, these animals should resemble real creatures and not be fantastic beasts (sorry, werewolves). the anthology’s subtitle (genre, history and criticism) signals that scholars can approach these texts from various methodological angles. while the anthology does not formally categorize its entries, the introduction suggests thematic connections between chapters. due to its loose groupings, readers can dip into animal horror cinema as they choose. while the individual contributions are enriched when taken in conjunction with other entries, they function independently. the anthology nevertheless works as a coherent whole since many of the chapters address similar concerns. animal horror grows out of divisions separating the human and non-human, divisions exacerbated by modernity. these movies transform that conceptual binary into a melodramatic opposition. regardless of whether these films challenge and subvert that binary, they foreground that imaginary border, leaving it open to interrogation. in addition to showcasing multiple methods for engaging these films, this anthology highlights the subgenre’s diverse array of texts. the editors note that the limited attention previously given to animal horror has gravitated towards the big three: king kong, the birds, and jaws. this collection expands consideration beyond those canonical texts. indeed, spielberg’s classic receives less in-depth critical engagement than its infamous sequel jaws: the revenge. part of the anthology’s appeal comes from it giving serious consideration to everything from laudable cult classics, to obscure schlock, to high-profile contemporary works. the eclectic menagerie showcased here ensures a tantalizing initial engagement with an understudied body of texts. before getting into case studies, the editors provide context with “a history of animal horror cinema.” the chapter covers a lot of ground quickly, going from animal horror’s pre-cinematic roots to present day. especially in the chapter’s latter half, the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 210 authors drift from a linear chronology in ways that obscure the subgenre’s development over time. it also occasionally feels as if they pad their analysis with (amusing) plot synopses. this overview works best when drawing on historian gregg mitman’s work to detail animal horror’s origins in sensationalistic ethnographies, and the migration of tropes and personnel from these “documentaries” to feature narratives. the section informally grouped as ecocritical begins with michael fuchs’s “‘they are a fact of life out here’: the ecocritical subtexts of three early-twenty-first century aussie animal horror movies.” fuchs’s introduction, which positions rogue, black water, and the reef as distinctly australian, feels underdeveloped. however, fuchs provides insights relevant to understanding animal horror regardless of nationality. fuchs’s most intriguing points come from discussion of these films’ formal presentations. their aesthetics blend naturalism with spectacular idealization. their use of (not always convincing) digital effects further compromises their realism. these narratives, inspired by true events, present humans entering a natural world they do not understand. simultaneously, fuchs argues, their conflicted aesthetics reflect our limited ability to understand and represent the non-human world from an anthropocentric perspective, through an anthropocentric medium. in “polluting and perverting nature: the vengeful animals of frogs,” jennifer schell addresses a horror film exploiting 1970s environmentalist sentiment. schell notes that previous scholarly engagement with frogs consists of fleeting acknowledgment of its surface-level progressivism. schell challenges that orthodoxy, charging that its fantastic narrative of the natural world in revolt undercuts its apparent endorsement of environmentalism, implying that nature’s self-regulation makes human intervention unnecessary. schell opens up discussion around a text (and narrative strategy) relegated to the sidelines of larger debates about popular narrative media’s ability to address pressing social issues in progressive ways. her impressive eye for detail and sense of historical context makes for a convincing close reading. maja milatovic’s “consuming wildlife: representations of tourism and retribution in australian animal horror” complements fuchs’s piece and engages its national context more fully. milatovic argues that australia’s settler-colonial identity lends resonance to the cinematic spectacle of anglos being punished for treating a hostile environment carelessly. milatovic details how many australian animal horror films deal with similar themes, so her reason for focusing on long weekend and rogue specifically feels unclear. she appears more interested in long weekend, resulting in an unbalanced analysis. however, like schell, milatovic’s appreciation of context and eye for detail makes for isaac rooks – nature read in tooth and claw 211 strong close readings. milatovic argues that both films, despite their eurocentric imperialist gaze and imagination, highlight white complicity in the exploitation and destruction of the land and wildlife. john edgar browning closes the ecocritical section with “oil and the (geo)politics of blood: towards an eco-gothic critique of nightwing.” nightwing focuses on reservation residents fending off developers and plague-carrying vampire bats, and browning argues that it respectfully grounds its allegorical solution to environmental crises in native american spirituality. however, browning’s answer to criticisms of nightwing’s representation of native americans is not wholly convincing. indeed, his descriptions make it sound problematically stereotypical. browning’s contribution does offer strong analytical work, particularly in its discussion of how nightwing adapts the gothic to the american frontier. craig ian mann provides a well written and argued contribution with “america, down the toilet: urban legends, american society and alligator.” mann details the work of critics who already recognize alligator as a work of class-conscious satire. mann enhances earlier analyses by approaching alligator as an adaptation of the urban legend about alligators in the sewer, a story offering its own social commentary. mann notes that the alligator folktale’s popularity spikes during tumultuous periods in the us, suggesting an affinity between the source material and the satirical intent of john sayles’ screenplay. mann is perhaps too intent on discerning authorial intent, but that is a slight weakness in a strong piece offering an explicit and convincing theory for why an odd piece of animal horror lore possesses great potency. as in browning’s chapter, tweaked gothic tropes feature in susanne schwertfeger’s “re-education as exorcism: how a white dog challenges the strategies for dealing with racism.” skeptics of the animal horror film genre might question its suitability for addressing serious topics. indeed, schwertfeger details how many feared that it was inappropriate for white dog, with its genre tropes and anglo director, to engage the sensitive topic of racism in america. schwertfeger argues that director samuel fuller’s cinema-savvy approach results in a reflexive narrative up to the task. white dog offers an “inverted” gothic narrative that capitalizes on the aesthetic’s strengths, while avoiding the racial prejudices tainting traditional gothic conventions. while other chapters center on specific texts, niklas salmose builds “we spiders: spider as the monster of modernity in the big bug and nature-on-a-rampage film genres” around an entire animal order. informed by philosophy and literature, salmose argues humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 212 that spiders, industrious creatures that ensnare others in their complex webs, are the ideal monstrous representatives of modernity. tackling multiple films from the 1950s and 1970s, salmose sometimes gets sidetracked by thinner texts. there is only so much to say about mesa of lost women. however, when salmose deals with richer material his analysis provides great insights. his conclusion intriguingly implies that postmodern spider films have stripped the monstrous spider of its deeper meaning, and it leaves one wanting more detail. perhaps, given the chapter’s scope and ambition, this criticism is unfair. however, it is testament to salmose’s skill that he leaves the reader wanting more. myha t. do’s “concubine and chameleons: deconstruction and consumption in pu songling’s and gordan chan’s painted skin” examines a tale of supernatural animal spirits that take human form. in doing so, it compromises the editors’ criteria for animal horror and thus feels out of place. in the introduction, the editors justify its inclusion by citing their desire to feature a non-western film, claiming that asian cinema deals with animal horror differently. without dismissing the importance of cultural specificity in regards to perceptions of animals, this overlooks numerous films from south korea, india, and thailand directly in line with the anthology’s focus. while dealing with a different kind of text, do’s feminist bakhtinian analysis makes an argument in line with a general theme of animal horror identified by the editors: these animals are horrific because they cross the border separating humans and animals, and their doing so reveals the porous nature of that division. dawn keetley’s “frozen, the grey, and the possibilities of posthumanist horror” is one of the anthology’s highlights. keetley considers the posthumanist potential of horror, a genre that traditionally rests on humanist notions of self. posthumanist horror recognizes the non-human otherness inside the human and grapples with the existential crisis of reevaluating notions of self. keetley offers two films centered on wolf attacks to illustrate different strands of horror: frozen (not the disney film) represents a humanist approach, while the grey represents a posthumanist one. keetley’s precise focus and clear thesis makes for a manageable and highly satisfying chapter that considers animal horror’s capacity to reify and challenge humanist conventions. editors gregersdotter and hållén return as the authors of “anthropomorphism and the representation of animals as antagonists.” like salmose, they cite several movies in order to explore a larger topic; in this case, they address how animal horror anthropomorphizes its antagonists to create worthy opponents. their use of disparate examples occasionally causes problems. they do not address how granting human-like isaac rooks – nature read in tooth and claw 213 intelligence to some species requires a greater suspension of disbelief than others, nor the significance of whether a film suggests an equivalency between humans and animals seriously or for comic effect. still, their broad focus allows them to elucidate interesting tropes in the subgenre, including the frequent use of point-of-view shots and close-ups on animals’ eyes. johan höglund finishes the anthology with “simian horror in rise and dawn of the planet of the apes.” höglund engages agamben’s work on the processes by which society grants or denies the right to be considered human and treated accordingly. after explaining the relevant theory succinctly and clearly, höglund details how the apes films enact and interrogate those processes. as the anthology demonstrates, the subgenre thrives on divisions separating humans and animals. höglund’s entry allows this collection to end with a case study suggesting that those divisions, and the violence they generate, are the true source of horror and require dismantling. in their introduction, the editors suggest various critical communities who might benefit from this collection. they argue for animal horror’s relevance to feminist and postcolonial scholarship, given links between anthropocentric logics and those that oppress women and non-western, non-white communities. while these groups might find much of interest in the subgenre itself, these concerns remain fairly marginal within this collection. only a few chapters explicitly foreground a feminist or postcolonial focus. unsurprisingly, those most likely to find the larger collection worthwhile are scholars interested in ecocriticism and the intersection of animal and media studies. though a bit of a hodgepodge, animal horror cinema points to rich possibilities for future exploration. the horror genre offers a unique method for engaging ideas relevant to animal studies and ecocriticism. bringing genre texts into these larger conversations promises to facilitate the well-rounded consideration of important topics. microsoft word wallen-yates. pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 reviews martin wallen more than human dialogues julian yates, of sheep, oranges, and yeast: a multispecies impression. university of minnesota press, 2017. 368 pp. $120 hc, $30 pb. at the beginning of his book, julian yates meditates on the character of jack cade from henry vi, part 2, who makes a passing reference to the use of parchment for legal documents. the reference appears in the context of cade telling his rebel band of the reforms he will make when king. documents written by lawyers on parchment have the power to “undo a man,” and cade promises to end such oppressions, just as he promises to make bread cheaper and beer stronger. in his mind’s theater, yates changes cade’s metaphorical parchment to an actual piece of lamb skin held aloft by the actor, creating a physical contact between lamb and human in order to imagine an intermingling that “makes manifest the fictive process of giving voice to things” (5-6). manifesting and giving voice to things constitute the two primary foci for yates, as he sees these rhetorical actions bringing beings into dialogue. thus, he identifies his aim as imagining “a series of scripts for literary and historical study ... that knows no stable ontological differences between animal, plant, fungal, microbial, viral, mineral, or martin wallen -more than human dialogues 243 chemical actors” (12). yates’s scripts constitute the three sections of the book that give voice to sheep, oranges, and yeast, respectively. as a follower of donna harraway, yates argues that this strategy of scripting dialogues avoids “an always already compromised anthropocentric endeavor,” so long as we “change what we understand by ‘voice,’ ‘face,’ and any number of terms that tie us to a metaphysics of presence as opposed to one rooted in performance” (21). were he the actor playing cade, he would add the prop of the parchment, and by holding the lamb skin he would manifest the lamb, not as presence, but as a rhetorical performance. other actors (or readers) might overlook the prop, which would keep the lamb hidden and mute among the other references to bread and beer. but, in bringing innocuous beings into dialogue, yates claims to avoid anthropocentrism by giving those beings voice. the voices he gives to sheep, oranges, and yeast wind their way through various texts in overlooked roles, such as the parchment cade refers to. yates brings the innocuous objects to the fore by pointing out that rhetorical performances are often dependent on interacting with such unheard beings. such dependence is where yates finds the agency of the innocuous, or uninteresting, beings. in making them apparent, for example by underscoring an offhand reference with a physical prop, yates gives them voice, and makes them “interesting.” this strategy comes from thelma rowell, who suggests asking sheep questions generally reserved for primates, such as chimpanzees, that would make them “a bit more interesting” (118). working toward a different set of questions to ask our fellow beings is indeed interesting. but this is where the claim to avoid anthropocentrism fails in a fundamental way, in that yates can only heed the voices of beings made interesting. his claim to form a multispecies community through hearing the voices of innocuous beings depends on their ability to reflect his interest, not on their capacity to perform outside his interest, which remains unheard. the first dialogue yates scripts, that with sheep, moves through three phases. he opens by manifesting sheep-as-herd through the analogy developed in modern times between them and a “conglomeration of commuters” (40). with this he takes up foucault’s warning about biopower to observe that “the individualizing power ... that ‘cuts’ certain individuals from the flock,” to render them into parchment, for example, “merely realizes a different application of the same differentiating ethic of care and concern offered ... for the general health of the flock” (41). in the second phase of his dialogue, yates translates this view of shepherding the flock, based on the religious pastoral, into a post-human performance of calling a flock in such a way that the human “i” all but disappears as the power to exclude or include, and remains only the calling voice, a “convoking function” (72). for yates this convocation becomes less an humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 244 “endeavor” and more an “orientation” that he hopes will shift agency from the human rhetor (72). in the third phase of this dialogue, yates expands pastoral into otium, which “names a state of rest ... a vegetal being allied to pure growth.... we find ourselves configured as if a plant ... neighbors to all the plantlike sheep of england’s enclosure movement whose animate, living ‘stock’ were used to ‘grow’ wool and flesh” (93). yates modernizes otium into “downtime,” the promise of which keeps workers — like those in chaplin’s movie — complacent. such a modern translation yates finds manifested in the serta mattress advertisements that employ cartoon sheep who promise “downtime” for mattress buyers. these sheep become the agents enabling yates to script a dialogue between holbein’s engraving of a pupil carrying ale to three leisurely gentlemen, pepys’s recollection of seeing some shepherds in the countryside, and raymond williams’s account of tv-watching as a kind of otium. the dialogue inevitably leads to cary wolfe’s critique of agamben’s critique of heidegger’s account of boredom, culminating in the panoramic observation that “the extended or general text of pastoral, pastoral as archive, manifests in different times and places folded in strange or seemingly contradictory ways, as its core tropes are successively performed” (112). the pastoral is with us always in innocuous tropes, producing “a residual reservoir of sameness, a zone of creaturely indistinction” (118). yet, while the pastoral certainly continues to shape constructions of community, and in ways more insidious than innocuous, recognition of the tropes that perpetuate it does not give sheep agency, except in service to the pastoral itself and to yates’s own performance. the second dialogue attempts to expand the multispecies community by revealing innocuous ways oranges have been transformed to affect modern culture. having aligned sheep and humans by imagining both to have plantlike qualities (in a rough aristotelian sense), yates begins his material history of orange agency by announcing that he will inquire into “this vegetal substrate and explore how our discourses are marked by forms of vegetal being, calibrated by vegetal temporality” (159). he focuses primarily on the jesuit john gerard, who used orange juice as invisible ink to plot his escape from the tower of london in 1597. of gerard’s secret messages yates comments that their content does not matter; what does “is the act of appearance itself, the bringing out of an invisible medium, of writing that faded as soon as it was written.” the immediate fading interrupts “one order of writing as it is backed by paper and ink ... creating thereby the appearance of presence, agency, and so revelation” (150). the agency yates recognizes here comes from the priest’s use of orange juice to write an invisible script that can be made to appear by a knowledgeable reader. this use, or martin wallen -more than human dialogues 245 transformation, of the invisible orange into a revelation generates the material history yates scripts, even as he reminds himself that “still elastic ... on its way to becoming something else — food, excrement, cleanser, invisible ink, a rosary, a catholic convert — every orange marks the singularity of an event” (174). the reminder plays a crucial role in yates’s history, as it facilitates setting orange and human into a performative interaction. the human does not simply juice the orange, eat it, or write with it; rather the human and orange come together as co-agents, heeding each other’s call, the orange seeking “to interpellate you as the plant plays its own form of bioor zoopolitics.” not caring whether the one it addresses is jesuit or anglican, the orange writes invisibly to those capable of reading it on the way to revelation. it is always, yates says, “in the vocative case ... an act of nomination that designates the multispecies polity of animate beings that shall eat and so name and so disseminate it” (174). like alice finding the cake bearing the words, “eat me,” the one who knows how to read the invisible writing of the orange can respond only as an eater, metabolizing the code hidden among innocuous beings into a multispecies revelation of transcendent likeness. this call by the orange, and this response by the eater constitute a performative assimilation, leading yates to ask, “is this structure what it means to eat?” (208). the question of what it means to eat as a response to the interpellative call of an orange attempts to make oranges more interesting, something “we wish to dwell or ‘be’ and become with and among” (118). to take such an interest in the invisible writing of an orange, to hear the silent appeal, follows the scripted dialogue derrida traces in kant’s aesthetics when he comments that the “beautiful forms” kant values in nature for their lack of signification serve as “encrypted signs, a figural writing set down in nature’s production.” such encryption, such “non-language of forms,” derrida says, becomes “a language between nature and man.”1 this language does indeed write the sort of interest with which yates grounds his community of oranges and jesuits, but it does so by making an orange (or sheep) more like a chimpanzee, who is more interesting because of being more like a human. the call and response occurs between like beings who assimilate one another into their own interiority, who digest one another in order to recognize themselves outside themselves, as a transcendental signified. this digestive, transformative dialogue — like pastoral’s individualizing power — can only take place by an exclusion, by setting a limit on what can be read, recognized, dwelt among through interpellation. what is excluded, derrida notes, “is what does not allow itself to be digested, or represented, or stated.... it is an irreducible heterogeneity which cannot be eaten either sensibly or ideally.”2 so, the question yates asks, compelling as it is, still belongs to the “gamut of questions” that derrida argues align the interlocutors in a dialogue of mimetic subjectivities, even if “subjectivity” is metabolized through a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 246 post-humanist effort at non-anthropomorphism into an agency of pure growth.3 yates must exclude such “irreducible heterogeneity” in order to hear the silent call of those he gives voice to. the third dialogue of the “interspecies impression” relies on a similar exclusion. the voice to be heard is that of yeast. or, rather the trace of yeast in bread. or, rather walter benjamin’s analogy between bread and stones. the traces lead yates back to gerard’s imprisonment, for in his account of that time, the jesuit refers casually to receiving every day “six small rolls of very good bread” (245). what interests yates here is that “it’s easy to miss the bread in this story.” again, it is this innocuous quality of the bread, the fact that it is so common — like the stones on which and with which we build our social structures — that calls to him. just as he wrested the parchment out of its contiguity with bread and beer in jack cade’s speech, yates here pulls the priest’s haphazard reference forward to reveal its innocuous agency in our modern subjectforming engagements. even though cade promises his followers stronger beer, and holbein’s engraving links ale to otium, yates looks soberly to bread to recover 16th century londoners’ dialogue with yeast, not as such, “but mediated by and through its effects” (249). the agency of yeast is found in the bubbles it effects, even though it is long forgotten in itself. through eating bread, humans become metabolized into a multispecies bubble, though one that has overlooked the beer. yates tropes bread into the stone, founding his performative revelation of a digestibly modernized metaphysics. temporal though he claims it to be, it remains grounded in the traditional anthropocentric subject that aligns other beings in service to it. the lesson yates says that gerard’s memoir teaches us is “which things to keep,” and which innocuous things “might enable you to animate still other things differently — piecing them together to create your own gathering” (251, his emphasis). he looks to the agency of an orange’s appeal, to the bubbling trace of yeast found in bread (but not ale), orienting himself as a shepherd who can read silences as signifiers. he follows “our ways of making things speak to and of ‘us’” (25). and he reinforces the kantian aesthetic (which has become so normalized as to be innocuous) of a nature written as the direct expression of the divine artist, legible to the one who knows how to read the silent or invisible writing. yates reinforces this aesthetic in what he describes as a gathering of things which we make speak to us and of us. and he stops his ears to the possibilities of beings remaining among themselves in ways that exclude him, and to which he holds no relevance. yates succeeds only in making sheep, oranges, and bread into props for his performative modernization of the anthropocentic western subject. yates possesses the care to look for a strategy apart from the anthropocentric orientation martin wallen -more than human dialogues 247 that has done so much damage to our fellow beings. but the orientation he embraces inadvertently reinforces anthropocentrism. overall the book shows a lack of editorial agency, having neither index nor bibliography, two common offerings that would have heightened its appeal. yates’s prose labors under a mannered and bloated style (it calls loudly for farmer oak), and is burdened further by loose diction. one howler appears in his use of “climactic” for “climatic” (180), revealing that yates should exert more care in manifesting his things. notes 1. jacques derrida, “economimesis.” diacritics 11 (1981): 15. 2. derrida, “economimesis,” 21. 3. derrida, the animal that therefore i am. david wills, trans. (new york, 2008), 63. microsoft word dolle-harn. pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 reviews christopher v. dolle “chimeric pasts, presents, and futures” human animal research network editorial collective, editors. animals in the anthropocene: critical perspectives on non-human futures. sydney university press, 2015. 296 pp. $35. since it was first proposed as a new geologic epoch by paul j. crutzen and eugene f. stoermer in 2000, the anthropocene has garnered widespread scientific and political attention. the concept is frequently invoked in critiques of anthropogenic global warming to illustrate the gravity of the current man-made climate crisis threatening life on earth, and to stress the importance of an urgent social and political response to this threat. however, as it has fixed itself within the academic and cultural zeitgeist, the notion of the anthropocene has often been critiqued for its tendency to reduce humanity to an undifferentiated mass, or to propagate the cartesian dualism that cleanly breaks human apart from animal. at its most dangerous, the anthropocene reduces the planet to an agentless construct, subordinated to the some-7,000,000,000 people who occupy its surface. christopher v. dolle -“chimeric pasts, presents, and futures” 253 the university of sydney’s human animal research network’s 2015 collection, animals in the anthropocene: critical perspectives on non-human futures, seeks to challenge these assumptions, shifting critical focus away from the humans from whom the epoch derives its name and toward the assemblage of non-humans living and dying with us amid the anthropocene. the volume’s editors are an interdisciplinary collective formed in 2011 at the university of sydney, consisting of members from the arts and social sciences, natural sciences, veterinary science, public health, and law. the uniquely multidisciplinary nature of the human animal research network (harn) allows for innovative approaches to issues inherent in human-animal studies to flourish, as they employ humanist, socio-political, and scientific methodologies to address questions of human-animal interaction. throughout, animals in the anthropocene works to shift our understanding of the anthropocene away from the anthropos and, instead, to approach the concept “from the perspective of ‘the animal question’ — asking how best to think and live with animals” (viii). in doing so, the collection offers more questions than answers, complicating current anthropocene discourse and drawing readers into a web of human-animal relations. though there has been frequent critique of the anthropocene in much recent environmental scholarship — work by jason w. moore or andreas malm, for example — for harn the concept exists as a useful lens through which to view human-animal relations, calling attention simultaneously to humanity’s tendency toward anthropocentrism and revealing the human “species” as merely one among many. this tension between the human-centeredness of the anthropocene and the revelation that we are living as an interconnected network of humans and animals regularly reemerges in the collection’s chapters. throughout, karen barad’s “agential realism” looms large, as does the eco-feminist work of donna haraway. chapters make frequent reference to the ways in which the anthropocene displaces human agency as much as it reinforces it, and the editors themselves note that many of the book’s authors “re-appropriate the term” “towards relationality and away from the presumptions of human mastery and separation that are embedded in anthropocentric thinking” (x). the anthropocene, then, becomes not only a geologic marker of anthropogenic impact, but an opportunity around which the collection’s contributing authors are able to interrogate the humananimal question, with multiple perspectives and differing approaches, spanning the apiaries of california, the island of cyprus, and the streets of india. the collection’s first two chapters deal in paradox. florence chiew’s “the paradox of self-reference” employs emile durkheim’s sociological approach and niklas luhmann’s humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 254 and gregory bateson’s work in systems theory in order to rethink what it means to act in the anthropocene. chiew is interested in the self-referential nature of anthropocene narratives, emphasizing the ways that the anthropocene (and the current philosophical and scientific discussions surrounding it) paradoxically present the human as cause and effect. in situating humans as the source of both destruction and restoration, anthropocene discourse frequently ascribes agency only to humans. instead, chiew proposes a self-referential system of life that links human and non-human species. acknowledging these ecological entanglements, chiew argues, will affect the ways we address the “questions of blame, ethical accountability, and political intervention … that implicate us” all (17). ben dibley’s “anthropocene: the enigma of ‘the geomorphic fold’,” the book’s second chapter, works to understand another seemingly paradoxical component of the anthropocene, what he describes as a “difficult dance … to negotiate [the] ends of the human” (22). the anthropocene, he writes, presents us with a “strange paradox that simultaneously demands, recognising that we know not what the human is, and, yet acknowledging that what is definitive about the human, will be inscribed in the stratigraphic record” (23). dibley’s chapter strives to complicate the accepted notion of the human as it persists in the humanities and social sciences, emphasizing human agency while, at the same time, arguing against the narcissistic hubris of the anthropos. for dibley, the very notion of the human is challenged by recent developments in continental philosophy, and work by scholars like timothy morton informs the chapter. the sheer geologic scale of the anthropocene, for dibley, forces us to rethink time, human agency, and human responsibility, ultimately necessitating an ontic reconceptualization of what it is to be human. shifting away from the more philosophical questions of the first two chapters toward a more critical, historical exploration of humanity’s impact, the book’s third chapter, agata mrva-montoya’s “cycles of anthropocenic interdependencies on the island of cyprus,” undercuts discourse that assumes the anthropocene begins with concurrent industrialization, some 150 years ago. mrva-montoya argues for the inclusion of premodern societies in our conceptualizations of humans as geologic agents. she employs a “long-term view of the interdependencies of human societies and the rest of nature” (34), exploring archeological records on the island of cyprus that reveal the anthropogenic changes that occurred over the course of 10,000 years. human engineering of the animal world in cyprus, mrva-montoya writes, “carries implications for the current animal conservation and management issues” around the world (35). she points to repeating cycles of introduction, feralization, naturalization, control, and extinction that complicate distinctions between what are considered wild and domestic or native and alien animals. these complications make conservation efforts challenging, christopher v. dolle -“chimeric pasts, presents, and futures” 255 as protection and management efforts are “littered with examples of fixing one problem by introducing another, which questions the capacity of humankind to effectively mitigate anthropocenic damages” (55). human intervention, then, is both problem and solution. dovetailing with mrva-montoya’s discussion of the ways in which humans have intentionally and unintentionally engineered the animal world, adrian franklin’s “ecosystem and landscape: strategies for the anthropocene” addresses the inconsistent reactions to feral and introduced animal species across britain and australia. franklin’s chapter traces the concepts of ecosystem and landscape, noting that while “ecosystems” tend toward ideologies of “belonging,” referencing “wider territorialisation, governance and etic concepts such as biomes,” “landscape references detailed life worlds of experience, complexity, culture, knowledge and change” (72). franklin then explores the nativism and naturalization of feral cats in both australia and britain in order to demonstrate the very different forms of nationalism to which landscape and ecosystem orderings subject animals. in the uk, franklin writes, feral cats exist as a generally accepted component of society. “[t]here is practically no scientific effort put into their eradication and control, nor public support/demand for it” (74). however, in australia, “anti-cat sentiments are widespread and substantial,” and “feral cats are widely considered to be ‘un-australian’ in civil society” (74). franklin concludes that these antithetical positions reflect the respective social cultures, and that both landscape and ecosystem are artificial concepts invented to make sense of the anthropocenic changes happening in the world. franklin’s and mrva-montoya’s chapters also illustrate the kind of case-study approach frequently found in animals in the anthropocene, as each employs specific, localized models that are then metonymically expanded. in this way, the unique lessons the authors engage take on more general significance, enacting a kind of network of examples that mirrors the connectedness of the anthropocene. vanessa barbay’s chapter, “the matter of death: posthumous wildlife art in the anthropocene,” explores the possibility for posthumous collaboration with animal subjects through art. barbay traces this human-animal collaboration across x-ray art, natural-history illustration, and taxidermy, concluding that the aboriginal art practices she explores “have more to offer contemporary animal artists, compared with colonial representations and memorialization” (94). this chapter is somewhat of an outlier in the collection, presenting an overview of barbay’s own artistic, image-making process as she worked to “facilitate the agency of the dead animal subject” (105), rather than focusing on any sociological or scientific debates or on questions of ontics, as do the other chapters. the inclusion of this chapter speaks to the diversity of the collection as a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 256 whole and offers a fascinating and unique perspective on creating co-constitutive art in the anthropocene. the book’s sixth chapter, madeleine boyd’s “a game of horseshoes for the anthropocene,” returns us to the core of the collection, employing theories of agential realism (barad) and a new materialist (haraway) approach to explore the connection between human and horse in the horseracing industry. boyd argues that the commodification of current horseracing has destroyed humans’ historical social contract with horses, as she traces the violence inflicted on horses through the practices of breeding, medicating, and killing. the antidote to this violence, she writes, channeling the companion dynamics of donna haraway, requires “a system of intra-actions-thatmatter between significant bodies” and “interspecies empathy” (130). the model for the future, then, according to boyd, is one that involves humans evolving in relation with others to become “homo sapiens relationata,” rather than “homo destructus” (131). the seventh and eight chapters of animals in the anthropocene address industrialized food production and theories of dominance implicit in species thinking. in “painfully, from the first-person singular to first-person plural,” daniel kirjner considers the role of feminist theory and implications of feminism in the study of human-animal interconnections. kirjner links the anthropocene to conceptions of masculinity and to patriarchal thinking, connecting the idea that men should control women to the concept that men must overpower nature (140). industrialized food production, which inflicts large-scale harm on animals and creates environmental side effects for other animals, kirjner argues, reproduces patriarchal forms of domination that celebrate violence and aggression. ultimately, he writes, the central characteristic of domination within the anthropocene is that of predation, connecting sexism, speciesism, environmental degradation, and masculinity in patriarchal cultures. approaching the topic of food production from a different perspective, simone j. dennis and alison m. witchard tackle the topic of in-vitro meat in “we have never been meat (but we could be).” they employ the biopolitical framework of foucault to explore the ways in which meat materializes social and species hierarchies. the meat industry, they argue, has significantly contributed to the conceptual split between human and animal: “our access to flesh is made on the basis that it is significantly different from human flesh: we do not, by and large, consume our own flesh, but instead that of the animal other” (151). the biotechnology of in-vitro meat, however, has the potential to disrupt this dichotomy. in-vitro meat has the potential “to violate our accepted norms and cherished categories, such as those of difference between humans and animals, between nature and culture” (160). theoretically, creating in-vitro meat produced from human christopher v. dolle -“chimeric pasts, presents, and futures” 257 cells might completely undo the categorical distinction between animal and human, offering the potential to erase species thinking, break down traditional categories, and reconceptualize being. chapters nine, ten, and eleven argue in favor of the inclusion of animals in contemporary political theory, forcing us to reconsider the political arrangements that determine life in the anthropocene, and look toward a politics of shared human-animal futures. gwendolyn blue’s “multispecies publics in the anthropocene,” as the title implies, offers a posthuman rethinking of the “public,” engaging the work of john dewey, karen barad, and donna haraway to craft an argument in favor of a multispecies public. in order to make sense of the anthropocene, blue argues, it is necessary to reconceptualize the “we” that comprises political subjectivity, to move away from a subjectivity based in anthropocentrism and to explore the ways boundaries and distinctions fall apart, decentering the human political subject. richie nimmo’s chapter, “apiculture in the anthropocene,” acknowledges a similar anthropocene paradox to that of florence chiew (chapter 1), the pull between modesty and hubris. nimmo, like others in the collection, explores human agency amid an ostensibly posthuman world, arguing in favor of a nontraditional kind of responsibility and a new politics in light of our co-constitutive, materially heterogeneous entanglements with non-humans. nimmo employs colony collapse disorder of honeybees to illustrate both the potential inherent in and need for a posthumanist approach to politics. the honeybee — nimmo writes about the western honeybee (apis mellifera) specifically — is very much linked to humans; it is used throughout the world as “the pollinator of choice” (183) for commercial agricultural crops, and the crisis of the honeybee functions perfectly to illustrate the shared harms of the anthropocene. bees are a particularly interesting example, as they form non-human collectives — colonies — and make up large, industrial human-animal agribusiness networks from which humans derive profit from animal labor. nimmo concludes by arguing in favor of what he calls a posthumanist politics that reorients discourse. “rather than beginning by asking what is wrong here; what is unacceptable; and what must stop; the key questions become what is good here; what is of value; and how can this be developed” (193). an approach that tries to develop “a more explorative, local, and entangled politics” (196), then, offers an opportunity to transform not just human relations with non-humans, but to potentially change how we see and experience our very existence. krithika srinivasan’s “the welfare episteme” transports readers from the apiaries of california to the streets of bengaluru, india, taking up the biopolitics of controlling humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 258 stray dog populations. srinivasan asks how is it that humans, given our power over life, might seek to improve interactions with non-human others while simultaneously safeguarding human interests? srinivasan complicates ideologies of “improvement” and traces the ramifications of biopolitical control in human-animal interactions. she draws on foucault’s work on epistemes to better understand the dynamics of welfare discourse, and his theories regarding the complicated ways in which power functions in society. for srinivasan, neutering and vaccination exemplify biopolitical control of dog populations, and, while noting that this type of “management is not, in and of itself, problematic” (210), she considers the increasing intervention by humans in the lives of animals for their own good a matter of concern. again, like many of the chapters in animals in the anthropocene, srinivasan produces more questions than answers, opening up for examination the privileging of human interests within the anthropocene, even in the pursuit of animal welfare. the book’s twelfth and final chapter is michael hathaway’s “wild elephants as actors in the anthropocene.” hathaway pivots away from the political explorations of the previous three chapters and offers what is perhaps the book’s most hopeful moment, chronicling the year he spent in a rural village in southwest china living among the country’s last remaining herds of wild elephants. hathaway looks at the relationships that have formed between these elephants and the villagers, mediated by a conservation organization, and the concessions made by highway developers because of the impact on the elephants. though human-elephant conflict is a complicated issue — elephants prove destructive to local crops and to human infrastructure — hathaway argues that these activities of “resistance” are only part of their behavior. he argues that to fixate only on the problems caused by animals is to reinscribe notions of anthropocentrism. instead, he hopes we might negotiate conflicts to find nonviolent resolutions, considering non-humans as “active beings and historical actors that shape the worlds that both they and other species — including humans — live in” (240). harn’s animals in the anthropocene proves to be a valuable contribution to the interdisciplinary field of human-animal studies. it is wide-ranging in scope and in methodology, presenting a diverse set of frameworks through which we might begin to answer questions of multispecies responsibility and justice. the collection demonstrates that the anthropocene need not be anthropocentric. humans need not be at the center of the biological world, nor should we consider our own moment temporally outside of history. instead, as mrva-montoya does, we must locate the present within the geohistorical networks that date back thousands, even millions, of years. approaches christopher v. dolle -“chimeric pasts, presents, and futures” 259 such as those in this volume might ultimately allow us to look toward a relational model of human and non-human life that makes possible a future for us all. microsoft word calarco-iveson-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 9:1 review essay matthew calarco life and relation beyond animalization richard iveson. zoogenesis: thinking encounter with animals. pavement book. 346 pp. $31.99 pb. the growth of animal studies from an emergent field of inquiry into a mature set of discourses and practices over the past several years has been marked by two particularly welcome developments. first, concerns and questions about the status and nature of animals and animality have penetrated ever deeper into the core of disciplines across the humanities, social sciences, and physical sciences. this trend has helped to call into question some of the most stubborn dogmas in these disciplines and to provide matthew calarco -life and relation beyond animalization 153 the space for important intellectual and theoretical transformations. second, extant approaches and frameworks among animal activists have increasingly come to inform the work being done in animal studies, enriching its ethico-political sensibilities and providing practical support for its enrichment and evolution. what has perhaps gotten lost in the rapid growth of animal studies, however, are deeper questions about what is ultimately at stake in the field. although the multiplication of disciplinary perspectives on animals and animality is no doubt important, we might ask ourselves: are some frameworks more critically insightful than others in terms of trying to discern violence and disrespect aimed toward animals and animalized others? similarly, we might also wonder: which perspectives are most fecund for transforming those relations and ultimately arriving at alternative forms of life? richard iveson’s book, zoogenesis: thinking encounter with animals, seeks to frame and address these important questions. with this ambitious, wide-ranging, and erudite book, iveson hopes to provide nothing less than new critical and affirmative groundings for future work in animal studies. on iveson’s account, unless we understand the deep sources of violence toward animals, we will never arrive at a place from which we might begin to contest those sources and eventually reconstitute more respectful relations with animals. in this review, i will track some of the basic elements of iveson’s fascinating and powerful argument before closing with some questions about some of its possible limitations. rejecting the institutionalized genocide of animals. iveson’s overall project begins from the premise that animals matter for themselves — which is to say, in and of themselves — and not simply in view of how they might shed light on certain questions concerning human nature or human sociality. that the study of animals and animality might illuminate certain aspects of how power circulates among human beings is, to be sure, something worthy of our attention for iveson; but his primary emphasis is placed on ensuring that animals are seen as beings who have value beyond their instrumental usefulness to human beings. as he writes in the introduction, to accept the chief premise animating his work is to accept that humans do not have the right to do whatever they like with other animals. it is to accept that our given state of affairs is unacceptable and must be radically transformed. put simply, it is to no longer accept the economy of genocide into which we have all been thrown. (25) the overarching aim of his project, then, is to find ways to allow animal lives to matter, that is, to count and become salient in those disciplines, institutions, and practices that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 154 have traditionally excluded animals from the circle of concern. given iveson’s philosophical background, the natural place to look for allies for such a project is the analytic philosophical tradition, populated by luminaries such as peter singer, tom regan, and paola cavalieri. the standard gesture in this discourse is to extend ethical consideration to animals by way of analogical reasoning, demonstrating that animals are sufficiently similar to human beings as moral patients so as to warrant similar moral standing and consideration. iveson, though, takes a critical stance toward this tradition, as it tends to gloss over the radical singularity and alterity of animals and to neutralize human-animal differences by way of conceptual and practical schemas. in so doing, he joins philosophers and theorists in the pro-animal feminist care tradition, who seek to ground animal ethics in caring relations between and among human beings and animals. and yet, despite iveson’s proximity to this tradition, his deeper philosophical commitments derive from the continental tradition, with jacques derrida and friedrich nietzsche being among the primary sources of inspiration. from nietzsche and derrida, iveson borrows the notion that the denial of animal finitude and singularity lies at the very heart of the current crisis in human-animal relations. as such, the task of zoogenesis can perhaps best be read as a meditation on the sources of that denial as well as what it would take to acknowledge and affirm animal finitude and singularity. the latter, affirmative task would not be so much a matter of granting animals their uniqueness and relation to death but of discovering and encountering it in various ways in the shared spaces in which human-animal relations emerge and are sustained. i will track the main thread of this critical and affirmative analysis in iveson’s work by examining some of the key themes in each of the five main parts of the work. from animalization to zoogenesis. the bulk of iveson’s book provides a condensed but rigorous reading of the history of philosophy and theory in view of animals and animality. in part one, he argues that the guiding thread linking together thinkers as diverse as plato, martin heidegger, and maurice blanchot is a denigration of animality (both human and nonhuman forms) and a denial of death to animals themselves. in a close reading of plato’s meno, iveson shows how platonic dualism (the reigning metaphysical system in much of intellectual and western culture for over two millennia) teaches us to seek the highest truth, beauty, and the good by leaving behind the sensible world and preparing for a disembodied life beyond death. although this non-finite mode of human existence is disavowed by post-metaphysical thinkers such as blanchot and heidegger, both of whom return the human to its irreducibly mortal mode of existence, such mortality is not understood to be shared between and among human beings and other animals. instead, mortality and the “capacity” for dying one’s own death come to be seen as something proper only to human beings. as such, iveson matthew calarco -life and relation beyond animalization 155 notes, the post-metaphysical decentering of the human subject that throws the subject outside of itself and toward its singular being-toward-death is insufficient to displace the anthropocentrism at the heart of the philosophical tradition. in order to accomplish this latter goal and to continue the post-metaphysical task of thought require giving finitude back to animals, or rather catching sight of the shared mortality at the heart of all human and animal life. failure to recognize the finitude and singularity of all living beings creates the conditions for what iveson calls animalization. lives that are animalized are lives that do not matter; such lives are reduced to deathless objects to be annihilated and consumed with impunity. in view of this reduction, iveson argues that it is imperative to disclose another way to give death, and to the giving of dying, to animals. to give death to other animals: the gift of and the giving that is the shared finitude of living beings. only then will the monstrous hubris of an unthinking utilization and consumption of fetishized corpses itself become unthinkable. (94) if we are to acknowledge the death of animals, iveson suggests we must begin with the recognition that all singular animal life (whether human and nonhuman) emerges in a process he names zoogenesis. zoogenetic relations emerge from a shared, ex-propriated site of encounter. in part two, iveson tracks such animal encounters in literary form with kafka (“investigations of a dog”), in ethico-poetic form with derrida (in his muchdiscussed naked encounter with a cat in the animal that therefore i am), and in ontological form with nietzsche (with the theme of a form of life beyond nihilism). the key to iveson’s notion of encounter is that it does not ultimately stem from an act of ethical will (which is to say, conscious responsibility for another animal) or a desire for spiritual perfection (understood as seeking out animal encounters as a way of improving oneself and expanding one’s consciousness). rather, on iveson’s reading, these thinkers and writers all point toward animal encounters as events, that is, as something that one undergoes — beyond full understanding, presence, and mastery. thus, animal encounters testify to the ways in which animals are more than a given subject can think. animal encounters are ways of naming the manner in which animals announce themselves in their singularity and finitude, beyond the strictures of traditional philosophical and theoretical discourses that would seek to strip them of their radical alterity. for iveson, such unpredictable and astonishing encounters speak to a way of life beyond the nihilism of life-denying transcendence and the incomplete nihilism of the “last man,” a relational encounter with a world that nietzsche describes humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 156 in the gay science as “over-rich” in all that is “beautiful, strange, questionable, terrible, and divine.” in part three, iveson explores how such encounters cannot be delimited either to the realm of the inter-human or to one’s preferred forms of animality and nonhuman otherness. as for the former delimitation, he argues that this sort of restriction of the ethics of encounter is at work in judith butler’s writings on the recognition and mattering of vulnerability. as with heidegger and blanchot, iveson suggests that butler’s post-humanist ethics fails to go far enough to displace anthropocentrism. conversely, he argues that gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s notion of becominganimal, while radically non-anthropocentric, re-establishes its own zoogenetic limit in the manner in which it configures the outside of the human as populated only by packlike, feral, and untamed animals and forms of life. in configuring the outside of the human in this manner, deleuze and guattari run the risk of missing precisely the kinds of encounters with animal singularities that kafka and derrida track and ending up in a kind of undifferentiated, deep ecological holism. while iveson’s reading of deleuze and guattari will be somewhat contentious for some readers, there is certainly merit to this concern with their work and with the manner in which their notion of becoming-animal has sometimes been put to work in pro-animal and ecological discourses. in part four, iveson tracks this same failure to think zoogenetically at the level of the socius, a restriction that has led to an anthropocentric delimitation of the boundaries of community and the political. through an analysis of a host of political thinkers, iveson convincingly demonstrates that no politics based on humanism — no matter how widely or generously the concept of the human is defined — will suffice to constitute a genuinely post-anthropocentric sense of community. rather than being a neutral designation, on this analysis “the human” nearly always functions in the dominant culture of the west in a performative manner to circumscribe a group of beings considered to be properly human and properly part of the society over and against those who are subor non-human. commenting on this anthropocentric logic in the humanism of susan buck-morss, iveson explains: buck-morss misunderstands that humanism is only insofar as it sets up a limit between the human and the animal. such is the demand for linedrawing which humanism can never avoid, and which ever again founds that animalization of the other which is the very condition for those political collectives she imagines her humanism will overcome. (244) matthew calarco -life and relation beyond animalization 157 for iveson, it is only with the more radical nietzschean and derridean affirmation of more-than-human life that we can arrive at a conception of community and being-with that overcomes this humanist closure and violence. to say yes to life (and to the finitude at the heart of life) is to affirm that one is always already encountered by singularities that are shared in and with others, that communities and relations preexist our encounters, and that community with animals only happens in the midst of these ongoing relations. in iveson’s words, a community beyond the human is a “community without limit” ... an infinite commonality of singularities which shares and in which is shared all finite living beings. (258) it is important to note that community and relation, if they are understood in terms of derridean différance and nietzschean will to power (as iveson’s account is), will not issue in a hands-off, rights-based, non-interference ethics and politics but will instead entail considerable transformation among and between those beings called animal and human. such transformations might even involve a fundamental transformation in the species heritages of human and animal beings, whether through biotechnological transformation or other similar kinds of interventions. in the final section of the book, iveson explores the question of how his ethics, politics, and ontology both feed into and challenge certain animal biotechnological research. here, in a complex reading of bernard stiegler and related thinkers, iveson acknowledges that animals and relations can and will change over time and that biotechnological interventions cannot be ruled out a priori; the question is rather one of which relations and transformations to undertake. iveson suggests that the key limitation with the transhumanist technological project is that it is based on an attempt to master animal life and finitude more generally, seeking to guide zoogenetic becomings along a single dimension or axis (largely structured by the demands of capital). by contrast, iveson outlines a notion of technicity that is open to becomings that unfold in a variety of un-master-able and unpredictable directions. on the scope and limits of zoogenesis. the potted overview i have offered here of iveson’s book fails to do justice to the complexity and intricacy of his arguments as well as the charitable and thoughtful engagement he offers with each of the major figures he analyzes. his book is to be highly recommended for any reader who hopes to gain a deeper understanding of how a critical animal studies perspective might thread its way through the hegemonic history of the west as well as the contemporary theoretical scene. in this closing section of the review, i want simply to pose a couple of questions in view of iveson’s project for those of us who might take up portions of it in various ways. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 158 given iveson’s attempt to think relation and singularity zoogenetically, one wonders about the broader scope of his project. how does the path of thought outlined in the book help to negotiate relations and singularities with non-living beings, systems, and so on? here the question is not so much one of how mortality and finitude figure in the constitution of living human-animal singularities, but rather one of whether ethics and politics might be extended beyond this particular set of relations. in other words, how should we read iveson’s call for a “community without limit”? the only example of an ethic of non-animal others discussed in iveson’s work is deep ecological holism, which is rejected precisely because of its tendency to override singularity in favor of relational wholes. but what if one sought to construct an ethic that recognizes a wider range of singularities, both living and non-living? in other words, how might iveson’s zoocentrism either be supplemented by or be in opposition to phytocentric, biocentric, or multi-centric environmental ethics? likewise, how might his project be situated in view of an ethics of the more-than-human world that aims to displace any and all centers in favor of a form of life lived in view of “all our relations”? with iveson’s close relation to both derrida and nietzsche in mind, one can see how such questions and possible tensions might arise. derrida does not rule out the possibility of thinking through the ethics and politics of such a broad set of relations, but his overwhelming focus is on how différance constitutes the matrix through which living singularities emerge and maintain some semblance of sameness. nietzsche’s thinking, by contrast, casts a much wider ontological and relational net. he thinks will to power as properly cosmic, insists that the apollonian and dionysian agon emerges primordially from nonhuman nature itself, and teaches us to be wary of thinking that life is anything but an exception in the planetary and cosmic order of things. such questions arise not simply because of the zoocentric nature of iveson’s project; this delimitation is entirely understandable given the need to work carefully through the human-animal boundary in particular and the unique forms of violence and becoming that occur along this axis. rather, what prompts one to consider the scope of iveson’s framework is his tendency to present zoogenesis as the intractable, sole (“only” is a frequent word deployed by iveson when considering the necessity of a zoogenetic thinking) site from which to contest the established anthropocentric order and constitute an alternative socius. were zoogenesis understood as a partial but important aspect of a form of life beyond animalization, there would be no need to pit zoogenesis against ecological or planetary holism. rather, the latter ethical and political frameworks might come to be seen as supplementary forms of normative consideration, which would themselves be nested inside a host of microand macrosingularities and matthew calarco -life and relation beyond animalization 159 relations that exceed the economy of the living. of course, to do justice to such a wide variety of singularities and relations, one would have to do away with the desire to privilege any single ontological or normative framework and allow thought to enter into a realm in which plural ontologies (which are rather different from a single pluralist ontology) proliferate in view of doing justice to all our relations. such questions hover on the edges of iveson’s project, and it will be of considerable interest to see how iveson’s forthcoming work on posthumanism and the path of thought he has opened up for his readers will unfold in view of these additional ontological and normative considerations. microsoft word myers-pdf-jgr h u m a n i m a l i a 6:2 caitlin rose myers “i’m told i’m famous on the internet” – henri the cat and the critical possibility of anthropomorphism the cultural phenomenon of the humorous youtube cat video often seems indissoluble. while most examples are from oneor two-hit wonders (thank you, roomba-cat-swats-dog and kitten-vs-a-scary-thing), there are the few that become significant enough that they inspire widespread followings. i am thinking specifically of feline celebrities such as maru the box-lover, happy cat the originator of the lol-cat sensation, lil’ bub, and grumpy cat. these sorts of cats are hyper-individualized to the point of stardom and can thus be examined as indicative of popular culture’s perception of the division between “human” and “animal.” these interactions further take place in a postnatural, virtual space, and are mediated through technological and verbal lenses that they explicitly and implicitly critique. i will specifically examine henri the existential cat and his first video in the context of individualization and derridean “nonpower,” as well as the way in which feline celebrity reveals the critical possibilities of anthropomorphism. jacques derrida’s the animal that therefore i am, a translation of the ten-hour long address to the 1997 “autobiographical animal” conference, posits that the process of individualization is imperative when considering the nonhuman animal and its gaze. he speaks specifically about the experience of being stared at by a cat while naked, but clarifies quickly, “the cat i am talking about is a real cat, truly, believe me, a little cat. it isn’t the figure of a cat. it doesn’t silently enter the bedroom as an allegory for all the cats on the earth” (6). this cat is not aggregate and resists instinctive human attempts to pluralize it — derrida says that he clarifies in order to “mark its unsubstitutable singularity” (9). as long as trauma is not involved, it is often assumed that one cat’s mental framework must be roughly equivalent to that of another’s. yet “henri” is set apart through the “director” will braden’s efforts to reinforce his individuality. some part of this arises from the public availability of his name. the first “henri” video begins and ends with his name — from “my name is henri” to “i am henri” — and this repetition indicates the deliberate association the filmmaker wishes to make between the statements made during the video and the individual, named entity. the importance of henri being alone, set apart from humans and other cats, is that it allows him to be identified by the viewer as a conscious, unique subjectivity. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 22 figs. 1 & 2 opening and closing shots of “henri” this transition from “my name is” to “i am” is one of the many intersections between these videos and derrida’s lecture. the ironic humor in the henri videos is undeniable, but at the core of this irony is a perceptive analysis of subjectivity’s presentation and representation. just before the second repetition of his name, henri watches a dark shadow above him as braden’s voice speaks: “i am haunted.” caitlin rose myers -“i’m told i’m famous on the internet” – henri the cat and the critical possibility of anthropomorphism 23 fig. 3 “haunted” bracketed between the two utterances of his name, henri experiences the ghostlike separation from the word/name that he is bound to. derrida says that “every case of naming involves announcing a death to come in the surviving of a ghost, the longevity of a name” (20). the separation between the conscious individual and the construction of the name is like that between body and spirit; we are all “haunted” by the names that are only tenuously and temporarily attached to us. in this way, the same word that can give us the power of unique subjectivity contains within it the “nonpower” of our separation from language. in the opening shot of the first “henri” video, the cat-speaker dominates the frame in an extreme close-up while verbally separating himself from the word given to him — it is only a “name” that derrida says indicates how both human and nonhuman animals are “deprived of language” — as derrida exclaims, “as if man didn’t also receive his name and his names!” (32). henri is the emphasis in the video’s opening shot, but the text instead emphasizes that his “name” is henri, and the disjunction between the two subjects is palpable. the video then ends with a shot in which henri is off-center and smaller than the frame encompassing him, failing to embody his name even as he attempts to claim it. it is a melancholy shot that contradicts his seeming ownership of the word, especially in the context of henri the “haunted.” his “i am” rings desperate and forced. derrida calls the inability to connect tangible form to the ghostly spirit of language a “nonpower at the heart of power” (28). nonhuman animals are considered to be typically without power because they do not have access to language. they do not speak as we do, cannot represent themselves through words, and are therefore separate from us — and by separate, we mean below. henri exposes and dismantles this language barrier between human and nonhuman by humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 24 showing that both experience the painful struggle to embody a name that is intrinsically separate from us. henri suffers the impossibility of representation within the constraints of language as we do, even as he utilizes it in what is presented as an attempt at autobiography. autobiography is, in fact, at the center of derrida’s critique of representation through language. he connects the autobiographical gesture of “present[ing]” oneself to the same ghostly sensation of naming and to the “first autobiographical gesture and the gesture of all the ‘here-i-am’s’ in the history of the law” (85). the animal looks at him and he responds instinctively with an attempt to construct an identity, and the mirror (or the autobiographical text) captures this construction. this attempt is, however, a “spectral drama” and the autobiography is a “sepulcher,” housing only the empty ghost of language with none of the real body, human or nonhuman, present (75). the term “drama” calls attention to the performativity of this “here-i-am,” and part of the humor of the henri videos comes from being presented with the human tendency to overperform ourselves. the phrase “i am” appears again and again in the first henri film, and each instance is another re-presentation of a speaker that tries to construct a sense of self through language. each gesture is also false, as all masks are false and therefore display the “nonpower” of self-deception contained within the power of presenting. “my caretakers love me” is a story that henri must tell despite evidence of distaste, as the video overall is a story that slides over the truth uncomfortably and cannot settle. fig. 4 autobiography in popular articles about the henri films, both melissa morrissette and deborah netburn refer to the relationship between the cat that braden films and the cat that caitlin rose myers -“i’m told i’m famous on the internet” – henri the cat and the critical possibility of anthropomorphism 25 emerges as a result as that of actor and role. “henri” is an “actor,” morrissette writes, whose name is “actually henry” — a transition from one assumed title to another that nevertheless calls attention to the arbitrary gift of language. henry the cat is “a difficult star” who is coached into the presented narrative despite not fitting directly into the proffered mold (netburn). this difficulty calls attention to the autobiography itself as a discomforting gesture. just as the statements in these videos are explicitly a performance, all outward signs of inward emotional states can be seen as a performance as well. caught in the mirror (or in the eyes of the other), the self performs another self. in this case, the lens of the camera causes the “spectral drama” to extend its reach beyond a single video. through the constantly expanding online network, this spectral and speculative notion of identity spreads out like a virus. what occurs through this lens is a performance for this expansive audience, just as all efforts to present the “i am” are responses to the discomfort of the gaze that asks for definition. henri seems intended to raise awareness of this fact. yet all of this discussion of autobiography may seem to erase the distinction between the human and the nonhuman to an unfortunate end. if we think of henri as an actor with a role, then we think of him as human and engaging in a human act. derrida explicitly discusses the dangers of anthropomorphism: “we know the history of fabulization and how it remains an anthropomorphic taming, a moralizing subjection, a domestication. always a discourse of man, on man, indeed on the animality of man, but for and in man” (37). this is a critique that must be dealt with in the context of the “henri” videos. henri’s difficulties are specifically human — his words are taken from human mouths and, when he empathizes, he seems to do so specifically to draw a human audience to consider human concerns. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 26 fig. 5 & 6 anthropocentrism even when he uses these words in a feline context (to discuss chasing and killing a spider, for example), there is no serious consideration of this context in the video itself. some responses to the “henri” videos absorb this sort of anthropocentrism and ultimately reinforce language as the barrier between human and nonhuman. although derrida finds the animal interactions in the alice in wonderland books productive (the flamingo that turns to look alice in the face, causing her to laugh, is of particular note in reference to henri), he acknowledges that alice’s statement about her cat’s inability to respond because it can’t speak is entirely missing the point (8). such a statement avoids the deceptive nature of language in itself and demands that all creatures present themselves through it or be forever silenced. henry’s owner makes an almost identical statement when she says that “there’s no way to convey to him how many people know of him,” as if a cat would care about stardom or a verbal discussion about it (netburn). this is one end to which one can take anthropomorphism: the complete erasure of the animal by making that animal either another human or refusing it consciousness entirely. as derrida notes, alice learns her lesson, or at least we learn it as a result of her adventures. in a land where “this way” and “that way” lead to the same place (madness), language and consciousness are equally unreliable. derrida says that “the said question of the said animal in its entirety comes down to knowing not whether the animal speaks but whether one can know what respond means” (8). the cheshire cat speaks and is therefore anthropomorphized, but it is through this anthropomorphism that we question language as a structure and ask ourselves what a “response” entails. we thereby uncover the tools for a critique of anthropomorphism even as we practice it. caitlin rose myers -“i’m told i’m famous on the internet” – henri the cat and the critical possibility of anthropomorphism 27 derrida questions his own derision of anthropomorphism when he asks if refusing to project could mean, “depriving the animal of every power of manifestation,” and especially of its power to criticize “its experience of my language” (18). this describes the first “henri” video precisely. the film uses the performance of human consciousness to dismantle it and its belief in the representational powers of language. derrida calls the gaze of the animal “bottomless”; like “the eyes of the other, the gaze called ‘animal’ offers to my sight the abyssal limit of the human” (12). through this vast unknown, the animal gaze reflects back toward the human the gulf of what it can never encompass. the animal shows the human its limits through both a critique of its methods and the possibility it represents of an outside to language. henri fits both of these criteria. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 28 figs. 7, 8 & 9 reflecting back first, his narrative includes a criticism of the human tendency to rely upon a “life of luxury” and the “filtered” though “impure” taste of the artificial, and we laugh as an audience because we recognize ourselves in this hollow materiality. we too are surrounded by machinery meant to make our lives comfortable and yet we feel alone. even more damning, henri draws attention to the comedy of our excessive and selfinflicted sadness. popular journalist matthew manarino makes this point when he compares lovecraft’s “cosmic futility” to henri’s: “’the world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind.’ lovecraft’s melancholy has become a shared sentiment among not only mankind but also those guardians of the internet — existential cats.’” we sympathize as we laugh, and these simultaneous reactions are a result of henri’s dismantling of autobiography. we invite the artificial materiality that causes our melancholy and then blame our items for owning us. similarly, our devotion to the sovereignty of language is of our own making and we suffer within its constraints. if this is what it means to be human, henri implicitly states, then why aspire to it? the true goal for the study of the animal is, as derrida states, releasing it from human reinterpretation. the animal does not need or want to be “giv[en] speech back” — it is “the absence of the name and of the word” and it lacks nothing as a result of being separate from language (48). the anthropomorphized henri is not at this stage, although he hints toward it. when he says that his “thumbs are not opposable,” he sets himself apart from the source of the words that he uses. caitlin rose myers -“i’m told i’m famous on the internet” – henri the cat and the critical possibility of anthropomorphism 29 figs. 10 & 11 bottomless gaze he is not human — he opposes the human, as he “oppose[s] everything” else. this brings us back to henri as “singular.” henri is set apart from both humans and from the human expectations of cats. he fits into neither category, which braden claims was intentional. he is quoted as saying in one of many popular articles on the henri phenomenon, “’henri just couldn’t have contempt for humans…. he had to have it for cats, too, and that’s what made it work” (morrissette). he has “contempt” for everything because, like the tortured individual he is, he does not see himself represented accurately in his surroundings. instead, he is “scorned” equally by the human and the common representation of the nonhuman. henri’s first video suggests that there is, or ought to be, another possibility. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 30 figs. 12 & 13 absence of the word henri often refuses to communicate on human terms or through human assumptions; he claims to “rarely purr” and calls his tail wagging “a reflex action” rather than an attempt to speak. this is derrida’s “absence of the word.” this is the silent and unknown depth of the “bottomless gaze” of the animal. henri manages to use a human voice to criticize human voices, while suggesting that he is beyond language himself, opposing common conceptions of the nonhuman experience. this suggestion would not be made available to us without moving first through anthropomorphism. braden needed to show henri “speaking” in order to suggest that there is more to the feline experience than the desire for language. while anthropomorphism is certainly not where investigation into the nonhuman world should end, it is perhaps a necessary step along the path. jane bennett, in her vibrant matter (2010), concurs. she writes, “maybe it is worth running the risks associated with anthropomorphizing (superstition, the divinization of nature, romanticism) because it, oddly enough, works against caitlin rose myers -“i’m told i’m famous on the internet” – henri the cat and the critical possibility of anthropomorphism 31 anthropocentrism: a chord is struck between person and thing, and i am no longer above or outside a nonhuman ‘environment’” (120). in this case, the animal gaze is the “thing” with which a chord is struck and we abandon the idea of the animal as beneath us. the next step is to acknowledge that it is separate from our conceptions of it entirely. henri’s public is drawn into his experiences through humor and empathy and thereby begins to work through his difficulties with language and representation in a hostile world. it is the combination of this urge to understand and the actor/role dynamic that begins to emerge as the next step beyond anthropomorphism. henry, the real cat behind henri, plays a role. this would mean that henri’s thoughts and experiences are not henry’s. the question then becomes, who (or what) is henry? almost a third of netburn’s la times article focuses, not on the videos or on braden, but on the lived experience of henry the cat. “when the weather is nice, henry spends most of his time outside, hiding under the trees and bushes around his owner’s grassy front yard. henry’s owner describes the cat as a ‘gentle hunter.’ he’ll often bring birds and small mammals back to the house, but they are almost always alive” (netburn). with the exception of the owner’s misrepresentation of henry’s actions as “gentle,” these are definable actions of the animal as animal. he hides under trees and bushes; he hunts but brings the animal back alive. he does purr, and frequently. he doesn’t hide when company comes to the house. this urge to investigate the actions of a nonhuman other opens up the possibility for the non-anthropomorphized animal that could, perhaps, attempt to represent itself. while we look toward this possibility, there will always be the threat of misunderstanding and subjecting the animal to language all over again, countered by the equal threat of silencing it and removing its ability to critique. the path is precarious but clearly essential. the first “henri” film may or may not have been intended to open these particular doors, but it certainly indicates the ways in which the public’s perception of the nonhuman has been and continues to be structured. this question of the animal gaze will always come back to language, the power or “nonpower” of representation, and our discomfort at the potentially bottomless depth of its understanding and judgment. as braden has continued to film henry the cat and begun profiting on his enterprise, the object of these films has become the product he is benefiting from rather than the animal experience. henri now uses references to internet memes to garner his laughs and thinks about his fame as much as he thinks about the judgments of his humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 32 owners. his critiquing gaze rarely delves deeper than surface mockery. this is the unfortunate result of the hyper-individualization of celebrity and the actor/role relationship in this instance. braden profits off of these films rather than henry and it is braden who therefore decides what henri will say. braden, like alice, can and does miss the mark on occasion. yet the first film will stand as a testament to the interpretive possibilities of the burgeoning critical genre of cat videos. works cited bennett, jane. vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham: duke up, 2010. braden, will. “henri.” youtube. youtube, 24 may 2007. web. 28 oct 2012. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. ed. marie-louis mallet. trans. david wills. new york: fordham up, 2008. manarino, matthew. “’i’m told i’m famous on the internet’: an interview with henri le chat noir.” newmediarockstars.com. new media rockstars. 12 nov. 2012. web. 1 march 2015. morrissette, mellissa. “henri the cat goes viral, turns profit in the name of art.”abcnews.go.com. abc news. 27 oct. 2012. web. 1 mar. 2015. netburn, deborah. "henri, afflicted by fame." latimes.com. los angeles times. 24 oct. 2012. web. 1 mar. 2015. microsoft word mershon-vanhorn-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:1 reviews katharine mershon reanimating chicago dave aftandilian, and gavin van horn, eds. city creatures: animal encounters in the chicago wilderness. chicago and london: the university of chicago press, 2015. xi+377 pp. $30.00 hb; $18.00 e-book. “hog butcher for the world, / tool maker, stacker of wheat / player with railroads and the nation’s freight handler; / stormy, husky, brawling, city of the big shoulders.” the first five lines of carl sandberg’s 1914 poem “chicago” capture its enduring image as a bold and brash city of industry. with its pavement and steel landscape, its air thick with the aroma of hog butchering, and its corrupt culture of political cronyism, images of chicago as a concrete jungle still persist. dave aftandilian and gavin van horn’s katharine mershon -reanimating chicago 137 edited collection, city creatures: animal encounters in the chicago wilderness, unsettles such perceptions of chicago by attending to “the many, surprisingly varied wild and domestic animals with whom we share our apartments and alleys, backyards and gardens, forest preserves and parks” (1). from chicago’s meatpacking heyday and beyond, aftandilian and van horn reveal that the city was and continues to be a living city filled with an astonishing variety of creatures. even if we are oblivious to their presence, these animals see us, and, as city creatures suggests, it is time for us to begin seeing them. to that end, city creatures aims to “reanimate chicago” by introducing readers to the “unexpected diversity of finned, feathered, scaled, and furry animals who live alongside us in the city and suburbs” (3). in (re)acquainting its audience with their animal neighbors, city creatures strives to “inspire readers to care about and for them” (3). this book thus has an educational and ethical thrust geared toward changing city dwellers’ attitudes and behavior toward the nonhuman creatures in their midst. city creatures accomplishes this goal by adopting a story-based approach that combines a variety of genres and media, including nonfiction essays, illustrations, maps, photographs, and poems. citing literary scholar jonathan gottschall’s argument that humans are “as a species, addicted to story” and conservationist will rogers’s claim that stories “can get through to our hearts with a message,” city creatures uses stories as a means to inspire its audience to empathize with the animals around them (3). rooted in the conviction that narratives foster a sense of shared community among people of different backgrounds, this volume features stories that “foreground other animals as agents … as subjects rather than objects, acting with consciousness and intention in the world.” by making chicago’s dismissed, ignored, or unknown animals visible as actors and subjects in their own right, city creatures hopes to change how people perceive and relate to nonhuman life in their everyday lives. while this emphasis on nonhuman creatures as subjects and actors aligns with much of the scholarship in animal studies, and both aftandilian and van horn have ph.ds. (in anthropology and religion respectively), this book primarily addresses itself to a nonacademic audience of “part-time naturalists, urban explorers, creative artisans, outdoor enthusiasts, [and] green-space lovers” (4). in addition to these readers, the volume has a number of stories about children and childhood, focusing on the ways in which we can teach children about the world through nature or can foster a childlike sense of wonder in ourselves. for that reason, this book would also appeal to parents and teachers. city creatures also features a diverse set of contributors, bringing together native chicagoans, immigrants to the city, academics from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, as well as artists, poets, museum curators, farmers, religious leaders, and more. filled with beautiful and provocative essays, images, and poems, city humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 138 creatures would be an ideal coffee-table gift for a nature-loving relative, a chicago history enthusiast, a visual art aficionado, a new parent, and beyond. priced at a reasonable $30 for hardcover and $18 for an e-book, with short and engaging sections that span no more than ten pages, the book is also ideal for high school or college-level teaching. one could imagine borrowing excerpts for a wide range of classes covering anything from animal ethics, art history, and chicago history, to environmental studies, urban history, and literary studies. the book’s educational benefits are enhanced by the recommended resources list at the end of each essay — a useful source for further exploration and research. for students of nonhuman life, the volume also has a larger appendix at the end that is categorized by subject, with sections such as “animals in art,” “chicago metropolitan nature,” and “philosophical and humanities perspectives on animals.” “why look at city animals?” to answer this question, the book begins with the following statistic: in the united states more than 80 percent of humans live in urban areas; globally, it’s around 50 percent (5). rather than lamenting the rise of cities as harbingers of humanity’s increasing isolation from nature, aftandilian and van horn suggest that we “retrai[n] our vision of cities as places of inhabitation and encounters with nature” (5). while one can commune with nature in america’s vast public lands and national parks, city dwellers can also appreciate and experience the wilderness in their own backyards. to that end, city creatures advocates for the paradigm of reconciliation ecology, a concept coined by evolutionary ecologist michael rosenzweig that refers to the “science of inventing, establishing, and maintaining new habitats to conserve species diversity in places where people live, work, or play” (6). while ecological restorationists seek to mitigate and reverse the human impact on the surrounding environment, reconciliation ecologists work to create new ways of responding to other species’s needs, allowing for dynamic sites of cohabitation (6). the ecological restorationist paradigm reflects two important ideas emphasized throughout the book: 1) cities have always been embedded within nature, and 2) humans are not the only city dwellers. while humans may have created cities, many forms of nonhuman life inhabit and change urban environments — from squirrels to insects to birds of prey. with these ideas in mind, city creatures “hopes to place the dialogue about urban conservation front and center and contribute to an ethic of care for the everyday places where people live and work” (7). “why chicago?” one might also ask, harking back to carl sandberg’s poetic depiction of chicago. as city creatures reveals, chicago is much more than the skyscrapers of its downtown. chicago is a city of neighborhoods, parks, and waterways, and as city katharine mershon -reanimating chicago 139 creatures reveals, even chicago’s most populated downtown areas are home to many forms of nonhuman life. in addition to chicago proper, city creatures covers chicago’s metropolitan region, encompassing its vast networks of suburban forest preserves, rivers, and prairies. chicago’s geography, topology, and hydrology have made it a popular meeting place for many animal and vegetal species (7). thanks to the efforts of early naturalist groups, chicago is home to institutions such as the peggy notebaert nature museum (operated by the chicago academy of sciences), the field museum, and the lincoln park and brookfield zoos. these institutions make chicago a prime destination for humans looking to encounter both familiar and unknown creatures. aftandilian and van horn also remind us that chicago is one of the birthplaces of the ecology and is home to numerous scientific organizations devoted to ecological management, such as the restore project (rethinking ecological and social theories of restoration ecology), and the chicago wilderness land management research program. chicago embodies the idea that cities are not biological deserts, but are vibrant settings to meet and study all types of nonhuman life (8). city creatures is comprised of six sections, each of which constitutes a potential site of human-animal encounters. although the book is nearly 400-pages long, its format of short, readable sections makes it easy to pick the book up and return to it at one’s convenience. it would be difficult to do justice to all the rich voices in the space of a book review, but i will highlight a few from each part. the first section, entitled “backyard diversity,” is filled with stories, images, and poems about the animals we might encounter close to where we live, such as opossums, raccoons, and squirrels. one standout is lea f. schweitz’s “mysterium opossum,” which recounts her unexpected encounter with the sacred, prompted by young son’s query, “what is that?” upon viewing an opossum in their backyard. in attempting to answer her son’s deceptively simple question, schweitz reflects on how “being present with urban nature and the sacred that hides within it is rarely easy; it’s ambiguous and unpredictable and fascinating, and sometimes frightening” (48). invoking twentieth-century theologian rudolph otto’s notion of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, which describes the experience of the sacred as one that overwhelms us when we confront a mystery, making us tremble in fear (the mysterium tremendum). at the same time, we are also drawn to this mystery and filled with awe (the mysterium fascinans). schweitz and her son’s experience with the “mysterium opossum” reveals the limits she had unconsciously placed on the sacred in urban nature, forcing her to interrogate and inhabit the ambiguity she feels about a typically despised creature like an opossum. in so doing, the opossum teaches schweitz and her son that “by abiding in the ambiguity, they can remain open to the grace in [the opossum] and the possibility of other unexpected spiritual lessons in urban nature” (49). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 140 section two, “neighborhood associations,” travels to chicago’s liminal spaces that are neither wild nor domestic. this section includes many highlights, such as the puerto rican-born and chicago-raised poet david hernandez’s “pigeon,” which draws incisive and uncomfortable parallels between chicago’s pigeons and its latino and hispanic residents (91). another fascinating piece from this section is eli suzukovich iii’s “kiskinwahamâtowin (learning together),” which is about a garden restoration project at the american indian center in chicago’s ravenswood neighborhood, a part of the city better known for being home to chicago’s mayor than for its connection to chicago’s native american communities. through compelling details and stories, this essay describes how the restoration of the garden also revitalized relationships among native languages, cultures, and communities in chicago (106). while “neighborhood associations” includes a few excellent pieces about the cats and dogs of chicago (see michael s. hogue’s essay about the community-building effects of an impromptu city dog park, susan hahn’s poem “wanting was an alley cat,” and alma domínguez’ paintings), i would have liked to have seen more space devoted to confronting chicago’s massive population of homeless dogs and cats. with 20,000 dogs and cats entering chicago’s city shelter annually, it would be worth exploring how socioeconomic inequities among chicago’s human beings have affected its feline and canine populations. because companion animal homelessness is a problem in cities across the united states, it would be valuable to explore what steps local animal rescue organizations and the city of chicago are taking to combat this challenge. turning to “animals on display,” section three visits places where humans go to watch animals, including aquaria, museums, and zoos. many of the essays, such as joan gibb engel’s “train to the zoo” and andrea friederici ross’ “bridging the divide: pondering humanity at the zoo” confront the ethics of taking children to zoos or of supporting institutions that keep animals in captivity. attuned to the benefits of experiencing “wild” animals up close, but also conscious of the costs exacted on the animals themselves, these essays present a nuanced picture of the ethical complexities of urban zoo-keeping. living animals are not the only kinds of creatures on display in chicago, as rebecca beachy’s “a living taxidermy” reminds us. describing her experiences performing public taxidermy demonstrations at the beecher lab of the peggy notebaert nature museum, beachy argues that “to display the dead, in every stage of decay and preservation, enhances the possibility of actually seeing — of witnessing death and life in palpable conversation. public taxidermy demonstration does just this” (157). supplemented by marianna milhorat’s video stills depicting different stages of katharine mershon -reanimating chicago 141 taxidermy, the experience of reading beachy’s essay is akin to witnessing a live taxidermy demonstration, complete with the attendant fascination and discomfort. terry evans’s photographs of drawers of taxidermied birds, beautiful and heartbreaking in their stillness, are a perfect accompaniment to beachy’s piece (175-7). section four, entitled, “connecting threads,” explores the protected areas around chicagoland that provide habitat for local and migrating animals. andrew s. yang’s essay “letting the city bug you: the artistic and ecological virtues of urban insect collecting” engages with baudelaire’s notion of the flâneur as a model for artistic engagement by questioning if there are non-anthropocentric ways of being a flâneur. for yang, this is possible through the eyes of insects, whose diversity and ubiquity make a strong case for exploring the city from an insect’s perspective. drawing from his experiences teaching an entomology class at the school of the art institute of chicago, and aided by photographs captured during such entomological explorations, yang describes the spontaneous social spaces that emerged as strangers joined his class to help collect insects at nearby parks. in addition to bringing diverse groups of people together, yang recounts how his students developed a greater appreciation for the small creatures in our midst as they learned to experience chicago through insect eyes. turning from creatures on the ground and in the air to those under the water, section five, “water worlds,” examines the ecologically essential, but perhaps less familiar, creatures who inhabit the bodies of water surrounding the city. the first essay, “washed up on the shores of lake michigan” by curt meine, recounts what happens when the usually hidden contents of the lake rise to the surface, as they did during the great alewife die-off of 1967. during that summer, the shores of lake michigan were overtaken by dead alewives, a species of fish not native to the great lakes, thus revealing the effects of human-perpetuated environmental change. meine uses this historical event to raise these essential questions: “do we accept, combat, or accommodate the invasive species that come to our waters? do we continue to see only the surface of lake michigan and to regard the water out there as something inert and apart? do we persist in seeing the lake as only a commodity, lacking a relevant history, ours to reconstruct according to political and economic demands? or do we care for the lake as a living community to which we belong?” (250). clearly, meine would answer in the affirmative to the final question, arguing for a broader ethic of care towards the creatures populating the chicagoland region, including not only those living on land, but also those in the water. following meine’s essay is a poem by todd davis called “alewives” that laments “how quickly they perish / far from home,” (253) and a photograph by colleen plumb of dead alewives stacked together in varying stages of decay. together, these three pieces make a convincing case for understanding lake humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 142 michigan not simply as a commodity to be used by human beings, but as a living, ecologically significant habitat for a diverse number of creatures. while many visitors to chicago are familiar with lake michigan, michael a. bryson’s “canoeing through history: wild encounters on bubbly creek” draws our attention to the largely forgotten south fork of the south branch of the chicago river located on chicago’s southwest side. nicknamed “bubbly creek” in the nineteenth century, this body of water earned its moniker due to the methane gas that bubbles up from the anaerobic bacterial decomposition of organic waste that makes up the creek’s sediments (264). this “organic waste” is a result of decades of using bubbly creek as a dumping ground for the chicago union stock yards, a decision that was justified by the false belief that the slow-moving current would wash the waste downstream (264). despite the water’s “perpetual sickness” from human mismanagement, bryson argues that bubbly creek and places like it are “potential sites for contact with wildlife and renewal of spirit — especially for urban citizens who may be plagued by a fundamental disconnection from the nonhuman world around them” (265). as a means of illustrating this point, bryson recounts the experience of taking a class on canoes down the creek, where students spotted a majestic sandhill crane. for bryson, this moment of sublimity in the midst of decay reflects the possibility of encountering nature in unexpected places and the hope for the creek’s eventual restoration (270-1). the final section, “coming home to the city,” turns to the wild animals living in chicago. this section includes essays, poems, and images of coyotes, buffalo, skunks, and more. one highlight is dave aftandilian’s piece, “hardy, colorful, and sometimes annoyingly loud,” which describes the infamous parakeets of hyde park, the neighborhood home to the university of chicago. as its title suggests, the presence of this non-native species is a contentious topic; they were beloved by chicago’s former mayor harold washington and despised by those irritated by their incessant squawking. enriched by diana sudkya’s beautiful and educational paintings of the parakeet nests, this essay fosters an appreciation for the birds, who promote ecotourism to hyde park as well as provide joy during chicago’s bleak winters (304). ultimately, aftandilian suggests that the monk parakeets are best understood as a “new kind of totem animal” (305). drawing from graham harvey’s definition of the term in his book animism, totemism here refers “not just [to] the animals or plants in question, but also to the humans who feel closely connected with them, together as ‘groups of persons that cross species boundaries to embrace more inclusive communities and seek the flourishing of all’” (305). through these birds, aftandilian believes that we can learn about what it means to become “native” to a place and to share it with others (305). katharine mershon -reanimating chicago 143 city creatures thus reminds us that cities are not solely the domain of human beings, and that as urban citizens we have a responsibility to attend to and care for the nonhuman creatures around us. by combining a variety of perspectives from within and outside of academia, this book is an accessible and entertaining way of seeing chicago or any urban environment with fresh eyes. for the scholar of animal studies or nonhuman life, the book would be a useful teaching tool or entry point into a new area of interest. works cited chicago animal care and control data statistics. web. 13 august 2016. sandburg, carl. “chicago.” poetry (march 1914). web. 13 august 2016. microsoft word freeman-andersen-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:2 review article carrie packwood freeman protecting meat kip andersen & keegan kuhn, (writers, directors, & producers). cowspiracy: the sustainability secret. aum films and first spark media. 2014. www.cowspiracy. com. a cow’s face stares at us on the dvd cover, and “cow” is in the name of the documentary, yet the marketing for cowspiracy: the sustainability secret does not otherwise indicate that it is a film that animal rights and vegan advocates have special cause to celebrate. as a media scholar who falls in the latter two categories, i was pleased that this environmental documentary has much to offer the animal rights movement, as i will explain in this review. the film is eponymously framed as a thriller about industry and environmentalists conspiring to keep a secret. for example, cowspiracy.com calls it “the film that environmental organizations don’t want you to see,” and the dvd cover reads “there is one single industry destroying the planet more than any other. but environmental organizations don’t want to address it.” the back cover explains that the filmmaker investigates “why the leading environmental organizations are too afraid to talk about it.” one can guess by the title’s reference to cows that the industry in question is animal agriculture; however, most of us are accustomed to environmental discussions of food typically restricting themselves to critiquing factory farming, while endorsing humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 168 locavorism, smaller-scale grass-fed or organic farming methods, and fishing of certain “sustainable” wild species, or some aquaculture methods (bristow & fitzgerald; freeman, “meat's place”; stanescu). so cowspiracy certainly could have been more of that same message promoting “sustainably-sourced animal products” or reduction in meat consumption, primarily based on environmental rationales. surprisingly, it is not, and it comes to the conclusion that a plant-based diet is needed to feed a growing human population, not only based on sustainability concerns, but also because veganism is more compassionate toward individual nonhuman animals. if the proposed point of the film is to uncover why the largest environmental ngos are not talking about the destructiveness of meat and dairy, we do not ever exactly find out their rationales, at least not from the environmental groups interviewed. but others interviewed in the film surmise the environmental organizations are pragmatically catering to their (financial) supporters. for example, food journalist michael pollan proposed that being anti-meat would be “a political loser” for membership organizations who probably feel that challenging people on something that is so dear to them will hurt fundraising efforts. a similar view is shared by some other experts (not featured in the film), such as holt, who found that many environmental organizations shun anti-factory-farming coalitions with animal rights organizations, in order to avoid alienating their own members who hunt and farm animals. likewise, i surmise that the two social movements’ fundamental disagreements over humans’ entitlement to hunt, fish, and farm nonhuman animals likely increases environmentalists’ reluctance to be associated with veganism, as the cause is heavily associated with the animal rights movement (see freeman, framing farming). motavalli has suggested that important food-oriented coalitions with environmentalists would be more likely, if animal rights activists became more “flexible” on the issue of eating animals, implying that it is the animal rights movement who needs to compromise its principles.1 but research by laestadius et al adds a more pragmatic rationale, arguing that food issues are often off-topic (or tangential) for environmental ngos, as they are historically set up to focus more broadly on energy, forests, oceans, pollution and waste, and do not make a habit of pushing the public to make major (unpopular) lifestyle changes. instead, environmental ngos focus more on persuading government and industry to make policy-based and supply-side changes (hence, food campaigns tend to promote “sustainable farming and fishing”). to tackle this major, overlooked issue with meat, these researchers have recommended the creation of food-focused environmental ngos. and, as a film, carrie packwood freeman – protecting meat 169 cowspiracy also drives home the urgent need for the environmental movement to prioritize the meat issue. cowspiracy’s narrative journey. the 1.5 hour film features young american environmental activist kip andersen as the host and narrator, and we follow him as he attempts to discuss the environmental impacts of the animal agribusiness and fishing industries with government agencies and major environmental advocacy groups (conspicuously, greenpeace repeatedly refuses to talk to him). andersen was motivated to do this by discovering that his “obsessive compulsive” efforts at biking and recycling were not making him sustainable, since he ate animal products, and they contributed the most to greenhouse gas emissions, habitat destruction, species extinction, ocean dead zones, and freshwater exploitation. he interrogates why governmental and environmental groups do not emphasize the destructiveness of animal farming and fishing, but does not get a satisfactory rationale from most of the environmental ngo leaders. an interview with the industry lobbying group animal agriculture alliance then coincides (perhaps not coincidentally) with a cut in funding for his film, and a feeling that investigating the meat industry is risky, as it was for howard lyman, whom andersen interviews about his experience being sued for libel along with oprah winfrey by texas cattle ranchers. there is an implication that the meat industry is a bully who may even have the environmental movement in its pockets. nonhuman animals are visually featured the most when andersen interviews animal rights activists, environmental scholars, and organic and free-range animal farmers, as he explores alternative animal agriculture models other than factory farming and commercial fishing. in the end, he is not convinced of their sustainability from a logical standpoint, nor is he convinced of their ethicality from an emotional standpoint, which becomes apparent as he (and presumably the audience) gets upset after seeing two ducks killed by a backyard farmer. andersen ends by concluding that veganic (organic, all plant-based) agriculture is the most sustainable and humane food production model for a growing human population. he explores newer plant-based meat, egg, and dairy alternatives, and he himself transitions to eating a vegan diet, not just for sustainability and spirituality, but for “thriveability.” how does cowspiracy advance animal advocacy? the first time the film acknowledges the nonhuman animal’s perspective is 14 minutes in, when dr. will tuttle provides historical context for how humans and the domesticated animals we (re)produce now comprise an astounding 98% of the earth’s biomass, crowding out the “free-roaming animals” who used to far outnumber us. representatives from the following animal protection organizations are also interviewed later: sea shepherd humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 170 conservation society, food empowerment project, animal place farmed-animal sanctuary, and american wild horse preservation campaign, as well as vegan activists like the “mad cowboy” howard lyman. also, environmental researcher dr. richard oppenlander appears many times in the film and provides some of the harshest critiques of how animal agribusiness kills wild animals and drives their extinctions. especially toward the end, the film overtly acknowledges the individuality, sentience, and desire to live of nonhuman animals, such as when we see the backyard farmer exercising his privilege to decide who lives and dies of the ducks raised in his small backyard. the camera sympathetically shows us the reaction of the duck who witnessed the first slaughter and is awaiting his similar fate, trapped in the hands of another man. then comes the highlight of the film, from my perspective, when andersen starts to cry after witnessing the two ducks getting their heads chopped off, noting that “when it gets to this point, it’s not even about sustainability anymore. it was just, uh, i don’t feel real good inside.” he admits that he had been doing what many environmentalists do, looking at everything/everyone abstractly in terms of numbers or effects on the overall group/system, rather than thinking of all of these animals as individuals; this echoes the classic debate between animal ethicists who want to privilege the individual and environmental ethicists who often want to privilege the species group (regan). when we viewers are weary (and perhaps weepy) after witnessing the two ducks being cut in half, and we think we now have to endure another slaughter scene, this time of a chicken, andersen relieves us (and himself) by rescuing the chicken instead. the whole atmosphere of the film livens up as we see the chicken in the passenger seat, being petted by andersen, who is driving her to a farmed animal sanctuary called animal place to live out her full life. as environmentalism tends to be masculine and cowspiracy itself features more men than women, it is refreshing to see the male host be confident enough to buck traditional masculine roles of animal domination and abstract rationality to show the “sentimentality” and compassion for individuals that is typically associated more with femininity (adams; luke). as a society, we need more men to challenge these antiquated gender roles in favor of an androgynous ethic of care (and justice) toward fellow animals (donovan & adams). poignantly, the backyard farmer explained that his dad made him kill rabbits when he was a kid and it was hard at first, and now we see him killing ducks in front of his own kids, so the legacy of raising and killing animals continues. farmers’ children also play a role in my second favorite scene, this one on markegard family grass-fed (free-range) farm. their adolescent daughter lea, shown petting a pig carrie packwood freeman – protecting meat 171 in a woodsy area, tells andersen, “some people think that pigs are dirty and gross, but i really like them. they know people. they’ll be friends and be really nice. and they could be like your best friend or could be like a sister.” another pig comes up to be petted. “see, they know you when you get to know them. sigh. i mean i shouldn’t be bonding but you have to have nice pigs.” andersen asked her “why shouldn’t you bond with them?” and lea answered: “well because they are going to turn into bacon.” it seems that children more naturally want to bond with animals (be they pigs, rabbits, ducks) than kill them, but parents teach them that those species of animals ultimately exist for the purpose of supplying human food. case in point, we then see lea’s mother, daniga markegard, with a human baby on her hip, matter-of-factly telling andersen how many months old certain pigs are, and thus which pigs are old enough to be killed (ironically, i note that her baby may be the same age as those pigs). when daniga says “those two smaller ones over there can grow up a few months,” and points at two pigs with her other two children (including lea), we realize that by saying “those two smaller ones” she does not mean her two growing kids. speciesism dictates that she means she can kill the young pigs — further emphasizing human dominance and control over the lives and deaths of nonhuman animals. that the markegard parents go on to say how much they “love animals” ultimately seems odd to the audience, and potentially undermines the “humane meat” impression many viewers may have otherwise received from this free-range farm. the film then moves on to the dairy industry, and i found it interesting that the representatives from this industry were more frank than their counterparts in the meat industry when it came to admitting the unsustainability and high inputs their farming methods require. additionally, the editing and framing of the film footage during andersen’s visit to the organic dairy farm will raise animal welfare concerns from the audience, for the cows and calves who were featured in muddy or mechanistic conditions, facing repeated family separations, and then eventual slaughter. the film’s producers are willing to undermine and challenge the claims of some animal agribusiness organizations, as when cowspiracy shows sad factory farm images over an animal agriculture alliance representative’s claims that the animals are better off in confined feeding operations. i was glad that cowspiracy avoided making certain environmental claims that would be counter-productive to an animal-rights cause. for example, the film did not propose a solution of “greening” the factory farm, nor any biotech solutions of engineering animals, or capturing greenhouse gas emissions from animal waste (clark; twine). and unlike the food campaigns of most environmental organizations (freeman, “meat’s humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 172 place”), cowspiracy calls for the major dietary changes that are actually ecologically necessary, not just what is palatable. the film does not assume that humans are unwilling or incapable of giving up eating animal products. on the other hand, the film is not written with a conscious recognition of animal-rights or anti-speciesist language that humbly acknowledges that humans are also a member of the animal kingdom, nor does it always recognize the individuality of nonhumans by carefully using words like “he” or “she” not “it,” and “who” not “that” (dunayer). pedagogical suggestions for use of cowspiracy in the classroom. most guest presentations in school classrooms cannot accommodate the two hours it would ideally take to show the full documentary followed by discussion. to utilize cowspiracy as a basis for a 60-75 minute discussion of environmental and animal rights issues with animal agribusiness, i recommend showing the following 40 minutes’ worth of clips from the film, interspersed with open discussions/q&a:2 topic of the clip timing (times are from the “first run release” version of the film.) specific elements featured problems with the fishing industry. 2 minutes 23:45 – 25:55 the oceans under siege; “bykill” deaths; driftnet damages; sharks killed in ‘sustainable fishing.’ free range and organic farming of land animals and its costs to the environment, wildlife, and society. 17 minutes 41:15 – 57:30 visit to markegard freerange family-run ranch raising pigs and cows; high land use calculations of ranching; visit to organic dairy farm; calculations of high water usage in dairy industry; ‘wildlife management’ at the hands of ranching interests, specifically the killing of wild horses and wild predators in the west; david carrie packwood freeman – protecting meat 173 simon on his book meatonomics outlining how to internalize/raise the costs of meat and dairy; political power of animal agribusiness and their lobbying. (vegan) solutions for feeding a growing human population 20 minutes 1:04 – 1:23 human overpopulation and inefficiency of humans eating animals; how meat contributes to world hunger; michael pollan recommending eating less meat and more plants; visit to a “backyard farmer” raising ducks (shows the killing of two ducks); andersen’s emotional reaction to the ducks’ killing; calculations of ecological inefficiency of backyard animal farming; visit to animal place sanctuary when andersen rescues a chicken and decides to go vegan; visits with veggie meat producers like beyond meat; howard lyman speaks on the vegan and environmental connection; physician michael klaper discusses health benefits of a vegan diet; visits to organic and veganic crop farms and calculations of their efficiency in feeding people (compelling charts and stats); will tuttle provides a vegan vision. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 174 the clips from the middle and later parts of the film that i have outlined above are the best ways to showcase how fishing and animal farming that might otherwise be presumed to be sustainable as well as “humane,” are still ethically and ecologically problematic in comparison with organic or veganic crop farming. while host kip andersen acknowledges some benefits that small-scale and free-range animal farming have over factory farming, his film ultimately dispels the myth that any animal farming is truly ecological. showing these film clips allows the audience members to: • learn about the plight of sea and land animals raised or killed for human food (even in the “best” conditions); • make connections with certain individual cows, pigs, ducks, chickens, and aquatic animals; • understand how wild/free-roaming animals are killed and displaced to cater to ranchers’ interests; • consider the broader role of economics and politics in the maintenance of an ecologically destructive meat-based diet; • understand that a plant-based diet can be a healthier alternative to a meat-anddairy-based diet; • acknowledge that eating organic plant-based foods is the most efficient and ecological way to adequately feed a growing human population, with the potential to save the lives of millions of under-nourished humans and billions of nonhuman-animals (both “wild” and domesticated). notes 1. for comparison, i doubt that it would be socially acceptable to ask human rights activists to compromise their life-affirming principles (or principles of freedom, justice, health, welfare, etc.). speciesist social norms allow for nonhuman animals’ lives and freedoms to be routinely compromised in resolving any conflicts; thus, defending animal rights (such as veganism) is perceived as “unreasonably” absolutist and inflexible. 2. for help facilitating discussions that blend animal protection with nature/environmental protection, see lisa kimmerer’s anthology animals and the environment: advocacy, activism, and the quest for common ground (routledge, 2015). carrie packwood freeman – protecting meat 175 works cited adams, carol j. the sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory. continuum, 1990. bristow, elizabeth, & amy j. fitzgerald. “global climate change and the industrial agriculture link: the construction of risk.” society & animals 19.3 (2011): 205-224. clark, jonathan. “ecological biopower, environmental violence against animals, and the ‘greening’ of the factory farm.” journal for critical animal studies 10.4 (2012): 109– 129. donovan, josephine, & carol j. adams. the feminist care tradition in animal ethics. columbia up, 2007. dunayer, joan. animal equality: language and liberation. ryce, 2001. freeman, carrie p. framing farming: communication strategies for animal rights. rodopi, 2014. (www.framingfarming.com) _____. “meat’s place on the campaign menu: how u.s. environmental discourse negotiates vegetarianism.” environmental communication: a journal of nature and culture 4.3 (2010): 255 276. holt, david m. “unlikely allies against factory farms: animal rights advocates and environmentalists.” agriculture & human values 25 (2008): 169-171. laestadius, linnea i., roni a. neff, colleen l. barry, & shannon frattaroli. ‘‘‘we don’t tell people what to do’: an examination of the factors influencing ngo decisions to campaign for reduced meat consumption in light of climate change.” global environmental change 29 (2014): 32-40. luke, brian. brutal: manhood and the exploitation of animals. u of illinois p, 2007. motavalli, jim. ‘‘across the great divide.” e magazine (january/february 2002): 34-39. regan, tom. ‘‘how to worry about endangered species.” environmental ethics: what really matters, what really works. ed. d. schmidtz and e. willott. oxford up, 2002. 105– 108. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 176 stanescu, vasile. ‘‘‘green’ eggs and ham? the myth of sustainable meat and the danger of the local.” journal for critical animal studies 8.1-2 (2010): 8–32. twine, richard. animals as biotechnology: ethics, sustainability and critical animal studies. earthscan, 2010. microsoft word erby-ahmad.pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:2 reviews kelly erby go west, oxen, horses, and mules diana l. ahmad. success depends on the animals: emigrants, livestock, and wild animals on the overland trails, 1840–1869. x +132 pages, notes, bibliography, index. las vegas: university of nevada press, 2016. $31.95 (hb). the nearly three hundred thousand men, women, and children who trekked across the north american continent in the mid-nineteenth century looking for a better life in the american west depended on animals to successfully make the journey. as diana ahmad demonstrates in success depends on the animals, when these americans hitched wagons heavy with supplies and belongings to teams of oxen, horses, or mules, they also took with them certain cultural values and preconceptions about the animals on kelly erby-go west, oxen, horses, and mules 263 which they relied and their relationships with them. the miles they traveled with these animals, however, ahmad argues, led many emigrants to alter their ideas about their livestock, as well as the wild beasts and pests they encountered along the trail. in seven brief chapters, ahmad examines nineteenth-century americans’ concepts about animals, the role that animals played on the overland trails, and the impact of westward migration on the relationships between emigrants and animals. this study fills a significant gap in our historical knowledge of westward migration, for, as ahmad points out, “hundreds of books have been written about the human experiences on the overland trails, while none have been written about the animals that accompanied the emigrants” (ix). but ahmad’s motivation for writing extends well beyond merely filling a gap; she wants her readers to understand that meaningfully incorporating animals into the history of the overland trails “broadens the historical experience of humans and animals alike” (x). she turns to overlanders’ personal diary accounts and letters home for evidence to support this claim. after a quick overview of the factors driving westward migration between the 1840s-1860s — including the gold rush in california, the opening of new western territories, and ideas about america’s manifest destiny to spread democratic and christian principles across the continent — ahmad traces the influences that shaped nineteenth-century americans’ mindsets about animals and their relationships with humans. she finds these influences included religious and philosophical teachings, laws, and, even, artwork. western religions taught that animals lacked souls and that god had created animals to be subservient to men. at the same time, americans read the bible to say that humans had a religious responsibility to care for animals. children learned that abuse of animals insulted god. the law also provided legal protection for animals and guarded against cruelty. meanwhile, in the landscape paintings that were popular in the early 1800s, including those by hudson river school artists such as thomas cole and george catlin, animals were used to evoke tranquility, solitude, power, and majesty. these artists employed animals to suggest that nature, in its untouched innocence, should take precedence in the new american republic over potentially corrupting human civilization and empire. the pervasive nineteenthcentury ideologies of gentility and the cult of domesticity, ahmad finds, reinforced many of these concepts. “kindness to animals,” ahmad observes, “became a mark of class identity, while cruelty to animals … served as a predictor of antisocial behavior in adults” (10). these years thus saw a growth in the keeping of pets, which the wave of advice manuals in this period suggested would help inculcate morality in children. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 264 with a baseline for nineteenth-century americans’ attitudes toward animals thus established, ahmad turns in her third chapter to the preparations emigrants made for their westward journeys, focusing on their extensive planning involving animals. she writes: “preparations for the journey west required as much attention to the needs of the oxen, horses, and mules as to the needs of the human travelers” (17). businesses in the major jumping-off towns for trails bound for oregon and california, such as independence, st. joseph, and st. louis, missouri, as well as kanesville (later renamed council bluffs), iowa, advertised their ability to provide anything emigrants required for the long expedition ahead, including draft animals. as one overlander stated in 1852, “good horses, good mules and good oxen are everything on a journey like this” (21). ahmad uncovers the factors that influenced emigrants’ decisions about what kind and how many animals to purchase to pull their wagons. she explains that oxen, despite the fact that they traveled at one-third to one-half the speed of horses, were the preferred mode of transportation on the trails because they were considered “the safest animals that can be employed upon the road,” as well as easier to drive and less likely to be stolen by native americans (21). but unlike oxen or mules, horses “had a reputation for being a pleasant team if chosen carefully”; in the absence of such care, however, horses were considered finicky and unlikely to complete the trip successfully (23). ahmad also explains the forethought that went into purchasing supplies for draft animals. she recounts, for example, the decision of finley mcdiarmid from wisconsin who, in may 1856, purchased an extra wagon in which he intended to haul grain for his animals. after the animals had consumed these provisions, mcdiarmid abandoned the extra wagon, which freed up the animals that had pulled it and gave him extra teams in case they were needed. by this time, the grasses along the trail had grown sufficiently long in the sun of late spring and early summer to sustain his animals until they carried him to his destination point (23). as the years went on, however, and more and more humans, wagons, and animals traveled the trails, “the opportunities for locating good grass and water for the livestock near the trails declined” (31). overlanders were forced to carry more supplies to nourish their animals or to venture farther from the trail to find feeding and resting spots for their animals, which added significant time to their crossings. ahmad also explains the training that emigrants put into their animals before embarking west. she writes: “most of the emigrants quickly learned that spending time with the animals proved advantageous. the majority of the animals had never been broken, and they needed to become accustomed to human touch and to spoken kelly erby-go west, oxen, horses, and mules 265 commands” (24). ahmad finds that guidebooks and letters from friends who had successfully completed the journey advised overlanders to continue to be thoughtful toward their animals once on the trails. she explains that some authors recommended that “the greatest attention should be paid to all animals that are taken on this journey” and that “the success of the journey ‘depends entirely’ on the condition of the teams” (25). for example, emigrants were told to drive their animals slowly and not overburden their teams with too much “trumpery” (25). on the trails, overlanders constantly considered the beasts of burden that pulled their wagons, hauled their supplies, and carried their loved ones. how much farther could they travel before the animals needed to rest? where could they stop where good water and abundant grass would be available to rejuvenate their animals? how could they prevent a stampede, or the theft of their animals by native americans? did they need to shoe their animals’ feet? should they purchase fresh animals in order to complete their trek? in the terrible event that one of their animals became exhausted or hurt, unable to go on, should they put the animal down to end its suffering, or simply abandon it in the western wilderness? ahmad argues that from such constant consideration and mutual dependency, deep emotional bonds between human and animal were often forged. she writes: “on the journey from the missouri river to the pacific coast, the overlanders developed a relationship with their four-footed companions that exceeded anything they anticipated and that surpassed their needs of using the animals to simply propel them westward” (51). ahmad even uses the term “friendship” to describe the special connection between humans and animals on the trails. but though humans and animals may have been friends, bonded together through hardship and suffering, emigrants nevertheless never forgot these animals also “provided transportation, labor, and revenue” (1). in other words, theirs was first and foremost a working relationship. accordingly, emigrants sold their animals to the highest bidder or abandoned them to the wilderness (and the wolves) when it benefitted them to do so, or welcomed the addition of fresh meat to their diets their animals may have provided. ahmad also describes the contributions of dogs along the trails. she finds that dogs provided companionship as well as helping to herd the teams, locating lost livestock, and guarding camps and other animals throughout the night. the many and various wild animals encountered during the three-to-four-month journey became another part of emigrants’ daily routines. according to ahmad: “the wild animals they encountered ranged from the smallest insects to the largest carnivores. considering buffalo and antelope savory, wolves and mosquitoes scary, and prairie dogs saucy, most emigrants humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 266 manifested a keen awareness and appreciation for the animal life that surrounded them on the great plains, through the deserts, and over the mountains” (67). ahmad acknowledges that many of these wild animals became sources of food and leather, while others, like prairie dogs, were driven out by settlers carving out new homes. but she also argues they proved endlessly fascinating to emigrants and “symbolized their desires for new homes in the west” because of their abundance (67). in telling the story of westward migration from the perspective of animals, ahmad’s research contributes to a growing body of scholarship that explores the diversity of the american west and the significance of nonwhite, non-male peoples — or, in this case, animals — to it. by the time they reached their final destinations, ahmad writes, “the overlanders came to a new understanding and appreciation of the domestic and wild animals they worked with and encountered” (85). it is not, however, clear what, if any, significance this new understanding may have had in shaping the future way settlers lived, worked, or farmed. moreover, if, as some scholars have theorized, human dominance over animals provides a foundation for naturalizing power imbalances between peoples — including race and gender hierarchies — the newfound “friendships” between humans and animals forged on the overland trails do not seem to have had much of an effect on power dynamics more generally, given the often violent and imperialist history of the american west. still, success depends on the animals enriches the history of westward migration and settlement by meaningfully incorporating animals and their contributions into the story. the account is accessible and lively and will appeal to academic and popular audiences alike. ultimately, it is a tale of compassion and empathy in the face of tremendous obstacles and hardship, as humans and animals alike became “overlanders,” reshaping the american frontier. microsoft word doran-herman.pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 11:1 reviews thomas doran what is it like to be a sequential animal? david herman, ed. animal comics: multispecies storyworlds in graphic narratives. london: bloomsbury, 2018. 280 pp. $114 hc, $39.95 pbk. the history of animal representation in comics art is so long, vast, and varied that it is surprising the medium does not already dominate arts and humanities scholarship in animal studies. reasons why not abound, mostly stemming from the fact that comics art thomas doran -what is it like to be a sequential animal? 171 lacks a central position in a traditional academic discipline. for decades, scholars in art history and literary studies have been making attempts to incorporate comics into their existing critical landscapes. as a result, much comics criticism and pedagogy in these fields continues to exhaust itself and its readers by arguing for the medium’s artistic legitimacy and unique narrative or representational affordances, hindering the development of comics studies as a field in its own right. comics studies scholar hillary chute has argued for a diversity of critical approaches in comics studies while also challenging existing fields’ approaches to the medium: “part of the pleasure of writing about comics is the absence of an analogous discipline that provides a ready-made, fully importable lexicon — not film studies, despite its useful language of framing, view, temporality, and visual pleasure; nor literary studies, despite its helpful iterations of narrative theory; nor even art history, despite its rigorous attention to spatiotemporality” (634). in applying this problem of incongruence to animal comics, a volume whose contributors are predominately literary studies scholars, the decisive question concerns whether the volume makes more of a contribution to comics studies and animal studies, or comparative narrative theory. the essays in animal comics are organized under four subsections covering history and theory, animal alterity, critical frameworks, and pedagogy. the first subsection of essays, “animal agency in the history and theory of comics,” features two essays that provide most of the historical context for the collection. of all types of literary or visual artists, comics artists are probably the most self-conscious about their debt to animals as a direct result of the medium’s historic reliance on anthropomorphized animal characters, and a thorough study of the historical evolution of animal representation in comics art has not yet been produced. in what should be required reading in comics studies courses, as well as animal studies courses that assign comics, glenn willmott’s “the animalized character and style” expands upon the concept of the “funny animal,” which he describes as “any character recognized as embodying nonhuman animal types and qualities.” often such characters, like mickey mouse, are regarded as little more than “human characters in superficially animalized form,” but willmott uncovers their influence and evolution to show how they “trouble mimesis, doing funny things to identification and our ethical response them” (53). two core influences on the funny animal wilmott discusses are the grotesque and the animal fable. the influence of the grotesque, especially the proliferation of “plastic, distorted, or combinative creatures,” willmott argues, “are the ludic source of caricature and comics style alike, the basis of styles representing things/persons with biomorphic freedom from conventional notions of species and nature” (56–57). the influence of the fable, wherein “the animal mask or body allowed for the defamiliarization of human traits,” evolved in comics to the point where funny animals no longer seemed to possess humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 172 “moral cognates in conventional virtues” or to broadcast a “taxonomically stable or biologically recognizable” natural world. unlike in the animal fable, the funny animal “defamiliarizes both human and animal under the alluringly stylized sign ... of an inaccessible or uncertain nature at large” (60). rounding out the history of animal comics, daniel yezbick offers an expansive survey of animal comics from the enlightenment to the present in “lions and tigers and fears: a natural history of the sequential animal.” this essay’s strength is in its dizzying array of theoretically situated recommendations — organized under three categories: companion, anthropomorphized, and mutated animals — rather than its historical complexity, and it should prove a valuable resource for readers looking to expand the historical reach of their courses or scholarship. though perhaps not the fault of the author, this function of the essay would be greatly improved with at least a few visuals (rather than zero). this shortage of visual accompaniment troubles the entire collection. excluding the creative work that concludes the collection, the average number of visuals per essay is between one and two, all of which are reproduced in grayscale despite the intricate and vital coloration of several of the original comics. given the countless works of art history and comics criticism that have faithfully reproduced and more extensively incorporated visuals into their ethic of criticism, it is difficult to view the paucity of visualization as merely an unavoidable consequence stemming from budgetary constraints in academic publishing. instead, it speaks to the volume’s critical priorities and constricted sense of audience. many essays offer brilliant analyses of comics iconography, linework, color, paneling, and page layout but with the unintended consequence that, without visual support, close analysis of an absent visual landscape can feel either tenuous or overdetermined depending on the interpretations drawn from it. further, many comparative claims — such as mary knighton’s claim that manga is somehow distinct from western comics art in its ability to construct “an experience of simultaneity and not just one of sequential [by which knighton means linear rather than the nonlinear sense of sequential popularized by scott mccloud] unfolding” (140) — can only be substantiated through a fair and thorough display of visual evidence. in the isolated moments where essays actually do establish a true critical dialogue with provided visuals — as in david herman’s continuum for visual representations of animal’s subjective experience (202–11), carrie rohman’s reading of gendered iconography in nick abadzi’s laika (125–29), or laura pearson’s analysis of the role of anthropomorphism in representations of human-shark contact zones in matt thomas doran -what is it like to be a sequential animal? 173 dembecki’s xoc: the journey of a great white (162–67) — we see precisely and variously how it can alter the critical values and potential audience. regardless of visual limitations, most essays in animal comics deliver necessary interventions into popular texts, and sometimes unique contributions to the critical vocabulary necessary for discussing the intersection of comics art and animal studies. in his reading of brian k. vaughan and fiona staples’s ongoing series saga, michael chaney connects the award-winning comic’s core interest in mixed-race identity with its sprawling galaxy of animal and hybrid figures. chaney notes that animal characters seem to do little more than draw attention to “boundaries of difference” among various human races by generating “heightened emotionality” along the narrative’s peripheries (100). to be sure, plush dolls of ghüs, a haughty though undeniably adorable anthropomorphic seal, and statues of lying cat, a reserved sort of feline lie detector, feature prominently among saga merchandise despite their marginal status in the narrative. at its core, chaney argues, saga is concerned with “mixtures carried out to extremes,” but with a predominantly aesthetic interest in animals (109). this aesthetic is developed “through a vast repertoire of sight gags, jokes, visual turnabouts, scatological signs, grotesque ironies, and meta-reflexive signifiers, which point to established orders of expectation (of genetic resemblance, for example, or of species uniformity or transspecies difference) only to violate them” (115). chaney’s reading of saga’s animal aesthetic is likely exportable to countless works of fantasy that sideline animal characters in any visual medium. but it should be noted that while the essay is appropriately theoretically situated, it actually engages sparingly with comics art as a spatiotemporal medium. on the other hand, carrie rohman’s “curly tails and flying dogs: structures of affect in nick abadzi’s laika” thoroughly engages comics art’s capacity to reinforce gendered forms of affect through amplified style. rohman focuses on the relationship between laika, the moscow street dog murdered by the soviet space program in 1957, and yelena dubrovsky, laika’s fictional trainer, arguing that abadzi distinguishes “spatial codes” evoked by curling, nurturing lines and straight, rigid lines to “highlight how modes of empathetic engagement that cross species lines are themselves entangled with the cultural codes linked to gender” (120). drawing on the work of lori gruen, greta gaard, and others, rohman connects the circularity of the line with an ethics of care that governs dubrovsky and laika’s relationship in opposition to the ethics of justice that drives nation-state conquest of outer space and irretrievably hurls laika into orbit in a steel tomb. throughout, rohman is attuned to the gender essentialism inherent in this visual dichotomy and attends to cases where abadzi’s representations of animal care appear excessively feminine, leading to an appropriately uncertain conclusion humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 174 regarding “the degree to which [he] is aware of — or merely traffics in — gendered stereotypes” (136). although animal comics reserves a subsection for pedagogy “and beyond,” the collection actually only features one teaching essay, charles baraw and andrew smyth’s comprehensive summary of undergraduate responses to pride of baghdad, we3, and duncan the wonder dog. student insights into duncan complement alex link’s essay, featured earlier in the collection, on the “the politics and poetics of alterity in adam hines’s duncan the wonder dog,” which discusses how “refracting ideas of species difference through concepts of cultural difference, and vice versa ... creates a dialectical interplay between anthropomorphizing the nonhuman and zoomorphizing the human” (70). while baraw and smyth’s essay makes a strong case for how duncan and we3 especially complicated student’s perspectives on animal intelligence, interspecies kinship, and the ethics of animal exploitation, at least one other essay highlighting innovative forms of comics pedagogy would round out this section. how, for example, might students produce work within the comics medium in order to advance and complicate their ideas about animals and animal representation? and how might comics themselves be used as a medium for generating ideas and presenting evidentiary reasoning, either by supplementing or replacing the traditional, text-based essay? this question of the form comics criticism assumes applies not only to students but to scholars as well. in his introduction to animal comics, david herman asks whether “graphic narratives about animal agents afford different storytelling possibilities than other kinds of multimodal narratives that exploit alternative semiotic channels” (12). obviously, the answer is yes. but this may only be demonstrated effectively if we thoughtfully incorporate the comics medium itself, and its creative processes, into criticism. this is not to say that all essays about comics should take the form of actual comics, like scott mccloud’s understanding comics (1993), but certainly some should. more generally, as chute reasons, “in interpreting the desires of the (verbal and visual) text, i have found that an analytic purview can be enriched by knowledge and engagement with practices of production” (634). in light of this critical ethic, animal comics may read as a collection that does not desire to embrace the full potential, the reality, of the medium it proposes to study, often taking refuge in the narrative theories of text-based literature. as a result, the volume can occasionally appear more interested in narrative theory than in animals or comics in their own right. still, the collection may prove useful to those already working at the intersection of comics studies and animal studies. perhaps its most consistent strength rests in the many contributions and thomas doran -what is it like to be a sequential animal? 175 qualifications it makes to the canon of animal comics, both in revealing the complexity of already popular comics and unearthing valuable texts that have gone overlooked. but its resistance to including comics art, both as visual accompaniment and as a critical practice itself, along with its theoretical density, may prevent it from truly extending the reach of comics art into the larger interdisciplinary field of animal studies. work cited chute, hillary. “drawing is a way of thinking.” pmla 134.3 (may 2019): 629–37. . microsoft word kolb-campana-maisano h u m a n i m a l i a 8:2 reviews justin kolb the satyr's navel joseph campana & scott maisano, eds. renaissance posthumanism. new york: fordham university press, 2016. 335 pages. $125.00 hb; $35.00 pb; $23.99 kindle. the new essay collection renaissance posthumanism, edited by joseph campana and scott maisano, finds its center, in true humanist fashion, at the navel of a body, artfully displayed by a master painter. but unlike leonardo da vinci’s “vitruvian man,” the central figure in titian’s flaying of marsyas (1570-75) is not a confident, self-contained body displaying its perfections, but instead hangs upside down and abject, its legs crossed and arms dangling limp, closely crowded by torturers and onlookers. it is not a man, but a satyr, with hooves, shaggy legs, and pointed ears, a man-animal in extremis. the figure is marsyas, the syrinx-playing satyr who, in ovid’s metamorphoses, challenged apollo to a musical contest, and paid for his defeat by having his skin justin kolb -the satyr's navel 187 painfully sliced off by the capricious god. just below his head, one of titian’s signature dogs laps up marsyas’ blood. in his essay on this late, possibly unfinished work, stephen j. campbell reads flaying of marsyas as an inversion of the renaissance humanism that historians and art theorists have extracted from works like the “vitruvian man.” inverting the image around the fulcrum of the umbilicus, campbell uses the painting to describe a different sort of early modern humanism. instead of offering man as the measure of all things, titian’s painting presents a body at once human and animal, not displayed in isolation, but crowded by other human, plant, animal, hybrid, and divine figures, as its skin, the membrane that separates it from the world, is peeled away. the face of titian’s marsyas is strangely placid, far removed from the agonized expressions found in other works on the subject. in this face, campbell sees “not the marsyas in ovid who screams ‘why are you stripping me from myself?’” but instead “a marsyas who accepts an annihilation of boundaried personhood … a dream of shattering, of the undoing/unfolding of the figure in its boundaries, of continuum of the body with matter, attained through an impossibly ‘nonviolent violence,’ as it was dreamed of in dante’s invocation of apollo and marsyas” (91). this dream of “undoing,” of taking the imagined autonomous, distinct, superior human being and stripping him of his pretensions, of leveling the great chain of being and flaying the vitruvian man, animates many of the essays in renaissance posthumanism. grounded in an emerging canon of “posthuman” early modern primary texts — edward topsell’s a history of the four-footed beasts (1607), conrad gessner’s historiae animalium (1558), giovanni battista gelli’s la circe (1549) — and favored theoretical interlocutors — donna haraway, n. katherine hayles, bruno latour, cary wolfe — renaissance posthumanism arrives as animals, plants, minerals, machines, puppets, homunculi, and other sorts of nonhuman life are proliferating in early modern literary studies. early modern animal studies alone has produced important recent titles like laurie shannon’s the accomodated animal: cosmopolity in shakespearean locales; andreas höfele’s stage, stake, and scaffold: humans and animals in shakespeare's theatre; and bruce boehrer’s animal characters: nonhuman beings in early modern literature. renaissance posthumanism is an entry in this increasingly crowded field. the collection is admirably direct in arguing for their conception of renaissance posthumanism. cary wolfe’s 2010 book what is posthumanism? is a recurring foil for the editors and several of the contributors. kenneth gouwens draws some precise lines in his essay “what posthumanism isn’t: on humanism and human exceptionalism in the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 188 renaissance,” gouwens argues that “the scholarly community owes a debt of gratitude to cary wolfe for defining and deploying the term [posthumanism] with exemplary precision,” but faults wolfe for “negligible attention” to the renaissance, which does not even appear in the book’s index, or to unmentioned humanists like petrarch, pico della mirandola, erasmus, or montaigne (38). in defining “humanism,” wolfe quotes at length from wikipedia, thus creating a “wildly misleading” (39) picture of renaissance humanist thought. gouwens, as well as campana and maisano in their introduction, work to correct this caricature of humanism, arguing that “while many renaissance intellectuals at time celebrated the dignity of humankind and appealed to the authority of reason,” these positions “were not universally accepted tenets, and indeed were explicitly contravened in works by some of the key thinkers who have been appropriated as poster boys for anthropological optimism” (39). rejecting foucault’s renaissance episteme, the contributors to this volume emphasize continuity rather than rupture, and the inescapable entanglement of the human with the nonhumans all around it, even in the works of great humanist artists and writers. these essays share a concern with vulnerability. the posthuman figures here tend to be objects rather than subjects, acted upon rather than acting, and several of the chapters argue implicitly for a surrender of human fantasies of autonomy and for passivity toward the myriad forces of the natural world. campbell’s marsyas is one example, vin nardizzi’s idiosyncratic praise of unlively “wooden actors on the english renaissance stage,” taking on the qualities of the “wooden o” (201) around them, is another. erica fudge’s “farmyard choreographies in early modern england” draws on haraway’s “joint dance of being” and “oxymoron of disciplined spontaneity” (146) between humans and dogs to attempt, not always convincingly, to re-imagine early modern husbandry as a collaborative “ontological choreography” (147). julian yates’ sprawling “oves et singularium: a multispecies impression” examines sheep in their various forms in early modern ecology and culture: as animal, parchment, garment, and metaphor. drawing on wolfe and on haraway’s work on “companion species,” yates uses peasant rebel jack cade’s brief sympathy for the “innocent lamb … made parchment” (4.2.72) in henry vi, part ii as the departure point for an examination of the many entanglements of humans and sheep, and how, via the pastoral metaphors of christianity, the “sheepy metaphors” of shepherd, flock, and herd “provided a set of formal or equipmental resources for all aspects of life, and, on occasion, they were subject to playful or troubling inversions, transpositions, as in the likes of jack’s utopian projects” (181). far from a commodity for human disposal, sheep justin kolb -the satyr's navel 189 are woven into human identity itself, providing the materials for defining human beings and the many ways in which they are herded and fleeced. human collaboration with the inhuman, conscious or not, recurs again and again in these essays. it’s rarely explicitly stated, but nature is often presented here as essentially cooperative, harmonious. if human beings put aside their dominance, they will find a rich and rewarding relationship with the inhuman. these pieces tend to elide the violence and exploitation found in so many human-animal relationships, most of which are something other than cohabitation with haraway-style companion animals. fudge’s cattle may be pulling plows before bacon and descartes (regular villains in early modern posthumanism) turned them into thoughtless instruments, but they were worked until they died nonetheless. sheep may structure human life, but they get skinned and eaten anyway. in moving away from modern anthropocentrism, one can overcorrect, and start seeing pre-modern practices as kinder or more just than the evidence warrants. holly dugan’s “a natural history of ravishment” is a welcome corrective to this tendency. dugan begins with an anecdote from the wonderfully weird english prose romance life of alexander, in which the conqueror and his men encounter a giant “wildman […] covered with rough hair, with a head and voice like a swine” (121). unsure whether the creature is man or beast, alexander devises a test: his men “take a young damsel, strip her, and set her before the creature” (121), which becomes inflamed with lust, and sweeps her up. the damsel is recovered with some difficulty, the wildman is burned at the stake, and alexander moves on to further adventures. dugan uses this ambiguous encounter — is the wildman’s lust a sign of his humanity or animality? — to examine the shifting boundaries between the human and animal in the alexander romances, and the centrality of “ravishment” to drawing those boundaries. dugan crafts a vision of nature that doesn’t skirt problems of violence and domination, as many of the other essays do: “in a violent world filled with a stunning array of nonhuman actors, human women’s bodies are rendered desirable — and vulnerable — to a wide variety of animals, transcending what we might term ‘species boundaries.’ in such tales, sexual violence emerges as a trope to define humanity” (121). shifting focus from alexander and his knights to the “mutual abjection” (121) of damsel and wildman, dugan decenters a naïve model of the human while avoiding utopian fantasies of cooperation. human beings should step down from their pedestal, but violence and exploitation will remain. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 190 where campbell sees acquiescence, even joy, in marsyas’ calm endurance of the “annihilation of boundaried personhood” (91), dugan’s feminist reading reminds us that there is nothing necessarily liberating about such annihilation: this logic helped gird renaissance interpretations of medieval literary tropes of ravishment as “natural” history; and it raises questions — at least for me — about our metaphors of desire that animate some posthuman theories, theories that call for an embrace of a widened nature of actants and a more-than-human world. the damsel and the beast, both abject in medieval and renaissance accounts of this tale, remind us that such an embrace has not always been volitional. (138) dugan raises a question that the new posthumanisms should take on: what should a posthuman life be? is there a livable point between the isolated vitruvian man and abject marsyas? can one open to the world and still keep one’s skin? spinning in circles around the axis of the navel, where should we rest? microsoft word jacobs-geller. pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:2 reviews joela jacobs animal answers to the jewish question jay geller. bestiarium judaicum: unnatural histories of the jews. new york: fordham university press, 2018. 404 pp. $75 hb. in bestiarium judaicum, jay geller brings together the jewish question with the question of the animal. he explores the ways in which jews, particularly in german-speaking european modernity (between 1750 and the shoah), have been dehumanized through images of animals, and how they, in turn, have written back to undermine these antisemitic stereotypes with animal figures of their own. the animalization of jews joela jacobs -animal answers to the jewish question 257 produces, in geller’s words of the introduction, “jew-animals” (5), and in his first chapter, he reaches back to ancient and medieval sources to sketch the harrowing history of associating jews with specific animals, such as pigs, apes, wolves, and vermin. this act of bestialization renders jews killable and has been used as justification for genocide, slavery, and exploitation in many contexts. the following seven chapters of bestiarium judaicum engage with predominantly nineteenthand twentieth-century literature featuring animal figures, written by german-jewish writers such as heinrich heine and franz kafka. in his analyses of these works, geller shows how the authors take up the species-specific stereotypes of the jew-animal and undermine it by “performing animal, the jew-as-animal, by literalizing their societally figured identifications (i.e., the jew-animal)” (21). in attending to the authors’ specific sociohistorical contexts and the particularities of individual animal figures, geller localizes instances of jewish writers turning the animalization of jews (jew-animals) into a literary performance of the jew-as-animal that undermines these stereotypes by literalizing them and exposing their constructedness. a study about jews and animals has to negotiate many difficulties that come with such a comparison, and geller carefully addresses the inherent dangers of ascribing the literary strategy of performing the jew-as-animal to these works. rather than assuming that all of the texts in his canon undermine the animalization of jews, readers should expect to find that some analyses remain purposefully inconclusive on this question in order not to overdetermine the work under discussion. undecidability is, in fact, one of the aesthetic strategies that geller considers to be central in particular to kafka’s animal figures, who remain hovering between human and animal species designations and, similarly, cannot always be conclusively identified as a “jewish animal” either. from the outset, geller also emphasizes that his study does not engage with the holocaust in the way readers might expect when thinking, for instance, of jews led “like sheep to the slaughter” in cattle cars (which is another example of the jew-animal, as the afterword establishes). rather, bestiarium judaicum demonstrates that the pervasive history of associating jews with animals has to be considered in a much broader time frame, with diverse appropriations by various people for many purposes, and, most importantly, that centuries of jewish history and literary production should not be read through the retrospective lens of the shoah. chapter one draws on a variety of sources, ranging from ancient texts to medieval treatises, and from proverbs to visual media that assemble an inventory of negative associations of jews with animals. in its variety, the chapter is exemplary for the host of references and striking illustrations reprinted in bestiarium judaicum as a whole. geller shows convincingly that the biologistic shift of modernity only reinforced the inherited humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 258 inventory of animal imagery: “where once associating ‘the jew’ with apes or parrots was tied to the devils’ imitatio dei and dissimulation it became grounded in an innate mimetic capacity that the animal employs to preserve itself and to prey on others; similarly, the association with vermin shifted from the discourse of sin and subjection to that of disease and parasitology” (46). the chapter ties these developments to the taxonomical thinking informing nationalist endeavors, which resulted in the modern paradox by which jews were both said to be so adept at “aping” their gentile neighbors that they would achieve perfect assimilatory success and become indistinguishable, yet be denied acceptance and equal rights due to the dictum of their “unchangeable jewish essence” that differentiated them. among other examples, geller demonstrates this through the legal requirement of last names for the jewish population, which resulted in many animal choices, such as hirsch (stag/naftali), wolf(f) (wolf/benjamin), and loew(y) (lion/judah), since these represented the tribes of israel, while gentile name choices, which predominantly represented professions (such as müller/miller and schmidt/smith), were prohibited. of course, these ferocious animal names often came at a price and officials also frequently handed out demeaning animal names. instead of carrying occupations in the family name, the word “jew” was increasingly appended to professions (e.g., viehjude/cattle jew) in order to distinguish gentiles and jews once more, and these terms took on a life of their own as insults, just as the wild animal names designating the tribes of israel became incorporated into the inventory of antisemitic stereotypes. throughout these discussions, geller demonstrates that “identifying jewish animality was often disseminated by phonemic, orthographic, and morphemic semes” (49). the study’s close attention to semantics also shows in geller’s own writing and the many word plays that operate throughout bestiarium judaicum, particularly its titles. the reader encounters, for instance, “semitic simiantics” in chapter four, and geller’s research interest in jewish masculinity come through in the suggestive excursions connecting (rat/mouse, lizard, and wolf/dog) tails to braids and circumcised penises on several occasions. it is precisely this focus on evocative language that enables bestiarium judaicum to pursue new angles in the discussion of texts such as kafka’s, which have been famously analyzed to excess. by weaving together the authors’ literary production with their socio-historical contexts, established through letters, diary entries, and explorations of the interactions and sometimes pesky politics of literary networks, the book outlines their specific bestiarium judaicum, that is, the writers’ menagerie of jewish animals. even though the book translates all original sources, the reader is well served with some knowledge of german as well as jewish terminology (i.e., traditions, history, and important hebrew and yiddish phrases). the few central concepts drawn from joela jacobs -animal answers to the jewish question 259 animal studies, on the other hand, are introduced in detail, so that it becomes clear that the intended audience for this study will be primarily at home in german-jewish studies, rather than animal studies — also due to the book’s primary focus on the human-produced and human-suffered side of animalization. nonetheless, bestiarium judaicum provides something that is often absent in the widespread engagement with particularly kafka’s oeuvre by animal studies scholars, namely deep knowledge of the many extant fragments and relevant other writings pertaining to the literary text, in the original language. in chapter two, geller discusses kafka’s the metamorphosis (1912/1915) and “josephine the singer, or the mouse folk” (1924) to show that both the undecidability of species designation and the identification of these figures as jewish “confronted their readers with the constructedness of both human/animal difference and species essentialism and thereby intervened, whether effectively or not, against an apparatus that these two constructs conditioned, an apparatus that helped naturalize both gentile/jew difference and the violent means sustaining it” (58). connecting the figure of the singing, or rather piping, maus (mouse) with the notion of mauscheln (speaking a language inflected by one’s jewishness), the analysis showcases a wide array of anti-semitic stereotyping (such as wagner’s 1850/1869 rant against judaism in music, to which geller returns in more detail in chapter four) and jewish artistic production (such as art spiegelman’s 1986 maus) that draw on vermin (ungeziefer, or untiere/un-animals, such as bugs, mouse, rats). in chapter three, cats join these mice in the discussion of jewish conversion to christianity as an impossible way out of the violent cat and mouse play in kafka’s “little fable” (ca. 1920/1931) and heine’s poem “from the age of pigtails” (ca. 1852-55). for scholars of german-jewish studies, the most compelling intervention of this chapters might be geller’s way of bringing together kafka and heine, and his elucidation of the intricacies of defining judentum (jewishness) in the verein für cultur und wissenschaft der juden (“the society for the [promulgation of the] culture and scholarly study [or science] of and by jews,” 82); while animal studies scholars will likely be smitten by kafka’s own derridean naked encounter (or rather, then, derrida’s kafkaesque encounter) with a cat in his pursuit to get rid of mice in the sanatorium (see 86). chapter four expands on the notion of undecidability as part of kafka’s aesthetics and picks up on the accusation of imitation in the jewish “reproductive arts, such as acting, musical performance, and journalism” (109) broached in chapter two, by engaging with “the report to an academy” (1917) and returning to josephine. continuously considering the two options of the jew-animal and the jew-as-animal side-by-side, this particularly lucid and convincing chapter on mimesis and mimicry concludes that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 260 “kafka’s creations do not present the jews as the dominant anti-semitic society’s ‘other,’ the monstrous animal-object created by gentile, bourgeois fears and hatreds. rather, he presents individuals and groups whose identifications are shaped by their interpellation into such a society” (137). chapters five and six are joined by similar titles and their focus on lizards; the first of them traces these saurian critters across of the works of max brod in relation to kafka, as well as in heine’s writing, and the second turns to felix salten’s bambi (1923). chapter five engages with judith butler’s response to the recent trial regarding the future location of a suitcase of kafka’s writings in an archive in germany or israel, toward which geller positions himself quite clearly. the chapter’s examination of the historical sources shows the importance of avoiding assumptions about the meaning of animal ciphers without considering their context. while the contemporary debates are important, some of the literary politics in chapters such as three, five, and seven occasionally detract from the book’s own argument. chapter six contextualizes both bambi and bambi’s children (1940) while arguing that some of the allegorical understandings of the text have flattened complicated nuances in their equation of the hunted forest animals with the fight for jewish survival in europe. particularly noteworthy for its unusual imagery in this discussion is heine’s notion of jews as hühneraugen (literally hen’s eyes, meaning corn) on the foot of the german nation (see 166). chapter seven attends to kafka’s “jackals and arabs” (1917) by dismantling an article by jens hanssen that is “enlisting them to decry so-called settler-colonialist zionism in 1917 and today” (170). this critique is motivated by the term gattung (meaning genre and genus) and argues against allegorical readings that erase kafka’s undecidability in favor of interpretations that map too neatly onto contemporary concerns in theory and politics. in this context, geller also draws on kafka’s canine references, especially “investigations of a dog” (1922/1931), in order to demonstrate that “kafka’s animal figuration defies any attempt at determinate allegorical identification, let alone attempting to revalorize alleged jewish caninity” (182). the final chapter moves from jackals and dogs to wolves, particularly werewolves, in the following works: freud’s “wolf-man,” h. leivick’s yiddish werewolf narrative the wolf (1920), heine’s characterization of jewish characters like shakespeare’s shylock in 1838 and the consort of “princess sabbath” (1851), and curt siodmak’s film script for the wolf man (1941). despite this wealth of sources and the anti-semitic identification of jews with wolves and with blood-sucking monsters like vampires, geller establishes that jewish werewolves (as figures outside of the law) were virtually absent from the european joela jacobs -animal answers to the jewish question 261 tradition until the twentieth century. in its masterful layering of references, this chapter extends an argument begun in chapter seven in respect to kafka’s work, by showing that “heine rendered the purported jewish referent of those interpellating identifications indefinite — that is, as both animal and human and neither; as both jew and gentile and neither — while siodmak demonstrated the tragic consequences on individual lives of such oppressive identifications” (191). the return to freud in this chapter, moreover, connects the argument to geller’s previous monographs, on freud’s jewish body: mitigating circumcisions (fordham, 2007) and the other jewish question: identifying the jew and making sense of modernity (fordham, 2011). in the afterword, geller engages with the animal poetry written in the 1930s by german-jewish author gertrud kolmar, who perished at auschwitz. the evocative imagery of her poem “der tag der grossen klage,” or “the day of the great lament [or accusation]” (222), reads “like a horrifying and horrifyingly prophetic allegory” (222) after auschwitz, and simultaneously shows the poet’s familiarity with jewish traditions and religious imagery. “just as the victimization of animals helped her figure the experience of german jewry after the nazi seizure of power,” geller writes, “so did the awareness of judentum’s traditions and history provide her with a framework to howl that große klage against the torture, to which animals are subjected, and to envision their possible (divine) redress” (223). in these final pages, geller carefully connects the suffering of jews and animals by highlighting the many problematic implications of calling animal existence in an inhumane world “an eternal treblinka” (citing the protagonist of isaac bashevis singer’s 1968 story “the letter writer” on 225). engaging with central moments of reflection on animals in the writing of holocaust survivors, such as primo levi, emanuel levinas, and jiri weil, geller defines important differences between the animalization and objectification of humans, and he strongly rejects the supposed jewish passivity implied in the “analogical identification of the jew-animal: ‘like [a] sheep to the slaughter’” (231) that invokes isaiah 53:7. ultimately, the book convincingly concludes that the many jewish authors on its pages “sought to wrest from the jew-animal, wherever it roamed, its oppressive force whether by uncovering the conditions for its production in order to subvert its naturalization or by giving voice to the jew-as-animal and to the jewish animot.” (232) microsoft word nash-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 richard nash a perfect nicking pattern almost a generation ago, bruno latour’s trenchant long essay, we have never been modern, proposed as its governing hypothesis that the ideological fiction of “modernity,” under which we had long engaged our actions, was itself dependent on the simultaneous deployment of two complementary practices, which he termed “purification” and “translation.” to be fully modern, according to this formulation, was to openly avow the productions of those works of purification that separated the social world (realm of the human) from the natural world (realm of the non-human), while simultaneously disavowing those hybrid productions resulting from translation: so long as we consider these two practices of translation and purification separately, we are truly modern — that is, we willingly subscribe to the critical project, even though that project is developed only through the proliferation of hybrids down below. as soon as we direct our attention simultaneously to the work of purification and the work of hybridization, we immediately stop being wholly modern, and our future begins to change. (11) latour was right about that, and our future has begun to change. this essay suggests that the breed of horse now designated as “thoroughbred” constitutes a particularly apt and valuable avatar for the ideological fiction of “modernity:” simultaneously nonhuman natural “other” and nature-culture hybrid of human artifact and management, the real flesh and blood animals pawing the turf today are inextricably intertwined with the cultural phantasms of purity, hybridity, racialized breed identity, registries, and those cultural apparatuses and inscription practices that police, promote, protect, and valorize certain formulations of modern identity formation. such an undertaking is too ambitious at anything beyond a suggestive level, a provocation to further thought; and even here i want to restrict myself to considering the implications that can be teased out of close attention to one particular term: “nicking.” in the largest sense of the term, i use “modern” in this essay in a manner consistent with the sense invoked by latour’s use of the term in we have never been modern where it refers to an era that begins in the late renaissance and continues until roughly the end of the twentieth century; such a usage is consistent with, for instance, the debate of “ancients vs. moderns” carried on among intellectual historians at the end of the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 28 seventeenth century. one can further mark in this essay what might be thought of as secondary division within the modern period, separating the “early modern” (from late 16c to late 18c) from what might be thought of simply as the “modern” or “high modern” era (late 18c to late 20c). much of the secondary literature on breed deals with only the second of these eras — often doing so as though there is only one “modern” period. by highlighting the distinction, i hope to make clear the stakes in trying to distinguish “early modern” from “modern,” while simultaneously viewing them both (from a non-modern perspective) as shaping the “modern” fantasy from which we are (i hope) only now emerging. in the context of this essay, it is probably most useful to see as hallmarks of the onset of the fully “modern” era such related developments in managed animal breeding as: the publication of a general stud book; the emergence of the term “thoroughbred” as distinct breed identity (and the various other modern breed identities that then followed); the concept of fixing a breed type as put in practice by robert bakewell; the concept of “pure breed” that followed and the supporting sciences of race and breed that developed over the next two centuries and gathered greatest influence at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. those developments not only consolidated but to very great degree altered in the process of consolidation an early modern practice of managed breeding that in many respects was antithetical to some of the presuppositions and practices that distinguish modern animal breeding.1 a longstanding truism of modern horse-breeding — one that seems to have originated near the end of the nineteenth century, and still survives today (though in somewhat diminished form) — is “breed the best to the best ... and hope for the best.”2 when horse racing enjoyed its greatest global popularity in the first half of the twentieth century, that truism achieved a widespread popular acceptance by leavening a doctrine of eugenic elitism with a dash of democratizing randomness, a kind of “screwball comedy theory of breeding” that allowed one to have one’s upper crust and eat it, too. the rise of a lucrative commercial breeding marketplace in the last third of the twentieth century transformed the landscape of thoroughbred breeding, chasing away most of the oldmoney dynastic homebred operations that had dominated the sport for more than a century, creating new commercial powers within the industry, and in the process, downplaying the doctrine of elite prestige encoded in the “best to the best” locution. less well-known outside the sport, but both older and more persistent, is the concept of the “nicking pattern.” the concept of a “nick” originated in the eighteenth century, and today if you are contemplating which stallion offers the greatest value in return for his stud fee to service your mare, there are bloodstock consultants who you can hire to richard nash -a perfect nicking pattern 29 advise you; one of the services provided in their analysis is likely to be a “nicking pattern” of various candidates. jargon is language of specialized use, and while it is commonly derided for its opacity and inability to communicate meaningfully to those outside a small coterie of initiates, it always has real value within that coterie. such specialized use of language may serve to set a barrier between those inside a knowledge community and those outside it, but that is only a secondary characteristic. the primary function of such language is to enable more nuanced and effective communication within the knowledge community, frequently in response to practical concerns important to those active in the community that remain merely esoteric abstractions to those outside the community. the cognate concepts of “nick,” “nicking,” and “nicking pattern” illustrate this sense of jargon. so one way to map the history of such a knowledge community is to pay attention to how understanding of jargon within the community changes, for what a “nicking pattern” is today, and how it works, is fundamentally different than it was in the eighteenth century; and the very sense of what it means “to nick” has changed over time. let’s start with how it is widely understood when used today. in contemporary usage, the most frequent use of “nicking” terminology is as a measurement of success in pairing certain sire lines with broodmares or broodmare sire lines. one of the most widely respected commercial providers of nicking information and analysis is a company called true nicks; they offer this concise explanation at the blog they maintain at their website: if you're not completely familiar with the basic premise of sire-line nicking, here it is in a nutshell: specific affinities of stallions of one male line for mares from other sire lines — called nicks — have made a profound impact on the development of the thoroughbred. today's powerful data-processing computers have now made it possible to measure and rate nicks. (rogers) like most things — and especially like most things involving a commercial element — the claim that your mare “nicks well” with a particular stallion is identified as a marker of success, or at least potential for success. and in a world where almost everything seems driven by metrics and scorecards, it is possible to get an analysis of a nicking pattern that will provide a simple score (“a+” to “f”) that is derived from anywhere from dozens to thousands of actual prior matings. and those matings are being analyzed in terms of how much racing success resulted from these prior matings. that is, these forms of big data analysis are rooted in an abstracted notion of “success,” one humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 30 that effectively ignores actual physical traits of individual animals, concentrating instead on the scorecard of wins and losses, money won, frequency and quality of racing success, etc., regardless of physical attributes of any given animals. as with most metrics designed for commercial applications, the governing presumption is that what buyers seek is a reliable predictor of likely future success, predicated on prior patterns of past success. again, true nicks provides a useful example. the language on their website is characteristic of such attempts to determine patterns of success: “generally, extremely high scores are the result of a mating which has had considerable success with limited opportunity. the best guide to the potential success of the nick is the letter rating which has been evolved through careful study of the relationship between the general population and the stakes winning population” (“frequently asked questions”). such an attitude is entirely in keeping with contemporary business philosophy, so much so that one may wonder why i even give so much attention to a focus on success. why would one, after all, measure anything else? a truism of modern business is that one measures what one desires. at one level, of course, there is legitimacy to such a view point. rebecca cassidy’s discussion of recent theories identifies three strands of theory as particularly significant to thoroughbred breeders — one sire-centered, one damcentered, and a third that emphasize the importance of effective “crossing” to maximize the positive influence of both sire and dam. in all three approaches, the goal of the theory’s predictive power is to accurately anticipate how much racing success may be realized by the progeny of a well-planned mating: three guiding influences that breeders consistently referred to during my fieldwork were dosage theory, the figure system, and the work of federico tesio. dosage theory attempts to predict ability based upon the analysis of superior male ancestors in a horse’s pedigree and is used by gamblers and breeders to forecast the likely distance over which a horse will excel. the figure system identifies individual horses as members of particular families, or female lines, in a hierarchy where family number one is the most highly valued. federico tesio’s theories concentrate on the heat and energy of a particular cross between individuals and between particular lines. (37-38) richard nash -a perfect nicking pattern 31 arguably the foremost breeder of the twentieth century was federico tesio, whose breeding the racehorse (1958) remains a lasting testament to his idiosyncratic approach. in tesio’s book, one confronts a dizzying mélange of crude genetics and mystical doctrine and belief that no one has ever been able to follow, but that all concede produced for tesio remarkable success. more than any other single authority, tesio might be cited as the most influential voice identifying “nicking” as the crossing of bloodlines according to a metric predicated on an abstract notion of racing “success,” even as he shrouds such success in a cloak of mysticism beyond the reach of scientific reason: “nicks” it is an interesting fact that every now and again two particular strains are found to give their best results when crossed with each other. generally this is first discovered by chance, then other breeders follow up the initial success until that particular cross becomes the fashion. (55)3 if in our modern era it makes commercial sense to measure success in order best to imitate it, from another perspective it makes sense to note that there are other things to measure; and that in other times, a different ideology might generate a different set of measurements. any attempt to measure an abstracted notion of racing success like the model described above places a premium on quantifying certain kinds of racing success as being of greater significance than other kinds of racing success. there are thousands of races of different kinds contested around the world every year; and these races are classified in various ways, with the most difficult tending to be the most lucrative, and with a generally agreed-upon (though by no means uniform) system of classification used to identify those stakes races where success is awarded the greatest premium. the grading of a nick, according to such a system — whether it follows the true nick methodology or some competing version — seeks to measure how often horses produced by matings between these sire and dam lines have outperformed the “general population” in terms of frequency of success in these most demanding races. in the eighteenth century, of course, there were far fewer races contested; the variation in quality of competition was considerably less uniform and predictable; the total sample size was dramatically smaller; the conditions of racing were significantly different; and the extensive patterns of family performance that contemporary analytics seek to quantify were too scant and scattered to be subject to analysis. what, then, constituted the basis for their “nicking patterns” when they created the term, and what notion of success, if any, was involved? humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 32 early capitalism was no less interested in success than late capitalism. but it did, indeed, have different ideological presuppositions as to what generated success. the notion of a “nick” in the eighteenth century alluded to what we might today think of as a “cancel.” the word was understood to be the mark — sometimes a strikeout, sometimes a check or some other mark — entered when an item was to be struck off a list — a debt paid, for instance. and the specific application of the term to breeding livestock, especially horses, was in the service of a belief that one sort of male when paired with one sort of female was likely to produce “a nick in the cross,” with one extreme physical trait “cancelling” the complementary extreme physical trait in the partner. “nicking,” then, was closely aligned with the belief that one should shun extremes, follow moderation, and strive to achieve success by achieving something like a golden mean. in his dissertation on the breeding of horses (1760), richard wall invokes the already prevalent terminology of “nicking” to describe how many breeders seek a successful pairing: it is very common with some of them to reason thus ... such a mare to such a horse because he is strong and boney, and the mare is small, therefore the cross may nick. — some put mares that are speedy, but soft, to horses that are slow and stout, thinking that method may nick. (21) here, the term “nick” already has the connotation of success, but it is one that arises directly from its sense of cancellation, with success imagined to occur in a moderate blending of extreme traits where the progeny will avoid the complementary defects of the parent. and the traits that are nicking are physical traits, or at least abstract qualities that are identified as being linked in some way to physical traits: large and small may nick; “speedy, but soft (ie, lacking endurance)” may nick with “slow and stout,” producing in the next generation a better blend of speed and stamina. the phrase attributed to madden at the start of the twentieth-century — “breed the best to the best ... and hope for the best” — is often rendered in shorthand form, giving only the opening clause. that doctrine is heard by many as straightforward endorsement of the elitist eugenic impulses embraced by aristocratic classes of that era. and undeniably that endorsement is there, even when tempered by the wry wisdom of the second clause. it may, however, be worth recalling that this doctrine arose in no small part as a way of advocating the importance of performance over the promise of pedigree. at the time that madden coined the phrase, orthodoxy — especially among the more “scientific” approaches to breeding theory — divided sharply over the relative virtues richard nash -a perfect nicking pattern 33 and drawbacks of breeding “in-and-in,” “outcrossing,” or seeking a compromise position via “line breeding” or other strategies to mitigate the risks believed to be posed on the one hand by incestuous matings and on the other by diluting influence. a century earlier, the managed breeding programs that robert bakewell had introduced to livestock management had emphasized the importance of breeding “in-and-in” as a means of establishing a breed type. over the next century, the ensuing interest in developing scientific theories of inheritance had motivated breeders to focus increased attention on the rigorously recorded pedigrees, and on the ever more nuanced analyses of that information that were produced.4 when the sport of horse racing began to take shape under royal and aristocratic sponsorship in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, nothing like a systematic recording of pedigree existed, much less a national registry of such pedigrees. but by the end of the eighteenth century, after several false starts and failed attempts, a general stud book was brought forward by the weatherby family with the support of the jockey club; and for the next two centuries, that family continued to maintain and update the registry. at first merely a record of pedigrees of “those horses of note on the turf,” the success of the project became self-perpetuating; and it had become in practice, though not in fact, a breed registry. it was only in the early twentieth century, in response to the challenge posed by american-bred horses (some with suspect pedigree) winning races in england that the jockey club passed the jersey act (named for lord jersey, the chief steward at the time). that act specified for the first time that to be registered in the general stud book, a horse must be able to show direct descent from animals previously recorded in the gsb for at least six generations. this act, passed just before the first world war, was repealed shortly after the second; though for all practical purposes the “thoroughbred” has been a nature/culture hybrid whose pedigree paper trace is inextricably linked to the animal’s breed identity since the term “thoroughbred” entered common usage in the early nineteenth century. madden’s somewhat puckish formulation — breed the best to the best and hope for the best — was in one sense a challenge to british aristocratic notions of lineage mounted on behalf of american emphasis on performance. but the ambiguity inherent in the term “best” is, and always has been, available for multiple interpretations. a no-doubt apocryphal — but delightfully mid-twentieth-century — anecdote attributes a related exchange when marilyn monroe is supposed to have propositioned albert einstein on their first meeting: “with your brains and my beauty, think what children we could humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 34 have.” the physicist is said to have declined out of concern that “the poor child might have your brains and my beauty.” one way to think of the centuries-old experiment that is thoroughbred horse racing is as a test of the relation between pedigree and performance, where the sport is the proving ground over which the claims of pedigree made on paper are put to the test by real animals. at another pragmatic level, madden was challenging the underlying premise of that experimental procedure by privileging in his breeding program those who had enjoyed racing success over those whose individual careers had been disappointing but carried forward a pedigree inherited from their more successful ancestors. if pedigree and performance were directly correlated and consistently transmitted, both breeding and racing would be tediously predictable; conversely, if no such correlation existed and inheritance proved to be utterly random and fortuitous, the entire sport would have long ago devolved into a lottery rather than an athletic competition. and over the decades and centuries, participants in the sport have advocated, with varying degrees of success and failure, each of these extreme convictions and a wide range of theoretical positions in between. the dynamic relation between pedigree and performance keeps alive a fundamental — and fundamentally vital — definition of the sport’s participants as nature/culture hybrids, defined neither exclusively by the specific physical traits and attributes that materially constrain the physical limits that define these horses as a “breed” distinct from others of their species, nor by the specific paper trace of pedigree that guarantees the accurate recording and registry of such breed identity, but rather by the hybridizing conjunction of the two. such a conjunction defines “breed” in a way that might be thought of as paradigmatically “modern,” entirely consistent with modern deployment of the racializing identity politics of such nature/culture hybridity in the modern geopolitical world; and at the same time quite distinct from the ways in which “race and breed” were most frequently deployed before the eighteenth century, when the phrase almost invariably alluded to a specific human agent responsible for the selection and development of particular animals, frequently (but not invariably) related to one another in the sense of an expanded family relationship. so, for instance, an owner might record in a pedigree that a horse’s dam was “extroynary [sic] fine, out of richard nash -a perfect nicking pattern 35 fenwick's breed,” as a way to indicate that she had been acquired from the stud managed by sir john (or sir william) fenwick. my research indicates, and i think that this is more than coincidence, that such denominations — “of fenwick’s breed,” “of a leedes mare,” “of darcy’s breed” date generally to an era before the systematic recording of breedings through the form of a stud book came to be commonplace; and gave rise to the project of general stud book at the end of the eighteenth century that then could — and did — become almost immediately the prototype for a breed registry, rapidly imitated in the recording of various breed — and racial — identities. our contemporary culture’s deployment of “nicking patterns” as a tool supporting managed breeding decisions along the lines advocated by consultant services like true nicks plays to our cultural moment’s commitment to the idea that “success breeds success.” the patterns being analyzed quantitatively by such programs offer to answer questions about where successful pedigree and successful performance reinforce one another; how can one intensify the impact of prior success? the approach advocated by the aphorism attributed to madden — “breed the best to the best ... and hope for the best” — began by advocating the conjunction of pedigree and performance, but concluded by falling back on randomizing hope; in that era, and with respect to those breeding questions, hope was a method. what current nicking analysis seeks to do is harness the tool of big data analytics to distinguish which combinations of successful pedigrees can be significantly correlated with greater than expected performance success. the governing drive is all success-oriented: success breeds success but does not do so invariably and uniformly; neither, however, is its distribution random, but rather conforms to patterns that may be anticipated with more than rough approximation. such a pursuit removes (or at least minimizes the weight of) the randomizing conclusion of the “best to the best” aphorism, seeking to focus instead on the opening clause’s expression of a desire associated with those elitist, aristocratic partisans of bigger walls, gated communities, and higher membership fees. that ideology has been long associated with horse racing, and not without reason, as the pageantry of large hats, champagne, and fancy dress surrounding premier events reminds us on a regular basis. indeed, that dimension of the sport is much older than the aphorism itself, and we can detect such aristocratic impulses at work from its very foundation, even before charles ii famously lent the sport the benefit of his royal patronage during the restoration. among seventeenth-century aristocrats, none was more zealous in humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 36 asserting his own status in horsemanship than william cavendish, (ultimately) first duke of newcastle, and while he preferred the haute école discipline of the manège, he was also eager to stake his claim as proficient in horse racing: let me tell you, that running-horses are the most easily found, and of the least use, commonly they run upon heaths, (a green carpet) and must there run all upon the shoulders, which in troublesome grounds is ready to break one’s neck, and of no use; though i love the sport of a runninghorse very well, and think i am as good a jockey as any, and have ridden many hundred matches, and seen the best jockeys, and studied it more than i think they have done. (80) it is worth noting that cavendish considers “the sport of a running horse” — as he does all other feats of horsemanship — as principally human activities, placing greatest emphasis on the role of “jockey” in the modern sense of a “rider,” a role that he claims to know well by both study and experience. elsewhere, he explicitly disowns what was for the time period the more usual sense of “jockey” — someone involved in the trade of buying and selling horses. for cavendish, horse ownership (the expense of which he knows well and addresses often) is a form of aristocratic display, in which expenditure is an investment in status, not a commercial investment. so, while he considers the ability to ride well in the sport of a running horse a necessary part of the repertoire of a complete horseman, he values the act of riding more than the animal being ridden. he prefers less specialized, slower, stouter horses, more capable of carrying weight over demanding terrain, and less susceptible to the injuries often incurred by running horses, who he dismisses as “of the least use.” it is also worth noting that the terminology cavendish employs (standard for his generation) designates the animal in question metonymically by purpose, rather than by any sort of concept of breed identity. a horse whose purpose is running is a running horse, just as those who pull a coach, a cart, or a plow would be respectively, a coach horse, a cart horse, or a plow horse. the designation “thoroughbred” (and its various cognates “thro’ bred,” “true bred,” etc.) begins to crop up in correspondence and advertisements as early as the reign of william and mary, but does not become widely accepted until after the publication of the general stud book in the nineteenth century. throughout the eighteenth century, even as the importance of pedigree came to be considered as contributing to the value of an animal, that metonymic designation continued to hold sway with “race horse” gradually supplanting “running horse,” and with identity generally seen as defined by function. so, for instance, a common trope in richard nash -a perfect nicking pattern 37 sentimental narratives at the end of the eighteenth century would have a horse begin as a pampered “running horse” in his youth, but then decline by degrees as he ages, serving as a hunter, and then a coach horse, before his final degradation into a cart horse, where he is often destined by sentimental codes to die in harness; these designations are status signifiers, labels of privilege and pathos, not pedigree and breed identity. cavendish’s ideas about breeding were thoroughly in accord with orthodox views of galenic geohumoralism, according to which the physical traits and governing temperament of an individual (horse or human) were largely determined by the climate of origin and the climate of origin of the individual’s parents. and in his view, this meant that an englishman breeding in the cold northern climate of england mares who were themselves the product of that cold, northern climate should seek always to invigorate the blood of those mares by putting them to recently imported stallions from hot, southern climates. chief among these potential stallions were spanish ginetes and african barbs. if a spanish stallion were crossed with suitable mares, he believed the match could provide good horses for schooling, cavalry, riding, hunting, and racing. cavendish and his contemporaries, for a variety of specialized purposes — including ambling, pacing, and the “running horse” — advocated the use of a spanish stallion, or, failing that, what was often termed a “bastard.” this sense of “bastard” is directly linked to what will be subsequently theorized as a “nick,” and it is significant that far from the notion of breed purity that will develop in the nineteenth century, the sport of the running horse is, for seventeenth-century breeders, best served by hybridizing outcrosses. michael baret provides a useful illustration: “it is holden that the spanish jennet, the irish hobby, and arabian courser is held both by maister blundevill, and maister markham, to be the chiefe for pacing: and the next unto them is the bastard stallion, begotten by one of them, on our english mares, which doth exceed either of them in toughnesse, by reason of the apt composition of the purity of their substance, in respect of their hot clime, and the humidity of our more temperate zone” (4-5). cavendish believed that the barb would be himself a better horse for the school exercises of the manage, because he was less “wise” or independent than the spaniard, but not quite as effective as a stallion. and, in keeping with the overriding elitist ideology of his practice, he conceived of their relative abilities in terms of aristocratic rank; in her life of her husband, margaret cavendish wrote that he believed “spanish horses were like princes, and barbs like gentlemen, in their kind.” moreover, in emphasizing the need continually to reinvigorate northern mares with spanish stallions, cavendish makes clear that his version of geohumoralism is intended as a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 38 prophylactic against the otherwise inevitable deterioration that one must expect in horses bred in a northern clime: i must tell you, that you must never have a stallion of your own breed, because they are too far removed from the purity, and head, of the fountain, which is a pure spanish horse: besides, should the stallions be of your own breed, in three or four generations they would come to be carthorses; so gross, and ill-favoured would they be: or at least, just such horses as are bred in that country, so soon will they degenerate: therefore, have still a fresh spanish horse for the stallion.5 in this sense — that the role of human agency is to ward off natural decline — cavendish’s thoughts on horse breeding clearly align not only with the position of a staunchly royalist cavalier and aristocrat, but also with the “ancient” position in the seventeenth-century debate intellectual historians have described as the “ancients and moderns controversy.” that debate, which raged through the libraries of france and england (a feature literalized for ironic effect in jonathan swift’s battle of the books) turned on the very question that is now sometimes used to distinguish study of “the renaissance” from study of “the early modern period.” the former term is often associated with a rebirth of classical learning, while the latter term tends to be associated with the innovations that ushered in modernity as a consequence of that rebirth. for seventeenth-century intellectuals (and aristocrats) the question was whether culture flourished more fully in classical antiquity (the ancient position) or in the contemporary moment (the modern position). by the end of the seventeenth century, this debate had tended to polarize the traditional “liberal arts” with “ancients” championing the literary, philosophical, and artistic triumphs of the classical age, and “moderns” pointing to dramatic advancements in learning from revolutionary developments in mathematics and the sciences. and arcing over this entire debate was a fundamental question about culture and history: is the path of history, as classical texts and the ancients assert, a story of decline from a “golden age,” when people were closer to the god (or gods) who created them; or, as the moderns would have it, a story of progress and improvement, advancing toward fulfilling the destiny of philosophies of perfectibility? cavendish seems to have managed his stud on the principles advanced by the partisans of the ancients, putting into practice what experience and study teach in order to hold in abeyance as best one can a process of inevitable decline and deterioration. but drawn up in battle as it were on the opposing side of this debate was the very man who had richard nash -a perfect nicking pattern 39 led forces successfully into battle against him at naseby: thomas, lord fairfax, who had commanded the parliamentary forces in that decisive battle. there are a surprising number of convergences and similarities, as well as oppositions, between the two men, not least of which is that fairfax, too, retired from public life to manage his stud. but though the two men agreed both on geohumoral theories based on the influence of climate and on the belief that extremes were to be avoided in favor of “the middle (where virtue lies),” fairfax adopted a modern, rather than an ancient position on the larger question of “improvement.” the geohumoral climate theory of breeding underlying the practices of fairfax, cavendish, and their contemporaries placed the highest value on “balance.” each of the four humors was correlated to its appropriate climate: hot and dry; dry and cold; cold and moist; and hot and moist. when no one humor was predominate, the result was a perfect blend of humoral composition. what was to be avoided was an excess of one particular influence; and so in a cold, damp climate like england’s, the influence of stallions imported from hot, dry climates was particularly valued. this notion of a cross in which opposing influences balance one another and cancel each other out is what gave rise originally to the terminology of “nicking in the cross,” in the manner described by wall earlier. but while cavendish and earlier breeders sought such balance as a means of preserving an always perilous status quo, fairfax fully embraced “modern” notions of perfectibility and improvement, informed by both an ideological commitment to the potential of future development and to a protestant doctrine that drew heavily on the parables in the gospel of mattew. the fairfax and cavendish families knew one another well, and in the 1630s, well before the battle of naseby, fairfax’s grandfather wrote to cavendish, in part to thank him for an earlier loan of a stallion: “i have received somme talents from you and i will be glad that you will take an account how i have employed them. i have not been necligent in improving them” (bl, add ms 70499 fo. 170).6 the elder fairfax is quite literally repaying cavendish in kind, but he is also alluding explicitly to matthew’s parable of the talents, and the explicitly christian injunction there to improve what we are given. when, following the restoration of monarchy, the younger fairfax came to write a manuscript on the breeding of horses that he left behind at his death in 1673, he began it with an allusion to two other parables from the gospel (the parable of the wise and foolish builders, and the parable of the sower): “he that would build well must lay a good foundation. he that would reap good fruits must plant good trees; for no man can gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles” (1-2).7 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 40 like cavendish, fairfax advocates the use of a stallion from a southern clime — barb or spanish jennet — and like cavendish, he urges such crosses to cancel or nick with the opposite tendencies of northern mares. but unlike cavendish, and in keeping with the parables in the gospels and their doctrine of improvement, he specifically imagines a series of such crosses in a planned series of mating over at least three generations in order to, as the phrase became, “improve the breed”: “and having made your race thus perfect you may for many descents breed of the most perfect of them and have better and better horses and shall not need to seek stallions or mares from the best races in christendom” (6). it is not at all insignificant that the eclipse line, the most significant bloodline in the modern thoroughbred, traces back in significant degree to mares originally bred in the stud of lord fairfax, according to the pattern he outlines in his manuscript treatise. and this, finally, is what i would suggest is the most powerful sense in which the thoroughbred epitomizes “a perfect nicking pattern” that establishes a living nature/culture hybrid as a most appropriate avatar for modernity: finding a paradoxical way to reconcile those contradictory impulses arrayed on naseby field. on one side, under the banner of the ancients, were arrayed those seeking to preserve the elitist aristocratic doctrine of privilege that was aligned in the royalist defending “the best of the best.” across that field they faced a rebellious onslaught, enlisted under the banner of the moderns, advancing a modern doctrine of progressive improvement derived from the hybridizing vigor imparted by deliberate outcrossing. the original early modern sense of a “nick” was to cancel or balance potentially destabilizing extremes in pursuit of that idealized moderate position “where virtue lies.” the underlying dream would seem to be to postpone indefinitely a decisive conflict between these opposing views by finding a way to escape the narrow sense of “cancel” that devolves into the merely mediocre, instead uniting the opposing forces in pursuit of “a more perfect future.” this endless oscillation between a preservation of an ideal state menaced by disruptive external influences and the active valuation of those invigorating hybrid crosses that stimulate new, improved, more perfect futures is at the heart of what we consider to be our modern world, in which so many of our defining political struggles take shape around the anxieties, possibilities, defenses, and desires that are figured by the nature/culture hybrid of racialized identities, both human and non-human. “nicking” is the perfectly paradoxical theory of modern breeding: at once promising to preserve against deterioration and to always be improving; it achieves balance between contrasting strengths and weaknesses, while perpetually reinforcing proven success; introduced originally as a strategy for the management of hybridizing outcrosses, it has richard nash -a perfect nicking pattern 41 been thoroughly internalized within what is now defined (and regulated) as a “pure breed” as a tool for managing the crossing of particular lines within the breed — lines that only make sense within the larger context of an animal breed thoroughly regulated and recorded by human managers. escaping from the gendered traps of spermist or ovist theories that seek to privilege the influence of sire or dam, it directs attention to the success with which families cross and intersect, and in doing so, offers an account for exceptions that elude more rigorously predictive model of genetic inheritance. ad hoc, abstract, subjective, and yet amenable to rigorous quantification, it perches atop the findings of modern science, by turns reinforcing and contradicting those findings, as the fluctuating winds of racing success dictate. nearly a generation ago, bruno latour urged us to become “non-modern” not by some act of revolution or some failed insistence on privileging hybridity over purification, or purity over hybridity, but by consciously and mindfully “reconsider[ing] our past, [and] understand[ing] retrospectively to what extent” (144) our construct of modernity depends on such figures of impossibly self-cancelling stories of preservation and improvement. notes 1. margaret derry’s work is particularly well known for its contributions to the history of what this essay identifies as a “modern era of animal breeding,” dating from after bakewell. see especially bred for perfection, horses in society: a story of animal breeding and marketing culture, and masterminding nature: the breeding of animals, 17502010. there is something of a tendency to relegate all theories of breeding prior to the rise of a science of genetics as operating without theory altogether: “theory, had little application, for until the late nineteenth century there was little applicable theory. not till mendel’s work on heredity became better-known did racehorse breeders begin to act on any explicit theoretical basis” (vamplew, 186). 2. the precise origins of this phrase are obscure, but it is generally dated to the late nineteenthor early twentieth-century, and most often ascribed to john e. madden who founded hamburg place in kentucky; throughout this essay, i accept that account. 3. a generation after tesio, leslie combs ii was quoted to similar effect by james gill in bloodstock: “first of all, we try to follow the pattern of successful matings of the past. some blood nicks very well with another cross, and once this has been proved on the track, it’s a good idea to follow along” (229). 4. wallner et al. find that not only thoroughbreds, but virtually all modern european horse breeds derive from turkoman horse lineage, dating from well before the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 42 managed breeding practices associated with modern breed identity: “the decline of y chromosome diversity in horses likely started about 5,500 years ago with genetic bottlenecks during the domestication process and was further enhanced by multiple prehistoric and historic waves of migration. most so-called “modern horse breeds” are the result of centralized and organized horse breeding over the past few hundred years. during this period, inbreeding and line-breeding concepts became popular, and the entire horse population has been strongly affected by these strategies” (2029). 5. william cavendish, a new method, and extraordinary invention, to dress horses, 92-93. see also previous related discussions of the cavendish-fairfax material that follows in nash, “gentlemen’s recreation and georgic improvement: lord fairfax on horse breeding” and nash, “william cavendish: riding school and race track.” 6. the letter from cavendish to which fairfax here replies read, in part: “therefore, if it please your lordship to accept of my bay barb: though for no other use but a stallion. i hope he will fit that turn to your lordship’s contentment & the better if you please to let him run with them. when i return from london your lordship must not deny me a journey hither to see some horses though not worth your lordship’s trouble to bring that noble gentleman your grand childe mr. fairfax with you who i hear to my great contentment is much addicted to that exercise.” [spelling modernized]. 7. cf. matthew 7:16. works cited baret, michael. an hipponomie; or the vineyard of horsemanship, book 2. george eld, 1618. cassidy, rebecca. horse people: thoroughbred culture in lexington and newmarket. johns hopkins up, 2007. cavendish, william, a new method, and extraordinary invention, to dress horses. thomas milbourn: 1667. _____. “letter, cavendish william, viscount mansfield, to thomas, first baron fairfax, dated welbeck 29 february 1627.” bl, add ms 70499 fo. 170. auction catalogue. bonhams auctioneers: cavendish (william, duke of newcastle). accessed 2/20/2018. richard nash -a perfect nicking pattern 43 derry, margaret. bred for perfection: shorthorn cattle, collies, and arabian horses since 1800. johns hopkins up, 2003. _____. horses in society: a story of animal breeding and marketing culture. u of toronto p, 2006. _____. masterminding nature: the breeding of animals, 1750-2010. u of toronto p, 2015. fairfax, lord thomas, “treatise touching the breeding of horses.” york minster library ms add 47. “frequently asked questions.” truenicks.com, accessed 2/20/2018. gill, james. bloodstock: breeding winners in europe and america. elm tree books, 1977. latour, bruno. we have never been modern, trans. catherine porter. harvard up, 1993. nash, richard. “gentlemen’s recreation and georgic improvement: lord fairfax on horse breeding.” england’s fortress: new perspectives on thomas, 3rd lord fairfax. andrew hopper and phillip major, eds. farnham, 2014. 235-57. _____. “william cavendish: riding school and race track.” authority, authorship, and aristocratic identity in seventeenth-century england. peter edwards and elspeth graham, eds. brill, 2016. 317-30. rogers, byron. “5 things you should know about thoroughbred nicking.” truenicks.com. september 23, 2008. accessed 2/20/2018. tesio, federico. breeding the racehorse. ed. and trans. edward spinola. j.a. allen & co., 1958. vamplew, wray. the turf: a social and economic history of horse racing. viking, 1976. wall, richard. a dissertation on breeding of horses. g. woodfall, 1760. wallner et al. “y chromosome uncovers the recent oriental origin of modern stallions.” current biology 27.13 (2017): 2029-2035. microsoft word message-lien h u m a n i m a l i a 8:2 review article reuben message newcomers to the farm? marianne e. lien, becoming salmon: aquaculture and the domestication of a fish. oakland, ca: university of california press, 2015. 214pp. $85.00 (hb); $35.00 (pb). becoming salmon: aquaculture and the domestication of a fish is an ethnographic study of contemporary salmon farming practices in norway, situated at what its author calls the “generative interface” (18) of science and technology studies (sts) and anthropology. building on earlier experience of fieldwork on salmon farms in tasmania, and working in close collaboration with sts scholar john law, marianne lien attempts to tie the “ontological turns” in sts and anthropology together, whilst at the same time exploring new perspectives on animal domestication. aiming to decenter the human methodologically and conceptually, becoming salmon reflects many of the concerns expressed by the so-called “nonhuman turn” (grusin), and will be of wide interest to scholars in animal studies and cognate fields. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 178 lien’s intervention is timely. aquaculture is now the world’s fastest growing foodproducing sector. more fish intended for human consumption are now produced on fish farms than by wild capture. salmon make up only a fraction of this business, the majority being comprised freshwater fin fish or crustaceans, farmed largely in asia. nevertheless, they are a highly significant fraction — especially in the cold north atlantic, and especially for norway, a country that has in recent years been producing over half of world’s total table-bound tonnage of the fish. salmon farming is big business, and is conducted on veritably industrial scale. “if we ever look back at a time when atlantic salmon underwent dramatic changes, it would be right now,” lien writes, “and the hot spot would be the fjords of western and northern norway” (166). appropriately, according to lien’s publisher, becoming salmon is the first ethnographic study of this rapidly developing sector. a readable and intelligent book, it should become a landmark study of a practice that — as its author wants to say — is symbolic of our changing relationship with nature in the anthropocene. while forms of fish farming have existed for centuries, the present mode of cultivating salmon is a recent development, only a handful of decades old. as early as the nineteenth century, salmon were artificially bred and released back into the rivers, thus augmenting wild stocks (see wilkins; nash). but today, the entire life cycle of the salmon is administered to: from the fertilization and incubation of the eggs, to the fish’s rearing up and growing out, first in fresh and then in marine pens, and finally on to slaughter and market. except for incidents of escape, there is no mixing between captive and wild populations, and, apart from those occasions where migrating wild salmon pass nearby to the coastal grow-out pens of the farmed salmon (where they become prone to parasitical infections characteristic of their captive cousins), no physical proximity exists. the novelty of this system provides a substantive rationale for lien’s framing her encounters with salmon farming in terms of “domestication”: are the salmon on modern salmon farms a new species of domesticate? whereas most animal domestications belonged to prehistory, the suggestion here is that, to the contrary, salmon farming now represents a unique opportunity to study to domestication in action (see also lien). as the title of the project from which lien’s monograph arose put it, are salmon “newcomers to the farm?” at the same time, lien treats aquaculture as a site through which to rethink familiar anthropocentric, controloriented conceptions of domestication in terms of metaphors of “mutuality, uncertainty and tinkering” (3). in effect, this leads to a view in which “domestication” emerges less as a theory through which to interpret changing human-animal relations historically, than as a name for an emergent mode of species co-existence, a lived ethics based on reuben message -newcomers to the farm? 179 appreciation of ambivalence. standing alone, this is a valuable contribution with clear normative undertones. yet it also inhibits the ability to answer those concrete, underlying questions raised by the study’s own substantive rationale. methodologically, lien’s approach “seeks to expand and explore the idea of what a human ethnographer can be and do as a situated and embodied sentient being” (15). this view takes her towards a “more-than-human” view of sociality (cf. tsing). in doing so, she approaches salmon aquaculture as a site for exploring the multiple agencies and relations (human and animal) involved in domestication as an open-ended practice. tracing heterogeneous interactions, lien tries to describe how all the elements comprising the salmon aquaculture industry, from the fish to the human worlds associated with them, are mutually constituted in processes she calls “biosocial becomings” (drawing especially on ingold and pálsson). in search of becomings, lien becomes a participant observer on salmon farms, salmon slaughterhouses, and various administrative locations associated with the salmon farming industry. lien plays close attention to the various activities through which what she calls the new “salmon domus” gets done at these various sites. this means describing how its objects, she says, are not given for apprehension, but are rather locally stabilized, or “come into being” in relational practices. thus, chapters are entitled: “becoming hungry,” “becoming biomass,” “becoming scalable,” “becoming sentient,” and “becoming alien.” through each of these, and while dealing with tangible economic or ethical issues (like feed conversion ratios or fish welfare), lien emphasizes that, despite what are clearly highly rationalised environments, improvisation and unpredictability are endemic to the mixing of people, technologies and animals. for instance, at the conclusion to an absorbing chapter on the salmon welfare, lien argues that even in such “highly commoditized food production sites ... sentience and care may unfold,” and that, in practice, outcomes will always remain “chronically uncertain,” “noncoherent,” and “multiple” (146). this reflects the central contradiction that runs through the book: the “tension of order and becoming — or of history and process” (166). for lien, domestication cannot be a boundary between nature and culture in the process of being pushed back by human action alone, so as to stamp new (cultural and historical) order onto the face of raw nature; it is a rather a mutuality of human and animal that is indefinite and reversible, a biosocial becoming. contrasting this perspective with an earlier monograph on salmon biologists and aquaculture is instructive. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 180 for environmental sociologist rik scarce, work at salmon hatcheries is geared towards the “instrumental rationalisation” of nature in processes of “social construction (7).” these social processes were nearly total – except for some unconstructed dimensions of nature that provided “resistance.” this property scarce described with the fishy metaphor “slippery” (86), suggesting a sense in which nature slithers away from the controlling designs of man. such a treatment of the relationship between culture and nature is clearly rejected by lien as historicist and order-imposing. when she (writing on this occasion with her collaborator law) likewise fell upon the metaphor of “slippery” (law and lien), it was to suggest an agentive capacity of fish, in which their very material textures participate in the different ways in which their existence is enacted or performed, and thus stabilized, in various salmon farming practices (see also lien and law). the shift in lien from a register of “construction” to “performance” is an argument against the coherence of history and the boundaries of the anthropos in conceptions of domestication. it also, however, involves ontological claims. lien wants to challenge conventional representational paradigms in anthropology by means of “a persistent and uncompromising questioning of the world as it is … [a movement] from a concern with epistemology to an unsettling of conventional ontology” (21). noting that anthropologists faced with the problem of “home blindness” (lien is herself norwegian) will normally have the option of resorting to comparisons in order to prompt methodological defamiliarization of what is taken for granted, for lien this route begs an ontological question, because it assumes a prior “idea of what is” (21, emphasis in original). that is, she says, to compare we need to have a conception of what the units being compared are. but this is just what her ethnographic practice wishes to establish by describing the “very emergence of such phenomena” (21). the alternative, she feels, comes down on the side of history, order, and of foreclosures of possibility — not of process and becomings. lien’s contrasts and vocabulary recall deleuze’s ontological distinction between being and becoming. but she never cites deleuze (or bergson). in fact, “becoming” is not defined in its own right (and, unusually for the prominence the word has in the title and text, does not appear in the index either). these gaps, however, arguably help to maintain consistency with becoming salmon’s primary theoretical input: actor-network theory (ant), and especially law’s successor project of “material-semiotics” (see law). this is the variety of sts that interfaces with anthropology in the book. consequently, situating ethnographic practice at the “deepest ontological level” means adopting a strong social nominalism and a fundamental emphasis on relationality. these are reflected in the ambition of depopulating reality of apparently specious entities, reuben message -newcomers to the farm? 181 principally those supposedly designated by collective and abstract nouns. thus lien’s approach strives, as she says, not to assume that “nature, society, people, market, gender, ethnic groups, and the like actually exist” (22, emphasis added). in this so-called “empirical” or “practical” ontological turn, what exists, in fact, is only “what comes into being through relational practices” (22). what a salmon actually is, is ultimately its relations, and since these are constantly changing and multiple, so too are salmon. what salmon are are practice generated realities, and as lien and law put it, “realities simply do not exist outside of the relations done in practices” (82). in the form of ant, the essence of this kind of ontic relationalism has been around for some time (e.g. latour). it is inseparably connected to a rejection of what law himself once called a “backcloth” approach to the interpretation of fact and artefacts, in which entities (principally nonhuman) are reduced to other entities (principally human or social) in the process of explaining them. fundamentally, as is well known, the effects of this onto-methodological conjuncture are approaches that abhor a frame — or at least deny that the researcher can simply select an appropriate frame for analysis. we must appreciate then that it is squarely in reference to this problematic that lien wants to shed the “epistemological anthropological approach” founded on “nature, society, person, market”, etc (23). these are frames (or contexts, or even hypotheses), and as such impose “order” and come down on the side of “history,” for instance, as epochs of culture-nature relations in which animals are seen as non-acting objects. they do not therefore come down on the side of “becoming,” “generative process,” and “noncoherence.” we can appreciate this at work in an ethnographic anecdote. lien describes the temptation of assimilating the fact of the salmon pens in the fjord to the genealogy of domestication implied by the sheep observed grazing on the slopes of the fjord around her — that is, to the history of agricultural husbandry (18). but she quickly retracts this option, because it is not only simplistic, but “fails to question the relation between ongoing material practices and discursive domains.” “more precisely, the comparison diverts analytical attention away from the generative agency of people-and-things [and animals] to the self-sealing metaphysics of conceptual categories” (19). comparisons foreclose, are associated with “ordering,” and inhibit “curious inquiry”(165), as she says elsewhere, because they are presumed to pose standard (reductionist and anthropocentric) ontologies. the distaste for frames and their tendency to impose order suggests an obvious difficulty for lien. “domestication,” the subject of her subtitle and key to her monograph, is clearly itself a frame. lien acknowledges this dilemma: “even humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 182 domestication,” she admits, belongs to the list of frames she wants to decenter (human, nature, society, etc.) (23). this is consequential, because it establishes an unresolved contradiction between the recent anthropological interpretations of domestication lien enlists and bends towards, and the theoretical infrastructure tasked in becoming salmon with being their scaffolding. when anthropologists like helen leach and others (e.g. leach; also mullin and cassidy) propose views of domestication based on mutuality and co-shaping of human and animal bodies and societies, and contrast this to older anthropocentric ideas of domestication as unidirectional models of control and confinement of animals lives, they are typically proposing what they see as a more appropriate frame or concept through which to understand a phenomenon. that the contents predicated on this frame are congruent with lien’s preferred metaphors of mutuality and uncertainty does not change this — it’s just another kind of frame. moreover, the revisions apply to the concept of domestication as understood by other and previous anthropologists: as a hypothesis, it is presumably intended to apply trans-historically and be universally applicable. that is to say, the suggested frame should apply equally to analysis of domestication processes occurring today and those associated with our neolithic ancestors and their emergent companion species. it unclear to what degree lien’s tendency to view reality in terms of flux, process, and mutuality comes from a prior theoretical commitment, or is an extrapolation of empirical observations about the apparently fluid, novel character of the contemporary world. lien both emphasizes the empirical warrant (contemporary salmon aquaculture suggests a new phase in the history of domestication), and says that “biosocial becomings” are what have “already and always” defined the co-constitution of humans and animals (15). we are thus left wondering whether lien intends her view of domestication to apply to all instances of domestication, and whether we are supposed to see it as a superior view; whether it applies only to contemporary domestications, or even only to salmon aquaculture in the fjords of western and northern norway? what really justifies her selection of this frame and the predicates she associates with it? thus on the one hand, the possibility is left open that some domestications are best comprehended via models of confinement and control – but others’ not, in which case the conditions for each type remain to be specified. the shift from the epistemological to the ontological register, and from “ordering” to “curious inquiry”, thus leaves much of importance unanswered, and room for confusion about what the conceptual reuben message -newcomers to the farm? 183 contribution of this book — and the more-than-human ethnographer — is to our understanding domestication and the wider literature on the subject. on the other hand, however, one could ask however whether, in lien’s hands, domestication is any longer an analytical concept at all? the “salmon domus,” lien concludes, is just what happens as salmon and people “make space for one another” (165). sacrificing explanatory pretensions, “domestication” seems to become simply a way of encouraging us to think-feel open-endedly about how to live together better today. this is a powerful imaginative achievement, and consideration of it might shed some light on how and why lien selected and ordered her conception of domestication in the way she did. nevertheless, it seems to leave the centrality of the idiom of domestication as a frame hanging somewhat askance, given the empirical pretext of intensive salmon aquaculture as the most recent turn of the great wheel of domestication. additionally, and more practically, the book exhibits a glaring omission in its limited consideration of salmon genetics. should we, as some now suggest, see salmo domesticus as a distinct species on the basis of its genetic difference to its wild forebears? is farmed atlantic salmon still a salmon? such matters are at the forefront of scientific commentary on the subject, and they go to the heart of the promise, substantive rationale, and thus shortcomings of becoming salmon. it is notable that one of the strongest moments in the book, however, occurs precisely when the author takes her own advice and explores beyond the confines of a familiar framework imposed, as lien herself says, by “the rigid ethnographic commitment to the observation of heterogeneous material practices as practices in actor-network theory and material semiotics” (163). in the chapter “becoming alien,” she explores the plight of the “escaped farmed salmon.” normally, these are treated as alien contaminants of rivers, despised by conservationists and anglers. but lien, with persuasion and grace, shows that they can hardly be said to have “escaped”; they, rather, by some accident or other, became “homeless” — they are more like refugees, survivors or fredløs (outlaws) (161–162). in this move, lien acknowledges that she upends precedent and imposes her own frame by making an intervention “at the level of representation” (163), or epistemology. in doing so, she goes beyond what can be physically seen, beyond the discourse of her human informants, and (perhaps) closest to the experience of her animal subjects. what she says becomes immediately and non-trivially political, too. it’s in moments like this that the eyes and instincts of the ethnographer studying an underexamined, consequential, and pressing contemporary issue overcome the smarts of the practical empirical ontologist. as has been recorded previously (cf. lynch), the value of a work associated with the “ontological turn” (at least in sts) here seems to shine humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 184 through as much despite, rather than as a result of, any particularly novel theoreticalontological commitment. works cited grusin, richard, ed. the nonhuman turn. u of minnesota p, 2015. ingold, tim and gísli pálson, eds. biosocial becomings: integrated social and biological anthropology. cambridge up, 2013. latour, bruno. “irreductions.” trans. alan sheridan. the pasteurization of france. harvard up, 1988. 153–238. law, john. “actor network theory and material semiotics.” the new blackwell companion to social theory. ed. bryan. s. turner. wiley-blackwell, 2009. 141–58. _____. “editor’s introduction: power/knowledge and the dissolution of the sociology of knowledge.” power, action and belief: a new sociology of knowledge? ed. john law. routledge, 1986. 1–19. law, john, and marianne elisabeth lien. “slippery: field notes on empirical ontology.” social studies of science 43:3 (2013). 363–78. leach, helen. “human domestication reconsidered.” current anthropology 44:3 (2003). 349–68. lien, marianne elisabeth. “domestication ‘downunder’: atlantic salmon farming in tasmania.” where the wild things are now: domestication reconsidered. ed. rebecca cassidy and molly mullin. berg, 2007. 205–27. lien, marianne elisabeth and john law. “emergent aliens: on salmon, nature, and their enactment.” ethnos 76:1 (2011). 65–87. lynch, michael. “ontography: investigating the production of things, deflating ontology.” social studies of science 43:3 (2013). 444–462. mullin, molly and rebecca cassidy, ed. where the wild things are now: domestication reconsidered. berg, 2007. reuben message -newcomers to the farm? 185 nash, colin e. the history of aquaculture. blackwell, 2011. scarce, rik. fishy business: salmon, biology, and the social construction of nature. temple up, 2000. tsing, anna. “more-than-human sociality. a call for critical description.” anthropology and nature. ed. kristen hastrup. routledge, 2013. 27–42 wilkins, noel. ponds, passes, and parcs: aquaculture in victorian ireland. glendale, 1989. microsoft word otjen-tsing. pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 reviews nathaniel otjen telling multispecies stories from the anthropocene anna tsing, heather swanson, elaine gan, nils bubandt, eds. arts of living on a damaged planet: ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2017. 368 pp. $27.95 pbk, $112 hc. attempting to mitigate the deepening crises of mass extinction, climate change, global inequality, and environmental destruction that characterize our current period of loss and risk, multispecies practitioners have called for alternative modes of togetherness predicated on the coexistence of humans and more-than-human beings. thom van dooren, eben kirksey, and ursula münster propose “arts of attentiveness” as a way of participating within and responding to multispecies collectivities. donna haraway asks us to “stay with the trouble” by attending to the difficulties that characterize the anthropocene. these propositions for living with others ask humans to alter our practices and critically reexamine our relationships with the beings that co-constitute this world. they also make clear the need for more constructive and empathetic ways of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 238 being if we hope to weather the anthropocene and support the entanglements that make wellness possible. the edited collection arts of living on a damaged planet: ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene responds to these recent calls for alternative modes of belonging. building upon anna tsing’s earlier work that asks us to cultivate “arts of living” among the endangered, this text proposes two frameworks for surviving the damaged world of modernity: ghosts and monsters. as tsing and her collaborators contend, the anthropocene has simultaneously brought into being and exposed a messy collection of monsters and ghosts that must be observed, studied, and appreciated. monstrous and spectral figures such as trash, radiation, tunicates, atomic bombs, trees, lichens, microbes, wolves, sea lice, ants, horseshoe crabs, and introduced plants all compose contemporary landscapes. whether examined in physical contexts, literary productions, or historical documents, ghosts and monsters render multispecies entanglements visible. by uncovering the collective basis of earthly habitation, these beings and things displace the human from an imagined central position and point toward future modes of togetherness. in short, examining ghosts and monsters helps us establish new arts of living during the anthropocene. monsters, for the editors of and contributors to this volume, are the product of modernity. at once “the wonders of symbiosis and the threats of ecological disruption,” monsters “help us pay attention to ancient chimeric entanglements ... [and] point us toward the monstrosities of modern man” (m2). ghosts are “the traces of more-thanhuman histories” (g1) that, like monsters, can be found in all spaces where humans and others interact. “[g]hosts,” the editors write, “remind us. ghosts point to our forgetting, showing us how living landscapes are imbued with earlier tracks and traces” (g6). by pointing to past moments that often exist outside of human time scales, these figures disrupt modernity’s linear configuration of time, showing us “multiple unruly temporalities” (g8). these two theoretical frameworks structure the diverse collection of essays that follow. as a collaborative publication, arts of living emerged from the conference “anthropocene: arts of living on a damaged planet” held at the university of california, santa cruz in may 2014. supporting an interdisciplinary approach to contemporary environmental difficulties, the collection features nearly two dozen contributors from a diverse range of disciplines, including anthropology, cultural studies, literary criticism, digital arts, science and technology studies, professional writing, biology, environmental history, and quantum physics. one half of the book nathaniel otjen -telling multispecies stories from the anthropocene 239 discusses ghosts and the other monsters. each part contains nine chapters along with introductory remarks and a coda. the split format of the book allows readers to begin with either ghosts or monsters and freely move between sections according to interest. each half is further divided into subsections that cluster essays into shared themes, arguments, and interests. the “monsters” half is subdivided into “inhabiting multispecies bodies,” “beyond individuals,” and “at the edge of extinction,” and the “ghosts” half contains “in the midst of change,” “footprints of the dead,” and “what remains.” with such a diverse cast of contributors and interests, the writing style of the essays varies from high academic to easily accessible. this stylistic and tonal range supports a wide readership. images, original artwork, diagrams, and citations abound within the text, enriching the reading experience and providing additional interactions. as one reads through arts of living, it becomes clear that this is a collection of essays interested in the power of narrative. not only does the volume seek to better understand the narratives we tell about being in the world, but it also aims to tell new stories — narratives that try to capture the complexity and liveliness of multispecies becoming — about leading entangled lives within the difficult present. the contributors are not simply celebrated scholars; they are also multispecies storytellers. the following chapter synopses offer a more-detailed sense of the material discussed within the collection and the authors’ interdisciplinary contributions. ghosts. in her chapter titled “no small matter: mushroom clouds, ecologies of nothingness, and strange topologies of spacetimemattering,” karen barad argues that atomic events demonstrate how matter, space, and time are inseparable and bound up with one another. moreover, this spacetimemattering is fundamentally spectral. as barad points out, “hauntings are not immaterial. they are an ineliminable feature of existing material conditions” (g107). therefore, “matter is spectral, haunted by all im/possible wanderings, an infinite multiplicity of histories present/absent in the indeterminacy of time-being” (g113). while barad provides an intriguing discussion of the atomic bomb, she also offers a valuable materialist definition of ghosts. hauntings, she writes, are “the dynamism of ontological indeterminacy of time-being/being-time in its materiality” (g113). this ontological indeterminacy is present throughout arts of living. like barad, nils bubandt is interested in material and temporal entanglements. in “haunted geologies: spirits, stones, and the necropolitics of the anthropocene” bubandt describes his research on the world’s largest mud volcano. located along the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 240 north coast of java, indonesia, the volcano has damaged a large area, spewing mud that is rich in heavy metals and sulfur. local inhabitants argue that the massive mudflows have been triggered by either a recent earthquake or by oil drilling in the area. because of this debate, the mud volcano is “a tragic and dystopic, but also illuminating, illustration of the anthropocene” (g122). the volcano illustrates “the impossibility of distinguishing human from nonhuman forces” (g122), and this “undecidability,” bubandt argues, “is simultaneously the signature characteristic, the curse, and the promise of our current moment” (g123). this period of global undecidability is a “spectral moment” (g128) which bubandt calls the “necropolitics of the anthropocene” (g125). exploring chestnut and pine forests in monti pisani, italy, andrew s. matthews reads the traces of past relationships between humans and more-than-human beings in “ghostly forms and forest histories.” he employs the practices of “walking, looking, and wondering” (g145) to study the ghostly traces of previous activities inscribed in trees. matthews observes evidence of peasant cutting, terraces, drainage systems, forest fires, former orchards, disease, and grafting. “the forms of trees, as of other beings,” he explains, “emerge from relations with others” (g151). by observing these ghostly marks, matthews is able to piece together a political history of the region. state formation, capitalism, and colonization have all shaped the chestnut and pine trees of this place. by calling our attention to forgotten histories, these ghostly traces, matthews contends, “provide ways of imagining and perhaps bringing into being positive environmental futures” (g145). monsters. in “symbiogenesis, sympoiesis, and art science activisms for staying with the trouble,” donna haraway outlines a vocabulary and proposes modes of togetherness suitable for life during the anthropocene. inspired by lynn margulis, haraway asks us to study and describe how beings are always in the process of “making with” one another (m25). she calls this multispecies turn in academia the “new new synthesis,” defining this shift as the interest in “human and nonhuman ecologies, development, history, affects, performances, technologies, and more” (m28). some of the work inspired by this “new new synthesis” includes “art science activisms,” or activist research that combines art and science, to propose “sympoietic practices for living on a damaged planet” (m31). haraway discusses two of these “animating project[s] in deadly times”: crochet coral reef and the madagascar ako project (m35). also interested in sympoietic practices, marianne elisabeth lien studies a salmon farm in west norway to better understand the complex, and often murky, multispecies nathaniel otjen -telling multispecies stories from the anthropocene 241 entanglements associated with domestication projects. as she explains in “unruly appetites: salmon domestication ‘all the way down’,” the atlantic salmon contained in this underwater enclosure are preyed upon by sea lice which feed on mucus and tissue, and, if left unchecked, can kill smolts. in an attempt to reduce these parasites, salmon aquaculturists have introduced wrasse, a smaller fish that eats sea lice. while wrasse help control sea lice, they also have “unruly appetites” (m116) and will occasionally nibble on salmon. the salmon, in turn, will also prey upon the wrasse. lien reads this messy process where “the role of ‘eater’ and ‘eaten’ is notoriously unsettled” (m108) as “domestication-in-the-making” (m109). together, atlantic salmon, sea lice, and wrasse are creating a shifting and unstable set of relationships off the coast of norway. like lien, who offers a tangled reading of domestication, peter funch asks us to revisit the project of conservation from a multispecies perspective. “synchronies at risk: the intertwined lives of horseshoe crabs and red knot birds” describes the intertwined, and vulnerable, lives of horseshoe crabs and red knot birds in the delaware bay. horseshoe crabs engage in mass spawnings and red knot birds consume their eggs shortly after they are deposited. however, with the decline of horseshoe crab populations due to overharvesting and habitat loss, the population of red knot birds has also suffered. as funch makes clear, “when all of these factors compound to cause horseshoe crab declines, they do more than imperil a single species; they also make vulnerable all who depend upon it” (m150). this understanding leads him to ask: if most conservation programs aim to assist a single species, how can we restore complex communities of organisms? funch argues that paying attention to multispecies entanglements is necessary work during this troubled period. arts of living is a required text for those interested in and involved with the environmental humanities. the two concepts it proposes — ghosts and monsters — are useful frames for studying and changing the sociomaterial landscapes of the anthropocene. spectral and unsettling figures can be found everywhere and they remind us not only of the changes we have caused, but also our constantly entangled presence on this planet. if we hope to participate in a livable future, we must craft new arts of living that recognize the contributions of others. as this collection of essays makes clear, we can gain perhaps our greatest inspiration by turning to the more-thanhuman denizens of this world. microsoft word mackay-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 11:1 carley mackay through the shadows of roadkill the more-than-human city as a zone of entangled lives and deaths is an understanding yet to be fully realized. – van dooren & rose 19. introduction. spotting the bodily remains of lost lives smeared into the pavement is a common occurrence i experience when driving through urban and rural landscapes. in north america, the name we give to these urbanized dead bodies is “roadkill.” this article problematizes how we often ignore and turn our gaze away from roadkill. speaking to this problem, i argue that turning towards rather than away from roadkill allows us to bear witness to the death of an animal, and this bearing witness to roadkill enables the unfolding of an intimate engagement with animal death. our acknowledgment of roadkill is crucial because bearing witness to these bodies opens the possibility for reflecting on how these bodies once possessed lives and identities of their own. in this article, i bear witness to roadkill by acknowledging and exploring the lives of these beings through their rendered roadkill identities. this article aims to contribute to the literature on human-animal relations and animal death through an analysis and critique of the banality of animal death, as exemplified with the case of roadkill. much of the literature on human-animal relations and animal death problematizes the violent, yet normalized, ways in which animals are made killable within industrial capitalism (noske; torres; shukin). these discussions of animal life and death are often shaped by analyses of the animal industrial complex, within which the intensive production and killing of animals for meat and other animal products unfold (arcari 69). rosenberg defines animal agriculture as “the managed reproduction and destruction of nonhuman life for the expansion of (qualified) human life” (70), providing an analysis of how systematized and sexual violence of berkshire swine bodies was a core strategy in their reproduction and killing as livestock capital. taking a different approach, arcari engages in a critique of meat production and consumption by problematizing how we normalize the killing of animals for meat through language, rendering animals invisible through their commodified identities as “livestock” and “units of production” (69; 81). cudworth focuses on the ways in which domesticated animals are subjected to normalized violence and killing. for example, she examines how (sick and rescued) companion animals and research animals are “euthanized,” while livestock animals are “slaughtered” where, despite these different classifications (or euphemisms) for killing, the logic of a “non-criminal putting to carley mackay -through the shadows of roadkill 129 death” of animals is at work (7). discussing violence and animal death differently, morin argues that the exploitation and incarceration of animals within industrial spaces such as the slaughterhouse and animal laboratory parallels the exploitation of human prisoners held within the confines of the prisoner execution chamber (1317). she draws our attention to how institutional and normalized forms of killing successfully function according to the extent to which bodies are “animalized,” where this animalization of incarcerated bodies provides the foundation for their violent yet normalized “killability” (1317; 1319). it is not my intention to suggest that these discussions of human-animal relations and animal death are problematic. these scholarly contributions are essential, given the variety of conceptual tools they provide us with for exercising ethical relations with animals. however, shedding light on an area that has received less scholarly attention, an analysis of the banality of animal death such as roadkill, can deepen how we understand animal death by opening space for discussing and reflecting on animals killed outside the confines of industrialized killing. this conversation encourages us to critique how we problematically normalize roadkill by shedding light on our (often neglected) role in their production. several scholars have examined roadkill in critical ways and offer important insights for this article. dennis soron engages in an analysis of roadkill by discussing the problematic ways in which western culture commodifies roadkill. drawing attention to this commodification enables us to consider the problems that shape our encounters with roadkill and the kinds of practices that prevent us from having ethical relations with them. i argue that roadkill commodification spectacularizes and humorizes animal death, shaping human-roadkill relations in unintimate and unethical ways. alexandra koelle discusses roadkill through her analysis of intimate bureaucracies, which she defines as an extensive study of animal movements and habitat types made up of assemblages of paper, policies, and people (655). these practices, koelle argues, form an agential world of accountability and counting. as i will explore, koelle’s notion of intimate bureaucracies assists with carrying out an analysis of intimate human-roadkill encounters. i discuss soron and koelle’s analyses in more detail throughout this article to better articulate my discussion of roadkill and human-animal relations. in this article, i problematize how we often fail to acknowledge roadkill animals and argue that our relations with roadkill warrant ethical kinds of engagement, which i explore through an analysis of death and intimacy. intimate engagement with animal death strengthens how we understand the complexity of human-roadkill relations, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 130 while simultaneously providing us with tools for addressing how to engage in these relations in ethical ways. as i make clear, death does not inhibit our relations with roadkill animals but instead acts as a catalyst for them. i address how we can intimately acknowledge the death of those rendered as roadkill and discuss how this acknowledgement creates opportunities for locating ourselves in their shadows. lastly, i advocate for an acknowledgement of roads as relational spaces upon which humans and roadkill are brought together in entangled encounters. to carry this discussion forward, i begin by describing what i refer to as unintimate bureaucracies to address the common ways in which human practices deny roadkill care and attention. i discuss several examples of unintimate bureaucracies that impact roadkill in different places across north america. some of the examples that i look at include the toronto animal services’ roadkill disposal practices and the ontario ministry of natural resources and forestry’s rules regarding the consumption of roadkill meat. a discussion of unintimate bureaucracies provides a foundation for understanding and exemplifying the kinds of practices that koelle’s analysis of intimate bureaucracies seeks to move away from. i then turn to a discussion of koelle’s analysis of intimate bureaucracies and road ecology in more detail. to develop my analysis of an ethical and intimate engagement with roadkill and animal death, i examine intimate bureaucracies and road ecology in relation to deborah bird rose’s notion of “shadows,” which illuminate roads as spaces where the living encounters the dead. by extending rose’s analysis to roadkill, i demonstrate the critical ways in which humans and roadkill are entangled. as i hope to make clear, through the shadows of roadkill our relationality with roadkill beings continues to flourish. unintimate bureaucracies. i define unintimate bureaucracies as statistical practices of organizing information about roadkill that narrowly define them through quantifiable measures. unintimate bureaucracies aim to count and dispose of roadkill bodies; however, they do not, for example, account for roadkill species diversity or aim to mitigate animal death. exemplifying unintimate bureaucracies, the toronto animal services states that it receives approximately 10,000 calls regarding roadkill annually (winsa). in 2011, the response team collected and disposed of approximately 7,500 bodies, stating that the most common animal carcasses found within the city of toronto were: 1) raccoons (3,258), 2) squirrels (1,533), 3) cats (1,336), 4) birds (354), 5) dogs (229), 6) skunks (191), 7) opossums (155), 8) rabbits (142), 9) rodents (86), and 10) groundhogs (69). although this list may not initially read as problematic, upon closer inspection it exemplifies unintimate bureaucracies. by cataloging several beings into the problematic category “rodents,” this list of data collection makes individual species such as rats, for carley mackay -through the shadows of roadkill 131 example, hard to locate and ethically acknowledge as a distinct species with different kinds of characteristics and navigational needs. failing to acknowledge the diversity of roadkill prevents us from mitigating the extent to which our technologized actions impact animals. as a result, this kind of data collection restricts our ability to engage with roadkill intimately. helping to complicate these numbers and address the lack of attention that is missing from them, soron argues that “flattened fauna” statistics are often always incomplete because they fail to account for the many wounded animals who stumble off the road to die out of sight (112). soron’s critique of “flattened fauna” statistics draws attention to the unaccounted for, and critically sheds light on how, when hit by a vehicle, some animals refuse to remain in their struck locations, perhaps demonstrating a will to die in a more remote space of their choosing. considering how animals might slip through the cracks of their statistical control can allow us to critically acknowledge them as beings who possess wants, needs, demands, and identities. however, unintimate bureaucracies depict (accounted for) roadkill animals as one-dimensional objects in need of collection and disposal, and this has problematic implications for how we think about animals— both living and dying— as bodies whose identities and lives lack meaning. many policies that govern the systematic collection and disposal of roadkill exemplify unintimate bureaucracies. for example, the toronto animal services emergency and mobile response unit stresses that specific guidelines must be followed when individuals attempt to move dead animals lying near their property. listed on the toronto 311 website is the following set of guidelines: “do not touch the dead animal with bare hands. wear gloves or use a double plastic bag to pick it up and place it in another plastic bag. wash your hands … bag the animal and place it on the curb for pick up (this does not apply to owned/pet animals)” (“dead animal removal — on city or private property”). the animals that are collected by the response team are then disposed of through cremation. akin to practices of garbage disposal, these acts fail to enable a deeper acknowledgment of the lost lives and bodies located in the bags. exemplifying unintimate bureaucracies are statistics on roadkill that quantify and calculate death based on economic loss associated with property damage. for example, in the united states in 2009, cost comparisons associated with vehicle damage had shown that collisions with moose resulted in $30,760 worth of damage, collisions with elk resulted in $17, 483, and deer-vehicle collisions, perhaps due to the smaller size of deer, produced damage costs of $6,617 (“wildlife-vehicle collisions in canada: a review of the literature and a compendium of existing data sources”). different methods for data collection that produce these analyses include police reports, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 132 insurance claims, and maintenance contractor records. reducing animal lives to economic loss represents roadkill as aggregated bodies whose deaths negatively impact human capital. absent from these methods for understanding and knowing roadkill are critical acknowledgements of the individual bodies whose lives and identities are lost to vehicle collisions. a systematic analysis of roadkill, which the work of unintimate bureaucracies is built upon, fails to account for more complex and intimate ways of engaging with and understanding these animals. unlike roadkill beings who are collected and disposed of via cremation, or those equated with costly vehicle damage, other roadkill bodies are collected and consumed as food. on the one hand, roadkill consumption demonstrates the bureaucratically, unintimate ways in which we collect and dispose of roadkill animals, providing little (or no) attention to the animal lives that once embodied roadkill vessels. find law canada, an organization providing legal information on a wide range of topics, states that laws regarding roadkill vary by province, where in ontario, for example, individuals can eat roadkill after registering the animal with the ontario ministry of natural resources and forestry (“can you keep roadkill?”). some roadkill animals targeted for such consumption include black bears, deer, beavers, rabbits, and moose. find law canada explains that roadkill is the safest when it is fresh, where indicators of this include bodies with clear eyes while bearing no maggots, fleas, or flies. outlining how to legally register an animal, find law canada states that “roadkill enthusiasts have to either mail in a form — called a notice of possession — to the mnrf or, for the more tech-savvy, create an online profile on the ministry’s website. if everything is okay, the mnrf will issue a confirmation of registration that allows the holder of the roadkill to legally consume the meat.” supporting this protocol, the dead animal disposal act specifies that “no person shall collect a dead animal unless the person is the holder of a license as a collector” (“dead animal disposal act, r.s.o., 1990, c. d. 3”). these practices administratively limit the avenues through which we can engage with roadkill as bodies accompanied by a history, context, and an identity beyond that of fresh meat. find law canada specifies an exception to the rules of registration by stating that humans cannot consume roadkill on the endangered species list. perhaps it is because of their scarce existence that governing agencies deem endangered roadkill as non-consumable. however, despite the logic that supports this exception, it exemplifies how the lives and deaths of animals are hierarchically arranged, denoting some animals — and their deaths — with more ethical acknowledgement than others. advocating for what i argue are unintimate practices of roadkill consumption, peta (people for the ethical treatment of animals) defines roadkill as “meat without carley mackay -through the shadows of roadkill 133 murder” (“meat without murder”). the organization frames the consumption of roadkill meat as a more compassionate way for humans to consume animals by eating animals who were once “free” rather than confined within violent systems of livestock production (soron 112). peta’s stance on roadkill consumption alludes to unintimate practices of consumption because it problematically and ironically hyper-commodifies roadkill bodies as “ethical” meat. the automobile industry plays a crucial role in the industrial production and consumption of agricultural animals, given how animal agriculture could not function without the support of industrial transport trucks that haul thousands of animals every day from farms and feedlots to slaughterhouses. peta’s position on roadkill consumption therefore fails to account for the problematic link between the production of roadkill bodies and agricultural animals that petrocapitalism makes possible. peta’s logic also supports a way of thinking that absolves humans from their role in hitting and killing animals with their automobiles, ignoring the violence of roadkill death. alongside this, in its negation of the violence these animals experience, peta’s description of meat without murder valorizes the “freedom” of roadkill animals as a means for moralizing their consumption. however, when we conceptualize animals who live outside of the industrial animal complex as inherently “free,” we fail to account for how human activity limits the lives of most animals. roadkill deaths exemplify the daily limitations animals endure as a result of this activity. brashares et al. address this lack of freedom in their analysis of “nocturnal refuge,” where they discuss how wildlife animals are becoming more nocturnal as a response to human activity (1232). seeking “nocturnal refuge” as a means of avoiding human contact exemplifies one of the ways in which the day-to-day lives of animals are subjected to human disturbance. although the consumption of roadkill exemplifies practices of unintimate bureaucracies, conceptualized differently, it also animates a possibility for intimately engaging with animal death. offering insight here, evans and miele discuss the intimate relationships that emerge from eating; they describe eating as a deeply visceral experience that brings together the intermixing and fusion of bodies (3). evans and miele explain how practices of eating allow for the emergence of something new between the consumer and consumed that was not there before (4). extending this kind of thinking to roadkill consumption opens possibilities for exploring how roadkill consumption can enable intimate practices. for example, through our absorption of roadkill, animal bodies become intimately dispersed within ours, resulting in the establishment of fleshy connections that fuse animal bodies with human bodies. when we consume the bodies of roadkill through this physical and symbolic fusion, we become entangled with their deaths. consuming the death of roadkill entails our humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 134 acknowledgement of them as beings who once possessed lives. we locate ourselves in roadkill identities by reflecting on our roles in inflicting the kind of death from which these identities emerge. however, for this kind of intimacy to unfold, critical attention to and respect for the roadkill bodies one chooses to consume is vital. if it is possible to consume roadkill intimately, it is necessary that we acknowledge the lives that once possessed their bodies rather than merely treating their bodies as flesh for consumption. roadkill commodities. the numerous ways in which we commodify roadkill signals our lack of political, intimate, ethical, and compassionate attention to them. soron’s analysis of roadkill commodification draws attention to some of the problems that prevent possibilities for our encountering of death in intimate ways. we can create alternative avenues for engaging with roadkill by understanding and shedding light on these problems. roadkill commodities such as cookbooks, cotton-stuffed toys, crude comical prank toys, glass wear, and candy exemplify the many ways in which the desecrated bodies of animals are consumed and rendered into comic spectacles of domination (soron 109). roadkill commodities absolve human responsibility and fetishize this violence by rendering these animals as figures who seem to invite and enjoy their own victimization (117). this enjoyment is animated in the silly faces of cotton-stuffed plush toys that look like roadkill, the sweet tastes afforded by sugar candies made with gelatin that look like dead animals, and cook-books labeled, “bambi helper,” suggesting that deer willingly offer themselves up as dinner. roadkill commodities such as plush toys and gummy candies use the reality of roadkill as an avenue for mocking animal death by attempting to make it funny. these commodities manufacture an imitation of animal death, creating a niche market that makes roadkill fun to consume. alongside this, roadkill commodities encourage and impede our ability to take roadkill subjects seriously; in other words, they allow us, as consumers, to consume animal death without taking it seriously. an interesting and problematic characteristic of these commodities is the way in which they are spectacularized and tailored to young consumers, impacting how children develop ideas about roadkill and animal death. roadkill plush toys and candies, for example, invite children to consume and engage with ideas of roadkill that shape how they understand roadkill as “cute,” “funny,” and “tasty.” this commodification promotes an unethical and unintimate human acknowledgement of roadkill because it represents the real and fallen lives of animals as mere objects of human consumption (for human profit). problematically shaping how we understand roadkill, these commodities negatively impact how we might carry out human-roadkill encounters, constraining our ability to exercise intimate human-roadkill relations. carley mackay -through the shadows of roadkill 135 intimate bureaucracies. absent from unintimate bureaucracies and roadkill commodification are the kinds of political and ethical attention that characterize what koelle refers to as “intimate bureaucracies.” she defines intimate bureaucracies as an extensive study of the diverse and far-ranging array of animal movements and habitat types made up of assemblages of paper, policies, and people that form an agential world of accountability and counting (655). koelle explains that road ecologists engage in intimate bureaucracies by examining roads as networks in the living landscape that can be altered to be more responsive to the multispecies that use them (657). road ecologists seek to mitigate the often-fatal infrastructure through which humans and animals are brought together. one of the goals of road ecology is to increase highway opportunities for animals, as the highway names a dangerous zone that intersects with the biological corridors of many animals (652). biological corridors refer to animal routes that fail to align with asphalt markings, which are often only recognizable to species who use them (651). via her analysis of intimate bureaucracies and its relation to road ecology, koelle examines the connections among science, policy, and humananimal corridors, arguing that “a pressing and lively world emerges when one takes seriously the scientific and regulatory worlds that deal with roadkill” (657). intimate bureaucracies bring attention to the entanglement of humans, animals, habitats, and automobiles, complicating the simplicity of understanding roadkill as bodies in mere need of collection and disposal. intimate bureaucracies provide ethical and intimate attention to roadkill, given the way they attempt to evaluate, know, and understand the biological corridors of animals who become victim to automobile collisions. by taking roadkill seriously through ethical and intimate acts of paying attention, counting, and mitigating animal deaths, intimate bureaucracies challenge our turning away from roadkill. this act of turning away signals the ways in which we fail to acknowledge the lives that roadkill possessed. in these moments, we also fail to consider the children, parents, friends, and other subjects who roadkill animals leave behind. thinking about these relationships allows us to acknowledge the multiplicity of animal identities that shaped these familial and social connections. providing further insight on roadkill and relationality, koelle emphasizes how humans, animals, habitats, and automobiles shape the ecology of roads, illustrating the road as a space upon which nonhuman nature and human culture fuse (652). the following passage exemplifies the intricate and complex ecology of roads: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 136 out on the highways and single lane roads of north america, the categories of “nature” and “culture” are hard to separate. snakes bask on paved roads. some get run over, and their bodies attract scavengers who find a steady food source along the asphalt. eagles gorge themselves on carrion, becoming so heavy that they need a running start before they can fly. cars often hit them before they are airborn. bighorn sheep glean salt from de-icing agents stuck in the cracks of the pavement. bats roost under highway bridges, and the moving that keeps grasses short along medians can increase forage for small mammals. (652) this passage addresses the entanglements of roadkill by highlighting how roads provide space for the living and the dead, where through relational acts, the death of some animals becomes a means for the livelihood of others. in these moments, living animals are brought into relation with non-living animals, re-using and recycling these bodies within their own. the road is a space where the dead and living encounter one another. the road, in other words, is a relational space within which animals — dying and living — and humans are brought together in entangled relations. i bring rose’s analysis of shadows into conversation with koelle’s analysis of intimate bureaucracies to provide a rich lens for understanding intimate bureaucracies, and more specifically, encounters between the living and the dead. bringing these concepts into conversation with one another helps to reveal how the lives of snakes, big horn sheep, eagles, and bats, for example, are rooted in the deaths and bodies of those from whom they forage. an analysis of shadows adds depth to koelle’s intimate bureaucracies by strengthening how we understand the entanglement between the living and the dead that the work of road ecology and intimate bureaucracies center on. rose describes how living beings — both human and nonhuman — live within shadows cast by the deaths of those who came before them. she explains that human and nonhuman animals precede one another, where the birth and life of one being exists within relation to the death of another. life, according to rose, always exists in the shadows of death. shadows of death provide a strong foundation for conceptualizing the intimate ways in which we encounter roadkill. an intimate engagement with roadkill can emerge from the practicing of intimate bureaucracies, whereby critical attention is given to understanding roadkill subjects and mitigating their death, all the while acknowledging the entanglement we share with roadkill bodies. or, in an alternative way, this intimacy can emerge via the fleshy entanglement of roadkill and those humans who — practicing carley mackay -through the shadows of roadkill 137 reflexivity and respect towards roadkill — consume their bodies as food. rose’s analysis of shadows allows us to think about relationships among humans, animals, and roadkill, offering a lens for intimately understanding roadkill as bodies that become recycled and carried within the lives of others. she explains that when we see ourselves in the shadows of others, we understand how our existence is made possible through the co-constitution of others (2). the shadows of death that precede us, rose expresses, must be understood as a multispecies shadow, “immensely great and never [fully] knowable.” shadows provide us with tools for examining our implication in the deaths of animals, thus enabling us to understand how roadkill (and, more broadly, animal death) is inherently relational. exemplifying human-animal relationality, shadows connect us to animals by disclosing our shared vulnerability to death. death provides an avenue for taking our shared vulnerability and relationality as human animals with nonhuman animals seriously. attempting to locate ourselves within the shadows of roadkill can allow us to “see the fate of animals as a reflection of our own enduring vulnerability and mortality, reminding us how the social world we have collectively constructed also violates, objectifies, constrains, and oppresses members of our own species” (soron 123). reflecting on our relationality with roadkill through the shadows of death can thus teach us about our shared (human-animal) mortality. mitigating roadkill is not always possible. collisions exemplify one of the negative consequences of driving that impact both human and animal lives, and an understanding of the relationality of roadkill needs to be grounded in an acknowledgment of this. however, drivers too often identify roadkill collisions as inevitable and normalize the killing of animals on the road as meaningless. accepting that collisions occur and, at times, cannot be prevented does not justify our turning away from roadkill. our reliance on driving shapes our normalization of animal death, which roadkill are a by-product of. driving, although normalized and often treated as a mundane daily practice by many, is not a morally or ethically emptied practice because it ties us to others with whom we share the roads (and are responsible to and for when sharing roads). morally and politically responding to roadkill requires that we acknowledge our responsibility to these animals by problematizing the normalization of their deaths. when we understand our relationality with roadkill, we recognize our entangled role in animal death and, in the process, create space for considering how roadkill bodies once possessed lives and relationships that matter(ed). roadkill relationality demonstrates how driving is an act that morally and ethically binds us to human and animal others. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 138 conclusion. to understand the overlooked lives of roadkill, we must critically examine our entanglement with them and reflexively locate ourselves in the production of their death. a thorough discussion of unintimate bureaucracies helps to shed light on practices that limit our abilities for intimately engaging with roadkill. a strong understanding of unintimate bureaucracies also helps to weaken the grounds upon which these practices unfold, thus opening different avenues for encountering roadkill in ethical ways. rose’s analysis of shadows strengthens koelle’s notion of intimate bureaucracies because it illuminates the human-animal relationality that is always present within practices of intimate bureaucracies and road ecology. more specifically, shadows provide a framework for conceptualizing the entanglement of life and death, revealing how this entanglement is vital to the identities of animals and humans. it is easier to consider how humans shape animal identities and animal deaths, given the asymmetry that too often characterizes human-animal relations. however, a consideration of how animals, and more critically, animal deaths, shape human identities is less discussed and therefore warrants further investigation. more must be done to prevent the death of animals summoned as roadkill. helping with this, koelle’s work details how processes of roadkill data collection must foreground details about the diversity and behaviors of animals, where this data can then be used, for example, in projects of road restructuration. exemplifying what these roadkill measures might look like, the washington state department of transportation has revealed its construction of a wildlife overpass that will allow animals to cross the interstate 90 expressway by providing an alternative pathway for those who roam the highway’s cascades (regimbal). the 66-foot-long archway will span the interstate 90, mitigating the risks of human-animal automobile collisions. the construction of this passageway represents the goal of mitigating roadkill death and signals our attention to the presence, agency, and lives of animals as mobile subjects who require us to share the roads. however, going beyond a conversation of roadkill prevention, it has been my goal to bring attention to the already fallen, describing different practices and ways of thinking that can initiate gestures of justice toward these beings. exercising gestures of justice towards roadkill requires that we un-normalize roadkill by weakening the kinds of perceptions that see roadkill death as banal — or do not see it at all. seeing and understanding roadkill bodies as animals with lives that matter(ed) and whose deaths we are always a part of provides the foundation upon which we can build intimate human-roadkill encounters. carley mackay -through the shadows of roadkill 139 works cited arcari, paula. “normalised, human-centric discourses of meat and animals in climate change, sustainability and food security literature.” agriculture and human values 34.1 (2017): 69-86. brashares, justin s., carter, neil h., gaynor, kaitlyn, & hojnowski, cheryl e. “the influence of human disturbance on wildlife nocturnality.” science 360.6394 (june 2018): 1232-1235. “can you keep roadkill?” find law canada – thompson reuters canada limited. accessed 1 december 2017. online. cudworth, erica. “killing animals: sociology, species relations and institutionalized violence.” sociological review 63.1 (2015): 1-18. “dead animal disposal act, r.s.o., 1990, c. d. 3.” repealed on march 27, 2009. queen’s printer for ontario. accessed 1 december 2017. online. “dead animal removal — on city or private property.” toronto 311. accessed 1 december 2017. evans, adrian b. & miele, mara. “between food and flesh: how animals are made to matter (and not matter) within food consumption practices.” environment and planning d: society and space 30.2 (jan 2012): 1-17. koelle, alexandra. “intimate bureaucracies: roadkill, policy, and fieldwork on the shoulder.” hypatia 27.3 (2012): 652-665. morin, karen. “carceral space: prisoners and animals.” antipode 48.5 (2016): 1317-1336. noske, barbara. beyond boundaries: humans and animals. black rose books, 1997. regimbal, alec. “i-90 archway is half of planned wildlife overpass.” yakima herald.com 17 july, 2017. accessed 23 november 2017. online. rose, deborah bird. “in the shadow of all this death.” animal death. jay johnston & fionna probyn-raspey, eds. sydney up, 2012. 1-20. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 140 rosenberg, gabriel. “a race suicide among the hogs: the biopolitics of pork in the united states, 1865–1930.” american quarterly 68.1 (2016): 49-73. shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. u of minnesota p, 2009. soron, dennis. “roadkill: commodity fetishism and structural violence.” topia 18 (2007): 108-123. torres, bob. making a killing: the political economy of animal rights. ak press, 2007. van dooren, thom & deborah bird rose. “storied-places in a multispecies city.” humanimalia 3.3 (2012): 1-27. accessed dec. 2, 2017. online. “wildlife-vehicle collisions in canada: a review of the literature and a compendium of existing data sources.” traffic industry research foundation. accessed 23 december 2017. online. winsa, patty. “roadkill: 3,000 raccoons, 1,300 cats and more are casualties of city streets annually.” the star 25 aug. 2012. accessed 13 december 2017. online. microsoft word wolch-owens-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:2 jennifer wolch & marcus owens animals in contemporary architecture and design what are animals doing in design? to answer this question, we analyzed a small sample of contemporary animal design projects, taken both from the oeuvres of established practitioners as well as one-off projects and competition entries circulating on design culture media platforms. in doing so, this paper also considers what it means to pose such a question, located at the intersection of human-animal studies (has) with its attention to relations between humans and animals, and design studies, whose focus is on technology, material and visual culture. while matthew fuller has examined art for animals, and disalvo and lukens attempt to make sense of a broader “nonanthropocentric design,” this research more specifically follows sloterdijk’s “rules for the human zoo,” proposing the intersection between these domains as increasingly politically pertinent for humans, given market-driven advances in biotechnology and the relationship of design to the libidinal late-capitalist economies of attention, creativity, and innovation. this research suggests that the aesthetic practice of design provides an ideal forum for bringing the question of animality and desire into studies of technics and technology. likewise, technical aspects of design provide a means to understand animals beyond innate morphological essences assigned by humans, from an ethological perspective composed of expressions of movements, sensations, and environmental flows (parikka xxv). in the cases of both animal and design studies, there is already evidence of trajectories towards convergence. given its roots in the animal rights and liberation movement, and predicated on growing scientific evidence of nonhuman subjectivity, has has particular relevance in the contemporary moment, in which resilience politics and the perception of ecological crisis underpin a de-centering of the human. more recently, some propose to reconfigure notions of agency and subjectivity to accommodate beings beyond the charismatic animals that have dominated 20th century animal studies and its humanist rights-based approach, including fungi (tsing), mosses (gabrys), and even the “inhuman” geologic matter of the cosmos (barad). these approaches may incorporate aesthetic and semiotic theory to expound upon the potential political agency of materials. without necessarily committing to latour’s project of assembling a “parliament of things,” these literatures are worth noting in the way that they bring materials into animal studies, providing a window to connect with design studies as a material practice. while animal advocates may clash with a bio-centric environmentalist humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 2 outlook on issues such as the extermination of certain species for the sake of biodiversity metrics, the general, if at times ambiguous, goal of raising awareness of a nonhuman-other can often constitute the ends for sustainability-minded animal designers. to begin to place animals in design, we must first understand design’s historical relationship to technology, and to material and visual culture. across theories of design in domains from anthropology (ingold), to philosophy (flusser), to histories of technology (marx) and art (coles 8), design is understood as a way of making and doing that emerges from the broader classical greek techné associated with the practical, manual labor of slaves and peasants. for these scholars, design becomes distinct from technology and the broader techné with the division of labor associated with taylorist industrial production. ingold describes how the emergence of design and other “spontaneous work of the human imagination” such as artistic or scientific genius, act as an antipode to technical practices resulting from the rise of machinic labor and the decline of the artisan (295). for scholars of material culture and technology, design refers to the curatorial or aesthetic arrangement of materials or technologies (bijker et al.). in this way, the “work” of the designer is this added curatorial or aesthetic labor that extends beyond the immediate material functionality of the technology itself. however, design is also distinct from the modern concept of art, underscored by renaissance concept of disegno and rancière’s “aesthetic regime,” or art. formulated at the close of what rancière terms the “representative regime,” disegno, or the act of drawing, serves to negotiate the interface between art and technology, or creative vision and manual labor in the modern era (ross 4). in this way, design must, or at least should, theoretically “work.” this technical sense of producing predetermined outcomes is in contrast to the autonomy afforded to art under the aesthetic regime that defines modernity. design is expected to produce novel, iconoclastic, and/or destabilizing scenarios or products, yet at the same time requires at least some level of consensus and functionality. one way of discussing animal design projects in our survey is in terms of this relationship to material functionality and aesthetics. largely resulting from academic studios, ideas competitions, and art practices, many projects featured on blogs such as bldgblg, its future perfect affiliates, and expanded environment, are more critical or speculative in nature. while they are sometimes elaborations on established typologies, such as a “future zoo,” they also feature forms other than traditional animal typologies, thereby imagining new material components for novel interspecies relations. these jennifer wolch & marcus owens -animals in contemporary architecture and design 3 projects blur the boundaries between art and design in different ways. “critical design” (malpass) or “design art” (coles) practices create objects whose “function” is often critique or provocation, something other than what is literally implied by design. speculative designs, emerging from academic studios, and think tanks draw on a long tradition in architecture of imagining visionary, alternative realities or critiquing existing ones is a hallmark of modern design. finally, the phenomenon of the starchitect is also clearly rooted in the modernist cult of genius associated with the aesthetic regime of art rather than an emergent or evolutionary perspective. many of the built projects featured on design sites — especially zoos and aquaria — relate more to a conception of architectural practice as brand-building in the contemporary moment. many of the built animal architecture projects on archinect, archdaily, designboom, and dezeen tend to be aestheticized neo-modernist iterations of these standardized typologies dictated by industry standard guidelines, rather than “designing for animals” per se. whatever the form, this characteristic of design for controlled innovation neatly corresponds to late-capitalist modes of accumulation. if the deep-time, atmospheric science, and post-equilibrium paradigms of ecology present a planetary reconfiguration of ideas about the environment, media theorists argue for a dissolution of the division between bios and techne through concepts such as bio-media (thacker) or wetware (winthrop-young) systems that triangulate with software code and hardware devices. considering the power dynamics of “designerly ways of intervening into people’s lives” (markussen), or the “engineering of affect” (julier; thrift) implicit in design, the notion of “atmospheric power” emerges to describe how the organism’s sensorium becomes the subject of design in the constant production of novelty, innovation, and brand management required to capture consumer attention in the contemporary attention economy (borch et al.). if genetic material, living cells, and neurons are the frontiers of a new wave of “techno-primitive accumulation” (preciado), examining the role of animals in design allows us to understand the dynamics of animality in contemporary designs for humans. for example, how might thinking about animals and animality help scholars of technology and design think about our relation to machinic intelligence, such as the mechanical turk, artificial intelligence, or fashion and makeup design to avoid facial recognition software? a study of animals in design: methods and materials. to begin to get an overview of contemporary design for animals, we conducted a targeted search of design-culture media for projects referencing animals. this search was largely web-based, as architecture projects, both built and speculative, are not published in ways comparable to books, peer reviewed journal articles, or even popular publications. this can be due humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 4 to professional non-disclosure agreements with clients, as well as the vast array of competitions, exhibitions, academic studios, and other speculative work that circulates ephemerally in, and in many ways defines, architecture and design culture today. our survey therefore focused on the so-called “blogosphere” of prominent architecture webblogs, including archinect, archdaily, designboom, dezeen, bldgblg and its future perfect affiliates. inhabitat, a more consumer-oriented eco-lifestyle design blog, also featured some animal architecture projects. finally, the blog expanded environment (formerly animal architecture) is wholly devoted to animals in architecture and design culture, and has organized several “animal architecture awards.” the following discussion of the species distribution uncovered in our search therefore corresponds to a wider body of scholarship visual and media studies addressing the algorithm habitats of charismatic digital animals (or charismatic starchitect brands)* (lorimer; rothfels; lippit). species representation. all in all, our search included a suite of weblogs and traditional publications, including books, journals, and exhibition catalogs dating from the year 2000 to 2014. in linnean terms, of the 86 projects considered, two deal with mollusks, 12 with arthropods, and 72 with vertebrates (we found no projects that explicitly dealt with annelids, sponges, or jellyfish). of the 12 arthropod projects, seven are bee projects, concerned with an animal whose relation to technology is also subject to numerous scholarly investigations (kosek; parikka). four of these bee projects were variations on a bee hive, a type of project addressed here as a decorative variant of animal housing. other designs included an ecological project that aims to assist bees in pollination, and two were projects that exploit the tendency of bees to produce honeycomb structures. the two mollusk projects found in our query were natalie jeremijenko and chris woebken’s “mussel choir” and scape landscape architect’s “oystertecture” proposal for new york harbor. by far the largest group is designs for vertebrates, despite being the phylum with the least number of individuals. of the 72 vertebrate projects, 12 deal with bats and/or birds, and all but two of these are housing for either wild animals or domestic chickens. as with the designer beehives, while these projects in some sense prefigure contemporary ecological and urban wildlife designs, they often appear to be less “design for animals” that engage with animal sensory capacities than decorative iterations of existing typologies. similarly, many of these designs for vertebrates also fell into established typologies, such as the veterinary facility or the zoo, each with its own set of industry-standard best practices, discussed later. jennifer wolch & marcus owens -animals in contemporary architecture and design 5 of the vertebrate projects, designs for companion animals such as dogs and cats were very common. there were 12 projects for dogs or cats, seven companion-animal veterinary care facilities, three companion-animal housing schemes, and two dog parks. not included in this companion-animal count was one project featuring experimental fish bowls, which joined a total of six underwater, marine, or aquarium projects. a subset of these care facilities for companion animals is a proliferation of designs for companion species that go beyond the threshold of standard veterinary care and into the realm of luxury, and signaling human social status such as in meier moh architekten’s “canis resort.” figure 1. “canis resort” (von meier architekten) dogs have long been the focus of studies of human-animal relations, given their evolutionary attunement to human affect, emotion, and ways of life. this has ranged from archaeological and zoological (serpell) to more ethnographic (haraway; thomas) analyses of human-dog relationships, while geographer heidi nast has criticized the contemporary material culture of these relationships as symptoms of “neoliberal alienation.” a history of this genre of design might include ohlone park in berkeley, california, which claims to be the home of the united states’s first dog park, established in 1979. other projects uncovered in our internet search included the dog playground “city dog adventure” in the netherlands by maarje dros, and east river waterfront dog park by ken smith. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 6 figure 2. “city dog adventure” (maartje dros) additionally, there were numerous takes on the dog-house typology, including the starchitect exhibition “architecture for dogs,” and cubix’s “dog house.” figure 3. “dog house” (cubix) thought in terms of design, these projects may have more in common with the decorative beehives and bird and bat houses. there were many designerly bird and bat jennifer wolch & marcus owens -animals in contemporary architecture and design 7 houses, ranging from high-end fabricated objects to the wildly speculative, such as zhong huang’s “birdscraper.” figure 4. “birdscraper” (zhuong huang) a variant on these companion-animal and animal-care projects is the wildlife rehabilitation facility, a typology associated with practices and technologies of restoration ecology or its more extreme variant, “rewilding.” the ethics of wildlife reintroduction and behavior modification are the subject of philosophical debate by environmental ethicists such as clare palmer. practical methods for wildlife reintroduction as part of restoration ecology are still emergent, subject to the formation of norms and best practices. they therefore provide more space for design intervention (harrington et al.). for the most part, projects found here were closer to refuges or veterinarian facilities. while many of these projects were nonetheless skillfully executed designs, intersections between the emerging fields of wildlife reintroduction and landscape restoration may be ripe for further innovation through the integration of technologies of rehabilitation, incubation, and behavior conditioning with the broader landscape-scale restoration and corridor plans discussed previously. by framing these projects in linnean terms we are able to see which types of animals receive the most attention from human designers. as might perhaps be expected, it is the vertebrates, not the far more numerous arthropods. interestingly, those animals often said to be our evolutionary closest relatives, great apes, received no attention, while companion animals such as cats and dogs receive a substantial amount. similarly, livestock animals that produce milk or are consumed directly by humans also receive almost no attention. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 8 best practices and speculative provocation. another way to parse these findings is to differentiate between built and unbuilt projects, or provocations and critiques made using nonhuman animals and realized projects of more conventional animal-building typologies. a large share of the projects featured on architecture blogs were iterations of established animal typologies: zoos, aquaria, veterinarian facilities, refuges, and wildlife rehabilitation centers. as with many of the designer birdhouses and beehives, in these built projects design does not engage with the animal her/himself, but rather functions as a means of human distinction. for example, pr materials for a luxurious veterinary facility or petting zoo usually obscure standard cages, operating equipment, and other nonhuman animal interfaces. in many cases, professional guidelines and affiliations exist. for example, the national institute of building sciences has a whole building design guide for vivaria; the national institute of health’s office of research facilities has guidelines for the design of animal research facilities; the world association of zoos and aquariums maintains an index of animal exhibit design and construction projects; and the north american veterinary community features sessions on design in recent conferences. these professional protocols and best practices form the basis for conventional, “everyday” animal architectures, and often form a distinct sector of the design services industry. for example, according to the whole building design guide, vivaria, like non-animal research facilities, must contain high performance heating ventilating and air conditioning (hvac), promote cleanliness, and facilitate biosecurity protocols. additionally, vivaria must accommodate the appropriate “cage sizing and cage systems” according to the national research council’s guide for the care and use of laboratory animals, which in turn dictate room size, environment, and circulation patterns. because of the controversial nature of animal research, extra security and confidentiality are also pertinent to design. in our search to find documentation of vivaria, we found they were conspicuously absent from the plans of prominent life-sciences university research facilities featured in architects’ portfolios. however, industry sources such as laboratory design news feature practical design products for use in animal research, such as coulbourn instruments’ “small animal treadmill,” “suitable for forced exercise training and muscle fatigue studies.” in this way, the opacity of architectural design contrasts with the visibility necessary for design and sale of products that populate the lab. similar to the invisibility of vivaria, in the case of the slaughterhouse architectural design obscures human vision, countering what timothy pachirat describes as “a space of exception.” while the obscuring of vision translated to a dearth of designs for vivaria, projects engaging with animals through food production constituted a significant jennifer wolch & marcus owens -animals in contemporary architecture and design 9 portion of projects. however, while many projects pertain to practices of confined livestock housing and care, few focus on the design of slaughterhouses and the act of slaughter itself — perhaps the most notable exception being the work of temple grandin. figure 5. slaughterhouse gangway (temple grandin) among all the livestock design projects, both speculative and applicable (at least conceptually), one can make a broad differentiation between techno-visionary projects and those that seek a more pastoral, locavore sensibility. fabricated farm projects in the survey that retain more of a back-to-the-land, urban homesteading orientation included mike meiré’s “farm project,” presented at design miami in 2008, 70f’s “petting farm” in almere, netherlands, and a host of objects for urban homesteading fabricated by new orleans based crookedworks. figure 6. “farm project” (mike meire) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 10 examples of the former include theoretical projects such as the mvrdv “pig city” project, a conceptual design to produce enough pork to satisfy the dutch market as efficiently as possible. the project is at once grotesque and also an effective critique of meat consumption and national sustainability politics. figure 7. “pig city” (mvrdv) a more recent speculative project, “farmland world” by chicago-based design with company, presents a techno-futuristic urban pastoral reminiscent of andrea branzi’s “agronica,” a project that landscape theorist charles waldheim references to argue that the contemporary convergence of design and agriculture is a result of increasing environmental literacy amongst designers. figure 8. “farmland world” (design with company) jennifer wolch & marcus owens -animals in contemporary architecture and design 11 waldheim suggests that this interest encompasses the production and distribution of food in a globalized world, as well as the benefits of pre-industrial farming techniques such as biodiversity and ecological sustainability. more broadly, waldheim promotes the discipline of landscape urbanism as a means to apply lessons from ecology informed by complex systems theory as a departure point, with landscape emerging as a preeminent medium for design. in this way, many of the animal-design projects in this study bear this influence beyond the scope of agriculture. encountering animals in the designed landscape. while frederick law olmsted deployed grazing livestock in projects like new york city’s central park as part of the pastoral ambiance of the landscape garden movement, an “ecological turn” in the mid1970s repositioned nonhuman animals in the landscape from a perspective informed by endangered-species legislation and biodiversity-driven conservation biology. within north-american landscape and environmental design culture, these strategies are often associated with the use of the “overlay technique” and ecological assessment surveys in the design and planning process that reconfigure landscape as habitat. as outlined in their 1998 animal geographies, wolch and emel observe that the contemporary “greening” of architecture and design has occurred in tandem with the maturation of urban ecological science to incorporate human-impacted urban ecosystems, while emergent late-20th century urban morphologies seem to allow more and more large fauna to come into close contact with humans. many of the projects highlighted below function to smooth out these points of contact within the urban fabric. these larger scale projects are often calibrated around a metric of biodiversity, or with the goal of protecting or recreating habitat connectivity for large keystone predators. derived from principles of applied conservation biology and restoration ecology practice, examples of these large-scale plans include the florida wildlife conservation corridor, the dutch national ecological network, and the proposed yellowstone-toyukon wildlife corridor. within these larger regional plans are landscape-scale design interventions, such as wildlife crossings and habitat restoration. while designers are largely absent from the florida plan, several high profile dutch design firms have built wildlife overpasses in the netherlands, and the arc wildlife overpass in vail, colorado was the product of a large international competition, won by michael van valkenburg associates “hypar-nature” proposal. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 12 figure 9. “hypar-nature” (mvva) other landscape plans and designs not necessarily part of a larger regional connectivity scheme may nevertheless include habitat restoration for specific species as a key part of the design. with complexity theory shifting focus from a balance of nature to optimizing energetic flows through a system, lines between habitat restoration and agriculture can blur. scape landscape architecture’s entry into moma’s rising currents exhibition consisted of a series of oyster beds to detoxify seawater and mitigate rising sea levels associated with climate change. figure 10. “oystertechture” (scape) jennifer wolch & marcus owens -animals in contemporary architecture and design 13 in addition to scape’s multi-functional infrastructure project, hung’s honorable mention “urban transhumance” in the 2012 animal architecture awards is another notable food-producing landscape-scale project. figure 11. “urban transhumance” (kyunglin hong) one notable difference between these and restoration ecology projects driven by conservation biology is the de-centering of a native species and biodiversity metrics in favor of metabolic performance. while not on the landscape scale, among the most practical developments in smoothing out animal encounters with the infrastructures of urban development may be mitigating bird-kill collisions that come with steel-frame glass-curtain wall construction (klem). architect jeanie gang has been especially prolific at designing bird-friendly high rises, such as her “aquatower” in chicago. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 14 figure 12. “aquatower” (studio gang) similar tactics are employed at her ford calumet environmental center on chicago’s de-industrializing south side. however, what is perhaps most notable about the environmental center is its function. between designs that preserve biodiversity, maintain ecosystem services, and produce food on the regional or landscape scale, are numerous designs for facilities such as the calumet environmental center, which enable people to watch or otherwise safely encounter urban wildlife. figure 13. lake calumet environmental center (studio gang) jennifer wolch & marcus owens -animals in contemporary architecture and design 15 these projects tend to oscillate between those that seek to reconfigure or reimagine entire landscapes, versus those that deploy positioning devices or architectonic interventions such as a variety of prompts, signs, viewing platforms and other tactics to design the experience of an existing landscape. the notion of seeing animals in the wild also extends underwater in promontorio architecture’s more river aquarium in portugal, as well as jeanne gang’s plans to reconfigure the baltimore aquarium as something more akin to a sanctuary. figure 14. mora river aquarium (promontorio architecture) in one sense, wildlife-observation structures may be seen as somewhat analogous to the decorative birdhouse. adhering to a sort of naturalist-relational aesthetics, many tend to operate within the modernist metaphor of alienation from nature, ignoring the constant interspecies becoming that is part of being human, and fixating on an encounter with a charismatic animal other or “native species” as a stand-in for broader more-than-human ontology. these projects are often accompanied by ecologically informed theoretical mission statements about facilitating cross-species care, though many are more sculptural and gestural than practical. projects fabricated for design biennales and exhibitions can make the goal of “creating habitat” for urban wildlife seem dubious. naturalist-relational aesthetics often entails the use of scientific language, such as “native species,” as part of the aesthetic form, or the boast of collaboration “in dialog” with wildlife experts. however, in the worst cases adopting the language and prerogatives of conservation biology can further obscure the production of scientific knowledge as an apolitical “black box.” this is especially humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 16 evident in projects that fixate on the idea of native species, which some consider a racialized historical concept of questionable practical utility. however, it is worth taking seriously the means through which we watch and encounter other animals. just as in the case of vivaria and the slaughterhouse, design as an aesthetic or sensory practice directly engages with the politics of visibility. from this frame, rather than decorative symbolic objects, an example of interesting wildlife housing and designs for encountering animals is austin’s bat bridge. the world’s largest urban bat colony, with 1.5 million roosting bats, is tucked under the congress avenue bridge in downtown austin, texas. each night they eat from 10,000 to 20,000 pounds of insects. the evening bat flights have become a major tourist draw, with an estimated 100,000 people visiting the adjacent statesman bat observation center to observe the bats (www.batcon.org). here, it is not presumed that the bats need housing constructed for them (they found the bridge). rather, the invasive bats, minding their own business, are re-branded and designed as a site of interest and a source of local identity, rather than a pest to be exterminated. of course, when it comes to watching animals the preeminent architectural types are the zoo and the aquarium. within the domains of architecture and design, zoos may be the typology with the most established body of critical and historical literature. animal historians have written extensively on 19th-century zoos, menageries, and stables, as part of imperial nation-building, modernization, and urban development (ritvo; anderson), while others have focused on the zoo as a philosophical project (acampora). jeffrey hyson has written specifically on this history of zoo design in america. some spaces, such as elements of the london zoo, are part of broader design histories (anker), while cedric price’s work in the london zoo has been the focus of hadas steiner. our research yielded many built zoos, as well as speculative ones. of particular note are the plans for big architect’s “zootopia,” which is under construction in denmark. the diagrammatic visuals and unrelenting iconoclasm for “zootopia” are classic big, and what is notable is the utopian language that attempts to rework the zoo as a landscape experience. jennifer wolch & marcus owens -animals in contemporary architecture and design 17 figures 15 & 16. givskund zoo (big) however, despite the requisite iconoclastic hype that comes with big’s branding, much of what they propose, conceptually, are standard protocols for zoo design, and already in play at the givskud zoo, with its “safari” layout. these tactics were pioneered by mid-century swiss ethologist and de facto zoo designer heini hediger’s work on social, critical, and flight distance in getting animals to reproduce and live full lives in captivity. these strategies have had a lasting impact on architecture and environmental design that is still felt today, as space is increasingly designed to produce value through predetermined cognitive outcomes in domains such as shopping and user interface or experience design (pine and gilmore; underhill). surely, big is accelerating these techniques in innovative ways, but most pertinent to big’s design for the sake of our discussion is the dynamics at play in the givskund zoo, the sort of ethological perspective whose form is produced by expressions of movements, sensations, and environmental flows that constitute the animal body. operationalizing umwelt: animal skeuomorphs. this ethological perspective on the animal has roots in proto-ecologist jakob von uexküll’s umwelt theorie and the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 18 subsequent field of bioor eco-semiotics. for uexküll and his followers, umwelt describes a species or organism-specific model of the world, corresponding to a given creature’s sensorium. this understanding has been adapted in ecology as the idea of “continua” in conservation practice. here, landscape connectivity is seen from an “umwelt” perspective based on species-specific affordances, rather than simply in terms of habitat restoration based on a remotely sensed “view from above,” as in post-war landscape ecology (manning and lindenmayer). this perspective leads us to a final category of design for animals that is less of a scalar or programmatic typology than design tactics or a mode of design production. in each of these projects, designs harness nonhuman animal bodies, abilities, or behavioral tendencies in an uxeküllian semiotic functionskries, or “functional circle” between organism and environment. these designs cast animals in performative roles through engaging with an animal’s perceptual capabilities. first, a suite of designed objects aestheticize engagement and interaction with urban wildlife in ways other than housing. these projects operate on the level of specific interactions rather than the broader, coarse grain of principles for architectural or landscape best practices. natalie jeremijenko and chris woebken, both as collaborators and independently, have produced a wide variety of transspecies work that fits this category. most famous perhaps is their “amphibious architecture” project, which attempts to enable fishes in new york’s east river to communicate with humans ashore. figure 17. “amphibious architecture” (natalie jeremijenko & chris woebken) jennifer wolch & marcus owens -animals in contemporary architecture and design 19 their designs for a “bat billboard,” as well as anne galloway’s “counting sheep,” propose a similar broadcasting of information from nonhuman-to-human, via digital sensors. while not involving animals per se, chris woebken’s “animal superpowers” design, as well as simone farrecina’s 2011 animal architecture awards winning “theriomorphous cyborg,” both draw on the resurgence of uexküll’s work in prompting humans to speculate on the other worlds sensed by nonhuman animals. however, as “critical design” or “design art,” many of these designs operate in a sphere closer to art practice, where material functionality is less clearly articulated. clearly, the prefix critical pertains to the way these designs are meant to provoke, bringing the issue of functionality into question in a way that sets them apart from our focus on architecture and landscape designs. while it is beyond the scope of this paper to enter a debate around the functionality or performative capacities of critique, it is worth noting how projects that attempt to extract information from the animal umwelt for aesthetic consideration by humans are distinct from a class of designs that harness these modes of perception as a means of production. here, we propose the use of the concept of the animal skeuomorph to describe the design elements at play. this concept originates in archeology to describe representations of non-functional elements derived from functional elements of a previous design iteration; one classic example of a skeuomorph being etchings on a clay pot that refer to a woven basket. steve jobs and apple brought the skeuomorph concept to prominence in user interface design (uix) with a famous example being digital representations of analog clocks. in this context of uix, skeuomorphs accelerate human comprehension of new designs. in the case of non-human animals, we use the term to describe the mobilization of animal perception and behavior to produce results desired by human designers. a prime example of this is the mit media lab’s mediated matter research group’s recent 2013 “silk pavilion.” one of five non-bee arthropod projects, a robotic arm creates a lattice by weaving a thread around a geodesic dome framing structure. silk worms are then placed on the thread to complete the fabrication of the dome, as they produce silk fibers along the thread as part of their life cycle. the result, unbeknownst to the worms, is an ethereal, silk cover for the dome. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 20 figure 18. “silk pavilion” (mit mediated matter group) heralded by geoff manaugh of bldblg as “animal printheads,” the dome is still somewhat of a conceptual aesthetic practice (the dome is displayed in a lobby at mit) rather than an actual building technique, but its value is located in material production, not (only) critique. while such techniques may be considered novel in their relation to emergent technologies and scientific knowledge, calhoun reminds us that technology often serves simply to allow us to do things we already do a bit more easily. in this sense, these animal-informatic designs represent an end point of a much longer history of human-animal relations defined by tracking and following other animals. strapping cameras onto pigeons or translating fish or bat behavior into text messages are in some ways fundamentally analogous to the early hominid strategies of reading the behavior of other animals in the landscape to aid in the search of water or food. as this eventually developed into the human “art of tracking” (liebenberg), sanford kwinter describes these increasingly sophisticated tactics of reading signs of other organisms in the landscape, accompanied by encephalation, as the origins of a science of the environment from which architects and designers continue to draw. from this perspective, we can begin to see technology as bound-up in evolutionary processes as suggested by paleontologist andrei leroi-gourhan. conclusion. critical or functional, technologically sophisticated or traditional, humans’ designs for other animals instrumentalize nonhumans by appealing to specific aspects of their physiological capacities, some in more productive ways than others. in addition jennifer wolch & marcus owens -animals in contemporary architecture and design 21 to isolating these sign relations and describing them in semiotic or uexküllian fashion, we can also analyze the economy of these projects, considering the politics of animal participation and the ways animals are cast as unwilling, and perhaps unaware, labor. from one perspective, because designs are for human purposes, we can only assume ends are calibrated to human values and politics. what qualifies as a “good,” “interesting,” or “innovative” design that capitalizes on the physical exertion of animals? in this light, the most successful animal designers are those that acknowledge the lives of the common and quotidian animals in our midst, and integrate animal subjectivity into contemporary practices, while also executing a novel technical outcome. a prime example might include jeanne gang’s integration of bird friendly building skin technology as one of many innovative features in her “aquatower.” reviewing these designs for nonhumans yields insights into human politics and the power of design therein. using the example of big’s givskund zoo and their move away from the caged animal, design begins to fade into the background, while subtly managing animal affect and behavior towards specific, functional outcomes. such an invisible zoo seems to come full circle to urban wildlife projects discussed earlier, where the planetary scale of urbanization transforms the globe into a managed sphere, and wildlife migration routes are subject to design. if the modern slaughterhouse corresponds to industrial modes of accumulation and labor relations characterized by the discipline of the factory floor and the jail cell, the most sophisticated contemporary designs for animals tend to operate in the register of umwelt, or a functional combination of perception and affect reflected in emerging technologies of wildlife reintroduction, the skeuomorphic mit silkworm pavilion, or distilled into market driven bio-info-cogno-technologies. to a more extreme extent, one can see this logic at play in bio-engineering projects of terraform 1, such as their living “in-vitro meat habitat” concept. figure 19. “in vitro meat habitat” (terraform 1) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 22 in this way, thinking about the regimes of control and productive capacities of animals in contemporary design may find fruitful insights from feminist notions of affective labor and autonomist marxist theory deployed to understands the dynamics of the attention economy and the “new spirit of capitalism,” where creativity (or creation) becomes a functional outcome of design (boltanski and chiapello; lordon). in this regard, a study of animals in design suggests designers ought to treat their subjects with compassion, as their worlds are also subject to management through design. moreover, as the world becomes increasingly designed, some argue the capacity for alternative and unforeseen uses diminishes as technology specifies pre-determined outcomes (redström). the fact that we are living through the sixth great extinction in the earth’s history attests to this dynamic, as well as the proliferation of design. when creativity and creation become specified by design, thinking about the way we design for other animals reveals the interplay between biological and technological evolution more broadly. in this regard, we might think carefully about who receives design attention, how much, and for what ends. note. using the internal search feature on each blog powered by google should also be considered in relation to the “politics of the search” outlined by rogers (2009) and others. while beyond the scope of this discussion, the politics of the search is directly related to the engineering of affect in which design practice is implicated. works cited acampora, ralph r. metamorphoses of the zoo: animal encounter after noah. lexington books, 2010. anderson, kay. “animal domestication in geographic perspective.” society & animals 6.2 (1998): 119–35. anker, peder. “science in culture: bauhaus at the zoo.” nature 439.7079 (2006): 916–916. barad, karen. “posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” signs 40.1 (2014): 801-31. bijker, wiebe e., thomas p. hughes, trevor pinch, and deborah g. douglas. the social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology. mit press, 2012. jennifer wolch & marcus owens -animals in contemporary architecture and design 23 boltanski, luc, and eve chiapello. “the new spirit of capitalism.” international journal of politics, culture, and society 18.3–4 (2005): 161–88. borch, christian, gernot böhme, olafur eliasson, and juhani pallasmaa. architectural atmospheres: on the experience and politics of architecture. walter de gruyter, 2014. calhoun, craig. “community without propinquity revisited: communications technology and the transformation of the urban public sphere.” sociological inquiry 68.3 (1998): 373–97. coles, alex. design and art. mit press, 2008 disalvo, carl, and jonathan lukens. “nonanthropocentrism and the nonhuman in design: possibilities for designing new forms of engagement with and through technology.” from social butterfly to engaged citizen. eds. marcus foth, laura forlano, christine satchell, and martin gibbs. mit, 2012. 421-435. flusser, vilem, and john cullars. “on the word design: an etymological essay.” design issues 11.3 (autumn 1995): 50–53. fuller, matthew. “art for animals.” journal of visual art practice 9.1 (january 1, 2010): 17–33. gabrys, jennifer. “becoming urban: sitework from a moss-eye view.” environment and planning-part a 44.12 (2012): 2922-39. grandin, temple with mark deesing. humane animal handling: understanding animal behavior and building facilities for healthier animals. storey publishing, 2008. haraway, donna j. when species meet. u of minnesota p, 2008. harrington, lauren a., axel moehrenschlager, merryl gelling, rob pd atkinson, joelene hughes, and david w. macdonald. “conflicting and complementary ethics of animal welfare considerations in reintroductions.” conservation biology 27.3 (2013): 486–500. hyson, jeffrey. “jungles of eden: the design of american zoos.” environmentalism in landscape architecture. michel conan, ed. dumbarton oaks research library and collection, 2000. http://scholarship.sju.edu/hist_fac/1/. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 24 ingold, tim. the perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. psychology press, 2000. julier, guy. “from visual culture to design culture.” design issues 22.1 (2006): 64–76. klem, daniel jr. “collisions between birds and windows: mortality and prevention (colisiones de pájaros con ventanas: mortalidad y prevención).” journal of field ornithology 61.1 (1990): 120–28. kosek, jake. “ecologies of empire: on the new uses of the honeybee.” cultural anthropology 25.4 (2010): 650–78. kwinter, sanford. “combustible landscape.” projective ecologies. chris reed & ninamarie lister, ed. actar, 2014. 336-53. leroi-gourhan, andrei. gesture and speech. trans. a. bostock berger. mit press, 1993. liebenberg, louis. the art of tracking, the origin of science. international publishers marketing, inc., 1990. http://ir.nmu.org.ua/handle/123456789/133244. lippit, akira mizuta. electric animal: toward a rhetoric of wildlife. u of minnesota press, 2000. lordon, frédéric. willing slaves of capital: spinoza and marx on desire. verso books, 2014. lorimer, jamie. “nonhuman charisma.” environment and planning d 25.5 (2007): 911. malpass, matt. “between wit and reason: defining associative, speculative, and critical design in practice.” design and culture 5.3 (2013): 333–56. manning, adrian d., david b. lindenmayer, and henry a. nix. “continua and umwelt: novel perspectives on viewing landscapes.” oikos 104. 3 (2004): 621–28. markussen, thomas. “the disruptive aesthetics of design activism: enacting design between art and politics.” design issues 29.1 (december 12, 2012): 38–50. doi:10.1162/desi_a_00195. jennifer wolch & marcus owens -animals in contemporary architecture and design 25 marx, leo. “‘technology’: the emergence of a hazardous concept.” social research 64.3 (fall 1997): 965–88. nast, heidi j. “loving…. whatever: alienation, neoliberalism and pet-love in the twenty-first century.” acme: an international e-journal for critical geographies 5.2 (2006): 300–327. national research council. guide for the care and use of laboratory animals. the national academies press, 2011. pachirat, timothy. every twelve seconds: industrialized slaughter and the politics of sight. yale up, 2013. palmer, clare. animal ethics in context. columbia up, 2010. parikka, jussi. insect media: an archaeology of animals and technology. u of minnesota p, 2010. pine, b. joseph ii, and james h. gilmore. “welcome to the experience economy.” harvard business review 76 (1998): 97–105. preciado, beatriz. “architecture as a practice of biopolitical disobedience.” log 25 (summer 2012): 121-134. redström, johan. “towards user design? on the shift from object to user as the subject of design.” design studies 27.2 (2006): 123–39. ritvo, harriet. “the order of nature: constructing the collections of victorian zoos.” new worlds, new animals: from menagerie to zoological park in the nineteenth century. r. j. hoage and william a. deiss, ed. johns hopkins up, 1996. 43–50. ross, toni. “linkages between aesthetic autonomy and discipline hybridity in the art of andrea zittel.” australian and new zealand journal of art 8.1 (2007): 108–24. rothfels, nigel. representing animals. indiana up, 2002. serpell, james. the domestic dog: its evolution, behaviour and interactions with people. cambridge up, 1995. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 26 sloterdijk, peter. “rules for the human zoo: a response to the letter on humanism.” environment and planning d, society and space 27.1 (2009): 12-28. steiner, hadas a. “for the birds.” grey room 13 (2003): 5–31. thacker, eugene. biomedia. u of minnesota p, 2004. thomas, elizabeth marshall. the hidden life of dogs. houghton mifflin harcourt, 2010. thrift, nigel. non-representational theory: space, politics, affect. routledge, 2008. tsing, anna. “unruly edges: mushrooms as companion species.” environmental humanities 1 (2012): 141–54. underhill, paco. why we buy: the science of shopping – updated and revised for the internet, the global consumer, and beyond. simon and schuster, 2009. waldheim, charles. “notes toward a history of agrarian urbanism.” design observer 11.04.2010. winthrop-young, geoffrey. “hardware/software/wetware.” critical terms for media studies. w.j.t. mitchell and mark b.n. hansen, ed. u of chicago p 2010. 186–96. wolch, jennifer r., and jody emel. animal geographies: place, politics, and identity in the nature-culture borderlands. verso, 1998. joan gordon -the nose knows h u m a n i m a l i a 11:2 reviews joan gordon the nose knows frank rosell. secrets of the snout: the dog’s incredible nose. chicago: u of chicago p, 2018. xiii + 265 pp. $26 hc. i walk henry, my portuguese water dog, four times a day, and am always struck by how different our perceptions of those walks are. i look around, but he sniffs. he can see what i see, but i can’t smell what he smells. what is he learning about who has been by, what is going on, where other animals have been? yes, we greet other dogs, but what about the rabbits, squirrels, rats, possums, raccoons, and coyotes of chicago? does he know things about them too? he won’t say. frank rosell explores the nose-driven world of dog perception. his book, first appearing in norwegian in 2014, is an exhaustive but somewhat repetitive survey of the state of knowledge about dogs’ ability to smell, with an emphasis on his own specialty joan gordon -the nose knows 217 in chemical behavioral ecology, examining “the odor-based communication of many different species” (xi). each chapter begins with an anecdote illustrating some aspect of dogs’ remarkable sense of smell and goes on to discuss a particular cluster of scientific and practical knowledge loosely connected to that anecdote, emphasizing the role of working dogs. the first three chapters are general introductions to the kinds of work dogs do and the physiology that allows them to excel. the remaining ten chapters go into more depth about these kinds of work, including search and rescue, hunting, policing, customs and border patrol, military applications, medical detection, and pest detection. most chapters have charts and lists that summarize what has been discussed or bring up other information about dogs. the first chapter sets the tone, and is a reliable indicator of how the rest of the book will be developed. its introductory anecdote tells the story of balto — a norwegian dog, by the way — who delivered the serum to nome, alaska, during the diptheria outbreak of 1925. it is written in the same simple, solid, but undramatic prose of the rest of the book, and is followed by the rest of the chapter, stressing the development of dogs as working companions. it briefly describes the possible origins of the domesticated dog and has a lengthy description of rosell’s work training dogs to sniff out beavers for research. following that is advice on picking the right working dog. curiously, this includes the information that the best seeing-eye dogs “favor the right leg and the left eye” and “had chest cowlicks that swirled counterclockwise” (19). one longs for the explanation, no doubt genetic, but it does not appear. there is a nice bit about what wagging tails mean when they wag more to the right or left and so on. the chapter ends with a list of the most popular dog breeds in 2013. the chapter is very loosely organized, as one may gather from my summary, although sometimes fascinating and sometimes useful. indeed, that is the case for every chapter. chapter two, “a dog’s sense of smell,” discusses the physiology of a dog’s nose. i learned that it is designed to channel two different airstreams, so sniffing and breathing are two different activities happening simultaneously as the dog inhales. and that sniffing, which “travels to the olfactory epithelium,” is how it processes all those smells so remarkably (27). humans just don’t have the equipment for the job. this chapter has some gaps, however. for instance, we learn that a professor compares the system to a car’s oil filter, but the comparison is not explained (27-28). the chapter contains a number of apparently unproved assumptions as well — about boxers’ senses of smell versus poodles’ (29), about how the canine nasal mite could affect the ability to smell humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 218 (31), how gasoline might negatively affect a dog’s sense of smell (33). a section on the human sense of smell seems out of place, inserted in the middle of the chapter. i have notes on each chapter that question why paragraphs are ordered as they are, what conclusions can be drawn from the facts given, where the author stands on such activities as hunting and poaching, what the relevance of some information is to the topic of the book. nevertheless, i pick up fascinating and curious pieces of information. for instance, chapter 4, “pet finder,” invites us to think of the anus as a clock face in order to locate the anal glands (64) — odd yet useful. chapter 5, “search and rescue,” gives fans of frankenstein (1818) the evocative fact that “between 1816 and 1818, there were heavy snowstorms” in the alps that, sadly, “took the lives of many dogs in avalanches while searching for people” (76). still, why does chapter 6, “on the hunt,” contain a chart of “some of the more common and less common animals hunted, the types of hunting dog groups, and the most common breeds for each form of hunting” (82) or a list of “different factors that will influence a hunt” (89) alongside much more relevant information on how clothing, weather conditions, wind, temperature, time of day, and so on, can affect a dog’s ability to smell. indeed, i suspect that this might be the most useful chapter of all if one is a hunter, although i suspect our readership may not include too many hunters. while i enjoyed finding out so many things about dogs’ noses, how they work and the work they do, and i was happy to store away nifty facts, the book itself seemed a bit of a jumble. i never detected any organizing principle within paragraphs or chapters, beyond the kinds of jobs dogs do. the style was very flat, whether because of or in spite of translation, even in the anecdotes meant to draw us into each chapter. necessarily, given the publication history, there was no research after 2014, and i found myself wondering if more insight has been gained since then. inevitably, i was not able to discern the specific secrets of henry’s snout, which is drawing on its snoring function as i write. kathryn renton -can the horse be modern? h u m a n i m a l i a 11:2 reviews kathryn renton can the horse be modern? kristen guest and monica mattfeld, eds. equestrian cultures: horses, human society, and the discourse of modernity. chicago: university of chicago press, 2019. 276 pp. $90.00 (hb), $30.00 (pb). a new collection of essays edited by kristen guest and monica mattfeld, equestrian cultures: horses, human society, and the discourse of modernity, responds to an increasingly robust literature on the horse in the fields of animal studies, literature, and history. the introduction challenges the speciesism implicit in the predominant periodization of modernity, which repeats “a narrative of dislocation and alienation” with respect to the natural and animal worlds at large, and the horse in particular. titles like farewell to the horse (ulrich raulff, 2018) suggest the march towards the modern is proportionate to the declining relevance of horses, and while minding the past importance of equids, also serves as an honorable salute to their obsolescence. guest humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 206 and mattfeld, however, propose that the horse — and not merely its symbolism — is in fact central to understanding conflicts that pervade the experience of modernity. they argue broadly that modernity reveals its unanticipated and contradictory effects in human-animal relations, and for that reason has “amplified [the horse’s] symbolic centrality to human culture” as “vehicles thorugh which [humans] have attempted to make sense of modernity’s effects” (3-4). the twelve essays in this collection cover expected topics, from war to horse breeding and horseracing, as well as the less expected ones of amateur circuses and horsemeat banquets, in a primarily anglophone context (england, united states, australia, as well as germany and france). each article illuminates a distinct facet of modernity embodied by horses, but there are also important connections apparent across the collection. beyond the arbitrary starting date of 1700, the editors define three primary forces of modernization addressed in corresponding sections in the volume: technology, commodification, and nationalism. within these sections, several predominant “contradictions” of modernity become evident, such as that, for example, between emerging technologies and theories of sentimentality; between the forces of commodification and attempts to transcend transactional valuation; and between the insecurities of national identity and the certitude of rational economic development. regarding the experience of technology in modernity, three articles illuminate not only the horse as technology but also the agency of the horse’s material connection to human lives. monica mattfeld, in “machines of feeling: bits and interspecies communication in the eighteenth century,” masterfully examines the riding aparatus of the bit. reviewing traditions of horsemanship as well as the history of science, mattfeld argues that eighteenth century scientific theories about the role of nerves, sensation, and feeling surprisingly found expression in the use of the hard metallic bit, particularly the snaffle. in the work of riding master richard berenger, the bit (in the right hands) exhibited a crucial vital materialism, encoding the “reciprocal embodiment of sensibility” (15) idealized by the image of the centaur, producing the “technoscience” of riding. donna landry, in “horses at waterloo, 1815,” considers the horse as machine of war in the napoleonic age, “manufactured” with imported eastern horses in order to achieve a responsive tool for the cavalryman. the functional aim of producing a close connection between the man and horse on the battlefield through this piece of military technology, however, also found a voice in soldier’s memoirs illustrating the emotional attachment and trust placed in these same animals. such accounts showcase the soldier’s own sensibility and the internal conflicts of experiencing how the technology of war had wreaked “equine carnage so extreme that ethical questions began to be kathryn renton -can the horse be modern? 207 asked” (26). both mattfeld and landry define centaur-like relationships that emphasized technology and feeling in equal parts, and consequently point to the conflicted “cyborg” nature of modernity for individuals attuned to the living nature of matter. sinan akili pursues this theme contraposto through the matter of dead horses. “the agency and the matter of the dead horse in the victorian novel” examines “a period when human dependence on, and exploitation of, the horse was at its historical peak” (40), and akili argues that in death, in particular, the body represented a point at which human and animal worlds converged, in accordance with emerging theories of evolution. akili illustrates this effective interconnectedness through the significant impact of the dead horse character in the novels’ action, even if such relatedness was not explicitly recognized when the animal was alive. indeed, it was at the point of becoming matter that the horse revealed its entanglement with so many aspects of human experience. finally, in an exceptional and meditative essay, “the aura of dignity: on connection and trust in the photographs of charlotte dumas,” rune gade explores interconnectedness between human and horse around the fringes of the technology of horsepower. describing the photography of dumas (anima, the widest prairies), gade characterizes these photos as witness to human-equine interactions outside of work. a quiet moment in the stall of a working draught horse, for example, both makes a statement about the effects of domestication that produced this particular environment of repose, while also confirming the communicative sentience of the individual animal at rest. photos of feral horses likewise exhibit this communicative state at liberty, despite the broader reality of their history as domesticates. the gaze of these animals, gade argues, has the power to provoke disquiet in the viewer. the juxtaposition of the quiet inner lives of animals with the external conditions of living in and with humans presupposes a latent acknowledgement of interspecies and technoscientific interdependence. if the contradictions of modern technology embodied by the horse in the first section emphasize the vital agency of matter — as akilli might argue, matter matters — the effect of the shame-inducing gaze (in reference to jacques derrida’s “animal that therefore i am”) becomes central to the contradictions of the modern experience of commodification and consumption in the second section. just as the photos of dumas disrupt the definition of horse-as-technology, the following essays disrupt the notion of horse-as-commodity. in charlotte carrington-farmer’s essay “trading horses in the eighteenth century: rhode island and the atlantic world,” the history of the first “american” breed of horse, the naragansett pacer, asks: what is the value of a horse? new england colonists found a ready market for exporting their breed of riding horse humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 208 in the caribbean sugar plantations as early as the seventeenth century, participating in the ready wealth and exploitative industry of sugar-farming by providing the horsepower for the plantation mills. these horses were in high demand on the market in part because they were also worn down by round-the-clock working conditions in the early industrial agriculture. jessica dallow pursues the intersection of the horse trade and the slave trade through unfree labor and commodification in “narratives of race and racehorses in the art of edward troye.” the equine portraits of edward troye, the “american stubbs,” documented winning racehorses owned by southern plantation owners in the united states. similar to gade, dallow argues that the portraiture emphasized triangulated gazes and interactions communicating the sense of an inner life for both horse and enslaved horsetrainer, jockey, or groom. rhetoric found in proand anti-slavery tracts at the time emphasized the similarities between slaves and animals, despite protesting human voices of slaves and black authors. troye’s portraits, therefore, according to dallow, capture how the fates of both man and horse were tied to each other, and the suffering imposed by their particular market value. kristen guest’s essay “more than a horse: the cultural work of racehorse biography” reflects on the commodification of the horse and the problems this poses for human understanding of the individual in a capitalist market system. in the genre of the racehorse biography, the hero, a horse immortalized for its ability to win purse money, is simultaneously held up as an example of an animal that cannot be assigned a concrete value because of its individual traits of heart, will, and determination. guest argues that this genre itself is an expression of a particularly modern anxiety about whether or not an individual, like an eclipse or secretariat, can in fact transcend the economic demands of the system that produced it and conditioned its existence. underlying the modern trends of technology and commodification covered thus far, we find the dual role of the horse as a communicative partner and material tool, a duality that mimics the anxiety of humans subject to the same forces of modernization. while the first two sections engage deeply with the material reality and subjectivity of the horse as subject of modernization, the third section emphasizes how the horse, as a companion in the modern era, renders these tensions visible in a human-oriented framework of identity. beginning with the eighteenth century, magdalena bayreuther and chrstine rüppell’s chapter highlights the palace stable as an incredible baroque architectural feat, not only symbolically but also politically central to elite expressions of power, attended to lavishly and ritualistically. pursuing the “unexpected” side of modernization, kari weil’s essay, “circus studs and equestrian sports in turn-of-the century france,” traces the reconfiguration of aristocratic identity in nineteenth-century paris through an amateur equestrian circus. if horsemanship once indicated the ideals kathryn renton -can the horse be modern? 209 of a sensitive and fashionable elite in the eighteenth century, by the nineteenth century horsemanship had become an arena of elite conflict between aspiring bourgeoisie and aristocratic privilege. seizing on a new form of physical culture to separate those of noble birth from bourgeois wealth, the aristocratic amateur acrobat exposed his body in a performance that scandalized bourgeois propriety and reveled in an exclusive mark of physical freedom and virility. this surprising equestrian moment, weil argues, marks a transformation away from riding as the sumpreme form of elite masculinity, to instead prefer “a disembodied gaze upon others,” including purebred horses and women riders, as an expression of power (183). susanna forrest’s delightful chapter “horsemeat is certainly delicious: anxiety, xenophobia, and rationalism at a nineteenth-century american hippophagic banquet” likewise notes an unusual engagement with the horse at the turn of the 20th century. horsemeat, historically the preserve of eurasian steppe cultures, had been culturally taboo for centuries, but found a moment of cultural acceptance in the united states for three very modern reasons. waves of immigration brought horsemeat eating from rural parts of europe, at first spurring xenophobic responses to the practice, but then finding an advocate in the economic rationalization of food supply economics. as a cheap and nutritious food, it was promoted by numerous public health officials and even celebrated in an all horsemeat banquet by veterinary students. the advent of world war i food rationing brought the movement to the mainstream. if the dead body of the horse had illustrated interconnections between humans and animal bodies in the victorian age, forrest illustrates how the dead body of the horse itself served as an agent of modernization. nationalism is one of the defining features of modern identity, and its contradictions are revealed in two remaining essays. tatsuya mitsuda, in “the politics of reproduction: horse breeding and state studs in prussia, 1750-1900,” allows us to think of the horse as a national flag, “raised” by the prussian state. reflecting bureaucratic centralization, the prussian state stud system identified and tested individual stallions as a seed bank for domestic horses. an ideal body type originally set by imported arab and thoroughbred horses for military uses later shifted to meet the demands of industrialized agriculture and produce a heavy draught horse. the nationalist manipulation of horse bodies rested on the need for horsepower in both military and economic arenas, a need that lasted well into the twentieth century. in this contemporary era, however, horses have controversial value as markers of national identity, as potently illustrated by isa menzies in “heritage icon or environmental pest? brumbies in the australian cultural imaginary.” a debate over australian feral horses, known as “brumbies,” initiated by an environmental conservation initiative in 2000 to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 210 remove them from national parks, met with a concerted campaign to protect the brumbies as central to australia’s cultural heritage. this situation echos that currently facing federal programs to contain feral horses in the western united states opposed by groups hoping to preserve an historic free-roaming horse and burro tradition through landrace registries. unlike in the united states, however, the brumbies gained cultural heritage status in australia in 2015. menzies provides an astute analysis behind this movement, as both celebration of national identity, but also as a response to assuage the “anxiety of belonging” for settler-colonial heritage. menzies concludes that the drive to eliminate the feral horses by national agencies imbues the animals with intense, if destructive, agency, while the argument for their protection as cultural heritage positions the animals as constructions symbolizing national belonging, justifying and preserving the consequences of a colonial past for the modern nation. menzies, together with gade, offers an important perspective into the still underexplored experience of the feral horse in modern life. this volume is a welcome addition to the field of equine studies and animal studies, and the scholarship in this volume engages with several defining theorists in the “animal turn.” jacques derrida’s analysis of the gaze of the animal, as one inducing shame and self-knowledge, serves as a touchstone for the experience of modernity and appears in several places in this volume. in extending the analysis of the horse as an agent of modernity, the work of donna haraway on the “kinship of technoscience,” karen barad on agential realism and “ethico-onto-epistem-ological intra-action,” and jane bennet on the vitality of matter all provide theoretical foundations for focusing on the horse within an otherwise rationalized, technological, anthropocentric vision of the modern. most valuable, however, is that none of these essays rely entirely on a reading of theory. instead, research contributions from each individual essay are hard won from attentive and thoughtful readings of sources. the analyses explore non-human and human animal relations as a subaltern methodology, suggest pathways to recognizing the agency of animals and materiality, and complicate divisions of nature and culture. these inquiries meet the horse where it is found, at crucial moments of conflict, introspection, or manifestation of tensions in the experience of modernity. in a cumulative sense, these essays show that the history of man and horse never was just a simple story of man’s dominance, nor conversely of rationalization and disenchantment over time. rather, the horse is modern because of its ability to embody the contradictions, fears, and anxieties about commodification, loss of identity, and obsolescence in the face of technology, capitalism, and globalization. microsoft word sherbert-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:2 michael g. sherbert revising posthumanist aesthetics in the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals the diversity and fervor of posthumanist theories in academic discourse over the past decade is indicative of the compelling concern for the nonhuman in our global ecological frame. many of these works interrogate the anthropocentric biases that ground most discussions of politics, ethics, and ontology, in order to destabilize and dehierarchize the privileged place of the human.1 a posthumanist approach to humananimal relations provides new tools through which to reflect on the constitutive nature of our humanist distinctions and procedures, and to account for them in ways that emphasize the value and specificity of nonhuman animal life. such an approach opens new avenues through which to evaluate and reframe humanist notions of subjectivity, experience, and ethical relations, in ways that reflect new knowledge of — and increased concern for — nonhuman animals. one of the leading posthumanist theorists of animal ethics, cary wolfe, advocates for a perspective that extends human moral responsibility across species boundaries to the nonhuman animal. combining aspects of jacques derrida’s deconstruction and niklas luhmann’s systems theory, wolfe argues that the current frameworks for the ethical treatment of animals are grounded in an arrogant and oppressive humanist perspective that privileges the human species, and those most like it, at the expense of all others. in other words, these frameworks are inadequate for “thinking about the ethics of the question of the human as well as the nonhuman animal” (animal rites 192; emphasis in original). wolfe’s project aspires towards the abrogation of speciesism, akin to the rejection of racial or gender prejudice (190). this essay, in the spirit of wolfe’s transspecies ethics, employs his posthumanist framework to identify an impediment within that framework to the practical application of his proposal. wolfe’s proposal, to engage the entire sensorium of human and nonhuman animals while simultaneously deprivileging human sight, fails to consider the deeply-seated human visual prejudices associated with human sight. (to clarify, my use of the word “sight” is consistent with wolfe’s use of the term, which includes the visual in general.) wolfe’s attempt to dehierarchize human sight/visuality does not go far enough, and should incorporate an interrogation of human sight which discloses the significance of human visual biases. specifically, i propose that there is a critical humanist fault unaccounted for by wolfe, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 64 the preference for the aesthetically pleasing, which impedes the possibility of realizing a more inclusive ethical framework regarding nonhuman animals. human aesthetic preference for non-human animals considered to be visually appealing continually does violence to those animal species considered “ugly,” by excluding them from the public purview, and in turn, from the financial support required to keep many of these species from extinction. the aesthetic bias is grounded largely in a human-centric preference for those animals “most-like us” or those most appealing to human interests. this entrenched humanistic bias, which pervades our institutions and institutional practices such as zoos and wildlife funding, excludes certain “ugly” species from our moral responsibility. inspired by a desire for a more inclusive ethical treatment of nonhuman animals, i propose here to identify the humanistic preference for aesthetically pleasing animals and the practical ethical implications of this bias for those that are excluded. i also argue that to obtain a more posthumanist ethical treatment of non-human animals we may need paradoxically to use our humanist biases against ourselves — at least temporarily. lastly, through a posthumanist interpretation of martin heidegger’s notion of care, i argue that we must highlight the human remainder in every posthumanist ethical project. to this end, i revise human aesthetic biases in terms of care. crossing species boundaries with wolfe’s posthumanist ethics. central to most posthumanist projects is the axiom that “human ways of knowing and being in the world do not have privilege or priority over the myriad variety of ways that nonhuman entities … encounter and apprehend in the world” (chiew 2). at the same time, the “post” of posthumanist theory, as stated by neil badmington, “does not (and, moreover, cannot) mark or make an absolute break from the legacy of humanism” (badmington 21). posthumanist thought is always infused with, and derived from, a history of humanist thought. this is why wolfe (following derrida) understands posthumanism as not a triumphant transcendence of human nature/embodiment, but rather, a call to attend to the human with “greater specificity, greater attention to its embodiment, embeddedness, and materiality, and how these in turn shape and are shaped by consciousness, mind and so on” (what is posthumanism? 120). similarly, wolfe engages derrida’s notion of limitrophy, which concerns what sprouts or grows at the limit, around the limit, by maintaining the limit, but also what feeds the limit, generates it, raises it, and complicates it … not to efface the limit, but to multiply its figures, to complicate, thicken, michael g. sherbert -revising posthumanist aesthetics in the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. 65 delinearize, fold, and divide the line precisely by making it increase and multiply. (“the animal” 398) the goal is not to erase the difference between human and nonhuman animal, as this would be to disavow singularity and difference, but to embrace species differences as valid asynchronies of being. by complicating the limit we open the human to the nonhuman other, and engage in a derridean autoimmunitary process, whereby the living being destroys its own protections to expose itself and be more hospitable to the other to come. we will return to the connection between the autoimmune and the opening of the human to the nonhuman later in the paper, but first we move to consider how common conceptions of the subject may perpetuate human speciesism. the subject, as it has been understood most commonly in western intellectual discourse and culture, is almost always already human. as such, western intellectual discourse often remains shackled to an unacknowledged framework of human speciesism. an anthropocentric speciesism unchecked, according to wolfe, “makes possible the systematic killing of many billions of animals a year for food, product testing, and research,” while providing an overarching logic of domination (animal rites 8). even with the advent of animal studies, the irony of many of these works is that they remain essentially humanist, effacing the species difference they have sought to respect (ibid.). ethical rights codes for animals tend to be based first and foremost on human centrality, protecting animals only through an indirect relation to human ownership, interest, or likeness. one of the theories wolfe takes issue with is philosopher luc ferry’s version of liberal democratic humanism. wolfe argues that ferry’s narrow “contractarian” model of ethics limits animals to only partial forms of protection from harm. instead of cruelty towards animals being a direct violation of animals’ own right to avoid suffering or not to be objectified, such cruelty leads to the potential degradation of human dignity and sensibility, with little concern for the animal itself. for ferry, animals have no rights, and only benefit from indirect duties humans may have towards them or on their behalf (akin to property), since they do not meet the necessary cognitive abilities (reason, language, etc.) to enter into an ethical contract. like ferry, emmanuel levinas — as understood by wolfe — proposes that humans have ethical duties and responsibilities only to those who possess logos (language, reason). for levinas, the human “can have direct responsibilities only toward beings that can speak,” whereas “the other has only to look at me. indeed, what is expressed in his face may be expressed by his hand or the nape of his neck” (levinas, qtd. in animal rites 61). in wolfe’s reading of levinas, such a face-to-face relationship between two rational parties cannot include any nonhuman humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 66 animals, as they are deprived of language and reason, and are for all intents and purposes faceless. before moving forward, let me briefly digress to acknowledge the ambiguity of the nonhuman animal in levinasian ethics that wolfe may have failed to fully appreciate. responding to an interviewer’s question regarding human obligations towards nonhuman animals, levinas notes, “it is clear that, without considering animals as human beings, the ethical extends to all living beings. we do not want to make an animal suffer needlessly and so on. but the prototype of this is human ethics” (wright, hughes, & ainley 172). levinas clearly does not exclude the nonhuman animal altogether from ethical concern. furthermore, he admits that after the human face we can discover the face of the animal, even though he remains uncertain as to which animals may have a face: “the human face is completely different and only afterwards do we discover the face of an animal. i don’t know if a snake has a face. i can’t answer that question. a more specific analysis is needed” (ibid.). as others have argued, the levinasian phenomenology of the face is best understood as a metaphor for the expression/exposure of the other, where the other always exceeds the capacity to be known and to be fully determined, thereby describing a relation that does not prescribe a human other (atterton; kendall; sandry). the ethical encounter understood in this manner would likely lead one to agree with matthew calarco’s assertion that, while levinas himself may have been largely anthropocentric, the underlying logic of his philosophy is not (55). although wolfe may have glossed over levinasian ethics too quickly to recognize its openness to the nonhuman animal, he is correct to take issue with levinas himself, who frequently resorts to advancing his ethics in a way that begins with and ultimately prioritizes the human. the lack of so-called human faculties (language, reason, cognition, thoughtful response, etc.) is a common thread found in many approaches to animal ethics.2 theorists such as martin heidegger, ludwig wittgenstein, peter singer, tom regan, and stanley cavell have relied heavily on ethical codes based on how similar (or dissimilar) the animal is to the human. wolfe expresses his displeasure most vehemently when thinkers like cavell care for the animal other “only insofar as it mirrors, in a diminished way, the human form that is the ‘source’ of recognizing animals as bodies that have sensations, feel pain, and so on” (animal rites 53). moreover, any responsibilities to animals for cavell, singer, and regan, are grounded in the humanist notion that they exhibit “in diminished form qualities, potentials, or abilities that are realized to their fullest in human beings” (53). for wolfe, “the human makes way for the animal, but only by means of the human itself” (205), distinguishing non-human animals not on the basis of michael g. sherbert -revising posthumanist aesthetics in the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. 67 their uniqueness and difference, but as simply inferior versions of our human selves. wolfe’s posthumanist approach to a more inclusive ethics begins with derrida’s reconceptualization of ethical foundations. rather than attempting to “humanize” nonhuman animals by giving them a token form of human cognitive faculties, wolfe follows derrida, who instead urges us to rethink the absence of human-like faculties otherwise, as something other than a privation. instead of targeting the identifiable human-like characteristics of nonhuman animals, derrida pursues jeremy bentham’s question whether animals can suffer. derrida appropriates bentham’s focus on the ability to suffer, as opposed to the ability to reason, as the benchmark for rights. suffering is understood here as a type of vulnerability, passivity, inability, and overall non-power shared by humans and nonhuman animals. this lack of power, or not-being-able, elicits a trans-species compassion which awakens us “to our responsibilities and our obligations with respect to the living in general, and precisely to this fundamental compassion that, were we to take it seriously, would have to change even the very basis … of the philosophical problematic of the animal” (derrida, qtd. in what is posthumanism? 82). derrida extends the ideas of vulnerability, passivity, inability, finitude, mortality, and non-power by linking their unavailability and inappropriability to the very thing which make them available to us — a second not-being-able — as wolfe says: “our subjection to a radically ahuman technicity or mechanicity of language,” which is itself not human at all (88). the human is always already radically other, never itself, always already ahuman/inhuman because of its prosthetic use of language. for wolfe, language can no longer be said to separate the human from other living creatures, as it is a nonhuman or ahuman emergence from an evolutionary process of “social interaction and communication among animals including but not limited to homo sapiens” (12). wolfe’s argument, owing much to derrida, problematizes the question of who and what can count as a subject of ethical address, as well as the anthropocentrism of most theories of animal ethics, by extending a common ethical base that crosses species boundaries. the importance of derrida’s approach to animals, for wolfe, is its self-reflexive character and its incessant drive to question long-standing human exclusivity and privilege. even though the critical study of nonhuman animals is meant to expose the various forms of derision, exploitation, and violence enacted on our fellow creatures, this does not mean that humanist/anthropocentric tendencies are not pervasive in it. crucially, posthumanist animal studies should be recognized as perpetually imperfect projects that drive theorists and animal rights advocates to improve upon current iterations of ethical discourse on the nonhuman animal. as wolfe reminds us, pluralist humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 68 discourses (those tending to promote inclusivity) often lack a certain critical character and tend to exhibit humanist tendencies: indeed, one of the hallmarks of humanism … is its penchant for that kind of pluralism, in which the sphere of attention and consideration (intellectual or ethical) is broadened and extended to previously marginalized groups, but without in the least destabilizing or throwing into radical question the schema of the human who undertakes such pluralization. in that event, pluralism becomes incorporation, and the projects of humanism (intellectually) and liberalism (politically) are extended, and indeed extended in a rather classic sort of way. (99) the humanist pluralism or liberalism that wolfe takes issue with is one that — similar to an increased recognition of disabled persons in society — takes nonhuman animals as the latest marginalized group to have ethical and legal enfranchisement extended to them via a politics of recognition (136). such a politics of recognition ultimately reinforces the normative model of subjectivity, which is essentially anthropocentric. the normalized liberal subject, holding rights and privileges, speciously extends validation or legitimation to those previously disenfranchised. it is a “kind of tokenism in which nonhumans who are ‘racially’ similar enough to us to achieve recognition are protected, while all around us a holocaust … against our other fellow creatures rages on and indeed accelerates” (before the law 104). providing full or partial rights are steps in the right direction in human relations with nonhuman animals, yet they still maintain a humanist/anthropocentric grounding that reproduces the kinds of normative subjectivity that provide a foundation for the discrimination against nonhuman animals in the first place. for wolfe, derrida’s deconstruction and luhmann’s system’s theory force us to rethink and re-contextualize our taken-for-granted human experiences and ways of knowing in new ways that recognize our anthropocentric bias, in hopes to create new meanings that are not exclusively human-centered. the ability to reframe our experiences and knowledge in ways that are less humancentric is imperative for wolfe’s posthumanist thought. as such, wolfe relies heavily on luhmann’s systems theory, which provides him, most notably, with a self-referential, self-modifying mechanism at work within the human system. the self-modifying mode of operation allows for an openness to the environment, and the possibility for reevaluating internal representations of the environment within the human system. luhmann’s systems theory is based on the premise that each organism represents one of a plethora of systems that internalizes the outside of the system as a form of reduced michael g. sherbert -revising posthumanist aesthetics in the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. 69 complexity. this involves selecting a limited amount of information from outside of the system and organizing representations of it in a way that allows for effective and efficient processing of meaning. the organism’s internal system is able to create or modify existing internal representations when provided with new information. in wolfe’s reading of luhmann, each system (like that of an individual organism) has a “fundamental and inescapable ‘blindness’” which generates the necessity for “the other and the world, the ‘outside’ of the system” (animal rites 204). in order to more accurately and effectively represent the outside world, the system must constantly reassess and reframe its representations of the outside. these representations of the outside, however, are always made within the self-referential closure of the system. for wolfe, luhmann’s systems theory articulates that “the ‘there’ of the outside emerges only as the outside of the inside, only by means of … [the] irreducible difference, [which] keeps open the alterity of the other and makes possible the ongoing question of the difference between … observation and what it excludes” (206). in other words, luhmann’s systems theory demonstrates that the relationship between a system and its environment is always mediated. as such, there remains an insurmountable alterity between the system and its environment, leaving open the possibility to amend previously held representations. for wolfe, this open-endedness is an immense opportunity for changing how we see nonhuman animals. wolfe also acknowledges derrida’s “to come,” which is meant to convey the point that identity is a process that is never complete, requiring repetition, and always differing and deferring from one moment to the next towards a future that never arrives as such. the inexhaustibility of the outside of the system is, for wolfe, a nod to derrida’s “to come,” in which there is always an act of selection and exclusion when describing an entity or concept, and thus always a “not yet” or incompleteness which supplies the opportunity to reconceptualize knowledge and opinion in the future. in the context of systems theory and wolfe’s posthumanist approach, this means re-interpreting humanist conceptions in ways that will allow for the development of more inclusive and ethical relationships with nonhuman animals in the future. wolfe’s posthumanist approach to the nonhuman animal is predicated on the possibility of humans recognizing and changing previously held human-centric representations of the nonhuman animal. in doing so, wolfe takes aim at what he considers to be the dominance of human sight and the visual for apprehending the nonhuman animal other, in hopes that we may be able to change visual representations and our anthropocentric gaze towards nonhuman animals. in particular, wolfe problematizes the relationship between the visual and its intimate connection to human reason, ability and mastery, in order to disassociate the visual from these humanist qualities. to anticipate, this leads him to take issue with ethical approaches which humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 70 merely aim to extend rights to nonhuman animals because they are “like us humans,” to instead articulate a posthumanist ethics which will not discriminate based on how similar (visually or otherwise) an animal species is to the human. employing a posthumanist approach to ethics involves reiterating an important disclaimer: that surpassing or transcending the human (or the human system, if you will) may not be entirely possible, but re-evaluating the human system will provide the opportunity for a more inclusive ethical code. wolfe formulates a posthumanist approach that does not surpass or reject the human, but “enables us to describe the human and its characteristic modes of communication interaction, meaning, social significations, and affective investments with greater specificity once we have removed meaning from the ontologically closed domain of” anthropocentrism (what is posthumanism? xxv). moreover, this posthumanist formulation must attend to the specificity of the human while acknowledging that the human is ultimately comprised of things nonhuman. it is this interpellation, one urging for a greater acknowledgement and understanding of the human and its ways of constructing meaning and knowledge, which provides the impetus for recognizing the anthropocentric/humanist bias of favoring aesthetically pleasing animals, over ugly ones, which has profound implications for the welfare of innumerable species. the implications of an anthropocentric aesthetic bias. much of wolfe’s work on animal ethics addresses the selective constructions and reductions involved in the act of viewing. drawing from luhmann’s systems theory, wolfe understands that sense observations are selective and contingent assemblies that reduce environmental input. in order for an organism to remain viable and informed by its environment, it must maintain a perpetual self-reflexive openness that continually produces an increase in its internal representation of environmental complexity by challenging previously formed representations to account more accurately for its changing environment. every system must work to make sense of and organize the overwhelming flood of environmental input, which always involves selection and reduction (131). as selection and reduction of environmental sense information is inexorable, there is a necessary “blindness” that pervades every system. knowing that there will always remain something unseen is, for wolfe, a posthumanist rejoinder to the humanist trope of visuality-as-mastery (ibid.). in the spirit of both derrida and luhmann, wolfe devotes a substantial portion of his work to de-hierarchizing the human sense of sight and visuality which has become humanity’s most privileged sense perception.3 for wolfe, it is imperative to cut the visual “loose from its indexical relation to the human, to reason, and to the representational mastery of space itself, and set it adrift within the generalized animal michael g. sherbert -revising posthumanist aesthetics in the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. 71 sensorium” (133-134). in other words, animal ethics must concentrate on a greater engagement with the entire sensorium available not only to humanity, but to other living things as well. in taking this invitation seriously one must not only welcome a greater commitment to understanding the world through senses other than sight, but also to re-contextualize sight to allow for a more comprehensive or differentiated “seeing” and knowledge of animals within our world — a notion wolfe does not consider. a more inclusive animal ethics involves understanding how the human sees nonhuman animals, so that we may open up our visual fields to that which has remained unseen. what i wish to emphasize in this essay, is that our current methods for viewing the nonhuman animal unduly ignore those nonhuman animal species which are deemed to be visually unappealing. according to agronomist ernest small, those species most at risk for extinction tend to be unattractive, and not obviously of any direct use to humans, and consequently lack crucial conservation support (“the new noah’s ark: part 1”). the biodiversity of the planet is consequently “being beautified by selective conservation of attractive species, while the plight of the overwhelming majority of species is receiving limited attention” (232). when conservation and restoration of lands and animals depends largely on convincing the public, the government, and wildlife organizations to provide the necessary funding, it is only those animals which are aesthetically pleasing or directly useful to humans that attract public attention effectively. the alarming rate at which species extinction is accelerating — roughly 30,000 species per year4 — coupled with the limited willingness of government, business, and civil society to minimize these losses, choices as to which species are to be saved are at the fore of the issue (234).5 when allocating limited resources and funding to conservation efforts, there is a widely acknowledged discrepancy between the priorities of academic researchers and the actual practitioners — policy makers and nongovernmental organizations — who are engaged in the practical application of these efforts (sutherland et al. 559). in practice, biodiversity conservation campaigns employ common marketing techniques to draw attention to their causes, and in so doing they tend to neglect certain species that do not fit the dominant marketing techniques. these marketing techniques emphasize two main principles: economic considerations directed towards human utility, and subjective satisfaction “based on human values, prejudices, instincts, or sensations” (“the new noah’s ark: part 1” 238). for small, perhaps even more important than economic justifications for species conservation are the emotional characteristics and attachments of certain species that appeal to the human psyche. appropriately named “charismatic megafauna” or “superstar species” are those select species that tend to conform to generalized human concepts of beauty and power. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 72 these species tend to be the “star attractions in zoos and animal preserves, [and] the subjects of extensive scientific study and of considerable media coverage” (“the new noah’s ark: part 2” 39). examples would include bears, elephants, apes, lions, tigers, whales, dolphins, and some birds. these superstar species are usually mammals of a larger size, and tend to exclude smaller animals like insects, fishes, and most bird species. those lacking a certain sense of beauty in the eyes of the human observer have hindered public support for their conservation needs. the explanation for this prejudice seemingly stems from human beings’ evolutionary preference for particular human-like features, as well as features that display power, beauty, and decoration. moreover, humans tend to admire characteristics they identify as having high value in human society (maternal instincts and cooperation), while abhorring those understood as being maladaptive in human society (thievery and extreme aggression). most importantly, baby/infantile characteristics, representing vulnerability, are always the strongest elicitors of human empathy and support (41). the evolution of human species has involved an immense pressure on those characteristics found in human infants, so as to elicit feelings of attractiveness/cuteness and to evoke protective instincts (ibid.). these infantile characteristics, often termed baby schema (kindchenschema), are recognized by a particular set of facial and body features, such as small body size with a disproportionately larger head, big eyes, and soft/rounded body features. personality traits such as playfulness, innocence, curiosity, and affectionate behavior are often associated with these physical features, and combine positively to evoke attributions of cuteness and caretaking behaviors. according to konrad lorenz, these features are evolutionary adaptations which trigger nurturing responses in adults, ensuring species survival (lorenz). furthermore, this adaptation, suggests lorenz, is species-unspecific, where cuteness and the evocation of caretaking behavior is determined by pedomorphic characteristics found in a variety of species (cats, dogs, etc.). notably, research looking at the effects of baby schema, pedomorphic characteristics, and cuteness support the idea that these adaptations in humans also transfer across species (golle et al.). according to golle, research suggests “a common mechanism that codes the cuteness of human and nonhuman infant faces” (4). in other words, humans have a general instinct to take care of the young irrespective of species, assuming the presence of particular infantile characteristics. the presence of a generalized trans-species mechanism coding for cuteness and infantile characteristics implies that, as with human children, a high degree of baby schema in a nonhuman animal would elicit a stronger motivation for caretaking than would a nonhuman animal with a low degree of baby schema. research does indeed suggest that a higher degree of baby schema results in increased motivation for caretaking in humans michael g. sherbert -revising posthumanist aesthetics in the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. 73 (glocker et al.), and recent findings suggest that this increased motivation in caregiving behavior may translate into conservation support for nonhuman animals (gunnthorsdottir). the human instinctual inclination to care for human young has far-reaching implications for how humans care for and support nonhuman animals. in a study conducted by anna gunnthorsdottir, it was found that the attractiveness of nonhuman species substantially increased support for their protection. her study, which sought to explore the visceral factors in decisions to support endangered animal species, confirms the direction of a growing body of research that finds that support for conservation is often based on the superficial characteristics of the animal rather than on its ecological value, uniqueness, or well-being (211). in sum, the greater the perceived attractiveness of an animal, the more fundraising support it received. the ramifications of these particular biases (resemblance to humans, aesthetic appeal, cultural import, and familiarity) have also been shown to be consistent across cultures (kellert). such results lead one to question how humanity’s selective preferences for certain animals will come to shape the future of the wildlife on our planet. the human bias for species that are aesthetically pleasing is a prime determinant in guiding the conservation support for nonhuman animals. as small stresses, these biases serve to “mobilise public attention and consequent conservation activities that effectively protect some habitats in which many species at risk occur. but this excludes most habitats and most species at risk, which doubtless have both economic and ecological importance to the future welfare of the world” (“the new noah’s ark: part 1” 246). in order to combat, and more appropriately to lend support to those at risk, our natural emotional and aesthetic biases towards a select number of species must be tempered with a more rational program that takes into account support for all habitats and species. otherwise, funding will continue to be disproportionately directed towards those aesthetically pleasing and cute species at the expense of others. correspondingly, small also acknowledges that most agencies involved in wildlife conservation fall victim to these same prejudices and are reluctant to acknowledge their biases (241). a recent study suggests that zoos, which substantially contribute to survival of some species, may indeed house certain species based mostly on the aesthetic beauty rather than conservation needs (frynta et al.). although the appearance of certain species is relatively independent of their vital ecological roles (or simply their well-being as fellow vulnerable creatures, as derrida would say) it does not mean that we must seek to abandon entirely our human biases. as small concludes: “what is important is not that we suppress our natural admiration for certain life forms, but that we moderate our prejudices with understanding for the value of all species, for the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 74 long-term welfare of humanity and our planet” (“the new noah’s ark: part 2” 53), and i would add, the well-being of the individual species themselves as fellow creatures. taking care. considering how human aesthetic biases are considerable determinates of human support and care towards nonhuman animals, one may wonder to what degree any type of human concern for nonhuman animal life may overcome its anthropocentrism. indeed, if we take wolfe’s emphasis on luhmann’s systems theory seriously, it would appear that the human (or human system) can only create or modify internal representations of the outside world. since these internal, self-referential representations are always constructed by the human system itself, it would appear that one has little hope for an ethics that would be untainted by the human. wolfe’s posthumanist approach clearly emphasizes the need to recognize the specificities of the nonhuman animal other, but largely neglects to emphasize the humanist remainder — specifically in the form of deep-seated humanist biases — of every posthumanist ethics. wolfe’s readers are left without a theoretical account of the attention and care necessary for an ethics inclusive of nonhuman animal others. an instructive approach to assist in the theorization of caring for the well-being of nonhuman animals — one which more clearly calls attention to the inherent humanist biases involved in such caring — may be found in the work of martin heidegger. heidegger’s attempt to move beyond the closure of western metaphysics and its corresponding humanism by thinking being (ontology) could arguably be considered a posthumanist gesture. despite the anthropocentrism that this work retains, the understanding of care — concern for the being of beings — as originating from outside the human constitutes an important resource for a posthumanist approach to caring for nonhuman animal others. the benefit of a heideggerian inspired formulation of care is the recognition that any desire to care for nonhuman animals must be tempered by a realization of the biases inherent in the one who cares. in other words, caring for the welfare of nonhuman animals may be posthumanist, but every act of care performed by the human is always limited by human biases and self-referential understandings of nonhuman animals. as a brief overview of heidegger will show, the care humans exhibit towards the other (human or nonhuman), no matter how equitable and nonanthropocentric this care appears to be, remains through and through a humanist projection. in the fundamental concepts of metaphysics, heidegger makes the distinction between a stone that is without world, the animal as poor-in-world, and the human as worldforming. in his working through this three-fold distinction, he emphasizes the michael g. sherbert -revising posthumanist aesthetics in the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. 75 unbridgeable distance between the human and the animal by asserting that animals live with the human, however, “this being-with is not an existing-with, because an [animal] does not exist but merely lives” (210). the distinction heidegger makes between existing and living is one regarding the ability to reflect upon one’s own being (existence), especially the ability to reflect upon one’s own finitude or future death. for heidegger, only humans are capable of reflecting — through language — on their own existence and finitude. this claim is, at once, the very source of heidegger’s humanism and his posthumanism. on the one hand, by denying the animal the ability to have language, heidegger reproduces a common humanist in human-animal relations; on the other hand, to deny the nonhuman animal the ability for human-like language could be regarded as a posthumanist gesture which refuses to anthropomorphize the nonhuman animal (iveson). heidegger thus asserts an abyss of otherness that cannot simply be overcome by humanity’s attempts to understand the nonhuman animal. in other words, heidegger’s posthumanist gesture is to recognize the impossibility of knowing the animal other in the way that the animal understands itself or experiences the world. as such, humanity is irrevocably limited to understanding the animal in human terms, always as a representation of the animal from within the human world. heidegger’s respect for differential being is posthumanist — in the sense of the term used in this essay — in its recognition that the nullification of humanism differentially re-inscribes new forms of metaphysical anthropocentrism. pursuing an approach that is more inclusive of the nonhuman other, yet still respecting the abyss of differential being, heidegger develops a conception of care that rests on a less human-centered logic of responsibility. this logic of responsibility is established on an inappropriable abyss and otherness that cannot be reduced to a responsibility simply for another human. in order to revise previous conceptions of responsibility, heidegger suggests an originary ethics that thinks being first, rather than an anthropomorphic subject or agent. for heidegger, responsibility is about being, about the responsible decision that responds to a call that comes from outside every individual being. as francois raffoul notes, both the call and the decision to respond in heidegger are phenomena originating from being rather than human subjectivity, and the call’s uncanniness points to an otherness within the human self, a self that arises from the call itself (197198). the subject arising from the call testifies to a dissymmetry and otherness within the human self, a self that is never the same as it was previously, because the other is perpetually inscribed in the structure of selfhood, thus indicating a primordial openness and incompleteness of the human (198-199). a constant unfinished quality constitutes the human, a perpetual lack, which for heidegger means something remains outstanding in the human’s potentiality-for-being (being and time 220). the structure of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 76 care is intimately entangled in a new future potential for the human, where the human is fundamentally constituted by its concern for things, its caring for the other, its being with others (180). care, fundamental to the human, always includes responsibility manifest as exposure to an inappropriable other. such an inappropriable other for which the human is responsible, as raffoul carefully articulates, exceeds any predetermined figuration, and as such, can in no way be limited to a responsibility to care for humans only (raffoul 177). if humanity is, in its very being, oriented towards care for both the human and nonhuman other as inappropriable other, human being thereby necessitates a change in its referential totality in order to accommodate and remain open to the relentless call to care for indeterminable others. put simply, for heidegger, human beings are beings who care for others (human and nonhuman) that can never be completely understood. as such, the human must constantly change its representations of itself and other beings in the world, so as to be able to remain open to, and inclusive of, other beings. opening to the other to initiate a relationship of care entails a transformation of the human’s understanding of the other, yet this transformation, although potentially more inclusive, still remains seated within human understanding. as heidegger reminds us, care comes before every factical position and attitude of the human, to care is to wish, to project the human’s being to itself toward possibilities that remain inappropriable in its taking care of things (being and time 182). every access the human has to the other is mediated by its very existential constitution as human and its historical context (204). discovering new beings is to remain in distortion and illusion, this is because the human expresses itself as “a being toward beings that discovers,” where discovery is simply how the human understands its world, by showing itself to itself, or put more simply, by understanding the world and the other from within the world of the human (205). in caring for the other by coming to know it or better understand it, the human appropriates what has already been discovered; even new discoveries of the other are only a departure from “discoveredness in the mode of illusion,” and thus new interpretations from the perspective of the human itself (204). the implications here are critical. heidegger’s arguably posthumanist notion of care, which comes not from the human subject but from being, is restrained by recognition of the human’s (humanistic) limitations in performing care. what arises from being (care) is fundamentally restricted in its usage by the human. to return then to the central argument of this paper, part of caring for the nonhuman animal as a posthumanist ethical project also means caring to attend the human biases which limit its posthuman character. michael g. sherbert -revising posthumanist aesthetics in the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. 77 to venture into a posthumanist ethical project of caring toward the inappropriable other, human or nonhuman, is to take care in our caring, a caring that wolfe’s posthumanist approach disregards. to be careful in writing the posthuman is to weave together two general motifs, motifs that draw on derrida’s cautions in challenging humanism (margins of philosophy 135). as derrida argues, the desire to leap beyond humanism must be joined with the recognition that we still remain in the shadow of humanism. a new writing — like a posthumanist writing — must amount to speaking “several languages and [producing] several texts at once” (ibid.). therefore, any posthumanist writing must attempt to get out of humanism, while recognizing it is itself still within it; it is to speak to the ghost of humanism that casts over us its shadow. this call to recognize humanism is to expose and weaken it. as badmington argues, quoting derrida, one must “‘lodg[e] oneself within traditional conceptuality in order to destroy it’” (qtd. in badmington 15). even if the postof posthumanism may never mark an absolute break from humanism’s legacy, it must work through and within humanism as the only way that it may overcome humanism (21-22). working through a history of the human means paying attention to human intellectual and cultural history, but also to the human’s embodied nature, and the biases involved therein. wolfe’s intent on cutting the visual from its indexical relation to the human can only ever be one part of a posthumanist project. what wolfe neglects in his posthumanist account is care, the care which provides the impetus to look back at ourselves as embodied beings with particular biases, and to be critical of how certain biases — like the human visual aesthetic bias — may disrupt the development of more inclusive ethical approaches to the nonhuman animal. a posthumanist autoimmune attack. in maintaining a realistic point of view on social change, engaging in a tokenism which raises awareness for the aesthetically disenfranchised by presenting aesthetically unappealing species as endangered, as spectacle, or re-presenting them as simulacra that “beautify” them may, paradoxically, be necessary approaches for short-term change, even if it deceptively preys on the humanistic biases that have resulted in the aesthetic prejudice to begin with, while continually re-inscribing a harmful liberal humanist bias. much like his views on the great ape project (“before the law”), even wolfe admits that more inclusive steps to animal equality, even when couched in humanistic frameworks, constitute “monumental and historic step[s] forward for our relations with animals within the political purview of liberal democracy and its legal framework” (104). what wolfe ultimately fails to explore in his posthumanist ethical approach is the ability to use our own humanist biases against ourselves, to the advantage of nonhuman animals. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 78 the character of revealing one’s own mechanisms of protection — much the way the visual humanist aesthetic bias aids in predisposing humans to care for those that exhibit baby schema — in order to expose these mechanisms to attack exhibits a particular quality associated with derrida’s notion of the autoimmune: “as we know, an autoimmunitary process is that strange behaviour where a living being, in quasisuicidal fashion, ‘itself’ works to destroy its own protection, to immunize itself against its ‘own’ immunity” (“autoimmunity” 94). according to derrida, for any system to remain open to critique, heteronomy, time, the event, the other, it must, in the cruelest fashion, attack and infect itself, an unavoidable autoinfection present in all autoaffection (rogues 109). in other words, in order to improve the system, the system must engage in an attack against itself. to critique the current anthropocentric attitudes pervasive in current ethical approaches to nonhuman animals necessitates the development of such an autoimmune attack on the human. in his essay, “the ends of man,” featured in margins of philosophy, derrida calls for a new writing featuring an autoimmune mechanism which attempts an exit from the system not by changing terrain, but by using the instruments already available in the system against the edifice (135). within the context of this essay, this means utilizing tools already available within the human (human preferences for the aesthetically pleasing) in order to overcome the current anthropocentrism pervasive in the human. this posthumanist autoimmune attack — involving the use of humanist biases to develop a more posthuman character to human-animal ethical relations — i argue, would involve commandeering human visual aesthetic biases to redirect them in ways that are more inclusive of visually unappealing nonhuman animal species. practical strategies for neutralizing the humanistic aesthetic bias. the potential strategies for moderating the humanistic aesthetic bias in animal ethics are profuse, and open up the possibility of a multitude of approaches. despite the fact that the most forthright approach would be to educate the government, wildlife organizations, and the general populace on the inequitable treatment of nonhuman animals that do not fit particular aesthetic frames, this may not be the most efficient catalyst for short term change. to be clear, i do not reject any educational strategies that wish to advise or caution the populace about the humanistic aesthetic biases discussed here; in fact, the long term objective would be to disperse information related to these humanistic biases as widely as possible. however, we must also recognize the difficulty in disseminating intricate ethical messages meant to educate the populace, such as time, money, effective avenues for reception, and so on. hence, what is offered here is a preliminary meditation on supplementary short-term strategies that raise awareness of the so-called aesthetically “ugly” nonhuman animals in the public purview. these strategies michael g. sherbert -revising posthumanist aesthetics in the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. 79 paradoxically involve utilizing the very human aesthetic biases discussed here against ourselves, in order to increase the visibility of the excluded. to raise awareness and to bring attention to those creatures that have gone unnoticed on account of the human’s aesthetic preferences for particular nonhuman animal species would involve, firstly, public acknowledgement of those species that are endangered. in a study by gunnthorsdottir, it was found that unattractive animals were rated as more attractive by participants if they were framed as an endangered species. the increased attractiveness of these animals then resulted in an increase in conservation support. as she states: “greater perceived attractiveness of an animal means more fundraising dollars and generally more support for its cause” (211). publicizing particular species with less than pleasing aesthetic qualities as endangered leads most people to rate these species as more aesthetically pleasing, and increases support for their conservation. in order to use this information effectively, various forms of media (wildlife, news and general interest organizations and networks) could create educational programming and articles on television, radio, or online that produce relatively immediate emotional affects that could increase funding and general support for at-risk species. “ugly” animals may be able to employ similar strategies to those of aesthetically pleasing animals by taking advantage of those cognitive mechanisms in the human that code for empathy and caretaking behavior. it is important to recognize though, as gunnthorsdottir does, that the increased support from framing “ugly” species as endangered involves more than just simple aesthetics, but also likely involves additional mechanisms involving empathy more generally. simply framing aesthetically appalling endangered species as endangered is an honest and effective means to consider as a potential strategy for increasing the visibility and support for these at-risk creatures. a more direct strategy that exploits the human aesthetic bias may involve “beautifying” or “cute-ifying” those species normally deemed ugly. public service announcements or children’s television cartoons/family programming involving those species deemed ugly may too increase the public profile of certain animal species. drawing and animating animals with the specific intention of re-conceptualizing them to include the baby schema may in turn increase visibility, awareness, and conservation support for those actual species. baby schema itself could be considered a symbol of vulnerability, much like human babies are vulnerable, so too are many animal species. to reconceive vulnerable species with the addition of baby schema is to visually mark these species as vulnerable, and in need of care. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 80 the final preliminary strategy proposed by this project involves celebrating the ugly as ugly. such a strategy would include the communication and circulation of entertaining media that focus on a broader notion of wildlife conservation, centering not on those “charismatic megafauna” or “superstar species,” but on other, aesthetically appalling animals in dire need of assistance. simon watt, biologist and science communicator, founded an organization called the ugly animal preservation society which seeks to increase the visibility of ugly endangered species through humour. watt’s organization takes a new approach to nonhuman animal conservation to penetrate additional avenues to conservation never before conceived, like stand-up comedy. as their website states, “the panda gets too much attention,” and they intend to promote ugly animals that go under the radar (ugly animal preservation society). the mission statement is to raise the profile and general awareness of some of the more “aesthetically challenged” creatures by gathering together comedians and scientists who create humorous and educational skits, each focused on an ugly species in danger of extinction. examples of such ugly animals include the blobfish, the dromedary jumping-slug, and the proboscis monkey. following each show, the audience votes for one of the animals, in order to choose that region’s “ugly mascot.” with the belief that the vast majority of life is ugly and not particularly exciting to the average person, watt champions the ugly in order to bring these species recognition. by engaging entertainment media, watt has discovered a supplementary avenue that raises awareness of aesthetically unappealing creatures in need of conservation assistance, and just as important, educates how humanistic prejudices have lead humanity to ignore the majority of species in need. much like watt’s, this essay advocates for new avenues of dissemination that increase the visibility of conservation messages for animals not considered aesthetically appealing to the human eye. each of the strategies listed above, in some form or another, involve the presentation of animals in media discourse. the presentation of animals in media risks portraying these species as objects for consumption, rather than as individual beings with specific motivations and experiences. a study by gouabault, dubied, and burton-jeangros, determined that there is a high degree of ambivalence in contemporary representations of animals in western media. they argue that the personification of many animal representations in media end up perpetuating anthropocentric sensibilities, rather than zoocentric sensibilities. the social representations of animals in ways that rely heavily on various forms of personification may further what they call a “pet relationship model,” which maintains an image of animals’ dependence on humans. a more appropriate strategy, they suggest, is the adoption of a “companionship model,” where the animal can be considered in and for itself. while personification may provide michael g. sherbert -revising posthumanist aesthetics in the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. 81 positive images of nonhuman animals, it may do so at the cost of omitting the lived reality and specificity of these animals. as such, there must be a concerted effort to consider the diverse motivations, experiences, and specificities of each animal or species represented in the media, whenever possible. to reiterate, in order to see the efficient recognition of the prejudices of the human aesthetic framing, there may be a need to inundate the populace with a variety of educational strategies that paradoxically exploit the very humanistic biases that have been responsible for the exclusion of unattractive animals. by exploiting these biases, at least provisionally, we may be able to attend to the previously excluded that are in urgent need of relief. though effective and efficient in the short term, the simple act of “beautifying” the ugly or appropriating the ugly for entertainment purposes is itself ethically questionable given our earlier discussion. simply making these animals more aesthetically pleasing would mean falling victim to the human aesthetic bias that this work aims to dispel. which is why, in a vein similar to wolfe’s, a more appropriate long term ethical strategy would focus not on characteristics of beauty or public notoriety, but instead, becoming more ethically responsible for the nonhuman other based on what all life seemingly shares, a vulnerability and finitude, a not-being-able that links ethical considerations across species boundaries. recognizing the obstruction of the human aesthetic bias. wolfe’s posthumanist approach provides an essential and much needed re-conceptualization of animal ethics which attempts to understand ethical relations with nonhuman animals from a perspective that is not exclusively human. his proposal, to de-hierarchize human sight and visuality in order to engage the entire sensorium of human and nonhuman animals, fails to recognize pervasive modes of human sight and conceptions of human visuality that retain an anthropocentric character. as this essay has sought to expose, wolfe’s posthumanist ethical approach to the nonhuman animal requires a supplementary posthumanist endeavor of care to assess and minimize the humanist biases that may impede its implementation. in so doing, this essay identified a humanist bias that impedes the practical dissemination of wolfe’s posthumanist proposal: that practical work in animal ethics regularly imparts an unrecognized framework of speciesism which privileges those species most aesthetically appealing to the human. as badmington rightfully establishes in his particular conceptualization of posthumanism, a complete detachment of humanism (be they cultural, embodied, biological, etc.) from posthuman discourse is naïve. posthumanist discourse invariably re-inscribes humanism each and every time, and because of this we must take care to attend to this re-inscription and determine how we are to move forward in such a way humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 82 as to be more responsible to the nonhuman other amidst these biases. after the realization that humanist biases are inevitable, the paradoxical use of humanist biases against ourselves — in the form of a posthumanist autoimmune attack — may be a necessary strategy in which to be more open to the nonhuman other. if this process of autoimmunity does indeed find itself within the structure of the posthuman, to weaken its residual humanism, it seems to correspond to the positive implication of autoimmunity, that is, autoimmunity works to keep an entity open to the wholly other to come. conceivably, such an openness that an autoimmunity of posthumanism affords may be a welcoming of the nonhuman other to come. regardless of the potential for the posthuman to exhibit an autoimmune structure, the issue at hand in posthumanist discourse, we have learned, is not simply a moving-away-from humanism but also a movement back towards humanism. this second movement, a movement of care that wolfe’s posthumanist approach neglects, is one which relentlessly pursues the humanist structures which have and continue to bias our posthuman yearning of openness to the nonhuman other. it is only by returning to the human in posthumanism that the human is able to work through itself, through its humanism, so that it may overcome its humanism. notes 1. theories which engage the nonhuman vary widely in terms of approach and concern, and frequently conflict with one another. some of the most prominent theories that focus on the nonhuman include: object-oriented ontology (latour; harman), systems theory (luhmann), deep ecology (næss), and a variety of approaches under the generic title of posthuman theory (wolfe, what is posthumanism?; hayles; morton). 2. this essay aims to problematize discourses which ground ethical codes on how similar (or dissimilar) the cognitive abilities of animals are to humans. much of these ethical approaches deny faculties such as language, reason, thoughtful response, and the cognitive abilities necessary to make or use tools; however, there is a growing body of research in comparative cognition which suggests that many animals do indeed have the ability to reason and use tools, as well as utilize language (see for example, menzel and fischer). 3. wolfe’s chapter on disability and autism, “learning from temple grandin, or, animal studies, disability studies, and who comes after the subject” (in what is posthumanism?) features his clearest and most articulate work on the topic of dehierarchizing the human sense of sight and visuality. michael g. sherbert -revising posthumanist aesthetics in the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. 83 4. estimates for the rate of species extinction vary widely, and as such, there is no clear consensus as to the actual numbers of extinctions occurring per year. the world wildlife foundation (wwf) estimates a range of between 200 and 100,000 species become extinct each year (“how many species?”). 5. in economic and biodiversity preservation literature, the problem of deciding which animals are most worth saving — in order to preserve the greatest diversity on a limited budget — is called the “noah’s ark problem.” the name of this model of biodiversity preservation brings to mind religious imagery, often associated with the superiority of humans in relation to their animal counterparts. works cited atterton, peter. “levinas and our moral responsibility toward other animals.” inquiry 54.6 (2011): 633-649. badmington, neil. “theorizing posthumanism.” cultural critique 53.1 (2003): 10-27. calarco, matthew. zoographies: the question of the animal from heidegger to derrida. columbia up, 2008. chiew, florence. “posthuman ethics with cary wolfe and karen barad: animal compassion as trans-species entanglement.” theory, culture & society 31.4 (2014): 1-19. derrida, jacques. “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” trans. david wills. critical inquiry 28.2 (2002): 369-418. _____. “autoimmunity: real and symbolic suicides — a dialogue with jacques derrida.” philosophy in a time of terror: dialogues with ju ̈rgen habermas and jacques derrida. ed. giovanna borradori. u of chicago p, 2003. 85-136. _____. margins of philosophy. u of chicago p, 1982. _____. rogues: two essays on reason. stanford up, 2005. frynta, daniel, silvie lišková, sebastian bültmann, & hynek burda. “being attractive brings advantages: the case of parrot species in captivity. ” plos one 5.9 (2010). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 84 glocker, melanie l., daniel d. langleben, kosha ruparel, james w. loughead, ruben c. gur, & norbert sachser. “baby schema in infant faces induces cuteness perception and motivation for caretaking in adults.” ethology 115.3 (2009): 257-263. golle, jessika, stephanie lisibach, fred w. mast, & janek s. lobmaier. “sweet puppies and cute babies: perceptual adaptation to babyfacedness transfers across species.” plos one 8.3 (2013). goubault, e., a. dubied, and c. burton-jeangros. “genuine zoocentrism or dogged anthropocentrism? on the personification of animal figures in the news.” humanimalia 3.1 (2011): 77-100. gunnthorsdottir, anna. “physical attractiveness of an animal species as a decision factor for its preservation.” anthrozoos: a multidisciplinary journal of the interactions of people & animals 14.4 (2001): 204-215. harman, graham. tool-being: heidegger and the metaphyics of objects. open court, 2002. hayles, n. katherine. how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. u of chicago p, 2008. heidegger, martin. being and time: a translation of sein und zeit. tr. joan stambaugh. state u of new york p, 1996. _____. the fundamental concepts of metaphysics: world, finitude, solitude. tr. william mcneill and nicholas walker. indiana up, 1995. “how many species are we losing?” wwf.panda.org. world wildlife foundation (wwf), web. 18 june, 2009. iveson, richard. “animals in looking-glass world: fables of überhumanism and posthumanism in heidegger and nietzsche.” humanimalia 1.2 (2010): 46-85. kellert, stephen r. “attitudes, knowledge, and behavior toward wildlife among the industrial superpowers: united states, japan, and germany.” journal of social issues 49.1 (1993): 53-69. michael g. sherbert -revising posthumanist aesthetics in the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. 85 kendall, karalyn. “the face of a dog: levinasian ethics and human/dog coevolution.” queering the non/human. ed. noreen giffney and myra j. hird. ashgate, 2008. 185-204. latour, bruno. reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford up, 2005. lorenz, konrad. studies in animal and human behavior. harvard up, 1970. luhmann, niklas. social systems. stanford up, 1995. menzel, randolf, & julia fischer, ed. animal thinking: contemporary issues in comparative cognition. mit up, 2011. miyasaki, donovan. “a ground for ethics in heidegger's being and time.” journal of the british society for phenomenology 38.3 (2007): 261-279. morton, timothy. the ecological thought. harvard up, 2010. næss, arne, & david rothenberg. ecology, community, and lifestyle: outline of an ecosophy. cambridge up, 1989. raffoul, francois. “the question of responsibility between levinas and heidegger.” between levinas and heidegger. ed. john e. drabinski and eric sean nelson. state u of new york p, 2014. 175-206. sandry, eleanor. “‘face to face’ learning from others in facebook groups.” digital culture & education 6.1 (2014): 1-12. small, ernest. “the new noah's ark: beautiful and useful species only. part 1. biodiversity conservation issues and priorities.” biodiversity 12.4 (2011): 232-247. _____. “the new noah's ark: beautiful and useful species only. part 2. the chosen species.” biodiversity 13.1 (2012): 37-53. sutherland, w. j., et al. “one hundred questions of importance to the conservation of global biological diversity." conservation biology 23.3 (2009): 557-567. “ugly animal preservation society.” uglyanimalsoc.com. n.p., n.d. web. 23 june 2014. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 86 wolfe, cary. animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. u of chicago p, 2003. _____. “before the law: animals in a biopolitical context.” law, culture and the humanities 6.1 (2010): 8-23. _____. what is posthumanism? u of minnesota p, 2010. wright, tamra, peter hughes, & alison ainley. “the paradox of morality: an interview with emmanuel levinas.” the provocation of levinas: rethinking the other. ed. robert bernasconi and david wood. routledge, 1988. 168–80. microsoft word fix et al-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:2 adam j. fix, hugh burnam, and ray gutteriez toward interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept: autoethnographies at the intersection of traditional ecological knowledge and animal studies the words before all else. in haudenosaunee communities it is customary before and after meetings, both large and small, to recite what we call: “the opening address” and “the closing address,” which is also known as “the words before all else.” in most cases, both the opening address and closing address are spoken in haudenosaunee languages, of which i (hugh) am still and will continue to be an avid learner. we call this, “the words before all else,” as translated in english, because it is our responsibility to ensure that, regardless of the topic of the meeting, we are always thinking of, and being thankful for our mother the earth, all of the beings of creation, and for the unborn faces yet to come. this orients us to our responsibilities while we live here on our mother’s body and also acknowledges our reciprocal and intimate spiritual connection to our relations. we provide a very brief paragraph of the opening address below in english. it is imperative to know that it is not customary to write the opening address, as haudenosaunee are an oral tradition people. typically the spoken word in our languages and worldviews are what gives specific meaning, beauty, and power to our ways as indigenous and haudenosaunee. reciting the opening or closing, depending on the speaker and the meeting, may take anywhere from a few minutes upwards to twenty minutes or a half an hour. as we take into consideration the intended audience of this paper, and at our discretion, we believe it necessary to provide at least a short paragraph of the opening address in order to speak to the content and the richness of this paper. during the opening address we give thanks to the people first, for their health and wellbeing. we then give thanks to our mother the earth and all that she provides. we give thanks to the grasses and to the medicines, then to the woodlands and to the fruits and berries. we give thanks to the waters, streams, lakes, rivers, and oceans. we give thanks to the life sustainers — corn, beans, and squash. we give thanks to the animals and then to the birds. we give thanks to the soft winds. we give thanks to our grandfathers’ thundering voices. we give thanks to our elder brother the sun. we give thanks to our grandmother the moon. we give thanks to our grandfathers the stars. we adam j. fix, hugh burnam, and ray gutteriez -toward interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept: autoethnographies at the intersection of traditional ecological knowledge and animal studies 129 give thanks to the four messengers, our protectors. we give thanks to our teachers and those who give us instruction. lastly we turn our attention to the skyworld and give thanks to the creator, who finished our bodies. after the speaker gives thanks to each and every segment or element of creation, the speaker then says, “and our minds are agreed,” to which the people in attendance respond by saying, “nyoh” together in unison, to show acknowledgment and agreement. the speaker usually asks that the crowd forgive them if they accidently left anything out and that they did not do it on purpose. by “opening” with this critical teaching of the haudenosaunee, our intent is to show the very practical ways in which relationships between the earth, plants, animals, cosmological beings, and humans maintain relationships together. we want to draw the reader’s attention to the animals and to the birds, as our relationships with them are traditionally grounded in acknowledgment of reciprocity and gratitude. however, as a result of an internalization of settler-colonial ways of knowing, we often forget about our relationship with them — this i want to be clear about. though this approach may not necessarily be the same way in which the haudenosaunee discuss this matter, as this paper is in written form and in english, this paper aims to put us back into discourse about animals in ways that are collaborative, generative, and based in story or autoethnography, similar to ways in which this is done through the opening address. our intentions are to “put our minds together” across differences with the clear intentions of thinking of the animals. introduction. traditional ecological knowledge (tek) is a contested term. while much of the literature on tek utilizes fikret berkes’s definition: “a cumulative body of knowledge and beliefs, handed down through generations by cultural transmission, about the relationship between living things (including humans) with each other and with their environment” (8), the lack of consensus is reflected in davis and ruddle’s review of the academic usage of tek. davis and ruddle argue that the lack of clear understanding of the term can further disenfranchise the disempowered, in that it can lead to the expansion of western-style power structures to collect and extract tek in the name of saving it (880; see also zedler). davis and ruddle conclude that the “definitional approach” is misguided and harmful (885), and whyte continues the critique by consciously avoiding the definitional approach to tek and considering an alternative: tek as a collaborative concept, which humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 130 points to the possibility that there are cross-cultural and cross-situational divides that make it so that non-indigenous parties cannot expect their own assumptions to apply to indigenous contexts. the concept of tek should be invoked to invite non-indigenous parties to learn more about how particular indigenous communities approach fundamental questions of the nature of knowledge and how it fits into their visions of environmental governance. this... is an invitation to become part of a long term process whereby cross-cultural and cross-situation divides are better bridged through mutual respect and learning, and relationships among collaborators are given the opportunity to mature. (10) therefore, tek as a collaborative concept preserves indigenous sovereignty while also extending an invitation to non-indigenous parties to participate outside of the dichotomous discourse of western civilization (e.g. savage vs. civilized, nature vs. culture, objective vs. subjective; for a more comprehensive treatment of this claim see r.a. williams jr.). one example of tek as a collaborative concept at work is the nmé (lake sturgeon) stewardship program initiated by the little river band of ottawa indians’ natural resources department. the department, which employs both tribal and non-tribal members, started a “cultural context group” that combined cultural, biological, political, and social elements with the goal of “restoring the harmony and connectivity between the nmé and anishinaabek and bring them both back to the river” (whyte et al. 3). the group participants do not have to adhere to the anishinaabek knowledge system, but rather agree to keep a “sense of themselves ... in a shared watershed and a mutual responsibility that respects nmé as a relative” (4). the authors conclude that tek “may approach the human condition as not a struggle to know the universe; the condition rather is to know ourselves well enough so we can act morally in the universe” (8). as this and other examples show, the “great divide” between tek and other knowledge systems lies not in knowledge itself but in power relations — the “power to impose a narrative as the truth” (houde 9). the dominant narrative in the west, according to tim ingold, is one that describes “how humans have risen above, and have sought to bring under control, a world of nature that includes their own animality” (1). this is a narrative that is troubled by advances in both tek and animal studies, which challenge the imposition of anthropocentric narratives as truth. both fields de-center the human in studying human-animal relations, thereby asking us to reconsider the basic adam j. fix, hugh burnam, and ray gutteriez -toward interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept: autoethnographies at the intersection of traditional ecological knowledge and animal studies 131 assumptions and narratives about human uniqueness that we construct and affirm in our daily lives (waldau). one example is found in the work of leanne simpson, who writes that in traditional nishnaabeg political culture, animal clans were highly respected and were seen as self-determining, political “nations” (at least in an indigenous sense) to whom the nishnaabeg had negotiated, ritualized, formal relationships that required maintenance through an ongoing relationship. ... animal clans were also a source of knowledge and inspiration. (33) simpson describes the relationship between the nishnaabeg and animal “nations” as one that “maintains coexistence, respect, and mutual benefit” (35), which represents a concrete example of the type of argument advanced by animal studies: that “there [is] no a priori distinction to be made between humans and nonhumans,” and that dividing lines between human and nonhuman animals are “subject to change and negotiation” (emel et al. 409). in navigating the confluence of tek as a collaborative concept and animal studies, we are drawn toward the term interspecies thinking as an analytic paradigm that “aspires to transmit the character of political and social worlds that can no longer take the human subject as their dominant object of analysis” (livingston and puar 3). simply put, interspecies thinking compels us to take the interests of other species seriously. in “why interspecies thinking needs indigenous standpoints,” kim tallbear asks, “is it too easy a comparison to say that western thinkers are finally getting on board with something that is closer to an american indian metaphysic?” at least within tek, the early returns show that indigenous scholars are working to refine the concept in a way that complements and buttresses not only an “american indian metaphysic,”1 but also begins to establish an egalitarian collaborative model (e.g. houde; whyte; whyte, brewer, & johnson). western thinkers, by contrast, have generally advocated for a “definitional approach” to tek that relies on knowledge mobilization (e.g. berkes; see also davis & ruddle), a process that mimics colonization through the expansion of (sometimes inadvertently) extractive western power structures. one example of this structure at work is the arizona state university team who obtained consent to take blood samples from the havasupai tribe, in order to help them combat a diabetes epidemic, but then used those samples to publish a dozen or more papers on unrelated topics, including the migration history of the tribe, which threatens their spiritual and political claim to their homeland (harmon). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 132 it is not hard to imagine that tek as a collaborative concept, while functioning as “an invitation to become part of a long term process whereby cross-cultural and crosssituation divides are better bridged” (whyte 10), can also function as an invitation to interspecies thinking. in the nmé stewardship program, the call for participants to see themselves as relatives with the others in the watershed speaks to one of the fundamental tasks of the field of animal studies: to imagine ourselves as full participants in a more-than-human world. but animal studies has not yet fully reckoned with the intersection with ik that vine deloria, jr. and kim tallbear discuss. but imagine an animal studies informed by the indigenous voices calling for tek as a collaborative concept — let us call it interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept. playing with the concept (as first presented in whyte), let us rewrite its characteristics from an interspecies perspective: · interspecies thinking as “[approaching] the human condition not as a struggle to know the [more-than-human world]; the condition rather is to know ourselves well enough so we can act morally in the [more-thanhuman world].” · interspecies thinking as “an invitation to become part of a long term process whereby cross-cultural and [interspecies] divides are better bridged.” · interspecies thinking as “[keeping] a sense of ourselves in a shared watershed … and a mutual responsibility that respects [nonhuman animals] as relatives.”2 following this model avoids what we might call the assimilatory approach to interspecies thinking, in which one would search for more benign ways to include other species within a human exceptionalist paradigm. we propose that interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept should begin with the indigenous cosmological foundations of tek, which provide the basis for intercultural collaboration, and from this position choose to focus most intensively on the narratives and practices that comprise the human/nonhuman animal divide. the three autoethnographies that follow are a preliminary attempt to think through this intersection, while also functioning as an invitation for others to join us, and all our relatives, here. methods. autoethnography as a method combines ethnography and biography and allows the author(s) to retroactively understand our past experiences and apply them to adam j. fix, hugh burnam, and ray gutteriez -toward interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept: autoethnographies at the intersection of traditional ecological knowledge and animal studies 133 research. we are using autoethnography in a similar approach as arluke and sanders, who write, just as we attribute truth and accuracy to ethnographic research based on the quality of the investigator’s relationships with those studied and the credibility of his or her account, it is reasonable to use the same criteria in evaluating studies of animal-human interaction. (51) in this case, building on the work of many authors (young & thompson; robinson; sanders & furman; irvine; sanders & arluke; arluke & sanders) we utilize autoethnography as a method to explore deep meaning, affective, and reciprocal relationships with and about humans, nonhuman animals, and their interactions. in this piece, three authors — adam fix, hugh burnam, and ray gutteriez — have autoethnographic voices. adam fix is non-native/ non-indigenous/ euro-american/ “settler.” ray gutteriez (mono) and hugh burnam (mohawk) are native/indigenous. our positionality, as indigenous and non-indigenous/settler, mono or haudenosaunee researchers, and/or indigenous community members, is an aspect that we have taken into great consideration. we have each adopted what patricia hill collins describes as “the outsider within” (s15) positioning of research, in which we conduct research on our community as community members but also as members of an outside group. we become the outsiders within, as we conduct research about our own communities and ourselves (dwyer and buckle 57). further, ladson-billings and donner state that scholars of color, including indigenous or american indian scholars, are positioned in ways that are of “common in the experience of a racialized identity” to which may mean to acknowledge “some of the common experiences that group members have had as outsiders and others” (284). this was something that we (hugh and ray) had to constantly be aware of while doing this research and reflecting on our experiences, as in many respects “insiders” to our communities and also “outsiders” as a result of our positionalities as researchers, too. researchers in various disciplines (e.g. anthropology, history, education, etc.) have historically exploited indigenous knowledges (denzin, lincoln, & smith; smith). apprehensiveness that community members might feel about this project, in which values would be shared to the outside world, is an extremely important consideration. audra simpson asserts that when ethnographic qualitative research meets its humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 134 “ethnographic limit” (78), the research must stop. simpson interviewed mohawk participants and she was met with aspects of refusal. participants refused to answer her questions over concern that their answers might severely threaten everything that their community had built within the context of a settler colonial society. simpson writes: the ethnographic limit then, was reached not just when it would cause harm (or extreme discomfort) — the limit was arrived at when the representation would bite all of us and compromise the representational territory that we have gained for ourselves in the past 100 years. (78) in this project, autoethnographic researchers are both the researchers and the researched; therefore, the ethnographic limit would be at our own discretion in collaboration with one another. the authors thought that it was important that we share only some of our understandings and teachings through an autoethnographic approach, constantly reflexive of the delicate balance of respect towards our own communities, regarding the sharing of information, how it is shared, why it is shared, and how much is shared. this is a necessary precaution that we take when we consider the delicate nature of our work from indigenous communities and people within the gaze of the colonial academy. three autoethnographies at the intersection of tek and animal studies 1. moving from animal studies to tek as a settler academic. i (adam) am a nonindigenous fourth generation euro-american male settler scholar working at the intersection of animal studies and indigenous studies. i was raised in a post-industrial city (buffalo, ny, on haudenosaunee traditional territory) that in many ways embodied the concept of a “sacrifice zone” (hedges & sacco) due to decades of environmental degradation and disinvestment. at the age of 23, i went on my first backpacking trip to the adirondack wilderness, and i immediately felt a very strong compulsion to spend as much time as i could living in, and working for, the protection of what we think of as wilderness. i quit my job and moved to california, eventually getting hired as a park ranger by the national park service. a couple of years later, i enrolled in a master’s program focused on human-animal interaction, hoping to learn more about some of the wildlife conflicts happening in parks and protected areas in the united states. then, in late 2012, the idle no more movement happened, and i was captivated by it. what an incredible phenomenon — thousands upon thousands of indigenous people were mobilizing in their communities and on social media in a way that i had never adam j. fix, hugh burnam, and ray gutteriez -toward interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept: autoethnographies at the intersection of traditional ecological knowledge and animal studies 135 experienced. i knew very little about the movement, but i was determined to learn more: who were these people who were putting everything on the line to resist tar sands extraction and to fight for indigenous sovereignty? i didn’t have much knowledge of indigenous sovereignty, but i was curious. so i used the only frame i knew — animal studies — to examine how nonhuman animal imagery was being used within the movement.3 i think that i learned a lot, and that i contributed something important, with this analysis. but i felt uneasy about asking too much, or saying something inappropriate, as an outsider. i felt i had a strong sense of self and community, and i didn’t want to “play indian.” by then i had seen videos and commentaries on the rainbow family and other groups of “pretendians” (nonindigenous people co-opting indigenous traditions and ceremonies). i read philip deloria’s playing indian and learned about the historic roots of the trend, and how insidious it was. so i decided to see what other non-indigenous people were doing that worked well. were there groups of non-indigenous people who were forming relationships with, and working to support, indigenous people in a way that was not relying on harmful stereotypes or perpetuating western power structures? how did they do it? i began to study the self-proclaimed “allies” that provided support to indigenous peoples during times of environmental conflict. through a series of in-depth interviews and participant observation with these “allies” in my home state of new york, i began to understand how meaningful relationships were being built across cultures. but philosophical and practical problems persisted, especially when the views of indigenous people came into conflict with the principles that i had adopted as a professor of animal ethics and a scholar in the critical animal studies community. when animal rights activists picketed traditional hunts in ontario, was i to join the protest? i turned to indigenous scholars for clues, and was encouraged by reading john mohawk (akwesasne notes; barreiro) and vine deloria, jr. (“american indian metaphysics”; “foreword”), both of whom advocated for a much more benign system of human-animal relations than the contemporary animal industrial complex.4 and though it did not resolve the divide between sentiocentric and ecocentric conceptions of morality, jane mt. pleasant’s study of traditional haudenosaunee food systems helped me understand that before conquest, the area that i now called home was an agricultural powerhouse that relied heavily on plant-based nutrition and had no need to exploit nonhuman animal labor. after the clinton-sullivan campaign of 1779 (mt. pleasant 471-473) destroyed haudenosaunee agricultural fields and burned the food stores, and after haudenosaunee land was drastically reduced, indigenous food systems would be humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 136 irreparably harmed. the american historian william cronon’s changes in the land supplemented mt. pleasant’s work by showing how the spread of animal agriculture and fenced private property was directly responsible for the political and legal transformation of nonhuman animals from relatives to resources in post-contact new england (ch. 7). it became very clear that protesting traditional hunts was not only misguided, but also harmful in the same way that tek can be, when deployed as an expansion of western ideals. it was noble to work for the protection of animal lives, i thought, but not like this — not by protesting one of the few treaty rights left for an oppressed people whose food and labor systems represented a preferable vision for human-animal relations. the alternative, then, was clear: to work towards strengthening indigenous sovereignty. as i researched tek and indigenous-inspired “ally” groups in new york, i saw practical examples of what we are now calling interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept. near ithaca, an ally group called strengthening haudenosaunee-american relations through education (share) bought a 60-acre organic farm and donated it to the cayuga (one of the six nations of the haudenosaunee confederacy). the cayuga had not had land of their own since 1779, when they were attacked and forced to flee because of the invading clinton-sullivan campaign (hansen and rossen). the share farm, as it is now known, exists as a gathering place for the cayuga and their neighbors and supporters, an educational site for students, and a working farm. it is also an experiment in implementing a system of environmental governance that is both fundamentally indigenous and inherently collaborative. the farm re-asserts indigenous sovereignty on the land in a small but profound way, reminding us that decolonization is not just metaphorical (tuck and yang), but material and practical. the farm also shows the enormity of the task in front of us: 60 acres is a tiny fraction of the cayuga homeland, and yet restoring it to the cayuga took hundreds of thousands of donated dollars (what some in the ally group think of as reparations), and faced fierce reactionary opposition, including public protests, signs, and billboards (“no sovereign nation, no reservation”) from a politically-motivated group of area residents opposed to an indigenous presence (hansen and rossen 130). the share farm therefore shows the practical difficulty of decolonization efforts, and by extension, the difficulty of implementing interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept on a large scale. despite this, the farm also provides a template for how it can be done — and how nonindigenous people like myself can contribute. 2. tek, responsibility, and healing. as someone who is trained in western science as an ecologist and has worked hard to remain grounded and rooted in my indigenous adam j. fix, hugh burnam, and ray gutteriez -toward interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept: autoethnographies at the intersection of traditional ecological knowledge and animal studies 137 culture as a nuum and yokutch person (mono and yokut from the southern sierra nevada range in california), i (ray) am in a unique position to assist in dialogue between the worldview i inherited from my ancestors and the one brought by conquest. i am highly critical of the use of tek in the western sphere, because land managers and academics are attempting to be open to partnering with indigenous peoples, but power is not distributed to indigenous peoples; instead, power is retained in the western institutions. in this section i am going to share about what lead me towards ecology/natural resources in higher education and as a career. when i was little, an elder taught me that the only difference between human-animals and all other animals is we human-animals have the ability to care for all things. i knew this was profound as a kid, yet i did not understand the depth at which this would guide my life. in our community we are given stories, not answers, and as we grow in age, maturity, knowledge, and wisdom, our understanding of the stories we are given should grow as well. having the ability to care for all things is a responsibility, and it is our choice as communities, individuals, and as a species to physically, emotionally, and spiritually fulfill that responsibility or not. as i got older and the depth of my understanding of this story grew, so did my desire to fulfill this responsibility, as my ancestors have done since time immemorial. with all but a couple hundred acres of our wuksachi-nuum ancestral homelands in the hands of the us forest service, national park service, and private individuals, to fulfill this responsibility and tend to the land i decided to pursue ecology in higher education and as a career. in my journey in higher education i naively believed that there would be space in the realm of ecology for my community’s worldview. i have watched tek grow in acceptance in universities and land management agencies. the difficulty has been the lack of substance in the “acceptance.” while there are those who are committed to the redistribution of power needed for indigenous people to reclaim their roles as caretakers, many seem only interested in tek as it pertains to their discipline in academia or land management, and are not dedicated to the decolonization of their institution. the space that has been created for tek is important movement in the empowerment of indigenous knowledge, but it is problematic when tek becomes attached to curriculum or used in land management decisions without indigenous peoples actually being involved as partners with the power to make decisions. as a representative on a usfs landscape restoration partnership, i have seen this behavior humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 138 in action. during a field trip to observe tree mortality and discuss management options, an indigenous elder shared some specific aspects of cultural burning and what his approach would be at a site. a member of the usfs wrote down what was being shared, added the information to the burn plan, and proceeded to call the prescribed fire at that location a cultural burn. in pre-settler times we needed a communal way to reconcile our use of plants and animals. this was done through the development of social norms. when gathering plants, thanks was given before gathering. in addition, an offering was made to the plant and to the land where the plants grow. you always ensure that you leave enough for the next gatherer, whether they are human-animals or animal-animals. when hunting, thanks is always given for a successful hunt. the hunter gives thanks to the animal’s spirit for providing the community with sustenance. as for our responsibility to care for all things — it is our role to learn the biophysical settings, to learn their needs and requirements to thrive. when gathering sticks to make baskets we need to know the right time of year to gather, in order to minimize the impacts and ensure the plants are not killed. as a hunter it is my responsibility to understand deer habitat and ensure that there is plenty of habitat for deer to prosper, and to maximize our use of the flesh, hide, bones, and tendons to honor that animal and the subsistence it brings to our people. in the conversation about tek as a practice and tek as an academic discipline and a land management tool, we need to address the need to heal the wounds of settlercolonial conquest. these wounds are buried deep in the minds, bodies, and spirits of all who live in this land now called the united states. tek can be a healing space. building on tek as collaboration, when indigenous and non-indigenous people commit to working together in fulfilling our human-animal responsibility of caring for all things — the land, water, air, and our plant and animal relatives we share our mother the earth with — in a manner that empowers indigenous communities, then tek can be regenerative for both indigenous and settler as we fulfill our responsibility as caretakers. 3. tradition, identity, and colonization terminology. throughout this section i use several words interchangeably or as translated in haudenosaunee languages to english: adam j. fix, hugh burnam, and ray gutteriez -toward interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept: autoethnographies at the intersection of traditional ecological knowledge and animal studies 139 ·“haudenosaunee” means “iroquois,” “iroquois confederacy,” “six nations,” or “people of the longhouse.” ·“native” and “indigenous” refers to, but is not exclusive of, north american indian, native american, aboriginal, and/ or first nations. ·“nation(s)” refer to indigenous nation(s)/ native tribe(s) or territories. ·“our ways” or “our old ways” refers to “indigenous knowledge(s) (ik)” or “american indian metaphysics,” or “our ways of knowing.” ·“kahstówa” refers to “feathers” or “feather hat” (mohawk language). tradition, identity, and colonization. in this section i use stories of a worldview of my own indigenous identity, along with my family’s history and identity, to provide a brief description of haudenosaunee ways of knowing — whose traditional family units are actually organized through the use of animals as “clans” and to identify maternal lineage and nation membership. i demonstrate this through my experiences as a mohawk father, to highlight internal struggles that i have, which may complicate notions of animal studies, traditional ecological knowledge (tek), and indigenous knowledge (ik), while at the same time shedding light on important differences to valuing animal life through haudenosaunee ways of knowing. my name is hugh burnam (hode’hnyahä:dye’), i am mohawk, wolf clan (haudenosaunee). i am a lifetime learner of our ways, i am a community member. i am a phd candidate in cultural foundations of education at syracuse university. i have two children. both of them are boys. my oldest son is 13 years old and he is my calm, well-mannered, and big-hearted son who cares for everybody. he is also quick to jab you with a sharp joke if you’re not careful. my youngest son is 1 ½ and i can already tell that he is my energetic, outgoing, fun-loving child, who i know will need to look up to his big brother for guidance. as i continue learning about my culture and our ways, i continue to experience the clashes between the “western” world and our world(s), as pertaining to research, to my personal experiences in my community, and my experiences as a parent. this year i wanted to try to make my youngest son a kahstówa made of cloth material, black ash tree splint, and various hawk and goose feathers. we had a special occasion coming up and i wanted to gift this kahstówa to him. as i sat there using my own kahstówa as a guide — mine made with eagle feathers (adult men typically wear eagle feathers), red-tail hawk, blue heron, and turkey feathers — i realized that this was not going to be easy. on the other hand, i also had deadlines coming up for projects at the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 140 university, lesson plans for my work as a teacher, and a dissertation to worry about. i did not have time to work on my son’s kahstówa, but nevertheless i tried. i sat there all day, experimenting with feather placement, wrapping sinew on the feathers, stitching them on, etc. i tried my best to have a “good mind” while i worked on the project, as we believe that you are to put your “good intention” into your most important work. unfortunately, i felt rushed. i kept thinking to myself that this was unfair. it seemed that every time that i wanted to go hunting, tan a hide, study language, or in this case, make my son something nice using feathers, these projects were always cut short because of my work outside of actually being haudenosaunee, learning and carrying on our traditions. i continue to think about ways that animal studies may be tied to our ways, aside from clothing and ceremonial attire. i discuss my nuclear family, which prompts me to discuss the ways that haudenosaunee separate traditionally families. traditionally, we identify ourselves through the maternal line and nation identity/ membership, of which we have “clans.” clans are themselves organized by specific clan animals such as hawks, bears, or turtles — to name a few. we have hundreds of stories about these animals, all of which can be found within our local territories, and these specific stories account for the ways that our clan families have come to be. many of these stories are told by elders and knowledge holders. eventually, the family units, or clans, became our governance structure through the uniting of various nations of the entire haudenosaunee, which we call the “great law of peace.” our governance structure is organized in a complex system of checks and balances between entire nations comprised of clan families, all headed by leaders of those clans families — known as chiefs, clanmothers, and faithkeepers (porter; barreiro). our nations operated traditionally through this system of governance, which is still intact today. this intimate familial connectedness and interaction, as woven through stories and tradition for thousands of years, became important for political strength and unity. all of this centers on our environment and living beings — both human and non-human. as i write this section, i reflect on many ways that my nation and my confederacy conduct our affairs, speak our languages, and arrange our families that were essentially centered on our environment, which included animals around us. we use animals not only as representative of our families and governance structure, but also in everyday adam j. fix, hugh burnam, and ray gutteriez -toward interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept: autoethnographies at the intersection of traditional ecological knowledge and animal studies 141 life as we hunt, fish, and use their bodies for our warmth and in ceremonies to give thanks. we are taught to use everything that they give to us — we call this “one dish, one spoon” — take only what you need and no more. if someone takes more than they need, it is against traditional customs of haudenosaunee, and it may be perceived as “greedy.” on the other hand, if someone doesn’t use what they have, say a person doesn’t eat all of their food or if they hunt and they don’t use all of the animal, it could be considered to be “wasteful.” i put these words in quotes because i have heard elders scold children and young adults for violating these customs, myself included. we give thanks to the animals even when we often take their lives to sustain our own. we have limitations, because we know that we cannot hunt certain animals all year-round and that we also want them to repopulate and replenish their own lives. but there is struggle, because we live in a world that does still does not understand who we are and in many cases still rejects indigenous peoples and ways of knowing. this makes learning and carrying on our ways, my responsibilities as a parent, very difficult. to maintain our identity in an assimilatory world today, i think, is the crux of the issue between traditional ecological knowledge (tek) and indigenous knowledge (ik). the difficulties of learning our old ways, as north american indigenous peoples now within this current settler colonial context, have arisen out of the remnants of disparaging histories of forced christianity, physical and cultural genocide, and the perpetual threat of an assimilatory landscape. much of the lasting effects of this history took hold as a result of systemic political and “legal” processes, such as: the doctrine of discovery (heath; newcomb) the indian act of canada (belanger; sinclair), the indian termination act (reyhner; kelly), the assimilation and cultural genocide efforts of residential boarding schools (juutilainen; grande), and forced citizenship via the united states and canadian citizenship acts (mccarthy; porter; simpson), to name a few, all which aimed to strip us of our indigenous knowledges, “savagery,” and “barbarism.” dan longboat (haudenosaunee) describes the urgent need for a curriculum that “include[s] stories, songs, life practices, and natural experiential learning in order to become ecologically literate” and to develop a “fluency in nature” (kulnieks et al 14). he writes about a “common understanding” and the need for indigenous peoples and non-indigenous settlers to collaborate together in order to develop a curriculum that “help[s] to resolve environmental issues” by utilizing stakeholders and knowledge holders such as scientists, eco-theorists, community leaders, and elders. longboat cites humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 142 bringhurst’s observation that most of us grew up in “industrialized economies and colonial regimes,” and therefore think that we don’t have a choice when it comes to our relationship to the planet. but we do have a choice, according to bringhurst: “that choice is to participate in the biosphere” (269). in their chapter titled “becoming visible,” ryan et al. cite anishnabe elder david courchene, who states, “effort must be made in order to be able to be able to be part of nature,” and that the children involved within this way of knowing “deserve the right to feel the land” (23). ryan et al. also describe the historical ways in which indigenous ways of knowing — languages, dances, and cultural traditions — were made illegal by canada (and the united states, i would add). as a result, indigenous ways of knowing eventually went underground and were hidden from the public, in order to survive. ryan et al. also cite a clan mother from six nations, alma greene, who wrote a 1971 book titled forbidden voice, reflections of a mohawk indian, which caused controversy in her community because her work essentially brought haudenosaunee teachings back to “public domain” (23). the heated discourse and disagreement is clearly embedded, to me, as glimpses into the past — that survival meant to separate indigenous ways from the mainstream us and canadian society. this brings to mind many complicated questions for me, including my apprehension in writing my ethnography: what should i share? how much should i share? why should i share? i have all of these questions, given the history of attempted physical and cultural erasure of my people. as a mohawk father, a haudenosaunee community member, and a scholar, i aim to continue the discussion about the often assimilatory approaches of the western academy. i want to continue to convey the difficulties of balancing indigenous haudenosaunee life-ways with the outside world. reading this over, i am still conflicted. i am still apprehensive about sharing more, which comes from a deep-rooted survival mechanism that my community gave to me a long time ago. in many ways i am thankful for that instruction, essentially a warning that my community gave to me, as this way of protecting my people and my family — by not sharing information — has become a traditional teaching for me. this is how we survive. on the one hand, i want to believe the overall goal of the western academy, to share knowledge and to take part in the liberal ideals of the western academy, as i have agreed to write this paper. i have chosen to take part in the beginnings of this collaboration. but on the other hand, i turn to the academy and ask these critical questions: what more do you want from my people? why should i share this information to you? you’ve already taken so, so much. i would even say, you’ve taken much more than you need. adam j. fix, hugh burnam, and ray gutteriez -toward interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept: autoethnographies at the intersection of traditional ecological knowledge and animal studies 143 in one of the first conversations that we had about this paper i stood in my kitchen thinking of topics to write about. as two of the other authors of this paper, ray and adam, threw around ideas for their writing, i struggled to come up with ideas of my own. i wanted to discuss the different ways that indigenous peoples understand their relationship to the earth and to the beings all around us. i would like to close out my section, as we did early in the paper, by acknowledging the ways in which we are told to give thanks, gratitude, and maintain an important teaching of reciprocity with the elements of creation. we give thanks to the people, then to mother earth, then to the grasses, medicines, trees, berries, and things that sustain our lives and to the animals and birds — who provide us with food, clothing, shelter, and songs. i wanted to explain that we give thanks to all kinds of beings from the soft winds, our grandfathers’ their thundering voices, our elder brother the sun and our grandmother the moon who walk in the nighttime sky with our grandfathers the stars. we give thanks to the four messengers, our teachers and to the creator — all of these elements of creation are so vital to understand if we are to discuss traditional ecological knowledge, indigenous knowledge, or animal studies. while they were talking, i also realized that i was staring at feathers, specifically, hawk, turkey, heron, and eagle feathers. i was staring at my kahstówah. immediately, i thought of my son’s kahstówah — which is now imperfect, and i hesitate to write that it is finished, yet he wore it to his first ceremony. my mom always told me, “make sure that there are mistakes in your work.” for me, this was always easy to do, and mistakes are clearly made in my son’s first kahstówah (i am laughing as i write this). she told me before that “nothing is perfect” and to intentionally keep a thread or two untied. although she wouldn’t outright say this, to me, she carries on a knowledge and way of thinking given to her from our family, community, and elders both alive and not. she gave me — as she often intentionally and unintentionally does — a way of thinking about our work and our relationships to one another. in some way, i hope that we could think about our relationships with animals as imperfect, as often even colonized now, but also as relationships that must be re-examined through a traditional indigenous lens. we must challenge our own colonial thinking, as our relationships to animals, and their relationships to us, are unfinished and always ongoing. conclusion. in this paper, we have explored the intersections of tek and animal studies, using the analytic paradigm of interspecies thinking. while recognizing that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 144 differences will remain between interspecies thinking and ik (particularly because of conflicts between sentiocentric and ecocentric conceptions of morality), we have made an argument that the invitation present in whyte’s notion of tek as a collaborative concept presents an opportunity to bridge the fields, and we have called this interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept. we have found parallel lines of thought within haudenosaunee and mono and yokut teachings, and through the actions of their allies. we have explained how we are each positioned with respect to this topic, and have provided autoethnographic accounts that function as both an exploration of the topic from unique perspectives and an invitation to other indigenous and non-indigenous people to engage in a critical dialogue situated at this intersection. we contend that autoethnography as a method has enabled the three authors to navigate a complex more-than-human terrain while retaining autonomy over their own ethnographic limit. animal studies compels us to take seriously the more-than-human dimensions of our relationships, and tek urges us to re-imagine environmental governance. similarly, this paper extends an invitation to scholars and practitioners in each field to reconsider their practices in light of the other. future work in this area could expand upon the use of autoethnography to examine case studies of the intricacies of human-animal interaction within tek-based environmental governance systems. additional applied scholarship could analyze the collaboration between non-indigenous animal studies scholars and indigenous scholars in the creation and implementation of tek-based environmental governance systems. in either case, the efficacy of the notion of interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept could be examined. notes 1. while tallbear and deloria, jr. use the term “american indian metaphysic,” we prefer the use of “indigenous knowledge” (ik) as a more expansive and inclusive descriptor. 2. here we are quoting kyle powys whyte’s description of “tek as a collaborative concept” as the basis for our description of interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept. we have inserted “interspecies thinking” in place of “tek” and made the changes indicated by brackets. though the term “interspecies thinking” cannot be attributed to a single author, in this context we are primarily influenced by kim tallbear’s usage. 3. see fix. adam j. fix, hugh burnam, and ray gutteriez -toward interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept: autoethnographies at the intersection of traditional ecological knowledge and animal studies 145 4. the phrase “animal industrial complex” was coined by barbara noske in the 1989 book humans and other animals. noske uses the phrase to describe the complex network of interactions between government, the private animal agriculture industry, and science that functions to sustain and normalize the system of human consumption of nonhuman animals. works cited akwesasne notes, ed. basic call to consciousness. native voices, 2005. arluke, a., and c. r. sanders. regarding animals. philadelphia press, 1996. barreiro, josé, ed. indian roots of american democracy. akwe:kon press, 1992. _____. thinking in indian: a john mohawk reader. fulcrum publishing, 2010. belanger, yale deron. ways of knowing: an introduction to native studies in canada. toronto, on: nelson, 2017. berkes, fikret. sacred ecology. 3rd edition. routledge, 2012. collins, patricia hill. “learning from the outsider within: the sociological significance of black feminist thought.” social problems 33.6 (1986): s14-s32. cronon, william. changes in the land: indians, colonists, and the ecology of new england. 20th anniversary edition. hill and wang, 2003. davis, a., and ruddle, k. “constructing confidence: rational skepticism and systematic enquiry in local ecological knowledge research.” ecological applications 20.3 (2010): 880-894. deloria, philip j. playing indian. yale up, 1998. deloria, vine jr. “american indian metaphysics.” power and place: indian education in america. v. deloria, jr. and d. r. wildcat, eds. fulcrum publishing, 2001. 1-6. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 146 _____. “foreword.” keepers of the animals: native american stories and wildlife activities for children. m. j. caduto and j. bruchac, eds. fulcrum publishing, 1997. xi-xii. denzin, norman k., yvonna s. lincoln, and linda tuhiwai smith. handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies. sage publishing, 2008. dwyer, sonya corbin, and jennifer l. buckle. “the space between: on being an insider-outsider in qualitative research.” international journal of qualitative methods 8.1 (2009): 54-63. emel, jody, chris wilbert, and jennifer wolch. “animal geographies.” society & animals 10.4 (2002): 408-412. fix, adam j. “’where is the seat for the buffalo?’: placing nonhuman animals in the idle no more movement.” journal for critical animal studies 12.1 (2014): 89-119. furman, rich. “autoethnographic poems and narrative reflections: a qualitative study on the death of a companion animal.” journal of family social work 9.4 (2006): 23-38. grande, sandy. red pedagogy: native american social and political thought. rowman & littlefield, 2015. hansen, brooke and jack rossen. “building bridges through public anthropology in the haudenosaunee homeland.” past meets present: archeologists partnering with museum curators, teachers, and community groups. j.h. jameson, jr., and s. baugher, eds. springer, 2007. 127-148. harmon, amy. “indian tribe wins fight to limit research of its dna.” the new york times april 21, 2010. online. accessed 26 jan. 2019. heath, joseph j. “the doctrine of christian discovery: its fundamental performance in united states indian law and the need for its repudiation and removal.” albany government law review 10 (2017): 239. hedges, chris, and joe sacco. days of destruction, days of revolt. nation books, 2012. adam j. fix, hugh burnam, and ray gutteriez -toward interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept: autoethnographies at the intersection of traditional ecological knowledge and animal studies 147 houde, nicholas. “the six faces of traditional ecological knowledge: challenges and opportunities for canadian co-management arrangements.” ecology and society 12.2 (2007): 34. ingold, tim. “from trust to domination: an alternative history of human/animal relations.” animals and human society: changing perspectives. a. manning and j. serpell, eds. routledge, 2002. 1-22. irvine, leslie. “a model of animal selfhood: expanding interactionist possibilities.” symbolic interaction 27.1 (2004): 3-21. juutilainen, s. a. “haudenosaunee women as mothers of the nation: resilience in the wake of indian residential school legacies.” american journal of indigenous studies 1.2 (2017): si35-si43. kelly, casey ryan. “orwellian language and the politics of tribal termination (1953– 1960).” western journal of communication 74.4 (2010): 351-371. kimmerer, robin wall. braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. milkweed editions, 2013.] kulnieks, andrejs, dan roronhiakewen longboat, and kelly young, eds. contemporary studies in environmental and indigenous pedagogies: a curricula of stories and place. sense publishers, 2013. ladson-billings, gloria, and jamel donnor. “the moral activist role of critical race theory scholarship.” the sage handbook of qualitative research. third edition. sage, 2005. 279-301. livingston, julie, and jasbir k. puar. “interspecies.” social text 29.1 (2011): 3-14. mccarthy, theresa. “dę'ni: s nisa'sgao'dę?: haudenosaunee clans and the reconstruction of traditional haudenosaunee identity, citizenship, and nationhood.” american indian culture and research journal 34.2 (2010): 81-101. mt. pleasant, jane. “the paradox of plows and productivity: an agronomic comparison of cereal grain production under iroquois hoe culture and european humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 148 plow culture in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.” agricultural history 85.4 (2011): 460-492. newcomb, steven t. “the evidence of christian nationalism in federal indian law: the doctrine of discovery, johnson v. mcintosh, and plenary power.” nyu review of law & social change 20 (1992): 303. noske, barbara. humans and other animals. pluto press, 1989. porter, robert b. “the demise of the ongwehoweh and the rise of the native americans: redressing the genocidal act of forcing american citizenship upon indigenous peoples.” harvard black letter law journal 15 (1999). 107. porter, tom. and grandma said — : iroquois teachings, as passed down through the oral tradition. xlibris corporation, 2008. reyhner, jon, and jeanne eder. american indian education: a history. u of oklahoma p, 2017. robinson, christine christina l. posthumanist (auto) ethnography: toward the ethical representation of other animals. diss. colorado state university, 2011. ryan, robert a. “native american indian cultural risk factors — contact to termination.” indigenous policy journal 26.2 (2015). online. accessed 26 jan. 2019. ryan, thomas g., lisa m. van every, astrid steele, and verna l. mcdonald. “becoming visible.” contemporary studies in environmental and indigenous pedagogies: a curricula of stories and place. a. kulnieks, d.r. longboat, and k. young, eds. sense publishers, 2013. 21-48. sanders, clinton r., and arnold arluke. “if lions could speak: investigating the animal-human relationship and the perspectives of nonhuman others.” sociological quarterly 34.3 (1993): 377-390. simpson, audra. “on ethnographic refusal: indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship.” junctures: the journal for thematic dialogue 9 2007: 67-80. adam j. fix, hugh burnam, and ray gutteriez -toward interspecies thinking as a collaborative concept: autoethnographies at the intersection of traditional ecological knowledge and animal studies 149 simpson, leanne. “looking after gdoo-naaganinaa: precolonial nishnaabeg diplomatic and treaty relationships.” wicazo sa review 23.2 (2008): 29-42. sinclair, raven. “the indigenous child removal system in canada: an examination of legal decision-making and racial bias.” first peoples child & family review 11.2 (2017): 8-18. smith, linda tuhiwai. decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous people. zed books, 2012. tallbear, kim. “why interspecies thinking needs indigenous standpoints.” theorizing the contemporary. cultural anthropology. april 24, 2011. online. accessed 26 jan. 2019. tuck, eve and k. wayne yang. “decolonization is not a metaphor.” decolonization: indigeneity, education & society 1.1 (2012): 1-40. waldau, paul. animal studies: an introduction. oxford up, 2013. whyte, kyle powys. “on the role of traditional ecological knowledge as a collaborative concept: a philosophical study.” ecological processes 2.7 (2013): 2-7. whyte, kyle powys, joseph p. brewer ii, and jay t. johnson. “weaving indigenous science, protocols, and sustainability science.” sustainability science 11.1 (2015): 25-32. williams jr., robert a. savage anxieties. palgrave macmillan, 2012. young, robert l., and carol y. thompson. “the selves of other animals: reconsidering mead in light of multidisciplinary evidence." 40th anniversary of studies in symbolic interaction. emerald group publishing limited, 2013. 467-483. zedler, joy b. “integrating traditional ecological knowledge with adaptive restoration.” ecosystem health and sustainability 2.6 (2016): 1-2. microsoft word forum-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 humanimalia roundtable on breed participants: margaret derry, donna haraway, donna landry, harriet ritvo, sandra swart moderators: kristen guest and monica mattfeld event date: august 3, 2017 (skype) question 1: your work focuses on a range of domesticated animals — including dogs, horses, cattle, and chickens. was the focus of your scholarship influenced by your personal affections or practical interactions with a particular breed or species? what difference did that make to your scholarship and politics? harriet ritvo: my relationship has been with one species, felis catus (or felis sylvestris catus); in particular, seven of the nine cats that i’ve owned (or accommodated) have been siamese to one degree or another. the only place that shows up in my work is in the animal estate, where i devoted a couple pages to the emergence of siamese cats, something i might not otherwise have done. but the main impact on my work is simply the experience of having a sustained relationship with individuals who are not human, rather than the fact that they were cats, or siamese cats. the external experience that has had an impact on my scholarly work and politics is my long interest in biology, especially evolutionary biology and zoology, and also an early — and i would say irregular — experience as a veterinary assistant to my uncle. what i’m working on now has to do with animals that are somewhere around the boundary, or non-boundary, that separates domesticated animals from animals that aren’t considered to be domesticated. as with many things this is as much about the way people think and the consequences of this thinking as about something intrinsic to animals themselves. margaret derry: i think i should begin by explaining the general focus of my research. my primary concern has always been with the methodology behind historical animal breeding, namely patterns of artificial selection. therefore my response to questions concerning the meaning of “breed,” “type” comes from that perspective. my personal past very definitely affected how my approaches to historical animal breeding would evolve. as a child, we bred hamsters. i also studied horse magazines on the breeding of thoroughbreds, quarter horses, and arabians. i bought books on the breeding of dogs — specifically collies. i associated breeding with art, for i was a drawer and painter from earliest childhood. in later life — after marrying and having children — i established myself as a painter, often favoring animal subjects. i sold my paintings through galleries and commissions. my husband and i bought a farm — and we humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 6 decided to buy and breed cattle. i was ecstatic! hands-on experience gave shape to my earlier interests by providing me with an inside understanding of breeding. the cattle also stimulated my painting — and i saw the act of breeding as one closely related to painting. it was a form of creativity, and a challenge in much the same way that painting was for me. there are very few good breeders, or even true breeders. there are lots of animal multipliers but that is not the same thing as breeding. when i returned to university in my late 40s to do a doctorate, it was natural for me to focus on the history of cattle breeding specifically. i found my breeding experience, combined with a lifelong interest in how breeding works, had taught me how “read” documents for indepth meaning about how and why people bred animals the way they do. i could get past phrases such as “breed the best to best” — which in themselves convey little meaning of how artificial selection is actually practiced. i became fascinated with the interconnection of art and practicality/science in breeding. the old phrase “the art of breeding” both made sense to me, but at the same time made little sense, and i could see the same dichotomy in breeder language. the subject of breeding has led me into ever widening subjects: eugenics, genetics, and culture versus science. at the moment i am looking at the effects, or lack of effects, of state regulation and the pressure of animal rights/welfare organizations on breeding. donna landry: i think happenstance shapes everything, especially when histories coalesce in what donna haraway calls “situated knowledges.” not only did i happen to prefer horses amongst all species of animal when i was growing up, but i was also fortunate enough to have riding lessons. then i fell in with a woman who was interested in arabians. i was an only child, fairly isolated — having been displaced from new york to ohio — and trying to find my way, so the arabian horse became my focus. later, as an english major, i was very interested in questions of politics, aesthetics, and ideology. over time, all these interests came together in my scholarship, though i didn’t originally work on horses. i began, as many feminists do, with recovery work of women’s writing, focusing on laboring-class women poets of the 18th century. i went on to work on the politics of the countryside in relation to increasing urbanization in the long 18th century, and on questions of empire. like many historians who grew up in a post-1968 generation, i was interested in the ways questions about class, race, and gender shape the way we look at history. in the late nineties, as i was working on the invention of the countryside, it became impossible to ignore the way horses were contributing far more to changes in british culture than had been acknowledged, and i began to think seriously about both the question of agency on the part of other species and multi-species dynamics. humanimalia roundtable on breed 7 sandra swart: i used to think — like many people — that to really understand an animal you needed to love them. in fact, konrad lorenz insisted that to study any species one had to love it. i began by working on dogs and horses because i know them pretty well. i’ve lived very closely with horses and dogs, and i’ve bred them, and i certainly love them. in writing animal histories, my approach was — at the time — to expose a kind of social-history school “workers’ history of animals” and reclaim a hidden or silent narrative. being an oxford-trained social historian i was brought up on that kind of working-class recovery project in the style of e.p. thompson, and i wanted to look at animals in a way that avoided what he called “the enormous condescension of posterity” by addressing animal agency. having lived with animals and experienced first-hand — for good and for bad — their agency, it has always seemed quite odd to me that people even debate the issue. as i’ve gotten older, however, i’ve found the idea of challenging condescension more problematic. when i wrote about horses they appeared in the stories i told not only as the gentle herbivore in a relationship with the rogue primate that is us, but also as the ultimate migrant laborer and foot soldier. yet when i look at my work, i can see now that i still wrote the view from the saddle, not the view from the horse, so the condescension remains. at the moment i am doing something totally different: writing a book on the baboon and human history that examines the long and tangled relationship between humans and baboons. over the longue durée we have certainly had a very stormy relationship, as close family often does. it is much different than writing about dogs and horses, moreover, because it’s impossible to say that you love baboons. because they are so much like us, you can only say that you like or dislike individual baboons, but to announce that you love them would be completely mad: like announcing you love all of humanity or that you need to love people to write decent history, which of course you don’t. so i would now say that historians are the curators of the human condition, but that manichean terms like “love” and “hate” simply don’t work. i would also say, building on levi-strauss’s idea that animals are “good to think with,” that — with all apologies to george orwell — some animals are more good to think with than others. for me, baboons are helping me think through how you can write not only the natural history but also the social history of an animal. specifically, i think that if you can demonstrate that the history of local baboon groups is idiographic and diachronic, then you can take it out of the realm of the natural and into the cultural. and if baboons possess that slippery thing called “culture”; if we can show that their lifeways change over time and that they exhibit agency, though obviously in humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 8 circumstances beyond their control; if we can demonstrate that their ideas are transmitted and that different generations learn to live differently because of changing environmental contexts, then i think we can actually write a social history of baboons — though we have to do so using primary sources written by their enemies. this is a very fundamental difference for me, in writing about baboons rather than dogs and horses, because i’m out of my comfort zone in all kinds of ways. like scholars who work on the classical era of ancient rome are often struck with how these people “are just like us,” that’s what happened to me when i was writing about dogs and horses. but at the moment i am more like a historian who looks at the 1960s and thinks, “those people are a lot like us, but boy, they are also really, really different.” donna haraway: i think there is no question that in my work i’m very personally entangled. experiences of affection and relationship have been fundamental to the direction my scholarship has taken. even as a phd student in biology, i was passionate about the stuff of biology that wasn’t even full organisms — it could be electron transport systems and disassembled mitochondria. i remember once telling my women’s liberation group that i experienced an erotic attraction to the electron transport system. it was always a relationship of love and rage that really drew me in on a deeply bodily basis. and even though material i was studying was so enmeshed in corporate and military and consumerist processes, i felt that as a biologist i was responsible for somehow witnessing, and maybe something more than that. so my early work, crystals, fabrics, and fields, through primate visions grew out of that. then came facing up to my relationships with individual dogs that had begun with my childhood dog, general eisenhower. he was a rescue dalmatian who was euthanized after he snapped at my baby brother. i remember the loss of innocence in permitting myself to be fascinated by my dog being brought to be killed. i repressed my complicity and my capacity for voyeurist sadism in that act for years, until i realized i was not alone and that the capacity for voyeurist sadism was a really important, awful part of our relationship with non-human animals living closely with us. so in a sense general eisenhower has always been the underside of my effort to try to figure out what living closely with a companion of another species is about. cayenne, my australian shepherd agility companion, and now shindychew (from ursula k. leguin’s “paradises lost,” her name is corrupted mandarin for “new earth”), my rescued formosan mountain dog cross, have taught me what i have distilled into a kind of aphorism: if you really take relationship with any being seriously, and most certainly relationship with an animal of another species — domesticated or not — these humanimalia roundtable on breed 9 animals make you more worldly, not less. i am adamant that the taking seriously of lifechanging love affairs with another animal doesn’t make us smaller. it makes us bigger in really critical ways. so the australian shepherd cayenne, without ever ceasing to be a dear personal friend, also ends up taking me from the spanish rough sheep brought to the americas, to the history of conquest, to the breeding of herding dogs of the american west, and to the extermination of navajo churro sheep, among many other entangled histories. taking cayenne seriously also took me into health and genetics activism in purebred dogland, and into some animal rights advocates’ opposition to all breeding of so-called purebred dogs. she took me into geriatric medicine for an aging companion, and our shared medical issues got me thinking seriously about the fact that we were both eating synthetic estrogens for female problems to do with sphincters that don’t work very well when you get old. before i got shindychew, first dumped as a puppy in the outskirts of taipei and then fostered in a fascinating international doghuman community linking california and taiwan, i had no intention of engaging in international adoption. but without telling the whole story of how we got her, her birth place made me curious about other worlds. because of her, i started furiously reading english translations of taiwanese fiction like wu ming-yi’s the man with compound eyes, which has two indigenous formosan mountain dogs in the plot, and learning about the history and contemporary struggles of formosan mountain dogs and diverse groups of indigenous taiwanese. every time i end up in a love affair it excites curiosity, and because i have been educated the way i have curiosity incites scholarship. in a range of ways, i can’t take a love affair seriously unless i somehow have an historical sense of what got us here and a political-ethical sense of how and to whom it matters. margaret derry: i think it is really interesting how much people have talked, in different ways, about the love you must have for animals, the empathy for them. i think that is very important, and has led me to think about the ways art and beauty inform the process of breeding. certainly, having bred cattle for 25 years i have known many, many animals, and it was their beauty as much as their personalities that blew me away: the way animals move, the way they look at you. it isn’t just love; it is sense of beautiful, living other things. sandra swart: i don’t know. my dog is a great mother and a great dog, but she is no looker. it hasn’t been beauty that has attracted me to animals, not even to horses. for me, it’s a sense of like-mindedness. when i was young i fell in love with a naval officer and we lived together. he was lovely in many ways. but often i feel my dog and i understand each other much more deeply: it’s more a meeting of minds. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 10 donna haraway: can i ask you all a question about social history? it isn’t questions about the agency of individual animals that really interests me, but how we might inhabit the premise that other critters actually have social histories apart from us: ecologically, developmentally, evolutionarily, historically. their sociology has many points in historical time. so how do we take that seriously? i’m not particularly afraid of anthropomorphism. i think its fine to use various categories, as long as one tries to make them visible. but i’d like to know how you all think about doing the social history of other critters? harriet ritvo: i would say that as long as you respect the complexity of the evidence, which is normally mediated through us, it should be possible. it’s difficult, both because of that mediation and because there’s not very much of it. there have been various scholarly attempts to speak for animals or retrieve their voices, or something like that, in which good intentions often disguise assumptions that are fairly arrogant. i think eric baratay1 makes the most persuasive attempt that i have encountered in his history of the non-human participants in world war i. donna haraway: there’s also a novel, belka, why don’t you bark? by hideo furukawa,2 that tracks the fates, lineages, and socialities of japanese and american war dogs that were abandoned on the aleutian islands at the end of world war ii. i think that book does an extraordinary job of writing the dogs’ social as well as individual history from a literary point of view. donna landry: that’s very interesting because it raises a question that subaltern studies posed, as gayatri chakravorty spivak showed, but has largely been dropped — that it’s not that the subaltern cannot speak, but rather a question of what the hegemonic audience can or cannot hear. the complexity of the evidence is certainly highly mediated, but nevertheless within these interstices one can find something which is not a stable, fixed entity but rather something that has its own dynamic. and i think the histories of animals offer interstices through which one sometimes gets glimpses of moments of change. in my case i have only worked on horses, but i think there are moments where what i see is some kind of equine agency in terms of the horse’s complex evolution with humans. sandra swart: i’ve experimented (as donna landry has) with cultural histories of horses, and i think there’s been some good work on this. but what’s currently exciting me is seeing how baboons have a social history that is not completely or directly mediated by humans. of course, humans make a large part of their environment, but humanimalia roundtable on breed 11 they’re not the ones driving the cultural change. very briefly, there’s a great example in kenya where there was a bad outbreak of tb in the 1980s because a local village was putting contaminated meat on the rubbish dump. among the local baboon troop, the big males got to the meat first (by pushing and shoving juveniles and females out of the way) and they subsequently died of tb. it almost wiped out an entire generation of tough, strong primate males. when researchers came back a decade later, they found that the actual culture of that particular troop had changed. it was far less warlike, far less aggressive, and something fundamental had happened: there was a shift in the idiographic culture of that specific group. so there was a lot more mutual grooming, and there was much less violence towards subordinates, although there was still a hierarchy. it seems that this has been transmitted generationally, and while humans have had a part to play in this narrative, it’s quite a small part. question 2: in our research we have struggled to determine a temporal point in the history of domesticated species at which “breed” becomes recognizable in its modern form. in part this has to do with the multiple meanings breed can enfold — including terms like land race, variety, population, species, sub-species, kind, family, kin, brood, lineage, stock, clan, tribe, as well as distinctions such as half-breed, mixed breed, new breed, traditional breed. there is also the problem of non-anglophone notions of “breed,” which have distinct historical genealogies and meanings. how do we distill out of all this a useful focus for research? harriet ritvo: in a way it’s a bit quixotic to attempt to establish a clear timeline for that kind of evolution of sense; it’s even hard to establish a consensus meaning for most of these terms for any particular point in time. often if you look at the work of a single person — even somebody like darwin who thought carefully about such things — you find him using many of these terms, but using them inconsistently. i wouldn’t be surprised if we all do that. one of the problems is that all of those terms are relative, with the possible exception of species (i don’t think it has a different relation to the real world than the others do, though it does have a kind of special status within taxonomy). these terms are really subdivisions of each other, rather than references to abstract categories that exist outside of what’s put into them. when i started working on classification, i had a meeting with a very kind botanist who was also a very good historian of science. i asked him about categories like family — for example, whether there was anything that made a family of conifers systematically similar to a family of molluscs — and all he did was laugh, which i took as a negative. i think that response would apply to both scientific and vernacular terms. so i think the history of these terms is incredibly interesting, but i also think that attempting to pin them down — to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 12 look for a consensus about their meaning at a certain time, even if inquiry is restricted to a particular place or language — is probably going to be frustrating. margaret derry: i agree with harriet that a lot of these terms are simply terms, and that different people are going to think about them differently and categorize them differently. the words “breed” and “type” can be applied to any domesticated species because all result from artificial selection. any time artificial selection is applied to a species [even populations of wild animals], studies can be done on the idea of either type or breed. the idea of type is ancient and probably was part of domestication itself. early artificial selection would have been used to modify a group of animals therefore cut off from the larger gene pool of their species in order to make them conform to human ideals — primary among such ideals would be tameness and tractability. inbreeding is essential to fix desirable type and that method probably plays a significant role in the combined changes seen in early domestic animals. we know now that simply selecting for these traits will alter physical appearance and genetic makeup (such as tamed foxes changing coat colour, neotony in dogs, or the reduced sized of domestic cattle from their wild counterparts). the more modern idea of type arose throughout the world and related to fixing desired characteristics in animals. while i focus on europe and north america in my research, i think the situation in other areas differs little from that in europe. type always meant reproduction of animals true to type — that is, at least some consistency and generally through inbreeding. “like begets like” being the motto for how artificial selection would be practiced. there were distinct types of dogs, horses, sheep, and cattle through europe probably at least as far back as roman times. these types tended to be restricted to local environments, but there was considerable movement of animals even at that time. the romans took chickens with their armies throughout their empire. horses and cattle were imported from the netherlands to britain and continental europe by the middle ages — and these animals modified the types found in their new homes. the idea of breed is relatively new, compared to domestication, in the course of human/animal history. the idea of breed — that is, before the advent of purebred breeding — was restricted to stock bred and raised by either royalty or nobility. the idea of “breed” dates back at least 2000 years, but gained in strength after 1600. that is true of europe, but also the middle east and china. thoroughbreds, king charles spaniels, lipizzaner horses, arabian horses, pekinese dogs, are all examples from diverse geographic areas. “breed” was the prerogative of animals kept and bred by the humanimalia roundtable on breed 13 nobility and royalty. type referred to the vast majority of animals of different species under human control — and type came to relate to specific geographic locations. the modern idea of breed has become irrevocably interconnected with purebred breeding, a system that arose in england in the early 19th century, and subsequently spread around the world. it is difficult to overestimate the impact purebred breeding has had on artificial selection practices since that time on a world-wide scale. purebred breeding democratized the idea of breed, the earlier preserve of the upper classes, and in doing so has become so pervasive that other and older approaches to artificial selection often seem hidden. purebred breeding is based on two primary concepts: the keeping of public pedigrees as opposed to private records, and a breeding principle based on selection by ancestry breeding. at its heart is the use of a show system to establish levels of excellence. pedigree keeping proved to have huge implications — primarily related to marketing — but it supported ancestry breeding too, a methodology that in its mature form carried with it many complex ideas relating to the convergence of genetics, purity, and quality. succinctly, pedigrees linked breeding culture with economic worth. when pedigree-keeping, with its effect on marketing and breeding methodology/culture, became intimately tied to a show system, the basic dynamics of purebred breeding had been formed. show-ring dynamics under purebred breeding developed more significant implications over the 19th century, and came ultimately to be almost the raison d’être for breeding by the method. pedigrees were vitally interconnected with this structure because they regulated which animals could participate in the show system. since pedigree standards governed which animals could compete in shows, they became intimately tied to the potential marketability that showsuccess provided. while purebred breeding promoted the idea of purity, it is important to remember that simply saying purebred breeding was about purity and elitism is just too simple. the idea of “purity” was irrevocably attached to the concept of consistency of type and the ability to breed truly. the animal was guaranteed “pure” — meaning it would stamp its type on its progeny, and the animal was effectively certified to do so via pedigree status. inbreeding was the method used to fix type. the importance of these features cannot be overestimated when one looks at the compelling market force this provided — especially in long distance travel. the animal would breed as truly in north america as in britain, was the belief. this did not prove to be the case in southern hemisphere countries like south africa — causing many people to question the effects of environment on genetic structure. the cultural significance of “purity,” as opposed to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 14 its breeding significance, comes from the method’s inheritance of thoroughbred horse breeding philosophy. thoroughbred ideas of purity of the blood dovetailed unevenly with robert bakewell’s principle of inbreeding. inbreeding became a stamp of purity. bakewell did not believe in purity and thoroughbred horse breeders did not believe in inbreeding. one domestic species that continued for some time to be dominated by breeding for type was the horse. the thoroughbred, for example, would combine its particular methodology for breeding with a veneer of purebred breeding but it never relinquished its historical approaches to breeding that had emanated from the ideas of royalty and nobility in the late 17th century. the heavy horse — shire and clyde — were not “purebred” until near the end of the 19th century. the french percheron only became “purebred” because americans forced french breeders to adopt the system for marketing reasons. the older horse types found in north america — the royal georges, for example, and the various lines of trotting horses — first came under what was known as the standardbred system (the selection of breeding animals and their pedigree registration are driven off their ability to meet a standard and to pass a test based on that standard), but this too would ultimately be overlaid with purebred breeding. the horse has retained principles of breeding that relate to type more than breed — the standardbred system being type breeding in its modern form — witness the dutch warmbloods. the standardbred system does not pedigree animals solely on the basis that both parents are themselves pedigreed. and there has been a general move within horse-breeding circles back to the idea of type. hard to call this simply cross breeding, because the animals are designed to consistently fit standards of type and to breed truly to that type. as far as i can see, because of the pervasiveness of purebred culture in any breeding, a clear understanding of how purebred breeding works and worked historically is essential in order to see what breeding concepts did not arise out of purebred breeding. it is then possible to see the historical overlay of other approaches to artificial selection and the influence of regional culture on how breeding proceeds, even within the structure of purebred breeding itself. the idea of type did not always die, nor did regional and cultural approaches to artificial selection become completely obliterated by the standards of purebred breeding. it has remained strong in certain horse breeding circles, such as european warmbloods, even if an overlay of purebred methodology infiltrated the breeding of these horses. the overlay of purebred breeding in arabian horses has not obliterated the dictates of a different system relaying on strains and female lines. i think the concepts of breed and type can be useful for researchers if they humanimalia roundtable on breed 15 can distinguish one from the other, and bear in mind that the artificial selection of domestic animals is the key to all this. this is what changes animals, and if we understand what those practices are and how they change over time you can begin to see a complete overlay of systems driven by cultural inlays and changing attitudes — what’s good, what’s bad, and so on. harriet ritvo: can i just mention the big elephant in the room that is not in the question, and that is why domesticated species are called species at all? the reason for doing it is completely different than the reason for identifying species in any other context. donna landry: well we are all in agreement that breed is a construct like race is, that these terms are most certainly relational, and that species has a special status. it seems to me that historically the overlapping use of “breed” enfolds a range of meanings beyond what the nobility produce — as in what the people in a family produce, and what people in a geographical locality produce. in england we find english landowners still speaking of their own personal breed — as in the horses that they breed — into the 18th century, and then that begins to overlap with something that seems to me to have more of an ethnography mapped onto it as it emerges. and then this is combined with the notion of how these creatures behave and what their characters are like. there is type, but it is taken from character as well as visible type. so there’s a long earlymodern period between 1550 and 1850 when these terms are coexisting. but increasingly after 1750, and certainly as margaret says, in the 19th century following the establishment of the general stud book in 1791, the question of purity becomes an issue and the notion of breed becomes something much more associated with nation. and i think this development is important in the development of anglophone (that are also sometimes anglophile) terms as culturally specific. in my work, i’ve been trying to understand turkish and ottoman ways of thinking about questions of breed. in turkish the term “cins” refers to a very capacious concept melding genus, species, class, race, kind, varieties, sex, gender, purebred, and thoroughbred. and then there’s “ırk,” which is race or lineage. in turkey today there are only two kinds of horse which rate as cins: the ingiliz (english) thoroughbred and the purebred arabian. irk might include any number of kinds and all sorts of anatolian breeds, all of which have their own specific histories and locations. now i tried to map this distinction onto ottoman history, where one of the few sources we have is evliya çelebi’s seyahâtnâme.3 evliya çelebi never speaks of “turkish” or turcoman horses, as 17th-century europeans did; he only gives us particular kinds of horses from near the caspian sea or central asian horses that western travellers would have called turcoman — the “nogai” or the “karaҫubuk” (“black rod”). his favorite is the “küheylan,” which might occupy the same category humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 16 as the “arab thoroughbred,” or indicate the specific strain of “küheylan” as still used by the bedouin today. there is a question here about the difference between cins, what gets to count as something that is so legendary as to be almost a species unto itself, and a mere ırk (race). in the west, the problem of breed as “legend,” in this sense, is situationally specific, but something that i think has to do with the rise of nationalism insofar as breed today commodifies and protects type via registries, dedicated organizations and other institutions. sandra swart: because of south africa’s very particular and racialized past the question resonates with me in terms of “breed purity.” i’ve long been tempted to write a book called “mongrel nation: a history of south africa,” because of the politics of breed and the particular route it took here. obviously you all have very usefully discussed the different meanings and concepts behind breed and its etymology — even a kind of taxonomy between these related terms. in afrikaans, however, breed is “ras” (race) and that is exactly how it translates: crudely, coarsely, bluntly. and that’s the way it’s worked historically. when south african breeders talk of breed there’s often a rhetorical overlay of authenticity and purity that actively tries to mask any hybridity. but ironically, hybridity is the most authentic south african dimension of the enterprise. certainly from a teleological perspective, animal breeding is the final place where ideas about purity of breed and openly eugenic discourse can be freely embraced, alongside classism and even sexism. what is useful is the way these associations quite usefully open up otherwise hidden debates. i don’t need to rehearse south africa’s history, but you all know that an exceptionally virulent strain of racism has run unchecked since the early 20th century under the auspices of racial science, accompanied by a morbid fear of miscegenation perhaps unparalleled elsewhere in the world. miscenogenophobia really is the fear of the so-called half caste, of the mongrel, of the impure, and in south africa it signals fears about sexual relations between white people and africans — though in actuality the whole white polity is built on hybridity. the concept of breed really leads us to the continued entanglement of human and animal. if you go right back to the original dutch settlers that have long claimed a purity and superiority of breed, for example, you find there was extensive interbreeding between the dutch settlers and the local khoisan women — not just sexual adventures and coercion, but also marriages in the early years of settlement. this was conveniently forgotten by the apartheid state when they outlawed interracial mixing, but by the late 17th century three-quarters of all children of slaves had white fathers. so there is the humanimalia roundtable on breed 17 creation of a mestizo class that has been denied in the history books. and this doesn’t go away: ideas about genetic and cultural purity persist not just physically but also culturally. here, this idea about an essentially organic culture of particular breeds has offered a useful fiction for ordering and then policing the south african state. yet, there’s a very porous boundary between the apartheid state and human classification that shows its face in the centralized state’s involvement with animal breed associations. in the 1910s and 20s it became increasingly obvious that a lot of white afrikaans farmers were being out-competed by african farmers. to address this, the state kicked into high gear — not only aggressively enforcing segregation legislation to protect the purity of the white race, but also, at exactly the same time, talking about the need to protect existing animal lineages to ensure they were not contaminated or diluted by african stock. there is a very famous quote by louie botha, the first president of south africa, where he says that if you breed an afrikaner cow with a friesland bull that the afrikaner cow will always be contaminated: she will always bear the imprimatur of this first mating and her children will also be polluted even if she then breeds with a pure afrikaner bull. he particularly mentions afrikaner cattle because the boers had an almost quasimystical relationship with this breed, believing that both cattle and men had come from authentic or tougher stock than was owned by the khoisan people and other aboriginal groups. the belief was that these qualities had evolved over time, making cattle and men stoic, noble, enduring, powerful, robust and masculine — and this is exactly how afrikaner culture brokers were starting to describe the afrikaner people. in fact, the story is so entangled that it goes right back to the first great trek in the 1830s, when afrikaners left the cape and came to the hinterland to found independent boer republics. here the myth is that all the wagons were drawn by afrikaner cattle. both cattle and men were seen as breeds that had almost been destroyed by the scorchedearth policy of the british, and the idea was that afrikaner should rally round this breed that had being so good and staunch for the afrikaner people. over time a breed standard developed, and it’s now the most popular beef cattle in the country. it looks entirely different, of course, but while the cow has changed radically the myths of breed purity have stayed the same. donna haraway: there are so many ways to enter this question. the last line of the second question asks how we distill a useful focus for research. obviously, the answer depends on the situated historical/social/biological settings that frame the research. as everyone has already said, the terms themselves are relentlessly relational — so i want to start thinking about this, as sandra has, from the point of view of being a citizen of a racist white-settler colony. though there are many of these, with different histories, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 18 questions about purity and mixing nonetheless remain on the agenda of daily life and political struggle, via questions about who lives and who dies. for both animals and people you cannot separate these issues of political struggle. for example, one can’t go to an off-leash dog beach in california — where the prestige of having and owning an identifiable non-breed, so-called rescue dog (particularly of a pit bull variety) is high — without thinking about the implications of race and class profiling. the death rate of both so-called pitbulls and chihuahua crosses is astonishing and i think of my formosan mountain dog cross, shindychew, and i know that there have been efforts, on the one hand, first to exterminate so-called primitive dogs, and afterwards, on the other hand, to collect the remaining “pure” dogs into a closed breed with a standard, but with two competing breed groups in taiwan. all this while the death rate of mixed dogs escalates, and the situation of free-roaming dogs in taiwan becomes less and less viable. so i’m really interested in these questions of mixture and purity in relation to the state, and particularly to histories that involve colonization; interested in understanding what happens between animals and humans in relation to questions of kind. i remember once being asked by the editors of a marxist dictionary if i could write an account of gender. i had to pay attention to five languages, including chinese, japanese, german, french, and english. as soon as i was thrown to geschlecht in german my entire ability to write that article changed completely, because i was thrown via gender into breeding. for me at this moment, the current question is about kin/kind in relation to family. there are more than seven and a half billion human beings on the planet today; most likely by the end of the century over 11 billion human people will be alive, barring widespread eco-social collapse.4 closely coupled with high-consuming wealthy humans, meat-producing and other extracted, exploited animals increase in numbers beyond bearing. given the extraordinary over-numbering of the planet since world war ii for both humans and non-humans, i’m concerned with this even as i’m also aware that talking about it immediately brings up charges of racism. you cannot talk about surplus numbers without being told, usually from someone screaming at you from the audience, that you are no longer a feminist, or that you are neoliberalist and racist to the core. moreover, the minute you talk about human numbers there are tight associations with the breeding of both crops and animals. the industrial breeding of food plants and animals is absolutely fundamental to the socio-ecology of capitalist expansion after world war ii, and you can’t navigate this terrain very well without being called a racist. personally, i’m committed to “making kin not babies,” a feminist anti-racist project. so i’m extremely interested in non-biogenetic concepts and practices of family and kin humanimalia roundtable on breed 19 making, which certainly include critters called pets, but also register that the overpopulation of animals called pets is part of the over-numbering that i’m talking about. blaming poor human beings for over-numbering, while the rich drive environmental destruction and injustice, as well as refusing to make kin outside biological or other conventional kinds of relatedness, whether with human migrants or non-human exploited or exterminated beings: all of this and more inhabit my nightmares. so i’m really interested in what constitutes multi-species environmental justice. and i think that this needs to be expanded outside the premise of human exceptionalism by recognizing that situated human histories are always multi-species affairs, and are always fundamental to these matters. this means that i and others really need to think about the implications of language, such as population, kind, family, clan, brood, lineage, and the rest of it; because on a global basis, things like the making of kin-like relations between critters are as absolutely fundamental as (and related to) the question of climate change. right now, we also have to deal with our inability to talk about all this because people like me are afraid to be labelled as racist, just as certain christians are afraid to talk about climate change because god couldn't have done that to his children. i actually think that feminists and so-called progressive people like me are afraid to talk about non-biogenetic family making or kinship making in relation to complex, differentiated human numbering. and i’m finding using the word “population” almost impossible for reasons michelle murphy makes plain in her wonderful new book the economization of life,5 but there’s not a good synonym. that’s what breed comes to for me: it has everything to do with being the child of a whitesettler racist state. question 3: what questions about breed do you think are most pressing now? harriet ritvo: i was going to say maybe pressing wasn’t the right word; but having heard what donna just said i revise that, and i have to say that i haven’t heard such an eloquent formulation of the straitjacket in which we inside the bubble find ourselves placed. so thank you donna! donna haraway: for being screamed at repeatedly …. harriet ritvo: well among other things, yes. that is to say it is easier to just shut up. donna haraway: and i think shutting up is an extra-ordinary failure of morality as well as scholarship and solidarity. we need to risk being wrong out loud and open to each other on very hard issues. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 20 harriet ritvo: so, here are some things that people might start to think about now. in a way, and as all of you have suggested, it’s the analogy between the breed-oriented rhetoric having to do with animals and questions of race having to do with humans. it is always a bit easier to let things slip out, or to say things unintentionally, when you are talking about other animals than when you are directly talking about people. but then some things just to do with breed in a more restrictive sense might be interesting to examine, such as the motivations that people have and still have for creating (or repackaging) kinds of animals. sometimes it’s actual physical manipulation, but there always seems to be a value to the establishment or validation of difference that i think is worth considering. it’s interesting to look at arguments within breeds about standards, especially — and this has been raised before — standards that integrate concerns with “excellence,” in whatever sense that is understood by breeders, with humane considerations, such as whether or not animals can breed or breathe without too much inconvenience or distress. i should say i always find it interesting to think about the way that people construct the histories of the breeds that they are most fond of. my sense is that most of those constructions are based heavily on fantasy. this kind of thing has been explicitly demonstrated with regard to the thoroughbred horse, because it has such a long history and a lot of attention has been paid, but it is much more widespread. i have witnessed an aficionado of pharaoh hounds claiming that the modern breed is descended directly from the dogs who might have lived in king tut’s kennels. the last thing that i would throw in is how emerging technologies of genetic analysis and genetic engineering will affect (or has already affected) the breeding of domesticated animals. margaret derry: what i was going to say was something like what harriet said towards the end. i would say understanding dna technology and how it interfaces with modern breeding is critical right now. the resilience of culture in animal breeding remains remarkably strong, and trying to understand why is important. dna technology can help us save breeds from the genetic defect overload that inbreeding has induced. the trend to cross breeding seems to have partially resulted from genetic defect issues, but the movement has not alleviated the problem. first, the animals used in the programs pass on their genetic problems, and second, there has been a tendency to make the cross-breds conform to the idea of “breed.” they are just new breeds. modern technology can go a long way in correcting at least some of these difficulties, but not before the breeders alter their breed regulations and standards. this is where state regulation of breeding and or animal rights organizations can fit in. a modern defect in shorthorn cattle is not regulated by the breeders in north america, humanimalia roundtable on breed 21 and it can be with dna testing. cattle carrying the recessive defect are pedigreed by the breed associations. at the moment organizations like peta seem unaware of the problem, but some shorthorn breeders wonder when they will be forced to resist pressure from such groups, even if the state does not interfere. in contrast to that situation, pressure from animal rights groups made the breed society in britain forbid the registration of cattle carrying the defect. another example of international breeder organization approaches to defective breeding in relation to pressure from the state or animal rights groups can be found in collie breeding. the merling gene, which dilutes color, can cause serious defects if merle to merle dogs are interbred with each other. there is no regulation set by collie breeders against merle to merle breeding. double merles can be pedigreed, in spite of rising criticism from some dog breeding circles. the situation is different in europe. the european convention for the protection of pet animals [a treaty of the council of europe] sets out standards of breeding which are designed to stop the ongoing perpetuation of genetic defects. breeding of merle to merle is forbidden. collie breeder organizations are more or less forced to adopt these standards. in britain, animal welfare groups forced the kennel club to stop registering puppies born from merle to merle mating. only in the us and canada can such puppies be registered. double merles are used for breeding and showing as well. dna technology can be used to preserve breeds threatened with extinction. it can be used to introduce aspects of wild cousins’ genetic makeup to the dna of domestic animals in order to improve their health and performance in geographic areas that challenge their wellbeing. the history of breeds and their background genetically speaking can be better understood with the use of dna technology. this would not only provide fascinating historical information but the situation could well help undermine cultural myths about breeds which lay the foundations for beliefs that are unfounded, and which promote unwise decisions concerning breeding practices and elitist attitudes towards other breeders and breeds. to me it is understanding how this technology can be incorporated by breeders into breeding programs, because there really isn’t much movement that way now — at least not from my experience in breeding and breed organizations. donna landry: having discovered that there are a lot of historians, particularly those working on court studies, who haven’t really noticed horses before, i think that making the panoply of animal studies available to them in ways that would be useful is something worthwhile that i’ve been working on. this has brought me to thinking about breeds in terms of history, again picking up on what others have mentioned. i’m interested right now in constructions of nobility, in particular dynastic associations. here, as in the case of south africa, transnational networks and hybridity in relation to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 22 pure-breeds seem to be really important. i’ll just give the example of the lipizzaner: very clearly a product of the habsburg dynasty and the austro-hungarian empire, the foundation sires for that breed included a spanish horse from the royal danish stud, several neapolitans — which is to say italian horses with spanish breeding, two kladrubers — which are identified with czechoslovakia but also have spanish breeding, and then finally, at the beginning of the 19th century, a purebred grey arabian from the syrian desert, representing the desire to go back to purity. so what could be more mongrelized, yet also become so fixed as an iconic breed type, than to become a breed that became a victim in the second world war, in need of rescue by general patton, and in the end to inspire perhaps the only historically-grounded disney film ever made (the miracle of the white stallions from 1963)? so the story of the lipizzaner has been appropriated in any number of ways, including by the slovenian poet edward kocbek, who writes: “it is good, when the day shines, / the lippizaners are black foals / and it is good, when the night reigns, / the lippizaners are white mares, / but the best is, / when the day comes out of the night, / then the lippizaners are the white and black buffoons, /the court fools of its majesty, / slovenian history.”6 i think one of the things we need to keep track of is how ideology informs questions of sovereignty — i’m thinking here of margaret derry’s work on arabian horse breeding and the disputes in recent decades over the u.s. versus the rest of the world. all of this is bound up with the sorts of things donna haraway was talking about, which is to say questions that are difficult to address but which have to be addressed; in which whole institutional histories of racism cannot simply be left to one side. questions of multispecies justice or multi-species lens are not simply and should not simply be the preserve of rich, white people. sandra swart: that’s very helpful; very interesting. south africa also got some lipizzaners after world war ii, donna, and they have their own local mythography surrounding them. but about the question of what about breed is most pressing now? well, i think the political relevance of breeds is clearly an important question. i’ve already spoken at length about afrikaner cattle and questions of breed purity, but another important question concerns the ownership of indigenous breeds. indigenous breeds are going to be more important because of the question of climate change. south africa is becoming hotter and hotter; we are in the midst of an unprecedented drought, and it will get worse. as time goes by, i think it will be an important political question as to who owns the right to indigenous breeds that are better equipped to survive drought; and who should be profiting from these particular breeds. if we revert to them, and at the moment some genetic reserves are held by the state, i put it to you that aboriginal organizations should be seeing at least some of that action. humanimalia roundtable on breed 23 i think the second thing is the practical relevance of breeds, and here many things come to mind but one is the idea of banning pitbulls. this has relevance in south africa, where from time to time the press and the state raise the idea of banning pitbulls. this happens because many of them are owned by gangs and there’s quite a lively underground trade in dog fighting. but there have been many cases recently of children attacked by so-called pitbulls, when in fact it is not just gang-owned pittbulls, but pitbulls who whose owners proudly keep the lineage pure. this is something we are going to need to think about in global as well as a local contexts, and i think historians who tell a longer story will be useful here. the third thing is the money side of breed, which suggests how breeds suddenly come to matter in ways you would not expect. with zimbabwe (because of the despot mugabe) going into financial recession many people are facing starvation this year, and the economy is ruined. but for the first time, young, upwardly-mobile, black african zimbabweans are getting interested in dog breeds, and dog breeds have become a consummate consumer signifier — a status symbol of upward mobility. at the same time, purebred breeding offers a way to make money in difficult times because it’s fairly easy to breed a dog, and it’s a fallback position for many young black africans who aspire to the middle class. i find the trend towards importing dogs like bull terriers, rottweilers, and german shepherds very interesting, as is the case of the black boerboel — a large, mastiff-like dog that has its own invented history in south africa. the boerboel was supposed to be either from a native breed or mastiffs brought to the country by the first dutch settlers, so in a lot of ways its story parallels the one told about the afrikaner cattle: it’s a dog that loyally served the afrikaner people, going with them into the interior to conquer and tame the wilderness, and that consequently became better adapted, tougher, and better at survival, just like the settlers. it’s a narrative that’s very familiar in the white secular state, especially under apartheid. but just recently something very intriguing has happened. the boerboel is largely a brindle dog, but often in a litter of puppies a solid black puppy is born — just as in many white african households a dark child is occasionally born because the afrikaner people are genetically about 7% non-european. in 1983, when they first invented the boerboel breed standard, black puppies were expressly excluded. but today the black puppy is back with a vengeance, and its vogue seems to be largely about money. an ordinary boerboel sells for about 5000 rand, but a black puppy can now sell for between 15000 to 130 000 rand when exported to americans. what happened as a result is that the state has started intervening, saying that unless purebred status is established breeders can’t export these animals; this has created an uproar in the dog breeding world, so much so that some are registering their dogs in the neighboring state of namibia. others are humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 24 saying — as they did under the apartheid regime — that the boerboel registry should maintain the current taxonomy and sneak the puppies in as “ultra brindle.” still others are advocating the scientific route offered by dna testing. this is where, contra margaret’s experience, i have seen breeders embracing technology. in fact, the boerboel breed society can now legally undertake spot dna tests of any boerboel dog. the final point i want to make, aside from political relevance, practical relevance, and financial relevance, is the relevance breed has to living, breathing animals. there are many examples we can choose, but i find interesting the invention of the canis africanis, the so-called african land race or breed. there was a wonderful myth that there is this pure, untouched african breed going back 10, 000 years. if you look at it, it’s the kind of dog you would find if you mix a lot of random breeds together and added a large dash of greyhound blood, which africans prefer for hunting purposes because of the speed. but once that dog was invented as a canis africanis, it got the stamp of authenticity and autochthony. such claims to breed purity have led not only to many middle-class south africans owning what is essentially a mongrel, but to them treating it with pride. this phenomenon has fundamentally changed the lives of many, many mutts. beyond domesticated animals, one of the earlier speakers mentioned the blurring lines between domestic and wild animals, and i think we see this very nicely in africa where the department of agriculture has unilaterally reclassified 12 wildlife species from species to breed. it’s fascinating to me, not only because it commodifies, but also because it domesticates wild life, regulating it under the state’s animal improvement act. so things like wildebeest and impalas can now be genetically modified or manipulated just like domesticated animals. any of these animals can now be changed “in the interests of the republic,” and i think this is going to change these animals’ lives, because there is a new trend towards breeding for the “exotic local.” so breeding for the “strange familiar” is resulting in white springbok or purebred black impala. such breeding programs fundamentally change the quality of an animal’s life, as well as altering their susceptibility to various local diseases. i think the department of agriculture has not thought this through and they need to be challenged by historians who can offer a different narrative on this subject. donna haraway: i think i will take a particular angle on this question, prompted by the title of a recent collection, arts of living on a damaged planet.7 i want to think of breeding in relation to the cultivation of the arts of living well with each other on a damaged planet — without a sense of apocalypse and the rest of it, but with a real alertness to humanimalia roundtable on breed 25 urgency. i have always been maybe too ready to take sides, so that my scholarship is always under a kind of tension with advocacy of different kinds. i try to keep the tension honest, and i try not to be an idiot about it, but taking sides is important to me. so, for example, i’m very interested in alliances with some purebred dog breeders and not others; and i am against some animal rights advocates’ opposition to all breeding of, for example, dogs and horses. i think it is important to take up the histories of breeding, the historical situatedness, the non-purity of it all, and to be for some practices and not for others, and to try and clarify with each other how some of this clearly relates to contemporary technological issues. i’m also interested in what kinds of breeds — plant, animal, and microbial — need to be cultivated to support the arts of living on a damaged planet. and i’m interested in experimentations related to heat tolerance and migration issues, and in questions of genetic mixing, and what that does to protection status. generally, i feel a need to be part of the ongoing struggle over who lives and who dies, and in thinking about the historical basis of this. everybody today has given extraordinary examples of why the history really matters, and all of this for me is in relationship to questions about extinction. i remember walking with my aged australian shepherd purebred at the john day national monument, which preserves a 65 million year record of the evolution of mammals, including the dog family. this history has produced vast radiations of dogs on the north american continent, particularly in that area of eastern oregon. and thinking about all the dogs that were and are on the day we walked through the rocks led me to think about who lives and who dies, bringing extinction into the matter. contradictions and complexities abound. so we have to find a way to oppose turning wildlife into an alternate breed so they can be hunted in a barrel, but also not be purists about genetic interventions with wildlife. we have to support indigenous property rights in animals, while opposing the commodification of animal flesh. clearly the contradictions are endless; and i suppose if i have any role to play in the scholarship of this, it is trying to figure out a way to narrate the contradictions so we can be part of the struggle. so we can cultivate the capacity to respond, what i call response-ability. margaret derry: i think running through all of these things is the issue of purity: what purity means. but fundamental to all we talk about with respect to domestic animals, and increasingly to wild animals, is their marketability. this is where purebred breeding drastically changed things; it is the reason why these ideas about purity became global as animals moved from the countries they were bred in, to locations around the world. there was money in the idea that consistency of type had to be preserved, and there still is money in that. so i think the vast global market for animals is very much part of the story. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 26 donna haraway: i feel like that really needs emphasizing: we are really hitting it with this question of breed, right smack in the middle of all of the worlding processes around us, even this ecological system, this world-ecology in jason moore’s terms,8 called capitalism. and not in some simplistic way. us: any final thoughts? donna haraway: yeah. i love my dog. notes 1. eric baratay, bêtes des tranchées. cnrs, 2013. 2. haika soru, 2012; http://www.haikasoru.com 3. an ottoman traveller: selections from the ‘book of travels’ of evliya çelebi, trans. robert dankoff and sooyong kim. eland, 2010. 4. adele e. clarke and donna haraway, eds. making kin not population (prickly paradigm press, 2018). 5. duke up, 2017 6. edward kocbek, “the lippizaner,” from embers in the house of night, trans. sonja kravanja (1977); the poem ends: “those who don’t know how to ride a horse, / should learn quickly ... /motors tend to break down,/elephants eat too much,/our road is a long one,/and it is too far to walk.” http://www.poetryinternationalweb.net/pi/site/ poem/item/5169 7. anna tsing, heather swanson, elaine gan, nils bubandt, eds. arts of living on a damaged planet (u minnesota p, 2017). 8. capitalism in the web of life. verso, 2015. microsoft word huben-cole-stewart.pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 11:1 reviews kelly hübben show and tell: exposing anthroparchy in children’s culture matthew cole & kate stewart, our children and other animals: the cultural construction of human-animal relations in childhood. farnham: ashgate publishing limited, 2014. 195 pp. $100.00 hc; $43.96 pb; $49.46 e-book. quite recently, i read a column in a dutch women’s magazine. it was a short text, in which the author described how her teenage son came home with a little pet fish, and presented it to her as gift. his mother was not going to fall for this trick again, and told him that the fish was his responsibility. she expected the poor creature to be dead within a fortnight, but the boy proved to be remarkably tender and displayed a level of care and compassion that surprised her. she ended her column by expressing her desire kelly hübben -show and tell: exposing anthroparchy in children’s culture 147 for grandchildren. this short column contains a number of implicit claims about children and animals that are common in the west. notice the casual act of the child consumer purchasing a living creature, the intergenerational negotiation of responsibility, the gendered nature of care, and the idea that pet keeping prepares children for becoming parents. in spite of the fact that animals, real ones and representations, are ubiquitous in the lives of children, there is limited research into how their presence affects children’s attitudes towards them. this lacuna, as well as the often contradictory messages that children receive about the nonhuman animals in their lives, is what inspired sociologists matthew cole and kate stewart to write our children and other animals. in the introduction they state how their “interest in children’s relations with other animals was sparked by this specific contemporary cultural artefact: the promotional tie-in meal offered by fast food chains that juxtapose nonhuman animal ‘characters’ as images and toys alongside the mangled body parts of other animals” (4). since this combination of “[d]eath and delight” (169) does not seem to spark any obvious indignation among children or adults, cole and stewart have made it their mission to expose the cultural mechanisms that ease children into a mind-set in which the exploitation of nonhuman animals is the norm. the authors focus on practices and animal representations in the uk, but stress that due to globalization, their findings are likely to be applicable to other countries in the west. grounded in critical animal studies, the book seeks to expose the anthroparchal mechanisms that influence children’s attitudes towards nonhuman animals, in order to challenge and ultimately overturn them. they explain that “a core contention of this book is that childhood socialization of dominant discourses and practices about other animals is, and has to be, extremely thorough, due to the very contingency and precariousness of those discourses and practices” (35). the authors adopt cudworth’s term “anthroparchal” to describe the hierarchical social structures in which humans come to dominate nature, because it “captures the interplay of the material and discursive constitution of domination” (27). one of the strengths of this book lies exactly in the authors’ insistence on the interconnectedness of discourse and practice, which they demonstrate in their analyses. another important asset is that the examples given convincingly demonstrate the important role of popular culture, such as cinema and magazines, as socialization sites where anthroparchal relations are shaped and reinforced. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 148 the book is divided into three parts, the first of which gives an overview of the historical developments that shaped the conceptualization of human-nonhuman animal relations in western societies, the uk in particular. this sets the stage for the second part, in which the authors look at how different cultural spaces contribute to the formation of children into tacit supporters of anthroparchy. the authors discuss children’s food, toys and pets in the family home, the cute style used in representations of animals in mass media, animals as food and objects of education in schools, and interspecies power relations in the digital media. as these areas overlap in the lives of children, the influence of anthroparchy is reinforced. in their empirical analysis of practices involving human-nonhuman animal relations in which children are implicated, cole and stewart expose the often grotesque ways in which exploitation of animals is obscured or justified. a powerful example is their discussion of educational practices, in particular those involving the keeping of animals on school grounds. these animals are sometimes raised in order to be slaughtered and sold, or even consumed by the school children themselves. this sheds light on the profound contradictions that determine human-nonhuman animal relations in the west. one moment we invite children to care for and empathize with these animals, the next they are asked to accept their killing, mutilation, and commodification. the authors argue that children are not overwhelmed by this paradox, because of the immense power that anthroparchy holds over their lives, discursively, emotionally, and in practice. the cute style that is typically used in popular media for children is characterized by the animals’ fluffiness, cheerful expressions, and their permanent focus on the reader. this gives the reader the impression that the animals are always readily available to the children, always waiting to be touched, fed or cuddled. being habituated to animal characters with no lives of their own makes it increasingly easy for players to be convinced that real animals have no intrinsic value either. a striking observation is that, although the animals depicted are often infants, there are no same-species caregivers around. the animals solely depend on care and affection provided by the human child, reinforcing the idea that animals have no species-specific needs. this is also the case in the farming simulation games on social media, where the practice of “constructing the willing complicity of exploited others” (135) is common, which gives the player the impression that farm animals exist in order to please human desires by offering them (the products of) their bodies. this is reinforced by the use of anthropomorphism, infantilism, and cuteness (129). in these games, players re-enact kelly hübben -show and tell: exposing anthroparchy in children’s culture 149 and reproduce dominant exploitative farming practices. tellingly, subversive gameplay is impossible: if we want to play, we have to subject ourselves to the ideology of the game. cole and stewart explore ways to offer children opportunities for resistance within the practices they describe, and alternative, non-exploitative lifestyles. throughout the book, they argue for the normalization of veganism, so that children will become aware of and will eventually choose a non-exploitative lifestyle. in order to present the reader with an example of such an alternative cultural sphere, the third section of the book discusses the genre of vegan children’s literature. the genre, as cole and stewart describe it, aims to empower vegan children and show non-vegan children that veganism is a real, ethical alternative way of life that is available to them. characteristics of this genre include the decentralization of the human subject and a critique of hierarchical interspecies relationships. this is achieved by a representational that highlights the animals’ autonomy, and, as opposed to the cute style, these books show that animals can have lives of their own that do not necessarily include human children. they also show ways children can enjoy the company of animals on their terms, without exploiting them. reading the authors’ analyses of a selection of vegan books leaves me with two concerns, not so much about the authors’ interpretations, but regarding the genre and its development. first of all, the tone of these books seems to lean towards the didactic. in the current literary climate, in which entertainment and aesthetics are valued at least as highly as the educational/moral content, this poses a problem. when the message takes over the narrative, it limits the possible impact on neutral readers, and may even antagonize others. the other concern is that, while cole and stewart acknowledge that speciesism often intersects with other issues, they do not address the fact that this genre appears to be quite eurocentric. in encouraging children to adopt a vegan lifestyle, it is easy to forget that in a multicultural country like the uk, some children are not in a position to make their own food choices, either because they have no desire to oppose their elders, or because the consumption of animal products is part of their cultural identity, and therefore laden with emotion. didacticism and eurocentrism are understandable flaws in a young genre, but they need to be addressed in order for it to mature. all children deserve access to texts that challenge anthroparchy, since ultimately, these texts empower their readers. containing many striking examples of exploitative practices, this book is thought provoking and inspiring, not only for scholars in the social sciences and the humanities, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 150 but also for educators and policy makers. by addressing the question of the effects and consequences of animal presence in the lives of children, this book offers opportunities to improve the welfare of both children and animals. children are acknowledged as capable moral agents, and when they are given the opportunity, they can become critical readers and consumers who can make their own informed choices. this book encourages those working with children’s culture to translate these insights into practice. the authors themselves hope that their book will have “practical pedagogical applications in helping children and adults to critically trace their own socialization routes,” and i wholeheartedly share this hope with them. microsoft word vonessen-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 erica von essen “we need to talk…” evolving conversations about wildlife ethics in hunting media introduction. in the context of hunting, most of hunter behavior is guided by informal norms for right and wrong conduct. indeed, some hunters maintain that formal regulation is “secondary” to one’s ethical code (von essen, “in the gap” 166). the ethical code here describes morally justifiable means of killing, stalking, managing and talking about game. it is based in large part on culturally shared values, enabling diverse hunters to coordinate their practices within the currently agreed boundaries between right and wrong (luke). however, there has been limited effort or will on the part of hunters to articulate what these ethics are. or, indeed, why following ethics rather than legal rules is preferred. this may be due to the fact that exposing what are seen as highly personal values means not only opening up the hunting collective to scrutiny over these principles from their peers and from the general public. it also means reflexivity is required on the part of hunters to search themselves to articulate the constitutive features of this ethic in the first place. in this paper, contemporary western hunters’ reflexivity over their ethics is examined over recent decades in sweden: how are ethics and ideas of right and wrong discussed and how do swedish hunters view ethics discussions generally — desirable, necessary or uncomfortable? previous research firmly argues against such reflexivity. hunting scholars almost invariably maintain that the exposure of ethics to a critical discussion is neither possible nor desirable, given that hunters’ ethics are a personal and contextual matter best left to the individual in that particular situation (see for example hanna; leopold; marvin; posewitz). for gibson, for example, hunting “cannot be understood on the basis of a priori ethical principles” (470). for cohen, similarly, hunters’ ethics have no ostensive coherence or design that can stand in a discussion about its constitutive features. even aldo leopold maintains that “the ethics of sportsmanship is not a fixed code, but must be formulated and practiced by the individual” (232; emphasis mine). as a corollary to this, hunters’ ethics have remained underresearched. while ethnographers readily seek to uncover indigenous hunters’ ethics, taboos and wildlife values (sodikoff), the ethics of contemporary secular hunting communities are relegated to the mystical domain of moral relativism and subjectivism (von essen, “the impact of modernization”). this is paradoxical when seen against these hunters’ explicit championing of their high ethical standards before the public (kaltenborn et al.; lindqvist et al.), often to deter detail humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 158 regulation, as if to say “we have our own system that works” in the countryside. this attitude is enshrined in the principle of “freedom with responsibility,” by which care and accountability toward wildlife is argued to emanate from within hunters’ own ranks rather than from externally imposed regulation (löfmarck et al.). but freedom with responsibility does not mean freedom from having a searching discussion about their ethics before the public. in the privacy of their own homes, hunters can conduct themselves however they want, but their interactions with wildlife must be subject to dialogue inasmuch as wildlife is a public good in modernity (nurse). further, hunters are dependent on the non-hunting public’s support for their continued practices with this good. indeed, hunters today must try to formulate an ethic that is “logically consistent and intuitively appealing to this moderate majority” (peterson 310), which may require putting their ethics up for discussion. nevertheless, it is a methodological challenge to de-mystify and de-relativize hunters’ wildlife ethics to reveal logical consistencies. surveys, in-depth interviews, and participant observation are tools that can uncover hunters’ ethics talk, by asking hunters about or observing hunters regarding their views on shooting practices, their conceptions of right and wrong, and ethical dilemmas in the field. the principal methodological challenge here is that contemporary hunters are sometimes reluctant respondents in terms of opening up to self-scrutiny and to researchers. this has been remedied, in part, through sustained ethnographic work building trust (bogliogli; gibson) or indirect interview techniques that encourage hunters to problematize the behavior of distant others or hypothetical situations rather than to incriminate themselves directly (child & darimont; nuno & st. john; pohja-mykrä & kurki). in the context of ethics in particular, hunters are more likely to raise ethical issues from a critical point of view, in part, to emphasize their own ethical credentials (kuentzel). a more instructive approach to finding out to what extent, and how, hunters conduct ethics discussions in their communities is to look at “natural data” in the form of the occurrence and shape of such discussions in hunters’ own media, both online and print. here, the sorts of ethics topics that are covered, the tone with which they are reported (e.g. critical) and the responses they generate by hunters can tell us something about the ethics talk as it currently featured in hunting magazines, on hunting websites, and on social media like community and hobby forums. the greatest benefit to a media analysis for this purpose is that texts can be examined both for the constitutive features of the ethic, and for meta-communicative discussions. the latter refers to hunters’ erica von essen-“we need to talk…” evolving conversations about wildlife ethics in hunting media 159 writing about how the hunting collective generally talks about ethics, and so represents reflexivity. the aim of the following study is to canvas hunting media in sweden to capture hunters’ evolving ethics talk. a large volume of hunting media is surveyed across six decades to track the changing nature of ethics and hunters’ awareness and presentation of ethics as an issue within their community. findings are clustered in two broad themes that were constituted inductively from the media survey: (1) an increased need to problematize their ethics; and (2) nationalistic pride over “swedish” hunting ethics. sub-themes are presented under each cluster. a central and instructive term that was found inductively from the research is “hunterlike behavior” (“jägarmässighet” in swedish). the discussion synthesizes the trends and elaborates on their drivers and future directions, by considering the historical contexts and modalities in which hunting ethics are shaped (list), including sweden’s ascension into the eu in 1994 and the relative status of hunting in society across decades. the study responds to a call from hunters to increasingly attend to ethics in hunting, albeit a call that is not unequivocally sounded from all hunting actors. yet it is also grounded in calls for outlining hunting ethics from multiple actors in society, including the broader public, engos, and wildlife managers and researchers who equally desire clarity on hunters’ ethics if they are to be continued to be trusted with managing the public good of wildlife. this much was identified in the nordic hunting in society research symposium (hansen et al.) and reiterated by the illegal hunting practitioners symposium (von essen et al.). ethics can be distilled, i argue, not by asking hunters to self-report their ethics talk or about their ethical principles directly (as they will routinely say generic things like “all animals are equal” and “treat the game with respect”), but by examining how they cover the topic of ethics in their own enclaves. with this, the study is an outsider’s foray into a discussion community characterized by reticence regarding allowing outsiders in. in the discussion, i problematize the permeability and the totality of this community. i argue that even if many contemporary western hunting communities today increasingly erect a “defensive shield” to the outside (ojalammi & blomley), they are also deeply affected by societal changes in values. this means that, first, there is a dialectic process of evolving public sentiment in relation to animals suffusing into hunting at all times, and second, that hunters are also part of the moderate majority that actively constitutes animal ethics also in the public sphere. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 160 method. this study resulted from a 3-year research project on illegal hunting among swedish hunters. this interview-based project sought to apprehend hunters’ relationship with and trust in formal rules and their institutions. interestingly, these interviews turned up a dense system also of informal rules that was outside the scope of this project to cover as a theme unto itself. these rules were contested, but they were also eager points of discussion for respondents. thematically clustering these “hunting ethics” issues resulted in a clear call for new research that i now embark on: a study that would delve deeper into ethics. rather than rely wholly on the results from the previous project, this study set out to re-canvass the hunting community for ethical issues using a complementary method of data collection to interviews: a text analysis of social, digital and print media. to begin with, expert unstructured interviews were conducted via telephone with six editors of swedish hunting magazines and four journalists. the researcher interviewed the editors of svensk jakt, jaktjournalen, allt och jakt och vapen, jaktmarker & fiskevatten, big game, and jaktojägare as the journals in the hunting field. the journals have slightly different profiles on the market, with svensk jakt being the oldest classical magazine and in many ways the least likely to “offend,” being mainstream and erring on the side of caution for ethics. big game is a new and more internationally oriented addition to the field, focusing on grand visuals and cosmopolitan hunters. jaktojägare is the second most popular hunting magazine and is partly known for including the perspective of everyday working-class hunters. the remaining magazines are smaller and more specialized, with allt om jakt och vapen targeting gearheads and jaktmarker & fiskevatten writing also for anglers. the hunting journalists selected for interviews were either personally recommended by the editors and/or notable (in the sense of being mentioned in or having authored articles in the magazines). interviews with each respondent lasted an average of 45 minutes on phone. they are anonymous, as the study sought not to provide portraits of individuals but looked for “themes across the body of participants as a whole” (pickering & kara). for transparency’s sake, however, respondents are tracked as r1 (respondent 1), r2, r3, etc. a preliminary list of ethics issues was produced from interviews. this was later revised upon undertaking preliminary reading of hunting media. in the final stage, a series of relevant search terms could be generated to narrow the search in media. these included words like etik*, jägarmässig*, sportslig*, fel, moral*, kontroversiell*, and känslig*, with asterisks to capture variability in word use. from these search terms +150 entries were identified for analysis online. in printed magazines, texts were surveyed for ethical issues focusing on, but not limited to, these words. svensk jakt, the oldest and largest erica von essen-“we need to talk…” evolving conversations about wildlife ethics in hunting media 161 hunting magazine, was subject to the most complete search featuring volumes from 1959 to today. jaktjournalen and jaktmarker & fiskevatten were also consulted back to the 1970s. occasional volumes were missing, but material across every year was available. the complete volumes of a year were surveyed at three-year intervals (all volumes of 1975, 1978, 1981, etc). this was preferred over an approach that would read fewer volumes over more years, with the reasoning that an entire year’s worth of magazines would be more representative. that is, it would be likelier to capture some ethics discussions than would than randomly selecting only january, july and december volumes. the findings were coded manually into principal themes. a boundary was set to exclude themes on ethics that did not pertain to wildlife or environment directly, but which may have dealt with social codes of conduct in hunting teams or weapon preferences and practices (as turned up in the search terms). the study distilled themes down into two clusters in this paper. in the end, these were chosen because they operated both on the meta-level — i.e. hunters’ talk about ethics, even talk about how they do not talk about ethics — and the practical level, i.e. hunting and shooting practices that were identified as ethically problematic in some way, including the character of wild boar and bear hunts in recent years. in this way they capture, on the one hand, increased reflexivity of hunters in problematizing their ethics, and, on the other hand, the specific junctures at which ethics arguably need to be further discussed. the choice of surveying also online social media was a considered one with ethical ramifications. a large hunters social forum, robsoft (the leading such forum for hunters) even has a forum board for “hunting ethics” in which various discussion threads are posted by users, and so was an intuitive search ground for tapping into current discussions on ethics by hunters. the forum was recommended by several hunters both in the previous research project and in the course of the expert informal interviews. holtz et al. write that experts and insiders may be of help “in judging the typicality of forums or in characterizing the community running and using the forum” (7) and robsoft was identified as typical of hunters by interview respondents. accessing forum posts may be problematic inasmuch as, first, forums often require membership log-ins to read and post, and, second, using exact quotations can make original posts easy to find and compromise anonymity. in the case of robsoft, the forum is openly accessible to all and every thread is public. however, membership was required in order to utilize the search function on posts. because original postings are in swedish and were translated into english, making direct search hits unlikely, moreover, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 162 the anonymity of posters has been preserved. no users are mentioned by name, but posts are identified by date. methods literature is beginning to explore the benefits of researching social media to tap into attitudes and discussions, citing the relatively large amounts of “natural data” and the “moderated virtual focus group” setting of social forums as advantages to the researcher (holtz et al., moloney et al.). responding to critiques that an online disinhibition effect following the relative anonymity of forum posting may distort data, such research is also showing that forums are an enclave that permits candid reflections that are mostly truthful in nature (glaser et al., im & chee). since this observation is fifteen years old, it might be pertinent to believe the naturalization of internet forums as a mode of communication in recent years has further normalized the discourses that feature here. in the hunting forum context, hunters have been asked about the representativeness and truth of postings online by recent researchers exploring the discourse on illegal hunting. while non-users of the forum speculated as to the occasionally sensationalist, narcissistic, or macho exaggerations of hunting stories, or a readiness to break the law that might feature in this context, users of the forum overwhelmingly suggested robsoft contained a true statements and that it formed its own peer community with rules (von essen, “in the gap”). this coheres with recent research noting that such forums form an “environment for peer-to-peer communication in which tensions and stigmas may be removed and opinions can be expressed with fewer inhibitions” (im & chee 524). while cautioning against entirely replacing traditional forms of qualitative data collection with social media, the latest research on hunters’ interactions online suggests that studying such forums is increasingly important to capture the full scope of hunters’ present communication with one another (ebeling-schuld & darimont; eid & handal; von essen). they are also important sites to cover inasmuch as they feature less official information and everyday talk (mörner & olausson). this has two important implications. first, the forum avoids hunter homogeneity by opening up to a potentially geographically, socially, and economically broad gathering of hunters not bound to a locality. second, the forum can question authority and official news sources. indeed, the hunting magazines of the swedish hunting association or the national hunters association may be said to constitute an official discourse of hunters as a collective (to some degree), while blog entries on the former site and readers’ comments under articles on the latter site, but also threads on forums on these articles, run a parallel discourse. this parallel discourse sometimes reproduces the official one, but it also questions it. this was found, for example, in the works of engbladh (2016) and von essen (“whose discourse is it anyway?”), showing how different corners of the website of hunting associations communicate about wolves in sweden differently. erica von essen-“we need to talk…” evolving conversations about wildlife ethics in hunting media 163 in the nordic countries, hunters are arguably more internet-experienced than in many other parts of the world as state agencies rely on their inventory reporting of game populations through digital databases that update in real-time (helle et al.). all of this combined points to the relevance and value of consulting online social media when accessing modern hunters. to summarize, data is taken from four sources: physical print magazines (approximately 30 volumes selected from every decade, a whole year surveyed, with a three-year interval, 1960s-2010s, constituting a total of 180 magazines); online articles from these magazines’ websites (using search function); forum posts (using search function); ten expert interviews (unstructured phone interviews), six of which with hunting magazine editors and four with hunting journalists. together, these comprise a comprehensive discursive community, minus private conversations between hunters in the field, in the car, at their local shop, and so on. due to the impracticability of quantifying findings, a qualitative content analysis is performed that records how ethics is talked about rather than an attempt to estimate frequency across a diverse and evolving material (earlier decades lack certain volumes, entire magazines, and of course online presence in a way that precludes systematic comparison using statistics). each theme begins with documenting the current situation and recent publications, and works back in history. findings 1. we need to talk… about ethics. 1.1 interrogating the meaning of jägarmässighet (“hunterlike behavior”). in interviews with hunting-magazine editors, respondents suggest that hunters sometimes crave both greater discussion on ethics as well as requesting a “blueprint” or ethical guidelines. one hunting-magazine editor says that readers expressed such a strong interest in ethics that this request had been formalized by the swedish hunting association in a project that ran 2013-2014 (r2). a second editor reports “feeling the ethics talk” at all humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 164 corners of the hunting community, which he wants to capture in his magazine (r2). a third editor reveals that push for ethics talk is continuous, inasmuch as subscribers often write the editorial board with inputs and opinions about what was ok to publish and what not in terms of topics, trophy shots, language use, and hunting stories (r3). a few editors also note knowing one another, having written for each other’s magazines in the past, and conducting a dialogue on ethics as an informal editorial community: “we have different profiles, but we can still hold a discussion about what to post” (r9). “ethics start already at the selection of cover images. never feature dead stuff. […] [w]e talk about these things increasingly and i think about ethics more and more the older i get” (r10). there is consensus among the editors interviewed that what constitutes ethics — and what comprises “jägarmässighet” (hunterlike behavior) — is subject to change. a blueprint for ethical conduct would hence be difficult to present. one editor maintains the term would be a difficult sell in their magazine, associated with finger-pointing around propriety. he notes it is primarily a word he associates with hunting associations when they represent hunting to the outside. “i don’t dislike the term,” he says, “but it’s used as a bat … it’s imprecise and really a matter of personal opinion” (r1). rather than comprising a clear set of rules, editors all suggest that, first, it is hunters’ discussions (and feedback to editors) that set the standard for what is ethical and not and, second, that although hunters may not think of themselves as conducting these sorts of discussions at present, they indirectly do so: “there’s an ethical discussion, but it’s not usually understood in terms of ethics,” an editor suggests (r2), indicating that it recurs through other topics. another editor claims that framing articles as ethics pieces is not conducive to selling magazines, but that raising unethical or taboo-laden issues as per other topics is an increasing occurrence (r3). yet another editor recalls raising an ethics topic, for example, at the end of his recent editorial on wolf hunting, when he addressed the issue of shooting animals at too long a range. “sometimes you just gotta speak up” (r9). nevertheless, editors also emphasize that framing such issues in terms of jägarmässighet is problematic as the term is vague. “really, you either say something is illegal or unethical (r1),” with the implication that hunterlike behavior is an unhelpful concept to facilitate ethics discussions. on the forum robsoft, hunterlike behavior is similarly problematized as a concept capturing ethical conduct. two users agree on the vagueness of the term, one of whom even suggests “a discussion is needed” on its exact meaning, but concludes their post erica von essen-“we need to talk…” evolving conversations about wildlife ethics in hunting media 165 saying it is also difficult to criticize standards of hunterlike behavior since they “come from your own perspective and they can usually motivate their conduct in terms of their own code of conduct. ethics and morals are, at heart, personal” (robsoft, thread: “piglet with class 1 jägarmässigt?” 2016-04-06). this is also confirmed by a huntingmagazine editor, who says “people think what they think, and there’s not a lot you can say or do about it” (r1). this reveals a paradox: ethical conduct needs to be discussed, and at the same time there is no point to discussing it, since it is a personal matter. 1.2 opening up for scrutiny. despite this, a plethora of articles and forum entries point to the danger of closing off ethics discussions by relegating them to the personal domain. “we’ve got to be honest and criticize ourselves” (robsoft, thread: good article on hunting photos, 2014-12-03). the same user expresses concern over the fact that shutting down such discussions for fear of offending other hunters and the public “will come back to harm us in the long run.” in the thread, discussion continues with agreement from another user that “we need to be able to tell each other when a line has been crossed, and we need to take the fact that our ethics may be questioned” (2014-1203), which forms the consensus across several users, e.g. “our problems should not be locked away in echo-chambers. put it all on the table and discuss and improve!” (201412-04). in an article titled “what can a hunting rifle look like?” (svensk jakt, nr. 7, 2015) the author declares that “hunters need to embrace self-scrutiny” (58). further, ethics are seen to “contribute to a better picture of hunting” (svensk jakt, nr. 5, 2015, 60). it is stressed that hunting “can stand up to scrutiny” (lewander, blog, 2017). on jaktojägare’s news media website, one argues “the ethics question needs to be attended to” (ljung, 2017-05-06) and that emerging issues involve necessary reviewing of ethics (ljung, 2017-04-20; ljung, 2017-07-31). the forum features posts that reiterate the importance of such “reviewing” conversations. one user, however, suggests that ethics discussions are more fruitfully held on the level of “big” or “soft” issues than “whether or not the 6.5 is a suitable caliber for moose” (robsoft, thread: ‘very interesting reading’, 2016-06-18). the user suggests that it is the responsibility of the swedish hunting association to raise broader societal questions of modernization and their impacts on hunting ethics, “like how we can integrate nonswedes, how we manage urbanization, ethics and so on. it’s great that we’ve started to discuss things like that.” two editors stress the governmental mandate of the swedish hunting association in prompting more ethics-instructing articles: “they feel the pressure, and they’ve always been good at raising ethics discussions because of it” (r4), humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 166 but they also note that hunting education in sweden needs to play a part in schooling new hunters in ethics. 1.3 hunters speaking up about poor conduct. in “failing ethics and shoddy macho ideals” (svensk jakt, nr. 10, 2015), “landowners and hunters agree on ethics” (sanchez, 2015?), and “hunting shop boycotts trapping business” (jaktjournalen online, jonson, 2016-04-29), it is noted that hunters themselves are also ethical gatekeepers. in a recent news article on jaktojägare, the importance of informal control is stressed when it comes to bear hunting, noting that even state agencies prefer to rely on hunters themselves to keep unethical practices at bay (jaktojägare, moilanen, 2015-07-06, “hunters look over bear hunting”). this is confirmed in multiple news entries and in the editors’ interviews, where one for example describes hunters as “peer police” and “vanguards of ethics,” especially, one magazine editor argues, moose hunting teams who take rules of right and wrong very seriously. one respondent who works with hunting photography and film-making notes how hunters “rear” one another by continuously pointing out errors and learning from peers (r6). it becomes clear that there is ongoing dialogue about standards for propriety in photography, in particular. “ethics begin with the choice of the cover image” (r10). editors note readers feeding back about unethical photos on covers, including an unlawful collar on a dog (r1), a duck shot in mid-flight (r2), a dead rabbit (r3), and more. this is the most intuitive way of initiating ethics talk with several respondents, as hunting photos now reach a large sector of non-hunting media, and the choice of object, composition, and editing of the hunting tableau represents the human-wildlife values of hunters today. talking about ethics is described as a necessary mechanism also to “clean up in hunting internally” (svensk jakt, nr. 12, 2014, 46), with the implication that ethically problematic and/or contaminating types of hunters, hunting, and photos are weeded out by ethical gatekeepers. the responsibility to talk about ethics, or policing ethical conduct, is further presented as a “collective” one, involving the engagement of “self-criticism” in other articles (svensk jakt, nr. 10, 2015). this is called “selfsanitization” by two respondents (r1, r8). 1.4 from anthropocentric ethics to ecocentric. in older magazines, ethics are occasionally problematized. for instance, there is an attempt to define “hunterlike behavior” in the article “a shooting bench in the woods,” in which the principal sign of hunterlike behavior, rather than being tied up in the “big questions” (such as calls from recent voices on the forum), is said to be “always firing with the best possible support for your rifle” (svensk jakt, nr.1. 1993, holmgren). “good sportsmanship” is credited erica von essen-“we need to talk…” evolving conversations about wildlife ethics in hunting media 167 with shooting skill (jaktjournalen, nr. 6, 1971, 16), or even attributed to the chase energy exhibited by hunting dogs (jaktmarker & fiskevatten, 1975, nr. 2, 34). indeed, a leading ethics themed discussion in magazines from the 1960s centers on the use of the newly emerging technology on telescopic sight as being unsportsmanlike, insofar as it tips the balance too far in favor of the hunter. this is despite the fact, as one hunting editor notes in an interview, that such technology ensures safer kills. an editor maintains his magazine “always had an ethics discussion, but it’s a whole different ball game today with new challenges facing hunting, new gear, a whole different technology” (r9), suggesting this has brought ethics to the foreground in recent days. in older magazines, ethics are characterized as “coming from one’s father” rather from discussion (jaktjournalen, nr 9, 1971, 3). “moral” is featured ironically in an article on hunting profiles, where the author levies thinly veiled criticism toward too-territorial hunting types who appeal to violated “hunting morals” when an unleashed dog encroaches on their land, or through the mere sight of another hunter (svensk jakt, nr.1. 1993, lindevall, 42). interestingly, research suggests swedish hunters have detached ethics from old concerns of jealousy, territory, boundary transgressions, and ownership disputes (von essen “the impact of modernization”), which feature prominently in the older magazines, either under the theme of ethics or in discussions that deal with right and wrong (see e.g. jaktjournalen, 1971, nr 11. “shooting another’s game,” 10-12; jaktjournalen, nr. 4, 1971, “whose moose?” 39; jaktjournalen, 1978, nr.1, “winter hunting in poland.” 16; jaktmarker & fiskevatten, 1967, nr. 10, “three episodes from september hunt in the north”). while the latter research conveys the impression that a majority of hunters are generally happy with this development, citing among other things that ethics can now start to be about the “real” issues like wildlife welfare, rather than mere bickering among neighbors over territory, one forum user also laments the erosion of private property as an institution (robsoft, thread: “new times, new ethics?,” 2015-1020). 1.5 presentation of hunting to the outside world. in the older issues of svensk jakt, ethics discussions feature not just in boundary and social disputes but also regarding the presentation of hunting to the outside world. in “ethics and morals in jakttid,” a reader’s entry renounces the poor portrayal of hunting on a popular primetime tv show which has just aired an episode featuring poor tracking efforts, alcohol consumption, and a preoccupation with money and trophies. importantly, he writes that that the episode “could have been an interesting and a good contribution to the debate and hunting ethics here as well as abroad” (svensk jakt, nr. 3, 1993, 78), showing some signs of wanting to problematize ethics. indeed, his main line of critique is that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 168 the tv show presenter failed to raise these as issues, instead portraying them as par for the course in hunting. this discussion is carried forward in the next volume (svensk jakt nr. 4, 1993) where the editors note that they have received “a large number of letters” from hunters who are similarly disappointed with how hunting ethics are portrayed on the tv show (29). among other things, this intertextual piece presents the criticisms of a reader called fransson, who insists hunters are more ethical than portrayed here. even some (albeit rare) articles from 1960s magazines express growing concern over the portrayal of hunting to the non-public, noting how hunters need to conduct themselves with “humanitarian and hunting-moral [jägarmoraliskt] consideration,” particularly of animals that the public media is fond of covering, citing a troublesome case of bear hunting that showed “tremendous ruthlessness and poor judgment” on the part of hunters (jaktmarker och fiskevatten, 1967, nr. 10, 443). nevertheless, the main impression is that topics which raise the need to talk about ethics are much rarer in older magazines, even if ethical issues are still indirectly discussed when hunters quarrel over territory disputes or best shooting practices. explicit calls to self-criticize do not generally surface in these magazines. 2. best in class: nationalism and pride over swedish hunting ethics. 2.1. pride. as potentially contaminating forms of hunting and hunters enter the hunting community, an increasingly salient discourse found in hunting media is the defensive elevation of swedish hunting ethics above those of other cultures. this is manifested in newfound pride over hearty hunting traditions that take their basis in utilitarian meatbased, rather than sport, hunting. pride is also expressed over sweden’s public access to land and relatively strong influence of hunters and landowners on hunting policy throughout history. in recent magazines this is occasionally accompanied by nostalgia toward the past. “a hearty portion hunting will” of the old days, for example, is contrasted against the technified character of hunting in a 2016 svensk jakt article titled, “technology and high ethics” (nr, 9, 2016, p. 82). even in articles covering other topics (like portraits of different hunters in sweden) a sense of pride is articulated about the swedish way of hunting, noting how “sweden is probably one of the world-leading countries in terms of hunting ethics” (svensk jakt nr. 5, 2015, p. 60). swedish ethics are described as “something we should be proud of and protect!” (editorial, svensk jakt, hultnäs, 2017-09-03). erica von essen-“we need to talk…” evolving conversations about wildlife ethics in hunting media 169 some editors explicitly push the swedish or nordic orientation to their magazines, rarely featuring depictions of hunting elsewhere in the world. “my view is you should keep it as nordic as possible, but this varies from editor to editor. it’s our profile” (r9). only one editor specifically emphasizes the international dimension: “our idea has been to raise our gaze across swedish boundaries, because people do travel more and more.” (r10). at the same time, he adds, swedish ethics are superior to those in many parts of the world. the implied virtue of swedish hunting is attributed to among other things a tradition of loose dog hunting, where ethics have been high both for the treatment of dogs (svensk jakt, ljung, 2017-07-31) and for wildlife (svensk jakt, ljung, 2017-05-03). editors recall questionable hunting practices by foreigners on swedish soil, “like italians who will accidentally shoot a dog and it’s no big deal to them,” and declare that by international comparison “i get the sense the ethics here are a whole lot higher … on everything from safety to what you can and cannot shoot” (r9). “as a swede you’re so used to high ethics but it becomes clear when you travel abroad that things aren’t the same standards. they don’t have tracking dogs on stand-by” (r10). in “ethics front and centre” in svensk jakt, a representative of the swedish hunting association is interviewed to proudly declare that sweden is world-leading in terms of having 48,000 tracking efforts every year, as done by hunters. seminars are devoted to praising and encouraging “voluntary efforts” under the nationalistic-sounding “swedish wildlife” project (svensk jakt, 2017, nr 2/3, p. 18). in a blog entry at svensk jakt (“hunting ethics equals society’s view on hunting,” 2015-04-18) by fredrik widemo, swedish hunting enjoys high acceptance by the non-hunting public because its regulation is built on “freedom with responsibility” on the part of hunters, giving rise to “the best hunting law in the western world.” websites are awash with similar entries, stating how ”swedish is a fantastic hunting country” (rydholm, svensk jakt, 2017-02-21), with a “long and liberal hunting tradition to be proud of” (daniel ligné quoted in jonson, jaktjournalen, 2016-08-18). apart from such declarations featured in the context of reacting against changes in law, they also feature prominently within topics that problematize questionable shooting or trapping practices. live-capture traps of wild boar, for instance, are opposed with the accompanying assertion that “this is not how it’s done in sweden [...] here we work with high ethics” (jonson, jaktjournalen, 2016-0429). on the forum, swedish hunting ethics is discussed in several posts commending “ethics to be proud of today” (robsoft, thread: ‘the bow-hunting question on the agenda’, 2017-06-10). in older volumes, swedish hunting is credited with having grown from a tradition of “folk hunting” (svensk jakt, nr 6, 1993, p. 40), one in which the influence of regular humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 170 hunters and small landowners on regulation and wildlife management has given rise to an internationally distinguishable ”order that is conducive to responsibility-taking.” the word “just right” (lagom) is also used to characterize the propriety of swedish hunting as compared international hunters (svensk jakt nr 1, 1992, “the grammar school teacher who hunts just right,” p. 66). magazines from the 1970s and 1980s also feature such sentiments, citing “the uniqueness and responsibility” of swedish hunting practices and ethics (jaktjournalen, nr. 11, 1971, p. 16). an article from jaktmarker & fiskevatten from 1969 sanctifies swedish dog hunting by contrasting it to “the shocking english fox-hunting. we smile at the extraordinary snobbery of this and are shocked by the undeniably high measure of animal cruelty it usually brings” (“fox without a shot,” 1969, p. 682). the principal trend is that a romantic-nationalist discourse has always been present, but recent articles draw more frequent and explicit links between swedish hunting as virtuous and responsible compared to the ethics of non-swedish hunting cultures. 2.2. (self-)critical voices. it can be noted that the forum discourse on the topic of traditionally swedish ethics turned up more self-critical notes, with some users questioning the idea of a homogenous swedish hunting ethics in the first place (thread: “bear hunting in russia,” robsoft, 2010-12-20). among other things, two users assert ”if swedes are now supposedly world-leading in terms of ethics, morals and common sense in hunting, i’d sure as hell like to know who gave us that title?” and ”it’s enough of a mess in sweden — ethics vary heavily from north to south.” this is affirmed by expert interviews with hunting editors, one of whom candidly reflects on discrepant ethics across the country (r3). another concedes “we’re not world-leading in everything even if we think so. there are things one can learn from abroad, like sustainable ‘trophy’ kills” (r10). it is also emphasized (r7, r8, r10) that a key component of the ethics discussion in the future will have to be vulnerability and self-criticism on the part of hunters, including a preparedness to also discuss misfires, wounded kills, and unsavory things “that happen to every hunt. it’s not just a success everytime” (r10). journalists note it is important also not to hide this in photos or hunting stories, so that hunters generally become better at reading about and addressing difficult aspects of hunting to tell the full story. as contended, one of the leading words associated with the unique swedish hunting ethic is the term “hunterlike behavior” (appearing as “jägarmässighet,” “sportmannamässigt,” or “sportsligt” [approx. “sportsmanlike”]) appears more rarely, in older magazines, and is far less tied to a typically swedish ethic than the term erica von essen-“we need to talk…” evolving conversations about wildlife ethics in hunting media 171 “hunterlike behavior” today (see e.g. jaktjournalen, nr. 1, 1971, p. 44; jaktjournalen, nr1., 1986, p.39). on the online forum, the term hunterlike behavior appears as an adjective to the following words: tone, position, conduct, precision, caution, level, harvest, order, spirit, moral, action, challenge, shooting position, and even clothing attire. consistent with the greater reflexivity and self-criticism of the forum, enabled by the candid peer community, posts also problematize the term “jägarmässig” in the context of swedish ethics, such as by noting “what is meant by jägarmässig depends on who you ask” (robsoft, thread: “piglet with class 1 jägarmässigt?” 2016-04-06). also in older magazines, albeit to a more limited extent, this is occasionally raised in relation to different standards for different game coming down to “a matter of taste and preference” within hunterlike behavior (jaktjournalen, 1980, p. 16). on the forum, there is an interesting tension between, on the one hand, the more nationalist discourse of valuing the integrity of a swedish hunting ethic, and, on the other hand, criticism toward closing off swedish hunting and its ethics as a sacred institution compared to other cultures. for example, in the thread “very interesting reading” (2015-06-18), users argue over arbitrary distinctions between “real” and “improper” hunters, with one user suggesting we need to abandon such terminology and belief in the uniqueness of swedish hunting in order to “welcome more people into hunting. diversity enrichens. multiculti [sic] and all that…” 2.4. swedish hunting ethics on the international arena. from the early 1990s volumes of svensk jakt, references to swedish hunting ethics are present, but less explicit. when they occur, it is usually in conjunction with concern about sweden’s then-ascension into the eu and the infringements that hunters fear will accompany this union. one article stresses the importance of defending the swedish hunting ethic upon entry into the eu (svensk jakt, nr. 4, 1992, “all hands on deck for eg,” p. 18): “we certainly have nothing to be ashamed about in sweden […] hunting ethics, wildlife care, regulation and hunting training are all top notch internationally” (citing j.o. petterson). it can be noted, however, that in five consecutive volumes of svensk jakt from 1993 — the year before the referendum — reports on hunting experiences by swedish correspondents in italy, france, germany, spain, and poland are carefully presented (”the eg series”) and serve to dispel rather than reproduce prejudices readers might have about hunting ethics in these countries. indeed, in contrast to today’s discussions on the trigger-happiness and occasional elitism of, e.g., southern european hunters to differentiate these from swedish hunters humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 172 coming from a proper meat tradition (r1, r2, r3, r5, r8, r9, r10), these articles speak relatively highly as to the wildlife management standards of italy and spain. it is notable, also, that older magazines feature concessions like “when it comes to wildlife management we swedes quite have a bit to learn from many european countries, particularly when it comes to hunting culture” (jaktjournalen, nr. 11, 1971, p. 37), and even articles titled “can sweden learn from yugoslavian hunting?” (jaktjournalen, nr. 4, 1971, p. 7). hunting trips and articles from other parts of the world were much rarer in older volumes; as one editor explains, “i think the whole editorial board went to alaska to hunt at some point in the 1970s, but that was it” (r9). in magazines published after sweden’s ascension into the eu, when there is more contact with other member states and hunting exchange globally, there is a sometimes more critical tone toward foreigners’ hunting, either in their countries or visiting sweden (svensk jakt, 1998, nr 2/3, “no hunting prohibition for foreigners,” p. 23), not to mention criticism of the eu as a central institution infringing on swedish hunting traditions and rights with its restrictive “bureaucracy driven” politics (svensk jakt, 1998, nr 2/3, “bloodbath in brussels,” p. 32). a magazine editor suggests that the ethics divide is far stronger between swedes and non-swedes, even other european hunters, than it is among classes of swedish hunters (like upper-class, working-class). he argues it is enough “just to get down to spain or hungary” to encounter unethical hunts (r3). discussion. this paper began by pointing to an increased need on the part of hunters to make transparent the ethics that inform their codes of conduct with wildlife (von essen, “whose discourse?”). previously unhelpfully relegated as belonging to a private domain, perhaps as a legacy of leopold’s consecration of hunting ethics as an introspective exercise in moral relativism, there is a growing recognition that wildlife is a public good and cannot be governed purely on the basis of private whims. it demands at minimum a self-critical discussion among hunters about their ethics. the seeds of such a discussion are now sown, although they are usually motivated by the selfpreservation of hunters in the face of new environmental regulation and infringements on rights (hanna), embodied in the principle freedom with responsibility. that said, the process of opening up to such discussions has been agonizingly slow, if hunting news media, social media, and expert interviews with magazine editors are to be believed. up until the last five years or so, hunting media have not been preoccupied with discussions of ethics in any direct sense, that is, in framing discussions in terms of ethics or pointing to the importance of having such dialogue among themselves. this scarcity of ethics talk may be due to a range of factors: such articles are seen as erica von essen-“we need to talk…” evolving conversations about wildlife ethics in hunting media 173 commercially unviable for the independent magazines; as finger-wagging by the association-linked magazines; and as encroaching on the personal values of individual hunters who, after all, have their own moral compasses. as was suggested in the introduction, there has also been resistance with regard to interviewing hunters about their ethics or, as i suggested to be more methodologically sound, surveying their discussion forums for ethics talk. in this way, this study marks a contribution to exposing ethics talk. insofar as magazines from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s feature mentions of the words “ethics,” “moral,” or “hunterlike behavior,” they use these words to characterize poor standards in concrete cases of hunting and shooting, and not on the meta-level of problematizing what they mean for hunters. the terms describe propriety of conduct in relation to respecting boundaries, avoiding disputes with neighboring hunters, but also when to shooting skill and style. compared to today’s coverage, which features more ethics in relation to animal welfare directly, the old hunting ethic is comparatively anthropocentric (see also van de pitte). this seems entirely plausible; the constituent features of hunting ethics likely do change so as to better resonate with the moral values of the general public (gill). in this study, this is partly evidenced in the shift from ethics referring to human standards of propriety to ethics referring to wildlife welfare and ecocentrism, a prominent discourse in public consciousness and policy today (eckersley). it is also probable that values around animal welfare and animal ethics do not disseminate one-way from the public to hunters, but that the public is also influenced by hunting values in a dialectical relation. this may be in two ways: one, hunters are members of the public, and in their diverse roles as husbands, ceos, celebrities, or teachers, they constitute part of the discussion in the public. indeed, inasmuch as hunters are singled out as a unit for analysis, they are a community of practice (widlok) and not of totality, occupying diverse roles. second, hunting values are making their way into the public. for the latter half of the 20th century, the popularity of hunting was on the decline, parallel to growing environmental awareness and animal rights activism (franklin). as such, in many places, hunters were seen as deviant and backward (vitali). today, however, modern alienation from the countryside, from the means of production, from animals, and from self-sufficiency have precipitated an upswing for hunting in many western contexts (von essen & hansen). hunting gains status as reconciliation with nature, as spiritual and psychological fulfillment, and as a more humane and responsible means to food humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 174 consumption in modern society (cahoone). this means that the hunter is often presented to urban publics as a role model or wildlife expert. the interesting finding is that despite previous research’s assertions that hunting ethics are private and situational, hunters have always shown a strong predilection for comparing themselves and their morals with those of others, which hints at some readiness to discuss hunting ethics. reflected clearly in media articles, this is a tendency that is observed also in the hunting scholarly literature (bell et al.; colomy & granfield; fischer et al.; silvy et al.), although, again, not understood as an exercise in reflexivity over ethics per se. modes of differentiation by hunters from less ethical categories of hunters feature in the media across decades, including imparting divides in ethics between local and tourist hunters, upper-class and working class hunters, and more. it is significant that in older magazines, a higher proportion of such comparisons are drawn between classes of swedish hunters internally. often jokingly, typologies of different hunter profiles are made: the slob hunter, the meat hunter, the city-boy hunter, and the gearhead hunter (see also jensen for such typologies in the literature; wade). in today’s media, by contrast, differentiation occurs increasingly on an international axis: swedish hunters as compared to trophy-hunting germans, pompous french bird hunters, ruthless english fox-hunters, and crazy redneck north american hog hunters. swedish hunters thus take care to distinguish themselves from hunters of what they see as less ethical cultures (von essen et al.). with globalization, it is hardly surprising that there is more contact between swedish hunting styles and those of foreigners, prompting assertions of national identity. the relative “defensiveness” around championing a traditional swedish ethic in contrast to foreign ethics can certainly be challenged. one body of scholars regards local pride by hunters as everyday sense-making, letting off steam, coping, and building solidarity (boonstra et al.; heley; watson). i suggest, however, that this repeats the unfortunate tendency of previous hunting research to depoliticize ethics and relegate hunters’ discussions to the private domain, instead of understanding them as partly political in nature. they are political in the sense that they are collective responses of hunter self-preservation at a time of external challenges. much like populist calls to e.g. “make america great again,” this particular element of hunters’ ethics discussion has counterpublic and conservative dimensions against change and modernity (von essen & allen, “a reluctant right-wing social movement”; von essen & allen, “taking prejudice seriously”). erica von essen-“we need to talk…” evolving conversations about wildlife ethics in hunting media 175 this gave rise to the second interesting finding: the re-activation of a traditionally swedish hunting ethic in recent years (von essen & allen, “a reluctant right-wing social movement”). recent media now promulgate the term “hunterlike behavior” as a typically swedish virtue. it is likely that this phenomenon is a response both to modernization processes and globalization forces that imprint on hunting culture and risk homogenizing it in a “global hunting culture,” and a response to increased regulations facing them (von essen, “the impact of modernization”). to clarify the latter, hunters are now resentful of eu infringements on their traditional hunting rights and its simultaneous toleration of ethically questionable forms of hunting in other member states. in response to this, it is not surprising that they have defensively activated a norm around swedish ethical hunting. this phenomenon can be observed also in the context of swedish forestry at the moment, where the swedish ethic of “freedom with responsibility” is increasingly called upon to stem the tide of recent environmental regulation (löfmarck et al.). if freedom with responsibility was a mantra, its manifestation was hunterlike behavior. the media analysis showed this term to be simultaneously opaque and potentially empty rhetoric. critical voices on hunting social media, not yet reaching the levels of published news media, have begun to direct critique toward this development and the problems associated with the term, as did one hunting editor. future research should critically uncover this term and what it means to different people in different contexts, so as to save it from being an empty signifier. the hunters that already question its meaning form an important bastion of reflexivity. they are actually beginning to conduct this discussion themselves in a new communicative arena online. such platforms are of critical importance, as previously the only dialogue associated with hunting was understood to be that between the hunter and “nature” (reis). there are two aspects to such ethics discussions that can be distinguished going forward. first, the dialogue hunters maintain within their own ranks and, second, the dialogue they conduct with the general public about wildlife. it seems that the former is a prerequisite for the latter to be held. hence, hunters first need to cultivate processes and platforms to hold internal discussions. finally, we can for analytical utility consider more explicitly what bergmann calls the modality of a code [ethic] — referring to the historical context and the framework that makes the ethic coherent and intelligible. with the current intellectual climate described as hostile toward hunting (parker) or, in sweden, at least more skeptical than fifty years ago, we can infer that hunters’ propensity to talk about ethics changes. critical voices suggest ethics become a mere façade through which hunters legitimize violence (kheel; peterson), but hunting humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 176 scholars insist codes of conduct imposing restrictions of hunters have existed since the days of kublai khan, when hunting was universally acceptable (swan). ethical discussions also become increasingly important in modernity in the context of the normative uncertainty facing people (löfmarck et al.) and the erosion of authority in their lives. the erosion of authority is reflected clearly in the lack of trust toward the eu in governing hunters or telling them how to hunt, a theme that runs through post-2000 magazines. the growth of autonomy, individualism, and self-expression values in modernizing societies meanwhile (and as a contrast to this) (inglehart & baker) also point toward increased reflexivity on the part of, for example, hunters to consider their ethical standards and what kind of hunters they want to be, explaining the rise in ethics talk across their ranks. from this perspective, future research might investigate ethics policing also as a form of signaling and identity work (bird & smith). finally, even if we can get hunters to communicate their ethics, we must expect this process to be something of an internal battle of different ethics in different corners of a diverse hunting community. certainty, as this study shows, there are also dissenting critical voices within hunting to whom ethics are more or less important and tug in a variety of different directions. indeed, rather than a cosmopolitan hunting community emerging, there is arguably increased hunter specialization and value-pluralism today. hunting becomes a site for differentiation, so that gearhead sportsmen and population cullers separate from trophy hunters and gentlemen bird shooters by way of different ethos (svendsen bjørkdahl). one anticipated danger of holding discussions within such a diverse and internally segregated community is that different profiles of hunters and sub-communities will try to lay claim to the “true” hunting ethic, and, as evidenced here, use it as the benchmark against which to condemn other hunting practices as slob hunting (kuentzel). against this, hopes of finding an ethic that is “logically consistent and intuitively appealing” to the general public (peterson 310) says nothing about the challenge of first agreeing on ethical baselines within a heterogeneous community of practice. conclusion. through a six-decade media analysis of hunting press, the latter itself evolving to encompass new communicative arenas online, this study has found an increased willingness on the part of hunters to problematize ethics relating to wildlife, environment, and propriety. discussions may appear to be cynically motivated, as if to ward off detail regulation and ensure hunters continue to enjoy freedom with responsibility in how they go about their activity. but hunters also indicate genuine concerns over animal welfare and sustainability that is testament to them not just erica von essen-“we need to talk…” evolving conversations about wildlife ethics in hunting media 177 defending themselves to the public, but being products of the values and animal welfare paradigms that shape public consciousness. the most striking finding was arguably that a key constituent of ethics talk today involves emerging forms of peer policing in virtual arenas, entailing greater scrutiny of practices and values of new as well as old hunters. compared to older days, ethics seemed to be more or less accepted as coming as a ready package “from one’s father” and there was perhaps less opportunity to challenge authority — be it in father figures, official hunting associations, or policy. today, by contrast, modernization involves emancipation from authority and greater reflexivity, which is reflected in ethics talk. works cited bell, s., k. hampshire and s. topalidou. “the political culture of poaching: a case study from northern greece.” biodiversity and conservation 16.2 (2007): 399-418. bergmann, j. discreet indiscretions: the social organization of gossip. aldine, 1993. bird, r.b. and e.a. smith. “signaling theory, strategic interaction, and symbolic capital.” current anthropology 46.2 (2005): 221-238. bogliogli, m. a matter of life and death: hunting in contemporary vermont. u of massachusetts p, 2009. boonstra, w.j., s. birnbaum and e. björkvik. “the quality of compliance: investigating fishers’ responses towards regulation and authorities.” fish and fisheries 18.4 (2017): 682697. cahoone, l. “hunting as a moral good.” environmental values 18.1 (2009): 67-89 . child, k.r. and c.t. darimont. “hunting for trophies: online hunting photographs reveal achievement satisfaction with large and dangerous prey.” human dimensions of wildlife 20.6 (2015): 531-541. cohen, j.a. “is hunting a sport?” international journal of applied philosophy 17.2 (2003): 291-326. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 178 colomy, p. & r. granfield. “losing samson: nature, crime, and boundaries.” sociological quarterly 51.3 (2010): 355-383. ebeling-schuld, a.m. and c.t. darimont. “online hunting forums identify achievement as prominent among multiple satisfactions.” wildlife society bulletin 41.3 (2017): 523-529. eckersley, r. “ecocentric discourses: problems and future prospects for nature advocacy.” debating the earth: the environmental politics reader. john s. dryzek and david schlosberg, eds. oxford up, 2005). 364-381. eid, e. and r. handal. “illegal hunting in jordan: using social media to assess impacts on wildlife.” oryx 4 may (2017): 1-6. engbladh, h. the swedish hunters association: a friend or a foe of the swedish wolf? swedish university of agricultural sciences, 2006. fischer, a., v. kereži, b. arroyo, m. mateos-delibes, d. tadie, a. lowassa, o. krange and k. skogen. “(de)legitimising hunting — discourses over the morality of hunting in europe and eastern africa.” land use policy 32 (2013): 261-270. foster, e. “research on gossip: taxonomy, methods and future directions.” review of general psychology 8.2 (2004): 78-99. franklin, a. animals & modern cultures – a sociology of human-animal relations in modernity. sage, 1999. gibson, k. “more than murder: ethics and hunting in new zealand.” sociology of sport journal 31.4 (2014): 455-474. gill, r.b. “managing wildlife ethics issues ethically.” human dimensions of wildlife 5.4 (2000): 72-82. glaser, j., s. dixit and d.p. green. “studying hate crime with the internet: what makes racists advocate racial violence.” journal of social issues 58 (2002): 177-193. hanna, e. “fair chase: to where does it lead?” the culture of hunting in canada. j. manore and d. g. miner, eds. u of british columbia p, 2006. 239-276. erica von essen-“we need to talk…” evolving conversations about wildlife ethics in hunting media 179 hansen, h.p., m.n. peterson and t.r. peterson. “results of the nordic hunting in society symposium.” human dimensions of wildlife 15.4 (2010): 301-302. heley, j. “the new squirearchy and emergent cultures of the new middle classes in rural areas.” journal of rural studies 26.4 (2010): 321-331. helle, p., k. ikonen and a. kantola “wildlife monitoring in finland — on-line information to game administration, hunters and the wider public.” canadian journal of forest research 46.12 (2016): 1491-96. holtz, p., n. kronberger and w. wagner, “analyzing internet forums.” journal of media psychology 24.2 (2012): 55-66. im, e.-o., & chee, w. “an online forum as a qualitative research method: practical issues.” nursing research 55.4 (2006): 267-273. inglehart, r. and w.e. baker. “modernization, cultural change, and the persistence of traditional values.” american sociological review 65.1 (2000): 19-51. jensen, j. “the virtues of hunting.” philosophy in the contemporary world 8.2 (2001): 113124. kaltenborn, b.p., o. andersen and j.d.c. linnell. “predators, stewards, or sportsmen — how do norwegian hunters perceive their role in carnivore management?” international journal of biodiversity science, ecosystem services & management 9.3 (2013): 239-248 kheel, m. “license to kill: an ecofeminist critique of hunters’ discourse.” animals and women: feminist theoretical explorations. c. j. adams and j. donovan, eds. duke up, 1995). kuentzel, w.f. “skybusting and the slob hunter myth.” wildlife society bulletin (19732006) 22.2 (1994): 331-336. leopold, a. a sand county almanac. oxford up, 1946. lindqvist, s., c. sandström, t. bjärstig and e. kvastegård. “the changing role of hunting in sweden — from subsistence to ecosystem stewardship?” alces 50 (2014): 5366. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 180 list, c.j. “on the moral significance of a hunting ethic.” ethics and the environment 3.2 (1998): 157-175. luke, b. “a critical analysis of hunters’ ethics.” environmental ethics 19.1 (1997): 25-44. löfmarck, e., y. uggla and r. lidskog. “freedom with what? interpretations of ’responsibility’ in swedish forestry practice.” forest policy and economics 75 (supplement c) (2017): 34-40. marvin, g. “challenging animals — project and process in hunting.” nature and culture: rebuilding lost connections. sarah pilgrim and j. n. pretty, eds. routledge,2013. 145-160. moloney, m.f., a.s. dietrich, o. strickland and s. myerburg “using internet discussion boards as virtual focus groups.” ans adv nurs sci 26.4 (2003): 274-286. mörner, c. and u. olausson “hunting the beast on youtube.” nordicom review 38.1(2017): 17. nuno, a. and f.a.v. st. john “how to ask sensitive questions in conservation: a review of specialized questioning techniques.” biological conservation 189 (2015): 5-15. nurse, a. “criminalising the right to hunt: european law perspectives on anti-hunting legislation.” crime, law and social change 67.4 (2017): 383-399. ojalammi, s. and n. blomley. “dancing with wolves: making legal territory in a morethan-human world.” geoforum 62 (2015): 51-60. parker, j. “the camera or the gun: hunting through different lenses.” hunting — philosophy for everyone: in search of the wild life. n. kowalski, ed. wiley-blackwell, 2010. 161-70. peterson, d. heartsblood: hunting, spirituality, and wildness in america. johnson books, 2000. pickering, l. and h. kara. “presenting and representing others: towards an ethics of engagement.” international journal of social research methodology 20.3 (2017): 299-309. erica von essen-“we need to talk…” evolving conversations about wildlife ethics in hunting media 181 pohja-mykrä, m. and s. kurki. “strong community support for illegal killing challenges wolf management.” european journal of wildlife research 60.5 (2014): 759-770. posewitz, j. beyond fair chase: the ethic and tradition of hunting. falcon, 1994. reis, a.c. “more than the kill: hunters’ relationships with landscape and prey.” current issues in tourism 12.5-6 (2009): 573-587 . silvy, e., m.n. peterson, j.l. heinen-kay and b. langerhans. “illegal harvest of marine resources on andros island and the legacy of colonial governance.” british journal of criminology 58.2 (2018): 332-350. sodikoff, g.m. “totem and taboo reconsidered: endangered species and moral practice in madagascar.” the anthropology of extinction. g. m. sodikoff, ed. indiana up, 2011. 6786. swan, j. “peaceful arms: hunting and sport shooting.” texas review of law and politics 8.1 (2003): 189-212. svendsen bjørkdahl, k. the wild ember within: a study of the hunting ethos in norway and the u.s.a. university of oslo, 2005. wade, m.l. “animal liberationism, ecocentrism, and the morality of sport hunting.” journal of the philosophy of sport 17.1 (1990): 15-27. van de pitte, m. “the moral basis for public policy encouraging sport hunting.” journal of social philosophy 34.2 (2003): 256-266. vitali, t. “sport hunting: moral or immoral.” environmental ethics 12.1 (1990): 69-82. von essen, e. “the impact of modernization on hunting ethics: emerging taboos among contemporary swedish hunters.” human dimensions of wildlife 23.1 (2018): 21-38. _____. “whose discourse is it anyway? understanding resistance through the rise of ‘barstool biology’ in nature conservation.” environmental communication 11.4 (2015): 470-489. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 182 _____. in the gap between legality and legitimacy: illegal hunting in sweden as a crime of dissent. swedish university of agricultural sciences, 2016. von essen, e. and m. allen. “the republican zoopolis: towards a new legitimation framework for relational animal ethics.” ethics and the environment 21.1 (2016): 61-88. _____. “a reluctant right-wing social movement: on the ‘good sense’ of swedish hunters.” journal of rural studies 50 (2017): 139-147. von essen, e. and m.p. allen. “taking prejudice seriously: burkean reflections on the rural past and present.” sociologia ruralis 50 (2017): 139-147. von essen, e. and h.p. hansen. “sport hunting and food procurement ethics. encyclopedia of food and agricultural ethics. d. m. kaplan, ed.” springer, 2016. 1-7. von essen, e., h. nordström källström, h.p. hansen, m.n. peterson and t.r. peterson. “on illegal killings of wildlife in fennoscandia.” urban and rural reports. uppsala: department of urban and rural development, 2017. watson, c. “a sociologist walks into a bar (and other academic challenges): towards a methodology of humour.” sociology 49.3 (2015): 407-421. widlok, t. “the universal hunter?” journal of contemporary african studies 34.1 (2016): 97-110. microsoft word matthews-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 9:1 paul robert matthews why animals and religion now? hegel’s dog. in his preface to herman friedrich wilhelm hinrichs’s book on the “inner relationship” between “science” and religion (die religion im inneren verhältnisse zur wissenschaft) from 1822,1 georg friedrich wilhelm hegel wrote, quite famously, if religion in human beings only grounded itself in a feeling, a feeling with no further determination than that of a feeling of absolute dependence, then the dog would be the best christian, for the dog feels this [feeling] most strongly and lives principally within it. the dog would also have a feeling of salvation, whenever it gained satisfaction from a bone. (berliner schriften 58)2 these words were directed at hegel’s esteemed colleague at the time, friedrich schleiermacher and, in particular, at his recently published glaubenslehre or the christian faith, where schleiermacher first defined the essence of religion as a feeling — a feeling of absolute dependence (schlechthinnige abhängigkeit). of course, schleiermacher had already, in his speeches from 1799, defined the essence of religion as “neither thinking nor acting, but intuition and feeling” (schleiermacher 22). however, at that time, hegel had nothing negative to say about schleiermacher himself, even if he was already combatting philosophies of feeling propagated by the likes of j.f. fries and f.h. jacobi (crouter 22-27). yet, by 1822, something had obviously changed. perhaps hegel had simply come to the conclusion that the need to reconcile religion with “science” had become so pressing that the time for niceties had passed. or perhaps his time in berlin had made it more difficult to “keep his natural tendency for sarcasm in check” (pinkard 501). in any case, as terry pinkard notes, schleiermacher, as well as many of schleiermacher’s supporters, found his comments deeply offensive — and (pinkard adds) “understandably” so. hegel had, after all, accused schleiermacher of “not being able to distinguish deep religious faith from the animal feelings of a happy dog wagging its tail after having been given a treat.” however, this is not the only thing of which hegel accused schleiermacher—indeed, not even, as far as i can tell, the primary thing. moreover, i highly doubt that this was the accusation to which schleiermacher, in the main, took offence, and which we still paul robert matthews -why animals and religion now? 69 find “understandably” offensive today. rather, hegel had accused schleiermacher of promoting an “animal religion” — a religion, quite literally, of and for the dogs. while it would certainly be worth our time to unpack the reasons why hegel characterized schleiermacher’s religion as an “animal religion,” that is not what i will be doing here; i bring up hegel’s dog only to point out that, although almost 200 years has passed since this exchange took place, we still think that we understand why schleiermacher would have taken offence at hegel’s words even, that is, without much in the way of context. this, i want to suggest, is an indication that our working conception of “religion” has not changed a great deal since the time of hegel or, at least, not radically. that we still find schleiermacher’s response understandable demonstrates that we continue to hold many of the same presuppositions about “religion” as hegel and schleiermacher — the same presuppositions which render effective hegel’s rhetorical show of force. among these are the (related) presuppositions that other animals cannot be religious (or even have religious feelings); that, conversely, only humans are capable of being religious; and that religion belongs, as aaron gross puts it, to the “nonanimal part of the human” (gross 13), which is to say that “religion” is a or perhaps even the (private) property of the human. moreover, these presuppositions are themselves supported by yet a further, more basic presupposition: that humans are somehow or for some reason essentially different from other animals by virtue of a certain power or property such as reason, language, or even “religion” itself. while it may still be “laughable” or even “offensive” to speak of animal religion, the time has come, particularly for those of us working in the field of religious studies, to take seriously the possibility of animal religion or, at the very least, to begin to take seriously the challenge of rethinking “religion” from the vantage point of “the animal.” although it has become increasingly difficult in recent years to maintain the boundary line which has traditionally separated or walled off the animal from the human being, we continue to employ a variety of concepts which depend in some way upon a hard and fast distinction between humans and other animals for their conceptual integrity (including the concept of the concept itself). such concepts include freedom, culture, language, thought, reason, morality, and, as i will be attempting to demonstrate here, religion as well. that said, the idea that other animals may indeed “have” religion or be religious in some way has as begun to gain a bit of traction. to be sure, others have expressed the possibility of animal religion before: most significantly, darwin, teilhard de chardin, johannes maringer, and mircea eliade. however, with the exception of darwin, such “animals” were always of the homo genus. yet, recent publications in the fields of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 70 religious studies, including cognitive ethnology, critical theory, and theology indicate that “the animal” or the question that “the animal” poses has found its way into the territory of “religion” and religious studies. in what follows, i attempt to take stock of these recent developments and to provide an answer, or series of answers, as to why these developments have come about now, and only now. i should emphasize that i am not interested in providing an overview of all of the work carried out in animal studies, as well as religious studies, that bears upon the question of the animal and religion. nor am i interested in defining or developing a new concept of religion (such an attempt would be, at minimum, counterproductive). rather, i am interested in tracing the effects that this recent intrusion of “the animal” into the territory of religious studies have had upon the way that we in academia conceptualize religion. i want to sketch out some reasons or suggestions, which make sense of the question, “why animals and religion now?” why is this question being asked now, why has it taken so long for us to ask it, and what does the fact that it has taken so long to ask say about the current state of the academic study of religion? the first part of this essay examines the role that animals have played in establishing the limit or horizon of our thinking about religion. the second part is devoted to why and how this limit or horizon has recently begun to shift or, in some cases, dissolve (if only in part). finally, i consider why now might be the time — and indeed, perhaps the only time we have — to respond to the question of the animal and its implications for the study of religion. i have attempted to engage with a variety of thinkers who, in their thinking about religion, have frequently touched upon the question regarding the animal. these engagements are by no means exhaustive, but i do take them to be representative of the way in which we, in the academic study of religion, have tended to approach religion until quite recently. yet, before we jump in, i would like to return for a moment to hegel and his dog, to remind ourselves of what is at stake in this line of questioning which runs from the animal, through the human being, to religion or, that is, to try to adumbrate the ways in which the animal, the human being, and religion have been historically bound together in such a way that, to (re)define one term, requires us to (re)define the other(s). defining or divining the subject of religion. in hegel’s critique of schleiermacher, we can distinguish a certain pattern or way of thinking about the relationship between and among religion, the human being, and the animal, which becomes repeated paul robert matthews -why animals and religion now? 71 throughout the subsequent history of thinking about religion — in particular, about the “essence,” as well as the “origin” of religion. at least within “western” thought, the distinction between human and animal has been most commonly justified on the basis of “the fact” that humans are the only animals that have the capacity to “reason” or to “think.” indeed, in this respect, hegel is traditional. everything genuinely human, hegel argues, has been and is a product or result of thinking, and it is only in and through thinking that the human comes to distinguish itself from other animals. although feeling, for instance, has an important role to play in religion, religion is ultimately a matter of mind or spirit;3 it is only because the human being is spirit, or becomes spirit in and through thinking, that the human being is capable of religion. “only thinking,” writes hegel, “makes the soul (with which animals are also endowed) a spirit, and philosophy is only a consciousness of that content, the spirit and its truth, in the shape and manner of its essential character that distinguishes it [the spirit] from the animal and makes it capable of religion” (encyclopedia 16). in hegel’s thought, as in that of so many others, thought or thinking, and all that thought or thinking usually entails (language, consciousness, self-consciousness, etc.), simultaneously provides the basis for the (re)production of the human/animal distinction and marks the essential determination or condition of “religion” as such. this formulation, as it turns out, can be found in many of the founding “fathers” of religious studies, from durkheim to jonathan z. smith.4 although thought or thinking does not always play the role of arbiter in these thinkers, whatever it is that distinguishes the human being from the animal also and at the same time determines the essential or necessary condition for the appearance of religion. for the most part, this connection or relationship between the essence of “religion” and the essence of the “human being” has, within the history of western thought, gone unthought or unquestioned. most have simply assumed that the subject of religion begins and ends with the human subject. i am sure, at any rate, that it never occurred to schleiermacher to question the logic behind hegel’s polemical diatribe — that is, to question whether other animals can in fact be religious. indeed, to the best of my knowledge, no one had ever seriously questioned whether, in fact, religion was an exclusively human phenomenon, limited to the realm of the human subject, until quite recently. while, beginning in the early 2000s, various works began to appear devoted to detailing how particular religions relate to other animals, there had been no single work devoted to examining the question of the animal and religion, in general — or, that is, from a critical perspective — until the appearance of aaron gross’ the question of the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 72 animal and religion (2014), followed shortly thereafter by donovan schaefer’s religious affects (2015).5 what differentiates the work of gross and schaefer from what came before is that they are interested not only in the way in which other animals have been regarded in particular religious traditions, but in the way in which “religion” as such, as well as the academic study of religion, has often excluded the animal from its purview. this is not to say that the animal has been absent from “religion” and religious studies. to the contrary, as gross argues, “the animal” or the question of the animal has “always been at the center of the modern and contemporary study of religion, albeit in a camouflaged and forgotten manner” (gross 61). though the turn toward the animal and religion, at least within contemporary animal and religious studies, may be new, the question of the animal and religion has certainly been asked before, if only implicitly. the question then becomes, why has it taken so long for us, especially those of us working in the field of religious studies, to notice that there has been an animal after us, following us now for quite some time? animals and the limits of the understanding of religion. i want to suggest that, while it certainly has taken a long time, perhaps too long, for us to notice the “absent presence” (to borrow from aaron gross and vicariously from carol adams) of other animals in and around the field of religious studies, it has always been a matter of time before the animal or the question of the animal and religion caught up with us. it could be argued that the question has been waiting for us since at least the dawn of the agricultural revolution, when we, or so the story goes, began to separate or distinguish ourselves from other animals through the construction of walls, both material and conceptual. the question of the animal has always been, in a strange, double sense, “after” us or “following” us — both before us, pursuing us, and after us, waiting for us (to follow).6 the question of the animal (and religion) has, it would seem, marked the horizon or limit of our thinking about religion for quite some time. in her article, "a report on the animal turn," philosopher and critical theorist kari weil suggests that the recent turn toward animals in the humanities and the social sciences has come about because we have begun to realize that animals are, to follow lévi-strauss, “good to think” (lévi-strauss 89) and, in particular, that they are good to think “the limit case of theories of difference, otherness, and power” (weil 3). and, we might add, of theories of religion as well. yet, animals have always been helpful for thinking the limits of such theories. gross, in the question of the animal and religion, demonstrates this through an analysis of four of the “founding fathers” of religious paul robert matthews -why animals and religion now? 73 studies: émile durkheim, ernst cassirer, mircea eliade, and jonathan z. smith. for durkheim, as gross points out, the “inquiry into religion is simultaneously an inquiry into the origins of conceptual thought (particularly the classificatory function), the emergence of the human out of animality, and the foundations of society” (gross 63). moreover, in durkheim, these inquiries are intimately related; indeed, they hang together. durkheim, along with marcel mauss, argues in primitive classification, that the “classificatory function” — that is, the ability to classify things and “arrange them into groups which are distinct from each other, and are separated by clearly determined lines of demarcation” — is the “defining” property of the human being. although “logicians and psychologists commonly regard the procedure … as being simple, innate, or at least as instituted by the powers of the individual alone,” the classificatory function, durkheim and mauss argue, is in fact a complex social behavior (4). “in the beginning,” the human mind finds itself “in a state of indistinction,” lacking “the most indispensable conditions for the classificatory function.” according to durkheim, “our present notion of classification has a history,” even a prehistory; it has “been formed by a painful combination of elements borrowed from extremely different sources, quite foreign to logic, and laboriously organized” (3). to make their case, durkheim and mauss “descend to the least evolved societies known, those which the germans call by the rather vague term naturvölker,” where “there is a complete lack of distinction between him and his exterior soul or his totem. [where] he and his ‘fellow-animal’ together compose a single personality.” among durkheim’s and mauss’ examples of such societies, we encounter the “emblem,” if not the “totem,” of the discipline of religious studies: the brazilian parrot of the bororo tribe, whom the “bororo sincerely imagines himself to be…” (6). to be sure, the bororo did not in fact claim that they are “men and parrots at one and the same time” (smith, “parrott” 272). this much jonathan z. smith makes clear in his essay, “i am a parrot (red).” as smith himself points out, to determine that this is indeed the case we need only turn to the original (german) text from karl von den steinen, unter den naturvölkern zentral brasiliens. yet, durkheim and mauss must have been aware of this as well, for, though they claim that, “the bororo sincerely imagines himself to be a parrot,” they note that he believes that he “assumes the characteristic form only after he is dead, in this life he is to that animal what the caterpillar is to the butterfly” (durkheim and mauss 7). nonetheless, durkheim and mauss go on to include the bororo among their examples of people who cannot make or who avoid making distinctions. in doing so, durkheim and mauss appear to follow “von den steinen’s mistaken lead in assuming that the key to exegesis [of the bororo’s statement, “we are humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 74 parrots”] lay in the fact that the bororo cannot distinguish between animals and men or between different species of animals” (smith, op. cit.) but, smith asks, what if they did? what if the bororo did in fact claim, apparently contrary to fact, “that they are men and parrots at the same time.” how would we, as scholars of religion, respond? this question turns out to be relatively easy to answer because, as smith notes, the majority of scholars that have attempted to make sense of the bororo’s purported declaration, “we are parrots,” have indeed taken the declaration at face value, that is, literally. after examining a range of interpretations, smith concludes that scholars who take the bororo’s declaration literally inevitably come to one of two conclusions: either that the bororo “mean it and they are wrong, or they mean it, but we can never understand what they mean” (286). smith, for his part, does not attempt to answer his own question, although he does suggest that the key to a satisfactory interpretation, for him, depends in some way upon lévi-strauss’ observation that the bororo “differentiate between aquatic, terrestrial, and aerial realms and the animals associated with them: the bororo were fish, they are now men, they will become birds” (272). in any case, it is clear that smith himself do not wish to offer a literal interpretation of the bororo’s declaration — to do so, to paraphrase smith and malinowski, would make the scholar feel silly and the speaker look ridiculous (266). according to smith, this “thought experiment” demonstrates the need for a consideration of the question of truth and a (re)examination of the principles of intelligibility upon which we construct our interpretations of phenomena which appear to be contrary to fact. if we fail do so, “then it is we rather than the bororo who are unable to make distinctions” (287). i have not invoked smith, mauss, durkheim, or the brazilian parrot of the bororo to offer a new interpretation of the statement, “wir sind araras” (von den steinen 512). i have done so to draw attention, first of all, to the fact that, pinched for an “illustration of the alleged inability of primitive man [sic] to make distinctions” (smith 273), mauss and durkheim turn to examples of people who supposedly do not or cannot distinguish human beings from other animals. in other words, in the thought of durkheim and mauss, the human/animal distinction is a, if not the, fundamental distinction upon which the classificatory function and its subsequent development are based. “without the human/animal binary,” aaron gross notes, “no more advanced and properly human classificatory function will develop” (64). the human/animal distinction, or the ability to think this distinction, marks the beginning of distinctly human thought.7 second, i want to draw attention to smith’s question, “what if we only knew that the bororo insist that they are men and parrots at one and the same time” (272), and ask the paul robert matthews -why animals and religion now? 75 question once again, albeit differently, under the assumption that the bororo (or the sioux, the bakairi, or the trumaí, or anyone else) do not or cannot make distinctions — particularly, between humans and other animals. under these conditions, how would we, as scholars of religion, respond? would we respond by denying such people their “humanity”? or by denying that such people can be religious? because durkheim and mauss already took the bororo’s statement to mean that they did not or were not capable of drawing distinctions, it is for us quite easy to say how they might respond. such people would, in the first place, still be human, but of an entirely different sort. they would be, as freud speculated in his totem and taboo, like children, caught in a sort of arrested development, akin to a “missing link.” similarly, they would still be “religious”; however, their religion would most certainly be “primitive.” a religion in which, once again, “there is a complete lack of distinction between [the individual] and his exterior soul or totem” (durkheim and mauss 6). moreover, such a religion would constitute only a stage in the development of religion, and an “early” one at that — a “passing,” liminary phase, through which the bororo never passed. although i do not want to engage in too much speculation, i believe smith would have to deny that the bororo could be religious — at least in any strict, anthropological sense. after all, according to smith, one’s capacity for religion depends in large part, just as with durkheim and mauss, on the ability to perceive discrepancies, incongruities, and contradictions, for it is “the incongruity between the expectation and the actuality that serves as a vehicle for religious experience” (“map” 301). furthermore, it is the “perceptions of discrepancy and discord which,” according to smith, “give rise to the symbolic project that we identify as the very essence of the human being” (“parrot” 297). thus, although smith admirably comes to the aid of the bororo, defending them against the attempts of durkheim and others, such as lévy bruhl, who characterize their way of thinking or mentality as “primitive,” he nonetheless reinforces the idea that for one to be religious one requires the ability to make or draw distinctions or to think, and to do so in a very particular (kantian) way. moreover, he also appears to reinforce the idea that it is precisely this ability to think which, insofar as it gives rise to symbolic thought, characterizes the essence of the human being. in a sense this is surprising, for in “map is not territory” smith proclaims that it has been “one of the great ironies of history” that we have used those “activities of man which are unique, especially language and historical consciousness,” to “dichotomize the world into human beings (who are generally like-us) and non-human beings (who are generally not like-us), into the ‘we’ and the ‘them’ which are the boundaries of any humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 76 ethnic map” (“map” 294). this dichotomy “has resulted in much mischief.” what kind of mischief? well, quite literally, the creation of dangerously inaccurate maps — maps replete with errors and plagued with false distinctions, which were subsequently used by scholars to construct the category of “religion,” as well as “world religions.” a world religion, smith argues, is a religion which “is like ours; but it is, above all, a tradition which has achieved sufficient power and numbers to enter our history, either to form it, interact with it, or thwart it. all other religions are invisible” (295). invisible religions are those which have not yet become “religions” in the proper sense of the word and which belong to “other” people — people who, again, for some reason, are not “us.” any distinction can make all the difference between “us” and “them.” “in classical greek anthropology,” smith notes, the distinction between “us” and “them” was drawn on the basis of language: “to be, in a cultural sense, non-human was to be a barbarian, to speak unintelligible, stuttering, animal or child-like speech.” in the 19th and 20th centuries, the distinction came to be drawn on the basis of “history,” that is, whether one has or does not have a history or a concept of history (294). the list, just like the list of all that is “proper” to the human being, could be extended infinitely to include “a nonfinite number of other concepts” (derrida 5), including that of the “classificatory function.” it does not take much imagination to imagine an alternate reality in which smith is, in fact, writing a tract on the way in which scholars of religion have systematically excluded non-human animals from the purview of religious studies. indeed, all of the “nonhuman” traits which smith brings up could be applied not only to other humans but to other animals as well. however, from the start of his essay, smith “takes the terms ‘human sciences,’ ‘humanities’ and ‘history’ … as limiting perspectives” for his understanding of religion. for smith, religion is an “inextricably human phenomenon,” by which he also seems to mean exclusively human (“map” 290). thus, when smith refers to “non-human beings,” he does not mean to include other animals; instead he is referring to something like von den steinen’s (or, for that matter, hegel’s) “natural man.” that said, smith does recognize that the idea that there exists an essential difference between the “primitive,” “inhuman” being and the modern, “human” being is highly problematic. indeed, he goes so far as to claim that this idea “has prevented us from realizing what is human and humane in the worlds of other men” (308). although it would be easy to extend this train of thought to include not merely “other men,” but other animals as well, smith stops abruptly at the boundary of the human world, leaving the boundaries of the nonhumans’ world largely unquestioned. “human life — paul robert matthews -why animals and religion now? 77 or, perhaps more pointedly, humane life,” smith writes, “is not a series of burning bushes. the categories of holism, of congruity, suggest a static perfection to primitive life which i, for one, find inhuman” (ibid.).8 in contrast to the inhuman world, the human world allows “incongruous elements to stand … [t]hey seek […] to play between the incongruities and to provide an occasion for thought” (309). thus, “human” life is marked off, as with mauss and durkheim, from “inhuman” life because it is capable of holding together disjunctive, incongruent, or even outright contradictory elements — a capability which presupposes the ability to make or draw distinctions, to think. thought or thinking ends up playing the defining role in the determination of what is “human” and what is “non-human” as well as what is and what is not capable of religion or being religious. in smith’s taxonomy, “our” bororo would not be considered “properly” human. they would have to be placed under some “other” category, a third category reserved for that ever evolving “missing link.” in both durkheim and smith, “the animal” is what remains unthought (and unthinking); it remains the unquestioned horizon or limit of “religion.” in smith’s essay, “the bare facts of ritual,” the consequences of this way of thinking in which the distinction between the human and the animal frames or sets the boundaries of “religion” become evident. there, the “bear,” like the brazilian parrot of the bororo, cannot be thought of as anything but a bear, or as anything but a “mere” animal (that is, as an object, as food, etc.). perhaps, it is indeed we (rather than von den steinen’s bororo) who remain caught in the dilemma of the ancient chinese philosopher, zhuangzi, who cannot tell whether he was dreaming he was a butterfly, or if a butterfly was dreaming that he himself had dreamed he was a butterfly, or if a butterfly had dreamed he was zhuangzi. yet, if religion is, as smith argues, “a creativity which both discovers limits and creates limits for humane existence” (“map” 291), then would it not be precisely the task of religious studies to question such limits, especially those which border on the human/animal? but, again, why has it taken so long for those of us working in religious studies to question this limit, and why have we only begun to question it now? why now? while it is clear, from a darwinian perspective, that we are animals, it is also clear that we are not animals, that a rupture has taken place between humans and other animals. moreover, if derrida is correct, then the difference, the abyssal gap between the “‘i-we,’ and what we call animals,” may indeed be necessary for thought and religion (derrida 47). that said, it is precisely this thought that we must call into question — that thought which again and again appears to separate us from other animals, if not from the start, then from a very young age; and which, at the same time, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 78 constitutes the “origin of the religious” (at least, in derrida’s estimation, of the abrahamic sort), insofar as it amounts to a movement of guilt or “shame” (49). such a move is, admittedly, “dizzying,” as aaron gross reminds us (8). to question whether or not one is thinking amounts to, by all cartesian measures, the very definition of insanity. yet, perhaps there is a way to include other animals among the taxonomy of thinking beings, such that “thought” no longer, from the outset, defines humanity or sets it apart from other animals. scholars working in the fields of anthropology, primatology, and zoology, among others, have been moving in this direction for quite some time. alongside the field of “animal studies,” a relatively new field, devoted entirely to the thought of other animals has emerged: animal cognition. although today “animal cognition” rolls off the tongue relatively easily, not too long ago the phrase would have raised quite a few eyebrows in most circles and, to be sure, in some circles, it still does. as frans de waal remarks, the idea of stringing “the words animal and cognition together — as if they might even belong together,” was almost inconceivable until the late 1970’s (de waal 265). recent research into the thought processes of other animals has forced even the most “speciesist” among us to recognize that other animals possess capacities for thought and emotion far beyond what most would have expected not too long ago. of course, if we had been taking darwin seriously all along, we would have expected to find “human” capacities and traits, or at least traces of such capacities and traits, such as, culture, morality, emotion, etc., in other animals. but for some reason we have been slow to attribute such properties to other animals, preferring to treat them as entirely “other.” hume, more than 100 years before darwin, demurred that, “when any hypothesis … is advanced to explain a mental operation, which is common to men and beasts, we must apply the same hypothesis to both” (hume 177). however, even in cases where it would appear that, for instance, the external actions of animals resemble our own, we have been reluctant to attribute to them corresponding internal actions or internal states, fearing that to do so would amount to a form of anthropomorphism. indeed, many have argued, and continue to argue, that we should refrain from using “human” categories such as thought, language, culture, etc., to describe what other animals do, as long as there are “simpler,” more parsimonious explanations to be found. while such a position sounds reasonable enough, when unconditionally applied it becomes entirely unreasonable (and anthropocentric), for those who take such positions often take the human mind as the measure of what is simple or complex, and, as philosophers and neuroscientists have often claimed, nothing is more complex than paul robert matthews -why animals and religion now? 79 the human mind. it was perhaps jane goodall, in particular her in the shadow of man, who first successfully challenged this position, leading many in her field to the conclusion that sometimes it is more parsimonious to explain, for instance, the mourning behavior of chimpanzees by assuming that they do indeed mourn — that is, in virtually the same way as human animals — than attempting to explain such behavior using “nonhuman” categories. still, the acceptance of animal cognition has come slowly and, although “the wall,” as de waal writes, “between human and animal cognition has begun to resemble a swiss gruyère full of holes” (de waal 268), it remains difficult to imagine a world without any walls at all. while the advances in the field of animal cognition have contributed to the arc of the animal turn, many of the implications of this cognitive revolution, as well as, for that matter, that of darwin’s some 150 years ago, have been lost on scholars in the humanities and, in particular, religious studies. despite the fact that, as donovan schaefer puts it, “almost every other presumed indicator of human uniqueness has fallen apart (cognition, language, tool use, morality) … we don’t think of animals as religious” (schaefer 2). the question is, “why not?” if we deny that other animals can be religious, it is probably because we believe, like hegel, that “genuine religion, the religion of the spirit, must have […] a credo, a content” (encyclopedia 16), that it must be reasonable or believable. we believe that religion requires a certain capacity for thought or thinking or, like j.z. smith, that religion is primarily about thought or thinking. however, this belief can be contested in two complementary ways. first, as already suggested, it has become increasingly difficult to argue that other animals do not have the capacity to think. it could, of course, still be argued that other animals do not think the right way or that animals do not really think – at least, not in the way that we do. after all, how could they think since thinking, as many have argued, requires language. in any case, even if animals do think, they certainly do not have a concept of the divine or the supernatural, or of any number of such concepts that presumably only human beings “have” or possess. yet, have we not grown skeptical of definitions of religion that prioritize thought, belief, language, etc., every definition of which exhibits a christian and/or protestant bias? a bias that exhibits itself in the tendency to prioritize action over passivity, interiority over exteriority, reason over emotion, mind over body, and, of course, human over animal? thanks to the work of scholars of religion such as of talal asad, tomoko masuzawa, and daniel dubuisson, many of us have become skeptical of “religion,” because of the concept’s undeniably christian (if we follow dubuisson) and/or protestant-christian (if we follow asad) history. the modern concept of religion was and continues to be shaped by political and economic forces — forces which are themselves always driven humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 80 by certain powers. the quest to define or locate the essence of religion, asad argues, has been part of a larger strategy “(for secular liberals) of the confinement, and (for liberal christians) of the defense of religion” (asad 28). although asad, as well as dubuisson, tend to flatten out and/or disregard important differences between and among post/enlightenment thinkers regarding the definition or essence of religion,9 their critiques have nonetheless brought attention to the fact that, insofar as our “religions” require a credo, something to believe (where to believe means to put your faith in the validity — logical or otherwise — of a certain proposition), they remain (for better or for worse) thoroughly protestant and/or christian. we have rightly become skeptical of hegel’s “religion” because, according to hegel, for someone to be capable of religion, they must be capable of thought or — what amounts to the same thing — to be able to say “i.” this is why, to return for a moment to hegel’s dog, a dog could never be religious and why schleiermacher’s religion in hegel’s view may as well be a religion for the dogs. it is the “i” — as kant argued in his anthropology from a pragmatic point of view — or “the fact that the human being can have the ‘i’ in his representations [which] raises him infinitely above all other living beings on earth… [and which makes the human being] through rank and dignity an entirely different being from things, such as irrational animals, with which one can do as one likes” (kant §6). it is this unique capacity of the human being to say “i,” at all times to be able not only to feel itself, but to think itself, which grants human beings, or more specifically human consciousness, the ability to relate to god. moreover, it is this ability to relate, consciously, to god that constitutes for hegel the essence of religion; it is what religions “is” (lectures on the philosophy of religion 1.61). if talal asad is right to argue that it is “preeminently the christian church that has occupied itself with identifying, cultivating, and testing belief as a verbalizable inner condition of true religion,” then we are right to be suspicious of hegel’s definition of religion (and of its corresponding, enlightenment subject) (asad 48). furthermore, if asad is right, any theory of religion which excludes other, nonhuman animals from its purview — without, that is, any justification, or without questioning the age-old assumption that there exists a decisive or definite difference between non-human and human animals — is in danger of perpetuating certain christian, or at minimum, enlightenment ideas about what religion “is.” even scholars who subscribe to a purely functionalist definition of religion or who would refrain from defining religion or using the term altogether nonetheless betray their “religion” in and through the choice of their subject matter. as long as we in religious studies continue to exclude other animals paul robert matthews -why animals and religion now? 81 from the purview of religious studies we remain committed to an enlightenment or post-enlightenment “religion.” i realize that such a claim may, to many, appear extravagant. yet, if it is true, how should we, as scholars of religion, respond? how can we begin to include other animals in the study of religion — not merely as religious objects, but as religious subjects, or better, agents? donovan schaefer asks, “if religion in the protestant key that underpins the enlightenment axioms of western culture is a matter of belief — the cognitive manipulation and the autonomous affirmation of a set of propositional assertions about the nature of reality — how could animals, who are prelinguistic bodies who don’t fit the mold of speaking, reasoning, choosing subjects, be religious?” (schaefer 2). schaefer, in his religious affects, attempts to construct an affective theory of religion, which pays attention to the way religion feels, to “the things we want, the way our bodies are guided through thickly textured, magnetized worlds,” to “the way our bodies flow into relationships — loving or hostile — with other bodies.” schaefer asks, “how is religion made up of clustered material forms, aspects of our embodied life, such as other bodies, food, community, labor, movement, music, sex, natural landscapes, architecture and objects. how is religion defined by the depths of our bodies?” (3). to my knowledge, schaefer’s work represents the first attempt to theorize what animal religion could be, and, more importantly, how it could be studied. in the final chapter of his book, schaefer turns his attention to the phenomenon of the chimpanzee waterfall display — a phenomenon which, jane goodall speculates, may be the result of “religious” “feelings of awe” (goodall and berman 213) — and attempts to develop “an understanding of animal religion as a dance — a play between bodies and world” (182). “animal religion” has generally been regarded to be a contradiction in terms, much like “animal cognition” was some 30-40 years ago. of course, this is because religion has, in the main, been thought to require thought and/or language. but perhaps, as schaefer suggests, religion has more to do with dancing, or with, as theorist of religion kimerer l. lamothe cited by schaefer writes, “the patterns of bodily movement — patterns of sensation and response — that humans create and become as they exercise their potential to bring into being the network of relationships that will support them in becoming who they are” (lamothe 592). in lamothe’s thought, religion becomes “an affective, radically embodied encounter with the world, our histories, our relationships, and the semistable forms of our bodies” (schaefer 192). however, as schaefer recognizes, even if we conceive of religion as a dance, we are only part of the way to an explanation of the chimpanzee waterfall display. we also need an humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 82 explanation for why chimpanzees are drawn to waterfalls, and for that schaefer turns to e.o. wilson’s concept of biophilia. in chimpanzees and many other animals, “a biophilic fascination with the natural, life-giving world — an ensemble of affective triggers designed by evolutionary biology — surges through their bodies” (199). animals, schaeffer argues, are drawn to features of their natural environment, such as trees, mountains, waterfalls, other animals, etc. such features call out to them and they respond and the result is a dance — a dance which, at least when performed by human beings, gets called “religion.” while i would rather not set (human) linguistic bodies in opposition to prelinguistic (animal) bodies, schaefer’s work helps us to imagine what animal religion might look like. as smith notes, religion has long been perceived as an “exotic category.” perhaps, we have been overly concerned with large-scale phenomenon such as “world religions,” or even “myth” and “ritual,” that is with, as deleuze and guattari suggest, “collective representations, which are generally binary, resonant, and overcoded,” representations which “presuppose exactly what needs explaining” (deleuze and guattari 218). if we as scholars of religion are to take seriously the critiques of religion levelled by asad, et al., we must begin to interest ourselves “in the world of detail, or of the infinitesimal: the little imitations, oppositions, and inventions constituting an entire realm of subrespresentative matter” (218-219; emphasis added). this would mean taking a cue from smith and beginning to map the as yet invisible religions of other animals and nonhuman beings. … thus far, i have concentrated upon internal pressures, developments which have occurred within the discipline of religious studies and, in particular, on the way that the discipline of religious studies has relied upon the “given” of an essential distinction, maintained through thought or thinking, between humans and other animals to fashion its subject matter. yet, i would like to point toward two developments which, though more or less “external“ to religious studies, have contributed to the turn within religious studies toward other animals and have little to do with thought or reason; although, both “reasons” nonetheless have forced us to rethink or reimagine the possibility of animal religion. other animals have a tendency to appear on the outskirts of perimeters of discussions surrounding religion, especially those surrounding the origins of religion, as well as its end(s). it has perhaps “been some time since the question of the origin of religion was paul robert matthews -why animals and religion now? 83 seriously entertained,” but the question, as masuzawa notes, “continues to hold sway in the popular imagination,” as well as in the academy (masuzawa 1). in 1994, the questions surrounding the origins of religion erupted once again with discovery of the chauvet cave in southwestern france. although there is no reason why we should necessarily attribute religious significance to such a site, or to the myriad mammoths, horses, lions, and other animals, and hand dots and prints which grace its walls, or even to the “bear stone altar,” the cave has become, as kimberly patton puts it, the “locus classicus” for the “contemplation” of the question of the animal and religion (patton 29). while we cannot know for certain what significance these animals held for the aurignacians who painted them, they certainly have held and continue to hold a religious significance for many who have visited the cave; at the very least, they evoke from many who have visited the cave a religious response.10 they force us, just as the animals in lascaux did some fifty years before, to consider the animal in a different light — even in a divine light. they challenge us, as scholars of religion, to take them seriously as religious agents, not merely as food, clothing, or decoration. “the iconography and archaeology of the cave,” patton writes, “testify to an extraordinarily complex relationship between animals and human beings. the existential nature of that relationship cannot be ignored, but neither can it be satisfactorily interpreted” (ibid.). for some time, these animals, not only of chauvet but also those of lascaux, altamira, trois-frères, etc., were taken as “having a magical character in relation to the hunt” (bataille 49). abbé henri breuil and johannes maringer, the most well-known prehistorians of their day, theorized, following the suggestions of james frazer, that paleolithic artists had painted such animals to help to guarantee the success of the hunt. yet, we now know that, at least in the case of chauvet, the majority of animals that appear upon the walls of the cave were never hunted (clottes). indeed, they appear to escape such functionalist or utilitarian attempts at understanding. describing a wellknown scene, located “in the base of a small offshoot of the main passage of lascaux,” georges bataille writes that, “it is certain that … the depiction of the horse falling from a cliff initially had, beyond any utilitarian meaning that magical belief would have designated, an emotionally moving sense. from the moment it attracts our attention, not seeing it or ignoring it would be inconceivable” (137). such animals force us to turn in their direction, to face them, and respond. bataille, though greatly influenced by the work of bruhl and maringer, saw that “the apparition of the animal was not, to the man who astonished himself by making it appear, the apparition of a definable object, like the apparition in our day of beef at the butcher that we cut up and weigh.” rather, the animal which appeared had, originally, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 84 an indefinable quality, “a significance that was scarcely accessible, beyond what could have been defined” (135). “modern” categories, such as “beef,” or “food,” or even “animal,” cannot contain these animals. and it is precisely their “equivocal, indefinable meaning” that, for bataille at any rate, suggests their religious significance. bataille believed strongly, on the basis of much of the same research upon which durkheim and mauss constructed their theories of “primitive” classification, that, “in the eyes of archaic man, animal life was not intrinsically different from his own” (140). in particular, bataille based his reflections on research by a. irving hallowell in his 1926 bear ceremonialism in the northern hemisphere, and éveline lot-falck in her 1953 les rites de chasses chez les peoples sibèriens, regarding the significance of the bear and its cults, particularly — in the case of lot-falck — among the alaskan koyukon and the japanese ainu. quoting lot-falck, bataille writes, “among hunting peoples, as among siberians, man feels the most intimately linked to animals. between the human species and the animal species, domination would have been unfathomable: they were essentially indistinguishable from each other. the hunter sees the animal, at the very minimum, as his equal…. the bear could speak if it wanted…. ‘wild game is like man, only more godlike’” (qtd. in bataille 131). from this passage, bataille advances the thesis that “among prehistoric human beings” animals stood on the side of divinity or the sacred, whereas humans stood on the side of the “animal” or the profane. “what in the development of religious history,” bataille wonders, “concealed this movement, which … is the passage from the initial opposition between animality-divinity and humanity to the opposition which still prevails today, that reigns over even minds foreign to all religion, between animality devoid of any religious signification and humanity-divinity” (141). what, in other words, has made it so difficult to grasp the significance of these animals, to interpret this “statement” “written” upon the walls of so many caves, which suggests an entirely different way of relating to other animals: of identifying with other animals? perhaps, to return once again to jonathan z. smith, and in particular to his “bare facts of ritual,” we have simply drawn the wrong conclusions from the archaeological and ethnographic data. perhaps the difficulty lies not with this movement or passage per se — that is, with bataille’s passage from animal-divinity/humanity to animality/humanitydivinity — but with the way scholars have tended to represent this passage as a passageway to an entirely different or other world, a passage-way to an “extraordinary, exotic category of experience which escapes everyday modes of thought” (“parrot” 6). while bataille suggests that paleolithic religion, which is to say religion in its “original” form, is about “the destruction of the world of understanding” (bataille 139), smith suggests, paul robert matthews -why animals and religion now? 85 drawing on the many of the same passages from lot-falck as bataille, that religion or, at least, one of the “fundamental building blocks of religion” is about “its capacity for rationalization, especially as it concerns that ideological issue of relating that which we do to that which we say or think we do” (“ritual” 57). smith attempts to contrast the idealized, ritualized enactment of “the bear hunt” with the way that bears were actually hunted.11 yet, significantly, smith never asks the question of the animal. he assumes, as takeshi kimura points out in his essay “bearing the ‘bare facts’ of ritual,” that “a bear is always a bear and is the same everywhere all the time” (kimura 113). for “a group which depends upon hunting for food” (“ritual” 60), smith reasons, a bear must necessarily be at bottom nothing more than “beef at a butcher that we cut up and weigh.” however, while it may be helpful to imagine the bear in this way for the sake of “ritual” or for the sake of constructing a theory of ritual as “compensatory symbolic action” (ray 159), it turns out that, like the animals of lascaux and chauvet, this bear escapes purely functionalist and/or utilitarian attempts at definition. despite smith’s suggestion that the peoples of the circumpolar north depend on the bear for food, it is clear that such “hunting” rituals are not about food — or, at least, not primarily — nor are they primarily about hunting (ray 157). although i cannot go into details regarding the religious significance of these rituals, suffice it to say that, to understand the significance of the bear ceremony, especially among the ainu, it is, as kimura argues, “absolutely necessary to take into full consideration the ainu notions of personhood and agency … rather than to impose uncritically the conventional modern western categories of human, animal, plant, and world on the ainu materials” (kimura 102). “what is at stake in these fundamental ainu categories,” kimura continues, “is the relationship between the visible material forms of things and creatures and their invisible spiritual forms” (108). as the ainu see it, during the time of the bear ceremony the bear is not a bear, but rather a divine or spiritual being, known as a kamuy. thus, even to refer to the ainu bear ceremony as a “bear” ceremony is, at best, misleading (indeed, we should have been referring to the ainu “bear” ceremony all along by its ainu name, iyomante, which means something like “to send off”). smith would have us believe that, when the ainu (or the bororo or any other group) claim something “contrary to fact” — for instance, that a “bear” or any other “mere” animal is not a “bear” (that is, in the “modern” sense) — they cannot actually mean what they say. the “bear,” for instance, must be a “mere bear.” rather than attempting to construct a theory of ritual which takes seriously what the ainu and other peoples of the circumpolar north say about “the bear,” smith ignores “the crucial issue of different humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 86 cultural understandings of personhood and the ontological status of animals” (101). in the end, he rationalizes away the religious significance of the bear as a (religious) subject or agent and forces the bear — and, for that matter, the bororo parrot — to conform to the strictures of critical reason. in short, to demonstrate that ritual and religion in general is about “rationalization,” smith forces his “ordinary, commonplace, common sense understandings of reality” upon the data (smith 61). the lesson to be drawn from this, it seems to me, is that we must learn to include other animals in the study of religion, to take them seriously, if we wish to chart an accurate map of the dimensions of religion. indeed, such a turn has already begun to take place. but why has it come about only now? concluding thoughts. the animals that we encounter in caves such as chauvet and lascaux demand that we take them seriously in part because they have been painted with such care. the beauty of the images, the skill with which they were created, challenge or call into question all of the notion that, somehow, “animal religion” is “primitive” or “childish.” moreover, they remind us of what “animals” once were: the caves “offer us a cognitive, spiritual map of part of the observable world: a world lost to us, but peopled by animal powers — or ‘powerful animals’” (patton 30). yet, if we have begun to recognize that these animals demand to be taken seriously, it is perhaps also because — as bataille suggests — they portend something grave. or, we might say, that the recent turn toward animals, especially animals and religion, portends something grave or even solemn or sacred. scattered throughout his reflections on lascaux and the birth of humanity are reflections on humanity’s end, upon its “eventual extinction” (bataille 87). indeed, who cannot be struck, as bataille was, “by the fact that light is being shed on our birth at the very moment when the notion of our death appears to us” (bataille 87). or, that is, by the fact that we have only just now to turn our attention to other animals now that other animals have begun to vanish into extinction in mass? bataille wonders whether “we might have a sublime idea of the animal now,” because we have “ceased being certain that one day a nuclear bomb will not make the planet an unlivable place for man [sic]” (bataille 178). while nuclear war remains an ever-present possibility, we know now with certainty that our activities on this planet our causing it to warm, threatening to wipe out vast populations of animal species, including our own, and causing an immense amount of suffering. this, coupled with the immense suffering we as human beings have unleashed upon animals for the mass production of meat, as well as for clothes, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and other products, makes the question, “why animals and religion now?,” ever more urgent. paul robert matthews -why animals and religion now? 87 unfortunately, i cannot push this train of thought further at this time; although, i believe it it’s easy to tell where it goes. the question that scholars of religion have asked, often unconsciously, for so long to frame the limits of their subject is, “can they think?” or “can they talk?” but perhaps we should have been asking, as jeremy bentham encouraged us to do at around the same time that kant ushered in his critical revolution, “can they suffer?” (bentham 311). the radical nature of this question, i would wager, has yet to be felt. if we take bentham’s questions as our starting point, the question of the animal becomes, not a question of a particular power or capacity to speak or to reason, but rather of a particular impotence or incapacity: namely, to suffer or to bear, to undergo, to endure. “being able to suffer,” notes derrida, “is no longer a power; it is a possibility without a power, a possibility of the impossible. mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life…” (derrida 28). and is there not something about this question — bentham’s question, “can they suffer?” — which, given the fact that so many religious traditions tend to gravitate around images of suffering and sacrifice, makes this question “religious?” or, at the very least, deserving of what we might call a religious response? and i do not mean, necessarily, a theological response; although perhaps that as well. the events which took place at the agriprocessors plant in postville, iowa — which, if you have the time (and the stomach), i would encourage you to look up — demand a religious response, not merely because they occurred within the confines of a kosher slaughterhouse. they demand a “religious” response, in so far as they force us, or should force us, to reconsider what constitutes the subject of religion — and that is to say both the subject of religion, as well, as the religious subject. especially, if arron gross is right to write, “by limiting the religious subject to a human subject, the study of religion has become implicated in both the ‘disavowal’ of regard for animals and the ‘war’ against them… rather than study the ‘sacrifice’ of animals, religious studies participates in it” (gross 122). notes 1. the german term wissenschaft, often translated as science, had and still retains a much wider meaning than the english term “science.” hinrichs’s book is, in the main, concerned with detailing the relationship between and among the religion of feeling (des gefühls), faith (des glaubens), and thought (des gedankens). following hegel, hinrichs argued that the religion of feeling could not be divorced from the religion of faith and thinking. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 88 2. unless otherwise noted, translations from german sources are my own. 3. the german word geist is, as anyone even vaguely familiar with hegel is aware, notoriously difficult to translate, for it can mean at the same time “mind” as well as “spirit.” in hegel, spirit remains the best translation, for by geist hegel has in mind in the entire world-process by which spirit comes to know itself in and through the “minds” or “spirits” of human beings. 4. to be fair, for smith, “religion is not a native term; it is a term created by scholars for their intellectual purposes”; it is always possible to redefine religion when necessary (“religion, religions, religious” 281). nonetheless, smith demonstrates, in and through his thinking about religion, that religion ultimately depends upon human thought or thinking. 5. to be sure, a few essays had already appeared which took a critical look at the relationship between religion and animals, such as kimberly patton’s essay, “caught with ourselves in the net of life and time” in a communion of subjects. 6. jacques derrida discusses the meaning of this “after” in his animal that therefore i am (10-11). 7. of course, this presents a chicken and the egg problem (as gross points out). if the human/animal distinction is required for distinctly human thought, then how does one arrive at the distinction in the first place, that is, before thinking, properly so called, takes place? durkheim and mauss’ answer is distinctly hegelian. the classificatory function develops along with the development of society, becoming ever more “scientific” with each successive generation until it reaches something like perfection in the mind(s) of the “modern” european. 8. a point could be made, or rather a question asked, as to why smith here choses the term “inhuman,” rather than “inhumane” or “nonhuman.” it would appear that smith leaves open the possibility that human beings could still be non-human or else that nonhuman beings could still be human. while i take smith to mean non-human (indeed, he does not clarify what precisely he means by “humane”), there is certainly some ambiguity here — ambiguity where distinctiveness is of the utmost importance (“map” 308). paul robert matthews -why animals and religion now? 89 9. hegel criticizes schleiermacher, as well as kant, fichte, and jacobi, because of their tendency to privatize, or subjectivize religion. from early on, we find hegel arguing for a volksreligion, or public religion. for more, see thomas a. lewis’ religion, modernity, and politics in hegel. 10. kimberly patton notes that when speleologists eliette-brunnel, christian hillaire, and jean marie chauvet entered the cave for the first time they fell on their knees (patton 29). 11. as both benjamin c. ray and takeshi kimura point out, there are numerous problems with smith’s description of “the bear hunt” or “bear hunting ritual,” beginning with the fact that is very difficult to speak of the “bear hunting rituals,” as smith indeed does, in the singular, as if there were a common set of rituals practiced by “paleo-siberian peoples” (“ritual” 57). significant differences exist, for example, between the rites of the ainu and the koyukon, to which both ray and kimura attest. works cited asad, talal. genealogies of religion. the johns hopkins up, 1993. bataille, georges. the cradle of humanity. ed. stuart kendall, trans. michelle kendall and stuart kendall. zone books, 2009. bentham, jeremy. an introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. 1780. clarendon press, 1917. clottes, jean. “rhinos and lions and bears (oh my)!” natural history 104.5 (1995): 30– 35. crouter, richard. “hegel and schleiermacher at berlin.” journal of the american academy of religion 48.1 (1980): 19–43. de waal, frans. are we smart enough to know how smart animals are? granta, 2016. deleuze, gilles, and félix guattari. a thousand plateaus. trans. brian massumi. u of minnesota p, 1987. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. trans. david wills. fordham up, 2008. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 90 dubuisson, daniel. the western construction of religion. johns hopkins up, 2003. durkheim, émile, and marcel mauss. primitive classification. 1903. trans. rodney needham. cohen and west limited, 1963. frazer, sir james george. totemism and exogamy. vol. iv. 1935. cosimo classics, 2009. goodall, jane, and phillip berman. reason for hope. warner books, 1999. gross, aaron s. the question of the animal and religion. columbia up, 2014. hallowell, a. irving. “bear ceremonialism in the northern hemisphere.” american anthropologist 28.1 (1926): 1–175. hegel, g.w.f. berliner schriften 1818-1831. ed. eva moldenhauer and karl markus michel. surkhamp verlag, 1970. _____. encyclopaedia of the philosophical sciences in basic outline. ed. & trans. by klaus brinkman and daniel dahlstrom. cambridge up, 2015. _____. lectures on the philosophy of religion. ed. peter c hodgson, trans. r f brown, j m stewart, and peter c hodgson. u of california p, 1988. hume, david. treatise of human nature. clarendon press, 1960. kant, immanuel. anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. trans. robert b louden. cambridge up, 2006. kimura, takeshi. “bearing the ‘bare facts’ of ritual.” numen 46.1 (1999): 88–114. lamothe, kimerer l. “what bodies know about religion and the study of it.” journal of the american academy of religion 76.3 (2008): 573–601. lévi-strauss, claude. totemism. beacon press, 1963. lewis, thomas a. religion, modernity, and politics in hegel. oxford up, 2011. lot-falck, eveline. les rites de chasse chez les peuples sibériens. gallimard, 1953. paul robert matthews -why animals and religion now? 91 masuzawa, tomoko. in search of dreamtime. u of chicago p, 1994. patton, kimberley c. “caught with ourselves in the net of life and time: traditional views of animals and religion.” a communion of subjects. paul waldau and kimberley c patton, eds. columbia up, 2006. 27–39. pinkard, terry. hegel. cambridge up, 2000. ray, benjamin c. “the koyukon bear party and the ‘bare facts’ of ritual.” numen 38 (2): 151–76, 1991. schaefer, donovan o. religious affects. duke up, 2015. schleiermacher, friedrich. on religion. richard crouter, ed. cambridge up, 1996. smith, jonathan z. “i am a parrot (red).” map is not territory. u of chicago p, 1978.pp _____. “map is not territory.” map is not territory. u of chicago p, 1978. pp _____. “religion, religions, religious.” critical terms for religious studies. mark c taylor, ed. u of chicago p, 1998. 269–284. _____. “the bare facts of ritual.” imagining religion: from babylon to jonestown. u of chicago p, 1982. 53–65. von den steinen, karl. unter den naturvölkern zentral-brasiliens. dietrich reimer, 1894. weil, kari. “a report on the animal turn.” differences 21.2 (2010): 1–23. microsoft word hunold-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 11:1 christian hunold green infrastructure and urban wildlife: toward a politics of sight introduction. contemporary urban ecologies are astonishingly hospitable to wildlife (adams; blaustein; gehrt, riley, & cypher; schilthuizen). the “rewilding” of cities is a global phenomenon, and the dynamics of human-wildlife relationalities exhibit considerable social, cultural, racial, ecological, spatial, and species variations in different parts of the world (barua & sinha; hovorka; mckiernan & instone; yeo & neo). in the united states, wild animals are thriving in many postindustrial cities whose ecologies have been transformed by significant changes in urban land use, including urban greening. wild animals have taken advantage of a myriad of friendly spaces created by ecologically restored waterways, parkland, backyards, urban farms, community gardens, green roofs, rain gardens, and other greened spaces that are rewilding cities through provisioning wildlife in unexpected places (aronson et al., “global analysis”; ives et al.). as u.s. cities invest in green infrastructure to ameliorate environmental harms, wildlife large and small is occupying novel urban ecological niches located outside large city parks and designated nature preserves. as a result, human-wildlife encounters are becoming more frequent in neighborhoods where such encounters used to be uncommon. increased sightings of urban wildlife, however, do not imply greater legitimacy for wild animals. increasing abundance alone does not mean residents will necessarily welcome daily interactions with wild animals (cox & gaston). rather, encounters with urban wildlife prompt a wide range of human responses. some city residents are rattled by the proximity of wild animals, particularly by predators such as coyotes, foxes, and raccoons they see as “invading” their neighborhoods, while others relish encounters with this wildness next door (correal; soulsbury & white). this essay starts from the premise that city-scale urban greening amounts to redesigning cities as if they were meant to attract wildlife — as if urban rewilding advocates were actually being heard (the nature of cities) — even though creation of wildlife habitat does not typically top the list of ecosystem services u.s. municipal agencies wish to promote. insofar as green infrastructure development is responsible for the proliferation of wildlife, however, this urban transformation calls for a reckoning with the question of whether cities that are now teeming with wildlife are also cities for wildlife; and, to the extent they are not, for theorizing forms of human-wildlife coexistence in urban settings. the cultural and political challenges of urban biodiversity have spurred theorizing about zoöpolis in diverse fields, including cultural geography humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 90 (hinchliffe & whatmore; rutherford; wolch), conservation science (aronson et al., “biodiversity”; beatley & bekoff), wildlife management (adams) and political theory (donaldson & kymlicka). the shaky legitimacy of urban wild animals has been tied up with their everyday invisibility — interrupted, for the most part, only when they enter humans’ field of vision, often as “nuisance” animals (donaldson & kymlicka). green infrastructure development, however, is disrupting invisibility as the default mode of urban wildlife, at least for many terrestrial species. in the wake of green infrastructure development sightings of urban wildlife have become routine. yet perceptions of wildlife as intruding on human spaces have proved remarkably persistent, particularly regarding occasionally troublesome species (couturier; luther) and species widely despised as “trash” animals (biehler; nagy & johnson). nonhuman charisma is deeply implicated in matters of negotiating human-wildlife coexistence (lorimer, “non-human charisma”). i examine these cultural and political challenges of urban biodiversity through the lens of the city of philadelphia’s city-scale green infrastructure program, green city, clean waters, one of the most ambitious such undertakings in the united states. i begin by showing how urban greening has undermined the plausibility of the prevailing approach to governing urban wildlife: animal control. animal control’s origins in untenable nature/culture binaries, i argue, imply not only conceptual confusion in the face of the blurring of human-wildlife boundaries facilitated by urban greening. as a practical matter, its emphasis on discouraging interactions between people and animals in order to minimize human-wildlife conflict falls short in neighborhoods where communities of wildlife are thriving close to home. where “everyday invisibility” is no longer the norm for urban wildlife, i argue, animal control is increasingly rendered absurd. but what is to take its place, and what role does visibility play in rethinking human-wildlife interactions? to help define a legitimating role for visibility in cultivating more convivial urban human-wildlife relationalities, i turn to david schlosberg’s analysis of the “politics of sight.” though he is not concerned with animals per se, schlosberg hopes to identify strategies for visualizing ecological entanglements and relationships of mutual interdependence between humans and nonhumans that are typically invisible. his tracing the everyday invisibility of humans’ embeddedness in nonhuman ecological processes to what he calls a culture of learned disappearance sheds light on why abundance of urban wild animals does not necessarily entail their accommodation as urban dwellers. based on schlosberg’s environmentalist politics of sight, i examine a number of self-consciously urbanist practices of engaging with urban wildlife — bird walks, nest-cams, wildlife photography — that strive to close this gap by visualizing wild animals as co-travelers and fellow urban dwellers. christian hunold -green infrastructure and urban wildlife: toward a politics of sight 91 urban greening: implications for animal control. the city of philadelphia is mandated by the u.s. environmental protection agency (epa) to invest some $3 billion in green infrastructure by the mid-2030s in order to bring the city into compliance with federal water quality standards, now routinely violated during heavy storms when untreated runoff and combined sewer overflows exceed the capacity of water treatment plants and are diverted into creeks and rivers. installation of “green” infrastructure (e.g. parks, rain gardens) rather than traditional “gray” infrastructure (e.g. underground holding tanks) is expected to produce, at roughly the same cost, a variety of “triple bottom line” economic, social, and environmental benefits (philadelphia water department 18-19). “wildlife benefits” rarely appear in the city’s green infrastructure policy documentation but number among the anticipated ecological consequences of green infrastructure: “stormwater wetlands are one of the best stormwater management tools for pollutant removal and can provide considerable aesthetic and wildlife benefits” (23; emphasis added). according to the epa, city-scale green infrastructure implementation is expected to support increased populations of wildlife and to facilitate wildlife movements and connect wildlife populations between habitats (chunn-heer). philadelphia’s commitment to manage urban runoff by reengineering approximately a third of the city’s surface area will improve wildlife habitat and increase habitat connectivity. this green infrastructure initiative is being undertaken by a postindustrial city whose approach to wildlife management reflects the sanitary cities movement’s emphasis on separating humans from waste and from animals in the name of public health (gandy; melosi). insofar as there is a municipal wildlife management policy system, it is fairly decentralized, involves autonomous agencies pursuing sectoral agendas, and has limited resources. its key components are vector control focused on zoonotic disease prevention (e.g. mosquito spraying, rodent control) and animal control focused on sheltering stray cats and dogs. natural lands management by the philadelphia department of parks and recreation (pp&r) includes managing several thousand acres of the fairmount park system as wildlands and urban forest, including biodiversity promotion and protection; the department operates three environmental education centers located in the park. philadelphia water (pwd) monitors aquatic species in municipal waterways. pp&r and pwd each partner with “friends of the park” organizations and other community partners to maintain parks and green infrastructure, including organizations interested in promoting urban biodiversity. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 92 the nonprofit organization animal care and control team of philadelphia (acct philly) is responsible for municipal animal control operations. acct philly operates a shelter for unwanted pets, but its animal control responsibilities occasionally also extend to wildlife, particularly to raccoons, which generate the most nuisance wildlife complaints in the city. visitors to the agency’s website are informed that removing unwanted wildlife from a residence is generally the property owner’s responsibility. however, there are two conditions under which acct philly will respond to a wildlife complaint: if the animal is in a common area of the home, such as the living room or bedroom; or if the animal appears to be injured or sick, whether it is found inside or outside of a dwelling. less proximal encounters, such as dealing with an animal “located in the walls, attic, or roof areas of a dwelling (or any other areas that are not common areas),” are the homeowner’s responsibility. close encounters with raccoons inside a residence put young children and older adults with limited physical mobility at some risk of infection or injury. residents of impoverished neighborhoods in particular may lack the resources to exclude unwanted animals from poorly maintained rental properties. in december 2017, for example, a 4month-old infant was mauled in an apparently predatory attack by a raccoon in her north philadelphia bedroom. the girl required surgery to fix numerous facial lacerations (cbs news). visitors to acct philly’s website learn that indoor encounters with bats can also be cause for concern. bats roosting in attics sometimes find themselves trapped inside homes, and a bite from a rabid bat can transmit rabies. as with other wildlife, acct philly will not respond to a complaint unless the bat is found in a common area of the home, though residents are advised to report such incidents to the philadelphia department of public health’s division of disease control “if the bat was in a room where someone was asleep or where there were young children present” (acct philly). home-invading raccoons and bats aside, philadelphia’s animal control agency concedes the legitimacy of urban wildlife — up to a point. the public is told the mere presence of wildlife is not in itself a cause for alarm. rather, it is “not uncommon to observe wildlife walking about on neighborhood streets — even during the daylight hours” (acct philly). however, this sensible explanation of the routine habits of wild animals and the corresponding recognition of their presence in the city as legitimate are followed by advice for residents who are concerned about wildlife near their home. residents who wish to deter wildlife are advised to secure their trash, to leave no food outside, and to keep their home in good repair to keep animals out: christian hunold -green infrastructure and urban wildlife: toward a politics of sight 93 healthy wildlife is found in yards, streets, parks, etc. these animals should be left alone and trapping of healthy wildlife is prohibited under state law with the exception of certain, special circumstances. […] use the resources provided above to deter these animals from frequenting your neighborhood. (acct philly) recommending that residents minimize wildlife attractants around their homes to prevent habituation and prevent human-wildlife conflicts is considered good urban wildlife management practice (adams; gehrt, riley, & cypher). i do not want to suggest that urban greening has undermined the case for secure garbage cans and sensible home repair. however, the logic of declaring urban wild animals as legitimate yet also unwanted is stretched rather thin by the proliferation of urban wildlife. in the animal control agency’s spatial framing of the legitimacy of urban wildlife, sightings of wild animals are unremarkable unless they enter spaces understood to be primarily human spaces; the legitimacy of their presence diminishes with increasing proximity to neighborhoods and to people’s homes. this is the “brittle legitimacy” of urban wildlife noted by donaldson and kymlicka: whatever our mistreatment of domesticated animals and of wilderness animals, there is at least a grudging recognition that they have a right to be where they are. but the very idea of liminal animals — of wild animals living amongst us — is seen by many people as illegitimate, and as an affront to our conception of human space. (211) such spatially dualist human-animal relationalities might have been adequate at a time when urban wildlife abundance was low and encounters with wild animals in u.s. cities were few and far between. in our contemporary greened cities, however, the idea that the very same wild animals that routinely occupy “yards, streets, [and] parks” may also be deterred from “frequenting your neighborhood” is ecologically dubious, if not increasingly absurd. given the inextricably intertwined human-wildlife urban geographies being created by urban greening, encountering wild animals in your neighborhood is no longer a rare experience. while dualist urban human-wildlife geographies have always been questionable — “wild animals live, and have always lived, amongst us” (210) — the contemporary permeability of the urban/wild divide is arguably a notable departure from the more sharply demarcated boundaries that held for much of the 20th century. the environmental historian ellen stroud, for example, has documented this blending of human and nonhuman worlds in the landscape of contemporary new england. much of what is politically contentious about urban humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 94 wildlife, she contends, revolves around questions of belonging provoked by this increased permeability of the built environment to encroachment by wild animals. the resulting indistinctiveness of human and animal worlds is experienced as unsettling by some because it undermines longstanding conceptions of cities and suburbs as spaces intended to satisfy primarily human needs: malls, trees, cars, pet rabbits, and roving carnivores are all part of the twenty-first century northeastern landscape, one in which the boundaries between city and hinterland are not nearly so stark as some would imagine or wish them to be. sprawling suburbs have become part of the sprawling woods, with corridors of wildness connecting city and forest, sometimes seeming to threaten both. (stroud 145) urban wildlife and the politics of sight. many urban dwellers experience encounters with wild animals on their doorstep as troubling interruptions of daily life, but it is precisely this blurring of human-wildlife boundaries that creates awareness of their collapse and, from time to time, generates calls for their restoration. in january 2017, for example, philadelphia city council member kenyatta johnson called for an investigation into the abundance of raccoons: “there has to be a reason they’re coming out of nowhere infesting these neighborhoods” (loeb). humans react to cohabiting with wild animals in complicated ways, but the intensity of city residents’ love-hate relationship with raccoons may be unrivaled (dempsey) given their penchant for ignoring the boundaries of spaces intended by humans for our own exclusive use and for provoking strong feelings of either solidarity or hostility (luther). some other urban-tolerant species, in contrast, are relatively well liked. white-tailed deer, for example, rarely encounter intense hostility from city residents, even though they cause substantial property damage (cornue & beck). such differences are attributable, at least in part, to the influence of nonhuman charisma on human emotional responses to encounters with wild animals. lorimer’s (2015, 2007) influential relational conception of nonhuman charisma includes ecological, aesthetic, and corporeal dimensions. ecological charisma refers to the degree to which an organism may be detected by a human observer using their senses, with minimal technological assistance (lorimer, wildlife 40). some terrestrial species such as raccoons, coyotes (hunold & lloro-bidart), and red-tailed hawks (hunold) enjoy high ecological charisma, compared to, say, fish and deer ticks. emotional responses to wildlife go beyond mere detection, however. “aesthetic and corporeal charisma,” lorimer explains, christian hunold -green infrastructure and urban wildlife: toward a politics of sight 95 describe the properties of organisms that generate emotional responses among humans encountering them. aesthetic charisma relates primarily to encounters with visual media or certain spectacular modes of ecotourism. corporeal charisma is concerned with feelings generated in proximal encounters in the field. (wildlife, 44) just as human valuation of urban wildlife is rather variable, the relationship between urbanization and animals’ visibility is far from straightforward. generally speaking, urban ecologies tend to favor generalist species with flexible habitat and food requirements. with their hustle and bustle and the demands they place on animals to negotiate human technologies such as road traffic, cities favor adaptability as a survival trait (schilthuizen). in their efforts to outwit “raccoon-resistant” garbage cans, for example, toronto’s raccoons have shown greater curiosity and success at problemsolving tasks than their rural cousins (dempsey; isabella). coyotes in chicago and denver have learned to “hide in plain sight” in very close proximity to people by paying close attention to human behavioral patterns, recurring schedules, and traffic patterns, and then adjusting their movements accordingly (gehrt, brown, & anchor; poessel, breck, & gese). the majority of mammals faced with human disturbance practice some degree of temporal avoidance by increasing their nocturnality, as compared to baseline activity patterns of wilderness populations of the same species (gaynor et al.). these examples indicate purposeful concealment remains a viable behavioral option even for urban-tolerant animals with a fairly large body size. and while access to areas (and times) that are relatively free from human disturbance is clearly important for wild animals’ wellbeing, i want to suggest that invisibility is something of a double-edged sword from the perspective of social justice. in human struggles for social justice, culturally mediated invisibility is heavily implicated in oppressed minorities’ lack of recognition by the majority society and, as such, often a formidable barrier to attaining moral and political equality. because visibility is such a powerful basis on which to assert membership in the wider society, political struggles for equality involve making claims to have one’s existence and way of life acknowledged, to be seen (and heard) by the majority. physiological and psychological needs for seclusion aside, it is not clear why this should be fundamentally different for wild animals’ claims to membership in urban society — if very risky for especially reviled species, given that, for example, increased sightings of brown rats trigger the deployment of rodenticide bait boxes in most u.s. cities.1 wild animals’ recognition as urban dwellers entails being perceived, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 96 by their human neighbors, as inhabiting urban spaces on their own terms as opposed to being regarded as out of place, particularly in parts of the city located outside designated parks or nature preserves. an ongoing scientific reappraisal of urban ecologies as valuable repositories of biodiversity (e.g. aronson, et al., “global analysis”; braverman; buller, “animal geographies i,”“animal geographies ii”; lorimer, wildlife 161; standish, hobbs, & miller) has established that cities are fully a part of nature and, further, that nonhuman nature in the city is not confined to parks or to a few precious relicts of native ecosystems (karvonen; kowarik). that said, installing green infrastructure does not by itself propel imaginaries of city life down the road from the “built environment” to “living cities,” configured as less human-centric, more inclusive landscapes shared more equitably by their human and nonhuman residents (braun; frank; hinchliffe & whatmore; wolch). what sort of cultural work might animate such more-than-human conceptions of urban life? how might human urban dwellers come to experience cities as being for wildlife, too? a more convivial relationship with “nature next door” (stroud) would seem to be predicated on cultivating what the nature essayist lyanda lynn haupt has called the attentive inhabiting of our home place, whereby human beings through experiential engagement with plants and animals become more receptive to the existence of the nonhuman world that surrounds us. the philosopher lori gruen has termed this relational sensibility entangled empathy: an experiential process involving a blend of emotion and cognition in which we recognize we are in relationships with others and are called upon to be responsive and responsible to another’s needs, interests, desires, vulnerabilities, hopes and sensitivities. (gruen 3) as important as a willingness to extend ethical consideration to nonhuman lives may be, what is at stake in developing a societal capacity to experience wild animals as genuine city residents surely is not exclusively (or even primarily) a matter of individual transformation. to helps us think about this collective dimension of inhabiting our home place more attentively, i want to enlist david schlosberg’s proposal for a “politics of sight.” for schlosberg, sight is political because politics, broadly conceived and culturally mediated, structures what people see and what they do not see. what is visible and what remains hidden, schlosberg contends, is the result of collective learning, including formal education and cultural communication in the wider society (see also drew). to illustrate what he means by a politics of sight schlosberg turns to china miéville’s science fiction novel the city and the city (2009), christian hunold -green infrastructure and urban wildlife: toward a politics of sight 97 set in “two cities that actually share the same physical, geographical space; they can only exist as distinct from one another if the citizens of each learn to make the other city and its citizens invisible, even as they pass them on the street” (schlosberg 203). that invisibility, schlosberg notes, “is taught, expected, and enforced” in both cities. he suggests this “learned disappearance of things right in front of our faces is also applicable to our relationship with the nonhuman world” (204). though miéville’s novel is not concerned with human-wildlife relations, schlosberg’s insight regarding the cultural dynamics of (in)visiblity suggests how human-centric conceptions of city life based on problematic nature/culture binaries manage to persist despite the increasing abundance of urban wildlife. nature/culture dualisms enshrined in the dominant values of industrial society, schlosberg contends, are very good at hiding these relationships from us, and so visualizing “the ongoing human relationship with the nonhuman” (202) is the task of a politics of sight. engaging in this reconstructive work entails exploring nonhuman nature “not as a force apart from human culture, but as intertwined with it” (buell 137). the degree to which existing institutions of ecological knowledge production and environmental education are allies in this cultural work is contestable (dickinson; henderson & zarger). historically, urban institutions created for the study and the enjoyment of nature have tended to reinforce the nature/culture binaries responsible for rendering urban wildlife invisible. by inviting people to spend time in natural areas set aside from the rest of city, spaces such as city parks, botanical gardens, and arboretums have unwittingly propagated a conception of nature as existing apart from, if not in opposition to, the city and its human residents. to visit nature, you must leave the city proper and enter a different realm that is curated to look, sound, and feel a certain way. in terms of enhancing receptivity to human beings’ material embeddedness in the nonhuman world, this sort of spatial and experiential “museumification of nature” (gobster) is problematic — yet powerful and persistent. even the environmental education centers created in the era of modern environmentalism rely on this model of confining nature to the park-like settings in which such facilities are situated and where visitors are instructed, in classes or on field trips, how to experience the natural world, understood to be qualitatively different from the places where they live and work. whether setting nature aside from the city and from human culture more generally can cultivate the development of “deeper and more mutual relationships with nonhumans” (fletcher) is doubtful, however, because it removes possibilities of having meaningful encounters with nonhuman nature from urban dwellers’ daily experience. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 98 restoring such possibilities and fostering a more attentive inhabiting of the city as a space shared by people and by animals is the task of a politics of sight. here i want to discuss some emergent practices of engaging with urban wildlife that seek to advance this cultural-political reconstructive work. urban birding and urban wildlife photography, i contend, are practices of visualizing how wild animals inhabit the city that work against the spatial and experiential “museumification” of nature. take urban birding. in philadelphia, the birdphilly initiative, a collaboration by the delaware valley ornithological club, philadelphia parks and recreation, and the fairmount parks conservancy, hosts birding walks around town. relevant for our purposes is that some of these walks do not take place in city parks but venture into less obvious urban spaces in search of birds. for example, a june 2017 “parkway raptors” walk held in center city assembled at a red-tailed hawk nest on eakins oval, a public plaza located across from the philadelphia museum of art in central philadelphia. a dozen participants watched two robust nestlings hop around on a nest constructed in the crown of a mature red oak, before walking along the tree-lined benjamin franklin parkway toward city hall. along the way, they encountered the female hawk perched in a plane tree, eyeing up a recently road-killed squirrel. the walk concluded at city hall, where a peregrine falcon was seen flying high up among the downtown buildings, carrying a pigeon to the nest situated in an alcove at the base of the building’s spire, 15 stories above street level. faced with these encounters, participants were encouraged to interrogate “the learned disappearance of things right in front of our faces” (schlosberg 204). of course, the participants were already predisposed to doing so and were hoping to find birds of prey; joining a saturday morning birding walk on the benjamin franklin parkway for precisely this reason is arguably not an everyday activity. raptors, moreover, are highly charismatic and their conflicts with humans in urban area are limited (boal & dykstra). advocating for “unloved others” (van dooren) or for aquatic or invertebrate species whose lives are considered expendable (hatley) or that are simply difficult to observe in the field may be harder to conceptualize in terms of sight. yet it is worth noting that the raptor walk participants experienced the parkway not as most people do — say, as tourists visiting one of north america’s venerable museum districts, or as commuters inching their way forward on a clogged arterial during rush hour — but as observers of vibrant bird habitat in downtown philadelphia. digital photography is an increasingly popular form of experiential engagement with urban wildlife, including species that are not charismatic or beloved. in april 2019, for example, nearly 400 philadelphia area residents took part in a four-day city nature challenge (crall), an annual competition in which urban dwellers from around the world compete to identify as many species of wildlife in their city as possible using the christian hunold -green infrastructure and urban wildlife: toward a politics of sight 99 inaturalist smartphone app. inaturalist users post an image to the app, where identification may be crowdsourced and discussed. getting participants to pay attention to frequently overlooked and unseen urban wildlife (e.g. sidewalk bugs) and to extend the conventional definition of nature to be inclusive of urban environments and urban wildlife were explicit goals of the competition. more than 1,000 species of plants and animals — weeds, wildflowers, trees, bugs, fungus, and wildlife — were logged in the philadelphia region, the vast majority of animal species being invertebrates. the city nature challenge has generated citizen science data urban ecologists are starting to analyze (leong & trautwein). efforts to promote a more attentive inhabiting of our urban home based on a politics of sight do not have to rely on physical encounters with wildlife in the field, however. in fact, digital media can reveal wild animals as urban dwellers in ways not easily accomplished by direct observation. wildlife photography and internet-enabled cameras that livestream the activities of wild animals are immensely popular and help bring the lives of urban wildlife to much wider audiences. the new york city photographer lincoln karim, for example, has documented the lives of red-tailed hawks in central park for nearly two decades, spending thousands of hours in the field. many of karim’s images (and videos) show the birds perched on buildings or airborne against the backdrop of fifth avenue building façades, highlighting how these birds inhabit their urban home. blogs that chronicle the lives of pale male’s family, and those of hawk families in other cities, have a devoted following. people share their observations and their images on social media, and they discuss the hawks’ lives and reflect on the role of wild animals in urban settings and on human-animal relationalities in anthropogenic landscapes more generally (hunold). nest cams, in particular, bring the lives of urban birds into the homes of millions of people. several universities and museums have installed such cameras at red-tailed hawks’ nests on their campuses. individual birds such as cornell university’s “big red” and the franklin institute’s “mom” have attained astonishing levels of internet fame. nest cams, it is worth noting, provide audiences with a type of genuinely unscripted reality tv rarely found on actual television, insofar as the story is not guaranteed to end well. disease and death are as likely to shape the narrative as the successful rearing of the next generation of birds. the website for the u.s. national arboretum’s eagle nest cam in washington, d.c., for example, contains the following statement: this is a wild eagle nest and anything can happen. while we hope that all eaglets hatched in this nest will grow up healthy and successfully fledge humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 100 each season, things like sibling rivalry, predators, and natural disaster can affect this eagle family and may be difficult to watch. nest cam operators occasionally face public outrage for showing the more gruesome aspects of the lives (and deaths) of wild animals (brulliard), but educational institutions seek to balance the fun of broadcasting the birds’ activities with relevant scientific information as, for example, online chats that allow viewers to interact with wildlife professionals knowledgeable about the birds’ behavior and ecology. what makes these projects so fruitful for advancing a politics of sight around urban wildlife, however, is their normalization of wild animals as successfully inhabiting urban spaces that do not look anything like classic wildlife habitat. eagles and hawks, however, are classic examples of charismatic megafauna that also, for the most part, do not greatly inconvenience humans. they are widely admired, and occupy the opposite end of the spectrum of animals widely considered vermin (biehler). as such, they are the low-hanging fruit of urban wildlife advocacy. raptors, of course, do well in urban areas in part because their prey — rats, pigeons — is so abundant there. this very same prey abundance also attracts mammalian carnivores that provoke decidedly more apprehensive responses from humans. take, for example, attitudes toward coyotes, wild canids that are becoming more common in cities across north america (couturier; van horn). promoting peaceful coexistence with this awkward species, admired by some and hated by others, is a more difficult challenge. as apex predators — animals that have no natural predators themselves — coyotes may be appreciated when they help control abundant populations of geese or scavenge animal carcasses, but as occasional killers of backyard chickens and beloved pets this very same quality makes some residents wary of their presence (elliot, vallance, & molles 1345; hunold & lloro-bidart). wildlife experts, such as the biologists of the long-running cook county coyote project in illinois, do not dismiss human-coyote conflicts that do occur — some coyotes do kill pets — but they emphasize that the term “nuisance coyote” is used more expansively than is warranted by the data: “there are also many levels of nuisance, with the term itself being highly ambiguous; only a very small population of coyotes appears to be causing actual conflicts with humans.” this observation appears to hold not just in chicago. in his natural history of the coyote, flores notes the emergence of a modus vivendi in cities with long-established populations of coyotes: “plenty of la residents still hate them, but in a pattern that urban coyote researchers are finding increasingly common […] urban people get used to coyotes” (201). christian hunold -green infrastructure and urban wildlife: toward a politics of sight 101 more tolerant attitudes toward urban wildlife ranging from indifference to curiosity to a desire for peaceful coexistence with at least some wild animals are becoming more widespread (pratt-bergstrom). in this context, it is instructive to ask how visual media campaigns on behalf of urban wildlife are seeking to move potentially troublesome species such as coyotes out of the nuisance animal category, and to reimagine cities as spaces both for people and for animals, including wild predators. in san francisco, the amateur wildlife photographer janet kessler has for the past decade immersed herself in the lives of several coyote families that inhabit a number of city parks and surrounding neighborhoods. her sparsely edited documentary images strive to bridge the gap between the animals as they are in a lot people’s head (scary wild predator) and the animals as they really are (family-oriented canid harmful mostly to rodents, though not overly friendly toward domestic dogs.) in terms of advancing a politics of sight, kessler’s work matters because it shows coyotes doing things in spaces that are distinctively urban and that we tend to think of as existing primarily to satisfy human needs: coyotes crossing a road, jumping a guardrail, sniffing a car tire, observing a neighborhood, watching pedestrians walking on a trail, and so on. kessler’s body of work also includes more classically naturalistic depictions of coyotes pouncing on voles and of coyotes interacting with one another, but she does not erase human-made structures from her images, objects that are often banished from wildlife imagery. in resisting this elision of the human-made she sets aside powerful stylistic conventions in wildlife photography and filmmaking that typically showcase wild animals in decontextualized naturalistic settings. in kessler’s images, to the contrary, a city street or a front yard is revealed to be an unremarkable part of the animal’s home, showing that coyotes inhabit the very same spaces as their human neighbors. that said, though kessler admires coyotes and welcomes their presence in the city, she takes great care to avoid romanticizing them and does not downplay their wildness and their basic indifference to us. in keeping with this stance, her public education and outreach website “coyote yipps” dispenses practical advice for handling potentially troublesome encounters with urban coyotes in the dispassionate informational tone cultivated by government wildlife agencies. the urban coyote initiative, founded by san francisco wildlife photographer jaymi heimbuch, draws more evenly on art and on science to visualize how coyotes inhabit urban spaces. this slick multimedia production employs the tools of high-gloss photojournalism to document the work of leading coyote researchers in the field and in the lab, while pulling out all the stops of fine art and street style fashion photography (vibrant colors, wide open apertures, soft backgrounds) to make images of city coyotes that take your breath away. here, the stylistic conventions of traditional wildlife humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 102 photography are not so much discarded as weaponized, inviting the audience to marvel at the sheer delightfulness of these wild canids roaming the streets of urban north america. viewers are given greater license here than by kessler’s work to engage affectively with the animals. the writing, an assortment of science reporting, personal field journals, and educational materials, has more in common with the lyrical nature writing of an akiko bush than with a game commission fact sheet. heimbuch and her collaborators are not bashful about their desire to move coyotes squarely into the charismatic megafauna column of the urban bestiary; their portrayal of urban coyotes as beautiful and intelligent social mammals practically makes you long for the day the animals will finally discover your neighborhood too. conclusion. calls to reestablish firm human-wildlife boundaries amidst the increasingly intertwined human-animal geographies being created in greened cities give voice to wildlife-related anxieties borne of this urban transformation, but they are trapped in unhelpful nostalgia. proposals to accommodate wild animals as urban dwellers that acknowledge the mutually entangled human-animal relationalities in greened cities and that incorporate some form of wildlife advocacy into green infrastructure development offer a more promising path forward (rutherford). urban bird walks, nest cams, and wildlife photography strive to reveal to human audiences the ways that animal geographies overlap with human geographies, outside the confines of designated natural areas, opening up possibilities for city residents to cultivate “deeper and more mutual relationships with nonhumans” in everyday life (fletcher). in its insistence that cities are for animals too such a politics of sight helps loosen the stranglehold on our collective imagination of the legacy of “partitioning the environment into dichotomous categories” (hobbs et al. 557) whereby nature is parceled off from the city and from human culture more generally. acknowledgments. i wish to thank the environmental political theory section of the western political science association for having awarded this paper the 2017 best paper in environmental political theory award. i am grateful to anna d’isidoro and to morgan sarao for their invaluable research assistance and insightful observations. finally, critical readings of earlier drafts by jen britton, bernard brown, lisa disch, and two anonymous reviewers for humanimalia, provided much helpful feedback. note 1. the movement to replace integrated pest management with non-lethal methods is in its infancy. the california city of malibu in june 2019 voted to eliminate pesticide use for rodent control on municipal properties (sawiki). christian hunold -green infrastructure and urban wildlife: toward a politics of sight 103 works cited aronson, m. f., lepczych, c. a., evans, k. l., et al. “biodiversity in the city: key challenges for urban green space management.” frontiers in ecology and the environment 15.4 (2017): 189-196. aronson, m. f j., la sorte, f. a , nilon, c. h. , et al. “a global analysis of the impacts of urbanization on bird and plant diversity reveals key anthropogenic drivers.” proceedings of the royal society b: biological sciences 281.1780 (2014): 20133330. acct philly. “raccoons & wildlife.” n. d. accessed 29 june 2019. online. adams, c. e. urban wildlife management. 3rd edition. crc press, 2016. barua, m. & sinha, a. “animating the urban: an ethological and geographical conversation.” social & cultural geography (november 2017). accessed 29 june 2019. online. beatley, t. & bekoff, m. “city planning and animals: expanding our urban compassion footprint.” ethics, design and planning of the built environment. c. basta & s. moroni, eds. springer, 2013. 185-195. biehler, d. d. pests in the city: flies, bedbugs, cockroaches, and rats. u washington p, 2013. bird philly. “map.” n.d. accessed 29 june 2019. online. blaustein, r. “urban biodiversity gains new converts.” bioscience 63.2 (2013): 72-77. boal, c. w. & c. r. dykstra, eds. urban raptors: ecology and conservation of birds of prey in cities. island press, 2018. braun, b. “environmental issues: writing a more-than-human urban geography.” progress in human geography 29.5 (2005): 635-650. braverman, i. wild life: the institution of nature. stanford up, 2015. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 104 brulliard, k. “people love watching nature on nest cams — until it gets grisly.” the washington post may 19, 2016. accessed 29 june 2019. online. buell, f. “nature in new york: a brief cultural history.” still the same hawk. j. waldman, ed. fordham up, 2013. 122-146. buller, h. “animal geographies i.” progress in human geography 38.2 (2014): 308-318. buller, h. “animal geographies ii: methods.” progress in human geography 39.3 (2015): 374-384. busch, a. the incidental steward: reflections on citizen science. yale up, 2013. chunn-heer, j. “epa articulates the multiple benefits of green infrastructure.” surfrider foundation march 19 2013. accessed 29 june 2019. online. city of philadelphia. greenworks: a vision for a sustainable philadelphia (2016). accessed 29 june 2019. online. crall, a. “competition meets collaboration: the city nature challenge.” discover magazine april 19, 2018. accessed 29 june 2019. online. cornue, r. & beck, p. “loving them and loathing them: conflicting attitudes towards deer management alternatives in central texas.” paper presented at the association for environmental studies and sciences, tucson, az, june 21-24, 2017. correal, a. “raccoons invade brooklyn.” the new york times january 1, 2016. accessed 29 june 2019. online. couturier, l. “one nation under coyote, divisible.” trash animals: how we live with nature’s filthy, feral, invasive, and unwanted species. k. nagy & p. d. johnson ii, eds. u minnesota p, 2013. 107-123. cox, d. t. c. & gaston, k. j. “human-nature interaction and the consequences and drivers of provisioning wildlife.” philosophical transactions of the royal society b373 (2018): 20170092. christian hunold -green infrastructure and urban wildlife: toward a politics of sight 105 dempsey, a. “toronto built a better green bin and — oops — maybe a smarter raccoon.” the star august 3, 2018. accessed 29 june 2019. online. dickinson, e. “the misdiagnosis: rethinking ’nature-deficit disorder.’” environmental communication 7.3 (2013): 315-335. donaldson, s. & kymlicka, w. zoopolis: a political theory of animal rights. oxford up, 2011. drew, j. “rendering visible: animals, empathy, and visual truths in the ghosts in our machine and beyond.” animal studies journal 5.2 (2016): 202-216. elliot, e. e., s. vallance, & l. e. molles. “coexisting with coyotes (canis latrans) in an urban environment.” urban ecosystems 19.3 (2016): 1335-1350. fletcher, r. “connection with nature is an oxymoron: a political ecology of ’naturedeficit disorder.’” the journal of environmental education 48.4) (2017): 226-233. flores, d. coyote america: a natural and supernatural history. basic books, 2016. frank, b. “human–wildlife conflicts and the need to include tolerance and coexistence: an introductory comment.” society & natural resources 29.6 (2016): 738-743. gandy, m. concrete and clay: reworking nature in new york city. mit press, 2003. gaynor, k. m., hojnowski, c. e., carter, n. h., brashares, j. s. “the influence of human disturbance on wildlife nocturnality.” science 360.6394 (2018): 1232-1235. gehrt, s. d., brown, j. l., & anchor, c. “is the urban coyote a misanthropic synanthrope? the case from chicago.” cities and environment 4.1 (2011). accessed 29 june 2019. online. gehrt, s. d., riley, s. p. d., & cypher, b. l. eds. urban carnivores: ecology, conflict, and conservation. johns hopkins up, 2010. gobster, p. h. “urban park restoration and the ’museumification’ of nature.” nature and culture 2.2 (2007): 95-114. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 106 gruen, l. entangled empathy: an alternative ethic for our relationships with animals. lantern books, 2014. hatley, j. “blood intimacies and biodicy: keeping faith with ticks.” australian humanities review 49 (2010): 63-75. haupt, l. l. crow planet: essential wisdom from the urban wilderness. little, brown and company, 2009. henderson, j.a., & zarger, r.k. “toward political ecologies of environmental education.” the journal of environmental education 48.4) (2017): 285-289. hinchliffe, s. & whatmore, s. “living cities: towards a politics of conviviality.” science as culture 15.2 (2006): 123-138. hobbs, r. j. et al. “managing the whole landscape: historical, hybrid, and novel ecosystems.” frontiers in ecology and the environment 12.10 (2014): 557-564. hovorka, a. “trans-species urban theory: chickens in an african city.” cultural geographies 15.1) (2008): 95-117. hunold, c. and lloro-bidart, t. “there goes the neighborhood: urban coyotes and the politics of wildlife.” journal of urban affairs (forthcoming). hunold, c. “why not the city? urban hawk watching and the end of nature.” nature and culture 12.2 (2017): 115-136. ives, c.d., lentini, p.e., threlfall, c.g., et al. “cities are hotspots for threatened species.” global ecology and biogeography 25.1 (2016): 117-126. isabella, j. “the intelligent life of the city raccoon: adapting to the urban jungle has made rocky smarter.” nautilus march 31, 2016. accessed 29 june 2019. online. karvonen, a. politics of urban runoff: nature, technology, and the sustainable city. the mit press, 2011. kowarik, i. “novel urban ecosystems, biodiversity, and conservation.” environmental pollution 159.8/9 (2011): 1974-1983. christian hunold -green infrastructure and urban wildlife: toward a politics of sight 107 leong, m. & trautwein, m. “a citizen science approach to evaluating us cities for biotic homogenization.” peerj — life and environment (2019). accessed 29 june 2019. online. loeb, p. “city councilman wants to explore sw philly raccoon infestation.” cbs philly, january 28, 2017. accessed 29 june 2019. online. lorimer, j. wildlife in the anthropocene: conservation after nature. u minnesota p, 2015). lorimer, j. “non-human charisma.” environment and planning d: society and space 25.5 (2007): 911-932. luther, e. “tales of cruelty and belonging: in search of an ethic for urban humanwildlife relations.” animal studies journal 2.1 (2013): 35-54. mckiernan, s., & instone, l. “from pest to partner: rethinking the australian white ibis in the more-than-human city.” cultural geographies 23.3 (2015): 475-494. melosi, m.v. the sanitary city: urban infrastructure in america from colonial times to the present. johns hopkins up, 2000. miéville, china. the city and the city: a novel. delray, 2009. nagy, k. & johnson ii, p. d. eds. trash animals: how we live with nature’s filthy, feral, invasive, and unwanted species. u minnesota p, 2013. the nature of cities. “let go of some urban domestication: how would you convince the mayor to re-wild the city?” (n. d.). accessed 29 june 2019. online. philadelphia water department. amended green city, clean waters (2011). accessed 29 june 2019. online. poessel, s. a., breck, s. w., & gese, e. m. “spatial ecology of coyotes in the denver metropolitan area: influence of the urban matrix.” journal of mammology 97.5 (2016): 1414–1427. pratt-bergstrom, b. when mountain lions are neighbors: people and wildlife working it out in california. heyday, 2016. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 108 “raccoon attacks baby and drags her out of bed in philadelphia, says mom.” cbs news december 22, 2017. accessed 29 june 2019. online. sawiki, e. “new city policy avoids pesticides.” the malibu times june 27, 2019. accessed 29 june 2019. online. schilthuizen, m. darwin comes to town: how the urban jungle drives evolution. picador, 2018. schlosberg, d. “environmental management in the anthropocene.” the oxford handbook of environmental political theory. t. gabrielson, c. hall, j. m. meyer, & d. schlosberg, eds. oxford up, 2016. soulsbury, c. d. & white, p. c. l. “human–wildlife interactions in urban areas: a review of conflicts, benefits and opportunities.” wildlife research 42.7 (2015): 541-553. standish, r. j., hobbs, r. j., & miller, j. r. “improving city life: options for ecological restoration in urban landscapes and how these might influence interactions between people and nature.” landscape ecology 28.6 (2013): 1213-1221. stroud, e. nature next door: cities and trees in the american northeast. u washington p, 2012. van dooren, t. “vultures and their people in india: equity and entanglement in a time of extinctions.” wild hearts: literature, ecology, and inclusion 22.2 (2010): 130-145. van horn, g. the way of coyote: shared journeys in the urban wild. u chicago p, 2018. wolch, j. “anima urbis.” progress in human geography 26.6 (2002): 721-742. yeo, j.-h., & neo, h. “monkey business: human–animal conflicts in urban singapore.” social & cultural geography 11.7 (2010): 681-699. microsoft word meijer-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 11:1 eva meijer the melancholic animal — on depression and animality why do we suffer? in “mourning and melancholia,” sigmund freud wonders what the use of grief and melancholy is, and sets out to understand the meaning of these experiences. he begins by distinguishing melancholy from mourning. both phenomena share certain characteristics: a feeling of dejection, loss of interest in the outside world, loss of the capacity to love, slowing down of activities. in melancholy a loss of selfesteem is added to this picture, as well as an expectation of punishment. the mourning individual has a clear reason for experiencing aforementioned feelings, usually the loss of a loved one, an object, or an idea. she needs to move through a process of mourning, a fixed time period in which the world is empty, in order to be able to enter that world, love, and open up again. mourning is thus a normal process — even if freud questions why we should feel pain when we lose someone or something — connected to life’s structure. melancholy is a pathology: instead of the loss of an external object, one experiences a loss of ego, leading to a death drive. freud thinks that an actual loss lies at the basis of both melancholy and mourning. however, in the process of mourning one severs the ties with the lost object, while in melancholy one identifies with the loss and internalizes it, which is a narcissistic movement (kristeva). freud approached melancholy as pathology of the mind and investigated its workings and meaning in his individual patients. he recognized the physiological components of the condition, such as a loss of appetite or sleep, but explained these as stemming from mental processes, or more specifically: as psychological responses to earlier events in life. depression, as we now call what freud named melancholy, is still considered to be a mental phenomenon. while its exact cause is unknown, it is assumed that it is caused by a combination of biological, psychological, and social factors. genes and childhood experiences, together with stressful life events, might trigger depressive episodes. depression is seen as an illness that should be treated with therapy based on dialogue, and/or antidepressant medication. discourses of healing, in the western world, often focus mainly on medical solutions. they are aimed at a specific type of neoliberal human individual and rely on a problematic dichotomy between body and mind. this approach to depression and healing neglects the cultural, social, and political processes humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 110 contributing to depression, as well as the other subjects affected — human and nonhuman. in this essay i set out on a different road in understanding depression, by focusing on the cultural and historical structures of this phenomenon, in which i pay specific attention to interconnections with animality. the experience of depression fundamentally challenges common western ideas about what it means to be human. when experiencing depression, cartesian distinctions between body and mind prove to be untenable, and existing notions of rationality, autonomy, and agency, often seen as defining characteristics of humans, are challenged. zooming out to the level of culture, we find that like madness more generally, melancholy and depression are historically shaped constructions. these constructions are related in manifold ways to the construction of the concept of animality. focusing on these connections is helpful for rethinking depression in the human case, and for better understanding nonhuman animal depression. other animals are often neglected in studies of depression, even though they may suffer from it, too. furthermore, human and animal depressions are often related, symbolically and in different practices. examining the psychogeographical dimensions of depression in connection to animality can contribute to a different discourse, which is more inclusive and brings to light the social and political factors involved. 1. experiencing depression. phenomenologically, depression is characterized by a disturbance of the experience of the world, relations with others, time, and oneself. medical ethicist kevin aho argues that in order to understand depression we cannot rely solely on a medical discourse that treats this condition as a chemical problem; in order to grasp its meaning, we need to also listen to the stories of those experiencing depression. drawing on many first person narratives, he distinguishes three defining characteristics of depression. the first is a disruption of spatial orientation and motility, in which the depressed person literally finds it hard to move and perform basic tasks, which leads to a collapse of life-world. the second is a state of emotional indifference that reduces one’s ability to care about things and is, similar to what freud described, not directed at a specific object but at the world as a whole. the third characteristic of depression is that it diminishes possibilities for self-creation, because it restricts the subject to the identity of a depressed person, instead of as someone capable of developing and interpreting herself in other ways in the world. in these three ways depression challenges some of the key features of humanism, such as agency, autonomy, and rationality. eva meijer -the melancholic animal — on depression and animality 111 depression often paralyzes the subject, making it impossible to participate in daily activities, which obstructs one’s agency. even if one is still physically capable of acting, the emotional and cognitive dimensions of existence are emptied of meaning and sense. depression for these reasons cuts one off from functioning in a world one once took for granted. in this experience, body and mind cannot be separated: bad thoughts and feelings are primordial and the lack of mental freedom is interconnected with a lack of physical freedom. this may lead to a loss of autonomy. the same applies to rationality: the depressed person cannot trust her own thoughts, because they are muddy and negative, and cannot be corrected by reason. interconnected with this is the fact that the depressed person cannot trust her feelings, because they work against her. depressed thoughts and feelings of worthlessness mutually reinforce each other. to conceptualize this further, it is helpful to turn to the work of merleau-ponty, according to whom body-mind dualism is untenable. our mental states are always embodied, he argues, and we think and perceive with our bodies. this does not mean he denies the existence of the mental or reduces everything to matter; rather, the use of our mind cannot be separated from our situated, physical being in the world. bodies are not objects that our minds control. depression shows us this very clearly. thoughts affect not only the depressed person’s mood, but can also literally affect her capacity to move, and in turn one’s mood and physical disposition affects the thoughts that are thought, and so on. according to merleau-ponty, humans share this embodied existence with other animals. while it is commonly accepted that nonhuman animals feel joy and suffer, it was long thought that they are not capable of suffering from depression because they lack the necessary sophisticated cognitive and emotional capacities. recent studies in the fields of animal cognition, emotion, and cultures (bekoff, minding animals; smuts) challenge this view of animal minds and moods, and show that differences between humans and other animals are of degree and not kind. this raises the question of whether or not they suffer from depression, too, and how humans can find out. in order to conceptualize depression in humans, aho focuses on first person narratives that rely on human language. the fact that other animals usually do not speak in human language makes this type of research into their minds and moods impossible. humans can however witness their behaviors and despair, and in certain instances compare these to humans’. nonhuman animal depression. recent years have seen an increase in the study of nonhuman animal emotions and minds (bekoff, minding animals), but depression in humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 112 nonhuman animals has not been studied much. certain symptoms of depression, however, have been studied, and we know that chronic anxiety, aggressiveness, sleep problems, helplessness, and lethargy are found in a wide range of species (see peñaguzmán for an overview). many nonhuman animals suffer from conditions that can be compared to human psychiatric disorders, such as post-traumatic stress syndrome, eating disorders, or certain personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder (ibid.; see also braitman). nonhuman animal mental disorders are often treated with drugs intended for human use; companion animals and captive animals that suffer from anxiety or depression are, for example, treated in the us with human antidepressants like prozac. the fact that these are effective is taken as proof of the animal subjects' depression. many nonhuman animals display behaviors that are selfinjurious and self-destructive. in a discussion of nonhuman animal suicide, david m. peña-guzmán argues that differences between human and nonhuman animal suicide should be understood along a continuum. self-reflexive behavior is found not only in humans, he argues, but also in other animals, and is not an all or nothing case in humans, either. different nonhuman animals have different types and degrees of subjective self-awareness, the breadth of which we often do not yet know. we do know that a great deal of empirical research supports this idea of continuity in animal capacities, in many fields, ranging from culture to language (meijer, political animal voices, chapter 2). furthermore, ideas of rationality, self-consciousness, and free will in humans are also disputed, for different reasons. peña-guzmán points out, for example, that suicide is not only committed by reflexive subjects: young children have committed suicide, as well as humans who are considered to be non-rational. a notion commonly associated with suicide is free will, but on the one hand, it is unclear whether we can speak of free will in the case of humans, and on the other hand, we know that other animals do plan ahead and make informed decisions, and have agency in shaping their own lives. awareness of death, another factor that is also often mentioned in discussions about nonhuman animal suicide, is not needed to be able to commit suicide — the example of children and nonrational humans illustrates this point also — and for humans death ultimately remains a mystery as well. in this context it should not be forgotten that death plays a central role in the lives of many animals (meijer, “the good life”). they lose their loved ones and can feel grief, which can be so strong they die from it (king). many nonhuman animals have mourning rituals surrounding death. all these factors also play a role in conceptualizing nonhuman animal depression, even though it might not entail the same level of cognition and awareness, for example, regarding the capacity to plan ahead or desire death. eva meijer -the melancholic animal — on depression and animality 113 so, while we do not have the type of first-person narratives aho relies on to understand nonhuman animal depression, there seems to be overlap in the conditions of depressed human and nonhuman animals. salmon in intensive farming, for example, show the disruption of spatial orientation and motility aho mentions — they often just float listlessly — and show no interest in others, which could be related to emotional indifference (vindas et al.). aho also mentions a loss of possibilities of self-creation, because depression restricts one to the identity of a depressed person, instead of as someone capable of developing and interpreting herself in other ways in the world. for nonhuman animals, depression has been studied mostly in captivity, a situation in which these animals cannot manifest themselves in the world anyway. this loss of worldliness and the boredom stemming from their captivity seems to play a large role in their depressions (braitman; peña-guzmán). further, investigating nonhuman animal depression can help us get a better grasp on the phenomenon for humans and other animals. it can also help humans to understand better the behavior of other animals, which is important in building better relations. it is morally relevant to know that other animals suffer from depression, too. the experience of depression borders on the unbearable, as many humans can testify. knowing that other animals may suffer from similar conditions shows us that their situation, for example, in intensive farming or laboratories, might even be worse than thought before, which should have consequences for how humans treat them. studying animal depression is not simply a matter of doing more biological research. as mentioned above, in western societies depression is usually approached as a medical problem. therapy and pills are seen as the solution for chemical imbalances leading to depression, and for those who stay ill, or who suffer from recurring episodes, there is always the option of hospitalization. this does not take into account the full meaning of depression, and for many humans, for example from non-western cultures, this approach simply does not work (cvetkovich). the reason for this is that specific view of the individual — as a rational, individualistic, autonomous agent — is taken as the standard to which all deviating humans are measured. this image of the human is presented as biological or natural, as a universal truth. ideas about madness and sanity are, however, cultural constructions, formed by power relations that value certain subjects more than others, and that often exclude nonhuman animals, which becomes clear when we consider their history. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 114 2. melancholy and animality. a swing consists of a bed or chair that is tied to the ceiling and operated mechanically. a melancholic person is tied to this bed or chair in a straightjacket and turned in an oscillatory or circular manner at varying tempos. if this leads to mania, the tempo is too fast, or an intermittent tempo should be chosen. according to mason cox, who developed this swing as a treatment for mental illness in the 17th century, it was very successful in treating melancholy (foucault). other accepted ways of treating melancholy around that time were music, dance, and plays (burton), work, and inciting fear (foucault). there was no strict line between medicine and art, nor between melancholy and reason. melancholy was even fashionable for a while, during the later 16th and early 17th centuries in england, and features prominently in the literature, music, and art of that time. melancholy and other forms of madness were not seen as anomalies that should be erased; they were viewed as elements of human experience, and the experience of madness was seen as disclosing something about the whole of life. views of melancholy and madness have changed significantly throughout history. in the middle ages, for example, it was thought that demons played an important role in causing melancholy. from ancient times to the 19th century it was thought that melancholic humans suffered from an overabundance of black bile. this idea was based on the four humours of hippocratic medicine — black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm — which needed to be balanced for someone to function well. in the history of madness, michel foucault discusses several of these views. he focuses on the changes in the western perception of madness from pre-modern to modern time, showing how our current conception of madness as a psychological category came into being. he does so not by narrating the history of psychology, but by telling the story of the other side, the mad people, the ones who have been silenced. by focusing on practices and tools that were used to treat, mark out, or label mad people, he investigates the construction of the modern conception of reason. this archeology of madness not only sheds light on the construction of “mad” and “sane,” it also sheds light on how our view of the human came into being. the concept madness helped create the image we have of reason and rationality. it functioned as a negative to create the positive image of the human as a rational agent. this image of the human has been challenged from the perspective of different fields of study such as feminism (adams, sexual politics), poststructuralism (derrida, the animal), black studies (ko and ko), and disability studies (taylor). nonhuman animals often function as the ultimate other in western thought and practices (derrida, op. cit; eva meijer -the melancholic animal — on depression and animality 115 meijer, political animal), and human groups that deviated from the enlightenment subject were often compared to nonhuman animals. in beasts of burden, sunaura taylor shows, for example, how notions of disability and animality are thoroughly intertwined, leading to similar treatments.1 disabled humans are animalized, and ableism affects not only humans, but also other animals. both conceptually and in many practices, the oppressions are interlinked. disabled humans are, for example, seen as animals and compared to them in language. other animals develop disabilities through human breeding programs; this applies to companion animals as well as to farmed animals in industrialized farming practices. these disabilities are not just physical; many nonhuman animals suffer from severe psychological problems. similar to disability and animality, the concepts madness and animality are interconnected in many ways. animality and foucault’s genealogy of madness. in his genealogy of madness, foucault repeatedly uses the concept animality. it is the only place in his work where he does so, and he uses it in order to explicate and problematize madness, not animality. similar to madness, foucault sees animality as a cultural construction, which changes meaning in different times. the concept does have some fixed components: it is always characterized by déraison and overflowing emotion, as well as a raging, a wildness, a strength (palmer). but these aspects of animality were interpreted differently in different times. in the renaissance, animality functioned as a figurative or symbolic portrayal of a dark and threatening, yet illuminating, element of the cosmos or human nature. it was part of the order of things and not the opposite of the human. it was also not something to eliminate from one’s existence, but a part of it. this changed in the classical age, where it was increasingly seen as a “zero point” of human nature (palmer 77). animality became what is left when humanity is stripped of reason. during this time, mad people were literally treated as nonhuman animals, in different practices. in the 18th century, there were, for example, displays of the mad based on menageries, where parents brought their children as a warning (79). mad people were also confined in cages, starved, and beaten, and even used as beasts of burden on farms, where whips were used to make them work faster. similar to that of other animals, their bodily integrity was not recognized. “crazy” women have throughout history been sterilized without consent (krase). lobotomies and other practices that worked on the body, such as electroshock therapy, were also used, often without consent. these patients were seen mainly as bodies, just like other animals. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 116 foucault emphasizes that his history of madness is a history of those who were silent, or rather silenced. this silence, of course, reminds us of other animals in the ways they are silenced in discourse and practices, treated as mute, in the ways their languages are seen as unintelligible because they are different from human language, and in the ways they are portrayed (meijer, political animal). this process led to the modern view in which both mad people and animals are seen as irrational, and in which the concepts madness and animality both become opposites of rationality (derrida, “cogito”; palmer). while foucault questions the opposition between reason and madness, he never challenges the split between reason and animality, nor does he consider the possibility that there is overlap between these concepts (palmer). this is problematic, because even within this construction of reason there are rational animals like nonhuman primates, dolphins, and others,2 and there are different discourses of rationality, such as certain nonwestern views, of which animality is a part. in modern science, the disciplining of the bodies of mad people that occured, for example, when humans were locked up in cages or made to work, transforms into a disciplining of the mind. the methods changed, but mad subjects are still molded into a certain type of being. here we also find similarities to the treatment of nonhuman animals; the contemporary mad subject is perhaps most similar to the domesticated animal, who needs caretakers in the form of doctors (derby).3 this very brief discussion of the interconnections between madness and animality shows the birth of a cultural view in which a certain conception of the proper, healthy human individual becomes dominant. this view is solidified in many different ways, such as in the dsm, freud’s ideas of the psyche, the large-scale use of anti-depressants in the west, and in cultural expressions of madness, depression, and sanity. this way of conceptualizing madness and subsequently of depression not only has consequences for human subjects, it also affirms a view of nonhuman animals as animal, implying they are not rational, and not even subjects in the proper sense of the term. furthermore, foucault shows that hospitals, clinics, techniques, policies, and politics do not simply focus on individuals, but also target social groups, such as the poor. behind our view of madness lies a (contingent) system of larger political and legal structures that form and inform our conception of the “right” subjectivity. in the case of depression, as with the other forms of madness, these cultural frameworks shape the interpretation of the feelings we experience and the conditions for living through and with it. eva meijer -the melancholic animal — on depression and animality 117 3. the cultural dimensions of depression. a 2013 study showed that afghanistan has the highest rate of clinical depression worldwide, followed by other countries in the middle east and north africa (ferrari et al.). studies also show that humans from marginalized social groups within countries, such as for example black women in the uk (ferguson) or transgender teenagers in de us (reisner et al.), suffer from higher rates of depression than humans from dominant groups. social-cultural patterns, such as racism, colonialism, neo-liberalism, speciecism, and ableism, favor some individuals over others. this may lead members of marginalized groups to internalize the idea they are worth less, and creates material realities which are more difficult to cope with, such as a lack of access to healthcare, education, access to public spaces, contraception, good food, or general poverty. different generations can pass these feelings on, all the way down to the level of genes. children from holocaust survivors or refugees are for example often at higher risk for depression, not just because of their parents’ behavior in their childhood, but also because of their genetic make-up (cvetkovich). in depression, a public feeling, ann cvetkovich examines the processes that lead to depression in the us, such as the heritage of colonialism and slavery. she argues that the current fixation on the individual and the framing of the problem in medical terms obscures the cultural processes that make large groups of humans ill. dissatisfied with the narratives around depression by middle class white people, she aims to develop a different narrative, tied to her own experiences in the queer feminist community, which is sensitive to other social groups. she does so by writing a memoir of her own experiences with depression, which is connected to the pressures of working as a young academic, and by looking at literature that makes visible the patterns that depress certain groups, such as black people. cvetkovich does not discuss nonhuman animal depression, or the role of large-scale nonhuman animal exploitation in human depression. this is surprising, because the treatment of nonhuman animals can be regarded as one of the most violent aspects of societies worldwide (adams, sexual politics). as we saw above, humans are not the only ones to suffer from depression. nonhuman animals in zoos, farmed animals such as pigs, chickens, cows, and fishes (vindas et al.), and laboratory animals are known to suffer from boredom (bovenkerk and driessen), which often leads to depression (braitman) and may lead them to commit suicide (peña-guzman). furthermore, not only do humans share the experience of depression with other animals, humans and other animals may also suffer from depression because of the same underlying social-political causes. examples of interconnections include the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 118 colonization of the land of indigenous groups of humans and animals which breaks up social groups and force them to move, ptsd in slaughterhouse workers (mcwilliams), compassion fatigue in human animal activists (adams, “traumatic knowledge”), and the suffering of humans and other animals in war zones. similar to human trauma, animal trauma is also moved on from one generation to another. feral and stray dogs, for example, have different responses to humans based on the historical treatment of their community (de lavigne) and a period of hunting causes animals to fear humans for generations (bekoff, “stalking”). similar to colonialism or capitalism, human exploitation of other animals based on speciesism is a fundamental aspect of the structure of our society that influences all living beings, either directly or indirectly. a complete psycho-geographical account of depression demands a mapping of all structures of oppression, and their connections. relations with nonhuman animals should also be taken into account. this asks for a new approach to depression, which is not only sensitive to other cultures, but also to species. to begin to explore this, i will now discuss an example of a situation in which nonhuman and human animal suffering, and to some degree depression, is intertwined: the animal advocacy movement. animal suffering and advocacy. humans who care for other animals in shelters, sanctuaries, or as veterinarians,4 who advocate for them, or who in other ways devote their time to improving their situation, run the risk of developing compassion fatigue.5 they might collapse under the weight of their knowledge of how other animals are treated, and how bad the situation is for billions of them. carol adams calls this painful knowledge about the fate of the other animals “traumatic knowledge.” this type of knowledge makes one feel the suffering of other animals and intensifies the emotional connection to them, causing dissonance, disturbance, and disjunction, and poses a major challenge to individuals experiencing it. this affects not just individuals but also the movement as a whole, both in its goals and in its effectiveness. the animal movement has a strong focus on ending animal suffering, which often connects to an abolitionist view of interspecies relations. it is argued that because relations with other animals are necessarily oppressive, the proof of which is in the oppression occurring today, we should aim for abolishing relations with them. this abolitionist approach is by some thought to stand in the way of imagining new futures and new relations with other animals. donaldson and kymlicka, for example, argue eva meijer -the melancholic animal — on depression and animality 119 that the strong focus on negative rights for other animals is understandable, given the situation that they are in, but that we also need to conceptualize new relations with them. this is a conceptual necessity, because taking other animals seriously as individuals with a perspective on common matters involves rethinking relations. it also has value for advocacy. arguing for abolishing all relations with other animals hinders the movement because it estranges certain humans from it, who want a better life for other animals but who do not want to end all relations with them. actual human melancholy, or depression, because of large-scale animal suffering also hinders the movement. at the core of this melancholy lies not just the fact that other animals suffer, but also the knowledge that they most probably will continue to do so, at least in the foreseeable future. this affects those advocating for animals, sometimes leading them to cease their work for the animals. many other humans also simply cannot cope with animal pain and suffering, or fear they cannot cope, which leads them to look the other way when they are confronted with it, instead of changing their habits (adams, “traumatic knowledge”). they might feel that their acts do not matter anyway, which may lead to cognitive dissonance or moral lethargy (aaltola). in this example the suffering, and in certain instances depressions, of nonhuman animals and human animals are interrelated, not just on the level of individuals, but also on the level of social groups, such as farmed animals and humans working for and with other animals. challenging oppressive structures, as done by animal advocates, could perhaps be seen as contributing to a collective healing process. 4. conclusion: interspecies healing and the politics of care. the experience of depression is for humans characterized by a disturbance of one’s relation to the world, relations with others, time and oneself (aho). a historical and cultural analysis of depression shows that this experience is influenced by larger scale cultural, social and political structures. to answer freud’s question — why do we suffer? — and to adequately treat depression, these factors also need to be taken seriously. this demands that we investigate further forms of depression in different groups and the connections between these, as well as for conceptualizing alternatives beyond pills and therapy. antidepressants might be of great value for individual humans, companion animals, zoo animals, and others, but they only treat symptoms and not the holes in the underlying fabric of society. changing the societal patterns and structures that co-create depression requires political and social reform. this will not heal all individuals; depression is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 120 interconnected with life’s ontological structure of absurdity and loss. but for marginalized groups, it would improve life. while a better world seems to be far away, especially with regard to the exploitation of nonhuman animals, there are already many practices that counter suffering and focus on creating new worlds with others. by way of a conclusion i will first discuss some examples of interspecies healing practices, and then conceptualize interspecies relations in sanctuaries as a politics of care. interspecies healing practices. therapy in the form of talking, medication, behavioral therapy, or hospitalization can be valuable — and getting to know oneself is good for everyone. there is beauty in the idea of dialogue as healing and that in speaking to a therapist you can rebuild yourself, by re-examining your history and present. for humans suffering from chronic depression, however, it is not possible to heal once and for all; one rather has to learn to live with recurring episodes. for those suffering from depression, cvetkovich offers practical advice: keep moving and help others. moving is here meant literally: exercise can be one of the few things that can get one through the day, and can help prevent depression in some humans. helping others shifts the focus from locating value in one’s own existence, something that is lacking in the depressed person, to acknowledging the value of others. it also connects the depressed person, who usually feels isolated from others, the world and her own projects, to her surroundings. living with depression asks for a stoic attitude — to accept what is given and learn to sometimes ignore what you feel, in favor of keeping going. above, i discussed merleauponty’s views on the body as the center of lived experience and as completely interconnected with the mind. this view is not only adequate for understanding the entanglement of body and mind in depression, it is also helpful in conceptualizing moving through it. setting the body in motion is not always possible, either because the depression is paralyzing or because one is not capable of moving physically, but walking, swimming, or running is helpful for many. it makes the body/mind feel better, and when one goes outside for walking or running, the world helps. nature shows us the world is bigger than we are and carries us, and that we are animal bodies, simply moving through time. developing a walking or running routine is also helpful: the body learns these habits as part of life (merleau-ponty), which will help one to keep going when things are tough. many depressed humans feel unconnected to others, yet they are often also more dependent on care, either from healthcare professionals or people close to them. dependency in western societies is often seen as a sign of weakness. this does not eva meijer -the melancholic animal — on depression and animality 121 recognize that we are dependent on others at different points in our lives, and it obscures the full potential of these relations. we are always already entangled in relations, not just with members of our own, but also with members of other species (gruen). many depressed humans report experiencing help from their companion animals (bekoff, “companion animals”), which challenges the species hierarchy: now the companion animal takes care of the human. depression is an extreme state, but many non-depressed humans also receive this kind of support from their companion animals, leading some thinkers to wonder whether perhaps all companion animals are in some sense emotional support animals (driessen). but maybe they are simply friends, who sometimes help out, and whom you help at other points. there are different interspecies healing practices that combine keeping moving and helping others. one example is found in households, where taking care of adopted companion dogs and taking long daily walks with them can help humans and dogs.6 volunteering in animal shelters can in certain cases also be seen as an interspecies healing practice. a good example is the amsterdam stray cat foundation, where humans with different neuro-atypical conditions, who have trouble fitting in in human society, take care of amsterdam’s feral cats and vice versa (see meijer, forthcoming), cocreating ecologies of care through the city. the nonhuman animals in both of these examples may of course also suffer from depression or ptsd and benefit from the relationships for the same reasons as the humans. caring for others as a political act. caring for others is an act of resistance in a world that does not value their lives.7 care is not simply intuitive or emotional, something following from fuzzy warm feelings: it is a moral attitude, one we should cultivate, which requires continuous attention (gruen). this moral attitude can also offer a different perspective on social and political relations. care ethics takes (unequal) relations, such as those between mother and child, as the starting point for ethical behavior. instead of following rules, maximizing happiness, or perfecting one’s character, the focus is not on the self but on the other (held). the strong focus on reason and the individual in other ethical theories is also challenged, and care ethicists emphasize that human — and as ecofeminists (adams, sexual politics; “traumatic knowledge”; gruen) argue, also nonhuman — animals are always born into relations. judgments are not universal but always tied to a context, since individuals are always situated. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 122 different aspects of the care ethical model can function as a starting point for a political model of care. instead of conceptualizing politics as the struggle between atomistic individuals with competing interests, or the process in which rational arguments lead to universal claims, relationships of care towards other social groups or communities, such as for example domesticated animals, or homeless humans, can be brought to the front. universal justice is not the focus here, because political and social relations are always formed in specific contexts in which judgments can be improved but will never be universal, but a striving for a more just world in given circumstances.8 a good example of a politics of care is found in animal sanctuaries (meijer, “sanctuary politics” 2). historically, sanctuaries are seen as apolitical spaces, which provide safety and refuge. in this model, those seeking sanctuary are often seen as outsiders or guests, in contrast to citizens, and connections between sanctuaries and democratic institutions or political practices are not often made. this runs the risk of reproducing exclusions and hierarchies of power, as well as legitimizing injustices, because the underlying power structures and the institutional mechanisms from which the exclusion follows are not challenged. new sanctuary practices challenge this, offering a more political model of sanctuary, focusing on political agency, political resistance, and redefining the demos. this movement is most clear in the human case, but explorations toward a more political model of sanctuaries, as sites-of-citizenship, are also found in relation to animal sanctuaries (donaldson and kymlicka, “co-citizens”). there are many different types of nonhuman animal sanctuaries that engage in different kinds of activities; for example, they provide permanent housing and care for formerly exploited farmed animals, take care of stray cats living in urban areas, or rehabilitate and release wild animals. different types of sanctuaries have in common that they focus on care and relations with groups of “others,” who often suffer from forms of violence because they are not part of the demos. they sometimes practice civil disobedience, and sanctuaries generally challenge the powers that be, making space for those who are not seen to belong here, and providing them with a place to recover from their traumas. their care extends beyond helping individuals: they also form a critique of violent structures in our societies that make humans and other animals ill, and show alternatives. in order to counter oppressive structures it is needed to imagine new futures, with other animals. notes 1. in order to co-conceptualize different forms of oppression, claire jean kim offers a multi-optic view. she argues that we need different lenses to be able to see different eva meijer -the melancholic animal — on depression and animality 123 kinds of oppressions clearly, and that these cannot be reduced to one primary form of oppression. racism for example does not trump speciesism, different oppressions often are primordial and follow their own genealogy. in order to challenge them we need to regard them in their own context and not reduce one to the other. explicating interconnections is useful and often necessary for understanding these different oppressions, and conceptualizing the road to a better future. 2. with these examples i refer to nonhuman animals who are seen as rational according to existing standards of rationality. this is a flawed view, in my opinion, because different nonhuman animals have different ways of navigating the world and their own forms of intelligence, and expressing this (see meijer, political animal), but the point is that even if we accept current notions of rationality we cannot exclude all nonhuman animals. 3. an interesting parallel is found in sue donaldson and will kymlicka’s comparison of certain animal sanctuaries and “total institutions” (“farmed animal”). 4. veterinary surgeons in the us have a 1.5 times higher chance to suffer from depression than the general population and are three times more likely to have suicidal thoughts (kelly). female vets are 3.5 times more likely to die from suicide than other members of the us population (tomasi et al.). 5. other animals may also internalize human grief; support dogs for veterans with ptsd for example sometimes develop secondary ptsd. 6. smuts discusses how living with her adopted companion safi changed both their lives and how mutual habits come into being; in “stray philosophy” i discuss how a romanian stray dog and a human learn to live together. these kinds of relationships form a good basis for healing. 7. care can both be a form of political resistance, when you care for those who are not seen as worth caring about, and a form of ontological resistance, to the fact that everything will perish and disappear. 8. the dutch party for the animals is also an example of this. they practice a new form of politics, based on care and solidarity instead of on competing interests and economic growth. interestingly, they are growing fast; they now have five seats in parliament, are humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 124 well represented in city councils and provinces, and are highly visible in debates and media. works cited aaltola, elisa. animal suffering: philosophy and culture. palgrave macmillan, 2012. adams, carol. the sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory. (1995). bloomsbury, 2015. _____. “traumatic knowledge and animal exploitation: part 1: what is it?” caroljadams.com. accessed 23 may 2018. online. aho, kevin. “depression and embodiment: phenomenological reflections on motility, affectivity, and transcendence.” medicine, health care and philosophy 16.4 (2013): 751-759. bauder, harald. “sanctuary cities: policies and practices in international perspective.” international migration 55.2 (2017): 174-187. bekoff, marc. “companion animals help people with mental health problems.” psychology today. accessed 23 may 2018. online. _____. minding animals: awareness, emotions, and heart. oxford up, 2002. _____. “stalking, hunting, stress, and emotion.” psychology today. accessed 23 may 2018. online. bovenkerk, bernice and clemens driessen. “over ijsberen en andere zich stierlijk vervelende dieren.” podium voor bio-ethiek 20.2 (2013): 10-15. burton, robert. the anatomy of melancholy. (1621) hen. crips & lodo lloyd, 1927. braitman, laurel. animal madness: how anxious dogs, compulsive parrots, and elephants in recovery help us understand ourselves. simon and schuster, 2014. cvetkovich, ann. depression: a public feeling. duke up, 2012. eva meijer -the melancholic animal — on depression and animality 125 derby, john. “animality-patriarchy in mental disability representations.” visual culture & gender 9 (2014): 18-30. de lavigne, guillaume. free ranging dogs-stray, feral or wild? lulu press, 2015. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. trans. david wills. fordham up, 2008. _____. “cogito and the history of madness.” writing and difference. trans. alan bass. u chicago p, 1978. 31-63. donaldson, sue & will kymlicka. “co-citizens in resistance, community building, and knowledge formation.” presentation at wesleyan sanctuary conference, september 2017. _____. “farmed animal sanctuaries: the heart of the movement?” politics and animals 1.1 (2015): 50-74. _____. zoopolis: a political theory of animal rights. oxford up, 2011. driessen, clemens. “animal hybrids.” presentation at ozsw werkgroep dierethiek, april 2018. ferguson, anni. “the lowest of the stack’: why black women are struggling with mental health.” the guardian 8 feb 2016. accessed 23 may 2018. online. ferrari, alize j., et al. “burden of depressive disorders by country, sex, age, and year: findings from the global burden of disease study 2010.” plos medicine 10.11 (2013): e1001547. foucault, michel. madness and civilization. routledge, 2003. freud, sigmund. “mourning and melancholia.” the journal of nervous and mental disease 56.5 (1922): 543-545. gruen, lori. entangled empathy: an alternative ethic for our relationships with animals. lantern books, 2015. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 126 held, virginia. “feminist transformations of moral theory.” philosophy and phenomenological research 50 (1990): 321-344. kelly, greg. “modern-day plague: understanding the scope of veterinary suicide.” vmd today.com 20 october 2017. accessed 23 may 2018. online. kim, claire jean. dangerous crossings. cambridge up, 2015. king, barbara j. how animals grieve. u chicago p, 2013. ko, aph, and syl ko. aphro-ism: essays on pop culture, feminism, and black veganism from two sisters. lantern books, 2017. krase, kathryn. “history of forced sterilization and current u.s. abuses.” our bodies ourselves 1 october 2014. accessed 23 may 2018. online. kristeva, julia. "on the melancholic imaginary." new formations no. 3 (1987): 5-18. mcwilliams, james. “ptsd in the slaughterhouse.” texas observer 7 feb 2012. accessed 23 may 2018. online. meijer, eva. “the good life, the good death: companion animals and euthanasia.” animal studies journal 7.1 (2018): 205-225. _____. political animal voices. diss. university of amsterdam, 2017. _____. “sanctuary politics and the borders of the demos: comparing two models of human and nonhuman animal sanctuary.” ‘like an animal': refugees, animals, and multiculturalism. natalie khazaal & núria almiron, eds., forthcoming. _____. “stray agency and interspecies care: the amsterdam stray cats and their humans.” animals in our midst. bernice bovenkerk and jozef keulartz, eds. springer, forthcoming. _____. “stray philosophy: human-dog observations on language, freedom and politics.” journal for critical animal studies 12.4 (2014): 105-139. merleau-ponty, maurice. phenomenology of perception. routledge, 2013. eva meijer -the melancholic animal — on depression and animality 127 palmer, clare. “madness and animality in michel foucault’s madness and civilization.” animal philosophy: ethics and identity. peter atterton and matthew calarco, eds. continuum, 2004. 72-84. peña-guzmán, david m. “can nonhuman animals commit suicide?” animal sentience: an interdisciplinary journal on animal feeling 2.20 (2017): 1-24. reisner, sari l., ralph vetters, m. leclerc, shayne zaslow, sarah wolfrum, daniel shumer, & matthew j. mimiaga. “mental health of transgender youth in care at an adolescent urban community health center: a matched retrospective cohort study.” journal of adolescent health 56.3 (2015): 274-279. smuts, barbara. “encounters with animal minds.” journal of consciousness studies 8.5 (2001): 293–309. taylor, sunaura. beasts of burden: animal and disability liberation. the new press, 2017. tomasi, suzanne e., et al. “suicide among veterinarians in the united states from 1979 through 2015.” journal of the american veterinary medical association 254.1 (2019): 104-112. vindas, marco a., et al. “brain serotonergic activation in growth-stunted farmed salmon: adaption versus pathology.” royal society open science. 3.5 (2016): e. 160030. microsoft word nimmo-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 9:2 richie nimmo enfolding the biosocial collective: ontological politics in the evolution of social insects introduction. imagining and representing “nature” is always a work of political inscription which simultaneously enacts some tacit vision of social relations and human community. this is particularly true of representations of nonhuman animals, our perceptions and definitions of which have been so fundamental to the work of human self-definition through the ages. when we imagine animals we imagine ourselves, and the nature, possibilities and limits of our own human existence. this article traces how honey bees have been imagined and represented in a significant scientific development of recent decades, and critically explores the resonance of this for our thinking about social and political organization. the analysis draws upon the concept of “ontological politics” (mol; whatmore), which foregrounds how our inscriptions of “nature” and “the natural” are constitutively interwoven with visions of “society,” “culture,” and “the social.” thus ways of knowing “nature” and its others are always involved in defining conditions of social and political possibility through the work of coconstructing human and nonhuman subjects, objects, collectives, and their interrelations, and inscribing ontological boundaries and domains as a given reality or common world. on this basis, the article examines some key developments of the last fifty years that have contributed to a particular trajectory in scientific studies of bees and other social insects, namely a turn to conceptions of evolution as perpetual competition for relative genetic advantage, governed by a mathematical logic. while not quite a paradigm shift, this has marked a significant change of emphasis in entomology, and constitutes a new problematic, which has given rise to new kinds of study addressing different questions and mobilizing a particular conceptual framework. this analysis traces the conceptual architecture of this and explores how it inscribes a particular ontology of “nature” and “the social.” ontological politics is not just a matter of inscriptions in the abstract, but of worldmaking practices bound up with lived politics. the task then is to unfold the politics that are being enacted within particular assemblages, and to situate this critically within the wider field of political relations. in this vein, this article argues that the ontological politics of a late modern turn to conflict in scientific studies of bees has been entangled with key contemporaneous currents in socio-political and economic thought, which share a vision of a world fundamentally shaped by competition between atomized and rationally self-interested actors. this is not to posit a quasi-causal interrelationship, but richie nimmo-enfolding the biosocial collective: ontological politics in the evolution of social insects 29 rather an ontological resonance, overlap, and cross-fertilization, consisting in a mutual reinforcement of framing assumptions. thus the aim is not to make an empirical contribution to the history of ideas, but to develop a sensitizing framework for thinking-through the politics of recent scientific visions of an iconic nonhuman society. the analysis therefore carefully retraces some pivotal moments in these developments in entomology in order to examine the ontological work involved, exploring what was foregrounded and inscribed as “real,” and conversely what was bracketed and rendered marginal or invisible. the specific argument is that the trajectory of the turn to conflict in studies of social insects, as an exemplar of what – following tim ingold — i will refer to as neodarwinism, is bound up with the ontological politics of inscribing and entrenching a “nature” that is separate from and prior to the social, knowable by particular sorts of knowledge, and thus amenable to certain kinds of politics. once this “politics of nature” (latour, politics) is identified, it becomes contestable, and this article develops a critical reading which identifies a work of ontological exclusion or containment of the social at every stage. in order to problematize this, the analysis draws upon currents from relational ontology and theories of biosocial complexity, in order to posit an alternative ontological-political vision and to imagine what sort of “nature,” “society,” and “politics” might emerge if the social is instead reckoned back into the evolutionary process. in this way, the analysis and argument that follows is at once about science, the nature of bees, and their mode of existence, but also about ourselves, our nature as human beings, and the social and political possibilities of our own mode of existence. imagining a nonhuman community. as neither human “subjects” nor mere “objects” of nature, animals have long been enrolled as cultural boundary creatures inhabiting the liminal border zones between “nature” and humanity. as inhabitants of these border zones, animals have been central to what we might call the anthropomorphic imagination — the ongoing work of self-definition that is an abiding preoccupation of human cultures (shepard). but this anthropomorphic imagination often focuses upon animals whose physiological and cognitive characteristics are more easily amenable to an anthropomorphic model of conscious being, subjectivity, and selfhood, meaning vertebrates, mammals, primates, and cetaceans. social insects, and bees in particular, are a significant exception. there is a remarkably rich cultural history of apian anthropomorphism, that is, of cultural imaginings and representations of bees vis-à-vis human beings, but it does not center upon speculation about the consciousness of bees and the nature of a bee’s subjective experience, but instead upon the nature of “bee society,” on the colony as a political community or collective, and on the extent and significance of its similarities with human society. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 30 an old beekeepers’ proverb speaks of the quintessentially collective and social nature of bees, una apis nulla apis — “one bee is no bee”; this is an enduring cultural idea which has recurred in different regions and historical periods over many centuries. at least as far back as ancient greece, bee colonies were thought of as a kind of political community in nature, an ideal natural polity, and bees symbolized virtuous dedication to the collective good (wilson, the hive 107-108; preston). in fact, only a small proportion of the many thousands of species of bees are social insects, so the characterization of bees as highly social reflects the cultural preeminence of one species, apis mellifera or the “western honey bee,” in human thinking about bees. as the apian species most amenable to the semi-domestication of managed beekeeping, apis mellifera has been involved in an exceptionally close and enduring relationship with humans for millennia, which has afforded ample opportunity for close observation of honey bee colonies. thus the rich history of apian folklore and symbolism is permeated with imaginative reflection upon the nature of honey bee “society” and the colony as a kind of political community; indeed, the cultural history of the honey bee could be aptly characterized as a never-ending thought experiment on the nature of collectivity vis-avis individuality. the fabled collectivism of honey bees is often evoked through examples of what is taken to be their “extreme” altruism: bees are often said to “work themselves to death” producing honey not for their own consumption, but for the future security of the hive (preston 11); they will sting any creature that threatens the colony, even though this results in their own death (starr et al. 787, 788; garson 30); and sick bees will willingly exclude themselves from the hive wherever possible, in order to minimize the spread of infection to others in the colony (rueppell, hayworth and ross). in each of these examples, collectivism is closely associated with altruism and construed as the antithesis of self-interest, and the cultural perception of bees has been fundamentally shaped by changing political inflections of this core idea of self-denying altruism. this is epitomized by the prevalent renaissance emblem of the beehive accompanied by the motto non nobis, meaning “not for ourselves” (wilson, hive 19-20); as claire preston (53) observes, “the unstated corollary ... is ‘instead for others.’” this enrolment of the bee as a symbol of civic virtue as distinct from private interest runs very deep in the cultural imaginary. it has gone hand in hand with the perception of bees as assiduous, productive, and hard-working, as perpetually engaged in tireless labor for the good of the hive (preston 54), and much has been made of the fact that the male drones, who do not work, are soon excluded from the hive and left to die once they have served their reproductive purpose (wilson, hive 30-32). richie nimmo-enfolding the biosocial collective: ontological politics in the evolution of social insects 31 so the cultural enrolment of bees as symbols of civic duty, altruism, industriousness, and collective virtue is simultaneously social, political, and economic in its scope and in its resonance. this has lent to anthropomorphic thinking about bee “society” a remarkable potency, and bees have very often been enrolled to assert the righteousness or naturalness of certain forms of political, social, and economic organization, as ostensibly demonstrated by their example in nature. throughout much of the medieval and early modern period, for example, bees were acclaimed as paragons of good governance, hard work, and obedience; they were hailed as exemplary of a natural order in which everyone contributes to the common good, by knowing his or her place within the social hierarchy and fulfilling his or her duties efficiently, in a kind of apian functionalism (wilson, hive 24, 26). english royalists in the 16th and 17th centuries pointed to what they perceived as the perfect submission of bees to their ruler as evidence that monarchy is indeed founded in nature and divinely ordained (preston 62). one telling feature of these visions of bee society was the assumption that the colony was a patriarchy, that the queen was in fact a male “king bee,” a misconception which was not dispelled until the beginning of the 17th century (preston 60-61). the history of apian anthropomorphism also encompasses a tradition of more egalitarian associations, however. whilst royalists in england hailed the divine monarchy of bees, revolutionaries in france adopted the beehive as a symbol of the republic, denoting the community of workers and the civic ideal (preston 73). this alternative view was always latent in cultural representations of bees, but with the social and political upheavals of the 19th and 20th centuries it became much more sharply distinguished from the more hierarchical and conservative strands of bee mythology. bees were often adopted as symbols of cooperation and communal ethics by social reformist and workers’ movements (wilson, hive 106), although this was opposed — and often swamped — by the association of bees with the dangers of collectivism by its opponents. for them, far from the bee colony being an ideal polity, it was a mindless and malign collective epitomized by the “the swarm,” which — like “the mob” — was a multitude frighteningly devoid of individual intelligence and free will. indeed, from the 1950s onwards, and in the context of the cold war, bees were increasingly equated with totalitarianism, and represented in western mass culture as an evil collective, signifying the irrational mentality of the crowd (wilson, hive 134-135, 138-139) and evoking anxiety and dread of the soulless collective. cultural imaginings of bees and “bee society” then have been deeply entangled with historically changing — and contested — political inflections of collectivism, individualism, cooperation, subservience, altruism, and self-interest. hence, there is a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 32 political significance to apian discourse which at least equals that of commonly anthropomorphized species that are physiologically and evolutionarily far closer to human beings. insofar as western thought has involved an enduring binarism of society and individual, apian discourse has been a barometer of the ever-shifting relationship between those potent mythic poles. the politics of apian natures. one might be tempted to distinguish the history of cultural imaginings and representations of honey bees from modern entomology, since the latter examines the organization of bee colonies “objectively,” using scientific methods, as distinct from anthropomorphic metaphors and symbolic associations. but it would be a mistake to draw too absolute a distinction between scientific and nonscientific ways of knowing, given that science is social activity and scientific “facts” are socio-materially produced (bloor; mendelsohn, weingart and whitley; knorr-cetina; latour and woolgar). as sheila jasanoff puts it: scientific knowledge […] is not a transcendent mirror of reality. it both embeds and is embedded in social practices, identities, norms, conventions, discourses, instruments and institutions — in short, all the building blocks of what we call the social (5). moreover, before acquiring the status of “facts,” scientific knowledge-objects must be assembled and made meaningful, which is a material-semiotic practice. hence scientific discourse is replete with metaphors, rhetorical and narrative devices, and cultural associations of much the same kind as those found in quotidian ontologies (gilbert and mulkay; woolgar; haraway, primate visions 4; crist; keller 117-118). far from being separate from politics then, scientific knowledge and discourse is capable of profoundly shaping socio-political discourse and socio-political realities, and indeed is always and everywhere involved in this ontological-political work. this is doubly true of the sciences of animal behavior, which combine the political efficacy of scientific knowledge-claims with the ontological role of nonhuman animals in definitions of “the human” (shepard; crist; haraway, when species meet), wherein changing visions of animality are constitutively interwoven with changing definitions of humanity, which in turn are entangled with discourses of race, gender, class, sexuality, community and hierarchy (haraway, primate 1). there is not a radical break or discontinuity, then, between the centuries-long cultural history of anthropomorphic imaginings of honey bee society and modern entomological work on apian social organization. both are part of one continuous history in which richie nimmo-enfolding the biosocial collective: ontological politics in the evolution of social insects 33 changing visions of apian sociality and apian politics have interacted with the changing political inflections of discourses of sociality, collectivism, individualism, altruism, and self-interest. this has been given an intriguing twist in recent decades by one significant development in entomology, which has challenged the very idea that bees are in fact cooperative by nature and dedicated to the collective good of the colony. rather than an example of altruism or of spontaneous cooperation, on this view the collective organization and integration of the colony is a mere epiphenomenon concealing an underlying reality governed by self-interest and inter-individual conflict. collectivism is explained as the byproduct of a biological calculus whereby the pursuit of selfinterest leads ineluctably to apparently cooperative behavior, and altruism is unmasked as something imposed upon the individual organisms that make up the collective by a hidden logic of self-interest that is conceived as embedded in the nature of life itself. the context for this is that altruism and altruistic cooperation have long been a problem for the dominant current in evolutionary thinking that permeates much of behavioral biology, which normalizes self-interest on the basis that organisms must always tend to favor whatever behavioral traits benefit the propagation of their own genes (crist 127128). while there is no consensus on the mechanisms by means of which this genetic imperative is realized in the behavior of actual organisms, self-interested behavior is regarded as an inevitable outcome of the evolutionary process because behavioral traits which do not favor the propagation of the bearer’s genes will by definition self-select for obsolescence. in this ontology, therefore, natural selection is held to operate at the level of so called “selfish genes” (dawkins), which are the real evolutionary agents, and organisms are essentially the bearers of an underlying genetic logic forever playing itself out through their inherited behavioral and physiological traits. as eileen crist explains, “the rationality of genes is pictured as a kind of hidden hand that — via the programming of neurophysiological machinery — guides behaviors so as to optimize the chances of survival and maximize the reproductive output of their carriers” (139). it is difficult, within this vision, to explain the apparent acquiescence of the thousands of female worker bees in a colony to a lifetime of working ceaselessly for the collective without seeking to propagate their own genes by reproducing themselves. this is “eusociality” — the highly collective and integrated form of sociality found among honey bees and a handful of other species, mostly insects, defined by a complex social division of reproductive labor, multiple overlapping generations in a colony, and large numbers of reproductively inactive workers (wilson, insect societies; wilson, “eusociality”). indeed, darwin identified eusocial insects as a serious problem for his theory of natural selection: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 34 i will confine myself to one special difficulty, which at first appeared to me insuperable, and actually fatal to my whole theory. i allude to the neuters or sterile females in insect communities: for these neuters often differ widely in instinct and in structure from both the male and fertile females, and yet from being sterile they cannot propagate their kin. (236237) darwin’s main concern was how it was possible for these sterile females to have evolved a distinctive morphology when they do not breed — how it was that they had not therefore been rendered an evolutionary dead-end by the process of natural selection. this “special difficulty” subsequently became generalized into the broader “problem of altruism” — the question of how it was possible, in terms of natural selection, for behavioral traits to evolve which were disadvantageous to their bearers, but advantageous to the community, a situation thought to be mostly sharply exemplified by altruistic behavior, defined as giving priority to the interests of others over oneself. darwin never solved his problem to his own satisfaction and was driven to suggest that perhaps, in the case of highly integrated social species like honey bees, natural selection operated at the level of the colony as a social collective rather than the individual organism (236-237). this significant self-modification of darwin’s otherwise elegantly consistent theory later gave rise to a fierce debate on the validity of notions of “group selection” or “multi-level selection,” in which some influential figures supported darwin’s “group selection” hypothesis (wilson and sober; wilson, “eusociality”; wilson and wilson). but the view that has become dominant in recent decades holds that group selection is a fanciful wrong-turn rendered unnecessary by the discovery of the gene and by subsequent advances in genetics science. on this view, the solution to “problem of altruism” is considered to have been furnished by william hamilton’s theory of “inclusive fitness,” which built on the recognition that genes are shared with relatives in order to propose “kin selection” as an extension of natural selection beyond the individual to those with whom genes are shared (“genetical evolution”) in this way, hamilton was able to explain how altruistic traits can emerge if they preferentially benefit relatives, in a manner that was still consistent with the classical principles of natural selection (herbers 214-216). this not only provided an apparently workable solution to the problem of altruism that had long dogged evolutionary theory, but also reinforced by theoretical demonstration the central tenet of neo-darwinism — that selection operates at the level of the gene or “genotype” rather than at the level of the organism, let alone the social group or collective. richie nimmo-enfolding the biosocial collective: ontological politics in the evolution of social insects 35 having ostensibly solved the broader “problem of altruism” that had emerged from darwin’s observations of social insects, hamilton also attempted to resolve the “one special difficulty” itself, by deploying his theory of inclusive fitness to the evolution of eusociality. he proposed that the social organization of eusocial insects could be explained by their “haplodiploid” system of sex determination, wherein the males develop from unfertilized eggs by parthenogenesis and have a single set of chromosomes, whereas the females develop from fertilized eggs and have two sets of chromosomes (“genetical evolution”; “extraordinary sex ratios”; herbers). hamilton observed that this mode of sex determination results in the peculiar situation of females being more closely related to their sisters than their mothers, and he argued that this could explain eusociality because it meant that females would propagate their own genes more efficiently by helping their mother to produce more sisters than by seeking to reproduce themselves (“genetical evolution”; “sex ratios”; herbers; ratnieks, foster and wenseleers 582-583). hence, according to hamilton, the apparent altruism and collective cooperation of eusocial workers was actually an expression of inclusive fitness, which is to say a manifestation of the underlying logic of genes operating through a hidden calculus of kin selection. rational actors and calculating genes. although hamilton’s “haplodiploidy hypothesis” was later called into question as an explanation of eusociality by the discovery that several eusocial insects are not haplodiploid, the broader approach to “inclusive fitness” became very influential within entomology and beyond (wilson, “kin selection”). it led to a raft of new research exploring how underlying logics of kin relatedness might be the key to diverse forms of social behavior. a landmark early paper in this vein by trivers and hare pointed out that the logic of inclusive fitness meant that there was a genetic conflict of interest between parents and offspring among haplodiploid insects due to their respective interests in establishing and maintaining differing sex ratios within the colony, with workers benefitting from a preponderance of females over males whereas queens benefitted from a more even balance of the sexes (249-263). this generated an enormous amount of interest in conflict among social insects, and subsequent research increasingly sought to explain various aspects of social organization among social insects by identifying and modeling conflicts of interest emerging from the calculus of coefficients of kin relatedness, as played out within the reproductive dynamics of insect colonies. although hamilton’s aim had been to explain cooperative behavior, according to population biologist joan herbers, “the prediction of such conflicts is considered a more fertile outcome of hamilton’s papers than the literature on cooperation” (215). indeed, cooperation, altruism, and collectivism were progressively rendered secondary phenomena beneath which the expert gaze — humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 36 bolstered by a knowledge of relatedness coefficients — could detect the more fundamental reality of endemic reproductive conflict and self-interest operating at the level of genes (herbers ; ratnieks, foster and wenseleers). in 1973 the evolutionary biologist john maynard smith and the mathematician george price published what was to be a landmark paper in evolutionary biology. it took as its point of departure hamilton’s acknowledgement that even natural selection at the level of genes operates in a social context. since behavior — which neo-darwinism takes to be genetically shaped or programmed, and therefore subject to evolutionary selection pressures in the same way as genes — involves interaction with other organisms in the environment, it follows that the “fitness” of any given behavior — its tendency to promote that organism’s reproductive success — depends upon how that behavior interacts with the behavior of others, as well as with all of the other forces and actors that make up “the environment” in the broadest sense. as the costs and benefits associated with any genetically-influenced trait must depend on the local environment, they are inherently social and ecological (herbers 215). but acknowledging the complex interaction between genetically coded behaviors and their social-ecological environment risks undermining the explanatory preeminence of the gene. consequently, there has been a tendency for its adherents to overemphasize one dimension of hamilton’s formula — the “sex ratio” or mathematical coefficients of relatedness between kin — at the expense of the environment which shapes the cost/benefit ratio of any given trait. joan herbers suggests that this is also driven by methodological and epistemological pressures, given the relative ease of calculating relatedness coefficients for use in the comparative algorithms favored by “hard” science, in comparison with which studying social-ecological contexts is far more difficult: understanding ecological context for a focal species takes a combination of good natural history and experimentation, which themselves are timeintensive. furthermore, there is precious little universality in ecology; a hard-won explanation for one population or species may not offer explanatory power for a second. science far prefers generality to unique solutions, yet for the operation of kin selection, we must expect different explanations in different ecological contexts. (herbers 216) pushed to its logical conclusion, it follows that selection “at the level of genes” is not at the level of genes at all, but rather depends upon a multitudinous environment with all of its contingencies. this is more than just a caveat to be applied to the theory of richie nimmo-enfolding the biosocial collective: ontological politics in the evolution of social insects 37 inclusive fitness, it potentially destabilizes the ontology of evolution as a process unfolding according to an immanent and ineluctable logic, and opens up the prospect of an evolutionary process irreducible to the mathematics of kin selection or the calculus of genes, but bound up with the whole indeterminate process of ontogenesis or becoming. maynard-smith and price’s contribution was to avert this looming specter of indeterminacy by drawing heavily from the analytical tools and conceptual apparatus of a theoretical field that had previously had very little to do with evolutionary biology, namely the field of “game theory.” as the mathematical study of approaches to predicting behavior in situations of conflict or competition, game theory first emerged in the 1940s and developed through the 1950s in the context of cold war politics. it was initially rooted in a model of how rational and self-interested actors would behave in a two-person zero-sum game, such as chess, poker, or intercontinental thermonuclear war (von neumann and morgenstern; myerson). indeed, game-theoretic thinking contributed to the doctrine of nuclear deterrence through “mutually assured destruction,” which was based on the central game-theoretic scenario of the “nash equilibrium.” this is a situation of strategic balance where, despite neither player being able to win decisively, the potential costs to either player of changing their strategy to a more hawkish or aggressive one consistently outweigh the benefits or “payoff” of such a shift, in such a way that a stability or stalemate prevails, resembling a sort of cooperation, as long as both players are rational, self-interested, and understand the structure of the game (nash, “equilbrium points”; nash, “non-cooperative games”; easley and kleinberg 166). maynard smith adapted this to evolutionary biology by treating the geneticallydetermined characteristics and behaviors of organisms in a population as their “strategies” in the “game” of evolution, where reproductive success or “fitness” is the aim or “payoff,” and this depends upon the rival strategies of the other organisms with which it interacts (easley and kleinberg 209-210). in his seminal 1973 paper on “the logic of animal conflict,” maynard smith stated that his pivotal concept, the evolutionarily stable strategy, was “derived in part from the theory of games, and in part from the work of […] hamilton on the evolution of the sex ratio” (15). hamilton himself was in turn influenced by this concept and went on to use it in his later work (hamilton and may; comins et al), praising its “combination of simplicity and generality” (sigmund 4). its value for him also lay in the fact that, by showing how apparently cooperative and altruistic behavior could arise from rational competitive strategies, game-theoretic approaches to evolution appeared to drive a stake into the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 38 heart of notions of “group level selection” and to confirm selection at the level of genes acting upon individual organisms, and in some special cases upon kin groups. in its impact and influence, the emergence of evolutionary game theory powerfully established the idea that the central tenets of game theory need not be confined to analyses of artificial and circumscribed interaction-situations such as games of strategy like chess, but were suited to grasp the underlying competitive logic of life itself, in all its diverse manifestations (maynard smith, “theory of games”; evolution and the theory of games). maynard smith’s evolutionarily stable strategy — paralleling the nash equilibrium — became the basis of a wave of new work deploying game-theoretic approaches and analytical models, not just in evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology, but also in economics and political thought. it embedded the notion that wherever there was life there could be found the same fundamental dynamic of interindividual conflict and competition between rival strategies, and that if one identifies the actors and their strategies correctly and at the right level for the phenomena in question, then the whole process can be grasped as unfolding according to mathematical principles. towards biosocial becoming. game theory then has provided a way to address the problematic social dimension of evolution in a manner consistent with the principle of evolution by natural selection at the level of genes. but the ontology of game theory is “social” only in the limited sense that the situations or “games” analyzed by game theorists are always multi-player, no player acts in isolation, and the outcome of a game depends upon how the strategies of all of the players affect each other reciprocally. the sociality of game-theoretic ontology ends there, because the players themselves are not social — their ultimate motives and their very constitution as separate players are treated as pre-given by the nature and rules of the game, built into the situation, and not amenable to social renegotiation. moreover, the actors of game theory are reflexive only in the limited sense that their rational decision-making includes the capacity to modify their strategies in response to the strategies of others, which still entrenches a view of the actors themselves as fundamentally atomized, self-contained and bounded individuals, compelled to perpetually calculate and recalculate their own actions in relation to the hostile and self-seeking strategies of others. in these respects the ontology of game theory is ultimately not social in a meaningful sense, but is rather an ontology of asocial individuals acting with limited strategic reflexivity in competitive situations. these characteristics distinguish game theory’s model of interaction from those common in sociology, for example, where interactions are held to be constitutive of richie nimmo-enfolding the biosocial collective: ontological politics in the evolution of social insects 39 social actors themselves through an ongoing reflexive process (mead). indeed, from a more thoroughly relational perspective, “the social” refers to a field in which self and other, inside and outside, organism and environment, coalesce and enmesh in a heterogeneous field of mutual interconstitution. thus, one does not grasp sociality by acknowledging the co-existence of multiple cartesian individuals, each encased in their own inviolable individuality, suspiciously peering out at others in an attempt to discern their competitors’ strategies and to modify their own accordingly for maximum advantage. in such a model, sociality is only ever a matter of external relations and never of what karen barad calls “intra-actions” (170, 178) — dynamic imbrications in which the “insides” and “outsides” of actants are perpetually mixed-up, reconfigured, and enfolded together. by neglecting in this way the constitutive nature of the social as a process of relational becoming, and reducing sociality to the strategic interactions of separate individuals, game-theoretic ontology inscribes what is at best an impoverished view of sociality. which raises the question of what might emerge from the encounter of evolution with more radically social ontologies, such as the forms of relational complexity theory that are increasingly shaping cutting-edge thinking at the interface of the social and natural sciences (connolly; bennett; ingold; palsson). the work of political philosopher william connolly has been critical in articulating how the rise of complexity theory as a challenge to reductionism in the physical sciences creates possibilities for new modes of trans-disciplinary thinking which explore the implications of a world constantly emerging in contingent ways from the conjunction of multiple, overlapping and complex systems, or what he calls “a world of becoming.” for connolly, reductionism lies in the tendency to isolate, seal off, and hypostatize systems that are always partly open assemblages, and to theoretically model these as “pure” closed systems which in principle are self-balancing, though they may be periodically disrupted by “externalities” (37). i want to argue that this is precisely what is at work in evolutionary game theory, which treats natural selection at the level of the gene as akin to a closed system, by reducing the role of the social-ecological environment in the process to the status of a constant and predictable external variable, little more than a relatively inert stage upon which the logic of genes plays itself out, and which therefore cannot introduce indeterminacy into the very heart of the process. this is not just a question of how macroscopic systems and their intra-actions are understood, but also of how the agents of these systems are imagined and inscribed, since closed and stable self-contained systems imply one-dimensional, atomized and mechanistic agents. a sense of the intricate relational entanglement of agents and assemblages is captured in jane bennett’s notion of “agentic assemblages,” and her “vital materialism” provides another fertile conceptual resource for thinking through humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 40 biosocial complexity (23-24, 35). in her intriguing discussion of the numerous limitations of the category of “environment” for a posthumanist politics, bennett points out that the term always refers to something which is outside, whether outside of the self, human society, or human culture; the environment is what surrounds; it is without, not within, a substrate or context, but always separated in some way from the entity it encircles. bennett’s notion of encountering vital materiality problematizes this with its capacity to show that in a world of porous materials where every boundary and border is permeable, what is without is always already within, and vice-versa, hence there is no “environment,” but only “an ontological field without any unequivocal demarcations” (116). tim ingold has examined the conceptual aporias of neo-darwinism and in particular the associated notion of culture as consisting of “memes,” where these are conceived as packets of behavior-determining “information” that operate in parallel with genes. this leads to the sham question of how to understand the inter-relationship between these two “levels,” which is an instance of what the philosopher alfred north whitehead called “misplaced concreteness” in treating as real what are purely analytic abstractions with no material presence — there are no such separate levels and thus there can be no relationship between them (4). the fallacy is similar in kind to the forms of essentialism and reductionism criticized by connolly and bennett, wherein a failure to think relationally and processually results in a tendency to inscribe or assume ontological separations where there are only complex entanglements. this is particularly manifest in the notion that genes somehow “code for” behavior, in a manner that has never been specified and yet is presumed to be substantively unaffected by the dynamic processes through which this “code” is realized in the growth, development, embodied learning, and social interactions of the organism in its complex environment (ingold 5-7). a biosocial conception of evolution as the processual unfolding of the whole assemblage of relations and matters of life cannot be squared with the bracketing-off of “proximal” or contextual factors such as “the social environment” from what is conceived as the core process of “natural selection at the level of genes.” this does not, of course, mean rejecting evolution per se, but grasps evolution as relational development emerging from ongoing dynamic intra-action between multiple complex and open systems, or what gisli palsson calls “ensembles of biosocial relations” (24), conceived not as some admixture of the biological and the social, but as biological all the way up and social all the way down. it follows that there is no genetic calculus which is the universal underlying basis of social behavior, since genes only act richie nimmo-enfolding the biosocial collective: ontological politics in the evolution of social insects 41 relationally within and through a developmental life process that is full of other forces, logics, indeterminacies and complexities. conclusion. entomologists have examined the social organization of numerous species of social insects, but the long and entangled history of human association with honey bees has given rise to an exceptionally rich history of apian anthropomorphism, in which bee colonies have consistently entered the cultural imagination as exemplars of a collectivist political community in nature. scientific discourse around honey bees and apian social organization therefore has particular political significance; hence the turn to studies of conflict as an underlying genetic driver of social organization among bees and other social insects is not a narrowly technical or discrete scientific development but is also a work of ontological-political inscription with resonance far beyond bees. in particular, by translating game theory — a useful but inherently limited mathematical approach to predicting behavior in specific situations of conflict — into a universalizable approach to all life, the forms of evolutionary theory bound up with these developments have inscribed individualistic competition as the very order of things. this article has sought to contribute to problematizing this, by closely tracing how it was assembled, and by excavating how key uncertainties and contingencies were bracketed off and backgrounded in the process. at the heart of this is the bracketing-off of the social itself, the complex environment in which organisms must operate. as a destabilizing but ineradicable component of evolution by natural selection, the social has been truncated by being translated into the impoverished social ontology of atomized rational actors. but if sociality is conceived instead as a radically relational process of heterogeneous becoming, this opens the door to alternative conceptions of social insects and honey bee colonies which contradict the prevailing orthodoxy. theories of “group selection” or “multi-level“ selection for example (wilson and sober; wilson, “kin selection“; wilson and wilson), in which selection at the level of genes and individual organisms is decentered by a broader notion of selection as a process that occurs across multiple interacting units including social groups and whole societies, have been repeatedly rejected by mainstream evolutionary biology but resonate with the anti-reductionism of relational ontologies. so too do theories of bees as “superorganisms,” which insist that the colony as a collective entity is the organism rather than the individual bees it comprises (tautz). an example from beyond entomology is the theory of “symbiogenesis,” which maintains that the source of the variation that gives rise to new species is not simply “random mutation” as darwin suggested, but a process of synthesis in which separate organisms merge to form composites. ignored or denied for decades, this has only belatedly achieved a degree of acceptance through the work of lynn margulis in studies of cell humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 42 evolution and endosymbiosis of bacteria (“genetic and evolutionary consequences”; symbiosis in cell evolution; symbiotic planet). for margulis, symbiogenesis revolutionizes our understanding of evolution, because, rather than natural selection through competition being the exclusive driving force of changing forms of life, instead symbiotic relationships of cooperation, interaction, and interdependence play a pivotal role in evolution. relational biosocial ontologies do not decisively settle the question of how evolutionary processes should be understood, but they do render contestable the entrenched conception of evolution as autonomous of the social and driven by an immutable inner logic of inter-individual conflict, competition and self-interest. thus, we do not have to see in the remarkable collective organization of the colony only an unintended consequence of the pursuit of reproductive advantage by calculating genes, and bees need not be thought of as organic machines unwittingly enacting an evolutionary imperative built into their genes, nor as rational actors compelled by the coefficients of relatedness to seek their own self-interest or that of their kin. instead, when we observe the colony, rather than an interesting case of the genetic determination of social behavior, we may — like so many before us — choose to perceive and imagine a society more collectively integrated than our own, but one where the sociality in question cannot be defined by its distance from nature. in this sense, bees can help us to think beyond not just the categories of “individual” and “social,” but also “social” and “biological,” and to conceive of a world in which these are inextricably enfolded into each other. it then makes little sense to imagine social organization as determined, dictated, or limited by nature, biology, or genes, for these are constitutively interwoven with the social and do not exist separately from social processes. a consistently relational and processual ontology therefore means a political work of imagining bees and other social beings as biosocial entities woven into the continuous stream of becoming that is the life process itself. works cited barad, karen. meeting the universe half-way: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. duke up, 2007 bennett, jane. vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. duke up, 2010. bloor, david. knowledge and social imagery. routledge and kegan paul, 1976. richie nimmo-enfolding the biosocial collective: ontological politics in the evolution of social insects 43 comins, hugh n., robert may, and william d. hamilton. “evolutionarily stable dispersal strategies.” journal of theoretical biology 82 (1980): 205-230. connolly, william e. a world of becoming. duke up, 2010. crist, eileen. images of animals: anthropomorphism and animal mind. temple up, 1999. darwin, charles. on the origin of species. john murray, 1859. dawkins, richard. the selfish gene. oxford up, 1976. easley, david, and john kleinberg. networks, crowds and markets: reasoning about a highly connected world. cambridge up, 2010. garson, justin. the biological mind: a philosophical introduction. routledge, 2015. gilbert, g. nigel, and michael mulkay. opening pandora’s box: a sociological analysis of scientists’ discourse. cambridge up, 1984. hamilton, w.d. “extraordinary sex ratios.” science 156 (1967): 477-488. _____. “the genetical evolution of social behavior i and ii.” journal of theoretical biology 7.1 (1964): 1-52. hamilton, w.d., and robert m. may “dispersal in stable habitats.” nature 269 (1977): 578-581 haraway, donna j. primate visions: gender, race and nature in the world of modern science. routledge, 1989. _____. when species meet. u of minnesota p, 2008. herbers, joan. “darwin’s ‘one special difficulty’: celebrating darwin 200.” biology letters 5.2 (2009): 214-217. ingold, tim. “prospect.” biosocial becomings: integrating social and biological anthropology. tim ingold and gisli palsson, eds. cambridge up, 2013: 1-21. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 44 jasanoff, sheila. “the idiom of co-production.” states of knowledge: the co-production of science and the social order. sheila jasanoff, ed. routledge, 2004: 13-45. keller, evelyn fox. making sense of life: exploring biological development with models, metaphors and machines. harvard up, 2002. knorr-cetina, karin d. the manufacture of knowledge: an essay on the constructivist and contextual nature of science. pergamon, 1981. latour, bruno. politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy. harvard up, 2004. latour, bruno, and steve woolgar. laboratory life: the construction of scientific facts. princeton up, 1986. margulis, lynn. “genetic and evolutionary consequences of symbiosis.” experimental parasitology 39.2 (1976): 277-349. _____. symbiosis in cell evolution: microbial communities in the archean and proterozoic eons. w.h. freeman, 1992. _____. symbiotic planet: a new look at evolution. basic books, 1998. maynard smith, j. evolution and the theory of games. cambridge up, 1982. _____. “the theory of games and the evolution of animal conflicts.” journal of theoretical biology 47.1 (1974): 209-221. maynard smith, j., and g. price. “the logic of animal conflict.” nature 246.5247 (1973): 15-18. mead, george herbert. mind, self and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist. u of chicago p, 1934. mendelsohn, everett, peter weingart, and richard d. whitley. the social production of scientific knowledge. reidel, 1977. richie nimmo-enfolding the biosocial collective: ontological politics in the evolution of social insects 45 mol, annemarie. “ontological politics: a word and some questions.” actor-network theory and after. john law and john hassard, eds. blackwell, 1999: 74-89. myerson, roger b. game theory: analysis of conflict. harvard up, 1991. nash, john f. “equilibrium points in n-person games.” proceedings of the national academy of sciences, 36.1 (1950): 48-49. _____. “non-cooperative games.” the annals of mathematics 54.2 (1951): 286-295. palsson, gisli. “ensembles of biosocial relations.” biosocial becomings: integrating social and biological anthropology. tim ingold and gisli palsson, eds. cambridge up, 2013: 2241. preston, claire. bee. reaktion books, 2006. ratnieks, francis l.w., and heikki helantera. “the evolution of extreme altruism and inequality in insect societies.” philosophical transactions of the royal society 364 (2009): 3169-3179. ratnieks, francis l.w., k. foster and t. wenseleers. “conflict resolution in insect societies.” annual review of entomology 51 (2006): 581-608. rueppell, o., m. k. hayworth and n. p. ross. “altruistic self-removal of health compromised honey bee workers from their hive.” journal of evolutionary biology 23. 7 (2010): 1538-1546. shepard, paul. the others: how animals made us human. island press, 1996. sigmund, ira kart. “william k. hamilton’s work in evolutionary game theory.” theoretical population biology 59 (2001): 3-6. starr, cecie, ralph taggart, christine evers, and lisa starr. ecology and behavior. brooks/cole, 2013 tautz, jürgen. the buzz about bees: biology of a superorganism. springer-verlag, 2008. trivers, r., and h. hare “haplodiploidy and the evolution of social insects.” science 191.4224 (1976): 249-263. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 46 von neumann, john, and oskar morgenstern. theory of games and economic behavior. princeton up, 1944. whatmore, sarah j. “earthly powers and affective environments: an ontological politics of flood risk.” theory, culture and society 30.7/8 (2013): 33-50. whitehead, alfred north. science and the modern world. free press, 1926. wilson, bee. the hive. john murray, 2004. wilson, david sloan, and elliott sober. “reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences.” behavioral and brain sciences 17.4 (1994): 585-654. wilson, david sloan, and edward o. wilson. “evolution for the good of the group.” american scientist 96.5 (2008): 380-389. wilson, edward o. “eusociality: origins and consequences.” procedures of the national academy of sciences of the united states 102 (2005a): 13367-13371. _____. the insect societies. belknap press, 1971. _____. “kin selection as the key to altruism: it’s rise and fall.” social research 72.1 (2005): 159-166. woolgar, steve. “what is the analysis of scientific rhetoric for? a comment on the possible convergence between rhetorical analysis and social studies of science.” science, technology and human values 14.1 (1989): 47-49. susan mchugh h u m a n i m a l i a 12:1 reviews amanda monteleone animal subjectivity and child animality in children’s media amy ratelle, animality and children’s literature and film. new york: palgrave macmillan. 2015. viii + 171 pp. $93.48 (hc); $79.99 (e-book). amy ratelle’s animality and children’s literature and film, uniting the disciplines of children’s literature and animal studies, clarifies the significant contributions of children’s literature and film to animality in western literary studies. ratelle argues that by assigning subjectivity to animals and/or rendering children in an animalistic way, children’s books and movies complicate their own apparent function of establishing human subjectivity and a clear boundary between animals and humans. beginning with memoirs of dick, the little poney (1799), ratelle analyzes a series of mainly british or american children’s works against prevailing western notions of human subjectivity humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 250 and dominance over other animals. ratelle foregrounds the analyses in each chapter with relevant information about animal-related issues and anxieties of the period. ratelle’s critiques often point to the limits that the narratives ultimately place on the realization of animals’ personhood. however, some of ratelle’s readings also suggest that more recent human actions to acknowledge animal personhood, such as the public interest in freeing keiko, the killer whale in free willy, from captivity, and “book buddies,” a reading program that fosters confidence in children by encouraging them to read to their animal companions, may have stemmed from the animal subjectivities presented in children’s texts. ratelle organizes each chapter around particular kinds of animals in children’s texts, prefacing discussion of individual works with historical accounts of when and why particular animals rose to the public consciousness. the chapters focus on horses, canines, livestock (pigs and chickens), lab animals (rats and mice), and cetaceans. the texts portraying these creatures follow a rough chronological order throughout the book. ratelle uses a cluster of critical lenses that deprioritize anthropocentric readings of texts, including those of donna haraway, cary wolfe, n. katherine hayles, michel foucault, and jacques derrida. ratelle also contextualizes the works with jean-jacques rousseau’s and john locke’s philosophies on cultivating human subjectivity and compassion toward animals within children through literature in order to ensure children’s development into civilized, rational beings. throughout animality, ratelle reads the overt intent in the books and films she analyzes as stemming from humanist philosophies. however, ratelle argues, an ambiguity between human and animal becomes apparent in child protagonists who develop intimate connections with animals, and in animal protagonists who attempt to find their footing in human worlds. this confusion of animal and human roles is emphasized throughout ratelle’s analyses of children’s texts. in the first chapter, “animal virtues, values and rights,” ratelle considers the horse in its dual roles in the nineteenth century as suffering brute and a symbol for human values of wealth, nobility, and power. the tensions in these roles become apparent in ratelle’s analyses of the anonymously written memoirs of dick, the little poney, and anna sewell’s black beauty (1877). ratelle describes how each work sympathetically portrays the misery of horses in their forced servitude to humans as well as the terms under which each protagonist voluntarily develops a relationship with human children. ratelle describes nineteenth-century animal rights activism as an upperand middleclass endeavor rising from concern over violence of the lower class, associated with their abuse of beasts of burden. ratelle compares these texts with enid bagnold’s amanda monteleone -animal subjectivity and child animality in children’s media 251 national velvet (1935), which portrays an evolution in the horse’s role from labor source to prized show animal. ratelle’s analysis of national velvet focuses on its adolescent human protagonist and, disfavoring previous readings of the adolescent girl’s sexuality, reads her sensual experiences of riding, or dreams of riding, horses as an indication of her “kinesthetic empathy” with horses. kinesthetic empathy, a term ratelle attributes to kenneth shapiro, describes how bodily intimacy between humans and animals results in a physical, rather than emotional, sympathy between them (36). ratelle ultimately finds that these texts, which she perceives as intending to emphasize bonds between horses and children, ultimately reveal the animals’ inability to live with humans without a compromise of their free wills. in “contact zones, becoming and the wild animal body,” ratelle focuses on canines in literature and film, beginning with an account of the literary significance of wolves in european folklore as evildoers and enemies. in her readings of jack london’s call of the wild (1903) and white fang (1906), ratelle observes tensions between canine “wildness” and human imperialist values. ratelle characterizes white fang and call of the wild as boys’ adventure stories that privilege imperialism and human action over intimacy or emotions. however, ratelle finds, london’s works portray a canine-human bond that reflect on haraway’s idea of “becoming with,” a kind of contact zone between human and animals characterized by fluidity and ongoing changes (53). ratelle ends the chapter with an analysis of hayao miyazaki’s princess mononoke (1997), finding that the animated film complicates the identity categories of animals and women as the film simultaneously animalizes and sexualizes women. ratelle finds that london and miyazaki portray characters with both canine and human qualities that must ultimately decide between animal and human worlds. ratelle considers the terms for animal protagonists’ survival in e.b. white’s charlotte’s web and the films babe (1995) and chicken run (2000) in “ethics and edibility.” ratelle reviews the nineteenth-century slaughterhouse reforms that sought to separate humans physically from animal killing and death in urban environments. according to ratelle, in rural environments, pigs were more problematic as livestock animals because their living conditions necessitated their close physical proximity to human quarters. because of this physical closeness, humans, including children, formed close bonds with animals reared for slaughter, resulting in their emotional turmoil when adults killed the animals for food. in ratelle’s analysis, wilbur’s personhood in charlotte’s web relates to his (perceived) capacity for human language, as well as a physical cleanliness that contrasts with the dirtiness of “uncle,” another pig portrayed unsympathetically and presumed for slaughter. similar to wilbur in charlotte’s web, in the film babe the sheep-herding pig humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 252 must present some semblance of extraordinary intelligence to be rescued from death. the protagonists of chicken run escape factory farm life and find safety in a bird sanctuary after realizing they were reared for purposes of slaughter. ultimately, none of these works, ratelle finds, go so far as to claim that the consumption of meat equates murder, since the animals that survive must prove themselves exceptional for their species. however, according to ratelle, charlotte’s web, babe, and chicken run problematize the artifices and secrecy that surround the rearing and killing of livestock. the use of research animals in children’s works is the focus of ratelle’s “science, species and subjectivity.” ratelle finds that the lab animals personified in robert o’brien’s mrs. frisby and the rats of nimh (1971) and william kotzwinkle’s doctor rat (1976) transcend the carnophallogocentric paradigm described by derrida, in which animals become candidates for human exploitation because of animals’ lack of reason or language (78). in the stories of o’brien and kotzwinkle rodents evolve rapidly as a result of experimentation and develop sophisticated societies of their own. ratelle foregrounds her analysis with laboratory animal philosophies dating back to galen (130-201 b.c.), on the practice of animal vivisection as a means of affirming the authority of ancient texts for students. ratelle finds that o’brien’s novel depicts a permeability of boundaries between animals and humans, while don bluth’s film adaptation, the secret of nimh (1982), deemphasizes this quality from the book, instead centering the story around questions of political power. kotzwinkle’s doctor rat portrays laboratory animals who, having assumed unusual intelligence, have themselves been indoctrinated in the scientific practice of fact verification as well as the practice of desensitizing students to animal suffering. ultimately, in both stories, the rodents must separate themselves from the human world completely in order to form viable societies. in the book’s final chapter, “performance and personhood in free willy and dolphin tale,” ratelle analyzes films that portray child-cetacean bonds through the use of captive animals. both free willy (1993) and dolphin tale (2011) develop the identities of child protagonists and marine mammals in close sympathy with one another. ratelle describes recent evaluations of dolphins’ intelligence as anthropocentric in nature and counterproductive to the elimination of systems of animal exploitation. according to ratelle, captive marine mammals like those at sea world are forced to bond with their trainers in a manner that relates to agamben’s concept of “bare life,” a condition of a biological existence that, without perceived language or culture, exposes entities to violence (138). ratelle finds that, ultimately, free willy suggests species difference in how the human and whale characters develop an increased longing for their own kind amanda monteleone -animal subjectivity and child animality in children’s media 253 through their prolonged interactions. ratelle notes that free willy’s popularity launched public concern for keiko, the killer whale in the film who, released years later from captivity, continued to interact with humans as well as other whales until the end of his life. ratelle finds that dolphin tale portrays a high degree of interspecies intimacy as boy and dolphin develop a very personal, almost romantic, relationship. ratelle’s analyses reveal the tensions rising from the films’ captive animal stars and the boundary-blurring, interspecies relationships these animals appear to experience onscreen with child protagonists. ratelle’s perspective toward the texts analyzed in animality remains animal-focused. the majority of ratelle’s analyses are complemented by a cluster of theoretical lenses that include haraway, agamben, and derrida. from an animal studies perspective, ratelle’s analyses illuminate recurring features in children’s literature such as animals’ language use, power relations in human-animal interactions, and boundary-blurring between children and animals. though perhaps beyond the scope of ratelle’s focus, questions of race, gender, and other identifications remain largely unexplored within the texts, particularly regarding the white, male protagonist that often serves as the default body in children’s literature. while ratelle’s analyses do consider female protagonists in terms of their gender identification, a more thorough treatment of race and gender within the network of power relations emerging in the analyses would have opened the findings to a broader range of interested scholars. another issue that emerges in ratelle’s methodology concerns her inclusion of princess mononoke, a japanese film, which she foregrounds in the chapter with a western history and western theoretical lenses. an animal studies analysis of princess mononoke requires more thorough contextualization and grounding in japanese history and theory regarding animals in order to furnish the same kinds of insights that ratelle yields from analyses of western texts. while it’s clear from ratelle’s analysis that princess mononoke reveals a kind of boundary-blurring between humans and animals, the film appears to be situated in an imaginary stemming from japanese tradition and requires more explication regarding that tradition for her conclusions about the film to be convincing. animality and children’s literature and film does critical work in both animal studies and children’s literature disciplines by shedding light on familiar children’s texts with new interpretations that challenge prior anthropocentric readings. one important contribution to this intersection of studies is ratelle’s argument that the portrayal of human-animal bonds in children’s texts, intended to cultivate children’s humanity, also results in a depiction of more permeable boundaries between children and animals. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 254 ratelle’s analyses of multiple forms of children’s media make the book useful for scholars of children’s literature and or children’s films. additionally, ratelle’s lenses and methodology complement texts clustered around particular historical moments, making her readings valuable to nineteenthor twentieth-century literature scholars analyzing other texts of the period from an animal studies perspective. noting realworld actions that have emerged from this animal-human boundary blurring, such as public sympathy for keiko, of free willy fame, and children’s “book buddies” programs, ratelle suggests that some recent portrayals of animal personhood in children’s works provide hope for more widespread recognition of non-human animals. microsoft word kostuch-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 9:1 lucyna kostuch do animals have a homeland? ancient greeks on the cultural identity of animals the role of animals in ancient greek culture has been discussed in a variety of contexts, — the relation between human and animal, the moral status of animals, animals in the works of naturalists, animals in tragedy, animals in art, zooarchaeological research.1 in the literature of ancient greece, animals are used to represent all things that do not belong to civil society or to the greek community: slaves, women, and foreign peoples (barbaroi). symbolically, animals are often placed outside the country.2 however, a close reading of texts by greek authors leads to the conclusion that this is just one side of the coin. the greeks attributed regional identity to animals, defined by the local geography, and by the history of a region enclosed by borders. at the same time, the world of animals seemed to be ethnically diversified, for the hellenes coined the terms “hellenic animal,” belonging to the greek culture, and “barbaric animal,” belonging to a foreign culture. in this way, greek animals became an inalienable part of the hellenic “national” legacy. the greeks imagined the human world and the world of animals as a world of common borders — there were “familiar” and “unfamiliar” animals at all levels of spatial division. this article, based primarily on literary sources, aims to answer the following questions: how did the ancient greeks associate animals with space, geography, and their own settlements? did they attribute nationality and territory to animals? did they think animals missed their homelands? could a foreign animal experience a process of cultural integration, namely hellenization? animals and greek civilization. unlike us, the hellenes thought about animals not only in terms of categories, such as nature, breeding, and pets. the greeks believed the presence of animals was manifested in all aspects of life, and that they had become an integral element of greek civilization. an animal constituted a central part of the religious cult under the control of the state. if there were around 1,500 greek states (poleis) in the course of history, then it is hardly possible to imagine how common the image of an animal being sacrificed must have been. the rituals were also performed outside the states, e.g., in panhellenic sanctuaries, or during times of military campaigning. additionally, we should mention everyday bird watching, advised already by hesiod (works and days 828).3 hunting, symbolically connected with humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 70 initiation, war, and pederasty, was popular as well (barringer). pictures of animals appeared on coins in many greek states. vases were often adorned with images of animals (morris 184-98; harden 25, 31). this is illustrated by the corinthian crater from the first half of the 6th century bce, where within a small space we can observe the following animals: four horses, two lizards, a scorpion, an eagle, a snake, an owl, a hare, and a hedgehog. departure of amphiaraus. fragment of the corinthian crater, 570-550 bc, berlin, staatliche museen, f 1655, lost. after a. furtwängler and k. reichhold, griechische vasenmalerei: auswahl hervorragender vasenbilder, munich 1932, pl. 121. animals within the confines of space — crossing state borders. the ancient greeks attempted to classify animals by dividing them into opposing groups: domestic and wild, serving humans and useless, helpful and harmful, common and exotic, living inside or outside the house, regional and panhellenic, aquatic and terrestrial, autochthonous (indigenous) or descended from non-natives, hellenic and barbaric, etc. they did not, however, apply any prevailing typology, and even the fundamental division into wild and domestic animals (hemera/agria) was controversial. aristotle would undermine plato’s animal classification, but he himself did not consistently employ his own categories (plato, statesman 264a; aristotle, history of animals 488b; parts of animals 643b; lloyd 17). in ancient times, animals were mobile and would cross state borders for various reasons. live animals would be resettled to serve in the army, as, for example, horses from thrace, and later, elephants from india and africa. foreign animals would be lucyna kostuch -do animals have a homeland? ancient greeks on the cultural identity of animals 71 placed in greek sanctuaries; however, more often only their tusks, horns, and hides were imported. nowadays, archaeologists are discovering the remains of crocodiles, gazelles, camels, and lions (ekroth 337-338). many domestic animals came from distant lands, such as monkeys, cats, peacocks, parrots, and white bears (lazenby 247-248, 301, 305; bodson, “motivations” 30; bodson, “animaux” 10-13). some non-native animals were trained to fight or dance before audiences. exotic animals, including dangerous panthers, may have been diplomatic gifts or tokens of love (bodson, “ancient“ 62, 7275; barringer 89-101). moreover, foreign animals were used to prepare medicine, or were sacrificed in magical practices. oxen, mules, and asses would leave the country, and would march with the army, carrying heavy loads. horses, and later elephants and even dogs, would follow soldiers into battle. the army would also bring some animals with it to perform rituals, for instance, sheep and goats that would later be killed on a battlefield or when encountering certain obstacles, such as gorges or rivers (ober 174; jameson 202-209). during a battle, the enemy’s animals would be considered spoils of war and captured on the spot. any animal could be condemned by a court for committing a crime, which meant they either would have been expelled beyond the country’s borders, or their bodies would have been abandoned there. all animals of the world and all greek “zoologists.” undoubtedly, the greeks were equally interested in both the animals they saw on an everyday basis and in the animals that inhabited foreign lands. they considered foreign animals and foreign people equally fascinating. this is illustrated by herodotus’s catalog of animals in libya, which includes the following creatures: snakes, lions, elephants, bears, poisonous vipers, horned and hornless asses, antelopes, gazelles, buffalo, foxes, hyenas, porcupines, wild rams, the dictys (not identifiable), jackals, panthers, the borys (not identifiable), land crocodiles, ostriches, small snakes with one horn, three kinds of mice, weasels, the dogheaded men (kynokephaloi), headless men, and wild men (4.191-192). the greek authors considered it their responsibility to provide detailed descriptions of all animals. interestingly, this duty was felt not only by naturalists, but by poets, playwrights, and historians as well. although the aims of homer, herodotus, euripides, and aristotle differed, we must keep in mind that zoology as a distinct discipline of knowledge (techne) did not exist. all greek authors, across genres and across time (from homeric time to the world of pausanias and of the second sophistic), were “animal experts.” sometimes we find excellent zoology in poetry, and mythological patterns in the works of naturalists. over the centuries, homer’s epic has been used as a reference, and his descriptions of animals and their customs has been both praised and criticized. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 72 aristotle confirmed or corrected the information on animals conveyed in works by homer, hesiod, aesop, aeschylus, and herodotus. he argued that all authors should possess scientific knowledge on various topics, as, for instance, the lifespan of a dog or an ox, the castration of a boar, the change in the color and shape of a hoopoe, the diet of eagles in mesopotamia, the reproduction of fishes in egypt, and bull horns and horns of libyan animals (history of animals 575ab, 578b, 601b, 606a, 633a; generation of animals 756b; parts of animals 663b. three centuries later, strabo, referring to his predecessors, called homer the creator (archegetes) of geography, which, in his opinion, also comprised the knowledge of animals. thus, strabo made homer an authority in the field of “zoology” (1.1.1-2, 1.1.16). sometime later, pausanias expected to find some information on elephants in homer’s works. he blamed the absence on homer’s ignorance — it was impossible for him to imagine that the poet could have omitted them on purpose. pausanias himself endeavored to make notes about any animal he had seen or heard of, even if it was not directly connected with the mainland of greece that he was depicting. (although pausanias lived in roman times, he described “all greek things” — panta ta hellenika). this endeavor is illustrated by his catalog of animals with white coats or plumage. pausanias first listed white blackbirds that were nesting in the mount kyllene of arcadia, and then identified white eagles in the mount sipylus in asia minor, white boars, white bears in thrace, white hares in libya, and white deer brought to rome from an unknown land (1.12.4, 8.17.3-4). aelian — the author of one of the most popular ancient works on animals — often quoted homer, praising his knowledge of seals preparing for sleep and the habits of panthers (nature of animals 9.50, 17.43). between familiar and foreign — animals and interpretatio graeca. the greeks did more than just describe animals, they used them in metaphors to depict people. here we encounter a surprising fact. logic suggests that the hellenes and the foreign tribes would be described in a similar manner: namely, the hellenes would be represented by greek animals, and the foreign tribes by foreign animals. however, this rule does not apply here, at all. to describe foreign peoples, the greeks most frequently used animals quite common in the greek world. this does not mean that they a priori considered the animals from their own country foreign. rather, it was an instance of the hellenes’ practice, deeply rooted in their mentality, of interpreting all foreign things by means of lucyna kostuch -do animals have a homeland? ancient greeks on the cultural identity of animals 73 greek concepts (interpretatio graeca). this is illustrated by the fact that in greek utopian fantasies, distant lands were inhabited by tribes whose body parts were similar to those of the animals that the greeks considered common. at the same time, these very lands were inhabited by extraordinary, exotic animals that bore no resemblance to greek creatures. additionally, there are some examples of non-native animals who experienced the process of hellenization; in other words, the knowledge about them had become so common in the greek world that they could be used to describe the hellenes. the greeks paid attention to the sounds made by animals (bettini 9-35) and associated them with languages of foreign peoples. homer considered language to be the fundamental criterion in dividing the world into hellenes and barbarians. the poet thought the carians made “barbaric sounds” (barbarophonoi), and he associated the trojans with bleating sheep (iliad 2.867, 4.433-436). in fact, the onomatopoeic sound bar bar, which is considered the root of the word “barbarian,” signified incomprehensible, unclear, and inarticulate sounds that resembled those of animals (skoda; tuplin 49-51; gera 184-195; munson; van hal; wrenhaven 24). the greek authors found analogies between the sounds of the languages of foreign peoples and the following animal sounds: bird chirping (especially those made by swallows, pigeons, magpies and crows), bat buzzing, cicada chirping, horse neighing, dog barking and dog howling, pig grunting, frog croaking, and roaring of wild animals (herodotus 2.57, 3.117, 4.75, 4.183; aeschylus, seven against thebes 463-464, agamemnon 1050-1052; sophocles, women of trachis 1060; euripides, orestes 1529; aristophanes, birds 199-205, frogs 679-685; ctesias, india fgrh 688 f 45.374; strabo 5.2.7; galen, differences between pulses 2.5; athenaeus 659a5). the barbarians’ speech limitations are reflected in some popular claims of the existence of headless men, tribes with no mouths, or those with dog heads. the theories concerning language also affected how barbarian physiognomy and customs were imagined. the most extreme forms assumed the existence of people with dog tails and furry skin, who would bark and make love on all fours. a belief that somewhere there existed people with goat horns and hooves was equally common. additionally, it was believed that there were tribes with horse hooves or snake bodies in place of legs. herodotus emphasizes that barbarians procreated in sacred places, similar to cattle and birds (2.64). strabo discussed the most primitive barbarians, who would drink water like cattle until their stomachs were bloated (16.4.13; cf. agatharchides ap. photius 450a46). thucydides wrote that it was customary for barbarians to carry a weapon at all times (1.6), an analogy to animals who are permanently armed with claws and fangs. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 74 in early literature, associating animals with barbarians was not so very radical. homer thought that souls in hades made sounds similar to those of bats and birds. we should stress here that “the hades presented as place in epic poetry is a peculiarly exclusive kingdom, aristocratic and hellenic” (vermeule 36). this old concept can later be traced to a work by sophocles (oedipus tyrannus 174). according to aristotle, the animal — or the barbarian — language criterion was also applied to hellenic children, who were like animals until they learned to speak (history of animals 588ab; problems 895a). the method for creating animal images of barbarians was very simple. in most cases, only animals that were quite common in ancient greece were used, such as: birds, bats, cicadas, horses, dogs, cattle, frogs, and even snakes (which were often kept in greek houses to deter mice and rats). it is true that herodotus described a dove from egyptian thebes (2.55-57), aristophanes depicted a thracian swallow (frogs 679-685), and the dog-headed men were sometimes compared to monkeys; however, in general, the greeks would use native animals to describe foreign peoples. body parts of tribes inhabiting the most remote parts of the world would most frequently derive from those of a common dog or a goat. the same rule applied in greek tragedies, stories filled with creatures from the barbarian world. although in aeschylus we can find a camel and a crocodile (suppliants 285, 878), in sophocles a monkey (ichneutae 128), and in euripides a gazelle (bacchae 699), most of the tragedies’ animals are the ones inhabiting ancient greece, or the ones that were present in the art and literature of ancient greece from the very beginning. in tragedy, we can find birds (eagles, pigeons, hawks, ravens, nightingales, vultures, swallows, roosters), oxen, horses, dogs, snakes, lions, sheep, wolves, goats, hares, deer, boars, pigs, dolphins, swans, bees, fish, ants, and insects (thumiger). even after the greeks had familiarized themselves with exotic animals, the ones they knew well were sufficient to describe all of humanity. this is illustrated by a work on physiognomy, which is associated with aristotle, but in fact was probably written in the 3rd century bce (pseudo-aristotle, physiognomy). the author proposes a theory, common in the greek world, that humans’ and animals’ natural dispositions are analogous. as gilhus explains, “physiognomics (physiognomonia) is the study of the relationship between the external form of animals and humans and their inner characteristics. animals are used as examples and symbols” (74) pseudo-aristotle’s physiognomy presents the following animals — listed from the least to the most frequently used in the work— a panther, a cat, a fox, a frog, a wolf, a goat, a she-goat, a sheep, a wild boar, a horse, a bull, a hare, a pig, a deer, a monkey, an ox, an ass, birds (hawk, quail, eagle, raven, rooster), a dog, and a lion. lucyna kostuch -do animals have a homeland? ancient greeks on the cultural identity of animals 75 among the above mentioned animals, the dominant position of a lion, as well as the quite strongly emphasized presence of a monkey, attract the most attention. the lion and the monkey are not perceived as greek animals. how did they become part of greek culture? archaeological studies show that, formerly, lions might have inhabited the lands of the balkan peninsula. perhaps they were brought to ancient greece in the mycenaean age (thomas). for that reason, the memory of them had been preserved until the time when the iliad was written — a lion is “the king” of the homeric simile (however, it is possible that lions were present in greece in later periods as well [cf. usener]). thus, the lion could remain a “greek” animal, because of homer’s account. the monkey (pithekos), known to the hellenes since the 7th century bc (jennison 20-21), is a second example of cultural integration in the greek lands. despite the fact that it was visibly non-native and was kept only as a companion, the monkey could have been used to characterize the hellenes perfectly. the greek authors compared ugly, shrewd, and mean people, as well as actors and dishonest orators, to monkeys (mcdermott 118, 142-147; lilja 31-38; demont 457-479). plato uses the monkey as a symbol of cowardice, next to the common deer (laches 196e). foreign yet domesticated animals were not compelled to abandon their “cultural” identity completely. naming animals in accordance with their country of origin made it possible to preserve a memory of their foreign descent. hence, a rooster was sometimes referred to as persikos ornis (the persian bird) or medikos ornis (the median bird). the latter name was also used with reference to a peacock, because before the campaign of alexander the great to india, the animal had been thought to have come from persia (bodson, “naming” 455, 465). the process of “hellenization” of non-native animals is consistent with the greeks’ ideas regarding the relationships between hellenes and barbarians. we know that the greeks did not dissociate themselves from barbaric cultures. on the contrary, they declared themselves “thieves,” and claimed to have borrowed countless cultural goods from other peoples (gruen 223-225, 266). animals were a part of this process. herodotus provided the most famous example when he wrote about a dove from egypt who established the oldest hellenic oracle at dodona (2.55-57). before learning greek, the priestesses in the oracle first used the so-called bird speech. an analogy can also be found in the birds by aristophanes, where some birds sing in the barbaric language, while some have mastered the greek language (199-200). the most remarkable greek stallions — xanthus, balius, and pegasus — were born in and grazed the meadow beside the swirl of the okeanos, the ultimate boundary of worlds (homer, iliad 16.149151; hesiod, theogony 281-282). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 76 a different way of handling the cultural integration of foreign animals was to describe them as if they had derived from animals that inhabited greek lands. according to herodotus, the hippopotamus (“river horse”) had hooves like an ox, and was equally big, but his mane, tail, and voice resembled those of a horse (2.71; cf. aristotle, history of animals 502a; achilleas tatius 4.257). “crocodile” signified a lizard living in a river (krokodeilos potamios). aristotle called an antelope a “horse-deer” (hippelaphos), and a rhinoceros an “indian ass” (indikos onos) (history of animals 498b, 499b). pausanias named the rhinoceros the “ethiopian bull” (aithiopikous taurous), and the bison the “paeonian bull” (9.21.2). a newly discovered animal was described by comparison to another foreign, yet known animal, e.g., a giraffe was called by the greeks a “camelpanther” (kamelopardalis). interestingly, when greeks were creating images of the joyful and serene place (locus amoenus) located at the end of the world, the interpretatio graeca rule was not applied. those lands were inhabited by animals entirely different from the greek ones — remarkably colorful birds, elephants, lions, panthers, and antelopes (winiarczyk 18, 78, 88-89). plato described elephants in atlantis (critias 114e). also, the voices of barbaric birds were considered beautiful (diodorus siculus 5.43.2;8 strabo 15.1.69), whereas the sounds made by barbarians were unpleasant to the greek ear. place in space — natural and cultural differences between animals. the hellenes were perfectly aware that the vast animal world differed depending on the place on earth. there were even lands with no fauna — for example, a place with no birds was called aornos. however, according to the greeks such places were scarce. even so, in many areas some animal species were absent — in some places there were no partridges, whereas in others there were no snakes, hares, boars, deer, weasels, etc. sometimes, this was true for the whole area, and sometimes only for a small island or river, or one mountain. naturally, the greeks were searching for the answer to the question: what rule governed the geographic distribution of animals? the greeks thought that animals were assigned to one of the fundamental categories of space (land, water, mountain, or air) at the very moment they were conceived. animals were born from the earth and water. in the case of some animals, such as frogs or mice, their autochthony was emphasized (campbell 233-239). the differences among animals were based on their distribution in the world. each animal had its own place in space. pausanias claims that when romans first saw elephants, they did not consider them animals, most probably because they were not able to assign them to any place on earth (1.12.3). lucyna kostuch -do animals have a homeland? ancient greeks on the cultural identity of animals 77 this simple division was followed by a more complex construction, in which the nature of a given group of animals was influenced by the elements of geography or climate (to periechon, aer, klima). homer was the first to introduce the basis for the science of correlations between animal physiognomy and habitat — the poet associated the size of animal horns with climate (odyssey 4.85). at the time of hippocrates, the role of this science was crucial, for it was believed to govern human life as well. huge climate zones (klimata), encompassing vast territories, were established at that time, such as europe, asia, and libya. greek authors were trying to prove that asian and libyan animals, with only a few exceptions, grew faster, and were larger and wilder than european ones (herodotus 3.106, 4.29; hippocrates, airs, waters and places 12; aristotle, history of animals 606b; strabo 15.1.21-22; ptolemy, tetrabiblos 2.2). it was also believed that medicine prepared from the bodies of asian and libyan animals had increased properties (pliny, natural history 28.45). pausanias explains that if someone traveled to distant libya, india, or arabia with the goal of finding animals resembling those in greece, he would fail to find many, and the ones he would find would look different. big snakes living in india and libya were not snakes, but different creatures. vipers in ethiopia were black, for they were born in black soil. consequently, sculptures representing the nile were made from black stone, for the river was flowing through the land of the black ethiopians (2.28.1, 8.24.12, 9.21.5-6). according to aristotle, animals of the same species, as, for instance, snakes or scorpions, could be venomous in one area and non-venomous in another (history of animals 607a). at the same time, it was thought that the appearance and behavior of animals were influenced by the elements of geography. falling rain or water in a river would change the color of an animal’s coat, but could also affect the fertility, health, or behavior of animals living in the vicinity (aristotle, history of animals 519a; onesicritus, fgrh 134 f 22; strabo 14.5.12; pausanias 9.8.2). the greeks believed that animals would resemble and adjust themselves to humans with whom they shared their territory. this rule also pertained to individual species that inhabited different regions of the world. plato discerned an analogy between the way horses and young boys were spoiled in the process of education (apology 20a-c, 25ab). aelian proved that libyan horses and their keepers were similarly scruffy, as opposed to median horses, which were neat and delicate, and to hellenic horses, who liked cleanliness and even perfume (nature of animals 3.2, 16.24). the greeks essentially pushed wild animals outside the boundaries of their own culture. although these animals inhabited greek lands (hughes 232), the hellenes preferred to associate them with foreign countries. according to herodotus, two rivers formed a border (horos) for lions, at macedonia, thessaly, and aetolia, and prevented humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 78 the animals from entering central greece (7.125-126). aristotle confirmed this view, and added that there were no panthers in europe (history of animals 606b). many centuries later, pausanias would write that lions inhabited the foothills of mount olympus, but only on the macedonian side, hence they did not enter thessaly (pausanias 6.5.4-5). although on numerous occasions the author mentioned bears, boars, and wolves living in the major greek mountains, if he had been asked, he would probably have said there were no dangerous creatures in ancient greece. there were no animals dangerous to humans even in greek rivers. creatures prowling for human flesh inhabited only the great rivers flowing through foreign lands. if such a beast appeared in a greek river, it meant that it had come from the sea (pausanias 4.34.2-3). crete, in particular, was free of all wild animals, for this was where zeus had grown up. no wolves, foxes, bears, snakes, or any other dangerous creatures would dare to venture onto the island. as a place where there were no wild animals, crete represents an example of an ancient topos (ps.-aristotle, on marvellous things heard 836b; diodorus siculus 4.17.3; pliny, natural history 8.228; aelian, nature of animals 5.2). thus, all signs indicate that greek animals had to conform to greek nature, or to that of the greek gods by analogy. for that reason, the hellenes did not generally sacrifice wild animals (wild animals were also difficult to handle at a sacrifice in a sanctuary). plutarch suggests that terrestrial animals became imbued with human customs through learning and imitation (on the intelligence of animals 23). this rule pertained to animals inhabiting various parts of the world. barbaric animals adopted barbaric customs, just as the greek animals were soaking up greek culture. even the wildest animals in the most remote lands could adopt local customs when provided with abundant food. aristotle emphasizes this phenomenon by referring to crocodiles developing bonds with priests in some egyptian settlements (history of animals 608b609a). boundaries in animal world — animals and cultural legacy. preserved literary sources suggest that the greeks attributed an ability to choose a territory, as well as to understand and mark boundaries, to animals. such boundaries defined the identity of an animal group, as long as they inhabited a given territory. in the territories of some famous human settlements, including important ones, such as thebes, ephesus, tarentum, aigai, and alexandria, the first steps were made by an animal who “chose” the place where the future city would be established. sometimes the animal would be a permanent resident of a given place, and the settlers would be forced to fight a battle with the animal for its territory. among the towns’ “founders” lucyna kostuch -do animals have a homeland? ancient greeks on the cultural identity of animals 79 were bulls, cows, mice, snakes (dragons), goats, wolves, bees, birds (crows, ravens, skylarks, pigeons, eagles, and jackdaws), or even fishes and boars (schmid 94-101; trumpf, 129-157; bowie 152-165). greek authors would frequently observe that animals inhabited only a single part of a certain territory, and that they would change their customs, or even the color of their coats, when forced to move to a different location. aristotle wrote that, in the vicinity of miletus, there were two adjacent regions: one was inhabited by cicadas, but the other was not. similarly, on one of the islands in the ionian sea, the territory where cicadas lived was separated by a river from the territory where they did not. the same applied to weasels on an island near lesbos, and to moles in boeotia (history of animals 605b606a). many authors described a similar behavior among cicadas in italy. they lived in territories separated by a river, which constituted a border between two greek colonies (locri epizephyrii and rhegion). on one side of the river lived cicadas that chirped, and on the other, ones that were mute (timaeus fgrh 566 f 43b; antigonus, on marvellous things heard 1, 2; diodorus siculus 4.22.5; strabo 6.1.9; pliny, natural history 11.95; pausanias 6.6.4; aelian, nature of animals 5.9). similar behavior could be observed among animals inhabiting foreign lands. pliny the elder gathered information on various animals, including wild asses, deer, and gazelles, who obeyed the rule of not crossing the border between their land and the neighboring one (natural history 8.226228). according to aristotle, animals removed from a territory they chose to inhabit would change their customs dramatically — moles would stop digging in the ground, mute frogs would begin croaking, and hares released in ithaca were found dead, for they had attempted to return to their native home (history of animals 606a; mirabilia 835b). it was believed that resettled animals would change the color of their coats (onesicritus, fgrh 134 f 22; posidonius ap. galen 5.463 k89). all these stories mention names of particular cities or regions enclosed by borders. we can imagine that the greeks used such information to establish boundaries between states, or that such phenomena had a key role in settling arguments between neighboring lands. the greeks thought that foreign animals became attached to a given territory to an equal extent. an elephant was considered the most “patriotic” among the animals of ancient world. it was thought never to forget the charm of its homeland, hence most resettled elephants died of despair. aelian explains: “elephants when withdrawn from the country to which they are accustomed, though tamed at first by captivity and hunger and after that by food and a varied diet, nevertheless do not erase from their memory the spell of country that fostered them” (aelian, nature of animals 10.17). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 80 animals were subject to the ceremonial law stipulating that if they committed a crime, they were sent into exile, which proved that the ancient greeks thought there was a connection between animals and certain territories. such a law definitely existed in attica (hyde; macdowell 117). furthermore, some laws banning dogs, goats, and flies from entering sacred territories had also been preserved (cole; mcdonaugh). one hellenic historian noted in his work that crows intentionally did not approach the acropolis (amelesagoras, fgrh 330 f 1). animals were able to identify what belonged to their territory and what did not. herodotus provides two examples. ibises protected the borders of egypt from flying snakes from arabia, and mice who destroyed quivers, bows, and shields that belonged to the assyrians marching on egypt (2.75, 2.141). a similar role was played by the lions, who attacked the persian army and ripped camels carrying food supplies to shreds (herodotus 7.125-126; pausanias 6.5.4-5). we could say that the lions were protecting the very same law that banned them from crossing the borders of northern ancient greece. before the macedonian attack, in one of the temples in thebes, as a sign of mourning spiders began to spin a black web, as if they were suffering together with the thebans. when sulla was plundering greek cities, he was attacked by somewhat vengeful lice (pausanias 9.6.5; 9.33.6). in ancient times, there was a famous story about greek birds who lived on an italian island. they did not mind the hellenes arriving there, but would peck all other foreigners to death (ps.-aristotle, on marvellous things heard 836a; lykos of rhegium, fgrh 570 f 6; timaeus, fgrh 566 f 53; strabo 6.3.9; aelian, nature of animals 1.1). the same rules governed the entire animal world: animals were kind to locals, but attacked strangers. however, scorpions in caria were an exception to that rule, for they would kill only their “countrymen” (aristotle, fr. 605 rose;10antigonus, on marvellous things heard 16; pliny, natural history 8.229). in ancient greece, animal customs were thought to be as regionally diversified as those of the hellenes. as proof of this, pausanias wrote that citizens of pellene in achaea excluded both men and male dogs from religious rites that worshipped demeter. greeks from any given region usually boasted about the extraordinary events that would occur there (pausanias 7.27.10, 2.30.5). these anomalies were considered to be “miracle stories,” but in fact they constituted a rule, and rendered a given region distinct from others (goldhill 57). the literature provided many examples of animals with unique customs, or with an unusual color of coat. on euboea, all oxen would be born white (theophrastus ap. aelian, nature of animals 12.36). in elis, no mules could be born, as a result of a curse. mares had to be rounded up beyond the borders of elis, where they would mate with the asses, and then the mares would be led back home lucyna kostuch -do animals have a homeland? ancient greeks on the cultural identity of animals 81 (herodotus 4.30; plutarch, greek questions 52; pausanias 5.5.2; aelian, nature of animals 5.8). only two ravens would live at the same time in krannon in thessaly (ps.-aristotle, on marvellous things heard 842b; teopompus ap. antigonus, on marvellous things heard 15). the same rule applied in the case of individual animals. a snake fed with biscuits in the acropolis had nothing in common with a flying snake from arabia, or with the snake that bit queen cleopatra in egypt. each of those snakes had a different history and culture; in short, they had different identities. when greek literature describes stories about animals infatuated with humans, the name of the place where the event occurred, or of a region or an island, is always provided. here are some examples: a dog fell in love with a boy in soloi in cilicia. a jackdaw burned with love for a young man in sparta. a horse was sick with love for his caretaker in athens. a ram, a gander, and a dog all fell in love with a harpist on chios. in alexandria, an elephant was competing with a scholar for the love of a certain florist. plutarch confirmed that those stories were well known (on the intelligence of animals 18). based on the numerous examples provided by aelian, we can put forward the thesis that each greek town had an animal that was infatuated with a human. individual towns prided themselves on having animals that displayed exceptional courage or hard work. a certain athenian dog was represented in the mural of the stoa poikile as a reward for the courage he displayed in the battle of marathon. a mule from attica received a salary from the state authorities for having volunteered to help build the parthenon (aelian, nature of animals 7.38; plutarch, on the intelligence of animals 13). some animals and their remains constituted part of the panhellenic legacy. when pausanias came across some remains of the calydonian boar in tegea, he could see only his frayed and decaying pelt, for his famous tusks had been taken to rome by augustus (8.46.1, 8.47.2). these particular tusks were not merely a curiosity, a body part of a mythical creature, but an element of the hellenic political, literal, artistic, and religious legacy. tusks belonging to another boar could have been an element of culture of some other peoples. according to the ancient greeks, each animal had his homeland and customs, and could feel at home in some place on the globe. notes 1. see especially lonsdale, “attitudes towards animals in ancient greece”; bodson, “attitudes towards animals in greco-roman antiquity”; kitchell, “man’s best friend? the changing role of the dog in greek society”; zucker, aristote et les classifications zoologiques; gilhus, animals, gods and humans: changing attitudes to animals in greek, roman and early christian ideas; griffith, “horsepower and donkeywork: equids and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 82 the ancient greek imagination”; thumiger, “῾anagkēs zeugmat’ empeptōkamen: greek tragedy between human and animal”; calder, cruelty and sentimentality. greek attitudes to animals 600-300 bc; konstan, “between appetite and emotion, or why can’t animals have erōs”; buxton, myths and tragedies in their ancient greek contexts; campbell, ed., the oxford handbook of animals in classical thought and life; meyer, aristoteles und die geburt der biologischen wissenschaft. 2. cf. vegetti, passim; dubois, esp. 78-94, 110-128; hall 126; cohen 4; sassi 82-139; lissarrague 120; heath; gilhus 85, 113. 3. references to well-known classical sources appear without bibliographical apparatus, following classical citation protocols. more obscure sources are cited in footnotes. 4. the initials fgrh indicate die fragmente der griechischen historiker. f. jacoby, ed. berlin, 1923. 5. scholars at the dinner table. ch. b. gulick, ed. 7 volumes. harvard up/heinemann, 1927-1941. 6. bibliotheca. r. henry , ed. 7 volumes. les belles lettres, 1959-1974. 7. leucippe and clitophon. s. gaselee, ed. loeb classical library, 1969. 8. bibliotheca. c. h. oldfather, ed. harvard up/heinemann, 1946-1947. 9. claudii galeni opera omnia. c. g. kühn, ed. 11 volumes. leipzig, 1821-1833. 10. aristotelis qui ferebantur librorum fragmenta. v. rose, ed. leipzig, 1886. works cited barringer, judith m. the hunt in ancient greece. the johns hopkins up, 2001. bettini, maurizio. voci: antropologia sonora del mondo antico. einaudi, 2008. bodson, liliane. “ancient greek views on the exotic animal.“ arctos 32 (1998): 61-85. lucyna kostuch -do animals have a homeland? ancient greeks on the cultural identity of animals 83 _____. “attitudes towards animals in greco-roman antiquity.” international journal for the study of animal problems 4 (1983): 312-320. _____. “les animaux dans l’antiquité: un gisement fécond pour l’histoire des connaissances naturalistes et des contextes culturels.“ acta orientalia belgica 14 (2001): 127. _____. “motivations for pet-keeping in ancient greece and rome: a preliminary survey.” companion animals & us. exploring the relationships between people and pets. a. l. podberscek, e. s. paul, j. a. serpell, eds. cambridge up, 2000. 27-41. _____. “naming the exotic animals in ancient greek and latin.” animal names. a. minelli, g. ortalli, g. sanga, eds. instituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, 2005. 453480. bowie a. m. aristophanes. myth, ritual and comedy. cambridge up, 1993. buxton, richard. myths and tragedies in their ancient greek contexts. oxford up, 2013. calder, louise. cruelty and sentimentality. greek attitudes to animals 600-300 bc. the beazley archive and archaeopress, 2011. campbell, gordon lindsay. “origins of life and origins of species.” the oxford handbook of animals in classical thought and life. gordon lindsay campbell, ed. oxford up, 2014. 233-247. campbell, gordon lindsay, ed. the oxford handbook of animals in classical thought and life. oxford up, 2014. cohen, beth. “introduction.” not the classical ideal. athens and the construction of the other in greek art. b. cohen, ed. brill, 2000. 3-20. cole, susan guettel. “women, dogs and flies.” ancient world 26 (1995). 182-191. demont, p. “aristophane, le citoyen tranquille et les singeries.” aristophane: la langue, la scène, la cité. p. thiercy and m. menu, eds. levante editori, 1997. 457-479. dubois, paige. centaurs and amazons. women and the pre-history of the great chain of being. u of michigan p, 1982. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 84 ekroth, gunnel. “animal sacrifice in antiquity.” the oxford handbook of animals in classical thought and life. g. l. campbell, ed. 324-354. gera, deborah levine. ancient greek ideas on speech, language, and civilization. oxford up, 2003. gilhus, ingvid saelid. animals, gods and humans: changing attitudes to animals in greek, roman and early christian ideas. routledge, 2006. goldhill, simon. “what is local identity? the politics of cultural mapping.” local knowledge and microidentities in the imperial greek world. t. whitmarsh, ed. cambridge up, 2010. 46-68. griffith, mark. “horsepower and donkeywork: equids and the ancient greek imagination.” classical philology 101 (2006). 185-246. gruen, erich s. rethinking the other in antiquity. princeton up, 2011. hall, edith. inventing the barbarian: greek self-definition through tragedy. oxford up, 1989. harden, alastair. “animals in classical art.” the oxford handbook of animals in classical thought and life. g. l. campbell, ed. 24-60. heath, john. the talking greeks: speech, animals, and the other in homer, aeschylus, and plato. cambridge up, 2005. hughes, j. donald. “the natural environment.” a companion to the classical greek world. k. h. kinzl, ed. blackwell, 2006. 227-244. hyde walter woodburn. “the prosecution of lifeless things and animals in greek law.” american journal of philology 38.2 (1917): 152-175; 38.3 (1917): 285-303. jameson, m. h. “sacrifice before battle.” the classical greek battle experience. v. d. hanson, ed. routledge, 1991. 197-227. lucyna kostuch -do animals have a homeland? ancient greeks on the cultural identity of animals 85 jennison, george. animals for show and pleasure in ancient rome. u of pennsylvania p, 1937. kitchell, kenneth f. “man’s best friend? the changing role of the dog in greek society.” pecus. man and animal in antiquity. the swedish institute in rome, 2004. 177-182. konstan, d. “between appetite and emotion, or why can’t animals have erōs.” eros in ancient greece. e. sanders, ch. thumiger, ch. carey, n. j. lowe, eds. oxford up, 2013. 13-26. lazenby, francis d. “greek and roman household pets.” classical journal 4.44 (1949): 245-252; 299-307. lilja, saara. “the ape in ancient comedy.” arctos 14 (1980). 31-38. lissarrague, françois. “the athenian image of the foreigner.” greeks and barbarians. t. harrisson, ed. routledge, 2002. 101-124. lloyd, g. e. r. “the development of aristotle’s theory of the classification of animals.” methods and problems in greek science: selected papers. cambridge up, 1991. 126. lonsdale, steven h. “attitudes towards animals in ancient greece.” greece and rome 26 (1979): 146-159. mcdermott, william coffman. the ape in antiquity. the john hopkins up, 1938. mcdonaugh, christopher m. “forbidden to enter the ara maxima: dogs and flies or dogflies?” mnemosyne 52 (1999): 464-477. macdowell, douglas m. the law in classical athens. thames and hudson, 1978. meyer, martin f. aristoteles und die geburt der biologischen wissenschaft. springer verlag, 2015. morris, christine. “animals into art in the ancient world.” a cultural history of animals in antiquity. linda kalof, ed. berg, 2007. 175-198. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 86 munson, rosario vignolo. black doves speak: herodotus and the languages of barbarians. cambridge up, 2005. ober, j. “hoplites and obstacles.” the classical greek battle experience. v. d. hanson, ed. routledge, 1991. 173-196. sassi, maria michaela. the science of man in ancient greece. u of chicago p, 2001. schmid, p. b. studien zu griechischen ktisissagen. paulusdruckerei, 1947. skoda, f. “histoire du mot barbaros jusqu’au début de l’ère chrétienne.” actes du colloque franco-polonais d’histoire. université de nice, 1981. 111-126. thomas, nancy r. “the early mycenaean lion up to date.” essays in honor of sara a. immerwahr. a. p. chapin, ed. princeton up, 2004. 161-206. thumiger, ch. “῾anagkēs zeugmat’ empeptōkamen: greek tragedy between human and animal.” leeds international classical studies 3.7 (2008): 1-21. trumpf, j. “stadtgründung und drachenkampf.” hermes 86 (1958): 129-157. tuplin, christopher. “greek racism? observations on the character and limits of greek ethnic prejudice.” ancient greeks. west & east. g. r. tsetskhladze, ed. brill, 1999. 47-75. usener, knut. “zur existenz des löwen im griechenland der antike.” symbolae osloenses 69 (1994): 5-33. van hal, toon. “spreken als de vleermuizen. over de griekse en romeinse belangstelling voor andere talen of het gebrek daaraan.” kleio 4.38 (2009): 147-162. vegetti, mario. il coltello e lo stilo. animali, schiavi, barbari e donne, alle origini della razionalità scientifica. il saggitore, 1979. vermeule, emily. aspects of death in early greek art and poetry. u of california p, 1979. winiarczyk, marek. the sacred history of euhemerus of messene. walter de gruyter, 2013. lucyna kostuch -do animals have a homeland? ancient greeks on the cultural identity of animals 87 wrenhaven, kelly l. reconstructing the slave: the image of the slave in ancient greece. bristol classical press, 2012. zucker, arnaud. aristote et les classifications zoologiques. peeters, 2005. microsoft word wynn-wise-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 11:1 reviews kerry wynn questioning the colonial imaginary michael d. wise, producing predators: wolves, work, and conquest in the northern rockies. lincoln: university of nebraska press, 2016. 210 pp. $45.00 hc; $45.00 e-book. for decades now, it has been commonplace to observe that the language we use shapes the world we inhabit, influences our policies, and defines our very understanding of ourselves and our neighbors. yet, we still have very far to go in the work of examining concepts and terms that many take for granted, categories that have been naturalized over time. in producing predators: wolves, work, and conquest in the northern rockies, michael s. wise takes up two such categories — predators and producers — and kerry wynn -questioning the colonial imaginary 151 demonstrates that the meaning of these terms and their associated concepts are not selfevident. instead, they have a long history, shaped in varying ways by multiple actors, and their meanings differ greatly across time and culture. producing predators is an important call to reconsider the paradigms through which historians have examined the american west, and the ways in which we continue to replicate the very categories established as the basis of u.s. colonialism. wise analyzes the construction of the categories of producer and predator that were established in the “frontcountry,” a swath of territory extending through the contemporary political units of alberta and montana. wise’s attention to both human and non-human actors, as well as his discussion of the underlying influence of the attempt to establish capitalist frameworks, allows him to uncover the ways in which multiple constituencies shaped and experienced the rhetoric, policy, and action undergirding the attempt to categorize human and non-human animals as predators or producers. beginning with the first u.s. efforts to colonize the “whoop-up” country, wise focuses on whiskey and wolves as flashpoints for portrayals of the region, adding an interesting wrinkle to the focus on commodities many historians, such as william cronon, have trained on other regions. wise demonstrates that there are surprising complexities to the trade in whiskey, arguing that the analysis of the injurious effects of the whiskey trade in blackfeet communities must be tempered by the recognition that whiskey provided a means to strengthen relationships between human and non-human animals and “emboldened native resistance to colonization” (5). because of the increase in bison hunting in this earlier period, which increased food sources for wolves, wise notes that the wolf population actually increased in this early period of the expansion of colonial trade networks (5). with the focus mostly on wolves, wise argues that “wolf eradication served its primary purpose not as an economic fix for industrial agriculture but as part of a broader set of environmental and cultural practices that established new social boundaries between predators and producers” (xvi). when stock owners sought the eradication of wolves at the turn of the twentieth century, they employed symbols that “obscured the stock industry’s predation on beef cattle by emphasizing instead its protection of livestock against other predators” (32). this idea was enshrined not just by discursive or symbolic means, but through policy, as wise shows in his comparative discussion of wolfing laws in the united states and canada. stock owners in the united states separated themselves both from animals they defined as predacious and the men who hunted them by paying to have wolves eradicated from the environment. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 152 when wise connects the discourse of predator and producer to the capitalist relations surrounding work in this region, he is able to make observations of importance to the world in which we live today. discussing the connection between discourse and material relations, wise observes, “in this brave new world of colonial capitalism, which bears much resemblance to our own, social reproduction was dictated by the power to represent labor as valuable, not by the actual power of labor to create value” (xx). this observation is an important reminder of the complex relationship between animals (human and non-human), discourse, and the market. categories such as predator and producer were important not just for their cultural value, but because they set up a paradigm for considering the marketable value of action. representing action as either predatory or productive in the u.s. political economy served to increase power and compensation for u.s. ranchers and conservationists while simultaneously devaluing blackfoot relationships to animals and land. a chapter on the creation of two slaughterhouses by u.s. officials at the blackfoot agency contributes to historical research on programs intended to compel indigenous assimilation to anglo-american ideas of labor, domesticity, and sustenance. in the late nineteenth century, u.s. agents attempted to stop blackfeet men from hunting and blackfeet women from butchering by moving the production of meat into these slaughterhouses (49). wise notes the tension between the food shortages experienced on the blackfoot reservation and the imperative pursued by agents to institute cattle raising and slaughter as a productive and industrial exercise. in his description, wise uncovers the violence of the u.s. model that the labels of “production” and “clean meat” were intended to hide (61). the historical contingency of dividing the world into predators and producers is made clear in wise’s discussion of blackfeet ideas about the relationship between human and non-human animals, and in the policy decisions made to gain control of the economy in blackfoot communities. wise describes the efforts of the federal government to organize and reinforce an adherence to capitalist visions of individuality and labor through the establishment of slaughterhouses on the blackfeet reservation. although for several decades the u.s. federal government and office of indian affairs agents aligned themselves with a small segment of successful blackfoot stockmen settled near billings, the 1920s witnessed the emergence of the piegan farming and livestock association, which incorporated blackfeet conceptions of kinship and reciprocity at the heart of agricultural production. blackfeet men and women didn’t believe in the division between predator and producer, making clear the historically and culturally constructed nature of these categories. kerry wynn -questioning the colonial imaginary 153 wise’s attention to the organization of economic and environmental systems involving human and non-human animals, and their variation across communities and borders, provides a model for analyzing the impact of colonialism in the united states. scholars such as jodi byrd, daniel heath justice, and mark rifkin have called for careful analysis to interrogate the ideological underpinnings of settler colonialism that came to be ingrained over time as assumptions of societies based upon the expropriation of indigenous land. as wise describes the beneficiaries of “production” and those villainized as “predators,” it becomes clear that we need to reexamine narratives based on these categories, not only in the west, but throughout american political, governmental, and economic systems. in questioning the boundaries of predator and producer, wise reminds readers to remain cognizant of the ways that these discourses have shaped our understanding of the history of the west and hidden the impact of certain capitalist practices. a focus on overhunting of bison as a reason for their decline, for example, downplays or erases the impact that the change in habitat caused by the livestock industry had in diminishing possibilities for bison livelihood. as wise describes the abuses of blackfeet land rights by u.s. stockmen who grazed their herds on blackfeet land illegally or paid well below a fair price for grazing rights, it is not difficult to understand that these “producers” engaged in predatory behavior, but that the earlier lines drawn around predation and production limited the recognition of their behavior because the work around stock raising was valued — and the labor of subsistence farming or hunting devalued — in the capitalist reorganization of the region. these powerful narratives of producers and predators continued to impact the west into the 20th century, as conservationists entered the contest to shape the region. wise notes the ways that the elevating of production shaped techniques that creators of wildlife preserves used to envision and sell their work, as they focused on the difficult work of producing these parks. wise argues that “western cattlemen and other stakeholders forced eastern philanthropists to frame their conservation policies within a colonial narrative of predation that has broadly informed regional wildlife controversies ever since” (100). even though cattle ranching was a key force in the decimation of bison populations, conservationists aligned themselves with ranchers against “predators,” eliding the violence and dispossession created by industrial capitalism. as a wide-ranging and compact study, producing predators has the potential to open avenues for future research. the many actors who comprise the subjects of the book, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 154 from u.s. wolfers to blackfeet collectivists to basque sheepherders, demonstrate the multitude of differing relationships to land, labor, and animals that have shaped the west in this region. any of these actors or the moments that serve as topics for each chapter could form the basis for more extensive studies. wise has shown that economic exchange and subsistence involved complex networks, and that policy and context shaped the meaning of producers and predators over time. by taking seriously relationships between human and non-human animals, and questioning the colonial imaginings of these relationships that imbue contemporary american policy, wise is able to destabilize some of the assumptions of settler colonialism. there is a place for more work that takes up the multitude of similar assumptions, crafted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that often prevent us from seeing the ongoing violence of colonialism for what it is, and from appreciating radically different understandings of kinship, labor, and value that continue to rival industrial capitalism. microsoft word johnson h u m a n i m a l i a 11:1 review essay lisa johnson animals, law, and power robert garner and siobhan o'sullivan, eds. the political turn in animal ethics. london: rowman and littlefield international, 2016. ₤85.00 hc; ₤29.95 pb; ₤29.95 ebook. those who wish to explore animal ethics from a political perspective will be interested in the essays included in the political turn in animal ethics, edited by robert garner and siobhan o’sullivan. the “political turn” refers to the political turn in animal ethics, as well as the “animal turn” in political theory. taken together, the 10 essays and editorial humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 142 introduction in this collection suggest new possibilities for creating a better world for animals. for example, some contributors focus on what the state should or could do, while others examine humans’ roles — as political actors — in interacting with state and institutional positions. most of the essays create a basis from which we can seriously begin to address power structures that impact animals’ lives. the editors’ goals are twofold: to determine the parameters of the political turn and to determine the extent to which this shift represents a truly new direction in animal ethics. though establishing firm topical parameters seems unlikely due to the everexpanding array of ethical concerns raised by our interactions with and effects on animals, the questions undertaken by these essays are addressed through the familiar methods and theoretical lenses of political theory. so we might say that the first goal has been met as to manner and substance of approach, but not as to subject matter. not enough heft exists within these pages to accomplish their second goal. in an anthology, writers write about a range of topics. while these topics might represent new directions, great gaps exist in areas that aren’t discussed, and unanswered questions emerge from issues that are addressed. thus, the collection does not entirely succeed at establishing the extent to which scholarship in this field represents a genuinely new direction. however, this is not necessarily a bad thing; it simply appears to be a misplaced goal. a more apt goal would have been something like this: to showcase representative works of political theorists illustrating the “political turn.” and this, of course, can be quite valuable for those interested in animal ethics who might harbor a belief that the field has grown quite stagnant. the political turn literature has indeed breathed fresh perspectives into old debates. as with any anthology, some essays are more innovative than others. all contributors discuss issues we would expect to be addressed by political theorists who are interested in animal ethics, including obligations arising out of a sense of justice, alternatives to citizenship models, and why political systems are not working for animals. examples of those discussions can be found in alasdair cochrane’s “labour rights for animals,” robert garner’s “animals, politics and democracy,” and dan lyons’s “animal protection policy in the united kingdom: from symbolic reassurance to democratic representation,” respectively. lisa johnson -animals, law, and power 143 the nature of an edited collection of essays is that some will contain redundancies, one to the other. in a newly defined field this may be unavoidable, as everyone situates their own work within the existing literature, and all build off of a common notion of perceived inadequacies in animal ethics moral philosophy. readers will see many references, for example, to sue donaldson and will kymlicka’s zoopolis: a political theory of animal rights — certainly a leading piece in this field, but whose authors are unfortunately absent as contributors to this particular collection. likewise, there is no shortage of references to the work of tom regan and peter singer, which is not the least surprising. this collection does many things right. certainly the most exciting ideas that emerge from these writings that suggest clear paths forward for thinkers and activists alike can be collected into two topical areas: direct rescue as a political act, discussed in steve cooke’s “understanding animal liberation,” and the suffering of “invisible” animals, addressed by siobhan o’sullivan’s “animals and the politics of equity.” the most compelling applied theory emerges in the forms of labor rights for animals (cochrane), enfranchisement of animals (garner), and a justification for refusing to defer to political institutions, which rests upon the rejection of the status quo of moral pluralism related to animals (friederike schmitz’s “animal ethics and human institutions: integrating animals into political theory”). these stand as shining examples of the forwardthinking possibilities inherent in political turn literature. cooke’s and o’sullivan’s essays are the stars in this collection. both move their respective topics forward substantially with fresh perspectives. cooke’s work is truly new, well-argued, and brave enough to venture into areas heretofore considered offlimits by many animal ethicists. he characterizes direct rescues of animals — both open rescues and covert rescues — as political acts. according to cooke, during open rescues, liberators show deference to the political institutions in which they are working. if covert, then the rescue itself indicates a rejection of the oppressive political system in which the rescuers are working. his discussion of the consequences that befall direct action rescuers is an excellent overview of the exercise of state power. though cooke does not mention it, it seems that recognition of direct rescue as political act could legitimize these activities as countermeasures to oppressive (to animals) governmental and legal systems. in other words, safely ensconced in political discourse, the once offlimits topic of direct rescue comes into focus as not only one that might be addressed, but one that we are compelled to address politically in a more engaged manner than the currently accepted status quo responses: flat refusal to engage or rote response of disavowal. though it is not entirely clear whether cooke endorses direct rescues at all, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 144 he does point out that too much deference is given in open rescue to the oppressors themselves. as for o’sullivan’s work, her discussion of the invisible suffering of animals provides clear articulation of an endemic problem. animals who are to be used by humans are hidden; consequently, they receive fewer legal protections. when harms are known by the community, those harms are more likely to be addressed through legal restrictions. but hidden animals do not benefit from the value-enforcing gaze of the community. the current status quo concerning the treatment of animals offends liberal democratic values. taken together, these essays create a solid platform from which to launch a serious critique and analysis of power — at the individual, institutional, and state levels. cook’s and o’sullivan’s works set up this possibility skillfully. however, in a book about political theory and animal ethics, one would expect to see power addressed in a more direct and sustained manner. in the here and now, power may eclipse in importance the property status of animals because it is something that could be meaningfully addressed within existing legal frameworks. power — who holds it, how it is exercised, and what its limits are — underlies all harms to animals. indeed, what seems missing from this collection is an essay that directly addresses the concept of power. as such, i provide a brief sketch of my ideas of power in this context.1 i see a bifurcation here of the types of power that can be exercised at the individual level: direct action power and strategic placement power. direct action power mostly benefits individual animals, while strategic placement power potentially benefits large numbers of animals. a person can use direct action power, such as engaging in open or covert rescue.2 alternatively, a person can use strategic placement power by assuming high-level positions in institutions such as universities, governments, corporations, or religious organizations. however, a person would have to be very lucky or very wily to successfully exercise both types of power over long periods of time. this is because the exercise of direct action power carries the risk of getting caught. besides the immediate legal problems, getting caught delegitimizes a person from exercising strategic placement power (probably) forever. a person with a criminal record — or worse, labeled as an “eco-terrorist” or “fanatic” — will be unlikely to be able to place herself or himself into an influential institutional position. so — the very lucky and the very wily aside — people may have to choose between direct action and strategic placement if they wish to exercise power at the individual lisa johnson -animals, law, and power 145 level. trade-offs exist both for the individual person and for the animals. direct action power is appealing because the lives of individual animals are important, though strategic placement power may have a larger impact on groups of animals. with the exercise of direct action power, individual animals may be removed from dangerous or deadly situations. however, the person who exercises direct action power may face criminal sanctions and lifelong disenfranchisement from meaningful participation in influential institutions (i.e., disenfranchisement from exercising strategic placement power) — not to mention the personal costs as well (e.g., loss of income opportunities, etc.). with strategic placement power, it is possible that no intercession can be made for individual animals (or only in rare circumstances), but the effects of actions taken are large in scale. however, the person who exercises strategic location power may have to “look the other way” when observing a situation where an individual animal needs immediate intervention. regarding direct action power, the law could respond to morally motivated lawbreaking by reliably recognizing a justification defense (rather than a defense of the excuse variety, or refusal to recognize any defense at all). cooke’s work touches on morally motivated lawbreaking. much more could be developed in this field. for example, if a justification defense were applicable to direct rescue, this would shift the discussion — at the state level — from one centered on “terrorist” acts to something else entirely, such as “exercising rights of conscience.” my point is that we can build upon theoretical bases in law — in forms that are already familiar (e.g., justification as complete defense) — to change the power dynamics between the state and the individual. likewise, o’sullivan’s observations about invisible animals seem a logical platform upon which to explore the consequences of hiding animals “used” by humans to areas that extend beyond her well-argued piece. for example, the sweeping up of animals to remove them from our communities either directly (e.g., animal control and “kill” shelters) or indirectly (e.g., loss of habitat due to human encroachment) is the status quo exercise of power (by the state or by other institutions or organizations, as the case may be). these exercises of power disenfranchise human beings from their natural right to see animals. as such, we are harmed by alienation of the natural world, and animals are harmed by loss of liberty and home (ranges, habitat, etc.) as state or institutional power is exercised in this context, harms are simultaneously realized by both people and animals. as to strategic placement power, a growing number of animal advocates are assuming high-level positions. for example, as i have discussed elsewhere (johnson), universities are now routinely offering courses in human-animal studies (differing titularly one from the other), with some leading to degrees or certifications. this increase in available humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 146 offerings is, of course, directly related to the fact that people behind such programs are exercising strategic placement power. we can assume that as such programs work with industry and government to place their graduates, the effects of strategic placement power will be dispersed. perhaps strategic placement power in government and industry will not be too far behind. of course, power is diffuse and not positioned in or from any particular point (foucault, history 94–96; foucault, power/knowledge 142), so a discussion of individuals exercising strategic placement power is something of a shorthand. however, without strategic placement of individuals who want to help animals, institutions simply have little or no incentive to change on their own. thus, the potential effects of the exercise of strategic placement power should not be underemphasized. those who exercise strategic placement power as lawmakers in local government are particularly well positioned to prevent harm to animals, given the historical effectiveness of jurisdictionally focused exercises of power. for example, in the united states, many “dry” jurisdictions exist (e.g., dry counties, dry cities), where the relevant government has exercised its power to prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages. without addressing the intricacies of the legal mechanisms and machinations that provide legal basis for this exercise of power,3 jurisdictional power could potentially be exercised to provide animal “safe havens” within entire jurisdictions where, for example, cochrane’s labor rights and/or garner’s enfranchisement principle are mandated by law. whoever happens to hold lawmaking positions where this occurs — our hypothetical lawmakers — will need political theorists to help craft legislation that creates an inclusive place for animals. political turn literature can help with this. but in the meantime, the political turn literature could address some of its weaknesses. for example, despite the many fine attributes of cochrane’s proposal for rights for animals, the work fails to provide a satisfactory account of basic legal classifications of property and persons, which leads to some unnecessarily fuzzy categorical assertions about the property status of children, employees, and citizens. additionally, cochrane’s account of autonomy reveals a particular commitment to a rather stringent requirement of self-reflection by the agent regarding his or her own life choices (e.g. benn 228–2294; raz 2045) while wholly ignoring criticisms of that requirement that might lead to different conclusions. cochrane’s autonomy allows him to deny that animals have inherent interests in their own freedom, but he could broaden his view to recognize that, for example, rational assessment of one’s choices is not the only way decisions are made. even if we choose to focus on rationality, it is far from settled that at least some lisa johnson -animals, law, and power 147 animals cannot or do not engage in the type of self-reflection necessary to meet this requirement. moreover, while potential confusion could exist regarding which type of autonomy is being discussed, personal autonomy is presumed, despite the many characteristics it shares with moral autonomy (e.g. waldron 307–329).6 for cochrane, continued ownership of animals and use of animals for human purposes is fine, provided that their rights are not violated. though animal use as we currently know it could not be continued under his theory of labor rights, he maintains that some uses of animals would meet these requirements and therefore pass muster. schmitz’s essay stands in nice contrast to cochrane’s work because she notes that “ownership” of animals used for commercial use impedes state recognition of their interests or rights. this critique of ownership of animals challenges the moral permissibility of using animals. schmitz encourages consideration of strategies that could be employed to change society for the betterment of animals. her focus on institutions seems aptly placed. however, in all, the essay offers a vague hope that “something” could be done, with little actual direction about how to do it. for example, schmitz does not necessarily believe that legal compulsions are the best way to make things better for animals, given the infringement on people’s personal freedoms, but she does not address why anyone should have freedom to infringe upon a living being’s interests to begin with. despite these shortcomings, some of her observations provide provocative guidance. for example, if moral pluralism as it applies to animals provides no reason to respect current political institutions that allow atrocities to continue against them, does that mean that animal advocates have no reason to abide by laws when acting on animals’ behalf? schmitz should recall that political theory essentially demands application, so a fudging on how good ideas might be made policy is a missed opportunity for our hypothetical lawmaker interested in “safe animal” jurisdictions. kimberly smith’s central claim in “a public philosophy for the liberal animal welfare state” asserts that the best understanding of american liberalism is that it treats domesticated animals as members of the social contract. as such, she proposes a system that excludes non-domesticated animals. she also favors words like “livestock” and “wild animals,” apparently unaware of the harms imposed upon animals by the use of subjugating terms. perhaps more disturbingly, the work proposes classifications that exclude. of course, exclusion classifications carry consequences to those so labeled: classification of animals as property has led to their wholesale exploitation by legal persons. given the inauspicious history of power abuses flowing from labeling living beings in manners that allow their exclusion from communities, why propose an account that includes only some animals rather than all animals? smith’s work is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 148 disappointingly human-centric because it favors animals that humans deem domesticated, while excluding others. tony milligan’s “putting pluralism first: cruelty and animal rights discourse” places the issue of cruelty strategically at the forefront of animal rights discourse, though no settled definition of cruelty is offered. while milligan essentially wants to uncouple cruelty discourse from rights discourse, the failure to settle upon a definition of cruelty is a weakness in his argument, and one that every defense attorney knows. while it is perhaps true that political theorists have begun to self-identify under the auspices of “political turn” literature, those interested in political processes, consequences, and concepts have in fact been thinking about animal ethics for longer than the emergence of the “political turn” indicates. however, this collection of essays suggests unique directions forward. recommended. notes 1. in writing this piece, the author does not intend to encourage or endorse the violation of any laws. 2. direct action rescue in this article only refers to acts that rescue or liberate animals without physically harming any human being or his or her property, or the property of any legal person. the author expressly disavows violence. 3. there is simply not enough space in this article to address this issue. 4. “self-knowledge, the congruence of action and belief, and a concern that these features be maintained by a vigilant critical moral consciousness—all these are necessary for autonomy” (benn 228–229). 5. “a person is autonomous only if he has a variety of acceptable options available to him to choose from, and his life became as it is through his choice of some of these options. a person who has never had any significant choice, or was not aware of it, or never exercised choice in significant matters but simply drifted through life is not an autonomous person” (raz 204). 6. it is not clear that moral philosophers would ever ascribe moral autonomy to animals. lisa johnson -animals, law, and power 149 works cited benn, s. i. a theory of freedom. cambridge up, 1988. donaldson, s. & kymlicka, w. zoopolis: a political theory of animals rights. oxford up, 2013. foucault, m. the history of sexuality: an introduction. vol. 1. r. hurley, trans. pantheon, 1978. _____. power/knowledge. c. gorden, ed.. c. gorden, l. marshall, j. mepham & k. soper, trans. pantheon, 1980. johnson, l. power, knowledge, animals. palgrave, 2012. raz, j. the morality of freedom. oxford up, 1986. waldron, j. “moral autonomy and personal autonomy.” autonomy and the challenges to liberalism: new essays. j. christman & j. anderson, eds. cambridge up, 2005. 307–329. microsoft word fudge-despret-3-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 9:1 review article erica fudge thinking with vinciane despret vinciane despret, what would animals say if we asked the right questions? translated from the 2012 french edition by brett buchanan. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2016. 249pp. $105 (hb); $30 (pb) ‘flush,’ mrs. browning wrote to her sister, ‘is wise.’ she was thinking perhaps of the greek saying that happiness is only to be reached through suffering. the true philosopher is he who has lost his coat but is free from fleas. (woolf, 90) in virginia woolf’s reading of the victorian poet elizabeth barrett browning’s depiction of her pet spaniel’s life, flush achieves understanding through loss of status. no longer a pedigree among mutts, his infestation of fleas leads to his being clipped, and to a realization that he is not superior to others, but, in fact, that “all men were his brothers” (woolf, 90). the loss of hierarchy, barrett browning suggests, produces wisdom. without wishing to suggest that she is like a dog, it struck me when reading brett buchanan’s english translation of her 2012 book que diraient les animaux, si … on leur erica fudge -thinking with vinciane despret 161 posait les bonnes questions? that vinciane despret, like flush, is wise. she too has, you might say, discarded hierarchy and emerged as a true philosopher. there has been no actual shearing here, of course, but despret’s wisdom is made visible in the way in which she sheds, and asks her readers to shed, assumptions and ideas that position humans as superior to animals. she constantly challenges the authority of much conventional science and of the philosophy that figures animals as always lacking. indeed, despret’s definition of the term “authority” in this context is telling. for her, far from being a tried and tested source of meaning, she has written (using the ideas of gregory bateson) that “a person is said to have authority when anyone who is under the influence of that authority does everything possible to make whatever this person says true” (118). this is not expertise but something more tyrannical, hysterical almost. it is by laying bare how scientific and philosophical discourses have constructed their worlds in order to possess such authority that despret has become established as a key thinker in animal studies. in a series of short, highly readable essays, written as an “abecedary,” what would animals say if we asked the right questions? picks holes in assumptions that hold animals under, that refuse them a place in the conversation. in his foreword bruno latour calls the 26 alphabetized chapters (“g for genius,” “r for reaction,” “v for versions,” etc.) “scientific fables” that bring together “the resources of science and of the humanities,” a necessary collaboration, he argues, if we are to “understand what animals have to say” (vii). each of the chapters opens up with a brilliant question: “with whom would extraterrestrials want to negotiate?” “do goats agree with statistics?” “do chimpanzees die like we do?” and at the heart of all of them is an assumption that despret outlined in ces émotions qui nous fabriquent: ethnopsychologie de l'authenticité (translated into english in 2004 as our emotional makeup: ethnopsychology and selfhood). in this work, in part an exploration of the impoverished understanding of the nature of emotion that is produced in laboratory studies, despret quotes from one of her key collaborators: “understanding, as isabelle stengers reminds us, ‘when it concerns science, is not a discovery of that which predated the question’” (21 – italics in the original). this has been a constant mantra in despret’s work: attending to how we inquire as much as to the responses we elicit is crucial, hence this more recent work’s title. as buchanan wrote in his introduction to the special issue of angelaki dedicated to despret’s work from 2015: “asking the right questions does more than attribute a different approach to the animals, it just as importantly highlights a different response from animals” (buchanan, 22). or as despret (writing with jocelyne porcher) put it in an essay included in that special issue: to acknowledge that “we don’t know how to ask the right questions … redistributes expertise and alters the asymmetry of the positions” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 162 (95). the shift affords new interpretations of authoritative positions because it allows new voices to be heard. in her work, despret thus constantly interrogates how questions are asked. so, in “l for laboratory” in what would animals say she wonders, “what are rats interested in during experiments?” she comes to the conclusion that “the possibility that the animal could show how he takes a position with respect to what is asked of him” is too often blocked by the “operations and routines” of the animal psychology laboratory (91). in orthodox maze experiments, she notes, “not only must the animal respond to the task that is addressed to him but above all he has to respond in the mode according to which the question is addressed” (92-3). the same is true of human participants of many psychological experiments. in our emotional makeup despret revealed this through her record of an experiment that she and stengers undertook in the 1990s which reproduced in part one that had previously been run in the 1960s. in the original, subjects were shown images from playboy magazine with heartbeats with changing pace perceptible to them as they looked. they were advised (falsely) that these heartbeats were their own, audible through the recording devices the testers were using to track physiological responses (the apparent aim of the experiment). when questioned afterwards, subjects revealed that slides shown with the sound of an increased heartbeat were their favorites, thus revealing, as despret put it, that “something really did succeed in affecting each of the subjects” (89). in their reproduction of this experiment despret and stengers changed some of the elements. the pictures were replaced (“times have changed as has the relationship to these images”), and the explanation for the audible heartbeat which the subjects were to hear was much less labored than in the original test: “we merely indicated that we were recording physiological parameters.” in addition, they “invited [the] subjects to come back ten days later so we could discuss with them how they felt about what we had asked them to do.” at that meeting they asked: “in your opinion, what were we looking for?” (8889). this is not a question that had been asked in the earlier experiment. what despret and stengers discovered was that their subjects — like the original ones — picked slides that “correlated with an increased heartbeat,” but that none of their subjects believed that the heartbeat they were hearing was their own — they had seen through that falsehood. why then, despret and stengers wondered, did the subjects still pick the images with an increased heartbeat that they knew was not their own? the answer was hugely revealing: each subject reported that s/he had “managed to connect his/her version of emotion to what the slide suggested.” that is, they had obediently (as they saw it) agreed with what they took to be the intention of the experiment. all the participants, despret writes, “behaved like good subjects: they were willing to be taken erica fudge -thinking with vinciane despret 163 hostage by a problem of which no one knew how far their interest in that problem went and how they themselves would construct it” (90-91). as for animals, so for humans. despret has argued that this sense of the willingness of the subject of the experiment to get it “right” as they believed the experimenter had defined it is not addressed by the majority of scientists. but it is not only in the laboratory that her work has implications: she has noted the obedience of the subject in other contexts. when interviewing people in refugee camps in the former yugoslavia, for example, she records in a 2008 article that she came to recognize that offering those people anonymity in their responses to her questions, while it might have appeared to allow them freedom to answer as they saw fit, actually “prolonged what one could call a regime of insults” they were experiencing; it marginalized and disempowered people already labelled “refugees,” a term that they might themselves not recognize, or choose to call themselves. “the result, the stake, even, of anonymity,” despret came to see, “is to produce a radical asymmetry of expertises: on the one hand there is the ‘researcher-author’ — the author of questions, of interpretations of hypotheses, of constructions of problems; on the other, there is a social actor: witness, informant, someone having opinions, beliefs and representations for which the researcher will take charge of the analysis” (130-131). as with the rats that were put in mazes by psychologists, and as with the subjects of her and stengers’ heartbeat experiment, in her conversations with the “refugees” despret recognized that: the subject is summonsed by a problem that he or she often has nothing to do with, or in any case nothing to do with the manner in which the problem is defined … and most of the time the subject mobilized in this way will agree to respond to questions without calling into question their interest, their appropriateness or even their politeness. (131) this is a willingness on the part of the interviewees that should never be discounted. their readiness to answer the questions that they have been asked but that they have not formed is crucial to how knowledge is gained. it seems to underline the authority of the researcher-author (no one is questioning their questions); but it should invite us to attend to the subjects’ engagement, their will to translate, their desire to fulfil the expectations of those they are working with. the questioners are thus, as stengers knew, not discovering an answer, but forming it when they ask their questions. this willingness of respondents despret traces in the world of agricultural animals, too. in “w for work” in the current book she notes that we should recognize that “when all is functioning well [on the farm], it is because of an active investment on the part of the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 164 cows. for when everything runs well, one doesn’t see the work.” but this reading of the farmyard is not only an attempt to bring back into view the purposive engagement of animals (although it is doing that), it is suggesting something even more profound than that. in her attention to the cows despret recognizes how deeply embedded in conventional western thinking is the idea of animal incapacity, the belief in their inability to display willingness because willingness is a virtue that requires a will (i.e. intention): “when the cows go peacefully to the milking robot, when they do not jostle with one another, when they respect the order of turn … when they do what they need to do so that everything runs smoothly, this is not seen as evidence of their willingness to do what is expected.” rather, she writes, “everything has the look of something that functions or of a simple mechanical obedience” (180-1). in an earlier reading of this (misreading of) bovine politeness — the disposition of the cows to work with each other and with their human keepers — despret went further: (i will probably push this point slightly too far), i would even suggest that what we call mechanistic thought, ironically, could be partially due to the good will of the animals themselves! when animals do what they know is expected of them, everything begins to look like a machine that is functioning. (“from secret agents” 43) the undermining parenthesis, the idea that this realization is “ironic,” the exclamation mark, typically for despret, i think, present what is a truly insightful recognition of a profound misrecognition with delicate humility. in thinking about cows as workers, not only does she reveal herself to be a better ethologist than descartes; she also asks us to re-assess one of the cornerstones of western philosophy that we might, all too often, take for granted. and she does it quietly, wittily, stealthily. hierarchy is challenged; status undermined; mechanical reaction is acknowledged as, actually, collaboration, and what is brought to the fore is our blindness (perhaps willful blindness) to this. vinciane despret is wise. in recognizing the inherent willingness of experimental subjects, interviewees, and agricultural animals to go along with the rules that have been set by others, the collaborative participation of all as they try to work out what is being asked of them and to provide what they believe to be the “right” answers based on that perception, despret looks for a way of coming to an understanding in the pursuit of knowledge that allows all parties to “speak.” she recognizes that politeness must be a “virtue” that is displayed by the experimenter/interviewer as much as by their subject/interviewee (“sheep do have opinions” 360). indeed, politeness is a key word in despret’s thinking. erica fudge -thinking with vinciane despret 165 it is, buchanan writes, a “form of methodological courtesy as well as an ethical obligation” (buchanan, 22). donna haraway offers a useful definition of what she terms despret’s “cultivation of politeness”: she trains her whole being, not just her imagination, “to go visiting.” visiting is not an easy practice; it demands the ability to find others actively interesting, even or especially others most people already claim to know all too completely, to ask questions that one’s interlocutors truly find interesting, to cultivate the wild virtue of curiosity, to retune one’s ability to sense and respond — and to do all this politely! (“a curious practice” 5) despret’s 2005 essay “sheep do have opinions” is a good illustration. she makes clear once again how the questions posed form the responses given. the problem sheep have faced, she writes, is that they, “even more than [other animals,] have been victims of questions of little relevance compared to their ability to organize themselves socially.” if you ask a sheep a question about “what they eat,” she writes, then you will only find “what we expect from sheep: that they convert plants into mutton” (362). what, though, is a good question to put to a sheep? or, as despret puts it, “how are we going to afford them the opportunity to give us the chance to talk differently about them?” (364). she takes her prompt from retired primatologist and now farmer thelma rowell’s decision to put down an extra bowl of food for her sheep. despret writes that, in this context, “if a sheep leaves its bowl, shoves away its neighbor to take its place and immediately returns to its bowl, or persists and follows the other one to oust it once again, a large number of hypotheses can be formulated” (360). the extra bowl means that such actions are not only (or not at all) to be read as reflecting competition over resources. crucially, rowell has given sheep the opportunity to do something else: the questioner has prompted interesting responses by giving her subjects the chance to play a role in forming the questions. a similar understanding is brought to bear in her collaboration with jocelyne porcher, with whom despret studied the cows. as they wanted to interrogate “the possibility that animals could take an active part in work,” they decided to involve the farmers they were working with in the interview process. porcher would say to them: during the research i undertook with farmers i (jocelyne porcher) often heard anecdotes, stories, even ways of talking which suggested that animals, in some way, collaborated in work. now, when i tried to pursue this question with the farmers head on, i was met with resistance or humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 166 incomprehension. clearly it’s not a good question to ask. but first-hand evidence kept coming up; this encouraged me to persevere. so, in your opinion, as a farmer, how do you think i should be framing my question so that it has a chance of being understood and being interesting? (despret and porcher 92) the responses of farmers allowed despret and porcher to recognize what they call “an amazing similitude between our relationship to research and the relation of the farmers with their animals” (94). the farmers, like the academics, also constantly questioned their own authority; they also gave over some of the power to their animals. thus, as recorded in another essay, one farmer, manuel calado varela, noted: “when i open the doors, the cows know i want them to go out, but i don’t know if they really want to go out” (“becomings of subjectivity” 133). for despret, as for calado varela, interviewer and interviewee together create the successful interview. far from the “radical asymmetry of expertise” produced by much conventional social scientific practice in which the interviewer is the dominant, authoritative force, despret and porcher understand that an awareness of the active role of all partners in what haraway has called the “joint dance of being” creates a new sense of partnership “that breeds respect and response in the flesh, in the run, on the course” (62). it opens up the way for conversation: between experimenter and subject, interviewer and interviewee, but also human and animal. “[o]f interest,” despret writes of thelma rowell’s study of sheep, “is he or she who makes someone or something else capable of becoming interesting” (2005, 363). and we find ourselves back with the key point: what would animals say if we asked the right questions? this book wonders about (among others) elephants who paint selfportraits, monkeys who get drunk, male penguins who are female after all, chimpanzees who mourn. what is at its core is a question about collaboration: how we can work together, communicate, translate each other; and from that come to gain more respect for each other. the onus is on us humans, inevitably, because until now we have been the ones setting most of the rules. it is our questions that demand answers, and the laboratory, with all of its failures, comes to embody some of the wider failures in human-animal relations. in ranging across various issues — whether animals can be said to be artists; what imitation might actually be, and whether animals do it, whether they might have a sense of justice — despret views the world with a kind of practical pragmatism, and takes people at their word in a way that is not naïve or gullible, but interested, trusting, erica fudge -thinking with vinciane despret 167 open, and, because of that, is revealing. thus, for example, in “e is for exhibitionists: do animals see themselves as we see them?,” despret contemplates bobby berosini’s cabaret performances with orangutans, and from that contemplation posits the idea that an exhibition presents “the possibility of exchanging perspectives” (30). that is, it takes selfhood away from the “solipsistic“ version that the scientific mirror test supports, in which “it is with one’s self alone that being a self is negotiated” (32). she suggests instead that some kinds of exhibition can show that animals might have not only a sense of self, but a sense of the perspective of those others who are watching them — which would be evidence of their possession of a theory of mind. despret supports this in two ways. first, she suggests that “the act of hiding oneself is complementary to, and not contrary to … the act of exhibiting oneself.” she clarifies this by noting that “hiding oneself while knowing that one is hiding indicates … the implementation of a process consisting of the possibility of adopting the perspective of the other: ‘from the spot where he is, he cannot see me’” (32-3). the bald clarity of this reading of hiding is typical of despret’s work. here, and elsewhere in this book, i found myself saying: “oh yeah,” and feeling like an idiot for not previously thinking of things in the way she presents them. she has the capacity to make what has never, or not fully, been considered seem patently obvious. of course it is possible to view a mouse that hides from a cat as having a sense of the cat’s perspective and intentions. of course the mouse in this scenario can be interpreted as having a sense of self that is a self in the world — even if it does not react as we might to its reflection in a mirror. i knew that, but until it was pointed out to me by despret, i didn’t quite know it, if you know what i mean. that is something that her work does constantly. the other way that despret considers the question of animals and selfhood in relation to exhibition is to consider, again obvious, how those who work with animals describe such exhibitions. returning to her work with porcher, despret recalls how one farmer felt that at the end of an agricultural show the cow he had brought to be displayed held “‘the belief that she really is different and particular.’” another stated that: “‘i had a bull that participated in some shows, and he knew that he had to be handsome because when you took a photo, he immediately raised his head a little. it was like he posed, you see, just like a star!’” (33). it is not only that despret is willing to read these breeders’ recollections as revealing that “animals and people have succeeded in becoming attuned to what matters to the other, to act so that what matters to the other also matters to oneself” (34). she also steps back from this immediate perspective and recognizes, yet again, the broader philosophical implications of her listening to, and taking seriously, these anecdotes. “i know these accounts will elicit a few giggles,” she writes, and she takes this very seriously. like toto at the end of the wizard of oz (another canine analogy), despret pulls away the veil and reveals a reality that had humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 168 remained hidden. she relates our giggling at the farmers’ bovine anecdotes to “the long history through which scientists have obstinately disqualified the knowledge of their rivals in matters of animal expertise” (34). in this context, we are implicated. we gigglers are those who are supporting the authority of the scientists, and the giggling — our giggling — can be read as a manifestation of the power of experimental science to control how animals are conceptualized, a power supported even by despret’s own readers — that is, by those who might consider themselves to be open to, and perhaps actively engaged in, thinking against that perspective. the “common sense” nature of a particular — hierarchical — way of constructing knowledge is revealed when we scoff at the idea of the posing bull. we are surprised into self-awareness through her thinking, and by this means she reinforces just how powerful the authoritative position is. in recording the farmers’ understandings despret shows how far the dismissal of anecdotes (a label that immediately demeans these reports) is also a dismissal of a certain way of viewing animals — a way that makes them much more capable than they might be in the laboratories in which “we show something à propos of animals [but] the animals show us nothing” (34). as such, her belief that some animals’ responses to being on show can be read as evidence that they possess a sense of the perspective of those who are looking at them reveals a willingness to recognize animals as collaborators in the exhibition. it also takes seriously what might be dismissed as merely anecdotal claims of non-experts. this is evidence of despret’s readiness to think beyond the “authority of science,” as she has termed it (our emotional makeup 84). it is a preparedness to see expertise as possessed, not only by those who work alongside (rather than experiment on) animals, but by the animals themselves. this is true politeness. thus, in “c for corporeal: is it all right to urinate in front of animals?” despret explores the primatologist shirley strum’s recognition of the significance of her presence in the world of the baboons she observed. she hones in on strum’s worries about what she should do when she realized during one observation that she needed to pee. despret records that strum made the decision “no longer to go behind her truck” — that is, no longer to hide from the baboons the fact that she, too, was a body in the world (with all the implications for control, dominance and authority that such a disembodied state supported). instead she undressed carefully in view of the baboons who were, as despret records it, “flabbergasted by the noise, for in fact, they had never seen her eat, drink, or sleep before” (18). as well as revealing her to be, like the baboons, in possession of a body, strum’s actions illustrate her recognition that those baboons were erica fudge -thinking with vinciane despret 169 active participants in their relationship, not simply creatures that she could watch as if she was not there. so, to ask “is it all right to urinate in front of baboons?” is to engage as a social being with the baboons who are themselves recognized as social beings (18). it is to open up a conversation that involves all participants, and that might transform all participants, too. to ask, “is it all right to urinate in front of baboons?” is to display “tactfulness,” and to recognize that in some contexts urinating publicly is actually a display of politeness. despret’s work thus asks us to think afresh about human-animal relations — in particular to consider not only how we ask questions of the subjects of our research, but also to recognize that the way we ask questions is crucial to the answers we receive. her understanding emerges from her observation of all participants in the lab, the field, the farm, and from a realization that expertise can be found in places that orthodox science and philosophy might reject. “in the best farms,” she writes, “talk is incessant.” the farmers speak to their cows and the cows respond: “because there is talk, there is talking back” (“becomings of subjectivity” 133). but despret’s work should not only impact animal studies as it analyzes the ways in which non-humans have been addressed, dismissed, misheard, and so on. i think her work also provides a kind of model for thinking that remains crucial to the development of our field. being interdisciplinary — being willing to read across, among, and with the boundaries that have been put in place by the institutions we work within — offers vital insights into human-animal relations that might be missed if we remain in our own places (i’m tempted to say “cages”). as bruno latour states: “to understand what animals have to say, all the resources of science and of the humanities have to be put to work” (vii). i hope that it doesn’t sound too impolite to suggest that wanting to know what it was like to be a cow (my current research interest) is not so different from wanting to know what it is like to be an environmental ethicist. despret’s work shows us that both require a willingness to assume that there is more than one way of viewing the world, more than one kind of scholarship, more than one method of argumentation. my feeling is that being interdisciplinary requires the kind of politeness that she articulates — that, in fact, tact is crucial. if i believe a cow can’t think or experience anything of significance to me then i have relegated it (and she is definitely an “it”) to the zone of the uninteresting (and incapable of becoming interesting). i would therefore be wasting my time wondering what it was like to be one. likewise, if i think an environmental ethicist has nothing to say to me that will be of value to my project then i have already shut the door on her, closed down that conversation, and my project has, as a result, become narrower. but if i open the door, or if the door is opened to me and i agree to walk through it, then i am, to use despret’s words, making “someone or something else capable of becoming interesting” (“sheep do have opinions” 363) and i am being made humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 170 capable of being interesting myself. there will be misunderstandings, apologies, uncomfortable silences, moments of disbelief, perhaps — that is the nature of communication. but, as in all good collaborations positive things might also emerge. despret’s reading of the work of the psychologist irene pepperberg is telling here. despret noted that pepperberg and her team decided that when alex, the grey parrot from gabon they were working with, made a “new signifying sound” to which they could attribute no meaning they would “act as if this sound was intentional and respond to [it] as if alex had wanted to demand something or comment intentionally” (“becomings of subjectivity” 125). they chose to assume that alex’s call was the opening gambit in a conversation; that it was “a new act of language.” despret writes: “the fact that the parrot may or may not have had the intention of producing the new combination is not important, pepperberg explains, because we simply want to show the parrot that phrases can have meaning and that they can be used to control, or at least influence, one’s environment and the actions of those who take care of him or her” (125). if a parrot could speak we might not immediately understand him, but we could act as if we did in order that he might recognize that understanding between us is possible. from this beginning alex, famously, revealed himself to be well capable of communication, of abstraction, of intention. a conversation did actually follow. as despret notes in “l for laboratory,” at the end of a day of experimental conversation, in what she terms “a real world … in which beings of different species work together,” “every night a parrot says to his experimenter as she is preparing to go back home, ‘good-bye. i am going to eat now. see you tomorrow’” (96). a tentative translation is possible to the potential of interdisciplinary understanding: when i hear, for example, an anthropologist, i should assume that his articulations are meaningful to me, even if that might seem unlikely on first hearing. and, once i have assumed that meaning is available in his articulations, when i ask him questions and try to understand more fully what he is interested in this interaction can only work if i give over some of my authority, if i assume that knowledge also dwells elsewhere, in places i cannot fully understand or translate into my own terms. in short, i must engage on the basis that anthropologists do have opinions. in addition, it is important that, in order for that conversation to be productive, the anthropologist should also consider what it is that i — a historian — might be interested in. there will be misunderstanding, but there will also be the potential for the historian and the anthropologist to achieve a rapport and from that to think in new ways, to be made capable of asking better questions and so of eliciting better answers — from each other, but also from the documents, texts, cultures that are the focus of their own individual research. erica fudge -thinking with vinciane despret 171 despret’s work allows me to see this as a vital way forward for animal studies. in a field that is growing so fast that it feels almost impossible to keep up with the work from one’s own discipline, she reminds us of the value of looking over the fences that have been put up by institutions and their managers. she asks us to recognize that new ways of thinking might come from attempts to read across boundaries and to speak — politely — to those who live in the next enclosure. despret has taught me, through her explorations of the worlds of people and animals, that we do not speak alone; we all speak to and with others for whom we should try to form our words, and who, in turn, will transform them to make new meanings. in the midst of these conversations common ground is possible. there is the potential for situations in which, as she writes, “a ‘we’ is created,” and “at the heart of” such situations, “perspectives are changed.” what is crucial here is “a particular skill: that of imagining being able to see with the eyes of an other” (31). towards the end of what would animals say if we asked the right questions? despret asks, “what does this do to think like this?” (179). thinking differently, for despret, is not an intellectual exercise, it is an action that can transform the world. it can uproot the hierarchies that allow us to regard cows as fleshy machines when they are actually actively purposefully collaborating in the work of the farm. it can challenge the assumptions that let us laugh at the idea that a bull might understand that he is a star. i began with woolf’s definition of “the true philosopher” as “he who has lost his coat but is free from fleas,” and now i can see that i should actually pause over whether that is actually so fitting a way of thinking about despret’s work after all. she is shedding hierarchy, no doubt; but she is also making room for others. rather than ridding herself of unwished for collaborators, despret argues for the need to “deterritorialize oneself, to open oneself up to new agencements of desire, to cultivate an appetite for metamorphoses, and to forge multiple affiliations” (137). there might be room for a few fleas after all. works cited buchanan, brett. “the metamorphoses of vinciane despret.” angelaki 20:2 (2015). 17-32. despret, vinciane. “the body we care for: figures of anthropo-zoo-genesis.” body & society 10:2-3, 2004a. 111-134. _____. our emotional makeup: ethnopsychology and selfhood. trans. marjolijn de jager. other press, 2004b. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 172 _____. “sheep do have opinions.” making things public: atmosphere of democracy. bruno latour and peter weibel, eds. mit press, 2005. 360–368. _____. “the becomings of subjectivity in animal worlds.” subjectivity 23 (2008): 123-139 _____. “from secret agents to interagency.” history and theory 52.4 (2013): 29-44. despret, vinciane, and jocelyne porcher. “the pragmatics of expertise.” trans. stephen muecke. angelaki 20.2 (2015): 91-99. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto. prickly paradigm press, 2003. _____. “a curious practice.” angelaki 20.2 (2015): 5-14. woolf, virginia. flush. (1933). kate flint, ed. oxford up, 1998. microsoft word turner-aloi. pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 review article stephanie turner artists unsettling anthropocentrism giovanni aloi, speculative taxidermy: natural history, animal surfaces, and art in the anthropocene. columbia university press, 2018. 315 pp. $30. in this ambitious contribution to studies of animal representation in the arts and, more broadly, human/animal studies, art historian giovanni aloi examines a range of contemporary artwork featuring taxidermy animals, inquiring into their potential, as complex sites of material-discursive practices, to rethink anthropocentrism. alert to ontological shifts in taxidermy as a representational medium, aloi is suspicious of historical metanarratives that insist on taxidermy’s scientific origins and a “progressivist vision” of taxidermy as a “succession of improvements motivated by a transcendental notion” of an idealized realism (52). not only do such explanations of stephanie turner -artists unsettling anthropocentrism 223 what taxidermy is necessitate a postcolonialist remediation of its continued appearance in natural history exhibits, they do not adequately address the aesthetics of taxidermy animals in contemporary art. yet such consideration is needed, given the many ways contemporary artists are engaging with taxidermy animals, as aloi makes clear in the examples he examines throughout his book. while aloi acknowledges natural history’s investment in taxidermy’s distinctive indexicality — animal skin undeniably references, because it is, at least in part, the actual animal — he also recognizes the mutability and motility of that same skin in aesthetic practice. in the “ontological shift from craft object to art object” (20), the unique problem of taxidermy’s indexicality challenges explanations of what it is and how it works. consider, for example, the image on the book’s cover. in this partial view of nandipha mntambo’s piece titfunti emkhatsini wetfu (the shadows between us) (2013), the viewer is presented with an animal hide arranged in such a way as to resemble the fabric of a flowing dress. this initial impression is reinforced as the contours of a female form become visible, filling out a portion of the hide. human and animal mingle uncertainly in this piece. indeed, the question of certainty is central to aloi’s project: how are artists using taxidermy to unsettle the “ontological certainties of anthropocentrism” (21)? how are they questioning “histories of representation that have cemented man’s exceptionalism” using “the very medium through which those histories were written in the first place” (21)? and how can asking such questions foster a greater critical awareness of the limitations of a human-centered perspective? aloi’s definition of “speculative taxidermy” helps to answer these questions. drawing on the theoretical development of speculative realism, the defining feature of which entails a rejection of western philosophy’s endless deferment of the physical world, aloi argues that much of the contemporary artwork involving taxidermy aligns with a renewed critical interest in the liveliness of things. agency is a key concept; the physical world is above all a network of relations among mutually influencing actors of all sorts, living and nonliving, including works of art. artists creating work in a speculative realist mode are exploring how their pieces — as material things — can shift frames of reference to generate new dynamics within the network. aloi’s examination of sculptor berlinde de bruyckere’s k36 (the black horse) (2003) exemplifies his notion of “ontological mobility,” the opportunity presented by a work of art to “reconfigure our taken-for-granted modes of being” (140). by altering the shape of the horse’s body and modifying its pose in ways that refuse to affirm received ideas of what horses look like, k36 both confounds the indexical relation between the taxidermy object and the represented animal as well as confuses the viewer’s sense of a “correct viewing point” (216-217). speculative realism’s endeavor to “decenter” the cartesian subject and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 224 “derail” the kantian assertion of the primacy of language and thought in accessing reality is foregrounded in such works, aloi contends (138). although aloi’s distinction between object-oriented ontology and new materialism could be better developed throughout his discussion of the “ontological turn” — the better to rethink the hierarchical relation between humans and nonhumans — his point in engaging speculative realism as a theoretical framework is clear: taxidermy objects function as active interfaces with which to critically examine the co-constitution of human-animal realities. usefully in his definition of speculative taxidermy, aloi demarcates the artworks he examines from those described by art historian steve baker as “botched” taxidermy, which operate on the principle of “botching” realism without confronting realism’s ideological framework. whereas in aloi’s discussion of botched taxidermy in his earlier book art & animals he allowed that such work “asks the viewer to work harder at undoing original meaning while preventing the opportunity for perceiving the animal body as a romantic and nostalgic safe retreat” (42), in this book, he is directly concerned with the limitations of its “align[ment of] the work of art with the impenetrability we attribute to animality. [...] what can we do,” he asks rhetorically, “with the knowledge that animals are inaccessible and ever withdrawing” (183)? many artists working with taxidermy are moving beyond this rather simplistic response to the indexicality of taxidermy. in addition to discussing works by nandipha mntambo and berlinde de bruyckere, aloi also considers the lively materiality of works by mark dion, maria papadimitriou, roni horn, steve bishop, cole swanson, and collaborators bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir and mark wilson. aloi’s astute analyses of these works show how, by exploring the intertwined histories of animals and humans, they reveal ways that the nonhuman matters at every juncture. papadimitriou’s installation agrimiká why look at animals?, for example, reassembling and relocating an animal hide shop to art gallery space, answers the titular question (first famously raised by john berger): we look at animals because animals — including those whose bodies are rendered into objects after their death — remain a vital part of an “anthropogenic chain of agency in which humans, animals, geographies, materialities, and biodefining economics become visible” (192). agrimiká works against the invisibility of animal deaths in the material objects rendered from their bodies — the installation’s glue pots, furniture, fabrics, and books. by doing so, this installation challenges berger’s insistence that the disappearance of animals brought about by industrialization gave rise to their compensatory propagation in visual culture. stephanie turner -artists unsettling anthropocentrism 225 but speculative realism is not the only theoretical framework aloi engages. more ambitiously, he examines speculative taxidermy through a foucauldian lens, which he describes as the biopolitical register of human/animal relations that is “situated on the surface of works of art” (39). in contrast to traditional historiographical approaches, which foreground metanarratives of progress, foucault understands history as the sedimentation of seemingly unrelated, but significantly parallel, discourses and practices. in examining contemporary taxidermy art, this perspective “enables a conception of this class of objects as a material interface inscribing human/animal relationships shaped by power/knowledge relationships, practices, and discourses” (57). acknowledging foucault’s lack of critical concern with human/animal relations and his limited discussion of aesthetics (40-41), aloi nevertheless finds value for both animal studies and art criticism in foucault’s analysis of the european ordering of knowledge. indeed, in large part the organization of speculative taxidermy emerges from aloi’s adaptation of foucault’s archaeological and genealogical methods, which he uses to map “the cultural and material conditions that enable practices and discourses to form and intermingle”(48) and to trace how these practices and discourses reveal vectors of power (57), respectively. keeping the focus on the materiality of speculative taxidermy, aloi brings speculative realism and foucauldian analytical methods into productive conversation. aloi begins with an unlikely example of an artwork comprised of wax, rope, fabric, and human hair: degas’s sculpture little dancer aged fourteen (1878-1881). this early objectassemblage, with its decidedly inelegant, undancer-like proportions, hinted at the potential of realism to gesture toward sociopolitical concerns, such as the stratification of gender and class in late-19th-century paris, and, more broadly, the constraints of classical ideals of representation. transgressive in both matter and form, degas’s little dancer presaged explorations in speculative realism that arose later, notably among the surrealists. here, the touchstone piece is meret oppenheim’s fur-lined teacup, saucer, and spoon titled object. the significance of object, according to aloi, lies not in its symbolic register, which merely perpetuates an anthropocentric interpretation (for example, it is “a textbook incarnation of the freudian uncanny” [162]), but rather its biopolitical register, which, alluding to the rise of mass-produced objects, touches on “the affirmation of exploitative regimes of industrial production aligning the human and the animal” (165), among other concerns of the anthropocene. to arrive at this close reading of oppenheim’s object in the book’s fifth chapter, aloi in the first chapter, “reconfiguring animal skins,” challenges the traditional historiography of taxidermy, delving into the origins of taxidermy as a site of discourses, practices, and power relations that highlight the varied cultural afterlives of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 226 taxidermy animals. the focus is on the processes and institutions through which an animal becomes an object within commodity with value. tracing this process is important in understanding the human/animal relationship “inscribed in” the taxidermy animal (55). at the same time, however, the unique indexicality of the object that is animal skin made to look like the living animal gives rise to an ontological instability; it is in some sense still an animal. it becomes a thing, an object that asserts itself, continuing to make distinct and important demands on our attention. in reaching this conclusion, aloi takes a cue from arjun appadurai’s notion — inspired by foucault’s emphasis on history as sedimentation — of the “social lives of things,” a notion that, “shifting the focus of inquiry from the essence of things to their function” (55), recognizes the potential agency of the certain kind of things that taxidermy animals are. this agency enables viewers to distinguish the “‘representational’ animal” from the living one, as aloi describes in his thoughtful analysis of snæbjörnsdóttir and wilson’s multimedia project between you and me, in which the two artists explore the various historical and material permutations of human/seal interaction. aloi explores the historical underpinnings of the “representational” taxidermy animal in chapters two and three, “a natural history panopticon” and “dioramas,” respectively. in his genealogical examination of the classical tradition of realism in natural history representation in chapter two, aloi draws on foucault’s analysis of early modernism’s “epistemological spaces of visibility” (77) to consider how such systems of ordering as the medieval bestiary and cabinets of curiosity had a flattening effect, bringing animals into the objectifying purview of science. mark dion’s critical cabinets of curiosity question this natural history panopticon by highlighting their arbitrary ordering of natural objects. aloi’s emphasis on the flatness of animal representation is central to both chapters. with this concept, he is referring to ron broglio’s analysis, in surface encounters, of western science’s view of nonhuman life as lacking depth — that is, of being devoid of self-reflexive and cognitive capacity — relegating animals to the “surface of things” (87). the development of taxidermy, the manipulated surface of animals, reaffirmed the flatness and subjectivity of animals under the human gaze. the development of the diorama and photography became new means with which to reinforce the surface-intensive, primarily optical mode of natural history representation. aloi’s genealogical analysis of the continuing influence of notions of classical realism is thorough in chapter three, showing how the “aesthetic rhetoric of natural history” (109) has given rise to a “transdiscursive intermingling” (112) of natural history and art in the speculative works of diorama photographers oleg kulik, hiroshi sugimoto, diane fox, and karen knorr. stephanie turner -artists unsettling anthropocentrism 227 aloi develops his examination of photography of taxidermy in chapter four, “the end of the daydream,” situating it at the ontological turn of speculative realism’s inquiry beneath the surface of things. in this chapter aloi effectively links foucault’s concepts of the tableau-objet and the event. the relevance of these two concepts to speculative realism is undeniable: while the tableau-objet refers to a painter’s deliberate calling of attention to the surface of the painting, an event occurs as a result of an artist’s “appropriation and transfiguration” of images within the work (150). both phenomena are described by aloi as non-affirmative, foucault’s term for a viewing experience that, in contrast to the affirmative “daydream” of the panopticon, challenges the viewer’s sovereignty (144). as aloi makes clear in his analysis of photographer roni horn’s nonaffirmative images of taxidermy birds, which decenter the viewer by subverting the portrait genre, the processes of the tableau-objet and the event “acquire considerable relevance when animals are present in the picture plane” (150). in chapter five, “following materiality,” aloi shifts his attention away from photographic images of taxidermy animals and back to the materiality of the taxidermy animal itself. the consideration of surfaces remains important, however, in aloi’s critical examination of the failures of, first, berger, and following berger, akira mizuta lippit, to acknowledge the persistent materiality of animal representation as it migrated across mediums. aloi’s genealogical method is evident in his analysis of the “weird loop” (172) of rendering, the industrial-scale assembly and disassembly of animal bodies both in the new modalities of photography and film as well as in the slaughterhouses of food animal production. borrowing from nicole shukin’s analysis in animal capital of the parallel developments of industrial agriculture, automobile assembly lines, and moving image culture — notably eadweard muybridge’s motion studies of animals — aloi undertakes a mini-archaeology of animal materiality across these parallels, with broad implications for speculative taxidermy. in general, new materialist interpretations, he explains, “follow materiality,”“tak[ing] us to the very edges of the boundaries of discourses, and well beyond the conception of authorship — [following materiality] challenges what can be said and thought about the objects we shape and that shape us” (186). the focal example is robert rauschenberg’s monogram, featuring a taxidermy angora goat in a tire. indebted to the surrealists’ use of found objects, or readymades, this famous piece is a “precursor of speculative taxidermy” (182), aloi contends, because it questions “the ontologies of natural and man-made within the context of representational realism” (183). it is here, in chapter five, where aloi most directly touches on the “pressing ethical questions” (173) raised by the materiality of taxidermy animals in contemporary art. “taking the materiality of works of art seriously,” he observes, “can [...] challenge the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 228 intrinsic anthropocentrism embedded in our relationship to objects, leading to the recovery of networks and agential relationships inscribing a political agenda” (175). however, aloi could better develop the ethical commentary surrounding such artwork. the ethical issues are complex and indeed, often foregrounded in the works themselves, as he notes in chapter six, “the allure of the veneer,” in examining works by nandipha mntambo, berlinde de bruyckere and steve bishop. a closer look at the ethical assertions of these and other speculative taxidermy artists is particularly important in critically examining the harms brought about by anthropocentric views and practices. aloi does delimit the ethical issues by pointing out that the artists he writes about do not kill animals to make art; rather, much like the surrealists’ use of the readymade, they repurpose animal objects. in view of such an apparently benign practice, however, it is noteworthy that contemporary artists nevertheless deem it necessary to develop a set of guidelines governing the use of animal objects to make art. aloi includes these ethical guidelines in an appendix. co-authored by artists mark dion and robert marbury, “some notes toward a manifesto for artists working with and about taxidermy animals” raises some provocative points that aloi could more productively consider in the last three chapters. for example, dion and marbury’s dictum that “a death is a terrible thing to waste,” the third item in their list of advice to artists, echoes shukin’s analysis of animal rendering, the biocapitalist imperative to use “everything but the squeal” in extracting value from animal bodies (shukin 95). it would be interesting to hear aloi’s interpretation of how the work of speculative taxidermy artists might renegotiate this biocapitalist imperative by adhering to dion and marbury’s dictum. a closer critical engagement with the “manifesto” could also illuminate the related dictum stipulating the artist’s responsibility to minimize waste during the creative process. how does the waste from the creation of speculative taxidermy function within its material-discursive practices? aloi could address the over-emphasis on the symbolic register in dion and marbury’s guideline for artists to be sensitive to viewers’ “very strong reactions to seeing dead animals” (258), and he could fruitfully enfold into his analysis the generative aspect of their mandate to “be curious” about both the larger context of the animals’ “classification, habitat, and biology” as well as “the oneness of each specimen” (258). this last advice, especially, could be better taken up in aloi’s analysis, as the affective potential in encountering the animal thing — the “aesthetics of attunement” (weil 34-35) — figures prominently in speculative realist theory. while aloi could more directly engage with dion and marbury’s ethical guidelines, the scope of his effort to bring foucauldian concepts and methods into conversation with stephanie turner -artists unsettling anthropocentrism 229 new materialist ideas and approaches is impressive. indeed, with each new work he encounters, aloi identifies new ways to map this conversation. in the seventh and final chapter, “this is not a horse: biopower and animal skins in the anthropocene,” for example, he finds in steve bishop’s “it’s hard to make a stand” the potential for foucault’s notion of the dispositif — the array of institutional means of controlling bodies — to critique the naturalizing narratives of animal domestication residing just beneath the surface of taxidermy. the question here is how an assemblage of readymade objects, in this instance a horse-like figure with a dog-like head fabricated from the fur of some other, unidentified, animal, makes visible the overlapping ontologies of domestication and domination. how, in other words, does taxidermy art “perform a political critique of the technocapitalist economies of visibility defining human/animal relations in the anthropocene” (223)? in the book’s coda, aloi considers the possibility for reenchantment in contemporary art invoking animal materiality, that is, its potential to elicit a pre-scientific perception of the natural world. pondering cole swanson’s multimedia, participatory installation out of the strong, something sweet, which imagines mythological relations of humans, cows, and bees, aloi observes the power of this and similar works to create models for “registering human/animal interconnectedness beyond scientific/capitalist optics, while still productively incorporating very real histories of human-animal becomings” (255). such work is much needed in the larger anthropocene project of realigning the human with the rest of the world. works cited aloi, giovanni. art & animals. tauris, 2012. berger, john. “why look at animals?” about looking. pantheon, 1980. 3-28. broglio, ron. surface encounters: thinking with animals and art. u of minnesota p, 2011. shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. u of minnesota p, 2009. weil, kari. thinking animals: why animal studies now? columbia up, 2012. microsoft word hunold-holmberg.pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 11:1 reviews christian hunold multispecies politics in the city tora holmberg, urban animals: crowding in zoocities. london and new york: routledge, 2015. 164 pp. $128.00 hc; $47.96 pb; $53.96 e-book. what are the multispecies experiences and politics of living in a city? in engaging this question, tora holmberg does not reduce politics to mere discourse or equate politics with rational deliberation aimed at reaching consensus on controversies involving urban animals. rather, holmberg embraces a resolutely agonistic conception of multispecies politics as “the more-than-discursive acts involved in the struggles over humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 166 priority of access, interpretation and resources” (2). who gets to live in the polis, and on what terms? in holmberg’s understanding, politics is not only agonistic, but also spatial: “in sociological micro-studies of spatial conflicts, including those involving human/animal relations, meaning-making processes and discursive struggles are highlighted in great detail. paradoxically, however, what i often find missing is the spatial dimension — as understood by urban classics — the physicality of places” (2930). writing as a sociologist, holmberg does not approach these entanglements of the political and the physical via, say, the new materialism in political theory or the spatial lexicon of cultural geography, but through fine-grained engagement with analyses of the production of social space in the works of georg simmel and henry lefebvre. this grounding in classical sociological theory may not speak equally effectively to all readers of the book, though many will appreciate that holmberg’s interdisciplinary study of urban human/animal relations rests on firm disciplinary foundations. methodologically, holmberg draws in equal measure on harold garfinkel’s interpretive ethnomethodology, wherein social spaces are produced through the participants’ shared practices of sense-making, and on donna haraway’s unpacking of posthumanist entanglements via the analytic deployment of material-semiotic figures (e.g. cyborg, companion animal.) holmberg’s sensitivity to foucaultian power/knowledge dynamics in human/animal relations rounds out the book’s epistemology. at the core of holmberg’s contribution to the study of urban animals lies what she terms the material-symbiotic figure of urban humanimal crowding, defined as the spatial formation of a trans-species collective in a specific social setting. such collectives emerge, for example, from encounters between dogs and people on a city beach or between animal welfare inspectors, cat ladies (a term holmberg uses), and their cats inside an urban home. how, holmberg asks, does the humanimal crowding that occurs in such social settings inform the understanding and management of urban human/animal relations? in her conceptualization, crowd/crowding is always both object and process, both noun and verb. guided by sociological theory’s sensitivity to the production of social relations by participants acting together in specific physical spaces, what a place means and who is included or excluded from it is never given, but always formed through the stories told and the actions performed by the participants. the figure of humanimal crowding, moreover, seeks to decenter human experiences in favor of species relationality, and thus to shift attention to the participation of nonhuman animals in urban place-making. for the most part, the book leaves wild animals to one side and focuses squarely on controversies involving companion christian hunold -multispecies politics in the city 167 animals: unleashed dogs, homeless and feral cats, animal hoarding, crazy cat ladies. these controversies play out in what holmberg terms zoocities. this prefix intends to capture the uneasy yet generative tension between disorder and order, between chaos and its (often unexpected) capacity to upend hegemonic norms. as for the general vibe of urban human/animal relations, holmberg positions zoocities at some distance from jennifer wolch’s zoöpolis, bursting with manifold hopeful opportunities for peaceful coexistence between humans and animals, and somewhat closer to steve hinchliffe and sarah whatmore’s living cities, wherein sources of difference, dissension, and confusion between species have a more tenacious footing. this willingness to countenance the agonistic dimension of urban human/animal entanglements points holmberg toward a sober assessment of the promises of crowding in zoocities. these lie, she contends, “not so much in peaceful reconciliation, but in the potential ruptures and leakages that the agonistic heterogeneity poses to the ideals of hegemonic purity” (127). human/animal crowding in zoocities, in holmberg’s analysis, figures both as a threat to be policed and as a potentially subversive element. four empirical chapters investigate how norm violations involving everyday encounters with unruly cats and dogs foreground and destabilize “ordinary and normal” understandings of urban spaces. the first of these, “bodies on the beach: allowability and the politics of place,” examines human-dog interactions on its beach, a dog beach in the california city of santa cruz. one of the methodological challenges facing studies human-animal relations is to account for nonhuman agency in the coproduction of multispecies places. in many ways, as holmberg is the first to note, the book adheres to a standard methodology of interpreting human study participants’ meanings (e.g., animal welfare officers, police, cat owners) and analyzing government documents through a theoretical lens; that is, the researcher endeavors to understand, more or less systematically, how humans make sense of their relationships with animals, while the animals themselves are consigned to agentic cameos. however, not least because this chapter draws on time holmberg spent on the beach observing interactions among dogs, their owners, and non-dog-owning beachgoers, she manages to capture something of how the dogs’ corporeality — their “dogginess” — shapes people’s affective responses to the ways that dogs inhabit this beach. the capacity of the animals’ dogginess — their sheer joy and rambunctious movements — to trigger fear or inspire admiration in different human observers offers up a plausible corporeal explanation for the peculiar intensity of debates regarding dogs in public settings. such nuanced attention to nonhuman embodiment, to animals as biological beings, is largely absent from the remaining chapters, all of which are focused primarily on catkeeping. holmberg’s decision against including ethological perspectives on animal humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 168 behavior in her study, ostensibly to avoid essentializing animals and to focus on the social construction of human-animal relationalities, dampens the liveliness of the cats (and some dogs) we encounter in the remaining chapters. in “verminizing: making sense of animal hoarding,” holmberg observes, rightly, that media accounts and reality tv treatments of this phenomenon overlook the agency of hoarded animals, but offers few suggestions for tackling this omission. in hoarding situations, cats and dogs are simultaneously loved and (according to animal welfare regulations) abused, and learning how the animals themselves might feel about their lives is admittedly far from straightforward. holmberg’s suggestion that documentary photographs and videos of animals recorded by animal welfare officials during investigations of allegations of animal hoarding might serve to communicate the animals’ agency is intriguing but not developed in much depth. that said, the chapter’s elaboration of what holmberg terms “sensuous governance” — the ways that officials use and record visual, olfactory, and auditory impressions to arrive at a finding of animal hoarding in urban homes — is both original and compelling. though holmberg is critical of the (occasionally severe) lack of care animals suffer in hoarding situations, her foucaultian analysis of the use of this phenomenon by the state to reaffirm middle-class ideas about healthy home hygiene and a healthy human-to-human social life is insightful. the ways in which thusly “verminized” cat ladies found by mainstream society to keep too many cats in the home resist dominant gender norms are analyzed in a chapter titled “feline femininity: emplacing cat ladies.” whereas such women are judged by animal welfare officials (and the media) to lack the most basic forms of control over their lives, holmberg insists on the resistance potential of this form of human/animal crowding: “i am nevertheless inclined to interpret the cat lady as a transspecies figure who challenges and subverts, a feline femininity that does not make herself available primarily for other humans in accordance with heteronormative ideals. instead, she prioritizes the cat, preferably many” (116). the book’s reliance on swedish case studies does not greatly diminish the book’s relevance for non-swedish audiences. if nothing else, the observation, in “stranger cats: homelessness and ferality in the city,” that “according to swedish authorities and most shelter workers, the street is not a place for cats” opens a fascinating window to another world for readers hailing from less well-ordered cities. the chapter provides a finegrained account of swedish animal welfare officials’ efforts to determine whether a given cat was born wild or is just lost — energies that public health officials in some us cities, for example, would be hard pressed to be able to expend on humans. the book’s strengths, at any rate, derive primarily from holmberg’s theory-driven interest in rendering the figure of human/animal crowding as capable of disrupting hegemonic christian hunold -multispecies politics in the city 169 norms regarding urban human-animal (and human-to-human) relationalities, a project that resonates regardless of national context. however, since the book presupposes some willingness to digest advanced sociological theory and related bodies of work in human-animal studies, it is probably unsuitable for most undergraduate animal studies courses. works cited hinchliffe, s. & whatmore, s. “living cities: towards a politics of conviviality.” science as culture 15.2 (2006): 123-138. wolch, j. “anima urbis.” progress in human geography 26.6 (2002): 721-742. michelle m. taylor -the squirrel’s heartbeat h u m a n i m a l i a 12:1 reviews michelle m. taylor the squirrel’s heartbeat ivan kreilkamp, minor creatures: persons, animals, and the victorian novel. chicago: university of chicago press. 240 pp. $90 hb, $30 pb. in george eliot’s middlemarch, often hailed as the realist novel of the nineteenth century and the one responsible for delineating eliot’s ethics of sympathy, the narrator cautions: “if we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. as it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity” (qtd. in kreilkamp 26). ivan kreilkamp ultimately asks who among the major victorian novelists push at the limits eliot sets for sympathy and open up the genre to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 242 the sound of the squirrel’s heartbeat. minor creatures explores what the results of such experiments in expanded sympathy are — for “protagonicity,” for narrative style, for the novel form itself. while those truly interested in the possibility of animal protagonicity in a realist mode will probably find kreilkamp’s analyses of the novels of thomas hardy and olive schreiner the most rewarding, his most revolutionary argument is not actually that which pertains to these late-century experiments with the novel form. more revolutionary is the claim laid out in the first chapter, “home, animal, novel,” that the (highly domestic) victorian novel, like the victorian home itself, relies on the existence of the animal, and particularly the pet, for its own existence. to count as a protagonist or a sympathetic human character of any order, kreilkamp argues, “one must love animals or be capable of loving them” (23). in the same way, “as an object of extravagant, excessive, potentially ‘sentimental’ love, [the pet] demonstrates the power and potency of affect within the home” (30). the relationship between home, pet, and novel is also fully triangulated, as “the sentimental victorian home is created and maintained through the excessive affect lavished on and in print narratives and on pet animals” (31). in other words, just as the presence of pets defines — and outlines the affective functions of — both novel and home, the presence of both pet and novel are necessary to create the victorian domestic ideal. though for the mid-century novelists krielkamp considers (charlotte, emily, and anne brontë; charles dickens; eliot herself) this love for animals usually excludes the squirrel, it can also exclude all but a select few privileged animals. this is often not a question of species, however, as hal herzog’s recent some we love, some we hate, some we eat: why it’s so hard to think straight about animals would suggest. rather, favorites are chosen within a single domesticated species, as in middlemarch, when monk the st. bernard is set apart from the nameless maltese puppy that sir james offers dorothea. these privileged few are also always minor characters. however ironically, while animals are relegated to the margins of the page, their marginality is central to the novel as a genre; kreilkamp writes that “it is not simply that animals are marginalized or marginal in victorian novels, but that animals must be marginalized, albeit not always successfully so” (14). calling on derrida’s famous argument that humans define themselves against “the animal,” as well as agamben’s concept of the “anthropological machine,” kreilkamp asserts that “the humane person or the humane literary form must preserve an (always subordinated and marginal) animality” (25). with this assertion he is able to establish the critical role of animals for victorian realism, and in doing so to overcome challenges common to scholars of literary animal studies. firstly, michelle m. taylor – the squirrel’s heartbeat 243 by “bring[ing] to the evolving field of literary animal studies a sharper attention than is typical … to questions of literary form” (2), kreilkamp has successfully convinced an occasionally skeptical audience of the value of studying animals — a fact attested to by the tenor of the endorsements, and the diversity of interests of the endorsers, that appear on the back cover. secondly, on several occasions, kreilkamp gently but resolutely affirms the legitimacy of animal studies as a field distinct from, if in many ways closely related to, critical race studies, feminist/gender studies, and other scholarship which attempts to address the marginalization of historically disenfranchised groups. of wuthering heights’s heathcliff being described as a colt, he writes: [s]pecies is as salient as race as a category by which to consider brontë’s depiction of character and should not be reduced to or considered only as a subcategory of race. in recent decades, we have tended to view victorian rhetoric that dehumanizes and animalizes certain characters or human beings primarily as one aspect of racialization, presuming that to view someone as animalistic is more importantly a way to define him as nonwhite. but the human-animal distinction bears consideration as operating according to a logic of its own that is not only a matter of defining normative whiteness. (55-6, emphasis in original) many of us who work in animal studies are probably familiar with the argument that to focus on topics of animality when racial, gender, or class valences are also present is unwise, possibly even offensive; yet kreilkamp defends animal studies against such claims, flipping them on their heads by problematizing the word “dehumanization” for assuming that “to take anything away from a fully or exclusively human status must be to condemn or insult” (158). in the following six chapters, kreilkamp traces a highly cohesive narrative over an approximately fifty-year period, one in which authors transition back and forth between the employment of “real” animals (by which i mean animals represented as fleshly beings, just as humans in novels are) and the employment of more abstract concepts of animality primarily to define human character and express human anxieties related to such definitions. as the last two decades of the nineteenth century approach, however, kreilkamp identifies in proto-modernist authors not just a willingness to create characters whose ears may be open to the heartbeats of some squirrels, but also a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 244 willingness to break down the traditions of the bildungsroman, to test the limits of omniscient narration, and to “transcribe” animal movement using pictorial rather than verbal representation. chapter two, “‘petted things’: cruelty and sympathy in the brontës,” illustrates how “the victorian novel needs … acts of cruelty in order to condemn them, in order to prove its own investment in a sympathetic and humane ethics” (45). in turn, the reader’s ability to respond proves his/her/their fitness as a humane being. kreilkamp identifies four roles within the world of the brontës’ novels (and the victorian novel more generally): “the cruel sadist, who enjoys inflicting pain; the coolly indifferent actor … who weeds out pests without a care; the cruelly indifferent observer, who can witness the sadistic act and the animal’s pain without feeling; and the feeling observer who acts in response to the abuse or responds to it with strong compassion and sympathy” (44-5). he relates these roles to the literature of the anti-cruelty and antivivisection movements, proposing that the brontës’ novels may even be considered part of this genre. however, in the worlds of the brontë novels these roles are sometimes blurred and conflated in troubling ways. when the eponymous governess heroine in anne brontë’s agnes grey makes the decision to mercy-kill baby birds so that her charge won’t torture them instead, her violent act is immediately understood, if still disturbing. less forgivable, of course, are the actions of the highly caninized heathcliff (whom kreilkamp thinks was inspired by emily brontë’s dog keeper) as he ricochets from the victim to the inflictor of cruelty and back again in wuthering heights. initially presented to the earnshaw family as a stray and finally seen digging up cathy’s grave, heathcliff’s multiple roles in the “theatre of cruelty” highlight the cyclical nature of violence, as emily brontë surely intended. however, by making the connection between heathcliff and keeper, with whom emily had a notoriously “abusively-loving” relationship much like heathcliff’s and cathy’s, kreilkamp may also be suggesting that emily implicates herself in the very practices of cruelty that she seeks to challenge elsewhere in the novel. while the chapter on the brontës focuses on animals represented in the flesh, so to speak, the next two chapters, on dickens and eliot, respectively, focus largely on different concepts of animality and the anxieties that these engender in the humans defining themselves in contradistinction to “the animal.” drawing on dickens’s haunted descriptions of smithfield market in his novels and household words essays, chapter three, “dying like a dog in dickens,” explores the consequences of being an animal of no special status in victorian england. to be an animal is to be in danger of being nothing but flesh: to be a mere body, then disembodied to the point of becoming michelle m. taylor – the squirrel’s heartbeat 245 nothing but “residue” (a term kreilkamp re-employs throughout his book). in great expectations, a book which kreilkamp suggests is about the “fear of being forgotten or misremembered … a fate that dickens specifically links to the state of being an animal, or of being animalized” (76), the metaphor of doghood is especially salient. he writes: “to be a dog is … to possess and to typify — in a novel deeply concerned with the precariousness of identity — a precarious or threatened identity, an identity falling short of the standard of full-fledged protagonist or even minor character” (76-7). kreilkamp briefly situates the problem of fleeting animal identity alongside specifically literary considerations, including the transition authors like dickens and eliot made from the form of the literary “sketch” to the fully-fledged novel, and the authorial power dickens frequently exercises in killing off his beloved characters like so many stray dogs. the fourth chapter, “middlemarch’s brute life,” ruminates on the influence of the biological sciences on eliot’s novels, which occurs in large part due to her collaborative intellectual life with partner george henry lewes. it argues that this line of thought shapes eliot’s fiction by causing her to reflect on the boundaries of the individual and, in turn, the responsibilities towards others that these boundaries necessitate. relying on a body of textual evidence which employs the language of “absorption” — most famously, the lament at the end of middlemarch that dorothea has been “absorbed into the life of another” (qtd. in kreilkamp 89) — kreilkamp describes how “eliot and lewes are both fascinated by what happens when one life-form is absorbed or subsumed into another, one form incorporated into a larger, more powerful, or more enduring one, a process which raises questions about the boundaries of any individual form — with consequences for the delineating of character” (90). he contends that “being and form cannot or should not be understood apart from an ongoing process and network of affiliation, competition, and struggle for possession of environmental niche” (93), joining a well-established group of scholars seeking to explain darwin’s impact on the victorian novel. in its aforementioned role of delineating eliot’s ethics of sympathy, middlemarch “articulates a vision of the individual being as constituted by its dependency on others, a dependency that is inextricable from a threat of possible absorption into or injury or destruction by another” (93). here, the humane subject is one who learns how to resist the temptation to absorb another, even when it is within his/her/their power to do so. in this light, kreilkamp joins nina auerbach in defense of the rejected maltese puppy, acknowledging that dorothea’s inability to sympathize with it spells trouble for her protagonicity: “the puppy seems to exist in part to reveal to us the potential for violence concealed within her powerful ego” (97). dorothea can humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 246 only see the puppy as a parasitic being, and not one deserving of care. on several occasions kreilkamp writes that the maltese is banished from the novel after dorothea rejects it, but this is not actually the case. sir james offers it to dorothea’s sister celia, who happily accepts and cares for the puppy (and soon, sir james himself). by doing so, she invites comparison with her sister and raises questions about her own potential protagonistic fitness — like so many other characters in the novel, encroaching on dorothea’s territory as protagonist and furthering kreilkamp’s points about competition and the possibilities of absorption. the latter half of the book, comprising the fifth through seventh chapters, turns towards thomas hardy, arthur conan doyle, and olive schreiner and their attempts at representing animals in their novels. by meditating on “the care owed to the weak or minor individual” (132) in far from the madding crowd, chapter five, “using and pitying animals in thomas hardy,” picks up the strains of the previous chapter on middlemarch. though the least developed chapter, this one does offer two fascinating hypotheses about hardy as a novelist: first, that his turn to poetry after jude the obscure was at least in part due to his conclusion that “the form of the novel contained a species-specific logic that could not ultimately be dislodged” (116); and second, that hardy may have viewed the role of author as akin to that of shepherd. kreilkamp initially makes this connection to emphasize the author’s responsibility “of bringing to life and nurturing new creatures in the form of characters” (123), just like gabriel oak nurtures the newborn lambs; but when he later discusses the ironic and sacrificial nature of the pastoral relationship, we are reminded of his earlier suggestion regarding the reason why hardy may have abandoned the novel form: in th[e] scene of the senseless death of nearly all of gabriel oak’s flock, hardy asks us to consider the ultimately sacrificial, carnivorous logic of the pastoral relationship. the shepherd raises and tenderly cares for every animal in his flock, but this may be, in the end, all in the service of a tender piece of meat. (127) like a shepherd raising his sheep to be killed, the author of a realist novel creates animal characters destined to be marginal — if not stoned off like fanny’s “prosthetic” dog then simply forgotten about. in the context of the chapter on dickens, it’s hard to tell which fate is worse. chapter six, “tracking animal agency in conan doyle and hardy,” begins more optimistically in that it reveals how hardy, along with conan doyle, attempted to michelle m. taylor – the squirrel’s heartbeat 247 “transcribe” animal signs — literally, tracks, or hoof-/pawprints — in their novels. distinct from the “translations” of nineteenth-century animal autobiographies, these transcriptions attempt to preserve species difference by representing animal signs with typographical ingenuity (doyle) or hand-drawn sketches (hardy). unfortunately, leslie stephen refused to publish hardy’s drawing of hoofprints and instead “translated hardy’s diagrams back from equine into the usual human prose — in doing so excising one of hardy’s most interesting experiments in dehumanizing … the form of the novel” (147, emphasis original). however, hardy’s wessex maps were later published, as well as his maps of egdon heath in the return of the native. for this reason, the rejection of the horse-hoof diagrams that kreilkamp brings to light here smacks of speciesism. the final chapter, “‘infinite compassion: nonhuman life in schreiner’s the story of an african farm,” is perhaps the book’s richest, as it affords kreilkamp the greatest opportunity to examine literary form and generic tradition. rather than reading african farm as “simply pessimistic or despairing in a naturalist mode” (151) or as a failed bildungsroman, kreilkamp sees in schreiner’s “strange novel” a revised bildungsroman. part of this revision is a celebration of passivity, which is “an openness to experience and to suffering … that abandons some of the prerogatives of human identity for a more receptive proximity to what jacques derrida calls ‘the living in general’” (150). we can witness this shift within multiple character paths as the novel “foils lyndall’s early strivings for powerful (humanist as well as feminist) agency and concludes with waldo’s (but lyndall’s as well) passivity” (150). closely connected to this passivity is an acceptance of ephemerality. though schreiner does much to alter the traditions of the realist novel, in some ways its original conventions, including the ephemeral nature of animal characters, are well-suited to her purposes. “organic ephemerality” is part of the diegetic world of african farm for characters both human and animal. while disappearance is usually only the fate for animal characters, the (human) “stranger” at the beginning of the novel never reappears, a fact which troubled some early readers. similarly, the narrator’s willingness to slip in and out of the perspectives of animal as well as human characters, from the dog doss down to the tarantulas in the rafters, echoes the novel’s general sense of limited temporality (in addition to its obvious interest in opening up narration to the squirrel’s heartbeat). the novel accepts this limited temporality and offers it up as evidence of a level playing field between humans and animals. this is nowhere more apparent than in the final scene, when chickens perch and sleep on the deceased waldo. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 248 minor creatures is remarkable for its attention not only to the animals that are present on the page, but also to the even more minor figurative and metaphorical animals of the victorian novel. kreilkamp has written a book equally foundational for scholars of animal studies, victorian literature, and genre studies — one which itself reads like an engaging narrative. works cited auerbach, nina. “dorothea’s lost dog.” middlemarch in the twenty-first century. karen chase, ed. oxford up, 2006. 87-105. herzog, hal. some we love, some we hate, some we eat: why it’s so hard to think straight about animals. harpercollins, 2011. microsoft word gigliotti-thompson. pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:2 review essay carol gigliotti another word for home roger thompson, no word for wilderness: italy’s grizzlies and the race to save the rarest bears on earth. ashland creek press, 2018. $18.95 (pb), $28.95 (hb). my grandmother sailed with her father, step-mother, and siblings from abruzzo, italy to ellis island, new york in 1908, where she officially immigrated to the us. she was twelve. like a war veteran, she was taciturn about her past, giving us few details about her previous life in italy. perhaps because of that reticence, i have harbored an intense desire to experience and understand the land where she was born. although only 2 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 232 hours by car east of rome, abruzzo is known as the “green lung of italy.” over twothirds of abruzzo’s terrain contains the heart of the apennines mountain range, the rest sloping languorously into the adriatic sea. two of the highest peaks in the apennines are contained within the boundaries of two of the three immense national and regional parks. gran sasso and monti della laga, majella, the national park of abruzzo, and one regional park, the sirente velino, cover 300,000 ha of the abruzzo region. abruzzo has long been involved in protecting its natural heritage by pioneering the idea of conservation. the national park of abruzzo was initiated in 1923 to protect both flora and fauna from extinction. the other large parks mentioned above have been operating since the period between 1989-91 (di gregorio 9-11). within these parks and their surroundings live many unique species, such as the yellow and black orchid, also known as venus’s little shoe, once common throughout europe and parts of asia. while two plants endemic to abruzzo, the apennine edelweiss and the marsican iris, are found only here, the european beech tree found across the continent covers 60% of the three national parks in extensive forests. the griffon vulture, the eurasian lynx, the apennine golden eagle, chamois, and wolf (all subspecies endemic to italy) draw attention to the endangered wild nature of abruzzo (di gregorio 5-9). however, it is the plight of the marsican bear, of whom only 50 are left, that sits at the center of roger thompson’s new book, no word for wilderness. while the iucn classifies brown bears (ursus arctos) globally as a species of least concern, the question of whether these italian bears are a subspecies has become essential. some argue that the marsican bear (ursus arctos marsicanus) is just another brown bear. thompson, however, explains why that needs to change. if the brown bears of abruzzo are to survive and thrive in their homeland, they need to be returned to the subspecies classification they were given a century ago. as thompson writes: “to be correctly classified is to be honored as worthy of attention, and only that special binomial designation can provide a species the fullest protection available. the nomenclature matters because research is deeply wed to it. so is money” (87). it is this directness about the local and global interconnections of money and politics driving extinction that sets thompson’s book apart. if securing the future of a small surviving group of ancient bears in what has been called a backwater region in italy may seem inconsequential to some readers, thompson articulates in factual detail why it is not. similar to other campaigns to save species, some successful, some not, the role of taxonomy looms large in saving the abruzzo bears. the coastal wolves of north america (british columbia and alaska) and close neighbors of the bears of abruzzo, the apennine wolves, have benefited from the subspecies distinction in order to make a carol gigliotti -another word for home 233 case for their place on the endangered species list and the protections that entails. as i was writing this review, a new york times article reported that geneticists have analyzed whole-genome sequences of 32 preserved wild tiger specimens from around the world, finding that instead of two distinct tiger subspecies there are six. the researchers involved in tiger dna sequencing argue, similarly to arguments for the abruzzo bears as a subspecies, that preserving the genetic uniqueness of an endangered species is as important as saving the entire species. just as an individual tiger is different from another individual, one subspecies of tiger is genetically and culturally different from another subspecies. according to the tiger researchers, documenting and saving subspecies helps to preserve the genetic diversity, evolutionary uniqueness, and potential of the species (nuwer). assuming that losing a subspecies does not really matter is not only bad science, but also a sign of disrespect of the species’ uniqueness and the habitat in which they flourish. hardly a helpful attitude towards protecting biodiversity or the contributions individual animals make to that universal manifestation of creativity. thompson points out that people continue to see bears as all the same, when in reality each subspecies of bear has evolved through a symbiotic relationship with the characteristics of their habitat, “as unique as accents in human language” (73). as thompson explains: “all creatures are part of a vast, invisible web of life whose gossamer threads barely hold together life on earth. break too many and the web collapses” (81). science and its classification system have a role to play in convincing people of our dependence on this web of life. thompson maintains, however, not only does science move at the speed of a sloth, species classification is only one part of necessary action needing to be taken to rescue the abruzzo bears, and for that matter, other endangered animals around the world. what is enticing and unusual in a book written by an author with a foot in academia — he is an associate professor at stony brook university and director of the program in writing and rhetoric there — and a foot in popular magazine and book writing is thompson’s detailed first person research on the individuals and groups in italy whose actions work for and against saving the bears. interviews with major players and stakeholders enrich thompson’s arguments concerning the importance of the “race” to save the abruzzo bears. paola cuicci, a large animal biologist, has been pivotal in collecting the data needed to reclassify the bears as a subspecies. as the first researcher to undertake a systematic count of these bears since 1970, even if they were protected before that time and since, cuicci’s work “has proven beyond all doubt that without help, the bears of abruzzo face imminent extinction. without action, they will humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 234 disappear forever” (75). due to the work of cuicci and his fellow biologists, the very distinct qualities of these bears have been documented over the last 10 years. they are smaller in stature, have flatter, wider heads, with flatter molars, are essentially vegetarian, and seem to have evolved into a less aggressive inhabitant of the mountains and forests which they have shared with the abruzzesi. much of the information emerging about these bears is new to the scientific community and that will help make the case for a critically endangered status and, as thompson insists, for what is the real goal of cuicci and his associates: to make a change in humans’ attitude towards the bears. cuicci has only been able to gather all this documentation in the last 10 years, after the director of the abruzzo national park, the geographic epicenter for the bears in abruzzo, was fired due to scandal. thompson devotes several chapters to franco tassi’s reign as “king” of the abruzzo national park. tassi’s role in initiating a conservation movement in abruzzo as an early, though now outdated, model for national parks was important. native wolves, for instance, grew in number during his term and he was involved in the movement to put aside 10% of the land in italy for protected areas. italy reached that percentage in the 1990s, and today rests at 11%. however, by forbidding any outside scientists into the park to gather data on the abruzzo bears, he stopped any new research such as cuicci’s until his firing. thompson sees tassi as a symbol of the political will that must exist in order for species such as the abruzzo bear to thrive. it is not enough to reclassify a species in order to recognize how few are left. it takes a drive and passion to change the circumstances under which the species is slowly disappearing. while tassi did not do that for the bears, he helped put in place the foundations of what is needed for it to happen. perhaps the most upsetting and formidable current challenge to providing a safe place for these bears, and many other wild animals, to survive comes from a source so surprising its explanation makes total sense. thompson describes how this threat relies on invisibility, silence, and shadows. it feasts on inaction, creeping into daily lives without recognition. it grows through a subtle play of power that seems innocuous, if not utterly harmless, and it knows that as long as it stays out of sight, it will grow too large for any single person to stand against it.... (121) if this sounds slightly ghoulish, it is. he is referring to the italian mafia’s newest business venture: the beef industry. in sicily and calabria, the mafia has exploited what carol gigliotti -another word for home 235 is called urso civico, or the civic use of public land. limited private use of public land is allowed by italian law, usually in the form of subsistence farming, including a few sheep or cows. in abruzzo, the camorra, a mafia clan, has begun to take over public land, particularly the national and regional parks. “with deep wallets and even deeper savvy in negotiating gaps in the law, the camorra, according to many in the area, has taken to livestock herding. the result has been devastating for the land and its wildlife. especially abruzzo’s bears” (148). if one wonders how this could take place without pushback from the authorities, as well as the people of italy, one only needs to read of how the mafia employs burning cats thrown into the woods to start fires in the forests, makes assassination attempts on the directors of the parks, and poisons wildlife, including the bears, to place the risks of pushing back into perspective. while thompson says seeing large herds of cattle grazing on public lands in the us would be unusual, i point to the enormous number of wildlife killed legally in the us by its own agencies, particularly wildlife services, an arm of the agricultural services. in 2017 wildlife services killed 2.3 million wild animals primarily to benefit the agricultural industry, which now grazes large herds of cattle in national parks, forests, and protected lands in the us. if the mafia use intimidation to demand the wild be bent to their agricultural business needs, then the differences in many cases between the mafia and the us wildlife services’ rationales for killing animals are only semantic. livestock grazing occurs on some 260 million acres of us federal lands, including national parks, and that number is growing under the trump administration (wuerthner). across the globe, protected areas and wildlife are being overtaken by commerce and greed. the public lands of abruzzo and the united states are simply two of those places. thompson’s grasp of the intricacies of the situation in abruzzo is formidable. for instance, he explains how the decline of the maremmas, magnificent native dogs of abruzzo, is a powerful image of what we are giving up. for thompson, the maremmas are both symbol and symptom of the end of the pax romana, a tradition of peace between nature and man in italy. as superb protectors of their flocks, maremmas have stood as guardians of that peace so the shepherds of italy could willingly relinquish a certain number of their flock (often already dead) to scavenging by wolves and bears, thereby allowing the “nature tax,” another tradition of abruzzo. the shepherds understood that sharing the land with animals, such as bears, was a tax they paid for working the land. the abruzzo bears, in over 1,000 years of co-existence, have never been reported to have attacked a human. the maremmas have helped to keep this peace. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 236 the dog embodies a long-standing peace, forged over generations and paid for by offerings of goodwill, and it represents long-standing pride in what is possible if humans work with animals and not against them. they represent balance, even if a tentative one, and their pervasiveness is sign of health in the region. (159) but thompson adds, “yet today the maremmas are declining in abruzzo.” this is a fascinating book, one that offers a microscopic view of the macro issues of species extinction: a unique animal in a unique ecosystem, the human actions that rupture the habitat, the safety, and the ability of a particular species to thrive and reproduce. it considers solutions on many fronts, some workable, others more illusory. but, in its thoughtful, beautifully written, and carefully documented narrative of the bears of abruzzo and their plight, we realize we are faced with similar choices wherever we are. in other words, it is up to all of us, all over the planet, to step up and face the realization that everything we do is a choice either for animals, or against them. wilderness is really another word for home. works cited di gregorio, luciano. abruzzo. 2nd edition. brandt travel guides, 2013. nuwer, rachel. “divide and preserve: reclassifying tigers to help save them from extinction.” the new york times, 25 oct. 2018. online. accessed 25 oct. 2018. thompson, roger. no word for wilderness: italy’s grizzlies and the race to save the rarest bears on earth. ashland creek press, 2018. wuerthner, george. “livestock’s impact on wilderness.” the wildlife news. online. accessed 3 oct. 2018. zoe hughes -at least as good as human h u m a n i m a l i a 12:1 reviews zoe hughes at least as good as human caroline hovanec, animal subjects: literature, zoology, and british modernism. cambridge, uk: cambridge up, 2018. 228 pp. $99.99 (hc). caroline hovanec’s debut book, animal subjects, opens with a review of the 1924 london aquarium by then “up-and-coming writer” virginia woolf (1). hovanec sees this review as an emblematic example of the close relation between literature and science in the heyday of darwin, when subjectivity was less begrudgingly extended to nonhuman animals. in a provocative introduction, she eschews the pervasive “‘two cultures’ narrative” -the idea that, by the twentieth century, “the sciences and arts had humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 262 split into two mutually incomprehensible, indeed mutually hostile, discourses” - painting a picture of intellectual spheres in enthusiastic dialogue, united by their interest in animal mental life, and their respect for each other’s methods and work (13). in the post-darwin sciences, household names sigmund freud and william james chipped away at the human-animal divide, suggesting, respectively, that humans were subject to animalistic impulses and consciousness was an adaptation, present in some form in all animals, and not an exclusively human gift. hovanec credits james and kantian science (modern physics and biology, which were predicated on relativity) with her literary subjects’ interest in non-human experience and perspectives. and she identifies a similar commitment to relativity in animal ecologist charles elton, comparative psychologist c. lloyd morgan, popular scientists julian huxley and j. b. s. haldane, and ornithologist henry eliot howard -all of them in frequent communication (and habitual collaboration) with modernist authors (12). hovanec argues that their work was invaluable to modern literary thought and vice versa - literature furnished modern scientists with valuable tools for apprehending animal life: “empathy, intuition, speculation,” etc. (17). the story that she tells, of literature and science intermingled, can be read as a challenge to the idea that there are no animals in modernism, just animal metaphors and specters. for hovanec, careful and caring observation constitutes legitimate inquiry. each of hovanec’s four chapters centers on a literary author, a scientist, and an idea or commitment that animated their writing about nonhuman animals. in chapter 1, “h.g. wells, charles elton, and the struggle for existence,” hovanec identifies in h.g. wells a fear, but also a kind of excitement, around the human inability to control nature. she characterizes wells as a decadent and bio-pessimist, who attributed cultural decline to the darwinian struggle for existence. on the one hand, she writes, wells took pleasure in the ability of natural forces (geologic time, animal predators, masses, etc.) to dominate, and humble, powerful men. on the other hand, wells’s late fiction registers a concern about the suffering that is rampant in nature -and a concomitant desire to bring nature under man’s managerial control. hovanec sees a similar tension in the work of ecologist charles elton, who sought to control natural agents, but also doubted that humans could do so, and who was fascinated by, and creative in his treatment of, fluctuating animal populations. in chapter 2, “aldous huxley, henry eliot howard, and the observational ethic,” hovanec suggests that huxley’s thin descriptions of animals speak not to his human exceptionalism or reluctance to attribute subjectivity to animals, but rather to his “ethics of nonviolence” (81). like his brother julian, the ethologist, aldous was curious about, zoe hughes -at least as good as human 263 and attentive to, the similarities between human and animal behavior. and though he refrained from publicly aligning himself with the anti-vivisection movement (partly, hovanec implies, out of concern for his self-image), his writing links human and animal suffering and “deform[s]” the people who cause it (91). hovanec contrasts what she calls “the vivisectionist’s gaze” with the ethological: making an example out of ornithologist henry eliot howard, who toggled between thick and thin description to honor his birds’ subjectivity and also the enigma of their minds (102). by hovanec’s account, huxley shared these inclinations -toward observation, against “overinterpretation” or speculation (108). he found in ethology what he found lacking in vivisection and behaviorism -a respect for animals’ unknowable, but presumably rich, interior lives and worlds. in the chapter that follows, “romantic ethologies: d.h. lawrence and julius huxley,” hovanec considers a different perspective on anthropomorphism. in the works of d.h. lawrence and julian huxley (their differences of opinion, particularly around evolution and animal sociality, notwithstanding), she identifies a shared romanticism, an “understanding of animals as feeling, expressive beings,” and a belief that we can intuit, or otherwise apprehend, their behaviors (124). lawrence sees in animals a “vitality” and “shimmery energy” that cannot be explained by natural or sexual selection (138). we can read similarly human accounts of animal behavior by huxley, who believed that psychological explanations were not just preferable to physiological explanations, but were, indeed, “more scientific” (126). he and lawrence allowed that animals had the capacity for self-expression and play, and used animal stories to imagine alternatives to traditional marriages (in the grebe, huxley found a model for a committed and genderequitable relationship; in the goat and tortoise, lawrence saw a surrender to primal, masculine urges). hovanec is not uncritical about what she calls “empathic epistemology” (128) -it is easy, she explains, to misunderstand animal behaviors and the stakes of misreading (play in particular) are high (157). she allows, however, that anthropomorphism can be an act of generosity, demonstrating our respect for, and willingness to take instruction from, our animal companions (29). in her final chapter, “bloomsbury’s comparative psychology: bertrand russell, julian huxley, j. b. s. haldane, virginia woolf,” hovanec interrogates competing accounts of animals’ sensory lives. at the turn of the twentieth century, comparative psychologists asked questions about animal perspectives and knowledge, figuring the human vantage point as one among many. the philosopher bertrand russell “zoomorphiz[ed]” humans, positing that human and animal worlds alike were shaped by arbitrary sensations (172). the biologists julian huxley and j. b. s. haldane wrote essays in which humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 264 they inhabited the alien perspectives of ants, bees, barnacles, and dogs. like them, virginia woolf used animal narration to undermine the things that we, as humans, take for granted, but she also used it to develop new aesthetic forms and to register concerns about “the truth-value of what passes for knowledge” (180). in early works, she labors to grant readers access to a “primitivist ... animal experience”; she ironizes this picture of animal cognition (which we see in comparative psychology and also in lawrence) in flush (185). but even as woolf suggests that speculating about animals is a losing endeavor, she concurs with huxley and haldane that it is necessary to unsettle the idea of perfect human knowledge and to expand the locus of ethical considerability. in what reads as an addendum to this chapter, hovanec submits that cognitive psychology lives on in animal studies and cognitive ethology, where “speculation, empathy, and ... fiction” are not just sanctioned but valued as interpretive tools (195). in a short but sweet conclusion, she brings us back to the present and the ecological crisis that present-day scientists confront. at the beginning of the book, hovanec suggests that curiosity about animals arises from and reinforces care. she makes a similar point in the conclusion, in which she observes that, “in contemporary popular science discourse,” our “fascination with animal life coincides with a growing recognition of its fragility” (196). in writing about tardigrades, she sees a wellsian tribute to resilience; in writing about octopuses, a huxleyan reminder that animals are strange and unknowable; in writing about whales, a lawrencian tale of animal artistry; in writing about mantis shrimp, a woolfian refrain that the human’s perceptual sphere is one among many as spectacular. the modernists’ animal subjects feature also in popular science, where the hope seems to be that they will help us to check our human exceptionalism. hovanec is the first to acknowledge that “there are no guarantees that [the stories of modernist literature and science] will ‘work’” in this, or any other, way (204). yet she is excited by “the possibility” that animal subjects will “help story a more attentive, more loving relationship with the world that houses all our animal worlds” - and ends on this uplifting note (204). hovanec shines in her treatment of modernist authors. her critical summaries are lively, her analyses incisive, and the sheer number of works that she engages, in depth in each chapter, is astonishing: in chapter 1, on wells and elton, she closely reads thomas h. huxley’s evolution and ethics (1893-4), elton’s animal ecology (1927) and ecology of animals (1933), and wells’s “bio-optimism” (1895), “on extinction” (1893), “zoological retrogression” (1891), “vision of the past” (1887), “aepyornis island” (1894), “in the avu observatory” (1894), “valley of spiders” (1903), “empire of the ants” (1905), “sea raiders” (1896), and men like gods (1923), loosely in that order. the zoe hughes -at least as good as human 265 scope of hovanec’s inquiry furthers her argument that animals (fleshy, not symbolic) loomed large in the minds of many literary modernists. and, further to my point about the modernist close readings, it enables her to draw out the tensions in individual canons or oeuvres. we glimpse inside the minds of authors and scientists as they glimpsed inside the minds of their animal subjects -observing their (often perplexing) moves, trying to make them hang together. hovanec’s attention to inconsistency is one of the chief pleasures of the book; her ability to explain it without explaining it away one of its chief merits. also of note is hovanec’s account of early twentieth-century scientific and literary exchange. she addresses her methodology at length in the introduction, where she gestures towards social and professional connections between authors and scientists, and justifies focusing on britain by reference to a “common cultural context” (particularly of science) (15). hovanec takes issue both with the notion of “a common zeitgeist” or “unitary spirit of the age” and “the opposite extreme, a strict empiricism that allows the critic to posit only those connections ... that are clearly and unambiguously demarcated in the historical record” (16). following gillian beer, she assumes that there are “‘loose accords’ across intellectual fields” -restricting her analysis to “figures who were linked by one or two degrees in a common intellectual network” but not “limit[ing] [her] analysis of the traffic of ideas among them only to claims that [might] be proven via concrete historical evidence” (16). it is sufficient for hovanec’s argument that there is science in modernist literary texts, and fiction in modern scientific texts: each of her chapters centers on an author and scientist, who are presented as like minds or spirits and not in a hierarchy of influence. with each authorscientist pairing, the reader gains a framework for thinking, and ultimately discoursing, about animal subjectivity. the reader may wish that hovanec said more, in parting, about the power of stories to generate action or change. the tales she relates about tardigrades, octopuses, and so on show that “modernist visions remain captivating” but not why they are important - what they stand to achieve and how, or by what means (196). it would be “naive,” hovanec asserts, “to overstate the efficacy of animal stories ... for creating a more ethical way of living with other kinds of beings,” but “it would [also] be naive to think that any ethical or political action [could] happen without the sense of meaning and value that narrative brings” (203). she locates modernist animal stories “somewhere between” darwin’s re-enchantments and thom van dooren’s bird studies, but does not elaborate, or build out that spectrum. her conclusion leaves readers wondering about the role that modernist stories will (or even can) fill in the crisis moment (204). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 266 ultimately, however, animal subjects is a book that makes powerful interventions in literary history, modernism, and animal studies. not only does it challenge the “‘two cultures’ narrative,” showing modernist authors to be engaged with animal science - and vice versa: animal scientists invested in the epistemic value of characterization and speculation -it deconstructs the animal studies version of that narrative whereby there are no animals in modernist literature. of all of the types of animal descriptions that w. h. auden catalogues (“literary animals,” he writes, “may be ... the subjects of fables ... the vehicles of similes ... ‘allegorical emblems,’” and so on) (23), hovanec specifies that she is most interested in the ones that are engendered “by the poet’s interest and affection” (28). and, indeed, it is one of the reader’s major takeaways that caring about animals, and respecting their autonomy, doesn’t require us to depict them in any particular way. sometimes careful observation generates an arachnid swarm. other times it generates a mechanistic description or its converse, a human projection. all of these representations have their shortcomings - but all of them, in their way, are subjectifying. to borrow a final turn of phrase from hovanec, they are products of the kind of “curiosity” that “[assumes] that animals are subjects worth getting to know” (31). katie warczak -challenging and changing humanity’s absoluteness h u m a n i m a l i a 12:1 reviews katie warczak challenging and changing humanity’s absoluteness megan h. glick, infrahumanisms: science, culture, and the making of modern non/personhood. durham, nc: duke up, 2018. 271 pp. $99.95, hc, $26.95, pb. historically, animality has been seen as something to define humanity against rather than with. animal studies as a field has contributed significantly to breaking down this binary and megan h. glick’s infrahumanisms: science, culture, and the making of modern non/personhood adds an important new element to the conversation through its emphasis on the titular term “infrahuman.” coined by robert mearnes yerkes, the founding father of primatology, the term “infrahuman” was originally applied to primates considered to be the evolutionary missing link between humans and non humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 256 humans. glick, however, uses the term as a “framework from which to consider how the management of the human/nonhuman boundary has impacted a wide array of biopolitical phenomena” given the term’s historical use to denote that which exists on the boundary of the human and non-human (3). such an approach is incredibly valuable because, although the social construction of sexual, racial, gender, disability, and other identities has been acknowledged, human identity remains largely biological and absolute in academic circles. infrahumanisms usefully challenges this absoluteness by highlighting how infrahuman figures such as children, primates, aliens, zoonotic diseases, obesity, and pigs shaped the definition of humanity throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. while the constantly shifting focal points and analyses can make glick’s monograph feel disjointed, there is no question that infrahumanisms convincingly makes a case for humanity being “a historical production that shifts according to time and place” (9). for a text with so much variety, glick does an excellent job of maintaining clarity throughout the monograph. infrahumanisms is unquestionably an academic work, but glick ensures readers can follow the text’s arguments even if they are unfamiliar with animal studies, science studies, critical race theory, posthumanism, or any of the other critical schools with which the book engages. this clarity is ensured through the provision of clear definitions for terms such as “infrahuman,” as well as explanations of concepts like michel foucault’s biopower and giorgio agamben’s bare life. beyond providing definitions, glick is heavily invested in summary, as at the start of each of the book’s three sections, the text provides an overview of that part’s main arguments, helping to foster greater comprehension when reading the two individual chapters that make up each section. the first part of the book, “bioexpansionism, 1900s-1930s,” represents a strong start for the monograph, as glick effectively highlights how children and primates affected narratives about humanity in the early twentieth century. as glick explains, the concept of the infrahuman took shape linguistically and culturally “at precisely the moment in which the hegemony of modern, empirical scientific discourse became established, existing as the remainder of a more ambiguous past” (26). two of these so-called remainders are children and primates. culturally connected to a “primitive” past through their association with the animal welfare movement, children’s transformation into adults came to be seen as a microcosm of the larger human evolutionary process. to help foster “correct” evolution, creations such as the jungle gym and boy scouts encouraged children to engage with a “primal” past via play and nature while also encouraging them to “internalize[e] a panoptical gaze, a sense of always watching, katie warczak -challenging and changing humanity’s absoluteness 257 seeing, and attempting to know – and of being watched, seen, and known” (47). this “correct” brand of evolution helped reinforce eugenic and evolutionary hierarchies at the time by suggesting that only with proper development could children evolve into adults and become fully human. of course, as glick explains in the second chapter, there was a racial element to this becoming human rather than infrahuman. charles darwin’s evolutionary theories induced cultural anxieties about humanity in the nineteenth century, especially about the prospect of different races sharing a common ancestor. as a result, the “search for a western ‘white’ primordial ancestor was critical” for upholding the racial hierarchies of the early twentieth century (37). most contemporary scholars suggest that any association with a primate or africa at this time was indicative of racial otherness, but glick usefully challenges this reductionism. early primatologists did not see all primates as the same and theorized the more “evolved” chimpanzee was the “white” african ancestor whereas the larger, more “primitive” gorilla was the “black” african ancestor (65). such a distinction is one previously uncommented upon and has the potential to complicate interpretations of literary works such as edgar rice burroughs’s tarzan of the apes (1912) and franz kafka’s “a report to an academy” (1917), both of which involve the primates discussed in this chapter. glick’s historical reading of children and primates as infrahuman thus has significant implications for the study of both moving forward, especially in the fields of animal studies and posthumanism. as this section highlights, despite its supposed absoluteness, new thinking about children’s evolution and the “humanity” of certain primates at the start of the twentieth century strongly influenced who was considered human and what it took for one to qualify as such. the next section, “extraterrestriality, 1940s-1970s,” takes a big leap from the first in terms of time and subject matter. skipping to the end of world war ii, this section aims “to illuminate how the revision of the human/posthuman body transformed conceptualizations of human autonomy, individuality, and free will in the postwar period” by examining the relationship between holocaust images and alien sightings as well as the rise of molecular biology and genetic engineering (82-83). while infrahumanism is still present in this section, it does not dominate the conversation as it does in “bioexpansionism, 1900s-1930s.” in fact, the concept primarily manifests in relation to glick’s arguments about the links between the photos of holocaust survivors and alien sightings. in an unusual but convincing move, infrahumanisms argues alien narratives were inspired by the omnipresence of holocaust photos because alien sightings only became prominent post-wwii and the small gray aliens supposedly humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 258 spotted bore a strong physical resemblance to emaciated holocaust survivors (92). the defamiliarization of the human body and its association with an extraterrestrial other does gesture, as glick acknowledges, toward the infrahuman, but this section is more concerned with the posthuman. the arguments linking holocaust survivors, aliens, nuclear fallout, and genetic engineering are thought-provoking and will be of use to posthuman scholars, but this section’s connections to the concept of the infrahuman could come through more strongly. “extraterrestriality, 1940s-1970s” also stays on the theoretical plane of posthumanism and infrahumanism despite the active identity controversies and debates taking place during this section’s timeframe. the fourth chapter touches lightly on the civil rights movement, but does not examine how black, women, or other activists responded to links to animality, nor does it explore how such connections affected movements that sought to extend equal rights to minority groups. the arguments made in the second section, therefore, while interesting, fail to fully connect with the text’s overall analysis or to offer an examination of how, culturally if not formally, infrahumanist narratives affected groups considered to be on the human/non-human boundary during the midtwentieth century. though not the focus of glick’s monograph, this lack of attention to infrahumanism’s implications is out of place in a discussion of the era that saw the rise of a myriad of rights-based movements that had to grapple with the effects of infrahumanist narratives. this lack of connection between the subjects being analyzed and the effects of infrahumanist narratives on those subjects extends into the last section, “interiority, 1980s-2010s,” particularly in the discussion of the aids epidemic (chapter 5). chapter 5 offers an excellent overview of the history of aids and discusses the “forms of xenophobia and ethno-racism [that] also came to shape the discourse and politics surrounding the aids crisis” once the disease was linked to africa, but these racial discourses are not fully analyzed (149). the racist reactions of western nations, especially in relation to the idea that africans first contracted aids by consuming monkey meat, are heavily discussed, as is the long-lasting association between africa and deadly diseases, but again activism and pushback are left out of the chapter. the term “infrahuman” is also largely absent, which makes this chapter feel disconnected not only from those directly affected by the prejudiced rhetoric surrounding the aids epidemic, but also from the overall purpose of the book. the final chapter on obesity and xenotransplantation gets infrahumanisms back on track with its discussion of how humans are becoming like pigs through increasing rates of katie warczak -challenging and changing humanity’s absoluteness 259 obesity and also how pigs are becoming human through their use as vessels for growing human organs destined for transplantation. pigs are a controversial cultural creature, and any animal studies scholar wrestling with the complexities of porcine portrayals in american culture will benefit from reading this last chapter. as glick points out, pigs are both associated with blackness and obesity, which has consequences for the human communities with which they are associated. whereas previous chapters fall short in terms of examining the effects of cultural assumptions on the communities they are based in, chapter six does address some of these issues. for instance, glick points out that obesity is more pervasive in low-income and black communities and that specific laws are designed to penalize these groups, including categorizing obese children as abused, which, in turn, legally validates the removal of those children from their families (189). such a thoughtful examination of this particular situation, along with the ethical and infrahuman implications of xenotransplantation, makes the final chapter a strong one, but it also highlights some of the weaknesses of previous sections, particularly the inattention to the effects of infrahuman status on those who inhabit this identity or who might in the future as obesity rates in the u.s. continue to rise. the first two chapters and the final one in infrahumanisms will be of use to animal studies scholars examining children, primates, pigs, and their links to humanity or infrahumanity. the other chapters will no doubt be of use to those studying science fiction, the cold war, and zoonotic diseases, but the disparities in usefulness speak to the book’s disjointedness. infrahumanism is supposedly the connecting thread between all the chapters, but once readers get past the first section, this term is largely dropped and the cohesiveness of the monograph falls with it. there is no question about the value of infrahumanisms’ content, to be clear, but trying to contain so much in six chapters that span 110 years and move from children to primates to extraterrestrials to genetic engineering to zoonotic diseases to obesity to xenotransplantation necessitates some jumps in argument and subject that the book does not effectively bridge. clearer arguments about the connections between these different instances of infrahumanism and their consequences for those subject to this classification would have helped tie the sections together more cohesively. the book would have also benefited from a more sustained engagement with race and disability studies. there are numerous books in both fields that link animality to disability, race, or both and while glick mentions in the introduction that infrahumanisms “address[es] states of personhood that are often not formally stripped of political rights or inclusivity but nonetheless experience forms of de facto cultural and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 260 political exclusion based on differential conditions of embodiment and identity, including race, gender, sexuality, disability, and disease status,” these identities’ links to animality or infrahumanity are rarely discussed in detail (12). in particular, strengthening the racial analysis would have improved not only the monograph’s argument, but also its cohesiveness given that this identity element is omnipresent in infrahumanisms, but rarely fully considered. glick’s monograph can be a jolting read from time to time, but it remains an important work of scholarship in the fields of animal studies and posthumanism. it introduces a useful new term to both fields and firmly establishes species categories as at least partly socially constructed rather than exclusively biologically determined. if there is one thing consistent throughout infrahumanisms, it is change. not only does the subject matter change significantly from chapter to chapter, but the definition of the human does as well, effectively proving glick’s thesis that this supposedly stable category is open to inevitable expansion and alteration. boria sax -shared creation of a not-so-human world h u m a n i m a l i a 12:1 reviews boria sax shared creation of a not-so-human world jocelyne porcher and jean estebanez, eds., animal labor: a new perspective on human-animal relations. bleilefeld, germany: transcript verlag, 2020. 200 pp. $87.49 (hb). relationships with animals are difficult, often just about impossible, to explain to those who do not share them. birdwatching is among the most popular recreations in britain and the united states, yet many people find it utterly bizarre. “sure, i like birds...,” they may think, “... but what is the point of all those crazy lists?” hunters at times describe their activity as an ecstatic union with the natural world, and some vegans talk in boria sax -shared creation of a not-so-human world 237 similar terms about giving up meat. after several years as a rather perplexed observer, i have concluded that all parties are generally sincere. there is very little dialogue among them because we lack the conceptual tools, and consequently an adequate vocabulary, to discuss them. it is common among many animal activists to make little or no distinction between animal husbandry and industrial farming. on one level, this is simply a historical mistake. while it had a few predecessors in the hatcheries of ancient egypt and the henhouses of rome, industrial farming is a modern phenomenon, in its more extreme forms a historically very recent one. centralized abattoirs began in napoleonic france. victorian breeders altered varieties of cows and pigs to provide the maximum amount of meat in the shortest time. herds of cattle greatly increased in size when the american midwest was opened to settlers at the end of the civil war. but the greatest push towards industrialization of animal husbandry only began around the end of world war ii with the development of the modern broiler chicken. whatever our political and social views may be, we are just about all products of capitalism. that institution has not only formed us but also the institutions that govern our lives to a point where it is difficult to imagine anything else in either the past or the future. it takes not only knowledge but a considerable effort of imagination as well to conceive of human-animal relations in the pre-capitalist, pre-industrial world. that is why it is not surprising that people may see traditional agriculture as an early version of industrial farming. jocelyne porcher has argued for decades that the two are entirely different phenomena in terms of both their goals and organization. the essays in animal labor develop a key concept, named in the title, for making this distinction. to some extent, the authors in the volume take the concept of “labor” articulated by marx and apply it to animals, though they do not share marx’s enthusiasm for capitalist productivity. our word “work” comes from the old english and retains something close to its original meaning, though the epithet “worker” suggests a lack of status. the common synonym, used in the title of this volume, is “labor” (“labour” in british english). this goes back through the old french to the latin labāre meaning “to slip,” suggesting stumbling under a burden. we speak of a woman giving birth as “in labor,” which suggests both pain and promise. the french synonym travail comes from the latin trepaliare, meaning “to torture.” used in both english and french, travail suggests a painful and laborious effort. the generally negative connotations of these words that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 238 have made people reluctant to extend the concept of work to animals, but porcher and her associates use the term in an overwhelmingly positive sense. porcher and jean estebanez explain in their introductory chapter entitled “animal labor” that work is a shared activity that is structured by rules and imperatives around some sort of purpose. it has a directional quality, which distinguishes it from games, but its significance is by no means confined to a single goal. in the process, it can create meanings, relationships, values, and dignity, as well as alienation and humiliation (21). though porcher and estebanez do not explicitly say so, “work” as they use the term seems to refer to the communal creation by human beings and other creatures of a shared world. the main argument of animal labor is that this shared endeavor can produce kinds of intimacy and understanding between human beings and animals that cannot be achieved in any other way. contemporary pets are usually exempted from any work beyond perhaps offering companionship to human beings. this could lead to an impoverishment of the relationship for all parties. perhaps we are afflicting animals with the feelings of purposelessness that have pervaded human civilization throughout the modern era. according to porcher and estabanez, “work is the primary source of our relations with animals, and the motor that has driven the process of domestication. our relations with animals are not primarily founded in domination ties, but in the freedom offered by shared work” (24). perhaps since our emergence as a species, or group of species, humankind has, in other words, been defined by reciprocal relations with other animals. the boundaries are marked by intersubjectivity, as humans and animals act according to understandings that are often not articulated. as animals involved in activities such as farming and building are gradually replaced by machines, animals as food are replaced by substitutes such as in vitro meat, and animal pets are replaced by robotic or digital substitutes, what happens to human identity? it is impossible to predict. the other major theoretical essay in the book is “from desolation to the creation of a common world” by estelle deléage. she argues that prior to the modern world the perception of time and space was experiential. both were in practice generally measured in terms of tasks achieved, in other words by labor. this changed with the manufacture of watches in the eighteenth century. time became a scale according to which labor was measured. the demand for ever greater productivity took precedence boria sax -shared creation of a not-so-human world 239 over, and began to overwhelm, all other values (148-9). deléage concludes that, “in industrial agriculture where ‘animal production’ occurs, human — and animal — work has been reduced to an ephemeral and perishable activity, which must constantly be renewed” (157). rather than generating or reaffirming values and relationships, work itself becomes a means, as well as an object, of consumption. the other essays in the book explore practical consequences of these ideas. in “elmo and paro” by porcher, the author argues that, due to the absence of shared subjectivity, her concept of labor does not apply to robotic or digital pets. in “horses in the laboratory,” porcher and sophie nicod discuss how working with horses involves constant reciprocity and develops new sensitivities for all parties. in “are screen animals actors?” estebanez, porcher, and julie doune argue that animals in film and related media are clearly engaged in work, in part because their careers involve the trajectory of professionalization, specialization, and retirement. it also involves simulation and play as the activity of their human counterparts. in “for a new conservation paradigm,” nicolas lainé looks at the social role of working animals in india and east asian countries. sébastien mouret analyzes the intimacy and reciprocity in relations between seeing-eye dogs and the blind in “guide dogs.” in “the wolf and the patou dog,” porcher and elisabeth lécrivain argue that canids do not necessarily forgo freedom in domestication. life in the wild is not, contrary to what is often supposed, one of absolute freedom, since wolves and other animals are constrained not only by the struggle for survival but also the social structure of the pack. the situation in domestication may involve sacrifices but it also opens new goals and opportunities for accomplishment. that theme is elaborated in more specific contexts in “military and police dogs” by mouret, porcher, and gaelle mainix. finally, in “draft horses in vinticulture,” chloé mulier and hanna müller argue for the reintroduction of draft animals, in place of machines, in french vineyards. running through these essays is an assumption that work is characteristic of the human realm, and this is one point on which i think there is room for further research and analysis. should the building of nests by birds or dams by beavers be considered work? what about cooperative hunting practiced by many animals such as wolves and harris hawks? what about cooperative activity across lines of species, for example when various small birds work together to mob an owl? the honeyguide, a bird of central africa, has developed a relationship with human beings, where it leads them to source of honey in return for a share of the find. the bird also has developed an analogous relationship with badgers. which, if any, of these various relationships should we consider “work”? if it turns out that what the authors in this volume refer to as “work” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 240 is an extension of cooperative activity among many species in meadows and forests, that would not greatly impact most of their analysis except to place it in a broader perspective. some american readers may find the continental style of argument, with its relatively high level of abstraction, hard to get used to. i have found very similar sentiments expressed in many conversations that i have had with sheep farmers and shepherds in the northeastern united states, who work closely not only with sheep but also guard dogs and guard lamas. in less abstract, though sometimes poetic, language, they speak of how traditional farming puts them more closely in touch with natural rhythms of life and death. animal labor, however, provides a more sophisticated defense of traditional farming, as well as other employment of animals, than anything i have found in the anglo-american world. courtney wennerstrom -sensibility and the human-animal bond h u m a n i m a l i a 12:1 reviews courtney wennerstrom sensibility and the human-animal bond katherine m. quinsey, ed. animals and humans: sensibility and representation, 1650-1820. oxford university studies in the enlightenment.voltaire foundation, 2017. 353 pp. ₤75.00 at its best, scholarship not only presses against traditional philosophical, ethical, legal, medical, moral, literary, and historical frameworks — thereby reimaging and reinventing trite discourses that no longer serve us — but opens up more meaningful ways of experiencing the world. expanding the breadth and scope of scholarship on our relationship with non-human animals, as a means of approaching our current ecological and humanitarian crises, is a particular strength of this rigorous, thoughtful, and ambitious collection of essays. as a whole, this volume explores how eighteenthcentury naturalists, activists, moral philosophers, painters, novelists, and poets offered scathing critiques of speciesism and ontological hierarchies; interrogated the cartesian humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 272 fallacy that animals are machines that cannot feel or reason; and pushed back against common cultural perceptions of animals as abject or other. despite the varying historical moments under examination, this book insists, repeatedly and compellingly, that acknowledging the power of the human-animal bond is fundamental to our understanding of what it means to be human and alive. as katherine m. quinsey asserts, the chapters in this volume “remind us human-animal relationship is as old as humanity itself, intuitive and instinctive” so that “we keep returning to this subject, as a place we have always known, to find ourselves” (288). with mutual epistemological recognition as their premise — combined with a desire to “challeng[e] current assumptions of sentimental writing [...] as pure anthropomorphism” (11) — these essays investigate how the eighteenth century created space for imaginative empathy while imagining possibilities to recognize animals as unique, irreplaceable beings. in doing so, these essays demonstrate the critical importance of this period in setting the stage for contemporary animal advocates and ecologists to unequivocally declare that any civil and moral society depends upon the ethical treatment of nature, the environment, and non-human animals. animals and humans, which spans 170 years, is organized thematically rather than chronologically. the first two chapters focus on the ways that animals, specifically whales and elephants, straddled ambivalent attitudes at the heart of british imperialism — paradoxically positioned as fetishized cultural objects, independent subjects, christlike and mythical creatures, inexhaustible suppliers of ambergris and ivory, and empathetic and moral beings simultaneously. the rest of the book is similarly structured, with several essays in a row devoted to unveiling the occasionally subtle and often overt critiques eighteenth-century thinkers made against very specific brands of human exceptionalism and speciesism, including concepts of anthropocentric teleology and human-centered models of the natural world. as these scholars demonstrate, eighteenth-century thinkers posed existential questions, such as whether animals have immortal souls or a right to happiness; how the rampant persecution of living beings epitomizes the fall; whether animals possess language; where the humananimal bond might provide a pathway to sensibility; the ethical implications of consuming animal flesh; and what shared sentience would look like. many also decried the cognitive dissonance implicit in committing violence against creatures who mesmerize and transfix us — and in whom we often see reflections of ourselves. throughout this collection, beloved canonical figures -including james thomson, alexander pope, anna letitia barbauld, william wilberforce, thomas gainsborough, arthur o. lovejoy, john aikin, and jeremy bentham — emerge as early animal and environmental advocates who highlight just how deeply the injustices of slavery, courtney wennerstrom -sensibility and the human-animal bond 273 imperialism, class hierarchies, misogyny, and animal exploitation are intertwined. the significance of uncovering a shared sympathetic identification with animals and ecological consciousness among these influential thinkers cannot be overstated. in these ways, the scholars in this collection reveal an early eighteenth century understanding of a kind of proto-intersectionality — that is, an awareness that white imperialist heteropatriarchy controls and brutalizes animal, black, impoverished, and female bodies for its own pleasure and profit. more importantly, there is concern that abuse towards any one of these bodies will necessarily lead to abuses of the others. early women poets and novelists used the discourse of sensibility and the trope of the sentimental heroine to highlight the links between misogyny, slavery, and the mistreatment of other species. in “animals and the country-house tradition of leapor and austen,” for instance, barbara k. seeber contends that these two writers challenge the callousness behind the subjugation of women and animals by appealing to a higher moral sensibility. in mansfield park (1814), as seeber rightly attests, “the bertrams continually remind fanny of her lower-class status, at times treating her like an animal” (283). given the family’s ties to antigua, their verbal assaults and cruelty to a sensitive female protagonist enable austen to “demonstrate the interconnectedness of the ideologies which objectify women, slaves, and animals, but also [to] directly challeng[e] them by clearly establishing fanny as the most feeling being in the novel” (283). in emoting where others will not or cannot, fanny is deemed morally superior to those who isolate and shame her. while mary wollstonecraft actively questioned sensibility’s fixation on women’s virtue and sentiments at the expense of their reason, she anticipates austen’s concern that conflating female and animal bodies harms both, while simultaneously alienating already disenfranchised populations. the wrongs of woman, or maria (1798) weaves in the distressing tale of the impoverished jemima, who has been cast out of society through no fault of her own and forced to be an attendant in an asylum, to underscore her identification with animals since she receives the same treatment as they do: “i was the filching cat, the ravenous dog, the dumb brute, who must bear it all” (qtd. in fitzer). jemima may not be the most feeling character in eighteenth-century fiction, but she exemplifies wollstonecraft’s rebuke of associations and assumptions about otherness “predicated upon a chain of being in which the urban poor occupied a rank just above the lower primates,” as irene fitzer points out in her essay, “an egg dropped on the sand: the natural history of female bastardy from mark catesby to mary wollstonecraft” (241.) yet, as james p. carson reminds us, even the philosophical understanding of the great chain of being during the period was complex and dynamic, not “simply hierarchical and not primarily anthropocentric but [also] conducive to animal rights” (99). the writers in this collection add invaluable insight to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 274 conversations about enlightenment science and ecology, unveiling previously unrecognized nuance and resistance to human domination. while quinsey claims that “a significant theme in this volume is the interrogation of the ideas of sentiment, sensibility, and anthropomorphism [which are] major threads in the eighteenth-century notion of animal welfare”(11), the relationship between the period’s obsession with the discourse of sensibility and its connections to non-human animals remains largely implicit. permeating the cultural and political landscape, sensibility touted theories about how and why we feel for others; and writers and moral philosophers fixated on the readable body, believing that somatic expressions such as sighing, blushing, fainting, and tear-stained cheeks were direct reflections of internal states of mind, acting as windows into the heart. entire studies have been devoted to the philosophical, aesthetic, medical, sartorial, religious, sexual, educational, and psychic frameworks of sensibility; however, this volume misses an opportunity to parse out the relationships between eighteenth-century theories of human bodies as decipherable texts to be decoded and glossed and animal bodies that are suspended between fundamentally unintelligible and strangely familiar. sarah r. cohen’s brilliant reading of thomas gainborough’s “fancy pictures” explains that “the artist used animals, and the human-animal connection, as a means of eliciting sensibility” (193); but how did sensibility also make animals appear more or less legible? although many of these scholars suggest the eighteenth-century contemplated the sensory and embodied experiences of animals to undermine ideologies of human supremacy, the specifics of how sensibility’s reigning theories of subjectivity, sentiment, and corporeal transparency informed the period’s perceptions of non-human animals’ somatic expressions remain underexplored. still, animal and humans is refreshingly optimistic. the volume’s far-reaching cultural implications add much-needed nuance to current discussions in ecology and animal studies, offering a rich history of empathy that is not dependent on mere projection: as rachel swinkin puts it, “regarding an animal as a singular being is not necessarily the same as humanizing it” because when we think this way, “we risk repeating the cartesian fallacy by assuming that only the human can be sentient and responsive” (177). while our current cultural climate often posits that empathy is a finite resource - frequently pitting human and animals against one another in competition for compassion -this volume reminds us that homophobia, racism, misogyny, ableism, and speciesism are part of the same broken notion that certain lives are far more valuable than others. in these ways, the eighteenth-century valued interspecies relationship as not just ideal but imperative for taking down the oppressive systems of courtney wennerstrom -sensibility and the human-animal bond 275 power that continue to plague us today. if james thomson’s the seasons “encourages a phenomenological plasticity that responds to the ways in which multiple meanings interact” (76), as denys van renen suggests, this volume helps readers historicize and participate in a similar kind of imaginative suppleness that embraces our dependence on the natural world. this work is prescient, timely, and vital. microsoft word freeman-potts. pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 reviews carrie p. freeman a well-done “meat culture” is best served rare(ly) annie potts (ed.), meat culture. boston: brill, 2016. 296 pp. $45 (pb). having no long-winded title, meat culture may mislead. if readers are looking for a whimsical exploration of backyard bbqs and cowboy culture, or even a more sophisticated global gastronomic journey of multi-cultural culinary traditions, this is not the book for them. one hint to its animal-friendly stance may be in its placement within brill’s “human animal studies” book series, and if you look further at the many well-known critical animal studies scholars contributing to this anthology, you’ll realize that the book takes a decidedly anti-carnistic stance in favor of cultural transformation to veganism. although, i don’t want to mislead. all of its 14 chapters are not about veganism, and it’s more accurate to say, or better yet, have its editor annie potts say “each chapter carrie p. freeman -a well-done “meat culture” is best served rare(ly) 231 interrogates some aspect of the animal industrial complex ... and meat hegemony in the 21st century” (2), with its broad range of articles on the topic of “production and consumption of animals” finding cohesion within a framework she refers to as “meat culture” (2). given the excessive harm caused by animal agribusiness, fishing, and human consumption of animal products (and the relatively low levels of critique it gets in mainstream culture, politics, and academia), this rigorous critical exploration of its cultural roots is needed. its editor, cultural studies associate professor annie potts, is well positioned to curate this particular collection of essays, with her active book authorship and expertise in human-animal studies and activism. along with philip armstrong, she co-directs the new zealand centre for human-animal studies at the university of canterbury in christchurch. while international in nature, this anthology doesn’t claim to be a global critique, and situates itself within western cultural perspectives from scholars in australasia (primarily australia, but also tasmania and new zealand), europe (primarily the uk but also sweden), and north america (primarily the us). its interdisciplinary scholarship centrally draws from the humanities but also pulls from social science via sociology. meat culture is most useful to those in human-animal and critical animal studies, but also has appeal within studies of food, sociology, media, marketing, philosophy, and art. it isn’t an easy-read textbook with student discussion questions; instead, this scholarly collection is most useful for graduate-level classes or for senior undergraduate students to read assigned chapters. the anthology’s chapters are not grouped into sections; the book simply begins with potts’s introduction to meat culture — both the content of the book itself and broader material realities. for those new to the topic and wanting to better understand its significance, potts’s introductory chapter provides a useful summary of meat’s abundance in global markets, growing trends in consumption, the cost in trillions of animals’ lives annually (segmented by species), and the suffering caused by meat production. the suffering section is segmented by animal species, with an overview of the (factory) farming conditions for pigs, cattle (including individuals used for meat and those used for dairy), chickens (including birds used for meat and those used for eggs), fish and other sea animals, and the effects on human farm workers, and environmental impacts on our planet. to describe the remaining 13 chapters, i have grouped them into some related topic areas that explain the useful ideas they provoke. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 232 (feminist) philosophy. chapter 10 debates whether pursuit of legal “personhood” status for the most intelligent and self-aware (human-like) animal species is elitist and problematic, and author karen davis, founder of united poultry concerns, argues it is. although, in her explanations of the complex capacities of chickens, she could be said to fit these farmed animals into that criteria for personhood. rather than ranking species by mental development, davis advocates for understanding other species through “anthropomorphism based on empathy and careful observation” (193). instead of seeking personhood, she proposes that we enter an era of “animal dignity” (195) (quoting frank bruni). i think engaging with the disability studies scholarship on critical animal studies would strengthen this chapter even further. chapter 3 is a philosophically dense chapter where humanities animal scholars from the united states, carol adams and matthew calarco, engage in a dialogue comparing derrida’s carnophallogocentrism — a “human, animal-flesh-eating” male subject (33) — to adams’s ideas in the sexual politics of meat. both derrida and adams understand one cannot analyze male subjectivity in western culture without considering carnivorism. adams presents a parallel feminist critique over the way that animal activism is often masculinized through the logocentric pursuit of rational moral argument within a political sphere (including seeking personhood status), which can, ironically, alienate the nonhuman subject even further. instead, she proposes we “rethink in a fundamental manner, the way one relates and is related to other animals (oneself included)” and better “attune one to animals and their lives” (47). i was most surprised by the final chapter, written by american ecofeminist greta gaard, where she introduces readers to “plant studies” — a field advocating plants’ capacities and critiquing animal studies for its anthropocentrism and zoocentrism in “treating plants like meat” (273). gaard thoughtfully applies an ecofeminist lens to examine the complexities of these arguments and offer ways that plant and animal studies could, via ecofeminism, explore human continuity and “kinship across plant and animal species” (273) to seek a less harmful, more mutual and reciprocal way of being in the world, while acknowledging we “will never reach a moral destination of universal non-harming” (279). racial prejudice and civilized (white) meat eating. in chapter 3, australian sociologists nik taylor and jordan mckenzie examine the european horsemeat scandal when horseflesh was discovered in beef products, resulting in mass recalls not because of health risks but due to ideas of “contamination.” focusing on the uk press coverage, the authors surmise that british society avoided a self-reflective critique of meat-eating practices in favor of using the horsemeat scandal to reinforce their own “civilized” and pure, meat-eating, racialized, white, human identity in contrast to the uncivilized “less than human” (57) people who would eat horses. in chapter 4, australian sociologists carrie p. freeman -a well-done “meat culture” is best served rare(ly) 233 jacqueline dalziell and dinesh joseph wadiwel analyze an animal rights campaign that highlighted the mistreatment of australian cows exported to indonesian slaughterhouses, causing public outrage against indonesia and a temporary ban on live exports there. authors propose that australians’ outrage was primarily generated by their desire to protect the superiority of whiteness (which applies by extension to their property) by saving their “white animals from non-white people” (79) who have presumably lower welfare standards (despite inhumane animal treatment by australian farmworkers as well). the authors express concern that if “animal welfare is coded as a marker of modernity” (86), western agribusiness can exploit this bias to charge higher prices and expand the global meat industry. representation in marketing. in chapter 5, vasile stanescu, a united states speech professor, critiques burger king’s “whopper virgins” advertising campaign that applied a colonial and xenophobic mindset when introducing rural villagers in transylvania to the whopper hamburger, as if it were humanitarian assistance to provide the strength-building western diet to these “effeminate rice eaters” (91). stanescu highlights the irony of how burger king proposed burgers as a charitable hunger solution when “excessive and cheap meat consumption” (106) is actually a causal aspect of global hunger (and the mass destruction of animals and ecosystems). in chapter 6, swedish critical animal scholars tobias linne and helena pedersen critique the swedish dairy industry’s staged pr “open farm and pasture release” (120) events to get schoolkids visiting swedish farms. the authors problematize the ethically unproblematic nature of the pr discourse in which the cows are personalized while also objectified just enough to uphold the species boundary where their exploitation goes unnoticed and unchallenged. to disrupt this hypocrisy, the authors suggest that teachers provide “dairy counter-education” (125) and critical pedagogy instead of marketing-based edutainment. representation in media. in chapter 11, british sociologists matthew cole and kate stewart make a convincing argument that the iconic, long-running tv character, doctor who, should return to his early roots of eschewing animal products, as eating animals is incongruous with his character’s sense of justice and moral leadership. it reinforces meat’s cultural hegemony for the show’s producer to use doctor who’s animal-based standard diet as a mechanism for increasing this alien character’s relatability with british audiences. the authors share useful examples where doctor who’s storylines could seamlessly critique animal exploitation, especially with doctor who as a vegan lead character. another storyline featuring alien meat-eating lead characters is in author michel faber’s 2000 book under the skin, but this time the animals the aliens are eating are humans. in chapter 8, new zealand literature scholar kirsty dunn explores the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 234 ways that this civilization from outer space uses many similar concealment techniques that we humans use to mask our discomfort felt over physically manipulating and killing sentient beings for consumption. in particular, the techniques for “distancing the consumer from the meat production process” (152), and using camouflaging language. dunn commends faber for skillfully contrasting “the calculated euphemisms employed by the characters with potent and visceral third-person descriptions of slaughter” (158). representation in art. australian art professor melissa boyde celebrates the potential for properly contextualized photographs to memorialize individual cows in her chapter 7 essay. she uses contrasting images to illustrate the reverence she has for her own sanctuary of rescued cows and their extended family, and the australian government archive’s slaughterhouse images of nameless cows before or during their dismemberment at the homebush abattoir in sydney in the mid 1900s. boyde expresses the ability of cow photographs to elucidate them as someone conceivably lovable and memorable or to obscure them into something utterly forgettable and unknowable. yvette watt, an arts lecturer in tasmania, answers the question she poses in chapter 9 “down on the farm: why do artists avoid farm animals as subject matter?” based on a survey with artists, watt finds that while artists often like to feature (wild) animals in their work, farmed animals are less popular as subjects, except with vegan artists. this may be due to artists’ perceptions of farm animals as “unnatural” in comparison to free-living, undomesticated wildlife, as well as the moral ambivalence that non-vegan artists potentially feel over their own meat-eating practices. watt calls for artists not to use farm animals (their flesh and skin) as art materials but rather to use them as symbolic subject matter to “question the social context that culturally sanctions animal abuse” (181). opinions on veganism for humans and their companions. in chapter 13, uk sociologist richard twine interviewed british vegans to ascertain how their decision to go vegan affected their social relationships. filled with interesting quotes, the study reveals new vegans experienced much resistance and defensiveness from family and friends. but over time, vegans’ companions often became “non-vegan vegan advocates” (258), as cooking and eating vegan foods became normalized and less “awkward” (257) in their social circle. twine contends that vegan advocacy must arm vegans with more than just ethical arguments and also provide social competency skills to cope with the “relational complexities” (262) new vegans will experience in daily practice. in chapter 12, feminist animal studies professor erika cudworth applies joy’s notion of carnism to explore how that ideology pervades the discourse around feeding companion animals farm animal meat from the pet food industry. interviews with dog “owners” revealed carrie p. freeman -a well-done “meat culture” is best served rare(ly) 235 the vast majority fed animal meat to their dogs and found it largely unproblematic morally, despite the contention they cared for animal wellbeing in general. while vegetarians in multi-species households experienced more ethical anxiety over the practice, most ultimately also fed other animals to their dogs out of a sense of biological necessity and consideration for the dogs’ preferences. while unfortunately there is not a conclusion chapter to the book, in conclusion of this review, i will say that meat culture offers a wide variety of thoughtful approaches to examining the hegemony of animal flesh in western culture, but always through a critical lens that seeks increased justice, not only for farmed animals or all nonhuman animals, but also for marginalized human groups, and at times, plants. in this way, meat culture is well done and offers hope that a meat-based culture could itself become rare. microsoft word marovich-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 9:2 review article beatrice marovich religious animals and animal gods barbara allen. animals in religion: devotion, symbol, and ritual. reaktion books, 2016. 560 pp. £40.00 (hb). donovan o. schaefer. religious affects: animality, evolution, and power. duke university press, 2015. 304 pp. $94.95 (hb), $24.95 (pb). the fraught conflict between religion and science is the stuff of grand cultural narrative. and while it may be true that particular theologies play into this opposition, there are also discourses in religious studies and theology that seem to exist precisely because of the fact that religion and science (despite all narratives to the contrary) inevitably collude and collide. such is arguably the case with the subfield of religion and animal studies. recognizing kinship bonds between humans and other animals may act as a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 122 kind of antiseptic, to clean out any anti-evolutionary theology that might ignite anguish over our common ancestry. an earlier generation of scholarship at the intersection of religious and animal studies (what gets billed, in the field, as the study of religion and animals) was more oriented around what dave aftandilian has called the “tradition-based approach.” this research sought to uncover the role that animals played, historically, within religious traditions and to understand the meaning of phenomena such as animal sacrifice or ritual slaughter. there was often a clearly ethical dimension to this approach as well, encouraging people of faith to affirm resources for animal activism or vegetarianism within their own traditions. but recent scholarship on religion and animals has begun to ask a different set of questions. in conversation with work in cognitive ethology, illuminating the intellectual and emotional lives of other creatures, many new projects on religion and animals explore the religious and spiritual powers in, and around, animal life.* this sort of inquiry raises questions about the nature of religion itself: is it something with roots in our animality? does religion or spirituality point to a set of phenomena that we also witness in the lives of other animals? two recent books exhibit, in very different ways, this approach to the study of religion and animals. rather than simply examine a given religious perspective on animal life, these books keep an evolutionary framework at the forefront, using it to pose questions about how nonhuman animals might give us insight into the nature, function, evolution, or origins of this phenomenon that we label “religion.” donovan schaefer’s religious affects: animality, evolution, and power might more obviously exemplify this paradigm, given that the book focuses explicitly on evolutionary theory. schaefer argues, in the book, that the study of religion has tended to side with the angels, over the apes. this opposition — of angel to ape — is a reference to an 1864 speech from british parliamentarian benjamin disraeli. speaking on the position of the church in its conflict with modern science (more particularly, evolutionary theory), disraeli suggests that this battle poses the question “is man an ape or an angel?” in response, disraeli resolutely affirms that he himself is “on the side of the angels” (1). implicit in such a statement are theological descriptions of angelic life from medieval thinkers such as thomas aquinas, who called angels “spiritual creatures” and characterized them as essentially non-physical entities who exist as pure intellection. against such a proposition, schaefer makes it clear that he is on the side of the apes. this is not, however, an affirmation of the power of science over that of religion. rather, schaefer is arguing for a theory of religion that refuses to fixate on the beatrice marovich -religious animals and animal gods 123 angels and their disembodied intellection and orients itself instead around the life of animal bodies. while religious studies has often presented itself as the scientific study of religious history, life, and culture, schaefer argues that an almost exclusive theoretical focus on cognitive phenomena such as the nature of belief or a fixation on the use of religious scriptures and language has kept the study of religion pinned to the world of the angels and has alienated it from the world of animal bodies. this critique of the belief-oriented focus in religious studies is not new and can be seen in the work of scholars such as talal asad, who have found it a remnant of protestant christian belief-oriented theologies. this, for scholars like asad, has rendered the discipline of religious studies almost incapable of theorizing traditions that do not fall into the structures of protestant life and thought (such as islam). schaefer is not unconcerned with such matters. but he is more concerned with the possibility that a fixation on belief and language has made the study of religion so anthropocentric that it is incapable of theorizing the possibility that jane goodall once raised as she observed a chimpanzee dance almost purposelessly in front of a waterfall: could this chimp be having a kind of religious experience, rapt by something like wonder or awe? schaefer is invested in a theory of religion that can explore or even explain the chimp’s waterfall dance. this means approaching religion as a phenomenon that is not only not limited to human life or culture, but is experienced and accessed by humans on the level of their animal bodies. this means, perhaps inevitably, theorizing religion itself as an evolutionary phenomenon. there are, of course, a great number of theorists both within and outside of religious studies who have already theorized the evolution of religion itself. but schaefer wants to prevent the reiteration of that great divide — between human and animal — that often appears even in evolutionary theories of religion, to suggest that humans are that animal with a logos that becomes manifest precisely through social structures such as religion, in order to separate them from the rest of the animal lives. instead, schaefer suggests, those things we label as “religious” in our own human lives have not only evolved from, but continue to evolve alongside, with, and as animal life. this requires, however, a clarification on how it is that schaefer is theorizing evolution, in the first place. schaefer emphasizes that the evolution of religion is not a logically ordered, straightforward phenomenon that thinkers such as daniel dennett or richard dawkins suggest that it is. religion is not a phenomenon that evolved to meet a particular demand or function in human life, later becoming essentially useless or redundant. or religion is not the logical, pragmatic, “development of cost-effective solutions” to life’s humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 124 suffering and problems (158). rather, schaefer is interested in the work of theorists who critique the adaptionist perspective in evolutionary biology such as stephen j. gould, elizabeth vrba, and richard lewontin. this “pluralist” perspective in evolutionary biology helps to highlight the accidental nature of evolution. what this means is that the set of phenomena we call religion is not the rational production of a resource but is instead the long sedimentation of many sets of collisions and accidents without apparent purpose or design. religion evolved, perhaps, not as something that was meant to help us survive or reproduce, but as something that we felt like doing with our animal bodies (173). the key theoretical resource that schaefer utilizes throughout the book is affect theory. in conversation, particularly, with thinkers such as sara ahmed, eve sedgwick, and teresa brennen, schaefer is interested in the way that a focus on feeling and affect can decentralize our theoretical obsessions with logic and reason while offering a theoretical framework that circulates in and around bodies. it is affect theory, in other words, that helps schaefer ground his own theory in the life of the apes rather than the realm of the angels. and it is also affect theory that sharpens his theoretical focus on the evolution of religion as a feeling-oriented (rather than a rational purpose-oriented) development. to think about affect is to think about power, and how it works both in and around us, influencing movement and action. affects, says schaefer, “sit closer to the engines of power than reasons, circulating their own compulsions that easily and often overwhelm rational, logocentric determination” (174). more importantly for the arguments that he makes about animal lives, affect is something that we not only share with other animals but which also functions in and through the most stereotypically “animal” elements of our human bodies. theorizing religion as an affective, rather than a purely intellectual, phenomenon exposes its animality. barbara allen’s animals in religion: devotion, symbol, and ritual is not a densely theoretical book, like schaefer’s. in fact, allen takes an almost encyclopedic approach to the topic. she discusses the role of animals in different religious traditions — including ancient egyptian mythology and (as i believe no previous book in the field has done) in celtic and viking religio-theological folklore. given that the chapters of the book are broken down by religious tradition, it would seem that the text takes more of a tradition-based approach (albeit, thinking comparatively about animals, between these traditions). additionally, allen is a minister in the uniting church in australia. so there is a sense in which this book reads more like a resource for people who practice a religious tradition, rather than a text that troubles at the notion of what religion is, in the first place. nevertheless, there are some elements of this book that i think illuminate beatrice marovich -religious animals and animal gods 125 this newer approach to a study of religion and animals, thus keeping an evolutionary theory at the forefront, and ultimately raising questions about what religion is in the first place. take, for instance, allen’s introduction to the book. noting that animals have long played a deeply ambivalent role in religious traditions around the world, allen also observes that religion itself is — institutionally — “on the decline in the west.” this poses the question, for her, of whether this decline will “be a sign of hope, or hindrance, for non-human species” (7). if many religious traditions have, historically, assigned animals a lowly status — wouldn’t the decline or disappearance of these patterns of life, thought, and ritual ultimately be a good thing? allen does not answer this question outright, but does suggest that we may be misunderstanding religion itself, if this is our view. making reference to the evolution of religious worship and ritual, allen raises the topic of the paleolithic cave paintings in places like southern france and spain. the figures of animals on these cave walls appear with some frequency in discussions about the origin or evolution of religious life. allen notes that there are a host of different theories about what these paintings could have meant, or what purpose they could have served, for ancient humans. were these images that were meant to generate a kind of good fortune, for hunting magic? were these animals figures of worship? allen acknowledges that it may be impossible to know whether these paintings ever really served a purpose that we, today, would deem religious. instead, they help her make a different point. what we do know, she argues, is it that “animal deities preceded anthropomorphic ones” and that the first divine powers in human life were animal (9). taking an evolutionary perspective on theological ideas, then, one is challenged to think about the gods’ origins within animal life. the gods were always already animal. in other words, allen seems to suggest that the evisceration of the connection between religion and animal lives may create a kind of amnesia about what kinds of bodies produced religious worship and ritual, in the first place. but even more than this, allen also argues that keeping alive this connection between animal life and sacred or holy power can help to keep in view the sacralization of animal life. we live in a cultural context in which the predominant view of animals is that they are commodities or products. to keep animals in conversation with their varied histories in religious life is to remember that they have also been deemed sacred. and, as allen suggests, when we actively de-sacralize animal life, “we rob them of their holy qualities and, in the process, de-humanize ourselves” (12). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 126 in sum, schaefer’s and allen’s books are divergent — they have different aims, and approach their themes using different methods. but one can see, in each of them, traces of an emerging disciplinary approach to the study of religion and animals. this is an approach that is, from the outset, oriented around animal lives. but it also promises to generate more complicated questions about how animals may actually be foundational to things that seem as if they were built by, and for, humans alone: religious life, and even divinity itself. note * see his discussion in dave aftandilian, “animals and religion” in grounding religion: a field guide to the study of religion and ecology, edited by whitney a. bauman, richard r. bohannon ii, and kevin j. o’brien (abingdon, oxford and new york: routledge, 2011). ann-sofie lönngren -“that’s when he comes rushing into her life.” swedish literary depictions of human-animal sexual contact at the turn of the twenty-first century h u m a n i m a l i a 12:1 ann-sofie lönngren “that’s when he comes rushing into her life.” swedish literary depictions of human-animal sexual contact at the turn of the twenty-first century to introduce an animal to the city is to introduce perversion. (despret 211) introduction. “so, what are you working on now?” “i’m writing an article about a few swedish literary narratives that i’ve found about people having sex with animals.” “… oooh, that’s terrible!” this short dialogue took place between me and a colleague of mine by the coffee machine at our workplace, and it says a lot about today’s societal norms regarding the human-animal relationship.1 the historical context to this reaction is the social condemnation and severe punishments that, largely as a result of the christian paradigm of sodomy, always seem to have characterized human-animal sexual contact in the western part of the world. in sweden, this tradition has been unusually strong (liliequist 395–397, 420–423; rydström, sinners 2). bestiality was made a capital crime in the provisional laws of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, but it was not until the beginning of the seventeenth century that it began to be brought to trial frequently. in accordance with the laws of 1442, 1608, and 1735, the crime of bestiality was often punished with death, for both the human and the animal, and the peak of these prosecutions was reached in the eighteenth century (liliequist 393–394). due to processes of modernization in the nineteenth century, sodomy gradually came to be considered less grave. when sweden implemented a new penal code in 1864, bestiality was regulated in the same section as same-sex sexual acts and “unnatural fornication” between a man and a woman, and it was thus punished with up to two years of hard labor. when this penal code was abolished in 1944, it marked the completion of what jens rydström defined as a major shift in swedish society: from a paradigm of rural penetrative sodomy to one of urban masturbatory homosexuality. this process made it impossible to continue to punish non-reproductive sexual acts humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 168 between a man and a woman as well as same-sex sexual acts; the latter was instead increasingly medicalized. since the late 1980s, however, sweden has shown a steady increase in legal rights and positive attitudes towards same-sex relationships (rydström, sinners 1–7). with regards to sexual acts between humans and animals, however, there has been a different discourse since 1944. in the process of modernization during the course of the twentieth century, a large part of the everyday interaction between humans and animals moved from stables and barns in the countryside into urban homes, which were increasingly filled with pets (thomas 242–287). simultaneously, the abolition of the penal code regulating sexual acts with animals meant that such practices disappeared from both the medical and the legislative discourse (bolliger & goetschel 27–28; rydström, sinners 7). instead, they came to be conceptualized as a rare form of animal abuse, and were therefore regulated under versions of animal welfare acts in different countries, including sweden. however, these laws could generally only be called upon if it could be proven that the animal had been subjected to violence or force (27–45). regardless of the fact that human-animal sexual activities were thus largely unregulated from the mid-twentieth century onwards, there remained a very strong social taboo; these two interacting circumstances shed light on the large scale production of animal pornography that took place from the 1960s onwards (grebowicz; kulick). indeed, the common use of animals in the sex industry, including photography, film, and even brothels, has been put forward as one reason why sex with animals was re-criminalized in many european countries and us states at the beginning of the twenty-first century (garrard, bestial 211–212). another reason is personal safety: the documentary zoo (2007), about a man being killed after being penetrated by a stallion, stirred much controversy in the us (bakke n7; despret 203–211). sweden followed the general development in the west in this regard and re-criminalized sexual acts with animals in 2014 (garrard, bestial 211-212). against this historical background it is not difficult to understand what instigated my colleague’s outcry. perhaps she would have reacted differently had she been familiar with the fact that there is a cross-cultural continuum of stories that depict humananimal sexual encounters, a sort of thematic genre that greg garrard refers to as “zoophilic narratives” or “zoophilic fictions” (bestial). moreover, there have been several attempts made in recent decades to challenge the rigid concept of bestiality by proposing other ways of understanding human-animal intimacy, attraction, and sex. one of these attempts is the introduction of the terms “zoosexuality” and “zoophilia,” which, ever since they were coined by hani miletski in the 1980s, have been in use as a ann-sofie lönngren -“that’s when he comes rushing into her life.” swedish literary depictions of humananimal sexual contact at the turn of the twenty-first century 169 signifier for sexual orientation towards animals (bakke 224). another challenge was formulated by peter singer, who, in his essay “heavy petting,” points out the overlaps between a human’s sexual functions and those of other large mammals. in this discussion, singer highlights not only bodily similarities but also aspects of lust, pleasure, and reciprocity. this contradicted the scientific paradigm, according to which animal sexuality is solely about reproduction and instincts (bakke 221; see also balcombe). singer’s line of argument instigated a scholarly debate about the lingering influence of sexual morals in discussions regarding the human-animal relationship. other challenges to the bestiality paradigm are inspired by queer theory, which, in the field of human-animal studies during the past decade, has meant an increasing deconstruction of this anthropocentric discourse in lieu of a focus on a wider spectrum of norms regarding intimacy, cohabitation, co-living, pleasure, and emotionality (dell’aversano; mchugh, queer; rudy). as vinciane despret formulates it: “one must […] learn to speak about sexuality in terms of bodies and desires and, above all, resist the temptation to consider sex with animals only in the interpretive categories of human discourse” (205). according to despret, the complexity of this topic goes beyond simple solutions and final answers and, ultimately, comes to form a lesson to be learned. how, then, do these historical and theoretical backgrounds relate to the abovementioned narratives about “people having sex with animals,” my mention of which instigated this discussion in the first place? more specifically, these three literary texts that i have found contain explicit descriptions of human-animal sexual contact, and were published in sweden at the turn of the twenty-first century. paradoxically, within the framework of the discussion above, the number of texts comes across as both surprisingly low and surprisingly high. it is surprisingly low since, as midas dekkers claims, regardless of legislative or social status, cultural representations of human-animal sexual acts, love, intimacy, tenderness, and emotionality have been ever-present since ancient times in different forms all over the globe (see also miletski, history). moreover, as jonas liliequist notes, in the scandinavian region, representations of human-animal sex goes all the way back to the bronze age (393, 398–400). finally, jens rydström has shown that bestiality is a topic in the works of both swedish turn of the twentieth century author august strindberg (rydström, “sodomitical”), and twentieth century author ivar lo-johansson (rydström, sinners 76–77). thus, there seems to be a swedish tradition of representing humananimal sexual acts that has continued well into modern times. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 170 the fact that i have nevertheless found only three texts can, however, be seen as significant in terms of the massive cultural silence regarding human-animal sexual contact in today’s society. indeed, it is peculiar that despite all the things humans are willing to do to animals — slaughter them, eat them, flay them, castrate them, tie them down, lock them up, experiment on them — human-animal sex is still so taboo it is barely possible to speak about it in western societies (dell’aversano; despret 203–211; rudy 601–602). against this background, the number of texts that i have found almost stands out as surprisingly high, and might be explained as an influence by the previously referred to strong tradition of bestiality in sweden in historical times. the historical and theoretical contexts outlined above are complex, and there are thus many ways in which human-animal sexual contact can be described. at the time of the publication of all three narratives that i will discuss — in 1984, 2003 and 2004, respectively — cross-species sexual acts were not illegal as long as the animal involved was not being harmed; still, such acts were subjected to strong social taboos. how do the literary texts navigate within these fields of tension? what contributions are made to the understanding of the turn of the twenty-first century relationship between the human-animal divide and norms regarding gender and sexuality in sweden specifically, and in the western context more generally? elsie johansson, the woman who met a dog (1984).2 elsie johansson did not have her literary debut until she was 48 years old, when she published her first collection of poetry. since then, she has been very productive and won numerous awards, in particular for her literary depictions of elderly women’s sexuality. this was the focus even of her first published novel, the woman who met a dog, in which the main character is vera: a single, very tidy and prudish woman in her late 50s, who works in an office. through retrospection we learn that vera’s life has been characterized by an inhibited upbringing hostile to all aspects of sexuality. thus, vera has never had any intimate relationships, neither physical nor emotional. her quiet life takes an unexpected turn, however, when she meets a large dog of unclear breed, mister mac (makken). their first meeting takes place when vera is sitting down for a brief rest on a bench during an early morning walk, and it is depicted along the lines of a heterosexual love story: that’s when he comes rushing into her life. over the little bridge he comes, snorting, as compact as a locomotive. the muscles are vibrating visibly under his skin. he sets out straight towards ann-sofie lönngren -“that’s when he comes rushing into her life.” swedish literary depictions of humananimal sexual contact at the turn of the twenty-first century 171 vera, but makes a break so abrupt that his rear end continues to move and bumps into the bench and then he sits down right in front of her knees. he shivers with enthusiasm, the month is open, she sees his pink tongue between white fangs. the ears are standing up. yes. he is a dog. nothing else. (johansson 39)3 over the course of a few weeks, vera becomes acquainted with makken and his owners, a young couple for whom, as they decide to go away on a weekend cruise, vera offers to dog-sit. thus, makken comes to stay with vera for a few days in her very clean and well-organized apartment. as they spend time together, just the two of them, vera becomes strongly affected by makken’s directness and attachment towards her. gradually, however, her emotions slide into an admiration of makken’s beautiful, strong, and muscular body, which she thoroughly enjoys when one night he jumps up into her bed and crawls into her lap: she pressures him towards her. she hugs him hard, she glides her lips over his ears, they are like the softest pads of the finest silk. […] he sighs with pleasure. he is warm against her stomach through the thin nightgown. […] now she rocks her body sideways, her head hangs, saliva flows and fills her month and she has a tingling sensation in her teeth. her hand slides backwards. she feels the rougher hair on his stump of a tail, the muscles on his hind leg and the warm cavity between the belly and the thigh. on the inside the skin is hairless and very, very smooth. there are hot streams running through her groin. he spreads a little and the right hand grasps his testicles, the fingers spread, stretch and contract, the palm of the hand massages with gentle movements. deep in her womb there is a pecking nest. a swollenness. an ache. then the broadaxe falls. […] dear lord in heaven! what am i up to? what am i doing? (johansson 64– 65)4 after this event, everything changes. vera starts a rigid fasting cure, and to makken she only gives such food as she knows he does not like, and throws away his good food. she also takes away his water bowl, and only lets him drink from dirty puddles in the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 172 street. moreover, in a horribly dense scene, she beats him with his leash. after a few days makken’s owners come back to collect him and she never sees him again, but her punishment of herself is far from over. gradually she slides deeper into what could perhaps be seen as a sort of ontological crisis, manifested in her self-denial of food, water, and company. signed off sick from work and locked up in her apartment, vera eventually starves herself to death. the only clue as to what has happened is found by her sister as she cleans out vera’s flat after her death, when she is puzzled to find bowls of water and dog food on the kitchen floor. in relation to the history of human-animal relations, the course of events in the woman who met a dog can be seen as a manifestation of what laura brown has called the “threat of interspecies intimacy engineered by the rise of modern pet-keeping” (65). even in the eighteenth century, carl von linné issued a warning about the feelings that might arise as noble ladies let their lap dogs into their beds (thorman 16–18). these premonitions can be understood in conjunction with monika bakke’s definition of pleasure as an overwhelming force constantly on the verge of escaping its controlling cultural framework (bakke 222), and also with conceptualizations of the pet as a liminal creature with the ability to overturn cultural categories (fox 526–528; fudge 19). the destructive consequences that might follow for the human upon experiencing pleasure with a body not recognized as a legitimate object of desire are commented upon by bakke: “erotic bliss as the tabooed aspect of human-animal pleasure […] is noncultural, unspeakable, and potentially even lethal to the anthropocentric subject” (222). this quote is very apt when describing the destructive path vera takes after her brief and, indeed, rather innocent moment of bliss with a beloved dog. another interesting aspect of the woman who met a dog is that vera’s character fits neatly within the stereotype that the person (often a woman) engaging sexually and romantically with an animal is a social loner who turns to animals as a substitute for functioning human relationships (bakke 227; fudge 20; garber 122–124). during the course of the twentieth century, the cultural figure of the lonely misfit has, however, also been subjected to suspicions of homosexuality, and just as cross-species and samesex sexual contact were regulated under the same penal code, they are intertwined topics in the literature of this time (kuzniar 206; mchugh, animal 115–162). indeed, i have previously found that even in late nineteenth century swedish literature written by august strindberg there are reoccurring suspicions that women who live alone with their dogs instead of a husband and children might be feminists, or lesbians (lönngren, following 45–55). ann-sofie lönngren -“that’s when he comes rushing into her life.” swedish literary depictions of humananimal sexual contact at the turn of the twenty-first century 173 the increasing visibility and rights of the gay community in the western part of the world, together with the gradual disappearance of the conceptualization of bestiality as a distinct crime, has often resulted in an understanding of depictions of close relationships between humans and dogs on a metaphorical level as “really” being about homosexuality (kuzniar 206–209; lundblad 49–74). such a metaphorical reading of the woman who met a dog would, however, mean losing sight of that which alice kuzniar has called “the socially dissonant and daring love of dogs” (224), which is vividly described in the novel. according to this line of thought, it would certainly be possible to understand vera not as a closet lesbian, but rather as a “zoosexual” (bakke 224), in that her sexual orientation seems to be directed primarily towards animals (or to one particular animal: makken). as such, she is surely unique in swedish literature. while both kuzniar and rudy acknowledge the subversive potential of choosing an animal companion instead of a human partner, however, vera’s strong awareness of and subjection to the social taboos of her time apparently makes such an embrace impossible for her. gabriella håkansson, “age of transition” (2003).5 gabriella håkansson is a highly acclaimed novelist, as well as an essayist and a literary critic. the text that i take an interest in here is one of her few published short stories, written specifically to be included in perversions, a collection of short stories. this collection consists of twelve narratives written by swedish authors on the book’s titular theme, but håkansson is unique in her focus on the pet. “age of transition” centers on the relationship between a beloved kitten, ducie, and her owner birgitta, who is a middle aged, single woman. even as she picks her up from the home in which she was bred, birgitta experiences strong feelings for ducie, and in their first year together they grow so close that birgitta’s friends feel ignored and tell her that she spends too much time with the cat. but birgitta doesn’t care; she likes to think of herself and ducie as “an old inseparable couple (85).6 when ducie is about to go into heat for the first time, however, the story takes a horror-like turn, in which the cat’s erratic and nervous behaviors are described through birgitta’s eyes. so also are the cat’s bodily changes, which birgitta thoroughly inspects:7 she had noticed how there in the center of the bottom was a small, small woolly bulge. now she could clearly see that the little bump had grown, and that by looking closely one could see a pair of black fussy labia and a darker moist crack between them, a crack which in ridiculous ways was humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 174 reminiscent of a female sex, but in miniature. “so she is going into puberty,” birgitta thought. (92) the veterinarian advises birgitta to start giving ducie contraceptive pills, and to consider a hysterectomy in due time. but birgitta is hesitant — is it really fair to deprive ducie of all the pleasures of sex? while she ponders this question ducie grows more restless, loses appetite and weight, and screams in agony day and night, keeping birgitta awake too. after both have endured a few days of insomnia, the cat repeatedly starts to rest its head on the floor, curve its back inwards, and raise its abdomen towards birgitta, thereby exposing its “hair-coated little black crack. birgitta could clearly see that it had swelled up, and when she held the cat in her arms she felt the sex warmly pounding, leaving a thin trace of slime on her bare arm” (96).8 perhaps there could be some way to help her, birgitta thinks, experiencing heatwaves rush through her body while contemplating it. she hesitates, however, until the cat gives an unusually long, agonizing scream and gazes pleadingly into birgitta’s eyes, then turns around and arches before her. birgitta stretches out her hand. with the outermost tip of her finger she touched the cat’s sex. it was wetter than she had expected and altogether soft, like the nose or the inside of the ear, and before she had the time to think the tip slid into the dark interior. the pulse increased at a breath-taking pace and small black dots were dancing before her eyes. it was warm and narrow in there, and birgitta perceived pulsating movements, a kind of mild convulsion that seemed to come from the animal’s pelvis, or was it perhaps the pressure from her own, heavy heartbeats that she felt there in her outermost fingertip? the cat had suddenly gone silent. slowly, very slowly, she pushed her finger a little deeper into the crack. […] birgitta’s face felt like melted lava. there were long, extended heatwaves that found their ways out into the arms and down into her fingers. with each wave she felt how the finger slid further into the animal’s flesh. the relief of not having to listen to the agonized mewing was incredible. slowly the blood sank away from the face, the pulse calmed down and the heat that had covered her body like a burning blanket cooled down. […] now it [the cat] lay completely still, and birgitta’s finger had sunk unnoticed all the way in down to the root. how peculiar it looked: the white, wrinkled woman’s hand that stuck out from the animal’s hairy body, like some weird, meaty outgrowth. ann-sofie lönngren -“that’s when he comes rushing into her life.” swedish literary depictions of humananimal sexual contact at the turn of the twenty-first century 175 for a movement they were both completely still, cat and human, joined in this repulsive act of reciprocal desperation. (97)9 the spell breaks. as birgitta withdraws her finger and sees that it is covered with blood and slime she rushes into the bathroom and throws up in the toilet. the cat remains lying on the sofa, watching her with dizzy eyes. during the next 48 hours, birgitta tends to ducie who screams with pain, bleeds and smells of “rotten sex” (99),10 and who finally gives up her breath entirely. in the final scene, birgitta pressures the cat’s cold and stiff body against her own: “‘my love,’ she whispered into the woolly ear. ‘my little love’” (100).11 in comparing “age of transition” with the woman who met a dog, the two stories display both similarities and differences. the main characters are obviously very similar with regards to their age, status, and social life, and can thus be seen as manifestations of the cultural suspicion of the urban woman who lives alone with no husband or children (holmberg 97–116). moreover, both stories re-invoke the bodily similarities between different mammals that singer pointed out in 2001 as being significant for an understanding of human-animal sexual contact. in vera’s case, the desire is clearly bound up with what she sees as similarities between makken and a muscular, male body — a literary design that is perfectly in line with age-old perceptions of the dog as a “manly” animal, connected to hunting and guarding (broberg 339–359). birgitta’s desire is also based on bodily similarities, but this time focused on the likenesses between herself and ducie – a description which is part of a cultural tradition according to which the cat is connected to femininity and the domestic sphere (broberg 339–359). however, håkansson’s story does not subject itself to metaphorical interpretations as “really” being about same-sex relationships as easily as the woman who met a dog does; a circumstance that is partly due to the fact that there is no such literary tradition to rely on, and partly due to ducie’s metonymic character of “actual animal” (baker 77–81; garrard, ecocriticism 140; lönngren, “metaphor”). “age of transition” stands out in its harsh criticism of a suffocating and intrusive pet discourse characterized by power, violence, and a selfish love on the part of a human being who just cannot see the pet as anything else than an extension of the human (see tuan; redmalm). indeed, similarities are not only an element of human desire for animals, but also a crucial aspect of the pet discourse (brown 8–9). in “age of transition” there is a vivid display of the destructive outcome of an intertwining of the two. in this story, the similarities between human and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 176 animal bodies ultimately stand out as deceptive, as they in fact make much more fundamental differences invisible, which make human-animal sexual contact lethal. as we have seen in both stories, human-animal sexual contact, although initiated by lust and love, lead to violence, suffering, and death. ultimately, it almost seems as if vera’s acute awareness of the social norms of her time is what gets makken out of the situation after having “only” been temporarily starved and beaten. likewise, it is birgitta’s disregard of these norms that makes it possible for her to go deeper and deeper into symbiotic living with ducie, with death as the ultimate outcome. thus, both stories are clearly in line with current discourses according to which human-animal sexual contact might potentially be lethal and are seen as being related to maltreatment and abuse (bakke 226). these stories are also of interest in relation to the pre-modern death penalty against bestiality — a penalty which, as stated earlier, was often executed on both human and animal — since, in the end, someone dies in both of them. ultimately, this is what makes it possible to formulate one last, fundamental similarity between the woman who met a dog and “age of transition,” namely that the punishment for breaking the taboo of a human-animal sexual contact is still death. lars jakobson, “co-livestock” (2004).12 with a large number of publications written over the course of more than thirty years, ranging from essays to short stories and novels, lars jakobson is one of sweden’s most highly esteemed and decorated science fiction authors. he likes to take an element of reality and change it in such a way that what is presumed to be “natural” and “true” comes across as a mere construct, a silent agreement generated by historical and political circumstances. this is his strategy in “co-livestock,” which starts with the outburst: “my wife is a bloody cow.”13 it continues with complaints about the narrator’s lazy, passive, and silent wife to the extent that the reader eventually realizes that this statement should not just be seen as a figure of speech, but that his wife is in fact a cow. gradually, a world is presented in which homo sapiens as a species is decentered, and in which cows and horses, for example, are just different kinds of people. thus, there are all sorts of animals living in both the countryside and the city, in barns, pens, flats, and houses, sometimes with humans, sometimes by themselves; some of them are even given human jobs. paradoxically, societal norms and infrastructure are still adjusted in favor of man, which makes the animals living in the city a constant source of irritation — they do not clothe their children properly, never pick up the phone, defecate on the staircase, etc. — ann-sofie lönngren -“that’s when he comes rushing into her life.” swedish literary depictions of humananimal sexual contact at the turn of the twenty-first century 177 yet their place in this parallel universe is never questioned. this scenario certainly opens up the possibility of reading the story metaphorically or analogically as a depiction about prejudices regarding certain social groups, such as “the poor” or “the immigrants,” as being sloppy, incapable, and unhygienic. although such a reading would certainly be culturally relevant, it would mean abandoning the story’s explicit meaning along with the knowledge this might generate regarding the human-animal relationship (see armstrong; mchugh, animal). if taken literally, despite the story’s science fiction-like qualities, it gains relevance against the background of a swedish history of human-animal sex. this context is reinvoked as the narrator remembers how he met his wife and they had their first erotic encounter, which happened during a visit to a farm: i don’t remember us talking much, her and me, it was probably me who did most of the talking, as usual, and i had also been drinking, but as it turned out i was the one leading her home. we were alone in the pen and i searched long and hard for something to stand on. i think that i found her awkwardness appealing, it made me tender and protective. she was willing and just as horny as me, but it was i who had to go around with the flashlight and look for a box or a couple of stones. she just waited. finally i turned over the salt block and rolled it over to her behind. and afterwards i stood there with my pants around my ankles and with my shirt unbuttoned, laid with my naked chest on her back and tried in vain to embrace her. eventually i just let my arms hang along her sides, my chest against her warm body, my cheek against her thick fur and she ate. […] the next day i came back and she lay down and i could sit in the sun with my back against her belly. (50–51)14 while images of grazing livestock are part of the general conception of sweden, the fact that there is a historical reality behind this depiction in “co-livestock” is evident from investigations that show that cows and heifers were the most commonly involved animals in this country’s sodomy cases, in pre-modern as well as modern times (liliequist 394; rydström 70–71). the practice of human-cow sex was also represented in twentieth century swedish literature, such as in the first part of vilhelm moberg’s humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 178 (1898–1973) emigrant-epos series (the emigrants, 1949; eng. 1951). this narrative takes place in the mid-nineteenth century and depicts the large-scale emigration from sweden to america. one of the characters the reader gets to know is arvid, a young man who is moving to america to escape the abusive nickname “the bull at nybacken,” which was given to him because of rumors that he had once had sex with a cow (for a further discussion of sexuality in this novel, see von seth). although the reader never learns if these accusations are true, they certainly come across as being associated with actual contemporary practices in sweden when read against the historical circumstances mentioned above. another swedish literary representation of human-cow sexual contact is found in the autobiography puberty, written in 1978 by the influential twentieth century author ivar lo-johansson.15 in his description of growing up on a farm in the 1910s and entering into adolescence, the girls living in the countryside appear difficult to approach. this was not the case with the farm animals, whose smells, accommodating attitudes, and open displays of genitals are described as appealing. but even though lo-johansson singled one of the heifers out, which he treated extra well and would sometimes embrace as he “caressed himself,” he could never, despite repeated attempts, make it to the point of actual intercourse (301–303).16 the obstacle was not only the task of getting up high enough, just as in jakobson’s story but also — which is a point of difference between these two stories — the inability of making the animal stand still. indeed, these two difficulties reoccur in rydström’s major study of court cases concerning the crime of bestiality under the swedish penal code of 1864–1944 (sinners, 222–229). a difference between both moberg’s and lo-johansson’s stories, on the one hand, and the scenes depicted by jakobson in “co-livestock,” on the other, is the absence of guilt in the latter. arvid, in moberg’s the emigrants, leaves sweden to escape the social condemnation connected to his abusive nickname, while the main character in lojohansson’s book is constantly afraid of being caught in the act of intimacy with the heifer, which, he thinks, might cause him to be sent to a correction institute. in “colivestock,” however, the lack of shame naturally follows from the imagined universe in this literary text, where humans and animals are seen as ultimately similar — although from a human point of view — and that consequently there is nothing remarkable about human-animal sex. indeed, in this story, the human-animal relationship with regards to sex can rather be seen in connection with the thoughts put forward by lojohansson who, in spite of experiencing shame and guilt, nevertheless advances the idea that sexuality is what animals and humans have in common, wherefore it should ann-sofie lönngren -“that’s when he comes rushing into her life.” swedish literary depictions of humananimal sexual contact at the turn of the twenty-first century 179 be seen as a force that brings different species together (lo-johansson 301; rydström, sinners 77). this way of reasoning is in line with the thoughts put forward by singer referred to above. the human-cow relationship in both puberty and “co-livestock” can thus be seen as instigators of that which kathy rudy refers to as another erotic world, beyond the paradigm of bestiality (this should be compared with donna haraway’s concept of “otherworlding” in “otherworldly conversations” [174–182] and when species meet [303–304n1]). still, the world depicted in “co-livestock” is clearly not a particularly happy one. although sex does not appear as a problem in human-animal relationships, these liaisons nevertheless leave the humans involved in them as emotionally starved, frustrated, and disappointed. with regard to the animals, the reader never learns their point of view, but, as the narrative makes clear, posing the same cognitive expectations for animals as for humans comes with big risks for the animals’ welfare. finally, it is worth highlighting one common aspect of all the sources i have referred to in the discussion about “co-livestock,” both literary and historical, namely the circumstance that sex with larger farm animals such as cows is clearly an all-male affair. the stereotypical image of a person who has sex with animals — a young male, in the countryside, with a cow instead of the woman he cannot access (bakke 226; miletski, understanding 40) — has turned out to be grounded in a historical reality (liliequist 394; rydström, sinners 70, 76–77). in “co-livestock,” the only female person whose crossspecies relationship we learn about is involved with a dog, a detail which — in particular in relation to the two other stories discussed in this article — further identifies narratives of sex with farm animals as being part of a male continuum. one significant aspect of this tradition is homosocial communication and community. according to historical investigations, sex with farm animals was sometimes executed in pairs or in groups, and there are reoccurring stories of information and tips regarding this practice being passed on from older boys to younger ones (liliequist 410–419; rydström 73–76, 215–216). this aspect is clear in lo-johansson’s depictions in puberty, and in “co-livestock” there also appears to be a constant male-to-male dialogue about the potentials and difficulties of human-animal sex and co-living. indeed, this forms a stark contrast with the two narratives discussed earlier in this article, which features lonely, silent women as their main characters. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 180 conclusion. in two of the literary texts discussed in this article, it is apparent that despite the fact that they were written during a period of time in which sex with animals had long since been de-criminalized in swedish law, the social condemnation associated with the bestiality paradigm remains very strong. indeed, in both johansson’s and håkansson’s texts, the death penalty is executed by the human party of the cross-species liaison in ways that almost makes the penalty appear as a natural order of things, an inherent logic in the pet-institution. the third story, jakobson’s, offers constructive points of criticism against this discourse, as it defines the problematic aspects of the modern human-animal relationship as much more thorough than being isolated to the sexual act. thus, even though no one dies in this story, and even though human-animal sex is completely normalized, it is still not a depiction of a happy multispecies society, either for animals or humans. still, it is apparent that these stories do not just reproduce the bestiality paradigm, but rather iterate it, and thus formulate the need for renewed understandings of the discourse of human-animal sexual encounters. in relation to this process, i want to highlight the fact that two of the stories in my material are written by female authors and feature realistic descriptions of isolated female main characters with pets in urban settings, and the third is written by a male author and features the unrealistic world of sociable male characters with farm animals in both rural and urban settings. indeed, there is a lack of words for what the female characters in the first two narratives experience, a void that can only be filled, in the third story, with a humorous play with language’s metaphorical and metonymical levels in a story that is so clearly un-realistic that it gets away with anything. although the material is very limited in scope, i would still like to advance the idea that this dichotomy can be seen as a visualization of the fact that after the swedish law against bestiality was abolished in 1944, this practice and taboo were not only reproduced in the pornography industry and in the form of a lingering social condemnation. rather, they became active players in the construction of the relationship between new/old, now/then, culture/nature, man/woman, western/nonwestern, straight/gay, and, ultimately, between what could and could not exist within the frameworks of the modern society. but for any study that acknowledges the fact that we live in a world of multispecies stories and practices of becoming (haraway staying), there is a need for other ways of thinking than the one organized according to such dichotomies. this was formulated by donna haraway in 2003: ann-sofie lönngren -“that’s when he comes rushing into her life.” swedish literary depictions of humananimal sexual contact at the turn of the twenty-first century 181 my multi-species family is not about surrogacy and substitutes; we are trying to live other tropes, other metaplasms. we need other nouns and pronouns for the kin genres of companion species, just as we did (and still do) for the spectrum of genders. (96) although the topic of human-animal encounters is multifaceted, contradictory, and largely underexplored (bakke 225), and it is thus difficult to prove anything for certain, it seems likely that human-animal sexual contact are more common in today’s society than is generally believed (bolliger & goetschel 26). also, as garrard notes, zoophilic sexual relations, be they physical, visual, or literary, are indeed part of the entangled world in which we live — whether we like it or not (bestial 217). in relation to these claims, it is important to recall the fact that what causes the harm in the woman who met the dog is not the sexual encounter itself, but rather the effects of the social condemnation of this act, executed by vera. together, these lines of thought points to the need for further verbalization of and investigations into ethical, cultural, legislative, medical, social, and biological aspects of human-animal sexual contact. notes 1. in this article, i mostly employ the terms “human” and “animal” as shorthand for the more accurate but longer phrase “human and non-human animals.” in this practice i am inspired by brown (2). 2. this book has not been translated into english. the translation of the title is mine. original: kvinnan som mötte en hund. 3. my translation. original: “det är då han kommer rusande in i hennes liv. över gångbron kommer han, kompakt som ett lokomotiv. musklerna vibrerar synligt under huden. han styr kurs rakt mot vera, men gör en inbromsning så tvär att bakkroppen slänger och törnar mot bänken och så sitter han pladask mitt framför hennes knän. han darrar av iver, munnen står öppen, hon ser hans rosa tunga mellan vita hörntänder. öronen står upp. ja. han är en hund. ingenting annat.” 4. my translation. original: “hon trycker honom intill sig. hon kramar honom hårt, hon glider med läpparna över hans öron, de är som mjukaste lappar av det finaste silke. […] han suckar av välbehag. han är varm mot hennes mage genom tunna linnet. […] nu vaggar hon med kroppen långsamt i sidled, huvudet hänger, ögonen är slutna, saliven rinner till och fyller hennes mun och i tänderna har hon en pirrande känsla. handen humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 182 glider bakåt. hon känner svansstumpens strävare hår, bakbenets muskler och den varma hålan mellan buk och lår. på insidan är huden hårlös och mycket, mycket len. det går heta strålar genom hennes ljumskar. han breddar en aning och högerhanden sluter sig kring hans testiklar, fingrarna glesar, sträcks ut och dras ihop, handflatan masserar med varsamma rörelser. djupt i skötet har hon ett pickande rede. en svullenhet. en värk. då faller bilan. […] -herre gud i himmelen! vad håller jag på med? vad är det jag gör?” 5. this has not been translated into english. the translation of the title is mine. original: “övergångsålder” in the collection of stories perversioner: 12 berättelser om avvikelser [eng. perversions: 12 stories about abberrations]. 6. my translation. original: “gammalt oskiljaktigt par”. 7. my translation. original: “hon hade lagt märke till att det mitt på stjärten fanns en liten, liten ullig utbuktning. nu såg hon tydligt att den lilla bullen hade växt till sig, och att det på nära håll gick att urskilja ett par svartfjuniga blygdläppar och en mörkare fuktig springa emellan dem, en springa som på ett fånigt sätt påminde om ett kvinnligt kön, fast i miniatyr. ’hon är alltså på väg in i puberteten,’ tänkte birgitta.” 8. my translation. original: “hårbeklädda lilla svarta springa. birgitta kunde tydligt se att den svullnat upp, och när hon höll katten i famnen kände hon hur könet bultade varmt och lämnade ett tunt spår av slem efter sig på hennes bara arm.” 9. my translation. original: “med yttersta spetsen av fingertoppen rörde hon vid kattens kön. det var våtare än hon väntat sig och alldeles mjukt, som nosen, eller insidan av örat, och innan hon hann tänka sig för gled toppen in i det mörka innandömet. pulsen tilltog i en hisnande takt och små svarta prickar dansade för hennes syn. därinne var det varmt och trångt, och birgitta förnam pulserande rörelser, ett slags milda konvulsioner som tycktes härröra från djurets bäcken, eller var det kanske trycket från hennes egna, tunga hjärtslag hon kände där ytterst i fingertoppen? katten hade med ens tystnat. långsamt, mycket långsamt, tryckte hon fingret lite djupare in i springan. […] birgittas ansikte kändes som smält lava. det hettade i långa utdragna vågor som letade sig ut i armarna och ner i fingrarna. för varje vågsvallning kände hon hur fingret gled allt längre in i djurets kött. lättnaden över att slippa det plågade jamandet var oerhörd. blodet sjönk långsamt undan från ansiktet, pulsen ann-sofie lönngren -“that’s when he comes rushing into her life.” swedish literary depictions of humananimal sexual contact at the turn of the twenty-first century 183 lugnade sig och hettan som täckt hennes kropp likt en brinnande filt svalnade. […] nu låg den [katten] helt stilla, och birgittas finger hade omärkligt sjunkit in ända till roten. så underligt det såg ut: den vita, rynkiga kvinnohanden som stack ut från djurets håriga kropp, likt någon apart, köttig utväxt. för ett ögonblick var de båda helt stilla, katt och människa, förenade i denna motbjudande akt av ömsesidig desperation.” 10. my translation. original: “ruttet kön”. 11. my translation. original: “‘hjärtegryn,’ viskade hon i det ludna örat. ’mitt lilla hjärtegryn.’” 12. this has not been translated into english. the translation of the title is mine. in swedish, it consists of a wordplay between “sambo” (“co-living”) and “boskap” (“livestock”), that i have done my best to try to capture in the translation “colivestock”. original “samboskap” in the collection of short stories berättelser om djur och andra [eng. narratives about animals and others]. 13. my translation. original: “min fru är en jävla kossa.” 14. my translation. original: “jag minns inte att vi pratade särskilt mycket, hon och jag, som vanligt var det väl jag som pratade mest, och dessutom hade jag druckit, men hur det var så blev det jag som ledde hem henne. vi var ensamma i hagen och jag letade länge och väl efter någonting att stå på. jag tror att jag fann hennes tafatthet tilltalande, den gjorde mig öm och beskyddande. hon var villig och lika kåt som jag, men det var jag som fick gå där med ficklampan och snoka efter en låda eller några stenar. hon bara väntade. till sist välte jag kubben med saltet och rullade bort den till hennes bak. och efteråt stod jag där med byxorna runt anklarna och med skjortan uppknäppt, låg med mitt nakna bröst på hennes rygg och försökte förgäves omfamna henne. till slut lät jag bara armarna hänga utmed hennes sidor, bröstet mot hennes varma kropp, kinden mot hennes täta hårrem och hon åt. […] dagen därpå kom jag tillbaka och hon lade sig ned och jag kunde sitta i solen med ryggen mot hennes mage.” 15. this has not been translated into english. the translation of the title is mine. original: puberty. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 184 16. this representation was previously discussed by rydström (sinners, 76–77). works cited armstrong, philip. what animals mean in the fiction of modernity. routledge, 2008. baker, steve. picturing the beast. animals, identity and representation. manchester up, 1993. bakke, monika. “the predicament of zoopleasures: human-nonhuman libidinal relations.” animal encounters. tom tyler and manuela rossini, eds. brill, 2009. 221–242. balcombe, jonathan. pleasurable kingdom. animals and the nature of feeling good. macmillan, 2006. bolliger, giera and antoine f. goetschel. ”sexual relations with animals (zoophilia): an unrecognized problem in animal welfare legislation.” bestiality and zoophilia: sexual relations with animals. andrea m. beetz and anthony l. podberscek, eds. purdue up, 2005, 23–45. broberg, gunnar. kattens historia. atlantis, 2004. brown, laura. homeless dogs and melancholy apes. humans and other animals in the modern literary imagination. cornell up, 2010. dekkers, midas. dearest pet. on bestiality. 1992. trans. paul vincent. verso, 1994. dell’aversano, carmen. “the love whose name cannot be spoken: queering the humananimal bond.” journal for critical animal studies 8.1-2 (2010): 73–125. despret, vinciane. what would animals say if we asked the right questions? 2012. trans. brett buchanan. u minnesota p, 2016. foucault, michel. the history of sexuality, vol. 1, the will to knowledge. 1976. trans. robert hurley. penguin, 1990. fox, rebekah. “animal behaviours, post-human lives: everyday negotiations of the animal-human divide in pet-keeping.” social and cultural geography 7.4 (2006): 525–537. ann-sofie lönngren -“that’s when he comes rushing into her life.” swedish literary depictions of humananimal sexual contact at the turn of the twenty-first century 185 fudge, erica. pets. acumen, 2008. garber, marjorie. dog love. touchstone, 1996. garrard, greg. “bestial humans and sexual animals: zoophilia in law and literature.” animalities: literary and cultural studies beyond the human. michael lundblad, ed. edinburgh up, 2017. 211–235. _____. ecocriticism. routledge, 2004. grebowicz, margret. “when species meat: confronting bestiality pornography.” humanimalia 1.2 (2010): 1–17. online. haraway, donna j. the companion species manifesto. dogs, people, and significant otherness. prickly paradigm press, 2003. _____. “otherworldly conversations, terran topics, local terms.” 2004. material feminisms. stacy alaimo and susan hekman, eds. indiana up, 2008. 157–187. _____. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. duke up, 2016. _____. when species meet. u minnesota p, 2008. holmberg, tora. urban animals. crowding in zoocities. routledge, 2015. håkansson, gabriella. ”övergångsålder.” perversioner: 12 berättelser om avvikelser. viktoria jäderling, ed. vertigo, 2003. jakobson, lars. berättelser om djur och andra. albert bonniers förlag, 2004. johansson, elsie. kvinnan som mötte en hund. lt, 1984. kulick, don. “don kulick om djurporr.” f-ordet: mot en ny feminism. petra östergren, ed. alfabeta, 2008. 75–86. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 186 kuzniar, alice. “i married my dog.” queering the non-human. noreen giffney and myra hird, ed. ashgate, 2008. 205–226. liliequist, jonas. “peasants against nature: crossing the boundaries between man and animal in seventeenthand eighteenth-century sweden.” journal of the history of sexuality 1.3 (1993). 393–423. lo-johansson, ivar. pubertet. bonnier, 1978. lundblad, michael. the birth of a jungle: animality in progressive-era u.s. literature and culture. oxford up, 2013. lönngren, ann-sofie. following the animal. power, agency and human-animal transformations in modern, northern-european literature. cambridge scholars, 2015. _____. “metaphor, metonymy, more-than-anthropocentric. the animal that therefore i read (and follow).” palgrave handbook of literary animal studies. robert mckay, susan mchugh and john miller, eds. palgrave macmillan, 2020. mchugh, susan. animal stories. narrating across species lines. u minnesota p, 2011. _____. “queer (and) animal theories.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 15.1 (2009). 153–169. miletski, hani. ”a history of bestiality.” bestiality and zoophilia: sexual relations with animals. andrea m. beetz and anthony l. podberscek, eds. purdue up, 2005. 1–22. _____. understanding bestiality and zoophilia. east-west, 2002. moberg, vilhelm. the emigrants: a novel. simon and schuster, 1951. redmalm, david. an animal without an animal within. the powers of pet keeping. örebro university, 2013. rudy, kathy. “lgbtq…z?” hypatia 27.3 (2012): 601–615. rydström, jens. sinners and citizens. bestiality and homosexuality in sweden 1880–1950. stockholm university, department of history, 2001. ann-sofie lönngren -“that’s when he comes rushing into her life.” swedish literary depictions of humananimal sexual contact at the turn of the twenty-first century 187 _____. “’sodomitical sins are threefold’: typologies of bestiality, masturbation, and homosexuality in sweden, 1880-1950.” journal of the history of sexuality 9.3 (2000): 240– 276. sedgwick, eve kosofsky. epistemology of the closet. u california p, 1990. von seth, oscar. ”pojken med koskällan och tjuren på nybacken. en queer läsning av vilhelm mobergs utvandrarserie.” tidskrift för litteraturvetenskap 4 (2019): 88–97. singer, peter. “heavy petting.” nerve, 2001. accessed 2020–06–12. online. tuan, yi-fu. dominance and affection: the making of pets. yale up, 1984. thomas, keith. man and the natural world: a history of the modern sensibility. pantheon, 1983. thorman, staffan. “hunden som människans följeslagare genom tiderna.” från renhållningshjon till modeaccessoar. 10 000 år av relationer människa-hund i sverige. föredrag vid ett symposium i uppsala 15 februari 2013. anne-sofie gräslund and ingvar svanberg, eds. kungl. gustav adolfs akademien för svensk folkkultur, 2014. 9–29. douglas leatherland -the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies h u m a n i m a l i a 11:2 douglas leatherland the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies introduction. this paper will explore fictional animal languages and the representation of other forms of communication between nonhuman species in the animal fantasy genre, focusing in particular on richard adams’s watership down (1972). adams’s novel is not the first anthropomorphic narrative to explore ways in which nonhuman animals might communicate by systems other than the human language in which the text itself is written, but its fictional rabbit language of lapine has inspired subsequent writers in their efforts to represent the capacities and limitations of language in relation to nonhuman systems of communication. it has prompted writers to explore, by focalizing through nonhuman animals, what constitutes a language in the first place. the significance of nonhuman forms of communication, and the place of human language within a spectrum of sign-systems, has been contemporaneously explored in the field “zoosemiotics.” coined and founded by thomas a. sebeok in 1963, zoosemiotics denotes the study of systems of communication within and between species (intraspecific and interspecific communication, respectively). while zoosemiotics does not regard nonhuman systems of communication as languages in the sense of our human languages, it does consider various equally, if not more complex, communication systems; human language is encompassed within the much larger sphere of animal (including human) communication. sebeok writes that each kind of animal has at its command a repertoire of signs that forms a system unique to it or is, in biological parlance, species-specific. language is a species-specific trait of man; it is therefore counterproductive and misleading to ascribe language to any other animal, except, perhaps, metaphorically. (“talking with animals” 88) contrary to sebeok’s separation of language from the nonhuman, i will apply the term language in a less limiting sense throughout this paper. as david abram claims in the spell of the sensuous, [e]very attempt to definitively say what language is is subject to a curious limitation. for the only medium with which we can define language is language itself. we are therefore unable to circumscribe the whole of language within our definition. it may be best, then, to leave language humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 102 undefined, and to thus acknowledge its open-endedness, its mysteriousness. (73) this paper will therefore focus on analyzing the capacities and limitations of accepted, human-centered definitions of language inherent in an example of a fictional animal language, richard adams’s lapine, as well as in non-verbal channels of communication in watership down and other animal fantasies. one aim in exploring the depiction of nonhuman “languages” in animal fantasy is to challenge traditional critical responses to such fiction as anthropomorphic. do the efforts of certain texts to explore language along a wider spectrum of communication systems across an array of different species provide a basis for defending fictional animal languages against the charge of anthropomorphism? the fact that most of the narratives i shall discuss feature animals communicating through channels other than the spoken language of humans would seem to suggest this is the case, and despite their adherence to the anthropomorphic tropes of animal fantasy for the most part, each narrative demonstrates to some degree a genuine attempt to remain faithful to factual and observable details of animal behavior. of course, the texts which will be discussed here, most of which are animal fantasies, are inevitably anthropomorphic. even such natural history narratives as henry williamson’s tarka the otter (1927) feature some level of anthropomorphism, despite their lack of more obvious anthropomorphic elements. anthropomorphism permeates all narrative; any attempt to represent the consciousness or subjectivity of another individual is an instance of anthropomorphism. monika fludernik speaks of the “anthropomorphic bias of narratives and its correlation with the fundamental story parameters of personhood, identity [and] actionality” (9). the more overt anthropomorphic tropes of animal narratives have tended to invite more scrutiny than the more covert, natural-historical elements. in the last sixty years or so, animal narratives have tended towards a more “natural” representation of animal characters, albeit still retaining some of the explicit anthropomorphism of earlier traditions — namely, the trope of ascribing speech to animals. the focus of this paper on the various channels used to communicate by animal characters in these fantasies is more specific than previous studies on the speaking animal in fiction. previously, the subject of speaking animals in literature has raised questions about narrative agency and the concept of giving animals a voice with which they evoke sympathy for their suffering from the human reader. early examples of such didacticism, especially in children’s fiction, include dorothy kilner’s the life and perambulations of a mouse (1783). in the nineteenth century, the “animal autobiography” douglas leatherland -the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies 103 black beauty (1877), written by anna sewell, is undoubtedly the most famous example. in sewell’s novel horses communicate with each other in their own language, which is not understood by humans but is rendered as simplified english. sewell tries to differentiate beauty’s voice from the human voices he overhears and reports. in black beauty and subsequent other texts, humans are excluded from the nonhuman realm as they are rendered unable to understand the language spoken between nonhuman others, while the nonhuman characters can understand what humans are saying for the most part. while this may provide a narrative convenience which prevents sewell’s novel from lapsing into the fantastical trope of humans speaking with other animals, it might also be a commentary on the separation of humans from the natural world in the modern age. literally and metaphorically, we are deaf to the voices of our nonhuman cohabitants. later fiction, however, begins to explore questions of language and communication in ways which reflect growing interest in the differences of degree between human and nonhuman animals sparked by evolutionary theory, thus using language as a phenomenon which bridges, rather than widens, the conceptual gap between humans and other species. one of the many debates intensified by darwinism was that of whether language was a trait unique to human beings or continuous with other forms of animal communication demonstrated by groups as diverse as bees, songbirds, and cetaceans. darwin himself remarks that, with social animals, the power of intercommunication between the members of the same community, — and with other species, between the opposite sexes, as well as between the young and the old, — is of the highest importance to them. this is generally effected by means of the voice, but it is certain that gestures and expressions are to a certain extent mutually intelligible. man not only uses inarticulate cries, gestures, and expressions, but has invented articulate language; if, indeed, the word invented can be applied to a process, completed by innumerable steps, half-consciously made. (44-45) darwin makes the point here that human language has developed as a result of evolutionary processes. humans still retain a plethora of vocal signals demonstrated by other animal species, therefore blurring the boundary between animal communication and human language, between “inarticulate cries, gestures and expressions” and “invented articulate language.” amongst twentieth-century writers who responded to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 104 this difference of degree between supposedly inarticulate animal sounds and articulate human speech is franz kafka. kafka’s inarticulate hybrids. kafka’s short fiction often explores the failing attempts of human-animal hybrids, or “humanimals,” to articulate or express themselves to humans despite their capacity for speaking in human language, emphasizing the untranslatability of nonhuman subjective experience into human terms. the most striking example from kafka’s narratives is the character of red peter in “a report to an academy” (1917). marianne dekoven writes: “it is the story of his acquisition of human language that makes red peter’s life history so important to kafka’s attack on the belief that language is what makes humans superior, in fact supreme beings, not just separate from but dominant over all other animals” (20-21). kafka’s ape-human speaks in articulate human language when addressing his audience of academics, although the process of becoming-human that he undergoes in captivity has prevented him from recounting his life as an ape prior to his capture. he can only recount his experiences leading up to and during his life as ape-become-human. the first instance of red peter’s acquisition of human signals of communication is learning the handshake: “the first thing i learned was to give a handshake; a handshake betokens frankness; well, today, now that i stand at the very peak of my career, i hope to add frankness in words to the frankness of that first handshake” (“report” 251). red peter interprets the handshake in a manner that ascribes a sort of translation to the gesture, whereas frankness is not the only thing implied by a handshake. a handshake can be a diplomatic gesture or it can demarcate familiarity. moreover, red peter’s attempt to translate the meaning of a physical gesture into linguistic terms mirrors human attempts to translate the gestures of animals into language, as well. red peter does demonstrate an understanding of the nuances of meaning, however. “i fear that perhaps you do not quite understand what i mean by ‘way out.‘ i use the expression in its fullest and most popular sense. i deliberately do not use the word ‘freedom’” (252). this delineation of the literal from the abstract shows that red peter has not only learned to articulately imitate speech but has acquired an understanding of the abstract nature of many concepts expressed in human language. peter’s recollection of his own observations of the ship’s crew are also interesting in that he seems at first to invert the human-animal binary. akira mizuta lippit remarks that “[t]he ape’s transformation accompanies a noticeable becoming-animal of its human captors and proceeds around the oral/aural loci” (149). “their laughter had always a gruff bark in it that sounded dangerous but meant nothing,” red peter recounts. he explains further that “they hardly spoke but only grunted to each other” (“report” 254). as an ape, red douglas leatherland -the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies 105 peter initially hears human speech as inarticulate grunting, a form of communication very distant from his familiar and (to him) articulate way of communicating with his own species. conversely, humans can only hear nonhuman vocalizations as inarticulate sounds. dekoven interprets the sequence “not as a comic reversal of human and animal, but rather as a moment suggesting their commonality,” a reading which might be applied to any of kafka’s short stories depicting “humanimal” hybrids (22). gregor samsa, the protagonist of “the metamorphosis” who wakes up transformed into a giant cockroach, is another example of one of kafka’s inarticulate “humanimals”: “gregor,” said a voice — it was his mother’s — “it’s a quarter to seven. hadn’t you a train to catch?” that gentle voice! gregor had a shock as he heard his own voice answering hers, unmistakably his own voice, it was true, with a persistent horrible twittering squeak behind it like an undertone, which left the words in their clear shape only for the first moment and then rose up reverberating around them to destroy their sense, so that one could not be sure one had heard them rightly. gregor wanted to answer at length and explain everything, but in the circumstances he confined himself to saying: “yes, yes, thank you, mother, i’m getting up now.” (“metamorphosis” 91) while his family understand his speech at first, the intelligibility of gregor’s words gradually deteriorates as the story unfolds. instead of forming coherent sentences, gregor is reduced to uttering audible but incoherent squeaks, and it is the chief clerk who first remarks that his voice is no longer human. however, gregor’s unintelligibility to others correlates with his increasing ability to understand himself: “the words he uttered were no longer understandable, apparently, although they seemed clear enough to him, even clearer than before, perhaps because his ear had grown accustomed to the sound of them” (99). we might arguably read this passage as another moment of “commonality” between the human and the nonhuman. “the metamorphosis” could, arguably, occupy a tenuous position on the spectrum of anthropomorphic and zoomorphic representation. david herman writes that “if anthropomorphism entails the imposition of human language on species that communicate otherwise, zoomorphism can entail the loss of language by the species assumed to be its rightful possessor — thereby staging a different way of being in the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 106 world” (174). lippit reads gregor’s transformation as an escape from the limitations of language: for gregor to complete the metamorphosis, he must willingly leave behind the human world of consciousness and language. kafka suggests that once one’s existence is no longer regulated by language, by the convergence of language and body, the entire world is thrown into an animated state of disarray […] since language is the means by which human beings are said to determine their existence, and since gregor lacks that capacity to be human, he must instead allow his insect body to lead him to a new identity. (146-47) while kafka’s narratives do not feature any fictional animal languages, his depiction of human language in “a report” and “the metamorphosis” as an inevitably limiting factor in establishing commonalities between humans and other animals (or, indeed, between humans and other humans) illuminates many questions about communication within and between species. while kafka’s short stories do not strictly belong in the animal fantasy genre, they do seem to encompass tropes found across many genres in which animals feature. as mario ortiz robles asserts, “kafka lends his name (which means ’crow’ in czech) to a unique generic moniker, the kafkaesque, that comes to subsume all animal genres with dark bureaucratic efficiency” (20). the preoccupation of his short stories with language and its capacities and limitations provides a useful framework for analyzing texts in the animal fantasy genre which similarly address, and challenge, the place of human language in the spectrum of communication systems across species. another concept prompted by questions about language in a species-specific context is that of translation. we understand the concept insofar as it applies to translating between different human languages, and primatologists and the like have developed systems for interpreting the bodily and facial gestures of primates and other mammals, but how does animal fantasy translate for animals? translating for animals. before moving on to discuss the linguistic elements of watership down, it should first be noted that the term “lapine,” the name of richard adams’s rabbit language, is not only derived from the french for “rabbit” but is also an analogue of “equine,” featured in the full title of anna sewell’s black beauty (1877), an animal autobiography which is, as the “translator” states, “translated from the original douglas leatherland -the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies 107 equine.” tess cosslett highlights some inconsistencies in sewell’s text, however, remarking that “translating” is a very apt metaphor for the way that sewell imagines a human voice for animal experiences. it does not, however, account for the horses’ ability to understand human language. and, in addition to this understanding a quite different kind of communication goes on from human to animal, via tone and touch. […] the book’s need to promote this kind of sympathetic communication with animals is at odds with the convention that the animals can understand everything the humans say anyway. (69) the notion of translation figures significantly in all such stories in which nonhuman animals converse in dialogue, which occurs in all manner of texts from the fables of aesop to the tales of beatrix potter, or in animal autobiographies such as black beauty. the “view that there exist signs, per se, in animal communication, or in any other communication among living systems,” write kull and torop, “poses the question about the translatability of these signs, both by humans and by other organisms” (411). artistic licence, of course, permits literature to bypass the question of translation, especially in the case of talking animals. however, some authors, as daryl hague points out, engage in “covert translation”; hugh lofting’s the story of doctor dolittle (1920) and margery sharp’s the rescuers (1959) he gives as examples. it is arguable, claims hague, that from an “ideal semiotic perspective […] translators add no value at all, since the output is supposed to be directly exchangeable for the input.” in lofting’s and sharp’s narratives, “inter-species communication is an issue. what happens is that the narrator expressly states that communication is taking place in mouse language (or whatever), then supposedly translates all the dialogue for the reader. in many instances, the narrator provides these translations inexplicitly, with no reference to their status as translations” (hague 178). ernest thompson seton, one of the turn-of-the-century “nature fakers” (along with jack london and charles g.d. roberts), acts as an overt translator in the opening of “raggylug,” his short story about an eastern cottontail rabbit featured in wild animals i have known (1898). this is in large part because seton is one of the most recognized writers of the “realistic” animal story, and thus any elements of his work that might be subject to the charge of anthropomorphism would be qualified by the author. we do humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 108 not find this in the animal fantasy genre, where such elements are to be expected. seton writes: truly rabbits have no speech as we understand it, but they have a way of conveying ideas by a system of sounds, signs, scents, whisker-touches, movements, and example that answers the purpose of speech; and it must be remembered that though in telling this story i freely translate from rabbit into english, i repeat nothing that they did not say. (seton 93-4; author’s emphasis) while seton makes explicitly clear his role as translator, he also legitimizes his translations on the basis of his own knowledge of the various channels by which rabbits actually communicate. this tenuous basis for defending his translation from “rabbit’ into english is rendered more explicitly anthropomorphic later in the narrative. seton describes how raggylug’s mother, molly cottontail, teaches him a signal code: “rabbits telegraph each other by thumping on the ground with their hind feet […] a single thump means ’look out’ or ’freeze.’ a slow thump thump means ’come.’ a fast thump thump means ’danger’; and a very fast thump thump thump means ’run for dear life’” (106). while seton is correct in remarking that rabbits communicate by thumping with their feet, his translation of these signals is limited to one basic meaning per signal. any of the variations of thumping listed above might signify any number of meanings depending on other variables. adams acts as a much more covert translator in watership down, although lapine words are occasionally intermingled with english words in the dialogue. the narrator therefore shifts between the translation and the transcription of lapine. an interesting example of a narrative which features passages of dialogue in an animal language which are not — even overtly — translated, is also a major influence on adams’s novel: walter de la mare’s the three mulla-mulgars, or the three royal monkeys (1910). de la mare’s tale depicts monkeys as linguistically diverse creatures. the monkey seelem teaches his three sons — thumb, thimble and nod — “the common tongue of the forest-monkeys — that is the language of nearly all the mulgars that live in the forests of munza — jacquet-mulgars, mullabruks, purple-faced and saffron-headed mulgars, skeetos, tuft-waving manquabees, fly-catchers, and squirrel-tails,” as well as ‘a little of the languages of the dreaded gunga-mulgars, of the collobs, and the babbaboomas. but the minimul-mulgars’ and the oomgars’ or man-monkeys’ languages (white, black, or yellow) he could not teach, because he did not know them.” alone, seelem and his sons speak “the secret language of the mulla-mulgars […] that is, mulgar-royal” (de la douglas leatherland -the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies 109 mare 16-17). when seelem leaves his family to find his brother assasimmon in his home of tishnar, he tells his sons: “‘wait here and guard your old mother, muttamatutta, my sons, her ummuz and ukkas. and grow strong, o tailless ones, till i return. zu zoube seese muglareen, een suang no nouano zubpf!’ and that was all he said” (18). the reader is left to surmise what this last sentence might mean. some sort of farewell parting would be an educated guess, but there is no indication as to the meaning of these words. adams, on the other hand, provides footnotes and a glossary of lapine terms, although he does not include any full sentences written entirely in lapine. thus there are two central and interdependent features of language which have surfaced from exploring a breadth of animal narratives, and which play a significant role in the animal fantasy genre, particularly in late twentiethand twenty-first-century texts: the ability of language to express or articulate subjective experience, and its ability to be translated from systems of communication other than human language itself. watership down, with its fictional rabbit language of lapine, is the first novel in the animal fantasy genre which really brings to the fore questions about the capacities and limitations of language in relation to these two features. watership down and the lapine language. there are several works of literature which feature fictional animal languages to a greater or lesser extent. the argument for these languages as anthropomorphic is twofold: while attributing a system of communication to nonhuman animals which is described in terms of language is clearly anthropomorphic, the recognition of difference between such languages and human languages emphasises their mutual unintelligibility. richard adams’s rabbit-epic, watership down, features a rabbit language called lapine, in which adams’s characters presumably converse throughout the novel, although their spoken dialogue is translated into english for the understanding of the reader. adams provides, however, some lapine terms and their meanings, as well as a lapine glossary (see table below). efrafa the name of the warren founded by general woundwort. el-ahrairah the rabbit folk hero. the name elil-hrair-rah means enemies-thousand-prince’ = the prince with a thousand enemies. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 110 elil enemies (of rabbits). embleer stinking, e.g. the smell of a fox flay .food, e.g. grass or other green fodder flayrah unusually good food, e.g. lettuce. frith the sun, personified as a god by rabbits. frithrah! = lord sun; used as an exclamation. fu inle after moonrise. hlessi a rabbit living above ground, without a regular hole or warren. a wandering rabbit, living in the open. (plural, hlessil.) hrair a great many; an unaccountable number; any number over four. u hrair = the thousand (enemies). hrairoo ‘little thousand.’ the name of fiver in lapine. hraka droppings, excreta. hrududu a tractor, car or any motor vehicle. (plural, hrududil.) hyzenthlay literally, ‘shine-dew-fur’ = fur shining like dew. the name of a doe. inle literally, the moon; also moonrise. but a second meaning carries the idea of darkness, fear and death. lendri a badger. narn nice, pleasant (to eat). ni-frith noon. owsla the strongest rabbits in the warren, the ruling clique. rah a prince, leader or chief rabbit. usually used as a suffix. e.g. threarah = lord threar. douglas leatherland -the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies 111 roo sayn used as a suffix to denote a diminutive. e.g. hrairoo. groundsel. silf outside, that is, not underground. silflay to go above ground to feed. literally, to feed outside. also used as a noun. tharn stupefied, distraught, hypnotized with fear. but can also, in certain contexts, mean ‘looking foolish,’ or again ‘heartbroken’ or ‘forlorn.’ thethuthinnang ‘movement of leaves.’ the name of a doe. thlay fur. thlayli ‘fur-head.’ a nickname. threar a rowan tree, or mountain ash. thrennions berries of rowan tree. vair to excrete, pass droppings. zorn destroyed, murdered. denotes a catastrophe. adams’s lapine glossary from a glance through this glossary, kathleen anderson points out that lapine “consists primarily of nouns (many of them descriptive, objects described through action or negation); it contains numerous multi-syllabic and/or compound words; it is vivid, imagistic, poetic (that is, aesthetic in nature); and it resembles human language in various respects.” however, despite this resemblance to elements of human languages (anderson finds affinities with french, spanish, sanskrit, arabic and native american languages), she also highlights the seeming lack of abstract linguistic terms. adams’s rabbits “employ words which are practical because they convey concrete and thus accessible meanings, and beautiful because they describe, not replace, what they represent” (anderson 31). it should also be noted that almost all of the phonemes contained in the lapine words listed above are soft sounds, which at least shows some humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 112 consideration of the limitations of rabbits’ vocal capabilities, if it were possible that they spoke a language. as a spoken language, lapine comprises only one of a plethora of channels used by the rabbits to communicate both with other species and with each other. adams draws upon the influence of r.m. lockley’s the private life of the rabbit (1964) for passages of description which emulate a style of narration found in the natural history genre. lockley, homogenizing the terms language and communication, writes: rabbit language is through the senses of sight, smell and hearing — the hearing of signals made by movement, of a body rustling in the grass or in the burrow, or by the thudding stamp of hind feet on the ground in alarm. vocally, it has two rare sounds: a low nasal grunt, hardly audible, and used in sexual contacts; and a high treble scream or vocal squeal resembling that of a little pig, or perhaps a child in severe distress, and it is only uttered when the rabbit is terrified, as when its life is in danger, in a trap, or when attacked by an enemy. (lockley 23) adams reminds the reader that rabbits communicate primarily through the senses of smell and touch, while also including lapine terms throughout the novel. language is depicted at times as useful to the rabbits in formulating concepts relating to their behavior or their environment, at other times unhelpful or only partially useful. lapine terms such as tharn, which describes the “state of staring, glazed paralysis that comes over terrified or exhausted rabbits, so that they sit and watch their enemies — weasels or humans — approach to take their lives” (adams 24), are simple monosyllabic words which denote complex meanings and describe concepts particular to the lifeworld of the rabbit. the term hlessi (plural: hlessil), used to describe a wandering rabbit living above ground without a warren, is also a term which describes a concept particular to the rabbits’ lifeworld, although there are analogous terms we might use to describe similar figures in human societies — vagrant, for example. the categorizing function of language, however, is also reductive and works against the rabbits’ instincts. take hazel’s encounter with the crow, for example: it so happened that hazel had never seen a crow. it did not occur to him that it was following the track of a mole, in the hope of killing it with a blow of its beak and then pulling it out of its shallow run. if he had realized this, he might not have classed it light-heartedly as a “not douglas leatherland -the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies 113 hawk” — that is, anything from a wren to a pheasant — and continued on his way up the slope. (39) while hazel’s lack of caution stems from his lack of any previous knowledge of crows, it is unlikely that as a rabbit in the natural world hazel would not be instinctually cautious around a new and unfamiliar species of bird. verbal language, rather than the instinctual language of the senses, guides hazel’s response in this brief passage. lapine is used to delineate categories of animals in the natural world, most clearly between elil (enemies) and not-elil. this reductive use of language categories to distinguish predators of rabbits from other animals results in hazel’s classing the crow as a “nothawk.” the limits of language are expressed elsewhere in the novel. after hazel’s company and cowslip’s warren exchange a few spoken words, more sensual channels of communication take over. adams writes: there were no more speeches. rabbits have their own conventions and formalities, but these are few and short by human standards. if hazel had been a human being he would have been expected to introduce his companions one by one and no doubt each would have been taken in charge as a guest by one of their hosts. in the great burrow, however, things happened differently. the rabbits mingled naturally. they did not talk for talking’s sake, in the artificial manner that human beings — and sometimes even their dogs and cats — do. but this did not mean that they were not communicating; merely that they were not communicating by talking. all over the burrow, both the newcomers and those who were at home were accustoming themselves to each other in their own way and their own time; getting to know what the strangers smelt like, how they moved, how they breathed, how they scratched, the feel of their rhythms and pulses. these were their topics and subjects of discussion, carried on without the need of speech. (72) adams emphasizes the limits of human language, destabilizing the human-animal dichotomy predicated on the faculty of language, while also aligning the categories of language and communication with, respectively, human and animal modes of exchange. rabbits are portrayed in the novel as only partially linguistic beings; some humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 114 exchanges, as in the above example, are left described, though unsaid, “topics and subjects of discussion, carried on without the need of speech.” interspecies communication is an important aspect of adams’s representation of language in watership down. rabbits can communicate with virtually any other species except humans, which again reconfigures the human-animal dichotomy, excluding humans from the animal-centric universe adams creates. the first spoken exchange between two different species is hazel’s conversation with the field mouse. “mice do not speak lapine,” adams tells us, “but there is a very simple, limited lingua franca of the hedgerow and woodland” (143). the field mouse speaks with an italian lilt: “‘go now,’ said the mouse. ’no wait owl. but a what i like a say. you ‘elp a mouse. one time a mouse ‘elp a you. you want ‘im, ‘e come.”’ (147). kehaar, the seagull befriended by hazel’s warren, speaks with a different accent entirely. he speaks the “hedgerow patois,” despite not being a creature of hedgerow or woodland, and his speech is a “harsh gabbling which they [the rabbits] all felt immediately to be exotic. wherever the bird came from, it was somewhere far away. the accent was strange and guttural, the speech distorted. they could catch only a word here and there” (adams, 179). while the field mouse’s accent is italian, kehaar’s is norwegian, as evidenced in a remark by adams himself: “kehaar’s character, even his voice, is based on a norwegian resistance man i knew in the war, a splendid chap, johansen” (“to the order” 121). it is also mentioned in the novel that the efrafan rabbits speak with a different accent to hazel’s warren; accents do not only differ between species. the inclusion of a lingua franca understood by most nonhuman animals suggests that each animal speaks a language particular to their species, but only nonhuman animals understand the hedgerow patois. it is not only this patois to which human beings are unattuned, it is also the subtler sounds and signals of the natural world and its creatures. “a bat flittered through the trees and out again without touching a twig. it was followed by another,” writes adams. “hazel could sense that there were many all about, taking flies and moths on the wing and uttering their minute cries as they flew. a human ear would hardly have heard them, but to the rabbits the air was full of their calls” (watership 288). while there is a flavor of primitivism in adams’s exclusion of humans, particularly modern, industrial humans, from the linguistic exchanges of nonhuman animals, it is not implausible to speculate on mutually intelligible forms of communication between other species. “in order to avoid predators, capture prey or in other ways further the mutual advantage of two or more species,” writes sebeok, “animals must have additional code-switching capabilities, an interspecific communication system” (88). perhaps adams’s hedgerow patois is an expression of these “additional code-switching douglas leatherland -the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies 115 capabilities.” interspecific communication also exists between humans and other, significantly non-domesticated, animal species: a famous example of interspecific communication to mutual advantage is found in the savannahs of africa south of the sahara, where a bird, called the honey guide, indicates to man the location of beehives that the bird cannot open but on whose honeycombs it likes to feed. this bird produces conspicuous beckoning calls, followed by certain optical signs, until a willing human being finds the hive, feeds the wax to the bird and consumes the honey himself. (89) the honey guide communicates its meaning to humans not only through bodily gestures but, significantly, through vocal signals. language is often used in a novel like watership down to symbolize primitivist tropes. for example, the dichotomy between orality and literacy, between spoken/natural and written/artificial language, is used to mirror other dichotomies, such as nature/culture, nature/technology, and, most importantly, animal/human. lissa paul writes: “when rabbits abandon their oral tradition in favour of literacy, as they do in cowslip’s warren, they lose their rabbit identities and are doomed.” there is a critical difference depicted in watership down, argues paul, “between vital oral rabbits and doomed literate ones” (118). visible, material markers of language are depicted as negative forces in adams’s novel: the notice-board placed by humans signifying the destruction of the sandleford warren, the stones in cowslip’s warren symbolizing a false concept of el-ahrairah, the claw marks gouged into the bodies of the efrafan rabbits to indicate their appointed time for feeding, or silflay. kathleen anderson claims that the oral traditions of adams’s rabbits indicate a reading of nature: “rabbits cannot read humans’ printed texts, but they can read the texture of nature as no human can. thus, their emphasis on nature as an integral element in their oral narratives occurs as a manifestation of their instinctive reading of the nature-text“ (29). according to this reading, adams is implying that humans lack the ability to read the “nature-text“ which is accessible to rabbits and, presumably, other nonhuman animals and “primitive“ people. lapine, argues anderson, “represents a literalization of nature, and as such, an affirmation of textuality“ (32). adams’s rabbit language thus breaks down primitivist dichotomies, and adams attempts to think through the process of linguistic expression by assuming the perspective of another animal. he considers humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 116 features of the landscape, both natural and man-made, which are significant to the rabbits’ lifeworld, and the rabbits’ language reflects the degree of significance pertaining to particular features. rabbits need know nothing more than whether or not another animal is a predator, for example, or whether or not an object is a “man-thing.” adams’s attention to the differently experienced world of another species, despite the human author being inevitably sundered from experiencing it himself, is nonetheless demonstrated by his particular lexical and semantic choices when it comes to his construction of lapine. nuances of meaning and the significance of lifeworld both play a crucial part in subsequent works of animal fantasy which explore the capacities and limitations of language. ursula le guin’s “therolinguistics.” ursula le guin’s short story, “‘the author of the acacia seeds’ and other extracts from the journal of the association of therolinguistics” (1974), features a discipline called “therolinguistics’, the study of animal languages specifically. le guin applies the term “language” loosely indeed, and her story is one of the most intriguing in terms of questioning our assumptions about what should define language. the story opens with a description of some messages left by a colony of ants: “the messages were found written in touch-gland exudation on degerminated acacia seeds laid in rows at the end of a narrow, erratic tunnel leading off from one of the deeper levels of the colony.” it is of particular interest that these messages are not only written but the seeds are arranged in an ordered sequence. while le guin specifies that these messages are “fragmentary, and the translation approximate and highly interpretative,” the advances in translation imagined in her story include the means to translate not only vocal or visual signals, but chemical signals as well (11). literacy, in le guin’s story, also undermines the hierarchy of the ant colony: “the seeds, carefully arranged in a pattern resembling a musical stave, had not been disturbed. (ants of the soldier class are illiterate; thus the soldier was presumably not interested in the collection of useless seeds from which the edible germs had been removed.)” (13). this contrasts with adams’s polarization of literacy and orality in watership down, in which the rabbit societies that flourish rely less on written forms of communication and more on oral storytelling to preserve their cultural history and the mythology of el-ahrairah, the semi-divine rabbit trickster figure. in the second extract from le guin’s story, about different dialects of penguin language, the therolinguistic study of these birds is conducted by monitoring body language, rather than translating chemical signals: “on film it is at least possible to repeat, and to slow down, the fluid sequences of the script, to the point where, by constant repetition and patient study, many elements of the most elegant and lively literature may be douglas leatherland -the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies 117 grasped, though the nuances, and perhaps the essence, must forever elude us” (13-14). le guin overrules scientific conclusions about the definitive characteristics of language here; “body language” acquires a literal instead of a figurative status. rather than merely measuring language in written or spoken form, therolinguistics translates even the visual signals and gestures of nonhuman animals. moreover, le guin attributes a kind of “writing” to penguins through the medium of their bodies. penguin language supposedly has “analogies with dolphin,” although it “seemed strange that a script written almost entirely in wings, neck, and air, should prove the key to the poetry of short-necked, flipper-winged water-writers” (14). the inclusion of all of these signed nonhuman forms of communication within the umbrella term of “language” in le guin’s story emphasizes to the reader the limitations of that system of communication that humans have traditionally understood as language. edward o. wilson, founder of sociobiology, humbles his human readers by calling us “chemosensory idiots.” “by comparison,” he writes, “most other organisms are geniuses. more than 99 percent of the species of animals, plants, fungi, and microbes rely exclusively or almost exclusively on a selection of chemicals (pheromones) to communicate with members of the same species” (80-81). wilson’s discussion of chemical communication between other organisms serves to highlight the anthropocentric partiality towards human language as the most advanced system of communication. as humans, we have tended to disregard the senses of smell and taste in the communication process because we do not rely on these senses to communicate ourselves. analogous arguments could be made for any quality which has been proposed as being unique to humans (morality, free will, knowledge of death, and so on). hauser, chomsky, and fitch even go so far as to deconstruct our long-standing assumptions about what makes human language unique. amongst these assumptions is the view that human language alone features categorical perception, “the phenomenon by which the categories possessed by an observer influences the observers’ perception”; for example, our perception of a rainbow possessing a finite amount of distinct colors is influenced by our preconception of these colors as distinct categories (goldstone and hendrickson 69). “it was some time before the same underlying perceptual discontinuities were discovered in chinchillas and macaques, and even birds,” they explain, “leading to the opposite conclusion that the perceptual basis for categorical perception is a primitive vertebrate characteristic that evolved for general auditory processing, as opposed to specific speech processing.” they conclude: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 118 a trait present in nonhuman animals did not evolve specifically for human language, although it may be part of the language faculty and play an intimate role in language processing. it is possible, of course, that a trait evolved in nonhuman animals and humans independently, as analogues rather than homologues. this would preserve the possibility that the trait evolved for language in humans but evolved for some other reason in the comparative animal group. (hauser, chomsky and fitch 1572) returning to le guin’s story, the message written in the acacia seeds bears a “striking lack of resemblance to any other ant texts known to us.” the opening lines of the text are as follows: seeds 1-13 [i will] not touch feelers. [i will] not stroke. [i will] spend on dry seeds [my] soul's sweetness. it may be found when [i am] dead. touch this dry wood! [i] call! [i am] here! alternatively, this passage may be read: [do] not touch feelers. [do] not stroke. spend on dry seeds [your] soul's sweetness. [others] may find it when [you are] dead. touch this dry wood! call: [i am] here! the narrator explains that no “known dialect of ant employs any verbal person except the third person singular and plural and the first person plural”; ant language possesses “he/she/it,”“they” and “we,” but no subjective “i” (11). this suggests that the ants that composed this new message are different in that they demonstrate self-awareness. dominique lestel writes: another approach to animal cultures might consider that they constitute societies in which the more central communication is to the society, the greater the individual member’s gradient of freedom, and that the most remarkable feature of this complexification is the emergence of an animal subject which prefigures the possibility of a human subject. (377) perhaps fictional animal languages that are attributed to members of a species which supposedly possess more self-awareness are less a matter for speculation than those attributed to species with a lower degree of self-awareness. this correlation would seem to confirm rather than to challenge the assumption that the complexity of a douglas leatherland -the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies 119 communication system depends on the degree of intelligence in a particular species. however, this assumption requires a clearer definition of intelligence and how it can be measured other than by its comparability with humans. le guin ends her short story with an extract that opens with the question: “what is language?” in this third extract, le guin addresses contemporaneous scientific debates regarding currently accepted and limiting definitions of language. “the question,” the narrator writes, “central to the science of therolinguistics, has been answered — heuristically — by the very existence of the science. language is communication” (17). language and communication are thus one and the same, according to le guin. but the narrator is dissatisfied even with this broad answer. “why do therolinguists study only animals?” they ask. therolinguists “have not faced the almost terrifying challenge of the plant” (18). this is an interesting development in the narrative. le guin’s speculations on the potential languages of plants reflect similar speculations about animal languages at the time her short story was written. its not-too-distant-future setting places “the author of the acacia seeds” on the cusp between the acceptance of already discovered animal languages (towards which contemporaneous scientific studies were tending) and another complete revision of the definitive features of language itself. the narrator can only speculate on whether plants can communicate in their own vastly different sort of language: can we in fact know it? can we ever understand it? it will be immensely difficult. that is clear. but we should not despair. remember that so late as the mid-twentieth century, most scientists, and many artists, did not believe that even dolphin would ever be comprehensible to the human brain — or worth comprehending! let another century pass, and we may seem equally laughable. “do you realize,” the phytolinguist will say to the aesthetic critic, “that they couldn’t even read eggplant?” and they will smile at our ignorance, as they pick up their rucksacks and hike on up to read the newly deciphered lyrics of the lichen on the north face of pike’s peak. the narrator even goes on to consider that “after them, may there not come that even bolder adventurer — the first geolinguist, who, ignoring the delicate, transient lyrics of the lichen, will read beneath it the still less communicative, still more passive, wholly atemporal, cold, volcanic poetry of the rocks” (19). this semi-satirical note on which the narrative ends suggests that yes, if animal “languages” can, and are, being discovered, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 120 then the floodgates of possibility might be thrown open wider still, while at the same time pointing out that there are inevitable limits to the human capacity to understand the “languages” of other species. perhaps we are not meant to understand them, but only to appreciate that a system of communication unique to each species may very well exist, and that this is enough for us to reconsider the arbitrary distinctions we make between ourselves and nonhuman animals. post-lapine: other channels of communication in animal fantasies. many animal fantasy narratives after watership down have also explored the complexity of communication systems in different species. kenneth oppel’s silverwing (1997), the first of a series about a colony of bats, describes the way in which bats communicate through the auditory channel of echolocation, although the novel does not feature a bat language of any kind. one of the silverwing elders, frieda, brings shade, the young runt and protagonist of the novel, to the echo chamber, located deep in a cave beneath the home of the colony in tree haven: he found himself in a surprisingly small, completely round, and totally deserted cave. but it wasn’t truly deserted. all around him, like currents of warm air, were voices, moaning at his ears, getting caught in his fur, his wings. “fold your wings tight,” frieda said, carefully closing the mud panel behind shade, “and stay still.” he barely breathed. still the voices seemed faint and far away, but he could hear them more clearly now as they swirled about: “…in the winter of that year…” “…owls took their revenge…” “…fifteen newborns died in the nursery…” “…rebellion crushed after the battle…” and he realized they were echoes, bouncing off the walls of the cave, again and again and again. “see how smooth the walls are,” frieda whispered. “it took years to hollow them out, polish them. generations. but it had to be smooth, or else the echoes would snag and fade. here they can bounce for centuries. it’s not perfect. sound escapes even through the door they so carefully built, and which i tend to every spring. sound gets old. loses its power.” (oppel 32-33) douglas leatherland -the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies 121 oppel depicts the echo chamber as a sort of archive recorded with echoes, albeit an archive which inevitably fades over time. of course, the spoken dialogue between the bats in oppel’s novel is written in english, the language of the author, but the bats’ communication through echoes is more central to its depiction of language and communication. after tree haven is destroyed by the owls, the silverwing colony begins their migratory journey south, and along the way shade’s mother, ariel, shows him the path of their journey by singing him a map: “ariel pressed her forehead against his and began to sing. a brilliant silvery landscape flared up from the darkness: a forest, a clearing, and a high oak rising up, spreading branches. it was tree haven” (55-56). once ariel has sung the path, shade is able to visualize the various landmarks along the path after he is separated from the clan during a storm. echolocation is but one element of oppel’s series that marks the first attempt in the animal fantasy genre to address thomas nagel’s conundrum: what is it like to be a bat? david clement-davies’s fire bringer (1999) features a protagonist, a red deer named rannoch, who can communicate with other animal species by means of a mysterious power. he converses with a raven early in the story, as well as a mole during his time living with humans. again, there are no fictional animal languages featured in the novel, although the subject of language remains central to the story. rannoch cannot understand human language, although the tone and texture of their speech evokes images in rannoch’s mind: “then the voices came again. they seemed to be all around him now. first there was one, then two, then three, and the texture of each sounded different to the deer. one — the boy’s — was like a spring. another, like a dead pool. the third was like a waterfall” (226). despite being unable to understand the humans, rannoch is able to discern some of the characteristics of each human by the texture of their speech. rannoch believes his ability to talk to other animals is unique until he meets rurl the seal: “i mean, how do you think i found out about the world? i’ve had conversations with dolphins that would make your fur stand on end. i’ve talked to penguins and kittiwakes. i’ve chatted to sharks — from the rocks, of course — and i’ve even had a long talk with an albatross, though i wouldn’t recommend it – they’ve really got very little to say for themselves.” “but i never learnt it,” said rannoch. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 122 “you don’t need to learn it; all lera could do it if they wanted to. or rather if they’d only stop thinking of themselves and being afraid all the time. listen for a change.” the seal’s tone had grown rather serious. “‘there was a time, in the old days, when all the animals conversed as a matter of course. but they lost the knack. don’t ask me why. most of the sea creatures can still do it but that’s the trouble with the land, i suppose. it cuts you off. splits you up, if you know what i mean.” rannoch looked rather relieved. “but why couldn’t i understand the boy?” he asked. “ah. no animal can talk to man and no animal should,” rurl muttered. “but man is an animal too, isn’t he?” (252-53) land animals have lost the ability to converse with each other, claims the seal, because of the physical barrier of the land itself. rurl’s assertion could also suggest that when creatures evolved and started to walk and live on the land, they gradually lost the ability to communicate with one another. language is thus tied to the landscape, contradicting conceptualizations of language as a system of arbitrary signs. clementdavies extends the primitivist trope found in adams’s novel of excluding humans from the domain of animal communication to other species. by developing written, artificial forms of language, humans have forgotten the ancient, natural language by which they once communicated with the nonhuman world. scents, codes and the language of dance in laline paull’s the bees. laline paull’s novel the bees (2014) is a more recent example of an animal fantasy which blends the anthropomorphic trope of having nonhuman characters speak in human language with the representation of systems and channels by which they actually communicate. the “language” of bees, which is communicated largely via frequencies and vibrations in the air, and pheromone signals, really sheds light on the limitations of human language. paull’s narrative does not treat the apian system of communication as a language in the more liberal way employed by le guin in her short story. instead, paull depicts the ways in which the honeybees communicate by both paying close attention to the observations of ethologists on honeybee behavior, and drawing on a repertoire of mechanomorphic terms typically used to describe insects in particular. any nonanthropomorphic “language” which is depicted in the bees is described in terms of frequencies and codes and various other terms we would normally understand as technical jargon. douglas leatherland -the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies 123 the language of codes and scents which is depicted in the novel is clearly portrayed as a capacity which is instinctual rather than learned. flora 717, the sanitation bee who is the protagonist of the novel, is bombarded by an influx of information from the moment she hatches, passed on to her through an elaborate network of codes: “as the queen’s love flowed through her body and brain, all the different frequencies and codes in the tiles slowed and clarified into a map of the hive, constantly running with information” (10). this transfer of information into flora’s body and brain sounds like the uploading of files onto a computer, and the “language” of the hive is described in this way countless times throughout the narrative. there is a more anthropocentrically charged element to paull’s representation of language. when flora is brought to sister teasel, whose kin are the nurses of the hive, sister teasel is surprised when she discovers that flora is capable of speech: “‘she speaks? the impudence! […] i hope all sanitation is not now possessed of tongues for we shall be in uproar!’ she glared at flora. ‘obstreperous dirty creatures’” (15). this attitude reflects the anthropocentric distinction (one of many) that humans have traditionally drawn between humans and other animals based on the supposition that only humans can speak, as well as the ethical stakes implied by this distinction. in this instance, however, the distinction which the capacity for speech is used to advance is that between higher and lower kin of honeybees in the hive. much like human language itself, this hierarchy in the hive is an arbitrary construct, emphasizing the capacity of language to enforce power, despite its limitations elsewhere. similarly to adams’s representation of the more articulate (i.e. standard english) speech of the rabbits compared with the simplified hedgerow patois spoken by other animals, paull’s novel includes some spoken interactions between the honeybees and other insects which feature some similar differences. interestingly, bees and wasps seem to speak with very much the same level of standard english, probably to be expected considering the close genetic relationship of the two insect groups. the bee (apis) and the wasp (vespa) address each other as cousins during instances where they encounter one another. bees and spiders also have no trouble understanding one another, which is more surprising considering spiders are arachnids. however, bees and ants, both members of the hymenoptera group of insects, struggle to communicate with each other through speech, evidenced by the following passage: flora hovered as low as she could and called out in clumsy hymenopteraese, the old shared tongue. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 124 “speech, sister!” the largest of the ants paused from directing the column’s labour. her mandibles shone black and strong. “speech, sister,” she replied in her strange accent. flora struggled to remember the coded tongue from the queen’s library. “the dead,” she said, ‘befell?” “sick rain.” “when?’ the big ant pulsed her antennae. “two…sun.” “two days ago?” (115-16) in this passage the capacity possessed by bees and ants to communicate through speech is limited indeed, more so that the rabbits’ ability to speak to the field mouse, the cat, or kehaar the seagull in watership down. it is unclear, however, whose hymenopteraese is more advanced, flora’s or the ant’s. this is of course due to the fact that the narrative is written from the perspective of the former, as watership down is written from the perspective of the rabbits. but speech is not the most powerful form of communication in the hive, or indeed a channel by which insects naturally communicate. sister sage remarks to flora about the sisters teasel that “they must still use speech to know each other’s thoughts. it is most quaint” (29). as a system of communication vocalized speech is therefore inferior to the transmission of scents and codes, and is depicted as almost primitive (“quaint”) in hive society. the sisters sage, the tyrannous priestesses of the hive, often extract secrets from honeybees of lower kin, including flora, by detecting scents through their powerful antenna. one secret that flora tries to conceal from them is that she has laid an egg, an act which is outlawed in the hive for any bee besides the queen. when flora resists their probing in order to conceal her secret, she finds herself beset by several sisters sage intent on extracting it from her: “another priestess joined the first, and flora felt their combined will focusing on breaking into her mind. they probed her antennae with their powerful scent, trying to force their chemicals into her brain — but despite the burning pain, flora maintained her lock. she concentrated on speaking calmly” (123). it is interesting here that “speaking calmly” is a way in which flora can bluff her way through the situation, emphasizing the capacity of spoken language to deceive. the passage of paull’s novel which remains truest to accounts of communication between honeybees is the description of dances performed by foraging bees to communicate such details as the location of pollen, the richest sources of pollen, and the douglas leatherland -the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies 125 distance of pollen from the hive. german ethologist karl von frisch first discovered this language of dance, and paull’s depiction of the dance in her novel remains true to observation for the most part: finding space by flora, [the forager] began to dance. slow and clear she stamped out a single phrase, over and over until the bees understood it and the rhythm caught. then she clicked her wing-latches open, pulsed her thoracic-engine and shimmered and stopped her wings to the same rhythm. other bees applauded and began to follow as back and forth she ran, into one section of the crowd then another, trailing the lure of raw nectar behind her. she stopped at another forager and fed her a drop from her own mouth. the sparkle of fresh nectar lit the air and the bees cheered again, and more ran to learn the dance. flora ran too, thrilled by the mixed scent of nectar and the cold fresh air clinging to the forager’s wings. her mind grew sharp with excitement as her feet picked up the choreography — and suddenly she understood the language of the dance. go south! sang the bee’s steps. for this long! there were fields — she described the pattern of the crops — the heavy waving heads of grain, the great west current of air that always blew through them — more fields, the stream, count two fences… then east! and the forager ran again, swirling and buzzing her abdomen to urge more sisters to follow. many bees shouted in excitement and ran to leap into the air themselves, but flora followed close behind this wonderful bee, copying her steps. and turn and go on. “turn and go on,” sang flora behind her. and then here, the flowers, the nectar, the sweetness! “the flowers, the nectar, the sweetness!” shouted the bees, dancing their map to the treasure. (88-89) a great deal of information is transmitted through this language of dance, more than could be quickly conveyed in speech. the fact that von frisch himself referred to his experiments as decoding a language goes far towards understanding what he considers to constitute language as a concept. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 126 von frisch talks about both the language of scent and the language of dance, and how the two “languages” complement each other: various types of plants blossom simultaneously, producing nectar of differing concentrations. the richer and sweeter its flow, the livelier the dance of the bees that discover and visit one type of flower. the flowers with the best nectar transmit a specific fragrance which ensures they are most sought after […] a new and hitherto unknown side of the biological significance of flower fragrance is revealed. its great diversity and strict species specificity communicate a truly charming scent language. (143) this “charming scent language” is not only understood by the honeybees and then relayed to the hive; it is spoken by the flowers themselves. when she is led by a wasp towards some warehouse buildings, flora encounters some weeds which call out to her with their weak scent: “[s]upplications and pleas came from every flower in every crack of concrete or breezeblock wall for flora to come to them, to them, they called and begged her, they wanted to speak with her and feel her feet on their petals” (167). thus do plants, as well as nonhuman animals, possess their own “language” in paull’s novel, and the transmission and reception of scent which characterizes the interaction between flower and bee is depicted in terms of an almost spoken exchange. paull also ascribes an emotional (even sexual) quality to this scent language, which is arguably, though not unequivocally, anthropomorphic. conclusion. “linguistic meaning,” writes abram, “is not some ideal and bodiless essence that we arbitrarily assign to a physical sound or word and then toss out into the ‘external’ world. rather, meaning sprouts in the very depths of the sensory world, in the heat of meeting, encounter, participation” (75). abram here breaks down the distinction between the concrete and the abstract. while languages like lapine or the various animal languages of le guin’s “author of the acacia seeds” are fictitious and thus highly speculative representations of nonhuman communication systems, they do raise questions of translatability between species. exploring language in these texts as situated along a more complex spectrum of communication systems reveals that the animal fantasy genre is responding to shifting revelations in the ways that nonhuman animals communicate within and between species. adams’s rabbits communicate, as we have seen, through a multiplicity of channels, not simply the lapine language, which invites us to consider the place of the supposedly human faculty of language on the spectrum of animal communication. douglas leatherland -the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies 127 since watership down, several works of literature featuring speaking animal protagonists have explored the diverse means by which the species featured in each narrative communicate. there is a marked shift after adams’s novel in the explicit representation of nonhuman forms of communication as different from human language. while such representations are, of course, highly speculative and still anthropomorphic to a certain extent, these narratives demonstrate a genuine desire on the part of the author to imagine how the sign systems used by nonhuman animals might be translatable into human terms. a degree of anthropomorphism is unavoidable in such depictions, but animals are not presented as simply speaking subjects, communicating only by means of audible speech. sebeok writes: it seems likely that a full-fledged synthesis will be achieved before long, offering both a new paradigm and a methodology for the comparative analysis of semiosis in its full diversity, ranging from the two vast linked polymer languages at one end of the scale to the thousands of natural languages at the other, with a host of singular information coding and transmission devices, inside and outside the body of every organism, in between. semiosis, independent of form or substance, is thus seen as a universal, criterial property of animate existence. (86) animal fantasies are exploring this semiotic diversity, and by comparing fictional representations of the ways in which animals communicate we can perhaps begin to imagine in human terms what it is like for other species to communicate, as well as acknowledging the limitations of human language in a multispecies world. works cited abram, david. the spell of the sensuous: perception and language in a more-than-human world. vintage, 1996. adams, richard. “to the order of two little girls: the oral and written versions of watership down.” the voice of the narrator in children’s literature: insights from writers and critics. charlotte f. otten and gary d. schmidt, eds. greenwood press, 1989. _____. watership down. puffin, 1993. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 128 anderson, kathleen, “shaping self through spontaneous oral narration in richard adams’ ‘watership down’.” journal of the fantastic in the arts 6.1 (21) (1993): 25-33. clement-davies, david. fire bringer. macmillan, 1999. cosslett, tess. talking animals in british children’s fiction, 1786-1914. ashgate, 2006. darwin, charles. “general principles of expression.” in maran, et al. 39-48. dekoven, marianne. “kafka's animal stories: modernist form and interspecies narrative.” creatural fictions: human-animal relationships in twentiethand twenty-firstcentury literature. david herman, ed. palgrave, 2016: 19-40. de la mare, walter. the three mulla-mulgars. a.a. knopf, 1919. fludernik, monica. towards a ‘natural’ narratology. routledge, 1996. goldstone, robert l. and andrew t. hendrickson. “categorical perception.” wiley interdisciplinary reviews: cognitive science 1.1 (2010): 69-78. hague, daryl r. “fuzzy memories: why narrators forget they translate for animals.” translation and literature 16.2 (2007): 178-192. hauser, marc d., noam chomsky and w. tecumseh fitch. “the faculty of language: what is it, who has it, and how did it evolve?” science 298.5598 (2002): 1569-1579. herman, david. “storyworld/umwelt: nonhuman experiences in graphic narratives.” substance 40.1 (2011): 156-81. kafka, franz. “the metamorphosis.” the complete short stories of franz kafka. nahum n. glatzer, ed. minerva, 1992. 89-139. _____. “a report to an academy.” the complete short stories of franz kafka. ed. nahum n. glatzer, ed. minerva, 1992. 250-62. kilner, dorothy. the life and perambulations of a mouse. g.s. appleton, 1851. douglas leatherland -the capacities and limitations of language in animal fantasies 129 kull, kalevi and peeter torop. “biotranslation: translation between umwelten.” in maran, et al. 411-26. le guin, ursula k. “the author of the acacia seeds.” the compass rose. grafton books, 1986: 11-19. lestel, dominique. “the biosemiotics and phylogenesis of culture.” in maran, et al. 377-409. lippit, akira mizuta. electric animal: toward a rhetoric of wildlife. u minnesota p, 2000. lockley, r.m. the private life of the rabbit: an account of the life history and social behaviour of the wild rabbit. andre deutsch, 1964. lofting, hugh. the story of doctor doolittle. jonathan cape, 1953. maran, timo, dario martinelli, and aleksei turovski, eds. readings in zoosemiotics. de gruyter mouton, 2011. oppel, kenneth. silverwing. harpercollins, 1997. paul, lissa. “dumb bunnies : a re-visionist re-reading of ‘watership down’.” signal 56 (1988): 113-22. paull, laline. the bees. fourth estate, 2014. robles, mario ortiz. literature and animal studies. routledge, 2016. sebeok, thomas a. “zoosemiotics: at the intersection of nature and culture.” in maran, et al. 77-86. _____. “‘talking’ with animals: zoosemiotics explained.” in maran, et al. 87-94. seton, ernest thompson. wild animals i have known. scribner, 1898. sewell, anna. black beauty. puffin books, 1994. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 130 sharp, margery. the rescuers. puffin books, 1964. von frisch, karl. “decoding the language of the bee.” in maran, et al. 141-55. williamson, henry. tarka the otter. puffin books, 1963. wilson, edward o. the meaning of human existence. liveright, 2014. jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics h u m a n i m a l i a 11:2 jérôme michalon the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics introduction. in february 1986, students at the association pour la spécialisation, l'enseignement et la recherche dans les thérapeutiques d'approche corporelle (asertac, the french association for specialization, education, and research in corporal-approach therapeutics) met, as they had every year since the late 1970s, to work and exchange views on a particular form of psychomotor therapy using the relationship with the horse. convinced that this approach was distinct from rééducation par l’équitation (rpe, riding for rehabilitation), practiced until then, these trainees and psychomotor therapists composed a text clarifying the specificity of their practice: 1. we are therapists. 2. we are doctors or paramedics and riders. 3. we possess essential theoretical and practical knowledge. this leads us to define our activities differently. we are abandoning “rééducation par l‘équitation” (rehabilitation through riding) to adopt the new formula of “thérapie avec le cheval” (therapy with the horse): “therapy” — this must concern therapists alone and constitutes an “additional opening” […] being added to the possibilities whose main aim is to improve or cure. “with” — in the place of through. the word with stresses a closer relationship, the complicity that the therapist strives to establish between the disabled person and the horse, whether riding or on foot, in horse care or other activities concerning them. knowledge of horse ethology is essential. “the horse” — instead of horse riding. “horse riding is, first and foremost, horsemanship. horses, in tac, represent all that the horse brings us as a living being, through its presence, its contact, its relationship that is both enriching and singular.” (martin; emphasis in original) introducing thérapie avec le cheval (tac, hippotherapy), this text would lead to the creation of the fédération nationale de thérapies avec le cheval (fentac, french national hippotherapy federation). as if to emphasize the will of these therapists to break with the equestrian world, it was sent to the haras nationaux, the french national authority for the horse-riding world, which had, until then, financed equine-assisted therapy humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 132 practices. how could one fail to see a form of manifesto in this text? a manifesto that aims, on the one hand, to assert both the therapeutic potential of the relationship with the horse and the necessity of professional coaching from the medical and paramedical world to best exploit it. reduced to this single dimension, the manifesto would be an interesting object for the sociology of professions, as it involves specifying the work activity, affirming the need for expert knowledge to accomplish it, and regulating its access via a specific status (that of “therapist”). but, on the other hand, this text also contains a discussion of the horse, above all described as a relational “living being” which is not limited to its role as a mount, as in horse riding. thus, in redefining this activity (therapy is not horse riding), a specific vision of the horse is affirmed, which would be defended and made visible by making it serve the goal of human therapy. the sociology of human-animal relations would then also have a lot to say about this manifesto, which shows a social dynamic reconfiguring relationships between humans and equids. in this article i will argue, based on the example of animal-assisted therapy practices, that there is a strong relationship between the evolution of professional identities and that of relations to animals. i will consequently defend the importance of analyzing professional dynamics to understand recent changes in relations to animals. and, symmetrically, i will strive to explain that the sociology of professions could benefit from studying the professional dynamics into which animals are integrated. a third, broader objective can be added to these first two, that of contributing to reflections on animal work. indeed, i will illustrate that the professionalization of animal-assisted therapy is accompanied by significant ontological stakes concerning the animals involved in these practices. simply put, the more these practices are oriented towards therapy, the more they characterize and perform animals like persons, like beings who are subjectively engaged in work. again, i will defend the importance of the sociology of professions to thinking about animal work. to back up these propositions, i will proceed in two parts. in the first part, i will discuss the development of canine-assisted therapy, retracing the major evolutions of these practices, especially the shift from the practice of canine assistance to a therapeutic practice (or “intervention” at least). i will analyze this shift as both the first act of a professionalization process and an important change in the representation of the dog. in the second part, i will refer to the way in which a therapeutic practice involving the horse was established in france and the united states, which, as in the case of the dog, promoted a new representation of the horse. this example will allow me to more clearly define the mechanisms that make such an evolution possible, building on several jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics 133 notions from the sociology of professions (“segmentation,” “autonomy,” “prudential practices”). based on these examples and these elements of analysis, i will conclude by introducing the idea that professional dynamics involve ontological stakes, perhaps underestimated by the sociology of professions. 1. from assistance dogs to intervention dogs 1.1 animal-assisted therapy: a profession “in the making.” there is a multitude of definitions and terminology to designate the subject of the matter (and this is precisely why it is of interest). “animal mediation,” “animal-assisted therapy,” ”animal assisted activities,” “equine-facilitated psychotherapy/learning (efp/l),” or even “zootherapy”: these terms all correspond to the professional positioning needs of the promoters and practitioners of these activities, especially vis-àvis the medical body and paramedical professions (freidson), and vis-à-vis scientific knowledge justifying (or not) these activities. i have chosen, here and in previous work, to speak of “animal-assisted care,” to find a way to name these practices that is at once neutral, consensual, and empirically founded (michalon, panser avec les animaux), a way of enabling me to understand how relatively close practices could seek to differentiate themselves. defined schematically, animal-assisted care consists of linking (physically and/or symbolically) a living animal and a human, to the psychological, physiological, motor benefits of the latter. this is all supervised by a third party: a therapist, a mediator, a social worker, a psychologist, a nurse, etc. although traces of the therapeutic use of animals can be found sporadically throughout history, it was not until the 1950s, in western europe and north america, that these practices began to emerge, to form an object of scientific research, to acquire theoretical equipment, and, above all, to attempt to structure themselves, professionally speaking. since the mid-1970s, when the therapeutic aspirations of these practices began to appear, several organizations came into existence seeking to federate practitioners, to provide them with the keys to practice legally, and to develop a market for their work. to give a broad overview of the results of these efforts, it can be said that, on various points, the results have been mixed. on the one hand, with several years of hindsight, we observe that the calls to come together, to obtain recognition from public authorities, from medical authorities, and to agree on common definitions and training are still regularly launched. on the other hand, it still seems difficult for practitioners to earn a living from their activity.1 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 134 that said, today there is consensus on the way to claim the “therapeutic” nature of the activity. in 1996, the delta society, one of the organizations formed in the mid-1970s, published one of the first good-practices guidelines, endorsing the distinction between, on one side, “animal-assisted activities” (aaa) and, on the other, “animal-assisted therapies” (aat). this distinction was made less on a cognitive basis than on the fact that some paramedical professionals looked unfavorably upon the development of practices claiming to be “therapeutic” without involving any specific training, any ad hoc professional organization, or any pricing (arkow). these professionals wanted to keep the therapeutic label to themselves, a label that had proved difficult to obtain, which offered them a legal framework, and eligibility for reimbursement by private health insurers. this break between aaa and aat, which is no longer contested, was thus a means to respect the professional jurisdictions in place. in the same way, a consensus emerged on animal-assisted therapy, considered to be a form of specialization linked to an already existing profession. to claim an animal-assisted therapeutic approach, it is first necessary to be recognized as a “therapist,” which means as a member of a medical or paramedical profession (psychotherapist, psychiatrist, psychomotor therapist, physiotherapist, or nurse), or support professional (social worker). most animal-assisted therapy training requires this prerequisite. in france, the opportunities to practice animal-assisted therapy thus take several forms: (1) the independent form, for professionals, recognized by their peers and trained by an “animal mediation” association, and who use this specialization in the context of their business activity; (2) the associative form, where several independent contractors establish a structure providing services to private individuals or institutions; (3) the institutional form, where paramedical professionals (speech therapists, psychomotor therapists, psychologists, etc.) under contract with a hospital or medico-social institution (for example, nursing homes) offer animal-assisted therapy within diverse activities. in all cases, the animal-assisted therapy economy relies on institutions: whether it involves services provided by an independent or an association, or a job integrated into the structures, it is predominantly the healthcare institutions that finance these practices (and thus indirectly health insurance). there seem to be significantly less private customers, as sessions are not reimbursed by health insurance providers. there is no ad hoc research on professional conditions within the animal-assisted therapy profession, nor even an official number of practitioners, precisely because the process of professionalization has not yet been accomplished, continually being repeated and translated into a phenomenon of segmentation (new practices are developed that claim a specificity and lead to the establishment of relevant training). the current fragmentation of this universe makes it difficult to define strictly the object which, in jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics 135 my opinion, makes it even more interesting, since this forces us to focus essentially on the dynamics of professionalization. however, quantification attempts have been conducted in france, led by the adrienne and pierre sommer foundation, an ngo seeking to federate and support animalassisted therapy initiatives. these censuses use the places where animal mediation is practiced as a unit of measurement. for example, they inform us that animal-assisted therapy is present in 36% of institutions for disabled or children with various disorders (cerphi), that there is a permanent animal presence in 2,408 care and accommodation establishments for the elderly in france (out of 10,481 [kohler and handi’chiens]), that equine mediation is practiced in one hundred or so french infant and child psychiatric facilities (ansorge and sudres), and that even 10% of french penal institutions put in place animal mediation programs (sommer foundation). furthermore, the sommer foundation has released a directory of different institutions, associations, and local authorities offering and/or training in animal mediation practices, including 248 addresses throughout france. while a strict definition of some professions can’t be reified (dubar and tripier), animal-assisted care is not one of them. even so, being linked to other professions while developing a specialty that it claims to be the only one to master (relations to animals in this case) brings animal-assisted care closer to thomas brante’s definition of a “preprofession” (“professional fields and truth regimes”). according to him, preprofessions (situated below established professions and semi-professions) incorporate innovative practices, supplementing what lies outside the expertise of established professions (“marginal” domains of established professions). in my view, the term “preprofession” is pertinent, as it serves to designate as much the state of progress of a professional group in a dynamic of professionalization, as its aspiration to become an established profession. speaking of “wanna-be professions,” as brante does, it is interesting to emphasize the will of some groups to structure themselves to resemble what they imagine to be an established profession.2 gunnar oloffson (in “the expansion of the university sector”) also speaks of pre-professions as “professions-inthe-making,” which corresponds well to animal-assisted care, which, since its beginnings, has continuously attempted to establish itself as a profession. and it is precisely this constant dynamic of professionalization that seems important to describe. let us begin the description with practices involving dogs. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 136 1.2 the rise of therapy: a new professional identity. in order to address the history of canine-assisted therapy, it is important to distinguish between two types of practices: assistance dogs (guide dogs for the visually impaired, listening dogs, and assistance dogs for people with motor disabilities); and those which we call “intervention” dogs (visitor dogs, alert dogs, resident dogs — inserted into more medical, support, or mediation activities and contexts). assistance dogs have a continuous presence (day and night, over several years) with their owners, who also are the beneficiaries of the assistance provided. intervention dogs are employed on an ad hoc basis (during sessions — hence the idea of intervention) by therapists, nurses, or social workers, who offer care or recreational activities to suffering people (here, the beneficiary is not the dog’s owner). these are the two branches, one of which, intervention, tends more readily towards a therapeutic dimension. although these practices are today differentiated, they have a common history, which is worth outlining. historically, guide dogs for the visually impaired were the first canine-assisted practices to develop, at the beginning of the 20th century (belin), first in europe, then in the united states. in the post-war era, the concept was popularized, based on a training model that would be taken up by other similar initiatives across the world. this model consists of selecting puppies of a pre-determined breed (initially german shepherds, golden retrievers, now labrador retrievers), placing them in host families for the first months of their life, then teaching them to respond to human commands to accomplish the tasks necessary to their guide dog activity, during one or several training courses. the final step is the moment (often a training course) when the animal and the future, visually-impaired, owner meet, learn to work as a team, to appreciate one another. after passing several tests (mouret), the animal is officially given (free of charge) to its owner. in the 1970s, based on this guide dog model, the concept of “listening dogs” for hearing-impaired persons emerged in the united states, then in the united kingdom (arkow). these dogs are trained to alert their owner through physical contact, when a sound is emitted (fire alarm, ringtone, doorbell). in 1975, the association canine companions for independence (cci) developed the concept of service dogs for people with motor disabilities. these dogs are trained to execute physical tasks (opening doors, picking up objects, etc.) that their owners, often in wheelchairs, cannot accomplish. the cci and its methods of selection and training would inspire many other organizations across the world. moreover, from very early on, the cci defended the idea of using dogs to assist in cases of mental disability and closely followed the development of animal-assisted therapy, which began to emerge at the end of the 1970s. in their wake, jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics 137 north-american organizations, like therapy dogs incorporated, therapy dogs international, and the delta society, were created and provided training curricula explicitly designed for these practices. these curricula offered a different training model. it was no longer a case of training dogs independently from their owners and bringing them together to share their lives. it became a question of certifying a “team,” consisting of an owner (therapist or not) and a dog (of any breed), leading to a certificate of professional competence to intervene jointly in therapy or support situations. the curriculum focuses on the relationship between the animals and their owners, and it validates their common ability to evolve in a healthcare environment, for example a hospital setting, without posing a risk to patients. thus, there is a diachronic continuum between assistance and intervention practices: the guide dogs from the middle of the 20th century served as a model to assistance dogs for mobility impairment in the 1970s, which themselves enabled the development of intervention dogs in the 1980s. the meeting of animal assistance and care for human suffering began with the development of practices seeking less to treat than to assist, then evolved towards explicit care ambitions, with a therapeutic dimension. this “rise of therapy” process corresponds to the creation of a new form of activity: while assistance practices uniquely involved the redefinition of an already-existing activity, that of the dog instructor whose guide dog training was only a specialization, intervention practices led to the emergence of an unprecedented professional identity, consisting of being a “third party” between a patient/beneficiary and an animal. this indicates that the shift from assistance to intervention, this rise of therapy, is at the basis of animal-assisted care’s dynamic of professionalization. furthermore, in this rise of therapy, an evolution of behavioral models to be developed and enhanced with dogs took place. with the shift from assistance to intervention, dogs had to assimilate completely different specifications. this evolution of the dogs’ prescribed work also implies a significant ontological shift, relating to the evolution of human-animal relations observed in western societies over the last decades. 1.3 the rise of personhood: an ontological shift. one could say that the prescribed work for assistance dogs principally consists of accomplishing technical tasks. in a nutshell, guide dogs and listening dogs must “guide” and “alert.” for the guide dogs, this involves avoiding obstacles in the street, stopping before stairs and pavements, indicating pedestrian crossings close to traffic lights to their owner.3 as for listening dogs, they must recognize different sound signals humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 138 (an alarm clock, a fire alarm, the sound of a baby crying, various ringtones), indicate them to their owner, and guide the latter towards the sound source. assistance dogs for people with motor disabilities also guide and inform, but additionally perform a range of physical tasks like opening doors, picking up and transporting objects, helping move a wheelchair, or even flicking a switch. although these tasks are complex and varied, demand adaptability from the animal and owner, and thus rely on a strong relationship between the two, it is possible to make a list of them and to train the dog to execute them more or less on request. as a result, these tasks can be called “technical,” in the sense that they seek to help disabled persons to adapt to a physical and technical environment over which they have limited control. moreover, these tasks are technical insofar as they are inserted into a relatively predictable course of action, which incorporates the procedures that the animals must follow. regardless of whether these tasks are technical, the dogs must have interactional skills to learn to execute and accomplish them: on the successful socialization of the dogs, and thus on their interactional skills, depend all the dogs’ training by instructors, learning commands from the disabled persons, and the “sustainability” of the technical assistance provided. nevertheless, this interactional dimension is not given prominence in public presentations on assistance activities: the realization of pre-determined tasks is the distinctive element of the assistance dog’s identity. this is one of the differences with the specifications of intervention dogs, which are precisely characterized by the absence of such a list of tasks. the sole prescribed task for the intervention dog is to interact. indeed, when consulting the literature, we notice that defining a “good intervention dog” proves to be difficult, uncertain, and vague, and that the very exercise often leads to general principles, formulated in behavioral terms, and not in terms of specific tasks to be accomplished. one speaks of the dog’s “character,” of its temperament, which must be simultaneously patient, imperturbable, but also playful, attentive, and joyful. one discusses its indispensable predictability as much as its capacity to initiate positive interactions, when necessary. the varying contexts, populations and activities (diverse games, walks, grooming) encountered by the dog entail versatility and adaptability. thus, more than just the behavioral characteristics of a breed, the dog’s personality must be considered; even its personhood. this impression is reinforced when one examines the tests certifying intervention dogs,4 which evaluate the quality of the owner/dog team. to make good teams, owners must act appropriately with their dogs, with healthcare professionals and beneficiaries, and the dogs must act appropriately with these same people. beside the question of the dog’s dangerousness, these different tests, borrowed from dog training practices, quite explicitly assess the dog’s “politeness,” “good manners,” and respect for a certain jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics 139 behavioral etiquette (spontaneously greeting people in a room, without jumping on them, but putting its muzzle on their laps). following the successful completion of these tests, the dog (and its owner) receives “permission to interact” (a common expression in these texts). therefore, intervention dogs are expected to have individuality, but not of any type: it must reflect an attraction, self-mastered and controlled, to human interaction. we clearly see what is happening in this characterization of the animal as an interactional being: it involves departing from the image of a “conditioned” animal, that “responds” to commands, and instead valuing the dog’s capacity for initiative, autonomy, and self-control. these qualities correspond to the western and contemporary definition of the individual. moreover, the certification procedures for intervention dogs recognize both the animal’s individuality, and that of the relationship uniting it with its owner, while shaping this relationship according to general criteria deemed to be the basis of social life (“polite” face-to-face interactions). this is what leads me to say that it is the animals’ personhood, in the sense of persona, of social identity, that is validated through these certifications. from the specifications of assistance dogs to those of intervention dogs, we shift from a vision of the animal as technical support, whose learning capacities are used to accomplish specific tasks, to the animal as an intervenor, whose interactional skills are themselves judged to be important as they pertain to relational work, both the goals of therapy and the means to achieve it. thus, the more the intervention takes place in a context which values human individuality, human personhood, the more the dog is performed as a person. there is, therefore in my view, concordance between the rise of therapy and rise of personhood, between the creation of a new professional identity and the creation of a new social identity for dogs. the example of equine-assisted therapy will help us to understand these reasons, while allowing us to refine the description. 2. from riding for the disabled to equine-facilitated psychotherapy/learning. like the example of the canine-assisted therapy, equine-assisted care emerged from meeting with physical disabilities. indeed, it was in the middle of the 20th century that a form of horse riding adapted to people with motor disabilities, who wanted to practice the sport, either as a leisure activity or competitively, was developed. the first equestrian centers dedicated to the practice appeared at the end of the 1950s in europe and north america (griffith). the first associations supposed to federate the practice, like the north american riding for the handicapped association (narha) in the united states and the fédération handi’cheval in france, were born in the late 1960s. they came from competitive and leisure horse riding and thus promoted the learning and practice humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 140 of equestrian sports.5 they thus trained “classic” riding instructors to welcome and support people with motor disabilities, initially, and today, with mental disabilities also. the professionalization model of these practices is linked to that of riding instructors (chevalier and dussart; chevalier; tourre-malen, “évolution des activités équestres”), who must have excellent horse-riding skills, and then specialize in riding for the disabled. this then follows the example of canine-assisted therapy, where dog instructors had to adapt their practice to a new specialty, without forming a new professional identity. again, it was only with the development, in the 1970s, of more explicitly therapeutic practices that a process of professionalization like that the one observed in the case of dogs was initiated. 2.1 changing the professional world: contesting the equestrian monopoly. the development of riding for the disabled showed that horse riding could have beneficial effects on posture, tonicity, musculature, and motor functions for people with motor disabilities. as a result, rééducation par l’équitation (rpe) came into being in france at the end of the 1960s, under the aegis of physiotherapist hubert lallery and psychomotor therapist renée de lubersac: a practice, and terminology, that, several years later, would inspire the activities of “riding for rehabilitation” in the anglo-saxon world. rpe marks the first step of the “rise of therapy” in the relationship with the horse, in line with the activity’s necessary supervision by medical or paramedical professionals. the shift from riding for the disabled to riding for rehabilitation echoes the differentiation between assistance dogs and intervention dogs, and involves more or less the same professional rhetoric: the accomplishment of therapeutic objectives must be carried out by a recognized therapist. anything else, like riding for the disabled, is relegated to the ranks of an “activity associating the animal.” however, despite this distinction, it is still about horse riding. indeed, to treat motor impairments, riding for rehabilitation uses the virtues of horse-riding techniques: one must indeed ride a horse, according to specific classic horse-riding codes, to reap the benefits. it was precisely this linking of therapy to equestrian techniques that would be challenged by the arrival, between the early to mid-1980s, of new practices like “thérapie avec le cheval” (tac) in france, or “hippotherapy” in the united states. in these two cases, the rise of horseassisted care would translate into the accentuated affirmation by healthcare personnel of their status as fully-fledged therapists, and increasing distance vis-à-vis horse riding. moreover, horse-assisted care practices could only develop with the help and market of competitive and leisure horse riding. the professional world reference is thus the equestrian world. jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics 141 in the united states, discussions about “hippotherapy” started within the narha which, in 1986, created an ad hoc training course solely intended for physiotherapists. in france, it was the haras nationaux (french national stud) that subsidized lallery and de lubersac’s research (aubard), and supported the creation of the association nationale de rééducation par l’équitation (andre, french national association for riding for rehabilitation) in 1971. it would then emancipate itself from the professional horseriding world, using somewhat radical methods and rather successfully. driven by the first north-american hippotherapists, the american hippotherapy association (aha) came into being in 1993 as a “special interest section” within the narha. it would only become independent in 2004, after innumerable discussions about the possibility of asserting a new professional therapist identity while delegating part of its training to an organization outside the medical world.6 this dilemma was solved earlier in france, between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, in a more radical way. having taught a course on the use of the horse in psychomotricity at the paris vi faculty of medicine over several years, renée de lubersac was able to develop a specific approach to horseassisted therapy: thérapie avec le cheval (tac). although this approach uses the horse’s movement, like riding for rehabilitation, it differs on at least two points. firstly, it is a psychomotor approach, which is not limited to the motor aspects of beneficiaries’ issues and integrates the mental dimension. secondly, the movement of the horse, its body, and its rhythm are used, but not exclusively: being next to the horse, holding its tether, brushing it, feeding it, or simply being “co-present,” can also have therapeutic benefits. in other words: riding the horse becomes optional. the scope of this gesture must be measured in light of recent evolutions in relationships with horses (digard, “des manèges”; digard, “qu’ont à voir”; roche). indeed, since the middle of the 19th century, the western relationship with the horse has experienced a profound transformation. at the beginning of the 19th century, horses represented the majority of equine livestock in france; however, due to the subsequent mechanization of means of transport and work, the work horse lost its function. its significant demographic decline statistically highlighted the presence of the saddle horse (digard, “des manèges”). as armies abandoned the use of equids in their operations, competitive and leisure horse riding became the main equine figure in the west. thus, equestrian culture still largely dominates relationships with horses and, despite several recent evolutions provoking important debates,7 it is very difficult to envisage relationships with the horse outside of horse riding, and a fortiori from riding. by asserting that riding is optional, and by revaluing elements normally considered to be “side aspects of horse riding” (tourre-malen, “les à-côtés de l’équitation”), tac humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 142 thus positions itself as breaking with equestrian culture. hence the purpose of the manifesto mentioned in this article’s introduction, seeking to assert the differences between rpe and tac. firstly, the manifesto insists on the importance of a therapeutic positioning and status: it recalls that rpe instructors should not define therapeutic objectives, and even less supervise healthcare activities. thus, in the same way that hippotherapy does not mention horse riding in its terminology, tac has constructed its professional identity through a split with the equestrian world. secondly, by emphasizing being “with the horse,” the entire relationship with equids is also redefined: incorporating this relationship into a therapeutic framework allows it to be extracted from ”rigid” horse-riding codes, from the obligation to ride and from learning equestrian techniques. in my opinion, the two movements are connected. by defining themselves as therapists, by changing the professional world, these actors can legitimately promote other modes of relationship with horses; and an entirely different vision of the horse. as they no longer depend on frameworks of the equestrian world, and as respecting the orthodoxy of horse-riding rules is no longer at the heart of their activity, no longer an objective to be achieved, they can claim a new horse ontology: more than just a “mount,” it is a “living being,” who has a “presence,” with whom one can engage into a “relationship.” it seems important to me to associate this change in professional world, from the equestrian to the medical world, from sport to therapy, with the new ontological framework of horses; and to think about the related stakes, using concepts from the sociology of professions. the example of equine-assisted care wonderfully illustrates the quest for autonomy in which actors are engaged as soon as they seek to establish themselves as a professional group. autonomy, a notion both central and debated in the sociology of professions (champy, la sociologie des professions; dubar and tripier), is presented either as a legal and a de facto right of established professions (in functionalist perspectives), or as the result of complex social processes, involving power relations and negotiated according to specific contexts (in interactionist perspectives). in the case which interests us here, we must note that there is truly a desire for autonomy, going hand in hand with the assertion of a new professional identity, but which does not aim for a lack of subordination to other professional groups. instead, the process of autonomization translates into a change of professional world: the will to be autonomous from the competitive horse-riding world, to then depend on the frameworks of the medical world. this is where andrew abbott’s ecological approach to professional dynamics in the system of professions becomes most relevant: no profession is really autonomous, but jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics 143 all professions seek relative autonomy vis-à-vis certain professional groups, resulting in a dependence vis-à-vis other professional groups. the question is knowing what the professional groups who “migrate” in this manner from one professional world to the other are seeking and finding. regarding equine-assisted care, my interpretation is the following: moving from the world of sport to that of medicine, a shift occurs towards forms of particular professional practices, prudential practices. developed by f. champy (la sociologie des professions; nouvelle théorie sociologique des professions), the notion of “prudential practice professions” designates a form of work that is found in certain professional groups, especially among doctors and architects, and which allows them to claim greater autonomy than other professional groups. in line with abbott’s analysis of the content of professional work, prudential practices consist, based on singular situations, of using abstract knowledge to establish a diagnosis, apply a treatment, and infer the evolution of the initial situation. but for champy, the idea of “prudence” must be added to define what differentiates professional work from other work types. the singularity of the situations dealt with implies an ethos of prudence, which translates into a distancing vis-à-vis immediate action and into collective deliberation, between professionals, simultaneously concerning the diagnosis, treatment, and inference. prudential practice professions put in place spaces of collective discussion, where only professionals can define what needs to be done, in the name of common cognitive frameworks. this is the dimension which, in my opinion, is important to understanding the shift from sport to health made by equine-assisted care practices. by moving towards the medical world, by accepting to depend on its frameworks, these practitioners first enlist the force of a superior common principle, that of human health (dodier), which tends to erase any other imperative, and, above all, they draw closer to a world where it is possible for them to legitimately redefine relationships with the horse. indeed, the medical world is a professional world of prudential practices, populated by the deliberative spaces mentioned above. in these spaces, equine-assisted care practitioners mix with other health professionals, who recognize their legitimacy to discuss actions to be implemented in order to accomplish therapeutic objectives. with them, it becomes possible to discuss modes of relationships with the horse that do not fit into the framework of the orthodoxy of equestrian practices, to envisage a wider range of interactions with horses. in a sense, as long as these modes of relationship serve therapeutic objectives, anything is permitted. this does not mean that equine-assisted care practitioners were fundamentally driven by a desire to remove relationships with the horse from the definitional monopoly of equestrian culture. however, by claiming humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 144 to be part of the medical world rather than the sports world, they clearly found both legitimacy (symbolic [demazière and gadéa]) and the professional form enabling them to do it. i will return to the contribution of the concept of prudential practices later. before this, i will demonstrate that the evolution of equine-assisted care practices provides additional elements to defend the existence of ontological stakes in professional dynamics. 2.2 the effects of equine-assisted therapy segmentation. the shift from the horse-riding world to the medical world, from sport to therapy, was thus accompanied by the assertion of new modes of relationship with the horse. again, referring to the example of tac, and to the 1986 manifesto, a specific horse ontology is clearly affirmed. indeed, extracted from its exclusive role as a mount, the horse becomes first and foremost a “living being,” whose presence makes the “relationship both enriching and singular.” this commitment to the “horse being” is explained by the more psychotherapeutic orientation of tac compared to rpe. in the same way that psychomotricity considers patients’ mental health, regarding their relationships with motor functions that the physiotherapist has already treated, the shift from rpe to tac is a step towards the treatment of individuals’ mental disorders. the development, in the 2000s, of “équithérapie” (equine-facilitated psychotherapy/learning: efp/l) in france would precisely mark the arrival of exclusively psychotherapeutic practices. created in 2005, the société française d’equithérapie (sfe, french equine-facilitated psychotherapy/learning society) defends a vision of équithérapie that is rather close to tac: an insistence on the positioning of the therapist, and a distancing from learning horse riding. but the difference between the two approaches resides in their objectives: “in équithérapie, the objective is to work on the patient’s psychological functioning, through mental (speech, feelings, emotion, desire, perception, the meaning given to life…) and corporal (sensoriality, movement, infra-verbal communication, gestural expression) means.”8 it therefore involves working towards the psyche and not overall psychomotricity as in tac. here, the psychomotor element is considered in its instrumental capacity: it permits us to reach the individual’s psyche. but psychomotor improvement is not the aim. this positioning is explained by the original professions of the sfe’s founders (psychologists and psychotherapists) and their theoretical filiation, drawing on psychoanalysis, psychodynamics, and humanist therapies — a good example of professional segmentation (bucher and strauss). the notion of “segmentation” aims to reflect that professions do not develop ex nihilo but in reference to past practices, and jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics 145 that, consequently, the stakes of professional dynamics are in the reappropriation and reinterpretation of the “gains” of preceding practices. figure 1: professional segmentation of equine-assisted therapy in france the above diagram represents this process of segmentation. arranged chronologically, we can identify the borrowings that each practice claims vis-à-vis the previous one. the term “tools” covers the techniques used to achieve therapeutic “objectives.” when we observe the nature of these tools and objectives in each practice, several common dimensions are visible. furthermore, a phenomenon converting “objectives” into “tools” during the shift from one practice to another can be observed. thus, rpe uses “classic” horse-riding techniques to achieve motor rehabilitation objectives. as for tac, it reappropriates certain motor rehabilitation techniques to accomplish treatment in which mental and motor aspects are combined, and where the aim is to improve both. lastly, équithérapie lays claim to tac’s conceptual framework, and the use of psychomotricity techniques, essentially with an aim to treat the psyche. thus, an analysis in terms of segmentation enables the emergence of new professional identities to be included in forms of heritage and praxeological continuity, and to better identify humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 146 what drives the desire for rupture and differentiation. it is interesting to note here that what leads tac to differentiate itself from rpe is of the same order as what leads équithérapie to distinguish itself from tac: new therapeutic objectives defending a vision of the horse that is different from the previous one. indeed, as an essentially psychotherapeutic practice, équithérapie offers an ontological framework of the horse that highlights its psychic presence: “the interest in using the horse is explained by its qualities as a living being with its own psychic apparatus.”9 we find the same evolution in the united states with the development, in the late 1990s, of equine-facilitated psychotherapy (efp) and equine-facilitated learning (efl), practices which, as their names indicate, essentially seek to address mental, emotional, and cognitive issues. in efp/l, like its french homologue équithérapie, the horse is above all regarded as a mental and emotional catalyst: “horses are sentient beings with feelings, thoughts, emotions, memories, and empathetic abilities.”10 the history of equine-assisted therapy is also that of the horse’s progressive departure from the equestrian activity (équitation adaptée/riding for the disabled), and a successive focus on the benefits of moving the body (rpe/riding for rehabilitation), then on the body and psyche (tac/hippotherapy), and lastly on the psyche (équithérapie/efp/l). it then seems that the more we move towards care practices with “mental” objectives, the more the vision of the horse, its ontological framework, highlights its “being,” its psyche, its individuality. france united states practice ontological framework of the horse équitation adaptée riding for the disabled classic horse riding adapted to motor disabilities activity (riding) rééducation par l'équitation (rpe) riding for rehabilitation classic horse-riding used therapeutically for motor disabilities activity (riding) + body thérapie avec le cheval (tac) hippotherapy therapeutic practice for psychomotor disorders body + psyche équithérapie equine-facilitated psychotherapy/learn ing (efp/l) therapeutic practice for psychic disorders psyche/being jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics 147 table 1 : chronological evolution of equine-assisted therapy practices as with dogs, the evolution of equine-assisted care practices, in france and in the united states, shows us a form of rise of animals’ personhood, at least a rise of singularity and subjectivity, going hand in hand with a rise of therapy practices. but additionally, the type of therapy in question influences the way in which the animals are seen to be represented and performed within practices: shifting from practices endeavoring to treat motor issues through the motor benefits of animals, to practices treating the human psyche and emotions through the emotional, mental qualities of animals. there is a clearly a homology, a pairing, between the ontological framework of animals and the ontological framework of human beneficiaries of care practices. i will return to this phenomenon of pairing in my conclusions. 3. conclusions. to conclude this article, i would like to return to what the analysis of professional dynamics can contribute, both to reflections on animal work and to the study of human-animal relations, before explaining what professional dynamics could also gain from them. 3.1 animal work through the prism of professional dynamics. research on the question of animal work has emerged over several years (porcher; coulter), and constitutes an extremely encouraging horizon for both the sociology of human-animal relations and sociology of work. this research aims to question and qualify the nature of animal work and to envisage, from a normative perspective, adequate forms of compensation — or recognition — for animals. this article has shifted slightly from that perspective. taking for granted the existence of a form of animal participation in production and service activities, i have rather sought to understand how this participation can be recognized, or not, as a form of work, and to document the professional worlds in which the question of animal work can be considered legitimate and pertinent. such an approach seems complementary to the objectives of a sociology of animal work, aiming to consider the subjective engagement of animals in production activities and to recognise this engagement (porcher). regarding these two aspects, the detour via the sociology of professions may prove to be very useful. by focusing on the evolutions of professional identities, this approach, especially the interactionist tradition (hugues; strauss), centers its analysis on the way humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 148 in which workers collectively seek to give meaning to their subjective engagement in work: professional dynamics have significant identity stakes, which give the worker’s subjectivity a high degree of public visibility. this is because professional groups, by constituting themselves as such, aspire, among other things, to a form of public recognition of their specific identity. i have attempted to demonstrate that these characteristics of the sociology of professions, forged from situations where animals were not really present, where thinking about relationship between humans (the professional and the client/patient/user) was at stake, have preserved their heuristic usefulness to consider work configurations where animals matter. the two examples that i have just described illustrate that there was a real co-evolution of the professional identities of animal-assisted care practices and the representations of animals engaged in them. when we analyze this from a diachronic perspective, this joint evolution leads towards the singularization of animals. regarding dogs, i referred to the notion of “person” or “living person” (micoud) to emphasize both the interactional dimension of the skills demanded of them, and to indicate that an entirely new social identity is conferred upon them. the procedures certifying therapy dogs actually recognize the quality of the relationship between the master and dog, including it in a singular history, in a biography, while simultaneously endorsing a specific social function: intervention in care situations. i have especially insisted on this dimension to show that the analysis of professional dynamics enables the construction of animals’ singularity, and the public recognition of their occupation, to be jointly addressed. with the example of horses, i was less interested in the animals’ training (which is, moreover, a blind spot in literature concerning equine-assisted care) than in the evolutions of the practices themselves. i have shown that the claims to new professional identities, corresponding to segments, were accompanied by new ontological frameworks for horses, in which it is not so much their personhood that comes to the fore as their subjectivity, and their status as living beings (in conflict with the equestrian world, which instead accentuates a framework where the horse is a mount). again, this involves public and repeated affirmations of the use of horses as singular beings, with a subjective relationship to the world and to the work activity in which they are engaged. to this extent, i believe that addressing the question of animal work through professional dynamics is a good orientation, which deserves to be tested on cases other than animal-assisted care, which is certainly very specific. moreover, it seems clear to me that the professional universes described here are the most likely to see the emergence of animal work as a pertinent question, because a form of animal participation in work is already publicly recorded and displayed, to the point of structuring professional identities. however, we must note that, even in this jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics 149 professional world, the question of animal work is still only tentatively addressed. in terms of respecting animals’ work hours, not over-soliciting them, putting them “into retirement,” the question of the effective compensation of animals, of the quantification of the added value created by their participation in care activities, is not explicitly and clearly asked. concern for the animal tends to be formulated morally, ethically, or emotionally, and rarely from the angle of economic contribution, social justice, or equity. and we must note that, in the literature, there are some critical analyses of animal-assisted therapy, presented as a new form of animal exploitation (zamir). through the prism of the sociology of professions, the question of animal work invites us to pay close attention to the evolutions of forms of human work. it should be noted that in the two cases studied, there is a shift from “technical” activities, in which animals are particularly envisaged as “doing” things, to activities where the relational dimension, the animals’ presence and interaction are valued. this evolution is certainly symptomatic of the tertiarization of the labor market in western societies, but even more it attests to the development of support, personal development (marquis), and mediation activities, which place the relationship with one another at the heart of the work (demailly), and which tend to emerge earlier in north america (ehrenberg) and are exported through the global mutations of capitalism (boltanski and chiapello). this form of relational work necessarily implies the adoption of the human individual as the basic unit, and it is not surprising that by integrating animals, they are also themselves easily individualized, singularized, personalized. these activities gain importance, not simply due to the well-known dynamics of individualization prevalent in western societies, but also due to evolutions regulating the labor market, which strongly influence the evolution of professional forms. indeed, the emergence of professions as a specific social form corresponds to the specific sociohistorical context from the middle and end of the 19th century (siegrist), in western europe and in north america, a context that was not homogenous and which has significantly evolved since. although, according to t. brante (“professional fields and truth regimes”) and g. olofsson (“the expansion of the university sector”), established professions and semi-professions first benefited from the desire of states to control intermediary bodies in the mid-19th century, then from the development of the welfare state in the 20th century, the pre-professions (of which animal-assisted therapy is an example) themselves surfaced in a relatively neoliberal context. the fact that i have been able to similarly describe professional dynamics in the united states and in france attests to the neoliberal shifts and progressive deregulation of the labor market humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 150 experienced in france since the 1980s. does this mean that the question of animal work is favored by a context of market openness and deregulation? i do not have sufficient evidence to assert this, but it can at least be noted that in the framework of industrial capitalism, with the development of animal production and industrial livestock farming, animals were completely de-singularized, reduced to their status as a resource, as meat and animal products, deprived of the recognition of any active role. within this context, the question of animal work was purely and simply eliminated. its (re)emergence must then be analyzed in light of capitalism’s complex mutations. 3.2 the singularization of animals and of professional dynamics. in contrast, i would like to emphasize the idea that recent developments in humananimal relations cannot be understood without resorting to the sociology of professions. this is especially the case when analyzing social dynamics aiming to singularize animals, who are still largely thought of as a sociological enigma. indeed, research on this question is relatively limited, while singularity and singularization have become key objects in contemporary sociology (bonny; namian). among the possible entry points to examine the process of animal singularization, the most obvious one is to understand the motivation of pet ownership. as surprising as it may seem, considering the significant and regular media coverage of this subject, french sociological works devoted to it are rare, and are limited to demonstrating the scope of the phenomenon in demographic terms (verger, grimmler and herpin) and analyzing it in light of consumption habits (herpin and verger). but this research does not investigate the meaning that owners ascribe to pets11 and does not tell us much about the way they are constructed as persons or as singular individuals (lestel).12 some anglophone works are interested in animals in the family sphere (greenebaum; power; staats, wallace et al.), and highlight the construction of some animals as family members, included in a family project and biography. although the process of animal singularization has been sufficiently examined in this restricted framework of the family, how can we think about it on another scale — a social scale? for example, the works of adrian franklin (e.g., animals and modern cultures) describe a sociohistorical process, underway since the early 20th century, characterized by the rise of zoocentrism. increasingly in western societies, we seek to consider the views and interests of animals, as much in political decisions as in individual choices. the rise of zoocentrism is linked to the emergence of animal protection, as developed in the 19th century in western europe and in north america (agulhon; pearson; pierre; pelosse, “imaginaire social et protection de l’animal, 1re partie” and 2e partie), and which was characterized by a strong attachment to individual animals, and less to animal species, which distinguishes it jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics 151 from environmental protection (burgat, la protection de l’animal and “la mouvance animalière”). works on the “concern for animals” (dodier et al), “animal cause” (jasper & nelkin; traïni) or “animal rights movement” (jacobsson & lindblom) may indeed prove to be good entry points to understand the social mechanisms through which the singularity of animals is defended and constructed. that said, these works may come up against an inherent limit to their object, and generally against the dynamics of collective action: the construction of any political cause implies forms of de-singularization (boltanski and thévenot), of a rise in generality. thus, mobilization takes place in the name of an animal population (a category), rarely of individual animals. furthermore, these works especially focus on the symbolic and legislative dimensions of struggles by animal welfare campaigners, and little on their effective protection practices, and even less on their concrete effects on animals.13 put simply, if the approach via the family dimension enables us to understand the mechanisms of animal singularization, the approach via social movements considers the way in which this singularity is defended in the public space. is there not an approach that could contain these two levels of analyses, representations, and practices?14 the sociology of professions appears to me to be one solution, for three reasons. the first relates to the proximity between the sociology of professions, in its interactionist version, and the sociology of social movements. for bucher and strauss (“professions in process”), it is important to study the segments of a profession like social movements (political, religious, reformist), based on a community of practices and bearing common values. their development corresponds to the affirmation of a professional identity in line with these values and practices. starting from an already existing activity, each segment constructs specific frameworks aiming to redefine modalities and objectives depending on the underlying ideology, much as social movements make frameworks from the issues at stake (contamin). through processes of segmentation, we can interpret professional evolutions as forms of collective action aiming to jointly defend a particular identity and practice. the example of animalassisted care developed in this article is quite illustrative: each new denomination, each new professional association, clearly affirms a specific ideology, as much regarding the objectives and form of activity (therapeutic, recreational, sports), as concerning the vision of the horse (mount, body, psyche), or the type of issue targeted by the activity (physical, mental, psychomotor). i thus defend the idea that these professional humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 152 dynamics should be analyzed as powerful operators changing human-animal relations, at least as much as animal rights movements. the second reason relates to the fact that the sociology of professions enables representations and practices to be jointly addressed. indeed, i have retraced the identity dimensions of the professional dynamics of animal-assisted care. much has been said of terminology, of the names that actors give to themselves (savoie). these words and their evolutions are clearly very important to understand the evolution of representations of animals. nevertheless, it is important not to disconnect these symbolic dimensions from their practical stakes; and entry via professional dynamics can help us to do so, insofar as the professional identities are intrinsically linked to practices, which they are responsible for designating and regulating. i have tried to show, especially with the example of dogs, that terminological developments corresponded to specific modes of relationship with the animal, which had to be performed, even incarnated. for horses, the logic is similar: a specific vision of the horse and a new behavioral modality must be affirmed and reinforced through the promotion of new practices. in sum, professional identities are not just a question of representations; they involve forms of ontological frameworks of animals, which have concrete effects on the animals concerned. lastly, i think that the sociology of professions can help us to better understand the processes of animal singularization as professions are, along with the family sphere, one of the places where singularity is made, which i will now develop. 3.3 professionalism as singularity making? the interactionist currents of professions have stressed that any dynamic of professionalization must firstly be understood in its identity dimension: attempting to establish a profession is a means to be defined as a specific social group, distinct from other social groups (demazière and gadea). from this perspective, professionalization is described as a process of identity transformation, of subjectivation of actors involved in it. but have we made it sufficiently clear that this process does not only concern professionals themselves but also their users, clients, and publics? it seems important to note, especially in the case of medical and paramedical professions, that professional identities are formed with respect to a specific dimension of the human body and psyche and their (dys)functioning. through these frameworks (dodier; mol), professional identities thus provide patients with a specific identity linked to their pathology/issues/condition.15 the example developed here adds another dimension: professional identities are constructed not only in relation to patients’ pathologies/issues, but also to those of the animals who participate in their treatment. jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics 153 there is thus a joint evolution of three identities, human and animal. this specificity results from the fact that the means of characterizing human patients/beneficiaries/users corresponds to similar means of characterizing animals. can this pairing phenomenon described in relation to animal-assisted care be observed in other professional dynamics? for example, we can certainly imagine this concerning any type of activity founding its professional activity on the specificity of a tool, technique, or technology, and on the effects produced by their use on clients/users/patients. perhaps this dimension is more obvious when the tool in question is living (a plant or an animal). i would also like to highlight the value of exploring these specific spheres for the sociology of professions. although they are still small in number, they could more clearly bring to light the ontological stakes of professional dynamics. this proposition partially joins thomas brante’s foucauldian analyses (“professional fields and truth regimes”; “professions as science-based occupations”) concerning the shaping of professional work. for brante, the elementary form of operation for this work corresponds to the triangle formed by science, professionals, and clients — or “the object” in the author’s terms. science and professionals have a similar interest in “the object,” but it does not assume the same form: science “constructs” the object with a desire for observation and knowledge represents it, informs it; whereas professionals work on this object, once it is defined by science. we find here the classical theory of professional work as the application of abstract knowledge, but brante draws our attention to the ontological stakes of this operation. through the science/professions/objects triangle it is as much a case of representing the world as shaping it in the image of this representation. changing the world according to a theory is a fundamental dimension of professional work. this transformative aspect of professional work invites us to more seriously consider the proposition formulated above, which consists of saying that professional identities are not just a matter of representation, and that ontological frameworks have very concrete effects on beings. brante himself mentions this ontological dimension of professional dynamics, but uniquely in terms of frameworks preceding the transformative gesture of the professional,16 without emphasizing the ontological effects of this gesture. this is what leads me to express a slight reservation regarding brante’s modelling. although i understand the epistemological necessity of referring to an “object” (of science and/or professions), it seems to me that by using this term we miss what makes the specificity of certain professions: the construction of the subjectivity of clients/patients/users — of beneficiaries. psychotherapeutic, psychoanalytical, psychiatric, or even social support and personal development practices clearly aim to help humans to reappropriate their humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 154 own lives, in one way or another, and to thus establish themselves as subjects. the purpose of these professions is clearly to construct subjects. this is evidently not the case for all professions. if we want to preserve the general scope of brante’s modelling, i think it would be interesting to emphasize the ontological effects of professional work (it transforms beings), rather than to uniquely stress the possible orientations of this transformation (objectivation). the idea that professions produce ontologies seems to me to be very stimulating, and i would like to use it to respond to the sociological enigma of animal singularization. to do so, i will return to f. champy’s notion of prudential practice professions. all professions must decide on singular situations, and thus must qualify the way in which phenomena known by professionals (for example, through scientific knowledge) are incarnated in specific and uncertain configurations (regarding doctors, this involves detecting the existence of a pathology in a patient, understanding the form of the pathology as it develops in the individual). prudential practice professions have a slightly different relationship with singularity. their specificity comes from establishing prudential measures, not simply aiming to welcome the singularity and complexity of situations, to discuss them, but to really bring them out. the deliberative measures of prudential practices do not necessarily seek to reduce singularity and complexity, to better control them, but instead to leave them enough room to open, to express themselves, to blossom. put simply: these are the spaces where singularity is qualified, where it takes shape. to this extent, professional work does not consist of acting against or despite the singularity of the issue/phenomenon in question, but of accompanying it in an alteration process (“treatment”). this in turn does not remove it from its singularity, but instead adds to it. following intervention by the professional, the situations and problems are still singular.17 professional prudential practice work thus acts with and for singularity. this leads me to think that prudential practice professions occupy a prominent place in the social mechanisms of the singularization of beings. like the family sphere, they construct the singularity of beings (via prudential measures), and like social movements, they give this singularity a high degree of public visibility (via professional identities). somewhat situated at the interface between these two worlds, one shaping singular relations and the other promoting them, these professions, first and foremost transformative practices, enable us to refine the understanding of mechanisms of social change. furthermore, speaking of professions as singularity production sites is a means to include professional dynamics at the heart of social change, to no longer consider the evolution of professions as a symptom of these changes, but as a source. jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics 155 notes 1. cf. l'institut de formation en equithérapie. foire aux questions. online. 2. in this case, the model of the medical profession (freidson). 3. for detailed descriptions, see mondémé; mouret, “iros” and “apprendre à prendre soin.” 4. this is based on the training tests of therapy dogs international, therapy dogs incorporated and the delta society (see michalon, panser avec les animaux). 5. it is important to distinguish the term “equestrian,” which refers to horse riding, from the term “equine,” which refers to the horse, and more generally to equids. 6. for an account of the birth of american hippotherapy see the american hippotherapy association website. online. 7. i particularly refer to ethological riding (digard, “des manèges aux tipis”) or to “équipiétons”: horse owners who do not ride their horses, leave them in the pasture, and come to clean, feed, and walk them on foot. 8. see la société française d’equithérapie webpage; emphasis in original. online. 9. see http://sfequitherapie.free.fr/. online. 10. see http://www.narha.org/secefmha/. online. 11. even speculatively (yonnet; héran; brohm). 12. baptiste coulmont’s research on dog names specifically encourages us to take greater interest in the signs of animal singularization. 13. for example, the millions of animals taken in by animal protection associations are subject to reclassification (michalon, “from sport to therapy”; michalon, “fabriquer l‘animal de compagnie”), where they are given a new social identity, singular and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 156 irreplaceable, a persona, aiming for adoption, and thus sustainable insertion into peaceful relationships with humans. 14. for an analysis of the media construction of the personhood of certain animals, see gouabault, burton-jeangros, et al. 15. this is particularly striking when sick persons reappropriate this identity by forming associations. 16. brante uses the notion of “ontological models” that influence the way in which scientists construct knowledge in a relationship between theory and significant facts. 17. this is even the very aim in some cases, like that of psychotherapies. works cited abbott, andrew. the system of professions. an essay on the division of expert labor. the u of chicago p, 1988. agulhon, maurice. “le sang des bêtes. le problème de la protection des animaux en france au xixème siècle.” romantisme 31 (1981): 81-109. american hippotherapy association. accessed 4 dec. 2019. online. ansorge, jessie, and jean-luc sudres. “la médiation équine en pédopsychiatrie.” soins psychiatrie 32.277 (2011): 40-44. arkow, p. animal-assisted therapy and activities: a study, resource guide and bibliography for the use of companion animals in selected therapies. 9th ed. p. arkow, 2004. aubard, isabelle. “comment est née en france la thérapie avec le cheval.” serpsy.org (soin etude et recherche en psychiatrie). accessed 7 dec. 2019. online. belin, b. animaux au secours du handicap. paris, 2000. boltanski, luc, and eve chiapello. le nouvel esprit du capitalisme. gallimard, 1999. jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics 157 boltanski, luc, and laurent thévenot. de la justification. les économies de la grandeur. gallimard, 1991. bonny, yves. “un objet bien singulier !” cahiers de la recherche sociologique 59-60 (2015): 17-30. brante, thomas. “professional fields and truth regimes: in search of alternative approaches.” comparative sociology 9.6 (2010): 843-86. _____. “professions as science-based occupations.” professions & professionalism 1.1 (2011): 4-20. brohm, jean-marie. “le chien et son double.” panoramiques 31 (1997): 33-42. bucher, rue, and anselm strauss. “professions in process.” american journal of sociology 66.4 (1961): 325-34. bucher, silke v., et al. “contestation about collaboration: discursive boundary work among professions.” organization studies 37.4 (2016): 497-522. burgat, florence. “la mouvance animalière. des ‘petites dames de la protection animale’ à la constitution d'un mouvement qui dérange.” pouvoirs 131 (2009): 73-84. _____. la protection de l’animal. presses universitaires de france, 1997. centre d'etude et de recherche sur la philanthropie (cerphi). les a.a.a. dans les établissements accueillant des enfants handicapés ou en difficulté: phase de quantification. fondation sommer, 2006. champy, florent. “la culture professionnelle des architectes.” sociologie des groupes professionnels. didier demazière and charles gadéa, eds. ladécouverte, 2009. 152-62. _____. la sociologie des professions. presses universitaires de france, 2009. _____. nouvelle théorie sociologique des professions. presses universitaires de france, 2011. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 158 chevalier, vérène. “pratiques culturelles et carrières d'amateurs : le cas des parcours de cavaliers dans les clubs d'équitation.” sociétés contemporaines 29.1 (1998): 27-41. chevalier, vérène, and brigitte dussart. “de l’amateur au professionnel: le cas des pratiquants de l’équitation.” l'année sociologique 52.2 (2002): 459-76. contamin, jean-gabriel. “cadrages et luttes de sens.” penser les mouvements sociaux. eric agrikoliansky, isabelle sommier and olivier fillieule, eds. la découverte, 2010. 5575. coulmont, baptiste. “des prénoms qui ont du chien : le partage des prénoms entre hommes et chiens.” annales de démographie historique. 2016/1.131 (2016): 151-70. coulter, kendra. animals, work, and the promise of interspecies solidarity. palgrave macmillan, 2016. demailly, lise. politiques de la relation. approche sociologique des métiers et activités professionnelles relationnelles. presses universitaires du septentrion, 2008. demazière, didier, and charles gadéa, eds. sociologie des groupes professionnels. la découverte, 2009. digard, jean-pierre. “des manèges aux tipis. ‘équitation éthologique’ et mythes indiens.” techniques & culture, 2004. accessed 7 dec. 2019. online. _____. “qu’ont à voir les sciences sociales avec le cheval?” le mouvement social 229 (2009): 3-11. dodier, nicolas. l'expertise médicale. essai de sociologie sur l'exercice du jugement. métailié, 1993. dodier, nicolas, pierre-benoît joly, and cyril lemieux, eds. la question animale. politix 64. lavoisier, 2003. dubar, claude, and pierre tripier. sociologie des professions. armand colin, 2005. ehrenberg, alain. la société du malaise. le mental et le social. odile jacob, 2010. jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics 159 franklin, adrian. animals and modern cultures: a sociology of human-animal relations in modernity. sage publications, 1999. freidson, eliot. la profession médicale. payot, 1984. gouabault, emmanuel, claudine burton-jeangros, and annik dubied. “genuine zoocentrism or dogged anthropocentrism? on the personification of animal figures in the news.” humanimalia 3.1 (2011): 77-100. accessed 7 dec. 2019. online. greenebaum, j. “it’s a dog’s life: elevating status from pet to ‘fur baby’ at yappy hour.” society & animals 12.2 (2004): 117-135. griffith, j.c. “chronicle of therapeutic horseback riding in the united states, resources and references.” journal of the american kinesiotherapy association 46.1 (1992): 2-7. heran, françois. “comme chiens et chats : structures et genèse d‘un conflit culturel.” ethnologie française 18.4 (1988): 325-37. herpin, nicolas, and daniel verger. “sont-ils devenus fous? la passion des français pour les animaux familiers.” revue française de sociologie 33.2 (1992): 265-86. hugues, everett c. le regard sociologique. essais choisis. editions de l’e.h.e.s.s., 1996. jacobsson, kerstin, and jonas lindblom. animal rights activism. a moral-sociological perspective on social movements. amsterdam up, 2017. jasper, james m., and dorothy nelkin. the animal rights crusade: the growth of a moral protest. free press, 1992. kohler, robert, and handi'chiens, eds. les activités associant l'animal en milieu sanitaire, social et médico-social. l'approche démographique, juridique et managériale. fondation adrienne & pierre sommer, 2010. lestel, dominique. l'animal singulier. seuil, 2004. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 160 marquis, nicolas. du bien-être au marché du malaise. la société du développement personnel. presses universitaires de france, 2014. martin, brigitte. “interview avec renée de lubersac.” le blog de la mediation animale et des interactions homme-animal. 9 feb 2009. accessed 28 nov 2019. online. micoud, andré. “sauvage ou domestique, des catégories obsolètes?” sociétés 2.108 (2010): 99-107. michalon, jérôme. “fabriquer l‘animal de compagnie. ethnographie d‘un refuge s.p.a.” sociologie 4.2 (2013): 163-81. _____. “from sport to therapy. the social stakes in the rise of equine assisted activities.” sport, animals and society. james gillett and michelle gilbert, eds. routledge, 2013. 85-100. _____. panser avec les animaux. sociologie du soin par le contact animalier. presses des mines paristech, 2014. mol, annemarie. the body multiple: ontology in medical practice. duke up, 2002. mondémé, chloé. “formes d’interaction sociales entre hommes et chiens. une approche praxéologique des relations interspécifiques.” phd dissertation, école normale supérieure de lyon, july 12th 2013. mouret, sébastien. “iros. un chien-guide d'aveugles, un travailleur du care.” vacarme. vol. 2015/1. no. 70 (2015): 192-203. _____. “apprendre à prendre soin. la centralité du travail dans l’éducation des chiens guides d’aveugles.” ecologie & politique 2017/1.54 (2017): 87-102. namian, dahlia. “psychologisation ou ‘singularisation’? l'intervention sociale au temps de l’accompagnement.” reflets 17.1 (2011): 58-89. olofsson, gunnar. “the expansion of the university sector, the emerging professions and the new professional landscape — the case of sweden.” working papers in sociology. linnaeus university, 2016. jérôme michalon -the rise of therapy animals’ personhood: a note on the ontological dimensions of professional dynamics 161 pearson, susan j. the rights of the defenseless. protecting animals and children in gilded age america. the u of chicago p, 2011. pelosse, valentin. “imaginaire social et protection de l’animal. des amis des bêtes de l'an x au législateur de 1850 (1re partie).” l'homme 21. 4 (1981): 5-33. _____. “imaginaire social et protection de l’animal. des amis des bêtes de l’an x au législateur de 1850 (2e partie).” l'homme 22.1 (1982): 33-51. pierre, eric. “la zoophilie dans ses rapports à la philanthropie, en france, au xixe siècle.” cahiers d’histoire 3-4 (1997): 655-75. porcher, jocelyne. vivre avec les animaux. une utopie pour le xxie siècle. la découverte, 2011. porcher, jocelyne, and tiphaine schmitt. “les vaches collaborent-elles au travail? une question de sociologie.” la revue du mauss 1.35 (2010): 235 61. power, e. “furry families: making a human-dog family through home.” social & cultural geography 9.5 (2008): 535-55. reynaud, jean-daniel, and nathalie richebé. “régles, conventions et valeurs. plaidoyer pour la normativité ordinaire.” revue française de sociologie 48.1 (2007): 3-36. roche, daniel. la culture équestre de l’occident, xvie — xixe siècle, l’ombre du cheval: tome 2 : la gloire et la puissance, essai sur la distinction équestre. fayard, 2011. savoie, etienne, ed. les noms que l’on se donne. processus identitaire, expérience commune, inscription publique. l'harmattan, 2001. siegrist, hannes. “history of professions and professionalization.” international encyclopedia of the social & behavioral sciences 19 (2015): 95-100. staats, s., h. wallace, and t. anderson. “reasons for companion animal guardianship (pet ownership) from two populations.” society & animals 16.3 (2008): 279-91. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 162 strauss, anselm l. la trame de la négociation. sociologie qualitative et interactionnisme. ed. textes réunis par i. baszanger. l'harmattan, 1992. standards of practice for animal-assisted activities and animal-assisted therapy. 2nd ed. the delta society. delta society, 1996. tourre-malen, catherine. “évolution des activités équestres et changement social en france à partir des années 1960.” le mouvement social 229 (2009): 41-59. _____. “les à-côtés de l’équitation. rapport à l’animal et pratique sportive.” etudes rurales 1-2.165-166 (2003): 133-46. traïni, christophe. la cause animale (1820-1980). essai de sociologie historique. presses universitaires de france, 2011. verger, daniel, ghislaine grimler, and nicolas herpin. “les français et leurs animaux familiers : des dépenses en forte hausse.” economie et statistique 241.1 (1991): 53-63. yonnet, paul. “l'homme aux chats. zoophilie et déshumanisation.” le débat 27 (1983): 111-26. zamir, t. “the moral basis of animal-assisted therapy.” society & animals 14.2 (2006): 179-99. microsoft word kozak-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:2 luba stephania kozak reclaiming indigenous identity through animal advocacy in art: adrian stimson and dana claxton if you had to pick an animal that was going to be the soul of your existence, the one thing that made life possible, you would be hard pressed to choose better than the north american plains bison (bison bison bison). – jack brink (imagining headsmashed-in 46) introduction. early modern european colonizers who arrived in north america were already experiencing a sense of disconnection from the natural world and its inhabitants, yet animals have always remained at the center of first nations cultures, traditions, spirituality and identity. roger boyd writes that a harmonious relationship between human and non-human animals is at the core of indigenous ways of life and identity (“the indigenous and modern relationship between people and animals”). furthermore, “indigenous hunter-gatherer societies treat other animals as fully sentient beings which have equal status to humans, and must be shown respect [especially] when they are hunted” (boyd). indigenous beliefs attribute spiritual qualities to animals that elevate their social position; “the cree also share the view of animals as having souls, and experiencing rebirth, in the same way that humans do.” the buffalo1 in particular is an animal that has co-existed alongside many plains indigenous tribes and is regarded with the utmost respect.2 the plains indigenous call the buffalo by several names in various languages, distinguishing them by gender, age, and physical appearance (brink 52). this conveys the way indigenous cultures have perceived nonhumans as capable of possessing their own identities. ken zontek writes that the buffalo is an animal that “traditions of tribes historically identified with ... [and the] history of human-bison interaction extends back to time immemorial, to creation itself” (3). in our interview, artist adrian stimson elaborated on the particular significance of the buffalo in the blackfoot tribe: the bison plays a very important role in blackfoot life, it is the foundation of our spiritual societies; the “motokiks” buffalo woman society is one of our most respected societies. the blackfoot see the bison as not only a resource for food, clothing, shelter, tools and spiritual life, we see it as our kin, and it is in our dna. (“beyond redemption and the buffalo”) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 70 tragically, western colonizers over-hunted the buffalo both for profit and as a way to oppress the plains indigenous people.3 as stimson explains, the slaughter was a part of the colonial project, genocide, a carefully planned process of removing indigenous people from their lands. it was an evil act meant to destroy and erase the indigenous people who relied on them for food. it was meant to starve and ultimately kill the “indian.” it was an action so heinous and diabolical that resulted in the death of not only millions of bison, but also the death of the people who relied on them, the idea that every buffalo killed is an indian gone was the policy of both canadian and american governments. for my people the blackfoot, it meant the end of a way of life and the real death of so many, many that were my family. (“beyond redemption and the buffalo”) the near extirpation of the buffalo by the early colonial settlers devastated the plains indigenous peoples’ dependency on the animal, which was not only a source for survival, but also an important part of their traditions and identities. according to gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s three modes for relating to animals in their essay “becoming animal,” the buffalo for the plains indigenous can be understood as an “oedipal” animal because of its unique history and alliance with humans, which positions it as a symbolical representation of intimate family relations (240). in this kind of mode, the buffalo becomes highly “individualized and sentimentalized,” thus elevating the animal’s social status and importance. does the historical trauma done to both the buffalo and first nations people continue to have a lasting impact on current indigenous generations, and if so, how is it expressed? through an analysis of the representation of the buffalo in the artworks of adrian stimson and dana claxton we can begin to understand the trauma of colonialization for both human and non-human species, utilizing art as a tool for communication. this paper discusses how the artists portray the merging of indigenous history and cultural identity with the image of the buffalo, which positions the animal as a culturally significant actor. i argue that by establishing the buffalo as a central figure that is at the core of plains indigenous identity, stimson and claxton reject a western humanist ideology by intimately engaging with the non-human in their art. the representation and attitudes expressed towards the buffalo in the artworks of stimson and claxton therefore incorporates some ideals of posthumanist theory.4 however, larger niitsitapi5 perspectives regarding animals also complicates and critiques posthumanist ideals, such as the liberal assumption in rights discourses that all rights should be extended to non-human luba stephania kozak -reclaiming indigenous identity through animal advocacy in art: adrian stimson and dana claxton 71 animals, which i will discuss further. alternatively, i suggest that the artists illustrate a collaborative state of co-existence between humans and non-humans that challenges ideals of posthumanist theory, thus beginning to decolonize these ideals. in his book posthumanism, pramod nayar challenges the constructed social boundaries between humans and non-humans, exploring the blurring of bodily borders and identity between species that inspires the scope of this paper. a “critical posthumanism” approach, which nayar defines as a rejection of human exceptionalism and abelism to include the non-human animal (4), therefore reflects the way in which the artists embrace the buffalo as part of their human identity. posthumanist theorist cary wolfe uses the comparison of human prejudices as a framework for thinking about the oppressive treatment of non-humans, which the author suggests originates from humanist ideals (animal rites 192).6 where wolfe views human rights discourses as a means for understanding anti-animal prejudices, this paper examines how the artists approach such issues through the merging of human and animal identities in art that reflects social and species conflicts simultaneously. wolfe advocates for an ethical consideration of non-humans because of our shared characteristics (what is posthumanism? 63), arguing that humans have a moral responsibility to non-human animals. i suggest that stimson and claxton uphold their moral responsibilities to the buffalo by promoting the animal as part of their plains indigenous identity and, moreover, as a valued kin, which advocates for the protection of the animal because of its distinct cultural and personal significance. in the cry of nature, stephen eisenman discusses the role art has played in the advocacy of animal rights, which also informs this paper. by situating the buffalo as a significant animal in their works, the artists emphasize the need to protect the animal and highlight the extensive conservation efforts of indigenous animal activists, demonstrating how the conservation of an animal can lead to the conservation of human culture. this paper proposes that adopting an indigenous perspective in which the animal is embraced as part of human identity — utilizing art as a space where such transformative experiences can be imagined — could offer new approaches for non-indigenous attitudes towards animals. the visual representation of the merging of human and non-human identities can inspire crossspecies way of thinking that push beyond the boundaries of conventional western anthropocentrism to challenge not only species prejudices, but also lead to a reevaluation of social prejudices between indigenous and settler people. for nonindigenous animal activists, the decolonizing of western attitudes towards animals through an indigenous perspective, which emphasizes a relationship of intimate kinship and interconnected co-existence between humans and non-humans, could humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 72 challenge colonial practices such as trophy hunting by drawing attention to the historical trauma associated with these practices. adrian stimson: being buffalo. adrian stimson, a member of the siksika nation, is a multimedia artist who expresses themes of history and identity in his art (“adrian stimson”). the buffalo plays a pivotal role in stimson’s performance persona of buffalo boy, performed at the burning man festival in 2007, and in the artist’s solo exhibit, “beyond redemption,” at the mendel art gallery in 2010. in my exclusive interview with stimson, i asked the artist why he chose to identify with the buffalo as opposed to other animals, such as the bear or wolf that also play important roles in indigenous stories and traditions. stimson answered, i felt that it [the buffalo] was a symbol of this history but was/is analogous to the indigenous population itself. buffalo boy is primarily a character parody of buffalo bill and his wild west shows, how the spirit of the buffalo was a big part of that spectacle, how during those shows, the symbolic killing of bison reinforced the narratives and intent of manifest destiny and terra nullius, an empty land meant for the colonizers. yet it was not an empty land, it had to be emptied first. (“beyond redemption and the buffalo”) stimson, adrian. buffalo boy, performance. 2007. burning man, black rock desert, nv. (©adrian stimson) luba stephania kozak -reclaiming indigenous identity through animal advocacy in art: adrian stimson and dana claxton 73 buffalo boy is a trickster character through which stimson “expose(s) cultural and societal truths” (rice and taunton), shifting between a shaman-exterminator and a gay cowboy (bell). in both personas, stimson is clothed in a buffalo robe, corset, or undergarment. however, buffalo boy does not simply wear the buffalo, but rather crosses “species-borders” so that he is able to embody the animal by sharing its identity. in her article “adrian stimson: buffalo boy at burning man,” lynne bell writes, in the felliniesque campsite of burning man, the multi-gendered buffalo boy — neither human, beast, boy, nor girl — gives us access to the trans, to the crossing of boundaries, to metamorphosis and the hybrid. (44) for instance, stimson does not impersonate the buffalo by wearing a head-to-toe costume, which would fully conceal his human identity, but rather allows both human and animal identities to be visible simultaneously. as deleuze and guattari write, “becoming is certainly not imitating or identifying with something…” (239). instead, “becoming” occurs through the fluid process of contagion, which allows for a multiplicity of differences that transcend boundaries, including species boundaries (242). stimson’s fluidity between human and animal identities therefore represents the very nature of “becoming animal,” but perhaps also exemplifies “becoming human,” which is dependent on the presence of the animal. in stimson’s film “what about the red man” (2006), “buffalo boy is portrayed running in every direction of a grand space where buffalo once roamed free” (rice and taunton). in the film, stimson demonstrates a sense of “becoming one” with the buffalo. as zontek notes, “this ‘becoming of’ the bison and their natural environment ‘dissolved the borders of the inner and outer worlds’ between humans and their surroundings”(8). deleuze and guattari suggest that becoming-animal involves an antihierarchical, rhizome model that is not “classificatory or genealogical” (239). the antihierarchical aspect of becoming-animal, which echoes posthumanist ideals (nayar 4), allows for an equalizing effect between stimson and the buffalo he becomes. in when species meet, donna haraway also bases her theoretical framework around the notion of “becoming with” other species. haraway argues that “response” is necessary in order to coexist with “companion species” and “an ongoing ‘becoming with’ to be a much richer web to inhabit any of the posthumanisms on display…” (16). responding through artistic practice, stimson portrays the buffalo as a “companion species” with which his human identity intertwines. stimson presents a way in which human and non-human humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 74 identities can “become one” in an intimate bond of kinship — one in which both identities are equally represented through harmonious coexistence. although stimson merges his human identity with the buffalo, demonstrating how a non-human informs the narrative of his indigenous identity, the buffalo does not necessarily represent the larger scope of indigenous attitudes towards many other kinds of non-humans. kim tallbear critiques the field animal studies for only beginning to acknowledge indigenous perspectives. tallbear writes, first of all, indigenous peoples have never forgotten that nonhumans are agential beings engaged in social relations that profoundly shape human lives. in addition, for many indigenous peoples, their nonhuman others may not be understood in even critical western frameworks as living. (234) these “nonhuman others” that tallbear refers to include natural forces, such as stones and stars (234). therefore, even progressive frameworks like posthumanist theory are challenged by how indigenous human and non-human relationships are recognized and operate, thus raising the question of whether posthumanism can be indigenized. i would argue that a branch of posthumanist theory certainly could, one in which antianthropocentrism, anti-hierarchicalism, and the intertwining of multiple worlds and organisms is the focus. however, other branches of posthumanist theory, particularly those that address the liberal issues of animal rights, i would argue cannot be indigenized because of a differing, western understanding of inter-species relations and classifications of “living” beings. however, a decolonization of the category of the animal is necessary in order to understand the unique relationship between indigenous people and non-human animals and to begin a process of reconciliation. as tallbear writes: our [indigenous] traditional stories also portray nonhuman persons in ways that do not adhere to another meaningful modern category, the “animal.” they feature relationships in which human and nonhuman persons, and nonhuman persons between themselves, harass and trick one another; save one another from injury or death; prey on, kill, and sometimes eat one another; or collaborate with one another. (235) the notion of humans and non-human animals as “collaborating” with each other is an interesting concept, one that perhaps most accurately articulates the complex bond luba stephania kozak -reclaiming indigenous identity through animal advocacy in art: adrian stimson and dana claxton 75 between the plains indigenous people and the buffalo, as expressed in the works of stimson and claxton. by connecting buffalo boy’s human identity with the buffalo, stimson positions the buffalo as a culturally significant animal. as a symbol of indigenous identity, the buffalo is perceived a valuable animal in a cultural context and concern over the animal’s wellbeing is raised. as zontek writes, “indians have demonstrated phenomenal cultural perseverance — spanning more than 125 years — in reinstating the bison once again as part of a sacred symbiosis” (152). while modern indigenous lifestyles may depend less on the buffalo for survival, the buffalo continues to remain a significant aspect of plains indigenous identities and traditions, as demonstrated through stimson’s performance. i asked stimson his thoughts on whether the buffalo population in north america has improved since their near extinction and whether he believes this improvement is due to the efforts of indigenous activists who predominantly helped restore the buffalo population through cultural association. would the results have been different if only non-indigenous activists advocated for the buffalo species? stimson replied, it is estimated that there are approximately 500,000 bison in north america now. [today’s bison are] a combination of wild herds and farmed bison. a far cry from the 75 million yet shows that they are resilient and can recover, if given the opportunity. i do believe that indigenous people themselves have restored the bison population, we have never severed our ties with them, and we want them back and through our spiritual people, activists, academics, artists and communities. we have always envisioned their comeback and dreamed for the day that they can roam freely among us. i feel that there are many non-indigenous allies who also see their value; many align their beliefs with that of indigenous people. today there are many collaborations between indigenous and non-indigenous people to save and promote the return of the bison. the scientific community has been very helpful in this regard. i believe that it has been joint effort primarily lead by indigenous people. (“beyond redemption and the buffalo”) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 76 furthermore, valerius geist writes, “the buffalo stands for a system of wildlife conservation in north america that is the most successful in the world” (14). by fighting for the conservation of the buffalo, plains indigenous people ensure that their own identities and cultures are restored. yet, beyond the cultural impact that the return of the buffalo would have for the plains indigenous, it would more significantly symbolize an overcoming of colonial oppression that would enable a future that includes indigenized posthumanist ideals. the buffalo is also the central theme in stimson’s multi-media exhibit, “beyond redemption,” and is the protagonist in the installation beyond redemption 3 and drawing bones 1. in “beyond redemption,” stimson draws attention to the history of the buffalo in north america and as the artist comments, “reconnects to that history through art” (mckay). in response to my question of what inspired him to create the exhibition, stimson replied, beyond redemption was the sum of my research around the historical slaughter of 75 million bison in north america. i was tying to sum up my feelings of this tragedy and the trauma it caused for my people, the blackfoot, and all other nations that depended on the bison for food, shelter and spiritual life. (“beyond redemption and the buffalo”) following this question, i asked stimson about the meaning of the exhibition’s title: “beyond redemption.” the oxford dictionary defines “redemption” as: “the action of saving or being saved from sin, error or evil” (barber et al.), whereas the phrase “beyond redemption” is defined as: “(of a person or thing) too bad to be saved or improved” (barber et al.). whose relationship is beyond redemption: the first nations and colonizers/settlers, the buffalo and the colonizers/settlers, or both? stimson answered: i asked myself, could this action ever be redeemed? can it be forgiven? can the invaders/settlers be forgiven for this evil action? i say no, it is beyond redemption. i believe the original slaughter itself is beyond redemption, there is no way that it can be redeemed. we can never forget these actions; they set the stage for the ongoing relationship between settler states and indigenous ways of being. i often wonder if the relationship can ever be repaired? can decolonization ever become a reality? there is so much luba stephania kozak -reclaiming indigenous identity through animal advocacy in art: adrian stimson and dana claxton 77 cognitive dissonance and racism that i doubt it. the damage that one action caused will be reverberated forever or until decolonization and individuals take responsibility for their histories and current actions. (“beyond redemption and the buffalo”) the “original slaughter” that stimson refers to is in regards to both the human and nonhuman victims, thus again reiterating the historically intertwined identity of both subjects. what stimson highlights in his response is that the colonial trauma experienced by the plains indigenous people and buffalo cannot be redeemed, but must be remembered — thus implying a call to action. for stimson, the act of remembering is actualized through his art, which gives access to a shared history between indigenous and settler people. i suggest that by reminding the spectator of the tragedies of colonial history and emphasizing the buffalo’s cultural importance, stimson is able to decolonize western views by offering new perspectives on interspecies relations in his art. the action of decolonization that stimson’s art encourages the non-indigenous spectator to engage with therefore leads to a better understanding of the collaborative relationship between the buffalo and plains indigenous people. in the installation beyond redemption 3, a large stuffed buffalo is mounted on a red platform, encircled by ten buffalo-robed figures. the central buffalo in the middle of the work assumes the role of a teacher, distinguished by its size and authoritative stance, while the robed-figures resemble the roles of pupils. stimson, adrian. beyond redemption 3, installation in “beyond redemption.” 2010. mendel art gallery, saskatoon. (©adrian stimson) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 78 when i asked stimson about the sourcing of the buffalo hides, the artist replied: i use bison robes often in my work, when sourcing the robes, i look for individuals or companies that have ethical practices, who treat their animals well, most often they are farms that use natural methods of farming, who cull ethically, who use all the meat and as much of the bison as they can. (“beyond redemption and the buffalo”) additionally, stimson shared his careful consideration of the taxidermy process for the buffalo robes, disclosing the deeply spiritual impact that the culling of the buffalo had on him. stimson writes, the 10 robes around the taxidermy bison were naturally tanned as opposed to chemically tanned. bison meat is becoming more mainstream and farming of bison more common, so robes are more readily available. for beyond redemption’s taxidermy bison, i contacted a bison farm outside of winnipeg, whose owner was a taxidermist. i talked to him about his farming ways and felt that he was both understanding of indigenous knowledge and had an overall ethical practice. from afar i did my spiritual practice of giving thanks to the bison for its life at the time of culling. i did the same with the 10 robes. (“beyond redemption and the buffalo”) stimson also remarked on the connection between the long-standing colonial history of game hunting and modern trophy hunting. stimson suggests that the role of his taxidermy buffalo is one of an ironic reminder and way of connecting to the history of hunting. stimson writes, researching colonial history, game hunting plays a huge role, the number of taxidermy trophy heads hanging in many colonial houses can attest to this, this practice continues today by trophy hunters. by using the taxidermy bison and robes in my work, i hope to mirror back this practice, somewhat ironically. it plays with that history. and also references the historical slaughter. (“beyond redemption and the buffalo”) represented within the space of an indigenous cultural context, the presence of the deceased buffalo in beyond redemption 3 symbolizes the complex social and spiritual luba stephania kozak -reclaiming indigenous identity through animal advocacy in art: adrian stimson and dana claxton 79 contract that is respected between the hunter and the animal. as calvin martin explains, hunting rests on a kind of social relationship between men and animals. through the cycle of hunting rites men emphasize their respect by means of symbolic expression of their subordination to animals. (115) indigenous cosmology dictates that animals self-sacrifice, giving their lives willingly to the hunter in need, and that they are to be regarded as divine gifts (martin 116). for the niitsitapi, the activity of hunting holds spiritual and social significance and is therefore an activity that contributes to their cultural identity (foster et al. 201). as eisenman writes, for the inuit “the hunt itself is seen not as a contest of wits but a communion between equals” (34). zoe todd’s research explores the unique human and fish relationship of the northern indigenous in the community of paulatuuq, noting their view of “fish pluralities,” which is the “multiple ways of knowing and defining fish” (217). todd writes, “humans and fish, together, share complex and nuanced political and social landscapes that shape life in the community” (218). todd also discusses the various states in which fish exist, not only in the physical form of food, but also as symbols in stories (222), thus demonstrating the multiplicity of ways indigenous people perceive and interact with animals. furthermore, todd writes that fish are regarded as capable of agency, and thus “human-fish relationships in paulatuuq are characterized by a relational, pragmatic approach at various ‘active sites of engagement’” (225). the capacity for animal agency creates a sense of equality between the hunter and the prey, which elevates the social status of the animal. the activity of hunting from an indigenous perspective is therefore one between two conscious and agent beings, which challenges power constructs of species hierarchies. furthermore, hunting emphasizes the dependency between the hunter and the prey, both of which rely on each other to collaboratively co-exist. the hunt can therefore be perceived as an ‘active site of engagement’ where interspecies responses occur to determine results, which exemplifies critical posthumanism. as nayar writes, critical posthumanism thus favours co-evolution, symbiosis, feedback and responses as determining conditions rather than autonomy, competition and self-contained isolation of the human. (9) while the aspect of hunting is difficult to accept for a non-indigenous animal rights activist, it offers an alternative approach to thinking about co-existence between species humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 80 in comparison, for instance, to the exploitation of animals for entertainment purposes in the “sport” of hunting in western cultures. in her article “decolonizing the non/human,” jinthana haritaworn discusses the necessity to decolonize the construct of a colonial environmental landscape, in which human actors are expected to play a “protectionist narrative” (211). in this colonial landscape, haritaworn writes that indigenous people are often profiled for their pathologized interaction with nature (211). haritaworn addresses the ironic outcome of this environmental racism: the need to go beyond a simple analytic of anthropocentrism is highlighted by the fact that indigenous peoples have had to fight to stay on and live off their lands, to continue to hunt and fish, for example, against both developers and environmentalists. (211) an indigenous approach to hunting can therefore be perceived as a paradoxical decolonization of the colonial environmental, challenging the colonial implications associated with posthumanist ideals against hunting. the use of the buffalo carcasses in the installation beyond redemption 3 may seem counter-productive to contemporary animal rights advocacy; however, within the installation it serves as a reminder of the spiritual and cultural importance of the buffalo for the plains indigenous ways of life. as stimson comments in “canadian art” magazine: i use the bison as a symbol representing the destruction of the aboriginal way of life, but it also represents survival and cultural regeneration. the bison is central to blackfoot being. and the bison as both icon and food source, as well as the whole history of its disappearance, is very much a part of my contemporary life. (qtd. in bell 48) the buffalo’s carcass within the gallery space becomes a sacred object: “the corpse of the animal begins to be treated less as a person, and more like a sacred substance” (martin 116). therefore, stimson is able to illustrate the indigenous spiritual connection held with the buffalo, which contributes to the cultural significance of the animal. the central mounted buffalo that stands authoritatively above the disfigured robed figures emphasizes the animal’s value and the respect it is given within the plains indigenous culture. acknowledging the buffalo as a sacred being, stimson further raises awareness and advocates for the protection of the animal by situating it as an important aspect of his spiritual human identity. furthermore, the shapeless buffalo-robed figures luba stephania kozak -reclaiming indigenous identity through animal advocacy in art: adrian stimson and dana claxton 81 positioned around the mounted buffalo indicate fluidity between indigenous and buffalo identities. to elaborate, the robed figures are neither in the shape of humans nor of buffalo, suggesting them to be either or both. nayar writes that an aspect of posthumanist theory is a moral-ethical response that blurs species boundaries (8). by obscuring the identity of the robed figures, as that of either human or animal, stimson exemplifies the ideals of a late modern “posthumanism” that was an indigenous practice, thus demonstrating a return to a previous awareness of human and animal relations that is decolonized. empathy is at the heart of animal rights discourses, which prompted me to ask stimson whether he feels empathy for the buffalo population that was massacred by the colonizers? and if so, how is this kind of empathy different from a ritualized killing of the animal by the plains indigenous people? stimson replied, absolutely, i often say what happened to the buffalo happened to us. we have and had a relationship with the bison for centuries, they were a part of our diet and i believe that through those centuries, their dna mingled with ours, they are in us and therefore connected in a very special way. there was a great respect for the bison, they were everything to us, and thus there is a difference between killing to kill off a species and a people to open up the plains and killing to survive. there are many protocols when we hunted the bison and every part of the bison was used, they were never left to rot in whole on the plains. the respect is mirrored in the societies we created; we mimic them, and also sacrifice ourselves through ceremonial acts for them. we never took more than necessary and were a part of their constant renewal. (“beyond redemption and the buffalo) this is not to say, however, that stimson did not ethically consider the use of the buffalo carcass in his installation. in a newspaper article from the saskatoon starpheonix, stimson states, “i used to support peta [people for the ethical treatment of animals] and all that … but for me, given the history of the bison, i feel strongly about using the bison in my work” (mckay). stimson’s rejection of peta’s ethical standards — which would include a stance against the hunting, eating, and use of the animal — roots the artist’s position, in regards to the use of the buffalo, within the framework of indigenous ideals as opposed to western (and eastern, since religions such as jainism advocate against harming any living being) views. stimson writes, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 82 at the time i decided to make this work, i was very conflicted yet in the end i decided that i felt the work would best express my sorrow for the historical slaughter and in turn, hopefully bring that horror and understanding to viewers. i knew it would be controversial, a trigger for many. in the end, as a blackfoot person, the use of bison material culture is part of who i am; i cannot turn my back on that. i strongly desire to keep the bison in my life, to consume its meat, to use its fur, to integrate its spirit into my spirit, to become the bison, to promote its presence on the land, to encourage their growth, to protect them, to encourage ethical management and finally, to ensure that they will be around for many generations. they are part of the continuum of being blackfoot and thus are part of my decolonization; they continue to feed me like they fed my ancestors. (“beyond redemption and the buffalo”) constructing the representation of the buffalo within a cultural context allows stimson to advocate for the buffalo’s significance by connecting it with indigenous cultural identity. however, the conflicting views between the evolving field of animal rights that is largely influenced by western perspectives and indigenous approaches to animals led me to ask stimson his views on the issue of killing animals. for instance, one of the arguments in animal rights discourses is that animals desire and deserve to live – to kill them is “speciesist” and ethically wrong.7 although indigenous values believe in responding to animals in a respectful manner, grateful for the animal’s sacrifice if hunted, in comparison to ethical atrocities found in situations such as factory farming, the end result is still the killing of the animal. is there a potential for non-indigenous animal rights views and indigenous views to find mutual agreement and establish a different approach towards animals and traditions? or will boundaries, such as different tradition and perceptions, keep the viewpoints of both groups separated? stimson answered: animal rights activists have to decolonize themselves first … they hide behind their ethics and ignore america’s history of genocide and ongoing subjugation. they ignore the facts around farming, [such as] the number of small animals killed in the process … it’s cherry picking who they want to single out as being wrong, and quite frankly racist, the inuit seal hunt comes to mind and the threats levied against them, i find their argument very hypocritical. luba stephania kozak -reclaiming indigenous identity through animal advocacy in art: adrian stimson and dana claxton 83 indigenous people were a part of the environment and did play a role in the management and well being of the bison. as long as animal rights activists act as the judge and jury of what is right and what is wrong for indigenous people, there will never be a meeting of the minds. in a weird way, they continue the colonial project, telling us that our ways are wrong. now having said that, i often feel conflicted as a meat eater, i hate factory farming; i see the environmental degradation that meat production causes. i do feel for animals and have cut down my own meat consumption and have moved to a more vegetarian diet. i support ethical farming and humane treatment of animals. i am conflicted when wild bison herds whose numbers are small can be culled by local indigenous bands (as in the herd at prince albert), i worry it will affect their numbers. yet in the end i will continue to stand up for those tribes, it is their way of life and is a continuum of their traditional practices. as time advances, there may be a time when traditions change, scarcity will dictate this, and in the process we will all have to change our minds on what we eat and think of animal welfare. (“beyond redemption and the buffalo”) for stimson, the issue of “decolonization” is necessary before settler and indigenous ideologies can settle on an agreement. i suggest that stimson’s artworks enable nonindigenous spectators to confront their own roles in the “colonization” of ethical and species boundaries, allowing individuals to learn about alternative indigenous viewpoints by using the buffalo as a mediator for social issues. the buffalo can serve as a kind of mediator because the animal exists in a space where a common concern and empathy or compassion can be expressed for the welfare of the animal by both indigenous and settler groups, despite differing attitudes or beliefs. in bones 1, another of stimson’s works in the “beyond redemption” exhibition, the overkilling of the buffalo by the colonizers is portrayed. bones 1 emphasizes the tragic results of the buffalo massacre, represented through the image of a massive pile of bones that comprises the majority of the space in the composition. other than the clear depiction of only a few pronounced buffalo skulls, the pile of bones can be interpreted as either human or animal given their abstract forms. the title of the work is also vague, allowing for the term “bones” to refer to both the human or animal. therefore, the boundary of identity between human and animal is blurred and the work can also be interpreted as representing the massacre of first nations people. amid the large heap of bones, two early twentieth-century dressed colonial figures (judging by the top hats and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 84 tailored frockcoats) are also present, one positioned on top of the pile of bones and the other below. the drawing also depicts the ghostly white silhouette of a child with their arms outstretched, placed directly in front of the colonial figure at the top of the bone pile. the placement of the colonial figure on top of the pile conveys colonial oppression literally over the buffalo and the indigenous people. the colonial figure at the bottom of the pile further signifies colonial control and oppression by situating the human-animal remains in between both colonial figures, which implies that there is no escape from either above or below. furthermore, the faceless child silhouette may be interpreted as a representation of the colonizer’s attempt to wipe away indigenous identity through the genocide of both first nations people and buffalo. stimson, adrian. bones 1, oil/graphite on canvas. 2010. mendel art gallery, saskatoon. (©adrian stimson) while bones 1 is positioned within a historical context, the representation of the buffalo can also be applied to contemporary understandings of indigenous identity. bones 1 emphasizes the unresolved trauma of colonial oppression of both the buffalo population and first nations people. the illustration explains the purpose behind indigenous activists who fought to restore the buffalo population, justifying their luba stephania kozak -reclaiming indigenous identity through animal advocacy in art: adrian stimson and dana claxton 85 actions as a way to recover and reconcile traumatized indigenous and buffalo relations. as zontek notes, “native americans have sought to preserve the bison as an extension of preserving themselves and their culture” (xiii). the efforts of indigenous activists have been to restore the harmonious relationship between indigenous people and the buffalo, which metaphorically can be understood as an effort that restores the child-like silhouette with a face — an identity. dana claxton: buffalo misappropriation. dana claxton is a multi-media artist and a member of the hunkpapa lakota nation. claxton’s work “investigates the ongoing impact of colonialism on aboriginal cultures in north america through the mediums of film and photography” (“dana claxton”). the buffalo is a featured subject in claxton’s video and mixed media installation, buffalo bone china, curated by tania willard at the mackenzie art gallery in 1997. in claxton’s performance, which accompanies the installation, the artist attempts to reconcile with the notion of trauma and fragmentation (of memories and history, i interpret) in an effort to restore both buffalo and indigenous identities. willard describes the performance as: dana smashes pieces of china and makes four bundles and places them in a sanctified circle while an experimental video of buffalo plays. feeling the loss of the buffalo, the backbone of plains spirituality and sustenance, the artist uses a rubber mallet to destroy plates and bowls. (“dana claxton: buffalo bone china”) the installation comments on the british colonial exploitation of buffalo bones for the making of fine china in england, highlighting the devastating effects this had on the first nations people (“dana claxton: buffalo bone china”).8 one of these effects was the misappropriation of the buffalo that resulted in the loss of culture and identity. the representation of the buffalo as a heap of bones resembles the image of the massacred buffalos in stimson’s drawing, bones 1, and both artworks suggesting the identity of the buffalo is fragmented and traumatized. by associating the buffalo with the identity of the first nations people, indigenous identity is by extension also represented as fragmented and traumatized. furthermore, the commodification of the buffalo bones represents the body as an assemblage of raw materials, which is fetishized in art. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 86 claxton, dana. buffalo bone china, multimedia installation. 1997. mackenzie art gallery, regina. (©mackenzie art gallery) in claxton’s performance, the china symbolizes the colonial failure to recognize the unique relationship between the buffalo and plains indigenous. claxton’s act of smashing the china demonstrates a resistance against the commodification of the buffalo and in doing so, claxton engages in a symbolic restorative action against colonial trauma. by destroying the china — a misappropriated product made from the buffalo bones — claxton restores a sense of justice by freeing the buffalo from its materialistic state of colonial oppression. the smashing of the china demonstrates a form of animal advocacy because claxton challenges the western commodification of the buffalo. in other words, the fine china that is made from buffalo bones represents a colonialized luxury good, which in comparison with how the plains indigenous utilized the buffalo for many other kinds of practical uses illustrates the misuse of the animal. as zontek writes, “native people utilized more than one hundred parts of the bison, including the guts as containers, the dung for fuel, the bones for tools…”(9). the decorative fine china that western settlers misappropriated the buffalo bones for was thus a non-necessity and an unnecessary exploitation of the animal. the western luba stephania kozak -reclaiming indigenous identity through animal advocacy in art: adrian stimson and dana claxton 87 commodification of the buffalo also represents a lack of intimate coexistence with the animal, especially in contrast with indigenous hunter-prey relationships. the china therefore symbolizes a further form of disrespect towards indigenous ways of life and identity. in stimson’s beyond redemption 3 installation, for instance, the buffalo is positioned in a stance of reverence and respect, placed above the other robed figures. while the hides of the buffalo are used as artistic commodities, they are represented within a cultural context that exempts them from being understood as “luxury goods.” the buffalo is thus represented as an expression of indigenous identity and maintains its living resemblance, while the fine china completely alters the buffalo into a commodity that has no resemblance to the actual shape of the animal. therefore, although stimson objectifies the buffalo in his art, the artist ensures that the integrity of the animal is upheld by maintaining its living resemblance, exemplifying a sense of respect for the buffalo. in “grateful prey: rock cree human-animal relationships,” robert brightman explains, animals may “pity” the hunters who have need of their flesh, and especially is their benevolence evoked when the hunter complies with the conventional objectifications of “respect,” treating the carcass, meat, and bones in the correct fashion. (187) haraway also focuses on the notion of respect when it comes to relationships with nonhumans, stating: “species interdependence is the name of the worlding game on earth, and that game must be one of response and respect” (19). by advocating for the respectful treatment of the buffalo, claxton incorporates haraway’s notion of respect as a form of response to the animal, further illustrating the respectful coexistence between indigenous people and non-humans. by smashing the china, claxton not only advocates for the respectful treatment of the buffalo, but also demands it for the first nations people as well! conclusion. the buffalo — driven nearly to extinction by colonial settlers by the end of the nineteenth-century — is at the heart of northern plains indigenous identity. contemporary canadian artists adrian stimson and dana claxton feature the buffalo in their works, demonstrating the animal’s significance both historically and within contemporary contexts by establishing the buffalo as an important part of indigenous identity. by emphasizing the cultural significance of the buffalo in their art, the artists humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 88 draw attention and inform the public about the restorative efforts of indigenous activists, further promoting the necessity to conserve the buffalo and indigenous culture. in stimson’s performance persona, buffalo boy, the artist intertwines human and animal identities by wearing a buffalo costume. by associating the buffalo with indigenous identity, stimson raises awareness about the cultural significance of the buffalo, which in turn advocates for the protection of the animal because of its importance. in stimson’s “beyond redemption” exhibit, the buffalo is also a central figure in both the beyond redemption 3 installation and bones 1 drawing. in beyond redemption 3, spiritual aspects and a collaborative relationship with the buffalo are emphasized. in bones 1, the artwork exposes the historical trauma of colonial exploitation. by representing the buffalo as a culturally and historically significant animal, stimson establishes the animal as a critical symbol of indigenous identity, thus justifying a continuation of conservation efforts. i asked stimson what does the buffalo symbolize or what role does it play in the lives of current first nations generations? how has the role of the buffalo changed from the way their ancestors perceived and relied on the animal? stimson answered: it [the buffalo] is a symbol of resilience and hope. the bison continues to inspire and give strength to many. it continues to play a strong spiritual role in many fn ceremonies and spiritual practices. as they grow and are reintroduces to natural areas and parks, it gives hope that our ways of being will continue. the white buffalo is part of many tribal prophecies, and many white bison have been born in the past number of years. its role has not changed; the bison still has many lessons in store for us and will continue to give us strength and hope for the future. today there are more conservational efforts and sharing of indigenous knowledge of the bison for foster better relationships between peoples. as some say education is the new buffalo. (“beyond redemption and the buffalo”) in dana claxton’s installation and performance, buffalo bone china, the artist comments on the colonial exploitation of the buffalo as well, and by extension, the oppression and genocide of the first nation people. when claxton performs the smashing of the fine china that is a misappropriated commodity made from buffalo bones, claxton demonstrates a resistance of colonial oppression for both the buffalo and indigenous people. by portraying the buffalo as a culturally significant part of indigenous identity, claxton also advocates for the buffalo’s protection and emphasis the importance of luba stephania kozak -reclaiming indigenous identity through animal advocacy in art: adrian stimson and dana claxton 89 restorative efforts for the buffalo population. as zontek asserts, “this restoration – marked by a vision for a healthy landscape, empathy between the animal and human worlds, and cultural perseverance – warrants presentation” (1). through the display of animal advocacy in the works of adrian stimson and dana claxton, the artists are able to re-establish and reclaim their sense of indigenous identity. while neither artist necessarily argues for the buffalo’s animal rights directly, they advocate for a more harmonious and collaborative relationship with animals, reminding outside spectators of the vital and complex role animals play in other cultural contexts. in the cry of nature, eisenman analyzes inter-species relations in indigenous art, observing the inuit hunter-gatherer relationship with animals as one of respect and autonomy (34) — aspects that i argue are also at the core of stimson and claxton’s art in regards to the relationship between the buffalo and plains indigenous tribes. however, while the buffalo is understood as an autonomous figure with its own identity and elevated status, it also informs the cultural identity of the indigenous people. in other words, within an indigenous cultural framework that rejects western humanist traditions, the buffalo is regarded as a spiritual, sentient, and near-equal being, not subject to the same speciesist prejudices it would face in western cultures. non-indigenous animal rights activists have the challenge of approaching thousands of years of indigenous ways of knowing and practices. in order to begin a reconciliation of the traumatized human and animal worlds, as well as indigenous and settler relationships, non-indigenous activists must become aware of the colonial implications of some posthumanist ideals. as finn lynge writes, “a world of beauty, life and respect for every living thing has no better allies than the indigenous hunters and fishermen who live on their ancestors’ land” (8). boyd also suggests, “a move towards the huntergatherer relationship with animals would both bring humanity closer to the scientific reality and bring a more sustainable relationship with animal species in general.” understanding human and animal relations through an indigenous perspective, where the identities of various species are presented as interconnected and equally important, can offer non-indigenous animal rights activists new advocating methods, such as presenting inter-species relations as integral aspects of other cultural identities and practices. furthermore, the artists demonstrate how art can be used as a tool in the communication of alternative perspectives. as stimson comments, art will always be an effective tool in understanding our human and animal condition. i believe the bison spirit lives in me, i can be a voice for humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 90 them, i can show the world how we lived and continue to live with them. (“beyond redemption and the buffalo”) my final question to stimson was this: can the concern raised over the buffalo help reconnect first nations people with settler generations and build new relationships? in other words, can co-activism between indigenous and non-indigenous animal activists lead to a form of reconciliation, in which the buffalo serves as shared interest or as a mediator of sorts? stimson replied: yes, we first have to remember and understand our history, to educate new and past generations on what happened, understand the devastation that the slaughter caused and how that still reverberates today. new relationships have been formed between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples and are evolving. the buffalo can be a symbol of conciliation, yet the majority of the work has to take place in the minds and hearts of the settler, indigenous people have been doing the majority of the work in understanding and healing this history. i see glimmers of hope within settler communities, minds and hearts are changing, albeit slowly. (“beyond redemption and the buffalo”) promoting niitsitapi views of animals through art enables the artists to portray issues of colonial trauma and history in a medium that everyone understand. claxton and stimson advocate for a collaborative coexistence among species in their works and suggest new ways of thinking about human and non-human relationships through art. claxton and stimson’s works exemplify a site where alternative social views can be represented and where the trauma of our shared colonial history can be addressed. furthermore, the artists promote a sense of inclusivity for the non-human to be embraced as part human cultural identity, incorporating but also critiquing posthumanist ideals, which advocates for more conversational efforts for the animal. i conclude that art is a meaningful tool that can facilitate a deconstruction of species borders and promote animal rights by positioning an animal within a cultural construct, while also offering an engaging way to promote posthumanist ideals. acknowledgements. i would like to express my profound gratitude to adrian stimson for volunteering his time to share with me his knowledge and thoughts. this paper would not have been possible without the support of my husband, nathan muchowski; parents, donald and jaroslava kozak; and aunt, lubov holynska. luba stephania kozak -reclaiming indigenous identity through animal advocacy in art: adrian stimson and dana claxton 91 notes 1.the oxford dictionary defines the term “buffalo” as: “1. the n american bison”; see barber et al. 99. although i will use the term “bison” occasionally within this paper, i will use the term “buffalo” more frequently because of its more common usage. 2. for a concise overview of the buffalo’s cultural and biological evolution in alberta, see the chapter “bison in alberta: paleontology, evolution, and relations with humans” in foster et al. 3. for more on buffalo hunting, see branch; taylor; and zontek. 4. nayar defines “critical posthumanism” as: “critical posthumanism rejects the ‘ableism’ of traditional humanism to include variant bodies — such as the differently abled — as well as the animal. by focusing less on ability and agency and emphasizing shared vulnerability, posthumanism calls for a radical rethink of species uniqueness and boundedness of the human” (4). for more on posthumanist theory, also see wolfe’s posthumanism. 5. the blackfoot word for all native nations. 6. for an insightful paper that criticizes wolfe’s aesthetic biases, see sherbert. 7. for more on modern animal rights discourses, see regan; singer. 8. buffalo hides were also exported to germany, where they were made into leather; see taylor 10. 9. for more on the commodification of buffalo bones and the “bone business” in the canadian prairies, see geist 110-11. works cited “adrian stimson.” saskatchewan nac artists. online. accessed january 2, 2019. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 92 barber, katherine, et al., eds. “buffalo, n. 1.” oxford canadian dictionary of current english. oxford up canada, 2005. _____. “redemption.” oxford canadian dictionary of current english. oxford up, 2005. bell, lynne. “adrian stimson: buffalo boy at burning man.” canadian art (summer 2007): 44-48. online. accessed jan. 2, 2019. boyd, roger. “the indigenous and modern relationship between people and animals.” humanity's test, january 14, 2014. online. accessed january 2, 2019. branch, edward douglas. the hunting of the buffalo. u nebraska p, 1962. brightman, robert. grateful prey: rock cree human-animal relationships. canadian plains research center, university of regina, 2002. brink, jack. imagining head-smashed-in. athabasca up, 2008. “buffalo bone china.” artsask, january 27, 2010. online. accessed jan. 2, 2019. claxton, dana. buffalo bone china, multimedia installation. 1997. mackenzie art gallery, regina. “dana claxton: buffalo bone china.” mackenzie art gallery, march 17, 2012. online. accessed jan. 2, 2019. “dana claxton; revisited.” aka artist run, april 9, 2015. online. accessed january 2, 2019. deleuze, gilles and felix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. trans. brian massumi. u minnesota p, 1987. eisenman, stephen f. the cry of nature: art and the making of animal rights. reaktion books, 2013. foster, john, dick harrison, and i.s. maclaren, eds. buffalo. u alberta p, 1992. luba stephania kozak -reclaiming indigenous identity through animal advocacy in art: adrian stimson and dana claxton 93 geist, valerius. buffalo nation: history and legend of the north american bison. fifth house ltd., 1996. haraway, donna j. when species meet. u minnesota p, 2008. haritaworn, jinthana. “dossier: theorizing queer inhumanisms: decolonizing the non/human.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 21.2 (2015): 210–213. lynge, finn. arctic wars, animal rights, endangered peoples. trans. marianne stebaek. dartmouth college, 1992. martin, calvin. keepers of the game: indian-animal relationships and the fur trade. u california p, 1978. mckay, stephanie. “back from the brink.” the starphoenix (saskatoon), april 21, 2010. online. accessed january 2, 2019. nayar, pramod k. posthumanism: themes in 20th and 21st century literature and culture. polity press, 2014. regan, tom. animal rights, human wrongs. rowman and littlefield, 2003. rice, ryan, and carla taunton. “buffalo boy: then and now.” fuse magazine, mar. 2009: 18–25. online. accessed january 2, 2019. sherbert, michael g. “revising posthumanist aesthetics in the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals.” humanimalia 8.2 (spring 2017). 64-86. singer, peter, ed. in defense of animals: the second wave. blackwell publishing, 2006. stimson, adrian. beyond redemption. mendel art gallery, saskatoon, 2010. _____. beyond redemption 3, installation. beyond redemption, mendel art gallery, saskatoon, 2010. _____. “beyond redemption and the buffalo.” email interview with luba kozak. january, 30, 2018. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 94 _____. bones 1, oil/graphite on canvas, 4 ft x 4 ft. beyond redemption, mendel art gallery, saskatoon, 2010. _____. buffalo boy, performance. burning man, black rock city, nv, 2007. stimson, adrian, dir. what about the red man. performance by adrian stimson, burning man, black rock city, nv, 2006. tallbear, kim. “dossier: theorizing queer inhumanisms: an indigenous reflection on working beyond the human/not human.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 21.2 (2015): 230–235. taylor, scott. buffalo hunt: international trade and the virtual extinction of the north american bison. national bureau of economic research, 2007. todd, zoe. “fish pluralities: human-animal relations and sites of engagement in paulatuuq, arctic canada.” études/inuit/studies 38.1/2 (2014): 217–238. wilson, michael clayton. “bison in alberta: paleontology, evolution, and relations with humans.” buffalo. john elgin foster, dick harrison, & i. s. maclaren, eds. u alberta p, 1992. 3–17. wolfe, cary. animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. u chicago p, 2003. wolfe, cary. what is posthumanism? u minnesota p, 2010. zontek, ken. buffalo nation: american indian efforts to restore the bison. u nebraska p, 2007. susan mchugh h u m a n i m a l i a 12:1 catherine nash kinship of different kinds: horses and people in iceland a person logs in to a database, enters the details of an individual, and is provided with information about their ancestors. in iceland they may be humans or horses. through this familiar search function it is possible to access the genealogical records of the entire population of people or horses through two online databases of ancestry and genealogical relatedness. since 2003 iceland residents have been able to use the book of icelanders, a digitized synthesis of archival and published genealogical information, to explore their genealogical relationship to almost any living or deceased icelander (pálsson 74). world fengur: the studbook of origin of the icelandic horse, which was established as an online record of icelandic horse pedigrees in 2001, similarly digitized existing horse pedigrees and locates newly born horses within these genealogies (lorange). both populations, made knowable in new ways through information technologies, are also subject to scientific investigations of their internal genetic variation, their relation to other populations, and thus, of their biohistories of origination (gudbjartsson et al.; hreiðarsdóttir; pálsson). yet these databases also reflect older techniques of locating individuals in schemas of genealogical relatedness that predate and inform the genetic and digital: the reckoning, recording, and recounting of pedigree and ancestry, human and animal, and their entanglements in cultural and scientific understandings of difference and distinction in human society (zerubavel) and the evolutionary relatedness of all life (strathern). the “facts of kinship” — of who is genealogically related to whom and how — are also mobilized in the enactment of kinship, that is, the making of relations through the exchange of genealogical knowledge and stories of relatedness (nash, of irish descent). this counts for human kinship but, as i explore through the case of horses and people in iceland, animal pedigrees and stories are often entangled in family histories, as well as national narratives. understanding kinship in terms of the making of relations as well as genealogical relatedness (carsten; edwards; franklin and mckinnon) also makes it possible to consider the practice of kinship among people through horses. the kinships of different kinds that i consider here include human and interspecies kinship, not only in terms of affective closeness and co-presence in human-horse relationships, but also the ways those relationships, as well as the lives of horses, are shaped by human understandings of kinship among horses in iceland. i explore how human-horse catherine nash -kinship of different kinds: horses and people in iceland 119 relationships are shaped by ideas of difference and connection and enacted through spatialities of distance and proximity. my focus is thus on a specific sort of domesticated non-human animal and a particular place in which human-horse relations are part of national heritage, public culture, and the everyday lives of those who engage with horses directly as breeders, trainers, farmers, horse tour guides, and competition and leisure riders (björnsson and sveinsson). the high numbers of horses per person in iceland in comparison to other european countries reflects their significance as a national breed and as working animals in sheep farming and horse riding tourism, and the popularity of competitive and leisure riding.1 though a distinction could be made between those who own a horse, or more usually several horses to ride for leisure, and those who are involved in commercial horse breeding and the highest level of competitive riding, the nature of involvement is more variegated and overlapping. many people involved with horses combine working and leisure riding; many leisure riders also compete at some level. horse riding is also not an exclusively elite pursuit. high level competition riding is an expensive pursuit, but the costs of owning “riding horses” rather than “competition horses” do not limit riding to the very wealthy, especially in rural iceland where access to pasturage is relatively easy, and since horses are still used in sheep farming.2 my inevitably partial understanding of horse culture in iceland, as a cultural and linguistic outsider, is based on qualitative interviewing and observational and participatory research, and draws on documentary, online and media sources.3 my engagement with this material is framed by a conceptual focus on kinship of different kinds, which i set out next before considering the kinships of people and horses in iceland. kin and kind. to describe human relations with non-human animals in terms of kinship, as donna haraway has most notably done, is to challenge human exceptionalism, “the premise that humanity alone is not a spatial and temporal web of interspecies dependencies” (haraway, when species meet 11; see also fuentes; fuentes and porter). interspecies kinship profoundly undoes a species-exclusive model of kinship. relationships that matter are not limited to humankind. but its power lies not in evoking a world in which all living things are deeply entangled, important though that recognition is, or in expanding the term to name any sort of relation as kin and thus evoking a generalized “undifferentiated universal relatedness” (haraway, staying with the trouble 217), but in attending to the specificity of historically and spatially situated interspecies relations. conceptualizing interspecies kinship in terms of “relationshipsin-progress” (haraway, when species meet 134) and “becoming with” non-human kin humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 120 displaces genealogical models of kinship within and between species, thus extending feminist denaturalizations of kinship as biological relatedness. the conceptual value of interspecies kinship lies in its power to evoke ideas of meaningful and significant connection, affinity, and relation, and to put them to work to describe human relationships with non-human animals. this power is deployed within the shifting and contingent ways that domestic companion animals are understood as family members in euro-american contexts (blouin, are dogs children?; blouin, understanding relations; charles, post-human families?; charles and davis; fox; greenebaum; irvine and cilia; power; shir-vertesh). domestic pets are widely described as part of the family, and terms such as child, sometimes sibling, and also baby are frequently used to designate the animal’s place within family relations. though this is often judged to be an infantilizing anthropomorphism, it is most likely that in most cases those who use these terms do so in order to express the depth of the relationship through the familial idiom at their disposal, rather than actually think of their pets as human. yet some studies of domestic companion animals that track their positioning on a continuum from animal to human, as if this were simultaneously a continuum between object and subject status (shir-vertesh) and as if these characterizations (and their contingent withdrawal) imply the overcoming or reinforcing of the “species barrier.” there is a tendency to interpret these designations as indicative of people locating their pet towards the human end of a spectrum between humanity and animality, rather than appreciating the ways in which people interpret, experience, and express their sense of the complex similarities and differences between human and interspecies kin. interspecies kinship does not depend on giving a pet a designated place in a kinship structure, nor does the personhood that is accorded to companion animals (and contingently withdrawn) necessarily signify a humanizing move. similarly common interpretations of domestic companion animals as substitutes for human family members — especially children — imply that kinship can only really be human (charles, animals 4). there have been moves to address the family more critically in studies of domestic companion animals (charles, post-human families?; irvine and cilia). however, the familial is better encompassed within a broader focus on kinship than conceptually centered, since the concept of kinship is more effective in addressing the complex configurations of connection and difference. for haraway, it is the “play between kin and kind” in the term kinship that is “essential to the figure of companion species,” between kinship as affinity and connection and kind as a category of difference, such as type or species (haraway, when species meet 134). “family,” she argues cannot do the work of kin and its routes/roots to kind catherine nash -kinship of different kinds: horses and people in iceland 121 (haraway, staying with the trouble 216). difference is integral to “kind,” but kin-making among people and with other animals is also a matter of differentiations and exclusions. this is both in terms of conventional biological, genetic, genealogical, and species-based models of relatedness, and in terms of the practice of kinship. it is this sense of kinship as a practice of making relations with “significant others” — whose specificity is bound to processes of exclusion and inclusion, connection and differentiation — that means it can productively challenge genealogical models of kin within and between species. it also avoids the analytical bluntness of kinship as a description of any kind of relation. kinship suggests affinities, fellow feeling, and connections, but for haraway and those inspired by her work its radical challenge to the absolute difference between humans and other animals does not mean the elision of difference. for radhika govindrajan “interspecies relationality, entanglement, and involvement do not erode difference but emerge from a recognition of it” (145). she argues powerfully for understanding nonhuman animals as “empathetic, intentional, interpretative, and intelligent beings” (22) but insists that this extension of subjectivity and attention to interspecies relatedness “does not overcome or erase ontological differences between human and nonhuman animals” (25). relatedness, she insists: must always be understood as constituting a partial connection between beings who come to their relationship as unpredictable, unknowable, and unequal entities. […] the proclivities, emotions, and desires of different animals are dissimilar and can never be fully reconciled even as they are constituted relationally. difference has to be “constantly and imperfectly negotiated through shifting turns to love, care, neglect, avoidance and violence.” so while interspecies kinship foregrounds the affective depth of particular human-animal relationships, it does not imply the extension of idealized familial relations to human relations with some animals. as with human kinship, interspecies kinship is a matter of domination, inequality, and hierarchy as much as care, affection, and connection, and is always inflected by human power over nonhuman animals. drawing on this work, my approach to kinship has three distinctive strands. firstly, i consider the practice of human kinship not only with but also through horses. in contrast to work on domestic companion animals, there has been less attention to the making of human kin through horses. this may reflect the emphasis in recent explorations on the particular character of the intersubjective and embodied nature of human-horse humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 122 relationships in riding (brandt; daspher; davis and maurstad; game; mcmanus and montoya; maurstad, davin and cowles; nosworthy; smith, “human-horse partnerships”; wipper; zetterqvist blokhuis) within emerging work on the complexity of human-horse relations more widely (birke and thompson; davis and maurstad). however, in her analysis of the imbrication of horse pedigrees and horse racing family dynasties in the elite thoroughbred horse racing industry in newmarket in the uk, the sport of kings, rebecca cassidy explores how the incorporation of new members in those families depends on connections to and success with racehorses, which are then naturalized by a newly “found” genealogical connection. the pedigree of thoroughbred horses is fixed in stud books but family connections can be ascribed to those whose racing success warrants their inclusion (see also cassidy, arborescent culture). this attention to the deployment of genealogical models of kinship is central to the second strand of my approach, which is to conceptualize kinship as the making of relations, yet also to explore how ideas of genealogical relatedness — the formal location of individuals, human and nonhuman, in genealogical networks, ideas of connection and differentiation within them, and imaginaries of lineage, ancestry, inheritance, and pedigree — are deployed, and with what effects, in terms of the forging of connections and delineation of difference (bamford and leach). this entails considering genealogical knowledge-practices as ways of making kin that both mobilize and undermine kinship as genealogical, within and between kind and kin. this is not simply a matter of parallel idioms but entangled equine and human family histories and genealogical imaginaries. thirdly, i extend this engagement with human-horse relations and pedigrees further by considering how people’s understandings of kinship among horses shapes how they understand their own relationships with horses, their practices of care, and the lives of horses. this, i will argue, relates to but is subtler than ideas of “instinct” and “group behavior” in explanations of companion animal behavior and guides to training practices (which power addresses as one mode of understanding domestic dogs) since it allows for the subjecthood, sociality, and agency of animals. in this way kinship as an analytical framework attends to the intersubjective relations between horses and humans as they are shaped by wider understandings and practices of kinship. in what follows, i address the ways in which human genealogies, family histories, and horse ancestries are recorded, recounted, and entangled. i then consider the breeding, care, and riding of horses as practices of making human relations. in the final section i explore the significance of understandings of kinship among horses for human-horse relations, the ways in which those relations are practiced by people in terms of ideas of catherine nash -kinship of different kinds: horses and people in iceland 123 spatial distance as well as species difference, and how kinship is enacted and recognized in subtle geographies of proximity and co-presence. pedigrees and stories. the first formal records of horse pedigrees began in iceland in the early 20th century, when a national register was established to record high quality horses (hugason). world fengur is now fully inclusive as all horses in iceland, and icelandic horses abroad must be registered within it. users pay a fee to register and access information on horse pedigrees and numerical evaluations of a horse’s qualities, and those of its ancestors and offspring. one account of this process suggests the parallels between the experience of human and equine genealogical research: when i met my first horse sóti frá tóftum (born in 1987), who has always been the best horse ever for me, i wanted to learn more about his descent. when i then learnt that his grandfathers gustur 923 and náttfari 776 were half-brothers and sörli 653 was sóti’s double great-grandfather, it got more and more exciting. later i found the worldwide database worldfengur and went deeper and deeper into the fascinating past. (mende 5) indeed, while the huge popularity of the book of icelanders, whose use is described as a national sport or pastime (pálsson 138), reflects the recent enthusiasm for genealogy in and beyond iceland, interests in genealogy in iceland predate this and are not limited to human ancestry. as i was told: “icelanders are crazy about pedigrees, dogs, horses and people; they like to know how they are connected and related.” this is more than just a parallel interest in human and non-human animal ancestry. though the book of icelanders and world fengur are of distinctly human or horse ancestries, people and horses are entangled in genealogies, family histories, and national narratives. icelandic horse and human genealogies are culturally and historically rather than literally entwined. but they can be thought of as co-constituted in more material ways. this is most evident in the shaping of horse genealogies through selective breeding. yet human family trees in the generations before agrarian modernization also reflect patterns of mortality, lifespan, and fertility in rural agricultural livelihoods that depended on the work of horses, whose ownership distinguished between farming households with some degree of security and landless laborers. the popular narrative of icelandic settlement and survival enabled by horses, which provided labor and transport in an environment that until the mid-20th century was most easily traversed on horseback, rather than by horse drawn or later motorized vehicles, is a more undifferentiated national origin story. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 124 this national interspecies history is paralleled by a rich printed and oral tradition of narratives in which individual horses and people are linked together, accounts of horse lineages and family horse breeding traditions, and family histories of human-horse relationships. famous horses are part of the collective public culture in iceland, commemorated in public statues, and widely known as national figures. as one breeder explained to me “we have these ancestors, ancestor stallions, and because the land is of course very small and the breed is not really big, then there are just a few of these big ancestors, these ancestors that we have like orri frá þúfu and ófeigur frá flugumýri,” whose names are familiar to many who are not directly involved with horses. digital media now supplement the print culture that includes mid-20th century books such as horfnir góðhestar (jónsson), which celebrates great horses of the past” and their relationship with humans, and the series of books published between 1968 and 1982 entitled ættbók og saga íslenska hestsins (pedigrees and stories of icelandic horses) (e.g. bjarnsson), which detail the ancestries and achievements of horses and the successes of those who bred them. the degree of genealogical depth and detailed knowledge of this varies among people, generationally and in terms of their degree of involvement with horses. for those more directly involved, “pedigree talk” — the discussion of a horse’s ancestry and how it relates to its qualities, whether the horse is theirs, a family member’s, or a friend’s, or one that has had competitive success or is of interest for buying — is one of the pleasures of horse culture.4 as birta, who runs a horse tour business, explained: there are many people, especially the people that are in breeding, they are really interested in that and they can talk for centuries about this and who is related with whom. they know all that and it’s really important and it’s nice. they are talking about families. they can see, it’s this family and it’s from this farm and this breeding. and maybe they knew the grandfather and they see that “ok this is the grandson” or “aha, this is this family ok, and this one….” they knew these horses and it is interesting to see the offspring and what this will bring. […] when you know about the temperament for example, the special skills they have, or colours, there are many things that are interesting. and there are speculations about what came from where and lots of expert opinions. these conversations use the idiom of familial relatedness and family lines to discuss pedigree and breeding, and interweave accounts of horses, places, and people: breeders, owners, trainers, riders, families, and farms. catherine nash -kinship of different kinds: horses and people in iceland 125 icelandic horses are always named with reference to the place in which they were bred (frá meaning from). horse pedigrees and stories are thus not only about individual horses and humans but also about particular geographies of horse lineages, or what birta describes as families. this may refer to older traditions of regionally and locally specific lineages — skyldeikarækt or “family/kin breed” — produced from inbreeding among a local group of horses. but “family” also refers to the “mixed’ breeding lines — ættlínur — that are distinctive to a horse farm but not based on the exclusive breeding of local horses (pálsson and haraldsson) and thus to horse pedigrees based on the interbreeding of horses from different parts of the island. but family also applies to intergenerational traditions of breeding, which were common in the past as part of small-scale family farming, but can also continue in contemporary horse breeding, especially in horse farms which are devoted to horse breeding, often in combination with sheep farming. the owners of a horse breeding, training, riding instruction, and horse-tour farm in south iceland began an account of the individual roles, experience, and expertise of the family members, by saying “family life is all about horses, that’s just the way it is!” as in this case, breeding is often described in terms of a collective family enterprise that includes the older, now semi-retired generation, one or more sets of adult children and their partners, who may have met on agricultural or equine degree studies, and their children. horses are thus not only the subject of “pedigree talk” but also embody family histories of breeding. an individual horse or group of horses is seen as the outcome of the skill, care, effort, and preferences of previous generations who made breeding decisions. people talk of their horses as being bred from particular mares and stallions that were the horses of their parents or grandparents or other family members in earlier generations. furthermore, “pedigree talk” and “family history” are not discrete categories. family stories are often also accounts of people and their horses. older or deceased family members are often remembered in terms of their relationships with horses — an uncle known for his beautiful horse, for example — and family histories are often accounts of lives served by, saved by, and lived with horses: a mother and baby saved by a horse willing to be ridden across a raging river to fetch a midwife; a cousin who was rescued as child by a horse who knew where to find shelter in a snow storm; horse drawn hearses taking away the bodies of deceased. while published histories of breeding have tended to be of traditions, knowledges, and lineages passed from fathers to sons, reflecting the gendered division of labor, authority, and power in farming households, family stories allow more room for women’s relationships to horses: a mother who humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 126 tended a wounded horse for months to heal it; an aunt who crossed a dangerous river by horse to go to dances in her youth; a grandmother whose favorite horse would come to the farm kitchen window. conversations move from remembering an individual to talking about their horse, horses or breed lines. but “pedigree talk” is not limited to those with family backgrounds in horse breeding, as many more people are involved in small-scale breeding as part of having horses to ride. not all horse people in iceland have family traditions of breeding and riding, but knowing one’s horses is always in part about knowing their pedigrees. families are also reconfigured through the relationships that develop between often middle aged married men and younger women from continental europe who come to undertake equine studies and work with horses in iceland, and stay to form new horse-breeding partnerships. horses are not only part of family histories; kinship is also practiced through horses. kinship through horses. the forms of kinship that are practiced through horses include, but are not limited to, the familial. collective family interests may mean that leisure riding can be enjoyed in multigenerational groups as children learn to ride very young, and as it is very common that people in their 80s and often 90s continue to ride. shared interests make it possible for those living in urban iceland to keep horses for leisure riding because the costs and efforts can also be shared. horse care is largely done by horse owners themselves, who spend up to two hours, four or five evenings a week caring for their horses when they are stabled, often in a rota with family or friends. sóldís, who lives and works in reykjavík, explained that “it would be hard to do it alone.” she has horses with her father and his brothers in a stable in one of the horse districts — large complexes of stables, paddocks, and competition arenas on the edge of the city — and on land near a rural summer house. the family has a weekly rota for cleaning the stables and visiting the horses near the summer house to feed them. this makes it possible to keep horses, and her family’s support allowed her to remain involved when she was less able to help when she had children. familial and wider social support also enables family members in late life to continue to breed and be actively involved with horses. however, the involvement of older people with horses is also a matter of agency and autonomy and wider forms of sociality. it is not uncommon for people in their early 80s to undertake solo four day summer riding trips in the highlands with more than ten horses: “just horses, a bottle, and horsemanship.” more often, the tradition of long distance annual summer horse tours involve groups of friends, partners, and relations, including those in their 70s who are fully engaged in the strenuous work of dealing with large groups of freely running horses and riding over rough terrain. these include catherine nash -kinship of different kinds: horses and people in iceland 127 women only trips. valhildur, who is in her mid-60s, keeps horses near her brother’s farm and in the horse district near her home in reykjavík. she regularly rides 65 kilometers between the city and her summer house near the farm to move her horses to and bring them back from the summer fields. she also takes part in an annual long distance horse tour with her women friends. her sense of kinship among them is based on mutual and necessary trust between people and between people and horses. she described these tours as joyful times — riding, singing, telling stories, caring for the horses, and sleeping in cabins — thus echoing but also offering a contemporary counterpoint to the traditional homosociality of working with horses in sheep herding in the past. this is a kinship based on shared experience with horses. kinship is also practiced through working with horses more directly. breeding, for example, can be an expression of care and respect for older or deceased family members, a way to maintain continuities of horse lineage and, through them, an emotional connection to those individuals and family farms, even if this is sometimes in tension with more “rational” breeding goals. sóldís told me about the effort she is making to keep a particular line of mares that her father and grandfather had bred going, by producing a new female foal. “it is hard,” she explained: we have been having more male foals than mares being born. we have waited a long time but my mare is now in foal at the moment — finally at the age of 18 — and i am waiting to see if it is a mare. then we’ll have to wait about 4 years for the foal to be old enough to be trained and then to see if it is a good horse. i need to be patient but it is frustrating when there are so many horses in iceland and it would be easier to buy one tamed and trained and known to be a good horse. the frustration is not only about the time involved but because honoring her grandfather’s and father’s breed tradition risks producing a horse that may not be safe for her to ride. she worries about the impact of her own possible injury on her daughter. family breeding in this case means both filial work to maintain continuity and parental anxiety about the effects on her child of her being injured while riding. many women in iceland talked of how this often intensifies for women after giving birth. valhildur recounted her adult daughter’s efforts to ride a difficult horse as a way of dealing with this fear. women’s shifting subjectivity as new mothers is worked through this interspecies relation (schuurman and sireni). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 128 practicing kinship through horses can involve the dilemma of what to do with the horses of a family member who has died. this can be entangled with desires to maintain a sense of connection to a farm and locality after the death of the relative who lived there. fjóla, whose grandfather had recently died aged 89, talked to me about her decision with her mother to rent out rather than sell his farm in the north of iceland where she spent summers as a child and where her mother had grown up. this includes an arrangement for the last eight of her grandfather’s horses to graze on the farm and be fed when necessary. she explained that “the horses were a family line that went back to his own grandfather and that was why they were so important to him. his father took the horses from his father” and they were bred locally with his, and then later with his brother’s stallions. his horses were a matter of pride for her grandfather but also crucial to the farm work, particularly when he began farming. she recalls his enjoyment of driving out to see the horses in the home fields up towards the mountains and looking at them through binoculars, especially in spring when foals were born. so though renting out the farm honors her grandfather’s wish for it to stay in the family, it is far more difficult to resolve what to do with the horses themselves and the breeding tradition they represent. for fjóla, “because the horses were such a big part of my grandfather’s identity, then of course it is who he was and that’s partly who we are.” she explained that they would sell the horses if there was someone with a special interest in them but i don’t think there is anyone who would care for them like that. they are not tamed or trained. maybe someone … because we have many relatives locally … just if they wanted to use the genetic line just to breed from them. if this does not happen, her grandfather’s line of mares will end when they die. despite the emotional and practical burdens of dealing with this form of inheritance, horses can be a living connection to those who bred and valued them. the end of the lineage severs that connection. though it means extra work in caring for the horses, fjóla’s mother has recently bred some foals from the mares and “dreams” of getting one of them trained for a grandchild to ride. this sense of futurity as well as continuity is woven into the practice of kinship through horses, as people choose, breed, or train horses for their children or grandchildren to ride. lilja, who runs a small horse riding tour business, explained that once someone decides that a new or soon to be born foal is going to be kept to be a special horse for one child, rather than being sold, they “do everything they can to make the horse become that horse” through care and training. “this makes it especially hard,” she said, catherine nash -kinship of different kinds: horses and people in iceland 129 “if that doesn’t work out, and especially hard if you have also bred the horse.” the work of making the horse into a special horse is an expression of love and care for the child. but as margrét, who works for a national horse organization explained, care for the child in turn shapes the relationship to the horse. a young child starting riding needs “the perfect horse.” it has to be very calm. it has to be not that willing to go fast, on its own at least, and it has to be a very special character, to let such a little person do all the controlling. so i had a horse like that and somehow that kind of horse, that does so much for your child really goes to your heart. that kind of character really is family. and horses are used in this role until they are maybe twenty-four. so of course it’s your family really. these horses she explained, “stay in the family” all their lives and are lent to younger relatives when the child has grown up. but what may or may not work out is not solely a matter of the character of the horse but also reflects how relationships and subjectivities within families are structured through power as well as care, and practiced through differentiation as well as fellow feeling. a child might not be interested in the special horse, or one child may be favored over others as its recipient. valhildur argued that the mutual trust that is required in riding eases intergenerational tensions since “the usual hierarchies in the family are not there when you are riding together. you trust each other and you trust the horses.” yet young people also assert their independence and difference within a family through rejecting its focus on horses, with all the range of parental reactions that can entail. people thus enact kinship through horses in iceland in shared family effort and experience, in caring for horses as a means of caring for and maintaining connections with older generations, and by bringing relationships with horses into the lives of younger family members, though never in isolation from familial dynamics of power and difference as well as love and unanimity. kinship with and among horses. but how are kin and kind, connection and difference, understood, practiced and experienced in human-horse relations? in iceland questions of kinship with horses are inseparable from understandings of kinship or, more broadly, social relations, among horses. while people use terms such as “family member” or “friend” to indicate the depth their relationships with particular horses, the dominant figuring of horses in iceland is that “they are horses.” the repeated injunction to “let horses be horses” is underpinned by an understanding of horses as social humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 130 subjects who relate to each other in groups, are happiest when together, who call to each other from the paddock or fields when separated, who greet each other when horses return to a group, who form distinct relationships within groups, and work to maintain them, and who negotiate group entry, inclusion and hierarchy.5 knowing horses well means coming to recognize the “diverse sensory modalities” — of sound, gesture and movement — of their intersubjective “affect attunement” (willett and suchak). icelandic studies of horse behavior argue that allowing horses to be social is key to their welfare (sigurjónsdóttir; sigurjónsdóttir and haraldsson). horse people in iceland insist that the quality of the human-horse relationship depends on recognizing that relationships between horses are fundamental to horse behavior and to the quality of a horse’s life with humans and among horses. even those who feel very close to their horses do not assume that a horse’s relationship with them is more significant than their relationships with other horses. this understanding of horses as social herd animals is a strand of equine studies (see van dierendonck and goodwin) and part of a wider turn to “natural” horse care (birke), but icelandic horse care is distinctive in being organized to as far as possible “allow horses to be horses.” this means “allowing them to be together.” horses are born and raised in groups that typically spend from june to december in extensive open ranges with minimal human contact and are not trained until they are 4 or 5 years old. even when stabled, horses are never kept alone and spend time outside in groups every day. they are thus more often with other horses than with people. it is this, icelandic horse people assert, that makes them physically and mentally strong and socially confident. human attention through grooming and exercise is certainly viewed as important to horse welfare, but also as a knowing compensation for the curtailment of their life in the herd in the fields (for at least part of the year) in order to have a riding relationship with them. understanding horses “as horses” thus involves both an insistence on difference and an appreciation of continuity between humans and horses in terms of the practice of kinship and sociality, “including the ability to distinguish family members from nonkin and members of one’s own social group from strangers, newcomers and outsiders” (smith, scandalous 156). however, attitudes vary as to the appropriateness of a familial idiom to describe horse relationships. when people talked to me about a group of horses in a paddock or field they described their relationships in terms of immediate parentage, offspring, siblinghood, and sometimes complex degrees of genealogical relatedness through breeding (e.g. horses sharing a particular stallion as a grandfather) but also in terms of which horses have developed particularly close relationships, who catherine nash -kinship of different kinds: horses and people in iceland 131 choose to be together, and who play with and groom each other. even for those who use the familial as adjective for these relations, kinship among horses, like human kinship, is understood as both genealogical and practiced, given and made. as lilja explained: they want to be together. they are family. there is a strong bond between them. horses that grow up together, either because they are siblings, or born in the same year and grow up and are trained together. or in my case because they are mother and daughter. you can see that their bond is very, very strong. they do not like to be separated for very long. that is not the norm and they are very happy when they are together again. but two horses that grow up together, that just live together in the same stable for a long time can develop that connection. it doesn't need to be dna. for some, the term family rather than herd signals the depth of the bonds between horses and the character of their collective relationships. this is kinship as initiated and practiced in the shared spaces and rhythms of the horses’ lives rather than fixed by, and limited to, genetic relatedness. yet for others the idiom of the family is problematic for both people and horses. hallbjörg teaches children to ride and understand horses. in doing so she discourages children from interpreting her description of horses’ parentage and offspring within a group in terms of a conventional human family of “mama, papa, baby” because it not only elides horse difference but also naturalizes socially conservative models of the family — nuclear, heternormative, patriarchal — in human society. “the horses don't have a family,” she argues: only these relationships while the mares are milking and so on. of course, i think they know each other, if they are brother and sister, like that, there is some connection but it is not family … family is a dangerous word. for her, projecting a narrow model of the family onto horse groups problematically closes down the possibilities for recognizing, respecting, and living alternative forms of human relationality and sociability, including solitary and independent life as a woman, and, in her case, with horses. how people understand relationships among horses thus not only shapes how human-horse relationships are described, understood, and practiced, but also how human kinship and family forms are conceived of and contested. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 132 however, it is the figure of the “pet” rather than the description of the horse relationships as familial that is most frequently rejected in accounts of human-horse relations in iceland. “pet” in this case means an animal that is treated and touched in particular ways — indulged, pandered to, stroked, and cuddled — and is used as a pejorative counterpoint to an icelandic model of human-horse difference and human authority. hallbjörg tells the children she teaches that: a horse is a horse and not a cuddly toy. i have to tell them “no this is an animal, like us as animals, but different to us. the horse is not a man.” […] the first thing to explain is that the horse doesn’t think like you. it is quite different and if you are going to ride him, if you are going to be able to control a horse you have to work with the horse and to work with the horse you have to try to understand it. and then i try to explain that the horse is a group animal and in a group there is always a leader and in this situation you have to be the leader because if the horse is the leader he can take you wherever and where you don’t want to go. in contrast to the figure of the sentimentalized “pet” or “toy,” horses are understood by icelandic horse people as herd animals that are happiest when those who care for and ride them give them the sense of security and safety they are used to within hierarchically organized horse groups by acting the dominant “leader” in the relationship. the possibility of achieving a deep relationship with a horse based on mutual understanding and trust is not set against an explicitly hierarchical relationship but depends upon it (hansen; patton). trainers, breeders, and riders are unanimous in their insistence that a horse-centered approach to training and riding is one of clear, consistent, and fair rules that ensure the respect of the horse for the human, create a foundation for a close human-horse relationship, and are key to the well-being of the horse. sometimes this is explained through the analogy of a parent-child relationship based on parental love, care, authority, and consistent and fair rules and boundaries, but not in ways that humanize horses or depart from the key tenet of horse difference. this perspective is not uniquely icelandic but it is argued there that icelandic practices of care create the conditions that allow for the depth of kinship possible between people and horses in iceland. in contrast to ideas of affectionate touch, intimacy, and indulgence evoked by the figure of the “pet,” it is spatial distance, as well as respect for species difference, that is posited as key to the possibility of mutually rewarding human-horse relationships. icelandic horses, it is argued, learn the rules of social life catherine nash -kinship of different kinds: horses and people in iceland 133 among horses through their early years in the herd with little human contact. trainers work with “horse talk” — the language of relational movement through which horses communicate and practice their sociality — to enable horses to read their instructions (brandt). they explained to me that horses who learn the rules of hierarchy in the herd accept human leadership much more easily. horses who have been too near humans, touched too much and given treats, they argue, are much harder to train because they have lost their sense of the rules of respectful interaction. respect is thus spatial relation. those that have lost respect are described as pushing into the personal space of the human, as helga, a competitive rider, breeder and trainer put it: “the horse is always trying to move your legs,” to make someone back away as the horse approaches them, so “they can walk more into your space” and assert their power to do so. hallbjörg warns of the dangers of mistaking some horse actions, such as trying to rub their heads on the rider after they dismount, as affection: “if a horse puts its head on your shoulder it is not being affectionate; it is trying to be dominant. you have to make it keep its distance.” human models of affection can mean misinterpreting horse actions, as helga explained: “people want kisses and hugs. but the horses don’t want it. they just want to be outside eating grass.” but horses are also trained to come to accept humans entering their space in horse care, and even more profoundly in riding. sigurlín, an experienced breeder and trainer, explained that training and riding mean authoritative but respectful entry into the horse space, as well as control over horse incursion into human space: i have my space and you have your space and you are not crossing my space if i don't allow you to do it. but some people think that horses do not have their space. it is the same with people, this your space and this is my space. and of course i cross it when i saddle you up but then i do it because i kind of tell you what i am going to do and then we do it together in a way but still i control it. leadership is thus also a spatial practice. but interspecies kinship — senses of fellowship, mutuality, connection — is also a spatial relation, based on proximity, co-presence as well as embodied contact. as in other leisure riding cultures, the idea of affective connection between an individual horse and human, especially through mutual bodily attunement in riding, is aspired to and celebrated (hagström; maurstrad, et al.; zetterqvist blokhuis). yet those who humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 134 sought to articulate the depth of some human-horse relationships turned to examples of moments of communion when the horse and human were nearby rather than riding. their reflections on the more mundane practices of kinship rather than the ideal of the mutual corporeality and temporary transcendence of difference between horse and rider resonate with other accounts of relaxed mutual attentiveness in longstanding human-horse relationships “on the ground” (birke and hockenhull 98). for anna, who bred and trained horses and taught horse training over many decades, the depth of a human-horse relationship is not a matter of horses appearing to express affection or of being eager to be touched affectionately: “they don’t seek human touch.” instead, it is experienced in unselfconscious co-presence, in moments between active engagement in riding, as a horse-human “dynamic” or “‘in sync” relation. this “body language and synchronization between a horse and a rider” can be seen, she suggests, at competitions, when the rider stands holding their horse’s neck waiting for the result, both mutually “in the moment” or in a break in a horse trek when the riders are talking together and they are leaning on their horses’ backs and the horse is quite happy and they are just standing there […] your horse is standing there and he is grazing and it has had enough to eat and they are just standing there resting one foot and they are hanging their head above you and you are talking to your friend. you can see a lot of friendship and acceptance and relationships. but it is not standing there petting your horse. it is in terms of both being in the same situation at the same time; both know what is going on. it is a routine and there is a certain calmness and acceptance and relationship going on that i think we miss because for us it is a very natural thing. it is very special and i think a lot of these horses that we own that we use a lot, we go into this kind of unity with them and we are not so aware of it. in reflecting on the “lots of little subtle things that people do and horses do that nobody notices that say so much about the relationship between people and horses,” anna asserts her sense of the expressive intentionality and agency of horses. this attentiveness to the subtle spatiality of human-horse kinship is not unusual. birta told me about one occasion in a break on a ride with the horse that she had a special relationship with as a teenager: it was in the spring with green grass and i was lying down in it and she was grazing. i had her on a long rein. she was eating by my side here so you could almost see a person when i stood up. i was like i can’t move, catherine nash -kinship of different kinds: horses and people in iceland 135 this is too good. it’s like “i want to be close to you” that is the best. it was so nice. this is a communication as well. she was eating. but it was not just eating. we were having fun. […] and when i did [exhales deeply] she did that as well. that was our thing. there was nothing in it. it is just like “i know you are there.” i was always sure that if i did [exhales] she would [exhale]. respecting horse difference and in particular horse sociality thus does not mean that everything horses do is reduced to instinctive herd behavior or interpreted simply as the effect of human channeling of horse instinct in training. foregrounding the “things horses do” as an expression of mutual connection is not to suggest that their agency is not deeply circumscribed by human power in the relationship (hansen; patton). but it does leave room for the agential specificity of horses — what they choose to do within the constraints of what it is possible to do — to be acknowledged. accounts of embodied communion, harmony, or “oneness” between horses and riders in riding do not elide the volition of horses, since communion depends on mutual trust and shared understanding, rather than simple dominance. yet, what the horse should be doing to achieve that state of bodily synchronicity is determined by what the rider wants them to be doing, whether this is communicated in deeply subtle bodily signals or more direct ways. this is not to deny the possibilities of the mutual pleasure of horse and rider in corporeal synchronity or “entrainment” (argent). however, it is also worth attending to human-horse relations beyond riding itself, relations that are often shaped but not wholly defined by or limited to riding. horses not being ridden and not constrained can choose to move away, stay near, or come closer. rannveig, who keeps horses to ride and work with on her sheep farm, explained that her horses express their relationship to her through moving to be nearby: “when i go and walk among them out in the big field. it is a few hectares. they just come and stand with me, or look at what i am doing so ... you know, just be there like a friend who sits there but does not say anything.” horses thus express their relationship to significant humans in some of the proxemic (argent 115) ways they do with the horses with whom they are friends: approaching or following them, staying close, grazing near by, resting together (feh; van dierendonck and goodwin). the term “preferred proximity partners” is used by those studying horse behavior in an icelandic herd to describe the long term relationships between horses “who have a close spatial partnership” (van dierendonck, et al. 289). being nearby, staying nearby, and coming to be nearby, without touching and without being too close, can be read as expressions of kinship — a kinship not of genealogical relation but of affiliation and familiarity within and between kind. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 136 conclusion. the intersubjective relations between people and horses that are expressed in subtle spatialities of proximity and co-presence are aligned with other accounts that explore interspecies relatedness forged through bodily care, intimacy, and shared lives (govindrajan). exploring kinship of different kinds, among people, among horses, and between horses and people, including genealogical imaginations and practices, situates these spatialities of interspecies kinship in wider sets of relations. these are not limited to the familial. horse people in iceland enjoy the kinship of shared experience with horses as an alternative to, within or in addition to “family life with horses.” some deploy the idiom of the familial to express the significance of relations with and among horses, while others reject it because of its socially conservative associations. understanding kinship in terms of practices of making significant relations of different kinds works against the naturalization of narrow, limited, and reactionary models of relatedness, among and between humans and animals. furthermore, the practice of “pedigree talk” — discussions of horse genealogies in relation to the character of particular horses as the outcomes of breeding and in terms of breeding potential — is not only a distinctive feature of icelandic horse culture but, to some extent, of wider public life. in iceland, horses as well as people are “ancestors.” and like the exchange of human family history and genealogical information “pedigree talk” can be understood as practices of making relations, within and beyond those linked by human or horse genealogies. horses can embody the horse breeding efforts and interests of past generations and the potential continuation of lineage and thus of connection, back to those passed and forward to the future generation. kinship of different kinds includes the making of genealogical connections among people into kinship relations through the care and breeding of horses, as well as the kinships made through and with horses. moreover, the practice of making significant relations is always about differentiation and degree, selectivity and exclusion, rather than generalized kinship. this is as much the case with interspecies kinship as with human kinship, a matter of which kinds come to be kin as well as which specific members of kinds. the concept of interspecies kinship radically undoes conventional models of who is related to whom and how, but also tracks practices of differentiation and distinction between kin and other categories of difference, including species and breed. interspecies kinship is shaped by how an individual animal is located within categories of animal difference, not only those of “wild” or “domestic,” “native” or “exotic,” for example, but also, for horses and other domesticated animals, how they are understood and valued as individuals, as representatives of the breed and embodiments of pedigree and lineage within the breed, and evaluated in relation to other members of the breed (irvine; nash, “breed wealth”). catherine nash -kinship of different kinds: horses and people in iceland 137 relationships with horses vary in their nature, intensity, and depth. the “special horse” is a horse among many “ordinary” horses and, as ever, the power to differentiate is framed by human power to decide upon the nature and duration of the lives of horses. understandings of interspecies kinship are enriched by recognizing the way in which human understandings of kinship among animals shapes animals lives and humannonhuman relations. however, recognizing the significance of relations among horses does not mean that they are allowed to continue if they clash with other decisions about what should or has to done for the sake of the breed or for the sake of making a living. people curtail and reconfigure relationships within horse groups when horses are culled, bought, and sold as people negotiate the contradictions and compromises between what is best for horses and what they want from horses. this certainly complicates but does not undermine the significance of the often overlooked spatialities of kinship between horses and people in iceland. senses of closeness or connection with horses are experienced not only in the ideal of embodied communion in the practice of riding but also in the subtle geographies of proximity. human leadership and mutual respect between people and horses are understood and practiced as spatial relations, based on ideas of the spatial negotiation of rank, respect, and power among horses. though understandings of the social nature of horses underpins ideals of horse welfare in iceland, it is the significance of leadership among horses, more specifically, that is drawn on to explain the nature of human-horse relations, rather than the spatial practices of “proximity partners.” yet people experience and recognize the relational behavior and agency of horses that choose to stay or come to be nearby them as expressions of connection. they accord their horses the intentionality of affective response as they work through the complexity, and, ultimately, unknowability of human-horse difference – what is shared across kind, what counts as species difference — and of what they mean to their horses. people resist collapsing human-horse difference and reject absolute difference. interspecies kinship is always a “partial connection” (govindrajan 25). in this case, affective interspecies intimacy is experienced not through overcoming distance and difference, but in being together nearby. this opens up the possibility of recognising interspecies kinship in the things horses, as well as people, do. notes 1. with a human population of 364,134 people on 1 january 2020 (https://www.statice.is/statistics/population/inhabitants/) and a horse population of 94,209 in 2019 (https://www.feif.org/feif/factsandfigures/registeredhorses.aspx) https://www.statice.is/statistics/population/inhabitants/ https://www.feif.org/feif/factsandfigures/registeredhorses.aspx humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 138 iceland has approx. one horse per every 3.8 persons. this compares with reported figures of approx. one equid (horses, ponies and donkeys) per 21 persons in belgium in 2015 which is the highest in the eu (removing the blinkers). 2. horse ownership and leisure riding is less elitist in iceland than in other euroamerican contexts, especially in rural iceland, but rising costs are making it become more difficult for lower income urban residents to participate. this is being addressed by the icelandic network of riding clubs in the icelandic equestrian association (landssamband hestamannafélaga) through subsidizing riding for children from low income backgrounds. 3. this paper draws on research funded by the british academy and undertaken in reykjavík and in rural north west and south west iceland over six months in 2016. it foregrounds the strand of work addressing kinship within a wider cultural geographical research project that explored the cultural, economic, and encounter value of icelandic horses (nash, “breed wealth”). though riding is central to horse cultures, my focus was on horse breeding and care, and human-horse relations more broadly. in addition to observational, and in some cases, participatory work, on horse farms, rental businesses, and cultural centers, thirty-one informal qualitative interviews were undertaken with participants that i identified as involved in icelandic horse culture through their institutional or business websites, or who were recommended to me. they included competition judges and riders, dealers, breeders, trainers, leisure riders, those running horse tourism businesses, farmers, equine veterinarians and educators, and representatives of breed organizations. the interviews took place in people’s homes, stables, and places of work, and in many cases were preceded or followed by conversations and observations while being shown around stables and introduced to horses in stalls and in paddocks. the interviews focused on people’s practices of horse care, their views of the nature and meaning of their relationships with horses, and their wider perspectives on horse culture in iceland. while keenly conscious of the challenges and limits of doing so, the research also sought to observe, as well as to discuss, interactions between people and horses, not while riding but in practices of horse care, in terms of touch, movement, sound, and gesture. these observations inform my engagement with what people said, but my attention to horse agency in their relations with people draws most heavily on the recounted observations and perspectives of my participants. my reflections on my own desire for affective connection with horses in iceland as i came to understand people’s insistence on horse difference also shape my consideration of kinship with horses. all participants have been anonymized. catherine nash -kinship of different kinds: horses and people in iceland 139 4. i use this term to encompass the commonalities between talk of human lineage and animal pedigree as does cassidy (the sport of kings 33) in engaging with “family talk” among elite english thoroughbred horse people. 5. these accounts of hierarchy in horse groups deserve further consideration. the term hierarchy often evokes a model of usually male competition for dominance and thus sexual success that has been entrenched in animal behavior studies and pervasive in popular understandings. yet, the continuous and contextual negotiation of status among mares, among geldings, among stallions, and within mixed groups of horses that horse people in iceland observe are recognized as complex forms of social interaction that involve age, kinship, the condition and character of individual horses, and their length of time in or newness to the herd. nor are horses’ negotiations of these relations of relative “rank” incompatible with other forms of sociality such as play, mutualism, cooperation, and long-term partnerships. they are often about conflict avoidance rather than aggression, and critics of the focus on dominance suggest interaction between horses is based “not on domination or even confrontation, but on cooperation and approval seeking” (sharpe 197). exploring this complexity is preferable to the crude model of alpha-male dominance and competitive aggression that “contaminates the humans who impose this theory just as much as the animals upon whom it is imposed” (despret 59). works cited argent, gala, “toward a privileging of the nonverbal communication, corporeal synchrony, and transcendence in humans and horses.” experiencing animal minds: an anthology of animal-human encounters. julie a. smith and robert w. mitchell eds. columbia up, 2012. 111-128 bamford, sandra and james leach eds. kinship and beyond: the genealogical model reconsidered. berghahn books, 2009. birke, lynda. “‘learning to speak horse’: the culture of ‘natural horsemanship.’” society and animals 15 (2007): 217-239. birke, lynda, and jo hockenhull. “journeys together: horses and humans in partnership.” society & animals 23 (2015): 81-100. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 140 birke, lynda, and kirrilly thompson. (un)stable relations: horses, humans and social agency. routledge, 2018 bjarnsson, gunnar. ættbók og saga íslenzka hestsins á 20. öld. odd björnsson, 1982. björnsson, gísli b. and hjalti jón sveinsson. the icelandic horse. mál og menning, 2006. blouin, david. d. “are dogs children, companions, or just animals ? understanding variations in people’s orientations toward animals.” anthrozoös 26.2 (2013): 279-294. _____. “understanding relations between people and their pets.” sociology compass 6.11 (2012): 856-869. brandt, keri. “a language of their own: an interactionist approach to human-horse communication.” society & animals 12.4 (2004): 299-316. carsten, janet. after kinship. cambridge up, 2004. cassidy, rebecca. “arborescent culture: writing and non writing racehorse pedigrees.” kinship and beyond: the genealogical model reconsidered. sandra bamford and james leach, eds. berghahn books, 2009. 24-49. _____. the sport of kings: kinship, class and thoroughbred breeding in newmarket. cambridge up, 2002. charles, nickie. “‘animals just love you as you are’: experiencing kinship across the species barrier.” sociology 48.4 (2014): 715-730. _____. “post-human families? dog-human relations in the domestic sphere.” sociological research online 21.3 (2016): 1-12. charles, nickie, and charlotte aull davies. “my family and other animals: pets as kin.” sociological research online 13. 5 (2008): 13-26. coulter, kendra. “herds and hierarchies: class, nature, and the social construction of horse in equestrian culture.” society and animals 22 (2014): 135-152. catherine nash -kinship of different kinds: horses and people in iceland 141 dashper, katherine. “listening to horses: developing attentive interspecies relationships through sport and leisure.” society and animals 25.3 (2017): 207-224. davis, dona lee, and anita maurstad. eds. the meaning of horses: biosocial encounters. routledge, 2016. despret, vinciane. what would animals say if we asked the right questions? u of minnesota p, 2016. edwards, jeanette. born and bred: idioms of kinship and new reproductive technologies in england. oxford up, 2000. feh, claudia. “relationship and communication in socially natural horse herds. ” the domestic horse: the evolution, development and management of its behaviour. d. s. mills and s. m. mcdonnell, eds. cambridge up, 2005. 83-93. fox, rebekah. “animal behaviours, post-human lives: everyday negotiations of the animal-human divide in pet-keeping.” social & cultural geography 7.4 (2006): 525–537. fuentes, agustín. “commentary: other animals as kin and persons worthy of increased ethical consideration.” cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics 29.1 (2020): 3841. fuentes, agustín and natalie porter. “kinship.” critical terms for animal studies. lori gruen, ed. u chicago p, 2018. 182-196. franklin, sarah and susan mckinnon, eds. relative values: reconfiguring kinship studies. u california p, 2001. game, ann. “riding: embodying the centaur.” body and society 7.1 (2001): 1-12. govindrajan, radhika. animal intimacies: interspecies relatedness in india’s central himalayas. u chicago p, 2018. greenebaum, jessica. “it’s a dog’s life: elevating status from pet to ‘fur baby’ at yappy hour.” society and animals 12 (2004): 117–34. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 142 gudbjartsson, daniel f. et al,. “large-scale whole-genome sequencing of the icelandic population.” nature genetics 47 (2015): 435–444. hagström, erica. “a halter and a lead rope: shifting pedagogical imaginaries of becoming within a human-horse relationship.” gender and education 28.2 (2016): 298313. hansen, natalie corinne, “dressage: training the equine body.” foucault and animals. matthew chrulew and dinesh joseph wadiwel, eds. brill, 2016. 132-160 haraway, donna j. staying with the trouble. making kin in the chthulucene. duke up, 2016. _____. when species meet, u minnesota p, 2008. hreiðarsdóttir, gunnfríður elín, thorvaldur árnason, vilhjálmur svansson, and jón hallsteinn hallsson. “analysis of the history and population structure of the icelandic horse using pedigree data and dna analyses.” icel. agric. sci. 27 (2014): 63-79. hugason, kristinn. “breeding of icelandic toelter horses: an overview.” livestock production science 40.1 (1994): 21-29. irvine, leslie, and laurent cilia. “more-than-human families: pets, people, and practices in multispecies households.” sociology compass 11.2 (2017): e12455. irvine, robin. “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia.” humanimalia 6.1 (2014): 62-94. jónsson, ásgei. horfnir góðhestar. norðri, 1946. lorange, jón baldur. “worldfengur – the studbook of origin for the icelandic horse.” acta veterinaria scandinavica 53.s5 (2011): 1-5. mcmanus, phil and montoya, daniel. “towards new understandings of human-animal relations in sport: a study of australian jumps racing.” social and cultural geography 13 (2012): 399-420. catherine nash -kinship of different kinds: horses and people in iceland 143 maurstad, anita, dona davis, and sarah cowles. “co-being and intra-action in horsehuman relationship: a multi-species ethnography of be(com)ing human and be (com)ing a horse.” social anthropology 21.3 (2013): 322-335. mende, caroline kerstin. old breeding lines: portrait of the legendary breeding lines with background information on horse raising and horse keeping in iceland. verlag alpha umi, 2015. nash, catherine. “breed wealth: origins, encounter value and the international love of a breed.” transactions of the institute of british geographers. march 2020. accessed 18 july 2020. online. _____. of irish descent: origin stories, genealogy and the politics of belonging. syracuse up, 2008. nosworthy, cheryl. a geography of horse-riding: the spacing of affect, emotion and (dis)ability identity through horse-human encounters. cambridge scholars, 2013. pálsson, gísli. anthropology and the new genetics. cambridge up, 2007. pálsson, gísli, and sigurður haraldsson. riders of the north. bókaútgáfan hofi, 1997. patton, paul. “language, power and the training of horses.” zoontologies: the question of the animal. cary wolfe, ed. u minnesota p, 2003. 83-100. power, emma. “furry families: making a human–dog family through home.” social & cultural geography 9.5 (2008): 535-555. schuurman, nora and maarit sireni. “the human horse relationship challenged by pregnancy and motherhood.” the meaning of horses: biosocial encounters. dona lee davis and anita maurstad, eds. routledge, 2016. 129-143. sharpe, lynne. . to the moral status of animals ?: a relational approachus ekcreatures li ingram, 2005. shir-vertesh, dafna. “‘flexible personhood’: loving animals as family members in israel.” american anthropologist 114.3 (2012): 420-432. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 144 sigurjónsdóttir, hrefna. “the importance of social opportunities in the life of horses.” animal welfare 13.s255 (2004). sigurjónsdóttir, hrefna, and hans haraldsson. “significance of group composition for the welfare of pastured horses.” animals 9.14 (2019): 14. smith, barbara herrnstein. scandalous knowledge: science, truth and the human. edinburgh up, 2006. smith, stephen. j. “human-horse partnerships. the discipline of dressage.” sport, animals and society. james gillett and michele gilbert, eds. routledge, 2014. 35-51. strathern, marilyn. after nature: english kinship in the late twentieth century. cambridge up, 1992. van dierendonck, machteld and debbie goodwin. “social contact in horses: implications for human-horse interactions.” the human-animal relationship. f. h. de jonge and r. van den bos, eds. van gorcum, 2005. 65-81. van dierendonck, m. c., h. sigurjónsdóttir, b. colenbrander, a.g. thorhallsdóttir. “differences in social behaviour between late pregnant, post-partum and barren mares in a herd of icelandic horses.” applied animal behaviour science 89 (2004): 283–297. willett, cynthia and malini suchak. “sociality.” critical terms for animal studies. lori gruen, ed. u chicago p, 2018. 370-382 wipper, audrey. “the partnership: the horse-rider relationship in eventing.” symbolic interaction 23.1 (2000): 47-70. world horse welfare and eurogroup for animals, removing the blinkers: the health and welfare of european equidae in 2015. online. available at: https://www.eurogroupforanimals.org/resources zetterqvist blokhuis, mari. “the praxis of horse riding – an autoethnographic study.” humanimalia 9.2 (2018): 47-67. zerubavel, eviatar. ancestors and relatives: genealogy, identity and community. oxford up, 2012. https://www.eurogroupforanimals.org/resources susan mchugh h u m a n i m a l i a 11:2 reviews carol gigliotti the way of reconciliation gavin van horn, the way of coyote: shared journeys in the urban wilds. chicago: university of chicago press. 2018. 234 pp. $25.00 (hc). when i moved to vancouver, british columbia, canada in 1999 from columbus, ohio, change was the order of the day. from not receiving a spam call on every hour to trying to figure out what a “garburator” was (a garbage disposal), i had no doubt i was in a different country. although i had lived in relatively rural areas in the us, it was exhilarating to discover how easy it was to see raccoons, bald eagles, bears, skunks, beavers, sea lions, seals, and of course coyotes in vancouver’s city center and surrounding neighborhoods. my favorite moment with a coyote was when my dog, copernicus, and i stepped out the front door in the early dusk to see a large coyote loping along the street in front of us. he turned his head to look our way as he passed and gave us a “wasup?” as the coyote floated away, it slowly began to dawn on humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 212 copernicus that what he had just seen was not a dog. i was happy to be in a place where people welcomed these incursions with such neighborly grace. that was years ago, but it is good to know that in cities in the us, similar sightings have been taking place, although profoundly negative reasons for this movement of wild animals into cities involve the loss of their original habitats through human caused destruction, fragmentation, or degradation. gavin van horn’s new book, the way of coyote: shared journeys in the urban wild, recognizes the greed and devastation that have caused these ruptures in chicago, once mostly prairie and prairie marshes upon which grew vast amounts of pollinator plants, such as milkweed, the only plant on which monarch butterflies can lay their eggs. by the end of a symposium on the multiple threats to the migration of monarch butterflies, gavin van horn’s head is in his hands: “the erasure of a biological phenomenon. a migration refined, over the course of thousands of years, by billions of tiny insects intent on completing their round in the cycle. wiped clean” (110). many of us experience this sense of hopelessness as we brace ourselves for the morning’s negative environmental news. van horn points to several strategies we use to cope with the grief we feel: ignore it; it is what it is; the “earth bats last” defense; pragmatic fatalism; and weeping. in his recent book, van horn offers another way: “restore the sacred when and where i can” (112). if that phrase seems too vague to address the current agreement among climate scientists that we have eleven years to shift our path from that of environmental collapse, van horn might agree. the word “restore,” however, speaks to his belief in concrete actions many of us can take to help ease this pressure on animals no matter where we live, or how discouraged we are. van horn moved to chicago, illinois in 2010 to take the position of director of cultures of conservation at the center for humans and nature. the editor of two earlier books on nature and place and author of many essays, van horn has engaged with these ideas through his writing, his work, and his passion for walking. in fact, the most eloquent and powerful sections of the book, of which there are many, emerge from his journeys on foot within and through a particular place, his present home, chicago. van horn sees this book as a search for what he calls an urban land ethic, and gathers support from these specific experiences involving animals who have made chicago their home, and sometimes the people who are caring for these urban wilds through preservation, restoration, and “reconciliation ecology.” carol gigliotti -the way of reconciliation 213 this last term is one that may need some explanation. coined by evolutionary ecologist michael rosenzweig, it encourages species conservation by inventing, establishing, and maintaining new habitats where people live, work, or play. a perfect example of this, van horn proffers, is the peregrines who make their nests and hunt in the skyscraper cliffs and canyons of chicago and other cities in the eastern, mid-western, and western us. almost lost to ddt until it was banned in 1970, raised for release in the 1980s, and delisted from the endangered species list in 1999, peregrine breeding pairs in illinois now number 30. the birds themselves gravitated towards places where the habitat was strikingly similar to what they needed to live. according to van horn, “by understanding the behaviors of other species, and what they require to meet their needs, we can deliberately create places of cohabitation” (29). but he admits reconciliation ecology will not work for rare and threatened grassland birds in chicago, who cannot survive without large areas for breeding and nesting sites. northerly island in lake michigan on the eastern edge of downtown chicago is a particularly successful example for van horn since it offers just such a habitat. the man-made peninsula is the single portion built of a larger lakeshore planning and beautification project designed by daniel burnham in 1901. along a major bird migration pathway, northerly island offers birds — such as kingbirds, short eared owls, northern shrikes, snowy owls from the artic, herons, and monarch butterflies among many others — a place to rest and refuel. the 91-acre man-made peninsula is home to locals such as muskrats, raccoons, opossums, and coyotes. learning how to reconcile our needs with the needs of other species, van horn insists, is rich with possibilities of grasping not just the importance of other species, but also the sheer wonder of their existence: active reconciliation means trying to understand what enables other animals to flourish in our presence, and how we can proactively create such places of cohabitation. this can foster ecological empathy, opening up a space for the long-term work of living with grace and skill in our everyday worlds. reconciliation ecology asks of us that we anticipate the impacts of our actions and take responsibility for our historical shortsightedness. (32) it also gives a more practical and ethical meaning to the word “entangled” used so often in animal studies discourse, as it demands rethinking and changing our perspective. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 214 van horn’s musings on beavers, voles, robins, minks, peregrines, monarchs, and coyotes, and the new breed of urban ecologists who study them all flesh out his thoughts on an urban land ethic, while aldo leopold’s work and writing offer inspiration and support. van horn’s voice, word choice, and well-crafted sentences engage the reader in ways that more theoretical, opaque, equivocal authors do not. midway through the book he makes an argument for a numenom, a species that, for leopold, best incarnates “the other-than-human forces that constituted a landscape's unique presence” (78). okay, so that is relatively theoretical and opaque, but listen to how van horn makes it breathe. he suggests “what might seem an unlikely candidate. a creature with a name that sounds like the sobriquet of a comic book antihero: the black-crowned night heron” (80). he then gives an exquisitely painted and tangible portrait of the night heron. he adds, however: “eventually though, the heron’s red eye, a ruby supernova that deepens to a black-hole center, is what will pull you in. this red eye fixes you in its gaze, letting you know that you are a part of the heron's passing world, not he of yours” (80). to stress this point, van horn describes the heron’s nests as “little more than a jumble of medium size sticks jammed into the crook of a tree” that they often build over heavily trafficked footpaths in the heart of chicago. in my estimation, any bird that intentionally or unintentionally put us in our place, cause us to take note of their presence, and remind us that we are subject to more-than-human forces by tarnishing our self-importance as well as our button-down shirts have my respect. let us call this the virtue of night heron shit. (81). for me, the most vivid part of the second section of the book, called conciliation, about conversations between people and place, is van horn’s weaving together of community bird oasis projects founded by sherry williams, and so-called throwaway landscapes. williams loved pigeons as a child on the south side of chicago. her interest in birds allowed her to compare the layovers of birds along the migratory flyway of chicago and the migration of african americans who moved to chicago from the south in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. this history resonated with williams as a way of understanding both the avian migrants and the migration stories of people in the pullman community. becoming a fellow of the audubon society, williams was able to transform the now forgotten site of the once grand pullman factory into one of the two oases in south chicago now welcoming birds on their way south or as more constant citizens. monthly guided tours by williams explaining the parallels of african american migration and that of birds in chicago help visitors of all ages appreciate the profound similarities in human and animal lives. van horn’s comments on how the carol gigliotti -the way of reconciliation 215 loss of intimacy with the small and secret places that once formed children’s imagination about themselves and nature add an important dimension. with support from leopold, “we only grieve for what we know” and that heart-wrenching quote from robert michael pyle’s the thunder tree, “what is the extinction of the condor to a child who has never known a wren?” (123) van horn reminds us that the wild may be found everywhere, even in us. thinking nature ends at the first sidewalk encountered is a mistake not only of category but of a limited and shallow imagination. the last section of the book, “mindways” suggests two intertwined methods of thinking developed from the experiences of the previous chapters: empathy and imagination. van horn explains: “but we don't need access to a bee’s mind to think about what a bee needs, and that kind of empathic thinking can be transformative” (207). it is those imaginative leaps, van horn insists, of a deep empathy with other creatures that will ultimately reveal our place beside them. microsoft word dinets-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:1 vladimir dinets spontaneous development of hunting-like behavior in a juvenile human: a case study hunting played a crucial role in the evolutionary success of our species: as specialized hunters, humans were able to spread all over the world, becoming the most widespread terrestrial mammal as early as 40,000 years ago (burenhult). but is human tendency to hunt at least partially innate (i. e., genetic) or entirely learned? this question is extremely important for understanding human history and evolution — for example, for solving the controversy about the precise role of hunting (as opposed to scavenging) in the life of early humans (domínguez-rodrigo) — but it has never been specifically addressed by scientific research. studies of hunting behavior in humans have mostly focused on adults (lee and devore; nitecki and nitecki; bissell et al.; bird et al.); on cultural acquisition of such behavior by children growing up in hunter-gatherer societies (macdonald); on social, economic and developmental importance of children’s hunting in such societies (jones et al.; walker et al.; hewlett and lamb; crittenden et al.); or on environmental factors influencing hunting success (collins). innate predisposition for such behavior has never been demonstrated, and is often presumed to be absent by researchers, as evidenced by the fact that it is not even mentioned as a possibility in the most detailed overviews of relevant subjects (harding and teleki; macdonald; hewlett et al.). on the other hand, the presence of a “hunting instinct” in humans is often mentioned as self-evident in popular literature, usually as a justification for hunting (see, for example, ortega y gasset). the most detailed argument to that effect was made by caras, who wrote an entire book arguing that “the will to hunt, the desire to hunt, lies deep. it is, and i do believe that, inherent in man.” causey quoted caras and wrote that “the urge to kill may be viewed as an original, essential human trait... a desire that has been developed and reinforced over millions of years.” she insisted that for humans, hunting is a manifestation of a “killer instinct.” however, causey’s statements were criticized as baseless and inconsequential by bekoff and jamieson, who noted that her paper had multiple methodological flaws, that there was no solid scientific evidence for instinctive predisposition to hunting in humans, and that the question is irrelevant to the discussion of the morality of non-subsistence hunting in the modern age. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 54 causey was not the only author to equate hunting with killing and to claim (explicitly or implicitly) that both are manifestations of the same instinct. many others (see, for example, ardrey; wrangham; wrangham and peterson; and the more complete bibliography in sussman) postulated the existence of a “killer instinct,” which is supposedly present in humans (and chimpanzees), and is responsible for both intra and interspecific violence carried out by both species, particularly by males. the idea actually goes back to the 18th century (burnet), although at that time the term “instinct” was not yet in use and people spoke of the “beastly nature” of man. these views were criticized by sussman as being constructed on various unproven assumptions and circular arguments rather than solid evidence, and constituting a popular myth rather than a scientific theory; however, he did not question the synonymizing of hunting and killing on which such constructs are based. many proposed assumptions about the role of hunting in human evolution have been based on studies of other extant hominids (see, for example, stanford 1996; pickering). however, the existence of a possible instinctive basis of hunting behavior is as uncertain in apes as it is in humans. in all extant non-human hominids known to hunt — chimpanzees (mcgrew; newton-fisher), bonobos (hohmann and fruth), and orangutans (hardus et al.; buckley et al.) — such behavior differs sharply between populations, suggesting cultural acquisition (rapaport and brown). on the other hand, hunting is regularly practiced by all well-studied populations of bonobos (hohmann and fruth) and chimpanzees (newton-fisher). some individual chimpanzees have developed novel hunting behaviors, such as hunting human children (cohen). there are published records of hunting in captive chimpanzees (shumaker et al.), but it is unknown whether the apes involved were captiveor wild-born, and such records are very rare, possibly due to the lack of hunting opportunities in captivity. hunting does occur in captive-raised macaques and capuchin monkeys (steven green pers. comm.). there is also an unpublished observation of a captive-raised orangutan hunting pigeons (george lacry pers. comm.), but it is unknown if the ape has had an opportunity to learn this behavior from wild-born conspecifics. proving that hunting behavior in humans is always culturally acquired would require extensive research. but proving the opposite does not: even a single case of spontaneously acquiring such behavior without cultural transmission or immediate reward would be sufficient proof that the tendency to hunt is innate at least in some humans. vladimir dinets -spontaneous development of hunting-like behavior in a juvenile human: a case study . 55 below i describe such a case, showing that many elements of hunting behavior can manifest spontaneously in a juvenile growing up in complete isolation from other hunters, in an environment where such behavior has no adaptive value. irrespective of the sample size, these observations clearly demonstrate that hunting behavior is innate in some individuals. materials and methods study sites. i was born on 17 may 1969, grew up in downtown moscow (russia), and spent summers in a small town of monino, 30 km east of moscow (55o50’n 38o11’e), until the age of 12. the part of moscow where i was growing up had extremely impoverished fauna (a few bird, rodent, and invertebrate species); large parks with more diverse faunal assemblages were at least an hour away by public transportation. monino was partially surrounded with boreal forests and open habitats with fauna typical for the region, except that large birds and mammals were almost entirely absent. at the time, both locations were considered relatively safe for a child: crime levels were very low or perceived as such due to the absence of crime reporting in state-controlled media, and there was no dangerous wildlife other than feral dogs. study subject. i grew up in a complete isolation from people involved in any kind of hunting or hunting-like behavior (such as fishing, birdwatching, or nature photography), although gathering behavior in the form of gathering wild mushrooms and berries was a popular pastime in monino. my father was an avid butterfly collector, but i did not meet him until the age of 12 due to my parents divorcing around the time of my birth, and was unaware of his hobby. i did not meet any biologists, hunters, or amateur naturalists until the same age. no one among my relatives or friends had any interest in wildlife, although some of my friends eventually developed such interest under my influence (see below). due to the extreme shortage of books about nature in the soviet union, such books were unavailable to me until the age of 6, and those describing the fauna of european russia became available only at the age of 8. the only context in which i was introduced to the idea of hunting was in fairy tales, where hunter characters were never central to the story, and i do not remember having any interest in these characters or the concept of game hunting. thus it can be stated that any hunting-like behavior shown by me at early age had developed spontaneously. information gathering. i started keeping written notes about wildlife i encountered at the age of 4, and some of these notes have survived until recently. my mother, who was amused, surprised, and sometimes worried by my hunting-like behavior, has very good humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 56 memories of the timing of its development, while i have clear recollections of particular “hunting” successes (see below). results emergence and development of hunting-like behavior. i first showed interest in surrounding wildlife at the age of 3 (before learning to read), and by the age of 5 i spent every day in summer looking for wild animals in surrounding forests. during other seasons i spent a lot of time looking for birds in city parks and (weather permitting) for invertebrates in vacant lots and lawns around our city residence. until the age of 7 i was mostly interested in invertebrates, since they were much more numerous and easy to catch; i started a “scientific” collection of insects at the age of 6. later my interests broadened to include vertebrates, as well as observing animal behavior in the wild. by the age of 12 i was entirely focused on scientific research; at that time i started systematic observations of a particular species which were eventually summarized in a peer-reviewed paper (dinets 1995). my mother and grandmother accompanied me at first, but starting when i reached the age of 5 they gradually allowed me to roam on my own, since i had good navigational skills. the level of my emotional involvement in this behavior was remarkably high. i would sometimes keep visiting a remote location for many days and even weeks, hoping to capture a particular species i once saw and missed. although usually i returned home on time, once i was so carried away trying to capture a dragonfly that i came home eight hours later than expected, causing serious distress to my family and, upon my return, some painfully excessive application of traditional parenting techniques by my mother. such extreme motivation is remarkably typical for “real” hunters of young age: as darwin wrote in his autobiography while recalling his school years, “i do not believe that anyone could have shown more zeal for the most holy cause than i did for shooting birds” (44). i enjoyed finding, catching and observing insects and other animals, but didn’t like killing them. at that time scientific entomology in the soviet union was almost entirely collecting-based; my dislike of the process was one of the main reasons for switching to vertebrate zoology and, in my adult scientific career, for specializing in research on behavioral ecology and conservation, where killing animals or subjecting them to heavy suffering is seldom required. this dislike was not limited to interspecific killing: neither as a child nor as an adult did i feel any desire to kill conspecifics for the sake of it. vladimir dinets -spontaneous development of hunting-like behavior in a juvenile human: a case study . 57 “hunting” patterns. i did not use the animals i found for food or any other practical purposes, and did not experience a shortage of protein or other food during my childhood. still, i devoted huge amounts of time and energy to looking for animals, often spending 8-12 hours per day “hunting.” moreover, during the first years i always tried to capture the animals and bring them home, even if only to release them later; this clearly suggests that for me it was an expression of a hunting instinct, not just nascent interest in wildlife observation or science (if such things are even possible in a 3 year-old). my behavior was remarkably reminiscent of carnivorous mammals that hunt despite not needing extra food, such as domestic cats bringing their kills to the place of residence (woods et al.), although the analogy could be superficial. obvious in retrospect, the similarity of my behavior to “real” hunting did not occur to me until i was older, probably about 7 or 8. this behavior was very different from gathering (of wild mushrooms and berries) in which i regularly participated: during “hunting” i was looking for large, spectacular-looking or uncommon animals, rather than large numbers of common ones, and the thrill of chasing and capturing them was an important component of the “hunt.” at first all my “hunting” was conducted within ~3 km from home; learning to ride a bicycle at the age of 5 did not have any effect on the size of that territory. at the age of 9 i felt a sudden urge to explore unfamiliar areas, and expanded my summer “hunting” area to ~15 km radius. at the same time, i began to travel to forests outside moscow during other seasons, learning the art of snow tracking and other relevant skills (mostly by myself, as any literature on the subject was extremely difficult to obtain). the next increase in “hunting” radius did not take place until the age of 12; at that age i also met my father and other amateur and professional naturalists for the first time. although i did not invent or make traps at that time, i readily took advantage of “traps” already available, such as bright light sources or holes dug up for future placement of utility poles. my search pattern was not random. i had a very good memory of all locations where i had found particularly interesting animals (i still remember many such places almost 40 years later, even though i have not visited monino since 1986), and tried to plan every day’s route in such a way that as many such locations as possible could be re-visited. some such places were promising locations for a reason (birch trees leaking sap, strong light sources attracting insects at night, forest ponds), but others were not. i was well aware of the fact that many wildlife encounters happened randomly, and in most cases there was no particular reason to expect them to happen again at the same location, but humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 58 still tried to visit these locations again and again. over time, repeated visits to the same locations often produced new interesting findings, so the pattern reinforced itself. influencing others. none of the children i knew until the age of 12 had developed such behavior spontaneously, but some of my friends became interested in looking for insects and other wildlife under my influence, and one eventually became a professional biologist. in the latter case it took a surprisingly short time (just one day spent looking for solitary wasps on a sandy hillside) to trigger the sudden interest that later became a life-long pursuit. discussion. although this unintentional study had minimal sample size, this is irrelevant, because even a single case proves a possibility. my experience clearly shows that hunting-like behavior can be developed by human children spontaneously in isolation from other hunters, even when it has no obvious adaptive value. the self-reinforcing habit of repeatedly visiting locations where successful hunts have taken place, even if such locations are not different in any perceivable way from the surrounding habitat, is often present in adult hunters. american birdwatchers refer to this self-reinforcement as the patagonia picnic table effect, after an unremarkable location in arizona that has produced many sightings of rare birds simply because it is frequently visited by birdwatchers (kaufman 196-197). during my conversations with tribal hunters from various ethnic groups (machigenga in peru, mbuti in drc, kichwa in ecuador) they acknowledged routinely using such search patterns, and even mentioned having traditional beliefs justifying it. mansi hunters of western siberia used an elaborate system of tree trunk markings to mark locations of successful hunts; it was prohibited to kill the same species at the same location, but hunting for other species in such places was encouraged (fedorova). spontaneous development of hunting-like behavior, although clearly not a universal trait in humans, is not unique, particularly rare, or abnormal. a case virtually identical to mine is famously described by durrell, also autobiographically. durrell initially developed such behavior in a very different social environment, but also in complete absence of possible role models. an informal survey of professional zoologists and amateur naturalists (n=25, excluding people who have grown up in the west or in postperestroika russia, where nature-themed books and tv documentaries were widely available) revealed that many of them have had similar early experiences, in many cases also clearly spontaneous and with very early onset. first manifesting avid interest in finding and catching small animals occurred at ages 3-5 (n=8) or 6-9 (n=7); later onset vladimir dinets -spontaneous development of hunting-like behavior in a juvenile human: a case study . 59 was reported only by two responders. this can happen to children of either sex. the behavior is contagious, although not all people are susceptible to such influence. after many years of accompanying me on my “hunts” and being very compassionate about my interest in wildlife, my mother still does not share it. on the other hand, my wife had no interest in wildlife whatsoever until meeting me at the age of 24, but quickly became infected, and is now a passionate wildlife photographer. under exterior influence, “hunting” tendencies can be manifested particularly early. my daughter became acutely interested in animals of all sizes at the age of 8 months, and started to enjoy looking for them in the forest at night at 12 months. at 18 months, animal names and sounds make up at least a half of her ~60-word vocabulary. if the tendency to hunt is innate, why doesn’t it spontaneously manifest itself in all humans? it is quite common for innate behaviors to be highly variable when they are no longer maintained by selective pressure. for example, domestic cows differ in their ability to defend calves from predators, with some individuals showing strong antipredatory response and others lacking it completely (flörcke et al.; flörcke and grandin). of particular interest is the evidence that the tendency to exhibit hunting-like behavior spontaneously is inheritable, possibly as a simple mendelian trait. it is very likely that i inherited it from my father, despite not meeting him in person and not knowing about his interest in collecting and studying insects until the age of 12. many zoologists and hunters have told me that some of their children fully shared their interest in wildlife, while others lacked it completely. but to further explore this possibility a rigorous study with larger sample size and well-defined criteria would be required. such a study would also be required to find out if there are any sex-related differences in exhibiting such traits. it is a common belief that males are more likely to possess them, and in many cultures hunting is a predominantly or exclusively male occupation; there are also important exceptions (goodman et al.; bird and bird), suggesting that the association of hunting and masculinity might be transmitted culturally rather than genetically. interestingly, although hunting is practiced predominantly by males in all chimpanzee cultures studied to date (stanford 1995), there are hunting methods practiced predominantly by females (pruetz and bertolani; pruetz et al.). my experience clearly shows that a “hunting instinct” is not synonymous with a “killing instinct.” i possess the former and not the latter. some people do have personality traits that have been called the “killer instinct,” “sadistic tendencies,” “murderous psychopathy,” etc. for example, certain hunters, particularly those who humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 60 practice “canned hunts” (shooting of animals in enclosures), derive more pleasure from killing animals than from chasing and finding them (bronner). indeed, it has been shown that animals killed by trophy hunters often serve as subconscious proxies for human males (dahles). some serial killers feel an uncontrollable urge to kill conspecifics (ressler and shachtman), while many other humans find killing others enjoyable (bourke). but the possible existence of a real “killer instinct” and its moral implications are outside the scope of the present paper. as for the “hunting instinct” in the narrow sense, its existence in some or even all humans does not justify unnecessary hunting (bekoff and jamieson). we now live in a world where the possibility of fully sustainable hunting is an exception rather than a rule, and have learned to follow that instinct in less destructive ways, such as birding, wildlife photography, and catch-and-release fishing. new substitutes for hunting, such as mammal-watching and recreational use of trail cameras, are being invented all the time and can be no less (arguably more) challenging and rewarding than “real” hunting (dinets 2015). the recent explosive popularity of pokemon go game, which allows players to hunt for virtual animals across a real terrain, shows how addictive such proxies can be, and how many people can enjoy hunting-like behavior despite being city dwellers completely isolated from natural environments. work of a field biologist is a particularly worthy alternative; even such a passionate hunter as darwin eventually realized that, for he recalls in his autobiography: “i discovered, though unconsciously and insensibly, that the pleasure of observing and reasoning was a much higher one than that of skill and sport.” a “hunting instinct” might be a part of human nature, but so is the ability to enjoy following our instincts in intelligent ways. acknowledgements. i thank my mother alla dinets, my late grandparents emilia dinets and rafail kaplan, and my grandaunt lora dinets for support and understanding; my late granduncle efim shvydkoi for general support and for providing access to monino study site; my father leonid kaabak for the allele that makes my life so interesting; all professional and amateur naturalists i have interviewed and my daughter sofia for help in data gathering; monique borgerhoff mulder and the anonymous reviewers for helpful critique. vladimir dinets -spontaneous development of hunting-like behavior in a juvenile human: a case study . 61 works cited ardrey, robert. african genesis: a personal investigation into the animal origins and nature of man. new york: atheneum, 1967. bekoff, marc, and dale jamieson. “sport hunting as an instinct: another evolutionary ‘just-so-story’?” environmental ethics 13 (1991): 375-378. bissell, steven j., mark damian, and kira c. young. “recent studies on hunting and fishing participation in the united states.” human dimensions of wildlife 3 (1998): 75-80. bird, rebecca b., and douglas w bird. “why women hunt: risk and contemporary foraging in a western desert aboriginal community.” current anthropology 49 (2008): 655-693. bird, rebecca b., brooke scelza, douglas w. bird, and eric alden smith. “the hierarchy of virtue: mutualism, altruism and signaling in martu women’s cooperative hunting.” evolution and human behavior 33 (2012): 64-78. bourke, joanna. an intimate history of killing: face to face killing in twentieth century warfare. new york: basic books, 1999. bronner, simon j. killing tradition: inside hunting and animal rights controversies. lexington: u p of kentucky, 2008. buckley, benjamin j. w., rosalie j. dench, helen c. morrogh-bernard, and david j. chivers. “meat-eating by a wild bornean orang-utan (pongo pygmaeus).” primates 56 (2015): 293-299. burenhult, göran. the first humans: human origins and history to 10,000 bc. vol. 1. san francisco: harper, 1993. burnet, james. of the origin and progress of language. london: mansell, 1773. caras, r. death as a way of life. boston: little, brown, 1970. causey, ann s. “on the morality of hunting.” environmental ethics 11 (1989): 327-343. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 62 cohen, jon. almost chimpanzee: redrawing the lines that separate us from them. new york: macmillan, 2010. collins, peter. “birth order, age, and hunting success in the canadian arctic.” human nature 20 (2009): 354-374. crittenden, alyssa n., nancy j. conklin-brittain, david a. zes, margaret j. schoeninger, and frank w. marlowe. “juvenile foraging among the hadza: implications for human life history.” evolution and human behavior 34 (2013): 299-304. dahles, heidi. “game killing and killing games: an anthropologist looking at hunting in a modern society.” society & animals 1 (1993): 169-184. darwin, charles. the autobiography of charles darwin 1809-1882. london: collins, 1958. dinets, vladimir. “surviving sites of european mink (mustela lutreola) in moscow region.” lutreola 6 (1995): 24-34. _____. peterson field guide to finding mammals in north america. boston: houghton mifflin harcourt, 2015. domínguez-rodrigo, manuel. “hunting and scavenging by early humans: the state of the debate.” journal of world prehistory 16 (2002): 1-54. durrell, gerald. my family and other animals. london: rupert hart-davis ltd., 1956. fedorova, elena g. система питания манси: взаимодействие исторических традиций [mansi foraging system: the interplay of historical traditions]. in историческое познание: традиции и новации. материалы международной теоретической конференции, ижевск, россия [historical studies: traditions and innovations. proceedings of the international theoretical conference, izhevsk, russia]. vol. 4. 23-46, 1993. flörcke, cornelia, terry e. engle, temple grandin, and mark j. deesing. “individual differences in calf defense patterns in red angus beef cows.” applied animal behaviour science 139 (2012): 203-208. vladimir dinets -spontaneous development of hunting-like behavior in a juvenile human: a case study . 63 flörcke, cornelia and temple grandin. “loss of anti-predator behaviors in cattle and the increased predation losses by wolves in the northern rocky mountains.” open journal of animal science 3 (2013): 248-253. goodman, madeleine j., p. bion griffin, agnes a. estioko-griffin, and john s. grove. “the compatibility of hunting and mothering among the agta hunter-gatherers of the philippines.” sex roles 12 (1985): 1199-1209. harding, robert s. o. and geza teleki. omnivorous primates: gathering and hunting in human evolution. new york: columbia up, 1981. hardus, madeleine e., adriano r. lameira, astri zulfa, and serge wich. “behavioral, ecological, and evolutionary aspects of meat-eating by sumatran orangutans (pongo abelii).” international journal of primatology 33 (2012): 287-304. hewlett, barry s., hillary n. fouts, adam h. boyette, and bonnie l. hewlett. “social learning among congo basin hunter-gatherers.” philosophical transactions of the royal society b: biological sciences 366 (2011): 1168-1178. hewlett, barry s. and michael e. lamb, eds. hunter-gatherer childhoods: evolutionary, developmental, and cultural perspectives. livingston, new jersey: transaction publishers, 2005. hohmann, gottfried, and barbara fruth. “culture in bonobos? between-species and within-species variation in behavior 1.” current anthropology 44 (2003): 563-571. jones, nicholas, g.b., kristen hawkes, and james f. o'connell. “why do hadza children forage?” uniting psychology and biology: integrative perspectives on human development. ed. nancy l. segal, glenn e. weisfeld and carol c. weisfeld. washington, dc: american psychological association, 1997. 279-313. kaufman, kenn. kingbird highway: the biggest year in the life of an extreme birder. boston: houghton mifflin harcourt, 2006. lee, richard b., and irven devore, ed. man the hunter. livingston, nj: transaction publishers, 1973. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 64 macdonald, katharine. “cross-cultural comparison of learning in human hunting.” human nature 18 (2007): 386-402. mcgrew, william c. the cultured chimpanzee: reflections on cultural primatology. cambridge up, 2004. newton-fisher, nicholas e. “chimpanzee hunting behavior.” handbook of paleoanthropology. ed. winfried henke and ian tattersall. berlin: springer, 2007. 12951320. nitecki, matthew h., and doris v. nitecki, ed. the evolution of human hunting. new york: springer, 1987. ortega y gasset, jose. meditations on hunting. belgrade, mt: wilderness adventures press, 2007. pickering, travis r. rough and tumble: aggression, hunting, and human evolution. berkeley: u of california p, 2013. pruetz, jill d., and paco bertolani. “savanna chimpanzees, pan troglodytes verus, hunt with tools.” current biology 17 (2007): 412-417. pruetz, jill d., p. bertolani, k. boyer ontl, s. lindshield, m. shelley, and e. g. wessling. “new evidence on the tool-assisted hunting exhibited by chimpanzees (pan troglodytes verus) in a savannah habitat at fongoli, sénégal.” royal society open science 2 (2015): 140507. rapaport, lisa g., and gillian r. brown. “social influences on foraging behavior in young nonhuman primates: learning what, where, and how to eat.” evolutionary anthropology: issues, news, and reviews 17 (2008): 189-201. ressler, robert k., and tom shachtman. whoever fights monsters: my twenty years tracking serial killers for the fbi. london: macmillan, 1993. shumaker, robert w., kristina r. walkup, and benjamin b. beck. animal tool behavior: the use and manufacture of tools by animals. baltimore, md: john hopkins up, 2011. vladimir dinets -spontaneous development of hunting-like behavior in a juvenile human: a case study . 65 stanford, craig b. “chimpanzee hunting behavior and human evolution.” american scientist 83 (1995): 256-261. _____. “the hunting ecology of wild chimpanzees: implications for the evolutionary ecology of pliocene hominids.” american anthropologist 98 (1996): 96-113. sussman, robert w. “the myth of man the hunter/man the killer and the evolution of human morality.” zygon 34 (1999): 453-471. walker, robert, kim hill, hillard kaplan, and garnett mcmillan. “age-dependency in hunting ability among the ache of eastern paraguay.” journal of human evolution 42 (2002): 639-657. woods, michael, robbie a. mcdonald, and stephen harris. “predation of wildlife by domestic cats felis catus in great britain.” mammal review 33 (2003): 174-188. wrangham, richard. “ape culture and missing links.” symbols (spring) (1995): 2-9. wrangham, richard, and dale peterson. demonic males: apes and the origins of human violence. boston, ma: houghton mifflin, 1996 microsoft word nash-mattfeld h u m a n i m a l i a 9:1 reviews richard nash the perfection of horse-manship monica mattfeld, becoming centaur. eighteenth-century masculinity and english horsemanship. university park, pa: penn state university press, 2016. 288 pp. $99.95 (hc). monica mattfield’s becoming centaur: eighteenth-century masculinity and english horsemanship will be a welcome addition to any library in early modern studies, and a valuable contribution to the fields of gender studies and animal studies. her careful and attentive study covers roughly the period from the interregnum in the mid-seventeenth century to the regency era at the end of the eighteenth century; and it is a credit to the originality of scholarship that one frequently finds (even if, like myself, one spends far too much time studying little known topics in the period) that her discussions both introduce the reader to new material and raise for the reader interesting lines of questions that we want to follow further in future work. the period richard nash-the perfection of horse-manship 187 under discussion, for instance, roughly a century-and-a-half is comparable to the length of the “automotive age.” consider how much has been said and written already (and how much more still could be said and written) about cars, trucks, and masculinity in this era. yet her topic of horsemanship and masculinity in the eighteenth century has been until now relatively untouched. that is perhaps partly owing to the fact that today, this deep into our own automotive age, we tend to think of horsemanship as a somewhat arcane performance on the cusp between sport and art; and it certainly is, and that is a very important — even central — feature of mattfield’s discussion. but that discussion is complemented and lent greater texture by her attention to the ways in which an emergent bourgeois culture adopted and adapted previous practices to new forms of cultural commodification. as important as these discussions are, they are also inextricably bound up with an equally significant contribution that this work makes to animal studies: thinking through identity performance beyond the species limit. the historical work mattfield does here nicely complements both social and economic histories that seek to tell the story of an animal within human culture, as well as those cultural histories that tell primarily a story of human history with an emphasis on the supporting role played by animals. between these two poles, mattfield’s work inclines more closely to the second, but as her title conveys, she is specifically interested throughout her study in attending to how a particular interspecies relational identity of “horseman” is performed. over the years, i have held several different “horseman’s licenses,” and have been supported by one of my favorite organizations, the horseman’s benevolent protection association (hbpa). and like many other members and licensees (though not nearly enough), i have considered it a great honor to have known some “real horsemen,” and i am hesitant to use the term too loosely (particularly in reference to myself), as it is — properly used — one of the ultimate accolades one can bestow on someone who works with horses. charlie whittingham was a horseman. oddly enough, while that honorific retains (at least for some of us) a very special set of associations, in my milieu of horse racing, those associations are about knowledge of, and care for, the health and training and well-being of the racehorse; and may have little or nothing to do with riding itself as an activity. i know excellent horsemen who do not ride. “horsemanship,” on the other hand has always been associated in mind with the act of riding, and more specifically, with what i think of as “equitation,” and the highly disciplined art of dressage, known in the early modern period as manège. while it is important to me personally as an entry point to mattfield’s argument, it is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 188 only a minor opening gambit in her study to underline the close connection and special relevance these two terms — “horseman” and “horsemanship” — enjoyed during the early modern era. nicholas morgan of crolane’s the perfection of horse-manship; drawne from nature, arte, and practise (1609) is now an exceedingly rare book, but it was in its time an important early articulation of the peculiar power encoded in this hybrid identity whose performance was constituted by forms of intimate knowledge that appear almost occult to the uninitiated. in my use and understanding, those forms of intimate knowledge have to do primarily with diagnostics, projection, and predictive understanding — a capacity that might seem uncanny to see what most do not, a practice built largely on sight and touch that can often detect what elude even the most sophisticated of current diagnostic technologies. for those more grounded (so to speak) in the arena of equitation, it has more to do with subtle communicative touch between leg and flank, or transmitted along a leather line between finger and mouth that join two bodies into a seamlessly connected, fully integrated whole. this is an identity that emerges through practice, beyond the limits of species and individuation; and it is a performative identity with a rich cultural history that mattfield’s book opens up for further exploration. william cavendish, created duke of newcastle at the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 was a colorful character and something of a prototype of seventeenth-century cavalier royalist. a courtier of the first two stuart monarchs, and one-time tutor to the young charles ii, he led royalist forces into battle (and defeat) at marston moor. remarkably self-conscious (perhaps even self-involved), newcastle’s cavalier identity was immensely important to him; and particularly during his period of exile following marston moor, he assiduously cultivated his reputation in europe as “the greatest expert of his age in the matter of horses” (24). and, as mattfield shows, for newcastle it was specifically horsemanship in the sense of equitation that mattered most to the carefully cultivated identity: “there is nothing of more use than a horse of manage; nor anything of more state, manliness or pleasure than riding” (22). we are used to thinking of “management” as a significant discipline (some might consider the most significant discipline) of knowledge, particularly in areas of politics and commerce. political and business management theory and practice are the cornerstones of professional activity in the modern era, but few are aware that our modern sense emerged from the early modern usage of “handling” cattle, particularly richard nash-the perfection of horse-manship 189 horses, that newcastle invokes here: “the action of controlling or manipulating a person, animal, etc.; the exercise of control” (oed). while it is easy today to see newcastle’s investment in his reputation for riding as an eccentric anachronism from a bygone era, there is considerably more to it than that, as mattfield shows. even among those to whom riding well matters today, his reputation still holds up well, in spite of vast ideological differences between his time and ours. our era is predominantly democratic in impulse, and we tend to privilege those whose theorizing of human-animal interactions privileges communicative exchange between collaborating partners. and it is possible to discern something like that message in newcastle’s actual practice, albeit with more difficulty in his published writings. but newcastle was deeply committed to an anti-democratic royalist ideology, and found ways to reconcile his riding practice to those beliefs. like so much elaborate analogical reasoning produced in the renaissance, newcastle’s thoughts on riding found resonance in a form of order that echoed throughout the creation — not just rider and horse, but in the domestic arena, the political arena, and the vast arena of the created world as well. all these relationships were hierarchical, but with reciprocal responsibilities, so horse, spouse, subject, and creature should all love, honor, and obey rider, husband, monarch, and creator, whose right conduct should equally compel fear and love, and command with firm and measured authority. ultimately, newcastle’s commitment to this ideology, which was, if anything, somewhat dated and anachronistic already in his time, develops into something more than is usual for his era. for newcastle, theorizing the role of horse and rider leads to a conception of riding well as a performance that enacts the ideal state. rather than monarch and subject as separate entities, one submissive to another, way gives in newcastle’s work to a model of a thoroughly integrated state in which the sovereign directs the subject as the mind directs the body — a single entity, greater than any of the parts. that is the essence of “becoming centaur.” this is not a theorizing of identity through the concept of the fully autonomous, individuated subject, but the resistance to that emergent political philosophy. riding well, for newcastle, who may be thought of as devoting his life to that activity, becomes a model for a performative identity more complex than we are used to associating with early modern political philosophy or human-animal interactions. in his own lifetime, newcastle’s commitment to the ideological practice of “becoming centaur” was already a reactionary ideological commitment to cavalier values that grew ever more dated, even as cavendish himself refined and perfected those commitments as active performance. what follows as mattfield traces the history of riding as humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 190 performance over the eighteenth century is an unfolding of a narrative both familiar and completely new. the transformation from aristocratic courtier culture to the modern world of bourgeois commerce; the emergence of new codes of masculinity, privileging “politeness” and sensibility, over anachronistic codes of honor and power; the appropriation of such performances for mass consumption, and the satiric checks that arose in response to push back against how such popularizations rendered only a corrupt, decadent imitation of lost ideals; these are all familiar stories. but the materials, forms, and social spaces that mattfield guides us through are new: the riding school of angelo’s academy, and the performance arena of astley’s amphitheater; the high art of joseph wright’s painting of polite masculinity, and the low ribald engravings that parody it; the performance of masculine style among the ton in hyde park, and henry bunbury’s satiric critique in the illustrated horsemanship guides of geoffrey gambado, esq; these are new materials to most scholars of the eighteenth century. and they add a new dimension to our understanding of how much the social codes of the modern era that emerged during that century owe to the definition of proper human-animal relations that provide the focus to becoming centaur. while the diligent reader will be able to uncover faults (at one point, it would seem that the hanoverian succession began with a william, rather than a george), their number are few, and easily outweighed by the new focus and fresh analysis mattfield brings to our understanding of the importance of horse-human relations in the eighteenth century. microsoft word bunyak-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:2 garrett bunyak will curiosity® kill the cat?: technoscience and free living cats “down under” eradicat® is a twenty-first century technoscientific implosion of kangaroo flesh, chicken fat, flavor enhancers, nationalist zeal, and sodium monoflouracetate. with the stated goal of protecting bird populations, toxic eradicat® sausages and the similar curiosity® bait are designed to kill free-living cats with poisons such as the synthetic compound 1080 (sodium monoflouracetate), a chemical offspring of world war ii developed in the united states in response to allied forces encountering rat-borne diseases (ward and spencer). justus ward, a pharmacologist for the u.s. government, quickly wrote in 1947 of “one of the most serious disadvantages of the poison” being that “dogs and cats are killed by eating sick or dead rodents killed by 1080” (1430). over the next several decades, partly in response to concern for endangered bird populations, compound 1080 would be weaponized to kill free living cats marked as “alien,” “invasive,” and “feral.” this genealogy of a contemporary war against cats traces changing relationships among colonists, cats, birds, and toxins, especially focusing on the increasing importance of technoscience in mediating these relationships in postcolonial australia and new zealand.1 the paper follows the accounts of scientists including biologists, naturalists, and ecologists to reveal legacies of colonialism, imperialism, and human exceptionalism that haunt and naturalize these lethal entanglements of scientists, kangaroo flesh, sentiments, poisons, birds, and cats. the “domestic wild cat” is paradoxical, but the irony reflects a situation that allows cats to be both loved as companions and exterminated as pests. in australia, for example, the free-living cat as a “feral,” “alien,” and “invasive” being is a threat to “natural” ecosystems. the cat as invasive species is marked for extermination and eradication. “invasive” and “alien” cats have not conformed to the acceptable spatial boundaries defined by people that increasingly define the “natural” location for domestic cats as indoors. although europeans released domestic cats in places such as australia and new zealand during colonization to control rodent populations, human exceptionalism propels scientific endeavors to continually intervene in ecosystems with little consideration of the unintended and ironic consequences of western rationality and “progress.” with these dynamics in mind, the history of human-felid entanglements is a useful story to examine the ongoing construction of “progress,” “rationality,” and “nature” with and through systems of representation and technoscience. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 204 this paper begins with a discussion of literature at the intersections of posthumanism, science and technology studies (sts), and animal studies before turning to a discussion of the use of genealogy as methodology. then, the history of human relationships with free-living cats in postcolonial australia and new zealand is read through accounts of historians, ecologists, and biologists, critically focusing on several contexts that have naturalized deadly human-felid entanglements in the twenty-first century. first, within the representations examined here, humans have been constructed as metaphysically superior to other species, especially by constructing “rationality” as a uniquely “human” characteristic. second, rationality is constructed as a means to control and master populations of cats and birds as well as entire ecosystems and is naturalized as a desirable social and scientific pursuit. third, science is represented as the ultimate mechanism for progressing towards more perfect control of the “domestic wild cats” considered here and “nature” more broadly. my analysis suggests practicing science to control ecosystems and “nature” is an unreasonable pursuit stained with legacies of colonialism, nationalism, and speciesism. the lethal consequences for non-human animals and indigenous people are discussed. most importantly, a science geared toward the control of the non-human world may be a greater threat to planetary wellbeing than many of the short-term problems science is working to solve. the current analysis extends interdisciplinary scholarship in sts through an historical examination of a particular scientific effort to control ecosystems and animal populations. posthumanism and human-cat entanglements. in many former colonies, historians suggest the domestic cat is a product of colonialism (faure and kitchener; koch et al.). european colonizers are said to have used cats to control pests onboard their ships and brought felids to their settlements (faure and kitchener). human-feline relations changed in the nineteenth century, according to katherine grier, as middle-class families in the united states began to consider “pet keeping” as a “morally purposive act” rather than a “personal indulgence” (2). companion animals began to be used to instruct children, especially young boys, regarding the virtues of “kindness and sympathy” to “create good men in a culture that worried a great deal about the nature of manhood itself” (19). colleen glenney boggs suggests these developments might be traced back to the pedagogy of john locke, specifically the idea that humane treatment of animals will ensure “human beings will treat each other with compassion” (140). boggs analyzes locke’s position, suggesting that although “locke’s emphasis is on the way human beings treat each other, his argument depends on the substitution of animals for human beings: being cruel to animals results in being cruel to other human beings; the two are garrett bunyak -will curiosity® kill the cat?: technoscience and free living cats “down under” 205 not separate from one another but, on the contrary, lie on a continuum” (ibid.). here, boggs lays the groundwork for a relational approach in which “we do not know — a priori or, for that matter, a posteriori — what or who ‘the animal’ or ‘the human’ is because such definitions emerge in a complex matrix of intimacies and representations; that is, they enable us to abandon the realm of ontological difference and locate us productively in the terrain of epistemological uncertainty” (188). boggs is able to focus her resulting literary analysis on investigating the historical construction of “humans” and “animals” in the works of emily dickinson, barbara bush, and edgar allen poe. in the west, the dominant construction of human-feline relationships is a humanist portrayal of a rational, responsible human “owner” and an instinctual “less than human” animal other (collard; bunyak). in this story, humans are granted reason, rights, and responsibilities including the responsibility to care for the companion animal other, presumably because the companion animal is less than human and lacks some allegedly unique human capacity (collard; cudworth). humans are often constituted in these representations as “caring” and “responsible” subjects, reifying longstanding notions of humans as stewards or caretakers of the more natural animal world. companion animal relationships have been important sites of analysis to examine the negotiation of the oft-critiqued human-animal and nature-culture binaries (haraway, companion species; haraway, when species meet; bunyak). as will be discussed below, the construction of felines as “less than human” family members also enables alternative constructions of cats as pests, ferals, and “invasives” because they are “othered” as less than human. humanist ways of thinking assume a metaphysically privileged human. as a result, animals are excluded from full political and ethical consideration and “refused speech, reason, morality, emotion, clothing, shelter, mourning, lying, lying about lying, gifting, laughing, crying — the list has no limit” (collard 40). for geographer rosemary collard, denying nonhuman animals status as subjects enables “multi-species dispossession on a grand and systematic scale” (36). often, humans are constructed as superior through recourse to an allegedly unique human capacity for “rational” thinking. the rational mind of the enlightenment, as philosopher david abram writes, “looks upon nature from a cool, detached position ostensibly outside of that nature” in pursuit of “its giddy dream of comprehending, and mastering, every aspect of the material cosmos” (108). as used here, humanism assumes “humans” possess a unique capacity for rational thought, despite the growing body of animal studies research that increasingly illustrates the ability of animals to solve problems, share material culture, and communicate using non-human languages (shew). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 206 the characterization of the human scientist as rationally pursuing knowledge is long exemplified throughout western science. for example, the nineteenth century physiologist claude bernard, known as the “prince of vivisectors,” disturbingly situates the rational scientist as detached from the material world as “he” works only in the realm of ideas, in the mind, when bernard writes, “the physiologist is not a man of the world, he is a scientist, a man caught and absorbed by a scientific idea…. he no longer hears the cries of the animals, no longer sees the flowing blood; he sees only his idea… he pursues with delight a nervous filament inside stinking and livid flesh that for any other person would be an object of disgust and horror” (103). bernard’s male scientist retreats from the stink of material reality to the mind, a realm of ideas, reason, and objectivity. in contrast to the detachment from experiments that continues to pervade scientific writings, activists read interspecies experimentation more critically. the american antivivisection society claims 24,564 cats were used in laboratories in 2012, and 9,272 cats were subjected to experiments which caused pain and distress. for some researchers, the domestic cat is considered an important tool in experimentation in neurology, ophthalmology, and immunodeficiency because “cat brains are the closest match we can find without resorting to people” (suzdaltsev). the aavs argues that often “research is extremely invasive, and almost always results in the euthanasia of the cats after they are subjected to grueling vivisection procedures.” in 2017, people for the ethical treatment of animals (peta) lambasted experiments at the university of wisconsin-madison because researchers “drill holes into cats’ skulls, implant electrodes in their brains, and implant steel coils in their eyes … cats are intentionally deafened and then killed.” in challenging the torture and killing of these animals for science, peta argues that “these cats are just as deserving of fulfilling lives and loving homes as the feline companions who purr on our laps” (1-2). notwithstanding outrage from animal rights groups, violent experiments on animals have led to the highest levels of recognition within science, including the nobel prize received by david hubel and torsten wiesel in 1981. part of hubel and wiesel’s awardwinning research involved the deprivation of kittens’ use of one eye by sewing the eye shut to examine the consequences of unilateral vision on the visual cortex in the brain. the suturing of kittens’ eyes resulted in blindness, but the research is said to have helped ophthalmologists to better develop protocols and recommendations for surgical treatment of diseases such as congenital cataracts. praise of hubel’s work in the field of neuroscience continued after his death in 2013 as evidenced by post-humous garrett bunyak -will curiosity® kill the cat?: technoscience and free living cats “down under” 207 commendation of him as “the man who developed our understandings of vision” that failed to acknowledge the terror and violence imposed on the felines that helped shape these discoveries (grzybowski and pietrzak). lavishing praise upon these scientists fuels a drive for continued growth and progress within the allegedly detached sciences. although animal experimentation and cruelty face increasing scrutiny in many circles, experiments such as those at wisconsin-madison suggest experimentation continues to abide by the logics of progress and human exceptionalism. despite metaphysically privileging the “human,” as boggs writes, “human exceptionalism ultimately does not protect human beings from abjection but enables abuse by creating a position of animality that is structurally opposed to humanity” (42). animality “collapses distinctions between humans and animals” because human beings can inhabit the “structural position” of animality (49). as boggs points out, early colonists “animalized” indigenous native americans as “beastlike,” excluding them from ethical consideration that may have prevented their eventual annihilation. just as humans can be “animalized” animals can also be “humanized,” as evidenced by the optimization of furry companion animal “family members” with and through contemporary veterinary medicine (bunyak). in deploying notions of an “animalized human” and “humanized animal,” boggs extends posthumanist work seeking to challenge and destabilize the binary categories of human-animal. with these dynamics in mind, erika cudworth suggests human exceptionalism has produced “disastrous consequences for many peoples and non-human life worlds” and advocates for conceptualizing ways “oppressions of human and non-human animals are intersected” (253). in response to longstanding intellectual recourse to humanist ways of knowing and being, scholars have deployed a posthumanist analytic to undertake several ontological moves, including extending ethical consideration and “subject status” to non-human lives and forms, destabilizing common sense understandings of the categories of human and animal, and rejecting a priori metaphysical privileging of humans2 (haraway, when species meet; boggs; cudworth; weston; puig de la bellacasa; frost; bunyak). in part, posthumanisms continue to destabilize the categories of “human” and “animal” and to encourage an examination of the processes that contribute to giving specific meaning and coherence to the notion of being either “human” or “animal.” yet, posthumanisms are concerned with more than meanings. as used here, posthumanism is concerned also with the ways meanings and discourses are constitutive of the embodied materialism and situatedness of being “animal” or “human” in lived social worlds. boggs points to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 208 this co-production in describing “animal representations” as “an interface where the literal and symbolic meet and unsettle the terrains of modern taxonimization” (189). the production of “nature” is also at stake with and through cultural processes, as posthumanisms emphasize the concept of “naturecultures” (haraway, when species meet; subramaniam). in her recent research on invasion biology, banu subramaniam rejects appeals to “nature” that make recourse to romanticized visions of an idyllic utopia before humans conquered and spoiled the wild. in contrast, subramaniam describes nature “as a concept, an idea, and a place that is co-produced through the interaction and entanglements of various organisms, histories, and geographies” (96). in deploying this definition, subramaniam rejects descriptions of “native” and “invasive” species as historically and culturally arbitrary, especially in a world with “profound human-induced movements of flora and fauna” (138). she aptly states, “whether we like it or not we are defining nature through our actions” (141). possums, for example, were released into new zealand by humans for the purposes of commercial exploitation, resulting in clear changes in new zealand ecologies as possums flourished in their new environments. annie potts points out possums are now widely represented in news reports, magazines, television, and children’s literature as “foreign invaders” that are “cute” but “lethal” (202). in deploying the language of invasion, possums are constructed as independently infiltrating new zealand’s borders when “the truth is they are as much victims of human colonization and exploitation as the native species of aotearoa” (224). potts suggests “the public dislike of possums … does not come ‘naturally.’ instead it must be programmed into children from an early age” (218). anti-possum sentiment fuels and naturalizes a figurative and literal war on possums. as potts points out, however, alternative stories of possums unsettle and denaturalize these relations by constructing possums as worthy of compassion and deserving of respect. the introduction of possums for commercial benefit and an eventual war on possums illustrates that interactions between humans and other species co-shape changing naturalcultural worlds. subramaniam goes on to suggest that “the invasive species ‘war’ reflects our continued ambivalence about immigration” and nationalist ideologies (120). she suggests “the battle against exotic and alien” flora and fauna maps onto broader anxieties about “economic, social, political, and cultural changes” (121). she continues: the categories of native and foreign are not useful. instead let us focus on ecological traits that cause change we find undesirable and on the causes garrett bunyak -will curiosity® kill the cat?: technoscience and free living cats “down under” 209 of these changes that we should be actually worried about — destruction of habitats, erosion of diversity, soil erosion, overdevelopment, monocultures, high input agriculture, pollution of air and water. and above all let us be clear that our choices are “human made” whether for economics, aesthetics, or enhancement of particular ecological characteristics like biodiversity, harmony, and species richness that humans have deemed important. (141) in situating humans as a part of, rather than detached from, nature, a posthumanist analytic is useful to contest and challenge anthropocentric efforts to control the nonhuman world and the related tropes of progress and reason. the liminal status of the “domestic wild cat.” archaeologists suggest cats began a commensal relationship with humans up to 12,000 years ago in the middle east alongside the development of agricultural societies in the fertile crescent (driscoll, macdonald, and o’brien; faure and kitchener). the storage of excess grains is said to have attracted mice and rodents, which in turn drew middle-eastern wildcats more closely to human villages. scientists point to the discovery of a cat buried alongside a human companion around 9,500 years ago in cyprus as some of the earliest evidence of a commensal relationship between the two species (driscoll et al.; faure and kitchener). the relationship is often represented as mutually beneficial because cats seemingly benefited from abundant food sources and humans benefited from the control of graineating rodents in “one of the more successful ‘biological experiments’ ever undertaken” (driscoll et al. 522). considering thousands of years of “evolution,” driscoll, macdonald, and o’brien suggest the most “notable adaptation is the cat’s overwhelming tolerance of people,” which “has made cats the delightful and flourishing profiteers in our homes that they are” (9977). at first glance many cats “profiteer” within human homes, but on closer inspection human-feline relations continue to be fraught with contradictions, contestations, and ambivalences. alongside driscoll’s optimistic evolutionary tale of furry pets living in safe health-promoting confines of the contemporary middle-class homes, jody berland writes “no animal in history has been so routinely murdered, tortured or massacred as the domestic cat” (434). these contradictory narratives are worth exploring in a little more detail. in the twentieth century, technological advances such as refrigeration and the invention of kitty litter are said to have laid the groundwork for a recent parade of cats into the confines of human homes in the second half of the century (robins). according to the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 210 australian companion animal council, 29% of australian homes “own” at least one cat and around 3.3 million are kept as pets in 2018. cats are even more popular in new zealand, as cats can be found playing and sleeping in 44% of homes and over eight out of ten cat owners in new zealand consider their pets to be a family member (new zealand companion animal council). the pet industry is booming — consumers spent 4.6 billion euros in the u.k. in 2016, 66.75 billion u.s. dollars in the united states in 2017, an estimated 8 billion australian dollars annually in australia, and nearly 1 billion new zealand dollars in new zealand each year (american pet products association; new zealand companion animal council). the optimization of companion animal well-being is a major goal of the western veterinary apparatus, as the responsibility of the owner to enhance the lives of companion animals fuels a growing pet industry (bunyak). the american association of feline practitioners (aafp) and american animal health association’s (aaha) “feline life stage guidelines” suggest veterinary medical teams should provide “recommendations for optimal health care for cats throughout the different life stages” (vogt, et al.). the aafp-aaha guidelines recommend a minimum of one annual wellness exam for feline companion animals. during wellness examinations, veterinarians are encouraged to discuss a range of technoscientific healthcare and behavioral management topics, including microchipping, medications, supplements, sterilization, body composition score, dental care, nutrition, feline weight, and vaccinations. alongside the expansion of a veterinary apparatus serving people, cats, and capital, it is important to additionally note that six to eight million cats and dogs enter shelters in the united states each year, and 3 million cats and dogs are killed each year in shelters alone, with about 80% of them healthy (humane society of the united states). in the u.s., six out of ten pet owners consider their pets a family member — yet their status outside of the position of humanity makes the bodies of unwanted cats killable. although the numbers are less imposing, thousands of cats and dogs are killed by rspca australia annually (rspca australia). part of the justification for the destruction of “domestic wild cats” is that, in many scientific discourses, cats’ lives are marked as “invasive” and “alien,” and this has deadly consequences. as will be discussed, free-living cats across australia are annihilated with and through science at the same time as humans pamper their indoor companions. before discussing this dynamic further, i next outline key components of the genealogical analysis that ground the method used in this essay. garrett bunyak -will curiosity® kill the cat?: technoscience and free living cats “down under” 211 genealogical analysis. for michel foucault, genealogy attempts “to desubjugate historical knowledges, to set them free, or in other words to enable them to oppose and struggle against the coercion of a unitary, formal, and scientific theoretical discourse” (10). in other words, genealogy is a method that seeks to reveal the resistance, struggle, and messiness that is smoothed over and obscured within discourses of science, progress, and reason. genealogy shows that “power creates illusions” by “deciphering,” “outwitting the ruse,” and reclaiming “knowledge that has been distorted or buried” (foucault, 72). anthony hatch describes the foucauldian methodology: genealogy … traces the emergence and descent of technologies and practices used to produce discourses about the body and the political contexts through which these elements are constructed as self-evident, natural, and universal. genealogy is also a form of political critique that diagnoses how such discourses, practices, and technologies are embedded in and rationalize unequal power arrangements. the intellectual and political intent of genealogy, therefore, is to contest discourses that are used to instantiate, enable, and support repressive and/or productive forms of modern social power by showing how those discourses have determined (in a limited way) what constitutes our present understanding of ourselves, our social world, and the social relationships therein. (12) technoscience, in the approach used here, encompasses assemblages of animals, persons, knowledges, instruments, and scientific representations that are organized by certain, historically specific social goals (rose). with this in mind, genealogy enables an examination of the discourses that legitimize the exercise of power, knowledge, and domination in contemporary efforts to eradicate free-living cats in australia. the analysis pays particular attention to the historical narratives of reason and progress used to legitimize and promote the eradication of felids through increasingly advanced technoscientific instruments, such as eradicat® and curiosity® baits. as will be discussed, certain scientific discourses clearly legitimize and naturalize unequal power relations within and between species, and these dynamics are shown to be in flux. in this genealogy, the relationship between discourse and materiality is conceptualized as co-constituted, as suggested by donna haraway in writing of a process whereby “the imaginary and the real figure each other in concrete fact” (modest witness 2). in this case, the scientific mission to control feral cat populations loops back to shape ecologies based on changing social notions of the way “nature” should be, even as other species resist scientific interventions. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 212 every genealogy is limited in scope. this paper focuses on the critiques the posthumanist analytic offers in relation to humanist ways of thinking to reveal the colonialist and human exceptionalist legacies that pervade the examined scientific representations through tropes of progress and reason. the data for this analysis are mostly collected from scientific journals in fields including ecology and biology. data were also collected from more widely distributed and accessible popular news reports and articles, including several written by academics. data collection and analysis were simultaneous and continuous throughout the research process, as new data often pointed the author towards novel and interesting developments related to the history of the project of controlling feral cat populations. as discussed below, cat eradication efforts are intertwined with concerns regarding apparent declining bird and mammal populations. as used here, the genealogical method is not suited to adjudicate the tensions between the desire to protect threatened species with the desire for the “humane” treatment of cats or any other animals. the intention here is to examine the ways these scientific discourses are co-shaped alongside continually changing naturecultures, especially focusing on the production of inequities within and between species, as well as the known and unknown consequences of scientific efforts to control and master the material world. cats, birds, and the rational human. in australia, the domestic cat is now considered a major threat to “native” ecologies and “local” fauna. the federal government approved a five-year plan in 2015 with a budget of $4 million dollars to kill free-living cats (commonwealth of australia). the domestic cat was brought to australia and new zealand by european settlers during colonization throughout the eighteenthand nineteenth centuries, probably to assist humans in the control of rodent populations (faure and kitchener; koch et al.; cushing and markwell). at first glance, the transport of cats for purposes of pest control or companionship may appear “rational,” but with the benefit of hindsight this action is problematized by considering the eventual ecological consequences and ultimately the rise of an entire scientific apparatus aimed at destroying the very cats europeans brought with them as colonists. the first irony in the history of efforts to eradicate free-living cats for ecological and aesthetic purposes is that these cats were originally brought by colonists to control other animals for these very purposes. the actions of these humans represent an aspect of human exceptionalism, because the forced transport of felids assumes a human privilege to master and control non-human others, at least for the “humanized” british immigrants that leveraged the predatory abilities of felines to control rodent populations. garrett bunyak -will curiosity® kill the cat?: technoscience and free living cats “down under” 213 indigenous peoples were not afforded the same “humanized” status as aileen moretonrobinson describes the situation in australia: the first wave of invading white british immigrants landed on our shores in 1788. they claimed the land under the legal fiction of terra nullius — land belonging to no one — and systematically dispossessed, murdered, raped and incarcerated the original owners on cattle stations, missions and reserves. in all these contexts the lives of indigenous people were controlled by white people sanctioned by the same system of law that enabled dispossession. (24) indigenous people were “animalized” in order to justify their rape, murder, and abuse. flogging, for example, was justified “on the basis of the supposed animality of the native, and the attendant belief that the savage was closer to nature, possessed a stronger tolerance to pain, and therefore a denser corporality that beckoned harsher measures” (wadiwel 49). as a pastoralist reportedly suggested, “a native had a hide, and not an ordinary skin like human beings” (hasluck 193). the “rational human” during colonization was precisely a white european man, as even the companion feline invaders were in some cases treated better than indigenous people by the colonizers in these years. as colonists invaded, “native, non-human animals” were often “disparaged as unproductive and unpalatable oddities, killed as competitors to introduced species, or harvested as a source of fur and feathers for export,” and british colonists also engaged in keeping and commodifying “native” australian mammals and birds as “pets” including “the grass or shell parakeet, cockatoos, rosellas, lorikeets, and cockatiels” (cushing and markwell 592, 596). during these times, colonists introduced many species to australia and new zealand. historian thomas dunlap describes the “perverse” “ecological imperialism” of the “european biological invasion” that occurred as colonists introduced dozens of european grasses, mammals, birds, shrubs and trees, as they “cut down forests, plowed prairies, and killed the native animals” (304; franklin). for colonists in the early years, “even the birds, which a later generation would find beautiful and melodious, seemed deficient” (307). as described by historian brett stubbs in “from ‘useless brutes’ to national treasures,” by the late nineteenth century, the ambivalent relation to “native” fauna in australia began to give way to discourses stressing protection of “native species.” ecological, nationalistic, and aesthetic desires including the “contribution of birds in the control of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 214 insect pests and a desire to protect beautiful and harmless species” drove changes in attitudes (stubbs; cushing and markwell 604; franklin). however, cushing and markwell suggest broad recognition of the “inherent value of native fauna as living creatures and the grave wrong of allowing those who were unique to australia to become extinct” (604) did not occur until the early twentieth century. the “rise of nationalism and a growing identification with native nature” in the early twentieth century fostered greater appreciation for “native” fauna and a novel “myth of a new nation forged from the people’s struggle with the ‘bush’” (dunlap 318; robin). as independence from britain increased, adrian franklin suggests, “nativeness was to be associated positively with the emergent nation and privileged over the introduced species … the acclimatized ‘foreigner’ animals could be cast as endangering true australian wildlife” (15). consequently, cats increasingly became a concern of scientists in the early and mid-twentieth century. science would eventually become the dominant means to control free-living cats that had flourished in australian ecosystems. by the turn of the twenty-first century, “eco-nationalism” became a dominant discourse in australian environmentalism (smith; franklin). eco-nationalism stresses a romantic ideal of nature that is uninterrupted by the destructive forces of human culture, and suggests that nature must be cleansed through the eradication of “invasive species,” including feral cats. in this view, both ecologies and nations are managed based on notions of belonging that construct a dangerous “other” that is always waiting to invade, destroy, undermine, and threaten those that belong within a nation’s borders. a related metaphor of war or invasion produces a state of exception that seeks to legitimize the protection of the nation from threatening “others” using any available methods, including border control, species cleansing, imprisonment, quarantine, and eradication. nicholas smith points to the power of invasive species discourses by noting that, in 1996, “west australian liberal member of parliament richard evans called for the eradication of all feral, stray and domestic cats in australia by 2020” (288). cats were reported as preying on birds as early as 1886, as naturalist andreas reischek wrote of the stitch bird of new zealand’s little barrier island, “these rare birds will soon disappear, even from these lonely wilds, owing to the domestic wild cats, which are very numerous, and commit great havoc on them” (87; cheeseman). ironically, in the same year the new south wales government “freighted four hundred cats by rail” as part of a broader strategy of releasing “thousands of domestic cats to combat the millions of rabbits threatening to destroy australia’s farming and grazing industry” garrett bunyak -will curiosity® kill the cat?: technoscience and free living cats “down under” 215 (smith 296). as cultural attitudes increasingly emphasized the value of “native nature,” the cat would increasingly become a target of scientific and rhetorical wrath. don merton, a famed conservation biologist, suggests that several natural historians observed cats killing considerable numbers of bird species in the kermadic islands, located northeast of new zealand, around the turn of the twentieth century, perhaps resulting in the extinction of the kermadec parekeet and a “large indigenous fruit pigeon” (151). zoologist evan turbott documents several efforts to destroy free-ranging populations of the domestic cat on little barrier island as early as 1896 when “at least twenty cats were destroyed,” and during the 1930s when “approximately 360 wild cats were confirmed as destroyed” (99). despite these efforts, cats remained “in considerable numbers on all parts of the island in spite of vigorous efforts to destroy them by both shooting and trapping” (ibid.). the extent that the early twentieth century efforts to eliminate free-living cats was associated with concerns related to bird populations in these local contexts is unclear, but does appear likely, especially in the context of rising concerns related to the protection of “native” species (dunlap; stubbs; lloyd; franklin). following wwii, technoscience became increasingly central to the management of these antipodean environments and attempts to expand the reach of anthropocentric control to entire island ecologies (dunlap). by the 1970’s, feral cats were garnering widespread association with declining populations of native birds in australia and new zealand as eradication efforts became clearly linked to concern for bird populations within the biological and ecological sciences. (merton, “kermadic islands”; dilks; karl and best). in 1978, merton claimed that “fifteen biologically-important islands in the new zealand region have been colonized by domestic cats; these predators are implicated in the extinction of at least 6 endemic new zealand birds, as well as some 70 local extinctions” (“controlling” 123). the source of merton’s data is unclear, but he responds to these circumstances by suggesting that “alien” species should be eradicated using “all available resources and all ecologically-acceptable means” (“controlling” 127). scientists increasingly began to suggest removal of free-living cats as necessary to the survival and revival of indigenous bird species. by 1978, merton suggests the hunting and trapping of freeliving cats had eradicated the species from four islands, and additional extermination programs were in place on two additional islands. in fact, merton points to increasing investment in eradication efforts, including a recent “large scale and long-term program of cat extermination using a combination of viral disease, trapping, poisoning, and hunting with dogs” (“controlling” 124). as free-living cat populations came to be humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 216 increasingly identified as a social problem, scientists helped to shape a sprawling institutionalized apparatus aimed at destroying these animals. in his 1978 recommendations for controlling “alien” species merton contrasts the rational methods of science with the emotions of a potentially critical public, as he writes “sound planning, including biological, political, social, financial, and logistic considerations, is crucial. furthermore, field operations must always be preceded by thoughtfully-presented public relations programs in order to enlist public support and reduce emotional and misinformed criticism” (“controlling” 127). by the 1970s, the annihilation of feral cats was taken as given for the rationally-minded scientist and sensible citizen, all arguments in opposition to this position were marked as “emotional” and “misinformed.” this recourse to rationality is reminiscent of claude bernard’s justification for an objective detachment from his gory experimentation on animal bodies. scientific accounts of cats as “alien” species deploy a detachment in their writing in describing the killing of dozens of cats as an “aerial baiting campaign” that “was responsible for the removal of at least 90% of the cats” (algar et al. 139). just as early colonists appealed to reason to justify the transport of cats to control rodent populations, post wwii ecologists and biologists appealed to rationality to justify their role in the killing and torture of cats. as colonists brought cats to control rodent populations, they were seemingly unconcerned with the possible consequences of the invasion into new territories for local flora and fauna, just as colonists acted brutally towards indigenous peoples such as “beastlike” american indians (boggs). in the nineteenth century, on the one hand, cats were “humanized” as popular vehicles for lockean moral pedagogy in the west that assumed compassionate treatment of animals would result in compassionate treatment of people. on the other hand, indigenous people were “animalized” to justify their rape and murder. as time passed, colonial cats in australia and new zealand were also “animalized” as “wild,” “feral,” “invasive,” and “alien,” partly reflecting ways nationalisms and “nature” intersected (merton, “controlling”; lowe et al.; robin). the subsequent treatment of these distinct groups aside, both the “humanized” and “animalized” cat, as well as the “animalized” aboriginal peoples, are constructed as less than human. in other words, the “human” is constructed as metaphysically superior to the “animal,” reflecting human exceptionalist sensibilities that asymmetrically shape contemporary animalized bodies in part by constructing some bodies as rational and garrett bunyak -will curiosity® kill the cat?: technoscience and free living cats “down under” 217 reasonable and others as emotional, illogical, misinformed, mindless, alien and beastlike. mastering nature. in 1970, don merton described “raoul island” as “biologically a great disappointment because the arrival of goats, cats, and more recently, norway rats … has caused dramatic changes to the island’s ecology” (“kermadic islands” 151). in merton’s account, the introduction of cats and rats by humans has thrown “nature” out of sorts, resulting in deleterious consequences. as a result, merton refers to the cats as “alien” species that threaten “indigenous species” (“controlling”). recent popular articles including titles such as “the war on feral cats will need many different weapons” (moseby and read) and “feral cats kill billions of small critters each year” (nuwer) deploy similar language to suggest cats are a threat to “native” species, echoing nationalist and anti-immigration discourses (subramaniam). as sociologist adrian franklin points out, the goal of ecology in matching the right organisms to an ecosystem reflects nationalistic policies that seek to match “the right people to the right territory” (17). by claiming “nature” is out of equilibrium, invasive species and antiimmigration discourses legitimize scientific and political intervention geared towards reconstructing ecosystems and societies based on changing cultural beliefs about who belongs in nature and nation. research in the 1970s and 1980s examined cat scat and revealed diets consisting primarily of rats (dilks; karl and best). p.j. dilks wrote of the limited bird remains found in cat scat, “except for one seabird, all of the vertebrate prey identified were species introduced to the island, and this reflects the present-day scarcity of indigenous species formerly found there” (65). discussing the depleted stock of indigenous species, he continues, “feral cats are only one of the factors involved but their removal might allow the rehabilitation of some bird species” (66). elimination of cats was controversial, in part because large rat populations also threatened bird populations by eating bird eggs and competing with birds for prey. since rats were the primary food source for cats, the removal of cats could plausibly result in further hardship for bird populations. as karl and best stated simply, “removing cats from an island may allow the rat population to increase, which in turn might be detrimental to birdlife” (291). however, despite finding the remains of the flightless kakapo in only 5.1% of cat scat samples on stewart island in new zealand, karl and best suggest the kakapo’s chances of survival would probably “only be assured in a predator-free environment” (292). the more cautious language of dilks relative to merton’s call for eradication suggests at least some scientific controversy regarding the most effective way for humans to manage these island ecosystems, especially in relation to free-living cat populations. as time humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 218 passed, the language of invasion, crisis, and eradication became the norm, as an entire scientific apparatus came to wage a figurative and literal war on free-living cats. felines were no longer welcome in the “nature” science had in mind. by 1985, free-living cats had reportedly been eliminated from eight islands in new zealand as eradication efforts were increasingly “naturalized” as common sense (rauzon 2). evidence of any actual risks cats pose to australian and new zealand ecologies were unimportant within the metaphors of invasion and war. in fact, habitat destruction for human purposes is now widely considered a greater threat to indigenous species than introduced species, and the evidence that feral cats are the primary cause of declines in culturally valued species is questionable (smith; franklin). scientific accounts of these complex ecologies largely situate humans outside of these more “natural” processes. despite the fact that europeans literally brought these now loathed domestic cats to these ecosystems, scientists are portrayed as detached rational puppet masters making decisions based on scientific facts. simply considering the colonial legacy of the cat suggests the importance of situating the human within these ecological systems, rather than as a detached observer capable of mastering nature. instead, science might benefit from acknowledging the role of humans in continually making nature, or as dunlap writes “remaking the land” (303). however, confronted with the unwillingness of other species and ecologies to meet desires for a precisely organized scientific dreamworld, science slogged forward in pursuit of progress towards the ultimate goal of mastering nature. technoscience, progress and poison. domestic cats are now classified as one of the world’s “100 worst invasive alien species” (lowe et al.). in 2013, loss and colleagues concluded that domestic cats kill 1.3-4.0 billion birds and 6.3-22.3 billion mammals in the united states annually — making domestic cats the largest source of human driven mortality of u.s. birds and mammals, as concern over feral cat populations articulates to new geographies. they acknowledge that the majority of the predation is the result of stray and feral cats, but that house cats are killers as well. the results of their work appeared in popular news media reports such as a smithsonian publication (nuwer). the classification of cats as “invasive species” has produced deadly relationships between felines and technoscience, as various contemporary efforts to eradicate domestic cats have unfolded in these constructions. eradication efforts are now aided by technoscientific baiting strategies, including the use of patented poisonous baits such as eradicat® and curiosity®. as conservation scientist david algar and colleagues describe in 2010, “eradicat® is similar to a chipolata sausage,… the bait is composed of garrett bunyak -will curiosity® kill the cat?: technoscience and free living cats “down under” 219 70% kangaroo meat mince, 20% chicken fat and 10% digest and flavor enhancers” (134). compound 1080 (sodium monoflouracetate) is injected into the kangaroo sausage to kill domestic cats if they bite into the delicious fat-oozing concoction. 1080 is the offspring of the u.s. office of scientific research and development, directed during world war ii by vannevar bush (ward). bush provides an exemplary trope glorifying science in a letter to the president, writing science offers a largely unexplored hinterland for the pioneer who has the tools for his task. the rewards of such exploration both for the nation and the individual are great. scientific progress is one essential key to our security as a nation, to our better health, to more jobs, to a higher standard of living, and to our cultural progress. (vi) for bush, science is a limitless frontier of possibilities and progress. in extending enlightenment visions of reason and progress, bush’s vision of science mirrors the work of colonial “pioneers” as they confronted “new and unexplored” lands and took “control” to develop the nation of australia, according to popular discourses on british migrancy (moreton-robinson). as history illustrates, many ways of being and relating have been destroyed by western progress narratives, as new “modernized” ways of being and relating have opened up for a small group of elite “humans.” further, the costs of speciesism and colonialism have included the aforementioned raping and murdering of indigenous peoples and mass killing of animals. in efforts to control freeliving cat populations, scientists have continued to trust a similar narrative that continued innovation and progress will eventually resolve the complex ecological and social problems they confront. interspecies chemical warfare illustrates this faith, but marginalized bodies continually resist technoscientific desires. compound 1080 was tested in new zealand as early as 1957 and was widely used after 1957 to control rabbits and possums (rammell and fleming). by 1978, 1080 was being used to poison cats in new zealand primarily using fish baits (veitch). from the late 1970s through 2000, compound 1080 was used to destroy cats on islands in new zealand, russia, seychelles, mexico, great britain, and australia, including matakohe, marion, fregate, denis, little barrier, isabela, long cay, gabo, hermite, and macquarie (nogales, et al.). in 1992, a dry pellet bait capable of remaining “palatable” to cats for over two weeks was tested as an improvement over the use of fresh fish (eason et al.). the baits, including the polymer technology produced by dupont, were determined to be a “high quality, highly palatable long-life bait,” as the authors express hope “that these will become commercially available in the near future” (375). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 220 then, in 1993, scientists associated with the western australian department of conservation and land management (calm) began efforts to design “a bait medium that was attractive to feral cats, capable of carrying a toxin, relatively easy and cheaply manufactured and could be deployed aerially over broadscale areas” (algar and burrows 134). after experimentation, kangaroo meat was determined to be a tasty lure for free-living cats, but technical problems with procuring uniform chunks of the meat led the team to turn to flesh in the form of sausage. the sausage was injected with 1080 to produce the lethal and “palatable” morsel. the design and development of the bait that came to be known as eradicat® was “essentially completed in 1999” (algar and burrows 134) and resulted in an application for a patent in 2001 (patent no. au13682/01). since the development of eradicat®, the bait has been used in many experiments, as well as contributing to the larger mission to eradicate cats from island ecosystems (algar et al.; algar, angus, and onus; commonwealth of australia). before deploying the tasty but deadly concoction of modern science in the mission of eradicating a population, the bait typically requires an application of coopex® to repel ants from degrading the deployed bait (algar and burrows). finally, the baits are typically dropped from aircraft. the 2015 threat abatement plan published by the commonwealth of australia considers 1080 baits “a critical tool for the effective control of feral cats” (15). yet, the use of these baits is controversial for a variety of reasons, including the potential of 1080 to poison “native” species, create unknown changes in ecologies, and enter into water supplies to perhaps eventually be consumed by humans (suren; sherley). further, resistant scientists have argued that the use of 1080 is considered “inhumane” (commonwealth of australia 15), as mcleod and sanders have shown that death from 1080 takes 4 to 24 hours and is caused typically by ventricular fibrillation or depression of the respiratory system (see also sherley). australian statistician clive marks tragically recounts 1080 testing he conducted in pursuit of more humane ways to manage feral cats: ‘look,’ i said and pricked the cat’s leg with the probe once again, ‘it responds to painful stimuli,’ and on cue the cat twisted about and pawed unsteadily at the place where it had felt the pinprick. it fell once again upon its side and convulsed in turgid spasms and then stiffened, relaxed then stiffened again as it slowly rolled onto its back and cried until too paralyzed to vocalize…. this should not happen. reams had been written and careers built upon fragile facts. according to the government websites carnivores do not suffer when they are poisoned with 1080. yet, in truth, garrett bunyak -will curiosity® kill the cat?: technoscience and free living cats “down under” 221 very few had ever seen the outcomes of using this poison on cats. we all knew that this was because no one really wanted to see. (55) marks’s emotional reporting of collecting data as cats’ lives slip away in experiments using 1080 unsettles the notion that the scientist must be detached from recognizing the sentience and worth of nonhuman lives. although the efficacy, safety, ecological effects, and morality of 1080 baiting is a topic of scientific debate, the use of the poison continues with variable levels of resistance in australia and new zealand. ecologists katherine moseby and john read write in support of the eradication efforts of the australian government and the stated goal to kill two million cats by 2020. arian wallach and daniel ramp, scientists at the university of technology sydney, respond to moseby and read’s support of cat eradication by arguing for accepting feline “immigrants as australian citizens” in a call to reduce the suffering of cats (3). wallach and ramp challenge the notion that eliminating cats will lead to the ecological effects eradication proponents desire, suggesting instead that cats are now deeply entangled in complex ecosystems and removing them “will not be a clean and painless surgery, and it will not heal the patient” (2). the 2015 threat abatement plan of the commonwealth of australia describes “humane” methods of eradicating free-living cats, including properly executed “shooting,” “trapping,” and “baiting.” reflecting continued faith in science and technology to solve any social and ecological problem, the document describes possibilities of “fertility control” including hypothetical “immunocontraceptive vaccines” and “novel gene drive technologies” (16). the document does not discuss in any detail trap-neuter-return (tnr) as a strategy for feline population management, despite an increase in laws requiring mandatory “de-sexing” for companion animals and widespread availability of “humane” de-sexing technologies (peta, “desexing”). as susan mchugh points out, however, spay/neuter technologies emerged as an afterthought of eugenic practices in the early twentieth century, and have similarly been used primarily to serve “human self-interests”3 (116). in the u.s., the efficacy of tnr is a popular research topic for scientists concerned with managing free-living feline populations (levy et al.; longcore et al.). the lack of interest in tnr in australia and new zealand likely relates to cats being in remote, inaccessible areas, making them nearly impossible to trap. nonetheless, the development of eradicat®, curiosity®, and hypothetical antidotes, immunocontraceptive vaccines, and gene-drive technologies humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 222 serve the needs and desires of both scientists and financiers — prestige and profit, rationality and progress, life and death are all on the line. the implosion of the eradicat® bait reflects the troubling assumption that humans can control and master “nature,” and reflects the emergence of a scientific mission to destroy free-living cat populations. millions of dollars, countless hours of research, and hundreds of journal publications are related to the control of feral cat populations. in response to the threats 1080 poses to companion pets, the invasive animals cooperative research centre began conducting research and development in 2015 on an antidote to toxins used in eradication efforts “for use with accidental poisoning of working and pet dogs” (commonwealth of australia). eradicat® and curiosity® have not killed the cat populations in australia, but scientists continue pursuit of new artifacts such as robotic grooming traps that use machine learning to spray 1080 laced gels onto the fur of feline passersby so that cats ingest the poison as they groom their fur (read et al.). cats have refused to cooperate with the imperatives of colonists and scientists — cats breed, kill, escape, and survive, despite the heavy artillery deployed to end feline lives. resistant scientists, citizens, and activists struggle against the ever more sophisticated technologies that are explicitly designed to end some lives so that others might live. since nonhumans fall outside of the purview of humanity, they are ever subject to the whims of science, capital, and human interest as knowledges are forged, resisted and changed regarding which nonhumans should be allowed to live and which will be targets of eradication. european disdain for indigenous australian animals fueled major declines in populations in the early years of colonization, whereas today scientists aim to foster these self-same populations in an invasive species war. ending progress. by deploying a posthumanist analytic and genealogical method, the history of the “domestic wild cats” of australia and new zealand has been put in relation to narratives of growth and progress, scientific hubris, rationality, speciesism, and colonialism. in many ways, this history is a microcosm of the legacy of enlightenment rationality within contemporary technoscience. from colonial expansion to the twenty-first century, curiosity® bait, and novel robotic grooming traps, human exceptionalism is firmly embedded within technoscientific entanglements of kangaroos, instruments, cats, persons, birds, and discourses. human exceptionalism is a critical assumption of biopolitics and thanatopolitics because both people and animals can be “animalized” to legitimize death, torture, and interspecies war. colonists and scientists sought to control their environment over the course of this history, deploying an ability to think “rationally” to solve particular problems at particular moments in time. this garrett bunyak -will curiosity® kill the cat?: technoscience and free living cats “down under” 223 long arduous pursuit of progress has continuously wrought unforeseen consequences, including the possible extinction of many birds and killing of millions of free-living cats. “non-humans” have continually refused the desires of colonists and technoscience. technoscientific efforts to control and master environments are an enormous failure if judged in relation to the broad consequences of anthropocentric growth and progress, including climate change, water shortages, pollution, deforestation, extinctions, and soil erosion (haraway, staying; weston; puig de la bellacasa; frost). ironically, many innovations aimed at addressing the human-made environmental devastation have wrought additional pollution, production, consumption, resource extraction, mass killings, and ecological crisis. kath weston suggests that we are intimately entangled with a world in which our “finest technological achievements are implicated in habitat destruction” (10). she points to historically located intimacies people experience within a web of life, and stresses the need for a way out of the endless pursuit of profit, progress, and growth so often guised under the cloak of “rationality.” she likens this tireless pursuit to the “dreamworld of the calculus” “with a boundary that logically and relentlessly approaches but cannot be breached through visceral experience” (179). as emotional attachment to the co-constituted pleasures, tropes, and routines of late capitalism “seduce people into participating in their own demise, often in the guise of working against it,” she urgently calls for a recognition that, unlike the calculus, “organisms, ecologies, ‘resources’ — all these have their limits” (194). the metaphor of war fosters emotional attachments to a mission to control ecosystems and eradicate invasive species. in naturalizing literal wars on animals including cats, possums, rats, and stoats, a state of exception fuels sentiments that prevent scientists and citizens from empathizing with the pain and suffering of the animals that are tortured and killed. under threat of invasion and war, science must spare no cost and take any risk to eliminate the menacing “other.” when science is governed by the demands of war, lethal and toxic discourses and artifacts are brought into being. as enemy species are attacked with all the toxic weapons science can assemble, the processes of overconsumption, deforestation, desertification, pollution, economic expansion, habitat destruction, and urban sprawl not only are obscured by the more immediate needs of war, but the war also further fuels corporate profits. these invasive species wars, for example, are justified based on economic benefits in programs such as the new zealand government’s predator free 2050 campaign. technosciences shaped primarily by nationalist, aesthetic, economic, and speciesist desires currently fuel environmental ruin. how can science empathize with the pain of the nonhuman and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 224 recognize the destruction wrought by dreams of mastering nature in the interest of financial profit? how can knowledge be used to shape worlds without mobilizing a rhetoric of war to suggest that some lives are more valuable than others? the same scientific discourses that have fostered today’s problems should not be allowed to try to innovate a way out of the trouble using the same assumptions and progress narratives that have caused a mess in the first place. the actions, knowledges, and desires of bodies excluded from the status of “humanity” provide leadership in challenging the power of rational technoscience and calling forth worlds shaped by hopes of shared pleasures, intersubjectivity, mutual respect, and cross-species care. although many aboriginal peoples have historically been animalized and excluded from participation in the progress narratives of technoscience, aborigines offer other ways of thinking and relating with nonhuman animals that challenge a metaphysics of human superiority. adrian franklin suggests aborigines have ironically come to embrace introduced species such as feral cats as beings that now belong within a “natural world” that “does not exist as a separable world, beyond and different from the human world” (167). he continues, “unlike the scientist, they do not deal in absolute categories, classifications, boundaries pure and impure but in the messiness of life itself, in the complex way real life confounds the possibility of such a neat and ordered world” (167). scientific efforts to order the world in its own image seek to cleanse landscapes of those bodies that supposedly do not belong. in contrast, although some animals were once strangers “to the country,” aborigines most frequently suggest cats belong in the “country” and even consider cats as “native animals” (173). although the diversity of aboriginal peoples’ ways of thinking should not be reduced to any one perspective, these local knowledges suggests the possibility of human and nonhuman animals relating through mutual recognition, respect and response, opening up intersubjective ways of becoming and caring that are not possible in the context of scientific colonization, imperialism, or invasive species wars. notes 1. australia and new zealand have very different colonial histories and european settlers have had divergent relationships with indigenous peoples, nonhuman animals, and compound 1080. while outside the scope of the current genealogy, australia and new zealand have differing and changing approaches to the control and management of nonhuman animals in the twenty-first century. both geographical locations are important in the history of the science and technology used in invasive species wars on feral cats and i have distinguished between these contexts throughout this paper using the language of australia and new zealand. garrett bunyak -will curiosity® kill the cat?: technoscience and free living cats “down under” 225 2. posthumanist ethics are often critical of animal rights ethics that may expand ethical consideration to nonhuman animals but reinforce a problematic human-animal binary by suggesting nonhuman animals lack a capacity for responsibility and agency and are unable to assume moral blame (for example see blatz; clement). posthuman ethics acknowledge nonhuman agency and subjectivity within human-animal, socio-natural assemblages and posthumanists are more likely to promote ethics as a shared practice rather than a set of rules (for example see: puig de la bellacasa; haraway, when species meet and staying with the trouble). 3. see mchugh 115-119 for further discussion. works cited abram, david. becoming animal: an earthly cosmology. vintage, 2010. algar, david, and neil burrows. “a review of western shield: feral cat control research.” conservation science western australia 5.2 (2004): 131-163. algar, david, gary angus, r. brazell, c. gilbert, and g. withnell. “eradication of feral cats on faure island, western australia.” journal of the royal society of western australia 93.3 (2010): 133-140. algar, david, gary angus, and m. onus. “eradication of feral cats on rottnest island, western australia.” journal of the royal society of western australia 94.3 (2011): 439443. american pet products association. “pet industry market size and ownership statistics” (2017). online. accessed 4 august 2018. berland, jody. “cat and mouse.” cultural studies. 22:3-4 (2008): 431-454. bernard, claude. introduction to the study of experimental medicine. (1865). trans. hc greene. henry schuman, 1927. blatz, charlie. “mad bears and innocent hares: remarks toward a theory of diminished responsibility.” between the species 3.1 (1987): 5. bunyak, garrett. “fat cats and porky pooches: “pet obesity,” moral panic, and multispecies possibilities.” society and animals. forthcoming. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 226 bush, vannevar. science, the endless frontier: a report to the president on a program for postwar scientific research. united states government printing office, 1945. boggs, colleen glenney. animalia americana: animal representations and subjectivity. columbia up, 2013. cheeseman, thomas f. on the flora of the kermadec islands: with notes on the fauna. transactions and proceedings of the royal society of new zealand, 1887. online. accessed 4 august 2018. clement, grace. “the ethic of care and the problem of wild animals.” between the species 13.3 (2003). online. accessed 12 december 2018. commonwealth of australia. “background document for the threat abatement plan for predation by feral cats.” 2015. online. accessed 12 december 2018. collard, rosemary-claire. “apocalypse meow.” capitalism nature socialism 24.1 (2013): 35-41. cudworth, erika. “a sociology for other animals: analysis, advocacy, intervention.” international journal of sociology and social policy, 36.3/4 (2016): 242 257. cushing, nancy, and kevin markwell. “the bird was a valuable one.” society & animals 25.6 (2017): 592-609. dilks, p. j. “observations on the food of feral cats on campbell island.” new zealand journal of ecology 2 (1979): 64-66. driscoll, carlos a., david w. macdonald, and stephen j. o'brien. “from wild animals to domestic pets, an evolutionary view of domestication.” proceedings of the national academy of sciences 106 (supplement 1) (2009): 9971-9978. driscoll, carlos a., marilyn menotti-raymond, alfred l. roca, karsten hupe, warren e. johnson, eli geffen, eric h. harley, miguel delibes, dominique pontier, andrew c. kitchener, nobuyuki yamaguchi, stephen j. o’brein and david w. macdonald. “the near eastern origin of cat domestication.” science 317.5837 (2007): 519-523. garrett bunyak -will curiosity® kill the cat?: technoscience and free living cats “down under” 227 dunlap, thomas r. “remaking the land: the acclimatization movement and anglo ideas of nature.” journal of world history 8.2 (1997): 303-319. eason, charles t., david r. morgan, and b. kay clapperton. “toxic bait and baiting strategies for feral cats.” proceedings of the fifteenth vertebrate pest conference, 1992. faure, eric, and andrew c. kitchener. “an archaeological and historical review of the relationships between felids and people.“ anthrozoös 22.3 (2009): 221-238. foucault, michel, and françois ewald. "society must be defended": lectures at the collège de france, 1975-1976. vol. 1. macmillan, 2003. franklin, adrian. animal nation: the true story of animals and australia. unsw press, 2006. frost, samantha. biocultural creatures: toward a new theory of the human. duke up, 2016. grier, katherine c. “childhood socialization and companion animals: united states, 1820-1870.” society & animals 7.2 (1999): 95-120. grzybowski, andrzej, and krzysztof pietrzak. “david hubel (1926-2013): the man who developed our understanding of vision.” neurological science 35.6 (2014): 919-921. hasluck, paul. black australians: a survey of native policy in western australia, 1829-1897. melbourne up, 1970. haraway, donna. j. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. prickly pear press, 2003. _____. modest_witness@second_millenium.femaleman©_meets_oncomousetm. feminism and technoscience. routledge, 1997. _____. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. duke up, 2016. _____. when species meet. u minnesota p , 2008. hatch, anthony r. blood sugar: racial pharmacology and food justice in black america. u minnesota p, 2016. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 228 the humane society of the united states. “pets by the numbers.” online. accessed 23 january 2019. karl, brian j., and hugh andrew best. “feral cats on stewart island; their foods, and their effects on kakapo.” new zealand journal of zoology 9.2 (1982): 287-293. koch, katrin, david algar, j.b. searle, m. pfenninger, and k. schwenk. “a voyage to terra australis: human-mediated dispersal of cats.” bmc evolutionary biology 15.1 (2015): 262. levy, julie k., david w. gale, and leslie a. gale. “evaluation of the effect of a longterm trap-neuter-return and adoption program on a free-roaming cat population.” journal of the american veterinary medical association 222.1 (2003): 42-46. loss, scott r., tom will, and peter p. marra. “the impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the united states.” nature communications 4 (2013): 1396. lowe sarah, m. browne, s. boudjelas, and m. de poorter. 100 of the world’s worst invasive alien species: a selection from the global invasive species database. the invasive speciesspecialist group (issg), 2000. online. accessed 12 december 2018. lloyd, natalie. “‘among birds and beasts’: environmental reform, racial preservation and australian progressives at the zoological gardens.” journal of australian studies 28.84 (2005): 43-51. longcore, travis, catherine rich, and lauren m. sullivan. ”critical assessment of claims regarding management of feral cats by trap–neuter–return.” conservation biology 23.4 (2009): 887-894. marks, clive. “killing schrödinger’s feral cat.” animal studies journal 2.2 (2013): 51-66. mchugh, susan. animal stories: narrating across species lines. u minnesota p, 2011. mcleod, lynette, and glen saunders. pesticides used in the management of vertebrate pests in australia: a review. nsw department of primary industries, orange, 2013. garrett bunyak -will curiosity® kill the cat?: technoscience and free living cats “down under” 229 merton, don v. “kermadic islands expedition reports: a general account of birdlife.” notornis 17.3 (1970): 147-199. _____. “controlling introduced predators and competitors on islands.” endangered birds: management techniques for preserving threatened species. stanley a. temple, ed. u wisconsin p, 1978. 121-128. moreton-robinson, aileen. “i still call australia home: indigenous belonging and place in a white postcolonizing society.” uprootings/regroundings: questions of home and migration (2003): 23-40. moseby, katherine and john read. “the war on feral cats will need many different weapons.” the conversation july 23, 2015. online. accessed 12 december 2018. new zealand companion animal council inc. companion animals in new zealand 2016. auckland, new zealand. (2016). online. accessed 12 december 2018. nogales, manuel, aurelio martin, bernie r. tershy, c. josh donlan, dick veitch, nestor puerta, jill wood, and jesus alonso. “a review of feral cat eradication on islands.” conservation biology 18.2 (2004): 310-319. nuwer, rachel. “feral cats kill billions of small critters each year.” smithsonian.com, january 29, 2013. online. accessed 12 december 2018. people for the ethical treatment of animals. “desexing and microchipping will be mandatory in south australia!” peta australia, 21 july 2016. online. accessed 12 december 2018. people for the ethical treatment of animals. “cats in laboratories.” peta, 2017. online. accessed 12 december 2018. potts, a. a new zealand book of beasts: animals in our culture, history and everyday life. auckland up, 2013. puig de la bellacasa, maria. matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds. u minnesota p, 2017. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 230 rauzon, mark. “feral cats on jarvis island: their effects and their eradication.” atoll research bulletin 282 (1985): 1-30. rammell, colin g., and peter a. fleming. “compound 1080. properties and use of sodium monofluoroacetate in new zealand.” ministry of agriculture and fisheries, wellington, new zealand (1978). read, j., frank gigliotti, sue darby, & steven lapidge. “dying to be clean: pen trials of novel cat and fox control devices.” international journal of pest management 60.3 (2014): 166-172. reischek, andreas. “notes on new zealand ornithology.” transactions and proceedings of the new zealand institute 19 (1886). 187-198. robin, libby. “nationalising nature: wattle days in australia.” journal of australian studies 26.73 (2002): 13-26. robins, sandy. “a history of cat domestication: when and where felines went from wild animals to adored companions.” animal behavioral college blog, march 1 2016. online. accessed 12 december 2018. rose, nikolas. the politics of life itself: biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twentyfirst century. princeton up, 2007. rspca australia. rspca australia national statistics 2016-2017. accessed 23 january 2019. sherley, miranda. “is sodium fluoroacetate (1080) a humane poison?” animal welfare 16.4 (2007): 449. shew, ashley. animal constructions and technological knowledge. lexington books, 2017. smith, nicholas. “the howl and the pussy: feral cats and wild dogs in the australian imagination.” the australian journal of anthropology 10.3 (1999): 288-305. stubbs, brett j. “from ’useless brutes’ to national treasures: a century of evolving attitudes towards native fauna in new south wales, 1860s to 1960s.” environment and history 7.1 (2001): 23-56. garrett bunyak -will curiosity® kill the cat?: technoscience and free living cats “down under” 231 subramaniam, banu. ghost stories for darwin: the science of variation and the politics of diversity. u illinois p, 2014. suren, alastair m. “quantifying contamination of streams by 1080 baits, and their fate in water.” new zealand journal of marine and freshwater research 40.1 (2006): 159-167. suzdaltsev, jules. “a brief history of scientific experiments on cats.” vice, february 11, 2015. online. accessed 12 december 2018. turbott, evan g. “birds of little barrier island.” new zealand bird notes 2.92 (1947): 108. veitch, charles r. “the eradication of feral cats (felis catus) from little barrier island, new zealand.” new zealand journal of zoology 28.1 (2001): 1-12. vogt, amy h., ilona rodan, marcus brown, scott brown, tony buffington, larue forman, and andrew sparkes. “aafp-aaha: feline life stage guidelines.” journal of the american animal hospital association 46 (2010): 70-85. online. accessed 12 december 2018. wadiwel, dinesh joseph. “thick hides: whipping, biopolitics and the white soul of power.” social semiotics 19.1 (2009): 47-57. wallach, arian, and daniel ramp. “let’s give feral cats their citizenship.” the conversation, 2015. online. accessed 12 december 2018. ward, justus c., and d. a. spencer. “notes on the pharmacology of sodium fluoroacetate — compound 1080.” journal of the american pharmaceutical association (scientific ed.) 36.2 (1947): 59-62. weston, kath. animate planet: making visceral sense of living in a high-tech ecologically damaged world. duke up, 2016. microsoft word vanengen-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 9:1 dagmar van engen how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 1. we are living in the time of the tentacle. a may 2016 current biology article made blogosphere headlines for claiming that cephalopods are taking over the earth, multiplying rapidly in oceanic conditions of global warming (doubleday et al. r387, stone). recent humanities books have fixated on tentacles: philosopher of science peter godfrey-smith’s other minds: the octopus, the sea, and the deep origins of consciousness sees cephalopods as “the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien,” or alternate visions of mind and consciousness (9), while donna haraway’s staying with the trouble: making kin in the cthulucene offers invertebrate tentacles as a paradigm for entanglement, multiplicity, mutual responsibility, and interdependency in the era of global crises. science fiction in 2016, from the blockbuster film arrival to nnedi okorafor’s hugoand nebula-winning novella binti, featured spacefaring tentacled aliens forming unlikely alliances with human peoples on earth. tentacles have been swimming around american imaginations at least since h.p. lovecraft’s weird fiction in the 1920s and 30s, and since japanese tentacle erotica filtered into american visual culture.1 but there is a new burst of attention to cephalopods — and invertebrates more generally — in animal studies, posthumanism, and science fiction studies that provides new alternatives to vertebrate embodiment, genders, and sexualities. these slimy, intelligent, alien, soft-bodied creatures are increasingly providing a paradigm for our apocalyptic world, the newest wave of apocalypse. given this proliferation of cephalopods and other invertebrates, it is somewhat odd that most work in animal studies has focused on land-dwelling, vertebrate animals like mammals and birds that are human companion animals (haraway’s dog, derrida’s cat) or attractive objects for conservation campaigns (like polar bears). simon watt’s the ugly animals project points out the ecological losses incurred by focusing exclusively on charismatic animals like pandas, while slimy animals like blobfish and hagfish get less scientific funding (9-10). but this vertebrate trend is starting to change. eva hayward, a scholar who works at the intersection of science studies, visual studies, and transgender studies, has opened a line of inquiry into the aesthetics, ethics, and embodiment of marine invertebrates in a series of essays. in “fingereyes: impressions of cup corals,” hayward examines how creatures touch and experience each other across species in synaesthetic ways in regimented spaces like marine biology labs (581). in “enfolded vision: refracting the love life of the octopus,” she parses how octopuses look and act humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 122 back on human spectators who watch their strange bodies from outside the tank or behind a camera (42). in “sensational jellyfish: aquarium affects and the matter of immersion,” hayward calls for an aesthetics of diffraction as an ethical way of encountering nonhuman animals. my essay here is, in part, a love letter to hayward’s sensuous engagements with aquatic invertebrates and their intimate universes, an homage to her queer trans-species sensibilities. yet why imagine invertebrates? why and how are humans imagining invertebrates in scholarship and cultural production with renewed energy, and what does that mean for the invertebrates, and for the humans? hayward’s work often invokes the strange genders and sexualities of invertebrate animals with respect to vertebrate, mammalian, heteronormative terms. standing in front of a monterey bay aquarium jellyfish exhibit, she ponders in her jellyfish essay, “my body knows that i am not in the kingdom of the vertebrates, with all their supposedly predictable binaries” (181). in her brushes with the invertebrate world, her argument sometimes pauses poetically in this way to allow readers to muse on the intimate connections between hermaphroditic invertebrate animals and queer or trans human bodies.2 hayward, as a scholar of the visual and a student of real-world human/non-human relations, is most interested in the materiality, affect, and aesthetics of how human bodies meet invertebrate bodies. she invests in the complex, entangled, and reflexive space of real-world or filmic interspecies meetings, and her work therefore offers important insights into the ecological, economic, and ethical interplays between human and nonhuman animals. for example, in “more lessons from a starfish: prefixial flesh and transspeciated selves” hayward skirts away from some of the provocative corporeal fantasies she conjures up, critiquing the excesses of cross-species imagination, especially identification, as “a politics of erasure rather than empathy” (177). this critique is an important one from the standpoint of conceptualizing animals as having distinct being from humans and material worlds affected by us; in this vein, it is important to resist anthropomorphization as an “alibi” for bad “human behavior” (vint 13). but it is also important to investigate how, in myra hird’s words, “[n]onhuman animals have for some time been overburdened with the task of making sense of human social relations” — in other words, the imaginarium in which humans imagine animals in order to reimagine ourselves (hird 227). hayward alludes to the implications of invertebrate genders, sexualities, and sensoria for human queer and trans people, but leaves it as an allusion, moving on quickly to the important work of understanding jellyfish, octopuses, and corals as agential, experiencing, living, material beings in the world along with, but distinct from, human cultures. dagmar van engen -how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 123 at the risk of being accused of anthropomorphization, i want to go there: not to straightforward identification with invertebrates, as hayward words it, but to a deep working-through of the imaginative frameworks through which humans engage and imagine animals in order to reimagine ourselves, especially in terms of gender, sexuality, and race. in other words, i want to draw attention to the cultural politics of human-animal imaginations in literary texts, with particular attention to nonbinary genders. as haraway writes in staying with the trouble, “[t]he tentacular ones tangle me in sf. their many appendages ... entwine me in the poiesis — the making — of speculative fabulation, science fiction, science fact, speculative feminism, soin de ficelle, so far” (31). which is to say, in my terms, humans are related to tentacled creatures, and those relations are always entangled in speculation and political imagination. the ways in which we speculate about invertebrates matter and have deep ethical stakes precisely because they are always imaginative in some way. i do not see this as more important than the project of studying the life conditions of real-world animals and preserving an ethics of their alterity; however, criticizing and immediately dismissing anthropomorphization is not enough. what of the structuring paradigms of imagination that mediate my relationship with animals, especially invertebrates? what shapes do they take, how have they been used, and how can they be remade or redeployed for new ends? these structuring paradigms of animal imaginations historically have been used not only against nonhuman animals, but also against certain groups of humans. here i am indebted to michael lundblad’s and mel chen’s instructive framings of animality as an imaginative concept. lundblad reframes the question of the animal as not only about “universal advocacy for actual animals,” but also about understanding “how we think about ‘real’ animals,” a distinction he sees as crucial to making the field of animal studies more responsible to the messy cultural politics of gender, race, and sexuality (“from animal to animality studies” 497). chen defines “animality” as not just a nonhuman concept, but a trope “that sometimes sticks to animals, sometimes bleeds back onto textures of humanness” (90). in this light, it is impossible to use terms like “anthropomorphization” or “the animal” without understanding how they have been used against beings of all species of animals, including some humans. i appreciate neel ahuja’s call in bioinsecurities: disease interventions, empire, and the government of species for attention to “the processes that anthropomorphize the human in order to characterize the human’s sovereign domination of the nonhuman” (viii). in other words, if the “human” referred to in animal studies is a culturally-specific category invented by western men and presented as if universal, as sylvia wynter has argued, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 124 then anthropomorphization is a process that must be applied (selectively) to humans before it is used to (mis)represent nonhuman animals (wynter 260). while lundblad acknowledges that animality studies might be interpreted as a speciesist line of inquiry, it is an urgent project, partly because ideas about animals have been central to western projects of dehumanization of humans through vectors of race and gender. recent research in black feminist and queer studies has begun to unpack the deep ramifications of the racialized human-animal threshold for representations and theorizations of the nonhuman. alex weheliye’s 2014 book habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human takes posthumanism and animal studies to task for “reinscrib[ing]” the eurocentric human subject as “the category to be overcome,” and for “presum[ing] that we have now entered a stage in human development where all subjects have been granted equal access to western humanity” (9-10).3 likewise, in “outer worlds: the persistence of race in movement ‘beyond the human,’” zakiyyah jackson cautions that the “distributive ordering of race ... authorizes and conditions appeals to the ‘beyond’” the human (215). the stakes of how “we” (that messy, dissonant, falsely-universalizing human pronoun) imagine animals in order to reimagine ourselves in differential ways are quite deep. in this essay i am particularly interested in how speculative representations of aquatic invertebrates might expand, transform, or otherwise reframe human gender beyond stubborn paradigms of “men” and “women,” “masculinities” and “femininities,” and the racialized weight of animality that rests on them. in particular, i am curious whether invertebrate imaginations offer alternatives for trans and nonbinary genders to the limiting paradigms of autobiography, mundane fiction, rights, and appeals to the “real.” building on previous work by myra hird, eva hayward, and joan roughgarden at the intersection of trans, queer, and animal studies, i am curious what generative frameworks for gender and sexual politics exist in the alien life-worlds of slimy sea creatures like starfish, octopuses, and jellyfishes. many invertebrate sea creatures reproduce asexually (e.g. through budding), are monogender or multigender, or are what biologists term hermaphroditic, switching gender throughout their lifetime or encapsulating large and small gametes in their bodies simultaneously.4 if, for a long time, animals and biology have been used to naturalize certain kinds of gender, sexual, and racial hierarchies in western cultures,5 then perhaps attention to different kinds of animals that do not bear out normative american conceptions of heterosexuality, patriarchy, gender binarism, and vertebrate-centric ways of mapping bodies might provide fruitful terrain for imagining otherwise. hird’s essay “animal trans,” for example, looks to the gender and sexual diversity of bacteria as a way to destabilize dagmar van engen -how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 125 transphobic conceptions of “nature” that are built on binaryand cis-gendered assumptions about animals (243), while roughgarden’s book evolution’s rainbow parses the sexual diversity of multi-gender fish societies (80). i, instead, turn to invertebrate animals, which are prominent in the canon of monsters and aliens in american science fiction and provide particularly fruitful ground for reconceptualizing nonbinary genders. when transformed by speculative queer cultural production, invertebrate sea animals offer a rich set of vocabularies and fleshly imaginaries for genders other than men and women, masculinities and femininities. if hayward is interested in real-world seagoing invertebrates, in this essay i explore fantasies about aquatic invertebrates in speculative erotic fictions with particular emphasis on nonbinary genders rather than femininities or masculinities.6 rather than examining aquaria or laboratories, i look to textual fantasy — to speculative, highly sexual visions of invertebrate animality in the alien, monstrous bodies of science fictional ebook erotica. in particular, i examine monster erotica, an archive of erotica stories sold in ebook, often self-published forms on kindle, nook, smashwords, and other for-pay sites. in these works, the narrative tropes of erotic fanfiction and romance narratives are used to envision explicit plots in which humans have sex with creatures from classic horror and science fiction films: bigfoot, dinosaurs, centaurs, kraken, and so on.7 these erotica stories are not just sensational, however: they offer a window into very graphic representations of cross-species sexualities, a phenomenon perhaps uniquely suited to speculative fiction.8 while monsters and aliens might seem a bit far afield from animal studies, entangled as they are in human projections onto animals, i contend that these monsters and aliens offer important insight into how different animals become enlisted in the work of legitimizing particular human genders, sexualities, and races through animal imagination. in other words, monsters and aliens are imaginary beings, but their textual bodies are composed of specific animals — bears, lizards, birds, crabs, squid, etc. — that are deployed for the purposes of different fantasies of gender, sexuality, race, and species. in particular, vertebrateand especially mammal-based monsters make it easier to confirm heterosexual, racialized fantasies about bestial dominant masculinities and fragile white femininities, whereas invertebrate-based creatures open up a whole different realm of embodied animal relations, fantasies, and desires. it is invertebrate, nonbinary genders that my inquiry tracks: genders that are neither masculine nor feminine but slimy, starfishlike, tentacled, or jellyfishlike. 2. to my knowledge ebook monster erotica has not yet been mentioned in academic print at all, partly because of its newness, and partly because of its multiple distances from respectable literatures as self-published, electronic-only, mass market, for-profit, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 126 fanfiction-derived, science fictional smut. it would not make sense to call this work marginal to the literary canon, in fact, because as a subgenre of pornography it so clearly stages itself as guilty-pleasure reading and does not make any appeal to literary respectability. it therefore offers a remarkable look at what kind of fantasies are flourishing under the radar in feminist porn in a time when mainstream video porn continues to so spectacularly fail at adequately representing the erotic lives of gendernonconforming people.9 the kindle market for this material is a wild, weird, and contested place, and for a time these stories sold well. between 2011 and 2013, the kindle self-published erotica market (kindle direct publishing) briefly offered a space in which a few dedicated, prolific authors could make a living from monster porn. virginia wade’s series cum for bigfoot began a trend, and received more media attention in the blogosphere than the work of other authors. eric spitznagel reports (and authors confirmed by email) that after amazon began its kindle unlimited program in 2014, it became harder for authors to earn enough for their work (xavier, email to author 7/12/2016). additionally, in 2013, amazon began an unevenly-enforced crackdown of sensationalized bestiality and monster porn in its sprawling erotica catalog that forced many authors to remove their stories, change their titles, and made it harder for readers to search for their work on amazon’s website (spitznagel; lipstein; kinderton, email to author 7/14/2016). while most of the works that received negative attention are still available on the kindle store in altered form, some authors stopped writing new stories, while others are earning less for what they do write. but the stories were popular and sold well, which indicates that there is more of a place for weird, speculative, nonhuman erotica in today’s pornography world than some might think. while this archive of stories has been dismissed in media attention as bad writing or self-evidently ridiculous (e.g. calling it “dinosaur porn” in itself constitutes the joke [beck]), erotic monsters, aliens, and animals in this genre offer a rich case study in how animal sexualities become recruited into human erotic fantasy literature.10 at least since the twilight phenomenon and the slew of young adult paranormal romances that series spawned, nonhuman creatures like werewolves and vampires have become newly sexy in american imaginations, especially in womenor queer-centric erotica and romance. sexy vampires are not entirely new, of course: queer theorists have proved that the gothic novels from which these romances are descended are also very erotic portrayals of monsters (haggerty; azzarello). but the eroticism of the nonhuman animal has now become more explicit or intense. paranormal romance often involves either humanoid monsters like vampires or spirits, or shapeshifting beings who are animal half of the dagmar van engen -how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 127 time, but become human during scenes of sexual tension — for example, the morphing quileute werewolves in twilight. monster erotica and related genres in the wild world of speculative erotica, however, offer a step beyond this paranormal romance: humans having sex with animallike, explicitly nonhuman extraterrestrials or monsters that do not first safely transform into humanoid shapes. in the words of one monster erotica author, e.m. beastly, the payoff for this is an expansion of what is possible in human erotic imaginations through the genre tools of speculative fiction. in the preface to monstrous lust: the forest of lust collection, beastly offers, “[i]f you are curious about what sex could be like with creatures of fur and fang; or scales, gills and feathers.... if it has a human level of intelligence or better. [sic] if it can communicate with a language. if it is sexually mature for its species. then you should be able to fuck it. not that something like that exists in our known reality. but that is what fiction is for, right?” (loc. 27). in tune with lundblad’s understanding of animality as a sexual trope, i find monster or cryptozoological erotica on the kindle store a particularly useful textual archive for working through the erotic imaginations humans project onto the animal world. stories that, in beastly’s terms, are about human sex with furry, fanged, scaled, feathered, or otherwise clearly nonhuman beings provide fascinating paradigms for how humans imagine animal and human sexualities. series like beastly’s monstrous lust, emerald ice’s sydney’s alien escapades (formerly titled alien love slave), and alice xavier’s alien seed consist primarily of a series of sex scenes between a human protagonist and a seemingly endless array of variously catlike, reptilian, birdlike, bovine, insectoid, octopoid, and many other varieties of animallike monsters. xavier’s alien seed is an alien-abduction breeding fantasy, in which the extraterrestrials turn out to be far more complex than the usual little green men. after the unnamed protagonist has been taken onto the spaceship, she discovers that she is being held captive for sexual experiments, and her captors are rather unintimidating-looking androgynous gray beings (loc. 109). but to take part in the sexual experiments, the aliens announce that they will transform into horrific beastlike shapes in order to better suit the protagonist’s fantasies (which do, indeed, center on monsters). these shapes include a wolf-like furry beast, a pantherlike feline beast, a blue-grey ogre, a scaly lovecraftian “tentacle-faced monster” (loc. 184) and something the narrator describes only as an “alien kraken” (loc. 294). a hyperbolic series of sex scenes follows in which each monster in succession has sex with the helpless narrator while she is wired into medical machines that measure her vital signs and her arousal. these monster sex scenes offer important insight into what, exactly, “animality” means in narratives of human sexuality. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 128 one way this erotic animal imagination manifests is in how the genre overwhelmingly describes sexual drive or desire in terms of animality, literalizing the expression, “fuck like an animal.” alien seed capitalizes on cultural discourses of animality that use the animal to figure raw, unrestrained, or improper desire or sexual acts, repeatedly describing sex with the monsters as “mating,” “breeding,” and “mounting,” a fairly standard trope for the genre. in one sex scene with a panther-like beast, xavier represents the human protagonist’s desire as caused by the beast’s catlike qualities, not in spite of them. as he performs oral sex on her, she notices that his animal attributes make him capable of more than a human partner: “something hot, wet, and snakelike slipped between my folds and pressed hard and wonderfully against my clit,” which turns out to be the panther’s “impossibly long and almost reptilian tongue,” which, she reflects, “push[es] [her] ordinary human body to the edge of what it could handle, all that it could contain” (loc. 246). not only does his animality make him a superhuman lover — she begins to take on animal qualities, in turn. the panther’s nonhumanness rubs off on her as she internalizes the animal she desires: she notes that the panther “fulfill[s] all [her] animal wants” (loc. 250), and she is so aroused that she “might as well have been an animal right then, all sense and sanity overridden by that inexorable need to fuck” (246). in alien seed, nonhuman lovers bring out “the lustful animal within” the human (loc. 203).11 beastly’s exploration of sex with “creatures of fur or fang; or scales, gills and feathers” points to a whole new level of attention to erotic relations between human and nonhuman animal beings (loc 2). this erotic relation, not just ethical relation, is new to the field of animal studies. little work in queer animal or animality studies has taken up pornography or erotica, nor has porn studies had much to say about animals, perhaps with good reason. as a field, porn studies tends to gravitate toward nondigitally-enhanced film, video, and other media where interspecies sex would clearly constitute animal cruelty. speculative representations of humans having sex with animallike nonhuman beings in any medium or genre tend to conjure up what chen calls “the specter of bestiality,” and at the very least to epitomize the problems of anthropomorphization from a traditional animal studies perspective (145). essays in animal studies and ecocriticism that do engage pornography tend to do so as a metaphor for nature photography, in a way that treats pornography as a synonym for exploitative modes of viewing, in line with 1980s modes of feminist critiques of pornography as “the linked exploitation of women and nature” (welling 55). these analyses are not informed by more contemporary feminist engagements with queer pornography as an instrument of, not just an obstacle to, feminist imaginations (taormino et al., howard). dagmar van engen -how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 129 in queer studies, on the other hand, the 2015 special issue of glq devoted to queer inhumanisms contained no analyses of cultural representations of sex between human and animal beings; noreen giffney and myra hird’s 2008 collection queering the non/human contains little, and none of that focused on erotica or pornography. chen gets close in animacies with an analysis of artist xu bing’s performance “cultural animal,” which involves a live pig mounting a paper-maché human figure as part of a critique of sexual stereotypes of “west” and “east” (145-6). donna haraway has an intimate and sexualized description of her dog licking her tonsils as “hav[ing] oral intercourse” in the companion species manifesto, but it is unclear whether the dog and cat find these erotic experiences as well (2-3). i do want to credit dominic pettman with grappling with the gnarly topic of interspecies sex in realistic genres like the documentary, in human error: species-being and media machines, where he parses the “powerful dialectic of repulsion and fascination” around the prohibition against human sex with animals (85-6).12 how animals are used to justify human gender and sexual norms, yes; how animals are queer, yes; how animals are literary figures for queerness, yes; how animals have sex with each other in ways americans might interpret as queer, yes; critiques of the conflation of bestiality and homosexuality, yes; platonic love or intimacy between humans and animals, yes; how real-world animals used in reproduction-related medical experiments become materially interlaced with human bodies, yes. but representations of actual interspecies sex acts are remarkably hard to find in animal studies, porn studies, or queer studies. speculative fiction has a unique role to play in the interface between porn studies, queer studies, and animal studies, and these fields’ proclivity toward realistic genres has limited their scope in this area. speculative romance and erotica like xavier’s offers a unique window into the erotic overlap between human and nonhuman beings. while katherine hayles was not speaking to the erotic when she asked this question, i am inspired by her provocation in how we became posthuman: “what about the pleasures” of the posthuman (285)? this is a particularly important question to ask because, as lundblad argues, animality has historically functioned as a trope of human sexuality in the wake of freud and darwin in american culture (the birth of a jungle 4).13 human genders, sexualities, and races in american literature are already bound up with the animal, for better or for worse. if monster erotica uses animality as figures for “the lustful animal within” the human, then what kind of animals, and what kind of desires? (xavier 203). monster erotica stories in this genre more broadly use the animality of the monsters and aliens within their narratives as a fantasy for sexual extremes not possible with only human bodies, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 130 but many are readable as masculine. in xavier’s alien seed, each of the monsters except the last one boast “monstrous cock[s]” that are the focus of the scenes’ erotic fireworks (loc. 207). vertebrate-based monsters all, the ogre, the wolf, the panther, and even the tentacle-faced swamp monster (which has a fishlike and catlike body, and only a tentacled face) draw on vertebrate animal forms that biologists tend to interpret as “male,” “female,” and “heterosexual,” whether or not the animals themselves actually bear out this evidence (roughgarden 5-6).14 within the story, the panther, ogre, wolf, and swamp monster are all male in their monstrous transmogrifications (although in their original forms they are small, gray, and androgynous). these first four monsters are also the ones that xavier unfailingly refers to using traditional masculine pronouns “he” or “him,” whereas for the fifth monster this nomenclature changes to genderneutral pronouns. in a story featuring a cisgender female protagonist, this seems to make the trope of animality in alien seed a fantasy about bigger, badder, more dominant heterosexual cisgender men: superhuman tops not limited to the mundane morphology of the human body, if you will. many of the erotica stories sold under the genre-heading “monster erotica” are labeled as heterosexual, even if their nonhuman content makes that label an uneasy fit. in virginia wade’s words, this is an archive of stories about “monster cock” and its superhuman possibilities for heterosexual women’s desire and sexual satisfaction (wade 49). stories like wade’s cum for bigfoot that feature vertebrate, land-dwelling mammals as the basis for the monsters’ bodies are full of heterosexual imperatives: at one point the protagonist of cum for bigfoot repeatedly insists to herself that she is “not a lesbian” when she is in close sexual proximity to another captive woman (95). other stories follow this script: k. j. burkhardt’s taken by the monsters, azuree loveley and s.l. ramsey’s enslaved: the orc captive, christie sims and alara branwen’s dinosaur erotica series, and many others. yet some of the erotica published during this period was very queer. a significant subsection of the genre (much like fanfiction) offers malemale romance rather than yet another heterosexual love story: roman pyre’s serpent lover, lyn gala’s claimings, tails, and other alien artifacts, jessie snow’s taken by tentacles, etc. even the ones that are labeled f/m in subgenre categories exceed their designation or are only tenuously so, because of the ways that the monsters’ animality overwhelms human heteronormative paradigms. while monster erotica authors get a lot of bad press for writing perverted or bestialized erotica — and i want to defend them from that type of criticism — some of the more popular stories traffic in sensationalized stereotypes of bestialized men of color, using racialized tropes of animality that tend to come from particular ways of imagining dagmar van engen -how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 131 vertebrate, land-dwelling, usually mammal species — especially apes. vertebrate, landdwelling, mammalian animals most frequently form the stuff of “animality” as a trope of sexual intensity, fantasy, or internal sexual drive, and also of the racialized gender and sexual stereotypes that lundblad, chen, jackson, and others critique in animal studies and posthuman theory. many stories in the genre seem to be woven out of not just heterosexual fantasies, but also racialized gender and sexual tropes all too familiar from the history of colonial fantasies and fears about nonwhite peoples. cum for bigfoot, jayme knight’s captured by the lizard king, and many others draw on a long western science-fiction tradition extending back to the pulp era’s images of beautiful, white, cisgender women falling into the arms of dangerous, dark-colored, male monsters from which they must be rescued. as i critique these racialized gender and sexual stereotypes, i want to be clear that i am not pathologizing the genre as bad because it is pornography or because it is self-published or because it is nonhuman, the charges usually leveled against monster erotica authors. the large, dark, masculine, sexually-threatening ape has been a well-worn trope in this colonial science fiction tradition at least since king kong and tarzan (the birth of a jungle 142). monster erotica stories that feature pale-skinned human women having sex with large, dark-skinned apes cannot avoid this representational history. for example, wade’s cum for bigfoot documents the adventures of three white women captured by a bigfoot tribe, while camping in the appalachian mountains, who fall in love with their bigfoot partner-captors. the series draws on the allure of the scripted vocabulary of white women’s sexual danger in the hands of dark, primitive, part-human bestial captors, combining primitivist tropes of indigenous masculinities with stereotypes of the black male rapist. the bigfoots’ speech is limited to monosyllabic words and sentence fragments (“you good girl” (97)), their bodies and fur are repeatedly described as “black” and having “enormous” penises (46), and the entire story is built around the trope of dubious consent or captive love. in one scene where the white female protagonists have fallen into the hands of a bigfoot tribe, the sex scene takes place against a signifying backdrop of conventional hollywood primitivity: beating drums, an “animal pelt” by a “fire pit,” “thatched huts,” “ancient” cultures, and “grunts and shouts” (58). the bigfoots drag one of the voluptuous white women onto a rug by the fire while she lodges her protests: “no! don’t do that! stop!” (58).15 not all representations of mammalian monster sex point directly or straightforwardly to this history of racism as animalization and hypersexualization, but wade’s description of light-skinned women having sex with a hypermasculinized black beast conjures up a representational history it cannot quite contain. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 132 chen argues in animacies that apes in particular bear a particularly heavy representational weight in the west, in the wake of anthropological and biological sciences that construed peoples of color as evolutionarily closer to large apes than white people. human-ape hybrids in american cultural texts cannot be separated from the “long history of british and european associations of apes and monkeys with african subjects” (97). large apes star in donna haraway’s analyses of animality, race, and gender in primate visions, in which she noted that “the signs of orientalist discourse mark primatology” when western scientists mapped sexual, gender, and racial ideals onto apes’ bodies in order to justify certain claims about human genders, sexualities, and races (10). so when zakiyyah jackson writes that “[t]he animalization of blackness has been central” to anti-black and other racisms from the beginnings of american nationhood, it is the colonial connection between peoples of color and large nonhuman primates that most overshadows fraught mammalian species boundaries (“losing manhood” 108). representations of animals having sex with humans are not neutral or apolitical with respect to the colonial politics of gender and sexuality, and this racialized history is partly what is at stake in a turn to invertebrate animals that might provide ways to imagine and map cross-species relations differently. when chen argues that animals have been used as figures for western colonial representations of peoples of color, it is vertebrate land mammals the argument refers to: apes, pigs, dogs, etc. on the other hand, monsters that resemble octopuses, sea serpents, or aquatic invertebrates do not graft so easily, or in the same way, onto the racialized gender and sexual categories that are the legacy of 19th century western science and empire. stories like kylie ashcroft’s mating with the jungle tentacle plant 2: mating in paradise, emerald ice’s sydney’s alien escapades series, and t. l. giffin’s taken by tentacles draw on invertebrate animality and tentacles in particular to suggest alternate interspecies animal imaginations and a different gender and sexual universe. in the text of alien seed, the final monster of the story offers some provocative alternatives to the limitations of vertebrate land mammality and its racialized heteronormative animal imaginary. the creature xavier describes as an “alien kraken” brings out a whole different set of “animal wants,” a new “animal within” that is both gender-nonconforming and invertebrate-like. after sex scenes with the panther, the wolf, the ogre, and the “tentacle-faced swamp beast,” all of which the story represents as dark, cisgender male, and (mostly) mammals, xavier introduces the alien kraken as an amorphous, gender-indeterminate, invertebrate sea beast. xavier introduces this alien kraken in gender-neutral and alien terms when the narrator gets her first view of the beast: dagmar van engen -how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 133 behind the ogre and the wolf-man lurked something worse, something huge. i felt paralyzed. i’d never seen anything like it. the tentacle-faced swamp beast was nice and tame compared to this. it was some sort of deep sea nightmare beast, with a long, serpentine body ridged with fins and covered in glistening green skin, and a horrifying jawless maw. it reared up before me, and i was staring into the many glowing eyes of a kraken. long, slick tentacles whipped about and wicked-looking spines bristled. i took in the scent coming off the monster’s skin, and it smelled like darkness and the ocean. (loc. 280) in this passage, the masculine pronouns xavier used to describe the wolf, the panther, the ogre, and the swamp beast disappear into the gender-neutral, nonhuman, and alien pronoun “it.” as hayward and jami weinstein point out, “the indeterminate pronoun it” for many trans people has been “bor[ne] as a mark of our inhumanity, our sexual indifference” (196). in monster, alien, and animal literature (and in everyday conversational parlance), creatures more distantly related to human beings tend to become this nonbinary “it,” while creatures more similar to humans are more often allowed the gender binary “he” or “she” as an indicator of more complex personhood (e.g. houseflies compared to golden retrievers).16 this ends up framing the gender binary as the threshold of familiarity or personhood, in addition to gender-binarizing and cisgendering the vertebrate mammal world. one monster erotica author i spoke with over email described her use of “he” and “she” vs. “it” in these terms: “i also consciously employ the ‘it’ vs ‘he/she’ pronouns to create that sense of distance and otherness; often, my monsters transition at some point from ‘it’ to ‘he’ to represent the protagonist’s changing perception of them ... it symbolically represents the transition of one character from being outside the social milieu of the other to being inside the same social milieu (as a romantic partner)” (kinderton, email to author, 7/14/2016). it is not my intent to suggest that all monster erotica that uses masculine and feminine pronouns is faulty or insufficient. rather, i want to point out the connections between the gendernonbinariness of the pronoun “it” and its distancing, depersonalizing, objectifying effects. this differential personalization in the figures of monsters and aliens depends on specific ways of gendering, sexualizing, and racializing the nonhuman animal world, in which simpler invertebrate animals with single-gender or gender-switching populations are imagined as distantly-related to human beings, in part because of those gender and sexual differences. from this point of view, it makes sense for hayward to imagine trans and nonbinary-gendered people having more in common with jellyfish, coral, or octopuses than with cisgender, heterosexual, vertebrate mammals. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 134 hence, in alien seed, it is the kraken’s kinship with invertebrate aquatic animals that imbues it with the gender and sexual nonbinariness and alienness that merits the pronoun “it.” xavier scripts the kraken’s body using the morphology of invertebrate sea creatures: it is a “deep sea nightmare beast” that has “fins” like fish, “slick tentacles” reminiscent of squid or octopuses, and a “jawless maw” like a lamprey. it resists the male/female rubrics the narrator has to describe desire, genders, and bodies (“i’d never seen anything like it”) through these aquatic invertebrate animal body parts and the alien gender and sexual connotations these real-world animals bear (280). xavier’s description of the kraken’s genitals as tentacles in particular use invertebrate animality to subvert and rewrite the heteronormative mapping of genitals, bodies, and sexual positions that dominate the genre’s sexual tropes. during the sex scene with the kraken, its genitals finally emerge from the interior of its body, from its mouth rather than from between its legs; it’s not clear that the kraken has legs. the kraken’s maw is fleshed out with the body parts of aquatic animals: its mouth is “like a shark’s mouth,” it has “strange feelers” like an insect or crab, and a “jawless maw” like a lamprey. its head is bioluminescent like many deep-sea creatures, “aglow with ... intricate yellow patterns” (loc. 377). the genitals are essentially tentacles or anemone fronds, displacing expectations that a penis will be the focus of the story’s culmination, as is the case in almost every story in this genre: “then slowly, a twisted glowing tongue emerged from the darkness of its maw. i gasped as it unfurled — it was not one appendage, but hundreds, all glowing, flowing and undulating as if they were underwater” (loc. 388). the “appendage[s]” are “undulating” “underwater” like a sea anemone (which are usually hermaphroditic species in real life) or like octopus arms. so alien seed’s figuration of the kraken-beast’s body capitalizes on the gender and sexual diversity of sea animals to build a fleshly imaginary of nonbinary genders, rerouting gender nonconformity through the animal and monstrous world. this monster is remarkable in itself, but it is the culminating figure in a hyperbolically erotic storyline, making gender-nonbinary invertebrate animality the pinnacle of erotic desirability over comparatively “tame” masculine monsters. the alien kraken is not just a scary, gender-nonbinary monster, but a deeply, overpoweringly desirable one within the text. unlike in other genres of monster literature, the protagonist actually has sex with this creature and its tentacles in detailed, close-up focus. her “gasp,” and her admission that she “was ready for it to mate with” her, are only a few of the story’s signifiers of the protagonist’s hyperbolic desire for the kraken (loc. 388): under the kraken’s predatory gaze, “powerful lust hit [her] like a train,” and all she can think about is “throw[ing] [her]self at” the kraken and “fuck[ing] like [she]’d never fucked before” (loc. 290). once the kraken’s genitals have appeared, she reflects that she dagmar van engen -how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 135 “do[es]n’t think [she]’d ever needed anything so urgently or profoundly before” (loc. 377). readers become interpellated into the protagonist’s excess of desire through her first-person narration, which places readers in the position of the human woman getting fucked by the monsters, not a distanced observer or the monster itself (loc. 388). the narration imagines in multisensory detail what it feels like to be touched by tentacles rather than human skin, for example, “straddling the creature’s slick, serpentine body” while the narrator’s “smooth folds glided along” it (358). not only does xavier’s writing of the monster’s body imagine invertebrate species and nonbinary genders coming together in a kind of underwater world of slimy sexualities. her imagination of the alien kraken deeply eroticizes both invertebrate animality and nonbinary genres, enormously important in a genre like pornography (or mainstream american culture more generally) where gender nonconformity is most frequently represented as a barrier to desire. one interpretation of this tentacle erotica story might be to understand the alien kraken’s tentacles and penetration of the protagonist’s body as yet more phallic imagery, drawing on psychoanalytic paradigms for sexuality and gender. however, the multiplicity of the kraken’s limbs and genitals exceed the singular phallus, and invoke a range of polymorphously perverse blurrings of limbs of locomotion, eating, and sex (tentacles can penetrate, feed, hunt, bind, or vibrate against the protagonist’s body). the kraken’s genitals are oral and multiple rather than phallic: a “twisted glowing tongue” that emerges from the mouth rather than between its nonexistent legs, it is actually “hundreds” of appendages rather than just one (loc. 377). reading this as phallic imagery would be an impoverished interpretation that cannot account for how nonhuman animal imagery shapes human racial, gender, and sexual formations. to put it bluntly, a tentacle is not a penis, and to see it as such is to cover over the perverse trans-species mapping of bodies going on in alien seed. invertebrate animals that have tentacles do not always or often take forms that could be called “male.” the multiplicity of tentacles, in fact, allows them to resonate in important ways with the gender-neutral pronoun “they” (rather than “he” or “she”) that some trans people use to describe themselves. within the text of the story, this registers in the way that xavier describes penises and tentacles as mutually exclusive: she expresses desire for “one of those cocks … or one or more of those tentacles, filling and violating me soon” (loc. 293). no other monster in the story is described as having tentacles instead of a penis. in this speculative feminist erotica genre, tentacle monsters offer a fantasy of pleasure unanchored to the constraints of human bodies or heteronormative realistic porn, and they do so by turning to invertebrate animality rather than vertebrate vocabularies. tentacles in alien seed transform what might appear to be a heterosexual erotica story into a deeply queer fantasy of human sex with nonhuman, nonbinary, extraterrestrial humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 136 beings. xavier’s writing here displaces the heteronormative, genital-centric mapping of bodies to stage the multiplication of nonbinary gender — from two to multiplicity, from “he” to “they,” from human to invertebrate. this gender, sexual, and species innovation also affects the story’s racial politics. while the mammalian, vertebrate-based, masculine monsters of the story all are dark-colored and (at least in part) evoke racialized masculinities, the kraken functions differently. the kraken “smells like darkness” (which is not exactly the same as being dark colored or visually interpreted as racialized), and it is not black or white, but has “glistening green skin” (loc. 283). while it is a dominant sexual figure, it is not a masculine figure, because of the different pronouns, body morphology, and species differences xavier uses to present it. because of these differences, the racialization of other monsters in the genre does not function in the same way, or as well, because there is no masculinity, femininity, or vertebrate mammalia to graft them onto. while this does not mean the story is free of racial politics at this point (the human protagonist is never described in phenotypical or racially-coded terms, which leaves her open to an interpretation of whiteness as neutrality), the kraken’s aquatic and invertebrate animality makes it slippery with respect to these formations. i am not arguing that vertebrate mammals are always heteronormative and racist where they are used as literary tropes for human sexuality or desire, nor that invertebrates are always queer.17 but the different gender and sexual politics of invertebrate-based monsters mean that the racialization of animals happens through different gender and sexual vectors that do not map as directly onto western body politics. the genderqueerness, alienness, and evolutionary distance between homo sapiens and invertebrates makes the imaginative logics of animality function much differently than with closer related species. and the gender and sexual strangeness of simple marine invertebrates with respect to human western white norms makes representations of invertebrate animality very different kinds of sexual and gendered logics. this invertebrate imagination does not only function as the object of desire in the story, such that the text projects human desires onto invertebrate animals in anthropomorphized form. this invertebrate, nonbinary animality also cycles back to the human protagonist in a kind of circular animal imaginary that cycles across bodies and species. at the end of her sex scene with the alien kraken, after it has unfurled its genitals as a “twisted glowing tongue,” and the protagonist is in the throes of her most superlative grip of lust (loc. 376), she begins to feel more like a cephalopod than like a homo sapiens. a “strange liquid seeped into [her] quivering body through [her] pores” after the kraken touches her, and suddenly her sense of embodiment cartwheels into a dagmar van engen -how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 137 different dimension. “everything seemed to change and warp as the alien’s strange nectar took effect. suddenly, i was in the wrong body. i was confined to a shell that was too small and unable to move in the graceful, fluid way i now knew was right. i wanted to reach out and touch this magnificent creature in ways beyond what my arms and mouth would allow” (loc. 394). she “float[s]” and “fl[ies]” in ways impossible for mundane human bodies (loc. 411). not only does her phenomenological felt sense of her body’s limits change, but her sensory world does, too, in ways that recall the kinds of synaesthetic world hayward attributes to octopuses and corals: she “saw strange half-formed visions and fluid colors, felt heat and cold, burning and tingling, all the time” (loc. 411). here, invertebrate imagination involves a mutual cycle of desire, touch, embodiment, and pleasure between the human woman trans-ing into alien kraken, and the alien kraken who has trans-ed from small gray avian-insectoid alien. i cannot think of a better example of what hayward and jami weinstein call “tranimalities” (200-201) than xavier’s use of a human woman temporarily transitioning into a cephalopoid alien and expanding her sense of embodiment and awareness. perhaps xavier’s words near the end of this scene best encapsulate the work this genre of monster erotica can do at its best: “i was the vessel for a thousand beings,” alien invertebrates and monstrous “its” that far exceed the heterosexual racialized imaginary of what is usually figured as “animality” in american literature (loc. 411). 3. trans theorist and biologist joan roughgarden writes in evolution’s rainbow of the problems of animal imagination, “parallels can sometimes be drawn between how people behave and how animals behave, as though animals offered biological cultures resembling ours. i’m quite willing to anthropomorphize about animals” (4). conversely, what feminist and antiracist scholars criticized for a long time was the differential animalization of the human, in which certain groups of human beings are imagined as more animallike than others, such that animal traits become signs that confirm the naturalness of (usually heterosexual) desires, (patriarchal) genders, or (almost always nonwhite) races. i want to propose that anthropomorphization and animalization are twin halves of the same process of a circular animal imagination that cycles unevenly through human and nonhuman beings for wildly differing purposes. understood this way, the vertebrate-centric and raciallyand gender-hierarchical animal imaginary american culture has been living with in the wake of 19th century colonial anthropology and biology is one form of the circular animal imagination that confirms stratified associations between human beings of color and large land-dwelling vertebrate animals; but it is not the only kind of animal imagination nor an inevitable one. many other imaginaries are possible. in this essay i have begun the work of tracing out what a queer, trans, and invertebrate animal imaginary would look like through the wild and weird archive of monster erotica stories that focus on invertebrates. this humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 138 invertebrate imaginary makes a different interspecies constellation of gender, sexuality, and body morphology than does the hierarchical vertebrate imaginary that has been a crucial element in consolidating human racial and species hierarchies. crucially, it creates cultural room for genders other than masculinities and femininities, men and women, and opens up a different conception of animality as a figure for human desires. invertebrate imaginaries are not immune to racialization, but their gender, sexual, and species logics are so different that they may provide alternate routes of connection and entanglement between species and bodies. where does tentacle erotica leave us, then? these highly eroticized, nonrealist, and genderqueer fantasies offer important bridges between trans or gender-nonconforming bodies and the nonbinary universe of invertebrate animal genders and sexualities. rather than the vertebrate land mammals that more frequently form comparisons between humans and animals, or are the subject of anthropomorphization, or are used to differentially animalize human beings, cephalopods, anemones, and other aquatic invertebrates offer a different set of connotations and associations to the word “animality.” if, as social darwinists are so fond of claiming, human inner nature is purportedly readable in terms of the figure of the animal (understood as evolutionary ancestor and racialized-gendered other), then “animality” might mean a whole new set of ideas if it is attached to sea slugs or squid. monster erotica capitalizes on these alternate associations to envision a different world of gender, sexuality, and embodiment than is available in human, mainstream, realistic porn. in light of how trans people are alternately hypersexualized or de-eroticized with sometimes deadly consequences, proliferating the vocabularies available for trans and nonbinary erotic life is urgent and needed.18 the fleshly imaginaries i find in monster erotica like xavier’s offer alternatives to yet another heterosexual white porn video by turning to a speculative treatment of invertebrate animals’ alien worlds. it makes a difference that this is not realistic erotica: the alien kraken is a figment of alice xavier’s imagination, and therefore does not bear the same representational burden of what gender, sexuality, or desire are supposed to look like based on what kind of genitals one has, or what kind of animals supposedly represent “natural” human behavior. this speculative function transforms real-world cephalopods and their nonhuman sexualities into important registers of nonbinarygendered imagination in human cultural texts. it does not negate the need for research on real-world invertebrate genders and sexualities, the effects human actions have on their lives, nor, in sherryl vint’s words, the need to engage ethically with “a being whose embodied, communicative, emotional and cultural life ... is radically different dagmar van engen -how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 139 from our own” (1).19 but centralizing imagination as a framework of investigation in speculative erotica and centralizing the cultural politics of animality leads to a very different set of questions, problems, and possibilities than those traditionally posed in “the question of the animal.” in this essay i have tracked some of the racial, gendered, and sexual politics of invertebrate animality, tentacular sexualities, and the fleshly imaginaries of nonhuman erotica. i hope this will lead to more attention to the function of animality in erotica, pornography, romance, and other explicit genres. what alternate conceptions of desire, beauty, pleasure, and sexuality do animals like anemones, octopuses, and starfish offer? what might an aesthetics of snails look like? what models of desire, attraction, beauty, and pleasure emerge from the sexualities and genders of nonbinary invertebrate animals that do not depend on the human gender binary or heteronormative animal narratives? what might sex and gender become when they are no longer human? starfish, jellyfishes, squid, and other animals that do not bear much apparent bodily similarity to human beings frustrate the logics of animality that are central to western racialized gender logics. these are slow-moving, sticky, soft, malleable, unstructured by internal skeletons, full of orifices, and register as genderless and sexless in terms of the binary gender and sexual criteria 19th century biologists used to evaluate species’ “high” or “lowness.” yet they are not genderless or sexless, if gender is not limited to a dichotomy of masculinity and femininity. slimy invertebrates do not have backbones, which opens their bodies up to conceptual rhymes with spinelessness, softness, femininity, and limp-wristedness in different ways than the vertebrate animal homosexualities that have dominated “gay rights” rhetorics in the united states and animal studies’s focus on vertebrate mammals closely related to humans. once sex and gender are no longer entirely human, they no longer necessarily involve men, women, masculinities, femininities, or even vertebrates, and sometimes they lead to alternatives to the racialized gender and sexual paradigms of the human that continue to haunt american culture. alien seed and other invertebrate-based monster erotica stories make more room for nonbinary genders by rerouting human eroticism through the nonhuman animal and plant world in different ways than the alltoo-familiar deployment of western racialized genders and sexualities through fantasies, fears, and colonial kinships with land-dwelling vertebrates, especially mammals. these stories suggest some of the possibilities of invertebrate aquatic animality and its nonbinary gender multiplicity as they are imagined through the bodies and behaviors of monsters. the sheer campy strangeness of these erotica stories, of humans getting fucked by a kraken, offers a different, underwater world of erotic imagination in contrast to the mundane constraints of realistic genres, straight porn, and (supposedly) gender-binary vertebrates. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 140 4. i want to conclude with some thoughts on monstrosity, animality, desire, and trans bodies as further suggestions about the potential of speculative erotica as a genre. i have been in conversation with some monster erotica authors over email, asking about their writing and the conditions under which they work, and a few of them shared with me their reasons for creating this kind of material. one of them, clea kinderton (who is the author of mounted and bred by the centaurs, among other titles), shared some beautiful insights into the power of monstrous animallike representations for the erotics of trans imaginations.20 kinderton identified herself to me as a “white, bisexual, polyamorous, pre-op trans woman (mtf).” for kinderton, writing about monstrous bodies is a way of grappling with the way her own transfeminine body has been interpreted as monstrous (i quote with permission): [a]s a trans person, i have always felt like a monster. i identify with them because they’re misfits and outcasts, feared and hated by others simply because they’re an “unnatural” mix of things that shouldn’t be mixed together. so in a way monsters have always felt like “my people”. a monster isn’t going to reject me over the way that i look because its standards of beauty are utterly foreign. it allows me to suspend my disbelief that another “person” could desire me as intensely as they do. (email to author, 7/14/2016) not all monster erotica authors or readers are trans. but kinderton’s connection between monster fantasies and being treated as monstrous oneself sheds light on the potential this genre holds (at its best) for queer and trans politics today. if the gender binary often legislates dominant beauty standards, and certain monsters are illegible to this binary, then monster erotica might be a place to rework the politics of desirability that leaves many human and nonhuman bodies behind. kinderton’s words imagine monsters as a place to rewrite the sexual politics of trans, especially transfeminine, bodies under white hetero-patriarchy, and my essay here is as much a love letter to her work and xavier’s as it is to hayward’s. for kinderton, it is difficult to identify with realistic erotica because of the difficulty projecting herelf into them long enough to suspend disbelief. she writes, “i struggle writing heteronormative romance simply because it seems absurd to me that i would ever find myself in that kind of relationship; i find it easier to imagine falling in love with an orc or a minotaur, of bonding over our mutual strangeness with a yeti or a ‘creature from the black lagoon’” (email to author 7/14/2016). kinderton suggests that trans people and others who struggle to see our bodies as desirable are already unlikely dagmar van engen -how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 141 to identify with realistic mainstream porn, and may be particularly well situated for nonhuman or speculative genres instead. her words provide a provocative response to tristan taormino’s question in take me there: trans and genderqueer erotica (a paper collection published by cleis press): if “[o]ur language is ... severely limited when it comes to describing the bodies of trans people,” then “[h]ow do we eroticize these bodies, talk about them in dirty ways, worship and respect them?” (xiii). the language of invertebrate animality and the monsters based on them in ebook erotica is one underexplored avenue in reply to taormino’s question. this is a different kind of response to the problems of mainstream porn than the burgeoning world of queer, trans, and feminist porn in realistic genres being produced by queer organizations like the crash pad (taormino et al.). kinderton’s response is a speculative one rather than a realistic or indexical approach to transgender representation: “so i’ve created my own little kingdom, with my own ‘knights’ (shaggy, scaley, hooved, and horned), people i can relate to, and who aren’t so quick to reject me for being different” (email to author 7/14/2016). i am not a sociologist, and i make no quantitative claims about readership here. but i think kinderton has a point — that feeling monstrous and fantasizing about monsters have much in common, and this might be the starting point for a new politics of the erotic, a new politics of monstrous desirability and erotic animality based in the language of invertebrate animals and their nonbinary genders. there’s a lot to learn from the slimy sexualities of sea animals as they are reimagined in queer and trans speculative fiction. the imaginative capacities of nonbinary invertebrate animals offer an expanded and much more livable take on the erotic life of gender nonconforming bodies than the violent framework we still labor under in the long shadow of the 19th century. reimagining cephalopod sexualities through nonbinary aliens might help imagine trans bodies differently. notes 1. china miéville argues that lovecraft’s work marks the entrance of tentacles into american speculative fiction, “a limb type largely missing from western mythology” previously (xiv). 2. hayward does this without treating animals as naturalizing evidence for human queerness or transness (hayward, “fingereyes” 590; wilson 284; roughgarden 4). 3. my work is inspired by weheliye’s definition of racialization as a process of distributing humans “into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans” (3). see also jackson’s argument in “losing manhood: animality and plasticity in the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 142 (neo)slave narrative” that “‘the human’ and ‘the animal’ are not mutually exclusive ontological zones but rather positions in a highly unstable and indeterminate relational hierarchy ... that requires blackness as exception” (123). see also jayna brown’s “being cellular: race, the inhuman, and the plasticity of life.” 4. roughgarden notes in evolution’s rainbow: diversity, gender, and sexuality in nature and people that “hermaphrodism is common in the ocean,” listing “barnacles, snails, starfish, fan worms, and sea anemones” as examples that might reverse scientific predilections for seeing binary sex-separated bodies as the norm for animals (30). darwin observed this in the descent of man: “with animals belonging to the lower classes, the two sexes are not rarely united in the same individual” (301). as elizabeth wilson, elizabeth grosz, and other feminist science and technology studies scholars have proposed, feminist and queer criticism might be enriched by not just critiquing the misuses of biology in service of gender and sexual hierarchies, but also by drawing on scientific knowledge about animals for new, queer ends. see wilson’s “biologically inspired feminism” and grosz’s time travels. 5. helmreich 7; hird 227; alaimo 51. 6. nonbinary trans genders have been discussed hardly at all in gender and sexuality studies, compared to binary l, g, b, and t identities. iranian historian afsaneh najambadi asks if “we [have] really finally done away with gender binaries in our historical and analytical work,” pointing out that “the only categories of gender that run through so much of our gender scholarship are women and men, masculinity and femininity” (12). it is my goal in this essay to show that speculative erotica texts about invertebrate animals demonstrate that nonbinary genders do exist in american cultural production in a different way than in realistic transgender, queer, and gendernonconforming literatures. 7. for analyses of the queer cultural work of women-centric erotic fanfiction (or slash fiction), see henry jenkins’ “‘welcome to bisexuality, captain kirk’: slash and the fanwriting community,” joanna russ’s “pornography by women, for women, with love,” constance penley’s nasa/trek: popular science and sex in america, and alexis lothian, kristina busse, and robin anne reid’s “‘yearning void and infinite potential’: online slash fandom as queer female space.” 8. monster erotica authors have, in fact, had to defend themselves continually against charges of bestiality in repeated cat-and-mouse games with amazon’s vague, unevenly dagmar van engen -how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 143 enforced anti-pornography rules for the kindle market. many of them have lost income and access to sales platforms because they write forms of erotica particularly vulnerable to public scandal. vanilla, human-only, heterosexual erotica stories are not subjected to the same levels of scrutiny. 9. see discussions in tristan taormino, constance penley, celene shimizu, and mireille miller-young’s collection the feminist porn book: the politics of producing pleasure. in monster erotica, i have only self-reported information about who authors are. because this is pornography, authors publish their work under pseudonyms and do not provide public biographical or demographic information. 10. it is true that there is plenty of bad monster erotica out there. author alice xavier reported to me in an email that the kindle unlimited payment scheme (a monthly subscription service rather than a per-story price tag) rewards fast, badly-written stories over quality, well-edited work (email to author 7/12/2016). but i do not invest as heavily in the concept of literary quality. or, at least, i am more interested in these stories’ gender, sexual, racial, and species imaginations than in whether they are written like fiction that comes out of mfa programs (which tend to stigmatize both genre fiction and erotica). 11. alien seed is couched within a framing narrative of alien breeding: the story concludes with the protagonist waking up in her car, happy to discover that the aliens have left her pregnant with one of the offspring they created over the course of their breeding experiments. but this reproductive trope does not invalidate the story’s queer sexual politics. while queer theory has spent much of its disciplinary history critiquing the limitation of sex to reproduction, recent queer feminist scholars have reexamined reproduction as a queer and feminist phenomena, in part because earlier queer theories tended towards gay male-centric cultural production, and in part because the history of race and sexuality in the u.s. complicate a simple equation between “nonreproductive” and “queer” (lothian; streeby). the presence of reproduction in itself does not make xavier’s story heteronormative. alien breeding fantasies are one of the most common speculative erotica tropes on the ebook market, and xavier is not alone in this framing device, in which an alien species’s need to reproduce serves as the narrative’s occasion for wild interspecies sex. ice’s series sidney’s alien escapades offers a similar story device of a human woman abducted by little gray aliens and subjected to a series of sexual experiments with a wide range of alien species who need her to reproduce: spiderlike, plantlike, fishlike, sluglike, crablike, etc. words like “breeding” and “mating” seem to function as a bridge between the narrative-framing justification of the need to reproduce and the construction of animality as internal drive or desire. perhaps half of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 144 the stories i read during my research for this project involved reproduction as a narrative justification for indulging in forbidden sex with monsters (including some fascinating male pregnancy, or “mpreg,” fantasies): kylie ashcroft’s mating with the jungle tentacle plant, m.a. church’s the harvest: taken, k. j. burkhardt’s taken by the monsters, soichiro irons’s forced by the forest, lucia lace’s mating with the science experiment, and many others. my stance with regard to reproduction in these stories is simply agnostic. i treat it as a plot device, as a fantasy that appeals to wide numbers of readers in this genre, and a device that (as joanna russ argues of dubious consent) serves as narrative legitimation for deviant desires (russ 93). but it is not the aspect of these stories’ sex scenes that most interests me. 12. drawing on peter singer’s statements on zoophilia and robinson devor’s 2007 documentary about bestiality on a horse farm, pettman’s argument is useful for unsettling easy assumptions that sexuality among humans is entirely about the human, but sometimes slides into the kind of comparisons with interracial sex and homosexuality i would like to question (86). see also pettman’s 2017 book creaturely love: how desire makes us more and less than human, which traces representations of animality in canonical western literatures about love in an effort to show that “two humans making love are (always already) animals engaged in sexual intercourse” (creaturely love xi). 13. in the birth of a jungle, lundblad defines animality as a darwinian-freudian discourse of the animal in the early 20th century that gets used to naturalize a range of constructions of human gender, sexuality, and race (2). 14. see roughgarden’s evolution’s rainbow, which draws on scientific research to argue that biologists over-rely on heteronormative and gender-binaristic assumptions about animal genders and sexualities that result in both cultural problematics and bad science. 15. this is a genre built on a tradition of reluctant consent emerging from womenauthored romance novels and fanfiction, in which dubious consent serves as a thin layer of legitimization for illicit desires and fantasies (russ 93). but with such stark black male/white woman signifiers in the context of the racialized history of the human/animal divide, it is hard to free this narrative from its historical legacy. 16. this is reflected, for example, in nature documentaries, where birds and mammals become personified through binary gender-specific language, while invertebrates, dagmar van engen -how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 145 insects, and monocellular organisms become distanced through gender-neutral pronouns. 17. h.p. lovecraft's uses of invertebrate and monocellular animality in “at the mountains of madness” and his letters certainly prove that any animal can be used to demonize people of color and elevate whiteness. 18. the stakes of the politics of desirability are quite high, especially for trans and gender-nonconforming people without the protection of whiteness or class privilege. every year in the u.s. dozens of trans women, especially trans women of color, are murdered by straight cisgender men who feel somehow tricked. as of the moment of writing, three black trans women in louisiana alone were killed in february 2017 (ciara mcelveen, chyna gibson, and jaquarrius holland), and at least seven trans women of color have been killed in the u.s. since the beginning of the year (murdock). 19. vint sees speculative fiction as a particularly important and appropriate venue for conveying precisely this alterity of animals “as beings in their own right,” taking a different approach than mine to triangulating science fiction and animal studies (6). 20. in her 1994 essay, “my words to victor frankenstein above the village of chamounix: performing transgender rage,” susan stryker calls for reclaiming the toxic associations between being trans and monstrosity: “i want to lay claim to the dark power of my monstrous identity without using it as a weapon against others or being wounded by it myself. i will say this as bluntly as i know how: i am a transsexual, and therefore i am a monster” (240). stryker’s piece focuses on connections between genderaffirming surgeries and frankenstein’s monster’s stitched-together body, while monster erotica author clea kinderton is interested in the cis-normative, transmisogynist gazes that render non-passing transfeminine bodies monstrous. works cited ahuja, neel. bioinsecurities: disease interventions, empire, and the government of species. duke up, 2016. alaimo, stacy. “eluding capture: the science, culture, and pleasure of ‘queer’ animals.” queer ecologies: sex, nature, politics, desire. catriona mortimer-sandilands, bruce erickson, and stacy alaimo, eds. indiana up, 2010. 51-72. arrival. denise villeneuve, dir., 1 laps entertainment, filmnation entertainment, lava bear films, and xenolinguistics, 2016. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 146 ashcroft, kylie. mating with the jungle tentacle plant 2: mating in paradise. self-published kindle ebook, 2013. azzarello, robert. “unnatural predators: queer theory meets environmental studies in bram stoker’s dracula.” queering the non/human. noreen giffney and myra hird, eds. ashgate, 2008. 137-158. beastly, e.m. monstrous lust: in the forest of lust collection. self-published kindle ebook, 2016. beck, laura. “dinosaur erotica exists and it’s just as amazing as you’d imagine.” jezebel, 10/01/2013. accessed 28 feb. 2017. web. brown, jayna. “being cellular: race, the inhuman, and the plasticity of life.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 21.2-3 (2015): 321-341. burkhardt, k. j. taken by the monsters. self-published ebook, 2012. chen, mel. animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. duke up, 2012. church, m.a. the harvest: taken. self-published kindle ebook, 2014. darwin, charles. the descent of man, and selection in relation to sex. ed. james moore and adrian desmond. penguin, 2004. doubleday, zoë, thomas prowse, alexander arkhipkin, graham pierce, jayson semmens, michael steer, stephen leporati, sílvia lourenço, antoni quetglas, warwick sauer, & bronwyn gillanders. “global proliferation of cephalopods.” current biology 26 (may 2016). r387-r407. gala, lyn. claimings, tails, and other alien artifacts. kindle ebook. ed. kierstin cherry, loose id llc, 2013. giffin, t. l. taken by tentacles. self-published kindle ebook, 2012. godfrey-smith, peter. other minds: the octopus, the sea, and the deep origins of consciousness. farrar, straus, and giroux, 2016. dagmar van engen -how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 147 grosz, elizabeth. time travels: feminism, nature, power. duke up, 2005. haggerty, george. queer gothic. u of illinois p, 2006. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. prickly paradigm press, 2003. _____. primate visions: gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. routledge, 1989. _____. staying with the trouble: making kin in the cthulucene. duke up, 2016. hayles, katherine. how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. the u of chicago p, 2008. hayward, eva. “enfolded vision: refracting the love life of the octopus.” octopus: a visual studies journal 1 (2005): 29-44. _____. “fingereyes: impressions of cup corals.” cultural anthropology 25.4 (2010): 577599. _____. “more lessons from a starfish: prefixial flesh and transspeciated selves.” women’s studies quarterly 36.3/4 (2008): 64-85. _____. “sensational jellyfish: aquarium affects and the matter of immersion.” differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 25.3 (2012): 61-96. hayward, eva and weinstein, jami. “introduction: tranimalities in the age of trans* life.” tsq: transgender studies quarterly 2.2 (2015): 195-208. helmreich, stefan. alien ocean: anthropological voyages in microbial seas. u california p, 2009. hird, myra. “animal trans.” queering the non/human. noreen giffney and myra hird, eds. ashgate, 2008. 227-248. houston, shine louise. crash pad series. pink & white productions, accessed 12 jun 2017. web. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 148 ice, emerald. sydney’s alien escapades. self-published ebook, 2013. irons, soichiro. forced by the forest. self-published ebook, 2012. jackson, zakiyyah iman. “losing manhood: animality and plasticity in the (neo)slave narrative.” qui parle 25.1-2 (2016): 95-136. _____. “outer worlds: the persistence of race in movement ‘beyond the human.’” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies. 21.2-3 (2015). 215-218. jenkins, henry. “‘welcome to bisexuality, captain kirk’: slash and the fan-writing community.” textual poachers: television fans and participatory culture. routledge, 1992. 185-222. kinderton, clea. mounted and bred by the centaurs. kindle ebook, red lamp press, 2013. knight, jayme. captured by the lizard king. self-published kindle ebook, 2013. lace, lucia. mating with the science experiment. self-published kindle ebook, 2013. lipstein, andrew. “‘cum for bigfoot’: the rise, fall, and future of monster erotica.” vice (march 14, 2015). accessed 28 feb. 2017. web. lothian, alexis. deviant futures: queer temporality and the cultural politics of science fiction. dissertation, university of southern california, 2012. lothian, alexis, christina busse, and robin anne reid. “‘yearning void and infinite potential’: online slash fandom as queer female space.” english language notes 45.2 (2007): 103-111. lovecraft, h.p. “at the mountains of madness.” astounding stories (february 1936). loveley, azuree, and s. l. ramsey. enslaved: the orc captive. self-published kindle ebook, 2014. lundblad, michael. “from animal to animality studies.” pmla 124.2 (2009): 496 502. dagmar van engen -how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 149 _____. the birth of a jungle: animality in progressive-era u.s. literature and culture. oxford up, 2013. miéville, china. “introduction.” h.p. lovecraft. at the mountains of madness: the definitive edition. china miéville, ed. the modern library, 2005. xi-xxv. murdock, sebastian. “in one month, 3 black transgender women were killed in louisiana.” huffington post, march 2, 2017. accessed march 7, 2017. web. najambadi, afsaneh. “beyond the americas: are gender and sexuality useful categories of historical analysis?” journal of women’s history 18.1 (2006): 11-21. okorafor, nnedi. binti. tom doherty associates, 2015. penley, constance. nasa/trek: popular science and sex in america. verso, 1997. pettman, dominic. creaturely love: how desire makes us more and less than human. u of minnesota p, 2017. _____. human error: species-being and media machines. u of minnesota p, 2011. pyre, roman e. serpent lover. self-published kindle ebook, 2013. roughgarden, joan. evolution’s rainbow: diversity, gender, and sexuality in nature and people. u of california p, 2004. russ, joanna. “pornography for women, by women, with love.” magic mommas, trembling sisters, puritans & perverts: feminist essays. crossing press, 1985. 79-100. sims, christie, and alara branwen. in the velociraptor’s nest. self-published kindle ebook, 2013. snow, jessie. taken by tentacles 1. self-published kindle ebook, 2014. spitznagel, eric. “monster porn: amazon cracks down on america’s latest sex fantasy.” business insider online, dec 21, 2013. http://www.businessinsider.com/ monster-porn-amazon-crackdown-sex-fantasy-bigfoot-2013-12. accessed 28 feb. 2017. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 150 stone, maddie. “swarms of octopus are taking over the oceans.” gizmodo 5/23/26. accessed 28 feb. 2017. web. streeby, shelly. “fabulations from below: queer, feminist, and decolonial speculative worldings.” conference presentation. modern language association annual convention, 8 january 2017. stryker, susan. “my words to victor frankenstein above the village of chamounix: performing transgender rage.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 1 (1994): 237-254. taormino, tristan. “introduction: gender/fucking.” take me there: trans and genderqueer erotica. cleis press, 2011. ix-xvi. taormino, tristan, constance penley, celene shimizu, & mireille miller-young, eds. the feminist porn book: the politics of producing pleasure. the feminist press at cuny, 2013. vint, sherryl. animal alterity: science fiction and the question of the animal. liverpool up, 2010. wade, virginia. cum for bigfoot: volume 1, books 1-5. self-published e-book, 2016. watt, simon. ugly animals: we can’t all be pandas. the history press, 2014. weheliye, alexander. habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. duke up, 2014. welling, bart h. “ecoporn: on the limits of visualizing the nonhuman.” sidney dobrin and sean morey, eds. ecosee: image, rhetoric, nature. state u of new york p, 2009. 53-78. wilson, elizabeth. “biologically inspired feminism: response to helen keane and marsha rosegarten, ‘on the biology of sexed subjects.’” australian feminist studies 17.39 (2002): 283-285. wynter, sylvia. “unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation — an argument.” cr: the new centennial review 3.3 (2003): 257-337. dagmar van engen -how to fuck a kraken: cephalopod sexualities and nonbinary genders in ebook erotica 151 xavier, alice. alien seed. self-published kindle ebook, 2013. microsoft word irvine h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 robin irvine thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia setting the scene. uugaa's daily life is saturated with horses. a summer day begins with a long step over the threshold of the ger (felt tent and home), carrying his working saddle. this step takes uugaa from the warmth and domesticity of the interior into the chill of the early morning eastern mongolian sun. hundreds of horses are visible, apparent as slowly moving constellations of four-legged dots in the distance (see fig. 1). most are off to the south, grazing out towards the hills where uugaa's family live in the winter. one herd in particular is immediately marked as present or absent in uugaa's eyes. this is a loosely fused grouping of four stallion bands numbering fewer than a hundred in total. today they might be grazing in a hollow barely a kilometer from the household encampment. tomorrow they might be many kilometers away, hidden by the barely perceptible rolling of the steppe. these are his father's horses, of which uugaa will inherit a significant proportion as the eldest son. at 23, uugaa is not only the oldest heir but is also the most horse-oriented when compared to his two sisters and younger brother. he is heavily involved with the training of the family horses for racing. his father, dorj, inherited the core horses of the herd from the soviet style collective for which he managed around 1500 horses until the dissolution of the socialist state in the early 1990s. fig. 1: a distant herd of horses moves across the front of the ger as we wait out the rain inside. hidden amongst the herd is the herder on his motorcycle. (photo by author.) robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 63 once the distant situation of the family herd has been determined by uugaa, or if the horses are out of sight, his attention moves to the foreground. this part of the steppe lacks fences and obvious visual divisions, but the summer homes scattered along the river occupy definite spaces. an invisible but appreciable perimeter is established around each ger at about the distance a guard dog will challenge an intruder. within this space one or two individual horses are usually present. in this case, uugaa has kept back just one horse. overnight it has grazed a neat circle of grass on its groundline and hobble. skirting the mostly still sleeping herd of sheep and goats in front of the ger, uugaa makes his way over to the horse, reeling it in firmly before saddling and bridling it where it stands. sometimes this horse is a seasoned riding horse, stoically wary but used to being sporadically plucked from the herd and worked for a few days. at other times, the horse is green, standing tense as uugaa tightens the girths, tossing its head when he pulls it round to stop it from moving off as he swings up into the saddle. on occasion, the horse is completely absent, having slipped its hobble and rejoined the herd during the night. in these cases, if another horse has not been kept back for riding uugaa relies on neighbors or, if the herd is nearby, the off-chance he might be able to catch one of the seasoned horses on foot. once mounted, the riding horse generally needs no encouragement to head off in the direction of the herd, even if its herdmates are not visible. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 64 fig. 2: a hobbled riding horse grazing on its ground line. the family herd will be located somewhere in the space between the foreground of this photo and the distant hills to the south. (photo by author.) a short while later, the herd trots by the ger and on down towards the river, pushed by a still slightly sleepy uugaa. he is tall and skinny, but sits low and relaxed in the v of his sparsely padded wooden saddle, wrapped in the folds of his dark mongolian overcoat. once the horses are in position he leaves them to move as they will, knowing that as the july heat builds they will most likely remain near or in the river (see fig. 3). uugaa is working alone while i stay with his family, as his father and younger brother are away racing three of their horses in central mongolia. before coming in for breakfast he must also gather the now grazing sheep and goats, bunch them and encourage them across the river to graze on the marshy flats beyond. sometimes he gets his younger sister to do this if he has other things on his mind, such as talking to visiting anthropologists. robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 65 fig. 3: horses moving into the river to cool off – clearly unsure about my presence. (photo by author.) the day has barely begun and uugaa has not only already ridden an individual horse, he has engaged with an entire herd of horses. he has managed their attention with shouts and sweeping arcs at trot, and with the familiarity of routine as they move back towards the ger by the river. every such morning also adds to uugaa's knowledge of the herd and his appreciation of the individual animals within the different sub-bands, noting injuries and changes. on another level, uugaa, his riding horse, and his herd have been moving within a wider system of movement. to the east and the west along the river other rural families have also been waking up and mobilizing their livestock. each encampment and its associated animals occupy a position within a shifting network of agreements, some administered by the local government and some unofficial. moreover, as uugaa moves with his herds of horses, he is constantly microadjusting his position in relation to others in order to avoid stallion fights. if we zoom the lens out further still, uugaa and his neighbors are grazing their horses in khölönbuir district, in dornod province, which sits to the far northeast of mongolia (see fig. 3). here the elevation is lower than that of central mongolia, the climate milder humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 66 and the pasture is said to better for horses. locals and even some non-locals claim that this rich and varied grazing produces the best and the fastest horses for the long distance racing that is so popular across mongolia. fig. 4: map showing location of fieldsite in eastern mongolia: khölönbuir district, dornod province. mongolia in the 21st century. this is post-socialist mongolia. since the early 1990s the country has undergone a series of structural reforms geared towards creating a democratic state and concomitant market economy. this has taken place under the auspices of the asian development bank and other institutions consistent with a new international orientation towards east asia and the united states (sneath 41). stopping short of the privatization of land, the reforms have resulted in the privatization of livestock and the ascent of the individual stock owning herder as the basic economic unit. this represents a radical change from not only soviet era collectives, but also presocialist socio-political systems for managing land use that saw herders have flexible, custodial access to large areas of grazing under the jurisdiction of monastic and aristocratic authorities who in turn managed land and livestock for the manchu emperor (sneath 44). today, uugaa's parents are responsible for their own finances, assets and debt. state bailouts generally are only available in extreme cases of winter disaster. in terms of horses, uugaa's family had taken a post-socialist enterprise model even further. over the course of the last decade they sold the bulk of their original horses and invested in stallions from sukhbaatar province to the south, said to be the area where the qing emperors’ “iron herd“ was maintained. furthermore, they also acquired horses with arab and thoroughbred bloodlines: cross-breds (eerliiz mor’). the herd dropped from a few hundred head to less than a hundred, but the potential net robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 67 value of the herd increased dramatically as the height and speed of the horses over short distances improved. success in the races over the summer would make it all worthwhile; they could sell the winners on (see fig. 5). investing so much in so few horses also entailed risk: lack of success or accidents would cost relatively more. the family had already sold many of their sheep and goats to pay for the education of the children. although their situation was not precarious, it was not entirely secure. this radical program of downsizing and quality improvement stood in contrast to some of their more conservative neighbors’, who retained larger herds of horses originating solely from the area. these local horses were labelled mongolian and were not thought of as hybrids, despite a long history of movement of people and animals to, from, and within the province, which now borders russia and china (see fig. 4). fig. 5: uugaa's younger brother, töögii, with two of the horses destined to be raced and potentially sold in central mongolia. (photo by author.) uugaa’s horses and family exist in a moment that is marked by many mongolians as the “age of the market” (zah zeeliin üye) (sneath 2001, 41). over the course of the transition to democracy and a market economy humphrey (“the moral authority of the past”) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 68 observed a parallel trend towards a religious and traditionalist renaissance as mongolians reached for the moral authority of the “deep past” amid an ongoing period of “post-socialist turmoil” (humphrey & ujeed vii). moreover, bulag notes that what constituted mongolianness during this period was very much debated, despite or perhaps because of decades of socialist efforts to homogenize mongolia according to successive visions of socialist modernity. concerns that have emerged and become increasingly overtly contested in the two decades since the transition include the purity or hybridity of mongolia, its history, its constitutive ethnicities and concomitant traditions (bulag). mongolia's geopolitical situation in a wider post-socialist world, and in particular the exploitation of its mineral resources by transnational corporations, have also emerged as major issues in the public imagination (high). both buddhism (abrahms-kavunenko; humphrey, “the moral authority of the past”) and shamanism (pedersen) have experienced creative revivals in different parts of the country. additionally, high literacy levels, ongoing links with russia, commercial engagement with china, and the everyday popularity of south korean television series available in many of the remotest provinces of mongolia, demonstrate the sheer variety of threads influencing the lives of contemporary mongolians. it is in this context of upheaval, ongoing debate, and explosive creativity that we can begin to appreciate the significance of the different ways horses and people co-exist in 21st century mongolia. i have already touched briefly on the tension between selling one’s horses and maintaining one’s original herd, which is part of one's connection with the local area. the decision to invest in cross-bred horses was not uncontroversial, and uugaa's family worked hard to maintain connections to other kinds of horse-human relationships. this included owning gaited horses, seen as prestigious and beautiful, but also as a type of horse that is declining in terms of numbers and presence in mongolia. furthermore, uugaa was also known for his skill in treating injured horses, training young horses, and catching horses on the open steppe. these skills form part of a constellation of features that constitute a “good man” across mongolia: hardy, adaptive, mobile, and horse-savvy. in addition, uugaa's family took very seriously their relationship with the local spiritual “masters of the land” (empson 122). beyond merely dedicating a lock of hair or a photo of a horse (or some other form of livestock), uugaa's family dedicated an actual mare to the local spiritual entity in order to accumulate good fortune to live and herd in the area. these skills and practices involving horses did not necessarily stand in opposition to cross-breeding and selling horses outside the area, but they did allow the family to maintain a strong claim to being good horsepeople robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 69 from various local and external perspectives. it should be noted that all of these practices were debated to some extent, and there was no single path to becoming a “good man” through horses. i have mentioned the recent concerns about hybridity and purity in mongolia, along with a parallel renaissance of religion and tradition as mongolians address the perceived knowledge gap caused by the socialist period. the decision of uugaa's family to introduce hybrid breeding lines to their herd becomes interesting in light of the way breeds or types of horse frequently become entangled with “national and ethnic identity” (cassidy, “the horse“ 12). “nationality,” “breed,” and “ethnicity” are here understood as emergent facts of difference that entail material and discursive work to achieve and sustain. an example of such work is the decision taken in mongolia in 2011 to separate cross-breeds and mongolian horses in horseracing categories, even if a formal breed standard has not yet been introduced, as it has in other central asian countries like kyrgyzstan. also, as khölönbuir is a largely barga mongolian district, uugaa's family are positioned as part of an ethnic minority in terms of human politics of origins and difference. during the seven decades of state socialism in the 20th century, khalkh mongols were promoted as the “biological and cultural ethnic core of the mongol nation” (bulag 34). alongside practices deemed religious or backwards, ethnic difference was alternately repressed and rendered mere folklore: dangerous threats to national solidarity or quaint obstructions to socialist modernity. the barga in particular, having migrated from inner mongolia in the 1940s, were persecuted for their relative wealth and as potential japanese spies. animals and animal husbandry were also included in the modernization and homogenization endeavors of the soviet era. an influx of soviet-trained veterinary technicians operating on the collectives during state socialism attempted to modernize and increase the productivity of indigenous types of livestock through cross-breeding projects (fijn). the efforts of uugaa's family to raise both mongolian and hybrid horses to race and sell in the khalkh heartland of central mongolia need to be understood in terms of this historical background of concerns about the advent of capitalism, the revival of pre-socialist mongolian traditions, as well as about ethnicity, nationality, and hybridity. as uugaa and his horses move forward in the 21st century, this historical background also needs to be understood as lived and dynamic. through his relationships with the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 70 people, animals, and other fixtures of the environing world he exists in, uugaa transgresses easy distinctions between ethnicities and breeds, or commercialism and traditionalism. he also moves smoothly between engaging with horses as individuals and horses as herds, types and fragments of wider histories and relationships. the multiple ways horses are present in uugaa's life and the way these presences were made visible in the field for myself as an anthropologist also raise questions about the assumption of a crisis of representation in multi-species ethnographic research. through a further exploration of how uugaa's life is saturated with horses, i want to showcase in this article an ethnographic instance that demands an open ended multispecies approach: i want to avoid interpreting the multi-species turn as a simple move towards taking horses (animals) seriously as kinds of “subjects,” “selves,” or “persons” in research that comes under the ambit of animal studies. in addition, through an examination of uugaa's relationship with a particular horse, i highlight the importance of not retrospectively condemning the allegedly anthropocentric research approaches to animals that came before the rise of posthumanism and multi-species ethnography — that is, approaches that for the most part focused on how humans used animals as symbolic and economic resources. as i develop these ideas in the next section, i suggest that while we must tackle the biases of our predecessors we must also tackle our own assumptions that emerge as we react to their work in the context of the current sociopolitical climate of the academy and animal studies. the chief reason i make this argument is that, given that the theoretical concerns of the day effect what researchers can see and make visible in the field, it is important to maintain the openness of humananimal theory to allow animals and their various relationships with humans to continue to emerge in new forms. multi-species fieldwork: theory and practice the same person is simultaneously a mass of atoms, a physiology, a mind, an object with a shape that can be painted, a cog in the economic machine, a voter, a lover etc. etc. (huxley) in this article i hope to illustrate how the “same” horse was simultaneously present in multiple ways over the course of my anthropological fieldwork in eastern mongolia. i do this with an awareness that i am writing in a moment that we might call a paradigm shift in animal-centered anthropology and animal studies more generally. according to kirksey & helmreich (545), within socio-cultural anthropology, at least, this shift towards multi-species ethnography is characterized by the pressing “into the robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 71 foreground” of “animals, plants, fungi, and microbes” in ethnographic accounts. this foregrounding of “nonhuman others” (kirksey & helmreich 554) or the “animals, themselves” (argent, “inked” 178 [my emphasis]) in academic accounts is sometimes placed in opposition to a previous cross-disciplinary paradigm, in which animals were predominantly “kinds, calories or constructs” or “objects” (argent, “do the clothes make the horse?“ 157). for example kirksey & helmreich (545) suggest that the emergence of multi-species ethnography has seen animals in academic accounts move from the confines of “the realm of zoe or ’bare life’” to “the realm of bios,” where they too can lead “biographical and political lives” alongside humans. this appropriation of agamben’s zoe/bios distinction suggests that animals in anthropology have been elevated from the zone of the merely “killable” or usable background matter to entities with legible, traceable social lives. this notwithstanding, it is worth noting that the ethnographic existence of animal personhood has been an interest in anthropology at least since the 1960s (carrithers, bracken, & emery 663). in the context of this apparent paradigm shift, and the flourishing of human-animal centered anthropology since the turn of the century, animals are variously considered “subjects” or “agentive individuals” (maurstad, davis & cowles), kinds of “person” (knight), “selves” (kohn) or “response-able” beings (haraway). although each of these concepts has its own nuances, what they share is a desire to decenter the human as the only kind of subject/agent/being worthy of study, and concomitantly of scholarly representation. also shared and now considered a basis for anthropological analysis is the “idea that diverse entities are fellow participants in the same world, and coconstitute each others’ environments” (long and moore 18). the term “diverse entities” is relatively open. it merely conveys something that exists: a thing. an entity can be a living being, a subject, an inanimate object, or anything in between. in terms of ethnographic fieldwork, in an ideal world animals would always be unknown entities to some extent prior to the commencement of the research. this is not always the case, however, and it is clear that theory informs what can be observed in the field. what concerns me is the risk of slippage from a default theoretical position of animals are objects to a default position of animals are subjects. the latter would be just as problematically ethnocentric as the assumption that animals are always-already merely background objects, there to be counted, eaten, and used as resources for humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 72 symbolic thinking. this is particularly the case when dealing with fieldsites in places such as mongolia, far from the north atlantic centers of anglophone academia. it is in places like this that we are likely to encounter understandings of animals that are radically different to those already in circulation in the academy. given this, any a priori assumption about what constitutes an animal — e.g. animals are subjects/objects — is potentially a foreclosure or a blindspot that might block the emergence of new understandings of what animals are and can be in different circumstances. academic research does not take place in a socio-political vacuum, and much recent anglophone human-animal and particularly human-horse relations research originates from and is based in north atlantic societies (e.g. cassidy, the sport of kings; maurstad, davis & cowles). given this, what parallel tropes and concerns might we juxtapose with the concern to make animals visible as kinds of subject, kinds of person, or beings to live “with” intersubjectively? the publication of singer’s animal liberation and subsequently regan’s the case for animal rights is often cited as a pivotal moment in the development of animal-centered scholarship (carrithers, bracken, & emery; shapiro & demello). carrithers, bracken, & emery (665) suggest that in particular the refinement of regan’s (264) notion that animals too were “subjects to a life” facilitated the comparison of individual animals with individual humans as at least partially equivalent kinds of person. the authors also note that the rhetorical force of this proposition has much deeper roots in western society, namely in the sacredness of human (and now animal) personhood and the individual human (and now animal) becoming the chief unit of moral regard (carrithers, bracken, & emery 665). the trope that directs us “to equate an individual animal with an individual person” is then considered a “supercharged argument” in the north atlantic context (ibid. 663), and perhaps now more than ever in the academy. thus “moral personhood” is extended from “well-to-do northern european men to the poor, slaves, women, children, other races,” and now animals too (ibid. 663). with that extension comes an assumed crisis of representation: who are we to speak for them? i am not arguing that this is problematic in itself. taking animals seriously as subjects/selves/persons has been and will continue to be an important corrective to approaches that align themselves solely with the contrary trope: “other animal species are not persons but are means to our ends” (ibid. 663). however, both an object-centered approach and a subject-centered approach privilege the emergence of particular kinds of animal entities. this is particularly the case when dealing with charismatic animals robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 73 such as horses, who, compared to the plants, fungi, and microbes are rhetorically advantaged — from many north atlantic perspectives, at least — in terms of human perception of “response” in human-animal relationships (ibid. 664). it is easy for an ethnographer to watch uugaa with his horses and see mutual patterns of response develop as he rides and herds. they have eyes and they see him and move accordingly. the grass beneath the hooves also moves in response to uugaa's passing, but the relationship is apparently readily observable as having a different quality. i say “apparently” because in making this statement i am already recreating a western hierarchy of natural existence in which grass comes far below horses in terms of its ability to respond — this hierarchy being the product of a specific set of histories and socio-cultural contexts itself. grass does not have eyes or a mouth, nor is it situated anywhere near humans when species are classified phylogentically — this hierarchy being the product of a specific set of histories and socio-cultural contexts itself. though this might be an extreme example, it does highlight the potential ethnocentricity of privileging face-to-face, body-to-body, intersubjective relationships over other kinds of relationship animals might “participate” in, or other forms that animals might take. this problem is particularly acute when we observe that single animals and single humans participate in multiple relationships and kinds of relationships across series of linked contexts. what if a horse can concurrently or at least contextually be both an “it” and a “he/she/they”? if the same horse is simultaneously present in diverse forms, as i will argue below, then i am inclined to draw out this diversity. the mass of equine atoms, the physiology of the horse, the horse as commodity (a cog in the economic machine), and the horse in art are all horse-human relationships, just as much as face-to-face intersubjectivity between these two large social mammals. the problem then becomes less a problem of the politically charged representation of a nonhuman other and more a problem of tracking the sheer number of different kinds of representational relationship and the entities they produce. this applies to human-only relationships just as much as multi-species relationships. candea (243) addresses these issues from a different angle by posing the question “what counts as a social relation and who can participate?”, suggesting that, not surprisingly, the answer varies depending on the theoretical paradigm being employed. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 74 what is interesting is that candea suggests that the “inclusion” of animals is not necessarily the most interesting issue, but rather how they are included. if following a classic or “durkheimian” model, where social relations are relations between subjects mediated by objects, then animals might be incorporated into scholarship as subjects (ibid. 243). this is in line with the extension of sacred personhood to animals mentioned above. however, according to candea a parallel movement to include or foreground animals (in a very different form) can be found in the opening up of the definition of “social relations” in the work of scholars such as bruno latour (see latour “a plea for earthly sciences” & reassembling the social; ibid. 243). within this approach, questions of subjectivity, intentionality, and cognition are backgrounded in favor of mapping the different ways “actants” (people, animals, things) come together or associate (ibid. 243). here lies an intriguing dilemma at the heart of multi-species ethnography: on the one hand, scholars engage with mushrooms and cup-corals (kirksey & helmreich) and, on the other hand, scholars engage with large mammals that are among the first candidates for the extension of moral personhood, such as dogs (haraway) or horses (maurstad, davis & cowles). can we expect a divide to form between scholars who study the former and the latter groups of non-human species, given the “resistance” of fungi and marine invertebrates to being defined as individual animals/persons (carrithers, bracken, & emery)? can some aspects of equine lives and relationships with humans also be resistant to subject-centric narratives? the positioning of animals in scholarly accounts is a political question, but it is arguably not necessarily an either/or question. might it be possible to conduct analyses that allow animals as kinds of objects and animals as kinds of subjects to sit alongside each other? that is, an open-ended multi-species ethnography, one that can continue to cope with the contextual emergence of living beings as objects, subjects, and other entities that do not quite fit into these two polarized categories? this is what i attempt through my subsequent description of uugaa's developing relationships with a new racehorse. i aim to familiarize the reader with some of the contexts through which this one horse emerged as a being with multiple ethnographically salient aspects in eastern mongolia. catching a racehorse. let us return to uugaa and his horse-saturated mornings. once he has breakfasted, uugaa generally heads out again, usually to do something with his horses, the horses of his neighbors, or the cross-breds that belonged to an absentee horse owner and trainer, which are grazed in isolation across the river to the north. the day after his father and younger brother left for central mongolia with a mixture of robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 75 cross-bred and pure mongolian horses, uugaa told me that he was going to take another horse through the final stages of its fittening for its first race the following week. the horse was simply referred to as khongor mor' (dun gelding/horse). the context of uugaa's project and his intimate knowledge of the herd provided the means to differentiate this dun gelding from others of a similarly auspicious color. generally, only the most famous horses are named and even these names often refer to the appearance (züs) of the animal. in subsequent sections of this article the reader will also come to know who or what khongor mor' was through his circumstances and placement in the overall family herd, as well as his appearance. but first, in order to restart the training process khongor mor' had to be captured and separated from the herd. this was done with a lasso-pole and riding horse (see fig. 6a & 6b). fig. 6a: uugaa with a riding horse and his lasso-pole approaching the herd in order to catch a horse in the open. the lasso-pole (uurga) consists of a slender wooden shaft with a leather noose attached to the end, though uugaa's was customized for extra length and a snappy whipping action. (photo by author.) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 76 fig. 6b: uugaa in action with the lasso-pole, catching another riding horse to exchange it for the one he is riding in the photo. (photo by author.) the technique of capturing horses using the lasso-pole was something that uugaa was adept at. it was a skill deemed particularly mongolian, especially when referenced in narratives of the decline of good horsemanship. many people favored enclosures and standard lassos. uugaa was frequently asked to capture difficult horses from neighboring herds, risking his own riding horse and equipment in the swirling, dusty mayhem of a less well known mass of flying hooves and pressing equine bodies. the basic procedure for catching a horse with the lasso-pole is as follows. upon approaching the herd, uugaa would single out the horse he was after and attempt to drive it into the midst of its bandmates. often one or two other horses would run with the target horse. this method of driving the desired horse into the main body of the herd slowed it down enough to allow uugaa to whip the noose over its head and twist it tight. long chases in the open are often an indication of the inexperience of the herder. once the horse was snagged properly, uugaa would sit back behind the saddle of his riding horse and come to a halt rapidly, bracing himself to take up the strain if the horse resisted. the horse could then either be led to the encampment or bridled on the spot, often with the assistance of someone on the ground (see fig. 7). robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 77 fig. 7: töögii bridles a horse uugaa has caught. (photo by author.) beyond these basic steps, every such encounter between the involved parties is unique. horses with the experience of khongor mor' usually come quietly once noosed. others will not come quietly and will struggle at the end of the pole. each sortie with the lassopole tested uugaa's knowledge of the target horse: whom it would run with, when it would turn, how it would react to the noose, etc. equally, as horses get older and more experienced they will learn to duck to evade capture just as the pole whooshes over them, or to shrug their heads to the side as the noose hits their ears. the terror and struggle of first encounters with the lasso-pole gradually fade with age until resignation is the norm upon capture. the horse and rider combination will also learn together, with turns and stops becoming sharper over time, for example. at first glance this is a three-way game that demands “relationships of response” between living beings: an ongoing micro-adjustment to each other, each encounter feeding into the history of the relationships between the concerned parties and changing them (haraway 82). we might call this face-to-face intersubjectivity, or better yet, lasso-pole-mediated intersubjectivity. taking seriously the idea that horses too can be “knowers” or subjects to signification (kohn 6) foregrounds the mutuality of such relationships. that is, both uugaa and khongor' mor develop as dynamic fixtures in each other's worlds — in a co humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 78 constitutive manner — at opposite ends of the lasso-pole. a young horse learns to release the pressure of the noose by stopping. a young uugaa learns when to release that pressure and when to apply it in response to the horse's response. both horse and human emerge from the encounter as slightly changed entities. according to kirksey & helmreich, the concept of “becoming” with or becoming together has increasingly been used to capture the ongoing nature of such mutual transformations. (for a recent ethnographic example see maurstad, davis & cowles 2013). “becoming” in this sense originated with deleuze & guattari (1987) to express how the properties of elements in assemblages change or align themselves with the other constitutive elements of that assemblage. however, through its popularization in human-animal studies via the work of haraway, it has become an appealingly straightforward way of countering anthropocentric accounts of human-animal relations by emphasizing how such relations involve “co-domesticating” or “co-shaping” between “subjects” or “agentive individuals” (maurstad, davis & cowles 324). thus, rather than uugaa being the human subject capturing, training, and modifying an equine object with properties that are exhausted by its knowable nature, both uugaa and khongor mor' might be construed as subjects modifying each other; becoming something novel together. or, on a grander scale, rather than humans in mongolia domesticating horses, humans and horses are seen to have domesticated each other in a process of mutual change (fijn). deleuze & guattari (1987) did not, however, root their version of “becoming” in encounters solely between subjects or species. although different, their approach is more in line with a latourian concern for “things,” where elements in an assemblage attain their status as entities with properties through their connections with other elements (latour, reassembling). despite this, in light of the trope discussed above (an individual animal = an individual person) the “with” in “becoming with” (haraway 16) carries appreciable rhetorical force, arguably gravitating towards encounters between subjects or kinds of person. this might not be such a problem when discussing plants or landscapes, but in this instance, in uugaa’s relationship(s) with khongor mor', i suggest that treating uugaa and the horse solely as two subjects coshaping each other impoverishes the ethnographic account. by widening the definition of social relations to include the association of the “diverse entities” that swirl around uugaa as he plunges into the herd and the river in the figure 6b above, we can enrich the account by multiplying the involved parties. if we think about the way uugaa at once manipulates and responds to the shifting mass of horses robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 79 to disrupt the rapid flight of his target, then we can foreground the role that the body of the herd plays in these encounters. the mass of individual animals is a responding entity that predictably shapes and molds itself around uugaa’s movements. the way the horses cohere to each other, the way khongor mor' sticks with his fellow geldings when running in front of uugaa, can be seen as part of larger whole, a larger entity, or series of connecting entities. we might plausibly reconfigure huxley’s words to suggest that not only is the same horse [“person”] “simultaneously a mass of atoms, a physiology, a mind, an object with a shape that can be painted, a cog in the economic machine.” the same herd is simultaneously a mass of horses, an entity with component parts, a responding being, an object with a shape that can be painted, a cog in the economic or ecological machine etc. etc. in terms of khongor mor' this means taking seriously not only his presence as a individual being, but also his presence as part of the herd and its various manifestations. selecting a racehorse. “being with” khongor mor' for uugaa, and for the watching ethnographer, takes place on various levels and in the context of various wider histories and relationships. khongor mor' as a responding being is never entirely absent from the wider field of relations within which his selection for training occurred, but his “response-able” presence (haraway 82) is frequently less ethnographically salient than it was during his capture. his presence took on other forms as part of the constitution of the family herd and its connections with both sukhbaatar province to the south and uugaa’s barga ethnicity. uugaa’s family tended to tie the current riding horse up at the line of carts situated to the north of most barga homes, while racehorses were tied to a separate high-line off to one side (see fig. 8). this is generally referred to as a tying up place (uya) in mongolian; the poles that elevate the line are called sojig. however, uugaa and his family called the whole tying up area sojig, as they do in sukhbaatar province to the south, where some of the key (mongolian) horses of dorj's herd come from. this was one claim among many nested claims to horse-related authority and connections extending beyond uugaa's home encampment. at the level of the household, every family was supposed to have their own training tricks and superstitions geared towards getting the best out of the land and the horses. within the community, friendships and relationships of patronage between uugaa, his humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 80 peers, and older trainers were distributed unevenly, giving some youngsters better access to a wider variety of knowledge. uugaa was an active gatherer of techniques of horsecare, being not only a skilled catcher of horses, but also a skilled treater of equine injuries. at the level of ethnicity, uugaa suggested that the barga were defined not only by lineage, by their carts, their sheep, and their ornate silver-worked tack, but also by their knowledge of how to fatten horses in the area. beyond that, as part of the eastern province of dornod, khölönbuir district, along with sukhbaatar province, was within an area fabled for its excellent horsestock and horse-raising conditions. this notwithstanding, uugaa was also aware of an emergent pan-mongolian horsemanship, defined largely along khalkh ethnicity lines (bulag). for uugaa, these local, provincial, ethnic, and pan-mongolian threads of horsemanship were not abstract but lived through specific practices like calling the uya the sojig. another example of panmongolian horsemanship is the way uugaa and his brother had attempted to ferment mares’ milk one summer to produce an alcoholic beverage that he said he had greatly enjoyed while racing horses in central mongolia. the barga apparently had no tradition of doing this, and indeed this was supposed to be one of the reasons why, although their horses were particularly fast, their men were poor wrestlers. the mares’ milk was said to give strength as a white food, but this strength went directly to the foals in khölönbuir rather than to the men. as i will develop shortly, this strength and concomitant fortune, which has ultimately come from the land, can contribute to the fortune of the household through either wrestling or horse-racing. robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 81 fig. 8: khongor mor' with uugaa a few days into the fittening process. in the background the high-line can be seen, with its supporting poles. uugaa’s family have added individual ties with swivels to minimize the chance of fankles. (photo by author.) in terms of the above connections, khongor mor' was from sukhbaatar province, a gift from a friend of uugaa’s who lived and bred horses there. he was the descendant of a particularly great horse on his dam’s side, named bosoo kheer. galshar (fast lines of ancestry) were traced through both sire and dam. the sukhbaatar horses in the herd were generally smaller than even the normal barga horses, as well as the cross-bred stock. my interpreter-assisted interviews with older neighbors pointed to a long history of cross-breeding in the area, with the barga horses reflecting the presence of taller ancestors from inner mongolia. this was not conflated with the recent surge in the acquisition of arab and thoroughbred lineages, however. the added height tells in the shorter races of the younger age-bands, though the cross-breds were then said to struggle in terms of endurance once the races were longer than 30km for 6 year olds and above. in order to explain to me why khongor mor' was more suitable for training than other horses of the same age, uugaa referred not only to his ancestry, but also his conformation. to describe the horse’s ideal features and physical shortfalls he drew on humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 82 books, pamphlets, and past debates with his father and the person who bred the horse. some of these books were recently published by great mongolian horse trainers, others were published during the socialist era, when horseracing was also important, if different. it is said that during socialist times, any herder and his jockey son might hope to win the regional or national horseraces, if they had a fast horse. now, however, with the advent of cross-breeding, expensive medicines, wormers, supplements, and hard feed (oats), horseracing was said to have become largely a rich man's game. these books and pamphlets depicted ideal types of racing horse based on central animals in a mongolian-buddhist tradition (see fig. 9). fig. 9: an exemplar of the frog ideal type of racing horse. uugaa would flick from page to page as we discussed khongor mor' in the confines of the home. the books did not leave the ger and were part of a larger collection of horserelated literature stored beneath the flat-screen television in the honorific zone at the back of the home. this zone, the khoimor, contained not only the television but also equipment for hunting and racing that was not of an everyday nature. the silk scarves awarded to winning horses could be found here, as well as photos of great horses from the family. everything to do with the household’s fortune was here, including locks of tail hair from deceased fast horses, the sweatscrapers for the racehorses, uugaa’s hat and his younger brother’s judo medals. although the contents vary, some being more religious than others, khoimor zones at the furthest end of the ger are a feature of homes right across mongolia (humphrey, “inside a mongolian tent”). if a family has any connection with horseracing, that connection will appear in material form within the robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 83 khoimor, reflecting the way racing is tied up with household fortune and masculine prestige. having leafed through the books, once we were outside with the horse uugaa would highlight features he had indicated inside — the back of his hands running across the body of khongor mor', coming to rest on salient features. the palm of the hand might dispel good fortune lodged in the horse. i will develop this point below. in uugaa’s eyes, khongor mor' tended towards being a frog type, based on his broad jaw and prominent forehead (see figs. 9 & 10). fig. 10: khongor mor' – uugaa was demonstrating the width of his jaw to me. he also pointed out the thick base of the horse’s ears and how they rose to a crisp tip. (photo by author.) uugaa mentioned that his father disagreed with this assessment, pointing towards the horse’s well defined gazelle-like back (another ideal type). in fact, uugaa’s explanations of what exactly made khongor mor' or any of his horses a good horse were voiced in a spirit of auto-critique. uugaa was well aware that tying wolf bones into the tails of his racehorses might be considered backwards and superstitious, but this did not stop him. what was important was that khongor mor' had a constellation of features that could be humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 84 related to the ideal types within the well-thumbed pages of the books. moreover, khongor mor' had the four very solid and straight legs typical of a good mongolian horse, along with a long back. his legs were just a little short for his back length (see figs. 8 & 12). another way of differentiating and discerning racing potential was to examine the relative distribution of the five elements in a horse's body (fire, iron, water, air, and wood). in this case khongor mor's strong shoulders led to his designation as predominantly a fire horse (see fig. 11). compared to the cross-bred horses in the herd, khongor' mor had nostrils that were relatively closed. uugaa would have liked his mongolian horses of both barga and sukhbaatar origin to have a better ability to draw oxygen while racing. fig. 11: the horse's body, divided up in terms of the five elements: air, wood, iron, fire, and water. every horse is stronger or weaker in one or more of these elements. robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 85 fig. 12: khongor mor' tied up at the sojig during the day. the solidity of his legs and shoulders are visible in this photo. (photo by author.) what was in the ethnographic foreground during the above discussions about conformation, or when uugaa thumbed through the pages of his books, or as his hands located points of strength and weakness on the body of the horse? to some extent he is certainly touching a history that belongs to the dun horse from sukhbaatar, but from an anthropologist's perspective that history is lodged just as much in uugaa’s books and hands as in the life experiences of the horse itself. that same horse has fragmented: bits of his body map onto images of ideal types and vital elements leaping from the pages of pamphlets to lodge themselves onto that body in turn. the “thing” or horse that uugaa and i discuss and touch exists as much through the words and images in the books as through the actual arrangement of an equine physicality. although khongor mor' might reassert his presence as a living being by swinging round as we move to look at his hooves, in this particular ethnographic moment his ability to respond is largely backgrounded. haraway describes moments of rupture between her and her dog, cayenne — moments when their smooth, co-operative entanglement comes undone during agility contests, and something goes wrong. when uugaa and i talk about khongor mor' and run our hands over his body as we refer to the books inside, the moment of response or the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 86 moment when the horse makes himself present as a living being is the moment of rupture or interruption. this is the inverse situation, where khongor mor' as a subject becomes an intrusion, disrupting the presence of khongor mor' as the mute equine form we were debating moments before. sweating a racehorse. the equine body that is designated khongor mor' was being prepared for a race of approximately 15km, although he was not expected to win. running the race was part of a longer trajectory of development for the horse. the training included tying the horse up for long periods during the day, without allowing him to graze. khongor mor' was fed oats. he was also sweated: wrapped in blankets and ridden until the sweat seeped out; then he was ridden further, to the point that when the blankets were removed the sweat splashed out on the ground round the sojig, mixing with the dust. fig. 13: uugaa's younger sister, otgon, walks off a sweaty and fidgety khongor mor' after a training session. (photo by author.) khongor mor' started off in solid summer condition, exuding salty sweat after only a short distance. but by the eve of the race, when the horse has already been “opened up” over 10km of steppe, the sweat uugaa tasted with the tip of his tongue was no longer quite so salty, and the horse was beginning to look more like the lean running machines depicted in the books (see figs. 9, 13 & 14). the simple motion uugaa made to taste the sweat represented not only a moment of assessment, but also a trajectory of assessments robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 87 and efforts as uugaa and the horse worked towards race condition. it spoke of commitment and a project with tendrils that run through books, the herd, the encampment, the ancestry of the horses and humans involves, as well as the bodies of uugaa and khongor mor'. fig. 14: a leaner, more racehorse shaped khongor mor' returns to graze with the herd in the evening. (photo by author.) the importance of sweat reappears at the finishing line, as the crowd rushes forward to be enveloped by the dust of the winning horses and attempts to touch the perspiration of the exhausted winner (humphrey & ujeed 160). dust and sweat are formless means of transporting fortune or vitality. just as a careless hand might lift fortune from the back of a horse, so a caring hand can wipe the muzzle of an animal due to be sold or killed on the inside of a deel (overcoat) in order to retain any fortune lodged in the animal. the ground around the sojig where the racehorses were tied was literally saturated with fortune-bearing sweat, and hence it was a very private space. the result on this specific raceday was not particularly important, so khongor' mor was ridden by a young son of a neighboring family who was neither the best nor the worst jockey. he did not place, but it was never anticipated that he would. his final fittening up had started a bit late and it was his first proper race. if we think back to the wider changes in humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 88 uugaa’s family’s herd, we can begin to imagine the annual rhythm of preparing a mixture of cross-bred and sukhbaatar-bred horses for races. we can begin to see how it is necessarily a long term project. during my stay with uugaa’s family in 2011, khongor mor' was at the start of a potentially long and important trajectory, where his fortune was tied up with that of uugaa’s family and also uugaa’s prospects as a trainer. for the time being, the stakes were low, but uugaa still took great care not to risk that potential fortune. khongor mor' was a cog in the economic machine of the family and the wider emerging economy of racehorses in mongolia. corporations and rich individuals can now not only fund the summer racing festivals (naadam), but also buy and run horses in their names. however, khongor mor' was not only a cog in a monetary machine, he was a part of uugaa’s herd and a part of the economy of fortune that centered on the ger. if misfortune were to strike him, if someone were to step over the lasso-pole on the ground, or place his palm on the horse’s back and subdue his vitality (khiimor'), this could have a knock on effect for the collective fortune (khisheg) of the whole household. equally, if khongor mor' went on to win, then his vitality would surge with the fortune of the family and their livestock. the connections between the spiritual masters of the land, the herd, and the household were not smooth and uniform, but they were there, even if they were debated and improvised to some extent. the locks of hair tied to the lattice at the back of the ger apparently retained the speed and fortune of deceased great horses for the household. skulls of great horses were strategically placed in hollows in the mountainside that overlooked the pasture below. these skulls fulfilled the same function as the locks of hair on a wider scale. the sacred mare (setertei güü), wandering alongside khongor mor' when he returns to the herd, is accumulating fortune, too. the cross-breds and the horses from sukhbaatar are becoming entangled with this network of fortune as they run and win for the household and gain a photo on the chest of drawers at the back of the ger. khongor mor' is an aspect of this economy of fortune that is at once collective and individual. he is both a living fortune-bearing equine being and a cog through which vitality passes in a large fortune-making machine. in the case of uugaa and this horse it would be quite possible to linger on face-tofaceness in their relationship: to ask questions about how uugaa understood the horse as an individual with idiosyncratic habits of behavior. fijn has made the case that mongolian herdspeople generally have an intimate knowledge of individuality within their herds; with that they have an extensive spoken vocabulary for discussing behavior robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 89 and an equally extensive corporal vocabulary for dealing with it. i could try to juxtapose uugaa’s understanding of his horse as an individual animate being that breathes (am'tan) with my observations of their behavior together, with an understanding of equine biology, and with my own experiences as a “working rider.” this juxtaposition would highlight the mutuality of these relations (the intersubectivity) as argent (“do the clothes make the horse?“) has argued. such an approach would no doubt be productive, but in centering animals as subjects we would also be decentering other forms that animals take and other kinds of relationships that they are involved in. by siting khongor mor' as the target in the lassopole game alongside khongor mor' the not-quite-exemplary racing body and cog in the fortune machine i am making the case for a multi-species ethnography that allows books, images, ideas, fortune, bits of horses and symbols to have traceable social and historical presences of their own, just as much as the animals (or humans) themselves. the point is not that these aspects of the same horse are ever entirely separable, but rather that the best kind of analysis might be able to tease out how these different but entangled aspects are localizable in particular micro-contexts and particular relationships that shift over time. conclusion: trans-paradigmatic ethnography and the horse multiple. having given the reader a short insight into the lives of uugaa and khongor mor', we can now return again to the image of uugaa stepping over the threshold of his home and seeing his herd of horses in the distance. now we can appreciate that every single one of these horses is entangled in relationships as complicated as those of khongor mor'. uugaa already knows which youngsters are the greatest racing prospects or are showing signs of gaitedness that might later be cultivated. he knows which horses may have to be culled before the coming winter so they do not die a tragic death in the cold and do not go to waste. he knows which is the sacred mare and which foal is hers. he hopes that she is accumulating fortune for the whole herd and household after the journey they made to the dedication ceremony at the cairn that pertains to the local spiritual master of the land. his world is saturated with these horses and more. moreover, the horizons of these horses as individual beings are saturated with his projects and dreams as well. however, what i have shown in this article is that it is not just a question of his world and their world(s) or his subjectivity and their subjectivity. the equine presences i have humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 90 made visible above are not limited to enduring equine selves. they are fragmented and partial: bits of bodies, vessels of fortune, ideal types, bearers of family debt, bearers of foreign blood and future hope. even as they change and develop over time, each aspect of a single horse exists through legible assemblages of action, meaning, and matter. i and other authors have emphasized the chaotic feel of the current post-socialist moment in mongolia and its “wild capitalism” (zerleg kapitalizm) (empson 117). i have made it clear that uugaa and his horses are nevertheless making something of this moment, even as they embody and transgress the characteristic tensions that 21st century mongolia is experiencing. the flows of sweat and fortune move through khongor mor', but also through other entities: through the herd or sections of the herd linked with sukhbaatar province and central mongolia; through the landscape where the skulls of great horses sit close to the earth and where sacred animals wander; through the encampment and the photos sitting in the place of honor at the back of the ger. with his horses and his herd, uugaa breaches easy distinctions not only between ethnicities and breeds, or between commercialism and traditionalism, but also theoretical distinctions between subject and object. although khongor mor' can be construed as a being that is present (a subject), particularly at moments such as his capture, he is not the only entity that is present or ethnographically significant in such instances. horses, or indeed all entities, might be considered “multiple” in the sense that mol has argued that bodies are at once one and multiple: persons’ bodies do not come into existence as smooth wholes, they emerge as wholes through practice, through work, through specific ways of engaging with and therefore generating reality. in terms of khongor mor' and the other horses whose lives in eastern mongolia i have touched on in this article, what i mean is that although it is possible to draw out singularity and subjectivity in these individual horses, it might be a mistake to do this a priori, without considering the plurality of forms that these equine bodies take in different contexts. herds, herding, types, lineages, races, and lassoing all see slightly different horses emerge at different points in time, and with varying ethnographic salience. if we are to push forward the potential of multi-species ethnography, we need to maintain it as an open project to allow multi-species researchers to continue to generate “transparadigmatic ethnography” (navaro-yashin) that is neither trapped in approaches that treat animals as always-already objects nor those that treat animals as always-already subjects. robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 91 i leave the reader with an image of khongor mor' being led away to his future. i know that he is still with uugaa and that their riding partnership has developed to the point where he is the horse uugaa rides for the summer festivals, where both wear their finest. fig. 15: otgon leads khongor mor' back to the tying up area after exercise. (photo by author.) works cited abrahms-kavunenko, s. improvising tradition: lay buddhist experiences in cosmopolitan ulaanbaatar. phd thesis. university of western australia, 2011. agamben, giorgio. homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. [1995] trans. daniel heller-roazen. stanford: stanford up, 1998. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 92 argent, gala. “do the clothes make the horse? relationality, roles and statuses in iron age inner asia.” world archaeology 42.2 (2010):157-174. argent, gala. “inked: human-horse apprenticeship, tattoos, and time in the pazyryk world.” society & animals 21 (2013): 178-193. bulag, uradyn e. nationalism and hybridity in mongolia. oxford: clarendon press, 1998. candea, matei. “’i fell in love with carlos the meerkat’: engagement and detachment in human-animal relations.“ american ethnologist 37.2 (2010): 241-58. carrithers, michael., bracken, louise. j. & emery, steven. “can a species be a person? a trope and its entanglements in the anthropocene era.” current anthropology 52.5 (2011): 661-685. cassidy, rebecca. “the horse, the kyrgyz horse and ’the kyrgyz horse.’” anthropology today. 25.1 (2009): 12-15. _____. the sport of kings: kinship, class and thoroughbred breeding in newmarket. cambridge: cambridge up, 2002. empson, rebecca. “the dangers of excess: accumulating and dispersing fortune in mongolia.” social analysis 56.1 (2012): 117-132. fijn, natasha. living with herds: human-animal coexistence in mongolia. cambridge: cambridge up, 2011. haraway, donna. when species meet (posthumanities). minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2008. high, mette. “wealth and envy in the mongolian gold mines.” cambridge anthropology 27.3 (2008): 1-19. humphrey, caroline. “fortune in the wind: an impersonal subjectivity.” social analysis 56.2 (2012): 156-67. _____. “inside a mongolian tent.” new society 31 (1974): 30-31. _____. “the moral authority of the past in post-socialist mongolia.” religion, state and society 20.3 & 4 (1992): 375-89. humphrey, caroline and ujeed, hürelbaatar. “introduction.“ in uradyn bulag, ed. nationalism and hybridity in mongolia. oxford: clarendon press, 1998. robin irvine — “thinking with horses: troubles with subjects, objects, and diverse entities in eastern mongolia” 93 huxley, aldous. letters of aldous huxley. ed. grover smith. new york: harper and row, 1969. kirksey, eben s. & stefan helmreich. “the emergence of multispecies ethnography.” cultural anthropology. special issue: multispecies ethnography 25.4 (2010): 545-576. kohn, eduardo. “how dogs dream: amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement.” american ethnologist 34.1 (2007): 3-24. knight, john. ed. animals in person: cultural perspectives on human-animal intimacies. oxford and new york: berg, 2005. latour, bruno. “a plea for earthly sciences” in judith burnett, syd jeffers, and graham thomas, eds. new social connections: sociology's subjects and objects. palgrave macmillan, 2010. 72-84. _____. reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory. oxford: oxford up, 2005. long, nicholas. j. & henrietta l. moore, eds. introduction to sociality: new directions (wyse series in social anthropology). oxford and new york: berghahn books, 2012. maurstad, anita. davis, dona. & cowles, sarah. “co-being and intra-action in horse– human relationships: a multi-species ethnography of be(com)ing human and be(com)ing horse.” social anthropology 21.3 (2013): 322-335. mol, a.-m. the body multiple: ontology in medical practice. durham, nc: duke up, 2002. navaro-yashin, yael. “affective spaces, melancholic objects: ruination and the production of anthropological knowledge.” journal of the royal anthropological institute (n.s.) 15 (2009): 1-18. pedersen, morten. not quite shamans: spirit worlds and political lives in northern mongolia. ithaca: cornell up, 2011. regan, tom. the case for animal rights. berkeley: u california p, 1983. shapiro, kenneth, & margo demello. “the state of human-animal studies.“ society and animals 18.3 (2010): 307-18. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 94 singer, peter. animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals. london: cape, 1976. sneath, david. “notions of rights over land and the history of mongolian pastoralism.” inner asia 3 (2001): 41-58. microsoft word vaught-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 jeannette vaught a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses in 2015, after a decade of litigation and legal appeals, the american quarter horse association permanently banned cloned horses and their offspring from entering its venerated registry. in doing so, the association, a behemoth among equine breed associations across the globe, took the position that particular technologically-mediated sexual liaisons between horses carried undesirable and preventable moral consequences. through an analysis of the intersections between the sexual mechanics of cloning, the history of the american quarter horse association, and the freighted cultural dimensions of the term “breed,” this essay argues that this ban was meant to clearly delineate the appropriate methods of sexual contact among equines who could be genetically considered quarter horses, and it did so by removing cloning from among the possible ways in which a “legitimate” quarter horse could be created. of course, policing animal sex to protect certain genetic and cultural identities has many antecedents throughout the history of livestock breeding, as does the fact that animal breeding practices often reflect contemporaneous human attitudes towards sex and morality (see ritvo; pawley; hurn), as well as racial formation (see rosenberg, “how meat changed sex”) and class (see coulter). for horses, as for all mammals, sex and genes are as unavoidably entangled with each other, as they are with historical and cultural contexts. because of this, it is worth paying attention to how an institution’s devotion to protecting specific genetic legacies allows it to also dictate the sexual arrangements and practices of its subjects. the american quarter horse association (hereafter, the aqha) is one among many of these institutions operating in the wildly diverse “horse world” of north america and europe, where these particular institutions are called breed associations. each one (there are many hundreds) considers itself the guardian of a particular kind of horse as defined through its genetic inheritance. the main tool of this genetic gatekeeping is called a stud book, which is rather like an enormous family tree. at the roots of the tree are the “foundation” horses that were used to create and define the breed. the branches of the tree grow from the offspring of these foundation horses. any “registered” offspring of these foundation horses carry papers determining their legitimacy and place in the tree, and they are uncontested representatives of that breed. these papers belong to the horse, and transfer along with the horse if the horse is purchased, not unlike a vehicle title. registered horses, if bred together, create automatically registerable jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 99 offspring. registration papers confer status, economic value, and advantages among breed-specific competition events. horses outside of this narrow group who, through various methods of official inspection and approval, are deemed advantageous to the overall gene pool, can enter the studbook from its margins and produce registerable offspring of their own. such is the way a stud book becomes populated: through careful choices made by breeders with the intent to further the goals of its foundational genetics as horses produce offspring whose bodies and behaviors conform to breed standards (see derry). this endeavor is always somewhat contradictory, being both inherently conservative and inherently futurist. but until the aqha’s cloning ban, a horse’s mix of genes, rather than the method of their transmission, was the primary area policed by associations. there are other examples of enforced equine sexual propriety, such as the jockey club’s famously steadfast insistence on a live sexual encounter between two equines in order to produce a registerable (and thereby raceable, and potentially extremely valuable) thoroughbred offspring (see cassidy). for the jockey club, enforcing physical, embodied sexual intercourse between a male and a female horse is a way of preserving genetic purity: there can be no mistake who the genetic parents of a particular horse are if both were physically present to perform the sex act. this reasoning has kept that practice, colloquially called live cover, de riguer for the jockey club, despite the emergence of reproductive technologies such as artificial insemination that other equine breed associations have welcomed. these technologies carry the (very slight) risk of breeding mistakes — such as inseminating the wrong mare by accident — and the (slightly higher) risk of genetic fraud. with the notable exception of the jockey club, many breed associations adjusted their requirements to allow for new kinds of sexual encounters between horses that expanded along with reproductive technological developments. this trend included the aqha: its stud book had previously adjusted to accommodate artificial insemination and other technological sexual techniques. many european breed associations also accepted cloning in the mid-2000s, and i assumed that the aqha would, as it had in the past, eventually clear its litigious refusal and go the same way. but when the aqha drew its firm line at cloning, my eyebrow raised: why would this technique, more so than others before it, justify the withholding of registration to the offspring of registered horses? why would this method of intercourse and conception be deemed inappropriate when others before it had passed muster? what line had been crossed for this breed association to associate morally repugnant consequences with this particular equine techno-carnal act? for the aqha, the discourse of the cloning debate did not center on a genetic risk that a particular sexual rule could mitigate. instead, the ban on cloning posed a sexual humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 100 solution to a moral problem. as this essay argues, that problem was cultural: unlike other reproductive technologies, cloning threatened to fundamentally disrupt the structure of naturalized heteronormative animal reproduction that undergirds the cultural identity of the aqha. it was cloning’s queerness — its disruption to the form of the family tree — rather than cloning’s impact on genetics — the tree’s content — that required policing. cloning ruptured the aqha’s trend of adjusting its conception rules to accommodate reproductive technologies. rupture and repulsion are common reactions to the specter of cloning: when i’ve spoken about animal cloning in public and academic contexts, the word often evokes an audience-wide cringe. the word is unsettling — due in no small part to its cultural sundering from ideas of “natural” mammalian sexual reproduction via its technological capabilities. even more than certain reproductive technologies that preceded it, cloning widely connotes a futuristic imaginary of a science-fiction sort for the majority of the american population unfamiliar with genetic sciences and agricultural worlds, despite its commonplace use in agricultural-animal production since the 1990s and early 2000s (russell). (it also genuinely surprises many people that animals are regularly cloned.) according to the aqha, its “unnaturalness” fundamentally disrupts the narrative of what a quarter horse, as a representative of that breed, should be. this sense of unnaturalness stems both from the process and result of cloning. cloning’s power to consolidate genetic transmission through a single individual, rather than two mammalian parents, profoundly unsettles the foundational concepts of sexual reproduction. and sexual reproduction, in bringing together two individuals to make one, results in singular and exceptional individuals (if predictably so), whereas cloning repeats the life cycle of an existing individual. these disruptions fueled a large part of the aqha’s refusal to register cloned horses. but by closing its stud book to cloned horses, the aqha took upon itself the role of re-defining the quarter horse as a breed. to do so, it drew clear boundaries around genetic definitions of equine legitimacy by imposing culturally conservative definitions of legitimate equine sex. the fears of cloning expressed by the aqha — fears that center on technological disruptions to “natural” family, kin, and sexual networks — accompany the public expansions of legal and cultural protections for people whose kin and kind partnerships do not conform to heteronormative arrangements. in this context, the aqha’s foregrounding of “natural” sexual relations over genetic purity in determining what horse could be a quarter horse was a cultural backlash that reveals the extent to which assumptions of two-parent “naturalness” pervades american quarter horse history and american culture more broadly. jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 101 this essay’s focus on sexuality and parentage brings it into the orbit of ongoing work in gender and sexuality studies that unites agricultural and animal history with concerns about race, gender, reproduction, and technology. while “nature” has made recent inroads into queer theorizing, particularly through the lens of “queer ecologies,” the expansive potential of including nonhumans and multispecies relationships within sexuality studies remains somewhat abstract, in part because this work tends to privilege animal and nonhuman representation over direct engagement with material nonhuman beings and the endlessly messy and challenging work of forging and maintaining relationships with them (see, for example, gandy; mortimer-sandilands). by contrast, attention to the material animal is absolutely central to recent work in agricultural history and anthropology in relation to the queer and multispecies sexualities that support (and have always supported) food systems and shape flows of capital (see blanchette; johnson; rosenberg, the 4-h harvest; rosenberg, “how meat changed sex”). likewise, attention to genomic sciences and reproductive technologies are getting a fresh appraisal from scholars interested in their impacts on racial formations and kin networks, and some of this work engages directly with the material multispecies dimensions of these tools (see kim; tallbear, native american dna; tallbear, “theorizing queer inhumanisms”; tallbear, beyond the life/not life binary). as someone who was partly raised by horses, and who spent many years working on horse breeding farms, i was steeped in relations that grew up around the complex intersections of technology, capital, and care. in such spaces, invasive breeding technologies are thoroughly present and normalized, but so is the physical work of caring for stallions and mares and helping them raise their foals in a fundamentally cooperative human-equine world. this essay grows equally from personal experience and academic concerns: those relationships matter materially as well as historically, ethically, and politically. the choices people make when producing animals deserve close inspection, and can help us formulate a more complete accounting of how sex, technology, wealth, power, and kinship are materially constituted. the american quarter horse as a breed is a good example of such an accounting, as the dense layers of its kinship networks are the results of very public biological and cultural moves. after lengthy and thorough public debate among people invested in the meaning of the breed, in the end, cloning could not make a quarter horse. throughout this essay, i examine how the entanglements of ideas of nature, sex, and american heritage confer legitimacy to the quarter horse as a twentieth-century breed, and how cloning threatened to upend those historical fictions, including the naturalization of heteronormative kinship upon which this breed depends for its cultural and genetic identity. brad weiss’s recent anthropological work on heritage hog1 breeds, which are bred, raised, and marketed as “natural” alternatives to industrially produced pigs and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 102 pig products, offers a helpful conception for thinking through the “nature” that is so often deemed inherent in these human definitions of animal legitimacy. weiss pays close attention to the embodied actions, emotions, and human/nonhuman relations that get pulled into “nature.” he asks, “how, for example, might the quality of ‘natural’ be registered as a sensuous quality in the course of feeding and watering a pig; then in the processing of its pork as a value-added product… and how might the meanings of ‘nature’ be modified, reinterpreted, or translated from field to slaughter facility to menu?” (weiss 8). similar questions can be asked of the relationships between equine breeding practices and registries: how might the quality of “natural” align and/or conflict with the quite sensuous enactment of humanand technologically-involved sexual arrangements that are designed to add legitimacy and value to the horse produced through that union? for both the hog and the horse, “nature” is shorthand for a fantasy of purity — purity of origins, purity of genetics, and, crucially, purity of the carnal body itself. because reproduction is the central act of animal production, these are multispecies sexual fantasies made “natural,” and therefore invisible as sexual fantasies, through the lens of commerce. as we imaginative humans well know, there’s no better way to kill the heat of a fantasy than by exposing its workings to public view. for the aqha, cloning did just that: it exceeded the bounds of “nature” and naturalization, thereby exposing the careful process of modification, reinterpretation, and translation of a horse from a genetic to cultural product. america’s horse, according to texas. the first successful equine clone was born in italy in 2003 — six years after the first cloned mammal, dolly the sheep, was born to researchers in scotland. veterinarians at texas a & m university (tamu) successfully cloned the first horse in the united states in 2005. shortly thereafter, the university partnered with bio-tech venture capital firm viagen, based in austin, texas, to produce more. a crop of foals conceived via this partnership, twelve in all, were born in texas in 2007. tamu had been working on cloning other companion and agricultural animals since the mid-1990s, and had significantly invested in the promise of cloning to protect global biodiversity through its association with project noah's ark, an international gene bank containing the genomes of endangered species (haraway 153). in 1998, tamu also housed a major domestic animal cloning research endeavor. marketed as “the missyplicity project,” tamu researchers sought to successfully clone a privatelyowned pet mutt bitch named missy, using private funds from her anonymous owner to cover a significant portion of the research bill (mchugh 152). the project was aggressively promoted to the public through the internet, cultivating a wide public audience (the project failed; cloning dogs and many other species remains an elusive procedure). the use of private funds was key, as it was not yet clear whether texan jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 103 taxpayers were willing to let their dollars go towards cloning initiatives at a major public university. all of tamu's cloning projects were additionally aided by a corporate partner, genetic savings & clone. gs&c is a cryopreservation warehouse located just down the road in college station, texas, the first of its kind to be, in mchugh’s words, “directly associated with cloning research.” let no one say that early clone enthusiasts lacked a sense of humor, despite the seriousness with which tamu incorporated — literally — cloning into its potential as the future global epicenter of cloned animal research. tamu’s first successful cloned horse was a genetic copy of a european internationallevel show jumping horse named quidam de revel. the procedure was entirely funded by his danish owner. this clone foal was named paris texas in a playful nod to the euro-texan collaboration (“first cloned horse”). news of the success, however, attracted a much more local equine clientele in its immediate aftermath: quarter horse breeders in texas. tamu is an agriculturally focused university with deep ties to three equine industries that heavily favor quarter horses: quarter horse racing, ranching, and rodeo (tamu has had an active intercollegiate rodeo since 1919). in texas, the people involved in these industries often overlap. and while quarter horses are extremely popular in texas, they are by no means limited to that region. they remain one of the most sought-after horses around the world. what exactly is a quarter horse? the term, if not the equine genetic legacy it represents, is native to the united states. the name derives from one of the first standards used to define what counted as a quarter horse: the ability to sprint a quarter of a mile with exceptional speed. the term was first used in the american colonies as early as the late 17th century, as anglo colonists bred imported light-bodied english horses with small, hardy horses living along the eastern seaboard. the horses already in the colonies were all descended from middle eastern and iberian horses brought to the americas with the spanish empire as early as the 1500s. several indigenous tribes managed small herds; others lived as feral animals on barrier islands. (chincoteague and assateague are the most famous locales, for readers of marguerite henry). horses called quarter horses at this time were hybrid stock. they were bred by wealthy colonists for their versatility to perform hard work and provide human leisure in the form of racing (mackay-smith 106-138). in the 17th and 18th centuries, the european and colonial concept of a “breed” (or in the parlance of the time, “race”) of animal was tied to a particular animal’s extant performance and utility more than its looks or kin connections (derry 15; 27).2 therefore, these colonial quarter horses were named for the physical tasks they accomplished, not their particular genetic mix or body type (29). american colonists who sought to breed a quarter horse chose parents who they thought could produce humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 104 an offspring likely to meet the standard of a fast quarter mile sprint. these parents could represent a vibrant mix of equine genetics; and it was possible that the horse produced would not turn out to be a quarter horse, after all. a less-often emphasized point about early colonial quarter horses is that they were an expression of colonial wealth and tools of dispossession. their bodies were used alongside enslaved labor to steal land from indigenous peoples and shore up the profitability of southeastern plantations, as well as to augment owners’ profits with racing prize money and gambling returns. quarter horses inhabited an increasingly diverse task-based equine population, especially in the plantation south. long before the trail of tears, these quarter horses reflected the complex power dynamics between colonizing and indigenous populations in their surroundings. they physically embodied the legacies of spanish colonization through their genetics, and also hailed more recent economies that still depended on indigenous trade networks. as multitalented animals, their class status, along with that of their human peers, often depended on how many equine neighbors they had and of what kind. they most often lived alongside mules, used primarily for draft labor; “saddlebred” horses, who were bred for their smooth gait to comfortably transport wealthy colonists under saddle and used primarily for overseeing plantations and policing the field labor of enslaved persons; and “standardbred” horses, another strain of race horse named for their ability to meet a particular speed standard (derry 29-30). these titles described all manner of hybrid horses. breeders chose sires and dams from among the variety available to them, and focused more on performance and purpose than on particular gene pools. in this context, even in the 18th century, quarter horses always-already both embodied and effaced their messy and multicultural origins in order to consolidate power in the hands of white settler colonists, from the relatively poor to the very wealthy. throughout the 19th century, horses called quarter horses continued to be various versatile hybrids, but their purpose shifted away from plantation work towards the work of westward expansion. as horses dispersed with settler colonists across territories previously held by new spain, it became harder to keep track of equine hybrid mixes. short-distance racing continued to be a popular human leisure activity, fueling demand for horses bred for the twin purposes of agricultural work and racing. additional crosses with equine stock managed by shoshone, nez perce, and comanche tribes in what had recently been new spain contributed to the diversity of horses called quarter horses in the middle of the century. hardy horses who could produce quick bursts of speed found special use among settler colonists in texas who were consolidating cattle herds, as they could easily help corral a wayward cow. after jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 105 the american civil war, as cattle ranching became an established economy in texas, the term quarter horse began to be more frequently used to describe these quick, agile horses used for managing cattle. settler colonists’ horses in former new spain received an additional infusion of hybridity with the more recently spanish-derived horses used by mexican vaqueros (mackay-smith). in the final decades of the 1800s, major anglo-owned ranches in texas began to breed their own horses for ranch use, and some kept detailed records of their breeding programs. ranch breeders called their hybrid horses quarter horses, and during the first decades of the twentieth century this name weathered the transition from defining a quarter horse by its utility and “type” to defining it through its bloodline and “breed.” by world war ii, the term “quarter horse” could no longer affix to a genetically diverse array of horses who could all perform a similar set of tasks, but instead it could only apply to horses whose pedigrees adhered to a particular set of recorded bloodlines. the major marker of this shift is the formation of the american quarter horse association (aqha) and its stud book in 1940. this event grew out of a widely networked collaboration between researchers at the university of texas and texas a&m university, wealthy texas ranchers, and people from various horse cultures who had found and kept meticulous records of where certain well-performing horses had come from. the aqha website details how j. frank dobie, a famed folklorist, horse enthusiast, and equine historian at the university of texas, met fellow researcher robert denhardt from texas a&m university in 1937 while both were tracking down equine records in a library archive. this friendship pulled denhardt into further research on a particular stallion named steel dust who was born in 1843. denhardt followed traces of steel dust’s alleged descendants by traveling to various ranches across texas, colorado, and arizona. in the course of this research, denhardt identified a handful of stallions who had worked on major texas ranches in the 1880s (and who had, luckily, been among people who kept paper and oral records of their breeding and work lives) and whose descendants stood out among ranchers for their abilities as cow-handling horses. during this research, denhardt also met helen michaelis, a ranching texan with extensive social connections and experience raising horses. in order to improve her own herd, she had done significant research of her own into the bloodlines of racing and ranching quarter horses in the 1930s. together, she and denhardt germinated the idea of forming a registry of horses who descended from specific ranching stallions, including steel dust. with michealis’s connections, they gathered several members of texas ranching royalty, whose horse breeding programs were tied to these “original” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 106 quarter horses, to charter the american quarter horse association. the charter was written and signed around a resplendent banquet hosted at the historic texan four sixes ranch. along with michaelis, each of the men at the table represented the financial and cultural interests of major texas ranches. a few among them were east coast natives with considerable urban wealth who had married into powerful ranching families.3 the registry they founded only accepted horses whose genetics could be traced to steel dust and the handful of other foundation stallions identified by denhardt and michaelis, all of whom were nineteenth century ranch horses who had worked on the cattle operations that provided much of the aqha founders’ wealth. horses who were to be included in the new aqha stud book had to pass a visual inspection — and have their pedigree verified by michaelis. this genetic requirement marked the shift from quarter horses being a versatile “type” to quarter horses becoming a “breed.” furthermore, the creation of the aqha and its restrictive stud book in 1940 was a strategic claim by its founders to control and nurture both a genetic legacy and a cultural one. this transition was not seamless. many breeders of what they called quarter horses resisted the idea that their horse could not be included in a registry by virtue of its ancestry, rather than by meeting a practical performance standard. denhardt, in a 1960 article he wrote for the quarter horse journal, described the disgruntlement of breeders who chafed at michaelis’s enforcement of pedigree rules: ‘“no doubt the biggest problem helen had to face grew out of the rule adopted by the association that in order to be registered, a horse must qualify on bloodlines. had helen known less about bloodlines, the task might have been easier. everyone who had a horse turned down on bloodlines, after the inspector had passed it on performance and conformation, felt he was personally insulted. the very idea of having his horse turned down by some ‘woman who never even saw the horse’” (qtd in close). this insult was an obviously human-gendered one, in the case of michaelis leveraging the authority to lay down the new parentage rules to men whose authority on sexual matters, animal and otherwise, was not often challenged in 1940. but it also reflected a significant shift by tying equine-gender parentage rules to specific sires and dams in order to produce a “legitimate” equine offspring. while the breeding research done by denhardt and michaelis was extensive, scholarly, and extremely valuable, the resulting stud book created a genetic and historical fiction that ranching horses were the “original” quarter horses. this story, one that is still told today, willfully ignores the nearly 300 years of previous equine history in the united states, and uses the concept of “native” american horseflesh to erase the myriad influences of spanish-derived horses over time. and by situating large ranches as the jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 107 guardians of original bloodlines, the 1940 stud book performed the function of supporting large ranches as vital cultural institutions in the anglo western united states. the quarter horse breed, as it was first defined through its stud book, effectively concentrated the cultural and economic power of large ranches through the medium of genetics.4 it defined a breed through an individual’s biology, but also through the culture to which that biology was attached. it consolidated genetic control over what had previously been a wildly diverse type of horse. it called that very particular consolidation “american” — a sleight of hand that did the double duty of asserting american nativism of the breed’s origins and equating texas cattle ranching culture with “american” culture. and, by virtue of the incredible economic and cultural forces its human founders represented — wall street, hollywood, the oil industry — it tied these particular equine bodies to the urban nerve centers of twentieth century capital accumulation, all the while effacing those connections by foregrounding instead the primacy of texas ranching.5 the formation of the aqha cemented the place of the narrowly-defined quarter horse as a literal embodiment of capital — economic, cultural, and genetic — and enshrined the appropriate means to acquire it, through ranching and its offshoot industries that were necessary to perpetuate a twentiethcentury ranching economy.6 the answer to the question “what is a quarter horse?” then, is quite different depending on the historical and cultural context in which the question is asked. before 1900, it meant a horse who could run a quick sprint. in the middle of the 20th century, the answer was a horse whose bloodlines tied back to a ranching ancestor — a change that revealed as much about the values and identities of those seeking control of the genetic version of this answer as it did of the horse in question. in the twenty-first century, the entwining of human values and the definition of the “breed” result in the assertion that a quarter horse, whatever else it may be, is certainly not a clone. what these different answers have in common, however, is an abiding interest in promulgating “legitimate” equine offspring. instituting equine sexual propriety. the visible work of a stud book is the work of mapping out kin relationships. at the heart of defining the quarter horse as a “breed” — or defining any “breed” of carefully selected mammals — is to weight the selection of mates so that their offspring will look and perform to certain expectations. any breeder looking to register the animals they bring into the world will choose to breed animals who are, in the language of stud books, eligible to produce registrable offspring. thus, the less visible work of a stud book is to shape kin relationships by defining the appropriateness of chosen sexual partners. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 108 until reproductive technologies became available, geography was a main determiner of what these kin networks could look like. when the aqha launched, the only way to produce an offspring from two horses was for the pair to engage in successful intercourse in the flesh. mare owners looking to breed their mares to a specific stallion needed to transport them to the place where a stallion stood at stud. occasionally, stallions would travel to a few locations during the breeding season to serve local mare populations, if there was a high demand. for people breeding horses in 1940, the most cutting-edge equine reproductive technologies were the good roads being built in rural areas, which made the process of choosing mates more expansive and allowed mare owners to choose from a wider variety of registrable stallions by virtue of the fact that distance was less of an obstacle. still, the rules for who could be included in the first aqha stud book reflected the fact that breeding horses was quite a limited enterprise. anyone looking to breed two horses together had first to find two reproductively mature animals, and secondly to be in close enough proximity to bring them directly into contact with each other. conceiving a foal without a live sexual encounter between a reproductively mature mare and stallion simply was not possible. because of these constraints, the additional limits the fledgling aqha placed on equine partners did not concern sexuality. legitimacy, as defined by the stud book, had to do with genetic authenticity — and, to that end, whether or not an equine individual was genuinely who a breeder claimed they were. in order to be registered during the first years of the stud book, prospective quarter horses had to pass an in-person inspection and pass a bloodline test to determine genetic legitimacy. a third requirement, submitting a photograph that showed his or her identifying markings, was instituted to prove that the horse listed in the registry book was the same horse being advertised and bred as a registered horse (close). and in order to insure with even more surety that foals were the product of a legitimate liaison, a mare could be the parent of only one registered foal per year (typical equine gestation is 10-11 months; it would be nearly impossible for a mare to produce two foals within a single year). these procedures meant that at the outset many horses were turned down, not deemed eligible to register as “legitimate” quarter horses. this is the method by which these newly instituted genetic and identification standards replaced performance as the warrant for calling a horse a quarter horse (and, it must be noted, this process of moving from “type” to “breed” via stud books and genetic standards rather than measures of performance was happening across the horse world at this time — the aqha was not atypical in this particular regard, and the quarter horse was not the only “breed” codified in this way). and, as the as the earlier quote about michaelis’s strict enforcement of the bloodline test suggests, many male breeders chafed at this transition. jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 109 what these new genetic limitations did was narrow the scope of kinship for certain horses, and shift legitimate equine kinship from a practical performance realm into a strictly sexual one. at once, a vast swath of horses who would all have been considered quarter horses based on what they did were now not considered quarter horses because of who their equine parents were (or weren’t). after the stud book was instituted, the only way to guarantee that a horse would be called a quarter horse was to carefully choose, monitor, and prove that a sexual act between particular equine individuals had taken place. this is the invisible work of the stud book made manifest: it makes people obsess in every detail about animal sexuality in order to police ideas of genetic purity. however, this transition from breeders as producers of good horses to breeders as guardians of appropriate equine sexual acts was a subtle and barely visible shift. this was in large part because the practical limitations of horse breeding ensured that, for the first decades of the aqha, genetic parentage and sexual parentage amounted to the same thing. the sexual act was necessary to making foals before the stud book existed; it was equally necessary after. another reason this shift was so invisible was that it was equally as embedded in cultural norms as it was in practical application. the need for two horses to produce offspring via a sexual encounter did not challenge the human social norms of heterosexuality, sexual maturity, and genital intercourse as appropriate methods of conceiving offspring. these external constraints of sex, age, and proximity in order to produce an equine foal appeared “natural,” just as they did for people, according to mainstream human-focused cultural arbiters in the united states in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. sexualizing the kin relationship among horses called quarter horses, far from being scandalous, was thus hardly noticed at the time it was instituted. it dovetailed seamlessly with the heterosexual two-parent definitions of family that pervaded public postwar american culture, a definition that had particular resonance among people in the ranching west concerned with social conservatism.7 when quarter horses became a breed defined by pedigree, the legitimacy of a sex act and its resultant offspring became the primary determiner of equine value. it is no surprise that the concurrently held human values of sexual propriety and determining the legitimacy of a child through definitions of “appropriate” parentage should supply the logic through which to justify and navigate this turn to sexual obsession among quarter horse breeders. these cultural traits were just as important as genetic ones. technological challenges to legitimate sex. once the dust had settled over genetic claims to kinship, relative calm characterized the growth of the aqha and its stud book from the early 1950s to the early 1990s. the breed became wildly popular among humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 110 american horse owners. today, the aqha is the largest breed registry in the united states, and its most famous slogan is that it represents “america’s horse” (this is the title of their members’ periodical, which its website touts has the largest circulation of any horse-related magazine in the world). the moniker certainly mobilizes nativist readings of the breed’s origins central to its stud book, but it does also describe the size and impact of the quarter horse population in the united states. the aqha represents the largest number of horse-owning americans and american horses. its website touts the breed’s popularity, declaring that quarter horses are owned and enjoyed by most horse enthusiast americans.8 in this, the aqha is correct. a 2007 study of equine demographics found, beginning in the 1980s, “[aqha] registrations exceeded all others [ie, thoroughbred, arabian, etc.] by tens of thousands,” and that quarter horses registered by the aqha made up nearly 60% of the total horses registered in the united states (kilby 181-2).9 by 2013, the annual aqha membership report tallied the number of u.s. human members at 144,030, and the number of u.s. human owners of registered quarter horses (who, unlike their horses, are not required to be members of the aqha) at 729,769. the 2016 aqha annual report lists 2,850,084 total living horses in its registry, with nearly 76,000 new horses added to the registry that year. unsurprisingly, the state with the most number of currently registered horses is texas, clocking in at 418,249, nearly four times that of the next most quarter horse-populated state, oklahoma. aqha headquarters are located in amarillo, texas, and the centrality of texas to the preservation and performance of ranching cultures persists through popular cultural forms like rodeos, quarter horse-only shows, and western trail riding. another key part of the importance of texas to the growth of quarter horse popularity and the aqha is its earliest institutional partner: texas a&m university. robert denhardt, the researcher who identified steel dust as an “original” quarter horse and promoted a ranch-based definition of what it meant to be a quarter horse, was a professor at then-texas agricultural and mechanical college. he managed the first aqha offices in college station, texas from 1940 to 1942.10 the folkloric work he started of tracing oral histories and equine bloodlines gradually moved from the humanities to the sciences, as animal reproduction became a veterinary specialty during later decades. this disciplinary transition did not disrupt the codification of the entwined biological and cultural genealogies of quarter horses and western ranching. instead, as both the aqha and tamu grew over the second half of the twentieth century, the fortunes of both remained connected as research in the natural sciences at tamu supported expansion of texas agriculture and extractive industries, as well as its animal health and veterinary programs — all deeply tied to ranch lands. from the 1980s forward, it was common for the aqha board to have one or more members who were jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 111 also veterinary faculty at tamu. in fact, as i write this in 2017, the current first vice president of the aqha, dr. jim heird, is also “the executive professor and coordinator of equine initiatives at texas a&m university.” dr. heird is also appointed as tamu’s dr. glenn blodgett equine chair professorship, and has a long resume in professional rodeo administration (“heird continues tenure”). dr. glenn blodgett, meanwhile, runs the horse division at the four sixes ranch in texas — one of the major ranches represented at aqha’s founding in 1940. tamu has consistently been a hub of veterinary care, breeding support, and administrative support to the aqha’s elite constituency. in this context, it is not surprising that quarter horse breeders were some of the first to buy into tamu’s equine cloning capabilities. reproductive innovation at this worldclass research facility was nothing new. breeders trusted their veterinarians and the scientific research they represented at tamu, and those who were willing to take risks on new reproductive technologies had not been disappointed. quarter horse breeders also trusted the aqha to adapt to new reproductive technologies. despite initial setbacks on how to incorporate new technologies into its registry policies, the aqha had twice changed its rules to accommodate reproductive technologies that expanded equine kinship possibilities. once in the 1990s and again in the early 2000s, new reproductive technologies overstepped aqha parentage rules that had been instituted at its inception in 1940 — rules that made sense for a time when it was impossible to breed horses other than through a live sexual encounter. in both cases, the aqha resisted and then accepted changes to its rule book. the first of these challenges was artificial insemination (ai), a technique that had been in wide use in dairy production since the 1940s and, with the invention of reliable semen cooling and transport technologies in the late 1980s, made a leap to the performance horse market in the early 1990s (derry 104-109). however, as early as the 1970s, some horse breeders across various breeds and stud books used on-site ai — where both the stallion and the mare were present, and the time from semen collection to implantation was nearly minute-to-minute — to minimize the risk of injury to stallions from mares refusing to be mounted. the ai technique mitigated stallion injury because it separates the sexual encounter into two parts. first, semen is collected from the stallion by means of human manual stimulation; the stallion ejaculates into a sterile artificial vagina. then, the semen is implanted into a mare by a veterinarian or trained technician (vaught, “animal sex work”). while on-site ai was not the same as a live sexual encounter between horses, the specialized procedure did not violate the existing rules of aqha registry rules of verified parentage, and the association considered the small number of horses who had been conceived via on-site ai to be eligible for humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 112 registration. i want to emphasize this point because it underscores the fundamental role of the aqha, as it saw itself: to protect genetic integrity, and not to get involved in sexual integrity. as i argued earlier, when the aqha was formed, genetic integrity and sexual integrity were one and the same. in this first foray away from live intercourse as a viable way of producing foals, the aqha’s tacit acceptance of on-site ai still operated under that logic. disputes erupted within the aqha when off-site ai became possible. these were serious enough to require legal action, and resulted in changes to the stud book rules. ai requires humans to take on key roles in the sexual exchange of semen between two horses, and effectively severs the necessity for two oppositely sexed same-species partners to actually have sex. but if genetic integrity of the resulting offspring is the main goal, then that detail could be overlooked in favor of ensuring that the correct stallion’s semen was implanted in the correct mare. on-site ai allowed for this, in the eyes of the aqha. however, when the hamilton equitainer, a cooling container specifically designed to ship refrigerated equine semen via fedex ground and air, was developed in the 1980s, the aqha maintained that its parentage verification requirements prohibited the eligibility of any foal conceived from an off-site mating facilitated with shipped semen and ai. the severance of the sexual act between horses was one thing; the fact that the horses to be bred no longer had to be in the same barn, ranch, town, or even state was quite another. ai with cooled shipped semen opened a host of questions for the aqha to consider — not least among them how the technology could favor the owners of certain popular stallions over others, once access to semen was no longer bounded by geography. the primary concern for the aqha remained one of parentage, and how to verify the genetic integrity of a foal if its alleged parents had not physically encountered each other. ai with shipped semen not only disrupted the sexual act itself, but wildly expanded the geographic limits of potential equine kin networks. yet once a suitable system of permits was devised for ensuring that only one stallion and one mare could produce a foal with cooled shipped semen (giving the aqha recourse should a genetic fraud occur), the aqha amended its registry rules in 1997 to allow horses conceived with cooled shipped semen to be eligible (hopkins and meadows). the queerness of ai, in that humans and technologies became not only the orchestrators of but also necessary physical participants in a sex act between two horses, could be overlooked when it was deployed in the service of preserving the sanctity of sire-dam verification. the stud book could accommodate species queering as long as two-parent sexual norms could still be maintained. jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 113 the debate over cooled shipped semen was just the beginning for the aqha’s legal disputes over parentage with regard to reproductive technologies, and the one-foal-permare-per-year rule lay at the center of the next controversy. originally intended as an obvious failsafe for ensuring against genetic fraud, this rule became restrictive when a new technology, embryo transfer, became available. this technique resembles surrogacy in human terms: a female who is not the genetic mother of an offspring gestates the fetus to term. with this technique, one mare can physically provide more than one egg for fertilization, and more than one embryo per breeding season to be implanted into various surrogate mares — thereby becoming a biological mother to more than one foal in one calendar year. in the fall of 2000, a number of texas quarter horse breeders sued the aqha on the grounds of violating the texas constitution and state anti-trust laws by not allowing them to register more than one eligible foal per mare. because only one foal could be registered — despite each foal being genetically eligible — the plaintiffs argued that the aqha was depriving them of the potential profits from selling horses that come with registration (mcbride). significant criticism came not only from those who were worried about genetic fraud and the increased concentration of favored genetics in a very few horses, but also from an increasingly vocal group concerned about the number of overproduced quarter horses being funneled into the united states equine slaughter pipeline.11 nevertheless, the courts found in favor of the plaintiffs, and the aqha settled with the plaintiffs in 2003. it revised its rule book in 2004 to allow one mare to genetically parent more than one foal per year (ross).12 the significance of the embryo transfer debate, in contrast to but nevertheless extending from the debate over ai, is that the aqha had to decide whether genetic integrity was related to the act of sex. now that a naturalized sexual act between two present partners was exposed as not necessary, as it could be mediated through technology, what was the aqha’s imprimatur? did altering the sexual act threaten the genetic definition of the breed? would allowing for technological interventions challenge the baseline definition of “natural” conception that the aqha had depended upon when setting out its genetic protocols? if the “nature” of sex could change so drastically, was the “nature” of genetic integrity also at risk? by changing its rules to allow horses to be bred with shipped semen and then to allow one mare the ability to officially mother several foals at one time, the aqha granted that technological intervention in the sexual act between two horses was not against nature, as far as genetics were concerned. but its resistance to these technologies, represented by the legal proceedings necessary to change the rules so as to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 114 accommodate them, signaled that the association was wary of viewing this kind of scientific intervention as progress for the breed. laboratory parentage: remixing sexual reproduction. elite quarter horse breeders in texas were encouraged by the direction the aqha was going in the early 2000s. breeders who had taken the risk of using ai and embryo transfer to produce horses that might not be able to be registered had seen their boldness rewarded. as the embryo transfer battle came to a close in 2004, cloning technologies for horses were heating up. when quidam de revel’s cloned foal was born at tamu in 2006, a small group of elite texas quarter horse breeders began to clone their most lucrative breeding horses. these breeders trusted in the research at tamu, and they had precedent to support their hope that the association’s trend of accepting technological reproductive change. these breeders partnered with tamu and austin-based biotech gene banking firm viagen to produce the first 12 american-owned equine clones, all quarter horses, in 2006-7. tamu provided the veterinary care, research laboratories, and genetic scientific expertise; viagen provided the gene banking, keeping the raw material from horses to be cloned safe and privately managed; and the horse owners themselves provided the money to complete the procedure, approximately $150,000 per horse. these cloned horses were reproductively mature sires and dams with impeccable aqha genetic pedigrees. their owners were attempting to maximize their reproductive worth in perpetuity by proving they could be cloned, and then banking their genes for future use. several of these foals were clones of a single stallion, smart little lena. smart little lena was a top-producing quarter horse stallion, a horse with more demand for breeding than he could supply even with shipped semen (a stallion can only ejaculate so much). he possessed an excellent breeding history that proved his ability to transfer athletic quality to his offspring. smart little lena was owned by a syndicate which kept a reproductive veterinarian on staff full-time. this veterinarian, a tamu graduate, initiated the partnership between the smart little lena syndicate and tamu to clone the stallion, and performed the veterinary part of the cloning procedure (where successfully cloned embryos are implanted into surrogate mares for gestation, essentially an embryo transfer). this successful partnership was only possible because of the personal connections and extensive resources that could be shared between the syndicate, their home veterinarian, and tamu. in order for the reach of horse cloning to expand commercially, those connections needed to be made more accessible. after jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 115 the first crop of cloned american foals was born in 2007, viagen stepped into that role, serving first as a coordinator between horse owners and tamu and also as a storage facility for dna (russell). it is no accident that smart little lena, an established top breeding earner and unimpeachable paragon of quarter horse stud book genetics, was a test case for whether clones would enter into the aqha registry. and while horse cloning was newly possible, cloning in agricultural contexts was already an established method of consolidating the power and impact of a select genetic pool (derry 130-131). if one were to follow the logic that guided the institution of the aqha stud book in the first place, cloning seems to be a reasonable extension. the stud book was built on the premise that a small number of horses were worthy of producing offspring by virtue of their pedigrees. cloning essentially serves the same purpose: it consolidates genetic power (and an owner’s ability to profit from it) in the hands of a few individuals. and it surely negates genetic fraud, as a clone is understood to be a genetic copy of the original individual. smart little lena was a perfect test case to see if this logic could be used to argue for the inclusion of clones in the aqha stud book, and by making a fleet of cloned smart little lenas, the syndicate took a gamble on whether the aqha would once again expand its rule book to accommodate them. in part because of the dense networks between cattle ranchers, tamu veterinarians, and elite quarter horse breeders, cloning was already familiar to some quarter horse breeders. by 2005, animal cloning in industrial agricultural contexts has become fairly commonplace at the elite level of population genetics. to be clear: relative to the millions of animals participating in agricultural production across the globe, the number of clones is very small. but this small number of cloned animals and their offspring create a disproportionately large impact on the overall genetics of commercially produced animals, including beef cattle. the producers of industrial animal genetics rely on cloning to solidify the reproduction of quality commercial animals. despite being effectively hidden from public view, cloning is a wellestablished if “boutique” agricultural practice. cloning operates, therefore, in two registers: as an established — almost passé — method of producing animals among people who work in animal agriculture, and as a jarring invocation of futuristic technology to many members of the wider american public. this double register is fitting to the process of cloning. the technique and technologies of animal cloning are utterly predictable developments stemming from the long history of agricultural animal reproduction. they are also absolutely remarkable for their ability to bypass two-parent mammalian sexual conventions. it is this latter humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 116 consequence that pushed beyond the limits of the aqha’s flexibility: not only does cloning transcend the limits of “natural” sex, but it also flouts the idea that an extant mammalian organism — a living being in the world — can be assumed to be the result of the sexual pairing of two oppositely sexed parents. what is genetic integrity in the face of a clone? the answer to this question is difficult to settle, because cloning subverts the two-parent paradigm of mammalian sex. the most significant breakthrough to lead to successful cloning was a technique called somatic cell nuclear transfer (scnt). dolly the sheep was the first scnt-conceived mammal, born in scotland in 1997 (kishigami et. al., 1945-1950).13 somatic cells describe any cell of an organism that is not a reproductive cell, such as eggs or sperm. skin, hair, muscle, organ tissues — these are made of somatic cells that, like all cells, contain an individual's dna, but are not meant for reproductive purposes. the major diversion of scnt from other forms of scientificallyassisted reproduction is that it requires no reproductive cells from prospective cloned individuals in order transfer genetic material — ai and embryo transfer still require eggs, sperm, and fertilization. this use of somatic cells in nuclear transfer represents what is truly new about the technique. laboratory technicians isolate and harvest the nucleus of a somatic cell, which contains the genetic information of the hopeful clone. then, the nucleus is transferred in full to a donor animal’s egg cell, which, if all goes well, incorporates the somatic nucleus into its cellular structure, forming what is essentially a fertilized egg. these nuclear-transferred eggs go through a number of laboratory “passages” in which cells grow in culture media — a critical stage of snct where “they can not only be multiplied but also modified through gene targeting” (franklin 19-25). once these eggs are multiplied and modified to create the potential options desired by clients commissioning the desired clone(s), veterinarians implant the egg(s) into a surrogate female’s uterus for gestation, and there the recognizable process of mammalian reproduction resumes, sans sex and all the attendant messiness and genetic unpredictability of sperm-egg fertilization. what typically gets lost in recounting the process of cloning is that it redefines parentage to include non-genetic essential contributors. a cloned animal has only one genetic parent, but it has a host of necessary multispecies non-genetic parents: it has the veterinarians and laboratory geneticists essential to the success of its transition from somatic cell to embryo; it has a donor egg cell to finalize the process of “conception,” and it inhabits a surrogate female who gestates, gives birth, and mothers the postnatal clone. the donor egg is absolutely critical to cloning, which, as a modified sexual process, requires a reproductive cell to house and gestate the cloned embryo. jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 117 cloning through scnt is a hybridized, remixed form of sexual reproduction from start to finish. because scnt merges two cells, it does not resemble asexual reproduction, or replication. but because it requires the genetic material from only one individual, and only one reproductive cell, it isn’t your typical sex, either. furthermore, the desired genetic material comes from a non-reproductive somatic cell, while the reproductive egg cell necessary for the conception and gestation of the eventual animal is cleaned of its own genetic information so as not to “contaminate” the clone. instead of four strands of dna re-combining to form a new individual, as with typical sexual reproduction, two strands are removed completely, leaving the existing individual’s dna intact despite the centrality of the egg to conception. scnt may be about copying a single individual, but in practice it is a profoundly strange transpeciative enterprise, which goes beyond a multispecies social or sexual mingling. where ai and embryo transfer certainly cannot happen without human intervention, the fact still remains that were the same two horses to be together in the flesh, a foal could result from their sexual pairing. for cloning, however, the resultant foal could not be possible without human interventions at the most intimate levels. the prospective clone, an invisible egg donor, and the successfully produced clone are all present within a single egg cell, gestated by a specially chosen birth mother. cloning brings the human obsession with the equine carnal act — an involvement begun with the transition from defining a breed by performance to pedigree — to the realm of transpeciative sex. at every stage, cloning is queer interspecies mixing, a far cry from the naturalized vision of opposite-sexed samespecies reproduction enshrined in the original aqha studbook. it is this transpeciative aspect that challenges conventional understandings of what it means to reproduce, despite cloning’s extension of familiar logics of favoring certain genetics over others. ian wilmut, the lead scientist in the development of scnt, saw cloning technologies as a kind of interdisciplinary method of reproduction that combined different forms of existing knowledge — “genetic engineering, genomics, and our [his team’s] method of cloning from cultured cells” – to do something new. the technology, he asserted, “makes it possible in principle to build new organisms at will,” a potential that “will take humanity into the age of biological control” (qtd. in franklin, 21). in this view, animal clones are stopovers on a longer journey into what we could call the biological anthropocene: a term which allows for a reorientation away from the typical view of anthropocenic factors (even just in agriculture) such as global pesticide use, extractive industries, and political machinations, and towards a more granular, even cellular, view of the anthropocene, where humans desire to — and succeed at — controlling the molecular dimensions of the larger world. clones, in giving humans staggering control over the genetic mixes of animals, are the anthropocene writ small. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 118 they are also, as anthropologist of agriculture sarah franklin points out, products of centuries worth of purposeful practical and scientific agricultural research. of dolly, franklin reminds us that she is “typically agricultural in that the project of her creation combined basic questions of genetics, or selective breeding, with commercial and industrial applications” (21). dolly and her agricultural clone contemporaries inhabit a longstanding tension between pastoral and industrial economies. for cloning used in intensive agricultural contexts, the process of isolating and reproducing an individual’s genes is oriented towards improving the genetics of a population: that is, clones are produced to maximize the quality of a large number of animals across time and space by extending the sexual impact of individual males and females. this general logic holds for performance horses, but there are important differences. an obvious one is scale, since the market for animal sport is much smaller than for animal food. another is that agricultural animals are rarely, if ever, sexually altered by neutering or spaying. male and female poultry, cattle, and hogs that are not intended for reproductive purposes are simply slaughtered before they reach sexual maturity. in contrast, after world war ii most male horses to be used for breeding became part of breed registries like the aqha, all of which require rigorous physical and genetic approval. these male horses have to earn the use of their testicles, and a large majority of quality male horses in the united states are gelded (castrated) as youngsters for this reason. castration is an accepted form of limiting the gene pool only to horses deemed worthy of reproduction — a much smaller concern in short-lived agricultural animals. therefore, in order to apply the population-level logics of agricultural cloning to the quarter horse world, the smart little lena syndicate had to convince the aqha that they were operating under the idea that cloning was an extension, not a refutation, of the stud book’s original intention. they needed to put forward the argument that cloning could foster the genetic primacy of individual sires that demonstrated both the genetic and cultural attributes the association wanted to promote. this gamble that the smart little lena syndicate took by cloning a culturally and genetically impeccable horse did not turn out in their favor. the aqha had, in fact, already attempted to pre-empt the syndicate’s test case by adding a new rule to their official handbook prohibiting clones from their registry in 2004, immediately on the heels of the embryo transfer settlement and as tamu scientists were working on the successful cloning of quidam de revel. rule 227 did not mince words: “american quarter horses produced by any cloning process are not eligible for registration.” the text then specifically prohibited registration of ‘“horses produced by any cloning process,” including “any method by which the genetic material of an unfertilized egg or jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 119 an embryo is removed and replaced by genetic material taken from another organism, added to/with genetic material from another organism or otherwise modified by any means in order to produce a live foal”’ (qtd. in dowell). this rule prevented any cloned horse and the sexual offspring of a cloned horse from inclusion in the registry, effectively severing their branch from the stud book family tree. this action had the same effect as castrating a stallion, as far as the stud book was concerned: no matter his genetic fitness, any horse produced by a clone stallion could not be recorded in the registry (aqha, “cloning lawsuit”). rule 227 supported an older and more general rule that “only horses resulting from the breeding of a sire and dam are eligible for registration.” this rule figured prominently in the recently settled lawsuit over embryo transfer. the lawsuit allowed embryo transfer to count as a “breeding of a sire and dam,” despite the aqha’s protest that the procedure, because the biological dam did not gestate and birth the foal herself, could compromise the genetics of the foal (“briefs filed”). the sire-dam stipulation was deemed legally flexible enough to describe horses conceived through assisted reproductive technologies as long as both semen and eggs from two individual male and female horses were required for these procedures to work. despite the fact that no actual horse-horse intercourse takes place, these procedures remained steadfastly, if oddly, heterosexual. cloning, in requiring only one genetic parent, broke from this sire-dam definition. in fact, as i have argued, cloning explodes the naturalized idea of heterosexual sex and mammalian parenthood. the aqha used this reason to justify a legal campaign for equine gender and sexual heteronormativity, in order to resist including clones in its registry. cloning, therefore, unlike ai and embryo transfer, offered the aqha a way to emphasize the cultural ramifications of sex. in the case of smart little lena, it opened the door for the aqha to use a definition of appropriate sex, rather than a definition of appropriate genetics, as a tool to legislate inclusion in its registry. these sexual stipulations foreground the underlying conservatism of the aqha’s ties to foundational genetics and how they should be promulgated. despite the association’s willingness to favor breeders’ desires to profit from their top horses through technological reproduction, the transpeciation involved in equine cloning forced the aqha to delineate that “legitimate” offspring had to be conceived through forms of sex that it deemed appropriate. having only one parent, according to the aqha, was too radical a departure from the one stallion-one mare requirement for a quarter horse foal to be legitimated by the registry. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 120 the aqha instituted rule 227 in 2004. the first quarter horse clones, including clones of smart little lena, were born in 2007. in 2008, pro-clone advocates petitioned the association to change the rule and allow clones into the registry. at this juncture, the association decided to turn to its membership to weigh in on whether rule 227 should stand. a member survey circulated in 2010 showed strong support for upholding the ban. the survey was sent to 3,000 randomly selected aqha members, and found that 86.02% of the respondents did not approve of horse cloning.14 the sample size was extremely small, but the response was a consistent and resounding “no” to registering quarter horse clones among those surveyed. plaintiffs took the aqha to court in 2013 to sue for lost profits, using the same antitrust tactic that won the registration rights for foals conceived through embryo transfer. this time, however, the aqha succeeded in using the “one mare, one stallion” stipulation to defend its ban, which a federal court upheld in a final ruling against the pro-clone plaintiffs in 2015. when news of the upheld ban broke, less formally-solicited public opinions echoed the member survey. online quarter horse forums erupted in spirited commentary in support of the ban. commenters on the online forum barrelhorseworld.com, for example, cheered. “good for the aqha,” wrote one commenter, “we have enough things evolving from test tubes.” another agreed: “i know i would never breed to a clone, i just don’t think it’s a good idea to mess with mother nature.” nature, in this logic, was defined primarily by two opposite sex parents — and in opposition to scientific “tampering” with what was assumed to be natural. the clone ban allowed the aqha to define registerable horses by the heterosexual pairing of their parents: one sire — one dam. the aqha had successfully worked against the incursions of cloning into naturalized heteronormativity by echoing the language used by the now-defunct defense of marriage act (1996), which defined marriage as constituted solely by one human male and one human female. these appeals to reproductive conservatism aligned with the aqha membership’s conflation of heterosexual sex with “nature.” the use of conservative marriage language around cloning and “natural” sex echoes the cultural values of the aqha’s founding, and found purchase among its 21st century members. the dubious naturalness of the technology was the prime cause for concern for the aqha’s members, as the procedure seemed to push into a deviant sexual territory well beyond the boundaries of heterosexuality. thus, cloning enacted both a retrenchment and a departure for the association. the strategy of upholding twoparent requirements allowed the association to continue to determine registry eligibility — and thus the direction of the quarter horse breed — with appeals to conservative social values that lay at the heart of its founding in cold war texas. this allowed the association and its members to reject certain reproductive technologies on jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 121 the basis that they contradicted the association’s investment in american cultural traditions of family that support heteronormative kinship networks. the aqha benefitted from the rhetoric of unnatural reproduction that surrounded wider debates over the technology both within the association and outside of it. brenda pieper, owner of popular quarter horse breeding stallion playgun, expressed that she was “very much opposed to doing it [cloning] just for the sake of putting that animal into the breeding herd,” highlighting anxieties about the unknown impacts of cloned animals on population genetics. others stepped around the futuristic connotations of cloning, characterizing it instead as a “step backward,” a shrinking of the gene pool instead of an expansion of it (qtd. in overton, “carbon copies”). these concurrent anxieties about the future on one hand, and the past on the other, reveal the extent to which the people involved in this debate struggled to firmly grasp the very nature of what cloning creates: a facsimile. no rules yet exist for how such new forms of life should be governed. the biological anthropocene focuses what is at stake in these discussions: namely, how the unknowable futurities embedded in cloning — its inevitable speculative dimensions — shift the boundaries of what counts as natural, and what those consequences might be down the road. the uneasy distinctions between elite “original” horses and their messily created reproductive copies are the ground, largely out of view, on which the cultural terms of political economies of technologized reproduction are being hashed out. these distinctions clarify where the veneer of nature ruptures in regard to human intervention in creating animal life. other equine breed associations and stud books took the opposite tack of the aqha. european breed registries have all dropped any injunction against cloning. any horse cloned from a horse registered with the major european olympic-type sporthorse breed associations — the hanoverian verband, the dutch royal studbook, the swedish warmblood studbook, and so on — can be registered and travel around the world to compete. any offspring of that clone would also be considered eligible. in 2014, blake russell, president of viagen, reported that european sporthorses now make up the “biggest part of the horse [cloning] market,” adding, “that industry shifted about 5 or 6 years ago [2008-2009].” the shift russell describes was from quarter horses to european sporthorses as the dominant part of viagen's equine business. clearly, the definition of natural as an appropriate marker for a horse’s performance, whether practical or genetic, did not have to align with the aqha’s cultural conservatism. deviant sex: the unsettled taxonomies of facsimile life. scientific concerns about cloning as detrimental to animal health, reproductive capacity, and performance has humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 122 been somewhat dispelled over time. still, the widespread public association of cloning with something profoundly unnatural and unnerving is pervasive. andrew roush, as a psychology student at western carolina university, conducted a survey in which he asked his respondents to “evaluate the ‘naturalness’ of animals of the same species in different circumstances,” such as the naturalness of an “elephant in a jungle versus zoo.” roush tracked the percent decline in perceived “naturalness” caused by varying degrees of domestication, captivity, and scientific or genetic manipulation. the largest percentages of decline had to do with the last category, genetics — and of those, clones were by far the “least” natural. the percent decline in naturalness for a cow living on a farm to a cloned cow was a whopping 80%, a significantly steeper decline even than that between a fish in the ocean and a fish who had been genetically modified to glow in the dark (herzog). the battle between heteronormative and transspeciative sex occurred on a hill of conservative definitions of sexual legitimacy that the aqha successfully defended. “america’s horse,” a breed first defined by the imposition of genetics over performance and the privileging of ranching over other cultural horse histories, must now also abide by conservative definitions of sex that once were “natural” and now must be policed in the face of deviant transpeciative technologies. yet the fuller implications of cloning for refiguring conceptions of gender, sexuality, and species, and the possibility for a fuller accounting of how the technology could be put towards the improvement of animal worlds, is not foreclosed. the aqha’s clone ban cooled much of the appeal for performance horse cloning among quarter horse breeders. however, one last story of quarter horse cloning bears telling here, as it clarifies the sexual potentials of cloning and the ways in which the new life forms engendered by the technology can reframe ideas of sex, nature, and transpeciative encounters in the biological anthropocene. i have focused on the smart little lena quarter horse clones in this essay, but they were not the only clones foaled in tamu’s inaugural class of equine clones. one clone among these was especially remarkable: a healthy foal who happened to be a clone of a castrated male horse. clayton, the foal, was a genetic facsimile of a gelding named scamper. scamper, an unregistered quarter horse, had carried his owner, charmayne james, to record successes in the sport of barrel racing. james wanted to re-create him in stallion form so she could capitalize on his performance record and celebrity through stud fees. james claimed, “if there was ever a horse to be cloned to help promote the sport of barrel racing [then he’s it] ... and that’s where my goal in life is, is to help promote barrel racing and help people get some better, sounder, quality horses out jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 123 there” (church). when clayton was born, james did not plan to barrel race him, because she regarded him as too valuable to risk injury. this value came both from the $150,000 james paid to viagen and texas a&m to bring him into the world, and also his future income potential as a sire. clayton’s purpose was to serve “exclusively for breeding,” using scamper’s performance record and status as the only barrel horse to be inducted into the prorodeo hall of fame as the basis for clayton’s breeding worth (“satisfied owners and breeders”). the goal of cloning scamper, then, was to produce a scamper who could mix with mares as if he had been a stallion in the first place — it is a form of earning back his testicles. clayton is a genetic facsimile of scamper, and is being marketed as a correction of the original human mistake of scamper’s castration in light of his exceptional athletic performance record. through the reproductive capabilities of clayton, james parlayed scamper’s performance record into a new narrative of technological redemption: through the promise of cloning, scamper the gelding could reproduce. james, in cloning scamper, never intended to try and crash the gates of the aqha, and never attempted to register clayton. their story is one of reproductive, not genetic, redemption. this curious scenario is surprisingly apt to the process of cloning. sarah franklin reminds us of the ancient and botanical roots of the word “clone,” which derives from the greek word for “twig,” and describes both the process and result of growing a new plant from a cutting of an existing one: a graft, in other words (franklin 19). but she also makes clear that complex multicellular mammals are not plants, and argues that the word “clone” is a loose and imperfect metaphor for the work involved in creating a new animal from the cells of an existing one. imprecision, contingency, and obfuscation are part and parcel of calling clayton, or dolly, or any other animal that successfully represents the genes of another, a clone. as a biological being, clayton simultaneously is and is not scamper: he grafts both testicles and reproductive profitability onto what was once simply story of multispecies love. love tends to get short shrift in narratives of anthropocenic anxiety in favor of pulling back the curtain of the workings of profit. but james’s story is instructive in reminding us to attend to love stories that can live within otherwise techno-bureaucratic and human-dictated activities. the reasons james gives for bringing scamper into the domain of the cloning laboratory are love stories. in one interview, james described the exceptional bond they shared from the day she met scamper at a new mexico feedlot (scamper’s testicular redemption is as much a class story as it is a gender one) as central to their competitive success. she tells the story of that day as the meeting of two kindred souls: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 124 my dad told me i could ride him, but warned me that he was cold backed [he had a history of dismounting his riders]…. i saddled him up and took him out behind the barn where no one could see me, and, of course, i kicked him into a lope [fast] because my dad told me not to. scamper dropped his head and bucked a little, but i just kind of giggled because i didn’t really know any better, and he looked at me, and right then, it was apparent that he loved little girls, and he loved me. … looking back, i probably should have been a little more fearful, but i knew that he would never hurt me. (james and wheatley) because this affinity is deeply wound into the narrative of his transformation from gelding to sire, scamper’s story exceeds prior limits of both species and sexual capacity that previously governed capitalist definitions of animal reproduction. clayton, as a “correction” of the mistake of castrating scamper, reminds us that the genetic facsimile is a form of nature that, no matter one’s trepidation, is capaciously able to correct human errors (while perhaps also marking an “erroneous” path into unknowable reproductive futures). and james, in attempting to fit cloning into the world view of barrel racing enthusiasts, mobilized naturalized assumptions of heteronormative, if not heterospeciative love — between herself as a female human and him as a male horse — in order to obscure, or decenter, the queer transpeciative aspects of cloning.15 conclusions. reconstituting these connections is paramount to understanding the aqha’s difficulty in reconciling cloning with a tradition that denies legitimacy of queer sex in the service of defining american normativity in its “heartland.” cloning, as franklin reminds us, makes plain the inseparability of new biologies from the “meaning systems they reproduce, depend upon, or challenge, such as beliefs about nature, reproduction, scientific progress; or categories such as gender, sex, and species” (3). the debate over cloning within the quarter horse breed reveals that the historical and cultural constraints to genetic integrity are equally important, if not more, than genes themselves. the meaning systems of the aqha, embedded in a conservative and nativist interpretation of american history and one-male-one-female definitions of legitimate kin relationships, simply cannot support cloning’s transformation of these categories. as a marker of the biological anthropocene, clayton, and cloning more generally, demands a reframing of reproductive technologies to reckon with their transgenic and transpeciative dimensions. they demand a reckoning with the cultural ideas that have shaped what it means to breed, and what it means to be a breed. cloning demands a new rhetoric to encompass both its redemptive and its commercial potentials in rural spaces that engender conservative definitions of a life form’s jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 125 legitimacy based on its parentage, and an examination of how more granular and affective stories, like love stories, interact with the laboratory to both illuminate and obscure key elements of transpeciative reproduction. ultimately, as both the stories of smart little lena and of scamper illustrate in their different ways, cloning cracks open the foundations — genetic and cultural — that have supported the ties between “america” and “america’s horse.” acknowledgements. the author would like to thank dr. jeannie waldron, dvm, for her endless patience and trust, and the incredible amount of knowledge she opened up to me many years ago. thanks also belong to the horses who taught me many things that humans could not. however, two humans deserving of special thanks for the long process of getting this article into the world are dr. janet davis and dr. susan jones, dvm/phd. this article would not have been possible without research support from the national science foundation and the american studies department at the university of texas on the one hand, and without personal support from my partner and the mm/wpw crew on the other. i also greatly appreciated the guidance of this issue’s editors, and the kind and perceptive comments from peer reviewers — any mistakes or wobbles remaining are entirely my own. notes 1. in this essay, i do use farm terms like hogs, poultry, and cattle in addition to lay terms like pigs, chickens, and cows. among animal studies scholars, the former terms are rightly connected with the de-individualization of farmed animals that accompanies their transformation from animal to product. as such, many argue that the ethical choice of terminology should only include lay terms that maintain the rhetorical individuality of animals as part a broader ethics. this is a toothsome issue for me, as words matter very much to the constitution of power, and i am also ethically committed to promoting the individuality and personhood of animals, but i, as yet, refuse to hide or disown the realities of my own farming past in the process of critically appraising it. so, in this essay, as with others i write, i retain the capitalistic nomenclature when writing about the material realities of animals-becoming-capital, and use individualizing terms when speaking of animals-as-animals. throughout, animals are “who,” not “it.” one interesting twist i’ve noticed while preparing this essay is that horses do not have a de-individualized equivalent term: horses are horses, whether they be also companions or paychecks to their proximal humans. 2. readers can consult a variety of literature on this topic in relation to the development of modern agricultural breeding practices. i suggest starting with margaret derry, bred humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 126 for perfection: shorthorn cattle, collies, and arabian horses since 1800 (johns hopkins university press, 2003) and masterminding nature: the breeding of animals, 1750-2010 (university of toronto press, 2015); and harriet ritvo, the animal estate: the english and other creatures in victorian england (harvard up, 1989). 3. the aqha describes its founding as taking place at a “dinner party” hosted by anne burnett and jim hall in 1940. burnett, the heiress to the four sixes ranching empire in texas, was one of the largest landowners in the world. hall was a new yorker who owned a seat on the new york stock exchange and was part of an elite east coast horse culture before marrying anne. they were joined at this “party” by several others, including robert lee underwood, who tied his ranch to oil fortunes in the 1930s; and jim minnick, who supplied horses to hollywood stars tom mix and will rogers. 4. these requirements created predictable rifts between many people who called their horses quarter horses. by 1945, two other quarter horse associations had formed in order to legitimate their non-ranching horses: the american quarter racing association and national quarter horse breeders association. both were concerned the aqha stud book was too restrictive. by 1950, in part because of the confusion these multiple associations created, the aqha and these two offshoot associations negotiated a contentious merger. 5. for further foundational reading on quarter horse history, see: dan d. and jack casement, “social significance of the quarter horse.” the cattleman. september 1940; robert m. denhardt, quarter horses: a story of two centuries (university of oklahoma press, 1967) and the quarter horse (american quarter horse association, 1941; rpt., texas a&m university press, 1982); j. frank dobie, “billy horses and steel dusts.” the cattleman. march 1937; wayne gard, fabulous quarter horse-steel dust: the true account of the most celebrated texas stallion (duell, sloan and pearce, 1958); and don hedgpeth, they rode good horses: the first fifty years of the american quarter horse association (american quarter horse association, 1990). i would like to point out that all of these histories were written by white men. the meaning of the quarter horse in american culture is indelibly tied to the preservation of white, heteropatriarchal values. 6. weiss’s exploration of the concept of a “heritage” breed and the entanglement of value with naturalization is a helpful one here, despite the very important distinction that hogs raised for meat face different cultural and economic pressures than horses do. nevertheless, if we play with the idea that a quarter horse is a “heritage” breed, weiss’s observations can help us parse the cultural danger cloning posed to the aqha. jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 127 if it is assumed that an industrial hog is not “naturally” produced, either as an animal or as a food product, then the clear distinction that “heritage” breeds can make is to connect genes, management practices, and products to the definition of “natural” that industrialization repudiates. by cultivating a breed of hog that does not conform to industrial practices and then protecting that bloodline from further hybridization, weiss argues, “such an unsullied line connotes a sense of what is uniquely real, and not modified or corrupted for commercial or commodified interests” (118). furthermore, “it becomes clear,” weiss writes, “that genetic diversity — and as a result, heritage as a quality of distinctive breeds — is always situated within a concrete social order.... a heritage breed is relevant to someone’s heritage, not simply to abstract continuity, traceability, or longevity” (117). ideas of what a “natural” hog is, what their “natural” life should be like, and what a “natural” pork product is are baked into the value — both cultural and economic — ascribed to these animals. just as important is the naturalization of whose “heritage” is being put forth as worthy of preservation — certainly it is not the hogs’ and their genetic qualities, but a human heritage. in this way, weiss reminds us, “a breed can embody a temporal sense of depth, as well as purity and distinction” (247). 7. for an entry into the literature on cultural and political conservatism in the western united states and its impact on sexual norms in the cold war, i suggest starting with lisa mcgirr, suburban warriors: the origins of the new american right (princeton university press, 2nd ed., 2015). 8. the website for america’s horse magazine does not give concrete circulation numbers, but it does automatically go out to every aqha member. its website provides a handy infographic with fascinating readership demographics and data for its advertisers. as of my last visit to this site in 2018, the graphic lists the average median income for aqha members at $161,000 and the average members’ net worth at $1.19 million; 49% of its membership is aged 56 and over; 75% are female; 34% have been members for more than 20 years; 97% own a pickup truck or suv; 61% are college educated; and 47% report as recreational, not professional, riders. see https:// www.aqha.com/media/10650/aqha-member-demographics.pdf. 9. by various measures presented in this study, quarter horses dominate the american equine landscape. in a table cited here, documenting the fifteen-year totals of the nine largest breed registries in the us, quarter horses registered with the aqha made up nearly 60% of the total horses registered in the us. the study also published a table based on data from the usda/national animal health monitoring system from 1998, which showed that registered quarter horses made up 39.5% of the total equine humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 128 population in the us (donkeys, burros, ponies, and miniature horses included). kilby points to several difficulties in formulating an accurate number of the total equine population, but argues that it is at or above 9.6 million. 10. denhardt left his post at the aqha to serve in world war ii. michaelis took over secretarial duties until 1946. 11. the technique of embryo transfer faced severe criticism from within and outside the quarter horse world, as some breeders used this technology (and, to be fair, ai as well) to produce a very large foal crop with the intention of only registering the “best” of them. anthropologist tamar mckee notes, “not only was artificial insemination (ai) allowed … but the semen of one stallion could be used to impregnate [an unlimited] number of mares in order to increase a breeder’s chances of creating the ideal foal” (mckee). in this equation, only the best foals would be registered, and the rest, as mckee found, “could be culled through slaughter,” or gelded and sold as grade horses. scamper, a horse you will meet later in this essay, is likely a product of just this kind of logic: his conformation and talent suggest that he was not ill-bred, but, perhaps because of his fiery temperament, his breeder determined he was not part of the top of that year’s foal crop. scamper and others like him form a cohort of unwanted and untended, and largely invisible, equine surplus in the united states. while many unregistered horses do find good homes, the overwhelming presence of unregistered quarter horses in the u.s. slaughter pipeline (they represent 7 of 10 of the total horses shipped from the u.s. to slaughter facilities in canada and mexico) reveals a startling excess of these horses (mckee). 12. for a thorough and extremely useful primer on the legal gymnastics of livestock production designed to facilitate animal capital, see rosenberg’s “how meat changed sex: the law of interspecies intimacy after industrial reproduction.” 13. the technique’s success is unevenly distributed among mammal species, however. some such as horses, cows, cats, mice, and famously, sheep, have all been successfully cloned. others, to the ongoing disappointment of their advocates, have yet to yield a clone, such as dogs (though, at the time this article is going to press, it appears from newsmedia accounts that one of barbra streisand’s pet dogs has successfully been cloned) and a number of endangered species of wildlife. jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 129 14. the sample number, 3000, represents roughly .02% of the total us-based membership of the aqha in 2010, which was approximately 144,000, according to kilby. 15. this love discourse is in direct contrast to the near-complete absence of attention to same-species love, in this case between horses, that characterizes breeding in the horse world more broadly. as samantha hurn describes for the particular equine breed the welsh cob, “in commercial cob breeding … love has nothing to do with sex. if a mare takes to the stallion she is covered by, then it makes the process easier for all concerned. if she does not, then there is little she can do about it” (31). addressing this gap requires a complete ethical overhaul of the entire capitalist enterprise of creating animal flesh and life in the biological anthropocene. works cited american quarter horse association, “annual membership report,” 2013. accessed january 14, 2015. online. american quarter horse association, “annual report,” 2016. accessed september 15, 2017. online. american quarter horse association, “aqha cloning lawsuit.” accessed august 17, 2018. online. blanchette, alex. “herding species: biosecurity, posthuman labor, and the american industrial pig.” cultural anthropology 30.4 (2015): 640-69. “briefs filed in continuing clone lawsuit.” quarter horse news.com, march 26, 2014. accessed august 17, 2018. online. cassidy, rebecca. horse people: thoroughbred culture in lexington and newmarket. johns hopkins up, 2007. church, stephanie. “world champion barrel horse gelding cloned.” the horse, november 15, 2006. accessed august 7, 2018. online. close, pat. “history of the first fifty years of the american quarter horse association.” western horseman magazine, march 1990. accessed august 7, 2018. online. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 130 coulter, kendra. “herds and hierarchies: class, nature, and the social construction of horses in equestrian culture.” society and animals 22.2 (2014): 135-52. derry, margaret. masterminding nature: the breeding of animals, 1750-2010. u toronto p, 2015. dowell, tiffany. “jury finds aqha clone ban violates antitrust laws.” texas agriculture law blog, august 5, 2013. accessed august 7, 2018. online. “first cloned horse in north american born at texas a&m.” veterinary medicine and biomedical sciences — texas a&m university — news. april 27, 2005. accessed august 17, 2018. online. franklin, sarah. dolly mixtures: remaking genealogy. duke up, 2007. gandy, matthew. “queer ecology: nature, sexuality, and heterotopic alliances.” environment and planning d: society and space 30.4 (2012): 727-47. haraway, donna j. when species meet. u minnesota p, 2008. helmreich, stefan. “species of biocapital.” science as culture 17.4 (2008): 463-78. “heird continues tenure on aqha executive committee, march 2017.” tamu equine. accessed august 7, 2018. online. herzog, hal. email with author, august 20, 2014. hopkins, fred m., and doyle g. meadows, “cooled shipped horse semen.” equifacts. the university of tennessee agricultural extension service. accessed august 7, 2018. online. “satisfied horse owners and breeders: charmayne james and scamper.” viagen blog, n.d. accessed august 17, 2018. online. hurn, samantha. “what’s love got to do with it? the interplay of sex and gender in the commercial breeding of welsh cobs.” society and animals 16.1 (2008): 23-44. jeannette vaught -a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses 131 james, charmayne, and bonnie wheatley. “scamper’s stats with charmayne james.” barrel horse news, n.d. accessed august 14, 2018. online. johnson, colin r. just queer folks: gender and sexuality in rural america. temple up, 2013. kilby, emily r. “the demographics of the u.s. equine population.” the state of the animals iv: 2007. deborah salem and andrew rowan, eds. humane society press, 2007. 175-206. kim, claire jean. dangerous crossings: race, species, and nature in a multicultural age. cambridge up, 2015. kishigami, satoshi, sayaka wakayama, yoshihiko hosoi, akira iritani, and teruhiko wakyama, “somatic cell nuclear transfer: infinite reproduction of a unique diploid gene.” experimental cell research 3.14 (2008):1945-50. mackay-smith, alexander. the colonial quarter race horse. helen kleburg groves, 1983. mckee, tamar. email correspondence with author, december 9, 2014. mortimer-sandilands, catriona and bruce erickson, eds. queer ecologies: sex, nature, politics, desire. indiana up, 2010. mcbride, jim. “aqha attorneys, breeders argue over limit rule.” amarillo globe news, october 10, 2000. mchugh, susan. “bitches from brazil: cloning and owning dogs through the missyplicity project.” representing animals. nigel rothfels, ed. indiana up, 2002. 180-98. pawley, emily. “feeding desire: generative environments, meat markets, and managing sheep intercourse in great britain, 1700-1750.” osiris 33.1 (2018). ritvo, harriet. “sex and the single animal.” grand street 7.3 (1988): 124-39. rosenberg, gabriel n. the 4-h harvest: sexuality and the state in rural america. u pennsylvania p, 2015. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 132 _______. “how meat changed sex: the law of interspecies intimacy after industrial reproduction.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 23.4 (2017): 473-507. ross, katherine w. “cloning and embryo transfer legal issues.” the horse, may 23, 2012. russell, blake. interview with author, june 26, 2014. tallbear, kim. beyond the life/not life binary: a feminist-indigenous reading of cryopreservation, interspecies thinking and the new materialisms. mit press, 2017. _________. native american dna: tribal belonging and the false promise of native american dna. u minnesota p, 2013. _________. “theorizing queer inhumanisms: an indigenous reflection on working beyond the human/not human.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 21.2-3 (2015): 230-35. vaught, jeannette. “animal sex work.” castac (committee on the anthropology of science, technology, and computing) blog, june 2016. accessed august 17, 2018. online. _________. “how to make a horse have an orgasm.” how to do things with animals. natalie porter and ilona gershon, eds. cornell up (forthcoming 2018). weiss, brad. real pigs: shifting values in the field of local pork. duke up, 2016. graham huggan -affective animals: transspecies encounters in modern british animal writing h u m a n i m a l i a 12:1 graham huggan affective animals: transspecies encounters in modern british animal writing introduction. this essay presents a selective overview of modern, mostly post-second world war, british animal writing. i will argue that this writing is driven by deepseated fears and anxieties that make a mockery of the clichéd notions with which it continues to be associated: the reciprocal warmth of animal companionship; the reinvigorating effects of experiencing the wild. while most of the essay is taken up with detailed readings of the primary texts, a few preliminary reflections on animal writing are needed. animal writing is easiest to define by what it is not, that is, a sub-branch or ancillary form of nature writing. to be sure, nature writing — which is itself far from easy to define — frequently features animals, but these are not necessarily central to the texts’ main interests, while those animals that do appear in them often tend to be part of larger scenarios that are either governed by readily identifiable aesthetic conventions — pastoral, for instance — or are otherwise made to conform to an equally predictable template of human needs, motivations, and concerns. in animal writing, by contrast, animals are generally positioned front and center of the text and their subjectivities are explored in direct association with those of humans. notwithstanding, recent claims to the effect that animal writing challenges species boundaries and/or the category of the human itself can sometimes be as forced as they are fashionable, while in its most triedand-tested forms, notably the beast fable, animals are still routinely used to shed light on human behavioral traits (mostly shortcomings and failings) that often have little if anything to do with animals themselves. (for a suitably wide range of views on modern and contemporary animal writing, see, for example, armstrong; t. baker; herman; mchugh. for a broader palette still, see also the recently published palgrave handbook of animals and literature, co-edited by mchugh together with john miller and robert mckay.) british animal writing is no exception to this general rule, though it certainly has its own idiosyncratic tendencies. these include the proclivity to describe largely failed attempts to domesticate wild animals, with sometimes devastating results for the human as well as the animal actors concerned. a pointer for this is the relative scarcity of wild animals in contemporary great britain, a self-proclaimed nation of animal lovers that also happens to be one of the most systematically denatured countries in the world. wildness may be the de facto currency of nature writing in the us, but there is graham huggan -affective animals: transspecies encounters in modern british animal writing 211 precious little scope for this in the uk, where wildness is hard to imagine and harder still to experience, and where particular (iconic) animals are more given to feature than particular (representative) landscapes as emblems for a “wild nature” that can only be captured with considerable effort and, even then, seems more likely than not to prove impossible to preserve (huggan). this might also help explain my choice of animal subjects in the material that follows. in the first section of the essay, i will focus on representations of hawks in works or parts of works by four reasonably well-known british writers, dividing these for ease of discussion into two consecutive sets of matching pairs. in the first of these, i will bring together j. a. baker’s the peregrine (1968), which is widely considered to be a classic of modern british animal writing, with kathleen jamie’s scattered observations on hawks in her 2005 collection findings; i will then go on to make a further comparison between helen macdonald’s award-winning 2014 memoir h is for hawk and the self-lacerating experiment after which it partly styles itself, t. h. white’s weird-and-wonderful the goshawk (1951). my choice of hawks relates to the fact that they are simultaneously dangerous and endangered. several species of hawk are currently listed in the uk as being either vulnerable or endangered, while hawks have historically been associated in the popular national imaginary with the heightened vision that brings with it an almost preternatural awareness of mental confusion or physical loss (macdonald; see also farrier). but if hawks are embodied warnings, these have not generally gone well heeded; and even if hawks themselves are protected, in making the decision to engage with them we are most certainly not. the wildest of wild birds, hawks are ruthless killers with the popular reputation of being untameable: to attempt to train a hawk is at best a perilous and at worst a life-endangering exercise, as macdonald and, before her, white find out. hawks are vulnerable creatures, to be sure, but it is human vulnerabilities that they bring into sharp focus; and the price for attempting to feed off their wildness may be sanity, possibly even life itself. in baker’s text, in particular, hawks have multiple associations with death — including the apparent wish for it. through its unflinching visions of the predator-prey relationship, the peregrine brilliantly succeeds in reversing the idea of human dominance over the animal, revealing instead a curious pathology of self-sacrifice connected to ongoing histories of human violence, including the contemporaneous threat of nuclear annihilation and (redoubled by proximity in the goshawk) traumatic memories of world war. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 212 in the essay’s second section, i turn my attention to a suite of texts that examine the relationship between humans and otters, ranging from two earlier beloved works, williamson’s tarka the otter (1927) and maxwell’s ring of bright water (1960), to more recent footsteps journeys — miriam darlington’s otter country (2012) — and experimental enactments: charles foster’s being a beast (2016). as i aim to demonstrate, otters offer further shared opportunities in these otherwise stylistically divergent texts to reflect on the deep-seated nature and epic scale of human/animal violence. this encompasses the brutal violence done by otters, the still more savage violence done to otters, and those seemingly limitless forms of violence that are routinely perpetrated by human beings against each other — and themselves. in addition, otters, as these authors suggest in their different ways, are as fundamentally unknowable to us as we are to ourselves, nor are they anything like the biddable creatures that decades of sentimental literature and film have made them out to be (for a valuable corrective to this, see allen). being a beast, in particular, cuts a riotous swathe through these flimsy veils of sentiment, but meaningful incisions are also made elsewhere, even in the muchmisinterpreted ring of bright water. finally, the fact that otters are co-listed with some species of hawk as vulnerable in the uk adds a further layer of piquancy to the texts, which may be traced to a triple crisis: a crisis of the environment, a crisis of representation and, within the overall context of (western) modernity, a crisis of the modern dissociated self. all three crises, my argument runs, are mediated through the human-animal relationship, which is framed whether explicitly or implicitly in affective terms. this relationship, inflected as it is through contemporaneous social anxieties, is nothing if not a troubled one. context may go some way towards accounting for this, but only some way, the larger point i want to make here being that animal writing is rarely reassuring about the relationships we (humans) enjoy with animals, and more often distinctly unsettling in the insights it provides into our relationships, both with each other and with ourselves. certainly, the texts i want to look at here are all disquieting to a greater or lesser extent, and several of them are shot through with violence. it is of course true that i have chosen to focus on texts that, in bringing out the nature of human/animal (human as animal) violence, are also the products of deeply troubled human personalities. it has been suggested, for example, that the human viciousness of tarka the otter, as well as the hideousness of williamson’s real-life politics, can be partly explained by his traumatic wartime experiences in the trenches, whilst the peregrine, which is ostensibly the product of an unremarkable man’s obsession with a remarkable creature, asks decidedly uncomfortable questions about the limits of human understanding and intelligence that cannot help but reflect back on the mysterious graham huggan -affective animals: transspecies encounters in modern british animal writing 213 figure of the author himself. but animal writing, i want to insist, is a genre that seems generally well suited to bringing out the worst in humans. and it is also a genre that is less likely to reveal our capacity to reach out to nonhuman others than to comment on the modern dissociated sensibility: our otherness to ourselves. a second, less contentious strand to my argument is that animal writing is necessarily if by no means exclusively about humans, and that it consequently offers a fascinating record of the human-animal relationship over time. more recently, this changing relationship has been a focal point for the burgeoning research field (also represented by this journal) of human-animal studies, which has sought to shed new light on the meaning of the human and the tangled interactions between human and animal worlds. much work in this field now focuses on the symbiotic relationship between two early twenty-first-century philosophical developments, which — in a questionable kind of intellectual shorthand — are currently referred to as the “animal” and “affective” turns. the animal turn is based on the premise that animals, rather than functioning as projection screens for a variety of human concerns and interests, are self-constituting subjects in their own right and active material agents in their own terms (kalof and montgomery; weil). the affective turn, meanwhile, focuses on the various processes by which human and animal bodies (or, perhaps better, human and other animal bodies) engage meaningfully with one another in situated ways that are irreducible to set behavioral patterns, and that involve open forms of mutual “becoming” or interactive “worlding” that belie the ontological stability implied by conventional understandings of the grounded self (halley and clough). these two turns come together in what i will be referring to in this essay as the multifunctional figure of the affective animal. affective animals are characterized not just by their broad emotional appeal but also by their situated capacity to affect human behavior. they may also be so named insofar as they are able to elicit public sympathy, and in this respect the figure of the affective animal becomes a kind of emotional cipher, a catalyst for media-generated activist and/or advocacy work (nyman and schuurman ). not all animals function in this way of course, and one of the benefits of animal writing is that it does not restrict itself to so-called charismatic animals that are manipulated in such a way as to tug at our heart-strings or activate the recognition of “our” complicity in “their” plight. indeed, one of the products of what might loosely be called an ecological turn (another turn!) in british animal writing has been the renewed attention to less obviously significant species within the larger framework of ecosystems in which — as has been known for several centuries — it is the insects and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 214 worms of this world that do the vital work. that these systems are subject to potentially catastrophic breakdown, and are far less stable than they seem, has also been known for quite some time, though today’s “anthropocene condition” (purdy) has reinforced this.1 hence the elegiac edge in modern british animal writing, an edge significantly sharpened by the unfolding consequences of the anthropocene, which registers both the anticipatory fear of likely disappearance and the felt disappointment of actual loss. and hence another form of regret experienced in texts that reveal, through several layers of mediation, that direct access to animal worlds is increasingly limited, and that — for many species — these worlds may not be accessible at all. but if the history of british animal writing is fraught in these and other ways, it also fights against its own melancholic impulses. iconic british animals — badgers and barnowls, ospreys and otters — continue to feature in contemporary texts, often in numbers that belie their actual ecological status; and indeed, in some of these texts, long inventories of local species are delivered that play to the best traditions of the darwinian sublime. even the more hopeful texts, though, tend to be haunted by the fear of loss, and it is no exaggeration to say that contemporary british animal writing, combining the long western traditions of the pastoral elegy and the beast fable, provides a set of more or less anthropomorphic stylistic exercises in human alienation from the natural world. i say more or less insofar as animal writing has historically gestured towards that which it can never achieve, that is, the human attempt to “become” an animal. admittedly, some forms of writing have little or no intention of doing this, turning animals into little more than human beings, often vulnerable or putupon human beings, in numerous entertaining varieties of mock-disguise. but other forms, taking their cue from the latest ethological discoveries, offer a more scientific approach to the understanding of animal behavior, attempting an impossible-butnecessary reciprocity of vision in which human beings are both fashioning observers and sometimes unwilling recipients of a keenly experienced animal gaze. while animal writing is by definition multisensory, it is the sense of sight that predominates in most cases, backed by a multifaceted history of empirical observation that has accompanied its most readily recognizable british variant, the first-person natural-historical account. this suggests that the study of animal writing might benefit from the various theories of the gaze that have been developed by contemporary visual theorists. one important point to bear in mind is that the gaze is not the same thing as the look. for kaja silverman, the look describes a visual category, often driven by personal desire, whereas the gaze describes a broader visual regime that is shaped by dominant social and cultural forces and frequently operates as an instrument of control graham huggan -affective animals: transspecies encounters in modern british animal writing 215 and mastery that positions the subject in relation to what it sees (134, 156). for humans to look at animals, in silverman’s terms, always implies a certain degree of intellectual and emotional projection; within the broader framework of the gaze, it also opens up the possibility of a returned look that confirms the other as a subject in its own right (95). within this general context, wendy woodward distinguishes between two kinds of animal gaze: an objectifying gaze that confirms (imagined) human superiority over animals; and a reciprocal gaze that acknowledges our “subjective kinship” with them (3). woodward is committed to the possibility of placing humans and animals in what she calls a “continuum of kinship” (14); other theorists, notably donna haraway, suggest that humans and animals co-exist in a much messier entanglement of desires and forces that is by definition unbalanced and asymmetrical, and in which the possibility always exists that human interest in the animal is not reciprocated at all (24). what does all this mean in the context of modern british animal writing? one thing it means is that animal writing, even given the scientific advantages of the times, remains as much an index of ignorance as a vehicle of insight into the phenomenal life-worlds of animals; as jed purdy starkly puts it, “we [just] don’t know what an animal’s life means, to it or to us” (244). another thing it means is that this continuing ignorance can be brought to bear on the history of what we have done to animals; and in this second sense, contemporary animal writing operates within another kind of historical penumbra — that surrounding human remorse. this isn’t to turn all animal narratives into moral tales, for as might be expected contemporary texts tend to be critical of their own moralizing tendencies, but it is to suggest that animal writing draws upon a conspicuously uncanny aesthetics that is driven by simultaneous unease and uncertainty over what it purports to represent. finally, a third thing it means is that the various uncertainties and failures embedded within the history of modern british animal writing are exacerbated by the current conditions of the anthropocene, which matches the actual disappearance of animals — in alarming numbers — to their metaphorical disappearance from our everyday lives (berger; lippitt). in contemporary writing these two forms of disappearance can easily start to blend in to one another, creating a grey area between extinction narratives, which document irrecoverable losses, and pseudo-extinction narratives, which build up apocalyptic atmospheres of disappearance even if the science tells us that this isn’t necessarily the case.2 recent work on extinction suggests that it is as much an imaginative failure as anything else (heise; van dooren); contemporary animal writing humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 216 fights all the more vigorously against this failure because it is one that it is fearful of repeating itself. in what follows, i want to chart these various interconnected struggles, which are at once physical and psychological, representational and epistemological, via a sample of older and more recent animal texts. backing up my earlier reflections on the animal gaze, i will turn first to two pairings of texts that illustrate the potentially visionary quality of modern animal writing while also showing its limits of vision in relation to the various “transspecies encounters” (haraway) it wishes to enact.3 hawk “i”s. all of russia, it is rumored to have been said, emerged from gogol’s overcoat. it is worth wondering whether something similar might be said of contemporary british animal writing and baker’s peregrine, though it is really only recently, with the various high-profile accounts that have accompanied the golden jubilee of its publication, that baker’s hallucinatory, sometimes harrowing rendition of his experiences with the titular animal has come to get the acknowledgement it deserves. like gogol’s quirky masterpiece, the peregrine is both terrifying and distinctly odd, with both narrative accounts almost willing the real/imagined calamities they visit upon themselves. famously, the peregrine took ten years to write though the text itself is quite short and only covers six months or so of its author’s obsessive tracking of peregrines in his low-key essex neighbourhood. robert macfarlane, one of several contemporary nature writers to live in these birds’ shadow, has described the text as being written in “ecstatic, violent, enraptored prose” (2). it is certainly true that the adjective “hawk-like” is as apt depiction of the text’s style as it is of its subject, especially in relation to its hyper-concentrated focus on the world-creating, but also potentially world-destroying, properties of the human/animal eye. in fact, the peregrine is a symbolist work in the blakean mould, albeit adapted to the late modern (mid twentieth-century) context of a nation still struggling with the collective traumas of two devastating world wars and the hawkish specter of another, in the shape of a potentially earth-destroying nuclear war. in this context, to see is alternatively to select one’s prey and to serve oneself up as the predator’s willing sacrifice. the peregrine moves alarmingly between these two opposing subject positions, never quite becoming the hawk (because its author cannot) but never quite succumbing to it either. at times, baker seems to claim an almost shamanic affinity with the hawk, as in one close encounter when the hawk’s eyes alight on the man’s face, and baker, part unnerved part mesmerized, consoles himself with the thought that “he regards me now as part hawk part man, worth flying over to look at graham huggan -affective animals: transspecies encounters in modern british animal writing 217 from time to time but never wholly to be trusted; a crippled hawk perhaps, unable to fly or kill cleanly, uncertain and sour of temper” (146). more often, though, baker admits that he knows little about either the hawk or its intentions. and for all the forensic precision of his observations, he cannot help but elevate the hawk into a kind of deathly symbol. this is all the more shattering in that peregrine falcons at the time were themselves a deeply endangered species: baker’s hawks are relentlessly pursued precisely because he fears that they may be england’s last. it would be an understatement to say that the peregrine is fascinated by death; rather it embraces it. almost lovingly detailed descriptions of fresh kills are intensified in the text by howling imprecations against man the killer: no pain, no death, is more terrible to a wild creature than its fear of man. a red-throated diver, sodden and obscene with oil, able to move only its head, will push itself out from the sea-wall with its bill if you reach down to it as it floats like a log in the tide. a poisoned crow, gaping and helplessly floundering in the grass, bright yellow foam bubbling from its throat, will dash itself up again and again on to the descending wall of air, if you try to catch it. a rabbit, inflated and foul with myxomatosis, just a twitching pulse beating in a bladder of bones and fur, will feel the vibration of your footstep and will look for you with bulging, sightless eyes. then it will drag itself away into the bush, trembling with fear. we are the killers. we stink of death. we carry it with us. it sticks to us like frost. we cannot tear it away. (113) scenes like this are almost too awful to behold, but they fix their raptor gaze on us. we want to look away and cannot; but if we are being honest with ourselves, we want to look as well. by looking, we are trapped into complicity, but like the hawk itself baker seems indifferent to this. as macfarlane rightly says, the text “suggests no basis for the establishment of an environmental ethics born of commonality,” though he goes on to cite several instances of contemporary avian conservation initiatives that have been directly influenced by baker’s work (2–3). the main reason for baker’s indifference is that he remains firmly locked into a post-romantic vision of his own solitude. though we learn next to nothing about him in the text, he is ever-present in it — a helpless witness to his own sensory impoverishment, no doubt, but a witness nonetheless. the struggle for vision in the text (a literal one too: he was myopic) is baker’s own; he is not especially interested in whether or not we want to participate in it. it is also a struggle humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 218 that is lost because it was too late in the first place. whether it is too late or not for humankind to save itself is a question that the text leaves open for us; but it gives us little reason not to believe that baker thinks it is too late to save himself. for the scottish writer kathleen jamie the peregrine is, somewhat cautiously, a respected “classic of english natural history: a keen, affecting book about a man’s affiliation and these particular birds” (35). but later in a chapter on peregrines and other birds of prey in her 2005 work findings, jamie is keen to know more: “who was this man who could spend ten years following peregrines? perhaps he was landed gentry. what allowed him to crawl the fields and ditches all day, all winter, until he could tell just by a tension in the air that there was a peregrine in the sky?” (43). as is characteristic for jamie’s work, these questions and speculations go unanswered, though she admiringly suggests that, for a man who would seemingly “annihilate himself and renounce his fellows,” it must have been an “act of consummate communication to his human kind [to] step back into language and write a book still spoken of forty [now fifty] years on” (43). i am not so sure that baker’s book is as generous to its audience as jamie implies, but she neatly captures its overwrought qualities, the obsessiveness of both the pursuit itself and the language that attends to it, which slavishly imitates the hawkish properties of vitality and hunger that it knows it cannot appropriate for itself. jamie’s own approach to writing is very different: understated, unassuming, and always wryly conscious of the gap between the ambivalent freedom accorded to wild animals and the pleasurable constrictions of her domestic life. above all, jamie’s writing performs the sly trick of managing to say a lot while repeatedly confessing to its own state of ignorance: self-interrogating phrases like “i have no idea,” “i couldn’t say,” and “i’m beginning to wonder” are scattered through the pages of findings, as they are in her other nature-oriented texts. temperamentally, jamie’s work combines the modern dissociation of the self with an updated form of romantic negative capability. acting together, these two qualities make for a style of writing that can appear clinically austere but is always charmingly honest, and that refuses to tie itself down to simple explanations: “i want to learn to notice, not to analyse,” she says at one point in findings, “to still the part of the brain that’s yammering, ‘my god, what’s that? a stork, a crane, an ibis? don’t be silly, it’s just a weird heron’” (42). for all jamie’s protestations to the contrary, this is modern animal writing to a fault, as aware of itself as of its subject and, acting as if to follow its own curiosities without feeling the need to rationalize or catalogue them, more likely to find graham huggan -affective animals: transspecies encounters in modern british animal writing 219 things by default than by design — hence the fragmented structure and simulated randomness, both classic modernist strategies, embedded within her work. there is an uncanny note to this work as well, as when jamie — following in baker’s footsteps — describes the peregrines she has recently taken to watching in her scottish lowlands neighbourhood as “flicker[ing] at the edge of one’s senses, at the edge of the sky, at the edge of existence itself” (47). her vision, unlike baker’s, may not be impaired, but like his, her epistemological horizons are strictly limited: there is only so much that can be known about peregrines, and however attentive we are to their movements they will always have the capacity to move beyond our field of vision, ascending from approachable objects of scientific inquiry to sublimated subjects of folklore and myth. jamie’s response to this, however, is to keep her own feet firmly on the ground, and to acknowledge that her world and that of the peregrine may be entangled at one level, but are emphatically not the same. “i like being able to glance up from my own everyday business,” she says, “to see the osprey or the peregrine go about hers” (46). this frisson of recognition is then intensified by her knowledge that these sightings are relatively rare occurrences. “what it is about the peregrines is their rarity. i’m sure they’re gone now, but for a while i enjoyed the pleasure of a warm secret: i could watch the uncommon and handsome bird from my own window, and know it was there” (46– 47). that these “warm secrets” are shared with us is part of the appeal of jamie’s writing, which ultimately turns it back upon the “falconer’s worship of mastery, [and] the wish to identify with terror, with the predator over its prey” (46). a rather different examination of the masculinist myths surrounding falconry can be found in the work of t. h. white, still best known today for his suitably garish arthurian romantic novels, but whose scarcely less melodramatic nature memoir the goshawk, written in the immediate world war ii period, has come to acquire a minor cult status of its own. the goshawk, the story of its solitary author’s increasingly manic attempts to train the titular bird, is probably most interesting today for the glaring contradictions that accompany a hysterical anti-modern crusade written almost entirely from a modern sensibility, and explosively bringing together romantic and modern imaginaries, the one fuelled by ancestral longing, the other by present misery and despair. the hawk itself is an ancestral figure, the living embodiment of its excitable author’s “excursion [out] into the fields and back into the past” (16). this untutored excursion, and the equally amateurish training it involves, are likened to a mock-trial in humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 220 which white doubles as unwilling executioner and tormented victim, exchanging these roles as often as the “trained” hawk turns from flesh-shredding apex predator to human symbolic prey. as the tale proceeds, this trial turns into a kind of medieval mortification rite — a submission of the self to punishment for the sake of others — which, in a not entirely dissimilar manner to baker’s the peregrine, shoots off sparks of modern warfare and civilizational collapse (52). also like baker, white clearly envies the hawk — for its hugely powerful presence, for its vastly superior powers of vision — but for these selfsame reasons he is terrified of it, acutely aware that “hawk vision” allows for the imagination of killing, but also of being killed (67–68). as these fears increase, the hawk becomes a powerful vehicle for white’s frustration and pent-up rage: against “civilized” society, against the warmongering modern world, but most of all against himself. “what right had a cowardly recluse who fled from his fellow men […] to write about these almost fabulous creatures?” (75). here as elsewhere in the text, white’s feeble attempts at hawk training turn into a post-romantic exercise in self-estrangement, for it is not the hawk that is other, but white (who likens himself at one point to frankenstein) who is other to himself. there is not much to be learned about hawks in the text, and white freely admits that he doesn’t know much about them either; rather, the text enacts a semi-parodic mating of raging souls in which the hawk, “haunted by moods and mania” (99), becomes an objective correlative for white himself. indeed, the goshawk is stalked by madness from beginning to end, a condition that goes far beyond the foolishness of its own enterprise, gesturing instead towards a collapsed world order that can neither be redeemed nor rectified, and over which the image of the hawk magisterially presides as a latter-day attila-figure, a legendary tyrant who “immolated victims, sacked cities, [and] put virgins and children to the sword” (172). white’s livid martial fantasies are a far cry from the more intimate scenes of transspecies encounter we find in helen macdonald’s 2014 memoir h is for hawk; nonetheless, the goshawk is obviously a formative influence on macdonald, whose text deliberately situates itself in white’s shadow and consciously engages with the estranged modern condition that it both dolefully inhabits and energetically attacks. reversing the temporal order of their respective texts, macdonald refers to white at one point as a projected merlin figure, “an imagined future self” (247). it’s clear though that white, the story of whose mental and physical turmoil is interwoven with macdonald’s memoir, is less the legendary magician of his own romantic imagination than a graham huggan -affective animals: transspecies encounters in modern british animal writing 221 deliberately unbalanced modern figure, the unstable origin of a calculated negotiation between an unwanted (war-torn) future and an equally violent past. in this context, h for hawk is much more than the female-centred recovery narrative it has sometimes been taken to be; rather, it is a failed attempt at human-animal reconciliation mapped onto an untimely contemplation of the fragmented modern self. this isn’t to say that the text doesn’t operate at one level as a chronicle of bereavement, but it is melancholic rather than mournful, and the moments of peace and communion it finds are essentially woolfian “moments of being,” temporary discoveries that reconfirm an overarching sense of loss (106, 117, 181).4 as in the goshawk, the struggle for self-control remains unresolved, and the text fights in any case against its own “strategies of containment” (jameson).5 it wants the wild, which is symbolized by the hawk, but knows full well that it can’t have it; and continuing in the search to have what it can’t have, it deliberately places itself in harm’s way, fearing that the opposite of wild isn’t tame, but rather that deadening aspiration of modern bourgeois civilization, safe (143, 189). in this sense, h is for hawk is what the late german sociologist ulrich beck might have called a “risk narrative,” in which the authenticity of modern lived experience is gauged by the capacity to exhibit one’s own vulnerability to external forces; as beck apodictically puts it, “i risk, therefore i am” (5). what is primarily at risk though, as in white’s prior text, is not physical but mental wellbeing. and, as macdonald comes increasingly to recognize, the wildness for which the hawk has been made to stand is less a panacea than an illusion; it is also a fundamental misunderstanding of how the hawk lives — not that this understanding can ever be fully arrived at any more than the category of the wild itself is available to human cognition (275). what this leaves us with, i would suggest, is a necrorather than biopolitical approach to the human-animal relationship that is played out through initiation, a secret if publicly shared rite, bound up with death and sacrifice, in which to encounter the wild animal is also to conduct a “conversation with death” (macdonald; see also mbembe).6 all four texts i have just been examining here are initiations of a kind, although it is arguably only in the earlier texts, white’s and baker’s, that the animistic dimensions of their human-animal encounters are fully acknowledged and played out. these initiations, though deeply personal, elevate the texts to the status of myth. they also convey an element of obsession or addiction that is the flip side of a modern “dissociated sensibility” (eliot) — one that, in resituating the self as other, causes us to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 222 seek with seemingly increasing desperation reanimating connections with others’ lives.7 modern british animal writing registers precisely this attempt, not so much to recapture what has been lost but to find an animating drive, discovered in our encounters with (other) animals, that might give temporary meaning and energizing significance to our everyday lives. this drive is as likely to be oriented towards death as towards life: hence the double coding of a great deal of this writing, which seeks affective solidarity with animals that kill for survival rather than sport, and whose death-instincts operate as risk-filled registers for revitalized human lives. this uncompromising view comes at a price, though i think it would be going too far to accuse such writing of nihilism; rather, in cases such as baker’s at least, it conveys an immense frustration with human foolishness and arrogance that is reflected at a visceral level in the violent human-animal (and animal-animal) encounters that are retrospectively rehearsed in the text. in the next section of this essay, i want to reflect further on the violence encoded in recent and contemporary british animal narratives, associating it this time with otters, not the most obviously violent of creatures, but ones that feature in some of british literature’s most conspicuously violent texts. otter others. the obvious place to start is with henry williamson’s tarka the otter, first published in 1927 but still as fresh and unsettling as ever, its instilled violence further intensified by recent biographical accounts of its traumatized author’s life (yeates). read today, tarka comes across as an x-rated beast fable in which otters, often as violent as the human hunters who see them as pests, feature as hyperkinetic creatures, always on the move, constantly alert, driven by hunger but also by what appears — to human eyes at least — like a permanent condition of jittery nerves. tarka is a novel, though hardly one made up. the product of thousands of hours of painstaking field research by williamson, it is as much an unsparing portrait of dartmoor, a oncebeautiful landscape increasingly scarred by human use, as a searing indictment of human injustices towards animals (and, though this is not a central feature of the text, toward each other and themselves). tarka is also very much a crisis text: describing the fateful collision of ancient and modern worlds, it both simulates an ancientness it cannot grasp and inhabits a modernity it cannot tolerate, with its headlining otters, unable to find a place in either, the very embodiment of what zygmunt bauman, in an updated urban context, has described as “modernity’s outcasts,” condemned to eke out “wasted lives” (bauman). if this makes the text seem sentimental, it is anything but, and violence is its standard graham huggan -affective animals: transspecies encounters in modern british animal writing 223 commodity. one typical sequence witnesses the charmingly named izzywig the hedgehog (“vuz-peg” in local dialect) unceremoniously turned over, protective spines demobilized, and devoured from the inside (44). to be sure, parts of the text, registered from the otter perspective, read like a celebratory local ethnography of otter culture, replete with devonian inflections and kiplingesque gestures toward zoological primitivism (which, as in the jungle book, is primarily intended to confer dignity on the animal world). but the violence is unrelenting, and in tarka’s post-primitivist world it really does amount to eating or being eaten; there is little time to ponder alternative courses of action, and indeed little time to do anything at all, such is the constant race to find the psychological wherewithal as well as the physical opportunity to survive. published more than thirty years after tarka, gavin maxwell’s ring of bright water is similarly written out of an intensely disappointed (in williamson’s case, quasimisanthropic) apprehension of the violence inherent in modern “civilized” life. in maxwell’s case, this leads him to camusfeàrna, a lonely made-up place on the northwest scotland coast whose real location, which would later ironically become a major tourist draw, is withheld from the reader lest its “identification in print [should] bring nearer its enemies of industry and urban life” (5). this is the stage, maxwell tells us in the foreword, for an escape from “the prison of adult life” in which the imaginative possibility is explored of looking at “some portion of the earth as it was before [man] tampered with it,” and in so doing of restoring the broken connection that modernity has created between mankind and “the other living creatures of the world.” some readers (and ring of bright water remains one of the best-selling animal books of all time) may take maxwell at his word, but many, i suspect, are wary of him; indeed, it is the stereotypically idyllic quality of maxwell’s scene-setting which — and not just for contemporary readers who know the story already — creates an initial impression of unease which quickly gathers momentum in the text. the two otters maxwell brings into his household (first mijbil, then edal) are the temporary stars of the show, but just as they are never entirely trainable, the trust that builds up between human and animal exists under a permanent shadow that belies the brightness and light-heartedness that are surface features of the text. to put it bluntly, the camusfeàrna project is doomed from the start, not just because there is no more chance of understanding the otters than of maintaining the enchanted status of their coastal sanctuary, but also for the obvious reason that otters, however charming they look and entertainingly they behave, are not, nor were ever meant to be, household pets. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 224 seen in this context, the greatest violence in the text is not the bludgeoning of mijbil, heart-rending though it is, but the decision to buy and keep him in the first place; and in this and other respects, ring of bright water joins other human-animal encounter narratives of its period, notably gerald durrell’s my family and other animals, as a kind of anti-model for modern animal conservation — not that it was ever intended to be a conservationist text. whatever the case, ring of bright water, read today, lacks the altruistic charm that it seems to have had for contemporaneous readers; instead, it is more likely to come across as a damaging portrayal of the possessive individualism of maxwell himself. there is a kind of childish petulance at work in the text, such as when maxwell, proud of having achieved the childhood goal of owning an animal that bears his own name (a “maxwell’s otter”), curses any “odious taxonomist of the future” who might dare take that name away from him (103). in his defence, there is gentle selfmockery, too, such as in one later episode when, out on one of his morning walks with edal, he whistles to bring her back only to find himself confronted instead by a wild otter, “staring at me with interest and surprise” (153). seeing that he is no threat, the otter sticks around for another look, then “resume[s] his leisurely progress southward along the edge of the rocks.” edal, meanwhile, is left to forage for crabs, small fish, and shrimps; when she gets back “home,” she will probably be rewarded with some eels, served up alive to her in her makeshift training tank (154). the passage offers a more affecting account of the consequences of captivity than any of the partly staged calamities, which accumulate quickly later in the trilogy, that befall human and animal victims alike. it is important not to be sanctimonious. ring of bright water is a product of its time, and it is probably more revealing of human frailty than of animal vulnerability, though both of these are tangled up with one another as well as with a number of material practices and agencies (local fishing and agriculture, the national tourism industry, the global wildlife trade) that turn it from the affecting story of one man’s encounter with wild animals into a modern “multi-participatory” text (haraway).8 it still seems worth wondering, though, what kind of knowledge is transmitted by books such as maxwell’s (and, in a rather different context, williamson’s) which, for several generations of child and adult readers, have helped shape an understanding of british otters’ still tenuous place in the modern world. as miriam darlington, to whose otter country (2012) i now turn, “much of what we think about otters [today] is mediated by television and by books like tarka and […] ring of bright water” (18). in the 1960s, she continues, “keeping pet otters made maxwell famous. his lyrical account of life with otters in the wild emptiness of the highlands was highly seductive, but how graham huggan -affective animals: transspecies encounters in modern british animal writing 225 much did it actually tell us about otters? the enraptured descriptions reveal nothing of the conflicts that emptied the land of its people and little of the reality of keeping wild animals in captivity.” this is true to a large extent of ring of bright water if not of tarka, which as argued earlier is in line with a great deal of twentieth-century british animal writing precisely for what it reveals about the violent modern world in which humans and other animals interact. darlington’s search for the animal behind the tale is thus possibly based on false premises, though this is partly the result of her chosen medium, the footsteps narrative, which is by definition belated with respect to the real and imaginative journeys it seeks to re-enact. footsteps narratives are caught in a cleft stick between critique and commemoration, with involuntary reverence being one potential end result. they are also good examples of “postmemory” texts, that is, texts that rely on representation to make up for their lack of direct experience (hirsch). this doesn’t mean that works such as otter country are condemned to one form or another of experiential inauthenticity, but rather that they depend, to an even greater degree than the works they follow, on an understanding of what the visual theorist steve baker calls the “symbolic availability” of animals as instruments for human needs and desires (5). as baker suggests, “attitudes to living animals [today] are in large part the result of the symbolic uses to which the concept of the animal is put in popular culture. this is not to set the representational or the popular-symbolic ‘over’ the real. it is simply to say that any understanding of the animal is inseparable from knowledge and its cultural representation” (baker 25; see also armstrong and mchugh). otter country, seen in this context, is not one but a variety of cross-hatched quest narratives, in which different temporalities coincide, real and imagined animals coparticipate, and the larger symbolic figures of the otter and the animal itself are productively engaged with as ways of both decentering and paradoxically re-centering the human subjects of these narratives, creating a “multispecies” mixture of biography and autobiography at the core of which stands the questing author herself (kirksey).9 this nesting of narratives probably makes the text sound more experimental than it is, and much of the book is a fairly standard account of darlington’s energetic search for otters across some of the more remote places of britain, seen alongside and in conversation with her analysis of maxwell and williamson’s writing, which is in turn enmeshed with their everyday working lives. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 226 human and animal subjects prove equally elusive, however, and darlington stresses the difficulties involved in a multi-scalar tracking process that involves the imaginative crossing of time as well as the material crossing of space. failure would be too strong a word to describe the result, but like other contemporary writers darlington is well aware that there is only fleeting access to the creature in the flesh, and that most of the time the human quest for the animal turns full circle. this dilemma is writ large in what is probably the greatest temptation of all in animal writing––performatively to “become” the animal that one can only imaginatively represent. a late scene in otter country demonstrates this nicely. near her home in devon, darlington discovers a set of otter tracks, and briefly imagines what it must be like to be an otter. crouching in the mud, she tries to recreate the view an otter might have as it comes out of the marsh. at the edges [of the river], water and mud lose themselves together. higher up, oak trees and rock are moored to the bank, and there are dry places between trunks to curl up. i place myself in the crook of a rock and a woody root, and my nostrils fur with earth-odours. if i were a hungry otter i would follow the rim of the crumbling wall and bank, blending myself with the contours, and later drop down a level to the rocks to search for crayfish and eels as they emerge on the rising tide. (333) sensing that she is close to the otters, she goes in after them, swimming otter-style with her nose at water level (335). the otters themselves never appear, and the scant reward for her efforts is to catch two human swimmers, youths skinny-dipping like her in the murky river, embarrassingly unawares. this unsolicited return to the human world makes perfect sense as an ending to the narrative; it also reinforces the delusion of “becoming an animal” that the text intermittently presents. one last text in my essay not only explores this delusion, but also actively performs it. this is charles foster’s astonishing 2016 thought-experiment, being a beast. being a beast is nothing if not a risky book. the author’s note at the beginning says it is motivated by the dual desire “to know what it is like to be a wild thing” (xi) and to counteract the mock-triumphal tendencies of nature writing, which foster sees as “generally [being] about humans striding colonially around, describing what they see from six feet above the ground, or about humans pretending that animals wear clothes.” he posits an alternative: to “see the world from the height of naked welsh badgers, london foxes, exmoor otters, oxford swifts and scottish and west country red deer,” but in so doing to chart the olfactory and auditory rather than the purely visual dimensions of animal life. the problem with this approach, as foster well knows, graham huggan -affective animals: transspecies encounters in modern british animal writing 227 is that it is impossible. being a beast is the confessional record of that impossibility, played out across a series of madcap scenes (foster “as” badger, “as” fox, “as” otter, etc.) that have been read by some reviewers as funny but are best seen as an awkward cross between the plaintively melancholic and the patently absurd. the absurdity of the exercise doesn’t mean that it is meaningless. foster is genuinely interested in how animals smell, touch, and feel, and how they negotiate the world from their own species-specific vantage point. he is also genuinely committed to trying to live the lives they lead, whether it is living in a hole and eating slugs (like country badgers) or wandering the streets at night and foraging in rubbish bins (like city foxes). moreover, as a trained vet he is knowledgeable about animal cognition and physiology, and in this sense being a beast is empiricism with a difference, backed by detailed scientific observation if still primarily devoted to experimenting first-hand with the (animal) senses so as to develop a heightened (human) sensory appreciation of the phenomenal life-world. the imagination also obviously comes into play here, and indeed foster describes his book as a “sort of literary shamanism” (xi). it is shamanism of a very different order, however, than what we see in the work of baker and williamson. shamanism implies the visionary capacity to transform and/or be transformed — to cross the boundaries between different worlds — but foster knows he is trapped inside his human body. he can no more become the animals whose actions and behavior he attempts to copy than he can unlock the secret behind “becoming-animal,” deleuze’s dizzying postontological vision of the incessant “becomings that compose different [human/animal] bodies,” which effectively turns all creatures, including ourselves, into affective animals, part of a larger network of ecological relations that continually constitutes and reconstitutes itself (buchanan 159, 161).10 not that foster doesn’t try, and there are moments in the text, such as when, after spending a summer living water-bound “as” an otter, he manages to convince himself that he is a shaman after all (93). but the approaching winter brings him back to earth, and his creeping sense of futility returns: this tells me something worth knowing. a depressed shaman, hunter or naturalist can’t work at all. a grey soul, apparently, can’t penetrate that thin veil between the species. i don’t understand the metaphysics. but it seems that you have to be sufficiently ‘i’ to be another, and depression humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 228 erodes the ‘i’ below the critical point. perhaps, for a human, being an animal is just an extreme mode of empathy — no different in kind from what you need to be to be a decent lover or father or colleague. when you’re depressed you might simply be nursing that injured ‘i’ too obsessively to have the energy or attention necessary for empathy. our nursing strategies are radically misconceived. they all tend to be based on the disastrous misconception that if you give away your self there will be less of you. in fact of course (as we know when the sun shines), the very opposite is true. (93) confessional moments like this give the book an elegiac feel, as if it is already apologizing in advance for the diminished empathy and stunted sensory perception that its melancholic author sees as being the inevitable by-products of contemporary half-living in a “post-natural” anthropocene world (purdy). his main counter-strategy seems to be a visceral form of self-abasement, but this — by his own admission — is only temporary, and the text is often marked by a glaring (if also guilty) lack of empathy, seen in his “otter” chapter in his high-handed treatment of both williamson and maxwell, and in his forked-tongue revelation of the one advantage he has “over those true masters of otter writing: i don’t like otters very much” (71). a few taut pages on otter physiology follow, in which otters are uncompromisingly described as pound-for-pound killing machines, “jangling, snarling, roaming, twitching bundles of adhd” (73). by the end of the chapter foster has calmed down, his point already having been made, but his mood will swing again in the next chapter, and the next. in this respect, being a beast is less a thoughtthan a mood-experiment, in which different animal species are mapped onto its human author’s continuously fluctuating neurological chart. odd though it is, foster’s writing is in fact a logical progression of the self-lacerating kinds of modern animal writing i have been looking at in this essay, which often tend to admit the impossibility of empathetic relations with (other) animals — even if this is precisely what they seek. to some extent, this is an effect of the souldestroying modern conditions with which this writing grapples rather than a consequence of its repeated failure to cross the species barrier; more specifically, it is connected to the modern dissociated self. the ecological orientation of much of this writing is not an antidote to these conditions, but rather a symptom of them. my contention is that what drives modern british animal writing is, above all, a general apprehension of loss that carries over into an uncanny feeling of lateness — the idea that the time is either out of joint or, still worse, that time graham huggan -affective animals: transspecies encounters in modern british animal writing 229 itself may be running out. (in some apocalyptic strands, time may well be felt to have run out already.) if this is an ecological idea, easily translated into the contemporary mantras of the new materialism and the anthropocene, it is also at heart a deeply human one.11 what this means is that modern british animal writers are condemned to repeat what foster calls the “two sins [that] have beset traditional nature writing: anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism” (xii). whether animal writing is in fact “nature writing” is a moot point, and i have been arguing in this essay that the two have different sets of priorities and concerns. but it is certainly the case that animal writing, and the particular examples of the genre i have been looking at here, function as an affective barometer for human fears and anxieties that have both distinctly historical and broader existential dimensions — fears and anxieties about human selfworth and identity that are redoubled by the animals that humans recognize in themselves. notes 1. the anthropocene — the so-called human age, marked by the simultaneous ubiquity and intensity of human influence on the planet — has unwittingly reinforced the idea of human centrality even as its ecological underpinnings maintain just the opposite: that human beings, as much shaped by as shaping the different worlds they fashion, are co-dependent inhabitants of a precariously shared earth. one of the best of the many books that have effectively created an academic cottage industry around the anthropocene is after nature, by the american environmental lawyer jedediah purdy. purdy argues that the anthropocene can be seen as the basis for a “new politics of nature, a politics more encompassing and imaginative than what we have come to know as environmentalism” (17). however, he also points out that the anthropocene is characterized by an atmosphere — a condition — of potentially debilitating uncertainty: over what global environmental action to take; over what local social practices and policies to implement; and, not least, over how to rethink the ways in which both human and nonhuman worlds are imagined within the overall framework of what he ambitiously calls an “aesthetics of [global] change” (245). such a transformative aesthetics, he suggests, urgently needs to find a place within it for the uncanny: for the “unsettling perception that we do not know, perhaps cannot know, the ethical status, meaning, or experience of another living being that stands in front of us” (230). in the human-animal domain, this means “admitting that we don’t know what an animal’s life means, to it or us, and that the answer we can give can only be some blend of discernment and projection” (244). i have dwelt on purdy here because his work, uscentered though it is, goes further than most in staking out the territory for humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 230 contemporary uk-based animal writing, which brings together just the combination of characteristics — uncanny aesthetics, epistemological uncertainty, ecological interconnectedness — he explores. following purdy, i see modern british animal writing as being caught in an “anthropocene condition” of failure that is marked by the unbridgeable distance between experience and representation, and by the gulf of incomprehension between different life-worlds. 2. thanks to kate marshall for bring the term “pseudo-extinction” to my attention. understandings of pseudo-extinction vary, with the most widely accepted, biological definition referring to the extinction of a parent species while an affiliated sub-species is still alive (de vos). my own understanding of pseudo-extinction, derived from marshall’s, differs from this. for further reflections on pseudo-extinction, see marshall; also armstrong. 3. like donna haraway, whose ideas are behind much of what i say in this and other work, i prefer the term “transspecies” to its more commonly used counterpart, “interspecies,” on the grounds that the prefix “inter” implies fixed boundaries around species that most human-animal theorists vigorously contest. (see, for example, wolfe; also haraway.) 4. “moments of being,” which now gives its name to a posthumous (1972) collection of autobiographical essays by woolf, are those moments in which individuals experience an awakening sense of the reality behind appearances, as opposed to the deadening state of “non-being” that affects and afflicts us in most of our daily lives. 5. “strategies of containment,” as fredric jameson explains, are ways of dealing with contradiction by constructing substitute truths that limit the damage history does to us (see, for example, jameson). i am using the term loosely here to describe white’s attempts to control contradiction by accommodating it — strategies that are inevitably, and indeed conspicuously, unsuccessful in his work. 6. “necropolitics” is the cameroonian philosopher achille mbembe’s term for what he calls “the subjugation of life to the power of death” (39) — a subjugation he sees as exceeding the regulatory bounds of biopolitics. i am using the term here to convey the sense in which animal writing is bound up in practices of death and sacrifice that often have a quasi-ritual aspect (for an in-depth treatment of this, see wolfe and shukin). in helen macdonald’s more prosaic but no less terrifying terms, human encounters with animals are “conversations with death” and animal writing, operating as one of the graham huggan -affective animals: transspecies encounters in modern british animal writing 231 primary vehicles for such encounters, often examines the “necropolitical” relations behind them (h is for hawk 29). new materialist thought — of which more later — has generated a fresh interest in animism as part of the wider transformative process by which bodily exchanges (both human and nonhuman) enact material and spiritual transfers from one state to another, including the ritual passage between life and death. i have no scope to examine this further here although it would be fruitful to do so, and animal writing more broadly stands to benefit from the necro/biopolitical approaches adopted in wolfe and shukin’s (and, to a lesser extent, alaimo’s and haraway’s) work. 7. the term “dissociated sensibility,” now used in contexts that far outstrip its original usage, derives from t.s. eliot’s 1921 essay “the metaphysical poets,” where he uses it to describe a newfound sense of the separation of thought and felt experience in some seventeenth-century literary works. the “splitting” of the self that ensues has been seen as a hallmark of the modern (western) sensibility, and whether this is attributable or not to eliot, it certainly applies to modern british animal writing, in which the dissociated sensibility, further magnified by the mutual gulf of incomprehension that separates human beings from (other) animals, is writ large. 8. the idea of “multi-participation” is probably at its most visible in new media studies, where it refers to the apparently ever-increasing capacity of media users to work across several different platforms at once. for donna haraway among others, this idea is extended to include the multiple, transverse relations that exist between often markedly different social actors, both human and nonhuman, and the representation of those relations across an equally wide range of cultural texts. 9. the idea that we live in a “multispecies” world has rapidly become axiomatic, spreading to fields well beyond animal and human-animal studies, with several recent interventions in anthropology, biology, geography, literary criticism, and philosophy, disciplines that are already incorporated to some extent into the methodological protocols of animal studies itself. the term “multispecies” (usually unhyphenated) refers to a shared method as much as a shared world, in which theorists and practitioners attempt systematically to break down what val plumwood calls the “hyperseparations” that have historically regulated human-animal relations, reinforcing the boundary between them and consolidating ideas and illusions of human mastery over the natural world. multispecies assemblages of different kinds have also been integral to new materialist thought (see also note 11 below), at least some of which is closely affiliated with posthumanism, itself a collage of related methods that is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 232 explicitly designed, not just to challenge the idea of human centrality, but to question the idea of the human itself. one might expect animal writing to be inherently multispecies, but this is in fact far from the case, as the wider history of the “symbolic availability” (s. baker) of animals for changing human needs and purposes attests. animal writing may not only be about humans, but it continues to be mostly about humans, just as nature writing, an always-tricky category that is by no means synonymous with animal writing, continues to negotiate the tension between its egocentric inclinations and its ecocentric claims. 10. for the original discussion of “becoming-animal,” see deleuze and guattari. 11. the new materialism, perhaps better seen as loose constellation of related approaches than as a unified philosophy or movement, has rapidly evolved into a new orthodoxy in ecocriticism, though — like ecocriticism itself — it ranges across a number of different disciplines that may have little or nothing to do with the reading of literary texts. new materialist approaches tend to stress the agential capacity of matter, the coimplication of nature and culture, and the entanglement of all (human and nonhuman) life forms. for a useful overview of these approaches, see coole and frost; for their application to human-animal studies, see the work of the sydney-based human animal research network (e.g. animals in the anthropocene); also wright. works cited alaimo, stacy. bodily natures: science, environment, and the material self. indiana up, 2010. allen, daniel. otter. reaktion books, 2010. armstrong, philip. what animals mean in the fiction of modernity. routledge, 2008. baker, j.h. the peregrine. 1967. collins, 2015. baker, steve. picturing the beast: animals, identity, representation. u of illinois p, 2001. baker, t.c. writing animals. palgrave, 2019. bauman, zygmunt. wasted lives: modernity and its outcasts. polity press, 2002. graham huggan -affective animals: transspecies encounters in modern british animal writing 233 beck, ulrich. world at risk. routledge, 2009. berger, john. about looking. 1980. bloomsbury, 2009. buchanan, brett. onto-ethologies: the animal environments of uexküll, heidegger, merleauponty, and deleuze. suny, 2008. coole, diana and samantha frost, eds. new materialisms: ontology, agency, and politics. duke up, 2010. darlington, miriam. otter country: in search of the wild otter. granta books, 2012. deleuze, gilles and félix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. 1987. bloomsbury, 2013. de vos, rick. “extinction stories: performing absence(s).” knowing animals. l. simmons and p. armstrong, eds. brill, 2007. 183–195. durrell, gerald. my family and other animals. hart-davis publishers, 1956. eliot, t.s. “the metaphysical poets.” metaphysical lyrics & poems of the seventeenth century. herbert j.c. grierson, ed. clarendon press, 1921. farrier, david. “the peregrine and its readers.” isle 22.4 (2015): 742–758. foster, charles. being a beast. profile books, 2016. halley, jean and patricia ticineto clough, eds. the affective turn: theorizing the social. duke up, 2007. haraway, donna. when species meet. u minnesota p, 2008. heise, ursula. imagining extinction: the cultural meanings of endangered species. columbia up, 2016. herman, david. creaturely fictions: human-animal relations in twentieth and twentyfirst century literature. palgrave, 2016. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 234 hirsch, marianne. the generation of postmemory: writing and visual culture after the holocaust. columbia up, 2013. huggan, graham. “back to the future: ‘the new nature writing,’ ecological boredom, and the recall of the wild.” prose studies 38.2 (2016): 152–171. human animal research network. animals in the anthropocene: critical perspectives on non-human futures. sydney up, 2015. jameson, fredric. the political unconscious: narrative as a socially symbolic act. routledge, 2002. jamie, kathleen. findings. sort of books, 2005. kalof, linda and georgina m. montgomery, eds. making animal meaning (the animal turn). michigan state up, 2012. kirksey, eben, ed. the multispecies salon. duke up, 2014. lippitt, akira. electric animal: toward a rhetoric of wildlife. u minnesota p, 2008. macdonald, helen. falcon. reaktion books, 2016. _____. h is for hawk. vintage, 2014. macfarlane, robert. “violent spring: the nature book that predicted the future.” the guardian, 15 april 2007. online. marshall, kate. “what are the novels of the anthropocene? american fictions in geological time.” american literary history 27.3 (2015): 523–538. maxwell, gavin. ring of bright water. 1960. penguin, 2001. mbembe, achille. “necropolitics.” public culture 15.1 (2003): 11–40. mchugh, susan. animal stories: narrating across species lines. u minnesota p, 2011. graham huggan -affective animals: transspecies encounters in modern british animal writing 235 mchugh, susan, robert mckay, and john miller, eds. the palgrave handbook of animals and literature. palgrave, 2020. nyman, jopi, and nora schuurman, eds. affect, space and animals. routledge, 2017. plumwood, val. environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason. routledge, 2001. purdy, jedediah. after nature: a politics for the anthropocene. harvard up, 2015. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate: the english and other creatures in victorian england. harvard up, 1989. shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life for biopolitical times. u minnesota p, 2009. silverman, kaja. the threshold of the visible world. routledge, 1996. van dooren, thom. flight ways: life and loss at the edge of extinction. columbia up, 2014. weil, kari. “a report on the animal turn.” differences 21.2 (2010): 1–23. williamson, henry. tarka the otter. g.p. putnam’s sons, 1927. white, t.h. the goshawk. 1951. weidenfeld & nicolson, 1964. woodward, wendy. the animal gaze: animal subjectivities in southern african narratives. wits up, 2008. wolfe, cary. animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. u chicago p, 2013. woolf, virginia. moments of being: autobiographical writings. 1972. pimlico, 2002. wright, kate. transdisciplinary journeys in the anthropocene. routledge, 2018. yeates, guy. henry williamson: the author as fascist. independently published, 2017. microsoft word jackson-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 9:1 j. kasi jackson companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. introduction. alice sheldon obtained her doctorate in experimental psychology from george washington university in 1967. she studied visual perception, specifically responses to novel and familiar stimuli by hooded rats in familiar and unfamiliar surroundings. in 1968, she began publishing science fiction under the pseudonym james tiptree, jr., and, less famously, raccoona sheldon.1 in her art and the correspondence that sprang from it she advanced ideas developed in the course of her laboratory research that can provide fresh perspectives for feminist ethics around the use of animal models. in this essay, i address the idea, prevalent among her feminist contemporaries and some more recent scholars, that sheldon’s views about biology and her critique of sexism contradicted each another. sheldon thought that understanding the evolution of sex differences could end oppressions. her feminist contemporaries critiqued this kind of research as inherently sexist. in contrast, sheldon believed that it was reductionism that impoverished the research, inevitably producing results that would support, rather than challenge, oppression and maladies. in order to use evolutionary research on sex differences to oppose oppression, sheldon envisioned doing a different kind of science. she ceased research because she could not enact this vision, and turned to science fiction in part to further explore her ideas. the promise and problem of model systems: reductionism. model organisms are housed, treated, bred, and otherwise standardized to minimize variation among the animals tested; at the extreme, they are genetically engineered animals produced for very specific work. their use is common practice in many fields of medical and biological research, including psychology and other behavioral fields, for several reasons. first, reducing variation allows scientists to perform research without concern about confounding results.2 second, ethics rules written for models permit experimental treatments that may be considered unacceptable with regard to other species. third, model systems reproduce quickly and are easily maintained in large numbers. this provides quick results and enables researchers to follow lines of inquiry through multiple generations, to modify experiments, and to compare outcomes over a relatively short time frame. the use of models is based on the assumption that j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 89 identified mechanisms are generalizable across species, as long as they share significant traits with the model. a few organisms provide most data in large part because techniques for managing them in the laboratory are well developed; using other species would require changing techniques, which is costly. (see lewis et al. for further discussion of model selection and of difficulties in using new models.) one of the tenets of models-based research is that the study of species considered “simple” under controlled circumstances produces new knowledge. scientists employ model organisms to simplify complex systems, as, for example, by working with a rat, which they believe has fewer interacting parts than humans, to determine how humans might react to certain stimuli. the tight control of factors in the lab makes it possible to consider processes of focus in isolation. sheldon believed the assumption that such research produces information about mechanisms applicable either to a target species (such as humans) or to a range of animals is problematic for a number of reasons. she critiqued the overreliance on data from species that were selected because they made good models for employing reductionist methods, as well as the assumption that conclusions gained from the study of these species, in tightly controlled laboratories, can be generalized beyond those environments. similar objections are being raised by scientists today (see, for example, zuk et al.). the point of minimizing or controlling variation, except in areas specific to the research question, is to allow for repetition, and to isolate the impacts of the experimental intervention in a common circumstance (i.e., an organism of a genetic type). but variation is an important biological concept. types and levels of variation include variation among members of a species and variation in how individuals display certain traits due to their external circumstances. the latter may include the peer animals they find themselves among, the risks they perceive, their options for mating, and their available resources. phenotypic variation — that is, the manifestation of genes in an organism’s innate traits — is understood as manner in which an organism’s environment mediates the expression of its genetic structure, including behavioral expression. birke, arluke, and michael argue that the reduction of variation in experimental regimes is problematic for two reasons: 1) because species that are more variable are not used, researchers learn about only certain types of species, and 2) laboratory species differ from their wild counterparts, because they are bred to reduce “natural” variability, an important component of wild populations (39-42). extrapolations of findings from models to target species tend to ignore these issues. as birke and her humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 90 colleagues argue, since nature is variable, scientists experimenting with model-species cannot claim to study it. experiments on homogenized animals cannot be generalized to variable humans or animals that are not bred for standardization (47-51). fehr, however, makes a distinction between reliance on reductive methodologies and the search for mechanisms, defined as “causal processes” (138).3 she does not argue for the abandonment of reductionism, which she describes as “the view that things in the universe are arranged hierarchically, and that causation only occurs at the lower levels of this hierarchy” (137). rather, she calls for the inclusion of non-reductive methods that scientists have neglected, and for the recognition that causation can occur at multiple levels of organization and interactions among them (e.g., variation in hormone levels as a result of an organism’s environmental context). fehr employs feminist analyses of the assumptions behind reductionism to argue that the search for mechanism is only problematic if it is always reductive. rather than always seeking explanations by breaking things down into small pieces, fehr argues that researchers should consider how different interactions among the component parts might affect the phenomena under investigation. this shift in attention to “higher level and interlevel mechanisms makes it possible to conduct research that pays attention to context and complicated causal situations” (154). fehr argues that researchers should use a plurality of methods for the task. she challenges the privileging of reductive mechanisms, wherein “wholes are explained in terms of their parts” (137), maintaining that non-reductive scientific methods can be used to find mechanisms operating at higher organizational levels. she posits also that this privileging of reduction results in the neglect of those areas of study that are not easily reduced to component parts, of the impacts of context on mechanism. as fehr puts it, “[b]y focusing only on tiny parts, relationships between the phenomenon and a greater whole are lost. possible higher level causal influences that may affect the phenomenon disappear and become inaccessible to investigation” (142). reductive approaches lead to the belief that the “tiny parts” will always produce the mechanism in question, regardless of context (143). i argue that sheldon also called for nonreductive mechanisms, for similar reasons. sheldon’s discomfort with reductionist philosophies led to her eventual disillusionment with science, and to write science fiction in order to theorize non-reductive methodologies. her vision of science as a potentially feminist tool to end oppression placed her at odds with many of her feminist contemporaries, and led later critics to describe it as self-contradictory. understanding sheldon’s critique of the reductionism j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 91 that was embedded in the theoretical and methodological debates surrounding the study of behavior at the time of her active research is the missing piece for resolving this apparent contradiction. behaviorism focuses strictly on observable units of behavior, and its proponents believe that actions undertaken by animals can be understood without a need to refer to what is going on inside the animal, and specifically without accounting for constructs such as mind. behaviorism focuses on learning, and sets aside processes such as emotion and cognition. although it has fallen out of favor recently, behaviorism dominated the psychological research of sheldon’s time. sheldon described the completion of her graduate work as “the most thrilling moment i have ever had in my whole life” (phillips 206). yet she would recall, “i kept having ideas that didn’t jibe with the official academic outlook at my department” (tiptree, meet me 311). sheldon believed in holistic models, which treated animals as complex, and which, therefore, could be applied to significant, complex questions of behavior. the protagonist of her 1976 story, “the psychologist who wouldn’t do awful things to rats,” tilman “tilly” lipsitz is, as sheldon had been, an engaged, idealistic phd of experimental psychology. he is passionate about learning about his model organism, the rat, and the idea that he can use this knowledge to better human conditions. he is disillusioned because no one else seems to share his vision. in his analysis of scenes of cruelty in “the psychologist who empathized with rats,” elms argues that lipsitz’s “observations and emotions regarding his colleagues and his research animals express those of alice sheldon” (89). i believe that sheldon’s critique goes beyond expressing discomfort with, as elms describes, “the treatment of small or relatively weak animals” (90). lipsitz exemplifies sheldon’s utopian vision for the possibilities of science. the passion with which lipsitz considers his opportunities to learn matches sheldon’s own. both sheldon and her character accept the use of animals as research models in laboratories, but they seek ethical use of animals, which is linked to their pursuit of non-reductive methodologies. this pursuit puts lipsitz at odds with the dominant paradigms and researchers in their fields, much as it did sheldon. in “the psychologist,” sheldon hints at an alternative way of interacting with model systems, one that emphasizes the relationship between researchers and study animals, and uses their interactions to develop new methods and research questions. pessimistically, she presents the most extreme, dismal possible outcomes in the story — utopia never materializes. by showing why this vision fails, she explores what generates conditions for cruel treatment of animals. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 92 the context of sheldon’s research career: theories, methods, and models. sheldon obtained her psychology bachelor’s degree from in 1959, and her experimental psychology phd from george washington university in 1967. during this period, her field was deciding how to select model systems, what they should be used to illustrate, what assumptions should be made about their application, and how best to understand their applicability to a broader range of species. researchers discussed publicly several issues on which sheldon reflected in both her fiction and nonfiction.4 since sheldon’s sole 1969 research publication appeared in the journal of comparative and physiological psychology, and did not address physiology, i will focus on how comparative psychologists saw these issues, since the other two groups concerned with these issues — physiological psychologists and behavioral psychologists — had less bearing on sheldon’s interests. comparative psychology emphasized research using model species from which findings could be broadly generalized to identify general principles, especially those related to humans and focused on learning. ethology, by contrast, aimed to identify principles of animal behavior, especially as applied to animals in the wild, although they too relied on model organisms.5 ethology and comparative psychology share a common origin in the work of darwin and other 18thand 19th-century natural historians. anthropomorphism, the use of human subjective experience to define animal reactions, was grounded in darwin’s arguments for continuity between animals and humans. researchers’ assumptions about the relationship between human and non-human animal behavior changed as different theoretical paradigms became prevalent (reviewed in watanabe). eileen crist argues that naturalists in darwin’s time allowed for animal intentionality, and in their writings constructed life-worlds with meaning for their animal subjects. in the quest to make their field a mature, respected science, ethologists abandoned this meaningful view of animal minds, and instead adopted a “technical-causal language” that inadvertently promoted a mechanomorphic view of animals as “mindless” (crist 203–04). crist posits that the claim that anthropomorphism is biased rests on the assumption that animals are not like humans, an assumption that has had consequences for models of animal behavior. crist focuses on field studies, and thus does not specifically critique comparative psychology. her work does provide, however, an overview of the driving forces, specifically higher valuation of reductive methods, that impacted that field as well.6 most (primarily north american) comparative psychologists differed from the majority j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 93 of (primarily european) ethologists in that the former focused on laboratory studies and the role of learning in behavior, while the latter focused on field studies and instinct. during the post-world war ii period, the influence and institutional standing of comparative psychology waned, while that of ethology grew, culminating in the 1973 nobel prize awarded to nikolaas tinbergen, konrad lorenz, and karl von frisch. one reason for this may have been that some comparative psychologists adopted an ethological critique of their field. comparative psychologist frank beach’s 1949 presidential address to the experimental psychological division of the american psychological association exemplifies this trend. beach pointed out that, although mammals account for only a tiny percentage of the world’s animals, they account for the overwhelming majority of the species studied. he questioned the emphasis on learning, arguing that comparative psychologists had not adequately defined learning, and therefore were categorizing any number of complex behaviors that might significantly differ as simply “unlearned.” in short, he asked, “[a]re we building a general science of behavior or merely a science of rat learning?” (beach 121). the thendominant white rat, he pointed out, had been adopted for use in behavioral studies because it was already being used in laboratory research, not because it was especially suited to the types of questions about behavior that were being asked.7 such critiques reflected the influence of ideas prevalent in ethology, and indicate a permeable boundary between the two fields. examining the overlaps and flow of information between the two fields, dewsbury shows that the distinct “origin myths” (dewsbury, “comparative psychology” 208) of the two approaches reflect the psychologists’ explicit goal of challenging their fellow comparatists to broaden their approaches in the hopes of improving their field’s reputation for offering excitement to researchers and catching up to ethology in the matter of institutional support. sheldon’s training began during this period, and her views reflect beach’s urgings to adopt a more ethological perspective. she felt that, as lipsitz muses about his research in “the psychologist,” rats might be an effective model for understanding general principles about aesthetic senses that would transcend species and could also be applied to humans (tiptree, “the psychologist” 675–79). lipsitz “wants to explore the capacity of animals to anticipate, to gain some knowledge of the wave-front of expectations that they must build up, even in the tiniest heads. he thinks it might even be useful, might illuminate the labors of the human infant learning its world” (679; italics in original). but sheldon also had a love for field research. in addition to her formal research on visual perception, sheldon observed and experimented with wild animals near her home. phillips posits that she “would have been perfectly at home as a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 94 female darwin: one of the great victorian naturalists, with a capacity both for observation and for original interpretations of behavior” (199). thus, in addition to valuing rats as models, she was interested in their behavior, and that of other animals she encountered, as beings (204–05). sheldon also appreciated her laboratory rats as a species. she acknowledged their wild origins and how this might impact their behavior, especially in terms of how they would prefer to live, yet she recognized that they differed from wild species, so that results from laboratory research could not be used to explain fully what wild animals might do. she uses lipsitz to reflect on how the evolutionary history of lab rats interacts with their behavior when he places their cages in a dark alcove to simulate the “friendly dark warm burrows” of “nocturnal rodents,” because he “sensed their misery, suspended in bright metal and plexiglas cubes in the glare” (“the psychologist” 674), attributing what elms terms “human feelings” to the rats (89). yet lipsitz notes the impact of human interference, as “they’re so genetically selected for tameness they can’t survive in the feral state” (674). as elms has noted, sheldon’s selection of research projects for her rats largely paralleled lipsitz’s (89). the emphasis on reductionism reached an extreme in the dominance of behaviorism as a theoretical framework in psychology between world wars i and ii. behaviors could be reduced to mechanisms applicable across species. thus, it was possible to base theories of human behavior on experiments with animals, and animals became a model by which to understand human behavior. under the assumption that animals were less complex than humans but obeyed the same general principles, they could be used to identify mechanisms in the lab. behaviorism relied especially on the laboratory rat to elucidate these broad principles. lyman-henley and henley provide a cogent discussion of the key differences among behaviorism, comparative psychology, and ethology that are especially relevant to sheldon’s positioning of herself and her animals in her research. they distinguish three approaches in terms of their reasons for studying animals. psychology’s goal is to arrive at “general principles that are intended to lead ultimately to an understanding of (human) behavior — using its (animal) subjects as a means to that end,” and ethology’s emphasis on “the naturalistic behavior of the animals under study in their own right — regardless of species” (lyman-henley and henley 19). they note the impact of behaviorism on the development of modern psychology, but argue that its emphasis on “the phenomena of learning and behavior, and animals per se … for reasons of scientific expediency and never for the study of their unique natures” distinguishes it from the j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 95 broader study of comparative psychology (17; emphasis in original). behaviorism, moreover, focused solely on the units of behavior that can be observed, quantified, measured, and set aside as unobservable mental processes, including cognition, emotion, and so on. by contrast, comparative psychologists were less willing to abandon studying such things as intelligence and consciousness. overall, “for the comparative psychologist the focus was then not so much on the phenomenon (as with behaviorism) exclusively, but on the phenomenon examined comparatively” (18). sheldon described behaviorism’s theoretical models as those in which “the animal doesn’t do anything nonobservable like thinking or even perceiving” (tiptree, meet me 358). in her own research, she tried to address this complexity. while prevailing theory presumed that novel stimuli attracted animals. sheldon proposed an alternative model: “if you want to see real animals in the real world, you don’t go out and present them with maximum novelty. you go where they are and try to look like a bush” (358–59). in her dissertation and her 1969 research publication, sheldon theorized that an animal’s attraction to novelty would depend on context, and her investigation found that an animal’s attraction to novel stimuli was a function of the familiarity of the environment — in a familiar environment rats sought out novel stimuli; in a new environment, they avoided it. although some of sheldon’s influences were considered behaviorists, they recognized the impact and importance of mental processes outside the observed units emphasized by most behaviorists.8 edward tolman taught sheldon’s first psychology class; he was a professor dewsbury categorizes as a cognitive psychologist, in that he focused on “the mind’s functions such as perception, attention, memory, imagery, and decision-making [and] focused on phenomena that appear to require the postulation of ‘higher processes’ than basic learning and memory” (dewsbury, “some historical trends” 8). in an early paper, sheldon aligned herself with tolman as a believer in complexity (elms 82). she also corresponded with and copyedited a book for rudolph arnheim, who linked psychology and art (discussed by elms and phillips). although they critiqued behaviorism's reductionism, they did not, however, oppose the use of model systems or research itself. sheldon, in particular, saw ethics, the treatment of animals, theory, and model systems as linked. she used work such as “the psychologist” to explore how a reductionist approach led to both cruelty and impoverished research. pragmatic solutions: ethico-onto-epistemology and companion species. in meeting the universe halfway and other works, karen barad argues for the “entanglement” of knowing, being, and ethics in what she terms the “ethico-onto-epistemology” of “agential realism,” positions she considers inseparable. like critical-science-studies humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 96 theorists such as donna haraway, barad aims to grant agency to non-humans. she echoes the common argument in science studies that critiques of science based in social construction envision nature as a passive, immutable object to which cultural forces assign meaning and significance. barad notes that social construction, ironically, shares certain assumptions with realism (the belief that science “objectively” reflects nature as it is) that privilege human activity. realists and social constructionists differ as to “whether scientific knowledge represents things in the world as they really are (i.e., ‘nature’) or ‘objects’ that are the product of social activities (i.e., ‘culture’), but both groups subscribe to representationalism” (“posthumanist performativity” 806). representationalism assumes that there exists a static, separate nature “out there” that is represented or described by humans using words and other data. barad and haraway see representationalism as a reflexive way of envisioning the science/culture interaction. for example, a realist metaphor might describe science as a mirror reflecting the nature out there, and a social constructionist metaphor would use the image of a lens, in which human social activities and processes might magnify or distort the image of nature. barad and haraway call for the replacement of reflexivity and associated reflective metaphors because they are based on reproduction or modification of something that putatively exists independently of the tool used to view it. in meeting the universe halfway barad proposes an alternative: the notion of a diffraction grating through which light passes with no reflection. this passage divides the light into components, such as waves. however, this division is not a preexisting static condition (like the image-production process in reflection). rather, the interaction between the structure of the grating itself (specifically the number of slits) and the light creates the pattern. thus, the diffraction grating emphasizes the “entanglements” that barad wishes to identify, instead of reinscribing the division between the knowing subject and the natural object under scrutiny upon which reflexive/reflective imagery relies. barad grounds her argument in a reading of physicist niels bohr's notion of complementarity. determining position requires an experimental apparatus with fixed parts. measuring momentum requires an apparatus with movable, instead of fixed, parts. it is impossible to measure momentum and position simultaneously (barad, op. cit. 814). theoretical concepts like position and momentum are not ideas; instead, they are specific physical arrangements: “‘[p]osition’ only has meaning when a rigid apparatus with fixed parts is used (e.g., a ruler is nailed to a fixed table in the j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 97 laboratory), thereby establishing a fixed frame of reference for specifying ‘position.... [a]ny measurement of ‘position’ using this apparatus cannot be attributed to some abstract independently existing ‘object’ but rather is a property of the phenomenon — the inseparability of ‘observed object’ and ‘agencies of observation.’” position and momentum cannot exist without the pieces of equipment used to measure them; thus, they are integrated with the apparatus rather than independently existing. in other words, there is a causal relationship between experimental apparatuses and phenomena being studied, which she calls “agential intra-action.” barad argues that “practices of knowing are specific material engagements that participate in (re)configuring the world” and, thus, “objectivity cannot be about producing undistorted representations from afar; rather, objectivity is about being accountable to the specific materializations of which we are a part” (meeting the universe 88–91; emphasis in original). unlike mirrors or reflective tools, the structure of the apparatus used in diffraction participates in the produced pattern. diffraction gratings are specifically designed to produce particular patterns, and the patterns and gratings do not exist independently; rather, they are entwined. as one demonstration of ethico-onto-epistemology and agential realism, barad concludes her book with a chapter discussing nanotechnology. this chapter opens with a description of early nanotechnology experiments in which scientists were able to manipulate individual atoms to form the ibm logo. she argues that changing views of the atom — from nature’s smallest, indivisible unit, to heuristic models rather than actual objects, to particles that can be physically manipulated and subdivided — do not mean that “the earlier images were wrong and we know better now, or that atoms are but social constructs that change as our ideas change” (barad, meeting 354). scientists investigating the cause of streaks that obscured images the scanning tunneling microscope (stm) produced realized it could move atoms. they realized that by changing the properties of the stm, they could switch between imaging and moving modes. thus, “imaging and manipulating are complementary” and “exclusive modes of operation” (358). the atom can either be part of the image surface (image mode) or part of the apparatus tip (manipulation mode). similarly, the human and the non-human intra-act in complex “entanglements,” which produce various knowledge objects. the fact that the atom is both the “object” under scrutiny and part of the “agencies of observation,” depending on the configuration, shows the entanglement of ontology (being) and epistemology (knowing), in that these are fluid, rather than being fixed preexisting objects. separating them creates a false dualism. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 98 similarly, the laboratory rat can be seen as part of the apparatus of the experiment and as the data or pattern produced by the experimental intervention. sheldon recognized that laboratory rats existed as entities in their own right, as well as part of her experimental apparatus. however, she recognized that laboratory rats are not wild rats (sheldon emphasized this by claiming her results only applied to the laboratory species); they would not even exist were it not for human intervention. birke, bryld, and lykke argue that scientists and science-studies critics, including some who consider themselves feminist, erroneously see animals as static, with completely biologically determined behaviors. birke, bryld, and lykke argue that even the most standardized laboratory species can exhibit flexible behaviors, determined by context, genetics, hormones, and other biological processes. this flexibility impacts the outcome of experiments. in the sense that researchers continually adjust and adapt laboratory techniques and research to account for this inevitable variation, model organisms can determine the direction of research. for example, laboratory rats are often bred for docility, and handling techniques have to account for minimizing stress, which might affect results. holmberg adds that some researchers are better at handling animals than others; thus, the human-animal interaction itself is a source of difficult-to-control variation: “[e]ven in the most highly standardized technique there must be room for individual interpretation and practice to make it work across different laboratories,” leaving some room for variation in the intra-actions between laboratory humans and animals (“a feeling” 332). the biology and sociology of model species shapes the development of researchers’ tools, and research is a product of the interaction between researcher and animal, occurring in the context of other societal forces. ultimately, birke, bryld, and lykke advocate for scientists to recognize “nonhuman otherness as a doing or becoming, produced and reproduced in specific contexts of human/nonhuman interaction” (169), rather than to assume that the models are expressing constant forms of behavior. this argument exemplifies agential realism and highlights the intra-actions and entanglements among theory, method, apparatus, researcher, and the other aspects of doing behavioral research with living — human and non-human — participants, both model and researcher. it demonstrates how models have agency and influence the outcomes of experiments. sheldon similarly recognized the individuality of standardized laboratory animals; this is especially apparent in the whimsical drawings she included in her publications. from the rat’s eye view, the drawings showed what the rats would rather do than perform the experiment (described and reprinted in elms; some of these drawings, credited to raccoona sheldon, appear in “the psychologist.”) j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 99 instead of finding the rats’ agency an impediment to her research, sheldon responded with humor and interest. she anthropomorphized the rats as a means of clarifying her perspective on her research question for her reader. another drawing, intended to invite the reader to empathize with the rats’ situation when making her point about novelty, shows two anthropomorphized rat families at home. in each one, a rat in a comfy chair smokes a pipe. a young rat plays with a toy on the floor of each room. each rat house has a different painting on the wall. the next panel shows the rats entering an art museum and the final panel contrasts the visit — both paintings are on the wall, and each rat family goes to the painting from their home — illustrating her hypothesis that animals will seek out familiar stimuli in a novel environment (discussed further in elms 86). sheldon’s drawings provide a visual example of how she saw the entanglements among ontology, ethics, and epistemology through the configuration of the experimental apparatus. the apparatus most associated with behaviorism is the skinner box, in which an animal is constrained and given a choice between two tasks (generally pushing a lever) and associated rewards (food) or punishment (electric shocks).9 this becomes a representation of the animal as a black box, because the triggers produce behaviors based on pain or pleasure responses, and no appeal to any mental process (cognition, emotion, etc.) is needed. the apparatus itself, by its design, excludes these mental functions from among the phenomena under investigation. in contrast, sheldon’s apparatus—designed to make an animal’s environment either distinctly novel or familiar and to examine responsiveness to familiar and unfamiliar stimuli in each context—and especially her imaging of the animals in her drawings emphasize comfort, aesthetics, humor, and other high-level processes. further, sheldon uses lipsitz to show how the interaction between the rats and the apparatus in ways the experimenter did not expect can lead to new research directions. in a conversation with his advisor, lipsitz shares the same drawings (here credited to racoona sheldon) that alice sheldon included in her dissertation to show what the rats would rather do instead of following her experimental protocol. lipsitz argues to his skeptical advisor that differences between hamsters and rats in their behavior in an open field can be explored using an apparatus in the lab to examine thigmotaxis, that is, how “the animal responds to edges and the shape of the environment” (“the psychologist” 676). this clearly indicates that sheldon had not given up on using animals to explore aspects of aesthetics in terms of perception of and reaction to environmental features. the whimsical drawings in “figure 18. examples of thigmotaxic response” show rats engaged in “shadow-crouching,” “crack-following,” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 100 and “rear-end-anchored locomotion” (677). lipsitz places this concept in the history, rather than in current practice, of research on animal behavior, saying “[t]hey used to call it thigmotaxis” (676). this indicates that sheldon encountered the concept because of her interest in the behavior of non-human animals, specifically their behavior in the wild, as the concept was no longer of interest to the field at her time. in the time-pressed environment of the laboratory, animals that exhibit behaviors not directly relevant to the research question at hand (in the case of this experiment, the rats were expected to go down one of two branches of a y-maze—either toward a familiar or a novel object) are generally discarded from the dataset as outliers. sheldon’s, and lipsitz’s, ability to watch, to record, and to see their subjects’ interaction with the apparatus as theoretically meaningful allows the concept to re-emerge as a research question of interest, exemplifying agential realism. since the laboratory rat is a living apparatus, sheldon was particularly concerned about ethics, which she felt was at the forefront of the entanglement. sheldon’s ethical imperative is on display in her desire to provide familiarity and comfort, where possible, within the construction of the research apparatus, including experimental design. she aimed both to comfort her subjects, where possible, and to study something that reflected her observations of wild animals. she recognized that animals in nature would be made uncomfortable by their constraint in the lab; thus, her desire to provide comfortable surroundings reflects not just an ethical imperative to treat animals well, but also a foundational belief about what good research requires. it illustrates that she saw the ethical and methododological questions as integrated in the formation of the entire theoretical structure. centralization and standardization of animal care regulations had only just begun in the united states at the time when sheldon entered the lab; individual researchers had long determined animal care.10 according to phillips (205), sheldon’s graduate advisor stressed, after the publication of “the psychologist,” that his lab did not allow the atrocities described therein. even so, her scientific work likely made her aware of cruelty in other places. like sheldon, donna haraway calls for ethical treatment of animals, yet disagrees with those who seek to end the use of animals in experiments. haraway argues that suffering and killing are inevitable components of relationships among human and non-human companion species, “a species in obligatory, constitutive, historical, protean relationship with human beings” (companion species 11-12). she qualifies that relationship as “not especially nice; it is full of waste, cruelty, indifference, ignorance, and loss, as well as of joy, invention, labor, intelligence, and play” (12). she rejects ranking systems that set ethical criteria for acceptable suffering and killing because these calculations rely on j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 101 “hierarchical and dualistic ranking schemes” that position some animals (and some humans) as “other.” she describes these criteria as in conflict with feminist challenges to oppression, because ranking systems allow some animals and people to become “killable” and “dead things” (when species meet 72–73). making some types of suffering, or the suffering of some, acceptable in all cases opens the pathway to more suffering. haraway accepts the inevitability of suffering, but rejects the acceptability of any; instead, all suffering must be minimized. her approach requires thinking about each case of animal experimentation, rather than adopting an all-or-nothing approach based on characteristics of a group. empathy from those inflicting the suffering does not mean that causing suffering is less wicked; instead, it “may” be forgivable (75). researchers should provide, as much as possible, positive living environments and conditions that meet a subject species’ needs and preferences, even if it complicates handling techniques or makes the reduction of variation impossible (88–93). haraway’s argument that suffering and killing is inevitable, but always unacceptable, that no classes of creatures are inherently killable, though some may be killed, and that infliction of suffering must be weighed carefully and minimized, provides a feminist ethical framework for thinking through the complexities lipsitz faces. tora holmberg revises and extends haraway’s position with the concept of mortal love, theorizing people’s relationships with animals they must harm or kill. both authors present positive relationships between experimental animals and the scientists and technicians who experiment upon them. they argue that these relationships provide feminist conditions for animal experimentation. holmberg applies a feminist ethics of care to the relationships between technicians and laboratory animals — specifically to the contradiction between caring while inflicting suffering, or even killing. she finds that “caring and killing seem to be more closely linked” for most of her respondents, in contrast to the few who cope with their task by objectifying animals (“mortal love” 157). lipsitz lives up to holmberg’s three principles for euthanasia or “killing well”: 1) attending to the animal’s comfort and peace during its life and death, 2) practicing and refining equipment, methods, and apparatuses, and 3) ensuring that only those who can minimize distress to both animal and experimenter kill (ibid.). lipsitz works to better his own animals’ conditions, as well as those of animals mistreated by his colleagues. he provides shredded newspapers to cover the bare wire in pregnant rats’ cages, even though the sterile cages allow for faster care and uniformity, showing compassion that his co-workers do not. lipsitz’s colleague jones, for example, places probes inside the heads of dogs. when the animals bloody their heads by scratching against the wire, jones puts plastic collars around their heads so humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 102 that they can’t reach the wire instead of trying to alleviate their discomfort. in another instance, lipsitz rescues a colony of rats that was scheduled for euthanasia. in many ways, lipsitz crosses a division of laboratory labor described by birke, arluke, and michael, with research scientists delegating unpleasant tasks — such as culling or killing to control the number of animals — to technicians. in response, technicians blame “scientists’ lack of adequate planning” (birke, arluke, and michael 101) for the need to cull. like lipsitz, the technicians perceive themselves as a “buffer” (103) between the animals and other researchers. in one case, lipsitz euthanizes a dog a colleague has vivisected and left alive over the weekend. he knows the colleague intentionally prolonged the dog’s suffering as part his experiment and may therefore be angry with him. but lipsitz considers his responsibility to end the animal’s suffering as a higher priority than his collegial responsibilities to support, or at least to ignore, his colleague’s research methods. but he does not confront his colleague directly, and he wonders whether the colleague knows who killed the dog. this indicates that, like the technicians birke, arluke, and michael interviewed, he sees himself as lacking the power to change the parameters of the research. he does what he can within his relatively powerless sphere. he does try to explain the need for more humane experimentation to his supervisor, but fails. frustrated, lipsitz proposes to his supervisor that he study why psychologists are so attracted to cruelty in their research questions. his supervisor accuses him of having “emotional problems” and a membership in the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and threatens to dismiss him (“the psychologist” 678). lipsitz’s supervisor accuses him of not being a professional scientist. he uses the definition of professionalization birke, arluke, and michael supply: “learning to distance oneself from the animal as animal and learning to approach it more as a laboratory tool” (11). these authors document strategies that professionals use to justify inflicting pain and death on animals, including emotional hardening to create distance from feelings and justification of both pain and death through a valorization of the pursuit of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. in contrast, lipsitz's ideal model of science is fully integrated with his commitment to treating his animals kindly. he harbors an “unfashionable yearning to learn by appreciation, to tease out the secrets with only his eyes and mind” instead of “with acids or shock” (“the psychologist” 674). although he accepts the need to euthanize his animals on some occasions, he seeks to do this humanely, and even to go beyond the basics of providing a pain-free death. j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 103 after his supervisor delivers an ultimatum that he develop a different, more profitable project or lose his position, lipsitz fortifies himself with absinthe and goes to kill his rats. during the kill scene, lipsitz feeds his rats carrots and then tries to kill them humanely, placing each rat in a separate jar with “an ether pad under a grill to keep their feet from being burned” by the chemicals (682). lipsitz’s experience of the deaths is filled with interactivity, compassion, and respect. it costs him dearly; if he objectified his animals, instead of seeing them as individuals, he would not suffer from their deaths. lipsitz refuses to use the term “sacrifice,” which his colleagues favor. he reflects: “‘the subjects were sacrificed.’ they insist on saying that. he has been given a lecture when he called it killing. sacrificed, like to a god. lord of the flies, maybe” (680). birke, arluke, and michael note “sacrifice” among the euphemisms that appear regularly in written reports of research results. they describe the term as helping the writer cope by linking the death of the animal to the experiment’s larger purpose (birke, arluke, and michael 100). lipsitz, however, questions the value of his colleagues’ experiments, and that feeds his objection to animal suffering. he doesn’t believe that the kinds of research questions that his colleagues ask warrant the type and number of deaths they cause. he recognizes that the euphemism obscures the researchers’ moral responsibility for killing and allows them to avoid an empathetic response. the construction his colleagues prefer uses the passive voice, thereby avoiding ascribing the killing to anyone’s agency. moreover, the term “sacrifice” implies that the deaths served a greater purpose, while lipsitz reflects, “[b]ut what the hell are they all working on? reinforcement schedules, cerebral deficits, split brain, god knows only that it seems to produce a lot of dead animals” (“the psychologist” 680). his colleagues are hardened to animal suffering and do not suffer themselves when they inflict pain. the story is most critical of research that is disengaged from social problems and oriented toward addressing abstract questions, regardless of the pain it inflicts. his supervisor chastises lipsitz for “frittering away [his] time and funds” (676) because he does not think that lipsitz’s desire to understand rat behavior will produce a significant payoff. additionally, lipsitz’s goal of conducting societally significant research to better the lives of children is not in line with those of his colleagues, who deride research questions that focus on applied problems. lipsitz cannot align his efforts with his peers’ goals, leading to guilty reflection about “what he should be doing, he with those thousands of government dollars invested in his doctorate, his grant” (680–81). his sense of duty and responsibility toward those who have funded his work drives his humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 104 misery. this contrasts with his colleagues, who prioritize theory-driven work to answer broad questions; in general, more applied research is less prestigious. yet, even lipsitz’s colleagues sometimes see value for their research in his skill in handling rats. while they view his abilities “somewhat scornfully,” they ask him to handle their animals because his skill makes the task easier (674). lipsitz attempts to train his colleagues to empathize with their animals. he uses the example of a bite to try to get them to understand the rats’ point of view: ‘“it can’t let go,’ he tells them. ‘you’re biting yourself on the rat. it’s the same with cats’ claws. push, they’ll let go. wouldn’t you if somebody pushed his hand in your mouth?’” (675). this is based on his observation that rat teeth and claws are curved like a fish hook—pulling against the hook will only embed it more deeply in the flesh and result in more damage. lipsitz even uses his example from the rats’ point of view to empathize with his supervisor. although he resists the supervisor’s instruction to kill his rats and move to another research project, lipsitz wonders “am i biting myself on him?” he “involuntarily” empathizes with ‘”the chairman’s unknown problems” (ibid.). lipsitz’s empathy is one of his defining traits and is, in fact, what makes his integration into the laboratory so difficult. sheldon links the sterility of the laboratory space with a sterility of attitude, in which compassion and empathy toward animals represents a contaminating factor. this is apparent in the description of “productive” research labs: “all over the country, the world, the spotless knives are slicing, the trained minds devising casual torments in labs so bright and fair you could eat off their floors” (682– 3). this contamination must be removed from the minds of scientists, just like physical contaminants are removed from the labs. in contrast, lipsitz’s experimental space is not clean. he links his space’s untidiness with the murder that he is about to commit by killing his rats to achieve efficiency. lipsitz faces the moral implications of his actions squarely, likening the pain inflicted on laboratory animals and the inflictors’ lack of empathy for this suffering to the german concentration camps: this is a temple of pain, he thinks. a small shabby dirty one. maybe its dirt and squalor are better so, more honest. a charnel house shouldn’t look pretty, like a clean kitchen.… auschwitz, belsen were neat. with flowers. only the reek of pain going up to the sky, the empty sky. but people don’t think animals’ pain matters. they didn’t think my people’s pain mattered either, in the death camps a generation back. it’s all the same, endless agonies going up unheard from helpless things. (682–83) j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 105 lipsitz’s jewish heritage informs his attitudes toward his animals. he recognizes the argument that all oppressions are linked — the crimes of the holocaust arise from the same root of inhumanity that leads to cruel science. lipsitz’s musings link adherence to reductionism and the exclusion of more complex and complicated methods to the pervasive cruelty that sheldon and lipsitz saw and resisted. lipsitz’s fellow researchers set up experiments to maximize efficient data collection without considering the impacts on the animals’ pain, or how that pain, discomfort, and fear might affect their research. the assumption that the animals’ pain would not affect the result exemplifies reductionist thinking, in that they see the animal as a piece of apparatus without the internal processes that would allow it to react to and shape the results of the experiment. they see lipsitz as an outsider because he challenges the dominant reductionist view; although lipsitz believes his supervisor deserves empathy, lipsitz’s perspective is so foreign to him that the supervisor accuses lipsitz of mental instability. this indicates how sheldon perceived the rigidity of the philosophies that drove behavioral research in psychology. the supervisor’s view of the rats and his doubts about lipsitz’s proposal show the impact of a reductionist behaviorist framework. specifically, the supervisor approaches the rats as simple creatures without the complex internal lives and emotional experiences that would allow them to serve as a model for higher-level human behaviors. this represents seeing animals and humans, with the possible exclusion of primates in this example, as separate. it also shows behaviorist reductionism, in that the supervisor is not acknowledging that rats may experience what are generally seen by researchers as more complex or higher-order processes (e.g., cognition, emotion) that sheldon and her mentors (like arnheim and tolman) were interested in studying. sheldon addressed the variability that birke, arluke, and michael argue most model organism research avoids. she argued that laboratory rats were bred for “cage life” and “not biting psychologists” and were thus “incapable of free life” (tiptree, meet me 358– 59). this can be extrapolated to a need to recognize the limitations of a specific species. specifically, experiments on a species should only be generalized to those species that share significant traits. this contrasts with the overreliance on one species and overuniversalization of findings generated from that one species that beach criticized. sheldon used lipsitz to propose a non-reductive approach to searching for behavioral mechanisms. lipsitz rescues unwanted rats from other experiments and establishes a colony of them in a basement space, ignored by others in the lab. he balances humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 106 recognition of the uniqueness, complexity, and context-dependence of this community and any results that he might get from research on them, with recognition that their particular traits allow him to explore complex behavioral mechanisms. lipsitz also recognizes the difference between laboratory animals and wild animals, even when they are closely related. specifically, he considers his lab colony as a community unto itself with its own peculiar behavior distinct from feral rats, and valuable for understanding the behavior of lab rats as a unique species. lipsitz also credits his model species for complexity in their behavior, and wants to understand the higher-level processes involved in their behaviors, such as the aesthetic sense the following passage shows. in addition to making his rats comfortable, lipsitz’s provision of nesting material leads him to new research questions. he is amazed when the rats transform their cages into “solid cubic volumes of artfully crumpled and plastered paper strips” (“the psychologist” 674). he wonders why no one has studied the nest-building capabilities of rats as they have studied similar abilities among birds. lipsitz appreciates the significance of the rats’ behavior and also how it depends on an environmental context. this event exemplifies birke, bryld, and lykke’s key point that model organisms and humans co-constitute the laboratory and that rats shape scientific research. in their view, lipsitz’s and the rats’ actions together opened this possible new research avenue; their view is significant because it centers the activity of the model system in the generation of research questions. as haraway and sheldon demonstrate in terms of a feminist research ethic, the acknowledgement of these intra-actions leads to increased comfort and additional knowledge. thus, instead of relying on reductionism to produce generality, lipsitz argues for context dependence as a better way to understand complexity. this is a non-reductive approach because he is venturing outside of a narrowly defined research question to think about connections across species, both to understand something about those species and also about the mechanism underlying their nest-building abilities. lipsitz also recognizes that he can learn much from the rats that can then be applied to solving human problems. his knowledge of rats as rats lets him see, more than other researchers, the rats’ potential as model organisms for more complex questions; the others just assume the rats are too simple for this work (678-79). specifically, his supervisor’s view is that the rats lack the capabilities and thought processes to answer questions of human development, and that lipsitz would need to use primates instead. overall, lipsitz’s supervisor does not think that lipsitz’s desire to understand rat behavior will produce a significant payoff for his research group. lipsitz sees the complexity of rat behavior because he provides an environment full of materials that j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 107 the rats can manipulate, and he spends time observing the creatures. he realizes they are capable of higher-level processes than his supervisor assumes. this calls attention to the fact that standard laboratory protocols that minimize variation and standardize researcher/model species interactions limit knowledge. in fact, model organisms and scientists co-constitute research directions germane to both species when researchers allow their relationship to the model to be complex and variable. as a researcher, sheldon wanted to explore how animal behaviors could vary based on social or environmental context, and to address the considerable variation within animal species used as models, especially between the laboratory and the wild. she believed that this kind of work could provide solutions to what she saw as an evolutionarily derived human tendency toward oppression and environmental destruction. she also saw humans as animals, and was interested in examining the evolutionary origins of human behaviors. sheldon held strong beliefs about the biological origins of some sex differences and of human tendencies that she saw leading to environmental destruction and oppression. sheldon feared that evolutionary linkages between human—primarily male— aggression and sex drives threatened human survival. she deemed evolutionary concepts “the best tool we have in thinking about sex differences” (phillips 292). as phillips argues, sheldon saw scientific research as a possible solution to the gendered dilemmas she explored in her fiction. many of the other feminist science fiction writers of her time period did not share her belief that applying evolutionary principles would further feminist goals; they saw this approach as problematic because it appeared to argue that sexism was “natural” for humans. other feminist writers of her time criticized sheldon for her arguments about the need to attend to evolutionary factors in addressing oppressions; they feared that evolutionary explanations would be used to justify sex differences as biological in origin and, therefore, natural.11 some literary critics read sheldon’s stories as pessimistic reflections on human gender roles. heldreth, for example, writes that “tiptree seems to see no hope for feminist equality, no release from the bondage of violent sex, and no hope for the human race” (28). more recently, unger has found the stories “disturbing” because “they appeared to accept a biologically determinist explanation” for the “hostile relationship between the sexes,” and they “did not offer any social or psychological mechanisms for change” (114). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 108 i, like some other critics, perceive more ambiguity in sheldon’s depiction of evolution, biology, and nature. genova argues that sheldon “rejects the biological determinism that her critics attribute to her…but without abandoning an independent and critical role for nature” (7). genova posits that sheldon , like haraway, saw herself “as rescuing nature from the clutches of deterministic science” (7): “[n]ature was not fixed, but more mutable than even culture or society” (12). sheldon’s writing appears to advance the notion “that there is no hope but that we will be victims of our own biology,” [a]nd then just as one accepts this message, she exonerates nature and blames such willful displays of culture as greed, avarice, ignorance. has nature failed the human species for tiptree or culture? the answer is neither. her final irony is that only humans fail themselves by thinking cheap and small about both nature and culture (17). genova argues that the conclusion of this is that attempts to locate answers in nature or culture are “misconceived” (17). galef posits that ‘[t]he clash between biological constraints and social imperatives, or between biological imperatives and social constraints, is what creates a large part of the complexity in tiptree’s fiction” (203). and according to williams, sheldon’s writing disrupts darwinian competitive narratives and replaces them with evolution by cooperative mechanisms. i believe that sheldon recognized that impoverished research conditions lead to impoverished data. while she wanted to use biology to understand and combat oppression, she was intending to use her utopian vision, not the science as she saw it practiced. sheldon recognized the problems of the overly reductionist models of her time, and she used science fiction to think through how altering those models to add non-reductive methodologies might lead to a science that meets feminist aims. i argue that those who react negatively to her position do not recognize this critical distinction; sheldon wanted to change science, and this new science undergirded her feminist possibilities. sheldon’s work mirrors ecofeminist and other feminist theorists’ arguments that addressing injustice and oppression includes the treatment of non-human inhabitants of the earth. francoise d’eubbone is credited with coining the term ecofeminism and combining the principles of ecology and feminism in her 1974 piece “le féminisme ou la mort.” in general, ecofeminism rejects the dualism between human and nature and posits that all oppressions are connected. sheldon anticipated many of these positions, reminiscing in an introduction to one of her stories that prior to the ecology movement j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 109 of the sixties, “i did my screaming to myself; it sounded pretty silly saying, i love earth. earth? rocks, weeds, dirt? oh, come on. a friend lectured me: people have to relate to people, you can’t relate to a planet” (meet me 234). she includes calling attention to the destruction of that planet along with “what man is doing to man — and woman” as her motivation in writing (385–86). what sheldon saw as a human, not just a male, tendency toward environmental destruction frightened her. however, she did not see the human species as evil. rather, returning to her beliefs that studying evolution was the key to understanding many destructive human impulses, she posited that “natural” human impulses led to the destructive behaviors because “the human beings who are doing all this are not malicious or aberrant. they are doing what we have always done” (236). for example, sheldon recognized that much environmental destruction arises from the fulfillment of basic human needs so that “[e]ven the trawlers who are fishing with nets five miles long — killing everything in huge swatches off the florida seas — are doing the human food-getting thing.” however, she feared that instead of changing environmentally destructive behaviors, the human species would simply adapt to survival on a ruined earth, “shoulder-to-buttock, gasping our own poisons and scrabbling for algae soup as the conveyor belt creaks by” (237). sheldon’s confidence in evolutionary explanations created discomfort for many of her contemporaries as well as for some more recent critics, because placing human behavior into an evolutionary context lacking internal significance and meaning along with animal models can lead to the objectification of humans. when sheldon called for the use of science to end oppression, i posit that she envisioned a science that would include non-reductive methodologies informed by feminist practice. many feminist critics, both scientists and non-scientists, critique androcentricism and sexism in sociobiological and evolutionary psychological theorizing about sex roles when these are applied to human behavior. sheldon argued that strictly reductionist approaches were also inadequate to explain animal behavior — a perspective that feminist animal and science studies writings have mirrored since her time. to reach my overall goal of resolving the contradiction that some of her feminist contemporaries saw, and that some more recent scholars still see between her views about biology and her critique of sexism, i will conclude by integrating her perspective within this new framework and discuss the dire consequences that sheldon anticipated if the research of her time continued on its trajectory. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 110 like sheldon, lynda birke, a biologist and feminist theorist, found science unfulfilling because “the love of nature that, in part, drove me to want to study biology seemed to be at odds with the scientific methods in which i was trained,” and the emphasis on reductionism denied her “awe at the marvelous creatures that exist in the world, in all their complexity and individuality” (feminism 7). however, birke also described feminist theories as inadequate because “feminism unwittingly relies on evolutionary discontinuity.” when “the flexibility implied by social constructionism extends only to human behavior ... the behavior of nonhuman animals remains largely in the realm of biology, outside the remit of most feminist inquiry” (“intimate familiarities” 430). anthropologist barbara noske agrees that the reluctance of those concerned with social justice to engage with the study of animals has left the development of behavioral models solely up to those who employ reductionism (114). a better strategy to combat sexism is to develop richer understandings of non-humans. sheldon sought this position. one response to biological determinism has been that humans are too complex for biologically based explanations of behavior, even though these models are appropriate for non-human animals. birke argues that by accepting this dichotomy, neither feminism nor science fully accounts for the richness of animal lives. birke underscores the current significance of what sheldon wanted to do in the lab and the continued need for attention to this area because “[i]t is, moreover, that question of accountability to others, including non-human others, that provides a significant challenge to feminist scholarship” (“unnamed others” 152). birke calls for cross-pollination among those who study non-humans, those who look at human/non-human relations, and those who focus on humans. she argues “[i]t is vital that this mutuality is properly recognized in our politics. to that end, it is equally important that feminist theorists engage explicitly with scholarship on animal behavior, particularly emerging debates about cognition and sentience” (153). sheldon attended to these same issues in her own research, and vested a longing to address them in lipsitz. paying attention can also lead to research linking environment and biology, or nature and nurture, another long-standing feminist priority.12 birke, bryld, and lykke argue that scientists attribute “gender differences” in non-human animals to intrinsic differences, such as genes or hormones, rather than to social interaction, even though most scientists recognize human gender as a “socio-cultural process” (169). birke’s “structuring relationships” critiques the notion that hormones and other biological processes alone determine animal gender. using “the psychologist” to frame her case, she argues that keeping animals in constrained and limited conditions leads to limited j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 111 and distorted behaviors, which provide constrained and limited information about their gender or the case of human gender. she calls for attention to how the practices of minimizing variation lead to behavioral constraints on the models. these are all positions that we see illustrated in lipsitz’s belief in the potential of his rat colony to offer insight into higher-level processes and his willingness to study the rats in and of themselves and to follow their behaviors for direction into new and exciting areas of research. elms argues for the influence of sheldon’s experimental psychology work on much of tiptree’s fiction, yet stops short of looking for direct connections between her research and her concerns for feminist issues especially around critiques of sex roles, arguing that “[i]t would be difficult to find any immediate origins of sheldon’s concerns with these broad issues of human psychological functioning in her laboratory rat research” (elms 92). the root of sheldon’s critique of both areas lies in her resistance to reductionism; it originates in her thinking about these issues as ethologists, comparative psychologists, and others discussed them, especially in their critique of behaviorism. consideration of sheldon’s work provides strategies for developing non-reductionist methods by looking at both human and non-human behaviors as contextual and everchanging. sheldon’s work heralded the importance of the following points for a feminist scientific practice: recognizing and attending to variation; emphasizing context and interactivity instead of reductionism; and centering the significance of the human/animal relationship, even when it leads to suffering and death. overall, alice sheldon provided one of the earliest glimpses of what it might mean to become a feminist scientist working on animal models, with all of the moral ambiguities, pain, and contradictions the role entails. sheldon argues that the researcher/model organism relationship is a key part of science, and attention to this relationship enhances both feminism and science. by showing the dire consequences of cruelty and callousness and contrasting them with lipsitz’s behavior prior to his transformation, she argues that learning about other creatures with care, regard, and respect, answering birke’s call to feminists to take into account the fact that animals “have points of view” and “to start listening,” will promote social justice and environmentalism (“unnamed others” 155). the kind of listening that sheldon proposed involved attending closely to species in the laboratory as entities deserving of study in their own right, not just because of what they might reveal about human nature. sadly, this utopian vision does not materialize. instead, sheldon’s dystopian ending to the story in which lipsitz becomes just as cruel as any other researcher emphasizes her belief that strictly reductionist approaches will only lead to oppression, cruelty, and misery. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 112 after he starts killing the rats as his supervisor has directed, lipsitz hallucinates. the images that he sees examine the contradiction that dirt and ugliness sometimes create stronger conditions for relevant and ethical science than cleanliness and sterility, a metaphor for the messiness of non-reductive approaches as compared to strict reductionism. he hears something and investigates by looking under a cage, where he sees a living composite of rat parts. lipsitz calls this a “rat pie” and wonders if it was “created and summoned by torment” from “a reservoir of pain” filled by the suffering inflicted by humans (“the psychologist” 683). in the next moment, the creature, or perhaps his view of it, becomes more familiar, “not threatening at all” when it makes a “tooth-click” that reveals that it compasses parts of a rat of which lipsitz is particularly fond. lipsitz then calls it a “rat king,” a being that has been mythologized since medieval times and that “occurred at times of great attack on the rats.” lipsitz feels that he summoned it by killing the colony of rats. he feels despair and rejection of “the whole human world.” in that instant, the creature changes again, and lipsitz meets the eyes of a different kind of rat king — a wise, gentle, and beautiful being. sheldon’s descriptions of these changes are grotesque and beautiful, dark and hopeful. she juxtaposes horror and beauty, cruelty and kindness because it was the horrific rat pie’s “conjoined forces which strove and suffered to give birth to this other — the king himself” (684). the king begins leading “[a]ll of them, blinded rabbits, mutilated hamsters, damaged cats and rats and brain-holed rhesus quietly knuckling along, even the paralyzed dogs out of the laboratory” (684). lipsitz follows, “thinking, i am an animal, too!” he looks back and sees even more animals, and some damaged humans as well. lipsitz believes that “all the abused ones, the gentle ones” and “[t]he ones who can’t cut it” are leaving the world (685). following, he wonders why these gentle creatures have been seen as a “threat” by those with power, and why the powerful have “hated us so.” he realizes how having to bear the cruelty present in the world has damaged him. the procession includes a girl who looks like sheila — one of lipsitz’s colleagues to whom he is attracted. in contrast to the hardened sheila, this girl is innocent. the girl and lipsitz locate the origins of the world’s cruelty in the philosopher descartes’s separations between body and mind, human and animal, and in his belief that “[t]heir pain doesn’t count” (686). but lipsitz realizes that a flaw in descartes’s reasoning is that humans are also animals and discounting animal pain means discounting human pain, similar to haraway’s arguments about the linked nature of all suffering. j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 113 in the midst of the procession, lipsitz wonders, “who will remain? if there is anything to care for, to be comforted, who will care?” (685). lipsitz feels responsible for what will be left behind, especially the cruelties that will arise when goodness is gone. due to this hesitation, he is eventually left behind. when he awakens, he feels as if he has forgotten something important, and for an instant it seems he might remember himself. but lipsitz is now truly transformed into what he is expected to become — a productive, callous scientist. he proceeds with a brutal killing of the rats and the planning of even crueler experiments on horses. he loses his ability to empathize and acknowledge pain, and he becomes as willing to inflict it as his colleagues. the kill scenes preand post-transformation exemplify lipsitz’s change from empathic scientist to cold-hearted careerist. in contrast to the mortal love and shared suffering present in the initial kill scene, the transformed lipsitz finds the “filthy rats” disgusting. he looks at the individual kill jars and thinks “whatever had possessed him, trying to kill them individually like that. hours it would take” (687). lipsitz dumps the rats into a garbage can and pours the ether on top. he sits on the can while the rats die shrieking, except for an escaped baby, which he stomps to death. lipsitz doesn’t just kill the rats; he obliterates the animal/human relationship that he had previously treasured. post-transformation lipsitz also disregards humanity, exemplified by his changed attitude toward his students. in the first part of the story, lipsitz struggles with effective teaching, much as sheldon did during her career (described in phillips 206). at the end, he muses that “teaching is for suckers” (“the psychologist” 688). lipsitz’s new attitudes also link animal abuse and misogyny. while killing the rats, lipsitz fantasizes about sheila, the research colleague who has not returned his sexual interest in her, and muses that “[t]here is no error more powerful than the belief that some cunt can’t be had. someday he feels sure that he will find that particular pussy-patch wide open to him” (687). lipsitz’s previous attitude toward shelia was wistful lust. the parts of lipsitz that made him sheldon’s ideal scientist left with the procession of all of the good things. what remains behind is a lipsitz aligned with the cold, cruel efficiency characterizing sheldon’s perception of the scientific status quo. sheldon’s story is ultimately despairing because she does not explore the possibility of a feminist vision in the laboratory. the good, gentle parts of lipsitz couldn’t survive in the lab or create such a vision. the destination of the procession is never shown to the reader and the girl in the procession who talks to lipsitz says it “isn’t real” (687). the reader’s focus remains on the lab and the now despicable lipsitz. we see the depravity that results when goodness is gone. when the relationship with animals and the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 114 acknowledgement of animal agency is completely removed from science, we get the kinds of “science” the nazis performed (depraved, inhumane), which lipsitz’s earlier reflections had referenced. an examination of sheldon’s non-fiction reflections on her fiction and her research career provides needed direction for recent feminist interest in theorizing to include the non-human. at the time she was writing, consideration of ecological issues was just beginning within feminist theorizing; further, her views on the significance of understanding evolution to address women’s oppression were troubling to her contemporaries. as well as being one of the first (and indeed perhaps the first) to articulate why treatment of the non-human is a feminist issue, sheldon’s works provide guidance for the further development of feminist science and animal studies in areas of recent concern. sheldon calls for researchers to attend to nuance and context by acknowledging an ongoing relationship with the creatures they study, instead of simply seeing them as representations of mechanism, theory, or processes in the human species. although she directed much of this toward people studying animals, which did not extend to the feminist theoretical community of the time, more recent tensions between feminist scientists in animal behavior and evolutionary biology and other feminist critics indicate that theories that link human and non-human are of broad concern and question how the human/animal boundary has been constructed within feminist theorizing. sheldon provides a significant contribution in this area. acknowledgements versions of this paper were presented at the following conferences and the audiences provided many insightful comments: mattering: feminism, science & materialism conference, the graduate center the city university of new york, feb. 14-15, 2013 and the 2nd annual gender and stem research symposium, hosted by advance purdue center for faculty success, lafayette, in, february 2, 2011. tora holmberg, rachel stoiko, andrea pappas, and anonymous reviewers provided suggestions while kate epstein provided editorial assistance that greatly improved the final manuscript. notes 1. phillips explores sheldon’s multiple identities under these pseudonyms. tiptree’s correspondents and readers thought she was a male writer, and the broader science fiction communities of her time treated her that way. in this piece, i use the name sheldon in relation to the work or correspondence being described. j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 115 2. the rats sheldon studied were selected and bred to minimize variation in traits, but they were not directly manipulated to the degree that contemporary biomedical models are. 3. fehr is part of a long line of feminist philosophy and science studies scholars interested in this question. the wide range of material in this area makes a full review impossible, but for a classic piece see longino. 4. the range of debate about model species in the late 1950s and 1960s is beyond the scope of this article. for further information about the details and fine distinctions in the history of behavioral research, i refer the reader to works such as burkhardt; lymanhenley and henley; thomas; and dewsbury, “a brief history of the study of animal behavior in north america.” 5. richard burkhardt examines their debates on the proper role of lab, field, and semiwild conditions, focusing specifically on lorenz and tinbergen (501-02). 6. crist does note that since comparative psychology was established prior to ethology, ethologists’ emphasis on technical language and skepticism about the idea of an animal mind (e.g., emotions, thought, and so on) probably arose because ethologists were responding to a framework already established by comparative psychologists for how to do objective science. 7. other scholars have pointed to more nuances in the initial selection of the rat model than beach acknowledged, with those who originally proposed rats as models sharing some of his concerns. for a detailed discussion of the impacts of standardization on selection of animal models see, for example, logan. for a thorough discussion of beach’s work, see pettit. sheldon herself studied hooded rats, not the white rat, probably because their superior eyesight was critical to her studies on perception (elms 86). 8. sheldon was initially interested in upper-level processes, an appreciation of aesthetics that she wanted to explore in humans (see elms for further discussion). 9. for further discussion of the impacts of the experimental apparatus on the history of the study of animal behavior, as well as its relationship to researchers’ underlying assumptions about animal minds, see thomas. for a detailed description of sheldon’s own apparatus, see elms 85–88. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 116 10. the first edition of the guide for the care and use of laboratory animals (currently revised by the national institutes of health [nih]) appeared in 1963. the 1966 laboratory animal welfare act, now the animal welfare act (awa, public law 89544), was the first us federal law regulating the treatment of animals in laboratories, and it excluded rats and mice. the 1971 nih policy, “care and treatment of laboratory animals,” addressed rats and mice. these regulations responded in large part to public outrage about harry harlow’s experiments raising monkeys in sensory deprivation chambers (for detailed descriptions, see haraway’s primate visions). animal care guidelines for psychological research are much more stringent now than when sheldon was in the lab. since the seventies, institutional committees have clarified animal care guidelines and obtained the right to approve procedures to monitor animal care in federally funded laboratories and individual researchers’ protocols before they begin their work, monitor compliance, and require trainings for personnel. the 2002 oprr/arena institutional animal care and use committee guidebook (iacuc) guidebook, office of laboratory animal welfare, nih, sets forth these guidelines and supervisory mechanisms. currently, research published in the american psychological association’s journals must adhere to its 2012 guidelines for ethical conduct in the care and use of non-human animals in research. 11. in fact, tiptree was asked by fellow panelists to withdraw from a science fiction fanzine’s panel of letter exchanges on feminism for expressing these beliefs. see phillips for a thorough exploration of sheldon’s critique of sexism and her presentation of sex differences, especially pp. 292–93 and 333–38. phillips (chapters 31 and 34) provides a nuanced discussion of sheldon’s views on gender, sex, evolution, and biology as well as their reception in the feminist science fiction community of the time that shaped them. 12. the works of patricia adair gowaty and marlene zuk exemplify feminist animal behavior researchers who integrate evolutionary insights with feminist theory. see for example, “evolutionary psychology and darwinian feminism,” co-written with anne fausto-sterling, an expert in gender and developmental biology, who had previously criticized gender biases in evolutionary biology. works cited barad, karen. meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. duke up, 2007. j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 117 _____. “posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 28.3 (2003): 801–31. barlow, george. “nature-nurture and the debates surrounding ethology and sociobiology.” american zoologist 31.2 (1991): 286–96. beach, frank. “the snark was a boojum.” the american psychologist 5 (1950): 115-124. birke, lynda. feminism, animals and science: the naming of the shrew. open up, 1994. _____. “intimate familiarities? feminism and human-animal studies.” society & animals 10. 4 (2002): 429–36. _____. “structuring relationships: on science, feminism and non-human animals.” feminism & psychology 20.3 (2010): 337–49. _____. “unnamed others: how can thinking about ‘animals’ matter to feminist theorizing?” nora—nordic journal of feminist and gender research 20.2 (2012): 148–57. birke, lynda, arnold arluke, and mike michael. the sacrifice: how scientific experiments transform animals and people. purdue up, 2007. birke, lynda, mette bryld, and nina lykke. “animal performances: an exploration of intersections between feminist science studies and studies of human/animal relationships.” feminist theory 5.2 (2004): 167–83. burkhardt, jr., richard w. “ethology, natural history, the life sciences, and the problem of place.” journal of the history of biology 32.3 (1999): 489–508. crist, eileen. images of animals: anthropomorphism and the animal mind. temple up, 1999. dewsbury, donald. “a brief history of the study of animal behavior in north america.” perspectives in ethology 8 (1989): 85–122. _____. “comparative psychology and ethology: a reassessment.” american psychologist 47.2 (1992): 208–15. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 118 _____. “some historical trends in american comparative psychology.” the behavioral neuroscientist and comparative psychologist 27.1 (2012): 7–10. elms, alan. “the psychologist who empathized with rats: james tiptree, jr., as alice b. sheldon, ph.d.” science fiction studies 31.1 (2004): 81–96. d’eaubonne, francoise. le féminisme ou la mort. vol. 2. p. horay, 1974. fausto-sterling, anne, patricia gowaty & marlene zuk, “evolutionary psychology and darwinian feminism.” feminist studies 23.2 (summer, 1997): 402-17. fehr, carla. “feminism and science: mechanism without reductionism.” nwsa journal 16.1 (2004): 136–56. galef, david. “tiptree and the problem of the other: postcolonialism versus sociobiology.” science fiction studies 28.2 (2001): 201–22. genova, judith. “tiptree and haraway: the reinvention of nature.” cultural critique 27 (1994): 5–27. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people and significant otherness. prickly paradigm press, 2003. _____. primate visions: gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. routledge, 1990. _____. when species meet. u minnesota p, 2007. heldreth, l. m. “love is the plan, the plan is death: the feminism and fatalism of james tiptree, jr.” extrapolation 23.1 (1982): 22–30. holmberg, tora. “a feeling for the animal: on becoming an experimentalist.” society and animals 16.4 (2008): 316–35. _____. “mortal love: care practices in animal experimentation.” feminist theory 12.2 (2011): 147–63. j. kasi jackson -companion species and model systems: researcher and animal relationships in the work of alice sheldon/james tiptree, jr. 119 lewis, jamie, paul atkinson, j. harrington, and k. featherstone. “representation and practical accomplishment in the laboratory: when is an animal model goodenough?” sociology 47.4 (2013): 776–92. logan, cheryl a. “the altered rationale for the choice of a standard animal in experimental psychology: henry h. donaldson, adolf meyer, and ‘the’ albino rat.” history of psychology 2.1 (1999): 3–24. longino, helen e. science as social knowledge: values and objectivity in scientific inquiry. princeton up, 1990. lyman-henley, lani, and tracy b. henley. “some thoughts on the relationship between behaviorism, comparative psychology, and ethology.” anthrozoös 13.1 (2000): 15–21. noske, barbara. beyond boundaries: humans and animals. black rose books, 1997. pettit, michael. “the queer life of a lab rat.” history of psychology 15.3 (2012): 217–27. phillips, julie. james tiptree, jr.: the double life of alice b. sheldon. st. martin’s press, 2006. sheldon, alice b. “preference for familiar versus novel stimuli as a function of the familiarity of the environment.” journal of comparative and physiological psychology 67.4 (1969): 516–21. thomas, marion. “are animals just noisy machines?: louis boutan and the coinvention of animal and child psychology in the french third republic.” journal of the history of biology 38.3 (2005): 425–60. tiptree, jr., james. meet me at infinity. tor, 2000. _____. “the psychologist who wouldn’t do awful things to rats.” the ascent of wonder: the evolution of hard sf. david hartwell and kathryn cramer, eds. orb books, 1997. 677–88. unger, rhonda. “science fictive visions: a feminist psychologist's view.” feminism & psychology 19.1 (2009): 113–17. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 120 watanabe, shingeru. “how animal psychology contributes to animal welfare.” applied animal behaviour science 106 (2007): 193–202. williams, tess. “the tiptree carnival.” foundation 33.1 (2004): 34–43. zuk, marlene, francisco garcia-gonzalez, marie elisabeth herberstein, and leigh w. simmons. “model systems, taxonomic bias, and sexual selection: beyond drosophila.” annual review of entomology 59 (2014): 321–38. microsoft word baar-hamilton-taylor-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:1 reviews monika baár working identities lindsay hamilton and nik taylor, animals at work. identity, politics, and culture in work with animals. leiden: brill, 2013, xiv, 196 pp. €104.00; $133.00 (pb). lindsay hamilton’s and nik taylor’s book, animals at work. identity, politics, and culture in work with animals analyzes the relationship between animals and humans in diverse situations: in veterinary surgeries, in slaughterhouses, on farms, in the wilderness, and in animal shelters. it is particularly concerned with the process of identity formation in the course of interaction with animals. the common denominator among these experiences is that they represent situations in which engagement with monika baár – working identities 145 animals constitutes work, even if it does not necessarily come with monetary rewards. the book is based on ethnographic research, and the authors also attempt to contextualize their empirical observations within theoretical literature. placing the performing, staging, and managing of identity at the center of their analysis, the authors put forward and continuously restate the argument that identities are never fixed and static, but are rather always in flux and intermittent. it is specifically the contextual and performative nature of identities on which they focus their attention. this point of departure, that life itself is messy and mobile and no clean lines of demarcations exists between humans and animals in practice, is hardly a counter-intuitive one. this does not mean, however, that it cannot prove a useful and productive point of departure for adding novel perspectives to the problem of human-animal interactions, which it definitely does. the book is structured around eight chapters, three of which contain theoretical reflections on human-animal interactions, while five others are comprised of fieldwork-based, ethnographic study. the theoretical ruminations draw on analytical frameworks employed in the fields of human-animal studies, cultural studies, and lastly, organization and network theory. the latter fields reflect the authors’ own backgrounds in sociology and management, and they represent innovative theoretical lenses which have hitherto rarely been exploited in the study of the subject. the first analytical chapter, ‘‘farm animals, vets and the transformation of ‘muck,’’’ studies how farm-animal veterinarians, in spite of the omnipresence of filth and dirt in their working lives, manage to keep themselves professionally ‘‘clean’’ as surgeons. it reveals that ‘‘muck’’ is a cultural and professional resource, the sign of ‘‘real work,’’ which provides a focus for the shared values and collective identity of the profession. at the same time, vets have developed various strategies which allow them to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 146 insert a sense of distance between themselves and their patients, and this allows them to remain unpolluted by the animal mess. the chapter ‘‘slaughter workers and the making of meat’’ takes its motto from upton sinclair’s famous book, the jungle: ‘‘they use everything about the hog except the squeal’’ — and this serves as a reminder that the production of meat in slaughterhouses stands as a powerful metaphor for soulless, mechanized production and the lack of humanity. the slaughterhouse is fundamentally different from any other factory because it turns living beings into dead on an enormous scale. the chapter shows how the violence necessary for killing becomes normalized by the creation of a degree of distance with the help of language, for example when ‘‘dead chickens’’ are referred to as ‘‘whole-bird products.’’ typically, the bureaucratically organized process of animal death is hidden from the public eye, which constitutes another form of distancing. moreover, the killing is organized and rationalized in such a way that no specific person is ‘‘really’’ responsible for the act of killing. the chapter also points out that the violence experienced in the slaughterhouse has an impact on the everyday, non-working life of its workers. also, the rates of violent crimes appear to be higher in communities where slaughterhouses are located (although there exists no clear-cut evidence of the casual relationship). the chapter ‘‘shelter workers and the construction of ‘animal personhood’’’ focuses on a very different site, and is based on data gathered in the course of three years in two animal shelters caring mainly for dogs. it focuses on the creation of ‘‘personhood’’ for animals, whereby unwanted, ‘‘rejected’’ animals become redefined as ‘‘pets-in-waiting’’ as the shelter workers seeks to find a caring home for them. it shows that the performance of care has a community-building effect, while the animals themselves act as resources for the resolution of conflicts between the disparate factions of the shelter workers. monika baár – working identities 147 the chapter ‘‘wildlife presenters, performance and the animal ‘actor’’’ deals with a professional group that enjoys a privileged status which comes with opportunities to visit exotic places, play with orangutans, and swim with dolphins. it shows that the unpredictability of animal behavior in the wilderness makes an impact on the presenters’ work. in broader terms, the authors conclude that in the course of film-making agency is exercised not simply by humans, but also by animals; although it is of course impossible to find out about the feelings of animals in the same way it is possible for humans. the chapter is also concerned with the process of ‘‘viewer commodification,’’ whereby storylines are manufactured in such a way that they confirm to certain pre-existing agendas and expectations of the audience. emotional aspects are also taken into account, for example the role of the ‘‘cuteness factor,’’ one example of which is the presentation of young primates as if they were human babies. the last empirical chapter, ‘‘small animal vets and the crafting of intimacy,’’ is based on fieldwork conducted in veterinary surgeries in the uk and australia, and looks at the relationship between animals, their owners, and veterinarians. it emphasizes the necessity of interlocution by the human guardians who translate the symptoms of the animal in a meaningful way to the vet. it also points to the increasing feminization of small animal veterinary profession. while the treatment of food-producing animals like cattle and pigs represent the ‘‘serious’’ side of the veterinary business and continues to be dominated by male veterinarians, small animal veterinary work has become associated with caring rather than scientific work, and as such is considered the typical domain of female professionals. the authors’ overall claim that the identities of humans and other animals are constructed in ‘‘messy and multiple ways’’ and its emphasis on the ‘‘complicated and complex relations’’ between humans and animals is entirely justified. nevertheless, throughout the book’s pages these arguments become repeated so frequently that they nearly lose their humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 148 explanatory power. this blemish does not, however, diminish the virtue of this work, namely that with the help of the ethnographic method the authors succeed in offering an interesting insight into human-animal relationships at the micro-level. particularly refreshing are the instances which reveal how animals are drawn into proximity with or are distanced from humans, sometimes even simultaneously. the book also calls attention to (though does not elaborate on) the necessity to study a wider repertoire of roles and performances, not just the professional aspects of animal-related workers: this includes their roles as spouses, parents, or contributors to their local community. another welcome aspect is that the book diversifies the heterogeneous images of professionals dealing with animals by introducing a gender dimension to the discussion. in the theoretical realm the book raises numerous questions and concerns. definitive answers are not provided; it is true, however, that the authors state at the outset of the book that offering ‘‘solutions’’ was not within the remit of their work. in light of the book’s focus on the anglo-saxon world, the question arises if its conclusions would also apply, and if so to what extent, to societies, environments and cultures with norms and values different from those in the ‘‘western world.’’ that question may constitute a vantage point for further research. microsoft word young-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:2 review article elizabeth young canine uncanny zone adrienne l. mclean, editor, cinematic canines: dogs and their work in the fiction film. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, 2014. 272 pp. $90.00 hc; $27.95 pd; $27.95 e-book. ann-janine morey, picturing dogs, seeing ourselves: vintage american photographs. university park, pa: the pennsylvania state university press, 2014. 228 pp. $34.95 hc. philip howell, at home and astray: the domestic dog in victorian britain. charlottesville, va: university press of virginia, 2015. 252 pp. $39.50 hc; $39.50 e-book. the dog grows ever more domesticated, albeit in different ways — from the affective enshrinement of dogs as family members in the home to the incorporation of the military dog as “citizen canine” (grimm). this domestication creates variously gendered roles, from feminized lady’s lapdog and child-surrogate to masculinized k-9 police dog and canine veteran. in its gender affiliations and in other ways, the dog has never occupied a singular or stable domestic space. dogs in the united states, for example, have been inseparable from the maintenance of white supremacy, from the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 132 hounds used to track escaped slaves to the german shepherds unleashed by police against civil rights protestors. across and within breeds, dogs oscillate between emblems of domestic order and perceived threats to it — an oscillation also embodied within the individual animal. for in the specter of the friendly pet who becomes cujo is the possibility that the dog may expose the permeable boundaries of domestication, turning from faithful to violent and reverting from cute to wild. following freud, we might think of this ambiguously domesticated dog zone between familiarity and estrangement as that of the canine uncanny. (i adapt this phrase from the title of murray pomerance’s essay, “hitchcock’s canine uncanny,” in cinematic canines.) in this zone, domesticated spaces are made strange, doubles proliferate, the line between animate and inanimate blurs, and the repressed of violence — both canine and human — may return at any point. three recent books explore the many dimensions, literal and symbolic, of a canine uncanny zone. cinematic canines is an anthology of critical essays on dogs in film; picturing dogs analyzes a collection of u.s. photographs of dogs from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century; and at home and astray explores debates over the domesticated dog in the cultural geography of victorian britain. all three books suggest the gendered dimensions of the domesticated dog in american, british, and other cultural histories; all embed that history, albeit unevenly, in other axes of power, including race, class, and nation. together, they suggest the need to continue to think about the aesthetics as well as politics of dog representation, particularly the ostensible fidelity — visual and behavioral — of the photographic image of the dog. collectively, these books show that the canine uncanny comes most fully into view through undomesticated interdisciplinary, intersectional, and transmedia cultural lenses. cinematic canines: dogs and their work in the fiction film is a lively collection of ten essays on “dogs in live-action narrative films” (15), divided into three sections. the first focuses on dog “stars” in silent and classic hollywood cinema: fatty arbuckle’s pit bull co-star, luke; the german shepherds strongheart and rin tin tin; asta, the wire-haired fox terrier of the thin man films; and lassie, the collie star of film and television. the second section addresses dogs as “character and supporting actors,” extending beyond hollywood and up to the present. essays here treat dogs in american and japanese wwii films; dogs in australian film across several decades; dogs in post-apartheid south african cinema; and dogs in films from different national cinemas set in the antarctic. the third section, “stocks, bits, and extras,” comprises one essay on dogs in hitchcock films and another on dog behavior in cinema. an afterword by mclean elizabeth young -canine uncanny zone 133 expands the category of live action cinema, exploring the representation of dogs in live action films that also include animatronics and cgi. the essays in the first section show both the singular success of dogs in the first halfcentury of cinema and the continuities between dog and human actors. the discourse of the star — enshrined in close-up within the diegesis of narrative film, celebrated in elaborately manufactured fan culture without — applied as much to dog stars as to human ones; the language of genre was shaped by canine players, as in the case of asta and the screwball comedy; and the hollywood goal of promoting american nationalism impelled lassie as much as john wayne. in a hollywood studio system, the dog was an exaggerated version of the actor under contract, commodified and controlled by others. hitchcock’s probably apocryphal quip that “actors are like cattle” seems inaccurate when it comes to the singular dog star; actors here seem like dogs, and vice versa. this similitude is particularly strong in the case of early cinema, with its absence of human speech. joanna rapf notes in her essay on luke that the silent film was “where [the dog’s] bodily language could be the equal of the people with whom he shared the screen” (51). cinematically, the dog-star was a quintessential strong silent type, an icon of rugged, albeit desexualized, masculinity. kathryn fuller-seeley and jeremy groskopf position strongheart and rin tin tin as “analogous to ... the decade’s leading male hollywood stars, especially the strong, athletic, loner heroes of action films, such as swashbuckler douglas fairbanks” (65). this masculinity could, semi-facetiously, come under dispute. kelly wolf notes that for son of lassie (1944), publicity materials asserted the “masculinity” of the actual dog playing the female character: “‘lassie resumes ‘her’ rightful sex. ‘she’ is actually a male collie’” (116). elsewhere the dog star seems more akin to the female movie star. as sarah ross and james castonguay note in their essay on asta, the career of the cinematic dog was “roughly the same length as the average career of a romantic leading lady during the studio era” (90). dog-stars, male and female, were individuals domesticated within the stabilizing plots and happy endings of hollywood studio films. the essays in the second section explore more uncontrolled plots with dogs in individual and group form. thus dogs in australian film are “teetering on the boundary between civilization and wilderness” (145) and dogs in films about the antarctic “circulate around the culture/nature, civilized/wild binaries, expressing anxieties about the fragility of these binaries in one of earth’s wildest environments” (192). these binaries may be organized around the purebred/mutt distinction, but also along intra-purebred lines and in mutable humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 134 ways. while the german shepherds strongheart and rin tin tin became lovable hollywood celebrities, as aaron skabelund notes, in hollywood wwii films the breed became associated with nazis, while in chinese films, german shepherds came to embody japanese military aggression (137-38). a standout here is giuliana lund’s essay on dogs in south african film, analyzing how films in the apartheid era offer a split between idealized purebred “bully” dogs and scorned mixed-breed curs: “the good ‘white man’s dog,’ like the good african, is a highly trained, domesticated servant doing the bidding of his master. in contrast, the kaffir dog, like the unruly and uncooperative african, must be beaten into shape or eliminated” (164). post-apartheid films have inverted these connections, valorizing the “kaffir” and “cur,” but not eliminating the allegorical mode; ironically, lund suggests, “current incarnations of canines have less agency, personality, and individuality ... recent films also make less of an attempt to engage a canine point of view” (178-79). the final two essays in the volume take the cinematic canine both further into and outside of the language of film studies. murray pomerance, a prolific film scholar, explores the wonderful topic of dogs in films by alfred hitchcock, who includes canines in so many of his films — pomerance discusses rebecca, foreign correspondent, suspicion, saboteur, strangers on a train, rear window, the birds, marnie and others — that they seem essential to his auteurist signature. pomerance argues that dogs in hitchcock have a stabilizing function: “[a]ll dogs are guide dogs for the somewhat ‘blinded’ viewer; the dog establishes the terms of our involvement and thus ultimately works as ballast for the narrative” (212). alexandra horowitz, a cognitive scientist whose inside of a dog has been a best-seller, undoes this “ballast” from the perspective of canine ethology. comparing dogs in film to actual canine behavior, horowitz argues for “the ways in which humans misread the dog” (219); specifically, she shows how cinematic canines often vocalize in ways that do not mean what they seem to imply, pay attention within the frame in unlikely ways, or fail to act as might be anticipated (223). horowitz characterizes this as “a dog’s actions, viewed ethologically, jarring with the intended meaning of the dog actor’s actions” (223), although this formulation raises the question of what the “intended meaning” of a dog actor might be. here the discourse of the dog and human in film decisively diverge, the dog not having the same relation to intention or performance as the human actor (although the dog does sometimes resemble, as mclean notes, the child actor [9]). the cinematic dog is ultimately a figure of radical animal otherness rather than an analogue of human celebrity. elizabeth young -canine uncanny zone 135 in different ways, the essays by pomerance, horowitz, and mclean suggest the uncanny dimensions of the cinematic dog. pomerance uses this concept in a general way: dogs offered hitchcock “strategic dramaturgical possibilities for establishing action and relationships that could not be shown otherwise — hence the invocation of the uncanny in my essay’s title” (201). the dog also seems uncanny in more specifically psychoanalytic senses in hitchcock films, unnervingly occupying liminal spaces between life and death (rear window) or between the familiarly domesticated pet and the unfamiliar attacker (the birds). mclean discusses the well-known “uncanny valley” that animators try to avoid. although “[d]igitized dogs in live-action films ... seem to leap safely across the uncanny valley” (240), she suggests that in a more general sense, dogs “already look like caricatures or stuffed toys ... [w]e always already understand dogs as both exaggerated and real” (240). the stuffed toy is a mark of the uncanny, lodged between inanimate and inanimate. in his taxonomy of uncanny forms, freud also favors the automaton and the double, figures who have cinematic canine analogues as well — for example, in the case of the multiple dog bodies who played lassie and asta over time, or who play a single dog in the same film. the uncanny would seem to organize canine cinema in another sense: in the disjuncture between the dog on screen and the experience of the actual dog or dogs on set. both the familiarity of the dog as a domestic animal and the apparent indexical fidelity of the moving image to its referent make cinematic dogs seem knowable, but this fidelity is constructed and misleading. horowitz analyzes this falseness as an ethological error, but it also adds an emblematically uncanny twinning of the familiar with the unfamiliar. this is, of course, an ethical issue as well about the possible mistreatment of dogs in the making of the film. as mclean puts it in her introduction, “i worry about film dogs ... [are] sick, dying, destroyed or destroying dogs in films ... ‘really’ suffering or not?” (18-19). the quotation marks around “really” express the fear that the unhappy dog on film — or, perhaps even more, the seemingly happy one — uncannily embodies a real dog who is really unhappy. if death constitutionally organizes photographically based images — in the sontag sense that “all photographs are memento mori” — this seems particularly so in the case of canine representation. the dogs here might be dead not only from the inevitable passage of time, but also from the violence inflicted on them outside the frame. given the gigantic number of dogs in film, the anthology’s focus on fiction live-action film and mainstream cinemas makes sense, though it inevitably excludes discussions of animation, documentary, and experimental film, which would provide different perspectives. a sequel volume on independent film might open up more varied humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 136 depictions of dogs, toward more radical formal or political ends. everyone will have their own list, but three recent examples that come to mind are kelly reichardt’s wendy and lucy (2008), a fiction film that reworks both female and canine subjectivity; laurie anderson’s heart of a dog (2015), an experimental documentary on grief, death, politics, and dogs; and white god (2014), kornél mundruczó’s allegorized drama of dog oppression and resistance in hungary. within the scope that cinematic canines sets for itself, there might be more essays focusing on race and ethnicity; for example, lund notes in passing sam fuller’s white dog (1982), an understudied hollywood film about racism (and ambiguous antecedent for mundruczo’s film). a sequel volume might also delve into more textured close readings of individual films or into further questions of film form. what happens to the vocabulary of continuity editing, like the shot-reverse shot or eyeline match, when the suturing of shots involves the gaze of an animal? how does cinematic sound operate in the case of dogs? different versions of uncanny domestication haunt the remarkable photographs of annjanine morey’s picturing dogs, seeing ourselves, which analyzes some three hundred photographs of dogs and humans from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including tintypes, cabinet cards, cartes-de-visites, photographic postcards, and later snapshots. (the volume reproduces more than a hundred photographs.) these represent the personal collection of morey, a scholar of literature and religion, who places them in the contexts of animal studies and visual and literary history. the photographers are not known, and morey organizes the book into chapters with such thematic groupings as “the visual rhetoric of everyday people,” “family portraits,” “hunting pictures and dog stories,” and “women cross the line.” she juxtaposes discussions of photographs with interpretations of dogs in such novels as the great gatsby, little lord fauntleroy, and the adventures of huckleberry finn. the overarching claim is that the domesticated dog is a political animal: “the dog becomes part of the patriotic iconography embracing all the meanings of home — family, fidelity, comfort, protection, nurturance, and love — as well as symbolizing some of the less palatable meanings of home and family — domination, subservience, and violence” (25). morey’s focus within chapters is on dogs as compositional elements illuminating human and human-animal relationships, sometimes by indirection or displacement. for example, she suggests that the extreme stiffness of facial expression in many of the photographs (a stiffness in excess of the demands of photographic portraiture at this time), should be seen in relation to the more playful depiction of dogs in these image; in these images, with very stiff-looking people, the dog is the “missing smile” (25). elizabeth young -canine uncanny zone 137 as with the cinematic canine, the focus on dogs as emblems of home brings gender into view: the book includes, for example, discussion of how hunting photographs align dogs with white masculinity, and, conversely, analysis of photographs that cross gender boundaries, such as a group depicting white women hunters with guns and hounds. that morey specifies these human figures as white is consistent with the most exciting feature of her analysis in picturing dogs, seeing ourselves: her attention to race, and especially to the representation, through absence as well as presence, of africanamericans. race is the topic of the third chapter, entitled “the gaze outside the frame,” which focuses on groups of photographs in which “the african american subject is reduced to petlike status” (78), including photographs of black employees with the dog of the white “master” and of black women caretakers with white children. she cautions against reading photographs of african americans with dogs as exemplifying the same kind of familial iconography as white families. in some cases, “even when no white person is visible, the racist gaze that is the product of white people’s bigotry still commands the image” (101). morey also attends to racial difference throughout the book, analyzing, for example, an image of an african american boy with dog in a fauntleroy suit (75) and an african-american boy with bicycle and dog (“cecil and fido” [111]). she speculates on the thematic connections between hunting photographs of white men, dogs, and captured nonhuman prey and contemporary lynching photographs of white men, dogs, and lynched africanamericans: in the latter, dogs are “terrorist instruments,” and “the edible bodies of animals have become the sexualized bodies of black men, who in turn are killed twice, thanks to shooting the death on film” (158). morey draws on scholarship from historians of photography who study race (including laura wexler and shawn michelle smith). the book’s focus on dogs and race also puts it in dialogue with recent work in american studies focused on non-photographic nineteenth-century racializations of animals (boggs, lundblad, freccero and kim). the racial ambiguities of these photographs suggest another feature of the canine uncanny: as with the analysis of post-apartheid films in cinematic canines, these photographs everywhere register the repressed, or barely repressed, legacy of slavery and racial violence. the uncanny converges with the gothic in these photographs, sometimes quite specifically, as in a haunting image of an african-american girl holding a small dog, directly facing the camera, liminally positioned in front of a very dark doorway — “either a sanctuary for her or a place of imprisonment” (119). another photo is a group portrait of five white adults, one man on the floor affectionately holding a large dog, with the woman’s face at the center scratched out (137). this defacement, in the most literal sense, suggests some act of violence, perhaps on the part humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 138 of one of the photograph’s other subjects — “the hidden private world has erupted into the public face of the photograph” (138). other uncanny modes erupt in a photograph of a hunting dog taxidermied with taxidermied kill in his mouth (199). here, as in the hunting photographs, the emphasis is on the dog as agent of violence, against humans and animals; as morey notes, the dog as a target of animal cruelty is not documented. like the violence against dehumanized black bodies that lies outside the frame, dog suffering and death remain uncanny presences. as a study of photography, the project is an eclectic one, based as it is a personal collection of images, with an author who controls the acquisition, categorization, juxtaposition, and other taxonomic logics of the volume. morey’s use of literary sources is interesting, though another scholar might more directly compare these photographs with paintings, silent films (the later photographs are contemporary with the early hollywood history in cinematic canines), or other visual representations of dogs. morey puts this issue in passive voice — “through the juxtaposition of similar images, questions and insights begins to emerge, as the photographs speak to us of their context” (48) — but she is making the photographs speak in particular ways. nonetheless, the photographs themselves remain remarkably evocative. philip howell’s at home and astray focuses on the uncanny ambiguities of the dog in victorian britain. he argues that this period is marked by fierce debates over the domestication of dogs, which was “partial, incomplete, and provisional” (3). though howell’s discipline is cultural geography, with its focus on space and place, the first two chapters are anchored by literary figures: the first chapter, on dogs in the work of charles dickens, explores competing images in his oeuvre of dogs as emblems of bourgeois domestication and, conversely, as “disruptive agents of contingency and undisciplined desire” (49). the second chapter explores the practice of dog stealing, famously dramatized in virginia woolf’s much later flush (1933), her mock-biography of elizabeth barrett browning’s dog. subsequent chapters address the founding of the battersea dogs’ home; cultural debates over darwinism as it intersected with debates over dog vivisection; the founding of the hyde park pet cemetery; and new regulations about public dog-walking, including muzzling laws. the study draws from but also contests a foucauldian framework of domestication as a disciplinary policing of norms. howell’s emphasis is sometimes on ideological containment of dogs and humans; thus battersea involved “policing, incarceration, and execution” (100) of masterless dogs, and “technologies like the muzzle, the collar, the lead and the license [function] alike as attempts, not to discipline animals directly, but rather to represent and regulate the conduct of their human companions” (170). elsewhere, he emphasizes more liberatory elizabeth young -canine uncanny zone 139 strands of debates over dog domestication, arguing that dog cemeteries were “not, or not merely, a confirmation of human privilege, [but] also a challenge to the established boundaries of the anthropocentric orthodoxy,” with “genuine potential for resistance” (148). his conclusion emphasizes the emancipatory elements of domestication, arguing that in the victorian period, for all its anthropocentric anxieties, dogs also became “political actors” (179). the study as a whole deconstructs the binary of “at home” and “astray,” with both modes organizing each other. the most effective chapters are the later ones, on dog cemeteries and dog walking, which give a vivid sense of geography. the impression here is of dogs, alive and dead, occupying public space, particularly in london, in new ways and to uneven effect. pulled into the home, dogs were also pushed into the public; as howell shows, the push-pull is not that of domestication versus its opposite, but of competing impulses within domestication. dogs could stray, like women — and indeed, gender is a key element in debates over the “dog question” (3), his term for the period, deliberately echoing that of the “woman question.” class is an organizing frame; anyone masterless — human dog thieves as well as stray dogs — threatened social order. the content of “astray” could be expanded further. although howell’s definition of “domestication” includes “the dog’s all-too-conditional citizenship in the ‘homeland’ of britain and ‘britishness’” (3), there is little discussion of empire or of otherness in racial or ethnic terms. the illustrations here, including nineteenth-century political cartoons, are rich and would merit their own analysis as visual sources. within the materials that howell explores, the tension between home and not-home suggests, once again, a geographical version of the uncanny. howell names this subject explicitly in his discussion of darwinism: critics of vivisection capitalized on the strangeness of scientific experiment on animals as “alienating and distinctly unheimlich ... to the victorian public” (103), and “just too unheimlich to be easily domesticated” (119). but the more general impression of dogs moving between homed and unhomed selves — and outside the home, in walks and cemetery plots — suggests a version of uncanny oscillation between home and not-home spaces. it is interesting to imagine the model expanded to other forms of a materialized uncanny, like the increase of taxidermy that often brought mounted dead animals, including some pets, into live victorian parlor spaces. the dead dog — executed at battersea, buried in hyde park — would seem to shape the domestication process of the live one as much as of the “stray” humans who were also being brought under social control. the unfinished and contested nature of these domestication processes is vividly on display in these exciting books, which show dogs as at once visibly familiar and unfamiliarly uncanny. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 140 works cited boggs, colleen. animalia americana: animal representations and biopolitical subjectivity. new york: columbia up, 2013. kim, claire jean and carla freccero, eds. american quarterly 65:3 (september 2013), special issue on “species/race/sex.” grimm, david. citizen canine: our evolving relationship with cats and dogs. new york: public affairs, 2015. lundblad, michael. the birth of a jungle: animality in progressive-era u.s. literature and culture. new york: oxford up, 2013. microsoft word ozarska-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:1 magdalena ożarska what if christopher smart’s cat responded? — a human-animal studies perspective on jubilate agno’s “cat jeoffry” men would be first and foremost those living creatures who have given themselves the word that enables them to speak of the animal with a single voice and to designate it as the single being that remains without a response, without a word with which to respond. (derrida, “the animal” 400) this paper sets out to examine how an analysis of the cat jeoffry section in the poem titled jubilate agno by the english poet christopher smart (1722-1771) can benefit from a human-animal studies perspective. in particular, i will consider cat jeoffry’s pethood, his name, and his possibly reciprocal relationship with the poet. i will investigate traces of the cat’s response to the poet’s effusions, based on jacques derrida’s reflections on the non-human gaze and human exposure thereto. i will also examine evidence of smart the poet’s “thinking hairy,” as discussed by dominique lestel. i hope to determine whether or not smart views his pet cat as what coetzee has called “an embodied soul” or not. 1 jubilate agno was written, at the methodical pace of two lines a day, at st. luke’s hospital for lunatics, where christopher smart was incarcerated between 1757 and 1763. by the standards of his time, smart was mentally disturbed: this diagnosis was pronounced on account of his religious mania, which consisted of bouts of public prayer, embarrassing to his enlightened, rational contemporaries. the madhousecomposed jubilate, smart's “collection of notes for an apologia pro vita sua” (greene 332), may have begun “as a genuine outpouring of poetical inspiration and ended as a device with little purpose beyond recording the passage of time, as mechanical as the notches on crusoe's stick” (bond 21). the latter may be true about many of the jubilate’s lines, but since its first publication in 1939 the “cat jeoffry” section has been among the most frequently anthologized pieces of smart’s oeuvre because of its lyrical intensity and personal touch. it is striking that the mere seventy-three lines of the “cat jeoffry” section are all that smart ever penned to immortalize his non-human companion, given his asylum estrangement and overwhelming isolation. this scarcity stands in stark humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 36 contrast to the abundance of detail that serves to illustrate the joys and sorrows of jeoffry’s owner’s own existence, as recorded both in his jubilate and other lyrics. naturally, using the term “owner” is now problematic for has scholars. it connotes “ownership,” i.e. possession of an object, a thing, which makes it hardly applicable to a relationship that necessarily combines “dominance … with affection” — a prerequisite for pethood according to tuan (2). at the turn of the twenty-first century and after, animals are no longer, on the whole, viewed as things. their several functions include that of acting as non-human companions. was that the case with christopher smart’s eighteenth-century cat? was smart the owner, the guardian (demello 164; weil 58), or perhaps the cat parent to his fur child jeoffry?2 could we not as well ask whether smart’s cat was white, black, or orange? these questions cannot be answered with any certainty now, given that no written records survive 250 years after smart’s composition of his madhouse poem. even jeoffry’s gender is somewhat vague. the cat may be a straightforward “he,” but its idleness resonates with a feminine ideal of leisure, thus unsexing the animal to a certain extent. it was “ladies [who] were often viewed as leisure personified, as the ornamental companions of men’s non-working hours.… male conduct book authors point out that ladies were put on earth to make men’s leisure more pleasant” (jordan 114).3 on the other hand, this unsexing may be a symptom of the cat’s being “an embodied soul,” and not simply a physical, hairy feline body. the “cat jeoffry”section of the jubilate begins with the celebrated line: “for i will consider my cat jeoffry” (l. 697).4 because the cat is referred to as “my cat jeoffry,” an explicit inscription of ownership, we understand that the cat was either incarcerated together with the poet, a pre-asylum pet, or — more likely perhaps — that jeoffry was befriended by smart at the asylum. whichever is the case, the first of pethood criteria, i.e. living in a human household, is met — if the definition of the household is stretched to incorporate the human’s nearest surroundings, rather than signifying the human dwelling exclusively. the fact that the cat is “my cat jeoffry” is also telling in another sense: the animal is not associated with a hospital attendant or a fellow inmate, nor is it a stray. he is then an animal that the poet does not hesitate to call his own, suggesting the existence of a relationship and bond of some kind beyond that of the master and the slave. on the face of it, however, it would seem that smart the poet leaves little doubt as to how, in general terms, he views his relationship to jeoffry: line 751 tells us that jeoffry “can jump from an eminence into his master's bosom” (my emphasis). although it is the only verse in which smart mentions where he stands in their relationship, this is by no means all that there is to it. theirs is far from a clear-cut master-and-pet/slave relationship as discussed by tuan. let us now look at how the pethood of smart’s cat is magdalena ożarska -what if christopher smart’s cat responded? 37 represented in the lines 697-770 of jubilate agno and how it sits in its contemporary cultural context. today, has scholars believe that several conditions must be met in order for an animal to be considered a pet, i.e. a non-human companion. as opposed to “meat” or, more generally speaking, “food” animals, pets5 are socially constructed in a way that underscores their relationship to humans (irvine).6 they must live in human homes, although the term “home” may occasionally have to be extended from dwellings to backyards or, if necessary, farm buildings as well. one of the most important aspects of being a pet is that he/she must have a name. as demello puts it, one cannot be a pet and not have a name. naming an animal incorporates him or her into the human social world and allows us to use their name as a term of address and a term of reference. we can speak to them as we do to our family and friends, and we can speak about them as we do about others that are important to us. in both cases, naming allows for interaction and emotional attachment. in addition, by talking about our pets to other people, the animal’s history and personality become clear. (148-149) in addition, “ideally, pets should ... enjoy a life of love and attention” (149). in consequence, expectedly, companion animals can hardly escape anthropomorphization, i.e. having human thoughts ascribed to them and being viewed as replacement human companions — substitutes for their humans’ absent or otherwise unavailable relatives or friends (154).7 smart’s cat has a name, referenced in the opening line of the passage, and repeated three times in ll. 742-743, in connection with the cat’s rat bite and subsequent recovery. the latter fact elicits from the poet a heartfelt need to “bless the name of the lord jesus that jeoffry is better” (l. 743). interestingly, it is now uncertain how common it was for mid-eighteenth-century english pet cats to be given christian names.8 it is said that isaac newton had a cat whose name was c.c. dr. johnson had a “very fine cat indeed” (boswell 294) called hodge,9 whom he fed oysters (berglund). horace walpole had a male cat, harold, and two female cats named zara and selima,10 the latter immortalized in thomas gray’s 1747 “ode on the death of a favourite cat drowned in a tub of goldfishes.” in her poem “mistress gurton’s cat: a domestic tale” (undated), mary robinson depicted a female cat called grimalkin. joanna baillie celebrated the generic humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 38 “kitt,” offspring of “pussy,” at play (“the kitten,” 1790). william cowper, too, used the generic “puss” for his “retired cat” (composed 1791, published 1803). in her 2008 study of eighteenth-century british elegies and epitaphs for companion animals, ingrid h. tague lists rev. george huddesford’s 1791 “monody on the death of dick, an academical cat”11 (293), and anne francis’s 1790 poem dedicated to “a cat of gentle, gen'rous mind,” called bully12 (295). anonymous epitaphs for felines under the names of tom and belwet appeared in gentleman’s magazine (1769) and london magazine (1775), respectively (blaisdell 223-224). tom and dick are about all the cat christian names that have come down to us; hence the question persists: why call a cat “jeoffry?” perhaps, it would seem, to honor the memory of geoffrey chaucer.13 smart was, after all, an ardent admirer of “chaucer! who the english tongue design’d” (untitled poem, 1756), and he authored a whole sequence of “chaucerian poems” (rizzo). whatever smart’s reasons may have been, it is a fact that only one of the jubilate “jeoffry” verses shows the poet in the act of directly apostrophizing his feline companion: “poor jeoffry! poor jeoffry! the rat has bit thy throat” (l. 742). given this second-person utterance, there is no doubt that — at this point at least — smart’s cat functions as a substitute for human companionship for the confined poet. whether this relationship is of reciprocal nature, and whether both agents are equally important and exercise mutual respect (demello 157), is a different issue. to date, the figure of cat jeoffry has been interpreted in ways corresponding to the overall design of the poem, i.e. smart’s insistent praising of the lord (shell; kenyon jones; miller; ożarska, “presentation”; ożarska, meanderings; perkins), proof of smart’s religious enthusiasm (hawes), or a metaphorical representation of the poetic process (ennis). in that respect, too, jeoffry clearly falls victim to anthropomorphization, an inexorable consequence of anthropocentrism (fudge, animal 77). for the most part, smart’s cat is figured as a model worshipper, because all his routine activities can be read metaphorically as inscriptions of an exemplary christian’s fulfilment of his pious duties (ożarska, meanderings), although jeoffry’s magnificat (hartman) is performed in a human-language-less manner. still, this indisputably spiritual layer of meaning tells us little about the relationship between cat jeoffry and smart. even though jeoffry neatly fits the criteria for the pet category, the word “pet” itself, in use since the sixteenth century (oed), is never used by smart, whose focus is on praising the creator rather than dwelling on his bond with jeoffry. beyond the statement of who the master is, smart is largely reticent about how he views his position in relation to that of his non-human companion. this is reflected in the magdalena ożarska -what if christopher smart’s cat responded? 39 verse: “for ninthly he looks up for his instructions” (l. 713), which — included as is it in the passage devoted to jeoffry’s consideration of himself and not of god — may seemingly reinforce his position of dominated yet affectionate slavery. jeoffry is also “docile and can learn certain things” (l. 746), a likely reference to smart the master’s teaching his pet some tricks. the rat bite that jeoffry sustains clearly distresses the poet, but is that all that we can say about the poet’s feelings for his companion animal? does jeoffry’s animal gaze puzzle his human into thought, as derrida’s cat’s gaze does? does smart consider jeoffry’s affections, and vice versa? what does jeoffry see when he looks at smart? there is no straightforward information on these issues and no trace of an attempt on the part of the poet to see the world through his cat’s eyes: jeoffry’s anthropomorphization is to be taken for granted, and not a word beyond that is uttered. but cat jeoffry’s recognized position as “the servant of the living god duly and daily serving him” (l. 698) is in fact more than anthropomorphization: for me, this and other statements to this effect are proof of jeoffry’s smartomorphization. it could hardly be clearer what smart sees when he looks at cat jeoffry, but the gaze never goes the other way round in any manner conspicuous to the reader. still, the gazes potentially or implicitly exchanged between christopher smart and cat jeoffry are very interesting. on the face of it, it might seem that smart the human dominates cat jeoffry because his gaze is never visibly reciprocated and jeoffry is never presented in the act of gazing directly at the human. why is jeoffry consistently shown as failing to reciprocate? is the smart-jeoffry relation different than that pondered by jacques derrida in his essay “the animal that therefore i am” (2002)? in that piece, the human, caught naked by his cat, exposed to the inevitability of a non-human gaze, becomes distressed at becoming the object of such fixed non-human attention — reduced to an embarrassed realization of post-edenic nakedness. yet a situation in which the domesticated non-human purposefully and consistently refuses to look at a human confined within the same closed space as itself is not very realistic. so why does smart never mention his cat’s gaze? why does he focus on his own gaze exclusively? is it because he does not consider jeoffry an equal partner in gazing, or are there other reasons? could they be human embarrassment or fear of exposure, after all? what naked truth is it that smart is struggling to conceal that makes him refrain from referring to the cat’s gaze even once? as it is unlikely that jeoffry deliberately and totally ignores his human, it can be assumed that the cat’s gaze must be utterly confusing to smart, who fails even to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 40 acknowledge its occurrence. the reader is led to believe that the cat’s gaze never meets his master’s eye: at least, this is what jeoffry’s master’s version communicates. in the process, however, the “master” seems confused and exposed. his nakedness is not physical but, one is tempted to believe, spiritual. obsessed with praising god, smart finds (and shows) himself admitting that a mere animal, whom he apparently considers sub-human most of the time, acquits itself of its godly tasks with more dedication and efficiency (“god tells him he’s a good cat,” l. 728) than he does himself. this would explain why smart consistently expresses his surprise and wonder at the worshipping capabilities of his cat, who makes the human feel unworthy and inadequate. if a language-less creature can “worship in his way” (l. 699), how much more is expected from a human worshipper, equipped with proper human language? thus exposed, the poet’s alleged spiritual barrenness is made explicit to himself, burdening him with a sense of inadequacy, as the quality of smart’s own devotions in comparison to those of his cat, clearly “an embodied soul,” is silently meditated on. just like derrida who, after montaigne, comes to understand human impudence in attributing the lack of certain faculties to animals (“the animal” 375), smart is led to realize that there exists very little difference between the two of them when it comes to their respective positions within god’s creation and the resulting obligations to praise the lord. just as derrida is led to believe that his pet animal is possessed of a capacity to respond, so may smart — but the latter is unwilling to accept it, much less admit it. this aspect of the jeoffrysmart relationship demonstrates how much harm was done by the pre-enlightenment “thingifying attribution of linguistic incapacity to animals” (shannon 14). it was rené descartes who expressed the opinion that animals were not capable of thinking, simply because no evidence of reasoning was to be found in their speech. if they could speak, descartes assumed, they would doubtless have made themselves understood by humans as well as by their own species. in other words, “speaking only counts if it means speaking to us and in our language,” as laurie shannon aptly concludes (15). now, what if the cat responded to smart? even if smart hardly finds himself speaking to jeoffry, the cat is responding in its own language — the language of its body, its movements, and manoeuvres, as well as the sounds of its own non-human language, some of which are audible to the poet: “for he purrs in thankfulness” (l. 728). interestingly, in his view, smart has no problem understanding and interpreting his cat’s language: he claims to know exactly when and with what intention the cat is giving praise to the lord. hence his puzzlement, which — intentionally or not — turns jeoffry into the recipient and object of smart’s admiring and respectful human gaze. thus, facing a cat, a worshipper superior to himself, must be frustrating: after all, it boils down to being seen — and judged — “through the eyes of the wholly other that they magdalena ożarska -what if christopher smart’s cat responded? 41 call the animal, for example a cat” (derrida, “the animal” 380; italics original). it is, as derrida sees it, “the unveiling and the verdict” (381). smart might then repeat with derrida, who is quite explicit in expressing the human response thus generated, that “[r]ather than chasing it away, chasing the cat away, i am in a hurry, yes, in a hurry to have it appear otherwise” (379) — that is, “i, smart, am in a hurry to try and cover my own spiritual nakedness” by means of an encomium of the cat’s anthropo/smartomorphized activities. in this view, it may be that in the case of christopher smart’s cat jeoffry it is the cat who — paradoxically — becomes the human’s “master.” it is the cat who sets the standard and the example for the human to follow, and not the other way round. if that much is accepted, we are facing a definitely pre-cartesian perception of the animal on the part of the poet. more than that, jeoffry appears capable of reading his human’s mind and offering him — with his mute (i.e. human-language-less) example — ideas for worship more perfect than smart’s own. does this make jeoffry a classic case of derridean “animot,” one wonders, an indefinite being, separate from what constitutes the human and the non-human, and capitalizing on its indeterminate status? in other words, is cat jeoffry a representation or projection of the poet himself, or is the poet a representation or projection of the cat “animot”? does smart tell cat jeoffry that “he’s a good cat,” as he says god does (l. 728)? does god tell smart that he is a good man and worshipper? does jeoffry tell smart that he is a good human? if jeoffry “knows that god is his saviour” (l. 739), is this smart’s devout attempt at bridging the gap between the two of them, or merely a result of smart’s meticulous daily observation and resulting fantasy? if smart chooses to dwell on the cat’s numerous virtues, among which ample space is devoted to a discussion of patience (“for he can set up with gravity which is patience upon approbation. / for he can fetch and carry, which is patience in employment. / for he can jump over a stick which is patience upon proof positive,” ll. 747-749), may this not be viewed as smart’s wishful thinking about how he would like to be able to conduct himself under the circumstances of his denigrating confinement? perhaps, at the lunatic asylum, the poet finds himself as idle as his cat, and thus partially emasculated — another mere “embodied soul” of coetzee’s, a human one this time. importantly, the cat’s dubious status resulting from the species’ long-standing association with evil powers (it should be remembered that, in line 770, cat jeoffry “can creep” like a serpent, symbolic of its devilish connotations) is dispelled, not only by ascribing the pet with smartoand anthropomorphized religious devotions. the figure humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 42 of the devil also serves to establish a connection between the physical qualities of jeoffry’s fur and electricity, which is highlighted by the poet in a number of lines: for he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes. for he counteracts the devil, who is death, by brisking about the life (ll. 721-722); for by stroking of him i have found out electricity. for i perceived god's light about him both wax and fire. for the electrical fire is the spiritual substance, which god sends from heaven to sustain the bodies both of man and beast (ll. 762-64). this fascination with electricity, a common eighteenth-century attitude reflecting the age’s excitement with emerging scientific discoveries, is not only coupled with the spiritual dimension, although this is the most obvious way to read it. it turns a statement of poetic ecstasy over the beauty of the bounty of god’s creation, prevalent in jubilate agno, into a particularized take on the pre-romantic unity between the supernatural and natural spheres. the focus is on the resulting perfection of one feline specimen: “for the divine spirit comes about his body to sustain it in complete cat” (l. 744), to sustain it as “an embodied soul,” that is. for all the above, smart’s attitude to his cat comes across as largely instrumental. beyond doubt, the poet sees a link between pet keeping and poetic creation: “for he is good to think on, if a man would express himself neatly” (l. 757). this is what smart needs his cat jeoffry for: jeoffry’s rhetorically inspiring presence is his unpaid occupation (fudge, “animal lives” 23). but the pet cat is not simply a source of poetic inspiration; he is also “an instrument for the children to learn benevolence upon” (l. 729). “every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit” (l. 730), the combination of the pronoun “him” with the overgeneralized “every house” suggesting (it would seem) a somewhat essentialized notion of “english cats … the best in europe” (l. 733). the above implies that, in his pethood, smart’s cat jeoffry is at once typical and atypical. in england, the eighteenth century saw a rapidly growing popularity — and population — of domestic animals, mainly dogs and cats, kept for companionship and pleasure.14 in the early 1700s, keeping pet animals was generally condemned as an extravagant luxury, but with the increasing affluence of the british society as the magdalena ożarska -what if christopher smart’s cat responded? 43 century progressed, it was gradually coming to be perceived as proof of an individual’s “moral virtue” (tague, “animal companions” 2). it should therefore come as no surprise that this evolving phenomenon was reflected in eighteenth-century poetry, with “an increasing emphasis on the individual animals themselves, not just on the universal virtues and morals they were believed to exemplify” (tague, “dead pets” 290). earlier didacticism was thus slowly giving way to affectionate and sentimentalized attitudes,15 which were only becoming possible due to new economic, consumerist, and domestic phenomena (tague, “animal companions”). for felines, however, this newly emerging perception as recipients of care and affection was hardly the norm in smart’s day. the species was still burdened with the legacy of the middle ages, which had viewed them as demonic, not only because of their aloof and independent disposition, but also due to their mesmerizing eyes, whose retinas shone with reflected light, bringing to mind supernatural powers of darkness (masson; thomas). low culture and folklore consistently linked cats with female sexuality, hence the view that cats are transgressive creatures threatening the male-instituted world order, or as living paraphernalia of witchcraft (blaisdell 221; kete 119; irvine 7; kalof 113). for the feline species, indeed, the pre-enlightenment was a dark period in their “itstory”: it was only with the coming of the age of reason that their “reduction to the status of ‘it’” was gradually beginning to shift (fudge, “what was it like”).16 but, on the whole, in the mid-eighteenth-century companion cats were a luxury to be afforded only by the well-off because, in economic terms, they were unproductive — unless their rodent-catching skills were counted (tague, “dead pets”).17 in smart’s day, as before, many of jeoffry’s feline contemporaries did not fare well: “untold numbers of cats were tortured … — tied up in bags, hung from may poles, suspended from ropes, burned at the stake, chased flaming through the streets and incinerated by the sackload” (kalof 112; thomas). it was not until charles darwin’s publication of on the origin of species (1859) and the descent of man (1871) that the neo-platonic idea that humans were higher than animals finally began to shift. consequently, an understanding that humans and non-humans alike were to be contained in “the same category: animals” at last began to take firmer hold (demello 41). this turn in the perception of animals had taken a couple of centuries, though. it was descartes with his discourse on the method (1637) and his “beast-machine hypothesis” (fudge, brutal reasoning 1) that came successfully to influence the european ways of looking at animals for a couple of centuries. descartes “tied the pair [i.e. humans and animals] in a lasting knot of adverse definition” and “relapsed [them] to a categorical alterity at odds with the genealogical commons established in evolutionary theory” (shannon 2). this was a marked contrast to the views that came before him: the classical take on natural history and the biblical humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 44 genesis with its seven-day creation story, both in a sense anticipating darwinism with their stress on the shared origins of humans and non-humans (2). in the eighteenth century, the rational-minded times in which christopher smart lived and composed his poetry, a popular view was the one expressed by alexander pope in his 1733-1734 essay on man, which attempted to situate humans somewhere between angels and beasts in the neo-platonic chain of being. little stress was placed on the inferiority of the “beasts”: the focus was rather on the difference between the human and the nonhuman. but smart mentions neither descartes nor montaigne in his jubilate agno, while ready to name large numbers of scholars and philosophers of his day and of the past. if smart had chosen to analyze his relationship with jeoffry in greater detail, he would probably have found it difficult, if not impossible, to assume any other stance than that of a first-person gazer at his companion animal, reducing jeoffry to a mere third-person: “for i bless the name of the lord jesus that jeoffry is better” (l. 743, my emphasis). a modern french philosopher and ethologist (i.e. researcher in animal behavior), dominique lestel, has offered the idea that in order to comprehend a human’s relationship with a non-human animal, the human needs to “think hairy,”18 i.e., to adopt a second-person perspective, reflecting the emergence of both selves in a mutual relationship. this perspective, lestel claims, enables going beyond the still valid popular perceptions of animality, i.e., zoological objectification and ethical sympathy (19). “i can only understand an animal when i think how the animal thinks about me as it becomes an extension of me through the opportunity of being its extension which it grants me. ‘thinking hairy’ … constitutes myself: this concept is central” (20). thus conceived, being human and being non-human both become relational and unfixed. to understand a non-human animal and take it for what it is, all it takes is to adopt a “you” perspective, with the animal as a first-person subject viewed from one’s own firstperson vantage point (20-21), preferably without “an ethologist’s intentness” like smart’s (miller 103). to qualify for “thinking hairy,” the human focus ought to be on non-human corporeality, and not “the world of eternal beings” (lestel 33). hence, if this view is adopted cat jeoffry’s hairiness, and not alleged spirituality, should be in focus. “thinking hairy,” lestel concludes, “is the ability to think oneself not through one’s body, or even though the human body in general, but through ‘self-embodiment’ of the animal, opening up to the animal body” (33). from this, it is a short way to allowing oneself to believe that the “animal responded” (derrida, “and say”). smart, it would seem, is just beginning to travel along this path, having experienced a fleeting secondperson moment of the rat-bite anxiety in his personal relationship with cat jeoffry. magdalena ożarska -what if christopher smart’s cat responded? 45 because smart’s cat is to the poet more than a pet or a slave to his master, his is a personal presence, which is why i propose to talk about cat jeoffry’s pet-personhood, and not simply pethood. today, extending the notion of personhood beyond the homo sapiens no longer surprises (degrazia), and indeed seems well-fitted for the case at issue. cat jeoffry’s othering appears almost marginal as smarto-anthropocentrism comes to the fore. the actual contact zone (to use mary louise pratt’s imperial terminology) between smart the human and jeoffry the feline is enabled by a requisite measure of colonization (in this case, domestication), but it seems that this imbalanced power relation is of secondary importance here. we have seen smart try to adopt a second-person lens to parallel the separate and almost equal identities of both selves in a mutual relationship, even if only occasionally. and yes, there is palpable evidence of smart’s “thinking hairy”: he achieves an insight into the divine through the literal stroking of cat jeoffry’s hair, which resonates not only with jeoffry’s alleged spirituality, but primarily with his tangible corporeality and fascinating likeness celebrated through the cat’s downplayed otherness. in conclusion, the above discussion has demonstrated that, to smart, jeoffry is a combination of coetzee’s “embodied soul” (complete with a christian name, personhood, and an almost human gaze, sufficient to embarrass a human theoretically placed above the animal in the chain of being and the hierarchy of god’s creation) with lestel’s concept of hairy corporeality. the “cat jeoffry” section of smart’s jubilate agno is not a polyphonic dialogue between representatives of two dissimilar species, even though this may be suggested by a superficial reading. in fact, the cat’s gaze serves to reflect the human’s own inadequacy, temporarily shifting the pet animal status from that of the slave to that of the master. this fact, embarrassing to the poet, is not easily disclosed — it is a naked truth that struggles to come through the poet’s quill, one that finally makes it into the outside world. jeoffry is thus the other proper no longer: his eyes are not only seen, but also seeing. and that is precisely one of the cat’s ways to respond: between his body language and feline sounds, his is both a hairy and an embodied soul. notes 1. in the lives of animals (1999), j. m. coetzee has his character elizabeth costello say the following in a lecture: to be alive is to be a living soul. an animal — and we are all animals — is an embodied soul. this is precisely what descartes saw and, for his own humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 46 reasons, chose to deny. an animal lives, said descartes, as a machine lives. an animal is no more than the mechanism that constitutes it; if it has a soul, it has one in the same way that a machine has a battery, to give it the spark that gets it going; but the animal is not an embodied soul. (coetzee 33) 2. referring to cat/dog owners/guardians as cat/dog parents/moms/dads, and to pet cats/dogs as fur children, is today’s common idiom used on pet keepers’ websites, such as catster.com or dogster.com. i thank sirpa leppänen for bringing these aspects of contemporary life-writing activity to my attention in her presentation on dog blogs as ventriloquy: what dogs tell about women’s domestic identity projects at the international auto/biography association’s 2011 european conference in tallinn, estonia. 3. the parallel between later eighteenthand nineteenth-century pets and ladies of leisure is indeed conspicuous: both were to be prettily useless and extravagantly ornamental, fulfilling the role of status symbols (tague, “dead pets”; jordan). 4. all quotations from jubilate agno come from bond’s edition of jubilate agno, and will be denoted by line number(s) only. 5. not all cases are as unambiguous as those of the dog or the cat: the rabbit is a rather problematic case in point (demello 10, 44-46; fudge, animal 38). 6. relevant still are those questions which, on a more universal note, fudge has asked: is a pet an animal? this might sound like a rather odd question, but it is one that is worth asking. a pet, simply put, is an animal who enters our (human) domestic space. it is different from other — non-tame or wild — animals, because it lives with us in our homes. on this basis, it is possible to see pets as making up a different class of creature. they are both human and animal; they live with us, but are not us; they have names like us, but cannot call us by our names. (fudge, animal 27) magdalena ożarska -what if christopher smart’s cat responded? 47 7. on a large scale, this has been observed since the victorian period, and frequently linked with social exclusion, like that of spinsters who lavished all their affections on their pet animals (flegel). 8. two queries, posted on researchgate and academia.edu websites, both with large populations of has scholars, returned no satisfactory results. neither did a discussion on h-animal humanities and social sciences network (february 1-29, 2016). 9. an epitaph for hodge was written by a minor poet, percival stockdale, and published in 1778. 10. both, as coghen explains (112-113), were names of heroines in popular contemporary tragedies: aaron hill’s 1736 english translation of voltaire’s zaireas zara: a tragedy, and nicholas rowe’s 1702 tamerlane. 11. who was “ordain'd to mouse in academic bowers” of oxford. 12. according to the oed, in the mid-eighteenth century “bully” was a term of endearment similar to today’s “sweetheart” or “darling.” 13. this is also a matter of speculation in sam sackett’s entirely fictional prose piece, “asher chomski” (113). 14. in the final decade of the eighteenth century, ownership of one dog per family was exempt from tax (olsen 32-33), which is taken to reflect the contemporary vogue for pet keeping. 15. these attitudes still persist. as deleuze and guattari tell us, there are three modes of relating to animals. one is the individuated, sentimentalized, affectionate view of what they call the oedipal animal, i.e., a pet. the other two are the jungian or archetypal animal as found in myths and ancient cultures all over the world, and finally the daemonic animal, one that is forever evolving and thus impossible to capture at any particular moment in time — as close to deleuze and guattari’s concept of “becominganimal” as can be (240-241). 16. there is, however, evidence of at least one mid-seventeenth-century cat owner making a door hole for his cats to be able to enjoy the freedom of walking in and out of the house (thomas 96). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 48 17. thomas tells us that appreciation for these particular skills can be documented since at least the tenth century, while earliest written records of human affection for cats in the british isles date back to the ninth century (95). 18. all quotations from dominique lestel are in my translation. works cited blaisdell, john d. “a most convenient relationship: the rise of the cat as a valued companion animal.” between the species: an online journal for the study of philosophy and animals 9.4 (1993): 217-30. berglund, lisa. “oysters for hodge, or, ordering society, writing biography and feeding the cat.” journal for eighteenth-century studies 33.4 (2010): 631-645. bond, w. h., ed. christopher smart: jubilate agno. london: rupert hart-davis, 1954. boswell, james. the life of samuel johnson. ed. christopher hibbert. new york: penguin classics, 1986. coetzee, j. m. the lives of animals. ed. and intro. amy gutman. princeton: princeton up, 1999. coghen, monika. 2012. “‘for he is a mixture of gravity and waggery’: cats in eighteenth-century british poetry.” poetry and its language: papers in honour of teresa bela, eds. marta gibińska and władysław witalisz, vol. 5 of text — meaning — context: cracow studies in english language, literature and culture. frankfurt am main, berlin, bern: peter lang. 111-120. degrazia, david. “on the question of personhood beyond homo sapiens.” in defense of animals: the second wave, ed. peter singer. oxford: blackwell, 2006. 40-53. deleuze, gilles, and felix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. transl. brian massumi. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1987. demello, margo. animals and society: an introduction to human-animal studies. new york: columbia up, 2012. magdalena ożarska -what if christopher smart’s cat responded? 49 derrida, jacques. “and say the animal responded?” zoontologies: the question of the animal, ed. cary wolfe. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2003. 121-146. _____. “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” transl. david wills. critical inquiry 28.2 (winter, 2002): 369-418. ennis, daniel j. “christopher smart's cat revisited: jubilate agno and the ‘ars poetica’ tradition.” south atlantic review 65.1 (2000): 1-23. flegel, monica. pets and domesticity in victorian literature: animality, queer relations, and the victorian family. new york: routledge, 2015. fudge, erica. animal. london: reaktion books, 2002. _____. “animal lives.” history today 54.10 (2004): 21-26. _____. brutal reasoning: animals, rationality and humanity in early modern england. ithaca: cornell up, 2006. _____. “what was it like to be a cow?: history and animal studies.” the oxford handbook of animal studies, ed. linda kalof. 2014. doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199927142.013.28. greene, d. j. “smart, berkeley, the scientists and the poets.” journal of the history of ideas 14.3 (1953): 327-352. hartman, geoffrey h. “christopher smart's magnificat: toward a theory of representation. ” elh 41.31(974): 429-454. hawes, clement. mania and literary style: the rhetoric of enthusiasm from the ranters to christopher smart. cambridge: cambridge up, 1996. irvine, leslie. “pampered or enslaved? the moral dilemmas of pets.” international journal of sociology and social policy 24.9 (2004): 5-17. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 50 jordan, sarah. “idleness, class and gender in the long eighteenth century.” idleness, indolence and leisure in english literature, eds. monika fludernik and miriam nandi. houndmills: palgrave, 2014. 107-128. kalof, linda. looking at animals in human history. london: reaktion books, 2007. kaul, suvir. “why selima drowns: thomas gray and the domestication of the imperial ideal.” pmla 105.2 (1990): 223-232. kenyon jones, christine mary. “kindred brutes”: approaches to animals in romanticperiod writing, with special reference to byron. ph.d. thesis, king’s college london, university of london, 1999. kete, kathleen. the beast in the boudouir: pet keeping in nineteenth-century paris. berkeley: u of california p, 1994. lestel, dominique. “myśleć sierścią. zwierzęcość w perspektywie drugoosobowej” [“to think hairy: animality from the point of view of the second person”]. zwierzęta i ich ludzie. zmierzch antropocentrycznego paradygmatu [animals and their people: the twilight of the anthropocentric paradigm], eds. anna barcz, dorota łagodzka. warszawa: wydawnictwo ibl pan, 2015. 17-33. masson, jeffrey moussaieff. the nine emotional lives of cats: a journey into the feline heart. new york: ballantine books, 2002. miller, eric. “taxonomy and confession in christopher smart and jean-jacques rousseau.” christopher smart and the enlightenment, ed. clement hawes. new york: st. martin’s, 1999. 99-118. olsen, kirstin. daily life in eighteenth-century england. westport, cn; greenwood press, 1999. oxford english dictionary (oed) on cd-rom, version 1.02. oxford: oxford university press and rotterdam: and software bv, 1992. ożarska, magdalena. meanderings of the english enlightenment: the literary oeuvre of christopher smart. kielce: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu humanistyczno-przyrodniczego jana kochanowskiego, 2008. magdalena ożarska -what if christopher smart’s cat responded? 51 _____.“the presentation and uses of cats’ images in some eighteenth-century poems.” the evidence of literature: interrogating texts in english studies, eds. sven-johan spånberg, henryk kardela, gerard porter. lublin: wydawnictwo uniwersytetu marii curie-skłodowskiej, umeå: university of umeå, 2000. 181-191. _____.“the presentation of the animal sphere in christopher smart’s jubilate agno.” lubelskie materiały neofilologiczne 2 (2002): 63-73. perkins, david. romanticism and animal rights 1790-1830. cambridge: cambridge up, 2003. pratt, mary louise. imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation. london: routledge, 1992. rizzo, betty w. “christopher smart's ‘chaucerian’ poems.” library s5-28.2 (1973): 124130. sackett, sam. “asher chomski.” chamberlain stories. bangkok: books mango, 2012. 110120. salisbury, joyce e. the beast within: animals in the middle ages. new york: routledge, 1994. serpell, james a. “people in disguise: anthropomorphism and the human-pet relationship.” thinking with animals: new perspectives on anthropomorphism, eds. lorraine daston and gregg mitman. new york: columbia up, 2005. 121-136. shannon, laurie. the accommodated animal: cosmopolity in shakespearean locales. chicago: u of chicago p, 2013. shell, marc. “the family pet.” representations 15 (1986): 121-153. tague, ingrid h. animal companions: pets and social change in eighteenth-century britain. university park, pa: pennsylvania state up, 2015. tague, ingrid h. “dead pets: satire and sentiment in british elegies and epitaphs for animals.” eighteenth-century studies 41.3 (2008): 289-306. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 52 thomas, richard. “perceptions versus reality: changing attitudes towards pets in medieval and post-medieval england.” just skin and bones? new perspectives on humananimal relations in the historic past. bar international series 1410, ed. aleksander pluskowski. oxford: archaeopress, 2005: 95-105. tuan, yi-fu. dominance and affection: the making of pets. new haven, cn.: yale up, 1984. weil, kari. thinking animals: why animal studies now? new york: columbia up, 2012. microsoft word mccormack-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 11:1 brian mccormack narrative, meaning and multispecies ethical ontologies introduction. critical posthumanism, by problematizing the notion of a strict binary division between human and nonhuman, throws into question a great deal of assumptions about both human and nonhuman animal meaningful experience. meaning is a concept traditionally — in cartesian metaphysics, for example — thought to mark the emergence of the human from the nonhuman.1 although few theorists today would subscribe to his metaphysics explicitly, descartes’s substance dualism plays a formative role in conceptualizations of human/nonhuman distinction. the reflexive ability to think about one’s thoughts, via language, purportedly allows for the kind of abstract thinking that engenders autonomous human decision-making. as a thinking being able to place oneself at a distance from the compulsions of the body, the emotions, and the immediate environment, the human is said to be free to act in accordance with rational thought. this relationship between thought, language, and autonomous action is deemed constitutive of the human and set off against a deterministic, mechanistic, uncomprehending, and ultimately meaningless nature. critical posthumanism troubles both sides of this binary, questioning the rational and autonomous image of the human while arguing that plenty of nonhuman animals experience their lives in ways that are meaningful for them.2 to say that meaningmaking is ubiquitous far beyond the human makes a concept of meaning highly relevant to formulations of multispecies ethical relationships. an analogous extension of the concept of narrative, however, might seem too highly suggestive of a uniquely human linguistic ability, or a uniquely human capability for complex symbolic thought, to do much work for multispecies ethics.3 a notion of nonhuman animal narrative subjectivity seems inextricable from charges of anthropomorphism, inaccuracy, and misrepresentation. if such a conceptualization of narrative cannot address these critical concerns, it may ultimately undermine its own potential ethical utility, serving not only to make nonhuman animals too human-like, but also diverting attention away from species-specific forms of meaning-making and the ethical implications they hold. yet claiming narrative as a constitutively human capability implies a further claim about human identity that must, in light of contemporary critiques of humanism, be placed under critical scrutiny. trying to isolate the purely human in relation to the concept of narrative leads to a number of complex and compounding questions from a critical posthumanist perspective: do nonhuman animals narrate? or is narrative perhaps better described as something humans do brian mccormack -narrative, meaning and multispecies ethical ontologies 65 which has analogues in the meaning-making practices of other species? what difference does a notion of narrative make that a carefully theorized concept of meaning-making does not? what kind of relationship between human and nonhuman does one’s concept of narrative reflect? how do humanistic, artistic, and scientific forms of knowledge and their disciplinary mixtures, blind spots, and overlaps get mobilized or elided in these debates? what happens when concerns for precision and accuracy in the portrayal and understanding of nonhuman lives clash with ethical strategies desperately needed to counter ongoing, intensifying crises of ecological devastation, nonhuman animal suffering, and mass extinction? the first part of this essay brings together some important reflections on nonhuman animal narrative from within recent environmental humanities scholarship that work to reposition the concept of narrative in relation to an ontology that moves beyond human/nonhuman and nature/culture dualisms. perhaps the most important articulation of such an ontology for a concept of nonhuman animal narrative is that offered by val plumwood. efforts to reposition the concept of narrative following plumwood also draw heavily on jakob von uexküll’s theoretical biology and his understanding of meaning-making processes. i draw out and develop some key points of connection between nonhuman animal narrative and an uexküllian concept of meaning in more detail than has been done so far. attempts to extend a notion of narrative beyond the human raise difficult questions of representational accuracy. to address these questions, i turn in the second part of the essay to recent narratological literature on nonhuman animal narrative, drawing mainly on david herman’s efforts to outline a narratology beyond the human. herman’s investigations lead from considerations of representation in fiction to animal agents in life writing and beyond, contextualizing the question of nonhuman animal narrative in relation to plumwood’s dialogical ontology and uexküll’s umwelt theory. plumwood and herman show how articulating a cultural ontology that recognizes the human as part of a broader ecology of selves entails careful experimentation with forms of narrative beyond the human. dialogical ethical ontology, meaning, and narrative beyond the human. in her essay “nature in the active voice,” val plumwood argues that overcoming cartesian dualism means re-animating matter by embracing a view of the natural world as creative and agentic: “in re-animating, we become open to hearing sound as voice, seeing movement as action, adaptation as intelligence and dialogue, co-incidence and chaos as the creativity of matter. the difference here is intentionality, the ability to use an intentional vocabulary. above all, it is permission to depict nature in the active voice, the domain of agency” (125-126). describing intentionality beyond the human means extending and in some cases reconceptualizing key terms such as meaning and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 66 agency, and it is in this context that plumwood also mentions narrative: “we need to rethink concepts of meaning and accident in relation to the non-human world, and to question the reductive and human-centered frameworks that depict places in nature, often rich in narrative, as the product of meaningless coincidence” (124). plumwood’s critique of cartesian dualism, as well as her call to conceptualize forms of cognition and communication beyond the human, echo insights put forth by uexküll nearly a century ago, when he argued forcefully against the cartesian paradigm in biology. in this section i describe how some of uexküll’s key ideas — his critical account of the influence of cartesian dualism in biology, his umwelt concept, the complex play of openness and opacity characterizing organismic relations, and his dynamic view of meaning-making — provide support for or otherwise resonate with plumwood’s approach. modern science, from uexküll’s perspective, marginalizes certain kinds of meaningful experience, particularly those which have a corporeal dimension, and posits far too absolute a distinction between human and nonhuman. uexküll’s theory of umwelten is meant to counter the tendency to place organisms within a cartesian spatial grid, a single world perceived the same way by all. uexküll saw this tendency as an anthropocentric residue caused by inappropriately applying models from physics to biology (“an introduction” 109). humans under the influence of cartesian thought disarticulate space from their bodies. rather than space being something that is experienced dynamically and bodily, cartesian thought imposes an impersonal understanding of space, stretching out in all directions and decentered from an experiencing subject. objects in cartesian space are to be comprehended primarily in terms of their extension, and all other qualities, now deemed secondary, are treated with suspicion due to their association with unreliable sensory experience. this way of describing phenomena is fine for physics, uexküll argues, but it is absolutely wrong for biology because it excludes from the beginning the entire perceptual side of life, which should constitute virtually the whole of biology’s subject matter: “the consequence of this was that scientists began to deal with the world in the way a deaf person deals with a street organ. the turning of the roller, the vibration of the tongues and the aerial waves, these things he can establish — but the tune stays hidden from him” (“the new concept” 114). uexküll wants to shift the inquiry into life away from a perspective that emphasizes outside forces acting on matter to elicit a reaction. for him, biology should be the science which asks how organisms perceive and respond to the world as it exists for them: “every animal is surrounded with different things, the dog is surrounded by dog things and the dragonfly is surrounded by dragonfly things” (117). such a view is incompatible with cartesian metaphysics, which conceives of human/nonhuman brian mccormack -narrative, meaning and multispecies ethical ontologies 67 distinction as an absolute difference between two fundamental types of substance. for descartes, everything on earth with the exception of the human mind is made up of the same inert matter, whose fundamental quality is extension in space. human minds, in contrast, are neither inert nor extended in space. human thought is alone among worldly phenomena in that it has the capacity to act without first being acted upon. nonhuman animals, from this perspective, would lack any subjective dimension capable of anchoring agency. uexküll argues that such dualist, mechanistic accounts of behavior should be replaced by laws analogous to those governing melody, harmony, and counterpoint in music. each organism has its own umwelt, akin to a space or stage on which a life is played out (a foray 144). it is built up by the sense organs, which help set the dimensions of this stage. uexküll describes the umwelt of an organism as being like a soap bubble that perpetually surrounds it. the soap bubble has a double significance, as brett buchanan explains (23). on one hand, it delimits the boundaries of a given organism’s umwelt — it constitutes the world as that organism perceives and lives it. on the other hand, it represents a boundary for the observer: it is a reminder that an organism’s perceptual world is never entirely available for inspection. yet most organisms are also imbricated in complex relationships with an environment and with other organisms throughout their lives. as much as the concept of umwelt implies enclosure of an organism in its own meaningful world, it also implies that those worlds consist of meaningful relationships. uexküll’s writings suggest that meaning must be understood in terms of relations among organisms within specific ecological contexts. uexküll defines behavior as a combination of perception (merken) and action (wirken) that can only be comprehended by understanding the role of meaning in living systems as what ties perception and action together. he argues that perception and action are connected in a kind of feedback loop called the functional cycle: “in every functional cycle, the same perception-effect process is repeated. indeed, one can speak of functional cycles as meaning cycles whose task is determined to be the utilization of carriers of meaning” (a foray 150). as an organism gains experience in their umwelt, the resources they are able to bring to new experiences are affected accordingly: “since every action begins with the production of a perception mark and ends with the impression of an effect mark on the same carrier of meaning, one can speak of a functional cycle, which connects the carrier of meaning with the subject” (145). the umwelt conveys the idea that the world as experienced from the point of view of the organism depends overwhelmingly on that organism’s physiology and what that physiology allows for. every species gathers, unifies, and engages with stimuli in their own species-specific ways. this process engenders a wide variety of umwelten, ranging from a single functional cycle processing only one stimulus to a multitude of interweaving functional cycles. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 68 every organism has its umwelt, yet the shape or style of each umwelt can vary dramatically among species, and in many cases among individuals. how can such dramatic variation be expressed within the common conceptual space of the umwelt? according to uexküll, an organism’s behavior is directed by what can become meaningful for them. meaning depends on physiology, personal history, and relations with other organisms and objects in the wider environment. meaningful experience only makes sense within this self-relational context, which would seem to make hierarchical divisions among forms of life suspiciously abstract. there does not seem to be any common ground between two umwelten that could be isolated or decontextualized in order to serve as a basis for ranking behaviors or capabilities. uexküll illustrates this incommensurability by contrasting how a human and their dog companion both relate to their shared home. if you saw your home and the objects it contains from your dog companion’s perspective, you would most likely conclude that this is an incomplete description of your house, because a dog’s experience of what is significant would omit too many things that have significance in the house for a human. uexküll points out that a human’s description of a forest would also be likely to leave out most of what is significant in the forest for other organisms. uexküll does not say this, but it is implicit that a dog who lives in a house with humans would also have a perspective on the house that would not be exhaustively describable from a human point of view. a dog who makes themselves at home in a human house would have their own familiar objects, routines, affective attachments and ways of orienting themselves within that space. to place the differences in meaningful relations formed within the house by a human and a dog into some kind of more/less hierarchical order, therefore, would be to ignore crucial self-referential, corporeal, and experiential dimensions of meaning. human language in particular and human meaning-making in general are often described as unique in that they allow access to more of the great many different sorts of phenomena which can be experienced. human meaning-making enables perhaps more features of phenomena, more connections among these phenomena, and more variable responses than the meaning-making systems of other animals. the perceived differences in scale that separate human and nonhuman meaning-making can make any comparability between human and nonhuman experience seem marginal and misleading. narrative can be difficult to accept beyond the human, since it is so clearly bound up with forms of language, memory, and cultural tradition that appear indelibly human. however, beyond this radical, linguistically mediated expansion of meaning-making that purportedly distinguishes the human, a facility with meaning-making often described somewhat vaguely as “richness,” uexküll suggests that what are common among forms of life are self brian mccormack -narrative, meaning and multispecies ethical ontologies 69 referential, dynamic, relational processes that ground and give rise to diverse forms or styles of meaning-making. paying close attention to these fundamental, general, and widespread aspects of meaning helps to enable a different ontological view of human/nonhuman animal similarity and difference than one informed by cartesian dualism. this ontological shift allows for a different perspective on the concept of narrative. uexküll suggests that what affects an organism and what that organism affects are entangled, and taking this entanglement seriously is instructive. individuals are never fully separable from the relationships in which they participate. rigidly demarcating perception from action or stimulus from response, while often analytically necessary, is always at least partially reductive, de-contextualizing, and incomplete. uexküll suggests that the problem of meaning is not adequately conceived as a question of how a stimulus might impinge upon the senses of an organism. this way of framing the problem cuts off much of the context in which lived experience unfolds. it creates the illusion that an organism can ever encounter an object in isolation or in a neutral, unmotivated state. a stimulus does not dictate an organism’s behavior in most cases. stimuli must be noticed, they are often sought out, and organisms must respond to or interpret them in some way. precisely what it means to notice or interpret a stimulus varies from organism to organism, and in many cases how a stimulus is received depends on what other activities the organism is engaged in. the organism/environment relationship is more sophisticated and deserves richer descriptions than strict mechanism and linear causality can provide. the organism/environment relation is best described in dynamic terms: “every subject spins out, like the spider’s threads, its relations to certain qualities of things and weaves them into a solid web, which carries its existence” (a foray 53). each organism comprises a series of dynamic relations with those aspects of the external world that are meaningful for them. an organism can survive as long as these relations continue to be made successfully. differences among organisms amount to variations on the kinds of relational threads that continually connect self and non-self. one of the most important of these relational threads in which meaning-making is situated is an organism’s relationship to its past and future. what processes are already underway that might condition or color an encounter between organism and environment? uexküll argues that organisms do not encounter objects in a contextual void, as if there were no dynamic, complex web of relationships — to self and the body, to relevant environmental features, to past experience and future needs — through which the same object may be experienced in many different ways. uexküll gives the example of a hermit crab reacting to the presence of a sea anemone (a foray 95). the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 70 crab will behave toward the sea anemone differently, according to what needs are most pressing for the crab. the pressing needs come first, in other words, not the anemone. those needs are a relation to future behavior that drives present action. the present action is likewise informed by the recent past (whether the crab has eaten recently, for example). these relations to external phenomena emerge, in turn, from a dynamic of self-relation. humberto maturana and francisco varela, in their collaborative endeavours to develop the concept of autopoiesis, see living as a process in which organisms are unified sets of relations engaged in the act of re-creating their own components (autopoeisis; tree). autopoiesis is the dynamic process of self-maintenance by way of self-creation that gives an organism autonomy as a unified whole, and which also gives it autonomy from any deterministic, passive relation to an outside environment. in the process of autopoiesis, organism and environment are both in constant states of transformation. meaning arises within such a self-relational context. a living system is an ongoing process that, by maintaining its organizing relations, constantly alters its structure. it is a dynamic construction of the relation between inside and outside which, through its relationship to itself, provides a context within which the world becomes accessible. this relation is a dynamic rather than static structural understanding of an organism. an organism can also be conceived in terms of multiple, ephemeral selves at different levels of biological organization, as biosemiotician jesper hoffmeyer explains (26). self-relation does not occur only at the level of the holistic organism. an organism is an ongoing production of self comprised of other selves. the term “self” points to this dynamic relationship, which need not entail consciousness in any straightforward or familiar sense of that term. what is categorized as human consciousness is one self-relational process among others that together comprise human meaningful experience. whether or not other organisms have analogous processes to human consciousness should not be the only basis for thinking selfhood. i refer to an uexküllian notion of meaning as process-based because for uexküll meaning emerges via dynamic, temporal, context-specific, self-referential, recursive, relational processes. because these relational processes may manifest in radically different ways across species, an ethical theory that takes them into account must focus on developing open-ended, communicative, and context-sensitive conceptual frameworks capable of promoting care across particularity and difference. plumwood argues that philosophers have for the most part neglected specific ethical relationships between humans and nonhumans, limiting themselves to debating the applicability of abstract concepts such as intrinsic value and moral considerability. as a result, they avoid the task of developing an adequate ethical response to the nonhuman world. responding adequately to the nonhuman, plumwood argues, means developing brian mccormack -narrative, meaning and multispecies ethical ontologies 71 communicative ethical frameworks that include them as participants. it means articulating alternative notions of human virtue that motivate us to care for nonhumans as subjects. these alternative virtues can be sought, she argues, by developing a dialogical ethical ontology that enables richer, less reductive ways of individuating, configuring, and describing the world. openness and attention are stances that underly “dialogical and communicative relationships of sensitivity, negotiation and mutual adaptation of the sort we need in the context of the environmental crisis” (environmental culture 169-170). one of the aims of a dialogical ethical ontology is to counter arbitrary species value hierarchies. interspecies equality in morally relevant categories can be expressed in terms of sameness or identity, but it can also be formulated in terms of difference. sameness, plumwood argues, is too simplistic because it is too reductive. equality grounded in difference, however, can lead productively to a notion of incommensurability or non-ranking. interspecies equality, if it is grounded in difference, can be a way of showing the inadequacy of hierarchy: “between beings with very different and only intersecting capacities, ranking is not possible in any accurate or meaningful way” (173).4 non-ranking is a meta-ethical principle that minimizes hierarchical thinking and approaches cross-species conflict in context rather than falling back on general principles that purport to class beings into the categories of valuable and expendable (174). uexküll’s concept of the umwelt, by articulating a species-specific notion of meaning-making irreducible to a single standard which could be abstracted in order to serve as a measuring stick for comparing disparate forms of cognition, helps to show the inadequacy of hierarchical thinking and serves as a starting point for conceptualizing affinity across difference. plumwood offers a pathway for thinking affinity across difference by arguing for a post-cartesian concept of mind grounded in something other than human-like consciousness: “a post-cartesian reconstruction of mind that emphasizes intentionality, for example, could enable us to extend our recognition of mind-like qualities much more widely into the world and give better recognition to radical difference” (environmental culture 176). for plumwood, extended formulations of intentionality and mind comprise a counter-hegemonic practice of openness to agentic and dialogic potentialities beyond the human. part of such a practice involves describing nonhuman animal subjects as narrators. she calls this the intentional recognition stance: “being able to conceive others in intentional terms is important to being open to them as possible communicative, narrative and ethical subjects. extending intentionality to the nonhuman is crucial for extending to them a narrative conception of ethics” (177). intentional description is also characterized by plumwood as a way of moving away from eurocentric, colonialist aspects of anthropocentric humanism: “acknowledging the legitimacy of intentional modes of description of the non-human world is also humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 72 necessary if western philosophy is to avoid its implicit eurocentrism in dismissing as ’primitive’ or less than rational the non-western cultures that often frame the world in thoroughly intentional and expressly narrative, communicative and agentic terms” (178). thom van dooren and deborah bird rose credit uexküll with being one of the first systematic thinkers of what they refer to as nonhuman storying. uexküll’s understanding of animal worlds as subjective, meaningful “life stories” arising from complex feedback loops of perceptions and actions lays important groundwork for later ethological, philosophical, and biosemiotic, among other, research projects. narrative is what, for van dooren and rose, connects one event to another within a specific context that produces meaning: “the significance of narrative is in the meaning-making that connects the lives of living beings to the worlds they inhabit” (“storied-places” 4). at the same time, however, it is not at all clear whether uexküll himself or many of those theorists who take up his project in different ways would accept even a heavily qualified notion of nonhuman storying. van dooren and rose are, as they point out, taking this research in new directions. specifically, they extend plumwood’s dialogical ethical ontology by proposing a concept of nonhuman storying that incorporates key aspects of an uexküllian understanding of meaning. as van dooren and rose point out, narrative can facilitate and relate together radically different meaning-making practices: “unlike many other modes of giving an account, a story can allow multiple meanings to travel alongside one another; it can hold open possibilities and interpretations and can refuse the kind of closure that prevents others from speaking or becoming” (“lively ethography” 85). because stories are ongoing, revisable, and able to incorporate complexity, narrative forms are ideal for thinking multispecies community in shared, overlapping worlds. plumwood argues that intentionality and narrative are key aspects of an ethical approach sensitive to selves in context: “narrative ethics, supplying context and identity, can help us configure nature as a realm of others who are independent centres of value and need that demand from us ethical relationships and responses” (environmental culture 188). plumwood argues that narrative is important for constituting the moral identity of actors and actions.5 intentional description enables narrative, which provides context and reveals relationships. van dooren and rose follow plumwood in describing nonhuman animals as narrative subjects. they ask what a minimal notion of storying, capable of identifying a wide range of selves, might look like. importantly, they argue, a concept of storying need not include the capacity to tell stories to another, only the ability to construct a storied experience of the world brian mccormack -narrative, meaning and multispecies ethical ontologies 73 (“storied-places” 4). accounting for minimal storying would be a means of marking sites of meaningful experience. embodiment and memory are two essential aspects of meaning-making that form the basis of a concept of minimal storying. plumwood argues that embodied communication is one site from which meaning-making may be describable as narrative. embodied action and the ability to identify and respond to it constitute one crucial source of interspecies communication: “reading embodied action is part of all our lives, and is the common language of embodied beings” (environmental culture 192). embodied action must be approached in broad and open-ended terms with an eye toward countering biases in favor of human-like communication (193). joshua russell describes an embodied, communicative aspect of interspecies encounter that suggests the presence of narrative: “animal narrativity describes the qualitative, felt sense that stories are present in animal bodies, gestures and relationships. it also situates narrative within the more-than-human world, rather than categorizing it as a uniquely human characteristic” (“animal narrativity” 146). van dooren and rose propose a broad concept of story that “emerges out of an ability to engage with happening in the world as sequential and meaningful events” (“storied-places” 3). narrative does more than place events in chronological order; it forges meaningful relations among those events and situates them within a wider context. narrative is the term van dooren and rose use for describing both what connects events together and what distinguishes them as discreet: “the significance of narrative is in the meaningmaking that connects the lives of living beings to the worlds they inhabit” (4). memory can be intergenerational or genetic, it can condition or derive from lived experience, in some cases it can be communicated, and it is often bound up with future projection (13). identifying different forms of memory and attending to embodied communication are part of a practice of openness to forms of narrative beyond the human: “but living well with others can never be about just learning to tell new stories; it must also involve learning new kinds of attentiveness to the stories of others — even if they are unspoken or are told in other-than-human-languages” (flight ways 78). van dooren and rose pursue a narrative ethics by asking how different populations of animals understand, negotiate, value, and actively shape their places. they refer to these meaningful multispecies temporal and spatial relations as storied-places (“storied-places” 1). storied-places are sites of multispecies encounter. for a place to become a home, there must be successful negotiation amongst its denizens. storiedplaces, then, are also multiple overlapping and entangled meaning-making practices that range beyond the individual. van dooren and rose describe places as embedded in histories and systems of meaning. it is not that meaning is projected onto a landscape — meaning and matter are co-constitutive. other animals are often physically and conceptually de-contextualized from their places by humans, usually with disastrous humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 74 consequences. one way to place other animal lives more carefully into context is to find ways to understand them as forming meaningful relations with their places, and storying is one term that can convey these meaningful relations. van dooren and rose work through the concept of storied-places by focusing on the philopatric practices of little penguins and flying foxes near sydney. these distinct populations are not akin to collections of genetically driven machines operating in a neutral space: “as with the penguins, for whom a burrow is far more than habitat, flying foxes inhabit not just trees but worlds of meaning” (16). they situate their studies of little penguins and flying foxes in large urban settings. learning to co-exist in these places involves developing an ethic of conviviality that is adaptive and receptive: “conviviality thus requires that we make an effort toward inclusiveness, that we endeavor wherever possible to make room for that other in our activities in shared places” (17). the concept of storied-places serves to highlight the meaning-making practices that transform ecological settings into homes. storied-places divert thought away from a cartesian view that conceives the world as empty space populated by isolated individuals. to form ethical attachments to those nonhuman residents whose storied-places overlap with ours is to take account of their meaning-making practices and negotiate new, more amicable multispecies relationships. one of the aims of nonhuman animal narrative is to re-embed human meaning-making practices alongside those of other species. david herman’s expanded concept of narrative reframes storytelling and interpretation within a trans-species ecology of selves (narratology x). narrative is not, for herman, a uniquely human capability, and it can be geared toward indicating and mapping multispecies entanglements just as easily as it can help to deny them. drawing out this positive potential is a crucial component of the ethical task laid out by plumwood: “at issue is a culture that, through forms of imaginative writing as well as philosophical, political, jurisprudential, and other discourses, fosters, first, a process whereby humans come to recognize themselves as inextricably embedded in and dependent on more-than-human environments, and second, a process whereby other animals come to be recognized in turn as part of human culture(s)” (155). in narratology beyond the human, herman develops a crossdisciplinary approach incorporating narratology and cultural studies of animals and human-animal relationships. narratological concepts and analytic resources, he argues, have yet to be fully applied to animaland human-animal studies, while the study of human/nonhuman multispecies ecological and cultural entanglements holds the potential to reshape how the practice of narrative is understood. herman makes an instructive comparison between his project and recent work in anthropology which seeks to reposition the human subject within a wider ecological context.6 he pursues a brian mccormack -narrative, meaning and multispecies ethical ontologies 75 concept of narrative that is applicable beyond distinctively human experience: “this model resituates processes of storytelling and story interpretation, as well as the analytic frameworks that have been developed to study those processes, in a transspecies ecology of selves, marked by a prolific allocation of possibilities for subjective experience across species lines” (x). the next section examines the question of nonhuman animal narrative from the point of view of recent work in narratology. critics question attempts to represent nonhuman minds faithfully, stressing the inaccessibility of subjective experience to rigorous scientific study. they point out that disciplinary divisions engender very different standards when it comes to describing nonhuman animal minds. yet as herman points out, there is no easy way to draw lines separating what is and what is not an acceptable form of nonhuman animal narrative. narratology, nonhuman subjectivity, disciplinary divisions, and mental continuity. in his seminal essay “what is it like to be a bat?” thomas nagel argues that a first-person, phenomenological experiential perspective cannot be assimilated to a third-person, scientifically objective perspective. there will always be a remainder or gap between the two, and this gap increases exponentially when the experience in question belongs to a nonhuman animal. a bat’s experience is likely to be very far removed from that of a human, and the subjective qualities of bat experiences are almost entirely inaccessible to scientific methods, which means that there is no way to ensure that representations of them would be accurate. to pursue detailed accounts of nonhuman subjectivity that build on or otherwise complement plumwood’s pioneering work necessitates addressing and accounting for the partial opacity and inaccessibility of nonhuman experience. to be effective, representations of nonhuman minds must be carefully managed, contextualized, and qualified. despite these difficulties, representations of nonhuman animal experience can be powerful strategies for challenging anthropocentric cultural assumptions about species hierarchies, nonhuman agency, and human identity. as herman points out, literary animal stories are a crucial resource for challenging anthropocentric value hierarchies: “by modeling the richness and complexity of “what it is like” for nonhuman others, stories can underscore what is at stake in the trivialization — or outright destruction — of their experiences” (“storyworld/umwelt” 159). the same set of events in a storyworld7 can take on multiple and sometimes radically divergent experiential profiles for different agents (158). the tension between two different accounts of a nonhuman animal’s experience (as herman demonstrates, for example, in his analysis of the graphic novel laika) dramatizes the damage that is caused when a subject’s experiential perspective is undervalued or ignored. the representation of laika’s suffering from her perspective, juxtaposed with the way it is elided in other representational strategies placed within the same frame, helps to illustrate how taking meaningful experience seriously can humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 76 counter anthropocentric interspecies value hierarchies. herman introduces a sliding scale ranging from what he terms course-grained to fine-grained modes of representing experience. how subjects negotiate opportunities for action can be represented from outside their perspective (course-grained), or from within their perspective (finegrained). in examples like laika, it is the contrast between mind-ascribing and mindeliding modes, rather than the fidelity of the representations of laika’s experience, that performs the critical function. even in these cases, however, accuracy in representations of nonhuman minds matters. a highly implausible or extremely anthropomorphic representation of laika’s experience would not be as effective as one which takes into account the fact that she is a dog. to begin to address the issue of accuracy, herman maps a range of representational strategies employed in nonhuman animal narratives.8 the most anthropocentric end of the spectrum, which includes forms such as allegory, is a virtual mapping of human subjectivity onto the nonhuman animal. anthropomorphic projection is at the midpoint, characterized by the use of human language, facial features, and other anthropomorphic elements to convey nonhuman animal experience. what herman terms zoomorphic projection differs from anthropomorphic projection in that it uses human elements to draw analogies to convey “what it is like” for nonhuman experiencing subjects. anthropomorphic projection involves familiarizing the nonhuman, therefore, while zoomorphic projection more often employs the nonhuman in the task of defamiliarizing the human (“storyworld/umwelt” 174). the least anthropomorphic approach herman labels umwelt exploration. umwelt exploration draws on uexküll’s theoretical biology to develop methods for analyzing attempts to emulate how a particular animal engages with a surrounding world. herman’s invocation of the umwelt suggests that it matters who is and who is not a self. not all experiences are the same, and not all nonhuman animal narratives need be read as anthropomorphic projections of human subjectivity. herman suggests via his classificatory scheme that nonhuman animal narratives can be constructed with more or less attention and care to the specificities of species, even if they remain inevitably exploratory. in contrast to herman’s approach, bernaerts et al. conceptualize all forms of nonhuman narration in terms of a double dialectic of empathy and defamiliarization. for them, nonhuman narrators encourage readers to empathetically project human experience onto beings that are not expected to have such experiences. because they are not human, however, these nonhuman narrators serve to defamiliarize aspects of human experience: brian mccormack -narrative, meaning and multispecies ethical ontologies 77 what is often at stake in non-human narration is the ability to acknowledge similarity and otherness at the same time, to recognize the ratness of the rat, the monkeyness of the monkey and the humanness of the rat and the monkey as well as the ratness and the monkeyness of humans. in that way, stories narrated by non-human animals can destabilize anthropocentric ideologies. by giving a voice to non-human animals and facilitating empathy, these narratives can place them on a continuum with humans, rather than constructing them as opposites. (“the storied lives” 74) nonhuman narrators in this scheme would serve specific purposes such as satire, didactic functions including ethical lessons incorporating phenomenological “what it’s like” experiments, or strive to de-objectify inanimate objects in favor of animistic accounts of the world. however, empathy and defamiliarization, as bernaerts et al. describe them, are too general and too human-centered to comprise an analytic framework capable of accounting for the specific requirements of portraying the experience of another species. this becomes clear when they include inanimate objects together with nonhuman animals in their analyses. the authors do not ground empathy in encounters among distinct selves, but limit its scope to the projection of human-like qualities onto nonhumans, which makes it hard to understand such an empathetic relation as having the ethical force capable of overcoming dualism in favor of mental continuity among species alluded to in the above quote. according to bernaerts et al., nonhuman narrators “undermine the idea of a stable and unified human identity, and question the concept of humanity” (75). but if nonhuman animal narrative is only the projection of human experience onto nonhumans, then does it matter whether the projection captures something accurate about the other animal? it is difficult to see how a truly empathetic relation capable of putting into question both anthropocentric humanism and the dualism it maintains could arise solely from such a solipsistic practice of projection. as plumwood points out, empathy and the ethical frameworks it is bound up with are about dialogue and the recognition of relationships rather than projection: “i am not talking about inventing fairies at the bottom of the garden. it’s a matter of being open to experiences of nature as powerful, agentic and creative, making space in our culture for an animating sensibility and vocabulary” (“nature in the active voice” 126; emphasis in original). herman, following plumwood, argues that narrative can act as a bridge between human and nonhuman by figuring the umwelten of creatures different from ourselves. he claims further support for this position via enactive cognitive science, which humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 78 describes the mind as distributed across brain, body, and world. the enactive approach suggests that minds arise in the interplay between an intelligent agent and the world they inhabit (minds are not isolated interior or immaterial). as alva noë explains in out of our heads: “mind is life. if we want to understand the mind of an animal, we should look not only inward, to its physical, neurological constitution; we also need to pay attention to the animal’s manner of living, to the way it is wrapped up in its place” (noe 42).9 the enactivist model especially refrains from a simple description of the mind as what exists between perceptual inputs and behavioral outputs. enactivists do not posit firm divisions between action, perception, and cognition. herman describes how enactivist cognitive science accounts for the organism/environment nexus which grounds cognition and underlies both human and nonhuman meaningful experience: this synthesis of post-cartesian ideas of mind with ethological work provides grounds for pursuing research premised on the continuity rather than the discontinuity between human and nonhuman experiences. new questions for research, and new metrics of value, emerge when human as well as nonhuman experiences are grounded in agent-environment interactions; across species these interactions differ in quality but not in their basic structure. (“storyworld/umwelt” 163-164) the assertion of cross-species mental continuity does not itself ensure that a concept of narrative is an appropriate tool for mapping this continuity, however. for bernaerts et al. narrative can only raise, but not address, the problem of knowing “what it is like” to be another animal. for them, following nagel’s assertion of a gap between firstand thirdperson perspectives, there are important disciplinary constraints that prevent literary narratives from being acceptably rigorous sources of knowledge of nonhuman animals, because literature cannot lead to an “objective phenomenology” (“the storied lives” 76). their solution to this impasse is to point out that literature does not aim to do scientific description or to provide accurate representations of nonhuman minds. rather, literature works on the values and meanings embedded in human experience, keeping the question of other, nonhuman animal worlds suspended (76). nonhuman narratives, they argue, can only create the illusion of experiencing the world from another animal’s perspective. it is something that happens only inside the mind of the human reader, in other words. marco caracciolo further problematizes the idea that a literary narrative can faithfully represent a nonhuman animal mind, pointing out that any such attempt simultaneously exposes the limits of the human imagination. imagining the perspective of another brian mccormack -narrative, meaning and multispecies ethical ontologies 79 animal in a narrative may throw human assumptions about other animals off balance, but not without pointing to its own biases. there is thus a built-in limitation in nonhuman narrative practices. caracciolo contrasts representation of nonhuman minds in literary narratives with recent efforts to make phenomenology useful for cognitive science.10 these projects have very different goals, methods, and disciplinary constraints, and caracciolo argues that their differences have important implications for attempts to blend literary and scientific accounts. he cites herman’s use of uexküll in his description of the category of umwelt exploration as one problematic elision of this gap. although, as caracciolo acknowledges, scientific and literary accounts can influence each other (and in the case of uexküll’s a foray and many other examples, they blend together), the disciplinary differences between them matter: granted, literary (imaginary) accounts of animal umwelten may build on existing scientific knowledge, and they may serve a heuristic function in advancing it. this points to the feedback loop between literary and scientific explorations of mind, which herman himself has often productively highlighted. yet bringing to light this feedback loop should not lead to collapsing distinctions between a literary project and a more scientifically oriented phenomenology. (“three smells exist” 486) human experiences are difficult to describe in detail, caracciolo argues, but phenomenological methods have been refined to produce accounts of “what it is like” for humans to experience a wide range of phenomena. nonhuman experiences cannot be accounted for in the same way. we can only make very general descriptions that lack crucial yet inaccessible details. literary description can go far beyond reliable scientific description, but only because it is not subject to the same rigorous disciplinary constraints, and that is why it is not trustworthy. caracciolo argues that literary accounts build on presuppositions (they become plausible to the degree that they accord with beliefs about the world), while phenomenological description brackets them. realism in literary representation of nonhuman minds is achieved, he argues, via a three-step process: a literary representation must resonate with readers’ expectations and beliefs; it must be detailed enough to offer what appears to be a holistic account of nonhuman animal experience; and it must draw on familiarity with everyday life in a way that is defamiliarizing in order to show a set of cognitive abilities that is distinct from the human (487). if these conditions are met, the representation will appear convincing. it gives rise to what caracciolo calls a cognitive illusion. a scientific phenomenology, on the other hand, needs to bracket imagination and presuppositions in a way that literary practices cannot: “a principled science of experience should be able to bracket presuppositions and sideline the researcher’s imagination... if we draw a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 80 dividing line between literary narratives and the project of building a science of experience, as i try to do in this article, what function can be ascribed to fictional accounts of animal phenomenology?” (488). the function, caracciolo argues, is to make apparent the limits of human knowledge. the project of building a science of experience has never been entirely confined to the inside of any one discipline, however. uexküll helps make meaning a key concept for thinking the nonhuman, necessitating and enabling a cross-disciplinary investigation of meaning-making that now draws closer those forms of life it had once helped keep apart. that uexküll was a scientist, and that a foray, his most celebrated work regarding nonhuman worlds, is a highly literary account intended for a popular audience,11 makes his work one particularly interesting site for thinking the relations between the sciences and the humanities as well as between the human and the nonhuman. uexküll is far from unique in seeking to bring his scientific approach to nonhuman animal experience to a popular audience. susan mchugh traces a complex web of influence running through the production of 20th century ethological knowledge, cultural representations of exotic and charismatic species primarily via visual media, and the narrative weaving of nature and culture, scientific and humanistic inquiry in popular ethology books. animal stories tell us about disciplinary boundaries and transgressions. mchugh points out that while literature has long been tasked with defending human exceptionalism from the cold rationality of the sciences, figures such as jane goodall and konrad lorenz have employed literary depictions of nonhuman life, complete with embellishments and fictional accounts, to make these sciences accessible beyond their borders. although she does not explicitly do so, it would be easy for mchugh to place uexküll as a key figure in this lineage: while groundbreaking ethological studies provide the basis for policy and other changes in the ways in which people live with animals in industrialized societies, best-selling ethological narratives of life in the field influence broader imaginative engagements with elusive species like the great apes that are otherwise largely mediated through film, video and digital media. obscuring the more mundane realities of data-driven science, such stories promote instead popular ethologists themselves as skillful storytellers. but in so doing, they also forge links in chains of literary influence, raising questions about how this pioneering scientific field traces its roots back to fiction, and continues to send out shoots through visual narrative forms. (animal stories 212) brian mccormack -narrative, meaning and multispecies ethical ontologies 81 mchugh argues that, from anna sewell to frans de waal, nonhuman animal narratives do important work to improve the treatment and understanding of the more-thanhuman world, and they sometimes lend support for ethological work in the field as opposed to the lab. in such cases, an excursion into literary worlds can double back recursively and affect funding priorities within the sciences. the effects of present-day scientific insights also affect literature, not only in terms of what is produced today but in how literary accounts of the past are read differently: “now that scientists are identifying the interdependence of life forms even below the cellular level, the pervasive companionship of human subjects with members of other species appears ever more elemental to narrative subjectivity, a dark matter of sorts awaiting literary analysis” (2). these examples suggest that, when the sciences and humanities mix, the effects are neither unidirectional nor predictable, but diffractive. how does the work of translation from scientific study to popular literature parallel other cross-disciplinary movements? how does disciplinary authority work in these scenarios? caracciolo is certainly correct to point out crucial disciplinary differences between a scientifically informed phenomenology and a literary narrative practice. yet claiming that a scientific phenomenology is the only legitimate way of rigorously accessing and accounting for nonhuman experience would severely weaken any possibility of a dialogical ethics. one would ultimately be forced to call positions like plumwood’s largely fictional or illusionary, because assumptions about nonhuman agency integral to a dialogical ethics would quickly overstep what can be verified by a highly regulated scientific phenomenology. for plumwood’s dialogical ethics to perform the work of shifting human understanding of nature away from cartesian dualism, nonhuman animal narratives cannot be conceived merely as cognitive illusions. moreover, if the legitimate function of literary animal narratives is to point out the limits of human knowledge, then calling all non-scientific animal narratives fiction may also dramatically affect their power to challenge anthropocentric assumptions. if one of the presuppositions we have going into a reading (which, in caracciolo’s formulation, comprise a necessary aspect of literary realism) is that it bears no resemblance to actual animals or their experiences, then wouldn’t this undermine their effectiveness? fully utilizing the resources of a narratology beyond the human, herman shows, means relocating the task of demarcating between reliable knowledge and wild imaginative projection. rather than trying to adjudicate proper and improper uses of narrative at the level of discipline or genre, such questions cannot be abstracted from particular instances of individual nonhuman animal narratives themselves, treating representational accuracy as one consideration among others within a complex and shifting cultural context. herman agrees with caracciolo that efforts to present nonhuman experiences in literary texts in the attempt to critique anthropocentric humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 82 attitudes enact the appropriation they are trying to counter, but herman sees this limitation as suggesting the need for these texts to show their constructed nature (“animal worlds” 429). he follows plumwood and others in thinking more deeply about how academic disciplines, cultural assumptions, and multispecies ecologies are entangled with one another in ways that confound any notion that they can be neatly demarcated. herman offers such an expanded view of narrative in his hermeneutic reading of thalia field’s bird lovers, backyard. field interweaves narration with commentary on the nature of narrative itself, and plays with normative conventions that mediate traffic between the register of action (motivations, goals, projects) and the register of events (movements in time and space). herman’s discussion of field suggests that, rather than simply offering an account of “what it is like” for any particular nonhuman animal, narratives can actively incorporate, address and animate these questions (“hermeneutics” 18). narratology beyond the human innovates analytical tools for drawing out how complex cultural assumptions are reworked in nonhuman animal narratives. rather than a series of claims about animal minds purporting to be accurate representations, nonhuman animal narratives can themselves be interpreted as sites of contestation and debate concerning multispecies ecologies. plumwood’s call to re-animate matter entails using a notion of narrative capable of shifting human cultural assumptions away from cartesian dualism. questions of realism and accuracy do not disappear in these contexts, but herman’s work helps to show that nonhuman animal narratives cannot be classified as mere illusions or anthropomorphic projections that disrupt species differences which would otherwise, from a different disciplinary location, be clearly marked out. conclusion. building on eileen crist’s assertion that there is no neutral language when it comes to describing nonhuman animal behaviors and minds (images of animals 10), van dooren and rose knowingly risk the charge of anthropomorphism in order to pursue a more inclusive mode of accounting for nonhuman meaningful experience: “this context requires us to develop a language that is capable of prompting recognition of similarity and responsibility, between embodied, social creatures. ’storied-places’ and an ethics of conviviality provide one such language” (“storiedplaces” 5). they also point out that storied-places cannot be fully accounted for, and that the absence of a comprehensive understanding is not an invitation to abandon this practice in favor of one which purports to be exhaustive (9). for these reasons, nonhuman animal narratives are strategic, context-sensitive, experimental, and exploratory, which means that they will remain open to skepticism and charges of brian mccormack -narrative, meaning and multispecies ethical ontologies 83 anthropomorphism. but as an ethical strategy, a notion of nonhuman animal narrative is a way of aligning oneself with a commitment to developing more companionable multispecies relationships. nonhuman animal narratives, as they are developed in a multispecies ethics of conviviality, are about making, rather than representing, worlds. plumwood offers an ontological ethical framework that refuses to hold up the project of building more equitable multispecies communities until universally agreed-upon representations of nonhuman subjectivities arrive, as rose points out: “she was not making truth claims about the world, but rather was asking what kind of stance a human can take that will open her to a responsive engagement in relation to nonhuman others” (“val plumwood’s philosophical animism” 97). plumwood’s ethical approach focuses on facilitating human access to a nonhuman world full of meaning: “rather than querying others, it asks the human to query herself, and it seeks to open the human to the experience of others in the contexts of their own communicative and expressive lives” (98). at the same time, however, it matters how nonhuman meaningful experience is conceptualized, identified, and responded to. narrative does not apply to all animals, nor does it apply to every action taken by an animal, human or nonhuman. narrative is also at risk of drawing attention away from more precise modes of accounting for divergent forms of lived experience. the tension between attempting to make room for nonhuman meaningful experience (which is an ethical necessity) and the impossibility of doing so with full confidence is not resolved in literary practices that incorporate and dramatize these tensions. employing a concept of narrative beyond the human is an ethical act, but one that must be undertaken with care. in the first part of this essay, i describe how uexküll’s umwelt theory offers a way of understanding meaning that can support plumwood’s dialogical ethical ontology. for uexküll, the human umwelt is both partially open to and entangled with others and partially closed and untranslatable across species. it is not a realm of subjective experience that can be transcended to reach purely objective knowledge. as plumwood, van dooren, and rose point out, being in relationship means being responsive to and striving to be open to others within the limits of one’s communicative and expressive capabilities. narrative would not simply be a projection of the human onto the nonhuman but a way of seeking better relationships, using the most effective conceptual tools available to us. the second part of the essay draws on herman to show how nonhuman animal narratives incorporate and keep alive rather than obscure and elide questions of representational accuracy. an ontological context that emphasizes entanglement across difference does not take the partial inaccessibility of nonhuman minds as a valid reason to avoid engaging with them. on the contrary, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 84 reconceptualizing the cognitive, communicative and affective worlds of other animals is a necessary prerequisite for living well with them. since we live in a time of escalating ecological crisis, building a more viable multispecies future is also an urgent ethical necessity, and extending a notion of narrative helps this process. just as there is no neutral language for describing nonhuman animal behaviors and minds, there are very few neutral ways of forming relationships with them. we already know what kinds of relationships an ontological framework influenced by cartesian dualism brings into being. uexküll, plumwood, and herman help us imagine new ones. notes 1. noam chomsky argues that descartes was correct to distinguish the human on the basis of the uniquely creative and malleable nature of human language: “the essential difference between man and animal is exhibited most clearly by human language, in particular, by man’s ability to form new statements which express new thoughts and which are appropriate to new situations” (cartesian linguistics 59). for descartes, nonhuman animals are like machines in that they can only react to stimuli within carefully circumscribed contexts, such as crying out when harmed. what they cannot do, in his opinion, is respond meaningfully: “but it is not conceivable that such a machine should produce different arrangements of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence, as the dullest of men can do” (descartes, quoted in cartesian linguistics 59). jacques derrida points out that: “now, when it comes to the relation to ’the animal,’ this cartesian legacy determines all of modernity.... descartes’s ’text’ is of course not the cause of this large structure, but it ’represents’ it in a powerful systematicity of the symptom” (for what tomorrow 65). 2. for a clear and comprehensive critical posthumanist critique of the rational and autonomous image of the human, see braidotti’s the posthuman. the following passage from elizabeth grosz's becoming undone offers an evocative account of what the humanities might become once the meaning-making practices of humans are recontextualized alongside those of myriad others: ...if there are a hundred thousand potential languages, expressive impulses, and modes of bodily communication, from human language to the dancing of bees and the song performances of birds, to the chemical language of cells themselves within every living body, then new notions of collectivity, new notions of social production, new modes of linguistic analysis are waiting to be born, waiting to be commensurate with and adequate to the multiplicity of life-forms to which they apply. a new brian mccormack -narrative, meaning and multispecies ethical ontologies 85 humanities becomes possible once the human is placed in its properly inhuman context. (becoming undone 21) 3. david herman shows how the concept of narrativity — what makes a text a narrative — has in most cases been conceived as intimately bound up with human subjectivity (narratology 156, 339). eduardo kohn argues that symbolic thought is a uniquely human form of semiosis (how forests think 133). in this essay, i do not attempt to rigorously parse narrative forms into categories such as fiction/nonfiction. because i am discussing theorists who are working to shift the concept of narrative onto new ontological ground, the question of how to classify forms of narrative must be reconsidered from within this new conceptual arrangement. this is a complex issue and ranges far beyond the scope of this essay. i seek instead to outline some of the general features of this new approach to narrative and its relations to ethical theory and concepts of meaning. for a careful discussion of genre and other modes of categorization as they relate to morethan-human narrative forms, see herman, narratology. 4. matthew calarco offers a helpful discussion of the advantages and disadvantages in conceptualizing human/nonhuman animal distinction on the basis of identity, difference, or what he refers to as indistinction. for calarco, plumwood is a paradigmatic example of the indistinction approach, which he also endorses (thinking through animals 61). 5. marc bekoff and jessica pierce make a similar point in their book wild justice. they point out the necessity of employing a form of “narrative ethology” to help make sense of the behavior of other animals, while also discussing the difficulties in utilizing narrative strategies for scientifically rigorous ethological studies (36-37). 6. see for instance ingold, kirksey and helmreich, and kohn. 7. herman defines a storyworld as the world as it is projected by a narrative — built up by the writers as well as the interpreters of the text (narratology 340). 8. for a more detailed discussion, see herman, narratology. 9. see also varela, thompson, and rosch’s the embodied mind. 10. caracciolo draws primarily on the work of psychologist russell t. hurlburt. 11. see brentari 135. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 86 works cited abadzis, nick. laika. first second, 2007. bekoff, marc and jessica pierce. wild justice: the moral lives of animals. u chicago p, 2009. bernaerts, lars, marco caracciolo, luc herman, & bart vervaeck. “the storied lives of non-human narrators.” narrative 22.1 (january 2014): 68-93. braidotti, rosi. the posthuman. polity, 2013. brentari, carlo. jakob von uexküll: the discovery of the umwelt between biosemiotics and theoretical biology. springer, 2016. buchanan, brett. onto-ethologies: the animal environments of uexküll, heidegger, merleauponty, and deleuze. state u of new york p, 2009. calarco, matthew. thinking through animals: identity, difference, indistinction. stanford briefs, 2015. caracciolo, marco. “three smells exist in this world: literary fiction and animal phenomenology in italo svevo’s ’agro and his master.’” modern fiction studies 60.3 (fall 2014): 484-505. chomsky, noam. 1966. cartesian linguistics: a chapter in the history of rationalist thought. 3rd edition. cambridge up, 2009. crist, eileen. images of animals: anthropomorphism and the animal mind. temple up, 1999. derrida, jacques, and elisabeth roudinesco. for what tomorrow...: a dialogue. trans. jeff fort. stanford up, 2004. descartes, rene. “from the letters of 1646 and 1649.” the animals reader: the essential classic and contemporary writings. linda kalof and amy fitzgerald, eds. bloomsbury academic, 2007. 59–62. brian mccormack -narrative, meaning and multispecies ethical ontologies 87 field, thalia. bird lovers, backyard. new directions, 2010. grosz, elizabeth. becoming undone: darwinian reflections on life, politics, and art. duke up, 2011. herman, david. “animal autobiography; or, narration beyond the human.” humanities 5.82 (2016). accessed 3 july 2019. online. _____. “animal worlds in modern fiction: an introduction.” modern fiction studies 60.3 (fall 2014): 421-443. _____. “hermeneutics beyond the species boundary: explanation and understanding in animal narratives.” storyworlds: a journal of narrative studies 8.1 (summer 2016): 1-30. _____. narratology beyond the human: storytelling and animal life. oxford up, 2018. _____. “storyworld/umwelt: nonhuman experiences in graphic narratives.” substance 40.1 (2011): 156-181. hoffmeyer, jesper. biosemiotics: an examination into the signs of life and the life of signs. trans. jesper hoffmeyer and donald favareau. u of scranton p, 2009. ingold, tim. being alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description. routledge, 2011. kirksey, s. eben and stefan helmreich. “the emergence of multispecies ethnography.” cultural anthropology 25.4 (2010): 545-576. kohn, eduardo. how forests think: toward an anthropology beyond the human. u of california p, 2013. maturana, h. r., and f. j. varela. autopoiesis and cognition: the realization of the living. reidel, 1980. _____. the tree of knowledge: the biological roots of human understanding. shambhala, 1987. mchugh, susan. animal stories: narrating across species lines. u minnesota p, 2011. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 88 nagel, thomas. “what is it like to be a bat?” the philosophical review 83.4 (1974): 435450. noë, alva. out of our heads: why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness. hill and wang, 2010. plumwood, val. environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason. routledge, 2002. _____. “nature in the active voice.” australian humanities review 46 (2009): 113–29. rose, deborah bird. “val plumwood’s philosophical animism: attentive inter-actions in the sentient world.” environmental humanities 3.1 (2013): 93–109. russell, joshua. “animal narrativity: engaging with story in a more-than-humanworld.” animal subjects 2.0. jodey castricano and lauren corman, ed. wilfrid laurier up, 2016. 145-173. uexküll, jakob von. 1934. a foray into the worlds of animals and humans: with a theory of meaning. trans. joseph d. o’neil. u minnesota p, 2010. _____. “an introduction to umwelt.” semiotica 134.1/4 (2001): 107–110. _____. “the new concept of umwelt: a link between science and the humanities.” semiotica 134.1/4 (2001): 111-123. van dooren, thom. flight ways: life and loss at the edge of extinction. columbia up, 2014. van dooren, thom and deborah bird rose. “lively ethography: storying animist worlds.” environmental humanities 8:1 (may 2016): 77-94. _____. “storied-places in a multispecies city.” humanimalia 3.2 (2012): 1–27. online. varela, francisco j., evan thompson and eleanor rosch. the embodied mind: cognitive science and human experience. the mit press, 1991. microsoft word iveson-haraway h u m a n i m a l i a 9:1 reviews richard iveson telling tales in troubled times donna j. haraway, staying with the trouble. making kin in the chthulucene. durham, nc: duke university press, 2016. 312 pp. $94.95 (hc); $26.95 (pb). the trouble. a particularly keen generosity of practice runs throughout donna haraway’s latest book, staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. haraway shares in the same “curious” methodological practice that she attributes to philosopher and psychologist vinciane despret, one that “is not interested in thinking by discovering the stupidities of others, or by reducing the field of attention to prove a point” (126). rather, such practice constitutes a kind of thinking that “enlarges, even invents, the competencies of all the players, including [one]self, such that the domain of ways of being and knowing dilates, expands, adds both ontological and epistemological possibilities, proposes and enacts what was not there before” (126-127). only with such a change in kind, suggests haraway, do we become capable of changing the story — aptly described here as “the prick tale of humans in history” — that has captivated, richard iveson – telling tales in troubled times 187 and kept us captive, for so long. such curious and generous practice, she continues, loosens the grips of cynical defeatism, allowing us to think outside of the “abstract futurism” that currently dominates thought and steeps us all in “its affects of sublime despair and its politics of sublime indifference” (4). for haraway, the prick tale’s current iteration can be approached most clearly through the work performed by the conceptual frameworks known as “the anthropocene” and “the capitalocene.” haraway convincingly argues that such terms, which are more or less commonplace in academic discourse today, readily maintain the prick tale with their “self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions, like the ‘game over, too late’ discourse” (56). however, to accept such deadening abstract futurism and thus its championing of supremely indifferent despair is as equally senseless — and brings with it exactly the same potential for catastrophic futures — as it would be to deny absolutely the seriousness, urgency, and magnitude of the problems that confront us today. haraway advocates instead staying with the trouble, which she describes as “redo[ing] ways of living and dying attuned to still possible finite flourishing, still possible recuperation” (10). we all, she insists, “require each other in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in hot compost piles,” a requirement that, in staying with the trouble, she aims to both argue and perform (4). in order to do this, she writes, we must first “look for real stories that are also speculative fabulations” (10). a somewhat vague specification admittedly, this is quickly augmented by a list of “oddkin” terms, all of which come under the order of the acronym sf: string figures, science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, and so far. “not in the world, but of the world,” says haraway, the “worlds of sf are not containers; they are patternings, risky comakings, speculative fabulations” (14). initial troubles. haraway’s narrative of composable and decomposable worldings brought forth through countless unaccountable multispecies players all ”enmeshed in partial and flawed translations across difference” is as compelling as it is necessary (10). before we can address staying with the trouble in greater critical depth, however, we must first consider two troubling textual issues, the first aesthetic and economic, the second terminological. 1. the market demands of celebrity. the influence of donna haraway’s work across an array of disciplines and inter-disciplines has long been undeniable. indeed, she is one of very few thinkers working in english today whom one could legitimately — that is, in a positive, non-pejorative sense — describe as a “celebrity” academic. moreover, there are probably even fewer contemporary thinkers, in any language, who are as aesthetically humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 188 and cognitively committed to design and pattern in the presentation of their work as haraway. in the case of staying with the trouble, however, it seems that the demands of the latter have suffered somewhat at the hands of the former. or, put in the language of political economy, we could say that the exchange value of “haraway” as the name of a commodity appears to have been privileged at the cost of the use value of haraway as thinker. hence, what will likely strike the reader first of all about staying with the trouble is its obvious imbalance, with very nearly half of the total content being made up of largely extraneous material: namely, an incredible mass of end notes, an extended bibliography, and, lastly, a whopping — and largely redundant — 32 page index covering a main text that itself covers less than 170 pages and incorporates dozens of images along the way. the likely second thing to become all too frustratingly evident to the reader — after the first dozen or so pages — is that haraway’s “new” book is in fact a collection of six previously published stand-alone articles, and concluding with a hitherto unseen piece of “speculative” fiction. all of this is not necessarily a bad thing — extensive revision coupled with adroit use of differently focused draft versions, for example, can indeed transform a set of related yet independent articles into a dramatic and coherent monologue. unfortunately, however, that has not been the case here. rather, a great deal of the same statements and descriptions are repeated again and again in every chapter, along with the same names and same references, the same intellectual debts and the same points of collaboration. indeed, the amount of repetition found within staying with the trouble is largely the reason why the endnotes stretch out over sixty pages, all of which is a lot less interesting than the actual work of staying with the trouble. the trouble, one assumes, is the consequence of stand-alone journal articles being forced too violently into the generic framework of book chapters. there are times when the sheer weight of reiteration comes to sound less like an acknowledgement of comrades banded in their shared struggle and more like a branding of kinship onto others, a marking of names aimed more toward ownership and legacy. but then again, and as is well known, reiteration tends toward odd, unpredictable doings when left unchecked for too long. with respect to repetition, moreover, the same question can be asked on a more general level, as haraway herself makes clear: “it is no longer news,” she writes, “that corporations, farms, clinics, labs, homes, sciences, technologies, and multispecies lives are entangled in multiscalar, multitemporal, multimaterial worlding” (115). rather, she continues, it is the details that matter, as it is the details that “link actual beings to actual richard iveson – telling tales in troubled times 189 response-abilities” (115). indeed, but this once again begs the question as to why haraway spends so much of her latest book reiterating the former at the expense of the latter. 2. posthuman/ism. reiterating the position put forward in when species meet, haraway again places herself in opposition to both “the posthuman” and “posthumanism” — two distinct notions that, more often than not, she condenses into the single term “posthuman(ism).” she does this first by retroactively invoking “companion species” as conceptually opposed to “posthuman(ism),” and then with the introduction of a new term intended to signify, among other things, its antagonistic distance from all things posthuman: compost. critters are at stake in each other in every mixing and turning of the terran compost pile. we are compost, not posthuman; we inhabit the humusities, not the humanities. philosophically and materially, i am a compostist, not a posthumanist. critters — human and not — become-with each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthy worlding and unworlding. (97) here, the trouble centers on just what haraway is referring to with the term “posthuman(ism).” first of all, the conflation of “the posthuman” (considered as either an entity or an event) and “posthumanism” (understood as a position subsequent to the deconstruction of the traditional discourse of humanism) strongly suggests that, for haraway, the two terms are synonymous, despite both terms having long served to mark sites of intense contestation across a wide variety of positions and disciplines.1 while the term for the most part remains without gloss throughout staying with the trouble, in the manifesto-type section that opens the first chapter there are signs that, for haraway, “posthumanism” refers above all to heideggerian existentialism (11). here, haraway tells of being “finished” with both “kantian cosmopolitics” and “grumpy human-exceptionalist heideggerian worlding,” further claiming to be without any relation whatsoever to the “existentialist and bond-less, lonely, man-making gap theorized by heidegger and his followers” (11). in contrast to the “world-poor” condition heidegger infamously attributes to nonhuman animals, she continues, the worlding of “the sf web of always-too-much connection” is rather “rich in world, inoculated against posthumanism but rich in com-post, inoculated against human exceptionalism but rich in humus, ripe for multispecies storytelling.” on closer inspection, however, we would do well to wonder just how anti-heideggerian we really humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 190 are here. first of all, the strain of existentialism that, at least from this very brief description, would seem to ineluctably stain every notion of the posthuman, sounds far more akin to antoine roquentin’s world of nauseous isolation as described by jeanpaul sartre than it does to anything put forward by heidegger.2 yes, ontological difference for heidegger does indeed constitute and, in so doing, privilege the human as dasein and, moreover, it does so at the cost of relegating every other living being to the vaguely articulated status of “poor-in-world.” on the other side of the coin, however, is that with his rigorous articulation of radical new concepts such as the structure of significance, of being-open, and of a calling forth into being that is simultaneously a being-thrown, heidegger dramatically informed and transformed our understanding of being-in-the-world. moreover, he continues to do so, as is the case here when, writing of the capabilities of pigeons that so impress and surprise their human kin, haraway notes that human beings often forget how they themselves are rendered capable by and with both things and living beings. shaping response-abilities, things and living beings can be inside and outside human and nonhuman bodies, at different scales of time and space. all together the players evoke, trigger, and call forth what — and who — exists. (16) “i am a compostist, not a posthumanist,” haraway declares, “we are all compost, not posthuman” (101-102). a better idea, i suggest, would be to stay with all the troubling humus and hubris of the posthuman, to continue taking the trouble with posthumanism for some while yet — com-post, that is to say, with-post. at the very least, this “having finished with” heidegger (and with kant before him) suggests a symbolic setting-free that accords rather with something like a “near-utopianism” that can be sensed throughout staying with the trouble, of which more later.3 three tales of trouble. the heart of staying with the trouble can be found at the various intersections and crossings-over of three different stories that speak themselves in three mostly distinct genres. first, now as then, is the prick tale of humans in history. second, comes the nested narrative — and sublime quietism — of the anthropocene. and, third, stories that somehow narrate outside the first and somehow think beyond the helpless despair of the second — stories of a living future for living in the chthulucene, and where, in the end, we will ultimately encounter camille.. 1. the prick tale. “tool, weapon, word,” writes haraway, “that is the word made flesh in the image of the sky god; that is the anthropos” (39). much of earth history, she writes, richard iveson – telling tales in troubled times 191 is a man-made tragedy “told in the thrall of the fantasy of the first beautiful words and weapons, of the first beautiful weapons as words and vice versa” (39). this is the prick tale, featuring but a single actor in the role of hero and world-maker engaged throughout in murderous conquest that allows of space for nothing else and nothing more: “all others in the prick tale are props, ground, plot space, or prey. they don’t matter; their job is to be in the way, to be overcome, to be the road, the conduit, but not the traveler, not the begetter” (39). in staying with the trouble, richard dawkins’s “later sociobiological formulations within the modern synthesis, the selfish gene” (62) serves as an exemplary moment in its ongoing action-movie plotline. working against this simplistic quest narrative, haraway poses sf writer ursula k. le guin’s “carrier bag theory of narrative” and what she calls the “gaia stories” of prominent social theorist bruno latour. as regards the latter, however, haraway is right to maintain her reservations with respect to latour’s reliance on “the materialsemiotic trope of trials of strength” (42), not the least of which being its obvious availability for appropriation within the prick tale quest narrative, and within that of neo-darwinist sociobiology in particular. at this point, haraway displays her talent for close textual analysis — albeit a talent far more in evidence in her early works — in tracing back latour’s structuring trope to its foundation in the work of political theorist carl schmitt. as haraway astutely remarks, “schmitt’s enemies do not allow the story to change in its marrow; the earthbound need a more tentacular, less binary life story. latour’s gaia stories deserve better companions in storytelling than schmitt. the question of whom to think-with is immensely material” (43).4 also interesting here is that, while haraway reiterates this last sentence any number of times over the course of the staying with the trouble, only here does it take on weight and meaning, as only here it is sufficiently contextualized to become something more than a simple slogan. 2. the anthropocene. according to haraway’s excellent analysis, “the anthropocene” understood in terms of an epochal period of time on earth is essentially a continuation of the prick tale of humans in history by way of a nested millenarian narrative that lends itself all too readily “to cynicism, defeatism, and self-certain and self-fulfilling predictions, like the ‘game over, too late’ discourse i hear all around me these days” (56). for all of that however, continues haraway, the idea of imminent catastrophe is hardly new – and this is a hugely important point: “disaster, indeed genocide and devastated home places, has already come, decades and centuries ago, and it has not stopped” (86). that we “stay with” such trouble is at the very center of staying with the trouble insofar as resurgence “is nurtured with ragged vitality in the teeth of such loss, mourning, memory, resilience, reinvention of what it means to be native, refusal to deny irreversible destruction, and refusal to disengage from living and dying well in humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 192 presents and futures” (86). such are the stories of living and dying in what, as a far better alternative to the misplaced but by now entrenched terms anthropocene and capitalocene, haraway gives the name “the chthulucene.” haraway is right to foreground the need to think of the anthropocene not as the name of an epoch, but rather as a boundary event akin to the k-pg boundary between the cretaceous and the paleogene periods. “the anthropocene,” she insists, “marks severe discontinuities; what comes after will not be like what came before” (100). of particular interest for haraway, however, is just why it should be that the epochal name of the anthropocene imposed itself in the way it did at just the time “when human exceptionalism and the utilitarian individualism of classical political economics become unthinkable in the best sciences across the disciplines and interdisciplines” (57). could it … perhaps, just perhaps … be that the anthropocene is not in fact a guarantor of the end of the world as a fait accompli but simply a last desperate fable along the prick tale of humans in history, simply “the last gasps of the sky gods” (57)? and again, what is simple sloganeering elsewhere here becomes a thing of weight and meaning: “it matters which thoughts think thoughts” (57). 3. the chthulucene. despite haraway’s claim that, as words go, the inelegant chthulucene is in fact quite “simple” (2), the term — all questions of pronunciation and catchiness aside – is not without its issues. as a term, “chthulucene” would seem to constitute a clear and obvious reference to the fiction of h. p. lovecraft in general, and to his 1928 short horror classic, “the call of cthulhu” in particular. however, at the very outset what for haraway must be made absolutely clear is that “lovecraft’s misogynist racialnightmare monster cthulhu” has no role to play here whatsoever (101, 174n4). in other words, it is imperative for haraway that, upon the introduction and every subsequent reiteration of the term “chthulucene,” we somehow not allow what is its sole, blaringly obvious reference to impact upon our relation to the word. in a move that can hardly be described as helpful, haraway signals this utter absence of relation by way of an extremely subtle change in spelling (a difference so subtle, it should be noted, that we must be parenthetically reminded to take note of upon each appearance). hence, haraway’s entirely discrete conceptual beast is properly the chthulucene, as opposed to that founded upon the lovecraftian term “cthulhu,” which would have yielded instead the noun cthulhucene. it’s just so obvious now, right? problem solved. all facetiousness aside, however, i am baffled as to why haraway would select for a central concept of the book — perhaps the central concept, and most certainly its unifying term — a term that refers uniquely and explicitly to the lovecraftian oeuvre, only to then deny the sole significance it necessarily brings with it? just what is going on here? is the shift from richard iveson – telling tales in troubled times 193 “cthulhu” to “chthulu” at once magical spell and magical spelling by which the monstrous anxiety of influence can apparently be rendered inoperative, or at least inapparent? it is difficult to understand exactly what is at work here, and what is at play. what appears and what disappears, and what is being made to appear and what is being made to disappear? the story as haraway sees it is that she “rescues” the cthulhu from lovecraft in order to make it available for other stories, and marks this liberation from lovecraft’s patriarchal mode “with the more common spelling of chthonic ones” (174n4). in this way, she argues, are unveiled diverse undulating and ongoing “tentacular powers and forces and collected things with names like naga, gaia, tangaroa (burst from water-full papa), terra, haniyasu-hine, spider woman, pachamama, oya, gorgo, raven, a’akuluujjusi, and many many more” (101). sounding a little vague and somewhat utopian at first, haraway begins to articulate the new contours of the chthulucene by first making very clear just what it is that we must not be doing, or must not continue to do, if we are to have any hope of staying with the trouble: this is not an argument for cultural looting; it is not about raiding situated indigenous stories for their use as resources for harnessing the “woes” of colonizing projects and peoples; and it is not “a way to finesse the anthropocene with native climate wisdom” (87). from the other side, meanwhile, it is not the answer to anything and everything: it is not about playing games for “universal oneness,” and it is not a “posthumanist solution to epistemological crises.” finally, it is not a general program that, if followed to the letter, promises a solution to any given particular: staying with the trouble, as is the case also for any one of its exemplary narratives, is not a general model for collaboration. it is not “a primer for the chthulucene.” so, after learning of all that it is not, what exactly is going on here? how might we set out “to learn somehow to narrate — to think — outside the prick tale of humans in history” (40)? the answer, posits haraway, is sympoiesis. staying with the trouble: sympoiesis. demon familiars. in a move that will be familiar to readers of her previous books, haraway narrates the story of the chthulucene by way of figures that are at once real and imagined: material-semiotic. christened “demon familiars” here, previous figures of haraway have included a certain postgender cyborg, a harvard mouse with an activated oncogene and, more recently, a protozoan by the name of mixotricha paradoxa. in staying with the trouble, however, the importance of such figures to the ongoing ebullience of worlding feels immeasurably greater, as too does the urgency with which they are required (the latter, no doubt, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 194 playing a major role in the former): “we need another figure,” she writes, “a thousand names of something else, to erupt out of the anthropocene into another, big-enough story” (52). perhaps, then, haraway can be forgiven for the somewhat obvious instrumentality in her use of another demon familiar and fellow north central california resident — the spider pimoa cthuluhu — as a stepping stone on the way to the latest figure of privilege: “bitten in a california redwood forest by spidery pimoa chthulhu [note spelling],5 i want to propose snaky medusa and the many unfinished worldings of her antecedents, affiliates, and descendants” (52). from the greek μέδουσα, meaning “guardian’ or “protectress,” medusa is a powerful winged being with living snakes for hair and possessing a gaze with the power to turn its recipient to stone. moreover, as the only mortal member of the race of gorgons, medusa is a chthonic being without proper genealogy, of “no settled lineage and no reliable kind (genre, gender)” despite being “figured and storied as female” and with a reach that is “lateral and tentacular” (53-54). in this, medusa is a figure and the figure here — one of a thousand names — of sympoiesis. perhaps, just perhaps, writes haraway, medusa might “heighten our chances for dashing the twenty-first century ships of the heroes on a living coral reef instead of allowing them to suck the last drop of fossil flesh out of dead rock” (52). sympoiesis. haraway offers less a rigorous accounting of “sympoiesis” as a concept, and more an exuberant surging and outpouring of synonyms, likenesses, kinships, and recursive patternings. we can, however, pick out three key aspects of sympoiesis. first, and most important, is an underlying relational ontology: entities are constituted by “an expandable number of quasi-collective/quasi-individual partners in constitutive relatings; these relationalities are the objects of study. the partners do not precede the relatings” (64). second, and following from the first, any research that takes substance as prior to relation will necessarily fail in any attempt aimed at “studying webbed inter and intra-actions of symbiosis and sympoiesis.” and third, the generative nature of sympoiesis is made possible by its recursive structure — it is the passing of “relays again and again … that make up living and dying” (33). familiarly demonic. with all the talk of “abyssal and dreadful graspings, frayings, and weavings” (33), of sympoiesis understood as “alignment” and not inheritance, and of chthonic entities as beings lacking proper genealogy and settled lineage, one cannot help but wonder at the glaring absence of gilles deleuze and félix guattari throughout richard iveson – telling tales in troubled times 195 staying with the trouble, and in particular their hugely influential notions of alliance, genealogy, becoming, demonic animals, and assemblage. haraway, for example, proposes that we replace the term “beings” with “holoents” (or “holobionts”), meaning “symbiotic assemblages at whatever scale of space or time, which are more like knots of diverse inter-active relatings in dynamic complex systems” (60). at this point, one can only assume that deleuze and guattari are still a little too demonic — or differently demonic — as yet for haraway, given her brief but scathing dismissal in when species meet and elsewhere. that said, one hopes that haraway’s renowned generosity of practice might well return her to thousand plateaus at some time in the future — a sympoietic engagement that would likely prove to be extremely productive indeed. in the same vein, one can wonder about potential results of a closer engagement with both nietzsche’s will to power and spinoza’s conatus. in opening the chapter on “sympoiesis,” for example, haraway suggests that critters become-with each other perhaps “as sensual molecular curiosity and definitely as insatiable hunger, irresistible attraction toward enfolding each other is the vital motor of living and dying on earth” (58). haraway is very unclear as to whether what is being described here is in fact a drive — especially given the use of terms such as “insatiable” and “irresistible” in this context, as this would seem to return us to the deeply problematic issue of the instinctive, the driven, and the mechanistic, of the vitalism of program and instinct and of the paradoxical entity that would be a “vital motor.” material semiotics and life at the limit. this paradox of a “vital motor” possibly plays an obscure role in haraway’s extremely important notion of “material semiotics,” insofar as the latter would seem to open up the idea of “living” far beyond its traditional restriction to that of individual biological organisms. material semiotics, she writes, “is exuberantly chemical; the roots of language across taxa, with all its understandings and misunderstandings, lie in such attachments” (66). for haraway, “critters” are always dynamic multipartnered entities across every scale and time, and theoretically without privilege. hence the need to ask how multicellular partners in the symbioses affect the microbial symbionts, and not just vice versa: “at whatever size, all the partners making up holobionts are symbionts to each other” (67). despite this, however, it remains unclear whether haraway includes within her definition of critters — holobionts, holoents — such multipartnered relatings as would traditionally be defined as nonliving entities, that is, “simple” material objects, mere “things.” at times the answer appears to be yes: “critters — human and not — becomewith each other, compose and decompose each other, in every scale and register of time and stuff in sympoietic tangling, in ecological evolutionary developmental earthy humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 196 worlding and unworlding” (97). at other times, however, it would seem not to be the case: “plants are consummate communicators in a vast terran array of modalities, making and exchanging meanings among and between an astonishing galaxy of associates across the taxa of living beings. plants, along with bacteria and fungi, are also animals’ lifelines to communication with the abiotic world, from sun to gas to rock” (122). blueprint for global change, salve for the suburbanite, academic ego-aggrandizement. in the end, staying with the trouble offers its readers an almost endless series of fascinating, interand intra-linked stories — of the crochet coral reef, of the madagascar ako project, of the console game never alone, and of many more stories, and of so many still to come. however, one question haunts every one of these stories: can such necessarily local commemorations ever translate into global change? take the tale of the melbourne pigeon loft, for example: can and do such tales ever amount to more than self-serving narratives of middle-class philanthropy? can and do they escape charges such as idealism and naivety, given the notion of staying with the wider trouble, such as the fate of aborigines? or are they only pocket utopias, mere academic compositions? it is a question, moreover, of which haraway is fully aware: “the municipal pigeon tower certainly cannot undo unequal treaties, conquest, and wetlands destruction, but it is nonetheless a possible thread in a pattern for ongoing, noninnocent, interrogative, multispecies getting on together” (29). such a practice of “cultivating response-ability,” she further argues, “is not a heroic practice … is not the revolution … is not thought. opening up versions so stories can be ongoing is so mundane, so earth-bound. that is precisely the point” (130). quite so. but this still does not answer our question: can such a resolutely mundane, so decisively earth-bound a practice, ever bring with it potential for change on a global scale? or does it rather narrate the impossibility of any such practical potential? responding to the question of a self-serving salve, haraway claims instead that the processes of symbiogenesis or sympoiesis are necessarily infectious (64) — an infectiousness that therefore has the potential to be world-changing. but are they really, in fact, infectious, as haraway claims: “companion species infect each other all the time. pigeons are world travelers, and such beings are vectors and carry many more, for good and for ill. bodily ethical and political obligations are infectious, or they should be” (29). they are infectious, or they ought to be infectious? to be, or to ought to be: that is indeed the question, but on this point, at this point, haraway hesitates. only at the very end, with the introduction of “the camille stories,” does haraway at last engage with this question of the relation, or otherwise, of local and global. richard iveson – telling tales in troubled times 197 camille began life at a writing workshop at a colloquium at cerisy in 2013, in which participants were collectively asked “to fabulate a baby, and somehow to bring the infant through five human generations” (134). the first iteration (“camille 1”) is born in 2025 and the last (“camille 5”) dies in 2425, during which time the global human population continues to increase to a high of ten billion in 2100, before then declining to a stable three billion by 2400. as one of the conditions for a sustainable global future, haraway writes, this massive reduction in the overall number of human animals is initially made possible through a “new” collective practice among small, close-knit communities of birthing babies bonded with animal symbionts. camille 1 is one of the first of these, born in symbiosis with a monarch butterfly and, at least in one of our futures, ushering in a new age of kinship, intimacy, and response-ability. ultimately, the potential for global change from local commemoration can be located here, in this speculative account of a future history. a “story, a speculative fabulation,” and, according to haraway, “a relay into uncertain futures” (134), the stories of camille offer an account of — and attempt to account for — a four-hundred-year period bearing witness both to the end of capitalism (and thus the capitalocene) and the inauguration of the chthulucene. camille, writes haraway, “is a keeper of memories in the flesh of worlds that may become habitable again. camille is one of the children of compost who ripen in the earth to say no to the posthuman of every time” (134). a story, then, a fabulation; but also manifesto and blueprint. and so, in the end, it matters more how we might we read this new genre of manifesto — it matters, in haraway’s words, which thoughts think thoughts and what stories we use to tell stories. is this utopian sf? does it bespeak of idealism, of naivety and of the ego? do we see in camille the vision of haraway as new (age) earth mother? and is this even fair criticism? or else prick thinking? and can this even be answered in accordance with the framework that haraway sets out — a kind of unfalsifiability that it itself denounces as irrelevant? “tool, weapon, word,” we recall, “that is the word made flesh in the image of the sky god; that is the anthropos” (39). and “camille” too is of course tool, weapon, and word, one purposefully aimed at crafting — at creating, speculating, constructing — a word and a world to be made flesh in the image of the chthonic god. but does camille offer anything beyond a simple change of name alone? is this perhaps a change of genre, but not of narrative structure? and how can we be sure that haraway’s tentacular “chthulu” is not, in the end, lovecraft’s deeply patriarchal prick? after all, the sky god too has a thousand names. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 198 in the end, our question can be further concentrated: is it possible to propose — to speculate — a figure of sympoiesis? or is it not rather the case that sympoiesis is the very impossibility of being named, of being figured (out) in advance? notes 1. oddly, elsewhere in staying with the trouble haraway appears clearly cognizant of the need to differentiate between the two distinct concepts, noting that “posthumanists” constitute “another gathering altogether” than those of the “posthumans” (50). just why haraway should abruptly bestow capital letter status upon the latter term remains unclear. 2. see jean-paul sartre being and nothingness [l’être et le néant] (1943) and nausea [la nausée] (1938). sartre’s telling philosophical tales is also germane to the issues in haraway’s case of inheritance, alliance, alignment, and legacy. 3. the notion of “a near-utopianism” in relation to haraway’s oeuvre comes initially from istvan csicsery-ronay’s review of when species meet entitled “after species meet” in which he writes of “the erstwhile human” becoming for haraway “a dynamic, tumbling network of living relationships” that includes “a near-utopian web of scholars and fellow-teachers constantly supplying new energies to each other” (n.p.). in humanimalia: a journal of human-animal interface studies 1.2 (2010): 145. 4. in my book zoogenesis: thinking encounter with animals (london: pavement books, 2014), i argue that schmitt’s friend/enemy dichotomy as and at the origin of the nationstate is nothing short of the political logic of genocide in its purest form (220-230). 5. and note the perceived need, on haraway’s part, to note the spelling correction/impropriety. microsoft word wright-cohen. pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:2 reviews laura wright milking the zeitgeist mathilde cohen and yoriko otomo, eds. making milk: the past, present, and future of our primary food. london: bloomsbury, 2017. 301 pp. $128.00 hc. in the contemporary united states, we find ourselves in an interesting and problematic moment with regard to our relationship with, and conception of, “milk,” a substance that has always been imbued with meaning beyond its status as our first food. in a december 21, 2018 article in vox, “‘fake milk’: why the dairy industry if boiling over plant-based milks,” umair irfan explains the fight between the $35.5 billion u.s. milk industry and the $1.6 billion plant-based milk industry over the right to use the word “milk” on its non-dairy products. he notes that “milk has a complicated, jargonfilled standard of identity,” but even so, “the dairy industry has complained for almost 20 years that the fda hasn’t policed this definition as products made from soy, almonds, cashews, rice, hemp, and oats have filled shelves in the dairy aisle.” dairy producers claim that it is unfair, for plant-based products lack the nutritional profile and taste of dairy milk but are taking advantage of the milk “brand” (irfan). the milk laura wright -milking the zeitgeist 251 industry in the u.s. has been losing ground and profits as non-dairy alternatives gain popularity, and even though the semantic battle has been brewing for years, the current administration’s industry-friendly fda might be willing to enforce a definition of “milk” that only covers substances produced by animals. further, the visual rhetoric of drinking cow’s milk directly from half-gallon and gallon containers is a prominent part of the contemporary alt-right lexicon, which has gained visibility since the 2016 election of donald trump to president of the united states. the prominence of milk in the discourse of contemporary white supremacists apparently results from a supposed genetic trait more common in white people than in other groups, the ability to process and digest lactose as adults (harmon). despite the science behind such a trait indicating that the ability to digest lactose is not unique to white people, white supremacists’ support for milk is grounded in symbolism as much as in (pseudo-) science. on this front, the argument has historical precedent. when milk first gained prominence in america, early dairy advocates extolled its virtues to the “aryan” population, writes historian melanie dupuis. as president herbert hoover, giving a speech in 1923, told the world's dairy congress, “upon this industry, more than any other of the food industries, depends not alone the problem of public health, but there depends upon it the very growth and virility of the white races.” (moon) given these present realities, the essays that make up mathilde cohen and yoriko otomo’s lavishly illustrated and astutely researched study making milk: the past, present, and future of our primary food provide timely and important reading, showing us how “milk” has always been a fraught entity, entangled with and often inseparable from our ideas about gender, power, commodification, and cultural identity. taken as a whole, the work constitutes a timely reading that navigates the fraught nutritive, sociopolitical, cultural, and symbolic status of milk, a food that melanie jackson and esther leslie refer to as “an ur-substance, an originary substance” (63). in addition to the contribution of jackson and leslie, this collection features essays by international scholars and artists from a variety of fields, including law, literature, geography, political aesthetics, communication and media, history, media studies, sociology, art history, economics, and anthropology, all of whom grapple with the fraught and complex social, legal, political, and historical meaning of milk as food, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 252 mythological substance, and metaphor. in his foreword to the work, peter j. atkins (emeritus, university of durham) notes the growth in the field of milk studies since he began researching 45 years prior and since the 2010 publication of his genealogical study of milk as a commodity, liquid materialities. in their introduction, cohen and otomo likewise discuss the ways that milk has become a serious topic of study in the social sciences since the turn of the millennium. they note the importance of thinking about milk in the current moment, fraught as it is with crises of masculinity, climate change, and issues of food sovereignty. to that end, they have edited a collection that both explains and problematizes our understandings of milk, as food, as metaphor, as gendered commodity, and as legal entity. the text is arranged in four parts. part one, “drinking milk: histories and representations,” is comprised of essays that examine the historical role of milk in several locations at various historical periods, including chloé maillet’s examination of visual representations of milk in the occidental late middle ages, which examines “cross-species milk kinship in the middle ages” (8) and the ways that milk consumption was perceived during this period as capable of shaping the very essence of the consumer, particularly as mother’s milk was thought to be the same substance as blood, only “whitened in utero” (9). maillet discusses the ways that milk both signified virginity (in its associations with the cult of the virgin mary) and the blood of martyrs, including christ, and she further analyses the trope of breastfeeding men (an image that appeared in paintings during the 12th through 14th centuries), as well as the transgressive nature of cross-species and adult breastfeeding as depicted in works from the 12th through 15th centuries. carol j. adams, whose work has long been focused on the sexual politics of feminized protein, brings to the surface the ways that animal rights and vegan activists have historically worked to expose the connections between human femaleness and the exploitation of cows for human consumption of milk. in her exploration of advertising motifs that conflate animal and human images, adams notes that “feminized protein from other species that is sold to humans arises from a destroyed relationship between mother and child and signals our broken relationships with other animals” (23). finally, andrea j. wiley explores the consumption of milk in india since independence in 1947. she claims that despite the fact that india maintains the highest level of milk production and consumption, the country has received little critical scrutiny in scholarly examinations of food. wiley traces milk’s 8000-year history in india as well as the role of cows, including their protected status, more generally. she notes that during the period after independence, milk has been associated with the strength and growth of the nation as it has become a rising world power. laura wright -milking the zeitgeist 253 the second section, “making milk: technologies and economies,” moves from historical conceptions of milk to the means of its production, the politics of labor inherent in its creation and dissemination, and the establishment of legal precedent with regard to the meaning of “milk.” melanie jackson and esther leslie unpack milk’s mythological and metaphorical status as both a “primal substance” that is nevertheless constantly evolving and “ever invented anew” (64) as it is separated from its source and shaped and rebranded in multiple ways — as ice cream, infant formula, or powder, for example, marketed by cartoon characters and other appealing avatars. richie nimmo’s essay about the messy history of the creation of milking machines examines the mechanization of cow’s milk, the primary milk consumed by humans, in the context of industrial factory farming. he reads milk production via various theoretical lenses — marxist, feminist, and human-animal studies — even as he provides a critique of these frameworks’ tendency to “presuppose and affirm an essential or given animal subjectivity” (83). yofi tirosh and yair eldan discuss a class-action lawsuit that took place in israel in 1995 against the dairy manufacturer tnuva, which had put silicon in the one percent milk it sold for public consumption. their essay focuses both on the nature of disgust, as felt by consumers who had partaken of the non-kosher contaminated food, as well as the legal challenges inherent in compensating consumers for this disgust — a disgust linked not only to compromised milk, but also to a compromised conception of the israeli state itself, as “milk served here as a vehicle for restating collective commitments: social, cultural, national, ethical, and commercial” (114). in the final chapter in this section, julie p. smith examines the contemporary practice of commercial wet-nursing and the exchange of human milk across national boundaries as a means of potentially elevating the status of breastfeeding as commodity-driven labor practice. smith reads breastfeeding as form of women’s work that is undervalued and incompatible with industrialized labor. the third section, “queering milk: male feeding and plant milk,” contains essays that examine the subversion of milk production’s seemingly essential status as a biologically mammalian female process. mathilde cohen offers a “transor cross-species” (143) analysis of male lactation in order to trouble supposed truths about sex, gender, and parenting. her essay demonstrates that although male lactation is possible, it is nevertheless atypical. she makes a distinction between male lactation and male breastfeeding, a process that she claims “is defined neither by milk production on the breastfeeder side nor by milk intake on the infant side” (149). hannah ryan chronicles alfred w. bosworth’s invention of similac, his work on the boston floating hospital, and his extrication of himself from his achievement in 1929, once formula became a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 254 corporate commodity that was marketed to displace breastmilk. further, this essay focuses on the ways that women’s bodily labor is virtually invisible and recorded in the history of the creation of infant formula, even as their breastmilk and the work that they did caring for the babies that bosworth studied were essential to his endeavor. “plant milk: from obscurity to visions of a post-dairy society,” by tobias linné and ally mccrow-young, traces the history of plant-based milks and the ways that the contemporary idea that such milk as nutritionally superior to dairy milk challenges powerful dairy industry propaganda machines in europe and the u. s. that have sought to sell the idea dairy milk as synonymous with national identity. in their chapter, they “re-inscribe plant milk into the social, political, economic, and cultural history of food, primarily with a focus on the 20th and 21st centuries” (196), noting that plant milk challenges the notion of what milk is, a point that opens plant milks up to scrutiny and, as is the case in the u. s. at present, potential litigation. in the final essay in this section, greta gaard offers a wide-ranging theoretical exploration that engages with “milk — in its many scientific and cultural constructions — as a lens for exploration, bringing together intersections of queer ecofeminist, transgender, material feminist, postcolonial, critical animal, and critical plant studies perspectives” in order to answer the question that she repeatedly asks, “what is [milk]?” she concludes by questioning what it might mean to queer the biblical land of milk and honey, establishing it not as god-given material for human exploitation but rather a space of “trans*species” freedom and justice. the final section, “thinking about plant milk,” concludes the collection by bringing the reader fully through such a “trans” experience, from initial conceptions of milk as the product of female mammalian production to a place in which we can understand “milk” — both literally and theoretically — as substance and signifier that encompass so much more. jessica eisen offers a posthumanist reading of milk that brings the cow back to the foreground even as it situates the cow within the broader context of the law, which codifies modern dairy farming. mathilda arvidsson’s brief final chapter constitutes a “recipe-manifesto” for oat milk, a plant milk that arvidsson contextualizes within her own experience of understanding the meaning of milk in order to explain “post-dairy visions and ethics” (249). of the recipe and commentary that she provides, she concludes that “the slowness of milk-making provides us with a mode of resistance against relationships with beings we do not honor through the desire for the pure, perfecting, relational food epitomized by milk” (249). the essays in this volume serve to explore milk from a variety of perspectives, all of which nonetheless speak to one another; the essays and authors reference each other and engage in a discussion across fields and modalities; and the overall organization of the volume allows for these essays laura wright -milking the zeitgeist 255 to be taken as a whole, as a history and social commentary, about the nature and shifting meaning of an important and enigmatic substance. works cited atkins, peter. liquid materialities. a history of milk, science and the law. routledge, 2010. harmon, amy. “why white supremacists are chugging milk (and why geneticists are alarmed).” new york times, 17 oct. 2018. online. accessed 12 jan. 2019. irfan, umair. “‘fake milk’: why the dairy industry is boiling over plant-based milks.” vox 21 dec. 2018. accessed 12 jan. 2019. moon, emily. “why is milk being called a white supremacist symbol?” pacific standard 24 oct. 2018. online. accessed 12 jan. 2019. microsoft word thornburgh h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 reviews ann marie thornburg who’s laughing now? mikita brottman. hyena. reaktion books—animal, 2012. 167 pp. $19.95 pb. the human imagination conjures an ambiguous notion of the hyena, both unsettling and unsettled. the hyenas of fact and fantasy are “difficult to categorize for all kinds of reasons” according mikita brottman in the final chapter of hyena, published in 2012 as part of reaktion’s ever-expanding animal series. “they are neither dog nor cat, neither predator nor scavenger, neither friend nor enemy, but always already a touch of both, making our neat human categories look ridiculous” (128). to help readers understand the gray space between these binaries, brottman begins the book with scientific information about hyenas. in chapter one we learn about the four different species of hyena (spotted, striped, brown, and the aardwolf). brottman notes that although hyenas look “like a cross between a cat and a dog” they “actually belong to the herpestidae family — the family of mongooses and meerkats” (12). hyenas ann-marie thornburg — “who’s laughing now?” 155 possess a number of compelling, strange, and ultimately adaptive characteristics, including powerful jaws and steely stomachs that can digest bone. the spotted hyena’s fabled laugh, which has contributed to the hyena’s image as a creepy, unhinged lurker, is addressed too. not surprisingly, it is not a laugh at all, but one part of a varied vocal communication repertoire. spotted hyenas seem to be the species most identified as “the” hyena, and therefore the species onto which numerous negative traits have been projected. it is sobering to learn that they are “among the most abundant and successful carnivores in sub-saharan africa, with a better kill rate than lions.” the female spotted hyena is also famous for her “20-cm-long (8-in) clitoris that is the same size and shape as a male’s penis, accompanied by a pair of pseudo-testes,” which is likely the result of “elevated androgen production in the womb.” this makes copulation a delicate balancing act for males, who are smaller than females, and birthing “painful and dangerous” for hyena mothers (18). brottman speculates that these anatomical realities cause some to “feel uncomfortable with the idea of female genitals that are larger than the male’s, especially when they grow visibly erect and engorged” (20). although books in the animal series are meant to be general reviews of species’ natural and cultural histories, brottman’s interpretative observations provide welcome invitations to think through the details presented. after introducing the four species of hyena in chapter one, brottman moves on to human conceptions of, and relations to, hyenas. “the hyena and human history” begins with a history of human attempts at classification, tracing descriptions of the hyena from the greeks to nineteenth century naturalists. rumors of hyenas’ hermaphroditism circulated, as did unsettling tales of grave robber hyenas. brottman describes “an obscure, hyena-like beast who terrorized the region of gévaudan in southeastern france” in the late eighteenth century (42). her assertion that “the hyena has always been a mystery to us,” seems especially true in light of the numerous and varied descriptions of the beast of gévaudan (33). natural histories produced during the victorian age were compendiums of negative stereotypes: “all in all, the hyena ‘is an ill, gloomy-looking animal; and its manners and habits correspond with its appearance’” (54). the twentieth century receives a brief treatment, but not humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 156 surprisingly, “otherwise sedate, objective sources of information are unable to refrain from a sneering tone when called upon to describe the hyena” (57). chapter 3 (“hyena magic”) is an appropriate extension of the context brottman provides in the first two chapters. here we are introduced to the hyena of myth and magic. “the hyena’s body, shrouded in taboo” has been used to make various amulets (63). in ancient times, a hyena’s anus worn on the arm was believed to make men irresistible to women. today hyena body parts have many effects the world over: hyena noses ensure a good harvest (sudan) and hyena meat is a potent medicine (bedouin of arabia). hyenas have long been associated with necromancy, and brottman speculates that “the hyena’s tendency to scavenge for food means that it often lives in the proximity of death” (67). brottman, who is trained as a psychoanalyst, usefully brings freud’s notion of the uncanny into the chapter. she writes that “in the final section of his essay [on the uncanny], freud reveals that the uncanny is, in fact, something secretly familiar, something that has undergone repression and returned from it.… [i]f premature burial is a supremely uncanny phenomenon, then so too is premature unburial, bringing to light the dead body, which is normally hidden from consciousness and, like death in general, is rightfully repressed” (71-72). for me, one of the most interesting stories in the book is that of the south african photographer pieter hugo’s interactions with, and photographs of, so-called “hyena men” in nigeria. intrigued by newspaper photos of handlers walking hyenas on heavy, chain-link leashes, hugo set out to meet the men, who made a living by “entertaining crowds with their three hyenas” and other animals (86). brottman describes multiple narratives of the men’s and hyena’s lives. again, she offers minimal but effective commentary on hugo’s own photographs of the men and hyenas: “interestingly,” she writes, “the photographer chose not to picture the men in the streets where they plied their trade; instead he shows them posing with their animals in bleak, wasteland settings.” drawing on critic will smith, brottman reveals the troubling implications of the photographs, which suggest that the “men and beasts … are unwanted creatures reduced to lives of scavenging on the margins of society, living every day with the simmering threat of repressed violence” (90-91). color reproductions of hyena images and artwork thread through the entire volume, adding visual interest. here, though, the inclusion of hugo’s photographs is especially useful, and i would have liked to see a few more of them in order to more fully consider their effects. ann-marie thornburg — “who’s laughing now?” 157 the fourth chapter surveys hyenas’ roles, mostly as symbols, in literature and the arts. this chapter feels the most list-like of the five, perhaps because whole books and films are paraphrased one after the other. still, brottman presents a useful overview of written and visual texts. a discussion of the role of animals-as-metaphors is especially appropriate in a book about hyenas, since they are almost always used to represent unsavory or downright unspeakable human impulses. brottman closes this chapter by warning that “the more we speak about symbolic hyenas, the less it matters to us that real hyenas are becoming increasingly scarce” (114-115). in chapter five, brottman appropriately turns to a discussion of how living hyenas fare in relation to their mythical and symbolic counterparts. she concludes that “the hyena has been blighted by the laws of sympathetic magic and contagion, which have been used to account for a wide variety of beliefs and practices in traditional cultures, and can equally well be applied to our own” (128). most of us, she muses, have never seen a living hyena. already endangered, they are rare even in the limited and limiting environments of zoos, probably because hyenas are not “crowd-pleasers” (136). (i was surprised to learn that until recently, a colony of captive research hyenas lived in the hills of berkley, california.) brottman ends the book by describing her own encounter with a spotted hyena in the wild. though she describes the hyena’s eyes as “glow[ing] an eerie red,” the encounter itself is marked by no drama, but still engendered a kind of wonder (144). the same could be said of hyena. it is a readable book that is thorough without becoming overly focused on any one set of details or area of inquiry. brottman carefully and compellingly presents numerous accounts of these long-maligned animals. this book, in turn, should prompt readers to carefully consider and reconsider the assumptions that lurk at the margins of their own responses to hyenas. janie hinds -horror and the posthuman: edgar allan poe’s narrative of arthur gordon pym, nonhumans, and ethics h u m a n i m a l i a 11:2 janie hinds horror and the posthuman: edgar allan poe’s narrative of arthur gordon pym, nonhumans, and ethics of all the images that make our world, animal images are particularly buried inside us. we feel the pull of them before we know to name them, or how to even fully see them. it is as if they are always waiting, crude sketches of themselves, in the recesses of our bodies. as if every animal a human brain has ever seen, it has swallowed.... and perhaps the red-haired mammoth, which someone in the cave named yuka, takes the onlookers further back still, to memories buried not in the brain, but in marrow and fiber and peptide. far into the flesh, where the temporal world starts to wobble a bit. — elena passarello, animals strike curious poses, 15. edgar allan poe’s only novel, the narrative of arthur gordon pym of nantucket, is surprisingly full of nonhuman animals: a newfoundland dog, barnacles, sharks, penguins, albatross, sea slugs, and birds and sea-beasts unknown and unnameable. equally surprising is how few readings of pym take note of these nonhumans as such, that is, as subjects of study or subjects of the narrative.1 critical animal studies, as it has developed over the past forty or so years, has increasingly focused attention on this type of oversight in the sciences and particularly the humanities, positing that the history of western thought about “the animal,” broadly speaking since the renaissance and certainly since the enlightenment era and the humanism subtending it, contributed to the construction of “the human” as that which is not-animal, codifying the notion that “the animal” — notably considered in this totalizing fashion — is pure body, rené descartes’s béte-machine, while the human is the animal that has overcome “his” animality, the human residing properly in the mind. as such, the animal has continued to be universalized, the human considered the subject of narrative, indeed seen as the only animal with the right to subjectivity in this view, and thus the only being capable of exercising ethical behavior. i want to offer a reading of pym alongside a reading of critical animal studies that, as recent theorists have proposed, considers nonhumans as capable of not only being the object of ethical practice but also as the subject, as beings that initiate ethical encounters, thereby inhabiting and co-creating a moral world. appearing in 1838, pym is the product of an era in western history that is commonly generalized as post-enlightenment in the sense that enlightenment humanist values of rationality, objectivity, and individual human autonomy had hardened into ideology, positioning the nonhuman as unworthy of human attention, indeed as the defining other of the human. this long era might best be called modernity in the sense that ron humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 26 broglio reads bruno latour’s definition: modernity “is predicated on the necessary fiction of separating nature as the realm of the nonhuman from culture ... ‘the realm of the human’” (“introduction” 2). my reading of this novel aims to complicate that generalization: poe, i will offer, demonstrates in pym an uncannily posthuman ethical position: human-nonhuman interaction in pym, in several instances, produces an ethics initiated by animals and responded to by humans. this is not an ethics seen in several recent animal liberation and animal rights thinkers — one that, with good reasons, trains our attention on the human animal’s obligations to the nonhuman — but rather an ethics that more fundamentally shifts the very character of both human and nonhuman. the novel does not simply reverse the order of the ethical gaze but instead complicates both what is considered human and what is considered animal. poe is notorious for his gothic stories, and pym is no exception. to some degree, it is the gothic extremes of this novel that produce its horror-effect: as pym narrates in something of a premonition of what will befall him on his sea-journey, his story involves “shipwreck and famine, death or captivity among barbarian hordes; of a lifetime dragged out in sorrow and tears, upon some gray and desolate rock, in an ocean unapproachable and unknown” (57), not to mention rotting corpses, nearconstant drunkenness, cannibalism, and the constant, gnawing hunger he and his companions experience. i would add that the horror-effect is also brought about by the narrative strangeness of the novel, another type of extreme not only thematized in the story but also performed in the unsettling narrative lacunae and shifts in style. these gothic extremes, in pym, are in most if not all cases accompanied by animals; the animals here, i argue, produce an ethical point of view which creates, for both the title character and the reader, the nauseating unsettling of “the human” that accompanies horror. encounters with nonhumans in pym produce such an effect, the specific ethicseffect varying with each animal or species. in what follows, i explore some of those encounters and effects to account for the revulsion the book has produced in readers since its first publication. pym’s posthuman position does not, of course, adhere to a historical chronology of “post-ness,” but rather, as james berkley writes of cybernetic posthumanism in poe’s short stories about human-machine amalgams, it is a posthumanism that “is not simply a matter of temporal or historical succession, the passage from one ‘epoch’ of subjectivity to another, but also a matter of spatiotemporal relations between subjects and environments that get played out simultaneously in narrative and phenomenological form” (357). indeed, the discomfort produced by pym could be said to arise from the unsettling of the human as center of the moral universe, literally disorienting the liberal humanist subject in thematic and narrative terms. janie hinds -horror and the posthuman: edgar allan poe’s narrative of arthur gordon pym, nonhumans, and ethics 27 nonhuman ethics now. it is crucial at this moment in animal studies to move away from the humanist, universalizing view of “the animal” and to develop ways of studying animals in their plurality and distinctiveness. in earlier years of the nowmaturing interdisciplinary field, writers like peter singer and tom regan, though they approached animals from utilitarian and rights-based premises, respectively, similarly constructed “the animal” as a single category. and for good reason: to establish respectability for the study of animals in the first place it was necessary to make a case for similarities between animals and humans so as to protect animal rights on humancentered (already accepted) grounds. such a discourse paints other species with a broad brush in an attempt to overcome hundreds of years of the cartesian understanding of animals as simply and only different, other. developing alongside this so-called identity argument, other, mostly continental thinkers proffered what might be seen as the opposite view: animals in this analysis are distinctly different from humans. this school of thought insists on a firm — what jacques derrida would term “abyssal” — boundary between humans and other animals to put nonhuman animality on the map as specifically not-human in order to begin to deconstruct the binaries definitive of liberal humanist thinking by exposing the constructedness of those binaries (“the animal” 381). both lines of thinking, however, have tended to continue the universalizing concept of “the animal,” overlooking the diversity of species, not to mention individual animals. the flaw in this kind of categorization is that it reproduces the humanist error of making the human the measure of all other species; whether other species were seen to either share characteristics in common with humans — language, rationality, sociality, for example — or not, the presence or absence of human traits defined the arguments. a truly posthuman approach, as thinkers like ron broglio and matthew calarco assert, regards animals in and for themselves, insofar as that is possible (broglio, “introduction”; calarco, zoographies). it follows that such an approach might be called on to recognize a radical otherness in some animals that violates human ethics to the degree that, as humans, we would be disgusted by, even judgmental about given behaviors contrary to our sense of moral behavior. moving beyond what paola cavalieri helpfully calls a “narrow morality” view, one that, as dawne mccance describes it, “has to do with assessment of interests and with questions of right and wrong” (cavalieri 9; mccance 135), a more legitimately posthuman ethics does not operate simply to solve an immediate problem but rather to deeply unsettle our apprehension of what it means to be human and what it might mean to be nonhuman. for this reason i want to mobilize a working definition of ethics that is less likely to use a baked-in set of (human) moral or ethical judgments (e.g., humans owe nonhumans humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 28 protection because of their vulnerability) but that instead views the phenomenon of the ethical situation and its effect on those involved. by “ethics,” then, i mean a fully present encounter with the other that not only recognizes the radical alterity of that other, but also produces a response, a change, through the encounter, enacted upon the subject by the call of the other, a call that speaks, which is to say communicates unmistakably something absolutely nonhuman about the animal — something that shifts the human slightly away from being human.2 several thinkers have contributed to this view, including derrida and broglio on the one hand, in what calarco calls “difference” ethics, and donna haraway and barbara smuts on the other, who honor difference but find connection with the nonhuman other as definitive of the ethical situation. as calarco summarizes difference ethics, in thinking through animals: “an ethics of difference starts from the premise that the ultimate origin of ethics resides not with me (my rationality, my freedom, my autonomy) but with the other, with radical difference, or heteronomy.... [my ethical response] arises precisely as a response to the other, from a source radically different from me that calls into question my typical ways of thinking and living” (32, emphasis in original). recognizing a debt to haraway, he makes a good case for a third possibility with the concept of indistinction: “the indistinction approach aims to think about human beings and animals in deeply relational terms that permit new groupings and new differences to emerge, such that ‘the human’ is no longer the center or chief point of reference” (thinking 56). whereas nonhuman ethics has typically put the human at the center — and the active position — of the ethical encounter, calarco suggests that the “zone of indistinction” puts the human in a position of being “like animals. to be like an animal is very different from the kind of position associated with the identity framework in which it is argued that animals are like us” (58). i will expand this ethics by attention more particularly to the psycho-philosophical history of thought about modernity’s notions of “presence,” seen as a rather ghostly but “solid” — centered — sense of a unified self. to better recognize poe’s realization of nonhuman animals as such, within encounters that work to develop ethical situations, i want to call his an ethics of co-presence, that is, an ethics that equally involves nonhuman and human animals, inhabiting a subject-position of equal ethical merit. an ethics of co-presence would rely on derrida’s reading of freud in derrida’s “structure, sign and play in the human sciences.” though derrida was to develop deconstruction more fully over the following couple of decades, this talk was one of the first and most articulate expressions of the critique of humanism that would underwrite so much philosophy and literary theory over the next fifty years. a brief description will suffice because the ideas are now so well-known. recognizing nietzsche, freud, and heidegger as counter-examples, derrida offers a critique of modernity’s notion of janie hinds -horror and the posthuman: edgar allan poe’s narrative of arthur gordon pym, nonhumans, and ethics 29 “presence,” the assumption of an essential, knowable entity at the center of any structure or system of meaning. most useful for my present definition, he highlights freud’s implicit critique of psychological “self-presence, that is, the critique of consciousness, of the subject, of self-identity and of self-proximity or self-possession in the very concept of the unconscious. this rejection of cartesian thought and methodology carries within it a related rejection of cartesian dualities, signifier/signified, instinct/reason, human/animal, etc. in the concept of presence such that one takes self-definition by the otherness of the other — the not-me. in the absence of self-presence, or full consciousness, freud posited desire — the desire for plenitude, for fullness of self, for self-presence — as the motivating life-force against the anxiety of living with absence (“beyond the pleasure principle”). such desire is a reaching toward, a longing, according to freud, for what appears to be full selfpresence. coming around to more contemporary uses of “presence” in animal studies, biologist smuts writes about just such a “presence” she has seen in the baboons she worked with in the 1970s and ‘80s, and her certainty that “inside this other body, there is ‘someone home’” (“encounters with animal minds” 308). her sense of this presence has to do, also, with individual baboons who have made contact — sometimes physically reaching out and touching — with her. interestingly, haraway misquotes smuts’s term as “co-presence” in her when species meet, i believe because “co-presence” captures well the sense of presence that comes about not as a singular, essential self, but in company with another. haraway takes this kind of encounter a step further, including change in the human animal as a definitive component of real contact. she uses both literal and metaphorical senses of the idea that animals have “face” to account for the possibility of these encounters: “the animals in the labs have face; they are somebody as well as something, just as we humans are both subject and object all the time” (76). smuts and haraway take a distinctly different view from that of derrida, who sees in the eyes of an animal — his cat in “the animal that therefore i am” — “a gaze that is vacant to the extent of being bottomless, at the same time innocent and cruel perhaps, perhaps sensitive and impassive, good and bad, uninterpretable...” (381). to be sure, derrida’s cat has “face,” but this face is “abyssal and secret,” where haraway’s and smuts’s encounters reveal knowledge of the other for both human and nonhuman. i will adopt haraway’s happy misquotation, “co-presence,” though by “presence” i mean something perhaps fundamentally different from smuts’s and haraway’s adoption. in their work, there is unquestionably something like full self-presence in both nonhuman and human in the encounter, where i would return to the freudian humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 30 suggestion that there is no such thing, that something is always hidden from the self (a center that may not in fact exist), and that desire for the other — for connection with the other — seeks to create self-presence, and that something like self-presence is approachable only in the co-presence with the radically other. rather than studying the face of animals, however, i would look more specifically at the mutual gaze in poe’s pym, for it is through looking into the eyes of someone from another other species that pym, in such co-presence, finds some part of himself that is both alien and recognizable. in short, he becomes more self-present only in these encounters, present not as an individual self but in combination with nonhumans. the ethical situations i will attempt to read in poe’s pym take place as a result of and to initiate a confusion of subject and object, a confusion of cartesian categories that does not, after all, confuse the subject, but that rather clarifies by re-positioning both human and nonhuman animal presence. the following sections likewise attempt to clarify by confusion of categories. i first look at wild or undomesticated animals in “the seagull and other birds,” but read them as co-presences with humans and, thus, as not-entirely-wild or other-than-human; it is only in human-centered ethics that these kinds of animals appear wholly other. in “domesticated animals,” i attempt to uncover a wildness running through pym’s anthropomorphized, humanized, domestic dog, tiger. “the human response” draws conclusions about human characters’ responses to nonhumans in poe’s work and readers’ responses to these encounters. the seagull and other birds. near the mid-point of the narrative of arthur gordon pym, a dramatic and critical encounter with a seagull transforms the purported humanity of the main characters. in a novel full of dramatic and critical episodes, many involving nonhuman animals of a variety of species, the meeting of pym, his friend augustus, fellow counter-mutineer dirk peters, and hostage mutineer parker, with this bird initiates a radical shift in the protagonist and first-person narrator pym and in the story he narrates. the starving survivors of the grampus, now only a floating hull, have encountered a dutch ship which they had expected to rescue them. the seagull’s presence on the ship has been so far invisible, but it presents itself just as the survivors realize that every human on board is dead. given its centrality to the narrative and the reading i propose below, the passage bears quoting at length: as our first loud yell of terror broke forth, it was replied to by something, from near the bowsprit of the stranger, so closely resembling the scream of a human voice that the nicest ear might have been startled and deceived. at this instant another sudden yaw brought the region of the forecastle for a moment into view, and we beheld at once the origin of the sound. we janie hinds -horror and the posthuman: edgar allan poe’s narrative of arthur gordon pym, nonhumans, and ethics 31 saw the tall stout (human) figure still leaning on the bulwark, still nodding his head to and fro, but his face was now turned from us so that we could not behold it. his arms were extended over the rail, and the palms of his hands fell outward. his knees were lodged upon a stout rope, tightly stretched, and reaching from the heel of the bowsprit to a cathead. on his back, from which a portion of the shirt had been torn, leaving it bare, there sat a huge sea-gull, busily gorging itself with the horrible flesh, its bill and talons deep buried, and its white plumage spattered all over with blood. as the brig moved farther round so as to bring us close in view, the bird, with much apparent difficulty, drew out its crimsoned head, and, after eyeing us for a moment as if stupefied, arose lazily from the body upon which it had been feasting, and, flying directly above our deck, hovered there a while with a portion of clotted and liver-like substance in its beak. the horrid morsel dropped at length with a sullen splash immediately at the feet of parker. may god forgive me, but now, for the first time, there flashed through my mind a thought, a thought which i will not mention, and i felt myself making a step toward the ensanguined spot. i looked upward, and the eyes of augustus met my own with a degree of intense and eager meaning which immediately brought me to my senses. i sprang forward quickly, and, with a deep shudder, threw the frightful thing into the sea. (132-33) the encounter with the seagull is initiated by a verbal exchange. the men on board the grampus have yelled, and their yell “was replied to by something ... so closely resembling the scream of a human voice that the nicest ear might have been startled and deceived.” notably, neither yell nor scream is verbal in the precise meaning of the word, but i choose to call the exchange verbal in the face of the long history of separation of nonhumans from human animals on the basis of language, because both the seagull and the men derive meaning from, give attention to, and take action in response to the sound the other makes, as is the case with language, human or otherwise.3 the bird, who has been “gorging” on the dead sailor, is presumably drawn away from its task by the human yell; pym does anthropomorphize the seagull, reading it in human terms, immediately and with some emphasis, by reporting that the “something” the men hear is so like “the scream of a human voice” that it makes no difference, in effect, that it is not different: “the nicest ear might have been startled and deceived.” importantly, the men’s yell is “replied to” in an exchange; pym does not read the two non-verbal sounds as empty of communication value. yet rather than humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 32 humanizing the seagull with his anthropomorphic first reading, what begins with the yell of the humans and the reply of the animal quickly alters pym’s human point of view. the grampus crew are drawn by the bird’s scream to see what appears at first to be a human, the sailor, who, albeit dead, is moving in ways that have appeared and still appear to be motivated by life. the dead sailor is “nodding his head to and fro,” a nonverbal type of communication, while his hands are also placed — though accidentally — in a welcoming gesture, “arms ... extended over the rail,” with the palms facing “outward.” pym reads these gestures as signifying like language, despite (soon) knowing the sailor is dead; this reading can only take place because the seagull is “gorging itself with the horrible flesh, its bill and talons deep buried.” it is the bird who communicates with the men, who calls them to attention and to the understanding that it — the bird — has been motivating the gestures and nods of the sailor all along. again, pym — and poe — anthropomorphize the seagull, but despite the human-like communication that has been established between bird and men, it is as an animal — as fundamentally nonhuman — that the men engage with the bird: the act of “gorging” on the sailor precipitates the response of horror as much as that the people of the dutch ship are all dead. eating a human produces visceral horror, even when it is a nonhuman doing the eating. pym is stunned, transfixed, his engagement total as he watches the bird’s next moves: “the bird, with much apparent difficulty, drew out its crimsoned head, and, after eyeing us for a moment as if stupefied, arose lazily from the body upon which it had been feasting....” after its call, the seagull, significantly, looks at the men, then, evidently satiated, moves toward them, “flying directly above our deck, hovered there a while with a portion of clotted and liver-like substance in its beak.” and in a gesture much discussed in poe scholarship, the bird drops the “horrid morsel” on the deck of the grampus, where it falls at parker’s feet. with this act, the seagull has addressed their need, wittingly or not; it has seen them, in the sense that derrida describes in “the animal that therefore i am.” in derrida’s encounter, as is well known, he responds to his cat looking at him naked. two simultaneous understandings need to be drawn from this encounter: that the cat assesses the human animal — seems to judge, and thus the shame and vulnerability derrida feels on being seen naked — and that the cat remains, for derrida, fully other, “uninterpretable, unreadable, undecidable, abyssal and secret” (381).4 the seagull’s response in pym combines the anthropomorphic ability to see and seemingly assess — as derrida’s cat sees him naked, “with a view to seeing,” which is to say a view to apprehending if not understanding — while its eating of human flesh renders it absolutely other, in the act of violating the human animal’s taboo of eating humans. janie hinds -horror and the posthuman: edgar allan poe’s narrative of arthur gordon pym, nonhumans, and ethics 33 fully engrossed in this encounter, pym and augustus seem to enter the seagull’s point of view. despite the horrified first response, both men respond by considering, for the first time, that they, too, might eat a human to stay alive: “there flashed through my mind a thought, a thought which i will not mention, and i felt myself making a step toward the ensanguined spot. i looked upward, and the eyes of augustus met my own with a degree of intense and eager meaning which immediately brought me to my senses.” seeing that augustus is also considering eating the “horrid morsel,” pym recoils from the thought and the act, and “threw the frightful thing into the sea.” the thought, however, lodges in their minds, and it isn’t long before the four survivors draw lots to determine which “one of us should die to preserve the existence of the others” (141). their encounter with the bird has dislodged their sense of the human as sacrosanct. the encounter and the cannibalism it facilitates have “laid entirely prostrate every active faculty of mind and body. we had seen and felt, but we could neither think nor act” (133). cannibalism was a common component of lost-at-sea narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the most well-known might be daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe, which responded to and helped produce the trope of the cannibalizing other, usually the dark-skinned, alien people whose territory the white sailor has attempted or succeeded in colonizing. what arguably contributed to the disgusted reaction to pym, immediately and until the present day, is that the cannibalism is performed not by the other, but by the protagonist.5 the encounter with the seagull, it could be argued, involves what gilles deleuze and félix guattari have termed, in a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, “becoming-animal,” which calarco has helpfully glossed as not actually being an animal. becoming-animal and challenging anthropocentrism is not a matter ... of imitating or identifying with animals. rather, it is a matter of being transformed by an encounter with nonhuman perspectives. becoming-animal is thus better understood in terms of symbiosis, affect, alliance, and contagion between beings that are usually identified as distinctly “human” and “animal.” (zoographies 42) the reason i have begun with the transformative engagement with the seagull in pym has to do with this sense of animal-human engagement: deleuze and guattari position “the animal” as neither at an “abyssal” distance from the human nor in terms of biological (or social) continualism. what they describe here is an aspect of what i’ve called co-presence, something like a mutual understanding that might lead to a more humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 34 complete sense of self/presence.6 arthur gordon pym’s engagement with the seagull unravels a human-centered ontology, even as pym anthropomorphizes the bird: he recognizes the otherness of this other — its ability to feast on a human without hesitation — even though the bird communicates as something like a human and, more importantly, appears to assess the humans and act on them. the bird is the subject of this encounter, is able to initiate contact, and to reposition those it contacts. as such, the seagull is neither human nor nonhuman, in the classic division of the two concepts, just as the humans of this episode are not entirely the objects of the encounter. though i fully subscribe to deleuze and guattari’s idea of multiplicity, of becoming-animal, despite their critique of freud’s oedipalizing of animals we should also recognize that freud did allow that an overwhelming otherness of the other does not preclude recognizing one’s own, human, similarities with the other — in fact, the uncanny effect of some gothic interactions, as freud well knew, involved just this kind of double exposure in human experience: the encounter of the other in the self, the unheimlich within the heimlich, by definition creates the vertiginous experience freud called the uncanny (“the uncanny”). one more comment by calarco can summarize becominganimal in this episode and the ethical potential of the encounter i have described: the “contestation of anthropocentrism and human chauvinism and the privileging of animality should be taken as evidence of a fascination for something ‘outside’ or other than the human and dominant perspectives (and this ‘outside’ might well lie within human beings, for example, in an inhuman space at the very heart of what we call human)” (zoographies 43). as we can see in pym, the “inhuman” act of cannibalism can travel from bird to human, can call to the nonhuman within. other birds in this novel range from a passing albatross — no doubt a human-oriented figure more than a singular nonhuman in its allusion to the recently (for poe) published “rime of the ancient mariner,” which poe knew and admired — to unknown and unnamed all-white and all-black birds, to a gathering of penguins and albatross in a rookery about which pym has much to say. it is this latter i want to read closely, for while pym’s viewing of the rookery does not have the same ethical consequences as his encounter with the seagull, it does represent these animals as multiplicities, as neither fully human nor fully nonhuman, much as the seagull was, and in so doing offers the encounter with these birds as an ethical challenge that shifts, however slightly, pym’s sense of the meaning of humanity. poe notoriously lifted much of this several-page description of the rookery from benjamin morrell’s 1832 narrative of four voyages, one of two sources he cribbed for several descriptive so-called digressions in pym, in a bid to shore up the hoax of its being a factual narrative; that being the case, the narrative perception of these animal-others ought to be significantly different from that in the janie hinds -horror and the posthuman: edgar allan poe’s narrative of arthur gordon pym, nonhumans, and ethics 35 earlier scene that poe invented.7 pym, however, interweaves with the morrell description a response of mystery and wonder, offering if not a meaning then an effect of the human-like design of the rookery.8 among the things that fascinate pym in this passage is the precise geometric design within which the two species cohabit and keep their eggs. after choosing an appropriate spot near the sea, “with one accord” and “actuated apparently by one mind,” the birds create paths that cross each other at right angles over a space of three or four acres (167). “at each intersection of these paths the nest of an albatross is constructed and a penguin’s nest in the center of each square — thus every penguin is surrounded by four albatrosses, and each albatross by a like number of penguins” (168). both species have “thievish propensities ... making no scruple to purloin each other’s eggs at every good opportunity” (168-69). other, smaller birds nest among them, “enjoying all the privileges of citizenship” (169). as with the seagull, pym anthropomorphizes these birds, seeing in them human-like behavior and reasoning, but — and this is my point — it is the very anthropomorphic qualities that mystify pym, given the alien otherness of the species, in the poe-authored part of the passage: “nothing can be more astonishing than the spirit of reflection evinced by these feathered beings, and nothing surely can be better calculated to elicit reflection in every well-regulated human intellect” (169). as with the seagull, these birds produce a response in the humans, though this response is “reflection” rather than the affective horror and subsequent change in ethical behavior we saw the seagull produce. one can guess that the subject of such reflection would be the uncanny similarity between these nonhumans and humans like pym. as the jane guy, the ship that has rescued pym and peters from the floating hull of the grampus, travels southward, they encounter all-white, very large sea birds that pym has no name for — and without names, they remain a (largely unexplored) mystery to him.9 more significantly, on and around the island of tsalal, the southernmost island north of the south pole, the men encounter all-black albatross. that they are an identifiable species, but black, heightens their strangeness: “to our astonishment we saw black albatross among these birds in a state of entire domestication, going to sea periodically for food, but always returning to the village as a home” (196). the islanders on tsalal are also black — indeed, so black that everything about them and surrounding them is black. for more than a generation, many scholars have read these islanders, in fact the whole of pym, as commentary on slavery in the american south. whether read as a proslavery diatribe about the “diabolical” nature of nonwhite people (toni morrison, e.g.), or as a critique of the institution of slavery (joan dayan), the people of tsalal are without doubt rendered as radically other: they are described as primitive in language humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 36 and housing; they do not understand nor can they tolerate anything white; their customs — including eating the entrails of live animals — are met by the white characters as disgusting.10 all of the animals native to the island are black, and their being black might be read as simply representations of the radical alterity of the entire island of tsalal. it is striking, however, that the black birds here are named, not unknown: they are albatross. not wholly alien, then, but rather seeming adaptations of a white species to the blackness surrounding them.11 along with their difference in color, their wildness appears to have been tamed, as they are here domesticated. it seems pym’s astonishment comes about because of this multiplicity, the known and named, ordinary albatross of poetry and lore, which can be known and deployed as a literary and mythical figure, combined with the absolute otherness of their blackness and domestication. these birds do not produce a shift in pym’s perspective on a par with the seagull, but in their radical animality combined with understandability, both heimlich and unheimlich like the seagull and the rookery birds, they astonish pym into questioning his prior categories.12 as though to put into relief such engagements with what we might call feral, at least undomesticated animals, the narrative of arthur gordon pym also involves another type of animal encounter, one that might be construed as deleuze and guattari’s “oedipalized wolf or dog,” the “analyst’s bow-wow,” or in other words, domesticated animals whose proximity as pets to humans have typically rendered them mere humanlike adjuncts to humans. the domesticated animal in deleuze and guattari is in no way other, nor is it much more than a figure for human characteristics, desires, or anxieties. many pets in poe’s work, however, are more layered; among the domesticated characteristics of poe’s pets is a trace of something profoundly unexplainable and alien, something unreadable by poe’s characters and readers alike. when pym stows away on the grampus to begin his adventure at sea, augustus sneaks pym’s newfoundland, tiger, on board as a surprise for his friend. in the next section, i will examine tiger’s appearance and disappearance, his iconic stature as a pet combined with the wildness embedded in his character, to return us to the idea of the co-present ethical encounter between not-entirely-animals and not-entirely-humans. the domesticated animal. generations of poe scholars and college students alike, the people who most commonly read pym, react to tiger’s appearance with confusion bordering on frustration. a stowaway, pym is hidden away in the hold of the grampus. augustus has supplied him with several days’ worth of food, drink, and reading materials. after a bizarre eight or so days, involving three-day sleeping spells and starvation (the food has spoiled and the water turned verminous), pym wakes from a janie hinds -horror and the posthuman: edgar allan poe’s narrative of arthur gordon pym, nonhumans, and ethics 37 dream or hallucination in which a lion has pinned him down and is on the verge of eating him, to find that it is his own dog, tiger, who has appeared out of nowhere, and who now in fact is on top of his master, pinning him down but licking his face. “my dream, then, was not all a dream,” pym writes, though owing to the ironic logic of dreams, the lion has become a “tiger.” the moment of recognition bears some scrutiny here, especially considered alongside the moment pym first encounters the seagull, not long after the episode with tiger. “i was bewildered, utterly lost in amazement — but i could not forget the peculiar whine of my newfoundland dog, tiger, and the odd manner of his caresses i well knew” (66). this encounter produces an uncanny blend of the familiar and unfamiliar, but not the focused attention and observation occasioned by the seagull. after the moment’s confusion, “i experienced a sudden rush of blood to my temples — a giddy and overpowering sense of deliverance and reanimation” (66). the seagull produces in pym, first, a new, cannibalistic thought, second, revulsion and the impulsive act of throwing the “liver-like substance” into the sea, and third, as i have argued, the shift in ethical behavior to allow for pym’s cannibalism. with tiger, on the other hand, “throwing [himself] upon the neck of my faithful follower and friend, [pym] relieved the long oppression of [his] bosom in a flood of the most passionate tears” (66-67). tiger is first and foremost familiar, so domesticated that pym responds to him as if the dog were a parent: he cries on the dog’s shoulder. unlike the other animals in pym, tiger is a pet, he has a name, and importantly, he and pym have a history. typical of the pet dog, tiger is represented as the human’s loyal defender: pym rescued tiger as a puppy from some “malignant little villains” who were set on drowning him; tiger “repaid the obligation, about three years afterward, by saving [him] from the bludgeon of a street robber” (67). we actually see tiger’s heroics shortly after this point in the narrative when, during a counter-mutiny wherein pym, peters, and augustus take the ship back from several mutineers, tiger saves augustus’s life by ripping out the throat of an attacker; for a domesticated creature, this action is rather at the violent end of the spectrum of human and nonhuman behavior. but also typical of the pet dog of myth and lore, tiger is extremely smart and communicative. down in the hold, he eventually makes pym understand that he, the dog, is carrying a message from augustus tied around his chest with a string, and of course, the message saves pym’s life by warning him to stay below in the hold while mutineers have control of the ship. their history together has resulted in this ease of communication. even more than the seagull in pym, tiger is anthropomorphized; his valued characteristics — loyalty, reasonableness, and communication skills — are human-like. his life with pym has humanized him, given him the status of companion insofar as he has behaved like a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 38 human. even when he becomes ill and shows signs of being rabid, frightening pym by showing his teeth, drooling, and growling, it turns out that he has suffered from the toxic atmosphere of the hold in the same way pym has done, recovering as quickly as pym himself. in keeping with the oedipalized “dog in the kennel” — that is to say, the owned and domesticated animal that serves as a figure for humanity — tiger does not in fact attack his owner, but rather resists the urge. and yet there are qualities and narrative phenomena associated with tiger in pym that can neither be humanized nor explained by any human logic. not only does he appear out of nowhere, he also disappears without explanation or afterthought. the narrative oddity of this appearance and disappearance is one of the frustrations readers experience in reading the novel. what happened to tiger? most readers ask. after all he has meant to pym, when he disappears, he is never mentioned again. we can only conjecture that he has washed overboard with the rest of the ship’s supplies; that he disappears isn’t mentioned at all. conspicuous in this detail is the fact that tiger is a newfoundland. this breed was popular along the early nineteenth-century u.s. eastern seaboard. yet it is puzzling that tiger is so pointedly created as a newfoundland when newfoundlands were and are renowned for their fantastic swimming abilities, owing to their great strength and webbed feet.13 why would a dog of a breed famous for water expertise disappear by being washed overboard? another unexplained oddity of tiger’s appearance and disappearance is connected to the cannibalism discussed earlier. as thirty years of my students alone have asked, when the characters are starving, why don’t they eat the dog? this is not a naïve question, and in fact follows logically from the western world’s generally cartesian view of “the animal”: considered radically “other” to the human, “the animal” is often considered food. in extreme circumstances, even the pet might be considered food, following this logic.14 tiger’s disappearance from pym is generally considered an oversight on poe’s part, yet the presence of so many other animals in the novel — and the attention the narrative affords them as subjects — asks us to consider tiger in the same spirit as these others. as a pet, tiger is ordinary from the human point of view, by which i mean he doesn’t require explanation because he is an adjunct to or extension of human subjectivity. the only-pet, being produced by human need, does occupy an ethical position, but it is one that typically locates the human as the active subject of the ethical situation.15 yet tiger is not only a pet. he is to some degree undomesticated, undisciplined phenomenologically, in that he never occupies pym’s mind other than when they are together; he is not mentioned before or after his short janie hinds -horror and the posthuman: edgar allan poe’s narrative of arthur gordon pym, nonhumans, and ethics 39 stay on the grampus. the trace of the unknowable or unnameable sticks to this most domesticated of animals in the novel. tiger, like the undomesticated seagull, offers what derrida might consider an “excess” of signification — that trace of indeterminateness beyond the two terms of any binary, “which overflows the totality of that which can be thought, the totality of beings and determined meanings...” (writing and difference 57, emphasis added). thoroughly domesticated, tiger nevertheless also bears traits of the nonhuman, unreasoning — which is to say instinct-driven — animal. his “loyalty,” for example, though it could work against his own self-preservation, appears to be out of his own control: he can’t help but protect his master. his instinct appears to be his “better reason,” at least as far as his service to pym goes. his mysterious appearance and disappearance suggest some motive other than thought as humans know it. he appears when he is most needed, and disappears when he is not. tiger is domesticated, but his “strangeness” is not, as calarco might put it (thinking 31). the radical alterity of the nonhuman is preserved in tiger even in his most domesticated characteristics. not unlike derrida’s cat, tiger, finally, is “an existence that refuses to be categorized” (“the animal” 9). pym’s tiger and the seagull appearing soon after perform the work of co-presence in this novel; to different degrees, they permanently affect the humans due to their presence as other, shifting the human away from what had been assumed to be humanity. what might be this “work of co-presence”? in addition to the ethical encounter, and perhaps because of it, in literary-critical terms co-presence may accompany any number of odd narrative effects, including the narrative forgetfulness surrounding tiger. in the epigraph to this essay, elena passarello suggests that while images of nonhuman animals are “buried inside us,” collective memory of animals is not held “in the brain, but in marrow and fiber and peptide” (15). passarello here recognizes the connectedness of the human and nonhuman, but locates the connection elsewhere than in the usual utilitarian or rights-based biological or behavioral continualism that underwrites most arguments in favor of connectedness. passarello’s “memory” resides “far into the flesh, where the temporal world starts to wobble a bit.” her suggestive temporal “wobble” surely refers to the long history and pre-history of nonhuman-human association on earth, a time-line so ancient that the sense of history is extinguished, leaving only a kind of ongoing real presence. still, i prefer to extend her wobbly temporality to an understanding of narrative itself, in particular to the kind of novel-narrative whose very generic definition depends on chronology; even in novels in which chronology is presented out of order (faulkner’s work comes to mind) cause and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 40 effect still operates, though it is harder to identify what causes what. in a text like pym, however, the chronology is standardized. this book, after all, was designed and offered as a faux-sea-narrative of the kind that was popular during poe’s lifetime. it isn’t cause and effect that is destabilized by the presence of some of pym’s nonhumans, but rather the temporality of consciousness usually presented in both novels and sea-narratives: conventional foreshadowings and/or explanations of events at a very basic level. ron broglio suggested something like this in an april 2018 meeting of the chicago animal studies workshop, in his pithy comment that “animals rupture narrative.”16 tiger’s presence, and especially his disappearance without a trace of narrative/narrator memory, i suggest comes about as a result of the co-present status of animals in this novel. tiger, the named pet, unsettles the narrative sense of consciousness-as-narrative, and is followed shortly by the ethical encounter with the seagull; indeed, it could be argued that pym’s openness to being called by the seagull, and thus interpellated into the ethical point of view of this bird, is prepared by tiger’s surprising appearance and disappearance — the unexplained and unexplainable otherness of even the family pet. the human response. poe wrote about many nonhumans in many places — “the raven,” “the black cat,” “murders in the rue morgue,” “hop-frog,” “the thousand and second tale of scheherezade,” to name just a few — which poe scholars have usefully read in deeply historical contexts, most recently as animal analogues to africans and african americans.17 these are and were well-known and, in many ways, accountable works: their animals have proliferated studied and useful readings since their first publication. arthur gordon pym has been as studied, yet its animals have remained somehow less accountable, often ignored, i believe, because they refuse to satisfy either literal or figurative literary readings. it was arguably one of poe’s least successful undertakings. he was prompted to write pym only after his editor at the southern literary messenger told him that novels were selling better than short stories, and that he should write a novel. it clearly was not poe’s best medium; in fact, he seemed to toss the thing together out of plagiarized odds and ends of other books, almost to spite thomas white, the editor. perhaps because of its bespoke origin, pym is a rather raw composition, the first parts serialized in the messenger in two issues late in 1837, and the full text published the following year. poe later called it “a very silly book” (letter to william burton, 1 june 1840). it is also the single piece of poe’s work to include so many animals in so many liminal and central positions, as if, to quote passarello again, all of these nonhumans had come to occupy not so much poe’s mind as his “marrow and fiber and peptide” (15). janie hinds -horror and the posthuman: edgar allan poe’s narrative of arthur gordon pym, nonhumans, and ethics 41 arthur gordon pym can be said to be emotionally and intellectually altered by his encounters with birds that are not figures but also not abyssally unknowable, that are singular nonhumans, through the last scenes of the novel, by which time pym has become an increasingly passive character: by the last scenes of the novel, he can no longer be bothered even to pick up a white, unidentified animal floating by, though he is as hungry as ever. he has responded to the call and the gaze of the nonhuman other, becoming the object of the ethical encounter. pym’s change is less recognizably ethical in the typically human sense associated with moral behavior; his change involves, rather, “symbiosis” and “contagion” (deleuze and guattari) as a result of these animal encounters, producing less-attractive, less agential behaviors on this narrator’s part — even his cannibalism is foist on him by others. several theorists and critics have linked passivity and vulnerability in the ethical situations that obtain among humans and nonhumans.18 as dawne mccance unpacks derrida’s “the animal,” she notes the passivity that he, among other things, suggests in his title “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” in following, the human becomes the ethical object, in particular the object of a gaze: passivity is “destabilizing brought about by seeing oneself being seen through the eyes of the other, through the eyes of an animal, an experience through which the self, stripped of the mantle of autonomous first-person author, is called on as an addressee, as one who comes after” (mccance 69). she describes an ethics closely aligned with my reading of pym’s animals: “ethics finds itself in this position of being-seen and of not-knowing, of not having the power, the capacity, to name or define ‘the animal’” (146). following his encounters with animals, pym is “stripped bare of the mantle of autonomous first-person author.” one of the marks of humanism was in poe’s era and is now the idea of human progress, marked against the backdrop of nature — and its nonhuman animals — as largely unchanging. what i’ve called an ethics of co-presence in poe’s work can serve both to support his era’s human-centered ethics and to undermine it; in this co-presence, pymas-character and pym-as-narrator shifts away from the intentionality expected of the human subject, just as he has abdicated his responsibility as narrator to anticipate and reflect on events like the disappearance of his dog. the realization of the self pym undergoes through his encounters with animals provides a model for the decentering of the human, which, given the baseline humanism of poe’s readership, produced reactions of horror and disgust. the narrative consequences of poe’s kind of animalhuman encounter equally bewildered his readers and readers ever since. the failure of the narrative of arthur gordon pym could well be connected to pym’s failure to perform humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 42 his nineteenth-century duties as a first-person narrator, as one who knows, who does the seeing, and who can explain what he sees. notes 1. dominic mastroianni’s “hospitality and the thresholds of the human in the narrative of arthur gordon pym” is one of just a couple of publications exclusively on nonhumans and this novel. while mastroianni reads pym’s animal-human “thresholds” as permeable and changing — a position i support fully — his focus is on nineteenthcentury concepts of hospitality, while mine is on ethics. jeremy macfarlane convincingly reads the cannibalism in pym as indicative of the title character’s transition to animality: the “shipwrecked sailors cease to be human. they follow the lead of animals, eat the flesh they thought only animals could eat, and reveal that they are, at heart, animals” (“eating like an animal” 28). macfarlane sees the animals in pym in the “subhuman” light that most nineteenth-century americans did (37), while i take the posthuman position that animals can operate on ethical grounds of equality. though nonhuman animals are not the center of her argument, joan dayan remarks that poe’s thresholds are mutable, as seen in “experiences that trade on unspeakable slippages between men and women, humans and animals, life and death” (“amorous bondage” 244). however, her subject is “animality” and the human-beast association in liminal beings, “lunatics, women, primates, black men, and children” (244). colleen glenney boggs likewise mentions pym and the “permeability of thresholds” between human and animal (animalia americana 120) in her wide-ranging study of animals as constitutive of liberal humanism. 2. the call, here, should recall louis althusser’s concept of the “hail” as best described in ideology and ideological state apparatuses: “ideology hails or interpellates individuals as subjects” (by which he means human subjects). insofar as interpellation is, according to althusser, ideology, the ethical call of a nonhuman operates exactly like the hail that brings subjects into ideology; indeed, the kind of ethics i am describing has the possibility of shifting one out of human ideology into something else, another ideology. however, for reasons of space and simplicity, and because critical animal studies uses the term “call” instead of “hail,” i will use “call” throughout this essay. 3. mastroianni thoughtfully reads the men’s yell and the bird’s response as neither language nor intentional action: the men’s shout is only a helpless ejaculation, and the seagull’s cry is but “vocalization.” he sees that the gull’s “intentions, if it has any, have nothing to do with promoting human welfare” (191), whereas my reading suggests that janie hinds -horror and the posthuman: edgar allan poe’s narrative of arthur gordon pym, nonhumans, and ethics 43 the actions of the bird — particularly dropping the “horrid morsel” onto the deck of the grampus — provoke an ethical response that is read by the men as if it were intentional; the men take the suggestion of cannibalism, whether the bird intends it or not. i agree that “the gull figures not only the nonhuman, but also an uncertainty about what is human” (193), and with mastroianni’s larger point about the “transformability” of human into animal, particularly the capacity of the human to turn cannibal: “the transformability of the concept of humanity has everything to do with the human body’s susceptibility to being eaten and incorporated by another animal” (194). 4. even as early as 1974, thomas nagel proposed a similar unknowability of another’s consciousness of a nonhuman animal in “what is it like to be a bat?” 5. white cannibalism is “reported on” by factual and fictional accounts other than pym. see, for example, maggie kilgour’s from communion to cannibalism and bell hooks’ “eating the other” chapter in her black looks (21-39). such reports often include a setpiece involving the drawing of lots to decide who is to be eaten. kilgour notes, in fact, that it was usually the one african remaining on board who “happened” to draw the short straw. 6. ironically, deleuze and guattari’s position here and in anti-oedipus: capitalism and schizophrenia is distinctly anti-freud. to take just one example, from a thousand plateaus, they famously deride the anthropomorphism of pets: the “oedipalized wolf or dog, the castrated-castrating daddy-wolf, the dog in the kennel, the analyst’s bowwow” (29). their ideas regarding multiplicity and “the pack” (among human and nonhuman animals) serve as a corrective to what they see as freud’s oedipal understanding of singular identity. i believe derrida, however, reads freud in a more nuanced way, as he sees in the very concept of the unconscious the idea of non-selfpresence, which of course is not the same as deleuze and guattari’s “pack,” but which lays a foundation for understanding the “self” as non-singular. 7. poe invented the ship-of-the-dead scene, though it strongly alludes to the flying dutchman story of myth and legend. 8. morrell does compare the penguins he found to soldiers in bearing, among other anthropomorphisms, as when the female penguin makes room for “her partner in cares and pleasures” (52). poe anthropomorphizes them in different terms, concluding only that these birds’ design elicits “reflection,” while morrell makes of them a model for humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 44 human marriage. notably, morrell’s account also reports on a visit to “the massacre islands, where thirteen of the author’s crew were massacred and eaten by cannibals” (title page). 9. haraway contributes a great deal to the important understanding of “named,” as opposed to unnamed animals, which for reasons of space i will omit in this argument. see when species meet. 10. south of tsalal, pym encounters all-white, unnamed birds whose call is “tekeli-li!” “tekeli-li!” is also apparently the tsalalians’ word for “white”; we see this clearly when the islanders shout this word whenever they see anything white, at which time they look or even run away. pym seems obtusely unaware of the connection between the word and the thing: he never mentions the connection. 11. pym’s response to the people on tsalal is similarly confounded: he recognizes them as human but not entirely so. on the subject of nineteenth-century comparisons of dark people with animals, see bell hooks, black looks, colleen glenny boggs, animalia americana, and joan (colin) dayan, “amorous bondage,” along with nancy isenberg’s recent white trash. 12. poe’s best known bird is, of course, the titular character of “the raven.” while this poem has the makings of an ethical encounter in the sense i have been discussing, given that the raven does call to the speaker, who does respond initially as to an other, it is by and large a figure — adjunct to and mirror of the human — not a real animal. in short, it is a poem and an animal about the human. indeed, poe wrote in “the philosophy of composition,” an essay in which he purports to explain how he came to write “the raven,” that the bird symbolizes “mournful and never ending remembrance” (167). 13. meriwether lewis famously took his newfie, seaman, along on the expedition from the mississippi river to the pacific and back. so beloved was seaman that, when he suffered from a beaver bite, lewis and clark performed surgery on one of his arteries (“seaman,” national park service, retrieved 8/20/18). poe had read the account of this expedition and may well have known about seaman or the newfoundland breed even prior to that reading. on poe’s reading of lewis and clark’s journal, see, for example, burton pollin’s “poe’s life reflected through the sources of pym” (poe’s pym). 14. the corps of discovery, a special unit of the u.s. army that accompanied lewis and clark, ate two hundred dogs during the 1804-06 expedition, but they spared seaman janie hinds -horror and the posthuman: edgar allan poe’s narrative of arthur gordon pym, nonhumans, and ethics 45 (“seaman: lewis’s newfoundland dog” retrieved 8-20-18). they likely spared the dog because of lewis’s fierce attachment to him. 15. utilitarian and rights-based theorists such as singer and regan are prototypical in this human-centered ethics. 16. julia kristeva offers a somewhat useful but finally limited description of the relationship among the “abject” — the putrid, disgusting, the not-me repressed by the unconscious — narrative disruption, and the horror effect: “when the boundary between subject and object is shaken, and when even the limit between inside and outside becomes uncertain, the narrative is what is challenged first,” she says in powers of horror (141). my argument has pointed out the uncertain boundary between human and nonhuman as potentially productive of horror, but from a very different position than kristeva’s. she limits horror to the presence of the abject, and while in pym there are disgusting enough scenes to produce an abject response, i argue that it is the ethical situation of co-presence between human and nonhuman that tilts the narrative off its axis, so to speak — not exclusively the horror-content of the mise-en-scene. 17. see especially emmy stark zitter’s comprehensive analysis of animals and race anxiety in poe’s stories (“language, race, and authority”). 18. see philosophy and animal life, in which cary wolfe, stanley cavell, cora diamond, john mcdonald, and ian hacking, read j.m. coetze’s the lives of animals in terms of human and animal vulnerability, both potentially the object of ethical encounters. works cited althusser, louis. “ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes toward and investigation).” in lenin and philosophy and other essays. trans. ben brewster. monthly review press, 1971. 127-187. berkley, james. “post-human mimesis and the debunked machine: reading environmental appropriation in poe’s ‘maelzel’s chess player’ and ‘the man that was used up.’” comparative literature studies 41.3: 356-376. boggs, colleen glenney. animalia americana: animal representations and biopolitical subjectivity. columbia up, 2013. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 46 broglio, ron. “introduction” to configurations: journal of the society for literature, science, and the arts 14.1-2 (winter-spring 2006): 1-7. calarco, matthew. thinking through animals: identity, difference, indistinction. stanford brief, 2015. _____. zoographies: the question of the animal from heidegger to derrida. columbia up, 2008. cavalieri, paola. the death of the animal: a dialogue. columbia up, 2009. cavell, stanley, cora diamond, john mcdowell, ian hacking, and cary wolfe. philosophy and animal life. columbia up, 2009. dayan, joan (colin), “amorous bondage: poe, ladies, and slaves.” american literature 66.2 (june 1994): 239-73. deleuze, gilles and félix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. trans. brian massumi. u minnesota p, 1987. derrida, jacques. “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” trans. david wills. critical inquiry 28.2 (winter 2002): 369-418. _____. “structure, sign, and play in the discourse of the human sciences.” the structuralist controversy: the languages of criticism and the sciences of man. richard macksey and eugene donato, eds. johns hopkins up, 1970. 247-272. _____. writing and difference. trans. alan bass. u chicago p, 1978. freud, sigmund. “beyond the pleasure principle.” the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud, vol. xviii. trans. james strachey. hogarth press, 1966. 1-64. _____. “the uncanny.” the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud, vol. xvii. trans. james strachey. hogarth press, 1966. 217-256. haraway, donna. when species meet. u minnesota p, 2007. janie hinds -horror and the posthuman: edgar allan poe’s narrative of arthur gordon pym, nonhumans, and ethics 47 hooks, bell. black looks: race and representation. south end press, 1992. isenberg, nancy. white trash: the 400-year untold history of class in america. penguin books, 2016. kilgour, maggie. from communion to cannibalism: an anatomy of metaphors of incorporation. princeton up, 1990. kristeva, julia. powers of horror: an essay on abjection. trans. leon e. roudiez. columbia up, 1982. macfarlane, jeremy. “eating like an animal: cannibalism and animalism in poe’s pym.” interdisciplinary humanities 32.2 (summer 2015): 27-39. mccance, dawne. critical animal studies: an introduction. suny press, 2013. mastroianni, dominic. “hospitality and the thresholds of the human in poe’s the narrative of arthur gordon pym.” studies in american fiction 40.2 (fall 2013): 185-202. morrell, benjamin. narrative of four voyages. j&j harper, 1832. morrison, toni. playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination. the william e. massey sr. lectures in the history of american civilization, 1990. vintage, 1992. nagel, thomas. “what is it like to be a bat?” the philosophical review 83.4 (oct, 1974): 435-450. passarello, elena. animals strike curious poses. louisville, ky: sarabande books, 2017. poe, edgar allan. letter to william e. burton, 1 june 1840. the letters of edgar allan poe. john ward ostrom, ed. gordian press, 1966. 129-132. _____. the narrative of arthur gordon pym of nantucket. 1838. harold beaver, ed. penguin books, 1975. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 48 _____. “the philosophy of composition.” graham’s american monthly magazine of literature and art. george r. graham, ed. vol. 28 (1846): 163-167. _____. “the raven.” the collected works of edgar allan poe, vol. i. thomas o. mabbott, ed. harvard up, 1969. 364-369. pollin, burton. “poe’s life reflected through the sources of pym.” poe’s pym: critical explorations. richard kopley, ed. duke up, 1992. 95-106. regan, tom. the case for animal rights. u california p, 1983. smuts, barbara. “encounters with animal minds.” journal of consciousness studies 8. 57: 293-309. singer, peter. animal liberation. random house, 1975. zitter, emmy stark. “language, race and authority in the stories of edgar allan poe.” studies in popular culture 21.2 (oct. 1998): 53-69. microsoft word lonngren-luumma. pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 reviews ann-sofie lönngren avian poetics karoliina lummaa, kui trittitii! finnish avian poetics. academia scientiarum fennica, 2017. 262 pp. €40. how does a bird manifest itself in a poem, and what is the relationship between the two? these are the initial questions posed in karoliina lummaa’s book about “finnish avian poetics.” the overarching theoretical frame for this study is “ecocritical poetry criticism” (10), with a special focus on material ecocriticism. against this background, lummaa argues that finnish bird poetry (a subgenre of nature poetry) is not only connected to the cultural signification of birds in this context, but also to the physical birds themselves. being both a literary scholar and an ornithologist, lummaa directs her interest simultaneously at the text, and at the signification and materiality of birds. “avian poetics” is the term she proposes for “poems that explicitly discuss birds as birds and consist of avian and non-human poetic influences” (12), and also for a kind of reading that focuses on “the material bond that links our means of expression to the features and actions of birds and the immaterial bond that links our way of building our ann-sofie lönngren -avian poetics 249 world to the ways in which birds build their world” (14). in an early stage of the investigation lummaa presents donna haraway’s concepts of the “material-semiotic” and “naturecultures” as being important influences for the formulation of “avian poetics,” but later she also stresses the signification of thoughts put forward by bruno latour, and in the field of object-oriented philosophy. following the description of the general points of departure for the investigation is a definition of its finnish context. the corporeality of birds, their physical environment, and their interaction with humans are, lummaa explains, essential parts of twentieth and twenty-first century finnish avian cultures. as a consequence of changing conceptualizations of “nature” from the 1950s onwards, there rose an environmentally conscious kind of literature that departed from the previously folkloristic, symbolic, and romantic understandings. this means that the symbolic meaning that had typically been given to birds in literature — such as life, communication, a fresh start, and an omen — although still narrated was nevertheless challenged by scientific and political discourses. this process rendered birds in poetry more concrete and material than before. whereas previous research about this change has focused on the environmentally conscious literature of the 1970s, lummaa wants to contribute new perspectives that show the political, philosophical, and aesthetic potential in finnish bird poetry from the mid twentieth century onwards. in kui trittitii! finnish avian poetics she investigates the relationship between bird poetry and actual birds — their sounds, corporeality, agency, and world — in six more or less well-known finnish poets that were published between the 1940s and the 2010s: eero lyyvuo, maila pylkkönen, timo haajanen, sauli sarkanen, jouni tossavainen, and antti salminen. so, how do birds exist and exert influence in finnish poetry? this question is discussed in three different parts. in the first part, “beings,” questions are posed concerning what answers literature gives regarding what (or who) a bird actually is, what the world looks like from a bird’s point of view, how the bird experiences the world, and what possibilities there are for human beings to see and understand the bird as an actual bird. in dialogue with jakob von uexküll, among others, lummaa formulates the concept of “other-earthliness” as a means of understanding how every creature is earthly in accordance with the ways in which they understand their own world, and also that these different “earthlinesses” are always “other” from someone else’s point of view. gradually, the discussion focuses increasingly on the significance of corporeality in these processes. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 250 in the second part of the investigation, “languages,” lummaa discusses the ways in which the sound productions of birds are incorporated into and affect poetry. verbal language is often put forward as a dividing line between human and animal, lummaa claims, which is something that entails a hierarchy between meaningful words and meaningless chatter. when human conceptualizations of bird sounds are introduced into poetry, however, this does not only mean a design of the possibilities (and impossibilities) of interspecies communication, but also that the birds are made active co-producers of texts, which can thus be understood with the term “naturecultures.” the last part, “environments,” is an investigation of the spatial connections between bird poetry and birds. here, lummaa introduces the term “immersive textscapes” as a way to understand how these connections are transferred to the reader via visual means. words that are graphically spread out over the pages, thus creating patterns as well as voids, come across as yet another way to incorporate the concrete living of birds into the human-produced poem. as a whole, lummaa’s book kui trittitii! finnish avian poetics is a valuable contribution to the field of ecocriticism. among its many strengths is the richness in the poetry and, in some cases, also the shorter prose-paragraphs that are translated into english and discussed. together with the volume’s fine reproductions of photographs of birds, this book gives the non-finnish speaker a solid introduction to finnish bird life and to the cultural meaning of birds in this cultural sphere. another impressive trait of this study is the passion lummaa displays for her subject, as well as her efforts to clarify her arguments and conclusions to the readers, and her thorough and insightful readings of poetry. however, there are also certain parts where lummaa’s study could have been developed. for example, i would have liked to see a discussion about the specific qualities and potential of poetry (versus prose) in the field of ecocriticism. also, the change that happened in the wake of the environmental movement and other political processes concerning depictions of animals as concrete rather than symbolic would also be valid outside finland, and it would, thus, have been constructive to enlighten the reader about the specificities of this particular geographical context. moreover, there is a lack of discussion about the distinction between birds and other kinds of non-human animals. what is unique for avian poetics in relation to other forms of animal poetry? another objection that i have is the weak connection the study has to human-animal studies, a field which, although occasionally mentioned, it would have been clearly ann-sofie lönngren -avian poetics 251 beneficial for lummaa to connect more explicitly to. in my view, a lot of the arguments and discussions in this book would have been both clearer and deeper with the use of concepts such as susan mchugh’s “literary animal agency,” eva hayward’s “fingery eyes,” jacques derrida’s “the animal gaze,” and donna haraway’s “other-worlding.” the parts about corporeality could very well have been discussed in dialogue with, for example, elisabeth grosz, and i do also think that thomas nagel could have been put to work much more than was the case. indeed, i get the impression that some of the concepts that lummaa herself coins in this study might have been replaced, or at least defined in relation to, some of those that have already been introduced by scholars in human-animal studies. a more thorough dialogue with this field could, moreover, have contributed to a now absent discussion of anthropocentrism in literary scholarship. while lummaa is very careful to point out that there is no way to know for sure what we can and cannot know about birds, she nevertheless states that elks do not have any imagination, and also repeatedly makes the claim that birds sing primarily to attract the opposite sex for reproduction. this may very well be the case, i do not know for certain, but such assumed knowledge knowledge of “humans” and “animals” are exactly what needs to be scrutinized in posthumanist research. these weaknesses should not, however, be seen as greater than the virtues of this investigation. lummaa’s knowledge of bird life is impressive, as are the empirical and theoretical ambitions of this book. indeed, with the important insights in kui trittitii! finnish avian poetics, lummaa has made a solid contribution to the field of ecocriticism and to further investigations of the connections between human and non-human and between text and matter, in finland as well as in other countries and other parts of the world. microsoft word drake-kirksey-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:2 reviews phillip drake creating possible futures: hope in the anthropocene eben kirksey, emergent ecologies. durham, nc: duke university press, 2015. 312 pp. $94.95 (hb); $25.95 (pb). one of the great ironies of the anthropocene is that, while it marks humanity’s overwhelming transformative influence on the world, it also testifies to a profound disempowerment. as the integrity of physical environments and ecological systems become further threatened by forces that bear the stamp of human influence, such as biodiversity loss, environmental pollution, dwindling primary forests, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events due to climate change, these forces all seem to exceed human control. given the scale of ecological crisis and sense of powerlessness, it is unsurprising that discourse of political ecology often assumes tones of despair. while acknowledging this pessimism, eben kirksey’s emergent ecologies forges possibilities for hope in the face of rapid ecological transformation. there is nothing superficial about this hope, which kirksey fosters by tarrying with ecological transformation at various locations, tracing entangled actors large and small, human and nonhuman, as they interact to build “possible futures” against the everpresent threat of destruction. ruin — degradation, exploitation, death, and extinction — humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 192 lurks in each of kirksey’s field sites, which include the canal zone of panama, costa rica’s highland cloud forests and diverse lowland forests and pastures, florida’s riparian wilderness, and new york’s art galleries. these sites represent interconnected “emergent ecologies,” which are “multispecies communities that have been formed and transformed by chance encounters, historical accidents, and parasitic invasions” (1). from each case study kirksey pulls together “interlocking tales” of assembled human and nonhuman actors thriving and dying, adapting and aligning, transforming and being transformed. emergent ecologies is an important text in the growing and diversifying field of the environmental humanities, as it applies “insights from contemporary philosophy ... to reframe key problems in the field of conservation biology — relating to invasive species, extinctions, environmental management, and reforestation” (1). this strategy yields a number of conceptual tools and perspectives that advance the ways multispecies communities are understood and engaged with. key figures in emergent ecologies are “ontological amphibians,” which are plants and animals that are capable of moving between and inhabiting multiple worlds (4). a concept adapted from peter sloterdijk, ontological amphibians “always face a decision about what kind of ontology to inhabit,” like “literal amphibians,” who can opt to live in both land and water (18). in a similarly playful adaptation of antonio gramsci’s term, kirksey’s book presents a series of “organic intellectuals,” “thinkers and tinkerers” who seek out hope in devastated landscapes, “guiding interspecies collaborations ... by seeding them, nurturing them, protecting them, and ultimately letting go” (7). by tracing the “desires, affective attachments, and dreams motivating people to care for wild things and living systems,” emergent ecologies draws attention to the messiness of ecological interventions, whether in the name of science, capital, or ethics. the first three chapters take the reader to the forests of panama’s former canal zone, an area shaped through time by colonialism, militarism, commerce, and science. during the course of several research trips to study ants, kirksey presents encounters with scientists, indigenous entrepreneurs, expatriate “zonians,” middle-class panamanians, frogs, butterflies, and various alluring insects. mixed into analyses of the fraught historical and political dynamics that has shaped the canal zone’s physical environment and ecological conditions, are encounters with fascinating human and nonhuman actors. kirksey devotes special attention to the charismatic ant species, ectatomma ruidum, which inhabits “rich social and environmental worlds.” not only are these “ontological amphibians” capable of moving between, and thriving in, diverse environments, they exhibit collaborative tendencies with plants, other insect species, phillip drake -creating possible futures: hope in the anthropocene 193 and members of stranger colonies. beyond a noteworthy partnership with caterpillars in which ectatomma ruidum exchange protection for a “nutritious liquid” excreted by the caterpillar (34), these ants show signs of learning and gift exchange that suggest individual ants may be “rational economic actors” (31). the third chapter also examines the fraught history and future of previously restricted land that reverted to panamanian sovereignty in 1999 called the “reverted zone.” included in the reverted zone are former us bombing ranges that still contain military waste and unexploded bombs, areas that are resistant to development and commercial expansion and, thus, beneficial to certain endangered species (38). drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, particularly volunteer work with the panama amphibian rescue and conservation project, this chapter marks a transition in which frog worlds take center stage of the book. moving to the el valle amphibian conservation center (evacc), a research facility in the panamanian highlands, the fourth chapter observes the precarious status of frog species whose lives have become entangled with deadly disease, market forces, and bureaucratic institutions involved with species management. at the evacc facility, kirksey tracks the work of husband-and-wife team, edgardo griffith and heidi ross, in their conservation and breeding of frogs that have become devastated by numerous threats, most notably the chytrid fungus. “bricoleurs and entrepreneurs,” griffith and ross began their operation in a couple vacant rooms of a “backpacker hotel” and eventually moved into their own facility, a “fragile bubble of happiness” that holds thousands of vulnerable animals. central to their “practical labor” of caring for and maintaining these amphibians is the importance of fostering hope and happiness to both give their own work meaning, and to draw in additional support through the pleasures of caring (56). the fifth chapter turns attention to chytrids. while one species of chytrid is driving many amphibians towards extinction, chytrids in general are “liminal critters” that inhabit multiple forms and worlds, and often “perform critical ecological functions” (73). chapter six tracks the xenopus frog, a suspected transmitter of the chytrid fungus, as it becomes an actor in human social and biological systems. also known as the african clawed frog, this durable and charismatic amphibian is not only a popular pet, but it can be used to detect human pregnancy: a female frog releases eggs within a day after being exposed to a hormone contained in a pregnant woman’s urine, which is injected into the frog. perhaps most illustrative of the creativity of kirksey’s methods, which meaningfully connect art to ecological science, this chapter features a “performative experiment” in which kirksey and other collaborators from the arts and sciences offered to give free pregnancy tests to women and free fungus tests to xenopus frogs at a gallery in new york (91). even though the tests would be harmless to the frogs, after humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 194 receiving considerable media attention and fielding concerns from animal welfare activists, the pregnancy tests were cancelled and the group instead focused on giving chytrid tests to pet frogs. this project — like the “the utopia for the golden frog” experimental art installation in chapter four, in which kirksey and collaborators converted a refrigerator into an ecosystem suitable for golden frogs that were being euthanized by zoos (61) — shows inventive ways “art interventions at the edge of standard scientific practices” might prompt novel ideas and feelings that shape our orientations to multispecies communities. the seventh and eighth chapters are set in florida, as kirksey focuses on multispecies encounters, both in the “wild” and the home. both chapters feature “flat” accounts of interactions between human and nonhuman animals, in which neither group is exceptional, with kirksey’s thick description of human and monkey interactions in “contact zones” along florida’s silver river in chapter seven, foregrounding the complicated social practices of each group. a popular spot for recreational boaters, silver river also hosts several colonies of rhesus macaques. kirksey depicts several extended sequences of boaters feeding the monkeys, particularly noting the ways social orders are both reinforced and disrupted in these encounters. this section also notes the complicated ways troubled racial and class dynamics factor into wilderness management practices in florida. also troubling is the commodification of animal life, which signals the asymmetrical power dynamics that give shape to emergent ecologies. in chapter seven’s interviews with monkey trappers who sell to medical laboratories, and in chapter eight’s account of exotic snake breeding, market forces seem to take precedence over the felicity of individual animals. while these chapters reveal the ways breeders and traders often do exhibit intense care for animal well-being, the animals remain “flexible persons.” a notion kirksey borrows from dafna shir-vertesh, flexible persons are nonhuman animals who are loved and “incorporated into human lives, and addressed with kinship terms. but they can be demoted at any moment, moved outside of the home and the family, as household income or personal circumstances shift” (135). here kirksey’s analysis of the biopolitics of captivity and breeding is appropriately grave, as there seems to be little equity or safety for nonhuman animals in many of the “multispecies families” he depicts. the final two chapters explore the complicated ways physical environments and ecosystems become reshaped according to diverse and often conflicting interests that include farming, ecotourism, duck hunting, and the preservation of precarious species. most interesting are the contentious relationships between various plant and animal species, whether competitive, parasitic, and/or cooperative. in one of chapter nine’s phillip drake -creating possible futures: hope in the anthropocene 195 anecdotes, for example, kirksey describes the historical transformation of tropical forest to savannah due to the cooperative and mutually beneficial activities of introduced cattle, rhizomatic jaragua grass, and cattle ranchers. after the government evicted cattle with the hopes of regenerating forest in the newly formed palo verde national park, the intrusion of dense cattails and jaragua grass interfered with reforestation efforts. once conceived as an enemy of conservation, cattle were enlisted as an ally in controlling grasses (171). also noteworthy is a north american duck hunters organization that helped fund the effort to control the cattails in palo verde national park, with the goal of providing habitat that would ultimately lead to more hunting game. the proliferating ducks in the area, however, plundered local farmers’ rice crops. here and in chapter ten, set in the highland cloud forest of monteverde, the complexities of conservation science and landscape management come to the fore. milton brenes, an “organic intellectual” who coordinates a reforestation program at the monteverde could forest school, receives special attention, as his reforestation philosophy focuses less on “preserving rare forms of life” than cultivating “alliances with robust trees that are helping him generate convivial assemblages” (195). thinking through “possible futures” always involves negotiating competing interests, in which some species are favored over others, some receive “benign neglect” that enables unexpected multispecies assemblages to flourish, and some species must die. in its cross-disciplinary travels, emergent ecologies compromises some analytical depth that may irk readers who expect more comprehensive engagement with the various fields touched upon in this adventurous book. while the project could go deeper into specific biological dynamics, provide deeper inquiry into the historical and cultural contexts shaping human behavior at his field sites, and ground its philosophical flourishes, these additions would likely narrow kirksey’s analytical connections and curb the appeal his disciplinary amphibiousness. of greater concern is the book’s light engagement with the politics of environmental justice. even while legacies of colonialism, capitalism, and militarism are rarely far from kirksey’s sightlines, his infectious wonder and attraction to ecological novelty occasionally feels out of touch with the mundane, everyday environmental politics that are driving ecological collapse. for example, it would have been useful to include case studies of emergent ecologies in urban and industrial spaces. kirksey’s final comments about loving and killing, that “taking a stand for creatures one loves means taking a stand against enemies that present existential threats to them,” drive home the stakes of inhabiting emergent ecologies with beautiful clarity and conviction: “when we participate in market economies, or grow our own vegetables, we are casting our lots with some ways of life and not others. life and death humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 196 are at stake every time we eat, buy clothes at the store, or flip an electric light switch” (219). impressively, beyond fostering hope, kirksey’s project also reminds readers of our own agency as ecological actors. whether we are “thinkers and tinkerers” or passive consumers of ecological resources, our actions matter. in spite of the numerous widespread ecological crises affecting the world today, kirksey not only finds hope, but illustrates its importance for motivating more thoughtful and ethical “convivial alliances” within the emergent ecologies we inhabit. through these alliances, we may learn to make space in which newness, amphibiousness, and love might thrive (218). microsoft word bowen-herman h u m a n i m a l i a 9:2 reviews liz bowen creatural frictions: the trouble with becoming-animal david herman, creatural fictions: human-animal relationships in twentiethand twenty-first-century literature. palgrave macmillan, 2016. 290 pp. $95 hc. few viewers of werner herzog’s 2005 masterpiece of human-animal encounter, grizzly man, can come away with an untroubled understanding of becoming-animal. the film follows its charismatic, enigmatic, and comically earnest protagonist, timothy treadwell, through the thirteen summers he spent observing and bonding with grizzly bears at close range in alaska — as well as his ensuing, untimely death by grizzly. the real tragedy of treadwell’s end is not its absurdity or inevitability, but rather the sense, cultivated slowly over the course of the film, that his willingness to martyr himself while “protecting” the bears was fundamentally misguided, and possibly flat-out harmful. one of the film’s more sobering moments is an interview with anthropologist sven haakanson, director of the alutiiq museum in kodiak, alaska, who says of treadwell: “he tried to be a bear. he tried to act like a bear, and for us on the island, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 128 you don't do that. you don't invade on their territory…. when you habituate bears to humans, they think all humans are safe…. if i look at it from my culture, timothy treadwell crossed a boundary that we have lived with for 4,000 years.” while rewatching the documentary recently, i was struck by the counterpoint it provided to much animal studies scholarship happening today, which tends toward celebrations of human-animal becomings as radical refashionings of all the old, takenfor-granted notions of human superiority and separability from nonhuman life. where exactly does our disciplinary desire for convergences, becomings, encounters, relations, transformations, and all the other familiar verbal-nouns get us when, as nandini thiyagarajan points out in a new edited collection on literary human-animal relationships, “becomings of this kind do not serve the animal in quite the same way” (210)? whether we’re dealing with deleuze and guattari’s pack-sublime or donna haraway’s more domesticated becoming-with companion species, it seems like high time we ask: is becoming-animal always the ethical or ontological position to strive for? i was therefore quite engrossed in the collection that houses thiyagarajan’s insights, creatural fictions: human-animal relationships in twentieth and twenty-first century literature (2016), which dramatizes this very question through a series of articles that take up the various literary possibilities — and perils — of narratives of interspecies becoming. at just the point when “becoming-animal” is starting to take on that academic staleness that encrusts so many of the most useful concepts, creatural fictions provides a range of perspectives that, taken as a conversation, leave the reader with fresh questions about literature’s capacity to engender ethical relations across species whose interests are not always aligned. the collection, edited by david herman (durham university), begins with a meditation on the term “creatural,” which herman helpfully distinguishes from “creaturely” as a way of understanding creatureliness to include human animals, as well as describing relationships between human and nonhuman beings. he explains, “the slight semantic shift from creaturely to creatural in this volume’s title is meant to indicate its alignment with [a strand of discourse associated with anat pick] in which the status of being a creature, subject to the requirements of the surrounding environment, the vicissitudes of time, and the vulnerabilities of the body, emphasizes the fundamental continuity between humans and other animals” (herman 3). it is tellingly easy to misread the book’s key framing concept as “cultural” rather than “creatural,” which resonates with the collection’s focus on literary representations of human-animal relationships as reflective and generative of culturally contingent notions of “the human,” attitudes toward animal rights/ethics/liberation, and popular affective orientations toward liz bowen -creatural frictions: the trouble with becoming-animal 129 particular species. from the outset, then, this is a book that is not only interested in how humans might become-animal, but how other animals become (or, in the biopolitical mode, are made) creaturely within particular environments, societies, and bodily economies. this universalizing move leaves quite a bit of leeway for the various approaches to becoming-animal that populate this collection. on the one hand, there is space for the kinds of celebratory, even utopian accounts of de-anthropocentrizing encounter that show up in marianne dekoven’s readings of kafka’s animal stories, shun yin kiang’s analysis of my dog tulip by j.r. ackerley, or jopi nyman’s discussion of jane smiley’s horse-racing novel horse heaven, where mutually transformative, intersubjective encounters between humans and animals can enable forms of knowing and being that are precluded by “[species] differences that the dominant order translates into identitybased and categorical distinctions” (kiang 147). for example, dekoven incisively says of kafka’s ape-become-human, red peter: “as ape, he had freedom but did not know he had it; as humanimal, he can see both that freedom is unattainable by humans, something that humans cannot see, and also that freedom is permanently lost to him. these insights, which undercut ideas of human superiority, would be unavailable either to a human or to an ape” (21). though the troubling ethics of red peter’s encounter with humans are clearly articulated in the story, dekoven suggests, the epistemological import of his transformation is nonetheless valuable for its disruption of humanexceptionalist claims to language and reason. nyman’s chapter on horse-racing narratives likewise acknowledges the risk disparities within human-horse relationships, even listing specific incidents of abuse within the horse racing industry. but he still finds that representations of these relationships do important work to amplify the role of nonhuman animals in constructing americanness, as well as to show how, even within the confines of human-constructed and controlled settings like the racetrack, a non-anthropocentric literary imagination can “restore agency to nonhuman animals and problematize human control over the nonhuman” (nyman 226). to be sure, all these explorations of the in-betweenness of human-animal encounters — the relational, the intersubjective, the mutually transformative — represent the philosophical heart of critical animal studies today. but after reading so many optimistic takedowns of the human-animal divide, i couldn’t help but feel a twinge of skepticism toward this reparative approach. mustn’t there be a point at which the appropriative or exploitative aspects of becoming-animal outweigh the ontological insights it provides? i found myself wondering, in other words: what if we take donna haraway’s directive to “stay with the trouble” in a different direction, and ground our thinking in the troubling parts of human-animal interactions: the inequitable humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 130 distribution of agency, vulnerability, and dependency in common relationships like domestication, training, and professional performance. what might we gain by dwelling in those unequal, possibly antagonistic or violent spaces without rushing to recuperate them through appeals to interspecies becoming? (this would, of course, mean taking a rather different approach to dog agility training than haraway herself does!) creatural fictions astutely anticipates this response and reserves space for this mode of critique, generating productive tensions across its twelve collected essays. in “‘like words printed on skin’: desire, animal masks, and multispecies relationships in monique truong’s the book of salt,” nandini thiyagarajan points out that the very human-animal divide for which critical animal studies is constantly seeking alternatives is a european, colonial construction, arguing that increased attention to postcolonial literature can invigorate fresh lines of inquiry beyond that conceptual punching bag. it is quite refreshing to read claims like, “though the book of salt prompts us to dwell within the human-animal distinction without encouraging us to see the potential of the animal and the limits of the human, the novel does engage with an important aspect of the human-animal distinction: how proximity to the animal determines what it means to be human” (198). in thiyagarajan’s analysis, human-animal proximity — namely, metaphor and meat eating, common bogeymen in animal studies — looks nothing like the radical decentering of the human that has become a go-to critical move, and yet thiyagarajan’s readings of literary animals still have clear political stakes for both postcolonial and critical animal studies. meanwhile, the collection’s final chapter, roman bartosch’s “ghostly presences: tracing the animal in julia leigh’s the hunter,” takes on the “fuzzy and rather oxymoronic debate about ‘becoming-animal’” through close readings of leigh’s novel about a man hunting the last surviving tasmanian tiger by developing “a peculiar form of empathy” through which he “seemingly succeeds at becoming-animal” and ultimately kills the tiger (260-262). arguing that “the text endorses what some scholars celebrate as a fundamentally subversive event of becoming-animal with a sense of fragility and undecidability,” bartosch asks, “what good does it do to ‘become-animal’ if the result is extinction?” (265). the implications of this question are certainly fartherreaching than this particularly extreme example, however. as the other essays in this very collection demonstrate, the human cultural imagination has produced many versions of becoming-animal that have uncertain or clearly worrisome consequences for the nonhuman animals involved. what good does it do to become-animal, we might ask, if the result is a horse fatally injured on the race track? might dwelling in the trouble in our cultural criticism necessitate more critical stances toward the real-world practices they portray? bartosch and the collection end with an emphasis on human liz bowen -creatural frictions: the trouble with becoming-animal 131 animal “recognition” rather than transformation, in which the beings encountering one another may be linked in their status as vulnerable subjects, but remain differentially situated in ethically significant ways (268). the conversation around becoming-animal is certainly not limited to literary study, but the collection’s strongest points are those that think deeply about the relationship between interspecies relationships and literary form. creatural fictions’s four sections are organized around literary periods and themes, to be sure: bookended by periodoriented works on early-twentieth-century modernism and contemporary fiction, respectively, the middle two “theory-building” sections focus first on gender, sexuality, and species, and then on genre and species. it is the essays on genre that feel freshest from a literary studies perspective; though literary animal studies often prioritizes content and ethical analysis over form, these chapters draw new and persuasive connections between genre constraints and the human-animal relationships depicted within them. christy tidwell’s “‘a little wildness’: negotiating relationships between human and nonhuman in historical romance” engages an under-theorized archive that is both amusingly familiar in its tropes — think, as tidwell’s introduction invites us to, of the lurid dime-store cover art populated by lusty humans and horses — and refreshingly unfamiliar in its subversions of those tropes through human-animal comparisons. hilary thompson’s essay tracing the operations of giorgio agamben’s “anthropological machines” in life of pi is equally compelling from a literary perspective, as it theorizes a “millennial” subperiod of contemporary literature that is distinctly interested in planetary self-criticism and humanity’s shared worlds with animals. these essays are fabulous examples of how the theoretical and thematic concerns of critical animal studies can be brought to bear on textual analysis beyond the level of content. they delve deeper than the question of what literature can tell us about human-animal relationships, and instead ask what those relationships can tell us about literature. this is the part of the book that best fulfills the pedagogical ambitions outlined in herman’s introduction, where he aims for the collection to “[exemplify] how frameworks for understanding human-animal relationships afford a basis for interpreting particular works [and]… to provide instructors and students alike with models for critical practice” (12). any of the essays in this section would be prime candidates for an animal studies methods syllabus. the other of the two “theory-building” sections rests on shakier conceptual ground. it is not at all clear why gender and sexuality is the only such identity-oriented section in the collection, especially when literary animal studies is so urgently in need of theory from the perspective of fields like critical race theory and disability studies. human-animal scholarship has a long history of engagement with feminist literary theory, which humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 132 includes contributors marianne dekoven and josephine donovan as major players. though that work has undeniably earned a place in a volume such as this, there are several important, emergent strains of intersectional scholarship that are either minoritized in the collection or omitted entirely. it is hard not to long for a disability section when characters with disabilities are uncritically referred to as “grotesque beings,” men transformed “into beasts” (reddy 121), and “crippled dogs” (donovan 91), just as the abscence of a black studies section seems glaring when references to the “sexual enslavement of women” arise (dekoven 27), or when gender-centric readings of j.m. coetzee’s disgrace leave out the post-apartheid racial dynamics of relevant passages (donovan). though no edited collection can be expected to cover all theoretical grounds, the privileging of women’s and gender studies over other critical fields is conspicuous in light of the lack of an intersectional sensibility in this volume’s feminist perspectives. moreover, the gender and sexuality section makes few new moves in its own conceptual world: it does little to draw out the implications of humananimal relations beyond binary gender categories, and only one of its three articles — kiang’s reading of a gay man’s friendship with his dog in my dog tulip — theorizes queerness in relation to human-animal affinities at all. though mel y. chen’s animacies is an occasional reference in these essays, it mainly resonates as a missed opportunity, as chen’s attentiveness to trans, queer, and critical race theory, resistance to gender essentialism, and valuation of disabled/atypical embodiment do not find much purchase here. all in all, however, creatural fictions is a collection that does impressive work to show how the fictional and the creatural act upon one another through form, genre, and interpretation. other highlights include damiano benvegnù’s chapter on italian modernism and andrew kalaidjian’s essay on the “dark pastoral” in the work of djuna barnes, both of which offer sharp analyses of how more-than-human worlds figure into modernity’s — and literary modernism’s — rapidly developing interchanges between rural and city life. their historically specific analyses are vivid in their localized scope, describing how a particular moment in human-animal relation can shape literary production. there are many wonderful moments of specificity like this, from craig smith’s discussion of contemporary debates over cetacean personhood, to kiang’s account of how ackerley and his dog find ways to accommodate their movement through the highly circumscribed urban environment of 1950s london. these rewarding readings attest to the fact that, sometimes, before we can radically reconceptualize human-animal relationships, it helps to understand the intricacies of how we conceptualize them in the first place. creatural fictions gives its readers room to do both. microsoft word braverman-pdf-d 1 h u m a n i m a l i a 11:1 irus braverman fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians on a rapidly changing planet introduction. the extensive body of social science and humanities scholarship on zoos rarely discusses aquariums. despite their independent historical trajectory and unique characteristics and challenges, aquariums are considered by many as the younger sister to the more established terrestrial zoo institutions. this perception of aquariums can be explained in various ways: aquariums do not have quite the same controversial colonial history as zoos, they are fewer in number and smaller in size, and they exhibit animals that are less “like-us,” and thus not as well-known to science. with the exception of certain marine mammals, aquarium animals have thus rarely been championed by animal rights campaigns, which have tended to focus more on captive zoo animals such as elephants and apes. of 41,500 species assessed by the iucn red list in 2017, only 1,500 or so were marine species (baylina, interview). aquarium establishments also necessitate complex physical and technical undertakings: huge water filtration systems, for example, and distinct expertise for handling marine creatures, many of whom simultaneously serve as commercial products in food industries. aquaculture, which accounts for about half of the seafood consumed worldwide, is the fastest growing sector in the food industry and generates 50 to 170 billion farmed fish every year (gunther). as one of my interviewees from the aquarium world put it: “it’s more complicated to explain conservation and protection and the need for sustainability and constraint in these contexts” (baylina, interview). also unlike contemporary accredited zoos, until recently many aquariums did not hire inhouse veterinarians. in fact, the marine environment was so alien to western medicine that early veterinarian expertise did not cover it. this situation is rapidly changing. the annual meeting of the international association of aquatic animal medicine, established in 1968, is now attended by hundreds of veterinarians and includes both marine mammal and fish experts. this article focuses on the novel profession of veterinarians in aquariums, discussing the challenges of this profession and the recent changes it has undergone. i draw on indepth interviews with aquarium veterinarians in various locations — including the united states, canada, israel, portugal, denmark, and germany — to document their humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 2 unique perspective and the challenges they face when attempting to manage the health and wellbeing of marine animals while simultaneously navigating conservation concerns. this can only be an initial study and thus highlights the need for additional scholarly work in the social sciences and humanities on aquariums, their wet forms of life, and the challenges — as well as the opportunities — that their management poses to the human caretakers of this space. this scholarly need is especially acute in light of the declining state of extant species and ecosystems in the world’s seas. in this perilous time, aquariums and their veterinarians will arguably perform increasingly important roles in the conservation of our blue planet. aquariums and their veterinarians: a brief history. the earliest documented aquarists were the sumerians, who kept fresh water fish in artificial ponds at least 4,500 years ago, and records of fish keeping also date back to ancient egypt and assyria (“aquarium”). the ancient romans were the first known marine aquarists: they constructed ponds that were supplied with seawater from the ocean. although goldfish were successfully kept in glass vessels in england during the mid-1700s, aquarium keeping did not become well-established until the basic relationship between oxygen, animals, and plants became known in the mid-nineteenth century (ibid.). in 1853, the zoological society in london opened the first modern public aquarium, where it exhibited over 300 marine species in enclosed tanks referred to as the fish house (figure 1). the term “aquarium” (from classical latin: a watering place for cattle) was coined by british naturalist philip henry gosse and was adopted and popularized by the london zoo shortly after (“history”). similar institutions were later established in new york city, boston, vienna, hamburg, lisbon, and berlin. by 1928, there were 45 public aquariums throughout the world, but growth then slowed down until after world war ii (“aquarium”). today, many of the world’s principal cities have aquariums (see, e.g., video 1). alongside public and private aquariums, there are also aquariums that serve chiefly as research institutions (e.g., scripps institution of oceanography) and temporary aquarium exhibits such as those found at world fairs (ibid.). irus braverman -fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians on a rapidly changing planet 3 figure 1: inside the fish house, circa 1875. (courtesy of the london zoological society.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_jcepckxoy&feature=youtu.be video 1: behind the scenes with director of ocean sustainability science at the new england aquarium, michael tlusty. (video by author, may 11, 2016.) toward the mid-twentieth century, the aquarium veterinarian profession became independent. sam ridgway was one of the founders of marine mammal medicine, and also the founding president of the international association for aquatic animal medicine (iaaam), established in 1968. a veterinarian and expert in dolphin biology and communication, ridgway emphasized that he does not see himself as an aquarium veterinarian — he fatefully stumbled upon dolphins when working with dogs and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 4 supervising food inspections at a military base (ridgway). “nowadays, most of the aquariums have vets, but their presence is not as consistent as in zoos,” nuno pereira of the lisbon oceanarium told me. he and other aquarium vets i spoke with mentioned that, until recently, there were significant challenges in training for and practicing this relatively novel profession. they stressed how, until not too long ago, it was difficult to obtain proper hands-on training (e.g., lepage, interview). this is how pereira explained the historical trajectory of acquiring a relevant education in this field: back in the days, veterinaries didn’t know how to work with fish; they had to teach themselves. there was literature but no formal education. [so] i went to aquariums in the united states and started to network and we started to help each other. nowadays, it’s better: there are some veterinary schools that deal with fish medicine so you can start learning this at the university. (pereira, interview) notwithstanding the increased opportunities for relevant education, all of my interviewees stressed the still-small number of aquarium vets and the emotional toll that the isolation of this community has had on their work. as one interviewee told me: “it’s quite strange to be one of three or four persons in this world who can handle this or that [fish] species. it’s kind of frightening.” the veterinarians i spoke with also stressed the vast differences between zoos and aquariums and the immense challenges of managing aquariums. in the words of núria baylina, curator and head of conservation at the lisbon oceanarium: the pumps, the filters, the disinfection systems — everything [intended] to keep an aquarium with marine species is very comprehensive [see, e.g., video 2] and is much more complicated than a zoo enclosure where you keep giraffes or elephants. so [aquariums already] start from a totally different place than zoos. the other thing that is very different is that in zoos, most of the exhibits focus on one species, while in aquariums, the majority keep mixed species exhibits.... [this is because] when people go to an aquarium, they want to see the environment, not just one species. it’s a little bit different when you go to the zoo — you go to see the elephants and giraffes and you can see them separately. our theme here is one ocean. just because we call them different names, that doesn’t mean there are a lot of oceans — it’s only one mass of water. so it’s all connected and what we do in one ocean will impact the ocean on the other side of the irus braverman -fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians on a rapidly changing planet 5 world. [another important difference is that] you don’t eat elephants and giraffes. [but] when you go to an aquarium you are showing species that most people in the world eat. (baylina, interview) figure 2: quarantine area at the israel aquarium (part of the tisch family zoological gardens) in jerusalem. (photo by author, july 7, 2019.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmefil4y4ro video 2: aquarium veterinarian elizabeth kaufman (dvm, certaqv) shows me around the quarantine area of the israel aquarium in the tisch family zoological gardens in jerusalem. (video by author, july 7, 2019.) finally, while accredited aquariums in many developed countries are governed by the same industrial standards as zoos and by the same bodies — the association of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 6 american zoos and aquariums in north america and its equivalents in other regions — they have not been subject to the increasingly strict proscriptions against the sourcing of animals from the wild, which, for american zoos, date back to the 1970s (braverman, zooland). in fact, aquariums around the globe still acquire most of their fish and – with several significant exceptions — even their marine mammals, from the wild, as i will discuss shortly. observation as scientific knowledge. elsewhere, i wrote about the enhanced importance of vets in zoo institutions and about their creativity in adapting their medical practice from cats, dogs, and cows to lizards, birds, and polar bears (braverman, “saving species”). this is even more true about aquarium vets, whose everyday encounters include not only fish but also invertebrates, mammals, and birds. how do they care for such a wide variety of species, i repeatedly wondered in our interviews. veterinarian and director of animal health and welfare at the national aquarium in baltimore, robert bakal, reflected: “one of my mentors in vet school taught me in dealing with exotic species — and it’s very true, all the way down to corals, and for other invertebrates for sure — [that] medicine is medicine and it doesn’t matter who your patient is” (bakal, interview). as a vet, he told me, he was trained to stick with the procedures in order to determine the problem. in his words: “the tests for practicing medicine on a dolphin may be different, the diseases may be different, but the approach is still the same: you still do a physical exam [and] you still come up with a list of possible causes and a list of what tests you want to run.” bakal referred to this unitary approach to animal care as the “interconnectivity” among all forms of life. leigh clayton, vice president of animal care and welfare at the national aquarium, agreed. in her words: “i call it running the process. it provides a context when you don’t know what to do. just run the process. the details when facing a sea star versus facing an elephant are different, but from the point of view of the general things you want to be taking into account, the process is the same.” bakal wrapped up: “i guess if you approach it from a position of being limited, [then] you’re limited. [but] i never saw this as a limitation. i actually find it to be liberating.” while many of the aquarium veterinarians i interviewed for this project emphasized the interconnectivity between the animals they care for and thus the importance of what they refer to as the “one health” approach (aguirre xii; travis), they simultaneously stressed the uniqueness of aquarium veterinary medicine. pereira of the lisbon oceanarium told me along these lines: “for ten years i worked with dogs, cats, and some wild animals. to start working with fish — well, it was difficult, because, physiologically, they looked like [they came] from another planet.” such irus braverman -fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians on a rapidly changing planet 7 otherworldliness is precisely what attracted most of the aquarium vets i spoke with to their profession in the first place. the watery nature of the ocean environment has resulted in the evolution of particular life forms that have evolved there, i was instructed. the density of water is about 800 times greater than that of air, with multiple implications for structure and size (balcombe 12). pereira explained: “it’s not easy to live underwater, so [animals] have lots of strategies to be able to breathe with so fewer options than we have in the air. imagine being a fish. your skins and lungs [would be] in much closer contact with a fungus or bacteria. so they must have a very specialized immune system.” veterinarian kasper jørgensen of the national aquarium denmark also emphasized the fish’s vulnerability. an expert in microbiology, jørgensen told me that “the most fragile place on a fish is of course the gills. they breathe with their gills [so] the gills are their lungs — that’s where the oxygen flow is. so it’s like if you have your lungs sticking out of the window when driving your car.” for this reason, jørgensen explained, fish are like canaries in the coalmine. “if you have a mixed species tank, you’ll see the more fragile fish acting weird first,” he told me. to distinguish the unusual from the normal, the veterinarian must learn how to carefully observe her medical subjects. in his words, the thing about keeping animals in this area is you have to look at them every day because, to begin with, you don’t know what to look for, until the day that they are acting weirdly. [so i always] walk around. otherwise, i wouldn’t be on top of my game, so to speak, because i have to know the fish pretty well. (jørgensen, interview; see also video 3) during a visit to toronto’s ripley’s aquarium, veronique lepage, the institution’s veterinarian, invited me to witness the shark feeding. this hourlong practice involved a meticulous interpretation and documentation of each shark’s food intake. “getting to know their day-to-day behavior, we can more easily identify when something is wrong with the animals,” lepage told me. using straightforward observation methods, aquarium veterinarians — both directly and through other caretakers in their institutions — can learn quite a bit about their “patients,” which is how they refer to the animals under their care, again highlighting the unified approach toward animals underlying veterinary medicine (see also jones 3). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhrr9kc-qa8 video 3: veterinarian kasper jørgensen of the national aquarium denmark (in copenhagen) discusses the water filtration system, among other issues. (video by author, july 30, 2018.) when making medical observations, jørgensen distinguishes between schooling and individual fish. as he explained, for evolutionary reasons certain animals, including those who travel in groups, will hide symptoms of illness. so when they die, “they will fall down suddenly.” indeed, school fish “do everything they can to not change behavior, like cows,” he told me. “but if it’s [an individual] fish in its own environment, we can easily see if something’s wrong.” this is how their routine of fish observations unfolds in the everyday, according to jørgensen: from time to time, the keeper will call me and say, “kasper, let’s look at aquarium 5, something is odd.” and then we stand there and we can see [that] they’re not moving like they used to. so i take some scrapes. if one [of the fish] is dead then i can do a necropsy. i also have a small heating chamber where i can grow bacteria, or i send it off to the lab. for the parasites, the best sample you can get is the fresh one, so i will do that myself. then we’ll figure out, “oh yeah, they had this parasite.” ... but you can also see on the fish that they are not well, that something is wrong.... maybe it’s a fish that lies on the bottom, [or] it’s swimming too much. you can see a fish jump out because it’s itching from a parasite; you can see them swim more poorly because they have a bacterial infection so their bladder is not working well, [in which case] the scale is a bit raised, you can see it sticking out from the body. irus braverman -fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians on a rapidly changing planet 9 while they may seem incomprehensible to non-expert eyes, fish in fact display a range of behaviors that their human caretakers may learn to observe and then to interpret, understand, and act upon. initially, fish care was founded upon group, rather than individually oriented, medicine. according to leigh clayton of the national aquarium, the tendency to study certain animals within groups and populations can be traced back to wildlife medicine. the transformations in this approach as pertaining to wild animals are increasingly relevant also to the care of marine animals. in clayton’s words: there’s a paper out there now on endangered species of frogs. the researchers found a frog with a tear in the body wall of the intestines so they cleaned it all up and shoved it in and glued it together and they wrote this paper. typically, no wildlife biologist would treat an individual frog. they would just let it die on its own or whatever. but in this situation they did, because there’s only 50 of them left. so, you’ve got this interesting shift: as the numbers go down, the surviving animals become more important as individuals. (clayton, interview) the group or population approach is still very much alive in the context of aquariums, clayton told me, implying that it attaches less importance to the individual animal. “we talk about it all the time, that aquariums are twenty years behind,” she responded when i asked her how aquariums compare with zoos, especially in terms of their role in conservation. among other reasons, the different ethical stance toward terrestrial versus marine animals are often explained by the category of the animals exhibited: while exotic zoo animals are often exclusively classified as imperiled (vulnerable, threatened, or endangered), exotic marine animals can be categorized as imperiled while also being subjects of human consumption. in other words, unlike most exotic animals exhibited in the zoo settings, many marine animals are also farm animals. the distinction between wild, farm, and even domestic animals (with certain fish designated as pet animals in the private sphere) in aquariums is thus much less pronounced than in zoos (braverman, zooland). clayton explained in this context that [a]quarium professionals, and even many aquarium animal care professionals, have looked at fish more like a commodity than as humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 10 individuals. it’s been a really long time since lions or elephants were considered a commodity.... when you’re talking about an individual sand tiger [shark], [that’s one thing,] but when you’re talking about 500 kilograms of fish from chesapeake bay that has millions of them, [that’s a very different ballgame.] it’s not that people don’t care, they do care, desperately. but there hasn’t been the pressure, internally or externally, to care about every single animal. in other words, it is difficult to explain to the public why they should care about saving the same herring or lobster that they will later find on their plate. clayton stressed, finally, that this situation is rapidly changing as fish are increasingly conceived as subjects of individualized care, as i will discuss below. taking from the wild: the aquarium veterinarian’s dilemma. initially, the zoo veterinarians’ central if not exclusive focus was on the zoo animals’ individual welfare. this focus has expanded and altered with the transition of zoos from institutions for public entertainment to promoters of animal and habitat conservation (braverman, zooland; wild life; “saving species”). two questions that have been more or less settled in the zoo conservation context for the last few decades are whether to take animals from the wild (absolutely not) and whether to reintroduce wild animals back into the wild (a noble but challenging endeavor). for the most part, aquariums have been answering these questions differently than zoos, although this, too, is changing, as i will discuss here (figure 3). figure 3: sea lion show at the lisbon zoo. many aquariums (e.g., the national aquarium in the united states) have terminated such shows for what has been perceived as their problematic anthropomorphizing of marine animals. (photo by author, july 9, 2018.) irus braverman -fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians on a rapidly changing planet 11 most marine animals held in aquariums are wild-caught. the united states imports 11 million tropical fish each year, who live in an estimated two million saltwater aquariums throughout the country, and the global saltwater fish trade nets as much as $330 million annually (weber). director of ocean sustainability science at the new england aquarium michael tlusty and the institution’s research scientist andy rhyne told me about the damages that the ornamental or pet fish industry — with its indiscriminate strategies of cyanide fishing and bottom trawling — has wrought upon fish, marine mammals, and their wet ecosystems. at the same time, they emphasized that this sorry situation of fish should not translate into a complete ban on taking aquatic creatures from the wild. in fact, they have been arguing that purchasing wildcaught corals is more conservation-friendly than buying corals from farms and aquarist tanks (braverman, “saving species”; “corals in the city”; see also figure 4; video 4). figure 4: tanks behind the scenes, new england aquarium, boston, ma. (photo by author, may 11, 2016.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi_kjvuc-80 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 12 video 4: andy rhyne discusses fish sources, new england aquarium. video by author, may 11, 2016. similar to the debates about corals, the debates about whether to source fish from the wild are ongoing and, as is often the case with animal-related issues, can be quite heated. while the vast majority of aquariums continue this practice, many have become much more selective about regulating how fish are captured so as to minimize harm to both the fish and their habitat. indeed, the estimated mortality in the reef-to-retail chain ranges from 10 to as high as 80 percent for different marine species. transport practices for the ornamental and pet industry have included starving the fish so that they do not foul their water, subjecting them to fluctuating temperatures, holding them in water of poor quality, and exposing them to harsh medications (algae barn). as a result, certain states, such as hawai’i, have introduced laws requiring higher standards for fish transport (weber). although the vast majority of aquarium animals are still acquired from the wild (parsons, interview), aquariums distinguish themselves from the pet and ornamental industries by how they obtain their animals. leah neal, formerly director of husbandry at the ripley’s aquarium in toronto, canada, described her aquarium’s intensifying precautions with regard to fish sourcing: we have vendors that we go through and we generally stick with those [vendors that] we know their supply chain. so we’re not going to the mom and pop [pet] shop online. we also collect at the florida keys, where we have a “no-hands” rule: we use nets and try not to handle the fish at all. we also get to pick. we have permits, but [in addition], when we decide if to take small versus big animals, we [opt to] leave the reproducing ones on the reefs. that way, we are in control. in baltimore [and also] in [the] new england [aquarium] they go to the bahamas once a year. out in the west coast, they [also] do their own collecting. we would like to know that we’re handling those animals from start to finish. (neal, interview) relatedly, and although this is also changing rapidly, most animal populations in aquariums are not part of captive breeding programs (such as ssps in north america and eeps in europe). the aquarium vets i interviewed indeed pointed to the technical and scientific challenges of captive breeding marine mammals and fish, and also emphasized the high costs of these endeavors. aquarium veterinarian kasper jørgensen and copenhagen zoo veterinarian kathryn perrin were discussing this point when i met both of them in copenhagen: irus braverman -fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians on a rapidly changing planet 13 jørgensen: in holland [there’s] an aquarium that says we do not receive animals from the wild and that is very cool, except they just ask us if we have any animals. and for them it’s not a problem to receive our animals that we retrieved from the wild and then it’s as if they didn’t take them from the wild. perrin: it would be really cool if you had an aquarium that genuinely did not source animals from the wild. that would be so cutting-edge. jørgensen: yeah, i think that would be very nice to end up there, except that it would be stupid to not just bring the herring from out here because there’s a lot of them — there’s really a lot. this brief exchange reveals a fundamental difference in approaches between veterinarians across distinct institutions and geographies, and especially between zoo vets and certain aquarium vets. whereas both zoo vets and an increasing number of aquarium vets, represented here by perrin, categorically prefer captive breeding over taking animals from the wild, certain aquariums have been promoting a less categorical approach, represented here by jørgensen. in his view, certain fish can be sustainably harvested from the wild, in similar fashion to their harvesting for the food industry. those animals who transition from the wild into captivity are exposed to a variety of issues, jørgensen further explained. he provided an example from the world of sharks to illustrate some of the veterinary problems that occur in the transition from wild to captive. in many public aquarium facilities, larger sharks are an essential part of the collection and represent one of the biggest draws for the public (grassmann et al.). jørgensen told me that the method of capturing them from the wild, which involves the unregulated application of certain antibiotics, introduces a host of problems for aquariums. in his words: the fishermen [who] earn their money catching sharks keep them in small tanks and ship them out to different aquariums. most of them keep the fish alive in these small places by adding a lot of antibiotics. when i receive a shark from indonesia and they get a bacterial disease that needs to be treated, they are always resistant to enrofloxacin, which is because the fishermen just poured it into the water. i am sure of it. and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 14 enrofloxacin is supposed to be a reserved antibiotic. it shouldn’t be used as a first line antibiotic. you should save it for the infections you really need it for. it’s very commonly used in exotic species because it’s safe and it works. as a result of these problematic capture practices, the recently acquired aquarium sharks could no longer be treated properly. as jørgensen put it: “that shark is gone.” he lamented, further, that the aquarium’s human divers could get infected by the same resistant bacteria, which likely infiltrated the aquarium’s water system. to avoid such messy zoonotic transmissions, the national denmark aquarium no longer gets them from that area and instead acquires its fish from kenya. “we’ve been down there and we’ve seen the facilities and i’ve written the treatment protocols and told [the fishermen] what to do and how we would like the fish we are getting.” rather than deciding to stop taking fish from the wild altogether, even the conservationand welfare-minded aquariums often prefer to adjust the geographic zone of the take and the protocols for how to more safely and sustainably take marine animals from the wild. at the same time, captive breeding is becoming increasingly feasible for a growing number of aquatic species. this transition is most apparent with regard to marine mammals such as dolphins and whales (schweig), as well as certain shark and ray species (bakal, interview). whereas captive breeding programs have existed in zoos since the late 1970s, public aquariums in europe established their first two marine fish studbooks and collaborative breeding programs in 2007 — first for zebra sharks (stegostoma fasciatum) and then for blue-spotted stingrays (taeniura lymma). núria baylina is curator and head of conservation at the lisbon oceanarium and the studbook keeper for the blue-spotted stingray breeding program. she told me in our interview that the rays’ captive population of 130 individuals is currently managed among various european aquariums with an eye toward protection and conservation. “ten years ago, we didn’t know much about them and we couldn’t figure out how to breed them,” she said. “now,” she continued, “we’re in the second or third [captivebred] generation.” “compiling this information and using this network really helps to develop our knowledge about the species,” baylina summarized. from baylina’s perspective, the knowledge developed about captive marine animals is valuable for the conservation of wild species, especially because biologists are unable to monitor them closely in the wild. in her words: “aquariums have a very important role in conservation and in learning more about these animals because we are able to keep irus braverman -fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians on a rapidly changing planet 15 these animals and study a lot of things that in the wild you would not be able to study because you would not have access to these animals and you would not be able to follow these animals in their life stages.” in the case of the blue-spotted stingrays, captive breeding in aquariums will likely also reduce pressure on the wild populations from the hobby aquarists. furthermore, according to baylina: “if this species will become threatened or endangered, we [would] have the knowledge to go for reintroduction program. so we’ll be prepared if we need to use these techniques for the species in the future.” she summarized: “a lot of people think we just keep the species for them to see, but that’s not the main goal of an aquarium.” in the united states, the american association of zoos and aquariums recently established the program “safe: saving animals from extinction,” which “takes a collaborative approach to recognize, promote and bolster conservation efforts for selected species” (“ocean conservation”). four of the five focal species or species groups selected for 2015 are aquatic: african penguins, sea turtles, sharks, and vaquitas. additional changes are underway for marine management in aquariums. some institutions, such as the national aquarium in baltimore and the shedd aquarium in chicago, have recently announced that they will no longer exhibit dolphins and orcas and that they will send their captive animals to semi-wild sanctuaries. the lisbon zoo’s vet assured me: “in europe, you won’t see a [newly] wild-caught dolphin in any accredited zoo or aquarium; not even one” (bernardino, interview). veterinarians are also calling for the captive propagation of certain marine animals, such as the endangered river dolphins, with the underlying understanding that suffering captivity is better than suffering extinction (ridgway et al; see also braverman, “captive for life”). while they lag behind zoos in terms of prohibiting take from the wild and in their technical capacity to breed animals in captivity, aquariums seem to be particularly wellsuited for moving animals in the other direction: from zoos back to the wild, a movement that under certain circumstances is referred to by conservation professionals as “reintroductions” (braverman, wild life). perrin of the copenhagen zoo shared in our interview that “every vet dreams about being involved with reintroduction and making an impact.” after personally observing the reintroduction of hellbenders (cryptobranchus alleganiensis, the largest salamander species in north america) in alleghany, ny, and persian fallow deer (dama dama mesopotamica) in the jerusalem hills in israel, i can attest to the emotional intensity present in the act of releasing animals humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 16 from captivity, which may be more aptly described using narratives of liberation that are characteristic of animal rights approaches. however, the central reasoning behind reintroductions by zoos, and their foundation in captive breeding, is neither based in animal welfare nor in animal rights but rather in endangered species conservation. accordingly, jørgensen is convinced that in light of the degrading state of marine ecosystems due to pollution, overfishing, ocean acidification, and global warming, aquariums must urgently assume a novel institutional role as the new noah’s arks. he explained in the context of sea otters, for example, that the captive populations are a “backup for the world.” so “if catastrophe hits alaska, we have fertile animals, and we know how to breed them” (he lamented, however, that the existing legal regime prohibits his aquarium and others to breed otters). similarly, “with corals, aquariums are the backup. and the way that the world is going now, at some point we will need this backup.” as for fish, in terms of inbreeding and genetic diversity they are better suited for captive breeding than any other taxa, jørgensen told me. “with fish you can go through a lot of generations of inbreeding with no problem” (interview). alongside developing the capacity to breed marine animals in captivity, a crucial component of the aquariums’ function as noah’s arks is their ability to reintroduce the animals to ocean locations. while reintroductions have been a challenging endeavor for many terrestrial animals (braverman, wild life), jørgensen told me that “for fish, you can just take two hundred of them and put them out where they come from after three generations and they will live perfectly.” nonetheless, reintroductions are prohibited in many countries, mostly due to concerns regarding pathogen introduction and genetic pollution. despite the legal obstacles, jørgensen believes that reintroductions will be necessary and that aquariums should be building up both medical veterinary knowledge and husbandry skills to execute them (see also stokstad). in his words: aquariums should work toward releasing the animals that we produce instead of euthanizing them. it’s fine for me to put them down if there are too many, but i’d rather just put them out in the wild. because [we] can easily do that. you have [to undergo] some very strict quarantine procedures but ... it’s possible. in madagascar, for example, all the riverbeds are drying out and getting polluted. we have some cichlid [fresh water fish, ib] from madagascar that are going to be extinct in the irus braverman -fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians on a rapidly changing planet 17 wild in a few years. we are the only aquarium in europe keeping these fish and we are trying to breed them just in case some government at some point allows us to let them out again.” “i really think we should reintroduce a lot more fish or make it possible to do that,” jørgensen said, and a growing number of his cohorts in aquariums would agree. in their view, contemporary aquariums should perform a more active role in marine animals’ conservation and, correspondingly, aquarium veterinarians should be better educated in the relatively new field of conservation medicine (aguirre viii). can fish feel pain? while the conservation of species is a relatively new focus for zoo vets and, even more so, for their counterparts in aquariums, the welfare of individual animals has always been the primary focus of zoo and aquarium veterinarians. the central, and most controversial, question that arises in this context is, therefore, whether fish — a taxa that includes some 34,000 species (fishbase) — feel pain. perrin of the copenhagen zoo considered aloud: “of course the elephant feels pain, but does a lobster feel pain?” she immediately replied that, “personally, i feel that there’s pretty good evidence that, sadly, animals from fish upwards feel pain. there is also increasing evidence that it’s more difficult with invertebrates to distinguish pain versus reflex.” apparently, the science is divided on this topic. perrin explained that the crucial distinction here is between nociceptive reflex and cognitive pain, whereby “there’s some sort of mental process about it being a negative experience.” “if you don’t perceive it as painful, [then] it’s not the same thing,” she explained. the question is how to know and quantify these responses in animals, who cannot inform us about their feelings in ways that we can easily comprehend and measure (see also dror). “you can’t really measure pain in animals because pain is the emotion associated with a negative stimulus,” perrin continued. instead, “you apply a stimulus that you assume is painful — heat, electric shock, or a chemical stimulus — to try and replicate a painful stimulus in a repeatable way that’s consistent, but very different from, pain.” specifically, with respect to fish, perrin told me that “there was an assumption for some time that fish don’t feel pain.” in their 2013 article “can fish really feel pain,” james rose and his colleagues reviewed studies claiming that fish feel pain and found deficiencies in the methods used for pain identification, concluding that “claims that fish feel pain remain unsubstantiated.” they wrote: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 18 in contrast, an extensive literature involving surgeries with fishes shows normal feeding and activity immediately or soon after surgery.... we evaluate recent claims for consciousness in fishes, but find these claims lack adequate supporting evidence, neurological feasibility, or the likelihood that consciousness would be adaptive. even if fishes were conscious, it is unwarranted to assume that they possess a human-like capacity for pain. (rose et al.) the same article concludes that, “overall, the behavioral and neurobiological evidence reviewed shows fish responses to nociceptive stimuli are limited and fishes are unlikely to experience pain” (ibid.). along the same lines, in 2016 australian neuroscientist brian key’s wrote the article: “why fish do not feel pain.” “it doesn’t feel like anything to be a fish,” he wrote elsewhere in this context (cited in safina). by contrast, jonathan balcombe’s book, what a fish knows: the inner lives of our underwater cousins, speaks to the sentient and rich mental life of fish. “scarcely a week now passes without a revealing new discovery of fish biology and behavior ... that defy the human conceit that fishes are dim-witted pea brains and slaves to instinct. fishes are not just sentient, but aware, communicative, social, tool-using, virtuous, even machiavellian” (19). similarly, oceanographer sylvia earle stated that “i find it astonishing that many people seem shocked at the idea that fish feel. the way i see it, some people have wondrous fish-like characteristics — they can think and feel!” (cited in safina). fish “have senses we humans can only dream about,” she continued. “try to imagine having taste buds all along your body. or the ability to sense the electricity of a hiding fish. or eyes of a deep sea shark” (ibid.). indeed, recent studies show that pain in humans, too, is a very elusive phenomenon (bourke; moscoso; wailoo). whereas the vets i interviewed all admitted that they do not have an unequivocal scientific answer to the question of whether or not fish feel pain, they have nonetheless opted to work under the premise that they do, either because they experience this to be true from their everyday acts of caring for fish, or due to the precautionary principle. “most zoo vets err on the side of caution: if you suspect there’s pain, then you should be doing something about it,” perrin told me. ripley’s veterinarian lepage was even more explicit: “that there is still a debate about this topic is totally baffling to me. i just don’t get the obsession about sentience in this context. to me it is obvious: fish feel pain!” (interview). irus braverman -fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians on a rapidly changing planet 19 euthanizing fish: a regulatory patchwork. the question of whether fish (and then invertebrates) do, or do not, feel pain has substantial implications for the everyday work of aquarium veterinarians. veterinarians are trained to treat all animals equally, pereira of the lisbon oceanarium exclaimed. for this reason, he continued, veterinarians would never say, “well, this is a sardine, i don’t have anesthesia so let’s use a hammer, or something like that.” instead, even though “the anesthetic is quite expensive, if i want to euthanize a sardine, i [will] use the same anesthetic that i would use to euthanize a [grouper].” the animal veterinary medicine association’s latest guidelines for the euthanasia of animals (avma) adopted a similar approach. using the “preponderance of the accumulated evidence” principle, these guidelines state, broadly, that: while there is ongoing debate about finfishes’, amphibians’, reptiles’, and invertebrate animals’ ability to feel pain or otherwise experience compromised welfare, they do respond to noxious stimuli. consequently, the guidelines assume that a conservative and humane approach to the care of any creature is warranted, justifiable, and expected by society. euthanasia methods should be employed that minimize the potential for distress or pain in all animal taxa, and these methods should be modified as new taxa-specific knowledge of their physiology and anatomy is acquired. (13) the guidelines are quite specific about how this principle translates to action in veterinary work, as the following paragraph illustrates: [t]he preparations for euthanasia of finfish should be very similar to the preparations for anesthesia of finfish. if possible, withholding food for 12 to 24 hours prior to euthanasia will reduce regurgitation, defecation, and nitrogenous waste production. the environment should be as quiet and non-stimulatory as possible given the circumstances. light intensity should be reduced if possible.... water quality should be similar to that of the environment from which the finfish originated, or optimized for that species and situation, for the duration of euthanasia.... if euthanizing a large population of finfish, it is important to monitor the anesthetic bath water quality (temperature, dissolved o2, and organic loading, in particular).... euthanasia methods should be tested in one animal or a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 20 small group of animals prior to use in a large population for an unfamiliar species. if handling is required, appropriate equipment (nets, gloves) should be used to minimize stressors. (68-69) the level of detail provided in the guidelines is stunning and contributes to a sense that euthanasia — the good or easy death — is at the same time a hyperlegal and scrutinized one. veterinary care is very much about regulated procedures with attention to nuance, as is even more evident in the avma appendices 2 and 3 (see appendices, below). yet, as lepage told me, “there are always the underdogs and, in the case of the veterinary standards, those are the invertebrates. even if there is a standard [for invertebrates], there are no baselines to implement it in practice” (interview). broadly speaking, the veterinary standards assume that animal pain must be avoided or minimized, even at the cost of death. such standards are not new, however. analyzing the relation between science and law in the context of the british 1876 vivisection act, shira shmuely argues that “’ethical’ was generally understood to be the minimal infliction of pain necessary to achieve the objects of the experiment” (forthcoming, 3). more generally, she suggests that “law and science jointly created ethical scientific facts” (7). the term “humane endpoint,” which was developed in the context of laboratory animals, is helpful in this context. the united states’ department of agriculture (usda), which is the agency charged to implement the animal welfare act of 1966, defines humane endpoints as points that are “chosen to minimize or terminate the pain or distress of the experimental animals via euthanasia rather than waiting for their deaths as the endpoint” (“humane endpoints and euthanasia”; see also “humane endpoints in laboratory animal experimentation”). similarly, the european convention for the protection of vertebrate animals used for experimental and other scientific purposes states that “the well-being and state of health of animals shall be observed sufficiently closely and frequently to prevent pain or avoidable suffering, distress, or lasting harm” (article 5). finally: “at the end of the procedure it shall be decided whether the animal shall be kept alive or killed by a humane method” (article 11). multiple guidelines have been developed around “humane endpoints” for fish that distinguish between slaughter, killing, and euthanasia (avma; yanong). because of the central role of veterinarians in the arenas of animal health and welfare, the avma guide has become the foundational normative guideline regarding many species and scenarios that require euthanasia. but while the use of the avma guide is irus braverman -fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians on a rapidly changing planet 21 appropriate for vets working with fish species in controlled settings, they may conflict with circumstances in “the field,” and thus a different set of criteria and indications may be applied in such instances. for this reason and others, the complex network of guidelines and standards with regard to euthanasia of fish has been referred to as a “patchwork of regulations and regulatory agencies.” critics have especially pointed to how the guidelines have “caused confusion regarding outcomes and intentions of fish slaughter, killing, or euthanasia among many professionals working with fish” (ibid., 4). figure 5: surgical scissors, lisbon oceanarium. (photo by author, july 10, 2018.) parallel to the many advancements in the field of fish and invertebrate medicine, animal rights advocates, too, have recently turned their attention to aquatic creatures, calling for the recognition of “fish rights.” the animal rights organization peta instructs, for example, that while the fish should not live in an aquarium but in the wild, when they end up in captivity people must resist the urge to liberate them. “never flush fish down the toilet in the hopes of ‘freeing’ them, as seen in the popular movie finding nemo,” peta’s website reads. “even if a fish survived the shock of being put into the swirling fresh water, he or she would die a painful death in the plumbing system or at the water treatment plant,” the website explains (“caring for fish”). so in regards to the norm of not flushing fish humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 22 down the toilet, the welfare/individual rights approaches are in accord with the conservation framework (e.g., concerns about introducing invasive species of fish or novel pathogens into the wild). but there are still myriad disagreements among the rights-welfare-conservation approaches to animal care. peta’s new campaign in baltimore targeted the national aquarium’s display of, and baltimore consumers’ appetite for, blue crab when they posted on billboards: “i’m me not meat” (mcfadden; clayton interview). indeed, while advocates for fish rights typically oppose any type of fish consumption, aquariums and their veterinarians often promote sustainable fishing, not calling for vegetarianism altogether. one of the veterinarians i interviewed, who preferred to remain anonymous, further emphasized the dissonances that emerge from a rights-focused thinking in the medical care for animals. in his words: people sometimes want [to become vets] because they love animals. but i’m not sure it’s the right [motivation]. they cannot see a dog or cat suffering, so they go to vet school to prevent that. what i usually say to these people [is]: don’t go to vet school. because you won’t be able to deal with some of the issues that a vet should deal with. for example: slaughter. have you ever been to a slaughter house? this is very hard. but the veterinary work started like that — vets started as inspectors of the meat. nowadays, you have veterinary students who say “i will not go inside that slaughter house.” [but] how can you be a vet if you don’t go there? this is a reflection that you are not able to face current day problems and complexities. i can’t say “i will not do euthanasia.” well, it’s very easy to say it, but then who will suffer more? the animal, not me! so it’s easy to say that, but if you aren’t able to go there and do that you won’t develop these capabilities. and the big problem is that, with time, the mentality of the veterinarian profession is changing. and this is not good [for the animals]. as this veterinarian pointed out, as part of their caregiving responsibilities, zoo and aquarium veterinarians must decide upon, execute, and deal with the consequences of the very real death of the animals under their care. for this reason, he is concerned that animal rights sentiments might hinder veterinary work. irus braverman -fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians on a rapidly changing planet 23 endpoint: fluid futures. this article is an initial attempt to sketch a portrait of the modern aquarium through the eyes of its veterinarians, a small but rapidly growing, and quite influential, professional cohort. their feet in several worlds, aquarium veterinarians must balance their medical training and animal welfare sensibilities with the specific nature of the marine animals under their care, as well as with the understanding of their increasingly important role in ocean conservation. for these professionals, the rights-welfare-conservation approaches to animal care are not abstract ideas but real-life situations that dictate their actual modes of practice in caring for marine animals. as the anonymous veterinarian told me: “these animals pay a price to be here. the price is [that] they don’t have freedom. and what we must give them in return are the best conditions possible, which they wouldn’t get in the wild, like medicine, surgery, et cetera.” considering the ethics of taking fish from the wild and inflicting pain on them, the article reflected upon the relationship between zoo and aquarium veterinarians and the role of the latter in light of the changing role of public aquariums. finally, i discussed how euthanasia is practiced and secured through the standardization and regulation of the fine details of veterinary operations. the hyperlegal apparatus that has emerged around what is typically seen as the profession’s most difficult decision reveals the challenges facing the contemporary work of zoo and aquarium veterinarians and the importance of law in the medical practice of caring for animals. arguably, the work of aquarium veterinarians ought to become its own topic of study as part of a broader contemplation of how we must care for captive marine animals and for our blue planet. works cited aguirre, alonso a. et al. conservation medicine: ecological health in practice. oxford up, 2002. “aquarium.” encyclopedia britannica. n.d. accessed 24 june 2019. online. “avma guidelines for the euthanasia of animals.” 2013. accessed 24 june 2019. online. bakal, robert. director, animal health and welfare, national aquarium, baltimore. inperson interview, september 27, 2018, baltimore, md. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 24 balcombe, jonathan. what a fish knows: the inner lives of our underwater cousins. scientific american, 2016. baylina, núria, curator and head of conservation, oceanário de lisboa. telephone interview, november 12, 2018. bernardino, rui. zoo veterinarian, lisbon zoo. in-person interview, july 9, 2018. lisbon, portugal. bourke, joanna. the story of pain: from prayer to painkillers. oxford up, 2014. braverman, irus. “captive for life: conserving extinct species through ex situ breeding.” the ethics of captivity. lori gruen, ed. oxford up, 2014. 193-212. _____. “corals in the city: cultivating ocean life in the anthropocene.” contemporary social science: journal of the academy of social sciences (special issue: urban animals: cartographies of radical encounters) (forthcoming, 2019). _____. “saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation.” humanimalia 9.2 (2018): 1–27. online. _____. wild life: the institution of nature. stanford up, 2015. _____. zooland: the institution of captivity. stanford up, 2012. “caring for fish.” peta. accessed 24 june 2019. online. clayton, leigh. vice president of animal care and welfare, national aquarium. inperson interview, september 27, 2018, baltimore, md. dror, otniel e. “the affect of experiment: the turn to emotions in anglo-american physiology, 1900-1940.” isis 90.2 (1999): 205–37. fishbase. 2018. accessed 24 june 2019. online. grassmann, michael, mcneil, bryan, and jim warton. “chapter four — sharks in captivity: the role of husbandry, breeding, education, and citizen science in shark conservation.” advances in marine biology 78 (2017): 89-119. irus braverman -fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians on a rapidly changing planet 25 gunther, mark. 2018. “fish are getting their animal rights moment.” civil eats january 18, 2018. accessed 24 june 2019. online. “the history of the aquarium.” zsl. accessed 24 june 2019. online. “humane endpoints and euthanasia.” usda. animal welfare information center. n.d. accessed 24 june 2019. online. “humane endpoints in laboratory animal experimentation.” humane endpoints, n.d. accessed 24 june 2019. online. “is there really a difference between wild-caught and aquacultured marine aquarium livestock?” algae barn. accessed 24 june 2019. online. jones, susan d. valuing animals: veterinarians and their patients in modern america. johns hopkins up, 2003. jørgensen, kasper. team leader, animal department, national aquarium denmark. in person. copenhagen, denmark. july 30, 2018. key, brian. “why fish do not feel pain.” animal sentience 2016.003. accessed 24 june 2019. online. lepage, véronique. associate veterinarian, ripley’s aquarium of canada. in-person interview, toronto, canada, november 22, 2018. mcfadden, david. 2018. “marylanders crabby over peta’s vegan billboard in baltimore.” wthr. august 25, 2018. accessed 24 june 2019. online. moscoso, javier. pain: a cultural history, palgrave macmillan, 2012. neal, leah, former director of husbandry, ripley’s aquarium of canada. skype interview, january 16, 2018. “ocean conservation.” aza. accessed 24 june 2019. online. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 26 parsons, ed. director of husbandry, ripley’s aquarium of canada. in-person interview, november 22, 2018. pereira, nuno marques. veterinarian, oceanário de lisboa. in-person interview, lisbon, portugal. july 10, 2018. perrin, kathryn. center for zoo and wild animal health, copenhagen zoo. in-person interview, july 30, 2018, copenhagen, denmark. ridgway, sam h. “history of veterinary medicine and marine mammals: a personal perspective.” aquatic mammals 34.4 (2008.): 471-513. ridgway, sam h., norris s. kenneth, and lanny h. cornell. “some considerations for those wishing to propagate platanistoid dolphins.” biology and conservation of river dolphins. robert brownell, w.f. perrin, kaiya zhou and jiankang liu, eds. iucn species survival commission occasional papers (no. 3.), 1989. 159-167. rose, j. d., arlinghaus, r., cooke, s. j., diggles, b. k., sawynok, w., stevens, e. d., & wynne, c. “can fish really feel pain?” fish and fisheries 15.1 (2014): 97-133. safina, carl. “are we wrong to assume fish can’t feel pain?” the guardian, october 30, 2018. accessed 24 june 2019. online. shmuely, shira. “law and the laboratory: the british vivisection inspectorate in the 1890s” (under review, cited with permission). stokstad, eric. “new hope for an endangered fish in madagascar.” science magazine. december 13, 2013. accessed 24 june 2019. online. schweig, sarah h. “finally: aquarium will no longer capture dolphins and whales from the wild.” the dodo. 3 june 2016. accessed 24 june 2019. online. tlusty, michael & andy rhyne. director of ocean sustainability science at the new england aquarium and research scientist, new england aquarium. in-person interview, may 11, 2016, boston, ma. travis, alexander j. “domestic dogs, gene repair, and the ’one health’ approach.” gene editing, law, and the environment: life beyond the human. irus braverman, ed. routledge, 2017. 153-168. irus braverman -fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians on a rapidly changing planet 27 wailoo, keith. pain: a political history. johns hopkins up, 2014. weber, sam. “why can’t captive breeding of saltwater aquarium fish catch on?” pbs february 15, 2015. accessed 6 august 2019. online. yanong, roy pe et al. “fish slaughter, killing, and euthanasia: a review of major published u.s. guidance documents and general considerations of methods.” university of florida ifas, 2007. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 28 the avma guidelines for the euthanasia of animals can be accessed at https://www.avma.org/kb/policies/documents/euthanasia.pdf. appendix 2: “some of the acceptable agents and methods of euthanasia” appears on pp. 100-101, and appendix 3: “some of the unacceptable agents and methods of euthanasia” appears on p. 102. both are copied below. irus braverman -fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians on a rapidly changing planet 29 ann marie mckinnon -herding community: entanglement in of horses and men h u m a n i m a l i a 12:1 ann marie mckinnon herding community: entanglement in of horses and men cinema produces an equalizing vision of the world in which human beings do not have preferential status over beasts or forests. -andre bazin, “death every afternoon.” “grána’s eye” [still from of horses and men] introduction. benedikt erlingsson’s film of horses and men was released in 2013, was nominated for best foreign film for the 86th academy awards, and won the 2014 nordic film award. it is structured around a series of episodes reflecting scandinavian sagas, or traditional oral stories that simon halink calls “sagascapes.” halink argues that sagascapes are stories that are historically entangled with the landscapes of iceland and, in the case of this film, include the icelandic horses that are entangled with human animals and landscape forming community.1 the film does not have a conventional plot; rather, the episodes or sagas are linked together by each character’s connection to their horses and, in what follows, because there is not a plot per se that describes the action of the film, i will consider each scene in the order that it appears in the timeline of the film to illustrate my claims. each new scene is introduced with a shot of the horse’s body or eye, and usually ends in a death or accident of either a horse or human. the action is inaugurated by the farmer kolbeinn (ingvar eggert sigurðsson) and the widow solveig (charlotte bøving), whose courtship is the principal thread that takes us to the end of the film. the other important through line is of a spanish tourist, juan, who meets each of the villagers and their horses on his bicycle and horse tours of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 96 iceland. the characters and horses meet death, blindness, love, and friendship along the way, and the film culminates in a final scene where both human and horse are coconstituted as one in a herd. the icelandic title of the film is horses in us (hross í oss) which makes me wonder: how is becoming-animal — the horse in us — a risky experiment? astridis neimanis asks: “what are the risks and consequences of becoming animal? not only for the human who becomes, but also for the animal that is pulled into this becoming alongside of her” (280)? horses in this film are shot, gelded or castrated, and nearly drowned. but “men” also die and are blinded/castrated. the director of this film has an equalizing vision and seemingly makes no distinction between humans, non-human animals, landscapes, and other signs. this astonishing film offers the student of both film and animal studies a text that operates at the intersection of two ontologies, or what jonathan burt calls a “rupture in the field of representation” (11). burt argues that the animal image in film points beyond itself to ethical questions regarding how animals are treated, not just in the making of the film but in society. i consider of horses and men as a means of understanding the icelandic horse in its landscape and the co-created human communities and landscapes — the sagascapes of places and spaces — they share, both on and off the screen to create a distinctly embodied, ethical community. however, this is a film, and so it is also about looking. in order to read the representations of the non-human and human animal entanglements, the director makes clear that the controlling visual metaphor of the film is the eye — the gaze of the animal — and the coats of the horses, an affectual image. in some instances, the spectator sees in the horse’s eye the figure of a human and, as such, the horse’s eye can be said to be merely a series of mirrors in which “man” sees his own image, “always already deformed in the features of an eye” (agamben 26). or, sometimes the image of the horse’s eye is opaque, without reflection, its sight unseen. and yet other times we see in the eye the objects viewed by the horse, such as fence-line and landscape. the gaze here is not one frozen in time and does not represent a colonizing metaphysics geared to the static, nature-based tourism images that prop up romantic wilderness ideologies. instead, we see the horse as an agent — a theatrical actor -in their own right for “what they feel is clearly written on their faces, made public — by tails, ears, and odors and displayed by their actions” (bekoff 44-5). the horse in this film is an actor and individual understood on the basis of what it does, a biosocial becoming in a specific geography and society, an agent of “intra-action” and “agential realism” as defined by karen barad. “crucially, agency is a matter of inter-acting; it is an ann marie mckinnon -herding community: entanglement in of horses and men 97 enactment, not something that someone or something has. agency is doing/being in its intra activity” (meeting 235). as barad explains: all bodies, not merely human bodies, come to matter through the world’s iterative intra-activity — its performativity. this is true not only of the surface or contours of the body, but also the body in the fulness of its physicality, including the very “atoms” of its being. (153) barad goes on to state that human bodies are not different than non-human bodies and that this intra-activity has material effects/affects in the world. we are not separate, but entangled: to be entangled is not simply to be intertwined with another, as in the joining of separate entities, but to lack an independent, self-contained existence. existence is not an individual affair. individuals do not preexist their interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entangled intra-relating. (x) barad argues that ethics is not simply about “responsible actions in relation to human experiences in the world” (160). ethics are embodied in relational ontologies of entanglement: there is no outside of matter but rather a “multitude of entangled performances of the world’s worlding itself” (“nature’s” 133). boundaries are coconstituted, including in “situations where there are no humans around” (meeting 160). this doing/being of inter-action is shown in this particular film through the visual repetition of the gaze of the horse, a visual metaphor for cinema itself, which is always the subject of its own vision as well as an object for our vision (sobchack 148). the horse’s eye in this film is a kind of animal camera that directs the audience’s gaze. because the film dispenses with narration and with little talking amongst characters, the world of this film is not explained to the audience, it is not about a particular human understanding of the world. rather, the film offers a version of the nature of reality. in addition to the horse’s eyes, the images of the coats of the horse invites the viewer into what laura marks calls “haptic visuality,” or a world of affect that opens up the visual boundaries that sight alone engenders (skin 2). this material and tactile and creaturely gaze draws on a range of senses, especially touch, which is the most intimate of connections that we can have with horses. through the tactile images of the equine body, of horses and men articulates a sense of shared embodiment and represents what anat pick calls “creaturely cinema” in that when viewing, our desire to reach out to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 98 touch the horse destabilizes the visual division between the human subject and its objective world, human and non-human life (193).2 in of horses and men there is much more to the question of where the horse’s body begins and ends than meets the eye. what we see when we look back to the eye of the horse in this film is a questioning entity looking upon human community. while vision abstracts the human subject from the objective world, arguably in this film the nonhuman animal eye reflects the very possibility of reciprocal understanding between the horse and human community, and we are entangled in our viewing with non-human animals via the reoccurring image of the horse’s eye. the human, like the horse, is a most social animal and it can be said that we both live in herds. and communities are knitted together by a shared ethics, which in this case are embodied in the “worlding of the world” via the horse. it is not a question of other animals being elevated to human status as creatures with “higher” human faculties but rather, as steven thierman argues, the human community could benefit by being brought “down,” as it were, to the level of other animals (185). we need not consider how to get animals into our moral community, but perhaps instead consider how we may be inserted into theirs by recognizing that all boundaries are always already co-constituted. in the case of this film, the animal gaze offers us ethical insights through the horses who look back. we cannot know explicitly what the horses think; however, we can follow the direction of the film that clearly moves us to see what the horses see, which is “us” of course. the tactile world of affect that the horses open up for us is sensual, sentient and sensible, making sense to us and also making sense of us, for us, in us, herded together. “brunn mounting grana” [still from of horses and men] ann marie mckinnon -herding community: entanglement in of horses and men 99 the animal gaze. with obvious cinematic attention to seeing and being seen, the nonhuman animals in this film are not merely the bearers of the look in a predatory human gaze. john berger, in his exploration of the gaze in “why look at animals,” argues that the “look between the animal and the man, which may have played a crucial role in the development of human society, and which, in any case, all men had always lived with until less than a century ago, has been extinguished” (berger 28). jonathan burt offers a corrective to berger’s assessment. we see animals in cinema as suspended between technological artifice and corporeal reality, and so the very technology of filmmaking attempts to depict a becoming with the assemblages of these non-human creatures and cultures that surround and inhabit us, and thus we in turn inhabit them. the director of horses underscores that reciprocal looking in this film is anything but extinguished, and instead offers what pick and burt would designate a “transformative cultural presence” in a cinematic “zoomorphic stage that transforms all living things into creatures” (pick 107). creatures in this instance means an entanglement of human and non-human animals, making them equal in their possession of the gaze. however, film has a powerful fetishizing effect: film fetishizes the animal look to such a degree that it could be suggested that it is around the idea of visual communication that the animal figure comes closest to resembling the technology that produces it. (burt 64) the gaze of the animal in cinema marks the point of contact across the species, for when the animal look merges with the camera lens, the animal eye is turned into a camera or a non-human recording mechanism (53). in the first frames of the film we see close up shots of the coat, ears, and eye of the farmer kolbeinn’s (ingvar eggert sigurdsson) prized grey mare, grána. next, we see light glinting off the binoculars of the villagers who spy on the farmer kolbeinn as he is on his way to court the widow solveig (charlotte bøving). he takes careful attention with his clothing and the turnout of his mare, for he knows the villagers and the widow are watching, and he wants to show off the mare’s spectacular skeið, or “flying pace.” the villagers are waiting to see his inaugural ride on the beautiful mare, but they are sexual voyeurs as well, and they want to see him greet the widow solveig whom he is keen to impress. it is impossible to determine which performance they want to see more. after a short visit, kolbeinn mounts his mare to return home, but solveig’s stallion brunn mounts grána while kolbeinn is still astride. this scene resonates with one of the most defamatory remarks in medieval icelandic sagas, which is gera meri ór einum or to “make a mare of someone,” symbolizing femininity, rape and bestiality humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 100 (sayers 32). the farmer is humiliated and the event shames the man to the point that he perceives no other option than to shoot his beloved mare, and the widow solveig, angry because her stallion has driven the only eligible bachelor away, gelds him.3 kolbeinn projects a misogynistic view of human sexuality onto the mare. like a raped woman it is her transgression, she dishonored him, and so must be killed. these opening scenes of both the materiality of bodies, animal sex, and the horse’s eye are an insertion of the sensuous real in animal form which, as pick and burt assert, is always a question of violence (pick 110). the violent killing of the mare is off screen, but the technologies of sight seen in cinema — in this case the binoculars of the villagers, via classic cinema’s shot-reverse shot format — signify unconscious desire, fantasies, and the ego-shattering enjoyment that both drives and resists film representation. the gaze undoes us and reduces us to animal shame (lacan 84). arguably, no discipline has worked harder to separate human beings from their animality than psychoanalysis. our rejection of our animality creates human consciousness; our civilizing of animal urges creates normative sexuality. the gelding of the stallion is simultaneous with the symbolic castration of the farmer, who is humiliated and degraded and, in turn, the cinematic gaze offers us the uncanny sense that the object of our eye looks or glances back, and so reduces we the audience to feel shame. the horse who looks reminds the farmer of his lack and reminds the viewer that the materiality of existence always exceeds our grasp of meaning. and so, the mare must die. the opposite of anthropomorphism in the film is, arguably, bestiality. we project nobility onto humans and bestiality on to beasts. usually, the screen confirms human superiority for viewers are directed by the cinematographer to see one form of sex as vulgar and repulsive, and the other as erotic and titillating. in human communities the disavowal of the animal’s gaze is marked by hatred for the animal within, a hatred for human animality (sliwinski 75). anne frieberg uses the term “petishism” to illustrate how the screen is not a merely a mirror, but a space where viewers can look at an image that does not reflect back themselves, but rather an animal as other that confirms one’s existence as human: “the primal scene of petishism is the terror of finding out that we are not, after all, so different from animals” (qtd in marks, touch 26). the purpose of a fetish — or a “petish” — is to distract us from the fear of difference and protect us from the truth of our animality. the farmer’s masculinity was already threatened by the widow, and so when her stallion mounts his mare, his fears of castration or humiliation are realized because of the villagers who watch. instead of having an empathetic understanding of all animal ann marie mckinnon -herding community: entanglement in of horses and men 101 life and death in solidarity, the farmer and those who watch are disgusted by this “bare life” as an animal — by his sexual desires for the widow — and by killing the horse, he kills off the remainder of the animality that causes him such un-worlding shame. but that is not the full story. the coupling between grána the mare and brunn at the beginning of the film is mapped onto kolbeinn and solvieg near the end of the film, for they finally consummate their relationship during the annual roundup of the horses. solveig takes the initiative with the farmer and they have sex in a meadow while the horses watch, with a close up on the widow’s now castrated horse, brunn. before the couple has sex, solveig instructs kolbein to make sure he doesn’t let go of brunn’s reins, for he is recently gelded and “excitable” and may run away. how we see horses has elements of voyeurism, desire, ownership and violence. but how do we see the horses who watch? as jonathan burt writes regarding perverse looking and animals in cinema: the issue here is not whether similar desires might be aroused in audiences from seeing animal and human bodies in similar contexts, but what it means to map the one onto the other. at one level, the invocation of taboo imagery points to comparable ethical questions relate to issues of exploitation — particularly where scenes of animal violence are contrived for the camera – or to the ambivalence of the interplay between extreme objectification and the thrills of identification. (44) the widow solveig is not killed and the farmer kolbeinn is not gelded after their sex act, so the camera’s concentration on the look of the horse that was gelded because of his “transgression” is notable. while kolbeinn’s mare was killed because of her sexual transgression as a female animal, the human characters in this scene nevertheless in the end become animal alongside the horses. in fact, in this image they remain physically tethered to their animality, for kolbeinn holds brunn’s reins while they have sex in the meadow. monica mattfeld reminds us that horse/human relationships also require technologies, specifically bits, the very material that “shaped the lives of horses and humans who “intra-acted” with them in complex apparatuses of “mattering”” creating a third, cyborg, identity (11). in this manner, the image of the animal is in a position of equality with the human subject, in that human and animal bodies are mapped onto each other via both sex and death. the human characters watch the horses have sex, and the horses watch the humans, and in this latter scene the horse’s gaze dissolves the boundaries between the animal and human bodies. there is no species on earth that is not entangled or in “symbiosis” with another species (lingus 166). we feel and move with other species: “our bodies are coral reefs teeming humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 102 with polyps, sponges, gorgonians” and we move “stirred by the coursing of blood, the pulse of the wind” (167). further, as alphonso lingis says about sex, our sense of ourselves, our self-respect shaped in fulfilling a function in the machinic and social environment, our dignity maintained in multiple confrontations, collaborations, and demands, dissolve: the ego loses its focus as a centre of evaluations, decisions, and initiatives. our impulses, our passions, are returned to animal irresponsibility. (172) the horses who watch seem to animate the relationship between the farmer and the widow, for the farmer and the widow finally find love in their animal irresponsibility, in a meadow, surrounded by horses, tethered to nature as represented by the gelding. jarpur and vernhardur [still from of horses and men] vernhardur, desperate to meet a russian ship in order to purchase vodka, grabs one of the free roaming horses, jarpur. the ship is far off shore and, in one of the most spectacular scenes in the film, he makes jarpur swim in the frigid water to the russian ship to procure the alcohol. the horse not only readily swims to the ship, but also very compliantly steps on a lift up out of the water, and later dives back into the sea with vernhardur aboard to swim back to shore. unfortunately, vernhardur doesn’t realize that the alcohol is pure, and after guzzling, he falls off his horse and dies with the reins looped around his elbow. poor jarpur the horse is stuck with vernhardur. tethered, all he can do is look and sniff at the dead man. each character in the film has a different relationship to the horse and the more unstable the boundaries between the human characters and non-human animals, the more brutally they are enforced. each human connection in the film means that one or more ann marie mckinnon -herding community: entanglement in of horses and men 103 horses have to give a pound of flesh, as it were, so that the human and non-human animal community can be sustained. significantly, while we see two men die in of horses and men, the moment of animal death — when kolbeinn shoots his mare grána and when the tourist juan kills old piebald, a scene discussed later in this writing — is off camera. we see kolbeinn bury his mare, complete with her tack, and then in the following scene, we watch the funeral for vernhardur (steinn ármann magnússon). vernhardur’s death is juxtaposed with the scene of kolbeinn’s burial of his mare, but the difference between the two deaths is that the camera closes in on the horse’s eye, and in this moment of entanglement between the cinematic gaze and the horse’s eye, the real asserts itself in the violent death of the horse who sees itself being seen. vernhardur’s death is more like an animal death in cinema, for the director does not give us a close or medium shot of vernhardur, and we are not offered a narrative of his interior life and so may not identify with him; in fact, we merely see a man die. the death of the mare is much more shocking. as early as the film theorist andre bazin, the notion that we displace our fear of death and dying onto animals represented in film has become the starting point of theorizing about the status of the animal in cinema. animals, as laura u. marks succinctly put it, are either mirrors or meat (touch 27). vivian sobchack on death in documentary cinema points out that: (…) we do not ever “see” death on the screen nor understand its visible stasis or contours. instead, we see the activity and remains of the event of dying. whereas being can be visibly represented in its inscription of intentional behavior (the “having of being” animated concretely in action that is articulated in a visible world), nonbeing is not visible. it lies over the threshold of visibility and representation. (233) while interspecies communication is often marked by killing and sex and death, this nevertheless creates an ethical space giving rise to a creaturely gaze with the potential to affirm empathetic communication between human and non-human animals.4 hilda kean argues that the passage to modernity was partly defined by how people reacted to the sight of the death or abuse of animals in city streets and then later in images.5 these urban sights gave rise to animal ethics and animal welfare, and the current proliferation of animal imagery online has only increased calls for their rights and welfare. cora diamond famously noted that what we need is not a morality based on biological similarities or differences, but rather a notion of fellow creatures with whom we have fellow feeling, and so our response to animals should be based on our fellowship in mortality (212). we share the biological fact that we die, but our ethics are what we humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 104 make of that fact. animal death is a recognition of our own vulnerability. in of horses and men, it is the look of the soon to be dead animal that we see — grána, kolbeinn’s mare — not the eyes of the dying man, vernhardur. derrida writes: “an animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. thinking perhaps begins there” (29). characters speak very little in the film, and as sharon silwinski notes, talking may merely be a means of getting rid of thoughts, instead of thinking. in silwinski’s reading, derrida asserts that it is emotional experience that is at the “heart of the labour of thinking” (76). in fact, we do not need to know exactly what the horses are thinking when we see them watch solveig and kolbein have sex or the alcoholic vernhardur die. jonathan burt adds: the image of the animal’s eye reflects the possibility of animal understanding by emphasizing animal sight. this does not mean that the eye gives any access to what is understood but it does signal the significant participation of the animal in the visual field. (71) this awareness of not-having/knowing is the very condition of an ethical response, one that takes us away from solipsistic discussions about animal speech. justice is not necessarily about knowing or calculability, and ethics depends on a position of “beingseen and of not-knowing.” according to cary wolfe, for derrida this question is “passive” for it “bears witness, manifesting already, as a question, the response that testifies to sufferance, a passion, a not being able” and this marks the beginning of thinking otherwise (wolfe, animal 24). “blind grimur” [still from of horses and men] ann marie mckinnon -herding community: entanglement in of horses and men 105 human blindness. animals in cinema have affective power through human observation, and in this film, we look that animal subject in the eye. as laura u. marks insists, here the film itself becomes skin or “embodied perception” (skin 145). the look between the animal and the man is alive, and we shuttle between the process of anthropomorphism — all of those mirrored eyes — and the animal that looks back. but humans are blind in comparison. in the next scene, egil (helgi björnsson,) sees his neighbor grímur (kjartan ragnarsson), riding one horse and leading another, dismount to cut an opening in a wire fence. grímur wants to make sure that the ancient national horse paths remain open, but egil considers them to be on his property and wants them fenced. grímur cuts the wire and it bounces up and blinds him while his two horses watch. egil comes after him in his tractor, but he does not know that grímur has been blinded by the barbed wire, and shocked by the oedipal nightmare of the bleeding and blind grímur, egil takes his hands off the wheel, and rolls over the cliff to his death. and the horses watch. arguably horses, more than most non-human animals, have been key to the formation of the bio-political state. kelly oliver reminds us that the corralling of livestock led to land disputes which inaugurated private property and property rights, and therefore rights language begins with the domestication and owning of animals (37). in our political philosophies non-human animals are not citizens, but rather the constitutive outside that tells us what it means to be human.6 but unlike most domesticated horses worldwide, icelandic horses have never lived exclusively on private property. horses that are in training are sometimes in a farm environment, but only for a part of the year, normally shod in the late winter and released back into the wild in the late fall. the international federation of icelandic horse associations notes: “to ensure that the icelandic horse is kept in conditions as close as possible to its habitat, this means: enough light, fresh air, and freedom of movement” (helgadóttir 538). iceland’s remoteness from the rest of the world ensures that icelandic horse culture stays close to the traditions and values of scandinavia, and so the horses help to anchor the islanders and their values in this place. icelanders say that the horses get their “personality from living in a herd” or their spirit (which is keenly linked to the spirituality of the place) and yet “become calm” and manageable in human society (harlan). in this manner, the icelandic horse occupies a liminal space in that it belongs to its own category, neither wild nor domestic. the tracing of the boundaries of private property in the film reflect the early dividing practices between human and non-human animals. egil’s desire to fence the property is to keep the horses off his land, but the ancient national horse trails are integral to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 106 icelandic horse culture, especially given that they are turned out in the wild for a part of every year and used in horse tourism. blind grímur’s interest in the horse trails is ranged against eglin’s demand for a civilization marked by fences, but this problem also stands in for one of the most difficult problems we currently face: how to reconcile these two worlds in the face of environmental degradation, extinction of both nonhuman animals and their landscapes. so, it is hard not to consider grímur’s blindness in light of the psychoanalytic notion that blindness is tied to insight, and that castration from nature is the cost of having human consciousness. cinema presents an object to be viewed and the activity of vision, and therefore cinematic space can be said to be an ethical space for it makes vision visible, and sight is read not only as vision but as moral insight (sobchack 243). however, we must keep in view that animal studies emerged from post-structuralism and its attendant critiques of such subject-formation, ushering in an interest in the “other” animal and ethics as something beyond the merely human. in of horses and men, the camera caresses horse bodies covered in hair and the landscapes of rock and snow, inviting the viewer to respond to the images in an intimate and embodied way. the sensual image of the horse’s coat on the screen rebounds back on the viewer’s own body in the “shared flesh of the material world” (sobchack 76-77). it is this very tactility of these images that connects us to the material world, rather than a psychoanalytic severing offering insight. instead, this tactile affectual imagery gives rise to a shared, embodied and vulnerable ethical community of horses and humans. johanna and herd. [still from of horses and men.] ann marie mckinnon -herding community: entanglement in of horses and men 107 roundup. against the protestations of the men, a young swedish horsewoman johanna (sigríður maría egilsdóttir) offers to round up some horses that have cut away from the herd, specifically her favorite blue-eyed mare, raudka. she is a dominant mare that many of the men want to purchase for they wrongly assume that johanna cannot handle her because like johanna raudka clearly has her own ideas. an experienced rider, johanna not only rides out and finds the horses and manages to catch raudka, but also finds blind grímur and takes them all back, seven horses and two riders linked together by one rope. as mentioned, each character in the film has a different relationship to the horses, and while the other characters merely use the horses, johanna is as one with them. how we manage inequality is essential to ethical relations and obligations towards those animals we live with and, in the case of horses, train. paul patton claims that the training of horses draws our attention to specific modes of communication involved in building and sustaining relationships with each other in community. the trainer both listens to the horse and gives the horse a vocabulary, and the greater the vocabulary of the animal, the more trust there is between non-human and human animals. good training closes the gap in interspecies communication of word, touch and sight. patton invokes trainers such as vicki hearne and the “horse-whisperer” monty roberts to claim that: …in training dogs and horses we create forms of society that establish domestic animals not only as our interlocuters in certain contexts, but as moral beings capable of being endowed with certain rights and duties. (patton 95) johanna is one with the horses, and regardless of how wild, they trust her to bring them back into the herd. tied together, she returns to the men triumphant. they are impressed by her ability to train and ride and, even though she is not from the island, they accept her as one of them and offer her a celebratory drink as a community, happily encircled by the reunited herd. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 108 death of old piebald [still from of horses and men.] sagascapes. filmed in skagafjörður, the action takes place in the cradle of icelandic horsemanship, the best-known destination for horse tourism in iceland. here the history of the relationship between man and horse and landscape is from time immemorial, and many key ancestors of the icelandic breed and renowned horse breeders make skagafjörður their home. guðrún helgadóttir has noted in her study of horse-based tourism that the idea of the “purity” of the breed is a key marketing principle in marketing iceland to the world with slogans such as “pure iceland” and “reykjavik: pure energy.”7 in addition, the film appears at a specific moment in iceland’s history, post the financial collapse of 2008-2009 and subsequent recovery, which was partly attributable to tourism — and especially horse tourism — and the marketing of “pure” icelandic culture to the world.8 there is a spatial dimension to nation building, and in the sagas, the figure of the horse is said to be etched into the volcanic ground of iceland. for example, ásbyrgi is a canyon in the north, and the formation of its towering cliffs is said to be made by sleipnir, the eight-legged horse of odind the norse god, for when his hooves touched the ground he carved out the horseshoe shaped cliffs. adrian ivakhiv names cinematic space a “geomorphy of the visible” a territorial ontology that grounds any image (26). relationships in these spaces — including the spaces of film — with others co-constitute who we are as we are, entangled in complex co-relationships is what barad calls “ethico-onto-epistem-ology” (meeting 206). the “hereness” of the cinematic space is reflected in the rugged landscape where icelandic identity is etched into the very ground by the hooves of the folkloric horses, iterated through centuries of storytelling. the “geomorphy” of this landscape in horses is a kind of “sensuous geography” that links the icelandic community. laura u. marks argues that commodification and ann marie mckinnon -herding community: entanglement in of horses and men 109 globalization will not wipe out cultural differences at the level of sensuous experience. while non-places (malls, airports) proliferate all over the world, there remain rich environments of ambient and sensuous life, and of horses and men captures such an environment (skin 243-44). the film exemplifies a kind of interspecies intercultural cinema — an embodied cross-species sociality — for horse and people are inextricably bound up or entangled with this landscape that is like no other on earth. marks defines intercultural cinema as “experimental cinema styles that attempt to represent the experience of living between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge” (1). the icelandic horse is much more than merely a vestige of a romanticized nordic past, trotted out for tourists. there is not quite the same historical break in the face of encroaching modernity in icelandic horse culture as there is in domesticated horse culture worldwide. while volcanic iceland in the tourist’s gaze is the land of “fire and ice” with the ubiquitous images of icelandic horses grazing freely in the background, these visual clichés known to us from tourism brochures are not the images of this film. icelandic horse-based tourism is an investment in a very specific form of nature — with its own rhythms and gaits, where the horses do not so much represent nature, but rather a desire to connect with something other, to feel something different, in the consumer tourism experience. juan (juan camillo roman estrada) is a spanish tourist in the film and a key representation of this moment in history. at the beginning of the film juan is riding his bike, and he is astonished by kolbeinn’s spectacular ride on his mare; he almost gets run off the road by drunken verdhaur who is meeting the russian ship; and he is first impressed and then later infatuated by johanna, for he sees her come back with the seven horses and, inspired, decides he wants to ditch his bicycle and ride a horse. of horses and men represents the specific “here-ness” of iceland, but the self-evident here-ness is disrupted by juan, the foreign tourist, who goes on the quintessential icelandic experience of a guided ride on a horse. in icelandic horse tours, the riders are often accompanied by a herd of free running horses. the guides maintain the pace in the front and drivers stay in the back to look out for horses that stray from the herd. inexperienced riders stay with the drivers in the back. juan is inexperienced indeed, causing him not to notice that his horse, old piebald, has a rock in his shoe, and the limping horse is slowed down. a snowstorm comes in and, unable to see, they fall dangerously behind the ride. juan panics. he believes that he is going to die in the unfamiliar frozen landscape, and so he cuts open the horse’s jugular, slices the belly and empties out the viscera, and climbs into the horse to stay warm. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 110 juan’s overreaction to the unfamiliar weather, and the thoughtless panic that brings about his meaningless killing of the horse, makes him a gruesome example of the worst sort of tourist, one that is completely unable to understand another culture outside of observation, play and consumption. for juan, it would appear that the icelandic horse is an object that merely has instrumental purpose: to serve international tourism and, more urgently, to save his life. while juan keeps warm inside, the dead horse is covered in snow. a god’s eye shot from above offers the audience an omniscient view of the character and surroundings, and we see the dead horse as if reified in a snow sculpture reminiscent of funerary art, echoing an earlier image of the farmer kolbein who lays out his mare grana in her tack for burial.9 juan’s murder of the horse in the film brings us back to a time before animal welfare and rights discourses that challenge the sacrificial killing of animals. or, more accurately, the murder of old piebald offers a version of the archaic myths and figures and sacrifices that are integral to the construction of modernity. cary wolfe notes how the discourse of speciesism, the symbolic system that rigidly separates human and animal, enables and indeed requires sacrifice: the institution of speciesism is fundamental to the formation of western subjectivity and sociality as such, an institution that relies on the tacit agreement that the full transcendence of the “human” requires the sacrifice of the “animal” and the animalistic, which in turn makes possible a symbolic economy in which we can engage in what derrida will call a “noncriminal putting to death” of other humans as well by marking them as animal. (wolfe, animal 6) burt points out that what appear to be archaic myths and practices such as animal sacrifice are in effect integral to the construction of modernity, for they show us the limits and vulnerabilities of human existence (66). a horse appears to observe each human death, and the director chooses to shoot the bodies of the two horses in the film that die — grána the farmer’s mare and the old piebald — in what can be described as elegiac poses. in each case the film cuts from the image of the dead horse to the funeral of the dead men, therefore giving equal importance to both human and non-human animal burials in the narrative. in kristin armstrong oma’s study of the ontological status of scandinavian horses throughout the iron age, she argues that horses held “a symbolic role as transporters from one realm to another, from the world of humans (middle-earth) to the different ann marie mckinnon -herding community: entanglement in of horses and men 111 abodes of the gods, and from the realm of life to the worlds of the dead” (26). when juan is rescued and wrenched out of the horse, he arises from the body — his snowy crypt in the shape of his horse — and cries like one newly born. juan’s journey is an epic one: he encounters strangers, struggles with adversity and a near death experience, and goes into the underworld (or belly) of a horse, and is resurrected back into society. he lives another day, he falls in love with johanna, and is symbolically reconstituted as icelandic. juan’s story operates as a through line or a vector along which the world enfolds generating new stories, new identities, and new bodies, connecting each saga. he enters iceland with different values and practices, and is confronted with a terrifying wilderness of snow and ice. almost dying in the snow and, cruelly through the death of a horse, he emerges as an intra-active figure, who “becomes” an intercultural hybrid in the final scene of the film: he is spanish/icelandic, born of an icelandic horse. “the herd” [still from of horses and men] herding community: entanglements. the film culminates in an annual roundup, where horses and humans commune in cinematic time as it passes via the very rhythm of the distinct gaits of the icelandic horses. in co-creation, the horses in the film do not represent any mere encounter between species, but rather are a profound example of entangled co-shaping. bound by ropes and reins, humans and horses become a hybrid or cyborg technology that creates new ontologies in community. at the end of the film, the cinematographer, bergsteinn björgúlfsson, does not shoot the action from the perspective of the horse or the human; rather, he inserts the camera in the middle of the herd in deep focus — a cinematic trope that is thought to encourage recognition and empathy in viewers — and presents a version of entanglement as herd. when faced humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 112 with the difficulty of thinking the animal in film, vision can strand the viewer in an ontological outside where we loop back into human preoccupations with human embodiment and the resulting othering of the animal. in this film, the entanglement of the cinematic gaze/horse’s eye, affectual bodies united in touch, bodies grounded in a territorial ontology form a community that includes the sentient landscape features of water, weather, and ground. this creaturely gaze emphasizes the relations between human and animal, undoes the conventional anthropocentric bias of the gaze in cinema, and informs an ethics that relies on the materiality and vulnerability of all living bodies, where nature is not the outside of the human condition (pick 193). this film’s “embodied cross-species sociality” challenges the freudian axiom that only the repression of our animality creates consciousness, culture and civilization (species 4). instead, as jodey berlant insists: “we look at the animals and the animals look back. they are not speaking, but they are not silent, either” (62). each saga offers important affectual and embodied entanglements between human and nonhuman animals. oppositions are not clear-cut, and in the case of horses and men, the image of the horse is not merely metaphorical but points beyond, to an entangled herd of common interests. acknowledgment. i would like to thank kristen guest and monica mattfeld for reading an earlier draft of this work. notes 1. jón árnason’s (1819-1888) collection of folktales, íslenzkar þjóðsögur og æfintýri (icelandic folktales and legends), comprises over 1300 pages of forty or more tales or sagas. in 1954–61 it was reissued in reykjavík in six volumes. his collection and other eddas form a central part of the romantic nationalist project of the 19th and and 20th centuries. an icelandic counterpart to the brother’s grimm, árnason’s collection is filled with tales of ghosts, trolls, elves, witchcraft, and magic. simon halink traces how these tales are the backdrop of the entanglement of landscape and national identity, or “sagascapes.” 2. see pick, creaturely poetics: “a creaturely ethics does not depend on fulfilling any preliminary criteria of subjectivity and personhood. its source lies in the recognition of the materiality and vulnerability of all living bodies, whether human or not, and in the absolute primacy of obligations over rights” (193). ann marie mckinnon -herding community: entanglement in of horses and men 113 3. killing horses to restore masculine honor is a key feature of icelandic sagas. hrafnkel’s saga is about freyfaxi, the treasured stallion of hrafnkel who all are warned never to ride. named after the norse god frey, freyfaxi has religious value symbolizing the fecundity of hrafnkel’s land and, of course, his virility. in this saga, einar disobeys and rides the stallion and therefore has to be killed. but a kinsman seeks compensation for his death, and hrafnkel is sentenced as an outlaw. they take over hrafnkel’s farm and keep the mares, but decide that because the stallion has been the cause of all the trouble, they push him over a cliff. thus ends hrafnkel’s masculine authority. 4. see barbara creed’s “animal deaths on screen” where she summarizes the connection between laura u. marks’ “skin of the film” and anat pick’s “creaturely gaze” (24). 5. see animal rights: political and social change in britain since 1800. hilda kean argues that not only does the sight of suffering usher forth a new era of animal welfare, but also that animals helped to define the social improvement movement more generally and hence informed modernity (26-27). 6. hannah arendt argues that we are not born equal but rather become equal as members of a group. human rights can be said to be first animal rights, in that they are the pre-condition of citizenship or membership in a community and so exist before the law. see alastair hunt, “rightlessness. the perplexities of human rights.” the new centennial review 11.2 (2011): 120. 7. online tourism sites often include such language as: “but this land of boiling mud pools, spurting geysers, volcanoes, glaciers and waterfalls is also an adventure playground…iceland is the least densely populated country in europe, with a pure, unpolluted and truly magical landscape.” “the embassy of iceland in ottawa, visit iceland” (accessed june 22 2020). in addition, this is a riding experience free of european and other influences: you do not need to get on and off on one side (the near or left side) of the horse. there is no history of the ménage, or dressage. the gaits of the horse are distinct and must be maintained: in addition to walk, trot, canter, and gallop, the horse has two extra gaits. one is a four-beat lateral ambling gait called tölt. another is a pace or skeið, or the “flying pace” used in races. 8. the banks had foreign liabilities amounting to more than 10 times the size of iceland’s gdp. the collapse of 85% of the banking sector made the country “the world’s largest hedge fund” (elliot). part of that recovery is also attributable to the strengths of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 114 two sectors, tourism and green energy. in 2013, tourism rose to 15.9% of the economy, or 5.9% of the gdp. 9. horses figure largely in the burial practices of the old norse and icelandic society. both men and women were often buried with their horses, sometimes complete with their tack, designating relative status in the community. see loumand, 130-134. works cited agamben, giorgio. the open: man and animal. stanford up, 2004. barad, karen. meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter. duke up, 2007. _____. “nature’s queer performativity.” qui parle 19.2 (2011): 121–58. bazin, andre. “death every afternoon.” rites of realism. ivone margulies, ed. duke up, 2003. 27-31. bekoff, marc. the emotional lives of animals. new world library, 2007. berger, john. “why look at animals?” about looking. pantheon, 1980. 3-28. berlant, jodey. “animal and/as medium: symbolic work in communicative regimes.” the global south 3.11 (2009): 42-65. burt, jonathan. animals in film. reaktion books, 2002. creed, barbara. “animal deaths on screen: film and ethics.” 2rel: beyond anthropocentrism 2.1 (2014): 15-31. derrida, jaques. “the animal that therefore i am.” marie-louise mallet, ed. david willis, trans. fordham up, 2008. diamond, cora. “eating meat and eating people.” philosophy 53.206 (1978): 465-479. elliot, larry. “how iceland went from world’s biggest hedge fund to pariah in the global market.” the guardian 26 january 2009. online. ann marie mckinnon -herding community: entanglement in of horses and men 115 fennell, david. tourism and animal ethics. routledge, 2012. halink, simon. “the icelandic mythscape: sagas, landscapes, and national identity.” national identities 16.3 (2014): 209-223. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. prickly paradigm press, 2003. _____. when species meet. u minnesota p, 2008. harlan, becky. “an icelandic family farm finds roots in their traditions.” national geographic 12 december 2014. online. helgadóttir, guðrún. “the culture of horsemanship and horse based tourism in iceland.” current issues in tourism 9.6 (2006): 535-48. hockenhull, stella. “human and non-human agency in icelandic film: of horses and men.” shared lives of humans and animals: animal agency in the global north. tuomas räsänen and taina syrjämaa, eds. routledge, 2017. 24-36. hunt, alastair. “rightlessness. the perplexities of human rights.” the new centennial review 11.2 (2011): 115-142. ivakhiv, adrian j. ecologies of the moving image: cinema, affect, nature. wilfred laurier up, 2013. kean, hilda. animal rights: political and social change in britain since 1800. reaktion books, 1998. lacan, jacques. the four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis. jacques-alain miller, ed. alan sheridan, trans. norton, 1998. lingus, alphonso. “animal body, inhuman face.” zoontologies: the question of the animal. cary wolfe, ed. u minnesota p, 2003. 165-182. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 116 loumand, ulla. “the horse and its role in icelandic burial practices, mythology, and society.” old norse religion in long term perspectives: origins, changes, and interactions. anders andren and kristina jennbert, eds. nordic academic press, 2006. 130-135. marks, laura u. the skin of the film: intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses. duke up, 2000. _____. touch: sensuous theory and multisensory media. u minnesota p, 2002. mattfeld, monica. “machines of feeling: bits and interspecies communication in the eighteenth century.” equestrian cultures: horses, human society, and the discourse of modernity. kristen guest and monica mattfeld, eds. u of chicago p, 2019. 11-26. erlingsson, benedikt, dir. of horses and men. filmhuset gruppen, 2013. neimanis, a. “becoming-grizzly: bodily molecularity and the animal that becomes.” phaenex: journal of existential and phenomenological theory and culture. 2.2 (2007): 279-308. oliver, kelly. animal lessons: how they teach us to be human. columbia up, 2009. oma, kristin armstrong. “from horses to jesus: saving souls in the transition from pagan to christian scandinavia.” the meaning of horses: biosocial encounters. dona lee davis & anita maurstad, eds. routledge, 2016. 24-38. patton, paul. “language, power, and the training of horses.” zoontologies: the question of the animal. cary wolfe, ed. u of minnesota p, 2003. 83-99. pick, anat. creaturely poetics: animality and vulnerability in literature and film. columbia up, 2011. sayers, william. “sexual defamation in medieval iceland: gera meri ór einum.” nowele: north-western european language evolution 30.1 (1997): 27-37. sliwinski, sharon. “the gaze called animal: notes for a study on thinking.” the new centennial review 11.2 (2011): 61-81. sobchack, vivian. carnal thoughts: embodiment and moving image culture. u of california p, 2004. ann marie mckinnon -herding community: entanglement in of horses and men 117 thierman, stephen. “the vulnerability of other animals.” journal for critical animal studies: continental philosophical perspectives on non-human animals. 9.1 (2011): 182-208. wolfe, cary. animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. u of chicago p, 2008. _____. “in the shadow of wittgenstein’s lion.” zoontologies: the question of the animal. cary wolfe, ed. u minnesota p, 2003. roland borgards -parrot poll: animal mimesis in daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe h u m a n i m a l i a 11:2 roland borgards parrot poll: animal mimesis in daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe one of the most famous scenes in daniel defoe’s the life and strange adventures of robinson crusoe, published 1719, depicts an animal mimesis: i got over the fence, and laid me down in the shade to rest my limbs; for i was very weary, and fell asleep: but judge you, if you can, that read my story, what a surprize i must be in, when i was wak’d out of my sleep by a voice calling me by my name several times, robin, robin, robin crusoe, poor robin crusoe, where are you robin crusoe? where are you? where have you been? i was so dead asleep at first, [...] that i did not wake thoroughly, but dozing between sleeping and waking, thought i dream’d that some body spoke to me: but as the voice continu’d to repeat robin crusoe, robin crusoe, at last i began to wake more perfectly, and was at first dreadfully frighted, and started up in the utmost consternation: but no sooner were my eyes open, than i saw my poll sitting on the top of the hedge; and immediately knew that it was he that spoke to me; for just in such bemoaning language i had used to talk to him, and teach him; and he had learn’d it so perfectly, that he would sit upon my finger, and lay his bill close to my face, and cry, poor robin crusoe, where are you? where have you been? how come you here? and such things as i had taught him. (103104) in the following i will give an animal reading of this famous scene,1 arguing in the theoretical framework of cultural and literary animal studies (mchugh; borgards, “introduction”). for such an animal reading of the mimetic parrot, two elements in a theory of mimesis (gebauer, potolsky) are of particular importance. first, since aristotle there has been a question whether mimesis is something common to humans and animals or if humans are gifted with the special ability to reflect on the mimetic act. that some animals are capable of mimetic actions seems evident. but are there animals other than humans which perform mimetic actions in a non-functional manner or which enjoy mimetic actions of their conspecifics in an aesthetical way? an animalistic position2 would claim that mimesis is the common ground of all animals, including humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 2 humans. many animals are notorious mimics, and so human culture and art, which stems from this mimetic ability, is a product of animal mimesis. an exceptionalistic position, in contrast, would claim that mimesis is the very thing that sets humans and animals apart. many animals may be notorious mimics, but only humans turn this ability into culture and art. the second element in the theory of mimesis which is of importance for an animal reading of defoe’s parrot is the fact that the term “mimesis” has — again since aristotle — been related to at least three slightly different concepts. on the one hand, mimesis means imitation. if one imitates another, there is a clear distinction between the imitating subject and the imitated object: in imitating, the imitator itself does not change. on the other hand, mimesis indicates a process of becoming similar, a process i would like to call “similation.” if one becomes similar to another, the previously clear distinction between both beings involved in this process is questioned: in becoming similar, the one who becomes like the other changes. and finally, mimesis can be understood as representation, e.g. when shakespeare’s romeo and juliet represents the abstract concepts of individual love and political hate in a concrete, physical form of visible actions. exceptionalists would admit that some animals are capable of mimesis in the sense of imitation; they would feel uneasy thinking of animals as having mimetic abilities in the sense of “similation”; and they would deny the possibility that at least some animals other than humans are capable of mimesis in the sense of representation. animalistics, in contrast, would rethink all of these ideas of imitation, “similation,” and representation in the animal kingdom. with these questions in mind, i want to sketch three arguments regarding poll the parrot. first, i show in a close reading of the rare references in the novel to the parrot, that the relationship between robinson and poll is not one of simple hierarchy but is also characterized by a certain kinship. i will expand on this by looking at the zoological knowledge about the parrot in the 18th century; and i will relate this discussion to the questions of mimesis i just mentioned. second, i give a brief postcolonial animal reading of the relationship between robinson and poll, which is repeated in the relationship between robinson and friday. this intersectional turn demonstrates that a new understanding of the parrot poll may lead to some new perspectives on friday and on colonial mimesis. third, i will give a poetological reading of the relationship between robinson and poll, which is repeated in the relationship between robinson and his journal. i will push this poetological reading further by both using and criticizing jacques derrida’s deconstruction of defoe, robinson, and poll. the specific form of animal mimesis, which can be described with and beyond derrida, even affects, roland borgards -parrot poll: animal mimesis in daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe 3 as i will conclude, the relationship between defoe and his novel robinson crusoe and between the modern subject and the rise of the modern novel. the first encounter between robinson and poll is dominated by violence: i saw abundance of parrots, and fain i would have caught one, if possible to have kept it to be tame, and taught it to speak to me. i did, after some pains taking, catch a young parrot, for i knock’d it down with a stick, and having recover’d it, i brought it home; but it was some years before i could make him speak: however, at last i taught him to call me by my name very familiarly. (80) the act of choosing one specific parrot out of a flock of parrots is performed as an act of direct violence: “i choose you” equals “i knock you down.” this sets up a strict hierarchy: there is one who knocks down and one who is knocked down. in consequence, the learning-process follows a similar hierarchy: there is one who teaches, and one who is taught. this obviously holds true for language itself: there is one who can speak; and one who must be equipped with words. robinson asserts himself as an active producer and poll as a passive receiver of language: “i […] make him speak.” in the light of this violence and this hierarchy, poll’s speech-act seems to be mimesis only in the restricted sense of mere imitation. poll just learns to repeat the words spoken by robinson; to do so, he doesn’t need to know the meaning of these words. when poll talks, robinson is amazed; but this remains — at least at first sight — a surface effect. even a talking parrot is only a parrot; even as the subject of imitation he does not change in his very essence. a talking parrot only sounds like a human without becoming human. but there is an alternative reading of the first contact between robinson and poll, as the very moment of violence also marks the start of crusoe’s caregiving. robinson takes care that his strike on the bird isn’t fatal; he acts within the limits of a restricted violence; and he waits until the bird has recovered consciousness. after bringing the bird to his home, robinson puts the parrot in a cage and therefore has to take care of him by feeding him. as a consequence, a communal life develops, a sharing of bread, as donna haraway would put it, a cum panis of messmates (species 17), companion animals sitting around a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 4 common table as in the famous scene which depicts robinson and his animals at dinner (cf. 108). in this alternative reading of robinson’s and poll’s relationship there is not only violence but also caregiving, not only strict hierarchy but also some kinship (staying 99-103). with this care and kinship, poll’s speech-act points to mimesis, not only in in the sense of imitation but also in the sense of similation. there is some kind of change going on within the parrot while he is being taught human language. the talking parrot — even if not becoming human — develops a set of similarities to his human companion. these similarities are reflected in the text in several ways. first, the moment poll begins to talk, the text changes from the pronoun “it” to the pronoun “him”: “i brought it home; […] i […] make him speak.” second, with the first word poll speaks his bird beak is metaphorically transformed into an anthropomorphic mouth: i diverted my self with talking to my parrot, and teaching him to speak, and i quickly learn’d him to know his own name, and at last to speak it out pretty loud poll, which was the first word i ever heard spoken in the island by any mouth but my own. (87; emphasis added) third, in the famous scene i quoted in the beginning poll is depicted not as a trained parrot, which reacts to a cue like an animated automaton, but as an autonomous person, who actively searches for robinson and intentionally addresses him: first, i was amazed how the creature got thither, and then, how he should just keep about the place, and no where else: but as i was well satisfied it could be no body but honest poll, i got it over; and holding out my hand, and calling him by his name poll, the sociable creature came to me, and sat upon my thumb, as he used to do, and continu’d talking to me, poor robin crusoe, and how did i come here? and where had i been? just as if he had been overjoy’d to see me again; and so i carry’d him home along with me. (104) it is poll who initiates the communication, it is he who takes the active part. robinson in turn is placed in the position of the reacting partner, thereby inverting both the hierarchy of the first contact between poll and robinson and the traditional structure of human-animal relations. fourth, and finally, as a communicating partner robinson explicitly describes poll as a “sociable creature” which acts “just as if he had been roland borgards -parrot poll: animal mimesis in daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe 5 overjoy’d to see me again.” poll seems to have become a living being endowed with the powers of language, joy, empathy, and reason. so, at a closer look the relationship between robinson and poll is not structured by simple dominance of the human over the animal but by a fundamental ambivalence of violence and care, hierarchy and kinship, and — in terms of mimesis — imitation and similation. this ambivalence is not just a literary fiction, it is also discussed in philosophical discourse and documented in the zoological sciences of the 18th century. the well-known philosophical staging of the talking bird comes from william temple’s account of a conversation between a brazilian parrot and prince maurice, which was incorporated by john locke into his 4th edition of essay concerning human understanding of 1700. in this account the parrot seems to talk quite reasonably with the “company of white man,” recognizing the prince as “some general or other” and characterizing his own profession as a chicken’s guardian: “je garde les poulles […] et je sais bien faire; and made the chuck four or five times, that people use to make to chickens when they call them” (locke 333). most of the reception of temple’s account was rather skeptical, referring to the unreliability of the story and to the assumption that parrots can only imitate the sound of words but never comprehend their meaning. with this disapproval, 17th and 18th century parrot discourse dismissed the high esteem of the parrots in the middle ages, which “tended to view them with reverence and amazement, and credited them with powers far beyond any attributed to them before or since” (boehrer 50). hence, from a skeptical point of view, the conversation between the parrot and the prince is nothing more than an effect of mimesis in the restricted sense of mere imitation. locke was completely in line with the skeptical arguments of his time, pointing out that animals do not have abstract ideas and therefore no language (cf. boehrer 70). but despite this, locke’s reference to temple’s parrot nevertheless offered arguments that lead to a “a muddling of the animal and the human,“ insofar “as temple's story draws attention to the fact that humans acquire language, like parrots, by imitation, whether of chickens or of other humans”(walmsley 418). from this point, mimesis may have productive effects; it could be one of the foundations of human speech. as for the zoological sciences, a similar ambivalence can be demonstrated in buffon’s histoire naturelle, with its rich chapter on the parrot, which is certainly a main humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 6 document in the discussion of animal mimesis in the age of enlightenment.4 buffon starts the chapter as follows: the animals which man has the most admired, are those that seem to participate of his nature. he is struck with wonder as often as he traces his external form in the ape, or hears his voice imitated by the parrot; and, in the first moments of his surprise, he is disposed to rank them above the rest of the brutes. […] had what was equally possibly taken place, had the voice of the parrot been bestowed on the ape; the human race would have been struck dumb with astonishment, and the philosopher could hardly have been able to demonstrate that the ape was still a brute. it is fortunate, therefore, that nature has separated the faculties of imitating our speech and our gestures, and shared them between two very different species; and […] she has reserved for him [for man, rb] alone the power of improving them; the noble mark of our pre-eminence, which constitutes our empire over the animated world. (63, 64-65) on the one hand, buffon admits that the parrot and the ape are both gifted with special mimetic abilities: an ape looks like a human, a parrot sounds like a human, and the imaginary cross-breeding of ape and parrot even looks and sounds like a human. but on the other hand, buffon emphasizes that there is an unbridgeable gap between humans and animals: the power of imitating our discourse or our actions confers no real superiority on an animal. it never incites to the cultivation of talents — it never tends to the improvement of the species. the articulation of the parrot implies only the close analogy of its organs of hearing and of voice to those in man. (417-18) this underpins a central zoological doctrine of the enlightenment: the closer an animal approaches the human, the stronger the rhetorical energy invested in reaffirming the anthropological difference between humans and animals. according to this rhetorical strategy,3 buffon emphasizes that the parrot’s ability to learn human language is only mimesis in the restricted sense of imitation: there are also two different kinds of imitation; the one is acquired from reflection, the other is innate and mechanical; the latter proceeds from the common instinct diffused through a whole species, which prompts or roland borgards -parrot poll: animal mimesis in daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe 7 constrains each individual to perform similar actions; and the more stupid the animal, […] the closer will be the resemblance. (418-19) that is all that animals can achieve. the ability to improve these skills is exclusively human and explains the superior position of humankind. so, just as in the case of defoe’s robinson crusoe, the relation between human and parrot is characterized by violence, hierarchy, and — in terms of mimesis — mere “mechanical imitation” (422). but there is — as in the case of defoe — an alternative reading of buffon’s chapter on the parrot, for the full force invested by buffon in reaffirming the anthropological difference hints at the underlying threat that a speaking animal poses in the age of enlightenment. and what is more, in a later chapter buffon switches from general considerations on the parrot to the description of a specific subspecies, the jacko, and to one individual bird famous for his mimetic abilities: but not only has this bird a facility, it has also an eagerness, in imitating the human voice. it listens with attention, and strives to repeat; it dwells constantly on some syllables which it has heard, and seeks to surpass every voice by the loudness of its own. we are often surprised at its repeating words or sounds, which we never taught it, and which we should not suppose it to have noticed. it seems to set itself tasks, and tries every day to retain its lesson. (446) obviously, this parrot does not just copy empty and meaningless sounds. this parrot shows a trait that aristotle explicitly reserves for human mimesis (aristotle 15): he not only mimics human speech but also enjoys his mimetic action. thus, he adds a reflexive dimension to his parroting, even a form of reasoning. by talking like a human, this parrot not only imitates humans, he even becomes similar to humans. even though buffon generally rejects the possibility of an animal surpassing “mechanical imitation,” he is obviously fascinated by this parrot’s capacity for mimetic similation. as a consequence, buffon values the parrot’s faculties higher than those of the ape, as it offers humans social interaction, amusement, and diversion: that sort of society which the parrot forms with man, is, by means of language, more intimate and pleasing than what the monkey can claim from its antic imitation of our gestures and actions. […] it diverts and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 8 amuses; in solitude it is company; it takes part in conversation, it laughs, it breathes tender expressions, or mimics grave discourse. (450-51) even in this context buffon insists that the parrot only performs a “play of language without meaning” (451). nevertheless, his description closely resembles that of poll, the “sociable creature,” robinson’s conversational partner, the messmate and companion for his profound solitude. so, at a closer look, the relationship between humans and parrots in buffon’s histoire naturelle is characterized by the same ambivalence between violence and care, hierarchy and kinship, imitation and simulation, as in the case of defoe’s robinson crusoe. when friday enters the scene, he replaces poll: there is barely any mention of poll in the second part of the book. this replacement is emphasized by an episode in which friday is introduced to the power of guns by randomly shooting down an innocent parrot: i loaded my gun again, and by and by i saw a great fowl like a hawk sit upon a tree within shot; so to let friday understand a little what i would do, i call’d him to me again, pointed at the fowl which was indeed a parrot, tho’ i thought it had been a hawk, i say pointing to the parrot, and to my gun, and to the ground under the parrot, to let him see i would make it fall, i made him understand that i would shoot and kill that bird; accordingly i fir’d and bad him look, and immediately he saw the parrot fall, he stood like one frighted again, notwithstanding all i had said to him; and i found he was the more amaz’d because he did not see me put any thing into the gun; but thought that there must be some wonderful fund of death and destruction in that thing, able to kill man, beast, bird, or any thing near, or far off. (153) what is strange about this episode is the absurdly exaggerated and detailed account of the killing of the parrot. for the sake of the story it is absolutely unnecessary to report robinson’s confusion regarding the species of the bird. but in light of the animalcolonial context this false belief and its revision is of crucial importance: listen, reader, it is not a hawk or any other bird which is killed by robinson, it is a parrot! robinson would probably never kill poll; but obviously he kills a parrot to symbolically clear the space for the human newcomer on his island. so above all, this episode points out that friday takes the place of poll. roland borgards -parrot poll: animal mimesis in daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe 9 the episode thus fits in perfectly both with the literary tradition of using the parrot as “a common deprecatory metaphor for threatening figures of alterity like social climbers, racial ‘others,’ and women who speak out or write improperly” (powell 64)5 and with the colonial discourse constantly correlating “beasts” and “savages” (gasché). during his first weeks on the island robinson himself seems almost obsessed by the idea of being devoured either by cannibals or carnivores, and therefore looking for “security from ravenous creatures, whether man or beast” (defoe 44) being exposed to “any violence of man or beast” (49). friday, too, is a cannibal; but in his first encounter with robinson he is above all a victim of cannibals. so robinson draws his analogy not between friday the cannibal and a carnivore predator but between friday the speaker of a foreign language and a talking bird. nevertheless, it was common colonial practise to draw an analogy between racial and cultural difference and the anthropological difference between human and animal, placing the european at the side of the human and the non-european at the side of the animal. in the light of this critical perspective it is easy to see robinson’s relationship with poll as a preparation of his relationship with friday, or the other way round: his relationship with friday as a repetition of his relationship with poll. as in the case of poll, the relationship with friday is also based on violence. that is why robinson exhibits his power by killing an animal in general and a parrot in particular: i can kill beasts, so i could kill savages; i can kill a parrot, so i could kill you. with this demonstration of his power to kill robinson erects a clear hierarchy: friday is down at his feet. consequently, the first lessons in which robinson teaches friday the english language6 and culture are modelled after the lessons in which robinson taught poll to speak. one can even notice that crusoe teaches friday a poorer language than poll. while the language taught to poll is full of affection, melancholy, and grief, which points to the vulnerability of both crusoe and poll, the language taught to friday is orchestrated by domination, order, and servility. from this perspective, there seems to be more compassion between poll and crusoe than between friday and crusoe. and, as seems to be the case with parrots, friday learns some words and phrases, but is not able to improve his english in the 12 years he stays with robinson — as charles gildon pointed out in his famous satirical critique of the novel, published in 1719, with friday complaining about his author defoe “to make me such blockhead, as to be able to speak english tolerably well in a month or two, and not to speak it better in twelve years after” (gildon 71). in learning a poor english, friday is “reduced to the status of colonized other” (nash 91). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 10 from a colonial perspective, this is exactly what the non-europeans were supposed to do: they were simply to imitate the imported culture. consequently, one could argue that “poll is a man friday with feathers, and the bird’s status as such supplies precedent for friday’s own servitude” (boehrer 71). but with poll at least two models of mimesis are at work: imitation and similiation, thus somewhat resisting this colonial perspective. sometimes the parrot simply seems to be a projection screen used by robinson; but sometimes he seems to act like a real person talking to robinson. so, when friday replaces poll the repetition of the parrot’s domestication not only includes violence, hierarchy, and imitation, but the whole ambivalence of violence and care (remember robinson rescuing friday from being devoured by the cannibals), of hierarchy and kinship (see the new messmate community developing after friday’s arrival on the island), of imitation and similation (e.g. the change friday undergoes in habits and religion). at first sight friday is just a parrot imitating humans, and so are the colonized people. but by using intersectional arguments, a postcolonial animal reading (huggan and tiffin 18) can complicate this interpretation of friday as a mere object of colonial dominance. an animal studies perspective takes into account that the parrot is not a simple but an ambivalent figure. instead of just rejecting the animal metaphor as reducing the non-europeans to brutes, it could be worth rethinking the animal metaphor as reflecting the complexity of the relationship between europeans and noneuropeans. this reading does not suggest that there are no differences between teaching poll and teaching friday. it only blurs the often assumed strict binary opposition between activity and passivity, setting europeans and non-europeans apart by using the traditional anthropological distinction between man and animal. but leaving this line of argumentation aside, i turn to the poetical implications of robinson’s parrot poll. before talking to and with poll, crusoe had already started writing in his journal. the novel hints at an analogy between poll and the journal in a subtle way. the first sentence of the journal sets a tone of despair, with crusoe bemoaning his fate: i poor miserable robinson crusoe, being shipwreck’d, during a dreadful storm, in the offing, came on shore on this dismal unfortunate island, which i call’d the island of despair, all the rest of the ship’s company being drown’d, and my self almost dead. (52) roland borgards -parrot poll: animal mimesis in daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe 11 one of poll’s phrases in direct speech reported by robinson is closely linked to this passage: “poor robin crusoe, […] how did i come here? […] where had i been?” (104). so, both the journal and the parrot reveal their basic function. they allow robinson not only to articulate himself and his self in the first person but also to receive and observe this articulation. therefore, the journal and the parrot operate like linguistic mirrors. not: i see myself, but: i read myself. and: i hear myself. taking into account that the creatio ex nihilo of a self-made subject and the individuation of a modern subject are core topics of the novel (fallon 50-51; watt 60), a journal beginning with the pronoun “i” can be understood as a crucial tool in robinson’s self-fashioning (greenblatt), a process in which the self is simultaneously the fashioning subject and the fashioned object. in a similar way, the parrot contributes to robinson’s self-fashioning or “selfcomposition” (fallon 49; calder 171; jager). when robinson listens to poll he not only hears his own words reflected back to him, but even the intonation and tone of his own voice: “i saw my poll sitting on the top of the hedge; and immediately knew that it was he that spoke to me; for just in such bemoaning language i had used to talk to him, and teach him” (104). so, the parrot is the closest one can get to a tape recorder in the 18th century. in buffon’s histoire naturelle, the admired jacko performs these recording abilities to a remarkable extent: one of those guinea parrots was so completely drilled by an old sailor, that it acquired exactly his hoarse voice and cough; and though it was afterwards given to a young person, and was in no other company, it never forgot the lessons of his first master, and it was diverting to observe its transitions from a soft gracious tone to its former hoarseness and coarse sea tones. (buffon 465-56) so the parrot seems to be the medium of self-recording in the 18th century. in robinson’s solitude, this reflection of his own voice is more than just comforting; it is one of the main pillars in the self-fashioning process of the castaway. this self-fashioning function of spoken language defoe may have found in an article written by richard steele, published in 1713 in the englishman, that reported the story of the castaway alexander selkirk. selkirk, who is known to be defoe’s model for his crusoe character, spent four years on the island of juan fernandez (secord 30-23, 53-63; humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 12 rennie 73-74; fausett 86-95). because of its geographical location east of chile there are no parrots on juan fernandez. so selkirk could not make use of their voice recording abilities. instead, selkirk used the bible: “it was his manner to use stated hours and places for exercises of devotion, which he performed aloud, in order to keep up the faculties of speech, and to utter himself with greater energy” (steele 172). for selkirk, talking aloud is a crucial self-technique:7 i speak, therefore i am human. in addition, selkirk reflects on his act of speaking: i hear myself speaking, therefore i know that i am human. defoe on the one hand adapts this practice. like selkirk, crusoe, too, speaks aloud and listens to his voice in order to preserve his identity, or as crusoe expresses it, to “compose my self“ (104; cf. nash 91). but on the other hand, defoe transforms this practice. he places the parrot as a medium between the act of speaking and the act of listening. selkirk speaks and listens at the same moment. with crusoe there is a time lag. first he speaks, and only later he listens. so the parrot operates as the externalization of the speech act, or as the intermediary in the act of listening to his own voice. he is, in the strict sense of the term, a medium. this exactly is the reason why poll the parrot can be compared to robinson’s journal. first and foremost, robinson writes his journal for himself and not with the intention to document his life for other people. thus the journal lends itself to a poetological reading. if in literary texts there are characters writing journals, this can be read as a metaphor for the authors writing their novels. these two levels — robinson as a writer and defoe as a writer — are twofold within themselves. robinson writes his journal, and he writes his autobiographical report, in which he includes a “copy” of his journal (52). defoe, in turn, is the author of the novel titled the life and strange adventures of robinson crusoe, and as such is also regarded the one who invented the genre of the modern novel (watt 92; drabble 265) or at least as one of the important figures in the early history of this genre (davis). so we have to consider four layers of poetological reflections: 1. robinson writes his journal. 2. robinson writes his autobiographical report. 3. defoe is the author of the life and strange adventures of robinson crusoe. 4. defoe is the author of one of the first modern novels. a poetological reading of these four layers may argue as follows: roland borgards -parrot poll: animal mimesis in daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe 13 1. robinson writes his journal for the purpose of self-assurance: i write, therefore i am. this is why the journal begins with the letter or word “i”: “i poor miserable robinson crusoe.” 2. robinson composes his autobiographical report as a re-enactment of his self-fashioning performed through his island journal. this is why this report also begins with “i”: “i was born in the year 1632” (4). 3. by establishing robinson as a writer, defoe indicates that writing is the main cultural technique in robinson’s process of self-fashioning, or even in a broader sense: that all cultural techniques used by robinson, whether in agriculture or war, are in their structure similar to the process of writing. robinson’s success is due to the fact the he is “writing the island.” 4. what is true for robinson as a character of this special novel also holds true for the modern subject as the main character of the modern novel in general. the modern novel negotiates the self-fashioning of the modern subject and implements writing as one of the main cultural techniques of this self-fashioning process. this would be a first poetological reading using the theoretical framework of foucault or greenblatt. and it is certainly not wrong. but in the frame of cultural and literay animal studies we can go two steps further, one step with derrida, and one step beyond derrida. in his second seminar on “the beast and the sovereign,” derrida presents an elaborate reading of defoe’s robinson crusoe. on the scene in which robinson is addressed by poll with “poor robin crusoe, […] how did i come here? […] where had i been?” derrida comments as follows: the auto-appellation, the auto-interpellation comes to him from outside, from the world, and thus returns from the outside or from the other toward him. but it remains a circular auto-appellation, because it comes from a sort of living mechanism that he has produced, that he assembled himself, like a quasi-technical or prosthetic apparatus, by training the parrot to speak mechanically so as to send his words and his name back to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 14 him, repeating them blindly. one could say of every autobiography, every autobiographical fiction, and even every written confession through which the author calls and names himself, that it presents itself through this linguistic and prosthetic apparatus — a book — or a piece of writing or a trace in general, for example the book entitled robinson crusoe, which speaks of him without him, according to a trick that constructs and leaves in the world an artefact that speaks all alone […]. one could imagine that when poll proffers and calls “robinson crusoe”, it is referring not only to the character — moreover fictional — called robinson crusoe, but also to the title of the book, to which the character tends to be responsible, since he is its signatory, at the very moment that the book, like the parrot and what it calls, no longer needs him. (volume ii, 86-87) what derrida suggests is, first of all, to shift the poetological moment of the novel. traditionally this moment would be the introduction of the journal, because this is when the writer writes about a writer and thereby configures a self-reflexive poetic situation. derrida, in contrast, pinpoints the poetological moment when robinson encounters poll, because this is when the speaker of the sentence in the first person becomes the listener of this very sentence. this shift from a scene of writing and reading to a scene of speaking and listening is linked to the idea, that “writing […] in general” is always a type of “autobiography.” at this point derrida refers to a typical deconstructive argument in three steps. first, the traditional, metaphysical distinction between the oral and the written word favors the spoken word, because self-expression seems to be more authentic when spoken orally. so the best metaphor for the autobiography would not be a written journal but a recorded voice. given the fact that in the 18th century no recording devices existed, the parrot seems to be the closest defoe can get to an appropriate metaphor for the selfrecording structure of an autobiography. second deconstructive step: but the parrot is a dangerous metaphor. his ability to repeat the first-person utterance of an autobiographical subject like robinson is due to the fact that he is trained to do so. poll does not just repeat a sentence spoken by robinson, but a sentence repeated by robinson. he repeats a repetition. and in constantly being repeated the first-person utterance loses all its authenticity, its presence, even its orality. the words of the parrot become just another form of writing, of écriture. roland borgards -parrot poll: animal mimesis in daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe 15 third and final step: if this is true, the poetological moment of the novel, the “autoappellation” (as derrida coins it), gets a totally different direction. the auto-appellation is not only a self-appellation, which reconfirms the self as the subject and object of the appellation. it is also an “automated” and mechanical appellation, which comes between the subject and his autobiographical self-expression. this has consequences on all the four layers of poetological reflection. 1. robinson might be writing his journal with the purpose of self-assurance, but there is always the effect of a self-loss: i try to write about myself but i lose myself in the writing. this is why the journal begins with a paradox. from the perspective of robinson, the journal is the first written articulation of his stay on the island. but for the reader, who has already read the autobiographical report about robinson’s first weeks on the island, the journal is a mere repetition of well known facts. robinson himself points to this necessary repetition introducing “my journal, of which i shall here give you the copy (tho’ in it will be told all these particulars over again)“ (52). 2. so by repeating the journal in the autobiographical report the theme of repeated repetitions becomes omnipresent. if the encounter with poll is indeed the main poetological moment, then the whole autobiographical report is nothing but perpetual self-imitation, or self-parroting of a lost castaway. this is why there are not two, but three interrelated sentences in the first-person, the first at the beginning of the autobiographical report, “i was born in the year 1632” (4), the second at the beginning of the journal, “i poor miserable robinson crusoe” (52), and the third in poll’s speech: “poor robin crusoe, […] how did i come here?” (104). 3. by depicting robinson as a self-parroting castaway defoe indicates that imitating is one of the main cultural techniques in robinson’s project of constructing his world on the island, or even more generally: that all cultural techniques used by robinson, whether in agriculture or war, are in their structure similar to imitating processes. it is all about mimesis, or more precisely, about mimesis in the sense of empty imitation. this kind of imitation is not something that sets animals apart from humans, but something they share, just as temple’s and locke’s parrot reminds us “that humans acquire language, like parrots, by imitation” (walmsley humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 16 418). hence, robinson is not the self-made man he seems to be. he is a repetition of european standards, which reduces crusoe’s abilities to those of an imitating parrot.9 4. what is true for robinson as a character of this special novel also holds true for the modern subject as the main character of the modern novel in general. the modern novel negotiates the self-parroting by the moderns and implements imitation as one of the main cultural techniques of a fundamentally unstable subject. this would be a second poetological reading using the theoretical framework of derrida. and this too is certainly not wrong. poll the parrot is a poetological figure, taking up a literary tradition beginning in medieval texts, where the “substitution of the parrot for the nightingale is a convention which personifies the literary shift from lyric to narrative” (mcmunn 71). but i would like to go one step further by questioning derrida from the perspective of animal mimesis. derrida describes poll as “a sort of living mechanism.” in this description there seems to remain a strange proximity to one argument of rené descartes’s infamous mechanistic philosophy: the animal as a machine, maybe a machine of some complexity, but nevertheless a machine. in his three books on animals (the animal that therefore i am and the both seminars on the beast and the sovereign) derrida himself invests much energy in deconstructing descartes, and so this reference to a mechanistic model may sound strange. but derrida seems to confirm his description, when he calls robinson the producer and poll the product: “a sort of living mechanism that he has produced, that he assembled himself, like a quasi-technical or prosthetic apparatus” (volume ii, 86). if the parrot is like a mechanism or an apparatus, then it would only be possible to train him “to speak mechanically”; all a parrot would be able to do with words is “repeating them blindly.” for derrida, poll seems to be capable of mimesis only in the restricted sense of mere imitation, but not in the more advanced forms of “similation” or representation. in order not to misunderstand this description, we have to consider that derrida in his first seminar on “the beast and the sovereign” deconstructs the binary opposition between “the living being and the machine, the living being and its mechanization, the marionette, the mortal and the immortal” (volume i, 184). mechanization for derrida is neither something that sets animals apart from humans (in a cartesian sense) nor something that completely rules humans like animals (in an naturalistic sense), but roland borgards -parrot poll: animal mimesis in daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe 17 rather a common element of both animals and humans.8 hence, human mimesis too partly tends to be in the restricted sense mere imitation. but this deconstruction of the automaton may be supplemented from three perspectives: systematically, historically, and literally. from a systematic point of view, the mechanistic description of poll presupposes an understanding of the animal that remains to be proven. this is exactly derrida’s own argument. we may not presuppose that the animal in general is only a reacting mechanism; we should take into consideration that eventually every individual animal is a responding other. derrida elaborates this constellation of response and responsibility in the famous scene of him naked in his bathroom and his cat looking at him as a naked philosopher. why should robinson’s parrot be less responding than derrida’s cat? speaking systematically, there is no reason for such discrimination. but perhaps, one could argue, derrida is not expressing his own opinion on poll but only referring to the state of knowledge at the time of defoe. so the question would not be: what do we, today, as deconstructive philosophers or empirical ethologists (e.g., pepperberg), know and think about parrots? but rather: what was known and thought about parrots in the 18th century? in his description derrida would not be using mechanistic terminology but only quoting it. but from such an historical perspective it is possible to criticize this argument as well. certainly in the early 18th century cartesian mechanism was the mainstream theory in the zoological sciences. but as shown in buffon’s histoire naturelle it is exactly the parrot that problematizes this mainstream theory. not that buffon would abandon mechanism. he rather reconfirms his mechanistic attitude when he states that even the imaginary crossbreeding of ape and parrot would in no sense be equal to a human being. but in speaking about the adored and sociable jacko this mechanistic position tends to lose its consistency. so in the science of the 18th century there is ambivalence in the assessment of the parrot that should be taken into account. yet perhaps, one could add, derrida does not refer to the state of knowledge at the time of defoe but simply to the way poll is presented by defoe himself. int his case the question would not be: what was known and thought about the parrot in the 18th century? but: how is poll depicted in the the life and strange adventures of robinson crusoe? in his description derrida would not quote the mechanistic terminology of the early 18th century but the mechanistic terminology of defoe’s novel. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 18 but also from this literary perspective things are more complicated. certainly in defoe’s robinson crusoe cartesian mechanism configures most of the literary animals of the novel. but as we have seen, it is exactly the parrot that questions this animal mechanism. not that defoe would raise poll to the rank of a human interlocutor. he rather emphasizes the difference between parrot and human when he replaces poll by friday. but in the scene with poll talking to crusoe this position tends to lose its consistency. so not only in the science of the 18th century but also in defoe’s novel there is ambivalence in the assessment of the parrot that should be taken into account. if this supplementing of derrida’s argument is valid, the poetological reading of poll the parrot again takes a different direction. poll is not the model for the simple constellation of violence, hierarchy, and — in terms of mimesis — imitation, but suggests the paradoxical constellation of violence and care, hierarchy and kinship, or in terms of mimesis: imitation and “similation”/representation. this again has consequences on all four layers of poetological reflection: 1. robinson might write his journal with the purpose to combat his solitude. but if it is true that poll is more than an apparatus, if it is true that his mimesis surpasses simple imitation and tends towards “similation” and representation, if it is true that he is a real companion, then robinson is not alone.10 this certainly applies from the moment when robinson knocks poll down. but poll’s sociability hints at the fact that robinson is surrounded by other sociable creatures as well — some cats, a dog, and a lot of goats. 2. by using poll as a model for his autobiographical report, the ambivalence of violence/ care, hierarchy/ kinship, imitation/ “similation” becomes omnipresent. if the scene with poll is indeed the main poetological moment, than the whole autobiographical report is a performance of this very ambivalence, linking robinson deeply to his companion critters. 3. by linking robinson to the mimetic abilities of his companion critters, defoe indicates that mimesis is an ambivalent cultural technique in robinson’s island project, or, even more generally, that all cultural techniques used by robinson, whether in agriculture or war, are in their structure similar to mimetic processes. it’s all about mimesis, not in the roland borgards -parrot poll: animal mimesis in daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe 19 restricted, but in the full sense of the term: about mimesis as imitation and “similation” and representation. robinson’s imitation of european standards is altered in the very process of mimesis, a process which can find a model in poll pitying poor robinson.11 4. what is true for robinson as a figure of this special novel also holds true for the modern subject as the main figure of the modern novel in general. the modern novel often negotiates mimesis as the main cultural technique of a fundamentally situated and animal-related subject. by using an animal studies approach towards the question of animal mimesis and by integrating the question of animal mimesis into the interpretation of the life and strange adventures of robinson crusoe, we see that poll turns out to be an important figure for some of the main topics of this novel. by emphasizing the relationship of crusoe and poll, by analyzing its modelling function for the relationship of crusoe and friday, and by reading poll as a powerful poetological animal, we can add an animal reading to the critical tradition that somehow neglected the impact of this specific animal in this specific text, as well as the impact of animals on modern writing in general. since boccaccio, we might search for the falcon virtually hidden in every novella.12 since defoe it might be useful to look if there perhaps is a parrot in any novel we are reading. notes 1. for animals in defoe’s novel cf. borgards et al.; derrida, the beast & the sovereign. volume ii; armstrong; williams; gasché; mackintosh. 2. for animalism and exceptionalism, cf., e.g., olson. 3. for rhetoric in buffon, cf. loveland; stalnaker. 4. for animals in the age of enlightenment, cf. senior; for parrots in the 18th century, cf. robbins 125-128. 5. for parrots as figures of “antifemale satire” in the early 18th, cf. brown 95. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 20 6. for a postcolonial critique of robinson teaching friday, cf. spivak 187; for the connection between “domestication of the wild” and “the acquisition of language and particularly its relation to power,” cf. nash 90. 7. for verbalization as crucial self-technique, cf. foucault 49; for a reading of steele, cf. borgards, “selkirks tiere.“ 8. cf. cary wolfe, who emphasizes that for derrida there is always an “estranging prostheticity and exteriority of communication [...] shared by humans and nonhumans the moment they begin to respond to each other by means of any semiotic system“(119) 9. that is why gilles deleuze is so bored by reading robinson crusoe; cf. deleuze 12. 10. for robinson’s “i am alone” as statement of sovereignty, cf. derrida ii, 1. 11. that is why gilles deleuze shouldn’t be so bored by reading robinson crusoe. 12. for paul heyse’s “falcon theory,” referring to boccaccio’s novella “the falcon,” cf. hutchinson. works cited aristotle. the poetics of aristotle. edited with critical notes and a translation by s. h. butcher. macmillan and co., 1902. armstrong, philip. what animals mean in the fiction of modernity. routledge, 2007. boehrer, bruce thomas. parrot culture. our 2,500-year-long fascination with the world’s most talkative bird. u of pennsylvania p, 2004. borgards, roland, marc klesse, and alexander kling, eds. robinsons tiere. rombach, 2016. borgards, roland. “introduction: cultural and literary animal studies.” journal for literary theory 9.2 (2015): 155-160. _____. “selkirks tiere. insel-theriotopien bei woodes rogers (1712), edward cooke (1712) und richard steele (1713).” in borgards et al. 25-59. roland borgards -parrot poll: animal mimesis in daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe 21 brown, laura. homeless dogs & melancholy apes. humans and other animals in the modern literary imagination. cornell up, 2010. buffon, count de. natural history, general and particular. vol. xvi. tr. william smellie. t. cadell and w. davies, 1812. calder, martin. encounters with the other: a journey to the limits of language through works by rousseau, defoe, prévost and graffigny. rodopi, 2003. davis, lennard j. factual fictions: the origins of the english novel. columbia up, 1983. defoe, daniel. the life and strange surprizing adventures of robinson crusoe (1719). michael shinagel, ed. norton & company, 1994. deleuze, gilles. desert islands and other texts. tr. mike taormina. semiotext(e), 2004. derrida, jacques. the beast & the sovereign. volume i. tr. geoffrey bennington. u of chicago p, 2009. _____. the beast & the sovereign. volume ii. tr. geoffrey bennington. u of chicago p, 2011. drabble, margaret. the oxford companion to english literature. oxford up, 1996. fallon, ann marie. global crusoe: comparative literature, postcolonial theory and transnational aesthetics. routlegde, 2016. fausett, david. the strange surprizing sources of robinson crusoe. rodopi, 1994. foucault, michel. “technologies of the self.” technologies of the self: a seminar with michel foucault. l.h. martin et al, eds. tavistock, 1988: 16-49. gasché, rodolphe. “of goats, caves, and cannibals: defoe’s robinson crusoe.” verschlungene grenzen: anthropologie in literatur und kulturwissenschaften. annette keck et al, eds. narr, 1999. 33-53. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 22 gebauer, gunter, and christoph wulf, eds. mimesis: culture—art—society. tr. don reneau. u california p, 1995. gildon, charles. robinson crusoe examin'd and criticis'd; or, a new edition of charles gildon's famous pamphlet now published with an introduction and explanatory notes, together with an essay on gildon's life by paul dottin. j.m. dent & sons, 1923. greenblatt, stephen. 1980. renaissance self-fashioning: from more to shakespeare. u chicago p, 2005. haraway, donna. staying with the trouble. making kin in the chthulucene. duke up, 2016. _____. when species meet. u minnesota p, 2008. huggan, graham, and helen tiffin. postcolonial ecocriticism. literature, animals, environment. second edition. routledge, 2010. hutchinson, peter. “novella.” encyclopedia of the novel. paul schellinger, ed. routledge 1998. 948-950. jager, eric. “the parrot's voice: language and the self in robinson crusoe.” eighteenthcentury studies 21.3 (1988): 316–333. locke, john. an essay concerning human understanding. peter h. nidditch ed. clarendon press, 1975. mackintosh, alex. “crusoe’s abattoir: cannibalism and animal slaughter in robinson crusoe.” critical quarterly 53.3 (2011): 24-42. mchugh, susan. “one or several literary animal studies.” ruminations 3. h-animal discussion netzwork. accessed 17 jul 2006. online. mcmunn, meradith t. “parrots and poets in late medieval literature.” anthrozoös 12.2 (1999): 68-75. nash, richard. wild enlightenment: the borders of human identity in the eighteenth century. u of virginia p, 2003. roland borgards -parrot poll: animal mimesis in daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe 23 olson, eric t. what are we? a study in personal ontology. oxford up, 2007 pepperberg, irene m. the alex studies: cognitive and communicative abilities of grey parrots. harvard up, 2000. potolsky, matthew. mimesis. routledge, 2006.c powell, manushag n. “parroting and the periodical: women’s speech, haywood’s parrot, and its antecedents.” tulsa studies in women’s literature 1.27 (2008): 63-91. rennie, neil. far-fetched facts: the literature of travel and the idea of the south seas. clarendon press, 1995. robbins, louise e. elephant slaves and pamperd parrots. exotic animals in eigtheenthcentury paris. johns hopkins up, 2002. secord, wellesley. studies in the narrative method of defoe. russell and russell, 1963. senior, matthew. a cultural history of animals in the age of enlightenment. berg, 2007. spivak, gayatri chakravorty. a critique of postcolonial reason: towards a history of the vanishing present. harvard up, 1999. stalnaker, joann. “painting life, describing death: problems of representation and style in the histoire naturelle.” studies in eighteenth-century culture 32 (2003): 193–227. steele, richard. [untitled]. the englishman 26 (3.12.1713): 168-173. walmsley, peter. “prince maurice’s rational parrot: civil discourse in locke’s essay.” eighteenth-century studies 28.4 (1995): 413-425. watt, ian p. 1957. the rise of the novel: studies in defoe, richardson and fielding. u california p, 2001. williams, r. john. “naked creatures: robinson crusoe, the beast, and the sovereign.” comparative critical studies 2.3 (2005): 337-348. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 24 wolfe, cary. what is posthumanism? u minnesota p, 2010. microsoft word hansen-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 paul hansen fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of the network and animal metaphor1 introduction. my ethnographic fieldwork has primarily focused on animal-humantechnology relationships. from 2006 i have researched industrializing dairy farms in the tokachi region of hokkaido, japan; from 2009 i have conducted research on humancanine relationships in urban japan, mostly in osaka and tokyo; and from 2014 i have done comparative research on these themes in urban and rural jamaica, kingston and the parish of saint thomas respectively.2 when focusing on animal-human-technology relationships, one is eventually drawn into contemporary discussions of actor network theory (ant), and by extension, science and technology studies (sts).3 today, ant and sts are fairly common territory for a range of social scientists and humanities scholars. these schools of thought influence the way researchers engage with their chosen disciplines or interact interdisciplinarily, and how they approach various topics of inquiry. as an anthropologist engaged in long-term ethnographic research, my roots firmly grounded in inflections of anthropos, finding myself ever-drifting towards conceptions of the posthuman, the nonhuman, more-than-human publics, and other contemporary schools of thought that point beyond the confines of human subjectivity and social structuring is liberating, but also disorienting.4 in light of these theoretical concerns, in this paper i argue that a move away from the comfort zone of “network” and “animal” as “conceptual metaphors” (lakoff and johnson 246-249) is needed in any ethnographic descriptions or analysis of agency of a sentient more-than-human kind. to be clear, this is not to propose that we abandon the concepts of network or animal in general, but that anthropological ethnographers in particular need to be ever-aware that they focus on the specific, interactive, historically situated, and developed capacities and potentials of extra human worlds. “being there,” or the practice of long-term ethnographic fieldwork, opens the researcher to constantly unfolding idiosyncratic engagements — or one could say “becomings.” thus, when one returns, "comes back" from "the field" and all the distancing that language implies, care should be taken not to succumb to reductionist descriptions and explanations that glaze over the existential anomaly experienced. on return, there is always an impetus to purify or sanitize events in order to sentimentalize, essentialize, and generalize findings, making them easier to write up and read. for field data to have any validity, this should be avoided. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 184 what’s in a “cow?” the notion of existing ever-between “being” and “becoming” (or “analyzing” and “engaging,” in terms of fieldwork practice) is essential to what follows. holism is an idea and ideal central to anthropology from its modern foundations. and as such, reduction is a reoccurring problem when doing anthropological ethnographic research and writing on the intersections and interconnections of humans, non-human animals, technology, plants, ideas, beliefs, and values. what links or divides disparate entities is seldom experienced as a set, let alone multiple sets, of flat or evenly balanced relationships for either ethnographers or their interlocutors, human or not. this is because interactions are imbued with differing degrees of, and potentials for, embodiment, intimacy, immediacy, and agency. moreover, even co-animated interactions can be vague and affect saturated exchanges. for example, a cow is not a human. this is simple to argue, and with a bit more persistence in argument it is clear that a cow cannot be just any cow, a cow in the general singular.5 in short, every cow that one comes in contact with must be regarded, and is certainly experienced, as a particular presence — a significant other — in a particular place and context.6 but what, exactly, is the experience of the ghost (yūrei in japanese) or soul (tamashi in japanese) of a cow? how does “it” — or indeed does it? — differ from encountering another ghost, for instance the specter of another human, or an inanimate apparition, say of a house? during an interview with a north-central hokkaido dairy farm owner, i was told that bovine spirits compelled him to erect an exceedingly expensive chikukonhi (livestock funeral monument). moreover, to appease these entities and to keep them from bringing misfortune to his business, he also attends and pays handsomely for annual buddhist funeral services to be conducted for the tamashi of cows — entities which he personally experiences as greenish blue dancing lights. i have known this man for 10 years, and while he certainly is an anomaly in his community, it is not because of his engagement in these practices or metaphysical beliefs. many local farmers have told me nearly analogous stories of “hauntings,” and they participate in similar rites — albeit the lion’s share of them far more half-heartedly. indeed, such funerary rituals, explanations, and justifications are common across a range of human-nonhuman relationships in japan (see ambros). however, this farmer stands out due to his other idiosyncratic engagements in the community. he is the owner of the largest and most fiscally productive dairy farm in the area, one on the technological cutting edge — for better or worse being another issue — of dairy farm industrialization. he is thus a selfproclaimed pioneer, a highly rational, hardnosed, business-first agriculturalist, who looks to cut costs wherever possible and guffaws at numerous traditional, regional, and co-operative customs. yet concomitantly, he is tormented by what remains unseen to paul hansen -fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of the network and animal metaphor 185 many. and he is more than willing to spend money on rituals to pacify these intangible, but nonetheless influential, indeed agentive, experiences and/or things. clearly, the questions and answers a researcher might produce regarding networks or agentive being in this example are not simple. who or what is motivating these acts? is it the farmer, the living cows, the bovine ghosts, or the company that builds the monuments? further, how are they linked? do we sagaciously point a finger toward the social or a shared a belief system as the root cause? or, perhaps less precisely, the answer is to be found in one of the regular neo-marxian alibis; perhaps it’s the economy or even habitus that impels these seemingly contradictory actions. moreover, are the souls or spirits encountered other-worldly interveners (things in and of themselves) in human-bovine relations? or are they this-worldly, human-only experiences that lead to local, rationally calculated costs of doing business? how does one balance the influence of personal guilt or social pressure? in this case, i know from years of ethnographic experience that no other farmers in the area are as stalwart in their ritual actions as the man described above. nevertheless, however one cares to explain the connections, cutting production costs with a marketfirst mindset and then spending the savings to appease bovine spirits seems paradoxical, given the neoliberal context of contemporary agribusiness, whether in japan, jamaica, or presumably jersey or jordon. perhaps one can most accurately say that all of these things are working in concert: holism and functional anthropology redux. and if so, a problematic question follows. do they influence equally? should we think of this constellation — human and not human, from beings to things, everbecoming and co-constituted of radically different essences — as a network? and again, if so, do such relationships and processes of functionality start to become fuzzy and unclear, or even fail, at a differing levels of analysis? how do we then account for the various components, agencies, or actants, especially ones that are clearly sentient and even have distinct personalities? putting all this in plain terms, when is a cow singular and experiential — as in, my cantankerous cow betsy who seems to intentionally step on my toes when milking? when is it plural and abstract — for example, a cow is a milk producing bovine being with four legs and four stomachs? what is clear is that the/a cow can be both in differing contexts and from differing perspectives. the question of squaring context and experience is not a new dilemma in anthropology, nor are the questions surrounding the experiences and analyses of ethnographic encounters. of ethnography and its particulars. from evans-prichard’s explanations of the logic behind azande witchcraft to alan young’s more recent discussions of the creation of ptsd as clinical category, notions of shared “epistemic cultures” underlie socio-centric humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 186 explanations of motive and experience. yet, such shared logics are not sufficient to explain singular or individual actions and interpretations which are at odds with “common sense.”7 confronting such seeming incongruity is at the core of anthropology as a discipline. alfred kroeber was a central figure in the cultural anthropology method and theory debates of his day. his pithy and oft cited description of anthropology as “the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities” is as fitting today as it was nearly 100 years ago.8 one could add other binaries to the mix. do we favor the explanatory power of the social over the individual, focus on structure or agency, grapple with human particularity or give more weight to our commonality with other animals? explanations of value and motivation in anthropology (including those of the ethnographic research process itself) make it an unlikely candidate for a purely positivistic science with clear premises, let alone conclusions. yet, these often intangible aspects of value and meaning clearly exist and they remain existential experiences that anthropological ethnography as “full bodied” or “sensuous” scholarship must grapple with.9 my point is more precautionary than critical. i suggest that the concept of “network” and the definition of “human” in opposition to “animal” are essential ideas from a macro perspective. they go a long way towards understanding human social structures, like industrial farms or dog friendly parks, in that they effectively bracket lived complexity so that generalized explanatory models can function. as such, the focus on human social structures is part of a widely shared epistemic culture of common social scientific explanation. i will return to the logic of human social structures, but what ought to be apparent even from the example of the cow and farm owner above is that these conceptualizations often break down during ethnographic encounters if retained in an inherently macro oriented context. put bluntly, the human social structures of many social science studies have a less discussed flipside that i will call more-than-human individuated agencies (hoping that this somewhat pedantic binary label captures something more of the singular and experiential nature of the everyday and ethnography). fieldwork experiences, for informant or researcher, are often poorly understood through the abstracting and pluralizing metaphors of network and animal. this is notably the case in encounters where differing umwelten or enviro-worlds are at stake: telling, for example, is the above account of a particular farmer, a particular experience, and particular cows on a particular farm. there may well be similar experiences, but they are not the same experience, and the purpose of ethnography, and this is a key if often forgotten point, is to participate, observe, and account for the particular and not to buttress preconceived paul hansen -fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of the network and animal metaphor 187 generalizations.10 this is not to say that one cannot, after the fact, generalize from these particulars. but for ethnographers who hope to engage with and add to the explanatory potential of posthuman, multispecies, or even cosmopolitan theory, they must do so being attentive to what they are engaged in first and foremost: the particular, affect saturated, and embodied relationships they are privy to via both participating in and observing the lives of others over time and firsthand.11 to be a part of umwelten or being-in-the-world is always plural, shared, and not singular. this notion of “shared worlds” is currently a highly popular social theory perspective, but at the same time it is important for anthropological ethnographers to keep in mind that living (and their research experience, for that matter) is an inherently individuated and idiosyncratic experience, an existential condition that ought to be understood and respected in ethnographic writing.12 translating such inimitable experiences (beings ever becoming) to others (an audience, occasionally very eclectic and catholic in their interests and tastes) about others (capital o, our interlocutors — animate or inanimate) is always incomplete and imperfect. moreover, in our idiosyncratic everyday encounters, agency is never distributed equally amongst the pantheon of agencies experienced. more to the point, networks are seldom experienced, let alone understood, as complete. in what follows, theorizations of an embodied and ecological umwelten primarily stem from three sources: the work jakob von uexküll, kinji imanishi, and perhaps most notably tim ingold. in support of this conceptualization, i focus on ethnographic descriptions of two contemporary and increasingly common dairy farm practices that involve complex interconnections of bodies and animal-human-technology: rotary dairy parlor milk production and the process of ai or artificial insemination. fuzzy bounds: more-than-human experiences, contingency and vagueness. we live in a world of increasingly complex “partial connections,”13 often untraceable, in accounting for human or nonhuman agencies. fuzzy bounds, the title of this article highlights the polysemy of experience in living with a myriad of other beings past, present, and continuous tense entwined.14 first, fuzzy is a somewhat childish way of saying furry — such as the hair of a variety of animals from humans to bears. and here too, sentient or not, real or teddy, experience is participatory, particular, and often tactile. fuzzy in this sense obviously connotes the hands-on experience of engaging in common human-nonhuman interactions: farmers milking cows, park walkers with dogs, children and their favorite bedtime partner/stuffed guardian. however, the word fuzzy also has a second meaning, something more distant, cerebral and visual. it means vague or unclear, for example the beginning and end of physical boundaries as viewed in fog or during twilight. this metaphorical definition suggests an observational as humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 188 opposed to a participatory vagueness. what we observe in terms of these nonhuman examples can be both a distant animal or an anthropomorphized friend or family member. encounters with dogs or cows can be engagements with fuzzy others in both senses, depending on context. this is surely because many domesticated mammals are differently, but nevertheless comparatively, embodied with humans. our close connections with these beings, physically and affectively over evolutionary time or even over a single life history, are relationships that are unclearly understood in general. that is to say, conceptualizations of a general animal other shift; dogs, in general, can be one person’s fuzzy friend, another’s fuzzy foe, and yet another’s fuzzy food. as underscored by kroeber’s aforementioned definition, the fuzziness of bounds is also a problem particularly rooted in the schizophrenic nature of anthropology itself: the act of articulating participant observations. this is a point brilliantly expanded upon by tim ingold in a chapter entitled “anthropology is not ethnography” (see ingold 229-243). augmenting kroeber and ingold, we can borrow from anthropologist victor turner to conceptualize anthropology itself as a discipline of constant methodological and theoretical liminality (see turner). on the one hand, anthropologists are pragmatic scientists. they are experience-oriented and embodied field researchers. they are existential data gatherers, even accountants of socio-cultural environments and conditions. on the other hand, anthropologists are also educators and writers expected to communicate these findings in a largely shared, if occasionally opaque, theoretical and stylistic lingua franca: a theory-savvy ethnographic text. they usually communicate findings and ideas to other anthropologists, social scientists, or neophyte researchers, seldom the general public. thus, alongside being cultural accountants, anthropologists are theoreticians or applied philosophers rooted in social and cultural data. yet any such binary necessarily collapses into a betweenness — accounting the particular in some generalizable way. in reality, even a moderately successful anthropologist compacts these dual roles into what often seems an uncomfortable discipline, the fuzzy discipline of socio-cultural anthropology. one aspect of research over the other might well be preferred by a given anthropologist; viewing oneself as a better fieldworker than the socio-cultural commentator or vice versa. nevertheless, navigating this liminal space is the alchemy of effective anthropology — one does raw data collection and via these particular experiences one can then theorize, generalize, reduce, and compare, hopefully with some evocative and imaginative élan. this is how the “being with” singular beings and witnessing their becomings over time forms the data that then must be actively and creatively morphed into an accounting for a general subject and accounting to a general audience. paul hansen -fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of the network and animal metaphor 189 yet, i suggest that it is in this exact contraction, in the vague parameters of doing and theorizing, that anthropology reaches a limit (or an impasse) as to how deeply the ethnographic element of the discipline can remain committed to modes of abstract macro-oriented discourse. this is especially the case when paradigms and accompanying jargon are assumed to be widely shared inside, let alone outside, anthropology. at the risk of putting a core question too simply, how far can the social, general and largely visual metaphors of network and animal go in describing the particular, embodied and multi-sensual human and non-human relationships and enviro-worlds of embodied experience? for example, for a farmer, what might the claim that “an animal or a piece of farm equipment is an ‘actant’ or has agency within a network” mean? furthermore, combining the term “social” — a common macro-level signifier—with network or animal is even more redundant and misleading.15 taking the already anthropocentric framing for granted, is there an un-social network or a nonsocial animal? again, i do not claim that the terms “network” or “animal” should be replaced with new and improved universal markers.16 this is unabashedly what anthropologist tim ingold does do in using the “meshwork” as a conceptual replacement for network (ingold 62). given that i too do anthropology, i am happy to follow down his path in terms of my own ethnographic work, but as a social scientist my general claim must be far more modest in scope. much as geertz outlines in his essay “anti anti-relativism,” the focus is a matter of balance and not exclusion. utilizing fieldwork experiences, in what follows i argue for the greater explanatory potential of conceptualizing networks alongside or in tandem with living meshworks and the need to account for agents or latourian actants (from a fellow living being, idea, apparition, building, etc.) as specific, and so historically situated, things and beings with individual capabilities, capacities, and thus, particular life trajectories and “potentials” in terms of micro encounter.19 even acknowledging more-than-human personhood as opposed to animal, or general categories of animal, is more illuminating in some cases with sentient nonhuman others. meshworks allow ethnographers to say something about experiences that networks, even in a revamped form, cannot. thus, my prescription boils down to a largely socratic one: know thyself and subject as a researcher. question your position and relations beyond a human-centric viewpoint as a researcher/writer. if network and animal alone suit your purposes as a social scientist, then use them. but in terms of ethnographic description there are alternative and more intimate, if less popularly discussed, options with the meshwork concept, remaining true to particularity perhaps chief among them. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 190 flattening and the problem of hyper-potential. augmenting arguments made by ingold and sismondo, i contend that the concepts of network and a general descriptive noun like animal are too fuzzy (that is to say imprecise) to discuss our changing relationships with many fuzzy others or nonhumans on an experiential level. even on a macro level, unrestrained focus on network or actant can become exceedingly complex, as noted below, but that is not at issue here. these concepts, when shoehorned into micro level analysis, render individual animated relationships vague, depersonalized, and even intentionally depoliticized and devoid of history.20 and as such, they can quickly become misleading terms when dealing with fuzzy others and interactions experientially, that is, ethnographically. the easiest way to view this problem is to account for sentient fuzzy agents first. this maneuver is not to dismiss cow ghosts or teddy bears as unimportant, but to hone in on the notion of particularity in regard to otherness and agency, as opposed to generality or essentialism. the process and use of ethnography itself is part of the issue here. in anthropology the question of reflexive positionality is important. who is doing what to whom and why? moreover, as anthropos implies, with few exceptions, in the final analysis the focus of the discipline has largely been on relations of human animals. i will suggest, as have an increasing number of ethnographers, that this be extended to “person” in reference to those fuzzy others who are now often referred to as animals.21 but i am not willing to avoid people, more exactly particular and encountered people, in ethnographic representation. outside of anthropology there are, of course, other forms of social science enquiry that also use ethnography as a research tool, but i suggest that the focus of such research is often on the question how followed by who? how did/does this happen and who or what is responsible? the difference between anthropology (on the whole, and prioritizing ethnography) and, say, ant or sts (as interdisciplinary, and again, on the whole) is the way a researcher starts to ask questions. does a researcher start with asking who and then ask why, or do they start with asking how and then ask who? the following examples highlight that where they arrive from that starting point can be quite different. bruno latour is trained as both an anthropologist and sociologist, and from the inception of ant he — despite being one of the founders of what could now be called a paradigmatic form of social science theorization — has had an uncomfortable relationship with the label ant. indeed, in a telling article, “on recalling ant,” latour begins with a rather jarring and well-known statement: “i will start by saying that there are four things that do not work with actor-network theory; the word actor, the word network, the word theory and the hyphen! four nails in the coffin” (15). this paul hansen -fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of the network and animal metaphor 191 sounds like a rather damning dismissal, yet despite distancing himself from some aspects and uses of ant terminology in 1999, in a 2013 book/online project we find the network metaphor remains troublesome, an unshakable ghost perhaps. in this work he offers two revamped meanings of the network concept.20 his first usage of network as a general-register concept is essential in any discussion — for example, a computer network or product distribution network. this use of network is, for the case at hand, unproblematic, as it indexes existing and traceable material connections, links that are to a large degree repetitive, generalized, and reductive. this is an accepted part of social science theorization. however, a problem arises with how latour defines network in a second register. his stated goal is to get at values, guiding principles that do not respect modern modes of boundary classification, as, for example, law, science, or religion are all replete with shared values. and following the ways values “translate” across what are perceived as discrete bounds is at the core of his revamped, second order, micro oriented network concept. what he now calls [net] to distinguish this process from the prior notion of network is [a] principle of free association — or, to put it more precisely, this principle of irreduction — that is found at the heart of the actornetwork theory … [authorizing] … observers to give themselves as much freedom of movement in their studies as their informants have… (an inquiry 33-34) this reframing is useful in highlighting connections of process, the linkages of how? for example, this operation stresses how values permeate heretofore accepted institutional domains and seem to possess agency in themselves. yet, [net] remains too fuzzy for communicating experiential and embodied (in situ/situated) relations, personal relations, and relations of persons — the who? and why? again, this is a matter of the starting question and where one wants to end up. latour correctly highlights that this latter incarnation is full of research potential, it is brimming over with it in fact. but that is precisely the problem in terms of anthropological ethnography. in this account there are no actual people who hold values, there are “the moderns” and a fictional ethnographer trying to understand their values through various material processes and relations; actual persons, individuals having or expressing their values, are absent. this claim requires elaboration. couched in his larger example of a fictional researcher used as a stand-in for a contemporary ethnographer researching “the moderns,“ latour offers the following example to trace the [net] of gas transmission when cooking risotto is unexpectedly humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 192 interrupted. the irreducible linkages of gas from russian oil fields to cooking in an apartment in france is traced beyond bounded spatial or material domains. the natural gas that lets the russians keep their empire going does circulate continuously from gas fields in the caucasus to gas stoves in france … [where, in his example, gas flow has inexplicably been interrupted while cooking a meal] … but it would be a big mistake to confuse the continuity of this circulation with what makes circulation possible in the first place. in other words, gas pipelines are not made “of gas” but rather of steel tubing, pumping stations, international treatises, russian mafiosi, pylons anchored in the permafrost, frostbitten technicians, ukrainian politicians. (32-33) from the start, and likely shocking for many an anthropologist, is the rampant essentialism here. leaving aside “the moderns,” who are the “the russians?” which frostbitten technicians? what “ukrainian politicians” in particular? these would be the first-order questions in anthropological ethnography. and indeed, doing long-term fieldwork among any of these groups, it seems reasonable, at least to me, that some people would be capable of highlighting what values they hold dear if asked. further, they would be capable of seeing, and willing to see, how values bleed across a variety of permeable institutions. but there is a creeping contempt in the text for extracting any notion of personal values from informants. our seasoned ethnographer is careful to “avoid giving their explanations too much weight,” and “ [a]lthough her informants are obviously attached to these distinctions, [between discrete categories like science or law] … she comes to understand very quickly (a few weeks spent doing fieldwork or even just reading newspapers, will have sufficed to convince her) that with these stories about domains she is being taken for a ride .…”(28-29). one can surely witness values reflected across a range of institutions through their material processes, but the ethnographic mission is to uncover who and why people hold these perspectives. at least this is the goal of micro oriented ethnographic fieldwork. indeed, if one could actually trace it, the gas [net] example is really a macro network of holy grail stature. in such an anything goes and everywhere links constellation of network — that is, seemingly ceaseless networks in the plural — agent alongside agency in a micro, individual, or at least individuated, sense becomes too vague to work with. in what follows, i will outline how the more macro network concept (or animal, even the more specific holstein cow) cannot be utilized to deal with paul hansen -fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of the network and animal metaphor 193 ethnographic — that is to say particularistic, historical, and indeed individual — interactive human and non-human relationships. metaphoric milking and its limits. depending on the time of year it can be 30 degrees above or 20 degrees below in tokachi, hokkaido. given this climate, the northern tokachi landscape, both natural and human-made, stands out in the context of japan. for example, it clearly contrasts with the rather temperate region of kanto, where the capital city of tokyo is located, let alone tropical okinawa further south. hokkaido as a whole comprises 22% of the japan’s landmass, while it is home to less than 5% of population. tokachi is the largest sub-prefecture in hokkaido, yet the capital city obihiro is home to less than 200,000 people. there are, perhaps more tellingly than these spatial statistics, more holstein cows than there are people in tokachi. the closest rail station to my field site is almost 40 kilometers away, a situation unimaginable in much of the nation. land, in relative financial terms, is cheap, because tokachi is expansive and not agriculturally productive much of the year. and these are only fragmented details of the many other particularizing shared macro features of the physical and social environment, specific factors that clearly impact ethnographic encounters, whether with other humans or non-human agents. over the last generation there have been significant shifts in hokkaido’s dairy industry.21 single-family owned dairy farms have rapidly given way to industrial jointshare companies. this outlines a myriad of issues in global agriculture practices too numerous to enumerate in this paper.22 for the case at hand it means that in order for japanese consumers to only pay double the world market price for their milk, there has been a rapid reduction in the number of single-family owned and operated dairy farms and a concomitant increase in the size and joint ownership of remaining dairy farms. since 1999, the size of an average hokkaido dairy farm has increased (currently to about double the national average, with around 120 cows per farm), while the number of farms has decreased.23 as the number of cows rises, the financial overhead, such as loans, leased land, and workers from outside of the family, community, and country also increase. concomitantly, the number of dairy farm operations, counted for example through farms with government issued milk quotas, has steadily declined. in sum, there has been a rapid and radical industrialization of dairy farming, and this necessitates two related shifts in terms of human-cow-technology relationships: the need for rotary parlors and the need for ai (artificial insemination). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 194 figure 1: bird’s eye view of a rotary parlor. (photo by author.) for a year i worked as a hired hand on a farm that used a fifty-cow rotary milking parlor like the one pictured in figure 1. such a farm is a highly-industrialized lifeworld. great hopes farm, a pseudonym that mirrors the optimistic and futuristic tenor of the actual farm, runs on a system of round the clock rotations. there are about forty staff members who work day, night, and on split shifts. a little under one third of them are chinese nationals contracted (indeed indebted to work as “trainees”) for three years, and vietnamese on extendable visas; some workers are from farm families and many are self-described furiita(non-permanent, contracted staff).24 workers are usually in their twenties and most are not locals. on the farm where i did the majority of my fieldwork, the average turnover rate for a laborer is about 11 months. together, these human workers — owners, laborers, japanese, or not — milk and care for over 2400 holstein cows, a number that is steadily growing. the goal of this particular owner is to reach 3000 head before he retires in 2020. managing human staff is, on paper, straightforward. basically, it is like working in any 24 hour-a-day service industry, in that workers come and go, but in terms of a functional network (at least in the mind of the owner) all elements (actants, human and bovine, alongside equipment) work in concert with the end-goal to get milk from the cow to the holding tanks, to the distribution trucks, and to the dairy-product manufacturing companies three times a day (a network of labor within the network of distribution). however, in this environment the management of cows is particularly telling. on average, a given worker’s contact with a specific cow and the equipment in the milking parlor is only 18 seconds, when legs, udders, pneumatic suction cups, and digital paul hansen -fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of the network and animal metaphor 195 readouts pass by them at eyelevel. this is viewed and calculated as an average unit of interaction, that is to say, of production. one can average how x number of workers can extract y liters of milk from z number of cows with a equipment from b company with headquarters in c country, per hour, per day, per year. and such information is used to logically decide what equipment ought to be purchased by a given farmer and marketed by a given company. figure 2: human eye view of the automated milking process. (photo by author.) functional and clearly marking how things work, like the above network of gas production and distribution, it is easy to grapple with the outlay of an industrial farm from such a macro network perspective. cows are number coded, ear tagged, fitted with a sensor, and largely sorted by a central computer program. a truly panoptic apparatus, the rotary dairy is networked directly to a central data system. the parlor records daily milk output, cow weight, and similar data, which are augmented by central office data that includes birthdates, cow costs, a history of illnesses, attempts at ai, and even the cost of semen utilized for each attempt. all of these rates can be averaged out, making it possible to discuss an average (though in actuality non-existent) cow much as i discussed a typical (though also non-existent) human worker. other aspects of mechanized technology separate particular cows with a series of linked and automated pneumatic gates. when the aforementioned computer and machine network deems certain cows to be in need of medical attention or due for attempts at impregnation (usually due to average times calculated through periods of lactation or fluctuations in relation to average body temperature), it, the equipment, acts. via the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 196 sensors in the collars of cows and the constant feedback of encoded information to the central computer, the equipment separates cows in need of human attention. in short, the life of each cow is meticulously, one could say nearly irreducibly, documented. insofar as it is possible, each cow is controlled by a constellation of automated systems rooted in a linking and coding of averages and binary logic that is only rarely overridden by human hands or checked upon until the cow is, quite literally, in the hands of the owner or a veterinarian. average workers, average cows, and a network of binary systems all working in concert until the point of human-cow contact. getting beyond an animal and network environment: take one. even from this superficial description a number of networks in latour’s general sense should be obvious. there are networks of workers twoand four-legged; one is organized by-andlarge in the head of the owner, while the other is managed largely by a computer system and its networked surveillance technologies. thus, these animated humans and nonhumans can be seen as networked via an inanimate nonhuman, the rotary milking parlor and its modes of both milk and data collection. but as aforementioned, and similar to latour’s cooking-gas cut-off scenario, the potential to create networks beyond those physically observed and encountered is hard to exhaust for a creative mind, one could freely associate elements and distribute agency. take, as an explanatory nonhuman example, a cow-parlor-computer-gate-veterinarian network. this can be observed when the information about a cow is sent to the computer, which then relays a code to the parlor to separate a cow for an attempt at ai impregnation by one of the veterinarians who visit the farm daily. this is a reasonable, cursory explanation that i expand upon in ethnographic detail below. the problem, hopefully obvious, is that these links can (and do) go on ad infinitum and ad absurdum: forever unto abstraction. or, turtles all the way down, as the colloquial phrase goes. the problem is, as strathern puts it, “the fractal logic … of networks within networks,” and where to “cut the network” to render it meaningful (partial connections 523). she assures us that it is through ownership that the network must be paused and interpreted, and in what follows i agree, but perhaps not in a way with which she would concur. hands-on milking: practical, situated, and embodied engagements. again, i view network chasing and tracing as a project with limitlessly positive potential. i am not suggesting that this be cast aside. it pinpoints connections as process-oriented and without superimposed hierarchies (truly hyphenated hybrids).25 in the above case, it allows for the abstract conceptualization of human-animal-technology (with or without the hyphens for the case at hand) to be, in some sense, theoretically anthropomorphized (rendered relational in human terms), without becoming anthropocentric.26 clearly, paul hansen -fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of the network and animal metaphor 197 agency is not human only in such actor-network assemblages, and bravo for this much needed conceptualization. but these boons do not come without costs. the “free association” and “irreduction” that latour highlights, allowing for actors to be made apparent even in terms of his more micro oriented [net], also acts to sterilize life and embodied agency from what are, in actuality, very individuated and qualitatively unequal processes. in sum, it denies multiple individual enviro-worlds in order to construct a coherent story of coming together or the sharing values, for that matter. it denies the fact that living things have their own unequivocal forms and inimitable situations that connect them with other living things, let alone nonliving things.27 it denies the different perceptions of the environment by actors — other than the researcher — in constructing the network. indeed, it seems to me impossible to account for every aspect of being. one is reminded of uexküll’s tick, a creature whose umwelt consists of three perceptual indicating processes and the ability to wait for 18 years to feed!28 as in my example of cow ghosts in the introduction to this article, can we view the tick as an agent? for a start, with what can one equate or weigh such actants in relation to other actants, while still accounting for the particularities of the environmental context and embodiment? the irreducible linking of tick, tree, and unwilling host is an interesting and basic explanatory device, a metaphor, a root image. but such connections, beings, and places, though all relatively simple in this case, are depoliticized, made vague and general. these are agents without life. that is, be-ings without histories, without trajectories, without choices, without values or value, even without bodies or environments, lacking any accounting of the innumerable contingencies that even make their linking possible at all. in sum, these agents are not practically engaged in the world. instead, they are at worst nodes in a network, at best they become generalized stand-in nouns meant to index or symbolize their particular and contingently shared umwelten. they are, thus and in fact, practically deployed points of contact created by the researcher/writer, time frozen markers of chosen relations — lest the networking continue without closure. i liken this view of networks to be like the observation of a family photo, flattened glimpses of connections, of life as lived together. and in such a vision (or one could say version) nonhumans may have a presence. perhaps in the family photo a pet dog is in the frame, or the new family car, for that matter, but this, as is commonly said when viewing photographs, is not the whole picture. it is an indexical image without inherent context and as such its meaning depends on the viewer’s interpretation. it is a creation of connections in the acts of taking and viewing. if there are any values here, they are humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 198 the values bestowed by an observer, either taking or viewing the photo, and are not necessarily shared by the subjects in the photo. explorations in embodiment and umwelten: take two. the above argument suggests that the idea of network, though constructive in a macro sense, needs to be re-examined and recalibrated if used from an ethnographic perspective or at the micro level of interpretation and explanation. the following section focuses on the process of ai or artificial insemination, in order to highlight how this can be accomplished by bringing network to bear without it being overbearing on qualitative analysis. unaddressed in the previous parlor-network example is the particularity working in the tokachi environment. one can seasonally rue either shivering or sweltering much of the workday. for humans, dwelling in such place can often be uncomfortable. one could push this further along a phenomenological track. differing people have differing values in this case. that is to say, differing tolerances and perceptions of hot and cold related to individual temperaments, embodiments, life histories, etcetera. more to the point, a particular environment flavors how a given individual approaches relations with human and bovine others, not to mention the multitude of complex and negotiated relationships to non-sentient things, from snow tires to cold-drink vending machines. but all told, this is simply to highlight the inherent abstractions required for the construction of a macro network approach. in essence, the environment can be utterly left out of the macro network and animal equation. moreover, such differences are all the more amplified beyond any human, animal, object divide. in reality, however, environments are ever-active and externalizable. in tokachi, depending on time of year or even the time of day, climatic temperatures can sour or save milk. cooled grease can slow the equipment, while hot grease causes the occasional breakdown. snow either needs to be time-consumingly shoveled or it does not. and, human workers (to leave cows out for the moment) are not just workers, interchangeable nouns, markers, or actants’ playing their role in the formulation of a network. the diversity of their backgrounds always surprises my japanese colleagues. chinese, taiwanese, japanese, brazilian, indonesian, urban and rural, male and female, high school dropouts and prestigious university graduates, tall, small, outgoing or shy a dairy farmer type does not exist beyond wild context and individualdenying abstractions provided by macro level analysis.29 one ethnographic point underscoring the intense particularity of dairying as an embodied experience is the fact that, as noted above, although there is only 18 seconds of interaction with these bovine others in the context of the milking process, workers nevertheless remember particular cows, and cows can react differently to particular workers during this short moment of paul hansen -fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of the network and animal metaphor 199 contact. this stems from the multiple histories kept outside the frame of the family photo style of network analysis. countless individualized interactions at other points of the workday, time spent feeding or cleaning these 2400 bovines, for example, come to bear on the exchanges made in a day’s hundreds of 18 second snapshots of human-cowtechnology meetings during milking in the rotary parlor. as noted, ingold theorizes such historical and embodied interactions as meshworks as opposed to networks (ingold 63-94). in the network-inspired versions of the milking process agents or “actants” are seen as points of process imposed onto the background or environment, and through these general forms observers describe relationships such as a typical milking process or an average family farm. however, a life of experiences and long-term interactions cannot be captured by flattened relations at the moment of timecompressed contact that make up these observations. life, from a micro or existential perspective, is in the doing, being, living, and becoming. seemingly old school ant, the hyphenations are always there for me, but in my reading each line is a reminder of particularity. they are lines indicative of complex connections, not a simple mark of assembling hybridity. when a family name is hyphenated, like munia-kanazawa, this line might only be read as having a macro meaning, the eligibility for a dual passport, for example. but it is the long-term lines of entanglement i am after, lines of bodies, histories, desires, values, and perceptions that comprise the lifeworld of the farm or family from the micro perspective. it is the fuzzy connections and the lived and particular experiences of these specific beings and things that start before an ethnographer’s observations and will carry on after the ethnographer is back home writing them up. the hyphen, in short, is never the same. it’s a mark that must be read as highlighting existential and phenomenological complexity, not abstract connection. to accept a networked depiction as holistic is to foreground what is indexical over what is experiential. for ingold, the difference here comes from a perspective influenced by heidegger, on one hand, and deleuze and guattari, on the other. he emphasizes a dwelling perspective (being in the world), in that to be, or to exist, is to be in a shifting state of becoming: being in, and a part of the world, and not being imposed on the world. it’s not a case of being or becoming, but of existing ever-between. such an embodied history and process-oriented understanding is concomitant with the idea of relations as a haecceity, not as bound and static nodes or point-to-point connections, but as lines in motion that do not meet at a point, but forever pass or entwine. in describing these differences in detail, ingold playfully contrasts the social network of ants, each performing its task, each working towards the same goal, with the creation of a spider’s web (89-94). the web is a meshwork uniquely integrated into its environment, with every fiber lending itself as a skillfully produced and perceptive extension of the body ordered to fulfill its purposeful and intended use for capturing prey. each strand has a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 200 cumulative and considered history. from this perspective, what cuts the network, so to speak, is indeed ownership. it is an individual’s ownership or possession of a specific body, perception, history, and abilities or skills to act in (as a part of) a particular web of self and multiple others (animate and inanimate) that is developed (and everdeveloping) in concrete places, and not in abstract spaces. as such, and in terms of micro participation, and not only macro observation, mesh is a much better metaphor for such particularistic relations. this is in part because webs usually are not as easily made abstract and stagnant as networks, thought about as uniform structures or pondered upon from afar. as ingold notes (89-94), for webs to exist they must be a successful and creative engagement of and within a particular environment by a particular creator with certain capabilities. or, put another way they are the process of a skillful web maker engaging in a distinctive place. this is the enviro-world of a living and shared ecology, and most importantly, a position were macro abstractions devoid of place, time, and embodiment, however indexical, such as the network or the animal in general, cannot exist in actual experience. put simply, the web must remain of the world, particular in its individual components, connections, and limitations. again, the point being made here is not to deny or discard animal or network as useful concepts. indeed, artificial insemination is an example of a process where network and meshwork are mutually informative in describing an inter-(enter)-relationship of animal-human-technology encounter. the base network can be hyphenated much as those described above. ai can be described in general as a human-cow-technology network. or, more precisely, as a veterinarian~cow~stock semen entanglement … maybe squiggly lines, wayfaring lines in ingold’s sense, are more indicative of thinking through imbroglios. one can abstract this out in any direction, tracing the training of the veterinarians, the history of various breeds of dairy cow, or mapping the extraction and distribution of bull semen, for example. but when it comes to the micro experience of ai, individualizations cut this network, providing a rather graphic example of a human~cow~technology meshwork. paul hansen -fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of the network and animal metaphor 201 figure 3: artificial insemination in action. (photo by author.) it is difficult to imagine a more invasive act than the entirety of a human arm being inserted into a human anus. however, the inserting of a human arm inside the rectum of a cow is a daily ai practice. what alarms many people witnessing ai interactions for the first time is the basic nonchalance of cows, and indeed of humans, as well. one is forced to question, how can we be embodied so differently? while young cows are generally skittish the first time (and the veterinary students i have witnessed are as well), by the third or fourth time cows barely seem to notice. what cannot be observed is the reason for the insertion of the arm. the hand in the anus is used as guide for the application tool entering the vagina into the uterus; this is a common explanation and practice, in general. but veterinarians will confess that within every cow the exact placement of the semen differs. every cow’s internal meshwork of flesh, muscle, and tissue is unique, and it takes a skilled hand to react to the micro level inconsistences and movements of the living body. moreover, the choice of semen is not a random act. here, for the impregnation to be successful a number of factors need to, as is commonly said, mesh: the timing of estrus and the life history of the particular cow plays an essential role alongside the will of the owner, the seasoned expertise of the veterinarian, and of course the most scientific of all processes, luck. taking participant observations literally: seeing and doing beyond social metaphors. concluding with an example used earlier in this paper, as the interdisciplinary projects of ant and sts evolved, they enabled researchers to look at the enviro-world in a new way. like a moment of zen awakening in the social sciences, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 202 they made readers and practitioners notice, and in the relatively short order of a few decades, how natural categories, and even the disciplinary ones, that we thought existed external to politics are in actuality constructed and mutually influencing, permeable and alterable. bruno latour in particular has motivated anthropologists, including myself, to shake themselves free from an anthropocentric view of agency and to trace the irreducible complexity of living processes. however, as clifford geertz says of lévistrauss, another paradigm-founding french anthropologist, insofar as network (or [net]) and animal are appropriate forms of reference in specifically ethnographic inquiry, i remain “appreciative and unconverted” (27). in other words, i find myself torn in terms of latourian thought and its relation to doing ethnography. for example, when latour attacks what he sees as “default social” of social science practices i find myself in full agreement.28 he suggests that “the social” has become a dominant metaphor, the default position of our mental software. [the social] … takes into consideration the following: there exists a social “context” in which nonsocial activities take place; it is a specific domain of reality; it can be used as a specific type of causality to account for the residual aspects that other domains (psychology, law, economics, etc.) cannot completely deal with; it is studied by specialised scholars called sociologists or socio-(x)—“x” being the placeholder for the various disciplines; since ordinary agents are always “inside” a social world that encompasses them, they can at best be “informants” about this world and, at worst, be blinded to its existence.… [t]his default position has become common sense not only for social scientists, but also for ordinary actors via newspapers, college education, party politics, bar conversations, fashion magazines…. the social sciences have disseminated their definition of society as efficiently as utility companies deliver electricity and telephone services. (reassembling the social 4-5) but cannot the over-inclusivity of the social that latour critiques in this excerpt (rightly in my view) be seen in contrast to the treatment he offers informants in his more recent an inquiry into modes of existence noted above? further, can we not view the overextension of the social in many ways as analogous to the “free association” and “irreducibility” of the network, or the use of general nouns such as actant or animal over meshwork associations and particular agents? can these all-encompassing terms not face a similar critique? for example, there are courses on how to effectively paul hansen -fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of the network and animal metaphor 203 network. networking is frequently used as verb. and there are social networks, broadband networks, and global networks of x or y. all are, of course, useful shorthand referents in terms of general processes. just as in common speech, a human can at once have animal instincts seen as a positive perceptive attribute, while at the same time be chastized for acting like an animal in other ways. we don’t claim someone has the instincts of a hippo or claim some unruly person is acting like a giraffe, because we have specific associations with animal types, and ethnographically this is all the more important. zookeepers may well associate a particular hippo or giraffe as having these qualities, and in my own work with dogs and cows many are seen as having idiosyncratic personalities and qualities.30 like “the social” as a macro-level catch-all concept, these macro metaphoric expressions of network and animal remain too functionally “fuzzy” if deployed without particular and embodied engagements. they lack the micro meshing found in individual beings and things and their particularistic and singular historical interactions. in sum, as participant observers we have grown far too accustomed to focusing on the metaphoric and macro notion of human social structures at the expense of the flipside, the participatory and micro-perspective of morethan-human individual agencies. a final example to reinforce this point can be seen in the work of anthropologist and political activist didier fassin, in particular a study, albeit limited to the human, that addresses a very real macro/micro dilemma in focusing on observational human networks as a guiding concept when considering participatory more-than-human meshworks might be more appropriate. in his article “scenes from urban life: a modest proposal for a critical perspective approach,” fassin examines the differing worldviews of municipal police officers and the residents of a working-class suburb in paris. the ethnography revolves around the macro level networked perspectives of the police versus the experiential meshworked perspectives of the residents (though, to be clear, he does not use ingold’s terminology). in the ethnography, due to a minor miscommunication in the network of information regarding a routine traffic violation, twenty police officers descend on a low-income neighborhood largely populated by african immigrants, hoping to catch the traffic violator by surprise. if this seems a touch heavy handed, it is justified because via another computerized network of intelligence, the traffic violator is also suspected of being a well-known drug dealer. that is to say, a human network defined this suspect, or actant, as a traffic violator in the first instance, and a second computerized network defined the suspect, more condemningly, as a drug dealer. for the police, the two identities are superimposed to become one hybrid suspect, a subject whose actual existence is now the conflation of two separate networks. without announcing their purpose for entering the neighborhood, they chase several youths who, utterly unaware of what is going on and having prior negative experiences with the police (both in the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 204 meshed and networked sense — being personally harassed or having had issues with “the system”) run from the police. of course, now the police enter the meshwork, in their experience, and not being a subjugated minority, they believe innocent people have no reason to run from them. at this point, members of the community and family members intervene on behalf of these well-known individuals, the young adults they are familiar with. they outline that they know the drug dealer the police are after and that they are willing to help with the investigation, but at the same time, being residents, knowing the day-in-day out particularities of the environment, they are sure that the suspect is not in the neighborhood at the moment the police are there. confident in their networks, and likely now caught in a mutual meshwork of distrust, the police are undeterred by the residents’ claims. finally, after breaking his sister’s arm, they arrest their key suspect only to find that he could not be the perpetrator of the traffic violation. he is legally blind. and, as it turns out, he is not the suspected drug dealer, either. fassin goes on to describe how the particular embodied, and historically situated, enviro-worlds of the police officers and these low-income residents were utterly incommensurate. police, from a few points of networked reference — a drug deal here, or a theft there — had developed a network view of the neighborhood as a dangerous and inhuman place. residents, however, through their daily dealings and dwelling saw it as a meshwork, a good community with a few known bad elements. fassin suggests that the truth of the incident lies in between these perspectives; i would say: between the meshwork of individual relations (family and neighbors) and the network of larger irreducible connections (crime rates and dangerous areas). and as such, flipping the way i have framed ethnography first, fassin notes that understanding the event must be an interpretation that seriously takes into consideration both perspectives and renders them co-intelligible. ethnography is crucial here, but it cannot do all: it must be sustained by historical and sociological knowledge. (376) working on ethnographic topics where the objects of study routinely transgresses what are assumed to be the normative physical and affective boundaries of non-human and human, the concepts of network and animal have great potential to frame interactions. they have proven to be essential metaphors to communicate findings from a macro and comparative perspective. yet network and animal remain problematic to square with embodied experiences of informant or ethnographer. this is especially the case when one conducts research largely rooted in anthropological ethnography, a mode of paul hansen -fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of the network and animal metaphor 205 inquiry dependent not only upon the observation of lives, but on the historical long-term affective and embodied participation in and with particular persons and their lived lives. as such, the strength of ethnography as a research genre is not found in its ability to support or buttress macro level metaphors, but to push back at the limits of those conceptualizations. acknowledgements. i am indebted to uchiyamada yasushi, kimura shuhei, robin o’day, dan white, gergely mohacsi and my former students at tsukuba university for ever-challenging and changing my thinking during my ‘tour of duty’ at that institution. the original japanese publication of sections of this paper would have been impossible without the opinions, input and translations of kikuchi mari. notes 1. this paper emerged out of a conference presentation in 2014 at the university of tsukuba’s global science week. as a result of that meeting, parts of this paper were published in a japanese language version translated by kikuchi mari and originally entitled [毛むくじゃらで曖昧な境界：社会的メタファーの境界でエスノグラフィーする こと] (“fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of social metaphor” trans. mari kikuchi in history and anthropology 42 [2015]: 29-46). tsukuba university, hokkaido university, the japan foundation, and the japanese society for the promotion of science have, at various stages, provided funding for the research at the core of this project. i am also extremely grateful for the feedback offered by the two peer reviewers of this article. 2. for research on hokkaido, and notably the industrialization of its dairy industry, see hansen, “culturing and agricultural crisis in hokkaido”; “becoming bovine”; “urban japan's ‘fuzzy’ new families”; “milked for all they’re worth”; and hokkaido dairy farm: change, otherness, and the search for security. for research on urban japanese dog– human relations “urban japan's ‘fuzzy’ new families” and “linking cosmopolitanism and multi-species touch in contemporary japan.” and for comparative research on these themes in urban and rural jamaica, kingston and the parish of saint thomas, “communication break down: “politricks” and mixed dairy farming in the parish of saint thomas, jamaica.” 3. for examples of such antor sts-influenced work see callon et al, franklin, and latour. sismondo provides a book-length summary. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 206 4. see hayles and wolfe for bookend interpretations of posthuman concerns, and smart and smart for an accessible summary of posthumanism’s presence in anthropological research and writing. 5. see derrida regarding “the question of the animal,” specifically the notion that referring to “animal” in the abstract is an act of erasure or violence in terms of particularity — like using the term “cat” to refer to one’s companion, “woman” to one’s lover, “boy” to one’s son is to focus on general classifications over actual relations. 6. haraway’s most recent work, staying with the trouble, discusses this notion of “being with” in detail. 7. in witchcraft, oracles and magic among the azande evans-prichard undermines the notion that logic is a particularly european construct. different cultures have different coherent and “common,” or shared, conceptualizations of logic, such as cause and effect. cetina is the classic reference in discussions of “epistemic cultures.” 8. this quote, though extremely accurate even today, remains somewhat of a disciplinary legend, as the actual quote attributed to kroeber is hard to find. for more on this debate see heesun hwang et al. “anthropology is the most humanistic of the sciences...” on open anthropology cooperative. accessed march 3rd, 2017. (online.) 9. see ingold; jackson; markowitz; and stoller for phenomenological and existentially influenced examples of ethnographic research. 10. the ground-breaking ethological work of both uexküll and imanishi moves beyond the classification systems of “animal as object,” attempting to bring being to the fore. it is clear that their work pioneered contemporary multispecies ethnography or post/non human studies. see kirksey and helmreich, kohn, smart and smart and wolfe. 11. anthropological ethnography involves not only observing (or interviewing) but participating alongside (or doing/being with) others, whether human or nonhuman. see also hansen, “crossing, not creating, boundaries” for a more detailed version of the argument made here. 12. such connections are made increasingly complex, often untraceable, in accounting for non-human agencies. this is a key point in recent work by beck; bennett; descola; haraway; kirksey and helmreich; and kohn. paul hansen -fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of the network and animal metaphor 207 13. see strathern’s partial connections for a book length treatment of these issues. 14. see hansen, “urban japan's ‘fuzzy’ new families.” 15. see hacking’s the social contract of what?, and latour’s reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory for critiques of the use of social as type default adjective or marker. 16. see ingold; and rabinow for similar engagements. 17. see nussbaum, and much of the work of social anthropologist nigel rapport, especially i am dynamite: an alternative anthropology of power and the more recent anyone: the cosmopolitan subject of anthropology. 18. latour’s desire to flatten relationships, that is, to de-anthropocentrize discussions of agency by focusing on heterogeneous assemblages, has been a much-needed macro level social science critique. see also callon, lascoumes, and barthe, especially pp. 226228. 19. there is a growing body of work here beyond my own work, such as shir-vertesh’s discussion of urban canine personhood and kohn’s examination of amazonian lives, such as jaguars as persons, are key examples. 20. the point could be made giving any number of examples of complex and tangential relationships. the endlessness with which such relationships can be traced (and indeed manufactured and ignored) by the fictional ethnographer latour uses as his “modern” research trope is the key problem. his following and tracing “irreducible” connections, “however dizzying it may be” (inquiry 43), is exactly the problem for a micro level investigation. i suggest no ethnographer, focused on specific lives and relationships, would seek to explain or understand such macro level networks in their entirety (the economic system of resource extraction to food production or the history of christianity). at best, anthropologists are dealing with interpretations (self and other) of specific relations and interpretations (at best) of entire systems. 21. for an in-depth discussion of hokkaido’s dairy industry see and its many particular issues consult hansen’s hokkaido dairy farm: change, otherness, and the search for security. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 208 22. for works on general trends in agriculture industrialization and its impacts, see kirby, and in terms of agriculture, pollan. 23. japan’s nōrinsuisanshō (ministry of agriculture forestry and fisheries or maff) statistics show a sharp rise in farm size and the number of cows per farm in hokkaido from 1999, with a glitch in 2013-2015 due to aging farmers and a particularly hot summer. maff “monthly statistics index” english version. 24. see hansen, “milked for all they’re worth: hokkaido dairies and chinese workers.” in japan furiita(free-timers) are contracted precarious employees. 25. there is volumnious reference material focused on notions of hybridity. i find bijker (262-267) to be particularly clear. regarding my own use of hyphens, i think that hyphens are useful from a micro perspective. they underscore that one is not speaking of categories, but of particular lines or linkages. animal-human-technology, to me, underscores connections of various elements into an idiosyncratic whole: it is a focus on the moment of hyphenation (the “now” of particular connections). 26. see bennett (98-100) for the important distinction between anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism as a problematic that neo-vitalist and object-oriented ontology is attempting to address. 27. a point that imanishi (9-20) prophetically addressed. 28. see “the tick” in von uexküll (44-52). 29. see hansen, “milked for all they’re worth: hokkaido dairies and chinese workers” and “kyoko’s assemblage: escaping ‘futsū no nihonjin’ in hokkaido” for a more theory-oriented breakdown of individual agency. 30. see hansen’s “urban japan's ‘fuzzy’ new families: affect and embodiment in dog–human relationships”; “becoming bovine: mechanics and metamorphosis in hokkaido's animal-human-machine; and “linking cosmopolitanism and multi-species touch in contemporary japan.” for more detail. works cited paul hansen -fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of the network and animal metaphor 209 ambros, barbra. bones of contention: animals and religion in contemporary japan. u hawai‘i p, 2012. barua, mann. “circulating elephants: unpacking the geographies of a cosmopolitan animal.” transactions of the institute of british geographers 39.4 (2014): 559-573. beck, ulrich. world at risk. polity press, 2009. bennett, jane. vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. duke up, 2010. bijker, wiebe. of bicycles, bakelites, and bulbs: towards a theory of sociotechnical change. the mit press, 1997. blue, gwendolyn and melanie rock. “trans-biopolitics: complexity in interspecies relations.” health 15.4 (2010): 353–368. bogost, ian. alien phenomeology or what it’s like to be a thing. u minnesota p, 2012. callon, michel, pierre lascoumes, and yannick barthe. acting in an uncertain world: an essay on technical democracy. graham burchell, trans. the mit press, 2011. cetina, karin knorr. epistemic cultures: how the sciences make knowledge. harvard up, 1999. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. david wills, trans. marie-louise mallet, ed. fordham up, 2008. descola, philippe. the ecology of others. geneviève bodbout and benjamin luley, trans. prickly paradigm press, 2013. evans-prichard, e. e. witchcraft, oracles and magic among the azande. 1937. oxford up, 1976. fassin, didier. “scenes from urban life: a modest proposal for a critical perspective approach.” social anthropology 21.3 (2013): 371-377. franklin, sarah. dolly mixtures: the remaking of genealogy. duke up, 2007. geertz, clifford. “anti anti-relativism.” american anthropologist 86.2 (1984): 263-278. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 210 _____. works and lives: the anthropologist as author. stanford up, 1988. hacking, ian. “making up people.” the london review of books 28.16 (2006): 23-26. _____. the social construction of what? harvard up, 2000. hansen, paul. “becoming bovine: mechanics and metamorphosis in hokkaido's animalhuman-machine.” journal of rural studies 33 (january 2014): 119-130. _____. “betwixt and between ja: japan, jamaica, agriculture, education and the will to employment.” the impact of internationalization of japanese higher education: is japanese education really changing? hiroaki kawamura, john mock, and naeko naganuma, eds. sense publishers, 2016. 159-75. _____. “communication break down: “politricks” and mixed dairy farming in the parish of saint thomas, jamaica.” jamaican dairy board 2015: 1-18. _____. “crossing, not creating, boundaries.” the journal of the royal anthropology institute 13.4 (2007): 1007-1013. _____. “culturing and agricultural crisis in hokkaido.” asian anthropology 13.1 (2014): 52-71. _____. hokkaido dairy farm: change, otherness, and the search for security. phd dissertation. university of london, 2010. _____. “kyoko’s assemblage: escaping ‘futsū no nihonjin’ in hokkaido.” escaping japan: reflections on estrangement and exile in the twenty-first century. blai guarné and paul hansen, eds. routledge, 2017. 152-178. _____. “linking cosmopolitanism and multi-species touch in contemporary japan.” japan forum (forthcoming). _____. “milked for all they’re worth: hokkaido dairies and chinese workers.” culture and agriculture 32.2 (2010): 78-97. paul hansen -fuzzy bounds: doing ethnography at the limits of the network and animal metaphor 211 _____. “urban japan's ‘fuzzy’ new families: affect and embodiment in dog–human relationships.” asian anthropology 12.2 (2013): 83-103. haraway, donna. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. duke up, 2016. _____. when species meet. u minnesota p, 2008. hayles, katharine. how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. u chicago p, 1999. imanishi, kinji. a japanese view of nature. “the world of living things by kinji imanishi.” pamela asquith, heita kawakatsu, shusuke yagi and hiroyuko takasaki, trans. routledge, 2002. ingold, tim. being alive: essays on movement knowledge and description. routledge, 2011. jackson, michael. lifeworlds: essays in existential anthropology. u chicago p, 2013. kirksey, eben, and stefan helmreich. “the emergence of multi species ethnography.” cultural anthropology 25.4 (2010): 545-576. kirby, david. animal factory: the looming threat of industrial pig, dairy, and poultry farms to humans and the environment. st. martin’s griffin, 2010. kohn, eduardo. how forests think: toward and anthropology beyond the human. u california p, 2013. lakoff, george and mark johnson. metaphors we live by. u chicago p. 2003. latour, bruno. “on recalling ant.” the sociological review 47.1 (1999): 15-25. _____. reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford up, 2006. _____. an inquiry into modes of existence: an anthropology of the moderns. catherine porter, trans. harvard up, 2013. markowitz, fran. “blood, soul, race and suffering.” anthropology and humanism 31.1 (2006): 41-56. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 212 nussbaum, martha. frontiers of justice: disability, nationality, species membership. harvard up, 2006. pollan, michael. the omnivore’s dilemma: a natural history of four meals. the penguin, 2006. rabinow, paul. the accompaniment: assembling the contemporary. u chicago p, 2011. rapport, nigel. i am dynamite: an alternative anthropology of power. routledge, 2003. _____. anyone: the cosmopolitan subject of anthropology. berghahn books, 2013. shir-vertesh, dafna. “'flexible personhood’: loving animals as family members in israel.” american anthropologist 114.3 (2012): 420–432. sismondo, sergio. an introduction to science and technology studies (2nd edition). wileyblackwell, 2010. smart, alan, and josie smart. posthumanism: anthropological insights. u toronto p, 2017. stoller, paul. sensuous scholarship. u pennsylvania p, 1997. strathern, marilyn. “cutting the network.” the journal of the royal anthropological institute 2.3 (1996): 517-535. _____. partial connections. altamira press, 2004. turner, victor. the ritual process: structure and anti-structure. transaction publishers, 1969. von uexküll, jakob. a foray into the worlds of animals and humans: with a theory of meaning. [1934]. joseph o’ neil, trans. u minnesota p, 2010. wolfe, cary. what is posthumanism? u minnesota p, 2010. young, allan. the harmony of illusions: inventing post traumatic stress disorder. princeton up, 1997. microsoft word chrulew-seshedri-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:2 reviews matthew chrulew the power of silence kalpana rahita seshadri, humanimal: race, law, language (posthumanities 21). minneapolis & london: university of minnesota press, 2012. 320 pp. $75.00 hb. $25.00 pb. this is an intriguing and quite original book that makes a significant contribution to agamben scholarship, the philosophy of race, and the “posthumanities” more generally. combining interstitial parabolic creative sections with conventional argumentation, seshadri offers important reflections on language, law, race and silence, themes she then explores through anomalous literature, beings, events and practices. she works patiently throughout with primary texts to articulate agamben’s philosophy of potentiality. the book’s central motif is silence, the dehumanizing force of which the author wishes to rehabilitate as withdrawal from the power of law and sovereignty. to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 156 this end, she coins the neologism “humanimal” to refer to that zone of indistinction, outside of proper human identity, where is produced the brute silence of the beast and slave — a hollow in language and law — but where also, perhaps, grows a weak saving power. in the first chapter, seshadri delves into a range of scholarship on silence, working towards an understanding of it as both negative and productive, neither simply repressed weakness nor inaccessible purity. following agamben’s suggestion that language is the originary dispositif to capture human life, seshadri’s innovation is to explore the way in which language is not only deployed by biopower to produce subjects and make them speak, but also withheld by it to exclude certain bodies from discourse, society and selfhood. importantly, she sees within this animalizing and racializing operation the possibility of resistance, where the capacity not to speak can undermine the power to silence. seshadri then moves to a discussion of silence in literature, eschewing the avant-garde silence of modernism, instead making use of derrida’s theory of literature’s ethical secret to analyse coetzee’s foe, a novel centred around the attempt to write an impossible novel, to tell the story of a shipwreck (as defoe’s robinson crusoe had done) and indeed of the “savage” friday (whom modern literature had rendered voiceless). she also later examines charles chesnutt’s “the dumb witness,” a folkloric story that likewise features a racialized mute with a severed tongue, here a slave who holds the secret of her master’s inheritance. in both stories, silence is revealed not only as a means of repression, but also as a capability to withhold, a neutralizing force that can deactivate the very sovereignty that silences. in giorgio agamben’s idiom, it is in the ban of the law, in its animalizing reduction of the political subject to homo sacer, that power’s secret weakness is disclosed as such and thereby made vulnerable. indeed throughout the book, seshadri engages deeply with the thought of agamben, and works hard to demonstrate the italian philosopher’s essential yet vexed proximity to his french predecessor jacques derrida. she wisely avoids dwelling on the acrimony occasionally evident in their published exchanges, instead engaging in numerous close readings from their respective archives, and emphasizing the extent to which, despite important displacements, agamben’s work “can only be understood as arising in the wake of deconstruction” (110). thus she devotes significant attention to combining the ontological analysis of biopolitics with the deconstruction of sovereignty and metaphysics. importantly, while attentive to the dehumanizing aspects of sovereign power, seshadri is not beholden to the repressive hypothesis to which deconstruction is matthew chrulew – “the power of silence” 157 sometimes prone, but recognizes that forces of diffraction do not necessarily undermine modern racist, speciesist biopower, indeed that the latter often operates precisely through the production of difference, instability, and hybridity. elsewhere she reads together derrida’s deconstruction of phonocentrism with agamben’s study of the negativity of the voice, and indeed argues that agamben performs a rigorous parody of deconstruction, making of the derridean différance in which we rootlessly wander a homeland in which to dwell. central to this clearing is, of course, language, which is key to agamben’s simultaneously traditional and innovative philosophical anthropology. following the discussion of “language and silence” in part i, the book shifts in part ii to “the exemplary plane,” where it presents two figures that, for seshadri, exemplify what she has identified, in the foregoing, as the potentiality of silence to neutralize power. firstly, wild children are shown, in their muteness, to sit outside (and indeed to disrupt) the humanist and racialized apparatus of language, and the historical nomenclature of biological science. then, the anarchic movement witnessed in certain forms of exceptional acrobatics — philippe petit’s 1974 highwire walk between the twin towers in new york is her main example — is taken to reveal the silent power of human gesturality. given their marginal or exceptional character, these are offered less as “examples” (representative of a kind and speaking to the universal) than as “paradigms” in the sense agamben has outlined, explaining his methodology of making historical circumstances intelligible by reasoning from singularities.1 the two chapters on wild children explore this phenomenon through politics, ethics, and science. their description in linneaus’s systema naturae is marked by their singularity: lacking language and race, between proper name and common noun, they are described not as belonging to a group but each in its individual case. these anomalies of natural history thus trouble the epistemological and ontological foundations of the discipline of taxonomic naming, proving the exception to adamic categorization — that is, in their muteness, they undermine the anthropological power of the act of naming. indeed, seshadri delves into an in-depth study of the status of the name in philosophy, its place in language, and its role in responsibility, arguing that homo ferus ultimately problematizes naming as an ethicopolitical task: the question of our ethical response to those who do not share language leads to this sauvage other exposing the instability of our own, supposedly proper “possession” of language. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 158 indeed for seshadri, “the onomatopoeic wild child is perhaps the only human being who truly dwells in language at the level of name. agamben has a term for such dwelling: he terms it ‘infancy,’ a condition in which the originary is also the most contemporary” (171). the book’s final chapter, titled “humanimal acts: potentiality or movement as rest,” explores how the thoughtful agile movement of those who play as children might also attain or approach this contentious condition. seshadri discusses the meditative practices of certain eastern traditions, not in order to relate abstract ideas à la comparative philosophy, but to expose the commonality of practice between eastern meditation and certain strands of continental philosophy, insofar as, in the understanding of “spirituality” valorized by hadot and foucault in their excavations of ancient modes of philosophical ascesis, a pathway is opened up to renew our understanding of the exercise of ethics. in the dynamic body of the acrobat, in its joyful concentration and severe exuberance, is disclosed an intractable power of resistance: “if approached from a certain angle, any agile exceptional movement, such as walking on a tightrope … can be said to harbor the kernel of human gesturality (as worklessness) that may well disclose the happy, profane life that is lived in the generic potentiality of the human body” (238). this is an intriguing and in places profound argument. to practice freedom, seshadri suggests, is to act in such a way as to preserve one’s “capacity” not to act — to “prefer not to,” in bartleby’s phrase that is so meaningful for deleuze and agamben, or in the pauline idiom to live one’s vocation “as not” (hos mē). i can attest to this argument’s effectiveness, considered in foucauldian terms as philosophy qua spirituality — that is, as exhorting in its addressees the care and indeed modification of the self. drawing as it does one’s attention to the body/mind relation, to everyday embodiment, to the ubiquity of reserved power in exercise and action, reading this section imparted a certain childlike attentiveness to my own experience of social sport and solitary writing. through reflection on historical practices and discursive events, these paradigms of agile movement and humanimal muteness ingeniously clarify agamben’s theory of potentiality, and respond to common objections to its focus on inoperativity. most prominently, agamben’s friend and adversary antonio negri has repeatedly bemoaned the lack of a producing subject, capable of meaningful resistance, in his political ontology.2 similar objections might perhaps be made against the feebleness of the mute wolf child or the virtuoso acrobat. yet seshadri pushes back against this objection to agamben’s perceived quiescence: “i suggest that for agamben, such so-called passivity is thinkable only within the context of movement understood ontologically as matthew chrulew – “the power of silence” 159 production” (199).3 her book is notable in providing a strong and integrative interpretation of this aspect of his thought, in particular of his reading of aristotle on dunamis, that will contribute to this ongoing debate over productivity and potentiality. in addition, she has more recently contributed two new translations, including of agamben’s important essay on potentiality, that emphasize the centrality of power and movement in his ontological reflections on human capacity.4 of course, questions remain as to how far agamben’s philosophical anthropology in fact escapes the hierarchical structures of anthropocentric humanism.5 his political ontology hinges on the unique human experience of language, and our resulting lack of a proper essence, nature or work. following heidegger, agamben has repeatedly emphasized moments in which nothing is spoken save language itself. similarly, seshadri’s chief concern is the silence that lies at the heart of the human capacity for language and gesture. from the perspectives of posthumanism and animal studies, such approaches remain open to the deconstruction of human exceptionality, in particular insofar as it challenges the denial to animals of this exceptional experience of language.6 philosophy’s habitual deafness to animal voices must itself be understood as a silencing.7 what of the speech and language, not to mention infancy and silence, of singular animals? at the same time, given the contemporary stakes of the war on animal life, reflection on the contingency and power of humankind is necessary and timely. while eschewing both “biological continuism and metaphysical separationism,” the posthumanist critique of human/animal dualism ought urgently to be followed by empirical and phenomenological reflection on the distinctiveness of human nature (or our lack thereof) — and likewise, on the different differences of other living creatures.8 perhaps cultivating our curiosity in regards to the latter might still come to disrupt our habits in asserting and securing the former. seshadri does deal well, if briefly, with the rendering of animals as brutes (25), even while not broaching many aspects of the contemporary “animal question” (indeed, the book is obsessively aware of all the questions for which it lacks the space to do justice). for her part, seshadri seeks in the main “to make a contribution to the philosophy of race and racism in terms of the questions raised in studies of animality and human propriety” (ix). as she ably demonstrates, agamben’s political ontology enables a compelling response to the racialization and animalization of human subjects. what we are left to think is the animalization of animal subjects, their discursive and material humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 160 imprisonment in their own nature that perhaps constitutes the originary operation of the “anthropological machine.” notes 1. giorgio agamben, the signature of all things: on method, trans. luca d’isanto with kevin attell (new york: zone books, 2009). 2. see, for example, antonio negri, “giorgio agamben: the discreet taste of the dialectic,” trans. matteo mandarini, in matthew calarco and steven decaroli, eds. giorgio agamben: sovereignty and life (stanford: stanford university press, 2007), pp. 109-25. 3. in an interesting footnote (pp. 275-6 n. 12), the author summarizes an occasion on which agamben discussed the concept of “movement” in response to negri’s questioning. 4. see kalpana seshadri, “agamben, the thought of sterēsis: an introduction to two essays,” critical inquiry 40:2 (2014), pp. 470-479; giorgio agamben, “the power of thought,” trans. kalpana seshadri, critical inquiry 40:2 (2014), pp. 480-491; giorgio agamben, “vocation and voice,” trans. kalpana seshadri, critical inquiry 40:2 (2014), pp. 492-501. 5. see matthew chrulew, “animals in biopolitical theory: between agamben and negri,” new formations 76 (2012), pp. 53-67; giorgio agamben, the open: man and animal, trans. kevin attell (stanford: stanford university press, 2004). 6. jacques derrida, the animal that therefore i am, ed. marie-louise mallet, trans. david wills (new york: fordham university press, 2008). 7. on the silence of animals in philosophy, see elisabeth de fontenay, le silence des bêtes: la philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité (paris: fayard, 1998). for a deep ecology critique of the modern suppression of animist attention to nature’s voices, see christopher manes, “nature and silence,” in cheryll glotfelty and harold fromm, eds. the ecocriticism reader: landmarks in literary ecology (athens, ga & london: university of georgia press, 1996), pp. 15-29. matthew chrulew – “the power of silence” 161 8. leonard lawlor, this is not sufficient: an essay on animality and human nature in derrida (new york: columbia university press, 2007). microsoft word koons-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:2 ryan a. koons becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv introduction. scholars have discussed the anthropocene for over two decades. this proposed latest epoch on the geologic time line broadly reflects human industry that, in an attempt to conquer nature, has equaled or surpassed the processes of geology and become a major source of global destruction (chin et al.). although scholars have proposed various start dates for the anthropocene, several academics compellingly propose aligning the start date with the colonial period, connecting the concept with the dispossessions, genocides, environmental transformations, and severing of relationships that define both colonialism and the anthropocene (davis and todd). whatever the precise name or start date of the anthropocene, two points have become clear. first, human agency has reached and moved beyond the point of affecting the entire planet. and second, colonialism continues to be bound up with the realities of the anthropocene. this entanglement of colonialism and the anthropocene speaks to the vital need for decolonization. while indigenous peoples have worked toward decolonization across the history of the united states settler colony, in recent years a surge of interest and scholarship on decolonizing methods and theorization has blossomed.1 often uncomfortable and literally unsettling, decolonization requires the repatriation of indigenous lands by settlers, indigenous resurgence, abolition of contemporary slavery, and the dismantling of the imperial metropole. in addition, decolonization involves the recognition and practice of “always already different” relations to land and the “nonhuman kin” such as animals and plants who co-constitute that land (tuck and yang 7). the long-standing and diverse multispecies relationships between indigenous peoples and the plants, animals, and other “naturalcultural” kin who co-inhabit their lands remain vitally important to all involved (descola). maintaining these relationships constitutes one key step along a path to decolonization the simultaneous need for decolonization and the human-centric nature of the anthropocene concept place into high relief those multispecies relationships built, maintained, and celebrated by indigenous peoples. members of tvlwv pvlvcekolv, a muskogee creek native american community, maintain a multispecies ritual performance cycle called the “busk.” an example of what kahnawà:ke mohawk anthropologist audra simpson has characterized as a “sovereign practice” (2), the busk humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 96 functions as a space in which members of this indigenous community formally and informally maintain relationships with a variety of animals, plants, and additional naturalcultural kin in their local ecosystem. the bedrock of these ritualized relationships is a series of “sung dances” or “danced songs,” such as the feather dance and the owl dance, the two case studies featured in this article. many of these events feature melody lines and choreography that connect to and/or derive from the habits of local other-than-human kin. exemplified in both feather and owl dances, tvlwv pvlvcekolv's ritual performance practice features the care and attention to multispecies kinship relationships that are part of the decolonization process. i write this article as a multispecies ethnography, a genre us anthropologists s. eben kirksey and stefan helmreich have characterized as writings in the anthropocene (549). this kind of work brings attention to the “situated connectivities that bind us into multispecies communities” (rose 87). one cannot fully or accurately describe and/or analyze busk performance practice or, indeed, most activities or relationships at pvlvcekolv, without taking into account the other beings with whom pvlvcekolv peoples interact (morrison). in describing and analyzing rituals i therefore write humans and nonhumans as equals in a non-hierarchical, multispecies entanglement. writing a multispecies ethnography on the topic of decolonization features relatively high stakes. “decolonization” became popular in scholarly and public discourses relatively recently. michi saagiig nishnaabeg (anishinabe) scholar leanne betasamosake simpson has pointed out that indigenous peoples globally have worked toward decolonization across colonial history (246). despite this fact, this recent and comparatively widespread surge of interest suggests the reaching of a consensus, a potential tipping point. australian anthropologist patrick wolfe has depicted settler colonialism as a structure and a process, not a single event (388). likewise, decolonization cannot be a single event, but rather a shifting of structures through multiple, complex processes. the better we comprehend the processes of decolonization, the better we can enact them. as a settler scholar working in collaboration with an indigenous community i perceive the stakes of this article to be high. among other processes, decolonization involves repatriation of indigenous lands by settlers, as i discuss elsewhere in this essay (tuck and yang 7). l. b. simpson has drawn attention also to the fact that indigenous peoples do not need settlers (245). her statement echoes what a. simpson has called “refusal,” practices of indigenous autonomy wherein native people refuse to accept the authority of a settler state through deliberate actions and/or inactions (106). (i return to refusal below.) given autonomy and refusal, i walk a tightrope in suggesting that the processes of ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 97 decolonization, notably land repatriation, appear to necessitate collaboration and frank indigenous-led discussion with non-indigenous populations to address and alter settler colonial structures. in writing this article i work to exemplify one way in which nonindigenous individuals might participate in decolonization: promoting acknowledgement and understanding of indigenous sovereign and decolonizing practices, such as ontological multispecies relationships. my goal in writing this article, therefore, has been to increase attention to the ontological processes involved in decolonization during the anthropocene. the anthropocene. scientists and scholars have discussed the relationships between human-derived destruction and global climate and geologic changes encompassed in the term “anthropocene” for over two decades. dutch chemist paul crutzen and us ecologist eugene stoermer originally popularized the concept in 2000; the international commission on stratigraphy is considering including this epoch within the geological time scale following the holocene era (zalasiewicz et al.). there is no question that anthropogenic actions and processes have had and are having global effects. in an extremely short period of geologic time, geologic strata reveal plastic, concrete, genocide, radionuclides, coal, plutonium, and other forms of rapid change and destruction because of the direct actions of humans, especially “petrochemical companies and those invested in and profiting from petrocapitalism and colonialism” (davis and todd 765). unlike every other geologic epoch, the proposed anthropocene is defined by the detritus, movements, and actions of humans. discussions of the anthropocene largely cover three primary topics: 1) critiques of the term and/or concept, 2) whether or not the current geological timeframe ought to be called the “anthropocene” or by another name, and 3) when the epoch began. in increasingly transdisicplinary work (swanson) the concept “anthropocene” has been critiqued by scholars especially in the humanities and social sciences for its conceptual failure to adequately account for power relations (davis and todd 763). the term is misleading: all humans become equally implicated in “the anthropocene” via the prefix “anthropos.” the word falsely contains an implicit and euro-centric assertion of human universalism. in fact, not all humans are equally responsible for the degradations that characterize this epoch; western, modern, and capitalist actors are responsible for the global, damaging processes. in an effort to address these power relations and improve the utility of the concept, several scholars have proposed alternative names. each of these proposed names reflects different aspects and nuances, narrating different stories and emphasizing different features of current realities. several choices include the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 98 “capitalocene” (haraway and kenney; malm; moore, capitalism), the “eurocene” (grove), the “plantationocene” (tsing et al.; gilbert and epel), and the “chthulucene” (haraway, trouble), among others. independently from one another, several people appear to have crystallized the term “capitalocene” around the same time. while still a graduate student, swedish ecologist andreas malm first proposed it in 2009; us economist david ruccio publicized it in 2011; us science and technology scholar donna haraway used it in public lectures in 2012; and british geographer and historian jason moore, with whom malm originally communicated his idea, expanded on it in an edited volume in 2016. an “ugly word for an ugly system,” “capitalocene” constitutes a “world-ecology of capital, power, and nature” that reflects the ways in which capitalism organizes nature (moore “acknowledgements" xi; “introduction” 5). similarly, in coining the term “eurocene,” us political scientist jairus grove focuses on the key roles played by historic european elite in developing a “mechanistic view of matter, an oppositional relationship to nature, and an economic system indebted to geographical expansion.” his term pushes against the false human universalization of “anthropocene” and assigns specific blame to historic europeans for the political orders that result from the exploitation of peoples and resources to create wealth (grove). collectively coined by a group of anthropologists gathered at the university of aarhus in a recorded conversation for the journal ethos in october 2014, the “plantationocene” reflects the devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations (tsing et al.) these plantations relied on slave labor and/or labor that was also exploited, alienated, and often abducted and spatially transported. additionally, these plantations were the model for the “carbon-greedy machine-based factory system that is often cited as an inflection point for the anthropocene” (haraway, trouble 206). haraway herself combines all of these terms, histories, and forces into her whimsically macabre umbrella term, “chthulucene.” she develops her term not from us science fiction author h. p. lovecraft’s “misogynist racial-nightmare monster cthulhu (note the spelling difference),” but rather from “the diverse earthwide tentacular powers and forces and collected things with names like naga, naia, tangaroa (burst from water-full papa), terra, haniyasu-hime, spider woman, pachamama, oya, gorgo, raven, a’akuluujjusi, and many many more.” her choice of a term reflects the need for a name that encompasses the “dynamic ongoing symchthonic forces and power of which people are a part, within which ongoingness is at stake.” she hopes that with intense commitment and collaborative work and play, “flourishing for rich multispecies assemblages that ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 99 include people will be possible” (101). “chthulucene” therefore reflects not just the current status quo, but also a hope that that status quo might feature positive change. besides names, scholars have proposed dates for the “global boundary stratotype section and point” (gssp), the term for geologic era start dates. these proposed dates range from the birth of human agriculture before 9,000 bc, to the beginning of the colonial era in the fifteenth century ce, to the start of the steam engine in the nineteenth century ce, to others. us chemist will steffan and colleagues argue that the onset of the anthropocene coincides with the “great acceleration” of anthropogenic changes upon the earth system, setting the date to 1964. the anthropocene working group, which is affiliated with the subcommission on quaternary stratigraphy of the international commission on stratigraphy, echoes this argument, citing the high carbon dioxide levels, mass extinctions, and widespread use of petrochemicals (zalasiewicz et al.). however, us anthropologist kent g. lightfoot and colleagues and british geographers simon lewis and mark maslin separately propose colonialism and settler colonization as the start date of the anthropocene. lewis and maslin specifically propose the year 1610. in proposing this date, they contrast the amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide (co2) found in geologic strata via ice core samples dating to the years 1492 and 1610, respectively. they record a difference of 7-10 parts per million (p.p.m.) co2 between those two years. in 1492 54-61 million indigenous people lived in north america; by 1610, the european colonial project had resulted in a massive genocide of indigenous peoples from 54-61 million to an estimated 6 million individuals. at the same time forests and other plants grew to take over landscapes formally lived in and controlled by indigenous peoples. carbon intake by those plants combined with the decrease in human-derived co2 lowered the amount of atmospheric co2 a total of 7-10 p.p.m. (175). lewis and maslin define this drastic dip as the “orbis spike,” from the latin for “world”; their choice of term reflects the ways in which human relations became intensively globalized during and after the colonial era as the so-called old and new worlds collided. they note that the orbis spike “implies that colonialism, global trade[,] and coal brought about the anthropocene” (177). broadly, the causative relationship between colonialism and the anthropocene highlights unequal power relationships between different groups of people, rapid economic growth, the impacts of globalized trade, and modern global reliance on fossil fuels. canadian anthropologist heather davis and métis anthropologist zoe todd echo the calls for a colonial start date to the anthropocene. they suggest that a start date in the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 100 twentieth century misses a valuable opportunity to open the anthropocene concept beyond its eurocentric framing. in their critique, they draw attention to crutzen and stoermer’s reliance on the “noösphere” in the seminal article that popularized “anthropocene.” the noösphere constitutes a “world of thought” that marks “the growing role played by mankind’s [sic] brainpower and technological talents in shaping its own future and environment” (crutzen and stoermer 17). the noösphere places thought above the biosphere and geosphere, suggesting that the biosphere cannot in and of itself constitute an “envelope of thinking substance” (teilhard de chardin 151). davis and todd state that this assertion contradicts thousands of years of indigenous philosophies. counteracting the noösphere, mohawk and anishnaabe sociologist vanessa watts notes that anishnaabe, haudenosaunee, and many other indigenous peoples conceive humans to be made from the land: “our flesh is literally an extension of soil” (27). watts articulates indigenous “place-thought,” the “non-distinctive space where place and thought were never separated because they never could or can be separated. placethought is based on the premise that land is alive and thinking and that humans and nonhumans derive agency through the extensions of these thoughts” (21). in essence, land and thought are integral to one another: “biota, geology, and thinking are one and the same,” and life, philosophy, and land animate one another (davis and todd 769) the on-going structure that is the colonial project focuses on changing the land: terraforming that transforms animals, plants, soils, and atmospheres (wolfe 388). examples of this kind of terraforming include the 1965 kinzua dam construction, which flooded 10,000 acres of the seneca nation’s alleghany reservation in violation of the 1794 treaty of canandaigua (rosier 345), or the construction of a right-of-way for interstate highway 10 in 1971, which forced pvlvcekolv to re-locate their square grounds. settler colonialism and its contemporary extension (petro)capitalism rest on a foundation of violent altering or severing of relations among humans, soils, plants, animals, minerals, atmospheres, and others (davis and todd 770). sisseton-wahpeton oyate (dakota) anthropologist kim tallbear draws attention to this point when she states that settler colonists “did not know how to do kinship,” noting that the settler colonial nation-states of canada and the united states have violated kinship obligations to nonhuman kin throughout colonial history (tallbear). tallbear describes the settler genocide of indigenous peoples in the americas as a “decimation of [both] humans and nonhumans.” she characterizes colonialism as the genocide of humans and other-thanhuman relatives. since humans need their kin to survive, the murders of nonhuman kin affect humans as much as the murders of human kin. ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 101 following tallbear’s lead, davis and todd narrate the anthropocene as an extension of the relationship-sundering logic that is settler colonialism (771). tethering the anthropocene concept to colonialism via a 1610 start date functions to draw attention to the specifically colonial character of the violence at the anthropocene’s core. the presence of this colonial violence highlights the need to consider and include the peoples directly impacted by the anthropocene: indigenous peoples and their philosophies, self-governance, and self-determination (davis and todd 763). davis and todd critique the propensity of geologists to attribute to “traces” the status of evidence of primary importance. “traces” refer to phenomena such as lewis and maslin’s co2 spike. davis and todd call instead for geologists and other natural scientists to focus on the evidence of specific, locally-situated lived experiences of indigenous people. they suggest that it is more important to examine the ways in which indigenous peoples engage with anthropocenic realities. we must feature indigenous perspectives in these discussions because the “fleshy philosophies and fleshy bodies” of indigenous peoples constitute some of that which is most at stake in the anthropocene. this necessity means accounting for “the fleshy stories of kohkoms (the word for grandmother in cree) and the fish they fried up over hot stoves in prairie kitchens to feed their large families” (767). understanding the relationship between colonialism and the anthropocene results in material consequences, which affect specific bodies and specific lands (767). heeding davis and todd’s suggestion that we consider the implications of the anthropocene beyond western and european epistemologies (764), i turn to a case study of indigenous performance practice at tvlwv pvlvcekolv. community and research descriptions. tvlwv pvlvcekolv (pronounced “dulwa palachicola;” hereafter solely “pvlvcekolv”) is a small american indian community located in what is now northern florida.2 although the geographic and spiritual center of the community lies near the state capital tallahassee, members live scattered across the southeast and beyond, inside and outside the united states. the community encompasses approximately 250 families. due to a series of colonial-era kinship alliances especially with traders from the british isles and slaves from west africa, many pvlvcekolv people were able to “pass” as white or black by the early 1800s. as such, pvlvcekolv is one of few muskogee communities that largely succeeded in hiding in plain sight and avoiding the trail of tears, remaining in the southeast.3 remaining meant that the community had to create and maintain traditions of privacy that still persist. unlike the muskogee (creek) nation in oklahoma, a tribe distinct from pvlvcekolv, remaining in the southeast meant that pvlvcekolv does not have federal humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 102 recognition as an american indian tribe. in the 1960s and 1970s, pvlvcekolv began proceedings to achieve federal recognition, aided by several helpful bureaucrats from the muskogee (creek) nation. motivated by a desire to maintain community privacy and autonomous sovereignty while avoiding federal control, elders withdrew the petition after roughly two decades of paperwork and communication (koons 59). their decision meant that pvlvcekolv peoples could focus their time and energies on community and ritual life and resurgence, eschewing what tsalagi (cherokee) political scientist jeff corntassel has called colonial “politics of distraction” (86) such as state affirmation and recognition. of the 250 families in the community, between 10 and 50 individuals now regularly participate in ritual. this annual ritual cycle is called the “busk,” often referred to as “green corn ceremonialism” in the ethnographic literature (ballard; bell; jackson; schupman).4 at pvlvcekolv, the cycle consists of four ritual events scheduled across the agricultural season in proximity with new moons in the lunar calendar. each busk occurs over a long weekend, friday-sunday, on the square grounds (see figure 1), the ceremonial center of the community. these grounds consist of four open, porch-like structures called “arbors,” each of which is aligned along a cardinal point. the community segregates into the arbors by sex and age group: women sit in the east, young men in the south, mature men in the north, and elder men in the west. at the center of the grounds sits the ceremonial fire atop a small mound (see figure 2). this entity is the portal through which the community directs their interactions with ohfvnkv, creator, or deity. the process of lighting the fire invites ohfvnkv to participate in the busk. pvlvcekolv’s ceremonial fire pre-dates contact with colonial settlers, a statement of the community's longevity and cultural importance (koons 98). figure 1. aerial view of the pvlvcekolv square grounds. (photo by ken koons.) ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 103 figure 2. the fire at the 2009 little green corn busk. (photo by hakopē.) around the fire and upon the cosmogram of the square grounds, community members perform a series of “animal dances” at each busk, such as buffalo dance, feather dance, turtle dance, owl dance, and others. pvlvcekolv members often describe these dances as ways to honor, acknowledge, thank, renew relationships with, and give breath to these and all other animals. among other things, these dances are iconic of the named animal, either in the steps, the shapes traced onto the grounds, or the song melodies.5 for example, the step for the garfish dance involves tacking side-to-side in the manner in which the gar swims. similarly, buffalo dance choreographically incorporates bison wallowing behavior and annual bison migration patterns that once upon a time included the southeast (koons 272-278). i have studied these dances and multispecies relationships for over a decade in collaboration with pvlvcekolv at the express invitation of ceremonial leadership. i am a non-indigenous, settler scholar who grew up in lenape, piscataway, and susquehannock territories in the mid-atlantic of north america. the data for this article derives from our collaboration, including observation-participation style humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 104 ethnography, audio-visual documentation and participation in ceremonial events, oral history interviews, and archival research around the united states. to date, i have conducted over one hundred interviews; documented and participated in fourteen ceremonies; made twenty-one research trips to archives, museums, and/or historic locations; and spent time with the community across twenty-seven research trips. at the command of the pvlvcekolv matriarch, i began actively participating in ritual events early in the research collaboration, and participation quickly became a key component of my broader research. a key individual in this research collaboration is tribal elder and maker of medicine hakopē. in addition to numerous interviews, he has guided and advised my research via weekly phone conversations almost every sunday evening since 2005. our conversations form part of the foundation of my understanding of pvlvcekolv tradition and culture. as a non-indigenous scholar collaborating with an indigenous community living in a settler colonial state on the sensitive topics of sacred performance and worldview, i have worked to maintain an ethical research program in dialogue with the community (smith). pvlvcekolv has granted me documented permission to conduct research and to publish material from the project. as per our research agreement, i use muskogee pseudonyms for living community members to maintain comparative privacy; despite the utility of this online journal format, i honor the research agreement by not including audio and video examples. ceremonial leadership and other elders have reviewed this manuscript for cultural accuracy and to ensure that it does not feature information that should not be shared. becoming avian. the anthropocene and the human-centric destructions associated with it mean that relationships between humans and nonhumans become particularly important. pvlvcekolv community members maintain a series of relationships with other-than-human kin through their busk-based ritual performance practice.6 a key component of this performance practice is the muskogee verb ometv. difficult to translate into english, ometv functions as a kind of umbrella term. it can mean “to be like," “to become,” “to emulate,” “to imitate,” “in the manner of,” or “by means of.” in a ceremonial situation, the verb connotes a sense of physical transformation (hakopē, interview, 23 august 2015). in his creek glossary, us anthropologist albert gatschet notes the word can mean, “to be alike to” (114). i translate ometv into english using the term “becoming.” theorized by french philosophers gilles deleuze and félix guattari (237), “becoming” (devenir in their original french) constitutes a process and relationship that emerges ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 105 from nonhierarchical alliances, symbiotic attachments, and the mingling of creative agencies in multispecies contexts (kirksey and helmreich 546). becomings are not dreams, fantasies, or imitations. rather, they form distinct ontological categories patterned through “sorcery” or alliance (deleuze and gauttari 238; haraway, species 28). what deleuze and guattari define as “sorcery” might describe the rituals that comprise the busk in the pvlvcekolv context. “becoming” is its own verb, “becoming-x” its own noun — “it lacks a subject distinct from itself” (deleuze and guattari 238). in this article, i therefore write of ritual participants becoming “becomings-birds” and “becomings-owls.” becoming occurs in concert with multispecies others. haraway has criticized deleuze and guattari for the misogyny, fear of aging, and incuriosity regarding actual animals in their proposal and discussion of becoming. she notes the concept’s utility, however, and that “becoming is always becoming with” (haraway, species 28, 244). the process neither occurs alone, nor in a context populated with only a single species. rather, it occurs in mutually constituted ecologies filled with a variety of beings and species. furthermore, becoming takes place in a situation when “the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake” during situations of great importance (244). deleuze, gauttari, and haraway’s “becoming” describes much the same phenomena as ometv: becoming like something/one by means of ritualized interaction with that something/one.7 becoming explains what occurs during certain danced songs in the busk. this ritual cycle constitutes an example of haraway’s situation of great importance in that it resets social and metaphysical harmony on local through universal scales. during the danced songs named after plants and animals the human performers become becomings-other: becomings-birds, -bison, -owls, -insects, -turtles, and -plants (abram). these danced songs include: feather, buffalo, owl, bug, turtle, harvest, and berry and arbor dances. as haraway notes, becoming is always a becoming with. participants cannot become becomings-bison or becomings-turtle without interactions with bison and turtle, respectively. the danced songs themselves comprise these interactions. although performers might engage in buffalo or turtle dances without the physical presence of a bison or turtle, those beings’ influences are present. during these ritual interactions, bodies are processes, not static containers or vehicles. us dance ethnologist deidre sklar has noted that beings constantly configure and incorporate information (and matter and energy) in a constant process of becoming that is the body (186). in these rituals human participants become more than human, or, put humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 106 another way, participants become more human through these interactions. haraway and others have proposed that, given that humans live alongside multiple species, our states of humanity partially derive from multispecies interactions (haraway, species; kirksey and helmreich). the fact that our humanities derive from these interactions reveals the foolishness of narratives of human exceptionalism (haraway, species 244). we do not live in an exclusively human world, but rather in a series of “contact zones where lines separating nature from culture have broken down:” a series of what french anthropologist philippe descola calls “naturecultures” (kirksey and helmriech 546; descola). pvlvcekolv’s animal and plant dances do not therefore form multispecies exceptions to a monospecies rule. rather, they comprise culturally-specific examples of multispecies interactions that form states of humanity particular to pvlvcekolv. these becomings-animal or becomings-other in ritual contexts can occur because of the nature of being and body in this muskogee context. according to hakopē, the edge of a being exists not at the skin or physical surface of that being, but instead at the boundary of that being’s influence (koons 136). when singing certain dances during the busk, humans slip inside the area of influence of specific beings to become becomings-other. as becomings-birds or becomings-owls, for example, participants acknowledge the importance of birds to their mutual ecology, their mutual natureculture. they also enlarge birds’ area of influence and enact these beings. in what follows, i describe and analyze the ritual practice of the feather dance and the owl dance, examining the processes of becoming featured in both rituals. feather dance. the feather dance functions as a space for the pvlvcekolv men who attend busk to interact and become with avian kin.8 by dancing feather dance, participants propitiate birds to fulfill their ecological roles. this danced song usually takes place as the first ceremonial action on the saturday of a busk weekend. the men begin preparations to enter feather dance by putting on white shirts, echoing the feathers that top the wands they carry, which in turn reference the white birds that appear in the lyrics in one of the feather dance songs. if not white, each man wears the best shirt he brought to busk, regardless of color or design. after dressing their finest, they each collect a feather wand or pole from where they lean against the south arbor. two or three feathers blossom from each of these sixor seven-foot long canes (see figure 3). as part of his preparations for each cycle, community member kusko gathers egret feathers he finds along the sides of several north florida rivers specifically for these wands. the men begin the dance in a circled cluster, shoulder to shoulder, at the northwest ordinal post. at the center of the men’s ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 107 formation lies a circle drawn in the sand called the bird mound (see figure 4). in the recent past, the bird mound was a physical mound of earth anywhere from eight to fifteen feet in diameter. now it is mostly conceptual; a ritual leader draws the mound on the ground when needed. it represents the birds and, like them, can migrate, both around the square grounds and from location to location (bloch and hantman). figure 3. the tips of the feather wands as they lean against the south arbor during the 2009 harvest busk. (photo by author.) figure 4. the bird mound drawn on the grounds at the 2008 harvest busk. right: detail of the bird mound. both images are black and white to render the circle more easily visible; the detail has been darkened for the same reason. (photo by author.) while standing around the bird mound, participants name people they want to keep in mind during the dance and to whom they want to dedicate their actions. they name ailing or aging relatives and friends, people suffering recent losses, persons with sudden problems and/or medical issues, and/or individuals unable to be present on this humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 108 particular occasion. they then vocalize a repertoire of birdcalls, incorporating a plethora of birds similar to the way they have just incorporated a plethora of people connected to pvlvcekolv. many community members maintain intimate connections with their surrounding environments and several are amateur or professional naturalists. the bird calls are quite accurate as a result. following these bird calls, participants enter the feather dance. from the northwest corner, the men move counterclockwise to the south arbor, east arbor, north arbor, and west arbor (see figure 5). this single rotation constitutes a round (see figure 6). although they might not occur contiguously, each pvlvcekolv feather dance usually features four rounds on the grounds and a fifth around the nearby ball post, with a different song per round. the dance has two primary choreographic components: participants circle together in front of each arbor (and initially around the bird mound) and move in two parallel lines between arbors. as they circle in front of an arbor, the men sing one or two verses of the song of that round. they then raise their voices in a high-pitched cry punctuated with birdcalls as they move between circle formations in front of the arbors. while alighting into the next circle, they raise a beautiful cacophony of birdcalls. then a moment of quiet, as they fold their ruffled feathers, and they continue into the next verse. figure 5. top to bottom: standing around the bird mound (harvest busk 2009); inside the circle, dancing in front of the west arbor (harvest busk 2012); outside the circle, dancing in front of the west arbor (harvest busk 2009). (photos by ken koons.) ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 109 figure 6. feather dance choreographic outline, round one. dancers seasonally make exceptions to this choreographic outline. because the feather dance intimately connects with avian life, the dance observes and echoes the respective south-bound winter and north-bound spring migrations of many bird species. so as not to impede these seasonal movements, the men do not alight in front of the south arbor in the winter at harvest busk, nor in front of the north arbor in spring at berry and arbor busk. not solely symbolic, the square grounds encapsulate both the ritual center and home of pvlvcekolv and, during ceremony, contain the entirety of creation therein. the space inside the shell ring becomes a microcosm of, a synecdoche for, all that lies outside of it. actions that take place inside the grounds and in their immediate vicinity during ritual events have very real effects and repercussions (kimmerer 125-26). havoc results in the world if the feather dance includes a verse danced in front of the south arbor at harvest busk or in front of the north arbor at berry and arbor busk. participants take great care to dance with the birds and not against them. while dancing with birds, the men enact a distinctive step specific to the feather dance: the scratch step. it involves a light stomp, pressing first one foot then the other into the circle. this step does not produce a sharp percussive sound; rather, as the foot “scratches” against the sand-covered ground, a soft shush sounds. harder ground helps the sound resonate more. in places where more sand has drifted downhill with the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 110 numerous rains typical of the area, these steps create an almost hissing sound of the sand rubbing against shoes or bare skin. the current pvlvcekolv repertoire contains sixteen feather dance songs. not all of these songs involve birds; some songs fulfill other ceremonial functions (koons 247-264). during my times at the grounds, song leaders regularly performed the same birdfocused feather dance songs, including the three i analyze here: the first song contains only vocables, “wi hi hi-yo-ni;” the second song, “eh-elo v-li-he-no” (“there are white birds there”), celebrates and names birds; and the third is the vocables-only song “hi-yo hi ya,” typically performed around the ball post. at pvlvcekolv, much musical meaning derives from the movement of ritual melody lines, though community members might not always agree upon the precise meaning. for example, a descending melody line might indicate a ray of sunshine breaking from behind the clouds (koons 147-50). often appearing as the first song in the feather dance “wi hi hi-yo-ni” formally brings the men together. bringing forth this first song visibly formalizes kinship ties as the men dance together as a group with birds. in this respect, this round creates a space for participants to reestablish a ceremonial sense of community. although the text contains only vocables and has no lexical meaning, the melody line of this first song, “wi hi hi-yo-ni,” aurally represents the flight of birds (see example 1). pvlvcekolv recognizes the existence of three cosmological worlds: the upper world, which houses ordered beings; the middle world, which houses we humans; and the other world, which houses chaotic beings. the melody depicts avian flight between the middle world, upper world, and other world or ground. participants begin and end the piece on, in this transcription, the pitch f#, which might represent the middle world, or more likely something growing on the middle world, like a bush or low tree. beginning from this bush or tree, the birds launch themselves into the sky, occasionally flapping their wings, as when the melody line dips a third before returning to the originating pitch between measures two and three and between measures eight and nine (see bracketed intervals in example 1). as the melody descends, so too do the birds, alighting upon the earth (here the pitch c#). they remain grounded briefly, perhaps pecking at a seed or eating an insect, before taking off again and gliding back into the sky. they end where they began, returning to that bush or tree branch. as such, the melody line illustrates their motion and affirms birds’ ability to move between worlds with ease. ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 111 example 1. “wi hi hi-yo-ni,” the song accompanying the feather dance, round one. transcribed by ryan koons. this transcription deliberately excludes shaker percussion and choreography to render the transcription incomplete. the second song, “eh-elo v-li-he-no," generally accompanies the second round of feather dance (see figure 7) and further develops the avian theme (see example 2). these lyrics contract a longer phrase meaning “there are white birds here.” similar to “wi hi hi-yo-ni,” this second melody also mimics avian movement, perhaps mirroring the diving motions of certain water birds. the first four iterations of “eh-elo v-li-he-no” (mm. 1-4) quickly descend the scale, like four egrets diving into a river after food. in this particular scale, the pitch g# is likely the water’s surface. the second four iterations of the line (mm. 5-8) might illustrate how the birds wing for height (mm. 5 and 7) before plunging again into the water (mm. 6 and 8). the final two iterations of this text (mm. 910) represent the birds swimming about in the watery depths. figure 7. feather dance choreographic outlines, rounds two and three. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 112 example 2. “eh-elo v-li-hi-no,” the song accompanying the feather dance, round two. transcribed by ryan koons. this transcription deliberately excludes shaker percussion and choreography to render the transcription incomplete. participants sing these first two songs during rounds in front of the arbors on the square grounds. in contrast, the third song “he-yo he ya” typically occurs nearby around the ball post. just as they have in every other round of the feather dance, the men form an inward-facing circle around the post (see figure 8). they then scratch-step their way through this song. the text lies somewhere between vocables and contractions. what were once lexically meaningful phrases are now little more than vocables. hakopē suggests that the lyrics speak about the singers passing or dancing silently by old grandfather or creator (interview, 19 january 2015). figure 8. feather dance choreographic outline, rounds four and five. the melody line of “hi-yo hi ya” might feature birds on top of the ball post or perhaps on top of an arbor, fluttering down to the ground (see example 3). across each verse, the overall melody line descends. here too, the melodic leaping motion up and down a third in measure one and up and down a second in measures two-four might depict ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 113 wing beats as the birds descend ever lower (see the brackets in example 3). similarly, the ascending fifth leap prior to a descending scale paint a picture of a flight pattern wherein the bird flaps its wings once to rise before gliding down (measure five), only to repeat the pattern twice more (measures six and seven). the final measure perhaps illustrates the bird briefly skimming the ground (the pitch c) before again rising. example 3. “hi-yo hi ya,” the song accompanying the feather dance, ball post round. transcribed by ryan koons. this transcription deliberately excludes shaker percussion and choreography to render the transcription incomplete. the avian beings who appear in the feather dance play an important place in muskogee cosmology. in the creation story as told at pvlvcekolv, creator or ohfvnkv creates water. finding that the beings around her are suddenly drowning, turtle dives beneath the waters and returns with mud, which she compacts into land. the birds scramble up to this land and spread their drenched wings open to dry them. some flap their wings, removing the water and drying the land. as turtle brings up more mud from beneath the waters, more and more birds flap their wings to dry themselves and the new-forming land. some few beat their wings so hard that they rise to great heights and see ohfvnkv. pleased with their work, creator gives “them songs, calls, and wild cries so all would know of creator's pleasure” (creation story, pap8.2). because ohfvnkv gifts birds with diverse vocalizations, pvlvcekolv intimately associates birdsong with ohfvnkv. the phrase “fuswv yvhiket os,” “the birds, they are singing,” acknowledges birds and their role. many songs in the feather dance repertoire are the musical equivalent of this spoken phrase, as in the case of the songs i analyze above. enacting these feather dance songs facilitates the men becoming with birds. all three songs melodically depict various bird movements through air and water and upon the ground. in this multispecies context, the men dance with birds, observing their seasonal migrations in the rounds of the feather dance. their scratch-step emulates the movement quality of certain avian species as they forage for food or nesting materials. this dance features participants taking choreography and song that emulate, depict, and quote birds into their own bodies in a mingling of creative agency. the respect they humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 114 performatively demonstrate for avian life speaks to the nonhierarchical alliance in which the men are bound with their avian kin (kirksey and helmreich 546). in the situation of great importance that is the busk (haraway, species 244), these ritual dances facilitate the men's transformation into becomings-birds. owl dance. where feather dance celebrates general human-avian relationships, owl dance focuses specifically on human-owl relationships. owl dance occurs in the late evening at pvlvcekolv busks and features quiet and slow choreography. hakopē, who enjoys nature documentaries, often excitedly explains that even sensitive recording equipment fails to pick up the sound of owl’s wing beats, also noting that owls can fly over dust without raising a cloud. they fly in complete silence due to serrated, comblike structures along the leading edges of their primary flight feathers and soft “fuzz” along the feather top that absorb sound (chen et al.). as pvlvcekolv people often say, silence is the voice of creator; that owls fly silently, therefore, connects the birds to creator. by virtue of large pupils that let in a lot of light and a larger number of blackand-white detecting rods rather than color detecting cones in their eyes (g. martin), owls can see very well at night. for this reason, pvlvcekolv people also consider owls masters of the darkness and the unseen. yet, hakopē occasionally notes, human dancers have trouble moving in this way. the slow pace of owl dance is iconic of owls’ silence in flight, one human way of realizing owlish habits. when bringing forth the owl dance, participants line up in front of an arbor facing the fire. more often than not, someone will ask those present why the owl dance is important. others respond: owls can see into the darkest of places, and the darkest place of all can be the human heart. connecting to owls is therefore important in coming to terms with one’s own darkest, most hidden parts, as well. maintaining a line, participants take very small stomp-steps (right-right, left-left, right-right, etc.) towards the fire while softly singing the owl dance song (see example 4). they then move counter-clockwise to the next arbor and step a little closer to the fire while repeating the song. they do the same at the next two arbors. after circling the grounds, they return to the arbor where they began. there they dance a fifth verse, this time stepping away from the fire. this dance is unusual. most pvlvcekolv dances feature even numbered groupings of choreographic actions, not odd numbers. ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 115 example 4. the song accompanying the owl dance. transcribed by ryan koons. this transcription deliberately excludes shaker percussion and choreography to render the transcription incomplete. the owl dance’s movements image silence, materializing it kinetically and visually through slowness. as a synesthetic metaphor, slow movement becomes a way of enacting silence through the feeling of one’s muscles moving, one’s voice singing. the song echoes the sonic habits of owls, allowing human dancers to become with owls vocally and choreographically. in bringing the dance forth, dancers traverse paths and gain in-sight into unseen places. according to hakopē, just as owls hunt in the darkness, so, too, do the dancers step out of the darkness and towards the fire, towards life. the fire is also the source of light and wisdom, to which the dancers arrive from a place of darkness and chaos,9 and to which they return. another time, hakopē humorously noted that, “you sort of quote shakespeare: ‘feathered friends, ex-romans, and owl countrymen, lend me your feathered ears, give me your night vision and your eyes, because you see, you are the masters of dark’” (interview, 23 january 2009). owl dance choreography facilitates participants’ transformations in hopes of performatively sharing in excellent vision in darkness, silent flight, and other owl abilities through ritual choreography. besides honoring and thanking owl, this stylized way of moving draws the sensory capacities and bodily habits of owls into the dancers. moving about in “owly” ways evokes and creates certain embodied perspectives grounded in owlish habits and abilities. just as the slowed steps of the dance are iconic of the silence of an owl’s flight, so is the slow and subdued song, according to square grounds teachings. the lyrics consist of two words: wi-yo, a vocable without semantic meaning, and o-pv, “owl.” a verse consists of three iterations of a two-measure phrase (measures 1-2, repeated in measures 3-4 and 5-6 in example 4) followed by two iterations of a single-measure phrase (measures 7-8). measures 1-6 in this transcription might follow the owl’s motion as it soars through the air, perhaps beginning in a tree and hunting across a meadow. the last two measures might echo the bird’s wing motion while slowly flapping, or they might indicate its sudden loss of height onto its next meal. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 116 the owl dance song resembles the calls of owls, but again, slowed down. elders suggest that the song derives from their ancestors’ observations of owl vocalizations. hakopē recommended i examine recordings of the call of the eastern screech owl, whom scientists have named megascops asio. eastern screech owl calls exhibit a series of distinct sonic features. these features include even pitched “trills,” which mated pairs or families use to maintain contact; descending “whinnies,” which individuals use to defend territory; low barking calls that indicate alarm or agitation; and screeches with which individuals or pairs defend nests or fledglings (cornell lab of ornithology). the screech owl’s call closely resembles the owl dance song, but only after slowing down the recording. after reducing the speed of one eastern screech owl call recording to 60%, the descending whinny closely resembled the descending melodic motion of measures 5-7 of example 4. the even pitched trills approximated the half-step melodic motion of measures 1, 3, and 5, and the vibrato or pulsations in both descending whinny and trill sounded not unlike the owl dance participants’ sung word articulation. owl dance is always the last danced song of the evening. community member yvhv stated that the owl dance “doesn’t close the grounds, but it says, ‘we are done here for tonight.’ and ... we'll just honor the owl and then go to our place” (interview, 30 november 2008). ritual participation, relations, decolonization. the owl dance and the feather dance as enacted at pvlvcekolv function as steps along a route to decolonizing the anthropocene. as discussed earlier, the anthropocene is an extension of the structure we call colonialism, characterized by indigenous dispossession, genocide, and environmental transformation, among other traits. no matter the precise name we use to describe or depict it, this era directly connects to settler colonialism. the two are perhaps not directly synonymous, yet the “tightly wound set of conditions and racialized, globalized relations” of both mean that we cannot untangle one from the other. processes of decolonization, therefore, have the potential to affect both the settler colony and the anthropocene (tuck and yang 7). unangax (aleut) education scholar eve tuck and us education scholar k. wayne yang explicitly warn against turning decolonization into a metaphor, which would serve to re-center whiteness, extend innocence to the settler, and entertain a settler future: all antithetical to true decolonization. rather, defining decolonization requires the “repatriation of land simultaneous to the recognition of how land and relations to land have always already been differently understood and enacted.” in addition to the repatriation of land, therefore, the path to decolonization involves indigenous people ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 117 embodying relationships with one another and with the nonhuman persons who coconstitute their communities and lands. l. b. simpson discusses decolonization in relation to indigenous resurgence. she brings the work of kwagiulth (kwakwaka’wakw) geographer sarah hunt and canadian interdisciplinary scholar cindy holmes into conversation with that of tsalagi (cherokee) political scientist jeff corntassel. in their discussion of decolonizing queer politics, hunt and holmes challenge indigenous peoples to embody and practice decolonial politics in their daily lives, propelling “us to live in our bodies as indigenous political orders in every way possible” (l. b. simpson 191). these political orders also feature nonhuman persons who co-constitute community and land. similarly, corntassel encourages indigenous peoples to eschew settler politics of distraction — such as state affirmation, federal recognition, and the performance of rights-based discourse — in favor of renewal. he proposes indigenous people focus on “everyday practices of renewal and responsibilities within native communities today” (86). corntassel’s depiction of settler politics of distraction resonate with a. simpson’s concept of “refusal.” she frames refusal as an alternative to federal recognition and other politics of distraction. from her perspective, refusal “comes with the requirement of having one’s political sovereignty acknowledged and upheld” (11). upholding indigenous sovereignty necessarily raises the question of the legitimacy of settler sovereignty. she notes that, in colonial contexts, indigenous sovereignties are “nested and embedded” within the overarching sovereignty of the settler colonial state. a goal of the ongoing and structural colonial project is simultaneously to acquire and maintain land while eliminating the natives who hold original title to/relationship with that land. indigenous sovereignty in a settler state, therefore, necessarily exists in great tension in relation to settler sovereignty. refusal as a set of “sovereign practices” functions to uphold indigenous sovereignty against the colonial project (a. simpson 2). these sovereign practices might include the refusal to vote in federal elections, the refusal to pay federal taxes, or the refusal to destroy or alter ontological and epistemological relationships with nonhumans. pvlvcekolv community members maintaining ecological relationships via the busk exemplifies refusal: by enacting those relationships, community members refuse colonially-imposed worldviews, upholding their sovereignty. like tuck and yang, the trio of a. simpson, corntassel, and hunt and holmes speak to the need of connecting with relatives and the naturalcultural kin who co-inhabit the land. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 118 l.b. simpson braids these ideas together, finding that the combination of living decolonial politics and everyday acts of resurgence “can be a force for dramatic change in the face of the overwhelming domination of the settler colonial state” (102). she notes that her nishnaabeg “ancestors are not in the past. the spiritual world does not exist in some mystical realm. these forces and beings are right here beside me — inspiring, loving, and caring for me in each moment and compelling me to do the same. it is my responsibility with them and those yet unborn to continuously give birth to my indigenous present” (192-193). these responsibilities encompass human and nonhuman kin in indigenous multispecies spaces. l. b. simpson states that these practices and relationships “will create flight paths out of colonialism and into magnificent unfolding of indigenous place-based resurgences and nationhoods” (193). although, in the words of tuck and yang, complete decolonization requires land repatriation, the process of decolonization also requires care and attention to the relationships between indigenous peoples and the nonhumans who co-constitute those lands. pvlvcekolv’s ritual processes of becoming with avian beings and others in the matrix of the busk constitute a step along this path to decolonization. the indigenous space that is pvlvcekolv’s square grounds exists on land owned by community members. this land has not been repatriated to the community but was instead purchased by the matriarch and her husband in 1999 for the purposes of ceremony. they own it outright, live on it, and are caretakers on behalf of the community. although the land was never repatriated, community member ownership means that pvlvcekolv has autonomous sovereignty on the land. drawing on corntassel and a. simpson, pvlvcekolv is a sovereign tribal town that has eschewed the politics of distraction by refusing the process of federal recognition. instead, the community focuses much of its energy on maintaining relationships with each other and with nonhuman kin via everyday and ritualized processes of renewal and responsibility. busk participants’ becoming with nonhuman kin function as acts of refusal that maintain pvlvcekolv’s sovereignty. these acts of ritualized refusal speak to power balances between human and nonhuman busk partners: the multispecies assemblage of the busk is a nonhierarchical structure. in becoming with nonhumans, busk participants emphasize human dependence upon a larger web of relationships. ritualized recognition of that dependence serves to decenter “the human.” this web of relationality is directly antithetical to the anthropocene concept. as a derivative of colonial logics and histories, the anthropocene is partially defined by the lack and/or destruction of relationships between humans and nonhumans. busk processes of becoming call attention to participants’ intentions, purposes, actions, and agency in a ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 119 form of refusal. participants’ intentionality renders becoming a process not merely for the sake of becoming, but also as an act of refusal against the anthropocene. maintaining relationality with nonhuman kin functions to refuse that colonial-derived sundering of relationships that defines the anthropocene. becoming refuses power dynamics imposed by agents of the colonial project in what is perhaps the most egregious denial of indigenous sovereignty: the anthropocene itself. instead, busk ritual practice resets power dynamics to its nonhierarchical balance via refusal, upholding pvlvcekolv's indigenous sovereignty. busk ceremonial practice — sovereign processes of refusal and ritualized becoming with avian and other kin — embodies hunt and holmes’s practice of decolonial politics. becoming with birds and others facilitates an indigenous multispecies political order: a refusal “to stop being themselves” (a. simpson 2). this indigenous multispecies political order functions as a mechanism to see, hear, and think differently. this “difference” encompasses the distinctions between pvlvcekolv’s indigenous ways of being and knowing the world, and the western ways of being and knowing that resulted in and maintain colonialism and the anthropocene. pvlvcekolv members embody processes of seeing, hearing, and thinking that vitally feature kinship relationships with nonhumans. the feather dance, the owl dance, and indeed all of pvlvcekolv's ritual becomings constitute an indigenous practice of refusal. in a settler colonial nation state, indigenous people practicing refusal by seeing, hearing, thinking, and acting differently on sovereign land in embodied relationships with nonhuman kin constitutes a step along the path to decolonizing the anthropocene and colonialism. maintaining those ritualized relationships and the non-western ontologies and epistemologies upon which those relationships predicate, pvlvcekolv maintains a process that begins dismantling some of the control of the settler colony. this dismantling functions to refuse the anthropocene. in l. b. simpson’s words, “placing indigenous bodies on the land in any indigenous context through engagement with indigenous practices is direct action” that leads to decolonization (236). pvlvcekolv’s regular renewal of multispecies relationships through the busk forms a sovereign process of refusal and decolonization of the anthropocene. acknowledgments. i am grateful to the many people who offered their time, advice, and perspectives on this article and its precursors. my thanks to megan k. bartlett, lee bloch, tara browner (choctaw), cyndy m. garcia-weyandt, thalia marlyn gomez quintana (yoeme/yaqui), ken koons, stephanie koons, elisabeth le guin, daniel neuman, anthony seeger, david delgado shorter, and kim tallbear (sisseton humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 120 wahpeton oyate-dakota). grateful thanks to niccolo seligmann for co-creating a multispecies home with me. thanks to the two anonymous reviewers and humanimalia editors istvan csicsery-ronay and robert geroux for their invaluable feedback. many thanks to elesvlkv, hokte eco, kusko, mvhayv-rakko, vhicv, and other elders in the pvlvcekolv community for their welcome, support, and insights and critiques on this article and the project from which it derives. special thanks to hakopē who, as always, provided key information and critical feedback. since 2008, this project has been funded by two student research grants from the dickinson college community studies center, a graduate summer research mentorship grant from the ucla graduate division, an institute of american cultures research grant from the ucla american indian studies center, numerous student opportunity fund grants from the ucla herb alpert school of music, and a ucla non-senate faculty professional development award from the ucla office of the vice chancellor for academic personnel. the author can be contacted at koonsr88@gmail.com. notes 1. i use several terms interchangeably to refer to the people who appear in this study, including “american indian,” “native american,” and “indigenous” because community members of tvlwv pvlvcekolv, the american indian group featured in this case study, use these terms to describe themselves. following a convention in indigenous studies internationally, i capitalize “indigenous” as a matter of respect and, as us ethnomusicologist victoria lindsay levine once noted in a conversation on the society for ethnomusicology’s indigenous music special interest group email listserv, to achieve parity with the way scholars represent other groups in writing. for the same reason, i include tribal or community affiliation when introducing the ideas of indigenous scholars; i introduce non-indigenous scholars by noting their nation-state of origin. i offer my sincere apologies if i inadvertently misrepresent any scholars whose ideas i feature in this article; errors in depicting identity are unintentional and mine own. 2. the muskogee language spelling in this document reflects moravian-derived orthography. the sometime-relationship between creek communities and moravian missionaries during the colonial era resulted in the adoption of the greek letter upsilon (υ) to represent the english “ou” as in “tough.” in 1843 the us presbyterian minister rev. robert m. loughridge replaced the upsilon with the roman letter “v,” which denotes schwa sounds like the “u” in “but.” similarly, the letter “c” denotes “ch” ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 121 sounds like the “ch” in “chunk,” and “r” denotes a lateral fricative, such as the “thl” in “athletic” and “bethlehem.” i render the community’s name, therefore, as “pvlvcekolv," and not the anglicized “palachicola” or “apalachicola” (martin and mauldin xvii-xviii). following pvlvcekolv convention, i capitalize ceremonially important positions, objects, and concepts: creator, maker of medicine, matriarch, etc. 3. since the trail of tears, some community members have traveled or moved away from the southeast for career, family, education, or other reasons. 4. in addition to other, pre-colonial definitions, the english word “busk” derives from the muskogee posketv, “to fast.” the sung and danced rituals of the busk occur atop a foundation of fasting from food during the daylight hours. the busk as intangible cultural heritage belongs to other communities in addition to pvlvcekolv. as well as muskogee or creek communities, cherokee, chickasaw, seminole, and yuchi communities have performed their versions of this ceremonial cycle for centuries and continue to do so. 5. busking community members say that these dances are “brought forth” rather than “performed.” some say the dances are ongoing and that people merely join in. the implication is that certain dances always exist in some form but are materialized or activated through the actions of particular persons at particular times. for this reason, i avoid using the terms "perform," "performer," and "performance practice" in the remainder of this article. 6. i avoid using the terms “religion” and “spirituality” when referring to indigenous peoples. the terms — especially “spiritual” — avoid clarity at best and sustain colonial authority over indigenous realities at worst (shorter 433). following us interdisciplinary scholar david delgado shorter, i replace the terms with “related,” focusing on relationships between humans, and between humans and others-thanhuman. 7. ometv and becoming at pvlvcekolv relate to the concept brazilian anthropologist eduardo viveiros de castro has called “perspectivism.” this concept, prevalent in amazonian indigenous cosmologies, describes worldviews in which humans understand that animals and spirits perceive themselves as anthropomorphic beings when they are in their own houses or villages, and experience their own habits and characteristics as culture (470). in many muskogee stories told at pvlvcekolv, owls and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 122 other birds have their own societies and cultures. viveiros de castro’s perspectivism assumes that “bodily attributes” such as beaks and feathers are “envelopes” that cover internal human forms. these envelopes or “clothing” are “privileged expressions of metamorphosis,” speaking to the "transformability" of beings in these cosmologies (47071). 8. us ethnologist frank speck described one of the few other feather dance performances to appear in the ethnographic literature, a performance at taskigi town, and included two different transcriptions of feather dance songs (186-190). the differences he observed between those two songs demonstrated the ways “the various towns differed from one another” (189). one hundred years earlier, us naturalist william bartram similarly noted that “every tribe which constitutes the muscogulge [sic] confederacy has separate customs and many of them different systems of legislation” (369). the differences between speck’s thick description and the traditions i have witnessed at pvlvcekolv echo these observations. 9. chaos does not have an exclusively negative quality in this context. works cited abram, david. becoming animal: an earthly cosmology. pantheon books, 2010. ballard, william l. the yuchi green corn ceremonial: form and meaning. u california p, 1978. bartram, william. the search for nature's design: selected art, letters, and unpublished writings. thomas hallock, nancy e. hoffmann, and joel t. fry, eds. u georgia p, 2010. bell, amelia rector. creek ritual: the path to peace. diss. u of chicago, 1984. bloch, lee, and jeffrey hantman. “archaeological ethnographies of migrating (living) native american mounds.” annual meeting of the theoretical archaeology group, new york, may 22-24, 2015. chen, kun, qinping liua, genghua liao, ying yang, luquan ren, hongxiu yang, & xin chen. “the sound suppression characteristics of wing feather of owl (bubo bubo).” journal of bionic engineering 9.2 (2012): 192-199. ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 123 chin, anne, rong fu, jon harbor, mark p. taylor, & veerle vanacker. “anthropocene: human interactions with earth systems.” anthropocene 1.1 (2013): 1-2. cornell lab of ornithology. “eastern screech owl.” cornell lab of ornithology. online. 18 march 2016. corntassel, jeff. “re-envisioning resurgence: indigenous pathways to decolonization and sustainable self-determination.” decolonization: indigeneity, education and society 1.1 (2012): 86-101. crutzen, paul j., and will eugene f. stoermer. “the anthropocene.” global change newsletter 41 (2000): 17-18. davis, heather, and zoe todd. “on the importance of a date, or decolonizing the anthropocene.” acme: an international journal of critical geographies 16.4 (2017): 761780. deleuze, gilles, and félix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. trans. brian massumi. u minnesota p, 1987. descola, philippe. beyond nature and culture. u chicago p, 2013. gatschet, albert s. “kasihta legend in the creek and hitchiti languages, with a critical commentary and full glossaries in both texts.” transactions of the academy of sciences of st. louis 5.1-2 (1969): 33-239. gilbert, scott f., and david epel. ecological developmental biology: the environmental regulation of development, health, and evolution. 2nd ed. sunauer associates, 2015. grove, jairus. “response to jedediah purdy.” forum: the new nature, boston review, 11 jan. 2016. online. accessed 11 jan. 2019. haraway, donna. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. duke up, 2016. _____. when species meet. u minnesota p, 2008. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 124 haraway, donna, and martha kenney. “anthropocene, capitalocene, chthulhocene.” art in the anthropocene: encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments, and epistemologies. heather davis and etienne turpin, eds. open humanities press, 2015: 255-270. hunt, sarah, and cindy holmes. “everyday decolonization: living a decolonizing queer politics.” journal of lesbian studies 19.2 (2015): 154-172. jackson, jason baird. yuchi ceremonial life: performance, meaning, and tradition in a contemporary american indian community. 2nd ed. u nebraska p, 2005. kimmerer, robin wall. braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. milkweed editions, 2013. kirksey, s. eben, and stefan helmreich. “the emergence of multispecies ethnography.” cultural anthropology 25.4 (2010): 545-576. koons, ryan a. dancing breath: ceremonial performance practice, environment, and personhood in a muskogee creek community. diss. ucla, 2016. lewis, simon, and mark maslin. “defining the anthropocene.” nature 519 (2015): 171180. lightfoot, kent g., lee m. panich, tsim d. schneider, & sara l. gonzalez. “european colonialism and the anthropocene: a view from the pacific coast of north america.” anthropocene 4 (2013): 101-115. malm, andreas. “the origins of fossil capital: from water to steam in the british cotton industry.” historical materialism 21.1 (2013): 15-68. martin, graham r. “sensory capacities and the nocturnal habit of owls (strigiformes).” ibis: international journal of avian science 128.2 (1986): 266-277. martin, jack, and margaret mckane mauldin. a dictionary of muskogee/creek. u nebraska p, 2000. in ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 125 mcbrien, justin. 2016. “accumulating extinction: planetary catastrophism in the necrocene.” anthropocene or capitalocene? nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism. jason w. moore, ed. pm press, 2016. 116-137. moore, jason. “acknowledgements.” anthropocene or capitalocene? nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism. jason w. moore, ed. pm press, 2016. xi-xii. _____. capitalism in the web of life: ecology and the accumulation of capital. verso, 2015. _____. “introduction: anthropocene or capitalocene? nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism.” anthropocene or capitalocene? nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism. jason w. moore, ed. pm press, 2016. 1-11. morrison, kenneth m. “the cosmos as intersubjective: native american other-than human persons.” indigenous religions: a companion. graham harvey, ed. cassell, 2000. 23-36. pap: pvlvcekolv project archival collection, world community productions archive (wcpa), finksburg, md. creation story. pap8.2. hakopē. interview. 23 january 2009. pap11. hakopē. interview. 23 august 2015. pap11. hakopē. interview. 19 january 2015. pap11. yvhv. interview. 30 november 2008. pap11. rose, deborah bird. “introduction: writing in the anthropocene.” australian humanities review 47 (2009): 87. rosier, paul c. “dam building and treaty breaking: the kinzua dam controversy, 1936-1958.” the pennsylvania magazine of history and biography 119.4 (1995): 345-368. ruccio, david f. “anthropocene — or how the world was remade by capitalism.” occasional links and commentary on economics, culture, and society. 4 march 2011. online. accessed 11 jan. 2019. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 126 schupman, edwin jr. “current musical practices of the creek indians as examined through the green corn ceremonies of the tulsa cedar river and fish pond stomp grounds.” ma thesis, miami university of oxford, ohio, 1984. shorter, david delgado. “spirituality.” the oxford handbook of american indian history. ed. frederick hoxie. oxford up, 2016. 433-452. simpson, audra. mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. duke up, 2014. simpson, leanne betasamosake. as we have always done: indigenous freedom through radical resistance. u minnesota p, 2017. sklar, deidre. dancing with the virgin: body and faith in the fiesta of tortugas, new mexico. u california p, 2001. smith, linda tuhiwai. decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. 2nd ed. zed books, 2003. speck, frank g. “ceremonial songs of the creek and yuchi indians.” anthropological publications 1.2. the museum of the university of pennsylvania, 1911. steffen, will, wendy j. broadgate, lisa deutsch, owen gaffney, & cornelia ludwig. “the trajectory of the anthropocene: the great acceleration.” the anthropocene review 2.1 (2015): 81-98. swanson, heather anne. “anthropocene as political geology: current debates over how to tell time.” science as culture 25.1 (2016): 157-163. tallbear, kim. “failed settler kinship, truth and reconciliation, and science.” indigenous science/technology/society. 3 dec 2017. online. accessed 11 jan. 2019. teilhard de chardin, pierre. the future of man. image books/doubleday, 2004. tsing, anna, donna haraway, noboru ishikawa, scott f. gilbert, kenneth olwig, & nils bubandt. “anthropologists are talking — about the anthropocene.” ethos 81.3 (2016): 535-564. ryan a. koons-becoming avian in the anthropocene: performing the feather dance and the owl dance at pvlvcekolv 127 tuck, eve, and k. wayne yang. “decolonization is not a metaphor.” decolonization: indigeneity, education & society 1.1 (2012): 1-40. viveiros de castro, eduardo. “cosmological dexis and amerindian perspectivism.” the journal of the royal anthropological institute 4.3 (1998): 469-488. watts, vanessa. “indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and nonhumans (first woman and sky woman go on a european world tour!).” decolonization: indigeneity, education & society 2.1 (2013): 20-34. wolfe, patrick. “settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” journal of genocide research 8.4 (2006): 387-409. zalasiewicz, jan, et al. “the anthropocene: a new epoch of geological time?” philosophical transactions of the royal society a 369.1938 (2011): 835-841. microsoft word braverman-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 9:2 irus braverman saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation figure 1. reticulated giraffe at the st. louis zoo. photo by robert lawton, nov. 11, 2005. cc by-sa 3.0. “i save a species, one individual at a time.” --kelly helmick (dsm). supervisory medical officer, smithsonian conservation biology institute; former president, american association of zoo veterinarians (personal communication, february 15, 2016) who killed marius? on february 9, 2014, two-year old giraffe “marius” was killed at the copenhagen zoo. marius was not sick or old. he was killed because he was what zoo professionals refer to as a surplus animal. a member of the reticulated giraffe species (giraffa amelopardalis reticulate), marius was managed by the european endangered species programme, or eep. according to bengt holst, scientific director at copenhagen zoo: “our giraffes are all part of the european breeding programme for giraffes, and as a pure reticulated giraffe, this giraffe was one of a european population of a little more than one hundred giraffes distributed over 35 european zoos.” “because he comes from a genetic line that has bred very well over the past years,” holst concluded, “there was no space for him anywhere in the population, and he was humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 2 declared ‘surplus’” (holst 1). in simpler terms, the copenhagen zoo killed marius to prevent in-breeding within the captive breeding program (mclaughlin and wilkinson). the ethics of the zoo’s decision to kill marius have been widely discussed and dissected, both in mainstream media (e.g., mclaughlin and wilkinson; eriksen and kennedy; morell; parker) and in academia (bekoff; braverman, wild life; mcculloch and reiss). instead of doing more of the same, my article will highlight a rather underexplored detail of this event: the person who pulled the trigger of the winchester rifle was the zoo’s veterinarian, mads bertelsen. this detail is not incidental, nor is it marginal: the role of zoo veterinarians has changed considerably in the last several decades and, in fact, they are now the only professionals authorized to conduct serious medical procedures on animals at the zoo. the rationale behind marius’s killing is also important: the idea of a pure genetic population that will be sustainable both in the zoo and as an insurance population for the broader species is now the zoo’s raison d'être and a major component of the zoo vet’s work. although all accredited zoos would agree that no mariuses should exist in their populations, the means for accomplishing this differ: while some zoos ensure that such animals are not born in the first place, others will kill them as they reach maturity. these differences in approach are the results of different balances that particular zoos strike regarding the welfare of various animal individuals. the zoo veterinarian is at the center of these medical and ethical debates underlying the daily operations of zoos, and is central to such decision-making practices, both as the zoo animal’s major medical provider and as the one who would typically execute such decisions. my article will explore the changing role of the zoo veterinarian (herein, the zoo vet) in contemporary zoos, and what these changes tell us about the transformation of zoo animal management more broadly. these changes are especially pronounced given that the scope of zoo veterinary medicine has transformed in recent decades to include a conservation mission that encompasses both zoo and wild animals, thereby demonstrating the erosion of the division between ex situ and in situ animal management (braverman, wild life). looking at zoos through the lens of zoo vets brings to light not only the recent transformation of this institution into one that includes conservation as its central mission (hence the vets’ relatively novel focus on the sustainability of populations) but also the intensification of wildlife management outside of the zoo (hence the more individual-based, medicalized approach of managers to wild animals, and the zoo vets’ increased involvement in in situ projects). irus braverman -saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation 3 taking population interests into account complicates the welfare calculus that zoo vets must consider, making for a much more involved biopolitical project. in particular, i will discuss the current position of the north american zoo vet at the nexus between animal health and welfare, on the one hand, and species conservation, on the other hand. while there exists a rich scholarship on zoos generally and on particular zoo professionals such as keepers (grazian), registrars (braverman, “zoo registrars”), and curators (berkovits), there is surprisingly little scholarly literature that focuses on zoo veterinarians, despite their centrality for this institution’s function in its modern form. this article draws on several interviews with prominent zoo vets, as well as on regulations that pertain to their work and written accounts of their experiences. i will start by briefly reviewing the institutional role of the zoo vet and a few standards that pertain to their position, especially in the united states. i will then move to document the diversity of species cared for by zoo vets, acknowledging the importance of this diversity for the very nature — indeed, the survival — of the zoo as an institution of captivity, and highlighting the unique challenges that vets face as the exclusive medical caregivers of this varied assembly. next, i will discuss the tensions between individual and species-focused welfare and conservation. finally, i will discuss three areas in which the work of vets purportedly advances conservation. i will conclude with a call to scholars in the social sciences and the humanities to further explore the work of zoo veterinarians. the zoo veterinarian: an institutional context. the story of veterinary medicine dates back to urlugaledinna, who lived in mesopotamia in 3000 bce and was an expert in healing animals (rcvs). the word veterinary likely originates from the latin veterinae, which means “working animals” (but see the veterinary student 6). the ancient israelites, egyptians, and indians were already familiar with various forms of animal diseases. moses established a system of meat inspection and egyptian hieroglyphs record the uses of herbs to treat and promote good health in domesticated animals. the kahun papyrus from egypt dates back to 1900 bce. vedic literature, which was written in india at around 1500 bce, refers to india’s first buddhist king, asoka, who defines two kinds of medicine: one for humans and the other for animals (cole). both texts are likely the first written accounts of veterinary medicine. much later, hippocrates (460337 bce) described hydrothorax in oxen, sheep, and swine, and mentioned the dislocation of the hip joint of cattle following a lean winter, and aristotle (384-326 bce) discovered a few diseases of swine, dogs, cattle, horses, asses, and elephants. vegetius, who wrote in the fifth century ce, is generally considered the father of veterinary medicine for his extensive writings on diseases of horses and cattle (wilkinson 13; humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 4 figure 2). since then, there have been numerous literary references to veterinary practices. however, it was only with the founding of the veterinary school in france by claude bourgelat in 1761 that the veterinary profession officially started (rcvs.). figure 2. title page of the first german edition of vegetius’s veterinary art (wellcome institute library, london). wikipedia commons. the modern profession of the zoo veterinarian is relatively new among western clinical medical practices; it is situated between the domestic and farm veterinarian, on the one hand, and the wildlife biologist, on the other hand. the first recorded zoo veterinarian, charles spooner, was appointed to the london zoo in 1829. in the united states, the first part-time zoo veterinarian was h. amling jr. at the bronx zoo in 1900. zoo veterinarians started meeting separately in the association of veterinary medicine in 1948, and in 1968 formed their own organization: the american association of zoo veterinarians, or aazv (fowler). irus braverman -saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation 5 the aazv is the professional association for individuals and institutions who apply the principles of comparative veterinary medicine to zoo and wildlife species. with more than 1,000 individual and institutional members from 60 different countries, the aazv provides advocacy, collaboration, and partnerships for combined efforts in sustaining and improving the well-being of wildlife in all habitats (“about us”). aazv members work in clinical zoo medical practices, diagnostic laboratories, reproductive and pathological laboratories, pharmaceutical companies, and a wide range of governmental health and wildlife management agencies throughout the world. kelly helmick is supervisory medical officer at the smithsonian conservation biology institute and the former president of the aazv. according to helmick: the aazv is an established leadership resource for the care of exotic zoo species, provides resources for members, but also serves as a body of experts for veterinarians looking for more information on exotic species, accrediting or legislating bodies, and affiliated organizations who may reach out to us from time to time for our expert opinions on various matters that touch on exotic wildlife health and welfare. (personal communication, december 20, 2017) if until the latter part of the twentieth century the health of zoo animals was administered by a variety of zoo professionals, and especially by zoo keepers, contemporary laws and standards increasingly identify the zoo veterinarian as the exclusive medical provider for zoo animals. the first aazv bylaws were written in 1974 and most recently approved in 2017. according to the 2009 aazv guidelines for zoo and aquarium veterinary medical programs and veterinary hospitals, “zoological parks and aquariums have humane and legal obligations to provide proper husbandry, veterinary medical treatment, and preventive medical programs for their animals” (2). to achieve this goal, “zoos and aquariums in the united states are required to employ an attending veterinarian who will provide adequate veterinary care for the animal collection and to assure that certain minimal standards of veterinary care are in place according to the animal welfare act of 1966” (2).1 specifically, the guidelines state that “surgery can only be performed by a veterinarian,” and that “all zoos and aquariums must have an on-site area available for minor surgical procedures” (6). these regulatory requirements frame the work of the zoo veterinarian, configuring the obligation of every zoo member institution in the united states to have a veterinarian on duty. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 6 the guidelines also situate the zoo vet as operating within the dual framework of welfare and conservation. according to article ii (5), one of the aazv’s major objectives is “to promote the general welfare and conservation of captive and freeranging wildlife” (aazv, 2012, p. 1). the objective of caring for both welfare and conservation, which is central to the work of zoo vets, is best reflected in former aazv president kelly helmick’s statement, quoted in the epigraph, that she saves species one animal at a time. rob hilsenroth, current director of aazv, tells me along these lines that, “while the effort is on the individual animals, the overview is saving species” (personal communication, february 15, 2016). working under the dual welfareconservation mission is arguably not only the prerogative of the zoo vet, but also represents the broader platform of contemporary zoos, which include conservation as a core part of their agenda. indeed, as i have argued elsewhere (braverman, zooland), in the last several decades zoos and aquariums (while i have focused on accredited north american zoos, this is mostly true of accredited zoos in other regions, too) have shifted their mission from entertainment to promoting conservation and education. exhibits with concrete and metal cages have largely been replaced by nature “immersion” designs, and the human stance of domination over animals has been redefined as one of care and stewardship (braverman, op. cit. 5). the accredited zoo’s new emphasis on conservation and care now calls for collaborative management of specific animals among zoo institutions through animal programs such as the species survival plans (ssps) in north america and the eeps in europe. there are currently nearly 500 ssp programs, grouped according to taxa for management under a taxon advisory group (tag). according to the american association of zoos and aquariums (aza), each ssp “is responsible for developing a comprehensive population studbook and a breeding and transfer plan which identifies population management goals and recommendations to ensure the sustainability of a healthy, genetically diverse, and demographically varied aza population” (“species survival plan”). ssps are collaborative breeding programs that coordinate between what effectively becomes a “zooland” — a network of all relevant institutions and animals under one management platform. a variety of population management strategies serve both to enhance the sustainability within zooland and to create healthy populations for possible “reintroductions” into the “wild.” such populations of zoo animals are often referred to as insurance populations. zoo veterinarians perform a central role in the elaborate administrative apparatus of accredited zoos. in north america, the aza guidelines are the required industry standard for 230 accredited institutions around the country. according to these irus braverman -saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation 7 guidelines, a veterinary advisor must be assigned to each ssp, while the veterinary advisory group (vag) coordinates between the advisors (“guidelines”). the guidelines identify a vast set of tasks for the veterinary advisor, ranging between responsibility for medical protocols, health provisions, disease prevention, monitoring and reporting, and providing information on conservation programs (ibid.). as i will discuss shortly, the expertise of veterinary advisors can extend beyond that of captive zoo animals to incorporate health care for in situ populations (deem 7). caring for diverse zoo animals. the modern zoo institution prides itself on exhibiting and managing a large variety of animals, and on adequately sustaining such animals in terms of their health and other needs. accordingly, perhaps the most notable feature of the zoo vets’ work is their care for such an incredibly diverse range of species, in what is usually a relatively small urban space. in helmick’s words: “you might see a hummingbird first thing in the morning and an elephant last thing in the afternoon and everything else in between. and you need to know what you’re doing” (personal communication, february 15, 2016). helmick emphasizes how this diversity carries over into medical practice: “we’re the last of the general practitioner. i am an anaesthesiologist, i am a pathologist, i am an internist, i am a surgeon, i am an epidemiologist. i am an ophthalmologist, a cardiologist, and a neurologist” (ibid.). michael adkesson is a zoo vet at the brookfield zoo in chicago. figures 3 through 7 relay the vast variety of animals he deals with on a daily basis, from polar bears through gorillas and penguins to pangolins and grey wolves. “for some animals, it’s very easy,” adkesson tells me, explaining that “with zebras, your equine base is very similar and very solid; for great apes and even some of your smaller primates, it’s [a] very close correlation to human medicines; same thing for tigers and cats and wolves and dogs and that sort of thing.” however, when it comes to aardvarks and kangaroos, he continues, “there’s just not a really close correlation to the domestic animal or the human animal data that provides you with information on how to treat those diseases and what drugs are going to be most effective and how they metabolize those drugs and what dosage is most appropriate” (personal communication, march 15, 2016). leigh clayton, director of animal health and welfare at baltimore’s national aquarium, is the lead vet responsible for the health and wellbeing of 15,000 animals from 800 different species. the challenge, in her words, is “to take facts you know from one species and then apply them to another species” (brogan). clayton explains. for example, how she anaesthetizes, x-rays, and operates on a fish, emphasizing that most fish are not traumatized by the medical processes and go right about their day upon humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 8 returning to their aquariums. the difficult cases are with those fish in large containers who cannot be trained to come to the vet. “schooling fish are hardest to work with as individuals,” she says. octopuses can be challenging, too, she adds (see, e.g., montgomery). figure 3. as part of a wellness examination, adkesson performs an abdominal ultrasound on a polar bear to evaluate organs such as the liver and kidneys for any evidence of disease. courtesy of michael adkesson, may 2016. irus braverman -saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation 9 figure 4. adkesson listens to the heart of a white-bellied tree pangolin as part of a regular veterinary check-up, may 2016. pangolins are rapidly facing extinction in the wild due to illegal hunting and habitat loss. according to adkesson, pangolins in zoos provide an opportunity to better understand the health and physiology of these rarely studied animals, which can in turn help advance sound conservation policies. courtesy of michael adkesson. figure 5: adkesson and veterinary technician examine a mexican grey wolf pup as part of a health check-up, june 2016. the last five survivors of this subspecies were bred in captivity and their progeny reintroduced in 1998. at the beginning of 2017, experts announced that only 113 mexican grey wolves were counted in the wild. courtesy of michael adkesson. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 10 figure 6. adkesson examines the teeth of a silverback western lowland gorilla as part of a preventative healthcare examination, august 2015. zoo veterinarians must be adept in multiple specialty areas of medicine and surgery, including dentistry. dental care and cleaning is part of every standard examination, adkesson tells me. courtesy of michael adkesson. figure 7. adkesson examines the eye of an amur tiger during a routine veterinary examination. courtesy of michael adkesson, january 2013. in addition to the expansive range of medical knowledge that zoo veterinarians must exercise on a daily basis and the safety challenges inherent in treating wild animals, the difficulty of the vets’ work is exacerbated by scant medical knowledge about most irus braverman -saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation 11 wildlife species, which have a short history of individual care by humans. as a result, zoo vets must also be creative. helmick explains: there’s no book on bear neurology. you can find one of dogs and cats and horses, but nobody wrote the book on how to do a reproductive evaluation on a chuckwalla, which is a type of lizard. so filling those gaps, making those inferences from other species, and making those leaps of faith and having a successful outcome — is why i like doing what i am doing. (personal communication, february 15, 2016) one such leap of faith occurs whenever zoo vets must figure out the appropriate medications, and their quantity, for zoo animals. traditionally, humans didn’t treat wild animals with drugs; “drugs were made for humans and domestic animals” (ibid.). there are no allopathic medical pills for elephants or bears. to treat many zoo animals, the vets must thus “compound” drugs — that is, source pharmaceuticals in larger doses and devise other clever ways of dosing for animals under their care. helmick describes a strategy she used for a hippopotamus she treated who suffered from skin infection. her pharmacist “came up with something that we lovingly call hippo balls — ... 50 grams of amoxicillin in a peanut butter ball half the size of my fist, as opposed to 350 small amoxicillin tablets that require darting the animal” (ibid.). at the zoo, safety is always a prime concern (zooland 142-5), adding another layer of complexity to the work of zoo vets. helmick discusses the challenges of ensuring the safety of both zoo animals and human staff and visitors: a follow-up visit on a grizzly bear usually requires some type of immobilization, and that’s a welfare issue for my patient. that’s [also] a safety concern for the staff that i work for. i have to get that animal safely anaesthetized, transferred across the zoo, usually when the public is there [i.e. during working hours], and safely into my hospital, get all my diagnostics, make a treatment plan [so] that i can administer as many treatments as i can under anaesthesia, and [finally] return the animal safely to his bedroom and recover him. (personal communication, february 15, 2016; see, e.g., figures 8 & 9) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 12 figure 8. helmick (left) listens to the heart of an immobilized lion at the woodland park zoo in seattle, washington. “there are inherent safety challenges that a zoo veterinarian must meet when immobilizing and examining a large exotic felid such as this lion, which weighed 178 kilograms,” helmick tells me. “techniques for drug administration that minimize stress to the patient and ensure complete injection of all immobilizing agents often require a significant investment of veterinary and animal care staff time. because immobilization drugs are marketed for smaller domestic dogs and cats, zoo veterinarians often use specialized products that provide the same drugs but in a concentrated form, to minimize the injection volume and ensure complete administration of all immobilizing agents” (email communication, december 20, 2017). photo credit: ryan hawk, woodland park zoo. figure 9. helmick monitors an anesthetized hartman’s mountain zebra (equus zebra hartmannae) during a routine examination at the smithsonian conservation biology institute, front royal, va. she tells me that, “while closely related to the domestic horse, zebras are wild animals and retain wild behaviors and responses even under human care. while a routine examination on a domestic horse can often be accomplished on an awake animal, zebras are dangerous animals and require anaesthesia to collect blood, examine feet, and perform other routine diagnostics, such as palpation. zoo veterinarians must take what they learned about domestic species and learn how to adapt that knowledge to the unique species in their care” (email communication, december 20, 2017). photo credit: dr. budhan pukazhenthi. irus braverman -saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation 13 the zoo vet’s medical knowledge thus draws on and infers from medical knowledge pertaining to humans, domestic animals, and animals in the wild, embodying the interrelations among these various animals and the need for a holistic approach toward caring for all living beings, while at the same time recognizing the differences between them. the range of species that zoo vets must care for, the lack of medical information about many of these species, and the fact that the zoo vet is effectively the last of the general medical practitioners — not to mention that this job is dangerous, short-staffed, and underpaid (and thus also highly gendered) — these factors all exemplify the uniqueness of the zoo vet’s work alongside the peculiarity of the modern zoo institution. welfare for individuals, welfare for species. as medical practitioners, zoo vets have an ethical obligation to care for their animals as individuals. a few questions arise in this context, including what the animal’s best welfare is, who gets to make this decision, and how to balance the welfare of different animals when they are in conflict. lately, additional welfare interests have complicated the picture as the values of individual animal welfare are balanced with less traditional values based on the conservation status of the animal and her population and species. the rationale behind marius’s killing by the copenhagen zoo, for example, was that his mother would benefit from her ability to experience natural reproduction, instead of the use of contraception medications. while such a “breed-and-cull” tactic is used in many northern european zoos, the more widespread strategy for reproductive control is the use of artificial contraception. indeed, this is how north american zoos typically avoid the need to kill larger mammals later down the line, sometimes with a considerable cost to the health of the contracepted animal (zooland 174-7). at the copenhagen zoo — which, like other accredited zoos, operates under the premise that surplus genes are undesirable in captive breeding programs — the giraffe mother’s welfare interests to give birth were valued as higher than the calf’s interest to continue living. who is to decide whose welfare matters more? kelly helmick told me in an interview: “i’m a vet, i’m licensed, and i’m accredited. [so] according to the law[s] that govern my role as a vet, i am the animal welfare expert.” at the same time, “the general public might feel they’re the animal welfare experts” (personal communication, february 15, 2016). the public outcry around marius’s killing is but one visible example of the “great battle of pastorship,” whereby, per michel foucault, each group claims to be the one true caretaker of the (giraffe) flock and its individuals (zooland 20-23). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 14 alongside the traditional individual-focused welfare models, another important normative framework that is emerging in zoos generally, and that is applied by zoo veterinarians in their work in particular, is the perspective of populations, species, and even entire ecological systems. under what is sometimes referred to as the “intrinsic value of nature” approach (see, e.g., callicott; naess), marius’s individual interest in a continued life was configured as falling short of the population’s interest in sustaining its long term genetic diversity, as his genetic makeup was perceived as non-valuable for the sustainability of the zoo population. put differently, whereas the exclusive focus of the veterinary medical world used to be on individual animals, concerns about the sustainability of entire populations are becoming increasingly important. rob hilsenroth, director of the aazv, told me along these lines: “the overall goal is to look at what is best for the species that you’re trying to save” (personal communication, february 15, 2016; my emphasis). according to the advocates of the ecological approach to zoo animal management, focusing too much on the rights and welfare of individual animals can lead to serious problems at the species level, especially for imperiled species. and since such species are comprised of individual members, so this argument goes, increased inbreeding, disease, and ultimate extinction would eventually impact individual animal welfare, too — if not now, then in generations to come. how to evaluate the welfare of animals who belong to endangered species and who are no longer capable of living outside captive institutions, or without intense human management in the wild? such difficult situations for the last members of species in existence who have become “captive for life” are becoming increasingly relevant as existing ecological systems can no longer sustain them (braverman, wild life). their status as the last members of the species matters to the management of their welfare as individuals: managing the last northern white rhino in existence, for example, is different from managing a meerkat, a barn swallow, or any other species defined as “least concern” by the international union for conservation of nature. philosopher ben minteer and ecologist jim collins write in this context: unavoidable animal welfare impacts produced as a result of high-priority and well-designed conservation research and conservation activities involving captive animals will in many cases have to be tolerated to understand the consequences of rapid environmental change for vulnerable wildlife populations in the field.... inevitably, these changes will continue to blur the boundaries of in situ and ex situ conservation programs as a range of management activities are adopted across more or irus braverman -saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation 15 less managed ecological systems increasingly influenced by human activities (49). zoo veterinarians find themselves at the nexus between the conservation interests of species, those of their individual patients, and the limitations of zoological medicine and institutional practices. so, for example, despite the condemnation by the aza of the culling of marius the giraffe, the aazv’s 1998 edition “guidelines for zoo and aquarium veterinary medical programs and veterinary hospitals” already considered that euthanasia “may be necessary for ... [animals] that are surplus to breeding and exhibit needs” (11). the incident at the copenhagen zoo thus highlights the ongoing internal debate within the zoo community, and among zoo veterinarians in particular, about the ethics of caring for individual zoo animals within a conservation framework. welfare hierarchies: domestic, zoo, wild. although the ex situ — in situ divide is increasingly blurring (braverman, wild life), and with it also the distinctions between domestic and wild animals, zoo vets seem to be hanging on to certain categorical distinctions such as that between wild and pet animals. kelly helmick tells me in this context: i do not confuse my pets at home with patients at the zoo. and yet i care deeply for them both and i try to put their interests forward each and every time. but i don’t think people understand that animals serve a purpose ... and [that] we as human beings have a responsibility to those animals whether they’re in the wild, in our homes, or at a zoo. our responsibility to them is different [in each situation]. that’s why we do more for an animal in the zoo than for an animal in the wild, in part because we can, but in part because we’ve taken on the responsibility for that animal — we give it its environment, we provide it with its food, and we darn well better take care of it when it’s not feeling well. (personal communication, february 15, 2016) helmick’s statement highlights both the unique status of zoo animals as existing somewhere between the categories of wild and domestic as well as the corresponding duties and responsibilities by the zoo vets, which also exist somewhere in between: stronger than those toward wild animals but weaker than for pets.2 notably, helmick does not refer to zoo animals by name, something she reserves to pets, instead referring to them as “patients.” the name marius, she points out, was given to the giraffe for internal identification purposes only, and wasn’t intended for use by the public; humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 16 tellingly, the copenhagen zoo’s scientific director never used this name in public presentations (parker). the vets’ guarding and reinforcing of the distinction between pet and wild animals corresponds with the overall mission of zoos to delineate and reinforce the categorical classification of animals. as i wrote elsewhere, “[t]he human need to organize and clarify animals is projected onto the space of the zoo, resulting in the separation of domesticated animals from wild animals” (braverman, zooland 69). the zoo’s guarding of traditional animal categories also goes hand-in-hand with its guarding of notions of wilderness and pristine nature — for what would be the central rationale behind its existence if not to expose zoogoers to wild nature? (ibid.). the difficulties of balancing the various interests and hierarchies among domestic, zoo, and wild settings and animals, especially those who belong to endangered species, are brought home by the following story that helmick tells me. the story focuses on an instance that involved caring for injured wild florida panthers taken from the wild and placed in human care until they were sufficiently functional in the wild. in helmick’s words: i was in florida, [and] we had a lot of animals passing though the hospital. i had a florida panther living in an offsite area managed by the u.s. fish and wildlife service, and i was going out weekly and treating it for fungal dermatitis before returning it to the wild. that was pretty intense. we had five-acre pens at a private facility, where we rehabilitated these animals with wild deer.... we’d make sure they could hunt before we released them back to the wild.... so there are some very intensive elements of population management and it depends on the population and the management that is required at the time. and a lot of the strategies, things that we do to help those animals, come directly from what we learn from the animals we have at the zoo. that’s part of the larger role zoo animals play. (personal communication, february 15, 2016) in this story, the medical knowledge produced by zoo vets in in situ and ex situ contexts inform each other so as to enhance the overall understanding of animals in both contexts, at the same time eroding the rigid demarcation between in situ and ex situ conservation (braverman, wild life). irus braverman -saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation 17 furthermore, helmick’s story demonstrates the calculus underlying the decision to place the wild deer in the panther’s pen, thus serving as a tool for the rehabilitation of the latter and implying that the endangered panther’s life is more valuable than that of the abundant white-tailed deer. in a follow up email communication, helmick outlines her ethical considerations in this regard: the deer cannot escape, [but] neither can the panther. should [the panther] be allowed to starve?... panthers are endangered — wtd [whitetailed deer; ib] are not. wtd are hunted by humans for food and sport. [why is] hunting a deer with skill, weapons, and the use of feeding stations to enhance kill success acceptable, but a “welfare” decision for other humans (vets) to contain that deer so that another predator — this time, the panther — can hunt it within a large space, requiring the panther to exhibit skill and ability, isn’t? does a wtd have the “right” to not be eaten by a panther? does the same wtd have the same right to not be hunted by a human? humans alter panther habitat to build homes and roads and to plant crops.... does the panther only have the “right” to hunt wtd when a human decides that the wtd can “escape” the predator?... what are the ethics of releasing a predator back to the wild without ensuring it has returned sufficiently to a level of health that will allow it to be successful in the wild? should the vet recommend that the panther be fed canned cat food and hope for the best? what are the ethical implications of that? you wouldn’t release a wtd back to the wild if you didn’t asses its ability to run away; you wouldn’t release an eagle back to the wild if you didn’t assess its vision and flight capability; you do not return a predator to the wild until you are sure it can hunt. if you can’t accept that last tenet and the ethical responsibilities that come with it — then you are choosing to let the panther go extinct because of lack of human compassion, presence of human ignorance or bias, or selfishness and an inflated sense of our “ethics.” (email communication, december 16, 2017) evidently, helmick’s everyday work as a zoo vet presents intense ethical deliberations. and although many animal welfare proponents would likely disagree with her conclusions, she does not shy away from identifying and tackling the problematic ethical issues head on. for her, the panther should be fed with captured wild deer for two accumulative reasons: first, because the panther is captive and thus humans have an enhanced responsibility for his welfare (this applies to the deer, too); second, because humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 18 panthers are endangered and thus humans have an additional responsibility to save them, which includes training them to survive in the wild before their reintroduction. constructing and negotiating such biopolitical hierarchies among different wild species and among members of the same species in wild and zoo settings are a routine matter in animal management (braverman, “anticipating endangerment”; law) and at the heart of the zoo vet’s work. zoo veterinarians as conservationists. the shift of zoo animal management in accredited zoos toward conservation is recent (braverman, zooland). like the zoo institution within which they operate, the zoo vet profession, too, has undergone a transformation in the last several decades. hilsenroth describes succinctly: “it’s gone from where we were in the 1950s, where it was mainly emergency medicine, then to preventative medicine, and then [to] sustainability within the zoo populations and, finally, now we’re moving toward the sustainability of animals in situ” (personal communication, february 15, 2016). the transformation, according to hilsenroth, is not only from individual to species but also from ex situ to in situ conservation. generally speaking, zoo vets see themselves as contributing to conservation in three ways. first, they directly participate in conservation in the wild — or in situ conservation. second, they promote scientific knowledge about zoo animal as proxies for animals in the wild, using these animals to create databases, archives, serum banks, and, generally, to further veterinary medicine for the benefit of wild animals and humans alike. third and finally, they purportedly contribute to conservation by reintroducing zoo animals into the wild (in a way, a more extreme form of proxy as reintroductions are performed in order to support wild populations — namely, the zoo animals support in situ conservation by themselves becoming in situ animals). to top off these three contributions, zoo vets also indirectly support conservation by caring for the animals who are then used to educate zoogoers about conservation.3 i will not discuss their role of zoo vets in conservation education here. instead, this section will explore the three more direct contributions of zoo vets to conservation. a growing number of zoo vets dedicate a growing part of their work to veterinary support of conservation in the wild. research veterinarian s.l. deem notes along these lines that, “[i]n addition to the health care provided to captive animals, zoo veterinarians today have a number of roles within in situ conservation projects that ensure the maintenance of healthy and viable free-ranging populations of wildlife” (deem 3). rob hilsenroth further explains that, “to be an aza certified zoo you have to be doing some kind of conservation initiative or funding some kind of conservation irus braverman -saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation 19 initiative somewhere in the world” (personal communication, february 15, 2016). in its 2015 annual report on conservation science, the aza noted that zoos spent over 186 million dollars on field conservation projects in over 120 countries, benefitting more than 700 species, 227 of which listed as endangered or threatened under the endangered species act (2). veterinary medicine is an increasingly important component of the zoos’ in situ conservation initiatives. for example, michael adkesson of the brookfield zoo tells me about his involvement in a marine protected area in peru: “i’ve been working down there since 2007 and am very intimately involved in a conservation program focused around south american fur seals, south american sea lions, and humboldt penguins” (personal communication, march 15, 2016; see figures 10 & 11). such in situ work is often related to a specific zoo exhibit or ex situ conservation initiative, which the zoo vet is already well versed in. hilsenroth explains, for example, that “if your zoo has some orangutans, you might be doing a project over in borneo with the wild orangutans and your vet might be going over there twice a year” (personal communication, february 15, 2016). this way, in situ conservation initiatives simultaneously support and are supported by the zoo’s particular strengths and resources. but working in situ also presents new challenges for zoo vets. one of the more straightforward challenges is that the zoo’s medical resources often cannot be transported to in situ locations. adkesson explains the difficulties of working in remote areas or in developing countries: “without the very advanced equipment while at the zoo,” he says, “it can feel like practicing ... fifty years in the past.” “so it’s a combination of trying to adapt equipment that’s used in a hospital setting into a field setting, to make things run off the batteries, [and to] make things run off a solar panel” (personal communication, february 15, 2016). in addition to the technological challenges, there are also the challenges of treating wild animals in less controlled environments. adkesson explains: with wild animals, that animal needs to wake up from anaesthesia and recover and be able to be right back in the wild in a free-range setting. you don’t necessarily have a lot of follow up care or the opportunity to intervene again, so you’re really trying to do everything as safely and effectively as you possibly can, while also making sure that animal is going to have no long term deleterious effects from [the medical care]. (personal communication, march 15, 2016) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 20 rob hilsenroth summarizes the differences between the work of zoo vets in and ex situ, or in-zoo. at the end of the day, he tells me “in situ vet work is much more focused on the population health of a given area,” while in-zoo vet work focuses more “on the health of that individual animal per se” (personal communication, march 15, 2016). figure 10. adkesson tells me. here, adkesson examines the health of a humboldt penguin in january 2017. his expertise with this species in zoos has inspired him to lead conservation programs in peru for over a decade. “frequently, zoo veterinarians are able to use the knowledge and skills they gain working with animals under professional care to benefit those in the wild,” adkesson tells me (personal communication, november 2017). courtesy of michael adkesson. figure 11. adkesson examines two wild south american sea lions immobilized at punta san juan, peru as part of a health assessment project to aid the conservation of this locally endangered marine mammal, november 2015. adkesson says that, “the expertise that zoo veterinarians have developed working with animals in captivity has prepared them to safely anesthetize animals in the wild for this type of work. these animals had samples collected to assess general health, disease status, and toxicant exposure. they were also outfitted with a satellite tracking tag to determine their movements in the ocean” (personal communication, november 2017). courtesy of michael adkesson. irus braverman -saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation 21 alongside the zoo professionals who are applying their ex situ-based knowledge in situ, the zoo animals themselves at times serve as stand-ins for their conspecifics in the wild. the role of zoo vets in this context is to further scientific knowledge about their zoo animals as a way of contributing to the accumulation of knowledge about wild animals at large. indeed, according to the zoo vets i spoke with for this project, collecting data about zoo animals is important not only in order to better manage zoo populations, but also to better understand their wild counterparts, thereby assisting with the in situ conservation of these wild animals. helmick comments, accordingly, on how the work of zoo vets both in situ and ex situ supports and enhances the understanding of individual animal husbandry and population management. in her words, having a “zoo keeper staff that’s knowledgeable and informed about welfare indicators they need to be looking for, having those conversations, applying best knowledge—that’s going to help some animal in the wild or populations in the wild at some point” (personal communication, february 15, 2016). research and data collection that travels the in situ — ex situ divide has already yielded important benefits, helmick tells me. her strongest example is the west nile virus. “it was a zoo vet pathologist who first identified this outbreak,” she notes, explaining that the serum samples that she collected in 1982 proved critical for developing the tests used across multiple species. “we helped provide the necessary material so they could validate this test across hundreds of species. it’s still the test they use today. we didn’t know we would need that sample when we collected it in 1982, but we knew that one day, that sample from that captive animal was going to serve a purpose for some wild animal or some other program elsewhere” (personal communication, february 15, 2016). through both data and serum, medical knowledge about zoo animals has seeped into and informed other fields of medical knowledge. “health connects all species on the planet,” tufts veterinary medicine dean philip kosch declared in a symposium on conservation medicine (norris 7; see also the one health approach, as explained by veterinarian alexander travis). much of the focus at the symposium was on the complex problems of emerging diseases. “there are almost no examples of emerging wildlife diseases not driven by human environmental change,” a disease ecologist reported. “and few human emerging diseases don’t include some domestic animal or wildlife component” (ibid.). proponents of conservation medicine argue, accordingly, that “just as an ecological perspective can aid health workers in understanding the mechanisms of disease, adopting a medical model can benefit conservationists” (ibid.). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 22 reintroductions. the third contribution of zoo vets to conservation and a locus of tensions between welfare and conservation is the complex process of animal reintroductions from captive to in situ locations. the idea behind zoo animal reintroductions, and a central conservation-based argument by zoo experts in support of housing animals in zoos and aquariums today, is that zoos serve as insurance populations, a source for captive members of endangered or extinct species to be reintroduced and restored in the wild (braverman, wild life 125-143). reintroductions have produced some notable conservation successes in recent decades, including the recovery of the arabian oryx, the black-footed ferret, and the california condor (minteer and collins 44; see figure 12). “it is one thing to evaluate captive-breeding programs designed to provide a steady supply of charismatic animals for zoo display,” minteer and collins write. “it is another thing to assess those activities with the goal of recovering wildlife populations threatened in the field because of accelerating environmental change” (47). for these authors, the second instance will “ultimately compel us to rethink our responsibilities to safeguard declining species and promote ecosystem integrity and health in an increasingly dynamic environment” (48). figure 12. helmick performs an abdominal ultrasound on an anesthetized black-footed ferret (mustela nigripes) at the smithsonian conservation biology institute, front royal, va. the black-footed ferret is one of the most endangered mammals in north america and part of a captive breeding program that reintroduces offspring to the wild. helmick tells me that, “maintaining the health of breeding individuals as well as ensuring healthy offspring for wild release is one aspect of zoo veterinary contributions to species conservation.” photo credit: dr. budhan pukazhenthi. irus braverman -saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation 23 but moving living organisms to new environments, even those perceived as natural or original, is risky. while much of my past research focused on risks that emerge from the training regimes designed for zoo animals undertaking this transition, the zoo vet seems to be more concerned with biosafety risks — namely, the transmission of foreign diseases and parasites. the paramount importance of biosafety in the work of the zoo vet can be gleaned from the following quote from a veterinary handbook: “the input of veterinarians in reintroduction is paramount. disease is a major risk factor in captive wild animal management. reintroduction of captive-bred individuals in the wild could have potentially catastrophic effects when you consider the possible dissemination and risk of an epizootic disease wiping out a population” (kelly, stack & harley 165). the myriad concerns regarding reintroduction practices have also resulted in an intensified level of regulation in this arena. for example, in quarantine and health screening protocols for wildlife prior to translocation and release into the wild, prominent veterinarian and founder and first chair of the iucn ssc veterinary specialist group, michael woodford, states: “it is now widely recognized by wildlife veterinarians that every wild creature that is the subject of a translocation must not be regarded as just a single animal but rather as a package containing an assortment of potentially dangerous viruses [and] bacteria ... any of which may become pathogenic in a new situation, involving stresses [to] individuals in a changed environment” (7). this approach is holistic not only in that it emphasizes the interconnections between different forms of life, but also for highlighting that what looks like an individual animal is in fact an entire ecosystem, what others have also referred to as a “holobiont” (margulis and fester). conclusion. my article has explored the changing role of the zoo veterinarian in contemporary zoos, with a particular focus on north america, contemplating what these changes may teach us about the shifting management of zoo animals toward conservation. at a time of rapid transformation of both captive and wild settings, the role of the zoo veterinarian is also undergoing dramatic changes. whereas traditionally, the vet’s main concern was the welfare of individual zoo animals, it has expanded in recent decades to include not only the diversity and sustainability of zoo populations, but also the health of individuals and populations in the wild. the expansion of medical knowledge, especially about disease and its prevention, and the development of complex and integrative in situ — ex situ population management strategies, are reflected in and reinforced by the changes in the zoo veterinarian’s practice. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 24 centering on zoo vets, this article has attempted to capture the complexity of animalhuman relationship at the nexus of wild and captive settings. the study of zoo vets is especially important during this precarious time, whereby the continued livelihood of many wild animals and species in their natural ecosystems is threatened. the zoo vet is at the frontline of caring for and reproducing medical knowledge about such imperiled animals, both as individuals and as populations, and must therefore make difficult decisions about their life, death, and welfare under constantly evolving and rapidly changing conditions. comparing and inferring between the medical conditions of different types of animals and operating in multiple settings, the zoo vet’s mostly solitary practices necessitate a complex biopolitical calculus. this article has only begun to reveal the biopolitics that define the zoo vet’s work, calling for further in-depth explorations in this direction. notes 1. notably, the awa does not apply to animal taxa such as birds and reptiles. for the complex and often insufficient web of law, standards, and guidelines that apply to different zoo animals in different contexts, see braverman, zooland, chapter 4. 2. the distinction helmick makes is not based on the type of animal but rather on her location and setting and on the human responsibilities that emerge thereof. in other words, for the vet, a (pet) fish is not a (wild) fish is not a(n aquarium) fish. 3. contested by animal rights advocates and welfarists, zoos justify their continued existence also by claiming that their programs educate the general public about the importance of wildlife conservation. enabling intimacy with exotic species, zoo animals thus serve as ambassadors for educating the public about their conspecifics in the wild (braverman, zooland 58, 74). works cited aza. 2015 annual report on conservation and science: highlights. web. aazv. (n.d.). “about us.” web. aazv. bylaws and strategic plan, 2012. aazv. guidelines for veterinary advisory group, 2001. web. irus braverman -saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation 25 aazv. guidelines for zoo and aquarium veterinary medical programs and veterinary hospitals, 1998. aazv. guidelines for zoo and aquarium veterinary medical programs and veterinary hospitals, 5th ed., 2009. aza. species survival plan programs (2017). web. bekoff, marc. “killing healthy zoo animals is wrong—and the public agrees.” national geographic. march 28, 2014. accessed january 5, 2018. web. berkovits, anette libeskind. confessions of an accidental zoo curator. tenth planet press, 2017. braverman, irus. “anticipating endangerment: the biopolitics of threatened species lists.” biosocieties 12.1 (2016): 132-157. _____. wild life: the institution of nature. stanford up, 2015. _____. zooland: the institution of captivity. stanford up, 2012. _____. “zoo registrars: a bewildering bureaucracy.” duke environmental law & policy forum 21.1 (2010): 165-206. brogan, jacob. “how does an aquarium veterinarian work?” slate. may 22, 2017. accessed january 5, 2018. net. callicott, j. baird. “animal liberation: a triangular affair.” environmental ethics 2 (1980): 311-328. cole, linda. “a quick history of veterinary medicine.” canidae. november 4, 2014. accessed january 5, 2018. net. deem, s. l. “role of the zoo veterinarian in the conservation of captive and free-ranging wildlife.” international zoo yearbook 41.1 (2007): 3–11. grazian, david. american zoo: a sociological safari. princeton up, 2015. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 26 eriksen, lars, and maeve kennedy. “marius the giraffe killed at copenhagen zoo despite worldwide protests.” the guardian. feb. 9, 2014. accessed january 5, 2018. net. fowler, murray e. a history of the american association of zoo veterinarians. american association of zoo veterinarians, 2006. accessed january 5, 2018. web. holst, bengt. “euthanasia of a 2 year old male giraffe at copenhagen zoo.” zoo. may 15, 2014. accessed january 5, 2018. web. kelly, paul, david stack, and jessica harley. “a review of the proposed reintroduction program for the far eastern leopard (panthera pardus orientalis) and the role of conservation organizations, veterinarians, and zoos.” topics in companion animal medicine 28.4 (2013): 163-166. law, john. “care and killing: tensions in veterinary practice.” heterogeneities.net. march 20, 2008. accessed january 5, 2018. web. mclaughlin, eliott c., and peter wilkinson. “zoo official on marius the giraffe: conservation isn’t always clean.” cnn. feb. 10, 2014. accessed january 5, 2018. web. margulis, lynn, and rené fester, r., eds. symbiosis as a source of evolutionary innovation: speciation and morphogenesis. mit press, 1991. minteer, ben a., and james p. collins. “ecological ethics in captivity: balancing values and responsibilities in zoo and aquarium research under rapid global change.” institute for laboratory animal research journal 54.1 (2013): 41-51. mcculloch stephen, and michael j. reiss. marius the giraffe and euthanasia of zoo animals.” veterinary ethics: navigating tough cases. siobhan mullan and anne fawcett, eds. 5m publishing, 2017. montgomery, sy. the soul of an octopus: a surprising exploration into the wonder of consciousness. astria, 2015. morell, virginia. “killing of marius the giraffe exposes myths about zoos.” national geographic. feb. 13, 2014. accessed january 5, 2018. web. irus braverman -saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation 27 naess, arne. “the deep ecological movement: some philosophical aspects.” philosophical inquiry 8.1-2 (1986): 10-31. parker, i. “killing animals at the zoo.” the new yorker. january 10, 2017. accessed january 5, 2018. web. norris, scott. “a new voice in conservation: conservation medicine seeks to bring ecologists, veterinarians, and doctors together around a simple unifying concept: health.” bioscience 51.1 (2001): 7-12. rcvs. “knowledge” (n.d.). accessed january 5, 2018. web. spelman, lucy h., and ted y. mashima, eds. the rhino with glue-on shoes: and other surprising stories of zoo vets and their patients. delacorte press, 2008. travis, alexander j. “domestic dogs, gene repair, and the ‘one health’ approach.” gene editing, law, and the environment: life beyond the human. irus braverman, ed. routledge, 2017. 153-168. the veterinary student. “history of veterinary medicine.” iowa state university veterinarian 2.1 (1939): 6-10. accessed january 5, 2018. web. wilkinson, lise. animals and disease. cambridge up, 1992. woodford, michael h., ed. quarantine and health screening protocols for wildlife prior to translocation and release into the wild. published jointly by iucn veterinary specialist group, oie, care for the wild, uk, and the european association of wildlife veterinarians, switzerland, 2000. accessed january 5, 2018. web. microsoft word koncul h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 reviews ana koncul beasts, savages, and beyond michael lundblad, the birth of a jungle: animality in progressive-era u.s. literature and culture. oxford: oxford up, 2013. 240 pp. $65.00. the beast, the wolf, the savage, the octopus: all of these well-known tropes have marked fin de siècle literature in the united states. in his book the birth of a jungle: animality in progressive-era u.s. literature and culture michael lundblad does more than trace the historical emergence of the discourse of the jungle in american literary and cultural texts between 1894 and 1914, the period known as the progressive era: he examines the texts that resist it. the birth of a jungle is an invaluable contribution to the fields of animality and advocacy, the archaeology of humane society, as well as the study of human-animal relations in the us literature. the body of texts lundblad uses to illustrate his hypothesis renders the discourse of the jungle comprehensible to readers unfamiliar with it. the book is therefore accessible to a wider audience than the community of scholars focused on ana koncul — “beasts, savages, and beyond” 159 american literature and culture of the progressive era period, posthumanism, gender and sexuality studies, or freudian psychoanalysis. to support his argument that the period also produced texts that defy the darwinistfreudian jungle and dwell on alternative formulations of human violence and sexuality, lundblad brings together works by henry james, jack london, frank norris, herbert spencer, andrew carnegie, e. r. burroughs and upton sinclair. these texts, lundblad argues, reflect a major shift within the discourse of the jungle — impulses that had been seen within a protestant framework as a devilish, lustful, and evil came to be viewed as natural instincts of the human animal. in the discourse of the jungle the behavior of actual animals represents natural human instincts for violence in the name of survival, on the one hand, and heterosexuality in the name of reproduction, on the other. the alternatives open up possibilities for other characteristics that might be signified by animality. the texts that have contributed to the construction of the discourse of the jungle commonly employ the aforementioned tropes in order to identify wild animal behavior with natural human instincts for competition, reproduction, violence, exploitation, and heterosexuality, as well as with national drives to be the fittest individual or the most civilized nation. as such, the discourse of the jungle heavily draws upon a darwinistfreudian heritage. through the attentive reading of the texts from the period that resist the discourse of jungle, lundblad emphasizes both their significance and the complexity of their positions, often neglected by current scholarship. understanding the historical and cultural circumstances in the us throughout the progressive era is of paramount importance for understanding why the discourse of the jungle became hegemonic, as well as how the construction of animality was associated with unrelated contexts such as us race relations. through the description of the details of theodore roosevelt’s governance (and particularly the nature fakers controversy) and of how social darwinism was rejected, lundblad emphasizes that racial hierarchies had the potential to construct and to be constructed by representations of animality within the discourse of the jungle. during the period in question, darwinian thinking achieved hegemony in the us. “unnatural” (homosexual) desire was seen as a threat to darwinian thought, rather than to god's will. together with freudian psychoanalysis, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 160 particularly its naturalization of animal instincts and of heterosexuality, lundblad sees darwinism as the foundation of the laws of the jungle. by examining the epistemology of the jungle, lundblad invites readers to consider another shift in attention, from sexual acts to sexual identities, reminiscent of foucault's famous claim that the species of the homosexual had not been born before the end of the 19th century. lundblad initially does so through a close reading of henry james’s “the beast in the jungle” and by relying on eve k. sedgwick’s “epistemology of the closet.” the author sees the figure of the beast as a signifier of queer desire in general, and goes on to argue that the internalized beast becomes the law of the jungle. lundblad examines the trope of the wolf species through a close reading of jack london’s “the sea wolf,” which is significant because it represents a movement from james’s beast toward an embodied individual character. for lundblad the novel represents an alternative reading of class-constructed sexuality and questions the submission to middle class constructions of heteronormativity. even so, the author insists, the narrative constructs “masculinity as embracing the primitive in an overcivilized world” (61). within the discourse of the jungle, animality is linked to heteronormativity first by following a freudian line of thought, but also through the assumption that heterosexual intercourse in animals is necessarily a model of natural heterosexuality in humans. representations of animals then become legible signifiers of human sexuality. london's work is particularly interesting, since it questions how the homoerotic content of interaction between men in a novel constructs (or challenges) the epistemology of a different kind of jungle (51). the author draws upon the depiction of the wolf on the ship and the potential homoeroticism he is involved in, and yet his narrative structure affirms normative heterosexuality by introducing maud, another character whose identity transcends conventional conceptions of gender roles. thus, lundblad invokes judith butler’s opposition between gender performativity and gender essence to conclude that transvestism’s potential to reveal cultural anxieties should not be neglected. besides highlighting the naturalization of heterosexuality within the discourse of the jungle, lundblad questions the assumption that animal representations can only construct intra-human sexualities. he contrasts a freudian psychoanalytical reading to deleuze and guattari’s critique of the oedipus complex, as well as to derrida’s l’animot. ana koncul — “beasts, savages, and beyond” 161 lundblad draws upon the posthumanities scholarship of wolfe, haraway, and derrida to claim that the term bestiality is just as limiting as the umbrella term animal. readers’ attention is drawn to the problematic histories of animalizing animals by representing them as driven by instincts, and lundblad calls for a history of animality that would focus on its cultural link with human oppression and violence. by effectively scanning the entire body of posthumanist scholarship that deals with what marchesini refers to as alterita non-humane, lundblad proposes animality studies as a discipline that will be more faithful to its research object than animal studies are. animality studies for lundblad would not only widen the scope of inquiry through the usage of a less limited term, but would also deal with actual animals and serve as advocacy for nonhuman animals’ priorities. another aspect of the darwinist-freudian framework, the survival of the fittest, is the theme of the third chapter, “the octopus and the corporation,” in which lundblad analyzes monstrous animality in spencer, carnegie and norris, particularly those representations of corporations that resist the discourse of the jungle. the metaphors are well-known: the corporation’s far-reaching tentacles are prepared to attack and abolish their prey in pursuit of profit, and the bull market has to be tamed. spencer’s and carnegie’s writings are early examples of this discourse, and their narratives have yet to be animalized, even though the monstrosity has already been condemned. a detailed description of frank norris’s the octopus illustrates the idea that corporations can be both monstrous and indifferent, but never subject to controllable behaviors nor explicable motivations, which would be the case in the discourse of jungle. the animalization of the market in spencer and carnegie is heavily influenced by christian discourse and social darwinist economic terms. in addition to justifying competition as “the survival of the fittest instinct” (87), spencer and carnegie use the tropes of a bear and a bull to signify the behavior of the market as a whole, rather than that of individual participants. lundblad invites readers to consider the taming of an increasingly animalized market. spencer’s view of society as an organism and the translation of individualism into the economic rhetoric of the “rising tide that lifts all boats” (89) used the social darwinist motto of survival of the fittest to justify exploitation, and caused the fading of christian morality. thus, violence became another expression of natural instinct, and the ability to control it the marker of class identity. textual representations of violence caused by instinct functioned to delineate humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 162 class boundaries. the relationship between animals and economic ferociousness indicates how capitalism in the progressive era exploited the logic of the jungle. the third chapter frames the construction of corporations as resisting the discourse of the jungle, in which wolfish predators exploit economic niches and international companies are driven by the instinct for survival in the market just like beasts in the jungle. the next chapter problematizes representations of real animals in the working class figures of frank norris’s the octopus and upton sinclair’s the jungle. lundbland proposes that these representations were more likely to be animalized in a darwinistfreudian sense than that of the corporation. a significant problem in these texts is emphasized by the author: of all economic classes, the working class is constructed as the most animalized, and the different construction of the nature of the beast in more privileged characters bears traces of residual christian discourse. according to lundblad norris’s novel represents “the crisis of faith in the explanatory power of the christian world view and displays a resistance to the growing hegemony of darwinistfreudian animality” (98). the privileged are able to resist being driven by animal instinct thanks to christian morality. working class characters, by contrast, are essentialized as beings capable of acting only according to the violent drive for survival. the scenes of violence in the octopus lundblad sees as illustrations of how animality defines both the nature of class identity and the nature of violence during the progressive era. another aspect of the threat of class violence is seen in the reading of the public spectacle of the electrocution of elephant topsy at coney island, “a moral holiday” (94) in which “hierarchies overturned and penalties were suspended” (94). lundblad sees the elephant's body as a representation of the working class, and as another example of the addition of aggressive impulses to freudian natural sexual drives. he also notes that the discourse of jungle is not necessarily limited to society’s lower strata. it evolves into a hegemonic discourse due to its ability to describe the behavior of all classes and of every attempt of social reform. the other race is also seen as driven by violent impulses in the literature of the progressive era. lundblad closely analyzes the representations of debauched africanamerican workers in the jungle and the octopus. the next chapter, titled “the evolution of race: archaeology of a humane society. animality, savagery, blackness,” explores why the discourse of the jungle makes it easier to imagine white men as descendants of animals than of “contemporary barbarians.” in this chapter lundblad ana koncul — “beasts, savages, and beyond” 163 examines the discourse of humane reform, which was constructed simultaneously with the justification of lynching through the myth of the black rapist. the birth of a humane society has its roots in christian notions of duty towards helpless creatures. the 19th century is marked by the emergence of numerous foundations, organizations, and laws against animal abuse, cruelty, and negligence, alongside the notion that to be human means having the ability to restrain one’s primal instincts. heat of passion – the inability to resist animal instincts – was introduced into juridical discourse as a mean of defense. this flexible discourse was employed for the purpose of claiming superiority over nonwhite human races, and reinforcing the logic that claims that the higher evolutionary stage of the more civilized groups grants them the privilege to treat other races humanely. the white race was therefore seen as the only one capable of limiting and avoiding the inhumane treatment of black savages and animals. interestingly, in contrast with white men’s interest in getting in touch with their primal instincts, black men attempted to distance themselves from the trope of the black rapist and from the general construction of their animality. as a result, lundblad writes, whiteness has been seen as associated with animality rather than with savagery. lundblad thus concludes that within darwinist-freudian discourse, savages have remained stuck in the totem and taboo stage and are in need of external prohibition, instead of internalization. finally, the author examines what is probably the most popular fictional figure of the jungle discourse of the 20th century, e. r. burroughs’ tarzan, in order to discuss the displaced representation of both us domestic and foreign race relations. lundblad emphasizes the novel’s disruption of evolutionary logic, and argues that not only can savagery and animality be distinguished, but also that animality has the potential to be elevated above savagery “in a disavowal of the evolutionary link between (black) savagery and (white) humanity” (139). in addition to examining the imperialist and racist implications of the famous work, lundblad pays special attention to possibilities of reading the animals as actual animals, not only as constructions of them. thus, tarzan’s supposedly inherent class and racial superiority distinguishes him both from animals and from the animalized white, the working class sailor, and so his cruelty is constructed as natural. tarzan, finally, seems to resist the common hierarchies of gender, colonial status, and race, which are embedded in the freudian primitive. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 164 lundblad concludes with several examples that emphasize the inconsistencies and complexity of the constructions of animality and of the discourse of the jungle at the turn of the century. he invites the reader to reconsider the relevance of haraway's, bekoff's, and derrida’s work, as well as of the potential of animality studies to reveal additional grounds for resisting hegemonic associations of the animal with instincts for heterosexuality and violence. the necessity of resistance to hegemonic associations is of inevitable importance, as the dominant discourse justifies and normalizes unchecked capitalist expansion and the repression of radical otherness. the darwinist-freudian framework has reoccurred persistently in innumerable cultural texts during the entire twentieth century. the discourse of the jungle has also flourished, widely permeating contemporary culture. alerting us to the importance of recognizing subtle deflections from the discourse of the jungle is perhaps the greatest value of lundblad’s book, as it issues a call for a more thorough reading that can provide displaced perspectives that subvert the dominant darwinist-freudian appropriations of sexuality and violence, as well as providing a model for further analyses of other, especially contemporary, incarnations of the discourse of the jungle. works cited marchesini, roberto. “alterity and the non-human.” humanimalia, volume 1, number 2 – spring 2010. microsoft word crenshaw-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 9:1 estée crenshaw the domestic chicken as legal fiction: cruelty for profit beauty always takes place in the particular. — elaine scarry cruelty, on the other hand, prefers abstraction. — jonathan safran foer all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. — george orwell introduction. in his well-known foreword “nomos and narrative,” legal scholar and activist robert m. cover states, “we inhabit a nomos — a normative universe. we constantly create and maintain a world of right and wrong, of lawful and unlawful, of valid and void” (4). occasionally, when the balance of right and wrong, lawful and unlawful, is in question, legal fictions are used to provide a scaffolding to notions that cannot support themselves. these legal fictions provide an explanation when, as cover states, “every narrative is insistent in its demand for its prescriptive point, its moral” (5). the notion of chickens as food has become ingrained as a mundanity in our current normative universe, but this mundanity has not come about without pointed effort and intention. it was created and maintained for a particular goal: profit. as more and more of the cruelty behind chicken agriculture becomes visible to the public, questions of cruelty arise that demand investigation of the legislation supporting this widespread operation. by examining closely, it becomes apparent that chicken agriculture is held together by legal fictions implicit in the laws that keep it going. while these fictions have not been explicitly or commonly addressed in court, they exist within the implicit claims certain laws make regarding chicken intelligence, sentience, and volition. when i speak of legal fictions, i am referring to these implicit fictions made within the language of the law. to begin an investigation on the legal fictions surrounding the domestic chicken, it may be helpful to evoke precedent of how legal fictions have been used in the past to similarly gain profit through the legitimization of cruelty. one of the most notorious of these fictions is the three-fifths compromise. the three-fifths compromise is often portrayed as a scheme of race — and it was, but only partially. more so, this compromise was set to establish the wealth and representation of each state. the clause states: representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 2 respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons. in 1863, when the fourteenth amendment was reconstructed to supersede the threefifths compromise, certain beliefs about black individuals that enabled the three-fifths ratio were in the process of being dismantled as well. implicit in the three-fifths ratio is the belief that black individuals are inferior to white individuals because of their different skin color. many similar beliefs of inferiority were used to justify the slave trade in america. however, the end result of these false beliefs was not merely racism, it was profit. the economy of the american south revolved around slaves — so much so that a newspaper editor from georgia wrote that “negro slavery is the south and the south is negro slavery” (cited in faust). the fight to keep slavery in america could be said to have been more about economics than it was about race. these false beliefs that enabled the three-fifths compromise, however, were legal fictions contrived to justify unjust actions. the notion that black individuals were inferior to white individuals in intelligence or capabilities gave justification for counting them as only three-fifths of their white countrymen. because blacks were legally considered three-fifths of a person, they required fewer taxes for slave owners to keep around (“the three-fifth compromise”). while this justification was built on fictions, it was successfully used to enable profit during the enactment of the three-fifths compromise and for many years after. following the fourteenth amendment continued years of persecution, lower pay for black individuals, and racism that still remains today. however, in 1863, once the legal fictions of blacks as inferior to whites were legally recognized as invalid, the three-fifths compromise could no longer be justified and these legal fictions lost all bearing, providing a space for more just legislations to be made. what makes a legal fiction valid, however, has less to do with its truthfulness than with how the legal fiction is being used. legal fictions are the act of “believing or assuming something not true is true,” and they are used to avoid “issues where a new situation comes up against the law” (“what is legal fiction?”). when congress passed a direct tax on slaves, “the first genuine direct taxes in american history,” the three-fifths compromise helped ease the economic strain this new tax had on slave owners (“the three-fifth compromise”). in l. l. fuller’s well-known account of legal fictions in the december 1930 illinois law review, he states that legal fictions differ from lies “by the fact that [they are] not intended to deceive” (367). he states that a fiction is “adopted by estée crenshaw -the domestic chicken as legal fiction: cruelty for profit 3 its author with knowledge of its falsity.” fuller acknowledges that this does not mean that an author disbelieves his or her fiction, but that there is an element of disbelief or “partial untruth” in it (368). in other words, there is reason for the author to believe it; the author has something to gain from the fiction being seen as truth. legal fictions are rendered invalid, however, when the “partial untruth” is revealed to be immoral or unjust. in sidney t. miller’s the reasons for some legal fictions, he notes that rules governing legal fictions state that “no legal fiction shall be allowed to work an injury” (625). the fourteenth amendment recognized the injustice in the three-fifths ratio and claimed protections and privileges for all individuals. legal fictions continue to exist in many spheres today. some commonly used fictions include corporations as persons and adopted parents. while certain functions of legal fictions may be essential to the legal process, there are many ways in which legal fictions have been and are currently misused for commercial gain. one sphere that is dense with legal fictions is animal agriculture. many of the legal fictions in animal agriculture are used, similarly to the use of the three-fifths ratio, to gain profit. in an industry wherein manufacturing costs and market demand are high,1 the balance between animal welfare and efficient slaughter often favors the latter. to support the need for quick and efficient slaughter, legal fictions have been used, in part, to curb punishment of lawbreakers and to maintain traditional practices within the industry that help ensure profit2 not unlike how the three-fifths compromise used the legal fiction of black individuals as inferior to white individuals to justify a decrease in the tax on slaves. many animal rights activists are unsatisfied with current legislation used to justify what they perceive as criminal behavior (more often: cruelty) performed for profit. the widespread and ongoing protests of animal rights activists give reason to examine the laws surrounding animal agriculture to better understand if and how they solicit legal fictions to enable cruelty for profit. my argument suggests that the legal fictions used within animal agriculture in the united states of america (and potentially elsewhere), specifically those relating to chickens, are currently used to “work an injury,” which should render these fictions invalid within the law. it should be noted that i do not intend to examine every law surrounding animal agriculture; rather, i aim to create a theoretical framework for which these laws can be understood and examined—through which individuals and organizations can address further legislative needs as pertaining to all aspects of animal agriculture. in order to more thoroughly investigate this topic, and because the entirety of animal agriculture law could not be accurately represented in the span of this article, i have narrowed my findings to those related to chickens—an iconic animal in animal agriculture — and, more particularly, chicken legislation within humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 4 the united states.3 because the united states is currently one of the largest chicken producing countries in the world, an examination of the federal and state laws surrounding chicken agriculture can provide a model for possible legal fictions found in chicken agriculture worldwide.4 chickens in law and life. the notion of chickens as a source of food has become part of what cover calls the “normative universe” — society’s cultural narratives of what are legal, rational, and commonplace (4). but the notion of chickens as food hasn’t always been the predominant mentality toward chickens. “in just over a century chickens have been transformed from birds revered for their bravery, fortitude and devotion to parenthood, to the least respected and most manipulated beings on the planet.... in modern societies these birds have become de-natured, de-personalized and even deanimalized” (potts 139). chickens have occupied a space in human culture throughout history. however, the variance of chickens’ social ranking in human culture is vast: “chickens have been worshipped as the representatives of deities, and persecuted as the conduits of evil” (55). many cultures hold stories, superstitions, traditions, and activities based around what is now the domestic chicken. among these, and perhaps among the earliest of these, is the relationship between the chicken and the creation of the world. myths of the chicken egg as an incubated universe or as a creator come in various forms, from egypt’s thoth to china’s p’an ku. the philosophical question, “which came first, the chicken or the egg?” has been a popular debate since aristotle’s day. these and other myths place the chicken on a pedestal of life and divinity. such placement “gave chickens immunity from being eaten” (67). the popular tradition of coloring eggs has been done for “thousands of years and in myriad cultures,” to represent life, the inevitable, happiness, and rebirth (60). these traditions were largely based on the availability and timing of eggs. in ancient europe, early representations of easter included chicken eggs because springtime was the few months of the year when eggs were abundant (58). now eggs are commonly available year-round in most places, occupying their own section of the grocery store. similarly, what eggs represent has shifted from mythic ideas, such as life and rebirth, to something more mundane and ordinary, namely food. though chickens have endured various functions in human society, from religious rituals to cockfighting entertainment,5 the widespread shift to the use of chickens as a source of food is largely thanks to twentieth century “development and expansion of industrialized farming and poultry capitalism” (potts 18). chickens are iconic in the realm of animal agriculture not only because of their prevalence in human history, but also because of the intense demand for chicken meat. the numbers are striking: “99 estée crenshaw -the domestic chicken as legal fiction: cruelty for profit 5 percent of all land animals slaughtered are farmed birds,” resulting in over “50 billion chickens killed for meat each year” (foer, 109; potts 139). before tyson foods,6 the world’s leading chicken meat provider, and before a series of developments by farmers, geneticists, politicians, and entrepreneurs to procure the ideal chicken, early, and often inaccurate, scientific discoveries of chicken intellect and emotion helped pave the way for justification of the ongoing and widespread slaughter that would ensue (potts 149). it was once more commonly known that chickens possessed astounding learning capabilities. “the brelands’ chicken shows in the 1950s in the usa were highly popular, demonstrating that chickens could be trained to perform complex and reliable behaviors” (hazel et al.). however, well-known biases among chicken experts, such as “small-brain fallacy” and the oversimplification of instinct, misled the mainstream narrative of chicken intelligence and emotional behavior and provided the perfect climate for legal fictions to be implemented (potts 3135). because this false information has for so long supported the use of legal fictions, acknowledging current findings of chicken intelligence, sentience, and volition7 is essential to unmask the legal fictions used to justify chicken treatment within animal agriculture. in her paper “thinking chickens: a review of cognition, emotion, and behavior in the domestic chicken,” lori marino argues: “unlike many other birds, chickens are categorized as a commodity, devoid of authenticity as a real animal with an evolutionary history and phylogenetic context. thus, arguably, perceptions of chickens shape their use as commodities which, in turn, then reinforces those original perceptions.” it has been shown that “more positive attitudes to animals may include a greater consideration of their welfare” (hazel et al.). furthermore, a recent study showed a positive shift in perception of chickens when individuals were asked to interact with them through training the chickens to perform various tricks. participants who completed the study filled out a survey wherein they agreed that chickens “are intelligent, and have different personalities” and have “the ability to experience affective states” (hazel et al.). while chicken intelligence, sentience, and volition has been known for decades, it has been largely ignored in legislation — or rather, masked — to grant chicken abusers legislative power. the need for legal fictions in animal agriculture is best explained by c. k. ogden in benthan’s theory of fictions: “a fiction of law may be defined as a willful falsehood, having for its object the stealing of legislative power, by and for hands which durst not, or could not, openly claim it; and, but for the delusion thus produced, could not exercise it” (qtd. in moglen). the use of legal fictions ensures that legislation is unable to fully prosecute the animal agriculture industry. it humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 6 provides a loophole through which abusive farm managers can gather profit at the expense of animal welfare. cruelty in legislation. to begin my examination of legal fictions within chicken agriculture, the act of cruelty must first be examined. by definition, cruelty is an act that presupposes certain attributes of the object being acted upon. first, existence or, more simply, life. and second, sentience or feeling. one cannot be cruel to a nonliving, nonfeeling being. it is impossible to be truly cruel to a rug. you can tear, stomp, or neglect a rug, but this is not cruelty in the true sense because the rug is not alive and it cannot feel. the third, and last, presupposition i will address is that cruelty assumes an individual (having volition to act for oneself). while it is possible to enact cruelty upon a group of beings, that cruelty is experienced on an individual basis and cannot be abstracted to assume a collective experience. chicken agriculture legislation in the united states assumes the position that chickens are non-existent (or nonliving), unfeeling (or things), and non-volitional (or collective) beings. legislation assumes these positions by neglecting to establish protective federal and state laws, by enforcing minimal punishments for lawbreakers, and by accepting traditional practices within the industry. my goal is not to examine every instantiation of chicken agriculture law as it relates to legal fictions, but to provide a framework that can be used to interpret these and other animal agriculture laws more generally. the next series of examples are to serve as evidence for my claims and in no way examine the entirety of these practices.8 they are meant to serve as a groundwork for further study and examination of animal agriculture legislation at large. chickens as nonliving. the first legal fiction of the domestic chicken shows disregard of the most basic substance of chicken experience, namely existence, or life. the federal government in the united states neglects to acknowledge chicken life by excluding chickens from protective laws meant to prevent animal abuse. the two main federal laws used to protect animals are the animal welfare act and the humane methods of slaughter act. although chickens are both animals and are slaughtered, neither of these laws does much to protect chickens from cruelty. along with all food animals, chickens are exempt from the animal welfare act (awa). in fact, in the awa, chickens are not even considered animals. under awa section 2132: “definitions”, it states that the term animal includes any “live or dead dog, cat, monkey (nonhuman primate), guinea pig, hamster, rabbit, or such other warm-blooded animal ... but such term excludes farm animals, such as, but not limited to livestock or estée crenshaw -the domestic chicken as legal fiction: cruelty for profit 7 poultry, used or intended for use as food” (“section 2132: “definitions”). chickens’ existence as animals is superseded in this law by chickens’ ability to be used as food. but it is not just their ability to be food — as cats and guinea pigs could also be consumed by humans — but because of chickens’ ability to make a large profit as food. the awa is designed to protect animals not used to make a commercial profit, such as pets. however, the irony of an “animal welfare” law that doesn’t protect all animals could only be possible with a fiction that suggests chickens are not, by definition, animals. to account for food animals, the humane methods of slaughter act (hmsa) ensures that “animals are rendered insensible to pain” before slaughter (“humane methods”). however, poultry are specifically exempt from this law as well, and the secretary of agriculture is not allowed to “regulate the routine or regular transportation, to slaughter or elsewhere” of poultry either (“title 7”). furthermore, section 646a, “persons exempted,” of the poultry products inspection act (ppia), specifies no humane treatment of chickens and exempts “any person engaged in the processing of poultry or poultry products for commerce” (“poultry products”). to fill the gap left by federal laws and to account for possible mistreatment of chickens during slaughter and otherwise, various independent organizations, such as the humane handling ombudsman and the national chicken council, have risen up. however, even these organizations rely on the fiction of chickens as nonliving, as seen in the many caveats they entail. the humane handling ombudsman, as part of the united states department of agriculture’s (usda) food safety and inspection service (fsis), is in charge of verifying that “poultry are handled and slaughtered humanely in accordance with good commercial practices” (“humane handling”). good commercial practices (gcp) as enforced by the usda, center not on the notion of chickens as living, breathing animals, but on the notion of chickens as food. according to the usda teaching module designed for inspection program personnel (ipp), the section titled “poultry good commercial practices (gcp) verification” begins: “there is no humane handling statute requiring humane handling in poultry” (“humane handling verification”). this statement is followed by reasonable guidelines for assessing mistreatment, with the worst offense being chickens dying before slaughter due to mistreatment. this mistreatment renders a noncompliance record because chicken cadavers “are considered adulterated and unfit for human food” (“humane handling verification”). however, if the mistreated chickens “can still be fully bled and [are] not breathing when they enter the scalder” no noncompliance record is made.9 according to these ipp instructions from the usda, whether chicken mistreatment calls for legislative action is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 8 dependent on whether the chicken’s life is still usable for food. chicken’s ability to be maimed is almost irrelevant; chicken life is directly tied to the notion of chickens as food and the ability to make a profit. the national chicken council (ncc) aims to provide overarching guidelines to “assure the humane treatment of animals and to promote the production of quality products” throughout the united states. however, not only are these guidelines similarly designed to increase profit with “quality products,” but also because chickens are exempt from protective federal legislation, these guidelines serve more as a façade of chicken treatment and can only be enforced if they coincide with state laws (“national chicken”). so while the ncc appears to support chicken welfare,10 it holds little bearing within a framework of laws that do not recognize chicken life outside of food and profit. such widespread exclusion of chickens from protective legislation suggests not a careless error, but a mindful fiction used to enable profit and bypass the penalties of cruelty. georgia, arkansas, and alabama are among the main producers of chicken meat in the united states.11 animal cruelty statutes within these states legislate animal cruelty punishments ranging from a misdemeanor to a felony, so long as the cruelty is “unjustifiable” (“states’: georgia”). aside from this explanation, there is no mention of poultry welfare aside from limiting the pain and suffering of food animals “as much as reasonably possible under the circumstances” (“states’: arkansas”). cruelty toward chickens is not punished because it is “permitted under the agricultural or animal husbandry laws, customs, or practices of the united states” (“states’: alabama”). these laws regarding the treatment of chickens reflect the nationwide neglect of chickens. chicken life is not mistakenly overlooked in these statutes, but has been purposefully made into a side note to chickens’ ultimate value as profit. when chickens are not used for commercial profit, when their lives and existence as chickens are more fully recognized, there often exists more protective legislation. in the statutes of california 597.3., live animal markets, it states that “no animal will be dismembered, flayed, cut open, or have its skin, scales, feathers, or shell removed while the animal is still alive.” furthermore, it states that “no live animals will be confined, held, or displayed in a manner that results, or is likely to result, in injury, starvation, dehydration, or suffocation” (“states’: california”). not surprisingly, part b of this law exempts chickens from such mistreatment: (1), “‘animal’ means frogs, turtles, and birds sold for the purpose of human consumption, with the exception of poultry” (“states’: california”). estée crenshaw -the domestic chicken as legal fiction: cruelty for profit 9 while many farms provide adequate space for broiler chickens to roam, layer hens are typically confined to “67 square inches of space,” by way of battery cages, which is undoubtedly “cramped and uncomfortable” (foer 79; johnson 123). layer hens “often suffer damage to their skin and feathers from the hard wires of the cage,” as well as “progressive bone disintegration,” “fatty liver syndrome,” and a number of other preventable ailments due to the fact they do not have space to “walk, fly, stretch, dustbathe, make nests or forage” (johnson 123-4). ironically, california’s statute 599 declares it is illegal to contain chickens “without facilities for supply food, water and temperature control needed to maintain the[ir] health,” insofar as the chickens are not being used to make a commercial profit. anyone guilty of breaking these laws is guilty of a misdemeanor, unless that individual works for a factory farm, wherein “established hatchery management procedures” are not prohibited (“states’: california”). what is often meant by “established hatchery management procedures” is that “any method of raising farmed animals” is legal “so long as it is commonly practiced within the industry” (foer 50-51). in other words, this phrase is a euphemism used to mask “horrifying cruelties against, and backward exploitation” of chickens (qtd. in adams 65). because chickens are largely exempt from cruelty laws, which is the case not only in the states mentioned, but in most of the united states (wisch), it is lawful to kill a chicken without rendering it “insensible to pain before being shackled, hoisted, thrown, cast, or cut” (hodges). among the lawful methods of killing chickens is the practice of destroying male layer chicks through “maceration (wherein live, fully conscious, and unanesthetized chicks are inserted into high-speed grinders); exposure to carbon dioxide, argon, or a mixture of the two gases; or by use of a high-speed vacuum system that sucks chicks through a series of pipes to an electrified ‘kill plate’” (“an hsus report”). other tactics include microwaving and smothering (foer 48; potts 159). maceration is claimed to be “the most humane method of extermination because it is the quickest” (potts 159). in the united states, more than 272 million male chicks are killed every year (159). although this could be seen as an act of cruelty, it is much faster and economically beneficial to grind or gas roughly half of the newly hatched layer chicks than it is to take the time to render each of them unconscious beforehand. because the end goal of chicken agriculture is profit, animal welfare needs to be masked, lest it slow down the entire operation. and the only way to do this is by the use of legal fictions. exemption from protective federal and state laws that could prevent the slaughter of live chicks and ensure a better living environment for layer hens suggests that chickens humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 10 are nonliving and will not feel pain12 (like other unconscious animals) and that they do not require the basic elements of life, such as food, water, or even air.13 the act of redefining chickens as not animals, thus excluding them from animal cruelty statutes, is a legal fiction used to justify mistreatment that allows greater profit. the life chickens possess — their intelligence, sentience, and volition — is superseded in law by their use as a money-making mechanism. a chicken’s death is planned meticulously and his or her life is directed with precision to get to that point; life is very literally a means to an end. “within the realm of factory farming, what we have discovered is life completely denaturalized, life as completely produced and constructed” (stanescu 69). the constructed nature of a chicken’s life suggests that their “life is not living ... life is merely a process, a precursor to death” (70). as such, chickens are often treated as if they are nonliving — because death is the point of their being alive in the first place. chickens as things/machines. the second legal fiction used to enable profit is a misrepresentation or objectification of chickens as things, namely as machines. this concept dates as far back as descartes, who mistakenly believed animals to be “automatons or moving machines” (francione 2). while our current understanding of chicken intelligence, sentience and volition debunks any grounding for this objectification, this hasn’t stopped people from using it for commercial gain. since the 1920s, the misperception of chickens as things has become more apparent and widespread than ever as chickens have been genetically altered for our consumption purposes — to either grow bigger faster (broiler chickens),14 or to produce more eggs more quickly (layer hens) (“u.s. chicken industry history”). these two types of chickens are defined by their mechanistic responsibilities: “broilers” to produce meat as food machines, and “layers” to lay eggs as “reproductive machines” (francione 11). the name “broiler” hints less than subtly at the common cooking method of broiling, used to prepare chickens to eat. “layer,” on the other hand, is an obvious denotation of a hen’s ability to lay eggs. these names also link the various chickens to their method of gaining profit: the sale of meat and eggs. another, more discrete, component to this process are broiler breeder chickens, the hens responsible for breeding more broiler chickens. these chickens “are now bred to grow so fast that they can have severe health problems if they are not killed at around six weeks old. but this is before they reach sexual maturity” (ellis 41). to grow them as quickly as possible is necessary so that farmers can keep up with the high demand for chicken meat. however, the process of growing broiler chickens has become unnatural and systematic: “their food is restricted. a breeder broiler hen at times is said to be fed 60-80 per cent less than a bird would eat if left to its own devices. critics say they are estée crenshaw -the domestic chicken as legal fiction: cruelty for profit 11 fed in one go” (41). the unnatural way broiler breeder chickens live and are forced to mate creates stress and tension for both the breeder hen and the breeder cockerels. as a result, “the breeder cockerels can have the ends of their beaks removed and their spurs can be cut to stop them damaging the hens” (42). regardless of these precautions, many hens are still injured during the mating process. broiler breeder hens are grown unnaturally quickly so they can fulfill the mating process in order to enable a greater profit for the farmer. “they are an integral part of the process that produces the cheap chicken we eat” (42). but in order to continue to produce cheap meat, legal protections must be replaced with legal fictions. it is not surprising then, that legislative protections vary among the different types of domestic chickens depending on the profitability each chicken provides. because legal protections are based on profitability, layers and broilers do not receive the same legal protection, even within their own breed (foer 106). because layers need to be female to produce eggs, male layers are not needed in the chicken industry. they are so genetically different than broilers that they do not produce adequate meat to be eaten; therefore, male layer chicks are useless, or unprofitable (ellis 43). because chickens are seen as machines, male layer chicks are seen as defective, serving no purpose. it is not considered what these chickens would choose to do with their own lives, how they would spend their days if given the option. it is assumed that they are created for a certain purpose, and if they fail to perform accordingly, there is nothing else to do with them but get rid of them or recycle them for fertilizer and pet food. (“chickens used for food”). similarly, when layer hens lose their reproductive stamina after a year — known in the industry as being “spent” — it is cheaper to kill them and start with new chickens than it is to keep the year-old hens around (mccance 18; ellis 43). although most animal cruelty laws prevent the “unjustifiable” killing of animals, chickens used for food can be justifiably killed in order to ensure profit—even if they aren’t being used for food (animal cruelty statutes). in many ways, the swift and economic production of chickens and eggs is astounding. in his book eating animals, jonathan safran foer suggests that to see “this little worldunto-itself, to see the efficiency and mastery of the machine, and then to understand the birds as extensions of, or cogs in, that machine — not beings, but parts. to see it any other way requires effort” (88). chickens are most readily seen as cogs in a machine when battery cages are used. battery cages got their name from the way many of the small cages can be “stacked in layers” like the cells in a battery (mccance 18). but there are also deeper implications of the word “battery” that suggest chickens are a sort of energy-producing mechanism. this applies most strictly to the layer hens who are confined to battery cages and are to produce eggs (which carry the potential energy for humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 12 life). this confinement also ensures, much like batteries do, that the needed eggs — or energy — are easily accessible, take up less space, and are packaged usefully (fitzgerald 29). the crowding of chickens in small cages goes against a chicken’s “pecking order instinct,” thus stressing out the chickens and causing them to “peck each other viciously” (ellis 43). because of this and because of the cramped and unsavory conditions rendered by keeping chickens so closely caged, “soon it became routine to add antibiotics ... that kept the creatures alive in otherwise unlivable conditions” (niman 71).15 these antibiotics caused chickens to grow rapidly, a “bonus” used for economic advantage (71). building on the rapid growth caused by antibiotics, we have genetically manipulated — or “built” in a sense — layers to produce “excessive amounts of eggs,” and broilers to grow 65 percent bigger in 60 percent less time with 57 percent less food (foer 106-7). the purpose of doing so was to decrease the amount of feed needed to raise the chickens to market size (uspoultryipe). less feed equals less money spent on the product and a greater net gain. however, because these procedures are accompanied by various forms of cruelty, legal fictions were necessary for them to continue legally. in this way, chickens are granted the rights of a machine (foer 108-9). when something malfunctions, such as a y-chromosome appearing in the dna, the machine must be fixed—and if it cannot be fixed, it is thrown out or recycled for parts, with no legislation to determine how this should be done. the language used in these cases reflects the perception of chickens as machines; chickens are not “killed” like an animal would be, but “destroyed” or “thrown away” just like a machine would be (ellis 43). noreen mola states, “language is a powerful tool. the words we choose do more than name or describe things; they assign status and value” (qtd. in adams 65). the value assigned to chickens through naming — layers, broilers, and battery cages — and through the laws that govern our use of them, is that of profitability.16 chickens as a collective. the last noteworthy legal fiction used in animal agriculture law is that of chickens as a collective, rather than as individuals. one of the main differences between a family dog and the chicken on a dinner plate is how it is seen in respect to other animals like it. the family dog is seen as an individual, separate from any other dog; by contrast, the chicken is seen as part of a collective entity, without any individual characteristics to distinguish it from the next chicken. dogs and chickens are similar in their “mental capacities,” but our perception of dogs and chickens separates them as far as family and food (foer 25-6). “the protective estée crenshaw -the domestic chicken as legal fiction: cruelty for profit 13 emphasis” we have for our dogs then, “is not a law of nature; it comes from the stories we tell about nature” (25). we don’t want to view chickens as individuals, because we don’t want to eat someone; we would prefer to eat something. studies show that chickens’ “cognitive abilities are in some cases more advanced than those of cats, dogs, and even some primates” (“the hidden lives”). chris evans, an avian behaviorist, takes the opportunity at conferences to “list some of the perceptual, cognitive and communicative capacities of chickens ... without revealing which species he [is] referring to. his audience invariably assumes he is talking about monkeys” (potts 52). our perception of chickens is so connected to the normative universe and the laws that uphold it (and we are so disconnected from chickens), that even the science we have of chicken intelligence, sentience, and volition often goes unnoticed. daily habits of individual chickens, such dust-bathing, grooming, spending time developing friendships (chickenkind or inter-species), and so on are removed from chickens’ experience on factory farms. it is widely known among chicken experts that chickens have good memory skills and “complex social hierarchies” (potts 39; “the hidden lives”). chickens can understand abstract concepts, “memorize more than a hundred other chicken faces and recognize familiar birds after several months of separation,” and can even “anticipate the future” (potts 39). in a study that taught hens to peck buttons to receive food, varying from a small amount to a larger amount of food, depending on how patient the chicken could be, “ninety per cent of the time hens chose to wait the extra time so that they might obtain more to eat” (potts 39-40). furthermore, chickens work together to “convey specific information” about predators and food, and have “distinct personalities” (smith and zielinski; “the hidden lives”). the ability chickens have to communicate with one another is “a complex affair, involving visual, vocal, olfactory and tactile senses” (potts 44). it is generally accepted among avian specialists that chickens “produce at least 30 distinct forms of vocalization, including territorial, location, mating, laying and nesting, submission, distress, alarm and fear, food and contentment calls” (potts 45). what is known as the “pecking order” was first used to describe the way chickens “enforce leadership by administering a sharp peck of the beak to underlings whenever they get an idea above their station” (smith and zielinski). these and other chicken attributes all convey the same message: chickens are individuals. but their treatment in animal agriculture assumes they have no individual desires or attributes aside from our perception of chickens as food and as a means to gain profit (ellis 43-49). in this way, chickens are rarely perceived as individuals who are different from one another. instead, chickens are grouped together based on their profitable qualities. they humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 14 are called simply “chicken,” “meat” or “protein.” but such titles do little to express the diversity and complexity of chickens, much like the way chicken mcnuggets “bear no obvious resemblance to chicken anatomy” (lawler 223). the laws we have surrounding the farming of chickens suggest that every chicken has the same potential: to render profit through the production of food. conclusion. the acceptance of the legal fictions of chickens as nonliving, as things, and as a collective presumably exempts chickens from the experience of cruelty. it is impossible to impart cruelty to that which has no life, no feeling, and is not an individual. as such, chickens fall to the same status as a rug. this low status, though obviously incongruent with what we know concerning chicken intelligence, sentience and volition, is completely logical in terms of profit. in situations where chickens are less conducive to profitability (e.g., state fairs), laws ensure more protection from cruelty than in situations where profitability is high (e.g., factory farms). profitability serves as the justification for cruelty toward chickens on factory farms and purposefully neglects our understanding of chicken intelligence, sentience, and volition. simply put, legal fictions are used to mask cruelty towards chickens to enable profit. the removal of these legal fictions—of chickens as nonliving, as things, and as a collective—is a necessary step to redefining chickens within the law and granting them welfare rights.17 the various ethical and moral concerns that are voiced about chickens on factory farms are legally and easily sidestepped by the legal fictions that have been created about chickens. animal welfare used to be foundational to the sustainability of the farming life. a farmer could not afford to lose even one animal if he or she were to make a living (rollin 10). however, due to inflation and the intense demand for meat, the foundation of sustainable farming has switched from animal welfare to economic efficiency (foer 95). farms have made technological and methodological advancements to accommodate the demand for meat, and new laws accompanied these changes to regulate the treatment of animals in this larger operation and to enable as much profit as possible. currently, many laws regarding animal welfare within animal agriculture contain a caveat phrase stating that certain prohibited human-animal interactions do not apply to the farming industry;18 individuals who commit these crimes are typically only charged with a small fine or a misdemeanor, if these laws are enforced at all (hodges). while animal welfare was once the more profitable option for farmers, it is now more profitable for farmers to exchange humane treatment for efficiency. however, this estée crenshaw -the domestic chicken as legal fiction: cruelty for profit 15 efficiency can only be justified and continued with the support of laws that construct chickens as outside the bounds of cruelty. when factory farm legislation is guided by euphemistic and inaccurate construction of chickens for the sake of profitability, we allow these organizations to define cruelty (foer 51). “cruelty depends on an understanding of cruelty, and the ability to choose against it. or to choose to ignore it” (53). as such, we must reexamine our understanding of cruelty in regard to the domestic chicken. by doing so, the law can accommodate a new normative universe that includes current science on chicken intellect, sentience, and volition and push aside the legal fictions currently in use that suggest chickens are nonliving, are things, and are a collective. in turn, this will propel legislation to perceive and protect life, rather than ignore it. notes 1. the u.s. government is largely responsible for encouraging chicken farming throughout the united states, by initially setting “chicken prices higher than the cost of production in a move to encourage the expansion of chicken farming” and by promoting “vigorous propaganda” in efforts to persuade individuals to keep chickens. this resulted in increased market demand mounted by “a public whose appetite was ever increasing, coaxed along by advertising and public relations” (see squier 43-44). for more information regarding the role of the united states in the development of chicken agriculture, see striffler. 2. for a comprehensive and up-to-date compendium of current animal protection laws and penalties, see “animal protection laws of the united states of america and canada” as compiled by the animal legal defense fund. 3. for a helpful reference of animal cruelty laws in various u.s. states, see “animal cruelty laws state by state” compiled by stray pet advocacy. 4. for more chicken industry statistics compiled by the national chicken council, see “broiler chicken industry key facts 2016.” 5. for more information on chicken history, see chapter 1: “from t. rex to transylvanian naked necks” of potts. 6. for more information on tyson foods and their role in chicken development, see part 1: “a new bird” in striffler. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 16 7. for more information on the science behind chicken intelligence, sentience, and volition, see lori marino’s paper “thinking chickens: a review of cognition, emotion, and behavior of the domestic chicken” as reported in science daily, and wang et al. 8. for a more detailed explanation of common practices (and their cost) within chicken agriculture, see hamra. 9. if chicken mistreatment is discovered, ipp must meet to “discuss the mistreatment with establishment managers at the next weekly meeting” and work with the district veterinary medical specialist (dvms) to decide if any further action is required (“humane handling verification”). 10. for more information on the national chicken council’s guidelines for animal welfare, see “animal welfare for broiler chickens.” 11. for recent economic data on poultry and egg production, see the u.s. poultry & egg association webpage, and for more information on the growth and development of state chicken production, see striffler. 12. for more information on chickens’ ability to feel pain, see grandin and deesing, and chapter 5 excerpt, “perception of fear and pain in animals,” from grandin’s animals in translation. it should be noted, however, that the argument that chickens or other animals do not feel “pain” when they are experiencing fear is irrelevant because causing fear can also be seen as a form of cruelty. 13. for a complete report of 2016 chicken deaths caused by synovitis, bruises, septicaemia and other preventable diseases and ailments, see the usda’s “poultry slaughter 2016 summary.” 14. to learn more about the hazards of quick chicken growth, see the aspca’s paper “a growing problem.” 15. for further details of the effects of battery cages, see chapter 6: “meat chicks and egg machines” of potts. 16. the language used to talk about chickens can give valuable information of chickens’ place and value within the normative universe of various time periods. dating back to estée crenshaw -the domestic chicken as legal fiction: cruelty for profit 17 the shang dynasty (1600-1045 bc), the chinese fenghuang chicken was described in zhou texts as an “omen of political harmony” (potts 86). this cultural projection was accompanied by prestigious “markings of the graph for virtue on its head, duty on its wings, ritual on its back, humaneness on its breast, and trust on its stomach” (86-87). if we compare this projection to present day, we find that similar divisions have been made to the chicken, but what they represent differs tremendously. the denotation of chickens as prophetic beings made up of honorable qualities has widely been replaced with portioned cuts of meat: thighs, wings, drumsticks, breast, etc., whose value is purely culinary and, therefore, monetary: boneless, skinless, fried, grilled, boiled, smoked, and so on. 17. for further reading on the public’s perception of animal agriculture cruelty in opposition with legal reform, see lovvorn. 18. for a list of animal cruelty laws by state and their corresponding fines/punishments, see clausen. works cited adams, carol j. the sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory. continuum, 1990. “chickens used for food.” peta, n.d. web. 13 dec. 2015. clausen, b. “animal cruelty laws by state: is it a crime to abuse an animal?” dopplr. the legal radar. march 29, 2016. web. 31 july 2017. cover, robert m. “the supreme court, 1982 term — foreward: nomos and narrative.” faculty scholarship series. yale law school legal scholarship repository, 1983. web. 3 apr. 2016. ellis, hattie. planet chicken: the shameful story of the bird on your plate. sceptre, 2008. faust, drew gilpin. the creation of confederate nationalism: identity and ideology in the civil war south. louisiana state up, 1988. fitzgerald, deborah. every farm a factory: the industrial ideal in american agriculture. yale up, 2003. foer, jonathan safran. eating animals. black bay books, 2009. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 18 fuller, l. l. “legal fictions.” illinois law review 15.4 (1930): 363-399. francione, gary l. introduction to animal rights: your child or the dog? temple up, 2000. grandin, temple. animals in translation: using the mysteries of autism to decode animal behavior. harcourt, 2006. grandin, temple, and mark deesing. “distress in animals: is it fear, pain, or physical stress?” paper delivered to american board of veterinary practitioners symposium, 2002. gross, aaron, and anne vallely, eds. animals and the human imagination: a companion to animal studies. columbia up, 2012. hamra, c. f. “an assessment of the potential profitability of poultry farms: a broiler farm feasibility case.” master's thesis, university of tennessee at martin. 2010. hazel, susan j., lisel o’dwyer, and terry ryan. “‘chickens are a lot smarter than i originally thought’: changes in student attitudes to chickens following a chicken training class.” animals 3.3 (2015): 821-837. “the hidden lives of chickens.” peta, n.d. accessed 11 dec. 2015. hodges, cynthia. “brief summary of the humane methods of slaughter act (hmsa).” michigan state university college of law. animal legal & historical center, 2010. web. 11 dec. 2015. “an hsus report: the welfare of animals in the egg industry.” the humane society of the united states. accessed 3 jul. 2017. “humane handling ombudsman questions and answers.” united states department of agriculture food safety and inspection service. 2016. accessed 26 mar. 2017. “humane handling verification for livestock and good commercial practices for poultry.” united states department of agriculture food safety and inspection service 30-26. web. accessed 26 mar. 2017. estée crenshaw -the domestic chicken as legal fiction: cruelty for profit 19 “humane methods of slaughter act.” chapter 48. u.s. government publishing office. accessed 19 mar. 2017. johnson, andrew. factory farming. basil blackwell, 1991. lawler, andrew. why did the chicken cross the world?: the epic saga of the bird that powers civilization. simon & schuster, 2014. lovvorn, jonathan r. “animal law in action,” paper delivered to thirteenth annual national animal law conference, october 14–16, 2005. marino, lori. “thinking chickens: a review of the cognition, emotion, and behavior in the domestic chicken.” animal cognition 20.2 (march 2017): 127-147. mccance, dawne. critical animal studies: an introduction. state u of new york p, 2013. miller, sidney t. “the reasons for some legal fictions.” michigan law review 8.8 (1910): 623–636. moglen, eben. “legal fictions and common law legal theory: some historical reflections.” tel-aviv university studies in law, 1989. accessed 19 mar. 2017. “national chicken council animal welfare guidelines and audit checklist for broilers.” national chicken council, 2014. accessed 19 mar. 2017. niman, nicolette hahn. defending beef: the case for sustainable meat production. chelsea green publishing, 2014. potts, annie. chicken. reaktion, 2012. “poultry products inspection act.” united states department of agriculture. accessed 19 mar. 2017. rollin, bernie. “the ethics of agriculture: the end of true husbandry.” the future of animal farming: renewing the ancient contract. marian stamp dawkins and roland bonney, eds. blackwell, 2008. “section 2132: definitions.” animal welfare act and animal welfare regulations. united states department of agriculture, 2013. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 20 smith, carolynn “k-lynn” l., and sarah l. zielinski. “the startling intelligence of the common chicken.” scientific american 310.2 (2014). 60-65. squier, susan merrill. poultry science, chicken culture: a partial alphabet. rutgers, 2012. stanescu, james k. the abattoir of humanity: philosophy in the age of the factory farm. dissertation. state university of new york at binghamton, 2013. “states’ animal cruelty statutes: the state of alabama.” nationalaglawcenter, university of arkansas. accessed 26 mar. 2017. “states’ animal cruelty statutes: the state of arkansas.” nationalaglawcenter, university of arkansas. accessed 26 mar. 2017. “states’ animal cruelty statutes: the state of california.” nationalaglawcenter, university of arkansas. accessed 26 mar. 2017. “states’ animal cruelty statutes: the state of georgia.” nationalaglawcenter, university of arkansas. accessed 26 mar. 2017. striffler, steve. chicken: the dangerous transformation of america’s favorite food. yale up, 2007. “the three-fifth compromise.” digital history: using new technologies to enhance teaching and research. accessed 19 mar. 2017. “title 7—agriculture.” government publishing office. accessed 26 mar. 2017. “u.s. chicken industry history.” national chicken council, n.d. web. accessed 9 dec. 2015. uspoultryipe. “raising chickens and turkeys . . . for today and tomorrow.” online video clip. youtube, 16 oct. 2015. web. accessed 24 nov. 2015. wang, zhuo, niting wang, zehua li, fangyan xiao, and jiapei dai. “human high intelligence is involved in spectral redshift of biophotonic activities in the brain.” pnas 113.31 (2016): 8753–8758. estée crenshaw -the domestic chicken as legal fiction: cruelty for profit 21 “what is legal fiction?” the law dictionary: featuring black’s law dictionary free online legal dictionary 2nd ed. accessed 19 mar. 2017. wisch, rebecca f. “table of state humane slaughter laws.” michigan state university college of law. animal legal & historical center, 2006. accessed 13 dec. 2015. kuura irni -queering multispecies bonding: reading donna haraway’s dog stories as queer feminism h u m a n i m a l i a 12:1 kuura irni queering multispecies bonding: reading donna haraway’s dog stories as queer feminism¹ introduction. at this moment, focusing on the connections among queer, feminist, and animal studies has remained the task of a few but important inaugural articles, essays, and collections.2 previous feminist debates regarding queer theory and nonhuman animals largely concentrated on identifying and discussing so-called “queer” or “trans” animals, or critiquing such accounts (e.g., alaimo; hird; sullivan). in this paper i will instead develop a queer theoretical perspective that focuses on questioning norms, not on identities. by conducting a queer theoretical reading of donna haraway’s work on dogs as significant others and companion species, i explore some of the ways that are or could be available for conceptualizing affection in relationships with nonhuman animals. haraway has been extremely critical of referring to dogs as furry “children.”3 addressing this critique also, i explore haraway’s alternative account of her affection for the dog, ms cayenne pepper, and her other stories related to dogs. i argue that reading haraway’s writing on dogs from a queer theoretical perspective and in terms of her alternative accounts of dog love demonstrates that they critique more than the problematic anthropomorphizing of nonhuman animals. i suggest that haraway’s critique, epitomized by her slogan “make kin, not babies” (staying with the trouble 102), relates to her call to imagine new constellations of family and kin not dependent on biological inheritance or anthropocentric understandings of significant relationships. i read in this an affinity with the queer theoretical critique of family and relationship norms.4 james stanescu, sanna karhu, and noreen giffney are among the authors that have inspired my take on queer theory as critique of norms. while a wide variety of queer theoretical perspectives focus on temporality, activism, or place, this paper addresses rethinking normative relationship patterns. here, queer theory does not concentrate on non-heterosexual identities or behaviors, whether human or nonhuman; rather, it focuses on, in noreen giffney’s formulation, “norms for the way they define, solidify, and defend their shaky self-identities by excluding those (dissident others) who fail or refuse to conform” (giffney 75). my focus is on norms related to the formation of families and relationships, and the norms concerning which relationships are kuura irni -queering multispecies bonding: reading donna haraway’s dog stories as queer feminism 189 understood as significant and valuable. in particular, i focus on alternatives to normative perceptions of relationships.5 i critically assess the assumption and ideal that intimacy, sex, and romantic love are involved in, as well as restricted to, a couple relationship between people, and the centrality of reproduction in the conceptualization of relationships in both people and nonhuman animals. where these ideals prevail, they lead to the devaluation of a range of alternative constellations of significant relationships and “kin” among people, as, for example, communal living, chosen families, significant relationships with nonhuman animals, non-monogamous relationship patterns, asexual or aromantic relationships, and friendships. i read donna haraway’s work on dogs as an intervention into the normative and anthropocentric, mostly so-called “western,” white ideals of kinship, and i view it as an opening up of an alternative, non-anthropocentric queer perspective. in other words, i suggest that haraway’s work can be read and developed as an intervention into thinking through multispecies kinship from a queer feminist perspective. in building my queer theoretical approach as specifically feminist animal and multispecies studies work, i am also inspired by ecofeminisms and critical animal studies that stress the importance of the agency and subjectivity of nonhuman animals, critically addressing the killing and ill-treatment of them, and working towards more resilient relationships with them.6 family and relationship norms are relevant for critical animal studies because they also tend to narrow the ways in which nonhuman animals can be understood and narrated as significant companions. i share haraway’s and other feminist scholars’ fascination with stories as part of doing science and feminist theory, in reflecting and building relationships with others— whether people or nonhumans—and in trying to find “an absent, but perhaps possible, other present” (haraway, “the promises of monsters” 63).7 making kin with animal companions. “(i)t is high time that feminists exercise leadership in imagination, theory, and action to unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species.” (haraway, staying with the trouble 102). one value of queer theory for animal and multispecies studies lies in problematizing the heteronormative understandings of kinship and intimacy, including questioning the normativity and primacy of couple relationships, as well as reproductive futurism, where the figure of the child is central for imagining futures (edelman). moreover, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 190 haraway’s thinking has affinity with the queer theoretical concept of chosen families and the rethinking of heteronormative notions of kinship and genealogy (e.g., butler, undoing gender; weston), when she proposes that we should think of kin and kind as not necessarily tied to ancestry or genealogy (staying with the trouble 102–103).8 in staying with the trouble, haraway’s proposition includes the wish that “making kin and making kind (as category, care, relatives without ties by birth, lateral relatives, lots of other echoes) stretch the imagination and can change the story” (103). for haraway, in contrast with most queer scholars, making kin includes nonhumans, and it is crucial how haraway includes them. in the context of companionship with animals, haraway fiercely objects to familial constructions related to dogs: “contrary to lots of dangerous and unethical projection in the western world that makes domestic canines into furry children, dogs are not about oneself” (haraway, companion species 11). this relates to the critique by critical animal studies scholarship, which draws attention to the power relations, exploitation, and domination of nonhuman animals inherent in the relations between humans and other animals.9 this critique also addresses the use of so-called companion animals as mere commodities for human pleasure and amusement (francione), and training and breeding them to demonstrate human power over them (tuan). furthermore, the legal classification of companion animals as possessions of their human “owners” allows them to be, for example, “euthanized at the whim of the owner” (cudworth 150; see also torres). as these critical studies demonstrate, a power relation is a central condition of domestic animals’ lives. however, as erika cudworth observes, nonhuman animals who live as part of households are not merely outlets for humans’ needs to show affection, nor are they a projection of idealized relationships among humans (146). within animal studies, a few scholars have taken a critical position that questions whether peoples’ relations with their animal companions is only a matter of humans dominating other animals. two important issues related to this need to be raised here. first, sunaura taylor, elaborating on what she calls the feminist disability ethic-of-care, criticizes the assumed dichotomy between independence and dependence (“interdependent animals” 113). in order for relationships between people and nonhuman animals to be ethical, there is not, and should not be, a requirement or assumption that all parties are independent or autonomous. rather, a feminist animal studies perspective should be attentive to the ways in which speciesism and ableism work together “to render dependency [of both humans and other animals] an even more justifiable and righteous reason for exploitation” (117). thus, the response to the issue of dependency should not be the fantasy of eradicating it from relations between humans and other animals, as it is not kuura irni -queering multispecies bonding: reading donna haraway’s dog stories as queer feminism 191 eradicable from relations among people. rather, the task is to be sensitive to the agency and subjectivity of nonhuman animals while being aware of and assessing the relationship of dependency that is involved. second, haraway generally operates with the notion of companion species, not companion animals, and this also concerns dogs. the distinction is important; haraway sees the problem in conceptualizing dogs as “children” as part of a broader problem of infantilization and commodification. as she explains in when species meet: “‘companion species’ does not mean smallish animals treated like indulged children-in-fur-coats (or in fins or feathers) in late imperial societies” (165).10 the concept of companion species involves questioning human exceptionalism, focusing on ontology and relationality— “(e)very species is a multispecies crowd” — and questioning categorization: “companion species is a permanently undecidable category.” haraway writes: “neither is the dog the same as a child nor an aged parent. … parent−child, guardian−ward, and owner−property are all lousy terms for the sorts of multispecies relationships emerging among us.… the categories need a makeover” (51, emphasis in original). the nonhuman animals with whom people live and who may be significant others are not companion animals whose purpose is to meet people’s needs; rather, they are animal companions, with their own demands and interests in the relationship, which defy placing them into predetermined categories. here, according to haraway, the human partner has a care responsibility that is different from caring for a child: “if we live with our animal companions at home as adults of another species, and not as furry children or weird dispensers of ‘unconditional love,’ we have a chance to care more broadly” (potts and haraway 326). like erica fudge’s claim that nonhuman animals are loved not because they compensate for children or other humans but precisely because they are not humans (20; see also cudworth 147), haraway suggests: “indeed, that is the beauty of dogs. they are not a projection, nor the realization of an intention, nor the telos of anything. they are dogs, i.e., a species in obligatory, constitutive, historical, protean relationship with human beings” (the companion species manifesto 11–12). developing queer feminist animal studies with haraway. to conceptualize love for a specific dog, ms cayenne pepper, haraway utilizes neither a conceptualization of love derived from cultural narratives of love between a mother and a child, nor of friendship (for an analysis of calling relations with dogs, friendship, see townley). in haraway’s narrative, affection for a nonhuman companion involves physical intimacy that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 192 resembles a romantic relationship: kisses, oral commerce, being in love. however, this relationship is between two adults of different species: ms cayenne pepper continues to colonize all my cells — a sure case of what the biologist lynn margulis calls symbiogenesis. i bet if you checked our dna, you’d find some potent transfections between us. her saliva must have the viral vectors. surely, her darter-tongue kisses have been irresistible. … we have had forbidden conversation; we have had oral intercourse; we are bound in telling story upon story with nothing but the facts. we are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand. we are, constitutively, companion species. we make each other up, in the flesh. significantly other to each other; in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love. this love is an historical aberration and a naturalcultural legacy. (the companion species manifesto 3) in addition to referring to symbiogenesis, that is, the ways in which cayenne and haraway are corporeally and constitutively companion species, haraway describes this narrative later as “soft porn,” and professes to being “in love” with “the real critters, like cayenne” (gane and haraway 144). it becomes clear that loving a dog in this way — becoming companion species in this very specific way — is what is indistinguishable from curiosity about what this particular dog thinks and wants (see also despret), not a wish that the animal companion should exist just to fulfill the human’s needs. there is no unconditional love to be received from a nonhuman companion. companion species relationships are fraught with power relations, mistakes, and communication failures; they are also a product of colonial and racialized relations (haraway, the companion species manifesto 2, see also zelinger “unnatural pet-keeping”). within this broader context, the practical attempt to build a relationship emerges. under these conditions, the ideal for acting as a companion species is to regard another as a significant other, “to have regard for, to see differently, to esteem, to look back, to hold in regard, to hold in seeing, to be touched by another’s regard, to heed, to take care of” (haraway, when species meet 164). crucially, such regard also enables humans to see nonhuman animals as more than a product of their genes, which is an important aspect of how haraway’s thinking links to queer theory. in when species meet, haraway describes an instance of cayenne enjoying herself with willem, an intact twenty-month old great pyrenees: kuura irni -queering multispecies bonding: reading donna haraway’s dog stories as queer feminism 193 willem lies down with a bright look in his eye. cayenne looks positively crazed as she straddles her genital area on the top of his head, her nose pointed towards his tail end, and presses down and wags her backside vigorously. (when species meet 193) this occurs while willem: …is trying for all he’s worth to get his tongue on her genitals, which inevitably dislodges her from the top of his head. looks a bit like the rodeo, with her riding a bronco and staying on as long as possible. haraway adds that they repeat this again and again, and that “(t)hey have slightly different goals in this game, but both are committed to the activity.” what is interesting in this play for my argument is the following: …(n)one of their sexual play has anything to do with remotely functional heterosexual mating behavior—no efforts of willem to mount, no presenting of an attractive female backside, not much genital sniffing, no whining and pacing, none of all that ‘reproductive’ stuff. no, here we have pure polymorphous perversity that is so dear to the hearts of all of us who came of age in the 1960s reading norman o. brown. i suggest that haraway’s stories about dog love can be read and developed as an intervention into queer feminist animal studies in at least three ways. first, haraway’s work includes an important critical edge, where nonhuman animals are not merely seen as a product of their genetic inheritance and their behavior is not viewed as a function of promoting a reproductive future. haraway’s work also aligns with the feminist scholarship that has long questioned gendered and heterosexualized ways of doing science (e.g., keller and longino). in terms of nonhuman animals, this includes questioning the ways in which scientists’ heteronormative perceptions have prevented them from reporting variations in the sexual behavior of nonhuman animals. heteronormativity has entailed explaining away all same-sex activities that seem to question the “heterosexuality” of nonhumans and in denying both the creative variety of nonhuman behavior and the sexual nature of practices such as mounting that do not contribute to reproductive purposes (alaimo 54; despret 136). the significance of this critique lies in the potential to acknowledge nonhuman animals as ”cultural beings” and actors “enmeshed in social organizations,” as in the following claim: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 194 in terms of environmental ethics and politics, it is crucial to acknowledge animals as cultural beings, enmeshed in social organizations, acting, interacting, and communicating. an understanding of animal cultures critiques the ideology of nature as resource, blank slate for cultural inscription, or brute, mechanistic force. (alaimo 60) in other words, from this queer theoretical perspective, nonhuman animals need to be seen as agents that are creative and whose behavior is not automatically determined by their genes. instead, nonhuman animals should be seen as capable of joy, play, and enjoyment of nonreproductive sexuality — or “polymorphous perversity,” as haraway calls it in the quotation cited above. second, in relation to race, haraway notes her whiteness and the conceptualization of cayenne as “pure-bred” (the companion species manifesto 2). their love is not innocent; instead, they are both ”offspring of conquest, products of white settler-colonies”: “we play a team sport called agility on the same expropriated native land where cayenne’s ancestors herded merino sheep … imported from the already colonial pastoral economy of australia to feed the california gold rush 49ers.” in other words, loving nonhuman animals is not innocent. these relations are saturated with power that exceeds the immediate contact between the individuals and the power of the individual human over the nonhuman companion’s living conditions, including racialized societal structures and colonial histories (see also zelinger). i see haraway’s intervention as potentially aligned with a range of critical interventions to queer theory and to colonial understandings of sex and family that analyze sexuality and kinship as racialized (e.g., bakshi et al.; eng; johnson; rifkin; tallbear). to explore further the idea that racialized and class-related family norms are imbued in encounters with nonhuman animals, including the context of animal advocacy, i use an illustrative example from harlan weaver’s work. when analyzing campaigns to save pit bull terriers, weaver notes that animal advocacy in the united states is typically shaped by race and class as well as tropes of family and citizenship, including campaigns featuring “mostly white, mostly heterosexual families living in houses with backyards” (“pit bull promises” 348). advocacy for pit bulls is permeated by familyrelated terminology: “(f)amily is prominent in their stories, with mom, dad, aunt, uncle, sister, and brother as recurrent markers for the dogs’ interactions” (347–348). pit bulls are also presented as good citizens enabled by advanced training, after which they can pass tests and acquire the title of, for example, canine good citizen, or may compete in sports or work as therapy dogs that listen to children as they practice reading (347). kuura irni -queering multispecies bonding: reading donna haraway’s dog stories as queer feminism 195 weaver’s work illustrates that racialized and class-related expectations of being a proper family member, a good citizen, and a productive member of society are extended to nonhuman animals. this includes expectations of nonhumans fitting into these ideals of being a family member and a well-behaving citizen, as well as images of white and middle-class families enhancing the value of these nonhuman animals. one crucial contribution of queer theory to critical feminist animal studies is that it denotes these normative constructions of family, kinship, and citizenship, and problematizes the ways in which the value of domestic nonhuman animals is tied to these understandings. third, i see the type of queer theoretical intervention that can be inspired by haraway as inclusive of the critique of compulsory sexuality and the ethics of antimonogamy (see rosa; willey). this broadens the alternatives to heteronormative family and relationship ideals to include significant relations with nonhuman animals. queer love in other registers than sex and couplehood. even though i am focusing on haraway, it is useful to note that, in the literature, expressions about love and intimacy that could be captured by the notion of a romantic-type relationship rather than any other mainstream conceptualization of love for nonhuman animals (e.g., friendship, parental love) also occur in the works of others. these accounts highly value dog companions in particular. for example, in the book, loving animals. toward a new animal advocacy, kathy rudy conceptualizes relationship preferences in the following way: “it’s not so much that i am no longer a lesbian, then, it’s that the binary of gay and straight no longer has anything to do with me. my preference today is canine” (41). in her article, “i married my dog,” alice kuzniar discusses early and mid-twentieth century literature about dog love. for kuzniar, dog love points towards the possibility of a queer rethinking of love and family constellations, offering a “radically open alternative to common social partnerings” (209). what is queer in human-dog relationships is that the passion for dogs “opens up the subject in unique ways that, precisely because independent of gender and sexuality, are liberating” (208). i contest the idea that such relationships are totally independent of gender, but i agree that there is also a point to querying — and queering — relationships in terms other than sex or sexuality. haraway’s conceptualization of her relationship with cayenne and the other excerpts i have cited have inspiring affinities with queer theory precisely because they conceptualize love and even romantic or erotic love in registers other than sexuality.11 here, my reading has a slightly different focus than margret grebowicz and helen merrick, who are rare in their serious engagement with a queer theoretical reading of haraway’s work on nonhuman animals.12 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 196 grebowicz and merrick argue that, in terms of queer theory, haraway is not only showing that nonhuman animals have unreproductive sex; the point is to complicate the human-animal distinction from the perspective of the agency of nonhuman animals. reading haraway in relation to judith butler’s political philosophy and jacques derrida’s work on animals, grebowicz and merrick argue that, in both haraway and derrida, “animal understood as a sexual agent becomes the figure of radical possibility and openness” and “animality explodes the universalizing category of nature as homogeneous and predictable” (beyond the cyborg 39). i agree with grebowicz and merrick; a crucial move in haraway’s thinking is to question the understanding of nonhuman animals as a part of nature that is assumed to be “stable, predictable, and controllable” (38). however, grebowicz and merrick concentrate on the sexual agency of dogs, and in doing so, they bind the analysis of queer and sex conceptually together. discussing haraway’s thinking in relation to judith butler’s, grebowicz and merrick note the importance in haraway’s work of nonreprocentric models of kinship, which give “sexuality a domain separate from kinship” and open “kinship to a set of community ties that are irreducible to family” (butler, undoing gender 127; see also grebowicz and merrick 46). they cite the introduction to the haraway reader, where haraway refers to her “queer family,” which includes “feminists, anti-racists, scientists, scholars, genetically engineered lab rodents, cyborgs, dog people, vampires, modest witnesses, writers, molecules, and both living and stuffed apes…” (haraway, “introduction” 3). grebowicz and merrick note that this is an example where, in haraway, “queer kinship goes well beyond the human ‘family’ to include all kinds of organisms and animals” (grebowicz and merrick 46).13 i would like to expand upon this example of a “queer family” — haraway’s writing companions or interlocutors when doing theory. in my reading, haraway’s work resonates with a genealogy of feminist and queer critiques of monogamy and the claiming of erotic autonomy (see klesse), in the sense that haraway’s narratives and interviews present constellations of close human relationships that include nonmonogamy, communal living, and significant relations that go beyond couplehood (how like a leaf 28, 32−33, 62−63). haraway’s work also presents a sort of love story with a dog that extends the possibility of falling in love beyond relationships with other people. finally, haraway’s work includes an account of erotic pleasure between her dog companion cayenne and the dog willem that exceed reproductive sex. importantly, klesse’s article makes clear that, in the feminist genealogy, erotic autonomy has not been a question of mere choice related to liberal kuura irni -queering multispecies bonding: reading donna haraway’s dog stories as queer feminism 197 individualism. unlike the discourses about nonmonogamy or polyamory found in contemporary popular publications that bypass questions about social injustice, in the feminist and queer genealogy that klesse traces from the nineteenth and early twentieth century onwards critiques of monogamy and heterosexual marriage have been linked to community building and struggles against systemic oppression. for example, these have included criticizing racialized imaginaries related to sexuality and the mobilization of compulsory monogamy for imperialism (klesse 221; see also e.g. mcclintock; willey). in haraway’s recent texts, stories are told in order to explore flourishing and “response-able” relations with nonhuman animals, assessing a range of injustices and complexities in this process (e.g., staying with the trouble 114−116). however, klesse’s genealogy of feminist critiques of monogamy significantly focuses on erotics and on sex, sexual autonomy, and sexual partners. what i read as important in haraway’s stories, regarding maybe an erotic (the kisses!) but not in any conventional sense a sexual relationship with a dog, is an affinity with sex-neutral14 queer theory that is inclusive of asexuality, nonsexual significant relationships, and the critique of compulsory sexuality. inspired by becky rosa’s article ”anti-monogamy: a radical challenge to compulsory sexuality,” angela willey (undoing monogamy 96) has aptly noted that it is not self-evident to “associate ‘falling in love’ with sex,” and “to make sex a central organizing principle of our relationships” (for analyses of asexuality see cerankowski and milks). i discuss willey’s work at some length because it enables me to connect haraway to one important feminist and queer genealogy: finding alternatives to the ideal and norm that link sex, couplehood, and monogamy to significant relationships. in addition to black and queer genealogies in feminist thought, willey is inspired by alison bechdel’s dykes to watch out for, a comic strip that ran from 1983 to 2008, compiled into thirteen collections, and the positive response it has received as a welcome alternative to the recently developed homonormative views of lesbian cultures, which are based on assimilating queer culture to the nuclear family and the couple normative way of life (97). inspired by the world of dykes to watch out for and becky rosa’s distinction between nonmonogamy and antimonogamy, willey develops what she calls the dyke ethics of antimonogamy (96−97; rosa, “anti-monogamy”). even as i appreciate the roots of this term in willey’s thinking with dyke cultures and her posing of dyke as a politicized category (98−99), for me the reference to “dyke” still restricts the potential of the “ethics of antimonogamy” for subcultures that strive also to be inclusive of trans masculine and nonbinary genders. therefore, i drop the word “dyke” from being a defining feature of the ethics of antimonogamy as i use this term. i humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 198 also want to stress that the ethics of antimonogamy does not refer to the opposition to or critique of monogamous relationships, per se; rather, it refers to the critique of the thought patterns and practices that connect sex, romance, couplehood, and the nuclear family as the ideal and normative relationship pattern and way of life. as presented by willey, the ethics of antimonogamy somewhat resembles the notion of “relationship anarchy” (nordgren), a term for relationship constellations in which a romantic and/or sexual couple relationship is not necessarily preferred hierarchically over other relationships, but where intimate relations can consist of both sexual and/or romantic and other close relationships. however, the way in which nordgren pictures relationship anarchy can be construed as being individualistic and ableist. even though nordgren mentions commitments, such as child care, as possibilities for relationship anarchists, the text assumes everyone to be “autonomous individuals” (first paragraph) who do not need to compromise in relation to other people’s (or nonhuman animals’) needs or wishes. thus, the challenges associated with nordgren’s conceptualization of relationship anarchy are similar to those of other popular criticisms of monogamy pointed out by christian klesse, such as individualism and the lack of engaging with social injustices, which create dependencies and provide better possibilities for some people to act as autonomous individuals in comparison to others (klesse 221). despite this critique, relationship anarchy is worth mentioning in this context; because it does not restrict significant relationships or loved partners to sexual or romantic relationships it resists normative constructions about which relationships count as significant and what kinds of commitments one is supposed to make. nordgren’s text is also anthropocentric; it does not discuss the possibility of significant relations with nonhuman animals. in contrast, willey includes a few mentions of nonhuman animals, who are part of the relationship constellations in the world of bechdel’s comics. for example, in writing about, mo, one of bechdel’s protagonists, willey notes that “her single life is not a lonely one marked by lack,” because “(b)esides her long-term relationship with two cats, vanessa and veronica, mo has an extended family of friends and exes” (109−110). of ginger, another protagonist, willey also notes that “(h)er primary affective ties are without doubt with her dog of many years, digger, whose death is a major event in the comic, the community, and ginger’s life” (112). willey does not, however, speculate about what accounting for significant nonhumans might do for understanding the ethics of antimonogamy. i share with willey the appreciation of the ethics of antimonogamy, which is grounded “in notions of friendship, community, and social justice” and which “decenters the sexual dyad” kuura irni -queering multispecies bonding: reading donna haraway’s dog stories as queer feminism 199 (willey 97). i see these thoughts as compatible with haraway’s understanding of kinship. i suggest that the strength in haraway’s story about cayenne is that it allows for including nonhuman animals in a broader spectrum of possibilities to think about significant others and intimate relationships. when haraway is read through the feminist and queer theoretical work i discussed above, her thinking can be seen to develop the strand in feminist theory and practice where the norms that set monogamy and the couple as the core intimate and sexual relationship, and to which everything else becomes secondary, are questioned. haraway’s work can be read as inspiration for developing queer feminist work where relationships with friends and communities, asexual or nonsexual relationships, and relationships with nonhuman animals can be considered no less valuable than romantic and sexual partnerships with other people. concluding remarks: queering multispecies bonding. in this paper, i have explored what a queer feminist animal studies approach might indicate when it is understood as a critique of norms related to family and intimacy. i suggest that developing sustainable possibilities for multispecies bonding benefits from a dialogue with queer theoretical work. one way to support the development of multispecies bonding is to combine it with questioning the normativity of monogamy, the coupling of sexuality with romance, and other anthropocentric, racialized, and class-related ideals of families and relationships. this requires attending to the existing critique of white, colonial histories and practices of kinship; as for example, kim tallbear writes in a contribution to the special issue queer inhumanisms: “indigenous peoples have never forgotten that nonhumans are agential beings engaged in social relations that profoundly shape human lives” (234). a queer theoretical perspective can contribute to feminist animal and multispecies studies and the understanding of multispecies bonding by questioning the a priori, assumed western hierarchy between romantic and sexual relationships versus friendships or other nonsexual or asexual relationships, including relationships with nonhuman animals. i suggest that reading both angela willey’s ethics of antimonogamy and haraway’s story about cayenne as such critique helps one think through intimacy, significant others, and romantic relationships more broadly than merely seeing them as sexual relationships between people. in turn, this helps in conceptualizing significant and loving relations between people and their nonhuman companions, providing an alternative to conceptualizing the love for nonhuman companions via the cultural narratives of parental love or friendship. one key point in critical animal studies and the haraway-inspired queer feminism developed here is to not only ask how queer theorization that includes nonhumans facilitates questioning people’s heteronormative kinship constellations (e.g., bibler; mckeithen), but to focus on how developing multispecies bonding also sustains the thriving of the nonhumans humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 200 that are part of these relationship constellations. this requires the human partner to be curious about and have regard for the individual nonhuman—their needs, wishes, characteristics, and conditions for flourishing. when viewed from haraway’s perspective, understanding companion species as “a permanently undecidable category” (when species meet 165) requires avoiding assigning the animal companion into any predetermined category—such as a child. instead this approach requires attending to both the specific and individual differences at work in the relationship. as i have suggested, according to haraway’s critique, it seems that it is extremely problematic to assume a nonhuman (in her case, a dog) is one’s “furry baby.” haraway poses the infantilization of dogs and the need to rethink categorization as the central problem, which i read as part of the negotiation of the particular kind of otherness of a specific nonhuman animal. first and foremost, haraway’s critique of considering a relationship with a nonhuman as being similar to that of a parent-child relationship focuses on the categorization of the adult dog (as infantile, as child). consequently, in haraway’s work, discussion about the corresponding cultural trope available for making sense of the affection on the part of the human (“parental love”) is foreclosed. however, parent-child relationships do not merely involve small children; a grown-up can still be someone’s child, and any sustainable parenthood is hardly compatible with making predetermined assumptions about the characteristics of the child. furthermore, subcultures, such as drag and ballroom scenes, proliferate with alternative kinship systems, including houses, mothers, and children, which are not based on biological ties (e.g., butler, “gender is burning” 391). these kinship systems bear little resemblance to the white middle-class conceptualizations of familial relationships criticized by haraway. possibly, they could inspire feminist animal and multispecies studies to think about parent-child relationships in new ways. interestingly, haraway’s proposal to “unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species” (staying with the trouble 102) extends to the rethinking of romantic love with an adult partner as nonanthropocentric, but not to any possibility to reconsider parent-child relationships from a queer perspective. i have argued that haraway’s storytelling about dog love is extremely relevant. when read in relation to the queer theoretical critique of norms, it provides one way of destabilizing the normative ideals of relationships, and it helps compose alternative stories of multispecies bonding. such a queer theoretical approach contributes to the tools that help conceptualize closeness and intimacy without the need to assume that people can only have significant, close, and loving relationships with other humans. initiating a discussion about these alternative relationship constellations in the context kuura irni -queering multispecies bonding: reading donna haraway’s dog stories as queer feminism 201 of feminist animal and multispecies studies provides the possibility for establishing solidarity between critical animal studies and queer activist and scholarly attempts to question heteronormative, anthropocentric, racialized, and classand couple-based relationship and family norms. queerand trans-sensitive animal studies could be further developed that account for how gendering and racializing categorizations are involved and enhanced, and, in complex ways, regenerated in people’s relationships to other animals (see also weaver, “feminisms” 12). thinking about multispecies bonding in the context of queer feminism also contributes to broadening the focus on gender in feminist animal studies from “women and men” and their assumed sexual relationship towards a more multifaceted understanding of genders, (a)sexualities, and multispecies relationship constellations. notes 1. i am grateful for comments from and discussions with participants in the network for critical animal studies in finland, members of the research project, climate sustainability in the kitchen – everyday food cultures in transition, members of the group, slow academy for anti-authoritarian queer and trans thinking, friends in my queer and nonbinary communities, and anonymous reviewers. i will continue to think through the comments and discussions in my future work. 2. see bibler, “capote’s frozen cats”; despret, what would animals say if we asked the right questions?; gaard, “toward a queer ecofeminism”; giffney and hird, queering the non/human; stanescu, “species trouble: judith butler, mourning, and the precarious lives of animals”; steinbock, szczygielska, and wagner, tranimacies. intimate links between animal and trans* studies; weaver, “pit bull promises” and “the tracks of my tears.” 3. haraway, the companion species manifesto 11; when species meet 51, 52, 67; “cyborgs, coyotes and dogs” 331; and haraway in potts and haraway 326. 4. haraway’s “make kin, not babies!” slogan has also elicited a critique of haraway as “trafficking irresponsibly in racist narratives” (lewis 12). this is because haraway suggests that fewer humans are needed on this planet; however, according to the critics, haraway does not sufficiently explain how the number of people might in practice be reduced in order to avoid coercive methods or even genocide (lewis; j. turner, “life with ms cayenne pepper”). this critique, which is extremely important, in my interpretation reads haraway as proposing a normative way of behaving. for example, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 202 according to lewis (6), haraway is giving “antinatalist instructions.” from the perspective of lewis’ reading, haraway’s recent work appears problematic and far from useful. however, in my paper, i explore reading haraway from the perspective of a critique of norms. in other words, the inspiration i draw from haraway’s work is not about imposing childlessness on others; it is about the possibilities the dog stories offer for rethinking norms and assumptions related to family, relationships, and sex that are imposed on both people and nonhumans. this opens up possibilities for alternatives rather than closing them down. 5. see for example mckeithen, “queer ecologies of home: heteronormativity, speciesism, and the strange intimacies of crazy cat ladies”; tallbear, “making love and relations beyond settler sex and family”; weston, families we choose: lesbians, gays, kinship; and willey, undoing monogamy: the politics of science and the possibilities of biology. 6. haraway’s studies have elicited critiques from within ecofeminism and critical animal studies for a range of reasons; for example, because haraway has accepted the use of nonhuman animals in laboratories and food production. (for critiques of haraway, see, e.g., donovan, “animal ethics, the new materialism, and the question of subjectivity”; giraud, “‘beasts of burden:’ productive tensions between haraway and radical animal rights activism”; karhu, from violence to resistance: judith butler’s critique of norms 97–98; and weisberg, “the broken promises of monsters: haraway, animals and the humanist legacy.”). however, in this paper i suggest that, despite these aspects of haraway’s work, the thinking about significant multispecies relationships—which, in particular, in haraway’s work, concerns people and dogs— and specifically the affinity i see in haraway’s work with queer theoretical critique of norms, can also be useful for critical animal studies. 7. see also despret; grebowicz and merrick 113; hemmings, why stories matter. the political grammar of feminist theory; swanson et al. “introduction. bodies tumbled into bodies” 8−10; and tsing, “unruly edges: mushrooms as companion species.” 8. in particular, grebowicz and merrick read haraway in relation to judith butler’s thinking (beyond the cyborg 43−44). 9. for an overview of the critique, see cudworth, social lives 149–154. kuura irni -queering multispecies bonding: reading donna haraway’s dog stories as queer feminism 203 10. in addition, for an analysis of dogs in relation to consumerism and companionanimal industries, see haraway, when species meet 47−55. 11. at least one reader seems perplexed about haraway’s story about cayenne in companion species manifesto, and asks: “she is letting ms cayenne pepper plant ‘dartertongue kisses’ in her mouth. is this dog abuse, pack psychology, mere gambolling? is it something so subtle and particular that we need to work to find the words?” (j. turner, “life with ms cayenne pepper”). i agree that this is something we need to find words for, and my paper is one attempt to address this. however, i do not read haraway or the other writers i discuss as promoting dog abuse. due to space limitations, i narrow the focus of this paper by not discussing bestiality. for existing analyses of bestiality, see brown and rasmussen, “bestiality and the queering of the human animal”; grebowicz, “when species meat: confronting bestiality pornography”; and c. taylor, “sex without all the politics?” 12. lynn turner has also discussed haraway’s work in her article, “when species kiss.” turner focuses on the interspecies kiss in texts by donna haraway and hélène cixous and the photography of carolee schneemann, connecting this discussion to derrida’s encounter with a cat in “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” in particular, turner focuses on performativity in derrida’s work via its connections to these other scholars. turner’s central argument is that these scholars and/or artists “turn the tables and question our certainty regarding our own clarity of communication; they transform the terms of the alleged privation of the animal with regard to language” (67). haraway’s earlier writings, most notably, on cyborgs, have elicited more discussion about her connections with queer theory (see for example, cox, “decolonial queer feminism”). 13. joseph schneider also mentions haraway’s “queer family of companion species” (58), without, however, analyzing or further developing the notion of queer. 14. megan milks promotes the notion of “sex-neutrality” in place of “sex-positivity” in order to be more inclusive of asexuality: “’sex-neutrality’ invokes the same respect for diversity originally implied by sex-positivity without assuming sexual desire or suggesting sex is inherently positive” (114). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 204 works cited alaimo, stacy. “eluding capture: the science, culture, and pleasure of ‘queer’ animals.” queer ecologies. sex, nature, politics, desire. catriona mortimer-sandilands and bruce erickson, eds. indiana up, 2010. 51–72. bakshi, sandeep, suhraya jivraj and silvia prosocco, eds. decolonizing sexualities. transnational perspectives, critical interventions. counterpress, 2016. bibler, michael p. “capote’s frozen cats.” angelaki 23.1 (2018): 116–130. birke, lynda. “naming names—or, what’s in it for the animals?” humanimalia 1.1 (2009). 1–9. online. brown, michael, and claire rasmussen. “bestiality and the queering of the human animal.” environment and planning d: society and space 28.1 (2010): 158–77. butler, judith. undoing gender. routledge, 2004. _____. “gender is burning. questions of appropriation and subversion.” dangerous liaisons: gender, nation, and postcolonial perspectives. anne mcclintock, aamir mufti and ella shohat eds. u of minnesota p, 1997. 381−95. cerankowski, karli june, and megan milks, eds. asexualities. feminist and queer perspectives. routledge, 2014. cudworth, erika. social lives with other animals. tales of sex, death, and love. palgrave macmillan, 2011. derrida, jacques. “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” trans. david mills. critical inquiry 28.2 (2002). 369–418. despret, vinciane. what would animals say if we asked the right questions? trans. brett buchanan. u minnesota p, 2016. donovan, josephine. “animal ethics, the new materialism, and the question of subjectivity.” critical animal studies. towards trans-species social justice. atsuko matsuoka and john sorenson, eds. rowman & littlefield international, 2018. kuura irni -queering multispecies bonding: reading donna haraway’s dog stories as queer feminism 205 _____. “interspecies dialogue and animal ethics: the feminist care perspective.” the oxford handbook of animal studies. linda kalof, ed. oxford up, 2014. 1–20. edelman, lee. no future: queer theory and the death drive. duke up, 2004. eng, david l. the feeling of kinship. queer liberalism and the racialization of intimacy. duke up, 2010. fox keller, evelyn, and helen longino, eds. feminism & science. oxford readings in feminism. oxford up, 1996. francione, gary l. introduction to animal rights: your child or the dog? temple up, 2000. fudge, erica. pets. acumen, 2008. gaard, greta. “toward a queer ecofeminism.” hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy, 21.1 (1997): 114–37. gane, nicholas, and donna haraway. “when we have never been human, what is to be done? interview with donna haraway.” theory, culture & society 23.7–8 (2006): 135– 58. giffney, noreen. “denormatizing queer theory. more than (simply) lesbian and gay studies.” feminist theory 5.1 (2004): 73–78. giffney, noreen, and myra j. hird, eds. queering the non/human. ashgate, 2008. giraud, eva. “‘beasts of burden:’ productive tensions between haraway and radical animal rights activism.” culture, theory and critique 54.1 (2013): 102–20. grebowicz, margret. “when species meat: confronting bestiality pornography.” humanimalia 1.2 (2010): 1–17. grebowicz, margret, and helen merrick. beyond the cyborg; adventures with donna haraway. columbia up, 2013. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 206 haraway, donna j. the companion species manifesto. dogs, people, and significant otherness. prickly paradigm press, 2003. _____. “cyborgs, coyotes, and dogs: a kinship of feminist figurations.” the haraway reader. routledge, 2004. 321−32. _____. how like a leaf. an interview with thyrza nichols goodeve. new york: routledge, 2000. _____. “introduction: a kinship of feminist figurations.” the haraway reader. routledge, 2004. 3−6. _____. “the promises of monsters: a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others.” the haraway reader. routledge, 2004. 63−124. _____. staying with the trouble. making kin in the chthulucene. duke up, 2016. _____. when species meet. u minnesota p, 2008. hemmings, clare. why stories matter. the political grammar of feminist theory. duke up, 2011. hird, myra. “animal trans.” queering the non/human. noreen giffney and myra hird, eds. ashgate, 2008. 227−47. karhu, sanna. from violence to resistance: judith butler’s critique of norms. academic phd dissertation. faculty of arts, university of helsinki, 2017. johnson, e. patrick, ed. no tea, no shade: new writings in black queer studies. duke up, 2016. klesse, christian. “toward a genealogy of a discourse on women’s erotic autonomy: feminist and queer-feminist critiques of monogamy.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 44.1 (2018): 205−31. kuzniar, alice a. “’i married my dog:’ on queer canine literature.” queering the non/human. noreen giffney and myra hird, eds. ashgate, 2008. 205–26. kuura irni -queering multispecies bonding: reading donna haraway’s dog stories as queer feminism 207 lewis, sophie. “cthulhu plays no role for me.” viewpoint magazine 8 may 2017. accessed 18 june 2020. online. mcclintock, anne. imperial leather: race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest. routledge, 1995. mckeithen, will. “queer ecologies of home: heteronormativity, speciesism, and the strange intimacies of crazy cat ladies.” gender, place and culture 24.1 (2017). 122-134. milks, megan. “stunted growth: asexual politics and the rhetoric of sexual liberation.” asexualities: feminist and queer perspectives. karli june cerankowski and megan milks, eds. routledge, 2013. 100−118. nimmo, richie. “animal cultures, subjectivity, and knowledge: symmetrical reflections beyond the great divide.” society & animals 20.2 (2012): 173–92. nordgren, andie. the short instructional manifesto for relationship anarchy, 2012. online. potts, annie, and donna haraway. “kiwi chicken advocate talks with californian dog companion.” feminism & psychology. 20.3 (2010): 318–36. rifkin, mark. when did indians become straight? kinship, the history of sexuality, and native sovereignty. oxford up, 2011. rosa, becky. “anti-monogamy: a radical challenge to compulsory heterosexuality?” stirring it: challenges for feminism. gabriele griffin, ed. taylor and francis, 1994. 107–20. rudy, kathy. loving animals. toward a new animal advocacy. u minnesota p, 2011. schneider, joseph. donna haraway: live theory. continuum, 2005. stanescu, james. “species trouble: judith butler, mourning, and the precarious lives of animals.” hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy. 27.3 (2012): 567–82. steinbock, eliza, szczygielska, marianne, and anthony wagner, eds. “special issue: tranimacies. intimate links between animal and trans* studies.” angelaki: journal of the theoretical humanities 22. 2 (2017). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 208 sullivan, nikki. “the somatechnics of perception and the matter of the non/human. a critical response to new materialism.” european journal of women’s studies 19.3 (2012): 299–313. swanson, heather, anna tsing, nils bubandt, and elaine gan. “introduction. bodies tumbled into bodies.” arts of living on a damaged planet. monsters of the anthropocene anna tsing, heather swanson, elaine gan and nils bubandt, eds. u minnesota p, 2017. m1−m12. tallbear, kim. “an indigenous reflection on working beyond the human/not human.” josé esteban muñoz, jinthana haritaworn, myra hird, zakiyyah iman jackson, jasbir k. puar, eileen joy, uri mcmillan, susan stryker, kim tallbear, jami weinstein, and jack halberstam, theorizing queer inhumanisms. glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 21.2–3 (2015): 230−35. _____. “making love and relations beyond settler sex and family.” making kin not population. adele e. clarke and donna haraway, eds. prickly paradigm press, 2018. 145–64. taylor, chloë. “’sex without all the politics?’ sexual ethics and human-canine relations.” pets and people. the ethics of our relationships with companion animals. christine overall, ed. oxford up, 2017. 234–48. taylor, sunaura. “interdependent animals: a feminist disability ethic-of-care.” ecofeminism. feminist intersections with other animals and the earth. carol adams and lori gruen, eds. bloomsbury, 2014. 109–26. torres, bob. making a killing: the political economy of animal rights. ak press, 2007. townley, cynthia. “friendship with companion animals.” pets and people. the ethics of our relationships with companion animals. christine overall, ed. oxford up, 2017. 21–34. tsing, anna. “unruly edges: mushrooms as companion species.” environmental humanities 1 (2012): 141–54. tuan, yi-fu. dominance and affection: the making of pets. yale up, 1984. kuura irni -queering multispecies bonding: reading donna haraway’s dog stories as queer feminism 209 turner, jenny. “life with ms cayenne pepper.” london review of books 39.11 (1 june 2017.) accessed 22 june 2020. online. turner, lynn. “when species kiss. some recent correspondence among animots.” humanimalia 2.1 (2010). 60−86. accessed 24 june 2020. online. weaver, harlan. “pit bull promises. inhuman intimacies and queer kinships in an animal shelter.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 21.2–3 (2015): 343–63. _____. “the tracks of my tears. trans* affects, resonance, and pit bulls and parolees.” tsq: transgender studies quarterly 2.2 (2015): 345–52. _____. “feminisms, fuzzy sciences and interspecies intersectionalities. the promises and perils of contemporary dog training.” catalyst. feminism, theory, technoscience 3.1 (2017). 1–27. weisberg, zipporah. “the broken promises of monsters: haraway, animals and the humanist legacy.” journal for critical animal studies 7.2 (2009): 22–62. weston, kath. families we choose: lesbians, gays, kinship. columbia up, 1997. willey, angela. undoing monogamy: the politics of science and the possibilities of biology. duke up, 2016. zelinger, amir. “unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina.” humanimalia 9.2 (2018): 92-120. accessed 24 june 2020. online. microsoft word nyman-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:2 jopi nyman horse as significant other: discourses of affect and therapy in susan richards’s chosen by a horse: how a broken horse fixed a broken heart introduction. the transformation of the animal from the other of cartesian modernity to a central actor in late modern culture has been registered in recent literary and cultural studies, such as huggan and tiffin’s postcolonial ecocriticism: literature, animals, environment and philip armstrong’s what animals mean in the fiction of modernity. literary texts, as armstrong claims, have for a long while reflected on the relationship between “the animal” and its various counterparts, including “humanity” and “culture” (1). when mapping out the development of the literary representation of animals at various points in the history of modernity, armstrong emphasizes its diversity that runs counter to traditional juxtapositions: while swift’s eighteenthcentury satires call for “sympathetic identification between human and animal” (48), contemporary postmodernist writing often critiques western industrialism and science, which have caused the destruction of wild and unspoilt nature (170). the widely-held opposition between the humans and the animals has been questioned by other critics as well. while huggan and tiffin discuss texts problematizing widely-held views of agency and sexuality as solely human characteristics (see 190–201), susan mchugh emphasizes the interconnectedness of the various species and suggests that non-human animals do not function “as supplements to human subjects” but it is “as actors” that they contribute to the “shaping” of humans (3). life narratives, as i will argue, are a site for exploring such relationality. to fill in a gap in earlier research, this essay draws from the insight provided by the affective turn (see, e.g., clough and halley; gregg and seigworth) to examine the relationship between humans and animals at the level of a particular human-animal encounter, a horse and her human caregiver, as depicted in contemporary autobiographical writing by susan richards. by examining richards’s recent memoir in the framework of current theorizations of affect, the essay seeks to develop, first, an understanding of a hitherto neglected thematic and, second, a new critical vocabulary for human-animal studies to address life narratives telling of the emotionally loaded relations between humans and non-humans. the importance of such relations has been pointed out by several scholars in human-animal studies who have suggested that pets, or companion animals, have a particularly significant role to play today. as lisa jopi nyman – “horse as significant other” 69 sarmicanic suggests, the fact that companion animals occupy a place in our homes tells of their difference from other animals, wild and domesticated (164). what also marks companion animals as different is that their task is to “fulfil certain social and emotional needs,” often in the role “of a friend” (164). in order to examine the particular characteristics of this close bond, this essay focuses on the role of the animal in autobiographical writing, a genre where the stories of “significant others” contribute to the narrator’s “self-formation” (smith and watson 65). in my discussion of the importance of companion animals in human lives, i will address their affective representation in contemporary autobiographical writing with particular reference to susan richards’s chosen by a horse: how a broken horse fixed a broken heart (2006), a book that has been followed with two sequels, chosen forever: a memoir of a horse, a book, and finding love (2009) and saddled: how a spirited horse reined me in and set me free (2010). chosen by a horse is a multi-faceted example of the current tendency of weaving the affective into a pet memoir and performs thus what mchugh finds central to the genre: it “negotiate[s] a politics of intimate spheres” (121). while its explicit focus is on its narrator’s relationship with her new animal companion, the mare lay me down, it contextualizes the relationship in her personal history and the discourse of trauma. the human-horse relationship depicted in richards’s memoir emerges as one that is intricately linked with her changing identity. by reading chosen by a horse in the context of affect theory, i suggest that its emotional representation of the bond between humans and horses is not a mere marker of the increasingly individualized and emotional relationship between humans and animals characterizing late modern culture, as could be imagined. rather, i will contend that this relationship, represented in chosen by a horse by the use of a discourse of healing and selfregeneration, seeks to reconstruct the traumatized subject and negotiate her identity. as i will also suggest, the affective representation of the horse and its significance to the self-transformation of the traumatized autobiographical narrator is also part of the therapeutic discourse of contemporary american culture. from the perspective of human-animal studies the essay contributes to what kari weil refers to as its ethical turn, in her review of the recent developments in the field (16–17). through a discussion of richards’s narrative telling of its narrator’s emotional relationship with lay me down, a former crippled and abused racehorse that she decides to help, i suggest that the text can be seen as an example of what weil terms as humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 70 “an attempt to recognize and extend care to others,” revealing “a concern with and for alterity, especially insofar as alterity brings us to the limits of our own self-certainty and certainty about the world” (17). as richards’s narrator comes to recognize her traumatized past and understands that the relationship with the non-human is a way of working through trauma, the memoir reconstructs her identity and emphasizes the links between the fields of trauma studies and human-animal studies (cf. weil 17). in such an approach, affect, this essay argues, is the mode through which human and nonhuman, culture and nature, are shown to be interrelated rather than isolated. to use the words of sarah j. whatmore: “it is a mistake to posit humanity (culture) as somehow existing apart from the world of things (nature); the human comes into being with this world” (37; emphasis original). chosen by a horse is an example of such processes. the affective turn and the non-human. as the consequences of the affective turn in the human and social sciences have shifted the focus of research onto such issues as passions and emotions, researchers have sought to open up new areas of study left unexamined in the past. as anu koivunen claims with particular reference to the role of the affective turn in feminist theory, its proponents emphasize its capability of locating the personal and the emotional in the research or point to the ways it provides an alternative and more general frame where the representational is replaced with the real, the cultural with the natural (koivunen 9-10). some trends in affect theory stress a critique of constructivist approaches and promote phenomenological or deleuzian thinking; it should also be noted that while no unified theory of affect can be found, the turn has been accepted by both post-structuralist and anti-poststructuralist scholars (9– 10). the diversity of affective approaches is also evident in conceptual discourse. koivunen reports that it is best seen in the use of such terms as emotion and affect. while some theorists such as sara ahmed and teresa brennan use the two terms interchangeably, for others they may appear as different phenomena (10). regardless of the terminological problems, the affective turn foregrounds a particular way of responding to others and provides a useful way of approaching cultural texts working with affects, including those addressing human-animal relations. while the heightened interest in the affective in culture may be a characteristic of contemporary society valuing constant self-reflexivity and self-making, mobility and liquidity, as suggested by social theorists such as anthony giddens and zygmunt bauman, its various forms call for detailed scrutiny. the affective bond between humans and animals can be examined from various perspectives. in her overview of the relationship between humans and companion animals in particular, sarmicanic mentions that people gain both physical and jopi nyman – “horse as significant other” 71 psychological benefits from companion animals (166–168). animal companions, she suggests, are able to “ground and balance us as humans” and boost such feelings as “certainty and happiness” (169). the psychological benefits of the human-animal bond can be located in a sociological context, too. in his discussion of the relationship between humans and animals in modern society, adrian franklin has suggested that the increasing presence of the latter as companion animals is linked with their role as alleviators of what giddens has referred to as ontological insecurity in modern society and its transforming human relationships (57). in franklin’s view, with animals humans are able to create “enduring relations of mutual dependency” (57). such relationships are by definition affective relationships, involving feelings and emotions with others — here with non-humans. the recognition of such relationality leads to the problematization of dominant models of self and identity. as the human and the animal are interrelated, the basis of the traditional cartesian model of the autonomous and unified western subject based on human reason faces a crisis because it is based on oppositions (subject vs. object, mind vs. body, nature and culture) that have set the self apart from its others (see lloyd; connell 186–87). the cartesian subject, as badmington suggests, has relied on “reason [that] not only grants the subject the power of judgement; it also helps ‘us’ to tell the difference between the human and the non-human” (3). the increasing role given to emotions and deep relations with others, while formerly marginalized, problematize the maintenance of such boundaries and point to their potential significance in autobiographical representations of animals and the need to foreground such features in their analysis. autobiographical narratives dealing with animals can be divided roughly into two groups: life narratives written from the perspective of the human participant such as richards’s that tend to address the shared relationship between an animal and its guardian, and those that (appear to) provide the viewpoint of the non-human. writing of the origins of the genre of animal autobiography margo demello suggests that the publication of texts telling the life story of an animal, such as the life and perambulations of a mouse (1783) by dorothy kilner, sewell’s black beauty (1877), and virginia woolf’s flush: a biography (1933), shows how women writers, often allegorically, have sought to provide the voiceless with a voice and a life story (3). the problem, however, is that of representation and language: how accurate and authentic can human representations of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 72 animals be, especially if they claim to represent the animal’s view point? such questions have been addressed by several scholars and karla armbruster, for one, has suggested that a possible way to think about the representation of “animal voices and minds” — in fiction as well as in life narrative — is to recognize their often shared aim, “a yearning to genuinely know the otherness of nonhuman animals” (19). such an aim is particularly well pronounced in such works as the autobiographical narratives by the autistic scientist and writer temple grandin, who has suggested that because of her condition she is particularly well tuned to the animal world: “in addition to a greater sensitivity to touch that allows her to read cows’ and horses’ body language with her fingers, she maintains that she is able to see what and how nonhuman animals see” (weil 119). in addition to grandin’s texts exploring the interface of humans and nonhuman animals, the genre of life writing dealing with animals may include texts as diverse as narratives of animal catching by the naturalist and zoo-keeper gerald durrell, joy adamson’s narratives of african animals, and contemporary travel texts addressing issues of conservationism and human-animal encounters, such as brian payton’s in bear country: a global journey in vanishing wilderness (2007) and linda spalding’s follow (1998), a narrative of her search for the true story of the primatologist biruté galdikas and her orangutans (see nyman, postcolonial; nyman, “ethical encounters” 108-127). while formally and ideologically distinct, as they are rooted in different historical and cultural contexts, such texts provide diverse perspectives onto the multiple experiences of human-animal relations and their various meanings in human and animal lives. recent studies of life writing dealing with animals have reflected on the genre’s response to life narratives that depart from the conventional requirements of genre by challenging its individualist legacy. in her introduction to “post-ing lives,” a recent special issue of the journal biography, gillian whitlock expands the concerns of the autobiography as a genre by examining it in the context of post-cartesian thinking, where the rational and human subject of modernity has been problematized. she draws attention to the ways in which contemporary autobiographical narratives critique the traditional subject by voicing various ideas of the human in new contexts and the ways in which they are “entangled variously in nature, culture, and technology” (vii). the autobiography, while traditionally linked with the enlightenment project of narrating the development of a matured and apparently reasonable self, is also able to contest such normative teleologies. as linda anderson describes its work: it “‘place[s]’ the subject, the ‘i,’ only to be undone by the instability and difference” (12). in the history of life writing, anderson suggests, revisions of genre conventions are associated with women and postcolonial authors in particular: where virginia woolf’s autobiographical jopi nyman – “horse as significant other” 73 writings are known for their ability to “undermin[e] the unity and confidence of that universal ‘i’ claimed by the masculine subject” (102), postcolonial autobiographical writers such as michael ondaatje, often detached from a fixed sense of home and identity, are constantly “reinventing themselves, their location and community” (120). life writing dealing with animals and especially the transforming human-animal relationship has similar potential to reconstruct and address new of modes of identity and relationality in contemporary society. the position of the animal viz. autobiographical narrative is, however, problematic, as suggested above. in huff and haefner’s study of what they term as animalographies, i.e., stories allegedly written “‘by’ and about animals” (153), the authors distinguish between “popular posthumanism” and “critical posthumanism” (155). while the former seeks “to describe and colonize, through human language and perception, the subjectivities of other species,” the latter “analyzes the relationships between subjectivities, and studies how those subjectivities transform in the process of engaging each other” (huff and haefner 155). in their view the latter form of writing, and especially such texts as haraway’s partly autobiographical when species meet, are particularly important because of the mutual transformations they depict. although haraway’s text is unable to capture the experience of the dog, it is, however, in their view strongly engaged with the non-human because of its “deep analysis of relationality” (168). such relationality, as i will argue in my reading of richards’s text, is emotionally charged but also limited by the genre’s demands and its conventional focus on the human participant’s development. constructing sentimentality. right from the beginning, richards’s work locates the story of lay me down in the contexts of affect and ethics. at surface level, the description of the abused horse in the book promotes a sentimentalist response often used in a didactic manner to boost animal welfare as in such works anna sewell’s black beauty. as natalie corinne hansen points out, such strategies construct humans as saviors and redeemers and can also be located in today’s discourses promoting “animal rights and animal welfare” (227). this is evident in the first chapter of the book, in which the narrator acquires an abused horse, “a bay-colored skeleton [...] followed by a muddy foal” (9), from the local spca in whose paddock 40 abandoned horses are “stumbl[ing] in mud” (2). in the course of the narrative, the empathetic relationship with this suffering and sick horse escaping “misery” (8), while starting from pity, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 74 develops into a sense of deep relationality. yet the discourse of sentimentalism seeks an affective response from the reader by underlining the suffering of the horses, since their physical condition has been generated by human carelessness and desire for economic profit. in fact, demello considers suffering as a key theme in the genre of animal autobiography (8). the issue is clearly present in richards’s description of the bodily suffering of the horses: the mares struggled in the deep mud on swollen joints weakened by malnutrition and untreated racing injuries. many of the horses had open, weeping sores on their legs and flanks. all wheezed and coughed with respiratory illnesses, and green phlegm oozed from eyes and noses. (7–8) in addressing the abuse experienced by the horses, chosen by a horse appears to foreground what weil understands as characterizing the fields of trauma and humananimal studies: “we can recognize the serious harms rendered to victims of horrific acts, but we cannot count on those victims to tell us their stories or what to do about them” (17). as the text’s descriptions of suffering horses emphasize, they call for an ethical response, enacted here as a form of caring for the non-humans and their alterity. in richards’s text, the narrator’s decision to care for the other is linked with her own personal past and traumatic experiences. what appears noteworthy in the memoir’s description of the events leading to the arrival of lay me down is that the narrator reflects on her changing attitude and distinguishes her relationship with the ailing mare from her other relationships with her other horses and human friends. the trope of illness, rooted in the narrator’s memories of the incurable leukemia of her mother and the resulting traumatized childhood of the narrator, is emphatically present in the text. this confrontation with the abused horses is termed as “different” and as something “previously avoided” (1). as she puts it: i was not accustomed to going to the rescue. mine was never the face friends saw smiling over them as they woke up in the hospital after surgery. i wasn’t the one they called to drive them to get their stitches out or to pick up the results of lab tests or x-rays or anything medical. i had a horror of sickness, my own or anyone else’s. (1–2) the construction of this episode as “different,” and its later significance in the narrator’s transforming life, is related to the fact that richards’s narrative stems from therapeutic discourse. when starting to care for lay me down, susan is in her forties and works as jopi nyman – “horse as significant other” 75 a social worker. before the career change, her life has been troublesome. following the death of her mother when she was five, she spent her traumatic childhood in various foster homes involving experiences of unacceptance and shame. after college, she worked as an english teacher in boston but spent her evenings in a local sports bar, drinking white wine and “danc[ing] in [her] underwear,” as well as seeking acceptance from the men there. marrying an abusive and hard-hitting tennis coach, a former vietnam vet, she has moved out to vermont only to find out about his real character. horses, however, are the way out, and upon buying georgia, a three-year-old and troublesome morgan mare, she leaves her husband and starts to remake her home. the narrative emphasizes the safety of her own house as a space exempt from domestic violence (see 54), represented in the text as a further step on the ladder of increased selfknowledge, i.e., her “healing,” recuperation from an abusive relationship. in so doing richard’s book reworks virginia woolf’s famous metaphor of “a room of one’s own,” the importance of which is supported by richards’s literary aspirations alluded to in the text (see 88–89). it is conspicuous, as the following section will show, that the narrator’s caring relationship with her non-human companions, horses such as georgia and lay me down, plays a major role in this process of reconstructing her identity. countering loss. richards’s narrator’s new way of life, without alcohol and a husband, is emphatically linked with horses as significant others that are capable of transforming lives. while they have been part of susan’s life since childhood, georgia functions as her way of escaping the pressures of the abusive marriage. the close relationship with the companion animal provides an alternative to violent home dinners and extensive consumption of wine. to use the narrator’s words, “the idea of being with georgia for the next thirty years [...] made me think about my life and where it was going [...] i didn’t want to bring anyone into the lie that was my life, not even a horse” (78). in the final stage of the marriage the daily training provides a way out of the house. upon the divorce georgia acquires a new role: “georgia was, in a sense, my therapist. for years she listened to my rantings as we tore around the woods. i couldn’t help it. i needed an ear and there they were, two big ones, right in front of me” (87–88). this discourse of therapy and healing is present also intertextually in the text: the narrator reveals that the reading shared by her and her friend allie consists of a casual selection of popular self-help books such as “the road less traveled, men who hate women, or the aa big book” (67). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 76 what georgia starts lay me down appears to continue. the process in which the narrator saves a suffering horse and develops a deep relationship with it, only to lose her to an incurable disease, appears as a further stage in her therapeutic process and ability to cope with loss. while georgia functions as a therapist, as an other to whom a story is told, lay me down is a marker of self, abused and betrayed like the narrator: “watching lay me down and her hostile foal, it was impossible not to connect my own plight with theirs: orphaned, abandoned, mistreated” (49). what such treatment generates is anger, associated by the narrator with her childhood treatment: i didn’t know i was angry until i was about thirty-three. i thought i was just born uncongenial until a therapist suggested i might be reacting to the loss of my parents and being left in the “care” of my grandmother. after that, for years i was nothing but angry. i’d get angry if the phone rang. i’d get angry when the clothes dryer buzzed. i’d get angry when the toaster oven went ping! (49; emphasis original) that anger dominates the narrator’s life world is evident when the legal owner of lay me down comes to collect the foal with his friend. the text shows susan’s irritation caused by the owner’s neglect over the well-being of the horses, which is not a result of lack of financial resources, as his truck and trailer are brand new and spotless: “i didn’t want to believe that [...] he’d spent money on a fancy rig but not on food” (59). the two men are represented as eastern city dwellers, almost as gangsters, whose attitude towards the horses is purely instrumental and thus morally wrong in her view. read in the context of the narrator’s life story, her outburst of anger at the men is not a mere response to their treatment of the horses. following a moment of screaming, she reflects on the situation: “i felt awful — awful for the foal, awful because i had turned into my grandmother, and awful because lay me down was going to be alone in her pasture that night” (62). responses such as anger, as well as feelings of shame, are relevant for the therapeutic discourse of the story, demanding the narrator’s coming to terms with her past. in other words, richards’s text, like many other autobiographical writings, is involved in what henke refers to as “the articulation of a haunting and debilitating emotional crisis that, for the author, borders on the unspeakable” (xix). the subsequent relationship between the narrator and her new horse shows how the narrator learns to counter the past and its formerly silenced experiences of trauma. similar results concerning the treatment of trauma by developing a close relationship with horses have been reported by practitioners involved in use and development petassisted therapy. burgon’s empirical study with young “at-risk” participants jopi nyman – “horse as significant other” 77 emphasizes such benefits as increase in self-esteem and confidence, as well as the development of empathy and self-efficacy (170–176). in a similar manner, mallow, mattel, and broas report that their subjects emphasized positive experiences from working with and grooming horses on a regular basis: “the women have remarked that they are ‘giving back to the horses’” and “‘understand how they (horses) must feel because they were hurt by someone as well” (208). in chosen by a horse the narrator learns to relate deeply to the animal and then to confront the loss, which contribute to her coping with the past. since it is difficult to verbalize the past, the narrator’s “unspeakable” feelings are articulated through the horse rather than uttered directly. while the process culminates in lay me down’s inoperable illness and death, it is a part of the narrator’s reconstruction of identity. the following passage shows clearly how the narrator uses the horse to construct a narrative of self and emphasize the depth of the relation between herself and the horse. what she sees in the horse are not merely qualities that are missing in herself. rather, their significance lies in the fact that lay me down’s response to her troubled past is one that is different from susan’s way of relating to her experience. unlike me, lay me down seemed to feel no rancor. in spite of everything, she was open and trusting of people, qualities i decidedly lacked. it was her capacity to engage that drew me to her, that made me aware of what was possible for me if i had the capacity to ... to what? forgive? forget? live in the moment? what exactly was it that enabled an abused animal, for a lack of a better word, to love again? (64–65) this comparison between the animal and the human can be addressed in the context of the therapeutic discourse in american popular culture and its perception of self and social relations in particular. illouz suggests that its function is “to manage various disruptions of biography [...], the uncertainties that have become inherent in postmodern lives, and problems of [...] the ‘size’ of the self, how big or how small one defines oneself” (157). in this sense richards’s book is part of the same discourse: the animal appears to play a scripted part in assisting the narrator in learning about herself. her problematic view of herself is evident in her reflection on lack of love: “i often wondered what it was like to be loved like that, to be the recipient of such a grand gesture” (165). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 78 this relationship involves a close bond between the two participants, human and nonhuman. the strength of the bond is apparent in lay me down’s “openly affectionate” and “unusually expressive” “devotion” toward the narrator, involving “quick little grunts” (157) and affectionate behavior: “in the stall she sighed, made eye contact, sniffed my head, my neck, my hands, and let me examine her bad eye without displaying any anxiety” (157). from the perspective of the narrator, the relationship is represented as “unique”: “from the beginning, it felt like it was i who had something to learn from her, i who would ultimately benefit from ‘saving’ her” (158). to stress the affective nature of this relationship, the text foregrounds how bodies, human and nonhuman, are touched and communicate by doing so. to use the words of brandt, “the language of the horse operates through the body [...] because humans cannot convey intentions to horses through spoken language, they too must use their bodies to generate a communication style to which the horse can respond” (301). in richards’s narrative, however, the body is more than a means of communication, it is also an example of what affect theorists refer to as “embodied subjectivity” (koivunen 13–14), the way in which bodies function as the loci of affect, or as sites of affect. in haraway’s view, the human-animal relationship, the process of becoming with that shapes an identity of togetherness, starts from touch (35–36). these issues are explored by richards and can be seen in the following two quotations dealing with the pleasure and warmth of bodily touch. while the first passage speaks of how the human experiences the encounter, the second example seeks to capture the pleasure of the nonhuman: “she took a deep breath and let a fine mist flubber out of her nostrils and slightly parted lips. i felt it on the back of my neck, her big, wet sigh. i felt it on my heart” (65) and “the harder i brushed, the better she liked it, bobbing her head and leaning into the brush whenever i came to a particularly itchy spot” (147). these moments show mutual recognition and relationality, and also serve to confirm what natalie corinne hansen finds central to “horse stories” in her essay on humans and horses in anna sewell’s black beauty. reading them, she suggests, in order to examine how human lives are imagined as profoundly shaped through relations with nonhuman lives, opens reading practices to thinking through relationality in terms of locating the self with and through the nonhuman other in the intimacy of desire or in engagements of shared embodiment. (225) jopi nyman – “horse as significant other” 79 while lay me down is not a therapist, this relationship between the two participants, horse and human, resembles that between a therapist and a client, though with the difference, as suggested by siporin: “gestural and body language, implicit in therapistclient relations, is explicit in human-horse communication” (461). in addition, this narrative also involves further passages promoting an identification between the two. an example is the moment when the narrator watches her four horses grazing in pairs, feeling “sad”: “sometimes a couple grazed so close together their noses touched, and it looked like they were telling secrets [...] the way it felt sometimes when i was around couples at a dinner or a party — shut out of an exclusive club of two” (118). this desire to construct a dyadic relationship with a human being is also a theme that the text addresses in its discussion of susan’s dating with hank — if successful, it would reintroduce susan into conventional middle-class society with the potential promise of a stable sense of identity. trauma and recovery. yet the representation of the self in richards’s memoir does not easily emerge as a coherent and fixed one; it is contradictory and split, stemming from a traumatic past. in approaching this, the text again approaches the topic by utilizing the horses of the narrative. it appears that the contrast between the two mares unable to cope with each other is reflects the two sides of the narrator’s self. georgia, the dominant mare who is prone to aggressive attacks and to whom human beings are there to be bossed about (94), is linked with the narrator’s troubled self, the “screaming bitch” shouting at the policeman giving her a ticket for speeding (82). while georgia is “a monster” (113), only the narrator is allowed to think of her as such. this self, characterized by anger and lack of trust in others, is negotiated by lay me down, “the pet who [...] never bit or scratched or ran away or got mad or did anything but bask in the attention and be a wonderful, affectionate, totally available pet” (46). as a representative of care and forgiveness lay me down helps the narrator towards a new life. upon facing the impending death of the horse at the equine veterinary clinic at cornell university the narrator realizes that the emotional burden of her traumatic past extends to her present life and choices. the following passage emphasizes her feelings of “dislocation and isolation” found central to trauma by trauma theorists (vickroy 23). while the narrator reflects on the loss of her familial bonds and its influence on her later life, she is now able to confront them because of her commitment to lay me down: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 80 i couldn’t save myself either, from feeling five years old again, helpless and horrified. i knew that my rage and deep sorrow was thirty-eight years old, preserved perfectly intact, like a buried artefact suddenly exposed to light. my past was more real than ever, more acutely alive in me than ever before. it had taken my love for this sick horse to make me willing to finally face death after all these years, to cry for the first time about the death of my mother and the loss of my family. it had taken me thirty-eight years to not drink or joke or lie about how awful the rest of my childhood been. it was hard to accept that it was mine. all these years i had coped by distancing myself from it, as if it happened to someone else, a child in a story. (205–206) the moment following the death of lay me down showing the narrator supported by her friends is also important from the perspective of working through the traumatic past, not only as a description of the death of a companion animal. as the novel describes the first sunny day in april when lay me down’s life is no longer deemed worth living: allie, dr. grice, and donna stayed where they were, kneeling in the grass. somehow i understood that they weren’t going to leave. they would stay for as long as i needed them to stay, absorbing this experience in their own way, but mostly they were there for me, to guide and support me through the death of my horse. no one was going to tell me to stop crying or to be strong or to that i would be ok or that it was just a horse. no one was going to tell me how i should think or feel. and it was in that gift of silence, that long beautiful pause, that i knew i could hold lay me down’s head for as long as i needed to, because no one who surrounded me now would ever pull away. (239) this passage describes the reconstruction of self, the healing, that the memoir seems to have aimed at. at this stage the narrator has achieved a position that is a combination of autonomous behavior, not directed by others, and relationality, being a member of a community supporting the mourner. in so doing the passage restores what trauma has taken away from her, a sense of oneself as “decent, strong, and autonomous” (23). and, more significantly, this community allows the narrator to mourn for the passing of a non-human member of the community — it is not “just a horse” (239), but a creature with whom she has enjoyed a mutually and emotionally fulfilling relationship. the passage raises the need to address susan’s mourning for her non-human companion. on the basis kari weil’s discussion of responses to animal death, in such situations jopi nyman – “horse as significant other” 81 mourning and melancholia may function as one’s “refusal to subscribe to the law of sex or species, to erase boundaries between kin and kind, pet and lover” (110) and thus may contribute to the formation of a new identity. alternatively, the issue can be examined on the basis of the view presented by haraway, who suggests that life forms are intricately intertwined and that their identities cannot be separated (“every species is a multispecies crowd” [165]). in this context susan has become with lay me down, formed an identity that demands the horse as a part of the self. as haraway puts it: “partners do not preexist their relating; the partners are precisely what come out of the interand intra-relating of fleshly, significant, semiotic-material being” (165). the special status of the narrator’s relationship with lay me down is stressed in the text. for instance, it is seen in the transformation of her view of illness and death, where the former fear of loss becomes an acceptance: “i had thought i would prepare for her death by pulling back, withholding my feelings, or even euthanizing her before any symptoms developed. instead, i spent more time with her” (147). to show the similarities and connections between the various losses, the deaths of lay me down and the narrator’s mother are pulled together when hotspot, lay me down’s devoted grazing partner and protector, finds her dead, panics and grieves. for the narrator, hotspot’s response is an echo of her own formerly unarticulated grief: his grief was beautiful and ferocious; his whole body shuddered with the thrust of each call. i stayed near him, close enough to feel his whinnies reverberate in my chest, as if they were mine. it was as if at last my grief, too, had the power to shake the ground and shatter the air between me and my beloved. it was as if my grief had finally found a memory, a voice. it took two nurses to pull you away from her. (246; emphasis original) the idea of relationality and the possibility of reconstructing intimacy appear to be at the center of chosen by a horse. their significance is evident in the text’s parallel narrative in which the narrator reflects on the development of her (unsuccessful) relationship with hank, a former writer and a businessman who is allergic to horses. this story, revealing her insecurity and avoidance of emotional intimacy, is similarly rooted in her experiences in childhood and marriage, which she now feels determined to counter. the narrative includes various passages in which the narrator reflects on her ability to love “that way”: “i wondered if something was wrong with me, if i was one of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 82 those people incapable of intimacy. it would have made sense if i was, but i didn’t want to be” (95). before setting out for dinner with the recent divorcé hank, she says: “i don’t think men do this, reevaluate their lives, starting from birth, before going out to dinner with a woman” (119). this narrative, while focusing on human-human relations, is linked with that addressing human-horse relations: both are part of the therapeutic discourse through which the narrator seeks to negotiate her distance from others. as the narrative emphasizes the role of childhood trauma as a source of the narrator’s reluctance, the results of her working through point to a possibility of entering such relations in later life, or at least of no longer being a prisoner of anger and rage. this is evident in her thoughts when they decide to separate: “i leaned back against the booth, suddenly too tired to feel angry anymore, too tired to hate him. it wasn’t hank i’d miss, or a warm body to hold, not really” (244). here the symbolic role given to the letter h in the narrative in joining the disparate parts of the narrative together should be addressed: the letter h is, in addition to hank and the verb hate mentioned in the quotation, present in several episodes in the book. these include the narrator’s grandmother’s maiden name, hartshorne, and the initials on the buttons on the liveries of the family coachmen (3), the hospital at cornell where lay me down is treated is in the shape of the letter h (199), and the set of words that appears to describe the novel and its thematic — the title includes the words horse and heart, and it centers upon the notions of hurt and healing. conclusion. in this essay i have examined the representation of the strong affective bond between the narrator of richard’s text and her horses. by emphasizing the special character of lay me down and the transformation it triggers in the narrator, chosen by a horse voices the increasingly powerful role of companion animals in human lives and underlines their significance in late modern society. the description of the affective and embodied relationship, seen in the bodily and non-verbal communication between humans and non-humans, also shows the extent to which companion animals are more than pets and objects. rather, the strong sense of relationality shapes both participants and constructs their relationship as one that exceeds the boundaries of species, showing how identity is a question of becoming with, not alone or individualistically, as suggested by haraway. as susan’s narrative shows, her life is transformed because of her strong bonds with horses and the emotional security that they provide. however, the location of richards’s work in contemporary popular american therapeutic discourse mars its boundary-breaking powers to some extent. by linking the moving death of the horse to the other traumatizing events in the narrator’s life course, it imagines the companion animal in a way that makes it appear more as a catalyst than jopi nyman – “horse as significant other” 83 as an agent, and thus represents it as an instrument necessary to the “healing” of the narrator. such representation is rooted in the way in which chosen by a horse follows the generic conventions of the therapeutic narrative as defined by illouz: it seeks to “organize the self in a consistent way by finding the causes of a deficient relationship in a repressed or forgotten past” (176). as the emotional problems of the narrator of chosen by a horse are framed in the framework of her life story, it centers therapy and sees it as a naturalized way towards a better and more enjoyable life — strong bonds with animals are one of the many cures. in this sense the narrative, regardless of the emotional link between humans and non-humans, appears to conform to the demands of the therapeutic discourse as applied in popular narratives and self-help literature rather than to transform them. while the memoir, unlike many other animal-oriented autobiographical and therapeutic texts, is to some extent able to resist the desire to “colonize” the animal as seen in its attempt to portray the close relationality between humans and animals, in the end it remains human-centric as seen in its emphasis on the meaning of the animal for the human participant. acknowledgement. i wish to thank the academy of finland (project 14875) for its financial support. works cited anderson, linda. autobiography. london: routledge, 2001. armbruster, karla. “what do we want from talking animals? reflections on literary representations of animal voices and minds.” demello, speaking 17–33. armstrong, philip. what animals mean in the fiction of modernity. london: routledge, 2008. badmington, neil. “introduction: approaching posthumanism.” posthumanism. ed. neil badmington. basingstoke: macmillan, 2000. 1–10. bauman, zygmunt. liquid modernity. oxford: polity, 2000. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 84 brandt, keri. “a language of their own: an interactionist approach to human-horse communication.” society and animals 12 (2004): 299–316. burgon, hannah louise. “‘queen of the world’: experiences of ‘at-risk’ young people participating in equine-assisted learning/therapy.” journal of social work practice: psychotherapeutic approaches in health, welfare and community 25 (2011): 165–183. clough, patricia ticineto with jean halley, eds. the affective turn: theorizing the social. durham: duke up, 2007. connell, r.w. masculinities. cambridge: polity press, 1995. demello, margo. “introduction.” demello, speaking 1–14. _____, ed. speaking for animals: animal autobiographical writing. london: routledge, 2013. franklin, adrian. animals and modern cultures: a sociology of human–animal relations in modernity. london: sage, 1999. giddens, anthony. modernity and self-identity. cambridge: polity, 1991. gregg, melissa and gregory j. seigworth, eds. the affect theory reader. durham: duke up, 2010. hansen, natalie corinne. “horse talk: horses and human(e) discourses.” demello, speaking 207–29. haraway, donna. when species meet. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2008. henke, suzette a. shattered subjects: trauma and testimony in women’s life-writing. london: macmillan, 2000. huff, cynthia and joel haefner. “his master’s voice: animalographies, life writing, and the posthuman.” biography: an interdisciplinary quarterly 35.1 (2012): 153–69. huggan, graham and helen tiffin. postcolonial ecocriticism: literature, animals, environment. london: routledge, 2010. jopi nyman – “horse as significant other” 85 kilner, dorothy. the life and perambulation of a mouse. 1783. fairfield, ia: 1st world library, 2004. illouz, eva. saving the modern soul: therapy, emotions, and the culture of self-help. berkeley: u of california p, 2008. koivunen, anu. “an affective turn? reimagining the subject of feminist theory.” working with affect in feminist readings. ed. marianne liljeström and susanna paasonen. london: routledge, 2010. 8–28. lloyd, genevieve. the man of reason: ‘male’ and ‘female’ in western philosophy. london: methuen, 1984. mallow, alissa, pamela mattel, and lynda broas. “‘for the love of horses’: establishing a protocol for women in a therapeutic community to work with rescued horses.” journal of social work practice in the addictions 11 (2011): 205–08. mchugh, susan. animal stories: narrating across species lines. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2011. nyman, jopi. “ethical encounters with animal others in travel writing.” travel and ethics: theory and practice. ed. corinne fowler, charles forsdick, and ludmilla kostova. london: routledge, 2014. 108–27. _____. postcolonial animal tale from kipling to coetzee. new delhi: atlantic publishers and distributors, 2003. payton, brian. in bear country: a global journey in vanishing wilderness. london: old street, 2007. richards, susan. chosen by a horse: how a broken horse fixed a broken heart. 2006. london: constable, 2008. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 86 _____. chosen forever: a memoir of a horse, a book, and finding love. boston: mariner books, 2009, _____. saddled: how a spirited horse reined me in and set me free. boston: houghton mifflin harcourt, 2010. sarmicanic, lisa. “bonding: companion animals.” encyclopedia of human-animal relationships: a global exploration of our connections with animals. vol. 1. ed. marc bekoff. london: greenwood p, 2007. 163–74. sewell, anna. black beauty. 1877. ed. adrienne gavin. oxford: oxford university press, 2012. siporin, sheldon. “talking horses: equine psychotherapy and intersubjectivity.” psychodynamic practice: individuals, groups, and organizations 18.4 (2012): 457–64. smith, sidoney and julia watson. reading autobiography: a guide for interpreting life narratives. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2001. spalding, linda. the follow. london: bloomsbury, 1998. vickroy, laurie. trauma and survival in contemporary fiction. charlottesville: u of virginia p, 2002. weil, kari. thinking animals: why animal studies now? new york: columbia up, 2012. whatmore, sarah j. “earthly powers and affective environments: an ontological politics of flood risk.“ theory, culture & society 30.7-8 (2013): 33–50. whitlock, gillian. “post-ing lives.” biography: an interdisciplinary quarterly 35.1 (2012): v-xvi. woolf, virginia. flush: a biography. 1933. london: persephone books, 2005. microsoft word donhauser-smith. pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:2 review essay justin donhauser endangered species and intrinsic value: a virtue-centered approach i. a. smith, the intrinsic value of endangered species. new york: routledge, 2016. 158 pp. $49.95 pb. is there any good reason to take measures to protect endangered species that have no value for anything we care about? this question propels ian smith’s the intrinsic value of endangered species. smith ambitiously, yet effectively, tackles historied questions about the nature of species and their objective value, while highlighting connections between those questions and advancing a sophisticated new view of natural intrinsic value. throughout the book, he proficiently navigates debates about the metaphysical status humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 238 of species and their intrinsic value, and repeatedly revisits how his conclusions can bear on species management decision-making. smith’s view of species and his account of their intrinsic value is insightful, novel, and nuanced; he has succeeded in writing a book that should interest not only philosophers of science and environmental philosophers, but also biologists (restoration ecologist in particular), and natural resource managers. it would work well for teaching upper level undergraduate or graduate courses in environmental philosophy or philosophy of biology, and even certain ecology or conservation biology courses. smith’s view also has clear implications for how environmental policies and resource management strategies could be more ethical, and offers guidance on how to realize more ethical and effective responses to particular endangered species cases. the overall argumentative progression of this book is as follows. in chapter 1, smith motivates his project by discussing the crucial need to understand the value of species, and on what grounds they ought to be protected, given the magnitude of ongoing and imminent species extinctions we now confront due to anthropogenic climate change (10-12).1 the chapter focuses on a case study of efforts to protect the endangered humpback chub (gila sypha) from extinction. the chub illuminates the role considerations of intrinsic value can play in justifying species preservation efforts as a paradigm of a species with no appreciable instrumental value. the chub has no clear aesthetic value that would compel anyone to save it. indeed, a google search immediately confirms the chub is at best unimpressive, and quite ugly compared to other species. as smith says, “it is certainly not one of the charismatic megafauna, like species of bear, whale, and cheetah that seem to have obvious aesthetic value” (7). and even if some could find the chub cute or somehow impressive, other potential sources of value the species lacks outweigh saving it simply because a few find it cute. for instance, the species doesn’t matter environmentally. smith cites the director of the group charged with protecting the chub from extinction in the colorado river, the native fish work group (nfwg), explaining that the chub lacks “ecosystemic value”; insofar as its entering the process of extinction has not changed the tropic community it is a part of in any way and no other species in that community has been or is expected to be negatively impacted by its extinction (8). the chub’s functional ecological contributions are negligible. it also lacks anthropogenic instrumental value. smith explains that although it was once a significant source of food for local indigenous peoples, the numerous species of bass and trout that now populate the river make the chub a far inferior catch by comparison. worse still for pathetic chub, there are severe economic disadvantages to trying to save it. justin donhauser -endangered species and intrinsic value: a virtue-centered approach 239 to make this clear, smith focuses on the strategy for saving the chub, and other endangered minnows, advocated by the glen canyon institute, which entails decommissioning the glen canyon dam in the colorado river basis. this would have the effect of warming the waters and making the formerly muddy banks muddy once again, which would improve conditions for minnows, including the chub. yet, these conditions would negatively impact the far more instrumentally valuable bass and walleye species that thrive in the river’s current cool and clear conditions. in fact, decommissioning the dam would drain the lake, lake powell, which the dam was erected to create. in turn, this would destroy the thriving introduced fisheries, the main sources of tourism to the area, as well as the stores of potable water the dam creates (8).2 saving the chub is a resource sink. the species has no apparent value for anything. thus, any good reason to consider taking efforts to save it would have to be rooted in some non-derivative value; intrinsic value that the species has in and of itself (3). through his subsequent engagement with debates about the nature of species and their intrinsic value, smith makes a compelling case that we are morally required to save endangered species in many cases, even those like the chub, because they do possess intrinsic value. chapter 2 looks at the theories born out of the long and lively debate in biology and philosophy about the nature of species and potential criteria for individuating natural species. out of context, this may strike some as a departure from a critical discussion of intrinsic value. yet, smith shows that it is a fruitful and instructive exercise. the value of understanding different species concepts proves useful over and over again later in the book when he critically appraises others’ views on intrinsic value and species management that appeal to different species concepts. smith narrows down his working conception of what kind of entity a “species” is such that it could have intrinsic value,3 adopting the hennigian species concept (hsc) put forth by meier and willmann, named after biologist willi hennig, a founder of phylogentics and cladism. according to the hsc, a species is a reproductively isolated population or group that originates in speciation (i.e. “a dissolution of their stem species”) and cease existing either by going extinct or being outmoded through speciation (29). smith acknowledges the limitations of the hsc, and notes that adopting this conception limits his subsequent account of intrinsic value to just those groups of organisms that are delineated by the hsc. he shows that, despite these limitations, the hsc fares better than nine major competing conceptions of species for the purposes of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 240 his project in the book. he also shows that the hsc enables one to find faults in numerous other views about the intrinsic value of species (chaps. 3-5), and later in the book he explores how the view of intrinsic value that he extrapolates from the hsc can be extended to larger groups of organisms (higher order taxa) that are not picked out by the hsc (chaps. 9-10). for readers more interested in the nature of intrinsic value than the metaphysics of species smith’s systematic defense of the hsc in chapter 2 may be a bit dense. fortunately, his discussion is very organized (see table 2.1, p. 22), and he does not bury the lead. the takeaway from the hsc upon which smith’s positive account of intrinsic value rests is clear. the hsc provides definite spatiotemporal criteria for identifying and individuating populations of any species. as smith puts it, according to the hsc, “[species] are real — that is, they are not mere artifacts created by the minds of observers” (29). indeed, according to the hsc they are created and destroyed by speciation events or extinctions, and therefore have a sort of existence in and of themselves. smith’s view of the intrinsic value of species is thus built on the simple fact that things can go better or worse for such groups. basically, a species tending toward extinction, or “dying” through the deaths and failed reproductions of their members, is bad for a species and persisting is good. but, of course, a group of organisms can also persist in better or worse shape across time, and this is where smith’s appeal to an aristotilean ethic comes in. in his view, it is best for a species to be flourishing, and virtuous for us — as rational beings with the ability to assess how things can go better or worse for other sort of entities — to help them flourish to the extent possible in light of various mitigating factors. before fleshing out this view in chapter 6, smith motivates the need for this new conception of intrinsic value by considering problems faced by well-known competing conceptions of the intrinsic value of species in chapters 3-5. chapter 3 focuses on holmes rolston’s neo-kantian account of intrinsic value. referring back to the discussion of different “species” in chapter 2, smith initially points to difficulties rolston’s view faces because it is unclear exactly how he conceives of a species (48-50). he then assembles a charitable reconstruction of rolston’s view and, though he says much more in the ways of critical analysis, smith points out one critical flaw of rolston’s account. as many readers of this journal will know, rolston argues that species are “ends in themselves” in the kantian sense, such that they are individuals with a goal or telos. their telos is to survive and successfully reproduce via the strategies and justin donhauser -endangered species and intrinsic value: a virtue-centered approach 241 behaviors their members have evolved in the environment(s) in which they have done so. thus, in rolston’s view, “a species is what it is where it is,” and is a thing with objective value that is defended by the individual organisms constituting it through their struggles to survive and reproduce (50-52). smith argues that rolston’s view is insufficient as a conception of intrinsic value, because the view goes no further than this. that is, rolston provides an account of how species exist such that they have value in and of themselves, but this alone does not tell us why we ought to act to protect species. in smith’s summation, “he jumps the ‘good to ought’ gap without sufficient argumentation”; simply assuming that because species have intrinsic value we are therefore somehow automatically responsible for protecting it (53). chapter 4 considers an alternative view, proposed by lawrence johnson. johnson’s view extends to human and non-human species his conception of what it is for an individual person to have intrinsic value. in gloss, according to johnson, we each, in and of ourselves, have “well-being interests” such that it is more or less good for us to satisfy our well-being interests and more or less bad to not do so (60-3). this is the source of our intrinsic value as persons. whether or not any species has intrinsic value is then dependent on how johnson conceives of “species.” as johnson has it, a species is a “genetic lineage sequentially embodied in different individual organisms that is alive just so long as the lineage is embodied in living organisms” (63). johnson recognizes that species are of course not conscious over and above the consciousness of the individual organisms that carry on the genetic lineage, but he notes that realization of well-being for a species can nevertheless go better or worse in a number of ways, depending on how the members of lineage interact with their environments across time (64). thus, according to johnson, species have intrinsic value, since it is objectively good for the genetic lineage as whole to maintain ecological functioning that preserves the lineage and enable it to thrive. a natural objection to johnson’s view is that he is making a category mistake and double counting the well-being satisfaction of individual organisms. in an attempt to counter such objections, johnson contends that the interests of a species are distinguishable from those of its constitutive individual members. an example that he thinks makes this point is as follows. the evolution of exceptionally large secondary wing feathers in the male pheasant (argusianus argus) serves to bolster the well-being interests of individual males, while at once threatening the well-being of the species. this is because having the larger feathers attracts more mates (in the interest of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 242 individual males), but also makes it difficult for the males to evade predators, leading to a decline in their population levels (against the interest of the species) (65). my own view, which i’ll not defend here, is that johnson is in fact making a category mistake; and that talk about well-being interests of the species is elliptical for talk of the well-being and fates of individual organisms. in the cited example, the evolution of larger feathers is simply an adaptation that works in favor of individual males successfully satisfying their interests in one way, and that works against them doing so in another way. what’s more, i cannot see how johnson’s view does any better than rolston’s, since he too “jumps the value to ought gap” without argument. smith, however, gives johnson the benefit of the doubt on these points, and instead points out that johnson’s conception of species is flawed (66-7), and that his conception of the “well-being interests of a species” does not logically support his comparison of the intrinsic value of species to that of individual persons. smith’s argument for the latter is straightforward; he denies johnson’s assumption that it is possible to have “interests” in any substantive sense without having the capacity to experience whether or not those interests are satisfied. accordingly, he contends that while persons are the sorts of individuals that can have well-being interests — since we have the capacity to consciously experience things going better or worse with respect to those interests — species just aren’t the sorts of things that can have well-being interests, because they can’t have interests at all (68). chapter 5 critically evaluates baird callicott’s account of the intrinsic value of species. smith, i think aptly, separates out the humean, darwinian, and leopoldian elements of callicott’s view. the humean bit of callicott recognizes the we have evolved, psychologically, to have both self-regarding and other-regarding sentiments; we are at once egoistic and altruistic. the darwinian bit recognizes that it is sometimes to our evolutionary advantage as a species to be altruistic, as when a parent sacrifices things for their offspring or when we cooperate as a member of a tribe to survive. callicott argues accordingly that, even though this is tempered by our egoistic tendencies, our altruism can be extended beyond our families and communities to members of other human communities and of larger “communities” like nations and humanity in general. the leopoldian bit then expands on leopold’s conception of individual members of the human species being functional members of ecological communities; our altruism should naturally extend to other species and ecosystems because maintaining their well-being can also tend to be to our evolutionary advantage (70-71). on this view, nonhuman species thus have intrinsic value to us, because when we direct an altruistic, other-regarding, sentiment at some other-than-human entity we are valuing it for its justin donhauser -endangered species and intrinsic value: a virtue-centered approach 243 own sake — not just for its instrumental value for us (72). for example, when we naturally extend sympathy to a drowning animal we are valuing it for its own sake. in smith’s interpretation, callicott’s view does not succumb to the problems of rolston’s or johnson’s. he argues, rather, that callicott’s further argument for why we ought to extend moral considerability to other species of organisms does not provide sufficient reasons to conclude that we ought to extend moral considerability to species. callicott’s reasons for why we ought to extend moral considerability to nonhuman things is also humean. this is that we have evolved such that our reason (in the philosophical sense) can inform, and thus direct our attention to what things ought to be “proper objects of our concern” (72-3). smith offers a complex evaluation of why callicott’s view cannot consistently hold that we ought to preserve the intrinsic value of individual organisms and also preserve the intrinsic value of species, which i will not bullet out here. in short, smith points out that, unless he’s interpreted in ways that are inconsistent with parts of his overall view, callicott simply does not clearly articulate any reason why we ought to preserve the intrinsic value of any species, but only gives sufficient reasons to preserve individual organisms (and maybe populations) (74-5). the second half of smith’s book is where one finds the robust bits of his positive account. smith fleshes out his virtue-centered account of the intrinsic value of species in chapter 6. he then elaborates on how the view suggests we should evaluate considerations of preserving sexually reproducing species we’ve endangered in particular in chapter 7; he responds to anticipated objections to his view in chapter 8; he explains how his view enables us to evaluate tradeoffs and competing considerations in evaluating preservation strategies in chapter 9; and he considers the extent to which his account of the intrinsic value can be extended to higher order taxa (e.g. genera, families, and orders), and what this implies about whether we ought to preserve such groups, in chapter 10. since his arguments throughout these chapters are more careful and complex than the preceding critical chapters, and so as not to ruin the book for potential readers, i will forgo repeating smith’s arguments in these later chapters in detail here. i’ll instead outline the main thread of his positive argument, and then close by discussing some potential objections to parts of smith’s overall argument that make it a good foil for further thinking about endangered species and our obligations to protect them. as i’ve noted, smith’s is a virtue-centered view of the intrinsic value of species. his view is founded on the observation, and basic premise, that life is apparently valuable, since all living things naturally value life in some way or other. in other words, living humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 244 things value life to the extent that they actively avoid death and harm and strive to maintain life in various ways (77-78). smith’s conception of intrinsic good and flourishing then builds on john o’neill’s conception of “biological good.” in o’neill’s view, the “extrinsic,” or instrumental, goods of a biological entity are environmental conditions that enable it to realize its natural capacities and to flourish, and the intrinsic goods of a biological entity are its natural capacities. thus, for a biological entity to flourish is for an individual of a kind of biological entity to realize its capacities and potentials (80). smith extends this conception of intrinsic good to species, or at least many species, by tying it to his prior commitment to the hsc. he argues accordingly that “an hsc species flourishes if it maintains reproductive isolation over time” (81). as i understand his argument, this is a minimal condition for any hsc species’ flourishing, since maintaining reproductive isolation means that the living members of the species were able to realize their capacities and potentials, at any given time, such that their species could persist. and so, since life is objectively good, on smith’s view, the persistence of any human or non-human species is objectively, and intrinsically, good. this line of thought, if correct, establishes smith’s claim that endangered species — even pitiful ones like the humpback chub — are intrinsically valuable. but why ought we save them? in line with his virtue-centered argument to establish their value, smith further argues that it is a virtue for our species to protect and save endangered species for three reasons. first, he argues that humility is a human virtue; and that, since it is our actions that have caused most, if not all, endangered species to be so, we ought to save them to exercise our humility (ch. 7). second, he argues that exercising our virtues is partially constitutive of our flourishing. thus, in his view, exercising our speciesdirected virtues is partially constitutive of our flourishing (118). this, i think, is to say that using our reason to conclude that species are intrinsically good and exercising our virtues by taking actions to save them is good for our psychological well-being; thereby serving as a potential means of helping each of us flourish. third, smith argues that protecting and saving species is partially constitutive of our well-being because they are external goods for our species (118-120). his is to say that other species are good for our survival and well-being as individuals, and thus as a species, because they are functional parts of the environments in which we live, as leopold emphasizes. yet, smith further argues that this does not imply that we ought to save all endangered species. in his view, we should not save species that we have endangered in cases where doing so would be that a threat to the survival of humans. perhaps shockingly, he contends not just that we aren’t morally required to save such species, but that we are morally justin donhauser -endangered species and intrinsic value: a virtue-centered approach 245 required to let them go extinct. in his view, saving them would be wrong, because preventing humans from existing would be preventing them from flourishing and doing good. he argues that this is wrong, and that humans have a sort of moral priority, because we are the only species capable of doing virtuous, moral, things (9). in the later chapters, smith is careful to consider many implications and extensions of his view, as well as different sorts of tradeoffs and value conflicts that can come up when considering to save any particular endangered species. i will leave that material for potential readers to discover. as i believe smith’s book is a worthy read and can help further critical debates about the value of species and how we ought to manage endangered species, i’ll conclude now with some brief critical points that may pique the interest of those who remain unmoved by my review so far. there are indeed many contentious claims made throughout smith’s book. this is not a fault of the book, as one has to say something contentious to say anything new and substantive. nevertheless, some of smith’s central claims make it a great foil for further critical thought about intrinsic value and species management. some will take issue with smith’s claim that for an individual (organism, population, clade, species, etc.) to have intrinsic value, it must be objectively real. why couldn’t a species be intrinsically valuable even if it were a conceptual construct? surely, one might think that social, psychological, and conceptual constructs of other sorts have a certain sort of value in and of themselves. for example, countries, states, social clubs, and universities one may argue have certain kinds of intrinsic value. and, on different grounds, numerous environmental philosophers argue that there just is no value without valuers; that value itself is a construct (cf. callicott; norton; mccord). accordingly, one might contend that smith could defend his virtue-centered normative position without committing to the robust views about the metaphysical status of species he defends. after all, we could exercise our species-directed virtues of humility even if species are a conceptual construct. likewise, efforts to protect species that are partially constitutive of our biological well-being could still help us flourish in various ways, even if species aren’t objectively real. on a somewhat related point, some may find smith’s treatment of callicott’s humean view of intrinsic value to be unnecessarily critical. smith contends that callicott does not give reasons for why we ought to preserve any species, since, in smith’s interpretation, our “other-regarding sentiments” only extend to organisms and perhaps humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 246 populations. yet, callicott’s overall view is not inconsistent with smith’s virtuecentered position, since smith provides a conception of the intrinsic value of species that would enable one to extend other-regarding sentiments to hsc species. one might reasonably argue, moreover, that extending such other-regarding sentiments is a virtue that is partially constitutive of human flourishing. it is thus arguable that smith unfairly positions his view as an alternative to callicott’s. although he addresses such concerns directly (in chapter 8), some may also be inclined to still deny smith’s claim that species have intrinsic value on the grounds that having such value requires having self-interests of the sort that organisms have but species do not and cannot (cf. johnson; sandler). smith simply has an alternative view that both organisms and species have intrinsic value because there are objective ways in which they can flourish and things can go better or worse for them. but this is just a different conception intrinsic value, and one could reasonably deny that it is the right one. since he makes an earnest attempt to show that his conception is of value and practical use for species management decision-making about, the onus would be on anyone who argued as much to show that smith’s conception is worse than any other. this is nevertheless a point on which some might take issue with smith’s arguments. smith’s commitment to the hsc may also be a point of contention, since one could argue that the hsc is flawed, or that other species concepts are superior for a number reasons. for instance, one could reasonably argue that the hsc, as smith interprets it, is too unspecific; and that species are really much smaller, localized, historical groups than he considers throughout his book (see de queiroz). the consequences of this would not be inconsistent with smith’s overall argument necessarily however, it would require positing a new variation of the hsc, whose focus was limited to something like localized “population types.” it would also have ramifications for how the practical implications of the view would have to be reframed; “species preservation” efforts would have to focus not on species as delineated by taxa but, rather, on discrete local populations of any species (cf. donhauser; sagoff, “environmental harm”). such a revisioning of the hsc may also have ramifications for smith’s counterarguments to anticipated objections and for his claims about how his view suggests evaluating tradeoffs and competing considerations in species management decision-making. of course, there would be similar sorts of ripples and potential troubles for smith’s account if any alternative species concept (e.g. the ecological species concept) were shown to fare better than the hsc. justin donhauser -endangered species and intrinsic value: a virtue-centered approach 247 finally, i imagine some readers might question how useful smith’s theory, or even any theory of intrinsic value, really can be for practical decision-making. while smith considers numerous ways he thinks his view could bear on such decision-making, it is nevertheless arguable that appeal to intrinsic value isn’t really useful for making decision. for example, some argue that it isn’t considering the intrinsic value of species, but considering their instrumental values, that actually enables us to assess tradeoffs and make effective management decisions (see, for instance, maguire & justus). since smith’s own considerations of various tradeoffs in species management decisionmaking are prioritized relative to how they bear on human flourishing along various dimensions, some may even gripe that his view collapses intrinsic value to instrumental value. it is not my mission here to undermine smith’s arguments or to defend them against any of the sorts of potential concerns just glossed. my task has been to evaluate smith’s book and to provoke interest in it, as i believe that it is a theoretically and practically valuable work. nyone interested in natural intrinsic value, species concepts, or species management issues ought to read it. notes 1. all cited page numbers refer to smith’s text. 2. curious about what the nfwg was doing to save the chub in view of all of this, a bit of googling quickly revealed that the situation is even more dire for the pathetic chub than smith presents. the nfwg has tried to save the chub by breeding them in a hatchery, transferring the hatchlings to lakes around nevada to mature, and then transferring those mature chubs to the colorado river; only to have the transferred populations go extinct within one generation because their offspring cannot survive in the colorado river (see chessa). 3. smith does not argue as much, but some would also argue that having criteria for determinately locating any natural thing, such as species, is necessary for even devising ways to study and/or protect and save it (cf. haskell; odenbaugh; sagoff, “what does environmental protection protect?”). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 248 works cited callicott, j. baird. “on the intrinsic value of nonhuman species.” the preservation of species. b. norton, ed. princeton up, 1986. chessa, frank. “endangered species and the right to die.” environmental ethics 27.1 (2005): 23-41. de queiroz, k. “species concepts and species delimitation.” systematic biology 56.6 (2007): 879-886. donhauser, j. “making ecological values make sense: toward more operationalizable ecological legislation.” ethics and the environment 21.2 (2016): 1-25. haskell, edward f. “mathematical systematization of ‘environment,’ ‘organism’ and ‘habitat’.” ecology 21.1 (1940): 1-16. johnson, l. e. “toward the moral considerability of species and ecosystems.” environmental ethics 14.2 (1992): 145-157. leopold, aldo. a sand county almanac. oxford up, 1967. maguire, l. a., & justus, j. “why intrinsic value is a poor basis for conservation decisions.” bioscience 58.10 (2008): 910-911. mccord, e. the value of species. yale up, 2012. meier, r., & willmann, r. “the hennigian species concept.” species concept and phylogenetic theory. wheeler & meier, eds. columbia up. 30-34. norton, bryan g. toward unity among environmentalists. oxford up, 1991. odenbaugh, j. “seeing the forest and the trees: realism about communities and ecosystems.” philosophy of science 74.5 (2007): 628-641. sagoff, m. “environmental harm: political not biological.” journal of agricultural and environmental ethics 22.1 (2009): 81-88. justin donhauser -endangered species and intrinsic value: a virtue-centered approach 249 sagoff, m. “what does environmental protection protect?” ethics, policy, and environment 16.3 (2013): 239-257. sandler, r. l. the ethics of species: an introduction. cambridge up, 2012. microsoft word john-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:2 kelsey dayle john animal colonialism—illustrating intersections between animal studies and settler colonial studies through diné horsemanship the objective of this paper is to highlight the relationship between violence against nonhuman animals and indigenous peoples, and conversely to reframe the conversation about horses by positioning horses as teachers and knowers for decolonization. i highlight a theoretical and material tension marking an entry point to a number of concerns in both settler colonial and animal studies. i name this tension: animal colonialism. animal colonialism is one interlocking tension that strikes upon conversations of heteropartriachy, racism, environmental racism, indigenous erasure, and religious fundamentalism — all forces that connect, intersect, and overlap in complex ways. throughout the paper, i turn toward horses as “knowers” that help to demystify problematic tensions and binaries that pollute indigenous lifeways (animal/human, alive/not alive, traditional/modern, sacred/profane). the authority to name is a powerful tool within indigenous and decolonial studies because it centers and locates contexts that make or circumvent erasures. turner and simpson explain that naming and interrogating words are vital because they are political. they write, “we use language that our scholarly training equips us with in order to convey the experience and the political positioning of our people under the difficult political conditions that we have inherited and live within and struggle with today” (10). in other words, theoretical naming is a tool for using an indigenous framework to make sense of political and material realities wrought by settler colonial violences. additionally, theory is done differently by indigenous peoples. in this piece, i do some “naming” and “theorizing,” and will explain my use of each. i name the central phenomenon animal colonialism not as a way to fully know or claim the phenomenon, but to articulate the interconnected nature of indigenous nonhuman animals, peoples, and lands, and the ways these relationships encounter and are tangled with oppressions confronted by various disciplines. i also center animals in colonialism to show that settler colonial erasures specifically assault animals, but also that animals resist and show humans how to resist. i use the word “indigenous” or “diné” before horses, animals, or land not as a way to show anthropocentric dominance kelsey dayle john -animal colonialism—illustrating intersections between animal studies and settler colonial studies through diné horsemanship 43 over nonhumans (that is to say, land is possessed by those of indigenous heritage), but to designate these nonhumans as belonging to an indigenous ontology that might not make the same divisions that the western world does (i.e. animal/human, alive/dead). finally, i consistently use the phrase “nonhuman animals” to recognize that animals are not animals in a human/animal hierarchy, but rather that humans are also a type of animal. i resist the hierarchy of humans over animals within my writing by designating both as animals or as both “indigenous.” to describe animal colonialism i challenge fundamental concepts of methodologies by way of certain ethnographic refusals (simpson). i use my own experiences and reflections on my research as a diné woman, horse trainer, and activist scholar in my community. i make this theoretical connection in hopes that it will benefit future indigenous and decolonial researchers who position land, people, and animals as interconnected while centering indigenous communities and their ontologies. the topics in this paper emerged as i reflected deeply on the theoretical framework of my dissertation research with navajo horses and decolonization in my community. horses and navajo/horse relationalities have historically been represented negatively, as either “mystical” or through the “feral horse problem.” though i touch on realities and all sides of horse politics in my community, i aim to reframe the conversation as one that does not see horses as simply “feral” or “mystical.” to do this, i interrogate a number of underlying ontological binaries before i speak specifically about horses on navajo nation. my work consistently centers the horse in the effort to understand and promote decolonial healing within my community. i make the connection between animal and settler colonial studies with an axis of my own ontology: diné horse relationalities as they relate to land and the settler colonial regulations forced upon both. in conclusion, i highlight the opposite of animal colonialism as i have come to know it. i describe a diné epistemic framework by describing horse/human relationalities and the knowledge these relationships offer for resisting structures of settler colonial violence. my experience working with horses through a diné epistemology is the source of my refusal on a number of fronts. knowing that knowledges within the academy are never safe nor non-political, i find this arena one that i choose (as an indigenous, feminist scholar) to engage, i offer my stories and not somebody else’s. outline. i begin by locating myself as a diné feminist scholar and explain how this illuminates my work with my community. from here, i give a brief note on academic humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 44 interventions for indigenous peoples, relaying the message that interventions are never fully “new”; they are only “new” to academic spaces because indigenous knowledges and epistemologies have been purposefully excluded and erased from education. i trouble the concept of “newness” as it perpetuates indigenous violence and erasures. next, i provide a theoretical map of animal colonialism by showing how diné horses connect and disrupt binaries in four arenas of settler colonial studies — genocide and slaughter, heteropatriarchy, wage labor, and education. with these examples, i center diné horses and show how a horse lens reframes the conversation on feral horses in navajo nation. this is a central thread that defines the tensions that operate throughout this article as i straddle rhetorics, disciplines, and materialisms. like all things in the diné universe, diné can and should turn toward horses for help. therefore, i do not center the controversy regarding feral horses, rather i center the horses. horses and horse relationality is a form of resistance to animal colonialism because it perpetuates a diné epistemology of connection, resistance, and healing amidst the violence experienced through animal colonialism. simply put, anyone who has ever spent any time around horses knows they area more authentic windows into all things than our own human selves. positionality. this article came about as a reflection on the methodology and theoretical foundation of my doctoral dissertation in partnership with my community — navajo nation. my dissertation research centers the navajo horse as a central point of diné decolonization. this work was inspired by my own experience riding and training navajo horses. i grew up with horses and watched my dad train mustangs we adopted from navajo nation. i’ve ridden horses my whole life and more recently started working with them. i ride them to get away from academic theory, to get away from humans, and to learn, reflect, grow, and plug into something much more important than my own narrowness. because i wrote this article during my dissertation research process, i submitted it to the navajo nation research review board and it was approved as a theoretical piece. i felt it was important to get the board’s approval because the work represents stories that are generalizable and experienced by many diné, not just my family. i use my own stories and experiences to trouble the idea of “data,” while acknowledging that my stories, experiences, and knowledges are informed by my community; therefore, the knowledge is never owned by me or my family, rather it is shared amongst the larger diné community. kelsey dayle john -animal colonialism—illustrating intersections between animal studies and settler colonial studies through diné horsemanship 45 for this reason, i do not use interview or observation data from my dissertation in this piece, rather i reflect on the theoretical formations through which i ground my work and ongoing decolonial projects with my diné community. the ideas and themes from this piece were developed in the process of doing indigenous research (see kovach; smith). margaret kovach explains that indigenous research is never one dimensional, but involves the person, their positionally in the community and their relationships with that community (for me that is my relationship and positionality with horses in my life). my relationship with my community and my identity as a diné woman is grounded in my relationship to horses. as i began to gather literature for the theoretical framework of my dissertation study, i realized that my topic sat in an interdisciplinary space within academic communities of settler colonial studies and animal studies. because indigenous research is inter/cross/trans-disciplinary by nature, i found it difficult to utilize one theoretical location within a particular discipline and in many ways refused (see simpson) to locate the work in any one discipline because i saw it fracture the meaning. these interventions are the connections and interventions that bring potential for settler colonialism and animal studies to connect and work toward a common goal of decolonization. before i began my graduate study and dissertation, i observed horse relationality by watching my dad train and ride horses for over twenty years. this was my first form of education and before i knew how to navigate academic or educational systems, i could catch, saddle, and ride my own horse. as i began to conceptualize my dissertation project, i quickly realized that divisions and disconnections in theory made it hard to write with integrity as a diné woman who values horses through a diné ontology. however, my connection to horses represents more than just identity and experience — it is a window into a set of beliefs and traditions that characterize our existence as diné and the ways in which we confront protection and beauty. as many indigenous scholars do, i draw on my own experiences to tell stories that communicate what has not yet been written about or respected in academic theory (see belin; grande; and lee). i trouble conventional forms of academic “data” because i believe standing in the intersection of theory, methodology, and reflections in my research is a political stance. research can never not be political, and so i choose to blur the lines methodologically as a refusal of separations. in the same way that theorists are troubling binaries like human/nonhuman, and alive/not alive, i methodologically challenge the division between service, theory, and method. i add this as a methodological intervention for future indigenous scholars who might do research and/or work that involves the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 46 interconnected and interrelated relationships between land, people, and animals. the method must fit the relationship, and as we are never just humans alone, i am never just a researcher alone. indigenous scholars often build theory, do research, include personal and family stories, all as a way to shift and mold methodologies to reflect the integrity of our work in our communities. finally, my work continues to intersect with feminist and queer studies. i identify as an indigenous feminist, meaning that i see gender as a primary organizational force for any ontology. i identify western forms of heteropatriarchy as violent in indigenous communities and a primary form of colonization, and tool for land seizure and genocide (see arvin et al.). within this framework, i also align with queer theory to trouble oppressive binaries and to break down barriers of disconnection. even as i align myself with these communities, my work remains distinctly indigenous and should be read as such. interventions and theoretical bilocations. indigenous interventions in animal studies should not be considered an intervention at all. though indigenous voices are more recent in academic conversations, they are not new epistemological interventions. diné have practiced such “interventions” for many years. interventions may come from traditional data, or they may come from personal experiences and family knowledges. linda t. smith and margaret kovach have done great work demystifying overlapping lines between personal and community knowledges by explaining how they are always a product of and accountable to their community. on a similar front, indigenous scholars argue that indigenous feminisms have distinctly different goals (if they are called feminism at all) than those of white and women of color feminisms.1 the distinct difference is best described by a particular practice of sacredness grounded in place and language, upheld by sovereignty.2 these interrogations involve troubling longstanding divisions and intersections that uphold grounded forms of hegemony. this thread will run throughout my project, as each arena is addressed in ways that both overlap and intersect. even though scholarly interventions can be separate from the resistances and interventions that many indigenous peoples perform in their communities, they are also uniquely important because theoretical interventions inform research and policy that directly affect the material realities of indigenous peoples. kimberly tallbear names it as an intersection between new materialisms and animal studies, dependent upon metaphysical differences of objecthood for indigenous communities, while tying it to a number of binaries. she writes, “first of all, indigenous peoples have never forgotten kelsey dayle john -animal colonialism—illustrating intersections between animal studies and settler colonial studies through diné horsemanship 47 that nonhumans are agential beings engaged in social relations that profoundly shape human lives. in addition, for many indigenous peoples, their nonhuman others may not be understood in even critical frameworks of western living” (234). to resist the theory to practice hierarchy, indigenous scholars work directly on the ground in their communities while working in academic arenas, making service and research indistinguishable. for example, i work with rescue horses for a local horse rescue that takes in horses from navajo nation, and i consider this my “on the ground work.” at the same time, i write theoretically about the interconnected nature of diné horsemanship. these projects are separate and connected at the same time. separate, in that my service to the horses is not considered “data” or “research” but it informs my knowledge, and vice versa. similarly, my family’s knowledges and the lessons i learned from my horses are not just “my own,” but were a gift to me through my diné family and my positionality as a nihooká diyin dinéé. the data shared with me by my community will stay with me and inform my work with these horses. it is impossible to separate these spheres. one major academic intervention by indigenous scholars is the vast amount of work done on settler colonialism (see tuck & yang; wolfe; and veracini, for example). this intervention defines settler colonialism in the network of oppressions that operate distinctly for settler societies like the united states. settler colonialism is an ongoing phenomenon that undergirds policy, research, education, and culture, and works to erase indigenous peoples, lands, and epistemologies. in settler colonial studies literature, land has been the central concern of scholars.3 the direct connection between land-nonhuman animals-indigenous bodies is less of a focus in the literature. animal studies, one side of the spectrum, confronts anthropocentrism as a foundation of the field. facets of animal studies model area studies that critique existent epistemic imperialisms. but these interventional area studies rarely consider nonhuman animals, land, plants, and communities with relationships that resist dominant epistemologies outside academic contexts (read indigenous communities). kimberely tallbear’s work falls into a number of academic arenas, including animal studies, queer studies, environmental studies, and new materialisms, which makes locating her work challenging, even troubling in the best sense. in a publication on theorizing queer inhumanisms, she clarifies, “from an indigenous standpoint, my work should not be seen as queering indigenous practice. rather it should be seen as a twenty-first-century indigenous knowledge articulation, period” (230). the project of building connections between theoretical locations can’t escape the political arena. this is because the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 48 divisions in theories, methodologies, and disciplines are political, materially acting to destroy indigenous communities. therefore, the connections drawn between these theoretical, academic locations is a highly political project. any scholarly intervention by indigenous peoples cannot ignore the obvious — that research, education, and scholarship are tools characterized by and embedded within colonial narratives (see grande, and smith). therefore, scholarly interventions from indigenous peoples must walk the line between documenting indigenous knowledges to build up the community and confronting settler colonial ideologies that construct current academic area studies. for example, this paper offers very little of what might be considered “traditional navajo knowledge” about sacred horse practices because the audience is largely non-navajo. i reserve sharing diné knowledge systems for diné spaces.4 instead, i focus on settler colonial ideologies that destroy horse/navajo/land relationalities and show how diné resist these settler colonial violences. the purpose of this paper is to “decolonize” academic arenas and not to display sacred information in an inappropriate context. therefore, i am cautious and intentional about the type of information i share in any academic context. another important point to acknowledge is that the individuals who do this work do it largely outside formal academic institutions. in particular, animal studies have failed to be accountable to urgent interventions from settler colonial studies. these interventions begin with the connection between nonhuman animal and indigenous genocides as inherently interrelated and nondistinguishable theoretically or materially. decolonizing animal studies means recognizing that animal genocide is a tool used to control and subdue indigenous peoples for the purpose of resource extraction and land seizure. furthermore, the settler colonial narrative is delivered in all educational and research arenas and should not be only a concern of native american or ethnic studies (see smith). various scholars take on and trouble these intersections with the agreement that posthumanism, new materialisms,5 and queering inhumanisms must grapple with questions of colonialism and interrogate global white supremacy, both of which require centering voices of marginalized black and indigenous women of color. as mcmillan explains, “theorizing blackness has long required considering existential questions of life and death, the limits of humanity, and a stultifying thingness” (224). this further introduces the lens of indigenous and black feminist thought. indigenous feminist theory challenges methodologies and interrogates heteropatriachy, specifically kelsey dayle john -animal colonialism—illustrating intersections between animal studies and settler colonial studies through diné horsemanship 49 demonstrating how gender violence operates as the most central tool of settler colonialism (see arvin et al; lugones; tuck & yang). animal colonialism. in this section, i flesh out the parameters of animal colonialism by connecting diné horse relationalities to various sites of oppression confronted in settler colonialism studies. indigenous animals are not only devalued because they belong to, are in territory of, and in relationship with native peoples, but are also assaulted to disrupt non-anthropocentric indigenous knowledge systems.6 animal colonialism can be carried out in policy or ideology, materially or theoretically, and exists in intersecting arenas of material and nonmaterial knowledges. most often it demystifies sacredness embedded in native worldviews by severing the connection between nonhuman animals and the sacred. for diné, animal colonialism is obvious in the blatant depreciation of navajo mustangs, diné/horse relationalities prior to colonial land, and animal knowledge structures. navajo livestock are consistently judged as less valuable than non-navajo livestock, based on their proximity and connection to navajo people — a phenomenon that has re-occured throughout history. diné and their horses continue to be separated by time and space, and the agency of horses is silenced. deeply intertwined with the interlocking forces of settler colonialism, the devaluing of distinctly diné animals is the face of settler colonialism most apparent in the historical moment of the 1930s and 1940s livestock reductions. i spiral around this particular moment not because it is a linear point of change, but because it exemplifies a moment that illustrates the tensions of the paper. projects of animal colonialism regulate and control the material landscapes of navajo people with an institutional gaze that enforces a “proper” way to relate to both land and livestock (especially on the navajo reservation). in the following section, i outline four different networks where animal colonialism is intertwined with settler colonial practices, which in turn police diné land, horses, and people. first, i describe the legacy of animal slaughter as tactic of forced removal and genocide against native peoples. second, i outline the connections between normative gender, sexuality, and family structures as they relate to animal and land care. third, i look at the history of the navajo livestock reductions and their connection to wage labor, reservation boundaries, and social control on navajo nation. fourth, i discuss the destruction that ensued by replacing informal education with formal schooling. animal genocide. any inquiry specializing in animals and human relationships is a study into the multiple forms of erasure in native american communities — both human and nonhuman (john). this inquiry necessitates focusing on the direct linkage humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 50 of the extermination of animals to the extermination of indigenous peoples in the u.s. settler society. violence against animals in the u.s. settler nation is frequently discussed in animal studies; however, there are few conversations about how violence against animals is used as an extermination tactic against indigenous peoples for the purpose of relocation and genocide (see hubbard; jaffee & john; john; voyles; and weisiger, dreaming of sheep). furthermore, violence against animals should not be read only insofar as it regulates and polices human bodies and lands, but as an assault on the reverence of inhumanisms generally. tasha hubbard argues that the slaughter of animals, specifically the plains buffalo, is part and parcel to the genocide of american indian peoples. hubbard defines nationality and sovereignty as concepts which include both humans and nonhuman animals writing, “being a people is not a domain exclusive to humans” (294). nations and groups are formed by the connections that peoples make with lands and animals, and one cannot exist without the other. the un-doing, circumventing, and erasing of indigenous nationalities and sovereignties is connected to the erasure of livelihoods embedded in traditional pastoral practices. for hubbard, this “challenges human centric and territorially shallow definitions of group life” (294) by including the animalhuman-land connection found in many indigenous epistemologies. my entry point to this conversation is at the horse-human-land connection and its destruction on navajo nation. prior to the forced removal of navajo people from diné bikeyah to bosque redondo, various tactics were used to force navajos to submit. one primary tool was the burning and slaughter of diné livelihood — crops and livestock. after navajo resources were destroyed, the people were forcibly removed through starvation. diné returned to diné bikeyah by the treaty of 1868, but the damage caused by disrupted connection still continues. in one colonial swoop, diné land, livestock, and livelihood (and the strong connection between all three) are targeted for removal. as hubbard extends the definition of nationhood, i also think about nations, sovereignties, and agencies prior to nation-state politics. by centering on the buffalo, hubbard expands the concept of sovereignty by extending agency to nonhuman animals. sovereignty is an ongoing conversation amongst indigenous nations and the definition varies across communities and peoples. in many ways, sovereignty is a rhetorical tool adopted by indigenous nations for the protection of land, animals, people, and worldviews. i respect the work done by indigenous peoples that harnesses sovereignty as a tool for self-determination and the deep theorizing required to deploy kelsey dayle john -animal colonialism—illustrating intersections between animal studies and settler colonial studies through diné horsemanship 51 a western concept for the protection of indigenous lands and peoples. as i trouble the concept, i want to recognize and respect its uses for indigenous liberation. jaffe and john trouble the concept of sovereignty in an aim to decolonize disability studies lenses. they argue that “disablement” is not only a concept for humans, but that disabling the land or earth is central to settler colonialism. they write, the disablement of land/body as a tactic of settler colonialism has persisted for centuries and takes various forms. by highlighting indigenous struggles to protect mother earth and her sacred resources, we suggest that indigenous ontology, specifically relationships to land (deloria), challenges disability theory at the epistemological level by rejecting the taken-for-granted dualism between the environment/space and (disabled) humans/bodies within (settler) disability studies. (1408) as binaries between land and humans are troubled, so too are the concepts that they produce — nationhood, self-determination, and sovereignty. tavia nyong’o queers the inhuman while also brining in the unavoidable perspective of race. they ask: how might we read the human exercising sovereignty over the nonhuman? how does the nonhuman prevail in an act of sovereignty, and how might we be accountable to and aware of “the reduction of racialized others to human prey” (252). they warn against de-centering humans who have never been considered “human” (indigenous and black folks) and theorize, “what promise wildness might hold for queer, feminist, and antiracist projects” (265)? such questions foreground settler colonialism and the violences toward nonhumans and humans as breeches of sovereignty that complicate the narrative of sovereignty in posthuman studies. this conversation challenges definitions of sovereignty, who has sovereignty? who speaks and knows? who is a self? and how are nonhuman animal selves or land selves, knowers, and speakers silenced? furthermore, how do indigenous peoples un-silence and already listen to nonhumans? gendered colonialism. any relationship to land involves the familial and kinship networks through which that relationship is defined and enacted. diné feminist scholar jennifer denetdale contextualizes local diné experiences as sites of both colonization and resistance: “indigenous feminist and queer analysis demonstrates how the spaces of domestic and intimate are also sites of colonial surveillance and control, thereby gendering settler colonialism” (“chairmen” 72). colonization is woven into all aspects humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 52 of life and continues to characterize both local and extra-local experiences of diné peoples. furthermore, “the transformation of the diné into seemingly willing citizens not only of the united states but also of their native nation occurs through institutions that regulated and surveilled their traditional practices in arenas that ranged from governance and education to health, marriage, and sexuality” (74). concerns of family, gender, and sexuality connect to all institutions and areas of life for diné. a pre-colonial network is disrupted by settler colonialism in both the public and private spheres, as each interacts and regulates the other. one of her many interventions in feminist scholarship illustrates how the navajo nation government is complicit in systems of settler colonialism, particularly in upholding western patriarchal norms, regulations, and hegemonies (denetdale, “return”). she zooms both in and out to capture public and private concerns in relationship to each other, showing both disruptions and resistances. when talking about indigenous animals, especially diné horses, it’s never just about the horses or livestock. it connects to the interrelated diné epistemology and requires attention to how disruptions ripple through and split this interconnected way of knowing. as heteropatriachy is enforced in various systems, diné were characterized as “deviant” or “wild” because they didn’t uphold western, christian gender norms or practice heteropatriarchal family structures — which ultimately became required by the u.s. for participation in private property and livestock ownership (denetdale, “return”). in the western worldview, private property was held in the male name and passed down through the male. the space and resources provided subsistence necessary for families and livestock. by regulating the ownership and possession of resources to men, political, economic, and social power is typically held by men. in contrast, diné are matrilineal, meaning that land, livestock, and family groupings (or clans) are passed down through the female line. marsha weisiger explains that livestock was in the care of, and seen as, property of the women, giving diné women increased political and economic power. in a western, patriarchal worldview, this was characterized as backward and barbaric, making it an area of diné life and worldview that must be corrected through the christianization and formal schooling of navajo people. i add that this corrective process also involved transferring navajo livestock ownership and grazing permits to men’s names. denetdale explains how heteropatriachial normativity directly impacts and regulates diné pastoralism. during the livestock reductions and the animal slaughters that prompted forced removal, the u.s. “attempted to transform the diné from a pastoral people with a flexible political kelsey dayle john -animal colonialism—illustrating intersections between animal studies and settler colonial studies through diné horsemanship 53 system into a village dwelling, self sustaining people, organized into nuclear households with a man as the head” (76). voyles also draws the connection between heternormativity and reproduction for peoples, lands, and animals. under the western gaze, navajos, their land, and their livestock were caught in the catch-22 of both too populous and too uncivilized. this connection is best seen in the livestock reductions imposed on diné during the 1930s — a policy enacted under the guise of land conservation, but ultimately resulting in massive social and economic destruction for navajo nation. to connect imagined ideals about normative gender, sexuality, land/people voyles explains, in the eyes of the federal conservationists, it was not just livestock but the navajo people as well who were overpopulating navajo land. in the 1930s, long-held federal impressions of navajo overpopulation of their “inadequate” land base were folded into the discourses of the navajo problem. an increase in the size of the reservation to accommodate navajos and their herds seemed a political impossibility, due in normal part to a noisy campaign by the non-native stockmen who ran their herds in the area east of the reservation proper.” (43) it is important to note that the land is either desired or detested by the western world, but either way it constructs limits to the reproductive soveignty of diné. this results in the overarching belief that there were too many navajo.7 she writes, “thus the discourse around the navajo problem privileged the ’problem’ of population, framing the navajo as irrationally hyper-reproductive given the ’barreness’ of the land base” (43). in short, the regulation of sexuality, gender, and family organization extends to the regulation of land, livestock, and vice versa. i cannot ignore the similarities between the characterization of indigenous lifeways as uncivilized, indigenous femininity as uncivilized, and indigenous animals as uncivilized. to trouble another binary, i align with a critique continuously articulated by indigenous feminist thought: what do the civilized/uncivilized or wild/tamed binaries mean, especially for indigenous women? maria lugones explains that indigenous women are always excluded from white feminist spaces, and that their dehumanization is inherent in the intersection of black and woman or indigenous and woman. she writes, “they [indigenous and black women] were also understood to be humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 54 animals in a sense that went further than the identification of white women with nature, infants, and small animals. they were understood as animals in the deep sense of ’without gender,’ sexually marked as female, but without the characteristic of femininity” (202-203). furthermore, as violent binaries of wild/tame become more defined, the intersections that subordinate women of color go unnoticed. the project of interrogating the “wild” is once more not exclusive to sexuality, indigeneity, and nonhuman animals, it permeates all lifeways for indigenous peoples and hides opportune intersections of resistance. stock reductions and wage labor. grazing policy and land management are political tools that regulate life beyond just the range. the creation of western livestock policy on navajo nation can be traced back to the livestock reductions in the 1930s and 1940s. the indian service (now the bureau of indian affairs) began to conduct research on the state of navajo rangeland in the early 1930s. through multiple surveys and reports, it was determined that the navajo range was “overgrazed” and “mis-managed” by diné.8 consequently, an urgent narrative of impending doom and destruction emerged and undergirded a new generation of policy. the overall goal of the program was to reduce navajo livestock by approximately 56%.9 i make this connection to show how livestock reduction policies were not instated to address overgrazing on navajo nation at all, but were aimed toward assimilating and controlling social and economic determination for navajo people through the introduction of wage labor and a push toward uranium mining (voyles). furthermore, the state sanctioned regulation of lands is the regulation of nonhuman animals inhabiting these lands. in addition, the policies can be seen as a sort of plan b for land control, since navajo nation refused to adopt the general allotment act 1887, “the primary objective of which had been to change the cultural habits of the american indian” (fonaroff 208), to transform them into farmers and land owners through the western notion of private property. as the policy reduced family income and livelihood, one proposed solution by the u.s. government was for wage work to replace any income lost through livestock economies. this seamless transition set a path for companies to secure low wage labor from native peoples, and while their original source of wealth was destroyed, navajos became dependent upon income and wealth that benefits the u.s. henderson argues that, “wage work was more necessary for men from families with small herds, whereas kelsey dayle john -animal colonialism—illustrating intersections between animal studies and settler colonial studies through diné horsemanship 55 it was a supplement and diversion for men from wealthy families” (381). the government promised that stock reduction would increase productivity, progress, and “security of property and freedom of mobility” (fonaroff 212). additionally, community education through extension work and other avenues was enacted as an informal training on “best practices” for grazing and range management. all of these imposed changes aimed to transfer diné grazing into white regulated grazing. what followed was the adjustment of grazing policies on navajo nation in accordance with goals to conserve and restore the range. however, the term “land conservation” masquerades as a tool of settler colonialism in the same way as education in indian boarding schools, because it adjusts, alters, and destroys diné relationships with the land and livestock through a network of boundaries, limits, and the introduction of wage labor. fonarnoff recounts that the beginning stage of social control was enacted when three navajo individuals were charged with the violation of grazing limits. this move served as a scare tactic against the navajo people who continued to disregard polices on stock limits. in the rhetoric of “conversation,” i am brought back to kimberly tallbear’s work that interrogates rhetorics of “preservation” and “conservation.” she explains that narratives of a disappearing or vanishing native extend beyond native bodies to native cultures, languages, lands, lifeways, objects, and nonhuman animals. the myth of the vanishing native then becomes a justification for the extraction of native american dna (see tallbear) and the enforced methods of “conservation” automated by non-indigenous actors. in the same way that wage labor limits one’s ability to expand, grow, and accumulate wealth, grazing management of navajo limit the expansion and growth of livestock economies. the two work hand in hand. for the navajo, grazing management is particular insofar as it is established in and for a reservation setting. pre-reservation, grazing occurred expansively with traditional pastoralism focusing on cyclical movements; conversely, reservation confinement and policies of grazing inside reservation borders make livestock ownership reductive and limiting. it goes without saying that some (settlers) were encouraged to expand, while others (indigenous) were prevented from expanding. the confinement of the reservation limits the amount of expansion allowed by any one family through the enactment of grazing management plans, permits, and stock limits. this is a spatial arena of erasure comparable to gendered population control and animal slaughter. prior to contact and the confinement of a reservation that comes soon after, growth and expansion were not limited. with reservation borders and increasing humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 56 expansion by white ranchers and farmers, expansion was limited by a material, spatial border that restricted growth, time, wealth, and tradition for the navajo people. the confinement of navajo and their livestock, in turn, allowed for the expansion of the western frontier. in the same way that a fence might block grazing and herd expansion, wage labor acts as a time barrier restricting time spent developing herds. simply put, limits on expansion are a form of erasure. furthermore, expansion should not be read in the capitalistic sense. wealth and expansion in a diné framework are defined differently. education. often left out of the residential boarding school documentation is the knowledge that was replaced through formal schooling. loss of language, culture, and religion are highly cited consequences of residential boarding schools, but the loss of livestock relationships and time spent with horses and sheep is hardly mentioned. this loss of time and space which originally created, sustained, and was passed down through sacred relationships is a direct result of forced formal schooling on navajo nation. horses are present in diné creation stories alongside the nahooká diyin dinéé and are understood as an integral part of the diné narrative from the beginning. this relationship sustains and underpins the entire worldview, because horses are embedded in the four cardinal directions, with a horse in each direction. diné worldview is in the four cardinal directions, which map out diné understandings of life, learning, and movement through time and space (lerma). although horses and humans are not directly linked in a kind of evolutionary chain that science likes, they are linked by their emergence from the earth and its four sacred elements. at their introduction, the horses come to the earth’s surface and are made to be a tool for and a gift to diné. with them comes a set of instructions in husbandry, songs, and prayers that reflect the deep and intrinsic connection that both share with nahasdzaan (mother earth). sustaining this sacred connection takes time, generational education, land, and a preservation of traditional religion — all of which are systemically interrupted through residential boarding schools, reservation confinement, policies on reduction, and the introduction of wage labor. excluding this narrative from education is a form of epistemic violence (john). before formal schooling, diné learned from their family members, primarily their maternal grandparents. before formal schooling, students would spend their days learning about cooking, weaving, herding, horse training, and grew up as fluent kelsey dayle john -animal colonialism—illustrating intersections between animal studies and settler colonial studies through diné horsemanship 57 speakers of the language. the worldview and connection to the horse is embedded in diné bizaad, and the complexities of a horsediné-diné bikeyah connection are all embedded in the particulars of the language. for example, words like danihiliį́į́’or shilį́į́lago translated loosely to “our livestock” or “appearance of livestock for me” respectively, seem, in english, literal and devoid of their embedded meaning. however, in diné bizaad these words note the mystical, embodied, and spiritual embodiment of the livestock which are created to fulfill a purpose alongside the diné people. it shows the sacredness of horses in this world, and the relational possession (not in the sense of western property) fixed in the creation of livestock particularly for diné survival, healing, and empowerment. formal education of the boarding school era has disrupted diné forms of education; diné bizaad is largely a second language for most young people, and time spent with livestock is restricted. the price of stock can no longer sustain a family’s income, and the introduction of wage labor has made the upcoming generations even more dependent upon formal schooling. thus, the language, songs, and prayers regarding horse training and husbandry are kept mostly by the older generation. in short, wage labor and formal schooling have stolen time from navajo people: the time to learn, to relate, and to embody sacred relationships given since the beginning of creation. as wage labor and formal schooling become more common for navajo, the ontological destruction circles in on itself, fracturing horse-human-land health even further. animal colonialism is the intersection of humans, animals, and land within arenas of settler colonial studies. it necessitates a holistic and interconnected look at not just indigenous perspectives, but perspective of indigenous lands and animals. through these four theoretical locations, i show how diné horses specifically connect to settler colonial studies and point toward the multifaceted and interlocking forms of oppression, erasure, and violence inherent in settler colonialism. contextualizing feral horses through the lens of animal colonialism. there’s a lump in my stomach every time i see a skinny horse on the navajo range. this happens frequently as i drive to work on weekdays and to my dad’s house during weekends. on a healthy horse, you can’t see ribs or hip bones. but these horses look like skeletons on the horizon, like death. this particular form of violence is usually blamed on diné rather than contextualized in our entanglements with settler colonialism. the range is not enough. even though it's expansive, it’s regulated by barbed wire fences and policies that mirror handcuffs. i worry about what the violence of seeing these horses everyday does to me, does it desensitize me? it impacts my rib cage the same way i shudder at violent films. seeing these horses is like taking a bullet, spiritually. every single day. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 58 we can’t take in another horse, or feed another horse. i can’t train another horse. i can’t fight about it or even let myself shed another tear. but this is just one side of a warped mirror maze of a colonized world. and if i turn away, i’ll see it again somewhere else. so i stay in the round pin an extra 30 minutes with a little mustang horse picked up off the highway. i try to understand why she resists, work with her and not against her, hear my dad’s instructions, and embody his patience. i go slow with ropes and work through her trauma from being rounded up. i postulate that my studies in settler colonialism resonates with her, too. in this section, i show how the network of concerns within animal colonialism has helped me contextualize and reframe the conversation about feral horses in my community. this is an area that is very close to my heart and my life. most of the horses i grew up with were rez ponies from the navajo range. i often think about how i relate to them versus how i relate to other feral horses on the navajo range. through the lens of animal colonialism, i can frame why and how things are they way they are. how the localized horror of seeing starving horses is much more than a matter of neglect, it is a matter of violences wrapped up with other violences of settler colonialism. at present, there is a high number of feral10 horses roaming the navajo nation. this is a highly controversial issue among both navajos and non-navajos. in 2013, horse slaughter became illegal in the united states. at the time, navajo nation was facing its own choices about whether to round up free roaming horses on the navajo range or let them be. traditionally, this issue has been divided between “traditionalists” who claim that the horse’s sacred position in navajo epistemology and philosophy means the tribe should not round up and sell horses for slaughter, and on the other side, “nontraditionalists,”11 who advocate for the round up in order to alleviate the effects of feral horses on rangeland, homesites, and water. in 2017, the most recent aerial survey estimates 38,223 horses on the reservation.12 some issues with an increased unauthorized horse population are: overgrazed range areas, horses in the right of way, homesite destruction, inbreeding, water usage, and erosion. as i have done throughout the paper, i continuously trouble the binary of traditional/modern as i think about its origins and how it is utilized within my community. maria lugones explains this longstanding use of the binary within a network of coloniality writing: “a conception of humanity was consolidated according to which the world’s population was differentiated in two groups: superior and inferior, rational and irrational, primitive and civilized, traditional and modern” (192). i remember tallbear’s critical framing of “traditional” and “nontraditional” to reflect the kelsey dayle john -animal colonialism—illustrating intersections between animal studies and settler colonial studies through diné horsemanship 59 longstanding idea that traditional indigenous peoples (their biology, dna, and blood) and their lifeways are somehow disappearing. this is problematic in that it justifies the extraction of indigenous blood, dna, and materials in the name of “preservation.” i do not provide a solution for the highly controversial phenomenon of increased horse populations, but i do offer a helpful framework to consider: the context of nonhuman animals using a horse lens to interrogate settler colonialities. i situate the phenomenon in the social, historical, and settler context within which the navajo and their horses have long endured, beginning with their forced removal and into present day. given the holistic position of horses in diné communities, i return to the preceding binaries enforced by settler colonialism that narrates the stories both diné and non-diné tell about horses [e.g. sacred/not sacred (read round-ups v. free running horses), or human/animal (read preservation of land for humans v. preservation of land for horses), or researcher/researched (read humans v. horses)]. to better articulate these ideological separations as they relate to diné land and animals, i draw from indigenous geographer mishuana goeman, who explains how the creation of indian reservations lead to the on-rez/off-rez indian identity dichotomy. often this identity bifurcation leads to the traditional v. non-traditional indian identity. an “on rez” indian becomes synonymous with “traditional,” while an “off rez” indian is viewed as “non-traditional.” this lens, created by settler colonial ideologies of bifurcation, becomes the primary lens for viewing horses on navajo nation. the binary can then be extended into multiple problematic spheres outlined earlier. traditionalists are those who are characterized as believing in the sacredness of the horse and who oppose round ups, while the non-traditionalist is viewed as having a pro-slaughter agenda. theorizing divisions between traditionalism and non-traditionalism is a complex endeavor and different in different contexts.13 however, the lens of on/off rez or traditional/non-traditional is scarcely critiqued for being a consequence of settler colonial land policy. to address the navajo horse specifically on navajo nation, i argue that a dualistic lens cannot be used; instead, diné must use and center a diné framework. in her work on both genetics and new materialisms, tallbear brings an indigenous critique to current conversations in the fields of both animal and queer studies. she writes, in general usage, the terms animate and inanimate reflect a categorical divide between entities — those that are seen to live versus those that are humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 60 deemed to be not alive, and this is the west defined at the level of the organism. i use the term de-animate after mel chen’s use in animacies (2012). chen derives the concept of animacy from linguistics. a “hierarchy of animacies” refers to the greater and lesser relative degree of entities’ sentience, aliveness, (self-)awareness, and agency. the animal hierarchy is actualized through the associated verbs/adjectives “animate” and “deanimate” that refer to greater and lesser aliveness attributed — in the nonindigenous knowledges i interrogate — to some humans over others, and to humans over nonhumans.” (180) one doesn’t need to equate “traditional” with anti-round up in order to believe horses are sacred. in fact, the sacredness of horses is commonly interpreted by self-identified traditionalists as sacredness within the relationship between humans and horses, where both are bound to one another through creation. the sustained relationship of the horse to diné land and people makes them sacred. therefore, wild or free roaming horses do not fulfill their full potential of sacredness without navajo people’s particular contribution. the sacredness enacts itself in the relationship between the two where land, resources, time, spirituality, and education are all needed to sustain hózhó, or balance. although the increased population of horses on navajo nation is problematic, the refusal to auction them for slaughter should be recognized as an intentional resistance against slaughtering and erasures of settler colonialism. traditional medicine people and community members who resist round-ups, as i understand it, do so as a stance against past atrocities involving animal slaughter and to display the positionally of the horse in diné creation frameworks. even if an individual is pro-slaughter, that individual will almost always state that they understand that the horse is sacred. i’ve found that the two sides are not as rigid as we might think; instead, it is the choices offered through settler colonial histories, policies, and narratives that are rigid. diné resistance through diné horsemanship. dancing with ms. bambi she’s a mustang without a permanent home sweet tempered and gentle natured i can tell that she’s seen things and more kelsey dayle john -animal colonialism—illustrating intersections between animal studies and settler colonial studies through diné horsemanship 61 so i dance with ms. bambi slow and gentle pressure and release feel the movements, anticipate the steps think forward and around at the same time dancing with ms. bambi patience, kindness, and empathy i think about fences, ropes, and roads they affect her like they affect us i know my history and it frames her history so i dance with ms. bambi move with intention raise my arm slowly change my thought patterns resist frustration and anger change direction dancing with ms. bambi watch her move and trust relearn and unlearn watch her heal as i heal and we move together watch her head lower toward mine dancing with ms. bambi the bleak realities of settler colonialism are always met with resistance, survivance, and preservation among indigenous peoples. to highlight this form of resistance on navajo nation i relocate the conversation to diné horsemanship and narrate horse-human relationally as refuse as it has shaped my life, research, service, and resistance according to what my horse thinks. resisting and re-thinking frameworks dominated by animal colonialism is an enactment of resisting oppression, genocide, and destruction of indigenous lands, animals, and peoples through the embodied and maintained relationship of each humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 62 together. it’s about reconnecting what has been disconnected, erased, or bifurcated through any and all violences to the land, the people, or the nonhuman animals. it is about centering the horse as a knower and a speaker, and therefore about maintaining relationships which resurrect epistemologies assaulted by settler colonialism. it reconnects what has been severed by animal colonialism. therefore, the creation and preservation of relationships with horses through training is an act of survival and resistance. diné horsemanship involves the practice of relating to horses on diné land with the horsemanship instructions given to diné in our philosophy of education. it requires a connected network of land, language, and spiritualism that builds up and is built from family, land, and livestock. for diné, family is k’é, or a complex network of familial and social relations given through creation scriptures and enacted with animals on land.14 i learned how to relate to horses by watching my mom and dad for twenty years. when i saw my dad embody patience, kindness, empathy, and relationships, i saw a choreographed dance that gave me a lens to view all things — good and bad. until recently, i was scared to train horses, even though i’m an experienced rider and have maintained relationships with them for years. but i started to push myself to go further because my academic goals felt heavy and constraining to me. as i opened myself to practice, to what my dad showed me about diné epistemology, i knew that i needed to be on diné land, with diné horses, practicing the diné epistemological relationalities my dad and his horses demonstrated around me. this is where i locate myself in my poem “dancing with ms. bambi.” it’s about learning to move and be holistically. it’s about learning to contextualize the present moment, to have empathy for the violences of settler colonialism, and to heal and resist by way of a relationship. bambi is like me, she knows, she understands, and together when we build and restore our relationship. we heal together. as a diné woman, i encounter gender violence head on, and at times i felt like the crying out for justice was only ever heard by bambi. we dance, and sometimes step on one another’s toes, sometimes we’re off beat, but when we feel each other and move together, it’s like a well choreographed dance. practicing a diné epistemology means enacting relationships that reconnect horse human-land-language, in the sovereign space of diné bikeyah. diné bikeyah is not the reservation area of navajo nation, but it is the pre-colonial name for the space between the four sacred mountains where diné and their universe are placed. diné bikeyah is my view of nationhood that precedes national definitions and boundaries from a western lens, and foregrounds the agency and autonomy of nonhumans. kelsey dayle john -animal colonialism—illustrating intersections between animal studies and settler colonial studies through diné horsemanship 63 any project of destruction of land-language-livestock destroys the entire network. in reverse, projects of restoration for diné must take place on diné spaces with their horses and other nonhumans. this connection positions individuals outside of academia as experts and draws attention to the urgency for young people to have spaces to be with horses and to learn about the traditional stories given with them — all of which are nation building exercises and promote diné resistance to the separations and violences of settler colonialism. horses remain a vital part of life on navajo nation, and many people still train through horse songs and prayers — all done in the navajo language. down to the smallest act of feeding and watering a feral horse that might come through a person’s grazing area one evening, diné love and relate to horses unlike any other people. specifically, horse training is a form of resistance. today, many individuals besides my family obtain, by chance or circumstance, a navajo mustang15 and train it. in my personal experience and conversations with navajo people, mustangs are unanimously the best and most versatile horses. however, they take longer to train, making them an investment of time, money, and heart. right now, i’m invested in one horse named bambi as my form of resistance and a symbol of my love for diné land, people, and horses. even amidst the systematic genocide of navajo livestock, many diné preserve traditional instructions — horse songs, ceremony, husbandry, and language. offensive to the navajo community is the idea that animal studies is a new and emerging field, because diné have maintained their practices, beliefs, and knowledge systems amidst the full assault on land, animals, peoples, and the sacred connections that bind each together. in short, animals studies has already existed in the lived, material, messy, visceral remains from colonization on the navajo reservation — the place where most people would not want to be, the place where rez dogs and rez ponies roam around: the place where the navajo horse roams. finally, decolonizing animals studies means handing off the project to the indigenous peoples — like diné — who have maintained the epistemological and material structure which sustains knowledge of/with animals — in particular, horses. decolonization aligns with a number of fields that have challenged oppressive binaries — new materialisms, queer studies, indigenous feminist thought, animal studies, and settler colonial studies. animal studies, therefore, must take specific strides to decolonize, meaning that it must be place-based, promote indigenous resistance, and position first knowers of animal knowledge as experts — indigenous peoples and in particular diné. decolonization is about restoring right relations. for navajo, those right relations humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 64 involve an intertwined restoration of animals, humans, and land together through the network of sacred knowledge. decolonization, for navajo, means resisting a network of interlocking settler colonial forces — indian boarding schools, livestock reduction, gender and sexual violence, land allotments, christianization, environmental racism, and animal colonialism. navajos continue to resist animal colonialism and the destruction imparted upon distinctly diné livestock for the purpose of destroying navajo people and/or forcefully mapping navajo people’s relationships with land and the u.s. government. such practice is embedded in aspects of diné epistemology with horses. notes 1. see arvin et al; & mihesuah. 2. i will trouble the concept of sovereignty as i build on the discussion of horses as “knowers.” 3. see snelgrove et al; & wolfe. 4. after i finished my dissertation research, i organized a horse knowledge conference in my community. the conference was hosted by a navajo tribal university on the navajo nation and was free and open to the public. 5. new materialisms challenge concepts like life, living, knowing, and voice while simultaneously challenging ontologies through which we understand being and knowing. 6. for example, navajo mustangs, today are still valued at only $35 a head, regardless of their high potential to learn and inherent trainability. 7. we see this played out biopolitically in the forced sterilization of navajo women. see define. 8. i utilize a few overviews of this era and the reports and policies enacted. i draw heavily from fonaroff; henderson; voyles; and weisiger, dreaming and “gendered injustice.” 9. there are different estimates on the amount of stock are reported in the literature. 56% is reported in voyles. “comparing figures for 1933 and 1937 indicates a substantial kelsey dayle john -animal colonialism—illustrating intersections between animal studies and settler colonial studies through diné horsemanship 65 decline number of goats (a loss of between 100, 000 and 200,000) and a smaller d in the number of sheep” (henderson 382). 10. there is a debate about whether to use the word “feral” or “wild”; generally, “wild” means completely wild without human contact (generally not the case with horses), while “feral” means horses let loose on the range and uncared for. most recently, policy regarding navajo nation refers to these large number of horses as “unauthorized horses.” 11. traditionalist vs. non-traditionalist is a complex binary which is not always an accurate representation of the diverse set of beliefs across navajo nation. 12. 95% confidence interval; estimated number from presentation at division of natural resources 2017 summit, based on an aerial survey done by the horse management task force under the fish and wildlife department of the navajo nation division of natural resources. 13. in my experience in my community, the word traditional is often used as a signifier of agency within my diné community. as people foreground “tradition” in certain contexts, it signifies pre-colonial ceremonies, ideas, and relationalities. 14. for more on k’é see kulago, lee, and weisiger, dreaming and “gendered injustice.” 15. i alternate terminology with horse, feral horse, unauthorized horse, and mustang. the definition of a mustang is essentially a wild, stray, or feral horse. the pretense is that it was once domesticated. works cited arvin, maile, eve tuck, & angie morrill. “decolonizing feminism: challenging connections between settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy.” feminist formations 25.1 (2013): 8-34. belin, esther. of cartography: poems. u arizona p, 2017. define, michael sullivan. “a history of governmentally coerced sterilization: the plight of the native american woman.” may 1, 1997. online. accessed jan. 20, 2019. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 66 deloria, vine jr. god is red: a native view of religion. fulcrum, 1972. denetdale, jennifer. “chairmen, presidents, and princesses: the navajo nation, gender, and the politics of tradition.” wicazo sa review 21.1 (2006): 9-28. _____. reclaiming diné history: the legacies of navajo chief manuelito and juanita. u arizona p, 2007. _____. “return to the ’uprising at beautiful mountain in 1913’: marriage and sexuality in the making of the modern navajo nation.” critically sovereign: indigenous gender, sexuality, and feminist studies. joanne barker, ed. duke up, 2017. 69-98. farella, john. the main stalk: a synthesis of navajo philosophy. u arizona p, 1984. fonaroff, l. schuyler. “conservation and stock reduction on the navajo tribal range.” geographical review 53.2 (1968): 200-223. goeman, mishuana. “notes toward a native feminism’s spatial practice.” wicazo sa review 2.24 (2009): 169-187. grande, sandy. red pedagogy: native american social and political thought. rowman & littlefield, 2004. henderson, eric. “navajo livestock wealth and the effects of the stock reduction program of the 1930s.” journal of anthropological research 45.4 (1989): 379-403. hubbard, tasha. “buffalo genocide in 19th century north america: ‘kill, skin, and sell.’” colonial genocide and indigenous north america. alexander laban hinton, andrew woolford, & jeff benvenuto, eds. duke up, 2014. jaffee, laura jordan, & kelsey dayle john. “disabling bodies of/and land: reframing disability justice in conversation with indigenous theory and activism.” disability and the global south 5.2 (2018): 1407-1429. john, kelsey dayle. “rez ponies and confronting sacred junctions in indigenous and decolonizing education.” indigenous and decolonizing studies in education. linda tuhiwai smith, eve tuck, and wayne k. yang, eds. routledge, 2018. 50-61. kelsey dayle john -animal colonialism—illustrating intersections between animal studies and settler colonial studies through diné horsemanship 67 kulago, hollie. “diné (navajo) philosophy of community as ke.’” encyclopedia of educational philosophy and theory. michael a. peters, ed. springer, 2016. 1-6. lee, l.l., ed. diné perspectives: revitalizing and reclaiming navajo thought. u arizona p, 2014. lerma, michael. guided by the mountains: navajo political philosophy and governance. oxford up, 2017. lugones, maria. “heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system.” hypatia 22.1 (2007): 186-209. mcmillan, uri. “objecthood, avatars, and the limits of the human.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 21.2-3 (2015): 224-227. mihesuah, devon a. “a few cautions at the millennium on the merging of feminist studies with american indian women’s studies.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 25.4 (2000): 1247-1251. nyong’o, tavia. “little monsters: race, sovereignty, and queer inhumanism in beasts of the southern wild.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 21.2-3 (2015): 249-272. simpson, a. “on ethnographic refusal: indigeneity, ‘voice’ and colonial citizenship.” junctures 9 (2007): 67-80. snelgrove, corey, rita dhamoon, & jeff corntassel. “unsettling settler colonialism: the discourse and politics of settlers, and solidarity with indigenous nations.” decolonization, indigeneity, education, & society 3.2 (2014): 1-32. smith, linda tuhiwai. decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples. zed books, 2012. tallbear, kimberly. “an indigenous reflection on working beyond the human/not human.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 21.2-3 (2015): 230-235. tuck, eve, & wayne k. yang. “decolonization is not a metaphor.” decolonization: indigeneity, education & society 1.1 (2012): 1-40. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 68 turner, dale, & audra simpson, “indigenous leadership in a flat world.” research paper for the national centre for first nations governance, 2008. 1-18. online. accessed jan. 20, 2019. veracini, lorenzo. “introducing: settler colonial studies.” settler colonial studies 1.1 (2011): 1-12. voyles, tracy. wastelanding: legacies of uranium mining in navajo country. u minnesota p, 2015. weisiger, marsha. “gendered injustice: navajo livestock reduction in the new deal era.” western historical quarterly 38.4 (2007): 437-455. _____. dreaming of sheep in navajo country. u washington p, 2009. wolfe, patrick. “settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” journal of genocide research 8.4 (2006): 387-409. microsoft word worboys-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 michael worboys inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers today jack russell terriers (jrts) are among the most popular dogs in britain and are seen to have long history, dating back to the fox terriers bred by parson jack russell in the early and mid-victorian period. yet, jrts are the dog breed most recently recognized by the british kennel club, only being allowed to enter dog shows and to be registered in the club’s stud book since 2016. this essay explores this paradox. it tells a story of struggles between different groups over the physical form and cultural meaning of this particular type of dog, but similar histories of the contested and contingent creation could be told of every dog breed. modern dog breeds were invented materially and culturally in the victorian era, first in britain before being spread around the world. then and since, the conformation of individual breeds has been subject to continual reimagining and reinvention by dog fanciers, along with the proliferation breeds to produce the 344 breeds now recognized by the fédération cynologique internationale (fci). history shows that breed could have been differently conceived and specific dog breeds differently made. what makes the recent controversies over jrts particularly interesting is the sharpness and duration of the disputes over breed status, and their resolution in the existence today of at least five versions of the breed. at its simplest, the clashes were over whether jrts were to be defined by their function or their form. in other words, were jrts working dogs of variable appearance, bred and owned for their working abilities; or dogs of a specific, standard shape, size, color, coat, etc. — the technical term is “conformation” — bred for fancy shows and pet ownership? history mattered in the disputes because of two foundation claims. firstly, that parson john russell only valued dogs with working ability and, while a founding member of the kennel club, had no time for conformation dog shows. secondly, that there was a breed-defining dog, “trump,” that russell had bought from a postman in 1819 and the “blood” of which should still be present in all “true” jrts (j. & f. jackson 10). perversely in the light of later events, russell is alleged to have been impressed by trump’s look, seemingly taking her form as an indicator of function. (see figure 1.) from the first myth aficionados have argued that to be true to the parson’s beliefs, jrts should be kept out of dog shows and away from the attentions of the kennel club. from the second comes an essentialist assumption that there was and is a “true” jrt michael worboys -inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers 45 type that has existed since the mid-nineteenth century, or should be preserved and even recreated. some “doggy people” go further. they have an essentialist view of the breed that accords it a constancy and agency, even a destiny to manifest particular abilities, or a specific look, or both. figure 1. trump. this is a widely circulated drawing of jack russell’s famous dog, though its provenance is uncertain. in this essay, i follow the vicissitudes of jrts from the early victorian era to the present day, beginning with a discussion of the life of parson john russell (1795-1883) and fox terriers in general. next, i look briefly at the invention of the modern notion of a dog breed in the victorian era, and at the subsequent cultural and material co-production of distinct breeds, in which form took over from function as the primary defining and differentiating feature of all types of dog. one indicator of this change was that doggy people no longer wrote of fox terriers, but of the fox terrier: capitalization and the designation of a proper noun signifying the essentialization of breeds as singular entities. next, i consider fox terriers and terriers more widely in the 1920s and 1930s, when there was first talk of the parson’s dog-type being a breed. this claim was first made by arthur heinemann thirty years after the parson’s death; however, he and his followers made no attempt to have his type recognized by the kennel club. the inheritor of heinemann’s type of dog was the jack russell terrier club of great britain (jrtc-gb), founded by sporting and rural owners in 1974 “to promote and preserve the working terrier known as the jack russell.” this was a political move to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 46 head off attempts to bring jrts into the world of fancy dog shows. the jrtc-gb was successful until 1990, when the kennel club accepted a jrt-type as a breed, marking its difference from the sporting version with a new name — the parson jack russell terrier (pjrt), later shortened to the parson russell terrier (prt). subsequent developments were shaped by the success of groups in australia, the united states, and other countries, to which the british kennel club was aloof, in promoting jrts as show dogs and having a breed standard accepted by national and then international dog fancy organizations. finally, i consider the events that led in december 2015 to the acceptance, against bitter opposition from sporting owners and dog welfare activists, of a workingtype jrt as a breed by the kennel club. the hunting parson and his terriers. john russell’s obituary notice in the illustrated london news began by describing him as “the well-known north devon clergyman, or rather country gentlemen in clerical orders, as he was better known for his performances in the hunting-field and his social popularity” (“the late rev. john russell”). his fame had crossed the atlantic. the notice in the washington post was headed “the last of the old school of reverend english sportsmen,” while the new york times noted his fame as “a mighty hunter throughout the west” (“the rev. jack russell” and “death of parson russell”). russell had studied at oxford, where he apparently excelled at pugilism (an early type of boxing), and then served in a number of curacies in devon, becoming known as a good preacher, with strong opinions and starting a number of charities for his parishioners (“the late rev. j. russell”). at the time of his death, he was best known for his friendship with the prince and princess of wales (later edward vii and queen alexandra), whom he had met in 1865 and visited several times at sandringham. indeed, in his later years russell was a national celebrity, sought after to officiate at marriages (“the death of the rev. john russell” and “the aged sporting parson”). over 1,000 people attended his funeral, to which the prince of wales sent a wreath. only the obituaries in the sporting press, such as that in bell’s life, mentioned that had “established also a breed of fox terriers for which he had ever since been famous.” a biography entitled a memoir of the rev. john russell and his out-of-door life had been published by edward davies five years before his death. it had just a couple of pages on his dogs and first told the story of trump. russell, then an undergraduate, was strolling around magdalen meadow in oxford one afternoon when: [b]efore he had reached marston a milkman met him with a terrier — such an animal as russell had as yet only seen in his dreams; he halted, as michael worboys -inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers 47 actæon might have done when he caught sight of diana disporting in her bath; but, unlike that ill-fated hunter, he never budged from the spot till he had won the prize and secured it for his own. she was called trump and became the progenitress of that famous race of terriers which, from that day to the present, have been associated with russell's name at home and abroad — his able and keen coadjutors in the hunting-field. (davies 53) the author then gives a description, very much in the vein of the writings of types of dog as conformation breeds that were emerging in the later 1870s. in the first place, the color is white with just a patch of dark tan over each eye and ear, while a similar dot, not larger than a penny piece, marks the root of the tail. the coat, which is thick, close, and a trifle wiry, is well calculated to protect the body from wet and cold, but has no affinity with the long, rough jacket of a scotch terrier. the legs are straight as arrows, the feet perfect; the loins and conformation of the whole frame indicative of hardihood and endurance; while the size and height of the animal may be compared to that of a full-grown vixen fox. (53-4) davies then quotes russell’s observation, already made by the mid-1870s when conformation dog shows were barely a decade old, that “true terriers [differ] as much from the present show dogs as the wild eglantine differs from a garden rose.” moreover, that “they have so intermingled strange blood with the real article, that, if he were not informed, it would puzzle professor bell himself to discover what race the socalled fox terrier belongs to” (davies 54).1 russell was said to be have speculated that the fox terriers seen at the new dog shows were “composite animals,” having been crossed with italian greyhounds for finer skin, beagles for their ears, and bulldogs for courage. however, he believed it to be the wrong sort of courage, making dogs likely to fasten on a fox and kill it, rather than drive it out of hiding for more sport. the beauty and value of trump was that, bred in the home of a humble postman, she had come from working bloodlines. thus, the best guarantee of ability in a fox terrier was to breed from such stock, but it was impossible to guarantee bloodline heritage from trump, as russell had not kept pedigree records. when russell died aged 87 years, he had one or two pet dogs, having given up hunting and his kennel some time previously. books on dogs in the first half of the nineteenth century do not distinguish fox terriers as a variety or type of terrier. in his 1840 book on dogs, charles hamilton smith writes humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 48 on “terriers,” which come in “two very evident varieties,” which are described and illustrated. the first is smooth, rounded, and rather elegant in make, with colours usually black, and tan spots over the eyes, and the same tint spread over the extremities and belly; sometimes also white; the muzzle sharp, the eye bright and lively, the ears pointed or slightly turned down, and the tail carried high and somewhat bowed; but the second is the more ancient and genuine breed, usually called the wire haired or scottish terrier; the muzzle is shorter and fuller, the limbs more stout, the fur hard and shaggy, and the color a pale sandy or ochry, and sometimes white. (hamilton smith 206) fox terriers were not mentioned as a distinct type of terrier in william youatt’s the dog (1845) or h. d. richardson’s dogs: their origin and varieties (1847). both authors discuss just two terriers — english and scotch, with skyes as a sub-type of the latter. thus, when john henry walsh (who published under the pseudonym of “stonehenge”) discussed fox terriers in his influential the dog in health and disease in 1859 (75, 82), it was as a new breed. he speculated that it had been made by crosses between english terriers and bulldogs. their physical shape, color, coat, etc. varied across the country as they were bred to suit local geographies, styles of hunting, and the predilections of masters of fox hounds. whatever type of dog russell had acquired in 1819, it was nothing his contemporaries could have recognized as a fox terrier. in 1867, walsh edited the first book to set out conformation dog breed standards — the dogs of the british islands. fox terriers had their own chapter and were classified with hounds, not with other terriers in the “companionable” group (107-33). the illustration showed a dog at work, about to go to ground. (see figure 2.) the descriptions of each breed in the book were based on articles originally published in the field newspaper, which walsh also edited. the chapters had been published as “first drafts” of conformation standards, with readers encouraged to submit comments to help refine the description of “points.” with some breeds, the follow-up correspondence was included in the dogs of the british islands, and this was the case with fox terriers. indeed, they had by far the longest chapter, of 23 pages, reprinting 20 letters. such a response indicated the level of interest in the breed and the depth of disagreement about its conformation. the issues were those that were animating the new dog show fancy over all breeds: above all the specificities of conformation with regard to shape, color, size, and coat; the relation of form to function — for example, did length of muzzle indicate michael worboys -inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers 49 scenting ability; and what value should be accorded to pedigrees? russell’s dogs were mentioned as one amongst many “strains” kept by individuals or the masters of hounds across the country. indeed, the variety of physical forms was the main reason why it proved so difficult to agree on a single, national breed standard. figure 2. “jock,” the property of mr. cropper. stonehenge, the dogs of the british islands, opp. 107. in the second edition of dogs of the british islands, in 1872, the fox terrier chapter was unchanged, but in the third edition, in 1878, was quite different. the letters had gone, and the conformation standard was definitive. it was a breed written about as the fox terrier. there were new drawings of prize winning smooth and rough haired dogs, shown static and in profile. (see figures 3 and 4.) at some shows, particularly in ireland, rough haired dogs were called wire or coarse haired fox terriers. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 50 figure 3. mr. murchison’s fox terrier “olive” and mr. burbidge’s “bitters.” stonehenge. the dogs of the british islands, opp. 134. figure 4. rough fox terriers. – mr. g. f. richardson’s “bramble” and mr. lindsay-hogg’s “topper”. stonehenge. the dogs of the british islands, opp. 140. walsh gave descriptions of two forms — the smooth and rough coated — with close attention given to specifying points. the description stated that the breed had developed from a group of “terriers of no definite breed,” especially “from the strains michael worboys -inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers 51 used with foxhounds by mr. radclyffe and the rev. j. russell in the west of england, some of which were rough and others smooth” (148-49). walsh was more discursive on fox terriers in the 1879 edition of the dog in health and disease, though he was no fan. he began by observing that, “for the last ten years this pretty little dog has been the favourite companion of ‘young england,’ and has latelyshared the favours of the other sex with the collie, the dachshund, and the black poodle” (80-81). the increase in the number of female owners was projected as damaging, as dogs would be bred as pets and, hence, lose their working abilities and character. walsh wrote that “probably not one per cent, of our existing fox terriers have ever come across the scent of a fox, either in their own persons or in those of their immediate progenitors.” however, the changing nature of fox hunting had also been detrimental. huntsmen seemingly no longer used fox terriers, as the dog’s size meant they were unable to keep up in the faster chases on horseback that had become the norm, or to negotiate the hedges and fences of enclosed land. when they were used, huntsmen carried them on horseback, which further encouraged a smaller type. fox terriers were first admitted to dog shows in 1863, when most entries came from the north of england. their popularity spread south, allegedly after sewallis shirley, the soon to be president of the kennel club, took up the breed in 1872, the same year that saw the separation of smooth and rough coated classes at shows. shirley’s dog “bristles” was termed wire haired, and he may have acquired him in ireland, where he had an estate. (see figure 5.) unsurprisingly, given the time taken to settle a breed standard and their increasing popularity as a pet dog, judging proved controversial. however, the codification of standards offered in walsh’s book, the growing national authority of the kennel club from 1873, and the establishment of the specialist fox terrier club in 1876, together stabilized the breed. hugh dalziel, a leading author on canine matters in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, published a book exclusively on fox terriers in 1889 and edited a stud book that supplemented that kept by the kennel club (dalziel 1888; and 1888-94). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 52 figure 5. fox terriers. “buffet.” the property of mr. w. j. white (top). “bristles.” the property of mr. s. e. shirley (left) “bloom.” the property of mr. f. burbidge. (right) vero shaw, the illustrated book of the dog, opposite 297. in 1894, rawdon lee, another coming authority in canine journalism, published a book devoted wholly to terriers, which discussed 14 breeds, with smooth and rough coat fox terriers as distinct breeds (lee). his main rival in the last quarter of the nineteenth century was vero shaw, who in 1894, in the context of the wider fin de siècle fears of degeneration, worried about “dogdom’s deterioration,” due to the favoring of exaggerated fancy points and inbreeding (shaw, “dogdom’s deterioration”). however, lee suggested that fox terriers might be an exception, having been taken over by a better class of owner and rescued from previous abuses. those days are still spoken of “good old times,” and so long as the dog was white, with a patch of black or brown or tan on him even brindle was not then considered disqualification — weighed anything between 11 lb. and 30 lb., and had his tail docked, he was called a fox terrier, and sold as such. he had a pedigree made for the occasion perhaps. and if his ears were too big, they could be sliced down, as they sometimes were, and if they stood up erect instead of dropping, they could be cut underneath, and often were, and made to hang in the orthodox fashion. (lee 102-03) michael worboys -inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers 53 cropping ears and docking tails had been banned, size had been regularized, and fox terriers were no longer at the mercy of “dog dealers.” however, it was not only the dog fancy that had produced improvement, lee implied fox terriers had their own agency. at this period there was an opening for a popular dog; the fox terrier availed himself of the opportunity, the public gladly accepted his enterprise in so doing, and his progress from the stable and the servants’ hall to the drawing-room was rapid. (106) unusually then, popularity had not conflicted with quality. with the multitude came, for once at least, wisdom; the youngsters studied from their elders, hob-nobbed with fanciers, and so by degrees obtained an inkling as to the requirement and appearance of a perfect terrier, or one as nearly perfect as possible.” (103) lee mentioned russell’s dogs, which were included as rough haired fox terriers, one amongst many strains and one of the best. however, because of russell’s attitude to pedigrees, lee noted that “we look in vain for many remnants of the strain in the stud books” (146). in fact, russell’s fox terriers had been sought by fancy breeders, ironically for their white coat not their abilities, being used in breeding when owners wanted to lighten the coat color of the dogs in their kennel. dog breeds. the differentiation of the smooth and rough haired fox terriers into distinct breeds exemplified the profound change made to dogs from the mid-nineteenth century with the adoption of “breed” for varieties of dog.2 this was nothing less than the invention of the modern dog, as the species was reimagined and remade into discrete, separated and standard physical forms (worboys et al.). at the same time, these new ways of classifying and breeding led to the differentiation, essentialization, objectification, and commodification of dogs as a collection of breeds. it became impossible to think about dogs as other than this breed or that. the cur and the nonbreed mongrel disappeared, as mixed types regarded as crossbreeds. this transformation saw not only the predominance, even fetishization, of the notion of “breed" defined by conformation, but the production of a uniform-looking (and conforming) population of dogs within each breed. the adoption of breed standards led to the production of sharper differentiation and separation between types of dog and the proliferation of discrete and distinctive named breeds. greater breed uniformity externally was accompanied by greater “internal” uniformity in heredity as breeders made greater use of inbreeding to reproduce and preserve breed ideals. agreed humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 54 conformation points brought stability; however, breeders also wanted, unsurprisingly in victorian britain, to “improve” and, hence, continuously alter standards. the difference between preand post-breed dogs can be compared to how colors appear in a rainbow and on a modern paint sample card. the former has distinct colors, but these vary in hue and shade, merging into one another at the margin. the latter consists of distinct, separated, and uniform blocks of color, with subtle differences in shade. if the small number of dog varieties in the early nineteenth century can be seen as akin to the seven colors of the rainbow, then the 204 breeds now recognized by the british kennel club are like the numerous colors displayed on a paint sample card. dog aficionados in the victorian era adopted the notion of breed from breeders of livestock, thoroughbred horses, and fancy poultry. the leicestershire farmer and livestock breeder robert bakewell led the key cultural and material developments in the eighteenth century. the essence of breed was and is the division of a domesticated species by form rather than function. however, with livestock and poultry form was and is a proxy for function, indicating ability to produce meat, milk, eggs, etc. the term breed was first used for purebred livestock, commercial poultry, and thoroughbred horses, then with sporting and fancy animals, and then to companion animals. in the move, breeding for form became an end in itself. the economic historian john r. walton has characterized bakewell’s use of breed for his new types of sheep and cattle as “an ingenious marketing and publicity mechanism” (walton 152). breed worked on many levels. certain identifiable physical characteristics were imprinted in animals of a particular strain, and prospective purchasers were then encouraged to associate those markers with some attribute or attributes of productivity which, it was claimed, such animals also possessed: rapid weight gain, larger size, high food conversion rates, better distribution of meat, heavier milk yields and so on. the success of a breed depended to some extent on the visual impact of the chosen marker or trademark, and the ease of its transmission from one generation to the next, to some extent on the degree to which the claims made for the breed's performance were thought to be valid. (152) in other words, breeds were “brands.” bakewell’s new leicester sheep breed was claimed to be a better value product because of the meat it produced, with its name and michael worboys -inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers 55 distinctive external form differentiating it from its competitors. but typically for a brand, it had more than economic value. those who acquired the new leicester were buying good, if not pure, blood and gaining an association with an improving ideology. harriet ritvo makes a similar point with regard to british aristocracy’s fascination with prize bulls in the context of improving agriculture in the nineteenth century. however, with dog shows, along with the “doggy people” and fancy culture that supported them, ritvo points up contradiction: “the prize-winning pedigreed dogs of the late nineteenth century seemed to symbolize simply the power to manipulate and the power to purchase — they were ultimately destabilizing emblems of status and rank as pure commodities” (ritvo 106). dog breeds were, and still are, co-produced culturally and materially. in the dog fancy culture of mid-victorian britain, they were first imagined as ideal types of existing dog varieties, with conformation points set out for judging dogs at shows, selecting for stud duties, and realizing value in the market. the standards, as shown with fox terriers, emerged from debates amongst fancy breeders, which were then tested, confirmed, and refined through competitions. in some cases, breeders “bred up” (selected) to ideals, say, for a particular shape of ear; in others the normal variation in heredity threw up novel features that were preferred, such as that for wholly black newfoundlands, rather than the white-and-black dogs made famous in the early victorian period by the painter edwin landseer. breeds were defined by breaking the dog’s body into a number of component parts or “points,” with each given a very detailed specification and sometimes quantification. (see figure 6.) in walsh’s 1879 edition of the dogs of the british islands the requirements for a fox terrier’s head, and ears, valued at 15 out of 100 points, were as follows: the head should be flat and narrow rather than wide, but not so narrow as to indicate weakness. it should taper from the ears to the nose, with a slight hollow in front of the brows, but no very marked stop. the jaws should be rather long and tapering, the bone strong and the muscle closing them prominent at the cheek, but not swelling out as in the bulldog, a cross of which breed is to be deprecated. the cheek-bones should be clearly cut with a very slight hollow. teeth level and strong. an underhung mouth indicates the bull cross, and is to be penalised. end of the nose black; a cherry nose is very objectionable, and a white or spotted one almost worse. the eyes should be small and by no means prominent. edges of the eyelids dark. ears small and v-shaped, set close to the cheeks with the points looking forward and downward, not hanging hound-like. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 56 pricked, tulip, or rose ears, as being indications of the bull-cross, should never be allowed. (87) figure 6. “diagram of a dog.” vero shaw, the illustrated book of the dog, 37. this description takes certain features as indicators of the crossbreeding and the dilution of “true” or “pure” of blood, where blood was seen both figuratively and biologically as hereditary matter. pure blood, concentrated by inbreeding and evidenced in pedigrees, was sought after because it was understood to best reproduce conformations — prepotency. however, breeders recognized that inbreeding too closely and too often could lead to specific health problems and overall deterioration, but they agreed that outcrossing could mitigate its dangers. standards were never static but were changed by the collective decisions of show judges, reflecting their preferences and responding to the “improvements” made by breeders in selection for specific points and crossbreeding. improvement was sought for individual dogs to better match ideals and for greater uniformity of conformation across a breed population. disagreements amongst fanciers over the status of established and improved types was often resolved by the proliferation of breed types, as seen with fox terriers: first, splitting into smooth and rough coated dogs, and then the latter remade as coarse or wire haired varieties. michael worboys -inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers 57 fox terrier in the 1920s and 1930s. the founder of the charity the tail-waggers’ club, captain h. e. hobbs, wrote in 1931 that terriers of all types had never been more popular, and that “an old dog fancier of 1800 would be astonished at the changes that have been wrought and the extraordinary range of the modern terrier types” (hobbs). he observed that the fox terrier “first evolved about 1860,” and he speculated a quite novel origin, from “the old black-and-tan terrier, with a subsequent introduction of beagle blood.” the rough and coarse haired labels had been relatively short-lived, being combined and remade as the wire haired or wire fox terrier. in the hands of the wire fox terrier association, established in 1913, other differences were developed. the dogs were made slimmer and bred with a squarer looking head, largely due to the length of hair around the muzzle. (see figure 7.) the wire fox terrier has the distinction of having won best in show at the westminster dog show of the aka more than any other breed. figure 7. wire-haired fox terrier, 1917. through the inter-war period, at shows fox terriers were divided into smooth and wire classes. with the public, they were popular pets. in 1939, the daily express, a leading british national newspaper, announced “we are going to buy a dog” and invited readers to recommend a breed (cooper). they received over 10,000 nominations, and the top three were: 1st. fox terrier (wire haired) — 2nd. scottish terrier — 3rd. fox terrier (smooth haired). the journalist who had the winning breed as a family pet humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 58 described his new dog “a chap with a head like a brick,” and from past experience seemed none too pleased with the readers’ choice. in the voting, jack russells had their supporters, but not many. through the 1920s and 1930s, the leading breeder of jrts was mrs. anne harris (neé rawle), who had taken over the kennel of arthur heinemann and maintained its working orientation (j. & f. jackson 55-80). however, the popularity of terriers meant that jrts, along with other breeds favored as pets, were bred to a general type rather than conformation standard. heinemann had been a badger-hunting enthusiast and “dog dealer” who made the jrt a brand, claiming his dogs were true blood descendants of the parson’s dogs. they were sporting dogs, with the alertness, courage, and strength to follow foxes and other quarry to ground. heinemann’s role in the history of jack russell terriers is disputed. to some breed supporters, he was the person who preserved and protected “the genuine jack russell terrier,” but to others his role was more ambiguous. in 1986, jean and frank jackson argued that “heinemann’s attitude towards terriers and to the work expected of them were very different from parson jack russell’s” (j. & f. jackson 57). they dismiss claims that his dogs were based on four bequeathed to him by the parson, pointing out that he was only 11 years old when the parson died and that by then the parson had no working dogs. heinemann was a graduate of eton and cambridge, who eventually made his living from journalism, writing under the pseudonym “peep-out,” and breeding. the jacksons argue that his career and entrepreneurial activities gave him a platform to shape a false narrative of jrts. in fact, his preferred sport was badgerdigging and badger-bating, which led him to produce dogs suited to this type of work. indeed, the parson jack russell terrier club he founded in 1914 had previously been the devon and somerset badger digging club. the jacksons have styled heinemann a “dog dealer,” a pejorative term from the victorian era to the present day, who appreciated “value” not “quality” in dogs. the largely working and pet profile of jrt owners in the inter-war years was evident in their lack interest in the rewards of “dog dealing” and fancy shows. compare their dogs with the career of a terrier with similar origins — the sealyham terrier. this breed had been developed for going to ground by huntsmen across the severn estuary from north devon in south wales. it moved from a strain of fox terrier to a breed when it was recognized by the kennel club in 1911 (marples). breeders developed more exaggerated fancy points, such as longer hair and a beard. sealyhams became highly fashionable in hollywood, where owners included humphrey bogart, bette davis, cary michael worboys -inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers 59 grant, jean harlow, alfred hitchcock (whose dog acted in the birds) and elizabeth taylor (hough; salkel; “country life”).3 in britain the royal family favored them, and one was owned by agatha christie. they were bought and sold for high prices as symbols of celebrity and wealth. sealyham terriers were typical of the way breeds of terrier proliferated. in part, this came from recognition of the types that had existed in particular regions across the country before the codification of breeds, and in part from “product differentiation” produced by competition at dog shows, in the market, and ownership of the latest status symbols. in the 1950s and 1960s, jrts continued to be bred as working dogs and continued to grow in popularity as pets. stanley dangerfield, the canine correspondent of the daily express, wrote regularly on jrts and especially on why it was not a breed. dangerfield was a critic of the kennel club and had soft spot for jrts. he observed they had “charm but not papers,” and that were “classless,” the “non-conformists” of the dog world. indeed, they had become a “reverse status symbol” (dangerfield, “answers”; dangerfield, “we don't want”). dangerfield told his readers that jrts were a variety or type, not a breed. he wrote “it has never been established what is the shape, size or colour of these dogs,” and that to achieve breed status, “it was up to fanciers to agree a conformation and breed consistently for several generations” (dangerfield, “replies”; dangerfield, “how to choose”). at this time, there were no jrt clubs, but this soon changed. “the genuine jack russell terrier.” the first, largest and most vocal of the new organizations was the jack russell terrier club of great britain (jrtc-gb), formed in 1974 to maintain the dog’s working abilities and to counter the activities of the south eastern jack russell club (sejrc), which was pushing for kennel club recognition of jrts in conformation shows (huxham 30-31). this prompted “a brief period of internecine warfare” over the status of the jrt (jackson 94). in the event, it was anything but brief, running for over 40 years and continues even after the kennel club decision in 2015. the jrtc-gb’s aim was to “promote and preserve the working terrier known as the jack russell.” the founders argued that such a club was needed to save jrts from ruin by pet owners, dog show exhibitors, and commercial breeders (tottenham 143-47). at one level, aficionados of jrts were pleased with their popularity as pets, but were concerned that the public was being offered and accepting as jrts dogs of the wrong size, shape, color, and, worse still, with no working ability. moreover, there was the danger that the jrt working type would be taken up by fancy breeders and introduced into conformation shows. the danger was that the likely greater number of show dogs humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 60 would inevitably see more crosses with working dogs and an overall loss of ability and character. to avoid such developments, written into the jrtc-gb’s constitution was opposition to the kennel club. history has shown kennel club recognition to be detrimental to the physical structure and working capabilities of a variety of working breeds. therefore, this club is opposed to kennel club recognition of the jack russell terrier. (jrtc-gb) nonetheless, the jrtc-gb had a conformation standard and held shows where dogs were judged on their look. however, their standard stressed form as a proxy of function, ability, and character. furthermore, specific physical features were not tightly defined. for example, on height, which was later to become the key issue, its standard allowed dogs between 10 and 15 inches at the shoulder. to emphasize that beauty and form were not primary, the standard set out that: “old scars or injuries, the result of work or accident, should not be allowed to prejudice a terrier’s chance in the show ring unless they interfere with its movement or with its utility for work or stud” (jrtc-gb). the jrtc-gb’s standard was drawn to best capture the sense of an anti-conformation breed. the main activities of the jrtc-gb were supporting owners who worked with their dogs hunting foxes, badgers, and rats, including organizing jrt-only shows, and arranging working terrier events at agricultural shows. the latter could be large affairs, as at the great yorkshire show in 1983, where there were 648 entries in events for working dogs, with 52 rough coated jrts on display (atter). from 1984, the jrtc-gb was supported by the national working terrier federation (nwtf), which gained over 30 affiliate organizations in britain, representing all working terriers, plus other working dogs, such as lurchers and whippets, and ferrets (national working terrier federation). these activities continue in the twenty-first century, despite the ban on blood sports enacted in 2004, which limited some types of hunting (atkinson). hunts with pack of hounds now follow scent trails, but fox terriers are still used to flush foxes out from their hiding places into nets for humane killing and for the control of rats. the jack russell terrier club of america (jrtca) was formed in 1976 on the same model as its british counterpart, to protect the “true” and “real” working dogs; it similarly rejected affiliation with the american kennel club, being “emphatically opposed to recognition of the jack russell terrier by any kennel club or all-breed registry.” at the shows of all these organizations, judges used less circumscribed michael worboys -inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers 61 conformation criteria than those at conformation shows. greater variation of physical form was accepted, and more attention paid to appraising character and physical ability. the clubs also hold trials for trailing and locating vermin, and sometimes obedience, racing, going-to-ground, and agility. in 2018, the jrtca held 21 events and plans to open a museum and library. the parson jack russell terrier. the first challenge to the jrtc-gb came in 1983, with the foundation of the parson jack russell terrier club (pjrtc), which wanted, albeit reluctantly, its promoters said, to seek kennel club recognition for the breed (bartlett). the founders of the pjrtc were worried that jrts were under threat on three fronts: i) they were losing a distinctive conformation in the hands of the jrtc-gb; ii) they were losing ability due to their popularity as pets; and iii) they were being exploited by dog dealers who were marketing any small white terrier as a jrt. the pjrtc claimed to be protecting the working type by preserving its conformation. for them, there was no contradiction. they argued that an uninformed, sentimental public was being sold dogs that were too short to be true jrts and many were crossbred, such that “thousands of small terriers, because they are white, and don’t belong to any breed are generally called ‘jack russells’” (the parson jack russell terrier club). the pjrtc argued that kennel club recognition would define a type, provide registration of pedigrees, give expert advice on breeding and health, and entry into competitions would, through the selection of the best, bring improvement (hussey-wilford, “the parson jack russell terrier club”). the addition of “parson” to the club’s name was not only to distinguish it from the jrtc-gb, but also to indicate it was more committed to heritage and reestablishing dogs that were true to the parson’s type in body and character, basing their breed standard of heinemann’s 1903 template. the immediate cause of the foundation of the pjrtc was another application for kennel club acceptance of jrts. in november 1983, the sejrc had applied for recognition of their jrts and caused consternation by their proposed standard of 10 inches in height (wheatland). the application prompted the leading weekly newspaper our dogs to open a forum on the issue (jackson, “recognition”). the majority of articles and letters published in our dogs were, unsurprisingly, in favor kennel club recognition. they argued that it was the best way to protect the breed from ruin. however, there were differences over timing. some argued that recognition was urgent, others that it should be delayed to allow the pjrtc to establish its authority, to build up pedigree records, and to agree on a standard. the pjrtc applied to the kennel club for breed recognition several times through the 1980s and, after several rejections, their type was accepted in january 1990. but not humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 62 immediately as a breed in its own right, rather as a variant of the fox terrier that in time would be upgraded to breed status when its conformation was stabilized, and numbers provided good competition and reduced inbreeding. full acceptance required “dogs of known ancestry for two full generations and at least half a third (generation)” recorded in the stud book (hussey-wilford, “fear not”). in fact, when provisionally recognized, the number of pjrts was so low that it started out on the rare breeds register! the announcement of provisional acceptance of the pjrt was front-page news in the leading dog magazine our dogs (“recognition of parson jack russell!”). fanciers claimed that their dogs, to be named parson jack russell terrier (pjrt), would reproduce the old type of working terrier, though its “work” from now on would only be in the show ring and at stud. that said, the breed standard began by setting out conformation features that were linked to character and ability. general appearance. workmanlike, active and agile; built for speed and endurance. characteristics. essentially a working terrier, with ability and conformation to go to ground and run with hounds. temperament. bold and friendly. (“parson jack russell terrier — recognition”) a key feature was to achieve dogs that were “14/14” — 14 inches in height and 14 lbs. in weight. having obtained their standard from history, albeit a selective reading of texts, where would the pjrtc find the dogs to start the new “true” breed? if they went to the jrtc-gb, it was likely they would be denied the best dogs, leaving only their “varmints” as foundation stock (brewer). one correspondent to our dogs wanted to exclude the influence of “mr. and mrs. average-dog-owner” and their pets, with the avoidance of “cute faces,” “queen anne legs” (curved or bandy legs), and “belly to the ground” dwarfs (bartlett). breed aficionados feared the merging of the working and show dogs, with the latter taking precedence due to the money and the personal glory that came from dog shows prizes. other supporters of recognition were skeptical about turning the clock back to an unknowable, and likely non-existent “true” type. they argued that a new and dominant jrt should be allowed to emerge from competition at shows, in a darwinian survival of the fittest. bert gripton, who had been “sixty years a breeder,” claimed that “all the fuss over the recognition of the jack russell terrier is a sheer waste of time. there are a dozen different types of the breed,” and that reference to a “true type” was “sales talk and guesswork” (gripton). other skeptics felt that all michael worboys -inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers 63 that would be gained from kennel club recognition was paperwork and increased costs of ownership (j. & f. jackson 58-9). recognition, albeit conditional, of the pjrt infuriated jrtc-gb, and its members redoubled their efforts to keep their working dogs away from the clutches of the kennel club (langley). however, the kennel club were in no mood for a fight and pointed out that “great care has been taken to distinguish this breed from its more populous (and popular?) short-legged namesake and, unique in breed standards, a minimum height is stated” (“parson jack russell terrier”). the reference to “short-legged” jrts was also a slight on dogs of the sejrtc, which had continued, unsuccessfully, to seek recognition for its jrts. the pjrt standard was not without its critics, with objections over color, coat, and hocks (the sharp angled joint at the back of the leg, equivalent to the human ankle) (hussey-wilford 1990). the new standard was framed to avoid the conformation-based health issues of the short-legged, long back “dwarf” of the sejrtc. the kennel club leadership were aware that this might not be the end of the story. they noted that no other applications for the recognition of jrt types had been received and more might be expected. in a conflation of aficionados and their dogs, and perhaps again suggesting canine agency, the report on the decision in the kennel gazette ended by stating that “the initiative lies with the breed” (hussey-wilford, “fear not”). the number of pjrts increased after 1990 and full acceptance came in 1997, though acknowledging the unsatisfactory compromise in its original name, it soon became just the parson russell terrier (prt). in the negotiations towards breed recognition of the pjrt, the working dogs of the jrtc-gb were studiously ignored, seemingly beyond the pale. that said, the jrtc-gb enjoyed a victory of sorts, as the newly recognized breed had been given the longer and less familiar name of the parson jack russell terrier. but there were soon new tensions amongst the working jrt fraternity. in 1992 a new club for working jrts was formed — the british jack russell terrier club (bjrc). why? its founders were concerned that members of the jrtc-gb were cross-breeding their dogs with white lakeland terriers and staffordshire bull terriers to improve look, working ability, or both. the aim was familiar — to preserve the “real” or “pure” jack russell and to exclude “foreign blood.” thus, their proposed standard was that “a jack russell should not show any strong characteristics of another breed.” in response, the jrtc-gb members acted to counter the practice of cross-breeding, but it took two decades for the bjrc to be satisfied before it was wound up in 2012. jack russell terriers home and away. through the 1990s, there was a new challenge to british aficionados of jrts of all types. the australian, american, and other national humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 64 kennel clubs had recognized a short-legged, show-type fox terrier dog, and gave it the iconic name of the jack russell terrier (jackson, “the parson under threat”). the australian kennel club had accepted a jack russell terrier in 1991, alongside the pjrt, later pjr. the most obvious difference was shape: the pjr was square (drawn neck to front toes, to rear toes, to base of tail, back to neck), while the australian jrt was rectangular. (see figure 8.) figure 8. shapes of jack russell terrier and parson russell terrier. i am grateful to terrierman for permission to use this image. with typical british canine chauvinism, fanciers argued that kennel clubs in other countries had been wrongheaded in recognizing a dog that, our dogs columnist frank jackson asserted, “does not exist in britain except as an increasingly uncommon type of mongrel” (jackson, “origins”). indeed, jackson was affronted by the claim that such dogs had been “attached to the parson’s illustrious name” and deemed to be british. he was not against recognition as such, only that it should be seen as an australian breed and given a different name. in 1994 an american russell terrier club (which had been known as the english jack russell terrier club) started to register 10-12-inch-tall dogs as jrts (terrierman). the american kennel association (aka) accepted this standard in 2004, but for legal reasons the breed was named the russell terrier (rt). the situation with names and types became bewildering: the aka recognized the australian jrt, while neither the fci nor the british kennel club accepted the american rt. the fci had adopted the kennel club’s pjrt standard (no. 339) in 1990; however, it allowed a transition period when the minimum height was set at 10 inches (fci breed standard). this compromise lasted 11 years, until it came under pressure to accept small jrts as a distinct breed and perhaps to abandon the “bastard” compromise of the prt.4 the fci provisionally recognized the smaller australian jrt as the jack russell michael worboys -inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers 65 terrier in 2001, with full adoption in 2003. the british kennel club was initially aloof to these developments. it had never joined the fci. having been founded in 1873, many decades before the fci in 1903, it had claimed superior experience and knowledge. for over a century it was unwilling to concede any of its authority to the fci; however, the growing internationalization of the dog fancy meant that its detached stance was becoming untenable. indeed, after fci recognition of the australian jrt and the success of the breed at dog shows across the world the kennel club bowed to the pressure and moved to recognize an australian-fci type as a breed. however, the club proposed its own conformation standard, which it said reflected the knowledge and experience of the jrt's country of origin. the delineation of the new british jrt was in many distinct from its other conformation standards by allowing considerable latitude with breed points; the new british standard was in many distinct from that of other breeds by allowing considerable variations; thus, the coat “may be smooth, broken or rough,” and the ears “button or dropped.” significantly and perhaps still inviting a future compromise with the working jrt fraternity, the standard set out: “scars not to be penalised” and “broken or missing teeth due to work are not to be penalised.” unsurprisingly, the kennel club decision sparked a mixed reaction. on one side, there was outrage and uproar from the jrtc-gb and dog welfare activists, and on the other resigned acceptance from prts aficionados and breeders of the smooth and wire haired fox terriers. the leaders of the jrtc-gb were affronted by recognition of the britishjrt. its chair and founder greg mousley issued a statement attacking the kennel club and claiming that his club had been, and would continue to be, the protectors of the jrt (“jack russell terrier club of gb protest”). they had a registration system, dating back to the 1970s, that was “carefully structured to prevent any kennel club pollution,” and they were at the center of an international network of affiliated working jrt clubs. he went on that “our terriers worldwide, are classy, correct in conformation and possess a tremendous working ability. they are virtually free of both hereditary and congenital defects whilst amongst the kennel club breeds these are rife.” mousley claimed that the kennel club had tried before to usurp their role, but the jrtc-gb had “held firm against the parson russell [breed] and succeeded.” he homed in on the position of the prt, arguing that its low numbers and poor quality made it a “failure.” he predicted the same fate for the british-jrt. however, it was not his club that offered the ultimate protection: “the true working jack russell is quite safe where it always has been. long before the old sporting parson bought one! safe, with the working terrier men and women of great britain and the rest of the world!” the jrtc-gb enjoyed the support of the “pedigree dogs exposed blog,” which had been started in 2008 after the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 66 showing of the documentary of the same name on bbc television (“pedigree dogs plagued by disease”; bateson). in october 2015, the blog’s editor, jemima harrison, started a petition to “save the jack russell” from “the kennel club’s lean, mean inbreeding machine” (“save the jack russell”). ronnie irving, who had been chair of the kennel club from 2002 to 2011, allegedly tried to explore reconciliation with the jrtc-gb, but predictably to no avail (thomas). there were in fact relatively few enthusiasts for the british-jrt as a show dog. indeed, there was some mystery as to why the move-to-recognize decision had been made at all. there was no breed club pushing for the change, seemingly only the lobbying of an individual, geoff corish, who had been taken with the australian jrts when he had seen them abroad. cynics suggested that the kennel club was driven by money and prospect of income from pedigree registrations of a popular breed.5 however, the club maintained that its aim was to protect dogs and their owners from dealers who were passing off any old small white terrier as a jrt, and to promote improvement of the breed. no doubt, the club’s leadership also wanted to reclaim ownership of an iconic british breed from australian breeders and the fci, and restore some of their authority to shape canine affairs. however, in large part they were accepting the success of the australian-jrt type at shows internationally, and especially in comparison to the prt. at the big fci meeting in milan in 2013 there were 189 australian-jrt entries and just 59 prts. ronnie irving wrote in our dogs in october 2015 2014 that he was in favor of recognition by the club, but that it should be called the australian jrt to recognize where it was “developed” (irving). practical problems with the british-jrt were predicted. with no breed club nor other body for its development, the new breed lacked the essential social infrastructure to provide shows judges, expert advice, and networks of breeders.6 problems were anticipated because the breed standard was relaxed, but supporters argued that these would be settled over time through competitions. needless to say, there were few british-jrts from which to breed with, hence, its establishment began with a foundation dog that geoff corish imported from japan, presumably of australian heritage (“kennel club to recognise the jack russell terrier”). it was a moot point whether breeders would turn to working jrts to develop the breed, rely upon imports, or perhaps even go for the best-looking pet dogs. robert killick, a regular columnist in our dogs and jrt owner, satirized the decision to recognize the british-jrt. he asked: why it had taken so long to accept what he called michael worboys -inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers 67 “the real jack russell,” implicitly and perversely endorsing the dogs of the jrtc-gb (killick). he worried about the consequences of recognition. we all know that once the breeders think they can win prizes with their version of the jack russell, it will not take long before it becomes just another terrier far removed from the one we’ve known and loved for years. he speculated that jrts’ temperament would be calmed to suit life as a pet and that its name might be changed again, say, to the “priestly jack russell.” but then, they would need a new name and standard for the “old type” jrt, which he facetiously called the “fred russell.” his breed standard began: he should be a cunning, loving dog who will bite your visitors and then sit dotingly on their laps. he will catch any living creature including the postman. and he is under the impression that he is as big as great dane. killick suggested that jrts were unsuited to showing and would not follow instructions, potentially causing mayhem in show rings due to their energetic, anarchic behavior. he ended with a familiar trope — if your fred russell terrier had these attributes of character and activity, rather than specific conformation points, then “the very reverend gentlemen who invented the breed, would be very pleased.” conclusion. the story of jrts demonstrates how dog breeds have been continually coproduced and co-reproduced culturally and materially. in the first instance, the very notion of breed was and remains an invented social, economic, and cultural category that supports the biological division of canines into distinct, separated physical forms. the invention and manufacture of breeds in the victorian period involved segmenting, separating, and often exaggerating the normal variation in physical form within a species, and then fixing it by further selection and inbreeding. this way of thinking about and changing animals was first developed with livestock, where physical form or conformation was a proxy for function or production, and economic value. however, when extended to dogs and breeding for fancy, achieving a desired conformation became an end in itself, as top dogs won prizes and prestige for their owners, and represented a new ordering of dogs that echoed social hierarchies, and which different groups gave and derived from cultural meanings. there are two distinctive features of the story of jrts: the importance of history, and the impact of international developments in breed development and politics. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 68 the different breed jrt conformations that have been created have been contingent, shaped by “doggy politics” and its interactions with the biology of dogs. the dogs have agency, not in the mystical, essentialist manner that some jrt aficionados claim, but in their normal biological variation in form and ability, which provides breeders and owners with the resources to select for and change conformations and behaviors. dogs have been remarkably malleable. in no other domesticated species are there such relative differences in size and form as in dogs, say, between the great dane and the chihuahua. and it is these same properties operating at the other end of the scale, giving slight differences in coat, color, size, form, etc. that have enabled breeders to imagine, produce, and reproduce the jrt types now recognized and the great variety of “unrecognized” jrts appreciated as companions. the many versions of jack russell terriers that have been created around the world since the early twentieth century are typical of the ways all dog breeds have been made and remade. the story of these developments show how differences over the “true” breed type, amongst breeders, owners, exhibitors, and dealers, have been settled, sometimes by reaching a consensus, but more often by splitting breeds, multiplying their numbers, differentiating and embellishing their physical forms. dog breeds were (and still are) co-produced culturally and biologically, and the history of jrts demonstrates that “breed” itself could have been differently conceived and individual breeds differently made. acknowledgements. the research for this article was supported by the wellcome trust (grant 096571/z/11/z). i would like to thank neil pemberton, tom quick, and juliemarie strange for their comments on earlier drafts, and my referees for their constructive comments. last but not least, my thanks to kristen guest and monica mattfield for all their help and for putting together this special issue. notes 1. davies is referring to joseph bell, an edinburgh surgeon and anatomist with forensic interests, now best known as the inspiration for the character of sherlock holmes. 2. the best known earlier use of the term “breed” in shakespeare’s richard ii, in which john gaunt speaks of “this happy breed of men, his little world.” there is agreement that this refers to the english population and the country. the speech also speaks of michael worboys -inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers 69 “this scepter’s isle” and “this other eden, demi-paradise, this fortress built by nature herself.” later in the speech breed refers to royalty: “feared be their breed and famous by their birth.” 3. by the end of the twentieth century, the sealyham terrier’s popularity had plummeted, and it was designated an endangered breed. 4. the french club du jack russell claimed that the temporary standard led to dogs that were “bastard and lame, adding that “in england, only parson russell terriers are officially recognized. a shame for the country of origin of the breed!” club du jack russell, https://www.jackrussellofficiel.com/la-race/standards-commentaires/ standards-f-c-i.html. accessed 19 dec 2017. 5. one estimate was that if just half of the 10,000 plus jrts in britain were registered, the kennel club would gain £80,000. 6. a breed club was founded in 2016. works cited “the aged sporting parson.” north & south shields daily gazette and shipping telegraph, 4 may 1883: 4. atkinson, michael. “the terriermen.” sociology of sport journal 31.4 (2014): 420-37. atter, s. “the jack russell question.” our dogs, 3 november 1983: 7. the author of dartmoor days. a memoir of the rev. john russell and his out-of-door life. bentley, 1878. bartlett, v. “recognition is the only way to ensure the old types future.” our dogs, 3 november 1983: 7. bateson, patrick. independent inquiry into dog breeding, 2010. online. brewer, a. “a breeders viewpoint on the jack russell terrier.” our dogs, 24 november 1983: 3. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 70 british jack russell terrier club. online. club du jack russell. online. cooper, st. john. “i wanted to buy a dog.” daily express, 2 february 1939: 10. “country life says: save our sealyhams.” country life, 22 march 2018. dalziel, hugh, ed., the fox terrier club stud book and show record, 1888-92. l. upcott gill, 1889-94. dalziel, hugh. the fox terrier: its history, points, breeding, rearing, preparing for exhibition, and coursing. l. upcott gill, 1888. dangerfield, stanley. “how to choose the ideal dog for you.” daily express, 13 january 1968a: 14. _____. “stanley dangerfield answers your question on pets.” daily express, 22 march 1969: 4. _____. “stanley dangerfield replies.” daily express, april 1, 1968b: 10. _____. “we don’t want to join that club.” daily express, january 31, 1970: 4. davies, edward w. l. memoirs of the rev. john russell and his outdoor life. a new edition with illustrations by n h j baird. ed. chatto & windus; james c commin, 1902. “death of parson russell: the last of the old school of reverend english sportsmen.” washington post, 27 may 1883: 7. “the death of the rev. john russell.” bell’s life in london and sporting chronicle, 5 may 1883. fci breed standard, parson jack russell terrier. online. gripton, b. “jack russell recognition.” our dogs, 24 november 1983: 9. michael worboys -inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers 71 hamilton smith, charles. the natural history of dogs: canidae or genus canis of authors, including also the genera hyena and proteles. volumes i and ii. w h lizars, 1840. hobbs, capt. horace e. “new breeds of dogs in the making.” daily express, 5 may 1931: 6. hough, a. “campaign launched to save the sealyham terrier.” daily telegraph, 26 october 2011. hussey-wilford, ruth. “fear not for the jack russell.” our dogs, 2 march 1990: 2. _____. “the parson jack russell terrier club — a summary of the formation second time around.” our dogs — crufts classic. march, 1997: 54. huxham, mona. all about the jack russell terrier. pelham books, 1975. irving, ronald. “jrt recognition no surprise.” our dogs, october 30, 2015, 9. jrtca. jack russell terrier club of america. online. jack russell terrier club of great britain (jrtc-gb). rules and constitution. online. “jack russell terrier club of gb protest.” our dogs, 18 december 2015: 7. jackson, frank. “origins.” our dogs, 4 november 1994: 4. _____. “the parson under threat: the breed deserves better.” our dogs, 28 october 1994: 2. _____. “recognition for the jack russell?” our dogs, october 27, 1983: 2. jackson, jean and frank. the making of the parson jack russell terrier. the woodbridge press, 1986. “kennel club to recognise the jack russell terrier.” our dogs, 16 october 2015: 1. killick, robert. “jack russells: working dogs first and foremost.” our dogs, 6 november 2015: 9. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 72 langley, a. “turning the clock back 100 years.” our dogs, 23 february 1990: 2 and 18. “the late rev. j. russell.” the standard, 4 may 1883: 2. “the late rev. john russell.” illustrated london news, 12 may 1883: 464. lee, rawdon b. a history and description of the modern dogs of great britain and ireland: the terriers. horace cox, 1894. letters to the editor. “jack russell recognition.” our dogs, 24 november 1983: 9. marples, theo. the sealyham terrier: his origin, history, etc. “our dogs” publishing co., 1922. may, allyson n. the fox-hunting controversy, 1781–2004: class and cruelty. routledge, 2013. national working terrier association. aims and objectives. online. “parson jack russell terrier.” kennel gazette, march 1990: 2. the parson jack russell terrier club: an introduction (c. 1985). “parson jack russell terrier – recognition.” kennel gazette, march 1990: 24. “pedigree dogs plagued by disease.” bbc news online, 19 august 2008. accessed 13 august 2018. online. “recognition of parson jack russell!” our dogs, 19 january 1990: 1. “the rev. jack russell.” new york times, 20 may 1883: 10. richardson, h. d. the dog: its origin, natural history, and varieties. with directions for its general management, and simple instructions as to its treatment under disease. wm s orr and co., 1853. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate: the english and other creatures in victorian england. harvard up, 1986. michael worboys -inventing dog breeds: jack russell terriers 73 salkel, luke. “end of hollywood’s favourite dog? sealyham terriers on verge of extinction.” daily mail, 5 february 2009. “save the jack russell.” pedigree dogs exposed -the blog, 17 october 2015. accessed 13 august 2018. online. shaw, vero. “dogdom’s deterioration.” national observer, 11 may 1894: 656-7. _____. the illustrated book of the dog. cassell, petter, galpin & co. 1881. stonehenge. the dog in health and disease. longman, green, longman and roberts, 1859. _____. the dog in health and disease, 4th end. longman, green & co., 1879. _____. the dogs of the british islands, 3rd edition. “the field” office, 1878. _____. the dogs of the british islands. horace cox, 1867. terrierman. “the russell terrier: a contrived history.” terrierman’s daily dose blog, january 31, 2013. accessed 13 august 2018. online. thomas, g. “the jrt and its australian counterpart.” our dogs, 6 may 2016, 8. tottenham, katherine. the jack russell terrier. david & charles, 1982. walton, john r. “pedigree and the national cattle herd circa 1750–1950.” agricultural history review 34.2 (1986): 149-170. wheatland, p. s. “jack russell recognition.” our dogs, 15 december 1983: 10. worboys, michael, julie-marie strange, and neil pemberton. the invention of the modern dog: breed and blood in victorian britain. johns hopkins up, 2018. youatt, william. the dog. society for the diffusion of useful knowledge, 1845. microsoft word freund-eisenman h u m a n i m a l i a 7:2 reviews amy freund blood and paint stephen f. eisenman, the cry of nature: art and the making of animal rights. london: reaktion books, 2013. 309 pp, 98 illustrations. $29 pbk. stephen eisenman’s the cry of nature has both the strengths and weaknesses of truly interdisciplinary work. his account of artists’ involvement in the debates surrounding animal consciousness and rights juxtaposes art historical analysis with evidence drawn from social and cultural history, literature, philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and ethology. eisenman not only analyzes historical and contemporary attitudes toward animals, he also predicts — and advocates for — a new age of human-animal relations in which the binaries between species dissolve and animals are accorded all the rights associated with personhood. eisenman’s dazzling negotiation of sources and approaches and his commitment to animal rights make the cry of nature a challenging and deeply moving read. but it is also in some ways a frustrating one, especially for humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 142 students or scholars of visual culture. it is sometimes difficult to connect eisenman’s arguments about works of art to the visual qualities of the works themselves, and his occasional reliance on popular or outdated sources, or omission of important references, fails to give full force to his otherwise compelling claims. the cry of nature is nonetheless an important contribution to a growing body of recent scholarship on animals in art. the bulk of the book focuses on european paintings and prints produced between 1730 and 1970. this alone make the cry of nature a vital intervention, because there are few comprehensive studies of the depiction of animals during this period. diana donald’s picturing animals in britain, 1750-1850 (yale university press, 2007) and louise lippincott and andreas blühm’s fierce friends: animals and artists, 1750-1900 (merrell, 2005) stand almost alone, and eisenman’s work covers more ground than either. eisenman brackets his account of animals in the modern era with considerations of works from antiquity through the seventeenth century, and of contemporary practice, making the cry of nature a partial but still valuable survey of almost 3000 years of the representation of animals in western art. as such, it is a welcome addition to a very small field of broad surveys which includes linda kalof’s looking at animals in human history (reaktion, 2007) and the essays on the visual arts in the six-volume cultural history of animals (bloomsbury, 2011). but eisenman clearly conceived of his book as something different from these art historical studies — he does not, in fact, reference any of them. his introduction traces two major threads of thought about animal rights in modern europe and america: on one hand, a reformist position that seeks only to minimize suffering, and on the other, a radical position that argues for the autonomous selfhood of animals and their right to freedom. these polemics, eisenman argues, were initiated by the animals themselves, who from the late eighteenth century onwards were gathered in larger and larger numbers in urban slaughterhouses. their audible and visible pain transformed them into political agents. for eisenman, then, understanding the history of meat production and consumption is crucial to understanding the literary, philosophical, and visual discourses around animal rights. indeed, eisenman is explicitly committed to a marxist understanding of social and political change; he argues that the struggle for animal rights is determined not by scientific, philosophical, or religious debates but by “the state of the human and animal class struggle; that is, the actual material and social relation of people and animals to each other at given moments in history” (33). his first chapter investigates the ways in which animals have been differentiated from humans, arguing that these differences are more apparent than real. there is amy freund – blood and paint 143 overwhelming evidence, he argues, for non-human animal consciousness. thus animals have moral rights — rights which have been denied to them by western capitalism, which regards them as mere raw material. eisenman draws his evidence from popular and academic writing on animal behavior as well as from his own interactions with his dog. he holds up the animism of hunter-gatherer societies as an alternative form of human-animal relationships that recognizes and respects animal consciousness. animism, he argues, persists to this day in numerous literary and artistic genres, and has potentially liberatory consequences. chapter two, “animals into meat,” introduces both the historical and art historical narrative, beginning with the ancient world and culminating in mid-eighteenth-century france. that intellectual and aesthetic history is structured around the social history of animal slaughter and meat consumption. eisenman weaves his analysis of writings by aristotle, st. thomas aquinas, michel montaigne, rené descartes, jean de la fontaine, and julien offray de la mettrie in and out of his readings of works of art ranging from the lion hunt reliefs of ancient assyria through medieval illuminated bestiaries to the prints of albrecht dürer, the meat still lifes of pieter aertsen, frans snyders, and rembrandt, and the works of jean-baptiste oudry and jean-baptiste-siméon chardin. one of eisenman’s goals is to tease out how the texts and images under consideration either express the prevailing anthropocentric and speciesist world view, or make more radical claims about animal consciousness and individuality. the work of aertsen, snyders, and dürer, eisenman argues, typify early modern assumptions that animals were mere brutes, utterly different from and divinely subordinated to humans, whereas rembrandt and chardin, to different degrees, subvert those attitudes. but even aertsen’s and snyders’ paintings can be, and have been, read as more equivocal statements about animal life and death than eisenman allows; his argument does not account for, for instance, nathaniel wolloch’s work on these paintings as anti-cartesian arguments. nor does eisenman consider dürer’s well-known watercolors of hares and other animals, which elicit viewers’ close consideration of, and even identification with, living animals; instead he focuses on an engraving of the legend of st. eustace. one of the key terms in eisenman’s visual analysis is what he calls the “pathos formula," a concept developed in his earlier book the abu ghraib effect (reaktion, 2007). the pathos formula, he argues, is a morally suspect visual trope endemic to western representation, offering viewers “the beautiful death: humans or animals whose suffering is rendered so exquisite, piteous or erotic that they seem to welcome it, or at least accept it without serious complaint” (54). the pathos formula as applied to animals, according to eisenman, naturalizes their suffering and death. thus even chardin’s sober, pared-down still lifes of dead game, read by art historians like sarah humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 144 cohen as meditations on materiality and the existence of the animal soul, are in eisenman’s account guilty of the same delectation of animal death and human domination as aersten’s and snyders’s market stall paintings. is there, then, any way out of the pathos formula? what does a morally good picture of animal life and death look like? eisenman reserves his praise for artists who either present an ugly picture of the harm caused to animals by humans (william hogarth’s tortured animals, rembrandt’s isolated, roughly painted ox carcass, théodore géricault’s abused horses) or who capture the inner life of animals and elicit sympathy and identification from the human viewer. each of these possibilities presents problems. what is the difference between chardin’s and oudry’s paintings, both of which confront the viewer with carcasses of game animals? eisenman associates chardin, despite his use of the pathos formula, with pro-animal sentiment, based on the artist’s visible paint handling and the tactility of his modeling. oudry’s dead animals, by contrast, he finds “lifeless,” “inert,” “highly contrived and utterly dead” (91). but visible painting handling is not a reliable indicator that an artist is sympathetic to animal pain, even in eisenman’s own narrative; he roundly condemns claude monet’s impressionist dead animal still lifes (formally very similar to chardin’s work) as anthropocentric and lacking empathy (167). likewise, what does inner life look like in a painting? this question has plagued the depiction of humans for thousands of years. portraiture, for example, has used eye contact or lack thereof, profile or three-quarters views, busy compositions filled with symbolic attributes or blank backgrounds, and rough or smooth paint handling to represent human consciousness and individuality. animal consciousness, a concept not universally acknowledged by artists and viewers, is even harder to communicate visually, and eisenman’s criteria for recognizing it in works of art are never made clear. eisenman argues, for instance, that george stubbs captures the “unique comportments and attitudes” of the horses he depicts, conveying their emotional life and their autonomy (110). but how do stubbs’s horse portraits differ visually from early english horse portraiture, or from seventeenth-century dutch paintings of prize livestock? can we really speak of emotion and autonomy in the likeness of a horse with a docked tail being held by a groom in front of a landscape clearly shaped by human intervention? i think eisenman’s claims about individual artists and works are, for the most part, correct, but more sustained, specific, and nuanced visual analysis would have helped convince his readers, many of whom will be unfamiliar with the art historical narratives in which his arguments are rooted. amy freund – blood and paint 145 chapter three, “the cry of nature,” deals with art and writing from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, including the 1791 treatise by john oswald that structures eisenman’s argument. oswald’s the cry of nature; or, an appeal to mercy and to justice, on behalf of the persecuted animals, a pro-vegetarian argument against human cruelty to animals, provides not only the title of eisenman’s book but also the basis for his theory of animal agency. that cry, eisenman argues, is the vocalization of animals in pain, an unmediated voice of nature that has the power to change history if only more humans understood and heed it (146, 260). he places oswald’s writing in the context of artworks by william blake, thomas bewick, géricault, rosa bonheur, and j.j. grandville. among these artists, eisenman singles out géricault for championing animal liberty and autonomy in his paintings and lithographs of horses. eisenman argues that géricault’s 1817 race of the riderless horses is about the resistance of oppressed animals. but its pro-equine message is at best ambivalent; it is also a celebration of the human (male) bodies controlling the horses (154-155). it is not clear, moreover, why géricault’s painting is morally better than rosa bonheur’s horse fair (1853), a work that eisenman dismisses as denying animal individuality (181). chapter four, “counter-revolution,” is organized around the histories of urban stockyards and slaughterhouses in london, paris, and chicago in the second half of the nineteenth century. the centralization of animal slaughter and its removal from public view, eisenman argues, aided the counter-revolution against animal rights by silencing the cry of nature. each slaughterhouse is paired with artworks and writings — claude monet, gustave caillebotte, and émile zola for paris, charles dickens, charles darwin, edwin henry landseer, and william holman hunt for london, and sinclair lewis and william harnett for chicago. eisenman emphasizes the impact of darwin’s work, which provided scientific evidence that humans and animals exist on a continuum and share emotions, particularly the sensation of pain. the visual arts fare worse in his analysis; he roundly condemns impressionist still life painting, for instance, as reproducing the “modern myth of the painless, rational and redeemed animal death” (167). chapter five, “primal scenes,” covers from about 1900 to 1970. this era, eisenman argues, saw the birth of a post-humanist philosophy and art. eisenman builds his narrative around an analysis of sigmund freud’s conception of the human self. according to eisenman, freud’s most famous cases (the rat man, little hans, and the wolf man) revolved around the human subject’s witnessing of a “primal scene” of animal suffering or recognition of the blurry lines between humans and animals. this trauma and truth, eisenman argues, also structures the work of isaac bashevis singer, george orwell, pablo picasso, chaim soutine, francis bacon, and joseph beuys. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 146 eisenman’s pairings of literary and visual sources (singer and soutine in particular) are convincing, and resound satisfyingly with his earlier discussion of still lifes of meat. but there are still frustrating problems of evidence and analysis — eisenman’s discussion of picasso’s guernica, focused on the screaming horse, neglects the rest of the composition. indeed, he only reproduces that detail of the eleven by twenty-five-foot painting, effectively depriving himself and his readers of picasso’s larger visual gambit. likewise, eisenman’s treatment of freud’s wolf man case depends on his own speculations about the patient's childhood relationship to animals. eisenman’s conclusion, “art and animals right now,” extends his argument to the present, tracing artistic and philosophical responses to the rise of factory farming after 1960 and identifying a new form of human identity and society predicated on our relationship with animals. we are now, eisenman suggests, experiencing a dissolution of the binaries (self/other, mind/body, human/animal) as well as of the social relationships (kinship, community, employer) that structured human identity in the past. at the same time, our affective relations to companion animals are increasingly important to our social and emotional lives. this new kind of “relational identity” is “multiple, hybrid and dependent on other beings and things for its changing definition” (252), a kind of return to animism in a posthumanist world. in support of this fluid new form of identity, eisenman invokes bruno latour’s we have never been modern (1991), and latour's idea of a “parliament of things” that would erase the oppositions between types of beings. the work of sue coe and damien hirst are his primary examples of (very different) artistic projects aimed at exposing this new relationship with animals and its persistent contradictions — contradictions that will only be resolved when more people hear and heed the cry of nature. but who is the “we” who is experiencing this new form of relational identity, and whose emotional well-being is increasingly dependent on companion animals? the forms of pet-keeping on which eisenman’s argument depends are specific to the wealthiest classes of the wealthiest nations. his elision of class-based difference is particularly striking given his commitment to a historically grounded understanding of the material and social relationships between humans and animals. that commitment, which serves eisenman extremely well in his discussion of meat production and consumption, is also less evident in his analysis of works of art. we hear very little about how these works were produced, circulated, viewed, and understood, or about the institutions and traditions in which they are embedded, or even about who paid for them and why. the differences between blake’s and hogarth’s audiences, or the orientalist context of stubbs’s horse attacked by a lion, inflect these works’ meanings, amy freund – blood and paint 147 and accounting for them would enrich eisenman’s argument. art historians will also notice that eisenman’s narrative of animal rights in the visual arts fits comfortably within the canon of western art post-1700. that narrative is almost entirely french and english until the mid-twentieth century, and within those national traditions is strongly dependent on painting and prints. the result is some peculiar blind spots. no one would dispute that artists like chardin, géricault, or soutine were deeply engaged with the representation of animals, but what about the innumerable porcelain animals produced by the meissen factory or the oeuvre of the sculptor antoine-louis barye or the photographs of eadweard muybridge? these works may have been less formally innovative but their very popularity constitutes important cultural evidence about human-animal relations. eisenman’s discussion of european and north american thought about the relationship between humans and animals in the age of darwin would be strengthened, moreover, by engagement with the problems of colonialism and scientific racism. the cry of nature remains, despite these questions, a passionate, thought-provoking, and genuinely interdisciplinary contribution to the history of the visual representation of animals, to the scholarly literature on animals as historical agents, and to the animal rights movement. microsoft word rother-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:2 adeline rother becoming zoö-curious: reading sexual differences in the field of animal life jacques derrida’s lectures in the animal that therefore i am famously demonstrate that the western archetype of “man” relies upon “the animal” as its hidden, absolute other. as derrida argues, philosophers as divergent as rené descartes, jacques lacan, and emmanuel lévinas all attempted to differentiate animals from man on the basis of a single negative trait or “lack” (manque): in descartes, the lack of consciousness; in lacan, the lack of the ability to truly respond (rather than merely react); in lévinas, the lack of an ethically recognizable face. but derrida further points out that the male philosophers who theorized man and animal always tended to deprive the animal of any sexual specificity. “the animal” was a neutered concept that obscured many kinds of sex, sexes, and sexualities in different species of animals. in contrast, the dozens of animal figures in derrida’s own texts include and welcome richly vibrant sexual differences, so he claims; in his words, “all these animals are welcomed, in a more and more deliberate manner, on the threshold of sexual difference. more precisely of sexual differences [with an s], that is to say what for the most part is kept under wraps in almost all of the grand philosophical-type treatises on the animality of the animal ” (the animal 403-4). in this article, i explore a range of curious sites where sexual differences are being reinscribed into the neutered philosophic concept of the animal. i put forth a new term — that of the zoö-curious gender discourse — to label the diversity of writers and thinkers who are revealing strange and multiple sexes and sexualities among animals. certain gender theorists attentive to animal sexual differences are in fact employing these differences to reimagine and expand our own. “zoö-curiosity” is evident, for example, in eva hayward’s reflections on starfish and the process of trans surgery; in rosi braidotti’s exploration of a “woman-insects nexus” as a space of gendered becoming; or in elizabeth grosz’s essay on insects as philosophic fantasms of female sexuality. a particular locus of intensity in this zoö-curious terrain is what i refer to as insex: a tenderness for tiny life-forms that one finds in certain corners of the work of derrida. in “ants” or “a silkworm of one’s own,” derrida approaches sexuality and sexual differences through insect metaphors; in doing so, he furthers the erotic entomology of other french-language writers like jules michelet, maurice maeterlinck, andré gide, or simone de beauvoir1 in order to launch a poetic critique of discrete binary genders as they are inscribed into overly rigid, complementary structures of relation. the theoretical import of these poetic and erotic little life-forms extends quite far. as the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 88 philosopher kelly oliver has recently wagered, paying attention to sexual differences in the field of animal life can fruitfully complicate the neutered concept of “the animal” in a way that reflects back on the plurality of sexual differences in and among human beings. oliver writes, “by considering the multitudes of animal sexes, sexualities, and reproductive practices, perhaps we can expand our ways of thinking about the sexes, sexualities, and reproductive practices of ‘man’” (55). the zoö-curious gender discourse i allude to in this paper is, as oliver insists, giving rise to new embodied experiences in the differentiated space of human sexuality. i have defined the zoö-curious gender discourse as a brand of animal amateurism that is engendering and re-gendering the human being through the lens of our changing representations of animals, precisely where the sexes and sexualities that these animals display are the most surprising and obscure. by unfolding the strangeness of insects and other animalcules, oliver, hayward, derrida, and gender theorists in the broadest sense of the term are spawning new imaginary matter for multiplying and nuancing human sexual differences, and for tracing and complicating the webs of relation that arise and dissolve all around them. the insect is an electric figure in this process, as its sex is anything but normative. take for instance the “he-she” butterflies known as gynandromorphs (perfectly divided down the middle); the instances of a third sex (like the sterile female worker bee); of a monstrous sex (like the hyper-fertile termite queen, or the seahorse father); or sex organs found in atypical locations (certain male octopi inseminate through a special tentacle, while female bedbugs receive insemination anywhere the male can penetrate their exoskeleton). other invertebrates like slugs and snails possess varying degrees of male or female traits on a sliding scale of intersexuality. for many writers and artists, these anomalies suggest new ways of imagining what we mean by human sexuality. anne berger, in her article on derrida’s “ants,” claims they insinuate “the holographic and moving contours of bodies to come, of bodies as they might come” (64). insects (we need to get close to observe them) present us with reproductive morphologies and markings that are strangely provocative, yet stunningly dissimilar to the sexual categories we impose upon ourselves. insects provide us with an obscure impression of eroticism without confirming our expectations of where sex is, of how it must be parceled out. why would the matter of insects entice us, unsettle us, and sometimes arouse us? sigmund freud worked in a laboratory to study the sexes of eels before he turned to psychoanalysis (he dissected hundreds of them in search of the elusive male eel sex adeline rother -becoming zoö-curious: reading sexual differences in the field of animal life . 89 organ)2; alfred kinsey completed a doctoral thesis in entomology and reared millions of gall wasps prior to becoming an expert in human sexuality.3 while i undertake this study, i too am observing insects through the impossible shifts and ruptures of their life-cycles, raising silkworms (sent live in the mail from my father), and watching nervously as aphids colonize our garden. in the meantime i remain attuned to the sexes of insects in their incidental manifestations. a gynandromorph butterfly was recently hatched in the puparium at london’s natural history museum. half-female, half-male, a “rare sexual chimera,” its sexes are stitched along a nearly perfect line that cuts straight through the butterfly’s genitals, or so the news story goes.4 this reminds me that vladimir nabokov engineered a method of tracing the evolutionary connections between butterfly species by comparing the forms of their genitalia, and that the boyaged nabokov in his memoir speak, memory possessed a pinned specimen of a gynandromorph butterfly, which a careless nanny sat upon and destroyed (127-128). why insects? why the incredibly small? in wonder and science: imagining worlds in early modern europe, mary campbell argues that the visual imagination that emerged through advances in optical technology contained an inherently sensual aspect, especially when scholars with creative and artistic sensibilities began adopting the microscope (183-185). in his 1858 entomological memoir, the french historian jules michelet wrote that under the microscope, “a hundred things in anatomy which seem horrible to the unassisted sight, acquire a touching and impressive delicacy, and a potential charm which approaches the sublime” (145-146). to see the insect from upclose is to transform something tiny and confusing into something charming and detailed. and yet, the insect’s allure remains ambivalent. michelet devotes a chapter of the insect to the tragic fate of jan swammerdam, a seventeenth-century dutch scientist who labored in solitude at the microscope, and who was eventually done in (michelet claims) by the microscope’s confounding revelations. swammerdam began his career by comparing the reproductive systems of wildly divergent species, from human beings to hymenoptera. he was the first to see and understand the maternity of the insect and the human maternity. the latter subject, so delicate and yet so grand — in which he labored conjointly with his master at leyden — i put aside: let us dwell upon the former. he dissected and described the ovaries of the bee: found in them the pretended “king”; and proved she was a queen, or rather a mother. in like manner he explained the maternity of the ant; an all-important discovery, which revealed the true mystery of the superior humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 90 insect, and initiated us into the real character of these societies, which are not monarchies, but maternal republics. (134) when the belgian writer maurice maeterlinck addresses the bee’s historic sex-change in his 1901 insect tome, the life of the bee, he too praises swammerdam as the first to decisively fix the true sexuality of the minuscule bee. a cutting technology — of dissection, injection, and even artistic engraving — helped swammerdam define and preserve this new-found sexual reality. the real history of the bee begins in the seventeenth century, with the discoveries of the great dutch savant swammerdam. it is well, however, to add this detail, but little known: before swammerdam a flemish naturalist named clutius had arrived at certain important truths, such as the sole maternity of the queen and her possession of the attributes of both sexes, but he had left these unproved. swammerdam founded the true methods of scientific investigation; he invented the microscope, contrived injections to ward off decay, was the first to dissect the bees, and by the discovery of the ovaries and the oviduct definitely fixed the sex of the queen, hitherto looked upon as a king, and threw the whole political scheme of the hive into most unexpected light by basing it upon maternity. finally he produced woodcuts and engravings so perfect that to this day they serve to illustrate many books on apiculture. (2) “micrography” is the term that maeterlinck ascribes to these modern technologies of viewing and describing the insect (2). such micrography marks a shift beyond the paradigm of the “teeming” insect swarm, which literary historian christopher hollingsworth conceives as an ancient human (and primate) cognitive relational structure that organizes the process of distancing, blurring, and belittling (7-11). as hollingsworth writes, “the word ‘insect’ implies distance, reduced or negligible importance, absolute difference … one may similarly define and reduce an entire race or culture” (8). within this cognitive structure that hollingsworth refers to as “the hive,” living things can be assimilated and amassed into a distant, single group. the viewer, from his safe point of vantage, is both repelled and strangely allured by the sight of teeming life. this entire dynamic becomes a metaphor for organizing political life and the power differentials between the rulers and the ruled. “the hive’s pictorial space is bipolar; its emotional associations follow suit. community attracts, but also repels … yes, to see the whole, the city, the future from afar is to long for it, to wish, as it were, to join the masons raising its walls. however, to see in this way is also to stand adeline rother -becoming zoö-curious: reading sexual differences in the field of animal life . 91 apart and above, to be superior” (15). can microscopic technology clarify the insect and undo its power as a metaphor for human debasement? how is the sex of the insect involved in the metamorphosis of its very metaphor? maeterlinck encounters “the hive” as hollingsworth describes it when he peers into a domestic beehive in the life of the bee. he recounts lifting the lid off a barnyard hive and pumping out a veil of smoke as he slowly approaches the bees within. our first impression is one of unsettling confusion that leaves the author grasping for words. the first impression of the novice before whom an observation-hive is opened will be one of some disappointment. he had been told that this little glass case contained an unparalleled activity, an infinite number of wise laws, and a startling amalgam of mystery, experience, genius, calculation, science, of various industries, of certitude and prescience, of intelligent habits and curious feelings and virtues. all that he sees is a confused mass of little reddish groups, somewhat resembling roasted coffee-berries, or bunches of raisins piled against the glass. they look more dead than alive; their movements are slow, incoherent, and incomprehensible. can these be the wonderful drops of light he had seen but a moment ago, unceasingly flashing and sparkling, as they darted among the pearls and the gold of a thousand wide-open calyces? … they appear to be shivering in the darkness, to be numbed, suffocated, so closely are they huddled together; one might fancy they were ailing captives, or queens dethroned, who have had their one moment of glory in the midst of their radiant garden, and are now compelled to return to the shameful squalor of their poor overcrowded home. (7) as our language for describing them fails, these bees make us uneasily conscious of death and the passage beyond. but maeterlinck does not stop there, or capitulate to the collapse of discernibility. he patiently moves closer to bring out the lovely complicated patterns “within” the swarm, “beneath” the disordered groupings (things like grapes, like coffee beans, like the overcrowded poor) that muddle our categories and our thought. the perceived femininity of the bee, its sex-change at the foundation of modern entomology, provides the entryway into a new imaginary engagement with the hive. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 92 from the height of a dome more colossal than that of st. peter’s at rome waxen walls descend to the ground, balanced in the void and the darkness; gigantic and manifold, vertical and parallel geometric constructions, to which, for relative precision, audacity, and vastness, no human structure is comparable. each of these walls, whose substance still is immaculate and fragrant, of virginal, silvery freshness, contains thousands of cells, that are stored with provisions sufficient to feed the whole people for several weeks. here, lodged in transparent cells, are the pollens, love-ferment of every flower of spring, making brilliant splashes of red and yellow, of black and mauve. close by, in twenty thousand reservoirs, sealed with a seal that shall only be broken on days of supreme distress, the honey of april is stored, most limpid and perfumed of all, wrapped round with long and magnificent embroidery of gold, whose borders hang stiff and rigid. still lower the honey of may matures, in great open vats, by whose side watchful cohorts maintain an incessant current of air. in the centre, and far from the light whose diamond rays steal in through the only opening, in the warmest part of the hive, there stands the abode of the future; here does it sleep, and wake. for this is the royal domain of the brood-cells, set apart for the queen and her acolytes; about 10,000 cells wherein the eggs repose, 15,000 or 16,000 chambers tenanted by larvae, 40,000 dwellings inhabited by white nymphs to whom thousands of nurses minister. and finally, in the holy of holies of these parts are the three, four, six, or twelve sealed palaces, vast in size compared with the others, where the adolescent princesses lie who await their hour, wrapped in a kind of shroud, all of them motionless and pale, and fed in the darkness. (11-12) nothing short of the religious mood is required for entering and literally enumerating the folds of this new space. the confusion of the teeming swarm is clarified and rendered sensual, while the male human viewer finds himself ecstatically dwarfed. instead of a swarm, we discover something like “the fold,” and are shown a new imaginary pathway for making contact with the insect other. these examples suggest that numerous possible threads feed into a zoophilic fantasy around the insect, a fantasy that reverses a phobic orientation, but not without introducing a new and more exquisite poetics of violence (pinning, dissection, and the penetration of seeing). the zoö-curious gender discourse i am describing frequently wrestles with its own need for violence: for technologies that freeze, fix, and magnify adeline rother -becoming zoö-curious: reading sexual differences in the field of animal life . 93 the otherness of the animal. the insect redoubles this violence because its own anatomy implies cuts, or segmentation. the word insect-, meaning “cut up” in latin (from the past participle of the verb secare), is reflective of this cut-like structure, as is the greek word entomon, meaning “segmented.” entomology can thus be regarded in some primary sense as the study of something that is cut. derrida plays with these associations in his insect texts (“a silkworm of one’s own” and “ants”), as he links the structure of insects to our notion of sex, which comes from the same latin stem-word, secare. nabokov (the writer and professional lepidopterist) wove many of these threads into his transgressive story of sibling love, ada, or ardor: a family chronicle. an anagram between insect and incest is constantly at play within the novel. ada veen is an aspiring entomologist. she and her brother van (who is also her lover) pore over specimens of butterflies, orchids, and butterflies that look like orchids; they unfold their love and press its limits through their mutual fascination for insex. in one instance, the pair discovers the mating habits of a biting gnat named serromyia femorata (in an intentional slip, the bug is referred to as serromyia amorata). the gnat practices a form of sexual cannibalism that ada and van themselves devour as they read a book entitled history of mating habits. laughing, lusting, they read, copulation takes place with both ventral surfaces pressed together and the mouths touching. when the last throb (frisson) of intercourse is terminated the female sucks out the male’s body content through the mouth of her impassioned partner. one supposes […] that the titbits [sic], such as the juicy leg of a bug enveloped in a webby substance, or even a mere token (the frivolous dead end or subtle beginning of an evolutionary process — qui le sait!) such as a petal carefully wrapped up and tied up with a frond of red fern, which certain male flies (but apparently not the fermorata and amorata morons) bring to the female before mating, represent a prudent guarantee against the misplaced voracity of the young lady. (144) there is camp in this entomological erotica. arousal capitulates into amusement and absurdity in the effort to humanize the sex lives of bugs. slippage into humor and exaggeration is also evident in isabella rossellini’s recent series of zoö-curious short films entitled green porno and seduce me. these films seek to represent the sex lives of animals through a stage-like production involving human-sized costumes of flies, bees, mantises, spiders, and several species of fishes, marine mammals, and other creatures.5 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 94 in each piece, rossellini herself plays the animals seducing and being seduced. she is demarcated as human by her hands, body, voice, and face, even as she plays on the borders of what would be considered erotic in the human realm. in the beginning of the short film “noah’s ark,” pairs of iconic animals are seen filing up a ramp into a wooden ship. one of the elephants, but not the other, is endowed with a long, roseate-colored penis. rossellini, standing under an umbrella in the role of narrator, asks, “how did noah do it? how did he manage to organize all animals into couples?” she rehearses, “as it is written in the bible, noah gathered all animals into his ark, in order for them to reproduce and repopulate the earth. one male, and one female. couples.” cued by this binary word, a godly hand comes down from the sky and points at a solitary pink thing that is conveying itself into the ship. on the plank behind the elephants, this naked pink organ looks like the pachydermal penis, detached. “you!” the pointed finger calls out, “why are you alone?” a close-up angle transforms the pink thing into a pointed worm: it is a sheath-like costume in which rossellini herself is enclosed. “i’m an earthworm,” it says. “i am a hermaphrodite. i’m both male and female. to reproduce, i can mate with other hermaphrodites, or i can segment my body and clone myself.” satisfied with this account of “sex” in the apparently asexual, the finger now points to a phalloid cluster that is making its way into the ark. “you!” it says, “what’s that pile?” the pile, again presenting rossellini’s face, asserts, “we are crepidula fornicata. we are all male. to fornicate we form a pile. then one of us, the bottom, turns into a female.” the pointed finger hesitates. what is the creator of dichotomous sexualities supposed to make of that? rossellini is clearly playing with the latin name crepidula fornicata to highlight the habits of this particular seaside fornicator.6 sometimes called the “copulating slipper snail,” crepidula fornicata are sequential hermaphrodites that modify the composition of their testicular and ovarian tissue according to their position inside the copulating pile. rossellini is able to embrace this animal strangeness, to wear it like a costume, as a vector of performative (be)coming. such manifestations of zoö-curiosity build upon a lengthy “tradition” of french entomological amateurism. in andré gide’s memoir if it die: an autobiography, an aged gide exposes the nature of his own life-long love for adolescent boys; but he also sweeps back over the many other passions that marked his life from beginning to end, including entomology. i doubt whether i ever extracted as much or as keen joy from anything later on, be it from books, music or painting, as i did in those days from adeline rother -becoming zoö-curious: reading sexual differences in the field of animal life . 95 the play of living matter. i had succeeded in getting suzanne [andré’s cousin] to share my passion for entomology; at any rate she would accompany me on my hunting expeditions and was not too much disgusted at turning up bits of dung and carrion in search for dungbeetles, burying-beetles and devil’s coach-horses. (81) the young gide’s hobby produces striking mental images that remain with him, strangely intermingling with his burgeoning sensuality. just as many children learn about sex by watching pets, livestock, and other animals, the young gide discovers a voluptuousness in living matter that precedes the need or the impulse to define his own. in the same passage, gide describes being struck, overcome as he watches a hatchling emerge from an egg. by digging into the sawdust, one found … larvae as well — enormous white maggots, like cockchafer grubs. one found, too, strings or packets of soft, whitish eggs as big as damsons, and all sticking together; i was at first greatly mystified by these; they had no proper shell and it was impossible to break them; it was even rather difficult to tear open their soft parchment-like skin, but when one did — wonder of wonders! [ô stupeur!] — out slipped a tender grass-snake [s’échappait alors, une délicate couleuvre]. (81) does some aspect of the surprise in this passage owe to the way in which the revealed object, a phallic tail, is gendered in the french language, is emphatically softened by the feminine noun une couleuvre (grass snake), and preceded by the adjective délicate (translated here as “tender”), all within a broader gender-bending context of young love with the vigorous girl-cousin suzanne? like in derrida’s entomological memoir on silkworms (which i look at in a moment), insect sex is discerned without discerning a sex; there is an amalgamation of masculine and feminine features in a new and unprogrammed moment of birth; there is a desire, an innocent one, to tear sex’s veil and to see.7 the broad context i am sketching here can help us interpret the seemingly strange insect metaphors in derrida’s work. derrida’s insex are indeed strange, but they do not emerge from nowhere; a specifically french tradition has taken the erotic insect as its topic at least since michelet in the mid-nineteenth century. for many writers, the modern microscopic paradigm contains an inherently sensual and private aspect; moreover, the morphologies and behaviors revealed by the microscope both repel and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 96 attract the eye of the viewer, precisely because they challenge or flout the more domesticated ideas of sexuality imposed upon the macro-level, human realm. it is in this web that one might rediscover the insects of derrida, and distinguish them in their specificity from the many, many other animals derrida engaged with in his thought. derrida described his own corpus as traversed by the tracks of animals. “animals are my concern,” he states in the animal that therefore i am, before providing a pages-long list of animals he had followed in the literary and philosophical writings of nietzsche, heidegger, montaigne, freud and lewis carroll (403-406). this interest in animals has intrigued and at times perplexed readers and critics. the fact that zoöcuriosity needs be explained already reveals something about the marginality of animals to philosophy and to serious thought. in a filmed interview published online8, derrida commented upon the marginality of animals to philosophy in the following terms [i translate]: the question of the animal persists in my texts from the beginning. but recently, over the course of recent years, i’ve consecrated fairly long publications to it. it’s a very important point in deconstruction, the definition of “what’s proper to man,” of what is supposed to distinguish man from the animal in general. so that has interested me very, very much, and i’ve worked on it a lot, it’s true. in general i avoid speaking of “the animal” in general. for me, there is no “the animal.” when one says “animal” one has already started to no longer understand anything; one has already started in fact to enclose the animal in a jar [derrida picks up a glass bug jar sitting at his side]. there are animals, with considerable differences between different types of animals. there is no reason for one to put in the same category of animal the monkey, the bee, the snake, the dog, the horse, arthropods and microbes. these are radically different types of organization of life. and already the gesture of saying “the animal” and of placing in one category both the chimpanzee and the ant is a gesture of violent repression, of violent enclosure on the part of man. all of these living things aren’t man, so we put them in a single category: it’s a stupid gesture, first of all, theoretically ridiculous. and it’s also a gesture that is part of human violence in general in regards to animals. animals have been marginal to philosophy, but this very marginality becomes central to the derridian criticism of it. the way out of a centuries-long philosophical impasse is through its margins: in this case, through the many teeming species demanding to be adeline rother -becoming zoö-curious: reading sexual differences in the field of animal life . 97 recognized in and already beyond the overly rigid and impossible, “ridiculous” category of the animal. and just as it would be impossible to enclose all animals in a single theoretical category, it would be absurd to try to reduce the many animals in derrida’s texts to a single matter, effect, or concern. derrida says as much when he refuses to explain or summarize his “animal figures” in a simple and unified way, like an animal-trainer forcing beasts to perform at a circus (the animal 403; 407). each type of derridanimal, each individual critter, has to be seen and heard in its specificity. derrida’s insects are not his cats, his hedgehogs, or his sacrificial rams; they unleash a libidinal symphony and resound within a particular literary and philosophical history all their own. what, then, is the specific meaning opened up by derrida’s bugs? i would wager that derrida’s insects swirl around the cut and the uncut, unleashing a curious kind of analytics around this distinction. i’ll address derrida’s two primary insect texts in the coming pages, arguing that “a silkworm of one’s own” enacts a fantasy of the uncut, whereas “ants” engages in the poetic sensuality of a body that is cut, segmented, or “constricted” at its origin. the division i am making may seem overly simple or binary, but derrida’s insects precisely get us to think about the very play, the very alternation, between the cut and the whole, and the impossibility of arresting this movement or metamorphosis. in the beginning of his public lecture “ants,” derrida creates a thousand and one little passageways between the metaphor of the insect, and the topic of the colloquium, “readings of sexual difference.” one effect of using an animal metaphor in the first place is to show that the problematic of sexual difference cannot be limited to the human realm. derrida does not specify what sexual difference is, but instead seems to define it as a structure in movement, a productive site, in and between living things. giving rise to an apparent division (for example, between male and female), sexual difference doesn’t stop there; it produces further traces that give shape to and undo the stable sexes or entities we’re putting under the microscope. “[t]his is my hypothesis, as soon as there is sexual difference, there are words or rather traces to be read. […] there can be traces without sexual difference, for example for unsexed living things, but there can be no sexual difference without traces, and this goes not only for ‘us’, for the living thing we call human. but henceforth, sexual difference remains to be interpreted, deciphered, decrypted, read and not seen” (20-21). the double force of the insect — the way it pulls us in because we want to see it, and pushes us out, because it remains too small — now provides a kind of methodology for looking at what the human and nonhuman sexes “are.” rather than clear and straightforward objects of science, sexual humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 98 differences provoke science — knowledge aided by sight, knowledge as sight — but also and more fundamentally give rise to readings, to interpretations, like those of the micrographer entering ever deeper into the insect’s folds. the cuts of the insect, or of sex, do not refer to something, but to this movement that draws us in, at times inviting violent over-readings and efforts to firmly differentiate one “insex” from another. derrida establishes this structure and its violent magnetism in his long remarks on the figure of the ant. as an insecta […], the ant is a cut invertebrate (the name means cut, it names the cut), which is to say divided into small strangulations by so many annulations. in the end, the ant well deserves this title of insect: it is an annulated animal. its body is marked, scanned, strictured by an annulated multiplicity of rings, that cut it without cutting it, divide it without cleaving it, differentiate it without dissociating it — although the name, insecta, from inseco, means ‘cut’. thus it is that a word meaning ‘cut’ can come to mean ‘strangled,’ but not ‘cut’, and (but) cut and (but) not cut, separated but (and) not separated, cut but immediately repaired. stricture. this is what we would like to talk about: about the separated/not separated, about the cut/not cut — and about the word “sex”, about sexual difference in relation to the cut (and) (but) not cut, to the cut that is no longer opposed to the un-cut, between the ‘separating’ and the ‘repairing’ […]” (21-22). like the hedgehog whose bristly body provided a new figure for poetry in derrida’s “che cos’è la poesia?”, the ant here provides a shift in scale, and a radically new and unexpected vocabulary for engaging with sexual difference. the ant, as derrida states, is a figure of the un-seeable precisely where one wants (or does not want) to see. the ant is also a figure of the eminently destructible, in that the magnifying glass we turn upon the ant to see it better also threatens to send it up in a tiny puff of smoke. but though the ant is a symbol of powerlessness and vulnerability, it can also embody strength in numbers, like ants in an “army,” amassed in a teeming puddle. when parsed out, however, under the microscope, the ant bears a three-part structure, and also possesses the jointed legs that arthropods are named for. they bear cuts, an idea which is also found in the classificatory name of hymenoptera, or “membranous wing.” the forewings and hindwings of bumblebees, for example, are linked together by a series of hooks called hammuli, which can make it appear that they only have two wings (when in fact they have four). the wings of ants are used during their “nuptial adeline rother -becoming zoö-curious: reading sexual differences in the field of animal life . 99 flight,” as if “hymenoptera” also referred to marriage, mating, and joining together (the greek god of marriage is hymen). the ant’s split wing becomes the possibility of “marriage,” without itself being repaired or joined together. it is this structure of an undecideable fold, of a surface with a hidden seam, that seems to electrify derrida’s discourse on the insect. a notion of gender ambiguity, and a refusal of total vision in determining the scientific contours of a “sexual” relationship or of one’s “sexual identity,” emerge from this zoö-anatomical metaphor. the insect shows the way in which human genders are continuously marked, and re-marked, by the cutting, classifying societal impulse which is bent on marking clear differences in the mingling matter of sex. it is perhaps to acknowledge this cutting, “sexing” impulse that derrida in fact re-sexes the word ant in his essay, changing it from la fourmi to le fourmi or le fourmis (35). the move is double-edged: it is a flouting of linguistic gender norms, and a “violent” redefinition which unleashes the cutting metaphorics of inscription and the pen. this strange “ant” can seem like a break from previous conceptions of the insect, but there is continuity between derrida’s insex and the founders of poetic entomology. michelet saw the insect’s cut/not cut structure as part of its fundamental attraction as an object of study. he said that the order of insects included so many species, most of them unknown, that the very effort to classify them was muddled. “our collections contain about one hundred thousand species. but taking into consideration that every plant at the least nourishes three, we obtain the result, according to the number of known plants, of three hundred and sixty thousand species of insects! and each, be it remembered, of prodigious fecundity” (18). the number of individual species in the insect world is enormous — mathematically sublime. but the task of counting common species is in fact an illusion, an oversimplification, as each insect itself contains eversmaller species in its layers, fluids and folds. “now call to mind that every creature nourishes other creatures in its surface, in the thickness of its solids, and in its blood; that each insect is a little world inhabited by insects; and that these again have parasites of their own” (18). like derrida unfolding the structure of différance, michelet continues this reflection in a totalizing vein, seeing or inscribing the cuts of the insect into every material structure, into the most essential parts of ourselves. “[i]n the masses men have supposed to be mineral or inorganic, animals are now revealed to us of which it would take a thousand millions to form one inch in thickness, — the which do not the less present us with a rough sketch or outline of the insect, and have the right to be spoken of as insects commenced” (22). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 100 what are derrida, nabokov, gide, and michelet precisely doing in grafting the matter of human sexuality into this physical materiality of the organic (and inorganic) world? in a sense they are proposing a methodology, a practice of reading that displaces the need to see — or rather, which relishes seeing, while breaking the equivalency between seeing and the truth. “[w]e are interpreting sexual difference in the sense that we are reading it, which is to say without seeing it, only so as to bear witness to it beyond the anatomical fact, beyond the proof of civil status, beyond every system of so-called objective criteria of sexual identification” (“ants” 36). derrida describes this labor as an “endurance of blindness,” gesturing in jest toward the insect’s antennae as another sensory metaphor for how we might learn to re-see (36). michelet also interrogates the power of the eye as the organ or technology most capable of producing the truth. he claims that using the microscope, a prosthetic eye, ultimately destroys a person’s vision, and, by metaphoric extension, the self or the very person (the eye/i) that seeks to see. jan swammerdam, great refiner of the microscope, “the galileo of the infinitely little” (130) who discovered the ovaries of the queen bee and other social hymenoptera, as well as metamorphosis, veered eventually into mysticism (a sight beyond sight) and was done in by seeing too much. “what really killed him? his own science”: his encounter eye to eye with “the living infinity” beneath the surface of the visible world. under the microscope, “it was not a matter of a decreasing scale of abstract greatnesses or of inorganic atoms, but of the successive envelopment and prodigious movements of beings which are the one in the other. for the little we see, each animal is a tiny planet, a small world inhabited by animals still more diminutive, which are in turn inhabited by others very much smaller. and this, too, without end or rest, except from the powerlessness of our senses and the imperfection of optical science” (138-9). “insex” is the neologism i want to introduce to lead the way into this network of ideas around the structure of difference, and the passage from seeing to reading in the study, curiously erotic, of life that is segmented and small. like derrida’s famous neologism animot, which looks like a singular but sounds like a plural (animaux), “insex” is a singular noun that contains the plural form (insects). it is difficult to say whether derrida’s other major insect metaphor, the silkworm, really is an insex at all. in “a silkworm of one’s own,” the insect’s segmented physicality is temporarily suspended in derrida’s turn to a worm that has yet to metamorphose into a proper bug. the silkworm is of course an insect, but in the popular imagination it is also a worm, both in english and in french (silkworm: un ver à soie). derrida seems attracted to this repugnant little creature — or to these repugnant little creatures, which are never raised in isolation — because they seem protected, as it were, from the structure of the cut. adeline rother -becoming zoö-curious: reading sexual differences in the field of animal life . 101 erotic singularities, they escape the narrator’s own desire to see and define the insect’s sex. “a silkworm of one’s own” was written in a sort of blind contract with feminist theorist hélène cixous (as was “ants”). cixous wrote an initial text entitled “savoir,” which derrida responded to with his own text, which also included a spontaneous close-reading of hers. although the broad theme had been agreed upon in advance, the two theorists paradoxically “planned” to be surprised by the event of reading the other. both pieces were published in single book entitled veils, with drawings by the visual artist ernest pignon-ernest. these drawings are curious in that they freely represent a fantasy of erogenous tissues, of intact skins or membranes, piled and folded upon themselves. as a point of entry into derrida’s silkworms, they suggest the paradox of the intact, the “untouched,” precisely where it appears so touchable. as a space that derrida and cixous are carving within the problematic of the cut-uncut, the book is longing to be a whole in excess of itself. it’s an imaginary space full of secrets, of secretions. beyond total reading, but in a sticky way, an inchoate way, like the worm. michelet described the finished product of silk as “a living tissue” (189). his chapter entitled “the silkworm” in the insect of 1859 is indeed not about the silkworm (the animal) at all, but about the raw material (silk threads) and finished products (dyed and cut silk fabrics) extracted from this little insect laborer. michelet likens silk cloth to a second skin, or to a second head of hair, that becomes a part of the person who wears it. “inferior to the skin, undoubtedly, yet it seemed related to it; or rather it became in the end a part of the body, and, as it were, melted into it, like a dream which informs our whole existence, and cannot be separated from it” (189). the “oriental ladies” who wear layers of silk and cashmere ingeniously imitate the silkworm, which spins its own soft envelope of light-colored thread. humans prize this protein fiber because we can appropriate its biological function. it does not yield clothing, but a true cocoon. silk “embraces willingly the living person” (189). the theme of a second skin pervades derrida’s meditation on the silkworm. “a silkworm of one’s own” is an autobiographic text that deals with religious belonging, through discussions of the tallith (a fringed prayer shawl made of linen, wool, or sometimes silk, worn by observant men in judaism) and of circumcision, with the one (the tallith) reading almost like the substitute, the second skin, given to replace the other. derrida explains that he never wears his tallith, but that he keeps it furrowed inside a well-worn paper bag, and feels it, blindly, before falling asleep at night (43). this admission of private eroticism is confessional, but derrida also connects it to the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 102 philosophical structure of the self. the self is presented as a kind of fantasy of touching oneself, of giving oneself to oneself, without separation, or without recourse to any other. the self, le soi in french, rhymes with the word for silk, la soie. the silkworm pupa, which encloses itself in a cocoon of whitish silk ejected from its salivary glands, seems to figure this desire for a self-enclosed subjectivity safeguarded from the touch of the other. in this autoeroticobiographical work, derrida (or the narrator posing in his autobiographical person) states that he raised silkworms as a young adolescent in his family’s home in el-biar, algeria. this memory (which came to him in the night, like a dream) gives rise to a long meditation, scanned with commas, spewing out like the filament of the silkworm. in contrast to all the “religious” signs, like the tallith, used to mark sexual difference or to celebrate the “instars” of sexual development (coming of age), the silkworm’s ambiguous or unidentifiable gender represents the desire for a sex or sexuality that would be free from any identifying “stamp.” when the pre-adolescent derrida gazed at his pet silkworms, he saw an obscure, “pure” form of self (or silk)cultivation. he saw a “being” “re-engendering itself in the spinning of its filiation, sons or daughters — beyond any sexual difference or rather any duality of the sexes, and even beyond any coupling. in the beginning, there was the form that was and was not a sex, the child could see it clearly, a sex perhaps but which one?” (90). here and throughout the zoö-curious gender discourse, the strange and invisible sexualities of bugs are providing a seeming freedom beyond our social categories. the memory is printed in italics, a snaking print, inserted like a foreign language into derrida’s own. before i was thirteen, before ever having worn a tallith and having even dreamed of possessing my own, i cultivated (what’s the link?) silkworms, the caterpillars or larvae of the bombyx. i now discover that that’s called sericulture (from seres, the seres, it appears, a people of eastern india with whom there was a silk trade). in the four corners of a shoebox, then, i’d been shown how, i kept and fed silkworms. every day, but i would have liked to make myself the indefatigable officiant of this service. several times a day, the same liturgy, you had to offer them mulberry leaves, these little indifferent idols. for weeks, i would leave the room where the box was kept only to look for mulberry trees. these trips were journeys and adventure: we didn’t know where to look for them anymore, or whether we were going to find any more. my silkworms stayed there, then, with me, in my place as in their place, in the rack of the magnanery, so many words i knew nothing of in those days. in truth, they needed lots of mulberry, always too much, these voracious little creatures. they were especially voracious between adeline rother -becoming zoö-curious: reading sexual differences in the field of animal life . 103 moltings (at the moment called the instar). you could hardly see the mouths of these white or slightly grayish caterpillars, but you could sense they were impatient to nourish their secretion. through their four moltings, the caterpillars, every one for itself, were themselves, in themselves, for themselves, only the time of a passage. they were animated only in view of the transformation of the mulberry into silk. like the movement of this production, like this becoming-silk of a silk i would have never believed natural, as this extraordinary process remained basically invisible. i was above all struck by the impossible embodied in these little creatures in their shoebox. it was not impossible, of course, to distinguish between a head and a tail, and so, virtually, to see the difference between a part and a whole, and to find some sense in the thing, a direction, an orientation. but it was impossible to discern a sex. there was indeed something like a brown mouth but you could not recognize it in the orifice you had to imagine to be at the origin of their silk, this milk become thread, this filament prolonging their body and remaining attached to it for a certain length of time: the extruded saliva of a very fine sperm, shiny, gleaming, the miracle of a feminine ejaculation, which would catch the light and which i drank in with my eyes. but basically without seeing anything. is the silkworm then an insex, producing différance and eliciting the cutting impulse of the viewer? or is it born in a place that is beyond the touch of the other, “indifferent” as well as undifferentiated? in the animal that therefore i am, derrida writes that his silkworms are “precisely a matter of nakedness, with or without a veil,” of “that which is naked, as it is said, as a worm” (404). he then recopies the moment where the silkworms “extruded saliva of a very fine sperm, lustrous, shiny, the miracle of a female ejaculation which would catch the light and which i drank in with my eyes. but basically without seeing anything" (89). the microscopic revelation is again being deflected, at least somewhat, at the very moment where the drive to behold it is the most intense. like the ant, the silkworm doesn’t mean or represent anything, but introduces a shift in methodological sensibility around the matter of sexual difference. the ant and the silkworm are transposed into a language which only in turn gives them un effet de réalité. ginette michaud, in her article “on a serpentine note,” emphasizes that the silkworm and other derridanimals are not metaphors that simply transfer meaning from one word or idea to another. nor are they metonyms that privilege a part (whichever “part” that would be!) to stand in for a larger whole. instead, they are more like “antimetaphors,” carriers of significance that evoke a sense of loss or mourning at the unknowable secret of their truth (59). i would locate them in a somewhat more immediate realm, in the electric imaginary zone of that which begs to be touched, even humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 104 while implying the untouchable itself (like a box of writhing whitish worms). the erotic charge of the silkworm vision, even if it shows no thing, takes us to a curious place where one could reimagine (and in some sense “touch”) one’s own sex beyond the touch of the other, or the sex of the other beyond the touch of one’s self. the fundamental structure of the bug metaphor (if metaphor it is) creates a space in which “the cut […] is no longer opposed to the un-cut” (22). the he-ants, she-ants, silkworms, crepidula fornicata, serromyia amorata, and other insex invite an indefinable metamorphosis in the open and differentiated space of human sexuality. but it’s a notion like the one i have just employed — that of “the open and differentiated space of human sexuality” — which directs me toward a possible critique of the zoö-curious gender discourse. i would argue that our very rhetoric of the “open space” or “free movement” of human sexual difference(s) may remain attached to a binary mode of relating ourselves to the difference of the animal. the turn to a concept of gender, broadly signifying a continuum of differences among and within our human selves, and associated with agency and the possibility of performance, free play, and unlimited engenderment, might owe something to the fantasm of “animal sex,” to the idea of a base, instinctual drive to reproduce that is limiting, constraining, animal. the animals invoked in zoö-curious gender discourse are frequently species of invertebrates, creatures very alien to human beings and other “higher mammals.” what if, in their very strangeness, insex are again suggesting the wide gulf between the animal and us? what if the terrain of insex reasserts a man-animal divide, one in which the human is set apart not by our capacity for language or logic or conscious thought, but in terms of our supposed access to difference itself? of the many divides that philosophers have put forth between the human and the animal, perhaps the most basic and the most ineradicable is precisely this: that the human being possesses a monopoly on difference itself. the insect’s wild diversity ultimately figures our own changeability, our own lack of limits, in other words the very transcendence that has always been attributed to mankind in opposition to the animal. the many instances of zoö-curiosity i’ve explored in this paper all partake in a broader sensibility and even a coherent tradition. perhaps we can embrace zoö-curiosity not only as an impetus for questioning, but also as an analytic in itself. zoö-curiosity is a leaning, a tending or a reaching, that turns upon an axis of affinity rather than a certainty of knowledge. perhaps many of the conversations taking place now in the fields of animal studies and human-animal studies lean this way, and lean together in a coordinated but differentiated fashion, because of a certain pleasure in beginning to adeline rother -becoming zoö-curious: reading sexual differences in the field of animal life . 105 know, because of “amateurism” in the literal sense of an animal-curious, other-curious, “love-research.” notes 1. though i don’t have the space in this essay to undertake a full reading of simone de beauvoir, it would be worth investigating the roles as signifiers of “feminine” insects like the spider or the praying mantis in her chapter “biological data” in the second sex. 2. see ursula reidel-schrewe’s “freud’s début in the sciences,” an analysis of how the biological complexities of sexing eels shaped the later analytic style of freud’s psychoanalysis. 3. see specimens in “shelf life 09: kinsey's wasps.” amnh.tv, american museum of natural history, aug. 2015. web. 19 aug. 2016. 4. carpenter, jennifer. “a rare he-she butterfly is born in london's nhm.” nature news. bbc news. 12 july 2011. web. 19 aug. 2016. 5. the entire series was made accessible online on the youtube page of the sundance channel. in an interview for the italian/american cinema project, rossellini explains her attraction to the sex lives of insects: “i have been personally always interested in animals and animal behavior, [i] take course in biology, take trips to a safari, but i know that people out there are not so interested in animal as i am, but i do know that people are interested in sex. so i said ok, i’ll do a series about the sex life of animals, but not mammals! [i’ll do] bugs and crustaceans, because they’re very far from us, otherwise we would pretty much know what they do. but the others, they do different things.” “green porno: interview with isabella rossellini.” (i-italytv. youtube, 3 mar. 2010. web. 18 aug. 2016.) in another interview, she compares her own father, the director roberto rossellini, to a male seahorse, because of his strong nurturing inclinations and behaviors. see “isabella's green porno the graham norton show.” bbc. youtube. 23 oct. 2009. web. 18 aug. 2016. 6. in fact, the name means “a small arched boat,” because if you turn the shell upside down, it resembles a small hollow boat with a little bench inside. see “the limpet of light virtue.” the london nerc doctoral training partnership. the london nerc dtp, n.d. web. 18 aug. 2016. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 106 7. this openness in engaging with the “play of living matter” is very different from what gide does in another zoö-curious text, corydon. corydon is a sweeping polemic arguing for the cultural superiority of “greek love,” with extensive footnotes contrasting the sex lives of bugs (in which the female is often bigger and dominant) to what gide describes as the superiority of the “male element” in humans and other higher animals. 8. see “jacques derrida and the question of ‘the animal.’” canalul utilizatorului hiperf289. youtube. 18 dec. 2008. web. 18 aug. 2016. works cited berger, anne. “sexing differances.” differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 16.3 (2005): 52-67. braidotti, rosi. metamorphoses: toward a materialist theory of becoming. polity, 2002. campbell, mary baine. imagining worlds in early modern europe. cornell university press, 2000. cixous, hélène, and jacques derrida. veils. trans. geoffrey bennington. stanford up, 2001. derrida, jacques. “ants.” trans. eric prenowitz. the oxford literary review 24 (2002): 1742. _____. “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” trans. david wills. critical inquiry 28.2 (2002): 369-418. hayward, eva. “more lessons from a starfish: prefixial flesh and transspeciated selves.” women’s studies quarterly 36.3-4 (2008): 64-85. gide, andré. corydon: four socratic dialogues. trans. p.b. london: secker & warburg, 1956. _____. if it die. trans. dorothy bussy. vintage, 1963. adeline rother -becoming zoö-curious: reading sexual differences in the field of animal life . 107 grosz, elizabeth. “animal sex: libido as desire and death.” sexy bodies: the strange carnalities of feminism. ed. elizabeth grosz & elspeth probyn. routledge, 1995. 278-300. maeterlinck, maurice. [1901] the life of the bee. trans. alfred sutro. dodd, mead and company, 1928. web. 13 november 2011. michaud, ginette. “on a serpentine note.” demenageries: thinking (of) animals after derrida. eds. anne emmanelle berger & marta segarra. rodopi, 2011: 41-72. michelet, jules. the insect. trans. w.h. davenport adams. t. nelson and sons, 188 nabokov, vladimir. ada or ardor: a family chronicle. mcgraw-hill, 1969. _____. speak, memory. vintage, 1993. oliver, kelly. “sexual difference, animal difference: derrida and difference ‘worthy of its name.’” hypatia 24.2 (2009): 54-76. reidel-schrewe, ursula. “freud’s début in the sciences.” reading freud’s reading. ed. sander l. gilman, jutta birmele, jau gellar, & valerie d. greenberg. new york up, 1994. 1-22. microsoft word taschereau mamers-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:2 danielle taschereau mamers human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence introduction. this article emerges from the claim that animals and other-than-human beings are implicated agents in settler colonial processes. more specifically, colonialism in north america has operated and continues to operate through the disruption and reordering of relations between humans, land, and lively beings. transformations of land and water into property, the commodification of animals and plants, and the ordering of each are vital elements in the ongoing reproduction of settler colonial claims, institutions, and lifeways.1 this claim has been articulated by several indigenous scholars.2 drawing on these insights, i argue that a broader context for considering colonialism and its dismantling ought to include animals and human-animal relations. conceptualizing colonization as extending beyond human lives presents opportunities for intervening in discourses of reconciliation that are still rooted in colonial logics and frameworks of understanding. articulating harms done to human and animal bodies, the relationships between them, and the lands that support them, opens up different material entry points for thinking about reconciliation and, necessarily, decolonization. the extermination of the free-ranging bison herds is a significant example of such colonial harm. in this article, i assess both the 19th century extermination and contemporary conservation policies as sites in which settler colonization has radically altered human-animal relations in north america. while a profound example of colonial harm, i further argue that human-bison relations offer important spaces for imagining and enacting decolonial possibilities. bison are not the only animals involved in colonial processes, nor are human-bison relations the only relations violently re-ordered by settler projects. my attention to bison is inspired by the methods of anishinaabe legal theorist john borrows, who practices the anishinaabe philosophical process of analogically reasoning from the observed interrelation of land, animals, and humans to develop legal and political principles. “drawing out law” from land offers a way to think ecologically about and through relationships (x-xii). bison and the relationships between indigenous nations and bison herds is a case study for observing the materiality of colonial harms, but also relations that exceed and disrupt settler attempts to order land and life. as elspeth probyn argues, case studies are neither generalities nor exclusively local in meaning, but instead their specificities “are made to travel” (52). the role of bison in colonial danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 11 processes on the plains does not explain the place of all animals in colonial relations. however, the specificities of the bison case offer a place from which relationships can be observed and critical insights drawn. animal studies and other posthuman strains of scholarship furnish resources that might also be deployed in the critical analysis of the narrower view of human-animal relations as shaped exclusively by processes of commodification. the hunting that led to bison extermination, for example, might be rendered as an instance of the “anthropological machine’s” reproduction of white european hierarchies (agamben 33-38) or as a particularly brutal site of “embodied cross-species sociality” (haraway 4). rather than importing the critical resources of euro-western theorists to the site of bison relations, i center indigenous scholarship that emerges from the particularity of human-bison relations in the west. this body of work reveals the lingering dimensions of settler colonialism in historical and contemporary conservation work. i take as a point of departure unangax theorist eve tuck and k. wayne yang’s insistence that colonization be examined through the particularities of techniques and practices used to impose colonial relations in specific times and places. to investigate colonization with specificity, they write, requires “attention to the colonial apparatus that is assembled to order the relationships between particular peoples, lands, the ‘natural world’, and ‘civilization’” (21). applying the insights of several indigenous theorists, i demonstrate how defining, ordering, and regulating “nature” are key techniques of settler colonialism, evident in the violation and transformation of human-bison relations in the place now referred to as the north american prairies. as a citizen and resident of one settler society (canada) engaged in research particular to one region (the north american prairie), i situate myself to be dually in conversation with, on the one hand, anglo-european political theory, and on the other hand, and the disruptive responses of indigenous scholarship that resist the political conditions of settler colonization in canada (and to a lesser extent, the united states). i consider confronting the implications of colonialism and the settler logics that linger in critical spaces, like the animal studies discipline, a political responsibility. this work requires the centering of indigenous scholarship, as well as humility in the face of multiple ontologies beyond that on which euro-modernity depends. from my position as a settler researcher who has lived in primarily urban settings, i do not claim to fully understand how buffalo3 are experienced and known as relations to indigenous peoples on the prairie. my understanding of land and life is refracted through anglo-european ontological frameworks and critiques largely emanating from within these frames. this humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 12 ontological limitation is an effect of settler colonial privilege: my political and methodological commitments have motivated my engagement with indigenous scholarship and the expansive worlds it theorizes, but colonial education and other assimilationist policies and institutions have forced many indigenous peoples to move between anglo-european and indigenous ontologies. the failure to grasp that another community — with a different intellectual history, values, political and social structure, and knowledge system — could experience a different mode of knowing and relating to the world and its nonhuman beings is not just a failure of imagination, but a pillar of colonial thought. this article reflects some of my attempts to expand my own thinking in ways that are not premised on the naturalized erasure of multiple, co-present ontologies, and to do so in ways that are attentive to the harm such erasures can inflict. reading bison extermination and conservation through indigenous scholarship clarifies how the historical horror of settler colonization has always been a multispecies endeavor and demonstrates why decolonial projects ought to consider an expansive notion of life, harm, and human-animal relations. i make this intervention in three parts. in part one, i outline colonization and decolonization as multispecies endeavors and introduce how several indigenous scholars have articulated human-animal relations. part two analyzes how narratives of 19th century bison extermination by nonindigenous environmental historians and by indigenous scholars have generated different accounts of human-bison relations and, as a result, different senses of what is lost in the wake of bison extermination. in part three, i compare the contemporary policies for bison restoration that emerge from these differing conceptions of humanbison relations, tracking the lingering presence of settler colonial logics and identifying decolonial opportunities. part one: colonization is multispecies. métis scholar zoe todd’s study of fishes as critical to colonial processes is instructive for thinking about human-animal relations. in her archival and field research, todd investigates plural ways of knowing, defining, and being in relation with fishes in the north west territories community of paulutuuq. more than just a food source, she observes, “human-fish relations present a whole host of social, cultural, and legal-governance principles that underpin life in paulatuuq” (“fish pluralities” 28). fishing in this community involves a constellation of knowledge and activities tied to the physical endeavor of fishing, as well as to cultural, legal, and political practices that engage broader landand water-scapes with community members. in the 1920s to 1950s, fish played a role in mediating relationships between hudson’s bay company clerks, oblate missionaries, and the inuvialuit peoples in the region. through the process of teaching oblate missionaries to fish, for example, danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 13 inuvialuit men also educated the missionaries in reciprocity, fairness, and land relations. fish did more than feed in this context, but were also “a ‘micro-site’ across which indigenous legal orders were consciously applied to resist colonial authority” (“classroom to river’s edge” 91). both the fish and the inuvialuit were implicated agents in experiencing this colonial interaction, todd argues, thus approaches to dismantling colonial processes must extend beyond human redress to include otherthan-human agents. colonial processes of extraction centrally involved animals and human-animal relations from the beginning. fish, deer, and buffalo fed the fur traders; beaver, muskrat, and mink fed the trade itself. analyzing the symbolic and material processes of settler colonization and their ongoing reproduction requires thinking more expansively about the other agents involved: this means including animals, along with other lively beings. further, given the centrality of animal lives and communities to colonial endeavors, animal life and human-animal relations must also be a component to decolonial inquiry, theory, and practice. todd’s research is located in the particularities of the paulutuuq community and not intended as a universal model of human-animal relations.4 however, the potential that todd sees for inuvialuit-fish relations to disrupt narrow narrations of colonization and anthropocentric state discourses might also be found on the prairies in the complex relationships between indigenous nations, non-indigenous settlers and settler state representatives, and the plains bison. as i will articulate in part two, these human-buffalo relationship have been a site of colonial violence. but they can also be a site of justice and resurgence. research on the politics of human-animal relations often involves the critique of species classifications and the power relations they reproduce, as well as an attunement to the entanglements of lively worlds. scholars working in the contemporary fields of critical animal studies and multispecies studies have advocated for styles of research and writing that are attentive to other-than-human lives and relations (van dooren et al; tsing; sundberg). while such work has, to rephrase juanita sundberg, helped scholars to think through the methodological challenges of accounting for nonhuman living beings as political actors in (eco)political processes, animal studies and other posthumanist discourses have tended towards universalizing the nature-culture dualism characteristic of anglo-eurocentric thought (35). indigenous theorists have long articulated relations between humans, land, and other-than-human living beings as reciprocal and activated through responsibilities. as the call for papers for this special issue and other interventions outlining the need to decolonize the fields of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 14 animal and environmental studies have made clear, historical and contemporary indigenous scholarship has too frequently been marginalized in these disciplines (johnson and murton; sundberg; hovorka). reflecting on posthumanism and the socalled ontological turn, todd articulates how much of the anglo-eurocentric scholarship that considers the vibrancy of other-than-human entities tends to universalize enlightenment logics of dualism, species, and “nature,” and excludes indigenous theories and worlds, “without being aware of competing or similar discourses happening outside of the rock-star arenas of euro-western thought” (“ontological turn” 9). the work of turning towards multispecies perspectives is indeed an important critical shift for euro-western scholars, but, as kim tallbear reminds, “indigenous peoples have never forgotten that nonhumans are agential beings engaged in social relations that profoundly shape human lives” (234). a prominent feature of indigenous research on the relationships between humans, land, and living beings is an emphasis on reciprocity. in addition to todd’s work, kim tallbear, leanne betasamosake simpson, billy-ray belcourt, and vanessa watts are some of the many indigenous scholars to have carefully articulated the role of species hierarchies and property logics in settler colonization. working from the particularities of diverse political situations, specific places, and distinct histories and cosmologies, these theorists have each disrupted settler logics with accounts of relationships to nonhuman living beings characterized by responsibility, reciprocity, and learning. such contemporary theorizations extend and build upon the work of n. scott momaday, leroy little bear, vine deloria jr., and many others, each of whom has articulated relationships of reciprocity. momaday, for example, describes kiowa knowledge of land and life as a “reciprocal appropriation,” where humans invest themselves in the land in cultural, spiritual, and physical ways, and in turn receive from the land support for their lifeways (80). rather than spaces and bodies to be dominated and subordinated within regimes of private property, land and animals are engaged as sources of knowledge and of life, and as agential beings to whom humans have reciprocal obligations (kimmerer 4). it is crucial to note that the relationships articulated by these theorists are embodied and are lived differently in different places. there is not a pan-indigenous conception of the nature of the relationship between humans and the world of lively beings, nor is there a universal understanding of the responsibilities that emerge from this relationship. michi saagiig nishnaabeg scholar leanne betasamosake simpson emphasizes the role of land, waterways, and lively beings in providing the context and consensual relations of reciprocity that animate anishinaabe theory, practice, and lifeways. nishnaabeg danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 15 worldviews, simpson explains, are “concerned with embodied knowledge animated, collectively, and lived out in a way in which our reality, nationhood, and existence is continually reborn through time and space” (15). moving west from anishinaabe and haudenosaunee territories into nêhiyaw, niitsitapi, and métis lands, the history of bison that i outline in the next section of this paper engages some of the distinct embodied knowledges that emerge from these nations’ relationships with buffalo, as documented by scholars from these communities. as indigenous and settler historians have argued, a condition of the settlement of plains territories was the classification and treatment of bison as commodities, rather than as peoples (jobin), nations (hubbard, “buffalo genocide”), or teachers and older brother (ladner). to take seriously the claim that animals are also agents in the experience of colonialism requires shifting analyses of both colonization itself and possibilities of repair. todd has articulated the scope of this required shift: ultimately, it is imperative to expand political notions mobilized by the state, such as reconciliation, beyond concepts of human redress. instead, we must acknowledge that people and fish, together, are important agents in both a) experiencing colonialism and b) dismantling colonialism. (“fish pluralities” 231) this proposition intervenes directly into liberal discourses of reconciliation and redress. reconciliation in canada has largely focused on single-issue apologies for violent policies such as the indian residential school system, the inuit high arctic relocation, and the relocation of the sayisi dene. these official apologies have functioned as incorporative mechanisms that contain the experiences of injured parties within state narratives, bracket specific incidents from a broader system of colonization, and distract from demands for substantive restitution (bonner and james; corntassel and holder; henderson and wakeham). while official apologies are of deep significance to individuals and communities, kahnawà:ke mohawk anthropologist audra simpson cautions that official apologies create affective circuits of survivor testimony and state contrition, emphasizing individual injury without situating the policies in question within a broader political context of settler colonization (20:00-23:00). settler political theorist james tully has also critiqued the scope of this policy-focused project that aims to reconcile indigenous peoples to largely unchanged institutions as one that overlooks the harms colonial development and settler states have wrought on relationships to land and lively beings, as well as between peoples (2). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 16 part two: narratives of bison extermination. reflecting on methods of attending to the interrelations of species and their environments, thom van dooren, eben kirksey, ursula münster note that “relationships also have histories” (2). this section examines two different perspectives on bison relationships and their histories. environmental histories of the 19th century extermination of free-ranging bison herds written by settler scholars tend to emphasize economic relations when analyzing the causes and effects of bison destruction. to some degree, these works consider the colonial ends extermination served. but apprehending the extent of the impact of bison extermination requires attending to the nature of relations between plains indigenous nations and their buffalo relations. when species loss is read through the work of indigenous histories, a different sense of relation — one grounded in reciprocal responsibilities — emerges, rendering the impacts of bison extermination in political, cultural, and spiritual terms, not just the ecological and economic dimensions articulated by nonindigenous environmental histories (although those impacts continue to be felt today). by emphasizing bison as living in complex relationship with prairie landscapes, other species, and human neighbors, indigenous scholarship makes clear the unique centrality of bison life to the region. from this perspective, the colonial re-ordering of relations through bison extermination not only entailed adapting to the loss of an economic staple, but finding ways to live in a world with its center violently ripped away. environmental histories of bison extermination. the dramatic extirpation of freeranging bison herds from the north american prairies in the late 19th century has been the subject of environmental histories and conservation research. at the close of the 18th century, there were between 30 and 60 million bison on the continent. these herds were a keystone species that influenced all aspects of life in the region. for example, depressions formed from bison wallowing collect spring rains, creating temporary micro-ponds in which frogs and other insects lay eggs. with more than 300 species of insects living in their uniquely soft dung, bison create stores of food for turtles, bats, and birds. bison also shape plant relations. selectively grazing on fast-growing grasses, bison presence takes pressure off of slower-growing woody plants and encourages vegetation diversity. with adults weighing between 900 and 2000 pounds, bison bodies are a considerable food source to coyotes, wolves, bears, cougars, and humans. these interventions in the land are just a few of the multispecies relations to which bison life is central. danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 17 by 1890, less than a thousand buffalo remained on the continent. it is crucial to note that the vast majority of the herds were exterminated between 1850 and the late 1870s. the killing was not only radical in its scope, but also in its speed. in extermination’s wake, environmental historians, conservationists, and other settler researchers have explored a variety of factors that contributed to the extermination of the bison populations. extermination happened both in overt ways — through direct killing by indigenous and non-indigenous hunters, tourists, and settler militias — and in systematic ways — via the development of transportation infrastructure, increased range competition from domesticated animals, and the transformation of bison habitat into farms and settlements. dan flores (466-67) and pekka hämäläinen (287-99) each argue that the arrival of horses on the prairies critically contributed to bison loss by increasing competition for food and water and intensifying hunting capacities. further investigating the role of new technologies, andrew isenberg identifies the introduction of more powerful guns, the construction and completion of the transcontinental railroad in the united states, and the large number of non-indigenous skin hunters who arrived on the prairie in the 1860s as accelerants in herd destruction (93-110). settler colonial economies were a significant factor in driving the intensification of bison hunting from the 1870s to the disappearance of the last herds in the mid-1880s. isenberg identifies the successful experimentation with higher-volume chemical tanning and the start of using bison leather to produce industrial conveyor belts in 1870 as a key amplification of hunting in the united states (130-1). because conveyor belt production required thinner leather, the hide trade expanded into a year-round hunt, as preparing thinner summer hides did not require the specialized skills needed for preparing winter robes (a. klein 151; carter 88). the fixing of hide prices in european markets, as scott taylor observes (3191-93), also increased pressure on the already dwindling herds.5 in the canadian context, the movement of fur traders northwest into the food-scarce athabasca and mackenzie river regions created a demand for preserved meat, which transformed the bison into the principal item of exchange in the region (colpitts 19-20; daschuk 31). the emergence of these commercial demands reordered human-bison relations: rather than a means of subsistence, bison hides and meat became a commoditized good invested with exchange value that reflected the demands of colonial markets. colonial politicians and policy makers were aware of the impact of bison commodification and population decline on indigenous communities. the disappearance of free-ranging bison herds was repeatedly framed by settler colonial humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 18 agents as inevitable, desirable, or both. american lawmakers in the 1870s “embraced the idea that the destruction of the bison was an inevitable part of the advance of civilization” and, isenberg observes, “were particularly attracted to the notion that domestic cattle made a higher use of the range than bison” (155). similarly, then prime minister john a. macdonald addressed the issue of bison extermination in the canadian house of commons 1883: “i am not at all sorry that this has happened. so long as there was a hope that buffalo would come into the country, there was no means of inducing indians to settle down on their reserves” (qtd. in locke 34). while bison extermination was not an explicit policy of either the canadian or united states governments, the loss of the species so central to the economies, kinship systems, political relations, and cosmologies of plains indigenous nations radically destabilized life in these communities, creating the conditions under which both governments were able to secure often-unfair treaties, impose reserve and reservation systems, and secure access to vast tracts of the prairies (milloy 51-52; daschuk 91-98; smalley 228). ultimately, these histories each emphasize dimensions of the colonial process: settler efforts to get hold of land and to order the life on that land in ways aligned only with visions of colonial expansion, cultivation, and industrialization. in addition to identifying how bison were exterminated, the environmental histories surveyed here each trace the transformation of bison from a key means of subsistence for the land’s indigenous inhabitants to a commodity resource for the unlimited expansion of colonial capital.6 this transformation, along with the acquisition of land it enabled, was a key tactic in the broader strategy of eliminating indigenous claims to territory and, further, indigenous nations’ ability to defend those claims within the legal and political frameworks of settler states. the north american prairie, then, is a place cultivated and settled amongst buffalo bones. it is a world made possible through the elimination of the species in its wild, free-ranging form. indigenous histories of buffalo loss. in addition to the emergence of commercial hunting, environmental histories of bison extermination emphasize subsistence as the primary dimension of indigenous-bison relations. the plenty of the buffalo resource simultaneously facilitated the social formations of an extended community, united by a flexible kinship network and rhythm of mobility punctuated by frequent large gatherings, clear community boundaries regulating resources access and allegiances, and a shared cosmology (milloy 57-64). bison play a significant role in the cosmologies and legal orders of several plains indigenous nations, often serving as a model of matriarchal leadership and non-hierarchical community organization. just as the bison herds and their seemingly boundless numbers supported large, politically and socially danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 19 complex communities across the prairies, their extermination over less than a century devastated the economic and social foundation of the plains nations.7 though histories such as those discussed in the previous section offer valuable insight into bison as both a means of subsistence and a commodity, nêhiyaw scholar and filmmaker tasha hubbard argues that this focus “overlooks their other important roles as guide, teacher, and relative” (call of the buffalo 21). indigenous scholarship on buffalo articulates human-animal relations as more expansive and intimate, and as a result, the stakes of species loss carry a different resonance. indigenous writing from the prairies tends to reflect an orientation towards experience that lakota scholar vine deloria jr. has described as “a fabric of life in which everything has the possibility of intimate knowing relationships, because, ultimately everything was related” (deloria and wildcat 2). here, interrelatedness is not a metaphor, but rather a reflection of the reciprocities, obligations, and responsibilities that weave together land, humans, and nonhuman beings. buffalo relations, then, not only encompass relations with humans, but also include relations with the landscape, plants, insects, birds, and predators. examining the destruction of the plains bison herds through indigenous scholarship, i suggest, generates a more nuanced account of human-animal relations, as such scholarship captures the ways in which the presence of bison on the land makes worlds possible. these worlds extend beyond subsistence to encompass the sustenance of politics, spirituality, and knowledge. to this end, hubbard’s study of kinship between indigenous peoples and buffalo demonstrates the multiple, literal relationships that structured life on the plains and the extent of the damage endured in the wake of species loss. beyond physical subsistence, hubbard documents the ways plains indigenous peoples “took the buffalo way of life as a foundation for living in a good way, both for themselves and for their children and grandchildren” (call of the buffalo 9). hubbard’s analysis of kinship and the role of indigenous creative expression in maintaining and renewing kin ties is grounded in knowledge imparted by blackfoot, crow, and lakota elders, whose teachings emphasize buffalo as sources of guidance. to demonstrate this guiding relationship, hubbard invokes both wilton goodstriker’s explanation of how blackfoot kinand alliance-making processes are modeled on bison herd organization, and draws upon crow elder joseph medicine crow’s description of buffalo as older brothers to humans and the crow relationship with buffalo as closer and more proximate than with other animal beings (call of the buffalo 13-14). such proximity is conveyed in the lakota word for buffalo: tatanka, or “he who owns us” (call of the buffalo 14). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 20 through her research with blackfoot elders and observation of buffalo, nêhiyaw political theorist keira ladner learned that the internal social structure of buffalo herds is one of non-coercive collectivity, held together by kinship and mutual responsibility rather than domination, and with a sense of balance between the male and female animals (137). these lessons from the buffalo are reflected in the non-hierarchical organization of blackfoot communities, the absence of claims to coercive power over people and territories, and a model of leadership that emphasizes collective and collaborative decision-making (138-40). buffalo live in smaller herds through the fall and winter, converging into massive collectivities on the plains in the spring and summer. mirroring their older brothers, blackfoot clans that had wintered in smaller camps would come together as larger nations in summer months where more abundant resources supported large gatherings (146). discerned through careful observation of relationships to land, other living beings, and natural forces, ladner explains that blackfoot governance is not exclusively the domain of human agents, but exists as and is enacted through relationships with “all beings within a territory, and it is about people establishing a relationship with a territory and learning from that relationship” (125). the centrality of buffalo relations to indigenous ways of life on the plains meant that the extermination of the free-ranging had spiritual and psychological dimensions. siksika, nêhiyaw, and métis stories about this time, hubbard explains, mourn the deep, generational trauma of losing buffalo relatives (“buffalo genocide” 300-302). the devastation of the herds introduced a time of confinement, wherein small numbers of surviving animals — such as the pablo herd which will be discussed in the next section — were confined to state-run parks and zoos, and weakened indigenous nations were sequestered to reserves and reservations that were fractions of their territories. crow leader chief plenty coups’s description of life for his people after confinement illustrates this loss: “but when the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. after this nothing happened” (qtd. in lear 2). for plenty coups and his people the radical disruption of their relationship with buffalo caused deep grief and an unnatural shift in the entwined histories of the crow and buffalo nations. the suffering of this loss and confinement did not completely nor permanently sever the relationship between buffalo and indigenous peoples. rather, hubbard observes, “the relationship was altered by colonialism to one of mutual hardship” (call of the buffalo 84). danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 21 indigenous histories do not necessarily contest the technologyand commodity-focused narratives of environmental historians; rather, they demonstrate the extent of humanbison relations and the stakes of bison loss as reaching beyond a settler capitalist economic framework. thinking about human-animal relations through the lens of indigenous experience and knowledge of interrelatedness — land and lively beings as literal relatives, as fellow nations — necessitates ways of approaching bison loss that more fully articulate the damage inflicted by the expansion of colonial capital in this region. the destruction of land and habitat is a loss of relations, of one’s relatives. to convey the scope of loss, leanne betasamosake simpson explains: “if a river is threatened, it’s the end of the world for those fish. it’s been the end of the world for somebody all along” (qtd. in n. klein). the transformation of prairie grasslands into sectioned, owned, and ploughed farms that facilitated the emergence of a settler world in the west was the end of the world for plains bison herds. further, as plenty coups’s reflection illustrates, this was also the end of a shared world of human-bison relations. part three: recovering bison, restoring relations. in the wake of their near extinction, bison became symbols of the need for conservation and of the stakes of failures to respond to precipitous declines in wild species. william temple hornaday’s extermination of the american bison (1889) was crucial in placing bison at the fore of an emergent conservation movement. under hornaday’s leadership, the new yorkbased american bison society formed in 1905 with the objective of “the permanent preservation and increase of the american bison” (annual report 1905 1). a critical moment for species survival was michel pablo’s maintenance of a private herd of 800 bison on the flathead reservation in western montana, the largest in north america.8 when the united states government dispossessed a significant proportion of the blackfoot territory under the dawes act in 1887 and again 1906, little range remained and pablo was forced to sell his herd, which the canadian government purchased for $245 per animal (brower 38-42; locke 16-21). the purchase and relocation of the pablo herd to canadian national parks was celebrated by many conservation activists, including the american bison society, which passed a resolution in recognizing the canadian acquisition of the herd as the “most important acts in the interest of conservation of the noblest of our quadrupeds” (annual report 1911 36). despite the collapse of commercial hunting, the game management strategies that emerged in the early 20th century remained immersed in a mode of commodity thinking focused on balancing the accumulation and loss of game populations (yarbrough 121). herds placed within the boundaries of lands designated as public humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 22 parks or preserves were given a liminal status that andrea smalley describes as “not domesticated, but not fully free to roam” (smalley 229). laws drawn up to demarcate wild lives and spaces as common property — held by the state — had the effect of securing and fixing indigenous life within a rationalized colonial order. rationalization intensified in a post-wwii productivist policy climate, where ecological and agricultural management techniques were applied to public herds and an emerging commercial bison industry (brower 51-84; loo 139-47). raised in a landscape carved into parcels of private property and intersected by roads and highways, commercial bison make up approximately 93% of the some 400,000 bison in north america today (gates et al 57). the approaches to conservation that emerged throughout the 20th century conserved not only bison themselves, but also a particular human-animal relation characterized by extraction and control. settler methods for conservation reflect the limited articulation of human-animal relations evident in environmental histories of bison extermination. just as an expansive account of interrelation and responsibilities emerges from indigenous histories of bison loss, indigenous approaches to conservation have, at their core, different perspectives on the role of relationships in restoration and, crucially, on the necessary focus of restoration work. a critical challenge for both animal studies and conservation policy is to develop methods of thought and practice that take seriously the reality of multiple worlds, as well as the many forms of relationships with and knowledge of living beings that circulate within these worlds and communities. how can theory and policy meaningfully articulate the multiple statuses bison hold within the intersecting and coinciding worlds of nêhiyaw, siksika, kainai, salish, and settler peoples? if the processes of colonization not only disrupted subsistence relations, but also political, cultural, and spiritual relations between indigenous and buffalo nations, then how might conservation practices be oriented towards restoring these more expansive human-animal relations in addition to the physical presence of bison on prairie landscapes? such a challenge requires openness to the ethical and spiritual dimensions of indigenous knowledge as constitutive of truth, rather than their marginalization as “belief” or “culture” (nadasdy 26; watson and huntington 259). to be sure, indigenous scientists are interested in the ecological dimensions of bison restoration and the impact of herds’ return on grassland biodiversity. however, indigenous relations with buffalo nations extend beyond physical co-presence on the landscape. in this section, i compare two policy documents that outline contemporary visions for bison restoration: one grounded in contemporary ecological thinking, the other in indigenous knowledge and danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 23 resurgence. informed by the attentiveness to human-buffalo relations in indigenous scholarship, i examine the conceptions of relations in each conservation vision. this analysis demonstrates how settler colonial logics of defining, ordering, and regulating land and life linger in much conservation work, as well as how these persistent logics are disrupted by indigenous-led initiatives and scholarship. the vermejo statement: a vision for ecological recovery of bison. developments in ecological science in the latter decades of the 20th century has led to the articulation of bison as a keystone species, situated as a central member of a broad network of land, plants, and animals in grassland environments. recent research has examined the ecological functions of bison on the north american prairie and identified several key roles played by herds, such as encouraging landscape heterogeneity through grazing, wallowing, rubbing, and migrating (coppedge et al; coppedge and shaw); converting vegetation into protein (haines; smith et al); and habitat creation for small mammals and nesting birds (johnsgard). contemporary approaches to bison conservation, such as those advocated by the international union for the conservation of nature (iucn) and the recently revitalized american bison association, emphasize the importance of preserving the wild character of bison, who are best able fulfill these ecological functions “as an evolving, ecologically interactive species in large populations occupying extensive native landscapes where human influence is minimal and a full suite of natural limiting factors is present” (gates et al 2). the challenge inherent in this more complex ecological vision of restoration is the lack of such natural, unoccupied landscapes on a continent fully mapped by private property lines and rendered intelligible through settler colonial logics of ownership. ecological restoration principles have begun to recognize human-bison relations as a tenet of restoration, albeit in a limited way. many aspects of this emergent approach to bison conservation are formalized in the vermejo statement, the outcome of a meeting about the ecological future of the north american bison hosted by the wildlife conservation society in 2006.9 jointly authored by members of conservation organizations, indigenous groups, commercial bison producers, and land managers, the vermejo statement advocates a shift in focus from the marginal survival of bison to the restoration of bison in ways which reintroduce as fully as possible original bison interactions with the landscape, other animals, and with humans (emphasis added). this vision for ecological recovery of the bison is described as: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 24 multiple large herds move freely across extensive landscapes within all major habitats of their historic range, interacting in ecologically significant ways with the fullest possible set of other native species, and inspiring, sustaining, and connecting human cultures. (sanderson et al 254) ecological recovery, then, is a project that will play out on a larger scale than the display of animals in public parks, zoos, and private holdings. as a result, the work of restoration is not just a question of science — agricultural or ecological — but also of ethics, politics, and culture (sanderson et al 254). as harvey locke notes, indigenous representatives in attendance insisted upon the inclusion of connection to human cultures in the statement (44). mapping the vision articulated in the vermejo statement prompted the collaboratively authored article “the ecological future of the north american bison,” which outlines the conditions for its realization (sanderson et al). to ground the vermejo statement vision in more concrete detail, the authors develop a scorecard to measure seven major factors and 18 subfactors contributing to the ecological recovery of bison populations. “indigenous cultural uses” is the only reference to indigenous peoples or participation in the scorecard, which defines cultural uses as “hunting and use of bison parts for shelter, clothing, food, and tools” (260). this vision of indigenous interaction with bison herds is articulated as a subsistence relation based on the consumption of hunted animals and is measured in terms of access, ranging from privately owned but inaccessible herds to bison living within traditional territories that are accessible without limitations (260). while the material use of bison was and continues to be an important dimension of indigenous-buffalo relations, this is only one dimension of that relationship, as i have argued based on the insights of indigenous scholars. the scorecard does not apprehend the spiritual, political, and social dimensions of the expansive relationships between plains indigenous nations and their buffalo relatives. framing indigenous engagement with bison exclusively through hunting reflects a narrow view of human-bison relations. while the scorecard includes indigenous cultural use, none of its factors include references to indigenous knowledge, science, or leadership. for example, the scorecard measures substantive capacity to manage herds as the “substantive scientific capacity to manage bison for ecological recovery” carried out by professional managers (262). while this measurement does not explicitly exclude indigenous herd managers or indigenous science, the fact that indigenous management is not actively included is worrying. paul nadasdy has observed that wildlife co-management projects have danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 25 tended to selectively appropriate indigenous knowledge and to marginalize indigenous authority in developing and implementing policy (nadasdy 37). the sole reference to indigenous peoples as engaging with bison-via-consumption, and a notable lack of reference to indigenous peoples as engaged in matters of management and knowledge, mirrors tendencies in euro-western social science and policy to delimit indigenous knowledge to questions of culture, narrowly-rendered. further, the characterization of cultural use as hunting or material consumption effaces the dimensions of economic, political, and spiritual responsibility that are also crucial aspects of indigenous relationships to their buffalo. buffalo as older brother, for example, is not intelligible in the vermejo statement scorecard. the vermejo statement’s broad, pragmatic approach to ecological recovery also has the effect of depoliticizing the status of indigenous nations. the vermejo statement recognizes the many competing, high-stakes interests in bison conservation, including inter-national politics of transborder regions, perceived competition with ranched cattle for range, and concerns about diseases and genetic purity. while the statement identifies “the prerogatives of tribal nations versus government authorities in setting bison policy” (255) as one of the controversies challenging bison conservation, these concerns of indigenous peoples appear akin to those of an interest group, like ranchers or sport hunters. analogous to liberal democratic practices of “minoritization” that seek to represent indigenous peoples as ethno-cultural minority groups rather than sovereign nations, the recognition of indigenous interests in the statement does not meaningfully identify indigenous authority (schulte-tenckhoff 68-71; tuck and yang 22-23). the pragmatism that brackets localized interest groups also skirts the broader questions of private property, land title, and sovereignty at the heart of the 19th century bison extermination and retained in earlier conservation practices. questions of land transfer or transformation in this vision are limited to the “stretch goal” of acquiring private property in sparsely developed tallgrass prairie regions for ecological restoration, contingent on the “consent of landowners and the political will to make it happen” (sanderson et al, 257). the role of indigenous nations is not mentioned. given the history of exclusion of indigenous peoples in practices of park-making and other modes of marking out land as “nature,” there is reason to be apprehensive about the possibility that the acquisition of private property for ecological restoration would entail the recognition of indigenous authority or reckon with colonial processes of dispossession (spence 5). further, the canadian and united states governments have demonstrated humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 26 for centuries that the tide of “political will” flows in the direction of further dispossession rather than repatriation of indigenous lands. at work in this kind of pragmatism, then, is the failure to identify the contingency of colonial logics, which naturalizes the conditions of marginalization of indigenous peoples. the vision for the recovery of the bison articulated in indigenous approaches to resotration, and the argument that i am advancing, questions this state-led organization of land and life. by shifting the goal of recovery from “preventing absence” to creating “the presence of full, functioning nature that sustains itself and sustains humans as a unique part of that nature” (sanderson et al 264), the bison recovery process mapped out in the vermejo statement recognizes and prioritizes human-bison connection, emphasizing in particular the connections of indigenous peoples. this shift necessitates a re-thinking of human-animal relations within conservation policy and indicates the possibility of openness to including indigenous knowledge in wildlife management. just as the simultaneous inclusion of indigenous cultural use and exclusion of indigenous knowledge or science from the vermejo scorecard demonstrates how a restricted vision for human-bison relations reproduces the limitations characterized in earlier conservation work, the re-imagining proposed in this article and by indigenous scholars recenters human-bison relations in ways that interrupt, challenge, and rewrite these limits. by absenting indigenous authority from discussions of land transfer and the representation of indigenous nations as interest groups, the vermejo statement’s pragmatism perpetuates the conditions of indigenous erasure at work in broader settler colonial logics, knowledge, and policies. ultimately, if these logics are not disturbed, possibilities for envisioning an approach to bison recovery that understands ecological and colonial damage as entwined will continue to be limited. the buffalo treaty: a vision for decolonial buffalo restoration. indigenous scientists and scholars have continued to develop approaches to conservation and wildlife management that highlight human and non-human relationships. centering indigenous knowledge and authority, these approaches shift the emphasis of restoration work from the return of a species to a landscape, to the complete and meaningful restoration of relation. the work of restoring relations and responsibilities between humans, lands, and nonhuman living beings involves an attentiveness to context, history, and power that has the capacity to disrupt settler colonial logics and processes of defining, ordering, and governing land and life. conservation becomes a multispecies endeavor with decolonial possibilities. danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 27 boundaries enacted between indigenous and western spheres of knowledge tend to presume that indigenous peoples are exclusively informed by indigenous ways of knowing, thus are not properly “agents constituting scientific practice” (watson and huntington 275). this dynamic effaces the history of knowledge exchange between indigenous peoples and settlers and denies the central role of coerced western education in canadian and american assimilation policies, which has forced indigenous peoples to become conversant in euro-western ontologies and epistemologies in addition to their own. both bodies of knowledge inform the work of many indigenous people, including indigenous environmental scientists such as paulette fox, who holds two degrees in environmental science from canadian universities and is a recognized kainai knowledge holder. rather than replicate the stripping down of indigenous knowledge to “data,” fox’s species restoration work activates both indigenous and euro-western sciences and incorporates spiritual and ethical dimensions of kainai ontology. in a recent interview, fox noted that her study of bison ecologies and advocacy for their return stems from a vision she had as a young child: “out of nowhere they appeared, i could see shadows and i could see dark silhouettes — the buffalo. they were communicating with me” (qtd. in segal 1:24). the buffalo treaty is one contemporary example of an indigenous-led, decolonial vision for species restoration. cultural meaning and principles of conservation science come together in the buffalo treaty’s recognition of interrelation as a truth discernible in visions and in ecology. for conservation and wildlife management policy, the buffalo treaty models the meaningful inclusion of indigenous knowledge, the recognition of indigenous authority, and the integration of plural ways of knowing that is required for a full and meaningful bison herd recovery. initially signed by eight indigenous nations located both north and south of the 49th parallel in 2014, the buffalo treaty is an instance of collaboration and knowledge sharing among the signatories committed to restoring free-ranging bison herds in their historical trans-border homelands. since 2014, more than 20 indigenous nations and bands have signed the treaty. this internation indigenous initiative outlines responsibilities to regenerate cultural, social, political, spiritual relations with the buffalo; to use the gifts of the buffalo in responsible ways; and to align research and management practices with indigenous principles of interrelation. the buffalo treaty emerged out of several years of indigenous organizing in alberta, under the leadership of the kainai first nation. kainai elders gathered with youth to teach them about the importance of the buffalo in 2009, which inspired a series of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 28 buffalo dialogues in the community and eventually developed into the iinii initiative (little bear, “buffalo treaty” 84). named for the niitsitapi word for buffalo, the iinii initiative’s goals and methods have been guided by elders from the kainai nation and include biologists, knowledge keepers, and political leaders from several indigenous nations (84). leroy little bear and amethyst first rider, both kainai intellectuals and community leaders, and paulette fox, a kainai environmental scientist and knowledge keeper, were key figures in drafting the treaty and building collaborative relationships across signatory communities, as well as with external conservation organizations and multiple state agencies. the expansive conception of human-animal relations articulated in indigenous histories and scholarship is at the heart of the buffalo treaty. the treaty opens by articulating the nature of the human-buffalo relationship: since time immemorial […] buffalo has been our relative. buffalo is part of us and we are part of buffalo culturally, materially, and spiritually. our on-going relationship is so close and so embodied in us that buffalo is the essence of our holistic eco-cultural life-ways. (85) referring to buffalo as the relatives of the treaty’s human signatories, the agreement articulates relationships between the buffalo and plains nations as mutually constitutive and based in reciprocal nurturing. the interrelation of indigenous and buffalo nations here is not a metaphor, but the literal co-constitution of ways of knowing and being in the world. articulating buffalo as relatives of indigenous peoples does not, however, claim that these nations are the same. the human-animal relations described in indigenous scholarship and activated in the buffalo treaty stem from an acknowledgement that there are different kinds of persons (nadasdy 31). muscogee scientist daniel wildcat explains that nonhuman beings have different experiences within the territories they share with humans and “know things that humans do not,” thus relationships with nonhuman relatives open up plural ways of knowing and deriving meaning from the world (297). in this way, the relations of reciprocity and responsibility outlined in the treaty provide a model for nurturing non-coercive relationships across difference. the buffalo treaty shares the vision for returning free-ranging bison to prairie landscapes outlined in the vermejo statement. however, the buffalo treaty takes an expansive view of return, in which relationships are a central feature. for example, article i of the treaty defines conservation as a practice learned from buffalo, “a danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 29 practitioner of conservation” (little bear, “buffalo treaty” 85). as a keystone species, the presence of bison herds on the prairies supports a web of relations — between plants, insects, birds, amphibians, and the land itself. life flourishes when bison return to the landscape. in some cases, bison restoration can bring other species back from the brink of extinction, like that of the endangered karner blue butterflies, whose numbers increased fourteenfold after bison were restored to the sandhill state wildlife area in wisconsin (national parks service). in addition to recognizing the role of bison in supporting life, the buffalo treaty’s method of conservation requires the perpetuation and continuation of “our spiritual ceremonies, sacred societies, sacred language, and sacred bundles to perpetuate and practice as a means to embody the thoughts and beliefs of ecological balance” (little bear, “buffalo treaty” 85). this dimension of the treaty vision acknowledges the critical role of human-buffalo relations in the histories of plains indigenous nations. it also recognizes that indigenous peoples have tended to their relationships with the buffalo and the spirit of the buffalo nation through ceremonies, stories, and language in times when interactions with bison herds have been impossible due to extermination and confinement. what the buffalo treaty seeks to restore, then, is not just the individual bison animal-body emphasized in early 20th century conservation work, or the large herds identified in the contemporary ecological recovery work. the treaty focuses instead on the free-ranging herd as a community fundamentally in relation with indigenous peoples and emphasizes safeguarding the ceremonies, sacred bundles, and languages through which human-buffalo relations are activated. cultural and spiritual relations figure prominently in the buffalo treaty, but the accord also addresses economic, health, education, and research dimensions of bison restoration. article iii articulates the economic relations as rooted in historical practices as well contemporary uses developed in “an environmentally responsible manner” (little bear, “buffalo treaty” 85). the economic dimension of the treaty recognizes bison as a crucial source of material sustenance for indigenous peoples in the past and identifies this aspect of human-bison relations as critical to indigenous visions for the future. however, this recognition of buffalo as central to historical and contemporary economies is not necessarily a reproduction of the commodity relations and property logics of colonial capital. rather, the buffalo treaty asserts the existence of economies that precede and exceed colonial capital and refuses the logics that dominate bison as objects of private property. similarly, the treaty objective of providing wild, freeranging herds “a safe space and environment across our historic homelands, on either humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 30 side of the united states and canadian border” (85) prioritizes indigenous territories over the claims of settler states. in affirming a responsibility to the buffalo as “our brother,” the orientation to human-animal relations disrupts the euro-western species hierarchy and relations of paternalistic control that often undergirds conservation policy. the buffalo treaty is not only a vision for the restoration of bison and the revitalization of an expanded notion of human-animal relations, but also an assertion of life-ways, economies, and sovereignty outside of settler colonial logics and institutions. as an agreement authored by indigenous leadership, the treaty centers indigenous knowledge and perspectives only selectively included in approaches like the vermejo statement. the buffalo treaty was the impetus for the repatriation of a 87 bison from elk island national park (alberta) to the blackfeet reservation (montana) in april 2016 and the restoration of a free-ranging herd to banff national park in february 2017.10 in these early implementations, the treaty can be read as a mode of reparation for the horrors of settler colonialism that seeks to restore the very relationship between indigenous and buffalo life targeted by this violence. written nearly a decade after the vermejo statement, the buffalo treaty responds to the former’s limited vision for human-bison relations by centering indigenous approaches to responsibility and reciprocity. rather than an oppositional alternative to the vermejo statement, i interpret the buffalo treaty as an example of how the meaningful incorporation of indigenous knowledge into conservation work can create contexts for restored human-animal relations, animal-land relations, and the potential for less violent indigenous-settler relations. the buffalo treaty does not just call for the transfer of animals or the protection of flagship species of megafauna. rather, it is a foundational agreement that seeks to revitalize human-animal relations that extend beyond the relations intelligible within settler colonial ordering of land and life — a relation the very existence of which challenges colonial habits. existing rewilding and conservation reintroduction projects recognize that humans have dramatically altered the structure and function of the natural world, and seek to restore missing elements to defaunated ecosystems. but these projects tend to place humans and non-humans as conflicting, opposite parties. restoration under the buffalo treaty, on the other hand, focuses on restoring a political, spiritual, and cultural relationship between humans and bison. this includes restoring bison-bodies to a defaunated space, but crucially includes the explicit task of working to reaffirm indigenous sovereignty in dispossessed lands through rejuvenating relations between indigenous nations and their buffalo kin. these relations precede the invasion of colonial property and conservation logics and persist in spite of them. by insisting on danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 31 reciprocal, equitable relations with buffalo, centering indigenous knowledge, and asserting indigenous sovereignty, the treaty provides a model of the kind of conservation policy that can disrupt the broader settler colonial logics that have imperiled bison. conclusion. given the centrality of the bison to the colonization of canada, the surviving herds and the relations between indigenous nations and those herds is a key site for exploring the practical work of decolonization. the 2017 reintroduction of 16 bison to alberta’s banff national park has unfolded in ways that respond directly to the buffalo treaty’s call to center human-animal relations. along with parks canada wildlife biologists, elders, knowledge keepers, and scientists from the siksika, kainai, piikani, stoney nakoda, and tsuut’ina nations of treaty seven territory and the métis nation of alberta have participated in the planning and implementation of the reintroduction project. parks canada has stated that they recognize the historical, cultural, and spiritual significance of bison to indigenous peoples in the region. in practice, this commitment has meant that ceremony has been woven together with procedure. at key points in the reintroduction process, representatives of treaty seven nations have performed ceremonies for the bison to prepare them for travel to banff and to welcome them back to their ancestral territory in 2017. in the summer of 2018, on the occasion of expanding the herd’s territory to 1200km2, elders flew into the park’s remote panther valley to perform ceremonies to reaffirm for the bison that these montane valleys are a space where they will be nurtured and will roam more freely than bison have on the continent in more than a century (derworiz). an exhibit explaining the reintroduction at the banff national park museum also provides a glimpse of the braiding together of euro-western and indigenous knowledge for this project. to illustrate the process of moving 16 bison across the province and into banff’s panther valley, a series of necessary objects are displayed: radio transmitting collar, ear tag, tubes placed over horns to protect the bison, shoes to outfit the park rangers’ horses, and a tobacco bowl used in the welcoming ceremonies. to me, the presentation of these objects speaks to the kinds of conservation work that the buffalo treaty makes possible: conservation that meaningfully weaves together indigenous knowledge with western conservation science and that takes an expansive view of human-bison relations. animal studies scholarship offers a wealth of resources for understanding how eurowestern species hierarchies both mark animals as necessarily distinct from humans — as killable objects whose deaths reaffirm the unique, dominating power of human life humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 32 — and delimit the range of relations between humans and animals to one of property ownership. the bison addressed in this article are just one of the many species that agents and processes of colonial capital have rendered exclusively visible through commodity relations and property logics. the transformation of free-ranging bison herds into commodities was a critical factor in their extermination in the late 19th century. clearing the plains of bison not only secured the material and political conditions for settler invasion of the prairies, it also radically disrupted the robust human-animal relations of reciprocity and responsibility between indigenous nations and their buffalo relatives. to move from this multispecies site of colonization to multispecies practices of decolonization requires the withdrawal of those forms of epistemological violence that animate policies of dispossession and elimination. specifically, such a withdrawal requires ceasing material violence: unfencing land, releasing animal-bodies from the biopolitical thrall of classification and enumeration. the invocation of nature/culture or wilderness/civilization binaries cannot alone accomplish this work. rather than attempting to somehow imagine the conditions under which bison herds might roam in an untouched, uninterrupted wild state, decolonizing bison life and human-bison relations means disrupting capitalist and colonial property relations to create space for the relations and knowledge that have shaped interactions between indigenous nations and bison herds for generations. as métis artist david garneau reminds us, reason and science are not the inheritance of euro-western cultures alone; indigenous relations with bison include the spiritual, but also the scientific. generations of nêhiyaw, kainai, pikanii, siksika, dakota, blackfoot, métis, and other plains peoples have developed and passed on best practices for bison population management, hunting and tracking methods, and techniques for preparing and using bison bodies. these practices and techniques exist alongside language, legal orders, stories, ceremonies, and prayers. in asserting indigenous authority and recognizing human-bison relations as exceeding commodity relations, the buffalo treaty activates garneau’s call for decolonial practice that is not exclusively a revival of traditional practices, but is also a “direct challenge to colonial habits.” indigenous articulations of human-animal relations are critical contributions to the intellectual work of animal studies scholarship — a project invested in the development of critical and methodological resources for analyzing the ways in which our social, political, and cultural worlds are co-produced by a multiplicity of human and nonhuman lives. the co-production of some worlds can entail the end of other worlds. bison extermination was world-ending for plains indigenous nations and their buffalo relatives. as i have argued, indigenous histories articulate a more expansive, material danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 33 account of the human-animal relations harmed by bison extermination and make more urgent the criticality of bison restoration. these same histories and the visions for restoration they inform also articulate human-animal relations in ways that imagine what decolonizing bison life might look like and reimagine that life beyond the strictures of settler colonial logics. notes 1. settler colonialism is a structure of political relations where a settler population seeks to eliminate and replace native forms of life through the permanent invasion of settler communities. settler colonialism is, as patrick wolfe observed, “a structure not an event” and involves an uneven, but continuous and ongoing process of dispossession and settlement (388). this structure involves the continued attempt to acquire and maintain access to territory through the elimination of the land’s original inhabitants and their political and legal claims to authority (coulthard; simpson, “mohawk”; pasternak). the structure of settler colonialism and the techniques through which it is enacted are varied, made to mutate and adapt in response to the particular conditions of different socio-historical conditions and the particular characteristics of communities and territories. 2. important formulations of this argument and contributions to knowledge about human-animal and multispecies relations have been made by kim tallbear; billy-ray belcourt; zoe todd, “fish pluralities”; tasha hubbard, call of the buffalo; john borrows; vine deloria jr.; robin kimmerer; leanne simpson; leroy little bear, the last of the buffalo; n. scott momaday, vanessa watts and many others. 3. bison and buffalo are used interchangeably in this article. bison is the official and scientific name and there are two species north america: plains bison (bison bison bison) and wood bison (bison bison athabascae). this article is primarily concerned with the plains bison. buffalo is the preferred term used by many indigenous peoples. the name for buffalo in the niitsitapi or blackfoot language is iinii, which i also reference. 4. todd explicitly warns that “to over-generalize local human-fish relations is a great disservice to the nuance and complexity of these personal stories” of fishing in paulutuuq (“fish pluralities” 231). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 34 5. in his study of the political economy of the buffalo hide trade, alan m. klein draws attention to the post-1870 shift in production towards white hunters: “of the 1.2 million buffalo skins shipped east by various railroads during the years 1872 and 1873, only 350,000 (roughly 28 percent) were supplied by indians. simply put, native americas were no longer the sole, or even the primary providers of buffalo products in the hide trade” (155-6). arthur j. ray (212) and frank roe (485) have also demonstrated the significance of white hunters to both the hide trade and the ultimate decline of the bison in canada. 6. indigenous hunters were also actors in the provisions and hide markets, as indicated to varying degrees in each of these histories. however, existing analyses limit their scope to the extent of indigenous participation in emergent capitalist markets, rendering human-bison relations primarily through the lenses of exchangeand subsistence-value. 7. while bison were the principal resources for the indigenous nations of the west, gathering and preserving berries and root vegetables and hunting smaller prairie game were important supplementary activities. sarah carter observes that this work was usually carried out by women, thus is frequently overlooked by histories centered on the better-documented histories of masculine activities (60). 8. along with belated state efforts, histories of early conservation emphasize the work of settlers, such pablo’s business partner charles allard, as well as c.j. “buffalo” jones, charles goodnight, and charles alloway and james mackay, fred dupree, and charles j. jones (locke 11-15; smalley 225-27). while some histories note pablo’s mixed blackfoot ancestry, hubbard and locke argue that the crucial contribution of latatitsa, a young pend d’orielle man, is overlooked despite the robust tribal memories of this early indigenous conservation work (hubbard 89; locke 11-15). following a vision received by his father, latatitsa brought six bison over the rocky mountains into salish territories, beginning the herd pablo and allard would later acquire. 9. the statement was crafted at the eponymous vermejo park ranch in new mexico. ted turner, billionaire founder of cnn, owns the ranch, has established the turner endangered species fund and turner biodiversity divisions, and is the largest single owner and manager of plains bison. the vermejo ranch is home to a herd of 1,500 bison — larger than any single conservation herd in north america — and is one of 14 large ranches owned by turner enterprises (gates et al 64). danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 35 10. these bison are direct descendants of the herd the canadian government purchased from michel pablo in 1907, whose ancestors were first brought west of the rocky mountains by latatista. more than just the transfer of a bison herd, blackfoot peoples saw the 2016 restoration effort as a homecoming. works cited agamben, giorgio. the open: man and animal. trans. kevin attell. stanford up, 2004. american bison society. annual report 1905. wildlife conservation society archives. _____. annual report 1911. wildlife conservation society archives. belcourt, billy-ray. “animal bodies, colonial subjects: (re)locating animality in decolonial thought.” societies 5.1 (2015): 1-11. bonner, michelle, and matt james. “the three r’s of seeking transitional justice: reparation, responsibility, and reframing in canada and argentina.” international indigenous policy journal 2.3 (2011): 1-29. borrows, john. drawing out law: a spirit’s guide. u toronto p, 2010. brower, jennifer. lost tracks: buffalo national park, 1909-1939. athabasca up, 2008. carter, sarah. aboriginal people and colonizers of western canada to 1900. u toronto p, 1999. colpitts, george. pemmican empire: food, trade and the last bison hunts in the british american west, 1780-1870. cambridge up, 2014. coppedge, bryan r. and james h. shaw. “effects of horning and rubbing behavior by bison (bison bison) on woody vegetation in a tallgrass prairie landscape.” american midland naturalist 138.1 (1997): 189-196. coppedge, bryan r., samuel d. fuhlendorf, david m. engle, brian j. carter, and james h. shaw. “grassland soil depressions: relict bison wallows or inherent landscape heterogeneity?” the american midland naturalist 142.2 (1999): 382-392. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 36 corntassel, jeff, and cindy holder. “who’s sorry now? government apologies, truth commissions, and indigenous self-determination in australia, canada, guatemala, and peru.” human rights review 9.4 (2008): 465-489. coulthard, glen. red skin white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. u minnesota p, 2014. daschuk, james. clearing the plains: disease, politics of starvation, and the loss of aboriginal life. u regina p, 2013. deloria jr., vine, and daniel r. wildcat. power and place: indian education in america. fulcrum publishing, 2001. derworiz, colette. “banff holds blessing ceremony with indigenous elders before letting bison roam.” cbc news, 16 july 2018. online. accessed 07 august 2018. flores, dan. “bison ecology and bison diplomacy: the southern plains from 1800 to 1850.” journal of american history 78.2 (1991): 465-485. garneau, david. “extra-rational aesthetic action and cultural decolonization.” fuse magazine 36.4 (2013): 15-16. gates, c. cormack, curtis h. freese, peter j.p. gogan, and mandy kotzman, editors. american bison: status survey and conservation guidelines. international union for conservation of nature, 2010. haines, francis. the buffalo: the story of american bison and their hunters from prehistoric times to the present. u oklahoma p, 1995. hämäläinen, pekka. the comanche empire. yale u p, 2008. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. prickly paradigm press, 2003. henderson, jennifer, and pauline wakeham. reconciling canada: critical perspectives on the culture of redress. u toronto p, 2013. danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 37 hornaday, william temple. extermination of the american bison. 1889. smithsonian institution press, 2002. hovorka, alice j. “animal geographies i: globalizing and decolonizing.” progress in human geography 41.3 (2017): 382-394. hubbard, tasha. “buffalo genocide in nineteenth century north america: ‘kill, skin, and sell.’” colonial genocide in indigenous north america. andrew woolford, jeff benvenuto, and alexander laban hinton, eds. duke up, 2014. 292-305. _____. the call of the buffalo: exploring kinship with the buffalo in indigenous creative expression. doctoral dissertation. university of calgary, 2016. isenberg, andrew c. the destruction of the bison: an environmental history, 1750-1920. cambridge up, 2000. jobin, shalene. “cree peoplehood, international trade, and diplomacy.” revue générale de droit 43.2 (2013). 599-636. johnsgard, paul a. prairie dog empire: a saga of the shortgrass prairie. u nebraska p, 2005. johnson, jay t., and brian murton. “re/placing native science: indigenous voices in contemporary constructions of nature.” geographical research 45.2 (2007): 121-129. kimmerer, robin wall. “returning the gift.” minding nature 7.2 (2014): 18-24. klein, alan m. “political economy of the buffalo hide trade: race and class on the plains.” the political economy of north american indians. john h. moore, ed. u oklahoma p, 1993. 133-60. klein, naomi. “dancing the world into being: a conversation with idle no more’s leanne simpson.” yes magazine. 05 march 2013. online. accessed 01 january 2018. ladner, keira. “governing within an ecological context: creating an alternative understanding of blackfoot governance.” studies in political economy 70.1 (2003): 12552. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 38 lear, jonathan. radical hope: ethics in the face of cultural devastation. harvard up, 2006. little bear, leroy. “the historic buffalo treaty of september 2014.” the last of the buffalo: return to the wild. harvey locke, ed. summerthought publishing, 2016. 84-87. _____. “jagged worldviews colliding.” reclaiming indigenous voice and vision. marie battiste, ed. ubc press, 2000. 77–85. locke, harvey. “banff national park and plains bison conservation.” the last of the buffalo: return to the wild. harvey locke, ed. summerthought publishing, 2016. 8-51. loo, tina. states of nature: conserving canada’s wildlife in the twentieth century. ubc press, 2006. milloy, john. “‘our country’: the significance of the buffalo resource for a plains cree sense of territory.” aboriginal resource use in canada: historical and legal perspectives. kerry abel and jean friesen, eds. u manitoba p, 1991. 51-70. momaday, n. scott. “native american attitudes to the environment.” seeing with a native eye: essays on native american religion. åke hultkrantz and walter holden capps, eds. harper and row, 1976. 79–85. nadasdy, paul. “the gift in the animal: the ontology of hunting and human-animal sociality.” american ethnologist 34.1 (2007): 25-43. national parks service. “bison bellows: bison bolster endangered blue butterfly recovery.” bison bellows 04 august 2016. online. accessed 07 august 2018. pasternak, shiri. grounded authority: the algonquins of barriere lake against the state. uminnesota p, 2017. probyn, elspeth. eating the ocean. duke up, 2016. ray, arthur j. indians in the fur trade: their roles as trappers, hunters, and middlemen in the lands southwest of hudson bay, 1660-1870. u toronto p, 1974. danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 39 roe, frank gilbert. the north american buffalo: a critical study of the species in its wild state. u toronto p, 1951. sanderson, eric w., et al. “the ecological future of the north american bison: conceiving long-term, large-scale conservation of wildlife.” conservation biology 22. 2 (2008): 252-266. schulte-tenckhoff, isabelle. “treaties, peoplehood, and self-determination: understanding the language of indigenous rights.” indigenous rights in the age of the un declaration. elvira pulitano and mililani trask, eds. cambridge up, 2012. 64-86. segal, molly. “indigenous scientist argues bison should return to blackfoot reserve.” tapestry. cbc radio. 14 january 2018. online. accessed 17 january 2019. simpson, leanne betasamosake. “land as pedagogy: nishnaabeg intelligence and rebellious transformation.” decolonization: indigeneity, education & society 3.3 (2014): 125. simpson, audra. mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. duke up, 2014. _____. “reconciliation and its discontents: settler governance in an age of sorrow.” lecture at university of saskatchewan. 22 march 2016. accessed 01 january 2018. smalley, andrea l. wild by nature: north american animals confront colonization. johns hopkins up, 2017. smith, douglas w., et al. “wolf–bison interactions in yellowstone national park.” journal of mammalogy 81.4 (2000): 1128-1135. spence, mark david. dispossessing the wilderness: indian removal and the making of the national parks. oxford up, 1999. sundberg, juanita. “decolonizing posthumanist geographies.” cultural geographies 21.1 (2014): 33-47. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 40 tallbear, kim. “an indigenous reflection on working beyond the human/not human.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 21.2 (2015): 230-235. taylor, scott m. “buffalo hunt: international trade and the virtual extinction of the north american bison.” the american economic review 101.7 (2011): 3162-3195. todd, zoe. “an indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: ‘ontology’ is just another word for colonialism.” journal of historical sociology 29.1 (2016): 4-22. _____. “from classroom to river’s edge: tending to reciprocal duties beyond the academy.” aboriginal policy studies 6.1 (2016): 90-97. _____. “fish pluralities: human-animal relations and sites of engagement in paulatuuq, arctic canada.” études/inuit/studies 38.1-2 (2014): 217-238. tsing, anna lowenhaupt. “arts of inclusion, or, how to love a mushroom.” manoa 22.2 (2010). 191-203. tuck, eve and k. wayne yang. “decolonization is not a metaphor.” decolonization: indigeneity, education, and society 1.1 (2012): 1-40. tully, james. “reconciliation here on earth.” reconciliation and resurgence. michael asch, john borrows, and james tully, eds. u toronto p, 2018: 83-129. van dooren, thom, eben kirksey, and ursula münster. “multispecies studies: cultivating arts of attentiveness.” environmental humanities 8.1 (2016): 1-23. watson, annette, and orville h. huntington. “they’re here — i can feel them: the epistemic spaces of indigenous and western knowledges.” social & cultural geography 9.3 (2008): 257-281. watts, vanessa. “indigenous place-thought and agency amongst humans and non humans (first woman and sky woman go on a european world tour!).” decolonization: indigeneity, education, and society 2.1 (2013): 20-39. wildcat, daniel r. “just creation: enhancing life in a world of relatives.” buffalo shout, salmon cry: conversations on creation, land justice and life together. steve heinrichs, ed. herald press, 2013. 295-314. danielle taschereau mamers -human-bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence 41 wolfe, patrick. “settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” journal of genocide research 8.4 (2006): 387-409. yarbrough, anastasia. “species, race and culture in the space of wildlife management.” critical animal geographies: politics, intersections and hierarchies in a multispecies world. kathryn gillespie and rosemary-claire collard, eds. routledge, 2015. 108-126. microsoft word schuster-pdf -jgr h u m a n i m a l i a 6:2 joshua schuster the future of the extinction plot: last animals and humans in octavia butler’s xenogenesis trilogy we can date the emergence of a scientific concept of extinction to darwin’s era, and in on the origin of species (1859) darwin argued that species extinction formed an integral step in making way for the emergence of new species. darwin viewed extinction as a normal and recurrent event in the process of natural selection, and wrote skeptically about the idea of large-scale extinction events. more recent research on the history of extinctions, however, has identified five previous mass extinctions in the fossil record. hauntingly, there is now evidence of a sixth mass extinction event happening today, with extinction rates rising to somewhere between 100 to 1000 times what are estimated to be background or normal rates of extinction.1 this sixth mass extinction is due to a number of anthropogenic causes, from overhunting to habitat reduction to the spread of invasive species into previously isolated ecosystems. understanding extinction today means to grasp how the increasing rate of the loss of individual species is bound up with a complicated intermixing of conquest and concern running through human-animal relations. the intricate connection between the future of life and the end of specific species which darwin recognized also has had profound effects on cultural representations of extinction. one could already discern in darwin’s time the literary subgenre of “last man” stories that situated a scientific concept of extinction within narrative and plot structures of the novel, thereby inverting common bildungsroman tropes of development and maturity so popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. more recently, extinction events are seen as common devices in a wide range of science fiction and speculative fiction, not all of which are dystopian or apocalyptic, as biodiversity depletion is becoming the new normal and therefore the new realism. yet even from the early historical versions of the extinction plot, one sees two very different lines of literary inquiry, which can be distinguished as “last man” and “last animal” plots. mary shelley wrote in both these modes to differing ends. frankenstein (1818) is a last animal plot, in that the monster created by frankenstein is the only animal of its species; it cannot or will not mate with humans, and seeks a female of its kind with which it can reproduce. shelley’s the last man (1826) depicts the elimination of humans by a plague, which spells the ruin of civilization but leaves the lives of animals untouched. in last animal plots, the single animal is mourned; the reader is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 34 asked to pause in a melancholy mode over the dormant species, yet modernity continues unabated. in last man plots, the planet is already in vast turmoil, modernity has collapsed, and the future is deemed unimaginable because it is uninhabitable by humans. in most novels that deal with the finitude of planetary life, these two narrative plots remain quite separate. even if in many last man novels animals have also vanished, it is fairly common for these stories to focus solely on the crisis faced by humans, with violence to animals as collateral damage in the background. more recent novels, however, by octavia butler (the xenogenesis trilogy, finished in 1989), margaret atwood (oryx and crake [2004] and year of the flood [2009]), and paolo bacigalupi (the wind-up girl [2009]) have made overtures to intertwine both plots, examining the entangled fates of humans and animals in a world undergoing ecological shock. these novels in particular are interested in how new genetic science changes what we mean by last man and last animal plots. in these narratives, genetic modification, cloning, and the storing of genomes in gene banks play central roles in reconfiguring what we mean by both species and species extinction. this essay discusses octavia butler’s xenogenesis trilogy —a collection of three novels — dawn (1987), adulthood rites (1988), and imago (1989) (and also called lilith’s brood) — in the context of how the rise of genomic technologies has called for fundamental revisions in science and art concerning extinction.2 previous scholarship on this trilogy has focused on how genetic determinism in the novels speaks to debates on fixed or flexible models of race and gender. my interest here is in discussing how butler positions genetic determinism within a series of biological and existential questions that force her characters and readers to confront biopolitical decisions that appear specifically at the threshold of extinction events. butler’s trilogy aligns science fiction and the future of science in a narrative concerning how to think and act self-reflexively about extinction in an era in which all life has become by definition precarious. butler’s novel begins in a time a few centuries after nuclear warfare has decimated the planet, eradicated most terrestrial animals, and nearly eliminated humans. a small group of remaining humans have been captured and put into suspended animation by a visiting alien species called the oankali. the oankali have three distinct bodies, male, female, and a third non-gendered form called ooloi. oankali need five bodies to mate, the male and female oankali, an ooloi, and a male and female of another species. from the outset of the novel, we find that the oankali, have stored human dna on their spaceship that is also itself alive, and have begun manipulating it, learning to control human diseases and mitigate antisocial behavior and mood swings. among the captive joshua schuster – “the future of the extinction plot: last animals and humans in octavia butler’s xenogenesis trilogy” 35 humans, the oankali awaken lilith iyapo as the person to take charge of awakening the rest of the humans, to introduce them to the aliens, and to plan their return to earth. the few remaining humans on earth are offered the choice to interbreed with the alien species and eventually leave earth, or remain on earth but to be sterilized, completing the extinction event. the oankali announce themselves as “gene traders” (41), but they also are interested in making a genetic bank of the overall biodiversity of the earth. despite the mass extinction event of the nuclear war, “earth was still a huge biological bank itself, balancing its own ecology with little oankali help.” by comparison, on the shuttle, “there was only a potential profusion stored in people’s memories and in seed, cell, and gene-print banks” (481). butler’s story of alien-human interbreeding opens on to themes prescient today that involve shifting notions of human-animal relations, the connection of rising extinction rates to ecological distress, and the rapidly developing gene sciences. while butler had experimented with some of these concerns in her earlier books in her patternist series (particularly in clay’s ark published in 1984), in the xenogenesis novels0 butler constructs a situation in which gene storage, genetic manipulation, and the exchange of genetic material through inter-species sexual reproduction are intertwined throughout the arc of the narrative. the oankali themselves declare their manipulations of genetic material to be a biological necessity: “we do what you would call genetic engineering. we know you had begun to do it yourselves a little, but it’s foreign to you. we do it naturally. we must do it. it renews us, enables us to survive as an evolving species instead of specializing ourselves into extinction or stagnation” (40). here gene gathering and manipulation are described as being instrumentally necessary to the continuation-by-variation of the oankali. the oankali declare extinction to be as execrable as “stagnation,” which implies that staying put in one species form or on one planet is a mistake. the aliens seek either to persuade or impose this attitude upon the few remaining humans. thus the last human narrative in the xenogenesis trilogy intersects with a new, first animal narrative, a human-oankali hybrid, which is indicative of the non-apocalyptic optimism of the oankali.3 this first animal narrative, with the role of adam/eve played by lilith, also stands as an allegory for the notion that science fiction is the special genre that can use posthuman figures to imagine an alternative to human conflicts. neither ultimately dystopian nor utopian, butler’s trilogy takes a cautious and intimate look at humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 36 how gene banks and genetic manipulation play crucial roles in a world of escalating extinction rates. early in the novel, one oankali explains that even though they now have banked genetic material and can clone humans, they would rather find a willing partner who challenges them to grow biologically and culturally. “we … do need you…. a partner must be biologically interesting, attractive to us, and you are fascinating. you are horror and beauty in a rare combination. in a very real way, you’ve captured us, and we can’t escape” (153). here i want to examine some of the recent scientific developments in reductionist gene science that focus on the manipulation and storing of genes as a way to stem animal extinction. comparing this scientific research on extinction to the last human and last animal narratives of science fiction in butler’s novels allows us to understand better the rapidly changing stakes of what extinction means today. not all visions of the precarious life of animals are the same, so careful attention is needed to unpack the specific metaphors, techno-sciences, and conservation aims that circulate around last animals. additionally, a closer look at gene banking and extinction in contemporary science and in butler’s trilogy opens up further analysis of how issues of biodiversity connect to biopolitics and animal materialities central to current debates in animal studies. butler’s novels ask the reader to consider the effects of the malleability of biology through an animal-human-alien spectrum. her writings speak to how animal studies can bring out new understandings of what happens at biological thresholds, ranging from the posthuman turn to human extinction. as kari weil states, “if animal studies has come of age, it is perhaps because nonhuman animals have become a limit case for theories of difference, otherness, and power” (5). however, the documentation, narratives, and scientific attention that are directed to last animals are often quite different from research on more commonly discussed themes in animal studies, such as animal rights, consciousness, using animals for food, or companion species. “last” lives have a different power than lives that seem to be lived in abundance, even as the lives of animals in broad terms remains quite precarious today. the end of an animal species raises complex questions about how to define species, how speciation works, how to record species loss, and how human power and attitudes toward species difference are factors in escalating rates of animal extinction today. taken all together, these matters indicate that extinction must play a significant role in the field of animal studies, although the topic of extinction has been relatively underdiscussed in this context. donna haraway, sarah franklin, and richard twine, among other scholars of animal studies, have called for more attention to how “stem cells, and the emergent industries of cell line banking and tissue engineering, integrate life and joshua schuster – “the future of the extinction plot: last animals and humans in octavia butler’s xenogenesis trilogy” 37 death in new ways that are both culturally and economically significant — and ask for critical attention” (franklin 5). in the context of the increasing evidence of biodiversity loss across the planet, haraway argues for a sense of a common danger facing humans and animals “to guide us in getting on together in defiance of the double death of extinctions and exterminations in the polluted oceans of indifference that threaten to drown the ongoingness of terran generations” (species matters 17). what makes butler’s work particularly compelling is the way she brings together issues of biology and ecology on microscopic and macroscopic scales without assuming that a healthy holism towards the planet will resolve biological conflicts into a benign condition of biodiversity. as i will discuss, the oankali are motivated to archive the earth’s biodiversity but not save the earth itself. the aliens are deeply curious about the earth’s animal life but have no deep connection to animals in particular beyond the fact that their spaceship itself is a giant living entity. the oankali do not see a contradiction in their desire to trade genes with humans and to store the earth’s biological material in seed and gene banks while they let life on earth go extinct. “we have prints of all of you”: the speculative fiction of gene banking and trading. at several moments in butler’s trilogy, the oankali remind humans that “we have prints of all of you” (291), meaning that they have collected and stored the genetic material of humans as well as of the plants and animals on earth. the ideas that biological diversity resides at the level of the gene and that genes can be collected as “prints” into what are now called “gene banks” are converging areas of biotechnological application today in conservation biology. modifying dna, cloning whole organisms from an embryo, and storing genomic material cryogenically (in a seed bank, cell bank, or even as a computer program), are each distinct forms of assisted reproduction technologies (art) that are redefining the terms of species and speciation. genomic manipulation and cloning have received considerable attention in scientific and public literature. while gene banking is less well-known, it plays a significant role in butler’s novel and in scientific work on extinction today. even before the first cloned animal, dolly, was achieved in 1997, several laboratories had already begun to collect the embryonic material of animals on the brink of extinction. these gene bank collections are often called “frozen zoos.” a frozen zoo is a collection of sperm, egg, and skin cells taken from endangered species and preserved in tanks of liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees celsius. the first facility of this type was humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 38 developed by the san diego zoological society (led by kurt benirschke4) in 1975. this research center, which copyrighted the name “frozen zoo,” now has samples from more than 8,400 individuals, representing more than 800 species and subspecies. if a species that had its dna preserved were to go extinct, in principle scientists could use the dna stored in these frozen zoos to resuscitate the animal, as long as another living animal, whose reproductive process closely followed the extinct animal, could bring the embryo to term. frozen zoos now have further research and funding momentum in the wake of increased attention to the notion of a sixth mass extinction, including a major facility recently established in england called “the frozen ark.” the metaphor of the ark or zoo gives these projects a millenarian halo, what donna haraway describes as a “sacred-secular” narrative of “both physical and epistemological rescue” (when species 252) that helps garner attention but belies the difficulty these research centers face in achieving reproductive success for animals rapidly dwindling in numbers. already by the late 1980s, when butler published the first books in the trilogy, several live births had been accomplished using previously frozen embryos. for example, dr. betsy dresser, first at the cincinnati zoo, and then moving to the audubon center for research of endangered species (acres) in 1995, has achieved several instances of applying a range of art to endangered animals, including the use of cloning and cryogenically preserved genetic material. at acres, dresser also has established a frozen zoo that holds the dna of over 5,000 animals. while research centers such as acres are building gene banks and developing technologies to revive and reproduce frozen embryos, many proponents of wildlife conservation question the large sums of money being channeled to these laboratories rather than to preserving existing animals in their ecosystems. dresser, in response, calls for a multi-layered approach to conservation, stating that “any tool for saving endangered species is important. cloning is just another reproductive tool, like in-vitro fertilization” (qtd. in trivedi). dresser conveys a stoic optimism in applying cloning science along with other forms of assisted reproduction technology to conservation biology, and it is easy to understand why. so much of popular culture reception of this science spins out into hypotheticals of greedy corporate genome manipulation for personal betterment or benevolent yet naïve scientists unleashing unforeseen dangerous consequences. james rollins crafted a pulp thriller, altar of eden (2010), inspired by the audubon center, which imagined an underworld of profiteering with enhanced animals. in rollins’s novel, the director of the frozen zoo at acres, a fictional character named dr. lorna polk, works on developing art techniques for endangered animals but finds herself enmeshed in a joshua schuster – “the future of the extinction plot: last animals and humans in octavia butler’s xenogenesis trilogy” 39 james bond-like scenario in which she must thwart a paramilitary operation on a tropical island attempting to apply similar genetic science to create super-animals and super-humans. such narratives of reductionist science used for outrageous biopolitical purposes and ego-driven bodily enhancement are formulaic conceits common in hollywood productions. butler manages to craft her narrative skillfully around art and gene banking without resorting to these big-screen scenarios, even as she makes explicit connections between gene banking and control over social and biological systems. what needs to be scrutinized more is how the work of frozen zoos is entangled with governmental and non-governmental agencies, landscape developers, the wider spectrum of biological science, indigenous people’s local animal knowledge, animal welfare activists, and poachers. some anecdotal insight into how frozen zoos operate can be of help here. i recently had the chance to view a small frozen zoo facility created at the toronto zoo. essentially, all that is needed to begin a frozen zoo is a tank of liquid nitrogen and some gamete cells. these storage tanks slowly leak, so they must be refilled weekly, while security measures and updated databases need to be maintained. at the toronto zoo, where a few dozen gamete cells of endangered animals are stored, the tanks occupy a small room next to a lab in which a few scientists work on developing better and more consistent techniques for freezing and reviving cells. much of the science dealing with freezing, storing, and reviving cryogenically preserved cells of endangered animals comes from the research done in the field of human infertility treatment. the scientists at the toronto zoo work on adapting this research and technology to the needs of specific animals and cell lines. they are not interested in making animals from scratch, and several spoke skeptically of science done at frozen zoos elsewhere that sought exclusivity or stressed achieving scientific firsts without focusing more on the primary aim of these labs: to find a way to increase animal numbers in their native habitats. the practical pay-off of these labs is more likely found in the capacity to send chilled elephant sperm for insemination rather than the cumbersome whole elephant, or figuring out that there may be laws against transporting some animals across borders to meet their mates, but not against sending the frozen gametes. these frozen zoo projects are just beginning to grapple with what kind of legal, biological, and politicized animal is revealed at the frozen, bankable cellular level. the daily functioning of these labs is not really evocative of new noah’s arks but rather appears as plodding science, caught humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 40 between unpredictability and determination, navigating through the entanglements of conservation, zoo culture, and animal reproduction research. the few environmental humanities scholars who have discussed frozen zoos, including haraway, carol freeman, stephanie turner, and matthew chrulew, have understood the freezing and cloning of dna for the most part as a biopolitical practice where the care of the animal is subordinated to the power of technoscientific institutions and the process of scientific development and control over life.5 chrulew argues that frozen zoos “exemplify in extremis the zoo-logic by which embodied living creatures, in connectivity with generations and kin, and emplaced within habitat, are subordinated to reified notions of the species and its genome…. what [the frozen zoo] reveals is the hierarchy of differential valuation that structures the biopolitics of endangered species preservation, prioritising species over individuals, code over life, genes over bodies.” there is ample reason to be critical about the biopolitics of regenerating species from frozen dna, as current research produces much more failure than success, and each procedure involves experimentation that can be invasive to animal bodies. in addition to the painful procedures animals must endure, as well as the many cases of miscarriage in such research, frozen zoo projects also problematically depend on a limited gene pool, tend to preserve favored and usually charismatic animals rather than all endangered species, and mix conservation research with for-profit potential and biological patents. one key question that needs to be continually asked is whether invasiveness is preferable to extinction, or is there another way? furthermore, art practices increase the reliance of animal life on new technological developments, which are prone to failure or obsolescence, and must justify themselves to institutional funding sources. finally, such science effectively diminishes the importance of localism, bypassing local knowledge and indigenous practices of care for ecosystems and cohabiting with animals. the frozen zoo is based on limited, reductionist science and recognizes that a frozen cell is a poor substitute for the wild animal. thus the frozen zoo is but one contribution to a species survival plan that is constantly under review for improvement and constantly prone to failure. in conjunction with a biopolitical critique of such reductionist science, it is worth considering what this science could contribute to conservation work that may at times rely on reductionism but is effective only in the context of larger efforts to support biodiversity at multiple scales and time frames. frozen zoos involve thinking about and acting according to time scales longer than a human generation, which is essential in conceptualizing long-term ecological changes. these projects look hundreds of years into the future, meaning that the zoo is a technology of prediction as much as a joshua schuster – “the future of the extinction plot: last animals and humans in octavia butler’s xenogenesis trilogy” 41 conservation of the past. frozen zoos predict both a catastrophic futurity and a technologically advanced and biodiversity-caring future civilization that can put such an archive to use, a possible world both utopian and crumbling.6 finally, catastrophic planning can result in more attention to ecological fragility in the present, while reductionism to the gene can lead to expansiveness later. in butler’s trilogy, ecological catastrophe and the use of gene banks are two aspects of the same situation. as the oankali explain to the surviving humans, the nuclear war had decimated the overwhelming majority of life on the planet and “had made their world utterly hostile to life” (290). almost all of the plant and animal life the humans see on the planet has been reconstructed from the “prints” of plant and animal genomes the oankali had made. without this re-engineering, “nothing would have survived except bacteria, a few small land plants and animals, and some sea creatures. most of the life that you see around you we reseeded from prints, from collected specimens from our own creations, and from altered remnants of things that had undergone benign changes before we found them” (290). if intelligent humans have begun to preserve genetic material in seed and gene banks as a way to try to evade permanent ecological loss, one could argue that similar intelligent life elsewhere in the cosmos will have confronted a comparable problem and conceived of a version of genomic banking as well. if our gene banks convey care for biodiversity, would not other species’ banks express the same thing, even if humans were part of such collections? it would appear that the oankali demonstrate a distinctly biocentric ethos in their attention to archiving life on earth and going to the trouble to “reseed” it once again for human habitation. in the rest of this essay, however, i will argue that butler’s narrative offers a more ambivalent view of how the aliens use gene banks, reductionist gene science, and proclaim that “we revere life” (153). as i will show, the oankali do not revere the earth, nor do they believe that the specific lives of animal species are ultimately all that important. species-being between essentialism and extinction. reductionist gene science and gene banking play the paradoxical role of offering both salvation and extinction in butler’s trilogy. the oankali are constantly collecting genetic data to learn about earth but also to store its information before the earth is destroyed, since it effectively will be torn apart after the oankali leave. an oankali tells a human, in seeming consolation, “we all took prints of you — read all that your bodies could tell us about themselves humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 42 and created a kind of blueprint. i could make a physical copy of you even if you hadn’t survived” (289). since much of the biodiversity on earth did not survive the nuclear war, life on earth is already a reprint, with biodiversity achieved by simulacra. the oankali store the earth’s genomic material, but then mix and match it with other genomic material when they reseed the planet. in post-extinction event times, the line between biodiversity bank and zoo is no longer distinct. furthermore, if the oankali can reseed earth, they can reseed other planets just as easily; thus there is no reason to be specifically attached to one planet. they can recreate extinct animals but just as well create new animals by way of genetic manipulation. the reader of butler’s trilogy then is prompted to ask the same questions regarding gene banking used for conservation biology today as well — will it be used to maintain biodiversity on earth or is it preparation to seed another planet? the gene bank made from earth’s biodiversity that the oankali establish is inseparable from the motivation to absorb human genes into their bodies, thereby effacing the human species even while preserving its genes. thus, in butler’s story, for human genes to survive, the human form and specific human body must give way. the material of the human genome is being divorced from the figure of the human body by the oankali. the surviving human characters are faced with this cognitive and embodied dissonance. those who choose to keep the human body intact, but at the cost of fatefully eliminating the human genome since they are sterilized, are called resisters. placing the onus for this decision on humans, the oankali initially believed that the nuclear war demonstrated that humans had decided to commit what the novel calls “humanicide” (8). as one of the oankali, jdahya, tells lilith, “we thought … that there had been a consensus among you, that you had agreed to die” (16). yet when the remaining humans are faced with self-knowledge of their own imminent extinction event, they are willing to use war against the aliens to keep the human form intact. the oankali undermine species specificity both by favoring genotypes over phenotypic forms and welcoming biotechnological manipulation regardless of any ensuing extinctions. to make sense of the current stakes of extinction, i would argue, requires a concept of animal species specificity that is more than just a collection of genes. a rabbit is not the same as a paramecium, which is not the same as a human; species specificity matters at the level of the overall biological form (phenotype) as much as at the minimal genomic level. however, it still needs to be acknowledged that being tied too rigidly to a notion of species identity is a version of biological essentialism that is undone by evolution itself. butler’s trilogy prompts readers to accept both essentialism and change in the animal in order to make sense of the contingent identity of a species. by showing joshua schuster – “the future of the extinction plot: last animals and humans in octavia butler’s xenogenesis trilogy” 43 both extinction and speciation in action, her work also recognizes how processes of natural and artificial selection have made and are still making species. animal studies and extinction studies require fine-tuned attention to both species specification and metamorphosis, which intertwine the integrity and consistency of a genome with aspects of genetic mutation, manipulation, and hybridization. it is common for conservation biologists today to declare the species “the basic unit of conservation” (marchetti and moyle 37) but at the same time to question what species and speciation really entails. the increasing introduction of art into speciation indicates that sexual mating is not the only way for reproduction (or speciation) to happen. in butler’s narrative, the human desire for being specifically human, and reproducing sexually without interference, is cast as either a form of resistance or nostalgia, depending on each character’s degree of consent. the oankali either will convince or force the human species to give way to speciation. the oankali are fond of sampling and storing biodiversity, but are they what deep ecologists would call biocentric (which is usually counterpoised to anthropocentric)? how does the xenogenesis plot intersect with a concern for life in general — and against speciesism — which would connect butler’s trilogy to an ecological critique of the contemporary human dominance of other species? as nikanj, one of lilith’s oankali partners, puts it, “we revere life” (153). for example, akin, lilith’s human-oankali child, takes every opportunity he can to “taste” the biological life around him, not to consume it but to store its genetic material and also appreciate its presence. by contrast, “humans had evolved from hierarchical life, dominating, often killing other life” (564). the oankali define themselves as life made from other life, and seem to adhere to a kind of universal biological egalitarianism: “oankali had evolved from acquisitive life, collecting and combining with other life. to kill was not simply wasteful to the oankali. it was as unacceptable as slicing off their own healthy limbs. they fought only to save their lives and the lives of others” (564). in another example of this reverence for life, the oankali do not eat animals and require that humans who mate with them do the same. however, there remain some tensions between the biocentrism of the oankali, with their gene storing and trading, and care for the specific biodiversity that the earth holds. to care for biodiversity certainly involves limiting extinctions when feasible or if caused by human negligence or self-interest. yet the oankali are not worried at all about the extinction of the specific form of the human species or of any other animal. if humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 44 humans rebel or refuse, nikanj mentions rather casually that, since the oankali already have the human genomes banked, “we would be sorry to lose you, but at least we would save something” (291). the generic biocentrism of the oankali, the need to “save something,” is evident furthermore in their claim that “life was treasure. the only treasure” (564). this phrasing suggests that life in general is the only true value, not any specific life form. the oankali are not concerned by the loss of earth in the slightest, which they will leave a shell of itself by harvesting it of organic and inorganic material for their space ship. another way of phrasing this difference between biocentrism and biodiversity is that the oankali care much about life (and gene pools), but are not very attentive to specific animals themselves. the oankali relish life at the level of genetic surplus and storage, but are not very mindful of the nuances of the lives of animals. the oankali do not seem to have close relations with companion species aside from their own ship, which is alive. one might say that oankali revere genes and what can be done with them more than any specific animal. while on the spaceship, akin is drawn to a composite animal the oankali had assembled called a “tilio,” which is described as being similar to an otter. “assemble was the right word, akin thought. the tilio had been fashioned from the combined genes of several animals. humans put animals in cages or tied them to keep them from straying. oankali simply bred animals who did not want to stray and who enjoyed doing what they were intended to do. they were also pleased to be rewarded with new sensations or pleasurable familiar sensations” (446-47). akin responds with both affection and suspicion towards this constructed animal that seems to enjoy its captivity. he recognizes in this animal the tendency of the oankali to treat life as something one takes “blueprints” of and controls, mastering its biology and behavior, even as one reveres it. but akin also questions this view of life that connects reverence to domestication, saying to himself, “you controlled both animals and people by controlling their reproduction — controlling it absolutely. but perhaps akin could learn something that would be of use to the resisters. and he liked animals” (447). akin shows a care for the animal that is not the same as the oankali attitude towards care for its genes and reproductive potential, which they seem to equate with “life.” in the context then of this discussion of the nuances of the extinction plot, gene banking, and reductionist gene science in “assembling” animals, we can further complicate recent debates in literary critical responses to butler’s apparent genetic essentialism. the topic of whether or not butler endorses a genetic essentialism in her novels has opened a series of vexing discussions among scholars of her work. jessie stickgoldsarah points out that “the gene figures in xenogenesis in several ways, all of them joshua schuster – “the future of the extinction plot: last animals and humans in octavia butler’s xenogenesis trilogy” 45 distressing: as a tool of surveillance, as fate, as the threatened core of human identity, as a source of fundamental human flaws. even when lilith or other human beings challenge these interpretations, they are unable to advance any opposing metaphors” (425). hoda zaki argues that butler’s acceptance of a biological hardwiring of human behavior is a politically conservative position, because it forecloses any notion that humans could act otherwise to effect positive social change. sherryl vint points out that it is really the oankali who are the genetic essentialists, and that the humans in the story are not entirely convinced that their behavior is wholly structured by the “conflict” in their genes that codes for hierarchy as well as intelligence (bodies 66).7 yet, as vint also notes, the oankali are largely portrayed as positive, while many of the humans seem brutish and refuse to learn from, much less mate with, the aliens. genetic essentialism, then, seems biopolitically opportunist for the oankali and biopolitically fateful for humans. in response to zaki’s argument, several critics have claimed rather that butler’s genetic essentialism is used strategically to critique other forms of essentialism, especially racism. the oankali do not mention race at all, and it has no biological bearing for them. while the remaining humans retain some racial stereotypes and separate tribal and linguistic behaviors, they do not focus on race but are concerned with the human as a species. nancy jesser proposes that “butler’s essentialism should be read within a context of a gene theory that undermines racial categories and constructs, but that does not abandon genetic input in other human aspects, most importantly sex/gender” (39). thus for jesser, biological essentialism is needed to dismiss the pseudoscience of racial difference, but ends up reinstating in butler’s trilogy a model of heterosexual kinship. among the core themes consistent across each of the books of the trilogy is the importance of parenting, kinship, and heterosexual pairing among humans. whether or not humans can reproduce, they are continually pairing off heterosexually in the narrative, and looking askance at those who don’t pair. to produce a human-oankali hybrid or “construct” as the novel calls them, five total parents are required, including a heterosexual human couple. the novel ends up apparently confirming what queer theorist lee edelman has convincingly established as the relentless drive for “reproductive futurity” that is a hallmark of heteronormative sociality. in edelman’s scathing assessment, the entire social apparatus of espousing faith in the future, being useful and productive in the present, and nurturing the next generation is designed to effect a continuation of heteronormative values and marginalize queer, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 46 nonreproductive, and anti-social lives. science fiction’s investment in futurity crosses paths directly with this powerful critique. however, two things in butler’s trilogy force a rethinking of this view that reproductive futurity must be tied to restrictive gender and social norms: the immanent event of extinction and the inclusion of alien genes into the condition for any human reproduction in the future. butler does not offer much of an alternative to edelman and jesser’s criticisms, but her trilogy brings in to play other factors that change what sexual reproduction entails. in these novels, every form of reproduction is a contested, tense, insecure, and instable activity. the oankali need three differently gendered bodies to mate — a human male and female and an ooloi — and the oankali acknowledge that they are not sure how the “union” between the species will turn out. the humans who resist having hybrid children unwillingly condemn themselves to being nonreproductive. these humans are by no means accepting of anything like a queer existence, but their position does effectively tie being human to being non-reproductive and non-futural (although later they are given the option to make a new colony on mars that would allow for human reproduction). the complexly layered reproductive decisions facing humans and aliens do not add up to a streamlined faith in the future. rather desire and sex are caught up in intense biological and psychological concerns that circle around situations of life teetering on extinction. mating with oankali includes a heterosexual component, but it is more than this, requiring a human-alien intimacy that breaks from values ascribed to the heteronormative, such as stigmatizing otherness and privileging standard models of the self. as donna haraway writes, xenogenesis “is about the monstrous fear and hope that the child will not, after all, be like the parent.... butler’s fiction is about resistance to the imperative to recreate the sacred image of the same” (simians 226). just as important, reproductive futurity for humans turns into a critique of their own speciesism, the attitude that human species is implicitly special and can control the lives of all other animals with impunity. for humans to reproduce, to have a genetic future, they must open themselves to genetic otherness and forego notions of species purity and human dominion over all life. lilith argues that the oankali are just as much at risk as humans in this exchange: “they change us and we change them…. but some of what makes us human will survive, just as some of what makes them oankali will survive” (282). reproductivity as hybridizing with the alien other in this sense also becomes antianthroponormative. a heteronormative speciesism that favors the human over all other species no longer holds when reproductive futurity means no longer remaining human. joshua schuster – “the future of the extinction plot: last animals and humans in octavia butler’s xenogenesis trilogy” 47 one of butler’s driving conceits in the trilogy is that any crossing of the human divide with other species, let alone with aliens, would require a complicated reconfiguration of what sex means from the body to the genome. in interviews collected in conversations with octavia butler, butler has noted that she particularly wanted to imagine the oankali as creatures who don’t look like us yet desire us. they are more like ameboa than like mammals. butler then says, “i wanted to have the interesting task of figuring out exactly how a different form of sex might work biologically” (105). her solution is to turn to reductionist gene science and construct a kind of genetic consistency across species. this sense of a shared gene pool with aliens, supplemented by the oankali desire to bank all genes they encounter, then leads back into problems of power and the ethical responsibility of manipulating the genes of humans and other animals, with or without their consent. whatever genes make up the oankali, those genes themselves seek to combine with other genes in perpetual symbiosis. oankali do not see genes as “selfish” (in richard dawkins’s sense) in that they only want to perpetuate themselves. the oankali would gladly trade genes to become other, rather than reproduce themselves and their current genes over and over again into “stagnation.” yet in another sense, the oankali do participate in the discourse of “selfish genes” in that they see the gene as the sole locus of action. akin states to a human he tries to convince to go to mars, “human purpose isn’t what you say it is or what i say it is. it’s what your biology says it is — what your genes say it is” (501). genes seem to do all the speaking for the oankali. evelyn fox keller has written extensively on the view, so dominant throughout the twentieth century, that the gene is the origin and primary site of activity that defines the organism. keller provides an intricate history of how the gene became such a singular focus for biologists, but also indicates how much of recent biotechnology is moving away from such a narrow focus on genes alone, and towards broader developmental biology and ecology. keller adds that the shift away from the gene as lone actor is due not only to better science but also to a better understanding of how science is connected to institutions, discourses, and social practices. for, as keller remarks, “what is specifically eclipsed in the discourse of gene action is the cytoplasmic body, marked simultaneously by gender, by international conflict, and by disciplinary politics” (refiguring life xv). to bring this back to butler’s trilogy, the oankali see the gene as the site of action, but they too act on the gene, and change it according to their interests, which need not coincide with the interests of the original animal the genes come humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 48 from. similar concerns are raised by contemporary frozen zoos, a technology that cannot help but increase the focus on isolated genes as the object of preservation. that the oankali’s reverent valuation of life is open to further critique is also indicative of the ethical ambiguity of their delight in genetic manipulation seemingly as a technoaesthetic pastime. lilith tells the other human captives, “we’re in the hands of people who manipulate dna as naturally as we manipulate pencils and paintbrushes” (167). readers have noted that lilith seems to compare the oankali to artists at the level of the gene, but pencils and paintbrushes are also tools for any form of instrumental work. pencils can be erased and paint is easy to cover over with more paint, suggesting a transience to oankali gene science. this artistic sense of gene manipulation does not ultimately entail a care for the autonomy of animals. in other words, oankali have a feeling for the gene (to borrow terms from evelyn fox keller’s a feeling for the organism), a somewhat lesser feeling for the organism, and not much feeling for the animal or ecosystem. no oankali suggests preserving the earth, much less freezing it. animal autonomy and alien phenomenology. ultimately, the reverence for life declared by the oankali means storing, manipulating, and mixing genes rather than caring for the more or less stable and repetitive lives of specific animals in their habitats. akin comes to fight for the restoration of human autonomy not just because he is part human, but also because he is wary of how the oankali treat genes and animals generally. akin is skeptical about some of the biopolitical practices of the oankali even while he recognizes the fatal “conflict” (as the book calls it) in the human genome that codes for both hierarchy and intelligence and is blamed for leading humans to humanicide. forcing humans to trade genes with the oankali will apparently resolve the genetic contradiction that led humans to kill themselves and other animals. but akin recognizes that the oankali would also be responsible for the ultimate extinction of humans: “because of us, they won’t exist anymore” (377). after realizing the role the oankali are playing in human extinction, akin exclaims, “there should be humans who don’t change or die — humans to go on if the … unions fail” (378). akin’s protests suggest that genetic manipulation might not be enough to ensure alien-human compatibility. akin’s insistence that the specific form of the human not go extinct but be allowed to try to live on mars is consistent with how other humans critique the oankali for treating them as mere animals. that is, the oankali treat humans the way humans tend to treat animals, as mere means for human ends. lilith remarks on this comparison early on in the first novel after hearing of how the oankali have been learning about human bodies joshua schuster – “the future of the extinction plot: last animals and humans in octavia butler’s xenogenesis trilogy” 49 by manipulating their dna while they sleep: “we used to treat animals that way … we did things to them — inoculations, surgery, isolation — all for their own good. we wanted them healthy and protected — sometimes so we could eat them later” (33). sherryl vint calls narratives about alien treatment of humans as animals “reversal stories” (animal 158). she describes this narrative conceit as a device to show a “perceptual world and cultural norms [that] are different from one’s own” (158). humans who treat animals reductively as mere matter or means to satisfy human desires are themselves the object of reductive treatment by the oankali. the aliens are effectively establishing their own frozen zoo of human dna, reversing the collector/collection relationship of today’s frozen zoos. “they collect the eggs, store them, collect sperm, store it” (295), as one oankali matter-of-factly notes. often the motive to store sperm and egg cells from animals encountered on earth takes precedence over any longer-term relationship with the animal. akin balks at this frozen zoo-like treatment, and the primacy of reductionist science, while bonding with other animals. in effect, akin seeks to reverse the reversal story and learn from this situation by preventing unnecessary human extinction and caring about biodiversity for its own sake. reversal stories connect to becoming-animal stories, but we should be careful here in assessing how much these two genres overlap in the context of the discussion of extinction and reductionist gene science. while butler’s trilogy beckons the reader with the fantasy of becoming-alien, a version of becoming-animal in the lexicon of deleuze and guattari, the narrative poses hard questions about extinction and the loss of biodiversity that are not addressed in philosophies of becoming. becoming-animal is not an end in itself but a stepping stone to a more powerful ontology of continuous individuation. deleuze claims that individuation entails a rudimentary vitalist power called “a life” that is inextinguishable in the universe because it is the immanent condition of the universe with itself. this power is complete, not reliant on anything else, and never can be vanquished. deleuze calls “a life” “an impersonal and yet singular life” (28). “this indefinite life does not itself have moments … but only between-times, between moments” (29). such indefinite life resides between the life of a specific body and its death, dwelling in neither. a life requires no body, indeed it is purely virtual and trans-individual. a life is a power that works within a plane of immanence to create events and singularities out of nothing more than the conditions of immanence of the plane. according to deleuze, these planes are infinite, and just as the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 50 virtual is infinite, so is this power of a life. such immanent power is implicit in all being, yet is particularly manifest in intense moments of individuation that appear either when an organism evolves or when it dies. this death is, however, only a temporary pause in the continual becoming of a life that will carry on in another form. ultimately, then, by deleuze’s philosophical account, extinction is only local, as life itself cannot go dormant and “might do without any individuality” (30). in butler’s trilogy, becoming-alien means absorption into a continuous becoming that may ultimately lead to a loss of animal form even as some form of life goes on. one of the ooloi “constructs” (a construct is a human-ooloi hybrid) named ahajas tells a human that “if i died on a lifeless world, a world that could sustain some form of life if it were tenacious enough, organelles within each cell of my body would survive and evolve. in perhaps a thousand million years, that world would be as full of life as this one…. “nothing is more tenacious than the life we are made of. a world of life from apparent death, from dissolution. that’s what we believe in.” (66263) life without death approaches “a life,” which deleuze believed would be “complete bliss” (27). yet as ahajas nears a state of crisis over his need to find a mate in the final novel of the trilogy, its body starts to lose its form and threatens to turn into a less complex form of a life that would be deemed a permanent loss of its previous identity. ahajas begins to panic and viscerally resists such an outcome, seeing this possibility as a devolution even if not a death. in fact, the oankali cannot really promise a world free from dissolution, even if death is not a concern since its body would effectively sprout life anew in some way. without a mate, ooloi risk losing their biological specificity to the extent of becoming a kind of organic soup. the ooloi and oankali, just like humans, strive to resist a certain loss of form or physical complexity that would set their bodies into a gelatinous state. becoming-alien, even as it undermines the human/other distinction, is not necessarily compatible with care for the nuances of biodiversity and the uniqueness of animal lives. there is a tension throughout the whole of the trilogy between the motive of banking “blueprints” of animals as they are and the motive to continuously become other and reconfigure life that takes no heed of past biological forms and sees biodiversity only as a useful tool for continual hybridization. indeed, why make genetic blueprints or bank specific animal genes at all if “a life” is really what is revered? joshua schuster – “the future of the extinction plot: last animals and humans in octavia butler’s xenogenesis trilogy” 51 butler’s last human and last animal plots show how notions of genetic determinism, hybridity, becoming, and biodiversity come under intense pressure in times of extinction. current attempts at amassing a frozen zoo and experimenting with ways to circumvent extinction through techno-science are projects that expand the scope of responsibility for animals, but the discourse of animal care used in these cases is not justification alone and needs closer consideration. furthermore, notions of animal becoming and hybridity also should be examined closely as complex entanglements, whether real or imagined, that always involve species in questions of power over life. cary wolfe points to how the rapid expansion of a biopolitical framework “increasingly takes as its political object planetary life itself” (52), as it spreads into the lives of animals from the minute genomic level to the scale of global ecology. thresholds of speciation and animal finitude are powerful sites for understanding how biopolitics works. butler’s trilogy examines these conflicted conditions in particular at the tense intersection where multiple extinction narratives converge in scenes of last human and last animal conditions. acknowledgment. the author would like to thank gaby mastromonaco at the toronto zoo for the opportunity to visit. notes 1. scientists began to use the phrase “the sixth mass extinction” a few decades ago to describe the recent escalation in plant and animal extinction, comparing the current depletion of species to five previous massive extinction events that have been verified using fossil records (leakey and lewin). paleontological evidence for previous mass extinctions is discussed by david m. raup in extinction: bad genes or bad luck? (1991). 2. all citations from the trilogy are from octavia e. butler lilith’s brood (2000). 3. ursula heise argues that studies of extinction narratives need to question the tendency for such stories to always depict biodiversity in an inexorable decline, with a melancholic frame locked in. in contrast, heise calls for a wider range of narrative comprehensions of extinction. in the case of butler’s trilogy, the oankali’s relentless humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 52 optimism and receptivity to human complexity suggest an alternative emotional and scientific approach to extinction narratives. 4. benirschke leaves open speculation on why a frozen zoo might be needed: “you must collect things for reasons we don’t understand” (326). see also ryder and benirschke. for more recent research on biodiversity cryopreservation, see jewgenow et al. 5. see haraway, freeman, turner, and chrulew. for further context, see also tudge, heatherington. 6. dresser has remarked that if humans ever find themselves terraforming other planets out of discovery or necessity, they would most likely use frozen dna to re-establish animal populations (qtd. in freeman 219). 7. as vint notes further, “the oankali may be genetic essentialists, but butler’s readers are encouraged not to be” (67). works cited benirschke, kurt. “the frozen zoo concept.” zoo biology 3.4 (1984): 325-328. butler, octavia e. clay’s ark. new york: warner books, 1996. _____. conversations with octavia butler. ed. consuela francis. jackson: up of mississippi, 2010. _____. lilith’s brood. new york: grand central publishing, 2000. chrulew, matthew. “managing love and death at the zoo: the biopolitics of endangered species preservation.” australian humanities review 50 (2011). web. 28 august 2014. deleuze, gilles. pure immanence: essays on a life. new york: zone books, 2005. edelman, lee. no future: queer theory and the death drive. durham: duke up, 2004. joshua schuster – “the future of the extinction plot: last animals and humans in octavia butler’s xenogenesis trilogy” 53 franklin, sarah. dolly mixtures: the remaking of genealogy. durham: duke up, 2007. freeman, carol. “ending extinction: the quagga, the thylacine, and the ‘smart human.’” leonardo’s choice: genetic technologies and animals. ed. carol gigliotti. new york: springer, 2009. 235-56. haraway, donna j. modest_witness@second_millenium.femaleman_meets_oncomouse: feminism and technoscience. new york: routledge, 1997. _____. simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. new york: routledge, 1991. _____. “species matters, humane advocacy: in the promising grip of earthly oxymorons.” species matters: humane advocacy and cultural theory. eds. marianne dekoven and michael lundblad. new york: columbia up, 2012. 17-26. _____. when species meet. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2008. heatherington, tracey. “from ecocide to genetic rescue: can technoscience save the wild?” the anthropology of extinction: essays on culture and species death. ed. genese marie sodikoff. bloomington: indiana up, 2012. 39-66. heise, ursula. “lost dogs, last birds, and listed species: cultures of extinction.” configurations 18.1-2 (2010): 49-72. jesser, nancy. “blood, genes, and gender in octavia butler’s kindred and dawn.” extrapolation: a journal of science fiction and fantasy 43 (2002): 36-61. jewgenow, k. et. al. “cryopreservation of mammalian ovaries and oocytes.” international zoo yearbook 45.1 (2011): 124-132. keller, evelyn fox. a feeling for the organism: the life and work of barbara mcclintock. new york: henry holt, 1983. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 54 _____. refiguring life: metaphors of twentieth-century biology. new york: columbia up, 1995. leakey, richard and roger lewin. the sixth extinction: patterns of life and the future of humankind. new york: anchor books, 1996. marchetti, michael p. and peter b. moyle. protecting life on earth: an introduction to the science of conservation. berkeley: u of california p, 2010. raup, david m. extinction: bad genes or bad luck? new york: norton, 1991. rollins, james. altar of eden. new york: harper, 2010. ryder, oliver a. and kurt benirschke. “the potential use of ‘cloning’ in the conservation effort.” zoo biology 18 (1997): 295-300. shelley, mary. frankenstein, or the modern prometheus. 1818. oxford: oxford up, 1994. _____. the last man. 1826. oxford: oxford up, 1994. print. stickgold-sarah, jessie. “‘your children will know us, you never will’: the pessimistic utopia of octavia butler’s xenogenesis trilogy.” extrapolation: a journal of science fiction and fantasy 51.3 (2010): 414-430. trivedi, bijal p. “scientists clone first endangered species: a wild sheep.” national geographic today. 2001. web. 28 aug. 2014. tudge, colin. last animals at the zoo: how mass extinction can be stopped. washington, d.c.: island press, 1992. turner, stephanie. “open-ended stories: extinction narratives in genome time.” literature and medicine 26.1 (2007): 55-82. twine, richard. animals as biotechnology: ethics, sustainability, and critical animal studies. london: earthscan, 2010. vint, sherryl. animal alterity: science fiction and the question of the animal. liverpool: liverpool up, 2010. joshua schuster – “the future of the extinction plot: last animals and humans in octavia butler’s xenogenesis trilogy” 55 _____. bodies of tomorrow: technology, subjectivity, science fiction. toronto: u of toronto p, 2007. weil, kari. thinking animals: why animal studies now? new york: columbia up, 2012. wolfe, cary. before the law: humans and other animals in a biopolitical frame. chicago: u of chicago p, 2013. zaki, hoda m. “utopia, dystopia, and ideology in the science fiction of octavia butler.” science fiction studies 17.2 (1990): 239–51. microsoft word lenow-peterson-pdf-jgr h u m a n i m a l i a 6:2 reviews chloe diamond-lenow tracing the animal in the human christopher peterson. bestial traces: race, sexuality, animality. fordham, ny: fordham up, 2013. 208 pp. $75 hc, $24 pb. christopher peterson’s bestial traces: race, sexuality, animality poses provocative and challenging questions for scholars working at the nexus of animal studies, sexuality studies, and critical race theory. peterson explores the ontological basis for practices of exclusion that emerge in systems such as racism and speciesism, arguing that belonging always entails processes of exclusion that establish alterity by means of abjection. he claims that the repudiation of the animal in the human is the fundamental operation that structures all other forms of social exclusion. in consequence, he suggests, many political moves that attempt to overcome problems of exclusion and abjection risk simply reversing that disavowal. for peterson, a more effective response is to avow the animality of humans in order to reverse the dialectic that produces the animal as abject. he argues, however, that avowals and disavowals are never complete — every disavowal leaves a trace of what it seeks to cast off. chloe diamond-lenow – “tracing the animal in the human” 191 peterson constructs his argument by analyzing diverse literary texts from the 19th, 20th and 21st century u.s. and 21st century south africa. these texts include edgar allan poe’s “the murders in the rue morgue,” richard wright’s native son, joel chandler harris’s uncle remus tales, philip roth’s the human stain, and j.m. coetzee’s disgrace. he “traces” productive moments in these texts that acknowledge and affirm the animality of humans. at stake for peterson is conceptualizing less violent approaches to alterity that move toward a postracial and post-human political landscape — while at the same time acknowledging that such spaces are always “yet to come.” one of peterson's most provocative arguments is that the commonsense definition of race as skin color is a “restricted” and “exceedingly limited definition” that should be eschewed for a more capacious and universal definition that more fully accounts for general processes of inclusion and exclusion (100). he offers a redefinition of race as “any kind of social formation whose boundaries become legible by virtue of who it excludes” (13). based on this re-definition, peterson introduces his concept of “anteracism” to describe a “general” form of racism “understood as minimal violence that conditions any relation to alterity” (100). homophobia, classism, and sexism are equivalent forms of violent exclusion — or “racism.” he argues that such forms of racism are inevitable because alterity always already entails an originary violence. peterson advocates analyses that situate animal representations within their “larger non-racist connotations” to prioritize analyses of species over “narrow” analyses of race (73). he argues that anti-racist scholars often replicate what steve baker calls the “denial of the animal” when they object to racialized people being represented as animals “without dwelling in the space of animality” (30). for peterson these objections fail to challenge larger frames of exclusion on which ante-racism is predicated. he argues that these analyses leave “traces that install new boundaries and spawn new forms of inequity” (79). such arguments reproduce a frame of “species abjection” that is the foundation for social abjection by disavowing the trace of the animality that racist discourses stick to racialized bodies. peterson contests black feminist theorist bell hooks’ representations that frame black female sexuality as animalistic. he claims that hooks disavows humans’ animal sexuality in favor of an anti-racist conception of sexuality — reproducing the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 192 degradation and exclusion of the animal. such anti-racist arguments about sexuality then reproduce the terms of ante-racism, since a “sanctified and de-animalized conception of sexuality conditions political efforts to humanize sexual [and racialized] others” (8). by peterson’s logic, hooks challenges racism while leaving intact the anteracism that he understands this racism to be founded on. peterson advocates for representations of human sexuality that avow the animal trace that he argues haunts all human sexuality. for him, coetzee’s disgrace (1999) contains just such a representation. disgrace, set in post-apartheid south africa, offers a story about david laurie, a white male professor whose life deteriorates after he has exploitative sex with his student melanie isaacs. peterson argues that coetzee disrupts a stable opposition between human and animal by framing laurie as haunted by an animalistic sexual drive of which he has no shame. coetzee thus disrupts the separation between the cartesian animal as automaton and the human as rational responder that defines human sexuality as controllable and animal sexuality as wild and untamable. coetzee does this, in peterson's view, by framing laurie as having an animalistic and unashamed primal sexual desire, a representation that “eschews the conception of sexuality as calculable, predictable, and tamable” (20). peterson here makes recourse to “nature” as if there is a transparent unmediated way to know what animal sexuality is. so coetzee’s representation of the professor as having animal sexuality does not represent animals, but a cultural and historical construction of animals. peterson advocates working toward a future-oriented, always “yet-to-come” “postracialism,” defined as “the final eradication of discrimination based on skin color” (13). he argues, however, that racism — violent forms of exclusion — can never be defeated, because of what jacques derrida calls “the autoimmunity character of democracy,” the failure of democracy to materialize the ideals of inclusivity that it champions” (19). according to derrida, structures of belonging will always produce “beasts” regardless of a desire for non-violence, since alterity will always produce exclusions, such that democracy will always be a “yet to come.” peterson argues that like an inclusive democracy, postracialism will always be “yet to come” (11). he thus frames anti-racist struggles as striving for an impossible and utopic “postracial landscape” free of violence and exclusion that can never be fully achieved because difference, conditioned by ante-racism, can never be escaped. for peterson the autoimmunity character of democracy is reflected in the experiences of racial and sexual minorities, but it is also reflected in the discrimination that those chloe diamond-lenow – “tracing the animal in the human” 193 labeled as racist experience. he claims that labeling people as racists positions them as an “aberration from the principle of equality” (19). one of his examples is coleman silk in phillip roth’s the human stain, who experiences the stain of being called a racist. silk, a mixed-race professor who passes as white, is called a racist after he calls two students who had not attended his class by the racially charged term “spooks.” peterson argues that the way in which coleman is abjected because of this event points to how anti-racist strategies that seek to challenge racism enact their own frames of abjection and exclusion. peterson’s book contributes to conversations in critical animal studies about the ways in which species functions to delimit frames of inclusion and exclusion towards violent ends. he advocates working for strategies that dissolve boundaries that produce inclusions and exclusions based on species — towards a postracial and posthumanist space that will always be a “yet to come.” it is good to explore the relationship between the human/animal binary and the human/slave binary. but this is an exploration fraught with difficulty. for example, peterson’s argument that “postracialism” is to be heralded as a valuable goal does not acknowledge that its contemporary role is largely as a conservative ideology that frames racial issues as being “over” in order to obscure the ways in which racial subordination continues to operate (see, for example cho). he does not interrogate the consequences of his attempt to prioritize analysis of species over race and to redefine “race” by expanding it to signify “difference.” these moves serve to undercut the specificities that serve as means to fight racialized power within material power relations, treating as propositions of logic what are actually issues of history, power, social structures, and racial politics. in so doing, peterson appropriates “race” as a signifier that can be used to discuss race without having to attend to racialized power. peterson’s definition of race and racism is problematic for assuming an analogous relation between systems of power and for situating these systems as operating like each other — rather than framing them as co-constitutive. though he explains that he doesn’t intend to eradicate the specificity of the language around racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism, in practice this seems to be the consequence of his approach. his definition of race precludes an intersectional analysis that suggests that an analysis of a representation of animality can never be considered outside of the racialized and sexualized significations and power structures that subtend it. scholars humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 194 in critical race studies and queer of color critique argue that speciesist and racist discourses are co-constitutive and never prior to each other (see, for example, chen; kim 2007; morgan; oliver; somerville; terry). peterson’s argument that humans can and should avow human animality presents all humans as being equally situated in relation to significations of animality and suggests that a white man’s avowal of human animality will have the same effect as black woman’s. such an argument ignores the racialized and sexualized significations that power-saturated discourses have produced in relation to these different subject positions. as a result, peterson’s demand to “avow human animality” may actually reinforce heteropatriarchal and white supremacist arguments about racialized sexuality by masking the historical power relations and cultural significations that naturalize these discourses. peterson’s arguments in favor of foregrounding “speciesism” as the fundamental category of difference over the politics of anti-racism would be strengthened by acknowledging the subject position he inhabits and adopts. his claim that all humans should avow animality — despite the political use of the animal for racial degradation — reveals that his arguments emerge from a position of “phallicized whiteness,” where whiteness functions as an “unmarked master signifier” such that the white, straight, and propertied male is the unmarked subject in theories of power (winnubst 40). this subject decides which differences should matter for others from his place of supposed disembodied neutrality (43). in fact, peterson approaches his analysis of race in disgrace and of the human stain through a framework of “white injury,” a position from which white people appropriate the language of civil rights to construct themselves as an injured group (wiegman 116). peterson does not interrogate the consequences of this framework for his analysis. because his subject position is not acknowledged, peterson does not present strong arguments for why anti-racists should value “speciesism” more than countering the history of animalized racisms that have shaped their lives. peterson’s argument is undercut to the degree that specificity drops out of his discussion of “animal.” in pursuit of dissolving the boundary between human and animal, he tends to treat all animals as materially and symbolically similar. yet for derrida, the general category “animal” is too reductive and effaces, for example, the difference of “lizards from chimpanzees, from mammals, non-mammals, anthropoids etc.” (2008, 58). derrida argues that that humans should encounter and think about animals “on their own terms” within this singularity, rather than thinking about animals as a universal category. he argues that encountering animals through their chloe diamond-lenow – “tracing the animal in the human” 195 particular singularity will help to break the clear and stable ontological distinction that western metaphysics produces between human and animal, as it would complicate the very ability to talk about animals as a bounded category itself. peterson’s analysis might expand on derrida’s proposal to radically undercut the essentializing singularity of the term “animal” by using the concept of “animot” to account for the multiplicity within the broad category “animal.” such an emphasis on difference would not only allow for peterson to explore the multiplicity effaced under the category “animal,” it would also allow for language that does not collapse categories but honors the differences of race, gender, sex. works cited chen, mel y. animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. durham, nc: duke up, 2012. cho, sumi. “post-racialism.” iowa law review 94.5 (2009): 1589-1645. coetzee, j.m. disgrace. new york: penguin, 1999. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am (perspectives in continental philosophy). ed. marie-louis mallet. tr. david wills. new york: fordham up, 2008. kim, claire jean. “multiculturalism goes imperial.” du bois review: social science research on race 4 (2007): 233–249. morgan, jennifer l. “‘some could suckle over their shoulder’: male travelers, female bodies, and the gendering of racial ideology.” laboring women: reproduction and gender in new world slavery. philadelphia, pa: u pennsylvania p, 2004, 12-49. oliver, kelly. “invited symposium: feminists encountering animals.” eds. lori gruen and kari weil. animal others. spec. issue of hypatia 27.3 (2012): 493-498. somerville, siobhan b. queering the color line: race and the invention of homosexuality in american culture. durham, nc: duke up, 2000. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 196 terry, jennifer. “the seductive power of science in the making of deviant subjectivity.” posthuman bodies. ed. judith halberstam and ira livingston. bloomington, in: indiana up, 1995, 135–161. wiegman, robyn. “whiteness studies and the paradox of particularity.” boundary 2 26.3 (1999): 115-150. winnubst, shannon. queering freedom. bloomington, in: indiana up, 2006. andrea petitt and alice j. hovorka -women and cattle “becoming-with” in botswana h u m a n i m a l i a 12:1 andrea petitt and alice j. hovorka women and cattle “becoming-with” in botswana introduction. cattle form an integral part of lives, livelihoods, and landscapes in botswana. they offer people socio-cultural and politico-economic means through which to participate in society as respected and supported citizens. when asked what it means to have cattle, many of our study respondents stated: “i feel like a person” or “cattle are life.” at the same time, people shape the circumstances and experiences of cattle. human connections to cattle within subsistence and commercially-oriented realms generate practices of ownership, rearing, and (re)producing of this particular species that influence their value, role, and use. human-cattle relations emerge and evolve through historically-situated social relations of power based on gender, ethnicity, and class. in turn, these relations present people with different political and economic opportunities associated with cattle production, and present cattle with different opportunities for eating, drinking, moving, and breeding. ultimately, intersectional human-cattle relations make both humans and cattle who they are in terms of societal positionality, economic opportunities, and political clout. humans and cattle are “becoming-with” – using donna haraway’s concept — in botswana with implications for humans, cattle, and the broader context. the broad aim of our paper is to explore intersectional human-cattle relations in contemporary botswana, characterized over the past few decades as enhanced commercialization. this period has generated new configurations of cattle based on breeding, mobility, and markets, and new opportunities especially for women to connect with cattle across ethnic-based contexts. cattle throughout botswana’s history has been a male affair, regardless of ethnic group, be it the dominant batswana, bakgalagadi, herero, nharo (san), afrikaner, or english. our paper thus explores specifically how women and cattle are becoming-with in botswana. we organize the paper as follows: first, we articulate a multispecies conceptual frame of intersectional “becoming-with”; second, we outline human-cattle relations in botswana as situated within social relations of power based on gender, ethnicity, and class; third, we provide methodological details of our case study in ghanzi district; fourth and fifth, we illustrate empirically how women across ethnic groups are becoming-with cattle in traditional and non-traditional ways respectively; sixth, we consider how cattle are becoming-with women through class-based processes of the cattle sector; finally, we humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 146 summarize our findings and reflect on what a multispecies intersectional “becomingwith” lens offers our botswana case study and human-animal studies more broadly. intersectional becoming-with. our relations to those around us make us who we are. we do not pre-exist our relations to others but rather we “become-with each other or not at all” (haraway, staying 4). a material-semiotic becoming-with emphasizes the physical reality of a relation and the meaning-making that the relation entails. relations materialize together, are ascribed specific meanings at the core of our existence, and are always situated in a specific context (haraway, species 287). hence, becoming-with is always becoming someone, somewhere in particular, through relations with another someone, somewhere. a necessarily multispecies becoming-with takes both humans and other animals seriously by engaging the relationships between them. we operationalize haraway’s multispecies “becoming-with” through intersectionality theory to articulate the nuanced ways in which individuals or social groups of distinct and different species (here humans and cattle) become-who-they-are. intersectionality articulates the relationships among numerous dimensions of social relationships, subject formations and categories of power (mccall). it reveals hidden acts of discrimination and highlights how a particular individual stands necessarily “at the crossroads of multiple groups” (minow 3). critical race and feminist scholars have been instrumental in embracing complex, overlapping categories of gender, ethnicity, race, class, orientation, age, and ability and exploring how they emerge in relation to one another symbolically and materially (butler; collins; crenshaw; hooks; mohanty, russo, and torres; valentine; walby, armstrong, and strid). we begin from the category “woman.” gender analysis of power relations reveals that what it is to be of a certain gender identity is defined and naturalized in different contexts through intricate socio-ecological dynamics (nightingale). social and political constructions of gender are always linked to the biophysical and more-than-human elements of existence (arora-jonsson). learning and practicing gender may be thought of as an interaction of both structural forces and the more or less conscious choices of individuals (connell and connell). specific to our paper, gender-livestock relations are grounded in what it means to be a man or a woman in particular contexts and become (re-)produced through daily practices and positionalities associated with animal rearing and relations (hovorka, “feminism and animals”). we can think about gender-species relations of power as driven by particular discursive and material placements of women relative to particular species (here, for example, in terms of proximity to or distance from cattle) (hovorka, “women/chickens vs. men/cattle”; petitt, women’s cattle). andrea petitt and alice j. hovorka -women and cattle “becoming-with” in botswana 147 we then consider how the category “woman” is constituted differently within and across ethnicity in terms of roles, rights, and expectations of those labelled or labelling themselves as such. hence we recognize that the category “woman” is far from unified (mohanty). we acknowledge that ethnicity mediates what it means to be, for example, a man or a woman in a particular context. ethnicity is an “articulation of cultural distinctiveness in situations of political and/or economic competition” (ballard 28). it is a process of differentiation through which the (re-)creation of ethnic categories and cultural differences are ascribed meaning and significance (wilmsen and vossen; eriksen). these differences are not based on an inherent characteristic shared by other group members but rather the shared meanings expressed and experienced through social relations (eriksen). ethnic categories are then reinforced by the simplification of features into a generalized idea of both othering and selfhood, anchored to a sense of collectivity (wilmsen and vossen). further, we appreciate that class relations also shape how women and cattle relate to each other. we understand class as a combination of social ranking (ortner) and material wealth that in botswana are expressed through cattle and land (bolt and hillbom). large cattle herds and privately held fenced grazing lands are associated with higher classes, while small herds and communal unfenced grazing lands are associated with lower classes. however, having large cattle numbers and private land tenure do not always coincide, as high class batswana elite keep large cattle herds on communal land. in ghanzi, large freehold fenced farms are primarily held by afrikaner and english farmers while nharo residents tend to make up the labor force in these operations; here afrikaner and english people are associated with relatively high social ranking regardless of their material wealth compared to nharo people. batswana, bakgalagadi, and herero people differ widely in their class positioning both in terms of social ranking and material wealth. finally, we consider the category “cattle” as constitutive of the same intersectional relations of power that shape “women” across ethnic groups. we take species seriously as a driver of social construction, difference, and inequality for humans, as well as a category in itself emerging out of power dynamics at the intersections of gender, ethnicity, and class (deckha; hovorka, “feminism and animals”). engagement with different species can within a social context reproduce distinct expressions of gender (petitt, “cowboy masculinities”). on the one hand, we conceptualize women’s relationship to a particular species in relation to men’s so as to highlight how genderspecies relations of power serve to (re-)produce men’s privileged roles, rights, and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 148 expectations associated with a particular species relative to women’s association with that species. often those animal species that are privileged tend to be associated with human social groups that are similarly privileged; in botswana this is expressed in terms of a men-cattle pairing (hovorka, “women/chickens vs. men/cattle”). on the other hand, we conceptualize animals themselves as becoming particular animals through their relations with humans in particular ways in particular contexts. we explore how class affects how cattle materially and socially evolve relative to humans. scholars exploring “becoming animal” articulate the ways in which animal subjects come to be who they are and form subjective experiences through multifaceted relations with humans in particular contexts (e.g. birke et al.; geiger and hovorka; lien). the remainder of our paper applies this multispecies intersectional becoming-with conceptual frame. specifically, we offer empirical illustration of women and cattle becoming-with in botswana. we demonstrate how gendered human-cattle relations in this context are mediated through ethnicity and class, and are manifested in contemporary commercialization trends generating new configurations of cattle and women’s empowerment opportunities. by doing so we offer an intersectional becoming-with frame that will be useful for other scholars exploring interspecies relations. human-cattle relations in botswana. the cattle sector has historically garnered much attention from national development mandates; cattle have been a backbone of botswana’s economy and society since long before independence in 1966 (guldbrandsen). the sector commercialized through the opening of export markets, initially in south africa, followed by zimbabwe, zambia, and mauritius, and culminating in the european union (eu) (gob 2005). the national herd comprised in 2013, when our field work was carried out, of 1,845 million cattle (statistics botswana, 12). cattle have generated revenue worth us$40 million to us$100 million annually since independence (darkoh and mbaiwa; mapitse). the contemporary period of human-cattle relations features renewed emphasis on commercial production, especially export to the european union (guldbrandsen; ransom; mbaiwa and mbaiwa; petitt, women’s cattle). the government of botswana offers substantial loans and grants for agricultural entrepreneurship, including cattle farming, to enhance national coffers and local livelihoods. government initiatives highlight gender equity and encourage women to apply for funds from the citizen entrepreneurial development agency (ceda) or the youth development fund (ydf) without authorization from a male spouse/relative (petitt, women’s cattle). the cattle andrea petitt and alice j. hovorka -women and cattle “becoming-with” in botswana 149 sector is bound by strict eu regulations, interpreted and implemented by the botswana meat commission (bmc), which holds a monopoly as a parastatal export abattoir, and the division of veterinary services (dvs), which guides breeding and monitoring programs. this institutional scenario privileges exotic cattle breeds that grow quickly, fenced grazing lands, and identification technology (e.g. branding, tagging, boluses, certification) to ensure traceability. cattle sold on the export market must align with these regulations. human-cattle relations have long emerged and evolved through historically-situated gender relations of power. the centrality of cattle to local masculinities and men’s lives is widely documented (e.g. dahl; talle; curry; hodgson; njuki and sanginga; schapera; peters; schapera and comaroff; comaroff and comaroff; kalabamu; hovorka, “women/chickens”; solway). specifically, cattle ownership and responsibility in botswana largely fall to men as a birthright. young boys are socialized into cattle rearing while girls are relegated to tending smaller animals such as chickens, pigs, sheep, and goats (brown; daps; kalabamu; van allen; hovorka, “women/chickens”). men thus acquire relevant skills and knowledge of cattle, enhancing their ability to access, interact with, or control them. men further benefit from associations with cattle through access to draft power for commercial food production, enhanced social status through the quantity of cattle owned, and entry into exchange or income-generating from selling cattle on the open market (hovorka, “women/chickens”). the cattle sector is thus dominated by men and male influence. approximately 76 percent of the national herd and 66 percent of all cattle operations are owned by men (moa 2014). notably, little scholarship investigates gender dynamics or the role and importance of cattle to women (must and hovorka). research is warranted for ghanzi district specifically, given that cattle holding statistics and local brand certificate registers indicate more women owning cattle than national statistics show (petitt, women’s cattle). human-cattle relations have also emerged and evolved through historically-situated ethnic relations of power. three overarching “cultures“ predominate in the kalahari region: bantu speaking peoples of the batswana, bakgalagadi, and herero; the san (including nharo); and english and afrikaner of european descent (chebanne; kent; barnard). the historical importance of cattle for various ethnic groups is well documented, including the dominant batswana agro-pastoralists (schapera; schapera and comaroff) bakgalagadi agro-pastoralists (kuper; solway; solway et al.), herero pastoralists (vivelo; henrichsen; april et al.), english colonial elite (guldbrandsen), and afrikaner settlers (russell). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 150 batswana settled the area of contemporary botswana in the mid-1700s, after which time the economic production of the bakgalagadi and the indigenous san, including the nharo, was slowly disrupted (solway; guenther). unequal labor relations developed with differentiated cattle production distinguishing the san from the bakgalagadi. as relations between groups became increasingly asymmetrical, class relations formed (solway; guenther). herero people immigrated from south west africa (present-day namibia) after their uprising that suffered defeat against the german government in 1904, and gained a reputation of having great skills of cattle rearing (vivelo; lindholm). further, those of european descent secured control over boreholes and established surveyed, fenced, freehold cattle farms in the early mid-19th century on previously san (including nharo) held hunting grounds (russell). the san were dispossessed and many resorted to working as cattle hands for the english and afrikaner farmers (russell; russell and russell; guenther). ethnicity-based differences and inequalities regarding cattle have been shaped further by the capitalist transformation brought about by the increasing importance of trade relations with south africa and europe (solway; darkoh and mbaiwa; gulbrandsen; government botswana 2013). the early cattle trade with south africa favored large size cattle in large numbers, and the trade with eu also requires traceability measures in order to secure disease control, which is facilitated by private property rights. thus class relations further cemented and were increasingly mediated through the commercialised beef sector (government botswana 2013). notably, gender-based experiences with cattle across ethnicity are underexplored in existing scholarship (petitt, women’s cattle). before turning to address this gap, we provide methodological details of our ghanzi district study site, data collection and analytical approach. methodology. we draw on data collected through an ethnographic field study conducted by the first author in ghanzi district, botswana. the district is characterized by its remote location, harsh kalahari climate, and intensive cattle production (largely for export to the eu). its administrative center is the town of ghanzi, surrounded by ghanzi farms and charleshill sub-district. the former includes freehold fenced land owned primarily by those of afrikaner or english ethnicities as well as a major nharo settlement; the latter is largely communal grazing land inhabitated by batswana, bakgalagadi, herero, and nharo ethnic groups. nine months of fieldwork in 2013 included participant observation (bernard; adler and adler) of cattle and cattle-based activites throughout ghanzi district. semi-structured primary interviews (bernard) were conducted with forty women cattle owners selected andrea petitt and alice j. hovorka -women and cattle “becoming-with” in botswana 151 across six ethnic groups, namely batswana, bakgalagadi, nharo, herero, afrikaner, and english. purposive sampling was used to ensure inclusion of women keeping cattle across various ethnicities and contexts such as herd size, land tenure, and geographical locale. it emerged quickly that residents of ghanzi district referred to women amidst three loosely identified “traditions” of cattle practices: “english and afrikaner,” “herero” and “batswana and bakgalagadi.” women were interviewed from each of these traditions until no new themes of data emerged from interviews were reached, with nharo women included to expand the cross-sectional approach. in total forty women cattle owners were interviewed and fifty additional interviews were conducted with key informants such as extension officers, village chiefs, and government personnel. interviews were conducted in respondents’ language of choice and translated to english as warranted. a translator training workshop was held to ensure sensitivity to nuances of words and expressions related to both cattle and gender. formal interviews were recorded when possible and detailed notes were taken. interviews were transcribed and qualitative data were analysed thematically (malterud; giorgi). field notes from observations, informal interviews, and conversations were also analyzed thematically based on bernard’s approach, where the material is scanned to get a sense of themes emerging, reshuffled, and explored according to the themes. women becoming-with cattle across ethnic groups. the privileged status of cattle in botswana makes relations with cattle meaningful in ways that relations to other animals do not (hovorka, “women/chickens”). becoming-with cattle means becoming a real person (petitt, women’s cattle). importantly, becoming-with cattle in botswana is symbolically and materially manifested differently according to gender and ethnicity. specifically, intersectional dynamics result in some women becoming-with cattle by being without them (batswana, bakgalagadi, nharo); some become-with cattle by engaging indirectly with them (afrikaner, english); and some become-with cattle by engaging directly with them (herero). first, according to many ghanzi women interviewed: “cattle are for men.” they spoke of relations to cattle in terms of culture, tradition, and how things were in the past when women’s roles, rights, and expectations did not revolve around cattle. they brought forth the idea that women are “distant from cattle,” particularly within batswana, bakgalagadi, and nharo ethnicities (petitt, women’s cattle). across class segments, on both fenced and unfenced land, women’s domain is subsistence crop production and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 152 small stock farming. kagiso, a woman cattle owner, articulates this differential positionality: hereros are different from us [batswana], the women are more involved in cattle farming than the men are. it’s in their culture maybe […] i think they [afrikaner and english] are different from us, the batswana, the setswana speaking people, because they grew up with cattle […] the afrikaans speaking people grew up with cattle […] the children grew up on the farm […] we just grew around the home, our activities are just around the home, batswana women, and our children, our girls, their activities are just around the home, whereas our husbands, the men, the activities would be more at the cattle post and so forth. so the afrikaans speaking women would be more knowledgeable on cattle than us. (interview, 31 october 2013, ghanzi farms). thus batswana, bakgalagadi, and nharo (san) women are, from kagiso’s perspective, which was typical for the women interviewed, placed distant from cattle (and san men as low class laborers), as well as from the social status, political power, and economic wealth associated with these privileged animals. becoming-with cattle in ghanzi means that these women are in fact becoming-without cattle and afforded less benefits as a result. in a society where ownership of, control over, and knowledge about cattle is on a broader level key to social and economic status, becoming-without cattle (rather than just not having cattle) marks an othering, as well as fewer possibilities to achieve independent social and economic security. however, while women owning cattle in the statistics are often assumed to be widows, narratives emphasize their lack of choice and do not afford them status as “real farmers.” second, other ghanzi women interviewed spoke of their indirect proximity to cattle, primarily through their husbands’ relations to cattle and connection to farming activities. these women were often refered to, by others as well as themselves, as “farmers’ wives” and belonged primarily to afrikaner and english (“white”) ethnic groups (petitt, women’s cattle). these women spoke of growing up on farms in proximity to cattle and learning about cattle production. yet their own farm roles entail running errands, food purchasing and preparation, and staff management rather than activities associated with cattle. cattle are the domain of men in this context, with women playing a supporting role. as yolana, an afrikaner woman claimed: “there are not many young white women farming, but a lot of women are helping their husbands” (interview 4 december 2013, ghanzi town). another white, albeit english, woman cattle andrea petitt and alice j. hovorka -women and cattle “becoming-with” in botswana 153 owner, denise, suggested that the first author go out with her husband and adult son to watch the cattle work, as she was to spend the day doing administrative tasks for the farm. while she feels broadly involved in cattle production, hands-on cattle tasks are not for her but rather her husband’s and adult son’s domain. it should be noted that only on larger farms with many employed cattle-hands are these supporting tasks a full time occupation. as well as being tied to ethnicity, being a “farmers’ wife” is thus associated with higher class. third, another group of ghanzi women interviewed spoke of their direct proximity to cattle, primarily through the everyday practicalities of cattle farming despite ultimate control reserved for men (petitt, women’s cattle). these women belonged to the herero ethnic group, and were often referred to by others as an exception to the common storyline that cattle are men’s domain. while higher class herero families also hire manual labor, across class segments herero women primarily milk cows for subsistence, placing them in direct proximity to cattle and hands-on engagement via milking. as one herero woman, louisa, explained: “in our culture […] when we grow up, we grow up knowing that we are farmers, we always stay with cows” (interview 15 june 2013, south of charleshill village, translated). hilya, another woman, specified: “in our culture, herero women look after the home, food, things like that, but the kraal [cattle paddock] is for the man [...] in our culture, herero women look after the cattle, but can’t decide without talking to the man” (interview 16 june 2013, charleshill). yet, as kunouee confirmed: “women are involved in cattle farming, but more especially the herero, we are milking” (interview 3 june 2013, charleshill). indeed, herero women such as violet, dressed in a long dress and horned hat reflective of herero culture and custom, proudly explained and showed us the milking process and her cows. they thus become-with cattle through both symbolic and hands-on cattle work. in sum, women’s proximity to cattle in botswana, in terms of their access to, use of, control over, and benefits from cattle, is differentially manifested across ethnic lines. specifically, there are three ways that women are expected to become-with cattle in ghanzi district: by becoming-without them as part of batswana, bakgalagadi, and nharo ethnic groups (“distant” from cattle); by engaging indirectly with them as part of afrikaner and english ethnic groups (as “farmers’ wives”); and by engaging directly with them as part of the herero ethnic group (as “milkers”). this intersectional becoming-with must be taken into account in understanding women’s positionality within the cattle sector and how government policies and programming may be realized differentially according to gender and ethnicity. their engagement with cattle are dependent on ideas of what a (primarily married) woman should do in specific humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 154 ethnic groups and the details of cattle practices varies with class. importantly, however, one must recognize that women’s proximity to cattle irrespective of ethnicity is necessarily dependent upon, subordinate to, and inequitable relative to men’s. this warrants investigation as to how women across ethnic groups may be becoming-with cattle in non-traditional ways so as to improve their lot in life. we turn to this investigation in the following section. women becoming-with cattle across ethnic groups in non-traditional ways. ghanzi women are becoming-with cattle in ways that depart from traditional expectations of women across ethnic groups outlined above. hence, they are becomingwith cattle differently and pushing beyond roles, rights, and expectations associated with being distant from cattle, farmers’ wives, or milkers. they are forging for themselves new places in which to engage in cattle production and open up empowerment possibilities within the cattle sector. first, batswana, bakgalagadi, and nharo women interviewed are challenging their distance from cattle. for example, sarah claims that she feels “like a person” because she has cattle. she is a late thirty-something un-married nharo (san) woman with a partner and four children. she keeps a herd of five cattle on communal village grazing land in new xanahas, which she received through a government poverty alleviation program. sarah makes all cattle-related decisions herself and directs her son and another male relative to assist with cattle rearing as she cannot afford to hire a cattle hand. as a nharo woman, sarah feels empowered by having cattle. similarly, leano is a thirty-something mokgalagadi woman who recently bought two heifers that graze on her partner’s fenced grazing land in charleshill sub-district. she owns cattle in a way that specifically breaks with traditional gender roles: “[in the past] women took care of goats […] women were responsible for the household and men for the cattle” (interview 1 august 2013, charleshill village, translated). finally, masego is an un-married twentysomething mokgalakgadi woman with a herd of twenty cattle that she bought after receiving a ydf grant. she manages her cattle and lives near her cattle kraal; she knows how to care for them, she knows intimately their life histories and their personalities. however, she hires a male relative to do some of the daily manual labour. according to masego, this is something that women in her village could never have done in earlier times. she explains that “in the past, the women would take care of the fields […] and knew that the cattle were for men, not women.” today “a woman can stand for herself and have her own cattle” (interview 18 june 2013, south of charleshill village, translated). these three women all enjoy independent ownership of and control over their cattle; they decide how to run the herd, when and what cattle to sell and what to andrea petitt and alice j. hovorka -women and cattle “becoming-with” in botswana 155 do with the money. their cattle face similar restrictions and possibilities as cattle owned by men. however, restrictions and possibilities of cattle notably differs depending on fencing. second, afrikaner and english women interviewed are challenging the extent of their indirect engagement with cattle in ways that differ from expectations of “farmers’ wives” discussed above. for example, christine is a married afrikaner woman who has involved herself more thoroughly in herd management of her and her husband’s farmholding. she has also started and is in charge of a stud operation. christine is often found out by the cattle kraals, proudly overseeing the herd. she sees her engagement with cattle as different from that of other white women: “the women don’t understand why. because i go in the vehicle with the guys and look at the cattle, and the women ask me, ‘why do you do that?’ […] they don’t think i am well [pointing to her head, laughing]” (interview 5 august 2013, ghanzi town). christine has control of the cattle and their production, as well as a close physical connection to cattle on a daily basis. she is thus becoming-with cattle differently among the afrikaner and english ethnic groups. likewise, annelies is a married afrikaner woman in her forties who decided to have her own cattle. in contrast to christine, her husband is not a cattle farmer, but a plumber, and annelies runs the whole cattle operation singlehandedly. after being gifted a piece of freehold land from her father she successfully applied for a ceda loan with which she could buy her cattle. annelies, like christine, sees herself as an exception among white women in ghanzi, but explains that having her own cattle had been a dream of hers: “i have always wanted to farm, that’s why i came back to ghanzi, i love farming” (interview 25 oct 2013, ghanzi farms). third, herero women interviewed are challenging the extent of their direct engagement with cattle beyond milking. for example, tjavanga, a young, married herero woman explains: “i manage this cattle post and my husband manages the other. we are two heads of the family” (interview 3 june 2013, charleshill village). as joint head-ofhousehold, tjavanga’s engagement with cattle has moved beyond only milking to herd management, ownership, and control. further, gendere, a herero widow who owned her own cattle, pointed to a way for herero widows to access cattle more actively. in the past, she explained, cattle of a deceased man would go to a male relative and the family would stay together and support each other. today, however, due to changes in family bonds, herero widows are taking control over the the herds of their late husbands: “the difference these days is that women have to stand up when the borehole is broken, and take care of things themselves — it’s the life of today. you have to take care of yourself” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 156 (interview 12 june 2013, north of charleshill village, translated). however, cattle care seemingly does not change in any noticeable way with the shift in gendered ownership. in sum, what sarah, leano, masego, christine, annelies, tjavanga, and gendere have in common is that their becoming-with cattle differs from traditional or mainstream positionalities of women in relation to cattle to their specific ethnic group. indeed, these are women forging new ways (such as independent ownership and management) and places (such as kraals and markets) in which to engage more thoroughly with cattle specifically and the cattle sector more broadly. doing so reflects women’s efforts to be less subordinate to, less dependent on, and more equal to men irrespective of ethnicity, while the possible paths to do so are shaped by intersections of gender and ethnicity. importantly, however, women’s proximity to cattle relative to men’s must be contextualized within broader political economic trends in the cattle sector (especially as related to commercialization and class relations of power), as well as related to the ways that cattle are becoming-with humans in botswana. we turn to these dynamics in the following section. cattle becoming-with women through class-based dynamics. gender and ethnicity clearly matter for how women become-with cattle in traditional and in “new” ways in botswana. at the same time, these becomings are situated within broader dynamics related to the political economy (especially related to commercialization of the cattle sector) and class relations of power (especially related to elite, powerful men who establish ultimate access to, use of, and control over cattle and the sector itself). these broader political-economic and class-based dynamics in turn matter to how cattle become-with humans (in other words, how cattle become who they are in botswana and what that means for the humans with which they engage). this stretches our intersectional storyline further: while gender and ethnicity matter to how women become-with cattle on a local scale, class, mediated through material relations integral to the commercialized cattle sector, matters to more broad scale human-cattle relations and cattle becoming-with humans. these broader class dynamics are also reflected in how cattle on a local scale become-with humans, and in this case women, in both material and symbolic ways. we explore these dynamics below. out of the forty women cattle owners interviewed, twenty-six had independent control over their cattle, seven had joint control with their husbands, and seven had no control over cattle production (petitt, women’s cattle 150). these cattle (along with other cattle owned or handled by women in botswana) are becoming-with women. these women span six ethnicities and various class segments, grazing their cattle on fenced land or andrea petitt and alice j. hovorka -women and cattle “becoming-with” in botswana 157 communal land. class dynamics associated with the contemporary cattle sector shape cattle becoming-with humans in ghanzi and botswana more broadly. the government of botswana’s push for income-generating, export-oriented, high-quality cattle production means that cattle lives are mediated through spatial controls, breeding programs, and marketing channels; these are differently available to people of different classes and thus their cattle. in terms of spatial controls, women — through direct engagement or mediated through employed labor and technology — determine cattle access to food and water as part of a rearing regimen. cattle spend most of their time grazing, ruminating, and drinking, and they move between grazing lands, water stations (cattle posts), and home kraals on a daily or weekly basis. fences are arguably the most efficient way for farmers to control cattle movement and reproductive activities, as well as for ensureing that soil and grasses regenerate sustainably. within a cattle sector impacted by drought and traceability regulations, fences ensure privileged access to grass and water as well as the control needed to optimize production and sales (petitt, women’s cattle). according to eu regulations, cattle kept on unfenced grazing land are required to stay in a fenced area for at least forty days to ensure that traceability requirements aimed at disease management are upheld (european commission). as building fences requires funds and can only be erected on privately held land, fences are linked to class and ethnicity in ghanzi. how cattle can roam, eat, and drink are thus shaped by class relations based on a commercialized cattle sector. cattle are becoming-with women whose ownership and control of infrastructure and mobility shapes the everyday experiences of the cattle. in terms of breeding programs, exotic cattle varietals are privileged relative to the traditional tswana breed in the contemporary cattle sector on account of their mobility, grazing needs, growth rates, and climate adaptability. with high cattle mobility, cattle roaming leads to breeding with neighboring herds of different breeds. the next generation of cattle then embody property rights of others across the landscape, and the investment of a bull is for the owner lost to the neighboring herd. with fenced grazing land breeding is controlled and limited to a specific herd. class relations thus shape the way that cattle breed and the bodies of next generations. while farmers with fenced land also keep mixed breeds, cattle on these lands do not have the same possibilities to choose for themselves when and whom to breed with. cattle on communal grazing land in small herds are sometimes artificially inseminated (made possible with government support) with a breed of the farmer’s choice, but reproductive attempts at other times with or without calves as consequences is still within reach for these cattle. the ability to purchase and rear a specific breed is class-related (petitt, women’s cattle). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 158 cattle are becoming-with women whose access to technology and property shapes cattle breeding practices and outcomes. in terms of marketing channels, access to a vehicle to drive cattle to the abattoir is classed, given the costs involved to purchase or rent this resource. this means that cattle kept by farmers of lower class are more likely to be herded by foot to a cattle market and from there either be driven directly to the abattoir or first to feedlots acting as mediators. cattle reared by higher class farmers are, in contrast, loaded on big trucks at their farms and driven straight to the abattoir. moreover, farmers from higher classes are more likely to have direct contact with buyers, and their cattle are less likely to suffer the dire consequences of a delayed market day, such as long hours without grass or water, and the double stress of travelling back and forth to the market twice. in short, class dynamics manifested within enhanced cattle commercialization shape how cattle are becoming-with women cattle owners in ghanzi, and people more broadly, in botswana through spatial controls, breeding programs, and marketing channels. ultimately, cattle themselves are spatially controlled, specifically bred, and kept in market-oriented production systems, and they wield substantive power and clout for women. the experiences of cattle, their relations to their surroundings, and their bodies are shaped by human relations of class. further research is needed to compare if and how cattle become-with women and men cattle owners differently. in existing scholarship on botswana ethnicity tends to come out as an explanatory factor for differences in cattle production, but in our data class stands out as most salient. coming full circle, cattle becoming-with humans through class relations of power mediated through commercialization of the cattle industry have implications for women across ethnic groups and how their becoming-with(out) cattle in traditional and non-traditional ways may be impacted. we offer our thoughts on these issues in our final section below. conclusion. our paper explores intersectional human-cattle relations in contemporary botswana within the context of enhanced commercialization. processes of commercialization have generated new configurations of cattle based on breeding, mobility, and markets, and new opportunities for women especially to connect with cattle across ethnicity-based contexts. grounded in haraway’s concept of multispecies “becoming-with” and drawing on indepth ethnographic field work in ghanzi district, we illustrate how women’s positionality in the cattle sector both reproduces and challenges gender and ethnic social norms that render women subordinate to men in their roles, rights, and expectations regarding cattle. particularly, intersectional andrea petitt and alice j. hovorka -women and cattle “becoming-with” in botswana 159 dynamics result in specific expectations on different women’s relation to cattle, as well as women’s symbolic and material reproduction of these so that some women are becoming-with cattle by becoming-without them (batswana, bakgalagadi, nharo); by engaging indirectly with them (afrikaner, english); and by engaging directly with them (herero). this highlights how species is relevant to the intersectionality of power relations of gender, ethnicity and class even when human and cattle are not interlinked. thus, humans can “become-with” another species through particular intersections of power relations by an explicit lack of engagement with that species. at the same time, women are becoming-with cattle in non-traditional ways, forging new empowerment possibilities in the cattle sector by addressing their distance from cattle, their labeling as farmers’ wives, or their roles as milkers, respectively. we also illustrate that cattle are becoming-with women in ways that extend beyond gender and ethnicity dynamics to class-based dynamics of the cattle sector. our findings illustrate how cattle are spatially controlled, specifically bred, and kept in market-oriented production systems, which in turn shape people’s access to, ownership of, and control over them. it is well documented that while women across africa are engaged in a number of cattle-related tasks, their control over cattle in settings of increased commercialization is often limited (dahl; talle; curry; hodgson; njuki and sanginga). in botswana, however, our findings suggest that enhanced commercialization of the cattle sector offer opportunities for women across ethnic groups to challenge longstanding traditions of gender relations to cattle. hence it is through “new” cattle — created materially and discursively through the commercialized cattle production systems defined by class relations — that women at the local scale must become-with to challenge norms and become-with cattle in “new” ways. different breeds have different temperaments and the cattle bodies shaped by variations in access to grass, water, and breeding define their possibilities to successfully engage in the commercial cattle sector. cattle-human relations at a broader level thus matter to women-cattle relations on a local and individual level. the way that cattle are becoming-with women cattle owners, directly or mediated through hired labor and/or technology, is most visibly shaped by class. in turn, the way that women are becoming-with cattle differently across ethnicities might affect the classed, gendered and racialized character of commercial cattle industry at a broader level. throughout this paper, we have thus shown how “becoming-with” of women and cattle in botswana is intersectional. we thus encourage other scholars to explore interspecies relations in other contexts with an intersectional becoming-with frame. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 160 to conclude, women-cattle relations are shaped by intersections of human relations of power. in the co-shaping of species, haraway underlines, actual animals and actual people are engaged in “always asymmetrical living and dying, nurturing and killing” (haraway, species 42). in the case of women and cattle of the kalahari in botswana, not only are the relations of becoming-with asymmetrical in a practical sense of power inequalities, but also in what intersections of (interspecies) power relations that primarily and most visibly define who, how, and what humans and animals becomewith. whereas gender and ethnicity are primary relations for how women become-with cattle, it is class that most visibly defines how cattle become-with women. as such, the becoming-with of women and cattle in ghanzi, and of humans and cattle in botswana, is intersectional, but asymmetrically so. the ways in which gendered ownership and daily caretaking might affect the ways that cattle become-with men and women differently is, still, a matter for future research. moreover, exploring the way that cattle agency might impact and contribute to the reproduction of human class relations could provide new insights to discussions of the intersectional becoming-with of humananimal relations in agriculture. works cited adler, patricia. a. and adler, peter. “observational techniques.” handbook of qualitative research. norman k. denzin and yvonna s. lincoln, eds. sage, 1994. 377-392. april, wilfred isak, boniface mutumba, and petrus erwee. “exploring entrepreneurship amongst the herero people in namibia: the otjinene village.” international journal of business administration 5.4 (2014): 70. arora-jonsson, seema. “forty years of gender research and environmental policy: where do we stand?” women's studies international forum 47.b (2014): 295-308. barnard, alan. “nharo bushman medicine and medicine men.” africa 49.1 (1979): 68-80. ballard, roger. “race, ethnicity and culture.” new directions in sociology. martin holborn, ed. causeway, 2002. bernard, h. russell. research methods in anthropology: qualitative and quantitative approaches. rowman altamira, 2011. andrea petitt and alice j. hovorka -women and cattle “becoming-with” in botswana 161 birke, lynda, mette bryld, and nina lykke. “animal performances an exploration of intersections between feminist science studies and studies of human/animal relationships.” feminist theory 5.2 (2004): 167-183. bolt, jutta, and ellen hillbom. “social structures and income distribution in colonial sub-saharan africa: the case of bechuanaland protectorate 1936-1964.” lund papers in economic history. development economics 130 (2013). 1-31. brown, barbara b.. “the impact of male labour migration on women in botswana.” african affairs 82.328 (1983): 367-388. butler, judith. the psychic life of power: theories in subjection. stanford up, 1997. chebanne, andy monthusi. “a sociolinguistic perspective of the indigenous communities of botswana.” african study monographs 29.3 (2008): 93-118. collins, patricia hill. black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment. unwin hyman, 1990. comaroff, jean, and john l. comaroff. “how beasts lost their legs: cattle in tswana economy and society.” herders, warrior and traders: pastoralism in africa. john t. galaty and pierre bonte, eds. westview, 1991. 33-61. connell, robert william, and raewyn connell. masculinities. u california p, 2005. crenshaw, kimberle. “mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color.” stanford law review 43.6 (1991): 1241-1299. curry, john. “gender and livestock in african production systems: an introduction.” human ecology 24.2 (1996): 149-160. dahl, gudrun. “women in pastoral production: some theoretical notes on roles and resources.” ethnos 52.1-2 (1987): 246-279. darkoh, michael b.k., and joseph e. mbaiwa. “globalisation and the livestock industry in botswana.” singapore journal of tropical geography 23.2 (2002): 149-166. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 162 deckha, maneesha. “intersectionality and posthumanist visions of equality.” wisconsin journal of law, gender & society 23.2 (2009): 249-267. department of agricultural planning and statistics (daps). gender equity and access to economic opportunities in agriculture in botswana. gaborone, ministry of agriculture, government of botswana, 1997. european commission. commission regulation (eu) no 206/2010 of 12 march 2010 laying down lists of third countries, territories or parts thereof authorised for the introduction into the european union of certain animals and fresh meat and the veterinary certification requirements. official journal of the european union, 2010. online. geiger, martha, and alice j. hovorka. “animal performativity: exploring the lives of donkeys in botswana.” environment and planning d: society and space 33.6 (2015): 10981117. giorgi, amedeo. “sketch of a psychological phenomenological method.” phenomenology and psychological research. amedeo giorgi, ed. duquesne up, 1985. 8-22. government of botswana. 2012 annual agricultural survey report. statistics botswana. ministry of agriculture. government of botswana, ministry of agriculture. gaborone. online. government of botswana. final report of the special select committee of inquiry on the botswana meat commission and the decline of the cattle industry, february-august 2013. parliamentary special select committee. government of botswana. government printer gaborone, 2013. government of botswana. national development plan 9 2003/4-2008/9. government of botswana. ministry of finance and development planning, gaborone, botswana, 2005. guenther, mathias. “why racial paternalism and not genocide? the case of the ghanzi bushmen of bechuanaland.” genocide on settler frontiers: when hunter-gatherers and commercial stock farmers clash. mohamed adhikari, ed. berghahn, 2015. 134-158. gulbrandsen, ørnulf. the state and the social: state formation in botswana and its precolonial and colonial genealogies. berghahn, 2012. andrea petitt and alice j. hovorka -women and cattle “becoming-with” in botswana 163 haraway, donna j. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. duke up, 2016. _____. when species meet. u of minnesota press, 2008. henrichsen, dag. “establishing a precolonial ‘modern’ cattle-and-gun society.” pastoralism in africa: past, present and future. m. bollig, m. schnegg, and h.-p. wotzka, eds. berghahn, 2013: 201-229. hodgson, dorothy l. “pastoralism, patriarchy and history: changing gender relations among maasai in tanganyika, 1890–1940.” the journal of african history 40.01 (1999): 4165. hooks, bell. feminist theory: from margin to center. south end press, 1984. hovorka, alice j. “the gender, place and culture jan monk distinguished annual lecture: feminism and animals: exploring interspecies relations through intersectionality, performativity and standpoint.” gender, place & culture 22.1 (2015): 119. _____. “women/chickens vs. men/cattle: insights on gender–species intersectionality.” geoforum 43.4 (2012): 875-884. eriksen, thomas hylland. “the cultural contexts of ethnic differences.” man, new series 26.1 (1991): 127-144. kalabamu, faustin. “women’s inclusion and exclusion from property ownership in botswana.” promoting social inclusion in urban areas: policies and practice, 6th n-aerus conference, housing development & management, lund institute of technology, lund university, sweden. 2005. kent, susan. “interethnic encounters of the first kind: an introduction.” ethnicity, hunter-gatherers, and the other: association and assimilation in africa. smithsonian institution press, 2002. 1-27. kuper, adam. kalahari village politics: an african democracy. cambridge up, 1970 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 164 lien, marianne elisabeth. becoming salmon: aquaculture and the domestication of a fish. u california p, 2015. lindholm, karl-johan. wells of experience: a pastoral land-use history of omaheke, namibia. diss. studies in global archaeology 9. department of archaeology and ancient history, uppsala university, 2006. malterud, kirsti. kvalitativa metoder i medicinsk forskning. studentlitteratur, lund, 1998. mapitse, neo. transboundary animal disease and market access: future options for the beef industry in southern africa. working paper 3. institute of development studies, brighton, uk, 2008. mbaiwa, joseph e., and onaletshepho i. mbaiwa. “the effects of veterinary fences on wildlife populations in okavango delta, botswana.” international journal of wilderness 12 (2006): 17-41. mccall, leslie. “the complexity of intersectionality.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 30.3 (2005): 1771-1800. minow, martha. not only for myself: identity, politics, and the law. new press, 1997. mohanty, chandra talpade. “under western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses.” feminist review 30 (1988): 61-88. mohanty, chandra talpade, ann russo, and lourdes torres. third world women and the politics of feminism. indiana up, 1991. must, erin, and alice j. hovorka. “‘what’s in a name’: implications of women’s cattle ownership for transformative gender mainstreaming in botswana.” journal of gender, agriculture and food security 2.3 (2017): 84-105. nightingale, andrea. “the nature of gender: work, gender, and environment.” environment and planning d: society and space 24.2 (2006): 165-185. njuki, jemimah, and pascal sanginga. “gender and livestock: key issues, challenges and opportunities.” women, livestock ownership and markets. jemimah njuki and pascal sanginga, eds. routledge, 2013. 1-8. andrea petitt and alice j. hovorka -women and cattle “becoming-with” in botswana 165 ortner, sherry b. anthropology and social theory: culture, power, and the acting subject. duke up, 2006. peters, pauline e. “struggles over water, struggles over meaning: cattle, water and the state in botswana.” africa 54.03 (1984): 29-49. petitt, andrea. “cowboy masculinities in human-animal relations on a cattle ranch.” elore 20 (2013): 67-82. _____. women’s cattle ownership in botswana. rebranding gender relations? doctoral thesis no. 2016:35. (published). department of urban and rural development. faculty of natural resources and agricultural sciences, swedish university of agricultural sciences, uppsala: acta universitatis agricultruae sueciae. 2016. ransom, elizabeth. “botswana’s beef global commodity chain: explaining the resistance to change.” journal of rural studies 27.4 (2011): 431-439. russell, margo. “slaves or workers? relations between bushmen, tswana, and boers in the kalahari.” journal of southern african studies 2.2 (1976): 178-197. russell, margo, and martin russell. afrikaners of the kalahari: white minority in a black state. cambridge up, 1979. schapera, isaac. a handbook of tswana law and custom. compiled for the bechuanaland protectorate administration. oxford up, 1938. schapera, isaac and comaroff, john. l. the tswana. 1953. international african institute, 1991. solway, jacqueline s. commercialization and social differentiation in a kalahari village, botswana. diss. university of toronto, 1988. solway, jacqueline s., et al. “foragers, genuine or spurious?: situating the kalahari san in history [and comments and reply].” current anthropology 31.2 (1990): 109-146. statistics botswana. 2017 annual agricultural survey report, 2019. online. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 166 talle, aud. women at a loss: changes in maasai pastoralism and their effects on gender relations. stockholm studies in social anthropology, dept. of social anthropology, university of stockholm, 1988. valentine, gill. “theorizing and researching intersectionality: a challenge for feminist geography.” the professional geographer 59.1 (2007): 10-21. van allen, judith. “feminism and social democracy in botswana.” socialism and democracy 21.3 (2007): 97-124. vivelo, frank robert. the herero of western botswana: aspects of change in a group of bantu-speaking cattle herders. west publishing company, 1977. walby, sylvia, jo armstrong, and sofia strid. “intersectionality: multiple inequalities in social theory.” sociology 46.2 (2012): 224-240. wilmsen, edwin n. land filled with flies: a political economy of the kalahari. u of chicago p, 1989. wilmsen, edwin n., and rainer vossen. “labour, language and power in the construction of ethnicity in botswana.” critique of anthropology 10.1 (1990): 7-37. microsoft word granjou-mauz-pdf-jgr h u m a n i m a l i a 6:2 reviews céline granjou horns, fangs, and people isabelle mauz, gens, cornes et crocs. paris: cemagref, cirad, ifremer, inra, 2005. 255p. € 25.40 pb; € 16.99 pdf; € 16.99 e-pub. isabelle mauz is a french sociologist with a background in agronomy and forestry; she works at the research institute for environment and agriculture (irstea) in grenoble, and has published a number of scientific articles in environmental and animal studies, especially on protected areas’ history. the book she published in 2005 presents her sociological research on the relationships between mountain people, chamois, and ibex in the vanoise french national park at the time of the return of wolves to the french alps in the 1990s. mauz carried out more than one hundred interviews with hunters, farmers, tourism professionals, local inhabitants, park managers, scientists, and environmental activists, backed up with participant observation of activities involving people and animals, including hunting, farming, and nature conservation. she is herself an alpine inhabitant. scrutinizing concrete and situated entanglements of humans and animals, mauz documents the ubiquitous presence of animals in people’s lives and shows convincingly humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 156 the role they play in shaping biographies, knowledge, and history. written a couple of years after latour’s innovative insights into the proliferation of bio-social “hybrid” entanglements1 and two years before haraway’s influential book on multispecies entanglements,2 her book can be considered a forerunner of multispecies ethnography. while it is not available in english translation, her work is of interest not only to scholars in animal studies but also to wildlife managers, hunters, and farmers, as well as to everyone interested in the history of mountain societies. the style of writing is especially lively, easy, and accurate at the same time, making the book truly enjoyable. introduction. wolves were exterminated in france and completely disappeared from 1930-1940 onwards. when some wolves were observed in the southern alps in mercantour national park in 1992 for the first time after this long period of absence, they were applauded by environmentalists and denounced by farmers’ representatives. since then wolves have progressively re-colonized the french alps, causing some damage to sheep herds and triggering political measures in an attempt to reconcile the predators’ presence with the mountain farmers’ activities. mauz began her inquiry in the northern alps in the vanoise national park at a time when there were no wolves in the area. she was then able to document how the return of the wolves disturbed and reshaped the previous entanglements of mountain people and mountain animals (ibex and chamois), as well as her own research work. part i. human worlds and wild animals. drawing on the results of the inquiry, mauz distinguishes between two groups of people that are also two social worlds. the first group is composed of farmers, hunters, and the former vanoise park managers. these people spoke in terms of nature and distinguished between wild nature and domesticated nature. drawing on personal memory and older relatives’ stories, they explained that wildlife was becoming less and less wild, while domestic animals were becoming wilder and wilder. they recalled, for instance, that people, sheep, and cattle no longer stayed in the same house as they once used to; they remarked that today, when cattle and sheep have been grazing for many weeks in mountain pastures during summer, approaching them has become very challenging. they also noted that ibex and chamois do not hesitate to come and stand close to people and to the people’s houses. this group of people expressed the view that there is currently more and more wildlife, but that wild and domestic animals are in fact less and less different. the second group includes scientists, environmental activists, and the more recently arrived park managers. they spoke in terms of the environment and distinguished between the natural environment and the artificial one. drawing on personal memory, scientific literature, and the media, they argued that nature has been constantly deteriorating cèline granjou – “horns, fangs, and people” 157 since a remote golden age, when there were only a few hunter-gatherer people and plenty of wildlife. only very recently has there been improvement linked to wildlife protection measures, so that fauna and flora have slightly rebounded. mauz found that chamois and ibex were markers with which people apprehend history and the world they live in. people explained that the first time they saw for instance a chamois standing near their pastures was for them the beginning of a new era, in which wildlife was no longer really wild. for both groups of people animals mark a dynamic of decline, but for different reasons: decline due to nature (livestock) becoming wilder and wilder according to the first group, and to a dynamic of degradation of the environment according to the second. strikingly, the interviewees spoke at the same time of their own life events and of changes in ibex and chamois population and behaviors. animals play an important role for people in building their biographies. men discussed for instance how participating in chamois hunts marked different steps and shifts in their lives, from their childhood when they listened to their fathers’ stories of the hunt, to the first time they went hunting and then became very good at hunting, up to the end of their lives when they only watched chamois from the village. in the same way, the farmers’ life stories were entangled with changes in dealing with cattle: most farmers claimed that today they no longer take enough care of their animals, suggesting a tendency to idealize the past. mauz found that talking about chamois and ibex also allowed people to claim a mountain identity, to make judgments, and to produce social ordering. for instance, hunters told her that hunting was an opportunity to assess and criticize other hunters’ skills (i.e. their ability to walk quickly and easily in the mountains, their ability to put themselves in the place of the chamois, and think like them) and to value their own skills. furthermore, hunting chamois is an important way for men to affirm their differences from women, who are not supposed to participate in hunting. hunting also allows hunters to affirm themselves as field experts of animals, in comparison with academic experts on animals. mauz provides another example about ibex: while the former park managers were first and foremost committed to protecting ibex, for the new managers ibex is but one of the many species to be protected, and they criticize their older colleagues for having devoted too much effort to ibex to the detriment of other species. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 158 mauz argues that animals not only express the distinctions between mountain people and the people they consider as strangers (including people from the nearest village), former and new park managers, men and women, field and academic experts: animals also play an active role in producing these distinctions and in making them obvious and long-lasting. for instance, seeing and getting close to a chamois is more challenging than seeing and getting close to an ibex: that is why chamois hunting, more than ibex hunting plays an important role in defining mountain people’s identity. part ii. the wolves’ arrival. the second part of the book addresses the return of wolves in the vanoise national park from 1997 onwards. the return of wolves affected the two former groups and tended to blur boundaries. while the first group considered wolves as a most violent and savage animal, the second one considered them as an emblem for biodiversity and environmental protection. consequently, when the return of wolves was disclosed, it triggered a strong clash between people who supported their return and considered it to be a success for biodiversity protection, and people who saw it as a major issue for farmers and sheep or even as a conspiracy set up by ecologists. there were wolves’ promoters and wolves’ despisers, and extreme and moderate opinions among each of the two former social worlds. wolves put the distinction between the natural and the artificial environment into question: for instance, should one consider the wolves that were suddenly back in the alps after a long absence as being more “natural” than the farmers’ sheep? and they also put the distinction between wild and domesticated nature into question. as wolves had attacked and killed sheep, doubts were raised over the farmers’ practices: were they taking enough care of their sheep? in order to manage wolves and sheep together, people and animals were led to tinker, to innovate, and to learn new ideas and practices. for instance, farmers had to learn to use guard dogs, while guard dogs had to learn to live with sheep, and sheep to live with guard dogs. conclusion. as a conclusion, mauz stresses that the return of wolves created disorder and put an end to the fragile balance between the two former groups; but it also triggered new exchanges and dialogue between people, as well as a dynamic of coproduction of new management practices. she argues that the coexistence of groups and visions is definitely better than the domination of one of them, as coexistence means social diversity and political pluralism. the notions of diversity and pluralism are indeed at the heart of mauz’s research work: documenting peoples’ opinions and stories in a very accurate way, she makes clear that there is no point trying to cèline granjou – “horns, fangs, and people” 159 distinguish between belief and knowledge, because the boundary is in fact thin and porous. she thinks it more important to document the plurality of opinions and to enable the reader to understand their various rationales. strikingly, mauz also endeavors to pay attention to animals’ characteristics in a similar way as to people’s characteristics. she provides the reader with descriptions of the animals’ biology and behaviors, stressing for instance how, unlike wild bears and lynxes, wolves tend to come very close to the people’s houses, they have a specific way of killing their prey, in a specific manner. yet mauz explicitly claims not to do biology, but rather to pay attention to people and their words. her book is about a number of lively stories in which hunters watch chamois, approach them, kill them, prepare and eat the meat, as well as about more unexpected stories like the story of a hunter who was used to making tattoos of his preys on his skin, the story of inhabitants who built an ibex sculpture in the center of the village, or the story of a couple who disagreed on the taste of chamois meat. isabelle mauz above all demonstrates how much people can tell about animals if you ask them and are ready to listen to them. notes 1. bruno latour, politics of nature. how to bring the sciences into democracy. trans. by catherine porter. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1999; bruno latour, we have never been modern. [1991]. trans. by catherine porter. cambridge, ma: harvard up, harvard, 1993. 2. donna j. haraway, when species meet (posthumanities). minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2007. microsoft word blokhuis-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 9:2 mari zetterqvist blokhuis the praxis of horse riding – an autoethnographic study darwin (photo: h.j. blokhuis) a good rider can hear his horse speak to him. a great rider can hear his horse whisper. unknown may 15, 2016. my horse darwin and i are out on a ride together in the early morning. we walk up a hill that leads into the woods, and darwin lowers his head and pushes forward to produce power. his body feels stiff this morning and so does mine. darwin’s ears are pricked forward as he walks with short steps, a bit hesitant. i feel his back muscles moving beneath me. his coat shines in the sun and his mane moves out from his neck and back again in the rhythm of his walk. sometimes his ears go back, as if asking me what i have in mind. he makes small sighs, blowing air out of his nostrils with each or every second step, and i interpret this as a sign that he enjoys the ride but at the same time is a bit excited. i just let him carry me along, keeping the reins half stretched. apart from the birds singing, it is completely still in the woods. the smell is fresh and darwin chews on the bit and moves in a steady rhythm, gradually beginning to relax his back muscles, and his movements begin to feel more supple. my body adopts the rhythm of the horse as he takes me along the path. after a while darwin starts taking larger and more determined steps. my breathing gets slower. the surrounding forest seems to disappear and my consciousness is dimmed as all kinds of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 48 unreflective thoughts circle in my head. we move flesh-to-flesh, our bodies merge and i don´t know where darwin’s body starts and mine ends. through my boots i feel his legs moving and i perceive his contact with the ground. his legs become like an extension of my legs and i can feel what he feels. his breath moves his chest in and out and i adjust my breath to his. i pick up his emotions and mood by watching the position of his ears and by taking up the energy of his movements. darwin responds to my signs and frame of mind through his sensitive body. even if feeling relaxed, a core of attention derived from prior experience is still present in my body, since darwin can easily jump to the side from a sudden sound of a bird or a leaf moving in the wind. darwin and i arrive back at the riding hall. with me still sitting atop him, we walk in and i collect the reins. i start riding in a rising trot, rising from the saddle every second stride. i apprehend the direction, listen to the rhythm of darwin’s hoofs hitting the ground, and feel him moving under me. the touch of my legs urges him to go forward, while the squeezing of the reins with my hands asks him not to move too fast. at the same time, i reflect on his current movements and compare them with how he usually feels. how is his rhythm and speed? are his movements supple or stiff? does he activate his back muscles? i pick up the feedback that i get from darwin’s body. he increases his speed and trots a bit faster, which leads him to lose his balance, and i try to slow him down using my voice and by moving my hips at a slower pace. i canter two rounds and then change rein, cantering two more rounds. moving in a nice three-beat rhythm, darwin’s ears are placed forward. i feel the power in his movements but he is still attentive to my signs. i concentrate on being balanced and relaxed. as i watch our direction, i also attend to my body, trying to keep my shoulders upright, my neck relaxed, my elbows close to my sides, and my breath lingering. my body adapts to darwin’s movements as he moves me back and forth in the rhythm of the canter and i try to disturb his movements as little as possible. when i say “ptroo” he immediately slows down to trot and i continue in a rising trot feeling his back muscles moving me up and down. i take a break and walk a few rounds on long reins while planning my next actions. darwin feels cooperative and relaxed now. i feel relaxed too. i decide to work on halfpass1 and begin by riding on a circle in the left rein in a sitting trot; i notice that i sometimes lose contact with my right seat bone in the saddle when riding to the left, so i quickly adjust my position. i feel darwin in response activating his right hind leg and placing it further under his body. this correction makes my hips and darwin’s hips parallel on the track. i change my body position to make it possible for us to move mari zetterqvist blokhuis -the praxis of horse riding – an autoethnographic study 49 together in a good balance and with our bodies moving in mutual harmony. the contact between my hands and darwin’s mouth is soft and light. riding on a left-hand circle (photo: h.j. blokhuis) i change rein and feel darwin increasing his force as he tries to raise his speed, taking longer steps and pushing forward towards the bit. i close my fingers gently around the reins and he slows down again keeping his two-beat rhythm. i concentrate to turn my upper body and use my leading inside rein to make him follow the track of the circle but i lose the nice feeling that i had. during short movements it feels okay, but only when i concentrate really hard. when will i ever learn to control my body? deciding to try half-pass in canter, i start with one round in left canter while keeping a good speed and rhythm. darwin snorts in every step and i feel his heart pounding through my boots. i adjust my weight and legs, placing myself in a position close to darwin’s point of gravity, and darwin reacts by putting more weight on his hind legs and moving his hindquarters forward and at the same time to the side in a nice halfpass. the contact with his mouth gets lighter and it feels like his front part raises up a bit from the ground. for a short moment, we are part of the same movement and it is a great experience, a feeling of synchronicity. my body feels like it is being carried on a cloud and our bodies move smoothly together without any resistance. i repeat the half-pass once more, riding straight out saying “good boy,” relaxing my hands and giving darwin longer reins to praise him for good work. then i slow down to walk on long reins, allowing him to stretch his neck and get his breath down. i feel his whole body relaxing. as darwin walks i prepare my body for riding half-pass to the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 50 right. when picking up the reins i ask him to bend his neck a little bit and to relax in his inner side; darwin protests by moving his head a bit up and down. how can this be so difficult? i place myself in a good position for right canter and ask him to canter and try a half-pass to the right. first it does not work at all and i realize that my gaze needs to be directed more towards where we are heading. i also feel that darwin drifts to the left, not being attentive to my outside leg. i try to be clearer with my leading right rein aid and i need to keep my right leg more steady towards his sides to be able to control the movements of his inner leg. is this movement too difficult for darwin? does he understand what i want from him? i change the position of my body, trying the exercise once again. suddenly, i feel how darwin reacts to the changes in my body; he moves a few steps in a nice half-pass. again we move together as one body and it is a very good feeling. i feel darwin’s energy and the power in his movements as he takes me along and helps me by being an active part in our relation. i repeat the exercise once more and finish our ride in trot asking darwin to stretch his head and neck forward-downward. introduction. horses and horse riding have been a lifelong passion for me. in this article, i will argue that to improve the interaction between rider and horse a constant communication involving both actors is essential. using my own experience from many years of riding and teaching rider-horse combinations, i will apply theories of practical knowledge to explore the praxis of horse riding. i aim to describe, interpret, and analyze, what is happening between rider and horse when riding. more specifically, i will address the following questions: what is the goal of riding for me? how do i interact with the horse when riding? what is the role of emotions and “equestrian feel” in my riding? how do i reflect on the interaction between me and my horse while riding? my interpretations of the interspecies interaction between my horse and myself are built on personal experiences and reflections, and i will be careful with my interpretations of what my horse thinks or feels. in this paper, i will focus on the discipline of sport dressage, an olympic discipline, where rider and horse perform certain sets of movements in specific gaits and tempos whilst being evaluated by appointed referees. practical knowledge is defined as knowledge that is based on practical activity, as for instance driving a car or playing an instrument, and could be described as “knowledge in use” that is demonstrated in the “doing” (hjertström lappalainen 7). in practical knowledge, our knowing is situated mainly in the body and is learned by experience (pröckl 7). however, it includes not only the skill, but also the ethical decision of how to act, and is always related to a particular activity. this means that apart from being able mari zetterqvist blokhuis -the praxis of horse riding – an autoethnographic study 51 to master a specific practice, a person should be able to act wisely and responsibly (svenaeus 22-23). in this article, i will explore my own practical knowledge of riding my horse darwin. darwin and i have known each other for about eight years. when i started riding him he was six years old and basically educated by his former owner. however, he could only be ridden by skilled riders, since he is a sensitive and lively horse. he is generally cooperative, except that he can be a bit irritated when being saddled and groomed. the praxis of horseback riding has been described in many manuals written by skilled and experienced riders and trainers. i have even written some myself. however, these manuals often focus on technical descriptions of how the rider should sit on the horse, how to use the seat, and how to use signals (aids). moreover, these manuals often lack self-critical aspects. they are mainly built on the perception that the horse is an object, and that the rider needs to use specific signals to achieve a given outcome. thus, riding is interpreted as the transmission of orders from rider to the horse. however, i came to believe that emotions and feelings play an important role in riding. when we meet somebody, be it a human or a horse, we see and feel first. also, the horse has feelings and emotions, and it is important that the similarities, as well as the differences, between human and horse be taken into account during interspecies interaction. i believe this contributes to improved communication between rider and horse and thus to a better welfare for both. the method used in this article is autoethnography, a qualitative research method in which the researcher seeks to describe and systematically analyze (graphy) personal experience (auto) in order to understand cultural experience (ethno) (ellis, adams, and bochner 1). it is an analytic approach and form of writing that explicitly connects a researcher’s lived experiences and perspectives to the social and cultural world in which they exist. this method has gained increased attention during the last two decades in social research, and has been used for instance in sport studies (cooper, grenier, and macaulay 46) and in health care (chang 443). in this paper, autoethnography was used to systematically describe and express relations between rider and horse, focusing on riders’ feelings and on how riders’ experience their own, as well as the horses,’ bodies and minds, making my own experience as a rider into a topic of investigation. my personal experiences are thus used as empirical material. the experiences are investigated and tied to abstract reasoning and theories (hammarén 17-20). when collecting my material, i recorded my own descriptions of actions, feelings, and reflections during riding using a small humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 52 microphone and a dictaphone, and directly afterwards i wrote down my experiences, supported by the recordings. what is horse riding? horses have been used by humans throughout history for warfare, in agriculture, and for transport. nowadays, in developed countries, horses are mainly used for leisure, equestrian sport, companion and human therapy. in this study i focus on riding being an interspecies and embodied activity. it is different from human interaction with, for instance, cats and dogs, since the rider is sitting on the horse’s back (brandt 300). riding is an olympic sport, but is sometimes characterized as “equestrian art.” nuno oliveira, one of the most famous horse trainers during the 20th century, stated that: equestrian art is the perfect understanding between the rider and his horse. this harmony allows the horse to work without any contraction in his joints or in his muscles, permitting him to carry out all movements with mental and physical enjoyment as well as with suppleness and rhythm. the horse is then a partner, rather than a slave who is enforced to obey a rigid master by constraint (oliveira 17). however, one cannot deny that we humans use horses for our own purposes. moreover, there is currently a public debate about riding, and particularly about dressage as an olympic sport, where critical voices describe dressage as one-way control, in which humans dominate the horse in ways that are ethically questionable (hagström 3; smith 40-43; mclean and mcgreevy 205; patton 89-91). in the discussion it is sometimes questioned whether horses should even be used for competition purposes, or whether we should ride at all. the relation between human and horse is an essential part of riding. a rider communicates with the horse through the use of cues and signs, and needs a variety of athletic skills and competences to be able to interact with the horse. during riding, most of the communication is dependent on body-to-body interfaces between the horse’s back, sides, and mouth and the rider’s seat (seat bones and crotch), legs, and hands. the communication is, however, mediated through equipment like the saddle and the pressure from a bit in the horse’s mouth. since the saddle and bridle are the contact points between rider and horse, it is important for a good communication that they fit the horse and suit the rider. a crucial part for the rider is to be able to combine or “time” her signs in accordance to the feedback that s/he gets from the horse. even if mari zetterqvist blokhuis -the praxis of horse riding – an autoethnographic study 53 unable to speak, a horse uses its body language (for instance mouth, ears and tail) to communicate with the human. the horse can also choose to resist to do what the rider asks it to do, for instance by bolting or rearing or refusing to perform specific movements or jump over fences. the rider communicates with the horse through the reins (photo: h.j. blokhuis) riding as practical knowledge. for experienced riders, the interaction between rider and horse is based on practical knowledge that the rider acquires through experience, meaning that s/he learns how to ride by spending time in the saddle. in the tacit dimension, michael polanyi argues that practical knowledge is built on “tacit knowledge” or “tacit knowing,” indicating that “we know more than we can say,” since we have a lot of knowledge that is embodied and cannot (in most cases) be put in words (4). he suggests that tacit knowing includes both intellectual and practical kinds of knowing, both knowing what and knowing how (7). however, neither is ever present without the other. an educated horse also has some kind of practical knowledge, since it has learned to respond in specific ways to different signals from the rider and is thus able to know how to perform different skills. as an experienced rider, i have spent hours and hours together with horses, learning the nature of horses. i have also learned to be attentive to the horse’s, but also to my own, actions while riding, and i use my body feeling to decide how to adjust my body, as well as to read the bodily reaction of my horse. my body reacts immediately and intuitively to the signs and movements of the horse. how to sit on the horse and how to use my body to communicate with him has been internalized in my own body, and i feel “at home” on top of my horse. during all the time that i and my horse have spent together, we have created a relation built on a mutual understanding and a feel for reading each other’s bodies. maybe one could even say that we have created a shared practical knowledge? even if i know how to communicate with darwin, it is very humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 54 difficult to explain the embodied and intuitive knowledge that i use while riding. it is situated in my body and is built on subjective and individual experience that is personal and differs between riders. however, the reflected knowledge used in riding, as for example how to manage a half-pass to the right, is easier to describe in words. what kind of knowledge is needed to become a good rider? here, i will use my understanding of three of the approaches to knowledge defined by aristotle in book vi of nichomachean ethics. the first is episteme that concerns theoretical knowing why, and is related to scientific knowledge, meaning knowledge that cannot be otherwise (140). the second is techne, or art that denotes technical knowing how to make things or how to act to achieve a certain goal, and is realized by poiesis, meaning making or production (141142). the third, phronesis or practical wisdom, is the moral disposition to act wisely and prudently (with practical common sense) (142-143). phronesis is a combination of intellectual and moral virtue that guides us when we face challenges that need to be dealt with “on the spot” (dorseth 192). it is intuitive and embodied and guides us when we decide how and also when to act in a particular situation with a particular individual. it is practical and learned by experience. aristotle also defined the form of action distinctive to phronesis as praxis or “doing” action, involving practical reasoning of what is wise and proper to do in a given situation (146). as a rider, i have learned, mainly through lectures and reading books and manuals, what cues to use when communicating with the horse and why. i know why i need to put myself in a position that is close to darwin’s point of gravity to make it possible for us to move together in a good balance. by practical experience i have learnt how to apply the different aids and how to interpret and predict darwin’s responses, depending on his personality and daily mood. moreover, when riding i use a combination of feel and previous experience to decide when to apply the different cues or aids, as described in my narrative when trying to ride a half-pass to the right: first it does not work at all and i realize that my gaze needs to be directed more towards where we are heading. i try to be clearer with my leading rein aid and i need to keep my right leg more steady towards his sides to be able to control the movements of his inner leg. when darwin and i run into a problem, i try to feel what i need to do and act immediately “on the spot.” this could be identified as the praxis of riding. i interpret that there is always an integration between how and when. when, for instance, performing a mari zetterqvist blokhuis -the praxis of horse riding – an autoethnographic study 55 specific exercise, darwin’s actions and reactions guide how i should adjust my body position and how and when to use my different aids. through my doings when riding, i exhibit phronesis, since my practical wisdom helps me to act in a certain way in the given situation. i believe that a combination of episteme, techne, and phronesis is needed to become a skilled rider, and that they are hard to distinguish. however, a rider should always act on the basis of what is good for the horse. i believe that i have a moral responsibility to be attentive to darwin’s reactions and to what he communicates to me through his body, since misuse of a non-human animal could lead to damage and pain that could jeopardize his welfare. however, even if i try to do my best, i can never be sure how darwin experiences our training session. i can only try to be open to his actions and reactions, and hope that he enjoys the riding as much as i do. i have been riding most of my life and i am deeply involved in the traditions of riding. my whole social life has been shaped by the life at the stable. in earlier days, competing in sport dressage was part of my identity as a rider, and i focused on making good results. nowadays i ride for recreation and continue to participate in dressage lessons with darwin every second week. my goal is to make him balanced, supple, able to move in self-carriage2, and to move in what is often called “harmony,” which means moving together without tension in an aesthetically pleasing manner. even if i have been riding all my life, i find new perspectives on my communication with darwin every day. equestrian feel — highly valued among riders. “equestrian feel” (sometimes also called “equestrian tact”) is identified as the complicated skill of how (and when) to apply and how to combine the rider’s signs in interaction with the horse (zetterqvist blokhuis and lundgren 579). feel has been emphasized as the invisible quality of every good rider who is communicating with her horse in a stable, sensitive and relaxed manner (geikie and morris 26). this feel is strongly connected to the rider’s body awareness and to the ability to intuitively and immediately attune to the actions and reactions of the horse. it has thus been recognised that equestrian feel is highly valued among riders (zetterqvist blokhuis and lundgren 573). in the complete training of horse and rider, the famous trainer podhajsky compares equestrian feel with the hearing of a musician. game writes about the importance of the rider being able to feel the horse’s movements and suggests that learning to feel this is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 56 as an “inhabitation”: “it is through rhythm that we, horse and rider, come to inhabit riding, as a musician inhabits a piece of music, or a writer a text” (8). the concept of human feelings has been defined in many different ways. damasio distinguishes between emotions and feelings, and suggests that emotions and related reactions are aligned with the body, while feeling is when we experience a bodily emotion and is thus connected to our mind (88). ratcliffe offers a phenomenological view on bodily feeling, suggesting that we are always in a special condition (a feeling of being in-the-world) that can be felt in our body and determines how we experience different events (236). our feelings are bodily and open up towards the world. damasio and ratcliffe agree that feelings are the basis for thoughts and thus important for our thinking and our daily life when, for instance, making decisions. i believe that the feeling used in riding could be identified as “tacit knowledge,” meaning that it is situated in the rider’s body and feeling. equestrian feel could also be seen as an expression of phronesis, since it guides the rider in how and when to use the different signs. three theories about interaction between rider and horse. the interaction between rider and horse is complex, and there are many different approaches to look upon that interaction. i will present three that i consider the most relevant today. one is the behavioristic approach, which concentrates on what stimuli (signals) the rider gives to the horse and on how the horse responds to these signals. in the last decade, this approach has been identified as “equitation science,” building on theories of how animals learn (mcgreevy and mclean 104-107). its focus is mainly on the outcome of the human’s actions, and in this view, in my eyes, the horse is perceived as an “automaton,” and the interaction between rider and horse can be measured objectively, for instance by using a pressure mat placed under the saddle and/or a rein tension meter that registers the contact between the rider’s hand and the horse’s mouth. darwin has learned to slow down when i squeeze the reins with my hands, as reflected in my narrative. another approach builds on zooanthropology (influenced by posthumanism), which views the interaction between rider and horse as a cognitive process. the relationship between rider and horse is seen as a dialogue. in this view, it is recognized that horses have their own minds and social needs, meaning that horses have cognitive abilities that allow them to take initiatives and interact with each other and their environment (de giorgio and schoorl 21). communication between rider and horse takes place when mari zetterqvist blokhuis -the praxis of horse riding – an autoethnographic study 57 both partners are consciously involved in the cognitive experience. recent studies have shown that horses are able to communicate their desires to humans and are, for instance, capable of actively choosing whether they prefer to wear a blanket or not by pointing at a signboard (mejdell, buvik, jörgensen, and boe 69). another study showed that horses are able to use “referential communication” by sending visual and tactile signals to their caretakers in a problem-solving situation where a food item was hidden in a bucket that was accessible only by the caretaker (malavasi and huber 899). when riding darwin, i feel that he is actively involved in our riding experience by the way our bodies and minds seem to change each other. in a third approach the interaction between horse and rider focuses on the corporeality of the two bodies moving together, where the bodies of rider and horse “merge into one.” bornemark suggests that horse and rider could form a “centaur motion” (referring to the mythological creature of the centaur with the upper body of a human and the lower body of a horse). she writes that “an equipage contains a horse and a rider, we are two different creatures with two different corporeality’s coming from different directions. but in our meeting, when the battle and struggle has calmed down, we can develop a common corporeality containing a common gravity, balance, direction and mood” (205, translated from swedish). in this view, rider and horse are both embodied subjects in their own right that take part in an active process of “becoming with,” where both parts affect each other and are transformed to an equipage where the border between the two is less distinguishable. this is reflected in my description of riding darwin: “we move flesh-to-flesh, our bodies merge and i don´t know where darwin’s body starts and mine ends.” there are relevant aspects of the interaction between rider and horse brought up in each of these three approaches. on the one hand, i agree that riding is a matter of pressure and pressure release, as suggested in the behavioristic approach. however, the horse is an active part in the riding experience, and the communication between rider and horse cannot be reduced to seeing the horse as an “automaton” responding (or not responding) in the desired way to the rider’s signals. the question is whether it is possible to combine sport dressage, where the horse should be obedient to the rider’s signals to achieve high marks from the judges, with the idea of shared experience between rider and horse. i would certainly welcome training methods that take the mental experiences of the horse more into consideration. the third approach is also relevant for me since the rider’s and horse’s bodies need to be intertwined to become an equipage. this approach also recognizes the emotions and feelings involved in the interspecies interaction. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 58 how do i look at the interaction with my horse during riding? i experience the interaction between darwin and me as a constant communication in which we are both subjects. my whole body is attuned to my horse’s body. we move together in the same direction and share a mutual understanding. in rare moments, when we are in the same movement and in the same rhythm, i experience that we move “as one” and it feels as if our bodies are connected, moving in harmony. the interaction feels light and easy and i have the feeling that i just need to think about what movement or exercise to perform, to make it happen. this is the good feeling that i am striving for when riding. it feels like my thoughts go directly through my body to the horse’s body and my equestrian feel guides me. i interpret it as if we can read each other’s bodies, and it feels like the boundaries between our bodies are indistinct or blurred. this is in line with the description of equestrian feel and also with the suggestion that talented riders even “behave and move like a horse” (despret 115). in phenomenology of perception, merleau-ponty stresses that body and mind cannot be separated. he states “i am not in front of my body, i am in my body, or rather i am my body.” and “i am conscious of the world by means of my body” (151). in the thinking hand, pallasmaa emphasizes, following the ideas of merleau-ponty, that a dancer or soccer player “think” with their body and leg, the craftsman and sculptor with their hands, and composers with their ears (116). pallasmaa also suggests that a sportsman needs to “embody the task” by making it an ingredient of the athlete’s sense of self (83). this is in line with my experience during riding: i “think” and react with my body and my body and mind is thus inseparable. i experience my horse through my body, indwell in his energy and it becomes almost like my “second skin.” however, when i for instance want to bend darwin’s neck a little and relax his inner side, he protests. in this situation, we lose the nice connection and instead we struggle against each other. darwin and i divide into two different bodies and species and i lose the nice feeling of darwin being my “sense of self.” if i sit on a chair at home and close my eyes, i can get the feeling of riding a half-pass to the right in my own body. this is in line with polanyi, who stresses that practical knowledge is situated “in our bodies” and that the body develops a knowledge about how to perform a specific movement (15-16). riding also has ethical components, since the actions of the rider may affect the horse’s welfare, and thus require moral consideration. several authors have described the relation between rider and horse as “partnership” (birke and hockenhull 94-97; wipper mari zetterqvist blokhuis -the praxis of horse riding – an autoethnographic study 59 67-68; game 1). in the article language, power, and the training of horses, patton, however, argues that riders’ rhetoric about dialogue and partnership between rider and horse is somewhat misleading as far as horse training is concerned (90). he suggests that each command given from the rider is aimed to achieve an absolute obedience from a trained animal, and furthermore that training and riding involve the exercise of power over the animal. in my opinion, the relation between me and darwin will inevitably be asymmetric, since i am the one that initiates the goals of our training and the content of our communication. i decide when to ride and what to do while riding, since he is unable to speak for himself. when sensing darwin’s body language and signs, i need to ask myself: how does he perceive our relationship? are my interpretations of darwin’s cues correct? how do i act if he does not understand my signs? if i put too high demands on darwin his welfare may be at stake. on the other hand, without asking my horse for a next step in the training, there will be no progress. my goals guide when to take a next step, rather than darwin’s. i need to act, but i have to decide what is suitable to do in a particular situation. in this case my phronesis guides me in what is the right thing to do. in my view, the relationship between rider and horse should be built on trust and confidence. darwin and i share a mutual experience and understanding during riding, and as a result of our interaction, we both change. riding as an embodied and mental praxis. as demonstrated in my narrative, riding involves bodies and minds of both rider and horse. when riding darwin i absorb his movements and i experience a common corporeality as he carries me along. he communicates his emotions through his body movements and reactions while i express my body feeling of being in-the-world, as suggested by ratcliffe (107). when learning a movement, merleau-ponty suggests that the body “catches and understands” the movement, and that “a movement is learned when the body has understood it, when it has incorporated it into its world” (139). i have, for example, understood the movement of half-pass, since it has been incorporated in my body. in riding, the knowing does not come from descriptions of movements. instead, a rider must experience riding for it to make sense to her. my actions during riding are built on a “body schema” of movements (143). i have learned this body schema by spending many hours in the saddle, and the knowledge is thus in my body. my body is the means with which my horse and i communicate a wide range of emotions and desires. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 60 maurstad, davis and cowles use the term “intra-acting” to describe the interaction between rider and horse. they stress that both human and horse change as a result from their meeting and that it is a process of “becoming with.” they write that “as relations grow, horses and humans, respectively, are changing, adapting and attuning to each other in order to communicate well and engage in their activities in meaningful ways” (332). in the interaction with darwin, he changes me and i change him. instead of being two bodies directed towards each other, we are two bodies moving in the same direction. darwin uses his body to interact with me and i try to be attentive to his body and to “let go” both mentally and with my muscles, allowing my body to follow and trust him. i try to effortlessly flow in harmony with darwin’s movements while he takes up my movements and body language, as displayed in my narrative. he is a large and strong animal and most of the time i feel confident that i will be able to control his speed and that he will not run faster than i wish or jump to the side. however, darwin also needs to put his trust in me and to be willing to join me when riding in the woods, and also to let me communicate with him in our training sessions. when riding darwin, i try to be present and focus on our interaction. heidegger (129131) writes about being in the right “stimmung” (mood or attunement) and that our “background emotions” play an important role in how we approach different tasks. in my opinion, rider and horse need to be attentive to each other’s emotions and mood to be able to achieve a fruitful interaction. horses can differ in mood depending, for instance, on the weather, what kind of work they did the previous day, and how they feel in their bodies. since darwin is a very sensitive horse, i need to breathe calmly and mentally prepare for riding. sometimes when i am stressed or irritated it has a negative effect on our relation. my body gets tense and it is more difficult for me to be attentive to darwin’s body and to perceive his actions and reactions, and to reach a good interaction. darwin and i are two bodies that live completely different lives, and we need to find a way to meet. i believe that the rider’s attention to the horse is one of the key factors in riding. another one is the emotional part, and that one is prepared to “open up” for the other. how do i reflect on the interaction between me and my horse while riding? when riding, i use a combination of equestrian feel and reflection. i often begin by intuitively “feeling” the horse through my body, but then start to reflect on how to interpret the horse, asking myself what i can request from my horse this particular day. i make decisions based on the feeling i have for my own and my horse’s body and reactions as mari zetterqvist blokhuis -the praxis of horse riding – an autoethnographic study 61 stated in my narrative: “how is his [darwin’s] rhythm and speed? are his movements supple or stiff?” i pick up the signs from darwin’s body, and from this i decide what exercises to perform, adjusting to the horse’s daily mood and condition. during riding, i alternate between feeling darwin’s and my own common corporeality and movements using my body feel and experience, and consciously reflecting over our performance. my attention moves between the position of my own body (for instance legs or hands) and darwin’s mouth or hindquarters. after riding, i often reflect on the riding session, analyzing what went well and what i need to improve next time i ride. dewey writes about the relation between doing and undergoing, and that during practice we alter between activity and passivity. first we do something and then we perceive and experience, followed by a new action, and this relation between doing and undergoing is what give us the depth and meaning of the experience (45). i need to wait for darwin’s response before i give him the next signal or aid. during riding, i often remember “snap-shots” of what i heard from trainers or physiotherapists or what i have read in scientific literature or in books. in these moments, i explicitly reflect on my own actions in the light of these thoughts to try to address a current problem. sometimes i focus on details in my seat or on how i use my body, while other times my thoughts move in various directions and i let my senses and intuitive feeling guide me. this is reflected in my narrative: “the surrounding forest seems to disappear and my consciousness gets dimmed as all kind of unreflective thoughts circle in my head.” this can also happen when i have been riding for a while and both darwin’s and my own body relax. i let my equestrian feel or intuition take over and it is like turning on the “autopilot,” and everything feels natural and easy. this is similar to the feeling of “flow” that has been reported by several sportsmen (csikszentmihalyi 28-29). when performing an exercise together with darwin, i have a bodily sense from earlier experience of how it should feel when it works out fine, and i try to find the same sensation once again. my attention alternates between feeling my own and darwin’s body and movements and reflecting on what i need to change in my body position and/or signs. i adjust my weight and legs, placing myself in a position close to darwin’s point of gravity, and he reacts by putting more weight on his hind legs humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 62 and moving his hindquarters forward and at the same time to the side in a nice half-pass. sometimes i experience that there is a conflict between thinking and feeling in riding. when i focus on a detail that i need to improve it occasionally has a negative effect on my feel. in these moments i need to “let go” instead of thinking and fighting against my body, making me more stiff and less sensitive to the signs from the horse, and to “melt” into his movements. this is in line with pallasma, who emphasizes that there is a possible conflict between two kinds of sensibility, conscious intellect and unconscious intuition (96-97). i believe that riding requires a large proportion of unconscious intuition, due to the fact that riding is strongly embodied. the rider should, however, also use her conscious intellect to pick up signals from the horse and to deepen her learning of praxis in riding. epilogue. the aim of this paper was to describe, interpret, and analyze what is happening between rider and horse during riding. i have applied theories of practical knowledge to explore the praxis of riding and used my own experience from many years of riding and teaching rider-horse combinations. the method used in this article was autoethnography where there is a continuous interplay between concrete experiences and abstract reasoning that could be imagined as a spiral or loop. i suggest that autoethnography with narratives that describe and express personal relations between riders and horses and that are emotion-led may be useful to complement general instruction manuals that focus on riding technique. there are, however, risks involved in the use of autoethnography. for example, it could be difficult for researchers applying this method to detect taken-for-granted assumptions and blind spots related to the area studied. i have tried to do my best to be attentive to these risks. i experience the interaction between rider and horse as a constant communication involving the bodies and minds of both actors. rider and horse are both embodied subjects taking part in an active process of “becoming with.” as a result of the interaction, both parts change and adapt to each other resulting in a shared practical knowledge. most riding manuals focus on techne, describing technically what signals (aids) to give to the horse to receive a certain response and how to perform specific movements. i cannot deny that some parts of the communication taking place between horse and rider are based on stimulus-response, as suggested in the behavioristic approach, meaning that riders use their seat and signals as “commands” that horses have been mari zetterqvist blokhuis -the praxis of horse riding – an autoethnographic study 63 trained to respond to. it is, for instance, possible for a skilled rider to mount darwin and make him perform specific exercises, even if the interaction will not be optional. however, to build a trustful relationship during riding, i am convinced that the rider’s as well as the horse’s emotions and feelings need to be taken into account. riding should be based on the understanding of the horse as a non-human animal in possession of its own mind. the horse’s consciousness, emotion, and intelligence should be taken into account during riding, as suggested in the posthumanistic view. however, we humans should be aware that the relation between rider and horse is always asymmetrical, since exercise of power over the horse is always present. we also have a responsibility for animals in our care. i suggest that when riding and teaching riding, more emphasis should be placed on how to interpret and attend to the horse’s behavior, body language, and reactions. every rider needs to “take the horse into one’s heart.” what is the horse trying to say? the question of how to build a good relation based on trust and partnership between human and horse needs to be highlighted. techne always precedes phronesis, meaning that the rider first needs to learn how to use his/her body language and signs to communicate with the horse. phronesis requires experience and reflection, and learning how to ride is a life-long journey that demands personal commitment. every rider has her own unique way of riding and every horse is an individual with its own body motions and mind, and it takes lots of time for a rider-horse combination to find a mutual understanding and to find their own way to relate to the world. this needs to be taken into account in the learning experience. and what about equestrian feel? i believe that there are two different kinds of equestrian feel. one is connected to the rider’s feeling of the horse through her body, and it also includes the rider’s reflections. an example is when i feel through my body (my hands) that darwin tries to increase his speed. i evaluate the quality of our bodily communication and react by squeezing the reins to make him slow down. this could be expressed as an “outside” equestrian feel. a second kind of equestrian feel is experienced when i feel darwin’s movements in my body. this feeling appears, for instance, when darwin moves in a nice half-pass and everything feels natural and easy. i experience my horse as a “second skin” and my body reacts immediate and intuitively. this is a kind of “inner” equestrian feel, like a centaur when rider and horse move as one body. the feeling of the movement is atomized and situated in the “backbone” of the rider. this could be comparable with “flow” or “optimal experience” as described by psychologist mihaly csikszentmihalyi (28-29) when referring to the experience of deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life that has been expressed by several successful sportsmen. maybe this “inner” equestrian feel could humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 64 also be seen as an expression of phronesis, since it is learned by experience and guided by what is good for the human in itself (and hopefully also for the horse) rather than aiming at a specific outcome. the knowledge and insight gained in this study could be interesting in relation to other embodied practices involving subjectivity and interaction. this also includes the relationship between corporeal activities and reflection. i believe that there is a need for new teaching strategies in riding where more emphasis is put on equestrian feel and on how riders’ experience their own, as well as the horses’, bodies and minds. a riding instructor/trainer needs to be able to recognize both rider and horse as subjects, to take into account the rider’s ability to feel her own and the horse’s body, and to be able to support each individual rider-horse combination’s active process of “becoming with.” acknowledgements. this study was funded by the foundation for baltic and east european studies. i gratefully acknowledge my supervisors associate professor jonna bornemark, associate professor ulla ekström von essen and professor bernt gustavsson, and my colleagues in södertörn university. special thanks also to fil. dr. petra andersson and professor harry blokhuis for fruitful discussions. and last, but not least, my horse darwin for many great experiences. notes 1. half-pass is a lateral movement seen in dressage, in which the horse moves forward and sideways at the same time. the horse is bent in the direction of travel. 2. self-carriage is the horse’s ability to properly carry himself on his own. when moving in self-carriage, the horse is responsible for his own body position and does not rely on the rider keeping the horse in a proper position with his/her hands. works cited aristotle. the nicomachean ethics. trans. david ross. oxford up, 1980. mari zetterqvist blokhuis -the praxis of horse riding – an autoethnographic study 65 atkinson, paul, and martyn hammersley. “ethnography and participant observation.” handbook of qualitative research. norman k. denzin and yvonne s. lincoln, eds. sage, 1994. 248-260. birke, lynda, and jo hockenhull. “journeys together: horses and humans in partnership.” society & animals 23 (2015): 81-100. bornemark, jonna. “ekipaget: häst och ryttare eller kentaur.” kentauren – om interaktion mellan människa och häst. ulla ekström von essen and jonna bornemark, eds. södertörn studies in practical knowledge 4, 2010. 188-206. brandt, keri. “a language of their own: an interactionist approach to human-horse communication.” society & animals 12.4 (2004): 299-316. chang, heewon. “autoethnography in health research. growing pains?” qualitative health research 26.4 (2016): 443–451. cooper, joseph n., robin s. grenier, and charles macaulay. “autoethnography as a critical approach in sport management: current applications and directions for future research.” sport management review 20 (2017): 43–54. csikszentmihalyi, mihaly. finding flow. the psychology of engagement with everyday life. basic books, 1997. damasio, antonio. looking for spinoza: joy, sorrow, and the feeling brain. harcourt, 2003. despret, vinciane. “the body we care for: figures of anthropo-zoo-genesis.” body and society 10.2-3 (2004): 111-134. dewey, john. art as experience. penguin, 1934. de giorgio, francesco, and josé schoorl. the cognitive horse. an inspiring journey towards ca new co-existence. learning animals – institute for zooanthropology, 2014. dorseth, marian. en analyse av aristoteles kunnskapsbegreper (teacher’s practical judgement). norges teknisk-naturvitenskapelige universite, avhandling for graden philosophiae doctor, institutt for pedagogikk og livslang læring. doctoral thesis. trondheim, 2016. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 66 ellis, carolyn, tony e. adams, and arthur p. bochner. “autoethnography: an overview.” forum: qualitative social research 12.1 art. 10 (2001): 1-18. game, ann. “riding: embodying the centaur.” body and society. 7.1 (2001): 1-12. geikie, sarah, and annie morris. “develop your feel and find harmony.” dressage today 7 (july 2017): 26-28. hagström, erica. “a halter and a lead rope: shifting pedagogical imaginaries of becoming within a human-horse relationship.” gender and education 28.2 (2016): 298313. heidegger, martin. being and time. trans. joan stambaugh. state u of new york p , 1996. hammarén, maria. skriva – en metod för reflektion. second ed. santérus academic press, 2005. hjertström lappalainen, jonna. “inledning.” klassiska texter om praktisk kunskap. jonna hjertström lappalainen, ed. södertörn studies in practical knowledge 7, 2005. 7-37. mcgreevy, paul, and andrew mclean. equitation science. wiley blackwell, 2010. mclean, andrew, and paul mcgreevy. “ethical equitation: capping the price horses payfor human glory.” journal of veterinary behaviour 5 (2010): 203-209. malavasi, rachele, and ludwig huber. “evidence of heterospecific referential communication from domestic horses (equus caballus) to humans.” animal cognition 19.5 (2016): 899-909. maurstad, anita, dona davin, and sarah cowles. “co-being and intra-action in horsehuman relationship: a multi-species ethnography of be (com)ing human and be (com)ing a horse.” social anthropology 21.3 (2013): 322-335. mejdell, cecilie, turid buvik, grete h. jörgensen, and knut e. boe. “horses can learn to use symbols to communicate their preference.” applied animal behavior sciences 184 (2016): 66–73. mari zetterqvist blokhuis -the praxis of horse riding – an autoethnographic study 67 merleau-ponty, maurice. phenomenology of perception. trans. donald a landes. routledge, 2012. oliveira, nuno. reflection of equestrian art. j.a. allen, 1976. pallasmaa, juhani. the thinking hand. existential and embodied wisdom in architecture. john willey & sons, 2009. patton, paul. “language, power and the training of horses.” zoontologies: the question of the animal. cary wolfe, ed. u of minnesota p, 2003. 83-100. podhajsky, alois. the complete training of horse and rider. the sportsman’s press, 1965. polanyi, michael. the tacit dimension. routledge & kegan paul, 1966. pröckl, maria. ”inifrån och utifrån.” inifrån och utifrån. om praktisk kunskap i förskolan. lotte alsterdal and maria pröckl, eds. södertörn studies in practical knowledge 8, 2015. 7-18. ratcliffe, matthew. feelings of being – phenomenology, psychiatry and the sense of reality. oxford up, 2008. svenaeus, fredrik. ”vad är praktisk kunskap?” vad är praktisk kunskap? fredrik svenaeus and jonna bornemark, eds. södertörn studies in practical knowledge 1, 2009. 11-34. smith, stephen. j. “human-horse partnerships: “human-horse partnerships. the discipline of dressage.” sport, animals and society. james gillett and michele gilbert, eds. routledge, 2014. 35-51. wipper, audrey. “the partnership: the horse-rider relationship in eventing.” symbolic interaction 23.1 (2000): 47-70. zetterqvist blokhuis, mari, and charlotte lundgren. “riders’ perception of equestrian communication in sports dressage.” society & animals 25 (2017): 573-591. microsoft word zelinger-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 9:2 amir zelinger unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina introduction: katrina, pets, and society. about two weeks after hurricane katrina made landfall on the gulf coast, new york times journalist john leland asked dog owners who were walking their animals in central park about their emotions in light of the numerous pictures of stranded pets coming from new orleans. in most cases, the rescuers did not allow pets to be evacuated together with their owners, and these animals were thus left behind and forced to confront the devastation wrought by the inundation of their habitats alone. leland wrote about the reaction of one new york pet-keeper: “for elizabeth finch, the owner of two dogs named zorra and hans blix, the sight of citizens forced to choose between their pets and their safety was, like the disaster itself, indicative of broader social rifts. ‘not to equate people with animals,’ she said, ‘but this fits into a bigger model of discrimination’” (leland). when leland and finch use terms such as “social rifts” and “model[s] of discrimination” in reference to pets, their allusions fit quite well with some of the main narratives typical of katrina. the hurricane, which assailed the gulf coast at the end of august 2005, resulted in more than 1200 casualties and over $108 billion in damage. it was the third deadliest, and by far the costliest, tropical cyclone in the history of the united states (blake, landsea and bigney). however, katrina represents much more than just destruction caused by exceptional natural events. in the media coverage during the weeks after the hurricane itself, and in academic publications in the years that followed, katrina has been largely perceived as what might instead be termed an “unnatural disaster.” this framing pertains to the evident social dimension of the catastrophe, which in this case became much more blatant and palpable than in other natural disasters in history. the social questions surrounding katrina are fundamental ones, involving race, class, hierarchies, and segregations, all of which in turn position the social weight of the event at the center of even the most basic discussion of it (dynes and rodriguez). katrina was an “unnatural disaster” because it was first and foremost about the social. probably more than any other catastrophe in recent history, katrina revealed that “disasters and their impacts are socially produced, and [that] [...] the forces driving the production of disaster are embedded in the social order itself. [...] the origins of disaster amir zelinger -unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina 93 lie not in nature […] but rather in the ordinary everyday workings of society itself” (tierney 4–5). for example, mississippi and louisiana, the states that were most severely hit by the storm, are also among the poorest in the usa. in new orleans county, which suffered the most in terms of death rates, more than twenty-five percent of the population lived below the poverty line at the time of the disaster, making it the most socially vulnerable county nationwide. this social precariousness intersected with the natural threat, insofar as this poor population was extremely ill-equipped to cope with the catastrophe (hartman and squires; haney, elliott, and fussel 87–93; reilly 247). prior to katrina, moreover, new orleans was a city sharply segregated along racial or ethnic lines: 67% of its population was african american, mostly concentrated in inner-city poverty-stricken neighborhoods like the lower ninth ward. this location also happened to be among those that were most strongly devastated by floods after the levees, which were intended to defend residential areas, collapsed.1 all in all, one can conclude that the social conditions underlying the catastrophe of katrina existed well beforehand, in the long past preceding the event itself (cf. bankoff, “time is of the essence;” tierney 40). as such, when the hurricane eventually reached the gulf coast, it merely catalyzed the deep-rooted conditions of marginalization of specific groups and of uneven distribution in the ongoing history of new orleans, albeit this time through the impact of a “natural” disaster (waterhouse 169–170). interestingly, when leland and finch speak about the side of katrina that pets experienced, they do so without hesitating to refer to a general suffering tied to some “hard” social elements like discrimination and marginalization similar to the ones mentioned above and embedded in the story of katrina at large. apparently, the hurricane, with its profound and gloomy social dimension, also exemplified the inextricability of pets both from human society and from pivotal social issues. as press reports and scientific research during the disaster and in its aftermath have demonstrated, concern for their own pets was one of the most decisive factors that influenced people’s decision not to evacuate before the storm (hunt, al-awadi and johnson; zotarelli; grimm 84). many owners, especially those without cars, faced difficulties in taking the animals along and chose to stay behind when confronted by the threat of being separated from their beloved dogs or cats (smith, hurricane katrina 24, 30). the close attachment keepers felt to their pets also complicated rescue efforts, as people once again refused to leave their pets behind. this often resulted in rescue squads resorting to violence — pushing pets out of rescue boats (grimm 82), or even threatening evacuees with guns to force them to leave their animals behind, in accordance with federal policy disallowing animals of any kind to join evacuation transports. consequently, katrina provided insights into the central position of pets in the social fabric of america and their influence on people’s actions. as noted by author humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 94 douglas brinkley in his popular recounting of the events, thanks to katrina “the nation was beginning to understand that animals are part of u.s. society and can’t be separated from their human companions in good times gone bad” (518).2 analyzing disputes over the custody of many of these displaced pets in the aftermath of the catastrophe, i argue in this article that katrina not only laid bare this general partnership of pets in society, but also allowed us to obtain a rare insight into the embedded nature of pet-keeping in some of the “deeper” social processes that are so inseparably associated with this thoroughly “unnatural disaster.” in the same way that katrina brutally brought to the surface many of the social grievances that american society had been disinclined to confront openly in the decades prior to the disaster, especially entrenched racial discrimination (ishiwata), it also bluntly revealed the extent to which present-day human-pet relations are interwoven with similarly controversial social concerns. when considering such an ostensibly “innocent” leisure activity as caring for companion animals such as cats, dogs, parakeets, or rabbits, one does not usually think of issues like hierarchies, distinctions, or inequality. furthermore, the personal relations between a pet-keeper and their companion tend to become almost exclusive associations, excluding elements of the wider context within which those relations are being played out. the kinds of interactions between humans and pets that have been most readily highlighted in human-animal studies are personal ones, those pertaining to the contact between the keeper and their individual companion “as the smallest unit of being and of analysis” (haraway 165). in the last couple of years, however, an increasing number of works have turned their attention to the ways in which petkeeping is anchored and made meaningful in view of the complexities of modern, capitalist societies, with their concomitant inequalities, segregations, and discriminations. these works explore the ties that enmesh pets in matters of race, class, and gender, and that make pet-keeping anything but an “innocent,” purely personal undertaking (nast; glick; weaver; kim 272–279). they show how human conflicts over these matters sometimes have an impact on the relationships that develop between humans and companion animals. they point out, for instance, that hegemonic perceptions of “good” vs. “bad” human-pet relations are rooted in more general hierarchizations among different social and racial groups, and in turn serve to amplify these hierarchizations. by way of juxtaposing human-animal relations with main issues highlighted by recent studies in the sociology and historiography of natural catastrophes (cf., bankoff, “learning about disasters from animals”), this article aims to contribute to this effort of disclosing some of the critical social “burden” that caring for amir zelinger -unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina 95 animal pets necessarily carries. taking katrina as an example, it shows that just like disasters pet-keeping is closely linked to society’s deepest concerns. especially in western societies, the social “burden” that pet-keeping carries is already revealed in the way the term “pet” is being defined. in the united states and western europe, dominant understandings of “pets” refer to them as animals that are privileged in comparison to all other domesticated animals — thanks to the special treatment they receive from humans. from a middle-class perspective, pets are the animals that we stroke […], cuddle […], play with […], groom […], and ensure that they receive all the exercise and social contact they need to keep them happy and healthy. they are regularly supplied with specially prepared, vitamin-enriched food, provided with warm and comfortable places to sleep, and at first signs of illness, are immediately taken to expensive and highly trained doctors. (serpell, in the company of animals 14) the perception of “pets” as privileged animals compared with livestock implies that pet-keeping itself is a privileged undertaking. according to this perception, a “pet” is not every dog, cat, or budgerigar that is kept at the home or its surroundings, but only the ones that are being taken care of in a way that ensures their greatest possible wellbeing. owners that do not, or are not able to, take “good” care of their animals are not genuine pet-keepers. they fail to give them the things that would make their lives pleasurable, and thus to elevate them to the status of “pets.” if we accept the privilegebased perception of pets we must concede that pet-keeping is the exclusive domain of a relatively small segment of society. if the number of pet-keepers is small, it would not be misleading to assert that “the majority of pet-owners spare no expense to ensure that their animals are as happy, contented and secure as they possibly can be” (15). this perception of pet keeping as the exclusive domain of the rich has huge significance for the custody disputes discussed in this article. these disputes revolved in the majority of cases around animals that, so to speak, climbed the social ladder in the wake of katrina. before the storm, they belonged to poor families from disadvantaged communities in louisiana and mississippi. after the storm, they found themselves in the homes of much more affluent people in florida, california, or new england, who were able “to spare no expenses” to ensure their happiness and treat them as genuine “pets.”3 this development was the result of the separation that katrina brought about between the pets and their owners who were not able, or not allowed, to take them along when humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 96 they fled from the devastated areas. after the storm subsided, many of the animals that survived in their shattered homes or in the streets were picked up by animal rescue volunteer groups that reached louisiana and mississippi to help them. although it is difficult to assess the number of pets impacted by katrina accurately, estimates of about 50,000 stranded pets, with approximately 15,000 of them being rescued have been recorded (mcnabb 75). due to the limited capacities of local shelters, and the fact that many of them were flooded, many of the rescued animals were sent away to other shelters, scattered across the country. when the local situation calmed down and evacuees started to recover from their ordeals, many of them began searching for the pets they had left behind with the hope of reuniting with them. dedicated websites, where owners could publish lost ads, were deployed for this purpose. while this led to the reunion of about one fifth of the rescued pets with their former owners, in many cases the shelters had already found new adopters for the animals by the time their original keepers were able to claim them. these new adopters were, for the most part, wealthy citizens who were willing to open their homes to the stranded animals and to help them to rehabilitate their lives. when the original owners found out their dog or cat was already given away, some of them sued the new keepers and the shelters that facilitated the adoptions for the return of their animals. it is on the basis of these disputes, emanating from an exceptional event such as a natural disaster, that i aim to unlock a possible but very poignant social dimension of modern pet-keeping, albeit one that is usually blurred and that fails to gain recognition. the sources i used for this article are mainly written press reports about the custody disputes. as we will see, national and local media took a lively interest in the pet disputes. when writing about them, reporters usually emphasized the socio-economic disparity between original and new owners, thereby helping to situate the disputes in the larger context of katrina’s controversies. the narrative they developed is therefore a prime example of the way katrina brought to the open the embeddedness of petkeeping in social conflicts that go far beyond the love individuals feel towards their animals. the news articles discussed document plentiful statements by the new adopters of the stranded pets. they also contain comments made by the animal welfare organizations that had rescued the animals left behind, and that later adopted them out to new foster homes. both new adopters and representatives of animal welfare groups tended to express their opinion to newspaper reporters very openly, justifying their unwillingness to surrender pets to their former keepers and lawful owners by maintaining that the animals were better off in their new, more affluent households, where they received better care from more responsible guardians than their previous ones. similar statements were found on websites of the organizations themselves, as amir zelinger -unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina 97 well as on different animal welfare blogs and pet adoption portals. i also consulted publications by rescuers and other animal activists about their experiences during, and in the aftermath of, katrina, where dominant attitudes concerning the appropriateness of certain people as pet-keepers, in contrast to others who were perceived as less qualified, are likewise documented. analyzed together, these sources reveal a constellation in which pet-keeping is intimately related to the production of social hierarchies and forms of inequality — a constellation that only such an extreme naturalsocial catastrophe as katrina was able to unveil. the long way home: recovery and pet-keeping. the social relevance of katrina did not end with the events of the hurricane itself, but extended well beyond them, becoming at times even more conspicuous during the phase of recovery. one of the most delicate issues in post-katrina new orleans is the question of the kind of city it is desirable to rebuild. as had already become clear in the first weeks after the catastrophe, the redevelopment of the city was not simply about returning to predisaster conditions. much more significantly, it represented a fractured rebuilding that exhibited conflicting interests, ideas, and political agendas for the “new new orleans,” contingent once again mainly on race and class matters, and translated into a variety of practices of inclusion and exclusion (gotham and greenberg 94–133). a case in point is that of demographic recovery: studies assert that wealthier and white residents have returned to the city and reestablished their lives there at a much faster pace and in far greater numbers than poorer and black people (haney, elliott, and fussel 99–100; steinberg 21). according to one survey of evacuees from different socioeconomic backgrounds, white populations were twice as likely to be living in their original homes during the immediate aftermath of the storm, whereas black populations disproportionately confronted long-term displacement. many of them have been unable to recover, among other reasons due to severe financial problems as a consequence of the catastrophe (bevc, nicholls, and picou 141, 146). as a result, new orleans has experienced a kind of gentrification, made possible and brought about by the natural disaster. owing to katrina, the segregation along race and class lines manifest in the city’s history is now deepening and intensifying (graham 28–29). moreover, this unequal recovery is not simply a process of “natural selection” through which people with more resources are able to reestablish themselves more easily than those who lack those capabilities and therefore lag behind. instead, it is substantially related to an intentional policy advanced by urban elites seeking to change the local social fabric according to their own view of a “good city” (i.e. one that is prosperous, distinguished, and genteel). as an article published in the wall street journal put it less than two weeks after the storm, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 98 despite the disaster that has overwhelmed new orleans, the city’s moneyed, mostly white elite is hanging on and maneuvering to play a role in the recovery when the floodwaters of katrina are gone.... the power elite of new orleans […] insist the remade city won’t simply restore the old order.... [t]he new city must be something very different […] with better services and fewer poor people. (qtd. in hartmann and squire 286) this desired “amelioration” of the urban landscape, made possible by the “shock effect” of the hurricane and the dismantling of preexisting conditions, found a practical outlet in plans that largely concentrated on the white and wealthier neighborhoods, giving preference to affluent home-owners over renters in terms of public assistance and financial aid from authorities (e.g. public housing in new orleans has been almost completely annulled after the storm [graham 25–29; steinberg 18, 22; cutter et al. 15–18, 20]). such perceptions and practices raise questions not only about who has really come back and reestablished their former life, but also about which individuals, communities, and residential areas have the right to reestablishment, according to a certain hegemonic value system. here we are forced to direct our view past “objective” social circumstances and onto social groups that are consciously aiming to establish themselves as better and more distinguished than competing ones, and therefore as more deserving and entitled to larger assets as part of a “healthy” recovery process that according to its intrinsic logic must be advanced unevenly. we can pose the same questions when dealing with the issue of reestablishment of petkeeping bonds in the aftermath of the storm. in fact, pet-keeping is tightly linked to the more general question of post-disaster recovery, because in western middle-class societies pets are perceived as creatures that are significantly bound to homes and private households. in the hegemonic perception of pet-keeping, pets are almost analogous to domesticity. they are perceived as part of the home as a site of comfort and stability in an otherwise turbulent world. pets are believed to contribute to a feeling of “ontological security,” inseparable from conceptualizations of the private domestic sphere (fudge 13–38; grier 58–122). the intersection between the housing problems in post-katrina new orleans and the reestablishment of pet-keeping relationships is clear. as sheila crowley observes, katrina created a housing crisis of historic proportions. whereas 302,405 housing units were seriously damaged or destroyed overall, in the areas most affected by the hurricane the devastation struck 73% of the buildings. former residents were stranded in every state in usa and even beyond its borders, and amir zelinger -unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina 99 about 700,000 people lost their homes. among those new orleans residents who lost their dwellings, 73% were black and 71% came from low-income households. once again, it was largely the poor and african americans who found it especially difficult to restore their homes or, alternatively, to find new housing units, as authorities did not effectively accommodate their exceptional situation in this respect, either. as a result, many of them lived in trailers supplied by the federal emergency management agency (fema) or even in tents for long periods (months, and even years in trailers). a significant number of katrina victims have never returned to their former homes, and some of them remained separated from family members for as long as three years after the storm. as crowley summarizes, “katrina is about wrenching hundreds of thousands of people from homes to which most will never return. katrina is about the sudden and complete loss of all that home means — safety, respite, privacy, comfort, and security” (155). with pets and owners separated and scattered all over the united states, it is clear why pet-keeping relationships were dismantled and why reestablishment was complicated, simply as one more fundamental demographic consequence of katrina. this is a radical change in the status of pets, who virtually lost their essential role within society as creatures of domesticity and were exposed to wholly new circumstances. naturally, this transformation was also visible along race and class lines, as some people had greater chances than others of recovery. less privileged and more vulnerable populations were not only less likely to evacuate by themselves, and therefore more prone to being forced to leave their pets behind by rescuers (baum 109; cf., thompson et al.), but also had fewer possibilities of gaining access to stable housing to share with recovered pets. many poor, black women moved again and again between different homes of relatives and friends; they were thereby forced into an extreme residential mobility that rendered the possibility of (re)establishing independent households — such a crucial condition of pet-keeping — unattainable (pardee 68–69). in her book pawprints of katrina: pets saved and lessons learned, cathy scott summarized her experiences as a volunteer in an animal welfare group rescuing pets from the streets of new orleans during and after katrina. she recorded some instances of pets that were located and identified but not reunited with their owners, as well as reunions taking place a very long time after contact was established. one significant story is about gary karcher and his dog himie that was rescued and brought to a shelter in tylertown, mississippi: “after gary returned to louisiana, he and his mother lived in a fema trailer on commercial property, where they were not allowed to have dogs. himie continued living in camp tylertown until gary could repair his damaged house;” only after nine months of separation was gary able to move back to his restored home, and only then did himie come to live with him again (71–72). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 100 hardships of that kind even led some former guardians to relinquish their ownership of a rescued pet, preferring for it to stay with its new owners in the hope that it would be better off. such was the case of belinda sumrall of st. bernard parish, who, upon locating her two german shepherd females, filed a lawsuit against the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals in montgomery county, maryland, which had adopted them out to a local family. once the juridical process was under way, she decided to withdraw the case: “she moved back to louisiana and, according to her lawyer kathryn bloomfield, her living situation became unpredictable. bloomfield says that ‘[u]pon confirmation that her two dogs were healthy and happy and staying with the family who had adopted them […] she gave up the custody fight’ ” (mcnabb 98–99; cf., scott 109, 197, 200–201; londoño). as such a story implies, one possible effect of katrina on pet-keeping in the aftermath is the movement of pets away from poor owners and into the hands of people who could apparently make them “healthier” and “happier.” based on our information regarding the socio-economic situation of the majority of the displaced people and pet-owners, such a movement potentially has distinct social significance. it means that as far as pets and keepers are concerned, the aftermath of katrina worked against what we may refer to as social reproduction (katz), namely against a reconstitution of pre-disaster social contacts between people and their animals. instead, it saw the production of new companionships, made possible by the storm’s severing of old bonds. “bad” pet-keepers. the organization that scott volunteered for, best friends network, passionately aimed at reuniting the stranded pets it found with their original owners. in order to reveal matches with animals residing in the shelter, not only did they conduct a thorough investigation of lost katrina pets websites and published ads, but they also developed a meticulous system that identified every individual animal that came into the organization’s hands, and closely tracked its whereabouts: it’s a system that, when implemented, is foolproof. each animal arriving at the center is assigned an id number, which is etched on an aluminum tag and attached to the collar. admission photos are taken and uploaded to a database and to the petfinder web site. […] included in the paperwork were existing and new microchip numbers, because all dogs and cats at camp tylertown were injected with a microchip. […] the chips, injected between the shoulder blades, contain individual identification numbers that are readable with an electronic scanner. […] microchipping […] is a major key to getting pets home (44–45). amir zelinger -unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina 101 the fact that best friends resorted to this operation should be read not only as an assertion of the individuality attributed to distinct pet animals in the context of disaster resilience, but also as a firm perception that pet-keeping in its modern version completely identifies a personal owner or family and the pet that belongs only to them as exclusive manifestations (kean; steinbrecher 197). the topic of successful reunions and the restoration of original pet-owner relationships is a leitmotif throughout scott’s book. according to her account, the ideal of reunion informed the motivations of volunteers and was to a large extent the “driving force. it lifted morale” (164). in the apogee of one of her stories about owner and pet coming back together she maintains: “to see them together again was what the animal rescue was all about” (163). every time a pet went home, it was announced in the camp with a ritual, during which rescuers banged together pots and pans and shouted “reunion! reunion!”: “reunions were the events volunteers and staffers looked forward to most” (163–164; cf., smith, hurricane katrina 133–134). imbued with this ideal of reunions, it does not come as surprise that for scott finding a new home for displaced pets was only “the next-best thing” (209-210). feeling less enthusiastic about adopting out to people outside of the devastated area, her heart lay above all with the locals: “despite limited resources, despite being separated from their families and pets for months, and despite facing obstacle upon obstacle, the people of new orleans who returned to their homes were determined to rebuild their city” (218). taking such attitudes about the advantageousness of reunions into account, it may seem bewildering at first glance, that, as noted above, many pets were briskly adopted out to new homes by the shelters that harbored them, and that such vehement custody disputes arose between owners and foster families that refused to hand the animals back. the reason for these refusals may lie in a different kind of social perception. contrary to the reunion ideal, one may detect through the custody disputes that certain animal welfare groups and new guardians in fact valued the instrument of adopting out, even in cases where original owners were located. in a petfinder forum from march 2006 concerning a rescued cat (precious) whose owners inquired about her after she was presumably given to a new family, one volunteer commented about the events: in my heart of hearts i feel that southern animal [sic] foundation […] adopted her out. [...] the reason why i feel strongly that this happened, is becuse [sic] i later found out that the owners had never requested a rescue of this cat, (naivity [sic], ignorance, etc.) and when it was finally rescued on oct 20th, it probably was marked as “owner abandoned.” ann bell, who is the director of saf [southern animal foundation], is known humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 102 for her views on animals that were “left behind,” and she feels that owners that deserted their animals, are not owners that deserve to have the animals back. […] you know, a part of me would agree with her action of adopting precious out, under the circumstances. it sure as heck must have been an immensely heart-rending thing, to see this cat come in, starving and dehydrated, after being trapped inside an apt for almost 2 months, with no owner requested rescue infomation [sic] tagged on her. […] i have seen the hopeful elation of the young 16 year old owner, when i told her that i thought we were nearing in to finding precious (after her teacher posted a lost ad on p[et]f[inder]). i then watched her slip into dispair [sic] as the days wore on, and precious had simply “disappeared” at southern animal foundation, with no record of her. the young girl and her mother, when questioned about why they had not requested a rescue, said that they “did not know who or how.” […] with the above information in mind, you can see why i am “torn” in my opinion, and “understand” if this cat was adopted out. i really stopped looking for her about a month ago, when i saw that all roads came to a dead-in on this cat. someone knows where she is, but they will never talk. […] on a sidenote, this 1 year old cat was not spayed. the above paragraph may reveal some of the outlooks held by animal welfare representatives in the aftermath of katrina. first, there is the conception that some pet guardians are not legitimate, a point made visible due to the hurricane. people that “deserted” their animals are not qualified to be pet-keepers. this discourse has a noticeable moral tone, as the “deserters” are immediately categorized as undeserving owners. however, as i outlined above, the fact that certain material conditions and the limited capabilities of vulnerable groups may have led to this “desertion” remains unspoken. rather, the writer resorts to allusions about the possible flaws of the owners: naivety, ignorance, and perhaps even dullness, considering that it took them so long to react and to begin searching for their cat. once again, the circumstances in which stranded people lived during the storm, and possible communication difficulties they may have experienced, are not accounted for. it is also noteworthy to read the last remark, “on a side-note,” that the cat had not been spayed, implying that the owners’ negligence of their animal actually began a long time before katrina disrupted the bond for good. in many of the custody disputes this line of argument — that former new orleans owners were bad pet-keepers who did not nurture their animals sufficiently — was amir zelinger -unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina 103 picked up by the adopters. new guardians, together with the animal organization movements that often acted as co-defendants, were striving to differentiate between the new and better keepers and their old, worse counterparts. a major issue in this regard are comments about the health and condition of the pets adopted. one case that attracted large public attention was that of steve and doreen couture of st. bernard parish, louisiana, whose dog, master tank, was fostered by pam bondi, an assistant state prosecutor in florida (and today attorney general of florida). bondi states that the st. bernard dog she adopted from the humane society of pinellas, florida, was emaciated and suffered from heartworm when he came into her hands: “i love noah [the new name she gave him],4 and just want to ensure he’s well cared for, safe, and loved for the rest of his life” (meadows); “i took a dog who was a walking skeleton. that’s what was wrong with him before the hurricane” (lee). according to rhonda rineker, a realtor from dunedin, florida, who adopted the coutures’ second dog, nila, and renamed her gracie, the animal had a “pre-hurricane condition of heartworm, a potentially fatal and easily prevented parasite” (meadows). attorney joseph bednarik, who commented fervidly on the custody disputes, stated regarding the stranded katrina dog he himself adopted: “she was found under a house with a cut off rope around her neck. no identification, no rabies tag, and no registration were noted. upon examination she was heartworm positive, tapeworm positive, and had advanced venereal cancer. the cancer was easily visible to anyone who cared to view her from behind. she was not spayed, […] her prior owners cared for her miserably” (mcnabb 79). bednarik claims that as many as 98% of katrina pets were not spayed or neutered, and about 85% had heartworms (ibid. 81). similarly, melisa dudley, the president of a new hampshire dog welfare organization that took some katrina dogs into its care asserted: “i’d be hard-pressed to return the dogs, just given the condition they were in. eight out of 10 were heartworm-positive. that didn’t just happen because katrina happened. […] others had old scars crossing their bodies. […] most weren’t spayed or neutered” (liebowitz).5 leaving aside whether these statements are objectively correct, one can recognize here a reproach of katrina pets’ ex-owners — mostly poor people — as unreliable pet guardians. significantly, an animal welfare discourse is being entwined here with judgments about people’s character, and about more and less proper homes for pets. such rhetoric also informed the narratives employed by the animal welfare groups, some of them written clearly in response to accusations regarding their adoption policies. characteristically of these narratives, animal compassion network, a north carolinian association sued for giving away a st. bernard parish resident’s chihuahua, claims repeatedly that it saw its mission as adopting out katrina pets “to suitable humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 104 homes,” “appropriate foster homes,” or “responsible adoptive homes” (jonsson; animal compassion network). this turns our attention back to the afore-mentioned perception of pet-keeping as privilege. the statements made by new adopters and animal welfare activists hint at the idea that if people cannot, or are not willing to, take care that their animals enjoy the greatest well-being, they should not keep them in their homes as pets. if people do not take their animals to the veterinarian to check for heartworms, if they do not pay for their cancer treatment, if they do not feed them the best and healthiest food, then they fail to be true pet guardians. this is the implication behind the perception of petkeeping as privilege and of pet-keepers as people who “spare no expense to ensure that their animals are as happy, contented and secure as they possibly can be” (serpell, in the company of animals 15). in the case of the custody disputes of katrina, this exclusion of the people whose care for their animals was allegedly deficient had very tangible consequences. as pia salk, a clinical psychologist and animal advocate from santa monica, california, who adopted a pit bull of a new orleans locksmith from the seventh ward, put it, “i would not return the dog to a home i don’t think she’s safe in.” she maintained the former owner didn’t know how to treat against heartworm (hall). pam bondi, the florida assistant state prosecutor who adopted a stranded dog from st. bernard parish, justified her decision not to return the dog using the same line of argument: “if i thought i was sending him to a stable environment, where he would be cared for, as hard as it would be, i’d put him in my car and drive him back myself” (lee). according to this logic, the coutures, the louisiana family who had owned the dog and supposedly failed to take care of his heartworm situation, proved unworthy of having a pet. their bond with master tank, their lost dog, had to be dismantled for good, after katrina had caused the first separation. it is important at this point to note that adopters’ allegations of bad care of pets were based not only on the deteriorated condition of their health, but also on animal-related practices considered typical of new orleans lifestyles. here the definition of bad petkeeping that fails to guarantee the well-being of an animal becomes enmeshed with stereotypical perceptions of cultural deficiency of poor african americans in new orleans. the most obvious point of reference in this regard was dog fighting. as bednarik maintained, “dog fighting is extremely popular in new orleans, so many of the animals rescued were severely marred pit bulls” (mcnabb 81). one of scott’s covolunteers was pondering, with regard to a rescued staffordshire terrier (a pit bull type): “red, this sweet creature with dogfighting in his breed’s lineage and his closely cropped ears […] was clearly a caricature of his past owner’s southern macho ideas of amir zelinger -unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina 105 power” (scott 124). in one extreme instance, a connecticut shelter refused to give back the cats of a displaced katrina family, claiming they were practicing witchcraft (mcnabb 94). this analogy is a revealing public denunciation of deviances generally ascribed to new orleans townsfolk before, during, and after katrina. as alice gavin suggests, a hegemonic reference to those lifestyles operates as a means of deploring certain milieux and the people to whom these pathological characteristics are attributed. the stigmatization of public housing in new orleans as a hotbed of criminality and laziness is one example (gavin). this instance resembles the above-mentioned stigma of dog fighting, also an infamous leisure activity generally attributed to a group of persons in an attempt to disapprove of them. in the same way that some people should not be entitled to reside in central “new new orleans” following recovery, thereby rendering them effectively displaced from the community of townsfolk (pardee 64, 77), others (or perhaps the same people) should be deprived of their place in the community of petkeepers.6 their alleged practices with animals, which so drastically deviate from the hegemonic definition of proper pet-keeping, render them unfit to have pets. “what’s best for the dog:” the disaster as chance. susanna hoffman, writing about symbolic perceptions of order and disorder as manifested during the oakland-berkeley firestorm of 1991, claims that one momentous measure that residents resorted to almost obsessively in the aftermath of the catastrophe was getting pets back home, with the goal of restoring a sense of stability. the recovered pet-keeping emblematized a recovered order that had been lost, a renewed normality that had been brutally dismantled by the disaster. the ideal was a reestablishment of a reality in traditional and familiar forms (hoffman 124). the disputes we are dealing with here show that a restoration of pet-keeping as it used to be is not necessarily what everyone was aiming for following katrina. animal welfare groups, as well as new foster families, had a different goal in mind. focusing on the ways in which they attempted to justify why many sheltered animals left for new homes reveals a view concerning a potential correction of the arrangement of pet-keeping that the disaster rendered possible. claiming to be placing the well-being of the animal before its status as property, the differentiation between “better” and “worse” pet-keepers was also a means of taking pets out of the “wrong” hands and delivering them to the “right” ones. the goal was not recovery of pre-disaster attachments between people and pets, but the creation of new ones — a correction that was pursued in accord with the hegemonic perception of good pet-keeping. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 106 to fully understand the custody disputes under discussion, it is important to consider the legal situation regarding the keeping, and especially owning, of pets in the united states. since the 19th century, the law in most states has viewed pets, especially dogs, largely as private property — like livestock. legally, pets are like commodities that have certain value for their owners, and not subjects that have their own interests and desires, let alone rights (hunter and brisbin, jr. 55–60; dayan 213–227, 245–248; baum 107–108, 118; hankin 321). with few exceptions, this view of animals and pets as mere objects of human interests still has a hold on the legal system (kelch 238; hankin 324, 337). the status of pets as property has enormous significance for the question of owner-pet affiliations and the possibility of dismantling them for the sake of creating new ones that will be of more benefit to the animals. as animal rights scholars assert, if pets and other animals are considered property, their own best interest has only marginal importance when weighed against the possession interests of their owners (francione; kelch 235). insufficient care that is detrimental to the well-being of the pet does not justify extinguishing property rights and eliminating the relationship between an owner and his or her animal property. in this legal framework, the welfare and quality of life of the animals and the kind of treatment they receive from their owners are not an essential factor of pet-keeping. pet-keeping, like any other form of animal husbandry, is little more than the physical possession of the animals by their lawful owners. it has little to do with a privileged status or existence of the animals in question (cf. hunter and brisbin, jr. 67–68). under such conditions, it is easy to see why most of the plaintiffs in the katrina custody disputes eventually received their animals back, either by court decision or after a settlement had been reached (mcnabb; shuffield 122; anderson 378–379). even though plaintiffs had less financial means than defendants, the traditional view of animals as property guaranteed their victory in court. to win the case, they did not have to prove that they took good care of the animals, but simply that the animals belonged to them (huss 1146). cases inevitably focused on the damage that was done to them by dispossessing them of their animal property, and not on the damage they might have inflicted on the animals by not treating them against heartworms. ironically, the same disregard of animals’ interests that, during the storm, led to the removal of pets from evacuation transports and to their separation from their poor owners now paved the way for their reunion with them. initially, the animal welfare organizations that were sued saw the disputes as a rare opportunity for setting a legal precedent for referring to animals as living creatures whose well-being must be accounted for, and not merely as soulless pieces of property amir zelinger -unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina 107 possessed by humans. the disputes generated considerable interest among animal rights activists and organizations. an article on the bondi dispute stated, for example, that “[c]ases like hers are being closely watched by animal rights activists and animal law experts, who say judges could carve new precedent if they consider a pet’s best interests when deciding who gets to keep it” (jenkins, “law a little fuzzy”).7 in the past decades animal welfare associations’ policy and ideology regarding companion animals has changed in one major aspect: instead of focusing their attention on acts of wanton cruelty against companion animals — the usual approach of humane societies in the past — they now see their mission in positively promoting good pet-keeping as conducted by caring, responsible guardians. this new policy goes along with condemning “bad” keepers not for cruelty per se, but for negligence and insufficient care, or so-called “passive cruelty” (hunter and brisbin, jr. 60–65, 68). in the context of katrina’s custody disputes, changing the legal status of pets from property to independent living beings who deserve good care was an instrument of achieving such a positive improvement in pet-keeping and in pets’ lives: it would have made possible and legitimate the movement of pets from mere owners who treated them poorly to true guardians who were versed in the principles of good pet-keeping and promised to make sure they lived as happily as possible.8 philip g. kircher, the lawyer of a psychotherapist and doctor from doylestown, pennsylvania, who adopted the mutt of a new orleans evacuee, summarized the non-anthropocentric principle that would have mandated such a movement: “we’re trying to do what’s best for the dog” (boccella). under these circumstances, it is understandable that for animal welfare organizations and the adopters who were their allies and shared their values the new reality katrina created was, to a large extent, a desirable one. it changed the lives and status of animals for the better. returning to the case of the couture family and pam bondi, an article in a local newspaper paraphrased bondi’s argument, that the adopted dog “needs medical care that she doesn’t think the previous owners […] can provide. […] ‘morally, ethically, legally, it’s not even a close call to me. i’m saving his life and protecting him.’ ” although she “won’t discuss how much she has spent on noah,” she reported he “gets fresh chicken and beef with every meal” (jenkins, “dispute nips at prosecutor’s heels”). in contrast to this luxurious life, her local veterinarian in florida apparently told her the dog “would not survive living outdoors back in louisiana” (carlton). in other words, with bondi, the dog’s life was elevated. he now lived like a genuine pet — with all the benefits received from a responsible guardian. in another dispute, that of new orleans evacuee paula duming’s lawsuit against wendy shieh and dustin jones, san diego residents who adopted her stranded dog pablo, “[t]he couple refused [to hand him back] on the grounds that they are able to provide pablo with better care than ms. duming who is on a fixed income” (burroughs). dale green, the director of the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 108 new hampshire rottweiler rescue organization for the love of dog, which adopted some katrina dogs, stated things plainly: “the sad fact of the matter is that the majority of the dogs that came out are better off up here” (liebowitz). all of these statements illustrate a picture in which the assumed movement of pets from poor louisiana and mississippi owners to richer ones in affluent towns in florida, california, or new england is a welcome process. as a subtext, it implies that only financially established people should be admitted to the community of pet-keepers. it excludes the poor from pet-keeping (cf. smith, governing animals 86). implicit in placing the welfare of the animals — “what’s best for the dog” — as first priority is that it would be undesirable for dogs and cats to be part of low-income households. considering these assertions, we can recognize the great positive impact that katrina had in the eyes of new guardians and, especially, animal welfare organizations. bearing in mind the above-mentioned traditional, rigorous attribution of an individual pet to one specific owner or family, we are in a position to assess the huge opportunity the catastrophe opened up for those discontented with the current state of pet-keeping in the united states and wishing to reform it. as a natural disaster of gigantic dimensions, katrina, in the eyes of animal welfare activists, made it possible to take pets away from their unqualified, poor owners. the stranding of so many animals and the disconnection from their homes facilitated something that is impossible to achieve under normal conditions, namely the reshuffling of pets and keepers. as scott admits, “[f]or some pets, katrina, while devastating in so many ways, was the best thing that ever happened to them” (198). she tells a story about a “yard dog” whose former owner had “never taken the time to name” him. he was “aggressive,” “feral-like,” and “scared,” as well as unhealthy. in contrast to his former life, this dog received much love and ample room to move about at the tylertown shelter. in this view, katrina’s stranded pets were rescued in a double sense: first, from the flood; second, from the households of people who treated them badly (cf. weaver 699). in the process, they turned from “yard dogs” into real “pets.” a closer look at the activities of animal welfare organizations in the immediate aftermath of the storm substantiates the idea that for many of them katrina opened a chance of transferring animals from bad owners and bad environments to more appropriate households for pet-keeping. a main issue is the rapidity with which organizations adopted out pets to new foster homes. in a large number of court cases, plaintiffs raised the accusation that the animal shelters that had been holding their pets were sending them to new homes after very short periods, without conducting an exhaustive search for legal owners and contrary to state laws about the minimum amir zelinger -unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina 109 amount of time shelters are obliged to harbor a displaced animal before delivering it to a new foster home (meadows). one rescue volunteer claims to have “encountered hundreds of cases of shelters that put up pets for adoption without first attempting to find owners” (roddy). while it is true that the temporary shelters had limited housing capabilities, compared to the enormous number of pets stranded as a result of the hurricane, it seems that such objective reasons are not the only ones explaining the hasty adopting out of many of the animals. the north carolina animal compassion network (acn), which was sued for adopting out a dog belonging to a louisiana person, published its own version of its actions immediately following katrina: soon after [the hurricane slammed the gulf coast] the aspca asked if acn would accept any cats and dogs from the flooded louisiana animal shelters into our foster homes. because these were surrendered shelter animals they had no place to go and no one looking for them; we willingly opened our hearts and foster-network to them. […] with the arrival of each transport from the disaster area, our medical staff and volunteers immediately recorded the intakes, began medical assessments and treatments, and matched animals with appropriate foster homes. (animal compassion network) from this portrayal of the events we can learn a few things: in acn’s perception, the animals that came to its facilities were clearly and exclusively surrendered ones (“these were surrendered shelter animals”), meaning that they no longer belonged to anyone, and that they had the status of feral pets, due to an act of abandonment by katrina evacuees. in other words, the animals were actively “surrendered” and not, for instance, lost or gone astray without owners being able to determine their destiny. based on this assumption, the animals had been in fact rendered available for adoption straight away. despite the claim, that “we also initiated reunification efforts using any clues we could find” (ibid.), it seems that from the beginning, new owners (from “appropriate foster homes”), and not the old ones, were desired. keeping in mind the concerted efforts that best friends, for instance, made to locate previous owners, the brevity of acn’s account of its own attempts at reuniting, and their focus on fostering, are quite astonishing. the actual outcome is not surprising: according to the account only 10.4% of the animals were reunited (ibid.). compared with mcnabb’s assessment of 20% of the total animals rescued returning to former owners, this is a quite meager number (mcnabb 76). to some degree, this interpretation supports the assumption that “rescue organizations’ mentality that those who left their pets behind during hurricane katrina do not deserve humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 110 them” (ibid. 76; cf. dickey 234) dictated many of their practices. a representative of voices for animals, a pennsylvania shelter that was believed to adopt out the poodle of a retired sheet-metal worker from the ninth ward to a woman in pittsburgh, admitted that “groups are struggling over what to do with animals they suspect ‘suffered serious long-term neglect’ before katrina” (boccella). the potential disinclination toward reunifications that characterized such groups is further corroborated by kathrine glover and rob robison, who following hurricane andrew (1992) developed a system to help reunite owners and their pets. during katrina, glover and robison attested that they “liked their [best friends’] emphasis on reuniting animals with their owners, which is not always the case with other animals groups” (perkins). indeed, many shelters were not really attuned to owners attempting to find out the whereabouts of their pets and, on the contrary, laid many obstacles in their path. a case in point is the above-mentioned story of the petfinder post, in which a cat, after being located, suddenly “ ‘disappeared’ at southern animal foundation, with no record of her.” according to the responder, “i really stopped looking for her about a month ago, when i saw that all roads came to a dead-in on this cat. someone knows where she is, but they will never talk.” as for the pinellas humane society, where pam bondi acquired the dog of the couture family, people who believed their pets reached the society’s shelter and the volunteers aiding them have testified that open communication with officials was extremely difficult to attain. first, officials claimed that the shelter was not holding the sought pets (even contrary to evidence), and later they resorted simply to not returning calls and e-mails (lee). paula duming, whose dog was adopted out to a san diego couple, contacted the animal benefit club of phoenix, arizona, the organization that gave him away, only to be consistently fended off by the director, dee kotinas. first, kotinas claimed the dog adopted was not the one duming was claiming; then, after duming brought her a photo, she tried to put her off with misstatements about the appearance and character of the dog she delivered to foster, and eventually she simply screamed at her, “it’s over. it’s adopted and it’s legal. move on. get over it.” kotinas even testified in court that she did not bother to look through the ad of the found dog in petfinder (battista; clancy and bazar). hence, we can conclude that on the side of organizations, reunions following katrina or the lack thereof were to a large extent a matter of choice. when the choice was made, it was often dictated by non-anthropocentric motivations regarding the well-being of the pet, combined with more or less implicit class-based views about the kind of household an animal would have a better life in. those views were grounded largely on considerations of the material capabilities and behavioral habits of guardians, and amir zelinger -unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina 111 therefore were tightly intertwined with discourses about poverty and the mentalities of poor, southern people. be that as it may, for certain animal lovers, katrina was a rare chance to effectively upgrade the social status of a considerable number of pets.8 for them, recovery meant building new human-animal companionships, but at the same time demolishing old ones.9 conclusion. in view of the magnitude, both of the number of lives lost and of the cost of the damage caused, hurricane katrina was a radical event. yet, katrina could only become so extraordinarily destructive because of the ordinary social structures typical for the region it assailed. in this sense, katrina was not really about the falling apart of world orders. socially, its impact had a firm logic that demonstrated the “normal,” rather than the exceptional. as an “unnatural disaster” it was not a monstrous happening, stemming from spheres beyond the human, but one that was tightly tied to established patterns that characterized the way a certain human society was structured. by relating the major social aspects that informed the disaster during the recovery phase to the issue of post-katrina pet-keeping, we can gain an insight into the extent to which this seemingly innocent hobby-like occupation is also played out in the framework of familiar social dynamics that determine interactions among individuals and groups. elizabeth finch, the dog-keeper from central park quoted at the beginning of this article, was absolutely right when she maintained that katrina’s stranded pets fit “into a bigger model of discrimination.” it is impossible to tell the story of these animals without placing them side by side with the more general, disturbing social elements that constituted this “unnatural disaster.” but equally, the embedded nature of the sociology of katrina and that of pet-keeping demonstrates that pet-keeping itself extends beyond the mere personal bond between a keeper and a companion into the domain of the political and the socially controversial. it means that not only did the hurricane itself have a considerable social dimension; it also enabled the quite common social reality of pet-keeping, an element that is usually blurred and unaccounted for, to rise to the surface. katrina, in other words, taught us something very fundamental about the social character of our intimate companionship with certain animals that we cherish the most. however, the custody conflicts studied in this article tell the story not only of a familiar social reality, but also of its disruption (cf. weaver 705–706). as we have seen, the perception of the movement of pets from their former owners to adopters outside of louisiana and mississippi as a positive development was rooted in a perception of petkeeping as privilege. new guardians and animal welfare movements called into question the status of former owners as pet-keepers. their allegations of poor treatment reveal how the hegemonic understanding of pet-keeping as privilege works to exclude humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 112 certain people from owning pets. on the other hand, the struggle by former owners to reclaim their pets may be seen as an act of resistance against their exclusion, and, by implication, against the perception of pet-keeping as privilege. by fighting to reestablish their bonds with their dogs and cats even after their lives were shattered by the hurricane, former owners hinted at the possibility that love for pets does not necessarily have to go along with ensuring their greatest well-being. they suggested that it is possible for keepers to be emotionally attached to their animals even if they didn’t treat them against heartworms or fleas (according to one estimate, more than a quarter of pet owners in the u.s. “fail” to give their animals “basic veterinary care” [pierce 4]). they insinuated that sometimes even “yard dogs” might be “pets,” and hence called into question the ideology that ties pets to domesticity and the comfort of the home. these ideas go far beyond katrina and the custody disputes it created. they challenge us to rethink our common perceptions of what “pets” are, and they call upon us to embrace a much more open, dynamic definition of this category (cf. eddy; serpell, “pet-keeping”). their disruptive force originated in the reality of social conflicts, but it is felt most severely on the level of theory. interestingly, the disruption of common perceptions of “pets” as privileged animals was already taking place during the catastrophe itself: without forgetting the great suffering that all animals were exposed to, it is challenging to refer to scott’s testimony, that not only “ordinary” pets, but many other animals, “regardless of their species” and “the kind of animals they were,” enjoyed the complete mindfulness of the rescuing volunteers attending to their efforts in the streets of new orleans (114, 144, 153).10 as a truly exceptional, tragic event, katrina at least hinted at the direction of a more equal animal community, that in this regard really differed from the human one. notes 1. in areas severely damaged, a total of 45.8% of the population was black, in areas undamaged this was only as high as 26.4% (hartman and squires 275). 2. however, this type of close attachment of keepers to their pets as demonstrated in the course of a natural disaster is only partly a new phenomenon. similar behavior is documented, for instance, in the 1927 mississippi flood (lübken 254–255). 3. according to steven wise, an animal rights lawyer who represented ex-owners, “[t]hese animals are only moving in one direction, from poor to rich and from black to white and, as an american, that really bothers me” (jonsson). amir zelinger -unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina 113 4. the significance of the renaming of the adopted dog came recently once again to public attention, as “late show” host stephen colbert mentioned the bondi-couture dispute in relation to bondi’s connections with, and support for, presidential candidate donald trump. on the september, 8, 2016 edition of the show, colbert half-joked that “refusing to give back a dog to flood victims, but naming the dog after the most famous flood victim of all time is just cold” (burris). 5. according to leslie irvine, a sociologist of human-animal relations who volunteered during katrina in a pet shelter in gonzalez, louisiana, only a few of the animals brought to the facility from new orleans were neutered. this can be read as another indication of the low socio-economic background of the owners of pets left behind. irvine supplies one more interesting fact in this regard, namely, that most of the dogs were mixed breeds, while many others were pit bulls (30; cf. dickey 232). 6. donna thomas of animal rescue new orleans (arno) has pointed out that snobbery had been a factor in animal welfare organizations’ efforts at recovery: “there’s this assumption that somehow everybody in new orleans was poor and uneducated and incapable of loving their pets” (meadows). 7. when, four years later, bondi ran for the office of florida attorney general as the republican candidate, her democrat opponents resurrected the memory of the dog dispute, even releasing a youtube video featuring the coutures, with the aim of convincing the public of bondi’s deficient sense of social justice. asked whether she was afraid this could effectively harm her chances in the campaign, she responded confidently: “not at all. […] i’ve received a tremendous amount of support from people and animal rights activists, and no criticism at all” (nipps). 8. the differentiation between “guardians” that are true “caregivers” of their pets and “owners” who “treat their animals like objects” is a central aspect of present-day pet ethics terminology; see pierce 213–215. 9. for recovery as demolition (of houses) see gotham and greenberg 109. pet-keeping following katrina is by no means the first example in american history of an elite group perceiving the aftermath situation of a hurricane as a chance to assert its authority and reshape society, in line with its own views of the desired conditions for the future. the hurricanes that attacked the colonies of the north-american eastern coast during the 17th and 18th centuries had already made it possible for richer settlers to get hold of the property of weaker ones, who as a consequence of the calamity were forced into humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 114 bankruptcy (mulcahy 28–29). at a much later date, the extremely deadly storm that slammed galveston, texas, has enabled a new business elite of progressive-minded people to gain dominance in the local political arena and determine circumstances in the town according to their ideals of reform and professionalism (bixel). 10. scott tells, for example, of the rescuing of geese, ducks, chickens, pigs, spiders, snakes, turtles, and many more species (not to mention the stray populations of cats and dogs) that received top-quality care by their human rescuers. see also moore. as a matter of fact, in earlier natural disasters from the first half of the twentieth century farm animals received greater consideration, and maybe even more devoted care, from rescuing authorities than pets, thanks to their material and economic worth (lübken 255–256). works cited anderson, zandra. “legal issues involving animal associations and individuals helping animals.” litigating animal law disputes: a complete guide for lawyers. joan schaffner and julie fershtman, eds. american bar association, 2009. 355–436. animal compassion network. “acn disaster response.” accessed january 25, 2012. bankoff, greg. “time is of the essence: disasters, vulnerability, and history.” international journal of mass emergencies and disasters 22.3 (november 2004): 23–42. _____. “learning about disasters from animals.” learning and calamities: practices, interpretations, patterns. heike enger, marén schorch, and martin voss, eds. routledge, 2015. 42–55. battista, francis. “pablo’s trial: a spectator’s view.” best friends network. accessed january 27, 2012. baum, marsha l. “‘room on the ark?’ the symbolic nature of u.s. pet evacuation statutes for nonhuman animals.” considering animals: contemporary studies in humananimal relations. carol freeman, elizabeth leane, and yvette watt, eds. ashgate, 2011. 105–118. bevc, christine a., keith nicholls, and j. steven picou, “community recovery from hurricane katrina: storm experiences, property damage, and the human condition.” amir zelinger -unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina 115 the sociology of katrina: perspectives on a modern catastrophe. david l. brunsma, david overfelt, and j. steven picou, eds. rowman and littlefield, 2010. 135–156. bixel, patricia bellis. “‘it must be made safe:’ galveston, texas, and the 1900 storm.” american disasters. steven biel, ed. new york up, 2001. 223–246. blake, eric s., christopher w. landsea, and ethan j. gibney. “the deadliest, costliest, and most intense united states tropical cyclones from 1851 to 2010 (and other frequently requested hurricane facts).” noaa technical memorandum nws nhc-6, 2011. accessed march 7, 2016. boccella, kathy. “tug-of-war erupts over katrina pets.” philadelphia inquirer. july, 16, 2006. brinkley, douglas. the great deluge: hurricane katrina, new orleans, and the mississippi gulf coast. morrow, 2006. burris, sarah k. “stephen colbert: ‘pam bondi is the only person in the world who made money from trump university.’” raw story. september, 9, 2016, accessed july 28, 2017. web. burroughs, anna. “hurricane katrina dog at center of legal battle.” yahoo! voices. march, 12, 2007. accessed january 26, 2012. web. carlton, sue. “there are no losers in katrina dog case.” st. petersburg times. may, 25, 2007. clancy, michael and emily bazar. “katrina creates custody dogfight.” usa today. march, 13, 2007. crowley, sheila. “where is home? housing for low-income people after the 2005 hurricanes.” there is no such thing as a natural disaster: race, class, and hurricane katrina. hartmann, chester and gregory d. squires, eds. routledge, 2006. 121–166 cutter, susan l., christopher t. emrich, jerry t. mitchell, bryan j. boruff, melanie gull, matthew c. schmidtlein, christopher g. burton, and ginni melton. “the long road home: race, class, and recovery from hurricane katrina.” environment 48.2 (2006): 8– 20. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 116 dayan, joan. the law is a white dog: how legal rituals make and unmake persons. princeton up, 2011. dickey, bronwen. pit bull: the battle over an american icon. alfred a. knopf, 2016. dynes, russel r. and havidán rodríguez. “finding and framing katrina: the social construction of disaster.” the sociology of katrina: perspectives on a modern catastrophe. david l. brunsma, david overfelt, and j. steven picou, eds. rowman and littlefield, 2010. 25–36. eddy, timothy j. “what is a pet?” anthrozoös 16.2 (2003): 98–105. francione, gary l. “animals—property or persons?” animal rights: current debates and new directions. sunstein, cass r and martha c. nussbaum, eds. oxford up, 2004. 108– 142. fudge, erica. pets. acumen, 2008. gavin, alice. “reading katrina: race, space, and an unnatural disaster.” new political science 30.3 (august 2008): 325–346. glick, megan h. “animal instincts: race, criminality, and the reversal of the ‘human’.” american quarterly 65.3 (september 2013): 639–59. gotham, kevin fox and miriam greenberg. crisis cities: disaster and redevelopment in new york and new orleans. oxford up, 2014. graham, darwin bond. “the new orleans that race built. racism, disaster, and urban spatial relationships.” seeking higher ground: the hurricane katrina crisis, race, and public policy reader. manning marable and kirsten clarke, eds. palgrave mcmillan, 2008. 17–32. grier, kathrine. pets in america: a history. u of north carolina p, 2006. grimm, david. citizen canine: our evolving relationship with cats and dogs. publicaffairs, 2014. hall, clara, “there’s a dog in this hunt.” los angeles times. august, 27, 2007. amir zelinger -unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina 117 haney, timothy j., james r. elliott, and elisabeth fussel. “families and hurricane response: a framework for understanding family evacuation strategies, stress, and return migration.” the sociology of katrina: perspectives on a modern catastrophe. david l. brunsma, ,david overfelt, and j. steven picou, eds. rowman and littlefield, 2010. 77– 102. hankin, susan j. “not a living room sofa: changing the legal status of companion animals.” rutgers journal of law & public policy 4.1 (winter 2007): 314–410. haraway, donna j. when species meet. u of minnesota p, 2008. hartman, chester and gregory d. squires. “the social construction of disaster: new orleans as the paradigmatic american city.” seeking higher ground: the hurricane katrina crisis, race, and public policy reader. manning marable and kirsten clarke, eds. palgrave mcmillan, 2008. 271–294. hoffman, susana m. “the monster and the mother: the symbolism of disaster.” catastrophe and culture: the anthropology of disaster. idem and anthony oliver-smith, eds. school of american research press, 2002. 113–141. hunt, melissa, hindi al-awadi, and megan johnson. “psychological sequelae of pet loss following hurricane katrina.” anthrozoös 21.2 (2008): 109–121. hunter, susan, and richard a. brisbin, jr. pet politics: the political and legal lives of cats, dogs, and horses in canada and the united states. purdue up, 2016. huss, rebecca j. “the pervasive nature of animal law: how the law impacts the lives of people and their animal companions.” valparaiso university law review 43.3 (spring 2009): 1131–1154. irvine, leslie. filling the ark: animal welfare in disasters. temple up, 2009. ishiwata, eric. “‘we are seeing people we didn’t know exist:’ katrina and the neoliberal erasure of race.” the neoliberal deluge: hurricane katrina, late capitalism, and the remaking of new orleans. cedric johnson, ed. u of minnesota p, 2011. 32–59. jenkins, colleen. “dispute nips at prosecutor’s heels.” st. petersburg times. july 04, 2006. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 118 _____. “law a little fuzzy.” st. petersburg times. july 16, 2006. jonsson, patrick. “lost in katrina and in new homes: whose pet now?” christian science monitor. july 21, 2006. katz, cindi. “bad elements: katrina and the scoured landscape of social reproduction.” gender, place, and culture 15.1 (february 2008): 15–29. kean, hilda. “the moment of greyfriars bobby: the changing cultural position of animals 1800-1920.” a cultural history of animals in the age of empire, 1800-1920. kathleen kete, ed. berg, 2007. 25–46. kelch, thomas g. “toward a non-property status for animals.” the feminist care tradition in animal ethics. josephine donovan and carol j. adams, eds. columbia up, 2007. 229–249. kim, claire jean. dangerous crossings: race, species, and nature in a multicultural age. cambridge up, 2015. lee, demorris a. “who are pets’ real owners after katrina left them homeless?” st. petersburg times. may 16, 2006. leland, john. “dogs are people too.” new york times. september 11, 2005. liebowitz, sarah. “who rightfully owns ah boo?” concord monitor. september 08, 2006. londoño, ernesto. “fangs are bared over md. group’s katrina dog rescues.” washington post. august 14, 2006. lübken, uwe. “ ‘poor dumb brutes’ or ‘friends in need’? animals and river floods in modern germany and the united states.” beastly natures: animals, humans, and the study of history. dorothee brantz, ed. u of virginia p, 2010. 245–263. mcnabb, megan. “pets in the eye of the storm: hurricane katrina floods the courts with pet custody disputes.” animal law review 14.1 (fall 2007): 72–108. amir zelinger -unnatural pet-keeping: pet-custody disputes in the aftermath of hurricane katrina 119 meadows, bob. “whose dog is it anyway?” people. august 21, 2006. moore, solomon. “animal refuge strives to corral pets—and despair.” los angeles times. september 11, 2005. mulcahy, matthew. “‘a tempestuous spirit called hurri canno:’ hurricanes and colonial society in the british great caribbean.” american disasters. steven biel, ed. new york up, 2001. 11–38. nast, heidi j. “critical pet studies?” antipode 38.5 (november 2006): 894–906. nipps, emily. “as bondi runs for attorney general, bitterness over dog lingers.” tampa bay times. september 4, 2010. pardee, jessica w. “living through displacement: housing insecurity among lowincome evacuees.” displaced: life in the katrina diaspora. lynn weber and lori peek, eds. u of texas p, 2012. 63–78. perkins, nancy. “saving animals: volunteers learn search-rescue methods in case of emergency.” desert news. june 18, 2007. pierce, jessica. run, spot, run: the ethics of keeping pets. u of chicago p, 2016. reilly, benjamin. disaster and human history: case studies in nature, society, and catastrophe. mcfarland, 2009. roddy, dennis b. “katrina victim, 86, sues to have his rescued poodle returned.” pittsburgh post-gazette. june 25, 2006. scott, cathy. pawprints of katrina: pets saved and lessons learned. wiley publishing, 2008. serpell, james. “pet-keeping in non-western societies. some popular misconceptions.” anthrozoös 1.3 (1987): 166–174. _____. in the company of animals: a study of human-animal relationships. cambridge up, 1996. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 120 shuffield, lacy l. “pet parents—fighting tooth and paw for custody: whether louisiana courts should recognize companion animals as more than property.” southern university law review 37.1 (2009): 101–125. smith, james patterson. hurricane katrina: the mississippi story. up of mississippi, 2012. smith, kimberly k. governing animals: animal welfare and the liberal state. oxford up, 2012. steinberg, phil. “what is a city? katrina’s answers.” what is a city? rethinking the urban after hurricane katrina. idem and rob shields, eds. u of georgia p, 2008. 3-29. steinbrecher, aline. “hunde und menschen: ein grenzen auslotender blick auf ihr zusammenleben (1750-1850).” historische anthropologie 19.2 (2011): 192–210. thompson, kirrilly, danielle every, sophia rainbird, victoria cornell, bradley smith, and joshua trigg. “no pet or their person left behind: increasing the disaster resilience of vulnerable groups through animal attachment, activities, and networks.” animals 4.2 (june 2014): 214–240. tierney, kathleen. the social roots of risk: producing disasters, promoting resilience. stanford business books, 2014. waterhouse, carlton. “failed plans and planned failures: the lower ninth ward, hurricane katrina, and the continuing story of environmental injustice.” hurricane katrina: america’s unnatural disaster. jeremy i. levitt and matthew c. whitaker, eds. u of nebraska p, 2009. 156–182. weaver, harlan. “‘becoming in kind:’ race, class, gender, and nation in cultures of dog rescue and dogfighting.” american quarterly 65.3 (september 2013): 689–709. zotarelli, lisa k. “broken bond: an exploration of human factors associated with companion animal loss during hurricane katrina.” sociological forum 25.1 (march 2010): 110–122. microsoft word perry-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:1 donna j. perry the patterned and emergent boundaries of wilderness beings: ponderings on the creature at the edge of the woods prologue. my nephew started his freshman year at the university of maine this past fall, studying forestry. we went to visit him in september and found the wall of his dorm room covered with leaves, as he focused on class requirements to learn how to identify the trees of north america by analyzing the characteristics of each type of leaf. when we went back to visit in november i asked how he was doing with learning the leaves. “fine,” he said. “except now the leaves are all gone so we have to know the trees by their bark.” introduction. my nephew’s experiences studying the intricacies of forestry are reflective of our knowledge of the natural world in general. much of nature exists as a mystery with opportunities for knowledge dependent upon seasonal variation, serendipitous encounters, and the mutually interrelated decisions of human beings and other living creatures. in the following essay i will reflect on how some personal experiences with wildlife in my own backyard have led me to reflect on the potency of knowledge between humans and free-living creatures in the natural world. (photo by author)* humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 94 the human-wildlife interface. the vantage point of my small rural home built on the edge of the woods nearly a quarter century ago has given me a viewpoint on many creatures, including songbirds, raptors, turkeys, deer, bears, fisher cats, raccoons, coyotes, frogs, nesting turtles, bees, and hornets. many of these have been seen from my window, which offers a buffered boundary from which to view, but not to alarm, the animals. the emergence of these creatures has been influenced not only by their own seasonal patterns and survival needs but my own decisions and habits, which include planting nurturing species of plants, creating a water garden, providing bird seed, and refraining from the use of herbicides and pesticides. when i first moved into the house, i had asked my father to build a wildlife feeder from which i envisioned feeding all sorts of animals who would live together in peace. the original wooden feeder eventually fell into disrepair, but the bird feeders that replaced it have continued to draw an assortment of animals over the years. the appearance of some creatures has been sporadic, while others arrive regularly, not only from season to season, but in a sequential emergence over the course of the day. the morning typically starts with visits by songbirds and squirrels, followed midmorning by a flock of turkeys and later nocturnal visitors, such as raccoons and opossums. each species comes in its turn, and i have never witnessed any predation at the feeder other than one hawk that swooped toward a bird one day, but fortunately missed his target. one species in particular has inspired the reflections leading to this essay: the coyote. encounters with a coyote living in the woods behind my house helped generate much insight into the natural world for me. in this paper i will share the story of my encounters with this fascinating creature, and then explore these experiences in relation to the metaphysics of philosopher bernard lonergan. moonshadow — a coyote encounter. the coyote first came to my attention one cold night in the snowy winter of 2015. one of my cats, yukon, sat at the back door gazing through the glass at something beyond. when i first flicked on the light i was able to see only a glimpse of a medium-sized brown creature as it fled. i thought it might be a small deer or a coyote. it turned out to be the latter. the coyote soon came back, despite the backdoor light. it seemed willing to take a risk in order to eat the sunflower seeds scattered beneath my birdfeeder. in a pattern that was to be repeated night after cold winter night, the thin hungry creature stayed for hours, long after any intact sunflower seeds had disappeared, to eat the shells that had been left behind by the birds. donna j. perry -the patterned and emergent boundaries of wilderness beings 95 i was able to take some photographs and began reading about coyotes to learn more. this led me to a wildlife biologist who studied coyotes. from the pictures, he thought it was a female, due to the shape of her snout. feeding wildlife is generally discouraged to avoid human-wildlife conflicts. but seeing the animal so thin at the time of year when female coyotes were likely to be carrying a litter i asked if it would be ok to feed her temporarily, keeping the food by the woods. he said it would probably be all right. thus began a new pattern. i began making her warm oatmeal mixed with yoghurt, and then expanded to high protein pancakes. night after night she came. when i brought the food out to the edge of the forest and placed it on “coyote rock,” she would temporarily retreat into the woods a bit. after i’d returned to the house she would come back and eat the food. the coyote was quite timid and never showed any aggression toward myself or my dogs. i noticed that when i spoke to her in a low voice she often stopped to listen. i never made any attempt to move closer to her or to touch her. i suspect that i might have been able to with time. but it was important to maintain some boundary with the wild. coyotes that become too used to humans often end up in situations in which they are harmed. gradually, spring arrived, and with every lengthening day the line of snow retreated until moonshadow, as i’d come to call her, was easily visible prior to dusk. i wondered if she had a litter somewhere and continued to feed her, but knew the day would come when i had to wean her from the supplemental food. by may i was often out working in the yard after work, and she began arriving regularly around 5 pm or so. during march it had been dark at that hour, but now the longer days exposed her, making her vulnerable. one day while working outside, i noticed that she was trotting around the back of the garden, waiting expectantly for her dinner. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 96 i had read that coyotes are highly intelligent and adaptable. i thought that she could adapt to a later schedule. so i began waiting until dark to put her food out. and sure enough, she began showing up later. finally i knew it was time to wean her and began putting out less and less food each day, until i stopped altogether. however, she continued to visit after dark for most of the summer to eat fallen seeds from the bird feeder. finally, when i was away for a week’s vacation at the end of august, she seemed to stop visiting and i did not see her for some months. i wondered and worried about her. but she had become mystery again. this past january, on the night before the first snow storm, moonshadow returned. i was happy to see her alive and well. i resumed our winter feeding schedule. she continued to remain very cautious, although during the late winter there was a two week period during which she arrived in the morning some days for breakfast. my back yard slopes downward, and several mornings after eating she sat on that hill overlooking the woods, almost as though the yard were now part of her dominion. moonshadow is an eastern coyote, which is now known to be a hybrid of the western coyote and the eastern wolf. the term “coywolf” has been suggested as more accurate donna j. perry -the patterned and emergent boundaries of wilderness beings 97 than coyote (way, “taxonomic”), and recently the species nomenclature of “canis oriens,” meaning “eastern canid,” has been proposed (way & lynn). patterned and emergent conditions for wildlife intelligibility. my experiences with the coyote, as with most human-wildlife encounters, are characterized by shifting successions of disclosure that involve both continuity and change. the seasons provide what philosopher bernard lonergan would call “flexible circles of ranges of schemes of recurrence” (insight 495). human knowledge of wild creatures is conditioned by rhythmic and seasonal variation, schemes of recurrence that are not identical from one year to the next but nonetheless have recognizable patterns. my knowledge of these creatures is partially conditioned by seasonal variation that both hides and reveals. for example, this year our neighborhood had its first encounter with river otters that had migrated to a nearby pond. our experience viewing them was delightful but temporary, as it was made possible by the winter ice which rendered the otters visible during times of eating and play. with the return of open water, otter sightings became much less frequent. variations in the seasons create new possibilities for intelligibility. a spring snowfall opens a horizon into events from the previous evening, as a narrow ribbon winds over the snow bank on the pond’s edge signaling an “otter slide,” much as the same snow makes visible the coyote tracks by my back door — creatures i did not witness, but whose presence i can discern through the patterns left but for a moment in glistening crystals of space-time. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 98 our knowledge of wildlife is conditioned by varying manifestations of the organism. on a biological level the appearance of the creatures themselves changes through processes such as molting feathers and shedding fur, which renders them more or less visible. visibility also varies due to an animal’s behavioral choices to meet biological needs, such as procuring food and shelter, along with patterns of hibernation. natural rhythms external to the creatures, such as sun/moon/day/night and winter/spring/summer/fall, all contribute to revealing or concealing the woodland wildlife. not only is visibility affected by these changing conditions, but sound as well. during times without snow i have been alerted to moonshadow’s presence though her footsteps on crunching leaves. shifting boundaries emerge across space and time. my awareness is often mediated by the sensory, interpretive, and behavioral capacities of other creatures, such as my cat’s observance of the coyote or the particular barking of my dogs when she is nearby — they are aware of her presence long before i am. my knowledge of the coyote involves assembling and analyzing both data i have attended to directly and data i attend to indirectly through understanding my pets’ behavior. finally, my opportunities to learn more about this coyote have been influenced by our mutual unfolding relations and emerging trust. lonergan describes the human person as a unity, revealed to others only gradually, using the metaphor of peeling back “the successive coatings in an onion” (insight 495). in a similar fashion, nature gradually reveals itself. a free-living creature chooses to let itself be known. coyotes usually stay hidden from humans due to the threat that people impose. moonshadow’s selfrevelation has been gradual, with building trust based on her experiences of me. moreover, the coyote’s experiences of me and my dogs is also influenced by change, as our own behaviors shift with the seasons. lengthening days and warming temperatures lead me to spend more time in the garden. open windows allow sounds from the house, such as my voice and noises from my pets, to be audible. unfamiliar stereo music now wafts through the air to the edge of the woods, where moonshadow prances uneasily. unfolding horizons of awareness are thus mediated through systematic and nonsystematic convergences and the relationship between myself and the wild creature, as well as other animals and the natural world. intelligibility is not fixed, but dynamic. wildlife encounters as potency. the metaphysics of bernard lonergan, sj, can offer some perspectives from which to further explore encounters with the natural world and its free-living creatures. lonergan was a twentieth-century canadian philosopher and donna j. perry -the patterned and emergent boundaries of wilderness beings 99 theologian. lonergan views human knowing as a process leading toward “being,” which he defines as “the objective of the pure desire to know” (insight 372). the objective is what is to be known by the totality of all true judgments, and includes all that is known, as well as what is to be known. lonergan describes the notion of being as an anticipated judgment about concrete reality. he further distinguishes “proportionate being” as that portion of being which lies within the realm of potential human understanding. proportionate being is “whatever is to be known by human experience, intelligent grasp, and reasonable affirmation” (416). a free-living creature could then be considered as a dimension of proportionate being, an intelligible entity which lies at least partially within the capacity of human understanding. lonergan describes a structure of knowledge using three elements of metaphysics: potency, form, and act. in brief, potency corresponds to “the component of proportionate being to be known” (457) through explanatory knowledge of empirical experiences, form corresponds to full understandings about those experiences, and act corresponds to a judgment or verification of that which we have reasonably affirmed as true. for lonergan, metaphysics comprises a unified and cumulative progression of human knowledge moving from that which is experienced to a higher level of understanding through critical reflection and reasonable affirmation. lonergan further distinguishes the metaphysical elements into two types. central potency, form, and act, are the experiencing, understanding, and affirmation of an individual existing unity. conjugate potency, form, and act are the experiencing, understanding, and affirmation of change within the unity. “central act is existence, for what exists is the intelligible unity. conjugate act is occurrence...” (462). this distinction provides for understanding the unique unity of an individual being while also apprehending changes within a particular unity over time. within a single being we can appreciate both continuity and change. research with human subjects suggests that this cognitive distinction between central and conjugate act is critical to overcoming group bias, and in building peace with former enemies (perry, catholic; perry, israelipalestinian). in the movement from potency to form and to act, our own understanding progresses from a given experience of a natural creature to a fuller understanding of them. at the same time, that creature is evolving and changing. lonergan’s philosophy provides for a metaphysical accounting of both our own progressive understanding as well as the developmental changes that are occurring in the being that is the object of our consciousness. as our knowledge of a particular wildlife creature progresses, we recognize that we are achieving a fuller understanding of the same creature. in our humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 100 understanding of a coyote, for example, central act is the affirmation of that coyote’s existence as a unique identity of unity. conjugate act relates to affirmation of an occurrence in that coyote-as-unity. coyote as known. wildlife encounters, then, exist as potency. indeed, in native american traditions, each animal is believed to provide special teachings for human beings (sams & carson; andrews). we then can ask of encounters with natural creatures, what is to be known here? there is an intelligibility in this creature open to deeper understanding. thus my experience with a single coyote can be the stimulus to call forth a deeper knowing through observing and reflecting on her behavior, reading scientific studies about coyotes in general, conversations with experts, and further reflective encounters. lonergan indicates that the notion of a thing moves beyond sensory and explanatory insights to grasp “a unity, identity, whole in data” in its “concrete individuality.” “thus, the dog [or coyote] fido is a unity, and to fido is ascribed a totality of data whether of color or shape, sound or odor, feeling or movement” (insight 271). lonergan goes on to say that things are “extended in space, permanent in time, and yet subject to change” (271). the notion of change is conceived through differences in data at different times within the same thing. this approach is helpful for understanding the natural world, particularly coyotes, which are known to be highly adaptable. as coyotes adapt they have been expanding their habitat considerably, even into urban areas, leading to increased human experiences of seeing and hearing coyotes (way, suburban howls). this offers an opportunity for expanded human understandings and judgments about coyotes. my observation of a single coyote over time has yielded considerable insight about the characteristics of the coyote, while also observing changes over time. my understanding of both continuity and change within the same animal has led to cognitive affirmations about this coyote. encounters with wildlife are patterned not only by the revealing or concealing rhythms of the natural world. they are also patterned by the individual lens or “mediated immediacy” (doran) that the human knower brings to that encounter. despite the fact that coyotes are an important part of both urban and rural ecosystems, they are “viewed by many people as a pest or vermin, something un-desirable to be disposed of ” (way, “love wolves” 11). this is partially due to the perceived threat of coyotes to livestock and pets. but the profound disvaluing of this animal often results in lethal — and cruel donna j. perry -the patterned and emergent boundaries of wilderness beings 101 — forms of control, including being trapped, poisoned, shot from the air, and killed in contests. coyotes are often subject to inhumane practices that are not only ineffective in population management but result in prolonged suffering and death. indeed, 42 of 49 (86%) of u.s. states allow unlimited bag limits of coyotes, suggesting that they are of little to no value (9). current coyote management practices are not only of ecological concern but raise disturbing ethical questions (way, suburban howls). the understanding — or misunderstanding — that humans have about particular wildlife creatures holds important ethical implications for how such creatures are treated. human bias towards coyotes has many interesting parallels to group bias of humans against other humans. i am addressing this in a separate paper and research project. but it is worthwhile to note here that coming to know “this coyote,” this unityidentity whole of moonshadow, has helped dispel some of the myths i had heard about coyotes in a similar way that personally knowing the human “other” helps to remove the stereotypes that comprise and perpetuate group bias. research suggests that human attitudes towards animals can change with time. one study that examined attitudes toward coyotes on cape cod, massachusetts, found an increase in positive attitudes and diminished fear toward coyotes in 2012, as compared with 2005. these changes in attitudes were also associated with decreased support for lethal management (jackman and rutberg). through knowing moonshadow i have experienced changes in knowledge about coyotes, as well as new perceptions about myself as connected to and relating with wildlife. this understanding provides a view of myself as mutually unfolding in relationship with this wild creature. mutual trust is needed for each of us to become vulnerable to the other. new patterns are created based on this trust and evolving relationship. the human-wildlife boundary becomes more permeable. thus this transition from potency to form and to act involves a change in the known related to coyote appearance and behavior, a change in the knower comprised of a development in intelligence about coyotes, and change in the context of knowing, the environment which illuminates or obscures the intelligibility of the thing to be known. human, coyote and ecological development are intertwined. coyote as knower. as stated above, the totality of data about “fido” includes “feeling or movement” (insight 271). lonergan notes that animals possess a further degree of freedom that allows them to move beyond the limitations of their material situation and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 102 outer circumstances. this further degree of freedom emerges from the animal’s sensibility: the animal pertains to an explanatory genus beyond that of the plant; that explanatory genus turns on sensibility; its specific differences are differences of sensibility; and it is in differences of sensibility that are to be found the basis for differences of organic structure, since that structure, as we have seen, possesses a degree of freedom that is limited, but not controlled, by underlying materials and outer circumstances. (291) lonergan describes a species as “an intelligible solution to a problem of living in a given environment” (290). here we must note that for coyotes the solution is not only intelligible but intelligent. lonergan, following darwin, contends that “for an animal to begin a new mode of living, there would be needed not only a new sensibility but also a new organism” (291). but the coyote is an animal that has adapted its ways of living, not through physical change, but through use of intelligence. for example, coyotes have acquired the necessary new insights to live quite successfully in urban environments, which has required changes in strategies for procurement of food, shelter, and avoidance of humans. research on coyotes living in chicago (of which there are approximately 2000 [dell’amore]) has revealed successful adaption to traffic patterns, including waiting at red lights, understanding direction of traffic flow, and pausing in median strips to wait for traffic to stop before crossing the further side of double lane roads (badger). now, to be sure, coyotes have not achieved the level of intelligence required for the building of cities. nor, that matter, for polluting them. but it is clear that at least partially through their intelligence coyotes have achieved the developmental flexibility required for “a partial transcendence of environment in the animal that develops in the shelter of the egg or womb, that enjoys parental care, that can move about from one place to another, that is equipped to outwit or to conquer foes” (insight 480). the intelligence of moonshadow, “this coyote,” is intelligible to me. i have observed and analyzed her behavior for more than a year now: how carefully she chooses her steps; how she arrives and departs from the southeast, where the woods are deepest; her wary assessment for scent and sound; how discriminating she is in visiting only one section of my yard, hidden from other views. she is clearly making judgments as she constantly scans the horizon, sniffs the air for new scents, whirls, runs, and hides in between hastily yet hungrily gulped bites of food. moreover, the behavior of moonshadow, along with bald-faced hornets who allow me to pass their nest unscathed yet sting newcomers, and my adopted feral cat that sits in donna j. perry -the patterned and emergent boundaries of wilderness beings 103 my lap but runs from all others, suggest that i am intelligible as a particular thing to my fellow creatures. while they may not know me in the totality of my data, they do grasp me as a particular individual, as different from other “things” of the same human species. lonergan notes the difficulties of understanding other animals from a psychological perspective because “animal consciousness is not accessible to us” (290). additionally, understanding the significance of animal behavior cannot be determined upon any one instance, but must include “the range of different modes of behavior relative to another range of significant different circumstances” (290-1). such a “range of significant different circumstances” gives rise to different expressions of potency as discussed above. it is thus critical that we recognize that our experiences with and insights into sensitive animal behavior are as yet incomplete. in the six decades or so since lonergan wrote his major work, insight, scientific research has indeed expanded human knowledge of animal psychology. in a passage in his recent book, are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?, world-renowned primatologist frans de waal discusses advances in human understanding of animal cognition, or the intelligibility of animal intelligence. he recounts the development of spontaneous insights in birds (as different from learning that is taught), orangutans who announce travel plans a day in advance, and elephants who have demonstrated self-recognition in experiments using large — and very durable — mirrors (choi). de waal argues against the hierarchical positioning in aristotle’s scala naturae in favor of recognizing a plurality of cognitions “exquisitely suited” to individual contexts: clark’s nutcrackers (members of the crow family) recall the location of thousands of seeds that they have hidden half a year before, while i can’t even remember where i parked my car a few hours ago. anyone who knows animals can come up with a few more cognitive comparisons that are not in our favor. instead of a ladder, we are facing an enormous plurality of cognitions with many peaks of specialization. somewhat paradoxically, these peaks have been called “magic wells” because the more scientists learn about them, the deeper the mystery gets. (de waal) de waal also proposes that maltreatment of animals can partially be attributed to human resistance to affirming animal intelligence. he notes that this denial has moral implications, as historically human exceptionalism has been used to justify the use of animals to suit our own ends, from research to entertainment. research in the field of human-animal relations supports his argument. human perception of animal cognition humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 104 is an important component of public attitudes toward wildlife. for example, belief in animal mind is correlated with decreased support for animal use such as in personal decoration or experimentation (knight, et al.). variabilities in proportionate being as good. recalling that proportionate being is “whatever is to be known by human experience, intelligent grasp, and reasonable affirmation” (insight 416), it becomes clear that the patterned variations and boundaries in wildlife encounters are part of proportionate being. the variability itself is intelligible. it can be experienced, understood, and affirmed. this leads to the question as to what is the good to be known through variations in wildlife encounters. reflection on my own experiences suggests shifts in the interiority of the knower, including both cognitive understanding and feelings. the patterned boundaries and mystery of nature’s revelations first serve an important purpose by calling forth the wonder that is at the heart of knowing. additionally, the recurring patterns of seasons, with their variations, invite us to deepen our knowledge, much as a second reading of a text might do. with this process the knower also changes; there is both continuity and change within the knower with each season. time is essential for a deeper, fuller understanding of the natural world to unfold. the rhythmic, yet fluctuating, changes in the intelligibility of nature set a cycle in which knowledge is hidden and revealed. even as the ice melts and river otter sightings have faded, we can now welcome the awakened songs of spring peepers and goldfinches coming into vibrant bloom. after a deep winter’s sleep, there is rebirth. moreover, this pattern of rebirth is intelligible and the expectation of its emergence brings hope. the serendipity of our encounters with nature, particularly with wild creatures, brings feelings of unique joy and gratitude. encountering a free-living animal has a mystical quality. to then extend a single encounter into a scheme of recurrence, and to build a relationship of trust with that animal, is deeply meaningful. potency and vertical finality. lonergan argues that potency is the “ground of limitation,” but “also the ground of finality” (479). from his delineation of potency, form, and act as the metaphysical structure of human knowing, it is clear that variabilities in potency, as the experientially-based starting point, would be a ground of limitation in human knowing. earlier discussion highlights that human experience with wildlife is limited by variable conditions, such as animal biological needs and behaviors, as well as visibility from seasonal effects on plants, trees, and bodies of donna j. perry -the patterned and emergent boundaries of wilderness beings 105 water. in order to discuss how variabilities in potency might also be the ground of finality it will be helpful to discuss lonergan’s use of this term. lonergan describes different ends of human action: “life, the good life, and eternal life,” which correspond to three types of finality: horizontal, vertical, and absolute. here we will focus on vertical finality, in which an individual or community moves beyond mere survival, or “life,” to a higher end of “the good life” (“finality” 38). unlike horizontal finality, which is achieved by nature’s “repetitive emergence and maintenance of life” (39), the good life of vertical finality is a historical development of moving beyond material limitations through the “progressiveness of reason” (38). for lonergan, the good life encompasses a range of human achievement, including practical outcomes such as technology and the arts, integrated within the higher ends of knowledge and virtue. (in later writings lonergan (method) moves beyond the aristotelian language of “virtue” to the term “authenticity” to describe the actuation of human intellectual and moral capacities.) we have established that the potency of human experience with wildlife is variable, thus setting up limitations in human knowledge about these free living creatures. but is there a way in which the variabilities in our encounters with the natural world also serve as a ground of vertical finality? in other words, can limitations in potency help to achieve the good life by virtue of their being limitations? lonergan describes the ground of vertical finality as the concrete plurality which allows for endless combinations and manifestations within a dynamic universe. the plurality of the natural world consists not only in its myriad of creatures and vistas but also in a “range of significant different circumstances” (insight 291) within which each being is revealed. the variability in nature’s revealing is itself a source of concrete plurality. in what way could this plurality of variations lead humankind to “the good life”? human responsibility for proportionate being. questions about vertical finality and achievement of the “good life” lead to questions about human moral development and responsibility. how do the variable boundaries of potency within proportionate being raise questions for moral deliberation? i suggest there are at least three types of questions raised: questions about our positioned experiences as one species existing within and relating to the larger whole of creation; questions about ourselves as responsible seekers; and deliberations about humanity’s role as responsible guardians of proportionate being. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 106 first is the consideration of our positioned experiences in relationship with other creatures and the larger creation. the emergent manifestation of nature within proportionate being teaches humility by reminding us that we are not in control. despite the wildlife viewing made possible by technologies such as web cameras focused on eagles’ nests and radio collars that track predators in national parks, there are many dimensions of nature that we cannot manipulate at will. further, not all wildlife encounters can be predicted. to fulfill the potential for our knowledge of proportionate being in the natural world we need to cooperate with nature, to be present, to be attentive to unexpected encounters. quietly present and aware, we can be with, not over our fellow creatures. second is the question of our ethical responsibility as seekers. part of my knowing the coyote has involved learning about the great harm done to coyotes by humans. this knowledge means that there need to be boundaries in my knowing this wild creature. we have one common space, the rock upon which i put her food each winter’s evening. but we enter that common space at different times. getting her too comfortable around people could put her at risk, given that so much harm has come to coyotes at the hands of humans. this dance between sun and moon at the rock on the edge of the woods has taught me that there are times when transcendence may lie in the decision to refrain from knowing; to respect the boundaries of knowledge. researchers face similar boundaries when conducting studies with human subjects. the layers of the onion, however fragile, may be protective. the responsible desire to know is not an unrestrained accumulation of knowledge, whatever the cost. the limitation in our knowing can be a good. human consciousness can choose to maintain some of the boundaries of knowledge. as noted by lonergan, “being is defined, not only by the questions we can hope to answer, but also by the questions whose answer we have to postpone” (insight 375). third are questions about our responsibility for proportionate being. the seasons not only turn, but they evolve. the cycles of nature are not mere repetition. one winter differs from the next; there are nonsystematic occurrences within systemic patterns. but beyond patterns and variations there are trends. trends may represent progress or decline. carefully reflective attentiveness can alert us to significant deleterious trends such as climate change. lonergan points out that accurate predictions depend upon “the survival of schemes of recurrence” (473). it is clear that human behavior, particularly in the industrialized age, has negatively impacted the schemes of donna j. perry -the patterned and emergent boundaries of wilderness beings 107 recurrence needed for sustainable planet ecology. this insight leads us to inquire about the harm to nature caused by humans. irrevocable loss of natural creatures and their environment is not merely a loss of potency but a loss of proportionate being. given that the “universal principle of limitation [for the “whole domain of proportionate being”] resides in the potency of the lowest genus” (468), if the potency of a particular dimension of the natural world is destroyed then there will be a limitation in “whatever is to be known by human experience…” (416). as we destroy creatures and their habitats we risk irrevocably altering what could have been known. we may indirectly learn about past beings through analyzing fossils and extracted remnants from the ocean’s depths. but the fullness of personal experiences with a host of living beings may be lost to us. sublime encounters between humanity and free-living creatures will slowly slip from actual experiences to a historical remembering, fading shards of memory and regret. in lonergan’s discussion of human development he describes the self as “confronted with a universe of being in which it finds itself, not the center of reference, but an object coordinated with other objects and, with them, subordinated to some destiny...” (498). pope francis points to that common destiny in laudato si, noting that each creature has its own worth, which is not limited to its ‘usefulness.’ “the ultimate purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. rather, all creatures are moving forward with us and through us towards a common point of arrival, which is god...” (verse 83; 24). while pope francis brings a theological perspective to his position, a similar conclusion may also be derived from scientific processes. findings of scientific research have made clear the interrelated destiny of the natural processes of our planet and all its living beings (chivian & bernstein). but also within the concerning trajectory of ecological decline is the more hopeful emergence of progress through the possibilities of human creativity. for example, humane society president wayne pacelle discusses the emergent development of a “humane economy.” pacelle analyzes historical shifts in human relations with whales from consumptive patterns using brutal hunting techniques to the more recent emergence of a “wildlife viewing economy” (317). this perspective challenges humanity to use our capacity for intelligence and responsibility to develop conservational rather than consumptive relations with creation. conclusion. human encounters with wilderness creatures emerge through the potency of experiences within the patterned and permeable boundaries of nature. such experiences offer possibilities for human knowledge, yet are also characterized by humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 108 limitations. these glimpses into mystery provide an intellectual, moral, and even spiritual good that calls forth human responsibility for the “good life.” but achieving the good life of vertical finality is not an automatic process dictated by natural laws. it occurs through conditioned probabilities realized through human knowledge and decisions (“finality”). moreover, finality involves change. finality has been conceived as the upwardly but not determinately directed dynamism of proportionate being. its realization may be regular, but its regularity is not according to law, according to settled spontaneity, according to acquired habit, according to existing schemes of recurrence; on the contrary, it is a change in the law, the spontaneity, the habit, the scheme; it is the process of introducing and establishing a new law, spontaneity, habit, scheme. (insight 497) humans have the capability to introduce new habits, laws, and schemes in order to protect and sustain the natural world. our task, then, is to fulfill the potential within the permeable boundaries of nature to realize the capacity for human knowledge and responsibility for our fellow creatures. *note: all photos by author. donna j. perry -the patterned and emergent boundaries of wilderness beings 109 acknowledgements. the author would like to thank dr. pat daly for his suggestions on this manuscript and other members of the boston college post doctoral lonergan fellowship for their review and discussion: dr. patrick byrne, dr. frederick lawrence, sue lawrence, dr. elizabeth snedden and dr. francesca zaccaron. works cited andrews, ted. animal speak: the spiritual & magical powers of creatures great & small. woodbury, mn: llewellyn publications, 2014. badger, emily. “you’ve heard of urban coyotes; urban bears could be next.” the atlantic citylab 2016. web. 13 april 2016. chivian, eric and bernstein, aaron. “how our health depends on biodiversity.” center for health and the global environment; harvard medical school, 2010. web. 3 june 2016. choi, charles q. “elephant self-awareness mirrors humans.” live science oct. 30, 2006. web. 23 april 2016. dell’amore, christine. “downtown coyotes: inside the secret lives of chicago’s predator.” national geographic nov. 21, 2014. web. 13 april 2016. de waal, frans. “what i learned from tickling apes.” the new york times april 8, 2016. web. 13 april 2016. doran, robert m. “reception and elemental meaning: an expansion of the notion of psychic conversion.” presented at 30th annual lonergan workshop, boston, ma., 2003. eastern coyote/coywolf research. web. 10 june 2015. jackman, jennifer l., and alan t. rutberg. “shifts in attitudes toward coyotes on the urbanized east coast: the cape cod experience, 2005-2012.” human dimensions of wildlife 20.4 (2015): 333-48. knight, sarah, aldert vrij, julie cherryman, and karl nunkoosing. “attitudes towards animal use and belief in animal mind.” anthrozoos: a multidisciplinary journal of the interactions of people and animals 17.1 (2004): 43-62. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 110 lonergan, bernard. “finality, love, marriage.” 1967. collected works of bernard lonergan. eds. f.e. crowe, & r.m. doran toronto: u of toronto p, 1988. 17-32. _____. insight: a study of human understanding. 1957. collected works of bernard lonergan. 5th ed., vol. 3. eds. frederick e. crowe and robert m. doran. toronto: u of toronto p, 2000. _____. method in theology. 1972. toronto: u of toronto p, 2003. pacelle, wayne. “the humane economy.” the bond: our kinship with animals, our call to defend them. new york: william morrow/harpercollins, 2011. 312-349. perry, donna j. catholic supporters of same gender marriage: a case study of human dignity in a multicultural society. lewiston, ny: the edwin mellen press, 2008. _____. the israeli-palestinian peace movement: combatants for peace. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2011. pope francis. encyclical letter laudato si’ of the holy father francis on care for our common home. rome: the vatican, 2015. web. 25 may 2016. project coyote: fostering coexistence. web. 10 june 2015. sams, jamie and david carson. medicine cards. 1988. new york: st. martin’s press, 1999. way, jonathan g. suburban howls: tracking the eastern coyote in urban massachusetts. indianapolis: dog ear publishing, 2007. _____. “love wolves and hate coyotes?: a conundrum for canid enthusiasts.” international wolf 22. 4 (winter 2012): 8-11. _____. “taxonomic implications of morphological and genetic differences in northeastern coyotes (coywolves) (canis latrans × c. lycaon), western coyotes (c. latrans), and eastern wolves (c. lycaon or c. lupus lycaon).” the canadian fieldnaturalist 127.1 (jan.-march 2013): 1-16. way, jonathan g. & william s. lynn, “northeastern coyote/coywolf taxonomy and admixture: a meta-analysis.” canid biology & conservation 19. 1 (2016): 1-7. microsoft word porth-alberti-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:2 reviews emily f. porth “narratives for resurrection” samuel j. m. m. alberti, ed. the afterlives of animals: a museum menagerie. charlottesville and london: university of virginia press, 2011. 247 pp. $35 (hb), $18.50 (pb). the bodily resurrection of animals has long been made possible through taxidermy and other preservation techniques, and the presence of such beings in museums is often taken for granted. specimens are re-animated in lifelike poses for the visual consumption of visitors and are usually displayed in ways that reinforce their liveliness, their idealized ways of being in the wild when they were alive, rather than their death and deadness. visitors are encouraged to look at displayed animals in order to learn about life, natural history, and how taxonomic systems have helped humans to understand evolution and the connectedness of species. like the unnamed bird that stands proudly upright within a tiny reconstructed marshland, encased in a table top habitat diorama on the cover of the afterlives of animals: a museum menagerie, humans gaze at animals and specimens stare back, unseeing through glass eyes. the pervasive emily porth – “narratives for resurrection” 123 illusion of life does not often prompt spectators to contemplate the death of these creatures and how they came to rest in the museum. however, each specimen — whether under the bright lights of a display or housed deep in museum storage — has a story that encompasses both its life as a living being and its afterlife as a preserved specimen. in this book, editor samuel j.m.m. alberti has brought together an intriguing and enlightening collection of essays, penned by authors from a wide variety of disciplines, to capture the stories of some of these more charismatic non-human animals. through the inclusion of diverse narratives, alberti demonstrates that natural history specimens are far from the ”natural” and ”objective” representatives of science they are frequently assumed to be. instead, preserved animals are unequivocally shown to be important pieces of material culture that, situated within their historical context, can shed important light on human-animal relationships. in the introduction, alberti sets the scene for his interest in the ”social lives of things” (3), having selected animals whose ”fame in life and their iconic status in death defy taxonomy. they are not only specimens, but also personalities; not only data, but also historical documents” (1). alberti identifies the individuality of animals as the book’s overarching theme (8-9) and readers are introduced to these remarkable creatures through twelve chapters that are presented in chronological order. beginning with christopher plumb’s story of how two zebra came to be publicly associated with the character of queen charlotte and her son from their arrival in britain in 1762, the book moves to alberti’s more straightforward narrative about the journey of an asian elephant named maharajah from a travelling menagerie, to a zoo, and then to his afterlife in the manchester museum. the story of a second elephant follows, by the name of sir roger, and we learn of his tragic execution and subsequent post-mortem display in glasgow through sutcliffe, rutherford, and robinson’s excellent archival research and emotive storytelling. sophie everest writes another impressively documented story about an unnamed mandrill’s study skin at the manchester museum, an individual whom she correctly points out as being important through his ”valuable typicality” (75). alberti acknowledges that most chapters in this book focus on individuals who have some notoriety, but given that the majority of museum specimens are unknown and anonymous, everest’s article is an essential contribution to this work. another humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 124 unnamed study skin, this time of a hen harrier — a bird of prey that has been intensively persecuted in the british isles — comes under investigation by patchett, foster, and lorimer. their focus, however, is on engaging with the ”biogeographies” of the harrier. once they determine the region in which she was likely hunted and killed, they travel there, specimen carefully in hand, to photographically situate her within the forest. although i did not end up entirely convinced by their assertion that a biogeography is less anthropocentric than the other biographies in this book, i enjoyed the ”salvage ethnography” that resulted from their journey (115). in her chapter about a gorilla named alfred who has spent his life and afterlife in bristol, paddon discusses how specimens become ”mascots.” she makes the argument that it is the ”imposed anthropomorphic constructions that connect audiences with animals, and museum visitors with animal mascots” (144). this certainly appears to be true for alfred, who was much-loved by the public (and, remarkably, even wore woolly sweaters during winter at the zoo ... although the two are not necessarily related!). the value of anthropomorphism emerges in other chapters too, evidencing that it can, indeed, be used as a bridge to empathy and understanding. however, fudge (2002) has pointed out that anthropomorphism can be problematic because it prevents humans from having a full understanding of the agency of other animals, and this would have been an important point to make and elaborate upon. rachel poliquin’s chapter on balto, the lead dog in a sled team who carried diphtheria toxin to a remote alaskan community during an outbreak in 1925, similarly emphasizes the use of anthropomorphism in the media’s construction of him as a hero: balto deserved to be immortalized through taxidermy because he was more than ”just” an animal and yet, simultaneously, he was preserved in a way that no human hero would have been because he was an animal (94). thankfully, poliquin recognizes that taxidermy is a ”dubious honour” (107), and in his chapter about chi-chi, the panda who lived at the london zoo and now resides at the natural history museum, henry nicholls also makes the point that the process from death to preserved specimen does not always go smoothly. although britain’s public appeared happy to bestow immortality upon a giant panda, they were far less supportive of preserving the remains of guy, a gorilla at the london zoo, just a few years later (179). nicholls attributes this to humans being ”touchy about the treatment of our close living relatives” and the surge in interest in primatology in the 1970s thanks to jane goodall and dian fossey (180). yet, when a young polar bear named knut died at the berlin zoo in 2011, there was an overwhelmingly negative response from the german public to immortalize him as a taxidermy mount. as such, it can be said that there are other emily porth – “narratives for resurrection” 125 forces at play in this shift in western culture, and public response is likely to vary widely based on the history and context of individual animals. this type of conflict also emerges in sabin’s chapter on the thames whale, who had very limited contact with the public (largely through the media) over the weekend in which she swam up the thames river to london and subsequently died during a rescue attempt. despite this very short relationship with the whale, members of the british public insisted that she be given an afterlife in the natural history museum, rather than be sent to the landfill after post-mortem analysis, the fate that is reserved for most whales and dolphins who are found dead (192-193). there are two chapters about (entirely different) whales. sabin’s first person account of the thames whale’s passage to her afterlife in the museum was an engaging and interesting read and, of course, it is about a whale that lived and died. in contrast, michelle henning’s chapter is about a whale that has no physical body and whose existence is purely hypothetical. ”neurath’s whale” is named after a man, otto neurath, a viennese museum director who contributed to a magazine article called ”museums of the future” in 1933. in his argument, neurath uses an example of a whale display in a natural history museum to discuss what he saw as the current limits of such displays. i appreciated this article because henning captures neurath’s desire to ”make visible a ’network’ of human and nonhuman relationships and dependencies, and to overcome the existing splitting of nature from society” (152). her discussion is entirely relevant to museums today, which still struggle with this challenge. the transition to reading garry marvin’s discussion of the unique relationship he identifies between so-called ”nature hunters” and the animals they have killed and mounted was a bit jarring after reading so many biographies of individual animals. the perspective of ”nature hunters” that he presents is important and valuable in itself. however, i find it problematic that marvin does not fundamentally question this category of hunter. the chapter’s introduction also seems to reinforce the nature-culture dualism; in defining the ”cultural lives” of animals as ”lives lived in the presence of or with humans” (202), he ignores the cultures of other species and neglects the widespread impact of human culture on wildlife. it was not until i reached marvin’s article and then the final chapter, when swinney pushes the themes of the book a little bit further, that i realized that this book is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 126 essentially entirely focused on the immortalization of wild nature. domesticated animals, specifically farm animals, are entirely excluded from a group of narratives that are apparently worthy of remembrance, and i find that troubling. ecofeminists have long criticized the masculinity of popular environmental narratives that neglect domesticated animals, who are perceived to ”mundane” and ”created by man” (davis, 1995: 193-194). it is true that museums have historically collected wildlife, and so examples of these specimens are far more prevalent. however, domesticated animals do exist in museums. the first cloned sheep, dolly, is now on display in edinburgh. i have also seen smaller community museums in england that have preserved prize-winning cock-fighting roosters in their collections, and remarkable horses have often been put on display as well. and, of course, there are the random cats who were likely euthanized as strays and whose bodies then found their way into a museum diorama (complete with taxidermied mice), documenting their place in everyday human life. anatomical collections like the hunterian museum are also full of bits and pieces of sheep, chickens, and other animals who were easy targets for experimentation about basic physiology. surely, their stories deserve to be told as well. overall, i was impressed by the caliber of scholarship in this book and some of the individual articles would make good case studies for discussion in university courses. for instance, i assigned alberti’s article on maharajah in an upper-division undergraduate seminar, and students greatly enjoyed its vivid detailing of the elephant’s journey through life and death, and that he situated these remains within the current context of the manchester museum (the class discussion was paired with the short youtube video mentioned in the chapter, made by the museum, about maharajah’s story). this book would also appeal to people who are simply curious about the origins of museum collections and the specimens they have within, although not all of the articles are written to be accessible to non-academics. other academic volumes about the meanings of preserved animals have recently been published, particularly those in the animalibus series (including poliquin’s the breathless zoo and landes, lee, and youngquist’s gorgeous beasts). yet, alberti’s edited volume is unique in that it is simply what it claims to be: a collection of animal biographies. it is this simplicity that draws readers into the story of each animal, and which will compel them to contemplate more deeply the lives and afterlives of other animals on display the next time they visit a museum or zoo. works cited fudge, erica. animal. london: reaktion books, 2002. emily porth – “narratives for resurrection” 127 davis, karen. ”thinking like a chicken: farm animals and the feminine connection,” animals and women: feminist theoretical explorations. carol j. adams and josephine donovan, eds. durham: duke up, 1995. 192-212. microsoft word bolender-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 karin bolender if not for her spots: on the art of un/naming a new ass breed if not for her spots, i might never have found her. if not for that sublime, spiky, silverroan, salt-and-peppery hide of hers — or more precisely, the naming, branding, and value-encoding of its genetic legacies, hidden biocultural histories, and transformative frictions — i never would have come to live in her midst, to wrangle ad infinitum with the complexities and contradictions of caring for one special, newfangled beast of burden, an inscrutable she-ass known to some (and unknown to others) as aliass. as it happens, those special, spectacular spots led me right to her, like the opposite of camouflage. if, for instance, the ass-in-question possessed a more commonplace gray or brown coat of fur, i would surely have passed her over. luckily, her so-called “spots,” and the brand name appended to them, did bring us together. and so we remain to this day, in a seamy meeting of desires and shame and whatever else we might hope to discover in the living stories we make together. this is first and foremost a barnyard love story. it reels through genomes and generations, equine breeds and coat colors, and certain kinds of passion and shame — both of which are borne of complicity with systems that privilege human consumer tastes and fleeting fashions over respect for the long evolutionary histories and untold wisdoms embodied in domestic companions. i tell this tale as an interdisciplinary, rural-urban-divided artist whose work hopes to suggest more inclusive and respectful modes for entangled storyings with others.1 in 2002, i set off on a seven-week walking journey across the american south with aliass, whose un/name claims space for her own embodied stories, which are never mine to tell (or, in most cases, to even know). aliass has been a steadfast companion ever since, in seeking new modes for making “untold” stories with others — especially those domestic “livestock” mammals whose fates are shaped by structures of western human exceptionalism and neoliberal capitalist enterprises, and more especially by the ways these structures mark and shape, exploit and distort the beloved (not to mention unloved) other through dominant ways of seeing and/or erasing, classifying and/or denying their embodied life stories. bound as such to a reverentially “unnamed” she-ass, this parapoetic art practice bucks old western dualisms and hierarchies (such as human/animal and other suspect binaries), and traces barbed-and-tangled strands of practical, ethical, aesthetic, and ontological humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 134 questions through the workings of a hope-ridden, muddy, wannabe-posthuman barnyard.2 as a situated multispecies art practice, the “unnaming of aliass” encompasses a longterm, embodied habitation in specific knotted quandaries of shared experiences, grounded in contemplative acts of journeying and making homes with one lovely, inscrutable long-eared equine who, for almost two decades now, has helped carry certain material and conceptual burdens of human desire, shame, longing, and wondering. drawing on principles and plays of indeterminacy that animate contemporary performance art practices, i initially set out with aliass to make “untold stories” — or rather, to deliberately inhabit the meshes of always-unfolding events, exchanges, and becomings that comprise the flow of lives in every environment. more importantly, this art practice attends to the fact that both long-ass journeys and everyday barnyard routines immerse us entirely in the lively businesses and strivings of untold others, from barn-rats to hayseeds to microbes whose biographies and even presences are mostly invisible to us. but the question arises, then, how do we attend to all these lively invisible multispecies barnyard-borne unfoldings, when western human habits of classifying tend to exclude and erase certain lives and their complex entanglements, choosing instead to invest only in the outward shapes, names, and marketable brands we impose on them? given the bent of this “art of unnaming” to honor embodied stories and umwelten that are mostly invisible to human perceptions, a certain irony lies in the fact that the fantastic allure of aliass’ so-called “spots” first brought me to her, and her to me. the she-ass and i have come a long way together in the meantime, as longtime companions do, toward knowing each other in ways that go beyond names and apparent surfaces. and yet from the get-go, her body, fate, and the textures of our everyday routines have been affected by human desires for “color” on her furry skin: from the lusty desires that brought me to seek out her breed and buy her from a tennessee cattle farmer, to the fact that for the rest of our lives together i must make sure she always wears a long-nose face mask on sunny days to protect her partly-pink muzzle from further sunburn (whether she likes it or not). in this regard, i owe it to aliass to face up to prickly questions of how her spots matter in our lives together, in inextricable, materialsemiotic ways.3 for the sake of our future stories, certain burdens of matter and meaning — and also significant erasures layered into piebald donkey coats — ask to be unpacked, if only to address (if not assuage) certain galls and asymmetries. this unpacking may perhaps work to weave thicker kinds of truth through the ways we know and tell our multispecies stories. karin bolender -if not for her spots: on the art of un/naming a new ass breed 135 but then don’t all barnyard love stories have their own distinct seedy and complicated biocultural histories and frictions, where human desires and economies twist significantly through others’ bodies, as mundane forces that work in all kinds of common breeding practices? whether or not we choose to actively reproduce others’ bodies in a deliberate fashion, many of us find ourselves participating in predilections for particular bodily shapes and colors and corresponding behaviors embedded in them. as we come to recognize the ways that beloved companions are often also what richard nash calls “real, living tropes,” uneasiness and even shame may arise as we recognize ways we burden domestic beasts with the materials we use to construct our own identities (246). donna haraway’s companion species manifesto draws attention to the presence of deeper colonial histories in domestic breeding practices, honing the responsibilities and ethical challenges borne in the assumed privilege of reproducing others’ lives to suit personal tastes and economic fashions. at the same time, visceral memories of companions we’ve loved and lost beckon us to care for some bodies more than others, and breed traits shape who we care for today and hope to hold in laps or pastures tomorrow; the power of these affects come forth in the trainer’s wisdom that vicki hearne quotes as a supposed antidote to the grief that comes with losing a beloved dog, for instance: “another dog. same breed, as soon as possible” (“oyez” 2). while we may know to the bone what such loves and losses feel like for us, we reckon much less about how other species feel and perceive their own living stories, loves, and losses. as human lovers-of-others who are bound up in dominant (and domineering) modes of seeing and representing others that manifest in phenotypic ways — in bone shapes and fur shades and distribution of tufts — how can we reconsider uncomfortable frictions of breeding, branding, and naming that determine whom we choose to love and honor and whom we ignore or despise, and as such both shape and undermine others’ life stories? the art of living and journeying with aliass responds to some of these quandaries by asking how might we creatively and responsibly buck worn-out names and hierarchies, along with assumed structures of representation and capitalist commodification, to frame the untold, embodied stories so often erased from exclusive human histories. this story, which is grounded in a hopeful act of “un/naming” one special she-ass companion, must go back to a time before i met the ass-in-question, to try to unpack some of the possible meanings and erasures packed into a different act of naming, which by convoluted paths and impulses is what led me to seek aliass in the first place: that is the naming of her breed, the american spotted ass. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 136 beginning with the figure of the american spotted ass, i have sought to explore some of the complex, kaleidoscopic ways that livestock breeding is laden with barbed human desires and economic valuations that burden our beastly companions in various ways. here the tale of how i came to love one special donkey crosses paths with cultural forces at play in the postmodern wild west, where one fairly uncommon genetic trait in equus asinus came to be named, branded, and commodified into a new “american” breed by a group of plucky montana ranchers in the latter half of twentieth century. although it is their colorful genes that technically make american spotted asses what they are, it was first and foremost the remarkable name appended to this newfangled breed that compelled a bottomless fascination, and eventual entwinement, with these humbly spectacular beasts — and more so as an attachment site through which to honor the untold stories that dwell in quiet, lively inscrutability under their so-called “spotted” hides. figure 1. the spotted she-ass-in-question, yet to be unnamed, in tennessee. (photo by kevin hayes.) like so many love affairs these days, this one begins in cyberspace. when i first came upon the website of the american council of spotted asses (www.spottedass.com) one fateful day in the spring of 2001, i thought at first it might be a photoshop hoax. according to spottedass.com and related websites, people (mainly in the us west and texas) were breeding donkeys for “color,” the genetic inheritance of a multicolored coat of fur that is variously known as “pinto,” “piebald,” “coloured,” or, in this case, “spotted.” for the most part, the spots bred into asses are not like the splattering of smaller dots characteristic of the appaloosa horse breed (though some breeders lean karin bolender -if not for her spots: on the art of un/naming a new ass breed 137 toward this loud “leopard” look); rather, the multicolored hides that crop up and get cultivated in domestic equus asinus tend to be patterns of larger blotches of color (usually varying shades of brown with some black, perhaps) on underlying coats of white.4 multicolored equine coats are familiar enough to horse lovers, whether as anathema in breeds like thoroughbreds and arabians — the roots of prejudice that play out against national velvet’s underdog champion the pie — or as the cornerstone trait of the wildly popular modern american paint horse breed, which is fast becoming a global force to be reckoned with. even so, something was different about the appearances of pinto spots on donkeys, which struck me as a kind of subtle, yet surprisingly radical, subversion, even as it hinted at a bizarre instance of cultural appropriation. in retrospect, i know that the happenstance discovery of this irreverently-named breed of ass, which is defined solely by the improbable coats of spots appearing on an otherwise plain and lowly beast of burden — troubled and excited me for a cascade of complicated reasons. most deeply, i was captivated by this newfangled ass breed because it somehow cast a sudden, blazing spotlight on the whole staged enterprise of shaping others’ phenotypic forms to human cultural whims. in that naked moment of beholding the phenomenon of the american spotted ass for the first time, feelings of uncertainty and shame erupted through cracks in assumed privileges and hidden histories. up rose conflicted feelings i had long held, unacknowledged, in regards to taken-for-granted practices of breeding, naming, and valuation of untold lives that weave worlds of domestic species together. of course, there is nothing inherently radical about donkeys, per se. domestic equus asinus, otherwise known as “burro” or, more biblically, “ass,” is among a coterie of familiar barnyard beasts that western children learn to recognize, name, and represent (whether or not they ever meet them in the flesh) — one of many naturalized inhabitants of old macdonald’s farm. even so, part of what made my first encounter with the spotted ass so surprising was the fact that, in spite of being one of the most ancient domestic beasts, donkeys received little respect or significant attention in my experience. on the contrary, their humble status was utterly eclipsed by the showy, elegant magnificence of their equine cousin, the horse (equus caballus). from the viewpoint of the colonial, thoroughbred-dominated northeastern horse world i grew up in, donkeys might as well be goats. but this newfangled, fancified “spotted ass” was another story — a distorted version of a familiar figure that rendered the species into an entirely different cultural category that made it seem rare and almost mythical. as i would come to understand years later, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 138 at first glimpse the spotted ass presented such an uncanny assemblage of cultural categories, appropriations, and erasures that my first glimpse of this chimeric “american” figure blasted straight through the façade it presented. such dissolutions of familiar surfaces and categories can invite a welter of promising possibilities for new kinds of knowing and being — the kind that arise when we realize the limits of names (whether of individual, breed, or species) to fully contain the lives within them. such was the ontological shift that came about for me in that first encounter with the spectacular asinine breed known as the american spotted ass. as it happens, i was not alone in falling hard for the romantic allure for american spotted asses around the glittery technological turning of the twenty-first century, though my political and aesthetic orientations may be somewhat unique. embarking further afield from spottedass.com, i came upon a homegrown website made in the early 1990s by a former arabian horse-breeder-cum-spotted-ass-lover named ruth kalenian. ruth’s site sucked me instantly deeper into a swirl of mysterious and inviting images, personal anecdotes and travelogues, and gems of information detailing what happens when a person’s dreams and directives are suddenly and unexpectedly hijacked by spotted asses. one particular photograph on this website captivated me so fiercely that i can still recall the tremblesome, quicksandy sensations i felt when i would gaze at it in those early days. it was almost like a promise of pastoral paradise: this picture of a vast-seeming spotted-ass pasture in some wild, western mythical montana territory, a site so glowingly full of lively promise that i felt it could not possibly be real. but what if it really was out there somewhere, this magical rangeland — was this an image of a destiny manifest, somehow, someday, somewhere over the rainbow...?5 the vertiginous feelings that arose as i gazed at those images on the laptop screen that day in 2001 were dizzying. indeed, the feeling of falling head-over heels for this spectacular ass breed has never yet hit any kind of bottom. and alas, if we should need further testament to the power of images (whether for good or evil) in human experience, it is worth noting that all this passion came to pass through the mysterious workings of a slow-loading, haphazard gallery of low-resolution jpegs, long before i ever met a spotted ass in the flesh. needless to say, the least i could do at the time was to become a card-carrying, baseball-cap and t-shirt-wearing member of the american council of spotted asses, embracing the council’s directive “to promote and preserve the american spotted ass and half-ass.” at the same time, this enthusiasm was laced with a sense of irony that hid deeper desires, lacks, and longings that were embedded in this figure, and more so the mysteries of its dubious name, like barbed-wire swallowed in the flesh of a tree. karin bolender -if not for her spots: on the art of un/naming a new ass breed 139 figure 2. my acosa membership card from the fateful year 2001. of course, the ferocity of this spotted-ass obsession did not come out of nowhere. rather, it was complexly woven through a life lived amidst families of domestic mammals, dogs and horses especially. and like many children, i delighted most in learning to categorize and identify different canine and equine breeds. later though, dissonances arose in recognition that dogs, horses, and others are individuals whose lives transcend categories like breed or species, yet they are subject to a kind of “flexible personhood,” in the words of anthropologist dafna shir-vertesh, wherein they can be both family members and disposable commodities.6 i became more and more wary of the ways in which breeding practices are entangled with global industrial agricultures, where genetic manipulations associated with breed often negatively impact domestic lives — not least through erasing individuality and the rights and recognitions that append to it. another dissonance was this: in spite of being raised to avoid prejudice, i learned in 4-h and elsewhere to name and judge the value of certain bodies by their specific shapes and colors. i learned to cultivate pride, delight, and even economic profit from aesthetic preferences for particular bodily shapes and sizes, colorful waves and tufts of fur, and sinuous curves of musculature under shiny hides — never mind various behavioral and athletic expectations layered into cultivated bodies. given all this, the first bewildering glimpse of piebald donkeys threw a spotlight on certain taken-for-granteds of domesticspecies breeding, naming, and branding practices. more than the standard, oldfashioned forms of barnyard genetic engineering involved in selecting for a certain trait (in this case, spots and only spots), what really got me most was the startling name slapped onto to this spectacular infrasubspecies of domestic equus asinus. one might humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 140 rightly ask, as i found myself doing so fervently in that initial implosive encounter: “what in tarnation is an ‘american spotted ass’?” american spotted ass: what is (and isn't) in a name? presumably the founding and naming of a breed is a high-stakes endeavor that one should always take seriously. harriet ritvo’s platypus and the mermaid describes how much was at stake in the classification and naming of a breeder’s product in the english eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for instance. ritvo elaborates how early breeders of domestic livestock competed with multiple claims to authority, whether regarding classification of species or dubbing their own specific innovative variations on them. the stakes are high, indeed: naming a breed is an act of reification, after all, making certain biological traits into a unique exchange of words and flesh (75). in the twentieth-century american west, we find a relative cultural free-for-all when it comes to livestock breeding and branding, including the development of such highprofile breeds as quarter horses, mustangs, texas longhorn cattle, and significantly, the american paint horse — arguably a major precursor to the spotted ass. the founding of the american council of spotted asses in 1969 is kin to these other breeding and branding enterprises, yet something decidedly different is going on in this case. unlike other registries that encode various conformation specificities for breeds of horses, dogs, cattle, and other domestic species, acosa cares only about the color of the asses-in-question (hart 54). the websites of most horse breeds, for instance, often include an historical account of the breed’s development, origin, and sometimes even the political frictions that have occurred along the path to its present position. acosa, on the other hand, presents the spotted ass as pure spectacle and commodity, offering images and text that focus solely on promoting breeding, selling, and registering asses of eligible color. according to acosa standards, the sole requirement to register a spotted ass is “at least two spots visible on a photograph, behind the throatlatch and above the legs.” (weaver 42). indeed, this is a breed with a history tied most explicitly to surfaces, only as deep as the naming and branding of a single visible genetic expression, which then becomes its trademark unique and desirable commodity. in the donkey companion, sue weaver relates the history of the spotted ass breed like this: montana native dave parker began raising donkeys in 1962, but it wasn’t until 1967 that he bought his first spotted animals. two years later, parker and his friend john conter (also of billings, montana) incorporated the karin bolender -if not for her spots: on the art of un/naming a new ass breed 141 american council of spotted asses. the two maintained a registry that they actively promoted through a line of clever spotted ass products such as baseball caps, t-shirts, and mugs bearing the distinctive acosa logo. (42) indeed, the rather shallow history of this particular breed is marked by the playful appeal of its handle. at the same time, though, in the loaded choice of words — and more so the branding/merchandising spun out from them — we find a rarefied product that reveals (even as it erases) particular western us histories and cultural attitudes. here the humble domestic equus asinus, a species who has labored in the fields and mines and miners’ claims of human enterprises for millennia, is “enterprised-up” with a remarkable moniker and loudly visible (if opaque) traces of fraught national/cultural “american” identities. genes for spotted coats crop up in donkeys all over the globe, from “batty” donkeys in ireland to les anes pie in france; yet the american council of spotted asses is the first and only organization to maintain a breed registry exclusively for this one trait, and so the first to stake a national claim on asses’ spots as distinctly “american.” the sense of playful irreverence in the naming of this new ass breed belies a certain cultural and historical complexity, which is evident in a statement from john conter, cofounder of the acosa, who explains: “now, we could call them ‘pinto donkeys,’ you understand that, but there’s no romance in ‘pinto donkeys.’ whereas when you say ‘spotted asses,’ well then, that means something” (qtd. in kalenian). as another ass consumer whose passion was catalyzed by the three loaded words chosen to designate this new equine breed, i can attest that “spotted asses” is indeed packed with potent material-semiotic meaning. i have mulled for years over the latent linguistic and material possibilities that manifest in these seamy spots where words meet bodies. beginning, first and foremost, with the explosive capacities of the word “ass.”7 with the double-edged pun whereby the word means both a long-eared species of equine and also a colloquial term for the human rump, this one little three-letter word packs a punch in the american vernacular.8 why “ass,” after all, when the common term for equus asinus in the american west is “burro”? but the founders of acosa chose “ass.” “fun-loving organization” that they are, sue weaver suggests, the acosa founders clearly reveled in this little kick of forbidden-ness that comes with the little ass pun (24). and truth be told, spotted-ass lovers tend to be a unique breed of folks who, for the most part, wantonly embrace the spirit of playful impropriety inherent in this uniquely us american pun.9 at gatherings of ass enthusiasts, one often sees bumperstickers and t-shirts proclaiming things like “we love to show our asses!” or “park your humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 142 ass here.” a cursory glance at farm names on the acosa breeder’s directory gives examples of enterprises like oklahoma’s assn9 ranch and half ass acres miniature donkeys. for me, the choice of “ass” rather than “donkey” or “burro” was potent in different (if not unrelated) ways, evoking certain radical possibilities and biopolitical implications informed as much by écriture feminine and derridean deconstruction as by the guffaws of punning bumper-stickers.10 for one thing, any double-meaning pun, by its very nature, undermines the foothold of any language. so the word “ass,” in and of itself, presented to my ontology a promising rupture, an intuitive breach that replaces seemingly fixed boundaries. when i was a girl my mother frowned on my uttering the word “ass,” which she claimed was “unladylike” and even “crass.” and yet here, in the seemingly simple linguistic equivalence that connects one word for the domestic donkey with its forbidden synonym, i could freely utter this “dirty” and “unladylike” word, now legitimized by its innocent application to a species of beast, and thus unsullied by the onerous freight of gender and class loaded onto the little word by my mother tongue. after all, “ass” is merely the short form of asinus, suggesting the classical pedigree of binomial naming conventions central to western science. yes, of course, and that was part of the special frisson: such scientific classifications tend to stand as the bedrock of western, language-bound species exceptionalism. on these foundations of names and categories we prop up the complex of assumptions whereby “human” stands apart from “animal.” in that regard, i found a certain liberation in the unique power of the pun embedded in “ass” to disrupt the assumed sense of things/bodies being just what we call them. whether in the wake of adam or linnaeus, facing up to questions and uncertainties at the heart of naming, with its questionable claims to knowing and ownership, is a profound disturbance that cuts to the quick of epistemological stability. and so the pun in the word “ass” hit me obliquely in just such a way that it became an ontological crack, hinting at slippage of boundaries that logos takes for granted — foremost between bodies and the names by which we aim to contain and render them to our purposes. this potent inversion of “ass” became, in time, a vital component in the eventual act of unnaming, which came about when i was faced with the task of naming my own she-ass companion. given its slippery and explosive capacities, calling attention to the “ass” that marks her species at the same time celebrates the name’s incapacity to really contain or grasp the one so-named, a.k.a. aliass. * * * karin bolender -if not for her spots: on the art of un/naming a new ass breed 143 “ass” was implosive enough, but with the addition of “spotted” to the mix — well, that was a whole other story.11 at first blush, my rush of associations related to spotted equine coats was not critical or political, indeed it took years of research and wondering to draw out these connections. but the first rush was visceral, sparked by a buried memory of a childhood experience at a hunter-jumper horse show in virginia: i vaguely remember seeing a pinto canter elegantly into the arena, and then hearing someone nearby hiss: “that horse doesn’t belong in the show ring!” as it happens, the bias against spotted horses i encountered that day has mostly vanished from many twenty-first century horse worlds, though various breed registries have traditionally forbidden the registration and breeding of horses with overabundance of white markings.12 yet that same bias proved a force to be reckoned with in the mid-twentieth century. in 1962, rebecca tyler lockhart, the oklahoma cowgirl who founded the american paint stock horse association, faced an uphill battle against various cultural biases in her determination to honor spotted horses, which were considered no-good and ill-bred. in a 2000 interview after her induction into the cowgirl hall of fame for her work on behalf of the now massively-popular paint horse, lockhart explained: “the paints were such underdogs, i felt compelled to rescue them. it was as if i was driven to do it” (qtd. in owen). the grand-daughter of cherokee farmers who arrived in oklahoma on the trail of tears, lockhart may or may not have been explicitly aware of the extent to which bias against pintos was tangled in barbed racial discourses of anti-native sentiment that associated spotted horses with “half-breed” indian ponies. in a discussion of why pintos did not appear in western studbooks of the midcentury us, frank gilbert roe puts it plainly: “in whatever degree this aversion may have grown out of the western anti-pinto prejudice, i suggest that the explanation may very probably be discoverable in the mutual hatreds of the anti-indian era in the west. the plainsmen regarded the pinto with contempt because the indian liked it” (171). since lockhart’s founding of the registry in a motel room in 1962, and even since the 1980s when i ran across the bias myself at the virginia hunter show, spots on equine bodies have become a hot global commodity. by 2000, the american paint horse association was the second-largest horse association in the world — a $17 million dollar a year industry with hundreds of employees, whose numbers have only continued to grow.13 from the perspective of lockhart and others who worked doggedly to overcome the anti-pinto prejudice, the popularity of spots on all kinds of equines might seem like a vindication. the same pinto color that was anathematized in the old(er) west has humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 144 infiltrated contemporary horse worlds, from hunter-jumper shows to rodeos, where the popular black-and-white tobiano paint color appears almost as a patriotic symbol, at times seemingly synonymous with the stars and stripes. even so, this shift in popularity of spotted hides caught my attention in a brand new way when i first saw the fraught pinto coloring appended to asses. given the specific western history described above, this appropriation of spotted equine hides, and its marketing into the american spotted ass brand, hinted at more than one way in which this claim to a certain genetic trait is distinctly american in flavor. as contemporary donkey books report, the spotted ass is one of two truly american breeds (the other being the american mammoth) (weaver 24). going back to the unique branding of the american spotted ass, this addition of a certain national claim to the breed’s name seems almost a foregone conclusion — in spite of the fact that genes for spots occur in ass populations the world over. given the history (or perhaps lack thereof) of this breed, i have found myself inclined to look deeper into the act of naming that has led to worldwide acceptance of the american spotted ass into the global ass community. in light of the residual tensions and western associations of pinto coloring with indian ponies, one could say that something distinctly “american” is at play in the appropriation of spotted equine hides for purposes of aesthetic pleasure and capitalist enterprise. from a perspective that looks askance at hidden naturalcultural histories and fundamental assumptions at work in livestock breeding in general, and specifically in the figure of the american spotted ass, spotted equine hides may indeed conjure a latent wild-west mythos, evoking the forces at work in what philip deloria calls “playing indian.” deloria claims that by adopting and coopting cultural trappings associated with native people, “white americans molded similar narratives of national identity around the rejection of an older european consciousness and an almost mystical imperative to become new” (4). at the same time, such claims to newness have tended to erase the often-violent histories they rest upon. in this light, the newfangled late-twentieth-century association of spots to asses in the us west seems kin to other appropriations of that period, whereby scattered associations with native cultures are rendered into cultural (and actual) capital. the same underlying logic of appropriation — evoking a kind of lost romantic wildness — finds many american car models in the 1960s and onward being named after indian chiefs and tribes. most notably, perhaps, the notorious ford pinto, which resonates for obvious reasons with the specific addition of color to the bodies of unassuming horses karin bolender -if not for her spots: on the art of un/naming a new ass breed 145 and burros. which brings us back, in a roundabout way, to acosa founder john conter’s mysterious claim that naming “spotted asses” is somehow a romantic gesture. in the vaguely surreal, pastoral promotional postcard vision below, courtesy of the ford motor company, the displaced hatchback and pinto foal meet in an empty landscape. indeed, the scene reminds me obliquely of the violently beautiful erasures witnessed in romantic paintings of the nineteenth-century american west, which borrow renaissance visual tropes of heavenly glory to assert manifest destiny into a supposedly historyless virgin wilderness. figure 3. 1980 postcard advertisement for ford pinto. going back to the “romance” that conter evokes above, it seems spotted ass hides are also “romantically” loaded in ways that obscure tangled western associations and historical erasures. just as the habitations and histories of native people and multispecies worlds vanish in the colorful clouds and peaks of romantic landscapes by artists like albert bierstadt, so, too, do the swirl of spots on asses overwrite circuitous routes and affects by which they came to be desirable, by various political and raciallyencoded cultural shifts in a few fraught centuries. over the years, i came to see how the blithe appendage of spots to the humble burro conjured latent and diffuse wildwestern, cowboys-and-indians associations, which in turn enact seemingly playful, postmodern erasures of specific histories of westward colonial land-grabs, genocide, and gradual patterns of appropriation. all unbeknownst to those who bear these loaded, colorful hides, of course. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 146 fig. 6. like an image in a funhouse mirror, aliass and i came across a pair of paints one day as we passed the hart 6 longhorn ranch in rural tennessee. the paints were aesthetically matched to the spotted longhorn cattle who roamed the same pasture, all blissfully ignorant of the histories and human desires that brought them together in this place. the paints snorted and spooked, bobbing their heads like tweedle dum and tweedle dee, as they had apparently never met a spotted-ass cousin before. (photo by karin bolender.) alas, it was this friction more than any other that first catapulted me into a passion for the american spotted ass — that is, the conflicted space between representation and inscrutable life, object and subject. as the figure of the american spotted ass hung in a wondrous space opened and spot-lit by its remarkable name, my own fervent hopes and desires attached to this odd longeared equine, welling up from a body whose ways of knowing and inhabiting places have always been pulled and pushed, shaped and affected by the presences of horses, dogs, and untold others. most hauntingly, the asses staring out from pixels and photographs seemed to be asking: what might happen if and when the named and commodified “ass” looks back as a full-blown subject, a karin bolender -if not for her spots: on the art of un/naming a new ass breed 147 blinking and breathing body that bucks representation with her own untold biography, fears and desires, cares and hungers? in the long run, i came to grasp that what i sought in the promise of this new ass breed could only be found in real ass worlds of hot, furry hides, shining eyes, hay and grasses, and long-eared sensitive bodies, and in the mysterious, material mesh of shared experiences in unknown woods and fields and weedy roadsides. so i set out into in search of the rarefied, spectacular beast who bore this loaded name, and so perhaps the secrets of our shared destinies. meeting aliass (halfway...?). the morning she was delivered to me, the loaded rig rumbled up the lane and squeaked to a stop under the sprawling bower of the old oak tree. i stood frozen with anticipation, as i heard the faint knocking of hidden hooves on hollow boards, and then she stepped shakily off the trailer with a little hop onto the pale, root-laced driveway dirt. so magical was that moment that i swear the little rough-furred spotted ass might as well have been a unicorn. so she was, and in a way remains: a projection, a mysterious vision, always seen from either too close or too far away. like the modern discovery of the 16th-century “lady and the unicorn” tapestry, there in the brightness of a tennessee afternoon was a glorified material-semiotic weave of ancient human fantasies, atavistic desires, twisted-together genomes and phenomes, phonemes and imagoes, shaped by thousands of years of beastly becomings. and branded, of course, with that newfangled “western” hide that had so captivated the imagination that i had no choice but to join with this unwitting ass and hitch her to theloaded tasks we carry on together to this day. even in the excitement of the moment, the full 400+-pound weight of it began to hit me as i took the lead-rope from the hand of mariann black, the ass breeder who had helped me find aliass and delivered her to me. the living presence of this big-eyed, big-eared, sensitive ungulate mammal, who was blinking and sniffing the air, listening for any sort of familiar sound to help her grasp her new surroundings, was entirely different than the images i had been poring over for the past year. for one thing, in spite of all the meanings and possibilities i had already bestowed onto her generic surface, i did not know this little burro at all. here she was, however, in full, furry, worried flesh: a gentle, sensitive prey mammal was at my mercy at the end of a knotted rope. her fate was in my hands as she stood there, looking and listening — to what, i could never know. her life, and possibly a hidden passenger within her: both were at my disposal, thanks to rights bestowed on me by ancient taxonomic hierarchies and rank economies in which certain lives are held as property by others. yet all mine she was, this inscrutable stranger whose embodied past, present, and future, whose senses of time humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 148 and place and remembering i could hardly fathom — never mind claim to name, know, or own. here then is the rub that becomes the gall. “gall” is a word we learn (often the hard way) among beasts of burden: when part of a harness or girth is ill-fitting, the pressure and frictions of various labors rub away fur and open a sore in the flesh, which becomes an aggravated open wound that often goes unnoticed under the offending tack. a gall is like a blister, but deeper and harder to heal. the history of human-equine dealings is full of harness galls and saddlesores, both recognized and hidden. in time, one learns tricks for treating these sores — old folk remedies or over-the-counter hemorrhoid ointments. even better, we sometimes find ways to anticipate and thus avoid them in the first place: fleece coverings for girths, harness pads, and so on. but one trouble with galls is that they tend to be obscured by what causes them, and as long as the pressure continues, the wounds stay open and sore. sometimes a gall becomes a scar, a hard hairless spot on the hide. older work mules often have galls all over their bodies, but i have seen and even inflicted such traces of ill-fitted pressures on all kinds of equine bodies, from scuffs and scars on old rodeo broncs to saddlesores on sleek-coated thoroughbreds and fancy show ponies. scars like these on withers and flanks are just one kind of visible trace that marks encounters between human cultures and equine beasts of burden over many millennia. now that i am better acquainted with aliass, who is most at peace when routine prevails and everyone she cares about is in their familiar place, the abyss that yawns between my thrill in acquisition and the grievous fear of the unknown experienced by my little long-eared friend on that day is all that much more gut-wrenching. neither my own past experiences of interspecies amities nor a vast bibliography of scholarly resources changes the fact that she was scared and lonesome and grieving as she stood hitched by a rope halter to a metal t-post, captive in an unfamiliar place among lurking human and canine strangers. her misery was hidden by the human habits of mind that erase the emotional lives of “livestock” from our recognition. her feelings were further obscured by the characteristic stoicism by which donkeys hide pain from possible predators. to this day, though, i can still remember the fear and grief that were plain to see in her tight muzzle, sad eyes, and flagging ears. painful sores and possible slaughter are not the only features of shared domestic lives in the american stable and barnyard, of course. with respect and careful attention toward embodied wisdoms, we may pursue and maintain diverse and admirable enterprises with equines and other domesticates. indeed, interspecies friendships appear full of karin bolender -if not for her spots: on the art of un/naming a new ass breed 149 joyful possibilities, though joyful for whom remains always an open question. the everyday experiences of millions of relatively happy dogs, cats, humans, horses, asses, birds, and others can attest to the felicities of multispecies becomings-together. that said, there is no getting past this fact: the bright spring day my brand-new american spotted ass arrived was one of singular bliss for me — an affirmation of the materialsemiotic conjuring powers of human imagination and desire — while at the same time, that day was inevitably a catastrophic one of loss and fearsome uncertainty for her. with no forewarning, she was hazed from her herd, chased onto a stock trailer, and ripped away from everything familiar to her — pastures, shelters, friends and kin — with no way to ascertain where she was being taken or what lay in store. i know of no way to fully assuage the long-standing asymmetries that weave through our relations, no way to evade the shame that comes in recognizing how her body and fate are shaped by my personal consumerist predilections and privileges. but in the long run, i seek at least to meet her halfway, as much as possible — to at least to make space to honor her own embodied stories in the making of our worlds together, and in my telling of our shared stories. i aim to resist, in small but meaningful ways, what is forced on her body by assumptions embedded in various terms we append to her species, breed, and individual being, from “livestock” to “animal” to “american spotted ass.” and that desire, laced with the shame of knowing how our knotty histories influence our becomings asymmetrically at best, is what led to the act of unnaming her. when i first met aliass, she was anonymously pastured on a cattle farm with a mixed herd of livestock. the farmer who sold her did not know or care much about her individually, but when he had to fill out coggins paperwork he wrote down “sally” in the space for the “animal’s name.” i don't know if that moniker was meaningful to him or not, but she did not seem like a “sally” to me. at the same time, i had to call her something. given all the personal and cultural baggage loaded on the american spotted ass breed she represents, i felt that whatever i ended up calling this singular she-ass had to disrupt the assumptions of labeling, classification, and even commodification that so fascinated me in regard to her breed.14 bestowing names on those we care for can be a form of respect and intimacy, as well. but given the typical ways and means by which we tend to classify, perhaps there is a need for another kind of name: one that recognizes companions as subjects with their own untold stories, and interior lives we can never really know. following vicki hearne’s injunction that we “consider the general implications of naming,” i sensed a need for a name that acknowledged freighted layers of history and language while at humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 150 the same time making new “unnamed” space for the inscrutable life that bears them.15 so i sought a way to conflate and blur together the acts of naming and labeling, to question and resist labels/classification and to hold within a single word an open space for intimate un/knowing. at a time when i barely knew the she-ass whose breed name had brought us together, the act of naming individually seemed to bear the responsibility of creating this special space of resistance, hopeful recognition, and intimacy in which our relationship could evolve. and then it came to me one day in the thick of a tennessee thunderstorm: the only name i could bear to burden her with had to be one that both refused and acknowledged its own asinine assumptions. in other words, a kind of name-that-isn’t-one.16 aliass. * * * i stand in wonder here and now, that after all these years of living with aliass and our rough-furred herd of rowdy kin, i have yet to get to the bottom of that shimmering pool of vague hopes, bright curiosities, and promising inside-outings that rose up in that first laptop glimpse of the american spotted ass and its ongoing cascade of consequences. here stands the twisted mystery of fates and commodity chains, desires and encounters that bring us together. like alice’s long, colorful fall down the rabbit-hole into wonderland, this head-over-heels tumble has bumped and twisted through almost two decades now, through underground labyrinths of images and phonemes, colors and shadows, beloved bodies and mixed-family phylogenies, as if descending deeply earthward toward the common linguistic root of “spectacle,” “seeing,” and “species” somewhere at the core. and what if there was such a bottom? could such a place exist, beyond the spots in our eyes and the spectacles we impose on others, whether through names and classifications or more material genetic manipulations? what if an unname, as such, could become an arrow pointing toward such a nameless place, where human ways of worlding through visual re/cognition and naming-calling — so often exploited by humanist hierarchies and capitalist schemes — might instead offer fertile fodder for new kinds of stories of multispecies futures? in her entry for “spectacular” on the abcs of multispecies studies website, anthropologist paige west proposes ways that habitual, even inescapable modes of seeing and naming might be artfully reimagined: if we returned to the latin origins of the old french word spectacle (the word from which the middle english term arose in the 14th century) we get spectacle from the latin spectaculum, which means “a show” or “a place from which shows are seen” and spectaculum is from the older karin bolender -if not for her spots: on the art of un/naming a new ass breed 151 spectare, which means “to see” or “to behold.” in latin speciō also means “see” and gave rise to the latin word species which meant “the appearance of a thing” or “its outline or shape” and which gave us the modern english word species. so, at its roots, deep in the history of utterances, spectacle connects to species. what if we started to reclaim the idea of the spectacular from corporations and marketers and big conservation? what if we went back to the beginning of its linguistic roots and decided to see every species intersection as spectacular; something extraordinary to behold? that is part, in my sense, of the multispecies project. to revive the wonder in and of our world through understanding the processes — political, social, historical — that worked to convince us that “nature” was somehow distinct from “culture”.... west’s notion that we reclaim the “spectacular” in new ways, toward more just and spacious modes of multispecies storying, allows a shift in thinking about the spots on one’s ass as more than just shameful imposition of human desires and capitalist enterprises on an unsuspecting beast. in this sense, it pays to humbly keep in mind that, for millennia, what humans have apprehended and appreciated in the shapes and colors of other living beings is always, first and foremost, expressed through species’ own genetic and phenotypic possibilities; even as technoscientific advances in gene editing alter this, we might still respectfully recognize that the mysteries and materials of life always precede our apprehension and categorizing of them, speaking their own secret names in their own unknown languages. this reminds me of the puzzled surprise that arose with the recent scientific revelation that those famous, mysterious spots painted on the paleolithic horse figures in the depths of peche-merle cave — spots whose elusive artistic meaning has perplexed scholars for decades — were not in fact a product of the artists’ imagination at all. rather, the patterns painted on those ancient horses were reflections of actual spots on horses they saw, as recent genetic testing of prehistoric wild horse herds of france’s perigord noir suggests (rosner). what is startling for me about this data is not so much the revelation that the horses were actually spotted as the fact that scholars were so caught up in the intricacies of human imagination and representation that no one ever imagined genes themselves might in fact be infinitely more richly imaginative and creative. there is an invitation, an art to this recognition: how meshes of material-semiotic imagination are never solely human, are always rooted in mysteries of encounters and lives entwined, beyond the grasp of any one species’ names or epistemologies. this art invites deeper connection and kinships, marking possible spaces and paths for respectful unknowing in acts of un/naming, in which human engagement with humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 152 spectacles and names need not exclude all other kinds of perception and agency. all of which is to say that much as i might want to erase the more shameful consumerist aspects of our barnyard love story, i have to admit that aliass’s spots, with all their fraught and seamy frictions, are ineradicably a part of it. were it not for this rarefied hide, which hides her so spectacularly, i would never have come to meet aliass, if only to load upon her own body all the old and gnarly human desires and hungers and cares, fraught histories and laborious enterprises that have been our species’ shared (if asymmetrically-borne) burdens for thousands of years. and while aliass’s spots may be troublesome in ways, imposing on her life with layered commodifications and cultural erasures (not to mention the ever-present threat of sunburn) — i nonetheless abide within their aura and implications, in hopes of deepening the capacities for recognizing and respecting the knowns and unknowns of our entwined naturalcultural histories and futures. and after all, it is inevitably through the material imagination of special shapes and colors expressed by her own living flesh and fur and bones (courtesy of her unique evolutionary inheritances) that i behold her — the graceful taper of her long white face, framed by the soft twin hollows of her ears and gray-pink muzzle, deep eyes that i cannot possibly describe, the spiky dark mane and coarse white fur of her neck that gives way to silver-gray-brown with flecks of rust and black across her withers and back, over the roundness of her flanks and belly, where patches of white float like passing summer clouds and taper down to the dainty articulations of her little white legs, and then to caramel-and-black striped hooves where her herbivorous body meets the grass and dirt that have shaped and sustained it for spiraling generations. i owe a lot to her spots: without their spectacular lure — and the words and stories they both conjure and elude — i might never have come to inhabit the hopeful frictions of living with a so-called american spotted ass in all the quiet dusty spaces, nameless encounters, and untold stories we make together. notes 1. my method of telling is informed by the work of multispecies ethnographers like anna tsing, eben kirksey, and especially thom van dooren and deborah bird rose, who together propose and practice a mode called “lively ethography,” where, in recognition that all lives matter to the places we make together, we might extend the scope of our stories to include not only to our charismatic familiars but also to the unappreciated and even unknowable others who play roles in every life story’s karin bolender -if not for her spots: on the art of un/naming a new ass breed 153 unfolding. see thom van dooren and deborah bird rose, “lively ethography”; and, van dooren and rose, “storied-places in a multispecies city.” 2. over the course of a fifteen-year project, i have written a good deal about the questions and conflicts that underlie the act of “unnaming” aliass, and how her “namethat-ain’t” grounds the development of an artistic and parapoetic practice built on contemporary modes of site-specific and durational performance. see bolender, “the unnaming of aliass”; on the elaboration of the project as a form of parapoetics, see bolender, “r.a.w. assmilk soap (parapoetics for a posthuman barnyard).” 3. on material-semiotic mattering, see haraway, when species meet, 246-247. on mattering, see karen barad’s meeting the universe halfway; and also barad, “posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” 4. on the various terms applied to spots on equine coats, see edward hart’s the coloured horse and pony. though british, hart also has some revealing things to say about the history of “parti-coloured” or “batty” donkeys as they appear in the uk and other places (hart 54). 5. recently, when researching events around my 2001 discovery of spotted asses, i happened again upon ruth kalenian’s website, which to my asstonishment (and hers, in fact) still floats in cyberspace like a relic of interwebs past, and remains a treasureful testament to her labor of cyber-ass love in the mid-1990s. inspired to reach out across the miles and years, i recently made contact with ruth, who now resides in that mythical montana realm she once dreamed of, on her own spotted ass ranch, having moved from maine to chase this passion across the us in the early 2000s. 6. see dafna shir-vertesh, “flexible personhood”: loving animals as family members in israel.” 7. i have written extensively about the role of the word “ass” in the project of unnaming aliass. see “r.a.w. assmilk soap.” 8. “ass” also functions as a “post-positive intensive,” which essentially means you can append it to any term you wish to intensify, i.e. crazy-ass, dumb-ass, wild-ass, and many more colorful phrasings along these lines. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 154 9. in us american english, “ass” as the synonym for donkey is the equivalent to “arse” in british-inflected english vernaculars. in my experience, though, most speakers of other english dialects grasp the american connotations of ass. 10. see bolender, “the unnaming of aliass,” for elaboration of the poetics of unsaying and deconstructive maneuvers that inform this gesture. 11. multicolored coats are not uncommon in the equine world. known and registered as “paint,” “pinto,” or appaloosa, depending on the colors and pattern involved and their specific biocultural histories and loaded associations, horses are routinely labelled and genetically shaped by human culture according to specific codes of color. but when i saw these spectacular spots applied, as such, to the humble ass, the entire enterprise of breeding for color took on a whole new, and rather garish, appearance, spattered as loud as the coat of leopard appaloosa mule with all kinds of underlying cultural resonances and implications. 12. arabians and thoroughbreds are two such horse breeds, with complex (and linked) histories surrounding cultural and scientific understandings of genetic purity as expressed in coat color. richard nash, personal email communication. 13. this information comes from a promotional american paint horse association video on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/aphavideo 14. in that sense, i was particularly wary of names for equines derived from consumable food items—names of horses i have known like cupcake, candy, and popsicle. 15. as hearne has it, “a real name rather than a label for a piece of property.” adam’s task, 167-9. 16. an alias is an assumed name that marks itself both as a placeholder and a proper noun. this word, according to the oxford english dictionary, enfolds several meanings: to “designate with an alias” and, from the field of electronics, to “cause (distinct items) to be merged or conflated.” from a latin root, in this case, the alias as such merges the vital phoneme, “ass,” that derives from the latin term that marks her embeddedness within the history of a breed and species: equus asinus. see also bolender, “the unnaming of aliass,” for more on the specific act of unnaming aliass. karin bolender -if not for her spots: on the art of un/naming a new ass breed 155 works cited barad, karen. meeting the universe halfway. duke up, 2007. _____. “posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” signs 28.3 (2003): 801-831. bolender, karin. “the unnaming of aliass.” performance research 22.6 (december 2017): 80-84. _____. “r.a.w. assmilk soap.” the multispecies salon. eben kirksey, ed. duke up, 2014. deloria, philip. playing indian. yale up, 1999. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. prickly paradigm press, 2003. _____. when species meet. u minnesota p, 2008. hart, edward. the coloured horse and pony. j.a. allen and co., 1999. hearne, vicki. adam’s task: calling animals by name. harper perennial, 1989. _____. “oyez a beaumont.” raritan 13.2 (1993). kalenian, ruth. “the american council of spotted asses and john conter.” personal website. accessed november 18, 2017. online. nash, richard. “’honest english breed’: the thoroughbred as cultural metaphor.” the culture of the horse. karen raber and treva j. tucker, eds. palgrave macmillan, 2005. 245-272. owen, penny. “a colorful life, she's riding ol’ paint to fame: ryan woman to join cowgirl hall of fame.” the oklahoman october 29, 2000. archive id: 826475. accessed june 10, 2018. online. ritvo, harriet. the platypus and the mermaid, and other figments of the classifying imagination. harvard up, 1997. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 156 roe, frank. the indian and the horse. u oklahoma p, 1955. rosner, hillary. spotted horses in cave weren’t just a figment, dna shows.” new york times november 7, 2011. accessed june 12, 2018. shir-vertesh, dafna. “’flexible personhood’: loving animals as family members in israel.” american anthropologist 114:3 (september 2012): 420-342. shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. u minnesota p, 2009. van dooren, thom, and deborah bird rose. “lively ethography: storying animist worlds.” environmental humanities 8.1 (2016): 77-94. _____. “storied-places in a multispecies city.” humanimalia 3.2 (2012): 1-27. weaver, sue. the donkey companion: selecting, training, breeding, enjoying & caring for donkeys. storey publishing, 2008. west, paige. “spectacular.” the abcs of multispecies studies. website. accessed september 30, 2017. online. microsoft word bayer-schwartz-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:1 ellen m. bayer in the vermicular janelle a. schwartz, worm work: recasting romanticism. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2012. 304 pp. $82.50 hb; $27.50 pb. “it may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures.” so claims charles darwin in his “earthworm treatise,” the formation of vegetable mould, through the action of worms, with observations on their habits (1881). indeed, as an avid gardener, i know that the worms’ work plays a significant role in a healthy summer harvest, and there’s nothing i like better each spring than cracking into the earth to find a plenitude of wriggling forms enriching the plot. despite my gratitude, when i see an earthworm struggling on a sidewalk after a rain shower, it is with great squeamishness that i pick it up and deliver it to the protection of a grassy yard. janelle schwartz’s fascinating study in worm work suggests i’m not alone in my paradoxical appreciation of and repulsion by “these lowly organized creatures”; the british romantic writers shared a similar sense of anxiety and esteem for the worm and the organic processes it represents. “worm” here encompasses a range of vermicular species, from the caterpillar to the polyp, but schwartz is careful to focus on invertebrates. worm work examines the growing interest, for naturalists and literary authors alike, in worms throughout the long nineteenth century, positing the worm as central to the development of a romantic literary discourse. this particular historical moment finds the worm firmly planted at the intersection between the organic and the aesthetic; “both natural historical and romantic writings,” the author claims, “share an oftentimes disregarded slippage between an articulation of the material world as inscribed by the figurative and the metaphorical as it is informed by matter itself” (xvi). in examining this slippage, via the worm, schwartz opens up new avenues for inquiry that move the discussion beyond two usual suspects, the beautiful and the sublime. as an alternative, schwartz offers what she terms a “vile aesthetic.” naturalists’ studies of worms, she contends, “provided late-eighteenth-century and romantic writers with a vocabulary for recognizing the instabilities of classification and for constructing an aesthetic imaginary that could take up those instabilities as its central logic” (xxi). worms, which naturalists perceived as treading a hazy line between plant and animal, threw a wrench in attempts humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 174 to classify and organize life forms. the complications associated with categorization serve as a trope throughout the text, and the author demonstrates how romantic literature recasts conversations about taxonomy and the desire for a coherent natural order. a second theme of decay and generation surfaces in the romantic texts schwartz surveys, which further emphasizes the slippage between the material and metaphorical. throughout worm work, schwartz herself oscillates between illustrating the direct influence of scientific vermicular experiments and discoveries on romantic literature and offering figurative “vermicular readings” of texts. for example, in her analysis of erasmus darwin’s poem the temple of nature (1803), schwartz claims that, “by filtering the elements of natural history through the body of poetry, temple transforms unfathomable nature into a sound cultural artifact” (28).through decomposition, a composition emerges. this movement between the material worm and the metaphorical use of worm work might prove problematic for readers like myself who approach the book through the lens of human-animal studies (has). i brought to the text an admiration for, but no scholarly training in, the writings of the british romantics; instead, i was curious about literary representations of the physical worm itself. this is not to critique the author’s approach. her “vermicular readings” are thoughtful, and they engaged the literary scholar in me. on top of that, the reader will recognize that the author has fun with wormy puns and analogies; her pleasure in the language makes this an enjoyable read. nevertheless, from an has perspective, i was often left wanting more of the worms on their own terms. as philip armstrong notes in what animals mean in the fiction of modernity (2008), scholars in has reject claude lévi-strauss’s notion that animals are “good to think with,” and are instead, “interested in attending not just to what animals mean to humans, but to what they mean themselves; that is, to the ways in which animals might have significances, intentions and effects quite beyond the designs of human beings.”1 i found most compelling the moments in schwartz’s text when she articulated the correspondence between the worm of natural history and the worm of literature. there’s plenty of this in the book to satisfy readers from an has background, and if i voice a complaint, it’s only to indicate that i found this aspect of the text to be a welcome contribution to the field, and i wanted more of it. in the first chapter, “transitional tropes: the nature of life in european romantic thought,” schwartz provides representative examples of eighteenth-century worm and insect studies, which set the natural historical and cultural contexts for her later analyses. starting with an overview of the shifts in methods of categorizing animate objects, the chapter illustrates how the worm’s mutability complicated taxonomic ellen bayer – in the vermicular 175 practices and attempts “to build a complete catalog of the natural world” (5). additionally, vermiform animals sparked debates about theories of generation, which extended outside natural history into theological understandings about the process of life. this chapter also suggests a rationale for schwartz’s interest in more figurative vermicular readings later in the text. in her discussion of the various ways in which humans integrated man’s relationship with the worm into such forms as the church hymn (as a means for humbling the congregants) the slippage between the material and symbolic worm becomes clear. she contends, “the metaphorized worm would only increase in sense, value, and frequency as the scrutiny of the origins and development of the insect world raised to a fever pitch throughout the eighteenth century” (8). as someone who has little knowledge of “vermicular activity” of that time, the opening chapter left me feeling equipped with a helpful foundation with which to approach the readings that follow. i suspect that chapter two, “‘unchanging but in form’: the aesthetic episteme of erasmus darwin,” may be of less interest to readers in has. despite the fact that the elder darwin was both a scientist and a poet, this section of schwartz’s text relies more heavily than others on worm work as an analogy. the author appropriates the concept of diplopia, a condition in which one sees objects in double, and transforms it into a framework for reading darwin’s final work, the temple of nature; or, the origin of society. schwartz reimagines diplopia as “a kind of coding of vision that allows for the necessary de-centering of the human — and, by extension, the irony of singularity to be that which is neither differentiable nor single valued — in favor of a more holistic rendering of the aesthetic imaginary” (29). while the chapter opens by noting that “darwin decisively submits that ants and worms must be seen, or realized, as man’s coarticulating actors,” schwartz’s analysis here favors what she terms the “diplopic paradox.” as i noted earlier, the reading of the poem in itself offers thoughtful insights, but i found myself asking as i read, “yes, but what about the worms?” the next chapter resituates the text in the realm of material worms. in “‘not without some repugnancy, and a fluctuating mind’: trembley’s polyp and the practice of eighteenth-century taxonomy,” schwartz outlines the major shifts in scientific, literary, and philosophical thought that the tiny polyp initiated. this “marine invertebrate with distinctly vermiform associations” (72) is sure to enthrall contemporary readers as much as it did those of the eighteenth century. chapter three shows in practice much of the larger theories and debates outlined in the first chapter, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 176 illustrating how studies of lower organisms complicated naturalists’ understanding of categorization, generation, and “the surprising nature of life” (74). here, we learn how naturalist abraham trembley discovered that polyps could generate new life through budding as well as regenerate from cuttings he himself performed. unsure whether to classify the creature as plant or animal, trembley’s experiments — and those of others who replicated his findings — initiated a crisis for the “enterprise of classification” (73) not to mention the debates it ignited about the nature of the soul and the concept of a divine creator. schwartz closes the chapter by pointing out the polyp’s influence on the works of eighteenth-century literary writers. forgoing analyses of writers such as fielding and voltaire who critiqued or satirized the polyp and what it symbolized, the author focuses instead on denis diderot’s three-act play, la rêve de d’alembert (1769), in which “he saw that the material properties of the polyp could be a positive trope with which to reimagine life and the place of humans within it” (107). i particularly appreciated this move in schwartz’s analysis, as she offers a clear demonstration of the polyp’s influence on literary minds: we see the transference of trembley’s scientific discoveries into the literary arts. the final two chapters concentrate on the function of worms in the works of two romantic writers, william blake and mary shelley. chapter four, “‘art thou but a worm?’ blake and the question concerning taxonomy,” establishes an unmistakable pattern of worminess in his work. narrowing her focus to two representative pieces, the book of thel (1789) and “the sick rose” (1794), schwartz contends that “these familiar poems readily employ the worm as a diplopic device, one that envisions the nature of nature as a purposive system of recycling: corruption is always suggestive of renewal, just as generation consistently gives way to decay” (115-16). blake’s engraved images accompany both poems, and schwartz’s reading of text and image are especially striking. so often we see images dropped into a text with no clear sense of their function in light of the analysis. not so here. the author provides close and detailed readings of blake’s images, indicating how one medium informs the other to build blake’s vermicular exploration of decay, generation, and the process of recycling. like the preceding chapter, this one is a fun read. that said, schwartz might have offered more detail regarding what blake knew of natural historians’ studies of worms. while she does note that blake’s poems represent “in lyric the (re)generative properties of insects discovered by bonnet and trembley” (137), she does not expand this discussion to suggest which aspects of these experiments, if any, may have been familiar to blake. i was curious to know what he had read in natural history and the sciences, or what he might have gleaned from other readings and popular culture. ultimately, the chapter establishes the worm as a key figure in blake’s oeuvre, and schwartz invites scholars to ellen bayer – in the vermicular 177 consider “the plethora of blakean worms and worminess” (115) that lay outside the scope of her project. the culminating chapter, “a diet of worms; or, frankenstein and the matter of a vile romanticism,” provided the discussion of mary shelley’s scientific reading and background knowledge lacking in the blake chapter. in outlining which studies and trends in the sciences shelley followed, schwartz constructs a compelling case to establish the worm’s influence on the novel. threads from the previous chapters — the origin of life, the desire to classify life forms (and the species that complicate this), decay and generation — align here in the figure of frankenstein’s creature. schwartz claims that, “worm studies in particular present an untraced opportunity to revise inquiries into ‘the creature’s formation’ from ‘impenetrable’ to comprehensible and to recast our understanding of shelley’s narrative plan as a whole” (153-54). she locates victor frankenstein’s discovery of how to reanimate life in his visits to the decaying bodies in “vaults and charnal houses”: “using these gothic settings as his needed ‘recourse to death,’ victor finally ‘examines the causes of life’ by placing himself squarely within the habit of decay — where he can watch precisely ‘how the worm inherited the wonders of the eye and brain’” (164). readers from has might note a glaring oversight here, as schwartz’s reading of this aspect of the novel is not entirely “untraced”: philip armstrong makes this argument in what animals mean.2 it appears that schwartz wasn’t familiar with armstrong’s text (she does not cite it in her notes or bibliography), but, given the similarity of their claims, she would have benefited from acknowledging this prior scholarship. although schwartz's text expands on the worm’s function in the novel beyond armstrong’s reading, there’s a missed opportunity here to engage with an analogous study. in her conclusion, “wherefore all this wormy circumstance?” schwartz offers a brief reading of keats’ isabella; or, the pot of basil (1818) to reinforce her overarching claim that vermicular readings provide a relevant framework for analyzing a broader range of british romantic literature. schwartz does not claim to exhaust the possibilities for exploring worm work in these texts, and her study invites future scholarship to investigate its role in other writings. closing with a glance at charles darwin’s “earthworm treatise” reminds us of the worm’s important role “in the history of the world.” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 178 despite the significance of worm work throughout human history, we find relatively little scholarship on these creatures outside of the natural sciences (the worm is notably absent from reaktion books’ “animal” series, for example). while has has considered some of the less “cute” members of the animal world, janelle schwartz’s text is a very welcome addition to the conversation. her text turns our gaze down to the lower organisms and challenges us to recast our understanding of their important ecological and cultural work. schwartz concludes, “no longer should we take for granted the action of worms, in life or in literature” (197) and her text makes a convincing case for this new perspective. notes 1. interestingly, schwartz closes worm work by echoing strauss: “just as we will become fodder for the worm, so should the worm be recognized as fodder: for us, worms are simply good to think with.” 2. armstrong contends that, “frankenstein’s description of the actual moment at which he discovers the ‘principle of life’ has nothing to do with electricity or technology, but everything to do with natural organic processes. his discovery comes from days and nights spent in churchyards, vaults, and charnal-houses, where the study of ‘bodies deprived of life, which, from being the seat of beauty and strength, had become food for the worms’ allows him ‘to examine the cause and progress of …decay’” (72). armstrong continues, “[frankenstein] discovers the ‘cause of generation and life’ by observing the progress of decay. and what he finds relates intimately to other manifestations in the novel of a radical challenge to the rigidity of species boundaries. the phrases ‘from life to death, and death to life’ in the passage above can only refer to the change from human life to human death, and from human death to non-human animal life — that of the worm and the other living creatures generated in and nourished by the decay of the corpse. the means of ‘bestowing animation upon lifeless matter’ deduced by frankenstein from his observations therefore depends on a kind of suspension of the firm species barriers that separate human from other animal life. in its origin — and this is surely part of its horror — frankenstein’s theory of animation involves recognition that in its vital and material substrate, the human is not clearly separable from the animal” (73). work cited armstrong, philip. what animals mean in the fiction of modernity. london: routledge, 2008. thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment h u m a n i m a l i a 12:1 thomas doran native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment “i had to give up my doctrine of instinct to that of their manito.” —david thompson, york factory in present-day manitoba, 1792 feathers. through the consultation of various eighteenth-century natural historical sources, ornithologists have recently renewed an old claim regarding the existence of the floridian painted vulture species (sarcoramphus sacer). the vulture, once believed to be a misclassification of either the king vulture or the northern caracara, is now legitimately being considered as a distinct species that was on the verge of extinction when first identified by euro-colonial naturalists in the late eighteenth century (snyder and fry 61).1 the painted vulture’s extinction story invites us to consider the possibility of a species that some native americans knew so well that euro-colonials would never get to know it on their own terms.2 the key historical evidence for the painted vulture’s existence includes william bartram’s 1791 travels through north and south carolina, georgia, east and west florida and an independent 1734 description and painting by eleazar albin. along with his description, bartram also included a depiction of the feathers of his “vultur sacra,” as worn by mico-chlucco the seminole king, in the original sketch for the frontispiece to his 1791 travels (snyder and fry 95) (see fig. 1). this fragment of visual evidence suggests that if the painted vulture did exist, southeastern native american cultures likely hunted the bird into extinction due, in part, to its ceremonial significance (75). but a conjectural extinction of this kind offers more than a novel point of entry into the worn ethnohistorical debate concerning, as bruce smith describes, whether native americans were “relatively minor and passive components of their biotic communities prior to european contact ... [or] a dominant influence in dramatically altering the species composition and structure of their environments.” as smith acknowledges, this mode of inquiry represents precisely the kind of binary thinking to be avoided in indigenous ethnohistory (1). in this article, i want to further destabilize this binary, and the painted vulture offers a concise point of entry for such work. here, we see a species that was in the process of extinction after european contact but not necessarily influenced by this contact. the painted vulture invites us to reframe our narratives of contact from the point of view of the seminole people. it is not a story where euro humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 2 colonials — through scientific and colonial expansion — eradicated a species sacred to indigenous cultures living in presumed balance with nature; instead, euro-colonial scientists unwittingly endeavored to learn as much as possible about threatened fauna before they disappeared entirely.3 this raises a crucial question: to what degree were euro-colonial naturalists willing to attend to the painted vulture through the medium of mico-chlucco’s feathers, in all of their vibrancy and spiritual power? that is to say, could colonial science, as thom van dooren describes, nurture “an attentiveness to the diverse ways in which humans — as individuals, as humans, and as a species — are implicated in the lives of disappearing others”? (5). this article explores this question by asking — regardless of whether the species in question happened to be abundant, declining, or extinct — how and to what degree euro-colonial scientists would actually consult indigenous knowledge to fill in the vast gaps in their own knowledge and/or alter their methods or theories entirely. with respect to the latter, and acknowledging the work of métis anthropologist zoe todd, i also explore the problem inherent in extracting classified and coded forms of knowledge from long-entangled interspecies and intercultural relations (todd 64). fig. 1. william bartram, sketch of mico-chlucco. (photo courtesy of the american philosophical society.). thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 3 indigenous knowledge was a vital, albeit often ignored or undocumented, source of information and inspiration for euro-colonial naturalists when it came to thinking about how to study and live among north american animals. and looking at indigenous influences on how naturalists thought and wrote about animals provides a necessary and often overlooked historical context for understanding how knowledge of animal behavior influenced early american ethics of human-animal interaction before the nineteenth-century humane movement. granted, studying indigenous zoology as it existed in eighteenth-century america poses many challenges because our readings of indigenous cultures is usually mediated through euro-colonial writers with limited access to these cultures, widely divergent motivations for recording details about native americans, and an understanding of animal life often incompatible with the vast and diverse network of knowledge systems that we call zoology. the interdisciplinary scope of this project is almost endlessly fraught, but it especially demands consideration of four intersecting challenges. first, how do we identify and evaluate the ethnographic methods (or lack thereof) employed by euro-colonial naturalists? some anthropologists have assessed the valuable influence of eighteenth-century figures on ethnographic knowledge and methodology, as well as its limits. for example, gregory waselkov claims that despite his “penetrating intellect” and “proto-anthropological method[s],” colonial naturalist and plant trader william bartram failed to “anticipate twentieth-century methods of ‘participant observation’” and wrote from the perspective of “a neutral, scientific observer, as an outsider reporting for the benefit of his own society.” as waselkov also notes, twentieth-century ethnographers have undertaken their research with a broader conception of culture as “learned and shared patterns of symbolic behavior that, by their structure, permit a society to adapt” (209). though these problems limited the scope of bartram’s and many others’ ethnographies, it does not necessarily follow that their resultant representations of native american cultures were unwaveringly homogenous or ahistorical, as some critics have claimed.4 second, assuming there are limits to the ethnographic value of euro-colonial texts, how do we avoid employing them reductively to construct historical narratives, especially in ways that naively assume indigenous cultures were once governed by fixed belief systems that rarely changed as a result of historical forces? literary historians, environmental historians, and ethnohistorians have all drawn on native american ethnographies from various periods to make historical claims about native american spirituality and cultural practice with mixed results depending on the nuance with humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 4 which they have scrutinized these sources and considered how to ideally blend oral or folk history with academic historiography.5 literary historian gordon sayre’s prescription for this methodological pitfall is useful. he notes that instead of drawing facts about native americans from euro-colonial reports through “a cut-and-paste method ... in which discrete historical or ethnographic facts ... about american indians are lifted out of the context in which eyewitness observers presented them,” more attention should be given to “what these books look like and how they work as texts,” essentially that they “deserve to be read as narrative literature” (2). this method demands that readers attend to the possibility that euro-colonial naturalists were selfreflexive thinkers and were receptive to the complexities of indigenous cultures, thereby resisting the assumption, as sayre puts it, that these writers “who lived in american indian communities for extended periods of time wore blinders that obscured their understanding of these cultures, and that this understanding is nevertheless somehow now available to the ‘enlightened’ reader” (29). a third question emerges from the material circumstances sayre describes, which concerns how we recalibrate our understanding and representation of indigenous power and influence. adding to this, we might read with an openness to the possibility that naturalists were not only receptive to native american cultural processes and changes, but that they were influenced and inspired by them. despite their reputation on paper for tedious taxonomies and formulaic prose, naturalists were not particularly specialized or confined in their fieldwork, openly resistant to reductive thinking, and mostly unaware of what the future held for the biological sciences. indigenous folk biology, as some call it today, was a vital and shifting source of information for naturalists. literary historian susan scott parrish has demonstrated how “naturalists [were] practically open to and even dependent upon indian” and other non-european sources of knowledge, however adept they were at rhetorically underselling these contributions (american curiosity 16). recovering these narratives — which were subject to sometimes crafty and other times nearly unconscious strategies of erasure — demands a more creative, imaginative methodology, which historian daniel richter has described as “facing east” less to uncover new information than to turn familiar tales inside out, to show how old documents might be read in fresh ways, to reorient our perspectives on the continent’s past, to alternate between the general and the personal, and to outline stories of north america during the period of european colonization rather than of the european colonization of north america. (9) thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 5 when facing east, the concept of cultural change as a construct of the western enlightenment to be either imposed upon native americans or reserved for western cultures — as the primary agents of rapid technological advancement — is stripped of its origin story. this is precisely because such a shift in perspective reveals indigenous influences on enlightenment thought. fourth, what does facing east entail for animal studies? despite the insistence by historians like richter and carolyn merchant that facing east entails viewing nonhuman animals not only as agents but thinking and feeling persons (richter 14; merchant 23; anderson 38), we are faced with a vast body of otherwise useful environmental historical and ethnohistorical research that persists in its view of animals as property or resources subject to scarcity from overuse or extermination. this perspective reduces indigenous interactions with animals to those characterized by utilitarian subsistence, rendering them as passive objects around which a presumably more authentic human culture is negotiated.6 the field of ethnozoology has the same fraught relationship with ethnographic research as ethnohistory, and it has been similarly resistant to ethology as a subfield of the zoological sciences, focusing primarily on taxonomy and secondarily on the use of animals for spiritual and ceremonial purposes. ethnobiologist amadeo rea succinctly defines this methodology as it functions in the broader field of ethnobiology: “the first job of ethnobiology, after discovering a set of names (folk taxa) used by some language community, is to determine how these names map to western scientific or linnaean taxonomy” (91).7 in this sense, the unidirectional focus of ethnobiology is comfortably situated in the logic of biopiracy (shiva 4). in animal studies, facing east entails a reframing of animal behavior that abandons many of the philosophical hindrances that have prevented western science from acknowledging or studying the vast and varied minds, intelligences, cultural histories, and spiritual capacities of nonhuman animals while also abandoning models of interspecies thinking fixated on drawing categorical distinctions between the human and nonhuman, living and nonliving (tallbear 26). at the same time, it offers an opportunity to reorient our ethical perspective by exchanging a preoccupation with rights and personhood for an openness to practices of what lori gruen calls “entangled empathy” in which the “empathizer reflectively imagines himself in the position of the other” (51). this article contends with the challenge of invoking an ethnoethological method through close textual and rhetorical analysis to better understand the influence of native american and animal cultures on the enlightenment study of animal behavior and emerging (and merging) theories of animal protection. i therefore follow two distinct humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 6 but connected trajectories. part one reconstructs native american folk ethology by examining multiple cases where this knowledge was mediated through euro-colonial naturalists. the goal is to reinterpret indigenous knowledge, often framed by eurocolonial naturalists and settler scholars as practical knowledge, for its ability to influence and counter western science. part two offers a more general analysis of how naturalists wrote about their dealings with indigenous cultures around animals, focusing specifically on strained interactions, misunderstandings, and resistance to indigenous knowledge and beliefs. the goal here is to witness how euro-colonial naturalists, to varying degrees, struggled to adapt their ethics to indigenous practices and beliefs. these two approaches combine to tell a story about how various ethical perspectives on animals were developing in north america alongside emerging knowledge about, and methods for studying, animal behavior. yet, it is important to note that animal protectionist rhetoric would not always lead to protectionist behavior; in fact, in natural history, it was often occasioned by animal killing, or embedded within an inescapable economy of animal killing. it is best, then, to view animal protectionist rhetoric as any expression either of resistance to human mistreatment of animals or of responsibility toward individual or collective animal lives.8 this story illuminates the rhetorical transformation of indigenous scientific knowledge into stereotypes of native instinct and the conversion of animal ethics into vague or inscrutable mythological prescriptions for human-animal interaction. but it also offers a counter narrative where the very naturalists who were discovering animals to be reasoning and intelligent, rather than merely instinctual, were forced to revisit racist assessments of the presumed instinct and sagacity of indigenous peoples. in this sense, my research complicates parrish’s thorough analysis of the “categorical splitting of the indian,” as a simultaneously knowledgeable surveyor of nature and curious natural object (american curiosity 229). parrish locates this split in the rhetoric of “indian sagacity,” a term used to describe both the “wisdom and instinctive preservation” of nonhuman animals and native american’s “keen sensory resourcefulness needed for survival in a challenging environment” (240–41). though parrish notes that this usage marks naturalists’ conflicted attempts to define the localized, natural intelligence of indigenous cultures, she nevertheless concludes that “[n]aturalists portrayed themselves as uniquely positioned arbiters or confirmers of this knowledge” (247). but this claim depends on how we define scientific knowledge. i expand on parrish’s observations by considering how forms of indigenous knowledge of less relevance to the conventional natural historical science of classification were differently perceived and mediated by naturalists. parrish shows how, for naturalists, thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 7 “indian knowledge ... does not seem wholly legitimate, because it does not preserve the proper epistemological distance between the observer and the observed” (230), but she also admits that “colonials who wrote about indians” were the most likely to see beyond “cosmopolitan assessments of native american knowledge ... guided by assumptions that indians had a merely figurative or utilitarian relation to nature and were incapable of the ideal mixture of empiricism and abstract reasoning” (239). however potentially anachronistic it may be to apply assumptions of empiricism and objective distance to early modern science, we must also consider the question of relevance when discussing the history of ethological fieldwork more specifically. from jakob von uexküll to jane goodall, ethology has often positioned itself as a kind of counter-science both in the type of knowledge it has sought to obtain about animals and the imaginative, creative, and embodied methods it has employed to obtain this knowledge.9 extracting native american folk ethology out of natural history writing requires careful examination of how representations of these figurative and utilitarian relations to animals reveal prior observational knowledge. for example, how were native american hunting methods matters of applied science rather than mere utilitarian guesswork or, even worse, base instinct? can we begin to appreciate the synthesis of data collection and abstract thought developed over generations as not only oral tradition but a history of empiricism? in other words, how do we move beyond the rhetorical rendering of indigenous knowledge into what sandra harding calls “culturally anonymous information”? (154). doing so also requires a reconsideration of the perceived center-periphery power dynamics of enlightenment science since ethological knowledge was not viewed as an integral component of cosmopolitan classificatory science. as parrish argues, “because america was a great material curiosity for the old world and its immigrants to the new, america’s unique matrix of contested knowledge making — its polycentric curiosity — was crucially formative of modern european ways of knowing” (7). exploring precisely the scientific material that cosmopolitan science did not value as science affords us the opportunity to face east when reading naturalist accounts of interactions with native americans around animals. the outcome is an imaginative perspective that considers the science that went unnoticed or mislabeled by naturalists, as well as indigenous attitudes toward euro-colonial scientific methods, questions, and values. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 8 1. mediating indigenous knowledge “i am an indian.” —robert beverley, history and present state of virginia (1705). “i had always conversed with the natives as one indian with another and been attentive to learn their traditions on the animals.” — david thompson, narrative of his explorations in western america, 1784 to 1812. in both quotes above — written approximately one hundred years apart — the eurocolonial naturalist casts himself as figurative native. but while beverley, writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, claims to be “an indian” (8), thompson, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, claims merely to be like them through intimacy (323). the question i will ask throughout this section is what these two identity positions — the european-turned-native and the intimate intellectual ally — reveal, obscure, and conceal. are these assumed identity positions distinct in type or only in degree? in one sense, beverley’s and thompson’s claims are certainly rhetorically distinct. while thompson is describing his methods and acknowledging the sources of his authority on north american animal life, beverley is apologizing for the plainness of his style, what literary historian ralph bauer has described as “primitive eloquence,” a rhetorical self-subversion tactic where the author substitutes style for presumed honesty (179). as beverley elaborates, “[t]ruth desires only to be understood, and never affects the reputation of being finely equipp’d” (8). bauer demonstrates how common this rhetorical position was among seventeenth and eighteenth-century creoles. more than style, an author’s primitive eloquence suggests “the erasure of cultural memory leaving the mind a tabula rasa, ready for inscription by pure new world experience” (179). parrish has also noted how such a rhetorical position, despite openly subverting the naturalist’s authority, “actually appealed to the metropole’s wish for writing to be materially like the thing it described” (“introduction” xxv). yet, as an example of primitive eloquence, beverley’s is especially cavalier. beverley seemed to straightforwardly assume the identity of a native american in 1705 because, in part, he viewed the indigenous inhabitants of virginia as a compromised natural commodity, mastered and stripped of their way of life by colonists. throughout his history, beverley argued for the native purity of the indigenous cultures he represented, “in that original state of nature, in which the english found them” (119), a pastoral existence in a land “of plenty, without the curse of labour” (184). for the loss of this “felicity [and] innocence” (184), beverley faulted british colonialism, which “make[s] ... native pleasures more scarce” (119).10 parrish has demonstrated how thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 9 beverley contradicted his own history of british colonial devastation of native americans by “allow[ing] himself the fancy that indians live outside of history,” which he reinforced through the use of recycled ethnographic descriptions and images, some drawn from century-old texts.11 as parrish argues, “beverley wanted to present a tableau of a static indian life that could imbue virginia, and virginia creoles, with an ancient, edenic pedigree while it also cut early-eighteenth-century virginia indians out of legitimate claims to a changing society” (“introduction” xxxiv). the alternative would have been to acknowledge how native american cultures had adapted to colonial settlement, but this might have prevented beverley from staking his claim on a native identity. after all, his static portrayal of indigenous life combined with his insistence on the colonial devastation of this way of life licensed him to assume the identity of a new native. understanding how naturalists constructed their identities and attendant actions with respect to those of their indigenous collaborators is essential to unscrambling eurocolonial and indigenous knowledge about animals. compared to beverley, thompson appears more earnest — if not self-conscious — about the constructed role he assumed in order to obtain indigenous knowledge. the erasure of one’s colonial point of view, a cultural-rhetorical posture for beverley, was more of a methodology for thompson.12 while the distinction between a naturalist claiming to be native or be like a native often correlated with one’s tendency to either silently appropriate or openly acknowledge indigenous sources of knowledge, the goal of this article is not to condemn certain writers for their acknowledgment of sources or lack thereof, but to assemble, categorize, and investigate a variety of cases. indeed, the very nature of natural history writing as a stylistically inconsistent and perspectivally diverse multi-genre prevents any individual author-naturalist from heroically emerging as an exemplar for principled ethnozoology. what follows is organized into two general sections. the first looks at several examples where indigenous knowledge was directly acknowledged, and the second explores examples where such knowledge was obscured or redacted. direct acknowledgment of indigenous knowledge. “it is true, and i am sorry it is so,” english fur-trader samuel hearne ironically lamented of the fact that his profession demanded he travel around north america rather than “stay at home” like a proper naturalist, “too remote from ... ocular proofs of what they assert in their publications.” in his 1795 journey from prince of wale’s fort in hudson’s bay to the northern ocean, hearne assumed the role of the characteristically american field researcher by frequently revisiting the methodological distinctions between natural historians and natural philosophers.13 while european natural philosophers partook in “experiment” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 10 and conjecture “for their own amusement, and the gratification of the public,” hearne offered “ocular proof” (130). scientifically, hearne dispensed anecdotes, what would in the long eighteenth century be considered “facts,” as andrew lewis has noted (21).14 but hearne was also storyteller who embedded his experience-driven scientific knowledge within the travel narrative genre. at the core of many of these stories was his “long residence among the indians” (130). in fact, hearne often vested his authority in chipewyan, cree, or inuit knowledge, especially when opposing natural philosophical speculation. and in most instances, hearne relied on an indigenous body of knowledge necessarily developed through rigorous and extended observation. in fact, he noted that the seasonal migration of the chipewyan people — west to east in the winter and spring, east to west in the summer and fall — mimicked that of the deer they studied and hunted (129). it would stand to reason, though, at least for northern fur traders, that knowledge of the beaver would surpass that of all other animals. in the eighteenth century, this body of knowledge accumulated and grew thoroughly extravagant. of the contemporary miscellany the wonders of nature and art — assembled from various sources — hearne joked that “little remains to be added to [its] account of the beaver, beside a vocabulary of their language, a code of their laws, and sketch of their religion” (149). citing hearne’s critique of this “contest between [naturalists], who shall exceed most in fiction” (149), sayre describes how beavers were often “presented as a culture worthy of the attention given american indians in the early ethnographic writing” (219). sayre presents the euro-colonial construction of north american beaver culture as an alternative model of native american life, “cooperative, industrious, and nonnomadic” in contrast to the imagined world of certain native americans, which seemed “so antithetical to european [society] that it was considered impossible to live in one without rejecting the values of the other” (220). but hearne, and other euro-colonial fur traders, relied on an indigenous body of beaver knowledge necessarily developed through rigorous and extended observation, much of which had to precede him by generations. and when he made the indigenous sources of knowledge clear, he also served as a sober arbiter of fact, parsing beaver reality, as he saw it, from beaver fiction — a common role for euro-colonial naturalists, as parrish has noted (american curiosity 247). but hearne reasoned, “[t]o deny that the beaver is possessed of a very considerable degree of sagacity, would be as absurd in me, as it is in those authors who think they cannot allow them too much” (149–50). for example, he wrote at length of the various details of beaver houses, mostly to dispel grand claims relating to their construction and interior design, “having several apartments appropriated to various uses; such as eating, sleeping, store-houses for provisions, and one for their natural thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 11 occasions, &c.” (146–51). resolving these details, however, was not a matter of restoring beavers to a lower position in the great chain of being. he affirmed that because “the attention of my companions was chiefly engaged on” the observation of beavers he spent many years among, he could not deny them “such a degree of sagacity and foresight ... as is little inferior to that of the human species” (146–47). despite the actual simplicity of their homes, long-term observation of the beavers licensed hearne and his chipewyan companions to use anthropomorphism constructively, attributing this simplicity not to divine creation — as wonders did (243) — but beaver preference: “[n]otwithstanding the sagacity of those animals, it has never been observed that they aim at any other conveniences in their houses, than to have a dry place to lie on” (148).15 according to hearne, beaver living conditions hinged less on necessity and more on rational preference, albeit based in sensory experience. complexity did not necessarily follow sagacity. indeed, parrish points to various early modern examples where the term sagacity was employed to characterize both animal and native american intelligences, the latter often referring to their allegedly privileged access to, and acute perception of, the natural world (american curiosity 239). for animals, the term was more loosely employed since much effort was made to afford them, beavers especially, various elevated forms of social status. these efforts were inspired by, if not inherited from, indigenous knowledge. in his letters of 1709–1710, for example, co-intendant of new france antoine-denis raudot asserted that many northeastern indigenous cultures, “believe that these animals are a nation. they see so much intelligence in them that they cannot help but compare them to themselves” (qtd. in sayre 226). the editor of wonders added, “[i]t has been asserted for truth, that there have been found above four hundred of these creatures in different apartments communicating with one another” (56). hearne was less ambitious, hinting at their “friendly discourse” but denying the above degree of social organization (148): notwithstanding what has been so repeatedly reported of those animals assembling in great bodies, and jointly erecting large towns, cities, and commonwealths, as they have sometimes been called, i am confident, from many circumstances, that even where the greatest numbers of beaver are situated in the neighborhood of each other, their labours are not carried on jointly in the erection of their different habitations, nor have they any reciprocal interest, except it be such as live immediately under the same roof; and then it extends no farther than to build or keep a dam which is common to several houses. in such cases it is natural to think that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 12 every one who receives benefit from such dams, should assist in erecting it, being sensible of its utility to all. (152) again, at the same time that hearne corrects others’ exaggerations, he adheres to a vision of a radically egalitarian and “sensible” social structure among beavers. he does not deny their ability to communicate and to agree on a fair and equal share of work; he only denies the specific social and physical structure of their homes and “neighborhoods” (that is, who among the beavers knew whom and under what circumstances). we can infer that hearne derived his extensive and detailed knowledge of beaver social organization from three different sources. first, were his own observations in the wild. second, were his observations of those beavers he kept as pets, “till they became so domesticated as to answer to their name, and follow those to whom they were accustomed, in the same manner as a dog would do” (156–57). he used these observations to settle specific disputes, regarding, for example, the emotional attachment the pet beavers felt toward “the indian women and children,” swiftly constructing a bond between fellow natives while maintaining his own distance rhetorically (157). in doing so, he also revealed how much of his knowledge of beaver behavior and social organization derived not from his own observations of domestic or free-living beavers but a third source: chipewyan knowledge. although hearne discusses beaver behavior and chipewyan hunting separately, his detailed descriptions of hunting methods echo many of his descriptions of beaver behavior, intentionally and sometimes unintentionally instantiating them as indigenous knowledge. as he admits, “[p]ersons who attempt to take the beaver in winter should be thoroughly acquainted with their manner of life” (152). basic biological knowledge, like the average size of beaver birth colonies, were derived not from hearne’s observations but from “the indians ... killing them in all stages of gestation” (155). hearne also explicitly links his understanding of beaver architecture to the various methods employed by the chipewyan to kill, in one case, “twelve old beaver, and twenty-five young and half-grown ones out of the house above mentioned” for its architectural sophistication, which, in fact, prevented them from killing “double the number” (148). later, we see more of how hearne’s architectural knowledge derived from accounts of how the chipewyan would dismantle beaver homes or otherwise yank them out using either hooks or their bare hands (153). and hearne similarly demystifies his understanding of the thick northern wall of beaver homes: thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 13 the northern indians think that the sagacity of the beaver directs them to make that part of their house which fronts the north much thicker than any other part, with a view of defending themselves from the cold winds which generally blow from that quarter during the winter; and for this reason the northern indians generally break open that side of the beaverhouses which exactly front the south. (156) it becomes clear here that hearne’s transparency regarding the indigenous sources of his knowledge about animal behavior complicates the narrative’s structure. he does not merely give due credit but instead compounds the ethnographic features of the text. knowledge about animal intelligence and culture could be arrived at through the conventional pursuit of knowledge about native american cultures. thus, the euro-colonials profited intellectually and financially. the intellectual profit mirrors the more tangible beaver-fur profit. as is clear, hearne adhered to the trend of many euro-colonial traders to use indigenous labor to acquire furs, skins, and specimens. sayre suggests that “making beaver hunting a part of the ethnography of indian behavior ... could shift the blame for destroying this creature to their mercenary employees and effectively conceal the fact that the destruction of idealized beaver life was their own responsibility” (239). and direct attribution of indigenous sources (when compared to indirect or total erasure) certainly does serve the rhetorical purpose of shifting the blame, especially if the marvels of beaver intelligence and culture, as in hearne, could compel readers to sympathize with the animal. but, if we take nonhuman animal intelligence and culture as scientific facts rather than forms of anthropomorphic exaggeration, we can also see that within these ethnographies of native american hunting cultures, another kind of indigenous ethnography of the nonhuman animal resides. this double ethnography not only complicates the narrative frame. it also has the potential to restructure our sense of perspective, so that we might possibly begin to see past the authored euro-colonial perspective to a counter-history of empiricism. as atlantic historian jorge cañizares-esguerra notes, european editors had been growing increasingly skeptical of indigenous sources since the late seventeenth century (114). thus, direct attribution of indigenous knowledge could be employed to transfer the burden of proof or deflect potential incredulity from readers, real or imagined. sayre notes that this strategy was common among eighteenth-century french-colonial naturalists like claude lebeau and louis-armand lahontan, “affording plausible deniability for improbable facts,” while in the process, he suggests, potentially undermining the ethnographic project itself: “[i]f the indians’ notions of the beaver are humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 14 wrong, european’s notions of the indians might be equally faulty” (226–28). fur trader and british explorer alexander henry offers a clear example of this rhetorical strategy and its accompanying paradox. in henry’s travels and adventures in canada and the indian territories (1760 to 1776), only the details of beaver behavior or culture that subvert human emotional or intellectual exceptionalism require caveat: according to the indians, the beaver is much given to jealousy.... the indians add, that the male is as constant as he is jealous, never attaching himself to more than one female.... beavers, say the indians, were formerly a people endowed with speech, not less than with the other noble faculties they possess; but, the great spirit has taken this away from them, lest they should grow superior in understanding to mankind. (124–26) henry’s account of the ojibwe’s belief in beaver speech, and the loss of it, was a common story in ojibwe and cree ethnography, one that calvin martin has used to advance his argument for why the cree, ojibwe, and micmac may have felt justified in participating in the fur trade despite the fact that it meant implicating themselves in the mass extermination of a species with significant perceived spiritual potency (146). for henry, it seems crucial that he pose indigenous knowledge here as resulting from spiritual belief rather than scientific observation. by doing so, he could dissociate ojibwe methods for arriving at knowledge of animals from the ethnographic methods euro-colonial naturalists used to obtain indigenous knowledge. preemptively countering sayre’s claim, euro-colonial naturalists like henry could pose indigenous epistemology as fundamentally distinct by linking the most extreme anthropomorphic assertions to spirituality rather than observation. as such, it makes sense that henry follows all other accounts of beaver culture and behavior with an example derived from spiritual belief. regardless of the methods by which the ojibwe may have arrived at their knowledge of beaver jealousy or monogamy previously discussed, which henry does not explain, readers are left to assume that their claims were driven exclusively by spiritual beliefs.16 in characteristic fashion, thompson reveals and subverts this rhetorical approach. beginning his chapter on the colville people with a brief ethnographic description of their village and the physical constitution of the men and women, thompson quickly turns to salmon fishing, fluidly shifting between ethnographic description and narrative account. passing quickly over the ceremonies that accompanied the arrival of the salmon — which he was “five days too late to see” — thompson emphasizes the “deep attention ... paid” to the salmon and the colville’s “delicate perceptions” (467–68). he thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 15 then notes the care taken by the colville not to contaminate the area near the river with traces of salmon carcasses, their dogs, or themselves (468). later, thompson admits, i looked upon a part of the precautions of the natives as so much superstition, yet i found they were not so; one of my men, after picking the bone of a horse about 10 am carelessly threw it into the river, instantly the salmon near us dashed down the current and did not return until the afternoon; an indian dived, and in a few minutes brought it up, but the fishery was over for several hours. (469–70) thompson often exhibits this form of humility, admitting to being initially dismissive of indigenous knowledge until discovering its basis in observation, experience, or reason. where henry and others would fabricate a rift between euro-colonial knowledge and indigenous belief, thompson explicitly collapses these distinctions. not only does he avoid attributing colville salmon knowledge to spiritual belief systems; he goes out of his way to consciously nurture precisely the kind of self-skepticism sayre suggests operates unconsciously among naturalists. perhaps even more significantly, this selfreflection unfolds through a personal narrative embedded within an ethnographic account. indeed, the relationship between the two genres is far from superficial. as we have seen with the ceremonies surrounding the salmon arrival, thompson refused to give account of that which he did not experience himself. one might argue that thompson was thereby claiming ultimate authority on indigenous knowledge, but this seems less devious given the natural historical genre’s tendency to reproduce and distort accounts of cultural practices across texts, thereby representing indigenous cultures as ahistorical. thompson desired to see, experience, understand, and relate. thus, readers were expected to shed their own prejudices through his experiences and acquire a supple form of skepticism about what might constitute intellectual, emotional, and spiritual knowledge. thompson and other euro-colonials could use indigenous sources to enhance the credibility of their observations precisely because of beliefs about native sagacity relating to the acuteness of sensory perception and, as parrish also notes, the idea that “indians, as ‘naturals,’ were perceived to dwell within nature and to have a peculiar access to” its secrets (american curiosity 237). as we have seen, the direct attribution of indigenous knowledge about animals often concerned behavioral traits that were, relatively speaking, anthropomorphic in scope. rhetorically, establishing plausible deniability for anthropomorphic claims makes sense. but it is also worth considering the scientific logic informing this strategy. mark catesby, like many other eighteenth humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 16 century naturalists, admired the beaver’s “oeconomy and inimitable art,” which “would almost conclude them reasonable creatures.” catesby also speculated on how their “greater sagacity than other animals to conceal their secret ways” made them extremely difficult to hunt: “some are taken by white men, but it is the more general employment of indians, who as they have a sharper sight, hear better, and are endued with an instinct approaching that of beasts, are so much the better enabled to circumvent the subtleties of these wary creatures.” (1: xxx). in a parallel discussion of beaver reason and native sagacity, catesby would almost inadvertently reveal a scientific logic for anthropomorphism: by emphasizing the natural intelligence of certain humans, naturalists could build a bridge linking various forms of human and animal intelligence. the prejudice of this rhetorical strategy is clear, but the idea of coming to terms with — or softening the blow of — anthropomorphic claims by placing the animal subject in contact with humans who have been narratively endowed with exaggerated forms of sensory perception — though not lacking human intellectual and emotional capacities — begins to look like a form of applied anthropomorphism. it would seem that euro-colonial naturalists, through a combination of in-depth field research and racist beliefs about native sagacity, were arriving at a kind of deranged definition of ethology. simply put, those who spent the most time observing animals in their own contexts would come to understand animal behavior in ways that those who studied animals in captivity — or merely read about them in books — would never be able to. and pursuing this type of scientific knowledge complicates parrish’s critique of the euro-colonial naturalist’s arbitration of indigenous science (american curiosity 247). because animal behavior and intelligence remained on the rhetorical fringes of the natural historical account and were rarely employed in the service of animal classification, it was not as relevant to natural history. instead of being absorbed by the euro-colonial scientific imagination, animal behavior stood off at a distance as an alternative model for studying and living among animals. in some instances, these ways of knowing could provide relief for euro-colonial naturalists immersed in an unknown new world. english explorer john lawson’s new voyage to carolina, written in the first decade of the eighteenth century, offers a case in point. lawson wrote of settling in “a house about half a mile from an indian town” with his bulldog and “a young indian fellow” and, one night, being frightened by a nesting alligator: i was sitting alone by the fire-side (about nine a clock at night, some time in march) the indian fellow being gone to the town, to see his relations; so that there was no body in the house but my self and my dog; when, all thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 17 of a sudden, this ill-favour’d neighbour of mine, set up such a roaring, that he made the house shake about my ears, and so continued, like a bittern, (but a hundred times louder, if possible) for four or five times. the dog stared, as if he was frightened out of his senses; nor indeed, could i imagine what it was, having never heard one of them before. immediately again i had another lesson; and so a third. being at that time amongst none but savages, i began to suspect, they were working some piece of conjuration under my house, to get away my goods; not but that, at another time, i have as little faith in their, or any others working miracles, by diabolical means, as any person living. at last, my man came in, to whom when i had told the story, he laugh’d at me, and presently undeceiv’d me, by telling me what it was that made that noise. these allegators lay eggs, as the ducks do; only they are longer shap’d, larger, and a thicker shell, than they have. (127) lawson was “undeceived” of his suspicions about native conjuration under his house by his “man’s” knowledge of alligator nesting and vocalization. thus, the story typifies how indigenous knowledge of animal behavior could convert euro-colonial fear of the unknown into scientific knowledge.17 lawson even develops suspense in the story peculiarly, not by withholding the fact that the squatter was an alligator — he reveals this detail before beginning to relate the story and reminds readers throughout—but by withholding the logical reason for the alligator’s residency. the object of suspense is not the agent of terror but the scientific lesson itself. indeed, lawson’s story interrupts a relatively generic natural historical description of the alligator, which he then fluidly reinstates when the story is resolved into relatable facts about the alligator’s nesting behavior. but while lawson’s man laughed at him for his ignorance of alligator nesting behaviors, lawson employs a swift rhetorical sleight of hand to convert this indigenous knowledge back to the naturalist’s point of view: “these allegators lay eggs,” he continues, without directly attributing what follows to his man’s account. despite his distaste for indigenous spirituality — or what he called “ridiculous stories” (213) — lawson cultivated a reputation for being fairly sympathetic toward native americans, relative to many of his euro-colonial contemporaries. “they are really better to us, than we are to them,” he maintained (235). the tension between his sympathy and disdain for native americans would play out in the structure of a new voyage itself, which weaves various points of view into composite narratives ultimately bounded by a natural historical rhetoric incapable of accommodating the text’s complexity. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 18 another often silent tension of euro-colonial natural history involved the use of indigenous labor for hunting. hunting was one of the most frequently remarked upon indigenous cultural practices in natural history writing and one of the interactions euro-colonials and native americans were most likely to share with animals. indigenous hunters also taught naturalists about specific behavioral patterns of game animals, like deer, beavers, bears, elk, and turkeys, which they had been hunting for roughly ten thousand years since the end of glaciation and the extinction of the north american megafauna (silver 36). like most naturalists, lawson employed native americans as guides and hunters because of this situated, local knowledge, as well as aforementioned assumptions about native sagacity (8). often, they were employed to hunt the most elusive or formidable animals, like bears, wolves, or, in mark catesby’s case, the yellow-breasted chat (1: 50). as parrish notes, many naturalists believed “the indian excelled because he could assimilate his body, his instincts, and his senses to even the most subtle animal” (american curiosity 243). embedded in these beliefs about native sagacity was a more practical insight into how knowledge about animal behavior could be obtained through embodied observation or interaction. the resultant hunting narratives would often include forms of direct or indirect acknowledgment of these practices where the narrative itself precludes the possibility of erasing indigenous participants or sources. instructive examples of the knowledge that informed hunting methods abound, from swedish naturalist pehr kalm’s note that “the alpine nations hunt marmots frequently” by digging them up during hibernation and cutting their throats while they remain torpid (141) to hearne’s descriptions of persistence hunting among the cree, the practice of running down moose or deer over six to eight hours to exhaust them to the point of total vulnerability (182). persistence hunting and other forms of close-contact animal killing have often been, though not exclusively, associated with the concept of “ordained killing,” which merchant defines as any custom governing “the killing and disposal of the remains of game animals who had given up their lives for human sustenance” (47). for merchant, ordained killing was distinct from other forms of hunting because “humans and animals confronted each other as autonomous subjects ... intertwined in a process of outsmarting, confrontation, and negotiation.” hunters, she argues, “prepared themselves to be, think, and behave like the animals they hunted.” at the same time, ordained killing constituted an early form of north american game-protection regulation, which, much like formal game-protection legislation, simultaneously functioned to preserve an ample supply of warm animal bodies for human sport, protect threatened species from regional or total extinction, and uphold a particular moral standard for killing animals, in this case informed by spiritual practices situated thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 19 in a desire to connect emotionally, intellectually, and physically with nonhuman animals.18 hunting practices that brought humans closer to animals in these ways — either through mimicry, attempted interspecies communication, or other methods — need to be considered for the behavioral knowledge they could have generated. how did these shared practices suggest theories of animal intelligence, emotional capacity, or morality? for example, direct, face-to-face encounters were often crucial to the act of ordained killing because they allowed the hunter to obtain something presumed to be direct consent from the animal (merchant 20).19 when hunting with native americans, euro-colonial naturalists often noted the bold proximity to animals they would achieve. some would even try on these face-to-face encounters themselves. for example, william bartram, in his famous clash with the alligators of the st johns river in florida, noted that before killing one rather brazen alligator on the shore of his camp, he engaged in an extended face-to-face encounter (initiated by the alligator) whereby he was supposedly able to read the animal’s disposition (77).20 but face-to-face contact was not merely a matter of direct, embodied communication; it was sometimes a form of animal mimicry, of trying on nonhuman capacities. various forms of mimicry clutter accounts of indigenous hunting. some were probably familiar to euro-colonial hunters, like mock bird calls (thompson 35). others were more curious. for example, lawson described an elaborate mask his guide wore, “made of the head of a buck ... the skin ... left to the setting on of the shoulders,” complete with “a way to preserve the eyes as if living.” he detailed the deer skin coat worn with the mask, which allowed the hunter to “go as near a deer as he pleases, the exact motions and behaviour of a deer being so well counterfeited by ‘em, that several times it hath been known for two hunters to come up with a stalking head together, and unknown to each other, so that they have kill’d an indian instead of a deer” (22–23). likely inspired by theodor de bry’s engravings of the timucua people (see fig 2), beverley also noted this practice, adding that colonists had developed a poor imitation of it by teaching their horses to stalk deer while walking on the other side “to cover him from the sight of the deer” (244). accounts of animal mimicry could easily drift from admiration to ridicule, especially because, unlike other indigenous practices, they did not convert as easily to useful forms of scientific knowledge. though, as beverley’s account demonstrates, the euro-colonial hunters did not seem willing to put on the skins themselves to find out. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 20 fig. 2. theodor de bry, “cervorum venatio.” plate xxv in america, pt. 2 (1591). (engraving of drawing by jacques le moyne.) erasing indigenous knowledge. parrish and other historians of science have argued that indigenous cultures were “rhetorically discredited while they were consulted in practice” (“introduction” xiv), a constitutive fact of enlightenment knowledge advancement, including knowledge of animal behavior. we have already seen how openly acknowledging indigenous sources could sometimes work to rhetorically discredit native americans, but how can we satisfactorily demonstrate that a particular form of more deliberately erased knowledge originated from indigenous sources? instead of drawing on ethnographic sources constructed during a different historical period, i use the inherent complexity, multivalence, and variability of narrative voice in natural historical texts to reveal internal contradictions and unfold evidence of erasure. to establish a trajectory of deceit, i first want to establish three more familiar, baseline forms of rhetorical deviance: reductive attribution, confirmation through euro-colonial testimony, and subversion of indigenous intellectual capacity. reductive attribution, perhaps the most common example, involves simply attributing a small detail, such as the name of an animal, to native americans and reporting all other related factual details as neutral natural historical knowledge. beverley’s account of the beaver labor hierarchy provides a clear example: the admirable oeconomy of the beavers, deserves to be particularly remember’d. they cohabit in one house, are incorporated in a regular thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 21 form of government, something like monarchy, and have over them a superintendent, which the indians call pericu. he leads them out to their several imployments, which consist in felling of trees, biting off the branches, and cutting them into certain lengths, suitable to the business they design them for, all which they perform with their teeth. when this is done, the governor orders several of his subjects to joyn together, and take up one of those logs, which they must carry to their house or damm, as occasion requires. (246) this account continues for some time in the same fashion, without any further attribution. given the topic, the attribution of the name pericu could serve the purpose of establishing plausible deniability as previously discussed. yet, the whole of the story is in no way explicitly given away to indigenous sources. instead, only a name is given away, but, in its specificity, the name implies knowledge of the entire account. readers are left to infer that either the whole account originated with beverley’s indigenous source (or that of hariot or smith, beverley’s colonial sources). or, at the very least, the account was constructed from various shared observations and detailed conversations with indigenous sources. also common was the practice of using euro-colonial testimony to verify indigenous knowledge, which catesby perpetrates in his account of the whooping crane: this description i took from the entire skin of the bird, presented to me by an indian, who made use of it for his tobacco pouch. he told me, that early in the spring, great multitudes of them frequent the lower parts of the rivers near the sea, and return to the mountains in the summer. this relation was afterwards confirmed to me by a white man; who added, that they make a remarkable hooping noise; and that he hath seen them at the mouths of the savanna, aratamaha, and other rivers nearer st. augustine. (1: 75) the strategy here is fairly explicit, but it is worth noting how, along with using white testimony to verify the story of crane migration, catesby also subverts the indigenous testimony’s status as scientific knowledge by linking it with the indigenous use of the bird for the presumed utilitarian purpose of constructing a tobacco pouch from crane skin. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 22 methods of subversion could be still more subtle, as with virginia enslaver william byrd’s description of fire hunting in his history of the dividing line betwixt virginia and north carolina. the practice of hunting deer by trapping them within a circle of fire was commonly cited by euro-colonial naturalists as evidence of indigenous animal cruelty. byrd extends this claim in his description: “‘tis really a pitiful sight, to see the extreme distress, the poor deer are in, when they find themselves surrounded with this circle of fire. they weep and groan, like a human creature, yet can’t move the compassion of those hard hearted people, who are about to murder them” (198). here, byrd goes beyond discrediting native americans as scientists and attempts to dismantle their humanity. it was not uncommon for naturalists to describe indigenous hunters as indifferent to suffering, but byrd draws a line from this emotional detachment to the strong emotional response of the deer who “weep and groan, like a human creature.” thus, according to byrd, native americans were incapable even of accessing the anthropomorphic behavioral and emotional characteristics of nonhuman animals. this strategy is far more complex than simply claiming native americans were instinctual and therefore more animal than euro-colonials because it implies that a kind of instinctual interspecies empathy was needed to understand nonhuman animal behavior. byrd regularly reinforces this argument by casually aligning his indigenous guides with cruelty and aligning his team of white surveyors with animals through compassionate acts and even zoomorphic descriptions of human behavior (175). looking beyond these common strategies, uncovering evidence of erasure requires readers to move fluidly through natural historical texts, untethered by assumptions of consistency regarding narrative voice or rhetorical mode. lawson’s text provides a clear example. reading the following passage on its own — drawn from lawson’s bird catalogue — readers are forced to make various assumptions about its source: there is also a white brant, very plentiful in america. this bird is all over as white as snow, except the tips of his wings, and those are black. they eat the roots of sedge and grass in the marshes and savannas, which they tear up like hogs. the best way to kill these fowl is, to burn a piece of marsh, or savanna, and as soon as it is burnt, they will come in great flocks to get the roots, where you kill what you please of them. they are as good meat as the other, only their feathers are stubbed, and good for little. (147) this passage adopts a rhetorical structure common to natural historical animal description. first, the author makes some claim to the animal’s range, possibly thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 23 including some mention of its relative abundance. second, a physical description is provided, which may also include observations pertaining to the animal’s behavior. third, hunting methods are described. finally, the author offers practical uses for the animal’s body, often culinary or sartorial.21 since the first two elements seem to derive from visual witness, readers often reasonably assume that they originated with the author. whether true or not, these witnessed facts establish authorial control over any additional unattributed information provided. here specifically, we might assume that because lawson seems to know where to find white brants, what they look like, and how they taste, then he also must know how to kill them by burning them out of the marsh. and lawson makes no effort to suggest otherwise. but over a hundred pages earlier, while narrating his experiences with the sewee, lawson had already revealed the indigenous knowledge he would later omit from his catalogue: as we went up the river, we heard a great noise, as if two parties were engag’d against each other, seeming exactly like small shot. when we approach’d nearer the place, we found it to be some sewee indians firing the cane swamps, which drives out the game, then taking their particular stands, kill great quantities of both bear, deer, turkies, and what wild creatures the parts afford. (10) here, lawson had no trouble representing himself as an uninitiated witness of sewee fire hunting in the marsh, so that he could use the scene to segue from his travel narrative to a lengthy description of sewee culture. but to say that attribution in the later passage should be assumed because it follows this passage, albeit much later, would be to assume a linearity and continuity that does not exist in the text. the rhetorical and genre distinctions between the sewee passage and the white brant passage invite readers to compartmentalize and forget, that is, assuming they would even read both sections of the book, each of which appeal to distinct audiences. the sewee description is part of a personal travel narrative constrained by linear time and invested in resolving suspense or ambiguity. the white brant description is part of a scientific catalogue of animals, a common appendix to natural historical travel narratives, which often runs longer than the narrative itself. sewee presence is integral to lawson’s travel narrative but not his scientific catalogue. it is also important to note that this form of cross-genre amnesia can be produced without a 137-page gap, as such shifts may occur from page to page, paragraph to paragraph, within one paragraph, or even within a single sentence. in fact, it is quite common for unattributed knowledge to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 24 directly precede the precise narrative event that informed the aforementioned knowledge, without any effort on the part of the author to retroactively gesture to the indigenous source. hearne often painted euro-colonials as relatively incompetent hunters who were sometimes forced to go several days without provisions for their want of hunting skill and knowledge. any success was usually only arrived at through substantial indigenous assistance.22 but hearne was crafty. as we have already seen, while he was not afraid to use indigenous knowledge to oppose other naturalists’ conjectures, when it came to representing his knowledge of animal behavior as science, he often concealed evidence of the indigenous sources involved. as previously discussed, hearne retroactively revealed the origins of his knowledge of beaver behavior by repeating key details in his account of chipewyan hunting methods (153–56). he also explicitly undermined other indigenous hunting practices. for example, he assailed impounding deer, a “method of hunting, if it deserves the name,” he quipped, where deer were lured into a labyrinthine fence-like structure and eventually killed (50). for hearne, “there cannot exist a stronger proof that mankind was not created to enjoy happiness in this world, than the conduct of the miserable beings who inhabit this wretched part of it” (51). hearne yoked his indictment of animal cruelty to indigenous work ethic, noting that “it cannot be supposed that those who indulge themselves in this indolent method of procuring food can be masters of any thing for trade,” proceeding to detail why deerskins, procured out of season and “as thin as a bladder [and] ... full of warbles,” were “of little or no value” to traders (51–53). of course, impounding deer required hunters to frequently observe deer trails and learn seasonal behavioral patterns, but hearne made very little of this knowledge despite describing the method in exhaustive detail. like lawson, hearne relied on the multi-genre structure of his text to launder knowledge derived from indigenous sources. much of this erasure occurs in transition paragraphs that segue from travel narrative to extended scientific descriptions of a particular species. often, hearne shifts from narrative to narratively situated observation to disembodied scientific description within a single paragraph. for example, a narrative about encountering and hunting muskoxen with native american guides transitions to an objective scientific description by gradually, and almost seamlessly, erasing its indigenous sources. hearne begins this paragraph by directly noting his guides’ presence in the aforementioned muskoxen encounter, saying “we saw a great number of them.” but he then begins to shift to passive constructions to describe a body of encounters that, collectively, contributed to the scientific knowledge thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 25 he is about to share. “great numbers of them also were met with in my second journey to the north,” he claims, while still vaguely gesturing to how “several ... my companions killed.” exactly who these companions were, hearne does not disclose. instead, he proceeds to elaborate on the muskoxen’s northern range even more passively: “they are also found at times in considerable numbers near the sea-coast of hudson’s bay.” the passive construction renders the subject of these muskox sightings uncertain. were they found by hearne and his guides or only his guides? when an actively constructed encounter next surfaces, hearne appears suddenly alone and seemingly at home in the arctic: “in those high latitudes i have frequently seen many herds.” shifting to behavioral accounts of muskoxen — here, the proportion of bulls to cows in a herd — hearne briefly resurrects his chipewyan and inuit sources, describing that “from the number of males that are found dead, the indians are of the opinion that they kill each other in contending for the females.” as already discussed, disclosing indigenous sources could serve various rhetorical purposes. so, while not necessarily a mere lapse for hearne, this moment is especially useful for what it reveals about the probable subjects of his previous passive constructions. but, after this moment, hearne abandons all efforts at source attribution in describing muskox jealousy during mating season, interspecies and intraspecies aggression, dexterity on mountains, and feeding preferences (87–88). over the course of a single paragraph, the text slowly untethers itself from the environment, circumstances, and agents that produced the knowledge it seeks to relate. examples of this kind abound in the natural historical corpus, but few naturalists excelled like hearne in constructing a seamless transition from narrative accounts of guided expeditions to seemingly objective descriptions of a sole eurocolonial naturalist. fig. 3. william bartram, “the great alachua savana in east florida.” (photo courtesy of the american philosophical society.) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 26 hearne’s work also invites us to question how naturalists’ complex relationships to their indigenous sources contributed to the emergence of various forms of humane sensibility. philadelphia naturalist william bartram’s descriptions of seminole deer hunting offer a curious point of transition. bartram’s initial description in his 1791 travels of the “extensive alachua savanna” complements his visual depiction of nonhuman animals living in relative harmony (see fig. 3). he describes “innumerable droves of cattle; the lordly bull, lowing cow and sleek capricious heifer” amidst “hills and groves [that] re-echo their cheerful, social voices.” likewise, “herds of sprightly deer, squadrons of the beautiful, fleet siminole horse, flocks of turkeys, civilized communities of the sonorous, watchful crane, mix together, appearing happy and contented in the enjoyment of peace” (119–20). then bartram crafts a narrative through which he may sympathize with these animals in a fashion characterized by what thomas hallock has called “the desire to be indigenous — even if at the expense of native peoples” (from 173).23 the animals frolic in peace, ‘till disturbed and affrighted by the warrior man. behold yonder, coming upon them through the darkened groves, sneakingly and unawares, the naked red warrior, invading the elysian fields and green plains of alachua. at the terrible appearance of the painted, fearless, uncontrolled and free siminole, the peaceful, innocent nations are at once thrown into disorder and dismay. see the different tribes and bands, how they draw towards each other! as it were deliberating upon the general good. suddenly they speed off with their young in the centre. (120) bartram does more than invoke native sagacity in the seminoles’ ability to sneak up on various species. he also constructs a hierarchy that portrays indigenous humans as less organized and civilized than the nonhuman animals of the savanna, describing a kind of interspecies congress amidst the terror, a social organization to counter that of the “uncontrolled and free siminole.” he then turns exclusively to the deer, his model for nonhuman confidence and poise: [b]ut the roebuck fears him not: here he lays himself down, bathes and flounces in the cool flood. the red warrior, whose plumed head flashes lightning, whoops in vain; his proud, ambitious horse strains and pants; the earth glides from under his feet, his flowing main whistles in the wind, as he comes up full of vain hopes. the bounding roe views his rapid approaches, rises up, lifts aloft his antlered head, erects the white flag, and thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 27 fetching a shrill whistle, says to his fleet and free associates, ‘follow;’ he bounds off, and in a few minutes distances his foe a mile; suddenly he stops, turns about, and laughing says, ‘how vain, go chase meteors in the azure plains above, or hunt butterflies in the fields about your towns.’ (120) the deer swiftly escapes the seminole hunter whose arrogance seems to have infected the horse on which he rides. bartram then gives voice to the deer, who mocks the hunter’s astronomical ambitions. the whole story hovers somewhere between fact and fiction.24 what begins as an objective and then somewhat idealized description of the savanna eventually shifts to an everyday narrative of hunting on the savanna, but from the anthropomorphized animals’ perspectives, which finally leads to a roebuck speaking aloud in english. it would seem, however, that bartram derived this narrative, in part, from a specific experience he had in the savanna, which he relates about ten pages later.25 as bartram recounts, he and his seminole companions came upon a herd of deer who, “upon the sight of us ... ran off, taking shelter in the groves on the opposite point or cape of this spacious meadow” (127). his companions “quickly concerted a plan for their destruction” and took a roundabout course to the opposite grove. they were then able to approach the deer and observe them closely, at which point bartram was moved by the innocence of the deer: “thoughtless and secure, flouncing in a sparkling pond ... some were lying down on their sides in cool waters, whilst others were prancing like young kids.” he assures readers, “i endeavoured to plead for their lives, but my old friend though he was a sensible, rational and good sort of man, would not yield to my philosophy” (127). the ensuing hunt reads like the previous narrative with one major alteration. the hunter approached until eventually he was spotted, and “a princely buck who headed the party, whistled and bounded off.” the buck reached “prodigious speed,” effortlessly crossing the savanna until “the lucky old hunter fired and laid him prostrate upon the green turf, [and] ... his affrighted followers at the instant sprang off in every direction, streaming away like meteors or phantoms, and we quickly lost sight of them” (127–28). if the previous narrative was based on this experience, bartram adapted it into a fantasy where all of the deer escaped unharmed, and the buck was given the last word. perhaps the strangest harmony between the two versions is the use of the word meteor in both. if the meteors in the fantasy serve as an ephemeral substitute for the deer, here the surviving deer are directly compared to meteors because of their unattainability, even though the very buck who initially invoked the comparison turned out to be entirely attainable.26 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 28 the other major difference between the two versions is that, in the real account, bartram’s sensibility toward the animals is situated in the story itself. bartram himself was physically present and therefore able to advocate for the protection of the deer, however futile that advocacy proved to be. but how would this qualify as redaction of indigenous knowledge? what is most apparent when comparing the two narratives is the part of himself bartram leaves out despite being a reluctant participant in the hunt. by leaving out bartram the naturalist, he excludes the science, reducing his seminole guides to base primitives with no interest in “philosophy,” be it ethical or natural. at the same time, he positions himself as an advocate for the deer, one who could see dignity in their unrestricted lifestyle and assumed innocence. for bartram and many other naturalists sympathetic to the effects of settler-colonialism on native americans, cross-cultural misunderstanding would inevitably entangle with emerging ideals of interspecies kinship. 2. resisting indigenous knowledge. “i have been something tedious upon this subject, on purpose to shew what strange ridiculous stories these wretches are inclinable to believe.” (213) —john lawson, a new voyage to carolina, 1709. inherent in lawson’s acknowledged benevolence toward southeastern native americans was a desire to save them from his devil’s schemes. in one interaction, he convinced some shakori people to eat a rooster they told him was “design’d for another use,” which he inferred to be a sacrifice to “their god ... (which is the devil).” by doing so, lawson obtained threefold satisfaction by helping the shakori abandon what he believed were superstitions, getting to eat the fowl, and “cheat[ing] the devil” (56). later, he explicitly dismissed various indigenous practices involving the abstention from killing or eating animals as “foolish ceremonies and beliefs” (210). as lawson’s resistance demonstrates, indigenous practices, values, and beliefs were rarely selfconsciously adopted by euro-colonials.27 in this final section, i discuss some instances akin to lawson’s, where naturalist and indigenous ideas about animals differed significantly, either ethically, scientifically, or otherwise. in the wake of previously discussed indigenous knowledge of animal behavior, encounters of this kind illuminate the protectionist ideas and actions that emerged out of these tense contact zones. william bartram adored rattlesnakes. in a recollection from his youth, he describes an encounter with a large rattlesnake while in east florida, “attending a congress at a thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 29 treaty between that government [the british colony of east florida] and the creek nation” with his father, royal botanist john bartram. while on a “botanical excursion,” father bartram warned son william of a rattlesnake “formed in a high spiral coil” at his feet. greatly disturbed, young william grabbed a branch and killed the snake, then dragged him back to camp “in triumph,” where he was “soon surrounded by the amazed multitude, both indians and my countrymen.” that evening, the bartrams were invited to dine on the snake with the governor, which troubled young william: i tasted of it but could not swallow it. i ... was sorry after killing the serpent when cooly recollecting every circumstance, he certainly had it in his power to kill me almost instantly, and i make no doubt but that he was conscious of it. i promised myself that i would never again be accessary to the death of a rattle snake, which promise i have invariably kept to. (169– 70) this episode accompanies several others concerning william’s and his father’s sensibility toward rattlesnakes, often involving their attempts (mostly failures) to protect the snakes from fellow naturalists or indigenous guides (168–71).28 this series of accounts directly follows — and seems to structurally atone for — one of the strangest and most remarked upon incidents from travels in which bartram violated his rattlesnake pledge. while living with the seminole, adult william had “an opportunity of observing their extraordinary veneration or dread of the rattle snake.” while drawing “some curious flowers” in his apartment, bartram was interrupted by his interpreter. a rattlesnake had “taken possession of” the seminole camp, and they wanted “the flower hunter” to please “kill him or take him out of their camp.” bartram resisted and unsuccessfully attempted to slip out the back door of his apartment when a party of three young seminole men entered: [t]hey plead and entreated me to go with them, in order to free them from a great rattle snake which had entered their camp, that none of them had freedom or courage to expel him, and understanding that it was my pleasure to collect all their animals and other natural productions of their land, desired that i would come with them and take him away, that i was welcome to him. (164–65) bartram consented and, upon entering the camp, witnessed everyone standing back in terror as the snake “leisurely traversed their camp, visiting the fire places from one to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 30 another, picking up fragments of their provisions and licking their platters.” quickly and dispassionately, he hurled a knot of wood at the snake, killing him instantly. he then cut off the snake’s head and removed the fangs for his collection. back at his apartment, three seminole men came calling to “scratch” him “for killing the rattle snake within their camp,” saying that he “was too heroic and violent, that it would be good for [him] to lose some of [his] blood to make [him] more mild and tame.” when bartram resisted, they suddenly changed their mind, proclaimed their friendship to him, and departed. he then concluded “that the whole was a ludicrous farce to satisfy their people and appease the manes of the slain rattle snake,” noting that the seminole never kill any snakes out of a fear that “the spirit of the killed snake will excite or influence his living kindred or relative to revenge the injury” (165–66). the critical attention given to this episode has focused squarely on bartram: his fear of portraying himself and his disposition toward animals unflatteringly (slaughter 148– 49), his dismissal of seminole veneration of rattlesnakes as a kind of “ludicrous farce” (irmscher 167), his distorted perspective as a white naturalist who portrayed native americans paralyzed by fear and myth (hallock, from 160–61), and the relative intimacy colonials shared with the creek nation in the late eighteenth century (ethridge 8). but what seems most remarkable about this account of animal killing is that this particular snake probably should not have died. the murder implicated two parties who would both rather not kill rattlesnakes for their own reasons. first, there was bartram, a quaker naturalist with a standing vow against harming rattlesnakes. then, there were the seminole people with a tradition of acknowledging snakes’ spiritual power and complex moral capacities. especially extraordinary is that, in a story bartram fashions to flatter himself, he does not acknowledge the humor and irony in the indirect speech he constructs for the seminoles: “[u]nderstanding that it was my pleasure to collect all their animals and other natural productions of their land, [they] desired that i would come with them to take him away, that i was welcome to him” (164). from one perspective, they were not so much begging for him to intervene — as bartram would have us believe — as they seemed to be manipulating him into removing the snake from their camp by granting him permission both to violate their moral standards, the details of which they mostly did not bother to share with him, and to carry on with his natural historical rituals of collecting and studying lifeless specimens. perhaps understanding he had been manipulated, bartram reframes his act as reluctant heroism without erasing the contrary evidence. the story offers an example wherein a natural historical specimen thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 31 was acquired through reluctant-yet-permissive indigenous persuasion of a comparably reluctant naturalist. what is often left out of discussions of this episode, and many others, is whether the seminoles’ moral views on rattlesnakes derived from anything other than a static spiritual belief. it is not unreasonable to think that their frequent interactions with these snakes resulted in knowledge about their behavior and intelligence that would, in turn, influence their resistance to killing them (as was the case with bartram), in this instance leading them to attempt to convince someone they believed enjoyed killing animals to eliminate the danger for them. available ethnographic research says little about this facet of knowledge. in fact, many historical and ethnographic interpretations of seminoles and creek ideas about rattlesnakes have been drawn directly from bartram’s ethnographic footnote to this scene, wherein he relays the belief that “the spirit of the killed snake will excite or influence his living kindred or relatives to revenge the injury or violence done to him when alive” (166). but bartram also suggests that only some seminoles were motivated by these beliefs, others by fear: “that none of them had freedom or courage to expel him” (164, emphasis added).29 fig. 4. detail from unsigned engraving of the “beasts of carolina” in john lawson’s a new voyage to carolina (1709). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 32 other naturalists would offer their own interpretations following interactions with native americans and snakes. lawson, for example, shares a similar explanation to bartram’s, that many of the carolinian tribes avoided killing snakes “because their opinion is, that some of the serpents kindred would kill some of the savages relations, that should destroy him” (210). he characterizes this custom as one of “thousands of these foolish ceremonies and beliefs” but adds that “several customs are found in some families, which others keep not.” lawson then elaborates, relating “a long tale of a great rattle-snake, which, a great while ago, liv’d by a creek in that river (which was neus) and that it kill’d abundance of indians; but at last, a bald eagle kill’d it, and they were rid of a serpent, that us’d to devour whole canoes full of indians, at a time.” again, lawson adds his opinion that those who told these stories — here an elderly creek doctor — “understand a little better themselves, than to give credit to any such fooleries” (213). yet, lawson himself endorsed sleeping with live rattlesnakes as a treatment for various diseases (220) and lent credence to “the power, or art (i know not which to call it) [of rattlesnakes] to charm squirrels, hares, partridges, or any such thing, in such a manner, that they run directly into their mouths,” a marvel he claimed to have witnessed firsthand (129) (see fig. 4). lawson’s natural history clearly exhibits the tension between an emerging faith in the individual’s ability to create scientific facts through observation and an early-modern, english-protestant intolerance for folk knowledge and practice, which colonials, by their own logic, extended to native american spirituality (anderson 57). kalm, for example, relates a story of an “old swede” who killed a snake precisely because his indigenous guide “adored it.” assuming “it was the indian’s deity, he took a stick and killed it, in the presence of the indian, saying: because thou believest in it, i think myself obliged to kill it” (117). once again, the rift between indigenous adoration of animals and the rash, heretical suspicions of euro-colonials resulted in animal death. while many naturalists attempted to suppress indigenous knowledge and practices around snakes, thompson sometimes promoted indigenous attitudes toward, and strategies for living with, rattlesnakes, noting that both the “indians, and also the white hunters have their superstitions” (524). while not totally sympathetic to “[t]hat hateful reptile the black rattle snake,” he stressed a spiritual understanding of the snakes grounded in behavioral knowledge. thompson claimed that the snake “fears no animal but the hog” and described indigenous accounts of hogs attacking rattlesnakes unprovoked and with “powerful antipathy.” he also endorsed the idea that “the indians justly look on the hog as a manito” (521–25), a form of divine animal guardian.30 thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 33 the term manitou derives from an algonquin word employed to describe various forms of “spiritual power,” depending on the specific culture and usage (richter 7). because of the reach of the algonquin language group, as well as the variant term (orenda) among iroquoian languages, the concept has cross-cultural relevance among many of the native american groups discussed in this article (83). historical and ethnographic definitions tend to emphasize the fluidity of the concept. martin describes manitou simply as power, or “the spiritual potency associated with an object ... or phenomenon” (34). in reference to the narraganset, merchant defines manitou as “any being superior to or surpassing humans, the word meaning literally ‘god (manit) exists’” (70). anderson describes manitou as a “spiritual power that could assume a multitude of forms” (19). those who believed in manitou understood “the world to be infused with this spiritual power.” ideas related to the source of this power, its implications, and an individual’s responsibility toward it could vary greatly across cultures. martin argues that “without manitou nature would lose its meaning and potency” (34). he further identifies the period from the late eighteenth to early nineteenth century as one of widespread native “despiritualization,” resulting from european colonization and the spread of disease (144–45).31 in the early-modern period, as anderson notes, even european animal folklore “coexisted uneasily with christianity” (48). as protestants waged their own wars against this folklore — where anthropomorphized animals often signified, symbolized, or prophesied — they encountered a more radical indigenous system where animals were active agents who possessed their own power.32 their rejection of manitou depended, in part, on its presumed similarity to what they deemed witchcraft and its attendant faith in animal familiars (48–49). starting from the work of jesuit missionary gabriel druillettes, who, beginning in 1646, began manipulating the smallpox-devastated abenaki into renouncing manitou, merchant projects that the loss of manitou was instrumental in the emergence of capitalism and western metaphysical dualism. this abdication, she argues, “prepared the way for the fetishism of commodities ... obscuring the underlying death of the animals and their indian equals” (58–61). indeed, much of western rejection of manitou has been rightfully seen as a religious repudiation, but the concept also challenged emerging western scientific and philosophical models for thinking about animals and life itself. having already seen how the concept of manitou could be influenced by indigenous knowledge of animal behavior, it is worth concluding by following an example where manitou is brought into dialogue with a core western ethical debate around animals in the long eighteenth century: reason versus instinct. among euro-colonial naturalists, thompson was one of the most receptive to manitou. in its logic, thompson saw manitou as a system of divine classification where “each manito has a separate humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 34 command and care, as one has the bison, another the deer; and thus the whole animal creation is divided amongst them” (83). and compared to william bartram, who argued for animal reason over instinct,33 thompson actively employed manitou to destabilize the reason-instinct binary, as is evident in the following conversation drawn from his time among the swampy cree: “you that look at the stars tell us the cause of the regular march of this herd of deer.” i replied, “instinct.” “what do you mean by that word?” “its meaning is ‘the free and voluntary actions of an animal for its self preservation.’” “oh oh, then you think this herd of deer rushed forward over deep swamps, in which some perished, the others ran over them down steep banks to break their necks, swam across large rivers, where the strong drowned the weak went a long way through woods where they had nothing to eat, merely to take care of themselves? you white people, you look like wise men, and talk like fools. the deer feeds quietly and lays down when left to itself. do you not perceive this great herd was under the direct order of their manito and that he was with them, he had gathered them together, made them take a regular line, and drove them on to where they are to go? and where is that place? we don't know. but when he gets them there, they will disperse, none of them will ever come back.” and i had to give up my doctrine of instinct, to that of their manito. i have sometimes thought instinct to be a word invented by the learned to cover their ignorance of the ways and doings of animals for their self preservation; it is a learned word and shuts up all the reasoning powers. (101–02)34 thompson’s companion found the concept of instinct ridiculous, and thompson would reach the same conclusion in the sense that instinct seemed to serve not so much as an explanation for specific behaviors as a feeble concession that no explanation currently existed. in this sense, thompson not only entertained indigenous knowledge but employed it to reject a core characteristic of reductionist biology, as described by vandana shiva, “to declare organisms and their functions useless on the basis of ignorance of their structure and function” (22). thompson also did not, as anderson notes of many colonists, misunderstand manitou by equating it with the christian god thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 35 concept (19). instead, he saw manitou in a realm somewhere between the quasi-spiritual and philosophical, and acknowledged its cultural and scientific value without regard for his religious beliefs.35 as he later notes, “the indian ... does not believe in instinct, a word of civilized man, which accounts for great part of the actions of mankind, and of all those of animated nature; the indian believes that every animal has a soul which directs all its motions, and governs all its actions” (204). while he did not capitulate entirely to the idea of animal souls, thompson recognized that the complexity of behaviors among individuals and within groups sometimes hinged on the goal of selfpreservation, but what could count as self-preservation and the means for achieving it required complex decision-making, planning, and a fluid sense of individual and collective identity. manitou therefore stood as an alternative to instinct with the ability to open up a new conceptual channel beyond mere reason for imagining the motivations and powers behind animal behaviors and the ethics of interspecies relations. elsewhere in his narrative, thompson makes active rhetorical concessions to the concept of manitou, while describing the “strange turn of mind” among cree hunters who fail to kill a deer and then “become excited, and no better success attends them, despondency takes place, [because] the manito of the deer will not allow him to kill them” (417). thompson views this despondency as an illness to be treated with a couple days of rest. here, he does not passively report the words of an indigenous companion, nor does he follow up, as others would, with some hasty deflation of manitou as foolish superstition. he unironically states the role of manitou as fact and then attempts to explain its logic through a familiar line of reasoning: “it is something like the axiom of the civilised world, that poverty begets poverty” (417).36 as an especially fluid concept, manitou was also adaptable to social and economic change. for example, thompson recounts an elderly man’s explanation for the decline of beaver populations, how beavers, once “an ancient people ... wise and powerful,” angered the great spirit, who banished them to the water to become prey, food, and clothing. since then, the great spirit had grown angrier and charged humans with their total destruction (203–204). though he offered no explanation for why the great spirit sought to punish beavers, the man did suggest a kind of fatal flaw integral to their destruction: “all of them are infatuated with the love of the castorum of their own species” (204). etiological narratives originating in native american spirituality that justified the killing of animals for food are not uncommon. but few narratives so transparently illuminate the way in which belief systems and their attendant stories evolved to permit growing forms of environmental exploitation, even though both the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 36 elderly man and thompson recognized that the destruction of the beaver could result in great poverty for native americans (204–06). rather than blame euro-colonials outright for escalating the fur trade, some native americans adapted their own beliefs to current conditions, even shifting the fault for the anthropocentric destruction of beavers onto the beavers themselves: the great spirit commanded their destruction, but selfobsession (or castorcanadacentrism) was their proximate undoing. for martin, this mission to exterminate beavers was part of an even larger interspecies conflict, which began before european contact. martin contends that some native american cultures were “convinced that the bear and the beaver (doubtless in league with other species) had conspired against man to destroy him” (107–08). the beaver was intruding on dry land, and the bear was imposing his formidable physical and spiritual power upon feeble humans. martin uses a scene from thompson’s narrative to demonstrate the latter belief — a scene in which a bear, before being killed, was shamed for his species having terrorized humans in the past (thompson 114).37 notwithstanding the fact that martin constructs a collective memory for native americans that far exceeded the capability of oral tradition in its intergenerational and cross-cultural assumptions, his research highlights how often spirituality could coincide with and adapt to enable the killing of various animals in novel or traditional ways. in entertaining thompson’s interest in replacing instinct with manitou, it is difficult to flatly argue that manitou had superior ethical implications. it did, however, bear more immediate relevance to the expansion of knowledge about animal behavior, consciousness, and intelligence in the long eighteenth century. this new knowledge would have its own ethical implications for western science, which, much like manitou, would have contradictory consequences for the lives of animals. in this article, i have attempted to initiate a new practice for making sense of the history of animal protectionist rhetoric in the americas. this work begins with efforts to assemble and interpret the full body of evidence for native american ethology in order to reveal how this practiced knowledge of animal behavior was shared with eurocolonial naturalists mostly through the hunting and killing of animals. new light on this knowledge permits our return to more inscrutable narratives of cross-cultural contact around animals in order to deeply connect indigenous knowledge and philosophical inquiry to emerging debates around the ethics of human-animal interaction. if we begin our history of animal protection here, these two narratives of knowing and minding animals should merge, though not without tension: emerging frontiers of scientific discovery and emerging ways of caring about animal life uncomfortably intersect, troubling a familiar paradigm wherein science is seen to thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 37 exploit animals to obtain knowledge, and external activist forces seek to protect those animals from harm. instead, we see how science emerged directly from animal exploitation, which sometimes troubled its practitioners. further, the science itself contributed knowledge that came to define and circumscribe ethical discourse. the concept of the so-called “ecological indian” — in both its dehumanizing perpetuation and racist refutation — is deeply complicated by this model. after all, how would western perceptions of indigenous animal cruelty or overhunting change if we more accurately measured indigenous contributions to the science of animal behavior and its contributions, in turn, to animal protectionist rhetoric? notes 1. because of the focus on scientific and environmental practice and texts in this article, i use the terms scientist and naturalist interchangeably, with the acknowledgment that many of the settler-colonial figures treated here were also — and sometimes primarily — traders or explorers. as a white settler scholar working in the field of early american literary and environmental history, i do not intend for this choice to erase or diminish the violence, theft, and subjugation embedded within euro-colonial cultures of science and nature writing. 2. i use the terms indigenous and native american interchangeably depending on the grammatical structure of the sentence and the conceptual scale being discussed. while i refer to specific cultures by name whenever possible, i revert to the generic terminology where authors are unclear about the specific culture or are themselves speaking generally about native americans. when referring to specific cultures, i try to use common names employed today, acknowledging that these names often carry a long history of colonial misunderstanding, overgeneralization, prejudice, and violence. occasionally these revisions create a discrepancy between the name i use and the name used by the naturalist being discussed. i do not use the term indian except when quoting other writers who do. 3. for further reading on the concept of the “ecological indian,” its problems and cultural implications, see shepard krech, the ecological indian: myth and history (1999); calvin martin, keepers of the game (1978); and annette kolodny, “rethinking the ‘ecological indian’: a penobscot precursor” (2017). 4. as atlantic historian jorge cañizares-esguerra points out, “[p]aradoxically, the search for alternatives to traditional literary sources of information led european scholars to assume amerindians were ‘peoples without history.’ ... as ethnography humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 38 gradually replaced literary sources as evidence for reconstructing europe’s ‘obscure’ ages, amerindians came to be perceived as early humans, literally frozen in time” (49– 50). pamela regis has also argued that eighteenth-century naturalists’ belief in the great chain of being, the resultant rhetorical structure of the natural historical descriptive mode, and its inclusion of native american ethnography alongside descriptions of flora and fauna, prevented early american naturalists from representing native americans as “individuals with a personal history, nor ... a group with a collective history” (78). 5. the challenges of using and not using ethnography for historical research have been widely debated among ethnohistorians especially. for example, calvin martin’s 1978 keepers of the game is directly concerned with cultural change — namely, the revision of beliefs about animal spirituality — among the cree, ojibwe, and other northern furtrading cultures that permitted and participated in the escalating destruction of north american beaver populations (18). martin argues that native americans saw certain dominant animals’ spiritual power weakening, associated the large populations of these animals with the spread of european diseases in america, and declared war on the animals for conspiring to destroy them through disease (146). martin attempts to explain the paradox of why native americans would participate in and help to escalate the fur trade despite their belief in the spiritual power of the animals they were helping to exterminate. yet, critics of martin correctly note that he seemed to have no problem “compress[ing] nearly 400 years of cultural history into a homogenized ‘ethnographic present’” (bishop 51). charles bishop also questions the fundamental assumption that a conflict between spiritual beliefs and material needs and desires is necessarily paradoxical, arguing that “indians can have practical and pragmatic wants which are not necessarily in conflict with beliefs about the animal world and how it is to be exploited. thus, motives to acquire new material items need not cancel out or replace attitudes of respect towards game” (46). 6. this problem has been addressed in the work of many animal-centric historians, including harriet ritvo, erica fudge, virginia dejohn anderson, and countless others. 7. as a subdivision of the interdisciplinary field of ethnobiology, ethnozoology examines indigenous knowledge systems for understanding and classifying animal life (i.e., folk zoology). arlene fradkin’s cherokee folk zoology typifies the narrow focus of ethnozoology; in a seven-chapter work, five chapters focus on nomenclature and classification, and two focus on human-animal interaction. but even these two chapters advance minimally into the development or changing conditions of these interactions (249–438). when animal intelligence and cross-cultural interactions between humans thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 39 and other animals are a subject of interest to ethnozoologists, their focus remains primarily descriptive in the sense that what indigenous people know about animals and do to them is more important than how they came to develop their knowledge. the questions pertaining to human-animal interaction that are absent from ethnozoology concern how knowledge about animal behavior and intelligence was developed intergenerationally, how observation informed and transformed this knowledge, and how this process of knowledge production informed indigenous belief systems. 8. my intention in adopting the term animal protection, rather than animal rights or animal welfare, is to use language that is more inclusive of both rights and welfare discourse in their various historical iterations while still emphasizing an interest in animals as individual and collective subjects. i also wish to avoid anachronism, essentialism, and conceptual restrictions wherever possible by representing indigenous and euro-colonial knowledge and ethics in all of their historically and culturally situated complexity. 9. see jakob von uexküll, a stroll through the worlds of animals and men (1934) and jane goodall, through a window (1990). 10. all quotes from historical texts have been left mostly unedited. with the exception of the occasional inconsequential modernization or correction, the original spelling, punctuation, capitalization, mechanics, and emphasis have been largely preserved without comment unless otherwise noted. 11. parrish notes several source texts for beverley, including thomas hariot’s briefe and true report of the new found land of virginia (1588), john smiths’ the generall historie of virginia, new-england, and the summer isles (1624), john banister’s natural history manuscripts, and theodore de bry’s engravings for hariot’s 1590 edition of the briefe and true report (“introduction” xxxii–xxxv). 12. though it is beyond the scope of this article, more research is needed to trace this rhetorical appropriation of indigenous identity by white settlers in the early modern period to the common practice today among white americans of claiming indigenous ancestry, often through family narratives or dna tests. for discussions of how these claims disrupt indigenous sovereignty and identity, see eve tuck and k. wayne yang, “decolonization is not a metaphor” (2012), darryl leroux, distorted descent: white claims to indigenous identity (2019), and rebecca nagle, “how ‘pretendians’ undermine the rights of indigenous people” (2019). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 40 13. andrew lewis discusses the emergence of the distinction between american natural history and european natural philosophy as being grounded in the “low threshold for entry and participation” in america, which “valorized americans’ predominant experience with nature: that of living in it” (6). he also demonstrates how “american naturalists imagined themselves stripping away ‘philosophy’ from nature study and basing their practice on collected facts” (21). 14. in his travels into north america, naturalist pehr kalm offered his reasoning against reason for the relative value of “facts” compared to philosophical deduction in a note on the myth of swallows hibernating under water: natural history, as all other histories, depends not always upon the intrinsic degree of probability, but upon facts founded on the testimony of people of noted veracity. — swallows are seldom seen sinking down into the water, swallows have not such organs as frogs or lizards, which are torpid during winter, ergo, swallows live not, and cannot live, under water. — this way of arguing, i believe, would carry us, in a great many cases, too far. (141) 15. for in-depth discussions of how anthropomorphism is used in ethological hypothesis formation and its presence in rigorous scientific findings, see kristin andrews, the animal mind: an introduction to the philosophy of animal cognition (2015); marc bekoff, minding animals: awareness, emotions, and heart (2002); frans de waal, the ape and the sushi master: cultural reflections of a primatologist (2001); and gordon burghardt, “cognitive ethology and critical anthropomorphism: a snake with two heads and hognose snakes that play dead” (1991). 16. david thompson, however, attributed knowledge of beaver monogamy — which aligns with current ethological understanding — to the cree hunters who observed them for extended periods of time (200–01). 17. this is not the only example of this phenomenon in lawson’s narrative. in another scene, while making his way along a swamp and becoming “incapacitated” by “the dismall’st and most hideous noise,” his “indian pilot” explained “that it was customary to hear such musick along that swamp-side, there being endless numbers of panthers, tygers, wolves, and other beasts of prey, which take this swamp for their abode in the day, coming in whole droves to hunt the deer in the night, making this frightful ditty ‘till day appears” (26). thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 41 18. typically, the history of game protection has centered around the passage of formal legislation regulating or restricting the hunting of specific threatened species. much legislation of this kind was being passed in north america in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, often motivated by a desire to control animal populations for hunting while also preserving the genteel moral standards of sporting culture. sporting magazines and manuals are a key source for original publication of early american game protection legislation and surrounding debates. for some examples, see american shooter’s manual (1827), american turf register and sporting magazine (1829–1844), the port folio (1801–1812), spirit of the times (from 1831), and the sportsman’s companion (1783). however, the history of game protection regulation in north america would become far more complex if we added ordained killing to the scholarly conversation. 19. for a recent indigenous critique of ordained killing, see craig womack’s essay “there is no respectful way to kill an animal” in which he describes ordained killing as “never ... a matter of respect ... [but only] a matter of moderating disrespect” (12). 20. for a detailed discussion of this episode, see thomas doran, “beasts of burden and other beasts: william bartram’s traveling humane persona” (2015). 21. the order and presence of each of these elements may vary significantly. 22. hearne even named some of these sources, perhaps the most notable being the chipewyan leader matonabbee, who assisted hearne on the coppermine river expedition (35). 23. hallock discusses how bartram’s descriptions of the alachua savanna preserved the place in pristine form even while anticipating and tacitly supporting campaigns to transform and develop the region for human industry and habitation, “that it was the pressures of expansion that gave shape to a national pastoral” (from 172–73). while i do not discuss these “programs of expansion,” my reading offers another way bartram’s priorities of indigenousness discredited native americans in favor of the nonhuman animals he saw as his allies. 24. according to estimates, the average creek hunter at the peak of the fur trade — during the middle of eighteenth century — probably killed about 20 to 30 deer annually. some contemporary estimates place this figure closer to 300 pounds of deerskin per year per hunter, which is a higher figure though vaguely so. it is difficult humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 42 to estimate the precise mass of deerskin a single deer would yield since the weight of a skin would no doubt vary from deer to deer (braund 69–70). 25. admittedly, bartram and his indigenous guides had no shortage of encounters with deer on which to base hypothetical stories. the encounter i describe here seems to relate most closely since it actually occurred on the savanna, but, as i go on to discuss, any such story was likely a composite of various deer encounters, some described and others not described in travels. 26. in his draft manuscript of travels, bartram also compared seminoles on horseback to meteors, which would seem to wreck his whole metaphor were it not for the larger context wherein the seminoles faced “the gradual and constant encroachments of the white people on their borders” (334–35). for a more in-depth examination of bartram’s manuscript draft of travels, see nancy hoffman, “william bartram’s draft manuscript for travels: private journal and public book” (2010). 27. lawson’s resistance to indigenous knowledge could also make him oblivious to indigenous jests. his catalogue of the “beasts of carolina,” for example, includes an indigenous tale of a frightening and mysterious cougar-colored creature who hunted with a faster animal resembling “an englishman’s dog” (125). despite hunting with a bulldog himself (127), lawson failed to acknowledge how this description could be a veiled reference to european colonizers. 28. in one exceptional episode, bartram managed to protect a “generous serpent” from his companions by demonstrating how the snake, shading in the meadow near a spring they frequented, “suffered us all to pass many times by him during the night, without injuring us in the least.” in another, bartram and his father “plead for [a snake’s] life, but our guide was inexorable, saying he never spared the life of a rattlesnake, and killed him.” bartram unceremoniously adds, “my father took his skin and fangs” (168–69). elsewhere in the manuscript draft of travels, bartram even describes intentionally agitating snakes in an attempt to confirm their innocence and unflappability (309). 29. hallock recognizes this fact, as well as the “absent or distorted perspective” we attain from bartram’s account, but he also attempts to fill in this perspective through references to later ethnographic accounts of creek spirituality. some of these ethnographies, like john swanton’s creek religion and medicine (1928), actually use bartram’s account as their primary source material, making reference to them somewhat redundant (490). thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 43 30. one practical application of this belief involved wearing a hog-tooth anklet as protection from rattlesnake bites, which, thompson admits, “so far as is known, no person thus fortified has ever been bitten by a snake” (525). anderson (25–26), braund (63), martin (78–79), and merchant (49) also discuss various forms of manitou-related ornamentation wherein the manitou or spirit was believed either to be contained within the object or able to harness its spiritual power symbolically. of course, focus on the material facts of indigenous hunting has been popular among ethnographers and historians, at the unfortunate cost of consistently drawing attention away from the actual processes involved in understanding animal behavior. 31. citing the micmac, martin suggests that many native americans saw europeans as having “recourse to a greater power (manitou) than the indian” (59). 32. for example, in his voyages and travels, john long confidently rejects indigenous “totemism” as superstition — namely, the ojibwe belief in spirit animals or animal coessences — but he admits that “[t]his idea of destiny ... however strange, is not confined to the savages,” but also affects “minds above the vulgar and unlearned.” he then describes the case of samuel bernard, a banker in the french court of louis xv, “who had a black hen to which he thought his destiny was attached” (110–12). 33. for a thorough discussion of bartram’s ideas on animal reason, intelligence, emotion, and culture, see his essay on “the dignity of animal nature.” 34. i have revised the passage quoted here — adding line breaks and making minor alterations to punctuation — to more clearly reflect the exchange between thompson and the cree speaker. 35. thompson’s tolerant dealings with manitou are reminiscent of n. scott momaday’s secular acceptance of native american spiritual beliefs as they pertain to matters of environmental ethics: very old in the native american world view is the conviction that the earth is vital, that there is a spiritual dimension to it, a dimension in which man rightly exists. it follows logically that there are ethical imperatives in this matter. i think: inasmuch as i am in the land, it is appropriate that i should affirm myself in the spirit of the land. i shall celebrate my life in the world and the world in my life. in the natural order man invests humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 44 himself in the landscape and at the same time incorporates the landscape into his own most fundamental experience. this trust is sacred. (579) 36. prior to his admission of the value of manitou in his narrative, thompson dealt slightly more playfully with the concept while still rhetorically conceding its existence. after successfully killing a polar bear, his companions began skinning the bear on their canoe when the tide forced them ashore: [t]hey left the skin to float ashore, and ... brought the head to land ... then made a speech to the manito of the bears, that he would be kind to them as they had performed all his orders, had brought the head of the bear ashore, and placed it with its nose to the sea, begging him to make the skin float ashore, which, at the factory would sell for three pints of brandy; the manito had no intention that they should get drunk, the skin did not float ashore and was lost (32–33). despite the humorous turn where the manitou appeared to reject their request — not because of some ceremonial error but because they intended to use the proceeds to purchase brandy — thompson seems to play along rhetorically with the existence of manitou in anticipation of his eventual earnest capitulation to the concept. 37. cultural practices surrounding the killing of bears often manifested themselves as attempts to completely erase the bear’s physical form. elsewhere in thompson, a grizzly bear who has killed two men is burned “until nothing but ashes remained” (341). henry also describes killing a bear with the chipewyan and then partaking in a ceremonial feast for the kichi manito where they ate the entire bear in one sitting, henry “obligede [sic] to receive ... a portion of not less than ten pounds weight, and each of [his] men ... twice this quantity” (192–94). works cited anderson, virginia dejohn. creatures of empire: how domestic animals transformed early america. oxford up, 2004. andrews, kristin. the animal mind: an introduction to the philosophy of animal cognition. routledge, 2015. bartram, william. “the dignity of animal nature.” 1737–1805, historical society of pennsylvania, philadelphia, bartram family papers (collection 36), box 1, pp. 81, 83. thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 45 _____. “great alachua-savana.” 1766, american philosophical society, philadelphia, violetta delafield-benjamin smith barton collection. online. _____. “mico-chlucco, king of the muscogulges or criks, call’d the long warrior.” 1786, american philosophical society, philadelphia, violetta delafield-benjamin smith barton collection. online. _____. travels, manuscript draft. 1773–1777, historical society of pennsylvania, philadelphia, bartram family papers (collection 36), vols. 2–4. _____. travels through north and south carolina, georgia, east and west florida, the cherokee country, the extensive territories of the muscogulges, or creek confederacy, and the country of the chactaws. philadelphia, 1791. edited by francis harper, u of georgia p, 1998. bauer, ralph. the cultural geography of colonial american literature: empire, travel, modernity. cambridge up, 2003. bekoff, marc. minding animals: awareness, emotions, and heart. oxford up, 2002. beverley, robert. the history and present state of virginia. 1705. edited by susan scott parrish, u or north carolina p, 2013. bishop, charles a. “northeastern concepts of conservation and the fur trade: a critique of calvin martin’s thesis.” indians, animals, and the fur trade: a critique of keepers of the game. shepard krech, ed. u of georgia p, 1981. 39–58. braund, kathryn e. holland. deerskins and duffels: the creek indian trade with angloamerica, 1685–1815. 1993. 2nd ed., u of nebraska p, 2008. bry, theodor de. america. pt. 2, francoforti ad moenum, 1591. burghardt, gordon. “cognitive ethology and critical anthropomorphism: a snake with two heads and hognose snakes that play dead.” cognitive ethology: the minds of other animals. carolyn a. ristau, ed. lawrence erlbaum associates, 1991. 53–90. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 46 byrd, william. the dividing line histories of william byrd ii of westover. 1841. kevin joel berland, ed. u of north carolina p, 2013. cañizares-esguerra, jorge. how to write the history of the new world: histories, epistemologies, and identities in the eighteenth-century atlantic world. stanford up, 2001. catesby, mark. natural history of carolina, florida, and the bahama islands. 1731. london, 1771. 2 vols. dooren, thom van. flight ways: life and loss at the dull edge of extinction. columbia up, 2014. doran, thomas. “beasts of burden and other beasts: william bartram’s traveling humane persona.” journal of florida studies 1.4 (2015). online. ethridge, robbie. creek country: the creek indians and their world. u of north carolina p, 2003. fradkin, arlene. cherokee folk zoology: the animal world of a native american people, 1700–1838. garland, 1990. goodall, jane. through a window: my thirty years with the chimpanzees of gombe. houghton mifflin, 1990. gruen, lori. entangled empathy: an alternative ethic for our relationships with animals. lantern books, 2014. hallock, thomas. from the fallen tree: frontier narratives, environmental politics, and the roots of a national pastoral, 1749-1836. u of north carolina p, 2003. harding, sandra. “other cultures’ sciences.” the postcolonial science and technology studies reader. sandra harding, ed. duke up, 2011, pp. 151–58. hearne, samuel. a journey from prince of wale’s fort in hudson’s bay to the northern ocean. 1795. richard glover, ed. macmillan, 1958. henry, alexander. travels and adventures in canada and the indian territories between the years 1760 and 1776. 1809. burt franklin, 1969. thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 47 hoffman, nancy. the construction of william bartram’s narrative natural history: a genetic text of the draft manuscript for travels through north and south carolina, georgia, east and west florida. 1996. university of pennsylvania, phd dissertation. _____. “william bartram’s draft manuscript for travels: private journal and public book.” william bartram: the search for nature’s design. thomas hallock and nancy hoffman, ed. u of georgia p, 2010. 282–94. irmscher, christoph. the poetics of natural history: from john bartram to william james. rutgers up, 1999. kalm, pehr. travels into north america; containing its natural history, and a circumstantial account of its plantations and agriculture in general. vol. 2. trans. john reinhold forster, london, 1771. kolodny, annette. “rethinking the ‘ecological indian’: a penobscot precursor.” interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment 14.1 (winter 2017): 1–23. krech, shepard. the ecological indian: myth and history. norton, 1999. lawson, john. a new voyage to carolina; containing the exact description and natural history of that country: together with the present state thereof. london, 1709. leroux, darryl. distorted descent: white claims to indigenous identity. u of manitoba p, 2019. lewis, andrew. a democracy of facts: natural history in the early republic. u of pennsylvania p, 2011. long, john. john long’s voyages and travels in the years 1768–1788. london, 1791. lakeside, 1922. martin, calvin. keepers of the game: indian-animal relationships and the fur trade. u of california p, 1978. merchant, carolyn. ecological revolutions: nature, gender, and science in new england. 1989. 2nd ed., u of north carolina p, 2010. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 48 momaday, n. scott. “a first american views his land.” 1976. american earth: environmental writing since thoreau. bill mckibben, ed. library of america, 2008. 570– 81. nagle, rebecca. “how ‘pretendians’ undermine the rights of indigenous people.” high country news, april 2019. online. parrish, susan scott. american curiosity: cultures of natural history in the colonial british atlantic world. u of north carolina p, 2006. _____. “introduction.” the history and present state of virginia. 1705. edited by susan scott parrish, u or north carolina p, 2013. rea, amadeo m. wings in the desert: a folk ornithology of the northern pimans. u of arizona p, 2007. regis, pamela. describing early america: bartram, jefferson, crèvecoeur, and the rhetoric of natural history. northern illinois up, 1992. richter, daniel k. facing east from indian country: a native history of early america. harvard up, 2001. sayre, gordon. les sauvages américains: representations of native americans in french and english colonial literature. u of north carolina p, 1997. shiva, vandana. biopiracy: the plunder of nature and knowledge. south end press, 1997. silver, timothy. a new face on the countryside: indians, colonists, and slaves in south atlantic forests, 1500–1800. cambridge up, 1990. slaughter, thomas. the natures of john and william bartram. knopf, 1996. smith, bruce d. "introduction: indigenous north american societies and the environment." subsistence economies of indigenous north american societies. bruce d. smith, ed. smithsonian institution scholarly press, 2011, pp. 1–10. thomas doran -native american ethology and animal protectionist rhetoric in the long enlightenment 49 snyder, noel f. r., and joel t. fry. “validity of bartram’s painted vulture (aves: cathartidae).” zootaxa 3613.1 (feb. 2013). 61–82. swanton, john r. creek religion and medicine. 1928. u of nebraska p, 2000. tallbear, kim. “why interspecies thinking needs indigenous standpoints.” fieldsights, 18 nov. 2011. online. thompson, david. david thompson’s narrative of his explorations in western america, 1784 to 1812. j.b. tyrrell, ed. the champlain society, 1916. todd, zoe. “refracting the state through human-fish relations: fishing, indigenous legal orders and colonialism in north/western canada.” decolonization: indigeneity, education & society 7.1 (2018): 60–75. tuck, eve and k. wayne yang. “decolonization is not a metaphor.” decolonization: indigeneity, education & society 1.1 (2012): 1–40. uexküll, jakob von. a stroll through the worlds of animals and men: a picture book of invisible worlds. 1934. trans. claire h. schiller. international universities press, 1957. waal, frans de. the ape and the sushi master: cultural reflections of a primatologist. basic, 2001. waselkov, gregory a. “the significance of william bartram’s writings on the southeastern indians.” william bartram on the southeastern indians. gregory a. waselkov and kathryn e. holland braund, eds. u of nebraska p, 1995. womack, craig. “there is no respectful way to kill an animal.” studies in american indian literatures 25.4 (winter 2013): 11–27. the wonders of nature and art; being an account of, whatever is most curious and remarkable throughout the world, vol. 6, london, 1768. nigel rothfels -zoo stories h u m a n i m a l i a 11:2 reviews nigel rothfels zoo stories john bierlein and the staff of historylink, woodland: the story of the animals and people of woodland park zoo. seattle: historylink, 2017. 200pp. $29.95 pb. andrew flack, the wild within: histories of a landmark british zoo. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2018. 272 pp. $39.50 hc; $39.50 e-book. a quick description of woodland: the story of the animals and people of the woodland park zoo might look something like: “a lavishly illustrated and richly detailed history of one of america’s most lauded zoos — an account that will be particularly enjoyed by the zoo’s patrons and enthusiasts who will undoubtedly find it prominently showcased in the ‘zoostores’ conveniently located at both major exits from the park.” the book is larger format (9”x10”) with two columns on a page and illustrations on every spread until the end, where one finds: a list of people “whose contributions made this book possible,” an appendix of awards the zoo has received from professional associations humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 220 since the 1970s, a three-page list of zoo board members and members of a zoo commission in the mid-1980s, a bibliography of about 40 titles, a list of photo credits, and a brief index. this is a book designed to be prominently displayed on a coffee table, and there is nothing wrong with that. but let me return to two words in that quick description: “lavishly illustrated.” they are lavish, but they are also entirely predictable. the cover of the book, for example, shows an up-close photograph in oranges and greens of a jaguar in the forest. the animal is walking toward the camera, but looking just off to the side as if something has caught his attention. but this isn’t the south american jungle. there is a little snow on the ground and those plants are a mix of synthetics and species more at home in temperate environments. this is a jaguar in the north — in captivity — but there are no bars, no mesh, no food bowl, no straight lines, no people. it is a classic shot of a popular modern genre of zoo photograph, of photographs visitors to zoos are always trying to take themselves. it looks like the “wild” but then clearly isn’t. it is the sort of photograph loved by zoo marketing departments and directors, the fans of zoos, and probably even the designers of the exhibit (in this case, the portico group in seattle). there are many photographs like this in the book — mostly full page. then there are the inevitable photographs of children looking with wonder, often through a barely-perceptible wall of glass, at “nature.” then there are the older, black-and-white photographs — often images from postcards — that are used in the beginning chapters to tell the story of the early years of the zoo. these images are more about whole exhibits with people in the foreground. they are about “visiting the zoo” but they are clearly from an earlier, somehow quaint era. finally, there are the images of people and animals who have proper names — the personalities, both human (especially former directors and longterm staff) and animal, who mark points in the long march of the zoo from a small amusement park to a what is now described as a leading world center of environmental education and conservation. the main author of woodland is john bierlein, who worked in education and interpretation at the zoo for over twenty years and appears to have taken over the book project from another employee, dana payne. somewhere along the line, “staff” at historylink, “a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit corporation established in 1997 to pioneer innovative approaches to historical research, education, and publishing” (https://www.historylink.org/file/20001), became involved. historylink holds the copyright for the book and the whole project would really be best understood as a work of public history. indeed, it is easy to imagine how the book might be translated into the sort of exhibits one increasingly finds in libraries and other civic locations. the book https://www.historylink.org/file/20001 nigel rothfels -zoo stories 221 tells a local story for a local audience very well. it is organized in a clear chronology and introduces readers to the main personalities that have shaped the institution since it was founded in 1899. we read about the directors and their efforts to advance the zoo in collaboration with or open opposition to city government. we are introduced to heroic visionary architects and thinkers (especially david hancocks and jon coe) who had the audacity to think about new futures for the zoo. and, of course, we read about the locally famous animals remembered for one reason or another. all of this is predictable, and it is all good reading, too. bierlein, historylink, and the woodland park zoo should be commended for producing a work that is informative, thoughtful, and the sort of record that would make any community proud of its zoo and its history. andrew flack’s the wild within: histories of a landmark british zoo is another kind of book entirely. recognizing, of course, that book titles are as much a marketing decision as anything else, one should pause for a moment on that subtitle. it is “histories” because flack is not interested in telling a single chronological account of how a small provincial zoo that opened 1836 managed to survive various heydays, economic catastrophes, world wars, and waves of criticism to become the fifth oldest zoo in the world. and it is “a landmark british zoo” because, in the end, although flack’s account is anchored in the animals and people of the bristol zoo, he wants to tell a more general story about exotic animals and spectacles in britain over the last two centuries. flack does interweave a chronology of the bristol zoo, divided into three fairly discrete periods. in the early years, the focus was to build an exhaustive and taxonomically organized collection of animals for the benefit of science and the edification of the public. then, in the latter part of the nineteenth century and through the post-wwii period, the zoo participated in a growing sentimentalization of zoo animals as, according to flack, the public became more comfortable with darwinian ideas of continuities between humans and animals. finally, beginning in the last decades of the twentieth century, the zoo began to tell larger stories of species in crisis by highlighting the lives of individual animals as ambassadors of the wild. rather than organize his book chronologically, though, flack tells his story by describing “layers” of relationships, representations, and interactions between people and animals at the zoo. these layers, flack argues, are always present at the zoo and in individual exhibits and are stressed to lesser or greater degrees depending on the time, circumstances, and even the individual animals on display. the layers, for flack, include: 1) animals as articles of value for commerce; 2) animals as characters in humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 222 performance and entertainment; 3) animals as repositories of knowledge; 4) animals as anthropomorphized “shape-shifters” that somehow seem both animal and human; and 5) animals as entities that challenge and resist the objectifying gaze of the audience and insist on their subjective agency in the world. each of these layers forms a chapter of the book and through them flack presents more than a history of the bristol zoo; he provides a theoretical structure for understanding how people in a wide variety of contexts build their understanding of the animals of the world. flack’s approach does tend to de-emphasize the distinctive and particular character of the bristol zoo. although, we meet many of the animal and human personalities of bristol, and learn, too, about particularly innovative exhibits (including the first nocturnal house in any zoo), i never really got a sense for the landscape and feel of the bristol zoo. in contrast, reading bierlein’s woodland leaves an impression of almost having visited the zoo repeatedly over the last 120 years. woodland is more about a very particular zoo; the wild within tells perhaps a more important story about zoos in general by focusing on a historically important zoo that has been largely neglected in scholarship. there are strengths to both approaches, but flack’s will, in the end, give one a deeper understanding of the jaguar cove exhibit at woodland park zoo than finding out that the resident jaguar had to be trained to swim in the exhibit so a good photograph could be included as part of an application for a prize from the association of zoos and aquariums. woodland, as betty white writes in her “foreword,” is “an animal lover’s delight,” a “time-traveler’s visit to the woodland park zoo.” the wild within, by contrast, is for a reader who appreciates the work of a historian who has spent years sifting through a deep and rich array of archival materials to tell a larger story of animals in modernity. i enjoyed both of these books and recommend them to anyone interested in thinking more about the peculiar cultural phenomena of zoos. microsoft word everett-rollin h u m a n i m a l i a 9:2 reviews jennifer everett a not so new basis for animal ethics bernie rollin, a new basis for animal ethics: telos and common sense. university of missouri press, 2016. 209 pp. $40.00. about ten years ago, i visited a pig farrowing facility near my rural indiana town, tagging along on a field trip arranged by a colleague. it was a modest-sized facility by current standards, clean and well-lit, housing a few hundred docile sows, about midway through their pregnancies. the farmer who hosted the group spoke, as expected, of the benefits of climate control, individualized feeding and veterinary care, and stalls that protect smaller and less aggressive pigs from the abuse of bigger bullies. i was not too surprised to hear him express some regret at the imperative to intensify and specialize in order to remain in the hog business. what surprised me was his reaction upon learning that i was a philosopher who teaches a course in animal ethics. “have you ever heard of bernie rollin?” he asked me. “well, i heard him speak once. he made humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 200 some good sense.” if memory serves, he said this was at an ag convention. wait; what? an academic philosopher? speaking at an ag convention? as a (then) early career philosopher working in a marginalized corner of the discipline, i felt a certain gratitude to bernard rollin for whatever he said to earn that farmer’s approving remark — as if it lent me a kind of vicarious legitimation. and i was astonished to hear he was being invited by organizations that represent factory farmers to speak with them directly. in a context where animal advocates are commonly called extremists if not terrorists, just how does any critic of factory farming get such an invitation — let alone an academic philosopher? who is this guy?, i wondered. what could he be saying? what’s his secret sauce? by all rights, bernie rollin has to be regarded as one of the most influential animal ethicists emerging from the analytic philosophical tradition. he is a prolific scholar, having published 18 books and hundreds of journal articles. he has delivered over a thousand lectures around the world to practitioners in various fields of animal use as well as to university audiences. in practical terms, he has helped to “eliminat[e] many of the atrocious exercises that were earlier seen as essential to becoming a veterinarian or a physician or a science professor,” to establish “control of pain in research as a major duty of the responsible researcher and … encode this duty in legislation,” and to “catalyze the elimination of one of the most egregiously inhumane housing systems regnant in confinement agriculture: sow stalls, or gestation crates” (ix). in 2016, he received a lifetime achievement award for excellence in research ethics from public responsibility in medicine & research, a leading professional association and policy advocacy organization for research ethicists in the biomedical sciences. it’s fair to say he has been a significant player in the evolution of what he calls the “social-consensus ethic” regarding animals — and thus in the rise of the field of human animal studies itself — over the past four decades. having recently worked through rollin’s latest book, a new basis for animal ethics: telos and common sense, i’ve found it pays to remind myself of these remarkable shifts and to wonder about the characters, including rollin, who brought them about. how has he managed to be so influential within fields of practice that he has at the same time confronted as morally indefensible? and how have his positions and tactics aligned and/or contrasted with those of other animal ethicists and advocates? i suspect that, had i approached the book with those questions in mind — questions more historical and biographical than philosophical — then i would have enjoyed it a great deal more. what we get from a new basis is rollin’s account of the processes, strategies, and jennifer everett – a not so new basis for animal ethics 201 arguments through which he has managed to reach across chasms of moral disagreement and contribute meaningfully to social and institutional change. it’s broad work ranging over a wide swath of philosophy, history, and professional practice, elaborated through anecdotes recalling philosophical arguments with students, colleagues and others. much of the material has been previously published in other forms and venues, but rollin clearly intends the book as a retrospective synopsis for a general audience rather than a new theoretical contribution for an audience of fellow scholars. more relaxed than academic, a new basis conveys the socratic brazenness for which rollin is widely known and frequently admired. if you want to get broad sense of rollin’s work and character — his secret sauce, so to speak — without reading his extensive body of research or his autobiography putting the horse before descartes, this would be an excellent go-to source, along with a few of the many youtube videos that provide a window into rollin’s career and personality. the book is divided into two parts. part one, “creating an animal ethic,” narrates rollin’s account of why a “new” commonsense animal ethic is needed (chapter 1), how it can be brought about (chapters 2 and 3), what “common sense” has to say about animal minds in contrast with what post-cartesian science has held (chapter 4), and how the common sense view accords with an aristotelian ethic centering on the concept of telos (chapter 5). part two, “ideology and common sense,” continues his critique of scientistic skepticism of animal minds (chapters 6 and 7), further develops the commonsense telos-based ethic (chapter 8), and applies this ethic to the cases of factory farming, animal research, genetic engineering, and (quite briefly) zoos (chapters 9-12). whatever the logic of this structure, i would organize the book’s content into three themes: ethics (introduction and chapters 1, 5, and 8-12), pragmatics (2 and 3), and science (chapters 4, 6, and 7). rollin’s core ethical claim is that our moral obligations to animals are rooted in what matters to them, which is a function of the kinds of animals they are and the needs that animals of those kinds evolved to have — in a word, their telos. as he puts it, animals … have basic needs and interests constitutive of their nature, or telos, which we as a society believe should not be overridden for human good. as aristotle pointed out, living beings have unique strategies for solving the problems inherent in living — sensing, moving, reproducing, nourishing themselves — the thwarting of which matters to them.... the aristotelian notion of telos thus becomes central to animal ethics. (55) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 202 in terms of the traditional divide in animal ethics between, on the one hand, welfarists (who argue for better treatment of animals in agriculture, research, zoos, etc.) and, on the other hand, rights theorists (who claim such practices violate animal rights regardless of how humane we make them), rollin is firmly in the welfarist camp. what distinguishes him within that camp is his emphasis on telos as providing a richer conception of animals’ interests, “beyond the narrow restrictions of pleasure and pain” (55). telos, he says, “provides an excellent shield against the sorts of rationalizations that confinement agriculturalists in particular have given in defense of keeping animals in highly restrictive and impoverished environments” (55). it is not sufficient to ensure they are housed, fed, watered, and spared gratuitous pain (as factory farmers claim) if at the same time they are prevented from expressing instincts for, e.g., foraging, rooting, hunting, nesting, nurturing, and socializing in ways characteristic of their species. rollin targets factory farming as especially egregious in this regard, but also applies the point to zoo enclosures, laboratory housing, and so on. rollin doesn’t think there’s anything wrong with the use of animals for food per se, maintaining that traditional livestock husbandry (now all but eclipsed by industrial agriculture) was “a fair contract between humans and animals, with both sides benefiting from the ancient contract represented by domestication” (86). nor does he oppose our altering a species’s telos through genetic engineering if doing so makes the resulting animals better off. what matters is not that we have altered a species’s telos, subordinating their nature to our own purposes, he argues, but whether such alterations result in diminished animal welfare. anyone looking for a radical critique of human domination of other species or calls for the abolition of systemic practices of animal use and oppression will thus have to look elsewhere. rollin is a proud incrementalist, advocating for the significant change that is already implicitly embedded in ordinary moral common sense, not for a fundamental rethinking of the categories of “human” or “animal.” he aligns in this respect with animal advocates like henry spira and temple grandin who are known for working directly with those they seek to change rather than primarily against them and for prioritizing concrete improvements in animal welfare over principled moral stances. he characterizes his pragmatic philosophy as “judo” by contrast with argumentative “sumo” (31-35) and likens it to plato’s view that moral education occurs by reminding people of what they already believe (and pointing out the logical implications of those beliefs) rather than teaching them what to believe. jennifer everett – a not so new basis for animal ethics 203 there’s much to be said for the incrementalist argument, as well as the point that common sense moral thought is more than sufficient to condemn practices like factory farming. but i was disappointed by rollin’s inclination to scoff at ethical views that are much more demanding or radical than the mainstream “social consensus.” he criticizes peter singer, for instance, on grounds that his positions fail to “resonate with people’s already held beliefs,” are therefore “impracticable” and thus “more silly than anything else” (12). he writes: singer himself has argued, for utilitarian reasons, that the only way to ameliorate the suffering of farm animals raised in industrial animal factories is to stop eating meat and adopt a vegetarian if not vegan diet. a moment’s reflection reveals the implausibility of that suggestion. people will not give up steaks, hot dogs, and hamburgers even when counseled to do so by their physicians to improve their own health or event to save their own lives, so the chances that they will do so in the face of a philosophical argument are vanishingly small. (12) never mind that singer no longer seems to hold, if he ever did, that adopting vegetarianism is “the only way to ameliorate the suffering of farm animals.” he endorses a much more flexible dietary ethic in the way we eat: why our food choices matter, co-authored with jim mason. and never mind that plenty of people regularly do decide to give up meat eating on the basis of moral arguments; singer’s writing is widely recognized as having persuaded millions of readers to do just that. far from “impracticable,” many would cite animal liberation as the book that has had the greatest worldly impact of any work by a living philosopher. more fundamentally, it’s far from obvious that palatability to popular common sense is the “strong constraint” on the philosophical plausibility of a new ethic (8) that rollin asserts it to be. indeed, there’s quite a rich philosophical literature on what’s called the question of morality’s demandingness — the extent to which a new ethic can call for dramatically different obligations than hitherto acknowledged by commonsense before giving up claims to plausibility —, a literature with profound significance for the climate crisis as well as animal ethics. but rollin doesn’t discuss the broader literature in contemporary ethical theory; in fact, he announces his lack of interest in ethical theory in the book’s introduction (1-3). nor does he contend with arguments opposing incrementalism that he would be sure to find in the practical ethics or wider human animal studies literature. eventually, it dawned on me that a new basis is simply not a project in that kind of academic engagement. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 204 the theory of social change that rollin proffers in chapters two and three presumably grew out of his experience employing the “judo” method, both in the classroom and in the public sphere, examples of which are provided throughout the text. he maintains (not quite persuasively), that this reminding vs. teaching distinction explains the successful strategy that martin luther king, jr. and lyndon johnson used in the civil rights era: [johnson] realized that the social zeitgeist had progressed to the point that most americans, even most southerners, accepted two fundamental premises, one ethical and one factual. the ethical assumption was that all humans should be treated equally in society, and the factual assumption was that blacks are humans. the problem was that many people had never bothered to put the two premises together and draw the inevitable conclusion, namely, that blacks should be treated equally. johnson believed that if this simple deduction were put into law at that particular time, most people would “remember” and be prepared to bow to the inevitable conclusion. (34) indeed, rollin attributes much of the social progress of the past 60 years to this sort of “platonic ethical recollection regarding the ignored consequences of our accepted social ethic” (34). i found myself wondering here what my colleagues in history and social science would have to say about such claims. indeed, i wondered why rollin would look for an explanation of 20th century social change in the work of plato rather than in the research of historians, sociologists, anthropologists, or political scientists. no doubt rollin has much lived experience of persuading audiences to their surprise that they already agree with him that their everyday practices are indefensible by their own lights — like a magician pulling a coin from behind their collective ears. but it doesn’t appear to occur to him that these experiences might have more to do with the way his charismatic swagger appeals to the colorado state university rodeo club (32-33) than it does with a theory of social change based on timely reminders regarding simple modus ponens arguments in ethics. or that his experiences in the teaching and practice of philosophy might not be a sufficient basis for a theory of social change. perhaps radical confrontations have had and will continue to have more to do with social progress than rollin quite realizes. jennifer everett – a not so new basis for animal ethics 205 rollin’s third theme is that the practice of science has been corrupted by an ideology that conflicts deeply with common sense about the reality of animal minds, about the place of values in scientific practice, and about the ethics of animal research. “it generally takes a phd, md, or dvm degree to evidence skepticism about animal mind” (41), as rollin drolly puts it. these are fairly well-rehearsed arguments and struck me as perhaps a bit dated. one of his arguments for the ethical illiteracy of scientists, for instance, begins as follows: “just how extraordinarily incapable scientists are of responding to rational ethical argument was driven home to me when i ran a long session on animal ethics and legislation at a 1982 national meeting of the american association for the advancement of laboratory animal science …” (emphasis added, 66-67). perhaps appearances are misleading to those of us who teach in small liberal arts colleges, but these feel like old battles, largely long since won. rollin, who has had a major hand in those victories, seems skeptical that the ideology of value-free science has been defeated or that more recent interest in ethics expressed by scientific bodies is genuine (75-76). regardless, we do still have to disabuse undergraduates of some naive positivistic assumptions about science, and except for a tendency to cast rather sweeping aspersions on the scientific community, rollin’s arguments are well framed for that purpose. i especially enjoyed chapter 7, “anecdote, anthropomorphism, and animal mind,” in which rollin recounts the process by which mainstream science came to reject any testimonial accounts of animal behavior that presupposed consciousness — such as those famously made by jane goodall — as illegitimate anthropomorphizing. what i was looking for substantively and didn’t find in a new basis for animal ethics is, well, a new basis for animal ethics — that is, new in relation to other work in the field that has been released in the past two decades or so. rollin positions his approach to animal ethics as “new” in relation to two “existing” approaches: first, an anti-cruelty ethic associated with st. thomas aquinas and immanuel kant, and second, the utilitarianism of jeremy bentham, john stuart mill, and peter singer (9-11). that certainly narrows the field of potential rivals, but at the cost of simply ignoring a huge and rich body of relevant scholarship. after the publication of animal liberation with its emphasis on animal welfare in 1975 and tom regan’s the case for animal rights in 1984, there was arguably a lull in foundational scholarship while the rights and welfare schools duked it out. when i picked up a new basis, i anticipated rollin joining the wave of more recent approaches that have attempted to reconcile, supercede, or otherwise carve out a space in relation to these two dominant approaches. the field of animal ethics is now occupied not only by the kantian rights tradition and the benthamic utilitarian tradition, but by well developed approaches based in the philosophies of contractarianism (rowlands), feminist care theory (donovan & adams), humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 206 pluralist principles (palmer), empathy (gruen), citizenship theory (donaldson & kymlicka 2011) and two approaches that seem quite congenial to rollin’s — pragmatism (mckenna and light) and the telos-like capabilities approach (nussbaum). and that’s just a small selection from the analytic side of the discipline. rollin’s a new basis is simply not aiming to place his ideas in conversation with work by other contemporary animal ethicists (or even, for that matter, with the prior generation of scholarship, as regan’s theory of animal rights goes entirely without mention). once again, it’s a book for a popular audience rather than fellow researchers, with greater emphasis on conversational anecdotes than argumentative rigor. since i came to the book looking for formal philosophical rigor — for rollin to engage with prominent objections that would emerge in the community of animal ethics scholars — i found his narrative asides distracting, at times even off-putting. he has a tendency to truck unhelpfully in ethnic and gender stereotypes — e.g., the asian sage (11-12), the ivy league native american (128), feminine vanity (92-93). he is prone to universalizing from his perspective, failing to recognize the specificity of his own experience, asserting, for example: “we are all brought up under the same laws and the same judeo-christian ethic; we watch the same movies and television programs, read the same newspapers and magazines, and share major portions of culture” (34-35). in the course of rightly critiquing moral relativism, he unnecessarily (even embarrassingly, in the hindsight of the trump era) endorses american exceptionalism: “in my view, the united states has developed the best mechanism in human history for maximizing both the interests of the social body and the interests of the individual” (25-26); suggests that we have achieved a state of rawlsian justice in which “one’s fate is mostly in one’s own hands rather than being determined by irrelevant features such as accidents of birth”; and concludes that “current democratic societies … seem to be continuing to evolve in the direction of greater fairness” (30). finally, a great many of his personal anecdotes — particularly those involving dialogue with students and opponents — come off as selfaggrandizing: e.g., “‘please don’t go,’ [the student] said. ‘we want to think this through. rodeo means a lot to us. will you help us think through how we can hold on to rodeo and yet not violate our ethic?’” [33]). i couldn’t help being disappointed by all this, because when rollin is writing about animals, about scientistic ideology, about the concept of telos and the core argument of the book, he can be clear, informative, engaging, and intellectually provocative in a good way. it’s not hard to see how rollin’s character and approach — somewhat brash, staunchly defending “common sense” rather than anything revolutionary, esoteric, or jennifer everett – a not so new basis for animal ethics 207 radical — would appeal to the thoughtful pig farmer mentioned in my introduction. for purposes of my animal ethics courses, though, i think i’ll stick with his journal articles. works cited donaldson, sue, and will kymlicka. zoopolis: a political theory of animal rights. oxford up, 2011. donovan, josephine, and carol j. adams. the feminist care tradition in animal ethics: a reader. columbia up, 2007. gruen, lori. entangled empathy: an alternative ethic for our relationships with animals. lantern books, 2014. mckenna, erin, and andrew light. animal pragmatism: rethinking human-nonhuman relationships. indiana up, 2004. nussbaum, martha. frontiers of justice: disability, nationality, species membership. harvard up, 2006. palmer, clare. animal ethics in context. columbia up, 2010. regan, tom. the case for animal rights. u california p, 2004. rollin, bernard. putting the horse before descartes: my life's work on behalf of animals. temple up, 2011. rowlands, mark. animal rights: a philosophical defense. palgrave macmillan, 2009. singer, peter. animal liberation. harper collins, 1975. singer, peter, and jim mason. the way we eat: why our food choices matter. (rodale, 2006. microsoft word vandermeer-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:2 elizabeth vander meer returning to wild? four lions’ journey from circus to “sanctuary” four lions — skinny, little, sid, and sammy — have been subjected to dramatic changes as a result of a shifting political landscape. each experienced a life of performance in a travelling french circus until authorities seized them in belgium after the country enacted a ban on use of wild animals in circuses in 2014. the lions then spent almost two years in temporary rescue in belgium awaiting transport to a permanent home at a uk zoo. these lions as individuals and their movement from circus to “sanctuary,” with a conception that they are being returned to a more “wild life,” are the subject of this multi-species, multi-sited ethnography. the temporary rescue context is considered in terms of animal viewing, lion-human interactions, and particular physical spaces of captivity, while findings in circus and zoo sites serve as comparison and contrast. introduction. the minister for animal welfare in belgium initiated a bill to end the use of wild animals in circus performances, which became law in 2014. while cirque exotique, a french travelling circus, performed in belgium that same year, police delivered a warning to the circus owner either to leave the country or relinquish their four lion (panthera leo) performers, skinny, little, sid, and sammy. a few months later police seized the circus-born lions and delivered them to the non-profit, belgian rescue. this was a temporary solution, as the rescue center searched for a permanent home for the four lions. after almost two years at belgian rescue, the lions were transferred to permanent captivity at a uk zoo that had been successful in rehabilitating other animals who had once been circus performers. skinny, little, sid, and sammy have moved biopolitically. activism and advocacy for “wild” circus animals resulted in their re-categorization, to save them from commodifying, objectifying circus life and to restore them to “wild life.” each place of captivity expresses its own collective biopolitics, and this paper begins to consider individual lion experiences within particular kinds of viewing or spectatorship and spaces provided for living. i focus on the lions’ immediate and temporary rescue in belgium, while also bringing to bear my research on circus and zoo sites for comparison and contrast. elizabeth vander meer -returning to wild? four lions’ journey from circus to “sanctuary” 181 i explore whether these circus-born lions, habituated to the confines and expectations of circus life, can return to the category of “wild” while they still live in captivity. existing bans on use of wild animals in circuses and bans enacted in the future will result in an increasing number of animals needing permanent homes in captivity; the four lions’ journey will highlight issues arising from their movement from circus to sanctuary that need to be considered at the governmental level at which bans are enforced. hribal notes an african proverb, “until the lion has his [or her] historian, the hunter will always be hero” (29), and so this research begins to tell the life stories of skinny, little, sid, and sammy, moving beyond cultural symbolism and lively commodity, thus “following the life” (marcus). the study provides advocacy through narrative, giving voice and presence to skinny, little, sid, and sammy, bearing witness to their lives to counter objectifying spectatorship that demands lively commodities. skinny appears to have experienced the most difficulty in his transitions from place to place; he exhibited weaker bonds with his three companions, initially in rescue being the last to eat and less integrated into the group. the name little belies little’s actual physique, as he has the largest girth of the lions and is most dominant, but still closely bonded with his companions. little appears to have been castrated later than skinny, sid, and sammy, seen in circus performance with a full mane. sid and sammy gained the name the twins in rescue because of difficulties telling them apart, due to similar physical appearances and their constant presence next to each other. research at the rescue, circus, and zoo sites of captivity have provided insights into the individual character of each lion as well as what they share due to shared bodily forms. skinny, little, sid and sammy in a typical lion pile in their final place of captivity. (photo by author.) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 182 methodology. drawing on methods in multi-sited, multispecies, and sensory ethnography (see hannerz; marcus; kirksey and helmreich; pink; campbell and lassiter; madden; and rock), this pilot study followed the lives of four rescued lions as cultural “things,” or lively commodities, but also “followed the life,” developing the four lions’ life histories. it is located in part within existing research that has focused on wild animal performers (bell; bouissac; nance; tait, “trained performances”; schwalm; cataldi; and carmeli). i focus on the lions’ repositioning from exotic circus performers to “wild” animals in temporary rescue center captivity, also drawing from my ethnographic research in the contexts of their captivity in a circus and final zoo home. i conducted semi-structured interviews with staff at the rescue center, who had cared for the lions during their temporary stay, and toured center facilities, seeing first-hand the environment within which the big cats found themselves upon initial rescue. i also gained an understanding of the rescue center ethos through interactions with staff. i began to get to know the lions as individuals through several months of close observations at the uk zoo that has become their permanent home. i became a spectator during observations by also attending a keeper talk on the rescued lions, and reviewing online posts about the lions’ rescue. the circus context for the four lions came to life through online video footage i discovered of their performances and display in the cirque exotique “zoo.” i also attended animal performances at french circuses, but was unable to locate cirque exotique. all places and persons, including the lions, have been given pseudonyms to protect their identities. i approach viewing and spectatorship, lion-human interactions, and captive environments through ideas in biopower and phenomenology. i consider how the lions as lively commodities are conceived in the discourse of their immediate rescue, as well as how any continued viewing may constrain or limit understandings of skinny, little, sid, and sammy as individuals who are meant to move from performing life, as working animals, to wild life. i look at the ways in which lions and humans come together at the rescue site and how relationships define individual animals, considering shapiro’s ontological vulnerability (shapiro, “the death”); shapiro traces the loss of the individual animal to the species concept and to a generic idea of “animal.” equally, i consider how enclosures are configured and how they restrict and enable movement. i employ research findings in circus and zoo contexts for comparison and contrast, and approach key points for exploration, keeping in mind collard’s understandings of lively commodities and thierman’s conception of care and harm in biopower. thierman argues for a view that hones in on “places where other animals come into contact with elizabeth vander meer -returning to wild? four lions’ journey from circus to “sanctuary” 183 human beings, so that we can see how power might be functioning in those concrete instances” (91). this view is enriched by a phenomenological approach. phenomenology in the tradition of merleau-ponty acknowledges that animate beings, or at least other animals, have a first-person perspective, based on particular sensory worlds (phenomenology; the visible). animals share intentionality, agency, and kinetic intelligence, or responsivity (see sheets-johnstone). for merleau-ponty, phenomenological enquiry is descriptive and returns us to a state of direct perception, returning us to “the things themselves” (phenomenology 8). westling describes how merleau-ponty conceives of relationships from this perspective: “between the human body and the world, ‘there is a relation that is one of embrace’ so that there is ‘not a frontier but a contact surface.’ we are both seeing and seen, touching and touched by the things and creatures about us” (43). this can be considered a non-anthropocentric positioning with potential to lead to attunement with other animals, and equally to their attunement with humans. phenomenological methods have been used to capture patient experiences and nurse-patient interactions in nursing (see thomas, for example), a care-giving field arguably with some parallels to animal rescue work. shapiro has developed a phenomenological method of attending to other animals that i follow in this study: revealing how other animals are socially/culturally constructed, considering the life histories of individual animals, and approaching other animals through embodied experience or kinaesthetic empathy (“the human science”). shapiro’s kinaesthetic empathy requires an intimate knowledge of individual animals, as well as species-specific behaviors. thus, in keeping with shapiro’s positioning, i approached the lions as individuals contained within human social contexts, with particular life histories, and with first-person perspectives that can be grasped, to some extent, through close observation and understandings of lion behavior. i gleaned the latter through familiarity with ethological research and through human informants who had close relationships with the lions. of course, my interpretations of lion behavior can be challenged. i acknowledge the dangers of anthropomorphism and employ a critical anthropomorphism (burghardt), or egomorphism, which attempts to lead to insights through personal embodied experience “achieved by perceiving characteristics in things rather than, as anthropomorphism implies, attributing characteristics to things” (milton 260). it is possible for other animals to show themselves to observers, and to consider this impossible due to our inevitable human positioning is in itself anthropomorphic and anthropocentric (see rivas and burghardt). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 184 temporary rescue: transience and care. in the early 2000s, belgian rescue began emergency rescue of exotic animals, seized from private owners or from zoos and circuses across europe. the staff have taken care of at least twelve lions over a sixteenyear period, including skinny, little, sid, and sammy. however, unlike the governmental support for circuses in france, center staff explained that in belgium such re-categorizations of animals were not accompanied by significant financial subsidies. marc, one of the keepers, explained, “the government will confiscate animals that are on a list of exotics that the public is not allowed to keep, and now wild animals from circuses in countries with bans, but they do not provide money to rescue organisations that take the animals.” skinny, little, sid, and sammy move to a new position of captivity within the rescue context. it appears that their value may shift from lively commodity to valued members of a wild species and singular individuals in need of rehabilitation. collard describes a “decommodification” that occurs with rehabilitation in rescue, although this process is not complete (161). the rescue center work involves some amount of commodification, but as collard argues, “there is a critical difference in the nature of commodification between being an exotic pet commodity and … a ‘wilderness’ commodity.” decommodification will be considered as well as reflections on care and harm within this rescue context in discussions of viewing or spectatorship, lion-human interactions, and physical spaces of captivity. animal viewing. belgian rescue facilities are located in the midst of wide tracts of forested land and fields. i met marc, one of two keepers who cared for skinny, little, sid, and sammy during their stay, and gained an understanding of the center ethos during the course of conversations with staff. rescued animals have been placed within the center in the hopes that care provided will move them towards better well-being and return them in some way to “wild life.” for native species this means rehabilitation and release, while for exotic species this means providing them with the space to exhibit species-specific behaviors and choice (a level of autonomy) without significant overt control by humans. the center has grown over the years to rescue all sorts of wildlife and to provide animals with the care required for recovery and reintroduction; an entire wing of their new hospital has been devoted to the rehabilitation of hedgehogs (eurinaceus europaeus). belgian rescue only allows public visits by appointment during the morning and afternoon, except on some public openings on weekends. during my visit, the center received one school group and a few individuals in the morning and afternoon. the elizabeth vander meer -returning to wild? four lions’ journey from circus to “sanctuary” 185 school group created a buzzing energy, as children exclaimed and giggled, engaging with their tour guide, and were excited by the animals, especially the birds of prey and the lions. the center at that time housed two rescued lions, aslan and big. when marc took me through the center, we first encountered the enclosure that housed a two-year old male lion, aslan, confiscated from a private owner. the owner had bought aslan as a cub from a circus, keeping him in a very small cage, with indoor and outdoor areas but little space for a growing lion. marc explained, “aslan will probably be rehomed in south africa. this is the center’s goal for most rescued lions.” center staff and ngos assisting with rehoming believe that these lions belong in africa, their natural “home.” each enclosure had signage introducing the animal living within it, explaining how they came to be at the center and the poor conditions they endured, or the injury they had sustained if they were indigenous animals, along with species-specific information. the names of the exotic animals appeared at the top of their signage. we entered another section of the center open to visitors and almost immediately came upon another lion, thirteen-year old big, who had crammed himself inside a large doghouse in his enclosure. he had been rescued from a croatian zoo that closed due to financial trouble. staff had hopes of rehoming big to south africa also. during my walk around the center to take photographs, i was heading back in the direction of aslan when i heard big’s penetrating roar. the guttural roaring took over the air and all other sounds at the center. aslan then began to roar at the other end of the center, just as loudly. this was part of the visitor experience on that day. belgian rescue remained relatively quiet, in contrast to circus spectatorship i had experienced. i could hear the chirping of birds, and the brisk breezes brought with them fresh smells of nearby woodland and fields. visitation here supports the running of the center, and visitors know that the aim is to release wild animals after rehabilitation, and to rehome exotic animals to sanctuaries or in some cases to zoos or wildlife parks. the animals are transients, although a handful do become permanent residents, and regular visitors may see different animals during each visit, depending upon the duration of the animals’ stays. visitors glimpse a moment in the animals’ lives during this transition period back to wild and permanent rescue. marc also described public participation in the center work: “members of the public often call about injured wildlife. people will also report exotics that should not be kept.” they reflect the care in biopower explained by thierman. at the same time, individuals may attempt to intervene and provide care that could be detrimental, as in the case of calls to the center regarding fledgling birds who are considered in need of help. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 186 animal viewing in this rescue context involves learning about individuals in brief, as well as placing these individuals within species categories and conservation. davis has explored spectatorship at seaworld and an associated environmental concern that may be felt by spectators; attendance at seaworld performances can reflect a consumption based on such concern (237). visitors to belgian rescue may experience satisfaction that their visits contribute to the conservation work undertaken there. signage provides individual profiles in the case of exotic animals, similar to animal sanctuary animalographies, but without any apparent gross anthropomorphism (see huff and haefner). center visitation can feel guilt-free, as it did for me, in contrast to the guilt of attending a circus show, where the focus remained on entertaining the audience through animal performance. here, animals still in a sense perform for a viewing audience wanting to see them going about their lives “naturally” in recovery; there is a thrill in seeing a kestrel only feet away as she recovers from a wing injury, or hearing a rescued lion roar. parreñas describes an intimacy experienced by staff and volunteers involved in wildlife rehabilitation, a copresence with individual animals (“the materiality”). intimacy may also be felt by visitors to the center, especially if they see, hear, and smell an animal that they had some role in rescuing. they may not touch the animal in rescue, as staff and volunteers might, but they have the opportunity for a close encounter involving other senses, and in which kinaesthetic empathy can develop. abrell describes an unease that sanctuary staff may feel in treating the animals under their care as lively commodities through display to gain income (323). however, at belgian rescue such encounter value could be seen as less problematic because animals, especially indigenous wildlife, experience visitors for only a short time; those animals who require privacy to recover remain out of the public eye. at the same time, following collard, exotic animals at the center are “neither fully commodities, nor wild beings” (159; see also jaclin), and they are not destined for reintroduction. visitors view wild animals with a captive history in the midst of wild born animals being rehabilitated for wild release; this location for viewing can absorb viewers in a context that covers over individual lion histories in the circus context, without understanding of the attachments and habituations that occurred within it. skinny, little, sid, and sammy may have been constrained by a rescue narrative that failed to fully reflect on their many years as circus performers and their hybridity of being neither completely wild, nor completely tame or domesticated. skinny, little, sid, and sammy exhibited behavior in their subsequent zoo captivity that showed such habituation, as well as possible stimulation felt in performing. on my last elizabeth vander meer -returning to wild? four lions’ journey from circus to “sanctuary” 187 visit to the zoo in winter, during the lions’ second year there, the holiday rides, lights, and music had been set up. as i walked to the lion enclosure, i could still hear 80s rock music and the mechanical sound of the small roller coaster ride. lights flickered through the trees. skinny, little, sid, and sammy all paced at the point in their enclosure closest to the noise, brightness, and movement; this was the first time i had witnessed such behavior. skinny sank to the ground, staying alert, as the others paced around him, later joined by sammy. i at first interpreted this movement as anxiety, born out of memories of circus life; these sounds and sights certainly brought the experience of attending the circus back to me. the four paid no attention to the group of spectators clustered in front of them, who expressed excitement at the lions’ closeness. skinny, little, sid, and sammy continued to stare beyond us, watching and sniffing the air. during another visit, a keeper described the behavior i had seen somewhat differently to my interpretation: “they love engine sounds and follow machines like diggers around that are moving outside their enclosure. the mechanical sounds from the fair they like, they’re interested in them.” the lions appeared to gravitate towards the familiar, and also to experience the anticipation they may have felt prior to performance, as they listened to machine sounds, music, and crowds nearby. in the same breath, focus on restoring some kind of wild life also allowed the lions freedom to engage (or not) with humans at a distance, to interact with each other, and to explore their surroundings without the rigid limitations and prescriptions of circus captivity, a becoming based more on their own choices, yet still within confinement. the constraints and stressors exacted from the lions in performances were revealed in footage of skinny, little, sid, and sammy performing in cirque exotique. the lion act took place in the midst of other traditional extreme circus acts. sammy entered the ring first, slinking low, ears back, and looking around furtively, as he gradually made his way to his pedestal, located on the edge of the ring. the pirates of the caribbean theme song blasted on speakers, as did the announcer’s voice. lions’ vision and hearing are acute, more so than a human’s, evolved for hunting (see haas et al), so we can wonder whether these sights and sounds would overwhelm their senses. sid entered next and found his place on a pedestal relatively quickly; he consistently moved with more speed and precision than his companions. skinny and little ran into the ring together and immediately head rubbed before taking places next to each other; head rubbing and licking in captive lion social groups have social bonding functions, also serving to reduce tensions (matoba et al). soon after they had taken their places, a spotlight on the ring illuminated all four of them. the lions yawned often during the act, which could be a sign of anticipation or stimulation (see baenninger). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 188 the first trick created a small lion pyramid, with little in the center and on the highest pedestal, flanked by sid and sammy. skinny stayed in his original place, but soon became the focal point for the trick that followed. the trainer directed him to a low platform in the center of the ring, prodding him with a metal bar and whip in the face, which prompted growling and swiping from skinny. skinny’s entire body seemed tensed, hunched as if in defensive mode even when the prodding had stopped. once skinny took his place, sammy, sid, and little began several rounds of jumping over him. the trainer almost continually provoked skinny during the 15-minute act, and at one point when he tapped skinny on the head with the metal bar, skinny flinched, growled, and lashed out with his paws, and would not move quickly to the next trick. the lions had all been declawed, to avoid injury to the trainer. the final part of the act involved the lions walking across a thin plank secured into two high pedestals. sammy was directed to lead and he stopped before he began to walk it, but he acquiesced after the trainer yelled loudly; sammy seemed relatively docile and imprecise with his jumps. little followed sammy, without protest. but when skinny approached, his body language still reflected absorption in defensiveness and fight, back hunched, head low, ears flush against his head, and eyes constantly on the trainer, as he growled and almost refused to submit to the trick. sid also showed some resistance, growling in the direction of the trainer, as all four lions lay along the plank, one after another. skinny began to bite little’s back vigorously as they lay there, and sid bit skinny’s, but the trainer stepped in with yells and whip movements to discourage them. sammy, little, skinny, and sid, in that order, returned to the ground and then raised themselves onto hind legs, gripping the plank with their front legs. they stood bipedal for several minutes as the crowd clapped and music swelled. here we glimpse the lions as working animals, their function specific, to entertain as at once anthropomorphized and thrilling exotic creatures, while in the rescue context they are asked to do what is considered natural for their species, other than being allowed to express predatory behavior through catching prey, and what they individually choose to do without such overt direction. lion-human interactions. marc launched into the following description of the differences between skinny, little, sid, and sammy when i asked him how well he knew the four lions, but he did not refer to them by name: it was difficult to tell two of the lions apart [sid and sammy], but two were easy, the dominant male [little] and the one outside of the three [skinny]. the biggest lion was the most dominant, but they all had larger elizabeth vander meer -returning to wild? four lions’ journey from circus to “sanctuary” 189 body size than other lions that had come through the centre before. we think this is because the lions were castrated and so they don’t have manes. marc explained that he and another keeper looked after the lions. jackson has highlighted lion behavior that may get in the way of knowing individuals in shorter spaces of time: lions spend 80 per cent of their time doing next to nothing. a lion is an overstuffed armchair, a stalled car, a rock. with his eyes half closed he stares into the distance, thinking lion thoughts, dreaming lion dreams. flies buzz. a single cloud shaped like a croissant drifts across the sky. there is not an awful lot for a researcher to report. (33) relationships among keepers, volunteers, and rescued animals are often short-term, as previously noted. recent migration studies have focused on transience and what this means for human migrant relationships with people and places (see gomes et al). transient migration is defined as “a specific migrant modality that is characterized by temporariness, transitoriness, impermanence, ephemerality, mutability and volatility” (yeoh 143), in which migrants must face “serious issues of poor or non-existent assimilation, marginalization and acculturation” (gomes et al 7). we can see some parallels when considering the lions’ position within the rescue center. the animals do become known as individuals to some degree, in order for staff to provide adequate care, while at the same time staff understand this as a moment of care, albeit a crucial moment; attachments and knowing are short-lived. success comes in releasing the indigenous animal, or “good” rehoming of the exotic animal, rather than holding onto relationships and maintaining them; in fact, this would be considered problematic in the context of this rescue center. marc began to discuss how the lions reacted to human presence in the rescue context, and what he knew about skinny, little, sid, and sammy in the circus context: the lions seemed relaxed in our presence, but whenever they saw something that resembled a stick, they became nervous; there is a video of [our] director raising a stick towards the lions. the stick also bangs against the side of the enclosure and the lions reacted with fear when before this they were perfectly relaxed. we don’t know much about their life in the circus but we know that they are afraid of the stick. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 190 marc then mentioned the circus owner referred to the lions as his children, and this was considered extreme and not a perspective to encourage, the reason that educational programs at the center discourage ownership of such exotic animals. skinny, little, sid, and sammy spent the first six years of their lives as performers. jaclin presents the idea of “beastness” to refer to animals as capital, with focus on “exotic” animals as pets (260). he explains that these pets’ hybrid nature is “not wild anymore, but neither quite domesticated” (257), and this is the position of skinny, little, sid, and sammy, born into circus life and raised by humans in this context. they must have performed hundreds of times, retaining memory of training for stages of the acts in order to perform them. skinny, who experienced the most provocation during the circus act as seen in video footage, would know what to expect from his trainer, that the provocation would end, as it did in every act. at the same time, he may have felt significant irritation and/or threat each time the whip came close to his face. little, sid, and sammy appeared somewhat detached from the act, going through the motions, but they had to remain alert and attuned to the trainer’s cues as they moved from one trick to another. cirque exotique training seemed outwardly to rely on negative reinforcement by whip and stick, with no meat rewards in sight. punishment may have also been used, if we return to marc’s comments about the lions’ apparent reaction of fear of brandished sticks. the declawing and castrating of the lions reflected the circus owners’ need to reshape lion bodies for performance, creating docile bodies. rescue center staff member ben recounted an interview with the owner of cirque exotique that had taken place after the lions’ seizure. the owner explained that his son, the trainer, had raised the lions, bottle-feeding them as cubs, and felt devastated. skinny, little, sid, and sammy were considered part of the circus family. during the interview, the circus owner explained that a lion will cost 3000 euros, and a trained tamed lion double that, so the circus would experience financial loss and also a drop in attendance. this problem, he had said, meant nothing in comparison to losing their children. this account is accurate, matching descriptions in news articles about the confiscation. the owner uses anthropomorphizing language and expresses a closeness to the lions that transforms them into beloved companions, in contrast to the narrative of conflict and dominion that was presented in circus spectacle. the lions, the owner, and his son must have experienced an intimate relationship based on physical closeness and observations, especially when the lions were cubs. elizabeth vander meer -returning to wild? four lions’ journey from circus to “sanctuary” 191 the moment we approached aslan’s enclosure, marc said his name and aslan began pawing at a large ball nearby, and then played with it vigorously, batting it about in front of us. marc pointed to a large beat-up tire lying on its side in one corner of the enclosure and explained, “aslan likes playing with that too, he tries rolling it but it’s really heavy so he doesn’t always manage it but he keeps trying.” aslan had a full golden mane and massive paws. he seemed indifferent to my presence then, but later, when i stopped at his enclosure on my own, aslan eyed me with great intensity and leapt in my direction. in response, my heart leapt as i thought of myself as prey. then he sank into the grass, totally relaxed, and as i spoke to him, his eyes would close and open slowly, in what appeared to be contentment (an expression i have seen on my domestic cat companions’ faces). marc had spoken to big as well, trying to convince him to extract himself as we stood in front of his dog house, but big merely opened and closed his eyes, remaining inside. a relationship based on kinaesthetic empathy appeared to exist between marc and aslan, as a young lion who clearly engaged with this keeper, responding to his voice and failing to exhibit the indifference lions have been said to express when habituated to humans (jackson 27). hosey and claxton consider that zoo captivity and keeper-other animal interactions can possibly be enriching, depending upon an individual animal’s life experiences and species-specific behaviors. keepers did need to observe and interact with the lions to gauge their health, and daily coerced them into a small cage with meat when they needed to clean the larger enclosure, for example. they required docile bodies at times to adhere to daily feeding and cleaning schedules. this is a more subtle lion-human interaction than what i witnessed in the circus, where direct contact between lion and trainer occurred, and trainers needed more precise control. direct contact does not occur in the rescue setting, as the lions move into the “wild” category and this wildness would only be endangered by and endangering with such interactions. even so, intimacy develops because rescue remains about saving specific individuals (see aitken). we can return to parreñas’s conception of copresence, which aligns to some degree with shapiro’s kinaesthetic empathy (“materiality”). volunteers i observed feeding young hedgehogs with syringes exhibited a tenderness, care for their wellbeing, kinaesthetic empathy developing through close observation, and actual physical closeness. they are invested in these little lives, and as parreñas explains, “copresence resulting from the act of individuals caring for individual animals produces forms of knowledge and feeling that are impossible to mediate through sight and sound alone” (99). thomas’s review of phenomenology in nursing notes the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 192 “dialogue” that can develop between nurse and patient, relevant here if we consider dialogue in the case of rescue staff and other animals as copresence, and she quotes merleau-ponty: “in the experience of dialogue, there is constituted between the other person and myself a common ground. my thought and his [sic] are interwoven into a single fabric … the other for me is no longer a mere bit of behaviour in my transcendental field, nor i in his [sic]; we are collaborators for each other in consummate reciprocity” (72). parreñas notes that “affect is produced between bodies” (“producing affect” 682), and closeness matters; we cannot deny that the circus family and lions may have also experienced copresence during bottle-feeding, for instance. at the same time, volunteer experiences with wildlife can become commodified or packaged, often brief encounters, so that animals still may retain lively commodity status, as collard has argued; the experience in some cases can be about the satisfaction and excitement volunteers feel when close to wild animals, but we can identify clear inter-species benefits occurring in the belgian rescue context with successful release. center staff recognized and aimed to preserve the closeness between skinny, little, sid, and sammy after their arrival. marc explained that, “we will normally rehome lions to south africa, but in this case it was impossible because there were four and we did not want to separate them.” marc continued to describe relationships: at first when the lions arrived, it was one separate and three together. three lions would eat and then the fourth would eat. the fourth lion was a problem to put away because he was not as bonded to the other three. meat would entice the fourth lion into the holding cage. but this began to change over 3-4 months after they had arrived at the centre and the lions seemed to be more comfortable together. free-roaming male lions will form strong and life-long male-male coalitions, often with brothers or cousins (jackson 39). in the circus context and in rescue, skinny, little, sid, and sammy, who came from two separate litters, were allowed to remain in a coalition group. at belgian rescue, the lions’ contact with each other increased, as beast wagon cages no longer separated them. this interaction continued in larger space in the zoo rescue context. i came to know the four lions in some small way after months of observations at the zoo and to recognize the physical differences between them. often when i visited, the boys were in one pile of lions in the middle of their enclosure, similar to jackson’s description (33). during a visit in autumn, i witnessed a sustained episode of play. it elizabeth vander meer -returning to wild? four lions’ journey from circus to “sanctuary” 193 was a crisp day moving into winter, with blue skies for miles and brilliant sunshine. skinny rose from his place on the rock formation to scuffle with one of the twins (due to the distance, i was unable to tell sid from sammy). skinny began to roar, a guttural crescendo that consistently enthralls me; roaring penetrates deeply, likened to a baby’s crying in its rough sound quality and ability to grab human attention (zielinski). as his roar began to diminish to low panting grunts, sid or sammy responded with a roar, and they replied to each other three times in succession. (while tait notes that in performance roaring can signify boredom [wild and dangerous 39], research has shown the importance of communal roaring in solidifying bonds between individuals, or to enhance an individual lion’s presence as dominant [schaller; stander and stander].) skinny then leapt onto the nearest tree trunk and hugged it between his front paws, sliding down and then running off in a rolling gallop. his companion stayed there to rough up the tree, but soon followed skinny. skinny had found a ball and lolled about on the grass trying to balance it on top of his paws, while sid or sammy joined him to stick big paws through a car tyre. the other twin ambled down from his platform perch to join his brother and skinny on the grass. little slept at the bottom of the rock outcrop. this play with skinny at the center of it reflected a freedom to make choices and a lack of any stereotypical behavior. physical spaces of captivity. belgian rescue enclosures were meant to suit particular animals, in terms of size and characteristics. paul, one of the keepers, explained the complications associated with rescuing a mix of native and non-native wild animals: new regulations have meant that exotic animals must be kept in quarantine for a period of time and then in certain parts of the centre, in certain enclosures, to stop possible spread of diseases. once through quarantine, exotics go to their designated enclosures, but if these enclosures are not filled with exotics, they remain empty, because we can’t put indigenous wildlife in there. marc took me to the enclosure that skinny, little, sid, and sammy had inhabited for almost a year and a half, while the uk zoo raised funds to build their permanent enclosure. it now held three snow leopards (panthera uncia), taken from a zoo in eastern europe that closed due to financial reasons. one female came up to us, as close as she could, and began to make chirping noises, to which marc and i both responded with verbal greetings. i looked around the main enclosure, measuring fourteen by twelve meters, and imagined the lions in it. it had a cave-like section at the back, under the platform. the enclosure was designed so that animals within it would have a place to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 194 retreat, away from close proximity to passing visitors. at the front to the left, i spotted another smaller enclosure attached to the larger one, where the lions would be herded during cleaning and feeding. a human-made pond featured in the center of the main enclosure. it seemed quite natural, in part because of the smells and sounds from wooded areas nearby. marc and paul described the lions living in cramped beast wagons and conditions where they performed at the end of a stick, so the situation here seemed an improvement in terms of the space the lions inhabited all day and the lack of stress from performing. online footage of cirque exotique filmed by a spectator reveals a glimpse of the caged circus “zoo” spaces, a circular enclosure or run in grass, eight to nine meters across, where the four lions interacted directly with each other. in the footage, the lions sleep beside each other, and only little gets to his feet to walk a short distance from the group to urinate. pan shots of the circus grounds also showed beast wagons and footage of skinny, little, sid, and sammy pacing in these small cages; rescue center staff acquired photographs of the lions in one of these trailers. this element of the circus complex acted upon the lions to reduce them to docile bodies (see foucault 172-173). thierman notes that: docility is inculcated and perpetuated by a variety of techniques, such as the distribution of individuals in space by enclosure, partitioning, and ranking (e.g. barracks, classrooms, etc), by the control of activity (e.g. with time-tables, training to perform particular gestures, etc) and through various forms of surveillance (e.g. panopticism). (96) the beast wagon cages appeared as a row of barracks, and animals were trained and prepared for performance pegged to a time-table. the lions had nowhere to retreat so as not to be seen, remaining ever visible to both passersby and circus staff, while part of circus zoo display. but one could say that the lions provided input into their captivity. they dictated the types of enclosures that could suitably hold them, in terms of materials used and structures created, the case at all three sites of captivity, and each lion reacted individually to systems of captivity. however, performance could be seen as having provided stimulation, perhaps in some ways mimicking stresses of wild life, if we accept bouissac’s reading of training, where the trainer takes advantage of, or taps into, natural behaviors (there are, of course, contrasting interpretations, for instance cataldi). the rescue center context, where the lions constantly inhabited the same, small space could provide minimal change and elizabeth vander meer -returning to wild? four lions’ journey from circus to “sanctuary” 195 stimulation, leading to monotony and perhaps boredom, resulting in its own kind of stress. however, skinny, little, sid, and sammy failed to express stereotypies while at the center, according to staff; skinny exhibited the most anxiety initially, but within months he had integrated with his companions. the understanding of temporary rescue had implications in terms of physical spaces provided for animals, and marc acknowledged that enclosures for the lions were too small for permanent living. he also explained that the center had plans to expand, in order to build larger facilities for predator species, despite their short sojourns. biosecurity also provided limitations, as exotic animals had to be segregated in certain cages, away from rehabilitating indigenous wildlife. the lions in zoo rescue inhabit a naturalized two-acre space surrounded by tall electrified fencing and consisting primarily of grassy land with a small section of woodland. the zoo constructed a concrete rocky hill with waterfall and pond, a large wooden platform lookout, and an indoor heated den lined with straw, into which keepers coerce skinny, little, sid, and sammy each night; the lions pace every morning in the den, awaiting release into the main, large enclosure. another fenced area within the main enclosure serves as a holding or transition cage from the den during cleaning. pacing behavior in this case indicates the lions’ desires to enter the large enclosure, and the difficulty keepers experience in “putting them away” at night indicates their desire to remain in a less confined space. we could say that skinny, little, sid, and sammy remember their confinement in small spaces in the circus and now reject it after experiences of a much greater expanse. braverman describes zoos as theme parks, catering to consumerism and thus ensuring that animals within them are lively commodities for spectatorship, rather than singular individuals, similar to their place in the circus narrative (242; see also malamud; jamieson). a critic posted on the zoo social media page to argue that the lions had traded one life as spectacle for an equally abhorrent life as spectacle in the zoo rescue context, after their brief and partial decommodification at the rescue center. zoo staff pushed back against this negative comment to ask where the lions would go, if not to the zoo, since they could not be released in africa. mason describes captivity as “a haven for some species but more prison-like for others” (713), and in this case a potential haven for particular individual lions, based on their past experiences of captivity. skinny, little, sid, and sammy, knowing limited spaces and highly controlled interactions with trainers in the circus context, have a different experience of rescue humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 196 center and zoo life than lions who were born into zoo captivity. skinny, for example, as the seemingly more reactive and provoked of the four lions in the circus, may continue to experience anxiety with change and even in different situations that arise and limitations day to day. personality research has moved into the foreground in zoo studies; it is now considered meaningful for the welfare of zoo animals (tetley and o’hara; watters and powell). recent studies of subjective well-being in lions (gartner et al; dunston et al), with trait-mapping over time and considerations of individual idiosyncrasy, may enrich our interpretations of lion experiences in permanent captive environments. conclusion. biopower, considering the lions as lively commodities, manifested uniquely in rescue center captivity. each captive context has shaped skinny, little, sid, and sammy, leading to different individual becomings, and equally each lion has shaped these contexts to some extent. viewing or spectatorship at each site imposed constraints on perceptions of the lions. the rescue center presented a narrative of wildness, or returning to the wild, that could cover over individual lion experience of the tame and taming circus life. at the same time, visitors had the opportunity to imagine or see the lions as individuals, so that viewing would not evoke the same reaction in everyone. skinny, little, sid, and sammy were there to be sensed, their firstperson perspectives there for interpretation, even in short spaces of time. lion-human interactions and relationships exhibited similar complexity. in the specific foregrounded rescue context explored, the species focus of conservation and the transitory nature of exotic animal emplacement could result in keepers failing to get to know individuals. however, marc most likely spoke softly to skinny, little, sid, and sammy, just as he spoke to aslan and big, creating intimacy as he related to them as individuals. individual animals also knew and responded to him. the rescue center provided a larger and more varied space than circus captivity, with enrichment, fewer regimented movements from one space to the next, and a lack of noisy circus performance spectatorship. yet, as temporary rescue, the still small enclosure size due to a transitory stay remained part of a transitional location that the lions began to settle into, but were then moved away from in rescue. the two-acre zoo enclosure affords each lion space to run, play, and choose different environments for activities. all four of the lions have exhibited a preference for spending their time in the large enclosure. their large enclosure, however, comes with the simplifications of naturalized zoo enclosures and potential stresses of zoo spectatorship and attractions, still far from the life of free-roaming lions in their indigenous contexts. it is still captivity, requiring human control over animal bodies, restricting movement to the two elizabeth vander meer -returning to wild? four lions’ journey from circus to “sanctuary” 197 acres within electrified fencing. even so, for skinny, little, sid, and sammy this positioning may provide for satisfying movement and choice after their experiences of circus captivity; we can consider a distinction described by fischer in relation to characters in a play who “are written by the playwright” and a person who “in contrast, writes herself into the drama of life” (62), where in zoo captivity the lions escape being “written” to the degree that they were in circus captivity. madden, mirroring shapiro, argues that, “it is in the interdisciplinary zone between ethnography, ethnology, philosophy, biology, psychology, zoology, and other allied approaches that we might find an appropriate script, an anthrozoography, that can create qualitatively rich and trustworthy accounts of naturecultures and the relations between humans and animals” (290). this project has been guided by understandings in biopower and phenomenology, which takes into account ethological research. the study focused on particular locations, following thierman, rather than on higher level biopolitics; exploration of legal and funding landscapes around rescued exotic animals is needed, for instance to address absence of governmental support for care of animals seized as a result of newly enforced bans on wild animals in circuses. continuing traditions of animal performance in circuses also warrant consideration to understand their persistence and the lived experiences of individual animals. skinny, little, sid, and sammy equally deserve further attention to bring their first-person perspectives to life in greater detail as they continue to inhabit permanent captivity. works cited abrell, elan. saving animals: everyday practices of care and rescue in the us animal sanctuary movement. cuny, 2016. aitken, gill. “conservation and individual worth.” environmental values 6.4 (1997): 439454. baenninger, ronald. “some comparative aspects of yawning in betta splendens, homo sapiens, panthera leo, and papio sphinx.” journal of comparative psychology 101.4 (1987): 349-354. bell, jessica. “there is no wild: conservation and circus discourse.” society & animals 23.5 (2015): 462-483. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 198 bouissac, p. circus as multimodal discourse: performance, meaning, and ritual. bloomsbury academic, 2014. braverman, irus. “zootopia: utopia and dystopia in the zoological garden.” earth perfect? nature, utopia, and the garden. a. glesecke and n. jacobs, eds. black dog publishing, 2012. burghardt, gordon. “critical anthropomorphism, uncritical anthropocentrism, and naïve nominalism.” comparative cognition and behavior reviews 2.1 (2007): 136-138. campbell, elizabeth, and luke eric lassiter. doing ethnography today. john wiley & sons ltd, 2015. carmeli, yoram. “cruelty to animals and nostalgic totality: performance of a travelling circus in britain.” international journal of sociology and social policy 22.11 (2002): 73-88. cataldi, susan. “animals and the concept of dignity: critical reflections on a circus performance.” ethics & the environment 7.2 (2002): 104-126. collard, rosemary-claire. “putting animals back together, taking commodities apart.” annals of the association of american geographers 104.1 (2014): 151-165. claxton, anna. “the potential of the human-animal relationship as an environmental enrichment for the welfare of zoo-housed animals.” applied animal behaviour science 133.1-2 (2011): 1-10. davis, susan. spectacular nature: corporate culture and the sea world experience. u california p, 1997. dunston, emma, jackie abell, rebecca e. doyle, megan evershed, and rafael freire. ‘exploring african lion (panthera leo) behavioural phenotypes: individual differences and correlations between sociality, boldness and behaviour.” journal of ethology 34.3 (2016): 277–290. fischer, luke. the poet as phenomenologist. bloomsbury, 2016. foucault, m. discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. penguin, 1977. elizabeth vander meer -returning to wild? four lions’ journey from circus to “sanctuary” 199 gartner, marieka, alexcander weiss, and david powell. “comparison of subjective well being and personality assessments in the clouded leopard (neofelis nebulosa), snow leopard (panthera uncia), and african lion (panthera leo).” journal of applied animal welfare science 19.3 (2016): 1-9. gomes, catherine et al. “themes and key questions.” transitions: journal of transient migration 1.1 (2017): 7-11. haas, sarah, virginia hayssen, and paul r. krausman. “mammalian species: panthera leo.” american society of mammologists 83.762 (2005): 1-11. hannerz, ulf. “being there ... and there ... and there! reflections on multi-site ethnography.” ethnography 4.2 (2003): 201-216. hosey, geoff. “hediger revisited: how do zoo animals see us?” journal of applied welfare science 16.4 (2013): 338–359. hribal, jeffrey. fear of the animal planet: the hidden history of animal resistance. ak press, 2010. huff, cynthia and joel haefner. “his master’s voice: animalographies, life writing and the posthuman.” biography 35.1 (2012): 153-169. jackson, deirdre. lion. reaktion books ltd, 2010. jaclin, david. “in the (bleary) eye of the tiger: an anthropological journey into jungle backyards.” social science information 52.2 (2016): 257-271. jamieson, dale. “against zoos.” the animal ethics reader. 2nd ed. s. j. armstrong and r. g. botzler, eds. routledge, 2008. kirksey, stefan, and eben helmreich. “the emergence of multispecies ethnography.” cultural anthropology 25.4 (2010): 545-576. madden, raymond. “animals and the limits of ethnography.” anthrozoos 27.2 (2014): 279-293. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 200 malamud, randy. “zoo spectatorship.” the animals reader. l. kalof and a. fitzgerald, eds. berg, 2007. marcus, george. “ethnography in/of the world system: the emergence of multi-sited ethnography.” annual review of anthropology 24 ( 1998): 95-117. mason, georgia. “species differences in responses to captivity: stress, welfare and the comparative method.” trends in ecology and evolution 25.12 (2010): 713-721. matoba, tomoyuki, nobuyuki kutsukake, and toshikazu hasegawa. “head rubbing and licking reinforce social bonds in a group of captive african lions, panthera leo.” plos one 8.9 (2013): 1-11. merleau-ponty, maurice. phenomenology of perception. routledge, 2012[1945]. _____. the visible and the invisible. northwestern up, 1968. milton, kay. “anthropomorphism or egomorphism? the perception of non-human persons by human ones.” animals in person: cultural perspectives on human-animal intimacies. j. knight, ed. berg, 2005. nance, susan. entertaining elephants: animal agency and the business of the american circus. johns hopkins up, 2013. parreñas, juno. “the materiality of intimacy in wildlife rehabilitation: rethinking ethical capitalism through embodied encounters with animals in southeast asia.” positions 24.1 (2016): 97-127. _____. “producing affect: transnational volunteerism in a malaysian orangutan rehabilitation center.” american ethnologist 39.4 (2012): 637-687. pink, sarah. doing sensory ethnography. 2nd ed. sage, 2015. rivas, jesus, and gordon burghardt. “crotalomorphism: a metaphor for understanding anthropomorphism by omission.” the cognitive animal: empirical and theoretical perspectives on animal cognition. marc bekoff, colin allen, and gordon burghardt, eds. mit press, 2002. elizabeth vander meer -returning to wild? four lions’ journey from circus to “sanctuary” 201 rock, paul. “symbolic interactionism and ethnography.” handbook of ethnography. paul atkinson, sarah delamont, amanda coffey, john lofland, and lyn lofland, eds. sage, 2007. schaller, george. the serengeti lion: a study of predator-prey relations. u chicago p, 1977. schwalm, tanya. “no circus without animals? animal acts and ideology in the virtual circus.” knowing animals. l. simmons and p. armstrong, eds. brill, 2007. shapiro, kenneth. “the human science study of nonhuman animals.” phenomenology and pedagogy 8 (1990): 27-42. _____. “the death of the animal: ontological vulnerability.” philosophy: between the species 5.4 (1989): 183-194. sheets-johnstone, maxine. the corporeal turn: an interdisciplinary reader. imprint academic, 2009. stander, p.e. and jean stander. “characteristics of lion roars in etosha national park.” madoqua 15.4 (1988): 315-318. tait, peta. “trained performances of love and cruelty between species.” performance research 14.2 (2009): 67-73. _____. wild and dangerous performances. palgrave macmillan, 2012. tetley, c., and sean o’hara. “ratings of animal personality as a tool for improving the breeding, management and welfare of zoo mammals.” animal welfare 21.4 (2012): 463476. thierman, stephen. “apparatuses of animality: foucault goes to a slaughterhouse.” foucault studies 9 (2010): 89-110. thomas, sandra. “through the lens of merleau-ponty: advancing the phenomenological approach to nursing research.” nursing philosophy 6.1 (2005): 63-76. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 202 watters, jason, and david powell. “measuring animal personality for use in population management in zoos: suggested methods and rationale.” zoo biology 31.1 (2012): 1-12. westling, louise. “heidegger, merleau-ponty and the question of biological continuity.” new formations 76 (2012): 38-52. yeoh, brenda. “transient migrations: intersectionalities, mobilities and temporalities.” transitions: journal of transient migration 1.1 (2017): 143-146. zielinski, sarah. “secrets of a lion’s roar.” smithsonian.com 3 nov 2011. online. accessed 7 jan. 2018. microsoft word kaarlenkaski-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 11:1 taija kaarlenkaski living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry introduction. the aim of this paper is to investigate the modernization of cattle-tending in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century finland from the viewpoints of materiality and embodiment. my primary questions are: how were bovine bodies, embodiment, and agency represented and conceptualized? what qualities did “good cows” have at the time? and what are the material implications of these conceptualizations for the bovine and human bodies on farms? although the modernization of dairy production has been explored from the point of view of animal studies in some inquiries (see, e.g., nimmo, milk, modernity and “bovine mobilities”; orland; gjerløff), the discourses and practices regarding the actual handling of the animals and conceptualizations about their embodiment and agency deserve more attention. as historian erica fudge has pointed out, it is difficult to piece together the lives of animals in the past, and usually one must employ many types of materials, even fragments and scraps (“farmyard choreographies” 162). in order to do this and to gain a multidimensional view of human-animal relationships, the materials studied in this paper represent different perspectives: views of cattle tenders will be explored through answers sent to an ethnographic questionnaire, and the perceptions of advisors in the field will be examined by looking at contemporary guidebooks on animal husbandry. the wider context of the study relates to the rationalization process of agriculture in europe which had begun during the early modern period, when livestock farming started to expand. the “agricultural revolution” in the eighteenth century made it possible to keep bigger herds of animals, and farm animals were increasingly seen as commodities. these changes were related to a new scientific worldview, which emphasized the division between human beings and non-human animals (raber, “from sheep” 78-85; ritvo 3). however, the modernization process was not straightforward and simultaneous in the whole of europe. as brantz has pointed out, during the nineteenth century, agriculture was in many areas still based on small-scale, self-sufficient family farms rather than mass production (82-83). although there are differences in the periodization of the modern era, it may be argued that around the mid-nineteenth century, the humanist discourse, dating back to antiquity, was restructured and realized in new ways materially, transforming different practices and taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 31 institutions as well as scientific and technological understandings. this meant that nature and animals were increasingly taken into possession by technology and industry (nimmo, milk, modernity 2-4; rundell 8-11). the present study focuses on finland, where the modernization of agriculture and livestock farming did not begin until the second half of the nineteenth century. as historians seppo simonen and viljo rasila have summarized, farming was modernized at the time by shifting production away from grain growing and towards milk production, since the former had become unprofitable due to foreign imports and years of crop failure throughout the 1860s. dairy production thus became an important source of income for finnish farmers, unlike earlier, when cattle had been kept primarily for producing manure for grain fields, and milk was produced mainly for household consumption. in addition, the state1 began to support animal husbandry by establishing advisor organizations to counsel farmers on producing butter and cheese, dairy and milkmaid sections were introduced in agricultural schools, and loans were granted to establish dairies. information on better farming methods was distributed by the press and new farming societies, and guidebooks were published (simonen 89-90; rasila 497-99). the shift in production methods was linked to wider societal and cultural changes: the second half of the nineteenth century was a period of modernization, industrialization, and national awakening in finland. the change from traditional self-sufficient farming towards commercial dairy production constitutes an interesting background for the study of human-cattle relationships. as similar transformations took place in many other european countries and north america at approximately the same time (see, e.g., israelsson 59-65; bourke; hansen; shortall; orland), the findings of the present study may also be considered interesting from an international perspective. as historian erica fudge has pointed out, agricultural history has usually tended to handle animals as part of farming practices or patterns of consumption. animals have often been discussed numerically, for example in terms of herd sizes, weights, and numbers slaughtered. what she suggests is “an animal history of agriculture,” which concentrates on the impact of the animals on the environments and cultures, as well as emotional and economical human-animal relationships. instead of providing a stagnant image based on statistics, fudge proposes focusing on the collaborative movements of humans and animals that are essentially formed in animal husbandry (“what was it like” 4; “farmyard choreographies” 147). following fudge’s ideas, this article aims to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 32 bring out and analyze descriptions of animal embodiment and material human-cattle relationships at the grassroots level of animal husbandry. this will be done by applying a theoretical framework combining new materialist thought and theories of animal agency, which will be elaborated upon in the next section. after setting the theoretical stage, research materials and methodological approaches will be presented in detail. the empirical analysis will begin by discussing the general attitudes towards modernization of animal husbandry presented in the materials. subsequently, three themes highlighting the embodied and material perceptions of cattle will be analyzed: education about animal anatomy, conceptions of mechanical and sentient features of cattle, and the characteristics of good milking cows. in the concluding section, the most significant theoretical and empirical findings of the study will be summarized. new materialism, animal bodies, and agency. the theoretical framework of the study is inspired by new materialist thought, which emphasizes that embodied humans are essentially part of the material world (coole and frost 8). i understand both human and non-human bodies as material-discursive phenomena constituted in the entanglement of material and cultural practices, which are inextricable (see grosz x-xi; eitler 265-68). according to manuela rossini (16), human and non-human bodies are in constant interaction with each other and their environment, and they construct each other through relationships and dynamic impacts. hence, cattle are seen in this study as companion species, following the concept formed by donna haraway (11-12, 15-16), because they have lived in interaction with humans for millennia and participated in constructing the mutual relationships of the two species. it has been necessary for humans and cattle to learn to operate in shared environments, and also to interpret each other’s communication (kaarlenkaski, “kertomuksia lehmästä” 237-41). as karen raber has pointed out, however, animal embodiment has not been extensively explored, especially not in historical accounts of human-animal relationships (animal bodies 12, 18). the ideas of pascal eitler provide interesting starting points for the study of animal embodiment. he has suggested “placing the body and its ongoing materialization” (273) at the center of animal history, and emphasized the social aspects of human-animal relations. following eitler, i will focus on the societal requirements that fall on different bodies in human-animal relationships (266). in the context of this paper, this means concentrating on the demands posited by the modernization and rationalization of animal husbandry. it is also important to note that when studying farm animals the animal bodies in question are both living bodies and dead bodies. cattle keepers work and interact with taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 33 living animals, but the work is governed by awareness of the fact that, in the end, the animal will be slaughtered and used for food. therefore, the idea of the dead body is often present in the practices with living bodies (see wilkie 147-56). relating to this, erica fudge has emphasized the inseparability of living animal and animal matter. she has developed a concept of “animal-made-object” which refers to two concurrent meanings: “(1) the animal-made object — the object constructed from an animal, and (2) the animal made-object — the objectified animal” (emphasis original). the concept highlights the position of animals as both agents and matter, as well as the contradictory nature of human-animal relationships. in addition, fudge has suggested that (dead) animal matter may also be seen as active (“renaissance” 42). thus, in this paper, agency, intentionality, and subjectivity are not seen as exclusively human qualities: agency is understood as relational and also includes non-human actors (coole and frost 8-10, 20-21). according to philosopher of science vinciane despret, agency is formed in relationships and it manifests itself in capabilities to incite and inspire other beings to act and be activated. she suggests that agency emerges in “a flow of forces” comprised of multidirectional relations of effects. this means that the parties are interlinked and they enable each other to become agents in their mutual relationships, interagencies (38-41, 44). furthermore, as chris pearson has pointed out, animal agency comes in many forms. depending on the animal species and living conditions, animals may affect their environment, for example, by allowing or restraining historical processes or by “acting with a degree of intentionality” (15). according to gary david shaw, agency may be seen as a continuum of actions, on which both human and non-human beings move (165). both despret and pearson have criticized the view, shared by some researchers (e.g., philo and wilbert; hribal), that animal agency becomes visible primarily when animals resist what humans want them to do or what is done to them. according to pearson, reducing animal agency to resistance creates unnecessary oppositions between humans and animals, and may dismiss situations in which animals maintain human pursuits (14). despret, on the other hand, has pointed out that the agency of animals often remains invisible in situations in which animals do what is expected of them. she suggests, however, that this also requires active investment and consent from the animals. in many cases, animals appear to be “secret agents,” whose actions and relational impacts need to be excavated from historical accounts (42-44; see also shaw humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 34 165). in this paper, this is done by reading published educational literature and archived manuscripts. reading the animal in old written materials. the materials for this study were produced between the 1860s and 1930s, a time frame that encompasses crucial changes in the modernization of animal husbandry in finland. one important channel of distributing information on new practices were cattle tending guidebooks.2 the research material includes ten books concentrating on cattle husbandry, published between 1865 and 1923. these were either textbooks for agricultural schools or books directed at small-scale farmers to improve their procedural practices in animal husbandry. the selected books concentrate on concrete and practical issues of cattle husbandry. four of the books in the selection were translations or adaptations from swedish or danish. according to toivio, denmark was regarded as a model for finnish agriculture at the time, and many central finnish farming developers studied there (108-09). the authors or translators of the guidebooks were agronomists and/or teachers of agricultural schools. thus, they were distinguished authorities of the field. the guidebooks implicate how “the folk” and animal husbandry were represented, and in which direction they were expected to change. in addition, views on cattle and humancattle relationships may also be read in the books. in addition to guidebooks, i will analyze ethnographic descriptions written in response to an ethnographic questionnaire, first published in 1893 and re-published in 1910 and 1930. as described by haltsonen, the questionnaire was compiled by a scholarly society called muurahaiset (ants), established by ethnologist theodor schvindt in 1886. one aim of the society was to collect material for an ethnographic dictionary, and to do that it published questionnaires on different areas of rural life and livelihood, including cattle tending. later, muurahaiset was organized as a branch of the finnish literature society, which was already at the time an established cultural organization and archive. however, the ethnographic dictionary was never published (haltsonen 232-38, 349). the purpose of the questionnaire is inevitably seen in the formulation of the questions. the list of questions about cattle tending takes up two pages in the booklet and includes questions such as “how were cattle named in different ages and different situations? […] what kind of food and drink was given to different types of cattle in different situations? [...] what names were given to cows and oxen?” (suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seuran 37-38). people who responded to the questionnaire were laypersons interested in collecting folklore and ethnographic information. most of them were rural officials, but there were taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 35 also some farm owners among them.3 the formulation of the questions had a clear effect on the descriptions, as it was usual during those times for the respondents to comply strictly with the questions of the questionnaire. as pia olsson has pointed out, informants were not expected to represent themselves, but instead a particular district and its culture, reporting what was common in their communities (40). thus, the responses describe cattle tending on a rather general level; personal opinions or experiences are almost absent in the texts. i have read altogether 68 ethnographic descriptions of cattle tending, written by 61 different respondents.4 more than half of the respondents were men (34) and 11 of them were women; 16 writers reported only the initial letters of their names, but these were probably also men. the descriptions were sent from different parts of finland, excluding lapland. nearly half of the descriptions were written in the 1890s or earlier. it is evident that the materials used were not originally produced to describe humancattle relationships or perceptions of bovine embodiment, which presents a methodological challenge for the study. therefore, the questions that i have posed concerning the ethnographic material, for example, differ significantly from the original queries of the questionnaire (see also olsson 12-13, 20). the first task was to actively “read the animal” in the materials, a method which may be paralleled with reading “against the grain.” lakomäki, latvala, and lauren have described reading against the grain as a critical investigation of texts, aiming to find and highlight meanings that are not in the forefront in the writings, meanings that the writers have possibly not even intended to include in them (12). applying this method, i attempted to find in both guidebooks and ethnographic materials descriptions of human-cattle relations and their material dimensions, and collected those sections of the texts. due to the nature of the materials, these issues were not usually in the foreground in the texts, and locating them required close reading.5 subsequently, i organized the sections thematically and focused especially on animal embodiment and agency, gathering and analyzing the most interesting formulations in relation to the questions of the present study. however, it is important to bear in mind what fudge has written about the dangers of anachronism in using theoretical concepts: “all models of animal agency must be understood as historically specific and contingent: we must keep the historical worldviews we encounter to the fore in our analyses” (“what was it like” 8). therefore, my findings are brought into their context by exploring contemporary ideas about animals and cattle tending. in addition, i will follow the methodological guidelines of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 36 new materialism and analyze discourses as intertwined with material practices, i.e., i will pay attention to the material effects of the discourses found in the texts (see eitler 267). towards commercial dairy farming: education, enthusiasm, and resistance. as mentioned above, in the nineteenth century animal husbandry was usually merely one sector in the small-scale, self-sufficient production of finnish farms. according to simonen, milk production of cows was very low due to poor feeding and harsh living conditions (9).6 moreover, as several researchers have argued, cattle tending was regarded as part of food management of the household carried out by women, not a separate field of work (e.g., siiskonen 94; simonton 122-23).7 in such a situation, it was understandable that the central aim of cattle tending guidebooks was to rationalize animal husbandry, and to replace traditional vernacular practices with more reasonable and profitable procedures. this attitude is seen especially in the oldest books in my sample, in which “the folk” are directly described as ignorant, backward, and lazy. in general, the guidebooks gave advice on the very basics: proper feeding and suitable conditions in the cowshed, as well as breeding and recognizing good milking cows. one aspect which was especially emphasized was orderliness: all work in the cowshed was supposed to be done regularly and systematically. in addition, special attention was paid to improving hygiene. as hustak has shown, during the modernization process of milk production, the sanitary reform concerned both bovine and human bodies, and the cleanliness of cows and their caretakers was seen as intertwined (200-09; see also block). many improvements suggested in the guidebooks included material aspects, such as changing the structure and furnishing of the cowshed, which transformed the environment of both cattle and their caretakers. at the same time, some enhancements may be seen as primarily cultural, as, for example, conceptions about good milking cows, and novel understandings of cleanliness. nevertheless, these were also strongly linked with and thereby affected material surroundings, and bovine as well as human bodies. according to heinonen, who has studied education on household management, similar themes were common in advisory publications in general at the time; they warned against laziness, uncleanliness, and wastefulness. integrity, patience, friendliness, diligence, and self-control were seen as ideal characteristics (137-47). thus, cattle tending guidebooks may be seen as an integral part of contemporary popular education (see also israelsson 74). an important material and technological precondition for the modernization and expansion of dairy farming was the invention of the separator in 1878.8 it enabled the taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 37 separation of cream from milk efficiently, and as early as the 1880s it was a common device in finnish dairies. in the 1890s, smaller home separators started to proliferate, improving the quality of home-made butter (peltonen, “uudet kaupallistumisen” 99106; see also hansen 233; bourke 160-61). as simonen has pointed out, the attitudes of the farmers towards the changing line of production varied. on the one hand, the introduction of the separator caused feverish enthusiasm in some, described colloquially as “milk fever” or “dairy daze,” but on the other hand, some farmers have been described as reluctant to give up the customary tradition of grain growing (104-05, 120-21). the suspicious attitudes towards commercial dairy production are also seen in the ethnographic descriptions, in which it is mentioned that skim milk produced in dairies was made fun of, and even “mock songs” about dairies were written. according to an informant, people feared that skim milk would be unhealthy, or at least it did not taste good and was not nutritious enough (sks kra. kallio, k.e. e 122. 1935. kokemäki, south-west finland;9 on similar apprehension in the usa, see smith-howard 75-77). in addition, one respondent wrote that because of the “dairy daze” people had started to regard cows as gods and the best feedstuff on the farms had to be given to them. this left horses almost without nutrition and care (sks kra. ruusunen, nikolaus e 48. 1904. several municipalities in southwest finland). this probably hyperbolic statement was related to the fact that traditionally horses were given the best fodder, because they were seen as being more valuable than cows. horses were also used for enriching one’s public appearance and marking social status, rather than merely for working. in addition, they belonged to the male public sphere, whereas cows were a part of women’s domestic world (frykman and löfgren 181-82). the rising status of cows could cause confusion among farmers. moreover, increasing field cultivation was necessary to produce sufficient amounts of high-quality hay for the cattle. earlier, the hay for winter feeding was gathered from meadows and marshes (simonen 89). in many cases, small-scale farmers regarded field cultivation of hay with suspicion (koivisto 10). thus, the production methods of cattle fodder were linked with profound cultural and practical changes in agriculture. as kokko has put it, traditional slash-burning, practiced especially in eastern finland, was based on oral tradition and practices delivered from one generation to the next, whereas field cultivation was linked to the spreading of literary knowledge (151). farmers were not used to acquiring information from books, but instead relied on the local knowledge humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 38 learned as part of the work (luukkanen 268). according to richie nimmo, who has studied the modernization of the british dairy industry, the discourse of modernization entailed tensions between the practical, traditional knowledge of the farmers and the rational scientific knowledge represented by the contributors to commercial dairy production. in many cases, farmers questioned the new methods and pieces of advice until they were proven to work in practice (milk, modernity 128, 133, 136). on the other hand, many respondents to the questionnaire were content with the improvements of animal husbandry and despised old customs and beliefs. according to mikkola, the modernization of farming was resisted by some and accepted enthusiastically by others, as was also the case with other new innovations (“odotettavissa uhkaava” 5; tulevaisuutta vastaan 149-53).10 as one respondent to the questionnaire stated, cattle tending was first improved on bigger and more developed farms. these were influenced by agricultural exhibitions, ambulatory milkmaids hired by the cattle breeding and control societies, as well as milkmaid education, and literature (sks kra ekman, e.a. [tunkelo]. e 45. 1894? längelmäki, pirkanmaa). from these progressive farms, the new information was also spread to their environment (mikkola, tulevaisuutta vastaan 148). familiarization with animal anatomy. the anatomy of the animals was one of the central themes of the guidebooks. for example, grotenfelt pointed out in his book, published in 1892, that it is absolutely necessary to know the different body parts and their functions in order to organize cattle tending and feeding properly (5). some guidebooks included basic information on bloodstream, breathing, and skin, but special attention was paid to the bovine digestive apparatus, probably because it differs significantly from the human one, and also from many other domesticated animals such as horses and swine. in addition to explaining the functioning of the digestive tract and rumination, the four-compartment stomach was demonstrated by a drawing in a few books. it may be argued that these pictures continue the tradition of medical compendiums featuring detailed images of animal anatomies, the earliest of which were published in the sixteenth century (see raber, animal bodies 46-47). as nimmo has pointed out, this interest in the “inside” of the animal body reflects the scientific approach to animals that started to prevail in the late nineteenth century. with the help of microscopes and other equipment, earlier invisible “truths” about the natural processes of animal bodies were revealed, and this required specialist knowledge (milk, modernity 87-88). developing results of biology and other life sciences are also visible in the guidebooks: in the latest book in my selection, published in 1923, taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 39 the composition of the animal body is explained on the level of chemical elements instead of organs. in addition, the functioning of cells and metabolism are explicated (nylander, cajander, and poijärvi 135-38). thus, the vernacular practical and “superficial” knowledge about animal bodies was supplemented and even replaced by more “deep” expert knowledge. figure 1. nylander, ohjeita karjataloudessa pienviljelijöille (okp) ii 5. ”stomachs of the cow opened.” contemporary anatomical facts were often used as grounds for the treatment of cattle in the guidebooks. for example, in a book dating back to 1865, it was recommended that cattle be given a sufficient amount of rough-grained feedstuff to keep them ruminating, as this is natural for them, and they should have enough resting time to ruminate properly (sakari sakarinpoika 14). those items of advice were necessary because according to the ethnographic descriptions it was common at the time to feed cattle in the winter with straw and mash that included, for example, vegetables, chopped hay, or straw, and some flour mixed with warm water. this kind of fodder does not need ruminating, and therefore sakari sakarinpoika advised giving mash only in small amounts at a time. furthermore, in some parts of finland, oxen were still used for working in the fields, and the author was concerned about their capability to rest and ruminate (ibid.). in later books, such as nylander’s manual published in 1907, it was humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 40 explained that bovine bodies need different nutrients: protein, fat, “sugar-like substances,” minerals, water, and a little salt. accordingly, the nutritional values of different feedstuffs were described, and instructions were given on the correct proportions of different fodder (okp ii 6-12; see also grotenfelt 11-13; hallenborg 1015). the purpose of detailed advice on feeding was, obviously, to increase production. the guidebooks reminded readers that the feedstuff given to an animal is used first for living, and secondly for production. for example, both grotenfelt (13) and lindqvist (13) brought up in their manuals that during scarce feeding the animal stays alive, but there is no surplus for production. the economic significance of milk was growing during the time frame investigated here, and it is presented as the most important product received from cattle in the guidebooks. probably for that reason the anatomy of the organs producing milk was also presented in detail in several guidebooks. the function of milk glands and their connection to bloodstream was explained. for example, grotenfelt stated in 1892 that “milk is formed from the carnation red blood that circulates in the arteries” (1).11 as nimmo has put it, milk “is an irreducibly vital substance, bound up inexorably with the bodily processes of a specific form of life, a living animal, and is emergent from complex interspecies relations” (“bovine mobilities” 57, emphasis original). to continue nimmo’s idea, milk could not be produced without the bodily investment of both cows and their caretakers and milkers. hand milking practiced at the time may be seen as interagency, which required mutual adjustment to each other’s movements and different body shapes (see also israelsson 142-44; kaarlenkaski, “kertomuksia lehmästä” 216-19; “of cows and women” 16). both milking and handling the milk were strenuous manual work, shaping the almost invariably female human bodies that conducted the work. to use erica fudge’s concepts, milk is an animal-made-object, in the meaning of “object constructed from an animal.” as both nimmo and fudge have suggested, animalmade-objects encompass the animal presence, often recalcitrant to objectification. this was especially the case with milk that is extremely perishable and a potential seedbed for bacteria (fudge, “renaissance” 49-50; nimmo, “bovine mobilities” 66-69). nevertheless, at the same time the dairy industry increasingly transformed cows into “objectified animals,” as their level of milk production was economically valued, and, consequently, their bodily functions were explored and controlled. in the discussion above, the bovine bodies concerned are living bodies with their active vital functions. however, dead bodies are also present in the guidebooks. according to taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 41 peltonen, milk was the leading article of finnish farms, but beef and veal were also sold as much as possible to earn cash income (“the iron cage” 238-39). this was also noticed in the guidebooks, and advice was given on how to effectively fatten up animals (e.g., lindqvist 75-79; hallenborg 40-42; cajander 52-53). in lindqvist’s book, published in 1886, the bovine anatomy was illustrated from the point of view of the value of the meat (80-81). the picture is an explicit example of an objectified animal: the bull is reduced to pieces of meat. however, the areas of different types of meat are drawn on an apparently live animal, not a carcass. regardless of the objectification, the animal maintains its potential for active agency (see also raber, animal bodies 50). an animate bull and a variety of beef are present in the illustration at the same time. the picture tangibly demonstrates fudge’s idea about the inseparability of a living animal and animal matter (“renaissance” 42). figure 2. lindqvist 81. “meat classification of the slaughter animals according to the requirements of the london market.” “living machines” treated with care and love. as the status of dairy farming was not yet established during the investigated time frame, many guidebooks set out to increase the appreciation of animal husbandry and emphasized its significance as a livelihood. at the same time, they described the position and function of cattle. for example, in 1877, oljelund formulated the importance of cattle husbandry as follows: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 42 the most profitable [livelihood] nowadays and in the future in our country will be transforming food substances quickly into milk. but this may happen only by keeping dairy cows. for even during years of crop failure, even a smallholder is able to buy the cattle feed he needs, because he has constant income from his cattle, and he may transform the fodder given to the cattle into milk. (21-22) although the excerpt highlights the significance of dairy cows, they are described as material resources that are able to transform fodder, unsuitable for human nutrition, into milk that could be sold (see also nimmo, milk, modernity 137). in lindqvist’s guidebook, this was seen as a natural function of cattle: “as bovine animals are also able to digest rough-grained foodstuff, they have been created to eat them and acquire benefit from them for human beings” (49). in addition, it was mentioned in some manuals that cattle compensate human beings for the care they provide them with their products (sunila 3; grotenfelt 14; for similar perceptions, see also fudge, “the animal face” 187). in some guidebooks cattle were referred to as machine-like, such as in the following description from hallenborg, published in 1904: the position of animal husbandry in farming is always understood in the right way when animals are seen as living machines belonging to farming, who utilize all the products that cannot be sold in their natural form. in that case, the cowshed is a factory, into which a farmer acquires those fodder substances that are the cheapest for producing meat, milk, etc. it has not been long since keeping dairy cows was commonly seen as “a necessary evil.” however, now the state of affairs is different. based on practice, it is known that milk production is the best source of income for a farmer. (10, emphasis original) similarly, in lindqvist’s manual body parts of the animals were called “machines of the body” (2). according to orland (169) and mcmurry (23), similar discourse was used in agricultural journals and manuals in central europe and the usa. understanding cattle as machine-like was part of the modernization process and progressiveness of the time. as heinonen has shown, similar machine analogies were used in different fields of educational literature (138). mechanistic ideas about non-human animals as well as humans originate from seventeenth-century cartesian philosophy. according to descartes, both humans and animals were automatic machines, but there was a profound difference: humans had minds and souls within the machines, whereas animals did not (see, e.g., fudge, “the animal face” 182; raber, “from sheep” 84-85). taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 43 according to mcshane and tarr, during the nineteenth-century industrial revolution it was common to view domesticated animals as machines whose performances were calculated and valued economically (2-7). as may be seen in the quotation from hallenborg’s guidebook above, the cowshed was transforming from a nest of “necessary evil” into a modern factory, in which “cheap fodder substances” were acquired in order to gain “the best source of income.” however, in this context machine and factory analogies should not necessarily be interpreted as negative. for example, the demands for cleaner and increasing milk production improved the hygiene and feeding of the cows (see israelsson 74-75). despite the fact that bovine bodies were described as machine-like, guidebooks invariably underlined good treatment of cattle. although cows were described as “mindless creatures” in the oldest book in my sample, dating from 1865, the author emphasized that cows are able to recognize their caring keeper and are tame and compliant with people that caress them (sakari sakarinpoika 24). in addition, oljelund recommended “gentle care” (22), and grotenfelt even suggested treatment “with love” (14) in their books. according to sunila, whose manual was published in 1898, a cow must be always, and especially while milking, be treated kindly and friendly, because otherwise it “holds back” its milk, gets restless and easily adopts the bad habit of kicking while being milked. (18) thus, kind treatment was used to prevent unwanted behavior. nylander saw this kind of handling of the animals as profitable for human beings in a more general sense: bad treatment of animals always expresses brutality and barbarism and bad relations between caretaker and animals. if the caretaker likes his/her animal and the animals like their caretaker, shouting, anger, kicking or hitting never come into question. without the right kind of good relationship with animals, we cannot expect good production from them. an animal treated badly gets timid or angry. timidity and anger generate dysfunction in the nervous system. bodily metabolism depends on the nervous system, that is, it also effects digestion of the fodder and milking. even mere humanity obliges us to treat animals well, but also our own benefit demands that. (okp ii 41) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 44 here, good treatment of animals is linked to the standard of civilization. as several researchers have shown, early animal protection movements also emphasized the connection between animal cruelty and impulsive and violent behavior between human beings. also in other parts of europe, advice on kind treatment of animals was especially directed to lower classes, who were seen as indifferent to the suffering of animals. instead, the ideology of the time represented the bourgeoisie as endorsing humane values (brantz 75; kete 1-4; see also kokko 143; nieminen 10). it may be argued, however, that kind treatment of animals was not unfamiliar to contemporary cattle tenders. in the ethnographic descriptions, it is mentioned that the cows were talked to and patted while milking, and some women even sang to the cows while they milked them. as one respondent stated regarding milking: “harshness did not help, but kindness did” (sks kra. eero väkiparta e 45. 1907. räisälä, karelian isthmus). nevertheless, it must be remembered that views of good care have changed over time, and nineteenth-century vernacular practices of slaughter, for example, were cruel from the present-day perspective (see nieminen 56-57; kaarlenkaski, “cattle tending”). to return to the quotation by nylander above, economic profit is also invoked in it, as the production of cruelly treated animals decreases. this argument may be linked to the idea of stewardship, which has been described as an essential ideology in farming. according to this philosophy, nature and animals are for human use, and a farmer’s task is to make them as productive as possible. for example, animals should be treated well, but not because they have intrinsic value, but because of human welfare and benefit (thompson 72-76, 86). these thoughts are compatible with the ideals of rationality and intensification, which are fundamental themes in the guidebooks. in addition, it is suggested in the ethnographic descriptions that economic factors urged the farmers to improve, for example, hygiene in milk production, as unclean milk was sent back to them from the dairies (sks kra. ruusunen, nikolaus e 48. 1903. several municipalities in southwestern finland). in the quote from nylander’s manual above, it is especially interesting that the emotional states of the animals are linked to the nervous system and, consequently, to the physiology of digestion and milk production. as block has shown, there was also similar discussion concerning the connection between a cow’s nervous system and milk secretion in the usa during the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century. it was believed that the treatment of cows, and also the characteristics of particular animals, affected milk quality significantly (118-19). in the same way, in finnish guidebooks, the “living machines” are described as sentient beings, whose mind and body work together inseparably. these “machines” do not work automatically, but they taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 45 need to be treated gently in order to collaborate with them successfully. although the profits of good treatment were known earlier, now they could be validated by scientific theories of physiology. it may be argued that the descriptions of proper treatment of cattle in order to keep them compliant expose the possible resistance of the animals. furthermore, in the ethnographic descriptions, it is mentioned that kicking while milking might be prevented not only by kind treatment, but by force: putting a fur coat on the cow’s head, binding its hind legs together or squeezing its nostrils. as the respondent reporting such actions stated: “there is nothing to tell about good and calm cows” (sks kra. laurila, lauri e 138. 1937. kannonkoski, central finland). this brings to mind despret’s idea about the invisibility of the desired behavior of animals: “when everything happens as it should, we don’t see the work” (42). and there is nothing to tell about it. the depictions of thwart or means for rejecting animal resistance direct attention to “negative” agency of the animals, but some clues referring to “positive” agency may also be found in the ethnographic descriptions. for example, in many cases the cows were expected to return independently from the forest pastures to get milked, because shepherds were not always used.12 reciprocally, in the evening, when cows came home from the forest, the farmwife went to meet them, and gave them a little food from her hand. thus, it was anticipated that cows would learn the practices of this particular human-animal relationship and act accordingly. these agencies formed in the multispecies relations were often coordinated by tacit knowledge that is rarely articulated and maybe even impossible to write down (see fudge, “farmyard choreographies” 156). this “secret agency,” the active consent of cattle to operate in collaboration with humans, is actually the prerequisite of animal husbandry. characteristics of a good cow. although new ideas and methods of cattle tending were distributed, traditional customs, beliefs, and magic rites still persisted in many areas of cattle tending at the turn of the twentieth century (kaarlenkaski, “cattle tending”). for example, in vernacular thought depicted in the ethnographic descriptions the conceptions of good milking cows were somewhat different from present-day ideas. abundant milk production was not the only desirable quality of the cow; equally important was that it did not eat too much, was easy to milk, and came home easily from the pastures in the forest. concerning the milk production, cows that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 46 “dried off” late or even continued to lactate until their next time giving birth were considered good. this conception was refuted in the cattle tending guidebooks, and it was emphasized that cows need time to rest from milking before their next lactation. hence, in vernacular thought, the ideal bovine body was tenacious and undemanding. at the time, most of the farms were very small and did not have resources to keep many animals. therefore, it was not possible to keep all the calves alive that were born. usually, the calves of good milking cows were chosen to be raised. interestingly, traditional beliefs also suggested that the appearance of the animal had to be taken into account (see also nimmo milk, modernity 141-42). for example, a big and strong-looking body, a long tail, big ears, small head, “beautiful eyes,” and the color of the muzzle were mentioned as signs that were believed to predict that the calf would be a good cow. different colors of the fur were favored on different farms. it was also a good sign if the calf seemed to be perky and lively and ate eagerly. these conceptions were based on traditional local knowledge and practical experience (see orland 178; nimmo, milk, modernity 141). due to geographical restrictions, it was usually not possible to choose between different bulls for breeding: usually the nearest available was used (see also nimmo, milk, modernity 142). in the guidebooks, on the other hand, it was frequently pointed out that because of harsh living conditions, the bodies of the finnish native cattle breeds were weak, their conformation irregular, and their milk production scarce. variance in the appearance of native cattle breeds resulted from occasional imports of foreign cattle during the preceding 300 years. native cattle was crossbred with different foreign breeds to enhance its quality, but significant results were not achieved. as the theory of pure breeding became familiar in finland in the 1ate nineteenth century, understanding of separate breeds started to prevail and more attention was paid to the uniform appearance of the animals. the eastern finncattle herd book was founded in 1898, followed by western finncattle and northern finncattle herd books in the first decade of twentieth century. during the same decade, ayrshire cattle herd book was also founded. ayrshire was imported systematically into finland from the mid-nineteenth century (myllylä 9-11, 14-20; lilja 56-59; toivio).13 nevertheless, the authors of guidebooks regarded the native cattle developable, and farmers were advised about how to recognize and breed better milking cows. interest in breeding domestic animals emerged in late eighteenth-century europe, aiming to enhance their physical as well as mental characteristics and capabilities (brantz 85). however, during the early stages, breeders had different objectives. while some taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 47 concentrated on improving the productivity of the animals, others emphasized their “fancy” appearance, that is, their size and muscularity (ritvo 45-81; walton). as holloway and morris (4) have put it, the relationship between beauty and function may be one of complementarity or tension. these aspects are also visible in the guidebooks. in the manuals, the qualities of a good cow usually included the abundant production of milk with high fat content. for example, according to nylander, bad characteristics — that should be resisted — are, e.g., lean milk, very weak structure, weak chest or hindquarters, etc; characteristics to be advanced are of course primarily generous milking, high fat content in milk, endurance, ability to transform fodder thoroughly into milk, strong body, good temperament, etc. (okp i 15) nylander emphasized both physical and mental features: in addition to durable and solid bodies, cows should have a suitable temperament. the guidebooks share a consensus that a good cow was even-tempered, calm, and not angry or timid. naturally, this kind of character made the handling of the animal easier. interestingly, nylander maintained that “the temperament manifests itself in the animal’s motion, gaze, and movement of the ears” (okp i 26). thus, he thought that the body and its agentive action revealed the character of the cow. nylander did not, however, elaborate on how the suitable movements and gaze could be recognized. possibly he thought that these signs would be clear to cattle tenders who have long relationships with cattle and experience with interpreting their actions. the manuals also emphasized invariably that the animals selected for breeding should be healthy. as early as in 1898, sunila (8) reminded readers that high milk production was not the only quality that should be taken into account, as there had already been endeavors to raise milk production by breeding in “unnatural ways.”14 this caused weakness and susceptibility to disease. as bert theunissen has shown, this issue was also discussed in the netherlands during the first half of the 20th century (667; see also gjerløff 28). thus, the bovine bodies were seen as recalcitrant to intensive transformations. in addition to the functional traits of the animals, many guidebooks described the appearance of a good milking cow in detail. for example, the size of the head, the shape humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 48 of the body and different members of the body should be considered (e.g., lindqvist 5357, 68; sunila 7-9; grotenfelt 23-24; oljelund 8; sakari sakarinpoika 7-8). detailed lists of recommended traits in the appearance of the animals were typical of the oldest guidebooks in my material. the lists of preferred features call to mind what historian anne katrine gjerløff has called “the milking signs” in her study on the appreciation of nineteenth-century danish dairy cows. according to her, the milking signs were a conglomerate of older, more or less pseudoscientific notions on how to valuate a cow just by looking at her. many of the milking signs were actually just a way of knowing whether the cow was in good health — as the soft skin and bright eyes — others were folklore or rooted in unproved scientific theories. (gjerløff 27) the best known theory of milking signs was that of françois guenon, who launched the conceptions of “milk mirror” and “escutcheon.” these referred to the pattern of hair growth around the cow’s udder and hindquarters, which he believed would indicate its milking capacity (see mcmurry 21-22; nimmo, milk, modernity 143). guenon’s idea of milk mirror was also presented in lindqvist’s guidebook (see figure 3). lindqvist suggested, however, that milk mirror should be observed along other characteristics, not as the only sign of a good milking cow (54-55). as nimmo has pointed out, before systematic milk yield recording, the practice of selective breeding was based on the understanding that a cow’s appearance could reveal its capacity for milk production. the farmer’s task was to know and recognize the various signs and select the right cows for breeding. these ideas were also adopted and promoted by the authorities of cattle husbandry (milk, modernity 143-44), including finnish guidebooks. according to orland, contemporary agricultural literature was often affected by vernacular thought and personal experiences (178).15 figure 3. lindqvist 54. “milk mirrors of different shape but almost the same acreage.” taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 49 gjerløff proposes that the milking signs were key factors in the assessment of the “beauty” of the cows. in addition, beauty and milk production were seen as intertwined: the cows that produced the most milk were considered the most beautiful, and the other way around, the cows that were visually most pleasing in relation to milking signs were estimated to be the best milking cows (27). similar notions were found among dutch breeders during the first half of the 20th century (theunissen 652). as gjerløff (28) and theunissen have shown, over the course of the twentieth century, milk production and fat content of the milk were highlighted in breeding. however, according to holloway and morris, the relationship between aesthetics and productivity is still discussed in breeding farm animals. as they have remarked, aesthetic judgements may heavily influence the decisions made about the life and death of animals (17-18). although the term “beauty” was not explicit in my material, the detailed descriptions of the appearance of the animals refer also to aesthetic evaluation. lindqvist even stated in his guidebook that the look of the cow should be “gentle and virginal” (53). in addition, he advised that a bull’s appearance should be “healthy, strong, and masculine” (ibid. 56). moreover, although kind treatment of cattle was emphasized in the guidebooks in general, nylander, cajander, and poijärvi pointed out in 1923 that a bull should not be coddled too much, in order to maintain a proper temperament (266). these kinds of remarks interestingly bring forward the gendered aspects in the understandings of the animals. this issue has also been discussed by mcmurry and bull. as mcmurry suggests, the ideal characteristics of milking cow, compliance and contentment, may be seen as reflections of a wider pattern of ideas about femininity at the time (22). to use jacob bull’s phrasing: “this is beyond cattle mirroring rural gender relations, but an inclusion of nonhuman bodies in the performance and definition of rural masculinities and femininities” (57). conceptualizations about feminine cows and masculine bulls also affected their treatment and, through breeding, the formation of their bodies (see also bull 59). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 50 figures 4 and 5. nylander, cajander, and poijärvi 84, 85. some guidebooks included photos or drawings of exemplary cows and bulls. in 1906, nylander remarked in his manual that “judgement based only on appearance is not completely valid” (okp i 24). although he admitted that some information about the health, developability, and structure could be gained solely by looking at the animal, the only reliable way to find out its milking ability was to measure its milk yield (24-28). even the oldest guidebook in my material, published in 1865, suggested regular test milking: measuring the milk yield of each cow in order to find out which cows are worth keeping (sakari sakarinpoika 32), and similar recommendations were found in several other manuals. at first, test milking was supposed to be done by the farmers themselves, but in 1898 the first milk recording association was established in finland, and in the beginning of the twentieth century, the number of associations grew steadily (koivisto 18-23). as orland has pointed out, milk recording did not only provide taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 51 accurate information on the milk yield of each cow and their hereditary potential, but it also made it possible to estimate the production costs (182). although milk recording did not solve the problem of inheritance at the time, as genes had not been identified yet, it made a new kind of knowledge possible about animals, as well as measuring and regulating their bodies in novel ways (nimmo, milk, modernity 151). in addition, according to orland, the definition of different breeds and establishing herd books influenced the conceptions of good cows (178). also in this instance, interest turned from the exterior of the bovine body to the interior. in the case of recognizing good milking cows and selecting cows and bulls for reproduction, the object that was aimed at was a calf that would be as profitable as possible. also in this case, the animal-made-object has two intertwined meanings. firstly, the calf as an object made by the cow and the bull, and secondly, the objectification of all of these animals and their characteristics. however, it was frequently recounted in the guidebooks that the results of breeding were not straightforward and foreseeable. in addition, it was pointed out that the treatment of the calf significantly affected its eventual quality as a milking cow. as sunila put it: “parents make the calf and rearing makes the cow” (7). this highlights the interagency of humans and non-humans and their cooperation in dairy farming. to use despret’s concepts, it may be argued that milking cows were formed in the “flow of forces” of both human and non-human agents, as well as the circumstances of their material environment. conclusion. at the turn of the twentieth century, modern and traditional practices met at finnish farms (see also peltonen, “the iron cage” 237, 246). the modernization process of agriculture was not linear and was met with resistance and suspicion by some and eager enthusiasm by others. in addition, discourses of traditional practices and modernizing agriculture were in many cases simultaneous (see also mcmurry 23). for example, cattle tending guidebooks discussed in this study included results of contemporary science as well as practical experiences and opinions of the authors. i have used finland as an example, but as similar changes in the significance of dairy farming happened at approximately the same time in other parts of europe and north america, it may be assumed that my findings are applicable in a wider context as well. the increased importance of cows was affected by technological development as well as changes in the discursive meanings of animal husbandry (see also nimmo, milk, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 52 modernity 70). new technology, such as separators and other machines that were used in the dairies, enabled effective usage of milk and higher income for the farmers. although the actual work of cattle husbandry was not yet mechanized at the time, except for home separators, scientific development influenced the practices of cattle tending, for example with its specific knowledge of animal anatomy, feeding, breeding, and measuring milk yields and fodder consumption. in many cases, new information based on science started to replace traditional local knowledge. however, i agree with orland (169) in her argument that progress in scientific research was not the only reason for improvements in cattle husbandry: changes in discursive meanings and forms of communication were also important. this was manifested in cattle tending guidebooks, which were a new method of spreading information. one of the focal messages of the manuals was emphasizing the economic significance of animal husbandry, a theme which was unfamiliar to many farmers at the time. along with the change in the production sector, cows turned into valuable animals, instead of being “a necessary evil.” it might be said that the earlier minimum requirement for cows was to stay alive — and even that was not self-evident in the frugal conditions. with the rise of dairy production, cows, and also their caretakers, turned into part of an industry (see hribal 105). as pascal eitler has pointed out, in the context of industrialization “many humans and certain animals have been subordinated to astonishingly similar societal demands” (272). for example, guidebooks instructed cattle tenders in orderliness and a methodical approach in their practices, which often meant learning new ways of using their bodies. moreover, commercial milk production influenced the material environments of both humans and animals, as more attention had to be paid to the size, lighting, and cleanliness of the cowsheds. at the same time, more interest and demands fell on bovine bodies, as more attention started to be paid to their productivity. by using erica fudge’s concept of animal-made-object, i have argued that the rising economic significance of the products produced by cattle influenced the increasing objectification of these animals. it may be maintained that bovine bodies were transformed from undemanding and enduring bodies depicted in ethnographic descriptions to demanding bodies, described in the cattle tending manuals, which needed constant attention and expert knowledge about their functions. in general, the interest turned increasingly to the insides of bodies instead of outsides that were the source of information about the animal earlier. it is important to notice, however, that the objectification did not yield only negative consequences for cattle: for example, better feeding, hygiene, and general living conditions improved their health and welfare. further, these improvements, along with taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 53 the investments for breeding, “influenced these animals’ mode of existence,” as eitler (267) has put it, as the sizes of the bodies started to grow.16 lately, contemporary animal production has been criticized for its reification of animals, and this is often seen as a rather recent phenomenon. as my discussion has shown, this objectification has long roots, dating back to the start of the modernization of agriculture, and even to earlier times. karen raber has claimed that the incipient scientific research and rationalization of animal bodies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries inflicted alienation and disaffection in human-animal relationships (“from sheep” 78-79). in a similar manner, richie nimmo has maintained that the modernization of dairy husbandry turned cows into “organic machines” that the farmers used, and that the role of the cows as coproducers of milk was dissipated (milk, modernity 131). the analysis of materials used in this study does not support such views. although cattle were described in the guidebooks on the one hand as “living machines,” on the other hand they were seen as sentient creatures with minds and emotions that work together with bodily processes. in the same way, a good milking cow was expected to have certain physical features as well as appropriate temperament. moreover, the attention paid to the beautiful eyes and gentle looks of the calves and cows implies that cattle did not only have bodies, they also had faces and subjectivity, at least to a certain extent (see fudge, “the animal face” 188). as fudge has pointed out, objectification is always complicated and multidimensional (“renaissance” 50). the products of cattle — milk, meat, and calves — may be seen as agents in themselves, whose features had to be taken into account when handling them. by using despret’s ideas of relational agency, i have been able to show that modernization of cattle husbandry was not a process that was controlled merely by humans, but that it was essentially influenced by non-human agents as well. for instance, the general material and economic circumstances of particular farms affected the possibilities to put new methods into operation. moreover, the agency of animals was multifaceted. although it was most self-evident in the descriptions of resistance, many instances in cattle tending in fact presumed collaboration and mutual tacit knowledge about the intentions of both humans and animals. these situations included, for example, milking and pasturing in the forests. this agential investment of cows was, and still is, a fundamental precondition of animal husbandry. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 54 acknowledgement. this study has been financed by the academy of finland (project number 296488) and the finnish cultural foundation. notes 1. in 1809, finland was ceded from sweden and became an autonomous grand duchy of russia. in 1917, finland declared independence. 2. according to anttila, the number of agricultural guidebooks published increased rapidly after the 1850s. this was also the case with books focusing on animal husbandry and the dairy economy (53). it must be remembered, however, that even during the second half of the nineteenth century only a small proportion of rural people were literate (luukkanen 83). 3. for more information on the backgrounds and motives of amateur folklore collectors and their relationship to the finnish literature society, see mikkola, “self-taught collectors.” 4. the original descriptions are stored in the folklore archives of the finnish literature society in helsinki. i have used the microfilm copies, which are stored in the joensuu folklore archives. 5. by “close reading” i mean reading the materials recurrently and being attentive to the details of the texts (see mikkola, “odotettavissa uhkaava” 8). 6. for the similar situation for example in sweden, see szabó 27, 37, 39; and canada, see hustak 197-99. 7. in finland and other nordic countries, the traditional division of labor persisted especially on small farms until the mid-20th century. this meant that men mostly performed tasks outside of the farm, such as working in the fields or in the forest, while women took care of the household and the cattle. milking cows was even considered to be shameful for men, and milk milked by a man could be regarded as unclean. thus, the relationship between men and cows was ruled by taboos (siiskonen 92; sommestad & mcmurry 151-52). 8. it must be remembered that at the same time agriculture in general in finland was mechanized. horse-drawn machines were increasingly put into operation in arable taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 55 farming and harvesting. however, the mechanization was not simultaneous throughout the whole country: southern and western finland were the most progressive areas. differences arose primarily from ecological conditions, which were favorable for arable farming in these parts of the country, and also supported the economic situation of the farms (anttila). 9. sks kra stands for the folklore archives of the finnish literature society. next, there is the name of the respondent, followed by the abbreviation e for ethnographical material and the number of the volume in question. to provide some contextual information, i report the year of submission of the text to the archive and the place where it was gathered. 10. by the early twentieth century, dairy farming was the main source of cash income on finnish farms, both independent and tenant farms. however, due to the small size of farms, long distances, and limited markets, the income level was fairly low. on independent farms, additional revenue was received by selling forest products. as this option was not available for tenant farmers, they often also worked outside their farms. furthermore, approximately half of the milk and milk products were still consumed on the farms (peltonen, “the iron cage” 236-46). 11. all quotes from the finnish research materials have been translated by the author. 12. it was customary at the time to pasture cows freely in the forests during summer, because there was a shortage of meadows, and they were used for gathering hay for winter. fields and meadows were rounded by fences to prevent cows from getting there (björn, “muuttuva maalaismaisema” 609-11). according to the ethnographic descriptions, if shepherds were used for keeping the herd together and driving away predators, they were usually children, youngsters, and elderly people. i have discussed the different aspects of forest pasturing more thoroughly elsewhere (kaarlenkaski, “lehmä luonnon”). according to björn, in some parts of finland, pasturing in the forests continued until the 1960s (kaikki irti 56-57). 13. however, the focus of this article is not on the development of cattle breeds in finland, but on animal embodiment in a more general sense. for more on the study of native cattle breeds, see, e.g., lilja; soini et al; ovaska and soini; toivio. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 56 14. an award-winning finncattle cow, presented in lindqvist’s guidebook (48), produced approximately 2,600 liters of milk per year in the late 1870s. by contrast, the average yearly milk yield of present-day finncattle cows is approximately 5,500 kilograms (“lypsykarjarodut ja lypsykarjanjalostus”). 15. this was also the case with finnish guidebooks. according to the prefaces, many books were based on foreign literature, as well as the practical experience of the author. 16. the award-winning cow in lindqvist’s manual (48), mentioned above in note 14, weighed 330 kilograms, whereas finncattle cows today weigh approximately 530 kilograms (“lypsykarjarodut ja lypsykarjanjalostus”). works cited anttila, veikko. talonpojasta tuottajaksi. suomen maatalouden uudenaikaistuminen 1800luvun lopulla ja 1900-luvun alkupuolella. kirjayhtymä, 1974. björn, ismo. kaikki irti metsästä. metsän käyttö ja muutos taigan reunalla itäisimmässä suomessa erätaloudesta vuoteen 2000. suomen historiallinen seura, 1999. _____.“muuttuva maalaismaisema.” suomen maatalouden historia i. perinteisen maatalouden aika. esihistoriasta 1870-luvulle. viljo rasila, eino jutikkala, and anneli mäkelä-alitalo, eds. finnish literature society, 2003. 598-619. block, daniel. “saving milk through masculinity: public health officers and pure milk, 1880-1930.” food & foodways 13 (2005): 115-134. bourke, joanna. “dairywomen and affectionate wives: women in the irish dairy industry, 1980-1914.” the agricultural history review 38.2 (1990): 149-64. brantz, dorothee. “the domestication of empire: human-animal relations at the intersection of civilization, evolution, and acclimatization in the nineteenth century.” a cultural history of animals in the age of empire. kathleen kete, ed. berg, 2007. 73-93. bull, jacob. “images of cows, stories of gender.” illdisciplined gender. engaging questions of nature/culture and transgressive encounters. jacob bull and margaretha fahlgren, eds. springer, 2016. 45-61. taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 57 cajander, e. karjatalouden järjestäminen ja johto. wsoy, 1918. coole, diana, and samantha frost. “introducing new materialisms.” introduction. new materialisms. ontology, agency, politics. coole and frost, eds. duke up, 2010. 1-43. despret, vinciane. “from secret agents to interagency.” history and theory 52 (2013): 29-44. eitler, pascal. “animal history as body history: four suggestions from a genealogical perspective.” body politics. zeitschrift für körpergeschichte 2.4 (2014): 259-74. frykman, jonas and orvar löfgren. culture builders: a historical anthropology of middleclass life. rutgers up, 1987. fudge, erica. “the animal face of early modern england.” theory, culture & society 30.7/8 (2013): 177-98. _____. “farmyard choreographies in early modern england.” renaissance posthumanism. joseph campana and scott maisano, eds. fordham up, 2016. 145-66. _____. “renaissance animal things.” gorgeous beasts. animal bodies in historical perspective. joan b. landes, paula young lee, and paul youngquist, eds. the pennsylvania state up, 2012. 41-56. _____. “what was it like to be a cow? history and animal studies.” the oxford handbook of animal studies. linda kalof, ed. oxford handbooks online, 2014. online. gjerløff, anne katrine. “fair and square. beauty vs. butter in the appreciation of the 19th century danish cows.” antennae 8.1 (2008): 26-30. grosz, elizabeth. volatile bodies. toward a corporeal feminism. indiana up, 1994. grotenfelt, nils. karjanhoidon ja maitotalouden oppikirja kiertäviä karjakkoja meijerikouluja, karjaja meijeri-taloja sekä alempia karjakkoja meijeri-oppilaitoksia varten. weilin + göös, 1892. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 58 hallenborg, j.f. lypsykarjan hoito. wsoy, 1904. haltsonen, sulo. theodor schvindt: kansatieteilijä ja kotiseuduntutkija. kirjapainoosakeyhtiö sana, 1947. hansen, bodil k. “rural women in late nineteenth-century denmark.” journal of peasant studies 9 (1982): 225-40. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto. dogs, people, and significant otherness. prickly paradigm press, 2003. heinonen, visa. talonpoikainen etiikka ja kulutuksen henki. kotitalousneuvonnasta kuluttajapolitiikkaan 1900-luvun suomessa. suomen historiallinen seura, 1998. holloway, lewis, and carol morris. “viewing animal bodies. truths, practical aesthetics and ethical considerability in uk livestock breeding.” social & cultural geography 15.1 (2014): 1-22. hribal, jason c. “animals, agency, and class: writing the history of animals from below.” human ecology forum 14.1. (2007): 101-12. hustak, carla. “got milk? dirty cows, unfit mothers, and infant mortality, 1880-1940.” animal metropolis: histories of human-animal relations in urban canada. joanna dean, darcy ingram, and christabelle sethna, eds. u of calgary p, 2017. 189-218. israelsson, carin. kor och människor: nötkreatursskötsel och besättningsstorlekar på torp och herrgårdar 1850-1914. gidlunds förlag, 2005. kaarlenkaski, taija. “cattle tending in the ‘good old times’: human-cow relationships in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century finland.” affect, space and animals. jopi nyman and nora schuurman, eds. routledge, 2016. 2339. _____. kertomuksia lehmästä. tutkimus ihmisen ja kotieläimen kulttuurisen suhteen rakentumisesta. suomen kansantietouden tutkijain seura, 2012. taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 59 _____. “lehmä luonnon ja kulttuurin rajalla. karjanhoidon eläinja ympäristösuhteet 1800-luvun lopun ja 1900-luvun alun suomessa.” ympäristömytologia. ulla piela and seppo knuuttila, eds. finnish literature society, 2014. 282-300. _____. “of cows and women: gendered human-animal relationships in finnish agriculture.” relations. beyond anthropocentrism 2.2. (2014): 9-26. 5 nov. 2018. online. kete, kathleen. “animals and human empire.” introduction. a cultural history of animals in the age of empire. kathleen kete, ed. berg, 2007. 1-24. koivisto, terhi. sata vuotta karjantarkkailua 1898–1998. maaseutukeskusten liitto, 1998. kokko, heikki. kuviteltu minuus. ihmiskäsityksen murros suomenkielisen kansanosan kulttuurissa 1800-luvun puolivälissä. tampere up, 2016. lakomäki, sami, pauliina latvala, and kirsi laurén. “menetelmien jäljillä.” introduction. tekstien rajoilla: monitieteisiä näkökulmia kirjoitettuihin aineistoihin. lakomäki, latvala, and laurén, eds. finnish literature society, 2011. 7-27. lilja, taina. “suomalaisten maatiaislehmien vaiheet omavaraisesta taloudesta 2000luvulle.” alkuperäisrotujen säilyttämisen taloudelliset, sosiaaliset ja kulttuuriset lähtökohdat. miia karja and taina lilja, eds. maaja elintarviketalouden tutkimuskeskus, 2007. 5167. lindqvist, carl adolf. karjanhoidon perusteet. g.w. edlund, 1886. luukkanen, tarja-liisa. mitä maalaiskansa luki? kirjasto, kirjat ja kirjoja lukeva yhteisö karstulassa 1861-1918. finnish literature society, 2016. “lypsykarjarodut ja lypsykarjanjalostus.” ruokatieto. accessed 1 aug. 2019. online. mcmurry, sally. transforming rural life. dairying families and agricultural change, 18201885. the johns hopkins up, 1995. mcshane, clay and joel a. tarr. the horse in the city. living machines in the nineteenth century. the johns hopkins up, 2007. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 60 mikkola, kati. “odotettavissa uhkaava tulevaisuus. konepelon taloudelliset, yhteiskunnalliset ja uskonnolliset ulottuvuudet.” tekniikan waiheita 28.4 (2010): 5-17. _____. “self-taught collectors of folklore and their challenge to archival authority.” white field, black seeds: nordic literary practices in the long nineteenth century. anna kuismin and m.j. driscoll, eds. finnish literature society, 2013. 146-57. _____. tulevaisuutta vastaan. uutuuksien vastustus, kansantiedon keruu ja kansakunnan rakentaminen. finnish literature society, 2009. myllylä, lauri. suomenkarja maan alkuperäinen karjarotu. suomenkarjan jalostussäätiö, 1991. nieminen, hannu. sata vuotta eläinten puolesta: kertomus suomen eläinsuojeluyhdistyksen toiminnasta 1901–2001. suomen eläinsuojeluyhdistys, 2001. nimmo, richie. “bovine mobilities and vital movements: flows of milk, mediation and animal agency.” animal movements — moving animals. essays on direction, velocity and agency in humanimal encounters. jacob bull, ed. uppsala university, 2011. 57-74. _____. milk, modernity and the making of the human. purifying the social. routledge, 2010. nylander, hannes. ohjeita karjataloudessa pienwiljelijöille i. karjanjalostus ja kaswatus (okp i). werner söderström osakeyhtiö, 1906. _____. ohjeita karjataloudessa pienwiljelijöille ii. lypsylehmien ruokinta ja hoito (okp ii). werner söderström osakeyhtiö, 1907. nylander, hannes, e. cajander, and ilmari poijärvi. lypsykarjan hoito. 4th ed. otava, 1923. oljelund, august. karjanhoito ja maitotalous suomen maatawiljelewälle kansalle. s. piipponen, 1877. olsson, pia. women in distress. self-understanding among 20th-century finnish rural women. lit verlag, 2011. taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 61 orland, barbara. “turbo-cows: producing a competitive animal in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” industrializing organisms: introducing evolutionary history. susan r. schrepfer and philip scranton, eds. routledge, 2004. 167-90. ovaska, ulla and soini, katriina. “native breeds as providers of ecosystem services: the stakeholders’ perspective.” trace: finnish journal for human-animal studies 2 (2016): 28-51. pearson, chris. “history and animal agencies.” the oxford handbook of animal studies. linda kalof, ed. oxford handbooks online, 2016. online. peltonen, matti. “the iron cage of dairy farming. self-sufficiency and specialisation in finnish peasant farming at the beginning of the twentieth century.” agricultural specialication and rural patterns of development. annie antoine, ed. brepols, 2016. 233247. _____. “uudet kaupallistumisen muodot.” suomen maatalouden historia ii. kasvun ja kriisien aika 1870-luvulta 1950-luvulle. matti peltonen, ed. finnish literature society, 2004. 77-134. philo, chris and wilbert, chris. “animal spaces, beastly places.” introduction. animal spaces, beastly places. new geographies of human–animal relations. philo and wilbert, eds. routledge, 2000. 1-35. raber, karen. animal bodies, renaissance culture. u of pennsylvania p, 2013. _____. “from sheep to meat, from pets to people: animal domestication 1600-1800.” cultural history of animals in the age of enlightenment. matthew senior, ed. berg, 2007. 73-99. rasila, viljo. “overview of the history of finnish agriculture – from prehistory to the 21st century.” suomen maatalouden historia iii. suurten muutosten aika. jälleenrakennuskaudesta eu-suomeen. pirjo markkola, ed. finnish literature society, 2004. 490-507. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 1 (fall 2019) 62 ritvo, harriet. the animal estate. the english and other creatures in the victorian age. harvard up, 1987. rossini, manuela. “to the dogs: companion speciesism and the new feminist materialism.” kritikos 3 (2006): 1-25. rundell, john. “modernity, humans and animals — tensions in the field of technicalindustrial imaginary.” new formations 76 (2012): 8-20. sakari sakarinpoika (zacharias cajander). lyhykäisiä osoituksia suomen emännille lehmäkarjansekä maidon-hoidossa ja juuston teossa. a. mannisen ja fr. ahlqvistin kirjapaino, 1865. shaw, gary david. “the torturer’s horse: agency and animals in history.” history and theory 52 (2013): 146-67. shortall, sally. “in and out of the milking parlour: a cross-national comparison of gender, the dairy industry and the state.” women’s studies international forum 23.2 (2000): 247-57. siiskonen, pirjo. “the role of farmers and farmwives in agrarian change.” the social implications of agrarian change in northern and eastern finland. tim ingold, ed. the finnish anthropological society, 1988. 76-90. simonen, seppo. lypsykarjatalousvaltainen tuotantojärjestelmä suomessa. maataloutta ja maatalouspolitiikkaa vuosisadan vaihteen molemmin puolin. wsoy, 1949. simonton, deborah. a history of european women’s work 1700 to the present. routledge, 1998. sks kra (folklore archives of the finnish literature society). ethnographical material, volumes e 1, e 42-48, e 51, e 58, e 61, e 64, e 67, e 101, e 103, e 122, e 126-127, e 132133, e 135, e 137-39, e 144, krk 221, kt 33. smith-howard, kendra. pure and modern milk. an environmental history since 1900. oxford up, 2014. taija kaarlenkaski -living machines with gentle looks: materiality and animal body in modernizing finnish animal husbandry 63 soini, katriina, c. diaz, g. gandini, y. de haas, t. lilja, d. martin-collado, f. pizzi and s. j. hiemstra. “developing a typology for local cattle breed farmers in europe.” journal of animal breeding and genetics 129.6 (2012): 436-47. sommestad, lena, and sally mcmurry. “farm daughters and industrialization: a comparative analysis of dairying in new york and sweden, 1860-1920.” journal of women’s history 10.2 (1998): 137-64. sunila, j.e. (transl.) neuvoja ja ohjeita karjanhoidossa. otava, 1898. suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seuran kysymyssarja kansatieteellisiä kertomuksia varten. kirjapaino osakeyhtiö alfa, 1930. szabó, mátyás. “hade djuren det bättre förr?” husdjuren och vi. arne biörnstad, ed. nordiska museet, 1986. 27-50. theunissen, bert. “breeding without mendelism: theory and practice of dairy cattle breeding in the netherlands 1900-1950.” journal of the history of biology 41 (2008): 637-76. thompson, paul b. the spirit of the soil. agriculture and environmental ethics. routledge, 1995. toivio, hilja. “risteytyksistä maatiaisrotuihin. professori victor prosch ja kotieläinjalostuksen murros 1800-luvun jälkipuolella.” lähde. historiatieteellinen aikakauskirja 10 (2014): 96-122. walton, john r. “pedigree and productivity in the british and north american cattle kingdoms before 1930.” journal of historical geography 25.4 (1999): 441-62. wilkie, rhoda. livestock/deadstock. working with farm animals from birth to slaughter. temple up, 2010. teya brooks pribac -place attachment and the roots of spiritual relating in animals h u m a n i m a l i a 11:2 teya brooks pribac place attachment and the roots of spiritual relating in animals before the gods existed, the woods were sacred, and the gods came to dwell in these sacred woods. all they did was to add human, all too human, characteristics to the great law of forest revery. -gaston bachelard, the poetics of space (186) introduction. in 2013, i had just completed a draft chapter on intersubjective attachment theory (bowlby, attachment and loss: volume 1; volume 2; volume 3) for my research in animal grief (brooks pribac, animal grief and spirituality) when i was asked if i could take in an orphaned lamb. he was tiny, only a week old, and there were two other, adult male sheep already living with us. the problem that i had, and many other rescuers and parents do not, was that i knew too well how easy it would be to mark this poor baby indelibly with all sorts of bad things. i also knew that only part of it was under my executive control, the rest was implicit — things about me, the way i function and interact, things that i was myself was most likely unaware of. naturally, we focused on what we could control, and hoped for the best. wanting to offer him a normative upbringing (as much as the circumstances allowed it) for the next four months or so i would spend most of the time in the paddock with him (as a mother sheep would do) and the other two sheep. my presence functioned as a secure base (ainsworth; ainsworth and bowlby) as predicated by attachment theory, while the other two sheep were effectively and affectively teaching him how to be a sheep. in the openness of the paddock and the adjacent forest area, the world became alive in a way that i had not experienced before. the sheep and other nonhuman residents were perfectly attuned to the environment. every sound, every sight, every scent bore a meaning; the world was filled with agency speaking to them, and they, in their turn, were responding to it. their moment-to-moment alertness (a stick could be a snake, a fallen branch a predator roaming through the bushes) was expected and therefore not surprising, nor was the rather automatic appraisal that followed disturbances, that is, the evaluation of the nature and danger levels of single disturbances in accordance with internal categorization systems, discussed below. could other animals, i pondered, encounter phenomena that resist categorization, a condition that has been proposed to give rise to the feeling of awe in humans (e.g. shiota, keltner and mossman), potentially leading to either dread or bliss? when i say teya brooks pribac -place attachment and the roots of spiritual relating in animals 77 “resist” i do not mean only that a phenomenon cannot be categorized because it is not known, not familiar, but also in the sense that it may be so broad that it simply does not fit, it cannot be forced into anything with limits, with boundaries, anything reductionist. suddenly a very clear picture of animals’ spiritual relating emerged in my head. of course, as i began to analyze this picture it began to blur very rapidly. it became even more complicated when i tried to verbalize it, and i felt relief when i came across others who had tackled the issue before me and who offer, among other things, some very useful language (e.g. harrod “a trans-species definition of religion”; harrod, “the case for chimpanzee religion”; schaefer, “do animals have religion?”; schaefer, religious affects). in this paper i first briefly present my conceptualization of animal (human inclusive) spirituality (brooks pribac, “spiritual animal”), along with relevant aspects of intersubjective attachment theory and self-formation. i then turn to place attachment and consider the possibility of place attachment (and aversion) as a relational framework through which animal bodies learn to communicate with intangible agencies within inhabited geographical spaces — a communication at the base of spiritual relating. an additional question that emerges when considering the potential of place as a relational variable is its capacity for healing effects (or otherwise) upon animal bodies and minds, and the impact of anthropogenic interference with spaces inhabited by other animals upon this healing capacity and perhaps necessity. this question is not explored in this paper, but it is acknowledged for its ethical implications and worthiness of further consideration and research. animal spirituality. intersubjective attachment and the emergence of the sense of self. in the 1950s, when john bowlby, the father of attachment theory, began work in the area of infant-caregiver separation, he had, by his own admission, “no conception of what [he] was undertaking”; the subject appeared to him “a limited one, namely, to discuss the theoretical implication of some observations of how young children respond to temporary loss of mother” (attachment xxvii). the negative impact of prolonged separation (such as in the case of hospitalization of children) was clear, the hows and whys less so. it was only upon familiarization with the ethological work of konrad lorenz and niko tinbergen, particularly the phenomenon of ”imprinting“ in precocial1 avian species, that bowlby was able to envision the possibility that mammalian (including human) attachments may work in a similar fashion. by converging fields pioneered by his two most significant intellectual influences (darwin and freud), humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 78 bowlby, in the words of his colleague mary ainsworth (cited in schore xi), in essence attempted to “update psychoanalytic theory in the light of recent advances in biology.” over the following decades, research in the field has produced an extensive corpus that testifies to the vital importance of attachment relations not only for humans but also for other animals. a substantial amount of data and knowledge of attachment relations and their roles in developmental and post-developmental contexts actually comes from more or less invasive experiments in nonhuman animals. in a nutshell, what this research reveals is that the interactions between the infant and the primary caregiver (usually the mother but not necessarily) influence the development of the infant’s brain and psychological and biological self-regulation, both of which are still maturing in infancy. there are some differences in the rate of preand post-natal development of the brain between altricial and precocial species (e.g., bennett and harvey) but essentially, as polan and hofer phrase it, the caregiver acts as a “superstructure” to the infant’s developing system (120). in practice this means that the developmental context along with the mothering/caregiving style will influence how the infant’s selfregulatory system develops and will inform his or her capacity to cope with stressful situations later in life. these early interactions in effect “teach” the infant that relational stress can be tolerated and regulated, or that it cannot be (schore; see also bradshaw and schore). within this relational context in the early period animals also begin to develop a sense of self. it is important to understand that the self under examination here is not the reflective, cognitive self — the self that thinks the self, the self that the weird2 (henrich, heine and norenzayan) population seems particularly fond of. instead, the discussion here revolves around the experiential, relational self — the self that feels the self. in this delicate period, through the interactions with the caregiver the infant animal develops working models of the caregiver (bowlby, attachment). through the caregiver’s reactions to the infant (e.g. responsive or not, attuned or not, etc.), the infant also develops a working model of the self, as siegel puts it eloquently: “we first know ourselves as reflected in the other” (siegel 62). caregivers’ responses thus provide the infant, be it lamb or human, with a plethora of critical information about the self (including whether the infant is “worthy” of love or not, whether help is available in case of need or not, how to behave to elicit it, etc.); the infant will organize this information in his/her internal working model, i.e., mental representations of the self, the socio-natural environment and the self in relation to the latter, which will accompany the individual throughout life. for our discussion of spirituality, the consideration of the self is relevant because the self does not only develop but also lives teya brooks pribac -place attachment and the roots of spiritual relating in animals 79 within a relational framework. research has shown that the self exists on a self-nonself continuum rather than a self-nonself dichotomy (han and northoff). this means that the self is fluid and remains open to relational potentials.3 this enables relations not only with other humans and other animals but also, i argue, with other perceived agencies. therefore i proposed to envision spiritual engagement as animal bodies’ affective dancing with animacy (“spiritual animal”). from conception to death, the organism is in constant communication with the environment. the environment acquires animacy, that is, becomes animated and endowed with agency by its capacity to speak and respond to the organism on an experiential level. this happens well before (and continues after) the organism develops the ability for any kind of reflective consciousness, leaving the organism essentially primed for affective communication with the rest of the world. in other words, we can conceptualize the spiritual experience as the engagement of the individual animal (human and other) with agency as a quality of an entity/phenomenon, which (i.e. agency) materializes by way of producing an effect on the animal’s experiential consciousness, drawing the animal into the relational dance. such agentic potential is not confined ontologically but belongs to all life forms and perceived manifestations. this exchange between the organism and animacy from the environment resembles dancing in the sense that the interaction of parts gives rise to a whole, and this whole can only be sustained while the parts continue to interact in synergy. during the dance the lines between the self and the nonself become blurred, producing a feeling of merging and oneness. schematically, this relational dance could be presented as follows: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 80 encounter between animal and entity/phenomenon. entity/phenomenon speaks to animal = animal is affected. this confers agency to entity/phenomenon. agencies (of animal and phenomenon) interact. this exchange / relational engagement between agencies = spirituality. note that the entity/phenomenon can possess agency on its own, irrespective of the encounter but from the animal’s perspective it is only recognized as meaningful if it affects the animal. an example of spiritual vs non-spiritual engagement: the taste of madeleine cakes can produce a spiritual experience if it speaks directly to the experiential consciousness, as it does in proust (remembrance); whereas a non-spiritual experience of madeleines is produced when, for instance, i take the cakes out of the oven, try them and feel thrilled that they are literally melting in my mouth (unlike last time i made them), and won’t the guests love them! of course there could be confluence of both. categorization and cognitive closure. the above conceptualization of animal spirituality is not too dissimilar to donovan schaefer’s conceptualizations of religion (religious affects).4 however, in my view religion is a broader concept that includes implicit and explicit elements for human and nonhuman animals alike. in contrast, i am considering the implicit dimension that exists outside interpretive frameworks: spirituality, rather than religiosity, which manifests as a propensity of animals’ intrinsically relational, non-reflective, experiential, embodied consciousness. i see human faith and belief as simply forms of, and results of, cognitive closure (e.g. webster and kruglanski). cognitive closure is defined as resolution of a state of uncertainty, and it is a rather important trait in the entire animal kingdom, not just in the human world. we all need to make some sense of the environment — both social and natural — of things that are happening around (and within!) us. understanding phenomena, finding connections, interpretations, and making decisions based on them is critical in the lives of all animals. there is safety in understanding what exists and happens around us, in having an explanation for it; what we do not know/understand is more unpredictable, it makes us uncomfortable, we may even fear it. therefore there is the tendency to try to grasp, to understand events and phenomena, to bring about teya brooks pribac -place attachment and the roots of spiritual relating in animals 81 cognitive closure. other animals’ religions, thus, in my view, would, like human religions, incorporate affective and interpretational components, likely including faith and beliefs of some kind. the interpretive domain is of course harder to access in other animals, and their interpretive solutions are most likely less elaborate compared to those of humans and our rather incredible capacity for imagination, but to various degrees they do exist. to achieve cognitive closure, the brain helps us substantially through its automatic categorization system and concept formation. animals’ brains process sensory data through acquired concepts. the term “concept” describes groupings of attributes, sensory details, characteristic of familiar “objects,” whereas “object” does not refer only to tables, chairs and the like but is intended in the broadest sense and it includes complex interactions and events (snyder, bossomaier and mitchell; vallortigara et al.). following the formation of a concept, the details constituting the concept elude conscious awareness in lieu of the bigger picture. while this process is necessarily reductionist in nature, it is very useful for animals; without the capacity for such concept formation and categorization we would have to start anew with every detail that hits our senses. animals would be overwhelmed by details and the efficiency of navigation and decision-making in our socio-natural environment would be significantly compromised. concept formation is of interest here because researchers have proposed that awe emerges at the encounter of a phenomenon that does not fit into an established mental template and that the brain thus cannot automatically assimilate and achieve cognitive closure. since other animals also process information using mental schemas, it is likely that they too encounter phenomena that their brains cannot automatically assign to a known category: generating a sense of awe. following this logic, spiritual relating would occur when an experience resists being squeezed into a pattern, a category. instead, the experiential self engages with it, enters with it into a dance of relating, merges with it into a dynamic relational unit. awe is what i would refer to as an accidental source of spiritual engagement, in the sense that such engagement is not sought; instead, it is triggered by an encounter, with a waterfall, for instance, as in the case of goodall’s chimpanzees (goodall), or a landscape, that speaks to the animal in a particular way. it could also emerge from being present in a place that offers calmness and peace: suddenly one may develop an overwhelming sense of integration within the self, a deep form of felt contentment as one becomes absorbed and absorbs the space with its tangible and intangible forces, or humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 82 conversely, finding oneself in a place/situation that causes utter dread. it is these two (“accidental”) forms of spiritual engagement that, in my view, mark the spiritual experience of nonhuman animals, and possibly many humans who, like the present author, do not engage in structured meditation or prayer. the latter, that is meditation and prayer, could be viewed as an intentional source of spiritual engagement as the individual intentionally seeks the connection, the experience. spiritual engagement (when the experience is positive) is not only an interesting subject for scholarly deliberations and a possible enhancer of religious belief, it also benefits animals’ physical and mental health. body-focused approaches, including meditation, are being increasingly employed in mental health therapies for their overall benefits. bottom-up psychobiological regulation appears to be more efficient and less costly to an organism than top-down processes (coan), and evidence suggests that while in shortterm practitioners of mindfulness meditation top-down regulation likely occurs, in long-term practitioners the reverse appears to be true, namely, regulation follows the bottom-up path (chiesa, serretti and jakobsen). this observation is potentially significant for the consideration of animal (human inclusive) spirituality. psychobiological regulation plays a vital role in animals’ lives, in infancy and beyond. aside from regulation provided through social interaction (e.g. primary caregiver and later partners, friends, etc.), animals need to be able to selfregulate to various extents. if meditation, as a phenomenon that facilitates reconnection with the experiential self and extension of this self and consecutive merging with the vitality of life and its intrinsic relationality, has such positive effects on human physical and mental wellbeing by influencing neuro-physiological structures and processes that humans in fact share with other animals, is it not safe to assume that other animals would benefit from it, too? could that ”glimmer of infinity” which victor hugo (cited in kristeva) concedes to all ”beasts” and is reached when the experiential self engages in the dance with animacy therefore be viewed not as a fad of the human ”divine” nature but as a biological imperative, on a par with alimentation, hydration, and interpersonal relations? nonhuman animals most likely do not train themselves in mindfulness meditation. however, is it not possible that they may have retained the capacity to engage in such meditative processes in a more spontaneous manner (a capacity that many humans, particularly those in industrialized societies, have lost and now have to re-learn), and perhaps to actively seek such experiences, or at least to embrace them when they occur? teya brooks pribac -place attachment and the roots of spiritual relating in animals 83 this resonates with bataille’s and rilke’s views of nonhuman animals as being more in tune with the flow of life, like ”water in water” (bataille 23), less concerned about interpretive worlds compared to humans (rilke). clearly, as willett points out, like humans, other animals also have to attend to more mundane things, such as searching for food, detecting danger, avoiding predators, and other cognitively and affectively demanding tasks that life brings along which involve interpretations of various kinds, as indicated above. bataille’s water in the nonhuman animal world thus is not always shiny and blissful, with anthropogenic violence mudding it further. nevertheless, the point i want to emphasize is that when the experience of connection, of bliss, does occur in nonhuman animals, it is felt, it is experientially meaningful in itself; like hunger is, and satiety, thirst and hydration, social deprivation and union. it does not need a cognitively interpretative component — ideological or other — to give it meaning. traditionally, as panksepp summarizes, speaking of mammals, the neocortex was believed to be not only ”the seat of conscious thought but also of emotional feeling;” experiential consciousness, feelings were viewed as a form of thought, both ”affective and cognitive processes were envisioned to be completely interpenetrant in higher brain regions that generated certain higher cognitive processes” (”cross-species affective neuroscience” 3). the confusion of thought and feeling and the belief that feeling had to be processed through higher brain regions to acquire experiential relevance has had clear implications for nonhuman animals. nevertheless, cumulative evidence challenges this view, substantially expanding the circle of phenomenologically conscious animals (e.g. cambridge declaration on consciousness 20125). i now turn to the consideration of the role of places for the development of animals’ capacity to communicate with intangible agencies, a communication at the foundation of spiritual experiences. place attachment. inhabited wilderness. ”inhabited space transcends geometrical space” writes bachelard (47) in his exquisite exploration of dwellings and the broader spaces accommodating them. we live and breathe spaces, we create them and they create us. space is so integral to being that it becomes elusive. although all animals likely exhibit place preferences (and aversions) based on phylogenetic and ontogenetic factors, research on place attachment continues to struggle with conceptual and methodological problems deriving from the intangibility of a phenomenon, which is, nevertheless, and not unlike many other ungraspable phenomena, composed of tangible entities with geometrically and otherwise defined and describable features. a more general definition of place attachment, which would bring higher homogeneity to this field of enquiry and further the theoretical development of the concept, has yet to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 84 be agreed upon (scannell and gifford 2). with place attachment being a continuation of community studies, there is a strong tradition of focusing largely and principally on social aspects of place attachment, i.e., the extent to which a place facilitates interhuman sociality and community identity. this has also resulted in the creation of measurement instruments which tend to address physical aspects in conjunction with social ones (summarized in lewicka). this approach has been contested by some — most notably perhaps by stedman — who are disinclined to view the physical space only as a container for human social interactions. instead, as suggested in this paper, from the organism’s capacity — indeed imperative — to communicate with the environment and entities within it emerges a relationality that creates experiential (albeit not necessarily always reflectively elaborated) meaning, whereby meaning, as summarized by johnson, “is not just a matter of concepts and propositions, but also reaches down into the images, sensorimotor schemas, feelings, qualities, and emotions that constitute our meaningful encounter with our world” (cited in lewicka xi). paul morgan draws parallels between interpersonal attachment theory and personplace attachment, proposing a developmental model of place attachment that, like interpersonal attachment, is a result of the exchange between the child and the physical environment as an interacting presence. rather than understanding the motivation to interact with the environment as sourcing entirely from within the child, morgan, citing striniste and moore (25), views such motivation as “both a quality inherent to the child, which determines how the child will use the environment, and a quality of the environment, which has the potential to draw the child’s involvement” (14). through repetition this relational dynamics of arousal-interaction-pleasure generates an affective bond between the animal and the place, consolidating into an unconscious internal working model informing future relationships with place. place thus has the capacity to soothe and, in korpela’s view, much like intersubjective attachment dyads, place may function as an external regulator mediating psychic balance. if such consolidation does not occur in childhood, place attachment later in life may be weak. however, there is currently not enough data to support this claim. in fact, given the inevitability of interaction with places, and given that extra-ontogenetic factors may contribute to animals’ affective responses to them, there is reason to believe that, like in the area of intrapersonal attachment, the organism remains open to place-attachment potentialities and affective reorganization all through life, with attachment emerging if the relational transaction secures the kind of multimodal support the organism needs and/or expects. teya brooks pribac -place attachment and the roots of spiritual relating in animals 85 fashion issues aside, the popularity of home décor media and the financial prosperity of this market with an estimated gross of us$65.2 billion per year in the u.s. alone (summarized in graham, gosling and travis), suggest a strong human inclination to concentrate substantial effort and other resources (when they can afford it) on making their residential hub not only mechanically liveable but also relationally competent, that is, capable of implicit communication with the dweller, of arousal and soothing, of promoting or supplanting moods, creativity, concentration, relaxation — features that determine the difference between a house and a home. in the choosing and shaping of residential spaces people may be driven not only by explicit tastes and preferences but also by unconscious factors reflecting emotional ties to certain features, sourcing from past experience with them, as graham, gosling and travis remind us. for instance, people may unconsciously incorporate features from a beloved grandmother’s house — those madeleines of interior design. however, despite the obvious psychological significance of residential spaces, the authors lament the lack of empirical research in the area even though it has received substantial attention by theorists and practitioners, including jung, and bachelard as seen above. the home with its sense of familiarity, coziness, and perceived protection indeed has the capacity to function as a bioregulator, as korpela suggests. on a cognitive-affective level, much as it can be the case in interpersonal relations, the home can become part of the extended self, and if the home is violated, for example by burglary, people report qualitatively similar albeit less intense psychological distress compared to victims of direct physical violations (droseltis and vignoles). however, human-made buildings and their adjacent yards are only part of the composition we may call home. the latter encompasses a much broader space, the limits of which are not always easy to identify. research into environmental degradation in and surrounding human habitats (e.g. due to mining operations, land clearing, and similar events) also records psychological distress (e.g. higginbotham et al.), which glenn albrecht named “solastalgia” and described as: the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault (physical desolation). it is manifest in an attack on one’s sense of place, in the erosion of the sense of belonging (identity) to a particular place and a feeling of distress (psychological desolation) about its transformation. it is an intense desire for the place where one is a resident to be maintained in a state that continues to give comfort or solace. solastalgia is not about looking back to some golden past, nor is it about seeking another place as “home.” it is the “lived experience” of the loss of the present as manifest in a feeling of dislocation; of being undermined by forces that destroy the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 86 potential for solace to be derived from the present. in short, solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at “home.” (45) rogan, o’connor and horwitz, on the other hand, report compelling testimonies of farmers who had themselves (along with their ancestors) been part of such an assault. with the “golden past” in mind, one that they had never themselves experienced, at least not in the place in question, the degradation was nonetheless obvious, and upon realizing the consequences of the long-held belief in the “normality” of the utilitarian approach which led to such degradation, they changed their ways. a turning point for a farming couple interviewed, for example, was their experience with wind erosion, “one of the worst experiences we had,” they are reported to have said (151). another farmer admits that he had always seen the environment as a means for agricultural gain: “i didn’t see the clearing really, because that was good, because we were producing something where before nothing was produced … and this is what farmers do, they clear the land,” until one day flying back home, “it suddenly struck me that what i had in my hands was the spoils and i was one of the spoilers that was making it look like that out of the window.… it was just so graphic that it was mind boggling.” unguarded instrumentalization of nature following the emergence of agriculture, but particularly over the past few centuries with technological advancement and unprecedented and unsustainable human population growth, has contributed substantially to the degradation of the planet. this is now backfiring, not only in terms of geophysical changes with their adverse effects (e.g. erosion mentioned above), pollution of vital resources such as water, extreme temperatures, etc., all of which may affect human (and of course other animals’) physical health as well as community wellbeing (berry, bowen and kjellstrom). this anthropocetric, self-appointed role of dominion (or “guardianship” as some would have it) over the rest of nature has uprooted humans from their evolutionary cradle to the extent that it appears to be quite directly impacting upon their psychological health. the field of ecopsychology in particular has been concerned with the troublesome relation between humans and the rest of nature. congruent with the biophilia hypothesis (wilson) whereby humans tend to feel an urge to affiliate with other life forms, this field explores the interdependency of humans and the rest of nature and the benefits a greater appreciation of this synergy and reciprocity by humans would bring to both. like other animals humans have also evolved in a naturalistic setting with large scale urban spaces being a relative novelty in our species’ history. regardless of human ontogenetic experience and reflective conclusions, human bodies and psyches recognize teya brooks pribac -place attachment and the roots of spiritual relating in animals 87 this intrinsic connection and may ache if deprived of it. city dwellers, for example, may think they are habituated to stress-inducing urban environments, but their bodies and brains may continue to react to the stress without the human being reflectively conscious of it, as bratman, hamilton and daily observe. an indication that this may be the case can be found in the numerous reports of therapeutic properties attributed to exposure to “nature,” including a sense of connectedness, belonging, and an extended (eco) self, which tend to be labelled as spiritual (e.g. snell and simmonds). even the smallest exposure appears substantially advantageous: ulrich found that rooms overlooking hospital gardens positively affect patients’ recovery rates, while moore notes that prisoners benefitting fom similar views exhibit lower rates of sick-calls (both reported in hinds and sparks 110). koga and iwasaki, with a focus on the tactile consciousness and simultaneous repression of the visual dimension, examined psychological and physiological effects of touching plant foliage compared to other textures/materials. the results, based on the experimental human subjects’ reported impressions and on observations of their cerebral blood flow, show that touching plants has a reflectively unconscious (but of course experientially conscious) calming effect on people, leading the authors to conclude that “plants are an indispensable element of the human environment” (1). while a substantial part of the literature addressing the human and more-than-human nature relationship appears to promote humans’ respect for the rest of nature, the instrumentalization of nature implicitly and most likely unconsciously propagated in these writings is disturbing. the notion of nature as a place to go to in order to destress, get away from the daily capitalist, consumerist life with its overwhelming contribution to the destruction of nature, and to recharge one’s internal batteries for better coping with the stress-inducing, “ordinary” life, gives little consideration to the fact that any such visit to “nature” is in effect an invasion. it is an intrusion into spaces of other animals (including us, the local human residents), into their ordinary life, and as such causes additional stress to them. nature is not an empty cathedral awaiting humans to come and unload their burdens, even though at times it may appear so given that animals tend not to put themselves on display for the “wilderness”-hungry human visitor. instead, nature is a fully inhabited space, home to communities and individuals who have been pushed to the limits (physically and psychologically) by the destructive powers of the ever expanding human population, urbanization, industrialization, and more recently eco-tourism and eco-therapy. walking into other animals’ homes and backyards will cause a certain amount of anxiety to the dwellers as any novel situation inevitably does. it will disrupt the animals’ current activity (whatever that may be at the time of the intrusion: acquiring food, constructing a home, educating their children, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 88 solving a personal dispute, resting after a hard day’s work, meditating, etc.), forcing animals to attend to the intrusion because failure to do so may cost them, their families, and their friends their lives. a recent disturbing report (gaynor et al.) shows that anthropogenic disturbances, which include anything from hunting to hiking, are forcing free-living nonhuman animals around the world to become more nocturnal. since it has become increasingly harder to avoid humans in space, they have to adjust their lives to avoid us in time. the “wildness” cherished in animals is far from the unstructured randomness that it is often credited with. when cookson states: “wildness in humans is usually seen as disruptive, while wildness in animals is essential to the health of their ecosystems” and “[i]f humans do not make the grade needed to use wildness constructively, then wildness becomes an otherness that is shunned” (188), he is disregarding the ecological and social sophistication characteristic of other animals’ communities. like human communities, other animals’ communities are also regulated by social norms and codes of conduct (e.g. broom) with aberrations exceeding acceptable levels likely to be penalized in one way or another. and just as intra-community social norms provide a certain grade of stability and security in animals’ lives (human inclusive) so does familiarity with the residential space and the conspecifics and others in it with strangers and the unpredictability accompanying them causing due concern. “‘i see, now, ‘the wilderness experience’ almost as an escape from the cultural reformation work needed, from reforms needed for survival of life on the planet,” robert greenway admitted in an interview (48). he continues, “[w]ilderness-as-therapy seems (in my more cynical or frightened moments) as an indulgence — an experience primarily available to a relatively wealthy tiny minority of the planet’s human population.” in the absence of such a reform, humans and other animals tend to their primordial needs for psychic homeostasis as best as their circumstances permit it, travelling through space, touching wildness and being touched by it, often without much reflective awareness of it. when kahn goes on his writing retreat, leaving human society behind for two months to write his academic book, it is not the wildness of his unshaved face and his unbathed body that makes his experience so special, even though he seems to have enjoyed that, too. rather, it is wildness emerging following the blurring of time frames and schedules that many humans are slaves to in their daily lives, which provides him with the opportunity to be present and with the time “to notice,” as he puts it, and the silence, which aided both. kahn writes: teya brooks pribac -place attachment and the roots of spiritual relating in animals 89 odd how the silence i described on my first night here was pounding my head. it was like i was coming off drugs and noise was my drug. this morning there is lovely sound in this light rain, and the blessing of the silence between the drops. (42) when silence is allowed into a space, the organism opens up to modes of communication and understanding — of relating — that may be supressed or obfuscated in an environment with noise as a prevalent theme. in our evolutionary past and in the rest of nature sound is used sparingly and meaningfully, attention to detail draws very fine lines between life and death: is the rustling foliage just signalling a cool change or is it aiding a predator’s disguise? the world is populated with “spirits” (agencies), and other animals are as aware of them as humans are, regardless of whether they develop stories around them or not. i was able to observe my own change of perception and increased attention to detail over the four months i spent in the paddock with orpheus-pumpkin, the orphaned lamb mentioned previously. this area is home to some of the world’s deadliest nonhuman animal species, such as the eastern brown snake and the funnel web spider, both of which live on and around the property; therefore, while sitting on the ground, barefoot most of the time, caution was in place. as guthrie argued in his variation of pascal’s wager in relation to anthropomorphizing: “it is usually better to err many times by applying them [human-like models, i.e. agency, intention] when they do not obtain than to err once by failing to apply them when they do” (guthrie 190). while waiting for snakes and spiders, one becomes sensitized to all life around, as minuscule as it may be physically, particularly anything out of the ordinary, the unknown, and hence unpredictable. following this period of close interaction with the ground and bushes i took a trip to the city; walking down the pavement i saw an unusual creature move in the middle of it. i stopped, convinced at that stage that it was an animal of some kind, but upon closer inspection i realized it was a leaf that had been moved by a gust of wind. i smiled, only half pleased. just like one learns the rules of urban traffic, one learns to navigate other shared spaces. in doing so animals discover spaces that are best able to communicate with them and fulfil their psychobiological needs, which results in place attachment. the wild rabbit who “domesticated” himself and settled in our garden, would spend most of his time watching the rest of the world from under the lemon tree. the sheep would spend the day grazing around the property but at night, or even during the day when they feel like resting, they would always come to the same spot on a small plateau within the paddock — elevated areas humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 90 with a good view over the rest of the habitat and a higher chance of early predator detection are a rather common choice as a resting place in this species. within this plateau they exhibit even more specific place preferences and it is not uncommon to see a sheep whose spot has been occupied by another sheep to nudge (or butt) the intruder to encourage them to move. when it rains the sheep take shelter in the barn, except for jason. rain speaks to jason differently than it does to the others. jason stays outside, lying under the rain with his face up and eyes closed. when the rain is heavier he moves under the tree, when the rain gets even heavier he joins the others in the barn. space as individual, individual as space. place attachment in humans is believed not to develop until the age of five at the earliest, but more probably later (morgan) and “certainly” after human-to-human attachment (morgan citing sobel). in my view, there are several problems with this assumption. the first and most obvious one is that relying on human self-reports can only reflect the contents of explicit memory and not that of the implicit memory storeroom which has an equal or greater impact on animals’ perceptions, feelings, choices, and decisions in life compared to the explicit contents. if we cannot recall place attachment from an earlier age it does not mean that place attachment was not present, or that it did not, at least, begin to form far earlier than our recollections suggest, probably earlier than, or perhaps alongside, intersubjective attachment. in fact, unlike lambs and other precocial infants who pop out of the womb (or egg — giving birth to live offspring is basically a delayed form of egg-laying [goodson, kelly and kingsbury]) and start following the caregiver, many animals (humans included) do not consolidate intersubjective attachments until they become capable of moving and getting lost. nelson and panksepp (438; see also panksepp, affective neuroscience 265) suggest that intersubjective attachment may have evolved from ancient mechanisms regulating place attachment, energy balance, thermoregulation, and pain perception, with the first three contributing primarily to evolving mechanisms for the appreciation of social presence with mechanisms for pain perception playing a greater role in the development of mechanisms for distress related to social absence (see also macdonald and leary). panksepp never pursued research into place attachment as the origin of intersubjective attachment nor was he aware of anyone else that did so (pers. comm.). nevertheless, from a neurochemical perspective, the endogenous opioid system with its capacity to modulate physical and social pain and pleasure plays a central role in mediating attachment relations, with the latter more likely to develop when a beneficial balance felt on the level of the experiential self is reached. in place preference conditioning, for instance, place preference is achieved by pairing a place with opiate teya brooks pribac -place attachment and the roots of spiritual relating in animals 91 administration (nelson and panksepp 438; see also prus, james and rosecrans). this does not tell us much about non-conditioned processes of place attachment, but it suggests that a place with the capacity to trigger an animal’s opioid system would be a suitable candidate for an attachment relationship, with mothers being one such place. the line between subject and place appears far more blurred than it is generally recognized. whether subject is place or place is subject may be difficult to establish, or rather the two “states” may be better viewed as fluid, taking the form of one or the other depending on the circumstances and viewpoint in any particular moment. before having the opportunity and the capacity to interact with other animals, an animal lives and develops in, and interacts with, space. the womb, or the egg, is not a stimuli-free void, a sensory desert animals have to go through before “real” life starts. real life starts at conception, and everything that happens afterward affects the organism, and it continues to do so until death. both the womb and the egg represent a vibrant environment with sensory input the foetus is influenced by and responds to, including endogenous (within the mother’s body) and externally generated sounds (griffiths et al.). in human fetuses, for instance, these sounds influence the post-natal organisms’ phonetic perception, i.e. human babies react differently to familiar (native) and nonfamiliar (foreign) vowels (moon, lagercrantz and kuhl), while domestic chicks communicate with both siblings and parents while still in the egg to synchronize hatching (broom and fraser). before having the opportunity to pair a voice with a face, the animal interacts with cognitively intangible entities, a relationality that appears to be the default mode of the experiential self. the experiential self is in constant communication with the “spirits’ in the environment, which are responding to it and elicit responses from it. there is a sensed presence before these agencies are associated with a particular face, smell and other specificities. even when they do become associated with an embodied entity the mechanisms underlying the relation remain implicit, “spirit”-like, sensed but largely escaping capacities for reflective articulation because such interaction does not address one level only, but a multitude of levels reflecting various organismic needs and capacities. once out of the womb (or egg) the organism continues its rich communication with space. attachment figures (both in infancy and later in life) are primarily places (albeit very specific ones) with the capacity to offer the multimodal support the organism needs. the individual as space is perhaps most obvious in the infant-mother dyad in altricial species. before mutual intersubjective attachment develops, i.e., before the infant recognizes and bonds with the primary caregiver, essentially the infant is interacting humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 92 with a space. unlike some other forms of space (such as a room or a garden), this space (the mother/caregiver) is a very active one and it intentionally seeks interactions with the infant, providing stimulation as well as regulation of the infant’s internal states as indicated earlier. despite the intentional interaction and care provided by the caregiver, communication within the dyad occurs on an implicit level. as such, factors outside the caregiver’s will and intentional focus affect the interaction and determine the success of the regulation or lack thereof. these factors include the caregiver’s own attachment style, stress reactivity, dispositional anxiety, and other components of the micro-cosmos embodied as a primary caregiver that communicates with the multimodality of the micro-cosmos of the infantile organism. if an individual can in essence be viewed as a space — not only for infantile organisms; adult attachment relations reflect a similar multimodal exchange engaging a conglomerate of properties and activity, which is better understood as a more or less integrated space rather than a singular entity, if any such thing exists in the first place — can space/place be perceived as individual, a personified (though also multimodal) entity? as part of the therapeutic process, siegel, for instance, encourages his patients to imagine a place from the past or present where they felt safe and happy. studies in separation distress reveal that a familiar environment may reduce separation distress vocalisations in animals (panksepp, affective neuroscience 265). further, oxytocin, the mammalian neuropeptide with homologies in other taxa, which plays an important role in social interactions and increases the sensitivity of the opioid system, when externally administered to animals may increase social bonding, but only if animals have not had the chance to fully habituate to the test chambers. if such habituation occurs, oxytocin is ineffective, which may mean that the existence of a reasonably strong place attachment may hinder the formation of new intersubjective bonds (ibid., 252). this suggests that the line between subject and space may indeed be far more blurred than generally thought. in a similar vein, while oxytocin may promote prosocial behavior towards ingroup members, it appears to have the opposite effect towards out-groups (panksepp and biven 39). in research, nonhuman animals’ place attachment tends to be conceptualized as so-called territoriality. like in the exploration of human place attachment where place has largely been viewed as a container for intersubjective and intergroup social interactions, as mentioned above, territory (and territoriality) is also usually explored through the lens of interand intraspecific subjective functionality (e.g. space providing mating opportunities, etc.), rather than focusing on the direct relation between individuals and their space.6 such relation may indeed be elusive, at teya brooks pribac -place attachment and the roots of spiritual relating in animals 93 least compared to the much more (observably) vibrant animal-to-animal interactions, with (other) places likely appearing largely static to an external observer, but the organism is nevertheless in constant interaction with them and this interaction, this relation, informs the organism’s state albeit in a largely reflectively unconscious way. just like a singular animal (human or other) has the capacity to speak to the sensory realm of another animal, leading to either attraction or aversion, both of which result largely from phyloand ontogenetically informed implicit processes, other spaces are also in communication with individuals through touch, sight, smell, and other sensory modalities. phylogenetic knowledge may broadly define needs and preferences; it may explain, for example, why wilderness has a powerful calming and so-called spiritual effect on people, why touching plants is beneficial as the japanese study showed, and why sheep choose the highest spot in the paddock to relax and watch the stars on a clear night. ontogeny defines such preferences further. concluding thoughts. it is becoming increasingly evident that to meaningfully engage in the dance with animacy one does not need highly elaborated concepts of divinities, the sacred, or other interpretive solutions that humans often associate with spirituality. the relational dance that emerges when the experiential consciousness responds to the touch of other animacy affirms its ontology and is experienced as meaningful without the need for cognitive elaboration preor post-factum confirming it. animal organisms’ capacity, indeed propensity, to engage relationally with the environment, populated with both tangible and intangible agencies, opens a window into possible modes of discussion and comprehension of phenomena that had, in the past, due to their liminal nature, been considered mentally ungraspable by the human — this not quite animal and not quite god oddity (agamben) — and as such well beyond anything that may pertain to other animals and the rest of earthly existence. the possibility of the sacrificial lamb having equal or greater spiritual depth compared to her killer (brooks pribac, “spiritual animal”) may not sit comfortably with every human. nevertheless, spirituality is another uniquely human characteristic that we may relinquish, and expand the circle of inclusion to other species. furthermore, spiritual experiences may have significant psychobiological value for animals, human and others. anthropogenic violence in the forms of both captivity with its inherent deprivation of species-specific natural sensory and other input, and the degradation of the planet most likely, and in their own ways, significantly impact upon this propensity of animals to engage with the agencies in the environment and the healing properties of such engagement. this may have substantial repercussions for their wellbeing. on top humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 94 of the grief they experience at the loss of significant others, many animals may also be grieving the loss of an ontological normative that has been tailored through a long evolutionary path and that humans have more recently come to manipulate for their own purposes. dedication. this essay is dedicated to the animals who lost their homes or lives in the fires ravaging australia in late 2019/early 2020. notes 1. precocial animals are relatively independent soon after birth, able to walk, feed themselves, flee, e.g. deer and ducks; altricial animals are relatively helpless and immobile at birth and completely dependent on adults for food, e.g. dogs and humans. 2. western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. 3. in contrast to western conceptualizations of the self as independent and separate from other selves (e.g. geertz; markus and kitayama) 4. schaefer proposes to move beyond the logocentric, human exclusivist view and explore religion from an evolutionary perspective, stressing the importance of affect, which humans share with other animals. schaefer theorizes religion as “a dance of relating, a compulsory, affective web fusing bodies to worlds (…) a cycling of semistable bodily forms,” emerging differently in different bodies (192). quoting lemothe, schaefer agrees that religion “is not what a person believes, nor what he has or does per se. religion rather exists in the moment of its performances as a kind of doing that embodies a person in relation to a sense of the world” (191). faith and belief, for example, are elements of the human religious dance, while other bodies, other animal species, with their distinct evolutionary histories informing distinct biophilic relations and related affective triggers, engage with the world differently, which manifests in different forms of religious dance. 5. http://fcmconference.org/img/cambridgedeclarationonconsciousness.pdf 6. the discourse concerning cage/pen enrichments for captive animals is a clear exception since it aims at providing a more naturalistic setting in recognition of the multimodal support such setting may offer to an organism (e.g. balcombe). teya brooks pribac -place attachment and the roots of spiritual relating in animals 95 works cited agamben, giorgio. the open: man and animal. stanford up, 2004. ainsworth, mary d.s. “object relations, dependency, and attachment: a theoretical review of the infant-mother relationships.” child development 40.4 (1969): 969–1025. ainsworth, mary d.s., and john bowlby. “an ethological approach to personality development.” american psychologist 46.4 (1991): 333–341. albrecht, glenn . “‘solastalgia’ a new concept in health and identity.” pan: philosophy, activism, nature 3 (2005): 41–55. bachelard, gaston. the poetics of space. 1958. trans. maria jolas. beacon press, 1994. balcombe, jonathan. “laboratory environments and rodents’ behavioural needs: a review.” laboratory animals 40.3 (2006): 217–235. bataille, georges . theory of religion. 1973. trans. robert hurley. zone books, 1989. bennett, peter m., and paul h. harvey. “brain size, development and metabolism in birds and mammals.” journal of zoology 207.4 (1985): 491–507. berry, helen louise, kathryn bowen, and tord kjellstrom. “climate change and mental health: a causal pathways framework.” international journal of public health 55.2 (2010): 123–132. bowlby, john. attachment and loss: volume 1: attachment. 1969. basic books, 1982. _____. attachment and loss: volume ii: separation anxiety and anger. basic books, 1973. _____. attachment and loss: volume iii: loss, sadness and depression. basic books, 1980. bradshaw, g. a., and allan n. schore. “how elephants are opening doors: developmental neuroethology, attachment and social context.” ethology 113.5 (2007): 426–436. bratman, gregory n., j. paul hamilton, and gretchen c. daily. “the impacts of nature experience on human cognitive function and mental health.” annals of the new york humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 96 academy of sciences 1249.1 (2012): 118–136. brooks pribac, teja. animal grief and spirituality: cross-species perspectives. phd dissertation. university of sydney, australia, 2018. _____. “spiritual animal: a journey into the unspeakable.” jsrnc 11.3 (2017): 340–360. broom, donald m. the evolution of morality and religion. cambridge up, 2003. broom, donald m., and andrew f. fraser. domestic animal behaviour and welfare. 2007. 4th edition. cabi, 2011. cassidy, jude, and phillip r. shaver, eds. handbook of attachment: theory, research, and clinical applications. 3rd edition. the guilford press, 2016. chiesa, alberto, alessandro serretti, and janus christian jakobsen “mindfulness: topdown or bottom-up emotion regulation strategy?” clinical psychology review 33.1 (2013): 82–96. coan, james a. “toward a neuroscience of attachment.” in cassidy and shaver, eds. 242–269. cookson, lawrence j. “a definition for wildness.” ecopsychology 3.3 (2011): 187–193. droseltis, orestis, and vivian l. vignoles “towards an integrative model of place identification: dimensionality and predictors of intrapersonal-level place preferences.” journal of environmental psychology 30.1 (2010): 23–34. gaynor, kaitlyn. “to avoid humans, more wildlife now work the night shift.” the conversation 15 june, 2018. accessed 6 dec. 2019. online. gaynor, kaitlyn m., cheryl e. hojnowski, neil h. carter, and justin s. brashares . “the influence of human disturbance on wildlife nocturnality.” science 360.6394 (2018): 1232– 1235. geertz, clifford. “on the nature of anthropological understanding.” american scientist 63 (1975): 47-53. teya brooks pribac -place attachment and the roots of spiritual relating in animals 97 goodall, jane. “the dance of awe.” a communion of subjects: animals in religion, science & ethics. paul waldau and kimberley patton, eds. columbia up, 2006. 651–656. goodson, james l., aubrey m. kelly, and marcy a. kingsbury. “evolving nonapeptide mechanisms of gregariousness and social diversity in birds.” hormones and behavior 61.3 (2012): 239–250. graham, lindsay t., samuel d. gosling, and christopher k. travis. “the psychology of home environments: a call for research on residential space.” perspectives on psychological science 10.3 (2015): 346–356. greenway, robert. “the ecopsychology interview.” ecopsychology 1.1 (2009): 47–52. griffiths, scott k., w.s. brown jr., kenneth j. gerhardt, robert m. adams, and richard j. morris (1994). “the perception of speech sounds recorded within the uterus of a pregnant sheep.” journal of the acoustical society of america 96.4: 2055–2063. guthrie, stewart e. “a cognitive theory of religion.” current anthropology 21.2 (1980): 181–203. han, shihui, and georg northoff. “understanding the self: a cultural neuroscience approach.” progress in brain research 178 (2009): 203–212. harrod, james b. “the case for chimpanzee religion.” journal for the study of religion, nature and culture 8.1 (2014): 8–45. _____. “a trans-species definition of religion.” journal for the study of religion, nature and culture 5.3 (2011): 327–353. henrich, joseph, steven j. heine, and ara norenzayan. “the weirdest people in the world?” behavioural and brain sciences 33.2-3 (2010): 61–83. higginbotham, nick, linda connor, glen albrecht, sonia freeman, and kingsley agho. “validation of an environmental distress scale.” ecohealth 3.4 (2006): 245–254. hinds, joe, and paul sparks. “engaging with the natural environment: the role of affective connection and identity.” journal of environmental psychology 28.2 (2008): 109– 120. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 98 johnson, mark. the meaning of the body: aesthetics of human understanding. u chicago p, 2007. kahn, peter h. jr. “cohabiting with the wild.” ecopsychology 1.1 (2009): 38–46. koga, kazuko, and yutaka iwasaki. “psychological and physiological effect in humans of touching plant foliage — using the semantic differential method and cerebral activity as indicators.” journal of physiological anthropology 32.1 (2013): 7. korpela, kalevi mikael. “place-identity as a product of environmental self-regulation.” journal of environmental psychology 9.3 (1989): 241–256. kristeva, julia. powers of horror: an essay on abjection. trans. leon s. roudiez. columbia up, 1982. lewicka, maria. “place attachment: how far have we come in the last 40 years?” journal of environmental psychology 31.3 (2011): 207–230. macdonald, geoff, and mark r. leary. “why does social exclusion hurt? the relationship between social and physical pain.” psychological bulletin 131.2 (2005): 202– 223. markus, hazel r., and shinobu kitayama. “culture and the self: implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation.” psychological review 98.2 (march 1991): 224-253. moon, christine, hugo lagercrantz, and patricia k. kuhl . “language experience in utero affects vowel perception after birth: a two-country study.” acta paediatrica 102.2 (2013): 156–160. moore, ernest o. “a prison environment’s effect on health care service demands. journal of environmental systems 11.1 (1981): 17–34. morgan, paul. “towards a developmental theory of place attachment.” journal of environmental psychology 30.1 (2010): 11–22. nelson, eric e., and jaak panksepp. “brain substrates of infant-mother attachment: contributions of opioids, oxytocin, and norepinephrine.” neuroscience and biobehavioral teya brooks pribac -place attachment and the roots of spiritual relating in animals 99 reviews 22.3 (1998): 437–452. panksepp, jaak. affective neuroscience. oxford up, 1998. _____. “cross-species affective neuroscience decoding of the primal affective experiences of humans and related animals.” plos one 6.8 (2011). online. _____, and lucy biven. the archaeology of mind: neuroevolutionary origins of human emotions. w.w. norton, 2012. polan, h. jonathan, and myron a. hofer. “psychobiological origins of infant attachment and its role in development.” in cassidy and shaver, eds. 117–132. proust, marcel. remembrance of things past [in search of lost time]. 1913. trans. c.k. scott moncrieff. u of adelaide e-book, 2014. prus, adam j., john r. james, and john a. rosecrans. “conditioned place preference.” methods of behavior analysis in neuroscience. j.j. buccafusco, ed., 2nd edition. crc press/taylor & francis, 2009. rilke, rainer m. duino elegies & the sonnets to orpheus. edited and translated by s. mitchell. vintage international, 2009. rogan, ruth, moira o’connor, and pierre horwitz. “nowhere to hide: awareness and perception of environmental change, and their influence on relationships with place.” journal of environmental psychology 25.2 (2005): 147–158. scannell, leila, and robert gifford. “defining place attachment: a tripartite organizing framework.” journal of environmental psychology 30.1 (2010): 1–10. schaefer, donovan o. “do animals have religion? interdisciplinary perspectives on religion and embodiment.” anthrozoös 25 (2012): s173–189. _____. religious affects: animality, evolution, and power. duke up, 2015. schore, allan n. “foreword.” in bowlby, attachment and loss: volume i: attachment. shiota, michelle n., dacher keltner, and amanda mossman. “the nature of awe: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 100 elicitors, appraisals, and effects on self-concept.” cognition & emotion 21.5 (2007): 944– 963. siegel, daniel j. mindsight: the new science of personal transformation. bantam books, 2011. snell, tristan l., and janette g. simmonds. “‘being in that environment can be very therapeutic’: spiritual experiences in nature.” ecopsychology 4.4 (2012): 326–336. snyder, allan, terry bossomaier, and d. john mitchell. “concept formation: ‘object’ attributes dynamically inhibited from conscious awareness.” journal of integrative neuroscience 3.1 (2004): 31–46. sobel, david. “a place in the world: adults’ memories of childhood’s special places.” children’s environments quarterly 7.4 (1990): 5–12. stedman, r. c. “is it really just a social construction? the contribution of the physical environment to sense of place.” society and natural resources 16.8 (2003): 671–685. online. striniste, nancy a., and robin c. moore. “early childhood outdoors: a literature review related to the design of childcare environments.” children’s environments quarterly 6.4 (1989): 25–31. ulrich, r.s. “view through a window may influence recovery from surgery.” science 224.4647 (1984): 420–421. vallortigara, giorgio, allan snyder, gisela kaplan, patrick bateson, nicola s. clayton, and lesley j. rogers. “are animals autistic savants?” plos biology 6.2 (2008): 0208–0214. online. webster, donna, and arie w. kruglanski. “individual differences in need for cognitive closure.” journal of personality and social psychology 67.6 (1994): 1049–1062. willett, cynthia. “water and wing give wonder: trans-species cosmopolitanism.” phaenex 8.2 (2013): 185–208. wilson, edward o. biophilia. harvard up, 1984. microsoft word dominguez-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:1 daisy domínguez at the intersection of animal and area studies: fostering latin americanist and caribbeanist animal studies1 in her article “the chicken or the iegue: human-animal relationships and the columbian exchange,” marcy norton contrasts the european human/beast hierarchy with the caribbean and central and south american indigenous institution known as iegue, where a tamed animal or human child is adopted, and the more essential distinction is tame/wild, regardless of species. norton argues that amerindians’ relationship with adopted non-human animals, rather than biology or wild mammal scarcity as writers like jared diamond suggest, is the reason these animals were not domesticated or consumed, leading her to question domestication as a “eurocentric (or eurasian-centric) modernization narrative” (30-31, 54-55). “by recovering iegue,” she writes, “we can destabilize domestication and the narrative of teleological, eurocentric historical progress that goes along with it” (55). her insightful study suggests ways that native cultures may have influenced our understanding of the notion of “pets” and bolsters the case for using the humanities as a way to debate contemporary animal personhood. it also questions the primacy of non-native — and non-native — ways of seeing (56-57). norton’s study is an example of the innovative possibilities of animal studies scholarship that intersects with area studies. because area studies scholarship often deals with the history and legacy of colonialism, area studies-based animal studies offers opportunities to learn about intersecting systems of discrimination and oppression across species, race, ethnicity, and gender. those familiar with latin american and caribbean2 history will logically seek and definitely find parallels between the exploitation of animals and humans in the colonization of the americas. however, as norton shows, these intersectional studies also offer other possibilities. area studies-based animal studies scholarship, which is more likely to examine noneuropean epistemologies, also brings us one step closer to challenging our current perception of humankind’s relationship to animals because it forces us to shift and expand our understanding of the world. likewise, connecting these two fields may serve as a way to recover the historical relationships to non-human animals of a multiplicity of cultures. despite the influence of the european animal protection society model on its latin american counterparts, area studies scholarship might uncover prior — even ancient — native examples of animal benevolence, like indian emperor daisy domínguez -at the intersection of animal and area studies: fostering latin americanist and caribbeanist animal studies 67 (and buddhist) ashoka, who issued the world’s first known animal protection edict in the third century bce (de mello 396). we might also reveal unexpected power dynamics between colonizers who lacked knowledge of native animals and the environment, and were therefore dependent on indigenous peoples’ knowledge. in “global entomologies: insects, empires, and the ‘synthetic age‘ in world history,” edward d. melillo concludes that …the histories of shellac, silk and [mexican] cochineal — coupled with the stories of their cultivators and consumers — have much to tell us about under-studied aspects of globalization, especially the unacknowledged dependencies of “the west” upon indigenous knowledge from outlying geographical regions and unfamiliar ecosystems. (269-270) in the same vein, sara vicuña guengerich argues that spaniards’ inability to tame bison in colonial north america made them dependent on pueblos and plains indians for bison products (266, 268). as a historian, i decided to find the english and spanish language3 animal studies histories related to latin america published in the last decade and to examine to what extent these works were fulfilling the promise of this type of intersectional scholarship. i have included animal studies histories of nonhuman animals or species as well as histories that examine humankind’s relationships with nonhuman animals. at times, i make references to works related to colonial spain when they contain references to “new world” animals and the american southwest prior to u.s. annexation because of the spanish influence there. i do this because it provides a fuller picture of anything whatsoever available related to latin america. while animals have been an integral part of life in pre-columbian indigenous civilizations and all communities in latin america since, scholarship that describes or acknowledges these encounters and relationships alone does not constitute animal studies scholarship. this paper deals with animal studies proper, which i will explain in more detail below, but which basically means scholarship that makes human-animal relationships a central part of its argument. the fact that i felt the need to broaden my scope in this way underlines one of the findings of this paper: that we need to encourage more animal studies history scholarship relating to and emanating from latin america. as a librarian, i am also interested in ways that libraries can encourage this scholarship. the latter part of this paper provides a snapshot of library holdings at the intersection of latin american studies and animal studies. i discuss some ways that animal humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 68 studies and latin american studies perspectives can inform the classification of monographs and the descriptions of special collections for better access. finally, i offer examples of collection development efforts that would both support and encourage animal studies scholarship. animals in latin american history. as may be seen in their artistry, cuisine, medicine, and in the spiritual realm, pre-columbian cultures held animals in high regard and had a close connection to them. to cite but a few examples, aztecs offered an array of animals — including mollusks, fish, quetzals, snakes, wolves, jaguars, pumas, and crocodiles (which indicate extensive trade networks) — to the aztec gods tlaloc and huitzilopochtli (urbanus 16). certain animals, like guinea pigs and spondylus in the central andes, were considered a high status food or used in jewelry and as currency, respectively (lefebvre and de france 18). in his letters, cortes describes the many types of birds that lived in moctezuma's ornamental gardens and pools, as well as all the fish it took to feed them: “three hundred men were in charge of their feeding — they consumed daily 250 pounds of fish, taken from the lake surrounding the city — and there were also ‘veterinarians’ who attended the sick birds” (de asúa 27-8). arriving european explorers, government officials, missionaries, and scientists also observed and admired latin american and caribbean animals, and have written about them with different ends in mind. spanish imperial surveys, or relaciones geográficas, and other relaciones discussed how european livestock were faring in the americas and mostly dealt with animals in terms of their economic value or liability and usefulness (alves 10, 202-6, 211). some chroniclers used animal products to judge social status, deeming those who hunted and/or ate cow and pig more civilized than those whose diet consisted mostly of vegetables and animals like snakes or locusts (pavaozuckerman and loren 207). as indentured and free indigenous peoples, enslaved and free africans and afrodescendants, arriving spaniards, and other immigrant groups formed what have become latin american and caribbean cultures, each group has contributed its own understandings to form new relationships vis-à-vis nonhuman animals. free and enslaved africans and afro-descendants in seventeenth century colombia and the caribbean used hens and roosters as part of their curative practices (restrepo 40-42). animals feature prominently in works of literature, from the popol vuh, the k’iche maya creation story, to contemporary mayan folktales (rodríguez-mejía and sexton). since pre-colombian times, mesoamerican indigenous peoples have believed in nahualli and tonalli, concepts related to the projection of human souls onto animals and animal daisy domínguez -at the intersection of animal and area studies: fostering latin americanist and caribbeanist animal studies 69 counterparts, respectively, both having undergone mythical and religious syncretism since the period of contact (musgrave-portilla 3-4). latin americans have a long history with nonhuman animals. however, latin american animal studies scholarship is a more recent phenomenon. latin american and caribbean animal studies. animal studies scholarship4 began to emerge in the mid-1980s. it examines human-animal interactions and relationships and may also extend to concern for the plight of nonhuman animals. in her seminal chapter “a left-handed blow: writing the history of animals,” the influential animal studies scholar erica fudge discusses the impossibility of writing a true history of animals because animals are unable to leave documentation. indeed, this void is behind one of the key debates in the field; to wit, whether histories of animals can only be representational and anthropocentric since animals do not leave the types of documentation that historians are used to using, and because of our inability to understand them in any case. for the most part, historians writing on this subject do not interpret non-human animals as having agency in the same way that humans do. in her work on colonial guatemala, for example, martha few argues that while locust swarms did not have agency or sentience, they were nevertheless “historical agents” because the considerable amount of destruction they caused forced human response (69). however, some scholars, like jason hribal, are bolder in their claims, analyzing, for example, how draft animals actively resisted abuse at the hands of their human masters.5 in her more recent essay “renaissance things,” fudge conceptualizes the history of animals much more broadly, allowing even inanimate animals some level of agency. by bringing actor network theory and thing theory to bear on animal studies, she argues that even animal products, which form objects in subject-object relationships, assert themselves by altering how subjects perceive themselves (41-56).6 including historical inquiries of “objectified animals, that is, animals living or dead” (44) in our understanding of animal studies is an important shift because it encourages analysis of the main way that many people see or (sometimes unconsciously) interact with animals: as objects. “without human intention, and indeed potentially against human intention, the animal-madeobject can be seen from [thing theory] perspective to construct new meanings, beings, and relationships,” fudge writes (45), thereby opening up many more possibilities for us to consider nonhuman (and human) animals. previously, fudge created a threefold classification system for animal histories: intellectual, humane, and holistic. in brief, intellectual histories are those that primarily focus on how humans have perceived animals. mid-twentieth century animal histories, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 70 which predate the emergence of animal studies, can largely be classified as intellectual because they tended to be chronological histories about how national or regional species or fauna were used in the colonization of the americas. these works include robert moorman denhardt’s the horse of the americas (norman: university of oklahoma press, 1947) and john grier varner and jeannette johnson varner’s dogs of the conquest (norman: university of oklahoma press, 1983). more recent examples include miguel rodríguez’s tras las huellas del perro indígena: estudio arqueológico del llamado perro “mudo” de nuestros indios taínos7 (hato rey, puerto rico: publicaciones puertorriqueñas editores, 2007), an archaeological and historical study that traces the pre-columbian dog in puerto rico. dunmire's new mexico's spanish livestock heritage: four centuries of animals, land, and people (university of new mexico 2013) is a history of the economies, transformations, and conflicts that surrounded the introduction of spanish livestock into the caribbean, mesoamerica, and later, present-day new mexico, once part of spanish-ruled new spain. although dunmire is not concerned with human-animal relationships like the others, his history evinces how important european livestock was to the colonization and development of cultures in the new world — as food, transportation, clothing, fertilizer, soap, barter, and as agricultural workers. this foundational research is necessary but differs in kind from studies that analyze human-animal relationships and what these say about us as humans. fudge labels these “humane histories.” animal studies scholarship in this category often questions human exceptionalism and human/animal or wild/domestic binaries (few and tortorici 5). historians debate how new methodologies might support a “history from below” or one that uses interdisciplinary scholarship in an attempt to see from the animals’ perspective.8 because latin americanist scholarship has until recently dealt more with animals in symbolic or representational terms (few and tortorici 7), this questioning of anthropocentric thinking might seem more prevalent in north american and european scholarship, which includes more histories related to animal welfare and companion animals. however, as recent scholarship makes clear, animal welfare is not a new concern for latin americans.9 there are several examples of latin american animal advocates and thinkers who pondered animal well-being. mexican novelist josé joaquín fernández de lizardi’s el periquillo sarniento, written in the early 19th century, includes a denunciation of bullfighting on humane grounds (gómez-centurión jiménez 173; alves 198-9). several images of latin america’s patron saint of animals, san martin de porres, depict the cleric feeding multiple species — a dog, a cat, a mouse, and sometimes a bird daisy domínguez -at the intersection of animal and area studies: fostering latin americanist and caribbeanist animal studies 71 — who are normally seen as enemies.10 while alves notes that this symbolically served as a socio-political metaphor for inter-human harmony (176-177), porres really did minister to animals. further, latin american animal protection societies go back to at least 1882 in cuba (funes monzote 220).11 funes monzote and exbalin oberto both mention less formal public concern for both livestock in mid-19th century cuba and the killing of stray dogs in mid 19th century mexico, respectively (funes monzote 222; exbalin oberto 108). the 19th and early 20th centuries saw various efforts to institutionalize animal welfare. reinaldo funes monzote’s chapter on the cuban society for the protection of animals and plants of the island of cuba (sociedad protectora de animales y plantas de la isla de cuba) traces how the writing of a variety of professionals made the case for animal welfare — on anthropocentric grounds such as hygiene and the effect animal cruelty had on mankind’s humanity, as well as making connections between slavery and cruelty toward children (225, 234). the multiplicity of motivations behind animal welfare initiatives also relates to mauricio alejandro goméz's article “legislación e higiene veterinaria: medellín, 1913-1926,” where he notes that despite the creation of an animal protection society for animals in medellín, colombia in 1917, veterinary science was used to protect human, not animal, health (and primarily concerned with urban areas which is where the modernist discourse of progress played out). an example of research that straddles fudge’s “intellectual”/“humane” divide is regina horta duarte’s chapter on the bird protection movement in early 20th century brazil, which discusses the influence of both european and north american feather consumption patterns and foreign bird conservation organizations and campaigns on brazil. her article also discusses the way that birds in early 20th century brazil were anthropomorphized with qualities that writers aspired for children, women, and citizens (290-292). birds were portrayed as “tireless collaborators in the greatness of the nation, ‘little workmen’,” and compared to the “citizen-worker who, in struggling for his own individual wealth, would never, even for a moment, cease to fight for the wealth of the nation as well” (290). silvia urich’s los perritos bandidos: la protección de los animales de la ley sarmiento a la ley perón, seeks to unearth the history of argentina’s robust animal welfare movement which stretches back until at least the late 19th century and, along with cuba, is the longest standing animal welfare movement in latin america.12 although urich states that her book chronicles the argentine animal welfare movement and not the animals themselves, i would argue that it is a “humane” history because it documents how people concerned with animals not only perceived the latter, but actively defended them. the revelation that two of argentina’s most well known presidents, domingo humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 72 faustino sarmiento (1868-1874) and juan domingo perón (1946-1955, 1973-1974), played important roles in this movement will perhaps be of interest to a wider readership. sarmiento was responsible for the first march for animals in the plaza de mayo, and petitioned against the reintroduction of bullfights in buenos aires; perón was an animal lover and petitioned for the animal protection penal law that passed in 1954. urich shares fascinating insights into the peculiarities of and dissonance within the argentinian animal welfare movement. one of these is the discourse surrounding bullfighting. while president sarmiento viewed the practice as an unnationalistic colonialist imposition (34-6), president carlos pellegrini would later argue that it was necessary in order to moderate argentinian virility (65). another interesting twist is that early in the movement sarmiento promoted the national zoo and deemed it as the ideal destination for visitors celebrating animal day, until later when zoos were deemed cruel institutions (101-2). while animal studies scholarship related to latin america and other parts of the world holds the promise of debunking myths that concern for animal welfare is derived from europe, i should note that currently the literature mostly evidences how the european animal protection society model influenced similar societies in latin america. in los perros bandidos, for example, urich uncovers collaborations between the british royal society for the prevention of cruelty toward animals, the american society for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and their counterpart in argentina, the sociedad argentina para la protección animal, including their mutual fight to improve the condition of horses by way of new shoes and water fountains (42). this connection complicates my optimism about home-grown animal benevolence, as well as animal welfarists’ historical recognition of intersecting systems of oppression, since even in latin america animal welfare societies were historically dominated by white elites (whether nationals or europeans) and have advocated for animal welfare while evincing bias and disregard toward the lower classes (horta duarte 281; funes monzote 221). fudge’s third category, the “holistic” history, is defined as one that goes the furthest by problematizing and helping us question what it is to be human. the strongest example of this type of historical scholarship is gazir sued’s tiranía antropocéntrica: historia de la crueldad contra primates no-humanos en puerto rico, 1936-2012,13 a passionate and wellresearched history of the u.s.-supported primate monkey colonies of puerto rico. tracing their history as far back as the late 1930s when the indian government as well as american and indian animal welfare advocates protested the exportation of monkeys to the americas on religious and cultural as well as humane grounds (43, 46), sued daisy domínguez -at the intersection of animal and area studies: fostering latin americanist and caribbeanist animal studies 73 meticulously documents the importation, maintenance, and experimentation on these primate populations, detailing the many cases of death by malnutrition, suffocation, and dehydration. throughout, he argues that much of the experimentation purportedly carried out for the benefit of humans has really just been cloaked in scientific rhetoric. examples of their mistreatment and torture include releasing monkeys into new territories without adequate provisions to test their ability to adapt to a new environment (147-9); deliberately injuring them to test foregone conclusions, as when monkeys are asphyxiated before (or after) birth to discover whether this will cause mental retardation or learning defects (125); deliberately blinding them to test their survival and development (192-3); and surgically giving the monkeys brain lesions in order to observe their subsequent behavior: the monkeys were attacked or pushed out by their peers and eventually died (158-9). sued’s conclusion, an impassioned plea for the puerto rican and human population to rethink our relationship with these and other captive animals, such as those in the puerto rican national circus, squarely situates his work within critical animal studies (cas), which has been differentiated from animal studies as being more explicitly concerned with animal liberation. this monograph is also remarkable because cas tends to be dominated by social scientists. interestingly, the two most recent major works on animal welfare — either as a movement (urich) or as the impetus behind his research (sued) — are in spanish. by contrast, a significant amount of current english language scholarship relates to the columbian exchange. latin american scholars’ proximity to local archival materials in latin america, coupled with the relative novelty of latin american and caribbeanbased animal studies scholarship, might explain these diverging tendencies. it will be interesting to track whether these interests merge as animal studies becomes more widely encouraged and accepted as a path of scholarly inquiry. these english language scholarly works cover a wide gamut of study, including animals as vectors of disease;14 cases of bestiality; the environmental impact that old world animals had on the human and animal populations of the americas; and more symbolic work on ways that europeans interpreted the americas through its animals or how indigenous peoples viewed european animals. in the animals of spain: an introduction to imperial perceptions and human interaction with other animals, 1492-1826, abel a. alves analyzes the scholarly writings of 16th century scholars francisco de vitoria and juan ginés de sepúlveda, who discussed animal-human hierarchies as a means to argue for indigenous peoples’ standing in the spanish empire (alves 49). in his chapter “the year the people turned into cattle: the end of the world in new spain, 1558,” león garcía garagarza discusses the eschatological concerns that led the 16th century indigenous mexican diviner juan teton to exhort his people not to eat or wear products derived from european animals, so that they would not be turned into the same at the end of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 74 their cosmic cycle (31-61). in his study “los perros de la guerra o el ‘canibalismo canino’ en la conquista,” ricardo piqueras céspedes relates how european dogs used by conquistadors to terrorize, subdue, and kill indigenous peoples, homosexuals, traitors, women who were unwilling to submit to sexual coercion, and for sheer sport (193-4). by deeming these dogs (some of whom became so famous that we still know their names: becerillo in puerto rico; his son, leoncico, from santo domingo; and bruto in florida) “canine cannibals,” the author implicates the colonizers for using the dogs as proxies during the early years of colonization and later dismissing them, once indians became essential as tributary labor and the dogs became a menace to livestock (191-192, 196, 200). like much of the most thought-provoking animal studies scholarship, recent works centering on the period of contact involve epistemological questioning. as miguel de asúa and roger french note in a new world of animals: early modern europeans on the creatures of iberian america, historical research on the contact period involves analyses of colliding cosmologies where, for example, europeans tried to make sense of and to name animals unknown to them (xv). in the animals of spain, alves discusses how the 18th century mexican historian francisco javier clavijero countered claims (by the comte de buffon and cornelius de pauw) that animals of the americas were inferior, by challenging the linnaean classification system and pointing to various large indigenous animals such as guanacos (alves 206-8). latin americanist histories of animals also often examine and make parallels between human and nonhuman animals’ experience of colonialism and imperialism in the same way that animal studies scholarship that is not area studies-based makes parallels between the exploitation of animals and women or enslaved peoples. martha few uses locust extermination campaigns in colonial guatemala as a way to examine the broader colonialist project of subduing not only human populations, but also the environment and animals (83-4). in his article “colonialism and wildlife in belize,” richard r. wilk critiques an urban european population that reinforced the peripheral status of rural populations through culinary and extractive hunting practices: the hunt brought men together in sociable groups, emphasized colonial racial boundaries, and dramatically symbolized the dominion of white men over the landscapes which the empire had conquered and controlled. in many parts of the empire the hunt was a dramatically public event which enlisted ranks of local people as beaters, bearers and servants, and daisy domínguez -at the intersection of animal and area studies: fostering latin americanist and caribbeanist animal studies 75 involved a series of ceremonies and rituals. it often violated local customs or taboos and led to the destruction of crops and property. (9) how can librarians foster animal studies scholarship? as a latin americanist librarian with a background in latin american studies, history, and library science, i would like to note some trends in how this scholarship is being cataloged, collected, and referenced. the animal studies literature within the field of latin american studies is still relatively new, which requires collection development librarians to actively seek this material out. using traditional methods like catalogs, databases, and finding aids — which in turn involves the leadership of catalogers, book dealers, and archivists — is a good start. i hope this assessment will help not only librarians who are building collections and helping patrons at their institutions, but other scholars who may be correctly convinced that there is more out there on their topic if only they could find it. of particular concern to anyone interested in seeing these works more broadly disseminated is the issue of how they are cataloged. this is obvious to librarians who help other scholars at the point of need or who, in their collection development capacity, are building collections for these scholars’ (future) needs. but it is also important for scholars who are searching for these books on their own because the subject headings assigned to books are pathways to those books. the more accurate those subject headings are, the easier it will be to find those books. most academic library books are cataloged in the online catalog worldcat using the library of congress classification system, which means that their call numbers are assigned based on one of the library of congress subject headings (lcsh) used to describe them. these are all the lcsh i was able to compile for existing histories of animals in the caribbean and latin america (excluding animal products). i use brackets where there are multiple possibilities as in species, animal name, country, territory, or century: • [species/animal name] — [country/territory] — history. • animal culture — [country/territory] — [province/state] — history. • animal rights movement — [country/territory] — history. • animal welfare — [species/animal name/country/territory] — history. • animal welfare — law and legislation — [country/territory] — history. • animal welfare — [country/territory] — history. • animals — latin america — history. • animals — symbolic aspects — latin america. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 76 • bestiaries — [country/territory] — [history and criticism]. • domestic animals — [country/territory] — history. • human-animal relationships—[country/territory/latin america] — history. • human-animal relationships —[country/territory/latin america] — history — [#] century. • livestock -[country/territory] — history • pets -[country/territory] — history. • pets -[country/territory] — history — [#] century. • primates as laboratory animals — [country/territory] — history. • wildlife conservation — [country/territory] — history. using critical theory to question oppressive systems in librarianship, librarians writing within the field of critical librarianship have discussed how subject headings and controlled vocabulary may contain implicit prejudice (drabinski, 198-9; morales, knowles, & bourg, 445). in the majority of the examples above, the subject headings are classified using a “country/territory/latin america” structure, thereby prioritizing national boundaries. this is problematic for pre-columbian civilizations and contemporary ethnic groups who straddle multiple nations. to classify their relationships with animals by nation-state is to falsely demarcate the extensiveness of their epistemologies both in the present and historically. below, i include some subject headings i found for books that are not animal studies histories in order to show that there are indeed some lcsh which include civilizations or ethnic categories with or without regard to nation-state. • animals — [country] — nomenclature [(popular)] — dictionaries — [language, including indigenous languages] • [civilization/ethnic group]15 — domestic animals. • indians of mexico — ethnozoology • indians of south america — domestic animals — [country] — [province] these monographs classified by ethnic group, however, do not include as many subheadings, but rather choose separate lcsh to achieve their goal. for example, one is more likely to find a book with a lcsh such as “animals,” “animals in art,” or “marine animals in art” used in addition to an lcsh related to a civilization or ethnic group such as “nahuatl language — texts.” it is surprising that there is no lcsh for “human-animal relationships — [civilization/ethnic group] — history,” which gives the impression that indigenous peoples do not have ancient relationships with and knowledge of animals. daisy domínguez -at the intersection of animal and area studies: fostering latin americanist and caribbeanist animal studies 77 the animal studies histories subject headings above are on a par with the lcshs for histories of animals in the united states and great britain, except that the latter include a few more headings, as well as variations and granular information or subheadings, noted in bold below: • animal welfare — [country] — history — [#] century. • animals and civilization — [country/continent] — history — [date] • animals and history. • domestic animals — [country] — history — [#] century. • domestic animals — social aspects — england — history — 19th century. • human beings — animal nature — history. • pet owners — [country] — [city] — history — [date]. • pets — social aspects — [country] — [city] — history — 19th century. • pet owners — history. as more histories are written, more variations on these lcshs should follow, but the prioritization of nation-state over civilization or ethnic subheadings is something that could be rectified in the short term. cumbersome for scholars is the interesting fact that spanish-language monographs may not be consistently classified with english-language library of congress subject headings, and may therefore be overlooked. monographs are also not always classified with spanish-language subject headings, and even when they are there is no consistency, since there is no one standard for spanish language subject headings, or encabezamientos (kreyche 390). the issue of language may not be unique to the cataloging of histories of animals but rather, latin americanist — and more broadly, some area studies — librarianship. monographs are also not always classified using french or portuguese subject headings, let alone indigenous language subject headings. in order to truly make this (and all) scholarship accessible to all and to build upon the work of indigenous language revitalization projects, multilingual subject heading standardization would be a very welcome endeavor. for this study related to spanish-language scholarship, the following is a list of some of the encabezamientos i was able to find that relate to animal welfare. interestingly, some headings only include the nation-state spain rather than [país] as a subheading because no latin american countries were classified under that heading. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 78 • animales domésticos — en el arte. • animales domésticos — en la literatura • animales domésticos — historia — siglo xviii. • animales exóticos — españa. • animales — protección — [derecho] — [españa]. • animales — derechos. • animales, trato de los — [derecho/protección] — [país]. • animales de laboratorio. • animales en vías de extinción — protección — [países de la unión europea]. animales silvestres — [país/territorio] — historia. • aves — protección. • bienestar animal — [derecho] — [país]. • bienestar animal — derecho comunitario • bienestar de los animales — [país]. • corridas de toros — aspectos morales. • derechos de los animales — [país]. • experimentación con animales — aspectos morales. • fauna — protección. • industria agropecuaria — aspectos morales y éticos. • mamíferos en vías de extinción — [países de la unión europea]. • perros — chile — santiago. • relaciones hombre animal — [aspecto religioso/aspectos éticos] — [iglesia católica]. • responsabilidad por daños de animales — españa. • trato de los animales — [aspectos jurídicos/ aspecto(s) moral(es y éticos)/aspectos psicológicos/aspecto religioso] — [país]. • trato de los animales — [legislación] — [país]. only one of the histories of animals that is germane to this study, lydia vázquez and juan manuel ibeas altamira’s perros y gatos del rococó, was classified with encabezamientos alone. the book relates to spain, but i would like to use it as an example because it is probably not a coincidence that it is also the only book i could not obtain via inter-library loan, as there were no circulating copies in north america. in other words, it is possible that monographs only cataloged with these spanish language subject headings do not receive as much visibility or attention as do those cataloged with lcshs. it is important for librarians and other scholars who are searching for more animal histories to seek out possible encabezamientos because this strategy may unearth daisy domínguez -at the intersection of animal and area studies: fostering latin americanist and caribbeanist animal studies 79 overlooked books. with such an encouraging and rich list of animal studies related encabezamientos, it is interesting to note that the majority of them do not denote histories (and therefore the books thus classified were not included in this study). although the recent english-language monographs discussed in this paper are held at several hundred libraries, the 2012 and 2013 spanish-language titles are held at only 4 and 5 libraries, respectively, despite having been classified with (english-language) lcshs (see table below). since these two monographs were published in puerto rico and argentina, respectively, and not by academic presses, it is possible that they were overlooked because they were left out of library approval plans. these plans, used by librarians to coordinate their acquisitions with book dealers based abroad, outline the types of material published in latin america and the caribbean that will be acquired by a library. if animal studies is not currently a category in library approval plans, one way to be an advocate for this field of study is to request that book dealers include it in library profiles. worldcat holdings for the most recently published animal studies books title holdings lcshs used to classify these books sued, gazir. tiranía antropocéntrica: historia de la crueldad contra primates nohumanos en puerto rico, 19362012. san juan, puerto rico: la grieta, 2012. print. 4 • primates — puerto rico — history. • animal welfare — puerto rico — history. • primates as laboratory animals — puerto rico — history. • rhesus monkey — puerto rico — history. • patas monkey — puerto rico — history. urich, silvia. los perritos bandidos: la protección de los animales de la ley sarmiento a la ley perón. buenos aires: catálogos, 2013. print. 5 • animal welfare — argentina — history. • human-animal relationships — argentina — history. • animal welfare — law and legislation — argentina — history. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 80 • animal rights movement — argentina — history. de asúa, miguel and roger french. a new world of animals: early modern europeans on the creatures of iberian america. burlington:ashgate, 2005. print. 214 • de asúa, miguel and roger french. a new world of animals: early modern europeans on the creatures of iberian america. burlington:ashgate, 2005. print. few, martha and zeb tortorici, eds. centering animals in latin american history. durham: duke university press, 2013. print 362 • animals — latin america — history. • human-animal relationships — latin america. • animals — symbolic aspects — latin america. dunmire, william w. new mexico's spanish livestock heritage: four centuries of animals, land, and people. albuquerque: university of mexico press, 2013. print. 552 • livestock — new mexico — history. • livestock — spain — history. • domestic animals — new mexicohistory. alves, abel a. the animals of spain: an introduction to imperial perceptions and human interaction with other animals. boston: brill,2011. print. 962 • human-animal relationships — latin america. • human-animal relationships — spain — history. • animals — spain. librarians have been critical of the lcsh system for being chauvinistic, classist, heteronormative, and more (drabinski 198-9; schroeder 62). librarians interested in animal studies would add speciesism to that list, objecting to how anthropocentric many subject headings are, for their main interest is how animal lives affect human lives rather than the other way around. one way we might begin to decenter the human in animal studies related descriptors is to attempt to classify from animals’ perspective. for example, i have yet to see a descriptor that relates two or more nonhuman animals or species as in the subject heading “human-animal relationships.” another example of daisy domínguez -at the intersection of animal and area studies: fostering latin americanist and caribbeanist animal studies 81 human privilege is the neutral lcsh assigned to sued’s disturbing account of primate research in puerto rico: “primates as laboratory animals — puerto rico — history.” from the primates’ perspective, the descriptor terminology might include words like “confinement,” “crimes against,” “cruelty,” “torture,” or “violence against.” there are indeed lcshs for “domestic animals — crimes against” and “pets — crimes against,” which is a start, but these indicate humans’ selective relationship with companion animals. the broader subject headings “animal rights,” “cruelty to animals,” and “speciesism” do exist. however, these subject headings may not be used when cataloging an animal history related to institutions that are deemed benign or neutral by some and cruel by others, like circuses, research laboratories, and zoos, among others. another example of anthropocentric thinking relates to scholarship that centers on microbes and insects, which are not uniformly classified as animal studies, even while scholars concede that these animals, like mammals, are “inadvertent historical actors” (mcneill 3). martha few discusses the methodological and theoretical difficulty of writing about insects, animals not seen as worthy of protection or conservation (64). the lcshs for john robert mcneill’s mosquito empires: ecology and war in the greater caribbean, 1620-1914 offer a case in point: • human ecology — caribbean area — history. • nature — effect of human beings on — caribbean area — history. • yellow fever — environmental aspects — caribbean area — history. • malaria — environmental aspects — caribbean area -history. • epidemics — caribbean area — history. • malaria — caribbean area — history. • yellow fever — caribbean area — history. • mosquitoes — caribbean area — pathogenicity. • ecological and environmental processes — caribbean region. the only subject heading that refers to the mosquito itself is not referenced as a history, as would be the case with other nonhuman animals. there is a tendency for historians to see insects as pests (melillo 238) or objects of study in the lcshs they are assigned: • flies — control — [state] — [county] — history — 20th century. • insect pests — history. • insects as carriers of disease — history. • mosquitoes — control — [country] — history — [century]. • tephritidae — research — hawaii — history. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 82 this tendency seems related to the insect in question and the region being covered. for example, insects like bees, beetles, and butterflies, which have better reputations where humans are concerned, have less menacing lcshs: • entomology — [country] — history. • bees — [region] — history. • bees — religious aspects. • beetles — [country] — religious aspects — history. • butterflies — [country] — history — [century]. • insects — religious aspects — history. • introduced insects — australia — history. • stag beetles — [country] — history. entomology-related subject headings, which often refer to animal products, offer some examples on how animal studies descriptors may be expanded to integrate histories of “things.” by also monitoring monographs about animal products, we can keep abreast of material of interest to animal studies scholars, even though those items may not be considered animal studies themselves. below are some examples of animal product lcshs: • bee culture — [country/state] — history. • butterflies — collection and preservation — [country] — history. • leather industry and trade — [country] — history. • lepidopterology — [country] — history. • moths — collection and preservation — [country] — history. • silk [industry] — [country] — history. • silk weaving — [country] — history. the subject-heading discussion above relates to monographic classification in catalogs, but this study includes many articles as well. my bibliographic approach to these intersecting fields of study has afforded me a newfound respect for the importance of area studies databases, which is where we generally turn to find research on a much more focused level: articles and, sometimes, isolated book chapters not found in monographic records for anthologies. general databases do not do justice to all the francophone, hispanophone, and lusophone animal studies scholarship in latin american studies. databases such as the hispanic american periodicals index (or hapi) index foreign language material not covered in predominantly english language databases, and work alongside other complementary full text databases such as the red daisy domínguez -at the intersection of animal and area studies: fostering latin americanist and caribbeanist animal studies 83 de revistas científicas de américa latina y el caribe, españa y portugal (or redalyc). although history articles in animal studies are not plentiful, archaeological scholarship that would be of interest to animal studies scholars is particularly well covered. area studies scholars should not consider a search complete until they have consulted specialized databases in order to counter the tendency to focus on english language material alone. scholarship in indigenous languages continues to be marginalized since “advanced search” features do not regularly include native languages as options. it may be that this is related to the low scholarly output in indigenous languages or to the staff’s lack of fluency in these languages. including these languages as options would signal a more inclusive environment and would be another act of advocacy, because it would mean that these organizations not only cared to actively seek this material out, but also that they hired fluent speakers to catalog this material specifically. collection development. latin americanist historians writing animal histories are conducting research using a wide array of specialized and archival sources, such as hunting manuals, sugar-production handbooks, ornithological texts, fashion magazines, ship logs, travel accounts, recetarios, and hybrid alphabetic and pictographic annals. sources also include some novel finds, like historical accounts written not by historians but by research scientists at the rhesus macaque and patas monkey research colony in the cayo santiago islet of puerto rico (ahuja 198). there are undoubtedly a myriad books that may be mined for different perspectives on all sorts of historical humananimal relationships. below, i note some of the ones that have occurred to me: 1. historical indigenous language dictionaries serve as “ethnographic compendia” (norton 37) through which colonial historians (and others) investigate the ways that colonial indigenous peoples named and therefore understood both amerindian and european animals. these dictionaries are a basic component for an animal studies collection. 2. librarians should collect the writings of several key scholars and naturalists, such as the comte de buffon and father feijoo, who are repeatedly referenced by historians because of their writings on nature and fauna, and seek out latin american scholars who have written on this topic. 3. replicas of manuscripts like the florentine codex or guamán poma de ayala’s nueva corónica y buen gobierno, which are widely held at humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 84 academic libraries, contain animal imagery and text that help to decipher how pre-columbian and newly colonized societies perceived nonhuman animals in practical, spiritual and symbolic terms. a robust collection of this nature would undoubtedly expand our understanding of pre-colonial and colonial animal-human relationships and interactions. 4. contemporary ethological research is important to animal studies scholars who are trying to better understand animal behavior. 5. while norton advises scholars to be conscious of tendencies to use contemporary anthropological (and ethnographic) scholarship to “upstream,” or overlay past indigenous societies with a timeless “ethnographic present,” or not allow for local and regional variations (3536), these works are indeed used to write interdisciplinary animal histories because they help historians understand indigenous perceptions of nonhuman animals. 6. there are a host of monographs from other disciplines, which will be useful to animal studies scholars. to name only a few: archaeological works could lead to knowledge of spiritual, culinary, and other practices involving animals; artwork, including postcards and photography, are often used as primary source material; and environmental research that discusses such things as pesticides and the endangering of animal habitats can be closely tied to this field of study as well. 7. it would be impossible to list all the types of publications related to animal products that would be of interest to animal studies scholars, but some include cookbooks; books on clothing and fashion; and medical/veterinary books detailing such things as animal tissue valves and animal testing. there are likewise many types of archival materials one could list, but some examples would be documents that list precolumbian tributary animal products, and documentation from obrajes where forced indigenous labor was used to create textiles, likely dyed using insects. 8. police records, import/export ledgers and documentation, and legislative archives are other broad categories that would be of interest to daisy domínguez -at the intersection of animal and area studies: fostering latin americanist and caribbeanist animal studies 85 animal studies scholars as a way to trace animal-related crimes, trade, and laws. 9. on a more panoramic note, research related to central america and south america (with the exception of argentina) is sparse. more bibliographic sleuthing may be warranted to discover research on these areas or to unearth primary documentation that will make it possible. archival and special collections. there are several ways that archivists can help make animal studies related collections more visible. the least labor intensive is to create and edit finding aids with human-animal studies scholarship in mind. because this is a relatively new field, currently held archival and special collections are likely to be of interest animal studies scholars, but were never described in a way that this population would find them. by including the phrase “animal studies” and related terminology in online descriptions to relevant collections, scholars would be more likely to find these collections. there is also work to be done in identifying and preserving historical literature. urich, for example, identifies several key publications from the argentinian animal welfare movement, including mosquito, el zoófilo argentino (the official publication of sapa) and boletín de la sarmiento (one of the other early animal protection organizations in argentina), and in cuba el boletín de la sociedad protectora de animales y plantas. there are most likely dozens more to be identified for many more caribbean and latin american nations. in addition, there may also be curricular material or material geared toward youth used in local and/or national animal awareness or animal cruelty prevention initiatives such as brazil’s “bird day” proposed in 1911 (horta duarte 286). librarians’ international book buying trips could include stops at animal welfare societies whose publications and records are of interest because they are related to the animal welfare movement. there are other types of documents, including ephemera, related to industries such as circuses and zoos; trade such as leather, silk, and wool; and any other number of animal products that are important to archive and preserve as well. these types of archives are of particular concern because they are more likely be found in storage or not methodically collected and not necessarily in a proper archive, as is more likely the case with material in municipal, state, or national archives that are traditionally used by scholars. archivists (and other librarians) should advocate for these documents to be archived and possibly housed in an environment conducive to their preservation and accessibility. these unique materials are also candidates for digitization, which is of particular importance for unique periodical literature that contains articles and advertisements. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 86 meeting and renewing at shifting intersections. a lot more needs to be produced to reach the critical mass achieved in american and european scholarship, but the latin american-based animal studies histories published in the last decade demonstrate that area-based scholarship offers various innovative ways to understand marginalized human and animal cultures. scholarship about intersectional human-animal oppression resulting from colonial and imperialist societies is important and is in fact lacking from certain regions in latin america. also needed are more of those histories which subvert accepted narratives and intersections, unearthing and paving ways for different epistemologies and value systems. caribbeanist and latin americanist librarians are passionate about creating wellrounded collections that cover all our regions and that include and reflect the experience of marginalized populations. nonhuman animals may be the most marginalized yet, as they are not accorded the rights that come with humanity. animal studies affords us a special opportunity to acknowledge new peripheries that are farther afield than we are accustomed to going. as our gaze shifts, humanity is cast in a new light. we learn how we have related to animals and how we have treated them historically. unfortunately, we need not go back to the original colonization of the americas to make connections between the continued exploitation of animals and humans. to cite but one particularly ironic example with a colonialist undercurrent, the new york times recently published an account of enslaved labor aboard fishing vessels who are used to catch seafood used in pet and livestock food in the united states.16 i also write in the midst of the black lives matter movement and at a time when the concerns of lgbtq, disabled people, and other communities currently not considered normative, have made us reflect on the term “privilege” with greater nuance. one would be hard pressed to read and learn about the more poignant work in animal studies and critical animal studies without challenging one’s own positionality vis-àvis any number of marginalized communities. this novel field, which encourages interdisciplinarity and acknowledges intersectionality, is worthy of attention because in pushing the limits of understanding what it might mean and feel to be different, it might help prompt us to examine, evaluate, contest, and reevaluate perhaps the most abiding epistemologies of all: our own. notes 1. an earlier version of this paper was first presented at the 59th salalm (seminar on the acquisition of latin american library materials) conference in salt lake city, utah in may of 2014. i would like to thank panel attendee and colleague david woken for his daisy domínguez -at the intersection of animal and area studies: fostering latin americanist and caribbeanist animal studies 87 comments during my presentation and steven ovadia, zeb tortorici and the humanimalia editors and anonymous reviewers in particular for their generous and helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. 2. all future references to latin america include the caribbean as well. 3. i have basic reading level knowledge of french, kichwa (ecuadorean dialect of quechua), and portuguese, and no knowledge of other indigenous languages. were i not to have these language limitations, i would have opened this study up to other languages. 4. animal studies is also known as human-animal studies or anthrozoology, although the former term is the one generally used by scholars whose work stems from the humanities (demello 5). 5. see hribal, 101-112. 6. thank you to zeb tortorici for pointing out this source. in her review of centering animals in latin american history, emily wakild remarks that it is curious that erica fudge, a renaissance and animal studies scholar, was used as a “theoretical focus” throughout that book and suggested other anglophone scholars, if an anglophone theorist was preferred. i think that fudge's “a left handed blow” is a seminal work in animal studies scholarship no matter the regional focus, but would have gladly also incorporated latin american animal studies theorists in this paper if i had been able to find them. 7. the title translates to on the trails of the indigenous dog: archaeological study of the socalled mute dog of our taino indians (but there is not yet an english translation of the book). 8. alves and exbalin oberto in particular bring ethological research to bear on their work and marcy norton, while cautious about historical pitfalls, does an impressive job connecting observations from the 15th through 21st centuries, particularly in the field of anthropology. the editors of centering animals in latin american history also encourage historians to use methodologies from other disciplines like ethology, or the study of animal behavior; ethnography; oral history; and literary studies (few and tortorici 10). 9. there are also numerous active animal welfare movements in latin america and the caribbean today. i am monitoring #ordenanzaanimalescuenca on social media, a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 88 hashtag being used by animal advocates demanding the first animal protection ordinance in cuenca, ecuador. a vegetarian colleague who lived in argentina for a time raised eyebrows when acquaintances asked how he fared in that beef-loving country because they were not aware that there is a vegetarian community in argentina. animal studies scholarship is also sometimes directly involved in animal welfare. however nominal, the proceeds of the anthology centering animals in latin american history, for example, will be donated to latin american animal welfare organizations (few and tortorici 9). 10. incidentally, there is also at least one instance of religious figures being linked to the death of animals. the virgin mary, saint augustine, and, in particular, san nicolás de tolentino were historically called upon in guatemala to repel locust swarms that endangered crops (few 73). 11. spain’s first humane society was created in 1872 in cadiz (proctor 20). 12. animal welfare organizations were created in uruguay in 1888; in paraguay in 1905; and in medellín, colombia in 1917 (urich 62; gómez 190). my colleague marisol ramos of the university of connecticut recently shared with me an 1876 satire by puerto rican writer alejandro tapia y rivera entitled “puerto rico visto sin espejuelos por un cegato,” where he references animal welfare consciousness, suggesting that there may have been other contemporaneous movements in the caribbean. 13. the title translates to anthropocentric tyranny: a history of cruelty against non-human primates in puerto rico, 1936-2012. 14. see j. r. mcneill, mosquito empire: ecology and war in the greater caribbean, 1620-1914; martha few, “killing locusts in colonial guatemala”; and heather mccrea, “pests to vector: disease, public health, and the challenges of state-building in yucatán, mexico, 1833-1922.” 15. the categories so far include inca, maya, quechua indians, and quijo indians. 16. see ian urbina, “’sea slaves’: the human misery that feeds pets and livestock.” daisy domínguez -at the intersection of animal and area studies: fostering latin americanist and caribbeanist animal studies 89 works cited ahuja, neel. “notes on medicine, culture, and the history of imported monkeys in puerto rico.” centering animals in latin american history. ed. martha few and zeb tortorici. durham: duke up, 2013. 180-206. alves, abel a. the animals of spain: an introduction to imperial perceptions and human interaction with other animals, 1492-1826. boston: brill, 2011. de asúa, miguel, and roger french. a new world of animals: early modern europeans on the creatures of iberian america. aldershot: ashgate, 2005. demello, margo. “the animal protection movement.” animals and society: an introduction to human-animal studies. ed. margo demello. new york: columbia up, 2012. 396-418. drabinski, emily. “teaching the radical catalog.” radical cataloging: essays at the front. ed. k. r. roberto. jefferson, n.c.: mcfarland, 2008. 198-205. web. 11 july 2016. dunmire, william w. new mexico's spanish livestock heritage: four centuries of animals, land, and people. albuquerque: u of new mexico p, 2013. exbalin oberto, arnaud. “perros asesinos y matanzas de perros en la ciudad de méxico (siglos xxi-xviii).” relaciones: estudios de historia y sociedad 35.137 (2014): 91-111 . few, martha. “killing locusts in colonial guatemala.” centering animals in latin american history. ed. martha few and zeb tortorici. durham: duke up, 2013. 62-92. few, martha, and zeb tortorici. “writing animal histories.” centering animals in latin american history. ed. martha few and zeb tortorici. durham: duke up, 2013. 1-27. fudge, erica. “a left-handed blow: writing the history of animals.” representing animals. ed. nigel rothfels. bloomington, in: indiana up, 2002. 3-18. _____. “renaissance animal things.” gorgeous beasts: animal bodies in historical perspective. ed. joan b. landes, paula young lee, and paul youngquist. university park: the pennsylvania state up, 2012. 41-56. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 90 funes monzote, reinaldo. “animal labor and protection in cuba: changes in relationships with animals in the nineteenth century.” centering animals in latin american history. ed. martha few and zeb tortorici. durham: duke up, 2013. 209-242. garcía garagarza, león. “the year the people turned into cattle: the end of the world in new spain, 1558.” centering animals in latin american history. ed. martha few and zeb tortorici. durham: duke up, 2013. 31-61. gómez, mauricio alejandro. “legislación e higiene veterinaria: medellín, 1913-1926.” historia crítica 41 (may-august 2010): 187-207. web. 11 july 2016. gómez-centurión jiménez, carlos. alhajas para soberanos: los animals reales en el siglo xviii: de las leoneras a las mascotas de camera. madrid: junta de castilla y león consejería de cultra y turismo, 2011. guengerich, sara vicuña “the perceptions of the bison in the chronicles of the spanish northern frontier.” journal of the southwest 55.3 (autumn 2013): 251-276. web. 11 july 2016. horta duarte, regina. “birds and scientists in brazil: in search of protection, 18941938.” centering animals in latin american history. ed. martha few and zeb tortorici. durham: duke up, 2013. 270-301. hribal, jason. “animals, agency, and class: writing the history of animals from below.” human ecology review 14.1 (2007): 101-112. kreyche, michael. “subject headings in spanish: the lcsh-es.org bilingual database.” cataloging & classification quarterly 51. 4 (2013): 389-403. web. 14 april 2015. lefebvre, michelle j. and susan d. defrance. “guinea pigs in the pre-columbian west indies.” journal of island & coastal archaeology 9 (2014): 16-44. mccrea, heather, “pests to vector: disease, public health, and the challenges of statebuilding in yucatán, mexico, 1833-1922.” centering animals in latin american history. ed. martha few and zeb tortorici. durham: duke up, 2013. 149-179. mcneill, j. r. mosquito empire: ecology and war in the greater caribbean, 1620-1914. cambridge: cambridge up, 2010. daisy domínguez -at the intersection of animal and area studies: fostering latin americanist and caribbeanist animal studies 91 melillo, edward d. “global entomologies: insects, empires, and the 'synthetic age' in world history.” past and present 223.1 (2014): 233-270. web. 24 june 2015. morales, m., e.c. knowles, & c. bourg, “diversity, social justice, and the future of libraries.” portal: libraries & the academy, 14.3 (2014): 439-451. musgrave-portilla, l. marie. “the nahualli or transforming wizard in preand postconquest mesoamerica.” the journal of latin american lore 8.1 (1982): 3-62. norton, marcy. “the chicken or the iegue: human-animal relationships and the columbian exchange.” american historical review 120.1 (february 2015): 28-60. web. 29 june 2015. pavao-zuckerman, barnet and diana loren. “presentation is everything: foodways, tablewares, and colonial identity at presidio los adaes.” international journal of historical archaeology 16.1 (march 2012): 199-226. web. 19 april 2015. piqueras céspedes, ricardo. “los perros de la guerra o el ‘canibalismo canino’ en la conquista.” boletín americanista 56 (2006): 187-202. proctor, frank ‘trey’ iii. “amores perritos: puppies, laughter and popular catholicism in bourbon mexico city.” journal of latin american studies 46 (2014): 1-28. restrepo, luz adriana maya. “botánica y medicina africanas en la nueva granada, siglo xvii.” historia crítica 19 (1999): 31-46. rodríguez-mejía, fredy r. and james d. sexton. “depiction of animals in the popol vuh and current mayan folktales.” latin american indian literatures journal 26.1 (spring 2010): 1-26. schroeder, robert. “[interview with] emily drabinski.” critical journeys: how 14 librarians came to embrace critical practice. ed. schroeder, robert. sacramento, ca: library juice press, 2014. 59-69. sued, gazir. tiranía antropocéntrica: historia de la crueldad contra primates no-humanos en puerto rico, 1936-2012. san juan, puerto rico: la grieta, 2012. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 92 urbanus, jason. “animal offerings of the aztecs.” archaeology 66.5 (september/october 2013): 16. urbina, ian. “’sea slaves’: the human misery that feeds pets and livestock.” new york times. july 27, 2015. web. 27 july 2015. urich, silvia. los perritos bandidos: la protección de los animales de la ley sarmiento a la ley perón. buenos aires: catálogos, 2013. vázquez, lydia, and juan manuel ibeas altamira’s perros y gatos del rococó. madrid: publicaciones de la asociación de directores de escena de españa, 2013. wakild, emily. review of few, martha; tortorici, zeb, eds., centering animals in latin american history. h-environment, h-net reviews. january, 2014. http://www.hnet.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=39949 wilk, richard r. “colonialism and wildlife in belize.” belizean studies 27. 2 (2005): 4-12. microsoft word dalke-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:2 karen k. dalke & megan j. olson hunt mustangs and domestic horses: examining what we think we know about differences 1. introduction. mustangs are defined as “all unbranded and unclaimed horses and burros on public lands” (united states code: title 16, section 1331). many descended from domestic stock who were released into the wild when they were no longer needed for farm work or transportation. this liminal space, created by humans, provides them with protection while putting them at constant risk of eradication. they lie “betwixt and between” the wild and domestic continuum (turner). to some, they are a national heritage symbol and a link to our american identity. to others, they are feral animals devoid of any special protection. media has, in many ways, created the mustang. over the years, especially during national economic downturns, mustangs have been viewed as invasive species, reproducing in an effort to drive ranchers from public lands. the mythology of mustangs creates an “other” type of horse (dalke). gentzler identified widely accepted myths, including the inability to tame mustangs, and the belief that they are dumb and inbred. she attempts to dispel these myths using her personal work experience. until the release of the united states geological survey (usgs) publication entitled quantifying equid behavior — a research ethogram for freeroaming feral horses, little quantifiable data existed regarding mustang behavior (ransom & cade). the usgs study included 1,800 hours of behavioral observations of 317 adult, freeroaming wild horses from 2003-2006 on three ranges: little book cliffs wild horse range in colorado, mccullough peaks herd management area in wyoming, and pryor wild horse range in montana. behaviors were classified into 13 discrete behavioral categories, some of which included feeding, resting, locomotion, and grooming. two additional categories of “human awareness” and “out-of-sight” were used to account for observational bias. the same criteria were used in this study. the catalyst for the usgs study was to assess the impact of immunocontraceptive porcine zona pellucida (pzp), a method for controlling the mustang population. a primary goal of the usgs ethogram was to quantify behavior that could address both applied and theoretical questions. this ethogram contributes a way to study mustangs that moves beyond self-reports and anecdotal observations. because there was no way karen k. dalke & megan j. olson hunt -mustangs and domestic horses: examining what we think we know about differences 47 to predict the horses who would be observed, “instantaneous scan sampling at one minute intervals was ideal for quantifying time budget data” (ransom and cade). upon one of this manuscript’s authors adopting two mustangs from the bookcliffs, who were part of the aforementioned study, she began wondering what differences really exist between mustangs and domestic horses: do mustangs exhibit the same behaviors in a domestic setting as displayed in the wild? is there more variation between domestic horses and mustangs, or the individuals who comprise those categories? does adaptation to domestic settings limit behaviors observed in the wild? what role does human perception play? in an attempt to answer some of these questions, the focus of this study is to compare how domestic horses and mustangs utilize their time. since one of the authors lives with the six animals in the study, there was considerable information known about their history and identifying features, unlike in the usgs study. this knowledge allowed for easy identification of each animal by markings if they were not in full view when photographed. 2. subjects and methods 2.1. subjects and data collection. this research study was conducted from august 20 to september 22, 2013 at the farm of one of the authors in northeastern wisconsin, united states, using gopro cameras (gopro, inc.). this time of year was chosen since it allowed for the most daylight and the most similarity to the more semi-arid regions used in the usgs study. filming did not occur on nine days during the research study, due to weather or camera malfunctions. on days when one of the animals, mister, was used for a lesson, at least two hours passed before data gathering resumed. on september 7, 8, 14 and 15, mister was at a horse show, so no data was recorded. the cameras retain a charge for about 2.5 hours, and due to battery limitations, cameras were introduced at different times to ensure that different parts of the day were represented from 8:30 am7:00 pm central standard time. in total, 70 hours of data for each horse was collected during this timeframe, with the horses being photographed at one-minute intervals. the cameras were placed in three areas: an indoor area, a mud lot, and a pasture. the indoor area (2,916 square feet) is a building that provides shelter from weather, a water tank, and granulated minerals and salt. the indoor area opens to a mud lot measuring 10,125 square feet (0.2 acres), where the herd is sometimes confined due to weather conditions (e.g., flooding that may impact required electro-braid fencing). the mud lot offers entry into two pastures, which are alternated to ensure ample feed. the herd was humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 48 confined to the northwestern pasture, measuring 164,304 square feet, or about four acres. the horses moved freely between the indoor area, mud lot, and pasture area during a 24-hour period. at 7 am each morning, two of the horses were placed in box stalls and fed equishine (as this is a selenium-deficient region) and pellets. this was done to ensure each horse received the required amount of supplement, as finding six separate feeding places in the indoor area could not be achieved. a small amount of hay (15 pounds) was available in the indoor area in 3-5 small piles, but no other food was necessary due to pasture. cameras were synced remotely once placed in the three designated areas to ensure coverage of all animals for each photograph. the overlapping focal areas of the cameras ensured photographs of every animal at one-minute intervals. the photographs, in contrast to video, provided discrete actions for each member of the herd that could be categorized using the behavioral classifications. the photographs were downloaded each day, and a student with extensive experience with horses (hired through grants in aid of research from the university of wisconsingreen bay) categorized the animals in the photos according to behavior. specifically, the data were initially entered into the statistical package for social sciences (spss), version 21.0 (ibm corp., 2012) based on the categories used in the usgs ethogram (see table 2). on several occasions, random photographs were viewed by the researchers to ensure accuracy in coding. the herd consisted of three mustangs, two domestically-bred horses, and a burro. since this herd had been together as a unit, it did not seem humane to eliminate the burro, juanita, for the sake of the study. the most common social grouping of burros is one or two adult females and their offspring. since burros attach to one animal (in this case it was the mustang ellie), she ethically needed to be part of the group (rudman). additionally, there was concern about changes in behavior as a result of her removal, possibly influencing the outcome of the study. wild mustangs bandita and cortez were introduced individually to the herd in 2008. bandita, introduced first, allowed haltering and touching prior to cortez. in 2007, both younger mustangs were kept in an adjacent 40 × 40 foot building with access to an outdoor arena. the area bordered the northwestern paddock, allowing for acclimation karen k. dalke & megan j. olson hunt -mustangs and domestic horses: examining what we think we know about differences 49 to the other equines. in addition to these animals, there was also a stallion and mare in an adjacent paddock. originally, the expectation was to observe all animals, but health issues prevented this from occurring as the aforementioned mare and stallion were recovering from leg injuries. the entire herd had been together for nearly five years at the point of this study. table 1 provides identifying information for each participant. although not intended, the herd of equines under study fell into three naturally occurring groups: mustangs who have been in captivity for less than five years (bandita and cortez), a mustang and burro who have been in captivity for at least 15 years (ellie and juanita), and horses born in a domestic setting (cosette and mister). these groupings ultimately led to the main research question of interest: does length of domestication have an effect on behavior? the horses and burro did leave the paddock and grazing areas for varying reasons (e.g., veterinary care, riding) during the study period, but never during the observational period. every attempt was made to avoid direct interaction with humans during observational data gathering. however, some variables could not be controlled, such as wind, heat, rain, or humidity. it should be noted weather changes abruptly in northeastern wisconsin, and thus every 2.5-hour time period was associated with the primary weather condition: sunny, mixed sun and clouds, cloudy, fog, rain, snow, or hail. in addition, temperature (f), average wind speed (mph) and dew point (f, an alternative measure of humidity) were measured. the purpose for measuring these variables was to help explain why the animals chose indoor or outdoor locations. for example, there could be an increase in indoor resting during hot or sunny weather. approval for this study was granted by the university of wisconsin institutional animal care and use committee on may 22, 2013. 2.2. statistical analysis. basic summary statistics (counts, percentages) were calculated to determine those behaviors that occurred most frequently, as well as animals who spent notably larger amounts of time doing certain behaviors than other animals. additional descriptive statistics from a 3 × 3 contingency table were used to explore how length of domestication (< five years, > 15 years, or always) affected the animals’ location preferences (two outdoor fields and one indoor location). additionally, multinomial regression was used to assess the effect of environmental (weather) conditions (temperature, wind, and dew point) on where the animals chose to locate themselves. the outcome of the model was animal location (north field, west field, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 50 indoors), with all three weather variables as predictors. length of domestication was included as a covariate to control for correlation within a given group of horses. finally, in order to assess whether length of domestication (as defined above) had a significant impact on behavior (the research question of interest), mixed effects logistic regression models were used, one for each of the four behaviors (α = 0.05). specifically, a given behavior was the outcome (feeding: yes/no, e.g.), length of domestication was the fixed effect of interest, and individual horse was used as a random effect to account for correlated observations within a given horse. analyses were conducted either in spss or sas/stat® software version 9.4 of the sas system for pc (copyright © 2016 sas institute inc.). the mixed effects logistic regression models were estimated using the glimmix procedure in sas. 3. results 3.1. descriptive summary statistics. feeding, the most frequently occurring behavior, occupied about 84% of the time budget across all animals (table 2). if an animal was moving and eating in a given picture, it was recorded as feeding to comply with the usgs criteria. drinking or licking mineral was also coded in this category. juanita (the burro) spent only 78.3% of her time eating, while the others spent 82%-87%. feral burros spend the majority of their time eating, although individual variation depending on their “life stage, level of physical activity, health status, environmental conditions and individual digestive and metabolic differences” does exist (svendsen 102). the difference of five percentage points amongst the horses also reflects individual variation. resting, which included rest standing, sleep standing, or any form of recumbency, was the second most frequently occurring behavior (10% across all animals). locomotion represented the third largest amount of the time budget (1.1%), followed by grooming (0.7%). thus, feeding, resting, and locomotion accounted for 95% of all behavior exhibited in the study, and were also the four most observed categories in the usgs study. however, compared to the usgs study, the animals here spent a larger percentage of their time feeding and less time in locomotion. a simple explanation for this difference could be due to the ample forage available in wisconsin compared to that in the western ranges from the usgs study. specifically, since there was more abundant foliage available, the animals did not need to travel long distances to acquire grazing opportunities. karen k. dalke & megan j. olson hunt -mustangs and domestic horses: examining what we think we know about differences 51 although this herd did not have a stallion, there was one on the property, so harem behavior was included, as a mare may have been present during estrus, thus evoking other behaviors in the herd (mcdonnell). there were no observations recorded for the categories of herding, harem tending, or reproduction. note that some behavioral categories did not have enough observations to allow for meaningful statistical analysis, but still warrant some attention. additionally, individual differences between animals may be explained by placement in the hierarchy, sex, or age of the animal, although these differences lie outside the focus of this study. bands of horses are complex entities where individuals negotiate status and identity within changing contexts (argent). the following are other observations from the data that were not tested statistically. mister and cortez, the two geldings, had the highest frequencies for standing attentive, while ellie, the lead mare, had only one recorded observation for this behavior. bandita accounted for all five observations of comfort behavior, such as sun-basking or play. finally, bandita and cortez (domesticated less than five years) displayed harem social behavior most frequently with 30 and 33 observations, respectively. this was in stark contrast to animals always in domestication or domesticated for at least 15 years: mister (0), cosette (8), ellie (3), and juanita (9). in general, these preliminary findings may also be impacted by sex, age, placement in the hierarchy, etc. 3.2. effect of domestication and weather on location. a 3 × 3 contingency table of length of domestication and location indicated that across all animals, preference was for the west side of the field (58.63% of their time was spent here) over the north side (30.62%), or being indoors (10.75%). however, 92% of resting behavior across all animals was done indoors. preference for the west field may be due to the fact that it is farthest from human contact (buildings) and closest to open agricultural land and woods. it is one area of the property where there tends to be a slight breeze and has the shade of a tree. with regard to the indoor location specifically, always-domesticated horses were more likely to be present (40.6%), followed by those domesticated at least 15 years (30.7%), and finally those in domestication less than five years (28.7%). this could be due to animals with longer domestication having increased experience with buildings in general, and familiarity with seeking cover during hot weather. the basis of the findings for the west and north fields was less clear. specifically, in the west field, always-domesticated animals and those domesticated for less than five years were most commonly present and with about the same frequency (36.2% and 35.3%, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 52 respectively). in contrast, animals domesticated > 15 years tended to be less present (28.6%). for the north field, animals domesticated > 15 years were present most often (41.7% of the time), while those domesticated < 5 years and who were always domesticated were present less often, and at similar rates (30.8% and 27.5%, respectively). in the multinomial regression model relating weather conditions to location, all weather predictors were significant in the full main effects model (adjusted for length of domestication) at the α = 0.05 level. results indicated that, as temperature increased, animals were more likely to be indoors than in either field, controlling for wind and dew point. additionally, 59% of the time spent inside was on sunny days. this is an expected result, as the indoor area provides shade, and water is also located here. the animals then preferred the north over west field, although the reason for this observation is not clear given the characteristics of the fields. as dew point increased (controlling for temperature and wind), animals were more likely to be in the fields than indoors. this could be due to increased air movement outdoors, allowing them to remain cooler as humidity rises. between the two fields, their preference was the west over north, which could again be due to the fact that the west field is more open, allowing for the most air movement. lastly, as wind speed increased, the animals first preferred the west field, followed by indoors, and, finally, the north field. there is again no clear reason for this pattern based on the authors’ knowledge of the property, and it may be due to a more complex relationship between wind and the other weather variables than was modeled here. 3.3. mixed effects logistic regression models for differences in behavior according to length of domestication. table 3 provides the observed counts for the top four behavior categories (feeding, resting, locomotion, and grooming) by length of domestication (less than five years, at least 15 years, or always). additionally included are the conditional probabilities of each behavior, given length of domestication. for example, the probability of resting given domestication for less than five years is 686/8341 = 0.082. these probabilities are related to the logistic regression models, the results of which are found in table 4. from table 3, animals with the shortest length of domestication (< 5 years) were less likely to rest (conditional probability of 0.082) compared to those in domestication for longer periods of time (0.113 and 0.118 for > 15 years and always, respectively). the karen k. dalke & megan j. olson hunt -mustangs and domestic horses: examining what we think we know about differences 53 pattern for grooming was opposite of this, with the least-domesticated animals (< 5 years) grooming more often (0.012) than the other two groups (0.004 and 0.005, again corresponding to > 15 years and always). for feeding and locomotion, the conditional probabilities were all very similar across the three domestication groups (see table 3). table 4 gives the results of the mixed effects logistic regression models (with individual horses fit as random effects to account for correlation) for domestication time, separately for each of the four behaviors. the predicted conditional probabilities from these models differed from the observed probabilities (table 3) by at most 0.001 (one one-thousandth), so that accounting for the correlation within animals did not greatly influence the results. the models align with the observed probabilities from table 3 in that they indicate the likelihood of resting and grooming were both influenced by length of domestication, while feeding and locomotion were not (all domestication groups were similar in these instances). for the former two behaviors, animals domesticated less than five years were significantly different from those domesticated at least 15 years or always. however, there was no significant difference between the latter two groups (> 15 years and always). for resting, the estimated odds ratio (or) between animals domesticated for less than five years and those domesticated for at least 15 was 0.706 (95% ci: (0.501, 0.996), p = 0.0475). thus, the estimated odds of resting for the < 5 year group were about 29% lower than those for the > 15 year group. when comparing the < 5 year group to horses who have always been domesticated, the estimated or (0.670, 95% ci: (0.475, 0.945), p = 0.022) indicated the estimated odds of resting in the < 5 year group were about 33% lower than those for horses who were always domesticated. a possible explanation for these findings is that horses domesticated for shorter amounts of time may be more “on alert” with regard to potential predators, which longer-domesticated animals would have become less concerned about. additionally, wild mustangs move frequently to secure water and food, so that resting only becomes more frequent after longer domestication and the realization that there is less need to roam to find these resources. with regard to grooming, animals domesticated less than five years had an estimated or of 3.108 (95% ci: (1.676, 5.766), p = 0.0003) when compared to the > 15 year group. as such, the estimated odds of grooming for animals domesticated < 5 years were about 210% higher than those for animals in domestication for > 15 years. lastly, the estimated or (2.344, 95% ci: (1.297, 4.237), p = 0.005) between the < 5 year and always groups showed the estimated odds of grooming in the < 5 year group were about 134% greater humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 54 than those associated with animals who were born into domestication. no other results based on the logistic regression models were significant at the α = 0.05 level (see table 4 for complete results). the difference in grooming based on length of domestication could be explained by the fact that self-grooming includes behaviors for managing insects, such as rolling on grass, nibbling, or tail-swishing. these behaviors may not be observed as frequently in the longer-domesticated horses who have learned to avoid insects by retreating indoors. horses that have been in domestication longer also allow fly spray to be applied by human counterparts, and thus require less self-grooming to manage insects. the above findings indicate that, even though horses may start out as feral and differ from long-duration domesticated horses on commonly occurring behaviors (such as resting and grooming), over time they become similar to the domesticated animals. in fact, as time progresses, they become indistinguishable statistically with regard to the frequency of these behaviors. even though these findings require more research, the implications are important. 4. discussion. the ancestors of our current-day american mustangs helped found this nation. the wild and free-roaming horses and burros act of 1971 recognizes this contribution. mustangs came under federal control because they could not be protected on a state-by-state basis. they were often brutalized and slaughtered by dealers looking to make money. much of the west prior to 1971 was united by the land ethic, “first come, first served — survival of the strongest, and get while the getting was good, there is always more beyond” (united states house of representatives, 92 congress 101). mustangs belonged to no one and there was no way to protect them from abuse. they lived in a wild environment, which the title of the law denotes. however, over time, “wild” has been applied to the temperament of the horse. arluke and sanders remind us that, “although animals have a physical being, once in contact with humans, they are given a cultural identity as people try to make sense of them, understand them, use them, or communicate with them.” this could not be truer for the mustang. the notion of “wild and free” created protection for mustangs, while at the same time suggesting they cannot be tamed. in retrospect, humans underestimated the adaptability of these horses, resulting today in burgeoning populations in both shortand long-term holding centers. karen k. dalke & megan j. olson hunt -mustangs and domestic horses: examining what we think we know about differences 55 the “blm [bureau of land management] has been removing an average of about 8,000 horses from rangelands each year for the last decade in an effort to control horse populations and meet its legal obligations. removing such a large number of horses each year has substantially exceeded the capacity of blm to place horses into private ownership; a result is that many tens of thousands of unwanted horses are maintained in long-term facilities until they die” (national research council of the national academies 66). many mustang advocates argue for keeping these animals on the range, and the majority of research has been focused on this issue. however, what should be done about the 50,000 horses awaiting adoption? the extreme mustang makeover, established by the mustang heritage foundation, is a current attempt at bringing attention to the versatility of these horses. their mission is “to increase adoption of wild horses held in the bureau of land management’s corrals and long term holding facilities” (mustang heritage foundation). the makeover is a competition that displays the talents of these horses, coupled with humane training approaches. trainers are given around three months to ready the mustang for competition. one could claim that attempting to train a horse in this amount of time could be taxing, “but stress also occurs during gathers and in holding facilities” (national research council of the academies 2). additionally, one could argue that in the long-term, placing a mustang in a private residence could be less stressful than housing it in a holding facility for the majority, if not all, of its life. with more horses in holding facilities than on public lands, one may conclude the blm has mismanaged mustangs on public lands. from the standpoint of the mustangs’ welfare, anything that can be done to promote moving them to permanent homes should be of paramount concern. this case study, albeit small, offers some interesting results: differences are apparent when transitioning to a new environment, but the horses acclimate over time. specifically, this study found equines start out dissimilar but become more alike over time with regard to two predominant equine behaviors — resting and grooming — even without specific, intensive training. these results suggest mustangs can and do adjust to domestic living, despite assumptions about their “wild” nature. although the exact underpinnings of this change cannot be determined with certainty, this research suggests constructing environments that allow mustangs to move about and interact with other horses may aid acculturation to a new setting. given the two leastdomesticated mustangs in this study did not undergo formal intensive training, there is evidence mustangs become accustomed to new environments on their own over time. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 56 although the extreme mustang makeover has helped place animals, the program focuses on behavioral change through intense 90-day training, culminating in national competitions. this process exhibits traits such as intelligence and willingness, but perpetuates the belief that mustangs are behaviorally quite different from domestic horses. in contrast, this study suggests there are some initial differences after mustangs are removed from their original environment, but that they change over time. since these findings help dispel the myth that mustangs are wild by nature and can only become integrated with intense training and resocialization, they open the door for further study and alternative adoption routines. the traditional approach to placing mustangs has been to train them to adapt to domestic settings. this study calls that tradition into question. may we instead create domestic settings that help mustangs transition and acculturate in a gradual manner that eventually leads to the same outcomes, but with fewer resources and less stress to the animals? it appears to be a possibility. although under this alternative model it is unlikely mustangs would be able to perform the tasks in the aforementioned competitions as quickly, it seems normalizing the adaptation and adoption process might increase the adoption rate, which is the ultimate goal. as with any horse, additional training would be needed if adopters planned to use the animal for a specific discipline (e.g., as a trail horse, for pleasure riding, for dressage, as a pack animal, etc.). however, note that this training is only enhanced by a mustang who is familiar with people and typical routines. research shows that both the arousal state of the animal and the level of attachment to his person impacts new learning. andrew mclean (bsc, phd, dipl. ed), owner and director of the australian equine behavior center says, “so a lot of what might seem like ‘horse whispering’ as well as all sorts of touch therapies might really be ‘horse attachment.’ if your horse is attached to you, he’s going to be more likely to have a lower state of arousal – meaning, he’ll be calmer and more focused on his learning session…tactile contact is an antidote for insecurity” (lesté-lasserre). in other words, transition may be less about training and more about creating a stable private environment. it is known that mustangs travel great distances each day for water and food when on public lands, but once adopted, they are often placed in small confined areas, fed at scheduled times, and approached with the expectation they should understand human behavior. this initial human contact could potentially impact the assimilation process in a negative manner. the results of this study raise the question of whether or not karen k. dalke & megan j. olson hunt -mustangs and domestic horses: examining what we think we know about differences 57 holding centers should instead allow for the expression of “wild” behaviors initially and transition mustangs to more typical “domestic” routines gradually over time. interestingly, since mustangs are herd animals and follow other horses, domestic horses are used to lure mustangs into traps during the mustang gathering process. however, once in holding centers, the idea that more acclimated — or even domestic — horses can assist new mustangs in their transition is abandoned. prison programs, the extreme mustang makeover, and professional trainers focus on humans teaching horses new behaviors. although these approaches work, is using animals who have been in holding centers for some time to help recently captured animals in the transition not an intuitive (and less resource-intensive) alternative? in other words, could horses help other horses? this study seems to suggest that. in terms of other ways to increase the chances of mustang adoption, the blm might consider taking advantage of the knowledge held by community groups advocating for mustangs on several ranges throughout the west. specifically, many individuals have followed certain mustangs for their entire lives, knowing when they were born, as well as specific personality traits and dispositions. adoptions are managed by the blm, but could pairing with these local groups enhance the process by providing additional information about the animals? animal shelters have utilized this technique to attract individuals looking to adopt a dog, cat, or other small animal. creating working partnerships between the blm and advocacy groups can only benefit mustangs. 5. conclusion. much of mustang research is dominated by a discussion of how to manage these horses on public lands. however, additional work should target ways to ensure successful adoptions, given the current large number of animals in holding facilities. “in fiscal year 2012, more than 45,000 animals were in holding facilities, and their maintenance consumed almost 60 percent of the wild horse and burro program’s budget” (national research council of the national academies 16). this small study suggests there are some differences when transitioning mustangs to private environments, but that adaptation is possible over time, even without intensive training. further examining what aids this initial transition should thus be a primary focus of the agency, both for the sake of animal welfare and for monetary considerations. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank dr. john stoll, laura johnson, katie stilp, and the grants in aid of research committee at the university of wisconsin-green bay, which provided assistance with data entry. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 58 works cited argent, gala. “killing (constructed) horses — interspecies elders, empathy and emotion, and the pazyryk horse sacrifices.” people with animals: perspectives & studies in ethnozooarchaeology. ed. lee. g. broderick. oxbow books, 2016. arluke, arnold and clinton r. sanders. regarding animals. temple up, 1996. dalke, karen. “mustang: the paradox of imagery.” humanimalia 1.2 (2010): 97–117. gentzler, toni. “national wild horse and burro news.” u.s. department of the interior, bureau of land management, spring 2001. lesté-lasserre, christa. “excitement, feeling and attachment’s impact on training.” the horse, 2 aug. 2013 web. 2 july 2015. mcdonnell, sue. the equid ethogram: a practical field guide to horse behavior. the blood horse, inc., 2003. mustang heritage foundation. extreme mustang makeover: mission. web. 7 july 2015. national research council of the national academies. using science to improve the blm wild horse and burro program: a way forward. the national academies press, 2013. ransom, jason i. and brian s. cade. quantifying equid behavior — a research ethogram for free-roaming feral horses. u.s. geological survey, 2009. rudman, rebecca. “the social organization of feral donkeys (equus asinus) on a small caribbean island (st. john, us virgin islands).” applied animal behaviour science 60 (1998): 211-228. svendsen, elisabeth d. the professional handbook of the donkey. whittet books ltd, 1997. turner, victor. the forest of symbols: aspects of ndembu ritual. cornell up, 1967. united states department of the interior, bureau of land management. wild free roaming horse and burro act public law 92-195. washington, gpo, 1971. karen k. dalke & megan j. olson hunt -mustangs and domestic horses: examining what we think we know about differences 59 united states department of the interior, bureau of land management. wild horse & burro adoption requirements. washington, gpo, 2010. united states house of representatives, 92 congress. 1971 protection of wild horses on public lands. washington: gpo, 1971. table 1: demographic summary of equines used in this study (ordered by age). name breed age sex capture date location at birth year of entry into current herd ellie mustang 25 mare 2/18/95 lava beds, nevada 2000 juanita burro 20 mare 5/20/95 black mountain, arizona 2000 mister paint 15 gelding na krakow, wisconsin 2003 cosette quarter horse 14 mare na black creek, wisconsin 1999 bandita mustang 7 mare 9/19/07 little book cliffs, colorado 2008 cortez mustang 7 gelding 9/19/07 little book cliffs, colorado 2008 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 60 table 2: summary of equine behaviors based on photographs taken across three areas: an indoor area, a mud lot, and a pasture. the length of domestication (less than five years, at least 15 years or always) is given below the animals’ names. feeding, resting, locomotion, and grooming occurred most frequently. equine total (percent within behavior) mister (always) cosette (always) ellie (> 15 years) juanita (> 15 years) bandita (< 5 years) cortez (< 5 years) behavior count (percent within behavior, percent within equine) feeding 3778 (17.2, 86.6) 3606 (16.4, 82.6) 3771 (17.1, 86.4) 3419 (15.5, 78.3) 3710 (16.8, 85.0) 3736 (17.0, 85.6) 22020 (84.1) resting 439 (16.7, 10.1) 573 (21.8, 13.1) 428 (16.3, 9.8) 500 (19.0, 11.5) 368 (14.0, 8.4) 318 (12.1, 7.3) 2626 (10.0) locomotion 42 (14.0, 1.0) 58 (19.3, 1.3) 37 (12.3, 0.8) 59 (19.6, 1.4) 57 (18.9, 1.3) 48 (15.9, 1.1) 301 (1.1) grooming 30 (16.4, 0.7) 16 (8.7, 0.4) 16 (8.7, 0.4) 17 (9.3, 0.4) 42 (23.0, 1.0) 62 (33.9, 1.4) 183 (0.7) standing attentive 40 (27.2, 0.9) 24 (16.3, 0.5) 1 (0.7, 0.0) 12 (8.2, 0.3) 22 (15.0, 0.5) 48 (32.7, 1.1) 147 (0.6) harem social 0 (0.0, 0.0) 8 (9.6, 0.2) 3 (3.6, 0.1) 9 (10.8, 0.2) 30 (36.1, 0.7) 33 (39.8, 0.8) 83 (0.3) elimination 8 (34.8, 0.2) 0 (0.0, 0.0) 1 (4.3, 0.0) 0 (0.0, 0.0) 8 (34.8, 0.2) 6 (26.1, 0.1) 23 (0.1) human awareness 2 (10.0, 0.0) 3 (15.0, 0.1) 3 (15.0, 0.1) 5 (25.0, 0.1) 1 (5.0, 0.0) 6 (30.0, 0.1) 20 (0.1) comfort 0 (0.0, 0.0) 0 (0.0, 0.0) 0 (0.0, 0.0) 0 (0.0, 0.0) 5 (100.0, 0.1) 0 (0.0, 0.0) 5 (0.02) agonism 1 (25.0, 0.0) 0 (0.0, 0.0) 0 (0.0, 0.0) 2 (50.0, 0.0) 0 (0.0, 0.0) 1 (25.0, 0.0) 4 (0.02) out-ofsight 25 (3.2, 0.6) 77 (9.9, 1.8) 106 (13.6, 2.4) 342 (43.8, 7.8) 122 (15.6, 2.8) 108 (13.8, 2.5) 780 (3.0) total (percent within equine) 4365 4365 4366 4365 4365 4366 26192 karen k. dalke & megan j. olson hunt -mustangs and domestic horses: examining what we think we know about differences 61 table 3: observed counts of behaviors across length of domestication (less than five years, at least 15 years, always) for the top four most frequently occurring behaviors. conditional probabilities of behavior given the length of domestication are given in parentheses. length of domestication total < 5 years > 15 years always resting yes 686 (0.082) 928 (0.113) 1012 (0.118) 2626 no 7655 (0.918) 7319 (0.887) 7530 (0.882) 22504 total 8341 8247 8542 25130 grooming yes 104 (0.012) 33 (0.004) 46 (0.005) 183 no 8237 (0.988) 8214 (0.996) 8496 (0.995) 24947 total 8341 8247 8542 25130 feeding yes 7446 (0.893) 7190 (0.872) 7384 (0.864) 22020 no 895 (0.107) 1057 (0.128) 1158 (0.136) 3110 total 8341 8247 8542 25130 locomotion yes 105 (0.013) 96 (0.012) 100 (0.012) 301 no 8236 (0.987) 8151 (0.988) 8442 (0.988) 24829 total 8341 8247 8542 25130 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 62 table 4: results from the mixed effects logistic regression models (fit separately for each behavior; individual horse included as a random effect): estimated conditional probabilities of each behavior given length of domestication (less than five years, at least 15 years, always), and estimated odds ratios for each behavior across domestication groups. length of domestication resting < 5 years > 15 years always conditional probabilities 0.082 0.112 0.118 < 5 years > 15 years odds ratios (p-value) (95% confidence interval) > 15 years 0.706 (0.048)* (0.501, 0.996) - always 0.670 (0.022)* (0.475, 0.945) 0.949 (0.764) (0.675, 1.335) grooming < 5 years > 15 years always conditional probabilities 0.012 0.004 0.005 < 5 years > 15 years odds ratios (p-value) (95% confidence interval) > 15 years 3.108 (0.0003)* (1.676, 5.766) - always 2.344 (0.005)* (1.297, 4.237) 0.754 (0.399) (0.392, 1.452) feeding < 5 years > 15 years always conditional probabilities 0.893 0.872 0.865 < 5 years > 15 years odds ratios (p-value) (95% confidence interval) > 15 years 1.221 (0.232) (0.880, 1.696) - always 1.298 (0.118) (0.936, 1.802) 1.063 (0.714) (0.767, 1.474) locomotion < 5 years > 15 years always conditional probabilities 0.013 0.012 0.012 < 5 years > 15 years odds ratios (p-value) (95% confidence interval) > 15 years 1.092 (0.738) (0.652, 1.831) - always 1.081 (0.767) (0.646, 1.808) 0.990 (0.969) (0.589, 1.662) * significant at α = 0.05 level microsoft word meijer-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:1 eva meijer political communication with animals introduction. the view that non-human animals1 cannot be political actors because they cannot speak is common in both philosophical tradition and political practice. this view seems to be false in two respects. it refers to a flawed conception of political agency and, second, it ignores the fact that animals clearly do communicate, with each other and with humans. seeing animals as mute does not simply reflect a misunderstanding of their capacities: it is interconnected with the way humans have defined language and politics2 and has led to rendering animals silent as a political group. in zoopolis, sue donaldson and will kymlicka develop a political theory of animal rights in which animals are seen as political actors. this is an important step forward in thinking about animals and animal rights, and it challenges how humans usually see animals and their (political) relationships with them. donaldson and kymlicka focus on political relationships of groups of animals to human societies and institutions and argue we should see these different groups of animals as citizens, denizens, and sovereign communities. although donaldson and kymlicka describe various human-animal interactions and relationships, they do not offer a theory of political communication, which, i argue, leads to conceptual and practical problems. in this paper i will sketch the outlines of a theory of human-animal communication, based on concepts that i borrow from ludwig wittgenstein’s later work, in particular his notion of language-games. viewing language as a collection of language-games is a good starting point for thinking about animal languages and shared human-animal communication because it can capture and reflect the multitude of (linguistic) interactions that exist between animals and humans. it is also a way to bring out similarities that are concealed by the fact that, usually, animals do not use human words. this theory of communication can function as a basis for thinking about political communication3 and thus can be seen as a supplement to donaldson and kymlicka’s theory, but it is also directed towards the next step. through political communication with humans, animals can exercise influence on the terms and conditions of interaction, which challenges the limits of existing liberal democratic models of politics. a theory of political human-animal communication that is based on the multitude of human-animal interactions that exist can function as a starting point for thinking about new forms of democratic interaction with animals. eva meijer – political communication with animals 29 i begin with a discussion of donaldson and kymlicka’s political theory, on the basis of which i argue it is necessary to think about political human-animal communication. following this i explore how the idea of language-games can shed light on humananimal communication and animal languages, and what the implications of studying human-animal language-games are for existing concepts and for language in general. building on the idea of human-animal language-games and conversations, i then sketch the outlines of an account of political conversations in which animals can exercise direct political agency in contact with humans, and introduce the figure of a (human or nonhuman animal) interpreter who can assist political human-animal communication. in the final section i discuss the limits of using a human liberal democratic framework to conceptualize political animal-human communication and political animal agency. i argue that concepts such as rights can offer a starting point for thinking about animals in democracy, but that their meaning will change when the political constellation changes, in interaction with animals. i conclude by arguing that taking animals seriously as political actors means not only that we need to study their behavior and extend existing concepts and institutions to include them, but also that we need to reconsider the meaning of these concepts and institutions and, where necessary, invent new ones in collaboration with animals. i. zoopolis. in political philosophy, the ability to speak is usually considered a necessary condition for being a political actor and a member of the political community. speaking is seen as a human enterprise clearly distinct from the way other animals express themselves and use their voices. in the beast and the sovereign (volume i), jacques derrida discusses aristotle’s politics, which he sees as a foundational text in the construction of this idea (347-9). in the politics, aristotle describes the connection between speaking and being a member of the political community, as he explains why it is the natural destiny of men to live in political communities: and so the reason is clear why man is a political being more than any others, bees or gregarious animals. as we maintain, indeed, nature does nothing in vain; now alone among animals man has speech. no doubt the sounds of the voice express pain and pleasure, and so they are found in all animals: their nature allows them only to feel pain and pleasure and to manifest them among themselves. but speech, for its part, is made to express the useful and the harmful and consequently the just and the unjust. this is, indeed, the distinctive character of mankind compared to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 30 all the other animals: he alone perceives good and evil, the just and the unjust, and the other values; now it is the common possession of these values that makes family and city. (the politics, 1253a 10-18, as cited by derrida vol 1: 347-8) aristotle distinguishes between speech, as informed by reason, and all other emissions of sound. as derrida shows, this distinction is essential for establishing the borders of the political community. but it not only defines the borders of the political community: it also defines speech (and language). within the definition of man as a political being, we find a definition of speech as belonging to men. other animals can express themselves through sounds, so they are not completely mute, but they do not speak and so they are destined to be silent in political matters. most contemporary political philosophers still think that being able to speak, in this understanding of the capacity, is necessary to be a political actor. this may be because speaking is seen as necessary for rational deliberation (habermas), or to participate in a social contract (rawls), or for democratic action (rancière), and so on. until now, political philosophy has largely been absent in thinking about other animals.4 animal rights theories that argue for taking animals into account in our moral decisions and in legal frameworks have also not really focused on challenging this view of political actors and political communities. they have primarily been advanced by moral philosophers and scientists of animal behavior and cognition, and traditionally focus on intrinsic capacities of animals and their interests, and the moral status and moral rights to which these give rise (see, for example, bekoff, regan, singer). progress in these fields of study has led to a better understanding of animals and their moral rights, and to more attention for animals in public debate and legislation. it has also led, however, to a conception of animals as moral objects to be studied, instead of subjects who have their own ideas about how they want to live their lives, and to an emphasis on negative rights. according to donaldson and kymlicka, this has obscured the question of how to obtain (political) justice for animals. they argue political philosophy is pre-eminently appropriate to address questions about animals because it can provide the conceptual tools to translate moral insights to an institutional framework, in which concepts such as democracy and citizenship can play a key role. with their political theory of animal rights, donaldson and kymlicka challenge existing ideas about political actors and political communities. they argue we should view animals as political actors and, in the case of domesticated animals, as members of democratic human-animal communities, in which humans and animals communicate. eva meijer – political communication with animals 31 they adopt the idea of universal negative rights for animals, as conceptualized in existing animal rights theories, and argue that negative rights, such as the rights not to be killed, tortured, or enslaved, are important. they propose to extend the idea of universal human rights to include non-human animals. however, although universal negative rights are important, they are not enough, because it is impossible to end all forms of human-animal interaction, since humans and animals are cohabitants of the same planet. furthermore, it is unnecessary, since respectful human-animal relationships are possible and already exist. donaldson and kymlicka show that the lives of humans and animals are interconnected in many ways, historically, culturally, and geographically, which leads to various relationships, rights, and responsibilities on both sides. in the human situation, universal rights hold for everyone, but in addition to those humans have rights and duties towards specific others, based on their moral and political relationships. donaldson and kymlicka use the ways in which human communities relate to each other politically as a starting point for thinking about political relationships with animals. they argue domesticated animals should be seen as co-citizens, wild animals as sovereign communities, and liminal animals, who live amongst humans but are not domesticated, as denizens.5 humans have different rights and duties with regard to these groups of animals, and animals in these groups have different rights and duties towards humans. donaldson and kymlicka discuss the political agency of domesticated animals in most detail and argue they are capable of exercising democratic political agency as cocitizens.6 they distinguish three necessary features of exercising political democratic agency, which in their opinion also apply to domesticated animals: the possibility of having and expressing a subjective good, the capacity to comply with social norms through relationships, and the capacity to participate in shaping the terms of interaction (104). to further conceptualize this, they turn to recent work in disability theory (francis and silvers; kittay), in particular theories that discuss how humans with severe mental disabilities can exercise agency through relationships that are based on trust, socalled “dependent agency” (104-8). exercising dependent agency would, in the case of domesticated animals, mean that they communicate their standpoints to humans they know well and trust (and who know them well), who then communicate these to other humans. domesticated animals also have a right to be represented politically through this form of interaction.7 in contrast, the political acts of wild and liminal animals are directed towards keeping a distance from human communities (through acts of protest and dissent, see also hribal, or voting with their feet). it is important to note that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 32 because we have not yet started to see animals as citizens, denizens, or sovereign communities, the exact range and shape of the ways in which they (can) exercise political agency is unknown. we often do not know animals’ capability or what they want. in engaging with them, humans therefore need to look for agency and should encourage animals to express themselves. it is unclear how relationships (in a safer world for animals) will evolve. communication and institutions. donaldson and kymlicka’s political theory of animal rights is important because it enables us to see animals differently, as political actors, and because it offers a new conceptual framework to explore questions about animals and human-animal relationships. however, although donaldson and kymlicka’s political theory is promising, it raises questions concerning political animal agency and human-animal communication, and concerning extending human liberal democratic concepts and institutions to include other animals. donaldson and kymlicka discuss communication and representation most extensively in the case of domesticated animals and argue these animals can exercise (political) agency through close relationships with humans. although this might work well for some domesticated animals, not all of them will be able (or will want) to communicate with humans in this manner, because of bad experiences or simply because they do not like humans that much, and some animals are at risk of forming adaptive preferences. in addition, we need a theory of political communication with wild and liminal animals. humans and non-domesticated animals share habitats, travel through each other’s territories, cooperate (see smuts 302) and have conflicts (see palmer; wolch); these encounters are not accidental but inherent in the fact that humans and animals share a world. although donaldson and kymlicka give many examples of humananimal relationships and interactions, they do not offer a theory of political communication. if we regard animals as political actors — whether citizens, denizens or members of sovereign communities — we need to think about how they can have a voice in questions that concern them, in contact within and between communities. as donaldson and kymlicka repeatedly point out, animals do communicate with humans (and with each other). they are not silent, although they are often represented as such. through communication, both humans and animals express themselves and learn about the position of the other. in addition to learning about animal languages, we therefore need to think about new, shared languages, based on existing human-animal communication. in some situations this communication will be similar to human (political) communication; in others it will be very different. sometimes it will be eva meijer – political communication with animals 33 immediately clear to all parties involved; in other situations it will need interpretation and/or translation. this is connected to questions about the translation of political animal agency and animal voices, and human-animal interactions, into political institutions. in donaldson and kymlicka’s theory, the focus is on extending existing human liberal democratic concepts and institutions to other animals. although they aim to provide theoretical background and do not discuss specific institutions and forms of representation in detail, in the model they sketch humans decide which institutions are just and how animals should be represented. existing institutions and concepts can offer a starting point for thinking about a new political model, but to be able to respond to the multitude of ways in which animals exercise political agency, it also seems necessary to think about new forms of representation and new institutions. this does not merely mean humans need to develop new forms of interacting in which the animals cooperate: it means animals should take part in determining the forms and contents of these interactions. existing interactions can provide a starting point and can function as a basis for the formation of new human-animal legal and political institutions. in what follows i will therefore explore possibilities of shared human-animal languages and communication. i do this by extending wittgenstein’s ideas about language and in particular his notion of language-games to human-animal communication, based on existing interactions. thinking of language as a collection of language-games is an appropriate starting point. it is flexible and does not discriminate between different types of linguistic acts. this is necessary in thinking about animals and language, because humans and other animals have so many different relationships and encounters and because animals express themselves in so many different ways. in addition, wittgenstein’s ideas about how language-games are related can shed light on similarities and relations in human-animal languages. using the idea of languagegames as a base for human-animal language works two ways. on the one hand it can clarify or explicate human-animal interactions in relation to concepts that already exist. on the other it can lay the foundations for new (interpretations of) (linguistic) encounters. ii. language-games and conversations. in the philosophical investigations (1958),8 wittgenstein argues we cannot give a single definition of language: there are many different ways in which we use language that are related but do not share one humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 34 characteristic, so therefore there is no one way to describe them.9 instead of trying to find a definition we should describe and investigate these different uses of language, that he calls language-games. wittgenstein does not give a clear definition of languagegames. he uses the concept to refer to the most primitive forms of language, as well as to the whole of our natural language as comprised of a collection of language-games, but he also uses it to refer to simple examples of language use. language-games are open-ended, there is always the possibility of the realization of new language-games and there are many language-games we do not even recognize as such.10 to grasp what language is, we should study language-games, by studying the practices in which they take place. some language-games take place only between humans, but there are also languagegames that take place between humans and other animals. this becomes clear if we look at the language-games we call “greeting.” people greet each other in various ways: we can, for example, say hello, wave, nod, or write hello in an e-mail or text message. we greet strangers on the street in a different way than we greet family or neighbors or lovers. this includes the tone of our voice, gestures, facial expressions, and so on.11 humans also greet animals and animals greet humans. some forms of greeting might only apply to humans, for example when computers are involved (although some nonhuman animals can, of course, learn to use those); others apply to humans and animals. humans and animals can say hello, walk towards each other, touch or keep a distance, look the other in the eye or avoid eye contact. how humans and animals greet one another will depend on the animals involved and the context. greeting rituals evolve. if a human meets a dog she knows well, greeting her or him will be different than when she meets this dog for the first time. the same is true for the dog; she will greet a human she knows well by walking or running towards her or him, wagging her tail, moving around in circles. when the human is a stranger, the dog will usually also go up to make acquaintance, but the bodily movements, sounds and facial expressions will be different. similarly, the dog will greet new dogs in another manner than dog friends, and a cat neighbor in yet another manner. we call the situations in which humans greet animals greeting; we also call the situations in which an animal greets a human greeting. the ways that animals greet humans can be similar to the ways that humans greet other animals, but they can also be different. however, there is no characteristic that all human language-games that we call greeting share and all human-animal language-games lack. eva meijer – political communication with animals 35 we can explore conversations, a group of language-games usually seen as strictly belonging to humans, in the same way. in contact between humans, some languagegames can be seen as conversations. the same is true for human-animal contact. these conversations might not be exactly the same as human conversations, but they can be similar. in the human context, we have many different types of conversations with others. humans have short conversations with their neighbors about the weather, they tell friends stories to which the friends respond, they use conversations to explain how something happened, to comfort someone, to gain new insights, and for many other reasons. human-animal conversations also have various shapes. humans can tell companion animals where they are going and the animals respond, animals can teach humans how they want them to behave in the house or in the park, and so on. in these conversations, oppositions between human/non-human, intentional/non-intentional and speaking/acting are not decisive. a conversation between a human and her general practitioner will be more similar to the conversation between a dog and her vet than to a conversation between two general practitioners who discuss what they had for dinner the night before. when a human visits the general practitioner, she might want to bring someone who knows her well, for support or to help with having the conversation; in the same way a human who accompanies a dog to the vet can participate in the conversation between them. a clear example of human-animal conversations is irene pepperberg’s conversations with african grey parrot alex.12 parrots speak; they can pronounce human words and use them in interaction with humans, but it is often thought that parrots merely repeat words (the word “parrot” is used as a derogatory term for humans who mindlessly repeat things). repeating words is a form of contact, a language-game, but it is not a conversation. alex and pepperberg show a mutual language between parrots and humans is possible, if both parties are willing to learn to understand each other. ethologist and philosopher vinciane despret therefore calls pepperberg the psychologist who managed to make parrots speak. even though parrots had been using human words for a long time, communication with humans had been limited to the use of a few simple words; parrots and humans have different ideas about language and this made it difficult to have meaningful conversations. for parrots (and birds in general), learning a language is strongly interconnected with acting.13 to make a conversation with alex possible, pepperberg gave him control of his rewards: if he recognized objects he could either have them or humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 36 could choose another reward (for example something to eat or going outside for a walk). in this way he not only learned to recognize and describe objects, he also learned to use concepts like “same” or “different,” and words to control the behavior of others, such as “come here,” “go away” and “i want to go there.” in learning these words and concepts, misunderstandings played an important role. instead of trying to avoid them, pepperberg used them as a way to create meaning between the researchers and the parrot. if alex made a sound by accident, trying to find out what it meant could help understanding other sounds. despret describes pepperberg’s work as rendering capable, as enabling the animal to speak. donna haraway argues that this “rendering capable” is mutual: the result is that this parrot and this woman invented an extended conversation that has perplexed professional human linguists more than they enjoy. a specific parrot and woman talked to each other extensively in a language native to neither of them. ... these companion species rendered each other capable of situated knowledges — of situated capacities, whether or not it was in either of their natures before they learned to recognize each other. (azeredo and haraway 17) in addition to the mutuality and situated character of this language, haraway draws attention to the fact that the language these creatures speak is “native to neither of them” (17); it is new. the words that were used gained meaning in the conversation, in the space between the human and the parrot. the conversation between pepperberg and alex is a clear example of a conversation because both the parrot and the human use human words. this is not always, not even often, the case in human-animal conversations, and it is not necessary for having a conversation. a shared language consists of what is made possible by mutual effort, not by one party imposing a language on the other. human-animal communication sometimes resembles human language use, but in human-animal communication words, sounds, gestures, body language and degree of eye contact can all be important. another example of human-animal communication that resembles a conversation between humans can be found in the recent newspaper coverage of a chimpanzee in the welsh mountain zoo who asked visitors to help to release him using sign language. a visitor of the zoo made a video of the chimpanzee, in which he asks the visitors to unlock the bolt on a door and open the window so that he can leave his cage. the eva meijer – political communication with animals 37 chimpanzee used sign language to communicate his request to the visitors. these signs resemble human sign language, and his question was immediately clear to the people watching him, who responded to him by making signs, to which the chimpanzee responded. peter dickinson, a worker at welsh mountain zoo, had previously observed chimpanzees at the zoo trying to communicate with visitors: “i have watched our animals sign to visitors, asking them to carry out certain behaviors. what is more the visitors react and do exactly what they are told. if a visitor is reproached by a member of staff the excuse is always ‘but the chimp asked me to do it!’” although the chimpanzee in this example did not use human words, and the communication is less complex than that between alex and pepperberg, this interaction resembles a simple conversation between humans who use sign language. in this (political) communication, the chimpanzee and the humans understood each other immediately. redefining concepts. so far, i have argued that seeing language as a collection of language-games provides a good starting point for thinking about human-animal language and communication. investigating human-animal language-games also tells us something about language in a more general sense. humans have defined language in a narrow sense, as strictly human.14 however, examining existing human-animal language-games brings to light that while communication and use of language between humans and animals might not be the same as communication between humans, there are similarities. (and although not all language-games apply to all non-human animals, many also do not apply to all humans.) furthermore, it seems to be impossible to draw a clear line between what is language and what is not, or to find one principle that applies to all acts that are seen as language. sign language between humans is similar to sign language between humans and non-human primates, dogs can learn the names of humans15 and vice versa, many species of animals sing, greet, chat, joke. the content of these different overlapping language-games is not fixed; when individuals from different species interact new language-games can come into being (see haraway; hearne). it is therefore not just difficult but impossible to determine the precise scope of language, and it seems similarly impossible to leave other animals out. however, to understand and further develop human-animal languages, it is not enough to study human-animal interaction and see whether or not acts resemble human language-games. we also need to reconsider the scope and the meaning of the concepts we use, because they are often defined in an overly narrow sense, which can obscure our interpretation of situations. although we need to think about new concepts that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 38 include animal acts and that are developed in cooperation with them, existing concepts can offer a framework or can function as a bridge between views. both wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance and his views about the public nature of language can be of use in this investigation. wittgenstein wrote dogs cannot hope (pi, iixi: 174). this is because he supposes their sense of time and (following) their view of the future is limited. empirical questions aside, this seems to be problematic with regard to the public nature of language and his emphasis on the close connection between the use and the meaning of words. raimond gaita refers to this public character of language in human-animal communities in his discussion of anthropomorphism. he gives the example of “intentions” (60) and argues that we not form the concept of intention first in relation to human behavior and then apply it to animals, but that we learn to use these concepts in response to both humans and animals. thus a remark about the intentions of a cat or dog would not be anthropomorphic because the intentions of animals are part of what gives the word “intention” meaning (not because it is correct or incorrect in describing the mental states of that cat or dog). similarly, humans who grow up in a community with humans and other animals learn what “hope” means not just by learning the word as applied to humans, but in a variety of ways, including seeing hopeful animals and reading about animal hope in children’s books. the word “hope” might not mean the same for everyone at all times: it will mean different things in different situations – in different language-games that are tied together by the word “hope.” other animals are not passive recipients of the term, but play a role in the shape these words gain, with their behavior and through interaction with humans. on the one hand, concepts are formed by humans and animals but, on the other, a word, such as hope, can tie a multitude of acts together that resemble each other but have different shapes. in describing the relationship between different games and, based on that, language-games, wittgenstein introduces the notion of family resemblance. he observes that we find overlapping similarities in different games (in the way members of a family share characteristics with each other), but we cannot find one common feature that applies to all of them.16 this way of connecting different acts17 can help us understand how we can broaden concepts to include animals, based on the resemblance and relations of animal acts to human acts. it can also give us direction in further thinking about political animal acts. if we, for example, think about protest, we can think of many different kinds of acts in the human case. if we then consider animal acts of protest, we can (in the absence of one common feature or general definition) look for similarities and differences — this does not give us a blueprint or a complete guide eva meijer – political communication with animals 39 to interpret all animal acts, but it does give us a direction.18 seeing animal acts as political acts might ask for adjustments in the concepts we use, and although existing concepts can offer a guideline, to make progress in understanding other animals we must also be willing to invent new concepts. iii. political communication. donaldson and kymlicka argue we should extend concepts such as citizenship and sovereignty to animals. this implies both a gestalt switch — we need to see other animals differently, as political actors — and an extension of human political concepts and institutions. in the first section i argued that even though donaldson and kymlicka discuss human-animal communication and political representation in the case of domesticated animals, who should be able to express themselves through relationships with humans, they seem to miss a theory of political communication. this is problematic with regard to domesticated animals who cannot or do not want to have close relationships with humans, and with regard to wild and limimal animals, with whom humans also often (need to) communicate. building on donaldson and kymlicka’s idea of animals as political actors and wittgenstein’s idea of language as a collection of language-games, i will now propose two ways in which political animal voice and human-animal communication can be conceptualized further, in interaction in and between human-animal communities. i first discuss the idea of political human-animal conversations. second, i introduce the idea of an interpreter, a human or non-human animal who speaks different languages and is therefore able to assist political communication between groups and individuals that do not share a language. political conversations. in a sense, all conversations in which the animals are taken seriously as interlocutors are political, because they challenge the stereotypical image of non-human animals as mute and because they show us new ways of thinking about communication and, more generally, living with different kinds of other animals. a good example of this kind of interaction is haraway’s communication with her dog companion cayenne pepper. in haraway’s descriptions of their training for agility, we can see how two subjects of different species communicate and meet each other in ways that clearly challenge existing ideas about human-animal interaction. the dog and the human work together towards a common goal, and in and through this process they get to know each other, change each other and create a common world, based on a mutual understanding. this type of world building is political because it challenges the species humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 40 boundary and because it shows us that and how we can take other animals seriously as subjects. cayenne pepper is not silent at all. she expresses herself and has influence on the course of this conversation, in which there is room for the new. although these types of conversations (another good example would be vicki hearne’s communication with dogs and horses) challenge ontological-political assumptions and have the potential to teach us something about the building of interspecies worlds, there are problems with regard to taking animals and animal agency seriously if the larger institutional framework in which these conversations take place is left intact. in the case of cayenne pepper and haraway, we can see this on several levels. on the individual level, because the human decides that, when, and how the agility training takes place, but also on the level of society and politics. the interaction takes place in a world in which dogs are bred by humans, in which animals are eaten by humans, in which they are used for medical experiments: a world in which animals are exploited by humans on a large scale.19 i do not mean to suggest that dogs cannot enjoy agility or never want to play or work with humans, or that all relationships can, or even should, be completely symmetrical in the distribution of power. but when the larger context remains intact, these promising interactions leave the animals dependent on the goodwill of the individual humans in their surroundings, and they do not reach their full (political) potential. so although this way of conceptualizing interaction is valuable for thinking about interspecies communication on an individual level and for opening our eyes towards new forms of co-existence, it seems necessary to look for ways in which these (and other) kinds of encounters can be translated into a political institutional framework. between humans, some language-games can be seen as conversations, and some of these conversations are political. this also applies to shared language-games between humans and animals; some can be regarded as conversations and some of these conversations take place in a political context. the borders are imprecise, even more since this is new territory, but human political conversations offer some guidance. political conversations between humans take place in different situations: in and between communities, between individuals and groups, in conflicts, through activism, and so forth. in general, conversations will not automatically lead to understanding or harmony; the possibility of misunderstanding is inherent in all interactions, and the outcome of political acts can never be determined beforehand. however, through conversations different individuals and groups can communicate their standpoints and therefore more attention to human-animal conversations will promote animal voices. eva meijer – political communication with animals 41 an example of a situation in which political human-animal conversations already take place is jun-han yeo and harvey neo’s (2010) study of border conflicts between longtailed macaques and humans in urban singapore. the population of native macaques in the bukit timah nature reserve in singapore is significantly affected by residential development encroaching into their habitat and destroying wildlife corridors. the national parks board (the agency overseeing the conservation of reserves and wildlife) has constantly to negotiate between complaining residents and preserving the macaque population. in this conflict, both the macaques and the humans exert pressure, though to different degrees; the macaques usually draw the short straw. the residents knew the macaques lived in the area before they moved there and they state that wanting to be closer to nature was one of the reasons they chose to live there. they also feed the macaques, which has invited the animals to move closer to the human settlements, leading to problems: the macaques steal food and make noises, and there often are encounters that the humans experience as problematic or frightening. however, the attitude of the humans is not only negative, in addition to feeding them, some of them like the way macaques look and the sounds they make, and many humans think they should not be killed. one possible solution for the conflict would be that the humans leave; they knew the macaques were there before they came and they often have the opportunity to live elsewhere. if this is impossible, it is necessary to think about new forms of communication. yeo and neo discuss different ways in which the macaques and humans interact, such as having eye contact, reading each other’s body language, staying at a distance or, on the other hand, making overtures. the macaques respond to human speech and their tone of voice20; humans respond to the sounds the macaques make. in the recommendations yeo and neo offer at the end of their paper, they mainly focus on what the humans can do. humans should, for example, be educated about the consequences of their behavior (such as feeding the macaques) and about the macaques’ behavior so that they know how to keep them at a distance. taking interaction into account and focusing on both sides of the communication, from a political perspective, could strengthen the voice and position of the macaques in the conflict. the macaques already communicate with the humans and they exercise political agency, by questioning the borders between the communities and by challenging the humananimal hierarchy. learning about each other’s languages, developing a new shared humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 42 language and establishing (political) rituals could give the macaques a better understanding of the humans and vice versa. although it goes beyond the aim of this paper to invent new institutions that can facilitate these kinds of political interspecies communications, a first step could be the development of forms of greeting as political rituals. greeting might not seem to have an explicit political content, but in conflicts such as these it could function as a way in which humans acknowledge the macaques’ existence (as individual others, as subjects) and it would therefore be a political act.21 furthermore, establishing greeting rituals can be helpful in determining borders between the two groups. in general, learning about greeting rituals of other animals and respectfully engaging in new rituals with them can function as a gateway to further political interaction and extended conversations. macaques are very sensitive to facial expressions and gestures (maestripieri) and responding to how they express themselves could make a large difference in how the interaction evolves. interpreters. although it is not necessary to completely understand someone to be able to speak with her or him, there is a need for some understanding of the other to be able to respond in the correct manner. domesticated animals and humans have cultural experience to draw from; many species of other animals (mammals, birds) are also easy to understand for humans without prior knowledge of them and vice versa. this is, again, a matter of degree and there are many different kinds of relationships and interactions possible. some animals (individuals or species) are communicative, others are shy; some animals are similar to humans, others might be too small or physically too different to understand for humans without studying them for a longer period of time. education can and should play a role in mixed human-animal communities22 and between communities, but it seems to be physically impossible to learn all other animals’ languages, in the same way it is impossible to learn all human languages. since it is impossible to speak all languages, in political communication between humans the parties involved either use a language everyone speaks (such as english or spanish), or an interpreter is present to facilitate the conversation. in human-animal relationships and encounters, interpreters can also play a role. an interpreter would be someone who knows how to interact with (certain types of) animals and humans in a meaningful way, who speaks or at least understands their respective languages and who can make the position of humans clear to a group of animals, or the other way around. an interpreter can be a human or non-human animal, or a human-animal duo (for example a human and a companion animal who eva meijer – political communication with animals 43 facilitate the communication between a group of animals and a human group). interpreters can be of use in contact with animals (communities or individuals) who prefer to have as little contact with humans as possible and in contact with animals who are physically or culturally very different from humans and therefore difficult to read. they can also be central in promoting animals’ voices in human cultural, legal and political frameworks, especially in the transition from current political communities to new, shared communities. different situations will ask for different kinds of interpreters. one can imagine an animal who understands humans and who can translate what they have to say to her group (animals who have experience with humans already do this in communication with younger or less experienced animals), or a human who understands a certain type of animals well and who can translate what an individual or a group of these animals has to say to a group of humans. an example of a human interpreter who has played a role in showing animals in a different light to human culture is jane goodall, who gave the chimpanzees she studied names instead of numbers. in addition to ethologists and biologists one can also think of artists, writers, politicians and philosophers. interpreting raises many (factual and moral) questions, about whether the interpreters get it right — and if there is a fixed “right,” since acting with and interpreting (human) animals changes what happens — about how they can be honest, and how they can put their own interests aside. these problems also apply to interpreters in human contexts. however, the advantage of interpreters over the collaborators donaldson and kymlicka propose, who operate in close relationships with animals that are based on trust, is that they are public figures who can be held accountable for their acts. a focus on language, instead of trust and dependency, contributes to taking the animals seriously as political actors, and of course other animals can be interpreters too. as i mentioned before, the possibility of misunderstanding is inherent in every act of communication, but misunderstandings can also be valuable (as in the case of alex and pepperberg) in learning about the other, or about one’s own position. so although it might not directly solve problems, being explicit about communications and facilitating them in different contexts will most likely shed new light on relationships and it might make new relationships possible. iv. animal democracy. so far, i have argued that if we see animals as political actors and if we want to extend existing political frameworks to include them, we need to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 44 think about political communication. i have also argued that although animals are often represented as mute or silent, they are in fact not. they communicate with each other and with humans and this communication has formed the meaning of words and concepts, even though language is often presented as solely human. donaldson and kymlicka propose to extend an existing liberal democratic political system to include other animals. they convincingly point out the weaknesses of existing animal rights theories that only focus on negative rights, and they argue we need an account of positive rights, in which the animals (at least some of them, such as domesticated animals who participate in shared human-animal communities) are included in procedures of decision making. however, the structure of their arguments as to why animals should be granted rights are similar to the arguments of other animal rights theories, that focus on the inclusion of animals in moral communities by extending existing human concepts.23 in his discussion of the respective animal rights theories of singer and regan, cary wolfe examines the argument that aims to extend a human or humanistic concept, such as universal human rights, to other animals. it is usually argued that we need to extend a human concept to other animals because it applies to them in the same way as it does to humans24 and because discriminating on the basis of species would be unjust and arbitrary. we can see an example of this logic at work in the great ape project through which philosophers (singer; cavalieri), ethologists and other scientists, argue for a small set of universal negative rights — the right to life, to protection of individual liberty, and prohibition of torture — for great apes, on the basis of their similarities to humans. non-human primates possess selfhood, form communities, have cultures, use tools and language, and so on and if these kinds of characteristics are morally relevant for humans, they are for other primates. so if we think humans should be granted rights on the basis of possessing these characteristics, other animals who possess them should be granted rights too. once this is established for great apes, the argument could and should be extended to other species on similar grounds. it would be arbitrary to extend rights just to non-human primates, and the negative rights that are proposed matter to many species. so the interesting result of the path followed by animal rights theories is that they show how the logic inherent in human rights leads to the conclusion that these rights should also apply to other animals. because animal rights are powerful in theory and in practice, and because the stakes are high for so many non-human animals, wolfe adopts a “pragmatic” (191) approach towards supporting projects that promote animal rights. he sees these projects, and the eva meijer – political communication with animals 45 discourse that they draw upon, as rhetorically powerful because they are “relics” (192). but he does so “only in abeyance, as it were, only in recognition of the underlying fact that the operative theories and procedures we now have for articulating the social and legal relation between ethics and action are inadequate ... for thinking about the ethics of the question of the human as well as the nonhuman animal” (192). according to wolfe, using existing ethical models and arguing they should also apply to other animals is the easy part. the harder part, and what we must strive for, is to develop a different kind of ethics that addresses theoretical complexities that surround the question of the (human) animal in different registers. compared to the great ape project and similar initiatives, donaldson and kymlicka’s theory can be seen as a step in the right direction because they argue for rights for all animals, and because they propose a relational approach in which animal agency is taken into account. but they still start from a human conception of politics, in which a multitude of animals and interactions is captured and ordered in a human liberal democratic way. in this framework, humans play the main role in deciding upon the terms and conditions of both the discourse and the practices connected to it. this can, for example, be seen in the idea of “dependent agency,” where a human does the communication with other humans, but also in the larger project of categorizing animals (as citizens, denizens, or sovereign communities) and in deciding upon their rights and duties. although their multiplicity and difference is recognized, animals are relatively silent when it comes to determining how the political situation can or should evolve. despite the problems, i do not think we should adopt a pragmatic approach, in which we rely on concepts such as rights and citizenship as relics or because of their rhetoric power. i would rather propose another way of looking at the meaning(s) of the concepts invoked, in which they have the potential to change. first, humans need concepts to be able to think at all. existing concepts can function as tools to imagine how change is possible. however, concepts such as rights are not just relics that can be used instrumentally. in addition to having the potential to change situations in the outside world, words carry within them the potential to change their meaning when these situations change. in the context of animal rights we can see that the concept “rights” can make a difference in the world, but also that were universal animal rights adopted, the meaning of “rights” would change. the large changes in our society will be reflected in the meaning of the word. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 46 if we take the idea of human-animal intersubjectivity in politics seriously, as donaldson and kymlicka propose, we (human and non-human animals) need to look for ways in which non-human animals can take part in reformulating the meanings of concepts and in determining the shape of the conditions of interaction. this could be the beginning of new, pluralistic, democratic interaction. this does not mean that humans should grant animals access to their democracies or communities, because the animals are already part of them, in many ways. rather, humans should acknowledge and formalize animals’ presence, so that humans and animals can further develop democratic concepts and institutions together. conclusion. both donaldson-and-kymlicka and wittgenstein use philosophy as a means to see things differently. for wittgenstein seeing things differently is the goal of philosophy; donaldson and kymlicka use a political philosophical framework to show non-human animals in a different light, as political actors. the strength of their account concerning political animal agency and human-animal relationships lies precisely there — they show us what is already present from a new perspective. the next task seems to be an investigation into the scope and meaning of existing political concepts in relation to animals (and also to humans). in addition to paying more attention to animal behavior and interspecies interaction, we need carefully to reconsider the borders of what counts as a political or linguistic act, and to investigate what concepts such as democracy, political agency, and citizenship mean once their scope broadens. the same double movement applies to language; investigating existing human-animal language-games needs to go hand in hand with a reconsideration of both the scope and the definition of language. the idea of language as a collection of language-games and the idea of family resemblance can play a role in helping us understand how words and acts are and can be related. although we need critically to examine existing concepts, these concepts can also function as glue between views (to get from one to the next); they can help us understand how change can be possible and help us envision what we are trying to reach. the question of what counts as language is also a political question. studying human-animal language-games shows us that a narrow conception of language, as solely belonging to humans, is arbitrary and untenable, as well as biased. jane bennett points to a similar entanglement of knowledge, meaning and concepts when she writes about political agency of worms as described by charles darwin and bruno latour. she argues that new knowledge of animals and a better understanding of eva meijer – political communication with animals 47 their behavior have changed the way we see them and how we (can) evaluate their actions. however, if we truly want to take the worms seriously, this does not end with our revised assessment of their activities: it also means questioning the uniqueness of humans and the concepts related to that view. in addition to reinventing concepts, we need to think about new “procedures, technologies and regimes of perception” (bennett 108) that will make it possible to read other animals more carefully and to respond to what they have to say in a better way than we do now. in creating new political concepts and institutions that are better suited to answer to human-animal languages and politics, animals are not passive recipients to whom humans give words. they can, do and should play an active role in shaping the terms of interaction and determining the meanings of the matters involved. notes 1. hereafter mostly referred to as “animals” for reasons of space. 2. for a detailed analysis of this phenomenon in the philosophical tradition, see derrida. 3. by focusing on political communication, i do not mean to imply that all political acts are communicative or that all political animal agency can be framed in terms of language. i also do not aim to develop a theory of deliberation. i want to address the stereotypical image of animals as mute or silent in relation to politics and to explore possibilities of translating existing communications to a political framework. 4. with a few exceptions, most notably robert garner and mark rowlands. 5. this group is new in animal rights literature. one of the goals of zoopolis is to dismantle the dichotomy between wild and domesticated animals (or nature and culture) and replace this with a matrix of types of animals and human-animal interaction and relationships (referring to wolch). donaldson and kymlicka convincingly show there are many animals who are neither wild nor domesticated and that the lines between these categories are not fixed (domesticated animals can become liminal or wild and vice versa). the introduction of this new group can clarify rights and duties of and towards these animals, which is important, but it seems somewhat paradoxical to create a new category for the animals who do not fit into the other categories, especially because this group is so diverse. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 48 6. in addition to nationality and popular sovereignty, on the basis of which they should already be regarded as citizens, according to donaldson and kymlicka. 7. the idea of dependent agency does not only tell us something about political agency in the context of animal citizenship. donaldson and kymlicka also want to direct our attention to the role that relationships play in citizenship for humans; we are all dependent on others at points in our lives and relationships matter in every political community. in human-animal relationships the animals also influence the humans. 8. hereafter abbreviated as “pi.” 9. “instead of producing something common to all that we call language, i am saying that these phenomena have no one thing in common which makes us use the same word, but they are related to one another in many different ways. and it is because of this relationship, or these relationships, that we call them all ‘language’” (pi, §65). 10. “we remain unconscious of the prodigious diversity of all the every-day languagegames because the clothing of our language makes everything alike. something new (spontaneous, ‘specific’) is always a language-game” (pi, ii xi: 224). 11. according to wittgenstein, linguistic acts are not necessarily more complex or of a higher level than non-linguistic acts. in aesthetic judgments, that wittgenstein considers to be complex judgments, the gestures someone makes are often more important than the words that are spoken (lectures 1-40). 12. although the conversations between alex and pepperberg are mutual and as much alex’s doing as pepperberg’s, there are moral and political problems with this type of research (in which the animal lives in captivity). exploring this further would ask for the development of new forms of research. 13. “language must be learned / taught in its pragmatic function: it is an effective means of acting and of making others act” (despret 3). 14. and humans have used language to draw a line between all humans and all other animals, by calling them “animals,” which has obscured both the similarities between humans and animals, and the differences between animals and other animals (species and individuals) (see derrida). eva meijer – political communication with animals 49 15. when wittgenstein writes (on certainty, §540): “a dog might learn to run to n at the call “n” and to m at the call “m,” – but would that mean he knows what these people are called?” he seems to suggest the answer is no; even though we can teach a dog the name of a human, the dog will not know that this is what the human is called because dogs cannot grasp what a name is. but if m and n are people who play roles in the life of this dog, the dog will know what they are called. for dogs as well as for humans, these are different language-games. 16. “i can think of no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, color of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and criss-cross in the same way. — and i shall say: ‘games’ form a family” (pi, §67). 17. nothing ever is exactly the same as something else, things (acts, humans, animals, concepts) resemble each other and humans use this resemblance to connect and categorize, but these categories always contingent. 18. wittgenstein argues there are no boundaries to concepts that are related in this way; we can for example not draw boundaries around the concept “game” (pi, §68). 19. for a detailed analysis of this problem in haraway’s work, see weisberg. 20. in the words of resident cindy: “i once reprimanded a monkey for attempting to snatch my bag from me. it seemed to understand my reaction, like raising my voice, pointing a finger at it, and it backed off” (yeo and neo 14) 21. iris marion young argues greeting is a necessary condition for political communication; in this example greeting already is an act of political communication. 22. donaldson and kymlicka argue that domesticated animals in shared human-animal communities should have a right to basic socialization, a right to learn how to behave in a community with humans and other animals. similarly, humans in mixed communities have to learn how they should behave towards the other animals in the community. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 50 23. donaldson and kymlicka provide a clear overview of both the arguments of existing animal rights theories and their own view on the matter in zoopolis (1-49). 24 either on the ground that they are sentient beings, as singer argues, or on the ground that they are “subjects of a life,” as regan argues. works cited azeredo, sandra. “multispecies companions in naturecultures: donna haraway and sandra azeredo in conversation.” pensar/escrever o animal — ensaios de zoopoética e biopolítica. ed. maria esther maciel. florianópolis: edusc, 2011. 2-29. bekoff, marc. the emotional lives of animals: a leading scientist explores animal joy, sorrow, and empathy and why they matter. novato: new world library, 2007. bennett, jane. vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham: duke up, 2010. cavalieri, paola and peter singer, ed. the great ape project: equality beyond humanity. london: fourth estate, 1993. darwin, charles. the formation of vegetable mould, through the action of worms, with observations of their habits. london: john murray, 1881. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. new york: fordham up, 2008. _______. the beast and the sovereign, volume i. chicago: chicago up, 2009. _______. the beast and the sovereign, volume ii. chicago: chicago up, 2011. despret, vinciane. “the becoming of subjectivity in animal worlds.” subjectivity 23 (2008): 123–39. donaldson, sue and will kymlicka. zoopolis: a political theory of animal rights. oxford: oxford up 2011. francis, l.p. and anita silvers. “liberalism and individually scripted ideas of the good: meeting the challenge of dependent agency.” social theory and practice 33/2 (2007): 311-34. eva meijer – political communication with animals 51 gaita, raimond. the philosopher’s dog. melbourne: text publishing, 2002. garner, robert. the political theory of animal rights. manchester: manchester up, 2005 habermas, jürgen. the theory of communicative action volume 1: reason and the rationalization of society. boston: beacon press, 1981. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. _______. when species meet. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2008. hearne, vicki. 1986 adam’s task: calling animals by name. new york: skyhorse publishing, 2007. hribal, jason. fear of the animal planet: the hidden history of animal resistance. oakland ca: counter punch press and ak press, 2010. kittay, eva feder. “at the margins of moral personhood.” ethics 116 (2005): 100-31. latour, bruno. pandora’s hope: essays on the reality of science studies. cambridge: harvard up, 1999. maestripieri, dario. “gestural communication in human and non-human primates.” evolution of communication 30 (1997): 193-222. oliver, kelly. “animal ethics: toward an ethics of responsiveness.” research in phenomenology 40.2 (2010): 267-80. palmer, clare. “placing animals in urban environmental ethics.” journal of social philosophy 34.1 (2003): 64-78. _______. “colonization, urbanization and animals.” philosophy & geography 6.1 (2003): 47-58. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 52 pepperberg, irene. “grey parrot intelligence.” proceedings of the international aviculturists society january (1995): 11–15. rancière, jacques. hatred of democracy. london: verso, 2006. rawls, john. a theory of justice. oxford: oxford up, 1971. regan, tom. the case for animal rights. berkeley: u of california p, 1983. rowlands, mark. animal rights: a philosophical defense. new york: st. martin's press, 1998. singer, peter. 1975. animal liberation. new york: pimlico, 1990. smuts, barbara. “encounters with animal minds.” journal of consciousness studies 8.5–7 (2001): 293–309. weisberg, zipporah. “the broken promises of monsters: haraway, animals and the humanist legacy.” journal for critical animal studies 7/2 (2009): 22-62. wittgenstein, ludwig. philosophical investigations. trans. g.e.m. anscombe. oxford: blackwell, 1958. _______. über gewißheit. on certainty. trans. denis paul and g.e.m. anscombe. oxford: blackwell, 1969. _______. lectures and conversations on aesthetics, psychology and religious belief. ed. cyril barrett. oxford: blackwell, 1978. wolch, jennifer. “anima urbis.” progress in human geography 26.6 (2002). 721-42. wolfe, cary. animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. chicago: chicago up, 2003. yeo, jun-han and harvey neo. “monkey business: human-animal conflicts in urban singapore.” social and cultural geography 11.7 (2010): 681-700. young, iris marion. inclusion and democracy. oxford: oxford up, 2000. nigel rothfels -swimming with whales and history h u m a n i m a l i a 12:1 reviews nigel rothfels swimming with whales and history jason m. colby, orca: how we came to know and love the ocean’s greatest predator. new york: oxford university press, 2018. pp. viii, 394. $29.95 (hc); $21.95 (pb). if you ever found yourself reading a book and realizing that you wished you had the skills to write anything like it, you know how i felt reading jason colby’s orca. the book left me with feelings of gratitude for his hard work, admiration and envy for his skills as a historian and storyteller, and also some new hopes about the possibilities of writing about animals and history. before anything else, i should say that i came to this book late. before i read it, it had already been generally enthusiastically reviewed in the american historical review, the pacific historical review, environmental history, the western historical quarterly, the journal of mammalogy, and even the new republic.1 i humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 268 tried to avoid looking at the reviews before reading, but i did notice a recurring theme: most readers seemed to think the book was a page-turner. i decided the book might be a good summer read. i didn’t read it because i had agreed to review it; i was just interested in the topic. it became a daily ritual for me: after a day of work that i wasn’t enjoying that much, i would grab colby’s book and read a chapter. after providing a thoughtful and well-researched introduction into both the natural and cultural histories of orcas alongside a history of human occupation in the pacific northwest, colby traces the lives and fates of a surprising number of whales and humans beginning in the 1960s through recent years. we learn that at the beginning of the period, “blackfish” were generally seen as either pests and competitors to commercial fisherman or as terrifying hunters of the deep — in either case, something to be eliminated by whatever means were at hand, including depth charges and a mounted .50 caliber machine gun. then we are introduced to one of the central figures of the book, ted griffin, the man responsible for bringing namu to his seattle marine aquarium in 1965, the man who eventually decided he wanted to swim with a “killer.” that “single act of going into the water with namu,” as colby quotes noaa scientist mark keyes, “contributed more to the conservation and appreciation of killer whales by societies of the world than all the biologists and conservationists put together, from the dawn of time to that moment” (87). as the story moves forward, we meet a remarkable range of mostly men whose lives intersect in often surprising ways with whales and our ideas about them. figures like michael bigg, paul spong, robert wright, ric o’barry, murray newman, warren magnuson, don goldsberry, and john colby. their interactions with whales whose names are still remembered — moby doll, namu, shamu, haida, skana, chimo, tilikum, alice, miracle, keiko, and others — help us understand why literally millions of people began to flock to newer and ever more spectacular marine parks all over the world, sometimes in the most incomprehensible places. there, visitors marveled at the animal they wanted to see more than any other: the killer whale. as colby makes clear, though, if people went to the parks to see something spectacular, a huge and recognizably dangerous animal that could do tricks on command, they soon began to see a good deal more. like many of those who were involved in catching and caring for the whales in the early years, the public going to the parks, where the turnstiles churned constantly and gift shops overflowed with plush orcas and shamu t-shirts, began to see the intelligence and the emotional lives of the animals. in a sense, the parks made it possible for large numbers of people to begin to care about and for the whales. part of that caring eventually drove changes in the ways wild orcas were seen, moved nigel rothfels --swimming with whales and history 269 legislation to protect the animals, motivated activists to stop the capture of wild orcas and protest their exhibition, and led inevitably to the vilification of anyone associated with the industry. we come to see how ted griffin swimming with namu in 1965 could lead to the death of keiko in a bay off of norway in 2003, the capture, rehabilitation, and release of springer in 2002, the death of dawn brancheau at seaworld in 2010, and the making and powerful impact of blackfish in 2013. the characters, human and cetacean, are drawn with extraordinary empathy and care, and their experiences, hopes, and worries, as told by colby, are powerful. as he notes regarding a story by farley mowat, “the small-scale spectacle of one whale’s fate could have a powerful impact on public opinion” (103). in the right author’s hands, such spectacles can also have a profound impact on someone interested in the history of orca-human interaction. but let me return to my summer evenings and a few observations that are a bit more idiosyncratic and not what one usually finds in a book review. first, the photographs, of which there are more than forty, are both exceptional and thoughtfully curated. they constitute a kind of personal photo album that tells a parallel story to the text. initially, i was disappointed that colby never actually discusses them directly, never explores them for their rich content. but over the course of the book, i began to look forward to the story they were also telling — the story that the reader gets to construct out of them. second, the chapters, of which there are nineteen along with an “introduction” and an “epilogue,” are short, typically fifteen-sixteen pages, and after every couple of pages, there is a break as the focus of the writing shifts. this is not the sort of book where one has to slog through endless chapters. the writing is crisp, and the narrative moves easily along different timelines in different locations with different characters, who drop in and out throughout the work. and, all along the way, colby brings us with him as he meets, now in their 70s and 80s, many of the principal figures of the book. for example: “by may 2013, i had spent weeks searching for clues of griffin’s whereabouts when i came upon an old telephone number. the phone rang three times before a woman’s voice answered. ‘i’m sorry to bother you,’ i explained. ‘i’m looking for ted griffin.’ then came a long pause — it didn’t sound promising” (39). works of history published by major academic presses are not usually written like this. similarly, recalling a visit with sonny and marie reid, colby writes, “it was a rainy morning on the sunshine coast in july 2016 when the couple welcomed me into their home with coffee and pastries” (140). i won’t tell you how these and many other conversations go, but i will say that while the university of victoria lists colby as a specialist in “modern u.s. history, international relations, environmental history, pacific northwest,” he is also a skilled oral historian who has recorded a critical history before it is too late. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 270 at the end of the list of people i put together above is john colby, and that name points to a third aspect of this project that intrigued me. in reviews of the book and interviews with jason colby that are available on youtube, the work inevitably gets described as “personal,” because one of the orca catchers in the history is the author’s father. it is an unusual circumstance and one that undoubtedly helped the historian in his efforts to contact people in the industry. a few doors opened to colby because people either knew his dad (and even colby himself when he was young) or because by saying his father had been involved in the business, people thought he might not be “the enemy.” but what makes this book “personal” from my perspective is that colby has invested himself in the story and has engaged with the people he met not first as a historian but as a fellow human with his own baggage. in the end, while the reids and others may have invited jason colby into their homes because of his father, they ended up sharing their thoughts with him because of who he is and what kind of historian he is. when marie reid admits, “we never actually owned up to it ourselves” (140), you have to admire how colby has been able to encourage people who carry serious scars to trust him. in my efforts to write about animals and people and culture, i have met people like ted griffin, paul spong, and robert wright, and i think if you can write a book that tries to see them and their actions with both empathy and the clarity of time, while helping a reader to understand the different personalities, experiences, and struggles of animals that have been systematically anonymized as “shamu,” you’ve actually accomplished something. i urge you to read this book. long before you get to the remarkable scene at peddler bay near the end of the epilogue (and, no, i won’t spoil it here), i think you will admire this book, too. note 1. see reviews by jen corrinne brown in the american historical review 124.5 (dec. 2019): 1917-1918; taylor m. bailey in the pacific historical review 88.2 (2019): 320-322; jakobina arch in environmental history 24.2 (apr. 2019): 391-392; gary kroll in the western historical quarterly 51.1 (spring 2020): 83-84; eric l. walters in the journal of mammalogy 100.1 (feb. 2019): 261–264; and rachel riederer in the new republic (august 17, 2018). the walters’s review is particularly interesting as his own biography intersects with the subject. the point of riederer’s review, of course, is rather different than the others, but it is a very thoughtful commentary on the book. microsoft word calvert-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 scout calvert ready for the robot: bovines in the integrated circuit introduction. a typical cow on earth at the turn of the 21st century is figured as an information-generating machine. she generates data from the time she is born, at every developmental milestone, with the birth, growth, and death of each of her calves, including birth, weaning, and yearling weight, calving ease, and feeding data that help farmers compute efficiency and make breeding and slaughtering decisions. if she is a milk cow, data are kept every time she goes to the milking parlor to be milked. she may leave traces each time she leaves the farm, if she travels across state lines, or is sold or slaughtered. the data she produces are the basis for novel technologies that purport to increase simultaneously the agency and the productivity of cows. in this paper, i consider contemporary cattle breeding practices in light of developments in farm automation and donna haraway’s cyborg figure. haraway identifies the appearance of cyborgs in cultural production at a historical moment when shifts in global capital replace “comfortable old hierarchical dominations” with “scary new networks” she calls “the informatics of domination” (“cyborg manifesto” 161). in this essay, i describe an informatic feedback loop whose output is the domination of informatics, which condenses on both humans and cattle along power nodes called dna and data, unmaking and remaking gender and labor in frightening ways that also carry the germ of other possibilities. i consider the cyborg as a figure that breeches bovine-human boundaries as well as bovine-machine boundaries, in order to think about possibilities for making new demands on animal sciences for resistant knowledges for cowborg survival. i trace the predicament of cattle in high tech, particularly dairy cattle, to think through feminist commitments to non-human animals whose exploitation is enhanced through sexual divisions of labor, through gender made and unmade by capital, and to think about alliances with farming animals made through the social relations of science and technology, even if our experiences of it are asymmetrical. cowborg politics have a seed of companion species in the code. cowborgs are assembled from bovines, humans, machines, codes, algorithms, gametes, cryopreservation technologies, harnesses, plows, and stories, through pedigree practices that graft cows and humans into the same cyborg litter: cyborgs are “imploded entities, dense material semiotic ‘things’ — articulated string figures of ontologically heterogeneous, historically situated, materially rich, virally proliferating relatings of particular sorts, not all the time scout calvert -ready for the robot: bovines in the integrated circuit 75 everywhere, but here, there, and in between, with consequences” (haraway, staying with the trouble 104). cyborg politics allow a query into the features of bovine life without technological determinism or unqualified re-imposition of the human-animal and other divides. because, like the cyborg, the cowborg is impure, heretical, noninnocent, she has no originary history to return to. there is no back breeding to some cow whose life is not entangled with human culture, no extraction of genes for lactase persistence from the human genomes in which they appear, no unwinding of humans from the lives of cows. domestic cattle and humans must, for at least the near future, remain yoked together. in particular, the association among technologis, cows, and people is articulated and contested through the meanings and discourses about genetics, value, and breeding that are crucial to the pedigree practices that structure cattle breeding. mutating breeding practices seem to be shifting from the prestige of noble cow families to emphasis on quantified traits in epds and sire summaries. i discuss the ways these statistical summaries work hand in hand with arts and discourses in the service of breeding. statistical analysis, modeling, and the quantification of lucrative traits have led to the development of means for clustering traits in parallel to breed, pointing a way to deemphasizing “breed” as a proxy category, in favor of the desired traits themselves. in what follows, i reflect on the possibilities for responding to bovines in human-bovine companionship through the affordances of automatic milking systems (ams) and farm automation. as laborers, cows suffer dramatic pressures on productivity that are manifested genetically, in their own bodies, while data-greedy robotic milkers generate new knowledge for human manipulation of bovine genomes. one alluring but catastrophic scenario for addressing cowy suffering would be to end dairying absolutely, ending both domestic cattle and some non-capitalist lifeways of people in companionship with bos kin altogether. another is to dream haraway’s ironic dream of a common language, to embrace, in our alliances with cattle, the heteroglossia she describes in the cyborg manifesto. the automated pastoral. the pasture dairy center at michigan state university has two automatic milking systems for its resident dairy herd, along with a series of robotically controlled paddocks. located at kellogg biological station, the research station of the historical land grant agricultural university, the dairy anticipates visitors. the robots are positioned at the short end of a long pole barn, where visitors can view the human “interface” for the ams through large glass windows. visible are the hinge of the robotic milking arm, the hoses and milk tank, an emergency stop button, and a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 76 small touch screen control panel. a gap allows the robotic arm access into a chute where a cow will attend to be milked. the cow “interface” of the robot inside the barn involves a few fence panels constructed into a lane where the cows can line up to wait their turn at the robot. a video monitor is mounted inside the viewing room, showing the cows queuing in the barn in real time. on my visit, some six or seven cows are waiting for their turn placidly, if somewhat restlessly. the robot turns a cow out of the chute and begins its cleaning cycle, rinsing the milkers, hoses, and tank with clean water. on the cow side, the robot has opened the other end of the chute and i can see a cow’s hooves through the short gap near the floor. she enters slowly, puts her head down to look through the gap and inspect the chute, turning her head side to side as she moves to compensate her poor near sight and to enable her to perceive the depth of the enclosure. she has positioned her body in the chute and, though i now see only her hooves and udder, i know she is receiving a nutrient dense ration from a bowl dispenser in the robot housing. the robot recognizes her by her rfid collar and begins moving. the arm, neither swiftly nor slowly, moves down low near the ground, centered between the cow’s fore and hind legs, then shifts up and back toward her udder. the cow shifts too. she seems to settle on a wide stance that will oblige the robot and be comfortable for a few minutes of milking. at the first touch of the cleaning brushes, she lifts a hind hoof and then settles again for the cleaning phase. a spray of water i’m told is warm and a soft rotary brush clean her teats, taking just a few seconds. then, with laser sights, the robot attaches the four milkers, one by one, to her teats. almost immediately, milk can be seen pulsing through the hoses to the tank. the cow has settled and she is done in just a few minutes. the robot opens the chute at the other end and she leaves to rejoin the herd. in the barn, many members of the herd are lined up shoulder to shoulder, eating fodder being fed out in a long trough with metal stanchions. a large pressure-activated rotary brush affixed to a pole is being used by a cow to receive a back scratch. one cow refuses my offered ear scratch so i give it to another. at the end opposite of the barn, access to the paddocks is controlled by a robot and activated by each cow’s rfid tags to allow intensive management of the pasture. as a group of visitors walks along the line of cows steadily eating at the feeder, none seem perturbed. with alertness trained by a childhood on a cattle ranch, the cows seem calm and unbothered to me. scout calvert -ready for the robot: bovines in the integrated circuit 77 cyborg figure, cyborg politics. what are we to make of the contrast between the pastoral and the high tech, spattered manure and freshly cleaned milk tank, placid cows amid busy robots in the scene at the pasture dairy center, or other ams-based dairies like it? behind the scenes, an assemblage of sensor technologies, miniaturized electronics, robotics, genomic technologies and discourses, networking protocols, cloud computing, cryopreservation, and data science, along with subsidies, tariffs, and farm lending programs, are at play. haraway uses “social relations of science and technology” to describe a “historical system depending upon structured relations among people” (“cyborg manifesto” 165). her cyborg figure, now more than 30 years old and part of her queer litter, deep in “the trouble” with her more recent analytic, companion species (haraway, staying with the trouble 105), is still productive for thinking about the three divides she identified when the manifesto was first published in socialist review. in “a cyborg manifesto,” haraway describes three “boundary breakdowns” or “leaky distinctions,” including between humans and non-human animals, between organisms and machines, and between the physical and non-physical (152-153) that characterize the late 20th century. haraway adopts the figure of the cyborg as a way to work through productive complications for socialist-feminist politics in a historical moment when binary categories are no longer stable, natural, or self-evident. the cyborg “appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed” (154). cyborgs are part animal, part machine, and they not only deconstruct borders and binaries, but warp categories and pleasurably breech them. this breeching poses a problem for socialist politics because familiar analytics of labor, the family, and the home are reworked. and crucially, the foundations of some strains of radical feminism on essentialist definitions of the category “woman” collapse without the structural support of these categories, taking along with them claims for privileged knowledge and identity staked on the experience of oppression. for haraway, affinity, rather than identity, is the animating feature of political coalitions. the cyborg figure emphasizes the constructed, historically located, and stitchedtogether quality of all unities, while avoiding the erasure of difference intrinsic to the universalizing “white women’s movement” haraway criticizes (156). haraway scrupulously avoids attaching purely positive valences to the cyborg, but invites a politics in which feminists take stock and account for knowledge practices as they grapple with the social relations of science and technology. haraway proposes a socialist-feminist response to late 20th century economic, technological, and scientific humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 78 conditions she calls the informatics of domination, which she describes as “a massive intensification of insecurity and cultural impoverishment, with common failure of subsistence networks for the most vulnerable” (172). information and information technologies are, of course, crucial features of these “rearrangements of world-wide social relations” (161), in which “the translation of the world into a problem of coding” is most visible in communications and biotechnologies (164). rejecting technological determinism, haraway invites readers to engage the cyborg figure as “the self feminists must code” (163). informatics of domination might be too mild a term to describe bovine lives, simultaneously tightly circumscribed by turbo-charged breeding practices (orland), while extended the appearance of new kinds of agency in dairy operations as affordances of automatic milking systems. the informatics of domination has mutated into domination of informatics, not just for cows but for all of earth’s systems, which are now covered in sensor and satellite networks, infrastructures for monitoring and surveillance submerged even in the most remote of locations. but the cyborg is a figure of resistance and refusal against technological determinism. the essentialisms that accompany these familiar structures of domination don’t compute for cyborgs. as haraway argues, “the need for unity for people trying to resist world-wide intensification of domination has never been more acute. but a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies” (154). while the cyborg is non-innocent, partially spawned of partnerships between science and militarism, it is also an apt companion for thinking about the predicament of bovines in high tech: “from another perspective, a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (154). bovines in the integrated circuit. haraway’s metaphor of the integrated circuit references rachael grossman’s ethnographic work in the global semiconductor sector, in order “to name a situation of women in a world so intimately structured through the social relations of science and technology” (165). in grossman’s analysis, semiconductor manufacturing is “literally a global assembly line stretching more than halfway around the world” (33). firms “developed a whole battery of methods to manipulate and control the women who work in their plants.... [t]hese techniques specifically exploit the traditionally defined attributes of femininity” (30). as grossman notes, “the sudden concentration of women in advanced industrial enclaves might well be expected to foster the emergence of a strong feminist consciousness among them. the carefully scout calvert -ready for the robot: bovines in the integrated circuit 79 planned personnel policies work against this” (30). in the words of an intel personnel officer, “we hire girls because they have less energy, are more disciplined, and are easier to control” (29). semiconductor manufacturing is precision work that requires fine motor skills, significant eye-hand coordination, and highly attuned proprioception. asian women were described by manufacturers and government labor departments as being naturally and uniquely suited to this work, which takes a toll on workers’ eyes and health and is remunerated at barely livable rates. haraway links women through the “enforced attention to the small” from the “nimble fingers of ‘oriental’ women” to “the old fascination of little anglo-saxon victorian girls with doll’s houses” (154). women in the integrated circuit are soldered into the circuits of global capital, manufacturing electronics components shoulder to shoulder with women in other countries and factories who work on a different stage in the manufacturing process. this highly exploited, disposable, and gendered labor force makes high tech possible. i draw on haraway and grossman to highlight the gendered and increasingly high tech work of cattle, particularly dairy cattle working in industrial settings, and to situate cows in the social relations of science and technology. cows’ work is often invisible “except when the cows resisted or refused to collaborate, precisely because this resistance showed that, when all is functioning well, it is because of an active investment on the part of the cows” (despret, what would animals say 180, describing porcher and schmitt). from pulling plows, carts, and wagons to “getting groceries” (grazing) it is obvious to those who labor with cattle that they work, even if that is only belied in complaints when a cow is “lazy” and must be “retrieved” for milking. but other work of cattle is invisible, gendered, and breed specific. a cow chewing her cud in the shade might seem to be on her lunch break, but she’s engaging in both productive and reproductive labor, making milk and reproducing her labor power. as porcher and schmitt describe, dairy work relies on the active collaboration of cows, who “invest their intelligence and their affects in the work” (55). while the specific acts of collaboration vary across the job sites of domestic cattle, dairies are not unique in this regard. the labor of oxen pulling a plow may be obvious, whereas making milk may not appear as work because it is not clear that dairy cows have a subjective relationship to lactation. as with the gendered labor of care, making milk is presumed to be a natural response on the part of dairy cows’ bodies. we understand that fashion models move their bodies in particular ways, respond to directions from handlers and photographers, but that the shapes of their bodies and faces are part of what they humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 80 produce. their physical appearance seems to emanate naturally from their bodies and is supported by their cooperation and collaboration. the work of domestic cattle is structured by gendered divisions of labor, as their work making what appears to issue naturally from their bodies requires collaboration of multiple kinds. increasingly, not just milk but also data are made by bovine bodies. domestic cattle perform many kinds of labor on farms and ranches, with sharp divisions of labor according to the sex and reproductive status of the cows, as well as their breeds. on cattle ranches, most bull calves will be castrated to avoid growth in bone mass, and raised as steers. their work is to gain muscle and not so much bone as they grow, and to stay calm and gentle. some will be raised as veal calves. bulls castrated as adults will be gentle and strong, necessary traits for their work as draft animals. some bulls work as teaser bulls to identify cows in estrus. these bulls are sterilized but not castrated and some, called “sidewinders,” have been altered surgically to direct the penis to the side of the body to prevent intercourse. a cow otherwise identified for culling can also work as a teaser animal if she is treated with hormones to encourage mounting behavior. purebred bulls “in service” are consorts to cow herds, usually beef cattle, at a recommended rate of approximately one bull per 20 to 30 cows, depending on the age of the bull, his libido, and his social status in the herd. bulls of beef breeds may also work at studs as ai sires, if they are purebred bulls with strong performance traits as measured through “expected progeny differences” (epds) or “expected breeding value” calculations (ebvs). since most dairy cows in the us are impregnated through ai (around 95%), purebred dairy bulls are unlikely to mingle with cows. their work is to produce semen to pass along traits needed by their daughters for successful work in a dairy, and to cooperate with handlers at the stud in the collection of their semen. bulls may be kept in isolation to eliminate chances of sexually transmitted infections. dairy breed semen is often sex sorted, since the aim, typically, is more daughters to add to the milking herd. cows in a “cow-calf operation” on beef ranches give birth to heifers and bull calves and raise them as “animal units.” these cows’ mothering and milking ability is prized. some heifers will be “replacement” heifers and stay in the herd as older, sick, or underperforming cows are culled and slaughtered. a beef cow’s job is not just to bear calves but to raise them, to demonstrate good “mothering ability” so that she calves easily and protects her calves on the range, and so that they have a good weaning weight when they are separated from her. scout calvert -ready for the robot: bovines in the integrated circuit 81 but not all cows gestate or raise calves. some work as embryo donors. with hyperovulation synthetically induced, a donor cow is inseminated with sperm from a high performing sire. some five to seven days later, the resulting embryos will be retrieved from her uterus through a process called flushing. the embryos, perhaps as many as 20, are graded under a microscope, then frozen or implanted in another cow whose estrus has been synchronized. after being administered a hormonal abortifacient, the cow can hyperovulate and fertilize ova again at her next estrus. dairy cows do not need to be good mothers because their work is incompatible with raising their calves, who are taken away soon after birth. instead, dairy cows must make good milk and plenty of it. but that is not enough to do their work well. they must also eat continuously to keep up with the enormous energy expenditure of highyielding lactation. they must not burn calories doing unnecessary walking. they must rest lying down to chew their cud and make milk. they must come to be milked at the right time and insist on taking their turn at the robot and at the feeder. and dairy cows must be docile, under penalty of death. dairy cows are “an ultraflexible underproletariat, exploitable and destructible at will” (porcher and schmitt, 42), and the fact that they labor is assumed in the marketing and animal sciences literature. dairy cows have “time budgets” to allocate across milkmaking activities. “in an ideal robotic world, there are three groups of animals: cows at the feeder, cows laying down and cows standing at the robot” (caron, “for a successful use of milking robots” 14). cows need 10-12 hours of time lying down (westin et al.; helmreich et al. 319-20) during which they rest, ruminate, and make milk. they must get up to attend the milking robot frequently enough to avoid pressure in their udders and mastitis, but not so frequently as to impede the ability of other cows to operate the robot, or to cut into eating and lying time. while waiting may be as short as 25 minutes on average (helmreich et al. 318), it could be as long as 7 hours for cows of low social rank “in crowded situations (i.e., where all cows have to pass through the robot to access pasture)” (westin et al. 559). thus, cows with lower rank or higher milking needs will spend more time queuing and less time resting or eating (552). social competition can result in displacement that reduces lying time or shortens the duration of bouts (559). cows with high milking frequency spend more time at night waiting for the chance to use the robot, which in turn means shorter bouts of lying time (helmreich et al. 321). one study of the relationship between injuries and lying time in ams dairies reported that only half of focal cows were uninjured, that is, neither lame nor having lesions on the hocks or knees that are associated with hard flooring and bedding, and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 82 which appears as a problem because it results in decreased visits to the robot (westin et al. 555). researchers were skeptical, however, that decreased lying time resulted in reduced welfare (helmreich et al. 321), insofar as they could detect a difference in welfare. while using the milk robot is described as “voluntary,” it is analogous to voluntary human labor under capitalism. strategies enforcing visits to the robot may be required so as to reduce human labor spent retrieving cows for milking. these may include offering supplemental feeding in a pen that cows can only access after attending the robot (scott et al. 62). cows working in ams dairies have a partial preference for indoor housing that is likely influenced by the need to remain close to rations to meet the energy requirements of high production. thus, “lower yielding cows may have had more time available to graze, whereas the high yielding cows may have needed to use their available eating time consuming tmr [total mixed ration] to meet their nutritional requirements” (charlton et al. 8). cows in the contemporary social relations of science and technology are so constrained by their genetic need for energy to produce milk, on the one hand, and selection for docility, on the other, that it is not possible to genuinely say they have freedom or choice. in the analysis of holloway et al., “cows’ freedom, choice and subjectivity is subordinated to the need to use the robotic technology efficiently and constantly” (“recapturing bovine life” 138). they are free, in marx’s words, to work or to starve, with attendant life-threatening ketosis, or to be culled. domination of informatics. “women in the integrated circuit” names “the situations of women in a world so intimately structured through the social relations of science and technology” (haraway, “cyborg manifesto” 165). the predicament of cattle is no less structured through these relations and even more intimately so. in contrast to the pastoral landscapes inhabited by cows in our collective imaginations, cows have been part of high tech for some time. cryopreservation techniques were pioneered with cow gametes in the 1940s. statistical prediction of progeny traits has developed with increasing power alongside breed improvement efforts and animal science through the 20th century. the informatics of domination is not only a description of the social worlds of humans. in all the work that cows do, they generate data: the acts of being born, weaned, or slaughtered, siring or giving birth to a calf, lactating, ovulating, or ejaculating, can potentially generate data that in turn shape the contexts in which cows work, including their own bodies. record keeping practices yoked with reproductive technologies, genomic testing, statistical analysis, and the rhetorical power of animals, organized scout calvert -ready for the robot: bovines in the integrated circuit 83 under the sign of the pedigree chart, fuel complex feedback loops and robust statistical likelihoods, treated as predictions of bovine performance traits (calvert). the information infrastructures needed for the cow to generate the data that power these predictive algorithms have been a couple hundred years in the making. barbara orland traced the development of measurements and processes for standardization of dairy cow bodies, including keeping milk records, animal measurements, and pedigree charts. showing how these practices were established by the early 20th century, orland demonstrates that “[c]ollecting data about milk performance is itself part of the history of improving the cow’s natural capacity to lactate” (168). according to orland, “today’s high-yielding cow came into being within a new culture of competition, standardization, performance control, selection, and predictability” (184). these statistical predictions are used in breeding decisions and gamete selection, and are part of the tangled loop of arts and information technologies that organize life for cattle in countries of nearly every economic status. cows and bulls both toil as gamete producers, sometimes in addition to their work making milk, raising calves, or making meat. far from the bucolic scene of the pasture, many cows live in cow sheds without access to pasture, in veal crates that constrict their movements while keeping them socially isolated, or in crowded, dusty, or muddy “concentrated animal feeding operations” or cafos. while many cows around the world are free to graze, move around, and otherwise fully behave as cows, many more do not. so, like haraway, i think here about the situation of cows in the social relations of science and technology. epds and sire summaries are charts of statistical calculations of commercially valuable traits of a registered bull or cow’s offspring that evolved from pedigrees through the practices described by orland, via breed improvement programs in the early 20th century as breeders increased the number of traits they measured and compiled. measurement data of a given animal’s progeny are computationally compared with all other animals in the breed database, and then assigned an index and accuracy score. as artificial insemination and cryopreservation became both technically possible and approved in the bylaws governing registration in purebred herd books, the number of progeny a bull could sire vastly increased, which in turn increased the number of observations of performance traits in his offspring. this, in turn, enhanced the power of the statistical predictions. these breed databases of phenotypes and biological relations are crucial resources for the development of genetic trait analysis. since the sequencing of the bovine genome (with l1 dominette 01449, a hereford cow, standing in as a reference for all bos taurus) in 2009, bovine genetic testing has expanded rapidly and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 84 epds and performance summaries are now “genomically enhanced” to influence accuracy scores for animals with fewer progeny. these tables now typically accompany pedigree charts for purebred animals. however, in some instances, pedigree charts are omitted or decentered and emphasis is placed on the scores for given traits. holloway and morris describe the “boosted bodies” of cattle represented such that a cow “isn’t simply a body, but a body and its data” (1718). statistical evaluation with genomically enhanced accuracy scoring is promoted to farmers as the ability to breed cows with laser sights on specific, abstracted, traits, targeting the performance of the herds as a whole, for example, calving ease, weaning weight, or docility, and thus address perceived weaknesses through the next calf crop. epds and ebvs are key artifacts for understanding bovine-human relations in the 21st century. they are possible only because of the development of arts, computational power, genetic discourses, and genomic technologies. orland’s turbo cow has mutated into a what deleval calls a “robot cow” (wadsworth) or a dairy cow who has internalized the habits and temperament necessary, and who is genomically shaped, for working in automatic milking systems. ams are more than milking machines. the collars the cows wear let the ams know their identities and the robot captures and stores data produced through the cows’ lactation work. the quantity and quality of the cows’ milk is noted; their estrus can be detected; mastitis and other health issues related to productivity can also be discovered with in-line sensors. the milk can be automatically quarantined based on the analysis. if a cow has mastitis or is being treated with antibiotics, her milk can automatically be discarded. when a cow is being milked, she generates other data as well: the speed at which she lets her milk drop and milk out, and the frequency of her visits. as holloway et al. demonstrate, these “data become part of a metrological regime which can be used to make decisions on what interventions in the life of each cow are necessary” (“re-capturing bovine life” 137). the milking data are added to a cow’s performance data and feed back into the performance data of the herd and of her forebears: the talents of the daughter are ascribed to her sire. as the data becomes part of each cow’s informatic profile, they iterate through a cybernetic loop with high potential for creating a nightmare situation for cows. these data feed into the algorithmic prediction of genetic traits that encourages the selection of these traits in breeding decisions, emphasizing productivity and docility, and forcing a change in “the parameters of interaction” for both dairy cows and farmers in response (coppin 49). scout calvert -ready for the robot: bovines in the integrated circuit 85 programmable cows. marketing materials from manufacturers of milk robots like the lely astronaut or deleval vms (voluntary milking system) emphasize the freedom dairy cows have in ams dairies, with positive potential for animal welfare. true, ams enable cows to choose when they’d like to be milked, but within a matrix of constraints: robot to cow ratio, herd social hierarchy, hours of the day, time pressures for other aspects of dairy work (eating, resting, and ruminating), and the spatiality (holloway et al, “re-capturing bovine life” 139) of the dairy. farmers use a variety of techniques to ensure that cows attend the robot with regularity, for example, through the use of oneway gates or by positioning the most nutritious rations in an area beyond the ams pen (scott et al.). since only one cow may operate the robot at a time, stocking capacity and farm productivity depends on cows’ cooperation with optimum milking routines. cows initiate the milking process by entering the parlor at a time of their partial choice, vying for position with their mates. when a cow enters the stall, she is given a ration of nutrient dense feed to help support the caloric needs of intensive lactation and as a food bribe to entice her to enter the robot. the robot reads the radio tag on her collar and uses previously stored information, along with lasers, to automatically clean her udders and attach milking nozzles. for robots to be able to work with cows, cows’ bodies have to be configured such that the robot can find and attach the milkers. their udders must be uniform, with teats neither too long nor too short, nor too far from the herd average, and centered near the bottom of the udder. their hooves must be sound to resist lameness from the concrete flooring of dairy barns, and their legs spaced so that the robot gets “a good rear leg view” (caron, five criteria). additionally, for cows to work with robots, they have to have a calm temperament so that they can wait patiently without moving or shifting, while the robot cleans their udders and attaches the milkers. they have to be sufficiently motivated by the food reward to enter the robot’s chute, and they have to go willingly to be milked so that farmers don’t expend their valuable labor retrieving them for milking. to create such cows, prospective semen buyers can choose bulls whose traits complement those already in the herd or choose a match for a particular cow from a large number of bulls in a catalog. some of these traits are for fertility and feed efficiency, others relate to the physical stature and shape of the bull and his offspring. other traits relate to the features of his daughters: their pregnancy and stillbirth rates, calving ease, udder qualities and teat placement. the gene for the presence of kinds of milk proteins is also available for selection. other dairy specific scores include somatic humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 86 cell score, mastitis resistance, milking speed, calving ability, metabolic disease resistance, and milking temperament. the ability to identify and genetically influence so many aspects of a cow’s body and correlate these traits to performance has allowed breeders to identify and select traits to influence herd productivity. these information technologies conjoined with assisted reproductive technologies now allow breeders and studs to pinpoint ways cow bodies may be less than ideal for robots, and attempt to reshape them. these traits are already tracked on dairy epds. while breed remains an important proxy indicator of genetics, semex has adopted a strategy that extends genetics discourses in new ways. the company markets semen with highly sought-after clusters of traits: repromix, genomax, immunity+, sexxed, and showtime, are a few. these categorize semen by the breeding values for clusters of traits directly, rather than allowing a prizewinning bull or notable cow family to imply those traits. emphasis has shifted from pedigrees to sire summaries, from breed to breeding values. animals who perform well on all of the robot-friendly indices can be grouped together for marketing purposes, as semex does with its trademark “robot ready,” a stud book of bulls of different breeds which it has identified as creating daughters whose bodies will conform to the robot. here, temperament is of particular interest. cows who work with a robot must have an aptitude for cooperating calmly with it. however, these cows must not be so passive when it comes to reproductive labor. semex codes for “calm cows at the robot milker and aggressive ones at the feeder: not stressed cows that hold in their milk and try to pass between two stalls when they encounter another individual” (caron, five criteria). an animal welfare concern thus beckons a genetic solution. cattle in high tech predicaments: dream of a cowborg language. prize winning pure-bred animals reflect elite values, including dignity and good breeding, back on their owners (ritvo). these “rhetorical animals” still play this role in purebred sales literature, particularly for beef breeds. but cows have other rhetorical uses as well. while a particular animal may reflect on an owner or breeder, kine as a kind carry other potent meanings for humans — from the compassionate and life-giving cow of plenty who appears in irish, hindu, and buddhist traditions, to the ancient aurochs carrying ethno-nationalist meanings in europe (driessen and lorimer). for rural and urban people alike, cows also stand for something beguilingly bucolic. some farmers’ resistance to industrializing dairies is the sense that the public wants to see cows grazing, which sustains a positive valence for dairy products (holloway et al, “robotic scout calvert -ready for the robot: bovines in the integrated circuit 87 milking technologies” 193). indeed, the notion of ancient, plodding farm animals in high tech predicaments is an oddity and a source of amusement and intrigue for tech marketers as well as media theorists. the critical media lab’s 2009 project connecting cows to the internet of things to enable their tweeting still has a cutting edge feel despite a website showing its age. as if to answer, microsoft has its own ted-style talk to play up the contrast and talk about its collaboration with japanese sensor makers and farmers in the development of heat detection data analysis technologies. dell technologies exploits the contrast in a visualization of data leaving a cow’s body in a video describing a partnership with chitale dairy in india. and of course, lely’s ams is called the astronaut, summoning visions not just of successful space missions, but animal astronauts and cosmonauts who perished in their service to human space aspirations. the university of waterloo’s critical media lab project teat tweets is made possible as an affordance of the data gathered by the assemblage of rfid collars, cows, milking robots, and social media. the crime lab team developed a project to generate tweets from robotic milking data, in collaboration with the farmer and a dozen cows at buttermine farms in ontario. the cows tweeted (via this enabling assemblage) from late 2009 into mid-2011. the critical media lab team noted that ams have “radically altered the daily rhythms of the dairy, as well as the farmer's relationship to the animals. the cows are now able to literally milk themselves at all times, day and night, and the farmer is now primarily an information manager” (“teat tweet”). the lab developed a mobile app as an experimental intervention “that would allow the farmer to regain intimacy with his cows, and allow anyone at all to learn more about where their milk comes from,” while noting as well that the project “[raises] questions about how technology mediates the relationship between animals and humans.” according to the lab’s site, the farmer chose twelve cows of different ages and lactation stages to participate in the project. the teat tweet team prepared twitter profiles for each cow, as well as a “voice” for each cow and ... a variety of tweet variables that would be used to flesh out data pulled from the vms database. the result is a live and ongoing twitter feed for each of the 12 cows, which relay their milking activities in conversational terms, and sometimes quote lines of poetry from virgil. (“teat tweet”) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 88 the crime lab’s twitter script assembles the tweets like mad libs, by putting a wrapper around certain data points. so, the cows, ostensibly, tweet how much milk they produced, how fast each teat milked out, and frustrated visits to the robot. the accounts also tweet lines from virgil’s georgic iii. the cows’ images appear on the critical media lab website, and their twitter profiles are still active, though they haven’t tweeted since 2011, and the cows, presumably, are dead. the crime lab twitter project inserts a mediating layer between cows and farmers, while it also creates a window to that relationship for curious bystanders. the project suggests a potential for new modes for bovine-human and bovine-computer interactions, while raising questions it does not answer. the project exploits the disjuncture between farming and computers, the idea of animals, let alone those with hooves, tweeting. largely without context, it’s hard to get a sense of the cows’ experience in the robot, except by aggregating the tweets for analysis. then we can count how many times each day a cow attempted to be milked. charge cindy, for example, had some days when she tried to enter the milking system 7 or 8 times, and 39 days when she only visited once. she visited on average 1.47 times per day in the 14 months she tweeted. meanwhile, in the 16 months attention please tweeted, she visited an average of 6.56 times per day. was attention please greedy for food bribes or was something else happening for her? she could not tell us. some eight years later, tweeting cows are no longer just the topic of a serious-playful exploration of the relationships between bos taurus and homo sapiens by digital animal studies scholars. microsoft’s joseph sirosh played up the contrast between cows and computers in a talk at the strata+hadoop world conference in 2015. in the talk “connected cows?” sirosh describes the pedometer-wearing cows whose step counts are “sent to the cloud.” the step data are used to detect health problems and estrus using microsoft’s cloud data analysis platform. sirosh’s talk is playful and punning (“when ai [artificial intelligence] meets ai [artificial insemination]”), and plays up the idea that a farmer would receive texts based on this data, alerting “him” (in sirosh’s use) to the activity change that signals estrus (sirosh).* but perhaps most compelling are a series of videos published on youtube in 2017 by dell technologies and subsidiary vmware. we are invited to “see how dell technologies is helping to transform dairy cows into living, breathing data centers and revolutionizing the dairy industry” through profiles of chitale dairy, a company in pune, india, that uses the firm’s cloud technology. in one striking 30 second video, actor jeffrey wright stands with a brown swiss dairy cow, lit in high contrast chiaroscuro. scout calvert -ready for the robot: bovines in the integrated circuit 89 she wears a collar with the number 2713 and an rfid tag and chews her cud audibly, as wright gazes at her inquisitively. “a dairy cow that talks to farmers ... what kind of sorcery is that?” he answers his own question: “it’s not the magic wand kind.” as wright touches the cow’s forehead, her body appears to light up in multicolored laser tracery of her circulatory and nervous systems. as a grid of points appears on her body, wright continues: “it’s the rfid collar and internet of things kind we created with chitale dairy.” behind them, lighting begins to illuminate a background of green, rolling hills — perhaps the swiss alps that are the ancestral home of the breed. the cow begins to emit what appears to be an illustration of radio waves from her head as wright explains, “so every cow can let farmers know how she feels, and what she needs to be healthier.” at this moment, a reverse shot shows the point of view of both actors: they are on a stage in a large performance hall playing to an audience. reversing again, the stage backdrop is now a view of earth from space, and we can see the radio waves reaching a satellite in orbit. wright’s cell phone appears to buzz, signaling a received message, and he continues: “all with a simple text. ta-da. magic can’t make digital transformation happen, but we can. that’s the power of vmware. part of dell technologies” (dell technologies, “the magic of chitale dairy”). the cutting-edge context set, other videos profile chitale dairy as if to contrast. in one, viewers meet makarand nagnath patil, a farmer in rural maharashtra, india, whose family and cows provide milk to chitale dairy (dell technologies, “how chitale dairy takes cows to the cloud”). on the spare, simple farm, we see patil and his family milk what appear to be a dozen or so cows by hand. with his young child, patil transports milk in a large metal milk can by motorcycle to the chitale collection center. yet even this farmer, appearing to run a very small dairy operation with very few animals, can benefit from data produced by the cows on his farm in their milk, through cloud services provided by dell technologies and delivered via text. patil, his cows and family, join others in the integrated circuit that is the global assembly line of bovine information work. back at the pasture dairy center, i asked the farm manager about adapting the cows to the robot. i learned that it usually takes about three days for a cow to learn to operate the ams, and that almost all of them are trained within three weeks. he cautioned that “cows will train you” to come get them from the pasture to be milked. the two robots at the farm handle 180 sessions each day, usually about two visits per cow, sometimes three. the recommended stocking rate is one robot per 50 to 60 cows, but at the pasture dairy center farm they’ve learned that when cows are provided pasture, they come in less frequently and so more cows can be handled by the two robots. the most humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 90 surprising thing the staff of the farm have learned from looking at the milking data is one big way dairy farmers have been doing things wrong for generations: cows can come to milk any time they want, day or night, and the least popular time is exactly the time farmers have historically done the day’s first milking, between 4:00 am and 6:00 am. the most popular hour, friendlier to both cows and humans, begins at 7:00 am. the appearance of cows in these narratives is about the meanings and images cows carry: bucolic, placid, dumb, and the contrast with smart, cutting edge technology. they appear as rhetorical animals. patil and his family are somewhere in between, a silicon pastoral: they milk cows by hand but benefit from knowledge derived from the data in the milk of their small herd. nevertheless, dell’s vision of cows who are simultaneously living, breathing data centers and able to tell farmers how they feel via text message are “bodies as code problems on the grid of c3i [command, control, communications, intelligence]” (haraway, “cyborg manifesto” 175). sensor technologies and algorithms that detect indicators of health and other bodily states from their movements tell humans one set of stories about what cows feel and think. “feminist cyborg stories,” in the language of the manifesto, “have the task of recoding communication and intelligence to subvert command and control” (175.) haraway’s “dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit” (149) is ironic: “cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication...” (176). present in both teat tweets and in dell’s and microsoft’s claims to give cows a means to communicate with farmers is the paradoxical desire both to ventriloquize with cows to say something about what we think about them but also to actually understand something about what cows think and feel, and about what they want and don’t want. animal sciences, ethnology, stockmanship, animal husbandry, have each, in their way, tried to understand something about cows, even formed, as they are, through foucauldian power-knowledge, such that cows can only be heard when they say something useful for human demands. as coppin says, the animal sciences were born in industrial agriculture. nevertheless, “agency is a temporally emergent phenomenon rather than a property inherent in some beings and not in others” (50) in the changing situations produced through human-bovine interactions. cowborg politics/program robots, not cows. what are we to make of the predicament of bovines in the integrated circuit? it is not a predicament only of cattle, but of cattle, people, and other earthly beings locked together in a struggle for survival. one effect of haraway’s and grossman’s references to electronics factory workers as women in the integrated circuit is to destabilize notions of high tech as “first world,” scout calvert -ready for the robot: bovines in the integrated circuit 91 masculine, clean, and untouched, by articulating a site for solidarity between morethan-women across categories structured by western dualisms. similarly, i trace the connectors of bovines in the circuit to destabilize the pastoral wholesomeness presumed to express cow living conditions. cows are soldered into the integrated circuit, laboring in highly gendered, abjectly exploitative conditions of highly delimited agency that are occluded by our bucolic sentiments. the technological apparatuses that seem to offer more freedom to cows are also nudges toward confinement systems that narrow the range of options available for bovine sensibilities. coppin shows that “sows ... are active participants in hog farming and assist in the reshaping of several social agents.” but nevertheless, "the primary relation between humans and swine is one of domination" (47). the imaginary of the internet of things is that not only documents and databases will be networked, but objects and even beings in the world, largely through the use of sensors that would track movements and other inputs to enable their manipulation at a distance. cows are not robots, nor are they “robot cows” as described in delaval’s marketing materials. formed, like humans, in technoscience, cows are cyborgs who operate dairy robots. robots are electronically activated machines for automating repetitive tasks, from czech robota, for forced labor. cows through the 20th century have become, like humans, thoroughly constituted in the social relations of science and technology, colaborers since the sledge and the plow, if not before, with bodies subject to the same breeding and biological discourses and practices. but cow robots could be built, designed to adapt to the variations in cow bodies and personalities that exist even under such intense selection pressures as are exerted through pedigree practices. humans could program robots, not cows, to maximize bovine contentedness over the economic contradiction of high milk production. for this to be thinkable, humans with cyborg politics must account for our place with cows in the social relations of science and technology. as holloway et al. argue, “robot technologies also demand a codisciplining of the farmer and the co-constitution of particular human subjectivities” (“recapturing bovine life” 137). and yet. robotic dairy work cannot be done without the cooperation of cattle, whether or not they understand that non-compliance is a death sentence. as with coppin’s pigs, the relationship between humans and bovines in the us-canadian context is one primarily of domination. still, ams could enable humans to ask questions of cows that matter to them, and facilitate responses, including questions back, that we can hear. cowborg politics takes stock of the social relations of science and technology to engage humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 92 scientific knowledge production for the task of imaginatively reprogramming robots and redesigning algorithms, intervening in cybernetic feedback loops that shape responses and responsibility of both bovines and humans. in an interview with the national journal that the national pork producers council may never live down, spokesman dave warner said “i don’t know who asked the sow if she wanted to turn around” (terris). of course, sows have been asked, and they’ve answered that they would prefer to turn and would prefer more space than the crates allow. they would also prefer not to die terrifying and painful deaths in slaughterhouses, though we will have to take that claim on our knowledge of porcine physiology and behavior, since swine informants don’t survive the process to offer humans guidance on improvement. how a human asks another human or another animal what it would prefer makes all the difference in the ability to perceive the response. a common way of asking cattle how they feel is to draw blood to test blood cortisol levels. temple grandin uses this research and keen observation skills honed through her experiences as a person with autism. ian duncan and colleagues who study animal behavior with attention and curiosity design experimental set ups that allow fish, chickens, pigs, horses, and other farm animals a chance to understand a choice and meaningfully answer (fraser et al.). these questions are shaped through contemporary animal sciences. thelma rowell’s work was “to expand the repertoire of hypotheses and questions proposed to the sheep” (despret, “sheep do have opinions” 368). cows do have opinions. good cattle handlers and ox drovers know how their bodies inflect to cows. any farm kid knows how far to go around a cow and where to enter her flight zone to encourage her to turn. too close and she’ll turn hard, too sudden a move and she’ll bolt. staying quiet and calm keeps cows quiet and calm. cows listen to people and people can listen to cows. cyborg politics demand new research questions. animal welfare knowledge provides some of the argot for creating channels for communication with bovines. but it may assume too much welfare provided by humans and be unable to detect other states of wellbeing or un-wellbeing. cowborg politics acknowledges crucial differences between kinds of beings but also similarities in human and bovine sensory systems, shared histories, and co-domestication. it incorporates impure knowledge from animal sciences, ethology, pastoralists, and agriculture to generate a permanently partial language that takes cow pleasures and perceptions seriously. it inhabits historically constituted relations with farming animals scout calvert -ready for the robot: bovines in the integrated circuit 93 while rejecting the capitalist logic of utter domination and resourcing of animal bodies, against which animal welfare is a failing bulwark. computational technologies, working with larger sample data from a seemingly endless stream of animals due to arts and industrialization, predict economically beneficial traits that can be correlated to genetic markers. auxiliary technologies like ams are purported to enhance cow agency, requiring less knowledge of cattle behavior and preferences from the humans they encounter. rather than eliciting response and responsibility (haraway, when species meet 71) from humans who live with cows, the techne of the algorithm entices humans to attempt to create cattle as docile beings whose temperaments are suited for unskilled handlers and whose bodies are fitted to robots. changing the machinery of dairying requires a change in the biology of cows, bred for docility and compliance, as a component of the dairy assemblage, creating a nightmare for cattle. high-yielding dairy cows require constant access to nutritionally dense feed in order to meet the calorie requirements of milk production and get their work done within each day’s time budget, even while the contradictions of capital sometimes require the dumping of milk to support prices given cows’ increased productivity. if cattle become compliant with permanent warehousing, this could mean a major change in animal agriculture, and the amount of open space required for dairying. the need to resist this is acute. yet, robots could be programmed to allow cows a way to be interesting, to tell us more than the time of day at which they prefer to milk, which would be good for cows and human-bovine companionship. i position this against some extreme forms of animal rights discourses that would see not just the end of cattle breeds of any kind but domestic cattle altogether. animal rights discourses that insist that all human-nonhuman animal relationships are exploitative reinscribe the line so thoroughly breeched by cyborgs between animals and non-animal humans, nature and culture, and the rest of the western dualisms scuttled by haraway, anzaldúa, and others. while, like the pigs in coppin’s swine study, the relationship between cattle and humans in industrial settings is primarily one of domination, in the lives of very large numbers of subsistence farmers all over the world, the fates of cows, yaks, buffalo, and other bos kin and their human companions are more directly intertwined. traditional lifeways that have been only barely possible would be absolutely impossible were relationships between people and bovids forbidden. yet capital appears ineluctably to find its way into parts of the world that had previously been remote to it, imposing visions of cow bodies as data centers, and introducing new mediations in those relationships. in acknowledgement of the long-shared histories between cattle and people for which i carry a gene for lactase humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 94 persistence as testimony (beja-pereira et al.), i am holding out for a cowborg politics that acknowledges this companionship, the cyborg status of all of us living through the informatics of domination/domination of informatics, and the shared stakes in earthly survival for all cyborgs. human workers who have dreamed, not feared, robots taking their jobs, or at least reducing the hours of the work day, can understand the contradictory dream of dairy robot stocking ratios and pedigree practices that hold productivity static or dial it down a notch, but produce more hours in the day for, as the slogan of the eight-hour movement goes, “what we will.” i can barely imagine human lives made less abject but i insist on continuing to do so, with bovines as our co-laborers and collaborators (in every radical sense) all the way. we will not be made ready for the robot. we are ready, and will make the robot ready, for us. with love and deference to susan leigh star (46) and donna haraway, i note: a cow is already a goddess and a cyborg. acknowledgements. thanks to nora madden, dulcy perkins, memi perkins, andrea kepsel, kate ojibway, kellogg biological station, and anonymous peer reviewers for the support, cooperation, and responses that made this paper possible. note *although heat detection data sent through sms has been around for several years, no one yet appears to have adopted the slogan “twat tweets” or “twatter.” works cited anzaldúa, gloria. “la conciencia de la mestiza: towards a new consciousness.” borderlands/la frontera: the new mestiza. aunt lute, 1987. 77–99. beja-pereira, albano, gordon luikart, phillip r. england, daniel g. bradley, oliver c. jann, giorgio bertorelle, andrew t. chamberlain, telmo p. nunes, stoitcho metodiev, nuno ferrand & georg erhardt. “gene-culture coevolution between cattle milk protein genes and human lactase genes.” nature genetics 35.4 (dec. 2003): 311–313. calvert, scout. “certified angus, certified patriot: breeding, bodies, and pedigree practices.” science as culture 22.3 (2013): 291–313. caron, jean-dominic. five criteria for breeding robot-ready cows. semex. genetics for life, 2015. scout calvert -ready for the robot: bovines in the integrated circuit 95 _____. “for a successful use of milking robots.” point de vue aug. 2016: 14–15. charlton, gemma l., steven mark rutter, martyn east & liam a. sinclair. “preference of dairy cows: indoor cubicle housing with access to a total mixed ration vs. access to pasture.” applied animal behaviour science 130.1-2 (feb. 2011): 1-9. coppin, dawn. “crate and mangle: questions of agency in confinement livestock facilities.” the mangle in practice: science, society, and becoming. andrew pickering and keith guzik, eds. duke up, 2008. 46–66. dell technologies. how chitale dairy takes cows to cloud. youtube. accessed 16 aug. 2018. online. _____. the magic of chitale dairy. youtube. accessed 16 aug. 2018. online. despret, vinciane. “sheep do have opinions.” making things public: atmospheres of democracy. bruno latour and peter weibel, eds. mit press, 2005. 360-70. _____. what would animals say if we asked the right questions? u minnesota p, 2016. driessen, clemens, and jamie lorimer. “back breeding the aurochs: the heck brothers, national socialism, and imagined geographies for non-human lebensraum.” hitler’s geographies: the spatialities of the third reich. paolo giaccaria and claudio minca, eds. u chicago p , 2016. 138–157. fraser, david, i.j. duncan, s.a. edwards, t. grandin, n.g. gregory, v. guyonnet, p.h. hemsworth, s.m. huertas, j.m. huzzey, d.j. mellor, j.a. mench, m. spinka & h.r. whay. “general principles for the welfare of animals in production systems: the underlying science and its application.” the veterinary journal 198.1 (oct. 2013): 19–27. grandin, temple. “behavioural principles of handling cattle and other grazing animals under extensive conditions.” livestock handling and transport. temple grandin, ed. cabi publishing, 2016. 39-64. grossman, rachael. “women’s place in the integrated circuit.” radical america 14.1 (1980): 29–50. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 96 haraway, donna j. “a cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century.” simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. routledge, 1991. 149-81. _____. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. duke up, 2016. _____. when species meet. u minnesota p, 2008. helmreich, simone, rudolf hauser, thomas jungbluth, beat wechsler & lorenz gygax. “time-budget constraints for cows with high milking frequency on farms with automatic milking systems.” livestock science 167 (september, 2014): 315–22. holloway, lewis. “aesthetics, genetics, and evaluating animal bodies: locating and displacing cattle on show and in figures.” environment and planning d: society and space 23 (2005). 883–902. holloway, lewis, and carol morris. “boosted bodies: genetic techniques, domestic livestock bodies and complex representations of life.” geoforum 39.5 (2008): 1709–20. holloway, lewis, christopher bear & katy wilkinson. “re-capturing bovine life: robot–cow relationships, freedom and control in dairy farming.” journal of rural studies 33 (jan. 2014): 131–40. _____. “robotic milking technologies and renegotiating situated ethical relationships on uk dairy farms.” agriculture and human values 31.2 (june 2014): 185–199. orland, barbara. “turbo-cows: producing a competitive animal in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” industrializing organisms: introducing evolutionary history. susan r. schrepfer and philip scranton, eds. routledge, 2004. 167–189. porcher, jocelyne, and tiphaine schmitt. “dairy cows: workers in the shadows?” society and animals 20 (2012). 39–60. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate: the english and other creatures in the victorian age. harvard up, 1987. scout calvert -ready for the robot: bovines in the integrated circuit 97 scott, v. e., k.l. kerriska, p.c. thompson, n.a. lyons & s.c. garcia. “voluntary cow traffic and behaviour in the premilking yard of a pasture-based automatic milking system with a feed supplementation regime.” livestock science 171 (jan. 2015): 52–63. sirosh, joseph. “connected cows?” — joseph sirosh (strata + hadoop 2015). youtube. accessed 1 oct. 2017. online. star, susan leigh. “from hestia to home page: feminism and the concept of home in cyberspace.” between monsters, goddesses and cyborgs: feminist confrontations with science, medicine, and cyberspace. nina lykke and rosi braidotti, eds. zed books, 1996. 30–46. “teat tweet: dairy diaries.” critical media lab. accessed 1 oct. 2017. online. terris, ben. “animal-rights issue complicates farm bill.” national journal july 2012. wadsworth, monica. selecting the right cows for your robot. milkproduction.com. accessed 6 apr. 2012. online. westin, rebecka, alison vaughan, anne marie de passillé, trevor j. devries, edmond anthony pajor, doris pellerin, janice m. siegford, elsa vasseur & jeffrey rushen “lying times of lactating cows on dairy farms with automatic milking systems and the relation to lameness, leg lesions, and body condition score.” journal of dairy science 99.1 (jan. 2016): 551–61. microsoft word holmberg-jarolmack-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:1 tora holmberg pigeon stories colin jerolmack, the global pigeon. (fieldwork encounters and discoveries.) chicago: the university of chicago press, 2013. 288 pp. $80.00 hb; $27.50 pb; $7.00$27.00 e-bk. pigeons are funny creatures. they are globally urbanized fellows, so much so that they have become a separate species — in english set apart from their rural cousins, the doves. as many urbanized animals, they thrive in the cities because they follow human patterns and live off our excess. people of all ages enjoy feeding pigeons, and in some settings, such as trafalgar square in london, pigeons are iconic to the “place images“ (shields) held and practiced. moreover, they make use of human technologies and infrastructures. a couple of years ago, a swedish newspaper wrote about a group of pigeons who regularly commuted inside the subway train from the outskirts to the suburban center, where they fed outside restaurants and in parks, only to head back “home“ again in the evening. obviously clever and successful in their urban lifestyle, pigeons have become “natural“ inhabitants of city parks, squares, roofs, and walls. moreover, on a global scale, different pure breeds are also popular human companions in play, work, and social interaction, and serve as important social facilitators, cultural anchors, and objects of love and care. yet their existence is not uncontested, and when their presence exceeds certain limits — be these limits numerical, spatial, or behavioral — pigeons become vermin, or “rats with wings“ (jerolmack 45). sociologist colin jerolmack starts from and explores the complexities of global pigeons. he does so through a number of ethnographic case studies in different pigeon contexts in a number of places around the world, for example micro-spatial conflicts around pigeon feeding in venice, human-pigeon interaction in new york, pigeon racing in south africa, and turkish tumblers in berlin. the “global“ in the title refers to and problematizes the fact that even though the book obviously does not cover the whole world, similar interactional and meaning-making patterns seem to structure the social worlds of pigeons. it also refers to the structuring of the social contexts present — through “extra-local“ political and economic processes and histories. theoretically, the book is placed firmly in urban ecology, but goes against the “bio-philia“ hypothesis — that humans as all other animals are hardwired to long for and seek out nature — and the more sociological but equally problematic “nature lost“ paradigm, which claims that naked urban life makes us anomic and irresponsible in relation to the environment tora holmberg – pigeon stories 201 because the bond to nature has been cut. this, the author claims, represents an “asocial“ view of nature, as something out there — non-human, pristine and vulnerable. but the author is similarly dissatisfied with urban scholars’ failure to account for human-non-human interaction, which has resulted in an equally problematic “a-natural“ view of the social. on the contrary, the book sets out to examine the social context in which human-pigeon interaction is formed and given meaning, thus combining the urban ecology perspective with social psychology, investigating issues such as performance of self and other, ethnic-, classand masculine identities, as well as emplaced sociability. following in the footsteps of chicago school ethnographers and classical scholars of sociology such as erving goffman and howard becker, jerolmack explores the social meaning of human-pigeon interaction in its specific setting. the book ends with a discussion of how urban ecologies can be better understood, not in terms of social or natural, but rather as hybrid, and “hybridity as a way of life“ (237), paraphrasing louis wirth’s famous expression, “urbanism as a way of life.“ the global pigeon is divided into an introduction chapter, three thematic parts — the pedestrian pigeon, the totemic pigeon and deep play — that are divided into seven chapters, and a concluding section. reading the chapters with great joy and interest, i find myself most deeply absorbed by the stories told of various feeding and placemaking practices in emblematic squares (chapter 2), and the male flyers and hobby breeders of brooklyn, the bronx, and berlin (chapter 3, 4 and 5). i will give just a brief overview of a few of the findings and arguments, before concluding with the more general strengths and weaknesses of the book as a whole. in chapter 2, “do not feed the pigeons. cultural heritage and the politics of place in venice and london,“ two competing stories are told: the pigeon as a rightful member of a community and enchanting creator of the squares of st marco and trafalgar, or as trespassers threatening the public health and architecture with a cultural heritage and of historical value. despite the many historical and political differences attached to these places, there are also striking similarities in the politics taking place. in trafalgar square, pigeons, feed vendors, and tourists feeding the birds were set up against local politicians, “pigeon police“ or “heritage wardens,“ and cleaners who eventually, at least partially, won the battle in 2007 through a decision made by the local government of westminster to ban pigeon feeding. however, where there are rules, there is disobedience, and consequently the activities moved to a part of the square belonging to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 202 the neighboring municipality, and “guerilla feeders“ emerged at night time while “rogue feeders“ continued to break the ban throughout the day. thus, the multi-species time-space patterning of trafalgar square changed and, according to the author, fierce policing has now disrupted the “spontaneous and idiosyncratic interactional moments that made the space a place like no other“ (74, italics in original). the prohibition of feeding and removal of trafalgar pigeons, the very animals people conceived of as special and as constituting the specificity of the place, has led to different place-making practices and meanings. the chapter convincingly highlights the slippery boundaries between nature and culture, wild and tame, inclusion and exclusion, and follows up on the argument outlined in chapter 1 about the strange position of the sidewalk pigeon as neither tame and protected under the jurisdiction of companion animals nor wild and considered pristine and conserved, but as an animal that transgresses or moves between these positions, resulting in a troublesome feral category. geographers chris philo and chris wilbert state that, “feral creatures are in themselves curiously transgressive beings, neither purely wild nor purely tame, existing as ’in-between’ animals finding themselves, appropriately enough, utilizing ’in-between-spaces’” (philo & wilbert 21). pigeons inhabiting urban spaces are often portrayed as ”homeless” or ”bums,” as they corrupt our sense of nature and pollute cultural orders (jerolmack, 73; 230). in chapters 3, 4 and 5, the reader gets to know in more detail the interactions, meanings, and practices that structure personal human-pigeon engagements: that of breeding, flying, keeping, and exchanging certain breeds. in new york, the keeping of pigeons in coops on rooftops, and the culture of pigeon flying taking place in pet shops, is an endangered urban way of life. due to sanitization and the gentrification of working class, immigrant neighborhoods that used to flourish in these regards, rooftop coops in connection to dwellings have been removed and are now rare. for the often older enthusiasts interviewed in chapter 3, pigeon keeping and the daily training and flying function to connect the men to a lost history, and to keep them in touch with a valued neighborhood community. the praxis and interaction are mainly understood in terms of labor, working with the animals and keeping the breed, flock, and coops clean and healthy, which, according to a working-class ethics, is something that facilitates a certain hard-working, dedicated, and family-sustaining masculinity. partly in contrast, the turkish immigrants in berlin, portrayed in chapter 4, typically keep their highly valued pigeons of turkish descent in coops away from their private dwellings. like the new yorkers, they fly pigeons as a way of life, but rather than through a discourse of work, they conceptualize the cross-species relations more in terms of unavoidable faith, addiction, and belonging together; they consequently talk of tora holmberg – pigeon stories 203 caring for, even loving the birds. it is thus a certain kind of kinship that is being performed, and one that connects these immigrant men with a turkish, nationalist view of ”nature” (118), seemingly in contrast to the meaning of the word. one of the interviewees keeps his tumbler coops in a backyard, close to the main airport, and jerolmack writes, i saw buildings and concrete in every direction from his roof, and planes flew very low overhead. yet he answered, “being in an urban center doesn’t matter. i just love nature. even if we are in the city, we create our own natural environment. it’s about being in nature. i can meet my friends and we stay outside. we all love nature.“ (119-120). interestingly, in both cases, pigeon flying appears as a “men only“ activity, and in the berlin case it restores a masculinity that connects to a nationality partly lost, one in which engagement with and caring for pigeons are conceptualized in sharp contrast to the morally degrading “tea houses“ that turkish males frequent and where they, according to the interviewees, smoke, gamble and drink. instead, masculinity is formed through the idea (and not always the practice) of homosocial outdoor activities of caring for, grooming, training and flying pigeons. thus, in both cases, class, gender, ethnicity, age and breed intersect in interesting ways, and even though a more thorough theoretical exploration of these intersections is missing, jerolmack proves to have a good ethnographic eye, ear, and nose, as well as the ability to write about his observations. on the critical side, animal geographies could have been engaged with more thoroughly. as van dooren and rose point out, “to draw attention to animals in city spaces is, in itself, nothing new,“ and delving more deeply into the literature could, i believe, have resulted in more nuanced analyses of animal agency and interaction. as for now, jerolmack sometimes falls into the same trap — the nature-culture divide reproduced by the social sciences — that he criticizes, for example when he dismisses the notion that humans and pigeons interact through shared symbols (37) while at the same time describing in detail how certain pigeons obviously recognize certain feeders, such as the classical “pigeon lady,“ and are invited — if not through symbols then what? — to sit on their arms or hands and eat (34-35). this kind of analysis, along with the anthropocentric social interactionist perspective, sometimes, as in chapter 1, reduces the complexities at hand and the role of urban animals to mere functionalist humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 204 terms. moreover, i am slightly disappointed that jerolmack ends up taking the hybridity perspective. what the reader gets in the book is a detailed and nuanced picture of various ways of dialectically intermingling, of strengthening or of weakening, the nature-culture binary. for the actors involved, such as the turkish migrant men in berlin, pigeon keeping connected them to nature, and thus more firmly to their national — cultural as well as natural — history. this means that there are complex, multispecies meaning-making practices going on, but it is not synonymous with hybridity, and it is discordant with the interactionist perspective. these critical remarks aside, the book makes an enjoyable contribution to the sociological and social-science literature on human-animal relations. in particular, it engages with mundane spatial practices, such as children feeding pigeons in father demo square, new york, and older men visiting a pet shop in the bronx, where the complexities are not obvious from the outset, but unfold through the process of analysis. in so doing, the book extends the social-science framework by broadening concepts such as urbanism, sociability, interaction, social self, and craftsmanship through the lens of human-animal sociality. and, as already mentioned, the reading is as illuminating and challenging as it is, to borrow one of the analytical terms used in the book, enchanting. readers will rethink and revitalize their ideas about pigeons’ social worlds and worldlings. works cited dooren, thom van, and rose, deborah bird. “storied-places in a multispecies city.“ humanimalia 3.2 (2012). web. philo, chris, and wilbert, chris. animal spaces, beastly places. new geographies of humananimal relations. new york: routledge, 2000. shields, rob. places on the margin. alternative geographies of modernity. new york: routledge, 1991. wirth, louis. “ urbanism as a way of life.“ american journal of sociology 44.1 (1938): 1-24. microsoft word intro-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 kristen guest and monica mattfeld breed: introduction breed is central to understandings of human/animal co-evolution; yet, what breed constitutes, how it functions within the modernizing framework, and how it differs between time periods and geographic locations remain under-explored questions. this special issue of humanimalia builds on and contributes to ongoing critical conversation about “breed” as a product of modernity that shapes animal and human experience. although rooted in ancient practices of selection that adapt animals for human use, “breed” is a relatively recent and distinctly modern category that knits together beliefs about processes of scientific rationalization, economic industrialization, and the control of nature by humans. indeed, as richard nash argues in the article included here, breed is a crystallization of “the ideological fiction of ‘modernity’” in which “real flesh and blood animals” exist as “simultaneously non-human natural ‘other’ and nature-culture hybrid of human artifact and management.” unthinkable in its current form without the related forces of economic globalization and standardization, “breed” shapes animal bodies and informs human understandings of identity. it is a category with its own mythologies, histories, and prejudices, with immediate connections to food production, the multi-million-dollar pet industry, and the everyday lives of animals and humans around the world. perhaps most centrally, breed as a post-enlightenment concept is bound up with human fantasies of “purity” and superiority related to our formations of identity. thus, harriet ritvo argues in the roundtable that opens this issue, there is a clear and worrying “analogy between the breed-oriented rhetoric having to do with animals and questions of race having to do with humans. it is always a bit easier to let things slip out, or to say things unintentionally, when you are talking about other animals than when you are directly talking about people.” echoing and influencing notions of race, racism, and eugenics at various points throughout history, “purity” is a concept that also inflects issues of global survival. to think about animal breed is to think about human society and its structure, its labeling, and its ongoing struggles over identity, class, race and belonging. it is also, as donna haraway points out in the roundtable, to confront head-on “questions about who lives and who dies.” “for both animals and people,” haraway insists, “you cannot separate these issues of political struggle.” working to examine and interrogate the assumptions that underpin the discourse of breed, the roundtable and essays included here attend to the paradox central to breed humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 2 as a category of identity: that it works to exclude or marginalize the mixed other, but is also always hybrid. if it is grounded in fantasies of purity, then, breed also demonstrates the disastrous consequences of closed gene pools; if it is rooted in ideas about progress and scientific advancement, it is also unsettled by the escalating capabilities of genetic science and technology. taking in a range of perspectives, from historical explorations of breed development to the ways current technology is revising our understanding of what it means to be a breed, the scholarship included in this issue considers what is at stake when we name, shape, and standardize animal bodies for human ends. the issue begins with a roundtable in which we asked scholars who have contributed significantly to the existing scholarship of “breed” to reflect on their own work, the current state of the field, and future directions for study. harriet ritvo, donna landry, sandra swart, margaret derry, and donna haraway generously agreed to meet with us by skype last august, and the resulting discussion, transcribed here in its entirety, offers tantalizing insights into the institutional, political, and personal effects of “breed” around the world. as these scholars variously suggest, breed is never only about animals. instead, breed and breeding are connected with local, national, and international history; commercial trade networks; land use, aboriginal rights, and community belonging; and individual and national identity. investigating some of these wider ramifications of breed as a form of human intervention in animal bodies and lives, the five essays that follow delve deeper into the historical and contemporary effects of breed. in the opening essay richard nash, whose work on the thoroughbred has contributed significantly to the scholarship of breed, considers the history and ongoing impact of one particular breeding practice, “nicking,” in the thoroughbred industry. centrally, nash argues that “the real flesh and blood animals pawing the turf today are inextricably intertwined with the cultural phantasms of purity, hybridity, racialized breed identity, registries, and those cultural apparatuses and inscription practices that police, promote, protect, and valorize certain formulations of modern identity formation.” in other words, thoroughbred horses are always intertwined with attempts to preserve some form of “pure” lineage, while also looking to alter bloodlines to maximize profit and prestige. taking up the conflicting political, institutional, and economic forces associated with the jack russell terrier, michael worboys extends his important work on the history of dog breeds. exploring the paradox of the jack russell terrier, a comparatively old british dog breed that has only recently been recognized by the british kennel club, kristen guest and monica mattfeld -breed: introduction 3 worboys investigates the contested history of a popular and now globalized breed. in doing so, he shows how culturally fluid and historically contingent seemingly immutable breed standards are, how influential naming practices have proven to be, and how these conflicts have had ramifications for individual dog lives. shifting the focus from histories of breed and breeding to contemporary agricultural practices, scout calvert considers the influence of technological innovation in the modern dairy industry and its ethical implications for our co-being with animals. looking to the controversial bovine milk industry, calvert suggests how haraway’s feminist theories of the cyborg allow for “breeching bovine-human boundaries as well as bovine-machine boundaries” in a way that results in a reworking of familiar categories and epistemologies associated with gender, the family, animal breed, and feminist practice. for calvert, the bodies of dairy cattle — or “cowborgs” increasingly bred to enhance their compatibility with technology — must be understood in the context of gendered labor. even as cows evidence exploitation “through gender made and unmade by capital,” she contends, we must take seriously the agential alliances made possible as by-products of “the social relations of science and technology.” also investigating breed alongside emergent forms of technology, jeanette vaught examines the fraught connections between reproductive control, breakthroughs in genetics, and the need for protected animal lineage in the american quarter horse industry. following ongoing debates about cloning associated with this breed, vaught argues that “the web of kin relations that cloning enters into invites a host of questions related to sex, species, gender, performance, capital, and culture — and, as the aqha’s response reveals, cloning challenges what it means to sexually reproduce.” in other words, disputes about cloning horses mirror wider national concerns about heteronormative vs. queer reproduction, with the american quarter horse association emerging as a gatekeeper of “american” values and genetic capital. the final article in this issue touches upon the major subjects of the previous papers, while bringing discussions about identity, naming, breed organizations, technology, and gender into the realm of the personal. via a “situated multispecies art practice,” karin bolender considers how the breed identity of the american spotted ass inflects her kin relationship with a member of that breed. sifting the problematic ethics and the personal affections involved with breeding and naming a non-human other, bolender systematically examines the hidden histories and discursive underpinnings that inform human predilection for particular kinds of animal bodies. in doing so, she thinks through the convoluted articulations of agency, self, and labels intertwined between ass, human, and capitalist culture that drives the breeding industry. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 4 taken together, the scholarship collected here suggests the diverse ways in which “breed” is a word, an enactment, and a becoming that connects human and animal. inseparable from scholarly understanding of domestic animals and their complex histories, it equally cannot be separated from human history. in other words, as jenny davidson has shown, “the word breeding sets a place for nature at culture’s table.”* similarly, the word breed invites the natural, biological into our understanding of culture insofar as it is inscribed on the bodies of animals whose being indelibly alters the world, the technology, the behavior, and the people, caught up in its multi-species search for the perfect being. * jenny davidson, breeding: a partial history of the eighteenth century (columbia university press, 2009), 1. microsoft word kendall-morwick-veltenpdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:2 reviews karalyn kendall-morwick londoners and other animals hannah velten, beastly london: a history of animals in the city. london: reaktion books, 2013. 288 pp. $50.00 (hb). beastly london is hannah velten’s third book published by reaktion; she is also the author of cow (2007) from reaktion’s animal series and milk: a global history (2010) from its edible series. like the books from those series, beastly london is an attractive volume printed on thick, lustrous paper and liberally peppered with illustrations (121 total, 34 color), although its larger size (250 × 190 mm) and two-column page layout make it a slightly more cumbersome read. arguably the most ambitious of velten’s reaktion trio, beastly london sets out to reveal “the rich heritage of the animal inhabitants of london from roman times to the present” (7) and to highlight “the role [animals] played in shaping the economic, social and cultural history of london”—a role that general histories of the city have largely ignored (8). karalyn kendall-morwick – “londoners and other animals” 129 to some extent, beastly london confirms john berger’s controversial thesis (although berger is not cited) about the disappearance of animals in modernity and the consequent impoverishment of human experience.1 velten portrays the close proximity of humans and the animals they used for food, transportation, and entertainment in medieval and early modern london, the explosion of interest in and use of animals in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the rapid decline of the city’s animal population — and consequently, its impact on londoners’ lives — in the 20th century and beyond. yet while velten sometimes echoes berger’s nostalgia for a time of more intimate human/animal relations — for example, when she contends that “london has lost some of its rich character with the withdrawal of animals” — her frank descriptions of the seemingly boundless violence and exploitation that these relations have entailed for nonhuman participants throughout the city’s history makes it difficult to regret animals’ absence in present-day london (7). indeed, the book at times reads as a catalog of the horrors to which londoners have subjected animals whom they have variously regarded as food, tools, status symbols, amusements, moneymakers, nuisances, threats, or objects for experimentation, prompting velten to conclude that “if one asked the past animal inhabitants if they would return to city life, they would most likely refuse” (245). chapter 1 examines perhaps the most pervasive form of human/animal relations in london’s history: the use of livestock animals for food. much of this chapter focuses on smithfield market, which since “about ad 950” (15) fed londoners’ “seemingly insatiable” appetite for animal flesh (13). prior to the advent of railways and refrigeration, country drovers brought cattle, sheep, pigs, geese, and other slaughterbound animals to london on foot from all corners of britain and ireland. london drovers met these animals at the outskirts of the city and completed their journey to smithfield using sheepdogs and iron-tipped goads. a typical market morning, velten explains, saw 600-plus salesmen negotiate with buyers who employed their own drovers to transfer purchased animals to private slaughterhouses. smithfield became widely regarded as a nuisance in the mid-18th century, when urban expansion brought londoners into unwelcome and often dangerous proximity with cruel handling practices and rampaging animals. further, population growth and the resulting increase in demand for meat made the market rapidly outgrow its 4¾ acres (“islington market” 343). an 1833 addition of “just under 2 acres” did little to resolve the problem, and the smithfield market removal act of 1851 spelled the end of smithfield as it had humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 130 existed for centuries, although it still operates today as a wholesale market (velten 22). velten also looks beyond smithfield to london’s history of backyard agriculture, noting the home-raised pigs, fowl, rabbits, and pigeons who provided “protein and pocket money” to london families — and whose living conditions were often no better than those suffered by the temporary residents of smithfield (28). the latter half of the 19th century saw a dramatic decline in london’s livestock population, but velten observes that this “void … was filled by an increase in the numbers of working animals” required to support the city’s “burgeoning economy” and growing human numbers (42). chapter 2 is devoted to these animals — especially horses, who provided the main means of transporting people and goods within the city until the early 20th century. despite one horse lover’s insistence that the equine inhabitants of victorian london had “a humanizing effect on the population,” readers of anna sewell’s black beauty will be familiar with many of the inhumanities velten recounts (43). from the fashionable carriage horses whose heads were held unnaturally high by bearing reins to the omnibus horses (scarcely mentioned by sewell) whose bodies were ravaged by long hours of pulling a massive, awkward load with “frequent stops and starts” (52), the vast majority of london horses were plainly “unfortunate animals” (50). some equines fared better, as velten points out: dray horses and carthorses pulled heavy loads but enjoyed ample rest during loading and unloading, while costermongers’ donkeys — according to writers like henry mayhew and charles dickens — were often prized and kindly treated (64). these exceptions notwithstanding, routine abuse of working animals prompted the 1824 founding of the society of the prevention of cruelty to animals (later the r[oyal]spca), and abundant cruelty kept the group busy pursuing prosecutions for the rest of the century and beyond. while chapter 2 focuses largely on victorian-era horses (with the final few pages devoted to dogs employed for cart-pulling and police work), chapter 3 offers a wideranging account of londoners’ use of animals for sport, from the amphitheatre contests likely held in roman london to the perennially popular pastimes of hunting, fighting, and baiting to the less violent sports of racing, show jumping, and polo. a theme throughout the chapter is the use of sporting animals to reinforce the human social order. hunting enthusiast henry viii declared much of the modern west end his private hunting grounds and used the area for hawking with his prized gyrfalcons, whose position atop the “bird hierarchy” (just above the peregrines flown by lords) affirmed his royal status (90). in medieval and early modern london, members of all social classes delighted in the baiting of bulls, bears, and other animals, but by the mid karalyn kendall-morwick – “londoners and other animals” 131 18th century, the public view of this bloody amusement had shifted to “abhorrence. no longer was it a formal sport patronised by the wealthy, but it was supposedly perpetrated by the lowest in society” (98). members of parliament who opposed the first anti-baiting legislation in 1800 worried not about the demise of baiting but about the possibility that “bans on hunting and shooting … (sports of the aristocracy!)” would follow (103). indeed, as velten intimates, public disapproval of animal-based sports seems to have been motivated less by humane sentiments than by class associations, as evidenced by the reputation of greyhound racing “as a poorer form of sport than horse racing” in the 1920s (113). the aforementioned sports represent just a few of the ways in which animals have served to entertain london’s human populace. in chapter 4, velten spotlights animal entertainers, beginning with the largely transient population of performing bears, monkeys, horses, and cockerels who accompanied minstrels through the streets of prenorman and medieval london (119). such acts persisted into the 19th century, when they were decried in news articles like an 1869 report on “the performing bear nuisance” (123). other popular displays, like “happy families” (collections of animals “supposed to be sworn enemies living peacefully together in one cage” [123]) and “lustus naturae: unusual or deformed animal exhibits” (125), revealed londoners’ fascination with the bizarre. and while such spectacles did little to challenge longstanding assumptions about human superiority over the brute creation, “learned animals” — horses, pigs, and dogs trained to mimic human intelligence by “solving” arithmetic problems and “spelling” words — afforded londoners glimpses of the mental capacities of other species from the 16th century onward (126). the latter half of this chapter focuses on the advent of the circus in (philip) astley’s amphitheatre in the 18th century — an apt transition into velten’s discussion of exotic animals in chapter 5, as the exhibition that was to become the first modern circus began as an equestrian spectacle and gradually expanded to include exotic species like elephants, tigers, lions, leopards, camels, zebras, giraffes, ostriches, kangaroos, and polar bears. although astley’s was demolished in 1893, and despite growing concerns about cruel treatment of performing animals, the allure of and trade in exotic animals continued to thrive. chapter 5 (for me, the most depressing) chronicles londoners’ centuries-old practice of keeping and displaying exotic animals, starting with the unfortunate early occupants of the tower of london’s royal menagerie. these animals — lions, other big humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 132 cats, elephants, and more — typically lived short, miserable lives in cramped cages. during the “bloodthirsty” james i’s reign, the tower lions were also subjected to baiting (147). outside the tower, exotics displayed at fairs, inns, and coffee houses for the viewing pleasure of affluent londoners experienced similarly horrifying conditions. the city’s first rhinoceros, exhibited in the 1680s, was “led with a ring through her nose” and died after two years (149). many exotics’ early deaths, velten notes, were undoubtedly brought on by inappropriate diets: another rhino ate breakfasts of “rice and sugar” (150), and the diet of the tower’s first zebra included “bread, meat and tobacco” (152). beginning in 1770, a menagerie in the exeter ’change gave ordinary londoners the opportunity to view exotic species. however, the danger this collection posed to londoners — as well as the cruelty it entailed for animals — became tragically apparent in 1826, when a beloved elephant named chunee became unmanageable and had to be destroyed. after refusing numerous arsenic-laced offerings, he was gunned down in a heartrending scene (depicted in one of the book’s color illustrations) that lasted over an hour and left his body riddled with more than 150 bullets (157). as velten speculates, nearby residents probably welcomed the subsequent demolition of the ’change “with relief” (158), although london’s “poorer classes” would not have a ready means of viewing exotics for two decades (170). the zoological gardens (later london zoo) opened in 1828, but access was restricted to zoological society fellows until 1847. in chapters 6 and 7, velten turns to the categories of animal most frequently encountered in present-day london: pets and wildlife, respectively. chapter 6 begins with an overview of exotic pet-keeping, which, like the trade in specimens for menageries and other displays, flourished in the 19th century. in the 20th century, wealthy londoners continued to acquire exotics, “return[ing] with unlikely pets from india and other parts of the empire” (182) or, until the 1970s, purchasing head-turning companions from the (in)famous harrods department store “zoo” (183). the dangerous wild animals act of 1976 curtailed such practices. turning to more conventional companion species, velten compares the varied fortunes of the city’s dogs and cats. at one end of the welfare spectrum were the indulged pets of the elite and the valued companions of the working class and poor, while at the other end were the stray dogs and cats who lived in continual danger of losing their hides to skinners, being killed as suspected plague or rabies carriers, or finding themselves strapped to a vivisector’s table. the situation for strays and pets of the poor improved in the late-18th and 19th centuries with the introduction of animal shelters and veterinary hospitals. several clinics offered free and low-cost services for struggling pet owners, while the home for lost dogs (later the battersea dogs and cats home) undertook the immense karalyn kendall-morwick – “londoners and other animals” 133 task of aiding the city’s homeless animal population. as velten acknowledges, “refuge” at battersea often meant certain death, but many animals thus avoided worse fates, and the shelter — still in operation — “has over 150 years of good work to its credit” (211). velten, of course, also devotes a significant portion of this chapter to the much-studied rise of numerous types of animal fancy (bird, rabbit, dog, and cat) during the victorian era, as well as the eugenicist and animal-welfare concerns they provoked. finally, chapter 7 describes the diverse relationships that have existed between londoners and wildlife. like other major cities, london has historically attracted scavengers, and londoners have either appreciated these fellow urbanites for their role in disposing of the city’s waste or maligned them for their associations with disease and destruction. thus, for example, ravens and kites enjoyed legal protections in early medieval london, while rats were exterminated as “vermin” and fell below the radar of victorian-era humane movements despite being used for baiting and fighting (108). other animal immigrants have been similarly unwelcome, like the cockroaches unwittingly imported from the west indies, while some, like the marine mammals who occasionally swam up the thames, were greeted with spears or gunfire by londoners eager for their meat and blubber. perhaps the most complex relationships between londoners and wildlife have involved native and long-established species like foxes and many types of bird. wild birds, velten explains, have “forged a relationship with the city’s inhabitants based on scraps of food,” yet this relationship has also required birds to “be wary [of] people requiring a meal, a pet or a sporting target” (223). and while many londoners throughout history have enjoyed the sights and sounds of their feathered neighbors, others have perceived them as a nuisance, as recurring disputes about pigeons and sparrows demonstrate. while velten underscores the dearth of wildlife in present-day london, the chapter ends on a hopeful note as she points to recent efforts to make the city and the once-noxious thames more hospitable to animal inhabitants. as i have endeavored to demonstrate through this representative (but by no means exhaustive) overview, velten’s wide-ranging and accessible book is an invaluable resource for scholars and others interested in human-animal studies, urban studies, and british history. its broad historical scope and non-chronological structure means that it is, at times, a disorienting read as velten’s topic(rather than period-) centered chapters require her to transport the reader abruptly from, say, the 20th-century greyhound track humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 134 to the 12th-century jousting contest (114). this mode of organization also makes it difficult for velten to provide “a snapshot” of “the heaving mass of animals” that inhabited london at any one historical moment, and readers primarily interested in a specific period of london’s history will have to sift through a great deal of material to piece together this image (7). however, what might from one angle be viewed as a limitation is simultaneously a testament to velten’s impressive range as a historian, and her chapters collectively reconstruct a city that, for centuries, teemed with nonhuman life. beastly london thus makes a unique and important contribution both to our understanding of the rich array of human/animal relations and to the study of british history, literature, and culture. 1. see “why look at animals?” john berger, about looking (new york: vintage, 1991), 3-28. work cited “islington market.” the farmer’s magazine may 1836: 343. microsoft word kelleher-essig h u m a n i m a l i a 8:2 reviews hillary kelleher high on the hog mark essig. lesser beasts: a snout-to-tail history of the humble pig. new york: basic books, 2015. xxvii + 320 pp. $27.50 hc. in lewis carroll’s “the walrus and the carpenter,” the imperial walrus insists on chatting with native oysters before gobbling them up. he hopes for pre-dinner dialogue as wide ranging as victorian colonial power — from lists of material objects like “shoes — and ships — and sealing wax” to abstract scientific inquiries like “why the sea is boiling hot” and “whether pigs have wings.” mark essig’s lesser beasts attempts a similarly broad conversation. and though his pig lacks literal wings, its influence spans global history, starting back when the seas were indeed quite hot. hillary kelleher – high on the hog 195 essig takes off roughly 65 million years ago after a meteor jolted earth’s axis, killing the dinosaurs and making room for mammals. he then glides smoothly through the evolution of hooved creatures (10 million years ago) and humanoid bipeds (4 million years ago) to land near 8,000 bce when neolithic boars domesticated themselves by scavenging garbage from homo sapiens villages. though domestication occurred independently in what’s now china, india, and the near east, lesser beasts focuses on the symbiotic relationship between pigs and people in the west. along this trail, we encounter swine of many sorts — from fatted white roman hogs, to lean and dark medieval forests dwellers, to modern industrialized hybrids. our shared history is a tale, as essig puts it, of “love and loathing,” with an urgent message for our current historical moment, when the mere thought of “buying a pork chop raises thorny questions about the environment, public health, workers’ rights, and animal welfare” (4). the effect of positioning the most humble of beasts within such an expansive temporal framework is to make pigs seem exceptionally important, as if all of civilization would be vastly different had they been left out. as essig synthesizes knowledge from across disciplines — archeology, biology, economics, philosophy, literature (to name just a few) — his voice emerges as authoritative, and his book should appeal to consumer activists as well as to anyone curious about culture. lesser beasts will find additional fans among scholars in intersectional fields like food studies and anthrozoology, as well as any scientists or social scientists interested in the coevolution of human and non-human animals throughout the anthropocene. essig’s fellow historians might likewise admire his deft and witty locating of material “objects” and “subjects” within the vast webs of power in which they find questionable agency. a similar tactic has been tried by journalists like mark kurlansky in cod: a biography of the fish that changed the world (1997), salt: a world history (2002), and the big oyster: history on the half shell (2006); marjorie shaffer in pepper: a history of the world's most influential spice (2014); dan koeppel in banana: the fate of the fruit that changed the world (2008); and andrew lawler in why did the chicken cross the world?: the epic saga of the bird that powers civilization (2016). within this survival-of-the-fittest competition, lesser beasts clearly aspires to top place. as essig himself proclaims, “no food has played a bigger role than pork in shaping cultural identities” (11). what gives lesser beasts an advantage is the historically contentious status of swine. at once reviled and celebrated, their meat both banned and barbecued, they’ve maintained a fraught relationship to humans into the present day, and their borderline position has humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 196 granted them the unique ability at once to unify and to divide. as essig observes, “for those linked by blood, religion, class, or nation, sharing a meal forges bonds but also draws boundaries; we use food to stigmatize foreigners, exclude nonbelievers, climb the social ladder, and kick others down a few rungs.” pigs, it turns out, have always been on the edge. even in populations who consumed huge quantities of pork — like the ancient romans — pigs got disparaged. christians condemned them as “lazy, filthy, and gluttonous”; jews and muslims forbade them entirely, and the english ranked them “the least desirable of all meats” even as they ate more pig than cow (10-11). paradoxically, the major reasons for the pig’s popularity — versatile diet and low cost — also provoke the most disgust. like humans, pigs are omnivores, and they’ve been known to eat almost anything from garbage to human flesh (which, if we’re to believe essig’s research, tastes a lot like pork). in the millennia before modern sanitation, pigs had a job beyond providing meat: transforming human waste and excrement into food, and this “alchemical power” helps explain the taboo. as essig cannily remarks, “if you are what you eat … then what’s eaten by the animals you eat becomes a cause for concern” (11). pigs also became associated with poverty because they could provide such a cheap source of protein — whether scavenging streets, chained in a back-yard sty, or packed for purchase in plastic. the pattern of the poor eating pigs has persisted across eras and cultures, with elites intermittently needing to distinguish themselves by feasting on more expensive animals. without taking sides on the disputed origins of jewish pork prohibitions, essig describes how this scriptural ban became key to the israelites’ cultural identity, distinguishing them from both neighboring tribes and imperial rulers. he also digs into the roots of european anti-semitism, showing how the pig — that shit-eating, childkilling, corpse-scavenging most despised of animals — got connected to the most despised of human groups who, in an ironic reversal, “became most closely identified with the animal they refused to eat” (98). we learn, for instance, how after spanish monasteries protected pigs during the muslim occupation, inquisitors used pork aversion to sniff out both sorts of infidels. somehow the uncleanness of pigs stayed connected with sin and evil, in opposition to the purity and innocence of the lamb. thus the jewish rejection of pork was at the same time preserved and transformed within christianity. essig links some of the paradox surrounding human-hog relations to our shared biology. as clever omnivores with similar digestive tracts, dietary needs, and generalpurpose teeth, “pigs and people threw their lots together, and that proved a wise hillary kelleher – high on the hog 197 evolutionary strategy for both species” (25). this tight bond, which continues into the present day, partly explains the blend of attraction and revulsion. when “we look back at the pig,” essig reflects, “we see quite a bit of ourselves. and then, more often than not, we eat him” (14). according to essig, the most influential talent pigs and people share is their knack for colonizing. as swine have spread easily into ecological and market niches, so have humans hogged up the planet, and neither expansion could have happened without the other. not only did cured pork fuel the age of exploration, but living swine adapted to and rapidly multiplied in nearly all settlement conditions. pigs also fed soldiers as they slaughtered native populations. “an army travels on its stomach,” essig tells us, and the spanish armies “filled their bellies with pork” (120). as a bonus, pigs packed an unexpected weapon: disease to which natives had no immunity. within half a century of cortez’s invasion of mexico, we learn, they’d helped wipe out the indian population by 90%. in addition, they carried out the work of clearing the land for european farming by devouring wild foods and disrupting the subtle agriculture practices cultivated by natives. finally, pigs were quick to supply meat for export by english colonists eager to take part in the growing network of global trade. as essig puts it in one of his many crisp clauses: “pigs became agents of empire in their own right” (132). not surprisingly, swine were equally instrumental in carving continental inroads. though cows became the “iconic animal” of the wild west, pigs got there first, destroying native habitat while feeding pioneers and, later, gold rush miners headed to the pacific. in a sad twist for the indians, the very grain colonists destroyed became settlers’ most sustainable crop once the land was tamed. as essig declares: “corn, paired with pigs, fueled the rapid settlement of the united states” (154). those who put down roots in the midwest stuck with both, creating the first hog farms. between the abundant food supply and the new potential for hybrid swine from around the globe, business boomed, and “pigs — the freewheeling self-sufficient creatures that had helped conquer the continent — took their first steps into a rigid, industrialized future” (165). that future included both more pork and more suffering, which essig vividly describes. as he recounts, in upton sinclair’s description of a slaughterhouse in the jungle, pigs shriek while hoisted by chains “each dangling by a foot and kicking in frenzy,” before workers known as “stickers” bleed them to death in a disassembly process that inspired the advent of the modern assembly line (195). but the suffering wasn’t contained to the slaughterhouse. new technologies gave rise to factory farms in which pigs began living their entire lives in horrific conditions: forced to lie in their own excrement on a diet humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 198 containing drugs and the remains of other pigs, most never see daylight between birth and slaughter. among the most appalling details essig shares is the plight of sows who exist in cramped metal gestation crates, freed only to labor in farrowing cages in which they are immobilized so as not to crush their own piglets. though traditional raising practices were hardly cruelty-free, essig shows how the advent of modern techniques created exponential suffering, and not just for pigs. in our own century’s vertically-integrated processing systems, single corporations own every aspect of the production process — from feed mills to breeding barns to slaughterhouses to packaging and distributing sites. in this new arrangement formerly independent farmers raise animals on contract at reduced price to meet consumer demands for cheap meat from companies like walmart. in spite of its growing affordability, however, pork has retained its historical stigma as unclean and unhealthy. the increased wealth of mid-twentieth-century americans led the majority to choose beef over pork for the first time; trichinosis outbreaks and dire medical warnings about animal fat didn’t help. to counter this latest revulsion, pork producers made the valiant but failed attempt to rebrand their product as “the other white meat,” removing pork from competition with beef and placing it in a new contest against chicken. this makeover, essig recounts, relied on “all the brainpower and ingenuity of the american government, universities, advertising firms, and pharmaceutical companies” (206). it also led to even greater suffering, with breeding and production practices that further restricted movement so as not to darken the meat. still, in spite of such combined effort, the other white meat didn’t fly, mainly, essig speculates, because it tasted bland. as it turns out, under these newly horrific conditions, pigs became neurotic, “super-nervous and high-strung,” as one scientist described them, and the stress damaged their meat” (219). these reactions should have been predictable considering the innate needs of swine, which essig explains in delightful detail. from studies of domestic hogs left to their own devices, we learn that pigs are active morning and evening, resting around noon and, like humans, forming complex social bonds within and among families. somehow, in spite of our 10,000 years of symbiotic history, we have neglected to see the basic nature of our fellow beings. and so, the animal that has historically thrived in almost any condition has “failed to adapt to tiny crates, crowded pens, slatted floors, and ammonia-saturated air” (231). the pigs, however, do not forget, and when they’re given the chance “a few million years of evolutionary history easily override a few thousand years of domestication” (239). hillary kelleher – high on the hog 199 though pig intelligence has been appreciated since ancient times, essig points out that “the contrast between the animal’s intelligence and its living conditions has become harder to ignore” (248). in fact, it’s spurred activists like gail eisnitz who, in her influential 2009 book slaughterhouse: the shocking story of greed, neglect, and inhumane treatment inside the u.s. meat industry, finds herself most horrified by hog barns. video footage from one of these barns was released in 2012 by mercy for animals. narrated by james cromwell, the human star of the beloved film babe, it features “runt piglets being grabbed by their back feet, slammed onto the concrete floor, and tossed into an overflowing bin of dead and dying piglets” (248). such modern muckraking has raised awareness and led to some minor improvements, including a gradual shift away from gestation crates and more stringent enforcement of anti-cruelty regulations. still, essig admits, we’re a far cry from what’s been popularly been dubbed “happy meat.” essig entertains the notion that the animal suffering at the heart of all farming might be a reason to give up meat altogether, a choice urged by animal liberation activists like jonathan safran foer who, in his philosophically reflective investigation eating animals, comes to the decision to raise his son vegetarian, or conservative vegan matthew scully’s surprising dominion: the power of man, the suffering of animals, and the call to mercy. in the end, though, essig supports a middle path for pigs as well as people and remains persuaded by less extreme efforts to minimize suffering through improved conditions. he thus follows in the tracks of michael pollan’s popular the omnivore’s dilemma and celebrity chefs like hugh fearnley-wittingstall, david chang, and tom colicchio. he also supports calls to curb the human and environmental damages caused by factory farms, by journalists like orville shell (modern meat: antibiotics, hormones, and the pharmaceutical farm), and eric schlosser (fast food nation). still, animal liberation devotees of peter singer might not find a lot to their liking on essig’s menu, nor will theorists who take a hard line against anthropocentrism or speciesism. ideally, for essig, pigs should get to be pigs before they become dinner. a carnivore who, while a college professor tended swine on a sustainable farm and learned to cure meat, he knows how to create both content and delicious hogs. his solution: return to animal husbandry practices that respect instinctive behaviors like rooting, roaming, mothering, and foraging for food. because a pig’s flesh expresses its fare more directly than the meat of ruminants, its flavor potential is enhanced by varied consumption, so a diverse diet of “grasses, seeds, nuts, legumes, fruits” paired with sides of “insects, larva, crayfish, lizards, medicinal plants and roots”(245) promise both happier and tastier meat. old-fashioned husbandry can also maintain more flavorful heritage and traditional breeds instead of the tasteless industrialized hybrids modified to survive humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 200 factory conditions. as in pre-modern cultures, sustainably raised pigs help everyone involved: farmers, grocers, restaurateurs, and consumers. essig’s epilogue “virtuous carnivores” calls a new breed of consumer to consider what’s “good for the land, the animal, and the soul” (255). in so doing they just might exert enough market pressure to influence industry. still, he warns, the trek will be uphill, especially considering the spectacular success of industrialized farming in providing cheap meat. right now only a fraction of americans is ready to place values over cost. factory-farmed pork tastes good enough for the price here, as it does in china, brazil, and other emerging meat-focused economies. given the “trade offs between price, ethics, and taste” traditionally farmed niche meat occupies a very small niche indeed (246). ironically, in spite of industrial farming methods increasing world-wide, the pig is in much the same paradoxical position as it was 3000 years ago. its meat continues to provoke debate around intersecting borderlines — and, as usual, the language wavers between adoration and disgust. now, though, these emotions are less about swine and more about their swineherds. no longer focused on pigs as gluttonous, filthy, garbage eaters, the controversies center around the quality of their lives as well as their flesh. as essig notes, “big corporations run by wealthy executives sell bacon for $3 a pound at walmart, while struggling farmers offer it at farmers’ markets for four times the price. we see, once again, the pig’s ability to divide [italics mine]” (246). the personal decision around consuming pork continues to forge identity — and it’s still dependent upon values, money, status, and taste — but essig believes the choice now stands to have a more conscious collective impact. given the versatility of pigs and people, he feels consumers should have the option of “meat that tastes good, doesn’t pollute, doesn’t make us sick, and comes from an animal that was treated well — from a pig that lived like a pig” (258). by choosing wisely, essig concludes, we have some hope of effecting change. lesser beasts promises to change a few minds, create some happier pigs, and increase consumer options, but after digesting the book, i’m left with little personal hope of making a dent in the superstructure. indeed the vast scope of the book reinforces, perhaps inadvertently, the inevitability of economic and political forces operating beyond yet shaping the lives of both pigs and people — and essig’s last sentence undermines the seemingly optimistic potential of his epilogue. to support the goals of changing industry for the better, he concludes, “all we have to do is abandon the idea — the millennia-old idea — that pork should be cheap”(258). hillary kelleher – high on the hog 201 in the end, i’m reminded of the late poet laureate philip levine, who once tried to teach me to write poetry in college. his efforts didn’t take, but his poem “animals are passing out of our lives” stayed with me. it’s written from a pig’s perspective as he’s walked, fully aware, to the slaughterhouse. this pig decides to keep his dignity no matter what roles await him in the killing machine. levine’s pig calls us humans to take the same stance: to look directly into our oppressive structures and stand up straight. along our paths we might exercise a bit of choice, if only when deciding what pork chop to buy. we exist, to return to lewis carroll, somewhere between resources and power, “cabbages—and kings.” lesser beasts encourages us to engage, like the walrus, in some pre-dinner reflection before we dig in. works cited carroll, lewis. “the walrus and the carpenter.” through the looking glass. macmillan, 1871. levine, philip. not this pig: poems. wesleyan up, 1968. animals are passing out of our lives it's wonderful how i jog on four honed-down ivory toes my massive buttocks slipping like oiled parts with each light step. i'm to market. i can smell the sour, grooved block, i can smell the blade that opens the hole and the pudgy white fingers that shake out the intestines like a hankie. in my dreams the snouts drool on the marble, suffering children, suffering flies, suffering the consumers who won't meet their steady eyes for fear they could see. the boy who drives me along believes humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 202 that any moment i'll fall on my side and drum my toes like a typewriter or squeal and shit like a new housewife discovering television, or that i'll turn like a beast cleverly to hook his teeth with my teeth. no. not this pig. microsoft word gundermann-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:2 christian gundermann equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings “felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas” (virgil, georgics ii. l. 490) living beings are complicated in the sense that they are folded into the world and the world is folded into them. this pleating both defines and sustains our lives. much as immunology might want (us) to believe that self and not-self oppose one another, whether as friend and enemy or as thesis and antithesis, this framework cannot and does not account for the necessary intimacy that all life maintains with the world from which it arises… (ed cohen, “self, not-self…” 38) 1. preliminary thoughts. i will be proposing that lyme disease is a phenomenon that puts in relief the limitations of the dominant mechanistic, reductionist, and materialist bias in the lifeand medical sciences of our present episteme. i will be making this claim largely through an equine case of lyme borreliosis and in the veterinary context, with explicit excursions into the human realm, but implicitly always with a view to the relevance of veterinary insights for the human medical setting. for this purpose, this essay will analyze the reductionist logic behind lyme research in some detail before ending with an alternative veterinary approach. my project comes out of a desire for medicine to reaffirm some of its disavowed investment with healing, which it began to shed when it espoused scientific, determinist reductionism as its hegemonic method.1 in lyme disease (as in the myriad autoimmune conditions that have taken center stage in our contemporary health scene), biomedicine may have found its stumbling block from which it could learn that eliminating an infection is not only not the same as healing, but that the static self/non-self ontology undergirding immunology’s approach to pathogenic micro-organisms may come to oppose or even obviate healing. the epigraph by virgil with which i open this piece condenses several of the most important elements of the dominant scientific ideology with which this writing takes issue. its literal translation into english is “fortunate who was able to know the causes of things,” but often translations suppress the past tense of the verb (“potuit”) and render it in the more generalizing, universalizing present tense. dryden’s well-known translation,” happy the man, who, studying nature's laws,/thro' known effects can trace the secret cause,” makes explicit the foundations of science: it is “man” who studies “nature’s laws” (virgil, works 92). there is a unidirectional flow from a now christian gundermann – equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings 151 singular “cause” to plural “effects” (“things,” indeed, become “effects”), and “cause” is understood as secret, requiring the methodic intervention of “man” who shall then be rewarded with happiness for tracing his way back, reversing the natural flow from cause to effects. with regard to lyme disease and its presumed bacterial cause, i will be proposing to replace immunology’s continued hegemonic self/other ontology with an ecology of entangled coevolution, and multiple and multidirectional flows of causality,2 and i will do so in reliance upon feminist science critique and ecofeminism (most explicitly donna haraway and karen barad) as one of my most prominent theoretical pillars. 2. primary care. i found an attached tick on my arm (as numerous times before), but wasn’t particularly worried. i seemed to have caught it within less than 24 hours. there is the usual allergic reaction on the skin after a few hours. itchy. red. still nothing to worry about. then, about five days later, i develop a dull constant headache for about three days. it feels like the flu, but never quite gets there. then i develop an itchy rash somewhere different from where the tick had attached. for two nights i am mostly sleepless, waking shortly after going to bed, all sweaty. for the first time in my life (and after many previous tick exposures), the energy-medicine practitioner (emp) whom i consult tells me that he is reading a lyme infection. i go to see my pcp (primary care physician) during walk-in hours nine days after the tick incident, and three days into the symptoms. the md meets me with skepticism. obviously i do not mention the emp. she dismisses my insistence that the symptoms are classical acute recent lyme infection. she says: your symptoms could be absolutely anything. i say that there is no consensus about the exact amount of time a tick needs to be attached to transmit borrelia burgdorferi (bb). she says: there is no controversy over this at all. the tick needs to be attached at least 48 hours. she says: we will test you. i counter: but tests are useless until at least 3-4 weeks after exposure. and even then, there are notoriously many false negatives. i say: please give me a script for doxycycline. now she really begins to be irked. no, the tests are accurate. no need to wait for weeks either. how do i come up with all these ideas, she asks. have you been diagnosed with lyme before? i briefly explain that i have been dealing with lyme in three of my horses for several years now. raised eyebrows. i will write you a prescription of doxycycline for 21 days, but you will discontinue treatment if the test comes back negative. sure! her office notes read: “i think it is a low possibility that he could have a line [sic] infection. we discussed this at some length. he is very humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 152 concerned about lyme disease and is very suspicious of this. we'll start empiric treatment and i will call him after we obtain the results of his labs…” (personal record). despite my needle phobia, and despite the general agreement among lyme-savvy physicians and scientists that tests will not detect bb. until at least 3 weeks after exposure, i decide to stick out being stuck in the lab because i am curious to see the result. since i am also writing about lyme, this has become mandatory field work. the result confirms my suspicion that i was given the two-tiers serological combination of elisa (enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay) and lyme igm western blot tests. in other words, the negative test result is no surprise at all. against the pcp’s recommendations, i stay on the prescribed empiric dose of 2x100mg of oral doxycycline for 21 days. at this point, my emp does not detect bb. in my body, and i begin to wonder whether i was infected this time at all. the biomedical tests certainly contribute nothing to the quandary. “elisa is falsely negative nearly 50% of the time” (global lyme alliance). my pcp’s position, while still common among general practitioners, is clearly not supported by any of the biomedical researchers specializing in the field of lyme disease. the more current position in those contexts is explained by dr. nevena zubcevik, harvard medical school, who insists on educating medical students on the “gravity of this epidemic” (stringfellow). zubcevik explains the dazzling array of symptoms from fever, fatigue, and joint disease to severe schizophrenia and dementia. she also acknowledges the unreliability of all existing testing for diagnostic purposes, arguing that bb. have mutated into at least 10 major new strands that are undetectable by current tests. she equally dismisses almost every single one of my pcp’s notions of diagnosis, transmission, and treatment by debunking, for example, the still-established notion that ticks have to be attached for at least 48 hours to transmit the bacteria to their new host (stringfellow). however seriously and proactively she takes the epidemic (instantiated, for instance, in her call for long and intense antibiotic therapy in all patients suspected of having been exposed to bb.), zubcevik does not depart from received notions of what constitutes an infection; of the concept that successful treatment consists primarily in eliminating the “intruding” organism through aggressive and extended intravenous antibiotic therapy; or that treatment for lyme disease is prolonged warfare against an extremely agile, “athletic,” “amazing organism.” while i see zubcevik’s position as an important antidote to the denial and patient-blaming of physicians like my pcp, in this article i ultimately call for a more radical reconceptualization.3 christian gundermann – equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings 153 3. testing. the point of this essay is in part to explore to what extent human medicine might learn from veterinary medicine. before going into the more conceptual and technical aspects of this exploration, consider the following practical and political implications: as i have experienced first-hand, many mainstream mds continue to prescribe the “two-tiers” testing system of elisa and western blot, even though mainstream biomedical researchers with varying and opposing positions (see auwaerter; stricker; stringfellow) agree that it misses up to, or more than, half of all lyme infections. this has to do with the timing of testing, with the lack of sensitivity in the first tier, and with the fact that it tests for human antibodies in the blood, even though bb. is known to be an immunosuppressant pathogen. with most other bacterial infections a culture test is the gold standard (i.e. a test that measures the presence of bacteria rather than antibodies), yet the food and drug administration has not approved such testing for human lyme.4 this has consequences on what insurance will cover. when my copy of the invoice for the combined elisa and western blot tests arrived in the mail (a bill the average patient ignores, since the lab bills directly to the insurance, which covers these approved tests), the figure billed was $824. for a test that has a proven 50% failure rate, this is a steep charge, and completely artificially inflated. in comparison, the more sophisticated and useful cornell multiplex lyme test for horses costs $100. since equine health insurance is still unusual, the typical horse owner pays this out of pocket. if my pcp, who prescribed the elisa and western blot to me, had to look me in the eye and say: i’m going to have you take a test that has a 50% failure rate, and it will cost you $800+, she might have done her research before prescribing it. and perhaps a universal and affordable health care system for humans would not be as impossible as it appears to be in the usa in 2018. lyme disease is a complicated matter. the ubiquity of the illness continues to be dismissed among sectors of the medical community. others blame all and every ill on lyme, which directly fuels the dismissive attitude of the former. both attribution and denial operate with the same monocausal model of illness based on pathogenicity rather than bacterial cohabitation. since no reliable and approved test exists, no one can refer to the ultimate “objective” arbiter to calm agitated minds. myalgic encephalomyelitis, fibromyalgia, multiple chemical sensitivity, ptsd, and many autoimmune conditions and other “evolving diseases” all bleed into each other.5 what do we mean by “lyme disease”? the debate about whether to speak of chronic lyme disease or to call it a post-infection syndrome is indicative of a conceptual clash.6 is lyme a discrete and distinct thing? what are the lived realities of cross-species entanglements in these phenomena? i am proposing that borreliosis demands a serious humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 154 rethinking of what conventionally constitutes diagnosis, etiology, treatment, and cure of an infection. 4. toward multispecies entanglements. one of the central theoretical questions of this project concerns the category of “species” itself. biology continues to use it taxonomically to delineate supposedly discrete entities. inspired by haraway’s notion of “companion species,” i will suggest instead that species are “the dance linking kin and kind” (“encounters” 100). margulis and sagan’s theory of symbiogenesis is foundational for haraway’s writing about the mingling of companions: cum panis, at table together. if we pay symbiogenesis more than lip service we cannot return to the supposed stability of species as discrete and distinct ontological entities, to the metaphysics of essence and origin. from this perspective, “bacterium,” ”arachnid,” “human,” or “horse” are no longer even convenient relay stations, but inadmissible reductions. whether you personally relate to horses or not, it makes no sense to talk of humans separately from equines because they share between five and thirty thousand years of becoming together, and this process is also inadmissibly reduced when described as “domestication,” that is, a unilateral action of the human actor (“figure”) upon the non-human, so-called natural world (“ground”), whereby the horse is understood as affected by the process, but the human is not. by studying species as a process, the established figure-ground relations that characterize our current thinking come undone. some of the most interesting challenges to stable ontology from inside western science come from micro-biology, specifically research on the human microbiome and the brain/gut interface. many researchers have demonstrated that roughly 90% of the cells that inhabit the space i have come to consider “my” body actually carry a genetic code other than “mine” (mayer 17). but what can i claim to be properly “mine” then? the notion of the “proper” itself is at issue. what biology, like psychoanalysis, discovers is that the self is thoroughly constituted through the other(s), but our grammatical logic continues to lag behind. the symbolist french poet arthur rimbaud famously said: “i is an other” (not: i am an other, this is crucial because it breaks with the grammatical logic of subject/verb agreement). but to write non-poetically, i am obliged to function within a grammatical/logical structure that contradicts at every point what i am attempting to think: “i” am forced to say “i,” even as “i” work to undo the “i.” as gastroenterologist emeran mayer suggests provocatively: “are our human bodies just a vehicle for the microbes living in it? do the microbes manipulate our brains to make us seek out foods that are best for them?” (mayer 18). and even here, what disappoints grammatically is the continued positing of an ontological opposition between “us” and christian gundermann – equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings 155 “them.” one has to be subject, the other object, one runs the show, the other obliges, even as they are fooled. the fact that rimbaud’s agrammatical conjugation (“i is”) continues to be “wrong,” suggests that there is still no intelligible language for an ecology of multiple becomings, for the way in which we are already conjugating, or “yoking together,” in the body.7 what are the naturecultures of an entanglement between bb, an arachnid species defined as deer tick or ixodes scapularis, and a slew of warm blooded organisms, including humans, who become hosts to the lyme bacterium through the dance and hunger of the deer tick who, during its life cycle from larva to nymph to mature arachnid, needs a red blood meal three times? how are we already conjugated/yoked together? 5. entangled species and environment. in addition to seasonal change, another variable in this “dance linking kin and kind” is geographical space. “lyme” is a specific geographical reference. old lyme is a small town in south-eastern connecticut near new london. it is the place where human cases of lyme disease were first noted in the mid-1970s. whether you subscribe to conspiracy theories or not, there is little doubt that the disease is perhaps not so much “man-made” — implying an autocratic position of control and unilateral agency akin to haraway’s “god trick” (haraway, “situated”) — but has, in its epidemic dimensions, and as a baradian phenomenon, resulted from agential intra-actions between homo sapiens and many other species in a specific environment. karen barad’s notion of agential realism is central to my project. i am unable to give a full account of her materialist reworking of feminist, queer, poststructuralist notions of performativity, which serves the need to reconsider “matter” (and more generally non-human ontologies) and its contribution to historicity, agency, change. at the core of her thinking, she interrogates the notion that the “existence of relations requires relata” (barad 130), a critique that makes it “possible to acknowledge nature, the body, and materiality in the fullness of their becoming.” in this new “performative metaphysics” beings, things, and identities do not predate or preexist their intra-actions. in fact, they constitute phenomena instead of being independent and pre-existing relata (existing prior to their relations, that is). for my particular purpose here, there is no “uninfected” or “pure” human or horse, but species always already form intra-active phenomena with bacteria. indeed, they are constituted as phenomena in and through these intra-actions. this lyme phenomenon has many aspects, one of which is climate change. population density and type of land use (suburbanization) have significant consequences on the balance of established patterns of intra-action between species, the climate, the environment. deer ticks have massively humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 156 populated the northeast over the last 20 years due to a combination of complex factors: milder winters, wetter environments, altered networks of predation, and other speciesbased intra-actions. reduced biodiversity has been shown to have not only increased the number of species favored by deer ticks, but also those that, due to their specific biochemical make-up, offer a perfect reservoir for bb to thrive (see logiudice; ostfeld). consider thom van dooren’s reference to “functional extinction” which “may well be followed by an actual extinction in coming years” (van dooren 55). van dooren criticizes the dominant definition of extinction as based on the death of the last individual of a species, rather than the entangled ways in which species interface with each other. this dialogue with haraway’s notion of species as a gerund rather than a noun is highly relevant here. one likely factor in the spread and epidemic dimension of lyme disease in recent years seems to be the functional extinction of several species, a lack of biodiversity in the increasingly suburbanized landscape of the american northeast and beyond. the biochemical intra-actions between bacterial antigens and an organism’s antibodies need to be reconceptualized along similar lines, interrogating the epistemological foundations of immunology in an ontology of stable relata that are presumed to preexist their relations. discussing allergy and autoimmunity conceptually, michelle jamieson criticizes the “assumption that cause can be confidently located in a discrete entity — be it antigen (in cases of infectious disease) or organism (in cases of immunopathology). both positions rest on the idea that organisms and antigens have fixed or given identities” (20). the vehement disagreements over the use of the term chronic lyme disease (is the cause a microorganism? or is it autoimmunity? or is it “mental”?) would seem to collapse outright before the insight that lyme disease as a phenomenon cannot and should not be located “in a discrete entity,” but rather must be approached as an ecological crisis, as a question of finding balance in intra-acting. this ecology also includes the so-called “co-infections,” the realization that multiple other microorganisms (such as bartonella, mycoplasma, fungi, viruses in the herpes family, and other “stealth infection” agents, who are always present in all earthly environments) begin to intra-act adversely within lyme phenomena, and may actually come to be the main instigators of misery for the implicated mammal. tetracycline-type drugs and their agential talents may or may not be the best part of a strategy for addressing the ecological crisis of any given lyme phenomenon, that is, the intra-actions between patients, multiple microbes, environment, exercise, history, etc.8 christian gundermann – equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings 157 6. bb. as an unusual form of intra-action. bb. is an unusual species, or rather, form of intra-action. its genetic complexity is striking. it possesses more than 1500 gene sequences, significantly more than other spirochetes, for example treponema palladium, which is said to “cause” syphilis and is one of the most complex bacteria known with its 200 gene sequences. bb. is not only multiple times more genetically adaptable to its environment than any other known bacterium, but disposes of so-called “stealth pathology” which includes immunosuppression in the “host” (see stricker, 149-50).9 due to its specific outer surface proteins (osp’s) — and again, the possessive pronoun “its” is an inadmissible reduction, especially here because “its” outer surface is the most obvious locus of intra-action, the contact zone — , its outer surface “mimics” the saliva of the tick as the future “host” is pierced by the tick’s harpoon-like hypostome and can hence invade the warm-blooded “host’s” blood vessels without being detected, unless the “host” is allergic to tick saliva, which, it was discovered, significantly reduces their chance of being infected (see “borrelia burgdorferi”). so an allergy, an immune pathology, is actually a good thing. i am interested in thinking through this intra-action, which i deal with almost daily between april and june and between october and december, as i pull ticks out of my horses’ and my own skin. we are used to the war rhetoric in the pamphlets issued by the cdc, as well as general, popularized discussions of medical interventions. we give shots, fight the flu, wipe out or nuke cancer cells, and a healing process is a battle with an enemy that needs to be beaten and killed. in alternative medical circles, similar rhetoric prevails touting bb.’s “tricky” nature. with its outer surface functioning metaphorically like a dress-code or performative appearance, it mimics something it is said not to be when it enters the mammalian body. the discourse — the notion of trickery, or performative deceit — clearly assumes that mammal and bb. have distinct and stable ontologies, even and especially as those are subverted. it is this subversion that is assumed to cause illness and pathology. in more mainstream medical literature, the term “cloaking mechanisms” describes the bacterium’s ability to hide in the “host’s” body by binding to substances such as collagen and proteoglycan, thus avoiding the “natural” or “healthy” immune response (stricker 150). bb. is suspected of hiding inside the body by encysting and masking itself.10 the symptoms that an infected/subverted body produces equally mimic many other common illnesses such as the flu, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, parkinson’s, lupus, myalgic encephalomyelitis, heart disease, and depression, thus subverting medicine’s diagnostic processes. similarly in horses, the veterinarian’s diagnostic prowess is subverted when bb.’s influence mimics other illnesses and conditions (laminitis, uveitis, osteoarthritis, neurological diseases like epm, etc.). the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 158 fortress of the good, self-identical self comes undone by the evil invader. the medical advocate and soldier is mocked and derided. therapy is equally as elusive and tricky as diagnosis, following once again the self vs. enemy logic. the tetracycline arsenal has proven somewhat effective when administered in the early stages of the illness, but bb. often seems to dodge all therapy to some degree, and maintains its footprint on a body it has managed to turn into its habitat, even if through that ultimate subversion of self-other stability: by having turned the “host’s” immune system against itself (autoimmunity). what concerns me about this discourse is that it fully remains within immunology’s metaphysical scheme, that it fails to see the entangled agency of all organisms involved, that it misses the intra-action at the feasting table of haraway’s mess-mate mingling. the predominance of the enemy and warfare paradigm stimulates a paranoid imaginary, like in so many other pandemics before. lyme becomes the master paradigm. everything is lyme. 7. caspio the lyme horse. my account of lyme disease involves the companionship (in its more colloquial acceptation) cultivated between several equines and their human guardian, myself. we live in new england, one of the world’s headquarters of lyme disease. one of my equines, caspio, is a pure-bred member of the “pura raza española” (pre) or pure spanish breed, one of the oldest breeds in the world, the horse that invented classical dressage together with certain renaissance gentlemen, our discipline and art form of choice. caspio has chronic lyme disease. in his case, it has produced arthritis, muscular weakness, gastro-intestinal symptoms, fatigue, and difficulty breathing, all of which flare up in more or less regular intervals. caspio came to me in a state of starvation and utter neglect. i restored him back to health and good weight over the period of a year, except that lyme is here to stay. nevertheless, as a horse of great athletic quality, he has regaled me with his talent in times of healing. his abuse and neglect have much to do with the unbalancing of his immune system, since horses are generally less symptomatic to borrelia infections than dogs and humans, though certainly by no means asymptomatic like cats and opossums. veterinarians, nevertheless, claim that a clear equine lyme titer is virtually unheard of in new england.11 the frequent disconnect between antibody titers and clinical symptoms underscore the fact that infection is not the same as illness, and that the elimination of “invading” pathogens is often out of phase with wellbeing. within the equine species, genetics perhaps is an additional component that explains why certain horses are more symptomatic. caspio’s line-breeding (inbreeding) coefficient is unusually high, and reflects the human desire around modern companion breeding.12 christian gundermann – equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings 159 in the human context, most lyme savvy health care providers agree (as does the cdc) that diagnosis should be based on symptoms, not tests. in the absence of verbal human language to communicate the experience of symptoms, this diagnostic process is even more “soft,” or based on “subjective” factors, because much of those symptoms have to be read through the perception of the human, both owner/guardian and veterinarian. not that pain could ever be measured quantitatively in any organism, but caspio’s joint pain, for example, particularly when not dramatic, will become legible primarily through my experience of his movement in my own body. if his sacroiliac joint moves less fluidly, it will become noticeable in my lower back when i ride him. it will also appear in the wear patterns of his hooves. these additional interpretive interfaces, which concern symptoms whose lack of specificity could point to all manner of other causes as well, makes many veterinarians more liberal in prescribing doxycycline “just in case.”13 others insist on the quantitative interface of serology, at least since the advent of the cornell multiplex lyme test (cml). in 2012, caspio took the cml, which yielded a high antibody titer (12,000) in the chronic register, and his current veterinarian prescribed a three-month course of doxycycline, during which time his symptoms, particularly hind end joint stiffness, and gi-tract dysfunction, improved noticeably. he was tested again, and his titer had come down to the equivocal range (1,100). a few months after the conclusion of antibiotic therapy, his symptoms returned more strongly than previously, but when tested, his titer was not nearly as high as previously (5,000). his veterinarian prescribed an additional 2-month course of oral doxycycline, which brought only the slightest, if any improvement. 8. the cornell multiplex lyme test. like the elisa and western blot tests, the cml is also an “indirect” test: it measures equine antibodies rather than measuring the presence of bb. antigens in body fluids, or culturing the bacteria in a body fluid sample to corroborate its presence. in this sense, the cml must be subjected to at least one of the same central criticisms leveled against the elisa and western blot tests, in that it is problematic to test exclusively for antibodies to an organism that is known to be immunosuppressant. nevertheless, the cml presents a sizable advance in usefulness over the elisa test, not only because it has proved to be more accurate and sensitive (with far fewer false negatives), but also because it measures differentially the antibodies to different bb. antigens and outer surface proteins (osps), and then proceeds to quantify them. it thus allows us not only to differentiate between acute new infection (where antibodies to osp-c’s predominate) and chronic long-term infection (where osp-f predominate), but also to quantify the degree of infection (see humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 160 “multiplex” 2). the very fact of this distinction between osp-c and osp-f levels in the cml takes a position on the chronic lyme disease controversy in the human context. while a widespread position in human medicine continues to insist that there is no “chronic lyme disease” but rather only “post-treatment lyme disease syndrome,” and that therefore long-range antibiotic therapy is not indicated (auwaerter), cornell’s equine veterinary perspective clearly allows for quantifiable “chronic stages of infection” (“multiplex” 3) also, and especially, after “successful” antibiotic therapy. as seen further below, the cornell “pony study” also proved that doxycycline therapy does not completely eliminate bb. from the infected horse’s body (divers 2).14 chronic lyme disease is therefore not a controversy in veterinary science, but rather a life-long condition to be managed through appropriate treatment and care. these are important clinical insights that point in the direction of species entanglements rather than separate ontologies, but no matter how much we rejoice in being able to put objective numbers to a titer (as the cml does), individuals deal very differently with different levels of antibodies, and the concrete meaning of an objective number is therefore quite tenuous for patients and their treating physician. how was this test developed? the cml is probably the only formal research project on lyme disease in horses, conducted in 2003 by the animal health diagnostic center at cornell university’s college of veterinary science. “because of the high seroprevalence in horses in the northeastern united states and numerous phone calls asking about lyme disease” (divers 1), in 2003 a research team decided to conduct a formal study with the following objectives: (1) understand the infection rate of horses exposed to ticks infected with bb.; (2) study the treatment options and outcomes; (3) study the effectiveness in protecting previously uninfected horses by administering a vaccine, based on injecting osp-a antibodies, and currently in use and approved for dogs. for the purpose of this study, cornell acquired 12 “pathogen-free” ponies, on 8 of whom infected deer ticks were placed for 7 days, and 4 of whom functioned as “control ponies” who were exposed to ticks that did not carry bb. (divers 1). all ponies’ serum levels of antibodies were studied continuously for nine months at which time they were all euthanized in order to conduct autopsies. separate studies were conducted for vaccine development and treatment. while the report does not give the exact number of ponies used for the vaccine and treatment part of the study, if we assume that a number equal to the one in the infection study was used, the total number of ponies used and killed would come to 36. to rehearse in all its cynicism a utilitarian position, still prevalent even in much animal christian gundermann – equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings 161 rights discourse to this day: given the amount of unwanted equines who are either euthanized annually, or sent to slaughter in mexico and canada, does not 36 appear to be a low price to pay for such a valuable study, which has answered pressing questions, put before the researchers by “numerous phone calls about lyme?” after all, i myself have used the cornell multiplex test, developed in 2011 in direct reliance on this study, several times over the last years for caspio (and two other horses). so is there real benefit? in when species meet, haraway insisted that one of her primary goals was to expose human exceptionalism and the subsequent carnophallogocentric logic that makes animals other than humans “killable" by definition, which is also why we don’t have a comparable study to the cornell pony study on humans. in other words, legally speaking, killing a non-human animal is by definition never murder, and therefore we can kill 36 ponies after 9 months of experimentation to conduct conclusive histological studies. carnophallogocentrism means that we cannot do the same thing with human test subjects.15 but haraway cautions us that veganism — one of the main contemporary strategies against carnophallogocentrism — is a fantasy of escape from the heavy, even excessive, ethical weight placed on us if we stop considering other animals “killable:” “outside eden, eating means also killing…” (296). no human can ultimately escape completely from the logic of sacrifice. the important distinction here is between “making killable” categorically, which she rejects, and concrete and situated killings, which she defends “for reasons and in detailed material-semiotic conditions that i judge tolerable because of greater good calculations” (87). her conclusion to the dilemma, if we can even call it a conclusion, is that, perhaps, we need to learn to kill better (better than in a human exceptionalist fashion where causing an animal death is a not a crime by definition), but also “get better at dying instead of killing” (81). the implication in “dying better” is that, on a case by case basis, certainly not every animal experiment is ethically responsible, even if the direct positive outcome of it saved a human life. haraway rejects the apparent clarity and abstract elegance of rational utilitarian calculations. what complicates matters further is that, in my case, the benefactors and the sacrificial animals are of the same species, except that some are somebody’s treasured and personal companions, and others are anonymous lab ponies, “used,” “infected,” “studied,” “euthanized,” “dissected” (divers). quoting the biologist marc bekoff, haraway suggests that his “make-or-break question is, ‘does the research benefit the animals?’” (87), further explaining that “[a] question like bekoff’s is not a moral absolute but a needed, mortal, focusing practice in a soul-numbing, situated humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 162 history” (88). haraway distinguishes between animals as “individuated critters” and “kinds” (she understands the latter as “mortal and fleshy knottings, not typological units of being”) (88). while we can affirm that animals (horses as kind) benefitted from this research in some ways, the research report gives us no indication as to whether the research ponies as “individuated critters” have, in any manner, benefitted from this research. have they, for example, been afforded a richer, more livable life while serving at cornell university than before they were chosen? given the traditional parameters of the study (where lab animals are generally reduced to being machine tools), this is doubtful. since i cannot explore this question concerning the individuated ponies in the sort of detail that it would require, i will instead look critically at some of the limiting outcomes and implications of the cornell study as a measure of the benefit for horses as kind in order to discuss what “killing or dying better” might, or might not, mean in this case. based on this analysis, i will suggest that the study can, indeed, not be justified as ethical. as i have demonstrated in “reading blood work is an art form,” there are alternative veterinary studies on metabolic conditions in horses, based on real-life “field experience,” that have not only avoided producing sacrificial victims by using equine patients that are already ill, but have also proven to be more useful for the simple reason that they avoid the artificial strictures of scientific reductionism, considering cases in the fuller complexity of real life scenarios, at the peril of limiting so-called objectivity, reproducibility, double-blindness. such extensive non-formal studies, however, do not exist for borreliosis. presumably the main reason for acquiring “pathogen-free” ponies specifically for the study, for infecting them artificially, and then ending their lives all at the same moment even though there are already plenty of infected individuals in the world, is the notion of controlling the variables in order to produce objective knowledge. the canonization of the double-blind study in the human context, and the “placebo effect” that haunts medical objectivity, have been studied by ed cohen. in veterinary contexts, interestingly, the placebo is presumed to be absent due to the alleged inability of nonhuman animals to comprehend the treatment protocols and therefore to “imagine” improvement or cure.16 the standardization processes of reductionism, however, are applied here in exactly the same fashion as with human clinical trials. all ponies are housed under the same conditions, and infected by the same, lab-controlled ticks, are treated in the same way and at the same time. however, given the unknowns in background and predisposition, these controlled factors seem powerless to produce objective data on the backdrop of such a low number (36) of test subjects. to begin with a central claim of the study, to have used “pathogen-free ponies.” given that a good 5080% of all deer ticks in new england may carry bb., it is impossible to assume that any christian gundermann – equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings 163 equine in the northeast has not been exposed to them. even a pony without any antibodies in its serum could have been exposed previously, and might have other responses to infection than a pony that had never been exposed to the spirochete. in a personal conversation with a veterinarian marginally involved with the “pony study,” i learned that the conditions under which the ponies lived previously was largely unknown and considered irrelevant by the researchers. so what does it really mean that they were “pathogen-free,” other than being an unverifiable foundationalism? the study also mentions that, of the 8 ponies exposed to bb. infected ticks for 7 days, 8 showed positive titers at the various intervals where serum was tested and skin was biopsied. how many ticks were placed on each pony is another unreported detail that would seem to be highly relevant based on my own and other horse guardians’ experience. at autopsy, all of them showed various, though differing degrees of bb. presence in various body parts. since the study ended after 9 months with euthanasia, it is unknown whether more time might have led to a higher degree of elimination of the pathogens. the study’s limited time factor of nine months gives little useful information to the average horse owner, who will presumably not euthanize their horse nine months after exposure to bb., and will likely never even know when first exposure occurred. furthermore, while the objectively measured presence of ospa, ospc, and ospf antibodies in the ponies’ blood serum is certainly useful information, we learn nothing about whether the ponies actually showed clinical symptoms, and if so what symptoms. since this is what really matters to the horses and their guardians, the study is again of limited value. clinical symptoms produced by infection with lyme disease are notoriously difficult to quantify, or even to attribute to lyme. in human medicine, such an evaluation would need to rely on qualitative research, a methodology often dismissed in science as “too soft” or insufficiently generalizable.17 with non-human animals, such an approach meets additional challenges of translation because the patients cannot articulate their symptoms in human verbal language. more creative, even “softer,” and highly labor-intensive methodologies would have to be part of the process. often horses are diagnosed with lyme when their owners insist that “he just doesn’t feel right” or “she has never been so crabby when asked to canter.” so since such a really useful part of the study (which symptoms occurred in each pony) would have been impossible to carry out within the parameters of a formal, quantitative scientific study, it seems as though the study avoided it by hiding behind the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 164 reductionist mantra of histological and serological data rather than question the larger epistemological frame. another important part of the study with potentially useful information for antibiotic therapy for infected horses is the treatment portion of the study. parallel to the infection study, an undisclosed number of ponies were infected and then treated with either oxytetracycline iv or doxycycline administered orally. treatment lasted for 3 weeks, and the ponies’ antibodies were tested continuously from beginning of treatment to 4 months after the conclusion of antibiotic therapy, at which point the ponies were euthanized and autopsied. the study concluded that osp antibodies declined steadily in the ponies treated with oxytetracycline iv. ponies treated with oral doxycycline “produced inconsistent results in serological response and culture findings” (divers 2). the preference for iv therapy with tetracycline is based on a study that lasted all of four months. there are several serious problems with this outcome. first of all, again the clinical setting in no way reflects the reality of real life horses “in the field.” most owners do not test their horses for lyme titers on a daily, weekly, or even yearly basis. titers, as a general rule, will only be pulled when there are clinical symptoms, which normally implies a much longer infection period than the one of the “naive” ponies studied. secondly, iv therapy is of considerable impracticality. oxytetracycline is particularly problematic, as any amount injected into the tissue around the vein can lead to lesions, and therefore requires an experienced hand at venipuncture (and a highly compliant horse). generally the most practical solution is to hospitalize the infected horse because of the exorbitant cost of barn calls and unavailability of veterinarians on a daily consistent basis, including weekends and holidays. but hospitalization is usually not only also very expensive, it is for many horses, if they are not used to frequent travel and change of environment, connected with extraordinary stress, which is likely to suppress the immune function. i have found that few western veterinary practitioners are attuned to those psychological dynamics in horses (neither, of course, are most mds in the human context).18 so the only really practical solution is oral doxycycline in most cases. however, anecdotally veterinarians have found that three weeks of doxycycline is insufficient to suppress the activity of bb. in infected horses enough to make a difference. most vets will prescribe between 4 and 10 weeks of doxycycline therapy, just like in human medicine where lyme specialists have had to go against established protocols concerning the length of antibiotic therapy to help their patients more successfully. so once again, the study is of seriously limited usefulness as it discontinued doxycycline after three weeks and cavalierly concluded that it “produced inconsistent christian gundermann – equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings 165 results” (divers 2). and this critique is really only beginning to scratch the surface of a myriad of variables not taken into account in any of the three formal studies, such as exercise and fitness level, nutrition, psychological well-being, weather and climactic conditions, breeding and genetics, training background, bonded-ness to each other, living conditions before and during the study, general health status, feet shod or unshod, teeth balanced or not, biomechanically correct training/schooling, etc. i’m not “being over the top.” these factors have all, “anecdotally," been of crucial importance in whether horses will even show clinical signs, and if so, how they live with them and whether they are able to live active, useful lives despite the infection. biomedicine continues to disavow the relevance of these “anecdotally” crucial factors. in other words, is biomedical science an enormously expensive, abstract, reductionist, ethically and monetarily costly enterprise with next to no applicability to the real life individual? years of both cml testing and doxycycline therapy had brought insignificant improvement for caspio’s quality of life, and it began to dawn on me that diagnosis and treatment are not only frustratingly out of sync with healing, but may indeed be antithetical to it.19 9. the healing of a holobiont. haraway’s most recent return to theorizing symbiogenesis clarifies some of the above quoted statements about human nature as an interspecies relationship. she proposes that we do away with older conceptual biological models such as host/symbiont, and even symbiosis itself to the extent that it implies a hierarchy between a main organism and its associates, and replace it with holobiont as a model that captures the continuous becoming with many organisms within ecological chains: “to be animal is to become with bacteria” (staying 65). in order to do justice to the “sensuous, juicy, chemical, biological, material-semiotic, and science-making world,” we must reject the “zero-sum game based on competing methodological individualists” (66), in other words, refuse immunology’s immune self against the rest. one of the implications of this “juiciness” that i wish to press is that animals (humans and equines in this instance) have evolved to be holobionts with bacteria, are making world(s) together. to conceptualize our coexistence even with the so-called “good bacteria” (the microbiome) as symbiosis marks an inability to relinquish the fantasy of a stable, bounded self “at the helm.” but the sheer idea that pathogens form part of a holobiont continues to be utterly foreign. as i suggest elsewhere in reference to the evolutionary biologist rob dunn’s work on crohn’s disease and intestinal parasites such as hook and pin worms (gundermann), what would it mean to include a pathogen like the spirochete bb. within the notion of a human or equine holobiont? can we imagine this “becoming together” as a creative, a “juicy” kind of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 166 world making? is there any role for bb. in the world of humans and equines beyond trying to eliminate it? in the remainder of this section, i wish to discuss two “juicy” strategies for the thriving of caspio and bb. as holobiont, for creativity, athleticism, and quality of life in the face of chronic lyme disease, after biomedical (antibiotic) treatment was completed with, at best, temporary and partial success. i want to take seriously what haraway suggests when she says that “to be animal is to become with bacteria” (65) where infection is assumed to be a necessary component of critterly complexity, which would have to mean that pathogens are part of the game. how to thrive with pathogens, particularly when their elimination is increasingly not an option? one of the strategies we have pursued is a medical modality that understands infection differently from western biomedicine, a medical approach that explicitly seeks to “negotiate” a form of being together with the pathogen: a form of therapy that is not founded on the notion of an originally pure organism who then became infected, and for whom medicine fights to restore this putative original purity as birth right. diplomacy rather than modern war fare. in jamieson’s words, this is “an ongoing intimacy or conversation” (22). health, understood in this way, is a continuing balancing act. balance also refers to our other strategy, in a very literal sense. no less important, and practiced in conjunction with energy medicine, is an artistic, creative endeavor of bodily expression, classical dressage, which is based on ancient rules of biomechanics and equitation and whose prime esthetic goal is mental, physical, and emotional balance in movement. 10. stomach-36/zu-san-li. after a strongly western-based early career, dr. p., dvm, has, over the past years, immersed himself in chinese medicine. years ago, dr. p. had treated caspio with antibiotic therapy according to western protocols. with conventional veterinary methods, he then attempted to diagnose caspio’s ongoing challenges with hindlimb soundness, and there were no results. nothing was overtly “broken,” yet caspio was not right. he was weak, stiff, lethargic. for a number of years, i quit consulting with dr. p. during those years (and dissatisfied with the limitations of conventional medicine for helping his patients heal), he began acupuncture training and developed experience in the field. i consulted him again about caspio in 2016. i described to him in detail what i understood to be caspio’s key issues. his three main areas of concern are his lungs, his gi-tract, and the large joints of his pelvis and hind legs, the “motor” of the dressage horse. i told dr. p. that caspio’s symptoms appear in periodic waves, in a rhythm of between every 5 days to every three weeks, depending christian gundermann – equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings 167 on various factors including season, diet, temperature, and stress level. those rhythmic waves of symptoms pointed toward what in immunological parlance would be called an autoimmune turn after incomplete resolution of an infection. as vicki kirby has argued, autoimmunity points to the “foundational quandary" at the core of immunology, an ontology of fundamental hostility between self and other (48). rather than understanding autoimmunity as immunology does as an error or exception to the function of the immune system, i suggest here to see it in line with other ecological imbalances derived from the sufferer’s disturbed companionship with other organisms. just like, at the macro level, the prevalence of bb. in our environment in the northeastern u.s. is likely the result of ecological disturbances in chains of predation, the chronic infection or autoimmune turn points to such a disturbance at the micro or ontogenetic level. while other veterinarians had told me that the weakness particularly in his stifle joints and connected muscles were due to osteoarthritis in the stifle and hock joints (something that could only be treated with steroid injections into those joints), i knew that his joints (and his ability to move and carry himself with strength) always deteriorated when he coughed a lot and concomitantly suffered from bouts of diarrhea. his lymph nodes were also typically swollen at those times. as soon as the diarrhea passed, the strength and self-carriage improved almost within hours. those veterinarians told me that those issues were unrelated, and their seeming connection coincidental. lyme infection was resolved through antibiotic therapy, in this view. the joint problems were mild osteoarthritis, and respiratory and intestinal symptoms were currently unexplained, but could be explored further with endoscopy, if they were serious enough to warrant invasive diagnosis. their migrant nature seemed to counter this way of proceeding. i could not resign myself to this conclusion about a lack of connections, but conventional medicine offered no epistemological or therapeutic model to address my observations. dr. p. listened to my detailed descriptions, pondered them, and finally said that my descriptions made perfect sense from a chinese perspective. the lung and the colon are pair organs, husband and wife, and when the husband is weak, the wife also suffers by having to work twice as hard. dr. p. suggested that rather than throwing more harmful doxycycline at caspio (for his possible chronic lyme infection), we were better off “tweaking his immune response” by other means. “working with” or “tweaking” the immune system to counteract a possible autoimmune response differs substantially from conventional approaches to infection and autoimmune disease. with autoimmunity, conventional medicine merely humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 168 suppresses the immune system wholesale (with drugs in the steroid family such as prednisone), which will then also suppress the immune response to pathogenic activity. dr. p. believed that caspio’s joint issues would improve with successful treatment of his lung and colon. in our second acupuncture session, one of the acupuncture points he decided to treat was stomach-36, or zu-san-li (leg-three-mile point), because we were headed to a dressage clinic, and he wanted to give him extra stamina. he said it was a point for supporting the stifle, but was also considered a general point for immune support, and was a master point on the stomach meridian, affecting the gitract as well. in other words, in chinese medicine these connections between lungs, gut, and large hindlimb joints are systematically understood. the fundamental difference between western, reductionist-materialist approaches to the body, and how traditional chinese medicine conceptualizes it, lies in the term “xi” (energy). the connections between lung, gut, and joints are not understood as primarily biochemical or anatomical in nature, but as energetic. while traditional chinese medicine also has a biochemical register (similar to the pharmacological western one) when it administers herbs, crushed insects, and other substances as pharmakon, acupuncture, like western forms of energy healing such as homeopathy, intervenes within the patient by influencing what it conceptualizes as energetic fields or streams. inserting needles in nodal points along “meridians” that are understood as rivers of energy on the body’s surface, acupuncture seeks to undo blockages, stimulate deficiencies, and deflate overabundance, thus rebalancing a disturbed field of energy that is “out of kilter.” in this sense, it is not so much that lungs, gut, and hind limb joint, confluencing in the acupuncture point zu-san-li, are anatomically connected (although of course the body, the individual, and the environment, are always physically connected as well), but that the energy flow between them is understood as particularly significant. when dr. p. inserted the needle into the zu-san-li point on caspio’s right hind leg (the weaker one), a drop of blood oozed out, and unlike other acupuncture needles, this one produced marked discomfort in caspio. dr. p. commented that the chinese consider it highly significant when blood appears at the puncture site (acupuncture needles are, after all, very thin and barely break the skin). dr. p. then reminded me that acupuncture can produce “healing crises,” which means that the symptoms become worse before they improve. within minutes, caspio began to produce a bout of diarrhea, and half an hour after treatment, when walking down the hill to his pasture, he stumbled and almost fell because his stifle was extremely weak, materializing the predicted healing crisis. again, this diarrhea and joint pain were organic manifestation of “xi.” an x-ray or mri of the stifle joint at that very moment would likely have failed to visualize any christian gundermann – equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings 169 problem, whether because our current visualization technologies are too crude, or whether “xi” is happening at a different level of reality altogether. the only answer that materialist science has for these phenomena is to attribute them to the imagination, hence the “placebo” or “nocebo” as explanatory patterns, understanding “imaginary” in opposition to “real.” veterinary applications of energy medicine, however, trouble the “placebo” pattern, since human exceptionalism also attributes an object status to non-human animals that excludes them from the dynamics of the imagination. they are, therefore, an interesting gauge for the realness of “xi,” which, indeed, had me worried about our participation in the approaching clinic. however, two days later, in our lesson, he produced a stronger canter than i had ever felt. chinese acupuncture had been able to materialize a form of support that i had not found in my experience with conventional western medical treatment for caspio. at the same time, acupuncture is not “a cure,” but rather a sustained practice of supporting the healing processes of the body. cohen reminds us that “[b]y end of nineteenth century, however, the vis medicatrix naturae had fallen out of favor among western bio-scientists” (“healing”). the birth moment of modern biomedicine marks this shift away from supporting toward curing, from health as balancing act to offense. my argument here is that conventional medicine has not been able to fully grasp the challenge of lyme (and other “emergent” diseases involving the immune system) at a conceptual level, due to its foundational self-definition. supporting a patient with lyme disease is bound to be unsuccessful, so long as we focus primarily on identifying and eliminating a pathogen, and measuring success in binary terms as infected/uninfected. all of “juicy reality” in this world is characterized by multi-species cohabitation. titers will and should be positive, and will sometimes have little to say about how we feel. the modern mechanistic approach based in “cold-body anatomy,” which dissects organisms until the cause is found (see the epigraph by virgil), has yielded enormous success at the level of first response. in the face of chronic ailment, older negotiating skills will prove themselves worthy of being revisited and expanded. my preference is to live and dance with a warm-body art and science. 11. artistic dressage. speaking of dance, then: a key component in managing caspio’s afflictions is classical dressage schooling. dressage as an olympic sport already has an intimate relationship with (conventional) medicine. biomedicine is to fix what dressage breaks. given the catastrophic rate at which dressage horses nowadays crash, the actual success rate of this high-tech endeavor remains dubious, but even more troubling is the ethical status of a sport that does so much damage, even though it grew out of an art humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 170 form that is all about preserving the horse’s soundness as a ridden athlete. here i am proposing a different kind of combined effort between art and science, that between energy medicine and classical dressage where both disciplines enhance each other mutually, and where sport/art and the balance it seeks to produce or restore can also be understood as both anatomical/dynamic (biomechanical) and as energetic. in other words, horses do not only learn to move more beautifully due to a set of biomechanical rules (and therefore strengthen their joints, tendons, ligaments, and muscles), but also because their energy flow is enhanced and/or balanced. in summer 2015, caspio and i began working with a well-known classical dressage master d. d’s knowledge of both equine and human rider biomechanics is profound, and has enabled her to rehabilitate horses that had been abandoned as broken and crippled, through the use of classical gymnastics alone. horses with neurological disorders, with injuries, and other disqualifying impediments such as poor conformation learn to (re)develop balance, feel, integration, and energy. before working with d, i had been told over and over by veterinarians and trainers that caspio was just too broken, even though what exactly was broken could never be identified in anatomical terms. one even suggested he might be of poor conformation. d. told me that caspio was a well-bred, exceptionally talented horse. her knowing but demanding gaze almost instantly changed caspio’s spirit. he felt recognized. the day of our first lesson, during which he snapped as if out of a deep slumber into a brilliance i had never yet seen in the work, our exciting journey began. every lesson has been new and revelatory. since summer 2015, we have gone to the arena almost every day to work, and also to find in our work the key to living with chronic lyme. i have suggested here to think infection as an energetic and ecological imbalance, rather than as the invasion by an alien agent who needs to be identified and eliminated. i have further suggested that both chinese medicine and the art of classical equitation can be tools to reestablish or create energetic balance, and thus to critically support an organism in its ever-present ability to heal. neither in energy medicine nor in classical training is balance ever understood as static, but both modalities provide methods for dynamically processing balance in relation to its necessary opposite, imbalance or loss of balance. classical training conceptualizes the beauty of this instability, the delicacy of each balancing act in succession, the gaining of strength and coordination on the abyss of imbalance: the dance on the verge of disaster, as my teacher says. furthermore, returning to barad’s propositions about intra-actions between phenomena that are constituted through the act of intra-acting, rather than as separate and autonomous entities, the human-horse intra-action in classical training produces such a phenomenon. there is no ontologically delineated “here” and “there,” or “before” and “after,” or “subject” and “object” in this christian gundermann – equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings 171 form of training, only strategic moments of agential cutting. the balance, movement, and beauty constituted through this phenomenon intra-acts favorably toward re-balancing the lyme-ravaged phenomenon of biochemical, biomechanical, and energetic imbalance. but how to write about what we do? my work and communication with horses is largely feel based, embodied, non-verbal. my dilemma in writing this section: despite new materialisms, situated knowledges, onto-epistemologies, and our recent academic emphasis on embodied practices, there is a fundamental gap between what can be said in a verbal academic text and what i study and practice. words, while often playing some role (particularly in communication between d. and myself), barely scratch the surface of our processes. how, then, to verbalize the knowledges that we produce through feel, touch, movement, timing, affect; the forms of cognition that are so marginalized in a world that is forevermore anthropocentric?20 how to mobilize barad’s theorizations to give an account of how caspio and i constitute an intra-active phenomenon rather than a subject/object ontology whereby, in traditional western logic, the human subject trains the non-human object? how to convey the importance of these forms of moving and learning for, on the one hand, healing from lyme disease and other chronic conditions (whether human or otherwise), but in a much broader sense: from a global condition that is characterized by forms of communication, production, and epistemologies that are almost entirely tailored to human, rational, and modern western scales and needs? as rachel carson said already two generations ago: “mankind has gone very far into an artificial world of his own creation. he has sought to insulate himself, in his cities of steel and concrete, from the realities of earth and water and the growing seed. intoxicated with a sense of his own power, he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and his world” (94). a closed circuit. a western human ghetto of modernity where, as in the epigraph by virgil with which i opened this piece, logocentric “man” processes the world of effects so as to identify the hidden cause. there are so many important matters we are failing to understand due to this isolation, probably increasingly so since carson wrote the lines above. the economy of the same, as irigaray said with regard to sex. the erasure of difference. how to make an opening to other scales, needs, and knowledges, to ways of knowing and learning that are not logocentric, i.e. that do not have that very specific, limited form of communication, the human word, at the center, the verbal signifier whose centrality is predicated on the absence or disappearance of the body, even as the body is never really shed, and returns as haunting supplement? but can we give verbal expression to a truly embodied way of knowledge production, one in which humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 172 the body is not “the other,” the hindrance, the suppressed matter that returns as a problem, a stumbling block to true communication, the matter under mind? a concrete example: how to describe in verbal language the meaning of a half-halt? there is a millennial equestrian literature on training that has concerned itself with such terms, but mostly from a strictly technical perspective. less focused on the technical aspects here, yet deeply concerned with the very materiality of the intra-action, i want to translate, trans-theorize, transpose, what this half-halt may have to do with lyme disease, global warming, human planetary dominance, lack of ecological balance. fundamentally a half-halt is a moment of redirecting, rebalancing, a moment that opens up a blank space in the flow of physical syntax between horse and rider; a moment of possibility or potential. it is also, perhaps most fundamentally, an intervention to restore lost or compromised balance. and it is an act that horse and rider can only do together. it is in this sense that i wish to insert classical training as embodied practice of healing against the immuno-ontologies discussed earlier, both in the literal sense of fostering balanced and aligned movement to heal an immune(and possibly neuro-) compromised individual so that neural pathways and ravished cells and tissues can regenerate themselves, but also in a more metaphorical sense where dynamic transindividual balance, rather than defended static self, are practiced. ultimately, all of classical training, and perhaps all biomechanics-based interactions with horses, are based in what biologists have called entrainment or murmuration, which inherently promote balance and flow in a way that undoes the individuality and boundedness of the self. there isn’t one at the wheel of control, the other receiving orders, one dominating, the other obliging. in the shifting balance of a ridden horse, there is and isn’t a self. in this article, i lack the space to explore the bodily details of this art form, originating fundamentally from the human and the equine spines and pelvises as they become linked; the implications of movements initiated in the sockets rather than the balls of joints for long-term health of compromised joints; and the neurological, as well as spiritual, meaning of moving with sacro-cranial alignment, positive tension, and a supple rib cage, all of which are the basis of correct classical dressage for both rider and horse, and which have far-reaching implications for healing a body ravished by lyme and other immune-mediated illnesses. by way of concluding, i stress that i wish to have classical training, and other embodied practices, understood as a science (based in knowledge), alongside the dominant biosciences of our time, not so much because it can be measured,21 but because it has real effects on soundness and health while engaging non dualistic, non-reductionist, and non-deterministic world-making experiences. to be absolutely clear, my discussion christian gundermann – equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings 173 of energy medicine and classical art form are not to be understood as a way of refuting or replacing biomedicine per se, while i do wish to chart the limiting effects of the latter’s epistemological foundation. this is not an either/or game, nor is the acupuncture/classical training approach generalizable in a reductionist way. there will never be double-blind studies on what i am proposing here. individual patients require different treatments at different times. to assume such a generalized meaning in my argument would be to miss my main point, which is a call to expand our current limited, conceptually constrained way not only of understanding lyme disease and immune system disorders, but of approaching the meaning of health and wellbeing more generally. notes 1. in “the placebo disavowed,” ed cohen locates the long 19th century as the historical moment when medicine “set[s] up shop in the domain of science…” (6), and further demonstrates that during the birth moment of modern medicine and immunology in the late 19th century, “[t]he axiom that only one cause is needed for an effect […] defines determinism as the epistemological ground for biomedical truth” (9). 2. see in this context michelle jamieson’s work on allergy in the history of immunology where, based on the early twentieth-century pioneering immunologist clemens von pirquet’s work, she suggests to undo the self-other ontology that has come to define immunology as a discipline and replace it with the notion of an “an ecological relation that is constantly being negotiated” (21). such an emphasis on diverse and negotiated relationality stands in stark contrast with immunology’s founding episteme as cohen summarizes it: “‘natural’ hostility as the essential condition of life” (“self” 37). 3. another important protagonist in the “lyme wars” who proposes long-term antibiotic therapy is richard horowitz, md. see his best-selling publication why can’t i get better: solving the mystery of lyme and chronic disease. this hudson valley based physician/author also offers extensive web support for patients and medical practitioners. 4. see https://www.lymedisease.org/lyme-basics/lyme-disease/diagnosis 5. the advocacy, education and research network lymedisease.org claims that “[p]atients with lyme disease are frequently misdiagnosed with chronic fatigue humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 174 syndrome, fibromyalgia, multiple sclerosis, and various psychiatric illnesses” (“about lyme disease”). 6. auwaerter’s rejection of the frequent use of the term “chronic lyme disease” is representative of the dominant biomedical, i.e. determinate mono-causal reductionist approach to infection, as when he argues that in the absence of “objective symptoms of infection” (144), i.e. positive test results, “subjective symptoms” (143) or “complaints” (144) such as “fatigue, musculoskeletal aches, and neurocognitive symptoms” (143), should not be categorized as chronic lyme disease, but rather as a post infection syndrome. this argument strikes me as curiously self-contradictory, particularly because the author himself admits that the standard lyme igm western blot assay is unreliable, producing frequent false positives (144). those who insist on long-term antibiotic therapy typically employ the term chronic lyme disease in order to justify this treatment (see stricker; stringfellow; cameron; donta; horowitz.). both sides operate with the same mono-causal concept of infection. 7. i am using the noun “conjugation” intentionally and in reference to haraway’s own poetic exploration of it in the context of “conjugated estrogens” and our need to “conjugate well” (not “correctly”) in her essay “awash in urine” (staying 111). 8. in this context, see md bill rawls’s work for a (bio)diverse approach to healing lyme, which includes elements such as exercise, antibiotics, microbiome support, meditation, nutrition, various plant-based substances, lifestyle changes, and nutraceuticals. 9. “host” remains in quotation marks here as it also participates in the old ontology of figure/ground relations challenged by my conjugation of the baradian/harawayan onto-epistemology of entangled becomings. the term “host” is discussed more fully below. 10. this is a dynamic that much, but not all, of main-stream medical research denies. see for example auwaerter: “suggestions that b. burgdorferi can survive despite antibiotic therapy by adopting a cystic form has only been seen in certain in vitro conditions and is unproven in humans” (146). 11. this comment is based on informal communications with field practitioners. the cornell u. study on “equine lyme disease” quantifies equine seroprevalence at “[n]early 50%” (divers 1). christian gundermann – equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings 175 12. an aspect to consider in the context of this exploration of companion mingling with respect to a vector-borne bacterial infection, therefore, is the component of breeding/genetics, a complex topic with connections that branch out like a spider web at a time when reproductive technologies, tried and tested on non-human species, now come home to roost. i do not have time to explore this topic in depth in the context of this article. 13. this goes with the additional caveat that, due to its anti-inflammatory properties, doxycycline will often bring improvement even in the absence of any pathogenic presence. 14. compare this with statements such as auwaerter’s who denies the ability of bb. to survive antibiotic therapy: “studies designed to investigate prospectively whether b. burgdorferi can be recovered after antibiotic therapy have found evidence of the organism neither by skin biopsy […] nor by culture…” (146). 15. let me caution, however, that the idealized term “human” is not accessible evenly among people, with the dire consequence that many human medical experiments are carried out on the backs, and at the expense, of non-white, poor, and/or third world human populations. 16. cohen discusses the role of the imagination in human medical treatment, as well as its increasing eclipse in modern biomedicine, which resurfaces and is formalized as the haunting supplement of the “placebo effect” (“placebo,” especially 7). 17. recall auwaerter’s characterization of “subjective” symptoms as “complaints” in counter-distinction from “objective symptoms” (144). see also dumit for a detailed discussion of the problematic withholding of care from sufferers of illnesses that are not fully biomedicalized. 18. as just one typical example of this lack of interest in those dynamics in relation to health, healing, and immune function, consider the discussion of an equine case study in “a new sensitive multiplex assay” where a hospitalized horse is subjected to the full high-tech gruesomeness of an immunological work-up including spinal taps and biopsies under general anesthesia (wagner 72), exemplifying the mechanistic “cold humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 176 body science” approach to medicine. the assay may well be sensitive, while the approach to the patient clearly is not. 19. in “healing as metaphor,” cohn historically describes the adoption of the political term “immunity” by modern medicine. “this metaphoric innovation fundamentally reconceived the prevention and amelioration of illness. bracketing healing as an improperly fuzzy premise, scientific medicine incorporated what it now saw as more properly ’natural’ function of the organism: self defense.” 20. there are several other embodied art forms, specifically music and dance, where a corresponding academic/verbal field of meta-study exists. the tensions and disconnects between musicologists and musicians, for example, while different in some of their specificity, represent a dilemma in some ways similar to the one at hand. in addition to the split between embodied practice and word-based metapractice, which in itself has also led to disputes over who truly produces knowledge, in the art work with horses trans-species communication complicates matters further. in the logocentric tradition, in all matters of knowledge production, non-human persons were only ever located on the object side. in my creative work with caspio, our dialogue produces knowledge. both of us train each other, educate each other, reflect, “speak,” and decide. in this sense, we form an intra-active phenomenon, not a logocentric subject/object ontology (where the human trains the horse). 21. the veterinarian hillary clayton, the mary anne mcphail dressage chair in equine sports medicine at the michigan state university college of veterinary medicine, conducts studies in equine biomechanics and locomotion that attempt to prove in western scientific terms why classical dressage is beneficial for the horse. my dressage teacher and her horses are among her research subjects. works cited auwaerter, paul g. “point: antibiotic therapy is not the answer for patients with persisting symptoms attributable to lyme disease.” clinical infectious diseases 45.2 (2007). 143-8. christian gundermann – equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings 177 barad, karen. “posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” material feminisms. stacy alaimo and susan hekman, eds. indiana up, 2008. 120-54. “borrelia burgdorferi.” microbewiki. online. accessed 23 aug 2017. cameron, daniel j. “insufficient evidence to deny antibiotic treatment to chronic lyme disease patients.” med hypotheses 72.6 (2009): 1-4. _____. “proof that chronic lyme disease exists.” interdisciplinary perspectives on infectious diseases (2010). online. accessed. 24 aug. 2017. carson, rachel. lost woods: the discovered writing of rachel carson. linda lear, ed. beacon press, 1998. cohen, ed. “healing as metaphor.” online. accessed 23 aug. 2017. _____. “the placebo disavowed: or unveiling the bio-medical imagination.” the yale journal for humanities in medicine (2016). online. accessed 23 aug. 2017. _____. “self, not-self, not not-self but not self, or the knotty paradoxes of ‘autoimmunity’: a genealogical rumination.” parallax 23.1 (2017): 28-45. divers, t.j., y. f. chang and p. l. mcdonough. “equine lyme disease: a review of experimental disease production, treatment efficacy, and vaccine protection.” international veterinary information service, 21 nov. 2003. online. accessed 27 aug. 2017. donta, sam t. “lyme disease guidelines — it’s time to move forward.” clinical infectious diseases 44.8 (2007): 1134-35. dumit, joseph. “illnesses you have to fight to get: facts as forces in uncertain, emergent illnesses.” social science and medicine 62.3 (2006): 577-90. dunn, rob. the wild life of our bodies: predators, parasites, and partners that shape who we are today. harper collins, 2011. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 178 gundermann, christian. “reading blood work is an art form: toward an embodied feminist practice of veterinary science and care.” catalyst 3.2 (2017). online. accessed 13 december 2018. haraway, donna. “encounters with companion species: entangling dogs, baboons, philosophers, and biologists.” configurations 14.1 (2006): 97-114. _____. “situated knowledges. the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” feminist studies 14.3 (1988): 575-99. _____. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. duke up, 2016. _____. when species meet. u of minnesota p, 2008. horowitz, richard. why can’t i get better? solving the mystery of lyme and chronic disease. macmillan, 2013. irigaray, luce. this sex which is not one. trans. catherine porter and carolyn burke. cornell up, 1985. jamieson, michelle. “allergy and autoimmunity: rethinking the normal and the pathological.” parallax 23.1 (2017): 11-27. kirby, vicki. “autoimmunity: the political state of nature.” parallax 23.1 (2017): 46-60. logiudice, kathleen, richard s. ostfeld, kenneth a. schmidt, and felicia keesing. “the ecology of infectious disease: effects of host diversity and community composition on lyme disease risk.” proceedings of the national academy of sciences 100.2 (2003): 56771. “lyme basics.” lymedisease.org. advocacy, education, and research. online. accessed 23 aug. 2017. “lyme disease multiplex testing for horses.” cornell university college of veterinary medicine, animal health diagnostic center. online. accessed 27 aug. 2017. mayer, emeran. the mind-gut connection. how the hidden conversation within our bodies impacts our mood, our choices, and our overall health. harper collins, 2016. christian gundermann – equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings 179 ostfeld, richard s., and felicia keesing. “biodiversity and disease risk: the case of lyme disease.” conservation biology 14.3 (2000): 722-8. rawls, william. unlocking lyme: myths, truths, and practical solutions for chronic lyme disease. vital plan, 2017. stricker, raphael b. “counterpoint: long-term antibiotic therapy improves persistent symptoms associated with lyme disease.” clinical infectious diseases 45.2 (2007): 14957. stringfellow, barry. “visiting physician sheds new light on lyme disease.” mv times, 13 july 2016. online. accessed 23 aug 2017. “testing.” global lyme alliance. online. accessed 23 aug. 2017. van dooren, thom. flight ways: life and loss at the edge of extinction. columbia up, 2014. virgil. the works of virgil containing his pastorals, georgics and aeneis : adorn'd with a hundred sculptures / translated into english verse by mr. dryden. text creation partnership. online. accessed 23 aug 2017. wagner, bettina, amy glaser, jacqueline bartol, omar mahar, amy johnson, and tom divers. “a new sensitive lyme multiplex assay to confirm neuroborreliosis in horses: a aase report.” proceedings of the american association of equine practitioners 57 (2011): 70-75. microsoft word intro-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:2 robert geroux introduction to the special issue: decolonizing animal studies indigenous people have long recognized the consciousness of the natural order. in fact, since the beginning of our time. the fundamental premise of niitsitapi ways of knowing is that all forms of creation possess consciousness. the non-separation of nature and humans is one of the demarcations between eurocentered and indigenous philosophy. (bastien, 80) is it too easy a comparison to say that western thinkers are finally getting on board with something that is closer to an american indian metaphysic? -kim tall bear. for those of us engaged in various projects under the horizon of critical indigeneity the “encounter” with non-humanity should not provoke articulations of the so-called animal question: in this space, there’s no heideggerian poverty-in-world to elaborate on, no derridean human/animal abyss to deconstruct. if the work of theory begins from the ground of encounter, then that particular abyss has its punctuality in another event (1492/1620): a specific history that unfolds and structures everything that follows. that structure operates according to a logic of extirpation; in north america it finds its motive power by an equally specific ideology: liberalism. as settler colonialism marches forward both conceptually and territorially, it places indigeneity on one side of a culture/nature binary; the binary is of course harmful and toxic, and is itself a distinctively occidental artifact, but (at least) at the heart of its ideological artifice is an acknowledgment and recognition of an unbroken humanimal bond.1 an important aspect of decolonizing work is in seizing or really taking back the conceptualization of that bond, in reoccupying and deploying it in terms that continue to reject all settler binaries (for example in avoiding a discussion of something like the “re-enchantment” of a world that was never made instrumental and essentially empty in the first place). this is the kind of work i had in mind when i proposed a special issue of humanimalia devoted to questions of decolonizing human-animal studies. a second aspect must be in emphasizing the uninterrupted continuity of this work, in recognizing the radical power of subversion even in the face of overwhelming civilizational projects;2 there is continuity from the deep past into our own time, in other humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 2 words, even when the predations of settlers and governmental powers threaten to eradicate traditional knowledge. this past of sometimes obscure “hidden transcripts” of resistance and subtle inversions and subversions, and most especially humanimal survivance, now becomes part of an increasingly widespread and interdisciplinary effort at several things: preservation (the land itself is a knowledge archive which is threatened by profoundly alien terraforming), description, and prescription.3 animals and ancestors (the two terms overlap) force us to challenge not only the north american liberal consensus, but also the “progressive”-left discourse of respect within a civil rights framework. this will be apparent in any discussion of “rights” (human or animal) in what follows here, for example. it may also be useful to address and interrogate a third concept: sovereignty. the term gets used frequently, and its common importance is clearly in limning modern territory and controlling nation-state populations. the political questions raised here address concerns over collective composition and autonomy, and of course land (decolonization can never be separated from questions of repatriation), but just as importantly they emphasize that the communities in question always already not only include other-thanhuman beings, they are framed and founded by those beings. to appropriate and redeploy settler language, non-human animals and others are founders. questions of intention and agency — their other-than-human agency — aren’t tangential or secondary debates to be addressed after the so-called essence of human nature is conceptually confined. the priority or polarity is reversed: indigenous ontologies tend to emphasize instead that common survival in the world depends on an expansive and generous attitude of radical other-than-human charity. that attitude and those actions are in settler/liberal terms the original “social contract,” which are cyclically recovered and revered in various ways: informally through daily life processes, more formally in and through ceremony. in all of this, through all of this, it is clear that the usual constituent components of the modern hobbesian sovereign must be different; as a result, critical indigeneity offers the opportunity to break the mimetic process by which native communities are encouraged to appeal to both nation-state and international powers for recognition.4 traditional knowledge in particular helps us see that the truthprocedures attached to such appeals properly flow not from governmental authorities but in an inverted fashion from the non-human actors who gifted human communities with the various skills to continue to live. in other words, if the world prior to the existence of the nation-state was (and in the international community continues to be) a “state of nature,” then we have non-human actors (and not hobbesian sovereigns) to thank for the passage out of the originary condition of human vulnerability and weakness. we still carry that weakness, and yet the artifice of modernity alienates us robert geroux -introduction to the special issue: decolonizing animal studies 3 from it. for this reason, i think of our various understandings as deployments of counter-sovereignty; in this sense they represent a kind of desecularization of hobbes’s artificial animal in the monstrous leviathan. we don’t need a mythical sovereign order like that monstrous animal, because we abjure the very separation of the human/animal break that necessitates this (quintessentially “human” or artificial) creation. it’s not just that the orders we envision aren’t an embodiment of artifice: again, they suspend the very nature/culture divide in reference (and deference) to a single, immanent sacred space. norms, rules, and laws flow from numinous concentrations in that space. so, to radically distill our vision without simplification, decolonizing praxis in what follows here means enacting powerfully subversive understandings of a) humanimal survivance over time, and b) countersovereign control over territory in space.5 each vector as it operates represents a frontal challenge to existing circulations of power, even (and perhaps especially) in indigenous communities: the settler-colonial order not only moved forward in time by means of a civilizational project that ideologically conceals and reifies a will-to-extirpation, it mobilized and continues to mobilize an imaginary of nature that stands on the side of the (so-called) “civilized,” even as it continually invokes the danger of new savagisms. similarly, the humanitarian appeal of liberal governmental control over space means the imposition of an ideological grid whereby outliers — subjects and collectives who don’t “fit” by various refusals to make appeals to rights discourse or identitarian pluralism — are viewed in schmittian terms as enemies of the sovereign, and by extension enemies of humanity. and we know that such enemies for liberals — following locke, among many others — are wild beings, dangerous to domesticated, settled space. with this repressive horizon in mind, and with special sensitivity to the neo-jacksonian turn represented by trump/pence, the essays collected here pay special attention to projects that mostly attend to local, particular, complex, but embodied humanimal questions: the northern tribes buffalo treaty (taschereau mamers), the “sacred domesticity” of human beings and horses as part of diné practice (john), decolonial performance art becoming-bison (kozak), creek ceremony embodying bird nations (koons), and the practical applications of traditional ecological knowledge (fix et al.). i now turn to a brief discussion of each essay, before concluding with some parting comments. *** we open the issue with a profound examination of species loss and potential recovery. danielle taschereau mamers engages in precisely the kind of work we have in mind: theorizing that elevates and foregrounds indigenous traditions in their relation to nonhuman animals, and which itself emphasizes the centrality of non-human agents in humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 4 restoring a healthy and vital balance to a world that is properly common to all of us. like all of the other essays contained in this volume, taschereau mamers begins by paying respect to generations of indigenous thinkers engaged in decolonizing praxis before and among us: leroy little bear, vine deloria jr., kim tallbear, leanne betasamosake simpson, billy-ray belcourt, and zoe todd are some leading figures that come to mind. it bears repeating that our work would not be possible without them. she then reiterates and deeply grounds the claim made here in these introductory comments, about animal agency in processes of both colonialism and decolonization. to take this claim seriously, she correctly notes, “requires shifting analyses of both colonization itself and possibilities of repair” (x). in a sense incorporating the comment made by kim tall bear above — it really does appear that western science and social science are “catching up” with what deloria called an american indian metaphysics! — taschereau mamers deftly combines narratives of bison extermination, interweaving indigenous accounts with more standard western “scientific” histories. all of this serves as important groundwork for the revolutionary buffalo treaty, where, as she says “conservation becomes a multispecies endeavor with decolonial possibilities” (x, her emphasis). diné scholar kelsey dayle john echoes many of these themes in her essay, which examines what might be called the aberrations of agamben’s anthropological machine, embedded as they are in settler-colonial space. what i mean by this is the determined and extended application of governmental power in the name of both human genocide (the extermination of a specific gens or people) and what might be called zoocide, or the intentional erasure of a specific configuration of animal life. as john reminds us, indigenous resistance to these processes is as old as encounter; as she puts it, such “interventions are never new” (x). and yet at the same time, our work in these pages springs from an equally powerful awareness that the force of those vectors of humanimal alliance and action have for the most part been marginalized in the academy. john carefully addresses that marginalization (as well as situating her work in the context of existing critiques), while never losing sight of her focus: in her words, the “horse-human-land connection” in the highly specific context of diné resistance to animal colonialism. as in the taschereau mamers essay, animal agency grounds a politics of shared history and common future. both essays are incredibly specific, moreover, about the politics of land management and indigenous counter-sovereign ecologics. similarly oriented in rhetorics of resistance and recovery is kozak’s piece on representation of bison in the work of adrian stimson and dana claxton. here robert geroux -introduction to the special issue: decolonizing animal studies 5 questions of settler agency, humanimal representation, response, and contemporary responsibility are raised and remain open. native artists speak for themselves and for their work, and when they do, they frontally challenge what might be called “typical” positions on questions of animal rights. this is, of course, an important debate, and one which extends well outside the confines of this issue. and yet, even the term “debate” gets things wrong, insofar as it implies the kind of free space for discussion and deliberation imagined by liberal academics. these issues aren’t purely philosophical problems but expressions of food sovereignty and more; they represent an ontological orientation that metis scholar zoe todd discusses in a parallel context, “fish pluralities.” we can begin with the awareness that such practices require the mobilization of the agambenian category of life that may be killed, and yet part of the fluidity of the “pluralities” that todd and others discuss is the reciprocal nature of that existential decision. blackfoot elder and scholar leroy little bear emphasizes this, for example, when he invokes the niitsitapi (nations of the blackfoot confederacy) traditional teaching that bison once ate human beings, just as we now eat bison.6 the order over time in this sense begins to resemble the immanent space of animality discussed by george bataille, in the opening passages of his work theory of religion.7 for these reasons engaging in either the kind of “hedonistic calculus” associated with the utilitarianism of peter singer, or some rawlsian rights-based approach takes us too far from the ground truth of kinship and what blackfoot scholar betty bastien calls “natural alliances.” in the work of both stimson and claxton we see represented animal bodies, but here when bones and corpses are rendered they refer in a primary sense not to the abattoir or factory farming (both very real problems in their context!), but to the existential disaster of encounter that i mentioned above (1492/1620). such questions of response and responsibility are central once more to the next essay, which also continues an elaboration of vizenor’s “aesthetics of survivance.” here, duration in time ramifies outward beyond humanity, even as it reflects back recursively in questions of the anthropocene. ryan koons begins with questions of conceptualization, interrogating contemporary uses of the term anthropocene, and in the process undermining the implicit assumption that the “anthropos” at the heart of global climate change is each of us, equally responsible and in some sense culpable for the actual (in this case the sixth extinction). “capitalocene” is better, he correctly suggests, which at least empowers us by implying a kind of margin or “shatter zone” for thinking, acting, and even dancing against the trends of our perilous times. his focus on a creek band and its bird dances helps us see that “becoming-animal” in its various deployments doesn’t mean an abdication of human responsibility. becoming-avian isn’t an escape from being human. like the artists in kozak’s essay, ritual enactments of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 6 animal life work instead in the opposite direction, concentrating our focus on nonhuman culture and history as a model for human conduct. koons’s detailed account helps us see how this is true, even when clear political aims seem evasive: ritually enacting a humanimal present returns our focus to the hyperlocal, the situated, and the embodied, eschewing sometimes unhelpful abstractions (“anthropos,” “global climate” and so on). our final essay rejoins many of the discussions and debates raised above in a unique way: not only in terms of the various anthropocentrisms subverted by tallbear’s somewhat sardonic use of deloria’s “american indian metaphysic,” but with a focus on disciplinary and even institutional questions about knowledge composition and what might be called epistemic politics. the haudenosaunee “words before all else” opens the discussion with a reminder that we are obligated: to express gratitude, but also to engage contemporary configurations and concentrations of power. as adam fix points out, the difference between the critical visions proffered here and various mainstream approaches to humanimal questions is “not in knowledge but power relations.” we can begin with the awareness that non-human animals are kin, co-founders of communities and revolutionary agents, but where do we find an institutional home for various deployments of the knowledge at the heart of our various projects? put differently, the very contours of land and the lives of its inhabitants are a living archive; part of our obligation is in preserving that archive, but where? i would suggest that one important focus is in projects and policy centers affiliated with tribal colleges. such institutions remain closer in many ways to elders, knowledge holders, and practices of decolonization as ground truth.8 a second and related source for hope is in departments of traditional ecological knowledge (tek) in research universities and other more “mainstream” sites of knowledge production and dissemination. fix, burnham, and gutteriez engage in autoethnography to highlight the opportunities represented by tek, as well as the problems that occur when traditional knowledge is removed from its home.9 *** this issue of humanimalia would not be possible without the truly revolutionary research carried out by decolonizing scholars before us and among us. i remain profoundly indebted to their intellectual and political labors. restating what hugh burnam says in the final essay of this issue, i too am an “avid learner,” and a relative beginner to the intellectual and political labor of decolonization. the work gathered robert geroux -introduction to the special issue: decolonizing animal studies 7 here gives me hope. we have differences, but in a constellated fashion we strive for the full and unconditional sovereignty of both human and non-human nations. special thanks to: diana passmore, holly cedar, kim tallbear, don pepion, charmayne champion-shaw, kennan ferguson, diana rose, istvan csicsery-ronay, anonymous peer reviewers. dedicated to the memory of elouise cobell. notes 1. on the issue of the intolerable “intimacy with nature,” and the paternalistic response at the heart of liberalism, see michael rogin, fathers and children: andrew jackson and the subjugation of the american indian. 2. this is the point of gerald vizenor’s “survivance,” a portmanteau (survival/endurance) that glances back at derrida, while decolonizing and deploying deconstruction in pursuit of native sovereignty. see gerald vizenor, “the aesthetics of survivance” in native liberty: natural reason and cultural survivance. see also the ancillary concept “continuance,” defined here: “‘continuance’ here refers to indigenous survival and flourishing in the face of change, including change stemming from oppression” (whyte, et al. 153). 3. “archives” may refer to the oral tradition or to actual formations in ecosystems, such as formations in the landscape created by plant and animal ancestors that can be used to reconstruct lessons from their time about how to live well” (whyte et al., 156). 4. on the flawed logics of reconciliation and mimesis, see glen coulthard, red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. 5. my neologism “counter-sovereignty” here can be seen as an amplification of kevin bruyneel’s understanding of the “third space of sovereignty.” see bruyneel, the third space of sovereignty: the postcolonial politics of u.s.-indigenous relations. 6. this comment comes from the podcast the native seed pod (june 14, 2018), “the reemergence of the buffalo.” online. accessed 2 february 2019. 7. “the immanence of the animal with respect to its milieu is given in a precise situation, the importance of which is fundamental. i will not speak of it continually, but i will not be able to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 2 (spring 2019) 8 lose sight of it; the very conclusion of my statements will return to this starting point: the situation is given when one animal eats another” (bataille, 17 [his italics]). 8. two such examples include the diné policy institute (dpi) affiliated with diné college, and the sustainable development insitute (sdi) housed at the college of menominee nation (cmn). 9. such questions also arise in the context of museum collections. for an especially poignant and powerful rendering of the repatriation of sacred bundles from the glenbow museum in alberta to the nations of the niitsitapi (blackfoot confederacy), see gerald conaty, we are coming home: repatriation and the restoration of blackfoot cultural confidence. works cited bastien, betty. blackfoot ways of knowing: the world of the siksikaitsitapi. u calgary p, 2004. bataille, george. theory of religion. trans. robert hurley. zone books, 1989. bruyneel, kevin. the third space of sovereignty: the postcolonial politics of u.s.-indigenous relations. u minnesota p , 2007. conaty, gerald. we are coming home: repatriation and the restoration of blackfoot cultural confidence. athabasca up, 2015 coulthard, glen. red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. u minnesota p, 2014. rogin, michael. fathers and children: andrew jackson and the subjugation of the american indian. transaction publishers, 1991. tallbear, kim “why interspecies thinking needs indigenous standpoints.” cultural anthropology april 24, 2011. online. accessed 2 february 2019. todd, zoe. “fish pluralities: human-animal relations and sites of engagement in paulatuuq, arctic canada.” etudes/inuit/studies 381-2 (2014): 217-238. robert geroux -introduction to the special issue: decolonizing animal studies 9 vizenor, gerald. native liberty: natural reason and cultural survivance. u nebraska p, 2009. whyte, kyle, chris caldwell, and marie schaefer. “indigenous lessons about sustainability are not just for ‘all humanity.’” sustainability: approaches to environmental justice and social power. julie sze, ed. new york up, 2018 glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) h u m a n i m a l i a 12:1 glen s. close screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) the secrecy of slaughter is a crucial feature of the modern regime of intensive industrial animal farming. the capitalist drive for efficiency in meat production responds to incessant human population growth in combination with the increasing meatification of global diets (weis 4), reflected in an eightfold increase in the total number of animals slaughtered annually over a half century, to 64 billion animals in 2010 (2). the drive for productive efficiency drives the perpetuation and aggravation of inhumane farming and slaughter practices on an unimaginably vast scale. the invisibility of industrialized animal abuse that allows incurious consumers to repress it from their everyday consciousness has been achieved through a long series of deliberate techniques of architecture, urban planning, legislation, advertising and other forms of symbolic representation. beginning in europe at the turn of the nineteenth century, slaughter operations were removed from urban centers, concealed, concentrated, enclosed, and euphemized (vialles 15-32). urban historian dorothee brantz summarizes the process as follows: whereas for centuries slaughterhouses had been a visible presence in the life of cities, by the end of the nineteenth century, they were hidden from public view. hence, the history of slaughterhouses is the history of their gradual disappearance from sight. this process is still visible in the present when slaughterhouses have completely disappeared from the urban environment in most european cities.... following world war ii, the emergence of interstate highways ... made it possible to remove slaughterhouses from cities altogether because they no longer had to be centralized at railroad hubs. today, slaughterhouses are mostly located in the countryside far removed from public contact. (slaughter 363) according to brantz, public urban slaughter became an issue for debate in the late eighteenth century, when the killing of animals at hundreds of private butcher shops in paris was increasingly denounced as polluting, unsanitary, noisome, and morally humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 52 degrading (11-13). beginning with the inauguration of the first modern public abattoirs in paris in 1818, urban european slaughterhouses were “pushed to the industrial peripheries” (259) by municipal policies of segregation and isolation that “eliminated the animals and the act of killing and dismantling bodies from public view” and “removed much of the stench, noise, and debris” (135). although removed from urban centers, nineteenth-century municipal slaughterhouses were not entirely closed to the public. paris’s la villette, inaugurated in 1867, featured in some tourist guides, while berlin’s central-viehhof, inaugurated in 1881, printed its own booklet for self-guided tours (362-3). in chicago’s privately owned union stock yard, slaughterhouse tours operated from the 1860s and attracted over a million visitors in 1893, the year of the world’s columbian exposition (shukin 93-4). tours were still offered five times a day during the 1950s, before the yards closed permanently in 1971 (brantz “recollecting” 118, 123). chicago had gained preeminence as the capital of u.s. meatpacking through its implementation of the mechanized “disassembly line” for slaughter and meat-packing and due to its central position in the national rail network. but by the 1960s its advantages had eroded and slaughterhouses were “relocated to communities with smaller populations, near the feedlots, to reduce production costs” (fitzgerald 62). as slaughterhouses became fewer, larger, and extremely competitive, meatpacking companies relentlessly pursued efficiencies by driving down wages and increasing line speeds (62), and they successfully resisted and weakened regulatory oversight and enforced the invisibility of their dangerous and infinitely cruel operations. the programmatic concealment of the reality of industrial farming and slaughter from public consciousness is epitomized currently by the proliferation in multiple u.s. states of “ag-gag” laws that “criminalize undercover investigations on factory farms” and other animal facilities by making it “a criminal offense for anyone to take photos or make videos of animals being treated cruelly or of conditions that are unsafe for animals or workers” (thibodeau 145). the most recent reporting indicates that conservative governments in the united states and australia have criminalized even the incitement to trespass on factory farms and denied access to public records revealing their locations, obliging activists to use “artificial intelligence software to scan satellite images” merely to determine their locations (brown). even within slaughterhouses themselves, architectural design guarantees that “divisions of labor and space on the kill floor work to fragment sight, to fracture experience, and to neutralize the work of violence” (pachirat 159). in the united states, as lucille claire thibodeau observes, “[n]o federal laws exist to protect any farmed animals from ... the horrific practices to which handlers regularly subject them” in factory farms (144), so in glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 53 the absence of public oversight, animals are left entirely at the scant mercy of producers whose overriding objective is to generate as much meat as quickly and profitably as possible. the federal humane methods of slaughter act, initially enacted in 1958, has almost never been effectively enforced when its provisions conflict, as they usually do, with the financial interests of meat producers (eisnitz 187-201; thibodeau 149 n27). given that public oversight and the possibility of bad publicity for meat producers is, in many countries, effectively the only brake on legally permitted and economically incentivized animal abuse, the importance of media images of animal slaughter can hardly be overestimated. as committed omnivore and anti-animal-rights journalist michael pollan concedes, “in our factory farms and laboratories we are [now] inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history” in part because “[t]he disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check ... on ... the brutality.” advocating humane carnivorism, pollan recommends the resumption of public looking at farmed and slaughtered animals as a remedy for the “nightmarish” brutality of unregulated and largely unseen industrial animal farms. he suggests that transparency and, specifically, a legal mandate requiring glass-walled slaughterhouses would ameliorate the currently invisible abuses and require respectful killing under the watch of conscious consumers. though no less utopian than the animal rights proposals he seeks to discredit, pollan’s notion of a glass-walled slaughterhouses is interesting indeed. in this essay i will explore a related scenario. what if a filmmaker were to record the activities of an industrial slaughterhouse with a view to providing at least a modicum of the transparency pollan recommends? what if the resulting slaughterhouse documentary were so accomplished as to receive international circulation and an academy award nomination? how might cinematic exposure affect viewers? in what follows, i will argue that it is possible to screen slaughter, in the sense of projecting otherwise heavily repressed images of the most ethically troubling moment of the meat production process for a cinematic audience, while also attempting to screen, in the sense of “obscure,” the full political, ethical and ecological significance of those images by imposing a humanist, solipsistic and carnivorous cinematic discourse. but i will also explore how the unique aesthetic and affective force of slaughter images serves to undermine such discourses of figurative evasion and apology for killing. the film i will critique here depicts slaughter in a mexican plant that, like many in that country, is smaller and less isolated from urban enters than corporate plants in the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 54 contemporary united states, but whose technical operations are essentially similar. in the late nineteenth century, the mexican government first attempted unsuccessfully to modernize animal slaughter in mexico city by importing machinery and industrial principles from the u.s. (pilcher), but only recently has it succeeded in sharply expanding the scale of operations and instituting international sanitation standards in a limited number of export-oriented plants. these include an integrated cattle feedlot and slaughter plant that opened in the northern state of durango in 2016 and that is reported to be the world’s largest complex of its type (miller, “sukarne”). activist investigations have demonstrated, however, that in the more numerous municipal slaughterhouses serving local markets operations are not effectively policed and horrendous abuses of animals persist as poorly trained workers lacking adequate equipment flout with impunity what regulations do exist to prevent unnecessary suffering during slaughter. i will address the film’s disregard for issues of animal welfare and for the ecological implications of the meat industry, and i will do so within the framework of global animal studies. i address specific characteristics of the mexican meat industry, including its profound integration with its u.s. counterpart, but my primary concern is with transnational issues such as what weis calls the “psychological burden” (145) born by slaughterhouse workers and the potential of cinema to function as an approximation of pollan’s glass wall. la parka. nicaraguan director gabriel serra argüello’s half-hour documentary la parka or the reaper was filmed principally at a slaughterhouse near mexico city in 2011. it premiered in 2013 and circulated widely at mexican and international festivals before gaining even greater prominence when it was nominated in the united states as a finalist for the 2015 academy award for best short subject documentary. this recognition was remarkable in that serra was the first nicaraguan ever nominated for an academy award in any category and also because he began la parka as a final project for a documentary workshop at mexico city’s prestigious centro de capacitación cinematográfica and completed it while still enrolled as a student there. serra’s documentary extends a very long tradition of cinematic recording of real animal killing that began in 1895, the same year as the lumière brothers’ first public demonstration of the cinematograph in paris. the history of slaughterhouse documentaries now spans more than a century. in the 1910s and 1920s, british animal-welfare organizations produced films documenting industrial killing that advocated for modern “humane” methods of slaughter and depicted them in contrast to traditional methods (burt 167-8). in 1949, georges franju, whom the film journal positif would later call “the greatest french filmmaker” of the era glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 55 (quoted in ince 21), completed le sang des bêtes (blood of the beasts), a surrealistically inflected twenty-two-minute study of slaughterhouses in suburban paris. a decade later, franju’s film inspired the bolivian-born documentarian humberto ríos to film faena (slaughter, 1960), a twenty-minute depiction of the activities of a frigorífico (meatprocessing plant) in the city of la plata, argentina. slaughter scenes from ríos’s documentary were subsequently integrated into a famous sequence in la hora de los hornos (the hour of the furnaces, dir. fernando solanas and octavio getino, 1968), a revolutionary leftist propaganda film considered one of the greatest classics of latin american cinema. in 1976, boston-born frederick wiseman released the feature-length meat, which is a characteristically complex examination of the operations of an enormous integrated feed lot and packing plant in greely, colorado. closer to serra’s time, in 2005, austrian documentarian michael glawogger’s debuted workingman’s death, a six-part documentary that includes a very striking chapter depicting an openair slaughter yard and market in port harcourt, nigeria that is reminiscent in its operation of the nineteenth-century buenos aires slaughter yard described in esteban echeverría’s literary classic el matadero (the slaughter yard, c.1840). many other slaughterhouse film documentaries and video exposés have been produced by animal welfare and animal rights organizations such as peta, without entering mainstream film history or film-critical discussions. figure 1 (07:20) la parka distinguishes itself from previous slaughterhouse documentaries due to serra’s conception of it as “a character portrait” focusing on a slaughterer (quoted in garcía).1 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 56 “la parka” is the nickname of efraín jiménez garcía, who was at the time of the documentary’s production a forty-two-year-old employee of the rastro frigorífico la paz, located about fifteen miles southeast of downtown mexico city. as serra informs us in a written message that appears at the end of his film, jiménez garcía had worked for twenty-five years at the slaughterhouse shooting a captive bolt into the skulls of cattle at the rate of approximately five hundred per day, six days per week. if accurate, these figures would indicate that jiménez garcía has single-handedly stunned or killed close to four million cattle in the course of his career.2 in this case, the only apparent benefit enjoyed by jiménez garcía with respect to workers performing the same task in u.s. slaughterhouses is the lower line speeds in his plant. political scientist timothy pachirat, who worked undercover at a much larger slaughterhouse in omaha, nebraska a few years before serra filmed la parka, estimated that “[o]n an average day, this lone worker [shot] 2,500 individual animals at a rate of one every twelve seconds” (quoted in solomon). in conjunction with the depression of wages, steep increases in line speeds at u.s. plants in recent decades have resulted in very high injury and turnover rates among workers (fitzgerald 62, 64), making it likely that very, very few u.s. slaughterhouse workers will now endure as long as jiménez garcía. between 1974 and 1986, when line speeds were far slower than today, “only 48 of 15,000 hourly workers at ibp [the u.s.’s largest beef-packing firm] received retirement benefits” (fitzgerald 67). figure 2 (00:42) la parka runs just over twenty-seven minutes until final credits, and serra devotes all but four and a half of those minutes to depicting the slaughterhouse and the processing of cattle into sides of beef and by-products. the film begins with a quickly edited and glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 57 disorienting montage of partially visible cattle struggling in the small pen where they are enclosed to be stunned. in powerfully agitated and claustrophobic shots, cattle enter and attempt to escape the pen until the protagonist shoots them in the head and they fall to the floor. these shots are recorded through an irregularly shaped opening in a wall of the pen from approximately the cattle’s standing eye level, and in this opening sequence the camera sits so close to the thrashing bodies and the shots are edited so quickly that the viewer struggles to make sense of them. the remaining twenty minutes of slaughterhouse description and action, however, are recorded with deliberate clarity and sobriety and a compositional elegance that reflects serra’s background in the visual arts as well as his years of prior experience in commercial video production (garcía). in press interviews, serra spoke of the film’s style as “very visceral, very precise” (quoted in “el nicaragüense nominado”) and declared his preference for “a sober language” obtained in part by not moving the camera (quoted in “entrevista a gabriel serra”). speaking to omar garcía, he cited among his primary technical choices the use of a tripod and fixed frame as well as the use of focus to play with the objects in depth. he said that he had striven for an “elegant” and “very subtle” treatment by adopting a “quite slow rhythm” and by restraining from “showing strong and vulgar and crude shots all the time.” throughout la parka, serra’s stable camera lingers intermittently on parts of machinery (gears, pulleys, conveyor belts, scales), architectural elements and abstracted surfaces, and records somewhat sustained but selective views of the many grisly and segmented tasks performed by the slaughterhouse’s forty disassembly-line workers. we watch the workers weigh the living animals, stun them, hang them by chains from a motorized overhead rail, slit their throats to bleed them to death, flay them, remove their internal organs, cut away fat, bisect the carcasses with electric saws, and weigh again the finished sides of beef (among other tasks). yet by means of non-sequential editing, serra presents this process in a fragmented and discontinuous fashion. many shots frame the figures of slaughterhouse workers unconventionally, centering on their hips and hands and showing only their mid-bodies from armpits or belly to upper thighs [figure 3], a framing that suggests a subtle parallel with the bovine carcasses we repeatedly see hanging with their heads and lower legs amputated. intermittently and from various angles, serra shows the stunner jiménez garcía at work as he stands above what is known in english as the “knocking box” or stunning pen, coordinating with a chute worker to position and enclose the animals and then leaning down to shoot them in the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 58 head before activating a tilting side wall that releases their spasming bodies for hanging from the overhead mechanized processing rail. figure 3 (04:45) signifying slaughter. the principle semantic import of serra’s film emerges from the juxtaposition of aestheticized images of routine slaughterhouse tasks with an intermittent voice-over consisting of edited comments by jiménez garcía gleaned from several days of separately recorded interviews. in the voiceover, jiménez garcía reflects on various topics relating to his work, commencing about six minutes into the film with the recollection of a recurring dream that began after his first day of work as a slaughterer. in the dream, cattle surround him and tell him: “it’s your turn now” (“y ahora te va a tocar a ti”) [figure 4]. jiménez garcía goes on to speak about his own fear of death, which is eminently reasonable given that he and his coworkers risk their lives every day managing hundreds of animals that each can weigh in excess of one thousand pounds, and wielding guns, large knives, and power-saws in close quarters while wearing almost no protective clothing. glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 59 figure 4 (6:22) in another very moving passage of this commentary, jiménez garcía, who wears a scapulary of the virgen [figures 5 + 6], explains his personal view of death. as rendered in the english subtitles, jiménez garcía’s monologue reads partially as follows. the world is over when you die. you never see it again. some people talk about heaven or hell … but i think that’s a lie. the world will be over for me after i die … and hell is what i go through every single day. (9:41) this monologue plays over a sequence that alternates shots of jiménez garcía stunning cattle and releasing the side door of the knocking pen with shots of the cattle collapsing and spasming as they are dumped out to be hung by another worker. all this as the scapulary-wearing worker, who has surely observed more animal death than almost any other human being alive, explains his conviction that death is the absolute end of the subject and the subject’s world, and that hell is for him what precedes oblivion. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 60 figure 5 (03:30) as the voice-over proceeds, jiménez garcía reflects further on his personal experiences of death. he recalls mourning the loss of his father, after which only the awareness that he needed to care for his own children prevented him from succumbing to incapacitating depression, and the loss of his sister, which revived his feeling of remorse for killing animals. relying as he often does on impersonal third-person formulations, jiménez garcía states that under the influence of grief, one begins to imagine that one will end up like the slaughtered animals, since “[a]nimals feel just like we do” (15:24). he says that the cattle in the chutes and the knocking box cry tears when they sense that they are going to be killed, since this is am ailment (“dolencias”) that neither human nor non-human beings can endure (15:32) [figure 6]. jiménez garcía here expresses perceptions that are shared by at least some other mexican slaughterhouse workers interviewed by aitor garmendia, a spanish video documentarian who gained access to fifty-eight mexican slaughterhouses in the years immediately following la parka’s release. according to garmendia, many slaughterhouse employees display indifference or contemptuous hostility toward the animals they process, but not all: there are also those who are very conscious of what they do and who are visibly affected by it. i have met some who can’t bring themselves to eat the meat of the species of animals they kill. in cattle slaughterhouses several of them have told me that the cows are aware of what is going to happen to them. that they have seen them cry in the moments before glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 61 dying and that those are images they can’t erase from their minds. (quoted in reza m.) although jiménez garcía later asserts a moral distinction between killable animals and non-killable humans, his other comments cited here indicate that he, like other slaughterhouse workers, understands all too well that awareness of the animals’ sentience and consciousness make it impossible to kill them without some degree of instinctive guilt or remorse. figure 6 (15:47) the most affecting passages of jiménez garcía’s recorded commentary also seem to be among the most significant in fulfilling director and scriptwriter serra’s preconception of his film. as serra stated in various interviews, the original spark for the project was provided by his curiosity about the pervasiveness of meat consumption in public spaces in mexico city (quoted in “entrevista a gabriel serra” and “el nicaragüense nominado”). as a foreign student, he found himself astonished by the proliferation of taquerías and torterías in the city and wanted to understand the origin of the oceanic tide of meat that feeds the appetite of the city’s twenty-five million residents (“entrevista”). after much reflection and discussion, however, serra found that meat became merely a vehicle for exploring his true theme. in comments to the press following his academy award nomination, serra insisted that he thus intended to make “a documentary about death and not about the meat industry; meat was a pretext for a stronger theme that interested me” (quoted in garcía). “[i]t’s not a documentary about slaughterhouses,” he humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 62 added, “it’s about death” (quoted in “la parka, el proyecto escolar”). serra did develop his project, however, by researching the large-scale industrial slaughterhouses that supply mexico city and ultimately obtained permission to film at rastro frigorífico la paz, located in a commercial and industrial area of los reyes acaquilpan, a small city on the outer edge of mexico city’s metropolitan area. there serra interviewed several workers before finding one who fit his predetermined psychological profile (quoted in garcía; see also “entrevista a gabriel serra”). specifically, serra was looking for a subject with an intimate working relationship with death but who also had suffered close personal losses, as serra himself had. serra stated that he saw himself reflected in la parka because “death has always been close to my life, i lost my best friends and many special people in unexpected and tragic ways and at very young ages” (“apuntes del director,” reproduced in garcía). speaking with one interviewer following his academy award nomination, the director states that “the meat of the animals is merely an excuse for penetrating the consciousness” (or “conscience,” conciencia) of his protagonist (quoted in ambrosio). but he also tells another interviewer that what the director of a character-portrait documentary ultimately does is to get the character portrayed to function as the director’s own internal voice, stating ideas that are also the director’s ideas (quoted in garcía). in his various pronouncements, serra cites three principal reasons for selecting jiménez garcía as the central subject of the film. first, jiménez garcía had suffered the loss of his father and sister. second, he struck serra as “a poet” (quoted in garcía). serra was captivated by jiménez garcía’s “clarity,” his “sensitivity” and his extraordinary “poetic consciousness” regarding his job (quoted in ambrosio), as exemplified by his remark about the tears the cattle shed when they sense their impending deaths (quoted in garcía). and finally, as evidenced by the images reproduced here, jiménez garcía has a face that is at once very handsome, very photogenic, and very expressive of the profound sadness of his work, with a down-turned mouth and hooded eyes. serra describes it as expressive “like an actor’s face” and as “very striking for the camera” (quoted in garcía). in prominent images such as figures 1 and 6 here, jiménez garcía also appears wearing a hood that iconizes his onomastic association with the reaper. but in compositions such as the one shown in figure 1 here, in which jiménez garcía gazes down at one of his victims in the stunning pen, the hood may also call forth associations with the cloak hood that frames the face of the virgin mary face in conventional catholic iconography, as she gazes down on her suffering devotees with compassion and mercy. this iconic resonance is reinforced by the several shots that prominently display jiménez garcía’s scapulary of the virgin (figures 5 and 6). glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 63 in a documentary less than half an hour in duration, it is of course impossible to achieve the breadth of perspective on livestock slaughter and meatpacking that frederick wiseman, a specialist in the observation of institutional processes, achieved in his feature-length documentary meat in 1976. according to critic barry keith grant, wiseman adopted in meat a “resolutely third person” point of view and a “cool and dispassionate tone” (119) in part by maintaining a considerable distance between the animals being processed and what was, for wiseman, an usually immobile 16 mm camera. the film’s twenty-minute “beefkill” sequence consists of ninety-two shots but contains no dialogue (106) and functions as a stark industrial analysis. grant notes that throughout the film wiseman “scrupulously avoids [the] subjective camera techniques” (120) that he had used in his earlier film primate (1974) to “encourage ... the viewer’s inherent inclination to anthropomorphize the apes and monkeys [research subjects at the yerkes national primate research center in atlanta], and to identify with the animals as if they were feeling human emotions” (112-3). rather than inviting empathy for individual animals being subjected to torturous procedures, as he did in primate, wisemen thus positions the spectator of meat as an “ideal (detached) observer” (122). he adopts a camera and editing style that “matches perfectly the alienated, desensitized world shown inside the monfort plant” and emphasizes “the dull banality of routine” (121, 124). grant suggests that wiseman’s humanism is expressed in both films by the “alienation of people from the world and themselves” (130) as manifest in the dispassionate violence perpetrated by the research scientists and slaughterhouse workers, but it is clear in meat that wiseman’s concerns are entirely anthropocentric, in accordance with his boast of having eaten steak every night he was shooting the film, “usually something i met earlier in the day” (quoted in grant 112). figure 7 (06:45) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 64 in la parka, serra employs a non-linear editing style and more aesthetically elaborate photographic techniques. the sharpness of the digital visual image and the mere appearance of intense crimson tones of blood and exposed muscle tissue produce a sensory impact lacking in wiseman’s gray and grainy 16-mm images. serra also includes facial closeups and extreme closeups of animals awaiting slaughter, allowing us to sense their terror [figures 2 and 7]. shots of the animals’ eyes, as jonathan burt observes with regard to other animal films, form an important motif in that they represent a mutual human-non-human gaze that can signify “not just a psychic connection” but also the potential “basis of a [non-verbal] social contract” (39) and “the possibility of animal understanding” (71, italics in original). here, of course, as serra and the spectator gaze into the eyes of cattle only minutes from death, we know that the potential benefits of a more humane social contract will be denied to those individual animals, but our gaze into their eyes is significant inasmuch as it reminds us that a living and sentient embodied subject is destroyed to produce every meal of meat. despite these fleeting moments of what i will call intersubjective interpellation, la parka does resemble meat in directing similarly intense cinematic attention to the very ugly mechanisms of meat processing and to the complex interactions of industrial machinery with the bodies of both the processed animals and the humans who labor in synchronization with the machinery. despite the admirable photographic quality and formal complexity of this cinematic representation, i take issue with serra’s decision to conceptualize and design his movie as a character study intended to portray one human person with the ultimate objective of addressing very abstract themes which serra defines variously as death, “the human condition,” and ”the responsibility we all have with the consumption of meat.” in the same comments, serra states explicitly that his film “is not a political documentary” (quoted in ramos), a claim that invites the question of precisely how and why one might seek to depoliticize an issue as ethically, ecologically, and economically consequential as industrial animal slaughter. whereas wiseman conceived meat as an analytical study of the u.s. meat-processing industry, focusing on institutional procedures and social interactions within the monfort plant, serra explicitly disavows responsibility for having made a documentary about the mexican meat industry and about slaughterhouses, insisting that la parka is really about death in the abstract and that the animals, the meat and even jiménez garcía himself are merely vehicles for reflection on his own personal experiences of death. i take serra’s disavowal of politics to mean, in part, that he prefers not to consider the remote socioeconomic, cultural, and ecological factors that might help to glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 65 answer several obvious questions raised by his film. first, why a capable man like jiménez garcía should consider killing approximately four million cattle over twentyfive years to be his best employment opportunity. second, who profits and how much from his apparently traumatizing and presumably cheap labor. and third, what is the overall impact of the industry serra portrays on the mexican and global environments and on the health and welfare of human workers and consumers as well as the millions of exploited non-human animals. i will deviate briefly in the following section from my exegesis of the film to gauge mexico’s role in the global meat industry and to establish that according to the most comprehensive and recent planetary studies, the ecological effects of intensive industrial livestock farming, and of beef production in particular, are no less than catastrophic. i will also show how more politically engaged documentarians have dispensed with serra’s apologetic humanism to reveal widespread animal abuse in the mexican industry. interlude: slaughterhouse politics. readers of humanimalia are likely well aware of the devastating environmental consequences stemming from the meatification of global diets in conjunction with the incessant growth of the human population. a series of comprehensive studies by institutions such as the united nations food and agriculture organization (livestock’s long shadow 2006 and “key facts and findings” 2013) and the united nations environmental program (assessing the environmental impacts 2010) have proved the disproportionate and unsustainable environmental costs of intensive livestock farming to support meat and dairy production. those industries consume far more resources and emit far more greenhouse gases than other agricultural activities producing comparable nutritional yields. a widely cited 2018 study by european scientists confirmed the extreme inefficiency of animal food products and demonstrated that current livestock-intensive industrial practices are “degrading terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, depleting water resources, and driving climate change ... reducing biodiversity and ecological resilience” (poore and nemecek 987). of all the industrially produced protein sources, beef, the primary commodity generated by jiménez garcía and his coworkers, is by far the most wasteful and ecologically destructive (creating a sustainable food future 2, “why people in rich countries”). between 1980 and 2000, cattle ranching in latin america constituted the single most important factor in the destruction of tropical forests worldwide (“un report”) and a major factor in the staggering 89% reduction in the wild populations of vertebrate species in south and central america between 1970 and 2014 (living planet report 7). the most famous manifestation of this destructive process is the often illegal humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 66 incursion of cattle ranchers and soy farmers into the amazonian rainforest in brazil, which is “now the world’s slaughterhouse” (watts) and by far its largest beef exporter (“livestock” 6). but it is important to recall when interpreting la parka that mexico is by no means a marginal player in the global economy and ecology of beef production. in 2013, the year la parka premiered, the u.n. food and agriculture organization rated mexico as the sixth largest beef producer in the world, and two years later mexico’s agriculture ministry ranked the country seventh among the world’s largest meat producers and international beef sales as the country’s second largest agricultural export (garmendia n4). according to the mexican beef exporters association, mexico currently retains its status “as the seventh producer of animal protein worldwide” and now exports beef to 58 countries on several continents (“about us”). for the past several years, mexico has also ranked seventh in the world in total beef consumption, eleventh in total beef exports, and first in live cattle exports, nearly all of which go to the united states (“livestock” 5, 6, 8). the mexican beef-cattle industry continues to grow and industrialize while attaining “high levels of integration with the u.s. cattle and beef industry” (parrish 2). oddly, mexico ranks as the third largest exporter of beef to the u.s., with approximately 449 million pounds shipped in 2018, but also as the fourth largest importer of beef from the u.s., with just over 508 million pounds received the same year (miller, “mexico”). products less valued by u.s. consumers, such as tongues, tails, eyes, and tripe, flow to mexican markets while cuts such as tenderloin and sirloin, which bring a premium in the u.s. market, move in the opposite direction (beaubien, “usda”). the rapid growth of mexican beef exports over the last fifteen years has required the government to extend federal slaughterhouse inspections, and the tipo inspección federal (tif) certification currently qualifies some thirty beef-processing plants to export their products across state and national borders. the tif designation indicates that slaughter plants have instituted a permanent regime of veterinary and meat inspections comparable to those required in u.s. plants. but the mexican industry remains decentralized in comparison with that of the u.s., and a far higher number of municipal slaughterhouses continue to operate without tif certification and with scarce oversight of compliance with regulations regarding sanitation and animal welfare. in the years following the release of la parka, international animal-rights investigators have begun to document the prevalence of atrocious abuses committed by these local slaughterhouses in violation of mexican slaughter regulations. before returning to my commentary on la parka, it will be instructive to compare serra’s approach to slaughterhouse documentation with that of the spanish activist, videographer, and photojournalist aitor garmendia, already mentioned briefly above. between 2015 and glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 67 2017, garmendia visited two hundred slaughterhouses in ten mexican states and, astonishingly, gained access to more than a quarter of them, a success rate that testifies to the far laxer security standards of mexican facilities in comparison with corporate u.s. ones. during his visits, garmendia was able to obtain extensive photographic and video evidence of violent and acutely cruel abuses perpetrated by slaughterhouse workers on cattle, horses, pigs, goats and chickens (kail; garmendia). in contrast with serra’s mournful but ultimately complacent and apolitical carnivorous humanism, garmendia defines his ideology as one of “militant anti-speciesism” and “[v]eganism, defined as the rejection of animal exploitation [and] a political responsibility” (quoted in mcarthur). his slaughterhouse series of digital still photographs was awarded first-place prizes in the editorial category at the 2018 tokyo international foto awards and the science & natural history picture story category at the 2018 pictures of the year international awards administered by the university of missouri school of journalism. the series forms part of a larger project that garmendia titles tras los muros (behind the walls) and subtitles “photography for animal liberation.” on the website that hosts the larger project (traslosmuros.com/en/), garmendia presents and photographically documents his general observations that although “legal protection of animal welfare has been designed to apply only to the extent that it does not negatively impact the productivity of the industry using the animals ... , a large part of the, already minimal, standards for animal welfare that are imposed upon slaughterhouses are simply not met.” during his slaughterhouse visits, garmendia confirmed that “the law was broken on repeated occasions,” particularly when animals were not effectively stunned by legally mandated methods: “in each and every site i was able to observe and under each and every method of immobilization observed, many animals arrive at the point of slaughter conscious” (garmendia). garmendia cites a 2012 academic study led by a mexican veterinarian and ethologist, which found that at one commercial slaughter plant in northwest mexico barely half of the more than 8,000 cattle monitored during processing “were effectively desensitized” before being bled and dismembered (miranda-de lama 497). garmendia’s findings were wholly confirmed by another extensive investigation carried out during the same period by animal equality, which documented that in all of the thirty-one mexican municipal slaughterhouses the organization’s investigators visited, “non-compliance with existing regulations results in animals being skinned alive, beaten, electrocuted, burned and killed while fully conscious without previously being stunned” (“historic!”). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 68 garmendia’s nearly forty-minute video documentary slaughterhouse. what the meat industry hides (2018) provides a very sharp contrast to la parka by focusing unflinchingly on the extreme distress and torturous anguish experienced by the billions of animals processed in mexican slaughterhouses.3 the documentary’s vividly rendered but unembellished images provide incontrovertible evidence of the accusations i have cited above from garmendia’s accompanying essay. it shows cows who continue to thrash, struggle, and suffer after being hit ineffectively with stunning guns (28:52) and one stunner who stabs repeatedly with a knife at a moving cow’s neck in an attempt to sever its spinal cord (30:40), a method of immobilization that is legally prohibited and would not render the animal unconscious before slaughter by bleeding. garmedia’s documentary also shows cattle and pigs thrashing around, lowing and screaming, and obviously still conscious while hanging upside down by chains from the overhead mechanized rail that carries them toward the “stickers” who will cut their throats (30:16). in one shot, an agonized cow continues to thrash and struggle even after having her lower legs amputated (34:48). in a longer scene (31:56), a cow wedged under the door of a knocking pen is shot in the head for a second time, but then escapes onto the kill floor and struggles to elude her tormentors for minutes on end (the scene is abbreviated through editing) until they immobilize her by hoisting her with a rope around her neck and shoot her again (33:50). garmendia then shows two cows bleeding out on the kill floor. the first is flayed alive by an impatient worker as it lies still gasping, and the second cow (34:10) gasps, shudders, moves its tongue, and stares in terror as blood gushes out of a slash in its neck and another worker slices its ear off. the legs of yet another cow are glimpsed under the edge of the side wall of the knocking pen, as it attempts to stand on a broken metatarsus bone, its hoof having been snapped near the fetlock joint and bent backward (26:30). it is important to note that while garmendia presents these horrific images as emblematic of the abuses he observed in all of the fifty eight mexican slaughterhouses he visited, he provides evidence to assert that similar abuses take place in many if not all other countries in which animals are slaughtered by industrial methods. garmendia closes his slaughterhouse documentary by summarizing news reports of animals of various species being slaughtered while still conscious at plants in the united states, great britain, belgium, australia, spain, and france (36:30), and in his accompanying essay “slaughterhouses in mexico,” he cites academic studies from england and colombia which both found that majorities of pigs were not adequately stunned before slaughter in government-licensed facilities. garmendia’s findings in mexico also align closely with those of the most serious investigators of u.s. slaughterhouse practices, including gail a. eisnitz and timothy pachirat. in her extensive and still unsurpassed glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 69 investigation of u.s. slaughterhouses during the 1990s, eisnitz compiled numerous testimonies of “improperly stunned cattle regain[ing] consciousness after they’d been shackled and hoisted onto the overhead rail” (28) and remaining conscious until they reached the skinner, who would then cut their spinal cords to immobilize them but not render them unconscious before skinning them alive (29). the u.s. humane slaughter act was very weakly enforced, eisnitz found, ultimately because, as the legal director of the government accountability project told her, the usda officials overseeing plant inspections “almost always place agribusiness interests above consumer safety and animal welfare” (204). pachirat, the academic researcher who worked undercover at the omaha slaughterhouse in the mid-2000s, described the systematic concealment of regulatory violations from usda inspectors and the normalization of animal abuse (158) resulting from the psychologically necessary desensitization of workers (217) in a production system governed by a relentless drive to profit and efficiency. by pachirat’s account, the supreme imperative of the slaughterhouse managers is “keeping the line running at all times” (211) and “at the highest speed possible” (199) in order to accomplish the overall operational objective of “maximizing the pounds of meat produced per hour of labor” (231). like eisnitz, pachirat also testifies to “massive violations” (206) of food-safety and animal-welfare regulations including the dismemberment of sentient cows (60, 287 n2) and describes other scenes of horror resembling those recorded by garmendia in mexico (pachirat 57). it is far beyond the scope of this essay to attempt a comprehensive comparison between the highly concentrated and intensively industrialized contemporary u.s. meatpacking industry and the less uniform and less concentrated but rapidly modernizing mexican industry. but at least two conclusions derive from the activist investigations cited here. first, that certain abuses are endemic internationally, even in the most technologically advanced slaughter plants in the wealthiest nations. and, second, that the frequent lack of regulatory oversight, adequate equipment (such as properly functioning captive-bolt guns), and worker training and discipline make mexican municipal slaughterhouses operating without tif certification either especially prone to atrocious abuses or especially careless in allowing documentation of those abuses by outsiders. viewed jointly, garmendia’s slaughterhouse and animal equality’s four-minute video exposé mexican slaughterhouses (2016) indelibly convey the hellish extremes of cruelty inflicted on animals by many mexican slaughterhouse workers far less presentable than jiménez garcía. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 70 considering this global context, i deduce that when serra declares that la parka is not political, he intends to evade any responsibility to address the ethical issue of whether non-human animals have the right not to be confined, forcibly impregnated, separated from their newborn offspring, castrated, beaten, jolted with electric prods, terrified, slaughtered at a very young age, and not infrequently dismembered while still alive and conscious. yet least two u.s. critics misread la parka as an animal rights film. for casey cipriani, la parka’s overwrought and overly insistent imagery made it read “like an advertisement for peta,” while peter debruge ascribed to it “a vegetarian’s agenda.” even setting aside serra’s enthusiastic proclamation of his passionate and undaunted appetite for beef,4 comparison with garmendia’s activist documentary confirms the anthropocentrism, humanism, and conservative pathos of la parka‘s filmic rhetoric. despite the director’s explanation of the original inspiration for his film, he shows no comprehensive awareness that the intensive industrial production and everincreasing consumption of meat, and above all beef, has serious implications for public health,5 animal welfare, worker safety, and especially for our ecological survival, given that the grossly inefficient and unsustainable practices of intensive industrial livestock farming contribute disproportionately to global warming, depletion and pollution of soil and water resources, and mass extinction of wild animal species due to habitat loss.6 traumatized and blameless. la parka portrays jiménez garcía as a strong, graceful, brave, and thoughtful man, but also as one apparently traumatized by his decades of experience in an extremely violent job. in the voice-over, as cited above, jiménez garcía tells us explicitly that he does not believe in hell because hell is what he is already living through. during the four-and-a-half-minute interlude dedicated in the film to the portrayal of jiménez garcía’s life outside the slaughterhouse, a sharp tonal shift occurs via a bright color palette, strong sunlight and lively camera movement. we see the protagonist embrace his young son while resting under a tree in a park, and we see him smile for the only time in the film as he plays soccer in the park with his children. immediately thereafter, however, serra shows jiménez garcía sitting silently alone in his living room watching television. he clutches his work backpack to his belly, and his face is gravely impassive except for a barely perceptible twitching of his cheek muscles. meanwhile, his family members converse in the adjoining kitchen, in a shot framed to signify alienation. in the last scene set in his home, jiménez garcía eats at a crowded table in that kitchen with his wife and some eight children, but he does not speak as his eyes flicker around the table and his facial features remain frozen in a mournful mask [figure 8]. it is likely these scenes that prompted debruge and cipriani, respectively to describe jiménez garcía as seeming “totally desensitized to life ... virtually numb to the world around him” and as manifesting a “disconnectedness almost like that of a glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 71 veteran suffering from ptsd.” trauma symptoms might also be suggested by the fact that jiménez garcía is the only slaughterhouse worker shown habitually wearing a raised hood, and that both while travelling to and from home and in scenes of rest and play in the park, he wears another sweatshirt zipped up and with its double hood raised, even as his children go bare-headed, some in short sleeves.7 figure 8 (24:56) in his comments to the press, serra portrays jiménez garcía as an almost saintly figure who has, as we deduce from the documentary, sacrificed his psychic well-being and physical integrity to provide for his family. one of his fingers is repeatedly shown to be paralyzed and atrophied. he suffers, we understand, to allow urban meat-eaters like serra to exempt themselves from direct participation in the violence their diet implies. in his public comments on la parka, serra repeatedly describes jiménez garcía as “intachable,” meaning irreproachable, blameless, or impeccable, bearing no flaw, blemish or imperfection (tacha). serra’s description of his documentary subject specifically as “an irreproachable person” (quoted in garcía) and “an irreproachable human being” (quoted in ambrosio) underscores his personhood and humanness, the attributes that grant him an essential ontological privilege and authorize him to kill other animals almost incessantly yet without social sanction. yet in the context of the film, the adjectival descriptor “intachable” seems at odds with jiménez garcía’s own characterization of himself in the voice-over as a murderer (“asesino” 7:18) who suffers recurring dreams of the animals turning the tables on him. given serra’s perplexing assertion of blamelessness, it is worth considering not only the filmic and testimonial humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 72 evidence of his protagonist’s psychological trauma and guilty conscience from his mass killing. without presuming to advance a clinical diagnosis on the basis of recorded video and audio evidence, i concur with debruge and cipriani that serra does portray jiménez garcía as suffering from evident psychological damage. the american psychiatric association lists among the “intrusion symptoms” of post-traumatic stress disorder “[r]ecurrent distressing dreams in which the content and/or affect of the dream are related to the traumatic event(s)” and “[f]eelings of detachment or estrangement from others” (diagnostic and statistical manual 309.81). in its diagnostic criteria, the world health organization cites “episodes of repeated reliving of the trauma in intrusive memories (‘flashbacks’), dreams or nightmares, occurring against the persisting background of a sense of ‘numbness’ and emotional blunting, detachment from other people” (the icd-10 classification f 43.1). in considering the question of trauma, it is useful to emphasize that, even within the community of slaughterhouse workers, those performing jiménez garcía’s job of stunner bear a unique stigma, in that they are perceived as the primary agents of violence in the slaughter process and thus the primary bearers of opprobrium. while stunning technically precedes killing, a quick review of slaughterhouse scholarship indicates that the question of how to assess the degree of jiménez garcía’s personal responsibility for the death of the cattle we see on screen in la parka is more complex than it may first appear. in the forty-man chain of disassembly at rastro frigorífico, jiménez garcía is the point man responsible for rendering cattle unconscious before they are hung and delivered to the so-called “sticker” who “uses [a] hand knife to cut [the] jugular veins and carotid arteries” (pachirat 258) and thus causes the cattle to bleed to death. yet the shots that jiménez garcía delivers would also kill the cattle before long, and the division of the killing labor within such legally mandated regimes of “humane” slaughter functions, according to ethnologist noëlie vialles, to diffuse responsibility for the killing. vialles cites slaughterhouse workers who conceive of the bleeding as a secondary action that “merely finishes off a death that would in any case not be long in coming.... [b]y separating the jobs, you completely dilute the responsibilities and any feelings of guilt, however vague and held in check” (45). “two men,” vialles concludes, “are necessary for neither of them to be the real killer.... [t]he action of each man is left indecisive” (46). in contrast, pachirat, who studied the operation and culture of a slaughterhouse several times larger than the one in la parka, found that workers in the u.s. plant invested the stigma of killing primarily in the stunner, who is intended to be the last worker in the chain to deal with the fully sentient and active animal. pachirat reports that workers glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 73 mythologize the stunner “as the killer among the 800 [slaughterhouse workers], his job [as] the work of killing, among the 121 jobs on the kill floor” (italics in original, 238). the mythologization of the work of the knocker — the almost supernaturally evil powers invested in the act of shooting the animals by the other kill floor workers, including, notably, the chute workers [who drive the animals to the stunning pen] themselves — makes possible the construction of a killing ‘other’ even on the kill floor of the industrialized slaughterhouse.... like […] the other workers, i [as a slaughterhouse employee] prefer to isolate and concentrate the work of killing in the person of the knocker. (pachirat 159) another worker stationed much farther down the disassembly line with pachirat tells him that “[k]nockers have to see a psychologist or a psychiatrist or whatever they’re called every three months ... [b]ecause, man, that’s killing, ... that shit will fuck you up for real” (quoted in pachirat 152-3). it thus seems evident that the stunner, in accordance with the nickname “la parka,” bears primary moral responsibility for the mass killing, and that he also bears the primary trauma of deactivating a sentient and active animal that is subsequently far less troubling to process. pachirat’s observations are in keeping with tony weis’s summary of the stress and trauma borne by slaughterhouse workers everywhere. beyond the physical health risks and insecurity lies an untold psychological burden from inflicting painful and deadly acts as a routine part of the labor process, and from the immersion in environments filled with so much suffering.... [w]orkers in factory farms, slaughterhouses, and packing plants are constantly faced with the anguished cries of animals, the visible expressions of confusion and distress, and the immediacy of bloodshed. to cope, most workers try to detach themselves emotionally while a few lash out with rage, as reflected in a litany of sadistic acts that have been documented in u.s. slaughterhouses [as in mexican ones].... a recent us-based study also found a strong relation between the proximity to industrial slaughterhouses and an increasing prevalence of sexual violence and other crimes. from this, the authors [three distinguished academic sociologists] suggest that the psychosocial humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 74 impacts of these work environments and labor processes could well be spilling out into households and nearby communities. (145) by selecting as his protagonist the photogenic, diligent, and mournful jiménez garcía, whose behavior towards the animals in the film is measured and professional and who seems to have internalized the psychological burden, serra presents the slaughterhouse’s most stigmatized job in a favorable light, ignoring pervasive and far uglier aspects of slaughterhouse work amply documented by more committed slaughterhouse investigators. while it is effectively impossible to determine the exact moment at which an animal dies on film or video, my own experience of watching la parka leads me to suppose that most spectators, and especially those unfamiliar with slaughterhouse procedures, will understand jiménez garcía to be killing the cattle when he shoots them in the head, and thus to bear primary ethical responsibility for their deaths. this supposition is supported by serra’s inclusion at the end of the film of text stating, as already mentioned, that “efraín kills about 500 bulls a day” (my direct translation of the spanish language text with emphasis added, 27:23). it is also worth noting that while serra treats jiménez garcía reverently in the central discourse of his documentary, he also trades on the self-evidently sinister aspect of jiménez garcía’s work in titling his film la parka, a non-normative spelling of the standard “la parca” (meaning, again, “the reaper”). in brief and close shot in the documentary (6:53), we see that the alternate spelling appears written in marker on the protagonist’s white rubber work boots and is thus not serra’s invention. but in symbolic terms it is significant that the “k” in the film’s title is not only orthographically transgressive and foreign, since it does not appear in native words in traditional spanish spelling, but also that it is spiky and off-balance in its graphic aspect and always hard in its phonetic value. as such, it contrasts with the consonant it replaces, the graphically rounded, friendlier, native “c” that can sound softly in other phonetic contexts in spanish. the same alphabetic substitution is used for similar semantic ends by mexican narco-corrido singer alfredo ríos, whose stage name “el komander” likewise projects murderous masculine hardness, as he reinforces his narco musical persona by integrating the iconic silhouette of the ak-47 assault rifle (preferred weapon of sinaloan narco-traffickers) into the capital k of his commercial logo. serra also trades on the sinister frisson of slaughter in the trailer for his film, which is not primarily documentary in nature but rather invokes familiar horror movie tropes to engage viewer interest. the trailer includes no images from the documentary itself, but rather only three agitated and dimly illuminated video shots. the first is a shaky and glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 75 fast-moving hand-held tracking shot of a moisture-stained cement wall, lasting seven seconds. the second is a less agitated four-second hand-held close-up of jiménez garcía’s hand holding the stunning pistol against the background of another damp and stained cement wall. and the third is a twenty-six-second hand-held shot in which the unsteady camera approaches jiménez garcía in a gloomy, moisture-stained cement room. jiménez garcía stands utterly still in his work clothes (white rubber boots and worn, maroon-colored sweatshirt, hood raised), clutching the stunning pistol and staring into the camera lens as the frame closes from a long-shot to a grim final close-up, which is held for about ten seconds. jiménez garcía keeps his head slightly bowed, in a posture signaling menace. in the dim overhead lighting his eyes remain concealed by the shadow of his eyebrows, and the shade cast by his hood encircles his face. if jiménez garcía is indeed a blameless and saintly man, why does serra present him in the guise of a horror-film villain in the staged trailer used to promote his documentary internationally? serra deems jiménez garcía “intachable” because he has “an elevated [and poetic] consciousness about his job” and because “he adores his children and his family and would give his life for them” (quoted in ambrosio). in la parka, jiménez garcía’s recorded monologue concludes with a segment (25:58-26:27) that again shows him at work above the knocking box as he justifies his work in the voiceover. in statements that mark the limit of the film’s attempt to reflect on the violence it documents, jiménez garcía declares that he would not kill a human being because a human being is not an animal, and that he kills animals to survive. the subtitles in this passage read: “i only kill bulls out of necessity. yes, because if i didn’t kill them, my kids would have nothing to eat” (26:13). given that this statement seems to be the film’s most explicit and important ethical justification of the violence it represents, it is worth contrasting the text of the subtitles with original wording of jiménez garcía’s comments in the voiceover: “o sea, ya la res, ya la mata uno para poder resistir uno. y porque por si uno no mata, este, o sea, que no hay comida.” this comment translates literally as follows: “i mean, the animal, one kills it in order to be able to survive. and because if one doesn’t kill, um, i mean, there’s no food” [figure 9]. the english subtitles here preserve neither jiménez garcía’s characteristic use of the distancing third person (“mata uno”) or the hesitations in his syntax (“este, o sea”) as he speaks, and by introducing a reference to his children that is not present in the original comment, the subtitles amplify the pathos of the justification. by positioning this rationale as the last words spoken in la parka, serra grants them interpretive finality and appeals to us to exonerate jiménez garcía while endorsing the implicit and false premise that humans must kill tens of billions of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 76 non-human animals per year (or, in jiménez garcía’s case, literally millions of animals by his own hand) to nourish themselves and survive. figure 9 (26:15) i submit here that to deem jiménez garcía, the stunner or killer of millions of animals, an utterly unblemished human being, one must presuppose that non-human animal lives have no inherent value beyond that of generating and reproducing muscle-cell protein for human consumption. this is, in the words of the ethnologist vialles, the carnivorous and capitalist view of the animal as “simply a machine for manufacturing flesh” (51). i contest serra’s carnivorous and humanist ideology, but i do credit him with having looked into the eyes of the animals he eats and for having provided us at least with glimpses of their beauty and terror in a film so well shot and composed as to merit an academy award nomination. yet, in comparison with the photographs and videos that comprise garmendia’s slaughterhouse project, serra’s examination of the slaughterhouse in la parka is evasive and consolatory. as i have already indicated, serra opted deliberately to treat his subject with subtlety and elegance and to avoid “vulgar” excess in his presentation of the slaughter process. the merits of this aesthetic strategy are, of course, defensible inasmuch as serra’s relative discretion and apolitical humanism facilitated the broad circulation of his film and its recognition by the u.s. academy of motion picture arts and sciences. yet by omitting what he deemed “vulgar and crude” scenes of illegal abuse and intense animal suffering such as those garmendia prioritized in his own documentary, serra effectively sanitizes the inhumane reality of mexican slaughterhouse operations as he also ignores entirely the glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 77 vast ecological crisis driven in no small measure by intensive industrial livestock farming, in order to focus his character study on one relatively sympathetic and apparently law-abiding worker. serra’s film contains no images as shocking or as politically potent as garmendia’s shots of an emaciated horse, too weak to walk, being dragged into a slaughterhouse by a chain around its neck and asphyxiated, or of the downed but still conscious cow gasping for life as her blood pumps out and a worker severs her ear. “animal liberation,” garmendia proclaims, “is a political issue of the highest order” (quoted in mcarthur), and his photography and videography serve that cause conscientiously and combatively. the last voice heard in his documentary is that of a goat screaming in the moment before it is shot with a stunning gun (slaughterhouse 36:23). serra, in contrast, conceives and presents his film with the vaguely guilty conscience of an unrepentant meat-eater who finds the tears of cattle poetic, alluding to them time and again in interviews, but seeks to instrumentalize (and thus devalue) slaughterhouse images and a slaughterhouse worker in the service of a personal reflection on an abstract theme so vaguely defined as to be effectively meaningless. yet, to balance my critique i would like to suggest in my final reflections how the mere recording of the animals’ real deaths may serve to rupture the strong aesthetic frame and the rather weaker rhetorical justification serra provides with the intention of containing the indexical evidence of incessant, massive and systematic violence. slaughter as cinematic ur-event. various film theorists have posited that real death, recorded, constitutes a uniquely disturbing cinematic phenomenon. mary ann doane has written that “[p]erhaps death functions as a kind of cinematic ur-event because it appears as the zero degree of meaning, its evacuation. with death we are suddenly confronted with pure event, pure contingency, what ought to be inaccessible to representation (hence the various social and legal bans against the direct, nonfictional filming of death)” (164). in an essay first published in 1984, vivian sobchack offered a profound reflection on the recording of real death on film, arguing that filmed documentary death “is experienced by us as indexically real” even when such images are inserted into fictional narratives and thus framed symbolically. indexically real death thus presents a “particular threat ... to representation” (227). sobchack posited that “[t]he representation of the event of death is an indexical sign of that which is always in excess of representation and beyond the limits of coding and culture” (233, italics omitted). she argued that, in fact, “we do not ever ‘see’ death on the screen. instead, we see the activity and remains of the event of dying” (233, italics in original). for obvious reasons, death as a “subjective lived-body experience” (234) is unknowable and invisible, and death as nonbeing eludes visual inscription (233). yet precisely humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 78 because of the harrowing “mystery and unrepresentability of [the] actual fact” of death (234), we remain transfixed as a culture by filmic and now video images of dying and cadavers. these are particularly interesting ideas to consider as we contemplate serra’s claim that his slaughterhouse film is not about slaughterhouses but about death, which, as sobchack argues, “always forcefully exceeds and subverts its indexical [cinematic] representation” (243). as an emblem of our pursuit of “the illusion of the representation of death” (234), sobchack cites the compulsive desire to slow down and stop the frames of a recording such as abraham zapruder’s 8mm film of president john f. kennedy’s assassination, in order to locate and know and thus imaginarily arrest the exact moment of death, as if the passage from being to nonbeing could be located and visualized in a single film frame and as if a degree of existential consolation or ontological mastery could be obtained by seizing and studying that phantom frame. sobchack reasons that death as nonbeing, as “abstract principle” (“death”) is inherently invisible, unrepresentable, and unknowable. following sobchack, sarah o’brien recently revisited what she calls “an ethically ambivalent desire for visual knowledge of death [that] drives the cinematic spectatorship of slaughter” (48). for o’brien, frequent cinematic recourse to images of real non-human animal death is predominantly supplementary and solipsistic in function, in that human filmmakers and spectators seek knowledge of the everperplexing and ultimately inconceivable reality of their own deaths through observing the dying of other animals they have historically imagined as their mechanistic proxies. o’brien argues that “the desire for knowledge of real human death ... incites the production and reception of cinematic representations of violent animal death” (53) and that cinema’s “recourse to animal death” is thus “supplementary” (50) in nature, in that “the medium presents images of violent animal death as a supplement for representations of human death ... so we may see, know, understand the finitude of our own place in the world” (50). this recourse is also supported by longstanding cultural beliefs in what o’brien calls, following jane desmond, the “overwhelming facticity” of non-human animals, given their supposed lack of language, interiority, intentionality, and subjectivity (50). in comments i find highly relevant to serra’s conception of la parka, she observes that cinema “repeatedly frames the sight/site of animal death as socially acceptable and materially sufficient evidence of death at large ... foster[ing] a scrutiny that aims sadistically and/or solipsistically at the acquisition of visual proof of our own death. yet ... this very pursuit of definitive knowledge is bound to failure” (52). the recognition of “the impossibility of knowing death” constitutes, in o’brien’s view, “the fundamental first step toward an ethical engagement with the site/sight of glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 79 slaughter” (53), one that “does not lessen animals’ violent deaths” by viewing them merely as mechanistic proxies for solipsistic human contemplation. my own critical view of la parka, finally, is that it was conceived by gabriel serra as precisely the type of solipsistic exercise that o’brien critiques: as a human “character study” in which a traumatized yet blameless slaughterer (“an irreproachable human being”) would voice the existential anxieties of the director-scriptwriter, and in which the slaughter of animals would function, as best i can deduce, as a dimly defined metaphor for the director’s grave personal losses. i intend no disrespect for serra’s personal suffering when i write that i do not ultimately understand how the industrialized slaughter of non-human animals raised for meat might relate to the circumstances of his losses or to the deaths of jiménez garcía’s father and sister, mentioned in the film. i do intend to point out that the mechanism of signification serra invokes corresponds with what jonathan burt describes, in animals in film, as a tradition of “rhetorical animals on screen” (31, italics in original), which is to say, animals whose autonomous being is effaced as the film text disengages from the living referent and attempts to reduce animal figures “to pure sign” (29). burt’s reasoning resembles that of akira mizuta lippit, who argued in an article published the same year as burt’s book that “the figure of the animal disturbs the rhetorical structures of film language. in particular, animals resist metaphorization” (13).8 burt’s thesis is that the meaning of filmic images of real animals can never be effectively delimited, since they call attention to “the contrivances of the medium” (10) and imply by their very presence “a form of rupture in the field of representation” (11). when contemplating the filmic image of an animal, burt reasons, “our attention is constantly drawn beyond the image” (12) and its semantic framing in part due to our awareness that animals can neither act nor perform nor consent to be filmed in the same sense as human participants do. representations of violence against animals, burt adds, are particularly notable for their ability to disturb audiences and “break ... the boundary between image and reality” (136). burt thus complements the ideas of doane, sobchack, o’brien, and other film scholars who warn that the cinematic representation of real animal death, whether human or non-human, constitutes a uniquely disturbing aesthetic event, capable of breaking the narrative and symbolic frames into which it is inserted. the arguments of burt and o’brien with respect to the reductive metaphorization of animal presence in films resonate strongly with arguments by gabriel giorgi regarding the presence of animals in latin american literature and cinema. in a book chapter on the long history of prominent slaughterhouse representations in argentina, which humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 80 preceded brazil in the role of “the world’s slaughterhouse,” giorgi argues that until quite recently argentinean writers and filmmakers politicized animals in the context of the slaughterhouse exclusively by “reducing them to a figure or trope with political meaning rooted in humanism” (161). he delineates a series of slaughterhouse texts whose “common rule” is that “they illuminate the animal body as a focus of exploitation, cruelty and death [only] in order to reflect in it the exploited, expropriated and alienated body of the worker” (135). giorgi continues: [these works] make the animal and its death the central figure for making visible work under capitalist conditions...: the animal is there a rhetorical operator, a trope, but stripped of political statute in itself, because what is politicized is work and the worker. these texts pass through animal death, which they foreground, in order to arrive at the exploitation of the worker.... they use the slaughterhouse to think through class and class struggle; they make the slaughterer or the slaughterhouse worker the paradigm of the worker or the proletariat, not as a killer [or “victimizer,” victimario], but rather, on the contrary, as a victim – and they identify him with the animals that he himself kills. (135-6, italics in original) from a non-humanist and animal rights perspective, the rhetorical trope of using the terrorization and killing of non-human animals to represent the economic exploitation of the workers who kill them seems perverse and deplorable, since it imposes an additional and posthumous layer of symbolic exploitation onto the already lethally exploited animals. yet this rhetorical usage resembles, as we have seen, the purportedly apolitical metaphorization proposed by serra in la parka, yet another film about slaughterhouses whose director claims it is not really about animal slaughter. according to giorgi, nineteenthand twentieth-century argentinean slaughterhouse fictions represented the slaughterhouses programmatically as “the scene of confrontation between [human] political and class antagonists” (152) and as “rhetorical and aesthetic devices of a humanizing politics (whether civilizing, proletarian, etc.)” (162), in contrast to more recent texts that explore biopolitical notions of trans-species commonality and a contagious, ontologically destabilizing proximity between nonhumans and humans. in the previous tradition, the only possible “ethical or political value” of the violence of slaughter “was exclusively human” (149). a valuable example in support of giorgi’s argument, though one he does not address, is humberto ríos’s faena, which i mentioned briefly toward the beginning of this essay. faena includes, again, the famous scenes of cattle being stunned with sledgehammers glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 81 that reappeared eight years later in solanas and getino’s la hora de los hornos, this time in “an aggressive montage likening the people of the third world to cattle being led to slaughter” by capitalist imperialism (podalsky 54). it important to note that ríos also explained his original project as wholly metaphorical and never as fundamentally concerned with the treatment of the slaughtered animals in themselves. in an interview conducted more than forty years after the completion of faena in 1960, ríos explained that he initially proposed “to make a documentary about killing animals” because “it occurred to me that we are like animals in the city, like beasts in a place that kills” (quoted in truglio and peña 228). during his time as a film student in paris, ríos had participated in a communist party cell that raised money to buy arms for the anticolonialist resistance in algeria, so he also approached the slaughterhouse with a vague notion of reflecting on “war, blood and violence” (228). but in the process of constructing faena he developed what he described as an analogical or metaphorical intuition to achieve “a concentration camp feeling” inspired in some measure by alain resnais’s nuit et brouillard (night and fog, 1955) and franju’s le sang des bêtes. “it had to do,” ríos explained, “with urban life, with the sensation of confinement, with the idea that this country [argentina, to which he had just returned] was like a concentration camp” (228). while the concentration camp comparison seems to relate in the immediate historical context of 1960 primarily to the repression of working-class organizations in the wake of the 1955 military coup that ousted president juan perón, it is remarkable that ríos also claimed for his film a prophetic prefiguration of the more extreme, intensive, and widespread repressive violence enacted by the military government installed by the 1976 coup. in an interview recorded for television in 2010, ríos summarized the enduring value of faena by describing the film as the involuntary premonition of what could happen in argentina with the violence, concentration camps, the electric cattle prod [commonly used to torture political detainees], the blood, the prisons, the very strong violence, and the evocation through the poem [the voice-over narration of faena, written by argentinean poet rodolfo alonso] of that very dark sentiment that later exploded with the presence of the military dictatorship, the concentration camps in argentina. (“1959: la huelga del frigorífico” 18:35) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 82 ríos recalled that despite its eventual induction into the argentinean film canon, faena initially met with hostility and incomprehension as almost no one, not even the film’s editor, grasped its metaphorical nature until long afterward (quoted in edaeditores). recalling serra’s evasive characterization of la parka, ríos pointed out that faena’s voice-over text “did not talk about slaughter. it was not commenting on the meat processing plant” (quoted in edaeditores). ríos’s overriding interest in proletarian struggle is, of course, coherent with his commitment as a communist filmmaker who collaborated not only in the algerian resistance but also, in argentina, in the propaganda efforts of the marxist-leninist-guevarist guerrilla organization fuerzas armadas revolucionarias (quoted in truglio and peña 233). and if current web search results relating to faena are any indication, ríos had decisively won the battle for semantic determination of his documentary by the time of his death in 2014. numerous obituaries in the argentinean press and announcements of subsequent showings of the film limited themselves to describing it using very slight variations of the single sentence dedicated to the film by spanish-language wikipedia in its article on ríos: “faena, a metaphor of the crimes of the concentration camps that was filmed in a slaughterhouse” (“humberto ríos”). figure 10 (26:50) breaking the frame. to reinforce the idea that the cinematic reproduction of real animal death breaks narrative and symbolic frames, i would like to conclude my exegesis of la parka by contemplating its final shot (26:28), which refers back to the series of briefer but compositionally identical shots that opened the film. after twenty glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 83 five intervening minutes devoted to portraying jiménez garcía and the operations of the slaughterhouse, we are finally given a fuller and more deliberate look at the last minute of conscious life of one of la parka’s supposed millions of victims [figure 10]. the camera shoots again from a low angle through a rough aperture as the entry door of the stunning pen lifts. a young, white-faced brown bull, its horns clipped to only a few inches in length, charges from the chute into the stunning pen and toward the camera but slips and falls to the wet inclined floor as the door closes behind him. the bull struggles once and then again to find his footing and stand, and we watch his massive flank and shoulder muscles ripple with effort. but the bull can only raise his head and sit, his snout and eye twice coming very close to the camera, before jiménez garcía’s gun reaches down into the internal frame of the aperture. the gun accurately delivers its bolt into the bull’s forehead, whereupon the bull’s head falls and his body spasms before the side wall tilts up to dump it out of the pen. throughout, serra replaces the original sound of the scene of the with an ambient recording of lowfrequency mechanical rumbling, lending a further element of abstraction. lasting less than fifty seconds until cut to black (27:17), this is the only shot in the film that serra renders in slow-motion, and it is worth considering the implications of this stylistic option. the shot contrasts sharply, for example, with a formally similar shot included in garmendia’s documentary (slaughterhouse 18:00-19:16), which records a nearly identical scene of a horse entering the stunning pen and falling, observed through a narrower and perfectly round aperture. garmendia’s shot is more shocking in that we see the desperate mare thrash at real speed and hear hooves clatter loudly against the cement floor and the metal walls of the pen. but it also shows less of the animal’s body, and the mare’s eye becomes prominently visible only after she has been rendered unconscious or killed and her head slides down against the aperture during the final ten seconds of the shot. the recourse to slow motion at the end of la parka may be intended to signify an attitude of perfunctorily contrite “formal reverence” for the animal’s dying, as sobchack suggests with regard to the use of slow motion dying in fiction films. sobchack observed that the slow-motion dying first seen in such fictional narrative films as sam peckinpah’s the wild bunch (and also, famously, in arthur penn’s bonnie and clyde) exemplifies the extreme visibility of “fictive death” in contrast to documentary death (235). for sobchack, “slow motion or stately camera and montage rhythms” were techniques by which mainstream narrative films “ritualized” their “formal reverence” for the deaths they inspected “in detail” (245). but slow motion may also connote a perspective of reassuring mastery via technological mediation and illusory proximity, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 84 as we spectators in our clean, comfortable theaters or offices or living rooms safely contemplate the indexical record of the mighty but panicked animal’s filthy struggle for life. i would thus include this selective slow motion among the various aesthetic strategies, including elliptical editing, meditative pacing, shallow focus, and ostentatiously elegant frame composition, by which serra seeks to distance himself and his viewers from the sometimes shockingly gruesome documentary images and to signify, perhaps, elegiac yet unapologetic remorse for his complicity as a meat-eater in the deadening violence that his working-class delegate must ceaselessly perform, at lasting cost to his physical and psychic well-being. my reading here will have left no doubt that i find myself moved and troubled by la parka. on the one hand, i know that the invisibility of industrial animal farming and slaughter to most citizens (an invisibility increasingly enforced by corporate hegemony and by law) constitutes a primary factor enabling the unprecedented scale and intensity of non-human animal abuse by humans. under current circumstances, filming in slaughterhouses is a brave endeavor of considerable ethical and political urgency. yet i submit that the very invisibility of the slaughterhouse places on the documentarian privileged to gain access to such facilities an extraordinary responsibility to place violent images in a rationally comprehensive perspective. serra professes an apolitical approach to inherently political material, and he proposes to weaken the referentiality of images of animal slaughter by deploying them as a metaphor of personal loss, a metaphor whose precise meaning is still not clear to me after repeated viewings and months of research on la parka. as viewers concerned with the massive abuse and exploitation of animals in intensive animal agriculture and thus uninclined to look past explicit cinematic images of slaughter to ponder logically inoperative metaphors, we may draw some encouragement from the filmmakers’ evident inability to predetermine and control audience reactions to their imagery. recalling the argentinean public’s incomprehension of what he considered to be the essential metaphorical meaning of faena (again, its anti-capitalist denunciation of the exploitation of workers), humberto ríos stated: after [watching the film], they would say, “i’m becoming a vegetarian,” “i’m going to campaign to stop them being killed like that,” “i’m not eating any more meat”… there was a moment when the buenos aires legislature requested to see the film in order to study how they could glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 85 reform the slaughter of animals, in other words, bringing faena to a pedestrian level… (quoted in truglio and peña 228-9) ríos’s complaint about a naïve public and its political representatives reducing his metaphorical construct to “pedestrian” concerns about animal welfare recalls serra’s aesthetic decision to avoid an excess of “vulgar and crude shots” of animal suffering, which would presumably have distracted from his self-referential rhetorical scheme. neither wishes to see his work reduced to such vulgar, pedestrian, or trivial concerns as the wellbeing of non-human animals. serra attests to having witnessed two predominant reactions to la parka, saying that certain viewers express admiration for the protagonist for persisting in such a daunting job, while others swear they will never eat meat again (serra quoted in garcía). all the evidence i have found suggests that serra, like ríos, sought to elicit former rather than the latter reaction, but if even a few of the spectators in the second group honor their words, la parka will have contributed something to the alleviation of animal suffering, as faena seems also to have done. like faena, la parka was also screened for legislators, in this case the mexican senate following the academy award nomination in 2015. i have found no record of its reception there, but it is worth noting that when seven mexican senators did act to criminalize abuse of farm animals in 2017, they did so in response to evidence including highly graphic activist videos provided by animal equality and other politically committed animal protection groups (“historic!”). in 2019 a similar initiative promoted by animal equality succeeded at a statewide level in jalisco, one of the mexican states with the highest number of slaughterhouses, resulting in the criminalization of farm animal abuses including slaughter without stunning (“aprobada”). given that la parka is, by virtue of its academy award nomination and its circulation at international festivals, likely the only slaughterhouse film that many viewers (including at least a few legislators) will ever see, i rue the missed opportunity for the film to have at least alluded to the deeper political, ethical, and ecological implications of the industrialized production and mass consumption of beef. i have no means of quantifying the public reception of la parka as i do for garmendia’s documentary, whose views on youtube have surpassed half a million as of this writing. in the u.s., la parka is currently only available for purchase on the video streaming platform vimeo, but it previously screened internationally in prestigious venues beyond the media channels of the animal-rights community. serra’s documentary discourse differs from garmendia’s in that the latter allows no imaginary evasion of the cruel realities depicted. my fear is that serra’s film ultimately affirms a carnivorous ideology of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 86 human supremacy, as well as the nobility of intensive industrial livestock farming, by focusing on and extoling the saintly, if traumatized, slaughterer. my hope, founded on the theory of the “cinematic ur-event,” is that serra’s images of beautiful but terrified animals subjected to mechanized and dispassionate capitalist violence will continue to signify and breed consequential empathy in defiance of their inadequate and restrictively humanist rhetorical frame. acknowledgements: this article benefited from the thoughtful collaboration of courtney lanz, katarzyna beilin, sainath suryanarayanan and two anonymous reviewers. notes 1. i have translated this and all other quotations from sources that appear in spanish in my bibliography. english-language quotations from la parka are transcribed from the subtitles except where otherwise indicated. 2. 6/7 of days per week multiplied by 365 days per year multiplied by 25 years multiplied by 500 cattle per day = 3,910,714 total cattle shot by jiménez garcía. in his review of la parka, mexican critic samuel lagunas arrived at nearly this same calculation. 3. u.n. statistics put the total number of animals slaughtered in mexico in 2014 alone at 1.6 billion (reza m.). 4. serra told a mexican radio interviewer that he likes meat a lot but that filming la parka was a very “visceral” experience that caused him to meditate every day he filmed at the slaughterhouse and travelled there and back (quoted in mvs). in the print version of the interview, however, he gives no indication of the exact nature of his meditations, much less that witnessing the reality of slaughterhouse work and the suffering of the cattle might ultimately have caused him to modify his own consumption in any way. in a nicaraguan television interview (“las confesiones de adán”), program host cristyana somarriba identified serra as a meat-lover and a carnivore before asking him how the production of la parka had affected his passion for asados or barbecues, which he inherited from his argentinean father. serra betrayed no discomfort in responding that he felt “fine, content” (15:08) and proceeded immediately to brag about a particularly fatty brazilian cut of beef that he had discovered in mexico and popularized among his friends there. he confirmed that he had continued to host asados with no qualms and as much delight as before (15:33, 15:41). after host glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 87 somarriba feigns concern earlier in the interview for jiménez garcía’s story and momentarily performs feminine horror in reaction to his recurring dream about the cattle (“¡ay, qué horror!” 10:00), she promptly recovers her televisual cheer and concludes the interview by presenting serra with an expensive bottle of rum provided by one of the show’s sponsors and inviting him to enjoy it with his meat (23:54). in another interview on instinto animal, a mexican television program devoted to exploring relations between humans and non-human animals, host laura barrera presses serra on his lack of moral judgment of jiménez garcía in la parka (1:22), and serra struggles to articulate an ethical position. first, he reiterates jiménez garcía’s selfjustification as highlighted in the film, that he kills because he has to feed his family and because someone has to do it, reminding all meat-eaters of their responsibility for his work. but serra then acknowledges that narco-traffickers might also claim that they kill because they need to eat, before concluding his answer noncommittally and somewhat incoherently by suggesting that we are all animals and that the question of animal slaughter presents a big conflict for everyone. when barrera then repeats somarriba’s question about how la parka changed his view of his own consumption of animals (2:27), serra responds more contritely than in the nicaraguan interview, stating that now when he thinks about the quantities of meat consumed in large countries, he experiences a new sense of affliction and a new consciousness. curiously, however, he responds to both of barrera’s questions by speaking of his own ethical position in the second person and thus distancing himself from the issues and the experience: “it inspires in you a sorrow and a consciousness that you didn’t have before” (2:52). he recalls that during the two months he spent at the slaughterhouse, he looked into the eyes of many cattle, but the editors cut his comments at that point and the interview concludes without serra having managed to articulate any coherent ethical statement with regard to his own work. 5. in 2015, the world health organization classified red meat as “probably carcinogenic to humans” based on evidence showing positive associations between its consumption and developing colorectal cancer. it classified processed meat as definitely carcinogenic based on abundant evidence that eating it “causes colorectal cancer.” the organization also found that “processed meat and red meat ... are linked to increased risks of death from heart disease, diabetes, and other illnesses” (“q&a”). type 2 diabetes, meanwhile, is currently “the leading cause of death and disability combined in mexico,” leading mexico’s health ministry to declare “the diabetes epidemic a national health emergency” in 2016 (“quality of care” 393). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 88 6. i am not the first critic to note serra’s lack of ecological perspective. in an undated review, lagunas wrote: “it is mistaken to view la parka, as many have, as an environmentalist film.” lagunas contrasted la parka with another contemporary slaughterhouse documentary, karol orzechowski’s the rhythm, that adopted a nonanthropocentric point-of-view valorizing the experience of the slaughtered animals rather than that of their “executioners.” 7. i owe this insight to courtney lanz. 8. after finishing my first draft of this piece, i discovered a 2018 article by carl fischer on classic films of the 1960s new latin american cinema that also follows burt, lippit, and gabriel giorgi in refuting the relegation of non-human “animals to the metaphorization of human existence” (327). fischer anticipates certain aspects of my critique of la parka here when he argues that images of non-human animal suffering intended by left-humanist filmmakers to “analogize ... human exploitation” (312) in the context of the political struggles of the 1960s read differently from a contemporary perspective: “the cattle on-screen [sic] interpellate not just potential militant rebels against the [dictatorship], but also those who might be sympathetic to non-human animal suffering as a cause unto itself” (322). pointing out the centrality of livestock in these films and the use of photographic and editing techniques to evoke their subjectivity, fischer writes that “viewers — especially today — may find their political sympathies diverted away from the metaphorized denunciation of neocolonial violence to take a stance against literal non-human animal abuse” (325). fischer articulates well the theoretical orientation which also guides my thinking here: “[a]nimal studies postulate thinking about non-human animals literally, rather than figuratively” in order to “broaden the expression of compassion espoused in these films’ political messages” (327). works cited “1959: la huelga del frigorífico lisandro de la torre (inédito 2010).” hernán khourian, dir. produced by tvpublica. hernán khourian 23 junio 2017. online. “about us.” mexican beef. mexican beef exporters association, 2020. ambrosio, gustavo. “la parka, documental que habla de la muerte con franqueza.” milenio 1 noviembre 2014. online. glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 89 “aprobada la iniciativa jalisco sin crueldad; el maltrato a los animales de granja será delito.” animal equality 8 abril 2019. online. assessing the environmental impacts of consumption and production. priority products and materials. united nations environment programme international panel for sustainable resource management, 2010. beaubien, jason. “why there’s so much beef being sent between the u.s. and mexico.” npr 28 nov. 2018. online. brantz, dorothee. “recollecting the slaughterhouse.” cabinet 4 (2001): 118-23. _____. slaughter in the city: the establishment of public abattoirs in paris and berlin, 17801914. u of chicago. ph.d. dissertation. 2003. brown, alleen. “animal rights activists uncover the locations of thousands of factory farms.” the intercept 31 may 2020. online. burt, jonathan. animals in film. reaktion books, 2002. carus, felicity. “un urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet.” guardian 2 june 2010. online. cipriani, casey. “what will win best documentary short?” indiewire 17 feb. 2015. online. “las confesiones de adán [sic] con gabriel serra.” youtube, uploaded by evas urbanas, 23 jan. 2015. online. creating a sustainable food future. a menu of solutions to feed nearly 10 billion people by 2050. world resources institute, 2018. online. “death.” oxford english dictionary. 3rd ed. oxford up, 2014. online. debruge, peter. “film review: 2015 oscar-nominated short films: documentary.” variety 21 february 2015. online. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 90 diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: dsm-5. 5th edition. american psychiatric association, 2013. doane, mary ann. the emergence of cinematic time. modernity, contingency, the archive. harvard up, 2002. edaeditores. “humberto ríos y el montaje del cine militante.” eda [asociación argentina de editores audiovisuales] 10 noviembre 2014. online. eisnitz, gail a. slaughterhouse. the shocking story of greed, neglect, and inhumane treatment inside the u.s. meat industry. prometheus books, 1997. “entrevista a gabriel serra.” docucaribe 29 agosto 2015. online. fischer, carl. “animal suffering and/as discourse in 1960s latin american cinema.” studies in spanish & latin american cinemas 15.3 (2018): 311-29. fitzgerald, amy j. “a social history of the slaughterhouse: from inception to contemporary implications.” human ecology review 17.1 (2010): 58-69. garcía, omar. “entrevista de omar garcía con gabriel serra.” cinemateca nacional [nicaragua] 17 febrero 2015. online. garmendia, aitor. “slaughterhouses in mexico: an investigation into the heart of the meat industry.” tras los muros, [undated]. online. giorgi, gabriel. formas comunes. animalidad, cultura, biopolítica. eterna cadencia, 2014. grant, barry keith. voyages of discovery. the cinema of frederick wiseman. u of illinois p, 1992. “historic! animal equality introduces senate initiative to end animal cruelty in mexico.” animal equality 27 mar. 2017. online. “humberto ríos.” wikipedia. wikipedia foundation, 7 feb. 2020. online. the icd-10 classification of mental and behavioural disorders: clinical descriptions and diagnostic guidelines. world health organization, 2019. online. glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 91 ince, kate. georges franju. manchester up, 2005. “instinto animal t3 p10 entrevista gabriel serra.” youtube, uploaded by 22instintoanimal, 18 dec. 2015. online. kail, ellyn. “the horrific brutality of the meat industry, in photos.” feature shoot 3 jan. 2019. online. “key facts and findings.” tackling climate change through livestock: a global assessment of emissions and mitigation opportunities. food and agriculture organization of the united nations, 2013. online. lagunas, samuel. “preferiría no hacerlo. la parka.” cinedivergente [undated]. online. lippit, akira mizuta. “the death of an animal.” film quarterly 56.1 (2002): 9-22. “livestock and poultry: world markets and trade.” united states department of agriculture, foreign agricultural service 9 apr. 2020. online. livestock’s long shadow. environmental issues and options. food and agriculture organization of the united nations, 2006. online. living planet report – 2018: aiming higher. world wildlife fund, 2018. online. mackiewicz, anna. “interview with tras los muros photographer aitor garmendia.” we animals,11 july 2018. online. mexican slaughterhouses. an investigation by animal equality. youtube, uploaded by animal equality, 30 nov. 2016. online. miller, anna. “mexico is big player in u.s. beef market.” western livestock journal 21 mar. 2019. online. _____. “sukarne: the mexican processing powerhouse.” western livestock journal 4 apr. 2019. online. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 92 miranda-de lama, genaro c. et al. “assessment of cattle welfare at a commercial slaughter plant in the northwest of mexico.” tropical animal health and production 44.3 (2012). 497-504. mvs. “la parka refleja méxico por ayotzinapa y otras muertes no resueltas: serra.” oro radio 20 enero 2015. online. “el nicaragüense nominado al oscar con una tarea universitaria.” [redacción ec] el comercio [lima] 28 enero 2015. online. o’brien, sarah. “why look at dead animals?” framework 57.1 (2016): 32-57. pachirat, timothy. every twelve seconds. industrialized slaughter and the politics of sight. yale up, 2011. la parka / the reaper. gabriel serra, dir. 2013. vimeo, uploaded by ccc mexico, 15 jan. 2015. online. la parka. trailer. youtube, uploaded by imcine, 28 nov 2012. online. “la parka, el proyecto escolar que conquistó a la academia de eu.” expansión 16 enero 2015. online. parrish, mary rose. “mexico. livestock and products annual. multiple trade deals open the gates to exports and competition.” global agricultural information network, usda foreign agricultural service 10 sep. 2018. online. pilcher, jeffrey m. “abattoir or packinghouse? a bloody industrial dilemma in mexico city, c. 1890.” food & history 3.2 (2005): 119-43. podalsky, laura. the politics of affect and emotion in contemporary latin american cinema. argentina, brazil, cuba and mexico. palgrave macmillan, 2011. pollan, michael. “an animal’s place.” new york times magazine 10 nov. 2002. online. poore, j. and t. nemecek. “reducing food’s environmental impacts through producers and consumers.” science 360. 6392 (2018): 987-992. glen s. close -screening slaughter. the repressed politics and troubled aesthetics of gabriel serra argüello’s la parka (2013) 93 “q&a on the carcinogenicity of the consumption of red meat and processed meat.” world health organization, 2015. online. “quality of care is key to tackling mexico’s diabetes emergency.” bulletin of the world health organization 95 (2017): 393-394. online. ramos, omar. “méxico representa oportunidad: gabriel serra, nominado al oscar” milenio 15 enero 2015. online. reza m., gloria. “la crueldad contra los animales en los mataderos de méxico, documentada por un fotoperiodista español.” proceso 21 noviembre 2017. online. shukin, nicole. animal capital. rendering life in biopolitical times. u of minnesota p, 2009. slaughterhouse. what the meat industry hides. dir. aitor garmendia, tras los muros, 2018. also available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vbtt5guqbk. online. sobchack, vivian. carnal thoughts. u of california p, 2004. solomon, avi. “working undercover in a slaughterhouse: an interview with timothy pachirat.” medium 25 aug. 2014. online. thibodeau, lucille claire. “‘all creation groans.’ the lives of factory farmed animals in the united states.” ethical vegetarianism and veganism. andrew linzey and clair linzey, eds. routledge, 2019. 140-51. truglio, marcela and fernando martín peña. “humberto ríos.” generaciones 60/90. cine argentino independiente. fernando martín peña, ed. malba, 2003. 225-35. “un report: nature’s dangerous decline ‘unprecedented’; species extinction rates ‘accelerating’.” sustainable development goals 6 may 2019. online. “usda: u.s. importing more beef from mexico.” drovers 19 jan. 2012. online. vialles, noëlie. animal to edible. trans. j. a. underwood. cambridge up, 1994. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 12, number 1 (fall 2020) 94 watts, jonathan. “we must not barter the amazon rainforest for burgers and steaks.” guardian 2 july 2019. online. weis, tony. the ecological hoofprint. zed books, 2013. “why people in rich countries are eating more vegan food.” the economist 13 october 2018. online. microsoft word sharma-pdf-jgr h u m a n i m a l i a 6:2 devika sharma the captive imagination: inhumanity, animality, and matthew barney’s cremaster 2 the convict is a paradigmatic figure of the “animality” of the human. since prison is typically perceived, pace foucault, to be a fundamentally dehumanizing location, we tend to think of people who have been imprisoned for longer periods of time as being challenged on their humanity. incarceration and isolation not only do something to people, we imagine, but more specifically affect their humanity understood in contrast to a more primitive, animal-like state of being, as suggested for instance by the title of the 1977 novel by ex-convict edward bunker, the animal factory. the fact that convicts are often represented as animals suggests that the animal and the convict may take up identical contrastive functions in the cultural imagination of what it might mean to be human; whereas we routinely put animals in cages, we imprison people who have somehow violated our notions of accepted common human behavior. the convict is regularly framed as less than human, as inhuman, by various discursive and material forms of “animalization,” making him or her appear, in judith butler’s helpful terminology, humanly unrecognizable (98). we may think of the “zebra stripes” on the prototypical prison uniform as such a dehumanizing device.1 the common conception of prison as a kind of zoo is likewise invoked when tv channels such as national geographic broadcast docu-soaps from notorious us prisons amid wildlife programs with titles such as “predators of the sea” and “hornets from hell.” metaphors matter, and the cultural metaphor of the animal-like convict continues to have material consequences for the social, legal, and political status of prison populations nationally and globally.2 setting out from american artist matthew barney’s film cremaster 2 (1999), the latter part of this essay explores the significance of ideas of captivity and incarceration for contemporary concepts of inhumanity and animality. captivity and confinement are, of course, in themselves favored objects of the popular imagination, but what i want to draw our attention to is a fact suggested by barney’s film, namely that notions of captivity typically operate as part of the framework through which we imagine aspects of inhumanity and animality. in barney’s peculiar piece of avant-garde cinema the major roles are played by an emblematic convict, a lot of animals, and an escape artist. in the pages ahead i explore the ways in which barney employs these characters to reflect on the boundaries of the human. in order to do so, i relate the film to two lines of contemporary theoretical reflection. the first considers what we may term “the question humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 86 of the inhuman” and it involves the work of thinkers such as gilles deleuze, felix guattari, eric santner, giorgio agamben, slavoj žižek, and judith butler. the second line considers in turn “the question of the animal” and engages work within the field of posthumanism and animal studies, including works by jacques derrida, nicole shukin, and cary wolfe.3 generally speaking, and reflected by these two lines of research, our common concepts of the human bring two boundaries into play: an external limit, where the human borders on the animal, and an internal limit, where the human is defined against shifting figures of inhumanity. recent scholarship on the relations between animality and biopolitics has, however, critically examined the ways in which the canonical literature on biopolitics — including the thinkers mentioned in the first category outlined above — typically employ the figure of the animal to reflect on what i here term the “internal” boundary of humanity. rather than furthering an understanding of the functions of actual non-human animals in biopolitical government, the figure of the animal is most often invoked to throw light on processes of dehumanization. demonstrating the importance of the distinction “human/animal” for the workings of biopower, cary wolfe in his recent book before the law: humans and other animals in a biopolitical frame (2012) wonders why “the main line of biopolitical thought has had little or nothing to say about how this logic effects nonhuman beings” (10). in a similar vein steven connor writes, after mentioning that according to michel foucault in madness and civilisation (1964) madness at the beginning of the seventeenth century was correlated with animality: “the real amazement is how, after this brief dalliance with the subject of animals, the inaugurator of the notion of biopower [foucault] could have succeeded in ignoring it for the rest of his career, despite his corrosive scepticism regarding the idea of ‘the human’” (579). as nicole shukin sums up in her book animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times (2009): if biopolitical critique has largely bracketed the question of the animal, critical theory and the emergent field of animal studies have […] tended to sidestep materialist critique in favor of philosophical, psychoanalytical, and aesthetic formulations of animal alterity. (12) what these evaluations have in common, then, is a critique of biopolitical thought for abstracting the animal into a mere figure for the kind of dehumanization and animalization of the human implied in, for instance, colonialism, imperialism, and other racist practices. animals are not merely symbols, these evaluations insist, but also substances. not merely metaphors, but material matter, complex living beings and devika sharma – “the captive imagination: inhumanity, animality, and matthew barney’s cremaster 2” 87 fodder for capital in biopolitical times. what distinguishes the functions of biopower today, these materialist critiques suggest, is not only that they continuously produce and reproduce the internal limit defining man against shifting figures of inhumanity, but also that they are deeply invested in producing, administering, distributing, and consuming animal life as, precisely, life that has been rendered too abstract and ghostly to count as an object of politics. what makes barney’s cremaster 2 relevant in this context is, first, the fact that the film examines the logic of both the internal and the external boundaries of the human as these boundaries are put into play by the figure of the convict, by some remarkably unorthodox animal coactors, and by a general entanglement throughout the film of human and animal lives. the film establishes close links between these two boundaries of the human, and in doing so it seems to suggest that these limits always interact, and that a critique of the production of inhumanity therefore should take into consideration also the lives of animals. second, cremaster 2 suggests that captivity and imprisonment are actively functioning frames for imagining and governing the two boundaries of the human. re-imagining and re-negotiating the meaning of these boundaries would thus imply analyzing historical and contemporary practices of capture and confinement as well as notions of freedom. an oft-heard critique of matthew barney is that his work is too speculative and aesthetically self-sufficient to have anything to do with the contemporary, surrounding world. as i see it, however, cremaster 2 examines an issue with great political relevance today, namely the ways in which we negotiate the discursive and material boundaries of humanity and animality.4 cremaster 2, as barney’s work in general, is not a very straightforward “discussion” or “suggestion” of anything. to describe the film as a critique of animal sacrifice under biopolitical conditions or of the animalization of u.s. convicts would be a forced reading. i have nevertheless found it fair to see in this film a visual engagement with captivity and its significance for the discourses, images, and institutions that govern the boundaries of the human. my overall hypothesis is that cremaster 2 prompts us, as does some of the theoretical work done on the question of the inhuman and the question of the animal, to scrutinize more carefully the implications of thinking with the prison as a framework when imagining inhumanity and animality. while my essay examines this problem mainly from the perspective of continental and anglo-american philosophy and cultural theory, it is important to note humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 88 that the terrain on which this problem unfolds most significantly is, of course, not theory. the material and institutional histories of thinking human and animal life in terms of differing degrees of freedom and bondage is waiting to be explored further. aliens. matthew barney may be the american artist who has confronted the boundary between the human and the non-human in the most spectacular fashion. barney regularly uses teflon and metals as prosthetics and implants that transform the biological, human body — often his own — into a cybernetic organism. at the same time, he also seeks to humanize the artificial by using a special surgical plastic that shares qualities with human tissue for framing images, so that they appear conceptually to be portals into the human body. this symbolic synthesis of organic and inorganic materials is characteristic of barney’s work, which in general concerns the (trans)formation of the human organism.5 he is known for the alternatingly eccentric, comical, and repulsive expressions in his works, and his aim of taking up — once again to employ butler’s terminology — the humanly unrecognizable is a core reason for the fascination they hold. cremaster 2 is a chapter in barney’s major work, the cremaster cycle (1994-2003), which is made up of five films: cremaster 1-5. in addition to the five feature length films, the cycle includes photographs, drawings, sculpture, and installations forming part of each of the five episodes. without attempting a proper synopsis of this complex film, it is nevertheless relevant to my discussion that barney takes up the myth in the gilmore family that harry houdini was in fact gary gilmore’s grandfather, with whom he identified a particular notion of freedom through self-transformation. in the film houdini is played by norman mailer, who in his the executioner’s song relates this family myth of kinship. as a conceptual model for the entire cycle, barney has chosen the sexual development of the human embryo. the movies are named after the cremaster muscle, which raises and lowers the testicles in the scrotum, and this slow process towards sexual differentiation during the first trimester of pregnancy is the basic “problem” of the five films. while the abstract, formal model for the cremaster cycle is thus the biological production of human beings, the non-human plays a more prominent role on the level of imagery. particular to the cremaster universe are a multitude of hybrid beings such as satyrs and other mythical beings, and this very profusion of animal species emphasizes the non-human ambiance of the cycle. likewise, we may understand the more “abject” sections of the cycle — the myriad of spectacular scenes with curious bodily orifices, prosthetics, and fluids, which cannot be given any closer determination — as an devika sharma – “the captive imagination: inhumanity, animality, and matthew barney’s cremaster 2” 89 invocation and modification of the limits of the human. due also to the works’ impenetrability, the cremaster cycle is, in every possible way, a very alien universe. the hybridity of beings is a hallmark of the entire cycle, but since i am focusing in particular on relations between questions of humanity and notions of confinement, i shall restrict my analysis to cremaster 2, in which this problem is played out most prominently. in a sense, cremaster 2 is a crime-biography. the film is about gary gilmore: his birth, crime, and execution.6 the historical gary gilmore was shot in utah by a firing squad in 1977 when he was 37 years old, for the murders of max jensen and bennie bushnell. before the trial for the two murders gilmore had already spent most of his life in juvenile penitentiary and prison. at the time the case was a national media event, mainly because gilmore refused to appeal the verdict, but rather asked for a swift execution of the death penalty. his execution marked the end of a period without death penalties — in the wake of first furman v. georgia (1972) and then the supreme court decision in gregg v. georgia (1976) — and the case was therefore an important turning point in american penal history. gilmore disturbed a novel tradition of not using the harshest measures, and interest groups justly feared that gilmore’s execution signalled a return to executions on a national scale. (matthew barney as gary gilmore; with permission of the artist) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 90 norman mailer immortalized gilmore’s story in his extensive work of non-fiction the executioner’s song, in which mailer several times emphasizes gilmore’s animal-like features as they were reportedly experienced by his surroundings.7 mailer establishes the familiar symbolic connections between “bestiality” and prison, by describing penitentiaries as “farmlike” (“introduction” 523) and maximum security prison specifically as ”a zoo, a flat one-story zoo with many cages” (483). especially mailer’s description of the hearings preceding the determination of the death sentence suggests that gilmore’s humanity was at stake. according to mailer, the challenge for gilmore’s lawyers was to present their client as “a human being” and thereby to modify the jury’s impression of him as being “a heartless animal.” later, gilmore was given a new lawyer, who explained gilmore’s inhuman acts by reference to his “animal life” in prison: ”none of us here have spent more than 90 percent of our adult life in the cages where the animals are,” the lawyer said in court (533). it seems important to note that these are not mailer’s capricious metaphors, but instances of a persistent image of the convict that resonates with the various forms of dehumanizing prisoners. in cremaster 2, barney has likewise chosen to represent gary gilmore as an animal, more specifically as a drone-bee. in the first part of this essay, i suggest that the gilmore drone is an aesthetic vehicle for visualizing and modifying both the idea of the convict as an animal-person and the common notions of the inhuman more generally. in this regard, it is worth noting that gilmore’s “animality” does not have only negative connotations in cremaster 2. on the one hand, barney employs gilmore’s animality to indicate a certain shapelessness, a radically open dimension of the human, which in this aesthetic universe — as it is the case in the work on becoming-animal by gilles deleuze and felix guattari — constitutes a creative potential. on the other hand, as a convict gilmore also serves as an instrument in the film for examining inhumanity as a result of being exposed to a certain lawless dimension of the law. in the second part of this essay, i show that cremaster 2 interprets not only the boundary between the human and inhuman, but also that between human and animal. finally, in the third part, i draw on the film’s envisioning of capture, in order to discuss the extent to which we employ captivity and confinement as frames for thinking the animality of human and nonhuman animals alike. two kinds of inhumanity: one good and one bad. deleuze and guattari’s notion of “becoming-animal” is an obvious frame of reference for barney’s examination of the marginal areas of the human. as is well-known, this concept was developed in a thousand plateaus (1987) and in kafka: toward a minor literature (1986), where the authors suggested that franz kafka’s stories are concerned with a special kind of devika sharma – “the captive imagination: inhumanity, animality, and matthew barney’s cremaster 2” 91 becoming: “becoming-animal.” for deleuze and guattari becoming-animal implies a particular, creative line of development, which leads away from the self-identical, certain, and therefore static individual psychological set-up, and provides a possible escape from the familial and societal structures that may seem repressive to the individual. the authors also use the concept of “deterritorialization” to exemplify the alternative organization of the human made possible by processes of becoming-animal. deterritorialization designates the expansion of a territory as a consequence of disrupting a given mode of spatial organization. when man deterritorializes into becoming-animal, he enters into an alliance with an animal and borrows from its intensity. the animal offers the humans a way to transform itself by providing “lines of flight,” that is, modes of deterritorialization, which the human could not have thought up by humans on their own. for deleuze and guattari, becoming-animal is merely one of several “becomings,” which makes it possible for humans to escape their set routines and the psychological regularities that follow. there is a close conceptual and figurative connection between barney’s aesthetic universe, on the one hand, and deleuze and guattari’s descriptions of becominganimal, on the other. the conceptual connection is found in barney’s interest in the transition between various states in man and alternative organizations of the human. barney has in several interviews emphasized that he perceives the characters in his works as personality zones: ”there is a lack of character development that interests me — the fact that they can quiver between something understood as a character with agency and something that operates more as a state of some sort, or a zone” (qtd. in sans 30). in his films, barney specifies this tremulous uncertainty of the characters between personality and state of being by letting one person’s movements reflect another’s in a separate sequence of events. this can be seen, for instance, when the character goodyear in cremaster 1 arranges a handful of grapes and thereby determines the pattern of dance for some girls in a parallel sequence of the film. for barney, the characters are at once real people, abstractions, and zones of potentiality. they could be termed ”per-zones,” because they have little depth of character, and instead correlate with a state of flux. using deleuze and guattari’s concepts, barney’s per-zones express a human process of deterritorialization, since they do not incarnate a certain human identity or psyche, but rather a territory under constant transformation. one could say that, in general, barney works to show how something with visual and material form humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 92 can be said to aim at that which has no form. this corresponds with the absence of form paradoxically found by deleuze and guattari in the literary forms of kafka’s works. the figurative connection between cremaster 2 and deleuze and guattari’s discussion of becoming-animal is made up of the many concrete alliances between animals and humans in the film. as mentioned above, cremaster 2 is alive with animals: lots of horses, 12 bison, a bull, and a lapdog among them. since gary gilmore is born as a drone, the bee and swarm play an emphatic role in this order of things. one reason that barney employs the imagery of bees is that the story of the historical gary gilmore took place in utah, the “beehive state.” barney thus employs the beehive as form because it functions as a mormon symbol of societal unity. according to the mormon faith, the symbol of the beehive suggests that the internal relationship among the faithful is more important for a strong society than any particular individual.8 this symbol fits well then within barney’s universe, where characters are taken up as per-zones, rather than fully formed individuals. in cremaster 2, barney latches on to this symbol by using 30,000 bees, employing beeswax as his preferred sculptural material, and generally shaping human characters in the image of bees: with wasp waists and in the roles of queen, drone, and worker bees. these animal-like people make manifest the continuous deterritorialization of the per-zones in the film. deleuze and guattari’s description of what becoming-animal means is, obviously, a very positive conceptualization of inhumanity. here, the inhuman constitutes a creative potential for the human, and becoming-animal is something human beings may strive for. thus, deleuze and guattari share an idea of the inhuman or super-human with thinkers such as nietzsche and bataille, according to whom the inhuman constitutes an escape from everything that is all too human and all that attends it in terms of reason and oedipal psychology and fixed ontologies.9 the image of the inhuman as something that is desirable in its radical otherness and non-conformity exemplifies a more general inclination to value the less formed, the affective, and the irrational for their liberatory potential. as a representative of a culture of lawlessness characterized by neglecting toothless, middle-class norms, the convict may paradoxically come to symbolize exactly this freedom and creativity, which in some instances is ascribed to the inhuman. norman mailer’s idea of the penal system swallowing up brave young men is an obvious example in this regard of the convict figuring as an antidote to the rigid conventionalism of society. this was an idea formulated, among other places, in mailer’s foreword to jack henry abbott’s prison memoirs, in the belly of the beast (1991[1981]): devika sharma – “the captive imagination: inhumanity, animality, and matthew barney’s cremaster 2” 93 there is a paradox at the core of penology, and from it derives the thousand ills and afflictions of the prison system. it is that not only the worst of the young are sent to prison, but the best — that is, the proudest, the bravest, the most daring, the most enterprising, and the most undefeated of the poor (xii). my point here is not that barney with cremaster 2 necessarily shares this idea of the convict representing the bravest and invincible segment of a generation. but barney’s preoccupation with gary gilmore and his imagined indefiniteness is indicative of the forcefulness and creativity held by the alien, the shapeless, and the inhuman in cremaster 2 and in barney’s work in general. this positive perspective on the inhuman as a zone of potentiality and fluctuation, which is mirrored theoretically in deleuze and guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, is however, only one of several perspectives on the inhuman being negotiated in cremaster 2. at a more general level, this creative dimension of the inhuman is countered by a completely different kind of inhumanity, which has to do with gilmore’s exposure to a certain lawlessness of the law. as an interpretive model for this other and darker aspect of gilmore’s “animality” as it is presented in cremaster 2, we can think of eric santner’s concept of “creaturely life.” in on creaturely life: rilke, benjamin, sebald (2006), “the creaturely” is santner’s conceptualization of an inhuman dimension of the human, a dimension brought forth when the human is confronted with a particular kind of political power. more specifically, a creaturely life is a life subjected to an exception in the law and therefore caught between law and lawlessness. there is thus a clear conceptual connection between santner’s description of creaturely life and giorgio agamben’s description of homo sacer and “naked life.” this inhuman dimension of the human, which concerns both santner and agamben, has to do with human beings’ radical powerlessness against the law, when law immodestly allies itself with lawlessness. santner determines the creaturely in this way: “to bring it to a formula, creaturely life is just life abandoned to the state of exception/emergency, that paradoxical domain in which law has been suspended in the name of preserving law” (22). just as deleuze and guattari begin their discussion of the significance of becominganimal with kafka, santner engages with kafka’s oeuvre when identifying the creaturely: “when, at his execution at the end of the trial, josef k. exclaims, ‘like a dog,’ kafka is thus referring not only to the pathetic scene of k.’s execution but also to the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 94 larger structure of k.’s experience with the law, one that renders him, precisely, ‘creaturely’” (22). santner’s description of joseph k.’s “animal death” is a suitable prism through which to understand barney’s gary gilmore. in historical terms, gilmore was executed following a completely different and lawful kind of trial than the one given joseph k. by representing gilmore’s death as a magnificent prison rodeo, barney emphasizes the spectacular and theatrical aspects of the death penalty as it is employed in the u.s. in reality, prison rodeos are not a part of the judicial domain and are, of course, never used as instruments of execution. when barney nevertheless makes use of this cultural ritual to represent the execution of gilmore, he instigates an encounter between the legal system and the theatre, between law and something apparently very much outside the realm of jurisprudence. real life prison rodeos are usually perceived as a festive custom in many american prisons; they are huge events that gathers local communities and give the inmates the opportunity to distinguish themselves as cowboys. the largest prison rodeo occurs biannually in the angola state penitentiary in louisiana, and as the prison rodeo administration writes on its homepage, the rodeo has become big business, from which some of the profits go to the louisiana tourist industry.10 by transforming the execution squad into a prison rodeo, cremaster 2 thus draws our attention to the entertainment value of the ways in which the death penalty is currently executed.11 whereas michel foucault described modern penal history as a movement from the public and spectacular to the private and discrete, brian jarvis reminds us in his book cruel and unusual (2004) that this history is continuously disturbed by the permanence of the spectacular in american penal culture. among other things, jarvis notes that the size of the audience following live broad-casting from the execution of timothy mcveigh in 2001 by far surpassed the 10,000 who witnessed the last public hanging in the us in 1936 (209). in the wake of gilmore’s execution in 1977, several commentators criticized the media circus that surrounded the event. with the interpretation of the execution as a spectacular and sublime punitive circus, cremaster 2 suggests that the law continuously enters into alliances with extra-judicial actors, so that contemporary forms of punishment obviously function as entertainment, theatre, and a source of income. simultaneously, we are reminded of the importance of the capture of animal life — and the ownership of animals — to the historical institution of the rodeo, an institution generating masculinity, wildness, and capital. while in the trial joseph k. is executed “like a dog,” in cremaster 2 gilmore is executed like an outlaw cowboy. he dies on the devika sharma – “the captive imagination: inhumanity, animality, and matthew barney’s cremaster 2” 95 back of a bull wearing his zebra-suit, and his kinship with the animals is underlined by the ten bison that seem to mourn over him in the arena after his death. the two limits of the human. coming back to the distinction i outlined in the introduction, we may roughly divide recent critical thought on “animality” into the two overall categories which i here term “the question of the inhuman” and “the question of the animal.” in the previous section i included deleuze and guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, as well as santner’s concept of creaturely life, in order to illuminate the ambiguity of gary gilmore’s inhumanity as it is represented in cremaster 2. these theoretical contributions to contemporary thought on the inhuman describe inhumanity as something related to the bestial, yet in reality unrelated to the natural world of actual animals. among other contemporary thinkers judith butler, slavoj žižek, and giorgio agamben have also contributed to thinking of the inhuman in a way that employs the animal as a symbol, a metaphor, but which nevertheless discusses “animality” as something ultimately concerning humans and not animals. žižek, for instance, is in his essay “the neighbor and other monsters” (2005) concerned with the inhuman as a socio-psychological phenomenon. for him, inhumanity signals a “monstrous” excess lodged in human subjectivity, an excess that cannot be tamed or socialized. this form of inhumanity is a dimension of the human that appears when the other loses face or is so thoroughly ashamed that his or her face is no longer recognizable, but rather twisted in a loss of self. for žižek, as is the case with the other thinkers mentioned here, the inhuman does not denote the difference of the human from the animals but from itself: “the differentia specifica which defines a human being is, therefore, not the difference between human and animal […], but an inherent difference, the difference between human and the inhuman excess that is inherent to being-human” (175). having related barney’s cremaster 2 to deleuze and guattari’s ideas on becoming, it seems relevant to note here nicole shukin’s critique of the concept of becoming-animal and other philosophical formulations of animal alterity. in animal capital shukin holds two main charges against the implications of this concept so central to the work of deleuze and guattari. first, and as already mentioned, shukin disapprovingly notices the abstract character of the figure of animality in this line of thinking. second, shukin wonders, as do hardt and negri, whether the animal alterity implied, according to deleuze and guattari, in becoming-animal can in fact be distinguished from contemporary forms of power and capital. are not the potentialities and intensities humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 96 involved in becoming-animal exactly the very forms of energy on which capital thrives today, shukin asks: in the context of animal capital, there is a great deal at stake in romanticizing affect as a rogue portion of pure energy linked to animality as a state of virtual rather than actual embodiment. [this] is because the field of power can no longer be clearly identified with a restriction on becomings. (31) i share with shukin a distrust in “becoming“ as a critical concept of counter-hegemonic forces. i also find the call for a materialist critique of the appropriations of animal life today both essential and timely. nevertheless, i still find merit in “becoming-animal“ as an analytical concept that may help us analyze and discuss the meaning not only of contemporary forms of creative and affective alterity, but also of the forms of alliances, collaborations, identifications, and interdependencies, actual or imagined, playing out across, and thus negotiating, the boundaries between human and non-human animals. my sense is that the social imaginary of animals, and the material practices it invites, are far too rich and varied to be fully understood in the opposed terms of animal fetishism or anti-capital. the second of the two main theoretical categories — “the question of the inhuman” and “the question of the animal” — is distinguished by a more concrete interest in the boundary between human and animal as such, as well as in the political functions this boundary has been made to serve. jacques derrida is an important representative of this different “animalistic” thought on the inhuman. the difference between these two overall approaches to the question of inhumanity/animality can be illustrated by two different critiques of emmanuel levinas’s presentation of the categorical imperative, which according to levinas emanates from the human face. in “the neighbor and other monsters,” žižek criticizes levinas for overlooking that categorical imperatives do not stem from the face of the other, but from his or her “facelessness.” žižek finds that a face is far too complete, far too human a symbol to signify the seamy side of the human — that is, the monstrous and inhuman dimension which is what truly requires an ethical response. conversely, derrida criticizes levinas for disregarding the question of whether animal faces call out to our responsibility in the same way as does a human face. in his seminal essay ”the animal that therefore i am (more to follow)” (2002) derrida’s speculates that apparently philosophers such as descartes, kant, heidegger, lacan, and levinas have never been observed by attentive animal eyes. “if indeed,” derrida writes: devika sharma – “the captive imagination: inhumanity, animality, and matthew barney’s cremaster 2” 97 they did happen to be seen furtively by the animal one day, they took no (thematic, theoretical, or philosophical) account of it. they neither wanted nor had the capacity to draw any systematic consequence from the fact that an animal could, facing them, look at them, clothed or naked, and in a word, without a word, address them. (382) instead of registering the experience of being observed by an animal, these philosophers have, according to derrida, made animals into a theorem — into something that is observed, rather than something that observes. derrida’s question therefore becomes whether it really has no implication for the status of animals that we can observe them observing us. this difference of perspective for žižek’s and derrida’s critiques of levinas is symptomatic of the difference between the two main categories of theoretical engagement with the question of inhumanity/animality sketched here. in derrida’s discussion, the animal is not primarily a metaphor for a dimension of the human. rather, derrida is interested in how we draw the line between human and other forms of life, as well as in the cultural history of this delimitation. employing the ethological knowledge currently at our disposal, derrida writes that we simply cannot retain the conception of man being distinguished from non-human life by a straight and clear boundary (415). beyond the human, we do not find the “animal” as a general, singular category of the living, but rather a multitude of life, which cannot always be neatly described in oppositional binaries such as organic/inorganic or dead/alive. for this reason, the delimitation between human and non-human animals is a differentiated and internally bifurcated boundary. when derrida is interested in this boundary, it is not to question whether it really exists, or to erase it. the challenge is rather, derrida suggests, “to multiply its figures, to complicate, thicken, delinearize, fold, and divide the line precisely by making it increase and multiply” (398). my reason for sketching, somewhat roughly, these two categories of contemporary thought on inhumanity/animality is that matthew barney in cremaster 2 engages with both of them. on the one hand, gilmore’s “animality” exemplifies various aspects of the human traditionally viewed as inhuman. when barney re-creates gilmore’s story in the shape of a drone, it is not because the historical gilmore had somehow fallen into the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 98 sphere of the animal, but because he — as a long term convict and murderer — embodied a counter image of what we think of as human, in both negative and positive terms. on the other hand, in cremaster 2 barney also questions our conceptions of nonhuman, animal life — that is, the outer boundaries of the human, as it were. as mentioned, cremaster 2 is a noah’s ark in terms of its abundant animal life and it is no less striking how the behavior of these animals does not seem to correspond with our conventional understanding of animal behavior. for instance, the ten bison that take up the arena after gilmore’s death; their movements are elegant and on the beat as in some synchronized sports. while bison typically connote ferocity, speed, and freedom, they here exhibit discipline and organization in their movements, indeed demonstrating very little of what is understood as normal bison behavior. it is a common conception that animals do not mourn their dead, but in cremaster 2 the solemn and reverent formation held by the bison surely looks like a ritual for the dead. in other words, the film not only posits different concepts about the “animality” of the human. using an unorthodox manner of creating alliances between animals and humans, barney also seems to point out that any adjustment of the cultural imaginary of the inhuman is dependent upon simultaneously opening the boundary between human and animal for further reflection. one of the scenes illustrating how barney complicates this boundary is a musical scene early in the film. here we see and hear a drummer, dave lombardo from the death metal band slayer, forcefully beating his instruments, accompanied by 30,000 bees. the musician sits by his drums in a closed studio, while the bees are in a contiguous room “singing” vocal harmony into an old-fashioned microphone. at one point the singer in this two-man metal band starts “buzzing” along into a telephone, while bees crawl in his long dark hair, as if on honey. in the credits we are told that the singer has the voice of steve tucker, lead vocalist of morbid angel. in this scene barney visualizes and negotiates the boundary between animal and human in two ways. first, the situation obviously unfolds an interaction across this very boundary. we may, for instance, think of this scene as a nod to joseph beuy’s famous performance coyote: i like america and america likes me (1974). beuys’s week-long performance in a new york gallery saw the collaboration between beuys and a live coyote, where beuys — using props and strips of felt, pieces of newspaper and a pair of gloves — performed small role-playing segments with the animal. beuys later noted about the performance that the coyote, called little john, was for him “an important cooperator in the production of freedom.” little john made it possible for beuys to approach that which “the human being cannot understand” (qtd. in wolfe, zoontologies 150-51). as beuys did with coyote, in the devika sharma – “the captive imagination: inhumanity, animality, and matthew barney’s cremaster 2” 99 musical scene barney employs an interaction across a highly visible barrier in order to explore that very boundary. the bees seem to be just as originally musical as the human musicians and the piece hence, by involving this egalitarian gesture, appears to be an original collaboration. (with permission of the artist) second, we may read the scene as a way of problematizing the conventional idea — so central to thinking on the human/animal divide — that we as humans are separated from the animals in and through language. for instance, in “fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse” from the collection écrits (1966), jacques lacan debates the language of bees. we know about bees, lacan writes, that they communicate the locations of nectar-rich flowers, through a special figure-of-eight dance. however, the language of bees is a straightforward information system rather than a communication system, because they have fixed reactions for the messages they convey. while people can improvise within their communication systems, animals can only inform, lacan posits. he simultaneously holds that it is exactly through our insight humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 100 into this inflexibility, this capturedness, of animal “language” that the rich variation in human language becomes clear to us. in regard to the bee-scene in cremaster 2, the important feature is that this inflexibility, or “imprisonment,” of the bees’ information system is not clearly enforced. by lifting the bees out of their usual context and allowing them to sing into a microphone, barney turns bee-language into a sign, the meanings of which are not as fixed as described by lacan. as the bees stick to the singer’s hand, while he growls into the telephone, it seems as if they participate in the conversation. frames of capture. above, i have shown some of the ways in which barney in cremaster 2 engages with questions of inhumanity and animality and thus visually configures some of the questions raised also in the contemporary critical thinking on these issues. perhaps the most precise contribution by cremaster 2 to the more theoretical work on these issues, however, is the film’s suggestion to connect the ways in which we draw anthropological and zoological lines to the ways in which we think with confinement and captivity as frames. various forms and degrees of confinement, both symbolic and material, make up the thread in the film, from gilmore the convict, through animals strikingly un-captured by their natural environment, to the figure of harry houdini. by connecting these two domains — the production of inhumanity and animality, on the one hand, and figures of confinement, on the other — the film draws our attention to an obvious, yet so far mostly unexplored, common material platform for the production and distribution of inhumanity and animality, namely confinement and captivity. when confinement is evoked as a practice implying re-production of a certain idea of the human it is mainly via what is frequently called “the holocaust analogy,” the comparison of today’s animal factory farms to the camps of the third reich. cremaster 2 invites us, i would suggest, to develop in new directions a thinking on captivity and confinement as symbolic and material practices vital to the production of the human over and against both the “less than human” and non-human animals. in both popular culture and critical theory the concentration camps of the second world war figure as limit cases in the histories of both the often banal brutishness of humans and the dehumanization of the human. correspondingly, the camp as a specific organization of human life typically constitutes the historical raw material for reflection on the inhuman propensities of human beings. this applies explicitly to the various examinations — santner’s and agamben’s among them — of “naked” and “creaturely” human life without legal or political rights. but it applies also to judith butler’s significant analysis of the de-subjectifying functions of guantanomo base. as a spatial manifestation of a particular kind of lawless sovereignty, which strips the individual of devika sharma – “the captive imagination: inhumanity, animality, and matthew barney’s cremaster 2” 101 human rights, the camp seems to us the location par excellence for dehumanizing human beings. but camps and cages are, of course, also sites for the management of non-human animals. in the essay ”the animal that therefore i am (more to follow),” derrida thus suggests that the extreme limit case of the camps of the second world war resonates in our current conception and treatment of animals. as derrida sees it, the denial in the history of philosophy of animals observing and truly watching humans is a symptom of a larger, collective disavowal, which over the last centuries has made it possible for humans violently to transform animals and their natural environment. the kind of violence derrida has in mind is, for instance, genetic experimentation, artificial insemination, and cloning of animals for the benefit of the human animal: as if, for example, instead of throwing people into ovens or gas chambers (let’s say nazi) doctors and geneticists had decided to organize the overproduction and overgeneration of jews, gypsies, and homosexuals by means of artificial insemination, so that, being more numerous and better fed, they could be destined in always increasing numbers for the same hell, that of the imposition of genetic experimentation or extermination by gas or by fire. in the same abattoirs. (395) comparing such ”abbatoirs” — factory farms and slaughterhouses — to the extermination camps of the third reich derrida asks us to consider if not our very humanity is today at stake in the ”animal extermination camps” we have somehow come to accept as part of late modern life? what would be the consequences for our shared ideas about the boundary between animals and humans, if we were, finally, to recognize that also animals suffer and therefore should be ensured some kind of rights?12 on the one hand, then, we may think of the camp and the camp-like prison as concrete, institutional places of transition between the human and that which is less than human — and, in an argument like derrida’s, as a place of transition between an animal life worth living and that life which is less than animal, so to speak. on the other hand, we should also note that there is a strong tradition in both philosophy and popular culture to imagine the various limits among the human, the inhuman, and the non-human by humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 102 frames of confinement and captivity. in the history of philosophy, this tradition receives its clearest expression in martin heidegger’s polemic against rainer marie rilke’s description of animals as being more genuinely free than human beings. for rilke, animals were free because they have access to the open spaces of the world, while humans are forever captured in a claustrophobically enclosed world, condemned to a sort of slavery due to their perpetual self-reflexivity. however, according to heidegger, rilke made the same mistake as did nietzsche, namely to conceive of the animals’ ostensibly instinctual will as primary and human thought and consciousness as pale derivations thereof, whereby the animal was elevated into something like a superhuman state. for heidegger, the ability to experience freedom in being, das frei des seins, is on the contrary what constitutes the human and delimits it from animals (226). while the animal, according to heidegger, will always remain imprisoned, captured by its environment, human life unfolds in an open space of opportunity. 13 both agamben and santner have employed heidegger’s critique of rilke’s “glorification of the animal” to shape their own concepts of naked and creaturely life, respectively. they have, so to speak, internalized the heidegger-rilke discussion about the differences in human and animal freedom, so that this difference is now described instead as a difference traversing the human itself. in the open: man and animal (2004), agamben describes the “anthropological machines” whereby the human has historically isolated and encapsulated the very aspects of its humanity, which for some reason or other were perceived as non-human, thereby re-producing the human as fully human. according to agamben, the human has shaped itself as human by expelling animal life while simultaneously containing it: “[t]he world [that] had been opened for man only by means of the suspension and capture of animal life,” (80; emphasis added). as a product of the various anthropological machines of history, the human conceives itself as a dyad of something that is human and thereby free and something that is nonhuman and thereby captured and hidden.14 when kafka’s joseph k. becomes santner’s preferred image of the creaturely, inhuman life, it is exactly because k.’s position in regard to the law can be likened to the animal’s encaged relation to its environment as described by heidegger. for santner, the creaturely is a dimension of the human, which is generated by a biopolitical power, and which makes man seem just like the animal in its captured relation to the world. my aim in this short exposition has been to strengthen the idea merely intimated by cremaster 2 that our conceptualization of the various limits between the human and its others is deeply related to the ways in which we conceive of freedom and bondage. as i mentioned in the introduction, we often use prisons, captivity, and simple lack of devika sharma – “the captive imagination: inhumanity, animality, and matthew barney’s cremaster 2” 103 freedom as discursive and visual frames for perceiving the less than human. one example could be automatism, which appears to be immanent to the framing of the criminal as an animal-like person. from descartes we have the idea of the animal body as a nature-bound and functional machine — an automaton. when one conceives of the criminal as a killing-machine, the criminal partakes in this cultural conception of the animal’s mechanistic, nature-bound character — its fixed and somehow captured relation to its environment. but of course it is not only philosophers who employ metaphors of imprisonment as tools for thinking and explicating the line distinguishing the human from the inhuman and the non-human. in oliver stone’s classic movie natural born killers (1994) the serial killer mickey at one point connects his own criminality with the automatic behavioral pattern of an animal: “the wolf doesn’t know why he’s a wolf,” he explains in court. according to the common image of the criminal as an animal, the perpetrator borrows from the animal’s ostensible lack of freedom, so to speak, its mechanical “captivity’ in its surroundings. heidegger used the term “benommenheit” [takenness] in order to describe the animal’s captivity in and by its world. that the animal is imprisoned by its environment paradoxically also came to mean for heidegger that the animal, to some degree, is intensely open to this very environment. this basic ambivalence and complexity of thinking “animality” through the framework of confinement is repeated in contemporary cultural theory and played out as well in the visual engagement with captivity in cremaster 2. agamben, for instance, describes the process whereby the human constitutes itself as human rather than inhuman in the following unequivocal way: ”man suspends his animality and, in this way, opens a ‘free and empty’ zone in which life is captured and a-bandoned {ab-bandonata} in a zone of exception” (79; emphasis added). this complex topography, which is presented by agamben to describe the relation between the human and the inhuman, complicates the common idea that the humanity of the human lies in a certain freedom with which human beings relate to their surroundings. in cremaster 2, barney is obviously interested in this ambivalent notion of animals as particularly free in comparison with man, or — in reverse — as particularly ”imprisoned” and ”enslaved” as compared to man. as we have seen, for barney bison are not particularly undisciplined compared to humans, while the language of bees, conversely, does not seem more fixed than human language. cremaster 2 thus visualizes humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 104 the fundamental ambivalence, whereby the animal is typically conceived as at once free and confined. this fundamental ambivalence in the understanding and representation of animal life is important also because our conceptions of the ”animality” of man seem to be modeled on how we conceive the lives of actual animals. this is why — barney’s suggestion seems to be — we cannot hope to alter the imaginary of the inhuman without simultaneously complicating the limit between animals and humans. to which extent are the forms of freedom we cherish dependent upon the discursive and institutional confinement of ”less than human” and animal life? what are the spaces in which the negotiations of human/animal and free/confined play out today? what cremaster 2 suggests, then, is that a further understanding of how we produce humanity, inhumanity, and animality, respectively, must include a reflection upon practices and ideas of confinement and captivity. on the symbolic level, such reflection is, i would suggest, exactly what barney uses the figure of harry houdini for in cremaster 2. as is well known, the historical harry houdini (1874-1926) significantly altered his contemporaries’ ideas of captivity. more specifically, he both invoked and subverted the idea of the prison as a hermetically sealed location. having been a locksmith apprentice in new york for a short while, houdini took up a number of handcuff tricks, which became a huge success when he was traveling in europe. here houdini challenged the police to chain him and put him in prison, from where he would usually break out. back in the u.s. he expanded his repertoire, such that prison cells, handcuffs, and strait jackets were now supplemented with escaping locked containers filled with water. in houdini’s box: the art of escape (2001), the british psychoanalyst adam philips suggests that houdini’s continuously firm grip on the collective imagination is based on the idea that human life can, in general, be understood as serial attempts at escaping one or the other restraint, be they material or immaterial. for barney, however, houdini is not only an emblematic condensation of a certain theme, but also an important figure in terms of poetics. harry houdini’s escape from his beeswax cabinet sets the stage for the final scenes of cremaster 2. here, we are located among ghostly animal lives in the shape of stuffed animals in a large building reminiscent of a railway station foyer, a reference to the 1893 chicago world’s fair, where the real harry houdini performed one of his famous metamorphoses. into this almost empty space enters the magician baby fay la foe, and a rather short exchange unfolds between the two, the escape artist and the magician, who is dressed as a queen bee. la foe mischievously suggests that houdini’s metamorphoses are not at all real, but merely a kind of bodily demonstration. over and devika sharma – “the captive imagination: inhumanity, animality, and matthew barney’s cremaster 2” 105 against this, houdini aggressively insists that his art truly is one of transformation. speaking in the third-person, houdini says: i can assure you that each time i challenge myself to escape from a locked trunk, a real transformation does take place. within metamorphosis, houdini becomes part of the cage that contains him. he enters the lock that seals his bonds. he begets the lock. it becomes a part of him. the walls that imprison his body come open (barney 1999, transcription of final scene). as noted above, it is a common observation that the freedom of the human is what makes it human. in cremaster 2, barney has, however, employed the figures of the convict, the escape artist, and some memorably ”non-animal” animals to complicate the ways in which we employ captivity as framework when imagining the inand nonhuman. if we were to understand, as i will suggest, houdini’s last words in cremaster 2 as a poetological mission statement for barney, we might say that cremaster 2 is an experiment in altering the common conceptions about the human’s humanity in much the same way as houdini treats his captivity. for barney, houdini and his escape artistry are then not merely a way of showing that human life always entails both limitations and attempts at escaping those limitations. houdini’s role in cremaster 2 is also to make visible how we continuously produce the human, the inhuman, and the animal, in an on-going negotiation of confinement and freedom. notes 1. in 1994 journalist adam nossiter reported in the new york times from a session held by the mississippi legislature that revolved around enacting new restraints on the state’s prisoners, including the striped uniforms with the word ”convict” inscribed on the back. nossiter quotes representative mack mcinnis, a democrat, in the new york times saying: ”’when you see one of these boogers aloose, you'll say, ’i didn't know we had zebras in mississippi’” (nossiter). 2. judith butler’s analysis of the “bestialization” of the prisoners in guantánamo as they were represented in photos published by the department of defense illustrates the ways in which this metaphor materializes not least in u.s. war prisons. butler writes, “there is a reduction of these human beings to animal status, where the animal is figured as out of control, in need of total restraint” (78). we need not, however, limit humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 106 this precise analysis to war prisons abroad. within the us, the so-called supermaximum security facilities continue to proliferate and they constitute yet another example of the ways in which the current american administration of punishment can be said to resemble some sort of pest control. what is significant in this regard is the figuring of the supermax prisoner as a risk-bearing creature who should by all means be maximally segregated from the rest of the population. in supermax prisons inmates are typically confined in their cells for 22 to 23 hours a day with most verbal communication occurring through intercom. as pizarro and stenius write: ”these institutions limit human contact to instances when medical staff members, clergy members, or counselors stop in front of inmates’ cells during routine rounds. physical contact is limited to being touched through security doors by correctional officers while being put in restraints or having restraints removed” (251). 3. this way of distinguishing two lines of critical thinking about the boundaries of the human should not, of course, be overstated. surely, the production of inhumanity is a most pressing issue also for derrida, wolfe, shukin, and peter singer. rather than as essential difference, then, i consider the distinction one of emphasis. for introductions to animal studies see cavell; wolfe, animal rites and zoontologies; kalof and fitzgerald; and atterton and calarco. 4. surely, this sense of hermeticism also stems from the fact that the films are only seldom shown to the public and are exceedingly expensive to acquire. my concern here is with the thematic issue of inhumanity examined by cremaster 2 and i am thus not focusing my attention on the cycle as a particular aesthetic universe or on the institutional and financial structures of its production and reception. see keller and ward for a critical examination of the paradoxical mix of avant-garde and blockbuster strategies of the cycle. see also the official homepage for an impression of the universe of the cycle: www.cremaster.net. 5. art historian and curator nancy spector gives the most thorough exposition of the expressions, effects, and recurrent themes in barney’s work; indeed, her analyses of the individual performances, installations, and films are indispensable for working with this strange universe. see spector for an interpretation of the overall issues in the cremaster cycle. 6. in fact, we know this only from the credits, from which we learn that gary gilmore is played by matthew barney and that the other characters are baby fay la foe, frank gilmore, bessie gilmore, nicole baker, harry houdini, and johnny cash. symbolism is devika sharma – “the captive imagination: inhumanity, animality, and matthew barney’s cremaster 2” 107 highly complex in the cremaster universe and since there is no dialogue or plot as such to support our inferences we must know the story of gary gilmore if we are to identify the individual scenes as references to his life. 7. according to mailer, a typical observation made by the people around gilmore was that he had a wild look in his eyes, and this perceived wildness is reflected for instance in mailer’s description of gilmore as “a wildcat in a bag” and in the way his goatee ostensibly suggested an underlying ferocity (executioner’s song 274). 8. see cannon for a discussion of the mormon understanding of this symbol. 9. in this context of captivity, bataille’s oft-cited 1936 programmatic text in acéphale may serve as an illustrative example. commenting on the cover art of a decapitated, naked man, bataille wrote: “man escaped from his head like the condemned man from his prison. he found beyond him not god, who is the prohibition of crime, but a being who doesn’t know prohibition” (181). for bataille, the free, headless man is more than a man; he is superhuman, since he has liberated himself from the slavery of human life. 10.see http://www.angolarodeo.com. see also the excellent documentary by jonathan stack and elizabeth garbus: the farm: life inside angola prison. 11 see michelle brown’s the culture of punishment, especially chapter 4, for a precise critique of prison tourism as well as of the “penal spectatorship” to which the prison tourism in the u.s. contributes. 12. of the several discussions within animal studies of this “holocaust analogy,” i think j.m. coetzee’s literary examination in the lives of animals of such analogies is still among the most vivid. see also the pointed commentaries by peter singer, marjorie garber, and others, in this rich volume. 13. heidegger used the concept of “benommenheit” to describe the essence of animals. this means being engrossed or captivated. this animal captivation paradoxically suggests an openness that is more intense than the human experience of the world, because it is so thoroughly swallowed up by its environment. the animal is therefore open to its surroundings, its environment, but in a closed and enslaved way, heidegger humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 108 argues in the lectures collected in die grundbegriffe der metaphysik. welt — endlichkeit — einsamkeit (see especially chapter 4). 14. in the context of this essay, two critiques of agamben’s argument seem particularly relevant to note here. to steven connor, agamben’s description of the “anthropological machines” that produce the human by separating the human from animal amounts to yet another way of formulating the exceptionality of the human. connor writes: “man is now not the only creature that is able to grasp its own essence, but the only creature that is able to experience the anguish of its lack of essence.” a more comprehensive critique is to be found in cary wolfe’s before the law. here, wolfe holds that agamben’s unwilled contempt for bare life and the animality that this life entails leaves no room for a political thinking on animal life as the unprotected life par excellence (24-27). works cited abbott, jack henry. in the belly of the beast: letters from prison. 1981. new york: vintage, 1991. agamben, giorgio. the open: man and animal. stanford: stanford up, 2004. atterton, peter, and matthew calarco, eds. animal philosophy: essential readings in continental thought. london and new york: continuum, 2004. bataille, georges. “the sacred conspiracy.” visions of excess: selected writings 1927-1939. trans. allan stoekl. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 1985. brown, michelle. the culture of punishment: prison, society, and spectacle. new york: new york up, 2009. bunker, edward. the animal factory. [1977]. new york: st. martin’s minotaur, 2000. butler, judith. precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. new york: verso, 2004. cannon, hal, ed. the grand beehive. salt lake city: u of utah press, 1980. cavell, stanley, ed. philosophy and animal life. new york: columbia u p, 2008. devika sharma – “the captive imagination: inhumanity, animality, and matthew barney’s cremaster 2” 109 coetzee, j.m. the lives of animals. princeton up, 2001. connor, steven. “thinking perhaps begins there: the question of the animal.” textual practice 21 (2007): 577-84. cremaster 2. matthew barney (dir.) new york: barbara gladstone, 1999. film. deleuze, gilles, and felix guattari. kafka: toward a minor literature. trans. dana polan. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 1986. ––––––, and felix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 1987. derrida, jacques. “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” trans. david wills. critical inquiry 28:2 (2002). 369-418. the farm: life inside angola prison. jonathan stack and elizabeth garbus, dirs. gabriel films, 1988. film. heidegger, martin. die grundbegriffe der metaphysik. welt — endlichkeit — einsamkeit. gesamtausgabevol. v. 29/30. manfred s. frings, ed. frankfurt am main: vittorio klostermann, 1983. jarvis, brian. cruel and unusual: punishment and us culture. london: pluto press, 2004. kalof, linda, and amy fitzgerald, eds. the animals reader: the essential classic and contemporary writings. oxford: berg, 2007. lacan, jacques. ”fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse.” écrits. paris: seuil, 1966. mailer, norman. “introduction.” jack henry abbott, in the belly of the beast: letters from prison. 1981. new york: vintage, 1991. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 110 ––––––. the executioner’s song. 1979. new york: vintage, 1998 . natural born killers. oliver stone, dir. warner bros., 1994. film. nossiter, adam. “making hard time harder, states cut jail tv and sports.” new york times 17 september 1994. phillips, adam. houdini’s box: the art of escape. new york: faber & faber, 2001. pizarro, jesenia, and vanja m. k. stenius. “supermax prisons: their rise, current practices, and effect on inmates.” the prison journal 84.2 (2004): 248-64. sans, jérôme. ”matthew barney: héros modernes/modern heroes.”art press 204 (1995): 25-32. santner, eric l. on creaturely life: rilke, benjamin, sebald. chicago: u of chicago p, 2006. shukin, nicole. animal capital -rendering life in biopolitical times. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2009. spector, nancy. ”only the perverse fantasy can still save us.” matthew barney: the cremaster cycle. nancy spector, ed. new york: guggenheim museum publications, 2002. 2-90. wolfe, cary. animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. chicago: u of chicago p, 2003. ––––––. before the law: humans and other animals in a biopolitical frame. chicago: u chicago p, 2012. –––––– ed. zoontologies: the question of the animal. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2003. žižek, slavoj. ”the neighbor and other monsters.” the neighbor: three inquiries in political theology. slavoj žižek, eric l. santner and kenneth reinhard, eds. chicago: u of chicago p, 2005. microsoft word birke-coulter-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:1 reviews lynda birke interspecies solidarity kendra coulter, animals, work and the promise of interspecies solidarity. london: palgrave macmillan, 2016. 201 pp. $110.00 (hc), 79.00 (e-book). i once lived with a border collie, and was often asked, “does your dog work?” perhaps she didn’t, in the sense that i did nothing to train her to herd sheep. on the other hand, tammy had a very clear sense of her world, and would often give “eye” to our horses, waiting for a signal from me to go round them up. her work was never done, as there was always someone — horse, dog, or human — who needed to be cajoled into some space or other. tammy’s story is a reminder that animals sometimes work for us, in the sense of fulfilling some specific role; but they may also have their own sense of work, as a job to be done. kendra coulter’s book animals, work, and the promise of interspecies solidarity begins from the acknowledgement that, in both human-animal studies (has) and in humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 132 labor studies, work done by and for animals has been inadequately explored. to understand animals’ work, coulter argues, means understanding and situating their lives. globally, capitalism is the driving force which shapes economic and social contexts. it molds all our lives, and — especially for nonhuman animals — the manner of their deaths. it also frames how we understand work largely in monetary terms. some human-animal interactions, to be sure, center on the generation of income; but others involve unpaid labor, or subsistence work. we need, she urges, to understand how nonhuman animals contribute to the global economy, and how they experience working with/for humans. although coulter stresses the importance of detailed scholarly studies to investigate human-animal work, she also calls for passionate engagement, and speaks of her “political and ethical commitment to ending suffering and improving lives” (13). as she notes, labor studies and critical animal studies have in common a concern for social justice which underpins the academic inquiry. she thus aims not only to analyze how human and nonhuman lives intersect through work, but also to propose changes. and, importantly, she tries to take seriously the animals’ points of view. the first section of the book begins with the observation that millions of people work with or alongside animals across the world, in many different contexts. yet, despite the enormous significance of nonhumans in, say, subsistence agriculture, studies in the sociology of work seldom address the animals themselves. coulter examines how some paid work with animals is relatively high status (some jobs with racehorses, for instance), while other work, such as in slaughterhouses, is low status, dirty work with little pay and lousy conditions. yet other areas of animal work are unpaid, through volunteerism. she draws attention to the gendered and racialized nature of jobs with animals, using the idea of “body work”: this might include maintaining and producing competition horses, cleaning and removing waste in agricultural or veterinary settings, or providing all-round care. body work between species is always a complex, interactive process, requiring interspecies negotiation; in turn, it involves communication and emotional labor. relationships between human workers and animals are complex. workers in labs or in intensive agriculture, for example, may be relatively detached, seeing the animals as merely units of production or tools of the trade; but others can develop bonds with the animals they use, even if these relationships are transitory. coulter emphasizes that “the material realities of work do not determine how people think and feel, but they help shape perceptions of self and others, within and across species” (50-1). places of work lynda birke – interspecies solidarity 133 and their local cultures moderate human and animal experiences: one farm/lab is different from another. nevertheless, while it is important to understand the nuances of human-animal connections in work, to recognize that care and compassion can exist alongside institutionalized abuse, the “material reality remains the same. the ends do not change, and the cause of the suffering continues” (53). the next section turns to work done by animals. animals across the world work in a variety of situations; yet only some of these we acknowledge as “work.” sheepdogs like tammy are “working breeds,” yet she did not “work” in the sense of herding sheep. part of the problem in recognizing animal work is the prevailing ethos of working for pay — which animals evidently do not. coulter draws a distinction among subsistence, and voluntary labor, and that mandated by humans. subsistence is work done in maintenance of self and others: all animals do this even if we don’t think of it as work. “voluntary” labor, done for humans, includes care work done by animals in our homes — the pet dog who barks to warn of intruders, say. but perhaps the most significant category is work required by humans. to analyze the impact of animals’ work, coulter draws particularly on feminist political economists, whose analyses of unpaid labor can apply across species. she draws particular attention to social reproduction — covering much of the labor, usually done by women, which goes on unremarked in households. animals, too, can be part of these processes of social reproduction, whether in terms of contributing to care or in the transport of items necessary to human life. she notes the example of donkeys in subsistence economies, whose women handlers can carry the baby while the donkey carries loads of food, water or firewood. without the donkey, the mother might have to leave the child behind — so, in that sense, the donkey contributes to childcare. like women’s domestic labor, that done by animals contributes substantially to creating value, to “people, economies, societies and corporate interests everywhere” (77). within these nexuses, animals are undoubtedly exploited or abused; yet, as coulter points out, there may be individual animals within these systems who do have some agency or even get some enjoyment out of what they do — as many people handling sheepdogs would argue. coulter emphasizes a continuum of suffering/enjoyment, terms which allow for animals’ abilities to feel. some elite racehorses, for instance, appear to get something out of the job even if running a race is physically demanding. by contrast, many animals — such as those living their lives in intensive agriculture — have few opportunities to enjoy much at all. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 134 the third section focuses on work done for animals — animal advocacy is an overtly political kind of labor, necessarily done by humans since nonhuman animals are excluded from political processes. some of this work involves little or no direct contact with other species (fundraising, for example); other jobs may involve direct hands-on animal care. some may be emotionally harrowing (leading, for example, to compassion fatigue among workers in animal shelters or laboratories). sometimes, the animal care is indirect, such as projects which aim to help ‘working’ animals, in part by collaborating with local communities whose lives depend upon them. and some work for animals explicitly entails working through legal and political processes. although animals are not directly included in the political sphere, there are many instances globally of efforts to ensure better lives for animals through legislation, from prohibitions on keeping horses in tied stalls (scandinavia) to city protections for stray dogs (greece). despite these efforts, there remains much to do; thus, coulter’s concluding chapter sets out what she terms an “anifesto” — bringing together ideas to recognize and value animals’ work, and to reduce suffering. there are, she stresses, many connections between human and animal work, both in terms of labor done, and in terms of the potential for shared suffering. there are also substantial differences: humans and nonhumans are not positioned equally, and animals have little power. even so, it is important to recognize that “animals are not powerless or voiceless, and they shape elements of daily practice in all sorts of ways” (141). we must, she argues, try to understand the nuances of individual animals and their working lives, as well as the generalized relations of (say) the exploitation of animals in factory farming. it is for this reason that she does not insist upon a specific category of animal “worker,” for to do so would obliterate the many identities animals have in relation to humans (as friend, guardian, etc). rather, we need to develop understanding of the complexities of animals’ work alongside other ways of knowing them. it is a strength of this book that coulter repeatedly warns us of the nuances. individual lives matter, and not all animals (or people) will have the same experiences; it is the task of has scholars to untangle these webs, and to examine specific contexts. how animals are treated within global economic systems goes hand-in-hand with how people are treated, especially women or people in poverty. meanwhile, scholars in labor studies must pay more attention to ways in which human oppressions profoundly intersect with those of animals: “a just and caring society cannot be created on a mass, unmarked animal graveyard,” coulter reminds us (162). lynda birke – interspecies solidarity 135 it is that nuanced understanding which argues against a unitary animal liberationist perspective, she argues. to be sure, there are strong ethical reasons to stand against using animals as commodities. but this position also glosses over the multiple ways in which animals (and humans) are positioned within economies, and ignores how millions of people’s lives are deeply enmeshed with those of other species. as she points out, for many people globally, “[t]heir livelihoods are interwoven with animals, and animal liberation would disproportionately affect these already disadvantaged people in significant ways” (149). acknowledging that animals are exploited within the status quo does not, for coulter, mean that all human-animal relationships must end. rather, she suggests, we should explore the possibilities of “interspecies solidarity,” not only as a commitment but also a political project. solidarity cuts across empathy and caring as well as rationality; it is an awareness of what we have in common, despite our differences. and it is a promise, not only to do better at understanding animals’ lives and experiences but also to try to change things. microsoft word andreyev-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:2 julie andreyev responding to dogs we and all animals with whom we share our time and space should be viewed as friends and partners in a joint venture where we enjoy an egalitarian give-and-take relationship.—marc bekoff (animals matter 164) go look at your dog. go to him! imagine his umwelt—and let him change your own. —alexandra horowitz (inside of a dog 198) dog lessons. march 17, 2004 — practically spring — but patches of snow still dotted the hills on the sides of the highway. the air cooled down as i ascended the coquihalla highway. the destination was the toll-booth where i would meet valerie. i parked the car in the lot just before the booth and walked to join her. i brought a small fabric kennel along to put the pup in for our 90 minute return journey. i found valerie and we exchanged greetings. i gave her cash and she handed me the black pup — the first one i ever held. i didn’t have a dog as a child. but when i was nine or ten years old, i became good friends with my brother’s dog sprinky. my brother alex was 12 years older than me, was married, and had his own apartment. soon after getting sprinky, he moved away to new zealand for work, and gave the dog to an elderly neighbor, ms. pettijon, who lived down the street from us. after school, i’d go get sprinky, bring her home, and play with her in the yard. i grew to love sprinky and she became my best friend. when sprinky died of a brain tumor, probably caused by the flea collar she wore continuously, i didn’t develop other friendships with dogs until much later. when i turned 41, i once again felt the need for dog companionship, to continue my growingup. the pup was bigger than i thought, but still only two or three pounds. he had no collar or jacket; his fine hair the only shelter between his body and the cold air. he would not be happy in the kennel i brought along, and would probably cry, valerie said. he was used to being in close contact with her and would expect that of me. she handed me an old flannel shirt of hers, something familiar for him during his transition. we parted, and i began the drive back to vancouver, the pup curled up on the shirt in my lap. i felt his body relax while he napped. a sense of trust. we stopped at a rest-stop along the julie andreyev -responding to dogs 109 way and he wandered around, sniffing the grass. after doing his business, he allowed me to pick him up. i sensed his willingness. we continued home. when greg and i were deciding on a dog, we hadn’t considered whether to adopt from a breeder or from a rescue facility.1 the criteria were determined by my allergies and our limited outdoor space. we settled on a miniature schnoodle — a small schnauzerpoodle mix — because these non-shedding dogs produce less allergens than shedding dogs, and they grow to only 20 pounds. our tiny japanese garden could accommodate a small dog for house-training. the pup would need access to outdoors every 1.5-2 hours. the outdoor space needed to be large enough for a puppy to wander around and choose a spot. for walks, we relied on the park across the street and the rest of the neighborhood. we found valerie, a breeder a few hundred miles away who cared about her two dogs and their pups. she provided a pen in the back yard for the pups to spend time outdoors with their parents. in the evenings, she brought them inside for warmth and safety. valerie sent pictures of the pups for us to decide which one we wanted to adopt. the pups were only five weeks old, still dependent on their mom. we may decide on a pup, but would have to wait another three weeks until they were weaned before we could adopt. one pup was black, with a little white star on his chest. he looked directly into the camera. he was the one. fig. 1. tom at five weeks old. (photo courtesy of valerie knutlie.) this essay explores the canine-human relationship for lessons in more-than-human ethics developed from the lived experiences of play, companionship, work, creativity, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 110 sleep, growth, and transformation shared over a lifetime. my experiences with dogs led to an understanding of the ethics of communication crucial to embodied encounters. close physical proximity, living and working together, and communications expressed between us through touch, voice, facial expression, gesture, and movement, created a loving bond. our experiences together transformed my view of the world, on what i chose to eat and wear, and how i chose to contribute to social change. the dogs included me in play, and i experimented in creative processes. these collective efforts inspired collaborative art-making. the compassionate encounters and the love that emerged provide a narration to support an exploration of more-than-human ethics. the narrations in this essay include an investigation into communication ethics, informed by val plumwood, as ontological investigation into other animal communication modalities. my elaboration on communication ethics integrates thought on proto-ethics — as originally proposed by jacques derrida —, embodied encounters leading to appropriate respondings. i include research into evolutionary biology, neuroscience, cognitive ethology, and ethics of care to support the investigation. evolutionary biology suggests that emotions and feelings experienced by humans and other animals provide social bonds. ethics of care describes the role emotion and feeling has for developing respect and compassion for other beings, even across species. i propose that these material experiences are relational moments of meaning-making. my lived experiences with the dogs led to knowledge of canine expression and communication in forms of gesture, energy, touch, facial expression, and voice, and this knowledge generated better relations with the dogs and creative collaborative events. cognitive ethology and biology methodologies described by marc bekoff, alexandra horowitz, and gregory berns support the development of knowledge through respectful applied methods. biocentric anthropomorphism, first proposed by bekoff, describes sensing and thinking about other animals who may experience the world differently. the philosophy of derrida on différance informs this ethics of diversity. responding, as a key aspect of communication ethics, is explored in this essay through reflections on the processes of my art project, epic_tom (2014-16), a performance and installation project carried out in collaboration with my two companion-working dogs, tom and sugi. this practical investigation includes an inquiry into representation, as experiments in imaging and sonifying canine expression. the project used technical methods of motion capture, animation, live algorithms, and granular synthesis to contribute to the imaging and sonifying stages. the project’s processes that involved the dogs included applying communication ethics to avoid harms. deep-listening, call and julie andreyev -responding to dogs 111 response, improvisation, and musicking are methods applied in the production stages that provided means to work collaboratively with more-than-human others. early days. we returned that evening, and greg and i fed the pup and played with him for a while. the reading we did suggested that a new puppy should not sleep with their human. we hoped the pup would accept the plywood pen that greg constructed by the front door. it was furnished with newspaper, a blanket, and soft toys. i put the pup in the pen, and headed to bed. after a few minutes, he began to whine. then, i heard little feet running down the hall to the bedroom. he came around to my side of the bed and reached up towards me. i picked him up. greg got up and added another board to the fence surrounding the pen, making it higher. we put him back in. for hours we tried to ignore his cries. i felt terrible. his first night away from his mom, in a new home, and forced to be by himself. we hoped it would get easier. finally, we all fell asleep. the following night at bedtime, we put him back in the pen. he whined even louder than the previous night. after a few minutes, i heard a scratching sound and then little feet running down the hall. despite his size, the pup had managed to climb the halfmeter high fence. he sat on the floor beside the bed and looked up at me. i reached down, picked him up. i made a little space for him by my pillow. i covered him with a light blanket. he quickly fell asleep. i could hear his small rhythmic breathing. we were all much happier. the next day, we named him tom after thomas bernhard — our favorite author at the time — and after tom sawyer. we sensed his critical attitude and adventurous spirit. since then, he has slept on the bed every night. in subsequent weeks, i kept tom close. i even took him to class when i had to teach. “pets” weren’t allowed in the building, but i brought him along anyway. i had a puppy bag that looked like a satchel, which allowed him to be hidden from view. once in the classroom, i’d set the bag on the work table and tom would crawl out. the energy in the class transformed; the students became calm and happy. they liked having him around. he liked it, too. he would cuddle up on the laps of some students, or just rest on a blanket. at lunch and on breaks i’d take him outside to a nearby park. sometimes along the way i’d visit the administrative assistants in the president’s office. they’d stroke and admire him. he never barked or cried during the work day. he enjoyed being near me and interacting with other humans. during his first year with us, his vitality expanded. he needed continuous physical and cognitive activity. if he was not satisfactorily engaged in walks or games, he’d take out his frustrations on objects, or on me. with his sharp baby teeth, he’d snap at the bottoms of my pants as i walked around the house. he’d attack pillows, socks, and shoes as humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 112 though they were prey animals. he’d pounce on them, bite them, and give them a quick shake. when i’d work in the garden he’d “help” by furiously digging holes around me. in the evening, when we’d let him out into the japanese garden for a pee, he’d run tight circuits around it, dispelling any left-over pent-up energy. because of his perpetual liveliness, he was always hungry. sometimes after being fed, he’d sit and point with his nose at the kitchen counter, asking for more.2 tom clearly communicated that his cognitive and physical needs weren’t being met. fig. 2. tom as a pup catching a ball. (photo by the author.) in order to channel his energy, i developed skill-building play sessions. some were beneficial to him, but others negatively affected his health. we attended puppy school, where i learned to ask him to come, sit, heel, and generally pay attention. at home, we taught him to go see greg, or go see julie. we taught him to get the mail, and pass the appropriate envelopes to greg or myself. we used the requests give this to greg or give this to julie. he accommodated — mouth to hand. to this day, when he hears the lettercarrier put the mail through the mail-slot he’ll run to retrieve it. the learning sessions julie andreyev -responding to dogs 113 were carried out using positive reinforcement through verbal praise and food rewards. we would finish a lesson on a well-accomplished task; a technique to reinforce positive memories. we never used punishment for incorrect responses or behaviors. if he didn’t respond to a request, we’d try a different approach, or just move on to a different task. if he used aggressive behavior toward us, such as biting or scratching, we’d give a yelp to let him know it was painful. dogs use this technique among themselves in play sessions in order to communicate; the too aggressive dog will learn from the yelp and subsequently avoid repeating harm (bekoff, “wild justice”). tom loved the learning sessions. he would express his enjoyment by laughing. his laugh, like that of all dogs, is an infectious series of short breathy exhalations (horowitz 103). we developed jump and catch games to learn eye-mouth coordination and strength. tom became expert at catching small bits of food tossed to him from the kitchen. he also learned to catch balls in mid-air, thrown to him from distances. he could do this for hours. he developed a keenness for chasing balls, sticks, and frisbees. his body took on a compact aerodynamic shape, with his back and head in a straight line, as he ran at top speed to intercept them. he’d use a similar shape to chase squirrels, despite my protests. ball or frisbee chasing has been described as a form of prey response in dogs (horowitz 287). a jump game involved me holding a stick at waist level and tom jumping and grabbing it. he was only as tall as my knee, so this was a considerable accomplishment. he concerned himself with grabbing the stick, not my hand. this repetitive action, and the intense ball chasing, took a toll on his back, and after some months we noticed changes in his movements. sometimes during a ball chase or jump session, tom would abruptly stop. panting, he’d look up at me with a worried expression on his face. in the morning, he’d hobble, one step at a time, up the stairs. if i tried to touch his back or hind legs, he’d growl and snap at my hand. he was reluctant to jump up onto the bed. instead, he’d stand and wait for me to pick him up. i interpreted these changes in his movement as an expression of pain. we took him to the vet. x-rays showed a smaller than usual space between one set of vertebrae in the middle of his back. the veterinary chiropractor suggested that he had a chronic muscle spasm due to stresses on that part of his back, created by repetitive intensive activities. tightening the muscles around the spine would shorten the space between the vertebrae. he advised us not to play ball every day, and not to do any jumping for a while. he warned that dogs will chase at top speeds even if they’re in pain, thereby exacerbating humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 114 the condition. we reduced the running and eliminated jumping. i combined this with gentle massage techniques learned from a canine masseuse. it took time for him to trust my touch. i learned that it was important to be consistent with the pressure and duration of touch, otherwise he’d bite at my hand and move away. if i did it correctly, he’d express his gratitude by licking my hand. if i stopped to soon, he would ask for more by reaching out to me with his front paw. his overall movements improved and he eventually stopped favoring his back and legs. he has since come to enjoy daily massages. every morning, he sits at my feet and presents his back to me. he licks to show his appreciation and contentment. despite his small stature, tom’s athleticism resulted in a body weight of 22 pounds, heavier than any other miniature schnoodle we met. this meant he was now too heavy to bring to work hidden in a bag. we didn’t like the idea of leaving him alone at home. he could only tolerate it for an hour or two before resorting to chewing rugs and shoes. dogs can get bored and lonely if left by themselves while their humans are away at work (horowitz 292; coppinger & coppinger 228). we tried a dog daycare for a while, but they demanded that he be kept up-to-date with vaccinations, including for dog influenza called kennel cough. i was skeptical of the benefits of these vaccinations, having learned that they can inadvertently cause harm.3 we decided to get a second dog as a playmate and companion for tom. even though this would mean more work, the dogs could keep each other company when we were out. fig. 3. sugi as a pup. (photo by the author.) julie andreyev -responding to dogs 115 the new pup resembled tom, but had a different character — he was less rambunctious, more thoughtful. inspired by his red-brown fur and zen demeanor, we named him sugi after a type of japanese cedar. naively, we thought tom would welcome sugi to the household, but instead he protested. he’d growl at sugi or ignore him. sugi would playfully nip at tom’s legs and then leap under the sofa to escape his wrath. this would annoy tom, who would bark and dive in after sugi. after about 2 weeks, tom accepted sugi. they played together and hung out. they’d curl up on the arm chair, or lie together by the fire. like a big brother, tom developed a protective attitude. he would deter sugi from risky situations that sugi would throw himself into. if sugi saw a new dog at the playing field, he would charge at top speed towards the dog. this is not a good idea, because a charge can cause alarm in the other dog. seeing sugi do this, tom would run after him. being faster and larger, tom could catch up to sugi and shoulder-bump him just enough to slow down his charge. tom’s interception created a more polite approach towards an unfamiliar dog. i relayed this to our dog-walker judy lopes, and she confirmed that more knowledgable dogs will do this to teach a less experienced dog. tom was expressing empathy for sugi by shaping sugi's awkward approach towards unfamiliar dogs; he was helping sugi avoid potentially dangerous encounters. we developed fun games to enjoy together. one was the name-game, in which i’d verbally ask each of them to retrieve a named toy from their basket: tom, where’s the meteor? tom would growl as he poked around in the basket, choosing out the appropriate blue knobby ball. if sugi had trouble remembering which item was the one i was asking for, he’d just grab the last toy that was handled and present it to me. tom would get frustrated and vocalize a short forceful but whiney bark — he knew the answer. if asked, he’d quickly present the correct toy. during the game, if i spent too much time attending to sugi, tom would also protest by articulating three quick forceful barks. he communicated that my attention to sugi was unfair.4 in other contexts involving unfair allocation of rewards, attention, or praise, tom would use this vocalization, or he would push himself between sugi and myself. at the end of the name-game, after all the toys were retrieved, i’d ask them to put each item back in the basket. they’d grab each toy and hurriedly drop them over the rim of the basket. in their excitement, they’d sometimes miss the basket, the item bouncing outside its rim. regardless, they’d sit and expect a reward for a job well done. sugi expressed himself differently from tom. he had to work harder in social situations. when he approached dogs, they’d often get angry with him by growling or humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 116 snapping. he avoided being touched by other humans. rather than being curious, sugi was fearful of unfamiliar objects in the house. he’d react to loud or unfamiliar sounds by fleeing, crouching close to the ground with his tail between his legs, ears pulled flat against his head. despite his fears and awkward communications with other dogs, sugi was keen to learn new things. he showed enthusiasm for tasks that demanded focus. sugi especially liked hiking and scent-tracking in the woods of north vancouver. in the forest, he never expressed fear. off-leash, he’d boldly run ahead, but would not forget to stop and sniff things along the way. his fur camouflaged him amongst the trees and dirt trails. sensing his comfort in this environment, we enrolled in a couple of scenttracking classes. sugi loved these exercises and would focus on finding the objects i would hide in the underbrush. his eyes would grow wide when i’d point at the ground and say search! he’d quickly sniff along the ground in the appropriate direction toward the item. when it was found, he’d point with his nose and sit, communicating the gesture for found it. i’d reward him with a treat. later, i adapted this game for sugi to find chanterelle mushrooms. he found this less interesting, but accommodated me. when asked to find the mushroom, he’d point to one, sit, and get a reward. then, he’d trot away to find a more interesting odor. the scent-tracking skills created a lasting influence on sugi’s attention to the world; on our walks in the neighborhood he takes his time sniffing everything little thing along the way.5 by observing sugi’s focused attention on the immediate world, he has taught me to slow down and to enjoy the moment. fig. 4. tom and sugi walking cooperatively together. (photo by the author.) julie andreyev -responding to dogs 117 dogs like to walk off-leash at their own speed. this gives them the ability to stop to sniff as they are inclined (horowitz 84-85). for our daily walks, tom and sugi have been taught to be responsible off-leash walkers. they stop at the corner and will not cross the road until i give the ok. they respond to nice walks by walking at my side if needed. tom is more responsible off-leash, so sometimes i ask him to help sugi by walking cooperatively. this involves them connected to each other by a short lead. during these walks, tom takes charge, stopping at the street corner and waiting for my ok. tom gets satisfaction from this task; sugi enjoys walking at tom’s speed. it took years to develop this cooperative walking, but it has paid off. the dogs’ ability to travel at their own speed and investigate the world is an important aspect of their autonomy. the early experiences with tom and sugi were lessons for me on their intentions and emotions, and how they communicated these. the dogs developed understandings of my intentions, emotions, and communications, too. the experiences affected the depth of our relationship; not only did they become loving companions, but also working collaborators, participating in numerous projects carried out in front of cameras, sensors, and microphones, in my home studio, in motion capture, sound recording, and tv studios, in the urban streets, and in forest environments. biologists propose that the human-canine social bond is unlike any other interspecies relationship. this is likely due to the shared communication modalities that have evolved over millennia (coppinger and coppinger; de waal 114-117; horowitz 42-46). the experiences have led to significant transformations in my life. dog communications. zoö-archeological research proposes that dogs originated from wolves 15,000 years ago, during the mesolithic period (coppinger and coppinger 5067). a view on dog evolution suggests that they adapted themselves to human habitation during this period; dog remains coincide historically with those of human settlements (ibid.). it is thought that groups of wolves began to take advantage of human refuse dumps, and for generations they built communities in relation to humans. the dogs lived close enough to get to know human behavior, but remained far enough away to maintain autonomy. this relationship is described as commensal.6 dogs were later taken into closer living quarters with humans, for companionship, work, and security relationships. over time, the close proximity with humans created cognitive adaptations in canines that are different from their wolf ancestors. these adaptive traits include communicative abilities that are remarkably similar to humans. dogs are good readers of human communications in order to get what they want, to anticipate future events, and to develop social bonds with their humans. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 118 dogs are keen observers of the human body. they pay attention to gestures, faces, and odors in order to read human intention and emotion. dogs learn to understand hand gestures, such as pointing. for instance, they are able to interpret humans pointing at overturned cups with food treats inside, something wolves can’t do (horowitz, 176177). like humans, dogs will also point with their noses and bodies to indicate something they want. a cognition study designed a situation in which a dog witnessed a human hiding a treat beyond the dog’s reach (op. cit., 177-180). that human left the room and the dog’s companion-human entered. the dog used attention-getting techniques towards his human — vocalizing and using body gestures, such as running between the human and where the treat was stashed, to direct his human’s gaze towards the location. the dog used pointing techniques, and knew that this human would be able to retrieve the treat. the dog anticipated his human’s mind. tom is a good pointer. when he’s still hungry, he’ll sit with his body clearly visible to me, aiming his nose at the kitchen counter. if he wants to be covered with a blanket he’s sit within my range of sight and stare at the blanket. fig. 5. sugi looking at me from an inverted viewpoint. (photo by author.) dogs read human faces for expressions of emotions in the same way humans read other human faces. they use “left-face bias,” looking leftward at the right side of the face being observed (racca et al.). it is thought that dogs and humans look at the right side of a human face because it is on this side that emotion is most clearly expressed. this behavior is specific to the canine and human relationship; dogs do not show left-face julie andreyev -responding to dogs 119 bias when looking at other dogs or at other animal faces. in the study that determined the left-face bias, the participating dogs showed even more communicative resourcefulness. they used their left-face bias on photographs of human faces shown to them on computer screens! additionally, when shown inverted images of human faces, dogs continued to use left-face bias, still looking at the right side of the human face. humans lose this ability when shown an upside-down face. perhaps dogs can do this because their point of view often includes their looking from behind at our faces. dogs can even look behind by tilting their heads back. they may use this technique to see and read our facial expressions when we stand, walk or sit behind them. i’ve seen sugi look at me this way (see fig. 5). what about other animals’ emotions and expressions? evolutionary biology, cognitive ethology, and neuroscience7 support the view that other animals have emotions, and that they are aware of them — they feel (bekoff, animals matter; bekoff, emotional lives; berns; horowitz). darwin argued that other animals experience anger, happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, and surprise (bekoff, emotional lives xviii-xx). empathy, envy, and indignation were later identified also by evolutionary biologists (walton; damasio, descartes’ error). it is suggested that emotions are adaptive traits that generate social bonds for survival fitness. emotions such as happiness, disgust, empathy, and sadness help create cohesion among individuals and groups. fear and surprise allow animals to respond quickly to potentially dangerous situations. empathy in apes, canines, rats, whales and elephants assists with the formation of cooperation among individuals (bekoff, emotional lives; de waal; poole). empathy was expressed by tom when he modified sugi’s approach to other dogs; sugi and tom work empathically when they walk cooperatively off-leash. how well do humans read canine emotions? dogs express their emotions — sadness, happiness, frustration, fear, empathy, contentment — through vocalizations, facial expressions, and gestures. they use a variety of kinds of vocalizations, including barks, whines, sighs, laughs, and growls. experiments have looked at bark-types used in three different contexts: how a dog barks when a stranger rings the doorbell; how a dog barks when locked outside; and how he barks during play. when hearing a doorbell, a dog will use a low-pitched, loud, harsh-sounding bark; when a dog is locked outside, he’ll use a single high-pitched bark, repeated with long pauses in-between; when a dog is playing, he’ll use high-pitched frequent barks (horowitz 108). humans are able to read these successfully. studies have determined that human listeners who listened to dog barks recorded in varying situations were able to identify accurately the bark’s emotional expression, even when the dog is not their own (pongrácz et al.). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 120 growling is also used by dogs to communicate. soft growls are used to express playfulness; firm loud growls are sometimes used to correct the behavior of a younger dog. whining is used when something is wanted or if the dog is in discomfort. tom combines barking and whining when he’s annoyed or desperately wants something, such as breakfast. tom has developed the ability to modulate his voice, in a way similar to human speech. he has offered his abilities in the recording studio on numerous vocal recording sessions for collaborative projects.8 both tom and sugi let out a sigh of contentment when they are tucked in bed. dogs are also good listeners. they hear a broader range of sounds than humans. humans can hear between 20 hertz and 20 kilohertz, while dogs can hear higher, up to 45 kilohertz, well beyond our detection. dogs can hear the high-frequency hum from fluorescent lightbulbs, and the ultrasonic vibrations of termites. they pay attention to the frequency modulation of human voice, as when we use pitch-shifting to a higherfrequency at the end of an exciting question — do you want to go for a walk? dogs can learn to understand human language to a degree, and they depend on hearing voicemodulation to fully understand the meaning (horowitz 93-94). when asked something, dogs will use their ears and head to indicate they are listening. they point their ears forward and may tilt their heads. some dogs are able to understand human language better than others. this is probably due to training. tom knows many more words for toys, people, and locations than sugi, because i spent hundreds of hours with him using these words when he was young. dogs use various gestural expressions to communicate that they do, or do not, understand human communications. these include using ears, mouth, and eyes in their facial expressions. their ears may be the most expressive part of their faces; various ear positions can communicate ranges of emotion from fear to curiosity. understanding canine ear positions, and their other gestures, depends on taking into account the context in which they are expressed. for instance, ears pulled back against the head can indicate submission, if the dog also looks away. the same ear position indicates fear, if the dog quickly retreats from the situation. ears forward combined with an intent gaze indicates listening and attention; ears forward combined with a head-tilt indicates i’m figuring something out. ear flickering from forward to back can indicate indecision or uncertainty (coren 99). dogs combine ear and other facial movements. ear and mouth movements are used together to express differing emotions. ears back against the head with teeth bared expresses fearful-aggression; ears perked-up with teeth bared expresses dominant julie andreyev -responding to dogs 121 aggression (ibid.). wide-open round eyes indicate excitement or anticipation; slightly closed relaxed eyes express calmness. dogs’ mouths express happiness or contentment when they are open in a relaxed way that shows some teeth; anger when the sides and front of the mouth are pulled tightly away to reveal all teeth. dogs enact little licks at the tip of the mouth to express contentment, or to acknowledge i understand what you said. dogs are not timid about using their whole body to express how they feel. these include various tail positions, raised hackles, crouches, standing on tip-toe, rolling on their backs, play-bows, and paw-slaps. a wagging tail is a complex affair and doesn’t necessarily indicate a happy dog. the context provided from the rest of the body is important for interpreting wagging. a dominant aggressive face that includes a high stiff wagging tail reinforces the expression of aggression. a dropped tail with a quickly wagging tip expresses submission. a tail relaxed, hanging down, or straight out the back indicates a neutral or calm state. holding a tail still while the rest of the body is taut can indicate concentration, such as when tom is anticipating a frisbee throw. dogs tend to wag with a right-sided bias when they happily greet their humans or someone else of interest; dogs tend to wag to the left when greeting an unfamiliar dog (horowitz 113). hackles up on the dog’s back indicates uncertainty or fear; combined with the appropriate mouth expression will reinforce a communication of aggression. in play, dogs use their whole body for communicative expression. the gestures can be subtle and quick between the moving dogs. many are only discernible to human observers through methods that include video recording and frame-by-frame examination to interpret what actually transpired (bekoff, “play signals”; horowitz). the play-bow is a body position in which the front end of the dog is on the ground while the rear is elevated. a short version of a play invitation is the paw-slap, in which the dog will slap both front paws or fore-legs on the ground briefly. during play, dogs will use nips, shoulder-blocks, hip-checks, and full body slaps against each other. they will continually remind their partners that these moves are enacted in play by following with a bow or paw-slap afterwards. play between dogs can be intensely physical; they jump and tumble, roll over each other, and chase at top speeds, knocking against each other as they run. in play situations in which one dog is much larger than his playmate, the larger one will handicap his play to account for the potential risk to the smaller dog. when tom was a year to three years old, he loved to play with big dogs in the nearby playing field. he was not afraid to play with great danes and pit-bull terriers, who would play rough and tumble, but always take into account tom’s relatively small size. a large mexican rescue dog called freida would humor young tom by gently mouthing him while he jumped all over her. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 122 dogs use some of these play gestures with humans. a dog may give a play-bow or paw-slap to invite their human companion to play. dogs will roll over on their backs in a submissive gesture to invite tickles and tummy rubs. puppies learn to modify their play bite to a soft mouth when grabbing humans. in the early days, i helped tom adapt his play by yelping if he bit me too hard. he’d stop for a moment to communicate that he understood, and then proceed with a softer mouth. dogs use other full-body gestures to communicate their emotions and needs to their humans. tom likes to sit on my feet when he’s waiting for me to get up to do something for him. he’ll also do this when he feels insecure, such as when he sees me packing to go out of town. sometimes when i’m sitting on the couch, tom will come and gently lean against me — i’m with you. sugi will poke my right calf with his nose when we’re standing at a crosswalk waiting for the light to change, or when he’s following me around the house as i get ready to take them for a walk — move along. recently, sugi started coming to me to express his fear when he hears a frightful sound. he’ll sit near me and use his paw to gesture that he wants to be picked up. i’ll pick him up and gently stroke his back and kiss his cheek, whispering reassuring words. after a few minutes his body will stop shaking and he’ll calm down. emotions of canines and humans are expressed through gesture, body, face and vocalizations, but they are also communicated on a more subtle level. neuroscience has examined the material nature of emotions in terms of brain activity in relational contexts. emotions and intentions from one individual is communicated as empathy experience toward others, even across species. these sensings have been discussed as involving mirror neurons and spindle cells. while the findings from these studies have advanced empathy studies, it is important to acknowledge that the majority of them were carried out using stressful and harmful techniques on captive animals. mirror neuron activity across species is a field of research closely being watched by biologists and cognitive ethologists because it indicates interspecies empathic responses. mirror neuron activity between individuals, even across species, can be interpreted as involving empathy — felt communications across differing bodies. i learned to understand the dogs’ gestures as expressions of their emotions and intentions, but i also felt them. while playing, tom communicated his happiness by laughing. when i heard this from tom as a pup, i was not fully aware that his breathy expression was a laugh, but i sensed his happiness and it was contagious — i laughed, too. sugi communicated fear using his full body posture, the position of his tail and julie andreyev -responding to dogs 123 ears, and sometimes full body shaking. his body clearly indicated his fearfulness and i felt his fear. biologist gregory berns recently conducted fmri research with dogs to examine what dogs were feeling when they saw human gestures, and smelled the scent of their companion humans (berns). the research experimented with whether dogs understood human gestures as modes of communication, and whether dogs felt good about these communications. this research involved training methods using food rewards for the research dogs to become familiar with the fmri environment. methods were developed to respect the participating dogs’ autonomy. (this key contribution to ethics of care is elaborated on below.) the dogs were taught hand gestures from the researchers as communicative modalities. they developed two hand signals. one communicated that a hotdog will be given to you in the next 15 seconds; the other that a hotdog will not be given to you. the researchers recorded the dogs’ brain responses to the hand signals while they were in the fmri scanner. the intention was to document, via the fmri scans, the dogs’ abilities to anticipate positive potentials. the scans showed that there was significant activity in the caudate region of the brain when the researchers gestured about giving the hotdog, and no significant activity when the researchers gestured that they would not give a hotdog. the caudate region in humans is associated with the expectation of something good. the scans indicated that the dogs understood the researchers’ gestures — they anticipated something good. other unexpected data showed on the scans. as with the research on macaque monkeys, the dogs’ premotor areas were active when they watched the hand gestures. when the human researchers gestured, the dogs’ mirror neurons became active. berns argues that the dogs were interpreting human hand gestures in relation to their own bodies. in other words, dogs interpret the communicative hand gestures that humans make through an understanding of the relationship between the human body and their own. they map the human gesture onto their own body — hand to paw. this indicates empathy from the dogs towards the humans. berns’s research also yielded information about the dogs’ responses to their companion humans. they used a test in which the dogs’ brains where scanned when they smelled the scent of their human companions, without those humans being present. the researchers presented to the dogs pieces of material that had been previously rubbed with the scent of their companion human. the fmri scans of the dogs showed greater brain activity when they sniffed the scent of their companion humans than when they sniffed the scent from unknown humans. the inferior temporal lobe — an area humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 124 associated with memory — was active in addition to the caudate area. berns suggests that the dogs feel good about the familiar scent of their human — perhaps canine love. dogs use other sense-perceptions on a similarly subtle level. animals, including humans, emit odors associated with their psychological states. dogs, like rats, can detect emotion from airborne particles — pheromones — released through glands and the skin (horowitz 80), produced in response to situations that cause alarm, fear, happiness, and comfort. it is likely that dogs can detect these hormonal emissions to sense their humans’ emotional states, even without looking at their faces. to study how dogs respond to human emotional states on a chemical level, research has looked at the cortisol levels in dogs produced in response to stressful vs. playful situations with humans. cortisol, a hormone linked to stress, is elevated in dogs after playing games that involve human voice commands (jones and josephs). they have lower cortisol levels when engaged in free-form play with their humans. during dog agility trials, when their male human companions have elevated testosterone — the hormone associated with dominance and aggression — before the trials, the dogs will have higher cortisol levels at the end of the trials if the team lost (ibid.). communication ethics. the ability to read vocalizations, face, and body gestures for intention and emotion across species potentiates a shared space of meaning towards social cohesion for relational flourishing. these communication modalities must take into consideration difference in cognition and expression. in this section, i will detail aspects of communication ethics with respect to difference. the examination includes a critique of anthropocentric methodologies that have historically led to the loss of autonomy for other animals, and the suffering and ecological degradation that this creates. my argument for communication ethics is informed by ethics of care, ecofeminism, philosophy, and respectful methodologies in neuroscience, cognitive ethology, and evolutionary biology. communication ethics calls for knowledge development through an ethics of response to free-living beings communicating on their terms. this ontological approach provides understanding of the diversity of other beings’ lives. in relation to this exploration, the last portion of the essay develops an expansion on representations of other beings’ communication modalities. art processes are a good place to explore representation because they can experiment with how these forms can influence thought. this aesthetic exploration is detailed in reflections on the processes collaboratively carried out with the dogs in the production of our art project entitled epic_tom. the project used methods offered by advanced technologies, such as motion capture and sound recording, to detail the gestural and vocal communications of tom. new media art forms — computational animation, granular synthesis, and julie andreyev -responding to dogs 125 audio-visual performance — provided means to represent tom’s communicated emotions and intentions. communication ethics is informed by methodologies from naturalist studies, cognitive ethology, and biology that use observational techniques on free-living animals that respect their autonomy. berns has recently expanded on this methodology by developing processes to allow for volitional participation of canines in the fmri studies. the methods include developing safe testing situations, and step-by-step sessions with the dogs’ to gain their trust and willingness to participate (berns, et al.). berns’ team built prototypes of the fmri machine that the dogs would learn to enter on their own terms. the dogs would willingly position their head on a custom built head support. the dogs who participated were rewarded verbally and with food treats when they held their head still. sound trials were used to replicate the loudness of the fmri environment. realizing the hearing sensitivity of the dogs, the research team created a set of canine ear protectors to shield the dogs from the noisy environment. berns stressed that the dogs were able to leave the testing stages at any time. they were never restrained or forced to do things they did not want to do. the evaluation of the dogs’ stress was monitored, and the researchers watched their bodies and gestures to see what the dogs communicated in each stage. some dogs exhibited an unwillingness, and these did not participate further in the research. some dogs enjoyed the challenges, and would become excited when they began their research day. berns’s methods include respect for canine-human bonds; at the end of each day, the dogs returned home to their human companions. berns’s research with dogs included creating ethical standards for their participation based on the standards designed for human participation in university research. research involving humans typically adheres to strict ethical guidelines, including respect for participants’ autonomy. for example, in canadian universities, respect for autonomy is a “core principle,” defined in the tri-council policy statement: “respect for persons incorporates the dual moral obligations to respect autonomy and to protect those with developing, impaired or diminished autonomy. autonomy includes the ability to deliberate about a decision and to act based on that deliberation” (canadian institutes of health research, natural sciences and engineering research council of canada, social sciences and humanities research council of canada, 8). berns applied the ethics of human autonomy demanded by his university to the canine participants taking part in his studies. he included respect for canine participants’ deliberations on the situations proposed to them, and respect for their willingness or unwillingness to participate in these situations. if a dog demonstrated an unwillingness, communicated humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 126 by a refusal to enter the device, or by pulling away, berns ended the session with the dog, or modified his approach. epistemological investigation that incorporates ethics of care is a compassionate methodology that stands in contrast to normative harmful methodologies involving other animals resulting in the diminishment of their autonomy — such as in lab spaces, cages, and zoos used for conducting medical, biological, and cognitive research. incorporating ethics of care in terms of communication ethics is proposed by val plumwood, who argues for “studying-up” on the communicative modalities of other animals by learning their communications, on their terms. she proposed looking at otherthan-human modes of communication — gestural, sonic, pheromone, scent, and magnetic forms (plumwood). by examining difference with regard to other animals’ communications and cultures respect for diversity, and simultaneously a sense of humility, is generated. some biologists and cognitive ethologists have developed novel methods that afford investigation using respectful means, which simultaneously reveal the limitations of human perceptual and cognitive capacity. by recognizing the strangeness of their communications — that they may not be understood by humans — a sense of humility is brought to bear. this humility can be seen as a counteraction of anthropocentrism. i am expanding this thought to propose that attention to the diversity of communications, within and across animal cultures and habitats, is ecological; it is attending to communicating in relation. this complexity of communications happens even though we humans may not be able to discern it. canines contribute to this expansion of respect for communication through their scentperception. they distribute, and read, scent-markings to communicate with each other. dog urine has chemicals that distinguish the marker’s sex, sexual readiness and social confidence. these markers provide qualitative evaluations for dogs to identify each other as individuals. dogs also leave identity markers in their feces, that include secretions from glands near the anus. they release these involuntarily when afraid or alarmed. canines can also leave scent-markers from glands in their paws and cheeks when they scratch or rub on the ground. dogs will sniff these markings in order to receive information on who was previously there. sniffing is a complex activity that includes the ability to refresh continually the intake of airborne particles. muscles in the nostrils draw air in, including the airborne particles of a scent, and simultaneously displace air already in the nose (settles et al.). this old air is julie andreyev -responding to dogs 127 either moved further into the nose cavity, or expelled via side-slits in the nostrils. the simultaneous inhalation and old-air displacement creates air turbulence that helps pull in the new air and particles. when air is pulled deeper into the nose, skin tissue lined with tiny receptor sites sense the odor particles. human noses have six million of these receptor sites; dog noses have three hundred million. in addition to the greater number of receptors, dogs have more genes in the olfactory cells, more olfactory cells, and they have more direct connections from the receptors to olfactory bulbs. this allows dogs to have more immediate perception of their environment, in comparison to human visual perception; the canine scent system has a shorter route to the brain than the human visual system. canine scent perception is assisted by the vomeronasal organ that sits above the mouth in the nose, and has many more receptor sites for odors (adams and wiekamp). other animals, including humans, also have this organ. lizards use it when they lick the air to bring airborne molecules into their mouth, where they are shuttled to the vomeronasal organ.9 dogs make use of the detailed scent analysis by the vomeronasal organ by licking and eating substances, including urine and feces that contain pheromone particles. the combination of more receptor cells, detailed genetic coding, and shorter neurological connections affords dogs an estimated one million times more sensitivity to scent than humans (horowitz 71-73). with this ability, trained dogs can detect a teaspoon of sugar in one million gallons of water (ibid., 72), and they can detect disease in humans. dogs can smell the volatile organic disease-maker particles diffused in the human blood stream and excreted as urine or as exhaled breath, at a concentration of 0.001 parts per million (waggoner et al.). dogs trained to detect cancer markers are best able to do so from exhaled human breath. they can detect cancer with up to 99% accuracy depending on the type of cancer (moser and mcculloch). a rumination on canine scent-perception provides thought on dogs’ relationship to time. dogs can detect how odor dissipates over time and space, such as the scent from a series of footprints along a path. they can tell which way a person went from the character of the odor’s dissipation — a detection of an other’s past movements. dogs can also smell the future. other beings who are approaching, but out of sight, are detectable. this allows dogs to anticipate what is to come. i have seen sugi do this. a few years ago while at an outdoor farmers’ market, sugi pointed his nose west, and excitedly sniffed the air and pulled on the leash. a few moments later, from that direction, judy — our dog-walker — appeared. sugi greeted her with jumps of joy and excited barking. sugi loves to meet familiar people this way in unexpected situations. sugi was not able to see judy because of the throngs of people between them, but he did catch her scent and anticipate her. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 128 the knowledge of other beings’ communication modalities presents a few ethical considerations. first, the reality that other beings’ communication modalities are so strangely different from those of humans demands a rumination on humility. in some of the research examples, direct human perception about other animals’ communication capacities was found to be too limited to provide knowledge on their complexity — with chickadees’ (ficken and popp), canids’ (bekoff, “play signals”), and prairie dogs’ (slobodchikoff), for instance. the research relied on technologies that revealed details about the communications that the researchers would otherwise not have been able to determine. these methods revealed aspects of the other animals’ communications, and simultaneously revealed the limitations of humans. this dual revealing — of complexity in others and limitations in ourselves — demands a critical look at assumptions that have historically been at the core of anthropocentric views. what we now know about some animals’ communications require a reconsideration of how we think of them; we can no longer make limiting assumptions about other animals just because we humans are too limited to understand them. further, the realization that humans may not be able to perceive aspects of the diversity and complexity of others’ communications suggests the possibility that the communications of others are probably much more complex and well-developed than we currently know. this is a humbling thought. it suggests that other animals are more consciously active agents in the world than humans have historical allowed. second, when the knowledge about other beings’ communication modalities is examined from a biocentric point of view, it becomes clear that the belief in human exceptionalism with regard to language is unreflexive. all beings are part of social systems that involve necessary exchanges of information with others in their communities. these exchanges create meaning that assists with social coherence and survival. they do this by communicating with others about themselves and about the world around them, using adaptive communication systems. each species, and even specific communities of individuals in distinct locales — like with the prairie dogs — have their own physical and cultural traits developed as communication modalities that have allowed them to flourish. their communicative modalities are, evolutionarily speaking, the most appropriate ones for them; they are no less, or more, valuable than those of humans. looked at from these biocentric and evolutionary viewpoints, human exceptionalism with regard to language has no basis as a means to evaluate other beings. it does not take into account that each species’s language has been adapted in ways that are intrinsically valuable for them — cultural and social expressions essential for those specific beings. julie andreyev -responding to dogs 129 with these points in mind, i argue that we need to expand the way we sense, feel, and think about other beings’ communications. this expansion can be had through examining interspecies communications for their ethical and ecological potentials. we may expand our sensing and thinking about other beings through the potentials offered as shared communications in proximal relations. an example was provided by sugi with judy and myself, who together shared an interspecies communicative event. sugi used his species-specific communication modalities to anticipate judy’s approach; he pointed judy’s whereabouts to me. upon judy’s arrival, he communicated how he felt about judy. my ability to read the complexity of communications offered by sugi was based on knowledge gained through lived physical experiences with him; it was enhanced by being physically present and paying attention to sugi in that moment. this physical experience using attention led to my understanding of his communication of joy and love for judy. i am proposing communication ethics as a means to advance understanding and compassion for other animals. communication ethics includes sensing and feeling the materiality of the embodied event: subtle communications that happen through sensing our own affective moment, and what is happening for the other. communication ethics pays attention to more-than-human communicative modes, such as gesture, and looks to relations between singular beings across species. communication ethics includes an acceptance of indeterminacy for the sake of expanding loving regard and ecological flourishing. fig. 6. sugi staring at me, attempting to communicate through thought alone. (photo by the author.) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 130 a reflection on the development of communications between the dogs and myself points to how it contributed to improved respect and love for them as individuals. some of our early communications failed because learning to respond appropriately was an incremental affair. additionally, each dog expressed his individual needs and desires in specific ways. responding appropriately included adapting communications with each dog; what worked with tom did not necessarily work with sugi. early on, i could recognize tom’s requests and expressions by getting to know his gestures, pointing and vocalizing. i had more difficulty understanding sugi. sometimes he would just sit and stare at me — maybe he thought i could read his mind (see fig. 6). but sugi taught me to be open to unexpected communications, and the excitement and love that accompanies these. transformation through embodied relations. being in proximity, sensing the dogs’ communications in our day to day experiences expanded my respect for other animals. as i got to know the dogs in those early days, i began to consider that other animals must have similarly rich individual ways of being. free-living animals must have unique histories that inform their worldly projects; animals in industries must have severe and lethal realities imposed on them. i became interested in how animal lives are affected by industries: mice and rats in labs, cows and goats in dairy industries, pigs, lambs, chickens, cows and steers in meat industries, sheep in wool fabrication, ducks and geese in down production, bees in mass agriculture, horses and calves in rodeos, and countless animals in zoos and aquariums. awareness of their suffering, coupled with the understandings brought about through relationships with tom and sugi, compelled me to adopt vegan ethics. views that accept the domination of other animals, are interconnected with the ideology of carnism, practiced in cultures that promote the construction of human identity based on the domination of other animals, carried out through meat-eating, dairyconsumption, and hide-wearing. the interdependence of domination and carnism is theorized in what weitzenfeld and joy call the “3 ns” — normal, natural, necessary (weitzenfeld and joy 23). forms of dominance, such as practiced in meat-eating, in rodeos and zoos, are widely accepted as normal. the ideology of carnism also details a naturalized speciesism by defining which animals are edible and which are not — in western cultures cows are edible and dogs are not. the normalization of meat-eating has been reinforced by false information on what is natural and necessary with regards to food. until recently, meat-eating was promoted as a necessity, but nutritional research has disproved this belief. more widespread julie andreyev -responding to dogs 131 discourse on this research is contributing towards its de-naturalization. the recent growing acceptance of vegetarianism and veganism within western cultures attests to the potential to de-normalize domination of other animals. de-normalizing carnism in contemporary cultures can be informed by comparisons with other age-old cultures that have practiced compassionate relations with other beings, and have provided healthy lifestyles. jain and some buddhist practices include abstinence from eating animals, and care for life in all its forms. many ecofeminist scholars propose veganism as a means for everyday action to counteract the mistreatment of animals. vegan ethics includes the adoption of awareness of the continued abuses in meat production industries that brings unfathomable suffering to individuals, and causes ecological devastation. every year, 56 billion animals are killed for the food industry (excluding the fishing industry). these industries employ inhumane techniques on animals confined under horrific conditions. the chicken industry uses hot-wire debeaking techniques for all chicks. day-old male chicks are gassed or minced because they are considered useless to the industry. hens are crammed in wire battery cages used for egg-laying, kept alive until they decrease their output. free-range chickens are slightly better off, but they too suffer overcrowding. they are kept in large barns without natural light, and are slaughtered after 1 to 2 years. dairy cows live only as long as they are able to produce milk, normally 5 years. many cows suffer mastitis from overly full utters, and lameness from standing on concrete floors. they are subject to forced impregnation each year in order to maintain constant milk production. their calves are taken away shortly after birth; the females raised into the dairy industry, the males killed or raised for the veal industry in small pens for months until they are killed. female pigs suffer gestation crates, pinned down on their sides while suckling their babies who are removed after a few weeks. in 2011, the food and agriculture organization estimated that, internationally, commercial fisheries caught about 100 million tons of fish for that year — an estimated 157 billion individual fishes.10 recreational fisheries catch 47 billion fishes per year, with 36 percent killed, the remainder returned to the water (balcombe 7). in ocean industries, fish are subject to suffering in the fishing processes. once caught and brought onto the ship, fish die from suffocation, being crushed to death by the weight of the netted catch, or by being frozen alive in the boat’s refrigeration units. the fishing industry also causes suffering and ecological devastation through by-catch — un-targeted fish and other animals caught by nets and lines. by-catch can include sea birds, sea turtles, sharks, dolphins, whales, and un-targeted fish such as halibut, flounder, cod, and others. by-catch results in the death of billions of pounds of marine animals every year. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 132 some studies estimate that the amount of global by-catch consists of 40 percent of fish caught — 63 billion pounds per year (keledjian et al). vegan practice not only rejects meat, dairy, clothing, fishing, and lab-testing industries for the animal suffering it creates, but also rejects large-scale agricultural practices for their ecologically detrimental outcomes. in 2012, the united nations environmental programme released information on the ecological effects of the meat industry.11 the livestock industry is among the top two leading contributors to climate change. that determination includes ecological stresses caused by the meat industry in the forms of deforestation, water use, fodder crops, fertilizer pollutants, as well as methane and nitrous oxide emissions from feedlots. some “sustainable” industries argue for freerange practices. however, these are not viable ecological solutions, because they require increased land-use, resulting in vast areas of deforestation (nibert 233-247). fishing industries have significant detrimental effects on ecologies. these include impacts on the species populations killed; the destruction of species inadvertently caught as by-catch; the discards from by-catch that increases scavenger species (garcia); fishing gear losses that subsequently harm marine life and environments (ibid.); fishfarm industries that increase pathogens for wild fish (morton); shrimp-farm industries that reduce lowlands, marshes and mangroves of asian coastal areas (páez-osuna), producing waste that causes eutrophication — plant and algae blooms that decrease oxygen, leading to the death of other marine life. by rejecting these forms of violence, vegan practice can contribute a compassionate and ecological response towards other animals. however, veganism should not be seen as a means to achieve a “good conscience” (cavalieri 62). what is needed is further examination into other normalized forms of violence — both physical and symbolic. for example, vegan shoes and bags made of vinyl rely on oil extraction, thereby causing harm to ecosystems and wild-living animals. forms of violence towards animals are also enacted in how they are represented in cultural forms — zoos, movies, animations, nature programs, books, newspapers, magazines, social media venues and advertising. these cultural products often represent other animals under normalized systems of domination, and therefore they can re-inscribe detrimental thinking. images of cows in pastoral fields, as represented in dairy advertisements, portray an idyllic environment far removed from the hard reality of feedlots. not only do cultural forms falsely represent reality, but real animals are often used in the production of these representations. julie andreyev -responding to dogs 133 communication ethics must include a critical examination into these cultural forms of domination, and how they serve to reinforce detrimental views about other beings. for the purposes of this essay, i will not provide a detailed critique of these popularized forms; representation in popular culture, such as in entertainment is been wellexamined by recent cultural theorists (berger; burt; sorenson). instead, the following section will explore how compassionate forms of representation can be generated by methodologies from ethics of care. more compassionate cultural practices can provide sensitive representations of other animals that can in-turn change minds. for the remainder of this essay, i will narrate the processes of one of my art projects carried out in collaboration with the dogs; a project that aims for a critical representation of caninebeing, and the wonder experienced in relation. epic_tom. in 2007, three years into my companionship with the dogs, i began a new body of work called animal lover. this work began as collaboration with the dogs, and has since expanded to include work with salmon, crows, trees, forests, and other humans. at the core of this interspecies practice is an incorporation of ethics of care as an investigation into the interconnection between ethics and aesthetics. the projects investigate communication, expression, and creativity of more-than-human being, to explore seeing, listening, and responding, for relational and ecological potential. in this section, i will detail the processes of one of these projects, epic_tom, that experiments with communication ethics and canines. for this project, i was interested in exploring how canines use gesture and vocals to communicate. by focusing on canine states of being, i imagined this exploration could provide transformative potential in cultural forms; an expanded view on canines through representing aspects of their expression. for epic_tom, i proposed to investigate these communications as creative content generated by the dogs. this investigation required the development of studio methods to record the dogs’ communications as production material. what processes needed to be in place in order to do this respectfully? interspecies collaborative art methods may include embodied relations with other beings in close proximity. these situations are proto-ethical, in that they present opportunities for ethical responding and improved relating. however, the embodied participation of animals also presents risks in terms of potential harm for those animals involved. how the other animal is treated during the processes has consequences for the animal, for the artist, and for the representations generated for public reception in the final form of the artwork. in order to enact responsive processes in interspecies artmaking, three interconnected questions arise. what methods are needed to enact respectful processes for the animals involved? how may these respectful processes be evidenced in the artwork in order to provide potentials for improved ethics by viewing humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 134 publics? how may the other animals’ creative contributions be carefully represented in the artwork, thereby expanding on representational ethics for cultural forms? the following narration on art production stages for epic_tom attends to each of these questions by folding ethics of care approaches into the studio processes. as a way to investigate the dogs’ full-body communications, i planned a series of sessions in a motion capture (mocap) studio to record data of the dogs’ gestures and movements. motion capture allows for movement to be recorded in three dimensions through cameras surrounding the studio space that read marked points on the moving body. the mocap data accumulated from a session may be used in software to model a moving virtual figure. i anticipated that mocap data from the dogs’ movements could be used to create animations of the dogs, enacting specific gestures and motions as representations of canine expression. potentially, these representations could contribute to sensing canine communications for viewers/listeners experiencing the final project. in order to conduct this investigation, i had to test the dogs’ willingness to participate in the mocap sessions. to gain their interest, i used knowledge generated from previous collaborations with them in similar working situations. for example, in projects carried out between 2007-2011.12 i had developed an evaluative process that involved presenting situations to the dogs and paying attention to their responses. this allowed a project’s production stages to move forward using successful situations, or to modify failed ones. in these previous working encounters, i was careful to provide safe and fun working conditions. when the dogs responded with boredom or reluctance i did not react with negative feedback, but either modified or discarded the approach. when presenting a situation to the dogs, i displayed a calm and confident mood, and used hand gestures, facial expression, and vocal language. for instance, if i wanted to video-record tom playing with a ball, i’d set up the camera, position the ball in the camera’s view, and vocally ask tom to go to the ball, indicating its direction with my eyes and pointing finger. tom would communicate his understanding by moving towards the location and grabbing the ball with his mouth. positive feedback was used with every request that was followed through with a communication of understanding. during my less successful communications, the dogs displayed boredom or indifference by communicating that their attention was directed elsewhere, such as in listening for sounds outside, sniffing the floor, or generally not paying attention. refusing to participate can be more overtly communicated by full body movements away from the situation. as with berns’s experiments with dogs in the fmri environment, tom’s and julie andreyev -responding to dogs 135 sugi’s autonomy was respected, in that they could withdraw from the situation at any time. in these situations, the responses from the dogs may be more nuanced. so attention needed to be paid to how they communicate these more subtle cues. for instance, the dogs communicated uncertainty by raising one paw and staring at me with ears slightly lowered, or by tilted their heads without enacting any other movement. from these interactions, i learned to be clearer with my communications. i was able to design situations for them that posed exciting challenges. each session in the art studio began with the negotiation as a question — do you want to go to work? this question, with an emphasis on the word work, signified a type of fun and challenging activity to come. for the mocap experiment, i was determined to use these care processes for the dogs. this resulted in forms of negotiation that led to unexpected results. on the morning of the first mocap session, i asked tom and sugi if they wanted to go to work. they both communicated their enthusiasm with full body expressions; their legs tensed in a upright stance, their bodies angled towards the door, heads held up, ears forward and up, tails up, eyes wide and round looking into mine — they were ready. they enthusiastically climbed into the car, understanding that the work would occur at a location other than our own studio. the next negotiation involved inviting them into the mocap studio in order to familiarize them with the space. they freely moved around the studio, exploring its scent, sights, and sounds. they met the mocap technician, (richard overington), animator (jay white), and my human collaborator, simon lysander overstall. once they became familiar with the space and humans, they communicated that they were interested in what would happen next — they stood close to me and looked at my face. a practical challenge for the mocap investigation was to design a way to accumulate data from key points on the dogs’ moving bodies. our industrial design consultant (hyuma frankowski) created custom-sized, flexible canine mocap suits that allowed freedom of movement. tiny reflective balls were attached with velcro to the suits, placed at key movement points on their bodies. these reflective points are detected by the cameras and provide data on how the points move in space over time. we discovered that these mocap methods were not suitable for capturing canine facial expressions. the initial head covering portions of the suits were not tolerated by the dogs, who continually tried to remove them with their paws. because these were bothersome for the dogs, we decided to not use the head pieces of the suits. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 136 fig. 7. tom and sugi putting on their mocap suits. (photo courtesy of elisa ferrari.) putting the mocap suits on the dogs was the most contentious part of our negotiation. we started with tom, but he growled and pulled away as we tried to put it on. we stopped trying with tom, and approached sugi instead. he demonstrated willingness by not pulling away. he even seemed to enjoy the attention. we responded to sugi’s cooperation with vocal rewards, smiles, and food snacks. tom observed the attention given to sugi, and he agreed to try again. he communicated this by moving towards his suit when i held it in my hand. sugi's willingness had ignited tom’s competitiveness. a similar negotiation is described by pepperberg in her interactions with alex the parrot. she created a method modified from a version first used by ethologist dietmar todt (pepperberg). the model/rival learning method involves a human interacting with another human in order to model an interaction for a participating animal. in our case, sugi took the role of the rival, in order for us model what we were initially asking from tom. in the mocap studio, finding means for the dogs to freely contribute their expressions and communications was crucial. we applied a process proposed as interspecies generative indeterminacy, in order to allow for the diminishment of human control, thereby foregrounding the dogs’ contributions. indeterminacy, a method first described by john cage, is an art process that provides for diminishment of authorial control, favoring less pre-determined conditions (jaeger 24). in relation to our processes, the julie andreyev -responding to dogs 137 mocap production sessions did not begin with a preconceived idea of movements and expressions, and therefore the results were indeterminate. the dogs enacted their own movements and expressions defined by their motivations; they walked, ran, jumped, sometimes with me and sometimes on their own. being open to the dogs’ expressions in the space, enacted via their own motivations, allowed their contributions to emerge. during these sessions, attention was paid to see if the dogs showed signs of fatigue, boredom or frustration. when tiredness set in, we would end the session, usually going only 2-3 hours. their movements were recorded by the mocap cameras and this provided a database of potential animation material. over a few short work days, the dogs contributed a variety of material. the best data came from one of tom’s jumps for a ball. it showed a sequence of complex movements that indicated tom’s motivation, and the range of his physical abilities. this data became the material for the animator to model a virtual body of tom. we agreed that his animation could be the primary contribution to the visual material for the project. a question arose: what was tom thinking-feeling during this jump? we planned to experiment with animation techniques, and with sound recording and computational methods, to experiment with sensing and representing tom’s thinking-feeling and expression. in the early days when we would play ball, i would marvel at tom’s focus and athleticism. his highly coordinated muscle responses, his compactness as he moved towards the ball, his speed, and focused attention clearly communicated his intent. if the ball was airborne, he would launch himself into the air to meet it, perfectly aligning his body for interception. he expertly anticipated where the ball would be when he arrived. after he grabbed the ball with his mouth, he would relax, the tension from the chase would leave his body, and he would return to ground gracefully on his feet. catching it was clearly satisfying for him. this was communicated by how he held his body as he trotted back towards me. he projected happy pride, with head and tail up. he gently rotated the ball in his mouth, as he massaged it with his teeth — the ball had a pleasant mouth-feel. the event of running and catching communicated a complex of shifting feelings and states of mind. the happiness expressed by tom after he had the ball in his mouth was clear. but i was interested in exploring what he was experiencing just beforehand, as he jumped. marc bekoff proposes a form of attention as “biocentric anthropomorphism,” a critical anthropomorphism allowing for considering the other animal’s point of view (bekoff, “play signals.”). he argues that thinking-like-a-dog, or feeling-like-an-elephant in ethological studies provide for expanded human imagination and compassion, and improved interactions. biocentric anthropomorphism can be applied in interspecies art humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 138 processes, where considering the others’ states of mind and feelings are crucial. in my collaboration with tom, thinking-like-a-dog was an important technique that provided for imaginatively considering his feelings. applied to the developing project, i imagined that tom’s experience in the moment just before catching the ball was protoeuphoric — potent with eagerness, expectation, anticipation. he would be anticipating the euphoria of the catch. this presented questions about the details of his thinkingfeeling. fig. 8. still from animation output for epic_tom, 2016, performance at neutral ground, regina, canada. humans tend to experience a prolonged sense of time when anticipating something good. perhaps this durational shift is experienced by dogs, too, like the dogs anticipating the hotdog rewards in berns’s experiments. how could this be represented in our animation of tom? slow-motion visuals have been used in popular film to depict extended time. for example, in the popular film the matrix, slowed-down action, combined with a circling camera point of view around the hero, serves to represent extended temporal experience felt during cognitive focus and intense physical activity. inspired by its use in the matrix, our animation of tom was developed into a slowmotion loop depicting his airborne jump for the ball, seen from a circling (virtual) camera point of view. we designed the animation to be continually looping without beginning or end, thereby extending this moment to any length needed for the project. tom’s focused attention and eagerness was communicated in his chase and jump for the ball. could these cognitive and emotional states be represented through additional animated forms and sound? simon and i developed other computationally animated objects that could signify aspects of what tom was feeling; an animated tennis ball — julie andreyev -responding to dogs 139 the object of tom’s motivation — orbits in the virtual space, just out of reach of his mouth; a quickly circling halo of leaves animated around the figure of tom creates a juxtaposed movement emphasizing tom’s slowly moving body; a colorful animated aura-pattern surrounds the figure of tom, suggesting his emotional experience. all of these elements are combined against an animated sky-scape or abstract backdrop that contributes an energetic spatial context. how may sound play a part to emphasize tom’s thinking-feeling? we investigated how tom’s vocalizations can contribute proto-euphoria aspects. to do this we experimented with tom in a sound recording studio. as in the mocap studio, i invited tom to get familiar with space before beginning work. when we started the recording session, i talked to him, and encouraged him to respond vocally. i communicated this by pointing at my mouth while asking him questions, signifying that i was requesting that he vocalize his responses. he contributed a variety of vocal utterances during this process. i used positive voice, facial expression, and food rewards to communicate my appreciation of his responses. as in the mocap session, modes of interspecies generative indeterminacy were used to provide a relinquishment of control for the outcomes. tom freely responded as he saw fit, and these vocals were recorded. we worked only as long as tom was interested. after we accumulated hours’ worth of responses, we took these recordings back to my art studio to listen. fig. 9. still from animation output for epic_tom, 2014, performance at aberthau mansion, vancouver, canada. during the listening stage, we found a sequence of utterances that complemented the proto-euphoric qualities of the animation. the recording was a thirty-second-long sequence of five vocal utterances that communicated wonder, desire, excitement, and anticipation. my determination of these emotional qualities was based on evaluating the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 140 utterances in terms of pitch, pitch-shift, and the dynamic changes over time. i relied on my experience with his vocal expressions in previous situations, and what these had expressed. we experimented with extending this vocal recording to complement the time depicted in the animation. we used computational granular synthesis techniques that afforded durational manipulation without changes in pitch. in this way, we were able to extend the 30 second recording to twenty-five minutes to complement the extension of time depicted in the looping animation, but without losing the expressive quality of tom’s untreated utterances. this process revealed the potential to consider the five utterances — now each five minutes long — as movements, as in a musical composition. therefore, these listening processes helped us determine the project’s final form — a live animation and sound performance. granular synthesis can apply constrained randomness to play a large number of tiny individual elements in a sound recording — as small as a few milliseconds. the treatment can add texture to the overall sound field, and the parameters of playback can provide additional sonic character. we listened and analyzed the qualities that resulted from various granular treatments on tom’s vocal recordings. the treatments could be used to emphasize the emotional qualities of each movement, and the shifting complexity of the whole. this approach was used to represent tom’s thinking-feeling over time. for example, the first movement uses granular techniques to emphasize the wonder he feels for the ball; the second movement emphasizes tom’s focused attention; the third movement builds excitement; the fourth movement builds anticipation; and the fifth movement emphasizes proto-euphoria. simon developed software that allowed him to play these sonic treatments live during a performance event. this soundscape is output to speakers in the space, and is used as the score to which participating musicians respond. we re-examined the animation in order to design visuals to complement each sonic movement. as with the sound software, simon developed software that could generate visual qualities that complement the feel of each movement. for instance, the circling aura around tom’s animated body was generated from an algorithm that presents a range of possibilities in terms of color, size, shape, location, and motion (see fig. 9). the software constraints offer a range of possibilities to output an ever-changing aura. the background behind tom is similarly created using a set of constraints in the software that generates a pattern that shifts, in terms of color and shape. therefore, the visual treatment for each movement employs a set of constraints that generate a distinct backdrop for tom’s animated body (see fig. 8). the visual output of the software is julie andreyev -responding to dogs 141 managed by me in the performance, with the results projected onto a screen situated behind the performers. in the project’s performance production stage, we experimented with participatory methods. the methods are informed by performance processes that generate relational potentials between players, and indeterminate results. these afforded the participation of additional musicians who could enhance the sound event. a music method — call and response — was used as a technique to produce patterns of interacting between tom’s vocals and the musicians. we conceived that the live soundscape based on tom’s vocals was a durational call that invited participating musicians’ responses. a phrase sung or played — called — by tom was responded to by the musicians in the form of another phrase, thereby demonstrating relatings among the players, and a process for building the sonic narrative. this approach incorporated methods of deep listening, improvisation, and musicking. for the 2016 performances of epic_tom, we invited local musicians from the host cities to participate. for neutral ground contemporary art forum, regina, we worked with members of the regina symphony orchestra (rso), who contributed violin, cello, and flute; for the pixelache: interfaces for empathy festival, helsinki, we worked with a jazz duo who played drums and stand-up bass. the rehearsal processes in both instances used methods of indeterminacy; we did not determine in advance what sonic details the participating musicians would provide. instead, we briefly described each movement in terms of its emotional character, and instructed the musicians to respond to the generated soundscape of tom’s vocals and the granular treatments — as a score. the visual material of the animations provided further cues for the musicians to follow the building narrative provided by the sequential movements. strict guidelines as to how and what the musicians played were relinquished in favor of emergent sonics. the rehearsals before the performance generated discussion between simon and myself with the participating musicians, in order to agree on their approaches given these directions. the processes were unconstrained, in contrast to more conventional musicmaking situations. this resulted in unique sonic characteristics for each performance. each was toned by the use of the specific instruments, by the participating musicians’ preferred genre, and by the approaches generated from the discussions. for example, the members of the rso warned that they normally perform under highly constrained conditions set by the musical composition, or by the conductor. for them, improvising responses to the emergent sonics over time was an unfamiliar method, but they were interested in experimenting with this approach. the musicians asked about the details of tom’s experience. it was through the insights generated by this discussion that the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 142 musicians determined what they would contribute. they suggested a building pitch shift — low to high pitched notes — as a musical phrase, to build emotional tension. this phrase would enhance the emotional character of tom’s vocals and the tension between the ball and tom depicted in the animation.13 similarly, in helsinki, the drummer and bass player discussed with us the cumulative emotional character of the movements towards a whole. this understanding afforded drum and bass approaches that supported the soundscape’s trajectory. the drums, in particular, can be heard to build in speed and complexity over the duration of the whole performance. overall, we suggested that the participating musicians provide an enactment of attention to tom’s sonics, and that this attention inform their responses. “deep listening,” a technique first developed by pauline oliveros in 1979, involves paying attention, as thoroughly as possible, to the sonic characteristics of a given moment. deep listening processes support a form of democratic listening (van nort et al.). similar methods were proposed by john cage who emphasized the importance of making an “identification with what is here and / now” (jaeger). deep listening can be applied to sound performances that use call and response methods, such as in our project. in order to respond to the sonics unfolding, a listener must enact two forms of attention: focus on the details of the immediate sonic event — such as a series of pitches —, and a global focus on the sonics of the total soundscape. these forms of attention were applied in the performances of epic_tom, where the participating musicians use deep listening as attention to the emergent characteristics — texture, pitch and rhythm — of tom’s call. the musicians combine this attention with improvisational techniques to model their sonics. improvisational techniques are important to apply in this process, because it is not possible to fully anticipate the details of soundscape; the musicians must play adaptively, in contrast to how they may play in more constrained musical events. globally, the musicians follow the structure of the soundscape based on its five movements and their unique treatments. these methods afford an enactment of ethical listening, and response to more-than-human expression. therefore, the methods propose a novel process for the participating musicians, and for the audience. julie andreyev -responding to dogs 143 fig. 10. epic_tom, 2016 performance at neutral ground, regina, canada, showing the participating musicians, members of the regina symphony orchestra—simon macdonald violin, simon fryer cello, marie-noelle berthelet flute (left); simon lysander overstall and the author (right). epic_tom is not a musical work per se, but more crucially an action. musicking, in contrast to music, describes a social act that establishes relationships — among performers, with an audience, and with larger societies. the project’s participatory methods with tom and the musicians, and with the audience, are a form of “musicking” (small). canine voice and communicative gesture are the focus of social sound-making with improvising musicians, thereby proposing interspecies creativity on the fly in front of a public. the project explores more-than-human relating through a positive relinquishing of human-centric authorship towards interspecies creativity. therefore, the project takes on larger societal dimensions where attention to other-thanhuman communication and creativity is demanded. epic_tom experiments with uncertainty and interspecies generative indeterminacy, thereby undermining assumptions about mastery. fig. 11. epic-tom performance at interactive futures 2014: more-than-human worlds compassionate interactions and the ethics of aesthetics, symposium, april 24-25, 2014, vancouver. (photo courtesy of leah weinstein.) ___________________________________________________________________________ humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 144 notes 1. the us produces 6,200,000 puppies per year combining stats on household births, small breeders and commercial breeders. the population of dogs is stable, so coppinger claims that that means 6,200,000 dogs die each year. 4,000,000 dogs spend part of a year in an animal shelter, 2,400,000 are euthanized or die in these shelters (coppinger and coppinger). clearly there is a need to adopt dogs rather than breed more. 2. pound for pound, dogs eat more than humans, generally twice as much. this is because the normal canine body temperature — 101.5 degrees fahrenheit — is higher than human’s 98.6. it takes more calories to maintain this higher temperature. dogs who spend time outside in cold temperatures have to generate even more heat and eat more. in terms of weight, active puppies need two to three times as many calories as a resting adult dog (coppinger and coppinger). 3. views within homeopathic medical practice suggest that vaccinations can cause overstimulation to the immune system in some dogs leading to allergies and other ailments (hamilton 372-382; goldberg). 4. both bekoff (“wild justice”) and horowitz (196-204) discuss observations of justice and fairness in canine play. 5. horowitz (78-79) argues that dogs are not necessarily inclined to be scent-trackers without training. 6. oxford english dictionary. the definition includes 1. eating at, or pertaining to, the same table. 2. biol. applied to animals or plants which live as tenants of others (distinguished from parasitic). 7. neuroscience can offer a means for evidencing animal neurological activity. however, it should not be the sole basis of making determinations about animal consciousness including emotions and intentionality. nor should it be a basis for extending ethics to other animals. neuroscience can be used detrimentally to support speciesism based on comparisons of other animal’s neurological systems to those of humans—a form of anthropocentrism. further, neurological experiments on other animals may be conducted in ways that compromise that being’s autonomy, and/or cause harm. 8. see projects “aria,” “epic_tom”, and “rockstar” (andreyev). julie andreyev -responding to dogs 145 9. rhinos, elephants, bats, cats, and humans also have the vomeronasal organ. it is speculated that this organ is used by humans to detect pheromones from other individuals (mcclintock). 10. some researchers suggest that this number is underestimated by more than half over the last half decade because of poor monitoring of the industry (balcombe 7). 11. the report states that most studies that attribute meat production as 10-35 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions; differences based on excluding or including deforestation (schwarzer). 12. aria (2009); bikeride (2009); screen tests (2009); rockstar (2010); wait (2011). 13. see video documentation here: http://julieandreyev.com/epic-tom/. this link shows a 4 min video and sound output from performance at neutral ground, may 21, 2016. produced in collaboration with members of the regina symphony orchestra—simon macdonald violin, simon fryer cello, marie-noelle berthelet flute—curated by brenda cleniuk, neutral ground contemporary art forum, regina. works cited adams, d. r., and m. d. wiekamp. “the canine vomeronasal organ.” journal of anatomy 138.4 (1984): 771-787. andreyev, julie. artist website. www.julieandreyev.com balcombe, jonathan. what a fish knows: the inner lives of our underwater cousins. scientific american / farrar, straus, giroux, 2016. bekoff, marc. animals matter: a biologist explains why we should treat animals with compassion and respect. shambala, 2007. _____. the emotional lives of animals: a leading scientist explores animal joy, sorrow, and empathy—and why they matter. new world library, 2007. _____. “play signals as punctuation: the structure of social play in canids.” behaviour 132.5 (1995): 419-429. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 146 _____. “wild justice and fair play: cooperation, forgiveness, and morality in animals.” biology and philosophy 19.4 (2004): 489-520. berger, john. “why look at animals?” about looking. random house, 1980. 3-28. berns, gregory. how dogs love us: a neuroscientist and his adopted dog decode the canine brain. houghton mifflin harcourt, 2013. berns, gregory, andrew m. brooks, & mark spivak. “functional mri in awake unrestrained dogs.” plos one 7.5 (2012): 1-7. burt, jonathan. “the illumination of the animal kingdom: the role of light and electricity in animal representation.” society and animals 9.3 (2001): 203-228. calarco, matthew. zoographies: the question of the animal from heidegger to derrida. columbia up, 2008 canadian institutes of health research, natural sciences and engineering research council of canada, social sciences and humanities research council of canada. tricouncil policy statement: ethical conduct for research involving humans, december 2010. coppinger, raymond, and lorna coppinger. dogs: a new understanding of canine origin, behavior, and evolution. u of chicago p, 2001. coren, stanley. how to speak dog: mastering the art of dog-human communication. free press, 2000. damasio, antonio. the feeling of what happens: body and emotion in the making of consciousness. harcourt brace, 1999. _____. descartes’ error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. penguin, 2005. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. fordham up, 2008. derrida, jacques and elizabeth roudinesco. violence against animals: for what tomorrow: ... a dialogue. stanford up, 2004. julie andreyev -responding to dogs 147 de waal, franz. the age of empathy: nature’s lessons for a kinder society. three rivers press, 2009. donovan, josephine & carol j. adams, eds. the feminist care tradition in animal ethics. columbia up, 2007. ficken, millicent sigler, and james w. popp. “syntactical organization of the gargle vocalization of the black-capped chickadee, parus atricapiffus.” ethology 91.2 (1992): 156-168. garcia, s.m. the ecosystem approach to fisheries. food and agriculture organization of the united nations, 2003. goldberg, michael. vancouver animal wellness hospital. web. accessed, june 28, 2016. hamilton, don. homeopathic care for cats and dogs: small doses for small animals. north atlantic books, 1999. horowitz, alexandra. inside of a dog: what dogs see, smell and know. scribner, 2009. jaeger, peter. john cage and buddhist ecopoetics. bloomsbury academic, 2013. jones, a. c., & r. a. josephs. “interspecies hormonal interactions between man and the domestic dog (canis familiaris).” hormones and behavior 50.3 (2006): 393-400. joy, melanie. why we love dogs, eat pigs and wear cows: an introduction to carnism, the belief system that enables us to eat some animals and not others. conari press, 2010. keledjian, amanda, gib brogan, beth lowell, jon warrenchuk, ben enticknap, geoff shester, michael hirshfeld, & dominique cano-stocco. “wasted catch: unsolved problems in u.s. fisheries.” oceana march 2014. mcclintock, m. k. “menstrual synchrony and suppression.” nature 229 (22 january 1971): 244-245. morton, alexandra. “opinion: save our salmon get diseased fish out of pacific ocean.” the vancouver sun june 17, 2016. web. accessed june 14, 2016. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 148 moser, emily, & michael mcculloch. “canine scent detection of human cancers: a review of methods and accuracy.” journal of veterinary behavior 5.3 (2010): 145-152. neutral ground contemporary art forum. regina, canada. web. accessed 26 january 2017. nibert, david a. animal oppression and human violence: domesecration, capitalism, and global conflict. columbia up, 2013. oliver, kelly. animal lessons: how they teach us to be human. columbia up, 2009. páez-osuna f. “the environmental impact of shrimp aquaculture: causes, effects, and mitigating alternatives.” environmental management 28.1 (2001): 131-40. pepperberg, irene m. alex & me: how a scientist and a parrot discovered a hidden world of animal intelligence—and formed a deep bond in the process. harper, 2009. plumwood, val. environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason. routledge, 2002. pongrácz, p., c. molnár, a. miklósi a, & v. csányi. “human listeners are able to classify dog (canis familiaris) barks recorded in different situations.” journal of comparative psychology 119.2 (2005): 136-44. poole, joyce. coming of age with elephants: a memoir. hyperion, 1996. racca, anaïs and kun guo, kerstin meints, & daniel s. mills. “reading faces: differential lateral gaze bias in processing canine and human facial expressions in dogs and 4-year-old children.” plos one 7.4 (2012). web. accessed 24 january 2017. rizzolatti, giacomo, & luigi craighero. “the mirror-neuron system.” annual review of neuroscience 27 (2004): 169-192. sandilands, catriona. the good-natured feminist: ecofeminism and the quest for democracy. u of minnesota p, 1999. settles, g.s., d. a. kester, & l. j. dobson-dreibelbis. “the external aerodynamics of canine olfaction.” sensors and sensing in biology and engineering. f. g. barth, j. a. c. humphrey, and t. w. secombe (eds.). wien, 2003. 323-355. julie andreyev -responding to dogs 149 slobodchikoff, con. chasing doctor dolittle: learning the language of animals. st. martin’s press, 2012. small, christopher. musicking: the meanings of performing and listening. wesleyan up, 1998. sorenson, john. ape. reaktion books, 2009. stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. “jacques derrida.” revised wed. mar 19, 2014. web. accessed june 25, 2016. van nort, doug, paulie oliveros and jonas braasch. 2013. “electo/acoustic improvisation and deeply listening machines.” journal of new music research 42.4 (1999): 303-324. the wachowski brothers, dir. the matrix. warner bros., 1999. waggoner, l. p., w. jones, m. williams, j. m. johnston, c. edge, &j. a. petrousky. “effects of extraneous odours on canine detection.” proceedings of the 2nd annual conference on enforcement and security technologies. the international society for optical engineering. december, 1998. 355-62. walton, stuart. a natural history of human emotions. grove press, 2006. weitzenfeld, adam, and melanie joy. “an overview of anthropocentrism, humanism, and speciesism in critical animal theory.” defining critical animal studies: an intersectional social justice approach for liberation. nocella ii, anthony, j., john sorenson, kim socha, and atsuko matsouka (eds). peter lang, 2014. 3-27. microsoft word margini-chez h u m a n i m a l i a 9:2 reviews matt margini phantom limbs keridiana w. chez, victorian dogs, victorian men: affect and animals in nineteenthcentury literature and culture. the ohio state university press, 2017. 212 pp. $69.95 toward the end of the excellent victorian dogs, victorian men, keridiana w. chez makes a claim that should sound plausible to anyone who has ever observed the pampered pooches of contemporary american metropoli: “we are not merely ‘other victorians’ (to paraphrase michel foucault’s famous 1978 opinion); we are obtusely and profligately ‘victorian’ about our pets” (152). dog spas, doggy daycare, dog high chairs, dog perfume, the westminster kennel club, the movie a dog’s purpose, sarah mclachlan crooning over a forsaken pitbull — so many phenomena across the landscape of contemporary american petkeeping have roots stretching back to the matt margini -phantom limbs 193 nineteenth century, when, “by legislative fiat as well as social and cultural transformation, dogs in england and the united states were removed from the hands of the working classes and remade into objects of love and leisure for the bourgeoisie” (2). chez is not the first thinker to address this late victorianism in the biopolitical arrangements of late capitalism; in when species meet, for instance, donna haraway admits that the “nineteenth-century family invented middle-class pet keeping,” and then adds: “what a pale shadow of today’s doings that was!” nor is it chez’s main project to apply lessons from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first: a historicist at heart, she remains squarely within her period. but there is much that feels suggestively (or at least potentially) present-tense in her explorations of nineteenth-century humandog arrangements. if we are late victorians, we regard dogs not necessarily as people, nor necessarily as commodities: we regard them as prostheses. chez’s argument is consistent yet complex: feeling enervated and detached from others by the combined effects of rising urbanization and industrial capitalism, the nineteenthcentury british and american bourgeoisie “developed the use of animal companions as emotional prostheses, attaching dogs to themselves to enhance their affective capacities and to complete their humanity” (2). dogs came to be seen as necessary members of (or accessories to) the middle-class household in order to repair and consolidate affective pathways between people that had become denatured. in a similar way, participating in the nascent humane movement — a transatlantic moral discourse that chez sees as totally intertwined with the anthropocentric logic of petkeeping — became a way to proclaim that one was “human.” the prosthesis argument is not entirely new. in his 2009 essay “anthroprosthesis, or prosthetic dogs,” which chez addresses, ivan kreilkamp discusses how the texts of the victorian age — “a thoroughly prosthetic age,” in his estimation — contain plenty of examples of humans using animals as “tools” that simultaneously “extend the human and mark the human being’s difference” (37). chez takes a little bit of issue with this formulation by noting that pets constitute humanity through their inclusion, rather than their disavowal. for kreilkamp, prosthesis is yet another ingenious function of agamben’s “anthropological machine,” the vast and apparently inescapable set of conceptual apparatuses that we use to shore up human exceptionalism. for chez, prosthesis is more of a bug than a feature, or at least a feature with a lot of bugs. as she notes, prosthetic human-dog arrangements came burdened with a set of unsettling implications, including the possibility that the human was always already a creature with a “lack,” and the prospect that “the human might be more attached to the dog than a mere prosthetic appendage deserved, thus inverting the proper power dynamic humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 194 between human user and animal tool” (20). still, her overarching point is basically compatible with kreilkamp’s argument. prosthetic dogs were not threats to human identity and human exceptionalism, even if the logic of prosthesis itself had destabilizing implications. they were crucial tools of distinction and self-definition. the truly new insights in chez’s book lie in her treatment of the historicity of this prosthetic arrangement. the overall configuration stays the same throughout the nineteenth century: whether pampered or rescued, dogs remain tools that humans use to construct themselves as moral subjects. but the definition of “moral subject” changes over the course of the century, as does the definition of the dog itself. in the first half of the nineteenth century, as chez explores through illuminating readings of novels by charles dickens and george eliot, dogs are thoroughly loyal and intrinsically subservient beings that aid in the consolidation of family and community ties. even in incredibly dysfunctional homes — such as, for instance, the “home” shared by the villainous bill sykes and the prostitute nancy in oliver twist, a home wracked by domestic violence, eventually shattered by murder — the mere presence of a dog produces something closer to harmony, something closer to care, something closer to an ideal family arrangement predicated on the free flow of empathetic identification. there isn’t much love between sikes and nancy, chez admits, but the presence of sikes’ dog, bull’s-eye, as an abused double of nancy (and an abusive double of sikes) nevertheless creates a powerful network of feeling between them, creating a negative image of the family that has all the same affective infrastructure. if the ideal dog was, in the victorian imaginary, a hearth-like centerpiece of the emotional life of the home, “against all odds, even such an un-ideal dog as oliver twist’s bull’s-eye forms bridges of empathy between readers, the criminal bill, and the companion he eventually murders” (27). in eliot’s adam bede, adam’s dog similarly helps solidify a circle of moral consideration that includes the family, but also extends further outward. in 1858, a friend wrote to eliot feeling “in charity with the whole human race” because of the novel’s portrayal of sympathetic canines. over the course of the century, however, dogs transition from being crucial aides to the consolidation of family and community to being the co-constructors of gender categories and other forms of social exclusion — including a model of masculine individuality that was predicated on, rather than averse to, sympathy and emotion. (as chez points out, it was assumed that more “humane” colonial administrators would be more effective ones.) hence the book’s title: in its second half, it becomes about how victorian dogs constructed victorian men. chez ends with an incisive reading of white fang and the call of the wild that reveals a very different version of the same prosthetic matt margini -phantom limbs 195 configuration: rather than a subservient and unconditionally loving pooch aiding in the “affective resuscitation” of a cold bourgeois subject (a victorian who would be able to love, were he or she not stifled by the cold logic of industrial capitalism), the novels depict an aloof, wolf-like dog bestowing self-reliance upon its master. chez calls white fang a “bare-dog,” riffing on agamben: an imagined version of the original dog, the primeval dog, denuded of human influence — a “rewinding” of the “evolutionary tape” (131). her argument builds to a satisfying conclusion when she shows how this creature — an exemplar of detachment rather than attachment — might have been a prosthesis as well. with her groundbreaking the animal estate in 1987, the historian harriet ritvo was perhaps the first victorianist to look at the english among “other creatures in the victorian age”; since then, there has been a large and growing scholarly conversation about the place of animals in the fabric of the victorian social world, especially over the last 15 years or so. chez joins the ranks of several recent studies that focus on the dog in particular (see also kathleen kete’s the beast in the boudoir, beryl gray’s the dog in the dickensian imagination, sarah amato’s beastly possessions: animals in victorian consumer culture, and monica flegel’s pets and domesticity in victorian literature and culture), often using literary texts — especially panoramic victorian novels — to locate the dog’s strange, shifting, and sometimes paradoxical place in a highly stratified society. in an essay for the influential 2007 collection victorian animal dreams, kreilkamp suggested that victorian dogs were “metonymical human beings,” borrowing a phrase from lévistrauss to connote their inconsistent and contingent status as quasi-humans: “pet dogs, in british culture, typically possess a tantalizingly incomplete identity: they are granted a name and a place by the hearth in the family circle, but only temporarily, only as long as their human master permits it” (81). more recently, monica flegel has suggested that they played the role of complex surrogates, childor partner-replacements who could fill out the “affective economy” of the home, but also queer it and deconstruct it by revealing its contingency on more-than-human participation. chez’s argument is similar to both claims; she treats the dog as an ambiguous and partial member of the household that always threatens to reveal its unstable foundations. but she also commits consistently to a metaphor that eschews place in favor of function. the victorian dog, in her view, is always already a technology, even and especially when it is celebrated for being a subject of its own. it is possible that she clings to this metaphor too consistently. in nineteenth-century novels, which draw beings into webs of relationship by design, dogs rarely appear detached from humans. in lyric poetry, however, their irreducible alterity is a frequent humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 196 and vexatious subject, as is their resistance to reductionist, instrumentalizing definitions of what they are and what they are meant to do. in 1874, robert browning, a noted humane activist himself, published a poem about a dog named tray who jumps into a river to save a doll from drowning, thinking it is a human child. the poem ends with a callous vivisectionist resolving to capture the dog and discern “how brain secretes dog’s soul” — an image that recapitulates but also satirizes the idea that dogs have a moral “soul,” an intrinsic orientation toward the lives of others, that humans can emulate and appropriate for themselves. a similar thread of epistemological self-doubt runs through the lyrics about flush, the brownings’ cocker spaniel, by elizabeth barrett browning (famously extrapolated into a novel by virginia woolf). in “flush or faunus” (1855) she begins in the mood of a confident portraitist, with a beguiling assertion: “you see this dog.” over the course of the poem, however, it becomes clear that she deeply doubts her ability to capture him at all — or to capture what exactly is going on when “a head as hairy as faunus, thrust[s] its way / right sudden against my face.” by the end of the poem, she has committed completely to the “faunus” metaphor, envisioning flush as a spiritual reincarnation of the “the true pan, / who, by low creatures, leads to heights of love.” she defines him as an affective conduit: a “low creature” who shows her what “love” truly is. but the vivid depiction of their physical intimacy makes this abstract definition feel deeply unsatisfying. it remains an incomplete account of a being whose nature will always exceed her conceptual grasp. whym chow: flame of love [1906], a bizarre and ostentatious collection of lyric poems by the aunt-niece duo michael field about their dead chow dog, strikes a similar chord: they, too, allow the dog to remain at a remove from their own instrumentalizing and allegorizing gaze, even as they compare him (with a similar restlessness) to mythic figures like bacchus, the risen christ, etc. and yet, whym chow might have made for an excellent sixth chapter to chez’s study, even if it complicates the narrative that, by this time, the dog was predominately an accessory to the male ego. her prosthesis concept is revealingly compatible with the way the fields envision the dog as an affective gobetween, a mediator of their affection for each other, playing the role of “holy spirit” in their ultra-catholic, trinitarian imaginary. also resonant is the way his very presence disrupts individualistic models of identity, creating a form of interspecies identity-inrelation in which all parties are complexly contingent on one another. this is the interesting side of the prosthesis arrangement from a posthumanist perspective: the way it produces queer forms of multispecies interdependency and intercorporeality, in which the human, always already “lacking,” is completed by a radically nonhuman entity. many of the readings in victorian dogs show us something that almost looks like matt margini -phantom limbs 197 vinciane despret’s concept of “anthropo-zoo-genesis”: animal and human, always intertwined, constructing and transforming each other in a ceaseless pas de deux. almost, but not quite. the dark side of the prosthesis arrangement is clear: a prosthesis is an object, always already instrumentalized, its sharp edges filed down until it becomes a useful tool. chez finds a useful (if utterly disturbing) crystallization of this dark side in an 1890 scientific american article that describes an attempt to graft a dog’s bone into a boy’s leg. so far, so good, except the surgery involved grafting the entire dog onto the boy’s leg: the boy and the dog were bound on a cot … both under the influence of anaesthetics, but the dog, which was a black spaniel, was incased in a hardened plaster of paris cast, his right foreleg and head and tail being free … great care has to be taken that the animal does not die, for it is a live, not a dead, dog bone that is wanted for the void in the boy’s leg… the image is grotesque for all sorts of reasons. but perhaps the worst part, as chez observes, was that the dog’s vocal cords were cut so that it wouldn’t intrude upon the arrangement with outward signs of suffering. the procedure necessarily involved foreclosing the possibility of interspecies sympathy: “silencing the other’s voice and immobilizing its body — creating a life without a life” (19). the prosthetic arrangements that she explores throughout her study were more metaphorical than literal, of course. but they, too, required ontological reducing or demoting the dog in ways that could be easily effaced. “in the ongoing process of togethering,” she writes, “the other is first flattened into a limited, unidimensional subject position.… the nineteenth century’s human-dog attachment was intimate yet hierarchical: like a piece of a planet breaking off into space, then reeled in by that planet’s gravitational force, the other became a satellite tethered in the self’s orbit” (59). this is a depressing summation — all the more depressing since self-doubting voices like barrett browning and the fields are absent from her study. the narrative of victorian dogs is pessimistic, tracing a movement toward greater modes of dominance, anthropocentrism, and ontological certainty within an arrangement that can often seem refreshingly complex, de-hierarchized, and queer. in some ways, though, this pessimism feels necessary. it provides a brisk corrective to discourses of multispecies utopianism that often stalk the human-dog relationship, not just in popular discourse but in animal studies as well. legions of dog books on the bargain shelf at barnes & noble tell us — in their titles, in their breathless prose, in their humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 2 (spring 2018) 198 inspirational images — that it’s a good thing that dogs have helped us realize what it means to be human. in a strange way, animal studies can sometimes tell us the same thing, celebrating human-dog entanglement as though entanglement itself were an intrinsic good. in when species meet, donna haraway, one of chez’s persistent interlocutors, seems quite in favor of the ways that dogs and humans have always been “co-constitutive” species, shaping each other in complex ways. chez is less sanguine, and she has victorian literature on her side. she demonstrates how entanglements can breed hierarchies, how a messy and inchoate relationship can be just another place where anthropocentrism takes root. she shows us how even the most self-effacing rhetoric of interspecies dependency — “who saved whom?”, ask the bumper stickers — can be another means of constructing humanness after all. works cited amato, sarah. beastly possessions: animals in victorian consumer culture. u toronto p, 2015. flegel, monica. pets and domesticity in victorian literature and culture: animality, queer relations, and the victorian family. routledge, 2015. field, michael. whym chow: flame of love [1906]. eragny press, 1914. gray, beryl. the dog in the dickensian imagination. routledge, 2014. haraway, donna j. when species meet. u minnesota p, 2007. kete, kathleen. the beast in the boudoir: petkeeping in nineteenth-century paris. u california p, 1994. kreilkamp, ivan. “anthroprosthesis, or prosthetic dogs.” victorian review 35.2 (fall 2009): 36-41. morse, deborah denenhol. victorian animal dreams: representations of animals in victorian literature and culture. ashgate, 2007. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate. harvard up, 1987. microsoft word sax-semken-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:1 reviews boria sax the question of the animal great blue heron steven h. semken, soul external: rediscovering the great blue heron. illustrations and design by andrew r. driscoll. north liberty, ia: ice cube press, 2015. 139 pp., $24.95 hc. at the start of the modern age, descartes was tormented by doubts about all he had been taught, and despaired of finding the answers in books, since “there is nothing one can imagine so strange or unbelievable that it has not been said by one or other of the philosophers” (39). he gave up study, sold some of his lands, and resolved to seek for answers in experience instead, by attaching himself to an army and travelling the world. once again, he was disillusioned, since people in different countries were all convinced their customs and religion were right, yet there seemed to be no way to determine if that were true. finally, he decided to disregard all he had been taught, and to search for the truth inside himself. he published two stylized accounts of his endeavor, discourse on method and meditations. boria sax -the question of the animal great blue heron 143 descartes aspired to place knowledge on an entirely new foundation, so that people of learning and intelligence would no longer disagree radically with one another. today, it is easily apparent to scholars that the ideas of descartes were far from being as original as he imagined, but were a sort of pastiche of unacknowledged borrowings from previous thinkers such as plato, aristotle, st. anselm, and st. augustine. what descartes never suspected is that he could not lay aside the analytic frameworks of those thinkers, since they were by then implicit in his language. in contemporary times, we are again plagued by the most fundamental doubts, such as those descartes so cogently described. in much the same way as descartes tried to escape his debt to aristotle, contemporary thinkers such as derrida, particularly in the animal that therefore i am, are trying to move away from the heritage of descartes. derrida, unlike descartes, is not trying to obscure intellectual borrowings, and his work is full of references to thinkers such as kant, bentham, adorno, and heidegger. instead, derrida tries to succeed where descartes failed by aspiring to transcend the limitations of his language. derrida follows in many ways the agenda pioneered by descartes. the seventeenthcentury thinker attempted to doubt everything systematically, to find what would best resist his skepticism; derrida, in a parallel way, looks for whatever will resist deconstruction. he finds descartes’s conclusion, that personal existence is the one thing that is most difficult to doubt, too anthropocentric. instead, he posits that the existence of his cat is most apparent. but it is hard to say whether the difference between descartes and derrida on this point is more than a matter of emphasis or rhetoric. both, at this beginning of their philosophical investigations, have only ascertained that something, as yet undescribed, exists, and the way it is designated may be almost arbitrary. derrida explicitly questions the categories in which we traditionally would comprehend its reality, saying it does not truly fall into the classification of “cat” or, even more significantly, that of “animal.” in what may now well be the most famous passage in his work, derrida explains that, “nothing can ever rob me of the certainty that what we have here is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized” (9). perhaps, but yet i am disappointed that, after rejecting the category of “animal,” derrida humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 144 continues to use it almost obsessively for the rest of his book. one might rationalize the decision as a concession to necessity, but that would be close to an admission of failure. soul external: rediscovering the great blue heron by stephen semken and andrew r. driscoll in many ways fulfills the agenda that derrida announced but did not pursue. there is no indication whatsoever that this design was intentional, though the book could conceivably be read, among other ways, as either a vindication of derrida’s agenda or a criticism of derrida’s own failure to follow it consistently. incredible as this may seem, it is a book about animals, specifically the great blue heron, in which the word “animal” is never used. the author’s probably understood in an almost “instinctive” way, that to call the heron an “animal” would invite generalizations, which, in turn, could only detract from its singularity. semken describes the great blue heron, the subject of his book, by invoking the motif of a “soul external,” which is common in myth and folklore. the concept also, as it happens, corresponds remarkably closely to derrida’s description of his relationship to his cat. soul external is an extended meditation that embraces great themes such as god, death, and magic, while staying focused on one amazing creature. the illustrator and designer, andrew driscoll, is rightly listed as a co-author, since the book might not exist, and would certainly not be the same, without his contribution. the book employs several different typefaces, which are carefully synchronized with the text. this will be an extremely difficult book to digitalize. the meaning depends heavily on visual cues, pacing, and associations, but very little on traditional rhetorical structures. as a result, the text often hovers precariously between profundity and nonsense, but perhaps that is, in any case, simply the condition of philosophy. possibly, the visual emphasis is a deliberate means to move beyond limitations of traditional texts, especially the more literal types of thinking associated with them. it is a book that one does not so much read through as immerse oneself in. the external, or separable, soul is a common motif in folktales throughout the world. in western culture, the most popular example is the norwegian tale “the giant who had no heart,” recorded by asbjörnsen and moe, but similar tales have been collected in germany, russia, america and elsewhere. in it, the hero must overcome an antagonist, who has hidden his soul away in an egg, which is enclosed, a bit like a matryoshka doll, in a series of concealing objects. this comes up again in the j. k. rowling’s harry potter books, where the villain, valdemort, has divided his soul into seven parts, and harry must destroy all of them to defeat him. in western philosophy, however, the soul has been almost universally assumed to be physically within the body. descartes placed it boria sax -the question of the animal great blue heron 145 in the pineal gland. many skeptics, unable to locate the soul in any part of the brain, have declared it to be non-existent, but, if semken, driscoll, and derrida are correct, they were looking for it in the wrong places. where should they look? soul external is, doubtless intentionally, a very difficult book to summarize or paraphrase, and it is far closer to poetry than to any analytic discipline. i read it as an account of a pilgrimage, in search of the separable soul. is the soul a particular great blue heron? is it the species of herons? the wetland where many of them live? or maybe the soul is semken’s mentor, horatio flagstone, a mystical ornithologist who published a book on the great blue heron on the mid-western prairie in 1933. like a pilgrim, semken tries to retrace flagstone’s steps, enquiring about him in a small village. with a few oral and written clues, semken manages to find a hand-written manuscript entitled “wild testament,” which flagstone placed in the hollow of a sycamore tree, and which contains cryptic descriptions of individual herons he observed. the closest thing to finding the soul, expressed a very enigmatic way, comes at the end of the book, when the authors tell us that spirit is the “fifth element,” present everywhere, yet always elusive. the volume concludes, “if in a pouring rainstorm, we can stand and take comfort beneath a rookery of heron nests, then, for a brief moment, all is as wise as a world in creation. all is steeped in primordial fluid, bloody as roots, old as the order of angels, safe as good thoughts, sharp as quick scents” (p. 106) not many people remember this today, but both ecocriticism and animal studies were originally formed in the 1980s, in large part in reaction to the literary theory, especially deconstruction, that dominated the elite college campuses in the united states at the time. by focusing more on living subjects, these movements hoped to circumvent the rarified level of abstraction that prevailed in the study of literature. they looked for inspiration to authors like henry david thoreau, aldo leopold, edward abbey, and paul shepherd. their essays were often vividly descriptive, with the more philosophical passages placed discretely, usually in transitions from one subject to the next. semken and driscoll belong to that tradition. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 146 at about that time, i founded the organization nature in legend and story (nilas) for similar reasons, hoping to revive narrative as a means of investigating the natural world. i and my companions soon were inundated by supporters of high theory, who were far more numerous, self-assured, and established than ourselves. i wanted to differentiate our movement by calling it something like “nature narratives” or “totem literature,” but was overruled by others who went for the more widely recognized “animal studies.” we put out one book entitled what are the animals to us? approaches from science, religion, folklore, literature, and art, based on papers presented at our conference in 2001, which had many excellent reviews, yet often met with incomprehension in the animal studies community, where deconstruction was becoming the predominant trend. ecocriticism, especially, began to fade under the reproach that they were reifying a concept of “wild nature,” which was in fact a product of human culture. ironically, animal studies and ecocriticism are now the last refuge for traditions of high theory, the very ones they were initially formed in opposition to, which have since lost their popularity at most institutions of higher learning. but perhaps the original impulse of ecocriticism/animal studies is now due for a revival, and derrida’s the animal that therefore i am is a partial, and hesitant, return to it. what enables this revitalization is the growing recognition that the construction of reality is not, and has never been, a purely human endeavor, but involves working with other living things (and perhaps mountains and streams). but it remains very difficult to speak of animals or plants in an idiom where they are not, like derrida’s cat, immediately overwhelmed by human meanings and associations, whether these are linguistic, philosophical, or symbolic. derrida errs, among other things, in regarding anthropocentrism as a philosophy, when it is far more a habit of mind. being anthropocentric does not require that one believe human beings to be superior to animals, nor that humans are ontologically prior. the man who obsesses on human wickedness is just as anthropocentric as the one who constantly celebrates human accomplishments. the only thing that can move us beyond anthropocentrism is to shift our focus of attention away from man, and to stop dwelling so much on human crimes or virtues, errors or accomplishments, and importance or insignificance. semken and driscoll have been more successful in overcoming the habits of anthropocentrism, since they focus consistently on another creature. both descartes and derrida, at any rate in the animal that therefore i am, belong to a tradition with roots going back far in the judeo-christian tradition and even earlier, which attempts to recapture a sort of primeval innocence and clarity, which existed boria sax -the question of the animal great blue heron 147 prior to the paraphernalia of civilization. there is an incipient romanticism in the impulse, even if neither figure seems, in most ways, romantic. descartes tried to go back before the origin of philosophy, derrida before that of language. semken and driscoll’s soul external show that this impulse is far from having disappeared today, as they endeavor to transcend limits of both traditional philosophy and language by refusing to recognize many traditional categories and conventions. fauna and flora have figured prominently in such endeavors, because these are a perpetual reminder that human society, with all its expectations, is only one of virtually endless possibilities. the abilities and the sensual perceptions of the world among plants and animals differ so radically from human ones that our ability to relate to them at all can seem a wonder, yet they constantly evoke very intimate feelings and subtle intuitions. the great blue heron rises from a pond with a grace that, when observed from a distance, appears almost ethereal. up close, a sharp beak, powerful neck, and large, yellow eyes give the heron a reptilian appearance. it is angel and ape, and many other things besides, which, taken together, make up what we call the “soul.” (photo by boria sax) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 148 works cited asbjörnsen, peter christen, and jörgen moe. "the giant who had no heart." scandinavian folk & fairy tales: tales from norway, sweden, denmark, finland and iceland. ed. claire booss. new york: avenel books, 1984. 4-9. aftandilian, dave, marion w. copeland, and david scofield wilson, eds. what are animals to us? approaches from science, religion, folklore, literature, and art. knoxville: u tennessee p, 2007. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. trans. david willis. new york: fordham up, 2008. descartes, rené. discourse on method and the meditations. trans. f. e. sutcliffe. new york: penguin, 1968. rowling, j. k. harry potter paperback gift set. 7 vols. new york: arthur a. levine books, 2009. microsoft word wolfe-geroux-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:1 robert geroux posthumanism: a political perspective cary wolfe. what is posthumanism? (posthumanities.) minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2009. 400 pp. $75.00 hb; $24.95 pb; $14.97 kindle. cary wolfe’s what is posthumanism? is a magnificently engaged and expansive book, a work of multiple and motile arguments. the sprawl of the work clearly comes from an origin in different and disparate essays, but a distinct order is discernible nevertheless. the first part approaches and interrogates theoretical and disciplinary questions; the second part turns to questions in the worlds of art and architecture. the practical inquiries arise out of the theoretical claims so that a comprehensive critical vision emerges. to paraphrase whitman, however, that vision contains multitudes. wolfe begins with the straightforward contention that contemporary philosophical approaches — especially in the analytical tradition — do little more than occlude and defer the most important questions in the field of human/animal studies. such questions require instead a comprehensive dismantling of the modern subject. clearly, then, this will not be another book on “animal rights”! wolfe’s proposed means for dismantling comes from two seemingly unrelated quarters: derridean deconstruction on the one hand, and the second-order systems analysis of niklas luhmann on the other. this double-pincer attack of weaponized thought has as its aim the occupation of a highly particular position on posthumanism, one that problematizes not only the human/animal boundary, but the organic/machinic one as well. deferring the turn to luhmann for a moment, the deployment of deconstruction is less conceptually forbidding than it might seem: readers familiar with derrida’s later work will recognize the sense of compassion and care brought to bear on the human/animal relation in particular. wolfe confronts contemporary visions of minds and persons in cognitive science (chapter 2), and prioritizes instead the derridean “non-power at the heart of power” (95). all living beings are limited and mortal; perhaps the only human “essence” is not essential at all, but a mere accretion of technics that obscures that limit and refuses bentham’s basic question “can they [animals] suffer?” the reality of such a question posed in the context of late-modern society (factory farms, animal experimentation, genetic manipulation, et cetera) calls for a response that is not ir humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 192 rational, but has to come from a recognition that instrumental reason has subjected animal life to the most extreme sort of biopolitical control. in a moving reading of coetzee’s well-known book the lives of animals (1999) (chapter 3), wolfe goes on to show us that such an engagement addresses suffering and invokes suffering in reponse: the “unnerving weight and gravity of our moral responsibilities towards nonhuman animals” (69) properly places us in an “unspeakable” position. this is true not only in the straightforward sense of a deep awareness of our culpability in often abominable human practices, but in facing “the limits of our own thinking in confronting such a reality” (69). theory’s task turns out to be not the sterile and dessicated dissection of concepts in their assemblages, but in acknowledging and experiencing a kind of trauma. wolfe, again: philosophy can hence no longer be seen as mastery, as a kind of clutching or grasping via analytical categories and concepts that seemed, for heidegger, “a kind of sublimated violence”… rather, the duty of thinking is not to deflect but to suffer … what cavell calls our “exposure” to the world (71). this heideggerian emphasis on openness and exposure turns out to be the conduit that runs between and connects the two parts of the work: the second half represents a break, a departure and engagement with the worlds of contemporary art (chapter 6), film (chapter 7), architecture (chapter 8), and music (chapter 11), among even other topics. these are clearly meant to be the sites of “suffering-through” powerful questions posed (and poised) at the very point where philosophical “clutching” ends and unspeakability begins. it’s also in the second part that we can start to uncover the influence of the second of wolfe’s pillars of conceptual influence: niklas luhmann. if derrida’s vision aids in the deconstruction of the human subject “from within” as it were, then luhmann’s approach instead focuses on the “without” of systems and their emergence under environmental pressures. perhaps because of wolfe’s multiple engagements, the deployment of luhmann’s system analysis feels spread thin in some places. in other places, however, it works perfectly. chapter 8, for example, is appropriately titled “lose the building.” in it we find an examination of contemporary architecture that is fascinating indeed. here we examine architectural projects which are not, properly speaking, parks at all (koolhaas and mau’s “tree city” proposal for toronto’s downsview park), nor buildings (diller and scofidio’s “blur” building, an “inhabitable cloud” on the shores of lake neuchatel), but robert geroux – posthumanism: a political perspective 193 events in which the mobile border between nature and culture is addressed, consciously confused, “deontologized” (206), and in some cases entirely effaced. here as elsewhere the operative term is autopoesis: architecture becomes a site in which we might see – in a non-clutching, wondering way — the process by which form and order emerge over time. the structural and the spatial become temporalized. such installations provide support for the principle that organic and machinic systems alike “attempt to adapt to … (environmental) complexity by filtering it in terms of their own self-referential codes” (220). here the decentering of the human in a vision like luhmann’s is applied to a fascinating middle-space that stands between questions of the individual (animal vegetable or mineral) and society or species-being. the built environment itself — just like an organ or organism, just like a machine — represents an autonomous, open/closed (porous), fluid attempt at self-production and reproduction. here, finally, we are in new territory, beyond the old iterations of liberal humanism and libertarian transhumanism. here, with the surprising help of second order systems analysis, we are in the thick of a truly posthuman project. literary theorists and artists interested in contemporary developments will no doubt find much to love in this chapter, as well as in the work as a whole. there are some small caveats, however. political activists might be lukewarm in their initial reception. above and beyond the common critique of the political utility of deconstruction (how does one convert “unspeakability” into a program for action?), one has to ask about systems analysis and agency. it’s fine to “lose the building,” as chapter 8 exhorts us to do, but one wonders whether we might not also be in danger of losing the actor. luhmann’s systems analysis prioritizes in a fascinating way the means by which orders emerge, become concrete, and self-reproduce. but who is acting? what is the context and reception of that action? where are the coalitions and alliances of actors together? where is the micropolitical exercise of power (and its rebellious counterexpression)? perhaps most importantly, how can one theorize in a radical or revolutionary manner the appetite to sabotage or smash systems, even (or especially) as those systems tend towards self-reproduction? does the deployment of systems analysis push us in an apolitical or even (gasp) a conservative direction? thankfully, no. there’s a profound logic and compelling picture here that thankfully avoids the conceptual pitfalls of modern philosophizing after descartes and kant. similarly, the deconstruction of the subject helps us avoid the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 194 temptation to think in terms of the self-possessed liberal individual, part of whose labor power involves the mastery of language. but even so, second order systems analysis tends to prioritize the homeostatic, even as it adds the temporal dimension. its priority on emergence needs a more robust understanding of agency. one need not be a liberal humanist in order to worry about the nature of freedom. microsoft word miller-meat cultures. pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 10:1 review article john macneill miller meat cultures adams, carol j. burger. bloomsbury academic, 2018. 192 pp. $13.45 (pb) geier, ted. meat markets: the cultural history of bloody london. edinburgh university press, 2017. 200 pp. $110 (hc) when he stepped off his ship in calais in 1782, the englishman frederic reynolds reported that a hostile french crowd congregating at the docks “hooted, hissed, hustled, and” — in an attack that treated the english diet as itself a basis for damnation — “called me ‘rosbif’” (2: 179). reynolds’s journal entry provides early evidence of the popularity of rosbif (“roast beef”) as a continental insult reserved especially for the english. it is an epithet that retains its currency more than two centuries later. no doubt the appeal of rosbif owes much to its simplicity: it does little more than associate the english with a food they often eat. yet there is a something deeply strategic beneath this apparently straightforward logic. even in 1782, the widespread availability of roast beef had long been a point of national pride for the english. one humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 214 swiss traveler reporting on england in 1725 observed that “roast-beef ... is the favourite dish as well at the king’s table as at a tradesman’s.... and this may be said to be (as it were) the emblem of the prosperity and plenty of the english” (muralt 39-40). when the french seized on this point of pride and transformed it into a curse word, they called into question both the naturalness and the desirability of eating such meat — forcing the english to see their customary cuisine through quizzical, alien eyes. they thus sowed insecurity around those everyday eating rituals that help define culture and community, attacking the englishman’s heart by way of his stomach. two recent scholarly books repurpose this age-old tradition of culinary critique to reveal the intellectual and ethical fruits of approaching our edibles with increased critical distance. the political power of both ted geier’s meat markets: the cultural history of bloody london and carol j. adams’s burger resides in their ability to cast entrenched anglo-american affections for meat in a new light — a light that makes our carnivorous culture look increasingly unsavory. burger draws on an accessible combination of history and pop culture to reconsider america’s obsession with the molded-ground-beef sandwich. meat markets looks across the pond to ask how nineteenth-century english literature might read differently if we understood the production and consumption of such literature in relation to the production and consumption of animal flesh that sustained its authors and publics alike. as they question the stories traditionally told about meat, these books also explore alternative modes of offering cultural critique, pushing against traditional divisions between academic and popular writing, and between history and critique, in search of new, more palatable forms of packaging the unsettling stories behind the anglo-american diet. this kind of genre-bending writing is rather old hat for adams, who popularized the analysis of meat as a form of sociopolitical critique in her groundbreaking work the sexual politics of meat (1990). there, adams freely mixed feminist theory with history, literary criticism, and analyses of pop culture to build a powerful intersectional argument about the intertwined oppression of women and animals. borrowing the term “absent referent” from semantics to describe animals’ paradoxical place in modern western society, she explored how the slaughter of animals is everywhere legible in our food choices, our clothing, and our language, even though the animals themselves are rarely referenced or acknowledged: “[a] process of language usage engulfs discussions about meat by constructing the discourse in such a way that these issues need never be addressed” (sexual politics 48). this rhetorical absence enables us to live peaceably while the signs of oppression and cruelty proliferate around us. john macneill miller -meat cultures 215 adams’s latest book, burger, shows her turning the full force of her rhetorical analysis on the most iconic example of animal erasure in the american diet: the hamburger. burger takes a cultural commonplace — the idea that the burger is a quintessentially american food — and proceeds to demonstrate, through a critical but compulsively readable history, that america’s infatuation with the hamburger is both appalling and apt. crucially, adams’s target is not just the burger but also the elaborate metaphors and storytelling that surround it. this mythos cloaks the burger’s unsavory origins and material composition, easing its mainstream acceptance by insistently ignoring the animals who are ground up into it. the first two chapters of burger dive into this triumphalist narrative, rehearsing the burger’s storied rise as a mass-market commodity while paying special attention to the jingoistic language and imagery that greased the way. although ground meat patties have a long and contested history, adams convincingly argues that the burger’s actual origins are finally less important than its many competing origin stories. those tall tales all revolve around small-town americana as they recycle the same narrative elements (a lunch counter or county fair; an enterprising small-business owner; customers demanding a meal that is fast and filling and portable) to personalize and americanize the burger — a product that is now primarily consumed at homogeneous franchises licensed by sprawling multinational corporations such as burger king and mcdonald’s. adams’s range of reference in these short but informative chapters is impressive: she moves easily between high and low culture, past and present, gathering into her survey texts from upton sinclair’s muckraking novel the jungle (1906) to the stoner comedy harold and kumar go to white castle (2004). at times she indulges in sardonic asides as she trots through this survey, inserting a cynical distance toward the burger that might be a bit confusing or off-putting for an unsuspecting reader. as she delves deeper into the burger’s history and her own vegan-feminist critical theory, however, it comes to make sense. it is in these later chapters — which cover cattle farming, sexist marketing, hamburger controversies, and meatless burger options — that adams makes her most important contributions to our understanding of this ubiquitous food. against the kind of entrepreneurial narrative “that grants inevitability to the success of the hamburger,” adams advances her own history — one that restores the burger’s absent referent, the cow, to the starring role (6). her chapter on cattle usefully deploys critical environmental history, first rooting the americanness of the hamburger in the arrival of cows in north america, then tracing the burger’s success as a function of the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 216 growth of western ranching and meat packing industries. the result is an account of the burger’s origins that underscores the cow’s significance as both unwitting accessory to, and victim of, colonialism and industrialization. the frontier masculinity inherent in this history leads adams into the kind of intersectional feminist work that established her as a major voice in critical animal studies. chapter 4, “woman burger,” reveals the startling relations between women and the widespread acceptance of the burger as an unimpeachably american food. as adams tells it, restaurants peddling the burger in the early decades of the twentieth century met with fierce opposition from the traditional custodians of home cuisine: women. in the wake of exposés about the unsafe practices of the meat packing industry, women remained suspicious of the ingredients hidden within the amorphous masses of meat cooked into commercial hamburgers. for the hamburger to succeed, then, restaurateurs had first to win over women. white castle spearheaded this effort, hiring female ambassadors who invited housewives to personally inspect the restaurant’s kitchens. these ambassadors emphasized an aspect of the burger that proved far more mouthwatering than the sliders themselves: the promise of nights off from the constant drudgery of kitchen work. once the burger industry won over american women with this small taste of liberation, however, it quickly sold them out, turning to misogynistic advertising campaigns to sell its products, linking burgers and sex in ways that reduce women to little more than meat. as this summary of adams’s chapter shows, her focus throughout burger is trained on the myriad contingencies and moments of resistance that preceded the burger’s rise to cultural dominance — the many points that suggest how, had history simply gone a bit differently, the burger would never have become such a ubiquitous and beloved american icon. her history of the veggie burger is especially enlightening on this head, as she moves beyond conventional accounts of the emergence of boxed veggie burgers in the 1980s to show that the veggie burger has a history at least as extensive, and at least as american, as its carnified counterpart. by the end of the book it is clear that the hamburger, far from remaining the plucky homegrown hero of american cuisine, has become a kind of undead monster: a culinary commodity so powerful that even the growing ethical, environmental, and epidemiological concerns about it seem helpless to halt its march toward world domination. the final chapters of burger offer hope for another future. they include adams’s experiences touring the facilities of impossible foods and beyond meat, two start-ups that have had some success developing “plant-based meat” that offers the sensory john macneill miller -meat cultures 217 experience of eating a hamburger without relying on any animal products, soy, or gluten (112). there is much to be excited about here, and these chapters benefit from adams’s decision to fully inhabit her always individual voice by openly addressing her personal experiences in the text. the book’s general exuberance about these newer, better alternatives overlooks some of the insidious rhetoric of these technological innovations, however. the language of pat brown and ethan brown, the (unrelated) founders of these ventures, shows no more concern for animal ethics than that of the average burger purveyor. by their own accounts, their goal is not to save cows, but to more thoroughly and completely eliminate them from a process in which the animals’ messy fleshiness looks antiquated and inefficient. “the cow is never going to get better at making meat,” one of them observes: “it was not optimized for beef” (qtd. in burger 112). “we’ve always tried to make the animal more efficient,” the other laments in an unrelated interview, “and there’s a biological limit to that” (qtd. in burger 117). if we are headed toward a meatless future, then, that trajectory may be a sign that our culture is not so much reconsidering animal erasure as perfecting it. burger makes no mention of this possibility; it ends on a hopeful note rather than a critical one. the book’s uplifting conclusion only adds to its already substantial crossover appeal: although burger is riddled with original insights and serious academic rigor, the book shares a number of features with other titles in bloomsbury’s object lessons series — quick chapters, enticing images, and portable format — that ensure it will go down easy with academics and popular audiences alike. the promise of a cleaner, more efficient, animal-free burger of the future looks less revolutionary in light of the conjoined cultural histories of industrialized slaughter and urban modernity that ted geier explores in meat markets: a cultural history of bloody london. meat markets sketches out a revisionist literary history structured around smithfield market, the notoriously noisy, bloody, and messy open-air market for the trading and slaughter of livestock located right in the city of london. both beloved and reviled, smithfield was a london institution from its founding in the middle ages until 1852, when an act of parliament ordered the removal of animal traffic to a new market outside the city. that market opened in 1855, leaving smithfield abandoned until a smaller meat market — one without the unwelcome noise and chaos of living animals — opened on the site in 1868. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 218 while victorian sanitary reformers and animal welfare advocates celebrated the shuttering of smithfield as a shared victory, geier rightly recognizes this relocation of livestock as something more sinister: “an erasure of the animal body from the city scene and, in the process, from the conception of meat in the consuming public” (88). the celebrated clean-up of smithfield market thus provides an important precursor to the ongoing development of “clean” meat, plant-based meat, and other technologyintensive alternatives to animal slaughter. all these developments participate in modernity’s movement toward what michel foucault called biopolitics — that is, a politics in which authorities seek a new kind of pervasive, invasive “power that has taken control of both the body and life or that has, if you like, taken control of life in general” (foucault 253). this “biopower,” foucault argues, draws on discourses of medicine and hygiene to enforce behaviors that help integrate the individual into the population, seeking increasingly absolute jurisdiction over massified bodies in order to transform society into a predictable, well-oiled machine of production and consumption. meat markets surveys 19th-century literature through a loosely biopolitical frame, arguing that the formation of modern mass culture, of modern literature, and of modern meat products are inextricably interlinked. like the meat rendering process itself, geier’s first chapter begins with living, breathing animals. although it surveys romantic through mid-victorian literature rather broadly, the chapter’s principal focus is on those moments when literature admits human limitations — especially humanity’s inability to fully understand animals. this inability, geier argues, is particularly privileged in the romantic usage of apostrophe, the literary device in which human beings attempt to speak to and commune with nonhumans despite the fact that the objects of their address cannot really understand them or respond. close-reading the apostrophes in works like robert burns’s “to a mouse” (1785) and william blake’s the book of thel (1789) demonstrates how “authors try everywhere to adequately attend to nonhumans while simultaneously evaluating the violence, or merely the irony, of address” (57). for geier, such moments acknowledge animal difference in productive ways, granting nonhumans a form of autonomy from human control — an autonomy that will vanish over the 19th century as animals are transformed by urbanization and industrialization from fellow laborers into mere cogs in a mechanical process of manufacturing human sustenance. the book’s second chapter leaves literature to the side to chart the long history of debates that led up to the 1852 smithfield market removal act, which serves here as a case study demonstrating the rise of modern biopolitics and its impact on john macneill miller -meat cultures 219 humanity’s relationship to nonhuman animals. the book’s third and final chapter returns to the literary, drawing on works such as charles dickens’s oliver twist (18379), edgar allan poe’s “the man of the crowd” (1840), and the penny dreadful sweeney todd (1846-7) to draw out links between industrial slaughter, mass literature, and the urban subject. meat markets suggests the generative, even revolutionary power of understanding 19thcentury literature through a biopolitical frame that foregrounds humanity’s consumption of other animals. yet the book itself does not exactly settle on this project as its central intervention. meat markets is, in fact, a bit vague on its place within the scholarly tradition and its signal contributions to that tradition. perhaps that is because the book is engaged with so many emerging and interdisciplinary fields (posthumanism, animal studies, food studies, and biopolitical theory) that it is difficult to locate the right scholarly genre for this kind of story about culture, modernity, and meat. meat markets seems especially torn between the dictates of a standard literary critical monograph — with its combination of explicitly stated methodology and literary close readings broken into individual chapters — and a more amorphous, more accessible type of broad-brush cultural history. so, while the overarching structure and political orientation of the book demonstrate an investment in foucauldian biopolitics, foucault’s name only crops up twice outside the endnotes. the concept of biopolitics, too, is only summarily referenced, without any clear definition or consistent inclusion in later chapters. this decision to rush past critical theory makes sense if meat markets aims to be more of a cultural history (as its subtitle indicates) than a work of criticism. historians are, in fact, referenced with far more frequency than either theorists or literary critics, with geier acknowledging an especially significant debt to hilda kean’s animal rights: political and social change in britain since 1800 (1998) and robyn metcalfe’s meat, commerce, and the city: the london food market, 1800-1855 (2012). what meat markets adds to the story of smithfield, however, is not so much new historical detail as a combination of biopolitical critique and investment in literary texts. consequently, it would have been helpful for meat markets to devote more time to clarifying its place in ongoing conversations at the intersection of animal studies, literary studies, and biopolitics. to my mind, meat markets is best understood as a foray into 19th-century zoopolitics. zoopolitics, in nicole shukin’s formulation, is a version of biopolitical critique that extends its inquiry beyond the species boundary as a “challenge to the assumption that the social flesh and ‘species body’ at stake in the logic of biopower is predominantly humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 10, number 1 (fall 2018) 220 human” (shukin 9). meat markets joins a small but growing body of zoopolitical works such as cary wolfe’s before the law (2013) and colleen glenney boggs’s animalia americana (2013) in investigating “the crucial role animals play ... [in the] formation of biopolitical subjectivity” (boggs 11). geier’s focus on meat brings this zoopolitical approach to bear on literature and food, another growing field of 19th-century cultural criticism that has remained strangely mum on questions of human-animal relations. even when critics hone in on “novels ... [that] express a general anxiety about meat” — as michael parrish lee does in his wonderful work on food plots in the 19th-century novel — the analysis tends to focus on the carnivorous and cannibalistic subjects of hunger, rather than the unfortunate beings sacrificed to satisfy such cravings (lee 183). a more explicit engagement with these traditions of literary scholarship would have highlighted geier’s originality and entitled him to expand his illuminating but often abbreviated close readings. indeed, meat markets is laced with compelling literary theses that never quite receive the elucidations they deserve. of mary shelley’s frankenstein (1818), for example, geier asserts: “one of its central revelations is that bringing unlife to life is not more horrible than bringing life to unlife. both seem a form of murder, if murder is the sovereign negation of the life status of another object” (55). it’s a fascinating sketch for a biopolitical reading of the novel, but one that is never fleshed out; close reading soon takes a backseat to broader overviews of literary and cultural history. at another point, geier suggests that esther summerson — the impossibly docile heroine of charles dickens’s bleak house (1852-3) — “resembles a bit too much the captive meat animal spared jostling, striking and other blows from the traffickers that might diminish her quality and her value to the end consumer” (72). again, this intriguing observation is dropped without further development, and meat markets whets the readers’ appetite for more extended interpretation that it never fully satisfies. still, to leave readers hungering for more is no small thing. taken together, burger and meat markets provide illuminating examples of the range of work currently underway at the intersection of animal studies, food studies, and cultural criticism. each is, in its own way, trailblazing: each offers a new pathway through relatively uncharted territory, as well as inspiration for future scholars developing their own ways of negotiating the sociopolitical dynamics of meat. if our disheartening modern system of meat production may finally be nearing its end, these books suggest, the enlightening field of meat studies is only just beginning. works cited john macneill miller -meat cultures 221 adams, carol j. the sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory. 25th anniversary ed. bloomsbury, 2015. boggs, colleen glenney. animalia americana: animal representations and biopolitical subjectivity. columbia up, 2013. foucault, michel. “society must be defended:” lectures at the collège de france, 1975-76. edited by mauro bertani and alessandro fontana, translated by david macey, picador, 2003. lee, michael parrish. the food plot in the nineteenth-century british novel. palgrave macmillan, 2016. muralt, béat louis de. letters describing the character and customs of the english and french nations. with a curious essay on travelling; and a criticism of boileau’s description of paris. london, thomas edlin, 1726. [reynolds, frederic]. the life and times of frederick [sic] reynolds, written by himself. 2 vols., london, henry colburn, 1826. shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. u of minnesota p, 2009. wolfe, cary. before the law: humans and other animals in a biopolitical frame. u of chicago p, 2013. microsoft word marchesini-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 9:1 roberto marchesini what is philosophical ethology? (edited by boria sax, richard iveson, and istvan csicsery-ronay) the problem of animal subjectivity. in the past century, research on animal subjectivity has faced several obstacles. waves of anthropomorphistic and projective (rather than continuist) interpretations of animal behavior were followed by reductionist or mechano-morphistic reactions. some authors have applied reductionist explanations to both the human being and other species — think of skinner’s behaviorism1 or wilson’s sociobiology2 –, filling humanists with indignation and arousing fierce criticism in the philosophical and anthropological communities. others have instead preferred to adopt descartes’s dichotomy, which allows one to explain animal expression through mechanistic coordinates without insulting the sovereignty of anthropocentrism. to treat animality as res extensa is to transform its expression into the sum of automatisms that are activated either by external stimuli or by inputs derived directly from somatic physiology. this explanatory mechanism offers significant methodological guarantees, because: a) it answers, or rather seems to be devoted to, ockham’s razor, redefined within morgan’s canon of parsimony; b) it does not require external or tautological entities, such as the res cogitans or the homunculus, which evade the test of scientific explanation; c) it agrees with the epistemological principles of description, falsifiability of the explanatory hypothesis, and causal modelling; and d) it is perfectly consistent with the canons of western culture that radically separate animality from the human condition. thus, during the twentieth century some very convincing interpretative coordinates were developed that appeared to ring the death-knell for the theme of animality: 1) animal expression was believed to be explained, once and for all, by a set of automatisms — some driven by phylogenetics and derived from innate instincts, others from ontogenesis, following the law of conditioned response, and thus learned by individuals through conditioning; and as a result 2) human beings could distinguish themselves by separating or emancipating themselves from the animal condition. human evolution was analyzed not in terms of adaptive specialization — that is, in its specificity — but rather as a lack of adaptive declination3 — that is, the human being is special, free from automatisms, and thus autopoietic. this interpretation separates roberto marchesini -what is philosophical ethology? 47 subjectivity from animality in order to link it closely to reason, language, and consciousness. this notion of the “specialness” — rather than “specificity” — of the human being has given rise to diverse interpretations, from martin heidegger’s conception of ontological difference4 to arnold gehlen’s theory of humans’ capacity for cultural compensation for their adaptive deficiencies. however, these interpretations are all essentially based on descartes’s dichotomy, which aims to lead animality back to the determinism of the res extensa, from which humans distance themselves because of their meta-predicative capacities. according to this interpretation, humans were not born from a particular declination of their animality, but by emancipating and distancing themselves from it. darwin’s theories have been adapted for this interpretation as well, so that the human condition is viewed not as the outcome of specific adaptations or predicative declinations to a certain performativity, but rather, the reverse. animality thus falls into the realm of determinism, that is, the mechanical translation of behavioral automatisms that are necessary and exhaustive explanations for animal expression: the animal is the sum of its automatisms, and its expression is their functional outcome. cognitive ethology — a branch that attracted a multitude of authors, from köhler to griffin — tried in vain to introduce fragments of subjectivity into the animal-machine by recognizing in it levels of intentionality that, albeit lower than those of a human being, can produce a glimmer of subjectivity by reflectively and explicitly managing some processes or psychological states. subjectivity is thus related to the knowledge of states such as emotions, intentions, the creation of goals and strategies (that is, behavioral molarities), the ability to find solutions through insight, the creation and use of tools, and so on. in this context, one is subjective insofar as one is aware of what one feels or expresses through behavior. this theory illuminates quite well some of the main events of the animal mind: evaluation, judgment, decision, planning, simulation, and creativity. however, i believe that it does not help us to understand the foundations of animal subjectivity, because as long as one models these capacities as automatisms there is no room for behavioral flexibility. a machine endowed with consciousness can only manage the mandatory nature of its mechanisms. to add a consciousness to the traditional model of the res extensa is not a solution — it would only restore descartes’s dualism by trading the metaphysical res cogitans for an informatic or cognitive res. what is really required is to question the very principle of res extensa, that is, the model upon which the concept of animality is based. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 48 ethological research, like cognitive research, has analyzed predicates in detail, without questioning descartes’s overarching paradigm of the “animal machine.” instead, it has simply proposed, in each case, a particular model of the machine: a) a psycho-hydraulic machine in classical ethology; b) a cybernetic or feedback machine in behaviorism; c) an informatics machine in cognitive hypotheses. my goal is to question the basic paradigm, that is, the ontology of animality, through existential — and therefore ethological — plurality. first of all, some important points must be established: 1) the basic model that explains an individual’s natural and acquired capacities must be redefined; 2) the concept of subjectivity must be reintroduced, without falling into the tautological trap of consciousness or other dead ends that would lead to an infinite regress; 3) one must explain the emergence of the psyche, rather than the total state of the body and its relations with the outside world; 4) the concept of existential plurality must be highlighted, avoiding the anthropocentric tendency to consider the human being as the privileged term of comparison, so as to grant the heterospecific a certain kind of presence. it should be understood from the outset that one can speak of subjectivity only by acknowledging a sort of “ownership” of behavioral capacities; individuals use the capacities, they are not controlled by them. otherwise, if the capacities were able to explain animal expression directly, there would be no room for the subject to appear. moreover, a different paradigmatic structure might explain animal behavior better: a) by resolving some inconsistencies present in the current explanatory models; b) by avoiding calling into question entities that are metaphysical or that cannot be explained clearly; and c) by respecting the principle of parsimony. 1. shifting from an “automatism-based model” to an “instrument-based model” in order to explain the capacities. to be able to speak of true ownership, one must first modify the model that describes and explains behavioral capacities. the mechanistic model is based on the concept of “automatism”: that an underlying structure is, as such, able to explain the expressed function. automatism transforms behavior into a sort of imperative and substantially deterministic reflection in the function produced, where a gateway for the stimuli (both internal and external) corresponds to a behavioral mechanism, such that each input matches a precise output. both the key signal describing the instinct and its elicitative processes, and indeed the structure of classical conditioning mediating the dialogue between stimulus and response, abide by the same basic requirement: the mechanism exhaustively and cogently explains the behavior. the roberto marchesini -what is philosophical ethology? 49 automatism thus becomes the explanatory paradigm of both the phylogenetic heritage and the learning processes. complex behaviors can also be explained through this model, if one considers the single automatism to be nothing but the atomic unit from whose composition, in sequence — e.g., behaviorist chaining — or in other correlative, synergistic, or antagonistic forms, any complex behavior may result. to consider behavior as the sum of automatisms activated one after the other leads to an analytical explanation of animal expression, where each molarity is led back to molecularities combinable with one another, in a context of expressive, rather than virtual, units. in order to understand this explanation, it may be useful to picture dominoes in which each piece can be a meaningful answer to the incoming wave, and a stimulus for the next one. a model that does not operate through virtual connections, but through a succession of expressive units, does not take into consideration the organization of the neurobiological system that has a connective-systemic, rather than an associative, structure. as soon as one considers a mental state as a particular systemic activation of a network — that is, as one of the possible “states of the network,” given by a certain connective activation of its structures — the model shifts considerably. without treating every single behavior as a specific expressive domino structure, the functional unit can be seen as a “group member.” however, its outcome derives from the systemics involved. supposing that each functional unit allows for a different expressive conversion that depends on the systemic configuration activated at a particular time, we encounter a model that is more parsimonious and more responsive to neural connectionism than to those autonomous units called associations. a functional systemics thus reveals capacities that are more reminiscent of a map schema than a domino game — that is, their structure can form different functional configurations, implying a series of possible expressive paths — and thus can give rise to a multiplicity of functional outcomes. thinking about the difference between a domino-model and a map-model, one can immediately see that the functional meaning shifts considerably. while the domino-based model exemplifies functional automatism (the perfect translation of inevitability and determinism), the map-based model shows capacities as tools. this shift in the explanatory model is quite significant. in the automatic model, the ratio of structure (what it is) to function (what it does), can be represented as 1:1 — that is, “what it is = what it does,” so that the function can be obtained from the given structure. in the instrument model, the ratio of structure to function is 1: infinity — that is, the instrument-endowment a) arranges itself, b) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 50 provides competence, and c) becomes available to the function, but does not determine it. once we consider the systemics responsible for the specific functional translation of the capacities we also recognize a surplus in the explanation of the expressive component that cannot be directly traced back to the capacities. this does not mean one must deny to the capacities a performative character, but rather to acknowledge that the capacities develop a range of possible performative outcomes, so that every expression is nothing but the result of the particular functional configuration that the system has provided the endowment. the map defines — or, one could say, virtually subsumes — a set of possible paths, without establishing which one should be taken. a map is much more economical model than a sequence of individual paths for managing the changes that may intervene on one’s path, and also for flexibly adapting the paths in ordinary situations. what does it mean to shift from an “automatism-based model” to an “instrument-based model?” if one considers the concept of ownership to be a prerequisite for the debate on subjectivity, then this shift means a great deal. while an automatism governs the individual, an instrument is used by the individual. one could think of natural or acquired capacities as instruments, such as a hammer: i use the hammer; it does not control me. there is an important difference: while an automatism would transform the animal into a puppet moved by wires, the instrument is controlled by the animal, who has broad flexibility in its use. the functional completeness of the automatism would transform the individual into nothing more than the sum of its automatisms. this modelling metamorphosis, for example, is easily demonstrated by the phenomenological analysis of animal behavior in the learning process: once an animal has learnt an operational schema, it then uses this schema in situations different from those in which it was acquired. also, it uses it on the basis of flexibility and functional co-optation, recalling piaget’s dialectic of assimilation/accommodation.5 the capacities can therefore be described as a “modal schema” that is body-specific (referring to the different functions of the body) and body-topical (identifying some specific involvements of the body). furthermore, its structure implies, and therefore allows, for more functional paths, depending on the specific configurations of activation. the modal schema is therefore dynamic, multi-functional, and evolutionary; its fractal structure in the synaptic networks allows the body to be relationally present in space. in other words, the capacities are the body’s instruments, and not vice versa. in order to offer the best performance for the relational needs of the body, which moves roberto marchesini -what is philosophical ethology? 51 in an ever-changing and therefore unique reality, the capacities cannot give rise to static, mono-functional, and unidirectional structures — as the stimulus-response interpretation suggests; it must rather predict enactivism. in other words, the modal schema can neither be assimilated to a sensory-motor “unity of expression,” as in the behaviorist interpretation, nor can it be assimilated to an “amodal representation” of external reality, as in the cognitive interpretation. to consider knowledge as the definition of a specific “modal scheme” implies that cognition does not fall outside of the body, that it is not amodal or computational, and that it uses instruments that reproduce virtual fields of somatic relationship with external reality. in this sense, a modal scheme is a sort of map of possible body-world relationships related to a particular type of somatized dialogic state. the modal scheme defines some “useful functional range” in order to decline in a certain way the relationship between body and external reality. the body, therefore, indicates a field of relationships — this is the ultimate heterotrophic and vagile constitution of animality — declined through modal expressions. this relational state or embodiment-cognition concerns a plurality of elements that cannot be translated into, or reduced to, mere sensorimotor dialectics. subjectivity, therefore, emerges out of a dialogue with the world that is mediated by sensory and instinctive responses. the paradigmatic transformation implied by this metamorphosis of modelling involves different domains: a) the domain of instrumentality, or of the expression’s distancing from the capacities themselves; b) the domain of modality, or assimilation of the endowment instrument to the body; c) the parameter of relatedness, or conjugative capabilities of the capacities. the instrument-based model gives a capacities-based character to phylogenetic and ontogenetic instruction, in the sense of “being useful for” — that is, to structure possible “expressive modals” instead of identifying them, that is, instead of looking for “expressive motives.” subjectivity lies in the denial of this “functional completeness” that would turn the animal into a set of mechanisms activated by external or internal stimuli. by considering the information (natural and acquired) as instrument rather than automatism, one conceives the animal to be the owner of its capacities: it uses them; they do not control it. an instrument can be used in a thousand different ways, and with creativity. to be subjective means to be the owner of one’s own instruments, to test them in new situations, to modify them, and to create new ones but why is an instrument-based model more suitable than an automatism-based one? the answer lies in the “principle of singularity of the real”6 (marchesini): the world presents itself in similar, but never identical conformations, so that an individual is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 52 always faced with some “margins of newness.” if one’s capacities were automatisms, one could not deal with changes, because the automatism does nothing more than repeat the recognized function. without such flexibility, software that plays chess through an algorithm would not be realistically possible. in order to control singularity, the animal must be able to use its endowments capacities in a free and flexible way, through what gould and vrba term “exaptation,” and with creativity. at this point, the evolving nature of these capacities becomes clear: they are constantly transformed according to the individual’s specific use. 2. subjectivity as presence and systemic emergence. viewing subjectivity in terms of a multilayered relational systemics of the body opens a way to overcome the cartesian dualism that is still present in cognitivism. the disjunction of subjectivity from the body may indeed be pursued not only by admitting a metaphysical res cogitans, but also by reading subjectivity through informatics, and thus translating it in an amodal way, as in the computational formalism that tries to interpret the cognitive function. reason, language, and intentionality, along the lines of post-cartesian philosophy, become disjunctive principles-operators compared to a res-extensa body that continues to be interpreted as a reactive entity, rather than as a presence-relationship. this is a passive body that, affected by a stream of world, reacts in a mechanical way. according to this dualism, one is a subject inasmuch as one is emancipated from one’s own corporeal roots and, by assimilation, from one’s own animality. in this paradigm, there is no room for animal subjectivity. moreover, human subjectivity is separated from the metapredicate of animality as well: one is a subject despite being an animal. according to the mechanistic explanation of the res extensa, animality is not a relational positioning, that is, a dasein. rather, it is simply a reactive structure, a set of motions activated by stimulating and elicitative intervention in gateways. if the animal-machine paradigm remains intact, some exhaustive models of expressiveness will inevitably be identified. such models are able to explain fully the expression that the individual manifests in the timeless immediacy of one’s being. martin heidegger eloquently explained this subject-less animality as the stunned condition of receptive-reactive immediacy that, lacking presence, cannot be present.7 however, this is a petitio principii: the model that explains the animal expression was intended to respond fully to the mechanistic requisites of the automaton-animal paradigm. there have been many debates about what kind of machine the animal is, but the paradigm that relates the animal condition to the machine has rarely been challenged on its own ground. roberto marchesini -what is philosophical ethology? 53 moreover, i believe that referencing the machine is important because it highlights the great differences between animal and machine. first of all, it is necessary to say that, despite its apparent coherence with the scientific canon, the statement “the animal is a machine” does not meet the criteria of falsifiability, since no machine, even as a theoretical formulation, can do what even the simplest of animals can. however, the specific characteristics of a machine are the real problem: a) the completeness of its functional contents-directions, compared to the performative outcomes; b) its selfcontainment; that is, the fact that it is never in a developmental condition, even when it introjects outside information; c) its lack of exclusively functional coordinates among the functional motives; d) its isochronic and therefore atemporal condition, compared to the unavoidable diachronicity of a living organism; and e) its lack of teleonomic structures relatable to the individual’s past motives. when one observes an animal and tries to interpret its behavior, one is inevitably faced with an “explanatory deficit.” therefore, one usually adopts epistemological strategies based on causal plurality, such as the presence of both proximate and remote causes in ernst mayr’s formulation, or niko tinbergen’s four questions of ethology.8 a mechanistic translation cannot grasp the multiple aspects of an animal’s behavior; these can be grasped only by identifying the animal’s expression with its feelings. animality is thus the individual’s unique position in the here-and-now: the individual's ability to interpret her own here-and-now with creativity, flexibility, and partiality. one can therefore say that if the capacities, either natural or acquired, were a script for the individual to follow, the animal would be the result of the actor’s interpretation, rather than the mere repetition of the contents of the script. if the capacities are considered as tools rather than automatisms, an expression cannot be derived directly from them; it should rather be derived from the positional systemics of the individual who bends the instrument to a particular function. the behavior is thus a manifestation of the animal’s unique and systemic state. the animal uses its own modal schemas, by extracting the specific function from the range of virtualities required by the schema. using once again the image of the script, one can thus say that subjectivity lies in this interpretive singularity, in the actor’s ownership of its part, on the basis of an overall status. in other words, the best way to understand subjectivity is to consider it a result of an emerging singularity of the systemics. the animal expression, therefore, should not be regarded as the sum of mechanical expressive units, but as an overall state of the system that, as a whole, extracts a particular functional declination from the functional virtuality of the capacities. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 54 subjectivity is thus the animal expression that cannot be reduced to its capacities, despite the modal value that they introject. when we speak of a systemic condition and an emerging singularity, we refer to an entity that owes its virtuality, its openness to all available combinations, to the redundancy — rather than linearity — of the expressive mechanism. the body is not made of strings and pulleys; it is a living entity that is constantly growing and converses with the outside world so much that every liminal definition is arbitrary. where does the body begin? where does it end? the answer is apparently simple but, on closer inspection, every definition of “border” is arbitrary. the body is placed on a variety of levels (sensory, metabolic, endocrine, immunological, motoric, symbiotic) that converse with the outside world. also, positionality — the emerging singularity — is the chaotic outcome of this continuous chatter of the body. in this sense, the subject’s mental state should be considered not as a homunculus, but rather as a set of overlapping hierarchical levels whose predicates appear before the units that compose it. consequently, there is no control unit or place of subjectivity, but rather an emergence of functional states that define “different levels of subjectivity.” these levels must carry out different functions, since the subject’s behavioral needs are diverse. however, in their entirety they define an inner world assembled in a way that is anything but logical, with very multifaceted manifestations of identity. diachronically, the emerging positionality creates a continuity of identity: an inner world that, through its partiality, expresses this momentary “feeling a certain way” — the title of the singularity. to be subjective means to have an identity — a biography — that is the outcome of several moments (the history of the species, gestation, developmental age, adulthood) and relationships with the world. these stories coexist, and each one bears specific motives. a causal plurality is therefore mandated: the subject is always a harlequin serving several masters. these stories are summarized in the individual that, precisely for this reason, is singular: it means that it is unique and unrepeatable, but above all it means that an animal’s behavior can never be predicted in detail. however, this unpredictability should be attributed to being part of different causal temporalities, rather than to the mere fact of being a complex system. the individual suffers from what her species has phylogenetically learned and introjected within the genetic and epigenetic inheritance of phenotypic translation, within the parental and cultural structures of ontogenetic translation. the individual is affected by both the first relationships she had with her parents as a baby, and those that she had with her peers during childhood, and that built her basic character. the individual is affected by her experiences and their patterns. she has developed an evolutionary differential that roberto marchesini -what is philosophical ethology? 55 depends on the received stimuli; she has built a specific knowledge. she responds to all this. biographical identity is a work in progress, because the animal is constantly learning, and therefore constantly changing its identity. the expression of a given behavior is also the exercise of certain behavioral traits, so that every time an animal performs an action, it transforms its own identity. the constant evolution of identity can be compared to muscles that are trained and therefore grow while working. to be subjective means to change, never to be equal to oneself, to be unfaithful to one’s past. moreover, learning is not a particular moment of subjectivity, but the very foundation of the subject: subjectivity means to possess an inner world in constant transformation. to be an animal means to dream, to plan, to build strategies, to reflect on possibilities, to evaluate the hidden contents of a situation, to do mental simulations based on different tactics. subjectivity is the result of the animal’s mental life, a sort of inner theater where each orientation is compared with all the others. lorenz called it the parliament of instincts. the result is therefore always systemic, reflective, and interactive, involving different parts; it is never mechanical, analytical, or like a ripple effect. the mind as a system gives life to thought. it retreats into itself and leads to more or less conscious global decisions. however, the mind is not consciousness: consciousness is just one of the many functions of the mind. moreover, mental subjectivity takes place especially in the unconscious: nothing is more subjective than the unconscious that manifests itself through desires, dreams, states of alteration, emotional images, unfolded memories, confused projects. in fact, one could say that consciousness is often a censor of subjectivity. the mind is an internal ecosystem: a microcosm that cannot overlap the macrocosmic world in which processes of reality take place. the mind puts the animal being in the world, but at the same time it allows it to distance itself and to reflect on given situations through a complex elaboration of all available information. the mind can transform all the events of the world into meanings — that is, it can translate them into categories of risks and opportunities, and therefore to perform an immediate decoding that allows it to make decisions. 3. psychic emergence and the positional-relational state of the body. the idea that the mind emerges in stages from all over the body, and is not simply related to it, leads one to consider the phenomenon of the psyche as the result of being-a-body, as opposed to descartes’s having-a-body and all its amodal and representational variants. the animal’s ontological status must therefore be redefined, and subjectivity must be brought back to the very character of animality. to be an animal does not mean to orient oneself towards something in an exclusively motor sense, but rather to assume a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 56 constitutive lack that demands to be supplemented, through the relationship with the world. a metabolic entity constantly redefines its terms at stake. in other words, it is never executive, because it always tends to overcome itself. as phenomenology emphasizes, this constitutive circularity interrupts the subject-world disjunction (merleau-ponty). when i speak of the unique emergence of positionality, therefore, i do not consider the problem of predictability as a distinctive meta-predicate of subjectivity: behavioral phenomena with a high degree of predictability can appear, just as, on the other hand, there are abiotic events whose course is absolutely unpredictable. i would like to point out the absolute arbitrariness of the explanatory coordinates of cause-and-effect. if the mind emerges from the entire body, it makes no sense to consider the mental state as the representation of something. in fact, it would be more plausible to correlate the concept of intentionality somatically: to be a body means to refer to something external — that is, to refer to something, to build one’s own contents co-factorially. the body can thus be regarded as a field where multiple games between different teams occur: phylogenetic instances that are related to ontogeny, needs that are confronted with environmental opportunities, stimuli that have to deal with the subject’s here-andnow dispositions, memories that casually emerge during the dream phase, which changes the present prospective. also, subjectivity is nothing but the set of results of this body-world relationship. subjectivity is an “expressive mode” — that is, a state declination. it makes no sense to claim to extract it from the individual alchemically and in purity by referring to the brain or some part of the cns, failing to extend this ownership to the body. this is the most important reason why i do not think that an animal is a machine, however complex, unpredictable, and interactive it may be: a machine performs functions on the environment, an animal achieves positional states with the environment. the concept of res extensa is based on the principle of the entity’s completeness in the performative explanation, that what, why, and how the machine is can be completely explained, with no redundancy, by what it does; but the animal is not an entity that can be explained without regard for its positional circularities. on the other hand, it is clear that the principle of causal/functional completeness applied to the res extensa is inevitably projected onto the res cogitans. this is what leads descartes to seek the certainty of one’s own existence by retreating into oneself and questioning external reality. subjectivity is therefore a condition of positionality that arises from the animal’s relational character. an animal realizes its subjectivity through its conjugative links9 to roberto marchesini -what is philosophical ethology? 57 the world, by declining itself through connective structures. by contrast, if animality is deprived of any character of subjectivity and turned into a mere mechanical functionality of some automatisms, then it is clear that any predication of the human will seek comfort in emancipation from animality and not in the expression of animality — one becomes a subject despite one’s animal being, rather than as a condition of it. the mechanistic explanation of the res extensa does not consider animality a relational positioning — that is, a dasein — but simply a reactive structure, that is, a set of motions triggered by the stimulating-eliciting intervention on its access points. so long as the paradigm of translation of animal being into a machine remains in place, one must inevitably search for some other models to explain the individual’s expressivity within the a-temporal immediacy of its being. martin heidegger has eloquently described this desubjectivized image of animality as something lost in a receptive-reactive immediacy, something that cannot be present because it lacks presence. however, this is a petitio principii: the model called to explain animal expressiveness was conceived to fully satisfy the mechanistic requirements of the animal-automaton paradigm. there has been a long debate on what kind of machine the animal is, but no one ever questioned the correctness of the paradigmatic definition that assimilated the animal condition to a machine. i therefore use the expression “emancipation of animality” from the restriction and mortification inflicted to it by the humanistic tradition. in order to do so, it is necessary not to dwell on the predicative elements, be they descriptive or explanatory, but rather to question the meta-predicative structure of animal-being, that is, animal ontology. every animal expression can be traced back to verbs of conjugation and positionality: chasing prey, rejoicing during a game, being frightened by a danger, protecting a certain resource. the animal is brought into the world through a verbal predicate that is realized in the conjugative act, as if the world was to complete the sentence and give meaning to the verbal declination. the animal cannot be explained through an internal recognition (that is, iuxta propria principia) because it is implicitly (verbally) conjugative. animality is thus a state of foundational deficiency, an appeal to something outside or past, and this will always distance it from the self-founding condition of a machine, regardless of the approximation or simulation that one may try to place in one’s model: the phantom of the machine will always disappear. the animal is subjective and, because of its desires, it is the protagonist of its own life. it is not a passive entity, but rather a continuous self-presentation, an irrepressible being that is looking for something. there is a close relationship between animality and research, between subjectivity and non-equilibrium. the animal is driven by languor, libido, instinct. it creates situations, transforms the world into a field of opportunities, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 58 because it desires and thus looks for opportunities. a leaf is moved by the wind; the animal, by contrast, has an internal driving force: it is subjective, because it is the protagonist. the internal motives are verbal structures: to collect, to chase, to look after, to join, to possess, to protect. the object is only an excuse. desires are verbs, actions in power, “structures that connect” (bateson), in certain ways, the animal to the world. the animal desires by expressing its motivations, by exploring and interacting with the world. on the other hand, the motivational state is the direct and neuromodulated expression of the individual’s endocrine status. for example, it expresses the individual’s biorhythm and periodicity that, through internal rhythms, impose glandular secretions interacting with streams of light, food metabolites, and immune feedbacks of the cytokine. desires define behavioral motives that, compared to the individual’s psychological state, are far from being amodal: one’s thoughts are governed by verbal functions that, compared to the motivations, are perfectly modal. when one speaks of self-assertion as an amodal function, one forgets that it is nothing more than a supervening level of basic motivational structures whose inductive and coordinative source are the gonads. when heidegger says that the man is the child of care, he forgets that the epimeletic behavior is based on oxytocin. to be sure, i am not trying to reduce the behavior of caring to the mere presence of oxytocin. i merely wish to emphasize how important it is to re-establish the connection between a mental state and the state of the body, avoiding the mind-body disjunction that only admits a correlation, rather than actual relation, even in the diversity of domains. descartes’s artifice of the dualistic operator opens the way for an amodal conception of cognition that is the first step to permanently remove subjectivity from the human and non-human animal condition. on the contrary, the expressive and relational performance of the mind always starts from a systemic-positional condition of the body: one only has to change some positional parameters and the psychic outcome assumes a totally different declination. moreover, thought always has a modal structure, compared to the body. on closer inspection, even human language reflects the “propositional structure” already implicit in the positional act, rather than following formal rules. chasing a hare is a behavior or a thought, a statement or an implication: its internal structure is what really matters. this is defined by a motivational predicate (chasing) and a modal specification that comes from schemes of experience in relation to the environment (how, what, where, when). chasing is a positional state because it defines the conjugative motive, creating an accurate declination of the connection between the subject and its here-and-now. roberto marchesini -what is philosophical ethology? 59 positionality is given by two forms of conjugations: 1) proactive positionalities that indicate how the subject engages the external reality, incorporates it, and orients itself therein; these positionalities can be defined as motives or “modal desires”; 2) reactive positionalities that indicate what kind of willingness the body has in its intersection with external reality; these can be defined as emotions or “modal willingness.” some authors such as damasio have stressed the importance of these positionalities, directly referring to the systemic body — and therefore he defines them as “somatic markers” — for cognitive activities usually defined as amodal. a significant example is the solution to a problem. first of all, it must be said that the animal does not just solve problems, as if external reality was nothing more than a series of objective problems. the motivational conjugation is the driving force that creates the problem — that is, it defines the gap between state and desired positionality. desire is the most immediate expression of subjectivity. it goes beyond need and, in a sense, gives meaning to it: i live because i desire, i live by expressing the desires that overwhelm me and shape my presence. all of the animal’s capacities do nothing but offer themselves as instruments for expressing desires. desire colors the world, it fills the eyes of a child’s wonder, it supports the chaotic games of a puppy, and gives its own meaning to the events of the world. if desire disappears, life withers into a vegetative atemporality; if desire decreases, life fades. desire is a mental languor, a craving for the world that makes the individual restless, ready for action, creative and involved. desire has always been at the basis of ethological research: each species has different desires, but every animal desires individually. it is a subject because it is oriented to seek a space where it can act: desire faces it with problems, makes it evaluate situations, urges it to find solutions, forces it to decide. the exercise of desire gives it more pleasure than the achieved outcome: the animal is a subject because it is part of the principle of expressive pleasure. secondly, it should be emphasized that, once a problem is revealed through the exercise of the desiring declination in conjugation with the outside world, this must be understood in its two inflections: a) all the structural features of the problem must be accepted, and the individual must therefore be able to refer to the positional resources that are useful for grasping complexity; for this reason, some problems require emotional activations of opening, and others require emotional activations of closure; b) the subject itself must be understood within the problem, as if the problem were a more or less comfortable environment, depending on the individual's intrinsic conditions. the animal is subjective because it has emotions, that is, some inner states that lead it to evaluate situations in a certain way. it is subjective because it does not experience the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 60 world passively, but interprets external reality depending on its status. through the emotional state, the animal converts the experienced situation in a value-for-itself condition. in this sense, to feel emotions is a necessary condition for a specific here-andnow: to be subjective means to build a singular and unique dasein of both the individual and the momentary past. emotions are the result of the relationship between the condition of the body and what external reality offers at a particular time. the body is a growing systemic reality: to transform this physiological processuality, which interacts with the world, in a state of mind means to exist as becoming. it is as if the animal colors the world through its emotions: the world takes on different shades depending on the animal’s feelings. for example, if it is tired and has negative feelings, it will not see what surrounds it in the way it does when it is happy. emotions such as sadness or fear will transform the world into something dark. therefore, to be subjective means to have a partial reading of reality. the animal never reads what surrounds it objectively; its approach is subjective because it is partial and relates to its internal condition. subjectivity is thus an interpretation of the world that anticipates the representation, a previous “evaluation” that places previous conceptualizations in question. the subject lives in the world, but more importantly, it lives according to its own values that color the world in a certain way. the animal is partial; it always has preconceptions. 4. subjectivity means existential plurality. the ethological principle according to which the individual is immersed in the world in always-different ways can be traced back to darwin’s principle of natural selection. however, this is neither an improvement on, nor an emancipation from, a particular previous condition, as the evolution of the human being is often trivially taken to be. it is rather a specialization, a special connection to an environment and lifestyle. evolution is a dialogic path that takes place over time, and in a context of plural relationships. it is the introjection of relationships that unfold between life and external reality, and whose outcome gives rise to a virtual range of ontogenetic phenotypes: a morphopoesis that is not only functional architecture, but also a dimension of presence and expressiveness. to consider evolution as a dialogue means to distance oneself from: a) an autopoietic vision of the living being and the various revivals of lamarck’s idea that evolution has an overall or intrinsic purpose, that is, it pursues a project; b) the idea that the individual is a completely passive entity in the evolutionary process when, on the contrary, the action and the creativity that she expresses in her life act on the selective pressures and lead to a modelling shift. roberto marchesini -what is philosophical ethology? 61 darwin’s revolution must therefore be regarded as a work in progress, a workshop of debates on animality that abandons naturalism, so as to become the paradigmatic crux for philosophical reflections on ontology. if one reads darwin’s thought correctly, one quickly realizes some important shifts from the humanistic tradition: 1) the organ precedes the function, and the anthropomorphic principle that it is designed for a particular performative declination cannot therefore be applied; 2) each organism is the result of a repeated modelling based on selective pressures, so that the living organism is an artifact and a work in progress; 3) the structural emergence is not based on an ideational coordinate; there is no designer; it abides by bottom-up (rather than topdown) organizational logics; 4) there is no model or reference, and the individual, therefore, can never approximate something; one cannot talk about gradients of completeness nor perfection, because evolution is a do-it-yourself process; 5) the evolutionary process does not abide by deterministic coordinates, and therefore cannot be compressed into an algorithm, because phylogenetics is historically based on occurrences and casualness. these shifts are substantial and cannot be confined to naturalism. they rather enter the philosophical debate, and the theme of animality leads to a comparison with the foundations of western thought, so that, in order to emphasize the discontinuity that charles darwin’s thought gave life to, one has to speak more and more of a posthumanistic age, seriously questioning: a) universalism, that is, the presumption of identifying a foundation of the projective and adaptive canon of humanism; b) essentialism, that is, the idea that each entity needs to follow a previous authentic, unchangeable, and referential schema; c) dichotomous thought in its various forms — particularly those of nature/culture, mind/body, human/animal, natural/artificial, innate/learned — that is, the idea that juxtaposed or related dimensions have a different domain; d) the disjunctive or non-relational conception of entities, that is, the idea that an entity may be founded according to its own principles and present itself as an impenetrable and autopoietic entity that can be reached through internal recognition and reflective speculation; e) the anthropocentric view of the ontological constitution, that is, the idea that the human being is measure and subsumption of the world. plurality entered the ontological debate with von uexküll’s concept of umwelt, that is, the immersion of a specific species in the world. this interpretation was then taken up by heidegger, so as to limit animality to the heterospecific and, vice versa, to free the human being from a particular declination, following to the letter the dualistic tradition of the epimethean genealogy of non-humans as opposed to the promethean genealogy of humans.10 by eliminating or drastically reducing the epimethean features of the human being (see the theory of human incompleteness that goes from pico della humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 62 mirandola to arnold gehlen), one tries to find some congruence between darwin’s thought and the humanistic paradigm. however, doing so misdirects the living human being’s basic premises, its contingent, nonlinear, positional virtuality inherent in “the expressive mechanism.” the animal, confined to its immersion, does not interpret its dasein, but simply enjoys and responds directly to the stimuli of the world in an absolutely atemporal, stunned condition. once again, one tries desperately to save the human’s speciality that guarantees universalism. according to this monadic vision of immersion, the heterospecific is an alien that cannot be investigated — as expounded in thomas nagel’s famous essay — that is, an entity with which no empathic relation can be built, since there are no connective bridges. one is once again faced with an ad hoc interpretation that expunges animality from the human domain, and reaffirms the automaton model. actually, when one reads evolutionism correctly, one notices an extensive overlap between different umwelten. this is attributable to: 1) homologies, that is, characteristics that are antecedent, shared because they are inherited from a common ancestor; 2) analogies, that is, characteristics that are convergent, shared because produced by the same selective pressures. diversity, therefore, should be not be used: a) to establish a total diversity between nonhuman and human that justifies an ontological difference; b) to build an existential hierarchy, that makes the human a standard for the evaluation of the non-human, and the latter an approximation; c) to declare a total alienation of the non-human, and therefore the impossibility of forming any hypothesis on heterospecific existentialism that is not a mere behavioral description. subjectivity thus enters the somatic-phylogenetic dimension as a body’s specific modality. human subjectivity is not the result of emancipation from a generic animal condition, but rather the very expression of a specific animal condition. subjectivity is the systemic emergence of a body in dialogue with the world, a being-with that subsumes the previous dialogic instances-consequences by constructing a new relational field that “exists” insofar as “an act is completed” — that is to say, the two states do not differ, but rather collide. existential plurality has several levels of contingency: a) the phylogenetic particularity that not only specifies absolute distances (greater closeness of humans to chimpanzees than to flies), but also some shared features that vary from species to species; b) the ontogenetic state that is not only an individuality that can be defined, depending on a cofactorial multiplicity (genetic, epigenetic, experiential), but is also the presence in a certain age; c) the singularity of the here-and-now, that is, the state of the body and its relationship with the events of a roberto marchesini -what is philosophical ethology? 63 particular time. subjectivity lies in this stream-like and continuous oscillation of presence in the world. in order to realize its project of universalism, the humanistic paradigm tends to expunge diversity by denying formal and expressive plasticity to both “the animal” and “the machine” in order to claim them for itself. non-human diversity is therefore deprived of subjectivity and turned into a mechanical specificity; it is transformed from existential diversity to functional diversity. for this reason, it seems very difficult to acknowledge a plurality in exegetical process, transforming it into a multiplicity of reactive mechanisms. twentieth-century cognitive ethology has not responded by questioning ontological anthropocentrism — that is, the cognitive universal — , but rather by presuming that the other species participate in the same exegesis. in my opinion, this is the greatest paradox that has prevented, rather than facilitated, a debate on animal subjectivity. just as a morphological, endocrine, and sensory diversity exists, so does a cognitive plurality, since the phylogenetic process specializes, but does not improve. the animal world is thus formed by a variety of intelligences specialized to process present information. to ask oneself what is the most intelligent animal makes no more sense than to ask what is the most sensory or endocrine species. a dog, for example, has a strong social capacity. a cat, instead, can solve problems independently: to ask which species is more intelligent is absolutely useless. 5. conclusions. to acknowledge subjectivity in the animal condition — that is, to bring subjectivity back to its animal condition — means to open a debate on many of the philosophical premises that characterize western culture. these premises tried to solve the problem of subjectivity through a series of artifices, the most notable of which is the dualistic artifice of incorporeal or amodal presence in time. subjectivity cannot be extracted from the body, and cannot even be confined to a particular emergence of evolutionary plurality, neither taxonomically (to what animal can subjectivity be related?) nor phylogenetically (from what point of the human evolution onward one can speak of subjectivity?). a living being is a subject because its ownership emerges from its systemic dialogic presence, from its reference to something external, but already presumed (like a lock that requires a certain key) and in progress (like a performance that always modifies the script). subjectivity indicates the individual's escape from the already-given: the excess of its being. the animal creates its present time, a here-and-now in which it builds its dasein. this present does not exist in itself. the animal invents it by relating past and future — that is, by giving resonance to passed time, and thus creating a temporal space for action and presence. the animal is a subject because it exists. it does not simply appear in the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 64 world; it is present, it participates in the world. to own a present means to have sovereignty over the here-and-now, and, in this sense, not to be immersed in it, but rather to emerge from the fluxes of time. the animal expresses itself through codes of resonance of the here-and-now that change, depending on the species. one could therefore say that there are as many presents as animal species. each species relates different times, because the phylogenetic history that preceded the individual emergence of a species-specific subjectivity is different, as well. subjectivity is this emergence from the flux of time. one does not choose to be a dog, a dolphin, a man, or a hen. one does not choose to bear the legacy defining the particular characteristics of one’s subjectivity. one does not choose the ontogenetic path that defines this individual identity, of which one so wishes to be the undisputed and sole creator. one does not choose the here-and-now that flexes one’s body unpredictably and ungovernably, like a slender boat trying to stay on course amidst stormy waves. although one did not choose any of these states and legacies, one does not give up; no individual does it, whatever species one has the fortune to belong to. the idea of the animal as a machine is finally declining, and it is now necessary to reconstruct an animal ontology that goes beyond the concept of res extensa. notes 1. at a first sight, the two traditional accounts — as expressed by skinner, on the one hand, and tinbergen, on the other — describe mutually incompatible explanatory models: 1) according to behaviorism, the animal works as a trigger machine; 2) according to classical ethology, the animal is a pressure cooker. as we can see, these two explanatory models are predicated on a basic assumption that is not called into question, namely that the animal is a machine. the scientific explanation of animal behavior, in searching to define “how the animal machine functions,” and restricting itself to defining features of animal mechanisms, has never problematized the cartesian paradigm of the animal as automata. the only thing that has been problematized is whether that mechanism is an instinct or a conditioning. as in kuhn’s view, science has only chosen the type of machine, remaining well anchored to the philosophical paradigm. for this reason, i believe that only a philosophical approach which problematizes the basic paradigm — the cartesian idea of animal automata — can really overcome ontological anthropocentrism: unless the human being is viewed as nothing but a puppet deterministically moved by strings. the main principle is refusing roberto marchesini -what is philosophical ethology? 65 mechanism, or, to put it differently, acknowledging animal subjectivity. in order to do so, a paradigmatic alternative to descartes must be found. 2. on this aspect, cf. sahlins. 3. declination is the term i use to identify the individual’s process of species tendencies to certain experiences and adaptations to the environment: it is what makes every nonhuman animal unique. often, we think of innate capacities as a defined set of features that standardizes all the members of a given species from the point of view of expression. on the contrary, the innate is like a schema, a structure able to adapt according to the developing path chosen by the individual. if cat-being foresees the predatory motivation, a towards-something motion, how, when, and where predatory behavior will be expressed depends on the biographic experience of the subject: in this regard, i would say that the predicate “predatory” is declined in a specific and peculiar way in a specific cat. the individual declination of predicates transform characters, which are not longer like essences, but like unlocked laboratories: material at the subject’s disposal to build their own existential dimension as the protagonist of their existence. 4. martin heidegger understood this aspect very well when he realized that the predicative explanation, still in vogue among the old humanists fascinated by the plasticity of the vitruvian model, was not the crux of the matter, because the difference between the human being and animal otherness was ontological, and thus metapredicative. the animal machine can perform actions, take part in some functions, be comprised in a period of time, and so on. but if/until it remains a machine, it will never be really present, because a machine is in an isochronal state, and does not own a hic-etnunc. 5. the child, for instance, uses processes of exaptation (gould) or assimilationaccommodation (piaget) to build new representations. therefore, the sympathetic elements give it the possibility to anchor the unknown elements, and to extend its representational horizon. the epiphany effect raised from the recognition in the heterospecific, the co-feeling in him, but at the same time in the being gradually projected in another dimension. 6. knowledge anticipates being able to use a foundation of stability-familiarity to project oneself into an unknown dimension, which in turn can construct a new “plane of reality” — to quote speusippus as recorded by aristotle — and so to begin a new adventure. leaning out into an unknown dimension remains dizzying, and one cannot humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 66 make the transition without the assistance of an other: to construct this dialectic, the hybridizing process, which can open new epistemic dimensions, is indispensable. 7. heidegger clarifies descartes’s unsaid. the mechanical translation of animality created an unbridgeable gap between humans and other species and, simultaneously, it definitively sanctioned its operative freedom over the non-human universe. since the seventeenth century, this paradigmatic development has been undoubtedly difficult and controversial: the point was to accentuate the dialectics of exclusion that was only in nuce in the early humanists. therefore, it is no surprise that, in addition to the hypothesis developed after descartes’s death (which increasingly amounted to a reductionism of animal expressiveness), proposals to restore subjectivity in nature came back, albeit in an intermittent way. on the other hand, countless factors privileged the reductionism to which descartes offered a particularly effective paradigmatic crux — first of all, the autocratic and autopoietic operation of the human being as the sole protagonist, a principle that had already been active in the western humanist metamorphosis for two centuries. 8. these two statements are misleading, but they offer themselves to reificatory projections. starting from statement a), both ernst mayr, when speaking of remote and proximal causal duality, and nikolaas tinbergen, in posing his four questions, exhorted us not to conflate evolutionary compatibility, dictated by the fitness of the subject, and elicitative compatibility, governed by hedonic-elicitative principles that the individual is subject to. if it can be proven that the fitness of altruistic behavior responds to the parameters of hamilton’s coefficient of relatedness, then it is equally true that an individual possessing a given trait may express it toward any entity which is capable of eliciting it, for example the expression of maternal instinct by an adult female of one species toward a cub of a different species. the explanation that refers to fitness tells us only whether an attribute is compatible in individuals of a given species, not why an individual would express it. 9. conjugation is the way the subject expresses his/her relationships with the world. depending on different situations, behavior can be conjugated in one way or another. for example, predatory behavior can be an expression of a physiological need (the result of being hungry), but it can also be a expression of a game or a competition. on the other hand, declination is the way in which motivation is expressed (towards what, how, where, when). this means that any tendency is a copula, something that is accomplished both in a declinative and in a conjugal sense. roberto marchesini -what is philosophical ethology? 67 10. in plato’s protagoras, epimetheus creates animals and his brother prometheus creates man. the topos of the epimethean genealogy of animals is well known in heidegger, but also in contemporary philosophy — in the work of catherine malabou, for example, and most notably in bernard stiegler’s hugely influential technics and time series, the first volume of which was published in 1994 with the subheading “the fault of epimetheus.” [ed.] work cited bateson, gregory. mind and nature: a necessary unity. hampton press, 20002. damasio, antonio r. descartes’ error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. putnam, 1994. gehlen, arnold. der mensch; seine natur und seine stellung in der welt. athenäum-verlag, 1950. gould, stephen jay. the structure of evolutionary theory. belknap press, 2002. gould, stephen jay, and elisabeth s. vrba. “exaptation — a missing term in the science of form.” paleobiology 8.1 (winter, 1982): 4-15. griffin, donald r. animal minds: beyond cognition to consciousness. u of chicago p, 2001. heidegger, martin. the fundamental concepts of metaphysics: world, finitude, solitude. trans. william mcneill and nicholas walker. indiana up, 1995. lorenz, konrad. on aggression. harcourt, brace & world, 1966. marchesini, roberto. “knowledge and different levels of reality.” philosophical readings 6.2 (themed issue: realism and anti-realism: new perspectives) (2014): 53-64. mayr, ernst. this is biology: the science of the living world. belknap press, 1997. merleau-ponty, maurice. phenomenology of perception. humanities press, 1962. nagel, thomas. “what is it like to be a bat?” the philosophical review 83.4 (october 1974): 435-450. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 68 köhler, wolfgang. gestalt psychology: an introduction to new concepts in modern psychology. liveright, 1947. piaget, jean. the science of education and the psychology of the child. orion press, 1970. sahlins, marshall. the use and abuse of biology: an anthropological critique of sociobiology. u of michigan p, 1976. skinner, burrhus frederic. science and human behavior. macmillan, 1953. tinbergen, nikolaas. the study of instinct. oxford up, 1951. von uexküll j. jakob, “a stroll through the worlds of animals and men. a picture book of invisible worlds.” instinctive behavior. the development of a modern concept. karl lashley, ed. international universities press, 1954. 5-80. wilson, edward, o. sociobiology: the new synthesis. belknap press, 1975. microsoft word berland-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 9:1 jody berland attending the giraffe imagine being one of the first people outside of africa ever to see a giraffe. no one you know has ever seen such a thing, it is entirely strange. if you belong to the inner circle of a powerful king or emperor’s estate, you may have seen elephants, monkeys, lions, and other exotic species arrive from distant places you will never see, and added to the private collection. captured from their natural habitats and isolated from other members of their species, the new animals’ appearance in the menageries and zoos of china and europe was part of creating new relationships between emperors and kings, new empires and their distant territories. what the animal “meant” to collectors and viewers in these early menageries was not so much “species” — a concept that did not yet exist — as curiosities, a wordless demonstration of the sender’s imagination and power to bridge two worlds. in 1414, a ruler in bengal shipped a giraffe to the emperor of china. the gift was a tribute, a gesture of good will cementing the special powers and potential economic relations of two rulers. sparse records of this event include an ancient painting and some brief academic commentaries tracing the story of “the emperor’s giraffe.” attr. shen du: tribute giraffe with attendant, 1414. (philadelphia museum of art) jody berland-attending the giraffe 23 we know very little about how exotic animals arrived to populate early modern menageries.1 how did they capture the giraffe? why was there only one? what kind of ship would carry a giraffe from africa, where it originated, to bengal, and then to china, in the 15th century? if the ship changed the life of the giraffe, did not the giraffe also change the shape and purpose of the ship? imagine them together, the ship and the giraffe, crossing an ocean, crossing cultures, and launching a new world order. a painting was made of this tribute giraffe that is considered historically important today. the fate of the giraffe featured in this painting is unknown. there is no record of affectionate relations between humans and giraffes in this or other early menageries, which is not to say that such relations did not exist yet — only that those who had ongoing personal encounters with the animals were not those authorized to record such events for posterity. to understand better the modern world and its organization of people, places, and animals, we need to establish that the giraffe was as much a medium of communication as the ship that carried it. the tribute was a ritual exchange performed in anticipation of an altered future. it demonstrated both the inviting mystery of a distant natural world, embodied by the animal, and growing human mastery over nature, embodied by the ship. its arrival altered relations between two imperial powers and helped to precipitate the emergence of transcontinental trade, an enterprise that became, through complex historical processes, world capitalism. to borrow mcluhan’s well-known phrase, the medium is the message, and in this story, the medium is an animal. to elaborate this idea, and to consider some of its implications, i compare the story of the 1414 tribute giraffe with the story of april, the famous pregnant giraffe of 2017. both giraffes were conscripted to enact a complex social ritual that brought together and changed the people involved in the event. to play this role, the giraffes had first to be conveyed from natural habitats into confinement, from distance into quasi-intimacy with european and global observers, from matriarchal family structure into an individual with a face that could at least hypothetically look back at its human viewer. each step of being made visible relied on something else being made invisible. i will argue that this double act of foregrounding and disappearing has discursively shaped both our relations with animals and the visual aesthetics of modern culture. let’s start with the visible. giraffes are so oddly crooked, so lovely with their earthy savanna colors and placid herbivore demeanor, so unreachable and tall. in the west, they are popularly associated with menageries and zoos, children’s toys, textile designs, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 24 african safaris, and more recently, the prospect of extinction. the 1414 giraffe launched new topographical imaginations and powers associated with its arrival, and “new ways of organizing nature,” as jason moore writes in “the rise of cheap nature.” encompassing humans, animals, and geopolitical space, these new powers laid the groundwork for the emergence of capitalism as a “world-ecology” (86, 85). april the pregnant giraffe of 2017 did not cross an ocean, but her image did. the screening of april’s pregnant pacing stimulated an audience of millions excited by the prospect of seeing her give birth online. their desire to witness april’s prolonged pregnancy day after day can only be understood in relation to the largely unspoken and unseen effects of loss among endangered animals, together with the absence of direct interaction with undomesticated animals in their everyday lives. six hundred years passed between these two events, a passage marked by the emergence of a capitalist world order and growing public anxiety about precarity and environmental risk. this precarity, a consequence of what has been named the anthropocence, is widely conceptualized as the result of human domination of and estrangement from nature, beginning with the industrial revolution and/or the rise of modern science (moore, op. cit.). but tracing the story of the tribute giraffe reminds us that in the process of colonization some people were estranged from nature, while others were defined and exploited by their proximity to its resources. these others had to develop methods or techniques to capture, kill, and transport animals for purposes previously unknown to them. together with their habitats and lands, these others came to comprise the back stage from which colonial subjectivity and the power of capital were extracted and performed. the giraffe made visible in this process represented and extended the influence of the nobles from bengal, but not that of the africans who captured the giraffe and arranged for its export to bengal, or the animal keepers who accompanied the giraffe to china. this giraffe reminds us that it is important, when we talk about human destruction, to ask, whose anthropocene? which humans? as dikesh chakrabarty reminds us, “the story of capital, the contingent history of our falling into the anthropocene, cannot be denied by recourse to the idea of species, for the anthropocene would not have been possible, even as a theory, without the history of industrialization” (chakrabarty 219-220). add this probing postcolonial question to mcluhan’s media theory and goffman’s cartography of social interaction, and you have begun to bridge the lives and surrounding cultures of two celebrity giraffes separated by six centuries. jody berland-attending the giraffe 25 antoine thiébault & jacques garnier-allabre: a giraffe from sennaar, africa, presented by the pasha of egypt to king charles x of france at saint-cloud, july 9, 1827. print. (the museum of european and mediterranean civilisations [mucem], marseilles) non-human animals have mediated social relations throughout history. they have played a significant role in relations between rulers, between families, between landowners and peasants, colonial invaders and indigenous peoples, governments and subjects, technologies and users, environmentalists and climate change deniers. in conditions of mobilization or movement they sometimes function as what cultural anthropologists and star trek fans call first contact between groups or territories. the 1414 giraffe, sent from one asian ruler to another, represented both difference and the possibility to cross that difference. first contact mediators and the narratives that surround them help make sense of the unknown, and they have important but diverse semiotic consequences. as alan liu observes, “first contact” encounters also arise in relation to new media when familiar images help users to befriend and navigate the daunting technology and to imagine where the interaction might lead. however familiar, these images cannot fully predict or control how media will reshape the cultures or subjectivities of the people who engage with them. liu is not thinking of animals when he describes first contact narratives drawing users into new media. but in the 1970s and 80s, in the dawn of the so-called information age, and even today, many humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 26 entrepreneurs have put this idea into practice. tigers, penguins, monkeys, birds, lizards, lions, and cats have all served as friendly mediators for navigators looking to find their way into new interfaces (cf. berland, “a visitor's guide”). they mean something different from these early menageries, but they would not be conceivable without them. if an animal can be a medium, and not just the content of a photograph, painting, or advertisement, and not just the body of an animal, what exactly is it mediating? the fascinating complexity of this question makes the idea of the animal medium worth examining. most obviously the naming of the animal as a medium is a project in the relatively new project of media archaeology, which seeks to rewrite the archives of human culture in search of their underlying material histories. despite this project’s notable attempts to counter anthropocentrism, this endeavor has rarely (with the notable exception of nicole shukin’s animal capital), accommodated the non-human animal as part of such histories. reframing this initiative to include the nonhuman animal highlights the animal’s role as what derrida calls a supplement to the social relationship in which it appears. the supplement both adds to and takes the place of the human subject to which it is added, thus rebalancing or more accurately unbalancing the architecture of personal and political relations in which it appears. a text adds a layer of meaning to, and simultaneously diminishes the established authority of, a field of knowledge; a new child expands and disrupts a relationship or family; a new technology enhances and displaces the bodies and work practices of people who engage with it. as hinted in the way i have described it, there are parallels between this idea and mcluhan’s study of media as “extensions of man,” providing extensions of our limbs and senses that simultaneously enhance and displace their powers. the car extends our feet but also diminishes their importance and the autonomy of the human body, an observation that applies equally to spectacles, telephones, and gloves. the way our limbs and senses require supplementation in order to flourish is the comparative strength and weakness of the human species. there is an analogy to be made here (especially for readers of harold innis, canadian communication theorist and mentor of mcluhan, who emphasized the relationship between communication and empire) between this extension of the body and the way a giraffe supplements an emperor. we are back at the beginning of the modern period, and the emperor is seeking to expand his power as though more territory will make him more powerful, as though jody berland-attending the giraffe 27 his territory is somehow inadequate on its own. by sending an animal as tribute to a potential ally, the ruler conveys the exotic richness of his country, and by making the wealth of his country appear to depend on the supplementation of the proposed alliance he also makes it potentially subject to invasion through or despite its expansionary drive. throughout the modern period, as territories or countries are colonized, they are (inequitably) enriched by the exportation of their material resources and yet diminished by their dependency on external powers. this relationship is commonly expressed in a reliance on images of wild nature, of “otherness,” so that a country’s destiny seems to be “defined by — and perhaps limited to — its beauty, wildness and natural wealth” (berland, “animal and/as medium” 90). now consider this pattern of colonial supplementation in relation to irving goffman’s idea that human social interaction is essentially theatrical. advocating in the presentation of self in everyday life for a dramaturgical approach to the study of human behavior, goffman shows that the “presentation of self” entails the strategic employment of select personal features and behaviors or “faces” that are distinct from those lived and more or less hidden “back stage.” modern countries continue to symbolize themselves through their most beautiful or symbolically potent animals. we do not see the labor and exploitation that enables the distant or proximate other to appear in the guise of beautiful wilderness and wonder. these ideas can be somewhat accommodated within an appropriately expanded field of media archaeology enriched by the recognition that the history of natural resources is also a history of colonialism. but the animal body is also different from dust, copper, chemicals, or gold; it does not disappear quietly into the image making apparatus, and has never done so. furthermore, whatever physical materialities are mediated in the acts of communication through which we become who we are, all societies involve conflict, and human conflicts are also expressed and negotiated through culture. as a mediator of social exchange, an animal medium can be simultaneously a body of bones and blood, a political tribute, a theatrical supplement, a ritual event, a resource for financial exploitation, and a resource for hope in the face of an ominous future. recognizing culture as both symbolic negotiation and material infrastructure is essential to understanding how and why animals appear in the midst of human social relations and cultural events. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 28 drawing of zarafa the giraffe, as imagined en route to marseille france from egypt, ca 1827. (provenance unknown) welcoming the exotic. ownership of menageries was a common feature of aristocratic life in roman and medieval times. records of their collections include elephants and lions, but not giraffes.2 the famous 1414 giraffe, born in what is now kenya, was shipped from bengal to the middle kingdom, where it was decisively misunderstood as a species. the only communication that preceded its arrival was a rumor, a word that meant “monster,” and since they expected to see a monster comprised of parts of various animals, that is what they saw. the chinese court welcomed this camel-leopard monster with great fanfare; it was exotic, it was irresistible, and it was a tribute to their greatness. who caught the giraffe, who accompanied her, who fed her, who saw her, how long she lived, what she thought about her experience, all this is unknown. despite the promising reception of this tribute, chinese trade ended by the middle of the 15th century (ringmar 376). but the new career of giraffes as emissaries of international trade had just begun. egyptian rulers sent several giraffes to europe, first to lorenzo de’ medici in florence in 1486, and then, several centuries later, to king george iv of england and king charles x of france, in 1827. note the dates of these gifts, writes eric ringmar in the journal of world history. if these giraffes were not the first to arrive in europe, they held particular historical importance. the first [1486] giraffe appeared right before the europeans — florentine explorers prominently among them — went off to discover what was to become “america.” the second giraffe appeared only three years before france’s first imperialist venture began — the bloody war in, and jody berland-attending the giraffe 29 subsequent occupation of, algeria. by studying how the europeans reacted to these two animals, we should be able to understand better how they regarded the extra-european world at the cusp of the two waves of expansion. (377-378) sent from one ruler to another, the giraffe could have been, and was in a sense interchangeable with, gold or silk brocade (zielinski). but the giraffe had unique persuasive powers. like other curiosities of the early modern period, it stimulated a combination of carnal acquisitiveness and a more disinterested curiosity about natural science.3 it was even greater curiosity because giraffes do not fight or eat other animals, which made them a novel innovation in the arena of courtly entertainment, disrupting what people expected of exotic animals (williams 52). this peaceful disposition did not reduce its charismatic power. ringmar writes: when suddenly seeing something that surpassed the expected in beauty, diversity, or abundance, the mind was overwhelmed. people were first astonished, then delighted, and finally excited. clearly there was something highly addictive in this mixture of emotions. it piqued people’s curiosity, and once they had seen a little, they wanted to see more. obviously, in terms of height and sheer impact, there was no more marvelous, or more curious, animal than a giraffe. (379) giraffes were able to convey the quality of the marvelous even after they had ceased to be “curiosities” as such, that is to say, after acquiring them ceased to be novel or exclusive to the private amassment of wealth and knowledge. they have become more accessible outside of africa through their presence in public zoos, natural history museums, films, and pictures. they flourish in children’s culture, providing friendly anthropomorphic figures for early object attachment while linking kids to a commodity market that is more and more child-centered. their unique shape is almost normalized, insofar as it is possible to normalize a giraffe outside of its natural habitat. combining childhood attachment, commercial mediascapes, and ecological vulnerability, the giraffe’s meanings continue to accumulate. this transformation alters what we understand to be its mode of mediation: how it mediates, and what it is mediating. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 30 jacques-laurent agasse: the nubian giraffe, commissioned by george iv in 1827. (royal collection trust) as my thinking about animal mediation unfolded, i began to wonder whether we should be thinking of these animals as “vanishing mediators.” fredric jameson introduced this concept in 1977 to summarize max weber’s foundational analysis of bureaucracy, and in particular the role of religious authority in the development of modern industrialization. in this analysis, the priest in religious europe represented and was seen to mediate the spiritual and the administrative authority endowed by god. this spiritual authority authorized the birth of modern bureaucratic organization which originated in the church but spread beyond it. as organizations further rationalized themselves to manage the more spatially and technically complex processes of industrialization and urbanization, modern bureaucracy abandoned its fealty to religion and made the priest’s specific religious power obsolete. the priest is the vanishing mediator of bureaucratic industrialism. in our story, the giraffe is presented as a ritual gesture to rulers preparing to embark on joint mercenary ventures into the unknown, and its conveyance precipitates new ways of seeing, transporting, owning, and connecting with other cultures. the prospect of extinction for giraffes and other species seems to make the utility of the vanishing jody berland-attending the giraffe 31 mediator concept uncontroversial. but the vanishing began much earlier than any prospect of extinction confronted the species. while giraffes were welcomed in europe, they did not always flourish there; the death of the beloved giraffe after eighteen years in the jardin du roi was, according to painter eugène delacroix, “as obscure as her entry into the world had been brilliant” (ringmar 388).4 her fortune was better than the medici giraffe, who broke her neck almost immediately on a beam in the special barn lorenzo had built for her. even before these events, there were disappearances; in order to capture the tribute giraffe, hunters likely killed its mother (buquet 6). to continue the export of giraffes, africans had to adapt or modify their practices in order to capture and transport the young giraffe in aid of a purpose previously unknown to them. the capacity to exchange the tribute giraffe thus involved seizing power not only over the animal, but also over the people who shared its habitat. this ritual performance of colonial power is vividly documented in the 1988 film “from the pole to the equator,” made from the film archives of global explorer luca comerio (1874-1940).5 its depiction of the performative killing of animals before indigenous hunters is particularly gruesome. the animals depicted in this record of conquest were not exported as live animals but hunted, killed and rendered into parts as trophies and other products, as i have documented in “the work of the beaver.” such practices entrenched the colonized african or indigenous person as a dual figure: both the inhabitant of a rich land capable of supplying wealth in the form of animal bodies, and a sacrificial figure represented metonymically by the animal it has forfeited. here the animal extends and symbolically displaces the indigenous person. indigenous and tribal peoples became vanishing mediators in the dissemination of wild animals to diverse parts of the globe. the giraffe came to represent africa without any sign of them, just as the beaver came to represent canada (which according to margaret atwood was built on dead beavers [surfacing 3940], without carrying visible evidence of the colonial and indigenous trappers who traded them. the origin of an exotic animal is in short both a crucial part of its perceived meaning, and a background rendered invisible by the technologies and discourses through which it appears elsewhere in the world. colonies are often called “frontiers” for intrepid explorers, but this process keeps colonized places and peoples back stage, as goffman’s describes it, and whatever happens there, as edward said writes in culture and imperialism, remains unseen. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 32 nicholas huët, the younger: study of the giraffe given to charles x by the viceroy of egypt, 1827. (the morgan library and museum) later appearances of the giraffe have built upon these first encounters. ringmar’s reference to the heightened desire to see something marvelous forms an important link between 15th century giraffes and the animals circulating today in media culture. giraffes have become more accessible by means of their presence in zoos, natural history museums, films, and pictures. in contemporary consumer culture, the animal plays an important function for children, providing anthropomorphic figures for early object attachment while linking them to a commodity market that is more and more childcentered. here there need not be just one giraffe because one toy can be replaced with another. as even children are learning, this is not true of the species as a whole. by combining mass mediation, childhood attachment and release, and ecological vulnerability, the giraffe’s meanings have again changed. now the giraffe occupies an uncertain place in the social drive to save/extinguish species that defines the so-called anthropocene. this transformation alters what we understand to be its mode of mediation: how it mediates, and what it is mediating. jody berland-attending the giraffe 33 this story of the tribute giraffe is a starting point for re-thinking the animal-medium relation, both as an historical project and as an important task for media and animal studies. scholars have written a great deal about the essential yet sometimes surprising role that communication has played in human history. but to understand the historical changes that occurred in the 15th century, and to consider their complicated relationship to the present, we first need to establish that the giraffe is as much a medium of communication as the ship that carried the giraffe to a country that had never seen one. the coming and going of ships and giraffes together helped to alter their environments by simultaneously demonstrating human mastery through new technology and embodying the exotic and untouched. only by reading the event as the imbrication of the animal and the technological, that is to say of two different but interdependent relational processes, can we understand its effects on how humans think and feel about animals, or how the venture of world trade was launched that later became, through various complex historical processes, global capitalism. understanding animals as mediators in the interplay between digital machines and reconfigured humans is different from viewing animals as the content being transmitted in that milieu. taking up the insight that an animal is a medium and the medium is the message means acknowledging, as jon durham peters does in his book the marvelous clouds, that thinking about animals in the context of mediation is not just important for our consideration of human animal relations; it expands our understandings of mediation itself. if mcluhan’s insights demonstrate “that media are not only carriers of symbolic freight but also crafters of existence” (peters 15), this insight applies to animals whether they occupy terrestrial, aqueous, pictorial, digital, or philosophical environments. this does not mean that animals are always mediators, willing or otherwise. as peters notes, “because media are in the middle, their definition is a matter of position, such that the status of something as a medium can fade once its position shifts” (29). that is to say, one giraffe can be an undisturbed member of a matriarchal family, another can be food for a human or animal predator, another a tribute sent to an emperor, another a prisoner behind bars, and another (differently) a figure on t shirt where before one was more likely to see eagles and elephants. recognizing that one entity changes through interaction with others is the foundation of ecology. ecology referred originally to the interactions of species, but mcluhan applied it to the interactions of communication media. giraffes become mediators when they appear in the middle of things, when they intertwine the ecology of species and the ecology of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 34 media, when endangered species meet webcams that meet with delayed motherhood, when movement from one territory to another shifts the geopolitics of nature and the grammar of looking. as always, what is hidden in these arrangements colors what is visible. if a medium creates a “common situation” in human culture, as mcluhan wrote (cited gordon 53), if a medium doesn’t “mean” things but “does” things, and if a boat is a medium that brings people and things together in the form of a new assemblage or new ecology, then a post-anthropocentric interpretation of these events must acknowledge the fact that forging good will between emperors relied as much upon the giraffe as it did upon the boat. giraffes have special qualities that determine what and how they mean for the various people who encounter them. at the same time, layers of historic events and discourses have accumulated to shape what any animal can mean today. pregnant giraffe april with one of her handlers, image captured from live cam feed, 2017. (©animal adventure park) on mediation in the anthropocene-capitalocene. for several months in the spring of 2017, a global audience waited for april the giraffe to give birth in a small zoo in upstate new york. the owner mounted a camera and transmitted a live feed of april as she paced back and forth in her pen, separated by a fence from oliver, the father, to ensure the safety of the calf. this is not the first time a zoo has sought to capitalize from a prospective birth, but this event broke all viewing records, creating a news sensation and a financial coup for the zoo. according to counts of online views, april’s prospective calf became briefly more famous than any human baby in history, including britain’s toddler prince george and beyoncé’s unborn twins. viewers’ comments heightened the intensity of waiting and reinforced the sense of a significant event. they confessed that they were hooked, they were addicted, they could not believe what they jody berland-attending the giraffe 35 were doing, the incredulity echoing in some strange way the marvel that must have been felt upon seeing the first giraffe. but this time, the description of enchantment is darkened by the frequent reference to addiction. this addiction is voluntary and involuntary at the same time; it is experienced as contagious, like a virus. to explain the apparent need of participants to confess as well as to watch, it is essential to acknowledge the reputedly viral qualities of this event. for such viewers, the enchantment of encountering the animal empowers and disempowers them at the same time. left to right: april in labor, screenshot from live cam, 2017. april and newborn tajiri, screenshot from live cam, 2017. (©animal adventure park) this enchanting contagion is both personal and public in its effects. thousands shared online their conviction that they could not sleep until april had had her giraffe. all the public feelings about the future of the giraffe as a species, the complicity of humans in the endangerment of wild animals, the confusion about what could be done to reverse an unthinkably huge extinction event, the unfortunate and unnatural everyday existence of giraffes penned in small spaces, and the unspoken boredom or loneliness of the watchers, all these were sublimated and poured into the need to watch april. the “event” gave participants an opportunity to express their own sense of being captured along with their hopes for a birth as affirmation of the vitality of nature. this love for april was expressed not only in online professions of insomnia, excitement, and addiction, but also in the vigorous sales of mother-giraffe memes and april-named tshirts and maternity clothes. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 36 this community of april fans is not the elite milieu shared by the royal owners of tribute and medici giraffes, quite the opposite. in this affective entanglement, anyone with a computer could look at april; anyone could express their feelings online. the giraffe was a medium again, but this time, for millions. this giraffe is performing a very different kind of political mediation. it provides an appropriate case study for foucault’s analysis of modern governmentality as a discursive process within which the constitution and practice of human subjectivity is formed. governmentality is directed to the governance of people, rather than territories or possessions. through its mechanisms, humans learn to consider and to regulate themselves as autonomous subjects posed to take full possession of their own lives, only secondarily and more or less instrumentally connected to others. because the regulative idea of self-governance has been internalized, the people that comprise the population regulate themselves, or submit themselves to its directives, even when the logic of individual agency collapses before them. because precarity has become so foundational to the neoliberal order, the practice of self-governance is increasingly shaped around it and can potentially evolve in various directions. the sense of being enmeshed in a state of precarity can engender recognition of the precarity of others and a sense of "being with,” a recognition that all life is co-existence (nancy). “precariousness designates something that is existentially shared, what is problematized here is not what makes everyone the same, but rather what is shared by all” (lorey 19; emphasis in original). the vulnerability of endangered species is now the principal rationale for animal captivity, but this context was hardly mentioned in the course of this media event. april’s craftily produced celebrity returned sovereignty to the individual viewers who invested love and hope in this giraffe, this baby, not all giraffes. april’s maternal body was a mediator between two powerful discourses, two potential world orders: neoliberalism, with its necrophiliac emphasis on the sovereignty of individual human subjects, and political ecology, with its life-affirming emphasis on habitats, cross-species entanglements and collective survival. shared motherhood aside, these logics are irreconcilable outside the space of the zoo. the affectionate alliance between april and her fans failed (at least in the short term) to the extent that it confirmed and naturalized the zoo’s authority in the posited order of things. their feelings about risk, an essential component of this event, were discharged through the carefully orchestrated love for an individual animal who once again, once its calf was born, would disappear from their screens. jody berland-attending the giraffe 37 google search result for april t-shirts. (photo by author, 2017) april is not mediating two emperors but rather more than a million viewers joined together by her image on the internet, and by the way the prospective event appeared to confirm their passionate commitment to nature and rebirth as a solution to precarity. watching april did not just absorb the attention of enchanted animal lovers, and did not just create a market for t-shirts and memorabilia; it also served to endorse unseen intermediaries (such as the zoo owner, who hovers on the edge of the screen) as instruments of risk management and animal salvation. audiences were well prepared to engage with this animal by their already-established relationship with animals on their toys, picture books, television and computer screens, and phones. as new media tools are launched, users are enticed to interact with them by images of animals that convey appropriate proportions of lovability, cuteness, mobility, autonomy, and adaptability. in this animal-tool entanglement, the magic of one is enhanced by the magic of the other. just as in 1414 a giraffe appeared in advance of new political relations, today animal images appear whenever new electronic spaces or devices are being launched (berland, “a visitor’s guide”). these images continuously reanimate our associations between animal motion and the vitality of representation, making new media programs and devices seem both exuberant and safe. the designers creating these animal mediators have retrieved and modernized the attitudes toward formerly unknown exotic animals that were inaugurated centuries ago: curiosity, acquisitiveness, fascination, and a blithe disregard for habitats and cultures. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 38 mom posing as april the giraffe with newborn son (credit erin dietrich via facebook). as viewers watch april pace, the live feed joins the giraffe’s body to our feelings of protectiveness and affection, and our need for diversion and pleasure. joined together by the optics of the zoo, we wait for her to do what giraffes must do (and we cannot) and what ensures the viability of the zoos that contain them, and that is to save the species. april the mother is the captured agent of a biopolitical economy that mediates and magically resolves the conflict we experience every day as we negotiate between money, global geopolitics, and the conflicted impulses within our hearts. these layers of meaning challenge our attempts to understand the april experience. what is problematic is not love for giraffes or elephants, or april’s evocation of the past, or the technological mediation of the encounter, but rather her triple commodification — the zoo, the advertiser, the measurement of online hits — and its carefully successful management of our perceptions and responses, which like colonialism, but differently, shape how she appears and what she means. april is thus an agent of the larger governmental practice of risk management. describing april’s mediation as risk management is not the same as talking about the risks animals themselves face in interactions with humans, or the way such risks are represented explicitly in human images or texts, or the security of april herself as a widely celebrated, privately owned jody berland-attending the giraffe 39 commodity. april’s global profile calls for a more socially and politically grounded theory of risk together with a revitalized theory of mediation. at a general level, potential risks that this maternal star of the virtual menagerie might assuage include: a loss of profit for zoos; more politically volatile uses of online spaces; boredom and indifference with life online; users’ non-participation in social media, with a negative effect on user data monetization; spreading animal rights activism; and a volatile concern about climate change and the devastated landscapes of the anthropocenic environment that catalyzes a need to act, somehow. a million individual users sharing the april experience can ameliorate some of these risks. but risk management in the age of climate change produces new risks, political and economic as well as ecological, that require the cultivation of new techniques, and we are subject to another cascading series of techniques to follow the waves and mediations (cf. van loon). april reminds us how much these new techniques of human governance concern our feelings. just as the giraffe and the ship are entangled in a performative event, so the coappearance of social media devices with their animal sidekicks plays an important role in the current “shift in our dominant cultural logic of mediation.” these devices do not just promise convenience and connection; they forge affective links between themselves, their animals, and us, which promise to help us manage our everyday lives and social interactions. animals, of course, touched humans before now, but how animals figure into the management of our experiences, how affect is mediated and toward what ends, what affective entanglement means in this context, has changed profoundly.7 affect is a subtler concept for talking about these media encounters than mcluhan’s speculative cybernetic physiology, in part because mcluhan was not very attuned to affect, or to politics, or to animals, for that matter, but also because the processes that he intuited have become so much more explicit. just as the 1414 giraffe was sent to advocate for friendly relations between two rulers, so contemporary celebrity animals advocate for friendly relations with the technologies and institutions that frame their presence. their performative place in the virtual menagerie is part of a new “digital nature” that, as charlie gere observes, is helping to naturalize institutional arrangements with complicated political repercussions (gere 144-5). april’s glorious sweetness and fame seems to re-enchant a disenchanted world. like other animal figures populating the virtual menagerie, april’s appearance has been stripped, coded and dramaturgically shaped as part of a post-narrative humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 40 aesthetic regime that stimulates the human-(quasi)animal interactions we long for, and generates profits from them. this multi-media regime interacts with our perceptual capacities and affective states in ways that have come to feel natural, the way artificial plants function when you walk into a bank. our “common situation” as mcluhan termed it is a scopic regime that foregrounds the animal’s charismatic beauty and hides the irrelevant/inescapable fate of their natural milieux. as cheryl lousley writes: distilling ecological relationships into icons of charismatic life displaces how biodiversity is one of the most contested areas of environmental politics where the decidedly social questions of sovereignty, property rights, justice, livelihoods, and the capacity to shape a future are all at stake…. the slippage from vitality to commodity enchantment is especially hard to avoid, i argue, because capitalist economies thrive on the appearance of flourishing objects of desire, available for intimate appropriation. (710) as we set our eyes upon these objects of desire, we participate in an habitual process of staged and regularly updated interaction that renders unseen the realities of habitat loss, declining populations, poaching, and protective incarceration. it is crucial to this scopic regime that we want to look, that we adapt to new techniques and temporalities of viewing, and that we momentarily forego political or ethical concerns about the implications of our own desires. in this festival of looking it is not only the animal who is sacrificed. as bodies and images are detached whether by guns or photoshop from the nature that makes them animal, the force of the imagery inveigles us to abandon the thoughtfulness that allegedly makes us human. but images of animals awaken an enriched sense of the vulnerability of the natural world. they can stir deeply ethical responses to our shared creatureliness and precarious futures, as the writing of lori gruen, isabell lorey, and anat pick reminds us. the experience of being joined to millions of viewers by a common passionate feeling for an animal is arguably as unique and potentially transformative an experience as seeing a live giraffe for the first time. jody berland-attending the giraffe 41 close up of a giraffe taken on safari. (photo by emily mcgiffin, 2017) conclusion: nature shots. mcluhan chose watchdog and fish metaphors to describe the state of distraction humans experience when they focus on the content of a medium rather than the medium itself. peters rejects this metaphorical use of the animal, for it teaches us nothing about them. “one thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in,” claimed mcluhan. “in fact,” peters interjects, “fish probably know a lot about water's temperature, clarity, currents, weather, purity, and so on, but the point was that they did not recognize it as water” (peters 55). and we don’t recognize the fish as medium. it does not matter whether animals interact with us in terrestrial, aqueous, domestic, digital, dietary, or philosophical environments: they can be a medium as easily as the water can. taking up the insight that “the medium is the message” without abandoning the squids or giraffes means acknowledging how much animals expand our understandings of mediation itself. how and what animals mediate is contingent on more than their biological niche, more than the technologies within which they appear, more than the feelings and ethics of individual people looking at them, although each of these plays a role in the moments and outcomes of mediation. this is true of any image. mcluhan asks us to reverse our perspective on images so that we view ourselves from the perspective of the media, that is, with “attentiveness to the agency of the medium in the analysis of social change” (mitchell and hansen, xi). it is as when mitchell asks, in his book of the same title, “what do pictures want?” but looking humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 42 through the picture to see ourselves being made by their making. this “attentiveness to the medium” is related to the suggestion that we look at ourselves from the point of view of the animal, acknowledging how little we know about what they know or feel or see but nurturing more empathic relations nonetheless. delving into mediation challenges us to multiply our gaze on ourselves. this is a profoundly political task of cultural and ontological reorientation. what might animals need to flourish in the environments of the future? they need us to see and feel the animals we encounter and to clearly face and sense what seems invisible behind them. we are as embedded in the world of natural and digital habitats as animals are, and we need to find more complex ways to render these realities and more sustainable modes of entanglement with them. nurturing awareness of how animal and technological media shape our embodied cognition of the world provides a chance to practice living with their eyes on us, and to realize how images that produce the greatest wonder are entangled with the politics of nature and desire in contemporary risk culture. tangling them differently offers a chance to focus not just on charismatic giraffes needing to be saved, but also on the visual languages, discursive mediations and reconfigured human-animal ecologies that can make diverse multispecies futures viable. notes 1. a fuller discussion of this history will appear in my forthcoming book, virtual menageries. 2. claire cock-starkey claims in penguins, pineapples and pangolins that giraffes were known in europe since julius caesar brought a giraffe to rome as part of his menagerie (11). see also lisa j. kiser, “animals in medieval sports, entertainments and menageries;” and eric ringmar, “audience for a giraffe.” 3. see martin jay and sumathy ramuswami, eds. empires of vision, especially nicholas thomas, “objects of knowledge: oceanic artifacts in european engravings.” 4. there are other versions of this story in which the giraffe’s loss is publicly mourned, however. 5. comerio was “a pioneer of documentary film making who traveled widely and often recorded the interaction of people and animals; indeed, the abundant animal footage here is the contemporary film makers’ most chilling material” (maslin). jody berland-attending the giraffe 43 6. see van den oever and winthrop-young. 7. in entangled empathy: an alternative ethic for our relationships with animals, lori gruen develops an understanding of affect that is founded in the recognition of entanglement with animals and a call for such entanglement to be more empathic. works cited “animal adventure park giraffe cam.” youtube. web. 10 apr. 2017. atwood, margaret. surfacing. mcclelland and stewart, 1972. berland, jody. “animal and/as medium: symbolic work in communicative regimes.” the global south 3.1 (2009): 42–65. _____. “a visitor’s guide to the virtual menagerie.” antennae 30 (themed issue: virtual animals) (winter 2014): 54-71. _____. “the work of the beaver.” material cultures in canada. wilfrid laurier up, 2015. 25–45. buquet, thierry. c. beck & f. guizard, eds. la bête captive au moyen âge et à l’époque moderne. encrage, 2012. 65-90. chakrabarty, dipesh. “the climate of history: four theses.” critical inquiry 35.2 (winter 2009): 197-222. cock-starkey, claire. penguins, pineapples and pangolins. british library publishing, 2016. gere, charlie. digital culture. 2nd revised edition. reaktion books, 2008. gianikian, yervant, and angela ricci lucchi. from the pole to the equator. museum of modern art, 1988. film. goffman, irving. the presentation of the self in everyday life. anchor, 1959. gordon, w. terrence. mcluhan: a guide for the perplexed. bloomsbury academic, 2010. gruen, lori. entangled empathy: an alternative ethic for our relationships with animals. lantern books, 2014. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 44 kiser, lisa j. “animals in medieval sports, entertainments and menageries.” a cultural history of animals in the medieval age. brigitte resl, ed. oxford up, 2007. 103-126. jameson, fredric. “the vanishing mediator: narrative structure in max weber.” new german critique 1 (winter, 1973): 52-8. jay, martin, and sumathy ramuswami, eds. empires of vision. duke p, 2014. liu, alan. “imagining the new media encounter.” a companion to digital literary studies. ray siemens and susan schreibman, eds. wiley-blackwell, 2013. 3–26. lorey, isabelle. state of insecurity: government of the precarious. verso, 2015. lousley, cheryl. “charismatic life: spectacular biodiversity and biophilic life writing.” environmental communication 10.6 (2016): 704-718. maslin, janet. “from the pole to the equator.” new york times, april 6, 1988. mcluhan, marshall. “new media as political forms.” explorations 3 (1955): 115-121. mcluhan, marshall, and lewis h. lapham. understanding media: the extensions of man. the mit press, 1994. mitchell, w. j. t. image science: iconology, visual culture, and media aesthetics. u of chicago p, 2015. mitchell, w. j. t., and mark b. n. hansen, eds. critical terms for media studies. u of chicago p, 2010. moore, jason w. “the rise of cheap nature.” anthropocene or capitalocene? nature, history and the crisis of capitalism. jason w. moore, ed. pm press, 2016. 78-115. nancy, jean-luc. being singular plural. translated by robert richardson and anne o’byrne. stanford up, 2000. peters, john durham. the marvelous clouds: toward a philosophy of elemental media. u of chicago p, 2015. pick, anat. creaturely poetics: animality and vulnerability in literature and film. columbia up, 2011. ringmar, erik. “audience for a giraffe: european expansionism and the quest for the exotic.” journal of world history 17.4 (2006): 375-397. jody berland-attending the giraffe 45 said, edward w. culture and imperialism. vintage, 1993. shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. u of minnesota p, 2009. thomas, nicholas. “objects of knowledge: oceanic artifacts in european engravings,” in jay and ramuswami. 141-158. van den oever, annie, and geoffrey winthrop-young. “rethinking the materiality of technical media: friedrich kittler, enfant terrible with a rejuvenating effect on parental discipline — a dialogue.” techné/technology: researching cinema and media technologies, their development, use and impact. annie van den oever, ed. amsterdam up, 2014. 219-239. van loon, joost. risk and technological culture: towards a sociology of virulence. routledge, 2002. williams, edgar. giraffe. reaktion books, 2011. zielinski, sarah. “the giraffes that sailed to medieval china.” science news: magazine of the society for science & the public. october 1, 2013. web. 11 april 2017. microsoft word vint-molloy-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:1 sherryl vint broadcasting beasts claire molloy, popular media and animals. london: palgrave macmillan, 2011. 256 pp. $85.50 (hb); $72.00 (kindle). claire molloy’s popular media and animals is published in palgrave macmillan’s animal ethics series, designed to explore the centrality of animal issues to contemporary scholarship and in particular to consider the ethical implications of our new knowledge of animal sentience, cognition and awareness. interdisciplinary in its approach, the series strives to investigate the philosophical, ethical, and political challenges, both conceptual and pragmatic, posed by shifting human/animal relations. the series preface also states that it aims to provide introductory overviews that map out ethical positions on animals that will be of service to university courses. molloy’s text fits this rubric well, providing a comprehensive overview of the way popular modes, particularly journalism, mediate our understanding of animals. the book is organized around ways animals are integrated into our imaginations and practices: as film performers, documentary images of “authentic” nature, objects of experimental practice, food, and sources of recreation for hunters. molloy’s work is particularly strong in its careful and detailed research regarding the history of animal welfare and a shifting context of legislation. her second chapter, “media and animal debates,” is an excellent resource for anyone interested in this history, filled with details from primary newspaper research from the early days of the rspca and aspca through the 1980s. molloy shows how journalistic representation of animal rights and animal welfare concerns shifted during this period from early pejorative associations with sentiment and the feminine, through a period of sympathy and support (particularly regarding resistance to traders who sold pet animals to research labs), to the demonization of animal “terrorists” following alf actions in the 1980s. molloy reviews the links between anti-vivisectionist and feminist struggles, and provides a compelling and detailed account of the entwined histories of advocacy, legislative change, and media response that encompasses both us and uk contexts. the strongest chapter in the book, this overview is extremely useful for teaching. chapter 6, “farmed,” is similarly useful in its careful tracing of historical changes in agricultural practices from the end of the first world war to the present. it is filled with a wealth of primary research that adds important detail to the changing cultures of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 210 animal consumption, from the effects of rationing during world war ii, creating a culture of “home food production” (103) that included animal husbandry, to the roles of groups such as the milk marketing board and the british egg marketing board (bemb) in constructing beliefs about the benefits of certain foods to increase market share. this chapter focuses on uk examples almost exclusively and thus is less inclusive than chapter 2’s discussion of animal welfare legislation, but is nonetheless extremely useful in its accumulation of detail such as the changing rates of consumption for various animal products. this chapter reads a number of advertising strategies to reveal what they obscure about the realities of industrial agricultural production, drawing our attention to a gap between nostalgic images of family farms and green spaces dominant in advertising of animals for food compared to the realities of factory farming necessary to sustain the astonishing levels of consumption generated by efforts like those of the bemb. particularly innovative is molloy’s inclusion of celebrity chef television series in her analysis, an under-theorized site manufacturing current ideologies regarding animals and practices of food consumption. the main limitation of this book, however, is this uneasy mix of analysis of popular culture (as expressive of contemporary concerns and anxieties regarding human/animal relationships) and analysis of journalistic and similar non-fictional genres (advertising, the cooking shows) doing similar ideological work. while the book is to be commended for recognizing that all genres are engaged in the ongoing production of cultural “common sense” regarding animals and human/animal relations, it nonetheless tends to overlook the importance of distinctions among them. the overall result is a rather uneven book: popular media and animals is excellent in its analysis of newspaper accounts and advertising strategies, but comparatively weak in its discussion of the work done by fictional texts. in particular, it fails to engage with any of the recent theoretical work done on the role of popular fictions in constructing and reflecting contemporary attitudes toward animals, such as susan mchugh’s essential work in essays and her recent animal stories (2011). there are two main problems with the discussion of examples drawn from popular culture. first, while there is evidence of extensive primary research supporting this book, its engagement with secondary scholarship on animals and popular culture is weak and fails to acknowledge or engage with existing interpretations very similar to those offered by molloy. for example, the discussion of animal performers in chapter 3, “stars,” does not cite jason hribal’s important work on evidence of animal resistance, work that includes hollywood animal performers but extends to animals involved in other attractions such as circuses, zoos, and rodeos, a historical dimension lacking from sherryl vint – broadcasting beasts 211 molloy’s discussion. similarly, chapter 4, “wild,” considers the problems of the attitude toward animals created by nature “documentaries” and troubling production methods that stage animal interactions to capture them on film, yet fails to acknowledge cynthia chris’s watching wildlife (2006) which makes these arguments and more. the discussion of blade runner (scott 1982) and 2001: a space odyssey (kubrick 1968) similarly overlooks extensive scholarship on both films, some of which engages with the question of animal representation. this leads to my second reservation about this book, the inclusiveness or representativeness of examples drawn from popular culture. one short introductory book cannot cover everything, to be sure, but this book would be improved by providing some rationale for the examples chosen. the chapter on “stars” uses as its main study the chimpanzee from bedtime for bonzo (de cordova 1951), a film now famous given the later career of co-star ronald reagan. while this may serve to illustrate the way animal performers were given a media image of living like a human film star (the argument of this chapter), the book returns to this text/chimp again in chapter 5, “experimental,” where it seems less suitable. the point made about research and this film — how contemporary research on raising primates as human was filtered into hollywood narrative — is fair enough and supported by discussions of similar experiments conducted on chimpanzees peter, gua and viki. yet this one case study does not support the wider claims made about the nature of mad scientists and animal experiments in horror and sf film overall. surely a better example here would be one of the many film adaptations of h.g. wells’s the island of doctor moreau (1896), a novel itself in dialogue with contemporary antivivisectionist discourse that molloy discusses in chapter 2. the readings of popular texts at times seem to contort them to fit a preferred paradigm — such as a discussion of them! (douglas 1954) in the context of discourses of managing insect threat, which overlooks other equally significant elements of the film’s themes (gender, the role of the military), or reading of jaws (spielberg 1975) as a film of nature’s revenge, when other films explicitly (unlike jaws) articulate this theme, such as frogs (mccowan 1972) or deep blue sea (harlin 1999). while this book is first-rate at historically contextualizing newspaper accounts of animals and exploring reasons for changing conventions, it fails to be similarly attentive to the importance of context for the kinds of stories told in popular fictions. if we understand the fictional texts in popular media and animals, however, merely to be hooks that draw the reader into the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 212 discussion of various issues of animal ethics, these criticisms are mitigated. for example, chapter 7, “hunted,” uses an exchange in an episode of northern exposure (1990-1995) to introduce the ethical positions taken on the topic. the analysis in this chapter offers little to help us better understand the themes of the series, but it does provide a good overview of ethical issues related to hunting. this book fits well into the paradigm described for the series, and provides a broad overview of the issues relevant to animal ethics and how popular attitudes toward them have changed over time. as well as being useful for classrooms, it provides considerable detail from primary research of attitude expressed in newspapers at various times, and of statistics related to food consumption, both of which will be useful for ongoing scholarship. although the readings of popular fiction do not offer anything not already established in scholarship, they are situated within useful discussions of non-fictional contexts (animal tourism, pesticide use, and more) that ably create opportunities to orient these texts toward broader considerations of animal ethics. popular media and animals is thus an excellent overview of issues of animal ethics, and could be a useful volume for teaching, were it not for palgrave macmillan's pricing structure. even the kindle edition of the book is expensively priced for such a venue, and i hope they will consider this limitation as this important series moves forward. irus braverman -fleshy encounters: meddling in the lifeworlds of zoo and aquarium veterinarians h u m a n i m a l i a 11:2 irus braverman fleshy encounters: meddling in the lifeworlds of zoo and aquarium veterinarians is it worthwhile trying to build bridges across disputes and constantly getting shot at from both sides? that has been my occupation since 1978.... [and] i have to admit that it hasn’t transformed the world. — mary midgley, beast and man, xii. i don’t know whether everyone needs to know every detail about everything. that’s why we work in teams, [and] that’s why we have experts who spend a lot of time becoming experts in the field. so i think it’s okay that not everyone understands the details in what’s involved in euthanizing an octopus. the point is that there has been a lot of work done [by experts] to come up with ways to minimize distress and maximize efficacy when doing that to the octopus. --martin haulena, head veterinarian, vancouver aquarium (interview). figure 1: the frilled-neck lizard (chlamydosaurus kingii), endemic to northern australia and southern new guinea, is the only member of the genus chlamydosaurus. here, on the surgery table at a prominent north american zoo. according to the vet: “she’s not eating, she’s not moving anymore. she hasn’t moved for four days. we gave her a lot of different medications but she’s not getting better.... we tried different treatments and she’s not responding to any treatment. so we cannot just leave her alone like that — we need to give her a chance.... so the surgery is kind of the last chance for her, to see if there is something we can do to save her.... if there is something we can do, like remove her ovaries, then we’ll try. and if during the surgery i see that there’s nothing to do, then i’ll just put her to sleep.” (anonymous, interview) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 50 why study zoo veterinarians? belgian philosopher of science isabelle stengers instructs that just as no living being is like any other, so every practice is unique and unlike another (“introductory note” 184). calling for an “ecology of practices,” she urges her readers to experience “coexisting and co-becoming as the habitat of practices” (ibid.). she further explains that, “approaching a practice then means approaching it as it diverges, that is, feeling its bordering, experimenting with the questions which practitioners may accept as relevant, even if they are not their own questions, rather than posing insulting questions that would lead them to mobilize and transform the border into a defense against their outside” (ibid.). later, stengers refers to this approach as “cosmopolitics” — a term she appropriated from kant to “consider that which is not in our own manner of thinking, and to come to a place where all forms of inquiry and ways of knowing are seen as having a legitimate place in the cosmos” (cosmopolitics 10). deboleena roy, herself a neurologist, philosopher of science, and feminist, laments along these lines that “educational systems ... have failed to train our students to become proficient in both the sciences and humanities” (roy 178). as humanists and social scientists, we have become versed in critical thinking and deconstruction and have as a result come to see science as no different than any other story we tell and as no less subjective as such. stengers responds to this postmodern tendency, demanding that much more attention be paid to the details and practices of professional forms of knowledge. “the emperor is wearing clothes,” she writes (“another look” 44). “everywhere, those experts, bureaucrats, and procedures authorized by science are at work.... we have to understand the singularity of scientific fictions and to take seriously their vocation not to discover but to ‘create’ truth.” for stengers, this does not mean accepting science as objective truth. she asserts, rather, that “the laughter of someone supposed to be impressed always complicates the life of power. and power is always lurking behind objectivity or rationality when these are arguments used by authority.” in fact, the only way to resist authority, according to stengers, is to concern ourselves with science, to “meddle in what is meant not to concern us” (ibid., 46). this article is precisely such an attempt to meddle in what supposedly doesn’t concern us. it aims to make visible medical practices and procedures that take place behind closed doors and that are perceived as being of no concern to the public, who wouldn’t understand them anyway. but as stengers points out, “the public is not incompetent. they don’t need to have their interest stimulated, they only need to be informed and persuaded” (ibid., 50). irus braverman-fleshy encounters: meddling in the lifeworlds of zoo and aquarium veterinarians 51 the experts that this article is concerned with are medical practitioners of a particular kind: zoo and aquarium veterinarians. elsewhere, i have described the recent emergence of this profession and its unique characteristics (“saving species”); i also distinguished between zoo and aquarium facilities and practices (“fish encounters”). here, i will utilize both text and multimedia presentations to allow the veterinarians i interviewed to explain their work more directly to the reader, who may then experience this work, the space and environment where it is performed, and the tools with which it is conducted on a more affective and sensorial plane. for this purpose, i have both recorded and, in some cases, also photographed and videotaped my interviews and observations. in other instances, i use materials drawn from the public domain. this article does not need to be read linearly; it can be experienced in a more intuitive and experimental manner by traversing between the quotes, recordings, images, and videos in any configuration and order. however, the article’s written format does prescribe a linear presentation, and so i have organized the materials within several loose categories and sections. i will start with the unique spaces and ecosystems that zoo and aquarium veterinarians inhabit, zoom inward to consider the tools and medicines they use to care for their nonhuman animals, pause to discuss the different diagnostic processes through which they produce knowledge about their animals, and, finally, zoom inwardly even more to explore their practices of surgically penetrating the animal body. quotes from the scholarly literature and from the interviews are intended to provide context and to set the tone for the visual and auditory experiences, which are an inherent and important part of the article. again, my point of departure for this article is what buddhists often call a “beginner’s mind,” an open and inquisitive place that allows one to “consider that which is not in our own manner of thinking,” and “to come to a place where all forms of inquiry and ways of knowing are seen as having a legitimate place in the cosmos” (roy 185). my hope is that readers emerge from this inquiry knowing more about how veterinarians see, think, and operate in their professional encounters, and understanding the singularity of their work with nonhuman animals, as well as how this work corresponds with other scientific practices. the idea, more broadly, is that we ought to immerse ourselves, mess with, and meddle in each other’s professional lifeworlds in order to enrich and broaden our understandings of our currently much too self-, siloed-, and human-centric place on this planet. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 52 veterinary spaces. for materiality is always something more than mere matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-creative, productive, unpredictable. — diana coole and samantha frost, new materialisms, 9. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkoj8fyxyrm&list=uubg__ptr9w6m9yadfvvlrg q&index=9 video 1: zoo veterinarian andreas ochs shows me around the veterinary hospital at the berlin zoo. (video by author, june 2018.) figure 2: lisbon zoo’s tranquilizer drawers, “espingarda pistola” (portuguese for “shotguns”) and “material para zarabatana” (anesthesia serum for the syringes). (photo by author, july 9, 2018.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkoj8fyxyrm&list=uubg__ptr9w6m9yadfvvlrgq&index=9 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkoj8fyxyrm&list=uubg__ptr9w6m9yadfvvlrgq&index=9 irus braverman-fleshy encounters: meddling in the lifeworlds of zoo and aquarium veterinarians 53 figure 3: tubes at the veterinary clinic in seaworld park at orlando, florida. (photo by author, october 11, 2019.) to the untrained eye, veterinary hospitals in zoos and aquariums look strikingly alike, and not much different from human hospitals. when browsing through the images and videos, consider the choice of paint color, the white neon lighting, and the sterile feel of exposed surfaces. there are visible variations in the types of equipment and tools that inhabit these veterinary spaces, which you may further explore in the next section. the pharmacy, with its myriad cabinets of boxed and bottled drugs, is situated either in a separate room, as in the lisbon and berlin zoos, or within the surgical rooms, as in the shedd aquarium (or in both, as in seaworld). terrestrial zoos with dangerous exotic animals are required to maintain shotguns and tranquilizers in operating condition in the case of an animal escape or other emergencies. https://youtu.be/dlvk1qn0a_k video 2: veterinarian rui bernardino introduces me to the mechanics of the veterinary hospital at the lisbon zoo. (video by author, july 9, 2018.) https://youtu.be/dlvk1qn0a_k humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 54 figure 4: rui bernardino and his colleague at the facility’s pharmacy, lisbon zoo. (photo by author, july 9, 2018.) watery environments. the pumps, the filters, the disinfection systems – everything [intended] to keep an aquarium with marine species – is very comprehensive, and is much more complicated than an enclosure where you keep giraffes or elephants. — nuria baylina, oceanaria de lisboa, telephone interview, november 12, 2018. figure 5: water pumps exhibited to the public at ripley’s aquarium in toronto, canada. this facility maintains 5.2 million litres of water, which, as the aquarium’s website clarifies, are “about 25,000 bathtubs!” (ripley’s aquarium, n.d.). (photo by author, november 22, 2018.) irus braverman-fleshy encounters: meddling in the lifeworlds of zoo and aquarium veterinarians 55 figure 6: water tanks — a view from the staff restricted area. the public exhibit is below the staff access space. national aquarium denmark, den blå planet. (photo by author, july 30, 2018.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovzo1e4wozq&feature=youtu.be video 3: bill van bonn of the shedd aquarium in chicago speaks about the design of a custom fabricated table for the aquarium’s green or longcomb sawfish (pristis zijsron). he also mentions that most recreational divers would not typically expect to see the same level of species diversity and numbers of animals together on a typical reef. (video by author, december 3, 2018.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovzo1e4wozq&feature=youtu.be humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 56 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr6rcinxmke&feature=youtu.be video 4: charlie innis of the new england aquarium in boston shows me the nebulizer and speaks about pneumonia in penguins. (video by author, september 27, 2019.) just as a fish is not a fish is not a fish, water is not water is not water. whereas some aquarium facilities pump and treat water from near (or not so near) natural bodies of water, others utilize tap water and mix it within their own facility to produce saline and fresh water. each of these methods comes with its own challenges and costs. either way, there is a growing realization on the part of aquarium veterinarians that the health of their visible macro-organisms is highly dependent on the health of their invisible (to the naked human eye, that is) micro-organisms. while not referring to bacteria as their “patients” — yet — veterinarians have come to understand that diverse and balanced microbial communities in their facilities’ waters are crucial for healthy microbiomes on and within their animals. for far too long, the ideal was a sterile water system, veterinarian bill van bonn, vice president of animal health at the shedd aquarium, told me in our interview. this ideal, encoded into usda standards and inspected by federal agencies and industry associations, is now being reconsidered. the new question is: “how clean is too clean for aquarium animals?” according to chrissy cabay, director of shedd aquarium’s microbiome project, this is perhaps the most important question that marine animal experts need to contend with if they wish to provide a healthy environment for the aquarium animals under their care. alongside his dealings with massive beluga whales, sharks, and rays, van bonn’s daily work thus requires acquainting himself with and caring for the tiny fungal, bacterial, and archaean life thriving in his institution’s marine environment (veterinarians admit that they still know very little about viruses). we spent a large chunk of our morning peering through a microscope at the array of microbial life in cultures taken from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nr6rcinxmke&feature=youtu.be irus braverman-fleshy encounters: meddling in the lifeworlds of zoo and aquarium veterinarians 57 different parts of the aquariums’ animals and waters: the nose of a dolphin, the shell of a turtle, a swab from a yellow stingray, and water samples from various exhibits. van bonn consistently stressed “the value of basic science work enabled by the privilege of having the animals in our care.” he referred to this as “science beyond conservation.” in his words: “the idea of simply knowing nature is an important and valuable function of zoos and aquaria that is not recognized enough” (e-mail communication; see also braverman, “saving species”). some argue that this idea is especially acute when it comes to microbiome management (west et al.). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvlxh4ylsxy&feature=youtu.be video 5: kasper jørgensen of the national aquarium denmark, den blå planet, talks about water. (video by author, july 30, 2018.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pauwurbougm&feature=youtu.be video 6: bill van bonn of the shedd aquarium explains the management of water and the growing understanding that this water contains its own animal environment. (video by author, december 4, 2018.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvlxh4ylsxy&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pauwurbougm&feature=youtu.be humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 58 figures 7 and 8: aquarium-dwelling bacteria. according to van bonn: “these two types of bacteria represent two very different morphologies of commonly found aquatic bacteria. filamentous bacteria are sometimes associated with skin infections in a variety of fishes, and enterococci can sometimes cause septicemia—infection spread through the bloodstream. as with all bacteria, their mere presence is not the problem. conditions must be right to favor them.” (courtesy of the shedd aquarium.) techniques and technologies, instruments and tools. when we come under the spell of the deeper domain of techniques, its economic character and even its power aspect fascinate us less than its playful side.... this playful feature manifests itself more clearly in small things than in the gigantic works of our world. — ernst junger, the glass bees, 132. acrouch, strung, the surgeon is one with his instrument; there is no boundary between its metal and his flesh. — richard selzer, the art of surgery, 21. since most medical and surgical equipment is not designed with nonhumans in mind, and that which does focuses mainly on farm and domesticated animals, zoo and aquarium veterinarians must be highly creative in adjusting existing equipment to the particular nature and needs of the animals under their care. this creativity manifests in elevators and tables that fit a variety of body sizes and weights, inhalation machines large enough for whales or elephants, and transportable ultrasound and laparoscopy technology. drug quantities and concentrations must also be adjusted for a myriad body sizes and conditions. i was particularly drawn to the multitude of scissors used by veterinarians. accustomed to scissors of one or two types, i found the array of scissors on display here enchanting. perhaps another reason for this enchantment is that such scissors are used accurately and intently to cut the flesh of a nonhuman being. something about the mundaneness of this tool explicated the unique variety of bodies, tissues, and issues that veterinarians must contend with when dealing with irus braverman-fleshy encounters: meddling in the lifeworlds of zoo and aquarium veterinarians 59 diverse nonhuman animals. scissors are unlikely to be applied to these nonhuman animals except by a veterinarian or a vet technician. senior veterinarian at seaworld lydia staggs described the function of scissors, as well as an additional two types of mundane technical tools used by vets: hemostats and forceps. “forceps are for grabbing things,” she explained. “you don’t want to use your fingers, you need to use an extension so you have different forceps for that.” “why not use your fingers?” i wondered. “well, it’s not as good sometimes,” she responded, laughing, arguably implying that there needs to be some divide between one body and the other. staggs also noted the importance of accuracy for surgical procedures on living animals: the thin interconnective tissues are so sensitive to the touch that the less you disturb them, the better (apparently, the process is quite different in necroscopy procedures, which are mandatory for every animal who dies at the park). “the hemostat is for clamping,” staggs continued matter of factly. “if i had a blood vessel that was bleeding and i needed to stop it very quickly before i could suture it, [i] would put a clamp on it to stop it.” then there are bandage scissors to cut bandages off. “this is specialized so you don’t cut the patient. see how you have a blunt end?” she commented. iris scissors, mayo scissors, metzenbaum scissors — there are thousands of different kinds of tools, the vet technician who worked in the room during the interview commented, and staggs continued: these are iris scissors. [they] are small, little delicate things. you’re cutting delicate pieces of tissue.... so you might need to have something that is at an angle.... because animals aren’t straight and perpendicular, so you might just need to get around.... mosquito hemostats are the little ones.... these are retractors. when you open an animal up and you need to see, you could have somebody stand there just with their hands, holding it open. but instead ... you put this in and then you press it and it opens to keep your surgical field open for you. so you can see down into the animal.... then these are rongeurs ... for snipping pieces of bone off. so in some of the fractures that we have, when you’re putting them together, if there’s a splintery end that just isn’t coming together, you can just kind of trim it up and make it neat so it doesn’t cause any more damage. sometimes, there might be a defect in the bone so you need to clear it up. that’s what we would use these for (interview). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 60 as one can observe when looking at the video i shot of this exchange (video 8), my camera had a life of its own, too, and insisted on focusing on the vet’s hands, instead of on her face. the veterinarian’s hands were indeed doing their own thing, encompassing within their movement the secrets to a deeper understanding of the life of the mundane artifacts that the vet was telling me about. philosopher and retired medical physician and clinical neuroscientist raymond tallis was also fascinated with the human hand, suggesting that: “the hand inspired the tooluse that has come to dominate human life and which has led to the emergence of the complex symbolic systems — most importantly language — that underpin civilization” (tallis, cover). he argued further that: herein lies the true genius of the hand: out of fractional finger movements comes an infinite variety of grips and their combinations. and from this variety in turn comes choice — not only what we do, but in how we do it.... with choice comes consciousness of acting: the arbitrariness of choice between two equally sensible ways of achieving the same goal awakens the sense of agency. (174) this heideggerian realization of the importance of the hand for the use of tools invites further reflections about the particular nature of the tools used in animal procedures, as well as the continued coproduction of agency through the interaction of the human and animal body through the tool. despite the huge advancements in medical technology, the simple daily tools remain crucial for procedures of medical care. social studies of science scholars christian heath et al. reflected along these lines that: in recent years we have witnessed a number of remarkable developments in surgical procedures and the technologies that are used to undertake operations. notwithstanding these developments, many, if not most procedures, rely upon commonplace objects and artefacts — hammers, chisels, pliers, drills, scissors, tweezers and the like.... these implements and materials not only enable the performance of highly complex procedures but embody complex divisions of labour, knowledge and expertise that underpin their availability, deployment and use. (297) other science studies call to take “the nonhuman, the material, and its agency seriously; to consider the interdependencies and interconnectedness of the human and nonhuman irus braverman-fleshy encounters: meddling in the lifeworlds of zoo and aquarium veterinarians 61 in action” (ibid.; see, e.g., maller). while most of these studies pertain to a human patient encountering the nonhuman in things and artifacts, here the nonhuman animal body surely invites further contemplation about networks across species divides, as well as on boundaries and forms of ordering that inhibit such networks. figure 9: surgical scissors at the lisbon zoo. (photo by author, june 2018.) figure 10: surgical scissors, oceanario de lisboa. (photo by author, july 2018.) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 62 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etgl-sqrwq8&feature=youtu.be video 7: rui bernardino of the lisbon zoo discussing scissors — and their different uses. (video by author, july 9, 2018.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wszze9th3fi&feature=youtu.be video 8: lydia staggs discussing scissors and other instruments at seaworld in orlando, florida. (video by author, october 10, 2019.) mundane procedures. i traveled to the shedd aquarium in chicago for the opportunity to shadow veterinarian bill van bonn as he attended to the 32 thousand animals in the facility. i prepared mentally and physically. physically, by putting together a few cameras and consulting with my media studies colleagues about how to shoot videos and stills at the same time; and mentally, as i wasn’t sure how i would react to the fleshiness of nonhuman animals. it was one thing to write about them and see them in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=etgl-sqrwq8&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wszze9th3fi&feature=youtu.be irus braverman-fleshy encounters: meddling in the lifeworlds of zoo and aquarium veterinarians 63 exhibits, and another to look into the insides of these animals, as i imagined my two days at shedd to be. but pretty quickly into my first interview with van bonn, i realized that my expectations from the visit may have been a tad too dramatic. “it isn’t every day that we operate on a whale,” he told me with more than a trace of irony. in fact, he explained, “i don’t think we ever performed a major operation on a whale in this facility — and we hope to never have to do so.” instead, the vast majority of the veterinarian’s work involves observing and asking questions, conducting clinical pathology such as blood and urine tests, and using diagnostic imaging tools such as x-rays, ultrasounds, endoscopy, mris, and cts. “people do want to jump to all kinds of exotic tools, including surgery,” van bonn told me. but more often than not, “the most valuable thing to do is to ask questions and get the history.” veterinarian chris dold of seaworld similarly emphasized the importance of the sensorial exam, using the term “organoleptic” to describe it. in his words, the first thing you’re taught in most veterinary programs is how to do a visual and physical assessment of your patient before you should really allow yourself to do any laboratory testing, imaging, any of those diagnostics. so use your senses before you use a tool. the word that sticks in my head that everyone makes fun of me for when i use it here is organoleptic. right? engage all of your senses for the purposes of diagnosis. so when i look at a group of dolphins like this [points at the dolphins we were observing], my clinical mindset is always on. (interview) in the audio recording i included below, parts of which are also provided herein as text, van bonn (vb) explained the typical management and development of an “animal case,” and the importance of the physical exam in particular. vb: getting the information can start with just asking questions but very often you got to go the next step, which would be a physical exam. using our senses — our hearing, our sight, our touch, our smell, not so much our taste but on occasion — to get additional information that we don’t get from just speaking to the person [who] knows the animal the best.... a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 64 physical evaluation generally requires getting our hands on the animal, understanding the animal, feeling the animal — is he soft or is he hard? if it’s a puffer fish like that [one we saw together] his belly should be nice and soft; he should be squishy. and if i were to have felt him and it felt like a hard baseball, that would raise concern because that would not be expected.... ib: how would you know if you’d never touched a fish? vb: well, we’ve touched lots of other types of fish [and], by nature, we’re comparative. ib: do you have to touch a fish to know a fish? vb: yeah, absolutely. so, in that scenario i would say okay now i need even more information, just feeling it doesn’t tell me what it is. how else can i learn what’s causing that thing i’m feeling? so then we [typically] use tools to determine how well the animal is doing physiologically.... now i say let me see a blood sample or a urine sample.... those windows into the health and welfare of the animal are incredibly powerful. with one sample of blood, i can tell you a lot about how’s the animal liver doing, how’s his kidney doing, how’s his thyroid function doing.... the next step is diagnostic imaging. (interview) https://soundcloud.com/user-751584113/recording-1-van-bonn recording 1: van bonn on different stages and procedures of mundane veterinary care. (recording by author, shedd aquarium, december 4, 2018.) instead of the whale surgery i imagined, i attended a cross river puffer fish procedure. this twelve-year-old fish was dealing with a skin issue. the vet told me that the cause of the wound was unclear, and that they have tried various treatments, including laser. https://soundcloud.com/user-751584113/recording-1-van-bonn irus braverman-fleshy encounters: meddling in the lifeworlds of zoo and aquarium veterinarians 65 the only treatment the fish responded to was regranex gel, an expensive topical ointment used for humans. the veterinarian explained: the [fish’s] skin wasn’t growing back in, so what we’re doing now is we’re taking off the dead tissue around the edges and we apply a substance called regranex and that helps it. [this is a] really unique medication. it is a human product — it’s in fact a recombinant platelet derived growth factor made specifically to stimulate epithelial growth for people who have chronic diabetes. diabetes causes pathology to the very small vessels so these little small vessels become diseased, blood doesn’t flow [and] doesn’t bring the nutrients or oxygen to the tissues and they get all sorts of ulcers and problems. one of the things that doesn’t get delivered there like it should is growth product for epithelia, so this product was designed for that. [this drug] is very expensive, it is not the standard thing you would [use]. the reason we’re using this guy is that we’ve tried all sorts of therapies on this guy that weren’t successful, including the laser therapy (van bonn, interview). as part of the procedure, the medium-sized fish needed to be anaesthetized. for most of the time, it was the aquarist from the exhibit who handled the fish and moved it from one tank to another with his bare hands (the veterinarian explained that fish “are not internally as sterile as we are” and have evolved to live with various critters. even during surgery it is not therefore essential, and could in fact be counterproductive “to be completely aseptic and wear a mask and glove and gown”). a vet tech mixed the white anesthetic powder and poured it into the water after some debate over the quantity. a few minutes later, the fish was sedated enough that he (or she, the people in the room weren’t quite sure, but the aquarist seemed to remember that her name was pam) flipped over. then it was time for the veterinarian to take a look. van bonn asked another vet to manage the procedure as he didn’t want to treat an animal while being distracted with an interview. when the veterinarian (whose name, incidentally, was also pam) touched her, the affected area looked way too soft to me; it seemed discolored, raw, and irritated. “this is great!” the two vets in the room exclaimed with much satisfaction. they weren’t going to apply the gel after all, as the fish seemed to be recovering on her own. they clearly had a completely different take than mine on the situation. below are a few of the images recorded to monitor the progress that this puffer fish has undergone, in light of which their satisfaction might make more sense. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 66 figure 11: cross river puffer fish before (top left), during (top right), and after (bottom) thirteen treatments of unidentified skin problem with regranex gel, an expensive human diabetic drug, conducted between march and december 2018. (images courtesy of ©shedd aquarium.) the clinical outlook: flipping the lens. chris dold interned with the marine mammal center and worked with the u.s. navy marine mammal program before starting to work as senior veterinarian with seaworld at 2005. he now serves as the chief zoological officer there, overseeing all animal programs as well as rescue and rehabilitation, science, conservation, and education. as we walked through seaworld, i encouraged him to tell me how he sees the park’s animals, and how his way of seeing irus braverman-fleshy encounters: meddling in the lifeworlds of zoo and aquarium veterinarians 67 differs from mine and other laypersons’. here, from our conversation on this issue (cd stands for dold and ib for myself): cd: i’ve always wondered what it would be like to be a human doctor. it would be horrible to walk around just diagnosing disease in everybody that you saw. especially, say, if you were a dermatologist. you’d be like, ‘i know what that is. that guy should see a doctor.’ ib: is the capacity to see through a clinical eye something that can be turned on and off? cd: for me, yes, absolutely. i see animals differently now, after i got my veterinary degree, than i did before, and i am not any less in awe of them. in fact, i’m more in awe. but there is definitely a switch you make through the veterinary education process. there is a kind of lens that i can flip down over my eyes and go into. ib: willingly? cd: no, sometimes it’s flipped for me and i can’t necessarily predict it. i have three dogs, a cat, and an aquarium. we’ve got animals all over the house, and i don’t go home going “how’s everybody’s health today?” i don’t go home every night and want to diagnose. but the first time i meet a dog i do a quick assessment, or if i see a dog who’s limping [or] coughing. so it’s always there. it’s like a shadow personality that’s always got to be in there. it can creep up when you least expect it or when something new triggers it, like a model animal you’ve never seen before. i walk [through] the park [i.e., seaworld] as often as i possibly can. and when i do, i go into that clinical mode. [i practice] a sort of a herd health approach. if i were to care for cows i would do the same thing. i’d go through the whole herd and i’d go “that one’s skinny; that one’s hiding in the corner; that one’s ribs are showing.” if you ever watched the most recent sherlock holmes with benedict cumberbatch, when he’s thinking of all of his theories, all of these words are popping up like next to his head, right? and that’s how i imagine it. you’ve got this list, it starts to develop a potential thing that maybe should be looked into. and then, you know, you’ll go individually and say, “well, do any of the dolphins look particularly skinny? do any of the dolphins look particularly overweight?” i can still stand here and enjoy the dolphins having fun and playing. i also want to make sure people are having fun and, if people are humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 68 working, i want to make sure [that] they are doing it safely. but at the same time, the clinical mind does that sort of list and that’s trained. ib: so the next obvious question is whether there is anything that this clinical mind is blind to? cd: by definition, if you’re blind to something, you’re blind to it. so i don’t necessarily know what we’re blind to. still, i would say that as a veterinarian, your proclivity is to minimize risks. the veterinarian’s mindset is [that] nothing is fine until it is, and it’s a bias, right? it’s a bias. [on the other hand,] as a daily caretaker or trainer or animal keeper your propensity is to assume that most things are fine. many of the vets i spoke with referred to this clinical lens, although often not by this name. more generally, all experts seem to put on a specialized lens; yet not all lenses are made of the same materials. the veterinary lens is unique not only for helping deal with the fleshiness of the body, but also for doing so in the context of nonhuman animals. indeed, the veterinarians i encountered stressed how different their work is, on so many fronts, from that of a medical doctor caring for humans. specifically, while the zoo vets often prided themselves for the variety of animals they can and often care for (braverman, “saving species”), many of them emphasized that they “don’t do humans.” this seems to be a “lens” issue (i.e., vets are not trained to put on the clinical lens in the context of humans), as well as a practical and even a legal one (i.e., related to liability, especially in the context of medical practice in the u.s.). as a result, a rigid division has emerged between human and animal medical care. under this divide, vets do not provide medical care for humans, although at times human physicians are invited to care for nonhuman animal patients. i was personally exposed to this divide during an unfortunate visit to the surgical room at a prominent north american zoo. overwhelmed with the fleshiness of the operated lizard, i found myself on the floor. while the vet was clearly aware that i had just fainted and suffered facial injuries, she continued to operate on the frilled-neck lizard without stopping to attend to her human guest. whereas this behavior seemed odd at the time, inhumane even, other veterinarians later explained to me that this vet was simply following the rules: veterinarians can only care for nonhuman animals, not for humans. one veterinarian told me along these lines that when, during a flight, the pilot asked if there is a doctor onboard, she did not respond. irus braverman-fleshy encounters: meddling in the lifeworlds of zoo and aquarium veterinarians 69 the art of surgery: peering into the animal body. the ritual of surgery ... is at once murderous, painful, healing, and full of love. perhaps if one were to cut out a heart, a lobe of the liver, an entire convolution of the brain, and paste it to a page, it would speak with more eloquence than all the words of balzac. such a piece would need no literary style, no mass of erudition or history. — richard selzer, the art of surgery, 18. although many of them have become accustomed to behind-the-scenes work only visible to their institutional colleagues and to other veterinary practitioners, most of the zoo veterinarians i spoke with were not opposed to, and were usually even interested in, exposing their work to the public eye. two issues seem to prevent this from happening more often: routines that have been put in place with regard to invasive medical procedures, and wariness about animal rights proponents who often categorically oppose zoos and aquariums and who could make use of such footage against them. “for obvious reasons, we can’t let you shoot any stills or videos behind the scenes,” one aquarium’s public relations (pr) officer instructed me mechanically. and although the reasons were far from obvious to me, i was not planning to argue. i had already learned that one should always stay on the good side of pr, who are often the gatekeepers to all forms of communication with zoo and aquarium staff. notably, the same pr official was not at all bothered about my audio recordings. control over the visual representations of their institutions seemed to be the main concern in this context. indeed, seeing is powerful. and seeing such spaces that were previously invisible is doubly so. according to van bonn, the fleshiness of the nonhuman animal usually draws people in. “if they could, they would like to be completely inside the animal, see it as up-close as possible,” he told me. in the marine center where he had previously worked, the necropsy (post-mortem) room was designed with a window for public viewing. school children would often bang on the window and demand to see things up closer, van bonn recalled. “just give humans as much of this closeness to other creatures as possible,” he commented somewhat warily. philosopher mary midgley’s realizations in beast and man are important in this context. she writes: “we are not just rather like animals; we are animals. our difference from other species may be striking, but comparisons with them have always been, and must be, crucial to our view of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 70 ourselves” (introduction to first edition, n.p.). the fascination with flesh, ours and theirs, can be understood as a fascination with the foundations of these similarities — and differences. at the start of her transformative book, midgley quotes from t.s. eliot’s the hippopotamus: the broad-backed hippopotamus rests on his belly in the mud; though he seems so firm to us, he is merely flesh and blood. flesh and blood is weak and frail, susceptible to nervous shock; while the true church can never fail, for it is based upon a rock. alongside the fascination with flesh — and especially with the fleshiness of the otherthan-us who is at the same time also so-similar-to-us — there is also a sense that fleshy matters and imageries can be appalling, gory, and repulsive to many. others are uncomfortable with what they see as the pornographic dimension of this spectacle. readers may recall in this context the upset that the dissection of marius the giraffe by the veterinarian at the copenhagen zoo (in front of an audience of school children) triggered around the world (for further discussion, see braverman, “saving species”). warnings about “graphic contents” often accompany relevant video presentations released to the public, as can be seen in seaworld’s sea lion procedure video. how do the veterinarians feel about this part of their work? whereas van bonn attested that he has no qualms about such procedures, other medical practitioners may feel differently, as one can learn from the following quote from surgeon richard selzer’s the art of surgery (which focuses on human bodies): even now, after so many voyages within, so much exploration, i feel the same sense that one should not gaze into the body, the same irrational fear that it is an evil deed for which punishment awaits. consider. the sight of our internal organs is denied us. to how many men is it given to look upon their own spleens, their hearts, and live? (24). arguably, the most radical manifestation of the clinical mind is during surgery, when the human eye peers into the body of another. melissa joblon, assistant veterinarian at the new england aquarium, explained that she never had an issue with peering, even irus braverman-fleshy encounters: meddling in the lifeworlds of zoo and aquarium veterinarians 71 as a lab technician studying the brains of apes. that is, until she herself was responsible for the process. in her words: i never had that weird, queasy feeling. it’s something that had never bothered me. [but] i found it completely different when i became the primary person doing it. so when i was an assistant, i was perfectly calm, cool and collected. but when i first started doing surgeries on my own as a doctor, i remember getting, never queasy, but that nervous feeling because it’s me in charge. i remember the initial soft tissue handling, of going in to see a dog or cat the first time. it was honestly a little bit terrifying because when something starts to bleed, you’re always used, as an assistant, to just sit there and dab. the doctor does what they need. now, it’s me who has to figure out where it’s bleeding, right? so, it’s a completely different world, where your mind has to be in a completely different place. but you get used to it and it’s all about experience. i’m still learning surgery — because it’s not something you come out of vet school and you’re a perfect surgeon. i’m still gaining those skills and learning them. but i love it now. now, it’s exciting. it’s fun. figure 12: stingray surgery at the denmark national aquarium. (courtesy of kasper jørgensen.) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 72 conclusion. [our animals] offer windows into the world that are not everywhere and they’re unique to most people’s experiences. we talked about how dolphins and whales are magical. but then so are dogs, and bacteria. if you look at these things—holy cow! — bill van bonn, vice president of animal health, shedd aquarium (interview). it is, then, surely time for the political left, and for intellectuals in the social sciences and humanities, to see that our continuity with nature is an important fact in the world, a fact quite distinct from those objectionable ideologies — not just the sociobiological one — that have, at one time and another, distorted and exploited it. — mary midgely, beast and man, introduction to revised edition. the bits and pieces of imagery, sound, and text that this article provided are intended to expose readers from the social sciences and humanities to the lifeworld of zoo and aquarium veterinarians and to their ecology of practices. these vets have a unique perspective on what it means to closely manage and care for animals in a captive setting, and on the broader role of zoo and aquarium institutions in today’s society. and although this is admittedly not the only perspective in town, it is nonetheless a valuable one (braverman, “saving species”; braverman, “fish encounters”). to understand it, we must make an effort to immerse ourselves in their world and to familiarize ourselves with their tools and techniques, their routines and ways of knowing. this was but a quick taste, of course. much more work on veterinary anthropology still awaits. and with it, an opportunity to bridge the much-too-dangerous, and widening, gap between the hard and soft sciences, and between humans and others. circling back to stengers, we ought to “meddle in what is meant not to concern us” (“another look” 46). not doing so would be granting too much power to the authorities who manage these spaces and interactions. at this very particular crossroad, meddling is not a choice but a responsibility: we must cooperate to break the divisive siloes that have come to characterize our lives, disciplines, and universities. acknowledgements. i am deeply indebted to dr. nili avni-magen, chief veterinarian at the jerusalem zoo, for gently encouraging me to continue working on the fleshy angle even after i had suffered serious injuries when encountering it in person during my fieldwork for this article. many thanks also to istvan csicsery-ronay of humanimalia for his willingness to experiment with this article’s unusual format and for providing a fantastic venue for my three sequential articles on zoo and aquarium veterinarians. finally, i am also grateful to the baldy center for law & social policy for the financial irus braverman-fleshy encounters: meddling in the lifeworlds of zoo and aquarium veterinarians 73 support that has made it possible for me to travel to the various sites explored in this project. works cited anonymous. staff veterinarian. in-person interview & observations. december 24, 2018. baylina, núria, curator and head of conservation, oceanário de lisboa. telephone interview, november 12, 2018. bernardino, rui. zoo veterinarian, lisbon zoo. in-person interview, july 9, 2018. lisbon, portugal. braverman, irus. “fish encounters: aquariums and their veterinarians in a rapidly changing world.” humanimalia 11:1 (2019): 1-29. online. _____. “saving species, one individual at a time: zoo veterinarians between welfare and conservation.” humanimalia 9.2 (2018): 1–27. online. cabay, chrissy. director of shedd aquarium’s microbiome project. in-person interview, chicago il. december 3, 2018. coole, diana and samantha frost. “introducing the new materialisms.” new materialisms: ontology, agency and politics. diana coole and samantha frost, eds. duke up, 2010. 1-46. dold, chris. chief zoological officer, sea world. in-person interview and observations, seaworld parks, orlando, fl, october 10, 2019. haulena, martin. head veterinarian, vancouver aquarium marine science center. skype interview, december 18, 2018. heath, christian, paul luff, m. sanchez-svensson, and m. nicholls. “exchanging implements: the micro-materialities of multidisciplinary work in the operating theatre.” sociology of health & illness 40.2 (2018): 297-313. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 74 innis, charlie. director of animal health, new england aquarium. in-person interview and observation, new england aquarium, boston ma, september 27, 2019. joblon, melissa, associate veterinarian, new england aquarium. in-person interview, new england aquarium, boston ma, september 27, 2019. jørgensen, kasper. team leader & veterinarian, animal department, national aquarium denmark. in-person interview and observations. copenhagen, denmark, july 30, 2018. junger, ernst. 1957. the glass bees. tr. louise bogan and elizabeth mayer. new york review book, 2000. maller, c.j. “understanding health through social practices: performance and materiality in everyday life.” sociology of health & illness 37.1 (2015): 52–66. midgley, mary. 1978. beast and man: the roots of human nature. routledge, 2005. ripley’s aquarium. life support systems. roy, deboleena. “cosmopolitics and the brain.” neurofeminism: issues at the intersection of feminist theory and cognitive science. a. jaap jacobson, ed. palgrave-macmillan, 2012. 175-92. staggs, lydia. senior staff veterinarian, seaworld. in-person interviews and observation, seaworld parks, orlando fl, october 10 & 11, 2019. selzer, richard. 1974. mortal lessons: notes on the art of surgery. harcourt brace & company, 1996. stengers, isabelle. cosmopolitics: vol. i. u minnesota p, 2010. _____. “introductory note on an ecology of practices.” cultural studies review 11.1 (2005): 183-196. _____. “another look: relearning to laugh.” hypatia 15.4 (2000): 41-54. irus braverman-fleshy encounters: meddling in the lifeworlds of zoo and aquarium veterinarians 75 tallis, raymond. the hand: a philosophical inquiry into human beings. edinburgh up, 2003. van bonn, bill. vice president of animal health, the shedd aquarium. in-person interview, chicago, il. december 3 & 4, 2018; e-mail communication, december 14, 2018. west, annie g. et al. “the microbiome in threatened species conservation.” biological conservation 229 (2019): 85–98. microsoft word birkeetal -pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:1 lynda birke, tora holmberg, and kirilly thompson stories of animal passports: tracing disease, movements, and identities introduction. the passport chooses to tell its story about you. is that story one of your own making? can it ever be? (kumar ix) ... no place is produced by a singular vision of how it is or might be. in short, places are co-constituted in processes of overlapping and entangled ‘storying’ in which different participants may have very different ideas about where we have come from and where we are going. (van dooren & rose 2) like us, some kinds of animals require passports to enable coming and going across national borders. passports tell all kinds of multispecies stories, in which humans and nonhumans are entangled in myriad ways. but what is the meaning of passports — human or nonhuman? what kind of symbolic, legal, material, relational identity and not least control and disciplinary work do they “do”? one of the authors (lb) pondered these questions at calais docks, in france, while regarding the six passports on the her lap — two for each species, human, dog, horse. to re-enter the u.k required scrutiny of these documents to ensure all were bona fide residents of that country. but while all three species had passports, defining some sort of identities and belonging, there are important differences. so, we might ask: what role do passports play, not only in producing identities, but also in relation to human-animal relationships across times, places and national borders? whilst the stories told by human passports have been considered (e.g., kumar; lloyd), what stories do animal passports tell? before entering the docks, officials demand sight of human passports; faces must turn to the window so that photographs can be matched. a different scenario involves dog passports: forms must be filled in, vaccination details and microchip barcode read and checked. the horses’ passports are checked before departure, but seldom on return. by contrast, their exit from the uk requires export licenses, and — for passage to some countries — health papers signed by a vet. different species, different documents, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 2 different meanings, yet ostensibly similar purposes to identify individuals and permit passage.1 arguably, passports serve a deep symbolic and transformational function. as anthropologists have shown, transitions across important boundaries require rituals or processes, to reduce risks of danger and to conserve cultural order (douglas). liminal cases such as grey zones are potentially harmful, and thus rituals are important ways of framing the transition as magical rather than dangerous, sacred rather than profane. crossing national borders is one such potentially harmful event due to its culturally messy state; not yet leaving the old country behind, not yet belonging to the new country. being “in between,” the individual is personally vulnerable and potentially dangerous to others. thus, passport screening at national borders can be viewed and interpreted as a transformative ritual, functioning to uphold the cultural order and mitigate risk. what is at stake in this in-between state is belonging: will the person/dog/horse be judged as meeting criteria permitting them to enter or re-enter a country? will they be transformed from someone seeking passage to a country, to someone approved to enter? this is evident at calais docks: despite being on french soil, and despite the putative integration of countries within the european union, passengers must pass through u.k border control even before checking in with the ferry company. this is a liminal zone (turner; van gennep), an area of land between nations, a non-place (augé). not only are legitimate passengers policed: vehicles too are checked for (human) illegal immigrants — that is, those without passports or permission to enter.2 passports clearly serve purposes of individual and national identification, and enable travel — for (some) nonhuman animals or ourselves. they create one definition of belonging, while implicitly defining non-belonging — those who lack passports. they enable journeys, liberating people from their usual surrounds, but they also incur surveillance, and their absence disqualifies people from unhindered travel. they thus tell stories, not only of how identity is differentiated, but also of mobility and social control. in relation to animal passports, these stories further embed nonhuman animals within human-animal nexuses of ownership. in this discussion paper, we use an eu case study to consider first what role passports serve, and then analyze their function in various forms of surveillance — around disease and global bio-security, around mobility/travel, and around identities. that is, l. birke, t. holmberg, & k. thompson – stories of animal passports 3 we are interested in highly controlled animal movements.3 finally, we consider some issues raised about technologies of identification, and what these say about identity and belonging, particularly with respect to human-animal relationships. in particular, we ask what do these documents contribute to human-animal engagements? what is a passport? human passports generally serve as documents of national identity, as well as their role in travel; in the uk, they have been issued by the state since at least the 16th century, identifying not only individuals but also sovereignty — as subjects of the head of state.4 initially, passports were a protection, an introduction; later, they also became a means of controlling populations — not only those wishing to enter or leave, but also those who are “resident aliens,” who are not full citizens but have permission to remain in the country (lloyd).5 to take the example of british passports: these bear the royal coat of arms on the front red cover and state that “in the name of her majesty,” the passport “requests and requires” that the bearer be permitted “to pass freely, without let or hindrance” (see figure one). this wording thus underlines the bearer’s status, as belonging to a particular nation, and also as subject of a sovereign, in “whose name” free transit is requested. the color matters, too: harmonizing passport color within the eu took years of debate (anon.). so, the outer appearance of the human passport signifies specific citizenship of a particular country, as well as the location of that country within broader affiliations (such as the eu). figure one: a passport for human citizens of the united kingdom humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 4 the animals’ passports make no reference to status as citizens/subjects, nor requests for free passage. like human equivalents, they identify individuals, but also sex and age, and place of birth if known. unlike humans, they also identify species or breed. horse passports indicate species on the front cover, while for dogs and cats, the cover states only “pet passport” (see figure 2a). in our example, the dogs’ passports state species/breed on the second page (“crossbreed,” for instance), while, significantly, ownership details appear on the first page. these documents are produced in the uk, but depend on european agreements about pet animal movement (the “pets scheme,” covering dogs, cats and ferrets — species most at risk for carrying rabies). they thus do not appear to be specific to britain, although british policies of rabies control require them for these species on return to the uk. while human passports might occasionally be required for identification within the country of domicile, they are not usually needed for dogs unless they leave and re-enter the country. british horse passports are more diverse, because they are required for domestic as well as international travel, and are issued by several organizations (breed societies, associations for specific equestrian disciplines, or international equestrian sport: see figures 2 b and c). outer covers of equine passports do not, however, necessarily indicate specific countries, and there is no harmonization of appearance. requirements for these passports is less about permitting free passage of animals as about policing human ownership, as well as more bureaucratic monitoring of disease and drug administration (eg. if the horse might end up as human food). since demands to view the passport at roadsides may occur in connection with checks on the transport vehicle, the passport also indirectly enables the policing of drivers and vehicles.6 l. birke, t. holmberg, & k. thompson – stories of animal passports 5 figure two: (a) is a dog/cat passport; (b) is a horse passport issued by the british horse society; (c) is an international horse passport, issued by the international equestrian federation (f.e.i). formally, passports are intended for two purposes. they serve as means of identification, helping to define belonging or not-belonging (inclusion and exclusion); they also facilitate control — of movements, and of disease. as already noted, checking horse passports is partly about identifying individual animals, but also about checking the validity of documents and their record of preventative health measures (eg vaccinations). importantly, it also serves to verify the animal’s ownership and establishes criteria of “responsible” ownership (those who maintain schedules of inoculations), thereby also categorizing humans. although human travel has long required passports, animal passports for travel are more recent, reflecting changes not only in human-animal relationships but also in how animals are expected to move. although horse passports, for example, as means of identity and ownership were used in some countries in the early twentieth century,7 horses had long been kept primarily as themselves means of transport. in that context, identifying individual animals/owners was possibly less important and horses themselves were not required to have identities checked: as means of transport, horses were depersonalized and therefore interchangeable. that view changed, partly because of the rise of motorized transport, but also because of changing attitudes towards animals in general. horses, particularly, are increasingly humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 6 seen as partners in equestrian leisure (birke, hockenhull & creighton), performance (thompson “binaries“; thompson, “theorising“), and competition (thompson and birke) pursuits. in these contexts, horses are often moved about as much as they themselves move. and as animals became subject to such movements over time, so they became increasingly vulnerable to restrictions and bureaucracy — notably around disease surveillance. so, what is a passport? something that allows and records movements; establishes and verifies identities and immediately records who can and who can’t, who is and who isn’t. in relation to animal passports, it is not only animal movements and identities that are being formalized, recorded and traced; it is also the human-animal relation that is under surveillance; a virtual portable panopticon to promote compliant behavior from docile bodies (foucault). in the following sections, we consider the animal passport's role of surveillance in tracing disease, movements and identities. surveillance: tracing disease. while it is difficult to control zoonotic diseases spread by wild animal movements, governments often seek to restrict movements of animals to control disease spread (for example, rabies control in the uk or australia). indeed, this is one reason why agricultural animals are individually identified, through movement records and eartags, ear cuttings, brands and so forth. in the uk at least, farmers must maintain detailed documentation, not only of individuals, but also of all animal movements (from farm to farm, or to market, or to another country). in cases of serious epidemics, these records can be quickly mobilized and animal movements curtailed — as was the case during the outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the u.k in the early 2000s (law). tracking british cattle movements via passports is mandatory, and is seen as providing assurance to consumers regarding the provenance of meat supplies.8 animal passports thus enable the tracking, and potential control of, disease. for dogs and cats under the eu pets scheme, the primary issue is rabies. some european countries and australia are believed to be rabies-free, and tightly control animal movements into them, while others (e.g., in south america) have more or less eradicated the disease through aggressive vaccination programs. the uk has long restricted importation of small pets from other countries for this reason. until recently, dogs or cats were required to go into quarantine for 6 months on entry. since 2001, however, the pets scheme has permitted movement of pets between eu member states, provided certain conditions are met. these are that: the animal is microchipped, then given rabies vaccination, then serologically tested for rabies antibodies,9 then given a pet passport — and the order here matters.10 l. birke, t. holmberg, & k. thompson – stories of animal passports 7 horse passports, too, have partly to do with disease control, particularly equine influenza.11 however, horses’ ambivalent status, between pets and agricultural animals (thompson, “theorising“), has different implications. horses treated with drugs not permitted in meat-producing animals cannot be slaughtered for human consumption. if “owners” want their animals to receive particular medicines they may be required to sign the passport to indicate that the animal will never enter the human food chain.12 a case in point is the 2013 horsemeat scandal across europe where horsemeat was found in otherwise labeled meat products. besides issues of consumer trust, the focus of much media reportage was the issue of whether or not phenylbutazone (“bute“) had entered the human food chain. these narratives of disease management not only enable tracing of disease, they also reinforce and record/reify/materialise discourses of “proper responsibility.” the responsible owner (introduced above) is one who ensures that the animal is properly vaccinated (and will be penalized if not), while responsible institutions are those which implement the regulations. in turn, this gives rise to a moral discourse of superiority — as was evident in the australian horse community’s outrage over the 2007 equine influenza outbreak that was blamed on poor biosecurity procedures in quarantine (davis). the story of movements told in animal passports is, furthermore, narrated through mechanisms of disease surveillance.13 outside of transport for slaughter, most horses for instance are moved for competition, owner relocation, or sale, typically involving veterinary checks, and stamping of, passports — as was the case with the horses in our story. so, tales of movements for these animals are framed within multiple narratives of competition/ human ambition (specific locations stamped into the passport; see figure three for relevant page of passport for the jumping horse, tripoli) as well as narratives of disease control. our passports, however, do not usually convey health status, and will not be stamped for these journeys — for we are usually travelling with animals within the eu, where borders can now be crossed quite easily. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 8 figure three: horse journeys — identification of the horse, tripoli, at different international competitions. the vet will sign and stamp the right hand side only if the horse appears sound and is up to date with vaccinations. that is, to travel, the passport must be authorized, but only by a person authorized to do so — a qualified veterinarian. travelling with our companion animals, then, is a story of control, reflecting a history of changing relationships with animals. to travel between nations requires us all to be firmly embedded in socio-technical networks of traffic management, of roads, seaways and airports — as well as vehicle inspections, disease control regulations, and veterinary inspections and licenses. travelling together means negotiating and being responsible for all of these; but above all, it requires systems of identification and monitoring. passports may permit movement, but they also control it. surveillance: tracing movements. animals, including humans, are creatures that are expected to move. to move, to animate, is perhaps ultimately what defines our shared animality. many species migrate between different places, in order to feed or breed, for example, though they seldom care about national and other borders. thus, particular bird species like barnacle geese can be characterized as both swedish and dutch, in that they spend time in both these human-defined territories. migration may be limited by geographical boundaries — although human activities can obviously overcome this for opportunists such as brown rats who migrated between land masses aboard ships. whatever animals’ motivation, their ability to move themselves is not usually subject to passport controls: rather, it is migrations of animals-with-humans which are policed l. birke, t. holmberg, & k. thompson – stories of animal passports 9 through passport systems and across borders. here, however, natural barriers can be overcome, through motorized transport (see figures four and five). physical locomotion is unnecessary, rather we are taken from point to point by means of other vehicles (cars, trucks, planes, boats). in our example, dogs, horses, and humans all travelled in a lorry, in turn briefly contained within a ferry.14 the vehicles brought us together within a small space, in turn moving us between other spaces, along routes defined by road and seaways, and enabling us to move rapidly. they also facilitate large-scale movements of animals around the world. figure four: travel with animals across borders: the pet exercise area at calais docks (photo courtesy of linda liebrand) figure five: travel with animals across borders: competition horse (frank) in lorry awaiting to board ferry at dover docks. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 10 many animal species are moved by humans for economic reasons, since they are “caught up in the globalised networks of production and consumption, which materially and discursively circulate them and their body parts as currency, capital or commodities” (bull 23). thus, animal mobility becomes part of capitalist logic: animals are transported from country to country for various (human) reasons. and, where once these animals would move at least part of the way on their own four feet (sheep “driven” from welsh hills to london markets, for example), now most animal journeys require motorized transport. this, in turn, facilitates much longer journeys — with unintended consequences for animal well-being and safety. documentation may be necessary, but it can also be tampered with — a significant problem in relation to long-distance transport of animals to slaughter. seen as commodities having little commercial value, many may be transported enormous distances alive, but with little care for their welfare, especially if doing so is cheaper than operating refrigerated meat transporters or where the live delivery of animals facilitates culturally prescribed means of killing. although europe has strict regulations, they are regularly and often flouted.15 moreover, fatigue, risk, and safety management protocols for drivers may conflict with animals’ health and welfare needs. both may clash with the geography of particular trips, especially where there may be no appropriate areas for drivers or animals to rest at recommended time and distance intervals. particularly valuable animals are, by contrast, likely to be closely scrutinised, and to travel with better protection (although travelling long distances still carries health and environmental costs, however much padding is provided). racehorses may travel for a particularly lucrative race, for example, or because of other regulatory requirements. furthermore, prohibitions on artificial insemination by particular breed registries such as thoroughbreds, or the pura raza española, mean that stallions, not their semen, must be flown across the globe and then mares transported to them upon their arrivalreflecting human demands for breed “purity,” identification, and control of potential disease. there are of course other objectives of animal mobilities. people themselves migrate and bring their companion animals with them. rebekah fox and katie walsh discuss migrants between the uk and dubai, and how people either bring pets along as part of creating a new home and sense of belonging, or abandon them along the way. for these animals to travel, identification is essential. most will be forced to travel in small cages, l. birke, t. holmberg, & k. thompson – stories of animal passports 11 in aircraft holds, well away from their familiar human companions, so adding to journey stress.16 here, it is not so much economic incentives driving need for passports as human attitudes toward animals as family members and their preparedness to subject their animals to the conditions of travel. in our examples, human activities necessitate and guide the travelling. the movement of humans and other animals can be regarded as a matter of “trans-species politics“ (holmberg, “trans-species“). while a feral dog may cross with impunity the arbitrary line we call a national border, once a dog accompanies (and is accompanied by) people, s/he needs identification, a means of location within specific human-animal relationships. to complicate things a bit, abandoned animals like cats and dogs, but also sometimes horses, can go into circles of homelessness stretching beyond national borders (holmberg, “wherever“). one of the authors (th) has herself “adopted” three dogs from ireland and flown them to sweden, a transition requiring passports and associated interventions (vaccination, chipping, and veterinary examination). this can be seen as an example of animal trafficking with colonial connotations — dogs often come from the south and are rescued to the north. haraway talks of this transnational rescue scheme in the us context, where dogs are often taken from the caribbean or latin america (which is ironic considering how many homeless and abandoned “native” dogs are killed in the us every year). domestic animals are — as they have always been — thus embedded in global networks of movements and controls, in which individual lives must be accounted for, identities and movements traced. these are not journeys of animals moving of their own volition, but of being transported for human purposes. such journeys produce new forms of mobility, in which animals are unwittingly enmeshed. at the same time, they offer unprecedented opportunities for surveillance. passports thus both permit and control movements for humans and nonhumans alike. those without passports cannot readily move across the specific zone demarcated by what we call a national frontier. wild animals may do so, but what passports define is who can or cannot be moved in association with human activities, as part of a humananimal relationship (whether that be as pet, valuable commodity, or potential food). crucial to that definition is individual identification. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 12 surveillance: tracing identities. whatever our personal sense of identity, passports distinguish us by physical appearance. for humans, dogs and horses alike, they specify size, age and gender. regardless of their similarity, they differ in how this differentiation is achieved. for humans, a photograph is essential, and newer passports also use facial recognition technology.17 dogs, by contrast, require microchips as primary mode of identification; passport photos are optional. the microchip contains a unique number, which can be picked up by a transducer. horses, on the other hand, are still often identified via a diagram, a two-dimensional silhouette, accompanied by standardized descriptions to support it (see figure six). microchips are now mandatory for young horses, but are not yet universal. in time, microchips might replace fire or freeze branding of horses — more painful process of identifying breed or ownership. figure six: identification diagrams for a horse passport: a veterinarian must identify specific marks on the horse (whorls in the fur, white marks) and indicate these on the diagrams. whilst microchips, like any technology, may be subject to tampering, failure, or removal, such embodied and reproducible technologies of identification reveal changing stories and new ways of telling them. prior to photography, human passports needed to indicate descriptive details — sometimes in unflattering terms. one french 18th century passport, for example, described the bearer as having a “nose like a duck,” and a spot on the cheek (lloyd 66). but the advent of photographs, and more recent recognition technologies, have reduced the need for lengthy description — perhaps to the relief of many travellers! they also enable precise identification and tracking of l. birke, t. holmberg, & k. thompson – stories of animal passports 13 individuals, in ways that narrative descriptions cannot, but which are somehow less personal. recognizing faces visually is crucial for human social engagement, and for our sense of who we are. obtaining a passport means familiarity with photographs, and how these purport to capture a visual image. we identify ourselves using the passport, yet many of us fail (or refuse!) to identify ourselves in the photograph they contain. that stern image, mandatory for passport photos, does not seem to relate to our sense of self; even so, there is some resemblance, something recognizable to either the immigration offical or the new technological scanners, or even to ourselves. while “nose like a duck” could perhaps apply to many travellers, modern passports are intended to provide sole verification, that we are who they say we are. they are at the very least props to our performance as traveler. microchips provide precise verification of identity — though by contrast these presumably do not relate at all to who the animal perceives him/her-self to be. microchips do not convey visual characteristics of the animal, let alone characteristics more likely to be salient for other species, such as signature smells. rather, microchips identify animals as numbers, which can be cross-checked with passports or breed societies (and some animals may have multiple numbers allocated by different organizations). microchips thus convey homogeneity (one numerical code amongst others) at the same time as specificity (it is this particular animal/breed) along with anonymity (becoming a number, rather as animals are in laboratories). horse passports are hybrid documents, still relying substantially on visual imagery. here, however, diagrams rather than photography suffice. the diagrams are standardized line drawings, which must be filled in by an identifying vet when the passport is first issued or when the horse is purchased. what matters here are height, location of whorls in the animal’s coat, or of patches of white on darker colours (on the head, for instance). these are the primary visual identifiers: not surprisingly, they are ambiguous, and easily forged (both in the document and on the horse’s body). if breeding is known, these details also appear alongside the diagrams. horses of specific breeds may also have a brand, usually on their shoulders and hindquarters but also on their necks (standardbred horses in australia), lips (some arabian horses), or hindquarters (hanoverian horses). these practices, together with local, regional, or humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 14 national traditions of horse presentation, identify them as breed-specific (so traceable in stud books). in the case of standardbreds, they can “pigeon hole a horse“ and conflict with “change of career“ pathways, especially in the direction of the show ring where a neck brand is considered unattractive. equine passports have space for breeding lineage (patrilineal and matrilineal); names of parents, grandparents, great grandparents, are listed if known, providing potential for further identification. “pedigrees” matter in identification of horses (ritvo; russell). beyond individual identity, passports also tell stories of nationality. to obtain a passport, humans need to show that they were either born in the relevant country, or have a right to be there (as a permanent right to remain, or through citizenship). passports thus convey a kind of belonging, to a nation or a wider institution (for example, bearing a uk passport indicates that the person is classified as british, but it also indicates the inclusion of the uk within the european community). passports also, therefore, help to define not-belonging — those who have entered the country illegally, without proper passports. animal passports similarly identify nationality, at least in terms of where the animal resides. but animal movements further complicate this. to say “this is a british horse” is a statement about where the animal lives, who the ”owner” is, and who issued the passport — not about rights to domicile. we might also say that tripoli is a ”belgianbred” horse (although he is a british horse as identified by the passport — because the ”owner,” lb, is british) defined as belonging to a breed called belgian warmbloods, indicated by his brand and number. tripoli may or may not have been foaled in belgium, but has been registered with the belgian warmblood studbook. if, at some point in his/her life, such a horse had ended up in france, or ireland, s/he might have a passport issued by those countries. this passport might then be incorporated into a ”british” passport identifying the animal, so that the passport becomes multi-layered nationalities within nationalities — in ways that human passports generally are not.18 nationality, as a form of belonging, is always a messy business. what makes it particularly complicated for nonhuman animals and their passports is patterns of ownership and movement through trade. ”belonging” to specific nations is, for nonhumans, traced through patterns of human ownership, and where owners reside, rather than something intrinsic to the animal.19 indeed, we might say that passports — and the systems of surveillance in which they are embedded — further entrench nonhuman animals as commodities. l. birke, t. holmberg, & k. thompson – stories of animal passports 15 discussion. in many ways, animal passports are bizarre. like human passports, they offer identification and facilitate ”free passage” across borders, yet simultaneously deny such passage, in that the individual will not be permitted to move across the border of his/her own free will — and, for animals, usually only with the permission of the ”owner.” we want here to explore some implications, drawing out three themes. these are: similarities/dissimarilities, particularly in relation to technologies of identification; questions of identities, nationalities, and ”belonging”; and finally, the question — what are the implications in terms of the human-animal relationship? a. similarities and dissimilarities. clearly human and animal passports are similar, notably in the work they do in regulating movements and serving as means of identification. we noted above the significance of passports within systems of surveillance — of disease control, of movement, of identifying individuals. this is, of course, identification by others, most notably those whose job it is to police the boundaries of the state and its laws. for each of our three species, that requires different personnel, and different networks. immigration officials, employed by the state, check human passports. veterinarians check equine passports, although not usually at the border (commonly done prior to departure, or at a competition). dog passports and microchips are checked by staff employed by the transporting company (e.g the ferry company). there is a lot of passport-checking going on at the docks, either with the passport holder or its human representative. although modes of individual identification differ — photography versus diagrammatic representations, for example — identification of all species increasingly relies on biometric technologies, from barcodes to facial recognition. just as human passports carry a specific number, which links to other personal information held elsewhere (e.g.the passport office), so do animals’ barcodes provide a unique identifier connecting in turn to databases yielding further information (details of the animal, and owner’s name and address). and just as animals may have multiple identifiers (microchip number, breed society number, international registration), so too do humans — unique numbers for bank accounts, employment and other sundry purposes. biometric technologies in turn require scanners/detectors as well as software for decoding. such systems, suggest dodge and kitchin in their analysis of biometric identification, “seek to render people machine-readable, and ... enforce the infallible linkages of individuals to their records in information systems” (872). in turn, people humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 16 are further embedded in a “machine-readable world in which all entities are assigned identification codes which can be ‘read‘ and acted on by software independent of human control. they work to eliminate the messy, subjective realities of everyday life, ordering and objectifying people, striving to make them consistently addressable by software” (ibid., 878). so too with animals — barcodes and registration numbers render them, too, trackable by the software with which they have become incorporated. the effect is that people and animals become increasingly enmeshed within and dependent upon technological networks to validate their movements, health status, and identities. animals — indeed, all forms of life — are now subject to digitization: dna barcoding is now frequently extolled as a way of mapping biodiversity (see ellis et al.). for companion animals, like humans, this means becoming locked into systems of monitoring, which enable populations to be tracked through space and time.20 surveillance society developed and became routine during the twentieth century, promoting new forms of visibility and new ways of managing risk (lyon ”editorial”; lyon, surveillance). for animals, microchip barcodes are the means whereby they too can be tracked and made visible, part of these proliferating digital networks. both passports and animals are thus actors within wider networks of socio-technical associations. while networks may differ between species, passports serve similar roles of mediation. in that sense, horse, dog, and human passports are all alike: each links the individual within nexuses of governmental (and international) regulations. latour’s sociology of associations is relevant here: looking at networks of actors, bound together by translations, captures what happens when various non-human actors such as the microchip, the passport, the visa, the border — as well as travelling animals — flow together in order to enable, or produce, a smooth transition from one place to another. actors, according to latour, are “anything that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference” (modern 71). and in the borderlands, passports make all the difference. a passport, in this approach, becomes on the one hand an “obligatory passage point“ (callon) — a central actor that all action must relate to — or, a mediator, an actor that translates an action from one part of the network to another, thus producing meaning around patterns of migration, and revealing the ”ontological politics” (law & mol, ”situating”) of transnational, transspecies border crossings. without a passport (and all the accoutrements, relations, processes and networks that it entails), human and animal cannot be transformed from national, to passage-seeker, to approved visitor — and back again. it is precisely in this role of mediator that the passport both enables mobility l. birke, t. holmberg, & k. thompson – stories of animal passports 17 and simultaneously constrains it, as we are all similarly forced into spaces and queues required by systems of passport control and identification. b. identity, nationality and belonging. “what do dogs want most? they want to belong, and they want each other” [elizabeth marshall thomas 111] “belonging“ can have several meanings, and includes the dimension of place as well as social relations: belonging to a nation, a city, a family or a soccer club, and being swedish, from uppsala, of the holmberg family and a fan of gävle if, go hand in hand. but it is not so simple. processes of inclusion and exclusion produce both our sense of belonging — the subjective dimension — and the conditions for belonging. we might think of animals similarly as ”belonging” in terms of place and social relations to a particular breed or species (kind), to a specific ”nation” (as identified in international passports), to an ”owner” (kin as specified within a passport or other documentation). animals — especially companion species — may in turn facilitate our own ”belonging” to a place, or social group; we might identify ourselves, for instance, through animal-related subcultures (such as dog training, specific equestrian pursuits, or approaches to the same pursuit). perhaps animal passport-holders do not share our understanding of belonging to abstract categories such as nation-states or breeds. they might, on the other hand, have some understanding of species (as similar to themselves), of place or of shared social worlds — as thomas recognizes in the quotation above (also see van dooren and rose for discussion of urban animals and their contribution to social worlds, and processes of meaning-making through action). whatever social worlds passports embed us in, they ostensibly identify us individually. but this may bear little relationship to our senses of belonging and identity. ”identity” — who we claim to be but also who we are perceived by others to be — is something created in relation to others through social interaction, meaningful exchange of symbols; words, body language and the like. while this is often seen in anthropocentric terms, human/animal relations are also implicated in the production of identity. studies of dogs and their people (sanders; irvine) have shown how they continuously exchange non-verbal symbols, producing shared interpretations and meanings. this working relation is not simply dominance; over and over, dogs guide people in how to behave through cross-species communication and interaction. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 18 identities of both human and dog are continually made and remade within the relationship (higgin; irvine). moreover, others also view human-animal ”couples” through the lens of cross-species identity. thus, if a dog behaves badly, this reflects on the human partner (sanders, 1999). women who house many cats are often regarded as crazy cat ladies. but the femininity performed is colored by the imagined nature of cats, their felinity, creating a kind of ”feline femininity” (holmberg, forthcoming). however, this is not just a matter of species identity, but an inter-personal process. departing from his own transgender process and relationship with his pit-bull terrier, harlan weaver notes that both gender and social interpretations of breed affects how others view him,21 and how he experiences his relationship with the dog. weaver conceptualizes this identity process a ”becoming-in-kind” (forthcoming). we cannot know how dogs, or any other companion animal, understand their own identities, but we can know something about how they engage with us, and (perhaps) about how they perceive the mutual relationship. our relationships with many species are historically and culturally contingent, as haraway has emphasized, in her influential companion species manifesto. yet at the same time, they (and we) experience these relationships within nexuses of human institutional control. here, it is not so much dynamic identities which matter, but ones which are fixed in space, object and time. where do passports fit into these interwoven identities of humans-with-nonhumans, of ”becoming-in-kind?” however much we may write about interspecies socialities, these are not manifest in individual identification promised by the passport. the fluidity and affect of our relationships with each other are lost, constrained. through such documentation; the emotional connection with our animal kin is erased. at the same time as performing a particular kind of ”harmless” traveler, at the moment moment of policing through passport controls, our identities and relationships become irrelevant, reduced to alphanumeric codes. in this moment, relationships between companion animals and humans are lost in translation. there is no becoming-in-kind as our shared passports are routinely checked at the docks by various personnel, but a process of monitoring that returns all of us to our separate species. in that sense, the surveillance, a product of modernity (lyon, ”surveillance”), further reinforces human/animal separation. like weaver, we experience our animal relationships differently through the transactions embedded in using passports. whatever our sense l. birke, t. holmberg, & k. thompson – stories of animal passports 19 of belonging with each other (we think of companion animals as kin, for example), that becomes reduced to a much more mundane sense of belonging and negotiating boundaries, which posit our animal friends as our property. c. documenting human-animal relationships. passports, then, reinscribe human-animal relationships within patterns of ownership, and nexuses of control. these work through connections inscribed directly or indirectly in the animal passports, between ”owner,” veterinarian, vaccine manufacturers, state institutions, and transport companies. there are, as haraway argued, multiple and complex levels of human-animal relatings — as passports illustrate, and as they comprise. just as human passports represent multiple histories — of colonialism, of immigration, of diaspora, as well as ideas of nation (see kumar) — so too do animal passports bear histories of myriad animal-human linkages. in this paper, we have referred to how passports enable surveillance, particularly in relation to disease spread and to movements. that is, they facilitate the control of individuals and their relations, especially across borders. traversing boundaries is hazardous; they are liminal zones, quite literally ”no-man’s land.”22 cultural order must be preserved, and the risk of pollution contained. this pollution might be disease (as in the case of animal passports) or the danger of illegal immigration, in the human case. passports, in douglas’ terms, serve to symbolize this process of surveillance, a way of maintaining boundaries even while permitting their crossing. they also symbolize our enmeshment within global networks. discussing barcoding technology, dodge and kitchin note that “identification codes are key components of governmentality and capitalism....[they] now provide a means of uniquely addressing all the entities and processes that make up everyday life — people, material objects, information, transactions, and territories. moreover, they provide a means of linking these entities and processes together in complex ways to form dense rhizomic assemblages of power/knowledge” (851) domesticated animals, too, are part of these assemblages, caught up with us in means of monitoring, which offer further traceabilities (specific locations of individual animals, tracked through gps, for instance). while we may all be caught up together, however, for animals these changes further entrench their ever-increasing commodification (see also cudworth; twine). in that sense, identification documents come to symbolize the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 20 status of animals as commodities that can be exchanged only with the permission of the passport and the approval of its state-endorsed associations. yet passports also arguably enable other versions of animals’ stories to emerge. while passports for some species, such as cattle, codify them entirely in relation to numbers, companion animal passports do attach a name. so, his humans know tripoli as a chestnut horse who can sometimes be rather grumpy, who likes his personal space, who hates wearing travelling boots, and who loves to roll as soon as he has arrived in a stable; we never recognize him as ”gbr10776” (the identification number on his passport), as he is a much-loved companion in shared lives and travels. his passport pages (e.g., in figure three) trace many shared journeys with one of the authors, as well as with a previous ”owner,” telling a specific story of his life enmeshed in human-horse shared worlds. it is a human-centric story, to be sure, just as narratives of animal-people usually are.23 nevertheless, what we emphasise here is that passports — and their associated connections — represent specific moments of relatings of interest to human-animal studies. we cannot, of course, readily tell how tripoli would recount his own travelling tales. boredom? standing around too long on the journey? perhaps an excitement when immigration officials come on board, ostensibly to check the lorry for illegal immigrants, but often apparently more interested in talking to the ”lovely horses” in the back. in his assessment of the journey, no doubt passports are irrelevant, even if his humans fret about their authority. one story passports tell is about border-crossings — not only in the obvious sense of moving across geographic borders of nations, but also in the sense of who one is. latour argued that modernity is characterized by a preoccupation with ”purification” — of society from nature and the human from the nonhuman. yet at the same time (indeed, precisely because of purification), it is a society in which hybridization proliferates (modern 10-11). animal passports specify species in ways that reinforce separations — this passport belongs to a horse, that to a dog. in that sense, their existence operates to purify species boundaries, and to maintain the separation of humans from other animals. yet passports also signify a kind of hybridization, a documentary indication of companion animals’ place in a human-animal social world. it is precisely because they, and we, are both implicated in the production of our social worlds that donaldson and kymlicka have argued for thinking about domesticated animals in terms of citizenship. for all that they signify human-animal separation, l. birke, t. holmberg, & k. thompson – stories of animal passports 21 passports also signify the shared, mobile enmeshment of humans and animals in citizenship as well as social life. acknowledgments. the authors wish to thank the editor and a reviewer for their comments and perceptive remarks. we would also like to thank tripoli for the reproduction of his equine passport. notes all referenced websites were last accessed in august-september, 2012. 1. this process of movement control applies to the eu, as the case study for discussion in this paper. the process differs from that of other countries, such as america. 2. in a country with strict quarantine laws like australia, the concept of illegal immigrants can be extended to include microbial agents such as viruses and diseases. 3. the topic of uncontrolled animal movements has been discussed in earlier research (see crosby, and anderson). 4. see http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/agencies-public-bodies/ips/passports/timeline/ for history of passports in the uk 5. even by the sixteenth century, settled immigrants did not have full legal status, unless they applied to become a denizen of the uk — the precursor of the current legal ”leave to remain” (lloyd 53) 6. passports or other identification are not mandatory in all countries; australia, for example, does not require equines to have passports (with the exception of international travel). 7. http://www.roots-saknes.lv/history/horsepassport/horsepassport.htm describes a horse passport issued in latvia, in the 1930s. the passport was signed not only by each owner, but also by the municipality or police authority, so embedding the animal into further institutional structures. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 22 8. see http://animalhealth.defra.gov.uk/keeping-animals/registering/cattle.htm #passports [see guidance notes] 9. this requirement for serological testing was dropped in 2012. animals must, however, wait 6 months after vaccination before travel. 10. the importance of order is also emphasized in law & mol, "veterinary realities." 11. horses are required to have equine flu vaccinations to compete under national and international rules. vaccinations against other diseases are often advised by vets for travel to some countries (e.g., against west nile virus, in some parts of southern europe), but are not currently mandatory. 12. according to the british horse society, a passport is needed, to “comply with an eu directive that aims to ensure that horses that have been treated with veterinary medicines not authorized for use in food-producing animals cannot be slaughtered for human consumption. if the uk had not complied, we ran the risk of losing 70 percent of horse medicines. uk veterinary authorities have stressed the importance of our compliance with the eu directive for horse welfare in the uk.” from http://www.bhs.org.uk/horse_care/passports/faqs.aspx. this act of signing an animal out of the food chain is then binding on any future owners. 13. human passports may, of course, sometimes used to restrict movement in relation to disease control, but this is not common. by contrast, records of prophylactic measures are essential to animal passports. 14. within the ferry, of course, humans are at liberty to move around, while the associated animals are not: they must remain in the vehicle for short journeys, while dogs/cats may have to be moved to kennels on longer crossings. ingold notes how passive transportation removes us from the physical sensations of our own locomotion, our engagement with the ground through our feet — perhaps especially for animals incarcerated in vehicles within vehicles. 15. for discussion of welfare and regulatory problems involved in long-distance transport of animals see chapters in appleby et al., 2008. l. birke, t. holmberg, & k. thompson – stories of animal passports 23 16. although some airlines now permit service animals such as guide dogs to travel in the cabin with their humans: see http://www.guidedogs.org.uk/news/2005/flying-highwith-pet-passports 17. the efficacy of this is disputed, however. see bbc news, website, 21 october, 2004. “doubts over passport face scans.” 18. though humans can, in some countries, hold dual nationality and therefore two passports. these would not, however, be folded into one another as horse passports are. 19. for some international competitions, such as the olympics, horses and their riders must both “belong“ to the nation they represent. in other words, the horse must be owned by someone of the same nationality as the rider. rspca “animal life,” summer, 2012:13. 20. technologies, of course, can fail — as the uk’s home office discovered to its chagrin in 1999, when newly-installed it systems for passport issue crashed (see laurie). 21. public attitudes toward some dog types, such as pit bull terriers, can in turn affect how that human-dog relationship can be permitted to move around — perhaps in terms of requirements to muzzle the dog in public spaces, or such dogs being barred from spaces (taking a dog to a campsite in normandy, france, in 2012, lb was asked to declare that the dog was not a ‘category a’ dog — i.e., a dog of specific breeds, such as bull terriers, rottweilers, etc. 22. a similar zone, belonging to neither one country nor another, is evident in war — as noted by the fictional equine personae in michael morpurgo’s war horse, who discuss who they are in relation to these borderlands, and see review by birke. 24. see examples of such “personal stories“ by horse-“owners“ about their animals, in birke, hockenhull and creighton. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 24 works cited anon. ”hue and cry: the many meanings of a passport’s colour.” the economist mar 3rd 2012. web. appleby, m.c., cussen,v.a., garcés, l., lambert, l. and j turner, ed. long distance transport and welfare of farm animals. wallingford: cab international, 2008. anderson, virginia dejohn. creatures of empire: how domestic animals transformed early america. new york: oxford up, 2004. augé, marc. non-places: introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity (transl. j.howe). london: verso, 1995 birke, lynda, jo hockenhull, and emma creighton. ”the horse’s tale: narratives of caring for/about horses.” society and animals, 18 (2010): 331-347. bull, jacob. ”introducing movement and animals.” animal movements, moving animals: essays on direction, velocity and agency in humanimal encounters. ed. j. bull. uppsala: u uppsala p, 2011. 23-40. callon, michel. ”some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of st brieuc bay.”), power, action and belief: a new sociology of knowledge? ed. j. law. london: routledge, 1986: 196-223. crosby, alfred w. ecological imperialism. new york, ny: cambridge up, 1986. cudworth, erika. social lives with other animals: tales of sex, death and love. basingstoke: palgrave, 2011. davis, mark. ”horse owners win free ride, for now.” the sydney morning herald (june 11, 2008). web. dodge, martin and rob kitchin. ”codes of life: identification codes and the machinereadable world.” environment and planning d: society and space 23 (2005): 851-881. donaldson, sue, and will kymlicka, w. zoopolis: a political theory of animal rights. oxford: oxford up, 2010. l. birke, t. holmberg, & k. thompson – stories of animal passports 25 douglas, mary. purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo [1966]. london: routledge, 2003. ellis, rebecca, claire waterton, and brian wynne. ”taxonomy, biodiversity and their publics in twenty-first-century.” public understanding of science. 19.4 (2010): 497–512. fox, rebekah, and katie walsh, ”furry belongings:pets, migration and home.” animal movements, moving animals: essays on direction, velocity and agency in humanimal encounters. ed j. bull. uppsala: u uppsala p, 2011. 97-117. foucault, michel. discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. london: penguin, 1991. gennep, arnold van. the rites of passage. chicago: u chicago p, 1960. haraway, donna j. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. _______. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. higgin, m. “being guided by dogs” in crossing boundaries: investigating human-animal relationships. ed. l.birke and j.hockenhull. leiden: brill, 2012. holmberg, tora. “kattkvinnor” (cat ladies), in gjerløff, a-k, thorslund, c. (eds.) dyrisk og dyrebar – kaeledyr i samfundsvidenskabeligt lys. fredrikshavn: nytt fra samfundsvidenskaben, forthcoming. _______. “trans-species urban politics. stories from a beach.” space and culture 16.1 (2013): 28-42. _______. “wherever i lay my cat? post-human crowding and the meaning of home”, in mchugh, s., marvin, g. (eds.), handbook in animal studies. new york: routledge, 2013. ingold, tim. being alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description. london: routledge, 2011. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 26 irvine, leslie. if you tame me: understanding our connections with animals. philadelphia: temple up, 2004. kumar, amitava. passport photos. berkeley: u california p, 2000. latour, bruno. reassembling the social an introduction to actor-network-theory, oxford: oxford up, 2005. _______. we have never been modern. harvard: harvard university press, 1993. laurie, j., ”why projects fail: the passport office. ” jisc infonet 2003. web. law, john. ”disaster in agriculture: or foot and mouth mobilities.” environment and planning a 38.2 (2006): 227 – 239. law, john, and annemarie mol. ”situating technoscience: an inquiry into spatialities.” environment and planning d: society and space 19.5 (2001): 609–621. _______. ”veterinary realities: what is foot and mouth disease?” sociologia ruralis 51.1 (2011): 1-16. lloyd, martin. the passport: the history of man’s most travelled document. stroud: sutton, 2003. lyon, david. ”editorial. surveillance studies: understanding visibility, mobility and the phenetic fix.” surveillance & society 1.1 (2002): 17 _______, (ed.) surveillance as social sorting: privacy, risk, and digital discrimination. london: routledge, 2003. _______. ”surveillance society.” talk for festival del diritto, piacenza, italia: september 28 2008. morpurgo, michael. war horse. london: egmont, 2007. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate: the english and other creatures in the victorian age. harmondsworth: penguin, 1987. l. birke, t. holmberg, & k. thompson – stories of animal passports 27 russell, nicholas. like engend’ring like: heredity and animal breeding in early modern england. cambridge: cambridge up, 1986. sanders, clinton r. understanding dogs: living and working with canine companions. philadelphia: temple up, 1999. thomas, elizabeth marshall. the hidden life of dogs. boston: houghton mifflin, 1993. thompson, kirilly. ”binaries, boundaries and bullfighting: multiple and alternative human-animal relations in the spanish mounted bullfight.” anthrozoos: a multidisciplinary journal of the interactions of people & animals 23.4 (2010): 317-336. _______. ”theorising rider-horse relations: an ethnographic illustration of the centaur metaphor in the spanish bullfight.” theorising animals. ed. n. taylor & t. signal. leiden: brill, 2011. 221-253. thompson, kirilly, and lynda birke. ”the horse has got to want to help: humananimal habituses and networks in amateur show jumping.” animals, sport and society. ed. m. gilbert & j. gillett london: routledge, 2013. turner, victor. the ritual process. london: routledge and kegan paul, 1969. twine, richard. animals as biotechnology: ethics, sustainability and critical animal studies. london: routledge, 2010. van dooren, thomas and deborah rose. ”storied-places in a multispecies city.” humanimalia 3.2 (2012). web. weaver, h., ”‘becoming in kind’: race, gender, and nation in cultures of dog rescue and dog fighting,” american quarterly (forthcoming) microsoft word cimatti-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:2 felice cimatti beyond the human/non-human dichotomy: the philosophical problem of human animality at experientia satis superque docet, homines nihil minus in potestate habere, quam linguam — spinoza, ethica, iii, propositio ii, demostratio fable god's inventiveness confuses our cartesianism. look at elephants with their hanging skin of very old men ... look at birds, those creatures without ears ... the zoo is illogical — nina cassian human animality. from a traditional ontological point of view, a body can be called human only when an “i” implants itself (laplanche) into the body, and as a consequence it learns to separate itself in two parts: that who calls itself “i” — subject, mind, will, soul, brain and many others are all but synonymous of it — and the “animal” part, that is the enslaved body, the mute flesh — which is ruled by the other one. it is this duality that marks the human being qua human. all the numerous forms of dualism and transcendence that present themselves in human life are derived by this originary separation. therefore, dualism and transcendence are rooted in the very anthropological dispositive which “construes” humanity. becoming human presupposes the implantation of subjectivity into the body, whose consequence is the immediate expulsion of “bare” animality (lippit; esposito, third person). for this reason, the question of animality is not only an ethical one, because it radically puts into question the nature of human subjectivity. the question animality poses is much more than the acknowledgment that non-human animals have some “subjective” rights. such “rights” presuppose some subjectivity that could exercise them — that is, they imply another “i,” even if simpler or less articulated than the human subject who “rules” its own body. a cat’s self-conscious subjectivity should become somewhat similar to human subjectivity. in such a case, a cat form-of-life would be assimilated to the human one. the point is not to extend subjectivity to all living beings — apart from the logical absurdity of considering a mold a subject (because any process of subjectification is a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 36 form of humanization); quite the contrary, the point is to work for a subjectless subjectivity (lacan; cimatti). the concept of “human animality” is an attempt to find a way to overcome this dualism, together with its consequences. from this point of view, a human animality is a goal for the philosophy of the future. in order to deal with this concept it is necessary to place it in its own context: human animality is the biological face of the concept of immanence. this is what is at stake when one speaks of animality: a life which is completely free from every form of transcendence. therefore, “human animality” is a major philosophical concept, whose theoretical and practical consequences extend themselves to politics, economics, ecology, and ethics (shukin; wolfe, before the law; maccormack). what do we speak of when we speak of human animality? we have just seen that the philosophical problem posed by the notion of animality is not mainly concerned with the also very important question of animal rights (regan). that is, animality is not an important but somewhat “regional” philosophical problem, a question that only interests the fields of bioethics, moral philosophy, or philosophy of life. the problem of animality and life is the “the subject of the coming philosophy” (agamben, potentialities 238). according to agamben, the great problem that philosophy currently has to face is trying to conceive of immanence. the last disguise of what once upon a time was transcendence has been hermeneutics, which posed language as the only remaining ground. the linguistic turn (in analytic and continental philosophy, cf. rorty) was the last attempt to preserve transcendence in a disguised form. from this perspective, language grounds all human experiences. language is the ground, but language itself is without grounding. like god, language is causa sui. afterwards, the linguistic turn has been reported to have come down to earth (meillassoux; gabriel). “realism” and “ontology” have now become magic words in philosophy, as if the ancient problem of transcendence has been resolved once and for all. first one has to situate the concept of “animality” within its own philosophical context. this is necessary; otherwise it cannot express all its effects, as when one thinks that it is a notion that is related only to the animal liberation movement. animality implies immanence. moreover, immanence is somewhat different from “realism,” nowadays a concept frequently used as a medicine against “transcendence” in its various forms: hermeneutics, mind/body dualism, the linguistic turn. therefore, the conceptual starting point of this paper is that the very concept of “realism” does not really represent a way out from “transcendence.” realism and transcendence go together: you cannot have one felice cimatti – “beyond the human/non-human dichotomy: the philosophical problem of human animality” 37 without the other. according to “realism,” reality is ontologically independent of human mind and language. that is, “realism” poses a reality out there in front of the subject. in this way “reality” is transformed into a transcendent entity; it becomes reality. the same process applies to the subject, because there is no “realism” without a subjectivity who attests to this foreignness of reality with respect to the human mind. what is such a subject if not another transcendent entity, the subject? one can speculate that the very problem of an absolute entity like “reality” does not pose itself for a cat, for example; and this does not happen because a cat is an idealist. a cat probably lives its own life, without questioning either what the “true” reality of reality is or what “it” really is. the cat fully participates in the flow of life, that’s all. only for a subject can the question of reality present itself. the concept of “immanence” is an attempt to get rid of subject and reality simultaneously. i think that the philosophical emphasis on realism is not an effective solution to the problem posed by transcendence, that is, the ancient division of the human world into two separate spaces: body and mind, where the first is down here on the earth and the ideas and the values are up there. if you really want to free yourself from dualism it is not sufficient to choose only one of the terms of the inseparable realismtranscendence couple. what we need more, writes agamben, is “an immanence that does not once again produce transcendence” (agamben, op.cit.). realism is not the solution we are looking for, because realism is simply the negation of transcendence, just as transcendence is the negation of realism. what we need is a way out from this pair of concepts. we need new concepts for thinking about human life, concepts that are not compromised by the long and ancient tradition of dualism. animality, in particular human animality, is such a new concept (cimatti). animality has always been considered as simply the contrary of humanity, that is, something like a junk category where all that humans want to reject from themselves had to be put. a concept of “human” cannot exist without the concept of “animality,” whose meaning is simply to be the logical contrary of humanity. a paradigmatic case is heidegger’s treatment of animality in the fundamental concepts of metaphysics. heidegger’s man has exactly the characteristics that the animal (its main exemplar is bee behavior) does not have, and vice versa. consider how heidegger distinguishes between human “comportment [verhalten]” and animal “behavior [benehmen]”: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 38 the specific manner in which man is, we shall call comportment and the specific manner in which the animal is, we shall call behaviour. they are fundamentally different from one another .... the behaviour of the animal is not a doing and acting, as in human comportment, but a driven performing [treiben]. in saying this we mean to suggest that an instinctual drivenness, as it were, characterizes all such animal performance. (237) on the contrary, we are not surprised to discover that according to heidegger human “comportment” is a “comporting oneself toward,” that is, it is not driven by instinct but by the inner will of the subject. whereas man is free, the animal is not free (only a subject can be said to be free). from an ontological perspective “comportment” could not exist without “behaviour.” the difference between them is not factual, because there is absolutely no way to distinguish physically between them (this is not a scientific distinction, but rather a theological one). something like the concept of “behaviour” must exist if one wants to characterize human action as free and self-conscious. it was clear from the very beginning that heidegger was not at all interested in living animals: what he needed was a negative term of comparison — the animal — which could help him in elucidating human characteristics. heidegger is not at all unique in this kind of treatment of animality. according to traditional philosophical and scientific definitions animals do not think, they have no language, they do not laugh, and so continues a very long list of incapacities (de fontenay). philosophy (with very few exceptions, one of the most notable being derrida) is unable to think about animality without making reference to humanity. in this paper i try to explore what human animality might be. it is important to note that the animality i speak of is not the animality which might have been found in the ancient past of humanity. in such a past, there was no humanity, so human animality cannot be found there. this is an important point: the human animality we are looking for is an animality not yet known. it is not something that is in the past; quite the contrary, it is in the future of human species. it is not something we have to recover; it is something we still have to think. when i speak of human animality i am trying to find what agamben calls “immanenza assoluta,” absolute immanence, that is a human life that is not ultimately derived from a dualism of body and mind, beyond the subject and the object, the earth and the sky. it is important to note that the “absolute” adjective intends to stress that such an immanence is not the contrary of transcendence: absolute immanence causes the very distinction between transcendence and “simple” immanence to collapse (potentialities 237). felice cimatti – “beyond the human/non-human dichotomy: the philosophical problem of human animality” 39 in order to find such a human animality we first have to pose the question of immanence, a concept that is somewhat elusive, simply because one would like to catch it without referencing its contrary: “immanence is immanent only to itself and consequently captures everything, absorbs all-one, and leaves nothing remaining to which it could be immanent. in any case, whenever immanence is interpreted as immanent to something, we can be sure that this something reintroduces the transcendent” (deleuze and guattari, what is philosophy? 45). a second introductory step will concern the question of how philosophy has considered animal animality, the animality of non-human animals. our first task is to reverse the stance of philosophy toward animals. “the one who believes in the world.” “if philosophy begins with the creation of concepts,” deleuze and guattari wrote in what is philosophy, “then the plane of immanence must be regarded as prephilosophical. it is presupposed not in the way that one concept may refer to others but in the way that concepts themselves refer to a nonconceptual understanding” (40). immanence is a peculiar concept. in general, in order to understand a concept one needs to find out what differentiates it from similar and related concepts. the concept of “immanence” is somewhat different, because it does not seem to imply a logical contrary, as in ordinary language “materialism” is the contrary of “idealism,” or “mind” the contrary of “flesh”; in a sense it is “prephilosophical,” because it places itself before philosophy and thought, which do nothing but analyze and articulate it. in another sense, it is the kind of concept which one can live in when any form of transcendence (the most important of which is language) is left behind. that is, “immanence” is a concept that looks to stop being just a concept, that is, a mental entity: “immanence” is another form of becoming-animal. in fact, transcendence is the worst enemy of immanence, even if it is not properly its contrary (what one is looking for is “absolute” immanence): “every time desire is betrayed, cursed, uprooted from its field of immanence, a priest is behind it. the priest cast the triple curse on desire: the negative law, the extrinsic rule, and the transcendent ideal” (deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus 154). the priest is anyone who looks to introduce levels and hierarchies into the “plane of immanence”: the philosopher who distinguishes between “behaviour” and “comportment,” the scientist who distinguishes between the “individual organism” and its “habitat” (gilbert et al.), the ethicist who decides which kind of animal suffering deserves ethical consideration and which kind does not (bermond). the priest is anyone who cannot tolerate that the “plane of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 40 immanence” is unique (even if it is internally stratified), that a super plane of immanence does not exist: “immanence” is “only immanent to itself” (deleuze and guattari, what is philosophy? 48). animality and immanence go together because no immanence can exist until an entity will remain who thinks of it, that is, until the very distinction of subject and object is maintained. immanence is more than a concept, it is a way to make experience out of life. the “becoming-animal” is not a feeling of affection for exploited animals, a feeling that only a subject who thinks of himself as not being an animal can prove. becominganimal is the only condition that can pave the way to immanence, because animality, as we will see further, is a living condition which escapes the “the imperialism of language” (deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus 65). human language is much more than a simple communicative device. it is the dispositive that implants transcendence in the human body (laplanche). the “i” is the genealogical precursor of all the other figures of transcendence. moral consciousness, the law, the homeland, values and so on are nothing but subsequent incarnations of the “i.” they are all authoritarian entities, which place themselves outside the plane of life and experience. the “i” decides what the body must do, and the body can do nothing but obey it, just as our lives with respect to the market law, for example. animality is that form of life that is not under the mark of language (animal languages are not devices that produce transcendence, cf. hauser and konishi); therefore the possibility of immanence begins with becoming-animal: “the plane of consistency knows nothing … of the difference between the artificial and the natural. it knows nothing of the distinction between contents and expressions, or that between forms and formed substances” (deleuze and guattari 69-70; emphasis in original). transcendence and language are on one side, becoming-animal and immanence on the other. the movement beyond the human/non human dichotomy implies a choice between these two fields. at the end, there is the unheard-of perspective of a life “closer to animals and rocks”: [t]he problem now concerns the one who believes in the world, and not even in the existence of the world but in its possibilities of movements and intensities, so as once again to give birth to new modes of existence, closer to animals and rocks. it may be that believing in this world, in this life, becomes our most difficult task, or the task of a mode of existence still to be discovered on our plane of immanence today. (deleuze-guattari, what is philosophy? 74-75) felice cimatti – “beyond the human/non-human dichotomy: the philosophical problem of human animality” 41 the zoo as a cognitive device. what is a zoo? it is a place that is designed for homo sapiens’s gaze, in which nonhuman animals are trapped in special spaces — cages, tanks, enclosures, small islands. take the case of the cage that contains a lion. next to the cage there are some notes about it: its scientific name, in this case panthera leo, information about where it lives “in nature,” sometimes the particular history of the specimen enclosed in the cage. the value of this example does not change even if the animal is not properly locked in a cage; it lives in a wider space, together with other lions. a space delimited by a moat is still a cage. we can also consider the african natural park where “free” lions still live as a cage (lippit). the lion’s cage is inseparable from the label that tells us that in the cage lives a lion: the cage is the other side of the name. the zoo is a kind of living dictionary, in which the lion in the flesh accompanies the animal’s scientific definition. there would be no zoos without language: language is the zoo of life. the cage is just as much a container as the name is: just as the cage contains the lion, the name also “contains” what it refers to. the name’s function is not to indicate something properly; rather it has the function of trapping a particular aspect of the world of life. there are not words because there are objects, quite the contrary; there are objects because there are words. i am not saying that language creates objects: what i want to say is that we can selectively focus our attention on objects just because we can name them. a word acts as an order imposing on a fragment of the plane of immanence to stop and to freeze: language is the “abominable faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words” (deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus 76). take, for example, the lion, at least according to what we can see of its own life. the lion lives, runs, kills, loves, sleeps, and dies. the lion’s life is a continuous flow; the lion is inseparable from such a flow. it seems as if there is not a lion on one side, and what it does on the other side. “the animal,” wrote paul valery in a notebook in 1935, “is a transformation disguised as an object or being.” there is no such object as a panthera leo and the actions it performs: the lion is a continuous life’s flow. when we give a name to it, this flow becomes a particular object, a “lion,” a kind of “animal.” now the lion is extracted from its own life: it becomes an object, a label in a zoo, a picture in a children's book. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 42 our point is that we can focus our cognitive attention on an object only if it is given a name. we do not need the word “lion” in order to perceive a living lion in its own umwelt: we need a name if we want to think of the “lion” as a particular life form, that is, a transcendent entity. the cage in a zoo is a transformation of a name into a physical container. the name also contains what it refers to: because it keeps something inside, and because it blocks the movements of its referent. when a name is associated with an object, a double relation is established: from the name to the object, and from the object to the name. at this point a very strong link exists between the name and the object, a link that the object cannot break, just like the cage that the lion cannot escape from. now the lion in flesh vanishes, because in the cage there is just a specimen of “lion.” the lion in the cage is just a token of the type panthera leo. a name has a semantic value in all situations and at all times. the lion in the flesh in the cage now becomes like any other “lion.” we no longer see this lion, within its unique flow of life, we just see a "lion," in fact a specimen of the species panthera leo. for this reason we can say that the zoo is not properly a physical place but a cognitive and ontological device. the zoo is the perfect manifestation of the logic of language and names: “language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience” (deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus 76). the zoo is a system to classify a particular kind of object, those objects we call “animals.” the word “animal” is a perfect example of the power of a name. there exist billions of different living beings on earth. a single word contains them all: zebras and viruses, cats and dolphins, living or dead. this huge variety of existences is reduced to a single object, the animal. the strange fact is that in our mind such an impossible object really exists: we simply say “animal” and this extraordinarily wide variety disappears. therefore, a true philosophy of life, a true philosophy of animality, must start with this word, “animal” (derrida). thinking and naming. one of the basic ideas of this paper is that human thought is mainly linguistic thought. that is, in most cases human beings do not simply communicate through the mediation of words, they think in words. the specific human way of thinking is mediated by language. i propose the following definition: language is the human way of thinking. i am not claiming that all human thought is based on language: when someone launches a ball to me, i just stretch my arm out to catch it. however, this is not the case in linguistic thought. on the contrary, i think in words felice cimatti – “beyond the human/non-human dichotomy: the philosophical problem of human animality” 43 when i am seeing a picture, and i analyze it detail by detail, its form, shape, color, and so on. it is important not to consider this situation as a “simple” perceptual situation, that is, as an example of the usual perceptual distinction between figure and ground. in the first example, my eyes are automatically attracted by the ball’s trajectory: in this case the distinction between the figure (the ball) and the ground is guided by the ball itself. in this case thinking is just perceiving. in the second example, the distinction between what is figure and what is ground is not determined by the eyes. at one moment what is important is the shape, at another moment it is the color, and so on. the importance of a perceptual detail is no longer guided by the eyes: now there is a “central” control of what is relevant moment by moment. a human animal can only control its own perception through words (vygotsky and luria). to focus attention on one detail rather than another one the human mind needs help: words allow human mind to focus its attention in a voluntary way. that is, through language, in particular internal language (vygotsky called it “verbal thought” [137]), the body learns to obey the transcendent “i”; in this way, the flesh becomes a slave (hansen; esposito, third person; cimatti). the relation of language to body language is like that of a priest to a sinner. there is a tight connection between language and subjectivity. language allows the human mind to control where it directs its attention. without language, attention is guided by perception; through the mediation of words, attention is directed to what the mind is interested in. without language, attention is guided by perception only. a mind without internal language can only think about what perception allows it to think about; a linguistic mind can also think about objects that perception is not actually perceiving. the main function of language in the human mind is not to be a communicative medium. instead, it is a cognitive instrument and an agent of power: “language is not life; it gives life orders. life does not speak; it listens and waits. every order-word, even a father’s to his son, carries a little death sentence — a judgment, as kafka put it” (deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus 76). thinking in language enables attention to be focused on what the mind wants, instead of only on what perception desires and life wants. the main cognitive consequence of the particular relation between the human mind and language is that homo sapiens cannot think without thinking about something. that is, intentionality is a direct consequence of this strong relationship between language and thought. thinking means focusing on a specific object. in this sense, language prevents the human mind from thinking without cutting out particular objects. what is lost, in human thinking, is the capacity to assimilate an experience as a whole. the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 44 philosophical problem of human animality is this: is it possible to imagine a human being able to not break experience into pieces? the anthropological problem of animality. whatever human animality might be, it must be something beyond language. language as a cognitive device strongly affects the human body. that is, the way we create our experience of the world is powerfully influenced by the anthropological fact that we think in words. “verbal thought” (vygotsky and luria) is the specific way in which human animals think. thinking in words implies that what we use to create our experience are mainly objects. there are two kind of objects: “external” ones — such as apples, shoes, dogs and so on — and “internal” ones, the “i.” the “i” is an object just like any other object. i can think about myself, i can “speak” to myself, i can “indicate” me as a particular object. there would be no “i” if there were no language. the “i” arises when a child is able to speak to herself the same way she is able to understand when other people speak to her, and when she can speak to other people. i am not at all asserting that before language there is no subjectivity at all. when the lion chases a gazelle its own actions are directed towards a specific object, and it is the same for the gazelle. the lion is the source of its own actions, and the gazelle is the object it is directed to. the same applies to gazelle, which is the source of its own actions, and the lion is the object it is escaping from. but the “i” is not only a source of actions, it is a source of actions that “knows” it is a source (of actions). the “i” is an object that is aware of being an object. the price a human being has to pay for self-knowledge is that from that moment on it will be separated from its actual life: language on one side, transcendence on the other. language fills the human world with many entities that the human mind can represent as objects. the lion and the gazelle seem to participate in a unique flow of experience, something like: lion + hunger + savanna + gazelle + fear + sun + other gazelle + other lions + grass, and so on. my point is that to see a tree, for example, as a single object detached from the context it is part of, we need the word “tree” that allows it to pop out from that context. the word is the cognitive and ontological device that transforms a tree in the forest into a “tree,” that is, a single object we can focus our attention on. the actual tree is not separable from all of the vital connections that link it to other trees, animals, grass, soil, and so on. the word pulls out the tree from the forest: now it is a single and autonomous object, a “tree.” the same process applies to the “i.” an infant, like the lion or the gazelle, participates in complex life flows: for example, infant + ground + ball + sun + fun + mother, and so on. felice cimatti – “beyond the human/non-human dichotomy: the philosophical problem of human animality” 45 in this case, the infant is not a separate entity with respect to the context it takes part in (in fact the very distinction between objects and contexts is contrived; in the plane of immanence such a distinction does not apply). in this flow of experience there is neither a subject nor objects. a subject arises when an “i” appears on the scene. a preverbal infant is not an “i,” simply because she cannot use language to refer to herself. actually, it would be more correct to say that language makes her a subject, an “i.” subject and object are linguistic entities. overall, language transforms an infant into a subject that has relationships with objects. this is a fact of human nature. the main consequence is that the possibility of a unitary experience is removed from the human body. a unitary experience is an experience that is not divided into parts, like subject and objects. language as a cognitive device turns human beings away from the world they live in. this is the main difference between the flow of life a non-linguistic animal takes part in, and the kind of experience a human being can participate in (bergson). this is the difference that exists between the umwelten non-linguistic animals live in, and the world (welt) of human beings (von uexküll; virno). what we call human animality is just the attempt to imagine a human being capable of living a unitary experience, that is, an experience that is not divided into subject and objects. the problem posed by the concept of human animality is how to imagine a life in which the distinction between welt and umwelt applies no more, or how to imagine a body passed through language into a unitary body (lecercle; lacan; agamben, l’uso dei corpi). a body that is no longer divided into two sides, internal and external, subjective and objective, flesh and mind. when we speak of human animality we are speaking of immanence: does the possibility exist for human beings to live in immanence? i hope i have made it clear why the animality i am speaking about here has not yet come: because non-human animals do not live in immanence. absolute immanence is a state that comes after transcendence. a being who only lives in a world divided into earth and sky, immediate presence and transcendence could hope for a different life. becoming-animal. for these reasons deleuze spoke of “becoming-animal” (deveniranimal), not coming back to animality. quite the contrary, “becoming-animal” it is still to be thought (beaulieu). as a first point, it is important to reiterate that human animality is ahead of us, not behind us. when deleuze and guattari speak of “deveniranimal” nothing is farther than the idea that human animality can be thought of as a bunch of instincts which we could (imagine we can) find in our mythological ancestry. once primeval homo sapiens began to think in language, in that very moment every humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 46 instinctual past vanished. let us start with a sort of “definition” of the concept of “becoming animal”: for if becoming animal does not consist in playing animal or imitating an animal, it is clear that the human being does not “really” become an animal any more than the animal “really” becomes something else. becoming produces nothing other than itself. we fall into a false alternative if we say that you either imitate or you are. what is real is the becoming itself, the block of becoming, not the supposedly fixed terms through which that which becomes passes. becoming can and should be qualified as becoming-animal even in the absence of a term that would be the animal become. the becoming-animal of the human being is real, even if the animal the human being becomes is not. (deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus 238) the focus of this concept is “becoming itself,” a new possibility of being human which leaves subjects and objects behind. the animal towards which this “becoming animal” aims is not a real animal, like a dog or a fish. the animal of “becoming animal” does not yet exist. it still does not exist because each existing animal is placed before language (as a cognitive device), while “becoming animal” is beyond language. therefore, only the human being, that is, the talking animal, can desire to become such an after-language living being: there is a block of becoming that snaps up the wasp and the orchid, but from which no wasp-orchid can ever descend. there is a block of becoming that takes hold of the cat and baboon, the alliance between which is effected by a c virus. there is a block of becoming between young roots and certain microorganisms, the alliance between which is effected by the materials synthesized in the leaves (rhizosphere). (238) as this quote clearly shows, “becoming animal” has to be intended neither as a transformation of a subject into an object (the wasp that becomes orchid), nor as a transformation of an object into a subject (the orchid that becomes the wasp). what deleuze and guattari consider the most important point is what they call a “block of becoming.” that is, becoming a relationship, to enter in a “rhizosphere,” a pure web without nodes (subjects or objects): “the term we would prefer for this form of evolution between heterogeneous terms is “involution,” on the condition that involution is in no way confused with regression. becoming is involutionary, involution felice cimatti – “beyond the human/non-human dichotomy: the philosophical problem of human animality” 47 is creative” (238). so “becoming animal” produces non-subjective individualities: “becoming-animal always involves a pack, a band, a population, a peopling, in short, a multiplicity” (239). as we have seen, the most important linguistic (and anthropological) construction is the subject, the body that says to itself “i.” this is a violent gesture that blasts the single body out from the context in which it lives. the “i” is a special object that does not want any contact with other objects. it is an object that conceives of itself as if it were the only object on the earth. “becoming animal” brings the “i” back to the world of relationships that it is part of: “every animal is fundamentally a band, a pack” (239). “becoming animal” requires imagining an “unnatural participation” (240) where no subject can place herself on the top of a hierarchy. “becoming animal” means no hierarchy at all. above all, it means that the very distinction between subjects and objects vanishes: inside a “block of becoming” there are neither subjects nor objects. there is simply becoming. this is a new way of conceiving of life (gilbert, sapp, and tauber): “unnatural participations or nuptials are the true nature spanning the kingdoms of nature” (deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus 241): propagation by epidemic, by contagion, has nothing to do with filiation by heredity, even if the two themes intermingle and require each other. the vampire does not filiate, it infects. the difference is that contagion, epidemic, involves terms that are entirely heterogeneous: for example, a human being, an animal, and a bacterium, a virus, a molecule, a microorganism. or in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig. these combinations are neither genetic nor structural; they are inter-kingdoms, unnatural participations. that is the only way nature operates — against itself. (241-242) we are accustomed to thinking of nature as a big zoo, with animals and habitats, predators and victims, agents and patients, those who chase and those who are chased, all with a backdrop of trees and grass. this is a way of thinking of nature and life as if it were a zoology book — hierarchies, levels, top and bottom, winners and losers. we think about nature as if it were a theater in which subjects look for a way to survive. on the contrary, deleuze and guattari try not to think about nature as a hierarchy, but as a multiplicity. a multiplicity must be considered as if it were made up of a huge number of bodies. a multiplicity is a completely different way of thinking of life (gilbert and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 48 epel; houle). multiplicity means life without subjects and objects; it means pure flows, intensities, gradients: thus packs, or multiplicities, continually transform themselves into each other, cross over into each other. werewolves become vampires when they die. this is not surprising, since becoming and multiplicity are the same thing. a multiplicity is defined not by its elements, nor by a center of unification or comprehension. it is defined by the number of dimensions it has; it is not divisible, it cannot lose or gain a dimension without changing its nature. since its variations and dimensions are immanent to it, it amounts to the same thing to say that each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors. (deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus 249; emphasis in original) human animality has to be searched for in such a multiplicity. but what does the subject become? where does the “i” end up? it should be clear, at this point, that such a worry is a way to preserve transcendence. deleuze and guattari’s advice goes in a completely different direction: “make a rhizome. but you don’t know what you can make a rhizome with, you don’t know which subterranean stem is effectively going to make a rhizome, or enter a becoming, people your desert. so experiment” (251). the goal of this advice is that such an “experiment” aims to get rid of someone who does the experiment: it is an experiment without someone — a subject — who makes experience out of something, the object. in order to describe this new situation, deleuze and guattari reintroduce an old philosophical concept, that of “haecceity.” it is an individuality that is not a subjectivity; it is an individuality that does not exist without the flow of relationships it entertains with other similar individualities. such a “haecceity” does not need to remark that it is a “subject,” or that it is not an “object” any more. in order to understand a “haecceity” we do not need the usual distinctions between agent and patient, animal or vegetal, internal and external. we now have “a natural play of haecceities, degrees, intensities, events, and accidents that compose individuations totally different from those of the well-formed subjects that receive them” (254). a “haecceity” is a body, and a body is what it can participate in. it is not a substance, it is not a form in a hierarchy, it is not an independent entity. deleuze and guattari provide us with a completely new definition of what a body is: felice cimatti – “beyond the human/non-human dichotomy: the philosophical problem of human animality” 49 a body is not defined by the form that determines it nor as a determinate substance or subject nor by the organs it possesses or the functions it fulfills. on the plane of consistency, a body is defined only by a longitude and a latitude: in other words the sum total of the material elements belonging to it under given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude). nothing but affects and local movements, differential speeds. (261; emphasis in original) from the perspective of “becoming animal,” a human body has no more “ethical” or “ontological” rights than a mouse or a tree: “there is therefore a unity to the plane of nature, which applies equally to the inanimate and the animate, the artificial and the natural” (254). a “haecceity” is not necessarily a “living” body, since the distinction between life and death is a hierarchical one, a distinction that at the very end presupposes a subject (although the names of such a subject can be very different, such as “god” or “natural selection.” despite their seeming diversity they have a very similar function: they are at the top of nature). the distinction between life and death is a distinction based on the idea that what seems to move itself — life — is intrinsically different from what seems to be moved, the non-living. at the top of what is living is that life which is conscious of being alive, the human subject, the only body that has the capacity to say “i.” the “becoming animal” perspective does not know what to do with such anthropomorphic concepts as “man” and “animal,” “life” and “death,” “natural” and “artificial,” and so on. this “haecceity” is then the mode of existence of “becoming animal”: there is a mode of individuation very different from that of a person, subject, thing, or substance. we reserve the name haecceity for it. a season, a winter, a summer, an hour, a date have a perfect individuality lacking nothing, even though this individuality is different from that of a thing or a subject. they are haecceities in the sense that they consist entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected. (261) the human animal consists “entirely of relations of movement and rest between molecules or particles, capacities to affect and be affected.” the subject is not on one side and space and time where his/her actions take place on the other: “you will yield humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 50 nothing to haecceities unless you realize that that is what you are, and that you are nothing but that” (262). you are longitude and latitude, a set of speeds and slownesses between unformed particles, a set of non-subjectified affects. you have the individuality of a day, a season, a year, a life (regardless of its duration) — a climate, a wind, a fog, a swarm, a pack (regardless of its regularity). or at least you can have it, you can reach it. a cloud of locusts carried in by the wind at five in the evening; a vampire who goes out at night, a werewolf at full moon. it should not be thought that a haecceity consists simply of a decor or backdrop that situates subjects, or of appendages that hold things and people to the ground. it is the entire assemblage in its individuated aggregate that is a haecceity; it is this assemblage that is defined by a longitude and a latitude, by speeds and affects, independently of forms and subjects, which belong to another plane. (262) a life. once language (as a transcendence device) is put aside, the possibility of a postsubjective human life appears. for this reason it is important to stress such an indefinite article, a life, a life which has not a name, a proper name (marks, gilles deleuze; badiou; leclercq; marks, “molecular biology”; esposito, third person; colebrook; protevi). if it is language which implants transcendence in human being, then there is no life of life, because it is only from the standpoint of a life that a being can be evaluated. this is univocity: there is no being of being. and if “life” can serve as a name of being, it is because there could never be a life of life. there is nothing but the movement of life, itself thinkable as the in-between of the movements of actualisation and virtualisation. this is why being's power, which is being itself, is neutral, impersonal, unassignable, indiscernible. it is to this collection of non-properties that the name of “life” belongs. (badiou 195) language cuts homo sapiens off from the rest of nature (agamben, infancy and history; cimatti). it is the case of “crossing language” — as jacques lacan once said —, of imagining a way of being human that does not separate him/her from all other living and non living beings: “climate, wind, season, hour are not of another nature than the things, animals, or people that populate them, follow them, sleep and awaken within them. this should be read without a pause: the animal-stalks-at-five-o'clock. the becoming-evening, becoming-night of an animal, blood nuptials. five o'clock is this felice cimatti – “beyond the human/non-human dichotomy: the philosophical problem of human animality” 51 animal! this animal is this place!” (deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus 263). a life is where “becoming animal” arrives; a simple life, a “block of becoming” without specifications, life and immanence: “there are only haecceities, affects, subjectless individuations that constitute collective assemblages” (266). in the end there is no longer the arrogant subject who says “i.” there is only a body that accepts participating in the flow of life, as any other body, regardless of whether it is human or non human, animal or plant, living or not. “one day,” badiou remembers, “deleuze wrote to me, in capital letters: ’immanence = univocity’” (badiou 193). a life is what opens itself after that the human/non human dichotomy has been overcome, that is, when remnants of transcendence do not exist anymore. it is a life because when the human position of self-proclaimed primacy will be left behind every life will be simply what it is, just a life like any other life. a life is not only a living being, because the hierarchic and metaphysical distinction between life and matter is no longer justified (bennett): “haecceity, fog, glare. a haecceity has neither beginning nor end, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. it is not made of points, only of lines. it is a rhizome” (deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus 263). the concept of “haecceity” aims to catch this new condition. a life is neither a material entity nor a possible one. it is a virtuality, “what we call the event, or the part that eludes its own actualization in everything that happens” (deleuze and guattari, what is philosophy? 156). a life, a haecceity, an event all share the basic character of not being abstracted from the plane of immanence. therefore “the event is not the state of affairs,” because “it has a shadowy and secret part that is continually subtracted from or added to its actualization: in contrast with the state of affairs, it neither begins nor ends but has gained or kept the infinite movement to which it gives consistency.” subjects and objects arrest the flow of life, they imprison it, like the animals in a zoo, or a human body in a proper name. this is the reason why the human/non-human dichotomy has to be overcome, because it is at the top of all the metaphysical distinctions which try to cage the plane of immanence. a life is a virtuality because it “goes beyond any possible function” (157). that is, even if it is actualized it maintains its own power of further transformations and changes: “nothing happens within the virtuality that has only meanwhiles as components and an event as composite becoming. nothing happens there, but everything becomes, so that the event has the privilege of beginning again when time is past” (158). a completely new ontology now appears, which does not know the usual distinction between life and matter, biology and geology, mind and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 52 body (in this sense it is properly not even an “ontology”; cf. smith; ansell-pearson; marrati). immanence equals univocity equals life: “we will say of pure immanence that it is a life, and nothing else. it is not immanence to life, but the immanent that is in nothing is itself a life. a life is the immanence of immanence, absolute immanence: it is complete power, complete bliss” (deleuze, pure immanence 27). works cited agamben, giorgio. infancy and history: on the destruction of experience. london: verso, 1993. _____. potentialities. collected essays in philosophy. ed. and trans. d. heller-roazen. stanford: stanford up, 1999. _____. l’uso dei corpi. milano: neri pozza, 2014. ansell-pearson, keith. “the reality of the virtual: bergson and deleuze.” mln 120.5 (2005): 1112-1127. badiou, alain. “of life as a name of being, or, deleuze’s vitalist ontology.” pli 10 (2000): 191-199. beaulieu, alain. “the status of animality in deleuze’s thought.” journal for critical animal studies 9.1/2 (2011): 68-88 bennett, jane. vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham, nc: duke up, 2010. bergson, henri. essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience. paris: puf, 1927. bermond, bob. “the myth of animal suffering.” animal consciousness and animal ethics. ed. marcel dol et al. assen: van gorcum, 1997. 125-143. cassian, nina. continuum: poems. new york: w. w. norton, 2010. cimatti, felice. filosofia dell’ animalità. bari: laterza, 2013. colebrook, claire. deleuze and the meaning of life. london: palgrave, 2010. felice cimatti – “beyond the human/non-human dichotomy: the philosophical problem of human animality” 53 deleuze, gilles. pure immanence. essays on a life. trans. anne boyman. new york: urzone, 2001. deleuze, gilles, and félix guattari. 1980. a thousand plateaus. capitalism and schizophrenia. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 1987. _____. what is philosophy? trans. hugh tomlinson and graham burchell. new york: columbia up, 1994. derrida, jacques. l'animal que donc je suis. paris: éditions galilée, 2006. esposito, roberto. 2007. third person. trans. zakiya hanafi. cambridge: polity press, 2012. de fontenay, élisabeth. le silence des bêtes, la philosophie à l'épreuve de l'animalité. paris: fayard, 1998. gabriel, markus. transcendental ontology. london: bloomsbury, 2013. gilbert, scott, and david epel. ecological developmental biology: integrating epigenetics, medicine, and evolution. sunderland, ma: sinauer associates, 2009. gilbert, scott f., jan sapp, and alfred i. tauber. “a symbiotic view of life: we have never been individuals.” the quarterly review of biology 87.4 (2012): 325-341. hansen, sarah. “infancy, animality and the limits of language in the work of giorgio agamben.” journal for critical animal studies 9:1/2 (2011). 167-181. hauser, marc, and mark konishi, ed. the design of animal communication. cambridge, ma: mit, 1999. heidegger, martin. 1983. the fundamental concepts of metaphysics: world, finitude, solitude. trans. william mcneill and nicholas walker. bloomington, in: indiana up, 1995. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 54 houle, karen. “animal, vegetable, mineral: ethics as extension or becoming? the case of becoming-plant.” journal for critical animal studies 9.1/2 (2011): 88-116. lacan, jacques. le séminaire. livre xxiii. le sinthome. paris: seuil, 2005. laplanche, jean. essays on otherness. london: routledge, 1999. lecercle, jean-jacques. deleuze and language. london: palgrave macmillan, 2002. leclercq, stéfan. gilles deleuze, immanence, univocité et transcendental. paris: sils maria, 2001. lippit, akura mizura. electric animal. toward a rhetoric of wildlife. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2000. maccormack, patricia, ed. the animal catalyst: towards ahuman theory. london: bloomsbury academic, 2014. marks, john. gilles deleuze: vitalism and multiplicity. london: pluto press, 1998. _____. “molecular biology in the work of deleuze and guattari.” paragraph 29.2 (2006): 81-97. marrati, paola. “the novelty of life.” constellations 18.1 (2011): 46–52. meillassoux, quentin. après la finitude. essai sur la nécessité de la contingence. paris: seuil, 2006. protevi, john. “deleuze and life.” cambridge companion to deleuze. ed. henry somershall and daniel smith. cambridge: cambridge up (in press). regan, tom. the case for animal rights. berkeley: u california p, 1983. rorty, richard, ed. the linguistic turn: essays in philosophical method. chicago: u of chicago p, 1992. shukin, nicole. animal capital. rendering life in biopolitical time. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2009. felice cimatti – “beyond the human/non-human dichotomy: the philosophical problem of human animality” 55 smith, daniel. “the doctrine of univocity: deleuze's ontology of immanence.” filozofski vestnik 22.1 (2001): 163-179. von uexküll, jakob. 1934. a foray into the worlds of animals and humans: with a theory of meaning. trans. joseph o'neil. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2010. virno, paolo. quando il verbo si fa carne. linguaggio e natura umana. torino: bollati boringhieri, 2003. vygotsky, lev, and alexander luria. 1934. “tool and symbol in child development.” the vygotsky reader. ed. jaan valsiner and rene van der veer. cambridge: blackwell, 1994: 99-174. wolfe, cary. before the law: humans and other animals in a biopolitical frame. chicago: u chicago p, 2013. olga petri and philip howell -from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong h u m a n i m a l i a 11:2 olga petri and philip howell from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong 1. introduction. figure 1. songbirds and birdsongs: from athanasius kircher, musurgia universalis (1650). birdsong is exemplary in its quotidian familiarity, and yet enigmatic almost to the point of obscurity, the heroic efforts of the ornithologists notwithstanding (stap).⁠ even the term “birdsong” is debatable, if by this we make the claim that nonhuman animals produce music, which is a canonical example of question begging. naturalists still disagree even on why birds sing (araya-salas; higgins 31-32; rothenberg, why birds sing; taylor, is birdsong music?), and they might be placed on a spectrum from the behaviorists and evolutionary biologists, who insist that the sounds birds make are no more than a territorial warning or a sexual invitation, to those who see or hear something else, some excessive exuberance, either approximately or exactly equivalent to our human act of singing for pleasure. birdsong is, for such aficionados, perhaps humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 164 even an analogy to art itself (okanoya; zeigler; marler). ⁠ they rightly lean on the venerable authority of darwin here. for him, it is the voices of the passeriformes, the perching or singing birds, that explain nothing less than the evolution of the aesthetic. but they also follow the lead of kant and his fulsome appreciation of the “free beauties of nature,” “pulchritudo vaga”: “things of nature into which no human has placed any meaning whatsoever” (cf. figal 54, 55).⁠ this natural beauty might even be more sublime than human art, since “a bird’s song, which we can reduce to no musical rule, seems to have more freedom in it, and thus to offer more for taste, than the human voice singing in accordance with all the rules that the art of music prescribes” (kant 73-74). hegel, in his appreciation of the “blithe self-enjoyment” of the birds, sounds the same note, exactly: “voice is not a mere declaration of a need, no mere cry; on the contrary, birdsong is the disinterested utterance whose ultimate determination is the immediate enjoyment of self” (philosophy of nature 409).⁠ the philosophers were drawn to the natural freedom of the birds, however, which severely restricted their appreciation of birdsong as art. the empyrean is a realm not only far above human art, but entirely apart from humanity itself. kant insists, for instance, that birdsong cannot be imitated. mimicry is artful, but in all the wrong ways, so that the use of mechanical ingenuities to imitate the birds is a species of roguery and by definition the opposite of true art or beauty. hegel returns to the consensus that imitation is neither nature nor art: we soon get tired of a man who can imitate to perfection the warbling of the nightingale … since from the free productive power of man we expect something quite different from such music which interests us only when, as is the case with the nightingale’s warbling, it gushes forth purposeless from the bird’s own life, like the voice of human feeling. (aesthetics 43) in short, the philosophers recognized birdsong as exemplary of the sublime, but they seem to maintain at all times a clear separation between animals and humans — and particularly from the latter’s ingenious tricks and techniques. the long cultural conversation that matthew head has characterized as the “banishment of birdsong” (head 16) culminates in an aesthetic appreciation that can only contrast sublime natural music with low human artifice, or else a merely mechanical nature with meaningful human art. the scholars of birdsong today are far less wedded to the separation of nature and culture than their enlightenment forebears. indeed, they follow the tenor of our times olga petri and philip howell - from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong 165 by systematically critiquing the nature-culture binary. hollis taylor asks, rhetorically, “does ‘nature’ need to be pitted against ‘culture’ and things human in order to make sense of it?” (13-14), before staking her zoomusicological analysis on the alternative of “natureculture.” rachel mundy (animal musicalities) has similarly pointed to the limitations of pitting the primacy of human “culture” against the ambiguous charms of animal nature: her vision of “animanities” refuses the claims of human exceptionalism, and rediscovers the importance of birdsong for the emergence of musicology. equally radical is holly watkins’s ambition (in musical vitalities) to relate musical practices to the natural world, taking in the “biotic arts” of other species; returning to the romantic tradition, and to schumann in particular, watkins finds that in such exemplary work as “vogel als prophet,” “one cannot judge where the human music ends and the bird song begins” (“on not letting sounds” 94; musical vitalities ch. 6). yet, even so, the centrality of human beings remains a dogged if no longer quite so dominant motif in the cultural history of birdsong. the nature/culture binary is routinely rejected, but it has not really been transcended, since the claims of wild nature, pulchritudo vaga, are arguably as privileged today as they were in kant’s day. so, for instance, the philosopher david rothenberg’s recent exploration of birdsong’s “‘humanimal’ soundscape” (nightingales 62) salutes the music that humans and birds make together, even in, or especially in, the clamor of the city. yet he draws our attention to the “resounding natural world that envelops us” (81), where he wistfully observes that “we are always only ourselves” (77). this is surely inevitable given the priority of the “wild” songbird (rothenberg notes that his caged cousin is “a different animal altogether” [27]). moreover, whilst the condemnation of mimicry is sounded much more faintly than in the enlightenment, it is heard nonetheless: “if we are to join in with his music, we cannot copy him, but must learn from him while applying our own humanity to the connection” (125). the central question of birdsong, the relation of human music to the animal kingdom, which has animated western culture since at least the middle ages (head), remains unanswered. zoomusicology tends rather to recapitulate than to resolve the differentiation between natural science and cultural history (rottner). hollis taylor and dominique lestel foresee the greatest advances in zoomusicology coming from field musicology, observing and recording animals in their natural environments. in the case of taylor’s prized pied butcherbird, this means the australian outback, and she is at pains to say that the reality of nature distinct from culture is not negated by her natureculture perspective (15). even where the exclusive claim of “humanity” to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 166 musicality has been unmasked as a transparently political artifact, such work has focused primarily on the sounds of wild birds in nature (mundy, animal musicalities). watkins’s emphasis on hybrid human and animal expressivity ends on an inconclusive note, too, asking what schumann’s art has to do with real birds, birds that inhabit the “open-ended, multisensory environments of the outdoors” (watkins, “on not letting sounds” 95; musical vitalities ch. 6). watkins might just as well wonder what a canary chirping an aria from aida can tell us about the forest. in this paper we wish to move away from this approach to birdsong, hampered or hamstrung as it is by the contrast between the sounds of wild birds and music made and heard by the only “intellectually engaged rational animal,” homo sapiens (leach 1). our intention instead is to make a foray into birdsong’s thoroughly unnatural, or rather, artificial history, emphasizing the ways in which birds’ capabilities have long been modified by or with the assistance of human beings, through a range of practices and technologies, in a variety of performances, and in different spaces, not just the arboreal and the urban, often in transit and transition between the countryside and the city. birdsong still holds “a special position of awe and intrigue” (levitin 264) for us, but we intend this brief genealogy of artificial birdsong (as we reluctantly term it to set it apart from what has been called natural birdsong, supposedly unaffected by human influence) to complement the work of the ethologists, neurobiologists, bioacousticians, and zoomusicologists. the novelty of this argument rests on our emphasis on those practices in which humans, birds, and artificial birdsong become entangled. we focus first of all on the training of songbirds, before moving to the role of singing birds as performing animals, in settings ranging from the parlor to the stage, and finally to the critical importance of technology, primarily in the spheres of amplification, recording, and broadcasting. in this alternative history of birdsong in european culture (we draw here especially on russian history), our avian exemplar is not the storied lark or nightingale (mansfield; randel; rothenberg, nightingales) but instead the humble canary. as an icon of birdsong, we are aware that the canary may cut a somewhat comical figure. however, as one of the most transformed songbirds, carefully bred, selected, and trained, especially for its singing ability, no better bird can be found. by bringing together the (nonhuman) animal, the human, and the machine, we aim more thoroughly to unsettle our inherited understanding of birdsong and to appreciate more fully the charms of the artificial. paradoxically, given the catachresis of “birdsong,” an unfortunate side-effect of the elevation of “natural” birdsong to the status of music has been the depreciation of the music that animals and humans make together. if this is true, learning to understand, olga petri and philip howell - from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong 167 even to love, the song of the humble canary might be ever more salutary in an increasingly anthropogenic world. 2. a training in song. figure 2. a box for teaching canaries, manufactured in germany (russ 130). as our initial remarks suggest, birdsong has long been appreciated as a phenomenon of nature, but the role of the animal in the world of human culture has accordingly received limited attention. human beings might be praised for their ingenuity, the only real source of aesthetic creativity and discernment, and appreciated in the production of music, but mimicry of nature is presented as mechanical, simple techniques or even low tricks that reproduce and render inane the purposelessly sublime sounds of (some) animals. the separation of nature from culture remains all but complete in this legacy, and it is difficult to shift any analysis of birdsong from this philosophically prejudicial ground. birdsong might be cherished by humans viewed as intruders in a nature carefully quarantined or perceived as such, but it seems fated to be regarded with suspicion when it is blended with techne. there is an alternative genealogy of birdsong, however, one in which nature and art are co-contaminated (shell 95). for whilst birds sing, they also learn how to sing. their tutors are sometimes other birds, not necessarily of the same species. birds learn how to be heard even in the most unpropitious environments. most importantly for our humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 168 purpose, however, human beings can train birds to sing, teaching them entirely new songs. the question then is not the beauty of a pure nature so much as the meaning we should ascribe to this artificial birdsong. what is the significance of teaching nonhuman animals, possessors of beautiful voices of their own, to sing on command, or to sing more loudly or clearly, or to imitate the songs of other animals, including songs composed by human beings? the training of songbirds has no great interest for the philosophers of aesthetics, nor for the majority of zoomusicologists referred to above, yet it is of vital significance for science. it is a practice which has attracted the attention of neuroscientists, cognitive and behavioral psychologists, ornithologists, and ecologists, all of whom attempt to bridge human and avian worlds (specter).⁠ such work recognizes that humans and birds are very similar in the way in which they register and learn vocal behavior. one of the earliest and the most remarkable of these studies was by the sixteenth-century austrian ornithologist count von pernau, amongst the first to note that birds acquire their songs by learning from and interacting with their environments (bertau; birkhead & van balen; stresemann). notably, this learning and interaction was understood even then analogously to the way in which children acquire language. contemporary neuroscientific analysis has confirmed the force of von pernau’s comparison (jarvis; kuhl).⁠ for cognitive and behavioral psychologists and neuroscientists, songbirds are “an important animal model for studying the sensorimotor mechanisms of vocal learning and the processing of learned, complex sound sequences” (bregman et al 1666).⁠ behavioral experiments with songbirds help to throw light not only on how and why humans recognize and learn to manipulate melodies and language, but also on how the human brain functions more generally. thanks to studies of the cheerful and ever melodically-curious canary, we know for instance about the process of neural replacement in brain tissues, leading directly to the new paradigm of neural plasticity, according to which the cells in the brain, be they human or canary, retain a far greater degree of functional flexibility than previously supposed (nottebohm). the groundbreaking discovery of neural plasticity made the canary one of the real heroes of modern neuroscientific inquiry. but long before, the canary was recognized by ornithologists and canary keepers as a remarkable bird because of its learning abilities, and also because the canary was so thoroughly domesticated. in contrast to many other songbirds (including the nightingale, lark, finch, warbler, and goldcrest), the canary is amenable to being kept in cages and bred in captivity (shell 283). better still, the canary sings throughout the year, and has a remarkable ability to transform and imitate virtually any sequence of pitches, whether produced by humans or other birds (baptista olga petri and philip howell - from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong 169 and gaunt). granted, the song of the canary is less melodic and appears in shorter motifs than that of the much-prized nightingale, but it was a song that can easily be modified. in short, the canary is by far the better pupil. in words lent by a 1799 moral homily, the canary-bird, to its avian hero: i spend the morning, very frequently, in emulating [my master’s singing] voice. this i cannot do — but the attempt has considerably improved my own. we cannot all reach excellence; but if we try to do so, we shall approach much nearer than if we make no effort. (kendall 33) from at least the early eighteenth century, training canaries to sing specific tunes and to imitate particular sounds became so popular that the practice soon outgrew the amateur tradition of middle-class tutors playing pipes or flageolets to train their birds, becoming an industry and an international trade. differences between countries, districts, and individuals should not be overlooked, but the contrast between german and russian breeders as the principal trading centers in europe is instructive. germany and russia moved simultaneously away from primarily appreciating the appearance of the bird towards valuing canaries for their singing ability and proficiency in acquiring new songs. the german singing canary industry was centered in the harz mountains, and in the town of st. andreasberg. by the end of the nineteenth century, the region exported more than 150,000 “harzer” or “roller” canaries each year⁠ (birkhead 36). in the russian empire, less famously, a smaller but still significant local canary trade arose around one breed — the ovsînochnaîa canary (cf. petri) — developed from crossing the european canary with local wild birds. with major breeding centers in the kaluga, tula, and borovsk administrative districts, the trade reached its peak at the end of the nineteenth century, when a single village in one of these districts could deliver more than 4,000 male canaries a year to keepers in moscow and st. petersburg alone (vladimirskiî 614; markova; mitîurnikov, “s’ezd russkikh ptitsevodov”; nevskiî; kulagin). breeders from these two countries developed quite distinct training techniques, some of which were analogous, others locally distinct. both german and russian breeders lavished their attentions on the best singers from amongst their flocks. german breeders, however, recognized and exploited the role of light exposure in song learning. in empirical trials, they anticipated the neuroscientific link between light exposure, hormone production, and the quality of a bird’s song. german techniques were cruelly effective: by keeping canaries in dark wooden boxes with small airholes (figure 2), breeders produced the best conditions for canary learning by focusing the birds’ humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 170 attention on auditory stimulation and thereby inducing them to imitate the tunes and sounds to which they were exposed. the famous “nightingale canaries” of the early twentieth-century german breeder karl reich were reared in precisely this fashion. in russia, breeders seemed to be aware of the german techniques, but consciously avoided them (mitîurnikov, “dobroe slovo” 175). they instead exposed their canaries to the sounds of local wild birds: young canary chicks were placed next to a cage with their wild cousins during the process of training. in both germany and russia, canary breeders determined to bring the sounds of nature to urban households, sounds which would serve as “an antidote to the noise of urban crowds,” though here too there are differences of emphasis. as jacob smith observes, the german roller canary “was associated with the european countryside, pure air and clean water, bubbling brooks, tinkling bells, and the peaceful, evening tones of the nightingale” (50). analogously, the songs of the russian ovsîanka “consist entirely of the tunes of our wild birds of the forest and other areas: canaries sing with tomtits, sandpipers, wood larks, white-throats, and yellow-hammers,” as ivan mituîrnikov, a late-nineteenth-century canary fancier from st. petersburg, explained (172). be it inanimate nature in the case of german canaries, or wild birds in the case of russian canaries, however, in both countries canaries were prized for their ability to selectively imitate what their human companions regarded as the sounds of nature, something that at a stroke differentiates the appreciation of the bird’s song from the grander notions of kant or hegel. the “water gluck,” for instance, a sound produced by the german roller, reminded listeners of “a little drop of water falling into [a pool of] water” (gutierrez 78).⁠ and whilst the sound of water is generic, the russian canaries were also understood by contemporary fanciers to capture distinctively local environments. “in the russian canary,” mituîrnikov writes, “you feel its russian nature”; it “does not belt out just any sort of ballad, but throws in sounds, plays with them, makes the most unexpected transitions.... in each bar, one can hear the expanse and depth, which almost visibly characterize [the bird’s] nationality” (172-173).⁠ german and russian manuals for canary breeding and training reinforce the idea that the song of the canary is to be developed as a musical quotation from an idealized natural soundscape, evidently intended as a remedy for listeners alienated from nature. in the “artificial” song of the canary, then, produced by these human-administered training routines, the worlds of culture and nature appear hardly separable at all. in the case of both german and russian canaries, the practice of training implies the collaboration between the bird, the human trainer, and the urban market for which a set of songs is specifically adapted. in case of the russian canary this network extends to olga petri and philip howell - from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong 171 yet another actor, for the ovsîanka tune is borrowed from a wild bird, the yellowhammer. the canary served as a kind of recording device, enabling the transmission of certain carefully selected sounds of nature to distant urban households. the canary here is a somewhat involuntary participant, indeed one whose musical repertoire is assembled and authorized by a human-constructed network and maintained in carefully controlled bounds. these training techniques relied on the pronounced malleability of the canary’s song, even if the underlying neurological phenomena would only be “scientifically” studied in the twentieth century. while most songbirds have several genetically inscribed templates of what they should sing, the canary’s templates are more flexible than those of almost all other species of bird. the training introduced by german and russian breeders relied on the bird’s natural propensity to quote and imitate sounds from its surroundings. ornithologists and amateur naturalists had known for centuries that birds extend their repertoires through imitation of fragments of the sounds they hear, notably the songs of other birds, including those of other species. charles witchell was one of the first to spot the importance of mimicry in birds (zon 7174). in his pioneering 1896 work, the evolution of bird-song, witchell concluded that “we need not wonder that the cries of birds are so often somewhat similar to the sounds that the birds themselves experience daily …, and the voice of the bird has been then attuned to harmony with neighbouring sounds, just as its colours so often blend with those of its surroundings” ⁠ (229). though a somewhat skeptical evolutionist, witchell accepted that the ability of birds to mimic natural sounds and the cries of other birds were evidence of an adaptation to their environment and a product of natural selection, and subsequent studies assume that mimicry might be most common among birds who need to communicate across long distance, to distract predators, or to lure prey. we also know that some birds like the marsh warbler or the european starling are particularly capable mimics, whilst other birds keep their repertoires relatively “clean” of external musical appropriations. there are still more questions than answers about the way in which mimicry works in the avian world (rothenberg, why birds sing 113), but the point is clear: mimicry happens in nature, not only in the world of human artifice and training. we should nevertheless emphasize the abilities of the canary, of all singing birds perhaps the most remarkable of musicians. we should not dismiss the canary’s agency just because it is the object of elaborate breeding and training. the canary’s unparalleled humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 172 capacity for imitation is the sine qua non. in modern parlance, the canary is an “open learner.” in perhaps more contentious phrasing, the canary shares a fundamental trait of “musicality” with both wild birds and human tutors. as training manuals attest, the canary picks up tunes from wild birds and does so voluntarily, not to say eagerly, but the selection of tunes is difficult for the human trainer to prescribe (launer and grosse; mitîurnikov, “dobroe slovo”; nevskiî). indeed, breeding and training routines interacted with the canary’s vagaries by exposing young canaries only to those among their elders who primarily sang melodies that the trainers found attractive. we might conceive of a complex dynamic between human and avian species, all the time attuned to the demands of the canary’s potential human audience. since canaries were bred to perform, we need to understand the demands placed upon the bird and its trainers by the consumer and the market. these command performances are what we must consider next. 3. the songbird as performer. figure 3. a girl with a canary (pervye kanareîki). though his pet starling is rather better known (cf. haupt; west and king), as a child in salzburg mozart had loved canaries most of all, and at the very end of his life he had a canary near him, though he is reported to have had it removed, as, heartbroken, he could no longer bear to hear its song (abert).⁠ as with all the german and russian olga petri and philip howell - from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong 173 canaries we have discussed, these birds were bred and trained to perform. they create, as meredith west and andrew king have argued, a “shared environment with another species”⁠ (113), and their musicality is more beguiling than the fragmentary mimicry of a parrot, say. musical ability was the quality selected for and developed by breeders and trainers who prepared canaries and other birds for their careers as performers in the households and public spaces of human habitation. mozart’s starling was perhaps already able to whistle a motif from the concerto in g major (k453) when mozart bought him; this may be what attracted the maestro in the first instance. birds are also musical collaborators: mozart’s musical joke (“ein musikalischer spaß,” k522), completed a few days after the bird’s demise, carries what has been called “the autograph of a starling” (west and king). even so, it is too easy to overlook the songbird in the corner of the room, this captive artiste. caged birds as performing animals have not attracted much attention from either animal studies or natural science. the fashion for caged birds has been well discussed, but for all the world as if birds were as much a part of the domestic furniture as their cages (robbins; breittruck). those who do write about birdsong focus mainly on the analogy between birdsong and manmade music, attempting to explain from a scientific or an aesthetic perspective why birds sing; or else they ask what birdsong means to humans, how it became “a sign of humanity’s ability to reason objectively,” as rachel mundy puts it (“birdsong” 206).⁠ it is hard to escape the gravitational pull of anthropocentrism, kant’s concern with the aesthetic perception of birdsong by humans. yet if we consider the nature of animal performance, a new set of questions about the relationship between birdsong and animalhuman companionship might emerge. though the songbird’s music is an ancient theme, it is important to emphasize that the performing canary is a relatively recent phenomenon. when canaries first appeared in europe in the fifteenth century, they were valued only for their exotic and colorful appearance. during this period, as tim birkhead informs us, men gave birds, including canaries, to women as courtship gifts (18-19). the birds were luxurious presents for aristocratic or well-to-do women who not only kept birds in cages in their parlors, but sometimes wore them on their bodies as living ornaments. this decorative role only began to change in the middle of the eighteenth century. the fashion for harnessing birds’ singing abilities became historically visible with the training regimes of josephcharles chastanier hervieux de chanteloup. ⁠ hervieux de chanteloup organized the first-ever canary concerts, for the entertainment of the princess de conde and her family. from this point on, the canary came quickly to be recognized as more than just a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 174 beautiful thing, an addition to a lady’s wardrobe or a lively element of interior design. the songbird was now established as a performer, a musician, even an artiste. the precise nature of these canary performances is more difficult to gauge, however. if we follow una chaudhuri and holly hughes’s line of inquiry regarding animal performances as animal acts, “records of and reflections on the relationships — real and imagined — between human and nonhuman animals” (6), we are instructed to consider the social setting, albeit a more-than-human one, in which the canary’s performance is framed. ⁠ here, the meaning that is being composed is very different, from, say, a display of “exotic” nature, a tableau of the “imagined geography of wildness”⁠ (tait 3). instead, canary performances are predominantly domestic, though this does not preclude the elaborate choreographies of nonhuman propensities and human direction. a canary grown accustomed to sitting on the shoulder or the finger of its keeper is one thing, one kind of performance, but a canary quoting the gurgling of a mountain stream or the chirp of a wild bird is something else, as is one singing an aria from rigoletto. since opportunities for musical entertainment were more limited than they are today, caged starlings, canaries, and other birds were widely deployed as “organismal technologies that produced ambient music at home,” as jacob smith puts it (50). canaries trained to render popular melodies eventually moved from the parlor to the theatrical stage (birkhead 46). interspecies performances were conditioned not just by human artifice and the birds’ innate or individual propensity to learn, but also by the environments in which and for which such collaboration took place. canary keeping was certainly an urban fashion (in contrast to the breeding and initial training, which were carried out more conveniently outside the city) necessitating complex logistical arrangements, all preliminary to the hallmark performances of the avian artiste. the delivery of songbirds to the city necessitated further training, in venues such as pubs and coffee houses, or in bird shows, in addition to their established role in urban households. this training may seem mechanical to the more cartesian-minded, but songbirds, particularly canaries, had to be carefully cultivated and encouraged to fulfil their prodigious musical promise. it is precisely the interactive nature of their musical ability that is at the heart of their appeal as performing animals. casting birds in human-orchestrated performances involves living creatures, and singing canaries could be as temperamental as any diva. animal performances became the aim and indeed obsession of societies of enthusiasts, sometimes in the villages, but mainly in the cities (certainly the latter have left far more in the way of records). the first urban societies of canary breeders, keepers, and olga petri and philip howell - from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong 175 enthusiasts began to emerge in europe in the early eighteenth century, especially in england, germany, and france (birkhead; rothfels). in russia, despite the success of rural breeders, such formal organizations were established much later, with the first records known to us dating to the late nineteenth century. according to birkhead, and rothfels (106), urban canary fanciers first organized themselves in informal groups, exchanging tips and observations about selective breeding and systematic training, later developing regular bird shows in coffee houses and inns. as these societies became gradually more formalized, they establish criteria by which to judge the success of their animals’ performances. rules were codified, specifying the conduct of bird shows, the criteria for prize selection, and the proper relationship between animal and keeper. these codes are a distinctive aspect of animal-human performances: as donna haraway points out, seemingly arbitrary conventions are the definition of the “rule-bound, skilled, comparatively evaluated performance” (220) that is, sport. historical manuals for canary breeding and rearing stress the importance of dominant human authority and intentionality as the basis for these human-animal performances: these singing canaries are there to be judged by humans, after all. it is the human who “decides … what the acceptable criteria of performance will be” (221). yet the animal is still the star performer, and performances could not be rote or routine. russian manuals note for instance that prized performers might fall silent in an unfamiliar environment, such as a coffee house or pub. these manuals, emphasizing the relational hierarchy in the cooperation between bird and keeper, concur that where a performance fails to take place, it is the keepers who are to blame, not the birds themselves. the keepers or handlers are censured for failing to establish a sufficiently comforting and supportive relationship with their birds, implying that with sufficient skill and “good” intentions a winning performance might have taken place. in the most grand and prominent bird shows in imperial russia, held in st. petersburg and moscow, judges and participants recognized that great performance rested on far more than careful preparation and expert knowledge, however. one manual from 1898 explicitly acknowledged the fact that it remained excruciatingly difficult to predict which bird might deliver a prize-winning performance on which day. in fact, even with regard to acknowledged star performers, the experts — to their shame — could never guarantee that a given bird would even sing on a particular occasion. it might remain stubbornly mute instead (shanin 40-41). the broader choreography of bird performances reveals the exacting level of care that was taken to minimize such capricious behavior. as bird show manuals and records humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 176 indicate, each keeper would deliver their birds in their cages to the main exhibition hall or room. the birds were brought into a separate room one by one to perform in front of a jury, since “in case of their collective presentation by several keepers at once, the birds become heated, go mad, get distracted, or simply fall silent altogether in the company of other birds” (savenkov 22). keepers were typically permitted to be present for the bird’s performance, but they had to remain silent. on one occasion, as a competition report from 1903 informs us, the birds were set to sing in the evening, with the use of artificial light, but under these unfamiliar circumstances, many canaries sang reluctantly or refused to sing at all; those that did “sang in dampened fashion and frequently interrupted their song” (brashnin 25). even the star performers failed to deliver. the champion canaries brought by a legendary moscow canary fancier, n. shaliadov, put in uncharacteristically and unexpectedly poor performances: “in the evening’s [artificial] light [they] noticeably slurred their songs and in the morning sang much better” (26). in these reports, much in the canaries’ performances is attributed to the influence of a human-controlled environments, but whilst conditions might be manipulated to improve the likelihood of a successful animal performance, the last word always remained with the avian performers. for instance, the proximity of the birds to one another at shows was frequently cited as an important environmental factor influencing the quality of canaries’ song. similarly, while canary fanciers were unanimous in their enthusiasm for singing competitions, some of them noted with regret that the everincreasing crowds and the noise they produced “scared the birds” into poor performances. so, the essential role of human intentionality meant in practice the translation of the desired choreography of a performance into rewards, such as treats, to which the bird might respond in the desired way. the role of human beings, individually and collectively, was to respond to and sometimes compensate for the effects of the canary’s predispositions and performance preparation. these environmental factors influencing the birdsong produced at the nexus of the bird’s innate abilities and human intentionality were much discussed in publications catering to bird fanciers and ornithological experts. in st. petersburg’s harsh climate, for instance, loss of voice was a widespread and frequently noted concern. a well-known breeder, ivan mitîurnikov, in an keynote speech to the society of russian bird breeders in 1892 claimed that “in st. petersburg there are many complaints about hoarseness of canaries” (352-353), and went on to outline a supposedly scientifically informed program or therapy for combatting this affliction. olga petri and philip howell - from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong 177 in domestic environments, avian performances naturally had a somewhat different meaning. canaries and their songs became fashionable as decorative and acoustic elements of many late nineteenth-century households, perhaps as a symbolically urban expression of the harnessing of nature to human purpose. the fashion for the domestic canary emerged in russia only at the turn of the nineteenth century, but if late, it was no less pronounced than its european precedents: “it is an aspiration in modern society to meet the demands of a cult of beauty and elegance in the home, where we often find – caressing our eyes between green foliage – a cage with representatives of the feathered kingdom. among these, the first place is securely occupied by the canary” (“akvarium” 7). one well known late nineteenth-century russian breeder and trainer, maria markova, claimed that the number of canaries sold in urban markets in the city had increased steadily, year by year (67), though she added the caveat that many of these birds were valued primarily for their appearance, rather than their musical companionship. still, we should be wary of disregarding the domestic environment as a site of the singing performance and the interspecies collaboration that produced it. just as significant as the importation of trained canaries from countryside breeders and canaryproduction regions was a trend towards ever more intensive de-centralized domestic training routines, or continued education for birds brought to the city. as knowledge about canary training began to be disseminated by expert societies and publications, more and more urban domestic birds developed all or part of their repertoire after arrival to their permanent urban abodes. whilst much less is known of these domestic performances than about those at bird shows, they are occasionally described in print journals carrying articles for and by canary enthusiasts. they indicate an ever-greater emphasis on the canaries’ ability to sing their keepers’ favorite motifs and tunes, learned and rendered repetitively over the companion animal’s lifetime. these melodies turned the city room or apartment into a liminal space where nature and culture blended into a uniquely urban amalgam. in the urban home, the canary’s song begins to function as a domestic musical device, shaped collaboratively and collectively by human and avian residents. here, once again, subtle intentional or unintentional changes in the domestic environment could significantly modify a canary’s performance, influencing pitch, duration, frequency of repetition, melody, and rhythm. these environmental factors could be managed by human residents, but never fully controlled, as an awareness by the human keeper of their influence on the bird’s song became more subtle. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 178 in the home as at bird shows, the care lavished on the canary by its owners was considered a fundamental precondition for effective animal performance, and an important manageable contingency determining the artificial accomplishments of the urban songbird. by placing an animal in an environment different from its wild habitat, the human collaborator assumed responsibility for their protégé. birdsong performance meant the cultivation of a relationship with the canary or other singing bird, care for its welfare as a living creature rather than a mechanical object, acceptance of its whims and caprices as well as of its innate ability to sing or mimic music. the canary was not a music-box toy or novelty, however much the mechanists valued reliability. 4. birdsong: technology and artifice. figure 4. disc label for “the birds and the brook” (tipp). in his study of stravinsky, daniel albright suggests that stravinsky’s music is concerned with “the deep equivalence of the natural and the artificial” (4).⁠ this is illustrated in stravinsky’s short opera “the nightingale,” which re-tells the fairytale written by hans christian andersen about a chinese emperor and two nightingales, one real, the other a mechanical toy. it is the latter which emerges victorious from a olga petri and philip howell - from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong 179 singing competition, albeit provisionally. the distinction between natura naturans (the independent creative power of nature), and natura naturata (the imitation of natural sounds such as birdsong) (cf. harley) is dramatized, but in stravinsky’s rendering, nature is irretrievably interpenetrated by art or artifice. because both birds sound to the audience equally artificial, the opera suggests “that in music, no natural system can exist” (albright 24). artifice and nature are “most intimate” companions, “as if each were the culmination of the other” (8). we return to the importance of the human, and the nature of artifice, in the final section of this paper, exploring the status of recorded performance of birdsong, the relationship between the bird singers and the human audience mediated through technology, asking: what difference does it make if a bird’s song is heard in recorded form, or amplified and mixed with human musicians, or modified in some other way? does it, as the philosophers seem to have thought, add an odious element of artifice, even kitsch, and so in itself negates the aesthetic beauty of birdsong? or might this artifice itself become an object of wonder over and above the human or animal voice in its unadulterated state? more recent technological progress in sound amplification, recording, and broadcasting has had such a transformational impact on birdsong and human-animal musical collaboration that we incline to the latter, again turning to our canary protagonist as exemplar. in the previous section, we used the word “performance” or “animal act” without any further elaboration, which suggests that any canary chirping in human company would constitute a performance. whilst this may be an excessively broad definition, it does serve to emphasize the fact that animal acts depend on human audiences for their significance (tait). “that which makes music an art is that which separates it from nature and the natural voices of birds,” argues elizabeth leach (3), following the medieval discussion of birdsong. music is not just sound, in other words, and musical performance and appreciation are indispensable elements of true art. leach goes on to say that the “performer of music is under an obligation not just to make musical sounds but to understand them as music, that is, as proportions that are rational. the listener is also under an obligation to understand sounds in this way, whether or not their performing agent does so.” however much we underline the ability and temperament of the avian artist, for most of the history of the appreciation of birdsong it is the meaning ascribed to it by human cultures that takes center stage, most clearly where human perception of animal musicality is concerned. only very recently has this cultural emphasis on the idea that music appreciation is a uniquely human cognitive humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 180 function, and hence its anthropocentrism, been challenged. but, somewhat paradoxically, this is made possible by the importance ascribed to technology. the shift from music’s rationality to its emotional impact has, in the modern age, directed attention to sound itself. as elizabeth leach stresses, this has been made possible in large part by the invention of sound recording (276). if this argument is right, it is human beings’ technical ingenuity in removing the necessary co-presence of performer and audience that has intuitively weakened the sense that sound is not music until it becomes the subject of a human audience’s appreciation. one might say, there is music on the record, regardless of whether it is played to an audience of human or non-human animals or, for that matter, anyone at all. a performance, therefore, can take place without a human audience and yet remain intrinsically musical. this appreciation of the recorded event as having not only a market value but a cultural significance shifts the emphasis from the listener to the star performer, the bird singer. in the case of the canary, this was never just the canary, however. the human-avian partnership extends now not just to the husbandry and preparation of the performers in many cases, but also to the arrangement and distribution of the recording itself. the earliest recordings of birdsong date back to 1889, when a german canary breeder named ludwig koch made a pioneering recording of a captive common shama on an edison wax cylinder ⁠ (boswall and couzens 925). edison himself anticipated the phonograph’s use in transmitting the sounds of nature, birdsongs in particular: “for amusement or instruction the phonogram can be of a dog’s bark, a rooster’s crow, a bird’s song, a horse’s neigh, a lion’s roar, and the like, and the phonogram can be used in a toy animal with a single phonet for the reproduction of the original sound” (edison cited in boswall and couzens 925). these recordings were made in significant numbers and widely distributed. the fashion of recorded song — as a training device or for the immediate joy of the listener — was transitory but pronounced, indicating that artificial birdsong held a distinct appeal for a significant audience. in an age of unfettered faith in the ability of science and technology to support infinite human progress, it was possible — indeed authorized — to disdain the innate biological mechanisms shared by humans and animals, which is to say the voice, in comparison with the machines or instruments that human ingenuity could already, or soon hoped to, manufacture. not only musical instruments, but also music boxes, toys that for instance imitated birdsong, have come to be prized above or alongside the avian original. this is so even when mechanical creations turn tutor, as with the bird organs or serinettes used to teach birds musical tunes. in this way, the bird is, arguably, enhanced by itself becoming little more than a “bio-machine,” whilst the machines made by craft become wondrous novelties. olga petri and philip howell - from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong 181 the relationship between the natural singer and the machine is notably complex, but was commercially successful in the heyday of bird recordings. at the other end of the spectrum, with regard to recordings of birds in their wild habitats, we again note the difficulty of filtering out kant’s “free beauties of nature” from the contamination of humankind and its mechanical creations. if we allow these complexities, however, which are after all not only a matter of technology but also of conscious selection, performance, and setting, if not in most cases also quite prominently breeding and training, where does this leave our understanding of the role of human orchestration and technology? if birdsong’s “artificiality” is accepted, what are the implications for our appreciation of the relationship between human beings and birds? given the scope of our inquiry, the performances we have already described or alluded to in this paper evidence complex human-nonhuman animal collaboration. by definition, this collaboration inserts human design and preference into a native animal propensity, and technology may facilitate the relationship between species, not just making the voice of the bird more audible to remote audiences. considering the application of technology to our interactions with animals, rachel mundy has written of the significance of the sound spectrograph in ornithological research, introduced in the 1950s. mundy draws an important distinction between the subjective, aesthetic experience of sounds and the supposedly objective visualization of data in the form of standardized visual representations, or so-called “spectrograms,” which rendered the sounds of different birds in various environments comparable and transliterated them from birds’ beaks to human eyes. unlike some of her predecessors who unequivocally announced the triumph of “avian bioacoustics” (cf. baptista and gaunt), mundy offers no such endorsement, continuing to recognize the importance of auditory or perhaps musical appreciation in any discussion of birdsong. drawing on science and technology studies, she argues that technological advances retain aesthetic framing even where their intent is to achieve a higher degree of objectivity. in her view, and in ours, birdsong is also being performed or at least mediated by this technology, rather than simply deciphered. indeed, the co-creation of the nonhuman singer, the human observer, and the machine is precisely mundy’s theme (animal musicalities). importantly, the integration of human technology and birdsong became a success only after some maturation of the technologies involved. the era of acoustic recording presented significant difficulties in isolating and sufficiently amplifying the small voices of the birds. technology had to improve beyond its initial stage, and the right bird also humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 182 had to be bred or discovered, a vocalist prepared to perch next to a recording device and sing its song on cue, all the while sounding quite “natural.” here, the real breakthrough came in 1910, when a famous canary breeder from bremen, karl reich, began recording trained and captive nightingales and the so-called nightingale-canaries (that is, canaries trained to sing like nightingales). according to birkhead, reich “must have had a truly magical touch, for he persuaded one particular nightingale to perch and sing right inside the horn of the recording machine” (43, emphasis in original⁠). the success of reich’s training regimen provided the first conclusive evidence that sound alone was sufficient for a bird of one species to learn the song of another (coperland, boswall and petts). these recordings became wildly popular not only with canary keepers, eager to train their canaries to sing like the much-loved and yet elusive nightingales, but also with bird enthusiasts more than happy to substitute a recorded rendition for a live bird (the market was evidently less snobbish than kant presumed). reich’s recordings were sold across europe, russia and north america, illustrating what birkhead calls “the dual miracle of modern technology and evolution” (43). building on reich’s pioneering work and its reception not just as a training technology, but also as musical entertainment in its own right, musical publishers drew upon increasingly sophisticated recording technology, microphones, and loudspeakers used to capture sounds from a broader sonic space, with a new degree of precision and clarity. this technological progress enabled joint recordings of birds and human musicians (bruyninckx).⁠ live birds, who had already been enrolled as novelty acts in the music hall and vaudeville, might be enhanced on stage alongside pre-recorded music, as with “musical dawson” and his “choir of canaries” in 1930s britain (tipp). against the background of a pre-recorded small orchestra, the canaries in their birdcages provided the live vocal performance. but their voices too might be recorded, exemplifying the use of technology to preserve and render joint human-animal-machine musical performances. dawson released eleven records of his canary choir, the birds accompanying the orchestral rendition of such standards as “the blue danube” and “o sole mio.” his star performers were even promoted by name, having been carefully selected and trained. they included “little tweet” and the “canary caruso,” whose solo performances of “bells of st mary’s” and “londonderry air” were released by the edison bell record label in 1929. the phenomenon of birds singing along with human-made music suggests that the boundaries between nature and technology are, as predicted by stravinsky’s nightingale, essentially irrelevant, at least as far as the audience is concerned. the canary choir also inverts the conventional hierarchy between “music” and “sounds of olga petri and philip howell - from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong 183 nature,” while at the same time undermining the prerogative of nature to produce these sounds and according artifice a prominent and acceptable role in their production instead. the popular appeal of canary recordings demonstrates that this inversion and inter-penetration of nature and artifice were not the exclusive realm of fiction, as in andersen’s tale. such recordings relied on the interplay of music played and composed by humans, inborn-but-bred propensities and trained repertoires of birds, and the world of recording and reproduction technology (not to mention the commercial, legal, and cultural underpinnings tying them together). to borrow andrew flack’s terms, such performances, live and recorded, illustrate “the hybridization of animal-humanmachine” (40).⁠ they also create and occupy what günter figal calls a “phenomenal space,” as every artwork “not only grants a space, but is itself spatial” (214).⁠ here, it does not matter whether the various performers are co-present, nor whether the audience is physically within earshot. questions of origin, moreover — whether birds are part of nature, and human music and technology are part of culture — become impossible to answer in this new kind of musical space. one further development of human-animal interactions mediated by technology in this way is highlighted in michael guida’s recent work on birdsong in interwar britain. guida’s focus is not only on the preeminent role of technology — in this case prewar and wartime radio broadcasts of birdsong and its role in maintaining civilian morale — but also the ways in which animals and humans influence each other. a prime example of this was a nightingale that spontaneously accompanied the cellist beatrice harrison in her london garden, and whose performance was subsequently broadcast live to a charmed nation.⁠⁠ in guida’s formulation, such a partnership, allied to and dependent upon technological innovation, attests to a cross-species contagion of emotion or affect. against the backdrop of these case studies, it is hard to argue for even the emotional aspect of musical appreciation as a property possessed exclusively by the human animal. most importantly, guida’s work reinforces and supports a view of the inadequacy of attempts to isolate “natural” birdsong from purely-human “music.” beyond a nature/culture divide, it is not even possible to sequester musicality from either biology or technology. as alluded to above, the advent of sonic recording technologies altered the process of training caged birds such as canaries. to train young chicks turn-of-the-century fanciers had long used bird organs, serinettes, and exposure to live birds, captive or wild, of the same species or others. progress in recording technologies and loudspeakers greatly simplified the training routine, providing both opportunities to reduce the cost and to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 184 enhance the capabilities of mass-produced birds, for the most part canaries. the odenwald bird company, which took german canaries from the harz region to the usa, developed, for instance, “a thoroughly mechanized operation with thousands of birdcages designed for easy cleaning and a system of loudspeakers used to train the birds to sing” (smith 69).⁠ the owners of the company, the stern brothers, also funded a radio show entitled hartz radio canaries to advertise their birds and to offer “on-line education” to distant canaries (hartz group history).⁠ the same brothers, having emigrated to the united states in 1926, set up as producers of pet food for canaries and other animals, and organized a radio show, the american radio warblers, on which canaries sang along to popular melodies (smith 69-70).⁠ these broadcasts were positioned as training sessions for distant canaries, although human listeners who were not canary keepers were also invited to join. evidently, then, recording technologies played a critical role both in the mass-production of trained canaries, as well as the distance learning of canaries in their keepers’ homes. underscoring this use, jacob smith cites a 1937 article from the chicago daily tribune, in which the author explains to canary keepers how best to situate their feathered pets near the radio to enhance their musical education (70).⁠ these “free lessons,” as they were called by the article’s author, could be supplemented with the use of phonograph records, which canary keepers were advised to also play to their birds a couple of times a day. these changes in training technologies significantly influenced the song of the canary. their influence supports leach’s argument that the invention of sound recording represents the great revolution in musical culture — for birds and their songs and human performers and audiences alike. canary songs became more standardized, and less like the ones sung by wild or untrained birds, but no less popular for that reason. distinct “schools” or styles could be intentionally developed with greater precision. some cruder forms, supported by mechanical musical instruments, declined in popularity. the german rollers, who sang with a “soft-voiced, sweet song,” having been taught with the use of the serinette or bird organ, were displaced in the us market by the domestically bred “american chopper who trills loud and long,” tutored by radio programs and recordings (nicholson 134).⁠ the new name was itself a new brand, suited to a nationalistic era, and further illustrates the geographical de-coupling of breeding and training. the variety of canary bred by the odenwald bird company was now hatched in places like new jersey, delivered for sale in the stores such as john wanamaker in new york, and trained to sing a standardized repertoire in their keepers’ homes (hartz group history; nicholson 132).⁠ the great popularity and appeal of these singing canaries now depended upon an extended network connecting them via human-made technologies to an elaborately orchestrated training repertoire of olga petri and philip howell - from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong 185 tunes. in the age of mechanical reproduction, human or nonhuman authorship was no longer distinguishable, again precisely as stravinsky seems to suggest. 5. conclusions. in an echo of kant, elizabeth leach summarizes the debate about the musicality of birdsong: “to acknowledge birdsong as music … is to concentrate on the sound that is produced, from the perspective of the listener. music is that which sounds like — that is, is heard as — music. denying birdsong the status of music, conversely, attests to a focus on production and knowledge of the nature of the producing agent” (274). taking this same choice for granted, a generation of music scholars in the 1950s and 60s insisted that “the music itself” is the central object of aesthetic experience, rather than its social or cultural context. but as the history of the singing canary, primarily in germany and russia, and later the united states, demonstrates, such a choice is far from inevitable. initially, art and artifice of the human kind may have been hidden from view vis-à-vis aficionados of the canary’s song. with the advent of decentralized domestic training, at some stage involving the widespread aid of recording technology, even the most philosophically inclined canary keeper could not but acknowledge the prominence of human manipulations in the production of the canary’s song. and yet, as the existence of a mass market for trained canaries and recordings of their songs indicates, this awareness of human-nonhuman cooperation at the nexus of nature, science, and technology did not detract from a wide-spread appreciation of the music so produced. the story of the domestic canary demonstrates the aesthetic continuities among human and nonhuman animals and machines and the close and creative relationship among these elements or agents. having looked at the past, we cannot endorse the invocation of the pure, nonhuman soundscape of paradise as a path to what mundy calls “edenic futures” (animal musicalities 167). instead, the history of birdsong as a human-avian artifact indicates both the vintage and elusiveness of this idea, as well as the redeeming substance of its inverse. our musical appreciation has been significantly bound up with animal natures, and this hybridization is essential to both the past and future development of aesthetic culture. a closer look at the performances of caged birds, even the humble canary, suggests in fact that “animal acts of all kinds are changing us, are changing our times, and will change the future of our species” (chaudhuri and hughes 2). looking at, and listening to, the canary is especially salutary because its labile song says so much about our own non-exclusive musicality, as well as the bird’s cultural evolution. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 186 the popularity of the bred and trained canary as a source of musical entertainment is no longer what it once was. the career of the canary appears to register a distinct fall from grace, while the avian references of our own great composers, including mozart, stravinsky, bartók, messiaen, the beatles, and others, enjoy sustained popularity. perhaps it was recording technology — initially an aid to training, but later an alternative to the trainee — which rendered the canary ultimately inferior to other forms of passive domestic musical entertainment. if so, the passing of the fad would offer further indication that the strange partnership between canary and keeper was motivated on the human side by an appreciation for the resulting musical performance. it also demonstrates that the cultural co-evolution of species, just like its biological pendant, is but a joint promenade for a while in the jungle of time, not a permanent symbiosis. works cited abert, hermann. w.a. mozart. yale up, 2016. albright, daniel. stravinsky: the music box and the nightingale. gordon and breach, 1988. araya-salas, marcelo. “is birdsong music? evaluating harmonic intervals in songs of a neotropical songbird.” animal behavior 84.2 (2012): 309-313. baptista, luis f. and sandra l.l. gaunt. “advances in studies of avian sound communication.” the condor 96.3 (1994): 817-830. bertau, peter. die bedeutung historischer vogelnamen-nichtsingvögel. springerverlag, 2014. birkhead, tim. the red canary: the story of the first genetically engineered animal. bloomsbury, 2014. birkhead, t.r. and s. van balen. “bird-keeping and the development of ornithological science.” archives of natural history 35.2 (2008): 281-305. boswall, jeffery, and dominic couzens. “fifty years of bird sound publication.” american birds 36.6 (1982): 924-943. olga petri and philip howell - from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong 187 brashnin, i. l. “5-î konkurs peniîa kanareek na vystavke imperatorskogo rossiîskogo obshchestva ptsetsevodstva 12 noîabrîa 1911 goda (v sem’ chasov vechera)”, in goncharov, v. p. gollandskaîa kanareîka c prilozheniem svedeniî o konkursakh peniîa kanareek komissii pevcheî ptitsy imperatorskogo rossiîskogo obchshestva sel’skokhozîaîstvennogo pritsevodstva. museî ptistevodstva, 1911. 25-27. bregman, m.r., patel, a.d., & gentner, t.q. “songbirds use spectral shape, not pitch, for sound pattern recognition.” proceedings of the national academy of sciences 113.6 (2016): 1666-1671. breittruck, julia. “pet birds, cages and practices of domestication in eighteenthcentury paris.” interdiscipines 1 (2012): 6-24. bruyninckx, j. (2012). “sound sterile: making scientific field recordings in ornithology.” the oxford handbook of sound studies. t. pinch and k. bijsterveld, eds. oxford up, 2012. 127-50. chaudhuri, una, and holly hughes, eds. animal acts: performing species today. u michigan p, 2014. coperland, peter, jeffery boswall, and leonards petts. birdsong on old records. british library of wildlife sounds, 1988. darwin, charles. the expression of the emotions in man and animals. harper perennial, 2009. fedorov, n. “o razmnozhenii kanareek.” vestnik ptitsedovstva 5 6 may and june (1891): 363-65. figal, günter. aesthetics as phenomenology: the appearance of things. indiana up, 2015. flack, andrew j.p. “lions loose on a gentleman’s lawn: animality, authenticity and automobility in the emergence of the english safari park.” journal of historical geography 54 (2016): 38–49. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 188 guida, michael. “surviving twentieth-century modernity: birdsong and emotions in britain.” the routledge companion to animal-human history. hilda kean and philip howell, eds. routledge, 2018. 367-389. gutierrez, h.w. the roller canary, 5th edition. poultry world limited, 1920. haraway, donna. when species meet. u minnesota p, 2013. harley, maria anna. “natura naturans, natura naturata and bartók’s nature music idiom.” studia musicologica academiae scientiarum hungaricae 36.3/4 (1995): 329-349. “the hartz group history.” accessed january 16, 2020. online. hervieux de chanteloup, jean-claude. a new treatise of canary-birds. bernard lintot, 1718. haupt, lyanda lynn. mozart’s starling. corsair, 2017. hawkins, john. a general history of the science and practice of music. t. payne, 1776. head, matthew. “birdsong and the origins of music.” journal of the royal musical association 122.1 (1997): 1-2 hegel, g.w.f. aesthetics: lectures on fine art, volume i. trans. t.m. knox. oxford up, 1975. _____. philosophy of nature, part two of the encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences. 1830. trans. a.v. miller. oxford up, 2007. higgins, kathleen marie. the music between us: is music a universal language? u chicago p, 2012. jarvis, erich d. “brains and birdsong.” nature’s music: the science of birdsong. peter marler and hans slabbekoorn, eds. elsevier, 2004, 226-271. kant, immanuel. critique of judgement. nicholas walker, ed. trans. james creed meredith. oxford up, 2008. olga petri and philip howell - from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong 189 kendall, edward augustus. the canary-bird, a moral fiction. interspersed with poetry. e. newbery, 1799. kuhl, patricia k. “human speech and birdsong: communication and the social brain.” pnas 100.17 (2003): 9645-9646. kulagin, n. “s’ezd russkikh ptitsevodov. zasedanie 25-ogo marta 1892 goda.” vestnik ptitsedovstva 10.october (1892): 374-78. launer, k. and grosse, r. (red skvortsov, v.). osnovy razvedeniîa i obucheniîa kanareek peniîu. st. petersburg: tip. shtaba voîsk peter. voen. okruga, 1913. leach, elizabeth eva. sung birds: music, nature, and poetry in the later middle ages. cornell up, 2007. levitin, daniel. this is your brain on music: understanding a human obsession. atlantic, 2006. mansfield, orlando a. “the cuckoo and nightingale in music.” the musical quarterly 7.2 (1921): 261-277. markova, mariîa. kanareîka v nevole. rukovodstvo k soderzhaniîu, prirucheniîu, razvedeniîu i lecheniîu. st. petersburg: tip. muchnika, 1889. marler, peter, and hans slabbekoorn. nature’s music: the science of birdsong. elsevier, 2004. mitîurnikov, i.p. “dobroe slovo k russkim kanarovodam.” vestnik ptitsedovstva 5-6 may and april (1894): 170-176. _____. “s’ezd russkikh ptitsevodov. zasedanie 23-ogo marta 1892 goda.” vestnik ptitsedovstva 9 september (1892): 347-358. mundy, rachel. animal musicalities: birds, beasts, and evolutionary listening. wesleyan up, 2018. _____. “birdsong and the image of evolution.” society and animals 17 (2009): 206-223. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 190 mynott, jeremy. birdscapes: birds in our imagination and experience. princeton up, 2009. nevskiî, nikolaî. rukovodstvo k soderzhaniîu i razdedeneîu kanareek. moscow: tip bulgakova, 1898. nicholson, arnold. “songbird assembly line.” saturday evening post 5 december, 1947. nottebohm, f. “why are some neurons replaced in adult brain?” journal of neuroscience 22.3 (2003): 624-628. okanoya, kazuo. “birdsong for biolinguistics.” the cambridge handbook in biolinguistics. cedric boeckx and kleanthes k. grohmann, eds. cambridge up, 2018, 431-459. oerlemans, onno. “sing and be heard: birdsong and the romantic lyric.” mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal 51.2 (2018): 1-16. pervye kanareîki [literature for children], izdavie zhurnala malîutka. moscow, 1890. petri, o. “song of the ovsîanka: enhanced nature of the urban canary in imperial st. petersburg (1880-1900).” society & animals (2019): 1-25. randel, fred v. “coleridge and the contentiousness of romantic nightingales.” studies in romanticism 21.1 (1982): 33-55. rottner, regina. “are ‘non-human sounds/music’ lesser than human music? a comparison from a biological and musicological perspective.” sign system studies 37. 3/4 (2009): 509-524. robbins, louise e. elephant slaves and pampered parrots: exotic animals in eighteenthcentury paris. johns hopkins up, 2002. rothenberg, david. nightingales in berlin: searching for the perfect sound. chicago up, 2019. _____. why birds sing: a journey into the mystery of bird song. basic books, 2005. olga petri and philip howell - from the dawn chorus to the canary choir: notes on the unnatural history of birdsong 191 rothfels, n. “how the caged bird sings: animals and entertainment.” the cultural history of animals in the age of empire. k. kete, ed. berg, 2007. 95-112. russ, k. kanareîka. eîa estestvennaîa istoriîa. st. petersburg: tip. stasîulevicha, 1899. savenkov, p. a. (1909). “konkurs kanareek na vystavke imperatorskogo rossiîskogo obshchestva s.-kh. ptsetsevodstva v moskve 11 15 noîabrîa1a 1909 goda.” in goncharov, v.p. gollandskaîa kanareîka c prilozheniem svedeniî o konkursakh peniîa kanareek komissii pevcheî ptitsy imperatorskogo rossiîskogo obchshestva sel’skokhozîaîstvennogo pritsevodstva. moscow: museî ptistevodstva, 1909. 21-22. shanin, k.i. kanareîka. razvedenie, ukhod, obuchenie peniîu i lechenie bolezneî. izdatel’stvo knigotorgovtsa brillîantova, 1898. shell, marc. “animals that talk; or, stutter.” differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies 15.1 (2004): 84-107. smith, jacob. eco-sonic media. u california p, 2015. specter, michael. “rethinking the brain: how the songs of canaries upset the fundamental principle of science.” new yorker 23 july 2001: 42–53. stap, don. birdsong: a natural history. oxford up, 2005. stresemann, e. “beiträge zu einer geschichte der deutschen vogelkunde.” journal für ornithologie 73.4 (1925): 594-628. tait, peta. wild and dangerous performances: animals, emotions, circus. palgrave macmillan, 2012. taylor, hollis. is birdsong music? outback encounters with an australian songbird. indiana up, 2017. taylor, hollis, and dominique lestel. “the australian pied butcherbird and the natureculture continuum.” journal of interdisciplinary music studies 5.1 (2011): 57-83 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 11, number 2 (spring 2020) 192 tipp, cheryl. “the birth of wildlife recording. part ii, recording in the wild.” sonic field. accessed 17 january 2020. online. vladimirskiî, a. “sovremennoe polozhenie kanareechnogo promysla v kaluzhskoî gubernii (putevye zametki).” vestnik ptitsedovstva 11 (1893): 612-615. watkins, holly. musical vitalities: ventures in a biotic aesthetics of music. chicago up, 2018. _____. “on not letting sounds be themselves.” the new centennial review 18.2 (2018): 75-98. west, meredith j., and andrew p. king. “mozart’s starling.” american scientist 78.2 (1990): 106-114. whatmore, sarah. hybrid geographies: natures cultures spaces. sage, 2002. witchell, charles. the evolution of bird-song. adam and charles black, 1896. zeigler, h. philip, and peter marler, eds. the neuroscience of birdsong. cambridge up, 2008. zoologicheskiî magazin ‘akvarium.’ kratkoe nastavlenie o soderzhanii i ukhode za komnatnymi pevchimi ptitsami i lechenii ikh bolezneî. st. petersburg: tip. t-va ekaterinenskoe pechatnoe delo, 1909. zon, bennett. evolution and victorian musical culture. cambridge up, 2017. microsoft word pdf template h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 boria sax jocelyne porcher, an introduction a muscular man with a handlebar mustache enters the lion cage wearing trunks with a leopard skin pattern and holding only a whip. he cracks it; the big cats roar but always obey his command. the audience looks with a combination of awe, pride, and guilt. there is no more iconic an image of human dominance than the lion tamer in a victorian circus. but the spectators are being fooled, for the lions, raised for several generations in a domestic setting, are hardly wilder than they. the tamer, who is also putting on an act, has worked out the routine in cooperation with his charges, whom he knows intimately, using sensitivity rather than force. perhaps it is really the audience that is being dominated and controlled? many people now take it for granted that almost all relationships between human beings and animals in a household or a farm are based on dominance. this has been argued most systematically in yi-fu tuan’s book dominance and affection. keith thomas has shown in man and the natural world that symbolism of dominance pervaded english culture in the early modern period, and harriet ritvo has demonstrated in the animal estate that this persisted through the victorian era. but one problem is that these authors do not define “dominance” very empirically, and that attribute may not be much more than a feeling. in narrative poetry of the european middle ages, the barnyard is often a site of merry adventures. the animals there are, by our contemporary standards, almost wild, and there is little or no suggestion of human domination. human beings, at least in certain eras and places, may feel dominant, but does that necessarily mean they really are? and, by what criteria is dominance, if it is at all an objective condition, to be recognized or measured? i myself more-or-less believed the dominance hypothesis for many years, but it now impresses me as a rather glib way to dismiss many complexities of human-animal relationships. in the view of many anthropologists, what we call “domestication” of animals such as the dog and sheep was originally not an assertion of human will but a symbiosis, which was probably mostly beyond the threshold of consciousness for all parties. in purely pragmatic terms, the initial benefits to the animals are far clearer than those to the human beings. the animals received a steady supply of food and protection from predators, but, when you consider the effort and resources we had to expend to maintain them, it is far less clear what was gained by people. if one can speak of “dominance” during the initial period of domestication at all, perhaps the animals rather than the people were on top. another development that places the dominance hypothesis in question is the digital revolution. human beings may have created computers, yet they do not seem to elicit any sense of dominance in us. to the contrary, they are involved in decisions at every level, and we at humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 2 times feel that they are actually controlling our lives. what is true of machines might, at least in this case, be true of animals as well. an alternative to the dominance hypothesis is provided by jocelyne porcher, an advocate of traditional farming. the idea that human identity is socially constructed around the imagery of animals ─ or, in the words of paul shepard, that “animals make us human” ─ is now almost a commonplace in anthrozoology. according to porcher, the poetic construction of humankind is not accomplished simply through the contemplation of animals, but through the sort of intense, reciprocal interaction that takes place in traditional farming. in the initial stages of the process of domestication, porcher believes, what animals offered to human beings was primarily not a commodity such as food, but bestial companionship. animals, for their part, received in addition to protection and food an opportunity to share some benefits of human society. the relationship was not based precisely on a “social contract” but more in the spirit of an exchange of gifts. factory farming, in her view, is not an extension of traditional animal husbandry but a new phenomenon, in which relationships with animals have lost their reciprocity. once mutuality is restored, however, the relationships between animals and human beings will not simply return to an earlier era but will continue to evolve, as they always have, in ways that reflect the creativity of all parties. some of these ideas may sound idiosyncratic to readers in the english-speaking world, but that is at least in part because they arise out of an unfamiliar intellectual tradition ─ anthropozoology (anthropozoologie). this is a discipline devoted to human-animal relations that developed primarily in france, parallel to, but largely independently of, anthrozoology/animal studies in the english-speaking world. the french discipline is probably a little older than its anglo-american counterparts. its major journal, anthropozoologica, began publication in 1984, three years before anthrozoös, which was the arguably first journal centered on human-animal relations in the english speaking world. much of the impetus for anthropozoology goes back to the work of anthropologist claude levistrauss, and it was profoundly influenced by the work of historian robert delort. it has also been somewhat impacted by the work of american donna haraway, but by very few other thinkers of the anglophone world. anthropozoology also shows little direct impact of the more familiar authors that we in the english-speaking world associate with ”french theory” such as jacques derrida and michael foucault. the most influential representatives of anthropozoology today include bruno latour, eduardo viveiros de castro, and philippe descola, along with porcher herself. my hope is that porcher’s ideas may inspire more investigation into human-animal relationships, including that of more traditional farmers with their livestock, which have received far less scholarly attention than the bonds between people and their pets. whether or boria sax — “jocelyne porcher, an introduction” 3 not we agree with porcher’s ideas, i believe they could add vigor to the somewhat moribund state of animal studies today. one big limitation of animal studies so far, as richard bulliet has shown in hunters, herders and hamburgers, is that its foundation is profoundly embedded in the history, culture, and philosophy of the english-speaking world, to a point where it can often impress people elsewhere as an expression of cultural imperialism. if, as many anthropologists now maintain, culture consists not simply of relations among human beings but also animals and vegetation, we should be especially careful that, in eagerness to move beyond anthropocentrism, we do not unknowingly embrace an ethnocentric perspective. selected bibliography bulliet, richard w. hunters, herders, and hamburgers: the past and future of human-animal relationships. new york: columbia up, 2005. castro, eduardo viveiros de. from the enemy's point of view: humanity and divinity in an amazonian society. trans. catherine v. howard. chicago: u chicago p, 1992. delort, robert. les animaux ont une histoire. paris: editions du seuil, 1984. descola, philippe. the ecology of others. trans. benjamin p. luley. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2013. eliason, eric a. "great plains coyote coursing: biofacts and a new folkloristic understanding of animals." wild games: hunting and fishing traditions in north america. eds. dennis cutchins and eric a eliason. knoxville: u tennessee p, 2009. 25-43. latour, bruno. we have never been modern. trans. catherine porter. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1993. lévi-strauss, claude. the savage mind. chicago: u chicago p, 1966. porcher, jocelyne. vivre avec les animaux: une utopie pour le xxxe siécle. paris: éditions la découverte/m.a.u.s.s., 2011. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate: the english and other creatures in victorian england. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1989. shepard, paul. the others: how animals made us human. washington, d. c.: shearwater books, 1996. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 4 thomas, keith. man and the natural world: changing attitudes in england 1500-1800. new york: oxford up, 1996. tuan, yi-fu. dominance and affection: the making of pets new york: yale up, 19 microsoft word iveson-sax-pdf-jgr h u m a n i m a l i a 6:2 review article richard iveson toward an imaginary animal studies boria sax, imaginary animals: the monstrous, the wondrous, and the human. london: reaktion books, 2013. 278pp. $39.00 hb. introduction. in common with both its subject and the sub-discipline of animal studies generally, boria sax’s latest book, imaginary animals: the monstrous, the wondrous, and the human, cannot be easily assigned a convenient niche within the traditional segregation of genre and discipline. sax, meanwhile, is very clear as to his aim: the founding of a brand new sub-field of study organized along the lines of animal studies but dealing solely with the realm of imaginary animals (25). while the success or otherwise of sax’s project remains to be determined, at the very least imaginary animals is an exhaustive but in no way exhausting scholarly account of fantastic creatures and wondrous hybrids that are as diverse as the cultures within which they emerged. populated throughout with beautifully reproduced illustrations, imaginary animals is clearly aimed at both academic and popular readerships. such a dual focus is always incredibly difficult to achieve, however, and results here in a text that is itself something richard iveson – “toward an imaginary animal studies” 167 of a hybrid, composed as it is of two distinct parts. the first six chapters plus the brief conclusion make up one part, with the second part consisting of chapters seven through twelve. where the second part tends largely toward an exercise in cataloguing, the first will undoubtedly appeal more to both the academic and the general reader. it is by far the more exegetical and critical, without ever becoming dense or difficult. this is not to take anything away from the sheer breadth of research and scholarship that is, if anything, even more in evidence throughout the later chapters. i will consider this second part first, before engaging with the theoretical sections of part one, sections that make imaginary animals much more than simply an encyclopedic listing of fantastic beings. first, the second part. in the later chapters, various “imaginary animals” are categorized according to six basic classifications: wonders; creatures of water; of earth; of fire and air; shape-shifters; and mechanical animals. here, one finds many fascinating stories ranging from yahweh’s relationship with the leviathan to the rise of the mermaid as a major modern mythic figure. at the same time, however, one must also undergo the chore of wading through lists that, because of their comparative nature, are at times somewhat repetitive. moreover, and unlike in the first part, these lists are seldom relieved by provocative passages of analysis and speculation. that said, sax does slip in some very interesting claims, such as, for example, that insofar as moral consideration in traditional indian culture “is not greatly contingent on human form,” the treatment of other animals is thus “generally better than it is in western countries, but the treatment of people with low status is worse” (143). on the basis of such claims, the potential for rigorously contextualized accounts of a given culture’s mythology — including our own — to challenge ingrained and seemingly immutable habits of thinking about other animals seems very great. while sax does not pursue this argument, the potential is clearly indicated in the strong sense of estrangement produced by the hugely diverse accounts of what “counts” as human across various cultural traditions. two related issues are considered in some detail in this part, namely those of plants and of consciousness — issues that, given their importance within animal studies and beyond, demonstrate a clear understanding of the larger stakes in play. anyone working in the field of animal studies will doubtless have faced the following question in one form or another (and most likely in tones of mock incredulity): “so, if we must humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 168 extend the ethical realm to include other living beings, are you suggesting that we should include plants as well!?”1 as sax argues, such questions in fact depend upon a baseless yet powerfully normative assumption that human consciousness is ontologically distinct and superior. such is the apparently self-evident “fact” one finds throughout the west today that “animals have some sort of incipient consciousness, while plants do not” (211; my emphasis). one can see how potentially important ethical debates around the issue of caring for plants are blocked by forever being reduced to a question of consciousness that appears long since resolved. similarly, the apparently absurd question of ”plant ethics” can be seen as raising the possibility of breaking down just such normative and reductive assumptions that so often organize our thinking. to this end, sax begins by demonstrating why the notion of consciousness in plants is anything but absurd. viewed over an appropriate timescale, he writes, plants can be seen to act “with an apparent deliberation that rivals that of any mammal” (211). plants explore territories, battle competitors, and surmount barriers between them and the sunlight that sustains them; they “recruit” various other animals through bribery, coercion, deceit, and self-sacrifice, and some even launch deadly preemptive attacks against other plants (ibid.). even the slowness of response thought to characterize plant life can no longer be considered certain: leaves and stems, writes sax, “may immediately emit poisons or even alter their chemistry when insects lay eggs on their leaves” (213). shifting to focus more generally on the often vexed — and just as often irrelevant — question of consciousness and its attribution to another, sax argues that it is primarily a question of dominance. given that there are quite simply no conditions or criteria by which consciousness can be either awarded or withheld, he writes, the human’s justification for domination is rather an illusion based principally upon “a trick of perspective” (247). hence, we need only shift that perspective just a little in order to disclose its fundamental bias. consider, writes sax, the crows of sendai, who place walnuts under the wheels of cars stopped at traffic lights, nuts which are then cracked open as the cars move forward on green. “quite possibly,” he continues, “these crows believe that cars and trucks exist for the express purpose of crushing shells” (247). displacing the anthropocentric bias in this manner opens the way to a far more nuanced understanding of the various ways in which human and nonhuman beings co-exist and co-evolve within symbiotic relationships, and not as a result of domestication (from the latin dominus) conceived as synonymous with domination. richard iveson – “toward an imaginary animal studies” 169 that said, writes sax, it is in fact technology, rather than other animals, which today more than ever renders the illusion of human dominance impossible to maintain. indeed, he argues, an alien newly-arrived on earth “might well think that computers were the dominant form of life, with human beings only present to build and service them” (248). and how, the alien may well ask herself, might these human animals have come to be so utterly dominated in this fashion? sax suggests the alien might very well conclude that humans must simply have been programmed that way, most likely set in motion by a series of automatic triggers of the most basic stimulus-response type (248). second, the first part. while retaining both brevity and simplicity of telling, the first part of imaginary animals concerns itself with the rather different task of responding in depth to a number of provocations that give each chapter its heading: “animal encounters”; “what is an ‘imaginary animal’?”; “every real animal is imaginary”; “every imaginary animal is real”; and “monsters.” in the first chapter sax focuses on the paradoxical figure of the “true unicorn,” clearly demonstrating why, should unicorns be discovered, no captured unicorn could ever be judged “authentic” according to its species classification. from this we can infer that it will be impossible ever adequately to define and delimit any species; if no newly emerging species can be defined, neither can any existing or now-extinct species, including human beings. sax dwells in some detail on this latter point and, while parts of the argument regarding human beings are interesting, some are nonetheless problematic. he begins by arguing that producing an adequate definition of the human species is, and always will be, impossible, simply because “the boundaries of what is considered human vary enormously by culture, by historical era and even in the course of an individual’s day-to-day experience” (23). a bear in one place and time is thought to be capable of coupling with a human to produce a child; in another, apes are assumed to be human while certain of tribespeople are not, or again, in another place and time, that the large cassowary bird is a human being is blindingly obvious to all concerned. by any account, this is an important point to make. however, writing of the innumerable doomed attempts to define the human on the basis of an apparently unique property, be it tools, language, consciousness, death, etc., sax seems to locate in this lack of a uniquely definitive property the very property it claims that humans lack. human animals, in short, are “uniquely elusive” insofar as they humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 170 lack any uniquely human characteristic; rather, they are always “disguised, airbrushed, rethought, hidden, exaggerated or otherwise altered” (24). given the inference that no species can ever be adequately defined and delimited, this is a puzzling move. human animals, sax insists, are unique because they elude definition, while at the same time unicorns, for example, also elude definition. sax’s definition of the properly human is almost as old as time, having been reiterated over and over again in myth and fable, most notably for us perhaps in the greek myth of epimetheus. western philosophy has depended for millennia upon just this notion of constitutive lack as proper to the human, before finally being taken to task by poststructuralist philosophy. after making his claim for a properly human lack, sax states his desire to extend “the academic area called ‘anthrozoology’ or ‘animal studies’ … to the imagination, to myth and legend” — a realm which, according to sax at least, “has seldom been very anthropocentric” (25). he attempts this in order to ”finally reveal our human claims to dominance to be illusory” (25). the claim that myth and legend are largely nonanthropocentric seems to me extraordinary, and the suggestion that in “folktales throughout the world, all forms of life, from human beings to foxes and trees, interact with something close to equality” (25) seems to fall prey both to a universalization of myth (which sax rightly argues strenuously against throughout) and to a forgetting of that trick of perspectival bias that ultimately sustains an illusory belief in a global human dominance. just such an anthropocentrism, precisely because it remains invisible and thus unquestioned, threatens to stall sax’s project before it can even begin, potentially risking a silent extension of anthropocentrism — in the guise of its very expulsion — throughout the realm of animal studies. instead, i would argue, it is necessary to engage adequately and repeatedly with anthropocentrism at every level, because it is something that can never be expelled, only ignored. despite sax's acknowledgment of the importance of replacing dominance with symbiotic co-evolution, equally problematic here is a nostalgic regression of other animals to an illusory “primordial” realm of “nonhuman cyclic time” that, in typically hegelian fashion, sax imagines predating the human world of names, categories, and concepts (31-32). readers of animal studies will doubtless be familiar with this argument. philosophical as much as physical engagements, however, have long shown the necessity of understanding the various controversies concerning temporality that mark it as a hugely complex and profoundly nuanced area of study. such a simplistic opposition that pits an unexplored conception of linear time understood as properly human, against some equally unspecified kind of cyclic time said universally to characterize the massively divergent ways of being of all other animals, offers nothing. richard iveson – “toward an imaginary animal studies” 171 it serves only to obscure questions of temporality, the answers to which will inevitably bear heavily on the future directions of animal studies, be it an imaginary variant or not. one might object to the reading being made here, pointing out that sax is not, nor does he claim to be, a philosopher, and as such it is unfair to reproach his work for its lack of philosophical rigor. we should not, however, forget that sax’s explicitly stated aim with this book is to construct, or perhaps to extend, animal studies to include imaginary animals of myth and fable within its remit. if we are reasonably to judge the project's potential for success — and whether such an endeavor is necessary or even advisable — it is necessary to engage with the work on the ground of contemporary animal studies, an area in which rigorous philosophical and theoretical critique constitutes the primary component. moreover, in this first part sax himself explicitly intervenes in a number of currently prominent philosophical controversies in animal studies, an engagement which makes this section of imaginary animals by far the more interesting of the two. in this vein, sax evokes the famous bathroom encounter between jacques derrida and his “little cat” as related by derrida in the animal that therefore i am (2006) — a passage that, having being read both intensively and extensively, has rapidly established itself as a theoretical touchstone within animal studies. sax’s own reading would doubtless have benefitted from being clearly situated within this broader context. without this wider engagement, what appears as an initially promising reading ends up veering off dramatically, ultimately losing itself. sax thoroughly misreads derrida’s analysis of the shared gaze. entirely contrary to derrida’s account, sax interprets the encounter with the alien gaze of an (other) animal as being simply “an experience that takes us back to something pre-cultural,” which awakens “primal responses” that remind those exceptional beings that are human of the arbitrariness of “civilization” in which such pride is taken. it perhaps goes without saying that sax’s christianized conception of nature — as a previously edenic realm from which all other animals were subsequently expelled as a consequence of the fall announced by the arrival of the time-bound and thus historical human — is anathema to derrida’s thought. in positing the existence of a mythic and timeless animal realm, particularly one that reserves for human animals alone the possibility of experiencing an authentic “primordial response,” sax suggests that the primary function of “nature” is in fact to humble a self-aggrandizing humanity that would otherwise be consumed by arrogance and hubris.2 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 172 at this point, sax cites donna haraway’s equally well-known critique of the derrida passage, in which she justifiably takes derrida to task for failing to consider the actuality of the cat — that is, her singular, nonsubstitutable existence and specific ways of being — as being relevant to the encounter. sax argues that by the end of his lecture derrida ultimately reduces his “actual” cat to a mere philosophical cipher, further suggesting that, regarding the bathroom scene at least, derrida had perhaps “been writing as a poet when he suddenly remembered that he was really a philosopher” (35). again, the opposition of poet and philosopher put forward by sax sounds an odd note, particularly given its application to derrida, who must take a large part of the credit for the thoroughgoing deconstruction of just this pairing. despite this, sax finds in derrida’s lecture the constant battle of poet and philosopher, the former demonstrating a longing for transcendence in his repeated attempt to reach out toward the cat’s “alien presence” while, with at least an equal persistence, the latter insists upon an understanding that transcendence remains forever impossible (35). moreover, for sax this internal conflict can be discerned by way of the “simple contradiction” to which derrida is said to fall prey. this contradiction is for sax a rather obvious one, in that derrida insists that the being who gazes upon him “cannot be classified or named,” while at the same time he continues “to call it [sic] a ‘cat’” (35). sax’s would-be coup reveals, however, only a lack of full engagement with derrida’s philosophy, particularly as regards the notion of the trace and its implication for traditional conceptions of language. this absence of engagement is further highlighted by sax’s suggestion that derrida could in fact have very easily avoided the contradictory application of the concept “cat” to a being who refuses conceptualization by way of a simple expedient, namely that, instead of employing the word “cat,” he could have simply drawn a picture of the inconceivable cat. what sax fails to acknowledge, however, is that pictures too take place only as a result of habitually acquired and unthinkingly deployed concepts; drawings of cats serve as labels and names just as well as might those attributed in word form or in a poetic fragment or algebraic equation. imagining otherwise would be to assume that pictograms are wholly idiomatic, and thus immune to the delays and difference that condition every making of sense or production of meaning. sax concludes his reading by arguing that philosopher-derrida ultimately silences poetderrida by forcing him “to read a huge book” (35). at the last second, however, poetderrida forces out a last-gasp claim that “an animal transcends all attempts at conceptualization, even by learned academics” (35). sax, it should be noted, is not richard iveson – “toward an imaginary animal studies” 173 claiming a direct citation. nonetheless, this apparently objective summation constitutes a further misreading. derrida’s actual statement reads: “nothing can ever take away from me the certainty that what we have here [in reference to the specific little cat gazing upon his nakedness] is an existence that refuses to be conceptualized.”3 there is nothing here to support sax’s reading that any given nonhuman animal necessarily transcends conceptualization, as what appears to be both consequence and property of a common animality from which humanity is excluded. to say that a given existence refuses conceptualization is very different from saying that that same existence transcends conceptualization. in one case, such an existence refuses absolutely to be subjugated by the shackles of conceptual control, instead forever exceeding externally imposed boundaries and, in so doing, disrupting every attempt to impose upon it a dominant univocal sense. in the other, however, every organism currently contained within the commonly accepted concept of “animal” always already transcends not just this very conceptualization by which such transcendental beings are identified, but every such conceptualization, insofar as actual nonhuman animals therefore exist upon some plane of being both higher and superior than that upon which humans, as sole possessors of language and thus concepts, are thus condemned to remain. moving on to a consideration of the obscure ontological status of “imaginary animals” in the next chapter, sax refers to recent research in a number of fields, including cognitive psychology, in order to demonstrate that in our “postmodern era” experience and imagination can no longer be considered opposites. this is because perception is never immediate, but is rather a largely imaginative process of construction, at once biological and cultural, built upon “conceptual frameworks, visual stimuli, sounds, memories, and so on” (40). perception, in other words, is always already apperception, from which sax concludes that experience therefore “does much to determine what stimuli we notice, and prior beliefs affect how we implicitly classify and interpret them” (40-41). such a conclusion does not go far enough, however, even despite the important critiques of eurocentrism and anthropocentrism that follow it; it leaves itself open to a reinscription of the humanist kantian subject — a reinscription this reconfiguration of perception as mediated process renders impossible. putting this aside for a moment, sax makes the point here that the experience of perceiving another animal is always in large part the process of constructing an imaginary animal.4 furthermore, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 174 animals are the major templates used in the construction of human identity, whether universal, tribal or individual. imaginary ones in particular are a record of the changes in humankind, as we absorb, lay claim or try to disown features that we discover in other creatures. and because people constantly not only appropriate aspects of the appearance, habits and abilities of other animals but draw on their identities as well, in ways that are almost as various as the animals themselves, there is a great diversity among human cultures and individuals. (46) sax is making a big claim here: that cultural difference — and thus culture “itself” — is either largely or entirely reducible to the result and record of the humanity’s arrogation of the appearance, habits, abilities, and even identities of other animals. this raises a whole series of questions, not least of which is that, if the construction of “culture” and thus “human identity” (or vice versa) depends upon the appropriation of (other) animals, then is cultureand identity-construction an entirely human province? if so, then the animal “identities” thus arrogated must be entirely imaginary and, if not, other animals must thus also take part in cultureand identity-construction. sax seems at no point to entertain the notion that nonhuman animals also possess culture, despite empirical evidence to the contrary. rather, it seems as if human metaphoricity at this point overwhelms and erases the existential specificity common to every animal, human and nonhuman, reinstating the privileged liberal kantian subject as it goes. only humans, in other words, are both biological and cultural, in contrast to all other, “merely” biological animals. but what happens in that case to perception-asapperception? the simplest perception, we recall, is a largely imaginative process of construction that is at once biological and cultural. what becomes of nonhuman perception? it does not seem likely that sax is suggesting that all other animals are incapable of experiencing their environment through their senses. this problem, i would argue, is a result of not working through further implications of the “postmodern” understanding of perception, in particular as regards the possibility of traditional biology-culture and nature-culture dualisms. this also is a concern i have with the notion of an imaginary animal studies such as sax articulates here: namely, that it risks detracting from actual animals. no doubt sax himself would abhor such an outcome and, indeed, such an outcome is in no way necessary. what is perhaps necessary, however, is a reconsideration of the notion of the “imaginary animal” which, according to sax, richard iveson – “toward an imaginary animal studies” 175 is a creature that seems to belong to a realm fundamentally different from, yet somehow allied with, our own…. an imaginary animal is a sort of “second self” for an individual human being, an association of people or even the entire human race — something we might have been, might become, fear turning into or aspire to. (47) such an argument has merit. in terms of a proposed new area of study, sax could easily have strengthened his argument by attending to the specific construction of contemporary monsters beyond sasquatch and the occasional brief reference to biotechnology. as it stands in its admittedly speculative and provisional form, however, it is difficult to see how such a conception answers to anything other than a desire to find an academic home for the collection and collation of whatever might constitute the postmodern equivalent of the mediaeval bestiary. this is not to say that such an equivalent would be without interest — on the contrary, a postmodern bestiary would doubtless prove fascinating. my point is simply that, if the remit of imaginary animal studies is to be something other than this, as sax himself clearly imagines, then it must seek its grounding elsewhere than in the hubris of the kantian subject. no doubt part of the problem here results from the constraints imposed by the attempt to appeal to academic and popular readerships simultaneously. even with these constraints, sax nonetheless still manages to display his undeniable critical acumen to devastating effect, most notably in his rebuttal of both the humanism and universality of steven mithen’s theory of cognitive fluidity, and again in his engagement with paul a. trout’s argument that the fear of being consumed by predators constitutes the foundation of religious awe and thus worship. conclusion: the last part. in a short conclusion, sax returns to the limits of human concepts, particularly in relation to what this means for rights discourse in the case of other animals. all animals, he reiterates, are “probably impossible” to fit neatly within the categories of human thought. while this might seem rather banal at first glance, it is an absolutely crucial point that so many concerned with other animals would do well to heed. for example, sax asks are other animals moral? well, he answers, “which morality did you have in mind? … a mafia don, a viking warrior or a confucian scholar?” (251). what about a sense of time? do other animals have that? again, sax humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 176 answers, which time did you have in mind, linear time or cyclic time, time as conceived “by buddha, newton or einstein?” (251). after dealing in similar fashion with a sense of self, of consciousness, and of death, sax makes the central point that most research inquiring into such questions “is not only anthropocentric but extremely ethnocentric as well,” and constitutes an obstacle that is “true of all of … approaches to animal rights” that seek to extend contemporary human concepts to other forms of life (252). as sax notes, such approaches may — at best — afford some small protection to a very small number of other animals whom humans perceive as sufficiently similar to themselves. at worst, i.e., when elevated to a universal principle, the only possible result is an oppressive imposition of concepts serving only to deny “distinctness and autonomy” (253). instead of attempting to impose our world, writes sax, we should rather try to enter theirs. all of this remains timely and important. i am, however, less convinced by the specifics of the alternative proposed by sax, who maintains that to effect such an entry one needs only a heightened sensitivity and imagination whilst at the same time placing an increased trust upon our “poetic imaginations” (253). regardless of the degree of imaginative sensitivity, such encounters will always depend upon established patterns of human thought, and as such this would seem to amount to little more than the somewhat trivial suggestion that we humans be more open to other animals. what makes sax’s approach different from so many others, however, is the priority he gives to imaginary animals (in the narrow sense of the word). such animals are, he writes, “based on real ones,” albeit with their common kinship and strangeness intensified to an uncommon degree and, as such, they constitute a human “mirror test” (253). this, sax says, makes them both good to think and good to dream. they remind us, he writes, of all which we do not know, and thus they warn against arrogance; in gothic churches, they “caution against fanaticism”; in palaces, they recall us to the temporary limits of power; and in libraries, they provide “a check on both pride and cynicism” (253). because of all of this, he concludes, imaginary animals promise transcendence: “fantastic animals direct us to, and then beyond, the limitations of normal routines, social conventions, religious dogma and perhaps even cosmic law” (253-254). perhaps. but perhaps such fantastic human constructions are themselves already mere instances of normal routine and social convention. moreover, if transcendence is indeed at stake, one cannot help but question where, exactly, other animals are in all this and, indeed, how this alone might offer more than even the limited potential afforded by contemporary rights discourse. richard iveson – “toward an imaginary animal studies” 177 sax’s latest book is perhaps inevitably caught in a double bind, opening itself to criticism precisely in the moment that it dares to go beyond a straightforward crossreferenced encyclopedia to become something different and considerably more interesting. in this sense, a critical response such as this one proves above all that this work does not concern itself with interminable collection collated into terminable lists, but rather reaches toward something entirely other. in this sense, imaginary animals is indeed exemplary of the field of animal studies at its best. notes 1. the answer, by the way, is yes, of course we should. and considerably further too. 2. it is useful here to counterpoint sax’s exegesis with a brief summary of the text it claims to elucidate. derrida seeks to take account of a thoroughly disarming encounter with the “bottomless gaze” of a feline companion whilst standing naked in his bathroom one morning. as both border-crossing and absolute limit, derrida describes the encounter as “an instant of extreme passion” that constructs a vantage from which man might, at long last, finally dare to announce himself to himself. further, he continues, to encounter the gaze of the absolutely other is to lose one’s self in the apocalyptic event of absolute potentiality that, in the very same instant a vantage becomes finally attainable, announces nothing other than the ends of man. 3. jacques derrida, the animal that therefore i am. trans. david wills (ny: fordham up, 2008). 9. 4. here we discover a particularly interesting overlap of sax’s major concerns with those worked through by tom tyler in his ciferae: a bestiary in five fingers (2012), published by the university of minnesota press in the same year as part of their influential “posthumanities” series. microsoft word clark h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 jonathan l. clark living with transgenic animals at research institutions and breeding companies around the world, perfectly healthy animals who were bred or obtained for research are routinely killed when they are no longer needed (animal procedures committee 18, 39-56; herzog 222-223; laboratory animal science association, the production and disposition; ormandy, schuppli, and weary; taylor et al.). some of these surplus laboratory animals, as they are often called, are still healthy despite having been used for breeding or research, and others were never even used at all. in fact, some animals are deemed to be surplus stock shortly after they are born; they are the unwanted byproducts of efforts to breed animals with particular traits. take genetically engineered (or transgenic) animals. in recent years, the increased demand for transgenic animals, particularly mice, has become a major contributor to the production of surplus laboratory animals worldwide (ormandy et al.). as hal herzog explains, the typical methods used to generate lines of transgenic mice have efficiency rates ranging from 1-30%, meaning that “sometimes only one [mouse] in a hundred can be used for research” (223) “the other ninety-nine will be killed when they are a few weeks old,” herzog reports (223). “they are the junk mice, collateral damage” (herzog 223; see also holmberg). although death is the “[d]efault [o]ption” for most surplus laboratory animals (carbone, “euthanasia” 160), not all of them are killed. laboratory workers have been known to keep surplus animals as “laboratory pets” and to adopt them and take them home (arluke 107; see also birke, arluke, and michael 104-106). and a number of universities, biomedical companies, and other research institutions have developed more formal laboratory animal adoption programs (carbone, “adoption”; carbone, guanzini, and mcdonald; laboratory animal science association, lasa guidance; wyrick). some of the animals in these programs are adopted as companions, and others are transferred to sanctuaries where they are allowed to live out their lives. unfortunately, however, little is known about laboratory animal adoption. it’s unclear how many institutions have formal adoption programs. nor do we know how many laboratory animals are given the chance to experience “life after the laboratory” (carbone, what animals want viii). though we lack precise figures, however, it is probably safe to say that relatively few laboratory animals ever make it out of the lab alive.1 jonathan l. clark — “living with transgenic animals” 89 and for a whole host of reasons, including the particular legal and cultural context, some types of laboratory animals are probably more likely to be adopted than others (carbone, “euthanasia”). take “companion animals.” today in the u.s., for example, dogs and cats are probably more adoptable than mice — a significant point given that far more mice are used for research than cats and dogs combined. in fact, a major reason why research on mice is thought to be less controversial than research on cats and dogs, particularly cats and dogs who were once someone’s companion, is that fewer americans think of mice as potential companions (birke et al. 25). at one end of the spectrum of adoptability, some surplus laboratory animals, most notably certain surplus chimpanzees in the u.s., are legally entitled to life after the laboratory (hua and ahuja). in 1997, a committee of the u.s. national research council, over the dissent of one member, recommended that killing be discontinued as a method of “dispos[ing] of chimpanzees no longer useful for research or breeding” (national research council, chimpanzees 39). chimpanzees deserve this “special status,” the committee argued, because of their similarity to humans (ibid. 38). in 2000, the u.s. congress enacted the chimp act, which mandated the creation of a federal sanctuary system for the “permanent retirement”2 of “surplus chimpanzees” owned by the federal government. the act makes it illegal to dispose of these chimpanzees by killing them. needless to say, congress has yet to provide for the “retirement”3 of surplus mice, rats, or fish, despite the fact that these animals make up the vast majority of laboratory animals in the united states. they continue to be routinely killed. in this article i am interested in laboratory animals who fall on the opposite end of the spectrum from chimpanzees. whereas chimpanzees are legally entitled to “retirement,” transgenic animals appear to be categorically ineligible for life after the laboratory, at least in canada and the united states (carbone, “euthanasia”; carbone et al.). i examine the significance of this exclusion through a detailed account of farm sanctuary’s failed effort to save the enviropigs. in the spring of 2012, after losing the main source of funding for its enviropig project, the university of guelph, in ontario, canada, decided to wind the project down. as part of this process it killed its entire herd of enviropigs, despite farm sanctuary’s offer to help place the pigs in permanent homes. although the university provided several reasons for rejecting farm sanctuary’s offer, they all boiled down to the fact that these were transgenic pigs. using the case of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 90 the enviropigs, this article grapples with what it means to create a subcategory of “laboratory animals” who are ineligible for life after the laboratory.4 the social construction of the laboratory animal. in an early article on laboratory animal adoption, veterinarian larry carbone described an objection to this practice voiced by some people involved in animal experimentation. “they will point to the fact that these animals are not pets, [that] they were bred for research, as if that fact alone should dictate their fates after the research has ended” (carbone, “adoption” n.p.; see also carbone et al.). for these critics, adopting a laboratory animal as a companion animal was a “confusion of categories” (phillips 136). (one wonders what they thought about the use of former “pets” for research.) yet it is precisely in situations like laboratory animal adoption, when an animal is being reclassified, and is moving out of one social category and into another, that the socially constructed nature of these categories is most clearly revealed (herzog 219-222). individuals are not laboratory animals by nature; they become laboratory animals only when they are classified as such (phillips). scholars in the field of animal studies have developed an extensive literature on the social construction of laboratory animals (see, e.g., arluke; birke; birke et al. 19-33; herzog 205-235; lynch; phillips; shapiro, “a rodent for your thoughts”). as these scholars explain, “laboratory animal” names a particular kind of human-animal relationship, not a particular kind of animal. and this is true even of animals bred specifically for research. it may be tempting to regard these purpose-bred animals as laboratory animals by their very nature, albeit a nature constructed for the laboratory. after all, they have been socially constructed as laboratory animals not just in the discursive sense (by being classified as such) but also in the literal, physical sense of the term (birke et al. 18, 22; cf. scarce). but just as animals can be reclassified, so they can be repurposed; indeed, it may even be possible to transcend the logic of instrumental use altogether and to develop ways of living with purpose-bred animals that do not involve using them, though this of course depends upon how one defines the term use. in thinking about laboratory animals, then, critics like the ones described by carbone conflate animals with their assigned roles (carbone et al.). or as ken shapiro might put it, they confuse “the animal as such” with “the animal as constructed” (human-animal studies 1). having mistakenly naturalized the social category to which “laboratory animals” happen to have been assigned, these critics find it difficult to imagine any other way of living with these animals. jonathan l. clark — “living with transgenic animals” 91 how we classify other animals shapes (and is shaped by) the kinds of relationships we have with them (arluke and sanders 167-186; demello 44-55; herzog 219-226). by denaturalizing social categories like laboratory animal, scholars in the field of animal studies hope to reveal other ways of living with the animals who have been assigned to these categories (gross; shapiro, human-animal studies). this strategy of denaturalization also informs certain forms of activism, including the creation of sanctuaries for animals who were formerly farmed or used for research. by demonstrating that there are other ways of living with “farm animals” and “laboratory animals,” sanctuaries reveal the socially constructed nature of these categories (silcox; twine, “is biotechnology”). whether they intend to or not, laboratory animal adoption programs have a similar effect. these programs denaturalize the category laboratory animal by demonstrating that “laboratory animals” are not necessarily consigned to this role forever. yet by forbidding adoption of transgenic animals (among others), these programs also create a subcategory of laboratory animals whose members are much more tightly consigned to the particular role or roles for which they were bred or obtained. this has the effect of circumscribing the kinds of relationships it is possible to have with these animals. we see this quite clearly, i argue, in the case of the enviropigs. the case of the enviropigs. created by scientists at the university of guelph in 1999, the enviropig has been described as the first line of livestock ever genetically engineered to be more “[e]nvironment [f]riendly” (“features, performance, pictures” n.p.). enviropigs are designed to secrete phytase, an enzyme that enables them to digest phytic acid, a typically indigestible form of phosphorus found in plants, including the corn and soybeans that constitute the bulk of the feed used in industrial swine breeding and feeding. when enviropigs and non-transgenic pigs consume this feed, the enviropigs excrete manure that is lower in phosphorus. like nitrogen, phosphorus is both an essential nutrient for crop production and a potential water pollutant, particularly on factory farms with such high densities of animals to farmland that they generate excess manure. these operations often use their farmland as a low-cost sink for the disposal of excess manure, a practice that causes excess phosphorus to accumulate in the soil. storms can wash this phosphorus into streams, lakes, and other surface waters, accelerating their eutrophication. over the past several decades, regulatory agencies in canada, the united states, the netherlands, and elsewhere have humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 92 promulgated phosphorus-based nutrient management regulations to attempt to address this environmental problem. in their efforts to market the enviropig to the pork industry, the guelph scientists have suggested that stocking hog operations with enviropigs would help keep the cost of complying with nutrient management regulations in check. switching to enviropigs would also help cut feed costs, the scientists have argued, by all but eliminating the need to add digestible phosphate supplements to swine feed. what’s more, they have claimed, the enviropig would deliver these economic benefits while reducing water pollution and conserving the finite geologic deposits of phosphate rock from which phosphate feed supplements are derived. yet despite the win-win appeal of these marketing claims,5 the pork industry has yet to license the enviropig technology. on march 21, 2012, a regional farming newspaper reported that ontario pork, an organization representing swine farmers in this canadian province, had decided not to renew its annual funding for the university’s enviropig research (greig). since the late 1990s, ontario pork had reportedly provided more than $1 million in funding for the project (leung; nickel). but with no industry licensee in sight, by the spring of 2012 the organization had decided that its limited research budget would be better spent on other projects (“enviropig”; quinn, “when technology”). in the ensuing press coverage, consumer wariness and regulatory uncertainty were the two most commonly cited reasons for the pork industry’s failure to adopt the enviropig technology (anthes, frankenstein’s cat; anthes, “don’t be afraid”; maxmen, “model pigs”; maxmen, “politics”; pollack). the availability of a much less controversial technological fix for the industry’s phosphorus problem was another major strike against the enviropig (pollack). instead of attempting to persuade a wary public to eat transgenic pork, the industry can simply add microbial phytase to swine feed, as a significant number of u.s. producers already do (key et al.). ironically enough, some microbial phytases are themselves products of genetic engineering. but whatever the thinking may have been among the major players in the pork industry, it is clear that the lack of commercial interest played a significant role in ontario pork’s decision to stop funding the enviropig research. the organization also thought that the research had reached a logical stopping point, a view reportedly shared by the lead researcher at the university, emeritus professor cecil forsberg (quinn, “when technology”). jonathan l. clark — “living with transgenic animals” 93 it quickly became apparent that ontario pork planned to stop funding not just active research and breeding but the maintenance of the existing herd as well. with then vicechair amy cronin reportedly taking the position that the organization “funds research, not maintaining animals” (greig n.p.), the lingering question was what would become of the last remaining enviropigs, sixteen in all, some of whom represented the tenth generation of the line and all of whom were then being housed at the university’s arkell swine research station. as far as ontario pork was concerned, this was a matter for the university to decide (quinn, personal interview). at an april 2nd press conference in ottawa, the canadian biotechnology action network (cban) welcomed news that the university had lost its funding, claiming it as an important victory in the group’s stop enviropig™ campaign (“genetically modified pig shelved”; sharratt, “remarks from lucy sharratt”). at the time, both health canada and the u.s. food and drug administration (fda) were considering whether to approve the sale of pork products derived from enviropigs. cban coordinator lucy sharratt called on the university to withdraw its applications for regulatory approval. concerned about negative consumer perceptions of canadian pork, a representative of canada’s national farmers union (nfu) joined with sharratt in urging health canada to close its enviropig file. if health canada should approve the sale of pork products derived from genetically engineered pigs, particularly without requiring that they be labeled as such, the nfu representative argued, consumers who wished to avoid genetically engineered meat might be forced to avoid all canadian pork (slomp). the u.s.-based center for food safety echoed these concerns and called on the fda to close its enviropig file as well (“canadian hog industry”). at this point, several major newspapers picked up the story. with titles like “death knell may sound for canada’s gmo pigs,” the coverage underscored the fate not just of the enviropig project but of the enviropigs themselves (nickel n.p.; see also leung; pollack). in a magazine article published on may 1st, sharratt suggested that killing the pigs was an unfortunate but necessary step in the process of shutting the project down. “the hard reality now is the 16 gm pigs housed at the university need to be euthanized and incinerated under careful biosafety procedures,” she wrote (sharratt, “this little piggy” 8-9). “this is a necessary step to ensure the end of ‘enviropig’” (sharratt, “this little piggy” 9). yet even if the pigs were ultimately killed, the new york times reported, the enviropig line would still survive on ice in the form of cryopreserved genetic humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 94 material (pollack). using this material, scientists would be able to start breeding enviropigs again some day if the industry should change its mind or if live pigs should be needed for additional research, perhaps in order to answer additional questions posed by regulators. shortly after this initial flurry of press coverage, on may 7, 2012, i interviewed richard d. moccia, associate vice-president of research at the university of guelph, who, along with university spokesperson lori bona hunt, fielded press inquiries on behalf of the university. as the senior administrator on the case, moccia spoke on behalf of the university. (forsberg had refused my request for an interview.) moccia cited three main reasons why the university planned to stop maintaining a herd of enviropigs. for one thing, forsberg, who had been conducting his most recent research as part of his emeritus professorship, had no plans to continue conducting research requiring live enviropigs, and no other researcher at the university needed the pigs either. the second reason, not surprisingly, was ontario pork’s decision not to renew its funding. and the third reason was that there had been what moccia described as a “pause” in the university’s submissions to canadian and u.s. regulatory agencies (moccia, personal interview). the university had also apparently come to the conclusion that it did not need to maintain a herd of enviropigs in case regulators asked questions requiring additional research. at the time of our interview, none of the pigs had been killed.6 when i asked moccia whether the university would ever consider transferring the pigs to a sanctuary, he told me that this would violate the animal utilization protocol (aup) governing the research project. in fact, he said, the aup prevented the university from transferring the pigs anywhere. but even if transferring them to a sanctuary were legal, he added, the university still wouldn’t do it. given the potential environmental and food safety risks, such a transfer would be “irresponsible,” he argued, and would not constitute “due diligence” on the university’s part (moccia, personal interview). several years earlier, in 2009, environment canada, working in conjunction with health canada, had conducted an environmental assessment of the enviropig line. the assessment concluded that enviropigs present a low risk to the environment, so long as they are confined indoors and are subjected to other containment measures. even as i write this in early august of 2014, canadian and u.s. regulators still have not assessed the food or feed safety risks associated with this line of pigs, and the pigs have not been approved for consumption anywhere in the world. at the time of our interview, moccia jonathan l. clark — “living with transgenic animals” 95 was concerned that the pigs might escape into the environment7 or somehow wind up in the food or feed system.8 “we have animals escape all the time from shelters in canada,” he told me, “and we just don’t feel that we would be willing to take the risk that a transgenic animal that originated from our university, that we produced, somehow escaped and nobody knows where it went” (moccia, personal interview). in theory, moccia acknowledged, it might have been possible to enter into a legal agreement requiring a sanctuary to provide adequate containment. but this would not have been enough to assuage the university’s concerns. “we’re just not satisfied that you could ever enter into that kind of agreement with the surety that you’d need,” moccia told me (personal interview). although by the time of our interview the university had ruled out the possibility of transferring the pigs to a sanctuary, it was still exploring the possibility of transferring them to another university or to a private company or government agency. yet this, too, would have violated the existing aup. a standard aup form available on a university of guelph website lists several options for dealing with animals at the end of a research project: they are either retained, sold, donated/transferred, adopted, “humanely euthanized,” or dealt with in some other way (“animal utilization protocol” 5). moccia would not allow me to see the aup for the enviropig project, but two days after our interview he did describe its section on disposition to me: according to our current and approved version of the animal utilization protocol 10r104, section 11, disposition, there are no legal provisions to sell, adopt or donate/transfer animals. all transgenic pigs generated at arkell are either retained (research, breeding) or euthanised, and their carcasses and any tissue/organs must be safely destroyed by an approved method (incineration, composting). (moccia, “ug position”; emphasis omitted) on the basis of this provision, moccia concluded that “adoption, sale, donation or transfer would represent [a] breach of our protocol and canadian laws and regulations” (moccia, “ug position,” emphasis omitted). when i suggested that this provision appeared to prevent the university from transferring the enviropigs to anyone, including to the kinds of recipients the university was seeking at the time, moccia suggested that it might be possible to amend the aup: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 96 as it stands now . . .[,] a move anywhere would be precluded according to the provisions of our current aup. [i]f we could find an appropriate receptor at another university, we could file for an amendment to move them, which may or may not be granted. it would obviously require that the receptor could provide the necessary containment and animal care oversight that is a mandatory part of the aup, but we feel that we could trust another research institution since they are also bound by the same rules concerning animal use as we are. so strictly at this time, our only legal options are to either keep the pigs alive at the university of guelph or to euthanize them as you say, unless we could find an appropriate receptor, in which case we would request an amendment to our aup and see what happens. but we would only do this for a research institution or university, and not an adoption group or animal shelter etc. (moccia, “re: ug position”) the principal investigator would be the one to apply for an amendment, and the university’s animal care committee (acc) would decide whether to grant the request. below i discuss whether there were any laws that would have prevented the acc from allowing the enviropigs to be transferred to a sanctuary. setting this legal question aside for the moment, it is crucial to understand that moccia was not approaching this matter as a purely legal issue. it also came down to trust. as his comments about the possibility of an amendment suggest, he trusted other research institutions to ensure containment and provide adequate animal care, but he did not trust sanctuaries to do so, partly because they are not covered by the same laws that research institutions are. if a suitable recipient could not be found, moccia told me, the university would kill the pigs. it had no plans to allow them to live out their lives on campus as “retired” research animals, though this would have been perfectly legal to do. the cost of doing so would have been difficult to justify, moccia explained. owing to the need for containment and specialized staff, he estimated the cost of maintaining the herd at approximately $100,000 per year. it’s difficult to imagine any university paying that kind of money, and committing scarce staff and facilities as well, just to allow a dozen or so former laboratory animals to live out their lives, except, perhaps, in the case of chimpanzees. jonathan l. clark — “living with transgenic animals” 97 by mid-may, with the university’s funds running out, and with no suitable recipient in sight, the fate of the enviropigs seemed all but sealed. the issue would reopen, however, when farm sanctuary took an interest in the case. farm sanctuary runs three sanctuaries for farmed animals, two in california and one in new york; it also operates the farm animal adoption network, which places animals in permanent homes across north america. the organization got involved in this case after i contacted them on may 2nd to ask whether they would ever consider rescuing a transgenic animal. on may 15th, bruce friedrich, farm sanctuary’s senior director for strategic campaigns, wrote to moccia by email, asking him to work with farm sanctuary to place the enviropigs in “loving homes” (friedrich, “from farm sanctuary” n.p.). “[r]ather than killing these poor animals,” friedrich wrote, “won’t you work with us to give them a happy retirement?” (friedrich, “from farm sanctuary” n.p.) “for the same reason you wouldn’t kill 16 healthy dogs at the end of a research project,” friedrich continued, “please don’t kill these poor pigs, who deserve a chance to live out their final years basking in sunshine, taking mud baths, and simply being pigs” (friedrich, “from farm sanctuary” n.p.). farm sanctuary’s plan, friedrich would tell me after the pigs had been killed, was to place the pigs somewhere in canada (personal interview). a few hours after friedrich made his request moccia rejected it. “we have had many generous and well-intentioned offers from individuals and groups who would like to help find homes for our enviropigs,” moccia wrote (moccia, “re: from farm sanctuary” n.p.). “unfortunately,” he continued, “there is absolutely no opportunity for this to occur” (moccia, “re: from farm sanctuary” n.p.). he offered a legal explanation, citing the aup: our research and animal utilization protocols require us to maintain strict care and control over the enviropigs. we are legally bound to keep the animals in closed containment, and the protocols strictly forbid the disposition of live animals to any other party at the termination of research. as such, adoption, donation or transfer of the animals would represent a breach of our protocols, as well as canadian regulations concerning our research animal use. (moccia, “re: from farm sanctuary” n.p.) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 98 in response to moccia’s legal argument, friedrich suggested that perhaps the university could amend its protocols; he also requested citations for the regulations to which moccia had referred so that farm sanctuary’s attorneys could examine them. friedrich also noted that laboratory animals in the united states are increasingly being adopted as companion animals or retired to sanctuaries. as an example, he cited the case of marilyn and madonna, two pigs whom the university of utah had transferred to a sanctuary (friedrich, “re: from farm sanctuary”). ignoring friedrich’s request for legal citations, moccia explained that this was not a typical case of adoption: keep in mind that these are genetically modified animals, and their disposition represents a very different situation than the adoption of a normal animal, post research. accordingly, our approved research protocols preclude any release from our facilities, and we are not considering options to attempt to amend regulations or otherwise alter our existing protocols. and i am not aware of any other universities in countries across the developed world that adopt out genetically altered livestock species from research labs. (moccia, “re: from farm sanctuary” n.p.)9 in reply, friedrich expressed farm sanctuary’s willingness to work with the university to address its concerns about containment, and he renewed his request for legal citations: “i feel certain that you would be able to change the protocols if you wished to. are there government regulations that you believe to be insurmountable? if so, can you tell me what they are?” (friedrich, “re: from farm sanctuary” n.p.). on may 22nd, lori bona hunt replied to friedrich on behalf of moccia, who was on vacation at the time: as prof. moccia has mentioned, the university’s approved research protocols preclude any release from our facilities. as well, it would violate policies re: containment and use of transgenic animals under canadian regulatory authorities (health canada, canadian food inspection agency and environment canada). we are not considering options to attempt to amend regulations or otherwise alter our existing protocols. (n.p.) the bottom line, then, was that the university had no plans to attempt to amend the aup to allow the pigs to be transferred to a sanctuary, regardless of whether this was a viable legal option, which, it claimed, it wasn’t anyhow. in her reply, bona hunt also jonathan l. clark — “living with transgenic animals” 99 mentioned that only nine of the enviropigs were still alive; the others had already been killed. as she explained, “all transgenic pigs generated for this research are either retained (for research and breeding) in an [sic] containment facility or humanely euthanized according to schedule” (bona hunt n.p.). farm sanctuary’s request led to another flurry of press coverage. in the pages of various newspapers, the debate played out much as it had over email. moccia argued that transferring the pigs to a sanctuary would be illegal, and he also cited potential food safety and ecological risks. as he told one reporter, “‘[t]he possibility of escapement or inadvertent release, however remote, could occur, with the possibility that they could intermix with either feral or domesticated pigs, or even end up in the human food chain by accident’” (quoted in perkel, “u of guelph nixes adoption” n.p.). farm sanctuary’s rebuttal is best captured in a commentary titled “save the enviropigs,” which friedrich published in the globe and mail on may 25th. despite farm sanctuary’s repeated requests for legal citations, friedrich argued, the university had cited no specific legal restrictions (aside from the potentially amendable aup) that would prevent it from transferring the pigs to a sanctuary. friedrich also suggested that the risks were manageable: the two actual concerns we’ve heard are these: first, that the animals might breed with non-gmo animals; and second, that they might end up on someone’s dinner plate. the solutions are obvious: first, the university should spay and neuter them. and second, the university can keep strict track of them and monitor them as they live out their lives and require that their remains be returned upon their natural deaths. (friedrich, “save the enviropigs” n.p.). on may 24th, just nine days after the university received farm sanctuary’s request, and presumably just hours before friedrich submitted his “save the enviropigs” commentary to the globe and mail, a veterinary specialist killed the last remaining enviropigs. or, as bona hunt would later put it, the pigs were “‘humanely euthanized’” (quoted in perkel, “university of guelph ‘enviropigs’ put down” n.p.).10 their bodies were incinerated, and genetic material was sent to the canadian agricultural genetics repository program in saskatoon, where, presumably, it is now being cryopreserved (miner; schmidt). in addition to repeating the same arguments the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 100 university had made all along, bona hunt added that “[r]eleasing the enviropigs would ... have ... possibly compromised consumer safety and market protection,” with the latter (“market protection”) presumably referring to the market for canadian pork (quoted in schmidt n.p.). lucy sharratt reportedly described the deaths as “a ‘sad but necessary conclusion to an unwanted and unnecessary ge experiment’” (quoted in schmidt n.p.). in a press release titled “gm ‘enviropigs’ meet dead end,” she argued that “‘[a]ll corporate plans for gm food animals, including the gm atlantic salmon, should die along with these gm pigs’” (n.p.). friedrich condemned the killing: by killing 10 perfectly healthy individuals, when there was a clear and effortless alternative for the university, guelph has forfeited any claim it might have had as anything other than a profit-driven arm of canada’s meat industry ... we’re saddened by guelph’s callous and mercenary killing of the enviropigs, who deserved better. (quoted in perkel, “university of guelph ‘enviropigs’ put down” n.p.) by the end of the day on may 24th, the day the pigs were killed, there were 3,450 signatures on an online petition to save them (“don’t kill the enviropigs!”). in the days and months that followed, people continued to sign, apparently unaware of what had happened. all told, 8,347 people signed the petition, with last signature occurring on october 5th, some four months after the pigs had been killed. on april 2, 2013, nearly one year after the pigs had been killed, guelph students for the ethical treatment of animals held an event on campus titled “who were the ‘enviropigs’?” (eh-en, samuels, and taha). the event ended with a vigil, co-hosted with guelph pig save, to remember the enviropigs. a brief look at the law. as i explain above, the university claimed that transferring the pigs to a sanctuary would have been illegal. the legal question is whether any statutes, regulations, legally binding policies, or other laws would have prevented the university from amending the enviropig aup to allow for the transfer of the pigs to a sanctuary with adequate containment and animal care protocols in place. without getting too deep into the details of my legal research, let me just say that the answer to this question is much less clear than the university suggested. i found no law that would have clearly forbidden the university from transferring the pigs. the best law i could find to support the university’s position was the canadian council on animal care’s guidelines for the use of fish in research.11 in a section titled “fish as pets,” the guidelines state that “[n]o gm fish may be removed from research facilities to private jonathan l. clark — “living with transgenic animals” 101 premises” (ccac, fish 65). of course, these guidelines are about fish not pigs, so it’s unclear whether they would have applied in this case. until someone tests the legal waters — something the university refused to do — we have no way of knowing how regulators and the courts will interpret the various laws in these kinds of cases. but it is also important to recognize that even if the university had the legal authority to spare the enviropigs, it was under no legal obligation to do so. as far as i can tell, its decision to kill the pigs was perfectly legal. given the uncertainty surrounding the legality of allowing transgenic animals to be adopted or “retired” to a sanctuary, and in light of the potential legal liability and public relations damage if such animals should escape into the environment or end up in the food or feed system, it should come as no surprise that killing has become the preferred method of disposing of surplus transgenic laboratory animals. indeed, like moccia, i know of no research institution that allows these animals to be adopted or transferred to a sanctuary (see also carbone, “euthanasia”; carbone et al.; laboratory animal science association, lasa guidance). every adoption policy i was able to find online is either silent on the question of adoption or explicitly rules it out. as a matter of institutional policy, then, transgenic laboratory animals appear to be categorically ineligible for life after the laboratory at most if not all research institutions in canada and the united states. and depending upon how the relevant laws are interpreted, in some jurisdictions they may be ineligible as a legal matter as well.12 of course, it is possible that adoption or “retirement” is allowed in at least some institutions and political jurisdictions, and that i have simply been unable to find these examples. more systematic legal and policy research is needed on this issue. discussion. so what are the implications of this case for our thinking about the social construction of laboratory animals? unless the laws, policies, and practices governing adoption are changed, transgenic laboratory animals are likely to be more permanently restricted to the particular role or roles for which they were designed than are their nontransgenic conspecifics. so in addition to being subjected to more intensive forms of containment, including physical confinement, they are also likely to be subjected to a kind of conceptual confinement as well (cf. derrida; pachirat 4; twine, “is biotechnology”). in other words, in addition to being more tightly confined, they are also likely to be more tightly consigned to a particular social category or categories. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 102 beyond being bred for a particular purpose, they are likely to be more tightly restricted to that purpose and to the kinds of human-animal relationships it entails. in a recent book on animal ethics, clare palmer asks us whether there are some types of human-animal relationships that “we just shouldn’t create...” (115). the fundamental question that the case of the enviropigs forces us to grapple with is whether we ought to create a whole class of animals who are restricted to only certain kinds of relationships with humans, particularly when those relationships mostly entail instrumental use. as the percentage of laboratory animals who are transgenic continues to increase (ormandy et al.), we need to ask ourselves whether it is acceptable for fewer and fewer laboratory animals to be eligible for life after the laboratory. to be fair, at no point in the controversy over the disposition of the enviropigs did the university ever claim that the pigs should be regarded only as laboratory animals or as farm animals. rather, the university’s arguments focused mainly on the need for adequate containment and animal care. although moccia did assume that these could be provided only by institutions that would have likely used the pigs as laboratory or farmed animals, this was not the same as saying that the pigs should be consigned to these particular social categories. similarly, when a research institution enacts a policy making transgenic animals ineligible for adoption, this is not necessarily an effort to restrict human-animal relationships. we should not be too quick to read these policies as implicit assertions that transgenic animals should exist only to serve the particular purpose or purposes for which they were designed. in fact, i know of no policy that forbids laboratory workers from developing companion-like relationships with transgenic animals in the lab. if the case of the enviropigs is any indication, then, the current reluctance of research institutions to allow adoption of transgenic animals does not appear to be motivated by a desire to restrict human-animal relationships. rather, this reluctance seems to be motivated mainly by legal concerns, and by a desire to avoid a pr nightmare should an adopted transgenic animal escape into the environment or wind up in someone’s food. yet whatever the intent behind these policies may be, it is clear that they do indeed restrict human-animal relationships. after all, having a companion-like relationship with a transgenic animal in a lab, particularly an animal who is still an actual or potential research subject, surely differs in significant ways from living with a transgenic animal in one’s home or caring for one at a sanctuary. so even as adoption policies expand the kinds of relationships it is possible to have with “laboratory jonathan l. clark — “living with transgenic animals” 103 animals” who are deemed to be eligible for adoption, they restrict the kinds of relationships it is possible to have with “laboratory animals” who are deemed to be ineligible for life after the laboratory. and in the case of transgenic animals, these policies typically create a bright-line rule that admits of no exceptions. instead of addressing adoption on a case-by-case basis, the policies deem all transgenic animals ineligible, regardless of the nature of the animal and regardless of whether a potential adopter or sanctuary has the ability to provide adequate containment and animal care. although this kind of policy makes sense if an institution must comply with a law that itself creates a bright-line rule against life after the laboratory, this simply begs the question of why such a law should exist in the first place. after all, if it is legal to farm an enviropig so long as adequate containment measures are in place and adequate animal care is provided, then why should there be a bright line rule against allowing an enviropig to live out his or her life at a farmed animal sanctuary with the same (or even better) animal care and containment protocols in place? perhaps it’s time for a more science-based approach to the question of whether transgenic animals ought to eligible for life after the laboratory. conclusion. until some time in 2013, two transgenic goats were on display at the canada agriculture and food museum in ottawa. developed by the now defunct company nexia biotechnologies, these spider goats were designed to secrete spider silk in their milk. i cannot say for certain how the goats arrived at the museum, or whether all the relevant laws and policies were followed, but the reaction to this exhibit reveals one of the unintended consequences of policies that classify transgenic laboratory animals as ineligible for life after the laboratory. in march of 2012, cban accused the museum of promoting genetic engineering. the goats functioned as a kind of living pr for the biotechnology industry, cban argued (“genetically modified goats”). when i interviewed sharratt about the enviropigs, she brought up the case of the goats (personal interview). she was concerned that transferring the enviropigs to a sanctuary would help normalize transgenic animals, just as the spider goat exhibit had done. as emily anthes explains, having a “close, personal encounte[r]” with a transgenic animal, as anthes did when she first saw a glofish at a pet store, can help dispel certain fears about them (frankenstein’s cat 31). creating personal encounters with farmed humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 104 animals is exactly what farm sanctuary aims to do by inviting the public to tour its sanctuaries. after feeding a pumpkin to an enviropig, a visitor might leave just a little less receptive to the frankenpig frame, which, to her credit, sharratt has avoided using in cban’s work. of course, even if the enviropigs had been allowed to live out their lives at a sanctuary, they might never have gotten to go outside. and if, as a result of biosecurity requirements, they would have had to have been subjected to more intensive confinement than other pigs, their uniqueness as transgenic animals may well have been reinforced in visitors’ minds. the public’s perception of the pigs ultimately would have depended upon how the pigs were presented. as richard twine explains, the development of transgenic farmed animals is caught up in “a politics of the new” (animals as biotechnology 22). using frames like frankenpig and frankenfish, critics suggest that these animals are radically different from the ones the public has grown accustomed to eating, while the industry strives to convince both the public and regulators that there is really no meaningful difference between the two. indeed, “when introducing live enviropigs™ to the public,” susan mchugh explains, “scientists [took] care to normalize these gm creatures as ordinary meat animals” (animal stories 208). some members of the press aided in the project of normalization. consider how a bbc reporter described his visit to the arkell facility in january of 2011: “the animals inside the clean, warm barns look like normal pigs and behave like normal pigs,” he explained, “but they are living, breathing wonders of modern science” (cooke n.p.). a video accompanying the story shows seven pink enviropigs playfully nipping at the reporter’s rubber boots. no frankenpigs here. adoption policies have important implications for efforts to normalize transgenic farmed animals. until they are approved for use as food, transgenic animals like the enviropig will remain laboratory animals. making these and other transgenic laboratory animals categorically ineligible for life after the laboratory only serves to reinforce the notion that they are radically different from their non-transgenic conspecifics. this surely presents a challenge for institutions seeking to assuage public concerns about these animals. their policies may ultimately end up backfiring, exacerbating the public’s concerns and unwittingly reinforcing the frankenfood frame. notes 1. i’m aware that using the phrase “laboratory animal” has the potential to naturalize the use of animals for research. i address this issue later in the article. but there is jonathan l. clark — “living with transgenic animals” 105 another reason to be wary of the phrase. talking about surplus laboratory animals is potentially misleading given that many of these animals never even enter a lab (cf. birke et al. 32-33, 37). some are killed in the breeding facility where they were born, whether at a commercial breeder or in a research institution’s own in-house breeding facility, while others are killed in the animal care facility, which is the place in a research institution where animals are held as potential research subjects. future research is needed to trace the various fates of animals who are bred or obtained for research — or who are the unwanted byproducts of efforts to breed animals for research — but who, at some point, whether after having been used for breeding or research or not, are deemed to be surplus stock (for a start, see laboratory animal science association, the production and disposition; wolfenshohn). 2. in 2007, congress strengthened the definition of “permanent retirement” by restricting the kinds of research that may still be conducted on chimpanzees after they have been transferred to a sanctuary. 3. use of the term retirement in this context needs to be interrogated, and not just to determine whether the respite from research is permanent. compared with terms like rescue, the term retirement depicts research institutions in a much more favorable light (carbone et al.). “rescue” implies that the breeder or research institution from which an animal is removed is a source of threat, which it arguably is in the case of surplus animals who are slated to be killed, assuming, that is, that even a relatively painless and stress-free death would constitute a harm to a member of the particular species at issue (for a discussion of this issue, see palmer 129-137). yet as the legislative history of the chimp act demonstrates, the term retirement has its own set of political disadvantages. during the debates that led up to the passage of the act, some members of congress suggested that chimpanzees were being provided with a cushier retirement than many of these members’ constituents were receiving. the term retirement is also interesting insofar as it implies that laboratory animals are engaged in a form of labor (for a discussion of this issue, see clark, “labourers or lab tools?”). 4. my account is based on several sources of data: press coverage, email correspondence between the university and farm sanctuary, statements published by key participants in the case, and interviews with these participants. i also conducted a legal analysis of the university’s policies, along with the relevant national, provincial, and municipal humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 106 laws that governed the university’s decision regarding the disposition of the enviropigs. 5. an assessment of these claims on their merits is beyond the scope of this article. 6. moccia counted fifteen, not sixteen, as had been reported in the press. 7. i appreciate the irony of the university describing these pigs as environmentally friendly and then expressing concern that they might end up in the environment. unfortunately, i do not have space in this article to discuss what is known about the potential ecological risks associated with feral enviropigs (but see national research council, animal biotechnology 11, 78, 84, 87). 8. ten years earlier the university had suffered its own biosecurity breach. in february of 2002, the guelph mercury reported that 11 dead “enviropiglets,” as another journalist would later call them (clarren n.p.), had been “mistakenly taken to a rendering plant” and cooked along with other animal carcasses (kirsch n.p.). this batch of cooked carcasses was then sold to feed mills, which used it to make feed for laying hens, broiler chickens, and turkeys. when this mishap was revealed to the public, officials from the canadian government attempted to assuage consumer concerns, asserting that anyone who had eaten eggs or flesh from birds who had eaten the feed had nothing to worry about — an interesting claim considering that regulators had not (and still have not, as of early august of 2014) assessed whether food derived from the bodies of enviropigs is safe to eat. 9. the university’s policies on adoption deal only with dogs, cats, and equines. they make no mention of transgenic animals (“animals in research and teaching”). 10. for an analysis of this misuse of the term euthanasia, see clark, “killing the enviropigs.” 11. i thank gilly griffin, guidelines and three rs programs director at the canadian council on animal care, for this reference. 12. for example, the u.s. food and drug administration’s current guidelines on the regulation of genetically engineered (ge) animals recommend that all unapproved (and thus still experimental) ge animals be killed when they are no longer needed, except in special cases where the agency’s “safety concerns are met” (guidance for industry 11). jonathan l. clark — “living with transgenic animals” 107 the kinds of exceptions the agency mentions have to do with allowing animals to enter the food chain. the guidelines make no mention of adoption or transfer to a sanctuary. perhaps these would be allowed if the agency’s safety concerns were met, but this is by no means clear. works cited animal procedures committee. report of the animal procedures committee for 2003. london: the stationery office, 2004. web. 25 jan. 2014. “animals in research and teaching.” university of guelph. university of guelph, n.d. web. 29 jan. 2014. “animal utilization protocol.” hagen aqualab home page. hagen aqualab home page, n.d. web. 26 jan. 2014. anthes, emily. frankenstein’s cat: cuddling up to biotech’s brave new beasts. new york: scientific american/farrar, strauss and giroux, 2013. _____. “don’t be afraid of genetic modification.” new york times. new york times, 9 mar. 2013. web. 25 jan. 2014. arluke, arnold b. “sacrificial symbolism in animal experimentation: object or pet?” anthrozoös 2.2 (1988): 98-117. arluke, arnold, and clinton r. sanders. regarding animals. philadelphia: temple up, 1996. birke, lynda. “who — or what — are the rats (and mice) in the laboratory.” society & animals 11.3 (2003): 207-224. birke, lynda, arnold arluke, and mike michael. the sacrifice: how scientific experiments transform animals and people. west lafayette: purdue up, 2007. bona hunt, lori. “fwd: from farm sanctuary re: the enviropigs.” message to bruce friedrich. 22 may 2012. e-mail. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 108 canadian council on animal care. ccac guidelines on: the care and use of fish in research, teaching and testing. ottawa: canadian council on animal care, 2005. web. 25 jan. 2014. “canadian hog industry abandons genetically engineered pig.” center for food safety. center for food safety, n.d. web. 26 jan. 2014. carbone, larry. “adoption of research animals.” animal welfare information center newsletter 7.3-4 (1997): n. pag. web. 25 jan. 2014. _____. what animals want: expertise and advocacy in laboratory animal welfare policy. new york: oxford up, 2004. _____. “euthanasia and laboratory animal welfare.” laboratory animal welfare. eds kathryn bayne and patricia v. turner. london: academic press, 2014. 157-169. carbone, larry, luce guanzini, and cary mcdonald. “adoption options for laboratory animals.” lab animal 32.9 (2003): 37-41. clark, jonathan l. “labourers or lab tools? rethinking the role of lab animals in clinical trials.” the rise of critical animal studies: from the margins to the centre. eds nik taylor and richard twine. london: routledge, 2014. 139-164. _____. “killing the enviropigs.” forthcoming in journal of animal ethics. clarren, rebecca. “should biotech piggy go to market?” salon.com. salon.com, 4 mar. 2008. web. 26 jan. 2014. cooke, jeremy. “gm pigs: green ham with your eggs?” bbc news. bbc.com, 4 jan. 2011. web. 22 jul. 2014. demello, margo. animals and society: an introduction to human-animal studies. new york: columbia up, 2012. derrida, jacques. “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” critical inquiry 28.2 (2002): 369-418. “don’t kill the enviropigs!” petition site. petition site, n.d. web. 26 jan. 2014. eh-en, mike, becka samuels, and rasha taha. “who were the ‘enviropigs’?” facebook.com. 2 apr. 2013. web. 26 jan. 2014. “enviropig.” ontario pork. ontario pork, n.d. web. 26 jan. 2014. jonathan l. clark — “living with transgenic animals” 109 “features, performance, pictures.” enviropig™. u of guelph, n.d. web. 26 jan. 2014. friedrich, bruce. “from farm sanctuary re: the enviropigs.” message to rich moccia. 15 may 2012. e-mail. _____. “re: from farm sanctuary re: the enviropigs.” message to rich moccia. 15 may 2012. e-mail. _____. “save the enviropigs.” the globe and mail. the globe and mail, 25 may 2012. web. 26 jan. 2014. _____. personal interview. 22 jun. 2012. “genetically modified goats on display at ottawa experimental farm.” take action canadian biotechnology action network cban. take action-canadian biotechnology action network-cban, 27 mar. 2012. web. 28 jan. 2014. “genetically modified pig shelved.” take action-canadian biotechnology action networkcban. take action-canadian biotechnology action network-cban, 2 apr. 2012. web. 26 jan. 2014. “gm ‘enviropigs’ meet dead end.” take action-canadian biotechnology action networkcban. take action-canadian biotechnology action network-cban, 22 jun. 2012. web. 26 jan. 2014. greig, john. “enviropig breeding put on hold.” ontario farmer. ontario farmer, 21 mar. 2012. web. 26 jan. 2014. gross, aaron. “introduction and overview: animal others and animal studies.” animals and the human imagination: a companion to animal studies. eds. aaron gross and anne vallely. new york: columbia up, 2012. guidance for industry: regulation of genetically engineered animals containing heritable recombinant dna constructs, final guidance. washington, dc: united states food and drug administration, center for veterinary medicine, 15 jan. 2009. web. 27 jan. 2014. herzog, hal. some we love, some we hate, some we eat: why it’s so hard to think straight about animals. new york: harper perennial, 2011. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 110 holmberg, tora. “tail tales: how researchers handle transgenic dilemmas.” new genetics and society 29.1 (2010): 37-54. hua, julietta, and neel ahuja. “chimpanzee sanctuary: ‘surplus’ life and the politics of transspecies care.” american quarterly 65.3 (2013): 619-637. key, nigel, et al. trends and developments in hog manure management: 1998-2009. washington, dc: united states department of agriculture, economic research service, 2011. web. 26 jan. 2014. kirsch, vik. “tainted animal feed risk downplayed by federal officials.” the guelph mercury. the guelph mercury, 19 feb. 2002. web. 26 jan. 2014. laboratory animal science association. the production and disposition of laboratory rodents surplus to the requirements for scientific procedures, 1998. web. 25 jan. 2014. _____. lasa guidance on the rehoming of laboratory dogs, 2004. web. 25 jan. 2014. leung, wency. “university of guelph left foraging for enviropig funding.” the globe and mail 2 apr. 2012. web. 26 jan. 2014. lynch, michael e. “sacrifice and the transformation of the animal body into a scientific object: laboratory culture and ritual practice in the neurosciences.” social studies of science 18 (1988): 265-289. maxmen, amy. “model pigs face messy path.” nature 486 (2012): 453. _____. “politics holds back animal engineers.” nature 490 (2012): 318-319. mchugh, susan. animal stories: narrating across species lines. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2011. miner, john. “experimental pigs destroyed.” the london free press. the london free press, 22 jun. 2012. web. 26 jan. 2014. moccia, richard d. personal interview. 7 may 2012. _____. “ug position regarding enviropig tm.” message to the author. 9 may 2012. email. _____. “re: ug position regarding enviropig tm.” message to the author. 10 may 2012. e-mail. jonathan l. clark — “living with transgenic animals” 111 _____. “re: from farm sanctuary re: the enviropigs.” message to bruce friedrich. 15 may 2012. e-mail. national research council. chimpanzees in research: strategies for their ethical care, management, and use. washington, dc: national academy press, 1997. _____. animal biotechnology: science based concerns. washington, dc: national academy press, 2002. nickel, rod. “death knell may sound for canada’s gmo pigs.” reuters. reuters, 2 apr. 2012. web. 26 jan. 2014. ormandy, elisabeth h., catherine a. schuppli, and daniel m. weary. “worldwide trends in the use of animals in research: the contribution of genetically-modified animal models.” atla 36 (2009): 63-68. pachirat, timothy. every twelve seconds: industrialized slaughter and the politics of sight. new haven, ct: yale up, 2011. palmer, clare. animal ethics in context. new york: columbia up, 2010. perkel, colin. “u of guelph nixes adoption of ‘enviropigs.’” the canadian press. 15 may 2012. web. 26 jan. 2014. _____. “university of guelph ‘enviropigs’ put down, critics blast ‘callous’ killing.” the canadian press. 21 jun. 2012. web. 26 jan. 2014. phillips, mary t. “proper names and the social construction of biography: the negative case of laboratory animals.” qualitative sociology 17.2 (1994): 119-142. pollack, andrew. “move to market gene-altered pigs in canada halted.” new york times. 3 apr. 2012. web. 26 jan. 2014. quinn, mary jane. “when technology is ahead of its time: ontario pork puts enviropig™ into perspective.” pigs, pork & progress. pigs, pork & progress, 2012. web. 26 jan. 2014. _____. personal interview with mary jane quinn, senior marketing communication leader at ontario pork. 27 jun. 2012. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 112 scarce, rik. “socially constructing pacific salmon.” society and animals 5.2 (1997): 117135. schmidt, sarah. “genetically engineered pigs killed after funding ends.” postmedia news. postmedia news, 22 jun. 2012. web. 26 jan. 2014. shapiro, kenneth j. “a rodent for your thoughts: the social construction of animal models.” animals in human histories: the mirror of nature and culture. ed. mary henninger-voss. rochester: u rochester p, 2002. 439-469. _____. human-animal studies: growing the field, applying the field. ann arbor: animals & society institute, 2008. sharratt, lucy. “remarks from lucy sharratt, coordinator, cban.” take actioncanadian biotechnology action network-cban. take action-canadian biotechnology action network-cban, 2 apr. 2012. web. 26 jan. 2014. _____. “this little piggy will be gmo-free.” common ground. common ground, 1 may 2012. _____. personal interview. 16 may 2012. silcox, nicholas. “farm sanctuaries: farm animals, categorical liminality, and future possibilities.” honors thesis. ursinus college, 2013. slomp, paul. “remarks from paul slomp, youth vice-president, national farmers union.” take action-canadian biotechnology action network-cban. take actioncanadian biotechnology action network-cban, 2 apr. 2012. web. 26 jan. 2014. taylor, katy, et al. “estimates for worldwide laboratory animal use in 2005.” atla 36 (2008): 327-342. twine, richard. animals as biotechnology: ethics, sustainability and critical animal studies. london: earthscan, 2010. _____. “is biotechnology deconstructing animal domestication? movements toward liberation.” configurations 21 (2013): 135-158. wolfensohn, sarah. “euthanasia and other fates for laboratory animals.” the ufaw handbook on the care and management of laboratory and other research animals, 8th edition. eds. robert hubrecht and james kirkwood. oxford: wiley, 2010. 219-226. jonathan l. clark — “living with transgenic animals” 113 wyrick, beverly j. “a successful animal adoption program: observations on the animal care facility program at the university of california, san francisco.” contemporary topics in laboratory animal science 35.1 (1996): 43-47. microsoft word pedersen-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 2:1 helena pedersen teaching the animal margo demello (ed.), teaching the animal: human-animal studies across the disciplines. new york: lantern books, 2010. 427 pp. $50.00. in 2003, clifton flynn published an article in international journal of sociology and social policy entitled “a course is a course, of course, of course (unless it’s an animals and society course): challenging boundaries in academia,” in which he gave an account of the institutional hardships endured when navigating his human-animal studies course proposal through the university bureaucracy.1 when reading teaching the animal, it is encouraging to realize that academic orthodoxy and scepticism against has courses may pose less of an obstacle in 2010. teaching the animal is a compilation of essays, course syllabi, reading lists, and other teaching and learning materials from has courses in 15 subject areas, with a clear emphasis on the humanities and social sciences (the natural sciences are only represented by two chapters). twenty-one scholars from a range of disciplines have contributed with their vast educational experiences to this ambitious volume. the book is organized according to disciplines and offers multiple entry-points (although a bit difficult to find―either an index or a more detailed table of contents, or both, would have been helpful). a cross-reading of the different chapters provides ample educational inspiration for creating new has courses in, i would say, almost any field. the educators contributing to this volume generously share their “best practices,” concrete ideas for teaching, assessment, and course development, and a wide repertoire of experiences of what may take place in has seminar rooms, but also discuss problems and challenges involved in creating and teaching courses in human-animal relations. in so doing, they also invite interesting institutional and epistemological insight into discipline-specific conditions for has education. indeed, reading this book is a learning experience in itself. let me highlight just a few pedagogical snapshots from some of the contributions: carrie rohman, in her chapter “literature and the discourse of species,” lets her students produce a written life story-account of their most significant encounter with a nonhuman animal in the beginning of her course, and asks them to return to their narratives to analyze them at the end of the semester. in this manner the educator uses helena pedersen — teaching the animal 87 the “baggage” of animal experiences the students already bring with them to class for the benefit of the course, and allows them to look back and reflect on their own learning processes when the course is coming to an end. similarly, paul waldau (“religion and other animals”) suggests an exercise he calls “personal archaeology” for both students and teachers as a way of uncovering multilayered personal histories with animals and their associated modes of learning, and initiating an inquiry into the complex process by which knowledge of other animals is built up. kenneth shapiro (“psychology and human-animal studies”) proposes exercises in intra-disciplinary critique to focus attention on how the students’ own field of study has treated animals. cheryl joseph (“exploring the animal-human bond through a sociological lens”) puts her students in personal contact with the author of the key text in her animal studies course, cooperates across disciplinary and institutional boundaries in her course development work, and provides several opportunities for students to apply theory to practice. david fraser, daniel m. weary, and marina a.g. von keyserlingk (“two interdisciplinary courses on the use and welfare of animals”) work with a researchoriented pedagogical approach directed towards “real-life” problem-solving and independent discovery (although some of these exercises appear to be attuned toward supporting animal enterprises rather than radically transforming them). when reading through this volume it strikes me that the numerous kinds of pedagogical advice, suggestions, and reflections offered speak not only to has education, but to education more generally (as paul waldau also notes in one of his two chapters). to reflect on teaching human-animal relations means, in a certain sense, to reflect on the education system as such. thus, the authors address a number of educational issues that do not relate exclusively to has, but that may take on particular expression and meaning in the context of a has course. student-centered curricula, the role of emotions in education, and the role of integrated field studies (or “community service-learning”) as part of the syllabus are just a few examples of issues raised that have general educational interest, and on which different has educators and students may have different views. more importantly, the significance of critical pedagogical approaches is emphasized throughout the volume in almost every chapter, and is also underscored in the editor’s introduction. critical pedagogy involves not only teaching critical thinking―on a more fundamental level it encounters and supports students as competent change-agents, in their own lives as well as others. many chapters in this volume position themselves close to such approaches, addressing critical pedagogical notions such as unlearning, socialization, social advocacy, and species ideology critique. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 88 a critical animal pedagogy would further seek to make in-depth interventions in the power structures and political economical forces in which human-animal relations are embedded, explore forms of counter-hegemonic resistance, draw on (and contribute to) activist knowledge, and problematize the very assumption of what makes certain bodies (human and animal) accessible for instrumental ends, but such a space is not always easily created in academia. for instance, it seems to me that inviting a farmer (albeit local and “organic”) to give a guest lecture on his animal products risks reinforcing the very ontologization of animals as commodities that a critical approach to human-animal education has an important task to dismantle, unless carefully balanced with exercises in immanent critique. this leads me to what i perceive as a few “missing links” in the book. first, i would have wished that teaching the animal, as it takes on the impressive task of outlining and discussing educational practices in human-animal relations, would have included education in its list of disciplines. i believe that an essay on the place of the so-called “animal question” in education studies and/or in teacher education programs would have provided a valuable meta-perspective to the overarching theme of the book. my second concern is that the book as a whole lacks a grounding in educational theory. how is the selection of material considered appropriate for teaching and learning carried out, by whom, and for whom? what does it mean to “teach” something to someone? what sort of actor is the formal education system in human-animal relations? what do the trope and the presence of “the animal” do to education? what tensions and contradictions in education discourse does this trope/presence bring to light? what are the limits to education in fostering critical awareness and to critique ideologies in which it is itself embedded? what are the different implications of “including” animal issues into existing curricula, as compared to recognizing that animals are always already part of hybrid educational assemblages and might require a critical posthumanist working through of entire curricular logics? some of the essays touch on highly relevant issues pertaining to educational theory. for instance, annie potts and philip armstrong emphasize the knowledge/power dimension, the political investments of knowledge production, and their implications for humans and nonhumans. paul waldau, lori gruen, and kari weil further remind us that animal life is not fully knowable to us, even if history of science has conveyed a different impression. what does this mean when educating about human-animal relations? even a critically inclined animal didactics may inadvertently mediate a message of the discursive accessibility of the animal; the animal as always already subject to scientific exploration and dissection, however non-invasive. as gruen and helena pedersen — teaching the animal 89 weil put it, the study of nonhuman animals brings us to the limits of our own knowledges, and this encourages us to continuously engage in critical inquiry into the particularities of our own forms of knowing. recognizing that this is essentially a practice-oriented volume, i still sense that there should be a place for a separate, concise section discussing has in relation to education theory, where issues regarding educational knowledge production and knowledge development raised in the chapters could have been brought together and discussed. such a section would arguably have given the volume as a whole more academic depth, a potentially larger influence on curriculum development processes in the institutional politics of tertiary education, and a common focus around which the different contributions could have been brought in closer cross-disciplinary conversation with each other. these remarks aside, teaching the animal clearly achieves an impressive goal and will be an excellent resource for every university educator interested in humananimal relations. note 1. flynn, clifton p. “a course is a course, of course, of course (unless it’s an animals and society course): challenging boundaries in academia.” international journal of sociology and social policy, 23:3 (2003). 94-108. microsoft word kelleher-neri-pdf-jgr h u m a n i m a l i a 6:2 reviews hillary kelleher bugging foucault janice neri. the insect and the image: visualizing nature in early modern europe, 1500-1700. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2011. xxvii + 233 pp. $82.50 hc, $27.50 pb. janice neri’s 2011 the insect and the image uses tiny critters to make big claims. even the subtitle, visualizing nature in early modern europe, 1500-1700, doesn’t quite contain the scope of her argument. indeed, this slim volume holds a store of fascinating facts and pictures, elegantly arranged to recount how insects inched from the margins of medieval manuscripts and into the centers of naturalist drawings, still life paintings, needlework designs, and microscopic illustrations. through these emerging media, they became features of curiosity cabinets and display cases, and they found new habitats within private collections, museums, universities, and other repositories of knowledge. they also traveled through incipient networks of exchange and commerce promising europeans access to exotic treasures from around the world. in fact, neri reveals, a small selection of bugs helped spin these global webs by casting nature as a commodity, an alluring assortment of consumable items. hillary kelleher – “bugging foucault” 179 neri coins the phrase “specimen logic” to explain this evolution and describe how sixteenth-century image makers — from artists and artisans to amateur and professional naturalists — began rendering insects in precise detail on otherwise blank backgrounds, a pictorial strategy favoring bugs that could be “depicted or displayed as objects, those that possess clearly defined edges or contours and whose surfaces are visually distinct” (xiii). dürer’s 1505 stag beetle signaled the shift. armor gleaming and mandibles raised, it looms large in the absence of visual referents and seems to rear its head right off the stark vellum. this lone beetle became the prototype for a genre that, with heightened concern for accuracy and three-dimensional effects, blurred distinctions between physical specimens and their representations. it also spurred developments of new materials and practices, including “cutting and pasting,” which happened literally (by moving images) and virtually (by copying across contexts and media). within a growing culture of curiosity, the wunderkammer became a site in which images and objects could function interchangeably — with cabinets containing collectibles as well as pictures, and pictures depicting cabinets of collections. at the same time, image makers “capitalized on the appeal of insects to feature them as spectacular illustrations in their publications — projects that were also intricately tied to the constructions of their own complex professional identities” (181). through this dual construction process—of creatures and creators — nature became decontextualized while artists and scientists arose as “gatekeepers to a strange and fascinating new world” (xi). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 180 the insect and the image displays the development and consequences of specimen logic over five chapters arranged in two parts. after an introductory section on theory and method, it proceeds thematically and chronologically, focusing on an assortment of humans: the miniaturist painter joris hoefnagel, naturalist physicians ulisse aldrovandi and thomas moffet, polymath microscopist robert hooke, and illustrator businesswoman maria sibylla merian. part i covers 1580 to 1620 and includes a chapter on early still life; part ii concentrates on the later seventeenth century when, though no longer novel, bugs were still “exotic objects around which professional personae and new visual strategies were formed” (xxvi). here neri explores “new worlds” — under the microscope and around the globe — as well as innovations in technology and decorative art. her conclusion tracks specimen logic into the nineteenth century, in images that “reflect the parallel expansions of europeans’ knowledge of the natural world and the global reach of european political power along with the spread of international commercial and trade networks” (182). this period also saw a widening, often gendered, split between professional and domestic spaces. as neri puts it, “the approach to nature as a collection of rare and precious objects moved out of the [scientific] mainstream and into the living room” (189). specimen logic relies on michel foucault’s notion of “screening,” the narrowing processes through which he believed nature is ordered and knowledge produced. for foucault, neri explains, “natural history texts ‘screened’ certain aspects of nature in order to make others visible, and this screening process defined both the scope of natural history and the character of the description — in other words, what could be described and how.” as she quotes from the order of things, “‘natural history did not become possible because men looked harder and more closely.” instead, they used their “ingenuity, if not to see as little as possible, at least to restrict deliberately the area of its experience’” (4). neri professes to “firmly ground” her work in foucault’s “archeological approach to studying the past” (xvi), a somewhat surprising stance given his rejection of foundationalism. still, like many others, she criticizes his sharp distinction between the eighteenth-century “classical age” and the renaissance, as well as his focus on texts at the expense of images. more importantly, she demonstrates how screening the natural field began much earlier, when images makers started “to parse the insect world into small units that could be easily comprehended and reproduced … in efforts to limit the scope of the natural world similar to those that foucault sees operating in eighteenth-century natural history texts” (22-23). this selective approach was, in fact, “already a part of sixteenth-century practices relating to picturing the natural world.” not until the eighteenth century would natural history texts “catch up hillary kelleher – “bugging foucault” 181 with visual images, notably their very narrow focus on a restricted number and type of structures” (189). thus, one of neri’s larger implications seems to be that foucault’s own screens, so focused on les mots, unduly narrowed his field of vision. though foucault never articulates a theory of visuality per se, neri notes how his work has inspired thinkers seeking to understand “the processes by which subjects become visual” (xvi), and she relies on a range of their theories. informed by foundational visual culture scholars like svetlana alpers and jonathan crary, she also draws on historians of science, including pamela smith, as well as on claudia swan and londa schiebinger’s somewhat comparable work on botanical imagery. this interdisciplinary approach places the insect and the image “at the methodological intersection of the history of science, art history, and visual culture” (xv), a juncture that enables a complex set of questions: “why did people become interested in insects, and why did visual representations take this particular form at this particular time? why was ‘precision’ valued and what did it mean? why did specimen logic dominate, how did it come to be accepted, and what were its implications and consequences?” (xvii). neri’s answers draw on alternative concepts such as “image” and “knowledge” to describe “the meaning and function of objects and practices that fall outside of the traditional confines of art and science” (xxvii). while observing how early modern bugs have been analyzed in many fields—from entomology to literature to religion—she digs deeper to unearth the “conditions under which it was possible for insects to emerge as subjects” (xvi). it was upon these “conditions of visibility,” she insists, “that later musings on insects were founded” (xiv). foucault sought to expose political and social conditions that, as he reflected in a late interview, “are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. they are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them anymore” (11). neri follows suit, and her rigorous focus on marginal elements of the landscape reveals many “unseen social, cultural, and historical processes at work in their production” (xiii). her narrow lens thus captures a paradoxically wide angle, illuminating how “material practices and ideas surrounding … the representation of nature intersected with global movements of peoples, plants, and other objects” (xiii). one category missing from this taxonomy is animals. on the one hand, the absence is predictable. as laurie shannon mentions in the accommodated animal, the word rarely humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 182 appeared before the seventeenth century, when creatures were differently sorted and, as neri shows, the very classification of insect included a range of beings from frogs to worms. like foucault’s madmen and criminals, early modern bugs hovered in liminal spaces among organic beings (like plants or snails) and inanimate objects (like shells or coins), while disrupting distinctions between the quick and the dead as living organisms, killed specimens, and lifelike images. on the other hand, however, neri’s missing animal is conspicuous, particularly in light of her references to intersectional fields that, like visual studies, extend foucault beyond his original parameters. she notes, for example, julie hochstrasser’s postcolonial unmasking of “violence visited by europeans upon inhabitants of the spice islands” in dutch still life (xiii), natalie davis’s feminist connection “between merian’s gender identity … and her ‘ecological approach’” (141), as well as merian’s own unsettling comments on best breeding practices for enslaved africans. her only nod toward the treatment of nonhuman animals, however, comes in a footnote to dated articles on the medical history of vivisection (216n71). with so much recent scholarship on early modern animals and her own foucauldian “ground,” such a thorough screening of human animal studies (has) must have been hard for neri to sustain, especially as she applied elements of foucault’s dismantling of human subjectivity to beings now called animals.1 always already objectified, foucault’s subject exists only through representation, an antihumanist position crucial for theorists — from giorgio agamben to donna haraway to erica fudge — who disrupt conventional distinctions between homo sapiens and other life forms. after noticing an introductory section called “insects as subjects,” as well as the title of part i, insects as objects and insects as subjects, i eagerly anticipated some discussion of has issues, but neri left me hanging. if, as she shows, insects emerged as subjects only through their objectification, i kept wondering how these bugs differed from their human representatives. aren’t we all subjected to subjectivity according to foucault? after reading and rereading, however, i began to sense these questions were out of bounds. as neri remarks in her definitive closing sentence: “the consequences of this metamorphosis, of nature rendered into a collectable and a commodity, extend beyond the narrowly constructed borders of this book” (190). still, the animal lingers. though incidental to her thesis, neri includes some unsettling details. joris hoefnagel, we learn, faced a common paradox: “in order to thoroughly examine a specimen it was first necessary to subdue and in most cases kill the creature … the specimen that exists hillary kelleher – “bugging foucault” 183 in nature is not as animated as the imaginary creature fabricated by the artist” (22). we also hear merian instructing a student that to “kill butterflies quickly … one must hold the point of a darning needle in a flame, thus making it hot or glowing red, and stick it into the butterfly. they die immediately with no damage to their wings.” this technique preserves “the insect’s delicate structures from the violence of its own death” (161). less relevant but more disturbing (for mammal readers anyway) is the royal society’s ordering of hooke “to perform respiratory experiments on live dogs,” a duty that left him “so distressed by the animals’ suffering that he refused to repeat the experiments … though he was eventually compelled to carry them out” (138). such vivid marginalia may be the best neri can do, within her strict archeological parameters, to convey the unfortunate consequences of specimen logic for insects and other animals. because their conditions of visibility depended upon being constructed as “an exotic, alien inhabitant of a nonhuman world” (xv), the only bugs we can see are already images. as such, they can only be approached in their otherness, by tracing their emergences, transformations, and effects. to her credit, neri maintains a similar archeological distance with humans (though they appear to have more agency, especially in crafting their personae). we hear, for example, how hooke’s humble origins and possible disfigurement from smallpox may have “contributed to his social status as an outsider” in the royal society (106) and how merian, as a divorced businesswoman, “remained a somewhat unstable commodity within the cultural economy of natural history” (166), but neri refrains from speculation on their subjective experiences. foucault might say that neri’s archeology stops short of genealogy. in other words, she lays out specimen logic without confronting its enabling structures of domination, including the human-animal divide upon which it depends. in fact, just as specimen logic relies upon a clear distinction between human image maker and animal subject, so too does its description. allowing “the animal” entrance to the insect and the image would disrupt the ontological status of its humans, and the artists and scientists themselves might disappear. and yet, as neri cannily admits, “limits, too, have their limits” (26). animals aside, when it comes to crafting professional personae around bugs, the insect and the image proves the practice alive and well. timely in neri’s career as well as her field, the book has carved a tiny but powerful niche in the industry of foucauldian scholarship while weaving its way into other areas. so far, it has received positive humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 184 reviews in renaissance quarterly, isis, archives of natural history and early popular visual culture (to name just a few journals) and has been put to use in newer work across disciplines, including dániel margócsy’s commercial visions: science, trade, and visual culture in the dutch golden age (2014) and ohad nachtomy and justin smith’s the life sciences in early modern philosophy (2014). it’s even creating some buzz in has circles, with citations in animals on display: the creaturely in museums, zoos, and natural history (2013), edited by liv emma thorsen and karen rader, as well as in the new routledge handbook of human-animal studies (2014). and it made the list of noteworthy books in the newsletter of the institute of animals and society. foucault saw himself as an agent of change. “how can you imagine that i think change is impossible,” he asked, “since what i have analyzed was always related to political action? all of discipline and punish is an attempt to … show how a new way of thinking took place” (14). as i consider the insect and the image, i’m intrigued by its own conditions of visibility as an academic artifact, and i wonder what further thoughts and actions it will inspire. will its black and white reproductions of colorful insect images disrupt or reinforce the logic of specimens? perhaps both. like a very curious cabinet, this book displays images of “seemingly timeless beauty” (xiii) in order to showcase their otherwise hidden production processes and so uncovers something of what foucault calls the “history of the present.” minnesota university press claims, on their website, that by “revealing how sixteenthand seventeenth-century artists and image makers shaped ideas of the natural world, janice neri enhances our knowledge of the convergence of art, science, and commerce today.” what to do with such enhanced knowledge remains a question for readers beyond neri’s narrow borders. this reader looks forward to deeper explorations of the animal issues she sidles around. note 1. a few of many titles: early modern zoology: the construction of animals in science, literature and the visual arts, edited by karel enenkel and paulus johannes smith (leiden: brill, 2007), a cultural history of animals in the renaissance, edited by bruce boehrer (new york: bloomsbury academic, 2009), and beasts and beauties: animals, gender, and domestication in the italian renaissance by juliana schiesari (toronto: u of toronto p, 2010). works cited foucault, michel. technologies of the self: a seminar with michel foucault. ed. luther martin, huck gutman, and patrick hutton. amherst: u massachusetts p, 1988. hillary kelleher – “bugging foucault” 185 shannon, laurie. the accommodated animal: cosmopolity in shakespearean locales. chicago: u of chicago p, 2013. microsoft word kajiwara-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:2 hazuki kajiwara human-animal interaction in post-tsunami japan 1.0 the human-animal connection: companions in everyday life. humans have lived with animals since prehistoric times. gunter discusses historical evidence suggesting that the domestication of dogs occurred at least 12,000 years ago, and cats, about 9000 years ago (2-3). a relationship with one or more animals seems to be very important for many living in today’s world. franklin claims that the importance of the relation between humans and pets is increasing because people feel ontologically insecure in their increasingly urbanized society (84-86). according to kruse, irvine and peggs, sociological research has focused on humans and their relationships with animals, not on animals and their involvement in animal-human relations or the role of animals in society (kruse, relevance; irvine, question; peggs 2). although people live closely with animals in the actual world, sociological studies have tended to disregard the way in which animals play important roles in society. this paper provides a perspective on the animal-human nexus in japan by examining the experience of people caught up in the tragedy of the march 2011 tsunami which whisked away both humans and companion animals in the matter of a few hours. over the last 30 years various empirical studies have shown that pet ownership has beneficial effect on human health. beck and katcher report that the mortality rate of heart patients who keep pets is lower than that for non-pet patients (2-8). patronek and glickman argue that pet ownership reduces the incidence of cardiovascular disease because it influences psycho-social risk factors. gaeng and turner also found that pets contribute to the health of older adults in nursing homes. in a study over 52 weeks johnson and her colleagues found that regularly walking a dog reduces adult obesity (see also zeltzman and johnson). carlisle found a significant difference between the social skills of children with autism spectrum disorder (asd) who lived with dogs and those who did not live with dogs, and concluded that dog ownership may be beneficial for some children with asd. these studies demonstrate that a relationship between a human and an animal can produce various benefits for the human involved. however, herzog has argued, that the “pet effect” is still an unsubstantiated hypothesis which at present requires much more research. in these regards irvine noted that since the 1990s, many working in this area have come to use terms such as “companion animal” and “guardian” in place of “pet” and hazuki kajiwara -human-animal interaction in post-tsunami japan 85 “owner” to capture the emotional connection between the species and to articulate the responsibility of humans for their pets, and that usage is now common amongst academics in japan (irvine, if you tame me §3).1 at the same time, the decision to have a pet often involves an ethical stance that recognizes the value (and the rights) of the animal itself. whatever the motivation to own a pet may be, the assessment of companion animals in the united states over the past 50 years by brackenridge et al. leads to the conclusion that the relationship between people and animals has become very close. considering the dramatic changes that have occurred in the structure of american families, kruse argued that the increased practice of allowing animals to share homes as members of the family has blurred the boundary between humans and animals as non-humans. on the other hand, franklin has described the relationship between pets and humans in late modernity in terms of changes in the ontological security of the individual (kruse, social; franklin 8586). since the 1970s, he argues, the nuclear family has come under increasing pressure, with individuals experiencing more fragmented and less secure life styles (cf. franklin 85-86). he suggests that the role of pets in human society has been enhanced by this important social and cultural transformation. however, he also emphasizes that the relationship between human and animals is not embedded in sentimentalism only; it is challenging and dissolving the boundary between species. today many japanese display one or more photographs of their pets on their mobile phones; they also spend considerable amounts of money on pet food and veterinary care. some pet owners even go so far as to indulge their pets with birthday parties, funerals, and other rites of passage, and treat their pets like their own children. although other japanese may think such behavior silly, obsessive, or just eccentric, few any longer openly criticize such behavior. given the closeness of the relationship between some japanese and their animals, it is reasonable that we ask what happened with regard to that relationship when the march 2011 tsunami struck many communities along the pacific ocean coastline in northeast japan. this paper first surveys the literature on disasters and pets, noting that the immediate outcome is that many pet owners have to deal with the sudden and permanent separation from their pets. it then discusses findings from research on pet owners following the japanese tsunami and earthquake. the case study is used to tease out some broad implication for our understanding of the human-animal relationship. 2.0 pet owners during disaster. even though one family may consider its pet to be a family member, it is often the case that others afford the pet a much lower status. doka humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 86 observed that the grief of those who lose their pets is often overlooked and ignored by others around them (11). redmalm argues that the problem is not so simple, and points to the ambiguity generated by pet grief as a “grief on the margins.” in any case, the sense of isolation which follows can then become a serious psychological burden for pet owners who have lost or otherwise become separated from their pets during and after a disaster. several quantitative investigations have been conducted by psychologists in this regard. zottarelli suggests that pet loss impacts negatively on the ability of their owners to respond during and after a disaster. hunt, al-awadi, and johnson found that pet loss or forced abandonment slowed the process of recovering from a disaster. hunt, bogue, and rohrbaugh suggest the need for steps to allow pets and owner to more easily evacuate together. thompson, and thompson, et al. found in their review of the literature that animals could be a protective factor rather than a risk factor during disasters. for example, animal attachment may construct disaster resilience. trigg, et al. open a different window on the pet-owner relationship by reviewing literature regarding human-animal interaction. they find that an understanding of different types of relationship can improve the effectiveness of rescue operations when disasters occur. yamazaki analyzes the factor that influences evacuation behavior of pet owners and their needs for support in quantitative investigation. trigg, bradley and thompson’s questionnaire survey also reveals how pet-owner closeness affects the survival plans made by owners. although there are few qualitative studies about animals when a disaster strikes, potts and gadenne have collected extensive accounts from experts in the area of animal protection, rescue, and welfare, and also from the guardians of companion animal after the christchurch earthquake in new zealand in 2011. they report that although the traumatic experiences connected humans and other animals intimately, the emergency management frameworks tended to be anthropocentric. irvine’s investigation of the decision-making process has concluded that the vulnerability of animals is constructed by our “thinking” (irvine, filling). accordingly, the pet evacuation and transportation standards (pets) act of 2006 was passed in the united states following hurricane katrina and other disasters (public law 109-308). the act ensures that state and local emergency preparedness operational plans address the needs of individuals with household pets and service animals during and following such emergencies. leonard and scammon provide an interesting review about the value and meaning of the pet in the society that are reflected in the pets act. they suggest that pets could be seen as existing with their own set of rights and thus deserve protection in this act, or as a special possession of humans that require a special legal status. in these regards a move towards the animal-rights and animalliberation perspective of singer might be detected, and the way animals are viewed in hazuki kajiwara -human-animal interaction in post-tsunami japan 87 japan — both as a species and as an adjunct to human behavior — needs to be seen in an evolving cultural context. here it is important to note that most of the studies just mentioned are set in an american (or at best a western) context. for that reason it is useful to consider how the relationship between animals as companions and their human guardian is changing in the non-western world. we may thus ask about the enduring impact of traditional cultural outlooks and the extent to which affluence and the spread of urban lifestyles are likely to change the way people view and treat animals in other societies. this research contributes to that questioning by considering the way in which one highly developed asian society has responded to the plight of pet owners following a major disaster. 3.0 evidence from post-tsunami japan. inokuma writes that dogs crossed over to japan from the korean peninsula and from the nansei islands (the chain of islands extending from southwestern kyushu to northern taiwan) after the jomon period (14,000bc-300bc). he also notes that the “japanese ching” that was kept inside as a pet by medieval aristocrats (32). nozawa and nishida argue that cats were probably introduced into japan from the asian continent during the nara period (ad.710-794) as a “pet” for the aristocracy (365). for ordinary people, animals had a practical value. dogs were then kept mainly to protect households and to aid in hunting. utsunomiya states that cats also had a utilitarian value, as they were able to catch mice, an important task given that rice was often stored in wooden containers, as were kimonos, books, and many other valuable possessions. she reasoned that the cats spread among the common people during the middle in the muromachi period (ad1336-ad1573) (108). in the present era, with rapid urbanization, the role of pets begins to change. ishida writes that the watch dogs had pretty much disappeared by the end of the 1960s (10). in line with theories about development and social convergence, hamano argues that rapid economic growth in japan after the 1950s produced the economic margin that would allow a shift away from keeping pets for instrumental reasons to having them for their consumatory value. in an aging society with fewer children, some people are seeking to own companion animal for psychological reasons. in that context the companion animal can become “an eternal child” for parents in what remains of the nuclear family after the children have grown up and left (22). ozaki and ozaki and sakurai argue that a “pet boom” occurred from around 1990 with the registration of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 88 dogs rising 1.5 times from 3.8 to 5.8 million animals between 1990 and 2000. the number of registered dogs has since continued to rise, and the figure stood at 6,785,959 in 2013 (ministry of health, labour and welfare of japan mhlw, annual) (see figure 1). in japan, the rabies prevention law of 1950 requires owners of dogs to register their dogs with local governments within 30 days after acquiring the animal. although owners do not always follow the guidelines, the government figures give us fair idea as to how the number of dogs is changing over time. based on its own survey of 50,000 people, japan pet food association estimated the number of dogs in japan was 10.346 million in 2014. there is no official registration system for cats, but the association’s estimate for cats was 9.959 million. figure 1: registered dogs in japan: 1960-2013 (source: ministry of health, labour and welfare of japan [mhlw]) although by many measures the relation between japanese and their dogs could be described as “very close,” the majority of owners kept their dogs outside until the beginning of this century, perhaps reflecting the ingrained cultural practice of removing footwear when entering a home. however, one survey in 2014 found that 80 percent of owners were now keeping their pet dog indoors (japan pet food association). although only 1 percent of apartments sold in the tokyo metropolitan area in 1998 permitted pets, by 2007 the figure had risen to 86.2 percent (real estate economic institute). kakinuma also found that 80 percent of dogs are sleeping indoors, with 30 percent even sleeping in bed with their owner (79-80). the shift to pet ownership can also be detected in figure 2. it shows that the number of articles in which the phrase hazuki kajiwara -human-animal interaction in post-tsunami japan 89 “pet loss grief” (petto losu) appeared in the title or text of an article. before 1995 there were no articles about the pet loss grief in japan’s two major newspapers. after 1995, however, both newspapers began to publish articles on such grief and the number of such articles has remained pretty constant since then. in other words, in this way as well, a strong attachment to pets has also been recognized in the japanese society since the mid-1990s. figure 2: articles about pet loss grief (source: compiled by the authors from the asahi shinbun’s database “kikuzo ii visual” and the yomiuri shinbun’s database “yomidasu rekishikan.”) today, about 34.3% of japanese households keep some kind of pet (cabinet office, government of japan cao, the summary). the yano research institute estimates that in 2013 pet owners spent about 1.4 trillion yen (about us$11.4 billion) at pet shops for pet food and for other pet related supplies and at veterinary clinics. according to anicom insurance inc., in 2014 pet owners spent j¥360,000 yen (about us $3000) for each dog on average and j¥180,000 (about us $1500) for each cat. in the mid-afternoon on 11 march 2011 the tohoku region in japan was struck by a large earthquake and the tsunami that followed. this was the largest earthquake on record in japan, and the fourth most powerful earthquake in the world since modern record-keeping began in 1900 (ministry of education, culture, sports, science and technology mext). about 18,500 people died from the tidal wave (national police humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 90 agency). furthermore, although causing no deaths from radiation, the fukushima no.1 nuclear power plant was seriously damaged and released much radiation which continues to be an on-going issue for those living in that part of japan. although the number of animals that died is not known, miyagi veterinary medical association estimates ten thousand dogs and cats were lost only in miyagi prefecture. in 2014 239, 000 victims were still living as refugees at various locations around the nation (reconstruction agency of japan). on 11 march many people evacuated with their companion animals. in ordinary times those animals are accepted by most japanese as members of their owner’s family on a kind of live-and-let-live basis. when evacuating, however, many pet owners suddenly discovered that the value afforded their pets by many of their fellow victims was rather low, in keeping with the idea that “human needs” would and should be given a much higher priority. people with pets were refused entry to many communal shelters and some were forced to abandon their pets. people who did not give up their pets often had to survive outside the framework for emergency support that had been established by government authorities and by many of the voluntary groups that swung into action. japan has a long history of frequent earthquakes, typhoons, volcanic explosions, and other natural disturbances. although the great hanshin-awaji earthquake in 1995 and the great east japan earthquake in 2011 were especially devastating, little research has been conducted on pets and pet owners caught up in those events. this paper reports on a qualitative study of the experience of pet owners who sought to evacuate with companion animals following the tsunami in march 2011. the content of interviews, field notes, governmental reports, news, and the website of sendai city in miyagi prefecture were analyzed to find answers to the following four questions: • what meaning did having companion animals have for pet owners? • once the tsunami hit, how did that meaning change? • how did the owners have to struggle to maintain their relationship with their companion animals? • how did their relationship with their animals change in the aftermath of the tsunami? hazuki kajiwara -human-animal interaction in post-tsunami japan 91 4.0 methodology. forty seven individuals were interviewed in the three prefectures affected by the tsunami: iwate, miyagi and fukushima (see figure 3). table 1 provides a breakdown of the interviewees. notes: * one female interviewee in iwate lived in her own house. ** the one female interviewee at miyagi had moved to another place. table 1: the interviewees figure 3: the three prefectures most affected by the 11 march 2011 tsunami semi-structured interviews lasting 60-150 minutes were conducted with each interviewee. overall, 13 field trips were made to obtain interviews in the three humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 92 prefectures from august 2013 to march 2015. a casual follow-up interview was carried out with most interviewees. in addition to the 35 pet owners, representatives of an animal welfare organization working with persons in the temporary housings, a pet beauty parlor owner, a city bureaucrat and 3 animal rescue activists were also interviewed in miyagi prefecture. throughout field notes based on observation at each location were also taken. all interviews were recorded with the signed consent of the interviewees and then later transcribed. to better evaluate the interview data, reports of the ministry of environment of japan, which has jurisdiction over companion animals and other information released by sendai city, were accessed from their websites. 4.1 the sample. a snowball sample was used in each of temporary housing complexes in the three prefectures. before interviewing i contacted the presidents of the neighborhood associations or the informal leaders within each of the housing complexes. once the details of the research were explained, the presidents or leaders also helped the snowballing process by providing introductions to potential interviewees. the research was explained again to each of the potential interviewees. this “base camp” for this study was in miyagi prefecture for several reasons. first, the number of registered dogs in miyagi prefecture in 2011 was 135,587 (ministry of health, labour and welfare of japan mhlw, the number). the number of cats is unknown. second, the presidents of the neighborhood association at each of two temporary housing complexes in miyage had a pet, and were readily sympathetic to the research. third, the makeshift temporary housing complexes were first built most in sendai city immediately after the disaster. consequently, many pet owners gathered who were first excluded from shelters in that area. fourth, the housing complexes in miyagi were the largest with one complex including 233 houses, and other the other including complex including 194 houses. the first interviews were with the leaders at each temporary housing complex i visited. they introduced me to the next person, and that person introduced the third and fourth persons, and so on. this proved to be a straightforward process for several reasons. the leader at each complex had already built close ties with all the residents in their crowded temporary housing complex. moreover, because two years had passed since the tsunami, all of the informants were able to talk freely about their experience. snowball sampling also had some limits. first, pet owners less well acquainted with the leader of their complex were not considered for the sample. moreover, it was difficult to hazuki kajiwara -human-animal interaction in post-tsunami japan 93 schedule interviews with some residents who were working, despite their having responded positively to an initial introduction. the sample was skewed some toward older residents who were more accessible. however, japan has the most aged advanced population in the world with 26% of japanese aged over 65 in 2014 (cabinet office, government of japan cao, annual). moreover, within japan demographic aging is most advanced in the tohoku region where the tsunami hit in 2011. according to the miyagi prefectural government in 2014, 43.8% of the persons in the prefecture’s temporary housing complexes were over 65 years of age. this reflects the fact that elderly people living with their pets are concentrated in the public facilities, because the elderly and pet owners are often refused accommodation by the owners of private rental apartments. according to the leader of one public temporary housing complex which i investigated, 70% of the residents were aged over 60. conversations with government officials and other volunteers indicated that the experiences gleaned from the snowball sample were not unusual. 4.2 the interviews. although the interviews were semi-structured, interviewees were allowed to talk freely and often integrated other information of their life stories into their narratives. this is in line with frank’s suggestion that qualitative data becomes very much richer when people relate their experiences of life in their own way. each leader’s interview was held in a meeting room in the office area at his or her complex. all other interviews were held in the interviewee’s own home, usually in the main living area. the pets were always present, and sometimes other family members who lived together sat at the same table. as i travelled to the field many times, i was able to revisit many interviewees and gain further insights from those informal chats. sometimes i walked a dog with an interviewee; at other times i played with the interviewee’s cats. apart from asking for demographic information concerning the interviewees and their pet(s), i often began by asking them about life and their relationship with their companion animal before the tsunami hit in march 2011. i followed up with a general question about events on the day of the disaster, and then allowed interviewees to proceed to talk about their experience after the 11th of march. often without prompting, interviewees reflected on the existence of their pets, the support they required at the time of the disaster and afterwards, and their hopes and plans for the future once they are able to leave the temporary housing. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 94 4.3 observation. while in the field, i stayed at the places visited until evening, often sitting on one of the benches placed in an open area provided within the confines of a temporary housing complex. this allowed me to observe people and their pets. many of the owners walked their dogs, and occasionally some would walk their cats. that allowed me to observe the interaction between people, between people and animals, and between animals. at one housing block i was able to participate in the summer festival. at another i participated in the karaoke singing that occurred twice a week. i recorded in my field notes what was noticed on such occasions. 4.4 ethical considerations. the interviewees were promised confidentiality and anonymity. they were told that their participation was voluntary, and that they could withdraw from the research at any time. two copies of the consent form were signed by both the interviewer and the interviewee, with one copy remaining with each party. the interview records were carefully kept to protect the interviewees’ privacy. first, after transcribing the interviews, a unique code was assigned for each interview record so that the transcribed notes would not reveal who the interviewees were. second, the transcribed notes and interview audio records were stored separately in locked locations. third, only i would have access to the original data, although the transcripts, which are in japanese, might be made available to committed researchers after a set period of time. finally, a japanese general family name was randomly assigned to each interviewee in this article. although a fictitious name was assigned to a pet, the english name was given for an english name and a japanese one for a japanese name. 5.0 findings. the discussion below is organized around the four research questions posed above. sections 5.1 and 5.2 focus on the nature of the relationship between owners and their companion animals before and after the tsunami. section 5.3 describes the efforts of owner to maintain the relationship with their animal companions in the confusion after the tsunami. section 5.4 considers how the relationship between owners and their animal companions changed following the tsunami. from those findings, the notion of “companion animals first” is forwarded as a useful category when evaluating the responses of many pet owners who are displaced by a large natural disaster. 5.1 companion animals as children. all interviewees referred to their companion animal as their “child” when talking about life before the tsunami, and these “children” seem to exist independently from whether the interviewees had real children. for example, mr. takahashi (aged 51) had a son and a daughter, and simply considered “muffin, his welsh corgi, to be his “second daughter.” mrs. tanaka (aged 61) complemented her two sons and three daughters with a fourth daughter, “riku” (a hazuki kajiwara -human-animal interaction in post-tsunami japan 95 mixed large-breed dog), who, in mrs. tanaka’s opinion, was “100 times cuter than any of my three daughters.” living alone, ms. hayashi (aged 63) spoke about ranmaru (her mixed breed cat), saying, “he is my child even though he probably thinks of me only as a buddy.” that sense of there being a child-like relationship was also reflected in terms such “my kids” (uchino kora) or “good boy” (yoi ko). their behavior conjures up images of blouin’s “humanistic orientation.” blouin argues that “humanistic” owners often personify their dogs in humanistic terms and usually treat them as children in order to enjoy a closer attachment to their pet. however, the meanings expressed by the word “child” by the respondents in this study seem to be more varied than in the study described by blouin. although this sense of parent-child relationship pervaded the interviews, living with a companion animal held different meanings for each of the interviewees and reflected differences in the way the animals functioned within each household. when mr. watanabe (aged 71) talked about his companion, he mentioned that duke (a shih tzu) served as a “kasugai” (clamp or clasp), a term often used to refer metaphorically to indicate something that binds husbands and wives together and helps them to overcome difficulties in their marriage. a japanese proverb states that “a child is a kasugai.” when mrs. sasaki (aged 85) lost her son 13 years ago, her nephew, who is a veterinarian, suggested that having a dog might help her overcome her grief and loneliness. she claims that john (a shih-tzu) actually became like her son. ms. nakamura (aged 37) had been suffering from depression for more than ten years when she adopted a kitten. her lu (a mixed breed cat) helped her mentally to get through 311, and for that reason she thinks of lu as being her eldest daughter. another important point to note is the choice of a name for one’s pet. interviewees tended not to give their pets traditional japanese names (e.g., such as “taro” or “hanako.” many pets had english names. while the “foreignness” of the name might suggest that having a pet was not a japanese practice, names were all friendly names such as “bob,” “jodie,” and “muffin.” diminutives in english were easy to pronounce and suggestive of a certain “cuteness” or intimate closeness that would not resonate with more formal names such as “elizabeth” or “william.” at the same time, the foreignness also seemed to indicate the limits to which the parent-child fiction might be taken. although companion animals were described as children, there was no sense of responsibility for bringing up their pets to be independent adults. in other words, the companion animals in this study were destined to remain as children who never grow up. it then follows that one role of these companions is to be showered with constant affection all the time, suggesting that their owners have a human need not only to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 96 receive affection but also to be giving affection. while that might be seen as a maternal instinct, that orientation was found in all interviewees regardless of their gender. 5.2 the impact of the tsunami. many of the interviewees whose lives were threatened by the tsunami believed that their animals had saved their life. mrs. kimura (aged 64) and mr. watanabe (aged 71) claimed that their dogs, who were riding in their car as they drove to escape the torrent of black water, conveyed a sense of urgency, as though urging their owners to flee with even greater alacrity. it was as though they were yapping, “let's go! hurry! hurry!” as a result, each person kept their foot on the accelerator and charged full speed ahead, thereby just barely escaping the tidal waves. ms. nakamura (aged 37) told how she had to wait for eight hours to be rescued after the sea had suddenly plunged into her room. she insisted that she had been kept awake by the faint cry of lu (her mixed breed cat) who had managed to reach “high ground” on top of the closet: lu continued to call for me with her little voice, “meeeow! meeeow!” in order to keep me awake. as a result i never fell slept and could survive. in these stories irvine’s notion of the animal as a “protector” emerged (irvine, my dog 114). even when the companion animals died, their death was seen as being the ultimate sacrifice to protect their owner. the narrative of mrs. yoshida (aged 56), who lost a cat and a dog to the tidal wave, related how her pets had died so that she and her family members would survive. three years later she was still thanking her dog and cat for saving her family’s lives. such persons irrevocably associate their own survival with the animal who died saving them. however, they do not think that animals have a supernatural or religious ability. rather they are proud that their “child” saved their life. many of the animals that survived had come to embody the lost world of their owners whose homes had been destroyed or carried away by the tsunami, leaving only a wasteland behind. pictures and objects reminding their owners of the past were lost forever. however, in line with stewart’s concept of “special animals,” the interviewees in this study suggested ways in which their animals had become a bridge to a past which seemed to float forever in the back of their minds. in her book, she wrote “… every animal is special in its own way, but some become more special to their owners than others” (8). she goes on to defines six types of the extra special animals. one type in particular served to link past events or transitions to the present in ways that allowed their owners to “stay in touch” with their lost worlds. hazuki kajiwara -human-animal interaction in post-tsunami japan 97 for yet others, such as mrs. yamada (aged 33), pets came to symbolize a shared “victimhood.” once mrs. yamada had been rescued following the earthquake, her first thoughts turned to pansy (her maltese dog). she confided: i came back to the house on foot, it took hours. it was very cold ... [and] it was already night, and pitch-dark. i thought that pansy might be dead. while i was yelling out her name, i pushed my way through the rubble in the house. then i heard her voice! she survived! because my husband was abroad on business, we moved to the emergency accommodation, just two of us, pansy and i. then people began to tell me, “persons with a dog can't come in.” i was so surprised. ... it took a while for me to realize that for other people pansy was only a dog. the stories of interviewees such as mrs. yamada highlighted the existence of discrimination or arbitrariness in society, as the owners came to recognize the existential gap that existed amongst people when it came to assigning a value to their companion animals. before the tsunami they had never been a position where they had to justify the existence of their pets or to think in detail about that gap. in this way many experienced a new dimension to being the owner of a pet as they shared hardships with their companions after the tsunami. they felt that the need to prioritize animal life and human life in a different way had been imposed upon them, and in this regard their relation with some of the significant people in their lives had fundamentally changed. suddenly they were confronted with a deeper set of human-first-above-all-else survival instincts many of their friends and acquaintances had not previously revealed. as a result, they felt they had been forcibly dragged into a harsh new world that existed beyond the confines of their own cocoon-like existence. 5.3 four strategies to maintain the relationship. interviewees who were refused emergency accommodation with their pets had had to struggle to maintain their relationship with their companion animals. most experienced a hiatus of three to four months before they were able to locate accommodation in a temporary housing complex. however, they were proactive in seeking solutions to their dilemma. confronting the system. two owners (mr.watanabe, aged 71, and ms. ito, aged 36) parked their cars in front of the emergency accommodation and continued living in the car with their dogs. mr.watanabe told his experience: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 98 i argued with the director of the gymnasium many times. i repeatedly requested that he let me and my dog in, just to sleep anywhere during the night. but he repeatedly and emphatically refused. he said “there might be people who have a dog allergy” or “the regulation require that we ‘keep animals out’“ as he gabbled on and on, blah blah blah! ms. nakamura (aged 37) did not have a car, but stubbornly faced those in charge of one emergency accommodation facility, repeatedly telling them “lu(cat) is my family.” not knowing what to do with her, they repeatedly shifted her from one room to another while repeating their own mantra, which was that having companion animals ran against the rules. ms. nakamura’s and lu’s mental fatigue were severe. returning to a destroyed residence. after being evacuated, four owners returned to their partially destroyed house even though they had been prohibited from doing so by the authorities. although the area in which they lived had been declared dangerous owing to the high possibility of aftershocks, they continued to stay with their pets in their dilapidated homes in defiance of the authorities. in doing so, they clearly place themselves outside the framework that had been established by the government on behalf of all the displaced victims of 3-11. making alternative arrangements. four interviewees were able to find emergency accommodation for themselves and their pets with relatives. in terms of social network theory, they were using their “strong ties” as social capital in ways conceived by granovetter. however, they came gradually to feel guilty and ashamed, as their relatives continued to house them without any financial demands. after the initial shock of having escaped the tsunami subsided, two of them moved to a public refuge and leashed their dog to trees outside the gymnasium that was being used as a shelter. the choice of one of the above strategies often reflected a rational assessment of the situation in which several factors were at play: the individual’s personality, their economic and social capital and the relative degree of social vulnerability. having said that, it was also clear that each interviewee had given careful consideration to the needs of their companion animal. here the breed of the pet seemed to be important, partly as a parameter defining what was physically possible for the animal, but also partly reflecting the owner’s perception of what his or her pet could tolerate. mr. watanabe (aged 71) felt strongly that his boy (john, a small shih-tzu) would die if kept outside as requested by the managers of the shelter where he stayed. (in much of northeastern japan that was affected by the tsunami it is important to remember that even in march hazuki kajiwara -human-animal interaction in post-tsunami japan 99 the temperatures are often below freezing.) mrs. kobayashi (aged 52) continued to keep her two cats in her dilapidated apartment in a restricted area, commenting that she never thought she would bring hinano and yui (her two mixed breed cats) to the emergency accommodation. she believed strongly that her cats would suffer from diarrhea at the place where dogs and many people were congregated, because her cats are especially nervous. because mrs. kimura (aged 64) and mr. kato (aged 72) had always kept their robust medium-sized mixed-breed dogs outside, they were happy to have their animal stay outside when offered accommodation with a relative. in both cases the animals served as watchdog guardians, thereby in some ways might be understood as providing a loose form of social exchange. in saying the strategy of owners to maintain their relationship with their companion animals reflected to some extent the breed or other characteristic of their pets, what was most significant was not the actual vulnerability of the animals but the owners’ interpretations of their companion animals’ needs. suffering in silence. in contrast to the above interviewees who were proactive in meeting what they saw to be the needs of their animals, two people who lost their pets did not speak to others about their loss. mrs. tanaka (aged 61) who lost two mixed large-breed dogs explained: how can i say it? if i talk, it will be painful, ... too painful. and how can someone understand? … nobody can understand our grief. you often see the “specialists” on television, don't you? when i see them come on the screen, i think “again?” i can only stare dumbfounded and blankly at such “specialists” [e.g. psychologists]. i think, what the hell are you talking about? an expert in what? can you understand the inside of our heart properly? so much for such experts! they mentioned two reasons for suffering in silence. first, in line with doka, some persons would not have seen the loss of their pet as socially or psychologically significant even in normal times, and even much less so in the extraordinary aftermath of the tsunami (11). given that the march disaster was so huge, with the tremendous multiple losses many experience — humans, homes, infrastructure, and places of employment, etc. these two felt that it was difficult to compare in any way the grief they experienced from losing a pet with the grief that many other people with greater losses were experiencing. moreover, in their normal lives they were not accustomed to communicating with strangers. neighbors and others they might have talked with had died or ended up in different locations. we can reason that they might have been able to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 100 locate their friends using the internet, but they did not have the skills to do so. as a result, once they had left their homes and communities, they spoke to no one about their grief. however, each of the interviewees did manage to “adopt” a new companion animal within one year. 5.4 changed relationships. many of the tsunami victims lost everything except their pets, and the bond with their companion animal became stronger. the animals may also have felt that bond strengthen, but did not require from their owners a logical or existential explanation. before the tsunami, the owner’s relationship with a companion animal was simply part of their ordinary life, taken for granted. however, once removed from their familiar surroundings they had to fight tenaciously to continue living with their companion animals and in some cases even for the right of their animal to survive. it is only natural that such persons would then be even more committed to maintaining a future with their pets. almost all of the companion animals belonging to the interviewees in this study experienced decrease in appetite, physical deterioration, and illness. the owners stated that their companion animal had became very nervous and showed signs of separation anxiety. mrs. yamada (aged 33) reported that pansy, her maltese, was diagnosed by a veterinarian as having ptsd. whenever mrs. yamada went out, pansy would whine intensely, causing her to take pansy with her as much as possible. recognizing this kind of vulnerability, many of the owners started to keep indoors companion animals that had previously remained outside. one exception was mr. kato (aged 72) who kept his dog outside in a doghouse. many of the victims of the tsunami were middle-aged and elderly, widowed, or otherwise living alone in communities devoid of a younger generation. they were at an age and a stage in life where it would generally be difficult to reconstruct their lives as they had been before the tsunami. many felt powerlessness. even among the proactive interviewees, many had acted out of a belief, even a hopelessness, that they had nothing to lose. nevertheless, with whatever limited resources they might have had, many interviewees described their desire to build new houses for their companion animals or to move to public housing where pets would be accepted. ms. ito (aged 36) and her father showed a drawing of a new house that included a garden where dogs could run around. the plan that the father drew in a pencil was accurate. he is a retired carpenter who looks forward to building a house as soon as feasible. mrs. kimura (aged 64) said that she was happy where she was, but nevertheless would like to build a house for her dog. because they will live with two or three generations together in new house, they hazuki kajiwara -human-animal interaction in post-tsunami japan 101 will be able to get a “two-generations loan.” for such interviewees, the relationship with companion animals and having a plan to do something “together” symbolized the desire to start a new life. considering the above, the outlook taken by many interviewees might be described as a “companion animal first stance.” these are people who want to give first priority to their pets. mr. watanabe (aged 71) who is a guardian of john (shih-tzu) described specifically his stance: [after a tsunami] i behaved john-centered. all that i did was for john, john, john. i was very much concerned about him rather than my wife! (laugh) at the time of a disaster when many seem to attach a prime value on human life, the interviewees often felt themselves to be out of step with the many other japanese with whom they had to live, and were certainly at odds with policy makers and administrators who had been given the task of looking after the victims. be that as it may, those who took a “companion animal first stance” were also seeking to reaffirm their faith in life. by accepting that stance as a valid perspective, the relocation of victims might have been carried out much more smoothly and with much less trauma for those owing pets. the findings indicate clearly that after the tsunami, companion animals played a positive role in lives of those interviewed, charging lives with hope for the future. for some animals this meant that they would come to embody the owners’ lost worlds. many owners seemed to benefit from the sense of loyalty and the affective affirmation they believed they had received from their pets. although the behavioral choices made by owners sometimes brought risks to their own health and safety, their choices seldom rebounded negatively on others in the community. to a certain extent all they sought was a return to the live-and-let-live equilibrium that existed before the tsunami. in any case, the attachment of the owners to, and perhaps dependence on, their companion animals seems to have been strengthened as a result of the disaster. it remains to be seen how far those strengthened relationships will be reflected in a significant societywide transformation in the way animals are seen in a japanese society where pets are coming to have an increasingly conspicuous presence. this begins to touch on notions of animal rights and will invite considerable debate in coming years. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 102 6.0 conclusion. in this study, the relationship of humans and their companion animals after the great 3-11 disaster were studied. the findings are, similar to those of potts and gadenne, that the companion animals became more important for owners after the disaster. this outcome was labeled the “companion animal first phenomenon.” it is an orientation which gives priority to companion animals above all else. whether that orientation is long-term or not remains to be seen, but in the immediate aftermath of the march 2011 tsunami in japan it is an important factor to consider when trying to understand the behavior of many pet owners during and after a major catastrophe. most survivors are now beginning to move into newly built public housing. although some public housing in sendai city permits companion animals, generally pets are not allowed in public housing in japan. most private rental housing also restricts pets. however, the interviewees in this study who have survived with their companion animal will find it extremely difficult to begin new lives without their pets. further research is needed to establish the extensiveness of the animal first outlook, but the need for more inclusive policies for dealing with at least some of the victims in the immediate aftermath of a sizable natural disaster should be obvious. as mentioned previously, the relationship between humans and their pets has become increasingly closer in japan. however, although the importance of considering that relationship during a disaster now appears on the agenda in many modern urbanized societies, few studies have focused that on what happens to that relationship when visited by such extraordinary circumstances. even from a purely anthropocentric point of view, the importance of such research for humans who own pets cannot be refuted. it is hoped that the findings from this and other similar research will contribute to meeting that need, in part by encouraging a greater amount of comparative research in different cultures including those of asia and of traditional societies now being shaped by the forces of globalization — forces that impel us to probe further and to recast questions about the convergence of human societies and the ethos they are likely to embrace in the near future. acknowledgment. a part of this work was supported by the uehiro foundation on ethics and education. note 1. for the sake of convenience “companion animal” and “pet” are used interchangeably in this paper, as are “guardian” and “owner.” hazuki kajiwara -human-animal interaction in post-tsunami japan 103 works cited anicom insurance, inc. “annual expenditure investigation for pets 2014” <http://www.anicom-sompo.co.jp/company/news/news_0150202.html> 4 nov. 2015. beck, alan, and aaron katcher. between pets and people: the importance of animal companionship. revised ed. west lafayette：purdue up, 1996. blouin, david d. “are dogs children, companions, or just animals? understanding variations in people's orientations toward animals.” anthrozoos 26.2 (2013): 279-294. brackenridge, sandra, et al. “dimensions of the human-animal bond and evacuation decisions among pet owners during hurricane ike.” anthrozoos 25.2 (2012): 229-238. cabinet office, government of japan(cao). “the summary of opinion poll about animal protection 2010 october.” <http://www.env.go.jp/press/files/jp/16451.pdf> 21 jul. 2015. _____. “annual report on the aging society 2015.” <http://www8.cao.go.jp/kourei/ whitepaper/w-2015/html/zenbun/index.html> 30 jan. 2016. carlisle, gretchen k. “pet dog ownership in familes of children witih autism: children’s social skills and attachment to their dogs.” diss. u of missouri at columbia, 2012. doka, kenneth. disenfranchised grief: new directions, challenges, and strategies for practice. illinois: research p, 2002. frank, arthur w. letting stories breath: a socio-narratology. chicago: u chicago p, 2010 franklin, adrian. animals and modern cultures: a sociology of human-animal relations modernity. london: sage , 1999. gaeng, marianne, and dennis c. turner. mit tieren leben im alter, reinhardt ernst. munich: ernst reinhardt verlag, 2005 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 104 granovetter, mark. s. “the strength of weak ties.” the american journal of sociology 78.6 (1973): 1360–1380. gunter, barrie. pets and people: the psychology of pet ownership. new jersey: wiley, 1999. herzog, harold. “the impact of pets on human health and psychological well-being: fact, fiction, or hypothesis?” current directions in psychological science 20.4 (2011): 36239. hamano, sayoko. “katei dobutsu to no tsukiai”(relations with the family animals). nihon no doubutsu kan: hito to dobutsu no kankei shi (japanese attitudes toward animals: a history of human-animal relations in japan). ed. osamu ishida, et al. tokyo: u of tokyo p, 2013. 19-35. hunt, melissa, hind al-awadi, and megan johnson. “psychological sequelae of pet loss following hurricane katrina.” anthrozoos 21.2 (2008): 109-121. hunt, melissa g., kelsey bogue and nick rohrbaugh. “pet ownership and evacuation prior to hurricane irene.” animals 2 (2012): 529-539. inokuma, hisashi. inu no dobutsu gaku: animaru saiensu 3 (zoology of domestic dogs: animal science 3). ed. hayashi, yoshihiro and sato, eimei. tokyo: u of tokyo p, 2001. irvine, leslie. filling the ark: animal welfare in disasters. philadelphia: temple up, 2009. kindle version. _____. if you tame me: understanding our connection with animals. philadelphia: temple up, 2004. kindle version. _____. my dog always eats first: homeless people and their animals. boulder: lynne rienner, 2013. _____. “the question of animal selves: implications for sociological knowledge and practice.” qualitative sociology review 3.1 (2007): 5-22. ishida, osamu, “josho dobutsu-kan no keifu” (introduction: the genealogy of attitudes toward animals). nihon no doubutsu kan: hito to dobutsu no kankei shi hazuki kajiwara -human-animal interaction in post-tsunami japan 105 (japanese attitudes toward animals: a history of human-animal relations in japan). ed. ishida ,osamu, et al. tokyo: u of tokyo p, 2013. 1-16. japan pet food association. “national breeding survey of dog and cats 2014: summary of key indicators.” <http://www.petfood.or.jp/data/chart2014/01.html> 17 jul. 2015. johnson, rebecca a., alan m. beck, and sandra mccune. the health benefits of dog walking for people and pets: evidence and case studies: new directions in the human-animal bond. indiana: purdue up, 2011. kakinuma, miki. “hattatsu shinrigaku kara mita kainushi to inu no kankei hito no migattena yokyuni honrosareru inu” (the relationship between owner and dog in the view of developmental psychology: the dogs who are trifled with the selfish demand of human). petto to shakai: hito to dobutsu no kankeigaku 3 (pets and society: the study of human animal relations 3). ed. yoshihiro hayashi, et al. tokyo: iwanami shoten, 2008. 76-99. kruse, corwin r. “the relevance of ‘animal issues’ for sociology.” isaz newsletter 20 (2000): 2-6. _____. “social animals: animal studies and sociology.” society and animals 10.4 (2002): 375-379. leonard, hillary a. and debra l. scammon. “no pet left behind: accommodating pets in emergency planning.” journal of public policy & marketing 26.1 (2007): 49-53. ministry of education, culture, sports, science and technology (mext). white paper on science and technology 2012 （provisional translation）: toward a robust and resilient society – lessons from the great east japan earthquake. tokyo: mext, 2012. 13. ministry of health, labour and welfare of japan(mhlw). “annual transition of the number of registration and vaccination of dogs, 1965-2013 fiscal year.” <http://www.mhlw.go.jp/bunya/kenkou/kekkaku-kansenshou10/02.html> 17 may 2015. _____. “the number of registration and vaccination of dogs according to all prefectures 2008-2013 fiscal year.”<http://www.mhlw.go.jp/bunya/kenkou/kekkaku-kansenshou10/ 01.html> 17 may 2015. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 106 miyagi veterinary medical association. “introduction of activity: information regarding disaster.” <http://miyaju.jp/activity/disaster/disaster_index/> 30 jan. 2016. national police agency. “press release.” 10 jun. 2015. <https://www.npa.go.jp/archive/keibi/biki/higaijokyo.pdf> 23 jun. 2015. nozawa, ken, and takao nishida. kachiku to ningen (domestic animals and human being). tokyo: idemitsu shoten, 1981. ozaki, yuko. “petto shiiku no kitei yoin: nihon-ban sogo shakai chosa maikurodeta o mochiite” (the determining factors of pet keeping: using japanese version of general social investigation micro data). seikatsu keizaigaku kenkyu (household economics study) 19 (2004): 21-34. ozaki, yuko, and fujiro sakurai. “juigyo no doko: kakushu no tokei shiryo kara.” (the trend of veterinarian business: from various statistics documents). jnihon juishikai zasshi (japanese veterinarian society journal) 55.8 (2002): 533-539. patronek, gary j., and lawrence t. glickman. “pet ownership protects the risks and consequences of coronary heart disease.” medical hypotheses 40.4 (1993): 245-249. peggs, kay. animals and sociology. hampshire: palgrave macmillan, 2012. pet evacuation and transportation standards (pets) act of 2006. “public law 109308-oct. 6, 2006 109th congress congressional record, vol. 152.” <http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/plaw-109publ308/pdf/plaw-109publ308.pdf> 17 may 2015. potts, annie and donelle gadenne. animals in emergencies: learning from the christchurch earthquakes. christchurch: canterbury university press, 2014. redmalm, david. “pet grief: when is non-human life grievable?” sociological review 63.1 (2015): 19-35. real estate economic institute. “press release” 3 apr. 2008. 1. hazuki kajiwara -human-animal interaction in post-tsunami japan 107 reconstruction agency of japan. “zenkoku no hinansha to no kazu” (the number of evacuees in japan). <http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/topics/main-cat2/sub-cat21/20141031_hinansha.pdf> 17 may 2015. singer, peter. animal liberation: the definitive classic of the animal movement. updated vers. new york: harper, 2009. stewart, f. mary. companion animal death: a comprehensive guide for veterinary practice. oxford: butterworth, 1999. thompson, kirrilly, et al. “no pet or their person left behind: increasing the disaster resilience of vulnerable groups through animal attachment, activities and networks.” animals 4.2 (2014): 214-240. thompson, kirrilly. “save me, save my dog: increasing natural disaster preparedness and survival by addressing human-animal relationships.” australian journal of communication 40.1 (2013): 123-136. trigg, joshua, bradley smith and kirrilly thompson. “does emotional closeness to pets motivate their inclusion in bushfire survival plans? implications for emergency communicators.” the australian journal of emergency management 30.2 (2015): 24-30. trigg, joshua, et al. “engaging pet owners in disaster risk and preparedness communications: simplifying complex human–animal relations with archetypes.” environmental hazards 14.3 (2015): 236–251. utsunomiya, naoko. petto to nihonjin (pet and japanese). tokyo: bungeisyunjyu, 1999. yamazaki, sakiko. “a survey of companionanimal owners affected by the east japan great earthquake in iwate and fukushima prefectures, japan.” anthrozoos 28.2 (2015): 1-14. yano research institute. ” results of investigation about pet business in 2013.” <http://www.yano.co.jp/press/press.php/001226> 17 may 2015. zeltzman, phil, and rebecca a. johnson. walk a hound, lose a pound: how you and your dog can lose weight, stay fit, and have fun together. west lafayette: purdue up, 2011. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 108 zottarelli, lisa k. “broken bond: an exploration of human factors associated with companion animal loss during hurricane katrina.” sociological forum 25.1 (2010): 11011122. microsoft word meyers-kirkpatrick-farago h u m a n i m a l i a 9:1 reviews nathaniel myers beyond ireland’s myth, its folklore, and its two-dozen indigenous animals kathryn kirkpatrick and borbála faragó, eds. animals in irish literature and culture. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2015. xviii + 270 pp. $90.00 hc, $69.99 e-book. of the many prominent animals to feature in ireland’s long cultural history — from the mythic salmon of knowledge to the folkloric selkie, from the indigenous red fox to the “celtic tiger,” that much-disputed label given to the country’s turn-of-the-twentiethcentury economic boom — perhaps the most notorious is the simian. an unlikely figure for ireland and its people, the simian became a “model” of sorts for depictions of the irish in the late nineteenth century, specifically by english political cartoonists who, within the framework of colonial discourse, wished to draw out what they saw as the primitive natures of the irish. these depictions gained renewed interest as objects of study during the height of postcolonial theory in irish studies in the 1980s and ‘90s, most notably by way of lewis perry curtis’s angels and apes: the irishman in victorian caricature (1997). it is hard, now, to imagine an intro to irish studies course that doesn’t humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 182 feature these images; certainly, at my home institution of the university of notre dame, these images provide a quick means to facilitate discussion around the colonial dynamics of ireland and great britain — and to reveal the troubling historical precedents for the university’s own iconic fighting irish, humanoid leprechaun figure. that these images of the simian irish helped expose, for postcolonial theory twenty years ago, the unfortunate colonial lens of nineteenth-century english cartoonists, they now help expose, for animal studies in the current moment, the unfortunate anthropocentric lens of not only those cartoonists but also the postcolonial theorists. after all, as animal studies points out, the problem doesn’t simply lie with the fact that the irish in these depictions are troublingly primitivized (and troublingly racialized) figures, but that such primitivizing depends on perceiving the simian itself as part of a degraded, nonhuman category. the images, in this way, reinforce, even as they blur, a hierarchical binary that privileges the human over the nonhuman animal. to attune scholars of irish studies, among others, to such anthropocentrism is one of the primary goals of animals in irish literature and culture; and, in fact, kathryn kirkpatrick, in her introduction to the collection, gives substantial attention to our infamous simian irish. the various ways the volume branches out from and develops the insights culled from those notorious nineteenth-century irish apes — encompassing a broad range of literary forms, historical time periods, cultural politics, animals and, especially, theoretical approaches to those animals — makes for its most generative and formidable scholarly impact. the mission statement of the collection is two-fold: first, to motivate a broader scholarly interrogation of the cultural uses of the animal in irish culture as it bears on, among other things, gender, class, race, the environment, and national and transnational identity; and two, to pivot away from human conceptualizations and uses of the animal in an attempt to consider the animal on its own terms, and in so doing to unseat anthropocentric views (2-3). to that end, the collection is broken into four sections that themselves ostensibly reflect the turn in focus from human to animal, from a series of essays on the abuse and consumption of animals in part i and those focused on the use of the animal in conceptualizations of gender and sexuality in part ii, to the more posthumanist approaches of part iii and iv, which feature a selection of essays first on literary writing that decenters the human in favor of the animal, and second on artworks that blur the very categories of human and nonhuman animal. and even as some of the book’s organization is a bit arbitrary, with some essays more thematically at home in different sections, and others having potential homes in several sections, there is nevertheless a thrilling ethical momentum to the collection, such that, should the nathaniel myers -beyond ireland’s myth, its folklore, and its two-dozen indigenous animals 183 reader dare to read it from cover to cover, he or she might discover not only the hermeneutic possibilities made available by animal studies but also the cultural and ecological benefits of such an approach. such ethical drive is in keeping with the primary theoretical underpinnings of the collection, defined primarily by the work of carol j. adams. nearly every article in the book directly cites adams, sometimes referencing the sexual politics of meat (2000) but more often pulling from her edited collection the feminist care tradition in animal ethics (2007). to be sure, what informs so many of these essays is the way the care (or lack thereof) of animal others translates into and informs the treatment of human others. more often than not, those others are women, as seen in kirkpatrick’s own article on the depiction of fox-hunting in eighteenth-century literature, as well as in katarzyna poloczek’s insightful examination of marine life in the work of several contemporary irish women poets, and in sarah o’connor’s article on the creative energies unleashed by the female-becoming-hare of éilís ní dhuibhne’s irish-language writing. but so, too, does the collection attend to a range of diverse human others, such as the exploited workers that amanda perry sees mirrored in the bovine imagery of poet dennis o’driscoll, as well as the transnational other of eva bourke’s migrant irish poetry, configured as insects, in co-editor borbála faragó’s own piece; or the diseased and dying others in luz mar gonzález-arias’s essay on the work of dorothy malloy (a poet who is rightly, and posthumously, garnering increased scholarly attention); and the queer others of ed madden’s excellent essay on the conjunction of sexuality and the animal in late twentiethand early twenty-first century gay writing, in which he ultimately calls for a “queer animal or eco-criticism” that, by incorporating queer theory’s wide-ranging suspicion of any discourse of “the natural,” would “interrogate the presumed naturalness of categories of gender and sexuality, and by extension the structures and categories of what counts as human” (115). carol adam’s “war on compassion” and the feminist care tradition thus provides a theoretical cornerstone for the collection, followed distantly by the significant contributions to animal studies of cary wolfe, donna haraway, and derrida’s “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” as with madden’s essay, animals in irish literature and culture is at its strongest when it draws from animal studies to investigate various cultural issues in ireland. alongside the aforementioned concerns around gender, sexuality, and the migrant is the engagement with issues specific to (but relevant beyond) ireland — issues such as those brought out by sarah townsend and maria pramaggiore surrounding the (depreciated) state of ireland after the 2008 economic collapse that “killed” the celtic tiger. townsend looks back at the pig’s cultural place in irish culture, focusing primarily on humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 9, number 1 (fall 2017) 184 patrick mccabe’s novel the butcher boy (1992) and enda walsh’s play disco pigs (1996), but tracing the history of porcine signification in ireland (with some roots in countercultural america) in order to frame its contemporary status as a “piigs” country, the label given to those countries — portugal, ireland and/or italy, greece, and spain — that particularly necessitated economic bailout, and thus were “deserving” of a tarnishing moniker that suggests greedy consumption, and the need for “handling.” and pramaggiore explores the harrowing fate of the horse in ireland in the years following 2008, examining their representation in film but also detailing the very realworld abandoning — and, in some cases, quite literal consumption — of “surplus” horses bred during the economic boom. among the more valuable scholarly moves these articles make is to pull from irish studies scholarship in order to consider the insights of animal studies. for example, pramaggiore draws from the vast work around ireland’s unique “double-edged temporality” — such as, among others, declan kiberd’s significant work in inventing ireland (1996), in which he suggests that the country’s brand of cultural modernity uniquely looks to tradition rather than seeking to break from it — in order to consider the horse’s own double-edged modernity, one in which its very commodification relies on the cultural perception of it as a traditional, rural animal (217, 227). in fact, one wishes there might have been a bit more interrogation into what irish studies might bring to animal studies throughout animals in irish literature and culture, rather than vice versa. one of the more fascinating revelations, for example, is made by donna potts, who discusses the work of one of animal rights’ earliest proponents, the irishman richard martin — a.k.a. “humanity dick” — who, in 1822, put forth an act that “was the first parliamentary law in the world to proscribe cruelty to animals” (167). potts’s work in this moment excitingly positions ireland in the field of animal studies, even at its forefront; but for the collection as a whole, there remains considerable room to further imagine the ways irish studies might impact animal studies. that’s not to say, either, that those essays in the collection that do not explicitly engage ireland’s cultural landscape are without merit—far from it. liam young’s essay on yeats, while not focused on broader questions of ireland per se, nevertheless attends to a much-needed field of inquiry on the poet’s vast poetic bestiary. his attention to the nonhuman and posthuman characters of yeats’s poetry gives a fresh dimension to the questions of authority and linguistic indeterminacy that have long been at the center of yeats scholarship. much the same might be said of tom herron’s insightful, if at times baroque, reading of paul muldoon’s maggot, muldoon being a poet whose literary bestiary may outnumber even that of yeats. jeanne dubino brilliantly draws out the nathaniel myers -beyond ireland’s myth, its folklore, and its two-dozen indigenous animals 185 affective anxieties of the biand interspecies-ism found in the dogs of “irishman” bram stoker’s dracula.and, as with the aforementioned dorothy malloy, i’m grateful for the attention given to the much-deserving donegal poet francis harvey across two of the book’s strong essays, including the one by potts, as well as that of christine cusick’s eco-critical chapter on bird poetry. i don’t wish to give much space to the collection’s weaknesses, though there are a few of note. aside from the previously mentioned desire for more essays that might suggest the relevance of irish studies to animal studies, i find that, in several instances, a few essays offer theoretical foundations that are valuable on their own but which are ultimately underdeveloped, or simply irrelevant, to the hermeneutic work that follows. it’s difficult not to observe, too, that maureen o’connor’s the female and the species: the animal in irish women’s writing (2010)—arguably the first substantial engagement with the intersection of irish studies and animal studies—is infrequently addressed in these essays, suggesting a not necessarily egregious but still occasionally surprising failure on the part of irish-animal studies to attend to its own foundations. but to critique the book on such terms is to miss its more important significance, not least the very way in which it builds on o’connor’s work: it begins to fill in the gaps, through a plethora of diverse voices on diverse topics, that would be found in any burgeoning field of study. it paves the way for new and further considerations of the intersection between irish studies and animal studies; it creates a space for the nonhuman animal to be confronted by a field of scholarship that has been focused almost entirely on the human, recognizing the ways humans have been dehumanized but with little attention to the nonhuman animals that are used in service of that dehumanization. ultimately, animals in irish literature and culture conveys the urgency with which we might adopt an animal studies perspective in irish studies, so that we may, as christine cusick argues, “step outside of [our] limited epistemologies,” (194) and march on with a more inclusive and ethical scholarly lens. microsoft word kelleher-mckenna-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:2 reviews hillary kelleher uncommon horse sense erin mckenna. pets, people, and pragmatism. new york: fordham up, 2013. ix + 247 pp. $85 hc, $26 pb. in pets, people, and pragmatism, erin mckenna offers a useful approach to ethical choices involving beings we call “pets.” extending insights from classical pragmatism, she proposes ways to improve lives in situations in which absolutist principles don’t deliver. in the process, she unearths subtly anthropocentric assumptions in leading theories for understanding human-nonhuman animal relations. at heart, the book poses the question: can there be “morally satisfactory relationships with horses, dogs, hillary kelleher – “uncommmon horse sense” 149 and cats that include some level of confinement, training, and control” (2). her affirmative response reveals the need for a pragmatist intervention in the current conversation, provides fascinating accounts of the histories and conditions of these species, and grounds her most abstract points in poignant experiences with close animal companions. the book devotes one chapter to each species, leading with horses. i found this longest, most detailed section especially compelling, partly because of the death of a relative’s filly in the kentucky derby. at post-time 2008, i sat at my television for “the best two minutes in sports,” as eight belles pulled out against the colts to place second. i didn’t see that, seconds after passing the wire, she collapsed with two broken ankles and was euthanized on the track. “we didn’t feel we could show it,” nbc told the new york times. “we didn’t want to show her suffering.” pets, people, and pragmatism doesn’t shrink from showing suffering. in often gruesome detail, mckenna describes the rampant abuse and neglect in racing and other humannonhuman animal activities. she tackles the so-called “retirement” (i.e. slaughter) of horses who cannot compete, as well as the dangers of selective breeding which often produces “horses with very fine bones that cannot hold up to athletic demands” (52). from a pragmatist perspective, however, the aim isn’t to end racing, but to improve conditions. given their “natural and developmental history,” she contends, “there are horse beings who want to perform, who want to run” (76). eight belles did, though as the washington post reported, she “ran with the heart of a locomotive, on champagneglass ankles.” for mckenna, enhancing life for domestic animal beings calls for understanding on the level of species and breed, as well as individual personality. rich in remarkable details, her book promises to help horses, dogs, and cats by illuminating relevant facets of our shared histories and current interactions. mckenna’s strain of pragmatism stems from peirce, james, and dewey. as she explains, it’s pluralist (eschewing universalist claims), developmental (seeing the world always in process), experimental (seeking hypotheses not final solutions), fallible (open to correction and revision), and ameliorative (making things better). upfront about her forefathers’ prejudices concerning nonhuman animals, she uses pragmatism’s own premises to rescue its relevance: its self-correcting experimentalism justifies extension into post-humanist thought. she also incorporates strands of early pragmatic feminism humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 150 via charlotte perkins gilman and jane addams, ecofeminism mainly through val plumwood, and cultural relativism by way of alain locke. the mix includes a bit of what she broadly calls “continental thought” via donna haraway and kelly oliver, though she complains (without much explanation) of their putting “language and concepts in front of actual relations” (22). through this pluralist mingling, mckenna advances “a new approach, not just an extension of moral theories” and develops “a pragmatist feminist account of the possibilities for relationships between human beings and other animal beings that will help us all re-think how we live together” (24). mckenna clears space for her account by exposing limitations of existing theories, including utilitarian concern for suffering (singer), deontological calls for rights (regan), and virtue ethics’ focus on flourishing (nussbaum). hatched before darwin’s idea of evolution, these approaches “often smuggle in remnants of the view of humans as separate from the rest of nature” (22). thus, while overtly rejecting anthropocentrism, they subtly reinforce human qualities as the measure of subjectivity. singer, she points out, puts humans on the top of his scale of interests, while nussbaum privileges human self-consciousness in her list of capabilities. and though regan famously declares “traditional anthropocentrism is dead,” he goes on to name “traits that have given humans special status to measure which animals are ‘subjects of life’” (23). somewhat dismissively, she includes haraway and oliver in this company because they “contest the divide, but still end up focusing on characteristics like language and consciousness” (230). all these approaches, mckenna contends, extend humanist ethics to other animal beings and thereby perpetuate the idea of human dominance within a human/animal hierarchy. pets, people, and pragmatism offers an exceptional challenge to human exceptionalism, even as it assimilates insights from these other approaches. disrupting outdated metaphysical and ontological assumptions lurking within nonhuman-animal ethics, mckenna considers nature and culture, not as binaries, but as always already intertwined. “humans,” she avers, “have always been in relations with animal others and we have influenced each other’s development along the way” (219). ever-evolving, our “culture“ (including language) occurs within “nature,“ so “when we try to deny our past or continued interconnectedness … we try to mute the animal in pets and the animal in humans” (34). for pragmatists, nothing exists outside of context, including their own theories. not surprisingly, therefore, pragmatism informs not only the book’s content but its style: unaffected prose, anecdotal interludes (complete with pictures of personal pets), hillary kelleher – “uncommmon horse sense” 151 and unconventional structure. rather than introducing abstract concepts in isolation, mckenna first demonstrates their efficacy with horses. her most direct engagement with theory, in a middle section called “american pragmatism: the continuity of critters,” is already grounded in experience, to which she returns in her equally informative chapters on dogs and cats. all chapters contain sections on abuse and neglect, research and biomedical contexts, use in entertainment, competition and work, and death. in each, she offers original solutions to problems exacerbated by other approaches. as she explains, “the debates among animal advocates, and between animal advocates and others interested in relationships with other animal beings, have not generally been guided by informed contextual thinking. instead, principles have been applied in absolute and universal ways” (6). for instance, she reveals that more horses were reported starving or abandoned during the 2007 u.s. ban on horse slaughter than either before or after. others lived with painful injuries, and many “simply had to endure longer transport to slaughter facilities in canada and mexico” (60). this is just one startling example of how well-meaning advocates pursued principles that, ironically, hurt the very beings they sought to help. indeed, she claims, universal approaches to ethics regularly overlook “the tensions, contradictions, and problems caused by the proposed ‘solution’” (60). particularly harmful, she argues, are activists seeking to liberate nonhuman animals from their status as property and, worse, utopians hoping to abolish domestication altogether. such stances oversimplify and “tend to push people to extreme and often contradictory positions…. this makes work for real change in the relationships among humans and other animal beings difficult” (5-6). one polarizing example is peta’s contention that “no breeding can be considered ‘responsible’” (3) which, she claims, has led conscientious canine and feline breeders to suspect all animal welfare groups and, hence, resist regulations by moderate organizations like the hsus. pragmatism would sooner search for areas of common ground and create coalitions that could, for example, reduce puppy mills. though groups would remain “opposed to each other on a number of key concerns,” pragmatic pluralism “could make possible many cooperative ventures that would directly benefit other animal beings” (225). thus, while mckenna’s critique involves metaphysics, ontology, and (less explicitly) epistemology, her thrust remains ethical. instead of implementing rules, she believes, “ethicists can help people work across their differences for the good of other animal beings” (218). the philosopher, in her eyes, is most exalted as a kind of conflict-mediator whose task “is not to provide the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 152 answer or the theory, but to help all involved explain and consider a variety of options in an open, tolerant, and respectful manner” (228). only through these means can philosophy effect real amelioration. more ardent non-interference approaches, mckenna argues, simultaneously block change and reinstate human/animal binaries by inscribing humans as ontologically different. if we frame domestication as intervening in nature, she warns, “we often unconsciously presuppose human transcendence over nature” (27). ironically, this stance is “often shared by animal rights/welfare people as well as by those who support the idea that the rest of nature exists simply for humans to use it in any way they see fit — a dominance and use view. both positions rest on a belief in human exceptionalism, though with different outcomes” (2). from a pragmatist view of continuity over species isolation, however, “domestication is a natural event and condition” rather than an example of domination, “a two-way street” in which we continually co-constitute one another (19). thus, though she outlines competing theories of domestication, creating a singular narrative is beside her point. instead, she opens each chapter with a chronicle (and helpful diagram) of that pet’s history as a species. by invoking the controversial term “pet,“ mckenna distinguishes herself from radical rights advocates like regan and francione, who want to end domestication, as well as from thinkers, like ecologist paul shephard, who relegate pets to a monstrously liminal status, between animal and human, as unnatural beings who “substitute for human companionship or for replacing our lost connection to the ‘wild’” (24). such views are anathema to pragmatism, in which relationships remain transactional and inequality does not, necessarily, entail domination or exploitation. positing pets as mere objects of use replicates the very binary that privileges humans; yet, among most animal advocates, the term “is assumed to be demeaning and to imply ownership and dependence, and to anthropomorphize the other animal beings.” taken to an extreme, anthropomorphism leads to projecting human qualities. without it, though, animals become entirely other, “lacking intelligence, emotions, and interests” (9). “both views— unreflective relations of use and making other animal beings seem human—enable us to see animal beings, pets in particular, as being here primarily for our pleasure,” which leads to mistreatment (34). because either extreme can result in abandonment and abuse of pets, she advocates limited anthropomorphism, a compromise between rejection (absolute difference) and overindulgence (complete identity). mckenna uses the exceptional status of pets to justify the need for her book. still, as she hints in her introduction and elaborates in her conclusion, pets, people, and pragmatism is hillary kelleher – “uncommmon horse sense” 153 the start of a larger project. by reflecting on how we see pets, she establishes a new framework for beings considered wild, on the one hand, and commodities of use, on the other. as she puts it, “understanding these pet relationships differently will have implications for our relationships with other domesticated animal beings as well as other non-domesticated species” (20). her biggest goal is to kindle a shift in the way we think. this shift “will have ramifications for what is seen as morally acceptable but it won’t always result in full agreement or clear and certain policies. instead it will suggest an approach to understanding and improving these relationships that is rooted in humility, caution, and respect” (224). mckenna cautiously expects that working toward common ground with businesses involving animals will improve nonhuman lives. i’d like to believe her. still, shifting attitudes can be painfully incremental. eight belles’s fall provoked national outrage in articles like the la times’s op-ed “bred for death.” there’s since been reform of track surfaces, yet the systemic problem with breeding remains. though her owner promised, in the wall street journal, to support “anything we can do to research how to get a moredurable horse,” he continues to race thoroughbreds, and serious attempts to expand the gene pool find little backing in the industry. perhaps the book’s unusually appealing cover, with a happy child and smiling golden retriever on leash, will entice those outside the choir and, as maintained on the back, “captivate scholars and pet enthusiasts alike.” (the colorful photograph does stand out among the staid jackets in fordham’s series on american philosophy.) reaching a wider audience would certainly maintain the lineage of peirce, james, and dewey — as well as gilman and addams — who publically engaged in moral debates, including those over emancipation and civil rights. the introduction to animal pragmatism: rethinking human-nonhuman relationships, which mckenna co-edited with andrew light in 2004, advanced pragmatism as a voice “hitherto missing” from animal-welfare conversations, one that “may more deeply challenge our views of our place in the world and thus also more effectively serve to alter current practice” (11). at the time there was “no established spokesperson from the ranks of pragmatists on moral issues involving animals” (4). though animal pragmatism’s surfaced elsewhere over the past ten years — recently in tom tyler’s ciferae: a bestiary in five fingers — the spokesperson job remains open. pets, people, and pragmatism establishes erin mckenna as an impressive candidate. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 154 works cited jenkins, sally. “is horse racing breeding itself to death?” washington post 4 may 2008. sandomir, richard. “horse’s fall faded in the glare of another’s triumph.” new york times 5 may 2008. weinbach, jon. “better racing oversight sought: squabbles stymie database to guide breeders, owners.” wall street journal 6 may 2008. microsoft word schwartz-menely-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:2 reviews janelle a. schwartz affective clamor tobias menely, the animal claim: sensibility and the creaturely voice. chicago: the university of chicago press, 2015. 280pp. $90.00 hb; $30.00 pb. animal studies, or human-animal studies (has), or anthrozoology, finds a refreshing and grounded new perspective in tobias menely’s the animal claim: sensibility and the creaturely voice. menely’s focused literary critique of poetry from the long eighteenth century, coupled to his insightful accounting of the emergent politico-cultural discourse of animal voice and the rights — arguably natural, divine, or juridical — pursuant to it, is a stunning accomplishment. it responds elegantly to kari weil’s recent thinking animals: why animal studies now? (2012), and provides a kind of tempering and expansive literary companion to brian massumi’s what animals teach us about politics (2014) and the nonhuman turn (2015), edited by richard grusin. add to this menely’s framing innovative enquiry into the linguistics and rhetorical impact of “animal claims janelle a. schwartz -affective clamor 171 regarding injury and interest” (1), and the animal claim indeed deserves recognition as a keystone work in incisive anthrozoological analyses. this new book should be read — admittedly anachronistically — as a foundationary text, a starting point for any examination of the creaturely voice, presenting as it does in written form the all-but-deafening nonverbal (yet nevertheless emotive and aural) testament to communityand identity-formation, to a hopeful advocacy that calls — even clamors — for constitutive and shared acknowledgement between the human and nonhuman animal. it’s as if the animal claim forms a synthetic wellspring of animal studies out of which we are convinced again (and stirringly) of the indelible influence of such seminal thinkers as benjamin, derrida, agamben, and peter singer; we are made to acknowledge implicitly and by exemplary demonstration the importance of considering thematic, periodized studies of the animal, such as harriet ritvo’s the platypus and the mermaid (1997), david perkins’ romanticism and animal rights (2003), and now menely’s the animal claim; and we find a collective sympathy through more idiosyncratic, yet no less prescient studies of animality like bec and flusser’s vampyroteuthis infernalis (2012). perhaps most significantly, menely’s book enacts a truly progressive investigation into animal-human relation, finally producing a convincing argument for its just representation without falling into the heretofore seemingly unavoidable trap of anthropocentrism. admittedly, the introduction got off to a bit of a slow start, weighing this reader down with a jargon-heavy recapitulation of definitions and methodologies. a necessary burden later realized, however, when the first chapter lifts off with the attestation: “it is only if we … presume the prior categorical identity of the human as a rational animal — that speech (logos), which in itself never fully transcends the passions and the voice, can be understood (tautologically) as the source of human exceptionality” (25). the human, as menely reveals, is “an unfinished identity,” rather than a moral center, itself still transitioning between passion and reason, passivity and willfulness. that it likewise undertakes to represent itself while simultaneously performing the “uniquely human labor of speaking for others” (205) sets the human brightly as storyteller, as advocate, as community builder through the protraction of “sensibility” — an affective practice and trope fitted never-so-neatly to what menely tells us is the “communicative heterogeneity” of the creature. from here, menely gracefully constructs an extended argument to recuperate the creaturely voice, one that necessarily looks perspectivally — and thus representationally — from both sides (human and nonhuman) and resides in the performance of marked paradox: we must “regard rights as neither simply an intrinsic humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 172 condition of nature nor a contingent condition of state recognition, but rather as a communicative transaction, a claim that begins before the law and yet is only realized in the law” (13, emphasis mine). in short, a “condition in which one is called upon in order to speak for” (17). the achronistic deployment of sensibility as a formative trope of the georgian literary imagination allows for menely to traverse effectively (if also at minor times diffusively) the subject material of enlightenment philosophy, eighteenth-century poetry and periodical culture, and nascent parliamentary debates over animal welfare. the polysemous capacity with which menely endows “sensibility” ultimately aids in the elision of any assumed hierarchical distinction between human and animal in favor of a creaturely arbitration, i.e. of responsible representation and responsivity: “a creature is always in relation, subject to another; a creature comes after” (14). menely’s exceptional new analyses of such canonical poems as thomson’s the seasons and cowper’s the task, as well as pope’s windsor-forest and christopher smart’s jubilate agno, alongside his studies of popular enlightenment thinkers hobbes, hume, and rousseau, are presented like a series of woven vignettes of close reading, historically and politically contextualized not just in their contemporaneous moment but for their ineluctable value to present-day debates over industrial livestock farming, animal rights and claims to sentience, and zoontological investigations. in a sense, then, the literary critiques appear as advantageous by-products of a carefully wrought ethicopolitical call-to-action, even as these critiques are clearly central to the work as a whole. as menely demonstrates, “we must continue to ask how animal claims have been recognized, amplified, and instituted, how the sovereign state or subject is made answerable, and how the essentially poetic quality of law and lawmaking informs the horizons of political community” precisely because “the claims of the animal continue to haunt the liberal state” (12, 201). the animal claim likewise demands for a continued accounting of “the communicative conditions in which we find ourselves answerable to the clamor of other beings who are like ourselves passionate and finite” (205). menely’s menagerie of animals, from the worm to the starling to the ass, is a convincing parade of impassioned voices recorded to compel an ethical response. these creaturely voices have, in effect, been hopefully “called upon in order to speak for” (if you’ll excuse this inversion of menely’s original meaning) the human still in process of becoming just. works cited bec, louis and vilém flusser. vampyroteuthis infernalis: a treatise, with a report by the institut scientifique de recherche paranaturaliste. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2012. janelle a. schwartz -affective clamor 173 grusin, richard, ed. the nonhuman turn. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2015. massumi, brian. what animals teach us about politics. durham: duke university press, 2014. perkins, david. romanticism and animal rights. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2003. ritvo, harriet. the platypus and the mermaid and other figments of the classifying imagination. cambridge: harvard university press, 1997. weil, kari. thinking animals: why animal studies now? new york: columbia university press, 2012. microsoft word barstow-stewart h u m a n i m a l i a 8:1 reviews geoffrey barstow welcome insight into buddhist vegetarianism in sri lanka james stewart, vegetarianism and animal ethics in contemporary buddhism. london: routledge, 2015. 214 pp. $145 hc. somewhat surprisingly, there has been very little academic discussion of buddhist vegetarianism. there have been some notable articles on this topic, and it regularly appears in broader discussions of buddhist ethics, but james stewart’s vegetarianism and animal ethics in buddhism is the first book that i am aware of to focus solely on the question of vegetarianism in a buddhist context. not only is it the first academic discussion of buddhist vegetarianism, but stewart also treats the topic well, providing a comprehensive look at the social and religious context of a meat-free diet in contemporary sri lanka. importantly, while stewart discusses many of the normative, doctrinal questions surrounding meat eating, he focuses his analysis on vegetarianism in contemporary, lived sri lankan buddhism. for as stewart reveals, vegetarianism in sri lanka is not simply a question of buddhist doctrine, but involves a complex tension between elite doctrine, national politics, and popular perspectives. as such, the book is essential reading for those interested in contemporary buddhist thought on animal ethics and vegetarianism. it should also interest those who study vegetarianism in a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 116 cross-cultural perspective, though those who have little background in buddhism should approach the work with caution, for reasons i will detail below. stewart opens with a short introduction presenting his subject: those contemporary sri lankan buddhists who advocate for vegetarianism, along with those who critique them. stewart makes the important observation that a strong majority of sri lankan buddhists are not vegetarian (an observation which, incidentally, applies to almost all asian buddhist cultures). he is aware that this fact runs contrary to many western assumptions about buddhism and non-violence, provocatively suggesting that “western expectations about ethical vegetarianism in buddhist countries may be just another example of western cultural neo-colonialism or orientalism” (5). following this introduction, stewart begins to set out the ethical contours of the debates surrounding vegetarianism and meat eating. in his first chapter, “the lion and the cow,” stewart argues that sri lankan culture presents a pair of contradictory cultural ideals. on the one hand, many sri lankans associate themselves with the strength and power of the lion, while at the same time admiring the gentleness and nurturing instincts of the cow. there is a tension, stewart concludes, between these ideals, so that many sri lankans acknowledge that vegetarianism and animal protection are good while also continuing to kill and eat animals. following closely on this discussion, stewart’s second chapter looks at the place of meat in theravada buddhist texts. once again, stewart finds a tension in this material. he argues that the overall tone of these canonical texts suggests that harming animals is wrong, and that vegetarianism, therefore, should be a good thing. contradicting this overall impression is the simple fact that the theravada sūtras repeatedly claim that the buddha both ate meat himself and allowed his disciples to eat it (as long as it was not specifically slaughtered for their consumption). therefore, as stewart notes, contemporary advocates of buddhist vegetarianism are stuck. while their position seems to align with the buddha’s emphasis on non-violence and the moral standing of animals, theravada sūtras clearly depict the buddha as a meat-eater. having introduced his readers to the issues and debates that surround vegetarianism, stewart turns his attention to the contemporary vegetarian movement. he opens this discussion in chapter three with an analysis of vegetarianism among lay buddhist communities. insightfully, stewart chooses to focus his analysis on food-offering rituals, noting first that offerings made to representations of the buddha are usually pure, vegetarian foods. monks, on the other hand, are often given meat, a fact that stewart geoffrey barstow-welcome insight into buddhist vegetarianism in sri lanka 117 attributes to a desire among the laity to give the monks what the laity believe they would like, as well as a desire to be seen offering expensive foods like meat. in chapter four, stewart turns his attention to monastic vegetarianism, beginning with the observation that monks rarely turn down meat. stewart attributes the fact that almost all monastics eat meat to their thorough grounding in theravada buddhist texts, which, we may recall, generally allow meat as long as the animal was not killed specifically for that monk. this leads to one of stewart’s most interesting observations: in contemporary sri lanka, vegetarianism is predominantly a lay, rather than a monastic movement. this is notable because it is precisely the inverse of the situation is much of the rest of the buddhist world. in china, for instance, buddhist monks are usually expected to be vegetarian, while only devout laity adopt such a diet. similarly, tibetan buddhist vegetarianism has always been predominantly a monastic phenomenon. the fact that sri lankan vegetarianism is predominantly lay is, to the best of my knowledge, unique in the buddhist world (though i would be very interested to know if similar patterns hold in other theravada countries). in explaining this fact, stewart looks to the phenomenon of “protestant buddhism,” a movement which he suggests has empowered the laity to analyze and interpret buddhism for themselves, though they do not necessarily have the depth of scriptural understanding achieved by monks. in my reading, chapters three and four constitute the heart of stewart’s analysis. in the remainder of the book, he fleshes out this portrait by looking at a variety of specific aspects of the contemporary vegetarian and animal welfare movement. he begins this process in chapter five by analyzing the cow protection movement. as noted earlier, the cow is a prominent symbol in sri lanka, associated with gentleness and maternal kindness. in stewart’s presentation, these perceived qualities have contributed to a widespread movement seeking to protect cows from slaughter. in chapter six, stewart turns his attention to the perceived role of meat in human health. he notes that several traditional doctors have advised that without meat, their medicines would not function. on the other hand, excessive consumption of meat is seen as bad for one’s health, and is associated with western excess. the proto-nationalist overtones that stewart observes here are fully discussed in chapter seven, which looks at the anti-halal movement. here stewart’s analysis takes a darker turn, noting the ways in which attempts to ban halal slaughter (ostensibly on ethical grounds) have become associated with xenophobic anti-muslim sentiment. as stewart puts it, “the halal abolition movement represents the dark side of the seemingly innocuous movement to better the lives of cows and other animals in sri lanka” (196). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 118 overall, vegetarianism and animal ethics in buddhism makes a number of salient contributions to both buddhist studies and the cross-cultural study of vegetarianism. in the first place, stewart makes clear that while it is a minority diet, buddhist-inspired vegetarianism absolutely does exist in sri lanka. this may seem like a minor point, but simply pointing out this fact (and backing it up with admirably thick description) is a significant contribution. secondly, stewart’s observations about the tension between monastic and lay vegetarianism are both insightful and interesting. future scholars would do well do heed his observations here, and not assume that vegetarianism must always be a monastic phenomenon. finally, stewart’s observation about how animal welfare activities are implicated in contemporary nationalistic rhetoric provides a useful caution. as admirable as many of us may feel that animal welfare activism is, we must also pay attention to ways in which those discourses can be co-opted by other movements. this book is, of course, not without flaws. at times, stewart’s analysis can feel thin, excessively anecdotal. to give one example, on page 81 stewart claims that most of his informants viewed vegetarianism positively, while only a few were actively opposed. it would be nice, however, to be given a better sense of how may informants he is speaking about, and how he found them. these concerns, however, do not take away from the value of the book as a whole, and overall i have few complaints with the body of this book. a more serious concern is the title itself. by titling his book vegetarianism and animal ethics in buddhism — with no reference to sri lanka — stewart seems to be suggesting that he is speaking for the buddhist tradition in its entirety. and yet, as stewart himself notes in his introduction, this is not the case. he is speaking about vegetarianism in contemporary sri lanka, with only a handful of references to the rest of the buddhist world. further, while some of his observations may dovetail with forms of buddhism practiced in other times and places, many of them do not. i have already noted that the tension stewart depicts between lay and monastic vegetarianism differs dramatically from the situation found elsewhere in the buddhist world. another example can be found in stewart’s discussion of the canonical, textual perspective on meat eating. stewart does a good job of presenting theravada canonical positions on meat, but his findings do not at all accord with the concerns found in either tibetan or chinese canonical materials, both of which draw on mahāyāna scriptures not found in the theravada canon. several mahāyāna texts, for instance, explicitly claim that the buddha was vegetarian, directly contradicting the claims made in the theravada material stewart discusses. my fear here is that some readers who do not have strong geoffrey barstow-welcome insight into buddhist vegetarianism in sri lanka 119 backgrounds in buddhist studies may read this book as if it speaks to the concerns of the entire buddhist tradition, particularly given the dearth of other studies of buddhist vegetarianism. so while i hope that stewart’s book is read by many whose primary interest is in non-buddhist forms of animal ethics, i also hope that such readers will bear in mind that stewart is depicting only one buddhist tradition among many. microsoft word sax-porcher h u m a n i m a l i a 6:2 reviews boria sax what is a “good death” for an animal? jocelyne porcher, pour une mort digne des animaux. introduction by elisabeth de fontenay. paris: éditions du palais, 2014. 107 pp. € 14.50. what is a “good death?” for the vikings, it was to fall in battle and thereby to gain entrance to valhalla. perhaps their constant wars were not simply for plunder so much as the opportunity to be killed. for many amerindian tribes of the amazon, it was the opportunity to be ritually sacrificed to the deities after capture by opposing tribes, which, similarly, would mean an enhanced position in the next world. captives would regularly be offered, and would decline, opportunities to escape (castro). these were both societies in which life was always precarious, and death by what we call “old age” was very rare. boria sax – “what is a “good death” for an animal?” 207 in early modern and victorian europe, the prevailing ideal was a peaceful death at home in bed, surrounded by family and friends. as death approached, a person would pay any debts, settle affairs, reconcile with adversaries, and then call relations to gather around, say parting words and finally, through an act of will, take leave of this world. people would meticulously plan the scene of their deaths, almost like a play, including which garments to wear and how to decorate the room. in contemporary times, comparatively little attention is paid to the moment of death. the prevailing expectation is that a person will die out of sight in a hospital or hospice, quite possibly alone. everything possible will be done to ease physical pain. reasonable, though probably not “heroic,” measures will be taken to prolong life. it is intended to be a comfortable but, in every sense, “sterile” environment, in which death itself becomes largely a clinical matter (ariès). and what is a “good death” for an animal? the examples that i have given barely hint at the variety of ways in which death is conceived among human cultures. ways in which a death is marked include fasting, feasting, fights, laughter, drunkenness, selfmutilation, tears, or casually moving on to other things (barley). while many animals may have some understanding of death, it seems reasonable to think that the variation among them must be vastly greater. today, the idea of death by the teeth of a predator usually fills us with horror, but that may not be necessarily the case among animals in the wild. even in cities, most human beings first learn of death through pets and other animals (melson). the very concept of death is something that people and animals socially construct together, and have probably done so in every culture that has ever existed. “domestic” animals, share, to a degree, “human” culture. in traditional european peasant culture, it was customary to raise a pig almost as one of the family. it was fed scraps from the table, allowed to roam free, and, essentially, treated as a pet. when finally the time for slaughter came, it was granted a version of the prevailing idea of a good death for human beings, and all members of the family were expected to be present to take their leave (pastoureau). the contemporary abattoir, as designed by temple grandin and others, is reminiscent, at least with respect to dying, of a hospital or hospice, carefully designed and regulated to be as clean and humane as possible. it may even have religious facilities, yet it has very little power to accommodate individuality. in the end, it is an institutionalization, and, therefore, at least a partial humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 208 denial, of the reality of death. jocelyne porcher’s most fundamental objection to industrial farming is not simply that it is “inhumane.” when heavily regulated, it might be humane, at least in the sense of preventing or minimizing the animals’ pain. but even if that is the case an industrial abattoir still denies their individuality and, thereby, their dignity, as well as that of the farmers. when an animal is deprived of an individual death, its life loses significance as well. one hears very little discussion today of death, its meaning, or, most especially, its significance in the context of a life. jocelyne porcher, in her book pour une mort digne des animaux (for a death worthy of animals), is one of few authors to address it directly, and her work is likely to have implications for human beings that go far beyond animal husbandry, at least as narrowly understood. this is one area where human practices with regard to animals and human beings are very intimately connected. it is particularly difficult to separate the “interests” of animals and human beings, and it is not easy to avoid invoking some notion of distributed consciousness. those who doubt that a very intimate, caring relationship may exist between farmers or herders and their animals should consider the many references in the bible to the relations of shepherds to their flocks. take for example, psalm 23, which, in the king james translation, begins: “the lord is my shepherd. . . .” porcher is a leading advocate of smaller, traditional farms in france, and an intense critic of industrial farming. this book, like her other writings, is based on the assumption of a very intimate understanding between the animals and the farmer. some may wonder if these relations are truly reciprocal, even whether they are real or imagined. such questions are legitimate, but they may also be asked about virtually any possible bond between animals and human beings. one who keeps pets might, in a similar way, ask “does my dog really love me?” one could also question whether animals truly allowed themselves to be taken by certain hunters, as the plains indians and many other indigenous societies have believed. relations between keepers and their pets have been studied vastly more extensively than those between farmers and their animals, but questions such as these elude scientific investigation. in the end, farmers, like everyone else, must trust their intuition about relations with other species. on a daily basis, porcher points out, relations between farmers and animals are reciprocal, since farm animals will at times refuse to cooperate if there is something that they do not like. but especially for those of us who are not farmers, these relations lead us into a mysterious world, based on perceptions for which we, in contemporary western culture, do not even have an adequate conceptual framework or vocabulary. boria sax – “what is a “good death” for an animal?” 209 to describe relationships between traditional farmers and their animals, porcher invokes anthropologist marcel maus’s concept of “the gift,” rather than any theory of the “social contract.” the farmer’s gifts to the animals include a steady supply of food and protection from predators, while the gift of the animals to the farmer eventually include their lives. she emphasizes that the killing is not the purpose of the relationship, but it is necessary for the bond to exist at all. according to porcher, the killing of animals is not only for economic reasons, but is also necessary because resources at the farm are only sufficient to support a limited number of animals. it is a very sad event. it is also an epiphany, revealing the rhythm of life and death, in all its tragic beauty. on this point, as so many others, i am impressed by the similarity between farming, as she describes it, and contemporary pet-keeping. both answer a human need for bestial companionship, but the pet-keeper generally addresses the danger of surplus population by means of birth control, as well as limiting contact with other animals. the advantage of that is that it allows the person to give animals greater individual attention and postpone the hour of their deaths. on the other hand, the status as a pet can deprive animals of much experience, both as infants and as parents. more generally, it takes away most contact by animals with other animals of their own, and different, species. while pet keeping generally brings animals, especially dogs, almost entirely into the human world, farming creates a realm for them between the natural world and our society, retaining both many advantages and problems of both. i strongly suspect that farmers relate to animals collectively, while pet keepers respond to them more as individuals, but that awaits confirmation by research. porcher’s approach to the subject is practical, and only indirectly philosophical. the central problem she addresses is that farmers often lack the resources, expertise, and legal authority to take the lives of animals in the most humane way, yet the industrial abattoirs, which may kill painlessly, tend to be bureaucratic, disorienting, cumbersome, and impersonal. in the absence of local facilities, the major alternative is traveling abattoirs, which, because of their smaller size, can accommodate the sensitivities of individual farmers and their animals. some farmers, for example, will wish to accompany their animals to the very end, while others will leave before their lives are taken. their scale and flexibility enables travelling abattoirs to allow such choices. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 210 porcher never uses religious language or imagery. it is noteworthy that even the word “sacrifice” (the same in french as in english) is never employed in her book, though it is regularly used by many academic authors to designate the taking of animal life. it is possible that porcher deliberately avoided the word, since, for some people, it still conjures victorian images of bloody, barbaric rites. nevertheless, the book has an unmistakable, if very unobtrusive, religious dimension. the killing of livestock becomes overlain with many social, cultural, personal, and philosophical meanings, to a point where even ostensibly pragmatic acts take on a ceremonial dimension. porcher’s conclusions may be controversial, but she deserves credit for courage to address a subject that has, up to now, been largely taboo. although there has been a revival of traditional farming in recent decades (kleppel), scholars still often assume that relations between farmers and their animals are purely utilitarian. hopefully, her work may inspire some anthrozoologists to devote closer attention to these relations, as they have long done to those between humans and their pets. works cited ariès, phillipe. the hour of our death: the classic history of western attitudes towards death over the last one thousand years. trans. helen weaver. new york: knopf, 1981. barley, nigel. grave matters: encounters with death around the world. long grove, illinois: waveland press, 2005. castro, eduardo viveiros de. the inconstancy of the indian soul: the encounter of catholics and cannibals in 16th century brazil. trans. gregory duff morton. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2011. kleppel, gary s. the emergent agriculture: farming, sustainability and the return of local economy. gabriola island, canada: new society publishers, 2014. melson, gail f. why the wild things are: animals in the lives of children. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 2001. pastoureau, michel. le cochon: histoire d'un cousin mal aimé. paris: gallimard, 2009. microsoft word marran-ambros-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:1 christine l. marran pets, death, and taxes barbara ambros, bones of contention: animal and religion in contemporary japan. honolulu: university of hawaii press, 2012. 265 pp. $55.00 (hb); $29.00 pb. the endorsements adorning the back of barbara ambros’ enticing monograph describe bones of contention: animals and religion in contemporary japan as a study of pet memorial rites in the archipelago, but the book is about much more than that. bones of contention offers a detailed portrait of pet rituals in contemporary japan through the lens of a broader history of animal memorial rites in east asia, and describes the significant role that animals have played in japanese culture as divine, shape-shifting, and disparaged creatures. in introducing the reasons that pet memorialization forms a contentious subject in contemporary japan as her book title suggests, ambros outlines a number of broader debates on animals in japanese culture. she begins with a detailed, historical counterpoint to the all-too-familiar claim by cultural nationalists and hopeful, but uninformed, scholars of western history and religion that japanese culture offers an alternative, less dominionist attitude towards animals. ambros’s refreshing perspective proves these claims of japanese exceptionalism utterly wrong. her accounts of buddhist and shinto ritual convincingly illustrate that these religions have not functioned as an antidote to anthropocentric views of the judeo-christian west. not only does ambros’ history of commemorative animal memorials show japanese religious thought about animals to have changed over time, but she shows how attention to religious ceremony enables us to “transcend an overly idealistic reading of japanese religious traditions and their views on animals” (18). as part of depicting animals in memorial practice, ambros outlines historical conceptions of what an animal was. the various terms used for animals in the premodern period suggest that the concept of “animal” was fluid and that there was a stronger sense of connection among the animal, human, and spiritual realms than in the modern period. terms used to refer to animals depended on whether the emphasis lay on differentiating among animals, determining relative degrees of kinship among animals, differentiating animals from humans, or delineating modes of connection with the spiritual realm. this attention to past classifications of animals sheds light on the unfortunate narrowing of terms used to describe animals in the modern period such humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 206 that they can be referred to in various disciplines as a single undifferentiated unit (the “nonhuman” or “the animal”) primarily to give reference to the human. ambros’ analysis of different historical taxonomies shows that the singular category of “animal” was not just a product of western modernity but developed through buddhist and neoconfucian cosmologies as well. by arguing that speciesist associations with animals cannot simply be the product of the rise of modernity and western attitudes (48), her work goes far in undoing the myth of japanese exceptionalism and the conventional contemporary privileging of buddhist thought as more ethical toward animals in japan. ambros continues with the subject of claimed exceptionalism for japanese treatment of animals and nature in her history of modern animal ritual. she shows how contemporary native animism (from the 1970s) enabled citizens to use animals for utilitarian purposes even as it treated them as spiritual beings, and how religious belief turned animals into willing martyrs for the sake of the nation’s progress and prosperity (51). ambros is always careful to provide analogies from other cultures in time, never deeming japan a unique or special case either in its care or abuse of animals. this makes her understanding of animals in japanese culture compelling and a far cry from the kind of essentialist claims she finds in some western scholarship such as the example of an historian who “is able to construct the japanese as exceptional by downplaying the role of animal domestication in japanese history, by homogenizing human-animal relationships in japan without regard to historical, regional, or class differences, and by ignoring the heavy use of nostalgia in contemporary japanese pop culture” (22). animal memorial rites may have emerged in the premodern period, but it is with the relatively recent commodification of animals that animal memorial rites began to pursue a “ritualized perfection in the face of the mechanized and often bloody realities of modernity” (52). ambros vigorously asserts that “although precursors are evident during the medieval period, such as the ritual release of animals and hunting rites, animal memorial rites emerged during the early modern period and became increasingly widespread as japan became an economic superpower in the twentieth century,” (54). in the case of bears, ambros shows that “by the early nineteenth century, bear memorials were being erected not to counter existing spirit retribution such as illness (as in the example from the 1730s), infertility, or the strange death of a hunter but to preempt retribution, allowing hunters to continue taking bears unharmed” (57). the same went for whales. the earliest memorials date from the mid-seventeenth century when whalers increasingly used nets to harvest. as with bear memorials, whaling memorials serve to justify the taking of the game. horses prove to be another example of the way in which the increased use of animal for labor and food meant the increase in christine l. marran – pets, death, and taxes 207 rituals. in this case, the decreased use of horses in the postwar period meant the decrease in memorial rites for horses. less surprising were the memorials erected for horses used in the military. (in continuing with her comparative perspective, ambros cites western examples of similar belief that animals were meant to serve human purposes, though she argues that animals were not considered to possess spirits capable of salvation, as in the early modern japan case.) ultimately, ambros calls these kinds of early modern and modern memorials to animals used in consumption, for military purposes, in lab experiments, for service animals, and in zoos “invented traditions” — elaborate rituals disguised as tradition that serve to diffuse the commodification of animals by treating the animals as important agents in building empire, medical institutions, and community, and who are constructed as having sacrificed themselves to such purposes. through an array of compelling examples, ambros successfully shows that as the commodification of animals has increased in the contemporary period, so have memorial rites. ambros’s twist to familiar histories of anthropocentric dominionism is to show how attitudes about animals emerge from the dead. writing from the perspective of necrogeography allows her to show how animals straddle the natural, the domestic, the metamorphic, and spiritual worlds. on the one hand, depictions of the memorialization of animal bodies suggest a rejection of a deeply exploitative world when we consider the memorialized animal ashes in the urns of cramped cemetery plots in buddhist cemeteries in the archipelago. on the other hand, memorials such as those for lab animals seem little more than a gloss for protecting uninterrupted medical research. after discussing animal ritual in the context of labor and consumption, ambros turns to the domestication of some animals as pets and the pet memorials for deceased pets. she begins with an extended history of pet-keeping in a cross-cultural context illustrating that domestic animals were primarily kept by social elites in premodern japan until the post-ww2 period when pet-keeping became a more widespread phenomenon. ambros is particularly interested in the shift when nonhuman animals came to be considered part of the family unit. she argues that pet memorial rites have little in common with memorial rites used for animals that legitimized imperial, national, and so-called traditional practices, because they do not reside within a broad network of relationships. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 208 in explaining the rise of pet memorial rites, ambros observes that “in the second half of the twentieth century the scope of memorial rites has been expanded to include a wide variety of beings and inanimate objects from mizuko [aborted fetuses] and pets to eyeglasses and brassiers.” she suggests that japan’s long history of buddhist funeral and memorial services and contemporary declining birthrates have encouraged buddhist temples to seek new ways to produce revenue. ultimately, pet memorials are used by people who would embrace similar treatment of humans and animals in life and in death, and are provided by an institution that needs revenue like any other. these services, as ambros shows in detail, can then be subject to taxation, thus providing revenue to the state. in terms of disciplinary frame, ambros’s study falls squarely within the parameters of animal geography when she is most concerned with place, especially the landscape of the dead, the taxing of the dead, and the mediatization of the dead. in describing the usefulness of framing her research in terms of animal geography, she cites the relatively new insights found in such texts as philo and wilbert’s animal spaces, beastly places: new geographies of human-animal relations (2000) and wolch and emel’s animal geographies: place, politics, and identity in the nature-culture borderlands (1998). these latter studies of animal geography explore the ways in which human culture has articulated the human-animal divide and subjected animals to social and spatial practices of inclusion and exclusion (14). one might also cite julie urbanik’s more recent placing animals: an introduction to the geography of human-animal relations (2012). in general, ambros does not argue for the importance of any particular disciplinary approach or for placing her work specifically within an established academic discipline or field. this is liberating in the sense that the incredible variety of primary sources, and descriptions of religious and state practices involving animals are themselves the focus of the chapters. an admirable example of religious and cultural anthropology, and necrogeography, bones of contention examines ritualized treatment of animals to show changing conceptions of human and nonhuman animal difference, and how japanese individuals and institutions have chosen particular animal bodies as worthy of special attention for utilitarian, symbolic, spiritual, and economic purposes. microsoft word aigner-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:2 andreas aigner, karl pieper, and herwig grimm “post-anthropocentrism” in animal philosophy and ethics: the disparity of the prefix “post” 1. introduction. in the wake of peter singer’s and tom regan’s famous works on animal ethics, new paradigms are constantly being sought out to redefine the relationship between humans and animals and to enable a better life for those life forms recognized as having moral value. these new paradigms are constituted in continuity with singer’s or regan’s aims to formulate concrete principles on behalf of animals or are meant to create alternatives to speciesist positions in regards to animal rights or welfare. examples can be found in virtue-ethical (e.g. nussbaum; hursthouse), pragmatic (e.g. mcreynolds), and contractarian (e.g. rowlands) approaches, as well as in approaches associated with contemporary continental philosophy, such as deconstruction and poststructuralism (e.g. derrida; haraway).1 however, while leaving behind speciesist prejudices, i.e. the categorical exclusion of nonhuman animals from moral consideration, the issue of anthropocentrism, which denominates the concept of the human (or the notion of human subjectivity) and human capacities (e.g. reason) as the benchmarks of moral value, remains unsolved in many aspects. as will be shown, anthropocentrism may not necessarily be considered as a particular form of speciesism, but rather as opposed to it. additionally, the critique of anthropocentrism may target two different aspects, a moral problem and an epistemic problem. deconstructive or poststructuralist approaches often diverge from other positions in animal ethics, as their critique of anthropocentrism additionally addresses the epistemic level. currently, one of the most discussed critiques of these aspects of anthropocentrism is jacques derrida’s. he deconstructs2 epistemic assumptions concerning the clear differentiation between humans and animals, arguing against an anthropocentric hierarchy, which can also be found in supposedly non-anthropocentric lines of thought. this approach has been favorably received by leonard lawlor and cary wolfe, but has also been subject to widespread critique, such as gary steiner’s. steiner argues that, by questioning the ideal of truth, “derrida fails to articulate any clear moral principles bearing on our relationship to animals” (anthropocentrism and its discontents 5), which he himself believes are the cornerstones of a better human-animal relationship. as they attempt to alter the anthropocentric perception of animals, steiner’s and the deconstructive approaches, though diametrically opposed, are both ascribed to the field andreas aigner, karl pieper, and herwig grimm -“post-anthropocentrism” in animal philosophy and ethics 57 of post-anthropocentrism. this already indicates the complex heterogeneity of the postanthropocentric field, which can be illustrated by these contrary positions. the heterogeneity is twofold: on the one hand, it is grounded in the disparity of the notions of anthropocentrism, on the other hand in the process of overcoming, i.e. the “post.” while the precarious notion of anthropocentrism has been subject to extensive discussion (cf. e.g. boddice), the various implications of the “post” remain unconsidered. the heterogeneity faced in the post-anthropocentric debate is not only an ambiguity of “anthropocentrism,” but an ambiguity of the prefix “post.” illustrated by the positions of derrida and steiner, this paper additionally focuses on the process of how anthropocentrism is surpassed rather than on what is surpassed, because a discourse that seeks to argue on behalf of animals should not be ignorant of its own methodological preconceptions. after a short terminological clarification regarding anthropocentrism (section 2), derrida’s approach to the question of the animal and the “post” in deconstructivist postanthropocentrism (respectively: post-humanism) will be illustrated. in doing so, we also refer to wolfe’s work, because his reading of derrida and his notion of post-humanism can help to make our point clear. it is important to note that we do not intend to identify derrida’s and wolfe’s respective positions, nor do we seek to compare them. the references to wolfe are rather used in order to illustrate our own understanding of derrida and the post-humanist “post” (section 3). as a counterpoint, we outline gary steiner’s analysis of the limits of postmodernism and his own specific “post” in overcoming anthropocentrism, and compare it to derrida’s account (section 4). it will be concluded that these different “posts” are associated with different notions of excess: depending on the approach, excess may be considered as human behavior with negative connotations, which the “post” should overcome, or as a process inherent to each normative or argumentative structure, be it an anthropocentric or a supposedly post-anthropocentric line of thought (section 5). 2. what is anthropocentrism? to approach the field of the “post,” it is paramount to distinguish carefully between the different conceptions of the problems in humananimal relationship which it concerns. one of the primary issues animal ethicists, animal welfarists, and animal rightists strove to overcome was speciesism.3 in speciesism, belonging to a certain species is the basic criteria for moral consideration and provides the reason to discount members of other species. being a member of a species is considered to be a sufficient criterion for the recognition of moral standing (cf. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 58 rippe 47-52). regarding human-animal relationship, a speciesist perspective is fundamentally sustained by “false notions of what animals are like” (spiegel 30). it is not only these false ascriptions to animals that are at stake here, but also the supposition that the characteristics possessed by humans entail moral superiority: “it is only an anthropocentric world view which makes the qualities possessed by humans to be those by which all other species are measured” (23). because, on this view, only humans possess morally relevant characteristics, anthropocentrism may be defined as a form of speciesism, in which being a member of the human species is the particular criterion for moral consideration. it thereby excludes all nonhuman species from moral consideration on the grounds that they are not human is speciesist and anthropocentric. considering some crucial aspects of these terms may challenge this differentiation between speciesism and anthropocentrism as its subcategory. “speciesism” (analogous to “racism”) is essentially a term with negative connotations, underpinned by false ascriptions: claiming an exceptional moral status for humans is not based on plausible reasons. if a plausible reason existed, the term “speciesism” would no longer be appropriate for describing the exclusion of nonhuman animals from moral consideration (cf. rippe 51). in anthropocentrism, the moral prioritization of humans is justified by relying on certain “typical” human characteristics (which by themselves are not necessarily false ascriptions): every anthropocentric argument that prioritizes humans over nonhuman animals already entails a clear differentiation between “us” and “them” on an epistemic level — “us” being defined by certain characteristics — , whereas “speciesism” is a species-neutral term, apparently not necessarily referring to the human or to human characteristics.4 thus, the exclusion of nonhuman animals from moral consideration is human-centered and anthropocentric, but not necessarily speciesist.5 even if not all nonhuman animals are excluded from moral consideration, this does not entail the overcoming of anthropocentrism, but only the overcoming of speciesism. an ethical argument may seek to include a variety of nonhuman species into the moral community by justifying the argument with the moral relevance of specific characteristics in these species. therefore, the argument is non-speciesist, but the epistemological process identifying the supposedly morally relevant characteristics is unavoidably anthropocentric. here, the human is not necessarily the center of moral consideration, but the “epistemological center” determining or acknowledging the moral value of the human and nonhuman species. in this sense, moral consideration of nonhuman animals means the overcoming of speciesism, whether one follows pathocentric, biocentric, or other lines of argumentation. but even if speciesism has been overcome, anthropocentrism surfaces in andreas aigner, karl pieper, and herwig grimm -“post-anthropocentrism” in animal philosophy and ethics 59 an epistemic form. in contrast to speciesism, this epistemic anthropocentrism simply describes the inevitability of a human perspective, without implying human superiority: “the fact that all values are seen or acknowledged from a human perspective does not tell us what we have reason to value, or what is valuable” (samuelsson 638). but even if that is true, as soon as specific characteristics in different species are actually recognized as being morally relevant, the question arises, how exactly did these characteristics happen to be recognized in this way? for example, as herwig grimm illustrates, peter singer’s appeal to consider certain animals morally depends on the recognition of humanlike characteristics in those animals (grimm 285288). recognizing a certain characteristic as being morally relevant is not based on some “perspective-neutral” or objective insight, but requires a specific human perspective, human categories, or epistemological differentiations between the human (whatever notion of the human this may be) and other animals. grimm points out that in singer’s argument the ability to suffer (or the interest not to suffer) is not only an accidental characteristic humans happen to have in addition to many other nonhuman animals. realizing that humans can suffer and therefore are not to be harmed is not just a consequence of realizing that all animals capable of suffering have to be morally considered (and thus be equally considered). here, on an epistemic level, humans must already have an idea of what it is like to suffer before they can formulate ethical arguments seeking to include all animals capable of suffering into the moral community. so, in this case, the recognition of a morally relevant characteristic in humans precedes the appeal to moral consideration for all animals capable of suffering. thus, singer overcomes speciesism in human-animal relations, but not epistemic anthropocentrism. hence, singer’s line of argumentation can be described as nonspeciesist (epistemic) anthropocentrism (ibid.). to a certain degree, such a position may be ascribed to what paula cavalieri describes as “perfectionism,” i.e. the assumption that conscious beings “deserve different consideration according to their level of possession of certain characteristics” (3). if humans, or a certain notion of the human or human characteristics, are the “perfectionistic” measure of moral value or the epistemological starting point for ethical arguments, then moral consideration of other animals is a question of similarity: the closer nonhuman animals supposedly are to us (for example in terms of consciousness or the interest not to suffer), the more we feel obliged to protect them from harm. but, on the other hand, if a human perspective is inevitable for us, do we have an alternative, epistemologically non-anthropocentric way of problematizing the suffering of animals? humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 60 to address this epistemic problem, for cary wolfe the main reference point in criticizing anthropocentrism is the humanist notion of subjectivity, that is, referring to the autonomous subject characterized by rationality and agency (what is posthumanism? xiii, 99; animal rites 1-17). wolfe’s argument is primarily based on derrida’s critique of logocentrism. this logocentric notion of the subject identifies humans as being humans, in contrast to animals, and therefore, it effectively avoids seeing human beings as human animals. as long as this notion of the “human” is accepted as a “fact” we reproduce — on an epistemic level — what we attempt to overcome: anthropocentrism (cf. e.g. boddice 3; grimm). thus, explicitly or implicitly attributing humanlike characteristics to animals (or acknowledging these characteristics in them) is not only searching for “the human” in animals (cf. grimm), but is also reproducing a humanist notion of subjectivity. it becomes obvious that placing the anthropos in the “center” is not just an issue of explicit political orientation, but also of implicit structures within normative concepts. according to this perspective, it may be doubted that supposedly morally relevant characteristics are defined generically (from a neutral or objective point of view) without any implicit “human bias” preceding this definition. thus, the definitions of anthropocentrism vary depending on the argumentative approaches. this is also due to the fact that anybody who works in the field of normative relations to animals needs to address this vital issue in some way, which results in a great number of positions and viewpoints. actually, two different forms of anthropocentrism are distinguished in animal ethics, philosophy, and related disciplines: moral anthropocentrism and epistemic anthropocentrism. the former is a normative concept (viewing the human and “specific” human characteristics as indicators for moral superiority) and the latter is the way humans perceive and understand things (cf. sandkühler 125; chimaira arbeitskreis 414; rippe 94-95; ach 3941). another attempt at defining anthropocentrism is rob boddice’s. boddice states that anthropocentrism can be related to a political orientation or to an ontological fact (7). anthropocentrism as a political orientation refers to a supposed superiority of humans over animals (in analogy to moral anthropocentrism); anthropocentrism as an ontological fact describes the concept that humans are only able to structure or perceive the world from a human point of view. however, the latter could be more accurately described as an epistemic problem rather than an ontological one, because boddice’s concept derives the notion of being from the notions of perception and experience. therefore, a differentiation between ethical-political (or “moral”) and epistemic anthropocentrism seems more appropriate in this case. as a fact that unavoidably defines human experience, epistemic anthropocentrism may be alternatively designated “anthropocentricity.” andreas aigner, karl pieper, and herwig grimm -“post-anthropocentrism” in animal philosophy and ethics 61 stimulated by the awareness of this “multi-levelled” anthropocentrism, two questions arise: first, which of these aspects of anthropocentrism can be subject to critique? and second, how can anthropocentrism be criticized by post-anthropocentric positions? this “how” refers to the terminology used to form ethical arguments: do authors seek out an argumentative clarity and transparency, which means not using equivocal terms or potentially confusing and unclear expressions, but instead striving towards a concrete applicability of their arguments, or are their arguments (supposedly) missing such a clarity, thus making it much more difficult to formulate concrete principles on behalf of nonhuman animals? of course, the form of the language in an ethical argument is based on the theoretical background of the author and is related to his or her political agenda. but in addition to the theoretical justification of ethical arguments within different postanthropocentric approaches, the “how” of argumentation also evokes a different concept of the “post” on a performative level. some approaches to postanthropocentrism are defined by a clear argumentative structure, presenting the argument as a step-by-step guideline in describing, understanding, and overcoming moral anthropocentrism. jacques derrida performatively undermines what these positions present as a solution to the problems in human-animal relationship. not just derrida’s “theories,” but also his argumentative style opposes the idea of the “post” as a simple overcoming of these problems. 3. the “post” in post-humanism. jacques derrida points out that the clear distinction between humans and animals, or even the concept of such a distinction in the first place, must be approached with extreme caution regarding its consequences in practical terms (cf. the animal that therefore i am). he suggests that every clear pattern of distinction produces inclusion and exclusion and therefore a hierarchy (binary hierarchical oppositions). the problem, as set out by the deconstructive approach, is not the act of distinction itself, but rather the static pattern, which these distinctions tend to follow. derrida not only expounds the problem of declaring human abilities such as rationality and language the ultimate criterion for moral value, but he distrusts the epistemic notion which implies that the human is separated from the animal by rationality and language. in his view, the core of “logocentrism” lies in the assumption of a specific distinction between the human and the animal. derrida proposes to deconstruct the basic concept of the human itself by “asking whether what calls itself human has the right rigorously to attribute to man, which means therefore to attribute humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 62 to himself, what he refuses the animal, and whether he can ever possess the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of that attribution” (135). although derrida rejects the clear distinction between humans and animals, this rejection does not imply any kind of biological continuity between animals and humans (30). for derrida, animals represent otherness at its purest (107). this is important because the confrontation with the other enables subjectivity and discursive reality — even if “we never have any access to the other as such” (“hospitality, justice and responsibility” 71). being confronted with the other, the subject is not able to respond as a clearly identifiable “i” as well. in other words, our relatedness to the other entails a fundamental passivity. this abyssal situation is repeated when we are confronted with the animal’s gaze (the animal that therefore i am 12). this illustrates that for derrida the ethical question of the human-animal relationship is always a question of our own subjectivity: who or what is this “i”? and, who is this subject, which the other confronts with its gaze? thus, derrida’s critique of anthropocentrism focuses on the notion of an autonomous subject and the clear distinction between the human and the animal rather than on formulating concrete moral principles that are based on an unquestioned notion of moral agency. following derrida in his critique of anthropocentrism (respectively, logocentrism), cary wolfe focuses on the problematic aspects of humanism and proposes a new notion of the term “post-humanism” (what is posthumanism?). post-humanistic thinking does not simply refer to the unmasking of a nonhuman core in the human, but to the recognition of the existence of nonhuman subjectivity in the sphere of living beings (ibid. 47). wolfe wants us “to rethink our taken-for granted modes of human experience” (ibid. xxv). he criticizes humanism not for its values, but for its conception of human subjectivity, which is itself grounded on a discrimination against nonhuman animals (of course, this raises the question whether it is really possible to criticize the humanist conception of subjectivity without criticizing humanist values) (ibid. xvi-xvii). therefore, wolfe’s notion of post-humanism is a form of post-anthropocentrism that refers to the epistemic aspect of anthropocentrism. even if wolfe’s and derrida’s positions are not identical, wolfe’s definition of post-humanism explicates important aspects of derrida’s approach to the question of the animal. we do not seek to identify or compare wolfe’s and derrida’s respective positions. instead, we focus on a derridaean perspective on posthumanism that questions what wolfe calls “taken-for-granted modes of human experience.” subsequently, we refer to the “post” of post-humanism as excess inherent in epistemic processes and normative and argumentative structures. andreas aigner, karl pieper, and herwig grimm -“post-anthropocentrism” in animal philosophy and ethics 63 here, it is important to proceed carefully. post-humanism does not criticize the (supposed) fact of an unavoidable human viewpoint or the reliance on humanistic values per se, but two other aspects. first, it criticizes the epistemic process behind the attempt to protect nonhuman animals that implicitly regards human characteristics (and only these) as paradigmatic for the moral consideration of these animals. as stated above, recognizing certain characteristics to be morally relevant is not independent from recognizing these characteristics as being morally relevant to humans. second, and even more importantly, post-humanism also critically addresses a viewpoint that conceptualizes the human as an identifiable “center of thinking or recognition” that would be opposed to a recognizable world (or to the animal) in a dualistic manner. on this level of critique, the clear differentiation between the human and other animals (respectively the animal) is radically undermined. the structure of the “post” in derrida’s post-humanism follows the deconstructive conception of the “post” as an incalculability within each “act of (a never fully achievable) overcoming,” while usually the term “post” is employed to refer to a temporal or conceptual “after.” the post-humanist “post” is located in the conception of demarcation as a multiplicity of borders in the differentiation between humans and animals. the purpose is not the complete annulment of borders, but the acknowledgement of heterogeneous borders and the permeability of borders per se (cf. the animal that therefore i am 48) instead of one clearly defined separation. thus, the use of “post” refers to the issue that overcoming (political and moral) anthropocentrism does not lead to certainty, but to yet another contingency. the envisaged era after anthropocentrism can never be fully achieved. post-humanism is the depiction of the contingency of every notion of a “post-anthropocentric era,” e.g. as visualized in animal rights discourse. as a consequence, the post-humanist “post” abandons the ideal of a homogeneous worldview or a universal ethical system. it conceives of an ethical or just act as not per se determined by referring to a fixed measure, like a morally normative system, which could guarantee justice. nevertheless, the deconstructive perspective does not consider itself in terms of an ethical nihilism. derrida’s deconstruction rejects the idea of justice as being calculable for the long term by installing a fixed set of rules or rights. instead, justice itself is “excessive” and incalculable, and thus each “just decision” we make has to be verified in each singular situation. also, this verification, although necessary, is always at risk of failing. we always have to consider that we may be producing new injustices when relying on (pre-) established modes of thinking and static conceptions of “right” or “wrong.” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 64 with regard to animal ethics, this entails that a more just relationship between humans and animals cannot be achieved simply by formulating a set of principles: can we, for example, ever be sure that our criteria for including certain beings into the moral community are fully just toward beings (singular others) not meeting the requirements for inclusion? derrida’s style of writing reflects this question in a performative way, by being evocative, questioning, indefinite, ambiguous, and non-linear (at least when measured against the standard of analytic philosophy). derrida confronts us with an incalculable “post,” which refutes definite decisions while at the same time urging us to take a close look at possible inconsistencies in supposedly consistent arguments, or at possible injustices behind supposedly just actions. quite paradoxically, the experience of “undecidability” that precedes every clear decision is the very condition for justice (cf. derrida, “force of law” 963-967). nevertheless, even if the application of concrete laws violates this idea of justice, laws actually need to be applied; law and justice are interlinked. as derrida states, “justice requires the law. you can’t simply call for justice without trying to embody justice in the law” (“hospitality, justice and responsibility” 72). we are obliged to decide and to apply laws, but this decision may only be potentially just as a “free decision” without relying on established rules. as soon as a decision has taken place and new “potentially just” rules or laws are established, however, these rules can no longer be considered as just (except in a legal sense). no decision we make can ever be affirmed as fully just (cf. “force of law” 965); justice, though a matter of urgency, is always “post,” always “to come” (cf. ibid. 969-71). it may be argued that this derridean “undecidability” gives rise to a critical and rather cynical objection: if we can never be sure to fully attain justice, why try anyway? how can we decide responsibly, if we don’t know what is right? as a matter of fact, derrida addresses exactly these questions without any cynical undertone: many of those who have written about deconstruction understand undecidability as paralysis in face of the power to decide. that is not what i would understand by “undecidability.” far from opposing undecidability to decision, i would argue that there would be no decision, in the strong sense of the word, in ethics, in politics, no decisions, and thus no responsibility, without the experience of some undecidability. […] so when i say “i don’t know what to do,” this is not the negative condition of decision. it is rather the possibility of a decision. not knowing what to do does not mean that we have to rely on ignorance and to give up knowledge and consciousness. a decision, of course, must be prepared as far as possible by knowledge, by information, by infinite analysis. at some andreas aigner, karl pieper, and herwig grimm -“post-anthropocentrism” in animal philosophy and ethics 65 point, however, for a decision to be made you have to go beyond knowledge, to do something that you don’t know, something which does not belong to, or is beyond, the sphere of knowledge. (“hospitality, justice and responsibility” 66) post-humanist deconstruction takes into account this relation between undecidability and our search for just decisions regarding our dealings with animals. as will be outlined more thoroughly in section 5, the “post” of post-humanism highlights that the excessive element within epistemic processes and normative structures is no negative condition for justice, but is inscribed into justice itself. 4. gary steiner and the “post” in humanist post-anthropocentrism. in contrast to the deconstructive approach, gary steiner does not locate the problem of anthropocentrism in the general distinction between humans and animals, but in the conclusion that the lack of certain (“human”) capacities entails a reduced moral worth (these frequently stressed abilities are, amongst others, language and abstract reason) (cf. “tierrecht und die grenzen des postmodernismus: der fall derrida” 10). what steiner discusses is the problem of an anthropocentric evaluation of the moral value of animals as it arises when human capacities are the sole reference. steiner seeks to abolish neither the distinction between humans and animals in all aspects, nor the humanist categories of moral and political rights. he strongly emphasizes that humans are fully rational agents and as such “able to perform the dialectical operations involved in generating a sphere of right not only for themselves but for these others [animals] as well. […] the resulting community is thus not restricted to fully rational beings but it is instead broad enough to embrace all beings that share in our subjective struggle for life and well-being” (animals and the moral community 162). steiner invokes a moral community for all sentient individuals, whether they are human or not. furthermore, he claims equal moral consideration for all members of this community. in steiner’s opinion this leads to immediate political consequences, such as veganism (163). steiner characterizes his own approach as a cosmic holism which integrates liberal individualism (anthropocentrism and its discontents 251), focusing on the notion of the “individual” and claiming that many animals possess sufficient cognitive equipment to qualify as individuals even if they do not qualify as rational individuals; the immediate moral question with regard to animals is how to do justice to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 66 them as individuals. (among other things, i leave aside the question whether duties of cosmic justice are owed to non-sentient living beings.) (animals and the moral community 154-155) furthermore, steiner assumes that “human beings are part of a larger cosmic whole and have a fundamental kinship relation to animals” (anthropocentrism and its discontents 18). therefore, the sphere of human social rights has to be supplemented by reference to a cosmic justice which demands nonviolence toward animals, and consequently, veganism (animals and the moral community 163). with these concrete claims, steiner seeks to demonstrate why and how in the specific field of the animal rights debate the deconstructive approach (for steiner, postmodernism in general) falls short. accordingly, by “entering this poppy field [of postmodernism], we abandon the ideal of truth, and we render obscure if not entirely incoherent the idea of a basis for making ethical determinations that can be discussed and defended” (animals and the limits of postmodernism 8). therefore, postmodernism is unable to formulate any clear principles on behalf of animals. for steiner, this shortcoming originates in the assumption that universal rationales are contingent and therefore no longer universal. steiner himself adheres to the universal rationale of cosmic holism, which replaces the rationale of human superiority over animals. in contrast to wolfe’s (and derrida’s) post-humanism in human-animal relations, steiner’s post-anthropocentrism is the overcoming of one universal rationale by another. steiner’s “post” does not suggest an era after epistemic anthropocentrism, but an era after political (respectively: moral) anthropocentrism. thus, his “post” does not entail the abandonment of humanist concepts of subjectivity. steiner rather argues that humanism can be divested of its anthropocentric prejudice (5) by leaving behind the “bad aspects” of humanism (moral predominance of humans) and keeping the “good aspects” (individualism, liberty, etc.). steiner thus diverges from post-humanism regarding the what of the “post.” but additionally, steiner’s ethical concept and political agenda demonstrate a clear argumentative structure and writing style, which delivers a clear problem description followed by a well-defined solution to the problem (as many positions in animal ethics do): the description of an anthropocentric status quo is counteracted by the illustration of a post-anthropocentric solution in a normative manner. this example shows that the what in overcoming anthropocentrism can be contrasted to the formal how of problematizing anthropocentrism within a normative domain. the terminology steiner’s arguments are based on performatively supports the idea of “post” as the overcoming of a concrete problem and therefore a temporal “after.” andreas aigner, karl pieper, and herwig grimm -“post-anthropocentrism” in animal philosophy and ethics 67 steiner’s approach follows a structure analogous to other current theories in the field of animal ethics. they understand the inherent value or inherent worth of animals, or living beings in general, as something independent of human interpretation. inherent moral value is not attributed to animals, it can only be acknowledged. in steiner’s approach, rationality and “dialectical operations” (animals and the moral community 162) are the conditions of possibility for this acknowledgement of inherent value and therefore the moral consideration of animals. however, because ethics is confronted with practical issues (such as the suffering of animals), this acknowledgement is also determined by the recognition of the presence or absence of certain attributes or characteristics, such as sentience. the example of gary steiner’s ethics shows how it is possible to emphasize the worth of all living beings in a post-anthropocentric manner, but that we, at the same time, need to formulate specific criteria for inclusion into the “moral community.” steiner does not explicitly exclude non-sentient (“non-individual”) beings from moral consideration, but he cannot include them effectively as “fullyfledged members” in the moral community (154-155). it seems as if the basis of steiner’s political position, i.e. veganism (163), is different from his ethical position. whereas for the moral community sentience is the most important criterion, this cannot be the case for veganism. a perfect example of the difficulties that present themselves for this form of post-anthropocentric ethics is the case of the oyster. steiner describes this issue as follows: “oysters possess no central nervous system and thus are not even capable of sensations of pain; they are so lacking in sentience that it seems absurd to accord them any moral status, let alone a status on a par with human beings. nevertheless, my working hypothesis leaves open this possibility” (anthropocentrism and its discontents 6). the issue here seems to be that although oysters may be included in a general appeal for veganism, their inclusion in the moral community remains problematic because of their lack of sentience and, thus, their lack of inherent value. as a consequence, there is an important difference between the acknowledgement of a moral community of all sentient beings and the political claim for veganism. furthermore, steiner prioritizes life forms, that is sentient individuals, which are presumed by humans to somehow value their lives in a similar way as humans do. as stated above with regard to singer, it may also be doubted that this is simply an accidental part of steiner’s argument. within steiner’s style of argumentation this may be less “obvious” than in singer’s “similar-minds approach” (francione 130).6 insofar as a being is not able to “value its life” (expressed through its struggle for life and well humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 68 being), it may fall short of demanding moral consideration by ethical systems such as steiner’s. consequently, our ethical duty is towards life forms that can “experience life as (a meaningful) life,” which implicitly evokes the concept of the humanist anthropos. even if steiner does not claim as much directly, his arguments nevertheless leave this impression, which is demonstrated by the following quote: “the better we understand the nature of animal experience and recognize the ways in which it is like our own, the more we will appreciate the sense in which we truncate the notion of justice by restricting it to the human sphere” (animals and the moral community 163). expanding the sphere of rights (and thus justice) to other animals requires two things: first, a clear, liberal, definition of the human (a notion of how it is to be human), and the recognition of universal human rights; and second, a comparison between our experiences and the experiences of other (sentient, individual) animals, because “liberal theory” needs a “holistic sense of kinship with animals” (154). understanding animals, or at least a certain “animal experience,” has to be carried out against the background of our own experience. although steiner wants “to let animals beings be in such a way that we no longer project upon them a diminished reflection of our own image,” we effectively should “value their mortality as we value our own.” he ultimately states: “we must learn to identify with animals, to see ourselves in them and them in ourselves” (137). therefore, we owe justice to animals as individual beings quite similar to us: “what is at stake is not love of the native soil or a totalizing concern for nature in the abstract but rather moral concern for sentient individuals whose lives matter to them just as much as our lives matter to us” (155). to conclude, “doing avoidable violence to one’s kin is fundamentally wrong” (animals and the limits of postmodernism 203). for steiner, there is a “fundamental sameness of all sentient beings” because “the basic terms of life and death are essentially the same for all sentient beings. humans and animals are, existentially, in exactly the same predicament: both must survive and give life meaning […] in the face of the constant yet indeterminate threat of death” (198). because sentient animals “have an interest in not suffering,” we must therefore “treat them legally as persons” (animals and the moral community 102). even though steiner stresses the moral value of sentient individuals, he wants to overcome the “seeming contradiction between cosmic holism and liberal individualism” (157). according to him, we have to acknowledge a “larger world context” (animals and the limits of postmodernism 194) or a certain natural or cosmic order within which sentient beings can (or rather: should) “realize their natural potential” (195). this is to say that sentient beings give their life meaning by realizing their natural potential. therefore, to prevent these beings from realizing their natural potential is to leave them with a meaningless life — or to the ultimate meaninglessness andreas aigner, karl pieper, and herwig grimm -“post-anthropocentrism” in animal philosophy and ethics 69 of death. steiner’s moral claim is that sentient beings “for whom life is meaningful” should not be “harmed or impeded in their conscious endeavours to make sense of the world” (203). sentient nonhuman animals matter as much as humans “in the cosmic scheme of things” (205). moral values, therefore, are not construed but something “given” within the cosmic whole, and we humans ought to acknowledge this. steiner does not intend to evoke the naïve image of a harmonious world deprived of any destruction and violence, but he nevertheless opts for limiting ourselves only to necessary acts of violence against animals (for example in case of self-defence) in order “to minimize the destruction that we cause” (ibid. 209). it seems that in steiner’s opinion only human violence and licentiousness are to be considered unnecessary, because in contrast to other animals we are not only more destructive, but we also are able to restrict our (natural?) destructive potential. only a life in an era after anthropocentrism supposedly would be worth living, and thus reducing unnecessary violence is an effort “to make sense of the world.” therefore, the ultimate meaning of life would be in terms of being able to realize one’s natural potential. in this regard, the “post” in steiner’s post-anthropocentrism literally “makes sense” (in contrast to the “post” in post-humanism, which does not refer to a concrete temporal “after”). according to steiner, his political agenda can be derived from and justified by his ethical system, but as we saw above in the oyster example, this is not the case. his political claim for veganism does not necessarily result from his ethical system (cosmic holism, cosmic justice for sentient beings). even if this objection possibly overstates the oyster counterexample — as steiner himself concedes, “the vegan imperative provides no guarantee that we will not encounter some irreducible conflicts” (ibid.) —, it raises a question that must be addressed by many advocates of animal rights: it is not clear whether the political agenda is based on or supported by an ethical system or vice versa, that is, can ethics be used to justify a political agenda? in the latter approach, the obvious contingency of political claims is covered by furnishing an ethical system after the fact. regarding steiner’s position, it does not seem as if the principles of a cosmic order and liberal individualism (or a liberalist political agenda) are “recognized simultaneously,” but the acknowledgement of liberal individualism — as well as the recognition of its shortcomings — precedes the recourse to a larger cosmic context. here, referring to a cosmic whole as a (potential) “guarantee for universal justness” supposedly saves liberal individualism and humanism from failing.7 moreover, once “liberal theory” recognizes the moral value of all sentient beings, the notion of a cosmic order itself supposedly becomes freed from a contingent anthropocentric perspective. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 70 even if steiner would deny this, it seems as if here the existence of some cosmic order depends on humans acting in its name. by acknowledging that justice is to be seen “in terms of natural entitlements that sentient beings have” (226), the reliance on nature and cosmos would then somehow potentially “guarantee” the justness of the vegan lifestyle. even if steiner admits that there is no ultimate guarantee for justness, humans would nonetheless act justly “by seeking to reduce violence in the world” (227). through steiner’s line of reasoning, new hierarchies and exclusions are produced (sentient life forms vs. others), which is exactly what deconstructive approaches criticize. as a “humanist post-anthropocentrist,” steiner is well aware of this issue; there are many “very difficult questions that await resolution, and some of them may never ultimately be resolved with mathematical precision. […] moral reflection is not a recursive procedure that a computer could be programmed to perform” (202). regarding his vegan imperative, steiner even seems to recognize a certain degree of “undecidability” in a vague derridean sense, because “veganism presents itself as an infinite task, one that the terms of existence make ultimately unfulfillable and that must therefore be seen as a regulative ideal for our conduct. living in accordance with the vegan imperative is not like turning on a light switch. it is like delving ever deeper into uncharted territory” (ibid. 208). but in order to ensure animal welfare and rights for at least sentient beings, he opts for remaining humanist a little longer (“tierrecht und die grenzen des postmodernismus: der fall derrida” 10; animals and the limits of postmodernism 5). therefore, in contrast to deconstruction, this “post” of anthropocentrism remains firmly rooted in the awareness of the notion of the human. the “post” in steiner’s position refers to the “post” of a political or moral anthropocentrism that considers all too obvious human characteristics as a measure of moral value (but even in steiner’s position there is a certain “human bias”). his “post” does not refer to a humanist concept of the human and thus his position is not posthumanist. moreover, by overcoming speciesism and politically relevant anthropocentrism, steiner’s “post” envisions an era after the “unquestioned” moral predominance of the human. his humanist “post” adapts a universal rationale to expand the moral community for an abolitionist telos. in this sense, steiner’s humanist post-anthropocentrism opposes derrida’s post-humanism in which the usage of “post” refers to the contingency of every “post-order” yet to come. as stated above, steiner’s “post” literally “makes sense” by avoiding “the unnecessary,” and enabling a meaningful life worth of living, whereas a derridean notion of “post” instead targets the limits of meaning. andreas aigner, karl pieper, and herwig grimm -“post-anthropocentrism” in animal philosophy and ethics 71 5. the “‘post’ of the excess” and the “excess of the ‘post.’” in negating the moral predominance of the human, steiner’s “post” evokes an era without unnecessary violence against animals (cf. animals and the moral community 131).8 the aim of humanist post-anthropocentrism in the abolitionist discourse is the recognition that treating animals as means to an end is considered to be excessive, i.e. unnecessary for mere survival (cf. singer 154-155).9 thus, abolitionist humanist post-anthropocentrism calls for the “post” of this excess: it envisages an order in which humans no longer exploit animals for their egoistic pleasures (cf. steiner, animals and the moral community 131). carrie packwood-freeman goes so far as to characterize the human in general in contrast to the animal by this notion of excess, which in turn makes a system of ethical principles necessary (20).10 she states: “if humans are characterized by excess, which can lead to both comfort and poverty, charity and harm, then an ethical system becomes socially and ecologically necessary for purposes of restraint” (21). the reasoning behind this claim for temperance is that humans should consider themselves as part of a living world (or cosmos) under the paradigms of equal consideration and justice. therefore, as gary steiner and gary francione would agree, excess, as the unnecessary instrumentalization of animals, is identified as an antagonism to a fixed structure of ethically necessary actions (cf. francione 36-37).11 steiner’s approach is quite similar to francione’s position in animal rights theory: the necessity of veganism and abolitionism is not just based on the sheer fact of sentience, but also on the recognition of a certain “natural potential” within sentient beings. as francione states: “sentience is what evolution has produced in order to ensure the survival of certain complex organisms” (55). sentience as an indicator for the “interest in remaining alive” is part of a larger evolutionary (francione) or cosmic (steiner) context. therefore, it is supposedly necessary to acknowledge the preference of sentient beings not to experience pain or distress (56). reducing violence in the world and thus leaving behind unnecessary excess and anthropocentrism is considered a meaningful and necessary “cosmic task” (even if steiner recognizes destruction, suffering and death in the world). as stated repeatedly in regard to steiner’s position, here the notion of “post” as an indicator for meaningfulness and necessity quite literally seeks to “make sense” and leave unnecessary excess behind. according to steiner, this is due to the fact that the “imperative of cosmic justice” requires us to view the “larger cosmic whole” not just as a “product of human discourses” (animals and the limits of postmodernism 194). but is it legitimate to associate meaning and necessity with nature or cosmos by focusing solely on sentient individuals? why would the cosmos prefer sentient beings, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 72 and not, say, ecosystems? however, even apart from human influence, it is certainly not possible for each single sentient individual to develop its natural potential and thus “to make sense of the world.” but then, why refer to “cosmic justice” for these individuals at all — or, why refer to it without at the same time also speaking of “cosmic injustice?” as steiner concedes in reference to schopenhauer, suffering and destruction in the world are inevitable (cf. 208-209, 225). admitting that nature or “the world” itself is not always meaningful and just, but often unpredictable and unjust to sentient individuals (as steiner indirectly does by referring to an inevitable suffering in the world), contradicts steiner’s view of nature or cosmos as a prefiguration of the vegan “regulative ideal” (209). at least some of steiner’s terminology seems to be misleading. the point here is that without an implicit reference to the human or to the injustices humans produce, talking of a cosmic justice for sentient individuals loses its relevance for steiner’s arguments. referring to cosmic justice necessarily means referring to human injustice here, or, in other words, humans can only “grant cosmic justice” to animals if the injustices at stake are human-made, because there is no chance of reducing “cosmic injustice.” but then, again, why would humans be obliged to protect sentient individuals in the name of (a non-discursive but natural) cosmos, when the cosmos “itself” doesn’t seem to care for each sentient individuals natural potential? quite paradoxically, it seems here as if reducing human excess also is implicitly supposed to save the cosmos from failing as a potential “guarantee” for justice; here, the existence of cosmic justice (or a cosmic order) depends on us acting in its name — a consequence which steiner would likely deny. however, it is the excessive violence that humans themselves inflict on animals, which steiner wants to reduce, and this normative claim is underpinned by an extended humanist notion of subjectivity. of course, steiner primarily uses the term “cosmic” to bring forth the recognition of a fundamental kinship between all sentient beings. it is an effort to include other animals in the moral community by overcoming an anthropocentric notion of rights and justice. but, it is not the formulation of principles and political goals per se that is the problem with steiner’s position, it is the way he justifies them. for steiner, referring to nature or cosmos (or a kind of “cosmic moral community”) as a measure for justice is a necessary means of “filling the gaps” within liberal individualism. but in fact, it is quite contingent. an example of another approach to the “post” of excess is cathy b. glenn’s. glenn differs from steiner by rethinking the notion of “person” in terms of relational structures, not in terms of having “an interest in not suffering” (animals and the moral community 102). as she states in reference to john durham peters12 and to erazim andreas aigner, karl pieper, and herwig grimm -“post-anthropocentrism” in animal philosophy and ethics 73 kohák, “it does not matter whether we can know other animals, or whether we can communicate with them, or whether we might discover an interiority to which we can connect” (glenn 500). “person” cannot be conceptualized by referring to certain traits or capacities. according to glenn, “judgements, norms, and ethics are intersubjectival and radically relational. persons, in relation with one another, constitute the basic relations of value and meaning in the universe and, in so doing, intersubjectively discover the moral and ethical result of that process in situ” (504). glenn’s statement is based on kohák’s theory of personalism, according to which persons (which exercise “free agency”) are modes of beings “constitutive of value and meaning” (506): the radically relational notion of intersubjectivity and the articulation of freedom as the ground of ethics that personalism offers can help guide concerned critics. when all beings, human and nonhuman alike, are acknowledged as persons who are metaphysically free and dignified, humans’ agency ought to be limited by that freedom. (505) therefore, our ethical duty would be to practice restraint. limiting our freedom to act violently against other human or nonhuman persons is supposed to be necessary in terms of a primary metaphysical freedom. this metaphysical “freedom-for others” defines the “community of persons,” where “the exercise of agency is always constituted in relation to others who exercise theirs” (505). despite the differences between glenn’s and steiner’s positions, they share a basic aim, namely, to overcome excess and unnecessary violence by evoking the concept of meaningfulness within a certain “whole.” in contrast to steiner’s humanist post-anthropocentrism (or to other approaches to the “post” of excess), in derrida’s post-humanism excess is not only conceived as behavior with negative connotation, but also as an incalculable “process” inherent to each (normative) structure or order.13 it is an aspect which by definition eludes the intended clarity or definiteness of each definition, norm, or differentiation. thus, it always entails an excessive element or aspect, which presents itself as immoderate, decentralized, and deferred. for example, each act of signification exceeds the intended meaning; there is always a “surplus” or a “lack” within every structure, text, philosophical argumentation or line of reasoning. this “surplus” or “lack” can be described as an incalculability that prevents such a structure or an argumentation from being completely consistent. this incalculable facet allows other readings of intended humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 74 meanings or even confronts us with the limits of meaning itself. deconstruction allows no full “presence” of meaning, truth, identity, or justice. in contrast to the “presence” of rights (law), justice is always to come, always “post” — nevertheless justice and law cannot be strictly separated because both refer to each other (derrida, “force of law” 959-961). regarding animal rights discourse, this indicates that by acknowledging the rights of sentient animals — fundamentally, the basic right “not to be treated as the property of others” (francione 49) —, the “presence” of the sought-out definite postanthropocentric “era of justice” will still be deferred: every justness that is based on normative rules (rights) following specific criteria of inclusion (e.g. sentient beings) possibly entails injustice through “promoting new hierarchies and new exclusions” (calarco 138) (e.g. the exclusion of non-sentient beings from moral consideration). it’s not only that there is always an incalculable “post” regarding sought-out definite decisions, but there will never be a (present) moment to conclude: “yes, now i’ve acted fully justly” (cf. derrida, “force of law” 961-963). even if not all hierarchies or exclusions seem to be cases of injustice (e.g. excluding single rocks and stones from moral consideration), it is already the sheer fact of following rules or principles per se that contradicts derrida’s notion of justice. on the other hand, justice requires decisions in order to establish rules; justice is always “before the law” and “for the law.” thus, the concept of an excessive aspect is not unfamiliar in the deconstructive approach. moreover, the excess can even be related to justice itself because justice is not achievable by relying on a static set of rules; justice and the excessive, incalculable “post” are intertwined. this incalculability is based on the idea of justice as being irreducible and infinite (965). but this gives rise to a critical objection stated by slavoj žižek: “derrida’s notion of ‘deconstruction as justice’ seems to rely on a utopian hope which sustains the specter of ‘infinite justice’” (less than nothing 127). in derrida, the “perspective of the last judgement” persists, “even if as a thoroughly virtual reference point” — a reference point containing a “standard which would allow us to take the measure of our acts and pronounce on their ‘true meaning,’ their true ethical status.” as žižek states, in deconstruction justice is “forever postponed, always to come but nonetheless here as the ultimate horizon of our activity.” this, in turn, raises the question of whether derrida’s notion of justice functions as a regulative idea for present decisions. derrida himself hesitated to associate justice with a kantian regulative idea (derrida, “force of law” 965). according to him, a potentially unjust situation always requires us to decide immediately in order to (potentially) attain justice. therefore, this immediacy would andreas aigner, karl pieper, and herwig grimm -“post-anthropocentrism” in animal philosophy and ethics 75 contradict the horizon of expectation within a regulative idea or a messianic promise: justice must not wait (967). justice is unpredictable and not based on preceding knowledge, information, or rules, and thus it (seemingly) does not wait for “approval.” so, even if justice is always and only “to come,” this does not entail ethical nihilism, as the responsibility for the other (be it another human or an animal) exceeds every singular act of dependence on predefined rules, and therefore faces the singularity of the responsibility for the other. each confrontation with a potentially unjust situation requires giving immediately what later might be considered a just response. but exactly this implicit “utopian hope” for approval gives rise to the question whether the deconstructive notion of incalculability and excess functions as a kind of red herring for a hoped-for “infinite justice.” in this case, the denial of “fully achievable justice” actually affirms (infinite) justice as being the “measure of our acts,” to use žižek’s words. by being denied as a “full presence” justice is revealed as an infinite and irreducible measure of our acts — a “measureless measure” against which every concrete attempt to attain full justice fails. this may be conceived of as a kind of regulative idea in the face of our contingent acts, although this regulative idea is not to be conceived in terms of a “unified programmatic ideal” or a “generic rule.” as derrida himself concedes, the idea of an infinite and irreducible justice actually is the basis for deconstructing the notion of “justice as presence” (cf. 965). as we have seen with respect to steiner’s and derrida’s positions, they may not necessarily be opposed in all important respects. whereas steiner admits that the regulative ideal of veganism as a “post” of anthropocentrism ultimately is a nonprogrammable “infinite task” (animals and the limits of postmodernism 208), derrida’s “post” as an incalculable excess within justice can be seen as implicitly entailing the ultimate (“measureless”) standard of “infinite justice.” in steiner’s conception, justice derives from a cosmic necessity, thus implying the existence of something “bigger” than humans. even if derrida’s position seems to contradict the assumption of universal rationales by emphasizing the contingency of every standard, his notion of justice still relies on the implicit reference to the standard of a virtual “big other,” judging our actions in a future “to come” (cf. žižek 127). from this point of view, steiner and derrida both associate justice with a certain reference point that is beyond human control or construction (be it a supposedly non-discursive larger world context or an infinite and irreducible justice). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 76 in addition, both positions have a certain notion of responsibility for the other. but whereas steiner opts for morally considering other sentient individuals (our nonhuman kin) by formulating concrete principles, derrida’s notion of otherness avoids concrete “positive” definitions or clear inclusions and exclusions. according to derrida, the “other” is not just an identifiable empirical being next to me (for example, a sentient individual with certain characteristics similar to mine), but something that is outside of calculability: the gaze of the other (animal) puts me into question and confronts me with a fundamental passivity — an experience of “not being able” (cf. wolfe, “humanist and posthumanist antispeciesism” 56). thus, our responsibility for animals is not based on a projection of certain “positive” human experiences or characteristics onto them (as our supposed “kin“), because the experience we share with animals is that of finitude, vulnerability, and passivity. every clear definition of the human tends to disavow this passivity and relatedness to the other: we humans “are always radically other, already inor ahuman in our very being” (57). drawing definite lines by including sentient individuals and excluding non-sentient beings from moral consideration (in a defined community) is based on a certain dichotomy between “us” (morally considerable individuals) and “them” (those excluded from moral consideration) — an extended “us,” which reproduces what we already hold ourselves to “know” about the moral value of humans or the human community. positions such as steiner’s or francione’s seek to avoid projecting upon animals “a diminished reflection of our own image” (steiner, animals and the moral community 163), but it does not seem as if they really avoid doing so in every respect. the question here is: are sentient animals really morally considered for being “other,” or rather for being fundamentally the “same?” and what about life forms that really are “other” by lacking these traits we recognize as being morally relevant? even if sentient animals are not required to be “fully rational beings” in order to be morally considered, they are somehow required to be similar to humans in terms of valuing their lives (being “interested” in not suffering and in staying alive) and making sense of the world. as already stated, it may be doubted whether this similarity is accidental. the problem here is not only the drawing of lines between morally considered and other beings, but also the reliance on these lines without (re-) considering the possible contingency or perspectival “bias” of one’s own position. or, stated otherwise, assuming that one’s own position is based on some observer-neutral or self-transparent perspective enabling him or her to recognize non-discursive “objective truths” in the world (and thus, supposedly mandating him or her to speak in the name of the cosmos). singer, for example, puts forward this position and argues for taking the point of view of the universe in ethics (cf. lazari-radek & singer, the point of view of the andreas aigner, karl pieper, and herwig grimm -“post-anthropocentrism” in animal philosophy and ethics 77 universe). but as žižek rightly points out, a “universal truth can only be articulated from a thoroughly partisan position” (“the prospects of radical politics today”). ethical problems are a matter of “risky decisions” exactly for the reason that there is no access to an observer-neutral perspective and truth. there is no external guarantee that our actions are just. it is true, regarding an envisaged “post” of human excesses and violence, that we actually need ethical principles and political claims, but it’s wrong to assume that these principles derive from recognizing some pre-established “good.” here, alenka zupančič correctly states that ethics may not only be conceived as a mere means of fulfilling some underlying ultimate aim (by supposedly recognizing a preestablished “good”) but that such an aim rather is “produced” by ethical considerations (13-20). this raises the question, whether abolitionists or animal rightists recognize the reduction of excess and violence in the world as a consequence of their ethical “reflections,” or vice versa, if they implicitly hold that ethics justifies what they already consider (politically) “necessary” (reducing excess). basing ethics on a certain notion of the “good” either seeks to avoid this question or falsely identifies political claims with a pre-established (ethical) necessity. 6. conclusion. humanist post-anthropocentrism in animal rights discourse aims to establish or to acknowledge an order which is deprived of human excess or excessive behavior. as illustrated by the example of gary steiner, this order may be conceived of in terms of cosmic justice or a kinship relation to animals. but here the cost of possible self-contradiction is unwittingly paid for the ability to commit oneself to specific claims on behalf of sentient individual animals. on the one hand, these political claims are supposed to be grounded in the universal rationale of cosmic justice. on the other hand, the existence of cosmic justice seems to depend on humans acting in its name. “derridean” post-humanism in human-animal relationship questions such a notion of order in the first place on the grounds that excess will always be inscribed into the order itself. moreover, justice itself depends on an excessive incalculable “post,” for according to post-humanism it is not the supposed certainty of a universal rationale that ensures justice. where humanist post-anthropocentrism in human-animal relationship seeks the “post” of the excess, post-humanism (derrida’s deconstruction) rather emphasizes the excess of the “post.” despite the incalculability stressed by derrida, the risk of “drawing lines” between “morally considerable” and other beings has to be undertaken in order potentially to achieve justice, even if possible injustices are produced elsewhere. because ethical problems require us to take the “risk” of deciding, the “post” of excess cannot be theorized about without at the same time evoking its own excessive aspect. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 78 there is no ultimate “guarantee” for our decisions to be fully just — not because we humans fail to recognize some “given” cosmic truth or values, but because justice produces its own excess. the problem with derrida’s “concept” of infinite justice and his “indefinite” writing style is not that they make it impossible to formulate concrete moral commitments. the problem is that problematizing exclusion and inclusion by denying the “presence” of justice is still based on the adherence to a “standard” — even if the standard of infinite justice is purely virtual, incalculable, and always “to come.” measured against this virtual standard — or regulative idea — no decision concerning exclusion or inclusion can be conceived as being fully just. contrary to this, it may be argued that excluding some beings (or systems etc.) from moral consideration while including others is not objectionable per se, but is the very condition for justice or ethical decisions. but this question will be left open here. acknowledgments this work was partially supported by the austrian science fund (fwf): grant p 27428b29. notes 1. there are some difficulties with categorizing derrida and haraway that cannot be discussed in detail at this point. although derrida’s approach, for example, is doubtless deconstructivist, he denies that deconstruction can be conceived as a philosophical category or method (“hospitality, justice and responsibility” 65). regarding his work, derrida even avoids speaking of a philosophy at all (cf. 76). furthermore, to associate derrida with poststructuralism, phenomenology, or postmodernism may not be wrong per se, but in order to avoid a reductionist stance, the difficulty of clear categorizations has to be acknowledged. 2. as already indicated in note 1, derrida himself does not consider deconstruction to be a kind of philosophy or method (cf. “hospitality, justice and responsibility” 65). rather, deconstruction “is something which is constantly at work” and thus has “no end, no beginning, and no after.” 3. the notion of “speciesism” was characterized by richard ryder in analogy to racism (“experiments on animals” 82). 4. against this view, it may be doubted that speciesism can be “set out in terms that are species-neutral. that is to say, in terms of a fault that could belong to any creature” (milligan 223). though an important objection, this point cannot be discussed here. andreas aigner, karl pieper, and herwig grimm -“post-anthropocentrism” in animal philosophy and ethics 79 5. this argument may be challenged by the differentiation between an unqualified and a qualified speciesism (cf. rachels 181–194). 6. gary steiner agrees with gary francione in stating that “peter singer end[s] up arguing that animals may be treated as replaceable ressources rather than as genuine individuals on the grounds that animals lack the cognitive sophistication to be self aware” (steiner, animals and the moral community 90). 7. according to steiner, overcoming anthropocentrism is not achievable by “dispensing with humanism altogether but instead by divesting humanism of its anthropocentric prejudice“ (animals and the limits of postmodernism 5). 8. the relevant passage in steiner’s book reads as follows: “to take the principle of equal consideration of interests seriously is to see that death is no less a harm to animals than to humans, and that we quite unnecessarily violate the prerogatives of animals to life and flourishing when we kill and eat them. […] we use and eat animals because it makes our lives easier and more pleasurable” (animals and the moral community 131). 9. peter singer points out the following: “there can be no defence of eating flesh in terms of satisfying nutritional needs, since it has been established beyond doubt that we could satisfy our need for protein and other essential nutrients far more efficiently with a diet that replaced animal flesh by soy beans, or products derived from soy beans, and other high-protein vegetable products” (singer, “all animals are equal” 154-155). 10. packwood-freeman in the relevant quote: “in fact, at the risk of essentializing, i argue that the one relevant trait that does distinguish the human species from most other animal species is its ability to do most things (both good and bad, productive and destructive) to excess of what is necessary for survival” (freeman, “embracing humanimality. deconstructing the human/animal dichotomy” 20). 11. quite similarly, tom regan is arguing against the unnecessary (“excessive”) killing of animals, but not against killing per se. according to regan, it may be considered acceptable to kill or to sacrifice an animal when faced with a life-endangering situation. he believes in a moral “principle of proportionality,” according to which “we are entitled to use force, but not excessive force, to defend ourselves, while allowing for the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 80 difficulty, in conditions of stress and emergency, of determining what force is excessive” (the case for animal rights 289). violence is allowed, as long as it is not unnecessary or excessive. 12. peters critically investigates “the twentieth-century project of communicating with animals” (244). according to peters, “empathy with the inhuman is the moral and aesthetic lesson that might replace our urgent longing for communication” (246). 13. with his notion of différance, derrida argues against the “metaphysics of presence” and the notions of identity and origin (cf. “différance” 1-27). works cited ach, johann s. warum man lassie nicht quälen darf. erlangen: harald fischer verlag, 1999. boddice, rob. “the end of anthropocentrism.” anthropocentrism: humans, animals, environments. human-animal studies. ed. rob boddice. leiden/boston: brill, 2011. 1-13. calarco, matthew. “between life and rights.” the death of the animal. ed. paola cavalieri. new york: columbia up, 2009. 135-138. cavalieri, paola. “the death of the animal.” the death of the animal. ed. paola cavalieri. new york: columbia up, 2009. 1-41. chimaira arbeitskreis (ed.). human-animal studies. über die gesellschaftliche natur von mensch-tier-verhältnissen. bielefeld: transcript, 2011. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. 2006. ed. marie-luise mallet. trans. david wills. new york: fordham up, 2008. _____. “différance.” margins of philosophy. trans. alan bass. chicago: u chicago p, 1982. 1-27. _____. “force of law. the “mystical foundation of authority.” trans. mary quaintance. cardozo law review 11.5-6 (1990): 919-1045. andreas aigner, karl pieper, and herwig grimm -“post-anthropocentrism” in animal philosophy and ethics 81 _____. “hospitality, justice and responsibility: a dialogue with jacques derrida.” questioning ethics: contemporary debates in philosophy. eds. richard kearny & mark dooley. london: routledge, 1999. 65-83. francione, gary. animals as persons. essays on the abolition of animal exploitation. new york: columbia up, 2008. freeman, carrie packwood. “embracing humanimality. deconstructing the human/animal dichotomy.” arguments about animal ethics. ed. g. goodale & j. e.. blacklanham: lexington books, 2010. 11-29. glenn, cathy b. “conceiving person: toward a fully democratic critical practice.” jac: a journal of composition theory 30.3 & 4 (2010): 491-514. grimm, herwig. “das tier an sich? auf der suche nach dem menschen in der tierethik.” tiere. der mensch und seine natur. ed. konrad paul liessmann. wien: zolnay, 2013. 277-332. haraway, donna. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. hursthouse, rosalind. ethics, humans and other animals. an introduction with readings. london/new york: routledge, 2000. lawlor, leonard. this is not sufficient: an essay on animality and human nature in derrida. new york: columbia up, 2007. lazari-radek, katarzyna & singer, peter. the point of view of the universe. oxford: oxford up, 2014. mcreynolds, phillip. “overlapping horizons of meaning: a deweyan approach to the moral standing of nonhuman animals.” animal pragmatism. rethinking humannonhuman relationships. eds. e. mckenna and a. light. bloomington in: indiana up, 2004. 63-85. milligan, tony. “speciesism as a variety of anthropocentrism.” anthropocentrism. humans, animals, environments. ed. r. boddice. leiden/boston: brill, 223-243. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 82 nussbaum, martha c. frontiers of justice. disability, nationality, species membership. cambridge ma: harvard up, 2007. peters, john durham. speaking into the air: a history of the idea of communication. chicago/london: u chicago p, 1999. rachels, james. created from animals. the moral implications of darwinism. oxford/new york: oxford up, 1990. regan, tom. the case for animal rights. 1983. berkeley/los angeles: u california p, 2004. rippe, klaus-peter. ethik im außerhumanen bereich. paderborn: mentis, 2008. rowlands, mark. animal rights. moral theory and practice. second edition. basingstroke: palgrave macmillan, 2009. ryder, richard. “experiments on animals.” animals, men, and morals: an enquiry into the maltreatment of non-humans. ed. r. godlovitch, s. godlovitch and j. john. london: gollancz, 1971. 41-82. samuelsson, lars. “at the centre of what? a critical note on the centrism-terminology in environmental ethics.” environmental values 22 (2013): 627–645. sandkühler, hans jörg (ed.). enzyklopädie philosophie. hamburg: felix meiner verlag, 2010. singer, peter. “all animals are equal.” animal rights and human obligations. eds. t. regan and p. singer. englewood cliffs: prentice hall, 1976. 148-162. spiegel, marjorie. the dreaded comparison. human and animal slavery. new york: mirror books/i.d.e.a. 1996. steiner, gary. animals and the limits of postmodernism. new york: columbia up, 2013. _____. animals and the moral community: mental life, moral status, and kinship. new york: columbia up, 2008. andreas aigner, karl pieper, and herwig grimm -“post-anthropocentrism” in animal philosophy and ethics 83 _____. anthropocentrism and its discontents: the moral status of animals in the history of western philosophy. pittsburgh: u pittsburgh p , 2005. _____. “tierrecht und die grenzen des postmodernismus: der fall derrida.” altexethik vol. 2 (2010): 3-10. web. 26 november 2012. http://www.tierethik.net/resources/raltex_ethik_2010_003010_derrida.pdf wolfe, cary. animal rites. american culture, the discourse of species and posthumanist theory. chicago/london: u chicago p , 2003. _____. “humanist and posthumanist antispeciesism.” the death of the animal. ed. paola cavalieri. new york: columbia up, 2009. 45-58. _____. what is posthumanism? minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2010. žižek, slavoj. less than nothing: hegel and the shadow of dialectical materialism. london: verso, 2012. _____. “the prospects for radical politics today.” international journal of baudrillard studies 5.1 (2008). zupančič, alenka. das reale einer illusion. kant und lacan. frankfurt am main: suhrkamp, 2001. microsoft word ray h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 nicholas ray interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents of all freud’s writings it is perhaps the late anthropological work civilization and its discontents (1930; hereafter cd)1 that offers his most explicit reflections on what constitutes and characterizes the human being. the text’s declared thematic focus is, after all, man’s discontent within the restrictions of collective life. it is unsurprising therefore that the vast majority of the innumerable commentaries that cd has attracted have largely concerned themselves with the resumption, criticism, or re-elaboration of freud’s predominant concern with the struggle between homo sapiens and civilization. what has tended to be left unaddressed, or at least uninterrogated, is the extent to which the text’s most fundamental claims with respect to these two categories, and to the struggle between them, are conceptualized, illustrated, or articulated with reference to animals and animality. if at a manifest level cd is freud’s most sustained meditation on the nature of man, it also the freudian text that is perhaps most densely and dependently subtended by propositions and presuppositions about “the animal.” it is these easily overlooked yet significant theoretical perspectives, and the latent implications they have for the economy of freud’s main argument, which i wish to examine here. in taking up these concerns my purpose is not to try to identify in cd a single or univocal freudian position on the so-called human/animal relation, which could then be applauded or condemned depending on its relative anthropocentricity. on the contrary, what i am concerned with examining in cd are precisely the underlying variances and tensions that mark freud’s thinking in this regard. he calls on animals and animality at many vital moments — as points of theoretical reference (whether implicit or explicit), as examples of contrastive illustration, and as expository figures and metaphors. but these frequent invocations draw on a variety of discourses that are not always well integrated with one another and are sometimes in overt conflict: biological, evolutionary, and ethological, but also philosophical, mythical, and even biblical. animals and animality are not, then, just points of reference in the development of freud’s declared theses on man and civilization. they are also potential nicholas ray — “interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents” 11 “pressure” points at which distinct theoretical orientations and assumptions overlap and which can, under scrutiny, imperil the cogency of freud’s argument. this essay tries to educe those distinct orientations and to make visible, even to aggravate, the tensions between them. it is not, however, an exercise in reproof against freud or a demolition of his claims. ultimately, i wish to read the text’s implicit instabilities not as mere deficits of thought but, in part at least, as symptomatic indices of a certain, problematic “constraint” exercised upon thought by the human/animal relation itself. in this regard, my approach has something in common with those of jean laplanche and leo bersani, for whom moments of tension, contradiction, and even “theoretical collapse” in freud’s oeuvre are to be listened to affirmatively, even “celebrate[d],” as a performative and ultimately instructive function of the very nature of freud’s object(s) of speculation (bersani, 3).2 however, what i suggest is remarkable about cd is that with respect to animals, animality, and their relation to the human, the text also partially apprehends and even incipiently interrogates the terms of its own theoretical instability. this partial recognition, and the reflections to which it gives rise, are held firmly apart from the main text, their articulation sealed off in a pair of almost extravagantly lengthy footnotes in chapter 4. the real theoretical value of these notes has tended to be overlooked. in them, it is not this or that conception of the human/animal relation that is at stake. rather, the categories of “human” and “animal” are temporarily put into suspension as categories, and in a sequence of extraordinary speculations on anthropogenesis freud sets out a radical critique of the separations they sponsor and of the constitutive fields of force they exert on thought. this essay, then, is an attempt to track and flush out the various animals and conceptions of animality that inhere within freud’s text, to underscore their plurality, and to demonstrate that the human/animal relation is a profoundly, if in the main implicitly, conflicted site within his thought. but it is also an attempt to give freud his due: to acknowledge an impulse in his thinking which is nascent and not systematically integrated, yet which is, i suggest, strikingly progressive; which not only recognizes but also labours to theorize in an affirmative, critical manner the powerful determinations underlying that very conflictuality. individual freedom and the community: therio-primitivism versus the termites. in its most basic form, freud’s thesis in cd is well known: the advance of what is called humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 12 civilization takes place at the expense of human instinctual life,3 which must be repressed, sublimated or introverted in the service of collective human progress. it is an argument whose apparent obviousness, even banality, bothers freud, who remarks several times on just how self-evident are the claims of his first five chapters, before he tackles the more novel theme of the death drive.4 yet if the manifest thesis about man’s relation to civilization seems clear to the point of being “common knowledge” (cd 117), the place of animals and animality within its exposition introduces latent complications that risk putting this “common knowledge” into question. freud only begins to tackle in depth the struggle between civilization and the drives in the third chapter. here, he elaborates what he sees as civilization’s key characteristics, finishing up his exposition with an initial reflection on man’s supposedly unique cultural disaffection within it — owing, freud argues, to man’s tendency to cling to individual freedom against the demands of collective living. however, at the core of this initial engagement with the central problematic of the book an unacknowledged yet critical tension arises between two competing conceptions of animality. the first conception, while it is initially broached in this chapter, goes on to have a pervasive presence throughout the rest of the text and as others have shown5 — is legible in a great deal of freud’s writing before and after cd. it consists in the attempt to code and circumscribe certain aspects of man’s being as “animal.” this conception is heavily marked by freud’s adherence to a certain modality of evolutionary biology and may be summed up, using philip armstrong’s term, as “therio-primitivist” (armstrong 142ff.). that is to say that while freud, good darwinian that he is, readily and repeatedly acknowledges that man is just another animal, when he invokes the putative “animality” of the human he does so in a tendentious way, exclusively to signify those aspects of man which are anterior, antithetical or antagonistic to civilization. an initial aspect of this therio-primitivist conception emerges when, a few pages into chapter 3, freud supplies the working definition of civilization which will underpin his entire exposition: the word civilization [kultur] describes the whole sum of the achievements and the regulations which distinguish our lives [unser leben] from those of our animal ancestors [unserer tierischen ahnen] and which serve two purposes — namely to protect men against nature and to adjust their mutual relations. (cd 89 [448–9]) nicholas ray — “interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents” 13 civilization is thus the distinguishing factor that makes “us,” we humans, “human.” those of our primitive genetic ancestors who were not subject to civilization were — to that very extent — animal ancestors. their “animality” is the sign of nothing other than their absolute anterior ignorance of the constraints and the advances of kultur. like so much else in freud’s thinking, however, his attitude to civilization and acculturation is deeply marked by the influence of the evolutionary biologist ernst haeckel and to the famous haeckelian principle that “ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis.”6 as the chapter goes on, freud is emphatic that civilization is not a phenomenon that happened once and for all in man’s phyletic past. rather, the evolution from “natural” animal organism to civilized being is to be recapitulated in the ontogenesis of each new life we call “human.” his most striking articulation of this claim in chapter 3 appears, almost in passing, during the celebrated discussion of technics and of man’s development into a “prosthetic god”: those things that, by his science and technology, man has brought about on this earth, on which he first appeared as a feeble animal organism [schwaches tierwesen] and on which each individual of his species must once more [wiederum] make its entry [eintreten] (“oh inch of nature!”) [...] are a fulfilment of [...] almost every infantile wish. (91 [450]; emphasis added) with an exclamatory nod to shakespeare’s pericles (“oh inch of nature!”) freud loads the passage with a certain rhetorical pathos.7 however, the theatrical inflection of human birth as an “entrance” (eintreten) also tacitly recalibrates the first of shakespeare’s “seven ages of man.” each human entry onto the world’s stage is in effect a re-entry that replicates or repeats (hence: wiederum), in the natural, unacculturated condition of the defenceless suckling, the earlier appearance of a feeble theroid ancestor. mewling and puking in this unacculturated state, man’s ontogenic infancy, no less than his phylogenic prehistory, is fundamentally “animalistic.” it is in line with this developmental conception that the text’s most pervasively recurrent means of figuring the restraint continually imposed by civilization upon the drives is as a process of taming. as i have argued elsewhere, for freud instinctual life increasingly becomes the domain par excellence of man’s putative animality.8 in cd this circumscription is consistently enforced by the repeated use — not just in chapter 3 but throughout the text — of the husbandrian terms zähmen and bändigen, and their humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 14 derivatives. the drives here are conceived as being fundamentally “wild [wilden]” (79 [437]). they are that aspect of man that must be “tamed [gezähmten]” in the name of community, at the expense of the convulsive enjoyments attendant on the satisfaction of primary impulses that go “untamed [ungebändigten]” (ibid.). without such civilized restraints on his instinctual life, freud indicates — in a term whose significance we will return to — man is, or remains, “beast”-like (112). freud’s most explicit avowal of the logic at work here comes two years after cd in the exchange of letters with einstein, where freud describes the “process of civilization” in relation to “instinctual impulses [triebregungen]” as being “comparable to the domestication [domestikation] of certain species of animals” (freud and einstein 214 [26]). but it is already a thoroughgoing theoretical support in cd and a repeated entrenchment of the delimitation of man’s animality as that which is most “crude and primary [grober, primärer]” (cd 79 [438]), most uncivilized, within him. in this connection alan bleakley has rightly drawn attention to the importance of freud’s few but significant comments in the main text of cd on the treatment of non-human animals by civilized man (bleakley, chapter 2). a key passage, which bleakley quotes twice, appears in chapter 3 of cd, in the paragraph immediately following freud’s allusion to the “feeble animal organism” of man’s ontogenic/phylogenic past. a country that has “attained a high level of civilization,” freud avers here, is one in which “wild [wilden] and dangerous animals have been exterminated and the breeding of domesticated animals [haustieren gezähmten] flourishes” (92 [451]). as bleakley emphasizes, this claim is nothing less than the correlative of freud’s central, metapsychological argument that man’s “cultural advancement” is achieved precisely at the cost of his “instinctual or animal body [being] cultured or tamed [...] through the [...] mechanisms of sublimation and displacement” (32). the crucial discussion of freedom takes place towards the end of the chapter where freud is considering civilization’s function of regulating relationships among individuals — “adjust[ing] the mutual relations,” as he described it in the initial definition of kultur. in the passages on freedom, freud ventures the claim that the “liberty of the individual is no gift of civilization” (cd 95). on the contrary, because living in communities (gemeinschaften) requires the inhibiting of certain individual wishes, liberty must, he proposes, have been “greatest before there was any civilization,” before, that is, man had emerged from his purely theriod condition (ibid). freud then goes on to distinguish between two different urges towards individual nicholas ray — “interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents” 15 freedom and their relation to civilized life. one type of urge — exemplified by an individual revolt against an injustice — may be, freud claims, entirely compatible with the development of civilization and beneficial to the community as a whole. however, a “desire for freedom” may also arise from the remains [rest] of [the] original personality [der ursprünglichen {…} persönlichkeit], which is still untamed [ungebändigten] by civilization and may thus become the basis in them of hostility to civilization. the urge for freedom, therefore, is directed against particular forms and demands of civilization or against civilization altogether. (96 [455]) freud thus differentiates between on the one hand an urge towards liberty which, arising in contingent circumstances of oppression or injustice, is progressive and ultimately operates in the service of evolving civilized life, and on the other hand an urge towards liberty which is wholly atavistic and thus fundamentally inimical to civilization. the therio-primitivist position remains, of course, strongly to the fore here. the second, essentially antagonistic, urge for freedom is not contingent but elemental, the residue of a primal — ursprünglich — condition that remains wild or untamed (ungebändigten): man’s original, “animal” core. and yet in the two sentences that immediately follow, sentences that have the appearance of doing nothing but elaborating this position further, we meet with a surprise. freud says: “it does not seem as though any influence could induce a man to change his nature into a termite’s. no doubt he will always defend his claim to individual liberty against the will of the group” (96). having thus far described in broad, theroid terms that which in man is historically anterior to civilization and/or fundamentally antagonistic to it, freud’s specific appeal to termites introduces a variant, complicating logic. where earlier — deploying a paradigm that will recur many times later in the text — freud has conceptually assimilated to “the animal” what is least civilized within human beings, now he suddenly invokes non-human animals to exemplify civilized life in its absolute form: the termitary as the paradigm of civilization without discontents. after this brief invocation, freud will carry on as though it made no difference, but the undeclared variance between the two perspectives thus brought into play is, nevertheless, significant. on the first view, human beings resist absolute absorption into the collective life of civilization because there is too much of “the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 16 animal” about us to renounce entirely our urge for individual freedom. on the second view, it is our very resistance to this absorption, our clinging to individual liberty against the exigencies of the group, that distinguishes us as human beings. the text’s initial discussion of man’s malaise in respect of the impulse for freedom is thus host to distinct theoretical perspectives that are not well integrated. on the one hand, freud puts in place an emphatic and pervasive circumscription of the “pre-” and “un-civilized” dimensions of man’s being as “animal”; on the other, he affirms the possibility that certain non-human species, far from being antithetical to kultur, might be seen as exemplary sites of its manifestation. the very presence of the termite example discretely erodes the stability — as termites will sometimes do9 — of the former construction; it gives the lie to the generalized equation on which freud’s pervasive therio-primitivism relies, between “animality” and the crude, the primal, the unrestrainedly wild, the bestial. yet this tension goes, of course, unaddressed by freud himself. instead a tacit theoretical uncertainty is lodged at the basis of what he worries is merely a “common sense” argument — an instability that leaves him caught between suggesting that there is too much and suggesting that there is too little of the “animal” about us humans ever to be contentedly civilized. differentiation: eros and the death drive. civilization and its discontents of course features one of freud’s most memorable accounts of instinctual life as a clash between the creative, binding force of eros, or the life drive, and the destructive, entropic force of the death drive. how are we to position vis-à-vis the larger metapsychological architecture of the text this initial, problematic treatment of freedom and discontentment which we have traced? where does it fit into the text’s distinctive elaboration of the impulses of life and death? and in what ways is that elaboration marked by recourse to animals and animality? as to the place of the discussion of freedom in respect of life and death, the answer only begins to emerge after the fact, at a significantly later moment in the text. to understand why, it is worth briefly noting the peculiar relation that cd bears to its own theoretical heritage. by the time of the text’s composition, the dualism of the life and death drives had been in place in the theory for nearly a decade, since beyond the pleasure principle (1920). prior to 1920 freud had posited a different dualism, consisting of the distinction between pleasure-oriented sexual impulses (sexualtriebe) and the impulses of selfpreservation (selbsterhaltungstriebe).10 the path towards the second drive theory was cleared in 1914 with the introduction of the concept of narcissism. in light of this nicholas ray — “interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents” 17 concept the original dualism (sexuality versus self-preservation) turned out not to be a dualism at all: sexuality and self-preservation, freud now claimed, were just two modalities of a single, affirmative energy of libido. the work of beyond the pleasure principle, as far as the drive theory goes, was formally to consolidate this newly recognized unity under the rubric of “eros” and to formulate a new, more encompassing dualism between eros on the one hand and an antagonistic energy, which he named the death drive, on the other.11 it is noteworthy that the starting point of cd’s argument is thus significantly out of synch with its moment of composition. the book gets going, and moves through its first four chapters, as though the upheaval in the theory of the drives had never happened: chapters 2 and 3 thus talk easily about the pleasure principle being “what decides the purpose of life” (cd 76), as though freud has forgotten his own work on the decisive importance of precisely what is beyond the pleasure principle; the copious remarks on “instinct” here carry no trace of the death drive; and eros goes completely unnamed. only in chapter 5 does freud bring the notion of eros explicitly into play, and only from this point does he formally begin to integrate his conviction that aggressivity and entropy have a grounding position in the instinctual domain, summarizing in chapter 6 the hypotheses that led to this conviction (narcissism gets its first mention at this late point!) before the systematic discussion of introverted aggressivity in chapters 7 and 8. in short, cd is a work that, rather than presupposing earlier developments in the theory of the drives, ends up curiously restaging them. as we have seen, the text makes theoretical recourse to the evolutionary principles of ernst haeckel, as do so many of freud’s writings. however, cd is perhaps unique in constituting a kind of discursive enactment of their logic: the unfolding of its argument concerning instinctual life recapitulates in miniature the diachronic, anterior evolution of freud’s thinking in this very domain. the effect of this compositional idiosyncrasy, inevitably, is to introduce a belated differentiation into freud’s central argument concerning the relation between civilization and the drives. throughout the key passages from chapter 3 discussed above, as for the entirety of the book’s first four chapters, freud invokes “instinct” (trieb) to encompass self-preservative and sexual needs (as in the earlier drive theory) and does not seek to give distinct elaborations of their respective vicissitudes within civilization. from chapter 5 onwards, however, the analysis of instinctual life humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 18 increasingly bears on two distinct theoretical fronts simultaneously: on the one hand, the relation between civilization and eros and, on the other, the relation between civilization and the destructive impulses of the death drive. now, in respect of the text’s account of animals and animality there are two key observations to be made about this emergence of the life/death dualism. firstly it is worth stressing that the book’s earlier remarks on freedom are not left isolated from, or inconsistent with, these later developments, but are reprised and integrated into their larger framework. thus in the final chapter, freud returns to the question of civilization and the urge for individual freedom and makes the following affirmation: [the] struggle between the individual and society is not a derivative of the contradiction [...] between the primal instincts of eros and death. it is a dispute within the economics of the libido, comparable to the contest concerning the distribution of libido between ego and objects. (141) since the end of chapter 6 (121ff) freud has stressed that the constructive, binding force of eros is in many respects congruent with the unifying goals of civilization. the above passage serves to pre-empt the tempting inference that all resistance to civilization must therefore originate in the death drive. on the contrary, freud insists, the particular wish to retain individual liberty against the demands of the group is a matter not of hate or aggressivity but of love (an excessive erotic/libidinal investment in one’s own ego) and thus of the life drive. of course, this affirmation does nothing to resolve the conceptual tensions that inhere in the formulations on freedom in chapter 3. it merely resumes them from the perspective of the schema of the second drive dualism and in doing so inscribes them anew within the conception of eros itself. the second observation is that even if the specific urge for individual freedom is thus affiliated to eros, the tensions that mark its initial articulation manifest themselves again in freud’s presentation of eros’s instinctual adversary, the death drive. the death drive begins to take shape in the main text during freud’s famous critique in chapter 5 of the imperative: “love thy neighbour as thyself.”12 throughout the pertinent passages of cd he remains committed to the claim that the “struggle between eros and death [...] is what all life consists of” (122). this instinctual antagonism is inherent in the existence of human and non-human animals alike, and even in vegetal life. nonetheless, as chapters 5 and 6 progress freud makes a number of gestures toward the possibility that the death drive within human beings has an exceptional potentiality. thus nicholas ray — “interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents” 19 alongside the stated position on the instinctual continuity among living things, freud’s phrasing repeatedly emphasizes a particular relation between aggressivity and man: “the primary mutual hostility of human beings” (112); “the inborn human inclination to ‘badness’” (120); “the inclination to aggression [which] is an original, self-subsisting instinctual disposition in man” (122) etc. the possible exceptionality of human destructiveness is resumed in a less gestural way in chapters 7 and 8. in a key passage that opens chapter 7, freud returns to the example of eusocial animals first invoked in chapter 3: why do our relatives, the animals [unsere verwandten, die tiere], not exhibit any such cultural struggle? we do not know. very probably some of them — the bees, the ants, the termites — strove for thousands of years before they arrived at the state institutions, the distribution of functions and the restrictions on the individual, for which we admire them today. it is a mark of our present condition that we know from our own feelings that we should not think ourselves happy in any of these animal states or in any of the roles assigned in them to the individual. (123 [482]) we have seen how freud will resume the early question of individual freedom versus society in the final chapter, analyzing it in terms of a distribution of libido within eros. here, however, and without seeking to articulate the two claims together, he ventures a contrary hypothesis in response to his question about “our relatives, the animals.” having speculated that the reason for the stability of non-human animal societies may be the achievement of “a balance [...] between the influences of their environment and the mutually contending instincts within them,” he goes on to propose: “[i]t may be that in primitive man a fresh access of libido kindled a renewed burst of activity on the part of the destructive instinct” (ibid). freud does not develop the specifics of this hypothesis about its primitive cause, but the exceptionality, in relation to other animals, of man’s capacity for destruction will underpin the rest of the text. famously, in chapters 7 and 8 the greatest source of man’s discontent within civilization will be identified with his distinctive “sense of guilt,” the virulence of which is precisely the introverted manifestation of man’s exceptional instinctual aggressivity (123–139). however, the integrity of this hypothesis on man’s putative exceptionality is no less troubled than is the hypothesis on freedom by the variant conceptions of animality on humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 20 which its exposition relies. the tensions to which they give rise are legible at two key moments in the decisive critique of “love thy neighbour” which leads up to the broaching of chapter 7’s hypothesis. there is, first of all, freud’s brief but significant invocation in chapter 5 of a certain grouping of animals to underscore the absurdity of an imperative to universal love: but if i am to love [a human stranger] (with this universal love) merely because he is an inhabitant of this earth, like an insect, an earth-worm or a grass-snake... (110) obviously, the remark mocks the ethical imperative by comparing human neighbors (nächsten) whom one is supposed to love, insofar as they are dwellers on the earth, with a selection of earth-dwelling animals who are thus called on to represent what is apparently least worthy of love: insects, worms, snakes. note the disjunction between this sarcastically intoned comment made en passant and the later, more formalized claims about the animal “states” created by our non-human relatives (unsere verwandten), not least of all insects. the latter claims rely on ethological observation and stress man’s “admiration” for such social achievement. in sharp contrast, the above comment appeals to a deeply traditional taxonomic hierarchy that antedates and remains foreign to organized ethology and which is ultimately traceable to leviticus: its derisory point, that is to say, is communicated by a pragmatic underwriting of the ancient abasement of all animals that “creep upon the earth” — even the ant and the termite — as abject and impure.13 of course, the implicit tension here — which means that the same animal species may potentially be seen as both contemptible (neighbors) and admirable (relatives) — goes unacknowledged. however, freud’s fleeting, contemptuous allusion to creatures that crawl the earth has the significant effect of pulling against the basic theoretical argument he will go on to propose: namely that the human neighbor is unworthy of my love precisely because at the least provocation he will unleash his innate aggression (the death drive) against me. for if, as freud will declare, this innate destructiveness is exceptionally powerful in man, relative to all other animals, then the more harmonious instinctual make-up of non-human species — including insects, earth-worms and grass-snakes — might logically be thought to disqualify them, rather than recommend them, as representatives of what is most undeserving of our affection. nicholas ray — “interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents” 21 freud’s apparently unequivocal claim about the exceptionality of human instinctual violence is compromised more emphatically just a few pages later. the critique of “love thy neighbor” builds to a climax when freud begins to detail the manifestations of specifically human aggressivity: [man’s] neighbour is not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. (111) this forceful proliferation of subordinate clauses is followed by the briefest sentence in the entire text — a proverbial declaration for which freud chooses not to supply a citation14 and which operates as a kind of shorthand to encapsulate all the behaviours he has just listed: “homo homini lupus”: man is a wolf to man (ibid). this well-known formulation has its roots in plautus’s comedy asinaria and has, as jacques derrida has shown at length, been “taken up, reinterpreted, reinvested and mediated by [...] many others: rabelais, montaigne, bacon, especially hobbes” (derrida, “the beast and the sovereign“ 11; first session).15 freud’s rhetorical appeal to the figure of the wolf at once unites his exposition with a venerable tradition within european social thought and, as it were, marks a critical disunity within his own exposition. on the one hand, we have the developing affirmation that something about the death drive in man sets him apart from his fellow animals, that his capacity not just for aggressivity in the name of survival but for cruelty (humiliation, torture, atrocity) is a distinguishing characteristic of the human. on the other hand, we have freud’s recourse to a perspective and a dictum that figure this supposedly exceptional cruelty as the expression of something fundamentally non-human: an inner, “wolfish” animality. the human species’s most devastating atrocities, freud states later in the same paragraph, from the “invasions of the huns” to “the horrors of the recent world war,” only serve to “reveal” (enthüllt) that ultimately “man [is] a savage beast [wilde bestie]” (cd ibid. [471]). as with the analysis of liberty, the account of the death drive is thus marked by a determined tension in its theoretical positioning of the human vis-à-vis the animal and animality. in respect of aggressivity cd postulates that human beings are too little like their relatives the animals ever to be free of “cultural struggle” (123); yet it codes and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 22 defines the devastation resulting from that struggle, the “excesses of brutal [brutalen] violence” it entails (112), as nothing less than animal itself. the cruelty that is supposed to distinguish the “human” from the “animal” as such is also, on this account, what shows the human, at bottom, to be a wolf, a beast, a brute. once again the conceptual delimitation of animality and the animal introduces a problematic and unacknowledged uncertainty into the exposition: man is at once, freud’s text indicates, too much and not enough of an animal to be adequately integrated into kultur. the ambivalence and instability that characterize chapter 3’s initial diagnosis are, then, neither resolved nor abandoned as freud’s exposition evolves its core propositions. on the contrary, that ambivalence and instability are carried over into the elaboration of its central claims, reprised and re-inscribed within eros and repeated, in a slightly different modality, with respect to the death drive. thus subtended by appeals to animal being which are ill at ease with one another theoretically, freud’s analysis of man’s own unease (unbehagen) within kultur rests upon conflicting conceptual foundations. the hypothesis of impaired olfaction: two feet / two footnotes. and yet what cd has to say about the human/animal relation is in no sense exhausted by these troubled formulations in the main text concerning liberty, instinctual love, and destructiveness. on the contrary, freud turns his attention to this theme in a more direct, if highly compressed way in the two famous, lengthy footnotes that depend from either side of cd’s structural midpoint — one affixed to the beginning of chapter 4, the other to the same chapter’s final sentence. these dense passages detail freud’s speculation on the relative impairment of the human sense of smell owing to the evolutionary phenomenon of man’s upright stance, his capacity to walk on two feet: for freud this sensorial loss may be the decisive physiological factor in determining the defensive capacities of the human psyche. the core of this hypothesis is not original to cd. it in fact derives from freud’s “prepsychoanalytic” past. he first broached it more than three decades earlier in private correspondence with his friend wilhelm fliess (complete letters to fliess, november 14, 1897). thereafter, he returned to it periodically but never very systematically and never in such a way as to fully assimilate it into theoretical orthodoxy. prior to cd he sketched the idea in print only twice: in the rat man case of 1909 (248)16 and in 1912’s “on the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love” (189–190). the discussion in cd is freud’s last treatment of it. it is also his most extensive and evolved. nicholas ray — “interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents” 23 the notes require slow and careful reading, since their argumentation is more cumulative than linear. looked at schematically, that argumentation consists of three “moments,” the second and third each emerging as a kind of recursive amplification and entrenchment of the one that precedes it. the first presents a specifically sexological reflection on the consequence of the upright stance for erotic life. the second presents a broader, anthropological perspective, linking bipedalism to the inauguration of civilization. the third and most compressed consolidates the earlier observations, hypothesizing an inaugural expulsion of “animality” — brought about by locomotive elevation — at the root of all human psychic defence. what has not always been fully appreciated by the few authors who have commented substantially on freud’s “olfactory” hypothesis17 is the extent to which this recursive exposition represents an expansion and a drawing out of the implications of the original 30-odd-year-old idea. a hypothesis that started out as, and remained for years, a more or less limited attempt to give repression a theoretical grounding in the physiology of the human body, begins to evolve in cd into an incipient, speculative account of anthropogenesis as such — one that is both striking and, in many respects, progressively counter-humanist. striking and progressive but also, it must be emphasized, poorly integrated. expanded as the hypothesis may be in this text, its typographic marginalization is significant. as bersani has astutely observed, the footnotes in cd constitute a kind of “unconscious” of the text itself (18), bristling with theoretical possibilities that in spite of an appearance of continuity are at a potentially dangerous tangent to the dominant claims of the “upper body” of the work. set off and relegated to the bottom of the page, freud’s speculations on bipedalism are partially insulated from the tensions that traverse the upper text in its theorization of civilization and the drives. more than that, however, they constitute an implicit interrogation of the presumptions and exigencies that underlie those very tensions. it will, i hope, be clear in the discussion that follows that by taking the content of the notes seriously, my interest does not lie in revivifying freud’s own inclination towards a reductive “biologism,”18 nor in the possibility of confirming or “refuting”— in the popperian sense — the objective veracity of the details of what is ventured in the notes. epistemologically speaking, their argument is comparable with the more famous humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 24 “scientific myth” — as freud himself calls it (group psychology 135) — of the murder of the primal father in totem and taboo. to be sure, partial aspects of what freud proposes do anticipate later, empirically-based advances in the field of human evolution.19 but i am less concerned with trying legitimize or substantiate his openly speculative conjecture empirically than with apprehending the critical intuition that it vehiculates. sex and the upright stance. the upper text of chapter 4 is concerned with love and the function of the family within civilization. the two footnotes in question are attached to separate conjectural remarks about the characteristics of human sexuality and what facilitates its subjugation to familial and civilized restriction. the ostensibly instigating concern of both notes is to argue that this subjugation is made possible by a fundamental, even constitutive, impairment of the sexual life of the human animal. freud’s specific thesis concerning human sexual impairment is that it is a consequence of what he calls an “organic repression” linked to “[man’s] assumption of an upright gait” (cd 99n). in the sexual field, freud proposes, the shift from quadrupedal to bipedal locomotion had the effect of causing a “diminution of olfactory stimuli” (ibid.). to be sure, this reduction in the significance of the sense of smell freed man from the regulated periodicity of the sexual process; but in placing man as it were “above” the olfactory enjoyments of the body (genital, anal, excretal etc.) it also exiled him forever from a certain instinctual jouissance. in addition, the upright posture made the “[human] genitals, which were previously concealed, visible and in need of protection,” thereby “provok[ing] feelings of shame” for the first time (ibid.). thus on the basis of a purely organic development, alienated from olfaction and subject to pudency, “the whole of [human] sexuality” (106n) became marked by a fundamental inhibition. it is necessary to underscore certain details and implications of this specific claim in order grasp the implications of the broader, anthropogenetic hypothesis arising from it. cary wolfe, in his brief comments on cd in what is posthumanism?, regards freud’s claim warily. on his account “freud’s parsing of the evolutionary sensorium” is to be seen as one of the “canonical” expressions of the privileging of “visual prowess” and thus of the “humanist ability to survey, organize and master space” (wolfe 130). however, this does little justice to the substance of freud’s argument, which is less an attempt to perpetuate the “stereotypical” (ibid.) humanist paradigm described by wolfe than to account for the very quasi-conceptual hierarchy from which it emerges. on freud’s view the locomotive elevation of the human being does not — definitively does not — amount to an ontological or sensorial elevation: on the contrary, it effects a loss of nicholas ray — “interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents” 25 sensory capacity, a reduction or impairment of apprehension with respect to outer and inner worlds. more significantly, for freud, if the upright posture of the human animal causes a “diminution of […] olfactory stimuli” it also, and by extension, causes a “devaluation of olfactory stimuli” (cd 99n; emphases added). the italicized words in these respective phrases translate two distinct german terms that it is important not to confuse: zurücktreten and entwertung. with the notion of the “zurücktreten of olfactory stimuli” freud describes as it were a purely physiological decline in what is or can be smelled by the human animal, in consequence of his vertical elevation. the “entwertung of olfactory stimuli” moves us from a quantitative reduction at the level of physiology to the qualitative cathexes and decathexes of the sensorium, to which the physiological reduction gives rise. in other words, freud’s text distinguishes between, on the one hand, an objective decline in the functional significance of the sense of smell within human beings, and, on the other, the resulting psychic devaluation or disinvestment of the sense of smell per se. man is thus positioned not just as an animal whose relation to olfactory stimulation has been diminished but as the animal which — for that very reason — seeks to dismiss olfaction tout court as an “inferior” sense. freud’s human being, then, is not, as wolfe believes, somehow sensorially superior to non-human animals owing to a “visual prowess” that supervenes after the diminution of the sense of smell. on the contrary, freud deploys his account of the physiological diminution of olfaction in man to explain the existence, and more particularly the contingency and the factitiousness, of precisely that qualitative stratification of sensoria presupposed by the humanist paradigm wolfe condemns. shame, cleanliness, and dogs. the critical implications of freud’s position begin to emerge more forcefully in the second half of the first footnote. here, he makes overt the next “step” in his exposition, specifically positioning civilization itself as the consequence of the erect posture. this account of the origins of civilization arises directly out of his foregoing proposition regarding the emergence of shame. he treats the latter as one of three decisive phenomena of civilized life caused by man’s upright stance, the others being family and cleanliness. his remarks on family are fairly brief. he has already conjectured in the chapter’s upper text that man’s motive for keeping his sexual objects near him in durable relationships must owe something to his capacity for continuous erotic excitement. at this point, freud merely tries to ground that claim by insisting that this humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 26 capacity is an effect of the loss of sexual periodicity caused by olfactory repression. what concerns us more directly, however, is the excursus into cleanliness. this theme is subject to a more extensive discussion and is eventually linked up with shame through a reflection on the figure of the freud argues, then, that the human “incitement [antrieb] to cleanliness” — for which hygiene is merely an “ex post facto justification” — was first caused by the shift away from quadrupedalism (100n). it arose, that is, not just from the “urge to get rid of the excreta,” which is common to living things, but from the conjunction of this vital necessity with the fact that, owing to the organic repression of olfaction, the excreted substances had become “disagreeable to the sense perceptions” (ibid.). now, the subsequent development of civilization entails the progressive entrenchment and accelerated recapitulation of this conjunction. the latter must itself be reestablished afresh within every new “human” life, since initially “[t]he excreta arouse no abhorrence [abscheu] in children” (ibid. [459n]).20 civilization thus puts, freud claims, a “special energy” into “hastening the course of development” laid down organically for human beings by the repression of olfaction in the distant past: education and upbringing serve to enforce and expedite at an ontogenic level the identification of the excreta, and their strong smells, with all that is “worthless, disgusting, abhorrent and abominable” (ibid.). crucially for freud, however, an adjuvant “social” factor, as he calls it, is glimpsed in the operations of civilization. if the latter is the avatar of the diminishment of olfaction in the upright human, it is also the avatar of the human devaluation of olfaction tout court, of the factitious — and fundamentally anthropocentric — stratification of sensoria which the devaluation implies. in short, civilization serves to efface as privation the privation (namely, “organic repression”) in which it has its origin. for the work of civilization does not only accelerate and solidify the physiologically-based predisposition to deem certain substances and smells worthy of contempt. it also enlists the human animal into deeming others who do not share the sense of abhorrence — those “who are not clean [...] who [do] not hide [their] excreta” (ibid.) — as being equally worthy of contempt therefore. to be a civilized human being is not simply to be capable of abhorrence; it is to apprehend the absence of this capability — and thus the “failure” or absence of olfactory repression – as being abhorrent in itself. nicholas ray — “interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents” 27 it is in this connection that freud turns more overtly to the question of the human/animal relation, opening up a line of interrogation that will become broader and more trenchant still in the second footnote. here is the key passage, which concludes the first note: it would be incomprehensible [...] that man should use the name of his most faithful friend in the animal world — the dog — as a term of abuse if that creature had not incurred his contempt through two characteristics: that it is an animal whose dominant sense is that of smell and one which has no horror [scheut] of excrement, and that it is not ashamed of its sexual functions. (ibid. [459n]) what is in question here is both actual hostility to a non-human animal (implicit contempt for the faithful quadruped, owing to its physiological incapacity for the shame and abhorrence that regulate civilized life) and the metaphorical “animalization” (by means — in this instance – of canine terms of abuse) of human beings who are somehow “below” civilized standards of cleanliness and decency, inhibition, sexual restraint etc. the upper text of cd is of course greatly preoccupied with the means by which human beings denigrate and justify aggression towards members of their own species. here, however, freud’s concern with the linguistic idioms that sometimes articulate that aggression brings into focus the fundamental human derogation of other species. apropos of this theme, the passage above is patently not an advocation of man’s “superiority” to the dog — or to any other non-human animal — owing to the sensory and psychic reorganization provoked by his locomotive elevation. everything freud has said up to this point makes it clear that for him the dog becomes an object of contempt and an exemplum of abjection only because human civilization is constitutively invested in the tendentious abasement of the sensory organization the dog represents. in other words, freud is at pains to stress the peculiarly factitious basis for the dog’s “inferiority” within the material and symbolic universe of the human. far from assuming a position of “humanist” ascendancy himself, freud thus begins to open up for critique precisely the devaluation of non-human animals — and the devaluation as “animal” of “uncivilized” humans — on which the illusion of that ascendency supports itself. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 28 as the implications of this argument are developed in the second footnote, it increasingly emerges that for freud the question of the origin as such of the human being is fundamentally inseparable from the question of these factitious devaluations. the human / animal separation as primordial defence. the second footnote is appended to the closing remarks of the chapter. in the upper text freud has by now returned to the impairment of “the sexual life of civilized man” and conjectured that “not only the pressure of civilization but something in the nature of the [sexual] function itself denies us [i.e. human beings] full satisfaction and urges us along other paths.” apparently withholding “full satisfaction” himself, freud has ended the thought with the equivocal statement: “this may be wrong; it is hard to decide” (105). in the extensive note that follows he spends a good deal of time supporting this conjecture nonetheless. contrary to what one might expect, the note doesn’t immediately resume freud’s account of the specifically human experience of sexuality. he in fact begins by postulating that the sexual function of many living creatures — human or otherwise — entails some incapacity for full satisfaction owing to the coexistence within each organism of “male and female” impulses (106n). no single object can simultaneously satisfy these differential impulses and therefore no individual can provide another with full sexual satisfaction. and this, freud insists, is true for man only because he is “an animal organism with (like others) an unmistakably bisexual disposition” (105n). the significance of this claim, which stresses the continuity between human and non-human sexuality, is the retrospective nuance that it implicitly grants to the position set out in the previous footnote. freud is not about to contradict that position; he will shortly return to the particular sexual effects of the upright stance in man. extravagant as the remarks on bisexuality may appear in their own right, what they achieve within the recursive argumentation of the notes is a calibration of the erotic bases from which the upright stance is said to cause a departure. their effect is to make freud’s account of the consequence of man’s bipedalism irreducible to a tale of expulsion from an original unimpaired plenitude. it isn’t quite the case that for freud “our sexuality fell when we stood up,” as bersani has suggested (17; emphasis mine). rather, freud sees the impairment of upright man’s sexual function as a specific and extreme instance of a deficiency that is already integral to the sexual function per se, even in non-human animals. nicholas ray — “interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents” 29 after briefly adverting to the further, complicating factor of sadism within erotic ties — the text’s first direct invocation of the death drive and one in which he refrains from hypothesizing its relative distribution among human and non-human creatures — he opens a new paragraph to treat in detail the conjecture which, he says, “goes deepest” (cd 106n). this returns him specifically to the human and to the consequences of the upright stance. he takes the opportunity here not simply to restate his hypothesis but to give it a further, recursive deepening — one that offers a summative statement of everything our reading has ascertained from the footnotes so far. thus he recapitulates his basic hypothesis that the erect posture and the depreciation of man’s sense of smell impaired “the whole of man’s sexuality,” and he briefly underlines the continuity between this basic human repugnance (widerstreben) towards erotism and contemporary manifestations of psychosexual pathology. however, he then goes on to venture the following — compressed — claim: [t]he deepest root of the sexual repression [sexualverdrängung] which advances along with civilization is the organic defence [organische abwehr] of the new form of life achieved with man’s erect gait against his earlier animal existence. this result of scientific research coincides in a remarkable way with commonplace prejudices that have often made themselves heard. (ibid. [466n]) it is worth underlining two, related points of development in this passage. firstly, the more apposite term “organic defence” has been substituted for the earlier “organic repression.” just a few years before cd, in inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety, freud had spoken in favor of a terminological distinction between “repression” (verdrängung) and “defence” (abwehr). the latter, he had proposed, should be used generically to refer to any operation involving the “protection of the ego against instinctual demands” (164). repression as such would be only one modality of defence and, what’s more, would not necessarily be the earliest, since other modalities may be assumed to exist “before [the] sharp cleavage [of the mental apparatus] into an ego and an id” (ibid.). at this point in the footnotes, the term repression, which freud has hitherto used a little awkwardly to describe the prehistoric repudiation concomitant with the upright stance, is redeployed in its restricted sense to describe psychosexual repression of the classical kind. it is replaced by defence — the elementary term now distinguishing the primordiality of the operation in question. secondly, we witness, in tandem with this gesture of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 30 terminological nuancing, the boldest framing yet of the function of this foundational rejection. where previously freud has described the elementary defence in terms of particular examples — the devaluation (entwertung) of olfaction and the attendant devaluation of “olfactory” species such as dogs — he now presents a consolidated characterization of its action: the foundational defence of the upright life-form — and the germinal “root” of all other defences the latter might subsequently evolve, including the sexual repression of civilization itself — is nothing less than a defence against “animality,” against being-“animal.” here, we have perhaps the most striking affirmation of the counter-humanist impulse we have traced in the notes so far. what impels the footnoted exposition is not an imperative to adjudicate the putative frontier between human and animal, even though, as we have seen, freud will labor to do so elsewhere in the upper text. it is to recognize — and give a constitutive place to — the human animal’s non-neutral preoccupation with establishing and consolidating precisely such a frontier. what crystallizes most overtly here is the endeavor not to entrench or renew any distinction between “human” and “animal” but to problematize the human animal’s urge to be ontologically distinct. on this view the perennial enigmas of anthropocentric thought — what separates “us” from “animals”? what is “proper” to the human? etc. — must be seen not simply as questions to be answered but as determined outgrowths of what is always already a defensive operation. the account of homo sapiens which gradually emerges from this typographically set-off, cumulatively adumbrated hypothesis, then, is one that, to borrow the terms of giorgio agamben, presents the human less as “a clearly defined species [or] a substance” than an “anthropogenic (or [...] anthropological) machine” (agamben 26) — a being that is defined/defines itself by the production and exclusion of “the animal” as a kind of constitutive outside. for freud — as also for agamben – this entails not just an originary rejection of the new life-form’s own earlier (i.e. pre-bipedal) “animal existence,” but, as we have seen, the devaluation of non-human others, and the relegation of devalued human others to the status of (mere) “animals.” summation: inside / outside. in the opening pages of cd, freud describes the originary process of infantile subjectivation. it is a process in which the ego forms as a differentiated entity by distinguishing as “other,” expelling from its nascent self, whatever is perceived to cause unpleasure — whether its origin is “external” (objects in the outer world) or “internal” (cd 67). thus indiscriminately rejecting as “not-me” nicholas ray — “interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents” 31 everything that is supposed incompatible with its rudimentary sense of identity, the burgeoning subject carves out a coherent psychic “inside” only by creating a “strange and threatening ‘outside’” (ibid.). the speculative hypothesis in the footnotes effectively transposes the logic of this ontogenic argument onto the still more obscure horizon of anthropogenesis. here, as we have seen, the becoming-human of man is fundamentally linked to a defensive withdrawal from non-human animals and a rejection as “animal” of those aspects of man’s own being which are intolerable. in short, the hypothesis gives the tendentious repudiation of “the animal” a grounding, constitutive place within what is called — what calls itself — man. further, kultur is not unique to man: in addition to characteristics it may share with the cultures of other animals, human civilization is an apparatus whose most elementary purpose is to consolidate and transmit the defensive illusion of man’s uniqueness, to perpetuate this foundational rejection of an animal “outside.” for all of its extravagance, then, the argument of freud’s olfactory hypothesis adumbrates a vision of man, and of human civilization, which is driven by a counter-humanist impulse more emphatic and progressive theoretically than perhaps anything in the upper text. innovation and going-astray. where does all this progressive insight of the olfactory hypothesis leave us in terms of understanding the tensions and contradictions that we have traced in the upper text? at the beginning of this essay i cited the work of the eminent french psychoanalyst jean laplanche as a key influence in the development of my argument. in this final section i would like to resume briefly one key aspect of laplanche’s thought in order to address this question. in a move that laplanche is fond of citing, freud famously places his own work within a tradition of scientific breakthroughs that have “de-centered” the human being and struck a blow against what freud calls “human narcissism” (freud, “a difficulty in the path of psychoanalysis” 141): copernicus de-centered man’s place in the universe; darwin de-centered man’s place among the animals; freud himself de-centered man’s ego, revealing him to be a psychically “heteronomous” being. however, in a series of texts reaching back several decades laplanche has shown in detail just how rarely freud’s thought is able to sustain this radical, de-centring impulse. whatever freud’s declared ambition in respect of the de-centring of man, laplanche argues, the “constant threat of narcissistic closure” (“unfinished copernican revolution” 81) pervades his theorizations. time after time — and indeed increasingly as his work matures — freud humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 32 ends up theoretically re-centring human psychic life by postulating an alternative but no less secure, essential and integrable “core self.” the late postulation of the biological core of the “id” is, in laplanche’s account, only the most perspicuous instance of the ways in which a safely “monadological” (83) or “ipsocentric” (“time and the other” 245) view of the subject subtly reasserts itself in freud’s thinking. what is particularly instructive about laplanche’s approach to these “goings-astray” (fourvoiements), as he calls them, of freud’s de-centering ambition, is that for laplanche they are not simply signs of intellectual failure or inconsistency on freud’s part. they are indices of what he views as a quasi-mimetic relation between freudian theory and its primary object: viz. the human psyche in its formation and development. freud’s theory does not, he proposes, evolve independently of that object. rather, the latter tends to magnetize the theory into an unwitting complicity with the very narcissism the theory seeks to understand and displace. laplanche sometimes illustrates this claim by means of a parody of haeckel’s “biogenetic law,” so dear to freud. where for haeckel “‘ontogenesis recapitulates phylogenesis,’” for laplanche “‘theoretico-genesis’ recapitulates ontogenesis” (laplanche, “unfinished copernican revolution” 81). put simply: any (human) theory of the human subject will be almost ineluctably oriented and constrained by the gravitational pull of man’s own illusory sense of autonomy and egoic centrality. on laplanche’s account freud’s oeuvre thus emerges as a conflicted site bearing the traces of a “double history of [de-centering] innovation and goingastray [i.e. theoretical re-centerings] — a sort of braid in which at times one strand of the plait is uppermost, at times the other” (laplanche, op. cit. 61). interpreting freud productively, laplanche insists, means not simply attacking him for inconsistency or contradiction. on the contrary, it requires that we recognise that such manifest theoretical tensions are the effects of determinate and conflicting fields of force underlying freud’s thinking: the radical impulse to counter human narcissism and the regressive tendency, peculiar to all efforts to think the human, to connive unwittingly with that narcissism. only then, laplanche proposes, can we begin to expand the decentering impulse of the freudian discovery, and do so in a way that is as resistant as possible to the incorrigible human constraint to efface that discovery’s humiliating audacity. as a psychoanalytic theoretician and clinician, laplanche’s reading and interpretation of the conflicting tendencies driving freud’s work are mainly preoccupied with freud’s formulations on metapsychology: that is, with the description of the psychic apparatus nicholas ray — “interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents” 33 itself. however, in their partial anticipation of agamben’s “anthropogenic machine” freud’s footnotes enable us to supplement laplanche’s approach by positing alongside freud’s “metapsychological goings-astray” a fundamental “anthropological goingastray.” what freud and agamben both suggest is that the self-serving human production of, and separation from, a putative “animal outside” is not a contingent possibility to which one may or may not fall prey. it is constitutively woven into the fabric and the conventions of human thought — no less indeed than the narcissistic illusion, which elsewhere draws freud’s metapsychology adrift, that we are psychically “centered” and autonomous. as agamben indicates, it may take different forms in different epochs — and indeed in different cultural settings21 — but its most traditional and emphatic form in western thinking is that glimpsed in freud’s notes: a repudiation of non-human animals as uncivilized and the animalization of derogated aspects of man. now on the one hand, freud’s theorizations in cd are demonstrably impelled by this anthropological gravitation within thinking. the displacement of human atrocity onto the figures of the wolf and the beast, the bald and sarcastic repudiation of certain species as the antithesis of the civilized “neighbor,” the negative circumscription of man’s putatively unacculturated “animality”: these manifest a complicity with the sedimented hierarchies of the anthropogenic machine which freud is also, elsewhere, able to intuit — in the partial, highly marginalized form we have examined. however, as we have seen in the theses on “erotic” and “thanotic” impulses, this rhetorical and theoretical denigration of animals contends in various ways with declarations of admiration; the animalisation of man’s unacculturated being and of instinctual excesses antithetical to civilization contends with repeated and affirmative claims about nonhuman eusociality; the assumption of connotative hierarchies between species contends with ethological claims about the differences among them. and we have also traced the curious theoretical contradictions to which these overlappings implicitly give rise in terms of freud’s central problematic: is man too much or not enough of an animal ever to be civilized without discontent? to that extent we may say that with respect to its variances regarding the human/animal relation, the upper text of cd is “braided” in a way that is analogous to the formulations on metapsychology analyzed by laplanche. its multiple innovations and intuitions contend, in an unresolved manner, with potent resurgences of an impulsion that is anything but unique to freud, pulling the text back humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 34 towards the abjection of animality through which the human being constitutively labors to define, and valorize, itself. to try to understand in this way the latent tensions that govern contradictory formulations in freud’s work does not mean giving those tensions a pass and allowing them to stand. as i hope will be clear, those tensions can and should be identified, analyzed and aggravated. by doing so, i suggest, we gain a richer understanding of what is a critical and complex yet rarely discussed aspect of his extraordinary thought. we can also then begin to ask how a psychoanalysis to come might best resist the foundational humanist impulse that can constrain and lead astray the thought of freud himself.22 in tracing the conceptualizations and representations of animals and animality in cd, my intention has not been to present an encompassing account of freud’s perspectives on the human/animal relation. his oeuvre is too complex and too shifting, his debts to — and displacements of — disparate traditions within science, philosophy, literature and mythology are too disparate, for this to be possible within a single essay.23 what i have tried to show is that animals and animality play a critical role in his thinking. they are at once indispensable reference points and sites of implicit conflict and instability. tracking the different manifestations of animality elsewhere in freud, and educing their respective implications for the different areas and eras of his thought, is a task for further research. however, it has also been my goal to suggest that as far as the concerns of human/animal studies go, freud’s oeuvre warrants being seen as more than just an object for critique. for all of its conflictuality and ambivalence, the freudian text also bears within it openings of considerable critical potentiality in their own right. these are sometimes marginal and incipient, and may require patient analysis and elaboration to disintricate, but they open onto theoretical intuitions and possibilities which deserve to be understood, which can themselves be put to work in the interpretation of the oeuvre’s own instabilities, and from which we may continue to learn. notes 1. where, within quotations, i also refer to freud’s original german texts the page reference for the gesammelte werke will appear in square brackets. nicholas ray — “interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents” 35 2. bersani’s approach takes inspiration from methodological principles set out in laplanche's “interpreting (with) freud” and developed systematically by him until the end of his life. 3. i am in favor of using the term “drive” to translate freud’s trieb and do so throughout, except when quoting strachey’s standard translation, which translates this term as “instinct.” however, since there is no english adjectival form for “drive” (the relevant german term is triebhaften) i retain the word “instinctual” where the adjective is required. 4. cf. bersani 14. 5. see, for example, laplanche, “biologie et biologisme.” 6. cd does not cite haeckel explicitly, and nor do any other of freud’s published works. however, as sulloway and gould have demonstrated, the absence of any localized mention of haeckel’s name is an indication of the almost pervasive influence and presence within freud’s thinking of recapitulation theory. 7. the “inch of nature” phrase is something of textual crux — one of many — in shakespeare’s play and is not reproduced in all editions. freud’s translator, james strachey, conjectures that freud’s familiarity with the phrase may derive from his reading of georg brandes’s monograph william shakespeare (1896). see cd 91, n. 1. 8. beyond the pleasure principle is perhaps the most developed example of this tendency. it comes most strongly to the fore in freud’s later work and is evident in the ease with which he refers, for example, to elementary animal [elementaren animalischen] instinctual sources [triebquellen]” (“the resistances to psychoanalysis” 218 [105–106]). see my essay “psychoanalysis and the ‘animal’: a reading of the metapsychology of jean laplanche” which tracks and critiques this development in freud. 9. the termite’s ability to eat through wood — to the point that structures supported by wood may weaken and collapse — is reflected in the etymology of its name, influenced as it is by the latin terere: “to rub, to wear down, to erode.” 10. on this conceptual pairing see “the psychoanalytic view of psychogenic disturbances of vision.” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 36 11. for a meticulous account of the evolution of freud’s drive theory see laplanche, life and death in psychoanalysis, esp. chapters 2, 4 and 6. 12. it is, however, broached earlier in a footnote in chapter 4. i discuss the notes to chapter 4 in detail later on. 13. see leviticus, 11 : 41–44, esp. 14. the footnoted reference to plautus given in the english standard edition is an editorial addition and does not appear in freud’s german text. 15. later in the first session derrida discusses freud’s hypotheses about man’s supposedly exceptional capacity for cruelty and cites freud’s admiring discussion of “our animal ancestors” at length. it is all the more striking therefore that throughout his extensive treatment of homo homini lupus in the seminar, derrida never reflects upon, or explicitly acknowledges, freud’s own appeal to this dictum in relation to the death drive. 16. later the same year freud raised the matter in some detail at a meeting of the vienna psychoanalytic society. it met with some scepticism among his colleagues. see nunberg and federn ( scientific meeting of november 17, 1909). 17. other discussions of the hypothesis may be found in harvey (chapter 7); lippit (chapter 4); sulloway (chapter 10). bersani (chapter 1) touches on it interestingly but with relatively little explicit development. the hypothesis is of interest to derrida (“before the law” 194) — and one can perhaps detect the trace of its influence in his “hypothesis” on modesty (“‘but as for me, who am i (following)?’” 61) — but he never gives a systematic reading of it. more recently, in his essay on “the pharmacology of desire” bernard stiegler has taken a deconstructive approach to the notes. stiegler’s important comments are sensitive to the question of anthropogenesis. however, his primary concern is with the cd’s exemplary foreclosure of man’s relation to technics, rather than its exposition of man’s defensive relation to a putative animality. i discuss cary wolfe’s brief comments on the olfactory hypothesis in the next section. 18. for a polemical discussion of the repudiation of freudian biologism within much contemporary psychoanalysis, see green. 19. notably, the discovery of zinjanthropian in 1959 showed the grounding role of bipedalism in the development of the human brain. this demonstrable relegation of the nicholas ray — “interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents” 37 brain to a secondary rather than a directive role in hominization was something of a scandal for the anthropocentric conception of the human being, as french anthropologist andré leroi-gourhan famously underlined: “we were prepared to accept anything except to learn that it all [that is, hominization] began with the feet!” (leroi-gourhan 65). the profound implications of this empirical blow to anthropocentrism are further developed in bernard stiegler’s book technics and time: the fault of epimetheus (1.§3). 20. translation altered. here strachey translates abscheu as “disgust.” however, abscheu is distinct from the word freud tends to use when he speaks specifically of disgust vis-à-vis sexuality. in his discussion of the perversions in the three essays on the theory of sexuality, for instance, freud refers to the “limits of disgust [grenze dieses ekels]” as being purely “conventional” i.e. differing between cultures (152 [51]). freud’s concern in the footnotes to cd is with an antipathy that is not reducible to the specific mores of a single culture but which plays a founding role in the establishment of human culture (kultur) itself. moreover, abscheu and its derivatives imply a fear or horror that is not essential to disgust (cf. chapter 1 of totem and taboo: “die inzestscheu” (“the horror of incest”)). in order to retain the distinction implicit in freud’s writing — and maintained elsewhere by strachey’s standard edition — i use “abhorrence” to translate abscheu here. 21. i do not have space here to discuss freud’s most sustained discussion of the human/animal relation in non-western cultures in totem and taboo. 22. i have discussed this at greater length, and with close reference to laplanche’s refoundation of freudian metapsychology, in ray. 23. this has, however, been attempted, not without interesting results, by genosko. works cited agamben, giorgio. the open: man and animal. trans. k. attell. stanford: stanford up, 2004. armstrong, philip. what animals mean in the fiction of modernity. london and new york: routledge, 2008. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 38 bersani, leo. the freudian body: psychoanalysis and art. new york: columbia up, 1986. bleakley, alan. the animalizing imagination: totemism, textuality and ecocriticism. hampshire and london: macmillan, 2000. derrida, jacques. “before the law” (1984), in acts of literature, ed. derek attridge. london and ny: routledge, 1992. 181–220. _____. “‘but as for me, who am i (following)?’” the animal that therefore i am, trans. david wills. new york: fordham up, 2008. 52–118. _____. the beast and the sovereign vol. 1. trans. geoffrey bennington. chicago: chicago up, 2009. freud, sigmund. beyond the pleasure principle (1920). standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud, trans. james strachey (se) vol. 18. 1–64. _____.civilization and its discontents (1930) se 21. 59–145. das unbehagen in der kultur, gesammelte werke (gw) band 14. frankfurt: fischer, 1999. 419–506. _____. the complete letters of sigmund freud to wilhelm fliess. trans. jeffrey masson. cambridge mass. and london: harvard up, 1985. _____. “a difficulty in the path of psychoanalysis” (1917). se 17. 135–144. _____. group psychology and the analysis of the ego (1921). se 18. 65–143. _____. inhibitions, symptoms and anxiety (1926). se 20. 75–175. _____. notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis (1909). se 10. 151–249. _____. “on the universal tendency to debasement in the sphere of love” (1912). se 11. 177–190. _____. “the psychoanalytic view of psychogenic disturbances of vision” (1910). se 11. 209–218. _____. “the resistances to psychoanalysis” (1925). se 19. 211–222. “die widerstände gegen die psychoanalyse.” gw 14. 99–110. _____. totem and taboo (1912 –1913). se 13.1–162. totem und tabu. gw 9. 1–209. _____. three essays on the theory of sexuality (1905). se 7. 123–245. drei abhandlungen zur sexualtheorie, gw 5. 27–145. nicholas ray — “interrogating the human/animal relation in freud’s civilization and its discontents” 39 freud, sigmund and albert einstein. “why war?” (1933). se 22. 196–215. “warum krieg?” gw 16, 11–27. genosko, gary. “freud’s bestiary: how does psychoanalysis treat animals?” psychoanalytic review 80.4 (1993): 603–632. gould, stephen jay. ontogeny and phylogeny. cambridge mass. & london: harvard up, 1977. green, andré. the chains of eros: the sexual in psychoanalysis. trans. luke thurston. london: karnac, 2000. harvey, david. sensual relations: engaging the senses in culture and social theory. ann arbor: michigan up, 2003. laplanche, jean. “biologie et biologisme” (1997) in laplanche, le fourvoiement biologisant de la sexualité chez freud. 127–144. _____. “exigency and going astray” (1993). trans. vincent ladmiral and nicholas ray., ed. john fletcher and nicholas ray. london: lawrence & wishart; forthcoming, 2014. _____. le fourvoiement biologisant de la sexualité chez freud. paris: presses universitaires de france, 2006. _____. “interpreting (with) freud” (1968). trans. vincent ladmiral and nicholas ray. seductions and enigmas: laplanche, theory, culture, ed. john fletcher and nicholas ray. london: lawrence & wishart, 2014. 55–70. _____. life and death in psychoanalysis. trans. jeffrey mehlman. baltimore & london: johns hopkins up, 1976. _____. “time and the other.” trans. luke thurston. essays on otherness, ed. john fletcher. london and new york : routledge, 1999. 234–259. _____. “the unfinished copernican revolution.” trans. luke thurston. essays on otherness, ed. john fletcher. london and new york: routledge 1999. 52–83. leroi-gourhan, andré. gesture and speech, trans. anna bostock berger. cambridge mass. & london: mit press, 1993. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 40 lippit, akira mizuta. electric animal: towards a rhetoric of wildlife. minneapolis and london: minnesota up, 2000. nunberg, herman and ernst federn, eds. minutes of the vienna psychoanalytic society. vol. 2. new york: international up, 1967. ray, nicholas. “psychoanalysis and the ‘animal’: a reading of the metapsychology of jean laplanche.” journal for critical animal studies 10.1 (2012): 40–66. stiegler, bernard. “pharmacology of desire: drive-based capitalism and libidinal diseconomy,” trans. daniel ross. new formations 72.12 (2011): 150–161. _____. technics and time: the fault of epimetheus, trans. richard beardsworth and george collins. stanford: stanford up, 1998. sulloway, frank. freud, biologist of the mind: beyond the psychoanalytic legend. new york: basic books, 1980. wolfe, cary. what is posthumanism? minneapolis and london: minnesota up, 2010. microsoft word fijn h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 natasha fijn sugarbag dreaming: the significance of bees to yolngu in arnhem land, australia introduction. we pile out of the dusty four-wheel drive troop carrier and begin walking in separate groups of two or three, bare feet crunching through the dry grass. the only other sounds are occasional resonant taps from an axe testing whether a trunk is hollow; or when the women periodically call to each other to keep within earshot amongst the scattered stands of stringybark trees. it is easy, open walking through country. the extended family group i came with care for the land by setting fire to the grass during the drier months, particularly at this time of year, sugarbag season. i observe while the women in their brightly coloured skirts with their young children or grandchildren look closely at the trunks of the trees and up into the canopy at the blue sky beyond, scanning for signs of the tiny black stingless bees. today offers good conditions for finding honey. if the conditions are too cool or windy the bees tend to stay in their nest, not venturing out to forage. we hear a yell in the distance indicating that a nest has been found and walk to the small, scraggly-looking tree. the teenager, who located the bees, begins to chop down the tree to get at the nest inside. children hold onto their jars and containers in keen anticipation of the rich, sticky honey within the tree. once the women have opened up the nest, they do not only consume the liquid honey but collect everything with the beaten end of a stick: the wax, larvae, pollen and the odd entrapped stingless bee. — (fieldnote, august, 2012, see video segment at: https://vimeo.com/88737231) this vignette and accompanying video segment illustrates a favorite activity of young and old, men, women and children in northeast arnhem land: walking through the bush in search of tiny “wild, stingless bees” to extract their honey.1 a stingless beehive is a complete meal for yolngu — not just a hit of glucose and fructose from liquid honey but an important carbohydrate with additional protein, fat, and essential minerals from the larvae (crittenden; o’dea et al.).2 the colloquial term of “sugarbag” is an all-encompassing word containing everything related to honey, including the stingless bees themselves, not just the honey. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 42 figure 1. a woman and two children in search of stingless bees, northeast arnhem land. still from “sugarbag dreaming” video segment, by the author. the practice of searching for sugarbag is integrated within many yolngu ceremonies and is linked with key ancestral beings. for example, the ancestor ganbulapula, celebrated at the site of the annual garma festival in northeast arnhem land, hits trees with his walking stick to disturb bees from their nest. he shields his eyes from the sun with his hand as he looks up into the sky, while the tiny bees hover around the nest of a hollow tree near a waterhole. while looking upwards he traces the flight of the bees to their nest. a yolngu residential college featured the image of ganbulapula as the school emblem, a metaphor for striving for excellence (the honey), while looking up and ahead into the future (dhupuma college).3 a long line of ancestors with a deep connection to this part of northeast arnhem land has searched for sugarbag in a very similar manner over the millenia. the practice may have been very long indeed, as this part of the world has been inhabited for over 45,000 years (david et al.). there is archaeological evidence from radiocarbon dates derived from wax figures found in rock shelters that sugarbag products have been utilized in northern australia for at least 4,000 years (nelson, et al.).4 in a paper published in 1976 the ethnobiologist darrell posey asks, “why have anthropologists and cultural biologists almost totally ignored the impact of insects upon human societies?” (147). this is still largely the case today, despite bees having co-adapted to human encroachment and raiding of their nests across the world.5 as freya matthews writes, “it would natasha fijn — “sugarbag dreaming: the significance of bees to yolngu in arnhem land, australia”” 43 be fair to say that today, outside entomological and amateur beekeeping circles, honeybees have little place in our cultural imagination. it has not entirely slipped our minds that the honey on our tables is produced by bees, but bees’ role in the process of pollination … [is] generally only vaguely understood and entirely taken for granted” (160). there is a profusion of rock art from the mesolithic depicting humans climbing ladders to extract honey from rock crevices. according to eva crane “mesolithic honey hunting techniques shown in rock art have striking similarities to those used by present-day honey hunters among the same peoples” (43-44). previously it was thought that meat was a likely factor in early human development but it is now thought that the nutritional value of honey was a major contributing factor, providing crucial fuel for the hominid expansion in brain size (crittenden). it has been proposed that the “sweet tooth” in humans developed through a reliance on honey as an abundant and nutritional food source (allsop and miller). the large quantity of fructose and glucose contained in honey would have allowed humans to focus not only on survival but also on other tasks, such as cultural activity. sugarbag dreaming occurs across arnhem land, a remote part of the northern territory of australia, where i spent time amongst yolngu in small homeland communities. yolngu are efficient in managing honey for consumption through their knowledge of the surrounding environment and established hunting practices. they categorize stingless bees and honey in relation to humans and other beings. indeed, honey, stingless bees, and the entire sugarbag complex are significant to yolngu, not just as an important source of food, but culturally as well. i want to show the multi-layered relationship between the yolngu and sugarbag as part of what deborah rose refers to as an “indigenous philosophical ecology” (rose). for rose, this ecological philosophy has “mutual benefits, and shows patterns, and a broader meta-pattern, in which life is both for itself and for others, and in which connectivity and stability are achieved through densely recursive benefits” (294).6 in search of nests. although there are no records of the first australians domesticating stingless bees in hives, they do make their lives easier by using strategies that facilitate the location of nests. on the broadest ecological level, first australians search for nests in arnhem land during rarranhdharr, or late in the dry season (generally late august-october) and within particular environments, such as stringybark or paperbark swamp habitat. yolngu seasonally return to places where they have prevously found nests. more specifically, as david mcknight learned from the wik-mungkan of cape york, the best time of day to search for sugarbag is in the morning or late afternoon, when it is easier to see the glint on the tiny stingless bee’s wing. according to my yolngu teachers, searching cannot begin too early in the morning, as the bees require warm temperatures in order to venture out of the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 44 nest. when passing trees, one taps the trunks with an axe, or if there is likely to be a nest inside a particular trunk, then hunters may place their heads against the trunk and listen for the sound of bees in their nest. in many different regions across australia, when a bee is located the aboriginal hunter may place a feather, hair, or grass on the bee’s abdomen, or sprinkle the bee with flour, so that it can be easily detected in flight when returning to the nest (schwarz). even silk teased out from a spider can be used as a way to mark the bee; meanwhile, the hunter may sing to the bees to “go home” (spencer). in another practice (as depicted within part of the djungguwan ceremony below) the hunter observes the behavior of the much larger bee-fly and uses it to indicate where a nest is as it hovers at the entrance, or, alternatively, tracks a predatory wasp, also known to hover near the entrance before entering the nest (halcroft, et al.). there are even accounts that the bees’ nest can be smelled from a considerable distance, as the pheromone of the bees is detectable by well-attuned individuals (crane). a hunter may claim specific trees by cutting a notch in the tree’s trunk (mcknight). “there are trees considered sacred, from which byamee cut honey and marked them for his own, just as man even now, on finding a bee’s nest and not being able to stay and get it, marks a tree, which for any one else to touch is theft” (parker 86). alistair campbell describes ways in which aboriginal groups produce food, rather than purely hunting and gathering, including an instance where women encourage bees to establish a nest within a favorable hollow tree. he refers to an account from duncan-kemp in the channel country of inland queensland, standing sentinel on a flat between two blunt-nosed sandhills was a ghost gum draped about with bunches of yellow flowering punjilla. bees hovered near and buzzed persistently over a hollow in the side of a tree. aboriginal women wishing the bees to settle there had carried the scented bush five miles and soon reaped the rewards of their labours. (208) this is one of many historical examples throughout aboriginal australia that demonstrate the influence of such influence of planned management on both flora and fauna (gammage). categorization of stingless bees. yolngu think of stingless bees and sugarbag within a complex structure of relationships and interconnections with their extended human family and the other-than-human world. historically, scientists have tended to categorize everything in the world in terms of taxonomy and morphology, mapping the animal kingdom according to a visually arresting tree-based network, starting from simple, single-celled organisms and gradually leading to more “complex” mammals and ultimately to humans. the honeybee (apis) does not quite fit within this progression from simple to complex, since, although the bee’s brain is approximately the size of a sesame seed, it can accomplish remarkably complex natasha fijn — “sugarbag dreaming: the significance of bees to yolngu in arnhem land, australia”” 45 cognitive tasks and has a sophisticated means of communication and navigation (see for example, dyer, von frisch). in entomological terms, until quite recently stingless bees in australia were separated into two separate genera in australia, austroplebeia and trigona. these two genera of stingless bee were first described by hockings in 1883, following a visit to the northern regions of queensland where local aborigines pointed out that one kind of stingless bee was called “kootchar” and the other “karbi” (michener, “observations on the nests”). the very large genus of trigona was applied to stingless bees across the american tropics, sub-saharan africa, and indo-australia, but the stingless bee species in each distinct region have now been found to be quite different genetically with divergent evolutionary histories. there is considerable variation in terms of scientific taxonomic classification. for example, within a single book dedicated to stingless bees, one species is referred to as austroplebia australis in one chapter and the genus trigona in another (vit et al.). trigona has now been reclassified scientifically as the genus tetragonula (michener, “the meliponini”). austroplebeia is usually distinguished in the scientific literature by cream or yellow markings and by the nests being found mainly in dead trees, whereas tetragonula are very hard to distinguish from one species to another, due to their morphological similarity as a genus. yolngu categorize bees by their distinctive ecology and behavior, rather than relying on external morphology and subtle differences in physical characteristics. instead of focusing on different species of stingless bee according to the linnean scientific nomenclature system, i will consider stingless bees henceforth according to yolngu categorization and terminology. according to john rudder, in the yolngu view of the natural world, “[t]here is no attempt to be exhaustive in the naming of species and while there are over six hundred named species, those that are named are the ones that are significant in some way or another” (qualitative thinking 148). rudder categorizes the yolngu cosmology of the natural world by subdividing groups of living beings (or those “having life” [walngamirr]), such as all plants with woody stems (dharpa, such as trees); all land and freshwater mammals (wäyin); or all fishes (guya). bees and all honeyrelated products, or guku, reside at this level of categorization (rudder, qualitative thinking and the natural world). it is clear, then, that this category guku, or sugarbag, is particularly significant within the yolngu worldview. sugarbag is also categorized as a non meat-based food source (murnyan), along with other vegetable foods (ngatha) (rudder). this separate categorization as a food source makes sense when sugarbag is one of the most valued foods in the yolngu diet (meehan). the yolngu see the world in terms of separate elements within an interconnected system, rather than according to a compartmentalized, hierarchically based structure. individual bees do not humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 46 tend to be categorized according to whether they are the queen bee, princesses in waiting, worker bees, or drones. instead, sugarbag may be distinguished based on the taste or texture of the honey; whether the stingless bee bites in defence of its nest; or on the basis of its specific habitat. the nest is also an important means of identification. for example classification might be according to the tree in which the nest is located; by where the nest is located in relation to the tree as a whole: i.e., whether the nest is in the canopy, low down on the trunk, or in a hole in the ground; by the formation of wax at the entrance to the nest; or the elaborate internal structure of the nest itself.7 the yolngu emphasize these distinctive features of the sugarbag complex to distinguish bees within a particular context, rather than focusing primarily on physical differences in the anatomy and morphology of individual bees. yolngu elders have a good knowledge of the internal structure of the meliponidae nest and can label all the separate elements, often represented in cross-section in bark paintings featuring sugarbag dreaming. the heart of the nest is the brood chamber where an individual bee is reared from egg to adult.8 in northeast arnhem land the white dots in bark paintings depicting the larvae within the heart of the nest can also be a metaphor for the nurturing of children at the center of one’s community.9 yolngu matha language speakers often relate what is being named according to different parts of a body, for instance, connecting a landscape where an ancestral being left a bodily mark to analogous parts on the anatomy of a plant or animal (tamisari). naming the correlated parts of one’s own body emphasizes the similarity among humans, other beings, and the land. for example, a man of the yirritja moiety, neparrnga gumbula, described his kinship with the birrkuda (or ‘short-nosed bee’): my mouth is the entrance to the beehive. my nose is beeswax. my eyes are nuts from the warraga (‘cycad palm’). my hairs are the fine roots of the mayku (‘paperbark tree’) and the wulu (‘white foam’) that they produce in the swamp at djiliwirri. my head and my knowledge are guku (‘honey’) from the wangarr birrkuda (‘short-nosed bee’). in death, my name is no longer neparrnga. it is birrkuda. (corn 1) david mcknight refers to five different kinds of sugarbag categories amongst the wikmungkan of cape york. the bees are distinguished by habitat, or ecologically based criteria, but with particular reference to the relative length of the entrance to the nest. he details two extremes, the male mai kuyan and the female mai atta: the entrance of the mai kuyan is a small narrow protruding pipe known as the kunch, which is also the word for penis. this is a male sugarbag; the kunch may stick out more than three inches or more. in contrast the entrance of the mai atta is a longitudinal opening, concave and flush with the tree. since it lacks a kunch it natasha fijn — “sugarbag dreaming: the significance of bees to yolngu in arnhem land, australia”” 47 is considered to be female. it is this sugarbag [that] contains the most honey. the mai kuyan is regarded as being especially important and particularly powerful not only because of its prominent phallic entrance, but because it is mentioned in the mythology, plays an important part in initiation and is associated with a story place. (201) there are food taboos particularly placed on mai atta because of its phallic connotations. for example, a son cannot give this kind of sugarbag to his parents, a younger sister to her brother, nor can a son-in-law take sugarbag from his mother-in-law. lloyd warner, one of the first anthropologists to write an ethnography based in arnhem land, stated that for the yolngu there is nothing in the universe that does not have a place in one of two categories: dhuwa and yirritja. yolngu themselves, all other animals, plants, the stars, the land, and bodies of water are grouped according to these two organizational systems of kinship (see warner). in accordance with this, the yolngu also group sugarbag (guku) into these two categories, each with its own separate totemic complex. the two sections below provide a detailed illustration of the significance of two kinds of sugarbag belonging to two oppositional moieties, the dhuwa yarrpany and the yirritja burrkuda. dhuwa sugarbag. dhuwa moiety sugarbag refers mainly to the long-nosed yarrpany. this kind of sugarbag is referred to as “long-nosed” because the nest (yarrpany worrutj) projects out from the stringybark tree (gadayka, eucalyptus tetradonta) in the form of an extended tubular entrance. note that the reference is in relation to the nose as a body part in yolngu matha instead of the linguistic analogy of another body part, the penis, amongst the wik-mungkan of cape york peninsula. this tubular protuberance functions as a defence against small intruders in search of the nutritious contents of the nest, such as the bee-fly or wasp. other kinds of dhuwa sugarbag exist but they are not as ceremonially significant and are deemed inedible (“too salty”) due to the bee’s incorporation of bitter plant resins within the honey. in the second part of the “sugarbag dreaming” film segment that accompanies this paper, djurambil mununggur jokes with another woman ranger about their child-mother (yothu-yindi) relationship with regard to dhuwa sugarbag (see https://vimeo.com/88737231). while scooping out the honey from the hollowed out log with her finger, another ranger says in yolngu-matha, “do it properly, the sugarbag is my child! (she laughs).” djurambil replies “i’m doing it this way because it’s my mother! sugarbag is jimmy’s, elsa’s and my mother, so why are you telling me what to do?” djurambil is indicating that they are custodians for the dhuwa sugarbag because they are maternally linked to the sugarbag totem and to sacred guku sites on their clan land. animals, plants, and in this case sugarbag are often referred to in kinship terms, as a recognition of each individual’s personal relationship to other significant elements of their humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 48 world. their light-hearted banter is a reaffirmation that everything is interconnected through kinship and sociality according to yolngu cosmology. the sugarbag hunter wuyal. yolngu make sense of bees through stories from their ancestors, connecting bees as part of their cosmology. when i expressed an interest in learning about bees from the yolngu, a senior ranger from dhimurru aboriginal corporation took me up to nhulun, the prominent hill overlooking the mining town of nhulunbuy, to point out the connection of this significant place with the stringybark trees, the bees, and their honey. the talented cross-cultural, or “two-way,” educator dr marika10 relates a dhuwa sugarbag story in connection with the nhulun sacred site. dr marika draws from oral accounts passed down by her father and father’s brothers. the following are extracts from her story of the travels of wuyal, particularly related to sugarbag: we, these five clans, sing of his adventures and the travels of wuyal as he danced and named places of significance in the homelands of these clans. he roamed the area looking for dhuwa sugarbag (wild honey) called yarrpany, a special sweet honey for dhuwa people, following after the bees (dawurr). we dance in movements depicting those of wuyal as he moved and looked for sugarbag. the places he trod mark his country and the places he stopped are sites of significance… as wuyal came up the path to nhulun he was covered in raman (literally feathered down), the fluff of a sort of wattle, stuck all over him with the honey he was eating … he collected honey on top of the hill and put it in his dilly bag (buyuminy) [on the top he named the surrounding places he saw] … he walked down the hillside, his chest covered in stringy bark (gadayka) leaves, leaves of the dhuwa tree where he could find his yarrpany. (wilkinson et al. 407-409) wuyal travels on to another place, mixing honey with fresh water from a rocky island. he strains the honey through a grass that grows there and drinks it, giving special names to this honey,11 and then follows a swarm of bees. a big depression in the land gives evidence of the swarm settling. dr marika then summarizes the significance of wuyal, the placenames, landmarks, and the link with bees: we follow in the footsteps of wuyal and other ancestral creators. we are tracing and treading in their likeness. our ancestral heritage, through the stories, paintings and verses provide metaphors that we use to interpret our experiences in the world today. in this way our ancestral realities become today’s realities. (409-410) natasha fijn — “sugarbag dreaming: the significance of bees to yolngu in arnhem land, australia”” 49 clearly, dr marika understands the yolngu mind as mediating between the ancestral domain and the lived world not only as metaphor and symbolism, but as metaphysics. by hunting for honey just as their ancestors did, the yolngu continue the knowledge and wisdom of their ancestral past, and then reinforce it through culture, such as the participation in ceremony. the wawilak sisters. the dhuwa moiety ceremony concerns the mythology of the wawilak women. in 1974 ian dunlop and an accompanying film crew filmed this ceremony with anthropologist howard morphy present as an advisor. morphy incorporated elements of this djungguwan ceremony and the story of the wawilak sisters were incorporated in morphy’s analysis in his thesis too many meanings and subsequent book ancestral connections. the journey of the wawilak sisters is associated with searching for honey (yarrpany). according to morphy, the songs record how [the ancestral beings] cut down the trees with stone axes, or in the case of the wawilak sisters with hooked boomerangs. the trees crashed to the ground, clearing areas of forest and sending beeswax, honey and splinters of wood flying through the surrounding forest (133). large poles, or djuwany posts, represent both these ancestral women and the stringybark trees that were cut down in search of wild honey. the gundimulk, or ceremonial ground, with accompanying sand sculpture, represents the structure of the beehive with its wax divisions. men take on the persona of the dhuwa bee, singing, while squatting in a line with their elbows bent, indicating the bees’ wings whirring near the nest. the sound of the bees is a reminder of the ancestral being retracing its journey (morphy, aboriginal art). the key male participants in the djungguwan ceremony experience unity with worker bees as they dance in single file below the feather string toward the hollow log djuwany (the nest), becoming become integrated as part of the sugarbag complex. a dhumarr, or large trumpet-like didgeridoo, represents the abdomen of the bee-fly (a fly classified within the bombyliidae family), which hovers at the entrance of the long-nosed bee nest (yarrpany). ian dunlop explains: “dundiwuy told me dhumarr ‘regards’ the honeybee all the time and through its hovering leads yolngu to their much sought after honey” (deveson 87). the white dots on the dhumarr represent the white flowers of the stringybark, an important source of nectar for the bees; reciprocally, the bee is an important pollinator of the stringybark tree. the bee-fly feeds on the nectar and pollen of the bees and, like the bees, is also an important pollinator. at the climax of the djungguwan ceremony, the dhumarr is droned, like the resonant sound of the bee-fly, along the length of a feather string rope, with the rope signifying the larvae within the nest. the white feather-string suspended over the ground, the djuwany posts, and the dhumarr trumpet denote a set of overlapping meanings, akin to a stage humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 50 set in a theatre production, where they represent different but integrated elements of the sugarbag complex. scientifically, the bee-fly is parasitic to bee and wasp larvae, but to the yolngu the bee-fly is a “restorer of life to the bees,” as it is said to lick dying bees, bringing them back to life. yolngu clearly view the relationship between stingless bee and bee-fly as a mutualistic, rather than a parasitic one and the bees are part of a multilayered and interconnected system. figure 2. the extraction of honey pots filled with bright yellow pollen from a yirritja stingless bee nest, within a stringybark trunk. still photo from “sugarbag dreaming” video segment, by the author. yirritja sugarbag. the yirritja bee, called birrkuda, is described as the “cheeky bee,” as it bites in defense. they do not sting as a european honeybee would, but these “stingless” bees still defend their nests vigorously by swarming around an invader and biting. the yirritja sugarbag complex has its own set of songs, dances, power names, and sacred objects. as howard morphy states, “the wild honey ancestor in munyuku country consists of the whole complex of things associated with honey: the bees, the grubs [or larvae], the pollen, the honey, the nest and the trees. fire is [also] part of the wild honey complex” (ancestral connections 173). he believes that this is because the hunters use fire to clear the ground while looking for the bees. yirrita sugarbag is associated with the time of year (rarranhdharr) when fires are lit and honey is ready to be collected (rae, et al.). the association with fire is also due to the necessity of smoking out these bees to avoid their defensive bites. the birrkuda wangarr, or ancestral being, is also associated with freshwater and floodwater because this particular stingless bee is located in paperbark (melaleuca) swamp habitat, where the bees obtain pollen from paperbark trees in flower. natasha fijn — “sugarbag dreaming: the significance of bees to yolngu in arnhem land, australia”” 51 figure 3. scooping up liquid honey using a makeshift spoon made from a stick with a frayed end. still from “sugarbag dreaming” video segment by the author. the renowned yolngu lead singer of the band yothu yindi, dr yunupingu, described in english his philosophical connection with yirritja stingless bees. the band had just released an album entitled “birrkuta, ‘honeybee,’”12 designed to convey a yolngu means of communication and sharing through his special connection with bees. it’s a deep message, where i have been able to draw from aboriginal understanding, yolngu understanding, about the honeybee. what it does and the way we are connected to it, in terms of the way it survives and what it produces. all those things are part of how we think of “the best”, or being perfect, or how we think of goodness, or sweetness. […] this theme encompasses the understanding yolngu people have within a structure. it can become available for one’s existence; one’s survival and it can also be a part of sharing. the understanding from the bee can be part of a sharing aspect in terms of being part of a community, being part of a society. […] there is a nexus a beehive full of activity all those type of things that we have as people, as human beings, we have that connection…we [yolngu] think about that. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 52 he tells how the bee is significant to his six daughters, as they have the rights to the accompanying miny’tji, or ancestral designs, and describes the album as a gift to his daughters, to the next generation, linking them back to their two grandmothers. to yolngu philosophy, the sugarbag complex is not just a metaphor but is intrinsically connected with the kinship structure, to specific clans and individuals, through the characteristics yunupingu so eloquently described. sugarbag dreaming across northern australia. sugarbag dreaming extends right across arnhem land from the east to the west but varies slightly from one clan to another, illustrating how sugarbag dreaming is passed on through painting, sand sculpture, dance, song, and storytelling. figure 4. bark painting of “sugarbag dreaming” by jimmy wululu, atsiaa collection, national museum of australia. a painting entitled “sugarbag dreaming” by jimmy wululu from central arnhem land, reveals different layers of meaning about sugarbag (figure 4). here the sugarbag design expresses the artist’s own identity as part of the yirritja moiety, using the characteristic diamond-shaped design, which is painted on the chests of initiates during ceremony to indicate the significance of sugarbag, one of the artist’s main clan totems.13 morphy states that the “painting of the design on a person’s chest or contact with a sacred object is thought to result in the transfer of ancestral power to that individual, the design afterwards becomes a sign for part of the spiritual dimension of that person” (aboriginal 131). natasha fijn — “sugarbag dreaming: the significance of bees to yolngu in arnhem land, australia”” 53 more functionally, the central pole represents the stringybark tree with the nest in the hollowed out heart of the tree. the diamond shapes represents the cells of the bees’ nest and the different colors indicate whether the cells are empty, partially filled, or full. the lines of black dots are the bees, while the white dots are the larvae. the repetitive pattern also reflects the auditory impression of the repetitive whirring of the wings of the bees, linking the painting with sugarbag dreaming songs and dances. the classic ethnographic film waiting for harry (mckenzie) features elements of sugarbag dreaming in a burial ceremony of the anbarra people, whose country lies across the western boundary of the yolngu-speaking area. during the ceremony a sand sculpture is constructed into the form of a beehive, and feathered string above represents a line of bees returning with honey. the deceased man’s classificatory brother sings about the bees’ nest, connecting it to the hollow log that will later house his relative’s bones just as this species of bee constructs nests within hollow stringybark trees. frank gurrmanamana sings poetically within the film, almost making ones mouth water, while he sings about the significance of the rich, dark honey in the nest: where bees swell the honeycomb ripe for sucking spirit women gather honey in baskets bees in a line hollow log coffin it follows its true path. later in the film he sings: dry tree trunk oozing drops of dark honey dry tree trunk waxy cells oozing thick fermented honey a long line of bees honeycomb. sugarbag drips from the mouth of the hollow log humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 54 (subtitles from mckenzie “waiting for harry”). clunies-ross gives a detailed analysis of this “sugar bag and hollow log” (wama-dupan) song series, describing sugarbag as being of “central importance to the myths expressed in djambitj, for wama (sometimes called yarrpan[y] [or dhuwa moiety sugarbag]) provides the spiritual food for a group of powers celebrated in the song-series” (150). one function of the ceremony is to increase the supply of honey by encouraging bees to return to their nests. gurrmanamana conveys this to clunies-ross by saying, “hang up the sugar bag string [the ceremonial featherstring], then (barra) the bees will come dancing back to the tree” (152). ronald and catherine berndt give an example of a non-sacred story entitled “the first bees” from northern gunwinggu (or alternatively spelt kunwinjku) further from northeast arnhem land, to the west of arhnem land. the story begins, “once they were men, all those bees” (392). from different clans the ancestors came together in one place to trade gifts but began fighting, with nobody to restrain them. when dawn came they didn’t go out hunting, but stayed in camp all day, fighting. at last they fell to the ground and just lay there, simply bodies. but sweat still came from them: it was like wild honey. as time passed little wings grew, and hairs emerged. gubalag spoke first: “don’t stay lying down like that!” he tried to run, and bit those two, nabiwu and gaddari: he had changed (“made himself”). as for their bodies, lying dead after they had speared one another, in the holes they had made in their bellies they saw bees crawling, their own honey bees. their speech was like the speech of bees, as they spoke to one another: “let us not go on fighting. let us become bees, and go off to find separate trees.” that’s what they did […] they farewelled (“sent away”) one another, eating from flowers to make honey. and people, we human beings, taste it and say, “this is real honey.” (392-392) this story explains kinship relations and fighting between clans, but it is also a good description of the actual behavior of stingless bees. stingless bees swarm differently from the apis genus of honeybee used in beekeeping.14 if stingless bees from one nest detect other invading bees nearby, the two colonies begin fighting in a “fighting swarm.” according to a study focusing on swarming defense in stingless bees, fights between two workers are almost always fatal for both individuals (gloag, et al.). the swarming of stingless bees in this manner was not noted in the scientific literature until relatively recently, when the combatants were pointed out to visiting museum entomologists by mayan informants in the yucatan (schwarz and bacon). this ethological knowledge, however, was also clearly passed on in an oral form amongst the aboriginal peoples of arnhem land for many generations before a scientist recorded the phenomenon. natasha fijn — “sugarbag dreaming: the significance of bees to yolngu in arnhem land, australia”” 55 the totemic philosophy behind hunting for sugarbag. the bee expert richard jones mistakenly states, “it is but a short evolutionary step from honey hunting to beekeeping” (220), implying that any society would inevitably choose to engage in beekeeping once the idea occurred to them and assumes that the process of domestication is more advanced than opportunistically hunting and gathering. jones goes on to say, “so a hollow tree becomes a hollow log; the log is cut in such a way that it can be opened and resealed by the owner and thus beekeeping is born. this first step certainly occurred in the area dominated by the maya civilisation” (220, emphasis added). he assumes that mayans were on the rungs of the ladder toward a civilized society by taming and keeping stingless bees in hives than those who opportunistically hunted for honey. in meso-america the mayans from the yucatan peninsula, prior to contact with colonizing spaniards, independently practiced beekeeping with stingless bees. the mayan stingless beehive consists of a horizontal hollow log with an enclosure on each end plugged by a disc of wood or stone and sealed with mud. according to the writing of oviedo in 1550, at the time of the first spanish invasion the taming of stingless bees was a highly important occupation with accompanying sacred rituals and ceremonies (bennett). stingless beekeeping is now only very rarely practiced amongst the mayans through the abundance of introduced, european-based beekeeping (crane). in contrast, i could find no accounts of aboriginal australians bringing bee nests back into a community or camp to be housed in hollow logs to extract honey at a later date.15 why did the first australians not independently adopt beekeeping in hives, prior to european colonization? one practical reason may be that, in comparison with the honeybee, it is easier to extract stingless bee nests from their natural habitat since, because they are often close to the ground and in small trees, they are more easily accessed. extracting honey from honeybees is also considerably more dangerous than it is from stingless bees because of honeybees’ potentially fatal defensive stings. i demonstrate, however, that the main reason that yolngu in arnhem land still collect honey from the bush is primarily philosophical. in philippe descola’s terms, the aboriginal australian totemic ontology differs from a western naturalist ontology but also from an analogical schema such as the mayan cosmology. descola distinguishes these various schemas according to how different people view interiority and physicality of other beings. in brief, a totemic ontology involves viewing humans as having both a similar interiority and a similar physicality to other beings. this similarity is central to the aboriginal concept of the dreaming, where particular beings share mutual essences with one another due to their shared ancestral heritage. both human and totemic beings, in certain humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 56 contexts, share the same core internal characteristics, or personalities, but also originally shared the same physicality in their shared ancestor. fiona magowan refers to this idea of mutual essences shared with other beings, or even natural phenomena, in yonlgu ontology, as being “co-substantive.“ she provides a nice example of the meeting of two rivers: “whereby an ancestor, human or part of the landscape or seascape is seen as being simultaneously held inside the other” (27). “these two waters are connected through a polymorphic relationship in that they share the same co-substantive essences of froth, allowing them to be viewed simultaneously as ancestral entities and as particular kinds of human relations, each being subsumed inside the other” (27-28, emphasis added). she applies this cosubstantiality and this co-interdependence to both landscapes and seascapes. similarly, the concept of consubstantial essences can be applied in specific contexts to totemic beings, such as the crocodile (see fijn), or in this case, sugarbag. conclusion. knowing that sugarbag is part of an interconnected system, linked to the hunters of the honey, bees, nests, eucalyptus trees, flowers, a particular bee-fly, and a specific season, we can see that it would be counter to yolngu philosophy to separate the bees from the sugarbag complex as a whole in order to produce a greater amount of honey in the form of containing bees in hives. why would individual yolngu want to change their methods when the technique they have passed on over the generations has functioned well for perhaps tens of thousands of years? why would yolngu discard the valued experience, excitement, and knowledge of hunting for honey in the bush and, just as importantly, the loss of cultural meaning attached to sugarbag? as i have shown here, if yolngu were to adopt alternative techniques for acquiring honey they would have to change how they engage with bees, honey, and the broader sugarbag complex, including their connection to the land. it would involve an ontological reorientation away from their ecological philosophy. yolngu know when it is honey season by signs and cues from their surrounding environment. everyone in the community keenly observes when the stringybark eucalypt is fully in flower and the flying foxes are fat and tasty, and have many other interconnected cues and signs from the land to tell them when the honey is ready. being in the bush and going out with extended family in search of honey is part of community life and is a joy for them. if a homeland community wants honey they wait for the right season and travel to a reliable place where they are able to find a plentiful supply for their needs just by venturing out and looking for it. acknowledgements. thank you to extended family at the homeland community of garrthalala for trips in search of sugarbag. howard and frances morphy, leon white, nic peterson, pip deveson, and the late kim mckenzie passed on knowledge and information in relation to this paper. thank you to the rangers within laynhapuy aboriginal corporation, dhimurru natasha fijn — “sugarbag dreaming: the significance of bees to yolngu in arnhem land, australia”” 57 aboriginal corporation, and the buku-larrnggay mulka centre. the painting by jimmy wululu is used with permission of the estate of the artist, licensed by aboriginal artists agency ltd. notes 1. i refer to the apidae family generally as bees, but apis as a genus as “honeybees” and meliponini as “stingless bees.” in this paper i focus primarily on the meliponini, rather than apis. 2. insects were a valuable contribution in the traditionally low-fat diet of aboriginal australians, particularly larvae of insect species and sugar-containing species (meyer-rochow and changkija). it is interesting to note that other peoples from south america who hunt for stingless bee nests also consume the larvae (crane). 3. one element that has changed in arnhem land is that people are less inclined to scale large trees to extract honey. ronald and catherine berndt describe how trees were climbed to obtain sugarbag in the past by “seeing where a bee has flown into a hollow tree, climbing up, using a rope or vine or just hands and feet, [then] chopping out the honeycomb with an axe” (115). 4. wax (or cerumen) is still used in the manufacture of spears, woomeras, firesticks, and to fashion mouthpieces for the didgeridoo (yidaki) (halcroft, et al.). 5. there are a couple of recent urban-based studies focusing on bees employing the use of multispecies ethnography (see kosek; moore and kosut). 6. aboriginal metaphysics does not generally align with western scientific premises but i use the term “ecology” in this paper, as this term is the closest approximation to yolngu perspectives relating to interconnections between other organisms (or beings) and the land. 7. according to posey, the kayapó indians of brazil use a similar means of categorizing fifty-six species of stingless bee: consistency of the honey; aggressiveness of the bees; and differing nest habitat. (posey, “folk apiculture”) 8. see figure 1.3 in michener, “the meliponini,” for a zoological diagram of the structure of a stingless bee nest that looks remarkably similar to aboriginal bark paintings of nests within hollow stringybark trees. 9. leon white conveyed this to me as a sugarbag metaphor passed on to him by dr yunipingu. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 58 10. i refer to both the late dr marika and dr yunipingu in terms of their surnames, as their first names are currently not mentioned in public for cultural reasons. 11. crane describes a special fine grass that is chewed to make a kind of sponge to then dip into a honey and water solution and this is then sucked and drunk as a sweet drink. 12. more often spelt birrkuda, the yirritja moiety “short-nosed” honeybee. 13. the description of the painting as a self-portrait and representation of the artist’s identity was conveyed in accompanying text within the exhibition “old masters: australia’s great bark artists” at the national museum of australia, 2013. 14. to see an amateur video of a fighting swarm, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=makx23bpufs web. 26 aug. 2013. 15. various programs have recently been developed where aboriginal rangers or elders are engaged in the transfer of colonies into hives to try to stimulate income within the community, tapping into the growing cottage industry surrounding stingless bee honey in australia (halcroft, et al; rogers). works cited allsop, karen a. and janette brand miller. “honey revisited: a reappraisal of honey in preindustrial diets.” british journal of nutrition 75.04 (1996): 513–520. bennett, charles f. “stingless-bee keeping in western mexico.” geographical review 54.1 (1964): 85–92. berndt, ronald murray, and catherine helen berndt. the world of the first australians: aboriginal traditional life: past and present. canberra: aboriginal studies press, 1988. campbell, alastair h. “elementary food production by the australian aborigines.” mankind 6.5 (1965): 206-2011. clunies-ross, margaret. “the structure of arnhem land song-poetry.” oceania 49.2 (dec. 1978): 128–156. corn, aaron. “ancestral, corporeal, corporate: traditional yolngu understandings of the body explored.” borderlands 7.2 (2008): 1–17. crane, eva. the world history of beekeeping and honey hunting. new york: routledge, 1999. crittenden, alyssa n. “the importance of honey consumption in human evolution.” food and foodways 19.4 (2011): 257–273. natasha fijn — “sugarbag dreaming: the significance of bees to yolngu in arnhem land, australia”” 59 david, bruno et al. “nawarla gabarnmang, a 45,180±910 cal bp site in jawoyn country, southwest arnhem land plateau.” australian archaeology 73 (2011): 73–77. descola, philippe. beyond nature and culture. chicago and london: u chicago p, 2013. deveson, pip. “the yirrkala film project notes.” manuscript, canberra: aiatsis, 1997. dhupuma college http://www.territorystories.nt.gov.au/handle/10070/64920, web. 23 oct. 2013. dunlop, ian. djungguwan at gurka’wuy: a film monograph by ian dunlop made at the invitation of dundiwuy wanambi. film australia, film, 1989. dyer, fred c. “the biology of the dance language.” annual review of entomology 47.1 (2002): 917–949. fijn, n. fieldnote, august, 2012, video segment at: https://vimeo.com/88737231 _____. “living with crocodiles: an alternative perspective on engagement with a reptilian being.“ animal studies journal 2.2(2013): 1-23. ford, andrew, and dr yunipingu. “m. yunupingu remembered.”abc radio http://www.abc.net.au/ radionational/programs/musicshow/m-yunupinguremembered/4740890 web. 06 aug. 2013. gammage, bill. the biggest estate on earth: how aborigines made australia. crows nest, n.s.w: allen & unwin, 2011. gloag, r. et al. “nest defence in a stingless bee: what causes fighting swarms in trigona carbonaria (hymenoptera, meliponini)?” insectes sociaux 55.4 (2008): 387–391. halcroft, megan, spooner-hart, robert, dollin, anne. “australian stingless bees” pot honey: a legacy of stingless bees. eds patricia vit, silva pedro and david roubik. new york: springer (2013): 35-72. jones, richard. “stingless bees: a historical perspective.” pot honey: a legacy of stingless bees. eds patricia vit, silva pedro and david roubik. new york: springer (2013): 219-228. kosek, jake. “ecologies of empire: on the new uses of the honeybee.” cultural anthropology 25.4 (2010): 650–678. matthews, freya. “planet beehive.” australian humanities review may (2011): 159-178. mckenzie, kim. waiting for harry. canberra: aiatsis, film, 1980. mcknight, david. “sexual symbolism of food among the wik-mungkan.” man 8.2 (1973): 194. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 60 meehan, betty. “hunters by the seashore.” journal of human evolution 6.4 (1977): 363–370. meyer-rochow, v.b., and s. changkija. “uses of insects as human food in papua new guinea, australia, and north-east india: cross-cultural considerations and cautious conclusions.” ecology of food and nutrition 36.2-4 (1997): 159–185. michener, charles, d. “the meliponini.” pot honey: a legacy of stingless bees. eds patricia vit, silva pedro and david roubik. new york: springer (2013): 3-18. _____. “observations n the nests and behavior of trigona in australia and new guinea (hymenoptera, apidae). american museum novitates  no.2026.” (1961). pp. 1-45. moore, lisa jean, and mary kosut. “among the colony: ethnographic fieldwork, urban bees and intraspecies mindfulness.” ethnography (2013): 1466138113505022. morphy, howard. “too many meanings: an analysis of the artistic system of the yolngu of northeast arnhem land.” thesis: canberra, anu [1977] https://digitalcollections.anu.edu.au/handle/1885/8038 web. 20 aug. 2013. _____. ancestral connections. chicago: u chicago p, 1991. _____. aboriginal art. london: phaidon, 1998. nelson, d. e. et al. “radiocarbon dates for beeswax figures in the prehistoric rock art of northern australia.” archaeometry 37.1 (1995): 151–156. o’dea, kerin et al. “traditional diet and food preferences of australian aboriginal huntergatherers [and discussion].” philosophical transactions of the royal society of london. series b: biological sciences 334.1270 (1991): 233–241. parker, k. langloh. the euahlayi tribe: a study of aboriginal life in australia. london: constable, 1905. posey, darrell a. “entomological considerations in southeastern aboriginal demography.” ethnohistory 23.2 (1976): 147-160. _____. “folk apiculture of the kayapò indians of brazil.” biotropica 15.2 (1983): 154-158. _____. “the importance of bees to kayapò indians of the brazilian amazon.” the florida entomologist 64.4 (1982): 452-458. rae, c. j. et al. “the role of bush foods in contemporary aboriginal diets.” proc. nutr. soc. aust. 7 (1982): 45-49. rogers, eliza. “bee project buzzing along” abc radio, http://www.abc.net.au/news/ 2013-1213/qld-native-bee-project/5155178. web. 13 dec. 2013. natasha fijn — “sugarbag dreaming: the significance of bees to yolngu in arnhem land, australia”” 61 rose, deborah. “an indigenous philosophical ecology: situating the human.” the australian journal of anthropology 16.3 (2005): 294–305. rudder, john. the natural world of the yolngu, the aboriginal people of north east arnhem land. a restoration house publication, 1999. _____. qualitative thinking: an examination of the classificatory systems, evaluative systems and cognitive structures of the yolnu people of north-east arnhem land. thesis, canberra: anu, 1983. schwarz, h. f. “stingless bees (meliponidae) of the western hemisphere. lestrimelitta and the following subgenera of trigona, paratrigona, swarziana, parapartamona, cephalotrigona, oxytrigona, scaura, and mourella. abejas jicotes (meliponidae) del hemisferio occidental. lestrimelitta y los siguientes subgéneros de trigona, paratrigona, swarziana, parapartamona, cephalotrigona, oxytrigona, scaura y mourella.” bulletin of the american museum of natural history 90 (1948): 1–536. schwarz, herbert ferlando, and annette louise bacon. “stingless bees (meliponidae) of the western hemisphere : lestrimelitta and the following subgenera of trigona : trigona, paratrigona, schwarziana, parapartamona, cephalotrigona, oxytrigona, scaura, and mourella.” bulletin of the amnh; v. 90. (1948): digitallibrary.amnh.org.virtual.anu.edu.au. web. 26 aug. 2013. spencer, baldwin. wanderings in wild australia. vol. 1. new york: macmillan and company ltd., 1928. tamisari, franca. “body, vision and movement: in the footprints of the ancestors.” oceania 68.4 (1998): 249. vit, patricia, silvia r. m pedro, and david w roubik. pot-honey: a legacy of stingless bees. new york: springer, 2013. von frisch, karl. “decoding the language of the bee.” readings in zoosemiotics 8 (2011[1973]): 76-87. wilkinson, melanie, dr r marika, and nancy williams. “‘this place already has a name.’” aboriginal placenames: naming and re-naming the australian landscape. eds. harold koch and luis hercus. canberra: anu e press, 2009: 403–462. warner, william lloyd. a black civilization: a social study of an australian tribe. harper & row, 194. microsoft word menely-braverman-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:2 reviews tobias menely “wildness without wilderness” irus braverman, wild life: the institution of nature. stanford, ca: stanford university press, 2015. 342 pp. $24.995 pbk. wild life is a multi-species ethnography, a study of endangered species and the institutions that manage their survival. braverman’s central contention is that the division between conservation in situ and ex situ — literally “in place” and “out of place” — is unsupportable in an age in which all ecosystems are shaped by human activity. aquariums holding endangered polynesian tree snails in the london zoo are, in her view, not categorically unlike a refuge where field biologists use radio-collar tracking and sophisticated databases to manage red wolf populations. this claim impels a wide-ranging investigation of conservation practices in this current phase of the holocene/anthropocene extinction, as the “biopolitical” institutions of the liberal state come to be dedicated to the sustention of the least “viable” species. in order to develop an “ethnographic account of the administrative structures and networks of the tobias menely -“wildness without wilderness” 149 emerging institution of natures” (11), braverman has compiled a rich archive based on detailed and illuminating interviews with more than one hundred and twenty conservationists, from zoo professionals to wildlife biologists. in the diverse voices of these experts we see the textured and sometimes contradictory principles that motivate conservation in the twenty-first century. braverman’s clunky “institution of natures” expresses one of her guiding suppositions: that our inherited concepts, particularly “nature” and “wilderness,” fail to convey the “messy and productive entanglements of wild life” in the anthropocene (232). the idealization of in situ conservation, she argues, relies on a discredited “idea of wild nature” (17). for example, the 2002 convention on biological diversity, a treaty signed by 193 nations, defines conservation in situ, in the “natural surroundings” of a given species, as its “ultimate goal” (34). similarly, the endangered species act is premised on the idea that preservation is a matter of restricting or removing human activity, of withdrawing rather than managing. ex situ conservation — the work of zoos, genebanks, and hatcheries — is widely regarded as a means to the end of returning animals to their “place of origin” (33). institutional cultures, funding streams, legal regulations, databases, and even species taxonomies are largely organized around the in situ/ex situ division, even as the exigencies of conservation increasingly require flexibility and collaboration. braverman offers numerous examples of conservation, in practice, that fail to uphold this dichotomy, conservation in which “intensive human management” is a feature regardless of setting (158). to preserve puerto rican crested toads, for instance, concrete pools were built to replicate karst ponds destroyed by development. when captive-born golden lion tamarins are released, they remain closely monitored, tracked when lost in the jungle, and given veterinary care when ill. red wolf pups are switched “between wild and zoo litters” in order to sustain genetic diversity (178), and “infertile wild” puerto rican parrots “are given captive eggs to foster” (150). the north american roseate tern is free-flying for most of the year but breeds in artificial nest boxes. eastern hellbenders are “born wild, reared in captivity, and then transferred back to the wild” (135). the tycoon richard branson has repurposed a caribbean island as a sanctuary for several species of madagascar’s endangered lemurs. braverman’s previous book was an ethnographic study of the zoo as institution. wild life asks whether the entire planet has become a “megazoo” (98). there are more than 210,000 “protected” areas in the world, braverman notes, and she provocatively asks humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 150 one conservationist whether zoos should be included on this list while conservationist rhetoric continues to romanticize natural ecosystems, such that even zoos attempt to simulate natural habitat, actual conservation practices are exemplified by the case of the sonoran pronghorn antelope, transferred between “semi-captive” and “semi-wild” conditions (112). what, she asks, is “indigenous range” when all ecosystems are being rapidly altered due to not only human encroachment and management but anthropogenic climate change (140)? for scholars working in animals studies, wild life offers a compelling, thickly descriptive model of multi-species ethnography — “anthropology beyond the human,” as eduardo kohn puts it. while braverman questions the mythic “identity of the animal as wild, exotic, and other” (63), she is attentive to behavioral and physiological variations among species and she raises interesting questions about species taxonomy and animal subjectivity. the six conceptually defined chapters are interleaved by short case studies that focus on individual species, such as the black-footed ferret, the red wolf, and the tasmanian devil. some are tragic, such as the story of the northern white rhino, and some are more hopeful. the california condor program, for instance, brought the entire wild population of 22 condors into temporary captivity, against strong opposition, before returning a sustainable population to the california wilds, where there are now more than 300 free-flying condors. braverman also notes that the taxonomic categorization of species, which has significant implications for conservation practice, is often less than self-evident. wolves and coyotes can interbreed. conservation efforts have been shaped by debates about whether northern and southern white rhinos represent distinct species or subspecies. the rejection of hybridization breeding strategies played a role in the extinction of the dusky sparrow. at several points in wild life, braverman wonders whether “the animal’s perspective” should “be included when defining in situ and ex situ conservation” (114). a snail in an aquarium, after all, will have a different experience of captivity than a wolf in a zoological enclosure. generally, though, the problem of animal subjectivity — of animals as thinking, perceiving, relating beings — is fairly attenuated in this book, which is no surprise given that conservation is organized around species and populations. subjectivity becomes relevant insofar as conservation requires the maintenance of “behavioral integrity,” animal knowledge of how to survive independently in the wild (215). questions about animal point of view also appear in controversies about the competing claims of species conservation and individual welfare. preservation often means capturing wild animals, as with the california tobias menely -“wildness without wilderness” 151 condors, or killing members of invasive species, predatory species, or surplus populations. such life-and-death decisions about individuals, populations, and species get at the heart of braverman’s ambitious and compelling assertion that conservation should be understood as a manifestation of biopolitics. these are the modern practices of governmentality, from laws and regulations to the use of databases and algorithms, organized around the state’s imperative to, in the words of foucault, “make live” (160). certainly the institutions of conservation are resonant with a larger “biopolitical order” (107). every pallid sturgeon, for example, is tagged with a “lifetime bar code” (109). “through documentation, classification, quantification, and ranking,” braverman writes, “threatened species lists elevate the listed nonhuman species from the realm of mere, or biological, life, to that of a political life worth saving” (229). biopolitics, in other words, helps to account for the “differential treatment between lives that matter most,” such as endangered species, and “those that matter less,” such as predators or nonnative invasive species (151). braverman only gestures at the trickier historical question as to why biopolitical governance should extend to endangered animals (and plants), why species threatened with extinction should matter as political lives. to characterize conservation as “an affirmative and proactive biopolitical project” (189) does little to explain what motivates nation states, in a neoliberal age, to involve themselves in the messy and expensive work of conservation. this question seems especially relevant given that conservation often has the effect of limiting development and resource extraction, instigating intense clashes over land use (as the recent occupation of malheur by anti-government militants attests). braverman mentions the example of crested toad preservation, which helped “defeat club med’s aspiration” to build a beach resort (27). kierán suckling, a director at the center for biological diversity and braverman’s most loquacious informant, observes that “every acre preserved or taken back for wildlife is an acre out of capital’s hide. thus capital must destroy the very concept of nature and the independence of plants and animals” (46). conservation, as a biopolitical program, may not be opposed to neoliberal capitalism, but it cannot be easily aligned with it either. suckling suggests, moreover, that the demystification of “nature” — which he defines as the autonomy of plants and animals living in places where human intervention is minimized (“every acre preserved”) — may actually serve the interests of unfettered development. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 152 according to braverman, “conservation biologists are often dualistic in their philosophy” — attached to “the ideal of human versus nature” — and yet “holistic in their practice” (226, 47). she notes that there has been a shift in the conservation community to seeing the in/ex divide in terms of “a continuum of management intensity,” ranging from laboratories to national parks (95). yet she refuses to “endorse” this “linear logic,” and instead emphasizes “the inherent messiness and fluidity between and within the sites.” successful approaches to wildlife preservation, in her view, require a recognition that each case is “unique and therefore prescribes its own unique path for conservation” (226). practices, however, are organized (or prescribed) by principles, and one of the principles that continues to motivate conservation is an idea of the biosphere’s autopoetic resilience, as it is expressed in natural selection, in the ingenuity of individual animals such as the gray wolves recolonizing california, and above all in ecosystemic networks. the “fidelity of many of [her] interviewees toward the ideals of nature and wilderness” is based on the realization that the preservation of biodiversity largely occurs not through intensive management but through wilderness conservation, the restriction of human encroachment on self-organizing ecosystemic communities (11). it is worth remembering that nature, etymologically, refers to the selfgenerating properties of the living world. one wonders how to square braverman’s claim that “the existence of a natural ecosystem ... is increasingly unrealistic, and can be obtained only through intensive human management” with the infamous nature article that estimated the economic value of global ecosystem “services” to be in the range of us $16-54 trillion (5). the problem is not hard to diagnose. braverman’s actual subject is endangered species, but, as is evident from the title of the book, her more tendentious claims require her to take these animals as stand-ins for “wildlife” and “nature” in general. in the margins of the story one can track the presence of wildlife the flourishing of which does not require intensive management, the predators (raccoons, coyotes, and red-tailed hawks) and prey (prairie dogs and mice) who share ecological communities with endangered species. the aim of deconstruction — including the deconstruction of the human-animal binary, as derrida insisted — is not to replace dichotomies with neologistic unities, such as “inter situ hybrids,” or with an empiricism of infinite particulars (the “unique” case), but rather to multiply categories, to increase nuance, to recognize difference so as to see how systems intersect and overlap. while i’m skeptical of braverman’s dogged assertion that in situ conservation is premised on a nostalgic fantasy, that there is no meaningful difference between zoological parks and vast refugia, wild life is a fascinating, timely, and significant book. tobias menely -“wildness without wilderness” 153 there is something undeniably haunting about a conservationist rhetoric that awaits a future in which a given “natural ecosystem” will be “back on its feet” (66). braverman reminds us that for many threatened and endangered species no such future is likely. as long as states and non-governmental organizations dedicate themselves to the preservation of endangered wildlife (and how long they will do so in the ecologically simplified and geo-engineered twenty-first century is an open question), some species will live only through perpetual management. microsoft word weil-freeman pdf dummy h u m a n i m a l i a 4:1 kari weil beyond considerability carol freeman, elizabeth leane, and yvette watt, eds. considering animals: contemporary studies in human-animal relations. farnham: ashgate, 2011. xvi +236 pp. $64.95 hb. on the cover of this wide-ranging and thought-provoking collection of essays is an image ― courtesy of the artist and co-editor, yve� e wa� ― depicting the backs of a series of toy animals who look at, and apparently consider, a display of images that includes a diagram of human and animal brains, a photo of two caged tasmanian tigers, and a painted, still life of raw beef. it is an image that aptly illustrates a major concern of this collection ― what would other animals think of what we do to them and how must they feel about us when their safety and their lives appear to lie in our hands, whether directly by what we do to them, or indirectly because of what we do to the environment and their habitats. images affect us, as does scholarship more generally, even if, as some of the essays suggest, we humans are often adept at avoiding or manipulating their truths. the hope of these essays is that research in animal studies and advocacy for animals can work together and it is addressed especially to those who share that concern. divided into three sections, the collection’s first section, “images,” offers analyses of penguin films, herzog’s grizzly man, photos of sacrificial bulls, and representations of possums (regarded as cute natives in australia, but vermin immigrants in new zealand, as kay milton discusses in “possum magic, possum menace: wildlife control and the demonisation of cuteness”). as her example indicates, these images depend on, even as they are sometimes undermined by, structures and circulations of narratives for their interpretation and effect. our unconscious susceptibility to such narratives is also the focus in undine selbach’s “the traumatic effort to understand: werner herzog’s grizzly man,” which insightfully points out that timothy treadwell’s very desire to escape into nature, if not to become bear, was more a product of western cultural narratives rather than a critique of it. elizabeth leane and stephanie pfenningwerth reveal the shared plot structures of such different works as march of the penguins, happy feet and classic disney cartoons. “marching on thin ice: the politics of penguin films” argues that, ironically, the documentary film turns out to be the least politically charged, because it represents the penguins as timeless creatures for whom climate change posits no threat. if, however, the negative effects of human intervention kari weil — beyond considerability 173 are more in evidence in happy feet, sympathy for the penguins is shown to be garnered in this animated film by the way that they “dance like humans” (39). if anthropomorphism can thus be strategic, it also carries the risks of anthropocentrism, as we find in many of the essays in the second section entitled, “ethics.” anthropocentrism is the focus in “’room on the ark’?: the symbolic nature of u.s. pet evacuation statutes for nonhuman animals,” in which marsha baum examines the dependent legal status of animals in the us and how “property-driven principles”(107) negatively affected their evacuation during such disasters as katrina. in her essay entitled, “making animals matter: why the art world needs to rethink the representation of animals,” yvette watt argues for the importance of representing animals as “individual, sentient and self-interested beings” in order to promote a concern for our relations with them. this strategic anthropomorphism appears to second wendy woodward’s suggestion that representations of named individuals are “far more effective in engaging the reading public” than reports of “animals as species” (53). but in her “naming the unspeakable: representations of animal deaths in some recent sought african print media” woodward also provocatively shows how the images of “individual deaths” have differing strategic effects depending on the particular species and their use-value to humans ― which is not quite the same as their property status (companion species, we can assume, would be different in this regard). thus, in the case of two “food animals” ― a photographed bull “sacrifice” and a staged chicken slaughter ― their particular lives and deaths are read as exceptional, and so do little to change attitudes towards other, similar deaths, or towards slaughter more generally. on the other hand, the reports of david the baboon, killed after attempting to escape his troop in cape town, and frida the lion cub killed in a canned hunt, attest to their individual suffering and to the ways they and their species more generally have become “sacrificial beings” and the victims of “unspeakable practices” that must not continue. use value trumps empathy when it comes to changing our practices. a different concern linking anthropomorphism and the representation of animals as individuals arises in many of the essays in the third section, entitled “agency.” philip armstrong argues for the importance of finding new ways to think of agency and of history, in terms other than those that depend on the conscious intention of an autonomous individual. he opens his essay on “cetaceans and sentiment” with the statement that “history is moved by emotion, no less than by ideology or economics” (169). it is a statement he illustrates with moving accounts of the impact of the visits of opo, a bottlenosed dolphin, to opononi beach in new zealand, and how these visits humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 174 became an enduring part of the local culture, told and retold in songs, children’s books, photo montages and on tv shows. armstrong suggests that these stories became “emblems for radical transformations of popular cultural affect,” preparing the way for new public displays of sentiment towards cetaceans that would become commonplace in the sixties with such programs as flipper. affect becomes agency in conflicting, if not counter-productive, ways in lucy davis’s “zones of contagion: the singapore body politic and the body of the street-cat,” an account of the sars epidemic in singapore and the way its “fears, economic uncertainty and shame … are displaced onto the body of the cat” (183). artfully interweaving these accounts with a first-person narrative of street-cat feeding in singapore by a group of “cat-women,” davis reveals the thickly entangled relations and dependencies of sex, gender, race and species. with a similar regard for agency as relational and emerging out of “interactions” (166), carol freeman’s essay, “extinction, representation, agency: the case of the dodo,” transforms the dodo from passive, historical object to a co-subject in order to consider what role it may have played in its own demise. such attention to non-human animals as active agents in history prepares the final, provocatively titled essay by tim low, “when nature is not?” that wants to extend such agency to plants. he focuses on the savannah grasses that rose to dominance six to eight million years ago, and promoted the use of fire ― “the most powerful tool at the disposal of early humans”(200) ― because they were easily burned. flammable vegetation thus played an active role in the discovery of fire, low argues, by making fires easy to light (201). to be sure, it should not be denied that the shape of our landscapes as of our tools is the product of much more than human activity (or intention) alone. but i would caution that the extent to which playing a role and having agency are regarded as one and the same may also determine the extent to which humans accept or shirk responsibility for their part in environmental change. in closing with low, who is a biologist, and beginning with a forward by the evolutionary biologist, mark bekoff, the collection is bookended by the voice of science. it is a distinctly empathic voice, echoed in ethologist jonathan balcombe’s interior essay on “pleasure’s moral worth,” and thus has a quite different inflection than the voice of science that is otherwise invoked in the volume. in their introduction, the editors emphasize the importance of including science in the volume to “deepen” its interdisciplinarity. elsewhere they speak of the “antidisciplinarity” of animal studies, which is defined “more by the subject of its analysis” (3). perhaps the discrepancy between the “inter” and the “anti” is related to the conflicted status of science in the collection. it is that which needs to be there, according to the editors, but for what purposes it isn’t clear. carol freeman points out with regard to the dodo, that so-called kari weil — beyond considerability 175 “scientific” illustrations were often derived from erroneous, popular illustration or hearsay from sailors (162). in “the speech of dumb beasts,” helen tiffin demonstrates the ways in which “scientific representations of animals challenge (or ignore) the potentials of animal speech” that are so prevalent in fiction. where most branches of science will condemn anthropomorphic interpretations of animal behavior, tiffin points out that the 1987 veterinary medical association report acknowledges the “tacit assumption of anthropomorphism” for animal research that is used to model humans (146). jed mayer’s insightful and important essay, “the nature of the experimental animal: evolution, vivisection, and the victorian environment,” focuses on the difficulties that both environmental and animal welfare movements in victorian england had in “negotiating the often conflicting demands of romantic sympathy and rational science” (93). evolutionary theory itself fueled the conflict by offering both the theoretical foundation for using animals as models for humans, and hence for practices such as vivisection, but also for lending support to the “great link” between humans and the nonhuman world, thereby fostering a sense of moral kinship and responsibility with animals. and any “sentimentalism” towards animals in the victorian era would, according to philip armstrong, come to be held in contempt with “simultaneous rise of positivist science and industrial capitalism,” which perceived compassion for animals as an obstacle to progress or profit (176). what does science add, we might ask, echoing the question “what does art add” that steve baker poses in his opening essay, “contemporary art and animal rights.” what does it add to the representation of animals at all, if not to advocacy for their lives? we think that science will give us some certainty, perhaps not unlike the “expectation” that philosophy “is ‘meant to settle’ things” (27). but art, baker argues, “generally fails ‘to settle’ things” and this, moreover, is not its failure but its strength. it invites the viewer to take note of the uncertainties of how and what we see, and of the unpredictable nature of what we feel. art should neither propose specific forms of action nor offer precise information. nor, according to the three artists he considers ― all women: sue coe, bri� a jachinski and angela singer ―, should artists ever allow their passion for a cause to slide into a “comforting sentimentality” (27); this despite armstrong’s arguments for the political possibility of sentimentality (the gendering of sentimentality would of course be important to consider here). baker cites coe’s statement that “the most political art is the art of ambiguity,” but he cautions that the politics of ambiguity is a politics of unclear outcomes. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 176 in its insistence on the importance of uncertainty regarding what and how we know about other animals, and its inquisitive openness to research that draws from a range of disciplines to give new shape to what we do know about them, this volume makes clear the complexities and the exciting potential of animal studies today. just as interdisciplinary work can make us see the errors and shortcomings of the individual disciplines it depends upon, so does animal studies reveal the errors and dangers of a humanism, if not an anthropocentricism, that is not always so easy to leave behind. for what other language of considerability ― moral, political or aesthetic, can we humans write in than our own? microsoft word traisnel-tyler-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:1 antoine traisnel a hands-on approach tom tyler, ciferae: a bestiary in five fingers. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2012. 319 pp. $30 pbk. if you do know that here is one hand, we’ll grant you all the rest. — ludwig wittgenstein, on certainty (opening aphorism) in his description of rembrandt’s anatomy lesson, w. g. sebald observes that the eyes of the surgeons assembled around dr. nicolaas tulp are not directed toward the dissected hand of executed convict aris kindt but are instead focused on a book of anatomy in the painting’s foreground. he remarks that in the book “appalling physical facts are reduced to a diagram, a schematic plan of the human being, such as envisaged by the enthusiastic amateur anatomist rené descartes” (who, as sebald notes, was likely present at the remarkable event). furthermore, the dissected limb is “not only antoine traisnel – a hands-on approach 185 grotesquely out of proportion,” but “also anatomically the wrong way round: the exposed tendons, which ought to be those of the left palm, given the position of the thumb, are in fact those of the back of the right hand” (16). here are two hands. it is no accident then, sebald speculates, that kindt appears to have two right hands. the criminal is disciplined by the dutch penal system and then again by the medical gaze’s “cartesian rigidity.” appropriated in the service of science, his body is ultimately overlooked by all but rembrandt (made perceptible in the hands of the painter). in sebald’s reading of this archetypal scene of modern knowledge, kindt’s left hand is substituted with a schematized model standing for every human hand. here is one hand. there are two hands on the book jacket of tom tyler’s erudite and incisive ciferae: a bestiary in five fingers (if we don’t count the small left hand that is the university of minnesota press’ posthumanities series logo). the hand on the front cover is buoyant and welcoming, counting or perhaps pointing to the five animal silhouettes that appear at the tip of each finger (a snail, a bird, a goat, an insect and a crab). the second hand, on the back cover, rests palm down, as if poised to pet or handle an animal. here we have two left hands, which are, in all likelihood, the same hand. from anaxagoras onward, tyler argues, philosophy has tended to fetishize the hand as the most singular instrument, erecting it as the hallmark of our humanity. when heidegger talks about the hand, for instance, it is always in the singular. it is “as if man,” derrida writes, poking fun at him, “did not have two hands but, this monster, a single hand,” which “signifies that we are no longer dealing with prehensile organs or instrumentalizable limbs that hands are” (“heidegger's hand“ 50). there is not “one true hand,” tyler insists, or even for that matter two, but a countless assortment of hands “each gripping and grasping after its own fashion” (243). one refrain of tyler’s thought-provoking book is that animals have commonly “been taken in hand” by philosophy.“ in ancient rome, he explains, “one who was enslaved, who had been claimed as a possession, was called mancipium, literally ‘taken by hand’” (264). ciferae is not therefore a declaration of animal liberation, in the sense articulated humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 186 by peter singer, but a manifesto for animal emancipation. it is an appeal for releasing animals from the hardened fist of an idealized and idealizing hand. in the same gesture, tyler seeks to relieve humans who are themselves held captive to their own clenched grasp (when, as he says, “comprehension depends on prehension” [15]). the one selfevident principle that guides his epistemological investigation is not the search for truth (veritas) but the right to wildness (feritas), a prerogative shared by human and nonhuman animals alike to “wander hither and thither, wherever the spirit [animus] will lead them” (no page number). appropriating wittgenstein’s claim in philosophical investigations that his aim is to “show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle,” tyler proposes to reread and revise an imposing selection of philosophical, scientific, linguistic and psychoanalytical texts that have recruited animals for their own benefit, while treating them in an offhand manner. in order to resist the temptation to subsume the particular under the general (or examining the fly through the distorting lens of a fly-bottle), he observes that one must always attend concrete cases, something he borrows from wittgenstein’s tireless examination of the metaphysical foundations of western knowledge practices. to evade the strictures of traditional approaches to the question of the animal, tyler adopts the format of the bestiary.* like its medieval counterparts, his bestiary is strikingly illustrated, gathering innumerable facts and anecdotes with the intention to educate but with no pretention to systematicity, exhaustivity or objectivity (46). the pictures and their substantial captions — drawn from sources as varied as comic strips and dictionaries, classical paintings and photographs, scientific manuals and children’s books — complement and enrich the body of the text but also playfully divert our attention by pointing in unexpected directions. we learn a lot from tyler’s baroque collection of animal trivia. i discovered, for instance, that marco polo portrayed the rhino as a plump unicorn in his travelogue, that some spiders possess as many as seven distinct kinds of glands to produce their silk draglines, that war camels wore sandals in aristotle’s history of animals, and that buridan’s ass was in fact a dog. in its eclectic erudition, the author’s modern-day bestiary asks not what we know but what can be known of animals (and of ourselves as knowing subjects). the book invites us to revisit protagoras’ claim that “man is the measure of all things.” can humans know the world beyond the limits of their human aptitudes? to answer this question, tyler enquires whether this protagorean perspective “derives from elements intrinsic to the writings of these diverse philosophers or is, rather, an extraneous, incidental prejudice of those already inclined to hold this position” (3). his investigation into the conditions of human knowledge production avoids being a simple rejection of antoine traisnel – a hands-on approach 187 anthropomorphism. tyler recognizes that wielding the threat of anthropomorphism can reproduce no less dogmatic a position, a reactionary posture that frans de waal has described as “anthropodenial” (66). to avoid this pitfall, he solicits the assistance of animals as trojan horses informing us about their own treatment at the hands of philosophers. animals have often held an ambiguous place in western philosophy. on the one hand, they have been taken up as indispensible accomplices or accessories in the service of philosophical discourses while, on the other hand, they have proved reluctant to conform to the conceptual categories we designed on their behalf. attending to carol j. adams’s notion of the “absent referent” and derrida’s concern that the general singular syntagm “the animal” compresses the inexhaustible diversity of the heterotrophic living into a “catch-all concept” (animal 31), he proposes to kill the chimeric animal conceived by philosophy. he enlists a “small army of assassins,” taking each animal as “a particular, tangible individual in his or her own right, not an instance of animality or of the animal” (44). unable to do justice to the wild multiplicity of animal life, tyler settles for one hundred and one — ci in roman numerals — wild animals (ferae) that must not be tamed into mere placeholders or transparent ciphers (“ci ferae, not ciferae”). in his playful nod to disney’s 101 dalmatians, tyler pledges to follow the lead of a number of beasts sequestered in philosophical texts by taking them not as ciphers but as indices (hence the first chapter is placed under the sign of the first finger, the index): “the undertaking of these indices, the elementary education required by animals 101, is the groundwork necessary in order both to bring about the death of the animal and to reanimate the lifeless ciphers” (45). the book is not merely an astute jeu d’esprit around our ways to count and account animals. it also carefully probes the ostensible anthropocentricism of three dominant epistemological paradigms in western thought: realism, relativism, and pragmatism. if the authors (not all philosophers) who have engaged with and promoted these epistemologies have often manifested protagorean biases, it does not entail, tyler suggests, that anthropocentrism is an inbuilt tenet of their knowledge practices. that anthropomorphism may be inevitable is not the end of the conversation, however, if only because we don’t have a stable picture of the anthropos. distinguishing between two forms of anthropomorphism, tyler calls “first-and-foremost anthropocentrists” those thinkers who find the world of animals absolutely unfathomable and assert “that one must endeavor always to abstain from the sticky temptation that leads to poetic humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 188 babbling and adhere instead to the limited but reliable methods of scientific seriousness” (64). tyler opens his investigation into epistemological realism with g. e. moore’s famous 1939 lecture “proof of an external world.” in response to kant’s assertion that things outside us are utterly impervious to certain knowledge, moore “proves” the existence of external things by holding up his two hands: “here is one hand. . .and here is another.” wittgenstein devotes the 676 notes of his posthumously published work on certainty to analyze and criticize moore’s claim. surprisingly, however, it is not wittgenstein but nietzsche and his horde of animal mercenaries to whom tyler turns. his main objective is not to discuss the validity of moore’s argument, as wittgenstein does, but to expose the anthropocentrism latent in his philosophical realism. to the notion that something exists beyond the grasp of human intelligence or imagination, tyler opposes, by way of nietzsche, that there “can be no truth beyond the empty husk of tautology, no grasp of the eternal essentials that make up reality, due to the forms and ideas that humanity cannot help but impose (104).”this limitation, however, is not specific to human beings: “like every other animal, humans are condemned to a particular, contingent understanding of the world.” despite the underlying protagoreanism of moore’s realist and yet cipherous hands, tyler concludes that epistemological realism need not be anthropocentric. nietzsche’s perspectivism provides a case in point for what this nonanthropocentric realism might look like. tyler reads kant, saussure and benjamin whorf to show that the anthropomorphism at work in their approaches is not essential to their relativist epistemologies. in his penultimate chapter, tyler explores the virtues and infelicities of pragmatism by recounting williams james’s encounter with a squirrel and witnessing the physicist ludwig boltzmann slipping “a pike into the complacent pond of philosophy” (181). though none of the three epistemological paradigms are entirely compromised by anthropocentrism, pragmatism wins the competition hands down. the pragmatist is in the world like bataille’s animal, entirely immersed in the world she attempts to know. tyler’s hands-on pragmatism thus presents itself as an “inclusive, ‘renovated pragmatism’ that encompasses, as cary wolfe would have it, a nietzschean commitment to ‘radical plurality, contingency, historicity, and difference’” (209). we learn from the examples of clever hans and rotpeter to define knowledge not as abstract theorization but as practical means in the service of subjective and partial ends. what matters ultimately is that knowledge is an instrument that enables us to “get antoine traisnel – a hands-on approach 189 things done” and that the epistemological frame we choose works for us, even as this “us” always remains to be known and defined. this pragmatist credo ultimately leads tyler to question the supposed superiority of the “instrument of instruments,” the human hand (which plays a different role in each chapter: as irrefutable evidence of the world’s reality for moore, as a thought experiment for kant, as the medium of a discourteous gesture for wittgenstein, and so on). which came first, human intelligence or the hand? tyler exposes the tautological rationale of both theories, which are shown to be two sides of the same uncritical “handy humanism.” instead of trying to settle this intractable “chicken and egg riddle” (226), he asks his reader to revaluate the supposed perfection of the hand. he reminds us, for instance, that the end of the elephant’s proboscis is called manus in latin and that chameleons have not one but two opposable digits on each hand. as for those who mistake darwinian evolution for a form of progress, tyler refutes the legend according to which the “opposable thumb” constitutes the hallmark of humanity and shows that the hand is but an archaic appendage. in ciferae, tyler euphorically extends derrida’s emajusculation and pluralization of heidegger’s hand by unleashing a multitude of hands with varying shapes, functions and fashions. to avoid the residual anthropocentrism of cladistic taxonomy, he ultimately borrows johann friedrich blumenbach’s categories to rename the human. considering that it is “not the hand that distinguishes human beings, but, rather, the fact that they have two,” tyler proposes to replace homo sapiens with pan bimanus in order to welcome back the chimpanzees that had been excluded from our genus (252254). this new classification, he insists, must be conceived as the provisional formation of a new and more hospitable “we” that would temporarily respond to nietzsche’s appeal to “become what we are.” “nietzsche urged his readers to construct or create a self, to ‘give style to one’s character’” (260). this is, perhaps, where nietzsche and wittgenstein meet: knowing (oneself) may ultimately be a matter of style. our five fingers, concludes tyler, “indicate modes of thinking when ‘we’ cease to consider ourselves preeminently or exclusively as human: the 101 gesture with hand or paw toward the limits of our thinking as human beings” (264). in his meditation on nietzsche’s styles, derrida ponders the possibility of attributing “with certainty” a sentence written in nietzsche’s own hand to the philosopher: “what, after all, is handwriting? is one obliged, merely because something is written in one’s hand, to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 190 assume, or thus to sign it?” (spurs 127). to these questions, protagoras would most likely answer yes. but one’s hand, he would add, is never truly one’s own, nor are we entirely responsible for our hands. note i want to flag the renewed interest in amending our taxonomic conventions, as demonstrated, for example, by caspar henderson’s beautifully borgesian book of barely imagined beings, which also happens to be written under the aegis of wittgenstein. works cited derrida, jacques. “heidegger’s hand.” in psyche: invention of the other. volume ii. ed. peggy kamuf and elizabeth rottenberg. stanford: stanford up, 2008. _______. spurs: nietzsche’s styles. trans. barbara harlow. chicago: u chicago p, 1978. _______. the animal that therefore i am (following). trans. by david wills. new york: fordham up, 2008. de waal, frans. primates and philosophers: how morality evolved. princeton: princeton up, 2006. henderson, caspar. the book of barely imagined beings: a 21st century bestiary. chicago: u chicago p, 2013. sebald, w. g. the rings of saturn. trans. michael hulse. new york: new directions, 1999. wittgenstein, ludwig. über gewissheit. on certainty. trans. denis paul and g. e. m. anscombe. malden, ma: blackwell, 2010. microsoft word hutchison-dubinoetal h u m a n i m a l i a 8:2 reviews bill hutchison the presence of the withdrawn jeanne dubino, ziba rashidian, and andrew smyth, eds., representing the modern animal in culture. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2014. 266 pp. $95.00 hb. “modernity,” writes jeanne dubino, “is marked by the increasing disappearance of animals.” dubino, one of three editors of palgrave macmillan’s representing the modern animal in culture, points out in her introduction that before modernity, “animals were everywhere” (1). we no longer live alongside animals saturating the spaces in which life resides with mingled modes of being. with the transition to modernity, the editors of this volume endorse john berger’s that animals appear to have withdrawn. looking down my chicago street, paved and populated with cars and building after building, the animals indeed seems to have gone, retreated to representation. the animal’s new natural habitat is within pages, paintings, theaters, and galleries. representing the modern animal in culture tracks in its twelve essays the history of this textual animal migration from the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. the editors have divided the book into three parts intended to serve as a rough chronology — “lives with domestic animals in the modern era,” “animals as metaphor in the age of darwin,” and “reconceiving nonhuman animals in the bill hutchinson – the presence of the withdrawn 191 contemporary world.” the book does not try to be a comprehensive or even broadly representative overview of modern culture’s animal; in fact, the diverse selection of essays underscores one of the volume’s unspoken highlights — that the human cultural milieu, such as it has been for the last couple of centuries, is so packed with animal representation that structural categorization becomes impossible. what does seem to be certain is that “the modern animal” is a representative animal. but rather than treating representation as simplification, representing the modern animal in culture sees it as a leaping-off point that allows representations of animals to escape the devastating gravity of simply being used as an allegorization of humans or human ideals. the first section, “lives with domestic animals in the modern era,” suggests a stronger claim than its title would indicate. while the essays in this section do each discuss humans living with domestic animals, the varied arguments share an unspoken commonality — each is about human relationships with animals; real, bidirectional interrelations across species boundaries. “lives” with animals, this section suggests, means “relationships” with animals. donna landry’s essay, “the noble brute: contradictions in equine ideology, east and west,” on “equine ideology” in the eighteenth century is an effort to come to terms with what landry terms “deep equine feeling” (30). landry shows representation dealing with the problem of recognizing passion in an animal that is so easily transformed into an aesthetic object, while productively entangling that idea with the issue of empire and native peoples, in which postcolonial understandings of race and species come into conflict and conversation. what landry does with horses, dubino does with dogs in her essay on nineteenth century british travel writing about stray dogs in turkey, “paying tribute to the dogs: turkish strays in nineteenth-century british travel writing,” which traces the relation of turkish strays and british xenophobia. a lesser essay would rely on the allegorization to do the heavy argumentative lifting, dubino’s work troubles allegory and finds foreign peoples and dogs to be in a deeper relation, in which the eyes of empire cannot make sense of these other tribes of beings who make claims on the colonial monopoly on subjectivity. kevin ferguson’s beautiful contribution to the section, “pets in memoir,” bears special mention: in its personal mode, it foregrounds the relationship that inheres in representation of the domestic animal in memoir. anthropomorphic as the pet memoir might necessarily be, it contains a self-othering in the animal subject’s resistance to reductive humanization, instead exploding allegory outward into the simple fact that there is an animal whose story — a story of relation — must be told. in “anthropomorphism: animals as metaphors in the age of darwin,” the second section in the book, the problem of animal representation is dealt with more overtly. the metaphorical animal, different from the “real” animal that is transformed into humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 192 allegory, collides with the expansion of darwinism and darwin-influenced thought in the nineteenth century. darwin’s style in his seminal works animated animals through literary devices, and these tropes proliferated into culture. alexis harley’s contribution, “darwin’s ants: evolutionary theory and the anthropomorphic fallacy,” deals with this most directly in her reading of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism in various works by george henry lewes and darwin himself. the analogic method, in which a mode of writing seems to bring a kind of personified life to the animal under study, may in fact reflect a problem in the boundaries between kinds that darwin sought to trouble. emily essert’s “cats, apes, and crabs: t. s. eliot among the animals,” and joshua schuster’s “the fable, the moral, and the animal: reconsidering the fable in animal studies with marianne moore’s elephants,” take up the metaphorical animal in t.s. eliot and marianne moore respectively, and in both the animal is subsumed into literary forms, while both insist on the real bodies of animals at the heart of the metaphor. both essays seek to reconstruct those real animals as looking out from inside the verses they populate, both aiming to untangle what schuster calls “the affective and imaginative lives of animals” (151). we are brought to the twenty-first century and the present moment in the final section of the book, “the posthuman: reconceiving nonhuman animals in the contemporary world.” this section follows expertly on the discussions of darwin in the previous section. andrew smyth’s delightful essay “splicing genes with postmodern teens” on suzanne collins’ hunger games series shows hybridization via genetic and social engineering as both a result of and relief from tyranny. smyth reads the social divisions among hierarchically-arranged districts in the world of hunger games against contemporary practices of factory farming, and the subjugated life of the animal under capital alongside the worker who tends to both creatures and divisions among them. the scientific animal leaves the realm of science fiction and moves to bioart in ziba rashidian’s “on the wings of a butterfly: bare life and bioart in eduardo kac, marta de menezes, and margaret atwood,” a reading of the ethics of using biological organisms in art projects. one of rashidian’s case studies, eduardo kac’s development of a “fluorescent transgenic bunny with a chromosome from a jellyfish,” is a story of the ethics of aesthetics, but takes a turn when the lab kac partners with declines to let the artist take the rabbit home with him (193). thus the muddle of bioart and the blurring of science and aesthetics emerges — issues of ownership collide with art, and the rabbit (which lived and died in the lab) is caught in the middle. transnational mythmaking and animal representation meet in susan mchugh’s reading of linda hogan’s novel power and hayao miyazaki’s film princess mononoke, “animal gods in extinction stories.” mythic animal god figures stand in and speak for the systems — ecological bill hutchinson – the presence of the withdrawn 193 and biological — that are under biocidal threat. mchugh finds the dying animal gods in her texts as figures who remain and resist, gods who will still retain a vital spark, but one which is undeniably dimming. the book closes with the standout essay in the collection, neel ahuja’s “postcolonial critique in a multispecies world.” representation is exceeded in this final chapter by the animal’s insistence on having always lived with and had relationships with humans, which have not only caused representations to proliferate in modernity, but continue to demand an accounting. ahuja tracks this accounting through the discourse of postcolonial cultural criticism. the strength of ahuja’s essay is in his methodology: the fusion of race and species, a shortcut in figuring relations between humans and animals especially in the wake of empire, must be undone. in this way, overlooked sites, species, and peoples will begin to emerge as having been central figures in shaping and being shaped by imperial forces and the cultures that emerged. the editors have done an admirable job in assembling this collection, which coheres conceptually without suggesting that it encloses. in fact, the twelve essays reflect a series of provocations necessary for animal studies to remain relevant and dynamic. literary and cultural scholars will also find much of interest as well. not every reader will find something to latch onto in every essay, but such is the reality of a collection like this, which asks a fundamental question: if the animal has withdrawn from the natural world into culture, why do i still feel it breathing down my neck? microsoft word meighoo-westling-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:2 reviews sean meighoo no logos: phenomenology, animal studies, and logocentrism louise westling, the logos of the living world: merleau-ponty, animals, and language. new york: fordham university press, 2014. 208 pp. $80.00 hb; $29.00 pb. the logos of the living world adds to the emerging body of scholarship within the closely related fields of ecocriticism and animal studies on the mid-twentieth-century french philosopher of phenomenology maurice merleau-ponty. westling’s monograph was one of the first books to be published in fordham university press’s series groundworks: ecological issues in philosophy and theology. it was not the first book, however, to offer a critical reassessment of merleau-ponty’s work either in relation to ecocriticism and environmental studies or in relation to animal studies. as westling acknowledges (146 n. 11), the volume merleau-ponty and environmental philosophy, based on the proceedings of the merleau-ponty circle’s annual conference in 2002, had already been published a few years earlier, as had ted toadvine’s monograph merleau-ponty’s philosophy of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 162 nature. meanwhile, david b. dillard-wright’s monograph ark of the possible had also been published a few years earlier, although westling does not cite dillard-wright’s work in her book. to be sure, merleau-ponty has recently emerged as one of the most important philosophers in the continental european tradition for contemporary ecocritics and animal studies scholars, and his work concerning “nature” and nonhuman animals is now being reread alongside the work of other key continental philosophers and thinkers. the volume eco-phenomenology, as its title suggests, addresses the ongoing relevance of phenomenology to environmental issues in a critical reassessment of the work of the philosophers edmund husserl, martin heidegger, emmanuel levinas, friedrich nietzsche, merleau-ponty, arthur schopenhauer, and jean-paul sartre. brett buchanan’s monograph onto-ethologies provides a careful account of the different ways in which the work of the biologist jakob von uexküll was taken up by the philosophers heidegger, merleau-ponty, and gilles deleuze. kelly oliver’s monograph animal lessons presents a broad survey on the treatment of nonhuman animals in the work of the philosophers and psychoanalytic thinkers jean-jacques rousseau, johann gottfried herder, jacques derrida, simone de beauvoir, jacques lacan, heidegger, merleauponty, giorgio agamben, sigmund freud, and julia kristeva. the logos of the living world thus offers a substantial contribution not only to the fields of ecocriticism and animal studies but also to the growing body of interdisciplinary scholarship on merleau-ponty’s philosophy as such. westling’s book is aimed at demonstrating the continued significance of merleauponty’s work to what is called so widely today the “animal question,” as she puts it herself (xii). in a very ambitious move indeed, westling seeks nothing less than to reorder the current intellectual configuration of the field of animal studies. she presents two main lines of argument in the introduction to her book, each one of which is wound closely around the other. in one line of her argument, westling reaffirms the momentous impact of merleau-ponty’s philosophy on postwar intellectual culture and the emergence of ecological awareness: “merleau-ponty established a radical new way of understanding the human place in the biosphere, one congruent with twentiethcentury science and animal studies” (9). she further claims that merleau-ponty’s work provides a more productive approach to animal studies than the largely deconstructionist approach that dominates the field today: “merleau-ponty’s work on the animal question anticipated and even moved beyond the positions of most current commentators in critical animal studies” (8-9). referring to both jacques derrida and cary wolfe in the opening paragraph of her introduction, she places their work at the sean meighoo -no logos: phenomenology, animal studies, and logocentrism 163 center of the current field of animal studies only to target it for a phenomenologicallyoriented critique over the course of her book. this line of westling’s argument on the continued significance of merleau-ponty’s work, then, leads directly to her other line of argument on the biological continuity between humans and nonhuman animals. she argues that merleau-ponty’s ongoing engagement with twentieth-century social and natural sciences, including gestalt psychology and what eventually came to be known as ethology, attests to the biological continuity between humans and other forms of life, a continuity that derrida himself seems to deny: in the animal that therefore i am, derrida undermined the long western philosophical humanist tradition of objectifying “the animal,” playfully exposing his own animality and calling for ethical attention to animals as distinct beings. he criticized previous philosophers for ignoring the rich body of scientific animal studies, implying that theoretical claims should be measured against ethological work with real animals in order to have any validity. yet he adamantly denied any biological continuity between homo sapiens and the rest of organic life, and he himself failed to discuss the findings of modern primatology or other kinds of work on animal cognition or communication. in the 1950s, merleau-ponty was already doing what derrida suggested half a century later… [merleau-ponty’s] investigations of the science of his time move toward the acknowledgment of an evolutionary continuum of humans and other organisms. (4, 9) although westling does not accuse wolfe of denying the biological continuity between humans and nonhuman animals, she does define her own intellectual project in contrast to his apparent dismissal of the humanities: cary wolfe sees the humanities as having been left behind in a radical reevaluation of our relation to nonhuman animals that has taken place in popular culture and indeed in many scientific disciplines. the present work offers an interdisciplinary ecocritical argument that phenomenologist maurice merleau-ponty actually began such a reevaluation more than sixty years ago, laying a theoretical foundation that is intertwined with the modern life sciences. such an approach brings philosophical rigor to ecocritical theory, demonstrates how literary works humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 164 can illuminate theoretical debates in richer ways than explicit theoretical argument, and brings scientific studies of animals into dialogue with the humanities. (1-2) tying both lines of her argument together, westling thus resists the deconstructionist bent of most current theoretical work in animal studies. the remaining course of westling’s book follows the argument that she lays out in her introduction. in chapter 1, “a philosophy of life,” westling provides an overview of merleau-ponty’s philosophical project of phenomenology or what she calls his “ecophenomenology” (43). revisiting his classic treatise phenomenology of perception as well as his posthumously published works the visible and the invisible and nature, she insists that “merleau-ponty is the only major european philosopher who embraces the consequences of evolution and sees humans as interdependent members of the ecosystem” (14). she argues that although husserl’s, heidegger’s, and merleau-ponty’s phenomenological investigations alike “opened a new direction for western philosophy [and provide] a crucial grounding for ecological thought,” merleau-ponty’s work “moves beyond husserl’s and heidegger’s” insofar as he maintains his focus on the body as the locus of all lived experience rather than on any transcendental subject or human essence (16-17). in chapter 2, “animal kin,” westling presents a sweeping historical account of the cultural anxiety within the western or “european/mediterranean” tradition (60) around the issue of biological continuity between humans and nonhuman animals or what she calls “human animality and kinship with the rest of the living community” (47). she moves rather quickly from an ecocritical reading of the ancient literary texts the epic of gilgamesh, “the curse of akkad,” and the bakkhai to a sympathetic discussion of the modern european thinkers and writers michel de montaigne, william shakespeare, and charles darwin. she then turns her attention to a critical interrogation of both heidegger’s and derrida’s philosophical approaches to the “animal question” as well as some more recent work in animal studies by contemporary scholars including giorgio agamben, kelly oliver, donna haraway, matthew calarco, cary wolfe, and timothy morton among others. returning to merleau-ponty’s work, westling argues that his later writings and lectures in particular offer a rich intellectual resource that these animal studies scholars have largely neglected to the detriment of their own work. in chapter 3, “language is everywhere,” westling puts merleau-ponty’s work on language, literature, and meaning — what he calls “logos” in his posthumously sean meighoo -no logos: phenomenology, animal studies, and logocentrism 165 published nature lectures — into dialogue with more current scientific studies on human language and animal communication. she suggests that although merleauponty himself never addressed the question of whether nonhuman animals possess the capacity for language as such, his philosophical approach to language as an “embodied and gestural” form of behavior tends to support what she claims is “the majority view among recent researchers from many disciplines that human linguistic capabilities function within an evolutionary continuum of cognitive and communicative behavior among animals” (103-104). drawing from an interdisciplinary range of current work in cognitive neuroscience, evolutionary linguistics, and biosemiotics, she even states that merleau-ponty’s later work “anticipate[d]” many recent scientific discoveries concerning the “semiotic nature of all life” (112-13) before going on to present an extended reading of yann martel’s novel life of pi. finally, in the conclusion to her book, westling considers how the practices of herding and agility training can contribute to our understanding of embodiment and interspecies relationships. she closes her discussion by returning once again to her phenomenologically-oriented critique of the deconstructionist approach to animal studies, referring specifically to wolfe’s work: “cary wolfe has said that we need an ontology that takes the body as central. i trust i have been able to show that merleauponty gave us such a philosophy more than fifty years ago” (144). westling’s book certainly offers an intellectually productive as well as a politically provocative challenge to the current field of animal studies. however, it seems to me that westling undercuts both lines of her own argument in some important ways. although her criticism of the denial of the biological continuity between humans and nonhuman animals within animal studies itself is well warranted, her criticism of derrida’s work in particular seems somewhat misplaced. of course, westling is quite correct in pointing out that in the animal that therefore i am, derrida himself rejects any continuity between what he calls so cautiously “man” and “animal”: “i have … never believed in some homogeneous continuity between what calls itself man and what he [sic] calls the animal. i am not about to begin to do so now” (30, emphasis in original). yet he immediately goes on to suggest that it is not the ostensible fact or evidence of biological continuity between humans and nonhuman animals that he rejects as much as it is the discourse of “biologistic continuism [or geneticism], whose sinister connotations we are well aware of” (30). indeed, it is derrida’s careful attention to the “discontinuity, rupture, or even abyss” (30) between humans and nonhuman animals — what he calls the “limit between man with a capital m and animal with a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 166 capital a” (29) — that guides him toward a deconstruction of the binary opposition between the “human” and the “animal”: beyond the edge of the so-called human, beyond it but by no means on a single opposing side, rather than “the animal” or “animal life” there is already a heterogeneous multiplicity of the living, or more precisely (since to say “the living” is already to say too much or not enough), a multiplicity of organizations of relations between living and dead, relations of organization or lack of organization among realms that are more and more difficult to dissociate by means of the figures of the organic and inorganic, of life and/or death. (31, emphasis in original) derrida thus complicates the distinction between humans and nonhuman animals by expanding species difference rather than reducing it, multiplying it to the point that even the distinction between the living and the nonliving is broached. it is surprising that westling should remain so unsympathetic to this affirmation of species difference in derrida’s work. her criticism of the denial of biological continuity between humans and nonhuman animals could have been directed more effectively, perhaps, at the decidedly deconstructionist work of some other contemporary animal studies scholars. in this is not sufficient, leonard lawlor opposes “biological continuism” to “metaphysical separationism”: “metaphysical separationism is platonism (or cartesianism); biological continuism, in a word, biologism, is the mere reversal of platonism” (72). lawlor claims to reject both of these “extreme positions” (136 n. 7): “[a]ny response [to the suffering of animals] that relies on biological continuism or metaphysical separationism will be insufficient” (97). however, he continues to rely on the essentially metaphysical distinction between the “human” and the “animal” over the entire course of his book, rejecting biological continuism on the very questionable grounds that it “reduc[es] the human down to the animal, down to the biological, down to irrational instincts and forces” (25). westling’s criticism of the denial of biological continuity between humans and nonhuman animals would have been much more pertinent to lawlor’s work than to derrida’s, and yet she does not mention lawlor’s work in her book at all. this antagonism on westling’s part toward deconstruction and derrida’s work in particular is not unrelated to her other line of argument on the continued significance of merleau-ponty’s work to the current field of animal studies. although westling insists throughout her book that merleau-ponty’s later work provides an especially rich sean meighoo -no logos: phenomenology, animal studies, and logocentrism 167 intellectual resource for animal studies scholars, she admits herself that “a certain tinge of human exceptionalism remains” in the final course of his nature lectures, “nature and logos: the human body” (86). addressing merleau-ponty’s claim that “soul” or “spirit” is “uniquely human,” she goes on to propose “that in the nature lectures merleau-ponty was still actively working out his thinking on the human place in the animal world and in nature more broadly, and that he would have eventually acknowledged the continuum of various kinds of consciousness emerging through the evolution of myriad animal species” (86-87). while westling thus suggests that this trace of human exceptionalism is an anomalous or anachronistic feature of merleauponty’s philosophy, i would suggest instead that it is a fundamental part of the logocentrism or the philosophical privilege accorded to language, meaning, and the “word” itself that is announced in the very title of her book: the logos of the living world. to be clear, i am not suggesting in any way that westling shares merleau-ponty’s ambivalence on extending the property of logos from the human to the animal. yet it does remain ambiguous whether she extends this property to animality as such, to life more generally, or to nature in its entirety. this ambiguity is displayed by westling’s frequent appeal to what merleau-ponty calls the “man-animality intertwining” over the course of her book on one hand (3, 6, 36, 101, 124, emphasis in original, cf. 38, 128, 14344), and by her association of logos with life or the “living world” in the title of her book on the other. it appears that although westling does not deny logos to life or even to nature itself completely, she does make a distinction between human or animal language and the “immanent logos” of life or nature (78, 131, 143) — what she calls the “silent language of primordial being” (141). westling resists the human exceptionalism that informs merleau-ponty’s philosophy, then, but not its logocentrism: merleau-ponty wanted to explain how a kind of mute meaning or logos is everywhere in the primordial or wild being that is our only environment and that of every organism on this planet. the function of human language and culture is to make this meaning visible and to extend it… if human exceptionalism can be set aside and biological continuity seriously explored, we may learn in time that many other animals participate — according to their own styles — in bringing forth or displaying aspects of the logos of primordial being that merleau-ponty described for human language and art, and thus also expressing and multiplying the life of the bare things. (136, 138) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 168 in this special phenomenological brand of logocentrism, the binary opposition between the human and the animal is thus replaced by an ascending scale of increasing complexity from nature or life to the animal or the human, from the inanimate or nonsentient to the animate or sentient, from an immanent logos to an articulate logos. it is perhaps inevitable that some trace of human exceptionalism should continue to inform westling’s own work insofar as she seems to follow merleau-ponty in reserving the most complex form of logos — self-consciousness — solely for “us” humans: “logos is what is realized in us — our self-conscious understanding of the incorporated meaning of animality…” (3). despite westling’s provocative argument in the logos of the living world on the continued significance of merleau-ponty’s work to the current field of animal studies, what her book ultimately demonstrates is the critical intervention that deconstruction still has to make into this field. this is not to say that animal studies scholars must choose between phenomenology or merleau-ponty’s work on one hand and deconstruction or derrida’s work on the other. but it is to say that we cannot rest content with simply extending the property of logos from the human to the animal as such. the deconstruction of logocentrism entails the deconstruction of all binary oppositions — not only the opposition between the human and the animal but also the opposition between the animate and the inanimate as well as between the living and the nonliving. to accord the philosophical privilege of logos to the “animal” rather than to the “human” alone is only to extend the reach of human exceptionalism itself. works cited brown, charles s. and ted toadvine, eds. eco-phenomenology: back to the earth itself. albany: state u of new york p, 2003. buchanan, brett. onto-ethologies: the animal environments of uexküll, heidegger, merleauponty, and deleuze. albany: state u of new york p, 2008. cataldi, suzanne l. and william s. hamrick, eds. merleau-ponty and environmental philosophy: dwelling on the landscapes of thought. albany: state u of new york p, 2007. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. ed. marie-louise mallet. trans. david wills. new york: fordham up, 2008. sean meighoo -no logos: phenomenology, animal studies, and logocentrism 169 dillard-wright, david b. ark of the possible: the animal world in merleau-ponty. lanham, md: lexington books, 2009. lawlor, leonard. this is not sufficient: an essay on animality and human nature in derrida. new york: columbia up, 2007. oliver, kelly. animal lessons: how they teach us to be human. new york: columbia up, 2009. toadvine, ted. merleau-ponty’s philosophy of nature. evanston, il: northwestern up, 2009. microsoft word attebery-pdf-jgr h u m a n i m a l i a 6:2 stina attebery coshaping digital and biological animals: companion species encounters and biopower in the video games pikmin and pokémon video games create new relationships between animals and humans by imagining these relationships reconfigured in an entirely digital space. many games explicitly explore biological issues in their gameplay and premise, structuring a player’s success around her ability to manage resources and modify the digital “bodies” of her avatar or other characters under her control. this is particularly true in the sub-genre of strategy games. in a typical third-person perspective strategy game, the player adapts to changing conditions in her environment by exercising control over resources coded as biological, resources that often include digitally rendered human, animal, or alien bodies. the emphasis on biological management in such games foregrounds issues of human and animal biopower by requiring the player’s active participation in creating and maintaining biopolitical structures and relationships. i examine two games series — the pokémon and pikmin franchises — that complicate the biopolitical resource management typical of strategy games by focusing on the biopower of animal-like digital creatures who are simultaneously resources and companions for the human player and her avatar. in this way pokémon and pikmin approximate the “messy coshapings” that donna haraway writes about in her accounts of companion species relationships, but these relationships occur within a digital environment where this messiness is communicated entirely through the immaterial technologies of gaming. these games simulate biology differently, as pikmin emphasizes the way human affection for animals. even under biopolitical relationships, can challenge the ease with which we can exploit a resource that we have bonded to, while the pokémon games, especially in light of some recent controversy over their depiction of animal fighting, have tried to reinforce the idea that the trainer/pokémon relationship is only one of affection, ignoring the other structures of dominance and control behind the training economy presented in the games. these games explore the complexities of humananimal relationships that define animals both as economic resources and as companions, and both games suggest ways of rethinking the relationship between biological materiality and digital imaging in video games. as computer-generated images of animals, the creatures in pokémon and pikmin resemble the varieties of animal cyborgs that donna haraway introduces in her stina attebery – “coshaping digital and biological animals: companion species encounters and biopower in the video games pikmin and pokémon” 57 “cyborg manifesto” and continues to explore in her later writings. animals are central to haraway’s definition of the cyborg, as she explains that “the cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed” (“cyborg manifesto” 152). many of haraway’s key examples of companion species relationships — cryopreservation of pets, digital records of endangered species, crittercam tv, etc. — feature animal-human relationships mediated and transformed through technology, but she does not discuss what it means when the animals we interact with are entirely digital. in fact, it is crucial for haraway that the animal cyborgs found in technocultural companion species relationships are material rather than digital. building on merleauponty’s term “infoldings of the flesh” as a replacement for the term “interface” to describe encounters with and through technology, haraway argues that “all the infoldings can occur only in the fleshly detail of situated, material-semiotic beings” (species, 263). it is important for the coshapings of companion species to interact with a “real [animal]” who is “mundanely present” and not a “fantasy projection of [a human] self” (221). as digital images of animal-like species, the pokémon and pikmin are excluded from this discussion of technocultural animals, since under this rubric the only fleshy infolding in these games can be between the material technology of the game console and the body of the human player, leaving animal bodies and biopower out of the equation. while haraway’s separation of material animals from digital animals emphasizes the value of embodiment in technocultural species coshapings, the digital creatures in these games function as more than just fantasy projections, complicating the material/digital binary that haraway constructs. while haraway’s discussion of animal cyborgs does not allow for a consideration of our relationships with entirely digital animals, other scholars have found ways to connect biological and digital life. ursula heise takes haraway’s argument a step further by questioning what relationship digital simulations of animals could have to the “fleshy,” embodied animals that haraway focuses on. heise notes that “robotic or electronic animals have been discussed very little in studies of cyborgs,” despite their prevalence in technoculture (59). heise is interested in the connections between digital animals and environmental change, looking at the ways digital animals are presupposed to replace vanishing material species and questioning whether these digital animals can be used for other purposes. building on akira mizuta lippit’s argument that “modernity can be defined by the disappearance of wildlife from humanity’s habitat and by the reappearance of the same in humanity’s reflections on itself: in philosophy, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 58 psychoanalysis, and technological media” (lippit 2-3), heise suggests that extinction is the driving force behind this vanishing animal presence and impulse to replace animals with digital and other artificial lifeforms. although many theorists raise concerns that digital animals and artificial life research constitute a “devaluation of the body and embodied life,” heise argues that this critique does not adequately address the nuances and possibilities of digital animals (67).1 she concludes that “technologically generated life-forms … need not be understood as a threat” because the animal cyborgs created in digital spaces lead us to reconsider the relationships we have with animals in the material world (77). animal cyborgs can encourage us, “through the discovery of otherness in our own technological creations, to the recognition of and respect for the nonhuman others we did not make” (78). using heise’s reformulation of the animal cyborg, the digital animals of pikmin and pokémon can be situated alongside embodied animal species when considering the bioethics of human-animal relationships under technoculture. the challenge, then, is to define how these digital and biological animals are situated alongside each other. like heise, i want to suggest that the digital animals featured in video games such as pokémon and pikmin do not simply serve as replacements for biological animals, but instead become part of a more complex network of biological and informational life. jussi parikka points out in his book insect media (2010) that animals — particularly, for parikka, insects — have an intimate and longstanding relationship to the similar nonhuman world of media and representational technologies, arguing: animals live in and of media: their world is by definition formed of the constant interactional sensing, movement, and memory of their surroundings, much as the media environment in which we live is constituted of our ethological bodies interacting with bodies technological, political, and economic … we do not so much have media as we are media and of media. (xxvii) parikka’s deleuzian meditation on these insect technologies connects artificial and biological animals together as similar “nonhuman forces expressing themselves as part of this media assemblage of modernity” through the expression of “intensity,” “assemblage,” and “diagram,” three concepts that he uses to develop the idea that animal affects can be captured and incorporated into media as part of a process of becoming-animal that allows for the deterritorialization of human perception from the limitations of the human body (xx-xii). insect technics “enables … a becoming-insect of stina attebery – “coshaping digital and biological animals: companion species encounters and biopower in the video games pikmin and pokémon” 59 humans with their tools, a new approach to and appreciation of the distributed affect worlds of social insects” (29), an idea that situates the animals present in digital gaming alongside biological animals through the experiences of the human gamer. when it comes to video game technologies, parikka connects digital game studies to surrealism and film, finding that digital games create “metamorphic modes of engaging with the surroundings,” which allow for the deterritorialization of the human subject (89).2 these metamorphic transformations of the human into the nonhuman/animal are an important feature of games that place the human player into strange and immersive worlds through game design elements such as first-person perspective, but pikmin and pokémon are both games where the human player clearly remains human as she learns new ways of interacting with animal subjects, instead of inviting the human to becomeanimal. these games emphasize the biopolitical relationships between humans and animals instead of eliding human and animal identity.3 instead of defining human-animal-technology assemblages through the idea of becoming-animal by interfacing with a digital game, pikmin and pokémon operate similarly to eugene thacker’s model of biological exchanges. this is partly because both games depend on a visual interface that frames the player’s relationship to these digital animals through statistics and schematics. thacker, in his book the global genome (2005), considers the relationship between materiality and informatics developed in contemporary biotechnology and genetics research. arguing that bioinformatics “strategically [brings] together the informatics and the biological in such a way that it can accommodate both the material and the immaterial, both medical benefit and economic value” (53), thacker outlines a system of biological exchanges where “biology is information, and that information is both immaterial and material” (21, emphasis in original). biological exchanges “conceive of ‘life itself’ as informatics, and in doing so biological exchanges informationalize without dematerializing” (11, emphasis in original). this elision of material biological bodies and digital information occurs through the processes of “encoding, recoding, and decoding” in which biological information such as genetic codes and other data is transformed into a digital format through both software technologies and economic categories such as intellectual property, circulated as bioinformatic data, and then decoded as “biological information … used, consumed, or incorporated into the body” (xx-xxi). this process, for thacker, is as much a part of economics as it is a function of media technologies (xxi), but it suggests a more humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 60 complicated ongoing relationship between biology and digital technologies than lippit’s idea that biological animals are simply being replaced by media images. i argue that games such as pikmin and pokémon that operate in a biopolitical register incorporating bioinformatic representations of population statistics alongside visual representations of affective animals relating to biological animals through a similar process of encoding, recoding, and decoding. these games encode the biological species relationships found in pet keeping, animal breeding and genetics, and animal training into a fantastical digital setting, recode these interactions as species encounters between the human player and these new digital animals, and invite the player to decode these encounters by incorporating their experiences with the pikmin and pokémon creatures into their interactions with biological animals. this process of decoding digital companion species encounters into biological species relationships becomes more difficult and more complex when, as heise points out, biological species are increasingly vanishing due to extinction and the instrumentalization of animal populations, but the vulnerability of biological animals in contemporary times makes this process more crucial. these two game franchise highlight the importance of maintaining human-animal relationships in the face of environmental catastrophe by creating shared conditions of vulnerability between digital and biological animals, albeit with varying success. the emphasis on vulnerability and affect in these two game franchises is important for encoding and recoding between digital animals and their biological analogues because these connections are being formed through depictions of domestication and biopower. parikka finds insects productive for discussing media technologies because, as he argues, “there is a curious, nearly ephemeral side to insects. they are probably furthest from the image of domesticated animals that have been contained and rationalized as part of the pet culture of modern society” (xxxiv), but modern pet culture is an integral part of the technologically mediated biopower depicted in pikmin and pokémon. yi-fu tuan argues in his book dominance & affection (2004) that pet keeping and domestication serve as a method of instrumentalizing animals, describing “how tempting it is for the powerful to reduce their pets (plants, animals, and humans) to simulacra of lifeless objects and mechanical toys — to the sort of frozen perfection that only the inanimate can attain” (4). while he makes a compelling case for the tendency in modern society to commodify animal subjects through human expressions of both dominance and affection, in light of the close associations between biological and digital life that i have outlined, tuan’s claim that breeding or training an animal is a way of rendering it “inorganic” becomes more ambiguous (168, emphasis in original). tuan stina attebery – “coshaping digital and biological animals: companion species encounters and biopower in the video games pikmin and pokémon” 61 overlooks the potential for more disconcerting and lively companion species relationships opened up through this process of creating shared vulnerabilities between biological animals and their simulacra. these potentially beneficial companion relationships are more thoroughly explored by haraway in her discussion of lively capital, biopolitical medical discourse, and the marxist economic language of “trans-species encounter value” (species 46). “lively capital,” for haraway, involves both biopolitical exploitation of animal labor and bodies and the development of disconcerting human/animal “coshapings” through these entanglements of humans and animal within biocapital (63). being aware of the ways humans shape and are shaped by our animal companions — of how “we can see how something more than the reproduction of the same and its deadly logics-in-the-flesh of exploitation might be going on in … ‘making companions’” (65) — shouldn’t lead us to overlook the complicated ways animals function in a capitalist system. however, emphasizing the ways these relationships can coshape humans and animals, whether biological or digital, can productively complicate the exploitative conditions in which these relationships are formed. pikmin and pokémon are useful examples to bring into this discussion because, despite taking place in entirely digital worlds, these games allow the player to interact with animal-like creatures under biopolitical apparatuses that place economic exploitation alongside companionship. by emphasizing the vulnerability of digital animals under a system of biopower, these games invite the player to decode her experiences managing vulnerable digital creatures into a more ethically engaged relationship with biological domesticated animal life. coshaping animal life in pokémon and pikmin. pokémon has been around since 1996, and although it began as a video game series, the franchise has expanded to include anime, manga, toys, books, and other merchandise and media.4 however, role playing games are central to pokémon’s success and important for defining the way the pokémon (“pocket monsters”) and their “trainers” interact. the pokémon video games are strategy role playing games based on creator satoshi tajiri’s childhood interest in collecting and “battling” insects by encouraging the animals in his collection to fight each other, drawing on both a personal and cultural nostalgia for a pre-industrial japanese countryside (allison 388). most of the pokémon games share a visual style, as the player explores a flattened, two-dimensional map screen until she triggers a cut scene or a pokémon battle, where the camera is positioned behind the battling pokémon who is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 62 surrounded by a set of tactical readouts showing the pokémon’s health and skill level alongside the available trainer commands. since the release of the 2013 games pokémon x and pokémon y the game worlds have been rendered in 3d, but the game interface and visual aesthetic carry over. all of the pokémon games also have a similar premise. the player receives her initial pokémon companion from an institution in her hometown (often from a professor who studies pokémon at a pokémon research lab). from there, the player sets out to collect different kinds of pokémon and compete with other trainers in pokémon “battles,” eventually winning the game by becoming the best pokémon trainer in the world — the “pokémon master” — and by cataloguing new species of pokémon in the “pokedex” provided to her by the relevant scientific author. a number of people have pointed out the way consumerism drives the pokémon franchise, but no one has considered the biopolitical or animal studies implications of the series to date. pokémon is a series caught up in a particular child economy of immaterial affective and imaginative labor, but by reading these games as responding to debates surrounding animal rights and animal biopower i am tackling a set of issues that has been overlooked by other scholars writing about these games. as joseph tobin’s edited collection on the pokémon phenomenon called pikachu’s global adventure: the rise and fall of pokémon demonstrates, scholars interested in exploring the economic implications of the pokémon world tend to focus exclusively on the real world global economies and socio-political issues surrounding pokémon rather than looking closely at the economic system presented within the game itself. these approaches tend to be deeply ambivalent in their attempts to reconcile the potential agency of the child consumers of pokémon cards, games, and merchandise with the status of nintendo as a corporate superpower. the best of the articles that take this approach are anne allison’s study of the way the pokémon’s “cuteness” is commoditized differently depending on the cultural context (382) and max haiven’s analysis of how the “playbour” of the child consumer, using julian kücklich’s term (qtd in dyerwhitherford and de peuter 527) becomes a key feature of the way imagination gives meaning and direction to pokémon games and merchandise. in considering how the player is coshaped by the experience of interacting closely with the pokémon as commodities and companions, i am departing from this scholarly trend by directly engaging with pokémon as a text instead of a cultural phenomenon.5 the game rewards players for collecting a large variety of species and for using these species effectively in fighting situations until their collection of pokémon are numerous enough and sufficiently well trained to defeat all of the in-game opponents. stina attebery – “coshaping digital and biological animals: companion species encounters and biopower in the video games pikmin and pokémon” 63 rather than discussing the entirety of the pokémon franchise, i will be focusing on a recent controversy involving two games — pokémon black and white (2011) and pokémon black and white version 2 (2012) — that make the biopolitical apparatus of this game series hypervisible by pitting the player against a series of opponents involved with an animal liberation movement called “team plasma.” team plasma travel the game world holding rallies and calling for the liberation of all pokémon from their owners, often enforcing their message by bullying pokémon trainers and stealing their pokémon. as if this pro-animal movement wasn’t painted as villainous enough, they are revealed at the end of the game to be merely a front for a mastermind named ghetsis, who wants to “liberate” pokémon from other trainers so he can consolidate power over the pokémon, declaring that “it would be perfect if we were the only ones who could use pokémon!” this presentation of animal rights activists as either naïve dupes or hypocrites turns what could be a nuanced self-critique into a very reactionary attempt to justify some of the more troubling elements of the pokémon series. this narrative choice has been taken up and challenged by the people for the ethical treatment of animals in their two parody pokémon games: pokémon black and blue (2012) and pokémon red, white, and blue (2013). peta has recently put out an entire series of these parody games challenging popular game franchises for depicting animal suffering, although most of these parodies are misguided and misrepresent the premise of the games that peta is trying to critique.6 however, the two peta pokémon games are surprisingly adept critiques of pokémon’s depiction of a companionate animal training relationship which, on closer consideration, resembles dogfighting as much as dog training. the first peta parody game, pokémon black and blue, takes up this issue in a direct response to the representation of animal rights groups in pokémon black and white, and was released as a protest of this particular game during the promotion for the sequel game pokémon black and white version 2. the game features characters from the first pokémon black and white game along with the main characters of the pokémon anime, ash and pikachu. instead of controlling the human trainer as an avatar, the player gets to directly control pikachu as he leads other recognizable (and trademarked) pokémon characters in a campaign to fight against their human masters. while the political message behind these games becomes a little heavy handed at times, i am interested in the way these parodies are placed in dialogue with the official pokémon games, which humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 64 after this point attempt to be more conscious of the implications of the human-animal relationships depicted in the games themselves. the first pikmin game, released by nintendo in 2001 for the gamecube console and later re-released for the wii, is a colorful strategy game marketed for children that is set on planet pnf-404, a planet revealed to be a futuristic earth where the human population has mysteriously vanished and been replaced by minuscule alien creatures that resemble hybridized plants and insects.7 although the species of pikmin that the player encounters are more uniform in design than the pokémon, which tend to resemble a variety of animal species, pikmin’s creator shigeru miyamoto worked on the original pokémon games and there are deliberate similarities between pokémon and pikmin both in their names and in their affective cuteness. miyamoto is an interesting game developer to discuss in the context of human/animal coshaping, as he has stated that he hopes that games can allow players to have the disorienting experience of encountering unfamiliar and alien animal others, comparing the act of playing an immersive game to a childhood memory of reaching into a stream and feeling a fish brush against his hands (paumgarten 1). this interest in the similarities between natural and digital worlds is borne out by his life and career, as he is responsible for creating games such as nintendogs (2005), an animal raising simulator, at the same time that he took up dog breeding as a hobby. pikmin benefits from this more nuanced extension of animal lives into game spaces, although these nuanced representations of biopolitical relationships between species are deliberately rendered as much more darkly whimsical and disturbing than in the pokémon games. the narrative of pikmin follows the avatar character olimar, an inch-tall alien scavenger who has become stranded on pnf-404 after his spaceship collides with an asteroid. olimar cannot survive for more than thirty days in the toxic oxygen-rich atmosphere of this future earth, but he must search for the scattered pieces of his spaceship before he can escape. the player is able to accomplish this task by enlisting the help of the native alien population of pikmin and the gameplay consists of the player organizing these creatures into groups and using them as a labor source to solve puzzles and gather together the pieces of olimar’s ship within the 30 day time limit to achieve the “good” ending of the game where olimar is able to escape the planet and return to his home.8 the game’s multiple endings, which are based on the number of resources the player is able to scavenge, are important because they give the player options for how deeply she can invest in the biopolitical apparatus of the game, since, unlike in games that only have one ending, the player of pikmin is not denied any of the game’s content if she stina attebery – “coshaping digital and biological animals: companion species encounters and biopower in the video games pikmin and pokémon” 65 chooses to avoid the main tasks set to her in favor of simply exploring the game world and interacting with the pikmin. unlike pokémon, in which the player interacts with a static visual overview of the game world, the camera movement and interface for pikmin is much more disorienting. the player is still looking down at her avatar olimar as she moves him across the screen, but the camera will suddenly rotate as olimar faces different directions, making it more challenging to achieve the precision necessary for guiding pikmin to do specific tasks. pikmin also alerts the player to the fact that she cannot see and fully control what happens to the pikmin when they are out of her field of vision. at many points in the game, the player can give pikmin a task and wander away to a different portion of the map only to receive the message that “pikmin are dying somewhere!” as they encounter an unexpected obstacle or predator. while the static field of view in pokémon matches this game’s interest in exerting total control over the pokémon and their environment, pikmin’s shifting camera movement and emphasis on unseen, off-screen action shows the player how little she can perceive and control her environment. even at the level of camera field of view the player’s interactions with the pikmin are messier and more ethically engaging than her interactions with pokémon despite the similarity of the games’ premises, requiring the player to adjust her strategy as she is coshaped by her pikmin companions. the first pikmin game was popular enough for a sequel to be made in 2004, and both games were rereleased for the wii in preparation for the third installment in the series in 2013. pikmin 3 returns to the robinsonade plot of the first game, following three new characters — alph, charlie, and brittany — as they interact with familiar and new species of pikmin to repair their damaged spaceship and search for edible alien sources of food to help stave off a famine on their home planet. the second game in the series is structured a little differently. pikmin 2 picks up where the first game left off, with olimar returning to his home planet of hocotate to discover that the company he works for is in debt after a valuable shipment was devoured by a “ravenous space bunny,” and he must return to the pikmin planet to search for resources to sell to save the hocotate freight company from bankruptcy. this game replaces the robinsonade narrative and time limit of the first game with a plot focused around the character’s role as an interplanetary capitalist, organized around olimar’s quest to find discarded humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 66 human artifacts and create “sales pitches” to market these scavenged artifacts on hocotate. the scholarly work on the pikmin series, like that on pokémon, has primarily focused on the role of the child gamer instead of on the biopolitical implications of the game itself, although the scholarly work done on pikmin tends to take a more pedagogical approach, overlooking the series’ invitation for child gamers to take on the role of capitalist entrepreneurs. the most notable of these analyses is games scholar james paul gee’s claim that pikmin is an excellent example of video games’ potential to facilitate learning and decision making. he uses the pikmin series to discuss how video games can help children develop problem-solving skills by “using situated meanings and the design grammar of the game to understand and produce meanings and actions” (gee 10). while i agree with gee’s argument that games like pikmin can be very valuable tools for developing problem-solving skills in a fun context, i find his praise for games that allow the player to “feel like active agents (producers) not just passive recipients (consumers)” (30) and “feel a sense of control” over their world (10) troubling because it reinforces a neoliberal capitalist mentality, especially in a set of games that are so explicitly following the logic of biocapital. although gee sees the pikmin series as a beneficial learning game for younger players, he does not spend time analyzing how the gameplay affects what is being learned, namely a system in which animal labor and life is controllable and expendable. considering how the pikmin are rendered within the game as a specifically animal-like labor force allows me to better address which skills the player is learning and how the game might offer a self-critique of its own exploitative premise by juxtaposing commodification with companionship. making live: finding affection in breeding, training, and genetics. it is helpful to place the relationships between the player and her digital animal populations alongside embodied human-animal relationships because these two games prominently feature biopolitical apparatuses that explicitly compare the immaterial “bodies” of the pikmin and pokémon to the management of biological bodies under biopower. both the pikmin and the pokémon are used as a biological labor force, comparable to michel foucault’s model of political and economic biopower. biopolitics, for foucault, represents a transition in the formation of sovereignty where political and scientific structures begin to regulate human bodies at the level of the population. foucault describes the sovereign’s involvement in managing populations as economic-political resources as “the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die” (foucault, society 241). the sovereign “makes” members of the population live and “lets” others die by exercising “the disciplinary technology of labor” through “techniques of power ... centered on the body” (242), stina attebery – “coshaping digital and biological animals: companion species encounters and biopower in the video games pikmin and pokémon” 67 specifically technologies relating to birthrates, public hygiene and nutrition, and disciplinary structures that subdivide humanity as a species. through these techniques, individuals within this population are made to live in order to be more economically productive sources of labor and let die as part of this same political-economic system. foucault is primarily concerned with the forms of biopolitical power that exist at the level of the nation state and he only ever addresses the ways these political apparatuses affect humans, but his understanding of how labor sources are structured around the concept of population can easily be applied to the uses of both human and animal forms of biopower under capitalism. by using foucault’s idea of biopolitics to discuss the role animal labor plays in the systems of animal capital underlying the pikmin and pokémon series, i am following the model of biopolitical theorists such as nicole shukin, melinda cooper, and cary wolfe, who are interested in expanding foucault’s theories to address how more contemporary corporate forms of biopower seek to control animal as well as human life. shukin picks up on the animal-studies implications of foucauldian biopower in her book animal capital (2009), criticizing foucault for separating the emergence of humans as a species from the experiences of animal species and criticizing later theorists working with issues of biopower, who use animals “predominantly as a metaphor for that corporeal part of ‘man’ that becomes subject to biopolitical calculation” and not as objects of the same biopolitical process that transforms humans into productive populations (shukin 10). cary wolfe is similarly critical of biopolitical scholarship that uses “animalization” as a discourse for approaching other biopolitical issues — slavery, imperialism, etc. — without also addressing the variety of ways that animal species are similarly subjected to biopolitical control (10). i find shukin’s and wolfe’s focus on animal populations to be particularly useful for my discussion of the pokémon and pikmin series, since unlike many video games that allow the player to control abstract representations of populations, the populations of pikmin and pokémon that the player interacts with are explicitly animal-like in their design.9 when the foucauldian biopolitical concepts of “making live” and “letting die” come into play in the pikmin series, they are structured around apparatuses of biopower that connect these “disciplinary technologies of labor” to the real world regulation of animals at the level of the population, as labor and livestock, while pokémon is more humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 68 clearly extrapolating from pet relationships, animal training, and animal fighting, which are forms of biopower more intimately related to human/animal companionship and coshaping. for foucault, the technologies in biopower that “make” populations live begin with the regulation of a population’s birthrate and the “training” of young children into the “kinds of abilities-machines which will produce income” (foucault, the birth of biopolitics 227). this training primarily takes the form of educating young people to be more viable as future “economic investments” (227). however, melinda cooper, in her book life as surplus (2008), points out that the types of income-producing “abilities-machines” that foucault associates with education and human reproduction have always been a crucial feature of animal breeding, arguing that “the most disquieting effects of the new reproductive sciences — in particular, the suppression, confusion, or reversal of generational time — were evident in the field of animal biology long before their human applications brought them to the attention of bioethicists” (cooper 133). these forms of animal biopower are featured in both the regulation of animal populations and in individual animal training and breeding relationships. the practices involved in animal breeding and husbandry initially seem more impersonal than the close contact between human trainers and animal subjects, but these practices can also develop complicated interspecies relationships based in care and affection as well as economic profit. as cary wolfe points out, while these practices of “changing and ‘maximizing’” animal bodies through technologies of genetics and selective breeding, artificial insemination, inoculation, etc., are complicit in manipulating animal bodies to fit “the particular ends of capitalist enterprise” (35-6), these techniques for making live also invite breeders and farmers to become coshaped by the animals they are manipulating. instead of just enforcing the management of animal populations as commodities, “these new biosocial collectivities assert the importance of care, an intimate understanding of the animal … and practices of husbandry that do not bear a direct linear relationship to efficiency and profit” such that “those factors constitute a complex of human, animal, and inorganic relations that cannot be wholly anticipated, much less quantified” (wolfe 36; emphasis in original). the relationships between breeders and animal populations, even at their most exploitative, can still become enmeshed in these biosocial collectivities that allow for the development of companionship between species. both pikmin and pokémon complicate foucauldian biopolitical sovereignty by depicting the economic power relationships between animal populations and human masters or trainers as companionable as well as exploitative, although the pikmin games have a stina attebery – “coshaping digital and biological animals: companion species encounters and biopower in the video games pikmin and pokémon” 69 more nuanced approach to this companionate biopolitical coshaping of the human player. one of the primary ways that players make animal populations into productive economic workforces is through managing pikmin and pokémon health and birthrate, a form of biopower that more directly references animal breeding and genetic modification than foucault’s education model. in order to recover all of the ship parts within the time limit set by the first pikmin game, the player must have a large and healthy pikmin population at her disposal, a requirement that encourages the player to set aside time each day from scavenging to “sprout” new pikmin. pikmin start out as seeds dispersed from large flying incubators which olimar calls “onions,” and these seeds grow underground until they are picked by olimar. if olimar leaves the pikmin in the ground for a couple of days they will mature into their adult form, where the leaf at the top of the pikmin head-stalk grows into a bud and then a white or pink flower. this process is time consuming, but adult pikmin prove to be valuable investments as they have increased strength and speed. however, the player can also directly manipulate the pikmin lifecycle to produce adult pikmin more quickly by guiding selected pikmin to specific nectar-producing types of grass that circumvent the generational time that pikmin would normally take to mature by immediately morphing them into their adult form. in this way, the game provides options for the player to manipulate the pikmin lifecycle to better accomplish the goals that she sets for herself within the game through a set of techniques similar to animal reproductive science and breeding. olimar can also breed pikmin of different colors with different skill sets, maximizing the efficiency of the population by subdividing pikmin labor to fit his particular economic goals. these differently skilled pikmin are helpfully color coded, so that blue pikmin are capable of living and performing tasks in water environments, yellow pikmin conduct electricity without suffering damage to their health, purple pikmin are stronger and heavier, etc. the variously colored pikmin populations, like the increasingly numerous varieties of pokémon, serve partly as a merchandising feature of the game, but these specialized populations are still an important part of the gameplay. the player must select how many of each type of pikmin she is working with on a given day within the game, and needs to be conversant in the particular skills of her pikmin to use their labor effectively. in addition to managing pikmin rates of maturation and nutrition, the player is also able to directly genetically manipulate her pikmin to transform one color of pikmin into another through the use of large “candypop buds” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 70 that she finds on the planet surface. when pikmin are thrown into these plants, they are transformed into a different species of pikmin, and some of the pikmin varieties are only available to the player through this genetic engineering process. these games therefore both require the player to familiarize herself with the particular pikmin skill sets and to practice a form of husbandry that lets her directly interact with and transform individual pikmin. the close observation of individual pikmin that is enforced by this requirement allows the player to be coshaped by the creatures she breeds and engineers since the abstraction of the pikmin into population statistics is countered by care built up by regularly handling individual members of this population. pokémon focuses a little on the generational time of animal breeding, as the player can, in the later games, leave compatible pokémon in a daycare center and return later to collect their new pokémon egg, but the player is not as directly involved in the pokémon lifecycle as she is in pikmin reproduction and birth and breeding and genetic engineering are a less crucial part of pokémon’s gameplay. however, pokémon is explicitly interested in depicting the types of biopolitical management found in animal training, a form of companionate biopower that pikmin does not address. as the controversy surrounding recent pokémon games and peta parodies shows, it is questionable whether the human-animal relationship in pokémon is the type of animal training that coshapes the player and her digital animals through mutual respect and communication or whether it is merely an abusive exercise of power over an animal for human economic gain. the narrative and dialogue of pokémon black and white argue that the pokémon and their trainers share a close bond of mutual respect and responsibility, as characters will exclaim, “we humans live happily with pokémon! living and working together, we complement each other.” even the pokémon battles are described as a way to “[deepen] the bonds between people and pokémon,” although it is unexplained how this might be the case.10 if these claims matched the gameplay in pokémon, this would afford pokémon some of the agency and responsibility necessary for maintaining a mutually beneficial training relationship. vicki hearne’s adam’s task: calling animals by name (2007) considers the complexities of training and pet-keeping companion species relationships that depend on the exertion of power over an animal subject. as hearne points out, animal trainers exert power over the animals that they work with, and this power relationship often involves “corrections” that can include sharp tugs on leashes or other forms of physical punishment. even though these corrections can appear, to an observer, to be a pointless and cruel exercise of power over an animal, hearne asserts that the relationships stina attebery – “coshaping digital and biological animals: companion species encounters and biopower in the video games pikmin and pokémon” 71 formed between a trainer and her animal are positive and mutually beneficial. instead of merely serving as a way to bring animals under human control, the “enforced obedience” of training facilitates increased communication and understanding between species (56). after all, “training methods, like any teaching method, depend on [the animal’s] willingness to cooperate” (56). this biopolitical control facilitates communication across species lines by providing a shared vocabulary of commands and responses that serves to coshape human trainers with their animals by requiring the trainer to respect and respond to the animal she works with. paul patton expands on hearne’s optimistic reading of the “shared commitments and collaboration” and “mutual autonomy” (53) in companionate animal training relationships by connecting this relationship to the power relationships inherent to foucauldian govermentality, although he doesn’t address foucault’s work with biopolitics specifically. as he points out in his essay “language, power, and the training of horses, animal training demonstrates the idea that “relations of communication are not external but immanent to relations of power” (91). however, he does feel, as does hearne, that it is important to differentiate between training as “an exercise of power that blindly seeks to capture some of the powers of the animal for human purposes, and an exercise of power that seeks to capture the powers of the animal in ways that enhance both those powers and the animal’s enjoyment of them” (93). if animal training is a fundamental form of making live under a biopolitical system, then it is one that ideally extends some agency and responsibility to the trained animal as well as to the animal trainer and in doing so undercuts the idea that “moral equality” between subjects is necessary before we can live ethically with one another (95). what is lacking in both patton and hearne’s discussion of animal training as an example of companionate biopower, although present in haraway’s writing, is the importance of economics for any discussion of foucauldian biopolitics. animal training is part of a larger economy of pet keeping that includes pet insurance, health care, pharmacology, and other forms of “making live” that complicate the thanatopolitical slant of biopolitics in other human-animal relationships such as factory farms (wolfe 53). animal trainers are paid for their work and the animals they train take on a new economic value that reflects their ability to function within the human economy as “abilities machines” with the skill sets to work as guide animals, show animals, therapy humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 72 animals, or rescue animals. these close relationships between animal training and economic gain have the potential to undercut the companionate coshaping that hearne and patton identify, since a trained animal who is enmeshed in an unquestioned exploitative capitalist system cannot have the kind of ethical “hierarchical forms of society between unequals” (patton 95) that animal studies scholars have attributed to the companion species relationships found in animal training. even though she doesn’t consider the fact that animal training is inextricably bound up in issues of economic exploitation, hearne does emphasize that human trainers must take on a significant amount of responsibility toward their animal companions, and this surplus of responsibility can help to complicate the more problematic, exploitative aspects of this relationship. training relationships extend a great deal of responsibility to the animal, viewing the trained animal as responsible and aware of its actions. in exerting power over this animal subject the trainer is also taking on an enormous amount of responsibility for the animal’s happiness and well-being. as hearne argues, this “awareness of the immense imaginative burden of authority” should be discomforting, as it is always important to “[realize] that the ability to exact obedience doesn’t give you the right to do so” (66). as hearne and patton’s exploration of the trainer/animal relationship shows, if the pokémon are invested in their own training, then the battles they are subjected to are less obviously abusive even though they may at times cause the pokémon distress or harm. although the game’s protagonists may claim that “fighting is done for pokémon and trainers to better understand each other,” this close training relationship does not match the actual gameplay. pokémon trainers simply do not spend the amount of time working with their pokémon companions that would be required to train an animal. between battles, the pokémon are confined in “pokéballs,” making it difficult to interact with them to the extent needed to establish a training relationship. animal trainers have a lot of direct physical contact with their animals, and need to build up a series of commands and responses through repetition. this tends to involve a lot of false starts, as the animal gets used to new commands, and trainers must improvise a wide variety of situations in which to practice a command to firmly establish the animal’s understanding and responsiveness (hearne 58-9). this is simply not possible if the animal spends a majority of its time separated from the trainer in a small enclosed pokéball. stina attebery – “coshaping digital and biological animals: companion species encounters and biopower in the video games pikmin and pokémon” 73 the use of pokéballs as animal storage devices in the pokémon universe is one of the features of the game that peta found reprehensible, although not exactly for the reasons i’ve outlined. the website for the peta game proclaims, the amount of time that pokémon spend stuffed in pokéballs is akin to how elephants are chained up in train carts, waiting to be let out to ‘perform’ in circuses. but the difference between real life and this fictional world full of organized animal fighting is that pokémon games paint rosy pictures of things that are actually horrible. this comparison is surprisingly apt — there is nothing in the early pokémon games to suggest that the pokeballs are anything but a storage device to keep the animals contained and out of the way between battles. what is interesting about this critique is the way that pokémon games released after this parody have taken up the challenge of responding to this criticism of the pokéball system. while the later games do not do away with pokéballs altogether, which would require the player to travel everywhere with a herd of partially trained unruly pokémon companions, pokémon x and y introduces wording that claims that the pokéball “comfortably [encapsulates] its target” — a disclaimer that they had not felt the need to include before peta’s criticism. these paired games also introduced a new game mechanic which allows the player to pet, feed, and play with the pokémon between battles. this new feature increases the pokémon’s effectiveness in battles and also adds a new animation to the battle sequences where the pokémon turns to the player and physically emotes while waiting for commands. this isn’t a perfect simulation of an actual animal training relationship, but it would represent a step forward in nintendo’s attempts to reframe the trainer’s responsibilities in the light of this criticism if these changes didn’t still actively avoid challenging the player to rethink her training relationship and if nintendo had considered how the economic implications of pokémon training connect the pokémon/trainer relationship to the forms of lively capital that haraway outlines. this economic value of animal labor is a crucial part of pokémon’s gameplay. whenever a player wins a pokémon battle she earns money which she can then put back into circulation in the pokémon economy by buying animal consumer items like pokéballs or health care technologies. the entire world of pokémon seems to run economically on the presence of pokémon as both consumers and consumable resources. although training can facilitate human/animal coshaping, these relationships between pokémon humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 74 trainers and pokémon are problematically enmeshed in an unexamined system of capitalist exploitation that limits their ability to function as companion species relationships by avoiding the messy and discomforting aspects of animal training that could have been incorporated into the game mechanics. the animals in pikmin are, like the pokémon, clearly valued for their economic potential, as they work to carry heavy spaceship components and pieces of salvage across to the planet so that olimar can capitalize on these resources. unlike pokémon, however, this game constantly invites the player to rethink the power dynamic of these relationships by emphasizing the way olimar is coshaped by this encounter with the alien pikmin. olimar’s commentary on the items that the pikmin are recovering for him frequently subverts the game’s requirement for the player to act as a capitalist entrepreneur. although a few ship parts that olimar recovers in the first game are crucial for his spaceship to function, after a certain point the ship parts that olimar finds are more frivolous. at one point olimar and the pikmin discover an “extraordinary bolt” which he initially purchased “because the salesman told [him] it is of extraordinary quality that is indiscernible to the average person.” another item, the “nova blaster,” he knows about only from “the promotional brochure,” which reports that this blaster can “travel in the currents of space-time, smashing through stars and into the rifts of space,” but olimar muses that he is unsure if this is actually the case. a third spaceship component seems to be the hocotate version of a microwave, and olimar excitedly looks forward to being able to heat up his instant noodles again. these silly descriptions emphasize the connections between olimar’s consumption of hocotate products and pikmin labor instead of obscuring the economics of the game. after finding a number of these unnecessary ship components, olimar begins to wonder aloud whether his efforts to recover parts that he seems to have been duped into buying are a waste of time. he states, “perhaps the pikmin have opened my heart to the beauty of this world. i even started thinking there were some parts i do not need. a daydream….” the player can choose how many parts she recovers in the first game, and these junk parts do not affect the functionality of the spaceship at the end. given this option in the gameplay, olimar’s commentary complicates his use of the pikmin as a disposable resource for salvaging other commodities, inviting the player to invest herself in exploring the planet with her animal companions instead of spending all of her time exploiting the pikmin to acquire consumer goods. this subversion of the game’s own capitalist premise is often reflected in children’s experience of playing the game, as players “often ignore the game objective of gathering parts for the spaceship; rather, they explore the planet, hanging out and fooling around” (weber and dixon 30). stina attebery – “coshaping digital and biological animals: companion species encounters and biopower in the video games pikmin and pokémon” 75 olimar’s remarks about how the pikmin are giving him a new appreciation for the planet and allowing him to rethink his dependence on consumerism suggest that he is being coshaped by these populations of pikmin in a way that the pokémon trainer is not. letting die: kinship and crisis. olimar’s coshaping with the pikmin is especially apparent in the way the game treats pikmin deaths. when foucault elaborates on the “let die” side of his biopolitical equation, he is again addressing the economic power of a sovereign over members of a population who are let die when they no longer function as financial assets. letting part of the population die, under a biopolitical framework, primarily involves policies that normalize death and illness as statistics: the idea of “acceptable losses.” this idea that death is an inherent part of a capitalist biopolitical system is something that theorist eric cazdyn develops in his analysis of “crisis” in political and medical discourse. in his book the already dead (2012) cazdyn writes that “the contingency of disaster is what sets it apart from crisis. unlike a disaster, there is something necessary about a crisis, something true to the larger systemic form. in other words, systems are structured so that crises will occur that strengthen and reproduce the systems themselves” (cazdyn 54). the “boom-bust cycle of capitalism” is, for cazdyn, “one of the more obvious examples of this logical necessity” (54). this distinction between crisis and disaster is borne out in the animal deaths that are part of a biopolitical system, but as sarah franklin rightly points out in her book dolly mixtures (2007), events like the animal genocides associated with health scares like foot in mouth disease show how easily the managed crises of animal deaths can tip over into disaster. franklin suggests that the unprecedented level of biopolitical control over animal genetics, living conditions, and deaths that humans now have may in fact contribute to pushing animal deaths from crisis into a disaster scenario (190). franklin also points out that these animal deaths, even when they do not occur in largescale disaster situations, are often complicated by the fact that these deaths paradoxically combine the proximity and companionship of animal husbandry with the need to “[manage the] transformation into useful products to be sold at a profit, something that by definition means ending animal lives prematurely” (173). this complicated relationship between companion species relationships and the transformation of living animals into dead animal capital results in a system in which “because animal lives are valued … their deaths must be properly managed” (173). the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 76 ease with which these managed crises of animal deaths can become disastrous mass extinctions complicates the affective bonds that are formed between the trainers and breeders who manage animal deaths — in franklin’s example, rural sheep farmers — since the conditions under which this affective human/animal coshaping arises are always on the brink of the kind of large scale catastrophe of animal disease and death that are inherent to biopolitical disaster. but, as cazdyn points out, disaster can be transformative, since the scale of a biopolitical disaster can cause us to rethink a system of managed crisis that has become normalized and internalized in biopolitical subjects. disaster can be a grim form of companion species coshaping. this elision of crisis and disaster in animal capital is highlighted in the gameplay of pikmin where the distinction between an “acceptable” number of losses and a population disaster are constantly renegotiated as the player observes and reacts to pikmin deaths. letting die as well as making live becomes a way of emphasizing the responsibility of a trainer/sovereign. despite being a game focused on depicting battles between animals, pokémon completely avoids addressing the possibility of animal death. pokémon never die. they “faint” when they have been badly hurt and must be revived in a clinic (another example of the “make live” aspect of biopolitics), but there are never any disastrous consequences for pokémon battles. however, the pikmin games do an excellent job of presenting this biopolitical distinction between disasters and crises though pikmin deaths. although there are rewards for letting as few pikmin die as possible, deaths are difficult to avoid, and any pikmin “losses” are presented as one of a number of interconnected statistics representing the changing population number. at the end of each day spent within the game, the player is presented with a line graph representing the changes in pikmin population numbers, along with three sets of population statistics: the number of pikmin “sprouted,” pikmin “lost in battle,” and pikmin “left behind” at the end of the day. this abstract graphical representation of the pikmin population and the economic language of “loss” establishes pikmin deaths as part of the same biopolitical system that controls their birthrate and genetic structure, but the game doesn’t overlook the idea that these pikmin deaths can be individual tragic events. when pikmin die because they are “left behind” at the end of the day, a brief cutscene shows them being pursued and eaten by predators. this cutscene can be skipped, but the fact that the game makes the player watch her pikmin die in a situation where she doesn’t have any way of controlling the outcome challenges the more impersonal statistical representation of their deaths in the chart, especially as these two images are immediately juxtaposed against each other. each time a pikmin dies during the day, it also makes a sad or frightened noise and a small ghost version of the pikmin rises up stina attebery – “coshaping digital and biological animals: companion species encounters and biopower in the video games pikmin and pokémon” 77 from where its body was. in a game that involves flinging pikmin at obstacles and predator species to discover new areas to explore, this constant reminder of the fact that these fighting units are living creatures with subjectivity serves as a disquieting counterpoint to the player’s instrumentalization of the pikmin population. this resistance to the instrumentalization of pikmin populations is also reflected in the avatar character’s dialogue and nightly journal entries. if the player accidentally blows up part of her pikmin population, olimar writes regretfully that he “must review [his] procedures for handling pikmin with bomb rocks so that [he does] not repeat this mistake,” making a manageable number of pikmin deaths an unfortunate but inevitable part of the system that uses the pikmin as animal labor: pikmin deaths in the mode of crisis. however, pikmin deaths can quickly escalate. olimar’s journals reflect this shift from crisis into disaster. olimar will grieve if all of his pikmin are killed, writing in the circumstance of a pikmin extinction event that they “have all perished because of my own carelessness” and failure “as a leader,” and claiming that he “shan’t sleep tonight” after the event. unlike earlier examples of pikmin deaths, which act as small moments of crisis but don’t greatly affect the game’s outcome, an extinction event is also an immediate game over. olimar’s grief and insistence on his own failures as an authority figure and caretaker show the extent to which he has been coshaped with the pikmin. while there are practical reasons for the game to end after an extinction event, since the player depends on the pikmin to unlock new areas of the game and complete tasks, olimar emphasizes his emotional distress instead of discussing the logistical consequences of this disaster. these dialogue options reflect my own experience playing the game: since i found the game interface for pikmin difficult to adjust to when i was first playing the game i tended to let many of my pikmin die as i fumbled to try to retrieve them from unexpectedly hazardous situations. these journal entries from olimar, then, may never occur for a more experienced player of this game and were not a part of my later playthroughs. however, even a more seasoned player of this type of game would encounter messages from olimar questioning his relationship to the pikmin (“i thought i shared a strong bond with them, but maybe that was just my wishful thinking” or “i often grow uneasy wondering why they never attack me ... could it be that they actually view me as a parental figure? a strange, disturbing thought”). olimar’s inability to define exactly what his relationship to the pikmin is and his expressed humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 78 desire for their companionship as he explores the beauty of planet pnf-404 similarly serves as a cue that the constant presence of pikmin deaths in the game is more subversive than the presentation, or lack thereof, of animal suffering in pokémon. olimar is constantly reminded of his own surplus of responsibility toward the pikmin, and this coshaping through a surplus of responsibility over animal subjects is extended to the player. conclusion: rethinking extinction and electronics. this emphasis on the precariousness of biopolitical animal life within systems of capital and the surplus of responsibility that pikmin, and to a lesser extent pokémon, invite the player to adopt suggests strategies for connecting digital media to animal welfare that go beyond the example of these particular games. while i have traced out some of the gameplay mechanics and narrative choices that prevent pokémon from engaging ethically with animal suffering while allowing pikmin to trouble these relationships, one of the key differences between these two similar game worlds involves the positioning of their settings against our contemporary neoliberal industrialized global society. as i have indicated, these two games, despite their visual and thematic similarities, are set at very different implied points in human history. pokémon is invested in an intense nostalgia for a pre-industrial japan, where you could know the names of everyone living in a small village and where children can explore natural spaces like forests and rivers. pikmin is set in a similarly visually beautiful world but the planet that olimar is exploring is a future earth where humans have somehow wiped themselves out, causing enough nuclear fallout to mutate the animal and plant species of earth into new unrecognizable forms. these different backdrops reflect the differences between these two game franchises in their ability to create a human relationship with a digital animal that still evokes the kind of coshapings and responsibilities that can be present in companionate human-animal relationships in the biological world. pokémon replicates a world structured around biocapital that its setting and narrative wish to predate, and this tension between its preindustrial setting and biopolitical economic system is never fully resolved, but pikmin constantly reminds the player of the environmental consequences of indiscriminately exploiting biopower by placing the player in a postapocalyptic world recovering from a series of species extinction events that finally included human populations. this post-apocalyptic setting, and the attention it draws to global environmental disasters, is an important way that this game challenges and refigures the biopolitical structures of making live and letting die. games such as pikmin can do an excellent job of drawing our attention to biopolitical issues of animal exploitation and environmental stina attebery – “coshaping digital and biological animals: companion species encounters and biopower in the video games pikmin and pokémon” 79 change, suggesting that we can become coshaped by our animal companions even in late capitalist biopolitical systems that see animals as resources instead of subjects. the forms of messy cohabitation that these games imagine challenge the conventional understanding of digital game spaces as forms of escapism and the view that artificial animals only function as replacements for biological animal species. notes 1. see helmreich, silicon second nature (1998) and hayles, how we became posthuman (1999) and “simulated nature and natural simulations: rethinking the relation between the beholder and the world” (1995) for examples of these arguments. 2. tom tyler makes a similar argument in his essay “new tricks” (2013), arguing that games can communicate the alterity of animal perceptions, focusing on the visuals and “smellovision” featured in the game dog’s life. 3. while i find parikka’s archaeology of insect media very useful for thinking through some of these relationships between digital and biological life, it is important to bear in mind the diversity of game platforms and mechanics, since many games do invite the kind of becoming-animal that parikka describes but not all games operate in this register. 4. each new game in the franchise is typically released as a two-game pairing — for example, pokémon x and pokémon y (2013), or pokémon ruby and pokémon sapphire (2002). these paired games typically have the same storyline and game mechanics, so when i am discussing a set of paired games like pokémon black (2011) and pokémon white (2012), i can address these two games simultaneously as there are not significant differences between the two in terms of gameplay or storyline but only in the presence of game-specific locations and in what types of pokémon are present in each game world and how often they are programmed to appear. 5. animal cataloguing is treated very differently in pokémon and pikmin. the “pokedex” is a straightforward index that promises to describe comprehensively every pokémon species, serving as another way of “capturing” pokémon. in pikmin, however, the player is presented with multiple conflicting species indexes. captain olimar makes detailed humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 80 naturalist notes for each species he encounters, often taking on the role of a scientific observer, while his shipmate in the second and third game, louie, begins to write a cookbook of recipe recommendations for each of these species. these dueling indexes of animals as a scientific phenomenon and animals as food undercut each other by emphasizing how individual perspective can change the way these animals are observed. 6. two of the more misguided parodies are super tofu boy, a response to the popular flash game super meat boy which features a protagonist who has been turned inside out (peta incorrectly reads this premise as a pro-meat message), and mario kills tanooki, a parody which mistakenly assumes that a recent super mario bros. game which depicts the character transforming into a raccoon or squirrel-like animal is pro-fur 7. the intense pre-industrial nostalgia of the pokémon games is contrasted in the pikmin series by this post-apocalyptic setting. the post-apocalyptic setting of pikmin allows this game to both defamiliarize everyday objects like pennies or batteries, for which olimar makes up names and uses in the absence of any other information, while emphasizing the impermanence of the value these human commodities. 8. unlike pokémon, which has only one “win state,” the pikmin games have multiple canonical options for the end of the game, defined around the player’s success in attempting to escape the planet and collect resources. the “good” endings show the player’s avatar escaping the planet, while the “bad” ending of the first game shows captain olimar’s still damaged spaceship breaking up in the planet’s atmosphere and olimar waking up to find himself buried up to his neck in the ground with one of the pikmin’s head stalks grafted to his head. while these alternate endings are labeled “good” and “bad,” the transformation of olimar into a hybridized pikmin creature in the “bad” ending offers a darkly whimsical reversal of the biopolitical control that he exerts over the pikmin population throughout the rest of the game, as the pikmin have taken it upon themselves to use a form of biotechnology to make olimar live. 9. pokémon typically have a clear animal referent in their design, so that a “psyduck” will closely resemble a duck, a “bulbasaur” looks like a dinosaur, and so on, while the creatures on the pikmin planet appear to be mutated combinations of plant and insect species, suggesting that the strange creatures in the post-apocalyptic world may be the result of nuclear fallout. stina attebery – “coshaping digital and biological animals: companion species encounters and biopower in the video games pikmin and pokémon” 81 10. much of the pokémon media outside the video game franchise, particularly the anime, explore the emotional relationship between pokémon and their trainers in depth. however, while these depictions of a trainer/animal relationship are closer to the type of messy coshapings formed through training in the material world, there is no real exploration in the tv series or movies of the larger systemic biopolitical apparatus built into the games. works cited allison, anne. “portable monsters and commodity cuteness: pokémon as japan’s new global power.” postcolonial studies 6.3 (2003): 381-395. cazdyn, eric. the already dead: the new time of politics, culture, and illness. durham, nc: duke up, 2012. cooper, melinda. life as surplus: biotechnology & capitalism in the neoliberal era. seattle: u washington p, 2008. dyer-witherford, nick, and greig de peuter. games of empire: global capitalism and video games. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2009. foucault, michel. the birth of biopolitics: lectures at the collége de france, 1978-79. trans. graham burchell. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2008. . _____. “society must be defended”: lectures at the collége de france, 1975-76. trans. david macey. new york: picador, 2003. franklin, sarah. dolly mixtures: the remaking of genealogy. durham, nc: duke up, 2007. gee, james paul. good video games + good learning: collected essays on video games, learning and literacy. new york: peter lang, 2007. _____. what video games have to teach us about learning and literacy. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2003. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 82 haiven, max. “can pikachu save fannie mae?: value, finance and imagination in the new pokéconomy.” cultural studies 26.4 (2012): 516-41. haraway, donna. “a cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century.” simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. new york: routledge, 1991. 149-81. _____. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota press, 2008. hayles, n. katherine. how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. chicago: university of chicago press, 1999. _____. “simulated nature and natural simulations: rethinking the relation between the beholder and the world.” uncommon ground: toward reinventing nature. ed.william cronon. new york: norton, 1995. 409-425. hearne, vicki. adam’s task: calling animals by name. new york: skyhorse publishing, 2007. heise, ursula k. “from extinction to electronics: dead frogs, live dinosaurs, and electric sheep.” zoontologies: the question of the animal. ed. cary wolfe. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2003. 59-81. helmreich, stefan. silicon second nature: culturing artificial life in a digital world. berkeley: u california p, 1998. jordan, tim. “the pleasures and pains of pikachu.” european journal of cultural studies 7.4 (2004): 461-80. lippit, akira mizuta. electric animal: toward a rhetoric of wildlife. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2000. parikka, jussi. insect media: an archaeology of animals and technology. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2010. patton, paul. “language, power, and the training of horses.” zoontologies: the question of the animal. ed. cary wolfe. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2003. 83-100. stina attebery – “coshaping digital and biological animals: companion species encounters and biopower in the video games pikmin and pokémon” 83 paumgarten, nick. “master of play: the many worlds of a video-game artist.” the new yorker 2 dec 2010. web. 25 apr 2014. pikmin. nintendo gamecube. nintendo. 2001. video game. pikmin 2. nintendo gamecube. nintendo. 2004. video game. pikmin 3. wii u. nintendo. 2013. video game. pokémon black. nintendo ds. 2011. video game. pokémon black version 2. nintendo ds. video game. “pokémon black and blue.” people for the ethical treatment of animals, 2012. web. 2 apr 2014. “pokémon red, white, and blue.” people for the ethical treatment of animals, 2013. web. 2 apr 2014. pokémon white. nintendo ds. 2011. video game. pokémon white version 2. nintendo ds. 2012. video game. pokémon x. nintendo ds. 2013. video game. pokémon y. nintendo ds. 2013. video game. shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2009. thacker, eugene. the global genome: biotechnology, politics, and culture. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2005. tobin, joseph, ed. pikachu’s global adventure: the rise and fall of pokémon. durham, nc: duke up, 2004. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 84 tuan, yi-fu. dominance & affection: the making of pets. new haven: yale up, 1984. tyler, tom. “new tricks.” angelaki 18.1 (2013): 65-82. vasquez, vivian. “what pokémon can teach us about learning and literacy.” language arts 81.2 (2003): 118-125. wolfe, cary. before the law: humans and other animals in a biopolitical frame. chicago: u chicago p, 2013. weber, sandra and shanly dixon. “playspaces, childhood, and videogames.” growing up online: young people and digital technologies. ed. sandra weber and shanly dixon. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2007. 15-34. microsoft word vandresommers-nance-pdfpdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:2 reviews daniel vandersommers history from the howdah: a new methodology for animal history susan nance, entertaining elephants: animal agency and the business of the american circus. baltimore: the johns hopkins university press, 2013. 294 pp. $55.00 hb. through entertaining elephants: animal agency and the business of the american circus, historian susan nance “presents a cultural and management history of elephant use in american entertainment” over the course of the nineteenth century (13). this history is an atypical one. by “turning the history of the circus inside out,” nance authors an “elephant-centered history of the show trade” (9). in so doing, she not only directs new humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 142 and gargantuan figures into the center ring of her history, but she also raises timely questions about how historians should approach the past. indeed, this book lives up to its title, for entertaining and dramatic stories about elephants fill its pages. readers will need to hold onto their howdahs as they peer into circus history from the backs of elephants like hannibal, hercules, hebe, and horatio. these elephantine tales capture the reader’s attention, making for a lively (although saddening) reading experience. this book is an untold history of circus elephants in america that should be viewed as a must-read for scholars interested in the american entertainment industry. most significantly, though, it articulates and then confronts colossal methodological and theoretical problems with locating nonhuman agency in the past. historians currently engaged with this issue must also add entertaining elephants to their reading lists. entertaining elephants advances a straightforward and two-part historical argument about circus elephants in america. first, nineteenth-century circuses needed elephants to succeed. therefore, elephants stood as symbols of and for the american circus. second, throughout the intertwined histories of elephants and circuses, elephants remained “historical beings” (6). they were individuals “who acted on their environments in their own interests as they understood them” (13). elephants always played an important role in determining their own history within the circus. nance argues this thesis convincingly, and the seven chapters of this book outline the major moments in the history of elephants and circuses between 1796 (when an elephant, betsy, first stepped foot onto united states soil) and 1907 (when the first american-born elephant, columbia, was executed by strangling). chapter one tells the story of the first two elephants displayed in american history. this duo, both oddly known by the names “betsy” and “old bet,” arrived in the period of the early republic. together, these two elephants set the precedent for future elephant “actors” in american show business. chapter two examines the creation of the elephant “actor” in the antebellum period. this important chapter demonstrates how “showmen named and promoted individual elephants as noted entertainers” (45). generally, antebellum circus leaders transformed the elephant into a “consumerfriendly animal with a biography, noted individual habits, human friends, and a desire to travel around america for the audience’s enjoyment” (41). elephants were further cast as “sagacious,” possessing human-like intelligence that enabled them to “adapt to human surroundings and to please people” (55). then, chapter three takes a behindthe-scenes look into how trainers actually conditioned circus elephants to play their “sagacious” roles. this chapter, possibly the most engaging of the book, resurrects the human-elephant “contact zone” (haraway, 2008) that undergirded elephant-training, daniel vandersommers – “history from the howdah: a new methodology for animal history” 143 explaining how elephants learned to stand on their heads, step over humans, salute their trunks, and perform skits with clowns. within the “social space” of elephanttraining sessions, humans and elephants communicated with each other (95). nonetheless, the elephant hook and the pitchfork, used for negatively reinforcing elephant behaviors, functions as the reigning symbol of this chapter. chapter four describes rhetorical valences of elephants deemphasized in the preceding chapters. even though the “sagacious elephant” served as the predominant trope for circus elephants during the antebellum period, these animals were also always seen as “treacherous beasts striving to compete with man” (137). this chapter focuses on the challenges posed by bull elephants. male elephants proved particularly difficult to manage because when they reached sexual maturity they experienced “periods of physical discomfort, irritability, and aggression known as musth” (111). bull elephants helped bring about a second elephant trope that became popular in the gilded age— the “unruly elephant” (118-119). also, born alongside this unruly image of the “elephant of war” (105) was the figure of the “elephant man,” or “superintendent of animals,” who employed hyper-masculine strength and courage to subdue violent bulls (120). the fact that elephants could be both “sagacious” and “unruly” made them all the more complex in the eyes of americans. chapter five takes a broader look at circus elephants in the gilded age, as the rise of rail circuses increased their numbers throughout the nation. the motto of this era was “[t]he more elephants the better” (144). this chapter details various aspects of elephant behavior (such as elephant weaving), elephant management, and the intensification of elephant advocacy by reformers concerned with cruelty against animals. chapter six continues in the vein of chapter four, again emphasizing the capriciousness of elephants, but this time positing that female elephants also asserted themselves. this chapter discusses the image of the “mad elephant,” appropriated to the female pachyderm of the 1880s — “a villain like her male counterpart, but seemingly more deceptive and vengeful” (176). last, chapter seven functions as a conclusion. by looking at the first decade of the twentieth century, it discusses elephants during “the height of the circus business and the peak of humanelephant conflict in the united states” (222). then, it briefly explores how and why both circuses and circus elephants became less popular by the 1990s. together, these chapters form a monograph with a chronologically-organized narrative about the rise and fall of circus elephants in american history. of course, this book will humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 144 prove priceless to historians of the american circus. although circuses have a vast and old historiography, entertaining elephants should appear on bookshelves, next to greg renoff’s the big tent and helen stoddart’s rings of desire, as a new and innovative approach to a very old topic in cultural history. yet with a constant eye to the business of entertainment, nance also has made entertaining elephants relevant to scholars interested in nineteenth-century business, management, labor, and advertising. this book’s widest appeal, however, will be to scholars of the burgeoning field of animal history. nance maintains that the recent authors of “transspecies histories” have been “too cautious in the questions they ask” (8). in her view, these historians “tend to restrict analysis to unconscious animal acts (such as succumbing to disease), to animals taken as anonymous members of broad populations (necessary when this is all that the primary sources permit, to be sure), or as a side note to activities of people deemed famous or important (biographies of pets of noted americans)” (8). nance, though, challenges historians to make animals the “primary focus of the inquiry,” to view animals as “unique individuals,” and to research histories that are “equally nonhuman and human” (8). and nance tries to live up to this challenge. four central questions guided her research: “how did elephants shape the showman’s work of developing and selling animal celebrity as entertainment product and abstract cultural concept? more broadly, are elephants crucial factors of historical causation? how might we document this? that is, does animal experience matter in history” (8)? addressing these questions, nance seeks to write a true “elephant-centered history,” where elephants are not simply studied as objects of human interest, but where they are also analyzed as volitive subjects of historical change. nance attempts to “take elephants as elephants” (10). to do this, she employs a multidisciplinary approach. first, she relies upon standard primary sources of cultural history — diaries, newspaper reports, memoirs, and other materials discovered in various circus archival collections. nance especially makes great use of circus press notices. second, nance draws consistently upon the secondary literatures of animal studies, natural history, behavioral ecology, cultural history, and business history to help contextualize specific elephants in specific moments in time. third, and most creatively, nance uses ethological and animal welfare science research (aws) done “on contemporary elephants to ... infer about the acts and experiences of their historical counterparts” (10). about her enlistment of ethology and aws, nance states the following: daniel vandersommers – “history from the howdah: a new methodology for animal history” 145 like all scientific work, the ethological and aws research on elephants is a product of particular political and cultural contexts that yield different kinds of humans and nonhumans. indeed, there is no “natural” or static ideal elephant, african or asian, across time and space. like all species, elephants are product of genetics, environment, and experience. however, they have evolved to survive in certain ways in certain places. although they may over generations adapt (or not) to environmental change or human pressures, they nonetheless come with certain hardwired needs and abilities that are always non-negotiable, such as the need to constantly move and forage or to abide by modes of social organization developed by elephants over the centuries to promote peaceful group cohesion and reproduction. so, this book does take free populations of elephants as more normative than captive populations simply because they are selfsustaining. (12) entertaining elephants, as the synopsis on the back cover states, “is the first account of animals that uses research on animal welfare, health, and cognition to interpret the historical record.” if for no other reason, animal and environmental historians should read entertaining elephants for this reason. nance’s use of aws allows her to locate expressions of “agency” in her elephants that standard readings of primary sources would have overlooked. for example, aws enables nance to make the glands of bull elephants historically relevant (111). it enables her to understand the importance of consistent routines in giving captive elephants a feeling of control over their environments (172). it enables her to explore exactly how elephants utilized their “long-term, extensive spatial-temporal and social memory” to learn circus acts (93). and it enables her to examine the role of “neurotheological compromise” in producing the “elephant breakdowns” endemic to circuses (197). nance’s careful use of ethology and animal welfare science research adds texture to her book. it frequently allows her to discover “real” and “sentient” elephants in the past, “beings who responded to a context or some internal motivation to produce events and effects that mattered” (9). to this reviewer, entertaining elephants is important because it takes animals seriously, and does so in novel ways. all historians of animals should consider nance’s challenge humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 146 to ask bolder questions of past creatures. and these historians certainly should not be afraid to integrate ethology and aws, as well as other methodologies based around the study of animals, into their own methodological toolkits. entertaining elephants is wellresearched. entertaining elephants is bustling with intriguing stories and dramatic images. entertaining elephants encourages readers to ponder their own ethical stances about animal welfare without employing a biased tone. entertaining elephants offers bibliographic essays regarding “primary sources,” “circus histories,” “business and cultural history of nineteenth-century entertainment,” “elephants and history,” “ethological/ethical/animal welfare research on elephants,” “animal histories,” “animal studies/histories of animal representation and use,” “animals and capitalism,” and “animals on stage” that will prove helpful for researchers in many fields. finally, entertaining elephants is generally a thought-provoking, entertaining, informative, and lively read. yet, it is not always an easy one. unfortunately, choppy sentences, unorganized asides, overuse of certain words (like “patter,” “elephantine,” and “interspecific,” for example), repetition and verbosity, and occasional typos distract from the book’s engaging content. nonetheless, entertaining elephants raises pressing theoretical questions about the agency of animals and essential methodological questions about how to capture, so to speak, this agency. those interested in animal history should read this book for themselves to determine whether nance produced a history that is equally human and nonhuman, for no criteria exists that can measure such an accomplishment. some might even argue that such a history is inherently impossible since “the human” remains always entangled with “the nonhuman.” nance’s book invites speculation over the possibilities and purposes of animal history, the problems embedded in the idea of “agency,” as well as the power of anthropocentrism in both the past and present. entertaining elephants also sparks curiosity about the substantial subject of historic elephants. how did the experience of zoo elephants differ from circus elephants? how did museum-goers think about elephants? how did naturalists, biologists, and zoologists? how did elephants appear in popular literature? how did elephants direct the attention of animal advocates to the plight of exotic animals? these are some of the “elephantine” questions that this book just begins to address. in the opinion of this reviewer, though, a good book should raise more questions than it answers. looking at animals should always make us curious and humble. daniel vandersommers – “history from the howdah: a new methodology for animal history” 147 works cited haraway, donna. when species meet. minneapolis and london: u minnesota p, 2008. renoff, gregory j. the big tent: the traveling circus in georgia, 1820-1930. athens: u georgia p, 2008. stoddart, helen. rings of desire: circus history and representation. manchester: manchester up, 2000. microsoft word vandersommers-pdf-jg h u m a n i m a l i a 6:2 daniel vandersommers animal activism and the zoo-networked nation despite its current significance to global politics, cultures, conservation efforts, and food ways, the history of animal activism prior to the second world war remains largely unknown and unexplored.1 by focusing attention on the public space of the zoo, this article demonstrates how concern for animals first appeared on the ground and argues that this concern was far more widespread in the decades surrounding 1900 than previously understood.2 zoos surely functioned as sites of violence towards animals, but they simultaneously functioned as incubators of compassion and concern. zoos networked all who were associated with them into burgeoning discourses about animal welfare. making a zoological park the centerpiece in a story about “activism,” though, challenges contemporary conceptions of this term. there were few pure activists in the first zoos. there were no rallies, parades, and mass protests, few petitions, and little politicking, lobbying, and debating. the zoological park served as a space in which common zoogoers could enact the activism, speak the discourses, and ponder the narratives they absorbed outside the zoo’s fences. a look into the first two decades of the national zoological park, though, reveals an activism-in-action, and demonstrates the great extent to which animal concern transformed zoogoers between 1890 and 1910.3 this article is composed of four sections. the first presents a case study of two elephants, dunk and gold dust, and shows how zoogoers’ concern for their well-being resulted in formal activism that led to the halls of congress. the second section takes a wider look at zoo activism in washington and argues that zoogoers, knowingly or not, participated in conversations about animal welfare. the third section demonstrates how early zoological parks nationwide were networked together and how these parks facilitated the spread of animal activism throughout american society. in its fourth section, the article concludes by pondering larger trends within the intellectual history of “animal rights.” a final appendix presents the transcription of a shocking letter penned in 1910 by miss m. gunderson, who employed “animal rights” rhetoric in surprising ways to critique the foundation of the national zoological park. “dunk,” “gold dust,” and animal activism in the national zoo. dunk, a large male asiatic elephant, arrived in the district of columbia in the spring of 1891 as a gift presented by james e. cooper, the owner of the adam forepaugh show. a few years previously adam forepaugh himself, before his death, donated the skeleton of an humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 112 elephant named romeo to the smithsonian institution so that it could be enshrined in the halls of the united states national museum. now the show gave the smithsonian a living elephant to adorn its new zoological park (“uncle sam’s elephant”). the transaction received much public fanfare and was treated as a grand philanthropic gesture, for, as the evening star reported, “mr. cooper makes this present to the national zoological park because it was the policy of mr. adam forepaugh during his life to encourage such institutions.” the great showman also gave elephants tippo saib and bolivar to central park and philadelphia, respectively (“an elephant for the zoo”). beneath its generous packaging, however, the dunk donation proved more pragmatic than altruistic, for the four-ton, almost nine-foot tall pachyderm had a long history of charging other male circus elephants (“presented to the zoo” and hamlet 1891, 110. although cooper explained that he hoped his actions would prompt other enlightened citizens to make similar donations for the “immense benefit to students and scientists” and for the purpose of “preserving these objects of interests” as “civilization” was “driving from the face of the earth the larger members of the animal kingdom,” in all practical terms, cooper was simply discarding a troublesome brute, displacing its burden from his business onto the smithsonian in the name of patriotism (untitled article, 1891).4 not only did cooper give dunk to the national zoo, he simultaneously loaned the zoo two other elephants that would accompany him to washington (“an elephant at the zoo”). tellingly, one of these, named gold dust (who, unsurprisingly, ended up staying in the national zoo for years), also possessed an irascible character, having previously killed at least one of his keepers (hamlet 1891, 11). for cooper, the national zoological park served as the perfect correctional institute for fractious elephants. if an animal proved too costly and difficult to control, he gave it as a “most generous gift” to the smithsonian’s zoo. if he thought there was a chance an elephant could be reformed, he would only lend it to the zoo, with the hope that a zoo hiatus would pacify the circus animal. in any case, whatever the true motives behind the dunk transaction, the gift captured public attention. william blackburne, the head keeper of the national zoo, led a three-elephant parade before throngs of district children “along new jersey avenue to s street, to u, to 13th and out on the hill and thence by way of the old quarry road down into the valley of rock creek.” when they arrived, the roof of the elephant’s makeshift enclosure was uncompleted. although the floor and the granite posts, buried eight feet underground and fixed with an iron ring to which the pachyderms’ feet would be chained, were finished, the octagonal, pagoda-like building itself was being built around its new inhabitants (“an elephant at the zoo”; “a march to the zoo”; untitled blurb; and hamlet 1891, 9-11). the zoo was not ready to keep elephants. daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 113 within days, animal activists objected to the elephants’ quarters. even the evening star published an editorial that complained on their behalf: there is altogether too much “air apparent” ... for these mammoth pachyderms, and unless the s.p.c.a. [society for the prevention of cruelty to animals] prods uncle sam’s conscience and urges more humane treatment of these captives, not only his own “dunk,” but dunk’s inseparable and boon companion, “gold dust,” will be cadavers for the dust ere the temperate summer sun can cherish these tropic exotics. (“the zoo elephants”) concerns like these would reverberate around the national zoo for years. dunk and gold dust on a walk. note the chains binding dunk and gold dust together. smithsonian institution archives. image# 2011-1032, 2003-19538. most district citizens, however, were more concerned with the elephants’ deviance than with their wellbeing. society had long depicted captive elephants as dangerous and savage mammoths precariously subdued — antagonists in a dramatic darwinian humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 114 narrative about the struggle between man and behemoth, a story that popularized elephants and bolstered their ticket-selling potential. shortly after dunk and gold dust arrived in washington, before construction on their house was even finished, tippo saib, another forepaugh elephant donated to the central park menagerie, captured headlines across the nation and emphasized the dangers that an elephant could pose to a zoological park. “tip,” while charging the wooden wall separating his exhibit from the neighboring elephant exhibit, attacked the keeper trying to calm him. the “rogue” “seized” the keeper with his trunk, thrust at him unsuccessfully with his shortened tusks, and then “threw him violently on the ground,” knocking him unconscious. the elephant tried to crush the keeper, but fortunately the man’s limp body was just beyond the reach of the chain secured to tip’s leg. the keeper survived, but the story made headlines as tip almost added “another human victim ... to his record of eight keepers that he ha[d] already killed.” newspaper columns about this episode not only narrated the attack itself, but also emphasized its aftermath — the “wicked” tippo saib was “chained ‘fore and aft’; a chain also from each tusk ... attached to a strong chain that goes around the body of the beast” (“tip at his old tricks”). washington zoogoers were well acquainted with the danger posed by captive elephants. they not only read about the continued aberrancy of tip, who attempted to knock down the wall of his enclosure again, just a few months after the above incident, they also read articles about how miss fanchon, a boston elephant, escaped her stable and ended up in the kitchen of her keeper’s wife; about how royal, an elephant employed in the el dorado grounds of weehawken heights, new jersey, went on a destructive and expensive escapade around the gardens when he was frightened by a firecracker; and about how chief, the man-killing elephant of cincinnati, was put to death by the zoo, receiving a total of twenty-four bullets (“tip smashes furniture”; “tip’s character is bad”; “naughty miss fanchon”; “damaged by an elephant”; and “vicious elephant shot”). elephants, by nature, acted out, and zoos could only hope that their chains were strong enough. dunk and gold dust proved no exception. in fact, the washington post declared gold dust the “meanest elephant on earth” in less than a year after his arrival to washington, publicizing his reputation for “breaking the arms, legs, and mortally injuring more men than any other elephant in the country” (“keeper and his pets”). on the last day of october, 1891, gold dust attacked his keeper, charles lewis, knocking him to the ground with his trunk. the elephant, then creating quite the spectacle for onlookers, charged around his exhibit until he was subdued by a “judicious use of pitchforks” and a “liberal supply of ropes and chains.” keepers of the zoo threw gold dust to the daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 115 ground, securing him until “the only things free about him were his ears, his trunk and his tail, and all these waved furiously for some time until the soothing effects of the sharp-pointed prongs began to be felt” (“gold dust on the rampage”). gold dust required force to be contained. “his trunk [was] raised against every man,” as an 1893 post article reminded the public (“spring opening at the zoo”). and even dunk, who was known to be the more tranquil of the two elephants, occasionally acted out. in july of 1898, dunk “pulled up the stake to which he was chained and succeeded in making his escape.” after frightening zoogoers and destroying some of the zoo’s trees, dunk submitted to the keepers in pursuit, one of whom was armed and ready with a rifle. the elephant was placed back into his exhibit and was unsurprisingly “chained fore and aft” (“dunk’s little outing”). even as elephants enacted their prescribed roles as the pernicious antagonists of american zoo dramas, concern for their wellbeing increased throughout the last decade of the nineteenth century. on june 3, 1891, barely a month after their arrival at the national zoo, the evening star printed a column entitled “more room for the elephants.” the anonymous author, writing under the anonym “g,” typed the following in defense of dunk and gold dust: i don’t know what the plans of those in charge of the zoological garden are, but i venture to suggest that some better provision should be made for the elephants than they now enjoy. i saw them saturday — a warm day — as they stood sweltering, chained like malefactors to the floor of a sort of house that shelters them and excludes them from the air. it occurs to me that an acre or two should be fenced off for them, with access to the creek. the fence need not be expensive, though it should be strong. wooden beams buried in the ground to a sufficient depth and connected by a single iron rope such as is used in connection with the derricks, at the height of four or four and a half feet from the ground, would be allsufficient. elephants are not addicted to jumping fences nor to crawling under bars, so that one iron rope, an inch or an inch and a quarter in thickness would hold them. the posts might be twenty or thirty feet apart and should be scotched by a prop on the outer side. the high, natural wall of stone on the opposite side of the creek would answer in place of a fence on that side, and the creek could be spanned by the iron fence in the way humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 116 proposed. elephants are fond of water, and it would be delightful to see them revel in the creek. they would keep themselves clean and would save the attendant all the trouble of carrying them water. their present situation is wretched and no humane person can see them with pleasure. if females should be added to the garden and should bring forth young it might be necessary to have a separate inclosure for each pair. (“more room for the elephants”) this elephant advocate was clearly acquainted with the habits of elephants generally, as well as with the constraints of dunk and gold dust’s enclosure specifically. he complained primarily about the elephants' limited mobility, for they were “chained like malefactors to the floor.” rather than simply admonishing the zoo for keeping elephants improperly, the writer suggested a seemingly simple way to redesign the elephants’ exhibit to allow them movement, using a fence and the cliffs along the creek to create a controlled space over which the pachyderms could wander. not only would this reform allow dunk and gold dust to live lives unchained, it would also create a more “natural” and self-sustaining environment where the elephants could clean themselves. on april 16, 1902, a decade and a year after the zoo received dunk (gold dust died in 1898), the washington post printed an article that amplified animal activists' concerns of about the national zoo’s treatment of its celebrity elephant (“gold dust passes away”; “elephant gold dust dead”). two days earlier, after a series of deliberations about the pachyderm’s well-being, the executive committee of the washington humane society decided to forward a protest letter to the district’s board of commissioners. this letter, printed verbatim in the paper, attacked the national zoo for its oppression of dunk, who served as a “living monument of the cruelty that can be thoughtlessly committed by a rich and civilized government.” the article described dunk’s exhibit, which was “hastily prepared for temporary occupancy” and “falling into decay,” as cruel and unsuitable. dunk still lived in the elephant house that was originally prepared for him, the exhibit that originally captured the ire of some activists before it was even completed. the enclosure still could barely “keep the temperature in winter as high as forty degrees, which is much too low for the animal’s comfort,” yet in the summer, its conditions proved sweltering and “unbearable.” of greater concern, though, was the manner by which dunk was tethered to this environment. for eleven years, “fastened by the leg with a chain not three feet long,” dunk received little exercise, only able to pace around a circle with a diameter of six feet. in fact, according to the editorial, because of the stigma of deviance attached to him during his life with the forepaugh daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 117 show, the national zoo only allowed him to be exercised after hours when the park was “cleared of people.” this ensured that he would not endanger innocent zoogoers and allowed the “whole force of the establishment” to be present for his long walks, in order “to guard against his escape.” although surely exaggerated for rhetorical effect, the author(s) depicted dunk as though he were serving a prison sentence (“pleads for elephant”). the executives of the local humane society contended that “under the influence of such confinement, it would not be strange if he were as vicious as he is said to be.” although seemingly simple, such a statement delved deeply into an aspect of elephant signification that usually lay below public perception — the fact that society (in this case, the national zoo) sometimes molded elephants into the very deviant characters that were popularly imagined. through its inhumane treatment of dunk, the national zoological park sustained the very malevolent elephant they feared, and something had to be done. the letter sent to the commissioners (and to the public through the medium of the post), emphasized injustice: it is a matter of indifference to the humane society whether the government keeps an elephant on exhibition or not, or, indeed, whether it maintains its zoological park. but if it sees fit to do either, the thing ought to be done well, and no such cruelty continued as has existed in the case of this animal so long. we are not insensible to the interest and enjoyment which such a park affords to the inhabitants, especially the children; and we have no idea that the proper care of it, and of the animals in it, is an extravagance that the united states or the district of columbia cannot afford. but it is clear to us that it would be far better to have no animals at all, or only stuffed specimens, than to keep them throughout changing seasons under improper conditions, and at the cost of their discomfort or suffering. these animal activists wanted the zoo and the public to know that the washington humane society was not a collective of radicals opposed to animal display. if the united states government “is going to keep live animals for the amusement or instruction of the inhabitants, they should be kept in a proper manner, and nothing savoring of neglect or cruelty should be allowed to exist in such a public undertaking.” to address humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 118 the situation, the humane society members requested that congress approve $20,000 for the purpose of building a pachyderm house, asking legislators directly to consider dunk’s well-being. if congress could not approve this request to better the living conditions of the nation’s elephant, dunk should either be donated to another zoological park “where proper accommodations already exist[ed],” or “he should be humanely killed” (“pleads for elephant,” “in behalf of dunk,” and hamlet 1902, 5). petitions for dunk’s well-being originated not only with the local humane society. “mrs. clark,” presumably an everyday, yet concerned, citizen of the district, published an editorial entitled “a plea for dunk” in the evening star that demanded justice for different reasons than the ones stated in the above plea: all other animals, of less intelligence, are provided with comfortable quarters, inasmuch as they have freedom of action and are capable of moving around in the spaces, cages or inclosures allotted to them; whereas the elephant, that is not only the largest animal in size, but in intelligence as well, is given the smallest space possible, and burdened with heavy chains which only allow him to take one step forward or backward, restraining any other motion. like other public entreaties for dunk, mrs. clark expressed concern about his limited mobility, calling attention to the shackles. for her, however, dunk’s intellectual ability made him more in need of humane treatment: “[t]he intelligence of the elephant is classed as being superior to that of other animals, in some instances almost bordering upon human intellect and reasoning power.” since the elephant possessed a more humanlike intelligence, it, although “patient by nature, becomes in time vicious and vindictive, and usually seeks revenge by killing his keepers, as happened but recently in new york, as well as in other instances” (“a plea for dunk”). like the humane society’s editorial, mrs. clark’s emphasized that the malevolent reputations of elephants did not reflect their true “natures,” but instead should be seen as symptoms of captivity. whereas the humane society blamed the chains for the elephants’ deviant behavior, mrs. clark took this reasoning one step further by extending intentionality to the elephants. elephants became “vicious and vindictive” because of their intellectual ability. an elephant “seeks” revenge. for mrs. clark, the inhumane captivity of the elephant provided the context for the animal’s acting out, but the animal only acted out because it was aware of the inhumane context in which it lived. and because dunk was aware of his chains, he possessed an even greater claim to daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 119 the humane sensibilities of the national zoological park, the district of columbia, and the nation at large. dunk was “not an object of interest, but of pity,” and the national zoological park needed to provide him with an enclosure that he would find suitable (“a plea for dunk”). the intertwined sagas of dunk and animal activism between 1891 and 1902 illuminate three important dimensions of the role that zoological parks played in the formation of animal activism at the turn of the century. first, the story of dunk shows how animal activists could and did directly influence national politics, making fiscal claims on congress for the well-being of an elephant. although congress did not approve the humane society’s request for $20,000, they did allocate half that amount for the purpose of providing dunk with a new elephant house (“but two have escaped”). dunk’s new enclosure, which was completed at the beginning of 1903, allowed him to move about without chains both in and outside his building. his house, a 35-by-65 foot “barn-like structure of brick,” greatly increased his space, and connected to this structure was a 79by-96-foot outdoor yard, equipped with a bathing pool six feet deep and twenty feet in diameter (hamlet 1903, 1). while dunk’s new home was not built around the rock creek itself, as the 1891 editorialist had suggested, his exhibit did free him from chains and allowed him to “enjoy one of the greatest delights of jungle life — the bath” (“the pet of the zoo”). after complaining for more than a decade, animal activists eventually managed to influence national policy, and while this kind of direct appeal to congress by outspoken zoogoers of the district of columbia proved the exception, these advocates commonly influenced policy at the local, zoo level. animal activists consistently made demands on the behalf of zoo animals, and throughout the first two decades of the national zoo’s existence, these demands encouraged the zoo to improve its enclosures. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 120 brick elephant house, completed in january, 1903. finally, dunk had an enclosure in which he could wander chainlessly. smithsonian institution archives. image# mah-15533. second, the dunk story demonstrates how the national zoological park created myths, personalities, and meanings for the animals it kept while at the same time problematizing these significations. when the zoo purchased elephants, they not only bought their literal bodies for the purpose of visual display, they also acquired all the meanings attached to their metonymic bodies, for the purpose of cultural display. dunk and gold dust captured public attention because they were deadly and formidable symbols of nature, and by acquiring elephants, the national zoological park legitimated itself as a modern zoo by demonstrating its ability to keep the most formidable mammals of all. the national zoo needed to underscore these animals’ treacherous reputations, for in doing so the zoo advertised its ability to pacify the beasts that most exemplified that which is anti-modern, wild, and unpredictable. such a rhetorical project placed the new national zoological park among the greatest zoos of the world, while simultaneously attracting urbanite zoogoers who had been voraciously consuming narratives of progress, refinement, control, and nationalism for decades. within the space of the zoo, however, the narratives associated with animals quickly changed. zoo workers, zoogoers, zoologists, and activists alike fashioned new narratives for the animals displayed in washington. quickly, the animals of the national zoo told many stories with many messages and meanings. some of these daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 121 directly informed the meta-narratives employed by animal activists, encouraging zoogoers and the public more generally to view animals as more than other, as beings, personalities, and agents deserving of moral consideration — an ethical position usually associated with mid-twentieth century animal rights language. many of the stories told of and through zoo animals, however, may not have led directly to the goals of activists, yet they always problematized the animal as a singular entity expressing a single and identifiable symbolism. zoos placed an animal on display for publics to see, and in the process of seeing, these publics ripped the animal and its meaning into many pieces. these pieces were always (re)assembled in multifarious ways. nonetheless, the zoo gave zoogoers an opportunity to make up their own minds about the animals they were amused by, and in doing so collapsed the enlightenment division between humans and other animals on a popular stage. indeed, dunk’s intelligence, in the words of mrs. clark, “border[ed] upon human intellect and reasoning power.” last, the story of dunk and his advocates directs attention to a component of early animal activism largely ignored by historians — the animal mind. as stories of all sorts reverberated through the animal houses of the national zoo, challenging long held assumptions about nonhumans, a specific conversation about the minds of animals emerged from the laboratories of the life sciences and found a new pulpit in the public sphere, especially the zoological park. in the 1890s and the first decade of the twentieth century, many associated with the national zoo began pondering the intellectual abilities of different species. what do animals think? what do they feel? can they speak? can they dream? by pondering animal minds, zoogoers expressed a desire to make sense of what did not make sense — that beings behind bars could demand so much from their onlookers. zoo activism in washington. certainly, district citizens acted cruelly towards animals long before the establishment of the national zoo. in 1887, smithsonian taxidermist william temple hornaday fashioned the department of living animals on the grounds of the washington mall. at first this animal collection was meant to assist hornaday in his art of making the dead look alive by giving him living specimens to use as models, but soon the department became a nationally known collection that would evolve (after intense congressional debate) into the national zoological park, the first american zoo funded by the federal government. even in the zoo’s embryonic stage, before the collection moved from the mall to rock creek north of the white house, district humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 122 citizens acted out against animals. at the beginning of 1889, the washington star printed an article entitled “cruelty to animals at the ‘zoo’” with the subtitle “visitors who torture the brutes will be taken to the police court.” according to this article, the spitting of tobacco juice into the eyes of monkeys proved so endemic to the department of living animals that w. c. weeden, the head watchman, had to arrest several culprits. they were usually released with a simple warning, but the problem grew to such serious proportions that hornaday began sending zoogoers caught spitting at animals directly to the fourth precinct station, where they would be fined five and eventually twenty dollars (“cruelty to animals at the ‘zoo’”). hornaday hired weeden in the first place “to compel the small-boy element,” as well as the “ragamuffin element” (those viewed as the most likely to act violently towards animals) “to depart after reasonable time” (hornaday 20-21). there was something about caged animals that encouraged onlookers to submit to their sadistic natures. in the summer of 1889, hornaday told the washington post that “it is strange how much deviltry one person can hatch, and their achievements in this respect will hardly be balanced by the good deeds of ninety-nine persons who are above torturing dumb brutes.” in particular, during the zoo’s first summer, one visitor, on multiple occasions, amused himself by coaxing his mastiff close to the bars of the cages so that it would snap at the animals. during one of these incidents, according to hornaday, “the dog worried a young antelope presented to us by senator stanford, of california, and the animal, not knowing that it was safe from the dog, beat its head against the fence in a vain attempt to escape.” the antelope suffered a concussion and died, and hornaday promised that in case of repeat offense the man would “find himself under lock and key at the station-house.” that summer several zoogoers also enjoyed feeding lit cigars to the buffalo, who were used to being fed the “succulent stalks of green grass” that grew along the walkways. a smoldering cigar, though, produced surprised reactions by all parties involved and became a frequent form of entertainment (“sunday at the ‘zoo’”). sometimes mistreatment encouraged retaliation. on june 8, 1890, when a group of children “amused themselves” by teasing the buffalo, “an attempt which is usually futile for the big brutes are ordinarily too lazy to lose their tempers,” one of the cows charged and broke through the fence around its pasture. the buffalo bolted into a crowd of zoogoers and headed horn-first toward a group of girls that included threeyear-old rosie fillins. as two of the older girls “ran shrieking in opposite directions,” little rosie stood frozen “almost paralyzed by fear.” to save the helpless rosie, annie howard, “a colored girl, employed as a nursemaid,” and clothed in a “bright red jersey,” ran toward the petrified three-year-old and “caught the infuriated animal’s daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 123 eye.” annie tried to dodge the buffalo, but she was “struck full in the small of the back and lifted bodily into the air.” after annie fell to the ground, the buffalo jabbed her in the arm and threw her again. before the buffalo struck a third time, some men armed with sticks drove the animal back into its enclosure. annie was “so badly bruised she could scarcely walk,” but she became “quite a heroine for her presence of mind in saving the little girl’s life.” the incident terrified the other children in the crowd, and their parents unsurprisingly demanded that the zoo make the buffalo enclosure “more secure” (“tossed by a buffalo cow”). teased or not, buffalo should not be able to get out of their enclosure. even though such animal escapes proved inevitable with the establishment of a zoo, the parents of stampeded children rarely accepted this inevitability. school children viewing bison. smithsonian institution archives. image# 2003-19498. the above incident captured the headlines of the washington post the next day. despite the clear and present danger of runaway bison, however, the newspaper never published an editorial or follow-up article that either blamed the national zoo for the incident or demanded that a stronger fence be placed around the buffalo enclosure. instead, three days later, the district public read the following headline — “don’t humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 124 bother the animals.” this article opened with the following assertion: “it is not in human nature to bear teasing. at least there is a limit to its unresisting endurance, and animal nature is of about the same quality, though more patient and submissive.” after this comparison of human and animal character, the author argued that the “buffalo cow who broke out of her pen at the national museum the other day and produced such a panic among the assembled bystanders is entitled to public sympathy, for all the evidence goes to show that her ladyship had been taunted and tantalized until forbearance was no longer a virtue.” the author cast the buffalo as a victim, asserting that she expressed virtue through her choice of violent escape over stoic passivity. furthermore, the journalist contended that the strength of the perimeter should not be considered the primary issue because the “mischief is on the outside, not on the inside.” if zoo “authorities are at fault at all it is in not properly policing the menagerie, so that its four-footed wonders may not be everlastingly poked at, prodded and provoked in cyclones of wrath [produced] by the ... small boy” (“don’t bother the animals”). despite palpable hyperbole, the above story successfully directed district attention to a serious problem in its zoo, the mistreatment of animals by entertainment-seeking crowds. runaway zoogoers were on the loose. zoogoers frequently enacted violence against zoo animals, and these misdeeds often appeared in newspapers. on august 6, 1890, for example, james doyle was fined five dollars for spitting tobacco juice into the eye of a bear (“he spat in the bear’s eye”). on november 13, 1893, when the zoo sponsored a “receiving day” that attracted fifteen thousand visitors, the evening star commented on the large number of “urchins” armed with “sticks and missiles of all sorts.” luckily, “none of the animals suffered perceptibly” (“zoo’s receiving day”). on may 26, 1895, a man unintentionally poisoned a famous diana monkey when he handed it a laurel sprig (deadly to primates) as an incentive to continue the “funny antics” that were entertaining his small son (“diana is dead” and “diana and the laurel”). five months later, some construction workers responsible for building an intercepting sewer accidentally killed a sea lion when they mistakenly exploded six sticks of dynamite (“dynamite made them roar” and “killed by the explosion”). at the end of 1913, violence in the park became such a problem that a zoo employee had to keep a list of the “lawless, troublesome boys who have been repeatedly warned by head keeper and sergeant of watch.” the next time eugine kilby, darrell bancroft, lowell bancroft, morris johnson, carrol tiffany, jas beagle, or harry johnson was caught in acts of “disorderly conduct,” they were supposed to be taken straight to the police station (scribbled note). daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 125 newspapers reported intentional acts of violence, but they also called attention to all sorts of perceived situational violence and systemic neglect caused by zoo environments. the environments of the zoo channeled the attention of onlookers to the topic of animal well-being. for example, as temperatures reached beyond 100° fahrenheit during the scorching july of 1892, washington newspapers concerned themselves not with the dangers of zoogoing publics, but, instead, with the dangers of extreme heat. zoo employees spent “the greater part of their time with sprinkling pots wetting the interior of the cages, dens, and enclosures.” dunk and gold dust were even taken on excursions to bathe in the rock creek (“keeping the animals cool”). yet popular concern for the welfare of zoo animals, in this case for the polar bears, black bears, elk, and wolves in particular, was expressed through daily print culture (“animals at the zoo”). and this concern was not unwarranted because occasionally zoo animals did succumb to overheating, as a cinnamon and black bear did in the summer of 1893 (“baby elk born in the zoo”). during the hot days of summer, the public wanted to know that their favorite polar bears were receiving their daily rations of ice blocks (“fraternalism at the zoo”). during the cold days of winter, however, they wanted reassurance that dunk and gold dust’s building would be heated, that the llamas could take shelter in a warm stable, and that the alligators would have a place near the stoves. william blackburne worried especially about the monkeys, for, as he reported to the evening star, “[t]hey suffer terribly from the slightest exposure, and they go into a consumption which takes them off in a hurry” (“zoo in winter quarters”). as the wheel of the mid-atlantic seasons turned, discussion about how zoo animals fared filled newspaper columns for two decades. climate and zoo-animal wellbeing marked a popular theme within the wider world of “zoo stories.”5 situational violence toward and systemic neglect of zoo animals riddled zoological parks, and in all these circumstances, no single person or persons could be held fully responsible for the animals’ misfortune and maltreatment. instead, “the zoo” as a collective, public space proved culpable, implicitly fostering, enabling, or encouraging harmful behaviors towards its inhabitants. in fact, much of this structural violence lay below perception. visitors, for example, often saw nothing wrong with feeding the animals, and they frequently tossed peanuts into the elephant enclosure and candies into the monkey cages. encouraging and legitimating such behavior, zoo animals universally learned the art of begging, manifested, of course, in species-specific ways. buffalo would sulk near their fences and chimpanzees would reach their outstretched humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 126 palms into crowds of snacking onlookers. frank baker, the zoo’s superintendent, knew that public feeding harmed the animals. in a letter to buffalo mayor conrad diehl concerning that city’s new zoo, baker admitted that “confinement even under the most favorable conditions will impair their [the animals’] health to some extent. this is particularly the case if indiscriminate feeding by the public is allowed.” baker failed to emphasize, though, how difficult it was for the zoo to police the errant food-tossing ways of zoogoers. head keeper blackburne was even convinced that this feeding not only caused health problems, but also provoked zoo animals to fight each other as they competed for both the zoogoers’ food and attention (blackburne to baker). surely some knew that zoo officials viewed the feeding of animals as deviant behavior. nonetheless, newspaper articles, with bylines like “small boy and his sister amuse themselves feeding animals and gathering chestnuts,” that idealized images of “dunk ... opening his mouth for the peanuts” of young children encouraged zoogoers to make the animals happy (“big crowds throng zoo”). in this way, the problem of public feeding represents one way in which the space of the public zoo fostered a type of systemic neglect. dr. frank baker. he was appointed as acting manager of the zoo in 1890 and was given the official title of “superintendent” in 1893, a title that he would hold until 1916. smithsonian institution archives. image# 2003-19546. daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 127 zoogoers did not just poke, prod, abuse, and feed zoo animals. they also advocated on their behalf. in the words of tappan adney, writing about the national zoo for the aspca’s magazine our animal friends, “[t]here are some persons to whom the sight of any animal in captivity can afford no pleasure,” and these individuals inevitably made their voices heard. on february 1, 1905, mrs. bertha a. mulhall wrote to frank baker, asking, “is there any reason for keeping the coyotes and [a] black wolf in small boxes? of course you know they are natives of our north-western plains and run over great spaces and it seems unnecessarily cruel to keep the poor creatures confined in such a small space.” baker replied quickly, assuring mrs. mulhall that the coyotes would only be held in the wooden boxes temporarily until construction was finished on the new animal house. however, in an attempt to assuage mulhall’s worry, baker concluded by stating that the “general health” and “personal appearance” of the coyotes are “decidedly better in the small quarters.” these coyotes captured the concerns of other washington citizens. mrs. william anderson miller communicated with baker about the “horrors” of the coyotes “shut in those small boxes.” on october 8, 1907, the national zoo received a letter by mrs. julia l. langdon barber that extended the worry about the coyotes to all the zoo animals, lamenting their “pitiful” housing. “if zoos must exist,” barber concluded, “then this one at the nation’s capital should be a model for all others to copy.” the national zoological park failed to meet the very standards that justified its own existence in the first place.6 the national zoo could not be a zoo upon a hill if its animals were shoved into cramped quarters. zoogoers of all sorts wrote for zoo animals of all kinds. miss mannie boyd miller, for example, asked baker to “try to make the poor lives of those eskimo dogs a little less miserable.” specifically, she was worried about the “foul greenish material” that filled the dogs’ eyes. and colonel c. a. williams worried about the rat nests nestled along the bears’ den because once the weather turned cold, the rats would inevitably relocate inside. the zoo also received correspondence sent on the behalf of animals not held in the zoo, and one strange incident involving a runaway pet cat shows how the national zoo began to function, despite cruelty, as a nucleus of animal activist language in the district. ann c. raub typed a long letter to charles d. walcott, secretary of the smithsonian institution, in “vigorous protest against the wanton killing ... of [her] beautiful and valuable pet cat at the hands of the clerk of the national zoological park, presumably under the direction of the superintendent,” frank baker himself! humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 128 according to raub, whose house bordered the park, her cat wandered into the zoo, and an authorized zoo employee shot and killed the cat while it was resting under a tree — information she gained “upon inquiry.” she complained that various zoo employees had treated her rudely, telling her different stories about where her cat was buried. she was even told that her cat was tossed upon a pile of manure and then partially devoured by a group of buzzards. frank baker did not deny that the cat was indeed killed, for in a letter to walcott he admitted that he did know how the zoo could be expected to keep squirrels, rabbits, and birds, the typical animal ornaments of urban parks, without “hunting stray cats.” he added that raub was “most exasperating and hysterical” (baker to “mr. secretary”). despite the truth of the matter, the incident sparked raub to posit that the zoo had no “right [emphasis added] to kill a harmless and gentle pet.” she continued to argue that her “well-fed pets would not harm the squirrels,” and suggested that the zoo was engaged in “common sense discrimination” by choosing the cats to be killed, for the zoo itself kept felines of jungles, forests, and savannahs. she concluded her obloquy by explaining how a few weeks earlier she had discovered a dead cat with a bullet wound lying on her property. this cat must have been shot in the zoo as well, and she wrote, “this i presume happens more than once and the poor animals crawl off and suffer long before they die. i really feel this whole matter should be reported to the humane society.” in fact, raub presumed correctly. according to a letter baker sent to walcott a few years later, several neighborhood cats died in the national zoo. yet while raub advocated for these cats, others complained about them. even augustus octavius bacon, senator from georgia, sent walcott a letter, typed on official congressional letterhead, urging the smithsonian to kill the stray felines that roamed the park. even if some saw cats as urban vermin not welcome in the rock creek, raub never gave up her fight. the entire episode began again five years later, in 1914, when she suspected that another cat was lost to the zoo (raub to walcott 1914 and baker to walcott 1914). complaints like these did not simply inform the zoo about the mischievous behaviors of zoogoers, nor did they simply criticize the zoo for the way it kept a particular species of animal. ann raub’s letter depicted the national zoological park as an institution characterized by hypocrisy and cruelty — hypocritical for caring about some felines while shooting others, cruel for both its hypocrisy and the indifferent way it treated nearby residents who lost housecats to zoo-sponsored rifles. whether or not raub’s criticisms were fairly assessed, she clearly connected her complaints to larger tropes concerning the ethical integrity of zoos. her description about the “wanton killing” and “discrimination” of the zoo suggests a larger context. the shooting of the housecat, at daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 129 least in its owner’s mind, was not a lone incident; it was the standard and acceptable behavior of an unethical institution. of course, other washington citizens more clearly developed this line of attack, not just encouraging the zoo to make some sort of change regarding how it kept its animals, but instead, calling the very concept and structure of the zoo into question. on july 28, 1910, miss m. gunderson mailed frank baker a scathing letter packaged with a book entitled the new ethics, “which heralds the revolutionized ethics of civilized man to come.” gunderson’s letter exemplified a radical tone, rhetorical maturity, and philosophical depth lacking in the letters of most concerned zoogoers. excerpted below, gunderson’s letter demonstrates the pure discourse of animal activism, the type usually associated with 1975 and after (when peter singer published animal liberation). in clear chirography, after the greeting, “to you, the superintendent of a not very honorable institution,” gunderson blistered: by what “right,” by what demon’s right, i ask, do you condemn your victims to their cages? you point to the “tiger’s tooth and claw” but are you tigers — you gentle men? if the ethics of the jungle is the only ethics comprehensible to you who call yourselves men, even gentle men and civilized — well then, live up at least to the standards of that ethics; do not fall below it. if the tigers and the lions in your pitiless claws were as swiftly killed as [the] more merciful tiger and lion kill their prey, they ... [would be] better off…. when you drag them from distant places, capture, transport, and imprison them, you engage in deeds of such moral infamy as no animal but man, the king of bandits, has ever stooped to. (1-2) gunderson elaborated for another half-page about how baker deserved to be eaten by a tiger, and then she transitioned to the topic of “animal rights,” a term rarely used in 1910. while a few european philosophers such as jean–jacques rousseau and immanuel kant problematized the idea of the animal in the eighteenth century, and while reformists of all kinds had focused increasing attention on the welfare of animals throughout the nineteenth century, there had been little talk about animal “rights,” in particular, throughout the early history of animal advocacy.7 rousseau briefly thought about the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 130 idea of “natural rights” in the context of the animal, and utilitarian jeremy bentham (opposed to the concept of “natural rights”) famously argued that humans, in a just world, did indeed have responsibilities to animals. the coupling of “animals” and “rights,” though, only occurred in the occasional radical treatise, usually written in the context of the rising british-inspired vegetarian movement, such as thomas taylor’s 1792 parody a vindication of the rights of brutes (morton 13-56). miss m. gunderson, however, ten years before the passing of the nineteenth amendment, employed the rarely discussed idea of “rights” in a new, zoo way. she continued her letter attacking baker’s character: have other animals no rights that you can ... ignore the simplest plea for justice? “naturalists” pointing to “nature red in tooth and claw” often assert that “man need not be kinder than god”; but why then do you fly into fits when bombs are dropped beneath buildings & ban anarchists from the bomb as well as the gods when they choose to hurl their devastating thunderbolts at helpless man and his conceit, or when, there’s an earthquake shock, they cause cities teeming with human life to be destroyed without the slightest regard to the “rights” of screaming man or to the “sanctity” of human life? the creatures in the jungle have ample share in the pains of life; but that certainly is not the slightest reason why you should further oppress them. “that there is pain and evil is no rule, that i should make it greater like a fool.” (2-3) in this assault, gunderson condemned baker, and thus the national zoo itself, as needlessly violent. in her usage of the darwinian imagery of “nature red in tooth and claw,” gunderson posited two larger contentions about human morality. first, she claimed that the naturalists’ acknowledgement of a violent darwinian world could not justify human violence against animals. second, she added that any person who used such logic to “oppress” animals could not speak of “rights” or the “sanctity” of life. neither concept, for gunderson, could find a place in a darwinian world, so if baker (and everyone he stood for) believed in “rights” at all, he would have to treat animals differently. continuing in her dramatic style, gunderson then transitioned from gods, anarchists, and men to animals, claiming that “[t]here is suffering enough among the inhabitants of the wildwoods ... but in spite of struggle and hardships, intermingled with hopes and joys, they are happier there by far in their native haunts than in the claws of pitiless daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 131 man.” concerning “rights,” she exclaimed, “theirs is the right to breathe the air of freedom in the forests of their fathers. their home is there, their heart is there, their happiness is there, where they wish to live and love and struggle for their own sake and their dear ones.” gunderson believed that animals possessed the right to live in their natural habitats (3-4). she concluded her five-page diatribe to baker by diving into philosophy in a way that strangely anticipated the works of critical animal studies almost a century later. gunderson used this space to viciously attack religion, while at the same time leveling something akin to a death threat towards frank baker: are you cartesians? have the revelations of darwin and of copernicus no significance to you? are you “king by divine right?” are you in medieval darkness? think you still that the heavens revolve around you, that gods take interest in your affairs, that you were made for eternal glory, and tiger and lion and eagle and deer ... were made simply to suffer to furnish for “the king by divine right,” sport or a degraded livelihood for him? if you belong to that class of benighted “naturalists” who fail to see the kinship between yourself and your prey, if you “think” that you were made for other worlds but that lion and tiger and elephant and deer and bear and ape were made for this, well then give to the creature whose home and heart and all is here, their share in the world to which they belong. if you belong to fairer worlds why not depart from this one, and relieve our world of a curse, the sooner the better! surely, you are not making fit “preparations”…. if, on the other hand, the delusion is not cherished by you, and you know that in all probability the only world to which man and other creatures of the earth have access, is this pitiful world ... why then do you deny to your fellow mortals their simplest right in this world[?] they are not machines, but our brothers, whether we are too blind and bigoted to see it or not and whether we will it or not, in the great evolutionary surge of life. shame on the garden where lone and tortured and outraged captives pine their gloomy lives away to furnish degraded pastime for thoughtless onlookers who here learn anew the lesson of cruelty alone. (4-5) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 132 gunderson concluded with the prediction that the “shameful garden of cruelty and wrong will no longer exist ... [for] the more enlightened children of the coming day” will not support “twentieth century barbarisms” (6). in this passage, gunderson, continuing her assault on baker, welcomed the superintendent’s own death because his passing would “relieve our world of a curse.” “the sooner the better.” despite the vile tone, gunderson used this passage to advance some radical claims about animals, elaborating on the idea, already stated, that animals possessed “rights” of their own. first, in asking the question, “are you cartesians?” gunderson not only revealed that she was speaking to an audience larger than just the recipient of her letter (notice the plural!), she also showcased her knowledge of western philosophy. rené descartes, the father of modern philosophy, was credited with formulating the predominant opinion about animals for the age of enlightenment and after — namely, in the words of nicolas malebranche, that “[t]hey eat without pleasure, cry without pain, grow without knowing it; they desire nothing, fear nothing, know nothing.” descartes believed that while animals constituted living, organic beings, they possessed no capacity for reason and could not feel pain; animals were simply “automata” (harrison 219). by asking baker to reflect upon his cartesian assumptions, gunderson created a rhetorical gateway the topic of “the animal” similar to that used by critical theorists and philosophers concerned with the “question of the animal” in the last decades of the twentieth century, who quite often began their thinking by dealing with descartes’ anthropocentrism. gunderson’s reference to descartes, and then to copernicus’s heliocentrism, demonstrates that everyday zoo criticizers could and did employ philosophical reasoning for the purpose of attacking the convention of animal captivity while simultaneously problematizing long-held assumptions about the relationship between humans and animals. specifically, by calling baker a cartesian and a “benighted naturalist,” gunderson challenged what she viewed as an arrogant inability to empathize with zoo animals, baker’s “fellow mortals.” baker failed to see the “kinship” between himself and his prey. after displaying her command of philosophy and berating baker for acting as if the heavens revolved around him, gunderson expanded on her notion of the “kinship” between humans and animals. “they are not machines,” she asserted, referring to the cartesian paradigm, “but [are] our brothers.” gunderson advocated for zoo animals in a different way than most animal activists concerned about cruelty. many activists believed that acting cruelly towards animals encouraged cruelty generally, and thus would cause humans to treat humans inhumanely; there was no place for cruelty in either the cult of sensibility or the refined city. other activists took this reasoning one daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 133 step further, believing that animals themselves deserved, as living beings, to be treated kindly. rarely, though, did activists explain exactly why animals required humanity’s moral consideration. gunderson claimed that baker (and thus zoos themselves) denied animals “their simplest right in this world” — “access” to the world. animals, a category of which humans were members, all had the right to “their share in the world to which they belong.” zoos fundamentally denied animals these rights, and therefore could be viewed as nothing other than institutions of “torture” and “cruelty.” zoo animals deserved to be in the world, an idea which captured gunderson in a literal way. animals should not be held in zoological parks; they should be free in their natural environments. few zoogoers wrote letters to baker like the one presented above. gunderson’s invective reveals the discursive limit of popular animal activism surrounding the national zoological park in 1910. most who advocated for zoo animals did so in a simple way, calling attention to a structural defect in a given enclosure or the misdeed of a given zoogoer. yet occasionally, activists ignored the particular cruelties of the zoo, and, instead attacked the very foundation that supported those cruelties, disrupting the ballast of the zoological park by delving into what it meant to be human and animal. critiques produced by these reformers expressed the potentials and limits of activism at the beginning of the twentieth century. they also gestured toward a type of philosophical questioning that would eventually usher “animal rights,” as an established idea, into the popular lexicon of americans. through penned words like those of miss m. gunderson in 1910, we see how a contentious discourse based around “animal rights” first emerged in the american public sphere. all of this should not suggest that the entirety of washington, d.c., advocated for zoo animals, for some sent letters complaining about the animals themselves, not the conditions in which they lived. dr. cecil french mailed a letter directly to frank baker that bemoaned the “tormenting barking” of the sea lions that kept him awake at night in his nearby residence. french suggested that if the zoo “shut them up tight inside a building, be it ever so small, they will mind their own business at night time, and never utter a sound.” mr. william w. bride also complained to baker about the sea lions’ barking. bride made sure, though, to emphasize that he “appreciate[d] the park very much” and that his “objections” were not those of a “crank.” bride even donated some red foxes to the zoo a few years earlier, but no matter how much he believed in the zoo, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 134 the sea lions’ barking in the early morning hours severely disrupted his sleep (w. w. b. to baker, 31 may). even in its annoyances, though, the zoo challenged its neighbors to think critically about animals. baker admitted to bride, “to be entirely frank in this matter i must acknowledge that i do not now know of any practicable way of quieting this animal, but the matter will be kept in mind with the hope that, by watching his habits, we may presently arrive at some means of controlling him in this respect.” in his response, bride informed baker that he “notice[s] that the animal stops his barking for an hour or so shortly after six in the morning,” and while he “frankly know[s] nothing of the habits or characteristics of the animal,” he suggested that maybe feeding the sea lions an hour earlier might ameliorate their appetite and lessen the early morning barking (w. w. b. to baker, 3 june). in offering this advice, bride took part in the formulation of knowledge about zoo animals while simultaneously (and gently) critiquing these animals. whether zoogoers were angry about how their zoogoing peers treated animals, furious about the authorized killing of stray cats, disturbed at the zoo’s violation of the “rights” of animals, or simply annoyed that the noises of the park disturbed their slumber, complainers necessarily had to think about wellbeing and justice in terms of zoo animals. the national zoological park forced the nation’s capital to consider the wellbeing of the encaged. even those who on the surface seemingly rejected any idea of an ethical claim made by the animals they objectified still had to first (at least subconsciously) come to terms with the animals they subsequently dismissed. only then could choosing to poke, prod, and tease be worthwhile, producing all the potential pleasures that “acting out” and “misbehaving” created for deviants. zoos forced all to answer this question: how should i treat the animal before me? no matter how zoogoers answered this question, its asking encouraged them to think about animals in new ways. from the beginning, the danger that zoogoers posed to zoo animals was widely known. as early as 1892, the national zoological park requested that congress pass an appropriation bill to increase the amount allocated for the maintenance of the park. to justify the request, zoo proponents emphasized to legislators that funds were desperately needed to pay watchmen to protect both visitors and animals. an unnamed zoo official told the evening star that not only did the zoo require watchmen to protect families and children from dangerous animals, but they were also needed “to insure the safety of the animals constantly endangered by malicious or thoughtless persons when not under incessant guard or by dogs, numbers of which found their way into the insufficiently patrolled grounds in spite of regulations, causing in several cases death of daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 135 the more helpless animals.” in this article, like the one above about annie and the runaway buffalo, zoo animals were described as “helpless,” vulnerable to the cruelty of rogue zoogoers. animals and humans both required protection within the national zoo. while arguing for more watchmen, the article simultaneously advocated for the zoo’s famous elephants, dunk and gold dust, calling attention to their inadequate quarters, “[a] shell of pine wood ... hastily built,” in which “they would perish in a single winter’s night should the fire kept in a rude stove be overlooked.” within one column of newsprint the author married two different denunciations of cruelty toward animals — violence exerted by zoogoers onto animals and neglect on the part of the national zoo itself. the activist author argued that both types of cruelty were, at least partially, symptoms of the zoo’s financial need, and, therefore, responsibility for correcting these wrongs fell, at least partially, upon congress. in choosing to finance a zoo in the first place, congress willingly inherited the moral responsibility of protecting the animals and humans that filled their zoo. the welfare of zoo animals became a matter of governmental duty the moment congress founded the national zoological park; spending done to improve the well-being of the national zoo’s animals should only be considered an uncontroversial “maintenance” expense. by employing this logic, animal activists, both inside and outside the zoo, cloaked the radical languages of activism in the accepted language of political responsibility (“the zoo appropriation”). no other zoo in the united states commanded the attention of the national government. even though situations like dunk’s direct claim on congress proved rare, the conversations about animal well-being within the national zoo cannot be understood as removed from national politics since those politics sustained the very life of the zoo itself, and thus of the lives in the zoo. when zoogoers deliberated about the welfare of zoo animals and the ethical integrity of the national zoological park, they ipso facto engaged the larger political discourses that structured the zoo. the national zoological park and its animals had inevitably stood as symbols of government and progressivism. gunderson’s radical diatribe against baker could be read as displaced commentary on the hypocrisies of progressive ideology and science writ large, and raub’s attack on baker for his cat-extermination policies could be seen as a conservative response to the government’s intrusion into the wealthy lives of those who owned property near the zoo’s grounds. the national zoological park, in this way, linked politics and culture, entertainment and ethics, humans and nonhumans, and as these linkages were made, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 136 zoo animals became relevant to new types of thinking, acquiring new symbolisms and making new demands. animal activism beyond the national zoo: philadelphia and new york. the national zoological park was not the first american zoo to provide zoogoers with an opportunity to enact violence upon zoo animals, nor was the national zoo the first to provide animal activists with a medium through which to criticize this behavior. almost twenty years earlier, the voices of animal activists reverberated around the philadelphia zoo, the first public zoo of the united states, which opened in 1874 after a failed start just prior to the civil war. within weeks of opening, one journalist contended that “[a]n observant visitor” to the zoo may be fascinated with the comicality of the prairie dogs in their village ... but he will [also] be impressed with the extraordinary unanimity with which everybody who enters the place manifests an irresistible desire to poke the animals. everyone seems to think that his money’s worth cannot be obtained unless he be permitted to stir up the beasts, and induce them to exhibit unwonted activity. men irritate the wild cat and the leopard with their canes; young women titillate the lynx with their parasols; energetic old women jab the opossums with their umbrellas; mischievous boys harass the wolves with their sticks, enrage the monkeys with torpedoes and drug the elephant with tobacco, while one man was detected the other day holding the lighted end of a cigar to the nose of the raccoon. the officers who are stationed in the grounds spend most of their time apparently in interfering with these efforts and stopping them; but as the officers are few in number and the visitors are many, the animals have a rather hard time of it. it would not be a bad notion if the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals would interfere in behalf of the persecuted opossum and the agitated wild-cat, by inducing the zoological people to compel visitors to surrender their umbrellas and canes upon entering the grounds. then the monkeys would have peace and the raccoons permanent repose. (untitled article, 1874) on the one hand, this account cast the zoo as a bulwark of anthropocentrism. for many, the philadelphia zoo offered opportunities for people of all social rank, even the upper class that carried canes and parasols, to exploit zoo animals. philadelphian zoogoers had poked sloths to death, poisoned baboons with “lucifer matches,” and squirted tobacco juice at “wild-cats,” and washington zoogoers continued this precedent. also, daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 137 like the national zoo later on, the philadelphia zoo required the presence of watchmen in order to ensure the safety of its animals, and watchmen always seemed to be in short supply (“the zoological”). the philadelphia zoo prohibited violent behavior. these encounters proved irresistible, however, to those who needed to bolster their self-esteem by asserting dominance over the kings of the jungles. in a rapidly urbanizing world, maybe zoo animals served as the tabula rasa onto which lost individuals could etch their names, as they retreated from the metropole into the illusory escape that the zoo (like other parks, arcades, and amusements) hoped to be. many journalists, though, saw through the zoo’s facades and criticized the recklessness of the nation’s first zoogoers. the writer of the above diatribe even called upon the aspca to assist the philadelphia zoo in keeping its animal collection safe from the egregious behavior of poking publics. the animals in the philadelphia zoo may have been viewed as more deserving of concern than the other animal inhabitants of philadelphia, but the rhetoric of animal activism within the first zoo did not fully escape the mockery often leveled at it outside the zoo. for example, one article entitled “more foolish legislation coming” detailed a legislative bill that intended to “prohibit living animals [from] being fed to snakes,” specifically referring to the rats and mice consumed by the philadelphia zoo’s serpent collection. the author criticized the legislator who presented the proposal for wasting the taxpayers’ time and then sarcastically warned his readers to be wary of future bills that might “prevent the keeping of turkeys because they catch and eat live grasshoppers.” protecting zoo animals was a contested issue from the beginning, and it would remain a controversial issue for a century, yet since the rise of the zoo movement, many americans recognized that the animals in their zoos needed advocates. between 1874 and the 1890s, public critiques of public zoos became commonplace beyond washington, d.c. nonetheless, mischievous zoogoers through the turn of the century refused to back down. while there is no way to quantify the rate at which zoo animals across the united states were poked, mocked, spat at, and targeted by food-slingers, the records of zoos nationwide show that violence toward captive animals was etched into the very structure of the zoo. even fourteen years into the twenty-first century, zoos still place placards around their grounds to remind visitors how to treat the animals. on august 27, 1894, the world, owned by the same joseph pulitzer who built the new york world building, financed the future namesake book prizes, and forged (with humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 138 others like william randolph hearst) “yellow journalism,” published an exposé entitled “sufferings of central park animals: a legalized institution of torture.” the article was crafted by elizabeth jane cochrane, who under the pseudonym “nellie bly” became famous in the late 1880s for circumnavigating the globe in record time (modeling her trip on jules verne protagonist phileas fogg’s famous eighty-day trip) and for feigning insanity in order to study the workings of an asylum. wherever the world travelled, so did bly’s columns, showcasing her undercover journalism and activist messages to urban audiences around the united states, and surely to those of the nation’s capital. “nellie bly” became a household name by the 1890s, and in 1894 when she cast her critical gaze upon the central park zoo, she redirected the attention of readers everywhere to their own local zoological parks.8 nellie bly began her exposition by informing her readers that she visited the zoo frequently because “the menagerie affords such a splendid opportunity to study man, his civilization, his humanity and his peculiarities.” despite these opportunities, however, bly then underscored a hypocrisy lurking beneath both the “menagerie” and the city at large; indeed, “one must remember that the same city which supports the menagerie supports a humane society; the one to prevent cruelty to animals, the other to promote it.” after making this claim, bly presented a long list of atrocities committed in the zoo. first, she dedicated more than one full column to the abhorrent conditions of the bird house, where the birds were constantly fighting sickness and refusing to lay eggs (except for the canaries, but their eggs usually spoiled). while visiting the bird house, bly watched a boy hit a robin with a pebble, a second boy peg an owl with a paper wad, and an adult man give chewing tobacco to a cockatoo (“nellie bly’s inferno”). of course, in the standard muckraking and editorializing style, bly saturated her prose with exaggeration, even employing personification when quoting a robin red-breast: i am sick, and i have lost hope. i have not had a clean bath this summer, and my longing for freedom has mastered every other feeling. i want to sit in the sun; it never reaches me here; i want to breathe the pure air instead of this horrible stench; i want to see god’s sky and build my nest in a green tree and bathe in a running brook. oh, i want to be free! what have i done to man that i should be kept prisoner in this unclean cage? through an anthropomorphized soliloquy, bly not only employed the ancient convention of extending human voice to nonhumans, she used this convention to daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 139 communicate the activist message that zoos were institutions of “cruel imprisonment.” by making animals speak, bly gave them a “voice,” and in so doing, also gave them a moral claim that her readers would be more likely to take seriously. bly allowed anthropomorphic animals to demand ethical consideration. by making animals speak in human tongue, she did not have to convince her readers that they — those other living beings over there — deserved her readers’ concern. instead, through simple personification, zoo animals underwent a metamorphosis into literary characters speaking on their own behalf, reiterating the complaints of animal activists. bly’s literary overstatements would have been palpably obvious to her readers, as would have been her moralizing thesis. her readers may have rolled their eyes at musings like these: “what was it to them [the birds] if the sun shone without, if the air was balmy and the trees green? what if other birds flew from tree to tree and sang and mated and built nests? god had intended that they should do likewise, but man, civilized man, had changed god’s plan.” nonetheless, no matter how bly’s readers felt about her “yellow” journalistic style, they at least entertained the idea that, first, zoos harmed the animals they kept, and, second, that those animals deserved moral consideration. throughout the rest of her article, bly continued in the same style to elaborate on the horrific conditions in which other animals lived. she described “torture in the monkey house,” where zoogoers threw peanuts, “waste paper,” “pieces of string,” “ends of cigarettes,” and “lighted matches” into the cages, where a man handed his lighted cigar to a monkey, and where another spat tobacco juice into a monkey’s eyes.9 bly detailed, of course, the misery of the elephants, “fastened to the wall with a three-foot chain,” noting their cramped conditions and their inability to bathe, for they were “covered with a coating of filth.”10 even though she acknowledged that it was “needless to specify each animal in the park to tell a tale of civilized cruelty,” she concluded her jeremiad by telling stories about polar bears and alaskan dogs suffering heat strokes, angora sheep lacking water or grass, foxes and wolves crammed into small pens, and bison covered in grime. all the animals of the zoo, bly emphasized, were “[b]adly fed, wretchedly watered, miserably housed, [and] shamefully neglected” — “[t]o tell the case of one is to tell it of all.” surely, in the minds of both animal activists and general readers, the same lesson rang true for other zoos. reading about the central park zoo as a “legalized institution of torture” created an activist lens through which the public could view all zoological humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 140 parks. animal activist writing always provoked responses, creating an established and ever-growing discourse about the welfare of zoo animals. less than one month after nellie bly’s feature, the world printed “why these cruelties?” which published three individuals’ responses to bly’s tirade, those of george bird grinnell (editor of forest and stream), an anonymous author writing under the name “suffering and discomfort,” and mrs. e. c. halcott. to soften bly’s critique, grinnell defended the general integrity of the zoological park. however, agreeing with bly, he emphasized that zoos must keep their animals healthy, and in order to do this, the animals’ “surroundings” needed to “resemble those to which they are accustomed in a state of nature.” they also needed the “food best suited to them,” and they “should have as much room as practicable and every attention should be paid to relieving them from the ailments which must necessarily follow the unnatural conditions of their existence in captivity”: that is, they should be given the best of medical care. grinnell then gave examples about how to make the animals’ enclosures and diets more “natural.” the anonymous “suffering and discomfort” criticized the central park zoo in a different manner. rather than blame the zoo as a faceless and abstract institution, this author pointed a condemnatory finger at the inexperience of the new superintendent who replaced william a. conklin. according to this anonymous writer, the departure of conklin marked the downfall of the central park zoo because his replacement had “no more fitness than a man would need who was a member of tammany hall.” mrs. e. c. halcott, the last editorialist published in “why these cruelties?,” took an approach more aggressive than both grinnell and “suffering,” stating simply that “[i]t is time that all zoological gardens [emphasis added] were done away with, for there is always much suffering and discomfort among the birds or animals there confined.” american zoos were closely connected in many ways, and as zoogoers critiqued their own city’s zoo, they frequently thought about zoos elsewhere. sometimes one zoo stood as a symbol for all zoos. other times, zoos were compared and contrasted. editorials about the atrocities in central park continued to hit new york presses. nellie bly even published a follow-up, two-column feature that described illinois governor john peter altgeld’s tour of central park’s zoo. in her typical style, bly informed the public about the governor’s horrified reaction to the zoo, when he apparently exclaimed, “how frightfully mismanaged! what neglect and what useless cruelty!” (“gov. altgeld at the zoo”). altgeld saw something deplorable in central park that he did not see in his own lincoln park zoo. daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 141 the national zoological park never figured far from the minds of zoogoers around the nation. shortly after governor altgeld toured the central park zoo, the national zoo’s own superintendent, frank baker, made the trip from washington to new york in order to assess the zoo that had been making headlines. zoo directors commonly monitored each other regarding the welfare of animals, establishing a peer-review system of sorts, and zoos around the nation looked frequently to frank baker for approval, advice, and legitimation. during the inspection of the central park zoo, a globe journalist interviewed baker about his thoughts, and one month and three days after the first nellie bly anti-zoo malediction, the globe printed an article entitled “poor beasts, if you knew” that contrasted the scandalous image of the central park zoo with the pristine image of the national zoological park. despite the ongoing activism that had surrounded the national zoo since its foundation, the author depicted it as the perfect example of a zoo done right. the byline of the article described the difference between these two institutions as “the difference between the bowels of compassion and the bowels of tammany.” a second byline declared that “grass, trees, and air are theirs.” and a third byline exclaimed, maybe speaking to the animals themselves, that “everything that new york denies you washington gives its captives.” the globe heralded the national zoological park as the ideal zoo. according to this article, which was clearly influenced by baker’s desire to use the newspaper for advertising purposes, the national zoo was “not a stuffy, cramped, ill-smelling menagerie, where dumb brutes suffer that the public may be amused.” misinformed by baker, who would not have spoken about the numerous complaints made against his zoo, the journalist depicted the national zoological park as a paragon of virtue, stating that “[n]o one [t]here is crying out for another [henry] bergh [founder of the aspca].” when asked for his opinion about the state of the central park zoo, baker simply told the reporter that “i will do anything i can. i have taken much interest in the article published by the world. the principle upon which we work is simply to place our animals, so far as is compatible with the condition of captivity, under the conditions peculiar to them in their wild state.” rather than discussing how to improve the central park zoo, the article devoted two full columns to vividly detailing the greatness of the national zoo — the spacious and well-ventilated enclosures, the abundance of water, the cleanliness of the park, and the advanced medical care. however, baker cloaked the zoo’s self-promotion in an activist guise, for the article concluded with the only other quotation and passage that concerned improving the central park zoo: “i would humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 142 suggest that perhaps some of the most important obstacles of central park may be in the difficulty of securing proper keepers. it is only possible to do this where the full power of dismissals and changes is absolutely vested in the superintendent, unaffected by any political influence.” baker’s boosterism proved casuistical. even though the conditions of the national zoo proved far better than the deplorable conditions of the central park zoo, activists still frequently complained about the way animals were kept in washington. baker surely could not be honest about the weaknesses of his zoo, nor would he want to call attention to the universality of animal activist campaigns surrounding all american zoos for fear that such candor would tarnish the reputation of his zoo and zoos everywhere. yet baker’s honesty is beside the point. baker travelled to new york as an ironic animal activist, as a symbol (whether rightly or wrongly) of the noble zoo. usually, animal activists served as critics of and bad publicity for zoological parks. in the day-to-day operations of a zoo, activists would have often been viewed by the superintendents that could never live up to activist standards as nuisances that questioned the very legitimacy of the zoological park. however, by inspecting the central park zoo baker became an activist himself, reappropriating animal activism for zoo endeavors. by playing the role of zoo critic, baker drew a distinction between a “good zoo” and a “bad zoo,” extolling the national zoological park, in particular, and the idea of the zoological park in general. baker may not have told the globe reporter about the chains that tethered dunk and gold dust to their exhibit, but he did successfully laud, and therefore exemplify, the characteristics that defined the ideal zoo. of course, these ideals always remained illusory objects to strive for rather than objectives obtained. by speaking about these ideals in a forum as public as the globe, though, baker made the rhetoric spoken in the halls of congress a few years earlier during the process of establishing the national zoo as a suitable model for the largest metropolis in the united states. the central park zoo, baker argued, needed to look to the national zoological park for salvation. zoos and shifting attitudes toward animals: larger trends. the lessons learned about the animal activism surrounding the national zoo apply to all american zoos, and these lessons are simple and threefold, corresponding to the three sections above. first, the case study of dunk and gold dust makes the simple point that zoological parks did indeed command the attention of the animal activists usually associated with the humane movement, the aspca, and similar organizations. second, newspaper articles about the national zoo and letters of complaint written to the zoo demonstrate that zoogoers, even if not consciously participating in formal activism, often concerned daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 143 themselves with the welfare of zoo animals. this broadens the category of “activist” to include informal advocates of animals and stretches the category of “activism” to move beyond politics and policy and into the realm of thought, discourse, concern, and affect, all of which became tangibly encoded in newspaper ink and communicated to vast urban audiences. third, animal “activists” and animal “activism” pervaded the american zoo movement. just as zoos were networked together, so were their accompanying “activists.” the american zoo movement began in philadelphia, spread to new york city, chicago, providence, washington, d.c., cincinnati, binghamton, and baltimore, and continued on to almost twenty other cities by 1900. as zoos became centerpieces of the american city, they simultaneously established public forums for the rethinking of animals. this article does not make a case for causation. it does not contend that the twentiethcentury animal rights movement arose out of the zoo movement, nor does it argue the inverse. animal rights and zoos both possess long histories that trace back to the eighteenth century. however, animal rights (originating in natural and utilitarian philosophy as well as radical vegetarianism) and zoos (first forged as imperial symbols of the “nation”) have very different, even opposed, creation stories. while this article does not narrate creation nor argue for causation, it does make visible a previously hidden context. by opening up the national zoological park, it shows animal activism in action. most everyday zoogoers did not consider themselves activists, enrolled in philanthropic and political organizations for the protection of animals. most everyday zoogoers did not consciously develop a nuanced metaphysics concerning the “nature” of rights, the universality of emotion, the interspecies experiences of pain and pleasure, or the implications of evolutionary theory. yet zoogoers thought about animals. they looked through the bars of zoos, over the walls of enclosures, and between the interstices of fences into the eyes of awaiting creatures. these gazes required responses, and these responses could manifest themselves in many ways. humans enacted violence and extended compassion toward animals, and processes of affect, projection, and othering inevitably wrapped into each other.11 no matter how zoogoers engaged zoo animals, these interactions, on the largest scale, created a new discourse of animal welfare. the national zoological park should be seen as both a laboratory, where zoogoers could think about and experiment with animals, and a lyceum, where the results of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 144 these myriad experiments could find an audience. the results, of course, were multifarious. the man who spat tobacco juice into the eye of a monkey, the girl charged by a buffalo, and the woman who pondered animal rights when a keeper shot her housecat all had something different to say about both zoos in general and animals in particular — but significantly, they had something to say. newspapers played an important role in this process, serving an amplificatory function, transforming individual experiences into public experiences. newspapers also structured these experiences around larger discourses about animals, animal welfare, animal rights, conservation, and ethics. zoos ushered their publics into these discourses, infusing these conversations with the voices, experiences, and energies of the masses. zoos also gave these discourses a different kind of palpability and materiality. few of the episodes described above dwell in the realm of abstractions, of signs and symbols, of high intellectualism, where the discursive usually resides. instead, the episodes above, embodied in the chains of elephants and the early morning barkings of sea lions, show how discourses come to earth, where they are reformulated to express the thoughts of the people. and the people of washington, as they strolled through the national zoological park, thought about the welfare of animals, not the horses that pulled their carriages or the dogs that slept by their beds, but elephants, chimpanzees, cockatoos, and coyotes. zoos marked an important feature of the changing landscapes of human-animal sensibilities. as the horizon of the nineteenth century faded into the threshold of the twentieth century, animals came into view for many reasons. the literatures of environmental history and animal studies have offered some reasons for this transition, but they have overlooked the centrality of zoos to the story. this article has captured the voices of those concerned with zoo animal welfare as they reverberated around rock creek between 1887 and world war i, but these voices were surely only part of the larger cacophony directed by a zoo-networked nation. ------------ the ngram graphs below help situate the voices of washington zoogoers within larger american discursive trends. while correlation does not equal causation, it is worth considering the pattern by which the phrases “national zoological park,” “zoological garden,” and “animal rights” moved in and out of the popular lexicon.12 the american zoo movement began in philadelphia in 1874 and spread from city to city between 1874 and 1910, reaching its most rapid pace between 1895 and 1905. the national zoological park opened its gates in 1891, after its emergence from the department of living animals. by the summer of 1895, the national zoological park became one of the best daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 145 known zoological gardens in the world, consistently capturing the attention of washington’s public and print media. while the term “animal rights” was supposedly, according to its historiography, only occasionally uttered by a handful of activists and philosophers (few of whom were american) prior to peter singer’s publication of animal liberation in 1975, apparently the term experienced an explosion between 1887 and 1902, peaking in 1895. this unremarked efflorescence deserves a study of its own, but for now, it is safe to conclude that when mapping the larger trends of american discourse, the language of miss m. gunderson, when she asked frank baker, “why then do you deny to your fellow mortals their simplest right in this world?” seems a little less surprising. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 146 appendix and author’s note. i stumbled upon the gunderson letter below while conducting research for my dissertation, which uses the national zoological park as a window into changes in human-animal relations during the decades surrounding 1900. the zoo’s official records are housed in the smithsonian institution archives. specifically, i discovered m. gunderson’s letter in a folder entitled “administrative: complaints, appreciation, and replies, 1910” (record unit 74, box 102, folder 2). there were six folders with the same heading that held documents dating from the years 1904 to 1940. and the complaints that were held in these folders addressed all sorts of matters. the complaint i read prior to finding the gunderson letter, for example, concerned a zoo employee who was contracted to renovate a local lawn and who had apparently not finished the task. the letter directed superintendent frank baker’s attention to his employee’s misdeed and asked him to encourage his employee to right the wrong. the complaint that appeared after the gunderson letter discussed a mandrill who reached through its bars, grabbed a man’s $8.00 hat, and ripped it to pieces. as these six folders (and other correspondence collections) demonstrate clearly, the concerns of zoogoers proved quite heterogeneous. some cared about pricing. others cared about customer daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 147 service. still, others cared about animal welfare. among the thousands of documents held in the smithsonian institution archives that dealt with the national zoo, the gunderson letter proved unique. in the article above, i hope i conveyed clearly the historical significance of this letter. “animal rights,” according to its historiography, was rarely discussed in 1910, and it is especially surprising to find a diatribe like the one below hastily scrawled on six pages of paper and sent to a zoo director. everything i know about m. gunderson lies within both the letter below and in frank baker’s simple response to this letter. nowhere else within the smithsonian archives have i found reference to m. gunderson. here is baker’s response: madam:— i beg to acknowledge the receipt of your letter of july 28 with regard to wild animals in captivity and three publications. these have been placed in the permanent files of the park. respectfully yours, superintendent at the bottom left of the letter, as was the convention of the day, baker placed the recipient’s name and address. the name he listed was “miss m. gunderson.” the address was the same as the one listed below. i decided to provide this transcription of the m. gunderson letter for several reasons. first, the letter is an important primary source for the argument above, so i wanted to give readers the opportunity to read the letter in its entirety. second, i wanted to raise awareness of this letter so that other historians interested in human-animal interactions in the nineteenth and twentieth century could keep lookout for similar types of archival material. i suspect that between 1890 and 1910 there was a greater discussion of “animal rights” than previously understood. third, and most importantly, i hoped to make this letter available to the teachers and students of animal studies courses. miss m. gunderson raised many topics that are now central to the field of animal studies — zoos, ethics, animal rights, natural rights, christianity, enlightenment, darwin and evolution, cruelty, political radicalism, racism, feminism, and anthropomorphization, to name a few. i hope that this novel letter provides an entryway into larger discussions. i kept all the letter’s original errors and attempted to keep the spacing as it appeared on the original pages. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 148 ------------ 1310 wallach pl. n.w. washington, d.c. july 28, 1910 dr. frank baker, superintendent of the garden of hell, washington, d.c. sir: to you, the superintendent of a not very honorable institution, i take the liberty to send a paper relating to the zoological garden, together with a book — the new ethics — which heralds the revolutionized ethics of civilized man to come. by what “right,” by what demon’s right, i ask, do you condemn your victims to their cages? you point to the “tiger’s tooth and claw”; but are you tigers — you gentle men? if the ethics of the jungle is the only ethics comprehensible to you who call yourselves men, even gentle men and civilized — well then, live up at least to the standards of that ethics; do not fall below it. if the tigers and the lions in your pitiless claws were as swiftly killed as more merciful tiger and lion kill their prey, they are better off by thousand times. when you drag them from distant lands, capture, transport, and imprison them, you engage in deeds of such moral infamy as no animal but man, the king of bandits, has ever stooped to. if without any provocation from your side, you should really be pursued by man-eating fijian or man-eating tiger (the worst of fates would serve you right), and you then should resort to decent self-defence, very well; but when it is you, a pretentiously ethical being, who play the part of a fiercer pursuer and tormentor on a vastly more gigantic scale, then if you receive no condemnation for your deeds, the reason is simply that the society in which you live is in reverse — at least as far as morals are concerned — in advance of societies of fijians or of wolves. have other animals no rights that you can thus ignore the simplest plea for justice? “naturalists” pointing to “nature red in tooth and claw” often assert that “man need not be kinder than god”; but why then do you fly into fits when bombs are placed beneath buildings & ban anarchists from the bomb as well as the gods when they choose to hurl their devastating thunderbolts at helpless man and his conceit, or when, daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 149 there’s an earthquake shock, they cause cities teeming with human life to be destroyed without the slightest regard to the “rights” of screaming man or to the “sanctity” of human life? the creatures in the jungle have ample share in the pains of life; but that certainly is not the slightest reason why you should further oppress them. “that there is pain and evil is no rule, that i should make it greater like a fool.” there is suffering enough among the inhabitants of the wildwoods to be sure — the difficulties with which they have to struggle are such that there is not much “danger” of their “overrunning” — as the caucasian savage has done — ; but in spite of struggles and hardships, intermingled with hopes and joys, they are happier there by far in their native haunts than in the claws of pitiless man — the most terrific and oppressive enemy alike of tiger and of deer. theirs is the right to breathe the air of freedom in the forests of their fathers. their home is there, their heart is there, their happiness is there, where they wish to live and love and struggle for their own sake and their dear ones. are you cartesians? have the revelations of darwin and of copernicus no significance to you? are you “king by divine right”? are you in medieval darkness? think you still that the heavens revolve around you, that gods take interest in your affairs, that you were made for eternal glory, and tiger and lion and eagle and deer, + his [illegible] with nervous and aching feelings, were made simply to suffer to furnish for “the king by divine right,” sport or a degraded livelihood for him? if you belong to that class of benighted “naturalists” who fail to see the kinship between yourself and your prey, if you “think” that you were made for other worlds but that lion and tiger and elephant and deer and bear and ape were made for this, well then give to the creatures whose home and heart and all is here, their share in the world to which they belong. if you belong to fairer worlds why not depart from this one, and relieve our world of a curse, the sooner the better! surely, you are not making fit “preparations” through the vile imprisonment of innocents. if, on the other hand, the delusion is not cherished by you, and you know that in all probability the only world to which man and other creatures of earth have access, is this pitiful world, which however might be greatly improved, why then do you deny to your fellow mortals their simplest rights in this world [?] they are not machines, but our brothers, whether we are too blind and bigoted to see it or not and whether we will it or not; in the great evolutionary surge of life. shame on humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 150 the garden where lone and tortured and outraged captives pine their gloomy lives away to furnish degraded pastime for thoughtless onlookers who here learn anew the lesson of cruelty alone. as for “knowledge” “sit her know her place [.] she holds the second, not the first” [your] “knowledge” which does not yield [and give] the higher moral law is but “some wild pallas from the brain of demons.” if wisdom and nature shall ever come to man, if darkness shall be displaced by day, this shameful garden of cruelty and wrong will no longer exist, but be placed side by side of against barbarisms. by the more enlightened children of the coming day, the “civilization” and [illegible] of twentieth century barbarisms will not be highly respected. hoping the thoughts of this letter as well as of the literature i sent may furnish to you and your co-guilty (as messrs. a. b. baker, c. d. walcott, w. h. blackburn, etc.) some needed food for reflection, if truth may be spoken not. very respectfully yours m. gunderson notes 1. the few who have approached the topic have done so with solely the british and french context in mind. for works on animal activism in europe see harriet ritvo’s the animal estate: the english and other creatures in the victorian age, keith thomas’s man and the natural world, moira ferguson’s animal advocacy and englishwomen, 1780-1900: patriots, nation, and empire, and kathleen kete’s the beast in the boudoir: petkeeping in nineteenth-century paris. a few scholars have written expansive histories about animal activism, discussing its early history only briefly. for two examples see james turner’s reckoning with the beast: animals, pain, and humanity in the victorian mind and gerald carson’s men, beasts, and gods: a history of cruelty and kindness to animals. particularly important and interesting, yet a more abstract intellectual history on ethics, not activism, is roderick frazier nash’s the rights of nature: a history of environmental ethics. and some others have written institutional histories about the humane daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 151 movement, yet these works only narrowly examine the twentieth-century movement and its key figures without putting either into larger social and cultural contexts. this historiography includes sydney coleman’s humane society leaders in america, william shultz’s the humane movement in the united states, 1910-1922, william swallow’s quality of mercy: history of the humane movement in the united states, and charles niven’s history of the humane movement. in addition, historians who have written within the subgenres of “animal history” devoted to the domesticated creatures of the nineteenth-century, the animals of early scientific laboratories, or animal conservation movements have shed light onto certain aspects of animal activism without systematically exploring that activism in broad terms. on eighteenthand nineteenthcentury domesticated animals see, respectively, works such as virginia dejohn anderson’s creatures of empire: how domestic animals transformed early america and clay mcshane and joel tarr’s the horse in the city: living machines in the nineteenth century. on the animals of the turn-of-the-twentieth-century laboratory, most importantly concerning vivisection, see books such as nicolaas a. rupke’s edited volume vivisection in historical perspective, richard d. french’s antivivisection and medical science in victorian society, or theodore g. obenchain’s the victorian vivisection debate: frances power cobbe, experimental science and the “claim of brutes.” and on early conservation see mark v. barrow, jr.’s nature’s ghosts: confronting extinction from the age of jefferson to the age of ecology, mark v. barrow, jr.’s a passion for birds: american ornithology after audubon, karl jacoby’s crimes against nature: squatters, poachers, thieves, and the hidden history of american conservation, lisa mighetto’s wild animals and american environmental ethics, andrew c. isenberg’s the destruction of the bison: an environmental history, 1750-1920, james a. tober’s who owns the wildlife?: the political economy of conservation in nineteenth-century america, and richard w. judd’s common lands, common people: the origins of conservation in new england. for discussions of zoos and animal rights, mostly situated later in the twentieth century, see elizabeth hanson’s animal attractions: nature on display in american zoos, 179-184, stephen st. c. bostock’s zoos and animal rights: the ethics of keeping animals, and bryan g. norton, michael hutchins, elizabeth f. stevens, and terry l. maple’s edited collection ethics on the ark: zoos, animal welfare, and wildlife conservation. 2. only two scholars have closely examined the history of american animal rights activism prior to 1945 — gary jarvis and diane beers. jarvis, through his dissertation “the road not taken: humanitarian reform and the origins of animal rights in humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 152 britain and the united states, 1883-1919,” recently uncovered the contradictory nineteenth-century origins of animal rights rhetoric by studying british and american humanitarianism’s contested relationship with romantic naturalism and darwinian science, both key components of radical humanitarian philosophy. jarvis argues that humanitarians often took paradoxical and ironic positions with science, castigating vivisection and vaccination while simultaneously profiting from the advances of evolutionary biology. beers, on the other hand, has recently filled many of the chasms of animal rights historiography with her classic for the prevention of cruelty: the history and legacy of animal rights activism in the united states. in this work, she details the development of american “animal advocacy” between 1865 and 1975, positing that this movement gained far more success in its first century than historians have previously acknowledged. furthermore, beers argues against both the dominant interpretation forged by harriet ritvo, who claims that nineteenth-century concern for animals in england functioned as bourgeois rhetoric meant to control the lower orders, and a second interpretation posited by kathleen kete — that affect extended towards animals in paris served as a subconscious release of social anxiety caused by the marginalizing effects of rapid urbanization, industrialization, and population growth. beers contends that animals represented more than power and release. animals actually mattered to the advocates beers studied. jarvis and beers together make significant contributions to the intellectual and social history of animal rights activism in the united states; however, both works are limited by the specific humans and animals they examine. jarvis prioritizes intellectuals (such as thoreau and shelley) who contributed to the most radical branches of humanitarianism and the rising vegetarian movement. beers pays attention to a broader group of actors, yet she restricts her study to those who were explicitly involved with formal organizations. neither jarvis nor beers examines laypeople who advocated for animals on their own time and terms. furthermore, the animals that fill the pages of these works rarely fall outside the categories of domesticated animals, lab animals, butchered animals, or the overhunted exploited for their fur and feathers. 3. my use of “activism-in-action” gestures towards bruno latour’s science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. 4. for more on the history of elephants in america see susan nance’s entertaining elephants: animal agency and the business of the american circus. according to nance, viewing elephants as “troublesome brutes” was especially common during the gilded age. earlier in the nineteenth century, though, elephants were commonly seen as the daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 153 “sagacious” “actors” of circuses. also, see nance’s thorough bibliographic essay on elephants and history (entertaining elephants, 281-283). 5. i borrow the term “zoo story” from randy malamud’s reading zoos: representations of animals and captivity. malamud defines the term “zoo stories” as “a catchall reference to a diverse range of literary and popular cultural artifacts.” malamud describes a juxtaposition between “zoo stories” and “how zoos actually function” (5). i believe that this dichotomy is a false one. first, how zoos “actually function” and how they are imagined are interconnected. second, neither “zoo stories” nor zoo practice can be viewed as monolithic — both change over time. 6. baker responded to barber’s complaint by calling attention to the political restraints of funding, stating, “i fully appreciate your earnest wish that the animals here might be given better quarters, but as you probably know appropriations for such purposes come very slowly and, for the present, we have to put up with such accommodations as the funds at our command will provide” (baker to madam). 7. rousseau contended in his discourse on inequality that “it is clear that, being destitute of intelligence and liberty, [animals] cannot recognize that law; as they partake, however, in some measure of our nature, in consequence of the sensibility wherewith they are endowed, they ought to partake of natural right; so that mankind is subjected to a kind of obligation even toward the brutes” (emphasis added). i discovered this quote in mary midgley’s animals and why they matter (62). for more on rousseau and the animal see francis moran iii’s “of pongos and men: ’orangs-outang’ in rousseau’s “discourse on inequality.” kant, on the other hand, in his groundwork for the metaphysics of morals, argued that humans did not have direct responsibilities to animals, but should nonetheless refrain from acting violently towards them since violence would bring out the bad qualities of mankind. for more on kant and the animal see lara denis’s “kant’s conception of duties regarding animals: reconstruction and reconsideration” or allen w. wood and onora o’neill’s “kant on duties regarding nonrational nature.” 8. for more on the influential life of joseph pulitzer see james mcgrath morris’s pulitzer: a life in politics, print, and power. on the biography of “nellie bly” see brooke kroeger’s nellie bly: daredevil, reporter, feminist. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 154 9. in each major section of the exposé, bly allowed an animal to speak. she quoted one of the monkeys, whom she called “a dear little woman from africa,” in the following dialogue: “it’s the same old story,” she says, folding her wee black hands on her knees. “either foul air or a draught. it is that draught that carries so many of us off. if they must make prisoners of us i think they might look a little to our health and comfort. why should we be constantly tortured? does it add to their amusement, for which you say we are kept here? you know it is our nature to exercise, and from the lack of it we sicken and die. we cannot exercise in these small cages. you know why kitty crowley died, don’t you?” “i heard she had consumption,” i explained. “no, indeed! she died of enlargement of the liver. that was brought on through lack of exercise. you see, a man had an office above her cage and he complained that when she tried to exercise, and all the poor thing had was a little swing, she shook the floor, so her swing was taken away and kitty lost her appetite, and shortly afterwards died. poor kitty! but she is out of misery now.” “i heard a woman to-day call us ‘dirty things,’” my little friend continued. “i wonder how she could expect us to be clean when we never get a bath. we are lucky to get enough water to drink. and we do so love bathing. oh, how i swam and played in the water when i was free! it is no wonder we are always sick here, and that so many of us die. no exercise, no bathing, either foul air or draughts, and detestable food. it is a happy day for us when consumption carries us off.” like the other personification presented in the text, bly used these fictionalized accounts to communicate radical activist messages to her readers. 10. bly also quoted the elephant, which proved especially dramatic. in his soliloquy, the elephant lamented, “isn’t it lovely? i can almost forget my tortures when i gaze on the blue sky. if i could only take a run across that green! how it would take the cramp out of my legs and how the soft earth would heal my poor feet! is there water beyond? i might get a bath. oh, the thought of standing throat deep in a cool pool is almost more than i can endure. and how i would drink! you know i can easily drink ten gallons at a time, and what do i get? most times none at all, and if any it is one wee bucketful. oh, daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 155 this life of torture is too unjust! i wish i were dead.” then, while deliberating on his peer, the infamous tip (discussed above), he exclaimed, “is there any hope of bettering our surroundings and getting more humane care? we have done nothing to merit torture from man, and if man is determined to keep us in captivity, don’t you think it would be humane if he built us proper houses . . .” 11. for a critical exploration of cross-species gazing see jacques derrida’s the animal that therefore i am. in the process of seeing, humans become animal and animals become human. inevitably, both humans and animals, in the minds of humans at least, always hold an ambiguous status, somewhere between “human” and “animal.” for derrida, “compassion,” seeing oneself in the other, creates human “disempowerment.” such “disempowerment” could lead to acts of violent othering, which in turn, reinforces compassion. for another example of how these processes influence history see kathleen kete’s the beast in the boudoir. for a useful analysis of derrida’s thoughts on gazing see matthew calarco’s zoographies: the question of the animal from heidegger to derrida. 12. google books ngram viewer can be found at http://books.google.com/ngrams. “zoological garden” proves to be the most effective term to track the concept of “zoo” since the latter term was slang not commonly used until after world war two (with the exception of a few titles in british popular culture earlier in the nineteenth century) and since “zoological park” was trendy, correlating with publications dealing with the nzp, not zoos in general. “animal rights” sufficiently tracks the culmination of animalwelfare thinking. as discussed above, this term was rarely used; therefore the frequency of its use does not effectively represent the numbers of people who considered the welfare of animals. however, its pattern can still be instructive. primary works cited “a plea for dunk.” the evening star 8 nov. 1903. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1896-1907. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 3. i believe this article was misdated in the scrapbook; it should be, i believe, dated in the year of 1902. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 156 adney, tappan. “the national zoological park.” our animal friends. undated but probably from 1890. “scrapbooks, 1887-1902.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. “an elephant at the zoo.” the evening star 1 may 1891. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1890-1896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. “an elephant for the zoo.” the evening star 21 apr 1891. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 18901896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. “animals at the zoo.” the evening star 13 aug 1892. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1890-1896.” smithsonian institution archives, record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. “a march to the zoo.” the evening star 2 may 1891. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1890-1896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. bacon, a. o. letter to hon. charles d. walcott. 6 dec 1913. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 3. baker, frank. letter to “madam.” 21 oct 1907. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 1. baker, frank. letter to mr. charles d. walcott. 9 nov 1914. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 3. baker, frank. letter to mr. conrad diehl. 29 oct 1900. smithsonian institution archives, record unit 74, box 96, folder 3. baker, frank. letter to “mr. secretary.” 20 dec 1909. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 2. baker, frank. letter to “mr. secretary.” 2 dec 1913. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 3. baker, frank. letter to mr. wm. w. bride. 9 jun 1911. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 3. daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 157 baker, frank. letter to mrs. bertha a. mulhall. 3 feb 1905. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 1. “baby elk born in the zoo.” the washington post 26 jun 1893. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 18901896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. barber, mrs. julia l. langdon. letter to “gentlemen.” 8 oct 1907. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 1. “big crowds throng zoo.” the washington post 15 oct 1906. “scrap books, volume 4, 1896-1907,” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 3. blackburne, w. h. letter to dr. frank baker. 2 jan 1906. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 96, folder 3. “but two have escaped.” the evening star 22 nov 1902. scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1896-1907.” smithsonian institution archives, record unit 74, box 286, folder 3. “cruelty to animals at the ‘zoo’.” washington star 10 jan 1889. “scrapbook vol. 2, 18881891.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 1. “damaged by an elephant.” new york herald tribune 9 jun 1891. “scrapbook, 18871902.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. “diana and the laurel.” the outlook 22 jun 1895. “scrapbooks, 1887-1900.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. “diana is dead.” the evening star 1 jun 1895. “scrapbooks, 1887-1900.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. “don’t bother the animals.” the washington post 11 jun 1890. “scrapbooks, 1887-1900.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. “dunk’s little outing.” the washington post 12 jul 1898. scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1896-1907.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 3. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 158 “dynamite made them roar.” the washington post 24 oct 1895. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1890-1896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. “elephant gold dust dead.” the washington post 7 nov 1898. scrapbooks, vol. 3, 18961907.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 3. “fraternalism at the zoo.” the washington post 22 aug 1892. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 18901896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. french, cecil. letter to doctor baker. 8 nov 1898. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 1. “gold dust passes away.” the evening star 7 nov 1898. scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1896-1907.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 3. “gold dust on the rampage.” the evening star 1 sep 1891. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 18901896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. “gov. altgeld at the zoo.” the world 16 sep 1894. “scrapbooks, 1887-1900.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. gunderson, m. letter to frank baker. 28 jul 1910. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 2. hamlet, sybil e. unpublished manuscript. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 365, box 37, folder 1, 1891. hamlet, sybil e., unpublished manuscript. smithsonian institution archives, record unit 365, box 37, folder 2, 1902. hamlet, sybil e., unpublished manuscript. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 365, box 37, folder 2, 1903. “he spat in the bear’s eye.” the evening star 6 aug 1890. “scrapbooks, 1887-1900.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 159 hornaday, w. t. “report of the department of living animals.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 158, box 5, folder labeled “department of living animals, 1887-1888.” “in behalf of dunk.” the evening star 16 apr 1902. scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1896-1907.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 3. “keeper and his pets.” the washington post 12 jan 1892. “scrapbook, 1887-1902.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. “keeping the animals cool.” the washington post 28 jul 1892. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 18901896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. “killed by the explosion.” the evening star and undated. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 18901896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. miller, mannie boyd. letter to dr. baker. (?) dec 1914. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 3. miller, mrs. william anderson. letter to doctor baker. (?) feb 1905. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 1. “more foolish legislation coming.” unknown newspaper probably dated 1876. scrap book (1866-1903). philadelphia zoo archive. item #pub r1. “more room for the elephants.” the evening star 3 jun 1891. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 18901896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. mulhall, mrs. bertha a. letter to dr. frank baker. 1 feb 1905. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 1. “nellie bly’s inferno: sufferings of central park animals: a legalized institution of torture.” the world 27 aug 1894. “scrapbooks, 1887-1900.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 160 “naughty miss fanchon.” boston herald 21 feb 1891. “scrapbook, 1887-1902.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. “pleads for elephant.” the washington post 16 apr 1902. “scrapbooks, 1900-1919.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 287. “poor beasts, if you knew!” the world 30 sep 1894. “scrapbooks, 1887-1900.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. “presented to the zoo.” the evening star 30 apr 1891. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1890-1896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. raub, ann c. letter to charles d. walcott. 18 dec 1909. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 2. raub, mrs. a. c. letter to mr. chas. d. walcott. 6 nov 1914. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 3. scribbled note, 29 nov 1913, smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 3. “spring opening at the zoo.” the washington post 3 apr 1893. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1890-1896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. “sunday at the ‘zoo’.” the washington post 23 jun 1889. “scrapbook vol. 2, 1888-1891.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 1. “the pet of the zoo.” the evening star summer 1903. scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1896-1907.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 3. “the zoo appropriation.” the evening star 15 apr 1892. “scrapbooks, 1887-19090.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. “the zoo elephants.” the evening star 19 may 1891. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1890-1896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 161 “the zoological.” bulletin 20 jul 1874. scrap book (1866-1903). philadelphia zoo archives. item #pub r1. “tip at his old tricks.” unknown newspaper and undated. “scrapbook, 1887-1902.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. “tip’s character is bad.” new york herald tribune 29 jun 1891. “scrapbook, 1887-1902.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. “tip smashes furniture.” new york herald tribune 20 jun 1891. “scrapbook, 1887-1902.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. “tossed by a buffalo cow.” the washington post 9 jun 1890. “scrapbooks, 1887-1900.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. “uncle sam’s elephant.” the washington post 21 apr 1891. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 18901896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. untitled article. bulletin 16 jul 1874. scrap book (1866-1903). philadelphia zoo archives. item #pub r1. untitled article. the washington post 1 may 1891. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 1890-1896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. untitled blurb. unknown newspaper and undated. “scrapbook, 1887-1902.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. “vicious elephant shot.” unknown newspaper, dec 1891. “scrapbook, 1887-1902.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. “why these cruelties?” the world 13 sep 1894. “scrapbooks, 1887-1900.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 285. williams, c. a. letter to superintendent of the zoo. 7 jul 1914. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 3. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 162 w. w. b. (william bride). letter to frank baker. 31 may 1911. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 3. w. w. b. (william bride). letter to frank baker. 3 jun 1911. smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 102, folder 3. “zoo in winter quarters.” the washington post 17 oct 1892. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 18901896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. “zoo’s receiving day.” the washington post 13 nov 1893. “scrapbooks, vol. 3, 18901896.” smithsonian institution archives. record unit 74, box 286, folder 2. secondary works cited anderson, virginia dejohn. creatures of empire: how domestic animals transformed early america. new york: oxford up, 2004. barrow, mark v., jr. a passion for birds: american ornithology after audubon. princeton: princeton up, 1998. _____. nature’s ghosts: confronting extinction from the age of jefferson to the age of ecology. chicago: u chicago p, 2009. beers, diane. for the prevention of cruelty: the history and legacy of animal rights activism in the united states. athens, ohio: ohio up, 2006. bostock, stephen st. c. zoos and animal rights: the ethics of keeping animals. new york: routledge, 1993. calarco, matthew. zoographies: the question of the animal from heidegger to derrida. new york: columbia up, 2008. carson, gerald. men, beasts, and gods: a history of cruelty and kindness to animals. new york: charles scribner's sons, 1972. coleman, sydney. humane society leaders in america. albany, ny: american humane association, 1924. daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 163 denis, lara. “kant’s conception of duties regarding animals: reconstruction and reconsideration.” history of philosophy quarterly 17.4 (oct. 2000): 405-423. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. ed. marie-louise mallet and david wills. new york: fordham up, 2008. ferguson, moira. animal advocacy and englishwomen, 1780-1900: patriots, nation, and empire. ann arbor: u michigan p, 2001. french, richard d. antivivisection and medical science in victorian society. princeton, nj: princeton up, 1975. hanson, elizabeth. animal attractions: nature on display in american zoos. princeton, nj: princeton up, 2002. harrison, peter. "descartes on animals." the philosophical quarterly 42.167 (apr 1992): 219-227. isenberg, andrew. the destruction of the bison: an environmental history, 1750-1920. new york: cambridge up, 2000. jacoby, karl. crimes against nature: squatters, poachers, thieves, and the hidden history of american conservation. berkeley: u california p, 2001. jarvis, gary. the road not taken: humanitarian reform and the origins of animal rights in britain and the united states, 1883-1919. diss. the university of iowa, 2009. ann arbor: proquest. 3467944. judd, richard w. common lands, common people: the origins of conservation in new england. cambridge, ma harvard up, 1997. kete, kathleen. the beast in the boudoir: petkeeping in nineteenth-century paris. berkeley: u california p, 1994. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 164 kroeger, brooke. nellie bly: daredevil, reporter, feminist. pittsburgh: three rivers press, 1995. latour, bruno. science in action: how to follow scientists and engineers through society. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1987. malamud, randy. reading zoos: representations of animals and captivity. new york: new york up, 1998. mcshane, clay and joel tarr. the horse in the city: living machines in the nineteenth century. baltimore: the johns hopkins up, 2007. midgley, mary. animals and why they matter. athens, ga: u georgia p, 1983. mighetto, lisa. wild animals and american environmental ethics. tucson: u arizona p, 1991. moran iii, francis. “of pongos and men: “of pongos and men: ‘orangs-outang’ in rousseau’s “discourse on inequality.” the review of politics 57.4 (autumn 1995): 641664. morris, james mcgrath. pulitzer: a life in politics, print, and power. new york: harper collins, 2010. morton, timothy. shelley and the revolution in taste: the body and the natural world. new york: cambridge up, 1994. nance, susan. entertaining elephants: animal agency and the business of the american circus. baltimore: the johns hopkins up, 2013. nash, roderick frazier. the rights of nature: a history of environmental ethics. madison, wi: u wisconsin p, 1989. niven, charles. history of the humane movement. new york: transatlantic press, 1967. norton, bryan g., michael hutchins, elizabeth f. stevens, and terry l. maple, eds. ethics on the ark: zoos, animal welfare, and wildlife conservation. washington, d.c.: smithsonian institution press, 1995. daniel vandersommers -“animal activism and the zoo-networked nation” 165 obenchain, theodore g. the victorian vivisection debate: frances power cobbe, experimental science and the “claim of brutes.” lanham, md: mcfarland, 2012. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate: the english and other creatures in the victorian age. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1987. rupke, nicolaas a., ed. vivisection in historical perspective. london: routledge, 1987. shultz, william. the humane movement in the united states, 1910-1922. 1924. new york: ams press, 1968. swallow, william. quality of mercy: history of the humane movement in the united states. boston: mary mitchell humane fund, 1963. thomas, keith. man and the natural world. new york: oxford up, 1983. tober, james a. who owns the wildlife?: the political economy of conservation in nineteenth-century america. westport, ct: greenwood press, 1981. turner, james. reckoning with the beast: animals, pain, and humanity in the victorian mind. baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1980. wood, allen w. and onora o’neill. “kant on duties regarding nonrational nature.” proceedings of the aristotelian society, supplementary volumes 72 (1998): 189-228. microsoft word schuurman-leiononen pdf dummy h u m a n i m a l i a 4:1 nora schuurman and riitta-marja leinonen the death of the horse: transforming conceptions and practices in finland introduction. along with the general transformation in human–animal relations in western societies, the roles and meanings of the horse have changed significantly during the modernization and urbanization process. in the 1950s in finland, the agrarian society still used as many as 400,000 horses in agriculture, forestry, transportation, trotting races, and the military. after a dramatic collapse in numbers (down to 31, 500 in 1980), the horse has engaged in a new role in leisure and sport, and in 2010 there were some 75,500 horses and ponies in finland (suomen hippos, tunnusluvut). thus, the horse, which has been used in the development of societies throughout the ages, has adapted to modernization and found its place in contemporary society. despite often working for its living, e.g. in riding schools, the status of the horse is shifting towards that of a companion animal. this change reflects the growing trend in western societies toward keeping animals primarily for companionship and leisure purposes (franklin). the way in which the death of a domestic animal is understood and organized reflects the recent changes in human-animal relations (vialles; marvin; burt; higgin et al.). according to marvin, the deaths of domesticated animals are “culturized,” meaning that the deaths are brought about and controlled by humans (16). marvin also suggests that the practice of killing animals and the general acceptance of the killing are fundamental parts of the social order shared by humans and animals (11). the acceptability of killing animals, however, varies culturally, and the ways in which the actual killing is performed are contextually diverse, governed by different rules, codes, ideologies, and practical and material concerns (higgin et al. 174, 183). as higgin et al. write, “there is not one single accepted version of what constitutes ‘a good kill’ but rather many different versions, each of which embody [sic] different human-animal relationships, different versions of animality and different versions of the acceptability of killing” (189). in this article, we study the transformations of the human-horse relationship in the specific context of equine death. we ask how the death of the horse has been organized and how owners have perceived it during a period of intensified use of horses in agrarian work and forestry from the 1860s to the 1960s and in contemporary riding and leisure horse culture. the study has been carried out in finland, and the research humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 60 material consists of interviews with horse owners and written narratives from the finnish literature society’s folklore archives. it is our hypothesis that there are differences in the ways in which contemporary leisure horse owners and people who worked with horses in 19th and 20th century farming society relate to the death of a horse. the theme of animal death can be understood as a combination — or collision — of emotional, ethical, economic, and practical questions. the focus of our approach is on the historical changes in the human-animal relationship and especially on the emotional dimensions of that relationship. the emotional relationship to the animal and its death. the central aspect of an emotional relationship to animals is the emotional tie to either an individual animal or animals in general (macnaghten). when looking at emotionality in the context of animal keeping, the focus is on the individual animal as a friend, a companion, an object of empathy, or a source of guilt. furthermore, the emotional relationship to an animal often includes a moral dimension, a willingness to act for the good of the animal. the “culture of care and responsibility” defined by macnaghten embodies love and respect for the animal, time spent with the animal, and a wish that the animal could live as happily, healthily, and freely from suffering as possible. the actual content of these concepts varies greatly, however, as what is seen as care by some is understood as neglect in other contexts. the emotional aspect of human–animal relations has usually been linked to companion animal keeping (franklin 98). while the reasons for keeping farm animals are primarily financial and practical, companion animals are kept mainly for social and emotional reasons (serpell and paul 129). the horse of western urban society is increasingly perceived in this way as a companion animal, as many leisure horse owners see their animals as friends and partners and especially as individuals (birke). emotionality and instrumentality have often been seen as opposed standpoints, but they do not exclude each other in the human–animal relationship. an emotional relationship to agricultural animals is especially evident in small-scale agriculture, where the animals are seen as part of the household, as family members, and as friends (holloway; tovey; theodossopoulos 15, 16, 31; leinonen, työkaverista 3-4). dimitrios theodossopoulos has investigated the human-animal relationship in a greek island farming community and states that the interaction of the farmers with their animals involves care, reciprocity, and the conceptualization of the place and purpose of each living organism on the farm (15). the animals are considered members of the household and the relationships between the animals and their owners are close. frans de waal writes that “with close familiarity, the individuality and awareness of other animals becomes evident” (de waal qtd. in dutton 139). working with the horse is one of the closest human-animal nora schuurman & riitta-marja leinonen — the death of the horse 61 relationships involving personal communication with an animal, and thus the relationship is inevitably between individuals. grieving over the death of an animal is seen as a clear sign of an emotional tie to the animal, and it can be compared to the emotions felt after the loss of a close human (meehan; howell). this emotional reaction has been associated with the role of companion animals as family members (arluke and sanders 11-12). however, producers of agricultural animals also may face situations in which they react emotionally to animal death, although slaughtering is an everyday practice and a pragmatic issue for most producers. animal death may be especially distressing when a whole herd of cattle has to be slaughtered as a measure of precaution against an infectious disease (law). the grief is made worse by the loss of the whole livelihood. thus the ways of relating to animal death illustrate how seemingly opposite systems of meaning, emotionality and instrumentality in human-animal relations can exist simultaneously (arluke and sanders, 131). these systems of meaning are often produced locally in a context where interaction with animals is part of everyday routines, such as in hobby farming (holloway), where the producers often have a close emotional relationship to their animals. on the one hand, the animals are seen as friends and sometimes members of the family, but on the other, they are agricultural animals intended for the market (cf. harbers). the simultaneity of emotionality and instrumentality is most visible in the case of animals whose relationship with humans is perceived in more than one way. for example, cassidy (39-40) states in her research that racehorses are grieved for not only because of personal attachment to them, but also because of the loss of their economic and breeding value. in 19th century finland the concept of equine death differed from the death of other farm animals. there was a special closeness between a family and their horse because the horse was kept in the house in winter. the stables, if there were any, were cold and drafty, and hence the horses were taken inside the house to eat, drink, and dry after a day’s work (vilkuna). consequently, the death of the only horse on the farm was especially distressing because of its economic as well as its emotional value. if the horse died in the middle of the logging season, the farmer lost a great deal of the year’s income. the practices surrounding animal death can also be understood through the concept of uncleanness as described by mary douglas (100, 101), where dirt is definable as a substance in the wrong place and thus needs to be viewed through a conception of order. even though the relationship to a horse was close in 19th century finland, the horse carcass was considered unclean. a combination of traditions based in humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 62 folk beliefs and christianity formed the meaning of equine death and thus influenced the related practices, including dietary restrictions, uncleanness of the skinner, and burying the horse. (leinonen, työkaverista .) the conflict between rationality and emotion can be seen in the case of shelter workers who have to euthanize animals as part of their work (arluke and sanders, 86-100). in arluke’s studies, the workers used various emotional strategies to be able to justify the emotionally difficult tasks they had to carry out. for instance, the workers justified euthanizing sick or old animals on welfare grounds and tried to make the actual moment of death as peaceful and painless for the animal as possible. an analogous situation is described by john law in the context of veterinarians euthanizing animals: if the animal could no longer have a good life, it would be given as good a death as possible. also, when performing euthanasia on an animal, the actual interaction with the animal itself brings a moral and emotional dimension to the task at hand. for shelter workers, the most challenging cases were those where the worker felt that the animal knew what was going to happen, and expressed its agony openly or was exceptionally calm and cooperative. the workers also accused animal owners of irresponsibility and of causing the death of the animal in the first place, which can be compared to horse owners’ tendency to attribute bad behavior to the horse’s past history or other people’s handling of the horse (birke et al.). animal welfare is a thoroughly moral issue in contemporary society, and a failure in the care of one’s own beloved animal can be a difficult issue to face, as well as a social disaster. thus, the purpose of such a strategy is to deal with the guilt and shame associated with a failure. the ultimate case of such a failure is obviously the death of the animal. when animals and their needs are interpreted, they are often anthropomorphized, i.e. compared to humans in their perceptions, actions, and intentions, and in the ways in which they are handled and cared for (daston and mitman 2). in pet-keeping, practices such as treating animals with complex medical treatments and burying them in pet cemeteries can be interpreted as anthropomorphism (serpell). the tendency to anthropomorphize the behavior of pets has been considered a form of faulty reasoning and a welfare risk for animals, on the grounds that it does not take into consideration the species-specific needs and abilities of the animals (tyler). anthropomorphism can, however, also be investigated as a method of increasing mutual understanding between humans and animals. according to buller and morris, anthropomorphism “offers a conceptual bridging point that brings humans and animals together”. according to bekoff, “being anthropomorphic is a linguistic tool to make the thoughts and feelings of other animals accessible to humans” (123). bekoff further argues that anthropomorphism nora schuurman & riitta-marja leinonen — the death of the horse 63 is a necessity, for without it our interpretations of animal feelings and behavior would be sterile and dull, and we would be losing important information (bekoff 123-125). understanding animals empathetically and verbalizing their perceived point of view can also be based on the idea of the animal subject as being distinct from the human (tyler). this comes close to the contemporary inclination to naturalize or hyper-animalize animals (buller and morris), emphasizing, when interpreting the actions of individual animals, their natural and biological qualities, such as the instincts involved. naturalizing animals stems from both the recent increase in scientific knowledge and also the romantic view of nature characteristic of modern western societies (franklin). in studies of horse owners made by birke, the naturalizing and anthropomorphizing of horses emerge as dualistic interpretations of the animals. on the one hand, the horse is seen as an “other,” an instinct-driven animal interpreted through scientific discourse. on the other hand, the horse is perceived as a companion, a human-like subject, who makes choices and wants the same kind of things as humans. interviews and written narratives as research data. cultural conceptions of animals can be analyzed as commonly shared discourses that define what is considered morally acceptable or unacceptable, valued, rejected, or simply taken for granted. similarly, the established practices of keeping animals and caring for them can be understood as part of the discourses that have produced them. (jokinen et al. 19, 238-239) in this paper, the investigations of the death of the horse are studied in the contexts of the personal experiences of people involved with horses at different times. the research data for this paper consists of written narratives from a writing contest1 and two sets of interviews conducted in finland between 1995 and 2007. the writing contest material comes from a collection of narratives called collection of horse narratives (hevostarinakeruu), from the folklore archives of the finnish literature society.2 the horse narrative material was collected in 2003 by organizing a writing contest campaign that was announced in finnish newspapers and horse magazines. people were asked to write about their experiences of horses “in the old days,” today, and in professional practice. the archive received 1400 pages of narratives from 107 women and 38 men, and also an interview with one woman. for this article, 35 narratives have been analyzed, of which 23 were produced by women and 12 by men, all of whom were born between 1913 and 1988. the criterion for choosing these narratives was that their focus was on the narrators’ own experiences and emotions in the context of actual events, rather than of general accounts of common practices. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 64 the first set of interviews consists of ten thematic interviews with finnish draft and trotting horse owners. the interviewees were all male, born between 1919 and 1951. they had learned their horsemanship skills “the traditional way” at home from their male relatives, using draft horses. four of the interviewees were professional trainers, breeders, horse loggers, and drivers. three were retired farmers and forestry workers, and one of them had also been a farrier. the rest had made their living in other occupations but had kept horses all the time. all of the interviewees had grown up on farms, except for one. all of them had experience of farming and forestry work with horses. the interviews were conducted between 1995 and 2004 in a wide variety of locations throughout finland. another set of interviews used for this article consists of nine thematic interviews with finnish riding horse owners. these interviewees were all female, because riding is predominantly a female activity in finland, as more than 90 per cent of riders are women or young girls (srl). the ages of the interviewees varied between 20 and 60 years, they all owned at least one riding horse, and some of them also had other roles as competitors, riding instructors, trainers, breeders or yard owners. the interviewees were asked about their background and present practices in keeping horses and the motivations for it, the role of animals in their lives, and their conceptions of horse keeping and animal welfare. the interviews were conducted in eastern finland in 2007. the interviewees were chosen using snowball sampling (atkinson and flint): the first informants were chosen for the first set of interviews from the finnish working horse society and for the latter set from the web pages of local stables. every interviewee was asked to give several names for further interviews. these interviewees were chosen according to the needs of the research, targeting a small but informative group of informants (flyvbjerg). the interviews for both sets were recorded and transcribed. then the interviews and the written narratives were analyzed thematically using content analysis (tuomi and sarajärvi). the themes used in this article relate to humanhorse relations, the use of the horse, conceptions of equine welfare and the practices and conceptions concerning the death of the horse. the interviews and written narratives were coded using phrases, sentences, or paragraphs as units for analysis (eskola and suoranta). these units referred to the themes as descriptions of everyday practices, personal experiences, or other anecdotes, which were often explained or argued for in some way. nora schuurman & riitta-marja leinonen — the death of the horse 65 the development of human-horse relations in finland. in this section, the role of the horse in society will be analyzed both in the context of the agrarian draft horse from the 19th to the 20th century and also in the context of the contemporary riding horse. agrarian here refers to the time when horses were necessary for the subsistence of an industrializing agrarian society in finland, between the 1860s and the 1950s-1960s. human-animal relationships in western societies are often presented as anthropocentric and utilitarian, counter to those in non-western societies, which are characterized as ecocentric and reciprocal. these views have underestimated the diversity and locality of western traditions (morris 2-5; theodossopoulos 15, 16). when investigating the humanhorse relationship in scandinavia and the changes that have occurred in it over the last five to six generations, one has to consider the locality and the mindset of the agrarian society compared to the globalized present day riding culture. farming has a profound effect on the ways people relate to the natural world and especially to animals. farmers care for, train, and protect their animals, and in return they expect them to work for them, to be useful. christian influences also promote a certain order or hierarchy in their mindset where animals are lower than humans, although care and responsibility for animals are considered important. finnish agrarian society consisted of small-scale farms, and because the wellbeing of the family was dependent on the wellbeing of the horse and cattle, these received the best possible care in terms of the knowledge that people had (ylimaunu 115, 121; suutala 203; leinonen, työkaverista 3; talve 69-70). in the 19th century, farming society horses were mainly used for travelling and smallscale farm work. towards the end of the century, however, self-sufficient farm work started to intensify, with heavier farming equipment and new techniques. another new element was the growing importance of the monetary economy introduced by logging. horses were given heavier equipment and their work increased, but they were poorly adapted to this demanding workload. feeding was inadequate, the feed was of poor quality, and the horses were too small for hard work. national breeding experiments were not successful amongst the farmers, and thus selective breeding in the 19th century was almost non-existent in remote villages. all the horses of a village were put out to pasture in the forest for the summer, and they bred there freely. nevertheless, horses were in close proximity to people because of their shared housing in winter and long working days on the logging sites. people tried to find better ways of caring for their horses, and they received information through the national and local farming organizations and associations, which arranged courses and published newsletters. (leinonen, työkaverista). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 66 the 20th century agrarian conception of the horse was very anthropocentric. the horse was considered an animal dependent on humans and close to humans. for example, one informant spoke about it as an animal that had been “created as a servant for humans” (a), but it is more commonly referred to as a friend and a workmate. this implies that the horse is an integral part of culture and everyday life, and it has indeed been created or bred for work. what it also implies is that the horse is subordinate to the human. a “workmate” is a slightly more equal concept used for a work horse, and emphasizes the bond felt when working with a trained animal. the horse was not, however, merely connected with work. the interviewees also call the horse “a creature of nature” (a, b), and it is thought that humans had “to take care of these creatures for they are helpless when ill-treated” (a). and because horses are creatures of nature they also “like to be talked to and stroked” (b). nevertheless, horses were an important part of the farming society, where they had their own place and duties. in the 1950s farming community, the horse was a necessity and “it meant everything” (d). for example, it was called “the only vehicle and all-round tool” (c). after the war, horses were needed for sustenance and rebuilding. they were valuable, and they were not destroyed as long as they could stand on their feet. many horses were worn out, and were therefore sore and aggressive. communicating this to the men, who were tired, financially poor, and traumatized by war, did not help but easily resulted in the animal being shouted at and beaten. according to the narratives, horse handling was violent especially on the logging sites, for men were eager to make money and the wellbeing of an animal was not their main concern. some horses were badly abused and killed through overwork and ignorant treatment, as described in the following extract: some savage masters loaded so many logs on the sleigh that neither the will nor the strength of the horse was enough to move it. then some savages started beating the helpless horse with a pole. i personally witnessed how an owner beat his horse so badly that it fell in the snow. the furious man kept beating the animal, which was making pitiful sounds. then my friend took his axe, went over to the savage, and said: unless you stop beating the horse i will smash you head with my axe. the savage man looked murderously at my friend and mumbled: “that devil is disobedient.” we watched the situation. the savage man stopped beating the animal and it stood up. he made the load smaller and the badly beaten horse started pulling the load. nora schuurman & riitta-marja leinonen — the death of the horse 67 death released some badly beaten horses from their pains. they died at night in the stables. in the miserable conditions some horses took sick. they looked depressed and were coughing.—the horse was usually medicated by pouring half a bottle of moonshine down its throat and then the owner went logging with it. sometimes a feverish horse like this died in the woods, much to the annoyance of its owner. (m) some relationships were longer-lived, some were briefer. some men changed horses frequently. they would buy them from markets, gypsies, and neighbors, and soon sell them again or change them for a better ones. some horse dealers made a profit on logging horses. they would buy a horse cheap after the logging operations in the spring, and sell it again in the fall for a better price. if it was a “good horse,” the interviewees would use it 5-15 years for hard work, and then sell it, or use it for lighter work, keeping the horse until its death. thus the relationship might be short-lived, but when working fulltime, the man and the horse spent many hours together each day, and the horse lived in a stable at home or at the logging site. in the equestrian culture of the 2000s, many aspects of the agrarian conceptions of the horse have been retained, but there are also new views and discourses that delineate the relationship to the horse. one of them consists of an emphasis on the horse as a biological animal and as part of nature. thus, the moral commitment of the owner to her horse is tied to the naturalized idea of the horse. one of the riding horse owners states that “it is still an animal, so you should treat it more like an animal than a human” (k). another interviewee sees that horses were “more like horses” in the 1980s, and that contemporary “urban horse owners are more alienated from horseness and nature” (i). the mental capacities of the horse are referred to by describing the horse as an active subject, “a thinking animal” (e), as defined by one interviewee. thus, the horse is compared to humans by emphasizing its cognitive abilities and a subjective viewpoint on its life. this can be interpreted as an anthropomorphic account, but it can also refer to an understanding of the horse as a conscious subject and an animal distinct from humans. this discourse is opposed to the idea of the horse as a near-machine, as in the following citation from a riding horse owner: “an animal that is very badly planned” (i). what has changed most in the role of the horse is the everyday relationship between the horse and its owner. the ways in which the horse’s life is organized and the daily routines of the horse and the owner affect this relationship. hence, the transformation of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 68 the everyday has important implications for the animal itself, its welfare, and ultimately its death. in the contemporary riding horse culture, the purpose of the horse is to provide companionship and athletic opportunities for to the owner. some riding horses live at the owner’s own stables at home, whereas many are kept at livery stables, where the owner pays for the care of the horse and usually simply visits the animal for the purpose of riding. these practices also vary in intensity, with some owners spending nearly all their leisure time with the horse, even if it does not live at the owner’s home yard. thus, some interviewees cannot imagine life without their horse, since it has become part of their everyday routine to take care of the horse and to ride: “i could not be without [them], it is like another world for me and another way to relax, so that i communicate my own stuff with them” (e). for some owners, the opportunity to compete in riding is the prime motivation for keeping a horse. this kind of relationship with horses cannot, however, be described as purely non-emotional or instrumental. for an amateur rider who keeps just one or two horses, these may be close companions in the intensive training and competition life. as one show-jumping enthusiast emphasizes, “you respect them, they are our friends” (f). the abuse of horses in competitions is also reported in the interviews, which can be interpreted in the context of this emotional relationship. when the rider does not succeed in competitions, the horse may be blamed for it. this is somewhat analogous to what happens in human friendships where both parties are considered equal — thus, relating to the animal emotionally comes very close to anthropomorphizing the animal. all the informants emphasized the need to treat horses well. for the male interviewees, the horse was a workmate and a creature of nature that was helpless if abused. hence, humans had a moral responsibility to take care of their horses. another reason for grooming and feeding the horse well was because the horse “tells about its master” (a). in other words, in the 1940s and 1950s a happily moving, fat horse not only looked good but was also an indicator to the community that the owner was a skilled horseman. in addition, these men felt that their horses liked being talked to and patted. in other words, when taking care of their horses the men took the horse’s point of view into consideration, and the aesthetic side also signaled the morals and skills of the horseman to his community. when contemporary riding-horse owners seek the horse’s point of view, they talk about the “happiness” or “enjoyment” of the horse as a justification for certain practices. they argue that the horse “enjoys,” e.g. being on the pasture, or hacking out, because it “is fun for the horse” (f). one interviewee wonders: “why do things which the horse doesn’t nora schuurman & riitta-marja leinonen — the death of the horse 69 enjoy!” (e). sometimes, the perceived equine point of view becomes an important factor influencing the decision-making of the horse owner. it may be verbalized anthropomorphically, but in many cases the aim of the owner is to understand the needs and feelings of the horse as an animal different from humans. one interviewee explains how the happiness of the horse is connected with the question of horse welfare: “the cornerstone of a good equine life is … that it lives in an atmosphere of trust and security … and when it is calm, when it is not stressed, it prospers” (h). generally speaking, the transformation in horse keeping has clearly changed the way horses are perceived in everyday life, where they live and interact with humans. however, despite these changes, many aspects are shared between the different generations and contexts of horse keeping. the essential combination of emotional and instrumental relationship to the animal and the importance of communicating with the animal and of seeking its point of view in pursuit of its care and welfare can be seen in both contexts. what is new is the way in which owners naturalize the horse and try to understand it as an animal distinct from humans. in addition, the decision-making process concerning equine care and welfare is more public and reflective. practices of horse slaughter, burials and flesh-eating. in the 19th century, adult horses usually died of old age, poor care, or too much work. the work horse of the agrarian era was used until it was unable to perform its duties anymore. horses that were killed were usually old, skinny, almost toothless, and could barely stand up. there were some exceptions, however, because free breeding on the summer pastures resulted in more foals than could be supported. thus, fillies were usually killed, as were the foals that were born in the fall. colts were valued, and could be sold. (leinonen, työkaverista ) historically, it was not a common practice to eat horse meat in finland until the 20th century, even though horses were sacrificed and ritualistically eaten in the pre-christian era. in the 19th century, a dead horse was considered unclean, and it was not usually killed by its owner but by a local skinner. the skinners were held in contempt and they were not allowed to eat at the same table with others, while the dishes that they used were destroyed. this ritual uncleanness affected the position of the skinner in the agrarian society. touching unclean horse carcasses placed the skinners in their own distinctive place on the margins of society (douglas). the skinner killed the horse by stunning it with a blow to the forehead with the back of an axe or a poleaxe (cf. higgin et al.) and then cutting the throat open. after that, he skinned the horse and buried the carcass. he took the skin, which was valuable in making boots and other leather goods. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 70 (leinonen, työkaverista; haavikko; lehikoinen.) the flesh was not eaten, for that would have been considered a sin, as we can see from this quotation from 1915. my horse is buried in full regalia, collar around its neck, bridle in its mouth, saddle on its back. this is the way my horse is always buried. as god has created it to pull, no one eats its flesh. it is a sin even to skin it. (n) the prohibition against eating horse flesh and considering the horse carcass unclean are probably due to both folk beliefs and christian traditions. in finnish folk tales the horse was born in the sacred grove where the ancestors lived. thus, the horse was a mediator between two worlds: the living and the dead. before the arrival of christianity, horses were sacrificed, and bits and other horse-related items have been found in iron age graves, usually in men’s graves, but also in women’s. in scandinavia during the viking and iron ages, horses were thought to take the dead to the afterlife, being the helping spirits of shamans as well as valuable personal property (shenk 5). christianity reached finland in the 12th century and introduced new practices concerning the horse. the catholic church wanted to draw a line between christians and the pagans who ate horse meat, and it had abjured horse meat from the diet in the 8th century, thus drawing a line between the profane and the sacred. it was also believed that pure animals suitable for food had cloven hoofs and ruminated, and that god gave the horse to humans as a servant and therefore it could not be eaten. (sherman 57; douglas 101) the reluctance to slaughter horses for food has prevailed to some extent in many western countries (thompson 25; vialles 120). in the 20th century attitudes changed and horse carcasses were no longer considered unclean. horses were shot, but they were still buried on the farms, not eaten. old, injured, and sick horses were, however, often sold on at market, and this was seen as cruel by the emerging animal protection movement. at the turn of the 20th century, animal advocates and agricultural schools tried to promote the use of horse flesh for human consumption (nieminen; leinonen, työkaverista ). the purpose of this was to encourage the slaughtering of old and injured horses in order to prevent further suffering. at the time, the idea was still too controversial and the activity did not last long. during the second world war, altogether 22, 000 finnish horses were killed or lost (waris). delivering food to the front lines was not always possible, and sometimes horses were killed for food. horse meat was sometimes a welcome addition to the one nora schuurman & riitta-marja leinonen — the death of the horse 71 sided diet of the soldiers, but usually it was a “necessary evil” that took some getting used to by the men. men would rather eat russian horses, and horsemen did not eat a horse they had known (leinonen, “finnish narratives”). sometimes horses were even buried on the battlefield (ojala). dying horses were symbolically seen as war heroes, like the men. “heroes” and “veterans” were words often used of war horses as well. by speaking of the horse as a hero or veteran “doing its duty in defending the country” (o), people justified their actions and explained their guilt about making horses suffer. it was difficult for people to think of the pain, fear, and agony that horses felt during the war. in harsh conditions horses became very important to many soldiers; they shared the same traumatic experiences and men felt solidarity, affection, respect, guilt, gratitude, and appreciation for the animal (leinonen “finnish narratives”). after the second world war, slaughterhouses paid good money for horses, and slaughtering began to become more popular. more and more slaughterhouses were set up, following developments elsewhere in the western world (vialles 17, burt 122). thus the common way to deal with a horse that was not fit for work was to take it to the slaughterhouse. there were, however, still those who considered it unethical to sell the old horse to be slaughtered, and rather shot and buried it on the farm. some even called these places burial grounds, and pets, such as dogs and cats, were sometimes buried there, too. in the 1950s and 1960s, a neighbor or a relative might come to take the horse to be butchered, and on these occasions the owner of the horse would leave the farm. this tells about the emotional bond that people had with their horses, and it can also refer to the old taboo of the unclean carcass and the custom of letting someone else kill the horse. (leinonen, työkaverista). nevertheless, many owners had to sell the horse to be butchered even though they would have preferred to bury the horse on the farm. the draft horse was considered a faithful servant until the end and even beyond, as we can read in the following. nisse was put into the butcher’s truck just like vappu because we could not afford to give either of them a peaceful final resting place at our home farm, even though we had once planned to do so. our family needed the money, and karjapohjola (slaughterhouse) paid good money for an old horse. — maybe vappu did not expect to have peace after death. and it was helping the family for the last time as the money from its flesh was used for the good of the family. (p) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 72 today, equine death raises several practical questions that the owner of the horse has to solve: first, whether the horse is to be killed or not; second, how the killing will be carried out; and third, what to do with the carcass. there are basically two ways of killing a horse in contemporary finland: a mechanical one and a medical one (cf. marvin 16). the horse can be euthanized with an injection given by the vet, or it can be slaughtered at an abattoir or at home, in which case the meat cannot be consumed by humans. after finland joined the eu in 1995, the prices for horse meat fell, which in turn led to a decline in slaughterhouses accepting horses. there is no tradition of horse rescue charities in finland, and unfit and unwanted horses are in many cases sold on, just as they were a hundred years ago. this welfare problem has been discussed amongst the equine industry and relevant organizations, and they have sought solutions in improving the slaughtering options (suomen hippos, hyvinvoiva hevonen). the questions of equine death, slaughtering, and euthanasia seem, however, to be controversial amongst horse owners. if the horse is euthanized, there are four ways of getting rid of the carcass. it is possible to take it to the dump, but horse carcasses are now considered risk waste and have to be covered immediately (iinatti). burying the horse on the farm is strictly limited to certain conditions due to environmental regulations, e.g. whether the farm is in a groundwater area or not (suomen hippos, hyvinvoiva hevonen). thus, a common practice is to have the carcass taken to a carcass elimination plant. as many owners wish to have a place where they can remember their horses and take flowers to their graves, it is now possible to have horses buried in pet cemeteries or cremated at a pet crematorium. sometimes the death of a horse is caused by an accident or illness. for example, in the 1950s an interviewee’s horse died at a logging site. the horse was going downhill with a load, fell, hit its shoulder on a tree stump, and had to be shot in front of its load. in another case, in a village in lapland, a horse was killed after sinking into a lake and freezing. contemporary horses may die in traffic accidents, as described in one of the interviews. other causes of death mentioned include slipping or falling in the paddock and breaking a leg. incidents of fatal illness such as colic and cushing’s disease are also mentioned. these examples illustrate how the risks for horses have changed along with the practices of horse keeping. grief, guilt and hard decisions. the practical questions of equine death are tied both to ethical issues and also to the emotional relationship to the animal. often the situation emerges unexpectedly, but sometimes there is more time for the owner to be prepared for the loss. the grief caused by the loss of a horse is described in the data in many ways. nora schuurman & riitta-marja leinonen — the death of the horse 73 in the agrarian era, the death of a horse was grieved over by the whole family. men especially talked openly about the grief of losing a horse. this is because the man-horse bond remained central in finnish horse culture until recent decades, and grieving over a horse was “allowed” for men in agrarian society. grief over a dead horse was particularly strong if the horse had been the man’s personal favorite. one interviewee said that the only time he had shed tears over a horse was when his good trotter was killed suddenly at the races. similarly, the death of a riding horse is openly mourned to the extent that it is sometimes difficult to recount the incident to the researcher. often even the thought of losing the horse is hard, as when the horse is ill for a long time with no certainty of its recovery. the sudden death of a horse is grieved over for a long time afterwards, as described by the interviewee whose horse had been euthanized because of a broken leg. she had preserved the broken bones, as they helped her remember that euthanasia had been inevitable: there was nothing you could do about it. actually, i have the bones over there in a basket in the closet, i cooked them so that… that’s another way of dealing with your grief, i cooked the front legs … but when you hold the coronal bone in your hand and it’s, it’s just a handful of pieces, you know for sure that you made the right choice, that you didn’t try whether it could have been saved by an operation. (i) sometimes talking about the death of a horse was difficult for the interviewees, especially if the incident had been very recent. one interviewee still remembered that the vet had talked inappropriately about the dead horse, referring to it as “the carcass: they must have some respect” (f). another interviewee felt that her horse had fallen ill and had to be euthanized due to incorrect feeding, and she blamed the livery stable for it. this reflects the tendency to attribute problems to external conditions as a strategy to avoid guilt (birke et al.). the question about whether to continue the life of a horse or not may be faced by the owner at any stage during the horse’s lifetime, if the horse has an incurable injury or an ailment or a behavioral problem that prevents its use permanently. the owner may also consider euthanizing the horse if she can no longer keep the animal, or the horse does not succeed in competitions in the way it was expected to. when the horse grows old, the owner has to decide whether it will be allowed to live until it dies naturally, or humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 74 whether it will be euthanized while it is still fit and well. in the data, euthanasia is mainly discussed in the context of equine welfare. euthanizing horses is seen as part of taking care of the animal, and thus a moral issue. the interviewees generally believe that horses should not be allowed to live too long when they are sick, injured, or simply too old and weak. as one interviewee puts it: “you have to look at the animal. when its time has come, unfortunately, you just have to let it go” (g). she stresses that the decision is for the owner to make. another interviewee mentions that she wants to have a nice memory of her horse as it has been while it is still “glossy and lovely” (e). if the animal is suffering, it is considered better if it “can get out”: people keep horses until they are too old all too easily; they get so weak, and the horses are sick because they are old and weak. people just don’t want to put them down, ‘cause they are so used to seeing them at the yard. it is, it is wrong. (l) among the arguments in favor of euthanasia is the horse’s own subjective experience. one interviewee claims that it is not important for the horse itself how many years it is still going to live. this kind or argumentation is similar to the emotional strategies used by shelter workers (arluke and sanders). when the animal’s point of view is interpreted in a way that supports the owner’s actions, any feelings of guilt over killing the animal are avoided. on the other hand, there are owners who are not ready to euthanize a horse even if it is sick, claiming that the horse “must be given the value of staying alive, if it is, if the horse is not hurt” (l). especially euthanizing a healthy animal is not considered appropriate. these owners point out that the horse sometimes “deserves to be retired” (e) after working for humans for a long time. in this discourse the horse is compared to humans, but there is also an empathetic tendency to identify with the animal itself. behind it lies the moral question of preserving life whenever possible, but paradoxically, there is a risk of guilt in case the animal is in pain after all. one of the men interviewed said that he had buried only his best trotter at the home farm, and taken the others to the slaughterhouse. this dualism can also be found in the context of contemporary riding horses. if they do not die suddenly, the question of euthanasia performed by the vet at home versus slaughtering at the slaughterhouse has to be faced when the decision about ending the horse’s life has been made. the question about slaughtering horses divides horse owners, but the divide is not always about whether slaughtering is acceptable or not. the main issue is the close emotional relationship to the owner’s own horse, which differentiates this animal from others of its kind. as has been the case during wartime, people do not always want to eat the nora schuurman & riitta-marja leinonen — the death of the horse 75 horse they have known. thus the moral principles of treating animals are contextually defined, when the familiar horse is not treated in the same way as horses in general. for ethical and ecological reasons, slaughtering horses is sometimes considered more ethical than selling them cheap or giving them away for free. many of the interviewees mention the benefits of having horses slaughtered, e.g. a reduction in the amount of imported horse meat, which has been associated with animal welfare problems. in consequence, some owners prefer slaughtering, as can be seen in these two citations: “i don’t want the horse to be in a hole somewhere, because when it’s dead it’s meat” (i); “i would probably take him to the slaughterhouse, because it’s sensible recycling” (j). in these views, slaughtering horses is linked to the naturalizing discourse by defining animals ultimately as organic matter. on the other hand, statements against slaughtering horses are many, as are the experiences of burying horses. being euthanized by the vet and buried at home is regarded as mentally easier for the horse itself. several interviewees do not consider slaughtering an option. one interviewee especially mentions that she has nothing against eating horse meat, but she would still have her horse buried, as she had done before, thus reflecting the above-mentioned attitude towards familiar horses. in spite of the restrictions, many owners do have the possibility of having their horse buried in the stable yard. if the horse is kept at a livery stable, the yard owner sometimes helps by offering to bury the horse on the property. this is considered very good service for the clients and also strengthens the trust between the client and the yard owner. as the two have taken care of the horse together during its lifetime, it is seen as morally appropriate by the yard owner to help out when the horse’s life comes to an end. the yard owner may also help by taking the horse to the slaughterhouse as “there are many who cannot take their own horse there” (i). in this way the responsibility for the death of the animal is handed over from the owner to a professional whose relationship to the animal is distant (marvin 17). one interviewee, a yard owner, tells about precisely this: these clients’ horses that we’ve had and the owner wanted them to be put down, we have handled this so that we take them all the way to the slaughterhouse, so that the owner does not have to see the business. (g) in finland, slaughtering horses is not industrial in the same way as it is for agricultural animals. each case is dealt with separately, thus dealing with the anonymity and many humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 76 welfare problems inherent in industrial slaughter (see vialles 31; calvo) are not discussed in the context of horse slaughter. for some riding horse owners, however, slaughtering a horse is clearly an emotional issue. this seems to reflect a way of seeing the relationship with the horse as emotional and moral despite the instrumental value of the animal. one of the more experienced owners links the close relationship with a horse with a morally responsible way of dealing with its death: “the people who also experience the horse emotionally, how can they manage the thought that they have loaded the horse into the slaughter transport truck” (h). consequently, euthanasia performed by the vet is seen as a favor for a faithful friend: “we had 22 years together. so i thought it would not have been the way i think of the world, if i had led her to the animal transport truck and she had gone to the slaughterhouse and someone had eaten her” (h). one of the strongest arguments against slaughtering is found in the viewpoint of the horse, and especially in the context of being transported to the slaughterhouse, a place unknown to the animal (marvin 16). according to one interviewee, being euthanized by the veterinarian is easier for the animal because it cannot realize what is happening. the horse is taken out of the stable, it is in familiar surroundings, it sees the other horses and a trusted handler, and then it is all over. in contrast, taking the horse into the strange surroundings of an abattoir frightens the animal and causes stress. this stress is transferred to the meat as stress hormones; here the moral and empathetic argument is strengthened by using an instrumental argument. the example illustrates the ways of relating to equine death more generally: although it has been and still is primarily an emotional and ethical issue, the instrumental meanings attached to it are inseparable from the emotional and ethical aspects. conclusions. in this paper, we have discussed the changing practices and conceptions of equine death, from the agrarian work horse era to contemporary riding horse culture. it was our hypothesis that the ways of relating to equine death have changed through modernization. according to our research, there have obviously been changes, but the unchanged aspects can be found in the emotional meanings attached to the horse and the emphasis on seeking the animal’s own point of view. as an emotional relationship to horses is not a new phenomenon, there has been a restructuring of the contexts and manifestations of emotional and instrumental meanings attached to the horse. in the agrarian era, it was thought that humans have a moral duty to treat horses well. good horsemen were socially respected. they disciplined and worked their horses hard but also gave them thanks with a moment’s nora schuurman & riitta-marja leinonen — the death of the horse 77 rest, kind words, and patting. their goal was to get the work done and keep the horse and equipment fit to perform, but they also respected the needs and experiences of the horse, their fellow worker. many of the horses were worn-out and angry in the 1940s and 1950s, but as they were indispensable they had to be used for work. in contemporary equestrian culture the animal may be anthropomorphized or naturalized, but there is also a tendency to understand the horse empathetically as an individual animal. the emotional relationship with the animal, including grief, guilt, and moral questions, has direct implications for how it is cared for, including the decisions involving the ending of its life. historically, the emotional and ethical aspects seem to be strong, but the instrumental conceptions have varied according to contextual conditions and practices. what is new in contemporary horse keeping compared to the agrarian era is that the decisions are more individual and therefore openly reflected on and argued for. the understanding of what is the right way to deal with equine death is tied to the perception of the horse’s own point of view about its own welfare. it seems that the need to reflect on the animal’s viewpoint demarcates the contemporary culture from the agrarian one, placing the former firmly within the realms of modern society. in coping with and managing equine death, the owner of the horse has to solve two main questions. first, whether it is best for the horse to be killed or to be allowed to continue its life. second, if the horse is to be killed, which method is the most appropriate – and most humane. the emotional and instrumental meanings attached to the animal are embedded in these two questions. the ways in which slaughtering and euthanasia are viewed today reflect the historical processes and practices of different times and material contexts. the acceptability of slaughtering horses bears the economic necessity of the post-war era to use and recycle everything possible. ethical and ecological reasons are presently used as justifications for the practice of slaughtering horses. there have, however, been tendencies at different times to avoid slaughtering or eating horses with which the owner has had an emotional relationship. similarly, the wish to bury horses is not a product of contemporary companion animal culture but a historical tradition that is — and may always have been — tied to the emotional relationship with the horse as a workmate and as the significant other. these horses are often euthanized at the yard, which is justified contextually by various strategies such as emphasizing the animal’s own point of view. finally, the practice of keeping old and weak horses alive in the name of retirement, can be interpreted as analogous to dealing humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 78 with old age in human companionships but also as a new way of building relationships with animals in a society that is not dependent on horses economically. the arguments for various solutions in dealing with equine death can be interpreted as strategies to avoid guilt over the death and suffering of the animal. they can also be understood as manifestations of the emotional burden involved in the responsibility of killing an animal to which the owner is closely attached. in promoting a certain way of dealing with equine death, policy-makers, animal advocates, and the equine industry would benefit from understanding the cultural meanings and historical practices of equine death. as the emotional, moral and instrumental questions attached to euthanasia and slaughtering are not homogenous and straightforward, a simple solution is not possible. considering the emotional ties that people have to animals, the ethical and cultural aspects should be foremost in providing opportunities for individual decisions. acknowledgements. we would like to thank the academy of finland for the financial support for the project “companion animals and the affective turn: reconstructing the human-horse relationship in modern culture” (14875) that enabled us to write this article. we also want to thank the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments and suggestions. notes 1.writing competitions organized by the finnish literature society are an old and established method used to gather traditional knowledge from lay people. 2. the finnish literature society is a research institute and cultural organization and a publishing house founded in 1831 for the study and promotion of finnish language and folk culture. the folklore archives collect oral tradition, personal narratives and memories. 3. informants are identified by alphabetical letters, the key to which can be found in the appended list of informants cited. works cited arluke, arnold and clinton r. sanders. regarding animals. philadelphia: temple up, 1996. nora schuurman & riitta-marja leinonen — the death of the horse 79 atkinson, rowland and john flint. “accessing hidden and hard-to-reach populations: snowball research strategies.” social research update 3 (2001). online. 26 january 2009. bekoff, marc. the emotional lives of animals. novato: new world library, 2007. birke, lynda. “talking about horses: control and freedom in the world of “natural horsemanship”. society and animals 16.4 (2008): 107-126. birke, lynda, joanna hockenhull and emma creighton. “the horse’s tale: narratives of caring for/about horses.” society & animals 18.4 (2010): 331-347. buller, henry and carol morris. “farm animal welfare: a new repertoire of naturesociety relations or modernism re-embedded?” sociologia ruralis 43.3 (2003): 216-237. burt, jonathan. “conflicts around slaughter in modernity.” killing animals. the animal studies group. urbana: u illinois p, 2006. 120-144. calvo, erika. “‘most farmers prefer blondes’: the dynamics of anthroparchy in animals’ becoming meat.” journal for critical animal studies vi.1 (2008): 32-45. cassidy, rebecca. the sport of kings. kinship, class and thoroughbred breeding in newmarket. cambridge: cambridge up, 2002. daston, lorraine and mitman, gregg. thinking with animals. new perspectives on anthropomorphism. new york: columbia up, 2005. douglas, mary. purity and danger: an analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. london: routledge, 1984. dutton, diane. “metaphors in constructing human-animal relationships.” encyclopedia of human-animal relationships vol. 3. ed. marc bekoff. westport: greenwood press, 2007. 1065-1068. eskola, jari and juha suoranta. johdatus laadulliseen tutkimukseen. tampere: vastapaino, 1998. flyvbjerg, bent. making social science matter: why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again. cambridge: cambridge up, 2001. franklin, adrian. animals and modern cultures. a sociology of human-animal relations in modernity. london: sage publications, 1999. haavikko, ritva. hevonen taiteessa, runoudessa, historiassa. helsinki: wsoy, 2003. harbers, hans. “animal farm love stories: about care and economy.” care in practice. on tinkering in clinics, homes and farms. ed. annemarie mol, ingunn moser and jeannette pols. bielefeld: transcript verlag, 2010. 141-170. higgin, marc, adrian evans and mara miele. “a good kill: socio-technical organisations of farm animal slaughter.” humans and other animals: critical perspectives. ed. bob carter and nickie charles. london: palgrave macmillan, 2011. 173-194. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 80 holloway, lewis. “pets and protein: placing domestic livestock on hobby-farms in england and wales.” journal of rural studies 17 (2001): 293-307. howell, philip. “a place for the animal dead: pets, pet cemeteries and animal ethic in late victorian britain.” ethics, place and environment 5.1 (2002): 5-22. iinatti, heidi. hevosen hävittämisen vaihtoehdot. hevosagro seminar sept. 17th 2011 in oulu, finland. online. 17 oct 2011. jokinen, arja, kirsi juhila and eero suoninen. diskurssianalyysi liikkeessä. tampere: vastapaino, 1999. law, john. “care and killing: tensions in veterinary practice.” care in practice. on tinkering in clinics, homes and farms. ed. annemarie mol, ingunn moser and jeannette pols. bielefeld: transcript verlag, 2010. 57-71. lehikoinen, heikki. ole siviä sikanen. suomalaiset eläinuskomukset. helsinki: teos, 2009. leinonen, riitta-marja. ”ihmisen ja hevosen suhteen muuttuminen.” maataloustieteen päivät 2010. ed. anneli hopponen. 2010. suomen maataloustieteellisen seuran julkaisuja no 26. online. 14 september 2011. _____. “finnish narratives of the horse in world war ii.” animals and war. ed. ryan hediger. boston: brill. forthcoming. _____. työkaverista tuntihevoseksi. ihmisen ja hevosen suhde suomessa. doctoral dissertation. university of oulu, finland. draft. macnaghten, phil. “animals in their nature: a case study on public attitudes to animals, genetic modification and ‘nature’.” sociology 38.3 (2004): 533-551. marvin, garry. “wild killing: contesting the animal in hunting.” killing animals. the animal studies group. urbana: u illinois p, 2006. 10-29 meehan, michael p. “the attachment between humans and animals.” encyclopedia of human-animal relationships: a global exploration of our connections with animals. ed. marc bekoff. westport, conn: greenwood press, 2007. 143-145. morris, brian. the power of animals. an ethnography. oxford: berg, 2000. nieminen, hannu. sata vuotta eläinten puolesta. kertomus suomen eläinsuojeluyhdistyksen toiminnasta 1901-2001. helsinki: suomen eläinsuojeluyhdistys, 2001. ojala, ilmari. suomenhevonen suomen puolesta 1939-1945. hämeenlinna: karisto, 1997. serpell, james. “anthropomorphism and anthropomorphic selection – beyond the ‘cute response’.” society and animals 11.1 (2003): 83-100. serpell, james and elizabeth paul. “pets and the development of positive attitudes to animals.” animals and human society – changing perspectives. ed. aubrey manning and james serpell. london: routledge, 1994. 127-143. nora schuurman & riitta-marja leinonen — the death of the horse 81 shenk, peter. to valhalla by horseback? horse burial in scandinavia during the viking age. master’s thesis in nordic viking and medieval culture. university of oslo, 2002. sherman, david m. tending animals in the global village. baltimore – philadelphia: lippincott williams & wilkins, 2002. srl. ratsastustietoa. suomen ratsastajainliitto ry. 14 september 2010. suomen hippos. tunnusluvut 2010. online. accessed 6 september 2012. _____. hyvinvoiva hevonen. online. accessed 6 september 2012. suutala, maria. onnellisia lehmiä ja viisaita ihmisiä. elämää saariston luontaistaloudessa ja sen muutoksia. huhmari: karprint, 2008. talve, ilmari. finnish folk culture. helsinki: finnish literature society, 1997. theodossopoulos, d. “care order and usefulness: the context of the human-animal relationship in a greek island community.” animals in person. cultural perspectives on human-animal intimacies. ed. john knight. oxford: berg, 2005. 15-36. thompson, kirrilly. performing human-animal relations in spain. an anthropological study of bullfighting from horseback in andalusia. thesis submitted for the degree of doctor of philosophy. discipline of anthropology, faculty of humanities and social sciences, university of adelaide, 2007. tovey, hilary. “heorising nature and society in sociology: the invisibility of animals.”sociologia ruralis, 43.3 (2003): 196-215. tuomi, jouni and anneli sarajärvi. laadullinen tutkimus ja sisällönanalyysi. helsinki: tammi, 2002. tyler, tom. “f horses had hands….” society & animals 11.3 (2003): 267–281. de waal, frans. chimpanzee politics. power and sex among apes. baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1998. waris, matti. ”suomenhevonen sotahevosena.” suomenhevonen suomen puolesta 1939– 1945. ed. ilmari ojala. hämeenlinna: karisto oy. 1997. 35–74. vialles, noélie. animal to edible. cambridge: cambridge up, 1994. vilkuna, asko. suomalaisen karjasuojan vaiheita. helsinki: suomen muinaismuistoyhdistys, 1960. ylimaunu, juha. ”elinkeinot ihmisen ja eläimen suhteen muokkaajana.” eläimet ihmisen mielenmaisemassa. ed. henni ilomäki and outi lauhakangas. helsinki: suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura, 2002. appendix: list of informants cited a: male, b. 1924, northern finland b: male, b. 1930, southern finland c: male, b. 1930, western finland humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 82 d: male, b. 1919, western finland e: female, aged 33, eastern finland f: female, aged 44, eastern finland g: female, aged 43, eastern finland h: female, aged 60, eastern finland i: female, aged 40, eastern finland j: female, aged 23, eastern finland k: female, aged 22, eastern finland l: female, aged 20, eastern finland m: sks kra. ht 94–102. 2003. male, b. 1930, western finland. references to the archive material are made in the following way: sks stands for suomalaisen kirjallisuuden seura (finnish literature society), kra stands for kansanrunousarkisto (folklore archives), ht stands for hevostarina (horse story) collection, numbers 94–102 stand for the page numbers of the collection, to ensure the anonymity of the narrator, and 2003 is the year in which the narratives were collected. n: sks kra. paulaharju, samuli 15594. 1915. female, aged 47, eastern finland. paulaharju, samuli is the name of the collector of the information, 15594 stands for the archive number of the information and 1915 is the year in which the information was collected. this citation is from the ethnology collection of the finnish literature society. o: sks kra. ht 492–500. 2003: male, b. 1939, southern finland. p: sks kra. ht 192-266. 2003: male, b. 1935, western finland. microsoft word fellenz pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 2:2 marc fellenz a trace of kinship: the place of animals in environmental aesthetics introduction. the pressing reality of looming environmental degradation has made the revaluation of long-held attitudes toward the natural world a practical necessity. important contributions have been made to this moment of reckoning by philosophers of environmental ethics, whose work moves the conversation beyond a preoccupation with human self-interest to include analyses of the moral standing of nonhuman elements of nature and the appropriate conceptual framework for including the natural environment within the field of moral concern. yet not all the recent philosophical reflections on nature have worked within the normative categories of natural rights and moral obligations. the past several decades also have seen increased attention to the special issues raised by the aesthetic appreciation of natural environments, moving philosophical aesthetics beyond its traditional focus on the philosophy of art.1 at the same time, thinkers in the continental tradition have highlighted the philosophical significance of our experience of nature by extending the phenomenology of place to our encounters with the nonhuman world.2 these philosophical efforts urge that experience in nature should inform the emergent rethinking of the human/nature relationship, and that aesthetics should hold a place along side political, moral, and utilitarian considerations in the formulation of environmental principles. that philosophers now should be attending to the aesthetics of our experience of nature is perhaps not surprising, given the growing attention to environmental themes in art, literature, and popular culture. more significantly, just as the ethics, epistemology, and ontology of the post-darwinian era have been challenged by the need to reassess traditional anthropocentric positions, aesthetic theory also must explore a broader terrain beyond our aesthetic responses to human art and artifacts. moreover, this work carries great practical significance. as history shows, moral and political transformations rarely are accomplished through theory and argument alone, but require an affective ground that is prepared to nurture change; thus, attention to and encouragement of aesthetic encounters with the natural world may have an important role to play in the theoretical efforts of environmental ethicists bearing fruit in policy and practice. marc fellenz — a trace of kinship: the place of animals in environmental aesthetics 29 however, efforts at analyzing the aesthetic appreciation of nature are complicated by the very problem that prompts this renewed analysis: the need to rethink the human/nature distinction. the categories “human” and “nature” have been conceived and constructed in multiple ways that in turn feed disparate means of conceptualizing and approaching the nonhuman world. the subsequent ambiguity concerning both the subject and object of the aesthetic appreciation of nature has resulted in many competing models for understanding the aesthetics of natural environments, and a consensus has yet to emerge on many fundamental questions: what, if anything, distinguishes the aesthetic appreciation of nature from that of human artifacts and environments? what, if anything, must the human observer bring to an encounter with nature in order for any subsequent appreciation to be properly aesthetic? what, if any, meaning is to be derived from those occasions when the natural world functions as a source of aesthetic satisfaction? in this article, i do not attempt to address the full range of problems these questions raise and the literature devoted to them. rather, i argue only that some insight into these matters may be gained by attending to the underappreciated place of nonhuman animals in environmental aesthetics. the experience of natural environments as habitats — dwelling places for animate beings to which humans are related in complex ways — is fundamental to dimensions of nature aesthetics that are prominent in our contemporary circumstance. experiencing wild animals and the environments they inhabit creates the opportunity for aesthetically powerful recollections of the historical and pre-historical ties to the nonhuman world surrounding our domesticated enclaves. today, given how remotely many humans live from that world and the prospect that the distance will only increase in the future, these recollections will permeate many aesthetic encounters with nature and inform the value of those experiences. the inspiration for my approach comes from several sources, the first being the simple desire to make sense of my own aesthetic appreciation of nature, in which encounters with animals and their habitats have held a central place; no doubt, there are points in my analysis where philosophical rigor is eclipsed by a more personal search for a language adequate to my experiences. nonetheless, a second, philosophical motive is at work here as well: i have argued elsewhere that, despite the valuable work done by environmental ethicists and animal rights advocates, our traditional ethical models have proven inadequate for articulating the normative value of the animal’s world, and that a complete axiology of animals and the natural environment must transcend humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 30 concern for the logical consistency of our moral reasoning to include analysis and experience more akin to aesthetic appreciation.3 this essay is an effort at developing the point in the converse direction by arguing that a complete understanding of natural environmental aesthetics requires some reflection on encounters with wild animals. deconstructing plotinus. the third source for this paper is the most unlikely one: the aesthetic theory of plotinus, the third-century founder of neoplatonism. in his treatise “on beauty” in the first of the enneads, plotinus reflects on the nature of physical beauty in this way: so let us ... state what the primary beauty in bodies really is. it is something which we become aware of even at the first glance; the soul speaks of it as if it understood it, recognizes and welcomes it and as it were adapts itself to it. but when it encounters the ugly it shrinks back and rejects it and turns away from it and is out of tune and alienated from it. our explanation is that the soul, since it is by nature what it is and is related to the higher kind of reality in the realm of being, when it sees something akin to it or a trace of its kindred reality, is delighted and thrilled and returns to itself and remembers itself and its own possessions. (237) what are we to make of this intriguing text? ostensibly, plotinus’s meaning can only be discerned in a metaphysical context, namely, the dualism of form and matter central to neoplatonic ontology. on this standard reading, the fundamental point of the text is that the elevation of material reality to a state that might properly be described as “beautiful” can only be explained by matter’s submission to and participation in spiritual form. only with this dualism in mind can one also appreciate plotinus’s subsequent argument that the true beauty of a human being rests with the intelligible soul and its natural function of giving form to the material body.4 although plotinus assigns a somewhat more positive value to the appreciation of material beauty than did earlier platonic thought, it is only by invoking the triumph of form over matter that plotinus can make sense of the human soul recognizing and welcoming aesthetically beautiful material objects. consistent with classical models, this reading shows the metaphysics and aesthetics of plotinus’s system to be mutually reinforcing. indeed, plotinus’s philosophy is typical of the ontological and evaluative dualism that has underlain the west’s traditional elevation of the cultural, the spiritual, and the intelligible at the expense of the natural, the physical, and the animal, and so his text marc fellenz — a trace of kinship: the place of animals in environmental aesthetics 31 would seem to be an unlikely starting point for a post-humanistic discussion of nature aesthetics. however, there is another dimension to this text that deserves attention. if we set aside plotinus’s metaphysical explanation of the soul’s aesthetic responses, we find that plotinus is also offering a rich phenomenological description of the aesthetic experience itself, of what the soul “sees” and “speaks” in the presence of material beauty. by bracketing the categories of ontological dualism, a phenomenological reading discloses a text that is separable from plotinus’s metaphysical project; indeed, the naturalistic overtones of plotinus’s language invites interpretations of the text quite at odds with his presumed intention. moreover, this deconstruction is not warranted merely by the play of words, for the resulting text illuminates several significant features of aesthetic experience that modern aesthetic theories have not emphasized. furthermore, although plotinus’s account is indifferent to the distinction between art and nature, i argue that these features are especially evident in certain types of aesthetic encounters with natural environments. thus, reflection on this text will prove valuable for thinking through some problems of environmental aesthetics. aesthetic kinship. like many later accounts, plotinus’s description locates aesthetic experience in a relational context. the aesthetic encounter is experienced as a welcoming accommodation in which the subject readily adapts to [sunarmóttetai, fits together with] the object. thus, it is only by standing in a certain relationship to the object that the soul will have the experience of beauty. however, unlike kantian theories that define the aesthetic relation in terms of disinterestedness or distance, plotinus uses the very different language of kinship. plotinus’s aesthetic observer experiences the beautiful aesthetic object as akin [suggenès], of the same family, whereas the ugly is present as alienated [allotrioumènê]. neither identical to the subject nor “out of tune” with her, the aesthetic object is a relative — other, yet related. furthermore, the language of kinship invites a deeper challenge to modern aesthetic models — consistent with the post-modern criticism of such thinkers as dewey and heidegger — by locating the aesthetic outside the subject/object dualism that defines the arena of modern epistemology. indeed, it suggests that in aesthetic experience the subject and object are not entirely separate, for such experience is grounded on the shared origin of observer and observed, their natural connectedness. in plotinus’s description, the experience of beauty is the aesthetic awareness of this relatedness. the suggestion that a sense of kinship is a defining feature of the aesthetic is provocative, but how broadly may we apply plotinus’s description? even if we leave humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 32 behind the platonic metaphysics with which he supports it, is what we may call the “kinship model” appropriate to the variety of occasions that are generally recognized as aesthetically evocative? although my focus here is the aesthetics of nature, plotinus’s language of kinship seems vindicated to the extent that it allows us to articulate certain fundamental aspects of the aesthetics of art. for example, consider the vaunted — if arguable — ability of great art to transcend historical and cultural barriers and form bonds between unacquainted artists and audiences, revealing “kinship” with sisters and brothers of distant places and times that might otherwise remain unacknowledged. at the extreme, today we may find ourselves strangely fascinated by ancient artifacts and the odd sense of connection their creators’ aesthetic choices provoke in us; it is also apparent that contemporaries and compatriots may experience a heightened awareness of relatedness through shared artistic encounters. plotinus’s language of “kinship” resonates with later accounts of these phenomena — such as the kantian description of the peculiar “subjective universality” demanded by the judgments of taste, or tolstoy’s discussion of the “infectious” nature of genuine art that destroys the spiritual gaps among disparate individuals — and thus is consistent with a history that recognizes a sense of relatedness as a component of the experience of art. more to the point of plotinus’s description, however, this sense of relatedness may also extend from the audience to the artwork. just as artists commonly refer to putting something of themselves in their work, the non-artist who is moved by an artwork also may feel peculiarly connected to it. the appreciator of art is broadened and enriched by feeling related to something coming from without (“that speaks to me”), experiencing the object itself as “akin” — something other that is nonetheless curiously related — if only metaphorically. in part, this may reflect a general human tendency to anthropomorphize artifacts and imbue inanimate objects with subjectivity they do not in fact possess. however, whatever the ultimate psychological foundation of such experiences, plotinus’s account — that in beauty we are drawn to an awareness of a peculiar kinship with what we would otherwise think of as unrelated — aptly describes some of the complexity of aesthetic experience. but what of our aesthetic experience of natural environments? if the experience of beauty is indeed a felt sense of kinship, then it is plausible that the “beauty” we find in nature — an admittedly vague notion, which has been conceptualized in innumerable ways — may be informed with a sense of kinship that is evoked by a wild encounter. indeed, the language of kinship offers interesting possibilities for articulating our aesthetic reactions to nature, for our connections to the natural world are especially complex and multilayered, covering degrees of relatedness that are both metaphorical marc fellenz — a trace of kinship: the place of animals in environmental aesthetics 33 and literal. the biological sciences provide a variety of conceptual models — from the ecosystemic to the genetic — for thinking about the relationships between humans and the larger biosphere; certain religious doctrines from various traditions also suggest that humans have essential ties with the natural world. the aesthetic encounter with nature may be experienced as an alternative, affectively potent way of confronting these alleged connections. no doubt the formal aesthetic properties of landscape, scenic vistas, and discrete natural objects account for some of the aesthetic value of the natural world; grace, balance, symmetry, and variety can carry aesthetic power regardless of the objects that exhibit them. however, the language of kinship expresses more than the appeal of these properties, allowing us to attend to the aesthetic impact of our complex relatedness to the nonhuman world, and thereby illuminating aspects of nature aesthetics that otherwise might go unnoticed. as i argue in the subsequent, the kinship model also provides a fruitful framework for analyzing the variety and historicism of the aesthetic appreciation of nature. the place of animals. the myths and liturgies of the prescientific age are filled with images that express a sense of human kinship to inanimate elements of the natural world. still today, some will use the language of kinship to describe their aesthetic responses to natural geography, landscape, and flora — to report feeling strangely connected to these nonconscious components of nature. however, the image of kinship invites us to give special attention to the relationships between humans and other animals, where literal biological connections, spanning a wide range of distance and closeness, obtain. these connections defy simplistic interpretations, and cannot be understood without appreciating the ambiguous web of similarities and differences between humans and the rest of the animal world. yet, awareness that humans hold some type kinship with animals has inspired an array of cultural products, from the ancient religious belief in trans-species reincarnation to the recent technological accomplishment of trans-species organ transplants. the efforts of generations of philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, and biologists have eroded every oncefirm division between human and animal realities, revealing continuity and kinship at the moral, epistemological, and even cultural levels. in considering the ethical significance of human/animal interactions in her animals and why they matter, philosopher mary midgley offers up the image of a “mixed community” to describe the complex of overlapping relationships that humans have developed with the socializable animals they have domesticated; her point is to argue that as rightful members of this community, domesticated animals are entitled to some direct moral standing. with humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 34 justification we may extend her point with the image of an “extended family”: humans and animals, literal kin through their ancient genetic ties, viewed as co-evolving through the history of domesticated civilization and, in the process, forming multiple bonds of social “kinship.” plotinus’s description of the experience of beauty leads to the prediction that these bonds will be aesthetically potent material, a prediction that is confirmed even if we limit ourselves to the artworld. human-animal interrelationships emerge in widely varied artistic manifestations, from the recurrent literary and dramatic themes of human-to-animal metamorphosis and humans living among animals, to bodymodification artists who surgically alter themselves to assume animal forms. mark dion, xu bing, wim delvoye, bansky, and many other contemporary artists have made compelling use of the powerful aesthetic presence of live animals, and their work consciously exploits more than the formal aesthetic properties of animal bodies. as steve baker has discovered through this type of art, the ambiguous territory occupied by animals — related yet other —renders their very existence a medium with unique artistic possibilities.5 of fundamental importance to environmental aesthetics, this curious aesthetic power of animals is also at work in certain encounters with nature. consider that the aesthetic presence of what may appear to be an uninhabited, “azoic” environment is fundamentally different from that of an encounter with wildlife. a powerful shift occurs when animals present themselves in a natural setting: the seal that emerges on a harsh shoreline, the hawk that pierces the otherwise empty sky, the frog that disturbs the still pond. with such appearances distanced scenery is transformed into encompassing habitat, and the formal, mostly visual, aesthetic properties of the environment become enriched, if not supplanted, by other data provided by smell, sound, and kinesthetic sensations. in the presence of wild animals, the aesthetic response to a natural environment can undergo a decided shift away from the passive observation of appealing vistas to something more intense and engaging. the kinship model offers an effective way of accounting for such shifts. in these moments, it comes to be felt (not simply thought, but felt): a living, embodied being, in ways akin to myself, is at home here. as midgley’s analysis suggests, the sense of human/animal kinship informs several morally significant relationships with domesticated animals. yet how much more provocative is the image of kinship when applied to wild animals living in natural environments. such creatures are living, embodied, mortal creatures like ourselves, yet marc fellenz — a trace of kinship: the place of animals in environmental aesthetics 35 they inhabit neither cage nor barnyard nor house, but rather places at the margins of civilization and beyond. they are clearly related to us, but also starkly other. their place in the world is very different from ours, and consequently any sense of relatedness we feel to such beings may be more challenging than the kinship we can feel toward our fellow humans, artifacts or pets. trying to accommodate that challenge in moral terms has proved daunting for the fields of environmental ethics and wildlife management. however, as a description of aesthetic experience, the kinship model allows us to articulate the intensity of certain encounters with wild animals in natural environments, and prepares the ground for appreciating the significance of such moments. kinship and the problems of environmental aesthetics. plotinus’s kinship model of aesthetic experience provides a fitting vocabulary to describe certain types of aesthetic encounters with nature, and draws our attention to the special place that our experience of animals may have in the aesthetic appreciation of natural environments. the value of this model is born out by a brief look at the fruitful pathways it provides for approaching several philosophical problems in environmental aesthetics. art and nature. as noted above, a central question for environmental aesthetics is whether any features of our aesthetic response to natural environments distinguish it from the aesthetic appreciation of art and artifacts. some standard responses are: (1) to stipulate that aesthetics simply is art appreciation, and that therefore whatever satisfactions the experience of nature offers must be analyzed in non-aesthetic categories (conceptual understanding, spiritual stimulation, pragmatic goods, etc.); (2) to recognize that nature does afford genuinely aesthetic experience, but only to the extent that it presents us with formal aesthetic properties (symmetry, contrast, diversity, etc.) that are also at work in aesthetically effective art and artifacts; (3) to recognize that both art and nature offer aesthetic experience, but that they do so, at least in part, on separate bases. variations of this third possibility are found amongst the recent attempts to think through an aesthetics of nature while recognizing the unique reality of environments as distinct from discrete objects. the kinship model offers an additional option: a sense of relatedness may inform all manner of aesthetic experience, but the nature of the relation, and thus the tone and intensity of the experience, will vary depending on whether the occasion is artifactual or natural (with further room for variation within each of those categories). a buck painted by landseer and a pig tattooed by delvoye may both evoke aesthetic reactions that exploit human/animal humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 36 kinship, but with very different intentions and to very different effects. different still will be the experience of an aesthetic immersion in a natural environment, mediated through an encounter with wildlife; to be drawn into a sense of connection with the natural world is a unique but still aesthetically charged experience, analogous to, yet phenomenologically distinct from, that of being drawn into the artworld through the mediation of an artwork. despite important differences amongst these aesthetic experiences, the flexible notion of kinship provides a coherent framework for discussing them all. additionally, the kinship model helps to explain an important difference between nature and art that was recognized by kant: that the aesthetic appreciation of nature cannot be entirely “disinterested,” for unlike the satisfaction offered by aesthetically powerful artwork, the beauty found in natural objects is contingent upon their genuine material existence. if our aesthetic appreciation of nature were simply a response to the formal properties of natural objects, it would be difficult to explain the phenomenological difference between the aesthetic impact of natural objects and that of convincing fakes (kant’s own explanation — involving awareness of our moral superiority over nature — is notoriously strained). we may still enjoy the tune when we discover that what we thought was a birdsong is in fact an accomplished imitation; the forms and colors in a bouquet may be just as pleasing whether they are embodied in silk or natural petals. yet, when we are tricked into accepting an artifact as a natural object and the error is revealed, an evident shift in the aesthetic experience occurs — something distinct from the analogous situation of, say, being duped by the forgery of an artwork. the kinship model explains this shift through the different senses of kinship that may be felt in the cases of aesthetically moving artifacts and natural objects. it is quite possible to feel a sense of relatedness to an artifact that imitates a natural object; as was noted above, kinship may attend the aesthetic reaction to a work of art, which may include a photorealistic landscape painting or a silk flower. however, to feel akin to something not of human origin will be a more interesting and challenging experience, and this is the distinctive feature of certain aesthetic encounters with nature — most powerfully in the presence of living animals. animals are present as realized possibilities of life in the natural world; their aesthetic appeal is not exhausted by their graceful, symmetrical natural forms but also includes the link they provide to those embodied possibilities. the variety and context of aesthetic experience. because it provides a coherent framework for articulating the aesthetic satisfactions to be found in a range of artistic and natural encounters, the kinship model is able to match one of the strengths of the marc fellenz — a trace of kinship: the place of animals in environmental aesthetics 37 “distance model” by allowing us to account for the variety of aesthetic experience — both in terms of the different degrees of aesthetic satisfaction typically found in various types of objects as well as the subjective differences among the experiences of individual observers. specific to nature aesthetics, some may respond to verdant landscape that offers homes to large, culturally significant mammals, while others may respond to termite mounds or the shed skins of snakes. there are degrees of kinship to be found in each of these natural presences, and particular individuals and cultures will — for historically constructed reasons — be more attuned to some than others. moreover, the complicated kinship between humans and the broad range of animal life provides a tool for contextualizing these different aesthetic experiences. in the postdarwinian world, the relatedness of humans and other animals is generally acknowledged, but has proven ambiguous in its implications for the human selfconcept. simultaneous with this period of crisis, the aesthetic impact of nature has taken on an urgency — evidenced by the recent philosophical attention it has received — that is not apparent in other eras. in those cultural circumstances in which humans understand themselves as either fully immersed in the animal’s world or completely separate from it, the aesthetic presence of nature will be very different, if not missing entirely. i will not pursue it in detail here, but analysis may reveal interesting correlations between the significance of the natural world as an aesthetic object and the understanding of the human/animal border. for example, amongst the ancient greeks and throughout much of christendom, the human/animal boundary was absolute, and at the same time “nature” was not generally viewed as something beautiful; conversely, where human/animal kinship is culturally institutionalized, the natural world has important spiritual, psychological and economic importance, but is not typically viewed as an object of aesthetic engagement. for many of us today, the connections between humans and animals are more problematic and ambiguous, and perhaps this complexity creates the climate for the type of aesthetic appreciation of nature that has provoked the contemporary discussion. subjectivity and objectivity. recognizing that our experienced kinship with wild animals is an important element in the aesthetic appreciation of nature also sheds some light on the complex relationship between the subjective and the objective in this type of aesthetic experience. by definition, the appreciation of a natural environment requires the acknowledgment of a larger, extra-human context in which the human observer is situated. reflected in the thought of deep ecology, many naturalists have decried the anthropocentric efforts to reduce the value — aesthetic or otherwise — of the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 38 nonhuman world to what may be expressed in the familiar categories of human culture, efforts that undermine the objective power of nonhuman nature to act upon us. with this in mind, those accounts of nature aesthetics that are modeled on the aesthetic appreciation of art and reduce the aesthetic impact of natural environments to the effects of their formal properties might be viewed as tantamount to domesticating the encounter with nature, an attempt to tame our experiences of the nonhuman world by confining them within the walls of human subjectivity and our pre-established categories of meaning. on the other hand, it must be granted that we can only have aesthetic appreciation of what is assimilable to our human sensibility, of what, as plotinus puts it, we can “fit together with,” and this is inevitably shaped by the all too human operations of history, technology and political power. as allen carlson argues, some degree of “artifactualization” — the assimilation of nature to where we are — may be necessary in order for aesthetic appreciation to be possible.6 yet this does not mean that all aesthetic encounters with nature are purely the result of human subjectivity being splashed across the canvas of nature (even if many such encounters may amount to just that). another possibility presents itself in the being of a nonhuman animal, which embodies its own perspective on the natural world. of course, the lives of animals are as vulnerable as the rest of nature to being obscured by the projected meanings and myths of human culture. but, through the recognition of our kinship, our shared vitality and mortality, the animal may also serve as an empathetic object that draws us outside our usual selves. the animal thus embodies a human-scale focal point around which the aesthetic experience of nature may be framed, and plays a uniquely valuable role in maintaining balance between the subjective and objective poles of the experience.7 aesthetic traces. while this survey is cursory, it makes a preliminary case for the power of the kinship model of aesthetic experience and its potential value for environmental aesthetics. yet even if this is granted, a potentially serious limitation on its application to the aesthetic appreciation of nature needs to be addressed. while generations of environmental thinkers have argued that humanity must nurture its ties to the natural world, their advice runs against a long and deep current in western thinking which has held that the nature of man demands transcendence of the rest of nature. thus, it may not be obvious to modern observers that the beauty they find in natural encounters is indeed the experience of kinship, rather than a distanced appreciation of the formal aesthetic properties of natural objects and vistas or — the more problematic kantian position — an indirect awareness of our superiority over nature. plotinus, agreeing with later empiricist aestheticians, indicates that there is marc fellenz — a trace of kinship: the place of animals in environmental aesthetics 39 something immediate in the experience of the beautiful, for it is recognized “at the first glance.” how then will the kinship model account for the presence of nature as an aesthetic source when there are many for whom any “kinship” to the natural world may not be apparent at the first — or even second or third —glance? a possible answer to this difficulty is suggested by the phenomenological reading of plotinus’s text. although he states that beauty will be apparent at first glance, plotinus writes that the kinship which occasions the experience of beauty may be felt only faintly, in the form of a trace [íchnos]. thus, a second interesting feature of aesthetic experience is revealed in his description: the experience may be intense even though the connection to what occasions it is subtle and indirect. to some extent, this is true by definition, as the aesthetic concerns what is felt, rather than what is made obvious through reflective analysis. this is apparent in the aesthetics of art where subtlety and nuance are prized, and obviousness, when not intentionally ironic, is likely to be dismissed as kitsch. moreover, as is often the case with someone not versed in the formal elements of design or composition, it need not be transparent to those who are moved by a work of art why they have been affected; we often know what we find aesthetically pleasing without knowing why (and, notoriously, often the artists themselves are unable to offer much guidance). certainly the seriousness and depth of appreciation are enhanced as the principles of art become clear with education and reflection, but such understanding is not prerequisite for aesthetic experience. indeed, much of the comprehension of art history and theory that constitutes art appreciation has little to do with aesthetics per se. yet, as we saw with his description of aesthetic kinship, plotinus’s insight here is especially fruitful when applied to the aesthetic appreciation of natural environments rather than artifacts. and, once again, the invitation to pursue this direction is offered by the naturalistic connotation plotinus’s language carries: íchnos, “trace,” also refers to the spoor or track left behind by a wild animal, a fortuitous image for the discussion of environmental aesthetics. to follow that image, we may consider that the hunter or naturalist who enters a natural space may encounter an animal either directly or mediately through the traces the animal has left behind. in the latter case, the experience may be of something less photogenic, but it nonetheless imbues the space in which it is found with a significance — this is a habitat — and, relatedly, an aesthetic presence it would not otherwise have. in like manner, the sense of kinship between human and animal that i claim informs certain aesthetic encounters with nature need humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 40 not be overt. perhaps it is easily felt in the presence of our close mammalian relatives, but it also may be found in the face of cold-blooded amphibians; it is invited by picturesque views of charismatic megafauna, but the trigger can also be a rodent’s gnaw-marks left on a piece of bone (…there are needs here...), an owl pellet (...life and death are around...), or the penetration of a sound or smell through a natural environment (...communication is taking place). while some who praise the aesthetic power of nature may do so as a result of a prior moral commitment to their kinship with other animals, more subtle and unexpected encounters with wild animals also may be the source for aesthetic appreciation of nature, as is attested to throughout a large body of environmental literature. those who resist welcoming other animals as kin may of course still describe their experience of nature as aesthetically charged, albeit in different terms. we might try to address their resistance with evidence of human/animal continuity gleaned from the modern biological sciences, with a view to prompting a reinterpretation of their aesthetic experience. indeed, some (e.g. carlson) have argued that scientific knowledge of the natural world is essential to the fully informed aesthetic appreciation of nature (just as, it may be argued, a knowledge of art history and theory is necessary for robust art appreciation). however, while an understanding of the environmental sciences may be sufficient to awaken in some a sense of kinship with the nonhuman world, it is problematic to see such knowledge as necessary for either aesthetic experience or recognition of our relatedness to the rest of nature. consider, for example, any number of prescientific totemic cultures, in which recognition of kinship with elements of the natural world informed all fundamental social institutions, including their artwork and aesthetic sensibilities. lacking the evidence available through modern genetics, these peoples nonetheless were able to perceive other animals as their kindred cohabitants of the world, something available to any sensitive observer today. living close to nature, pre-agricultural societies integrated human/animal kinship in their worldview, in spite of their lack of modern scientific knowledge, because this relationship was infused throughout their lived experience. consequently, whatever aesthetic experience preagricultural peoples had of nature and animals was no doubt very different from that available today to those in the developed world; indeed, one may question whether their appreciation of nature even qualifies as properly aesthetic. however, if we answer in the negative, it would not be because they lacked scientific knowledge of human/animal connections but rather because their awareness of these connections was so intertwined with their practical lives.8 today, as the heirs of western science — rich in knowledge of genetics and evolution, but often deprived of regular contact with what lies beyond our domesticated lives — any felt kinship with the natural world may marc fellenz — a trace of kinship: the place of animals in environmental aesthetics 41 be sparked unexpectedly, by subtle traces of ourselves we find in the animal’s world. how typical such experiences are is an empirical question not easily answered. but when they do inform our aesthetic encounters with nature, they may offer us a more intense thrill than our forebears enjoyed. the aesthetic startle. this point dovetails with a third feature of aesthetic experience expressed in plotinus’s description: the emotional state that accompanies the experience of beauty. plotinus claims that the soul is thrilled [dieptóêtai, from ptoeō, to scare, stun, excite; thus, startled might be a better rendering] by the encounter. although the aesthetic is not reducible to a simple emotional reaction, it is also more affectively charged than the sober contemplation of beautiful forms. plotinus explains this by claiming that the kinship which occasions the experience of beauty is found in an unexpected place; the soul finds a trace of its own spiritual nature present within the lower material world and is stunned at having found a relative in such a foreign land. once more, the phenomenological reading of plotinus’s description may, in a metaphysically neutral way, be related to generally recognized features of art’s aesthetic power. first, it might be said that an unexpected thrill is inherent to the aesthetic encounter with art. that such encounters often provoke verbal interjections — “that’s beautiful!” or “oh my!” or simply “wow!” — is linguistic evidence that effective art does more than foster staid contemplation. the alchemy by which mere oil and wood can become a madonna of raphael and horsehair rubbing against catgut can produce a bach violin concerto can be stunning to materialists and dualists alike, and offering such a startle is central to art’s power. second, an “aesthetic startle” fits with common explanations of how the artist is able to accomplish such transubstantiation. although it is debatable whether successful artists are in possession of a unique “genius,” few will deny that perceptual acuity and expressive depth allow them to reveal a novel side of common objects and experiences, to surprise the audience by revealing something that has in fact been near all along. further, we might relate the experience of an aesthetic startle to the modern notion of disinterestedness: the subject may be struck by the power of a work of art — something that may be neither practically useful nor morally valuable — to evoke an intense sense of relatedness that is distinct from both the pleasant and the good, and serves no pragmatic interest. applied to nature aesthetics, plotinus’s description once again offers insights that are especially fruitful. if, following the preceding analysis, we accept that the aesthetic experience of the natural world is informed by the human observer’s sense of at least a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 42 trace of kinship with this environment, would not a startle be an appropriate accompaniment for many who would discover this today? finding kinship with something beyond human society would have been unavoidable for our early ancestors, but for us who have been detached from the natural world by centuries of industrialization, such experiences may often be unexpected and startling in the challenge they present to our human self-concept. of course, north americans are heirs of the culture that produced henry david thoreau and john muir, and each tradition can cite its own historic icons of ecoconsciousness; thus it might be objected that the aesthetic power of nature should no longer surprise us today. but when our foodstuffs have spent more time in laboratories than in the elements, our healthcare system has reduced our bodies and minds to manipulable chemical systems, and our lives and labor have become increasingly mechanized — in sum, when most of our lived experience is that of technological hybrids rather than animals—the felt sense that we may bear any sort of kinship to living beings that thrive outside our cultural and industrial infrastructures will be disarming. the notion of an aesthetic startle also speaks to the complexity of aesthetic experience. compelling it may be, but even on plotinus’s pre-modern account, the beautiful is much more challenging than the pleasant recognition of symmetrical forms. the definition of art as the competent reproduction of pleasing images and sounds has been outgrown by the modern artworld; likewise, we should expect that today the aesthetic appreciation of nature must also be something more multifaceted and ambiguous. perhaps the contemporary crisis in art and the renewed attention to environmental aesthetics are two faces of the same phenomenon, as we find ourselves awash in the civilized products of supercivilized human beings. these artifacts are not simply akin to us but are us, mirroring our state of utter domestication; with their power to produce an aesthetic thrill thus handicapped, contemporary artists are driven to pursue the outrageous and absurd. environmental aesthetics takes on a new urgency in such a context, not only because of the practical threats that civilization poses to the survival of the nonhuman world, but also because the trace of kinship we find in the natural world, in the face of our animal relatives, reawakens the possibility of authentically startling aesthetic experience. naturalists and evolutionary psychologists speak of biophilia, an innate affinity between the human mind and the natural world from which it evolved, and we may find the term useful in connection with the kinship model of the aesthetic appreciation of nature. yet, the term may also suggest an idealized interpretation of the kinship between humans and other animals, according to which the appreciation of nature must marc fellenz — a trace of kinship: the place of animals in environmental aesthetics 43 be an unambiguously positive reunion with our estranged animal relatives. on the contrary, “biophobia” may be a thoroughly authentic reaction for modern humans facing the uncivilized animal world; there, we may find much with which we are “out of tune” and “alienated,” to use plotinus’s terms. given the complex and varied relationships between human beings and the rest of the earth’s ecosphere, one would expect the fully honest aesthetic experience of nature to be capable of provoking both love and fear. such variety is evident in the complex universe of human kinship: one can hunger to unite with a blood relative never before seen, while others spurn immediate family members with whom they have lived intimately for years. likewise, those who turn to nature will — both at turns and perhaps simultaneously — be pleasantly surprised and horrified at the relatedness they feel to the world outside of civilization: i, too, am animal. the nature-goer may be delighted at a renewed appreciation of the breadth of human sentience, and a sense of attunement to a larger world not of human creation. yet despite the fact that many naturalists have presented such experiences as positive and spiritually uplifting, these moments are not without tragic overtones, serving as stark and painful reminders of our amoral physicality and our utter mortality. aesthetic recollection. experienced in either of these ways, the aesthetic encounter with nature brings the observer into relation with something other, only to return with an altered understanding of herself and her place in the world. that aesthetic experience may culminate in such a moment of self-awareness is accounted for in plotinus’s description of the experience of beauty. he presents the aesthetic startle as a reawakening of sorts, for following it the observer’s soul “returns to itself and remembers itself”; inherent to the thrill is that the aesthetic subject has a sense of rediscovering something of himself through his kinship with the aesthetic object. for plotinus, this moment of recollection is caused by the subject beholding his own spiritual nature in the forms that take command of the beautiful material object. however, since kinship is a bidirectional relationship, the alternative interpretation — that the aesthetic observer finds something of the aesthetic source, something unexpected and baldly somatic, in himor herself — is equally plausible, and especially significant in the case of nature aesthetics; indeed, to uncover something presumed to be alien within oneself would be the more startling, the more psychologically and aesthetically powerful experience.9 in any case, plotinus’s image of the kinship between observer and observed not only describes the experience of the aesthetic, but also allows for the sense that value and meaning may be humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 44 generated from this experience. the aesthetic creates the possibility for emended selfunderstanding. that such a possibility should exist has been the position of a powerful line of thinking in the philosophy of art. while some have held art to be mere amusement and stimulation, or, more ominously, a deleterious distraction from humankind’s spiritual vocation, many others have stipulated that the aesthetic proper must in some way leave the appreciator enriched by the experience. this claim has been used as a tool for distinguishing between “high” and “low” art. while the products of popular culture no doubt have an aesthetic dimension to the extent that they operate on the registers of feeling, emotion, and sensation, they are often ill equipped to leave the consumer with much of enduring value; rather, they are likely to leave behind an absence, a hunger for further stimulation. in practice, distinctions between high and low, fine and popular art are problematic, and laden with political and class assumptions; what is at one time derided as mere “craft” or “popular art” may gain respect with political change or simply the remove of time. in theory, however, the demand that art has educational value and should promote the evolution of one’s self-understanding seems a relevant criterion for categorizing, and perhaps evaluating, art. with regard to the aesthetic appreciation of natural environments, whatever selfunderstanding may emerge from such experiences is inherently complicated. the actual observer of nature is never the ideal, and so whatever meaning is garnered from the aesthetic power of nature unavoidably will be filtered through the institutions and categories of culture. that there is the possibility of learning from the “pristine” reality of the natural world, uncontaminated by the detritus of human civilization, is a tantalizing prospect, one that naturalists from various perspectives have urged us to explore. but whether or not such hopes may be realized in practice is ultimately an epistemological problem that lies beyond the concerns of aesthetics proper. people may conclude that the kinship they feel to nature is evidence that there are traces of their most prized human attributes in the nonhuman world, or, conversely, that long derided elements of the natural world echo alarmingly within them. which of those or the innumerable possibilities that lie between is ultimately settled upon will be determined by many factors. but that some conclusion must be considered in the light of these boundary-challenges, that one’s self-concept is invariably informed by some —implicit or explicit — interpretation of our relationship with the natural world, may be a startling recollection to some. as we make daily strides toward achieving the cartesian dream of becoming lords and masters of nature, and in the process insulate ourselves from daily contact with that dominion, it is easy to forget the common ancestry of the marc fellenz — a trace of kinship: the place of animals in environmental aesthetics 45 human and nonhuman worlds. in the information age, when so much of the content of our consciousness is produced by the machinery of technology and culture, it is easy to forget that value can be generated by other means. the loss of death, the pain of disease and natural disasters can shatter that hubris. traditionally, religion has been the venue where such experiences of suffering have coalesced into the conception of a reality not of our own making but which we must, with humility, be mindful of. the first commandment instructs us to recognize the reality of god as something irreducible to the idols crafted by human hands. in the modern world, secular forms of thinking have supplanted this theological monopoly by drawing attention to the nonhuman reality closer to hand. some philosophers have argued that our relatedness to animals and the environment — our common mortal vulnerability — establishes firm moral limits on what we may do to nonhumans; similarly, many scientists have argued that only by acknowledging our evolutionary history — our origins in the ecosphere we share with all life on earth — can we truly understand ourselves. yet these arguments do not necessarily translate into the felt sense of kinship with nonhumans, and that sense may be prerequisite for taking the arguments and their humbling implications seriously.10 today, the aesthetic appreciation of nature may provide the needed inspiration. in the being of a wild animal we encounter the face of nature, whose gaze beckons us to recollect our curious, uneasy kinship to the nonhuman world. conclusion. plotinus’s theory of material beauty plays an interesting role in the history of western aesthetics: it served to reinforce the fundamental dualism of platonic metaphysics, while influencing later aesthetic theories by suggesting a somewhat more positive role for aesthetic appreciation than classical platonism had allowed. however, my reading of plotinus’s text — which leaves these metaphysical and historical considerations aside — reveals a description of aesthetic experience that is interesting and fruitful in unexpected ways. according to this description, the aesthetic is experienced as a thrilling awareness of a kinship between the subject and the object, one that has the power to refresh the subject’s recollection of her own nature. as we have seen, such a description provides an interesting focal point around which many commonly recognized features of art appreciation and aesthetic theory may be connected. however, i have argued that it provides an especially fitting and useful account of at least certain forms of the aesthetic appreciation of natural environments. the natural world emerges today as a significant aesthetic object in art, popular culture humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 46 and aesthetic theory just when our kinship with nature is strained by being pulled in conflicting directions: reinforced by a prevailing biological paradigm that emphasizes human continuity with the rest of life on earth, yet threatened by the obvious disruption our species has created on the planet. the kinship model accounts for why, in light of this tension, the natural world today will afford us aesthetic moments not appreciated in other contexts. as this tension speaks to the crisis we face concerning how to inhabit the world, our encounters with animals — our cohabitants of the broader environment —will have a special place in creating these moments. in the presence of wild animals, we may feel a sense of relation to their world that is startling, one that entices us to recollect both the proximity and remoteness of that world to the domesticated civilization we normally inhabit. whatever direction this recollection ultimately takes, whatever practical actions vis-à-vis nature it inspires, whatever modification to our self-concept it ultimately informs, the traces of kinship we find embodied in the being of other animals have an aesthetic power that can inform our experiences of the natural world today. the obvious beauty of majestic natural structures and scenes can overshadow these traces, but both the nature-goer and the aesthetic theorist will be rewarded for seeking them out and following where they lead. notes 1) carlson provides an authoritative analysis of the recent literature. also valuable is budd. 2) an influential example is casey. 3) see my the moral menagerie: philosophy and animal rights. 4) enneads, 249-253 (ennead i, tractate 6, chapter 6). the argument recalls porphyry's description of his teacher as seeming “ashamed to be in the body.” 5) cf. the postmodern animal. 6) “to achieve a balanced understanding of the situation, we must keep in mind that, as with appreciation of art, serious appreciation of nature means appreciating it as what it in fact is; and yet at the same time we must recognize that this also means appreciating nature as what it is for us. this idea limits yet enriches what is involved in appropriate aesthetic appreciation.” (carlson 10) marc fellenz — a trace of kinship: the place of animals in environmental aesthetics 47 7) carlson argues that the proper balance between subjectivity and objectivity is maintained by recognizing the importance of scientific understanding of nature for its aesthetic appreciation. i address this possibility in the subsequent. 8) reflection on this point might shed some light on a longstanding problem in art history. the existence of paleolithic cave paintings demonstrates that early humans had what appears to be genuine aesthetic sensibility, and that nonhuman animals existed as aesthetic objects in paleolithic culture. but why were these works created in caves that were inhospitable and difficult to access, rather than for maximal exhibition? the standard explanation is that these works has ritualistic, shamanic functions, rather than the display function of later, “proper” art. however, another answer is suggested by the role of an aesthetic trace. these early humans lived thoroughly within the world of animals, and their kinship was apparent and obvious; thus, their aesthetic energies would need to be directed toward a different space in order to be fully satisfying. how thrilling it must have been for these early humans to discover that through their unique technical skill they could master the interiority of the cave, that in subtle and unexpected ways they could find kinship with whatever specters they encountered there. it is unlikely that nature qua nature was an aesthetic object for early humans, even though elements of nature pervade their powerful and spiritually charged artwork. 9) this offers another angle on the difference between the aesthetics of art and the aesthetics of nature, with the arrow of emphasis pointing in opposing directions: in art appreciation we find part of ourselves embodied in the material world; in nature appreciation we find something not of our own creation embodied in ourselves. 10) that this sense may be an essential component of aesthetics generally — and not unique to the aesthetic appreciation of nature — may be read into kant ‘s famous claim (critique of judgment, §5) that “beauty only concerns men, i.e. animals, but still rational, beings — not merely qua rational...but qua animal also.” the aesthetic presents itself as an intense and valuable experience that reminds us our full humanity — both that which grounds us in nature and that which transcends it. works cited baker, steve. the postmodern animal. london: reaktion books, 1999. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 48 budd, malcolm, the aesthetic appreciation of nature: essays on the aesthetics of nature. ny: oxford up, 2005. carlson, allen. aesthetics and the environment: the appreciation of nature, art and architecture. london: routledge, 2000. casey, edward c. getting back into place: toward a renewed understanding of the placeworld. bloomington: indiana up, 1993. fellenz, marc. the moral menagerie: philosophy and animal rights. urbana: u of illinois p, 2007. midgley, mary. animals and why they matter. athens, ga: u of georgia p, 1983. plotinus, with an english translation by a. h. armstrong, vol. 1. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1966. microsoft word marchesini h u m a n i m a l i a 1:2 roberto marchesini alterity and the non-human trans. boria sax the principal theme in posthumanist discussion may unequivocally be summed up in the phrase “alterità non humane” – non-human otherness. we might even say that the philosophical treatment of this theme requires a broader framework, an expansion of the concept of otherness or alterity. the term “otherness” acquires its meaning in the context of close kinship, whether of an individual or group, and may be defined in two ways: 1) other entities as a basis for comparison – entities which are separate, strange, divergent, or foreign – out of which a subject emerges; 2) other entities as a point of orientation in a dialectic polarity, which may provide support in the construction of identity. this reveals the dual contribution of alterity to identity. alterity mirrors the distinctiveness of a subject, thus helping that subject to reflect on its own identity. in addition, it is a bearer of references, thus providing others with external guidance and support in the gradual development of identity. alterity is at one time both internal and external to identity, and consequently integrated and dialectical. this is the cleavage between a posthumanist approach to human identity, which integrates other things or qualities, and a humanistic approach, which purges all that is not human. but let us step back of a moment. in order to understand the posthuman endeavor to include the non-human within the human dimension, a prerequisite for this analysis, it is first of all necessary to focus on the dialectic of identity and alterity within the human dimension, for example in the construction of individual or cultural identity. up until the first half of the twentieth century to construct one’s identity meant to diverge, to distance oneself, and purify oneself of foreign elements. afterwards, particularly since the 1970s, a concept of identify that would include alterity began to emerge. the others, then, were no longer contaminants to be purged but qualities to be absorbed. reflection on the integrative quality of alterity, in psychology as in anthropology, has led to dramatic shifts in the concept of identity, thus abandoning the imposition of isolationist, solipsistic, or purist standards, in fact every concept of so-called “firm” identity. this adjective refers to any identity that is easily singled out from an environment, which is contiguous with neither alterity nor contamination. it is an identity marked as being special, unique, and pure, which stands out against its background, untouched by 92 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) alterity or “contamination.” such an identity is considered “firm” not for its own sake, but because the process of definition or the interpretive model has made it appear so. in fact, the divergence-expulsion model weakens identity, since it removes the nourishment that comes through commerce with alterity. the model that emerges in the second half of the twentieth century may be called dialectical-integrative, since it regards alterity as the other pole in a dialectical process of organization by means of incorporating external references, a bit the way a tree organizes its essential identity through absorbing nourishment from the environment in which it grows. the others, in other words, are not considered pollutants but centers of development and fields of expression for identity. in this sense, identity is developed through integration rather than inclusion. some consider this a model of “weak” identity, but i personally do not agree. the strength of this identity is the power to integrate alterity. its instruments are those of integration rather than defense, not the ability to construct barriers intended to safeguard a chimera of original purity. such purity is an illusion and that is fortunate, for it would be inhospitable and sterile. there are those who maintain that the construction of identity through the integration of alterity would be to sanction the end of identity or at least to take the first step in that direction, but, once again, i disagree. and integrative-dialectical process renders the construction of identity more hospitable (embracing alterity, or being embraced by it), and this establishes a threshold, a point of interaction between the home and the world. the threshold is there for the sake of the house, not the other way around. the model of divergence-expulsion does not simply set forth a very restricted idea of identity but in addition provides an interpretive framework in which manifestations of alterity are devalued in so far as: a) they are perceived as diluting identity; b) they are perceived as irrelevant to the formation of identity and, therefore, neglected; c) they are deprived of their diversity, in much the same way as the greeks who would not admit of plurality among non-hellenes. what i wish to emphasize is that there is a strict correlation between the divergence-expulsion model of identity and the humanistic paradigm. in the humanistic approach, the realization of human identity is interpreted as a process of purification and of separation, the peeling off of extraneous layers of in order to reach an identity at the depth. it is washing away possible pollutants that should not have been deposited and corrode the integrity of the body. this is analogous to peeling a fruit, removing the surface in order to reach a core of purity. identity is active and recognizable in so far as it remains untouched. humanism is based on the presumption of a complete human autonomy. inevitably, expressions of alterity cease to be points of reference, still less bearers of references, but less toxins 93 roberto marchesini – alterity and the non-human from which one must be separated for the purpose of avoiding contamination and recovering original purity, toxins which must be cleansed. this is to say, one needs to emphasize difference and discontinuity. according to this schema, humanistic identity is nothing other than a process of emergence. identity must stand out boldly from its background, distinguish itself from everything else, and cut an insurmountable furrow between itself and alterity. this emergence is an act of emancipation, and one might say that humanistic identity consists in liberating oneself from the bonds of confusion. it is a dramatic gesture of disruption and expulsion, which leaves behind a past filled with fragments and ambiguities; it is a quantum leap of differentiation that may not be measured in quantitative terms. in order to accomplish this, humanism inaugurates a dialectic based on the dichotomy of identity and alterity, thus compressing a plurality of alterities into a single, universal idea of alterity. furthermore, should distinctive identities emerge from this idea; they are no longer read as a plurality of entities but as aspects of identity, in consequence trivialized as specialties. in this way, humanism creates a horizon of the non-human that is characterized by universality, which is considered to be neither a multiplicity not a bearer of individual characteristics, as opposed to the category of humanity which is intrinsically pluralistic. the point is precisely this: the revolution in alterity that have characterized the last 50 years has opened the way for pluralism. in the twentieth century we experienced a gradual disintegration of the idea of universality and a progressive transformation in the areas of reference in two senses: 1) there was an recognition of the authenticity of diversity, which was no longer considered a matter of deviance or disturbance but a fundamental principle; 2) admission of an ontological pluralism which defeats every attempt to assign at measurement in relation to a central point. here, in my opinion, may be found the true crisis of humanistic thought: alterity has begun to reveal its plurality, thereby becoming unresponsive to every attempt at compression in a single category opposed to humanity. this is not a total collapse of the concept of identity, as some wish to maintain, but rather of a concept of identity that is nourished by divergence, of purity, and of emergence, which bring us back to the dichotomy of human and non-human. we might think this dichotomy is the bastion of defense for human rights, but in reality it is the archetype for every form of discrimination among human beings. the dichotomy of human versus non-human has practical implications that have revealed themselves as very dangerous in the course of the 20th century, to give some examples: 1) there is one prototype of purity that is more significant than any others; 2) every divergence from the prototype understood as partial and incomplete humanity; 3) that the humanity consists in divergence from alterity and is otherwise 94 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) self-referential. the dangerous precipice of solipsism is apparent in these affirmations, as well as the emergence of a principle of marginalization, which may be applied not only to non-human otherness but also to human otherness, in fact to every divergence no matter how it may be labeled. diversity is viewed, in other words, not as a field of many possibilities, is not valued for its ability to generate a range of alternatives, but is rather judged essentially in a uniform manner with respect to a single characteristic; the divergence from a prototype. just as “barbarians” were not a constellation of peoples and of cultures but simply those who did not speak the greek language, so the disabled are not a galaxy of existential modalities but simply those who lack the qualities of the prototype of that defines being able. humanistic identity in fact claims the exalted role of providing a measure of alterity, measurement in the sense of assigning a level of inferiority to alterity according to its approximation to the prototype. but what does it mean to surrender the pretence of a gravitational center or else a measure of proximity? previously being “other,” that is diverging from the prototype, meant to be lacking, deviant, deformed. there was an implicit judgment of inferiority since identity was used as the referential model and the measure of judgment. ethnic alterity, for example, came to be conceived as being poor, primitive, puerile, or even lacking in culture, and not simply the bearer of another culture. full recognition of diversity changes our understanding of both identity and alterity by opening a place for a pluralistic imagination, and that is the foundation of posthumanism. bibliography allman, john. evolving brain. new york: freeman & co, 1999. bachelard, gaston. la formation de l'esprit scientifique. paris: vrin, 1938 (trans. it. la formazione dello spirito scientifico. milano: raffaello cortina, 1995). damasio, a.r. l'errore di cartesio. milano: adelphi, 1995. ―――. the feeling of what happens. new york: harcourt brace, 1999 (trans. it, emozione e coscienza. milano: adelphi, 2000). diamond, jared. guns, germs, and steel. the fates of human societies. new york: w. w. norton & company, 1997 (trans. it. armi, acciaio e malattie. breve storia del mondo negli ultimi tredicimila anni. torino: einaudi, 1998). ―――. the rise and fall of the third chimpanzee. new york: vintage, 1992 (trans. it. il terzo scimpanzé. torino: bollati boringhieri, 1994). 95 roberto marchesini – alterity and the non-human digard, jean-pierre. l'homme et les animaux domestiques. anthropologie d'une passion. paris: fayard, 1990. edelman, g.m. neural darwinism. the theory of neuronal group selection, new york: basic books, 1987 (trans. it. darwinismo neurale. la teoria della selezione dei gruppi neuronali. torino: einaudi, 1995). eibl-eibesfeldt, irenäus. die biologie des menschlichen verhaltens grundriss der humanethologie. münchen: r. piper, 1984 (trans. it. etologia umana. torino: bollati boringhieri, 1993). ―――. grundriss der vergleichenden verhaltensforschung. ethologie. münchen: r. piper, 1967. (4. auflage 1974) (trans. it. i fondamenti dell'etologia. milano: adelphi, 1980). gardner, howard. multiple intelligences: the theory in practice. new york: basic books (trans. it, intelligenze multiple. milano: anabasi, 1994). gehlen, arnold. “rückblick auf die anthropologie max schelers.” max scheler in gegenwartsgeschehen der philosophie. p. good, ed. bern-münchen: francke, 1975. harris, marvin. cannibals and kings. the origins of culture. new york: random house, 1977 (trans. it., cannibali e re. le origini delle culture. milano: feltrinelli, 1992). ―――. good to eat. riddles of food and culture. new york: simon and schuster, 1985 (trans. it. buono da mangiare. torino: einaudi, 1992). lorenz, konrad. das sogenannte böse. wien: g. borotha-schoeler, 1963 (trans. it. il cosiddetto male. milano: garzanti, 1981). marchesini, roberto. il concetto di soglia. roma-napoli: theoria, 1996. ―――. la fabbrica delle chimere. torino: bollati boringhieri, 1999. ―――. post-human. verso nuovi modelli di esistenza , torino: bollati boringhieri, 2002. ―――. “la dimensione sociale dell'homo sapiens.” lettera internazionale 4. trimestre (2004). 38-41. marchesini, roberto, and k andersen. animal appeal. bologna: hybris, 2003. 96 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) merleau-ponty, maurice. la nature. paris: editions de seuil, 1995 (trans. it. la natura. milano: raffaello cortina editore, 1996). plessner, helmuth. die stufen des organischen und der mensch, gesammelte schriften, von g. dux, o. marquard und e. ströker unter mitwirkung von rw schmidt, a. wetter, m.j. zemlin. frankfurt am: suhrkamp, 1980-86, iv (trans. it. i gradi dell'organico e l'uomo. introduzione all'antropologia filosofica. torino: bollati boringhieri, 2006). remotti, francesco, ed. forme di umanità. progetti incompleti e cantieri sempre aperti , torino: paravia, 1999. scheler, max. “mensch und geschichte” (1926). philosophische weltanschauung, bern: francke, 1968. vilà, carles, et al. “multiple and ancient origins of the domestic dog.” science 276:5319 (13 june1997). 1687-1689. vygotskij, l.s. mind in society. (1935). cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1978 (trans. it., il processo cognitivo. torino: bollati boringhieri, 1980). ―――. thought and language. (1934), cambridge, ma: the mit press, 1986 (trans. it., pensiero e linguaggio. bari: laterza, 1992). microsoft word drake pdf dummy h u m a n i m a l i a 4:1 phillip drake the goat that couldn’t stop the mud volcano: sacrifice, subjectivity, and indonesia’s “lapindo mudflow” the little goat hangs in mid-air, legs extended. in this moment of suspension he looks back at the men in black and white ceremonial clothing, the men who threw him.1 they give away his life to the spirits and to the pit. but the image keeps him present above ground, perpetually a moment from his fate, dragging his rope-leash, haloed by clouds of smoke and steam rising out of the bubbling hot mud, waiting to be swallowed. the viewers of the image never see him land. the image denies resolution, disallowing any guarantee of the goat’s expiration, of the completion of the violence done to him. the audience receives only that moment of suspension, the horror of a helpless body facing certain pain and annihilation. published on the front page of the sunday edition of the jawa pos, indonesia’s mostwidely circulated newspaper, on november 5, 2006, the image of the goat sacrifice — the animal flying into a pool of hot mud —accompanied a long article about local factories’ financial losses caused by indonesia’s infamous mud volcano, commonly known as the “lapindo” mudflow, after lapindo brantas, a gas exploration company drilling at the disaster site (figure 1).2 in addition to the dramatic economic losses facing residents and factories in the area, this giant, uncontrollable geyser of mud has swallowed the homes of approximately 40,000 people in the sidoarjo district of east java. the four final sentences of the article, set off with a “meanwhile. . .” to signal the transition, have no substantive connection to the factory losses and serve only to contextualize the image of the goat. by mentioning the arrival of mystics who performed several sacrifices to appeal to supernatural forces to stop the mudflow, these sentences justify the presence of the photo of the goat’s spectacular death, which overwhelms this and other stories in the paper through its powers of attraction and provocation. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 84 [figure 1: the image of the suspended goat on the front page of the jawa pos, 5 november 2006. courtesy of pt. media virtual indonesia and the jawa pos archive.] the spectacular rendering of the goat’s death instrumentalizes animal being for the purposes of commodity production and circulation, the making and selling of newspapers.3 the weighty issues that surround the sacrifice — the frailty of bodies, the finitude of life, bodily “gifts,” structures of power, sacredness, meaning, non-meaning, and the horror of destruction — are condensed and muted in the image that sells, in the service of a media economy that contributes to the ideological production and maintenance of an array of subject positions that typically support the social and economic order. this image of the goat is one example of various aesthetic and ideological operations in both sacrifice and representations of sacrifice that generate subjectivities. observing that phillip drake — the goat that couldn’t stop the mud volcano 85 symbolic and physical acts of violence against the animal, the scapegoat, or subhuman individual who is sacrificed articulate and arrange subjectivities into social hierarchies, this essay explores the implications of this violence ― both in a specific case where individuals’ rights and status are in question and in the theoretical context of expressing and resisting power. i hope to refine understandings of both a general theory of animal sacrifice and a specific, located incident by bringing them into dialogue. i will consider the staging of unequal power relations in both the execution and the representation of the sacrifice ritual by tracing the various ways sacrificial violence expresses subjectivity. in recognizing these manifestations of power, we — who have the cognitive faculties, cultural determinations, and social agencies that enable us to perform violence, to abstain from it, and to contemplate it — refine our capacity to understand violence toward other animals (including other members of our own species), and the ways it shapes us within ecological networks, so that we can become better, or at least more self-aware, actors in our ecological communities. while this exploration of subjectivities generated through violence against the animal speaks to questions of ecological orientation that are important everywhere in the world, i frame these questions with a discussion about the recognition of victims’ otherness and hardship during the lapindo mudflow in east java. the mudflow is an ongoing ecological disaster that resists being fixed down to any agreed-upon narrative. disputes over causes, effects, compensation, and institutional responses unsettle understandings of the event, as various individuals and institutions represent and become represented in different politicized narratives. each of these representations weave, and are woven with, arrangements of power. as political and economic elites seek to protect their power and interests during the crisis, they often resort to denying the rights and status of mudflow victims, a denial that echoes the dehumanizing objectification of the other that is expressed in animal sacrifice. there is nothing extraordinary about claims that political and economic elites protect their interests at the expense of others. this paper suggests, however, that these dehumanizing procedures depend on an ontological demotion of the status of others. it becomes possible to prolong residents’ exposure to physical and social hazards related to the mudflow, not because they are poor or unfortunate in terms of social hierarchies, but because their subhuman status makes this exposure to danger seem natural. why sacrifice? the recent emergence of “biopower” as a theoretical paradigm for understanding the organization and execution of power has complicated the politics of social justice. various theorists present distinctive versions of biopower, for instance, as humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 86 the production and regulation of life (foucault), as the capacity to suspend laws and produce beings without political or living rights (agamben), or as the interiorized power from “no place” that merges with being and desire to become self-replicating (hardt and negri). in each case power constrains the horizons of individuals’ being and behaving in the world, making individuals regular, predictable, and dispensable. this regularization threatens to intrude into the practices and goals of social justice movements, potentially warping their status as truly oppositional or distinct from the influence of power. although acts of sacrifice also express uneven power between beings, georges bataille’s writings on sacrifice emphasize the subversive potential of sacrificial violence. for bataille, sacrifice is fraught with anguish, ecstasy, profanity, and sacredness. sacrifice resounds with conflict and contradictions that make it profoundly irregular and unpredictable. at the same time, the sacrifice destroys and degrades life and is an act that is easily subsumed within broader and more enduring systems of biopower, as we see in rene girard’s writings on the “scapegoat mechanism” in sacrifice rituals. the scapegoat quells feelings of violence and discontent, serving “as a substitute for all the members of the community, [ . . .] protecting all the members of the community from their respective violence” (101-2). tracing the structure of sacrifice in both history and myth as it becomes superseded by judicial systems in modern societies, girard suggests that the scapegoat mechanism is central to establishing and regulating human communities. bataille’s version of sacrifice, by contrast, always threatens to unsettle disciplinary systems. sacrifice provokes hermeneutic procedures that could potentially disrupt regularity and order. through dynamic and ever-appropriable productions of meaning and subjectivity, for both the killers and the killed, sacrifice generates the possibility of developing new ways to understand and, using the terms of peter singer, give “consideration” to the being of “others” (163). this openness to appropriations is radicalized in bataille’s writings on sacrifice. bataille understands sacrifice as a means of “giving” or “destroying” excess energies and resources that threaten to reduce individuals and objects to mere “things.” bataille draws on marcel mauss’s anthropological work on the gift to note the links between religious and economic exchanges and to suggest that the “expenditure” of excess energy generates ongoing value for the giver (accursed share 69). both the gift givers and receivers (the members of society) benefit: the latter from the spiritual, psychic, or disciplinary effects of the destruction, and the former from the “profit” of giving. the giver profits by “restoring the divine order” from the profanity and poverty of everyday life that is dominated by mindless work and consumption, that reduces phillip drake — the goat that couldn’t stop the mud volcano 87 beings and relations in the world to “utilities” and “things” (ibid. 56). as gifts, “things” that can be accumulated and consumed are invested with increased social and spiritual value. sacrifice brings the giver, the “accursed share” whose being and labor “is a surplus taken from the mass of useful wealth,” out of the “order of things” and into the “intimate order” (ibid. 59). immediately problematic is the fact that this experience of binding the self to this intimate order is precluded by self-extinction. quite simply, we cannot experience our death and the benefits of expenditure when we are already gone (“hegel, death, and sacrifice” 27). any attempt at accessing the experience of the sacrifice and its benefits becomes an exercise in “fiction” (ibid. 20). the ritual of sacrifice enacts a performance of the impossibility of elation that comes with dying. as dennis king keenan notes in his reading of bataille, sacrifice is itself mimetic, containing neither truth nor stable basis for its economy of exchanges. whatever meanings emerge from sacrifice manifest out of layered acts of mimesis, out of the conceptual appropriations made possible in the performance of the ritual (41). keenan also notes the resemblance between the scapegoat and the poet, in the sense that both are substitutes for self-expenditure that mimic the impossible original act (41). this similarity breaks, however, when keenan observes that the scapegoat “is murdered as a means to an end,” the end being the performance of sacrifice, while the poet sustains death through contemplation and “interiorization” (41-2). this fictive quality, this mimesis of a mimetic act extends into all representations of the goat’s death. through different conventions that mediate and make possible the repeated experience of the event that is also impossible, each depiction “sacrifices sacrifice,” using keenan’s terms in his response to jean-luc nancy’s analysis of georges bataille’s writing on sacrifice. according to keenan, nancy reads bataille’s version of sacrifice as revealing non-meaning, or, using derrida’s phrasing, providing “access to the immediate and indeterminate identity of a non-meaning” or “the possibility of maintaining non-meaning,” while bataille’s “obsessive” sacrifice of sacrifice “opens sacrifice to others and separates it violently from itself” (54-5). since neither meaning nor non-meaning can be fully revealed or sustained in fixed or finalized terms, the sacrifice of sacrifice performs a moment of “dis-appropriation” that cannot foreclose the potentiality, or postponed expressions of meaning or non-meaning – the “reappropriating” and “trans-appropriating” of death (44). art performs this sacrifice of sacrifice through mimesis, which enables individuals to “dwell” in aporia or enact the dis/re/trans-apppropriation of death and meaning, but keenan proceeds to suggest via humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 88 bataille that the sacrifice ritual, itself, is fictive, mimicking itself and the impossible task of experiencing the effect of giving away one’s own life (44). it follows that the image of the goat’s sacrifice (like all other representations of sacrifice) generates both aporia and the potential for various appropriations in meaning, which also manifest as articulations of subjectivity. jacques derrida observes that “carnivorous” animal sacrifice “is essential to the structure of subjectivity, which is to say to the founding of the intentional subject as well and to the founding, if not of the law, at least of right, the difference between law and right, justice and right, justice and law, here remaining open over an abyss” (acts of religion 247). each articulation of subjectivity depends on the construction and destruction of the animal. by “construction” i mean the ideological violence that establishes who does and does not receive justice, right, or law. the violence that marks a being with animality, degradation, or subhuman-ness makes possible the symbolic or physical destruction of this being, from which the exalted subject emerges as “not-degraded.” this ideological violence is a sacrifice before the sacrifice (or before the sacrifice of sacrifice) that installs a being into the sacrifice mechanism. we see this, perhaps uncomfortably, in bataille, where the act of elevating beings out of the order of things through sacrifice depends on the already-objectified status of certain beings. the necessity of elevation involves a degradation that implies previous attempts at elevation either failed or were never tried. implied in derrida’s statement about animal sacrifice is the permeable and undecidable nature of subjectivity. our experiences and actions in the world are not determined or organized by transcendent categories of thought or ego, but rather develop through engagements in the world. subjectivity is always fractured and evolving, shaped by experiences, practices, and events that are internalized, performing the “function of misrecognition” that forms, “hails,” or “overdetermines” the “i” (althusser 161). as derrida notes, the destruction of the animal enables individuals to stake their claim as subjects with specific (exalted) legal privileges and rights. cary wolfe also references the centrality of animals in shaping understandings of humanness: [t]he animal possesses a specificity as the object of both discursive and institutional practices, one that gives it particular power and durability in relation to other discourses of otherness. for the figure of the “animal” in the west (unlike, say, the robot or the cyborg) is part of a cultural and literary history stretching back at least to plato and the old testament, reminding us that the animal has always been especially, frightfully nearby, always lying in wait at the very heart of the constitutive disavowals and self-constructing narratives enacted by that fantasy figure called “the human.” (6) phillip drake — the goat that couldn’t stop the mud volcano 89 this ontological demotion of the animal, the privileged signifier of sub-humanness, which disidentifies beings’ relative rights and status represents, once again, the sacrifice before sacrifice (or the always-sacrificable status) of the individual who is objectified as the scapegoat or “excess” that must be vanquished. it is doubtful that this process, where mimetic articulations of subjectivity promote and demote the ontological status of beings, cab be escaped. the instability and vulnerability of ideological appropriations of sacrifice also destabilizes the orders of power that articulate ontological hierarchies. as understandings of the sacrifice ritual remain perpetually open for appropriations, so do articulations of subjectivity that both express and resist power. rather than falling into the regularizing modes of biopower, bataille’s version of sacrifice perpetually threatens to undo order, as a fervent and transgressive performance of the possibility of revelation or access to impossible meaning “because seeking distances it” (“hegel, death, and sacrifice” 28). neither power nor resistance is secured or finally made regular in the votive, volatile act of sacrifice. the lapindo mudflow. the lapindo mudflow is frequently cited as one of the world’s largest mud volcanoes and the most expensive disaster in indonesia’s history. since it began on may 29, 2006, it has released as much as 180,000 m3 of mud per day into the porong subdistrict of sidoarjo in east java and continues to flow six years later (dewan; mazzini et al. 1751). beyond displacing over 40,000 area residents, the mud contains toxins and gases that have been responsible for dozens of deaths, thousands of incidents of illness, and continues to threaten people’s lives in the region (rumiati, soedjono). in addition to the mudflow, which is currently being collected in a giant embankment and pumped into a nearby river, residents also face danger from flammable gasses and subsidence (sinking land), which has destroyed a range of structures, including homes, roads, and the portions of the mud embankment itself (utomo 42). despite its unusual geological character, most observers consider the mudflow a social disaster, as controversies involving some of indonesia’s most prominent and powerful political and business figures have marred the disaster management effort (schiller et al. 62-4). most famous is the debate over what triggered the mudflow: human error caused by unsafe drilling in a gas exploration mine less than 150 m from the center of the mudflow or by a massive earthquake occurring two days earlier in yogyakarta, over humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 90 200 km away. although various scientists have published reports that support both sides in the debate, and there are reasonable explanations to justify either conclusion, the majority of published reports by independent experts (those not affiliated with the central government or lapindo brantas) show that drilling has had some influence in causing the mud volcano.[4] at stake in these trigger debates is responsibility for funding and overseeing the expensive and difficult disaster management effort. ostensibly, if drilling triggered the mudflow, lapindo brantas would pay; if earthquakes triggered it, the government would pay. while a properly detailed account of the complex history, politics, and competing interests that have given shape to this disaster would be difficult to fit into a book, much less an article, it is enough in this context to note that these controversies have damaged the disaster management effort, leaving contractors and aid workers with little direction, support, or supervision (hamdi et al. 10).[5] after six years, workers have had little success controlling the mudflow and limiting the impact of subsidence, regional infrastructure remains in ruins, and victims have received only a fraction of the financial support promised to them to aid their relocation (suparno). with the local economy and regional infrastructure in ruins, there are simply not enough ecological or local charity resources for the necessary assistance to residents who are left to live in crumbling houses on sinking land, often forced to beg for food and income.[6] significant corporate or government intervention remains the only realistic means of restoring livelihoods and ensuring safety. because the recognition and classification of victims has been subject to controversy, thousands of individuals have been essentially left without support to live in safety, much less to relocate, leaving them scrambling with residents from other villages to form political coalitions to protect their rights and interests. the primary mechanism for providing aid to victims has been a sale and purchase program (akta jual-beli), which has delivered financial support based on land ownership and the location of damaged property.[7] instead of a formal compensation program that would require one institution taking accountability for the funding and management of assistance to victims, this program was funded by a newly-formed subsidiary of lapindo brantas and managed by a government-appointed organization of public officials and engineers.[8] as lapindo brantas’s finances dried up due to the global economic conditions, the completion of sale and purchase payments stalled, with most victims receiving less than half of the promised sums. phillip drake — the goat that couldn’t stop the mud volcano 91 despite these difficulties facing victims who qualify for the sale and purchase program, their access to supportive resources is greater than most victims who fail to qualify. thousands of individuals living in the same neighborhoods as officially-recognized victims are ineligible for assistance because they either own no property, lack the proper formal certification of their property, or live outside the land area designated by several presidential decrees for sale and purchase payments (hsf 90-4). neither lapindo brantas nor the central government has been clear about the rationale in the drawing of these specific boundaries, which in some cases literally run along neighboring property lines, and has often turned neighbors against each other (orolo). as arbitrary as these boundaries may seem, it is hard to imagine they are being set without deliberation, considering the high financial stakes and limited supply of funds. whatever the financial implications, the act of differentiating those victims whose losses will be recognized – and compensated for – and victims whose losses receive no formal recognition resonates with both bataille’s version of sacrifice and the “bare life” of agamben’s account of homo sacer. in the latter, the mudflow stands as the state of exception through which sovereign power is able suspend laws and produce individuals as homo sacer, those who can be killed but not sacrificed. as polar extremes in relation to the legal order, homo sacer and the sovereign “present two symmetrical figures that have the same structure and are correlative: the sovereign is the one with respect to whom all men are potentially homines sacri, and homo sacer is the one with respect to whom all men act as sovereigns” (84). in other words, through the recognition and ascription of homo sacer, the people of a given society experience the ascension of their status through their participation with expressions of sovereignty: an experience of sovereignty through being not homo sacer. andrew norris notes that the stakes of this relation extend beyond claims to power and social status, to figure in the ways we recognize the metaphysical distinctiveness of the human (10). as johanna oksala writes in her reading of norris, “homo sacer must die so that the rest of the political community may affirm the transcendence of their bodily, animal life” (31). in terms of agamben’s account of homo sacer, the grouping of residents who are affected by the mudflow into two groups of victims ― those with legal and financial rights and those without ― is made to appear as a natural expression of sovereign power. any casual survey of residents in the neighborhoods surrounding the levees will reveal a diverse range of interests and concerns about the mudflow and the institutional handling of the disaster, including the fair administration of compensation schemes, the completion of infrastructure projects, the invigoration of the local economy and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 92 generation of jobs, the improved monitoring of pollutants and other environmental impacts in the nearby fields and rivers, and the reconstruction of schools and mosques.[9] but the sovereign power, expressed via both national and local government institutions that tend to promote the interests of political and economic elites over developing more egalitarian policies, strips local residents of their distinctiveness, crudely categorizing these residents as either those who are entitled to the right of compensation or those who are not. although the access to rights and resources is of crucial importance to local residents, the very fact that government officials can literally draw lines that establish these rights indicates the already-degraded status of most residents in the region. as peter fitzpatrick notes, in submitting to western legal structures that simultaneously work to control both the spaces exterior and interior to sovereignty, “we are . . . bare before the law, and ‘always/already’ sacrificed in relation to it” (69). by drawing what appears to be arbitrary boundaries with regard to specific rights to compensation, the sovereign power of the government expresses its ability to revoke any and all rights from all citizens. earlier we considered the sacrifice before sacrifice as a process that makes possible the installation of the subject within the structure of sacrifice as object for the purposes of revealing or gaining access to a essential or transcendent meaning that restores the truth to the objectified subject. fitzpatrick goes further; he identifies the sacrifice before a legal system where sovereignty can be expressed. from the perspective of articulating power relations that stage and naturalize the demoted status of individuals as “things,” “homo sacer,” or “mudflow victims,” it becomes possible to recognize the close relationship between agamben’s and bataille’s systems of power and violence. bataille’s version of sacrifice, in its stubborn pursuit of meaning, in its recognition of the impossibility of meaning while also recognizing the impossibility of nonmeaning through the neverending generation of appropriative potentials, more accurately describes the irregular and unknowable influences and effects that permeate power relations. this irregularity gestures toward the potential limits of biopower’s capacity to manage subjectivity. as we observe specific “human” subject positions that are generated through violence against the nonhuman animal in the following sections, biopower’s lack of stability becomes increasingly apparent. sacrifice as spectacle. the jawa pos features the aforementioned image of the goat sacrifice at the top and center of its front page, which is paradigmatic of the mass media’s participation in the economy of spectacle. in its position of prominence, the image composes what guy debord refers to as an “unreal unity,” a commodity in the economy of images that mediates social relations and masks real conditions of phillip drake — the goat that couldn’t stop the mud volcano 93 exploitation and disharmony (35). the successful production and circulation of this image depends on its appeal, on the power of the aesthetic provocation – be it shock, wonder, or contemplation – generated in the composition and framing of the image. the image-as-spectacle, aestheticized and commodified, obscures the actual act of violence. the spectacle preempts the violence done to the goat by transforming ecological complexity into a dramatic moment, a moment designed for mass consumption. to invoke the well-known terminology of judith butler, the spectacular image “dematerializes” the violence being done to the goat. butler conceptualizes the representative production of bodies through a pun on “matter”: “[t]o know the significance of something is to know how and why it matters, where ‘to matter’ means at once ‘to materialize’ and ‘to mean’” (32). the goat’s existence and death neither materialize nor matter in the context of the spectacle, of the image’s aesthetic rendering. as timothy morton observes, there is something “suspiciously anti-ecological” about the aesthetic – as a faculty of sense and understanding – insofar as it is a “product of distance: of human beings from nature, of subjects from objects, of mind from matter” (24). the aesthetic staging of the violence toward the animal also structures the newspaper’s audience as human subjects removed from nature. as the image provokes the audience to experience and contemplate the destruction of the goat, the rendering of the goat’s life and death into stylized, aesthetic forms and effects intensifies the division between the human subject and the animal object. the privileged perspective for experiencing and contemplating the violence in the aestheticized image belongs to the audience, the human subjects articulated in the annihilation of the nonhuman. the aesthetic mediates the ways we recognize and understand the status and subjectivity of all beings – including people – that are subsumed within the category of the nonhuman. theses subjects are converted into objects and symbols. once conceived as object or symbol, the nonhuman is made vulnerable to violence, a violence in which the pain and horror of destruction is muted and obscured for the audience’s digestion. when considered beside bataille’s view that sacrifice seeks to recover beings from the “order of things,” the irony is apparent. the aesthetic operations that serve the economy of spectacle transform beings into things, even when representing a ritual that attempts to preserve beings as distinct from things. still, just as commodity production is not inherently malignant for labor, the aesthetic is not merely a structure of estrangement and obfuscation. morton is explicit about his humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 94 ambivalence toward the role of aesthetics in nature, noting the “crucial role” aesthetics plays in how “humans experience their place in the world,” and in framing “ways of feeling and perceiving this place” (2). the aesthetic may be anti-ecological, but, citing the work of both marcuse and adorno, morton suggests that the aesthetic also offers ways of helpfully reconceiving human and nonhuman relationships. for marcuse, “art could help ecology by modeling an environment based on love (eros) rather than death (thanatos) – as is the current technological-industrial world.” adorno notes kant’s notion of the “absence of interest” that characterizes the aesthetic in contrast to the practical realm: here “the aesthetic promotes nonviolence toward nature. art is not so much a space of positive qualities (eros), but of negative ones: it stops us from destroying things, if only for a moment” (24-5). the operations of the aesthetic are thus not necessarily subsumable within the commodity structure; they can, in fact, become antagonistic to commodity production, even when the very act of depiction recontextualizes the image’s referents and renders them vulnerable to commodification. in addition to noting the disparate potential outcomes of aesthetic rendering, it is necessary to observe the impact of cultural location in our understandings of sacrifice aesthetics. while the notion of aesthetic distance circulates within a western critical tradition that develops out of the work of kant, an array of ethnic, religious, traditional, and modern influences shape cultural production and reception – and by extension, the aesthetic experience – for indonesians in diverse ways (luvaas 265). surely the “hybrid” nature of cultural forms in indonesia does not preclude experiences of aesthetic distance, but it is also likely that local witnesses of the goat sacrifice, most of whom would be familiar with traditional feasts (slametan) and the muslim feast of sacrifice (idul adha) that feature animal sacrifice, would experience it differently than western observers. most indonesian readers of the newspaper will also be familiar with various traditions of sacrifice that occur throughout its islands. even so, this exposure does not guarantee an aesthetic experience of the image of the goat that is firmly distinct from that of nonindonesian and/or western readers. benedict anderson famously observes the role of newspapers in circulating news and ideas that fostered a sense of common experience that joined individuals from vastly different ethnic and cultural backgrounds into “imagined communities,” which culminate in the modern nation state (33). today’s media climate, however, where the production, circulation, and consumption of news content “flows” on a global scale, challenges the role of national categories for determining or comparing aesthetic responses (jenkins 2). yet, even as cultures “converge” in the global era of media to complicate the ways we distinguish aesthetic phillip drake — the goat that couldn’t stop the mud volcano 95 sensibilities, some differences in aesthetic experience are likely to endure, regardless of whether they are shaped by national, cultural, religious, or economic beliefs and practices. while an exploration of categories that determine aesthetic experience would be of interest, they are not a central concern of this essay. it is enough to note that the image is composed and circulated to sell newspapers, where its commodity function serves as one mode of appropriation of the sacrificial violence toward the animal, one that abstracts the violent event as a consumable “fetish.” as a mode of appropriation, the spectacular image-as-commodity can influence other hermeneutic or ideological appropriations. nonetheless, no appropriation or category of appropriation can guarantee access to a more primary or authentic meaning in the idea or experience of sacrifice. keenan’s reading of art as a mimetic sacrifice of sacrifice indicates that the only guarantee of understanding or appropriating the act is the lack of guarantees: the incessant potential for other appropriations. all modes of appropriation, however, like the aesthetic and economic operations at work in the production of spectacle, reproduce the violent act as a “fiction” that threatens to render it distant and abstract. similarities between the goat and those individuals adversely impacted by the mudflow once again arise, as respective hardships become recognized through abstract representations. in the image, the goat’s death is transformed into both an artwork and a commodity, while official policies that respond to the mudflow assign individuals and their hardships to categories of victimhood: those who legally are entitled to compensation and those who are not. the government and lapindo brantas recognize the qualitative specificity of hardship through the economy of land ownership. one’s status and experiences of suffering become identified with the classification and measurement of owned land. the act of identification, however, is not inherently antagonistic to the rights and interests of victims. for any individual, institution, or policy aiming to deliver assistance to people in need, needs and individuals in need must be recognized and classified. the established terms of this recognition and classification inevitably erase the meaning and truth of ideas and experiences that are always already inaccessible to representation (or they sacrifice sacrifice). these representative proceduresshould aspire, however, to avoid demoting the represented individuals’ social and ontological status. the classification of victims based on land ownership organizes individuals’ social and political status, but the fact that individuals can be so easily organized and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 96 classified indicates their ontological demotion. in other words, these representations raise questions not only about the denial of rights to those in the social margins, but also about the naturalization of the very denial of their rights. reason does not enter – tradition vs. modernity. through bataille’s version of sacrifice we come to see the emergence of a horizon of potential subject positions in both the act of sacrifice and representations of that act. both articulate and naturalize subject positions into hierarchies of social and ontological status by contrasting the animal, or subhuman, with the human. the human, with superior faculties and claims to rights, has the capacity to kill, benefit from killing, observe the killing, represent the killing, or contemplate representations of the killing. in the context of sacrifice rituals in indonesia, the hierarchical organization of subject positions frequently emerges in the tension between tradition and modernity played out in cultural production, politics, religion, and economic practices. a brief look at some trends will provide a sense of the intersecting influences of tradition and modernity in indonesia. culturally, indonesia is experiencing the same rapid development of digitized, mass entertainment that is transforming cultural production around the world, all while protecting and celebrating its diverse and rich traditional arts that are tied to locality and ethnicity (heryanto and hadiz 257). politically, indonesia is in the throes of massive liberalizing and democratizing reforms (reformasi) that began with the fall of the authoritarian suharto government in 1998, while it also retains many of the previous patrimonial structures that secure the status of political and economic elites (hadiz 716). regarding religious practices, indonesia has the largest population of muslims of any nation in the world. comprised of a broad and diverse collection of cultural and ethnic groups, indonesians are widely known for practicing and promoting tolerance toward individuals from other religions and cultural systems, a tolerance perhaps influenced by the nation’s well-known history of syncretism, of integrating traditional mysticism and modern religion (geertz, “ritual and social change” 35). at the same time, fundamentalist groups have recently augmented their cultural presence, influencing various laws and court cases related to social conduct (liang). the tension between tradition and modernity is also prevalent in the national economy, where local, informal production still provides livelihoods for almost half the population, even during the economy’s rapid development and emergence into the global sphere (islam 52). phillip drake — the goat that couldn’t stop the mud volcano 97 sacrifice, too, can be deployed to confirm both traditional and modern cultural narratives. the ritual of sacrifice, for instance, expresses the significance of traditional cosmologies in the contemporary world, where geological evidence presents only a partial explanation for the existence of the mud volcano.[10] indonesian theologian bernard adeney-risakotta writes that “most indonesians believe in invisible powers which reside all around them. . . . for some people, these local, invisible powers are to be cultivated, placated, feared, served or even worshiped” (235). while we find little success combating the mudflow with “modern” tools (e.g., pumps, tractors, and science), the sacrifice ritual appeals to forces extending beyond reason. noting the ways that some indonesian newspapers often accept the mystical origins of unusual events (as opposed to the western media’s dependence on scientific explanation), adeneyrisakotta writes that “human tragedies, including natural disasters, do not have a single, fixed ontological meaning, . . . but rather [meaning changes] in relation to human responses to the tragedy” (229). whether these mystics believed their sacrifice would stop the mudflow, the sacrifice ritual fits within naturalized spiritual narratives that continue to shape their understanding of the world, narratives that are sustained by the destruction of the animal’s life. in his well-known studies of javanese spirituality and rituals, clifford geertz observes that the maintenance of cosmological equanimity – between mankind, nature, and the spirits – is central to most traditional belief systems in java. within javanese tradition, geertz suggests, “to ‘be human’ is to be javanese,” where “man, his society, and his natural environment strike a harmony almost mathematical,” a harmony maintained by strict conformity to social practices and values that “religious ritual and belief dramatize” (“religious belief” 138). geertz notes the cultivation of harmony in his description of the slametan feast, which is still common in java today. the slametan is a large communal meal that is held in conjunction with significant events (e.g., births, deaths, and marriages) and features offerings to ancestors and local spirits to ensure the procession of events without incident (ibid. 139; hefner 538). when something is out of balance in the cosmos, when corruption proliferates and spirits become angry, people frequently see signs. in his personal account of life as a mudflow refugee, religious teacher h.m. maksum zuber observes the mudflow surging every time an official from the central government visited the disaster site: “the higher the position of officials at the site, the higher the explosions of mud,” finally growing “fierce with a blind rage, causing mud to gush and swallow anything that got in its way” after a visit from the president (7). in this context of social and environmental humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 98 disorder, it is possible to see the goat sacrifice as an attempt to respond to and pacify agitated spirits or unseen forces. the goat sacrifice captured in the jawa pos photograph has been one of many rituals performed at the disaster site as attempts to stop the mudflow. in addition to the goat in the photo, that day’s sacrifices included another goat, along with several chickens. there was even a contest held a month earlier by a local businessman who offered a house to anyone who could stop the mudflow with mystical powers (schiller et al. 55). the event included offerings of goats, cows, chickens, a bull’s head, and a magical bandana (“mystics can’t stop mud”). while these offerings and mystical powers draw on traditional beliefs and practices, when performed in the national media before the mudflow ― which, due to its associations with gas exploration drilling, is generally considered a very modern disaster[11] ― there is a danger that something is lost – in addition to the goat – when the sacrifice is taken out of context. having already noted the ways the aesthetic and commodity functions of the newspaper image appropriate the context of the physical killing of the goat, it is also worth noting that these functions appropriate the historical and cultural backdrop of sacrifice rituals. by framing the various mystical and traditional rituals in the carnival-like setting of the mudflow, the news media rearticulates these practices as spectacle. it is likely that some of the mystical “contestants” can be dismissed as mere exhibitionists. the links between mysticism and the mudflow are nonetheless real enough to resonate across indonesia. in java, for instance, earthquakes and volcanoes are often understood through myths about deities; most mountains have human guardians who mediate the spiritual and material worlds through rituals (adeneyrisakotta 236). it is also notable that it was mystics from sumatra who performed the sacrifice of the goat in the jawa pos photograph. in what was perhaps the most striking case of mysticism and magic related to the mudflow, anthropologist gregory forth notes that the well-publicized effort to stop the mudflow triggered a resurgence in “construction sacrifice” rumors in the eastern indonesian islands of flores and sumba in 2007-2008. according to legend, human heads endow man-made structures with strength, durability, and spiritual guardianship to prevent natural threats, and children’s heads are typically seen as the most powerful (4). in the past, suspiciouslooking outsiders have been attacked, even killed due to kidnapping fears. as the lapindo mudflow drew national attention, construction sacrifice rumors spread, complete with stories of attempted kidnappings, discovered headless bodies, phillip drake — the goat that couldn’t stop the mud volcano 99 disappearing children, and arrivals of suspicious strangers. in some cases the fear was great enough that parents kept their children from school (5). forth cites other researchers who suggest that the development of notions of construction sacrifice and head-stealing emerges out of a history of colonial contact, where powerful outsiders arrive and impose laws and practices while extracting wealth.[12] in this colonial context, the rumors articulate and solidify the divide between subjects as local residents and subjects as outsiders. there occurs a similar process with the sacrifice of the goat at the mudflow, where killing the goat expresses not only traditional cosmologies but also a defiance of contemporary cultural, intellectual, and spiritual movements. in other words, some may interpret killing the goat through sacrifice as a way for these men to express their identities in opposition to modernity and the cultural narratives and ideologies often associated with modernity (e.g., globalization, liberalism, and secularism). on the other hand, once the sacrifice is framed and circulated as a mass-media image, the killing of the goat articulates the modernity and rationality of readers and producers of the newspaper by provincializing the ritual of sacrifice and those who partake in it. we see this provincializing effect against those involved in the sacrifice quite literally in the caption of the image: “it does not make sense: a supernatural group performs a ritual of throwing a young goat [a kid] into the lapindo mud in porong, sidoarjo, yesterday” (tak masuk akal: kelompok supernatural melakukan ritual membuang anak kambing ke lumpur lapindo di porong, sidoarjo, kemarin). although generally used interchangeably with the english expression, “it does not make sense,” the expression “tak masuk akal” literally translates as “reason does not enter,” which seems more appropriate to an interpretation of a sacrifice ritual that articulates distinctions between subjects operating inside and outside the realm of modern reason. from the perspective of most readers and producers of the newspaper who inhabit a modern, globally connected “imagined community,” reason does not enter into myths, mysticism, and barbaric rituals. reason sustains modernity, as horkheimer and adorno’s renowned analysis of enlightenment culture highlights: “the principle according to which reason is simply opposed to everything unreasonable underlies the true opposition between enlightenment and mythology” (70). reason dictates that animal sacrifices will not stop a mudflow, that such killing of animals serves no rational purpose. horkheimer and adorno note, in fact, the role of reason in the recognition of humanity: “throughout european history the idea of the human being has been humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 100 expressed in contradistinction to the animal. the latter’s lack of reason is the proof of human dignity” (203). once again we see the animal playing a prominent role in the construction of what wolfe calls the “fantasy” of the human, where – like earlier notions of aesthetic contemplation, media consumption, and possession of property – reason provides the ideological prop upon which mankind elevates itself. the unreasonable, the ostensibly mindless iterators of outdated superstitious practices, are made to resemble something less-than-human. in this sense, the killing of the goat establishes a chauvinistic perspective of reason, from which the killing of the animal turns the killers, also, into animals. however unreasonable one thinks the practices and beliefs of those who sacrifice the animal, it is important to note that to many residents and interested observers, reason does not always enter into a range of other events related to the mudflow, including activities performed within modern, scientific paradigms of reason. reason also does not always seem to enter into, or at least to guide, the disaster management effort, which has been more alienating than helpful to most local residents (hamdi et al. 10). reason does not enter in the way elite politics have hijacked discourses about causality, transparency, and accountability, drowning the voices and interests of victims within an exclusive and opaque apparatus of power (utomo 28-9). perhaps the most prominent moment of unreason in the disaster management effort was the decision in 2007 to drop hundreds of high-density concrete balls into the mudflow’s main crater. scientists and engineers from the bandung institute of technology (itb) developed a plan to plug the main spring with concrete balls using what they called the “high density chained balls method” (istadi 1727): “the idea is to jam the gullet of the geyser with 1,000 or more balls linked together like charm bracelets, in bunches of four, the biggest of them weighing about 175 pounds” (mydans). certainly, reason plays an important role in the planning and execution of the concrete ball drop, even if the itb experts were acting on questionable evidence and predictions about the plan’s outcome, and even if other geologists doubted the plan (ibid.). but to other interested parties, especially local residents waiting for financial assistance, the plan represented the flagrant misuse of scarce funds that could have many more “reasonable” uses (zuber 98). even in a publication summarizing social and technical operations by management officials and researchers at the mudflow, a collection of experts at the surabaya institute of technology (its) notes that disaster management officials have devoted too many resources to seeking technological solutions to the mudflow. considering the size and phillip drake — the goat that couldn’t stop the mud volcano 101 complexity of the mudflow, the its report suggests that long-term projects that emphasize social and geographical welfare would be far more beneficial to the social and economic conditions around the mudflow. they would also be cheaper to administer (wiguna et al. 54). although the balls actually managed to stop the mudflow for a few hours, the mudflow quickly returned to its normal output, and the project was cut short in the face of growing expenses and public ridicule. the itb plan is paradigmatic of technocrats’ crude faith in solutions stemming from advancement of technologies and expertise, a faith that problematizes the centrality of reason in ideologies of modernity and has been a target of much critique (mayer). horkheimer and adorno note, for instance, that reason takes on a mythic quality as modern science employs it to secure human control over nature and the world (19-20). indeed, there is a simple and naïve quality to the plan, as if a child could have designed it, yet it also demonstrates humanity’s gross overconfidence the capacity to control nature. this combination of simplicity and arrogance in the conception and operation of the plan undermines its integrity as a product of scientifically-rigorous reason. aesthetic similarities between the goat sacrifice and the dropping of the concrete balls also challenge reason as an epistemic category that secures the distinctiveness of tradition and modernity. both acts, the sacrifice and the ball drop, demonstrate antagonism and arrogance toward nature (or nonhuman beings or forces) by denying the being of the goat and the power and complexity of geological forces. together, the acts articulate subjectivities associated both with modernity (e.g., as humans, consumers, practitioners of technology, etc.) and with tradition (e.g., as animals, the faithful, practitioners of ritual, etc.). forth even suggests some connection between the concrete balls and the spread of head-stealing rumors, noting that the balls where shaped “not unlike human heads” (6). as these acts blur the boundaries that typically articulate the distinctiveness of tradition and modernity, we become better accustomed to recognizing the ways these subjectivities are produced and circulated. far from arbitrary categories that should be abandoned, modern and traditional subjectivities are structured and habituated through beliefs and practices that are overdetermined by a host of social forces and by nonhumans. it is not just cultural, economic, and political phenomena that shape subjectivity; mudflows and animals have an impact as well. the ways individuals enter into dialogue with the nonhuman world of animals and natural forces goes far into humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 102 determining one’s subjectivity, whether it means articulating a person as distinctly human, modern, traditional, animal, or something else. tensions between tradition and modernity are even prevalent in contemporary religious movements and institutions in indonesia. islam’s prominence and influence manifests through an expansive range of modern institutions and social structures. in contrast to localized and informal spiritual traditions, islam is highly organized and widely visible throughout indonesia, influencing politics, education, business, and everyday public life (hefner 548). yet ambiguities arise during events like the annual feast of sacrifice (idul adha), which commemorates abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son ishmael at god’s command. most households perform an animal sacrifice, and dense urban neighborhoods streets will literally run red with animal blood. despite the institutionalization of the feast of sacrifice, which is a national holiday, when one witnesses or even participates in the actual taking of animal life, the gruesomeness of the act – the screams, twitching, and gore – momentarily disrupts the ostensibly clean distinction between the modernity of organized religion and the barbaric violence often associated with traditional mysticism. more important than upsetting attempts to plot coordinates of modernity, a project precluded by the range of cultural and historical influences that shape beliefs and practices, the feast of sacrifice exemplifies the naturalization of both the sacrifice ritual and the instrumental usage of animal life. this naturalization of animal sacrifice also naturalizes the range of human and subhuman subjectivities articulated in the sacrifice ritual. as wolfe observes in considering speciesist ideologies that privilege the human, these can evolve to justify incredible violence against beings who do not qualify as “properly human” (8). conclusion . keenan emphasizes that the power of sacrifice and representations of sacrifice lies in the endless generation of potential for appropriations, which we see expressing a range of ideological narratives and subject positions. in the violent act of sacrifice, an expression of control that establishes an ostensible ontological order within the ecological community, individuals betray the variability and contingency of subjectivity. this variability in subjectivity is also present in systems of biopower, where expressions of control, on both biological and social registers, must constantly evolve and be reconfigured to account for the ways biopower transforms both subjects and the conditions of power (hardt and negri 392). while bataille’s version of sacrifice does not offer an exit from this everlasting dance between control and subjectivity, it at least forbids the foreclosure of a possibility of exit. in other words, the sacrifice ritual phillip drake — the goat that couldn’t stop the mud volcano 103 may not reveal any meaning or essence that we can use to secure certain subject positions, but it also cannot secure the impossibility or absence of meaning or essence (keenan 43-4). the act of sacrifice, like the act of artistic production, submits ideas and identities to be appropriated by others through their experiences and interpretations of the sacrifice or artwork. even if neither meaning nor non-meaning can be guaranteed, we kill and create as if the potential to generate new meanings still exists. thus, at every rendering of sacrifice – the sacrifice before sacrifice that installs the individual within systems of power that establish who qualifies as a candidate to be sacrificed, the actual sacrifice where death occurs, and then the representation of the sacrifice – there is the potential for the scapegoat to exceed the ways he or she is represented, in spite of the social and ontological demotions ascribed to him or her. this potential has important implications for social justice movements around the world that strive to deliver certain rights and dignities to individuals marginalized by power. in the context of the lapindo mudflow, where victims face the threat of social and ontological demotion through their subjection to the legal discourses and instruments that identify and classify the status of different forms of hardship, the instrumentalization of the goat in sacrifice prompts us – victims, officials, and researchers alike – to explore more deeply the processes through which we recognize and put to use individuals’ bodies, rights, and capacities to suffer. crucially, the privileged “human” emerges through ritualized, instrumentalized, and destructive interactions with the goat: the goat who holds in place an array of subjects and relationships to generate and sustain an “imagined community” of humans. while this essay touches on some of the cultural, political, religious, and environmental factors that shape these understandings of human and nonhuman being in the context of social justice in the aftermath of the lapindo mudflow, further research must be done to more accurately and exhaustively account for the social and ontological conditions through which power is expressed and naturalized in ecological communities through literal and symbolic violence. this work demands much of researchers, both in methods and training. methodologically, it requires inquiry into causal relationships in complex social and natural systems to identify determining agents and to analyze relationships between actors, events, and systems that always threaten to give or take away the meaning of sacrifice. it follows that researchers adopting such an interdisciplinary, ecological approach require training, access to knowledge, and the capacity to synthesize diverse humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 104 and often discordant information. perhaps more daunting to researchers, however, is the realization that they, too, represent sacrifice through their work. they, too, appropriate, and submit to appropriation, the deaths of others. they, too, must come to realize in their own work the impossibility of pinning sacrifice to determinations or meaning, as well as the inability to guarantee or reveal this impossibility as necessary. it is a project that will miss its target, possibly but not necessarily because of researchers’ shortcomings, but also because sacrifice undermines researchers’ capacity to even question whether or not that target ever existed. notes i would like to thank john rieder, john zuern, and the anonymous reviewers from humanimalia for their comments on an earlier draft of this essay. the usual disclaimers apply. 1. although i am unable to verify the biological sex of the goat, based on personal experience – both witnessing goat sacrifices and conversing informally with participants – male goats are more frequently sacrificed in indonesia than female goats. for the purposes of this essay, i find it more palatable to possibly mischaracterize the goat’s sex than to ascribe him with the objectifying pronoun “it.” 2. the naming of the mudflow has been subject to contention, with many suspecting behind-the-scenes manipulation by media executives and politicians. studies have shown that through the first three years of the mudflow, the national media most often referred to the disaster as the “lapindo mudflow.” in the last two years, “sidoarjo mudflow” has become more common (ilmie). 3. in her book, animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times, nicole shukin employs the double meanings that the word “rendering” indicates: rendering signifies both the mimetic act of making a copy, that is, reproducing or interpreting an object in linguistic, painterly, musical, filmic, or other media (new technologies of 3-d digital animation are, for instance, called “renderers”) and the industrial boiling down and recycling of animal remains. . . . the double entendre of rendering is deeply suggestive of the complicity of “the arts” and “industry” in the conditions of possibility of capitalism. (20, emphasis in original) phillip drake — the goat that couldn’t stop the mud volcano 105 we see a similar complicity between aesthetic and commodity functions in the rendering of the goat’s body and death through the image. 4. for an extensive summary of the two competing positions regarding the disputed trigger of the mudflow, see both davies et al. and kadurin et al. 5. schiller et al.’s “learning from the east java mudflow” provides an excellent account of events through the first two years; bosman batubara’s “resistance through memory” presents a useful depiction of victims’ struggles; anton novenanto’s “the lapindo case” covers matters related to the national media, particularly questions about representation and the circulation of information and misinformation; most recently the non-profit, humanitus sidoarjo fund (hsf) has published a report on the social impact of the mudflow, including a detailed timeline. 6. there are even reports of increased crime in the area and some victims entering into prostitution (muradi, zuber 90). 7. lapindo brantas and the sidoarjo mudflow mitigation agency (badan penanggulangan lumpur sidoarjo – the bpls) have provided other forms of assistance, including temporary food, water, health, rent, and work assistance; however, this assistance has come in neither the quantity or regularity to significantly improve victims conditions (hsf 66). 8. lapindo brantas formed minarak lapindo jaya to handle the “sale and purchase” process, while the government established the bpls to oversee all geological, infrastructural, and social projects. 9. my findings are based on compiled conversations and formal interviews with porong-area residents between 2008-2011. the formal interviews occurred in 2010-2011, during a year of focused research on residents’ experiences and political practices in response to the mudflow with assistance from the surabaya institute of technology (its) in east java. these interviews focused on several dozen residents in the villages of besuki, mindi, renokenongo, and kedungbendo, areas most vulnerable to flooding due to levee failures. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 106 10. incidentally, in personal interviews with victims of the mudflow, while some have expressed religious explanations for their hardship – e.g. a test or punishment – each has stated that the mudflow was caused by drilling. 11. again, in every conversation or interview, residents of the villages around the levees invariably mention drilling as the cause of the mudflow. 12. citing r. a. drake’s analysis of the head-stealing rumors, forth writes, “the notional head-stealing has been construed as a transformation of indigenous head-hunting and traditional construction sacrifice, attributed ironically to powerful outsiders who have denied these practices to indigenous peoples by outlawing local warfare” (6). works cited adeney-risakotta, bernard. “is there a meaning in natural disasters? constructions of culture, religion and science.” exchange 38 (2009): 226-43. agamben, giorgio. homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. trans. daniel hellerroazen. stanford: stanford up, 1995. althusser, louis. “ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation).” lenin and philosophy, and other essays. trans. ben brewster. london: new left books, 1971: 121-73. anderson, benedict. imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. new york: verso, 1983. bataille, georges. the accursed share: an essay on general economy, vol. 1. trans. robert hurley. new york: zone books, 1988. _____. “hegel, death, and sacrifice.” yale french studies 78 (1990): 9-28. batubara, bosman. “the victims of the lapindo mudflow disaster continue to assert their rights to compensation.” inside indonesia 101 (july – sep. 2010). online. 26 sep. 2010. phillip drake — the goat that couldn’t stop the mud volcano 107 butler, judith. bodies that matter. new york: routledge, 1993. davies, richard, michael manga, mark tingay, susila lusianga, and richard swarbrick. “discussion: sawolo et al. (2009) the lusi mud volcano controversy: was it caused by drilling?” marine and petroleum geology 27 (2010): 1651–7. debord, guy. society of the spectacle. trans. k. knabb. london: rebel press, 2000. derrida, jacques. acts of religion. ed. gil anidjar. new york: routledge, 2002. dewan, angela. “money can’t buy him love.” asia sentinel. 31 may 2011. online. 31 may 2011. forth, gregory. “heads under bridges or in mud: reflections on a southeast asian ‘diving rumor.’” anthropology today 25:6 (nov. 2009): 3-6. fitzpatrick, peter. “bare sovereignty: homo sacer and the insistence of law.” politics, metaphysics, and death: essays on giorgio agamben’s homo sacer. ed. andrew norris. durham: duke up, 2005: 49-73. foucault, michel. society must be defended: lectures at the college de france 1975-76. trans. david macey. new york: picador, 2003. geertz, clifford. “religious belief and economic behavior in a central javanese town: some preliminary considerations.” economic development and cultural change 4:2 (jan. 1956): 134-58. _____. “ritual and social change: a javanese example.” american anthropologist 59:1 (feb. 1957): 32-54. girard, rene. violence and the sacred. trans. patrick gregory. baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1972. hadiz, vedi r. “decentralization and democracy in indonesia: a critique of neo institutionalist perspectives.” development and change 35:4 (2004): 697-718. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 108 hamdi, mujtaba, wardah hafidz and gabriela sauter. “uplink porong: supporting community-driven responses to the mud volcano disaster in sidoarjo, indonesia.” gatekeeper: the role of local organizations in sustainable development 137:j (aug. 2009): 116. hardt, michael and antonio negri. empire. cambridge: harvard up, 2000. hefner, robert w. “islamizing java? religion and politics in rural east java.” journal of asian studies 46:3 (aug. 1987): 533-54. heryanto, ariel and vedi r. hadiz. “post-authoritarian indonesia: a comparative southeast asian perspective.” critical asian studies 37:2 (2005): 251-75. horkheimer, max and theodor adorno. dialectic of enlightenment: philosophical fragments. ed. gunselin schmid noerr. trans. edmund jephcott. stanford: stanford up, 1987. hsf (humanitus sidoarjo fund). “social impact report: report into the past, present and future social impacts of lumpur sidoarjo.” humanitus foundation, march 2011. online. ilmie, m. irfan. “lumpur lapindo ataukah lumpur sidoarjo?” antara news. 30 may 2010. online. 4 june 2010. islam, iyanatul. “poverty, employment and wages: an indonesian perspective.” international labor organization jmhlw government of indonesia seminar on strengthening employment and labour market policies for poverty alleviation and economic recovery in east and southeast asia. jakarta 29 april – 1 may 2002. istadi, bambang p., gatot h. pramono, prihadi sumintadireja, and syamsu alam. “modeling study of growth and potential geohazard for lusi mud volcano: east java, indonesia.” marine and petroleum geology 26 (2009): 1724-39. jenkins, henry. convergence culture: where old and new media collide. new york: new york university press, 2006. phillip drake — the goat that couldn’t stop the mud volcano 109 kadurin, sergey, igor a. losev, lubov y. eremina, maxim belmesov, and igor k. nikolaevich. lusi research report. report for the russian institute of geological studies, the institute of electro physics, and ooo rineftgaz, 2010. keenan, dennis king. the question of sacrifice. bloomington, in: indiana up, 2005. liang jamison. “homophobia on the rise.” inside indonesia 100 (april-june 2010). web. 2 aug 2010. luvaas, brent. “dislocating sounds: the deterritorialization of indie pop.” cultural anthropology 24:2 (2009): 246-79. mayer, anna-k. “reluctant technocrats: science promotion in the neglect-of-science debate of 1916-1918.” history of science 43 (2005): 139–59. mazzini, a. nermoen, a. krotkiewski, m. podladchikov, y. planke, and s. svensen, h. “strike-slip faulting as a trigger mechanism for overpressure release through piercement structures. implications for the lusi mud volcano, indonesia.” marine and petroleum geology 26 (2009): 1751-65. morton, timothy. ecology without nature: rethinking environmental aesthetics. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 2007. muradi “human security perspective in social effect management of mud volcano disaster in sidoarjo.” presentation at open forum: the east java mudflow: learning from an un-natural disaster (flinders, australia: flinders asia center & flinders institute asia pacific, 2007). mydans, seth. “spirits are angry. bad time to bomb their volcano.” new york times. 28 march 2007. online. 13 sep. 2007. “mystics can’t stop mud.” new zealand news. 16 oct. 2006. online. 24 apr. 2008. norris, andrew. “introduction: giorgio agamben and the politics of the living dead.” politics, metaphysics, and death: essays on giorgio agamben’s homo sacer. ed. andrew norris. durham: duke up, 2005: 1-30. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 110 novenanto, anton. “‘the lapindo case’ by the mainstream media.” indonesian journal of social sciences 1:3 (2009): 125-38. oksala, johanna. “violence and the biopolitics of modernity.” foucault studies 10 (november 2010): 23-43. orolo, dedi. “status tak jelas.” warta jenggala online. 14 oct. 2010. web. 14 oct. 2010. rumiati, agnes tuti and desi cahyaningtyas. “analisis kondisi dampak sosial akibat luapan lumpur sidoarjo.” seminar nasional 4 tahun lumpur sidoarjo: pengelolaan lumpur sidoarjo dalam perspektif teknik dan ilmu kebumian. surabaya, indonesia: 30 nov. 2010. online. schiller, jim, anton lucas, and priyambudi sulistiyanto. “learning from the east java mudflow: disaster politics in indonesia.” indonesia 85 (apr. 2008): 51-77. shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2009. singer, peter. “all animals are equal.” animal rights and human obligations. eds. tom regan and peter singer. upper saddle river: prentice-hall, 1989: 148-162. soedjono, eddy. “penyediaan air minum di sekitar kawasan bencana lumpur sidoarjo.” seminar nasional 4 tahun lumpur sidoarjo: pengelolaan lumpur sidoarjo dalam perspektif teknik dan ilmu kebumian. surabaya, indonesia: 30 nov. 2010. suparno. “tanggul lumpur lapindo jebol, satu eksavator tenggelam.” detik surabaya. 28 april 2011. online. 28 april 2011. utomo, paring waluyo. “menggapai mimpi yang terus tertunda: menelusuri proses ‘ganti rugi’ terhadap korban lumpur lapindo.” disastrum 1:1 (2009), 27-45. wiguna, p. a., wahudi, c. and widodo, a. penanggulangan semburan lumpur sidoarjo. surabaya, indonesia: pskb, lppm, its, 2009. wolfe, cary. animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. chicago: u of chicago p, 2003. phillip drake — the goat that couldn’t stop the mud volcano 111 zuber, h.m. maksum. titanic made by lapindo. trans. b. batubara and s. masykur. yogyakarta, indonesia: lafadl pustaka, 2009. microsoft word price-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:2 jason price running with butkus: animals and animality in rocky rocky (1976), directed by john g. avildsen and starring sylvester stallone, is often viewed as the inspirational story of an underdog who achieves success through “going the distance” in the boxing ring with the champion. the film is inspiring for the way in which the title character, down on his luck, rejected by his trainer, and living in poverty rises to the challenge by taking the standing champion, apollo creed, the full fifteen rounds. while he ultimately loses the fight, this serves as a minor detail, since his goal was to prove his worth to himself, to prove that he is not just a “bum.” his determination and work ethic in training are inspiring as he comes close to the pinnacle of his sport with little financial and, at least at first, little emotional or moral support, considering his lack of friends and family at the beginning of the film. the rather innocent, well-intentioned title character secures the film’s success and importance in american film as rocky figures as a working class hero, one who refuses to let a life of poverty diminish his character or render him as just another parasite on or victim of his community. that is, the film celebrates the working class character as having value, and his story of moving from poverty and isolation to accomplishment speaks largely to american myths about the successes of poor immigrants and other poor folks who come from nothing to achieve something meaningful in their lives. rocky is an inspirational film in light of the character’s determination and drive for success — the film and its music are continuously cited in popular culture and by exercise enthusiasts. as its portrayal of rocky’s ethic of hard work translates easily to any challenge that viewers may face in their own lives, perhaps this is another reason for its initial and continued popularity. while many viewers note the film’s underdog story of believing in oneself and striving for a goal in the face of great adversity and doubters, i’m interested here in rocky’s animals and animality, which have not received much treatment by critics: the film series’ portrayal of the title character’s animality, its animal themes, and animal actors. as steve baker’s work on animals as symbols show, rocky’s close relationship and associations with animals are likely another reason why people relate to and like him. for example, baker notes that the english bulldog is often historically associated with the positive attributes of “courage and determination” (picturing the beast 50-52). the way rocky lives with pets and takes on an animal nickname provides a way to convey to the audience his courage, nobility, and innocence.1 animals and animal themes reappear throughout the rocky series: rocky’s humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 88 pet turtles, adrian’s job at a pet store, rocky’s “italian stallion” nickname, his being a “southpaw” and an “underdog,” his having a “beast” inside him in rocky balboa, the song “eye of the tiger” from rocky iii, rocky’s dogs: butkus and punchy, etc. rocky’s association with these mostly strong and virile animals provides a clear example of how animals are used for their symbolism in human narratives. while i’ll discuss animals as symbols at a few points, i’m more interested in the scenes in the films where animals are approached literally and on their own terms. in this essay, i’ll focus on the first and last films of the series, rocky (1976) and rocky balboa (2006), because animals and rocky’s animality receive the most attention there. as i’ll discuss later, the last film, appearing thirty years after the first, complements the original nicely as it picks up many of the same motifs and achieves some critical moves which were not possible or were not achieved in the first under-budgeted film, including stallone’s decision to actually box in the last fight scene. rocky and his pet turtles, cuff and link. rocky portrays the life of its eponymous poor young boxer as he struggles to live a meaningful life in an underprivileged urban setting of philadelphia. the film begins with a boxing match where he receives a brutal head butt and, after deductions for showering, doctor fees, and other items, he receives almost no pay for winning his fight. the film portrays the local philadelphians and match attendees as rude, offensive, and jason price -”running with butkus: animals and animality in rocky” 89 poor, with one patron yelling at the wounded rocky that he is a “bum.” rocky attempts to live differently and tries to avoid the abuses, both verbal and physical, from those he lives with, including his friend paulie (a meat plant worker), his trainer mick, who kicks him out of his gym, the loan shark tony gazzo, for whom he briefly works, boxing organizers, fans, and the press. he is portrayed as caring for animals, looking after pet turtles in his dirty apartment, and later running with his bullmastiff butkus. adrian, a pet store employee and sister to paulie, purchased butkus for rocky as a running companion and as she later becomes his love interest, she is perhaps the one character, in addition to the animals and perhaps apollo creed, his opponent, who does not treat him poorly. where most of the characters seem self-interested and prey on or abuse others, rocky and adrian are portrayed as benevolent and hurt or wounded by the abuse they receive from those they live with. rather luckily, he gets chosen as an opponent for the current boxing champion, creed. the organizers select him in order to promote the fight as a clash of cultures, thinking it will increase sales to sell the story of the champion fighting an underdog, a “nobody,” while also playing on the jingoism of the bicentennial of the birth of america. in other words, the fight isn’t taken seriously as an athletic competition by the promoters and creed’s camp, but more as an easy way to sell tickets to the fight. rocky takes the fight seriously, however, as a chance to prove his mettle. he doesn’t win, but still secures a sense of achievement, proving that he isn’t a bum or “worthless,” but that he belongs in the company of champions. the story is often viewed as inspirational for its portrayal of his finding a kind of success as a “million to one shot.” the second film under analysis titled rocky balboa (2012) begins, after a few brief clips of current champion mason dixon’s boxing matches, with a scene of rocky, now much older (at least in his 60s), feeding his turtles, putting food on the windowsill apparently for birds, and then doing pull-ups in the meager backyard of his lower class house. the film revisits many of the scenes from the original rocky and portrays in the title character someone struggling to deal with the death of his wife adrian, to move on from the past. upon stopping at a bar he once frequented in the old neighborhood, balboa happens upon marie, who appeared in rocky as a young teen hanging out in the streets and whom rocky attempted to guide away from being used sexually by boys. their relationship takes on an important role in the film as he invites her and her son, who live in a rather poverty-stricken looking part of town, to eat and later work at his humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 90 restaurant called adrian’s. the two encourage and help rocky in his training for his last fight. rocky also has a somewhat strained relationship with his son who works in the business world, and who often neglects to visit his mother’s grave or meet with his father. after a sports program on television runs a computer-animated simulation of a fight between rocky in his prime and the current champion mason-dixon, rocky decides he wants to return to fighting, even in his old age. much like apollo creed of rocky, dixon is portrayed as extravagantly wealthy; yet he is dissatisfied with how fans and commentators fail to respect him and speak poorly of him. rocky desires to fight a few small, local fights, but after the attention that the simulation garnered from the sports world, dixon’s promoters organize a fight between rocky and dixon, convincing rocky to participate. along the path of preparing for the fight, rocky offers several poignant speeches about his desire to fight and to do what will make him happy. he delivers these speeches to his son, who attempts to dissuade him, as well as to the judges who at first refuse to grant him a boxing license because of his age. balboa’s training for the fight against dixon that concludes the film brings his friends new and old closer to him, including his newly adopted dog punchy and his son as they help him train for the final fight of his life. rocky exercising in his backyard with punchy (bottom left). jason price -”running with butkus: animals and animality in rocky” 91 reading animals on their own terms. to be certain, in the rocky series animals are not the focus of the story, as the films obviously center around the life of the human boxer. and yet animals and animal themes play a significant part in rocky’s life. leger grindon2 highlights the fact that after rocky’s first win, he has no one but his pets to tell of his good news (knockout 215). while perhaps many have not taken notice of the animals in the film, a quick search on the internet reveals a butkus fan-page, butkus stallone being listed as an actor playing the part of butkus on the internet movie database (imdb.com), and at least one fan saying that he likes rocky because he likes boxing and loves animals. in addition, the visual that plays during the scrolling of the credits at the end of rocky balboa, which portrays candid video of average people running up the stairs of the philadelphia museum of art in imitation of rocky — something people apparently do there every day —, portrays at least two people running up the stairs with their dogs before celebrating like rocky. when animals appear in fiction or in film, a common practice is to read them as symbols, metaphors, or as propping up or developing human characters. in picturing the beast, steve baker calls this the “cultural denial of the animal,” which for him “is maintained by means of a rather effective two-pronged attack: it comes from common sense … on the one hand, and from theory (psychoanalysis, historical sociology, and a good deal more besides) on the other … the possibility of addressing the issue of animals has been closed off” (216). baker is thinking about instances where people have read stories with animals in them, like those produced by disney, to be not about animals at all, but as stories where the animals stand in for something else, usually a human issue or concern. to be sure, the films under question here use animals and animal themes in this way, as is evident in the name “italian stallion,” for example, which is stallone’s use of an animal name that provides a positive symbol of animality, an association of toughness and nobility for his character. it is a way to develop character, and as no horses appear in the film it is clear that rocky isn’t concerned with a real stallion. stallone himself, in his director commentary on rocky balboa, suggests that some of the animals should or can be read as symbols or as developments of rocky’s character. for example, he notes that the dogs in the films are like his alter-egos: butkus is strong and youthful like the title character in rocky, and rocky sees his older self in punchy. in balboa he also personifies his sadness and anger as a “beast” that he has to get rid of by boxing mason dixon. such uses and readings of animals make them mere props in developing human narratives: sacrificing the animal as a symbol or metaphor to tell a human story. in these uses of the animal, the animal’s life or presence is never humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 92 approached on its own terms or acknowledged as having its own bodily experience; rather, the animal is denied, as baker argues, and turned into something that makes sense in a cultural narrative. i’m interested, however, in taking the animal actors and animal bodies in the rocky series seriously and on their own terms. what happens when we read rocky’s dogs and the beef carcasses he punches not as a way to show that rocky is fierce or innocent or friendly (and they certainly can be and perhaps are intended to be read this way for the most part) but as animal bodies? included in this reading is rocky’s own animality and how we might read him as a material body rather than as a symbol for cultural success or as a figure for white masculinity or nationalism, for example. while much of the films’ use of animals is symbolic in nature, a few important scenes in each suggest the possibility of approaching animals and animality on their own terms.3 in this sense, the final fight scene of rocky balboa, in which stallone decided to actually box a seasoned fighter in antonio tarver instead of choreographing a boxing match with another actor, as he did in rocky with carl weathers, suggests a move away from the construction of a cultural narrative to a portrayal of real bodies being beaten and injured: a decisive move to treat bodies as bodies. as an example of a critic who reads bodies in rocky in cultural or social terms, victoria a. elmwood argues that rocky offers masculine status and national citizenship to a previously rejected group [african americans] in exchange for their allegiance in a quest for the remasculization of white men (and, by extension, the nation) as well as offering a bond of solidarity in rolling back the advances made by feminism. in particular, this rolling back focused on reinforcing the primacy of reproduction as women’s social (and civic) duty. (49) elmwood offers an important critique of the way adrian’s fate is made to depend on the success of rocky’s fight and how her interests are sacrificed to the story of male bonding. also, elmwood highlights a reading of the racialized body of the african american character. while elmwood reads the characters as symbols for masculinity and race relations — how their bodies can be read in a social sense — i’m interested in reading them as material bodies, acknowledging at the same time that much of the violence done to bodies results from racism and patriarchy when bodies are read culturally or perceived to be defined by race or gender. the horrible way that people treat others continues in the scenes of rocky balboa in which rocky struggles to deal with adrian’s death, emotionally breaking down at jason price -”running with butkus: animals and animality in rocky” 93 times. accompanied by paulie, he revisits places important to his and adrian’s relationship. paulie continuously complains, trying to rush rocky, explaining that he does not want to relive the past: “you treated her good … i treated her bad.” paulie’s words confirm his violent and poor treatment of his sister — early in the first film, he told rocky that she frustrates him so much that he could split her head with a razor —, showing his remorse at having treated her poorly. obviously, readings of race and gender relations are important for critiquing modes of oppression. however, when we view bodies as defined by or representative of these social categories or constructions, we often neglect a consideration of their singularity and materiality. that is, we might view adrian as a figure for the plight of women or representative of white women, viewing her body abstractly as a fact, and in the process neglect her as a real presence. this is not to undermine the importance of identifying racism and patriarchy in fiction and film. instead, the point is to appreciate more deeply the suffering of bodies, to stay a bit longer with the trouble and horror of the violence they experience, which is often neglected when bodies are viewed as representatives, facts, or statistics. film scholar leger grindon argues that “[t]hough an entertainment, the boxing film portrays suffering as central to experience” (knockout 187). in addition to the violence that emanates from patriarchal and racist discourses, suffering in rocky also often results from the conditions of poverty characters experience, as well as their failure to recognize the vulnerability of others. this suffering comes into focus as animals are used as symbols to develop character or to describe human suffering. many of the characters treat each other terribly in the first film, often, it seems, as a way to derive pleasure or profit from their abuse of others. apart from rocky, adrian, and the animals, many of the characters’ interactions with each other are relations of consumption. they often view others as a means to produce a profit for themselves, or as objects to be consumed for their personal enjoyment. for example, the crowds that attend the boxing matches are portrayed as grotesque in their consumption of the visual spectacle of the beating of the boxers’ bodies. in another example, there is a great deal of tension between rocky and his trainer mick, since mick had earlier thrown him out of his gym and returns to say he wants to train rocky only after rocky is selected for the big (and more lucrative) fight against the champion, indicating that mick views rocky as a means for his own profit. just as bodies can be read as symbols in terms of human narratives, capitalism can influence humans to read bodies as commodities to be consumed or profited from, often closing off the view that the body is a vulnerable life. where most of the characters in rocky adopt this mode of individualism and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 94 accumulation, rocky and adrian are portrayed as nurturing and doing for others by trying to bring them pleasure. of course, the animals in the film have not adopted consumption as their only mode of relating to others either, and this may be one of the reasons that rocky has only them to share his good news with. since everyone else treats him poorly — puts him down and treats him like “meat“— he chooses to keep company with his pets. rocky, of course, is not a perfect character without flaw or immunity from the ills of his community. in his poor state, he comes close to working within the norms of his community in order to survive and yet he strives to view and treat others as people, as bodies, and not as a means to secure money or pleasure for himself. in an early scene in rocky, while working for a gangster figure named tony gazzo, rocky struggles with trying to view someone as a means of profit and ignoring their bodily life. down by the docks, rocky approaches a man who owes gazzo money with significant interest in a physically threatening manner at first. he grabs the man by the collar, demanding the money. fist raised, he looks about to strike and finds he cannot do it: he cannot beat the man for his money. in this sense, he is not the best muscle or “goon” for a loan shark as he can’t bring himself to beat someone for their money, to ignore the vulnerability of a body. while he does get some money from the man, it seems he recognizes his behavior as a mistake and he is no longer shown collecting money for gazzo in the film. stallone says as much about rocky in his director’s comments on rocky balboa, when he suggests that rocky is a nurturer and “doesn’t require beating people to elevate himself.” in contrast, paulie’s desire to work for gazzo and his verbal abuse and physical violence towards rocky and adrian as when, for example, he swings a bat at them at his house, suggest his failure to respect the vulnerability of others’ bodies. paulie also arranges for the shamrock meat company endorsement from the meat-plant where he works to be sewn into rocky’s boxing robe, with paulie solely profiting from the deal. in this sense, paulie uses rocky and capitalizes off of rocky’s risking of his body to injury and death, confirming that paulie relates to others, even his friend rocky, in terms of selfaccumulation. rocky’s desire to have relationships with others that revolve around giving them pleasure or nurturing them extends to his relationships with animals as he lives with them, brings them food, and talks to them, sometimes awkwardly telling them jokes. most of the other characters in the film relate to animals only through consumption: paulie eats meat and works at the meat plant, for example. rocky challenges the normative practice of eating turkey on thanksgiving in the united states, as he doesn’t eat it, commenting that it is just another thursday for him. he is also never shown jason price -”running with butkus: animals and animality in rocky” 95 eating meat in the film, never consuming animals, with the exception of his drinking raw eggs as part of his diet for training. like paulie, mick, the trainer, relates to humans and animals via consumption. upon entering rocky’s apartment to congratulate rocky on getting the chance to fight against the champ and to secure employment as rocky’s trainer for what will surely be the most profitable of rocky’s career up to this point, mick notices rocky’s pet turtles and remarks that the turtles would make good soup. in response, rocky looks at him in horror and perhaps with an impulse of violence towards mick should he need to protect the turtles. in her analysis of late capitalism, rosi braidotti explains that all bodies, human and nonhuman animals, can become disposable: “no animal is more equal than any other, because they are all equally inscribed in a logic of exchange that makes them disposable and hence negotiable” (99-100). mick’s attempts to profit from rocky and his remarks about eating the turtles are consistent with a capitalist relation to others, where any animal, humans included, can be rendered as merely disposable and a means for profit. as the scene at rocky’s apartment continues, mick relates the great suffering he experienced in his boxing career through an animal simile. he remarks, “pugs like us were treated like dogs. for ten bucks you gotta rip somebody’s throat out.” his history describes the situation for poor boxers under capitalism and its violence. to be sure, humans and animals are and have been abused for reasons other than the influence of capitalist logic throughout history; however, this film set in the late 1970s in the united states often emphasizes the financial motives behind characters’ abuse of others. as the rocky series often portrays in brutal detail the blood, sweat, and beating of bodies and the dirty conditions in which its characters live, these films portray what is often elided by capitalism. while discussing dogs as commodities and as consumers of commodities, donna haraway recalls marx’s words that describe this fact of capitalism: marx always understood that use and exchange value were names for relationships; that was precisely the insight that led beneath the layer of appearances of market equivalences into the messy domain of extraction, accumulation, and human exploitation. turning all the world into commodities for exchange is central to the process … in marx’s own colorful, precise language that still gives capitalism’s apologists apoplexy, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 96 capital comes into the world ”dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.” (haraway 45-46) indeed, the boxing scenes throughout the series make a spectacle of this often neglected facet of capitalism as everyone makes money or derives pleasure from the wounding of the boxers’ bodies. adrian is perhaps the only character, aside from the boxers themselves, who doesn’t derive pleasure or profit from the beating of the boxer’s bodies, and in contrast with the crowds who are enjoying the spectacle she is portrayed throughout the series as often highly anxious and traumatized from viewing the abuses rocky takes in the ring. wounded rocky with adrian (talia shire). rocky. mgm, 1976. particularly interesting in mick’s description of the pain and trauma he endured as a boxer, is that the pathos he feels for himself fails to extend to the dogs of his simile. that is, the dogs here, which seem to refer to the abuse of dogs in the practice of dog fighting, are not approached literally but used as a figure for human suffering. at times, jason price -”running with butkus: animals and animality in rocky” 97 mick seems to view others, including animals, in terms of his profit and pleasure, which is perhaps one reason why he fails to extend consideration to the dogs of his description. another reason he fails to take notice of the dogs’ own suffering might stem from one of the “difficulties of reality” that cora diamond explains. writing about j.m. coetzee’s the lives of animals and the failure of its critics to acknowledge its protagonist’s, elizabeth costello's, wounded nature and her animality, diamond argues that philosophers tend to move too quickly from a “difficulty of reality,” something so horrible or so beautiful that we cannot fathom it, to the norms of philosophical or moral debate. such a move, for diamond, too easily assimilates an incomprehensibly complex thing into simple terms and therefore loses the opportunity afforded by it to think differently or respond differently. in relation to mick’s analogy, diamond points to a difficulty of reality that might further explain his failure to consider the dogs’ suffering. after discussing costello’s comparisons of our treatment of animals to the holocaust, diamond writes: “so there is a part of the difficulty of reality here that is not seen by costello: so far as we keep one sort of difficulty in view we seem blocked from seeing another” (diamond 55). as mick, and much of the film, is focused on describing human suffering — the horrible way people treat each other — it is near impossible for him to acknowledge animal suffering at the same time. where in costello’s lectures “her understanding of our relation to animals seems to throw into shadow the full horror of what we do to each other” (diamond 55), for mick human violence is in the spotlight, and animals remain in the dark corners of his understanding. that is, the horrors of human suffering exhaust the limits of his attention, and to consider animal suffering alongside his own seems beyond the scope of most humans’ abilities. in the meat locker. rocky invites comparisons between the consumption of the boxer as spectacle and the consumption of animals as meat. the scenes of rocky boxing in the ring are strikingly similar to his boxing the sides of “beef” in the meat locker, as in both scenes vulnerable flesh is cut, bodies are beaten, bruised, and swollen, and, after the volley of punches, blood is transferred to the fists or gloves of the boxer as evidence of the death or injury of the opponent. while most viewers fail to take note of the animals and the suffering of the animals in the film, due in part to the difficulty of bringing two “difficulties of reality” into focus at the same time as mentioned above, and because, as diamond notes, not everyone notices the lives of animals or recognizes the animals that we are (47), the scene in the meat locker offers a potential for appreciating the difficulty of reality that is the lived experience of cattle in the factory farming industry. again, the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 98 animal is not a central focus, and the meat in the locker can also be read in part for symbolic purposes to portray the suffering or virility of humans.4 rocky not only shows the dirty and bloody side of capitalism for the humans who suffer through poverty, but the meat locker scenes also show the aftermath of the turning of animals into meat. to be sure, rocky does not portray an actual slaughterhouse — paulie remarks that they are slaughtered across the street. while the scene does have the effect of displaying rocky’s strength, it also offers an opportunity, albeit only a brief one, for the appreciation of the animals’ suffering that we share with them. the repeated theme of cutting in the film also highlights the materiality and shared vulnerability of bodies. paulie slices meat in the packing plant while the sound of a cutting machine, perhaps a buzz saw, fills as background noise. mickey introduces rocky to the “cut man” who will slice rocky’s wounded eye-lid during the fight against apollo creed. in the case of rocky, the cutting occurs during the suffering he experiences in the ring, and it is done to relieve the swelling so that his eye does not swell shut; nonetheless, the cutting is still related to a woundedness and a vulnerability that is shared by both human and animal bodies. if rocky “is not about boxing” (qtd. in michaels 39) as stallone claims, then what is it about? as mentioned, the story of determination might be abstractly applied to any challenge someone faces, especially for those living in poverty. i. lloyd michaels offers stallone’s narrative of the creation of the screenplay for rocky: “stallone has said that the idea for rocky came from his observation of journeymen actors much like himself longing for a chance to escape the obscurity of bit parts in minor films” (michaels 39). in light of stallone’s comments, we might read the boxer as a metaphor for the poor actor struggling to survive and therefore as an almost biographical portrayal of stallone’s own struggles as an actor before achieving success in the writing and acting of this screenplay. by the time of rocky balboa, as i’ll argue later, stallone no longer treats boxers as symbols to be used in other narratives, but begins to approach them literally in a flattening of metaphor and symbolism, as at times is also the case with the animals in rocky. deleuze and guattari’s discussion of the flattening of metaphor in kafka: toward a minor literature is a model for this kind of reading and writing. they write that “kafka deliberately kills all metaphor, all symbolism, all signification” (22), and mention earlier that he at times makes language “take flight on a line of non-sense” (21). as steve baker reminds us, common sense is one of the kinds of thinking responsible for the cultural denial of the animal. such uses of language outside of common sense offer a way of thinking about the animal and the human animal on its own terms, outside of cultural narratives which usually turn it into a prop for human meaning. in jason price -”running with butkus: animals and animality in rocky” 99 addition, as leger grindon argues in “body and soul,” in boxing films “the boxer animates an implicit discourse on the conditions of oppression” (60). the directorial move of bringing the camera inside a meat processing plant in my view, intentionally or not, offers a potential recognition that actual animal bodies suffer greatly as do human animals. walking into the meat locker after making “moo-ing” noises in addressing some of the cut up bodies of beef cattle on the hooks, rocky remarks, “it stinks in here. it’s like an animal morgue;” “who killed all these things?” here rocky attempts an appreciation of a difficulty of reality: the suffering and the slaughter of animals in factory farming. his description of the meat locker as a morgue for animals suggests that he is attempting to imagine their deaths as best he can from a human frame of reference, as human bodies usually end up at the morgue after death. his “moo” in addressing the animal meat that hangs from the hooks acknowledges the lived experiences of these animals: a recognition that they were not just meat or commodities, but once lived and experienced the world. the answer to his question — who killed them? — of humans or factory farm workers and the owners of these farms is another of the horrors of human behavior, another difficulty of reality. this questioning of the abuse of animal bodies is consistent with his challenging the verbal and physical abuse of others in the film, obviously except for in the ring. michèle pickover draws a distinction between hunting and sport that also highlights an important difference between the slaughter of livestock and the sport of boxing. pickover argues “a fair sport involves two equally matched individuals who mutually agree to engage in an activity, which is usually overseen by independent judges. it is hard to argue that an animal lured to a location by bait … is anywhere near on equal footing” (24). although rocky and the other fighters are brutally beaten, consumed as spectacle, and profited off of by event organizers and promoters, they choose to risk their bodies, where the farm animals have no choice in the matter, suggesting perhaps the limits of the metaphor of boxers as meat. nonetheless, however briefly, in this scene rocky ponders the suffering and deaths of these animals in a way that points to this shared aspect of bodily life as the deaths of his friends and family throughout the rocky series confirm: adrian’s death from cancer, apollo creed’s death from boxing against ivan drago in rocky iv, and mick’s heartattack during a match in another of the rocky films. unfortunately, rocky’s time to stay with that moment of wonder at the deaths of these animals is cut short as paulie begins asking rocky if he’s having sex with adrian in humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 100 vulgar terms. rocky reacts out of frustration after paulie talks badly about her and tells rocky “you stink.” while slicing a piece of meat, paulie asks rocky “you screwin’ my sister?” to which rocky replies with a somewhat mild punch, saying that he should not “talk dirty” about his sister. here we see paulie treating adrian as somewhat less than human, or at least lower in a hierarchy than man, referring to her only as a body that can be used for reproduction and sexual gratification. in contrast to the dirt and smell of the meat packing plant, rocky argues that paulie shouldn’t talk “dirty” about her. in this sense, he is concerned for her body and challenges paulie’s patriarchal views of women. donna haraway’s commentary on “species” suggests the relation between gender, race, and animals that rocky highlights: the discursive tie between the colonized, the enslaved, the noncitizen, and the animal — all reduced to type, all others to rational man, and all essential to his bright constitution — is at the heart of racism and flourishes, lethally, in the entrails of humanism. woven into that tie in all the categories is ‘woman’s’ putative self-defining responsibility to ‘the species,’ as this singular and typological female is reduced to her reproductive function. fecund, she lies outside the bright territory of man even as she is his conduit. (haraway 18) rocky challenges paulie’s verbal abuse towards his sister5 and after lightly punching paulie, he punches the already dead meat violently and repeatedly, displacing his violence from paulie to the lifeless meat.6 at this point, the meat is no longer regarded as a former animal, but returns to the realm of human meaning, as it stands in for paulie. steve baker comments in the postmodern animal that “the animal reduced to meat is in an important sense no longer an animal — it is mere material, virtually interchangeable with human meat — and it therefore explains rather little about postmodern art’s fascination with the animal. for that fascination to operate, the distinct form of the animal has still to be recognizable” (95). rocky attempts to think about the meat in a way that acknowledges the lives and deaths of the animals, an exceedingly difficult task it seems, but ultimately his thinking about the lives of animals and taking animals on their own terms is cut short as the light shines back onto the human violence of what humans do to each other. jason price -”running with butkus: animals and animality in rocky” 101 paulie (burt young) cutting meat at the plant. rocky does not regularly train with the meat; in fact, he comments that doing so interrupts his training. obviously, rocky is not hurting the already slaughtered animals or advocating violence towards them as he asks paulie who slaughtered them. paulie’s comment following rocky’s volley of punches — “you know, you do that to apollo creed, they’ll put us in jail for murder” — confirms that the lives of these animals are no longer thought of as the violence inflicted on their dead bodies becomes translated to human terms and the animals’ bodies are now read as stand-ins for the bodies of rocky’s human opponents in the ring. grindon writes of the disavowal of violence in boxing under capitalism in a way which contradicts, but remains in the spirit of paulie’s comment: “for the general public the fighter is a vehicle for entertainment, another commodity. they are a mass of consumers emblematic of the callousness of the market system. the crowd can take pleasure in an event which would be a crime outside of the ring and buy off their conscience for the price of a ticket. the kinship bonding of the family finds its opposite in the predatory character of the crowd” (”body and soul” 62). in the ring, it is culturally acceptable to beat a man and sometimes to death as the commodified nature of the boxers’ bodies distances the audience from appreciating them as real presences. in the next meat locker scene, paulie, true to his character, sets up the news report of rocky punching the meat in the hopes of creating some publicity so that he might profit from rocky’s chance at the title. the news reporter frames rocky’s boxing the meat as a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 102 peculiar form of training. here, the carcass he hits isn’t regarded as a body, but is treated merely as a practice bag, or what boxers call a heavy bag: while this is usually a cloth or canvas bag filled with sand or other materials, the meat becomes the bag that rocky hits for practice. importantly, in an earlier scene, rocky himself is called a “meat bag” by the loan shark tony gazzo’s right-hand man, suggesting he is an object used by others to practice punching on. at this insult, rocky retaliates, yelling something inaudible in response, suggesting his refusal to be viewed merely as meat, as a body whose sole purpose is to be beaten and consumed by others. in addition, as the news report comes to a close, the film cuts away to portray apollo creed’s trainer watching the tv report as rocky holds up his hands covered in blood. he positions his hands as if to say to other boxers “this could be your blood” or “you’re dead meat.” blood courses through the bodies of animals and humans and its loss often indicates injury (as rocky and his fellow opponents bleed during boxing matches) or death. cary wolfe describes the importance of this vulnerability for cora diamond’s thinking: “what generates our moral response to animals and their treatment, diamond argues, is our sense of the mortality and vulnerability that we share with them, of which the brute subjection of the body … is perhaps the most poignant testament” (“exposures” 11). the fluidity of the animal’s blood and its transfer to rocky’s hands offers a trace of the animal’s body that further emphasizes its vulnerability and its death. the scenes in the meat locker then, have the effect of highlighting embodiment and the potential for suffering and death that we share with animals. during the final fight against dixon in rocky balboa, the blood flying off the meat in response to rocky’s punches in the meat locker is further juxtaposed to the blood in the ring that explodes out of the beaten human bodies via flashbacks to the meat locker scenes of the first film. jason price -”running with butkus: animals and animality in rocky” 103 rocky “punching meat“ in the meat locker. in his discussion of animal imagery in animals in film, jonathan burt mentions the uncertainty of meaning associated with animals on the screen. for example, after discussing the taboo and regulation of violence done to animals in films, burt suggests, the violent animal image, therefore, has a significance that extends beyond simply representing the uncivilized (both in the sense of “natural“ and the “barbarous“), and, like a form of propaganda, is assumed to have the power to cause the repetition of such action. again we see that the power of the animal image stems from the fact that, because it is more prone to collapse the boundary of representation and reality than other forms of imagery, it threatens to reveal not just the isolated fact of coercion or cruelty but the whole system by which coercion and cruelty are reproduced. (140-141) while we don’t actually see the slaughtering of animals or violence done to them in rocky, perhaps because of film regulations — we only see the end product of this process — the scenes of beef hanging from hooks in the meat plant have the potential to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 104 have a similar effect in causing viewers to question larger institutions like factory farming that cause these animals extraordinary suffering and death. running (and writing) with butkus. in addition to the meat locker scenes, the circumstances surrounding the creation of the screenplay and the appearance of animal actors in the films offer the opportunity to approach animals in a literal manner. interestingly, stallone calls his dog butkus his co-writer for the screenplay of rocky and describes an encounter somewhat similar to derrida and his cat as described in “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” he explains that he would write for a while with butkus next to him, and then read the lines for butkus’s approval. stallone relates this scene to some extent jokingly in an interview, commenting that butkus didn’t say much, but just looked back at him, so the feedback was always good (“commentary”). while i’m playfully comparing here stallone’s experience with his dog to that of derrida and his cat and the essay that followed, it is worth noting that stallone’s retelling of the encounter with his dog and acknowledgement of butkus as his co-writer suggests his recognition of the dog’s ability to respond and offers an indication of his own ability to respond as it perhaps informs his writing rocky as a character who values animals differently than most people in his culture. stallone’s viewing of butkus as co-writer of the screenplay and as co-actor in the film troubles a reading of the dog in rocky as just a way to demonstrate the human character’s sensitivity or strength. with the knowledge that the two are real life “companion species” in haraway’s terms, their running together and interactions in the film seem more genuine relating than just as a symbolic or psychological development of character alone. jonathan burt quotes rob block’s remarks about the treatment of animal actors as mere props in the 1920s and 30s in a way that contrasts largely with the treatment of butkus: “‘people would kill an animal just to get a shot. animals were just stock or props’” (153). burt cites the “1925 version of ben hur [in which] some 150 horses were killed during the filming of the chariot race” (153). similarly, in her writing about blind white male detectives and their service dogs in several american television series, susan mchugh relates the ways in which dogs are mostly used as props for human narratives: “if … some recent examples suggest that the dog is simply a prop for the wounded white american serviceman’s reclamation of his rights, then they do so only by abandoning the goal of structuring a story in such a way that a man and dog together can become the agent of justice” (mchugh 32). certainly stallone filming his own dog butkus, with whom he had a significant relationship, influenced how he viewed butkus as an actor. in addition, burt, noting how the animal in film resists our cultural projections, argues that “the animal body is caught up … in a complicated jason price -”running with butkus: animals and animality in rocky” 105 system of reactions and effects which is registered as a play between the surfaces of bodies” (31). for burt, the interiority of the animal is closed off, and as film operates via the showing of surfaces the animal has the potential to be read at the surface level, at times to insist on being read as just being an animal. given stallone’s own poverty prior to the success of rocky and his actual relationship with butkus, their lives mirror the film in a way that, with this knowledge, encourages viewers to read butkus, in addition to any symbolic connotations, as an actual dog, an actual running partner. rocky and butkus (butkus) regarding the reading of bodies, mia zamora in her analysis of asian american literature and nationalism queries: “is the body, in any final sense, ‘natural’ or ‘raw’ (i.e. nonor pre-social)? on the other hand, can the body itself be regarded as purely a social and signifying effect lacking in its own weighty materiality?” (7). zamora’s questions humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 106 get to the heart of how we interpret the bodies we encounter in fiction and film. following haraway’s troubling of the terms “nature” and “culture,” bodies are always inscribed in a variety of overlapping registers. the human tendency and philosophical norm that diamond draws our attention to, however, is more often to treat bodies only in a social sense, or to regard them as “facts” via “deflection” instead of as real material “presences” (diamond 59). butkus’s real presence in stallone’s life, his particularly large and bulky presence as a bullmastiff, challenges a reading of him as a mere symbolic animal. zamora concludes that “[t]he material body often suffers under the sway of the figurative regime” (zamora 8), and although this is certainly the fate of many animal actors in film, especially in the early 20th century, butkus invites a reading of his body as a real presence, one who was consulted and took part in the creation of the fictional screenplay of rocky, instead of as an animal who is sacrificed for its completion, or put to use as a metaphor by its human author. in his commentary on the 2001 dvd of rocky, stallone remarks that butkus was supposed to feature more prominently in important scenes of the film, as when rocky runs up the stairs of the philadelphia museum of art; however, the dog was too tired and too heavy for stallone the actor to carry, so the desired scenes were dropped (“commentary”). what is shown and not shown in the film therefore reveals the materiality of bodies: their limits, that the flesh gets tired. stallone also comments at times about the stress he put his own body through in making the films and describes actual injuries he suffered in filming the training and fighting scenes. due to the continued success of the series, the desired scene is finally achieved in the final film of the series when rocky and punchy, a much smaller dog than butkus, run up the stairs together in rocky balboa. rocky and marie’s son steps pick up punchy from a dog pound and as they choose him, rocky remarks, “you learn a lot talking to dogs.” however casually we may take it, the remark suggests that dogs have a different knowledge of the world than humans, a knowledge and experience beyond our grasp, another of the difficulties that diamond mentions. the iconic scene from rocky of stallone raising both arms high in a sign of the success of his training, is corrected here in balboa, or at least repeated with an important difference, as he raises only one hand while the other holds punchy. this image of rocky and punchy running up the stairs together, which stallone desired with butkus in the first film as well, suggests the importance of his nonhuman animal training partner to his success. the scene of a half hug between the training partners with one arm raised also mirrors the posture rocky takes when celebrating the end of a run on the beach with apollo creed in rocky iii. the repetition of this scene suggests that punchy is regarded as a significant training partner. punchy’s appearance in rocky balboa as butkus’s replacement also exposes the jason price -”running with butkus: animals and animality in rocky” 107 fact of butkus’s death, another way in which what is not shown reveals the reality and materiality of the animal’s body. stallone’s personal relationship with butkus and his desire to give him a more central role in important scenes in rocky highlights the way in which the films attempt to offer a more complex portrayal of animals, open to reading them flatly as animals. rocky and punchy running up the stairs of the philadelphia museum of art. rocky balboa. the final fight. in addition to the opportunities these films in the rocky series provide for taking animals seriously, they also offer the potential to consider our own animality in a serious way. the boxing scenes that portray brutally beaten bodies of the boxers are perhaps the best attempt at acknowledging the vulnerability that we share with animals. indeed, leger grindon says of boxing films, “the boxer’s rise highlights our animal nature, grounded in the body, and prepares the drama for the champion’s demise and the inevitability of death. as charlie davis acknowledges in the closing line of body and soul (1947), ‘everybody dies’” (grindon, ”body and soul” 189). the limits of the body are clearly brought to the fore as the title character describes the material effects of boxing on his body in rocky: “morning after a fight, you’re nothing but a large wound.” as an often wounded animal, wounded by the way other people treat him, by both verbal jabs and the physical jabs in the ring, rocky prompts viewers to regard his body in all of its animality. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 108 rocky bleeding during the last fight in rocky balboa. in creaturely poetics, anat pick suggests a pivotal moment in the reading of animals in film by way of a quote from jonathan burt: “questions about the cinematic animal arise at the point at which ‘fiction and reality collapse into one another’ (161)” (pick 109). while burt seems to have in mind a more traditional view of “animals” as those other than human throughout animals in film, pick’s claim that film is not concerned with species divides, but portrays all bodies as creatures (106) seems decidedly more accurate, given the current reading of bodies in these rocky films. that is, not only does the animal image trouble a border between fiction/reality, but so does our own animality, when taken seriously. as rocky balboa, the last film of the series, is so focused on looking at the past, at characters who have passed away (as have in some cases also the actors who played them, like burgess meredith, who played mick), the film draws attention to the material conditions of bodies, namely that they are vulnerable, they decay, and die. the length of the rocky series, appearing over a thirty year period, while sometimes mocked for its rather elderly and unlikely boxer protagonist,7 has the great advantage of portraying bodies experiencing time in a way that brings attention to the materiality of the actors’ bodies. discussing andré bazin’s interest in realism in film, pick suggests that ”the actor’s proper role is as a temporal avatar because, rather than acting classically (expressing an inner meaning), the performer in realist cinema is an aging jason price -”running with butkus: animals and animality in rocky” 109 being” (pick 115). pick goes on to challenge bazin’s emphasis on “human” existence, arguing that realist film doesn’t construct species differences. the way in which actors and characters, both human and animal, have passed throughout the filming of the series attests to this condition of real bodies, and the theme of death is also brought out in the fiction of the film: a complex blending of reality and fiction that animality brings about. stallone remarks in his director’s commentary on rocky balboa that he wanted to make rocky’s final boxing scene against mason dixon as real as possible. he describes how he, the other actors, and film crew came out to shoot the scene in the ring before an audience attending a real boxing match in las vegas without their prior knowledge and before the match they had come to see. stallone expresses his satisfaction with having actual boxing announcers, callers, sponsorship, fans, etc. in the shooting of rocky’s final bout. such a commitment to the real is consistent with pick’s “creaturely poetics.” discussing simone weil’s thinking on vulnerability and her interest in the material finitude of bodies, pick writes, “attitudes and actions may be judged according to their orientation toward reality: the extent to which they seek to avoid (deflect) or else perceive and receive the real” (pick 11). in rocky of 1976 stallone had described the film as not about boxing, and as a way to express the struggles of actors. as i’ve suggested, despite this intention, the film also can be read flatly where the boxer is not a metaphor for something else, but as a study of the brutal beating of bodies that takes place in the ring. in balboa, stallone’s decision to actually fight the boxing scenes against a real boxer instead of choreographing them further demonstrates a commitment to the real. he notes that he and antonio tarver were actually injured in the fight, with stallone breaking part of his foot. stallone recalls that the sounds of the fight — the hitting of flesh, gasps, and grunts — are real as well, without overdubbed studio sounds. at one point tarver hit him rather hard and stallone relates that he thought he was merely dazed, but actually struggled to get to his feet for several seconds. real blood and bruises, real injuries to the body trouble viewers who might wish to take the film as being about something besides wounded bodies, wounded animals. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 110 rocky (sylvester stallone) and mason dixon (antonio tarver) in the ring. in his closing comments, stallone remarks that as rocky makes his exit from the match against dixon, rocky is recognizing this time as the end of his career and soon the end of his life: rocky is thinking of his death. stallone’s body also shows the signs of his aging, of going the route that all material bodies go. like the fight at the end of the first film, rocky emphasizes to his opponent that the violence of the fight may cause them bodily harm. where apollo creed in rocky approaches the fight with the attitude that it is just a show to make money, he fails to recognize, and this is what rocky reminds him of, that fighting puts their bodies at risk to injury, suffering, and death. similarly, when the over-confident dixon comments that he is unafraid of getting in the ring, rocky remarks that he is always scared before a fight. in his parting comments, stallone conflates himself and the character, mentioning that he’s also thinking of the end of the rocky series and of his own death, in all the difficulty of thinking such a thing, as he exits the boxing arena. the conflation of fiction and reality that results from the character’s animality frustrates readings of him, even for stallone the director, actor (and in this scene real boxer), as other than, at least in part, a material body. when we read human and nonhuman animals as material bodies, instead of as mere symbols in a social or cultural narrative, we can approach a greater appreciation for the suffering that we share with them. where the materiality of our bodies and the bodies of animals is often elided in discussions of humans and animals in fiction and film as many critics note, these scenes in the rocky series prompt us to read bodies in an asignifying fashion, a reading of bodies as bodies, or what the narrator of j.m. coetzee’s foe might describe as a place of reading where “bodies are their own signs” (157). this jason price -”running with butkus: animals and animality in rocky” 111 approach to reading the bodies of human and nonhuman animals in film offers the opportunity to stay with the “difficulty of reality” in considering the horror of how humans treat each other and treat animals. while cultural readings of bodies might “deflect” us from this reality to turn our attentions to philosophical discourse, being “exposed,” in diamond’s sense, to these images of bodies suffering and being wounded prompts us to recognize the vulnerability of others and our own vulnerability, thereby challenging us to respond in more ethical ways to the bodies of others. as diamond notes, it is exceedingly difficult to consider or appreciate the horror of the suffering experienced by humans and animals simultaneously, and yet, while it focuses more on revealing the reality of the suffering of humans, the rocky series attempts to acknowledge and appreciate this other reality at the same time: the suffering and vulnerability of the animals with whom we live. acknowledgement. thanks to the bernese winter school 2012 for allowing me to present an early version of this project and to discuss questions of knowledge as they relate to animals with various scholars. notes 1. leger grindon argues “the animal motif, widespread in the ‘comeback’ cycle, amplifies rocky’s innocence when the fighter falls in love with the clerk at the pet store. the animal motif cultivates in rocky a franciscan sanctity“ (220). 2. thanks to michael green for querying aaron baker about my project, as they pointed me to grindon’s work on the boxing film as a genre. 3. in the sexual politics of meat, carol adams describes how upton sinclair’s use of meat and the processing of meat as a metaphor in the jungle fails: “as upton sinclair bemoaned, ‘i aimed at the public’s heart and by accident hit it in the stomach.’ butchering failed as a metaphor for the fate of the worker in the jungle because the novel carried too much information on how the animal was violently killed. to make the absent referent present — that is, describing exactly how an animal dies, kicking, screaming, and is fragmented — disables consumption and disables the power of metaphor” (78-79). although animals aren’t shown being abused in the rocky series as they are in the jungle, in a few important points the film offers opportunities outside of reading animals on the symbolic register, where animals and their suffering (including human animals) are approached in a literal sense instead of as metaphors. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 112 4. although carol adams mentions rocky briefly in her project, she offers only a passing comment in her important section on animals and race: “put rocky in a meat locker and you have the icon of the determined male fighter, of man over nature. but put an african american man in that same meat locker and the icon is not so undilutedly celebratory. it reinforces the idea of the black man as animal-like and violent“ (“pornography of meat“ 53). i’m interested in reading rocky’s body and those of the slaughtered animals as other than representatives of different species, in a way similar to anat pick’s approach of reading all bodies in films as “creaturely.” to be sure, adams’s reading of race and meat importantly critiques racist views of black males as inherently dangerous and violent, and points to the historically racist tradition of the animalization and dehumanization of the other. i’d also submit that rocky is sympathetic with animal suffering and not a proponent of it, and as a wounded body, he is not a master over nature or materiality but highly aware of being embedded in it. 5. paulie’s views about his sister confirm that he views women solely as means of reproduction in the way described by haraway: “if my sister don’t start living, her body’s gonna dry up.” he also offers disparaging and racist remarks to other characters throughout the film series, as when in rocky balboa he assumes that marie’s son steps, an african american teen, is a criminal based on the way he’s dressed and looks. rocky here as well attempts to correct paulie’s violent words, as he says of steps that “he’s a nice kid” and he critiques paulie’s attire: “coming from a human hamper, that’s quite a compliment.” paulie’s racist and patriarchal views lead to the violence, verbal and physical, against bodies. rocky’s challenging of these views and response with a verbal jab at paulie’s own character suggest his distance from this kind of thinking. indeed, paulie’s role in the films often seems to be a foil to the nurturing rocky; paulie serves as an example of human violence. 6. rocky’s hitting the already slaughtered animal bodies contrasts largely with the behavior of the boxer whose fight against muhammad ali inspired stallone to write the screenplay for rocky: the “bayonne bleeder,” chuck wepner. a documentary that aired on espn in october 2011 entitled “the real rocky,” directed by jeff feuerzeig and mike tollin, focuses on wepner’s boxing career and shows brief footage of wepner fighting a live bear in the ring towards the end of his career. wepner’s decision to fight a live bear, it seems, was a publicity stunt to sell some tickets, whereas rocky’s hitting the already dead animals causes their bodies no harm and instead draws attention to our poor treatment of them. jason price -”running with butkus: animals and animality in rocky” 113 7. this may not be the final fight or final film since as of july 25 2013 there is news of the beginnings of a new project in the works for stallone: another rocky film, a spinoff to be titled “creed.” works cited adams, carol j. the pornography of meat. new york: continuum, 2003. _____. the sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory. e-book. new york: continuum, 2010. baker, steve. picturing the beast: animals, identity, and representation. manchester: manchester up, 1993. _____. the postmodern animal. london: reaktion, 2000. braidotti, rosi. transpositions: on nomadic ethics. cambridge: polity press, 2006. burt, jonathan. animals in film. london: reaktion, 2002. coetzee, j.m. foe. new york: penguin, 1988. diamond, cora. “the difficulty of reality and the difficulty of philosophy.” philosophy & animal life. new york: columbia up, 2008: 43-90. deleuze, gilles and fèlix guattari. kafka: towards a minor literature. trans. dana polan. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 1986. derrida, jacques. “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” trans. david wills. critical inquiry 28. 2 (2002): 369-41. elmwood, victoria a. “‘just some bum from the neighborhood’: the resolution of post-civil rights tension and heavyweight public sphere discourse in rocky (1976).“ film & history 35.2 (2005): 49-59. grindon, leger. “body and soul: the structure of meaning in the boxing film genre.” cinema journal 35.4 (1996): 54-69. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 114 _____. knockout: the boxer and boxing in american cinema. jackson: up of mississippi, 2011. haraway, donna. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. mchugh, susan. animal stories: narrating across species lines. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2011. michaels, i. lloyd. “rocky.” film criticism 1.3 (1976): 38-41. pick, anat. creaturely poetics: animality and vulnerability in literature and film. new york: columbia up, 2011. pickover, michelè. animal rights in south africa. cape town: double storey books, 2005. rocky. dir. john g. avildsen. perf. sylvester stallone, talia shire, carl weathers, burt young. mgm, 1976. rocky balboa. dir. sylvester stallone. perf. sylvester stallone, antonio tarver, geraldine hughes, burt young. mgm, 2006. stallone, sylvester. “commentary.” rocky. 1976. dvd. mgm, 2001 _____. “director’s commentary.” rocky balboa. dvd. mgm, 2006. wolfe, cary. “exposures.” philosophy & animal life. new york: columbia up, 2008: 142. zamora, maria. nation, race, & history in asian american literature: re-membering the body. new york: peter lang publishing, 2008. microsoft word gordon-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:2 joan gordon animal viewpoints in the contact zone of adam hines’s duncan the wonder dog ”no animal confirms man, either positively or negatively.” (berger 5) ”it is a significant fact, that the more the habits of any particular animal are studied by a naturalist, the more he attributes to reason, and the less to unlearnt instincts.” (darwin 46) how dare we attempt to speak for other animals? duncan the wonder dog (2010) by adam hines is a stunning and award-winning graphic novel that portrays animal viewpoints in a number of ways from the anthropomorphic to the radically estranged. its setting is an alternative america in which other animals are not only sentient, but they can speak: yet these animals are still objectified, commodified, and abused by humans, and a terrorist animal rights organization has arisen to fight violently for animal rights. this science-fictional approach tackles the problem of speaking for other animals by recognizing a wide variety of ways in which to do so, as well as by considering the problems of speaking for ”the subaltern,” to use gayatri spivak’s term. the result is a complex work that lives in mary louise pratt’s contact zone of cultural interaction. duncan the wonder dog handles the difficulty of speaking for the subaltern by composing an autoethnographic text about the contact zone. i will be using this method of postcolonial analysis not to show how the graphic novel allegorizes postcolonialism among human beings, but instead to demonstrate how postcolonialism offers useful tools for understanding the posthumanism of animal subjectivity. i will analyze how both text and illustrations negotiate the great difficulties of presenting animal viewpoints, at once acknowledging and contesting the inevitability of such presentations as anthropomorphic. pratt’s contact zone emphasizes the importance of pictorial communication in the contact zone to overcome problems of transmission using a variety of pictorial styles, and thus the range of scholarship on picturing animals, from berger to baker to crist, will be a crucial part of my examination. adam hines’s duncan the wonder dog is a remarkable, almost 400-page graphic novel that is apparently ”merely the opening salvo in what the artist forecasts will be a 2600page epic in nine volumes, to be completed over the next twenty-five years” (difilippo joan gordon – “animal viewpoints in the contact zone of adam hines’s duncan the wonder dog” 27 1). it won a number of awards when it first arrived, immediately went out of print, but now is available again. in the story, an animal rights terrorist organization, orapost, is led by a psychopathic macaque named pompeii, while other animals search for other less violent ways to gain rights, and humans engage and recognize the other species’ sentience with various degrees of perception. there are a number of sub-plots as well: some, for example, ”humanize” the fbi agents who are searching for pompeii, while another shows a romance between a human woman and a gibbon, and there is a particularly moving interlude about the life of a pet dog. still other sections might be described as lyric episodes that focus on individual animals in their natural or domesticated situations. except for the cover, the entire book is done in black and white, but with great variety in drawing styles, format, and even texture. i have outlined elsewhere, in my entry on ”animal studies” in the routledge companion to science fiction (2009), how well suited science fiction is ”as an exploratory site for animal studies” (331) since it allows one to ”imagine the relationships of humans with other animals” as various sciences and philosophies propose, and can give voice to speculative alien viewpoints of animals other than ourselves (332). by adding images to the mix, the graphic novel adds a non-verbal tool to show further ways to communicate, relate, and think beyond words. co-witnessing, commonality, reciprocity between human beings and other animals have been the themes of my writing about science fiction for a long time now: most recently in terms of exchanging gazes and exchanging words.1 in those articles i have been using the word ”amborg” to refer to all animals, human and otherwise, in their liminal positions as they ”acknowledge the presence and sentience of other species” to co-witness subjectivity (”gazing” 191), what pratt would call a contact zone. now i am building on these ideas to examine how such liminality is portrayed. science fiction and the graphic novel provide what eileen crist calls ”interested participation”(61) for both the writer and the active reader, combining attention to scientific observation with artistic rendering and the rhetoric of fiction. a number of graphic novelists have recognized the power of the form in testifying for animal rights. a recent issue of antennae (16 [spring 2011]) was devoted to graphic novels, although a scan of its articles and valuable annotated bibliography (82-98) confirms the suspicion that, while animals are major players in comix, they do not play themselves or illustrate their own concerns very often. more often the animals in comix are stand-ins for human beings, there to amuse or to illustrate human ”beastliness” such humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 28 as racism or violence. there are, of course, notable exceptions. pride of baghdad (2006), drawn by niko henrichon and written by brian k. vaughan, who wrote y: the last man (2002-08, collected 2008-11), is based on a real event — the escape of a pride of lions from the baghdad zoo during a 2003 bombing raid — and is deeply concerned for the plight of animals in zoos and during wartime. sue coe’s sheep of fools ... a song cycle for five voices (with judith brody, 2005) is an agonizingly vivid and dramatically operatic exposé of how sheep have suffered as domestic animals. her pit’s story (2000) is an equally upsetting imagined letter from beyond the grave of a dog who has endured every aspect of cruelty inflicted by human beings. all of these graphic novels co-witness real-life events using their fictional tools. other science-fictional graphic novels besides duncan are concerned with animal rights. elephantmen, written by richard starkings (collected 2008-2010), concerns humananimal hybrids, chimeral creatures raised to be nothing more than sentient killing machines: while their treatment as ostracized immigrants in the series invites metaphors of identity politics, there are also a few sharp comparisons to animal testing. the episode ”tusk,” for example, begins with several quotations from the ”texas a and m health science center website 2006” about ”animals and hazardous materials,” ”animals and recombinant genetic materials,” and ”animals and radioactive materials” and then shows the human/animal chimeras undergoing tortuous experimentation with nerve gas. similarly, the section called ”the elephant in the room,” has a brief reference to animal poaching. a slimmer volume, we3 by grant morrison and frank quitely (2004, collected 2005), is quite widely known in discussions of animal studies and graphic novels. indeed, when i began collecting works to explore, every source i consulted, from my local comix dealer to an article in pmla (”the android and the animal” by ursula heise [2009]), cited this work. originally published as a three-part series by vertigo, this novel uses somewhat stylized renderings of the animals — here household pets, including a dog, a cat, and a rabbit — that have been surgically altered into cyborg weapons. panels are dynamic and highly colored, similar to japanese comix such as ghost in the shell (1989 +). the cyborg weaponizing of the pets, like the weaponizing of the chimeras in elephant men, clearly makes this sf. the creatures of we3 can speak but have limited capacities, the authors imagining how real pets might speak if they had the ability. joan gordon – “animal viewpoints in the contact zone of adam hines’s duncan the wonder dog” 29 figure 1 we3 grapples with the ethical problems of seeing animals as property and objects for research. figure 1 shows a negotiation between the technical language of objectification and the subjectivity that pictures and the ordinary language of action introduce. in the first panel the cat speaks and in the second an air force officer first wants to reward the animals for their work, recognizing their subjectivity, and in the next breath denies it by using objectifying technobabble: ”we’re decommissioning we3,” he says. ”these humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 30 animals are obsolete. they’re to be replaced.” the final panel on the page makes clear the editorial view of the author: the animals, whose faces confront us, rendered in a somewhat sentimental way, speak. the dog expresses incomprehension — ”dee-commish?” — while the rabbit can only speak of what it needs — ”no/grass/eat/now/eat.” these are sentient and innocent victims of the military-industrial complex, their bodies compromised by military-industrial augmentation, and bewildered by human machinations. while these other examples of graphic novels address animal subjectivity in powerful ways, none goes to the remarkable lengths that hines does in recognizing so many kinds of sentience, so many ways to use anthropomorphism, so many ways to acknowledge both the connections and the significant differences between ourselves and other animals. indeed, this novel’s ability to recognize and somehow express the profound, mysterious, and abyssal otherness of our fellow species sets it apart from the others and makes it an extraordinary contribution to science fiction and to the graphic novel. hines’s graphic novel emphasizes the variety of ways there are to be sentient and to be the subject of a life2 by employing multiple story lines from the politically charged to the moodily evocative, multiple styles from the realistic to the abstract, multiple relationships from human-human to human-other-animal to inter-species to intraspecies, and, especially, multiple viewpoints from the purely human to the anthropomorphic to the mysteriously alien non-human. it wrestles with the fact that humans cannot represent non-human animal viewpoints without anthropomorphism any more than they can represent non-human alien viewpoints in sf: we can only imagine the world for which our brains, bodies, and experiences equip us. we do, however, understand everything through analogy, comparing the unknown to the familiar, and both science fiction and the graphic novel provide vivid analogical possibilities. science fiction allows us to imagine the alien being or alien world by comparing it to other animals than the human, other spaces than our own familiar ones, estranging and enriching our understanding of the world we thought we knew. the graphic novel can visualize such comparisons. thus, they provide contact zones. mary louise pratt’s idea of the contact zone allows us to explore, through duncan the wonder dog, how the graphic sf novel serves as a powerful genre in which to engage with the alien viewpoint of other animals. pratt defines contact zones as ”social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as joan gordon – “animal viewpoints in the contact zone of adam hines’s duncan the wonder dog” 31 they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (1). that is exactly the space where all the animals, human and otherwise, live in hines’s book. the contact zone is an unstable place where things fall apart, but in which other things arise. pratt also uses the term ”autoethnographic text ... in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them” (2; emphasis in original). such texts ”[i]nvolve a selective collaboration with and appropriation of idioms of the metropolis or the conqueror. these are merged or infiltrated to varying degrees with indigenous idioms to create self-representations” (2). in the contact zone, where everything is in flux, ordinary representation cannot work but the hybrid form of the autoethnographic text, which employs techniques from all the points of contact — from the indigenous as well as the metropolitan — provides a space for communication. hines’s graphic novel imagines an autoethnographic text in which all kinds of animals grapple with ”highly asymmetrical relations of power” through imaginative transculturation, pratt’s term for ”processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture”: in other words, it employs human language and drawing. when pratt describes ”some of the literate arts of the contact zone” — ”autoethnography, transculturation, critique, collaboration, bilingualism, mediation, parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, vernacular expression” — she is describing the literate arts of duncan the wonder dog. the specific work which pratt uses to illustrate her ideas is a ”letter” from the incan felipe guaman poma de ayala, written in both qechua and spanish, and sent to king philip iii of spain in 1613. this letter contained ”almost eight hundred pages of written text and four hundred of captioned line drawings” and was called the first new chronicle and good government. it was, then, for all practical purposes a graphic novel, one in which guaman poma both appropriated spanish forms for his own purposes and introduced indigenous ones in order to reveal to the dominant culture not only how the subordinated culture sees itself and but how it sees the dominant one. pratt connects this autoethnography with a more recent ”creation of the contact zone, the testimonio” (2; emphasis in original). the testimonio is defined as ”a genre of literature that retells historical events using literary elements such as dialogue, poetry and metaphors from an eyewitness perspective” and was used by los desaperecidos [the disappeared] of argentina (del sarto and herbert). by providing the emotional intensity and vividness, along with the artistic control, of literature, testimonio humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 32 transcends the rawness of personal outpourings and the detachment of historical accounts. figure 2 joan gordon – “animal viewpoints in the contact zone of adam hines’s duncan the wonder dog” 33 one of the first scenes in duncan the wonder dog (figure 2) is a discussion between a tiger, drawn with some realism, and a monkey, drawn in a more stylized manner, about their situation in a circus (16-32). the tiger is an old hand, while the monkey is young, new to the circus, and afraid of what is to come. the rendering suggests that realism comes with maturity, as the outlines are, figuratively as well as literally, filled in. the monkey, who has named himself euclid, is reading from the vegetarian mathematician pythagoras, while the tiger, self-named mercodonius, introduces the notion of dharma from hindu thought. i emphasize the self-naming because it concisely demonstrates how these animals are, in their own world, independent subjects, without requiring human naming, an act which they anticipate but refuse to adopt since it is clear that the circus management oppresses them in violation of their sovereignty. in the circus, in spite of their ability to speak, the animals are merely representatives of their species rather than individual subjects.3 their discussion of human concepts shows how they adapt human culture to fit their own situation in a ”selective collaboration with and appropriation of idioms of the ... conqueror” in acts of ”transculturation” (pratt 2). mercodonius and euclid engage in a dialogue, telling stories and critiquing the ideas of pythagoras and of hinduism to mediate between their subjective states and their imprisonment. one can see parallels between these animals, made invisible by their objectification, imprisonment, and expendability, and los desaperecidos, ”disappeared” from their families as if they had never existed, denied even the evidence of their death. this section of hines’s novel serves as a kind of imagined testimonio, exposing the situation of these circus animals by drawing an analogy to los desaperecidos while retaining an understanding that these animal personalities do not merely stand in for los desaperecidos but have their own individual existence and suffering. while pratt’s discussion is meant to illuminate postcolonial discourse among humans, we see that it works equally well when applied to the problems of the human artist portraying animal viewpoints in a work not meant allegorically to be about human rights, but literally about animal rights. john berger, writing about photographs of animals, points out that in the associated ideology of such productions, ”animals are always the observed. the fact that they can observe us has lost all significance” (16). speaking about the circus’s cousin, the zoo, berger reminds us that ”even if the animal is up against the bars, less than a foot from you, looking outwards in the public direction, you are looking at something that has been rendered absolutely marginal” (24; italics humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 34 in original). mercodonius the tiger knows this and is teaching his grim knowledge to the monkey: for mercodonius, this marginalization is their dharma, their destiny. adam hines, through his transcultural project, attempts to recenter the animal’s gaze through an act of imaginary autoethnography, as he imagines the zoo from the other side of the bars. the centrality of animals’ gaze, of considering their viewpoints, is vital to hines’s commitment to animal rights. in an interview with noelene clark in the los angeles times, hines says that ”[a]nimal welfare is very important to me, and the series is not meant to be allegorical” (italics in the original). he contrasts his work to many comics using animal characters by saying: ”and to answer why i wanted to write about the relationship between animals and humans, it’s that it was rare to me to see one that wasn’t intended to be a parable for some other political injustice” (2). while we can draw parallels between liberation group orapost and al-qaeda or peta, for instance, or between the situation of many of the animals and that of some humans, that is not hines’s intention, even though ”i would not want to influence anyone’s personal take by my original intent” (2). while we might see the parallels between the plight of mercodonius and euclid and that of some humans, and while their philosophical musings are anthropomorphic, their conversation takes place in their cages as they await their performance, and the minimal and often cruel circumstances for animals in circuses are at the foreground of our understanding of the passage. joan gordon – “animal viewpoints in the contact zone of adam hines’s duncan the wonder dog” 35 figure 3 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 36 equally animal-centered is an extended interlude about a pet dog that movingly depicts the limitations put upon other animals in the practice of pet-keeping (293-327), another human-centered activity. the point is made absolutely clear by the family cat polly in her boldface tirade to the dog bundle’s ”owner” (figure 3): the poorest most pathetic humans live like gods compared to any animal! it doesn’t matter who you were with, they won’t get rounded up and burned in an oven if they walk the long way through somebody’s back yard! you wear clothes and bundle wears a collar that you gave him to match your carpeting and he’s dying and he just wants you to be here with him! who cares about the fucking shelter! (emphasis in original; 315) the cat makes points that parallel the policy of peta on pets: we believe that it would have been in the animals’ best interests if the institution of ”pet-keeping” ... never existed.... this selfish desire to possess animals and receive love from them causes immeasurable suffering, which results from manipulating their breeding, selling or giving them away casually, and depriving them of the opportunity to engage in their natural behavior. they are restricted to human homes, where they must obey commands and can only eat, drink, and even urinate when humans allow them to. the philosopher martha nussbaum might say that, according to peta, bundle, and, it seems, adam hines, pets are kept from a ”dignified existence” (326). nussbaum’s evocative word is ”flourishing.” she names some of the qualities of a dignified existence in which an animal might flourish: adequate opportunities for nutrition and physical activity; freedom from pain, squalor, and cruelty; freedom to act in ways that are characteristic of the species (rather than to be confined and ... made to perform silly and degrading stunts); freedom from fear and opportunities for rewarding interactions with other creatures of the same species, and of different species; a chance to enjoy the light and air in tranquility. (326) as much as i love and dote upon my cats, if i am honest, i have to admit that, neutered and staying indoors, they are restricted in their freedoms and, other than brief hunts for the mice that rarely oblige them by coming into the house, they have few opportunities joan gordon – “animal viewpoints in the contact zone of adam hines’s duncan the wonder dog” 37 to ”act in ways that are characteristic of the species.” none of the animals in these examples from the novel — neither mercodonius and euclid, nor bundle and polly — can flourish. figure 4 in the central moment (figure 4), the workman and the cow talk while waiting for the truck that will haul her away. she gasps in her extremity: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 38 i saw... up on the mound (breath)... i saw the building (breath) ... before they moved it ... and in the dirt (breath) ... i saw our prints (breath) ... i saw them in the dirt (breath) ... going in (breath) ... but i didn’t see any (breath) ... going out (breath). (73) the workman’s response? ”if you think a broken leg is bad, pal, just keep talking” (73). the cow demonstrates her understanding of the flourishing she is denied through not only her words but through her reasoning. the workman is emotionally stunted by his effort to deny her dignity. this section shows the effect (and affect) of cross-species communication, how both human being and bovine are changed, and not for the better, by the conflict between consciousness and action that speech has made obvious. in this contact zone, both are degraded. the passages discussed so far, and many more, make it clear that major issues of animal rights are explored and powerfully interrogated through artistic devices that pratt would call autoethnography or, perhaps, testimonio. because they all involve talking animals, they are also anthropomorphic in that they put words in the animals’ mouths that they cannot use in our world. language-use is something that humans cite as a difference between ourselves and other species, although ethologists are beginning to question the sharpness of the divide as they study crows and prairie dogs, for instance. following pratt, we could say that hines appropriates the tools of the dominant culture using the literate arts of the contact zone in order to give other animals their voice. joan gordon – “animal viewpoints in the contact zone of adam hines’s duncan the wonder dog” 39 figure 5 crows and prairie dogs aside, it is certainly anthropomorphic, of course, to imagine other animals reading and discussing pythagoras, or to imagine that they can confront the slaughterer with words. in a number of remarkable sections, however, duncan the wonder dog imagines a more alien animal viewpoint: these sections, concerning undomesticated and flourishing beings, feel hallucinatory or dream-like, as if the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 40 thinking processes are truly and radically different from the human. as an example, one section (figure 5; 117-119) imagines the thoughts of a seal through words, a few in a speech bubble, most floating above the scene, acknowledging the gaps between species in their communication, experience, and thinking, as the seal seems to say ”... the borders of our language cannot confine the world, and there are things i can’t tell you ... or show you ...” (117). hines uses the floating text and the bubbles to indicate that what the seal employs is not exactly human speech. the seal’s utterances are emotionally evocative and emphasize its interaction with the physical world of the sea, like a testimonio, but are not in any way technical or scientific, such as an historian or ethologist might use. by imagining other ways than the human for animals to express themselves, hines is employing what eileen crist calls the ordinary language of action. crist, in her book images of animals: anthropomorphism and the animal mind (1999), makes an important distinction between the effects of the ordinary language of action and scientific language in our discussions of animals: the use of the ordinary language of action reflects a regard for animals asacting subjects; the immanent, experiential perspective of animals is treated as real, recoverable, and invaluable in the understanding of their actions and lives. technical language, on the other hand, paves the way toward conceptualizing animals as natural objects; animals are constituted as objects in an epistemological sense, through conceptions that are extrinsic to their phenomenal world of experience. (2; emphasis in original) hines’s imagined autoethnography, his fictional testimonio on behalf of other animals, uses the ”ordinary language of action” to ”recover” the ”immanent, experiential perspective of animals.” does he really recover the seal’s perspective? no, he cannot: but his imagining acknowledges the seal’s subjectivity. in his refusal to objectify, to make other animals into symbols of human traits and situations, or into objects to study, in his use of active and evocative language, in his expression of the ineluctability of the other animal’s alien thought patterns through statement, graphic style, and illustration, in his concentration on individual animals rather than representative ones, hines both acknowledges and sidesteps the problems of the center speaking for the margins of which spivak warned in her famous postcolonial clarion call, ”can the subaltern speak” (1988). i addressed spivak’s ideas in my essay ”talking (for, with) dogs” (2010) by suggesting that science fiction permits the possibility of communication between, not subalterns, but ”alterns.” where spivak warns against speaking of the joan gordon – “animal viewpoints in the contact zone of adam hines’s duncan the wonder dog” 41 subaltern as sf’s ”monolithic collectivity” (73), using the objectifying language of the intellectual, i note that sf’s ability to speak for the alien or other animal attempts to restore individual voices. like spivak, crist is concerned to be mindful of individual subjectivity, using a similar term to ”altern” as she discusses animal subjectivity and ”the understanding of others as ’alter subjects’” (60). eileen crist argues that the kind of ”ordinary language” which recovers animal subjectivity, and which she sees in the writing of naturalists, is a valid kind of anthropomorphism that allows us to understand the lifeworld of other animals more than does what she calls the ”mechanomorphic” technical or scientific language employed by socio-biologists and ethologists, which turns other animals into objects of study. in a wonderful chapter on ”lifeworld and subjectivity: naturalists’ portraits of animals,” crist introduces alfred schütz’s term ”verstehen,””the understanding of action from the actor’s point of view,” which she then applies to writing about animals. using vivid examples from the early twentieth-century naturalists george and elizabeth peckham and jean henri fabre on wasps, she illustrates how: the shared vocabulary of objects, actions, and events...., episodic description, that is, the narration of concrete here-and-now events ... in virtue of a thickness of description that virtually transports the reader into the scenery; and the plethoric use of action verbs, in the active voice ... presents animals as authors of their actions. (86) elsewhere in the chapter she emphasizes ”the relentless visual quality” of the writing (76). the naturalists acknowledge through these techniques the ”lifeworld,” or the ”everyday world where things, activities, relations, and events have experiential significance,” a world in which ”[s]ubjects are always already ceaselessly engaged in meaningful activity” (54), of the animals they observe. and these animals are not mere examples of the generalized animal but individual and distinct subjects like derrida’s animot. to recuperate the term ”anthropomorphism,” crist differentiates her use of the term from ”the unwarranted or erroneous attribution of human mental experiences to animals” that scientists have scoffed at, and offers another definition: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 42 the anthropomorphism of naturalists is the effect of representing animal life in the language of the lifeworld. in rendering action meaningful and authored, animals emerge as subjects. in turn, the portrayals of animals as subjects allows the existence of mental life to supervene with forcefulness and credibility. (83) this is, i argue, the kind of anthropomorphism of adam hines as he puts words in the mouths of his fictional animals. it acknowledges their lifeworlds and subjectivity and, as crist says, forms ”a textual invitation to the reader to co-witness” (77). hines ”formulates” or puts words in the mouths of other actors to explain what they are doing (crist, 69, introducing a term from garfinkel and sacks). but these techniques are not meant to offer definitive explanations, or to speak for the objectified margins from some subject position of power. instead, such formulations recognize ”that the meaning of animal action is sometimes intractably opaque from a human perspective.” however opaque an action may be, it is not, thereby, ”intrinsically meaningless and experientially empty” (crist 61). the naturalist suggests possible meaning through rhetorical techniques that connect the experiences of human beings to the experiences of other animals in order to advance an understanding of their common world. figure 6 joan gordon – “animal viewpoints in the contact zone of adam hines’s duncan the wonder dog” 43 when hines uses speech bubbles and floating words, as we have seen, he is suggesting different ways of ”speaking.” he has other techniques as well. in figure 6, he shows what appear to be wild bactrian camels crossing the desert. what they think, if anything, about the fighter planes flying overhead or about other things is not shown. in the panel below, he shows birds with blank speech balloons, suggesting that although they are speaking we cannot understand it at all, or that they speak without content as we understand it. what the animals in these panels may be doing or why, what they are communicating, is ”intractably opaque” but not meaningless and empty. the ethologists and socio-biologists crist differentiates from the naturalists equate the opaque with the empty so as to avoid seemingly unscientific anthropomorphism, but crist recognizes something valuable in the naturalists’ formulations. in her discussion of ”others as ’alter subjects,’” ”the interplay of perceptual perspectives both is and is not reciprocal” (60), so ”interested participation is integral to the perception of [the other animal] as an alter subject” (61). naturalists use a kind of anthropomorphism, then, to set up analogies between themselves and the animals they observe, forming a sympathetic feedback mechanism that not only affects the animal being observed but the naturalist who observes as well. schrödinger’s thought experiment considers only the cat affected by the observer. hines’s experiment moves beyond schrödinger’s, also taking into account the effect on the observer. naturalists who allow themselves to reason through analogy about the animals they study begin to ”attribute more to reason, and less to unlearnt instinct” (darwin 58); human beings who exchange words with other animals in hines’s alternate world find out something quite similar, whether it teaches them compassion or not, but readers who enter hines’s world are hard put to ignore the testimonio. the testimonio suggests how important this kind of interested participation is, since it combines witnessing with the unifying arts of fiction so that writer and reader become co-witnesses of what might otherwise be unimaginable. crist reminds us that ”unimaginable” does not mean ”meaningless” and that visuality and the language of action suggest meaning behind what we cannot understand. by combining the language of action with pictorial representation to imagine the alter subject, the altern, the amborg, hines creates, not the literal autoethnography of guaman poma, but the imagined autoethnography of duncan the wonder dog. it humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 44 imagines and uses a variety of ways in which to speak, acknowledging the absolute alterity and opacity of the other voice while still building analogical bridges across that divide, so we can imagine what the margins might say back to the center without succumbing either to the objectification of the other or to some foolish version of anthropomorphism. while the techniques and vocabulary of postcolonialism work well in analyzing duncan the wonder dog, i am resisting their usual direction, which would turn other animals into metaphors for the concerns of postcolonialism. rather, postcolonialism provides exciting analogies to understand how we view other animals. while hines is limited, as we all are, by our human brains and bodies and experiences, he finds a way to bridge the gap. the animal in his case does not, as john berger says, ”confirm man, either positively or negatively,” but remains its ineluctable self. it is we who change. notes 1. those articles are ”gazing across the abyss” (2008), in which i lay out my definition of ”amborg,” and ”talking (with, for) dogs” (2010). 2. ”subject of a life” is tom regan’s term. we are, he says ”each of us the experiencing subject of a life, a conscious creature having an individual welfare that has importance to us whatever our usefulness to others” (363). 3. on the matter of sovereignty, derrida has much to say (see the beast and the sovereign [2008], as well as both vint and mcguirk). he also has a great deal to say about the significant difference between the anonymous representative versus the individual subject (see the animal that therefore i am (2006) as well as my ”talking (for, with) dogs”). works cited antennae. special issue edited by lisa brown. 16 (spring 2011). 10 june 2011. baker, steve. ”what does becoming-animal look like?” representing animals. ed. nigel rothfels. bloomington, in: indiana up, 2002. 67-98. berger, john. ”why look at animals?” 1977. about looking. new york: vintage, 1980. 328. joan gordon – “animal viewpoints in the contact zone of adam hines’s duncan the wonder dog” 45 clark, noelene. ”’duncan the wonder dog’: math, mystery and rhythms of the animal mind.” los angeles times. 22 april 2011. web. accessed 2 june 2011. coe, sue. pit’s story. new york: four walls eight windows, 2000. _____, and judith brody. sheep of fools ... a song cycle for five voices. seattle, wa: fantagraphics, 2005. crist, eileen. images of animals: anthropomorphism and animal mind. philadelphia: temple up, 1999. darwin, charles. the descent of man. 1871. a good atheist secularist book collection. carnegie mellon u. 14 june 2010. web. accessed 17 july 2012. del sarto, ana, and laura m. herbert. ”who is the subaltern and what is testimonio?” testimonio and argentina: a reclamation of historical space. ohio state university. 2006. web. accessed 11 june 2012. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. 2006. ed. marie-louise mallet. trans. david wills. new york: fordham up, 2008. _____. the beast and the sovereign. v. 1. 2008. ed. michel lisse, marie-louise mallet, and ginette michaud. trans. geoffrey bennington. chicago: u of chicago p, 2009. di filippo, paul. ”the speculator: duncan the wonder dog.” barnes and noble review. 2 may 2011. web. accessed 2 june 2011. gordon, joan. ”animal studies.” the routledge companion to science fiction. ed. mark bould, andrew m. butler, adam roberts, and sherryl vint. new york: routledge, 2009. _____. ”gazing across the abyss: the amborg gaze in sheri s. tepper’s six moon dance. science fiction studies 35.2 (2008): 189-206. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 46 _____. ”talking (for, with) dogs: science fiction breaks a species barrier.” science fiction studies 37.3 (2010): 456-465. heiss, ursula k. ”the android and the animal.” pmla 124.2 (2009): 503-510. hines, adam. duncan the wonder dog: show one. richmond, va: adhouse, 2010. mcguirk, carol. ”the animal downdeep: cordwainer smith’s late tales of the underpeople.” science fiction studies 37.3 (2010): 466-477. morrison, grant, and frank quitely. we3. new york: dc comics, 2005. nussbaum, martha c. frontiers of justice: disability, nationality, species membership. cambridge, ma: belknap harvard, 2006. peta (people for the ethical treatment of animals). ”animal rights uncompromised: ’pets.’” peta. web. accessed 14 june 2012. pratt, mary louise. ”arts of the contact zone.” profession 91. new york: mla, 1991. 3340. regan, tom. ”the case for animal rights.” 1985. social creatures: a human and animal studies reader. ed. clifton p. flynn. new york: lantern books, 2008. 355-367. spivak, gayatri chakravorty. ”can the subaltern speak?” 1988. colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: a reader. ed. patrick williams and laura chrisman. new york: prentice hall, 1994. 66-111. starkings, richard, boo cook, moritat, and j.g. roshell. elephantmen: wounded animals. berkeley, ca: image comics, 2010. vaughan, brian k., and niko henrichon. pride of baghdad. new york: dc comics, 2006. vint, sherryl. ”animal studies in the era of biopower.” science fiction studies 37.3 (2010): 444-455. microsoft word snaebjornsdottir-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:1 reviews katja aglert & tora holmberg extinction stories bryndis snaebjornsdottir and mark wilson. you must carry me now — the cultural lives of endangered species. göteborg: förlaget 284, 2015. 264 pp. £25.00 (hb). what are the premises of extinction in the age that some would call the anthropocene? through the tropes of the california condor and the colorado humpback chub this question is explored in you must carry me now — the cultural lives of endangered species by the artist duo bryndis snaebjörnsdóttir and mark wilson. in the grand canyon and its national park these two species have different histories, but their fates converge in that they are both near extinction, threatened by humanism and, now, being saved by humans. conservation is a costly and time-consuming life-support system that is often controversial. who should be saved, for how long, and who should be sacrificed? the humpback chub is a fish whose existence in the colorado river has been threatened and exhausted by the construction of a large dam and the introduction humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 150 of trout, a non-native sport-fish, resulting in a disturbed eco-system and a inhospitable environment for the chub. in the case of the california condor the situation is somewhat different. it is almost extinct due to lead-poisoning, the lead coming from human overhunting with poisonous bullets, leaving carcasses for the condors to feed on. these examples point to a troublesome knot of actors and potential action. in order to make space for the humpback chubs, conservationists now remove the trout through “electrofishing.” the condors are individually monitored, and when they fall ill, they are taken to clinics and treated until they are strong enough to be released again. how are we to understand and make visible the lives of these species, their protagonists, and supporters? how can the actors’ voices be heard? what is the potential role of art in this context? you must carry me now is an extension of the artistic research project and exhibition “trout fishing in america and other stories,” recently performed at the arizona state university art museum. it consists of a foreword, an introduction, and a handful of discursive reflections by a range of initiated authors, including the artists themselves. in addition to the texts, the book includes three different photographic sections: research photographs (in situ), documentation of the exhibition in arizona, and art works displayed in the book. these photographic sections, individually and together, introduce the reader to the visual methodologies and forms of representation that the artists have chosen for contextualizing the concerns and inquiries that emerge from their research. thus, the book provides an excellent mapping of the project as a whole, providing different layers of interpretation. as with other well-known artistic research projects from the snaebjörnsdóttir and wilson duo (such as nanoq: flat out and bluesome [2004], and uncertainty in the city: pets, pests and prey [2010]), you must carry me now unfolds, connects, and displays stories not otherwise told, by engaging diverse actors in unexpected ways. the project lies at the intersection of fine art research, animal studies, action research, post-humanism, and conceptual art. the book’s title, you must carry me now, is thought provoking. it is an intertextual reference to paul celan’s poem “vast, glowing vault,” which ends with the sentence: “the world is gone, i must carry you” (155). snaebjörnsdóttir’s and wilson’s title reminds us of the urgency of the end of the world as we have known it, and that the response can only be anthropocentric and technological. the identity of the “you” and the “me” is ambiguous, and the message is perhaps that we must carry each other. furthermore, the title alludes to the temporality of conservation practices. the “now” stands in relation to the past and the future, making visible the complexity of striving to katja aglert & tora holmberg -extinction stories 151 understand the complications of extinction of other animals (and ultimately ourselves). fröydi laszlo, in his indispensable chapter of the book, takes on the ambiguous relationship among conservation practices, ethics, and emotions, asking: are we willing to mourn the loss of the panda world, the condor world, the world of the humpback chub? or will we be content as long as there are just enough of them left to reproduce and stand as symbols for a managed wildlife? (144) animals haunt the valleys of the colorado river, which used to be a haven for condors, humpback chubs, and humans. as ron broglio wittily notes in the volume, “endangered species are the idiots to the civilised world” (101). but instead of stopping at the apparent impossibilities of these and other questions, the book “stays with the trouble,” in donna haraway’s phrase, and moves upstream. the thick descriptions of the national park, the science laboratories, and their inhabitants, place the analysis concretely at the heart of the problem, without ever pretending to solve it. the subtitle “the cultural lives of endangered species” speaks to the void of knowledge about animals that are about to go extinct. the “microhistory” (bertås) of the humpback chub is one in which global capitalism, water and food supply, energy production, and the vulnerability of the eco-system are interlinked and made visible. the paradoxical conditions are revealed: if the dam were removed, the chub would thrive, but the money from sports fishing would dry up, and the water supply for inhabitants of phoenix would be affected by water scarcity. in following the lead-sensitive california condors and their microhistories, the amount of time the individual birds spend in detox clinics — sometimes months and even years of one condor’s life — seem absurd. in order to prevent the condors from being poisoned in the first place, and to spare them the experience of going in and out of clinics, could not the problems of lead exposure be dealt with in other ways? could hunting be prohibited, or laws adjusted to minimize the risks of spreading lead bullets? what is the problem? this is not revealed in the book, but the california condor stories, as well as those of the humpback chub, involve the economic interest of actors such as conservation trusts and hunters. as one prominent example of how the book operates, a strong narrative is told about california condors and their relationships by documenting the personal histories of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 152 individual dead birds. in a series of photographs of dead condors arranged against a black background, the birds tell stories of struggling lives and the care-labor of the scientists who work passionately with them. these relationships are represented in detail in paragraphs juxtaposed with each of the portraits of frozen condors. the effect is powerful, strikingly sad, and moving, as in this caption for condor number 133: “133 and i share the same birthday — it’s the little things that make you connect” (133). the displacement of the birds’ bodies, arranged in ways that prevent their immediate identification as condors, together with biographically detailed and emotion-laden testimonies by unidentified scientists, creates a space that poses questions about the entangled life and death of humans and other animals. these individualized stories stand in stark contrast to the seemingly collective approach to the chubs and their stories. the fishes live anonymous lives in an element and space that are difficult to represent. photographs from the river display a cloudy environment in which the fishes can only be vaguely perceived. some photographs document fishes in buckets, caught or on the way to being transferred to or from the river. human scientists and conservationists move the humpback chubs and the california condors around, with the good intentions of restoring an eco-system lost. this labor becomes a sort of troubling sisyphusian endeavor, and is thus problematized through the artists’ project. it is, in this context, somewhat striking that the book’s commentators chose not to acknowledge the interesting contrast of the different life worlds of the condor and the chub: the grandiose, emblematic, individualized and elevated (air), versus the blurry, collective mass, and low (water). what can analysis and reflections on the different scientific methods, conservation approaches, and surveillance practices, in relation to these two specific species, tell us about the premises of their diverse lives, negotiations for survival, and eventual extinction? in the field of animal studies, researchers have analyzed art as an ethical catalyst, its purpose being to illuminate and problematize animal subjectivity and human exceptionalism. pedersen and snæbjörnsdóttir have, for example, shown how art can be an effective tool for positing new questions and positions for humans and animals. the authors propose that “art can create counter-hegemonic spheres where objectifying practices and institutions are challenged and the animal’s visibility is in some way restored” (115). making visible “un-charismatic” species such as the humpback chub can contribute to widening the scope of the cultural imaginary, with the potential of worlding otherwise. katja aglert & tora holmberg -extinction stories 153 further, as art provides tools for thinking differently, it is also about sensing. this is clearly and beautifully expressed by the artists: “to embrace ‘not-knowing’ and give consideration to the apparently absurd is to render oneself vulnerable; it is a vulnerability which precedes not power itself but a heightened sensitivity to unexpected connections, and thus new ways of thought” (23). you must carry me now is an apt example of a counter-hegemonic sphere, one that convincingly unfolds transdisciplinary artistic methods, and makes a relevant contribution to the field. as such it could well be used in education programs in the arts and related fields, and beyond. you must carry me now shows how artistic practices and methods can make visible how connections may be knotted together in order to problematize present orders, and potentially to point at different futures. however, as the artists themselves point out, “art at last may allow us the gift to understand nothing” (243). the book leaves the reader with a feeling of knowing a little bit, the wish to learn more, and the insight that one has not understood much at all. works cited bertås, m. microhistories. stockholm: konstfack collection, 2016. haraway, d.j. when species meet. minneapolis: minnesota university press, 2008. pedersen, h. and snæbjörnsdóttir, b. (2minneapolis008), “art, artistic research and the animal question.” artmonitor: a journal of artistic research 3 (2008): 109-123. microsoft word kendall-morwick h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 reviews karalyn kendall-morwick of dogs and dogmen: a history of greyhound racing in the united states gwyneth anne thayer, going to the dogs: greyhound racing, animal activism, and american popular culture. lawrence: up of kansas, 2013. 304 pp. $34.95 (hc). gwyneth anne thayer’s going to the dogs provides a welcome examination of a neglected topic: the history of greyhound racing in america. while existing accounts of the sport have tended to come from within the industry or from the literature of antiracing activism, thayer offers a more complex and balanced perspective. as the adopter of an ex-racing greyhound, she explains, she became curious about the industry and the men and women who worked in it, and her dissatisfaction with the information offered by the adoption community provided the impetus for her project. determined to be “fair and honest” in her analysis of the controversial sport and its history, thayer found karalyn kendall-morwick— “of dogs and dogmen: a history of greyhound racing in the united states” 175 herself walking “an uncomfortable tightrope” (ix), but the reward of her efforts is a nuanced and thoroughly documented history — featuring almost 100 pages of appendices, notes, and bibliographical information as well as 36 black-and-white images — that will prove interesting and accessible to a broad readership. thayer frames her discussion with a scene from a 1971 episode of the abc sitcom the odd couple that, she contends, “encapsulates the central disagreement driving the debate over dog racing” (2). oscar acquires a racing greyhound and intends to race him for profit, while felix objects to a use of the dog that he deems exploitative. oscar’s insistence that greyhounds are “born” to race, thayer argues, reflects a traditional view of “the role of dogs both as predetermined and as limited to duties beneficial to humans” (2). felix, conversely, espouses a modern view of dogs as companions possessing “something close to ‘personhood’” (2). with the dramatic growth of american pet-keeping culture and animal advocacy during the historical period thayer examines, the latter perspective eclipsed the former, making the decline of greyhound racing virtually inevitable. along with shifting attitudes toward animals, increased competition from an expanding leisure market and an inexpungible reputation as a poor man’s sport linked to crime and moral decrepitude appear, by thayer’s account, to have doomed the industry. the history of greyhound racing, then, serves as an illuminating microcosm of the dynamic entanglement of class, leisure, and humanimal relations in american popular culture. while the last century has witnessed both the rise and fall of greyhound racing in america, thayer documents the sport’s much earlier roots. in chapter 1, “chasing rabbits,” she examines how greyhound racing evolved from coursing, a hunting competition dating back at least to the roman empire in which sight hounds chase and kill small prey (usually hares). thayer points out that while blood sports have long been “associated with the lower class,” coursing’s popularity among the nobility established its image as “an elite european practice,” foreshadowing the entanglement of class and humane sensibilities in debates about greyhound racing (21). as the sport became more widely popular in 18thand 19th-century england, upper-class enthusiasts sought to differentiate their “carefully regulated contest” (24) from blood sports and from closed coursing (coursing in an enclosed space), which one commentator characterized as an “effeminate cockney” perversion of “the ancient and noble sport” (dalziel, qtd. in thayer 25). by the time coursing took hold in the united states in the mid-19th century, its status as the “sport of queens” was no longer assured (6). american enthusiasts humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 176 underscored its aristocratic heritage, but the “mixed” and sometimes rowdy crowds at coursing competitions (29), together with the increasingly varied nature of greyhoundrelated activities “similar to or even advertised as coursing events” (37) and humane objections to the use of live prey, coursing came to be regarded as “an objectionable rural custom” (43). while this reputation had relegated coursing to a remote corner of american leisure activity by the 1920s, owen patrick smith’s invention of the mechanical lure in 1919 paved the way for greyhound racing — a sport that, in contrast to its predecessor, would come to be associated with “modernity, tourism, and glamour” (2). chapter 2, “boom or bust,” chronicles the development of modern greyhound racing, beginning with smith’s 1919 opening of a track in the gambling hub of emeryville, california. early track owners faced crackdowns on illegal gambling, and many operated “on the fix,” bribing law enforcement in hopes of forestalling raids (47). faced with antigambling sentiment and the stigma of “working-class vice,” promoters sought, like their coursing predecessors, “to characterize greyhound racing as an elite ‘sport of queens’” (49). thayer, though, attributes its eventual success to the “grassroots appeal” of a sport whose working-class audience “helped create the sport’s identity ‘from the bottom up’” (49). bolstered by the introduction of electrically illuminated night-racing in the early 1920s, the efforts of a core group of “dogmen” — an informal term for those involved in “the hands-on work of racing greyhounds” (200n12) — carved out a niche in the expanding american leisure industry. smith and others created the international greyhound racing association (ingra) in 1926, signaling ambitions for further expansion. however, ingra’s efforts to impose “hierarchical control” on “independent and feisty dogmen” met with mixed success, prefiguring the internal tensions that would contribute to the sport’s eventual decline (56). greyhound racing also faced challenges from external competitors — most notably the thoroughbred horse-racing industry. chapter 3, “horses, hounds, and hustlers,” examines the dog-racing industry’s largely unsuccessful efforts in the 1920s and 1930s to expand to states with horse-racing interests. the most devastating battles were waged in kentucky and new york, where powerful horse-racing establishments capitalized on dog-racing’s reputation as “the sport of the common man” and rumored associations with organized crime to preserve their monopoly of the pari-mutuel wagering market (72). echoing the class-based bias of the coursing elite of 19th-century england, the chair of the new york state racing commission declared in 1936 that “dog racing is unsportsmanlike and detrimental to the ancient sport of horse racing” (swope, qtd. in thayer 79). ironically, as thayer points out, the horse-racing industry karalyn kendall-morwick— “of dogs and dogmen: a history of greyhound racing in the united states” 177 found its efforts bolstered by those of anti-gambling interests and even organized crime. the legal battle in kentucky culminated in the supreme court upholding an antigreyhound-racing decision that dealt the further blow of relegating dogs to “a different classification than horses” and therefore “established a precedent by which each state would have to legalize dog-racing separately” (77). legalization efforts in arizona, oregon, and massachusetts — states without a strong horse-racing establishment — were more successful. however, opposition in california from anti-gambling forces, a growing humane movement, and a film industry wary of competition from other evening entertainment offerings signaled the broad-based resistance greyhound racing would increasingly face. despite these setbacks, the industry prospered in more favorable climates. in chapter 4, “halcyon days and florida nights,” thayer describes how dog racing thrived in the sunshine state following its 1931 legalization of pari-mutuel wagering. throughout the 1920s, promoters, land developers, and entrepreneurs had gradually transformed the state — especially miami — into “america’s new vacationland,” setting the stage for dog racing to become part of a booming tourism industry (96). also key to its establishment was “an unusual and critical compromise” between dogand horseracing interests that limited direct competition by relegating dog races to the evenings (100). despite this apparent acquiescence to a lesser status, greyhound-racing promoters sought to cultivate an elite image by linking the sport with wealth, glamour, and modernity. that these associations found expression in american art and visual culture is evidence of the industry’s partial success at transforming its image. as thayer points out, the visual pairing of “the sleek form of the greyhound…with the elegant lines of a well-dressed woman” became a popular art deco motif (110). the linking of greyhounds with female bodies persisted in the postwar era, when marketers featured dogs alongside pageant contestants and bathing beauties. track appearances by celebrities like frank sinatra “added more than a hint of male swagger and naughtiness” to the sport’s glamorous appeal (122). however, the disparity between this image and the reality of a largely working-class fan base, coupled with the increasingly lowbrow image of florida tourism, left the class distinctions between dog and horse-racing largely intact. with its persistent working-class associations and failure to cultivate a nationwide fan base, the dog-racing industry was ill prepared to face an onslaught of anti-racing activism beginning in the 1970s. in chapter 5, “doggone mad,” thayer demonstrates humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 178 how media exposés and animal advocacy turned the tide of public sentiment against greyhound racing. of particular concern was the large-scale euthanasia of surplus and unprofitable dogs. here, the ideological rift exemplified by the odd couple became starkly apparent, with the “agricultural mindset” of typical dogmen (130) clashing with a more “modern sensibility” that regards dogs as quasi-persons (131). many in the industry regarded killing as a regrettable but unavoidable part of business, breeding resentment among shelter operators who felt “forced into the system of disposal” (136). in one of several striking parallels to the anti-dogfighting movement (which thayer does not discuss), some animal protectionists espoused misgivings about the dogs themselves, echoing long-established perceptions of racing greyhounds as “vicious” menaces (137). still, greyhound adoption organizations emerged in the 1980s, some in tense cooperation with an industry seeking to repair its eviscerated public image. thayer notes the “social cachet” that now accompanies greyhound “rescue,” demonstrating the anti-racing movement’s success (139). criticizing “pro-racing and anti-racing factions” alike for “oversimplif[ying]” the opposition (162-163), she nevertheless questions why greyhound racing has been targeted for elimination by a movement that appears unwilling to wage a similar campaign against the “statistically more dangerous” sport of horse racing, pointing in her tentative answer to the class distinctions discussed in previous chapters (144). while anti-racing activism was arguably the greatest challenge the industry faced in the late-20th century, it was not the only one. chapter 6, “the fall,” outlines several other forces that contributed to greyhound racing’s decline. confronted with humane objections and increased competition from televised sports, nascar, state lotteries, and casinos, industry leaders sought to cultivate a broader fan base and control media characterizations of the sport. their efforts included new track openings, publications, and a greyhound hall of fame in abilene, kansas. thayer observes that the industry’s earlier failure to generate publicity via television broadcasting — in part due to resistance from track operators reluctant to lose on-site gambling revenues (122-123) — left the sport “very regionalized,” as one nbc sports executive remarked in 1982 (watson, qtd. in thayer 168). while some dogs achieved “tremendous popularity” among dog-racing fans, none “ever achieved the level of name recognition” of a seabiscuit or secretariat (169-170). discord within the industry exacerbated its publicimage woes. a shift to corporate track ownership and dogmen’s decreased leverage in negotiations over booking contracts, gambling purses, and simulcasting agreements left many feeling “marginalized” by track operators and “stung” by an unsympathetic public (182). recent years have even seen track operators and anti-racing activists allied against “racinos” (facilities combining a casino with a greyhound track), the closure of karalyn kendall-morwick— “of dogs and dogmen: a history of greyhound racing in the united states” 179 which would mean the loss of “coveted bookings” for struggling dogmen (187). the “eventual demise” of greyhound racing, thayer concludes, “is a predictable reality that both proand anti-racing forces generally agree upon” (188). thayer’s well-researched and even-handed history makes an important contribution to the scholarship on animals in entertainment — an achievement all the more admirable given the controversial nature of her subject and her personal connection to greyhound adoption. perhaps because she endeavors so studiously to remain objective, however, the dogs themselves feel strangely absent from her account, and the result is a decidedly human-centered history of greyhound racing. for example, when thayer discusses the early cross-country transport of racing dogs, she focuses on the challenges faced by dogmen rather than the conditions endured by their dogs, which one would assume were far from ideal (61-63). readers seeking more insight into the lives of racing dogs will thus have to look elsewhere – a shame given that most available information on this topic comes from the proand anti-racing camps. additionally, thayer’s efforts to appear unbiased mean that her claims are sometimes qualified to an unnecessary and even frustrating degree, as when she suggests that “[t]he campaign to abolish greyhound racing sometimes even appeared to harbor a class-based bias” (143, emphasis added). the ample evidence she provides in support of this claim eliminates the need for such careful hedging, and i found myself wanting her to state her conclusions more definitively given her extensive research and obvious fair-mindedness. nevertheless, going to the dogs is a valuable resource for readers interested in american history, popular culture, and animal advocacy. microsoft word gordon-skabelund-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:1 joan gordon running dogs in capitalist japan aaron herald skabelund, empire of dogs: canines, japan, and the making of the modern imperial world. ithaca, ny: cornell up, 2011. xv + 267 pp. $39.95 hc. when i was in yokohama this summer i made sure to observe the dogs, since i knew i would be reviewing aaron skabelund’s empire of dogs: canines, japan, and the making of the modern imperial world. in fact, the book was my airplane reading for the trip to and from japan. here is what i saw. a brown toy poodle who had been trimmed to look like a teddy bear riding around in a baby carriage — teddy bear poodles are all the rage, apparently. a long-haired dachshund on a hot day in a union jack coat. a nasty yorkshire terrier that loved one member of a family and growled at and bit the rest. a pet shop that sold miniature dogs, and lots and lots of pet clothes, but no toys. here’s what i did not see: akitas, shiba inus, or any other “japanese” breeds of dogs (except for a picture of what was maybe a kishu inu (white, fluffy, spitz-like) advertising a cell phone company). these observations supported aaron skabelund’s claim that “dogs not only became pets, they were more than ever transformed into products” in postwar japan (172). indeed, the claims of empire of dogs are generally quite convincing. skabelund’s thesis is that “dogs, both real and ... completely imagined, teamed with humans to construct imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and ..., in turn, imperialism shaped the world of dog breeding and dog keeping as we know it today,” and he develops this thesis with specific concentration on japan (1). he cleverly uses the story of hachikō, the loyal akita who waited every day for his master outside a tokyo train station for years after the man died, to illustrate and question imperial constructions of dogs. the result is a readable historical overview of the interbreeding between dogs and imperialism in japan since the nineteenth century with a stimulating thesis to give it substance. it is a little light on theory — i would have welcomed a bit of haraway on dogs, for instance — but the acknowledgments make clear that skabelund is approaching his subject as an historian rather than an animals studies theorist, so the lack is not as disappointing as it might be. smooth writing and transitions, avoidance of specialized language, minimal bowing to sources, and the employment of hachikō as guardian spirit, all contribute to a readable and lively book, if not one as revelatory as one might hope. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 196 the book comprises an introduction and five chapters that are organized chronologically, as well as a number of illustrations, both black and white and in color. i wished for a chart and listing of the japanese kennel club’s recognized japanese dog breeds, something that would have served both as a source of information and as an illustration of many of the points skabelund makes about notions of purity and nationalism in dog breeding. the introduction points out that the movement from casual breeding for usefulness to more concentrated breeding for appearance paralleled movement from dogs as workers or, more usually, as another species inhabiting the same geographical area as humans, to possessions. these changes also paralleled the human rise in imperialism, and all of these parallels moved from europe to japan with imperial expansion. or, as skabelund says, “dogs and imperialism were inextricably intertwined and mutually sustaining” (30). he stresses dogs’ pliability: they “pass between domestication and wildness” (6) and “oscillate between high-status animals and low-status people” (7), which reminded me of their genetic plasticity as well. the introduction also asks, “can the subaltern bark?” (13): that is, what can we learn by exploring the changing social context of dogs in culture, rather than, what can we learn by listening to the dogs themselves. oh, well. it isn’t quite the same, somehow, although it is still very interesting, to study, as skabelund does, photographs and taxidermy of dogs in japan, in order to understand the relationship between dogs and humans. chapter one, “the native dog and the colonial dog,” explores how european and american colonizers employed “the rhetoric of civilization and scientific racism” (18) to contrast the sleazy, vicious, cowardly native street dogs they encountered in the colonies with the adorable, loyal, brave, and refined dogs they imported. skabelund reviews harriet ritvo’s important work in the animal estate (1987) and elsewhere to develop this theme, particularly the “identification of certain dog breeds with particular nation-states” and “hierarchy ... that valued breeds that originated in colonial metropoles far more than canines associated with those regions that were objects of imperialist ambition” (23). he observes that most dogs associated with colonial areas were not domesticated breeds but wild canines, and that those dogs recognized as breeds were generally lapdogs, characterized as “effeminate and exotic,” or large military or hunting dogs, described as “hypermasculinized” (25). the chapter deploys some close readings of prints,drawings, and contemporary writing that support these observations and themes. in the nineteenth century, “an age of rampant darwinism and social darwinism” (47), skaeblund notes that since most japanese dog breeds looked joan gordon – running dogs in capitalist japan 197 “wolfish” and therefore suggested a kind of continuum rather than a clear division between domestic and wild, westerners found them “deeply unsettling” (48). the second chapter, “civilizing canines; or, domesticating and destroying dogs,” explores the changing attitudes toward dogs in the latter quarter of the nineteenth century during the meiji era. in a period characterized by increased “surveillance and control over its subjects, both human and non-human,” japan joined the rest of the world in either eliminating other animals by “killing them or restricting them to socalled natural areas” or by “completely domisticat[ing] and commodif[ying] them, either as sources of food and other products or as pets” (54). wolves were almost completely wiped out, and rabies, spread in fact by human globalization, skabelund asserts, was used as an excuse to eradicate those canines associated with “groups and classes of people who were similarly seen as unruly and uncontrollable” (56). in a kind of cultural cringe, japanese elites adopted “civilizationist and scientific racist” language and attitudes to vilify native dog breeds and extol imported ones. skabelund provides a balanced perspective on this movement, however, pointing out that: the language of canine imperialism, especially civilization and scientific racism, may have been largely adopted from the west, but the use of dogs to denigrate other ethnic groups seems to have been universal and began long before the age of new imperialism had arrived in japan. (67) particularly interesting in this chapter, and illustrative of the book’s emphasis on material culture, is skabelund’s analysis of a statue of a major military and political figure, saigō takamori, and his dog. skabelund outlines a controversy about the way in which the dog was depicted, at first with floppy ears, then recast with very pointy ones, more suitable for a native dog breed. thus, the statue marks a movement away from western influence toward japanese nationalism. other examples from the time (the turn of the twentieth century) include a short story from the point of view of a native japanese dog. the third chapter, “fascism’s furry friends: the ‘loyal dog’ hachikō and the creation of the ‘japanese’ dog,” is the most successful and stimulating of the book. here skabelund parallels the rise of fascism in japan, along with the differences between japan’s nationalism and germany’s more race-based version, and the shaping of the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 198 story of hachikō. skabelund neatly summarizes the symbolic power of animals in human politics: what it means to be human is understood in relation to the nonhuman — whether the divine or bestial — so animals serve as metaphors through which to assert the humanity and civilized nature of one’s own group and the animality or barbaric character of “others.” (89) citing dogs’ “malleable symbolic power, “ skabelund then analyzes the differences between german and japanese imperial fascism. while the germans emphasized breeding and eugenics, “the creation of ‘japanese’ dogs, with hachikō as its paragon, was one of the building blocks of a culture of imperial fascism that venerated the nation, celebrated purity, esteemed fidelity, and glorified violence” (91). skabelund describes the process of “nationalizing” native dogs, of reappraising their value as representatives of a separate national identity that rejects western influence. thus, the akita, for instance, became a representative of the national character. here is the current (2013) description of the akita from the japan kennel club website: “it is an intelligent and courageous breed, slightly to highly reserved, even with its owner. yet, it is an extremely loyal and devoted dog and discerning guardians of their families.” like the american kennel club, then, the japanese counterpart is a last bastion of this kind of nationalist characterization. one of the fascinating aspects of this chapter is that skabelund finds photos of hachikō and digs up gossip about him that suggest the ways in which he was shaped and mythologized into an ideal representative of japan rather than an ordinary doggy dog. as in the previous chapter, skabelund explores the history of the making of a statue, this time the famous statue of “loyal dog hachikō” in front of the shibuya station in tokyo. the real hachikō had, scandal of scandals, a droopy ear; the statue has two pointy ones. the real hachikō was fed on scraps to keep coming by the station, and may have died from ingesting yakatori skewers; the mythic one came because of steadfast loyalty. the real hachikō was afraid of gunfire; the mythic one, never. chapter four, “dogs of war: mobilizing all creatures great and small,” makes clear the effect of total war on all animals including dogs and provides a history of dogs in war, offering examples in which they were fictionalized and mythologized for propaganda purposes. the final chapter, “a dog’s world: the commodification of contemporary dog keeping,” catches us up to the twenty-first century and to dogs as “‘family member’ and an ‘animate stuffed toy,’ as an ‘object of deep friendship’ and a joan gordon – running dogs in capitalist japan 199 ‘thing to be bought and sold’” (ōhira qtd in skabelund 184). as in the earlier chapters, we learn much from material culture — children’s books, statues, and so on — as the author surveys japanese history from wartime through fifties scarcity, the resurgence of the middle class, to the booming of conspicuous consumption. my own visit confirmed the continuing power of conspicuous consumption in a dog’s life in japan. i wondered, reading the book, and walking around yokahama, hiroshima, and kyoto, whether dogs are becoming more attenuated and unnatural as their usefulness for work wanes and as the presence of other animals in our daily lives disappears. is that tendency present throughout the world or more prevalent in japan than elsewhere? in akira mizuta lippit’s terms, as other animals disappear, do they become more spectral? are the tiny yorkies and coiffed teddy bear poodles in some way spectral? is there a connection between commodification and the disappearance of the real? as enjoyable and convincing as empire of dogs is, i wanted it to think harder about the implications of the historical trends it describes. still, the combination of historical information and material analysis was valuable for inviting further work. microsoft word tom.pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:1 erica tom gender and power in narratives of “natural horsemanship”: the production of “prey-identified masculinity” 1. overview. through visual and textual analysis, this cultural studies project examines the production of what i call “prey-identified masculinity” — a discourse of masculinity where the performer identifies with prey as a means to explain his empathy and sensitivity, while remaining in a dominant subject position. drawing on the work of louis althusser, michel foucault, and judith butler, i evaluate the ideologies and discourse being produced through two cultural artifacts concerning “natural horsemanship” practitioners monty roberts and buck brannaman — the autobiography, the man who listens to horses (1996), and the biographic documentary buck (2010). this analysis seeks to add to the developing field of horse-human relations, specifically the scholarship on natural horsemanship by lynda birke, keri brandt, and joanna latimer. by focusing on cultural productions (rather than the practice of the discipline) this article seeks to contribute to literature on “the representation of equestrian sports in the media” of which there is, “a striking dearth of research specifically on gendered representations of equestrians in media coverage” (adelman and knijnik 207).1 positing that prey-identified masculinity offers a new identity that may provide a sense of agency to a specific population, i also consider the pitfalls of a discourse that is grounded in sexist ideology. this analysis is concerned with the social power relations of performativity, how cultural narratives structure identities, and what is at stake in the production of prey-identified masculinity.2 2. introduction to “natural horsemanship.” natural horsemanship is a discipline and a term that, in and of itself, causes passionate debate across varied communities of equestrians.3 referred to as a “revolution” by some in the equine world, horsewomen and horsemen argue for and against the so-called natural methods employed by its practitioners.4 while some horse trainers claim status as natural horsemanship experts, others who may be widely included in the category decry the falsehood of the phrase itself. tom dorrance, who is thought to be the founder of natural horsemanship, authored true unity: willing communication between horse and human (1987); young trainers refer to dorrance as “the patron saint of horses.”5 ray hunt, a student of dorrance, famously opened all his clinics with the assertion, “i’m here for the horse — to help him get a better deal” (miller and lamb 32). dorrance and hunt are well humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 60 respected for their philosophies of working for the horse, but it is with contention that they are framed as the original proponents of natural horsemanship.6 i originally became interested in understanding natural horsemanship while i was working at a non-profit mustang rescue in 2007. our primary responsibility was to acclimate the yearlings to human contact, and to start the three-year-olds under saddle (to be ridden). the director of the program organized a few visits from a natural horsemanship practitioner.7 while i drew on some elements of the trainer’s work, i did not identify as a follower of natural horsemanship. what i may have taken for granted as a young equestrian was the idea that horsemanship was about engendering a harmonious relationship between horse and rider; i assumed this was what all equestrians desired to achieve with their equine partners. however, despite the ancient greek treatise on horsemanship by xenophon, which encourages equestrians to be gentle and understanding with their steeds, violent domination of horses has continued over time. the publication of anna sewell’s black beauty (1887), recognized as the first fictional work on animal rights, demonstrated the need for reform in 19th century england, and current debates over the cruel use of horse tack in dressage reveal that domination of horses still exists. certainly, the efforts of horse trainers such as dorrance and hunt to move the conversation from domination to concepts of connection, or control, have been important.8 notwithstanding the “better deal” horses may be getting, it is evident that equines remain at the mercy of humans. many natural horsemanship methods of gaining cooperation of the horse employ psychological coercion over physical force. resonant with the way in which foucault theorizes “docile bodies” are produced in modern society through surveillance, domesticated horses become docile not by beatings, but through the non-physical force of the human embodying surveillance within an enclosed space. though the focus of this article is the discourse and not the training methods, a brief description of natural horsemanship outside of its historical development is useful here. methods and approaches of natural horsemanship vary widely depending on the trainer and specific equestrian subculture — there are nonetheless some basic tenets and practices. natural horsemanship practitioners believe in harmony between horse and rider, gained through communication and trust rather than physical violence. they base their paralinguistic practices on ethology. many trainers, including roberts, describe learning about horse communication by watching wild herds; these trainers then translate this equine language into a set of communicative practices for humans to employ in horse training. one popular method of training is to work with the horse in a pen, arena, or pasture without the use of a halter, lunge line, or any other piece of tack ____________________________________________________________________ erica tom – “gender and power in narratives of ‘natural horsemanship’: the production of ‘prey-identified masculinity’” 61 — the human acts like the dominant horse, controlling the horse by embodying dominant horse behavior.9 the goal is to get the horse to accept the human as the leader. roberts’s version of this practice is called “join up,” and has received some criticism, mainly that it is psychologically stressful for the horse. roberts has addressed critics by conducting stress tests on horses he works with to argue that the horses do not experience psychological distress due to his methods.10 there are many other versions of the natural horsemanship method. one other popular approach is “liberty work.”11 although the controversy over the methods of this “revolution” and the impact on horses warrants further investigation, it is beyond the scope of this project. debates over the philosophical approaches to working and being with horses, and empirical research on human-horse relations are important; however, as sociolinguist cheris kramare argues, because language is a powerful tool of “shaping — and distorting — our perceptions of individuals” (21) and the world in which we live, it is likewise essential to understand what current media productions emerging from and about the equine world reveal about culture. the language of these cultural productions is important because, “language is not a substitute for action, but is itself action” (22). that is, as althusser theorizes in “ideology and ideological state apparatuses,” discourses serve to mediate relations of power in society. thus, all language is political. in this article, i seek to illuminate the function of the discourse prey-identified masculinity created in cultural productions concerning natural horsemanship. birke has demonstrated how the discourse of natural horsemanship functions to create a sense of community for equestrians who participate in the discipline, by starkly contrasting how they think of and treat their horses against those who practice “traditional horsemanship.”12 this project is likewise concerned with the discourse of natural horsemanship, but moves from focusing on how it works for the followers to those who are at the forefront, the practitioners. it is important to note that despite the fact that women make up the majority of equestrians worldwide — over 80% in the us — the leaders of natural horsemanship are overwhelmingly men.13 through analysis of two cultural artifacts concerning natural horsemanship practitioners roberts and brannaman, i demonstrate how their performance of prey-identified masculinity serves to bolster their leadership positions at the head of primarily female followings. 3. natural horsemanship in popular culture. roberts and brannaman are not only horse trainers, but also the main figures of cultural productions with cross-over appeal to non-equestrians.14 each was involved in film and television as children; roberts was humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 62 a stunt rider for various films, and brannaman and his brother were the “kellogg’s sugar pops kids” — shoving their cherubic smiling faces with pops, the sweet corn cereal in television commercials (roberts, meehl 11:23-12:51). the man who listens to horses (1996), a biographical sketch of how roberts developed his training methods, spent weeks on the new york times bestseller list, in addition to being an international bestseller. the recent biographical film buck (2010) centers on brannaman’s life on the road conducting horse training clinics, and earned various awards from independent film festivals, including sundance. researching his book the horse whisperer, nicholas evans interviewed both roberts and brannaman. robert redford credits brannaman as an essential contributor to the film adaptation — particularly inspiring the “humanity and gentleness of spirit” which redford enacted in his portrayal of the main character, tom booker, bringing a gentle cowboy to the big screen, and into living rooms across america (meehl 25:38-30:07).15 in the film the horse whisperer, booker is a horseman with emotional scars. his damage differs from that of roberts’s and brannaman’s: booker’s emotional scars are left by a woman who chose city life over a life with him. the audience comes upon tom at his family’s ranch, seemingly recovered from his lost love through his continued dedication to a pastoral existence. but trouble comes in the form of a cold and successful city woman, annie maclean, who brings him the challenge of a broken-spirited daughter, grace, and her damaged horse, pilgrim. annie brings the challenge of romance as well. developed in consultation with brannaman, redford employs a gentle masculinity for tom. he rarely lifts his voice or speaks at all, his eyes shift from downcast to searching; he often simply stands, waiting for both the horse and the daughter to come to him, quiet and docile. employing many of the western genre’s tropes, the cowboy’s silence is potent. in west of everything, jane tompkins draws on octavio paz’s definition of the macho as a being who is closed up — to speak is to become vulnerable, to speak is to become feminized, and therefore not to speak is to control one’s ability to be known, is to enact masculinity (56). the movement of the camera, spanning the distances between his body and theirs evokes the almost mystical power that tom embodies. annie too is drawn to his seemingly immutable strength and sensitivity (despite the numerous times tom simply ignores her presence and questions), for as tompkins reminds us, women are inevitably drawn to these men. tom and annie’s romance stops short when her husband, robert, joins them at the ranch. and in the end, tom is left hurt once more, as annie returns to new york to be with her daughter and stay in her marriage. though the plot is fueled by a forbidden romance, the magical power of tom to draw beings toward him is central. ____________________________________________________________________ erica tom – “gender and power in narratives of ‘natural horsemanship’: the production of ‘prey-identified masculinity’” 63 the mystical quality of tom is in part constructed through annie’s research of horse training. in a montage of annie poring over books, magazines, and websites, her voiceover gives a brief history of the relationship of horse and human: having once captured the horse for its meat, humans would always have a fraught relationship with the animal. after this gloss of the tension between horse and man, annie comes across an article on tom, who is framed as a special man, of magnetic powers. the spread of natural horsemanship through the media in the horse whisperer mimics the course of the discipline in real life. in october of 1993, the new york times told the story of the emergence of a “new” style of gentling horses in dirk johnson’s article entitled, “broncobusters try new tack: tenderness.” whether redford did so purposefully or not in his film, he brought forth natural horsemanship in the same manner it was being presented in print and by word of mouth — as something new and magical, as something beautiful brought forth by a certain kind of man.16 in “broncobusters,” johnson reports from greybull, wyoming, with an opening worth quoting at length: at high noon in a crook of the bighorn mountains, the sorrel danced nervously inside the corral, as a lanky cowboy moved in to start breaking the colt, a practice as old as the old west. but this cowboy wore no spurs on his boots. he did not bark at the horse to show who was boss. he did not sneak around to throw a saddle on its back to climb aboard until it stopped bucking. instead, he offered an outstretched hand, let the horse sniff it, and then gently stroked its neck and back. “it’s o.k. son,” the blue-eyed cowboy, tim flitner, whispered to the bronc. (a13) the blue-eyed cowboy describes the tension between the old ways of most wyoming horsemen and a new generation that prefers methods of gentling rather than breaking horses. he tells his friends that he gave himself a “macho-ectomy.” this article illustrates how methods perceived as new are taking hold, even in communities where loyalty to tradition is strong. flitner’s sensitive masculinity is produced as much by his current methods of gentling horses as it is by speaking of his past use of coarser methods. such an admission heightens his cowboy authenticity — and through the reflection and change to kinder methods, his sensitivity as well. the admission is essential to the gentle cowboy identity, as the sensitive nature of his current masculine performance is situated against past coarser performances. as judith butler states in humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 64 gender trouble, “identity is performativity constituted by the everyday ‘expressions’ that are said to be its results,” and the everyday expressions here are both current actions and reflective narration that create context, impacting how his performances are read (24-25). just a few years after “broncobusters try new tack,” evans began writing the horse whisperer and redford began employing the gentle methods of brannaman for the film production. in this film and the two texts featuring roberts and brannaman analyzed in this article, i argue that a particular brand of masculinity is being produced. 4. production patterns: prey-identified masculinity in natural horsemanship. to adequately analyze the narratives of these two natural horsemanship trainers, i will first demonstrate how the discourse of natural horsemanship is built upon a human (predator) ________________ horse (prey) binary hierarchy. i do not posit that all males act as predators, nor do i believe that females cannot in fact be predatory. however, the quotidian illustrations of the females’ locality as prey — in statistics of rapes by men against women — reveal how the discursive binaries of male (predator) _______________ female (prey) are put into practice. male (as predator) over female (as prey) serves as the foundation from which the equine training discipline, natural horsemanship, builds its philosophy; and it is most evident in the narratives of two leading horse trainers of this subculture, roberts and brannaman. gender essentialism is central to this philosophical framework. females are gentle and males are rough. women are understood as having a natural connection to horses, as in essentialist discourse they are conflated with earth and non-human animals. nikki savvides demonstrates the dangers of such ideas in her essay, “‘loving-knowing’ women and horses: symbolic connections, real life conflicts and ‘natural horsemanship.’” explaining why the idea that women are naturally connected to, and ____________________________________________________________________ erica tom – “gender and power in narratives of ‘natural horsemanship’: the production of ‘prey-identified masculinity’” 65 in harmony with, horses is problematic, savvides argues that the abundant literary production of narratives that perpetuate such beliefs create dangerous situations for both women and horses. for example, a novice rider may attempt an advanced jump with her horse because she believes she has a natural connection that will allow her to succeed without adequate training and practice. alternatively, within this discourse of gender essentialism there is also a danger for men — bereft of belief in men’s empathetic capacity, what options do men have for seeking connection and harmony? men are conceived of as having a natural desire to dominate; this is manifested by the utilization of equestrian tools such as ropes, whips, spurs and chains to subjugate the horse. steeped in the essentialist binary construction, man _____________________ woman-earth-animal the discourse of natural horsemanship, as produced in the man who listens to horses and buck, relies on gender essentialism to produce the alterior masculinity of the gentle cowboy — a prey-identified masculinity. prey-identified masculinity is a discourse of masculinity in which the performer identifies with prey as a means to explain his empathy and sensitivity while remaining in a dominant subject position. important to the construction of this identity performance is the assumed violence of mainstream conceptions of men and a narrow view of all traditional horse training as violent. as birke illustrates in her article “‘learning to speak horse’” this discipline’s followers, “establish an oppositional discourse, roundly rejecting anything they [see] as belonging to the conventional world of equestrian culture” (222). this oppositional discourse in terms of training methods is central in the narratives of roberts and brannaman, but further, the oppositional constructions of gender (particularly with roberts, and less so with brannaman) and species are imperative as well.17 in the man who listens to horses, roberts describes his father’s violent methods of “breaking” horses. he elaborates upon a traditional breaking technique where the horse is tied to a thick pole and left to stand for hours, sometimes hobbled (one leg tied up, suspending it from the ground). the horse is later “sacked out”: a saddle blanket, or other item, is whipped over the horse’s entire body and a saddle is then strapped on. quick movements around and against the horse with unknown objects can be humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 66 frightening and result in extreme stress and agitation. roberts writes that his father does all of these things and much worse. he chronicles the use of whips, spurs, and even chains. roberts describes the pain he felt witnessing this treatment. he writes about his relationship to one of his first horses, brownie, and how he tried to make up for past wrongs with kindness.18 developing his own training method, he calls it “starting” as opposed to breaking. roberts’s empathy is constructed against — constitutive with — the belligerent masculinity of his father, a man whom readers are seemingly supposed to accept as a stand-in for widely accepted notions of masculinity as fraught with physicality and violence. the beatings roberts experienced by his father are framed as a direct result of roberts’s gentleness. his father believed that horses only understood fear, “if you did not hurt them first, they would hurt you” (11). once, after demonstrating some of his own nonviolent horse training methods, roberts was beaten for deviating from his father’s instructions. roberts remembers, “the iron grip of his [father’s] left hand on [his] upper arms as he used his right hand to wield the chain” (55 56). this incident instilled in roberts the knowledge that if he were to show his own will, his father would beat the spirit out of him in the same fashion he did the horses he broke. roberts reflects, “i felt the same anger and sense of failure that the horse must have felt. a lesson in how not to win respect and allegiance, it only enforced a reluctant obedience, instilled by fear, and left me with a lifelong sense of resentment” (55 -56). it should be noted here that the veracity of roberts’s story has been challenged by his sister and aunt, who put together a collection of evidence that contradicts the violent image of his father, as well as his experience with horses in horse whispers and lies. they frame roberts as a man who chose fame over truth. however, by writing his popular autobiography, roberts wields considerable control over the construction of his life’s narrative — the story of how he came to train horses through performances of prey-identified masculinity. while it is important to acknowledge the contradiction put forth by roberts’s family members, the purpose of this project is not to determine the veracity of the narratives of roberts and brannaman, but rather to examine how their stories function as cultural productions. a similar narrative — of abuse that engenders empathy — is produced in the film buck, which follows brannaman to various horse training clinics across america. early in the film, brannaman speaks about the foundation of his career as a trainer. the audience hears his voice over, low and gruff. the audience sees brannaman moving deliberately. he grooms and then leads a horse across a green open field, ____________________________________________________________________ erica tom – “gender and power in narratives of ‘natural horsemanship’: the production of ‘prey-identified masculinity’” 67 horses are my life ... and because of some of the things i went through as a kid i found some safety and some companionship in the horses. and uh, i was just looking for a peaceful place to be, where i wasn’t threatened, or my life wasn’t threatened. so. i have an empathy for horses that ... when something is scared for their life i understand that. (2:38-3:11) the “things” brannaman went through as a child were beatings and emotional abuse from his father. meehl, the director, edits in brannaman’s narration of a cold snowy evening when he had reached his limit for abuse (13:36-15:03). his father was drunk, and before he could beat him, brannaman fled the house, out into the freezing weather. as his voice leads the viewer, the film moves slowly through black and white photographs: the darkened windows of a house, light on the porch creating a chiaroscuro of grey and black and white across a snow-covered yard, and then the face of the family dog, white flakes on his snout, eyes peering into the camera. that night, brannaman slept outside beside his canine companion, curled inside the doghouse to guard against the freezing temperatures — a real and symbolic alignment with creatures dominated by men. because roberts’s and brannaman’s narratives of victimization ostensibly allow them to understand the position of subordinates, they align themselves with “animals of prey” — women, and horses. their victimization echoes strongly throughout the two main texts examined here; roberts overtly utilizes the narrative to align his work, and himself, with women. declaring that women are generally more accepting of nonviolent methods, and because women and horses are both vulnerable creatures, roberts states that the horse, “is a flight animal who feels vulnerability twenty-four hours a day. it’s the same vulnerability that a woman may feel when she’s alone in an elevator and a burly man gets on”(xxvii). brannaman’s alignment with women is less explicit. he situates himself with horses explaining, “i have an empathy for horses that ... when something is scared for their life i understand that” (2:38-3:11). pairing this understanding with metaphors of the horse as child and as woman, brannaman’s discourse likewise becomes based in gender essentialism. these biographical productions produce the discourse of prey-identified masculinity, embodied in narratives constructed of language and visuals — which i will further demonstrate are made effective through power relations of race, gender, physicality, and sexual prowess. while these men are able to embody prey-identified masculinity effectively to gain a sense of agency, as chris weedon explains, “the wide range of identities humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 68 available in a society and the modes of subjectivity that go with them are not open to all people at all times … non-recognition and non-identification leaves the individual in an abject state of non-subjectivity and lack of agency.” thus, i will also examine the limitations of this discourse (7).19 5. unquestionably cowboy: race, gender, and sexual prowess. the fabrication of the american cowboy is a powerful construction constituted by a particular brand of masculinity, which is important to the construction of prey-identified masculinity. as james w. chesebro suggests, “masculinity is profoundly and ultimately a communication concept, a socially and symbolically constructed notion, that every culture and every era revisits and redefines in different ways” (36).20 the symbolic importance of the cowboy goes beyond the u.s. as elizabeth atwood-lawrence has argued, the cowboy is a “complex figure who partakes of both the reality of the rugged life he lived on the frontier and of the myth that has grown up around it, it is he who has captured the imagination of the world” (4).21 tracey owens patton and sally m. schedlock explain that the cowboy, as part of the myth of the west, “has lived in the minds of americans and across the ocean in europe for generations” (4).22 they contend that cultural productions, like owen wister’s novel the virginian (1902) — the quintessential western novel, depicting the life and character of a cowboy on a ranch in wyoming — contribute to the construction of the white cowboy. the gender and racial diversity that was present in westward expansion was written out of the virginian, and instead non-whites and women are erased, and a simplified version becomes myth, in which the white cowboy rides alone — a rugged and revered individual. the identities of roberts and brannaman are produced with, and build upon, such mythologies. roberts and brannaman are able to wield a sensitive masculinity without engendering critiques of their manliness due to their alignment with the cowboy myth, which includes their race and traditionally masculine bodies. as one of brannaman’s friends professes, “he’s built to fit a horse. god had him in mind when he made a cowboy” (meehl 25:08-25:25). such language naturalizes the image of the white cowboy — a figure that was constructed and fixed through wister’s “literary creation of the archetypal horseman of the plains, frederick remington with his painstaking artistic depictions of ranger life, and theodore roosevelt with his characterization of ranching as an invigorating and adventuresome life” (atwood-lawrence 25). standing tall and broad shouldered, brannaman and roberts are phenotypically classic american cowboys. in line with this classic visual, they read as white, which further solidifies their manliness. as reeser posits, white masculinity’s power is upheld in its contrast to the construction of other racial masculinities.23 asian masculinity is viewed as weak and ____________________________________________________________________ erica tom – “gender and power in narratives of ‘natural horsemanship’: the production of ‘prey-identified masculinity’” 69 un-intimidating, whereas black masculinity is viewed as excessive and dangerous — white masculinity is the ideal masculinity. roberts refers to his native american grandmother; however in this instance, this non-white heritage bolsters his connection with horses, due to the stereotype of native americans as naturally in tune with the earth and animals. the importance of roberts’s and brannaman’s bodies are evident in a turn to the visuals of the book and film. the film poster shows brannaman against a background of horses. the horses are not depicted as individuals; rather, as a flow of flesh, mane and tail, they are rendered as a landscape against which the cowboy is foregrounded.24 brannaman’s eyes are hidden by his downturned cowboy hat, invoking the mystery of the western wrangler. his hat and shoulders are the most prominent elements. one of roberts’s book covers parallels this film poster — the mysterious man amid a flow of horse flesh — but two other covers deviate from this formula. in one, roberts stands beside a prized horse, and in the other, beside queen elizabeth ii (who has been a great supporter of roberts). however, in these visuals that deviate from the traditional formula, roberts’s whole body is presented: his body is central to the identity production. further, beyond roberts’s and brannaman’s build and race, i posit that their physicality is made central through the discussion of physical acts — despite natural horsemanship’s emphasis on embodied communication over physical force —, specifically their participation in rodeo and other traditional western displays of physical prowess and mastery over animals. atwood-lawrence argues that “rodeo embodies the frontier spirit as manifested through the aggressive and exploitative conquest of the west … it supports the value of subjugating nature, and reenacts the ‘taming’ process whereby the wild is brought under control” (7). this perpetuation of the frontier spirit expresses how americans interpret the past, but also the present (10). rodeo perpetuates the values of the rugged and stoic cowboy (apart from women) and the importance of the challenge continually to bring that which is uncivilized under control, whether it be women, animals, or land. patton and schedlock state that, “no other sport, other than baseball, is so closely linked to the ideals, myth and traditions of the west as rodeo” (4). the constructed identities of roberts and brannaman each draw on the symbolism of rodeo. roberts was a bulldogger, and brannaman participates in rodeo styled events such as the californios, a competition featuring events based on working activities of real cowboys and ranch hands. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 70 roberts describes the cruelty of steer wrestling, also referred to as bulldogging — but not before he describes his mastery as a bulldogger.25 like the cowboy johnson interviews in “broncobusters try new tack: tenderness,” men who perform a sensitive masculinity must confess their past of coarse or brutal acts as proof of their current contemplative natures. atwood-lawrence explains the event, “a bulldogger enters the arena mounted, must leap from his horse at top speed, grab one horn and the jaw of the running steer, stop him, and then throw the animal flat on its side or its back with all four feet and head straight. time is called at the moment when this is accomplished, and a score of ten seconds or better is ordinarily needed to win” (atwood-lawrence 34). not only do the human participants risk injury and even death, but both horse and steer are put in danger with the high impact of the sport. roberts elaborates upon his excellence and mastery of the sport, listing his awards, while also expressing regret for his participation and rebuking the activity for the injuries and even deaths of both steer and men. these contests are physically demanding and extremely dangerous, attracting men who must not only be strong, but also have a desire to “prove their physical prowess” (atwood-lawrence 87). it is not surprising perhaps that a man whose masculinity was perpetually questioned by his father through censure and beatings would find a sense of self by excelling in an activity where “stoicism is a prime requisite” (87). roberts’s description of being a bulldogger solidifies his traditional masculinity — and his later censure of bulldogging serves to construct him as thoughtful and sensitive enough to recognize his past wrongs. this narrative cements his manliness; it heightens his authenticity as a cowboy. while brannaman’s career as a trick roper and wrangler is less obviously coarse or violent than that of a steer wrestler, it functions toward the same end. beyond his solo performances of trick roping mastery, he participates in traditional roping and herding events where treatment of cattle is controversial. amid urgings for the horse to be treated with empathy and respect in the film, working cattle (in which cattle are shown frantically attempting to rejoin their herd while the horse and rider keep it segregated) is nonchalantly accepted (53:00-54:41). brannaman’s roping is less about the kind of physicality roberts’s event enacts, yet it is linked with other issues related to masculinity in the film. one scene shows brannaman doing rope tricks amidst a circle of admirers. jokingly, brannaman smiles — ”this is the move i did for mary when i was trying to trap her” (47:35-48:49). his cowboy skills becomes a masculine move to “trap” a woman, playful yet adding to the common conflation of women with animals of prey. at another moment in the film, while brannaman is overseeing the starting of a colt, his masculine knowledge concerning women emerges as part of his equine advice. when ____________________________________________________________________ erica tom – “gender and power in narratives of ‘natural horsemanship’: the production of ‘prey-identified masculinity’” 71 the rider and colt appear to be moving harmoniously in the round pen, brannaman tells the rider how to end the day’s session: where you end up your ride on a horse is so important ... it’s a little bit like you guys, when you were young and you were dating. that last two minutes of the dates can be a real deal breaker. [a man astride a horse bends over at the waist, smiling and laughing] with these horses it’s the same thing. you gotta end on a good note. (46:37-47:19) as brannaman finishes this comparison between horses and women, the camera pans to a shot of mary (brannaman’s wife) and reata (their youngest daughter). blonde, beautiful by american standards, their smiling images are placed perfectly as proof of brannaman’s male prowess. similarly, roberts’s own masculinity is marked by his ability to “trap” an attractive woman. he tells the story of meeting pat, and how they eventually married, eventually having several children. telling the story of their romance, roberts details his work on the film east of eden (1955). he describes how the director paired him with james dean, so that dean could learn to be a real cowboy from roberts. brannaman helped dean buy the right kind of clothes, the right kind of boots, and narrates what seems to be a keen friendship between the two. further, roberts states, “[dean] fell in love with pat and followed her around like a puppy” (122). such a claim positions pat as a desirable woman, and highlights roberts’s masculine competence in retaining her allegiance in the face of the heartthrob’s affection. these references to roberts’s and brannaman’s masculine prowess in romantic and sexual terms, their traditionally masculine physiques by american standards, and the stories of their childhood paternal abuse work together to create narratives of the two men as having morally earned positions of authority from which to speak about the power dynamics of people and horses. 6. conclusion: agency, access, and the need for new narratives. in these stories, roberts and brannaman perform prey-identified masculinity — a discursive move that transforms their past abuses into sources of agency — positioning them as knowledgeable leaders of “prey animals”: horses, and the women that make up the majority of equestrians. though this performance empowers these two men, it is, as i have demonstrated in this article, specifically linked to the gender, race, and sexuality of roberts and brannaman. as weedon explains, all identities are not available to all humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 72 people (7). prey-identified masculinity is not available to the primarily female following of natural horsemanship because of its very hierarchical logic. a person must be identified first as a predator (male, and often white) for a performance of prey to engender empathy; women performing as prey merely re-inscribes the gender binary that appears inescapable — a binary demonstrated in savvides’s work, which analyzes the impact of the myth of horse and woman as naturally connected and similar. i illuminate the function of prey-identified masculinity as one of the ways in which men continue to be positioned as authorities in the horse industry — despite the fact that equestrians are primarily women — so that we might consider how discursive practices in natural horsemanship not only reflect but create culture.26 furthermore, this article encourages readers to imagine discursive practices that empower women not only to connect with horses, but also to be positioned as leaders in the horse industry. imagine a landscape beyond the gender essentialist myths of women and horses. imagine what kinds of stories we might tell. imagine a cowgirl riding off into the sunset.27 notes 1. see miriam adelman and jorge knijnik’s edited collection gender and equestrian sport: riding around the world. while some might wonder if focusing on cultural productions concerning natural horsemanship constitutes study of an equestrian sport, the growth and spread of natural horsemanship practitioners work across equestrian sports, including with dressage riders and in the racing industry — as demonstrated in the two cultural productions this article analyzes — is ample proof of its importance, and therefore is worthy of scholarly attention. for the scope of this article, and due to natural horsemanship’s origins in the us, in addition to the fact that these artifacts are produced within the us, this article focuses on gender performance in america. however, work looking at how natural horsemanship has been disseminated beyond the us is important. lynda birke's and nikki savvides’s work has focused on equestrian communities in the uk and australia, respectively. comparative worldwide analysis of the discipline of natural horsemanship may further enhance our understanding of this discipline and its implications for horses and humans. 2. chris weedon’s book identity and culture has been essential in developing my theoretical approach to natural horsemanship and the cultural artifacts examined in this article. ____________________________________________________________________ erica tom – “gender and power in narratives of ‘natural horsemanship’: the production of ‘prey-identified masculinity’” 73 3. the term natural horsemanship is of course sexist in that it that it uses “man” to refer to all people; however, i use it here for consistency and because it is the language used in this subculture. 4. in their book the revolution in horsemanship and what it means to mankind, robert m. miller and rick lamb claim that in the last few decades of the twentieth century the discipline of natural horsemanship, with the core tenet “that horses can be controlled more effectively without the use of force,” remarkably improved the relationship between humans and horses (3). lynda birke, in her essay, “‘learning to speak horse’: the culture of natural horsemanship” notes the controversies within and beyond the culture. she writes, “not surprisingly, there are a myriad of different methods used, while groups of enthusiasts and trainers form and reform, split, and create countergroups” (221). 5. see johnson. 6. while it is widely thought that current natural horsemanship practitioners are drawing on the philosophies of dorrance and hunt, as stated in miller and lamb’s popular book the revolution in horsemanship and what it means for mankind, there are those within the equestrian world who feel that dorrance and hunt would be displeased with the majority of what is called natural horsemanship. 7. i do not identify as a professional horse trainer, rather i have benefited from a wide range of experiences working and being with horses in, and for, a myriad of disciplines and purposes: as a young leisure rider, as a competitor on the university of washington’s intercollegiate equestrian team, as an assistant trainer at a mustang rescue, as an exercise rider working with ex-race horses, as a handler at breed shows, as an apprentice to a dressage trainer, as a ranch hand rehabilitating injured horses, as a program developer for equine guided education workshops, and currently as a participant-observer conducting an ethnography with the newark mounted police. 8. i am grateful to scholar gala argent for her critique of an early presentation of the project, during a panel at the 2013 society for literature, science, and the arts conference. 9. see tom and katz for an in-depth description of this method. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 74 10. see fowler, kennedy, and marlin. 11. a search for “horse liberty work” on the search engine google, or on youtube reveals innumerable website and videos of humans doing work “at liberty” with horses. see robin gates's website: http://www.libertyhorsetraining.com. 12. lynda birke’s articles “’learning to speak horse’: the culture of ‘natural horsemanship’” and “talking about horses: control and freedom in the world of ‘natural horsemanship’” examine the rise of natural horsemanship, the cultural shift within the equestrian world, and explore how horses are represented within the discourses of natural horsemanship respectively. 13. see birke and brandt, and also adelman and knijnik, who provide world-wide statistics on the growth of women’s participation in the horse industry (4). 14. while i examine the similarities produced in the man who listens to horses and buck, i am not examining these real life men — nor do i posit that these men are necessarily similar beyond what i illuminate in the productions, or that they would align themselves. further, while roberts is involved in the production of his biography, it is important to note that brannaman is the subject and not the creator of the film. 15. for a contradiction of the stereotype of the cowboy in mainstream media see gretel erlich’s the solace of open spaces. in her chapter on men, erlich describes the intricacies of the men she has come to know living in wyoming. she explains that these men are “an odd mixture of physical vigor and maternalism” (50). she argues that, “because these men work with animals, not machines or numbers, because they live outside in landscapes of torrential beauty, because they are confined to a place and a routine embellished with awesome variables, because calves die in the arms that pulled others into life, because they go to the mountains as if on a pilgrimage to find out what makes a herd of elk tick, their strength is also a softness, their toughness, a rare delicacy” (5253). 16. while some equestrians find this framing as “new” problematic, due to previous horsemen’s contribution to gentle methods — from xenophon to dorrance and hunt — this analysis is focused on the significance of cultural productions, not the factual genealogy of horse training. for trainers of the past whose work claims to offer ____________________________________________________________________ erica tom – “gender and power in narratives of ‘natural horsemanship’: the production of ‘prey-identified masculinity’” 75 something new, see also willis j. powell and j.s. rarey’s manuscript, tachyhippodamia; or, the new secret of taming horses. 17. the work of todd w. reeser, masculinities in theory, has been central to working through the gendered structures within natural horsemanship. 18. further work might consider how roberts often names and speaks of the horses he has lived and worked with in his book, while in the film about brannaman the only horse which the audience comes to know for any length of time is the stud colt, cal, who will supposedly be euthanized. 19. see weedon. 20. see chesebro. 21. see atwood-lawrence. 22. see tracey owens patton and sally m schedlock’s book gender, whiteness, and power in rodeo: breaking away from the ties of sexism and racism. 23. see reeser. 24. in west of everything: the inner life of westerns, tompkins explains the labor of horses. she argues that, “besides doing all the work in a literal sense, getting the characters from place to place, pulling wagons, plowing fields, and such, [horses] do double, triple, quadruple work in a symbolic sense" (90). they do a lot of work, but that work, tompkins argues, is quite simple. the horse represents a connection to nature by their very presence, “their dynamic material presence, their energy and corporeality call out to the bodies of the viewers, to our bodies" (93-94). 25. steer wrestling is also called bulldogging. atwood-lawrence explains the event originated with a famous black cowboy, bill pickett. in 1881, on a texas ranch, he observed bulldogs who took hold of cattle by their upper lips, biting down, subduing the animals until a cowboy could rope them. he decided to try this method himself, and he successfully adapted it and went on to perform as a bulldogger in the 101 ranch wild west show. cowboys no longer bite the steer's lips, but the contest retains its humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 76 roots, "that is, in pitting one man who must stay in superb physical shape in order to wrestle steers that may weight up to 700 pounds” (34). 26. see birke and brandt. adelman and knijnik provide world-wide statistics on the growth of women’s participation in the horse industry (4). 27. i am grateful to nigel rothfels for his interest in discussing my early thoughts on natural horsemanship at the 2013 animal studies graduate student conference at the university of michigan, his subsequent invitation to be a part of an exciting and productive group of equine-oriented scholars at the 2013 conference of the society for literature, science, and the arts, and his ongoing encouragement. i am indebted to the animal and society institute for my time at the human-animal studies fellowship at wesleyan during june 2015, where i was able to complete this article; particular thanks goes to kari weil. appreciation abounds for my committee, frances bartkowski, jason cortés, mira-lisa katz, and my colleagues, amy lucker and ned weidner — all of whom have endured more than their fair share of horse-talk, and whose critique is essential to my process. thanks also, again and again, to christopher myers. works cited adelman, miriam and jorge knijnik, edd. gender and equestrian sport: riding around the world. new york: springer, 2013. althusser, louis. “ideology and ideological state apparatuses.” lenin and philosophy and other essays. trans. ben brewster, london: new left books, 1971. 127-87. birke, lynda. “‘learning to speak horse’: the culture of ‘natural horsemanship.’” society and animals 15 (2007): 217-239. _____. “talking about horses: control and freedom in the world of ‘natural horsemanship.’” society and animals 16 (2008): 107-126. birke, lynda and keri brandt. “mutual corporeality: gender and human/horse relationships.” women’s studies international forum 32 (2009): 189-197. butler, judith. gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. new york: routledge, 1990. ____________________________________________________________________ erica tom – “gender and power in narratives of ‘natural horsemanship’: the production of ‘prey-identified masculinity’” 77 chesebro, james w. “gender, masculinities, identities, and interpersonal relationship systems: men in general and gay men in particular.” women and men communicating: challenges and changes. eds., borisoff, d. and l. arliss. long grove, il: waveland, 2001. 32-64. dorrance, tom. true unity: willing communication between horse and human. california: word dancer press, 1994. erlich, gretel. the solace of open spaces. new york: penguin books, 1986. evans, nicholas. the horse whisperer. new york: dell publishing, 1995. fowler, veronica, mark kennedy, and david marlin. “a comparison of the monty roberts technique with a conventional uk technique for initial training of riding horses.” anthrozoös 25.3 (2012): 301-21. foucault, michel. discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. new york: vintage books, 1975. redford, robert, dir. the horse whisperer. touchstone pictures, 1998. johnson, dirk. “broncobusters try new tack: tenderness.” the new york times. monday, october 11th, 1993. meehl, cindy, dir. buck. cedarcreek productions llc., sundance selects, 2010. miller, robert m., and rick lamb. the revolution in horsemanship and what it means to mankind. guilford, ct: the lyons press, 2005. patton, tracey owens, and sally m. schedlock. gender, whiteness, and power in rodeo: breaking away from the ties of sexism and racism. lanham, md: lexington books, 2012. powell, willis j., and j.s. rarey. tachyhippodamia; or, the new secret of taming horses. michigan: michigan historical reprint series print, 2005. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 78 reeser, todd w. masculinities in theory: an introduction. malden, ma: wiley-blackwell, 2007. ristau, debra ann. horse whispers and lies. veracity books, 1999. roberts, monty. horse sense for people: the man who listens to horses talks to people. toronto: knopf canada, 2001. savvides, nikki. “‘loving-knowing’ women and horses: symbolic connections, real life conflicts and ‘natural horsemanship.’” humanimalia 3:1. http://www.depauw.edu/site/humanimalia/issue 05/savvides.html sewell, anna. black beauty. new york: millennium publications, 1887. tom, erica and mira-lisa katz. “pasture pedagogy: notes from the field on embodied learning.” multimodality and embodied learning in communities and schools: moving ideas. ed., mira lisa-katznew york: peter lang, 2014. 109-38. tompkins, jane. west of everything: the inner life of westerns. new york: oxford up, 1992. weedon, chris. identity and culture: narratives of difference and belonging. new york: open university press, 2004. xenophon. on horsemanship. trans. morris h. morgan. london: j.m. dent & co., 1897. microsoft word vint for humanimalia-for pdf.doc susan mchugh and say the animal responded . . . in klingon? vint, sherryl. animal alterity: science fiction and the question of the animal. liverpool: liverpool university press, 2010. 269 pp. $95. a question that once might have arisen only amid the nerdiest scenes of late-night dorm life now seems to be gaining traction in animal theory: what if you spoke to an animal, and say the animal responded, only in the star trek-inspired language klingon? pushing jacques derrida’s famous proposition (“and say the animal responded?”) to describe her dog’s precise, intentional, and intense modes of communication as those of a klingon warrior princess, donna haraway’s more recent investigations of companion species extend a longstanding assumption that science fiction offers the best suggestions for transforming ideas about non/human relations. so what might systematic research into this popular genre reveal? the first book-length study to take up this challenge, sherryl vint’s animal alterity: science fiction and the question of the animal, shows how current debates in philosophy and literary studies regarding animals and animality have never been far from science fiction, a popular genre defined by its concern with technological and scientific transformations of social relations that include, but are not limited to, human lives. cleverly written both to introduce seasoned researchers in animal studies to the study of science fiction, as well as to clarify the relevance of this small sub-field of literary studies to much broader and growing interdisciplinary discussions, animal alterity makes the case that some exceptional writers in this genre offer ideal models for “find[ing] a way to connect with and respect alterity without reducing it to an image of self” (225). one of the greatest strengths of this book is its structure, which allows vint to sidestep the pitfalls of engaging in a battle for legitimacy within the discipline of literary studies that all too often lend a shrill, defensive tone to science fiction research. chapters are organized to identify common themes as equally important to both science fiction and animal studies, including: the identification of a metaphysics of subjectivity that excludes animals at the root of many of humanity’s problems; a concern with environmental destruction and the loss of a livable world for humans and other creatures, a recurrence of war with fellow creatures, human and non-human; the threat of human annihilation and a vision — sometimes fearful, sometimes optimistic — about another species replacing us as the dominant form of life; [and] themes of isolation, loneliness and alienation that are encapsulated in humans’ relationships with other species. (208) solidly grounded in contemporary literary and animal theory as well, animal alterity advances posthumanist investigations — especially those of rosi braidotti, n. katherine hayles, and barbara herrnstein-smith — into different ways of conceptualizing human subjectivity in relation to other life forms through close readings of a breathtaking array of science fiction texts, some familiar but many arcane, and all explicitly including characters perceived as animals. while the exclusive focus on literary forms like novels and short stories offers no direct answer to my opening klingon question, this structural decision enhances the argument by enabling animal alterities to illustrate key developments in the history of science fiction writing. unearthing often obscure predecessors and antecedents to popular and critically successful science fiction texts like h.g. wells’s the island of doctor moreau (1898), vint aligns the different ways in which science fiction writers have addressed similar questions about species and otherness, and her analyses suggest that the stories mutate across time as a result of otherwise seemingly disparate developments in feminism, poststructuralist theory, and scientific ethology. questions about how the migrations of these narratives to visual media forms like film, television, and graphic novels might influence or reflect these content changes remain open in the book, occasionally emerging in notes and citations as invitations to further research. the sheer range of literary examples representing “different historical and national contexts” is another aspect that makes this book important, and allows it to do more than just “illustrate the richness of sf’s engagement with the question of the animal” (21). as vint notes in the introduction, science fiction has long been understood as critical to utopian thinking at pivotal historical moments, particularly as a means of responding to (if not intervening in) the global unevenness of scientific and technological achievements. because the large and small animal revolutions imagined through science fiction occupy a weird space/ time relation — at once relegated to the past, at least, of literary history virtually upon publication, yet categorically staking claims in the future by projecting forward new visions of species life — the power of these stories may never quite be able to be articulated in the familiar terms of human sociality. however, with the particular sequences of authors and stories of remodeling human subjectivity that vint presents here, it seems that there is much more to say about the emerging force of feminist, antiracist, and postcolonial voices in not simply finding new audiences for the genre, but also renewing its relevance for thinking about humananimal relations at the turn of the twenty-first century. again, this is not a weakness so much as a clear indication that animal alterities boldly goes where no one has gone before, in order to clear paths for ongoing investigations in a number of fruitful directions. microsoft word mchugh h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 reviews susan mchugh kiwis on kiwis annie potts, philip armstrong, and deidre brown, a new zealand book of beasts: animals in our culture, history and everyday life. auckland: auckland university press, 2013. 288 pp. $49.99 pb. the publication of a new zealand book of beasts will give some pause for thought. of all the countries in the world, why should this one attract the attention of scholars interested in humans, animals, and human-animal relations? has the field finally reached its antipodes? or is there more to such a project than meets the northernhemispheric eye? the book itself makes a compelling case for aotearoa new zealand as a veritable hotspot of interest for human-animal studies. ecologically, “as the last substantial landmass on the planet to be settled by homo sapiens” it merits interest for the ways in which it “has been subject to the most rapidly extensive anthropogenic environmental change in recorded history” (25). its people — who share the moniker of their native bird species, kiwis — have “the highest levels of pet ownership per capita in the western world” (136). yet, in a modern nation built on whaling and fur-seal hunting, and where now sheep as well as cattle vastly outnumber human populations, its susan mchugh— “kiwis on kiwis” 149 economy remains predominantly rooted in animal-based industries, especially agriculture. consequently, its confluence of cultures is marked by “a deeply contradictory approach to human-animal relations” (151). small wonder then that producing even this introductory survey required a team of internationally renowned experts, who are, respectively, the co-founders (potts and armstrong) and a research associate (brown) of the new zealand centre for humananimal studies. drawing from their grant-funded project “kararehe: animals in art, literature, and everyday culture in aotearoa new zealand,” this highly informative volume also provides a fascinating model for human-animal studies research that is both nonanthropocentric and unapologetically “partial — in two senses: both incomplete and partisan” (4). informed by current theories and practices of humananimal studies, the authors persuade that meanings and values attached to animals are active forces in cultural and physical landscapes alike, often operating most powerfully where we least expect them to be present, such as in natural-historical accounts of species extinction. revered by biologists and birdwatchers alike as the seabird capital of the world, aotearoa has no endemic mammals and therefore served as an optimal cradle for a startling range of forest bird species that are unique to these islands, perhaps most famously the giant and not just flightless but also wingless moa, which initially were hunted only by haast’s eagle, in turn the world’s largest bird of prey. evolving over millions of years, these creatures languished following human contact; along with nearly half of the species of vertebrate fauna as well as countless invertebrate fauna, flora, and fungi, they went extinct within the past 700-800 years. but, as potts, armstrong, and brown carefully clarify, human colonial history marks no simple end to the story of animals in new zealand. following a brief introduction chapter 1, “moa ghosts,” clarifies how the clearing of forests by successive waves of polynesian settlers — later māori people — is one of several competing accounts of the giant birds’ fate. like later european settlers known as pākehā, the first people brought other mammals with them, including intentional companions like kūri (dogs) and fellow travelers like rats, who preyed upon and otherwise proved instrumental in decimating indigenous nonhuman populations, including many species of kiwi. yet it is “the dead moa — the moa as an emblem of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 150 extinction — [that] retain[s] a fundamental significance in the ongoing definition of new zealand endemicity” (12). inspiring a seemingly endless string of stories, whether of human relatedness, predation, or recent sightings, these “moa myths” reveal how people “smuggle their versions of kiwiness into the lush heartland of the new zealand imagination” (30). thus begins the book’s first section on animals as icons, which is authored by armstrong — a scholar in literary and animal studies who previously published what animals mean in the fictions of modernity (routledge, 2008) — and is rounded out by chapters devoted to other species whose members have had huge social, media, and economic impacts, in order to situate particularly brutal if also lucrative animal practices like mulesing and shore whaling amid the histories and fictions that have come to define new zealand in the world. “sheepishness” compares the work of w.h. guthrie-smith and samuel butler — both famous authors who began as farmers — to identify a surprising pattern of struggle “to find a new and less arrogant way of perceiving the agency of nonhuman species” focused not on the typical, close companions like dogs and horses, but rather on “that most routinely underestimated of new zealand citizens, the sheep” (60). providing a thicker context for understanding how cetaceans have become transitional figures toward extensions of positive feelings for wild animals, the chapter “opo’s children” tells the story of a particular dolphin who in the 1950s famously visited swimmers in the town of opononi, and of how the story’s extensive retellings in the following decades can be read as both indicators and shapers of everyday people’s increasing attributions of agency to animals. in the subsequent chapter, “the whale road,” armstrong clarifies how these stories influence as much as they reflect the growing incompatibility of perceptions of cetaceans as sentient with the exploitative practices of commercial whaling, and which more recently inform the global popularity of new zealand-based narratives about this growing consciousness like the bestselling novel and later blockbuster film the whale rider. the book’s second section on companion animals, authored by potts — an expert in popular culture who published chicken (reaktion, 2011) in the series animal — delves deeper into the longer human-animal histories of aotearoa. beginning with “ngā mōkai,” which examines traditional practices concerning pets, this section explores the complicated ambivalence that characterizes the most enduring and intimate relations shared between species from prehistory through the present. the term mōkai initially referred both to companion animals — ranging from parrots to dogs — and to human susan mchugh— “kiwis on kiwis” 151 slaves captured in war, and thus signals an uneasiness with captivity often lost in western-industrial stereotypes of domestic life. through appropriately measured analysis of a selection of myths and legends, potts demonstrates that companionate relations of humans and animals “were widespread, significant and complex in preeuropean māori culture,” and at times prove challenging to instrumentalist assumptions (107). more often than not, the old stories dispel fantasies of “native” life as “fundamentally or automatically attentive to the suffering or welfare of nonhuman creatures” (121), guiding, for instance, everyday customs and rituals that enable transitions of individual kūri from pets to meat. tracking the evolution of these practices into the contact period, potts shows how they do not disappear but importantly are shared with arriving white settlers, who also initially ate the “māori dogs” (119) later displaced from all new zealand tables by the titular creatures of the next chapter, “exotic familiars”: pigs, horses, and chickens. in this chapter and the subsequent one, “extended families,” a central theme comes to the fore, namely that the enduring british colonial legacy of pastoralism is the key to understanding the paradox of why new zealand’s economy is “increasingly dependent on the exploitation of animals” while its people profess to love, identify with, and otherwise respect nonhuman creatures (134). in response to the devastating christchurch earthquakes of 2010 and 2011, residents’ commitments to staying or reuniting with animal companions provide extreme illustrations of how pets are viewed as close friends or family members. but the connection between the nation’s “alarming” rates of domestic violence and the appalling instances of animal abuse documented every year by the royal new zealand society for the prevention of cruelty to animals points to a “dark side” to this love (148). informed by current social science research on human-animal relations, potts suggests that industrial-systematic exploitation of animals is an influence, but not a determining factor for what will come, a point driven home most forcefully in the book’s concluding section. the book’s third section, “art animals,” likewise takes a long view of a specific set of cultural practices, here the incorporation of animals in visual culture. authored by brown, an art historian who previously published māori architecture (penguin, 2009), the chapters “indigenous art animals” and “contemporary art animals” focus on the most vibrant traditions of animals in aotearoa art. the first elaborates the specifics of an humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 152 indigenous worldview that interweaves māori material culture and spirituality into animal and art-making practices. thus creatures like the birds and kūri that figure prominently as pets in a prior chapter return here as sources of fur and feathers for the most prized clothing and other adornments, as well as “minor but still important players” customarily intermingling with human forms in talismanic and transformative ways everywhere from tattoos to building décor (175). rather than claim that art has mediated a reconciliation of these customary knowledge systems with the instrumentalist ones imported from europe, brown smartly turns in the next chapter to tracking more precisely the shift among new zealand artists in recent decades toward representing animals prominently as animals. through analyses densely populated with examples, she identifies contemporary māori and pākehā artists’ incorporations of the animals of aotearoa new zealand in ways that move beyond the illustrative in work that “turns the gaze back on the viewers and asks them to question their assumptions about animals” (196). intriguingly, she identifies two complementary efforts as leveraging this important shift: creative curatorial foregrounding of animals in the oeuvre of well-established new zealand artists like don binney, joanna braithwaite, and bill hammond; and international engagements of human-animal studies scholarship and art practice as exemplified by the interactions of uk-based artist and art historian steve baker and wellington-based artist angela singer. in lieu of a formal conclusion, the book closes with two more chapters authored by potts in the section “controversial animals” intended to frame more political discussions that are “vigorously represented overseas, but [...] slow to emerge” in new zealand. the penultimate chapter looks closely at the extreme eradication measures targeting the brushtail possum, an australian native imported a century ago for the fur trade whose incredible feral success — with a population estimated at 30 million — and consequent environmental impact scripts its role as the number-one enemy in the national imaginary (202). comparing representations of the possum in environmental science, popular media, children’s books, personal narratives, even singer’s art, potts tells a complex story of transformations that forestall a compassionate response to the plight of creatures who have inadvertently become the target of so much ire. a slightly more hopeful story of national identification with animal exploitation emerges in the final chapter, “consuming animals,” which draws heavily on potts’s survey-based research on compassionate consumerism in aotearoa. while meat eating, like possum susan mchugh— “kiwis on kiwis” 153 killing, overwhelmingly remains identified with patriotism, potts’s informants speak to a small but significant counter-cultural movement toward veganism and vegetarianism that appears to be gathering steam at the turn of the twenty-first century, empowered by recent political redefinitions of new zealand as an avowedly anti-nuclear, antiwhaling, and otherwise positively compassionate culture. a highly informative, lavishly illustrated, and otherwise exemplary contribution to human-animal studies, a new zealand book of beasts demonstrates the keen attention to differences of cultures and disciplines that characterizes the field at its best. while nonkiwi readers might wish for a few more deliberate signposts — such as a glossary of māori terms — the book is sufficiently well-written to bring into being an audience who by the end will recognize the histories and struggles of aotearoa’s peoples and animals as matters of grave global importance. microsoft word weiss h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 reviews andrew weiss treasures from trash kelsi nagy and philip david jonson ii, eds. trash animals: how we live with nature’s filthy, feral, invasive, and unwanted species. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. xvi + 314 pp. $24.95. pbk. trash animals offers a close look at a variety of animal species that are widely treated in an uncritical and destructive manner. in the process, it makes a compelling case for the practical necessity, ethical worthiness, and genuine difficulty of gaining an informed perspective on species by whom humans are surrounded and with whom we are often in conflict. some readers might bemoan the lack of unambiguous programmatic solutions. ultimately, however, this informative collection offers compelling critical resources for confronting challenging situations that persist in their ambiguity despite careful and attentive critical thinking. trash animals imparts a valuable lesson for dealing with the messiness of human relations with animals that do not fit neatly into easily managed domestic spaces or easily dignified wilderness. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 166 trash animals makes a unique contribution to animal studies scholarship in at least three ways. first, the collection addresses a range of species with whom humans have problematic relations, providing insights unavailable to individual case studies, and doing so in an informative, memorable, and provocative way. second, it shows a spectrum of consequences that can follow from confronting those problem species, not all of which are positive. third, the collection explores the entangled cultural and emotional complications of these problematic encounters. the editors use the term “trash animals” to designate a category of animals met day to day that are seen as invasive, threatening, disgusting, or otherwise undesirable — and that are widely considered disposable. it is a term of derision borrowed from fur trapping industries (as when a non-target species like a skunk is caught in place of a bobcat, making the skunk a “trash animal”), which the editors repurpose for a critical project on behalf of the very animals derided by it. trash animals provokes us to challenge our own thinking about the many specific species covered in its pages, and to appreciate the complex cultural and biological history of similar species treated like trash. each contributor explores a particular species, scrutinizing its cultural history and associations, its mode of life and ecological niche, separating widespread misinformation from an obscured and usually non-threatening truth. outside the foreword and editor’s introduction, the book’s 17 short texts are grouped into five sections: i. the symbolic trash animal, ii. the native trash animal, iii. the invasive trash animal, iv. the urban trash animal, and finally v. moving beyond trash. while the contributions do not explicitly address these categories, they raise interesting questions about their themes and trouble their categories in provocative ways. considering gulls, wolves, snakes, and locusts, the symbolic section repeatedly shows the painfully enduring power of misinforming myth. considering coyotes, prairie dogs, and packrats, the encounters addressed in the native section show what can happen when a species impinges on one’s home or environs. considering canada geese, starlings, and carp, the invasive section shows just how precarious a species’ “desirable” status can be. each of these species was the focus of quite deliberate planning — protection for the geese, introduction to north america for the latter two — but each came to be maligned for adapting too well to their surroundings. the urban section treats cockroaches, magpies, and pigeons, noting quite a range of distance in our relations — magpies appearing at a safe distance, cockroaches decidedly not, and pigeons caught somewhere in the middle. andrew d. blechman’s piece on pigeons, andrew weiss — “treasures from trash” 167 perhaps the most thorough of the book, involves a broad and colorful cast of conflicting characters drawn from a larger book project simply called pigeon. the first two chapters of the final section, moving beyond trash, consider the possibilities of aesthetic beauty in the supposed ugliness of the bullhead catfish and the viscerally disgusting self-defense response of the lubber grasshopper, who vomits and defecates on those who threaten it. the final chapter, kathleen dean moore’s “the parable of the mice and the rats,” is the most expressly philosophical and the most productively meandering, eschewing the single-species focus of the rest of the other articles. the editors wisely opt not to try to tie up the collection’s loose ends; instead, moore’s piece provocatively asks us to consider how we develop a sense of responsibility for the world around us, and to challenge the culturally dominant economistic models for evaluating the world and our responsibilities. the introduction and the final essay are both marked by an unabashed ethical hopefulness, but the collection as a whole seems to me to tell a story that is more complicated and uncomfortable. while i sympathize with the editors’ desire “to consider new relationships between humans and conflict species” (25), the “realities of these relationships” referred to by the editors in the same sentence involve unresolved problems that need to be addressed. part of what makes trash animals so compelling is that an important and uncomfortable insight emerges when all of these various encounters with different species are brought together: that there are times when we encounter a problematic interspecies relation that we simply do not know how to resolve ethically. this is what donna haraway in when species meet and elsewhere thinks through with figures of indigestion. while the essays in trash animals admirably address the problems of ethical success and failure in dealing with abject animals, some are more successful than others, and some end in a kind of trenchant ambiguity, where it is not at all clear how one might even proceed in imagination. some of the stories end happily ever after, as it were, convincingly dispelling harmful misinformation. this is the case with kelsi nagy’s “prairie dog and prejudice,” which dispels the widespread notions that prairie dogs steal allegedly scarce grass needed for grazing cows and sheep, while digging burrows that threaten to break the legs of unsuspecting horses trotting through them. nagy demonstrates that grazers actually humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 168 prefer grass that has been pruned by prairie dogs who leave softer grasses to their taller cohabitants, while the eyesight and evolutionary history of horses suggests that they easily avoid small burrows. nagy concludes that prairie dogs are welcome inhabitants of her now bustling ranch; for her, prairie dog-less ranches are “ghost towns.” prairie dogs, ranchers, horses, and grazers can all peacefully live happily ever after on the same property. the problematic relation with apparent “trash” animals is simply repaired by careful thinking and research. not all encounters with trash animals end so well. bruce barcott’s “kill the cat that kills the bird?” tells the story of feralized house cats who have taken residence under a bridge where endangered birds are nesting; a zealous birder kills two of these cats with a rifle to defend the birds; many other birders rally to the cause, while defenders of cats are outraged and take legal action. the case itself is dismissed at an impasse, and it raises the larger question of how to care ethically for two irreconcilable species, here predator and prey, one “trashed” as feral and the other treasured as endangered. barcott identifies a conflict between protecting species versus protecting individuals — often seen in scholarship between ecological concerns and animal rights. in this case, the gun-toting birder claims he is justified in sacrificing allegedly insubstantial numbers of a plentiful species in order to protect an endangered one. but even for those who wish to settle the matter individually, a conflict remains: between a bird with an interest in living by not being eaten, and a cat with an interest in living by eating birds. feeding the cat in another way merely delays the problem, shifting the burden to chickens, fishes, or other farmed animals. from either perspective, some species or at least some individuals are rendered disposable — that is, they become trash animals. tje essay is wise to open the problem without pretending to offer a clear solution, forcing us to confront the conflicts in ourselves and with others. a third kind of case is significantly more brutal than the last, where little or no improvement is made in relating to other living animals. the stories that best fit this description here are those about cockroaches and packrats. in “metamorphosis in detroit,” author carolyn kraus, a self-professed vegetarian pacifist eco-feminist, vows to find a harmonious relationship even with cockroaches. exhausted after several unsuccessful creative experiments, she is compelled call an exterminator. kraus concludes that it is possible to love a fictional or theoretical roach for its resilience and adaptability, but impossible to do so when faced with a live one. the fate of the packrats in michael p. branch’s “nothing says trash like packrats: nature boy meets andrew weiss — “treasures from trash” 169 bushy tail” is similar. in a rather brutal scene i won’t recount here, branch, in whose house these packrats have begun to settle, ends up killing many of them, despite a newfound respect for their way of life informed by his research. while both authors have meditative moments of well-informed admiration for these species — and, indeed, inspiring them in the reader as well — not much has changed from the perspective of these other species. the packrats nearby the author’s house are spared, it must be said, despite a zealous neighbor urging a hunting mission in a 500-meter radius. nevertheless, as branch writes, he “became a cold-blooded killer of [his] fellow creatures” (147). the editors of trash animals aim to “[add] to the growing conversation about conflict species in culture and [to open] the door for further conversations and scholarship” (21). they hope to “[create] a conversation where people can conceive of solutions that move beyond dichotomies” (23), as for example the familiar one between environmental ethics and animal rights. even these “cold-blooded” stories then should be read as important contributions, widely representative and even positively thoughtful by comparison to average encounters with these animal others. but insofar as the collection encourages “making an effort to shift to an animal’s point of view,” (10) and “to conceive of better, more effective, more humane solutions for human– wildlife conflicts” (24), some of these encounters fall short. what do we learn from them? i want to suggest that even if conflicts with these two specific species had been solved eventually — let us imagine a future in which cockroaches and packrats alike can be peacefully lured out of a house, which would then be easily sealed off, to new homes on their own — such encounters remain structurally unresolved. moments like this will arise again. rather than deciding once and for all that kraus or branch were either justified or heinous for killing their respective home-invaders, we can mourn these apparently unavoidable deaths while trying to find better solutions. what can we learn more specifically? that research and experimentation is still worthwhile, even if occasionally futile. as the editors write in the introduction: “if no peaceful way can be found to coexist with some animals, at least much can be learned from a thorough understanding of the conflict, not only about the nature of species but also about human aesthetics, evolution, and the limits of moral thought and action.” (18) even if kraus’s experiments in trying to peacefully lure cockroaches out of hiding with beer ended unsuccessfully, her experimental ethic is admirable and worth emulating — she did as much research as she could and ventured humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 170 unconventional solutions for the sake of other animals. we must stay with the trouble, then, and try our best — without wasting time blaming and shaming others for unsuccessful attempts. trash animals takes a unique place among related scholarship through its emotional charge, powerfully communicated in the writing style employed by all the authors. while each piece has its own idiosyncratic voice, they all share personal intimacy. grounded in a specific place — almost exclusively in the united states it must be said, though canada and south korea make a single appearance each — all the texts have a conversational feel, making them readily accessible. while that personal, anecdotal, and occasionally poetic style is in good company with classics like aldo leopold’s sand county almanac, trash animals sets itself apart not only by the diversity of contributors and the species they cover, but by the severity and strangeness of the encounters. the editors nicely position the collection with respect to leopold’s text, favorably citing his remark that while the great majority of species may have no economic value, the “stability” and “integrity” they contribute to their ecosystems entitles them to continued existence. like leopold, then, the contributors and editors of trash animals try to show the dignity of under-appreciated species. the contributors are doing something particularly interesting, insofar as they’re trying to establish the dignity of those animals whose dignity is unreflectively denied by other humans. the denial of dignity to these other animals is the source of the very concept of “trash animals”; as the editors write in the introduction, “the term ‘trash’ opens up a moral loophole” (9) with which to justify violence. the authors often meet these “trash” animals in settings whose stability and integrity seems undermined by them —a home, a river, a city, or elsewhere. this is what i mean by the strangeness and severity of the encounters: they often do not take place at a safe distance. “trash animals” disturb precisely because they come too close for human comfort — as when cockroaches emerge from an old television in kraus’s home, or packrats take the pacifier of branch’s child. many cases are less severe than those two, less directly threatening — pigeons congregating en masse in busy cities, bullhead catfish swimming through muddy river waters, or canada geese honking on lawns. they all nonetheless appear in spaces in which we live. because they disturb many people on such a visceral and personal level, it is both fitting and compelling that trash animals should consistently adopt such a personal and intimate style; intimacy allows the authors to raise critical questions precisely at the moment of overwhelming andrew weiss — “treasures from trash” 171 emotions — disgust, insecurity, discomfort — that normally foreclose any such questioning. it may be difficult to ask critical questions when a cockroach is skittering across your floor or you can barely hear yourself think over an evening chorus of starlings in your yard, but the next best thing would be to have a writer walk you through such an encounter and to ask critical questions there. by having these feelings documented and reproduced we can revisit and rethink them, preparing ourselves to avoid being caught off guard, with the hope of “developing better, more humane, more effective solutions” (24). as many of the essays show, fear and disgust are powerful forces for perpetuating myths that figure these species as threatening, out of control, and immediately worthy of destruction. whether it is the alleged appetites of coyotes, belligerence of diamondback snakes, health hazards of pigeon droppings, dangers of prairie dens to horses, appetite for livestock of coyotes, so many of the widely believed threats of trash animals are extremely overstated or outright false. the editors and contributors “ask readers to set aside their preconceived notions and anthropocentric concerns for a moment and consider the realities of other living beings in a new light” (24), which might dispel destructive feelings of fear and disgust. this link between emotion and knowledge also works in the other direction — knowledge imparted by careful research can lead to different and much calmer emotions. as lisa couturier writes of coyotes in “one nation under coyote — divisible”: “i want to say to those willing to shoot at the unknown — to shoot at what is perceived as a threat — that perhaps certain explicit information would calm their fears” (111). couturier is appropriately tentative; tensions do run high as coyotes and many other species continue to be exterminated in alarming ways, as we see throughout the collection. few if any of these cases show much progress being made at the cultural level, but their resources for reimagining personal encounters are compelling. the tentativeness shown by couturier and other contributors reveals an important aspect of the collection’s contribution. those who feel responsible for other animals must find ways of reaching those who do not. trash animals offers valuable resources for such discussions, which will be unavoidable if any of these species are to have a hope of better relations with humans. to take a personal example, even prior to reading this collection i had no trouble admiring city pigeons for all sorts of reasons. but plenty of people do have humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 172 trouble, as blechman’s piece “flying rats” attests, and i admit i have been caught flatfooted as to how to respond to the hostility expressed about them. trash animals offers a close look at these kinds of emotional reactions and how they work—their justifications, often ill-informed, and the overblown proportions many myths reach—giving a set of important resources for anyone who wants to make the case (to other humans) for these animals and others like them. against complaints that pigeons are “filthy” or that their droppings are hazardous, i can now reply that they offer no more hazard than owning a cat, perhaps even less, given that city-dwellers tend not to get as close to pigeon droppings as cat-owners do to litterboxes. moreover, to those who advocate poisons and other forms of “pest-control,” the british non-profit pigeon control advisory service (picas) ’s model of offering shelter and food to city pigeons away from busy public sites has shown impressive results—a case where hospitality shows more promise than animosity. such pragmatic rebuttals abound in trash animals, many of which are surprising, detailed, and urgent. trash animals can be read as both a contribution to current scholarship and a preparation for a great deal of work that remains to be done. it provides a starting point for thinking about a set of problems — concrete ethical problems encountered each day — by developing the general concept of the “trash animal,” while examining many concrete cases in which that concept is at work. the collection offers a set of transferable practices. already since reading the book i have found myself becoming more mindful of my relationships with the moths, centipedes, and squirrels, and preparing to have real conversations on their behalf. trash animals offers a series of exhortations to slow down, think carefully, gain perspective and patiently widen our range of possible emotional responses, precisely at the moments where this can be the most difficult, but also most urgent: when we are emotionally overwhelmed by fear, disgust, or entitlement. it offers a detailed, pragmatically useful, and widely accessible set of stories and resources to think through these challenges in all their ambiguity and complex emotional depth. it’s a welcome surprise that a book about difficult encounters should be such a great pleasure to read, even as it provokes and unsettles. don’t be afraid to dig through this trash heap: you’re sure to find many unexpected treasures, even if everything unavoidably gets messy. andrew weiss — “treasures from trash” 173 works cited blechman, andrew d. pigeons. new york: grove press, 2006. haraway, donna. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2007. leopold, aldo. a sand county almanac: with other essays on conservation from round river. new york: oxford up, 1966. microsoft word sax h u m a n i m a l i a 1:2 boria sax the posthumanism of roberto marchesini taken in the most literal way, the word “posthumanism” can have two alternative meanings: “after humanism” or “after human beings.” those who write about posthumanism as an intellectual movement often seem to conflate the two. the latter meaning is certainly more sensational, and pertains to a perceived collapse of boundaries between human beings and machines, brought about by recent technologies, or between humans and other animals, brought about by new research. roberto marchesini, however, uses the term in the former sense, referring to the end of humanism, considered as an intellectual movement that has dominated western thought since the renaissance, and even this repudiation of humanism is qualified. the humanistic movement was in part a response to intensified religious conflicts, especially between catholics and protestants. early humanists such as pico della mirandola and erasmus of rotterdam sought to defuse conflicts by appealing to our common humanity, as something that transcended religious, intellectual, and ethic divisions. while repudiating the anthropocentric bias of traditional humanism, marchesini wishes to preserve many of its qualities such as tolerance and openness to new perspectives. to summarize the posthumanism of marchesini, machines and animals are the two major points of orientation in the construction of human identity. the impression of human domination has been, from the start, based on an exaggerated notion of human autonomy that is proving impossible to sustain. technology is not so much a means to human dominance as the area of most intense integration between human activity and the physical world. new inventions may seem dramatically to expand human power, but they also undermine human autonomy, since we are able to do increasingly little without mechanical assistance. computers, for example, are now so intimately involved in our most fundamental decisions that it is becoming very hard to pretend that they are simply slaves to human agendas. according to marchesini, our symbiosis with animals is now relatively psychological or spiritual, yet no less intimate, because animals have provided most of the images, models, analogies, concepts, intuitions, and metaphors that are the foundation of human culture. i had a small epiphany of this idea recently when i went to hallmark to 87 boria sax – the posthumanism of roberto marchesini buy a st. valentine’s day card for my wife, and noticed that most of the cards featured animals such as birds, squirrels, or butterflies, while the rest showed closely related images such as flowers or trees. it is almost impossible to describe many basic emotions such as love without the mediation of theriomorphic images and associations. it may even be a bit imprecise to speak of these as “our” emotions, since they are ultimately a product of our interaction with other beings. in other words, what we may conventionally think of as “human” culture and technology is actually the product of reciprocal relationships with a larger environment, what marchesini calls “non-human alterity.” but, given this interdependence of people with machines and animals, what does being “human” mean? marchesini believes that answering this question is a great intellectual challenge of our era. our answers may always be provisional, but they do not need to be equivocal or vague. we may define our humanity, as well as qualities such as ethnicity, by reference, rather than opposition, to other entities, particularly to animals and machines. poststructuralist theorists such as deleuze and guattari have rejected binary polarities, on the grounds that we cannot posit them without favoring one or the other side. but that is precisely what marchesini attempts to do with his concept of non-human alterity. he does not see alterity as something to be denied, ignored, or overcome, but rather to be embraced. “animal” may, then, perhaps still be an opposite of “human,” but the polarity is a source of mutual dependence and creativity. deleuze and guattari contrast what they call “rhizomatic” connections, which are horizontal and resemble roots, with “arborescent” ones, which are vertical and supposedly hierarchal. but this simply produces a one-dimensional analysis, which will not necessarily even be less judgmental than traditional investigations. (the polarity of “left” and “right” may, for example, take the place of “high” and “low” as an axis of discrimination.) i am unsure whether his arboreal imagery is intended as an implicit comment on deleuze and guattari, but marchesini compares humanity to a tree in the field. the soil, nutrients, sunlight, water, and so on may all contribute to it, and the tree is inconceivable apart from them, but yet it has a very distinctive profile. by understanding humanity in this way, marchesini allows for a sense of human solidarity without hostility towards either technology or the natural world. the term “posthumanism” may be a bit deceptive here, since the prefix “post…” suggests, ironically, a definition by negation. the point, however, is not to reject 88 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) humanism so much as to place that development in a larger context. marchesini sees posthumanism less as a sharply delineated movement than as a trend pervading much of contemporary life. in his book posthuman, marchesini explicates his case in a great deal of detail, drawing on such areas as history, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. nevertheless, the trends he identifies are so broad that even his erudite treatise is hardly more than a beginning. the process of vetting all of his claims by academic argument would be too laborious, too contentious, and too slow for any response to the urgent practical and cultural crises of today. finally, the major criterion of validation must be the intuition of his readers. marchesini is the major synthesizer of what the italians call “zooanthropologia,” a discipline that centers on roughly the same questions as anthrozoology or animal studies. and is “zooanthropologia” essentially a different word for an established discipline? on his web site at http://www.robertomarchesini.com/zoo_fr.htm is his “manifesto teorico della zooantropologia” (theoretical manifesto of zooantropology) and you can click to see versions of it in italian, portuguese, spanish and english (all spelled in italian). if you click on the last of these, two words appear – “coming soon.” the english version has been coming soon for about three or four years at least, and it is likely to be for some time to come. this suggests to me that reaching out to the englishspeaking world is not the major priority for marchesini or zooanthropologia. we in the english-speaking world can hardly complain about the neglect. after all, marchesini does cite dozens of thinkers who wrote in english in posthuman. he remains, however, almost completely unknown in the english-speaking world, despite the fact that there is, so far as i know, no theoretical synthesis of recent scholarship on human-animal relations of comparable subtlety and thoroughness in english. i suspect is that a cultural divide between the mediterranean and anglo-saxon cultures in play here. marchesini is writing in a country where pastoral tradition remains relatively strong, and factory farming has very seldom or never been carried to extremes approaching those in america. animals in the anglo-saxon countries have at times been objectified to such an extent that many theorists react with an almost exclusive emphasis on kinship. in countries of the mediterranean, where relations between animals and people have evolved slowly over centuries, an emphasis on alterity may come more easily. 89 boria sax – the posthumanism of roberto marchesini but, if this is so, perhaps the time has come for one more boundary, that between mediterranean and anglo-saxon culture, to be blurred. there are strong parallels between the zooanthopologia of marchesini and recent writing in animal studies/anthrozoology by americans such as donna haraway and glen a mazis, who also emphasize that human identity is a product of our constantly-changing relationships with other creatures. all of these thinkers see meaning as created through the interaction of human beings, animals, and machines, not considered as discrete entities in perpetual competition for power but as fluid elements of a larger environment. at the very least, marchesini presents a theory that makes sense of many contemporary developments, without dogmatism, pedantry, or excessive rhetoric. behind all his cultural and historical analysis is a surprisingly simple conception. i would characterize marchesini’s posthumanism as a form of neo-totemism. it is perhaps a variant of structural anthropology, in which the residual differences between modern and tribal cultures, as well as between anthropologist and natives, have been effaced. the model for non-human alterity might be a forest, a grassy meadow, or a coral reef on a summer day, filled with a virtually endless diversity of creatures. selected bibliography: bulliet, r. w. hunters, herders, and hamburgers: the past and future of human-animal relationships. new york: columbia up, 2005. deleuze, giles and felix. guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: u minnesota, 1987. haraway, d. j. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. marchesini, r. “alterità non umane.” liberazione: revista di critica antspecista 6 (2008). 6281. marchesini, roberto, and karin anderson. animal appeal: uno studio sul teriomorfismo. bologna: hybris, 2001. marchesini, roberto. post-human: verso nuovi modelli di esistenza. torino: bollati boringhieri, 2002. 90 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) mazis, g. a. humans animals machines: blurring boundaries. albany, ny: suny press, 2008. tugnoli, claudio. 2003. “l'unita di tutto cio che vive. verso una concezione antisacrifcale del rapporto uomo/animale.” zooantropologia: storia, etica e pedagogia dell'interazione uomo/animale, ed. c. tugnoli. milan: francoangeli. 13-76. microsoft word magnone-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:2 sophia booth magnone microbial zoopoetics in octavia butler’s clay’s ark in octavia butler’s 1984 science fiction novel clay’s ark, humanity is under threat. a microorganism from the planet proxima centauri 2 has hitched a ride to earth by colonizing the bodies of a crew of astronauts. most of the astronauts die; the lone survivor finds himself utterly changed. he is no longer human but human-plusmicrobe; the organism remakes his body, his senses, and his will to serve its own interests. his new purpose in life, he finds to his dismay, is to propagate an alien species. the compulsion to infect other humans is irresistible. left to its own devices, the organism threatens to take over the entire human race. this brief sketch of the plot of clay’s ark recalls an extensive tradition of narratives of infection in the science fiction genre. the plague narrative tends to represent disease as a rampant invader, threatening the purity and safety of the community, the home, the human body itself. in a genre so often motivated by the drama of us versus them, infection can be the ultimate other: nonhuman, irrational, and utterly amoral.1 humans cannot communicate or reason with such a silent, senseless enemy; their only hope for survival is to destroy it. yet in the hands of octavia butler, a writer known for her nuanced and open-ended depictions of unconventional partnerships and communities, the question of us versus them, self versus other, becomes much more complicated. in her plague story, the nature of infection makes it impossible to extricate “us” from “them”; characters soon realize that the return to a pure human self, purged of all contaminants, is an unrealizable fantasy. and unlike most iterations of the infection narrative, clay’s ark gives some thought to the infectious organism as a being in itself, a fellow planetdweller with life and purpose, though these may remain incomprehensible both to human characters and to the reader.2 infection, in this novel, requires more flexible and open-minded strategies from humans than mere eradication. what would it mean, butler asks, to approach an infectious organism as an unavoidable cohabitant, rather than a hostile invader to be eliminated? how might the human-microbe muddle engendered by infection change one’s understanding of subjectivity, will, and ethics? what is lost, and what might be gained, by this new form of interspecies agency? i propose to read clay’s ark’s speculative infection as a radically nonhuman form of signification — what i call, following aaron moe, a microbial zoopoetics. moe explains in his 2014 book zoopoetics: animals and the making of poetry that the emerging field of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 110 zoopoetics has two related aims. one is to trace the ways in which animal gestures, vocalizations, and movements have shaped the making of human writing. it is in this sense that jacques derrida first coins the term in the animal that therefore i am (2008), referring in passing to “kafka’s vast zoopoetics” (6), his extensive and imaginative literary treatment of animals. the second and more ambitious undertaking of zoopoetics is to consider how animals themselves may participate in poiesis, and how humans might practice the attentiveness necessary to experience it as such. zoopoetics focuses on the process by which animals are makers. they make texts. they gesture. they vocalize. the sounds and vocalizations emerge from a rhetorical body, a poetic body, or rather a body that is able to make. this assumes agency… it casts animals in the verb of making. (moe 11) zoopoetics, for moe, pries open some realms that historically have been tightly sealed off from nonhuman beings. through its lens, poetry, textuality, intention, and agency no longer appear as exclusive human property. the study of zoopoetics addresses itself toward the diverse array of utterance, inscription, and performance undertaken by animals themselves, whether or not these forms might be pleasing, meaningful, or even legible to a human reader. it requires one to remain permanently open to new ideas of who or what might constitute an author, and who or what might constitute a text. in his book, moe looks at some particularly poetic animals: cats, mimic octopi, beluga whales. in their intimacy with humans, the wonder they inspire, or their vocal prodigiousness (respectively), these beings might be said to resonate with human aesthetic and literary traditions, and thus to count as apt zoopoetic candidates. at the same time, moe places no specific boundaries on the types of animals that might participate in zoopoesis. perhaps it seems a stretch to seek zoopoetics in less recognizably “poetic” species — even in microorganisms, most of which are not even classified as animals. but such stretches of the human imagination are precisely what is required in order to critique and dismantle the long-standing anthropocentric tradition, in which nonhuman species tend to be valued only in terms of their utility for and compatibility with humans. broadly speaking, the more different from humanity a species appears, the harder it is for humanity to recognize it, care for it, and treat it justly.3 in the struggle for more universal recognition of the more-than-human world, speculative fiction has an important role to play alongside ethology, psychology, philosophy, and other “real-world” disciplines. sf opens a space to imagine possibilities for species-being that have not yet been, or perhaps cannot be, proven by sophia booth magnone -microbial zoopoetics in octavia butler’s clay’s ark 111 science. what would the world be like, for instance, if the agency of nonhuman species was unmistakable and irrepressible? how would, and should, humans contend with their changing status? in this sense, clay’s ark considers the implications of an unanticipated and highly speculative form of zoopoetics. individual human bodies are rendered into microbeauthored texts, while on a larger scale, an extraterrestrial agenda writes itself into the narrative of the human race. the novel makes it impossible to regard this as a friendly project: the organism’s impact is violent, unsettling, and often fatal. yet the straightforward model of interspecies warfare cannot capture the ambivalence of the human-microbe relationship. the notion of zoopoetics moves away from the classic script of invasion and defense to reframe this relationship in terms of the politics of textuality. it allows readers to consider how an infectious microbe might be not just a germ but an author, writing difference into the text of the human species, no matter how ugly or abnormal the result might appear to human eyes. this microbial author might even, butler suggests, act as a collaborator, co-producing, with its host, a radically new kind of being. with its proposal of interspecies symbiosis, clay’s ark anticipates a shift in the models and metaphors that structure human understanding of the biological world. the novel stages a cataclysmic event — the arrival of an extraterrestrial infection — to reveal a situation that was already true: that the being called a human is actually a diverse interspecies collective. although symbiosis, a pattern of close, long-term, often mutually beneficial interactions between organisms of different species, was once considered a relatively rare phenomenon, it is now recognized more generally in plants, fungi, and animals including humans. the research on symbiosis, still very much ongoing, has recently received significant attention in public scientific and medical discourses. an oft-quoted statistic is that microbial cells outnumber human cells in the human body by about ten to one, encoding about 100 times more genetic information than human dna and making up one to three per cent of the body’s mass (nih human microbiome project). much remains to be established about the significance of all the organisms sharing human space, but already there is evidence that the composition of the human microbiome affects one’s immune system, metabolism, mental health, even one’s personality and behavior.4 that is, in significant ways, microorganisms participate in making people who they are. microbiota that inhabit the skin, mouth, gastrointestinal tract, and more inscribe their own particular codes into the regular operations of the body; in a sense, they act as microscopic authors, helping to write individual humans into existence. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 112 the microbiome has thus emerged as an interdisciplinary lightning rod, sparking over a decade of conversation within and across the sciences, social sciences, humanities, and popular culture. at its most radical, it represents a profound challenge to some fundamental notions of identity in the western philosophical tradition: the species, the individual, the free-willed human. in the words of biologists lynn margulis and dorian sagan, the microbiome undermines the myth of the self-contained individual, showing us instead that “we people are really walking assemblages, beings who have integrated various other kinds of organisms — that each of us is a sort of loose committee” (19). the conventional metaphor of invasion and defense does not suffice for these ongoing interspecies relationships: margulis and sagan recast microbes and humans as committee members engaged in necessary and collective work. through this lens, the human microbiome illustrates how the intricate interspecies networks that donna haraway calls “companion species” operate even within our socalled selves. the most provocative suggestion of the microbiome is not simply that humans live in intimate proximity to other species, but that the notion of species itself, the stable boundary dividing “us” from “them,” is called into question. we are who and what we are because of largeand small-scale relationships with human and mostly, nonhuman others. companion species are defined not just by coexistence but by coconstitution. haraway proposes that “to be one is always to become with many.... the partners do not precede the meeting” (species 4), while anna tsing declares that “human nature is an interspecies relationship” (144). the field of multispecies ethnography has emerged as a mode of anthropology that refuses a narrow focus on the anthropos, asking not, “what is the essence of the human?” but rather, “what is the human becoming” in relation with other kinds of beings? (kirksey, schuetze, and heimreich 4). and importantly, it is not only familiar, charismatic, or highly visible critters that have been recognized in these multispecies accounts.5 dangerous, annoying, forgettable, and invisible species have secret histories and agencies of their own. tsing, for instance, follows fungi to document ten thousand years of interdependent companionship between humans and mushrooms. heather paxson introduces the idea of a “post-pasteurian” mode of approaching the microbial world in order “to invest in the potentialities of collaborative human and microbial cultural practices” (17) and embrace, rather than inoculate against, “microbiosociality” (39). paxson develops the notion of microbiosociality to tell a story about artisan raw-milk cheesemaking, an endeavor that, while socially and legally controversial, is voluntarily undertaken and managed by humans toward a desired end. clay’s ark tells a very different story, in which humans’ microbiosocial entanglement has far more dramatic sophia booth magnone -microbial zoopoetics in octavia butler’s clay’s ark 113 effects. their bodies recruited as a medium for the survival of an alien organism, they are reinvented, driven by a new purpose not of their own choosing. their individual lives are now construed as secondary effects. as eli, the surviving astronaut who serves as “patient zero” for the infection on earth, puts it to his newly infected companions, “we’re the sporangia of the dominant life form of proxi two — the receptacles that produce the spores of that life form. if we survive ... it will be because we fulfill our purpose — because we spread the organism” (192). and yet, although this relationship is both involuntary and severely distressing for human hosts, it also confers benefits. those who survive infection find themselves extremely resistant to disease and injury; they enjoy increased strength, faster reflexes, and a drastically heightened sensorium. the mechanism of the organism is not to prey upon its host, but to combine with it, infiltrate the species boundary and entangle itself with humankind on a cellular and genetic level. it is not a parasite, but a symbiont. and survival, post-infection, is a collective, interspecies project. symbiosis is not utopia: the microbiopolitics of biology = destiny. clay’s ark is part of octavia butler’s patternist series, four novels that trace the development of a future earth society in which the human race has been split into three subspecies organized in a strict hierarchy: the telepathic patternists rule, while non-telepathic “mutes” serve them, and the clayarks are classified as savage beasts to be exterminated.6 clay’s ark falls diegetically in the middle of the series, but was published last. it takes place on twentieth-century earth, before the widespread division of the human species. while the other three books focus on patternist characters, this one provides an origin story for the maligned clayarks; the events of the novel make it clear that clayarks are the eventual result of mutation introduced into human genes by the extraterrestrial microbes. clay’s ark switches between two narratives, designated past and present. in past chapters, the astronaut eli helplessly infects a family who rescues him from dying in the california desert; together, the members of this reluctant new household figure out how to survive their infection together. the present chapters take place some years later; through trial and error, eli’s infected community has established some guiding principles and has managed to isolate itself from the larger world, adding (that is, abducting) new members when necessary. these chapters focus on three such new members, the doctor blake maslin and his twin teenage daughters rane and keira, and their changing reactions to being conscripted into eli’s fold. the story is told from the perspective of multiple human characters, switching among eli, blake, keira, and rane; it offers no direct insight into the microbe’s own point of view, only the way the humans perceive it. butler repeatedly stresses that the alien organism is not “intelligent” in any recognizable way. yet it is exceptionally effective at humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 114 making things happen in the world by manipulating “higher” organisms to serve its agenda. without intelligence, consciousness, or intention, the microorganism manages to wield formidable agency. at first glance, microbial agency seems completely distinct from the kind practiced by humans. everything the microorganism does is oriented toward survival and reproduction; its agency is described as a pure biological drive, one of the many mindless, mechanical forces that ensure the regular operation of the natural world. humans, in contrast, act deliberately, based on reason, ethical principle, and personal choice — at least, so goes the ideal of the autonomous human subject so critical to much of modern political and philosophical discourse. yet there are plenty of forces in play in human behavior besides personal autonomy, and humans, too, are subject to certain forms of automaticity. “what’s the chemical composition of love?” wonders one infected character. “human babies are ugly even when they’re normal, but we love them. if we didn’t the species would die” (93). there is a continuity, in other words, between an infected state and the regular experience of being human; both involve a complex array of forces and influences that produce one’s self, largely unconsciously. the microorganism emerges as one agent among many at work in the human body, albeit one with particularly obvious effects. and while this agent may not be sentient enough to have a stated politics, it does have a clear agenda for its hosts, with ambivalent political repercussions. on the one hand, symbiosis is linked in this novel to a radical and transformative intervention into the anthropocentric status quo; this positive politics is the focus of my reading. on the other hand, symbiosis is not imagined here as a utopian prospect; in several respects, especially with regard to gender, the microbe seems to impose some of the worst, most oppressive human norms onto its host population. analyzing the changing trope of infection in science fiction, laurel bollinger notes that “to take embodiment seriously means to recognize the degree to which embodiment will shape consciousness ... even as doing so risks falling into the trap (or being accused of falling into the trap) of biological essentialism” (395). clay’s ark certainly risks falling into that trap. the microbe enacts a highly conservative agenda that brooks no resistance from its human hosts. its implicit slogan is “biology is destiny” — a notion antithetical to feminist, queer, and transfeminist scholarship, and that sums up a depressingly familiar gender politics. in the spirit of ambivalence and complexity that is so integral to octavia butler’s work, i highlight three aspects of the microbe’s “biology is destiny” agenda in order to complicate my own conclusions about the potentially revolutionary force of symbiosis in this novel. sophia booth magnone -microbial zoopoetics in octavia butler’s clay’s ark 115 the first is that reproduction — of the microbe, and thus of the human host population — becomes the single most important task post-infection. according to the organism, reproduction is synonymous with survival; a life that doesn’t reproduce is a failed life. and so every infected person is driven to reproduce. as one character observes, “the organism had turned them all into breeding animals” (106). this reproductive coercion affects everyone, but its effects predictably fall most heavily on the novel’s women, who are compelled not just to have sex but to become pregnant as often as possible, and then to devote themselves to raising their children. the men, on the other hand, are compelled to impregnate as many women as possible. with effort, male characters resist this urge toward a harem mentality and maintain more mutually fulfilling partnerships; the community practices a kind of loose monogamy, with both parents contributing to childrearing. but there is no opting out. reproductive agency is completely overruled — in fact, because everyone desires to reproduce, the concept becomes meaningless. in one case, the organism even reverses a woman’s tubal ligation (undertaken long before infection) to restore her fertility (206). the second implication is an absolute heteronormativity. “compulsory heterosexuality,” described by adrienne rich as a social and political institution that is difficult, but not impossible, to resist, is here reified as a biological imperative. under the new symbiotic regime, any kind of non-procreative sex — or, for that matter, celibacy — is not only forbidden, but actually made impossible. infected humans’ libidos are rewired so that only sex with reproductive potential is eroticized. the effect is an implicit erasure of queerness altogether, both in the specific sense of nonheterosexual partnership, and in the more general sense of opting out of heteronormative practices of biological reproduction.7 the novel leaves unanswered the question of what the organism would do if it encountered a homosexual, asexual, transgender or genderqueer host: would it “cure” these (ostensibly) non-reproductive states of being, just like it “cured” the woman’s self-appointed infertility?8 butler evades this problem by writing all of her characters as securely heterosexual before their infection; but it is clear that the new biosocial organization of this symbiosis excludes sexual and gender diversity.9 the novel thus runs the risk of aligning its microbe with the pernicious and pseudoscientific agenda of “homosexual conversion therapy,” by suggesting that sexual orientation, as an offshoot of reproductive capacity, is a biological fact that, under certain conditions, can be forcibly changed. the other side of this compulsory heterosexuality is that it fundamentally precludes notions of sexual agency and consent. rape is normalized as a mode of sexual encounter, except that it ceases to make sense as “rape”: there is no clear perpetrator or victim, because everyone involved is compelled into the act by their new reproductive humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 116 urges. as one woman reassures blake, who is worried about the safety of his daughters in eli’s household, “our men don’t rape. they don’t have to” (39). no infected woman is a “victim,” because she hungers insatiably and often indiscriminately for sex. thus the microbe’s agenda biologically substantiates the tired sexual tropes that feminists have been struggling against for decades: men who cannot help themselves, women who always want it even if they say they don’t. post infection, seduction becomes literally irresistible, an affective compulsion that precedes the physical violence of rape; sex is not a choice but a necessity, a bodily function that a man and a woman both desire but neither necessarily wants. in this community, sexual encounter is always problematized: one’s desires are never fully under one’s own power. there are loving, fulfilling sexual and emotional partnerships in this novel, but there are also moments of distressing brutality, such as the rape of the young newcomer rane, who, as a recent infectee, ambivalently experiences the act from two perspectives, resistance and active acceptance: it was as though she were two people. one wanted, needed, was utterly compelled to have this man — perhaps any man.... yet some part of her was still her. that part screamed soundlessly, weeping, and clawed with imaginary fingers at the ape’s ugly, stupid face.... then the organism controlled her completely. her body moved only under its compulsion and her feelings were abruptly reconciled with her actions. part of her seemed to die.... even as she screamed, she knew that what she was doing was necessary. (184) it is important to the story that rane’s rapist is not a member of the infected community; the rape occurs after blake and his daughters escape eli’s compound and are captured by a passing road gang. and yet that plot detail, like the characters’ universal heterosexuality, rings as contrivance, a way for the novel to sidestep some of its most difficult questions. casting rane’s rapist as an uninfected man, an unnamed criminal who is identified only as an “ape,” lets eli and his family members off the hook — outsiders may commit rape, but “our men” are exempt. the brutal horror of the passage, however, illustrates the extreme depths to which the infected community might fall if they let the microbe overwrite their precious remaining social and sexual mores. rane’s own microbe-induced desire for her rapist heightens, rather than eases, the trauma of the act. following the logic of the novel, one might speculate that a woman who was not a newcomer like rane, one who was more used to and accepting of the ways infection had changed her, might not experience this act as traumatic. and yet from a feminist perspective, it might seem both impossible and irresponsible to sophia booth magnone -microbial zoopoetics in octavia butler’s clay’s ark 117 imagine a world where rape is not traumatic. the part of rane that “seem[s] to die,” her claim to bodily and sexual autonomy, is a human value to which many readers might want to cling, even in the process of critiquing anthropocentric norms of subjectivity. the final implication of the microbe’s “biology is destiny” agenda is that it builds a logic of violence, competition, and predation into the structures of the human community. microbial hosts are driven to infect others; they do their best to control this urge in order to prevent the infection of the entire human race, but they must, from time to time, recruit — that is, kidnap and imprison — new hosts. no one will be convinced to join; it can only happen through coercion. uninfected humans thus become a form of prey for the human-microbe symbionts: although the secondary intention is to integrate new recruits into their fledgling community, the primary goal is to exploit their bodies as a medium for microbial growth. inevitably, some of the newly infected will die — an acceptable loss, according to microbial logic, as long as growth increases overall. the microbe’s predatory outlook toward others is echoed in the prodigious appetites of the infected, who hunger above all for raw meat and view small animals, like the chickens they raise, as ambulatory food rather than living creatures. this “survival of the fittest” mentality has a final implication within the community itself. from a purely biological perspective, the men are all rivals, competing for the limited resource of female fertility; consequently, due to their heightened senses, the men smell threatening to one another, and they must actively resist the urge to fight. women, too, get possessive of their sexual partners, a jealousy eased only by pregnancy. the infected community — men, women, microbes, food animals — thus illustrates some of the uglier aspects of haraway’s “companion species.” the sustenance of some depends on the exploitation of others, animals and humans; relations of use are unavoidable and “dying and killing are not optional” (species 74). intimate companionship is no interspecies utopia. the symbiotic revolution: rewriting kinship and identity. yet despite the alarming characteristics of infection outlined above, despite the ways that its social and biological reorganization of its human hosts echoes a retrograde political agenda especially with regard to sexuality and gender, the future that clay’s ark imagines is not simply dystopian. infection and symbiosis also present a set of revolutionary challenges to entrenched human norms about species, identity, and kinship. disrupting these norms, butler suggests, might be ultimately beneficial to humankind — less tangible than the microbe’s gifts of increased strength, speed, and sensory capacity, but in the long term, even more valuable. infection inaugurates a new kind of existence for human hosts, forcing them to reckon with the nonhumans that participate in their bodies, minds, and families. in what maria aline ferreira calls “a biopolitical strategy for adaptation and survival,” they must do the difficult work of unlearning some of the values and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 118 practices they consider most essential to their own species-being; “forgoing part of their sense of humanity is the only option that gives them a chance to continue living” (ferreira 407). the transgressive effects of symbiosis are not necessarily welcomed by the human hosts. but their resistance, butler suggests, might have less to do with anything inherently oppressive about their new symbiotic existence, and more to do with their attachment to an anthropocentric status quo that is shown to be as misinformed as it is destructive. one of the irrevocable principles of eli’s infected community is its need for isolation. other than occasional forays into the outside world to find new members, the group remains under strict quarantine. but isolation, combined with the influence of an organism that is completely indifferent to existing institutions on earth, offers the infected hosts a unique opportunity to rewrite human culture from the ground up, excising damaging and oppressive cultural constructs. butler employs a cast of characters that is diverse in terms of age, gender, class, and race in order to demonstrate from different social positions what might be gained by the collapse of human society: the symbionts build their community as far as possible off the grid that racism, sexism, and other structural inequalities have made of the established world. people whose previous social positions condemned them to inferiority can become valued participants in the new microbial regime. the character keira most directly illustrates this potential. as a young, biracial woman who suffers from untreatable leukemia, keira stands at the intersection of multiple, deeply entrenched forms of oppression. disabled and diminished both by her illness and by a racist, sexist world, keira is silent, sickly, and breakable as a human. from the moment she learns the strange truth about the men who abduct her family, she is intrigued by the idea of infection as a possible alternative to her current situation. unlike her sister rane and father blake, both of whom are horrified by eli’s people and dead set on escaping infection, keira is open to the possibility of integration and survival with the infected community. unlike her sister and father, both accustomed to the privileges of a healthy, autonomous body, keira is able to appreciate the positive changes incurred by the microbes, which empower her both literally and figuratively. she grows stronger and healthier, more able to assert her own agency and desires, as her leukemia is managed and apparently cured by the microbial reorganization of her body. keira can say unequivocally that “the organism had given her a great deal” (203). at the novel’s epilogue, she is the only member of her family left alive, by then healthy, pregnant, and partnered with an infected man. leaving normal human society behind sophia booth magnone -microbial zoopoetics in octavia butler’s clay’s ark 119 means extricating herself from systems of privilege based on race, sex, and ability to become a fully recognized and respected member of the community. the loss of keira’s blood kin, both killed by uninfected outsiders, is clearly tragic. at the same time, her transition to the larger affective network of the infected community, notable for its strength, intimacy, and diversity, reflects the novel’s interest in exploring alternatives to conventional family forms. survival, in the damaged world of clay’s ark, depends on letting go of longstanding rules determining who counts as kin. the novel resonates richly with donna haraway’s call to contemporary feminists “to unravel the ties of both genealogy and kin, and kin and species ... to make ‘kin’ mean something other/more than entities tied by ancestry or genealogy” (“anthropocene” 161). indeed, unraveling the knotted threads of genealogy, species, and kin is a recurrent problematic in butler’s oeuvre. many of her books revolve around the need to build community among a diverse and fractured group under difficult circumstances. kilgore and samantrai characterize this motif as an “insistence on hybridity beyond the point of discomfort” (357); butler’s racially and culturally hybrid families “challenge the ubiquitous real-world assumption that communities are an expression of homogeneity” — community, in her stories, tends to take shape as “affiliations that proceed, however, bumpily, from the fact of difference” (356). the infected humans, varied in terms of race, ethnicity, background, age, and sex, model butler’s motif of hybrid community. they are not born together, nor do they choose one another — they are united by the coercive force of the microbe. yet they regard one another not just as cohabitants or co-survivors, but as family. the ties that bind them are first biological, but then, and equally importantly, affective: they would not last long without the strong relationships of care they have built atop microbial compulsion. forming this family takes considerable effort: new adult members must be forcibly abducted, and most, like the maslins, begin by hating their captors and plotting escape. yet over time, they become fiercely loyal to the motley group they come to regard as their family. before being kidnapped by eli, “i didn’t have anybody,” recounts a young infected woman named lupe. “so i was alone. i’m not alone here. i’m part of something, and it feels good” (85). like the revolutionary new order that deleuze and guattari propose in a thousand plateaus, the symbiotic community forms by contagion, not filiation, and is thus able to link heterogeneous terms, dodging the gridlock of human social structures and creating access between beings marked as categorically different from one another: a black geologist, a japanese-american violinist, the white daughter of a rural rancher, a latina trucker. the novel marks this open form of kinship as a specifically anti-racist project: multiple characters draw a parallel between the infected family and the maslins’ own multiracial family (blake is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 120 white, while his deceased wife jorah was black). both of these families are viewed as illegitimate and suspicious by a hostile society that equates kinship with sameness. yet both demonstrate the possibility, and the necessity, of affirming strong and loving kinship across traditional lines of division. but kinship, in clay’s ark, means more than the bonds uniting diverse groups of humans. the cultivation of difficult community, in butler’s novels often involves nonhumans too: extraterrestrials in the novel series lilith’s brood (1987-89) and the novella “bloodchild” (1984), and vampires in her final novel fledgling (2005). while these relationships are often laborious, requiring the careful and ongoing negotiation of extreme difference, the humans, aliens, and vampires in butler’s works tend to share certain key characteristics, such as intelligence, communication, and empathy, that make such negotiation possible. the microorganism of clay’s ark is altogether different. the humans cannot address it as a fellow, cannot look at, talk to, or touch it. but it, too, is part of this strange family: it not only enables kinship bonds between humans, it also is itself their kin. microbes do not make self-evident kin for human beings; yet as haraway insists, “kin is an assembling sort of word” (“anthropocene” 162). the practice of assembling across extreme forms of difference — differences of culture, species, scale, sentience—is the only path toward a mutually flourishing world, for humans and others. bacteria and fungi join humans, other animals, plants, and more in the giant and complex kinship network of the “earth-bound” (161). the novel’s infection constitutes a speculative case of these human-microbe kinship relations. post-infection, the human host and the microbe guest are not simply living with one another—they have become one another. blake, anxious to apply his medical expertise to the bewildering circumstances of his capture, analyzes a flesh sample from one of the infected women using his portable medical kit: “unidentifiable microbes,” the small screen said. it was able to show him tiny, spiderlike organisms in her flesh.... they had made themselves at home in human cells in a way that should not have been possible.... [they] had sought out higher game than bacteria and managed to combine with it without killing it. they had changed it, however, altered it slightly, subtly, cell by cell. in the most basic possible way, they had tampered with meda’s genetic blueprint. they had left her no longer human. (51-52) from blake’s point of view, being a human means embodying a state of pure humanness, down to every last cell. the microbial cells that he diagnoses in meda’s sophia booth magnone -microbial zoopoetics in octavia butler’s clay’s ark 121 body thus expel her from the category: she is no longer human because she has been touched by a nonhuman enemy that has “tampered with” her, made “game” of her. within blake’s medical framework, meda’s body appears as a battleground upon which microbe invaders have tragically defeated human defenders. the doctor voices a tendency that ferreira notes in many characters across butler’s fiction: “the fear of penetration and invasion or infection by the alien other, the tinkering with genetic identity at the molecular level” (407). blake’s horror prevents him from viewing this cellular encounter as a collaboration — as a new multispecies assemblage, rather than the triumph of one species over another. but characters who have settled into their postinfection bodies come to appreciate the benefits of symbiosis. after all, they do, in fact, still inhabit their bodies along with the newcomer that has altered but not destroyed them. intimately linked on a cellular level, the human and the microbe assemble into a new kind of organism. blake’s professional urge to separate the microbial invader from the “proper” human cells fails to do justice to the complexity of the assemblage, which yokes human and nonhuman in inextricable and irreversible relation. the humans’ microbial kin participate in everything they do: their appetites, desires, bodily operations, and physical abilities are far different from those of a regular human. but the most visible form of their kinship occurs in reproduction. infection puts a strange twist into genealogy, turning it into the production of difference rather than the reproduction of the same. children born into this community have multiple parents: a human man, a human woman, and a teeming colony of microorganisms. this multispecies heritage produces children that are visibly and functionally other-thanhuman: vaguely feline quadrupeds with precocious strength, mobility, and sensory intelligence. at one point, an animal whizzed past—something lean and brown and catlike, running at a startling speed. it was much bigger than a housecat. rane stared after it, wondering what it had been.... “not ‘it,’ ” [ingraham] said, “ ‘him.’ that was one of meda’s kids.... our kids look like that,” he said. “you may as well get used to it because yours are going to look like that too.” (78) amidst all the changes infection brings about, the animality of their children—that is, the ways they fail to conform to human norms — is the part many humans find most disturbing, at least at first. eli, for one, is appalled by the alien body and habits of his first child jacob, and spends weeks trying to enforce the lesson of bipedality: “a human child walked upright. a boy, a man, walked upright. no son of eli’s would run on all fours like a dog” (175). eli’s first assessment of his son is rigidly prescriptive, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 122 patriarchal, and disciplinary: rather than embrace the boy as he is, eli can only see jacob’s difference as a pathological failure to achieve the benchmarks of a good son. but this anthropocentric perspective is not sustainable: although it takes work for these adults to stop seeing their own offspring as animals, monsters, and “things” (145), as more and more babies like jacob are born to the fledgling community, parents start to question their ingrained belief in a categorical division between humans and animals. by the time the maslins arrive, the community is fiercely devoted both to their children and to the principle that difference does not preclude kinship. the various effects of the microorganism — the changes it brings about in hosts’ bodies, the extraordinary abilities of their children, and the expansion of kinship bonds toward a multispecies social assemblage — constitute an accumulated challenge to one of the organizing principles of human existence: the notion of a definitive boundary between humans and animals. symbiotic existence reveals the human/animal boundary as a fiction, an idea with a lot of ideological significance, but intrinsically valueless. losing the security of unambiguous humanness is an upsetting process for many of the characters in this book: it represents not only a loss of their species-based identity, but also a loss of status in a culture that ranks humanity above all other kind of life. but ultimately, butler suggests, the world is better off without this fiction. in the context of the patternist series as a whole, the human/animal boundary is shown to have devastating effects. it is never a neutral distinction, but a politically motivated hierarchy that legitimates those deemed “human” to domesticate and exploit those deemed “animal.” as sherryl vint explains, the human/animal boundary “is constructed to mark the recognition or denial of kinship” (287), both in the worlds of butler’s novels and in the western metaphysical tradition; its function is morally prescriptive, rather than biologically descriptive. subsequent novels of the series reveal that the clayarks, descendants of eli’s clan, are eventually excluded from the category of personhood, becoming no more than beastly “animals” in the eyes of the reigning patternist “humans.” but clay’s ark describes the confused muddle that precedes the strict hierarchy of the pattern, dwelling upon a moment of possibility for kinship across culturally constructed boundaries, including species. eli’s community chooses to live with their infection rather than attempt to “cure” it; they regard themselves, their children, and their resident microbes as a network of persons, not “things.” this open, inclusive notion of personhood represents an alternative to the dominant tradition of both the patternist series and the nonfictional world, one that is better equipped to accommodate difference of all kinds. it chooses to assemble, rather than exclude, refusing the sophia booth magnone -microbial zoopoetics in octavia butler’s clay’s ark 123 categorical ordering of beings that would justify one kind’s violence against those designated as other. in this way, the infected community, though beset by the problems described above, offers an ethical model, demonstrating how to live without the historical and social infrastructure of a human/animal divide and how to develop productive, even loving relationships between human and nonhuman kin. recognizing diverse multispecies kinship means, for the characters in this book, giving up a piece of their identity as humans in order to redefine themselves in relation to other kinds of beings. and it is not simply the types of beings — microbes, quasi-animal children — that present them with an ideological challenge, but the fact of relation itself. the novel dwells upon a further difficulty of symbiotic living: the radical loss of self that it involves. faced with the prospect of infection, the humans cling to the belief that autonomy is a fundamental privilege of their species. as humans — intelligent, rational, free-willed beings—they feel they ought properly to be in charge of their own minds and bodies. what distresses them most about infection is not the disease itself, but the loss of self-control it engenders. this belief resonates in the context of an anthropocentric discourse that recognizes humans as the world’s primary agents, the only ones who matter and who are authorized to impose their program on the nonhuman world. with regard to microorganisms, it underlies what paxson calls a pasteurian microbiopolitics, which understands microbial and other nonhuman elements of the world as impurities and distractions, completely distinct from the human social field upon which they intrude: “pasteurian practices configure microbes as elements to be eliminated so that human politics might be cultivated” (17). blake, the kidnapped doctor, is the most vocal pasteurian in the novel. his training impels him to intervene into the spread of the organism, which he views only as an incipient epidemic. there is no possibility of living with it or of making peace with its carriers. to even consider doing so would represent, to blake, an abdication of his medical duties. “the disease could be studied, understood, stopped, or at least controlled — and it had to be. the disease was only a disease. it was the willing human carriers intent on spreading it that made it deadly” (67). this is a battle between humans, blake believes, one that can be solved by normal means without acknowledging the agency of any nonhuman players. the organism, reduced to a “disease,” is simply a weapon being wielded by humans, rather than a being in its own right; once the humans are subdued, the organism can be easily dispatched. blake’s determined mission to escape eli and seek medical treatment is, in fact, what leads to the microbe’s massive outbreak; he helplessly infects a trucker who runs him over, then drives off to unwittingly infect countless others. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 124 more useful than blake’s relentlessly medical approach, and vital in the wake of mass infection, is the emergent “post-pasteurian” microbiopolitics of eli, keira, and other members of the community. in cheesemaking, paxson suggests, “post-pasteurians move beyond an antiseptic attitude to embrace mold and bacteria as allies” (18). in the much more perilous world of clay’s ark, infected humans might have a hard time embracing the microbe as an ally, but they at least learn to coexist with it as a neighbor, to productively share the space of their brains and bodies. the microbe does not permit the comfort of sovereign subjectivity: the infected start to experience thoughts, desires, and compulsions that feel both deeply personal and utterly alien. they can no longer be certain of their own self-authorship: the most intimate parts of their existence are being rewritten by, or with, their new microorganism companion. and yet the people that they were are not altogether gone; they do not become pod people or zombies, evacuated of all human content. they retain their personalities, skills, and commitments, interwoven with the ever-ambivalent influence of the microbe. so it is not exactly a loss of self, but a total restructuring that infection initiates. the symbiont former-humans cannot cling to the fiction of independence. they can no longer call themselves individuals, for they are biologically, genetically, and ontologically bound by the forces of contagion. their collective subjectivity incorporates not only the various human members of the community, but the distributed population of microorganisms inhabiting their bodies: the “i” becomes an interspecies “we.” of course, this affront to the cherished principles of human being is experienced by the infected humans, at least at first, as profoundly traumatic; they are not used to sharing agency, especially with such microscopic creatures. for some characters, the change is too much to bear. one man, kidnapped and infected by the symbiont gang, poses a question that no one in the novel can really answer: “how much of you is left?” (140). unable to imagine a future as the pawn of a deadly disease, andrew commits suicide, choosing death as an extreme means of taking back his own story from the organism that would rewrite him against his will.10 getting on gracefully with microbial kin. the novel’s body count alone makes any straightforward celebration of symbiosis impossible. andrew kills himself; rane is viciously raped and murdered; blake is flattened by a truck; and other characters, remembered or mentioned in passing, are killed by infection before their bodies are able to adapt. these losses, collateral damage to the microbe, are suffered keenly by its human hosts—one of many forms of discord between these companion species. in a move characteristic of her work, butler leaves it an open question whether this symbiotic arrangement constitutes enslavement or revolution. she invents a wide cast sophia booth magnone -microbial zoopoetics in octavia butler’s clay’s ark 125 of characters to voice multiple viewpoints and carries this ambivalence through an inconclusive ending. by the final pages, the microbe has spread outside the small symbiont community; a global epidemic has begun and the human race may be doomed. at the same time, eli’s community remains determinedly equipped for survival; the novel closes on keira, seemingly cured of her leukemia, and her partner stephen, cautiously declaring their commitment to each other and their unborn child. the pregnant woman as the novel’s final image recalls the trope of what lee edelman calls reproductive futurism — where a child-to-come serves as an emblem of hope for the future that is implicitly bound up with the affirmation of an existing social and political order — but with a significant twist: keira’s child will not be human. like the rest of the symbionts’ offspring, the child will be part of, in stephen’s words, “a new order. hell, a new species.... we’ll be obsolete, you and me” (212-213). the future that this child represents is one of chaos and uncertainty; it may indeed be “no future” for humankind. yet even knowing that their union participates in the destruction of the social order as they know it, the couple still affirms the interspecies bonds that link them as a family and community. of interspecies contact zones, donna haraway writes, “there is no teleological warrant here, no assured happy or unhappy ending, socially, ecologically, or scientifically. there is only the chance for getting on together with some grace” (species 15). in the profoundest sense, clay’s ark is about “getting on together with some grace.” collective living is never easy or perfect: the book is very much a narrative of working things out, dealing with problems, figuring out how best to approach the urgent mission of cooperation and mutual survival. all this, butler suggests, is necessary work for humans to do, whether one happens to have been infected with an extraterrestrial microorganism or not. the arrival of the microbe serves as a dramatic catalyst, forcing the humans it infects to create collaborative living situations with each other and with it, and thus to abandon some of their most beloved cultural myths: conventional structures of power, a solid human/animal boundary, and sovereign subjectivity. and yet the microbe does not make these myths untrue — it merely exposes their fictionality. out of a teeming universe of nonhuman life, this particular organism finds a way to make itself heard — to inscribe its unsettling zoopoetics indelibly on the cellular and genetic medium of humanity. but it is by no means the first nonhuman to leave its mark there. to ask, as andrew does, “how much of you is left?” can only lead to existential anguish. instead, the novel asks us to be attentive to the multiple forces and relationships that constitute human identity, to consider the questions “who and what were you to begin with? who and what will you become, and with whom?” for a human, the novel contends, is never just one species. the microbial neighbors that share humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 126 the space of a human body are not merely alien interlopers; as silent, often inscrutable collaborators, they participate in the ongoing constitution of a self. reading infection as a microbial zoopoetics helps frame clay’s ark as not merely a narrative of disaster, but a set of speculations on how humans might best carry on in a more-than-human world. this reading insists, first of all, that humans are not the only authors, the only poetic makers. in place of an anthropocentric model that views the nonhuman world as a blank page upon which is indelibly inscribed the great human story, butler encourages us to consider that a microbe might be an author, a human its text. at the same time, texts are not neutral, passive objects awaiting inscription—they are vital, at times recalcitrant, engaged in the processes of authorship that make them. this is true of the human “texts” of clay’s ark, alternately resisting and yielding to their microbial influences; perhaps it is true as well of the texts that humans make, the many surfaces, landscapes, and bodies humans have treated as canvases for their own visions. the final lesson of the novel, then, is that in a fundamental sense, all authorship is collaboration — between makers and made, authors and texts — even though it almost always occurs on profoundly unequal terms. this microbe, it must be said, is not a model collaborator: it colonizes and exploits its hosts, indifferent to their interests. yet the experience of being cruelly objectified by another species is one familiar to many kinds of nonhumans. humans can do better, butler suggests, by constructing more responsible and mutually beneficial forms of collaboration with their nonhuman neighbors of all sorts. the poetics that the extraterrestrial microbe inscribes onto its human hosts is both profoundly disturbing and encouragingly revolutionary. but ultimately, what matters about this microbial zoopoetics is less the specific content of the text it produces, and more the processes of ongoing interaction that it forces humans to recognize, in their own bodies as well as in the world around them. the catastrophe of infection, the novel suggests, might contain the seeds of a better world, where community must be an interspecies project that recognizes and fosters multiple forms of agency, where humans can no longer organize around a self-serving and destructive anthropocentrism but must actively collaborate with their fellow terrestrials. this nonhuman boldly proclaims its own agency; it scripts its symbionts in ways that cannot be ignored. perhaps we can read, between the lines of butler’s imaginary microbe, the fainter, less obvious, but undeniable contributions of a vast array of nonhuman companions to the text we call “humanity.” sophia booth magnone -microbial zoopoetics in octavia butler’s clay’s ark 127 notes 1. in her 1975 essay “american sf and the other,” ursula le guin challenges science fiction to move beyond its standard elitist and imperial narratives, which tend to neglect, distort, and simplify a range of “others” — women, nonhuman species, working class people, people of color, and more. the genre has opened up considerably in the years since that essay was published, in part due to the influence of le guin and her feminist sf contemporaries. but the dominant narrative of hierarchy and xenophobia that she critiques has by no means vanished. 2. joan slonczewski moves even further in this direction with her 2000 novel brain plague, which focuses on the relationship between populations of intelligent microbes and the humans whose brains serve as hosts. a carrier and her microbes can speak (and argue) with each other; the intimacy of their symbiosis fosters strong mutual attachments, though microbial factions can also rise up against their human host by controlling her dopamine center. brain plague explores the possibility of productive, loving collective identity and collaboration between humans and microbes. it relies, however, on a strong anthropomorphism, rendering the microbes into miniature individuals who are, for the most part, legible and understandable to humans. butler refuses to let her microbes be so explicable. her novel thus makes it more difficult to theorize positive ongoing interspecies relationships, and yet reflects, without anthropomorphic shortcuts, the complexity and difficulty of human-animal relationships in the real world. 3. the most significant advances in animal advocacy tend to come on behalf of animals judged as similar to humans by virtue of their intelligence, communication skills, social organization, and so on. for instance, the international great ape project (http://www.projetogap.org.br/en/) proposes a declaration of rights for the four nonhuman “great primates” (orangutans, gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos) that includes the right to life, the protection of individual freedom, and the prohibition of torture. in the united states, the nonhuman rights project (http://www.nonhumanrights.org) works on a case-by-case basis to change an animal’s common-law status from “thing” to “person,” focusing on “bodily liberty” and “bodily integrity” as fundamental rights; their first cases were filed in 2013 on behalf of chimpanzees. 4. for some entry points into the extensive popular science discussion of the microbiome, see pollan, specter, and stein. the nih also maintains a list of journal publications relating to its research at https://commonfund.nih.gov/ publications? pid=16. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 128 5. i borrow “critter” as a critical term from donna haraway. “critter” acts as more than just a synonym for “animal”; it refers to “a motley crowd of lively beings including microbes, fungi, humans, plants, animals, cyborg and aliens” in order to emphasize what is shared across various forms of life, rather than distinguish by taxonomic category (species 330 n. 33). 6. there were once five novels in this series, but butler purposely let one fall out of print (see littleton’s interview “octavia butler plants an earthseed”). for a thorough overview of the remaining four books, see sherryl vint’s “becoming other.” 7. biological reproduction itself seems open to being queered, as increasing numbers of lgbt couples and families (particularly those with access to adequate and supportive health care) draw upon a range of assisted reproductive technologies. but when it becomes non-optional and inflexible, as it does in clay’s ark, biological reproduction seems to signify an extreme heteronormativity. 8. homosexual, asexual, trans, and genderqueer people can, of course, all reproduce; but in the context of this book, set in a remote location in a society on the brink of collapse, they would likely represent non-reproductive cases from a microbial perspective. 9. the novel does skirt this issue with the character of andrew zeriam, a young man that eli’s band infects as a mate for one of their single women. it is vaguely implied that andrew had been sexually assaulted by his previous captors (members of a road gang), but that he had not “cooperated.” “he was not a homosexual, then — fortunately for lorene” (124). butler thus opens a difficult question about how far her organisms will go to mold their human hosts, but does not answer it. 10. andrew is able to succeed at suicide only because he is in the early stages of infection. had the organism secured its hold on him, it would have prevented his death, via either his microbe-induced will to survive, which would have prevented him from carrying out the deed, or his body’s newly acquired healing ability, which would have closed his wounds before they could cause much harm. eli and his fellow astronauts also attempted suicide, trying to destroy the organism before it reached earth, but eli’s hazy memories of the event tell him that his survival drive would not permit him to sacrifice himself; he alone of the crew lives to pass on the infection. sophia booth magnone -microbial zoopoetics in octavia butler’s clay’s ark 129 works cited bollinger, laurel. “containing multitudes: revisiting the infection metaphor in science fiction.” extrapolation 50.3 (2009): 377-399. butler, octavia. “bloodchild.” 1984. bloodchild and other stories. new york: seven stories, 2005. 1-32. _____. clay’s ark. new york: warner, 1996. _____. lilith’s brood. new york: warner, 1989. _____. fledgling. new york: seven stories, 2005. deleuze, gilles and felix guattari. “1730: becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming imperceptible…” a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1987. 232-309. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. ed. marie-louise mallet. trans. david wills. new york: fordham up, 2008. edelman, lee. no future: queer theory and the death drive. durham, nc: duke up, 2004. ferreira, maria aline. “symbiotic bodies and evolutionary tropes in the work of octavia butler.” science fiction studies 37.3 (nov. 2010): 401-415. haraway, donna. when species meet. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2008. _____. “anthropocene, capitalocene, plantationocene, chthulucene: making kin.” environmental humanities 6 (2015): 159-165. kilgore, douglas de witt, and ranu samantrai. “a memorial to octavia butler.” science fiction studies 37.3 (nov. 2010): 353-361. kirksey, eben, craig schuetze, and stefan helmreich. “introduction: tactics of multispecies ethnography.” the multispecies salon. ed. eben kirksey. durham and london: duke university press, 2014. 1-24. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 130 le guin, ursula. “american sf and the other.” science fiction studies 2.3 (nov. 1975): 208-210. littleton, therese. “octavia butler plants an earthseed” (interview). amazon.com. n.d. 29 jun. 2015. margulis, lynn, and dorion sagan. acquiring genomes: a theory of the origins of species. new york: basic books, 2002. moe, aaron m. zoopoetics: animals and the making of poetry. lanham, md: lexington books, 2014. nih human microbiome project. national institutes of health. 2008. 10 mar. 2015. paxson, heather. “post-pasteurian cultures: the microbiopolitics of raw-milk cheese in the united states.” cultural anthropology 23.1 (2008): 15-47. pollan, michael. “some of my best friends are germs.” the new york times magazine. 15 may 2013. 4 mar. 2015. rich, adrienne. “compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence.” blood, bread, and poetry: selected prose 1979-1985. new york: w.w. norton, 1986. 23-75. slonczewski, joan. brain plague. new york: tor, 2000. specter, michael. “germs are us.” the new yorker. 22 oct. 2012. 4 mar. 2015. stein, rob. “gut bacteria might guide the workings of our minds.” npr. 18 nov. 2013. <http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2013/11/18/244526773/gut-bacteria-mightguide-the-workings-of-our-minds> 4 mar, 2015. tsing, anna. “unruly edges: mushrooms as companion species.” environmental humanities 1 (2012): 141-154. vint, sherryl. “becoming other: animals, kinship, and butler's clay's ark.” science fiction studies 32.2 (jul. 2005): 281-300. microsoft word grandjou h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 reviews celine granjou the friends of my friends dominique lestel, les amis de mes amis (the friends of my friends). paris: seuil, 2007. 220p. €20.00 dominique lestel is a very influential philosopher on animality in france. a founding member of the department of cognitive science of the école normale supérieure in paris and a member of its department of philosophy, his research work brings together philosophy and ethology to address the presence of culture in animal societies. after a few other stimulating books1 addressing great apes’ societies and animal-humans relationships, lestel published les amis de mes amis in 2007. the book examines friendship between people and animals and promotes a new definition of friendship as physical proximity and attachment. drawing on ethological literature, novels, and other materials, lestel describes and analyzes a number of situations where humans and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 144 animals have developed some kind of proximity and friendship in living together, in playing music together, or through other games. unlike most previous philosophical trends that stress the differences between humans and animals and elaborate human specificities, lestel argues that there is no point looking for the specificity of humans that would distinguish them from animals. instead, his objective is to elaborate the proximities between humans and animals and to document animals’ emotional and cultural lives. including short chapters with short sections and written in a quite conversational style, les amis de mes amis is easy to read. it will be of great interest for scholars in environmental humanities, philosophy and ethology, as well as for every person living with animals and interested in our relationships to them. it also reminds us of the concrete and situated nature of our relationships with others, whether they are humans or not. in the first chapter, lestel strongly criticizes the influential cartesian theory of the animal-machine that has contributed significantly to the shaping of french philosophy and conceptions of animals since the 17th century. for him, thinking that feeding an animal is very much like winding a clock is unsatisfactory, counter-intuitive, and nonsensical. descartes’s followers turned animals into machines with very coercive devices; then they called them “machines” and disregarded all other phenomena as anthropomorphic anecdotes. they refused to grant animals feelings, sensations, initiative, and intelligence. they fundamentally and pathologically distrusted life. they also despised people whom lestel considers true experts on animals, such as hunters and breeders. moreover, the animal-machine theory is not only about the animals’ nature, it is also about human-animal relationships: it justifies animals’ enslavement by humans. lestel denounces mass livestock production and argues that too many animals are sacrificed for the sake of so-called scientific experimentation. considering animals as machines is both disrespectful — as it leads to humans exploiting animals — and wrong — as it deeply undervalues animals’ real qualities, as well as our rich relationships with them. little attention has been paid indeed to the fact that animals do not leave people indifferent, and, for example, that people like touching animals. the ethologist joyce poole has written about how deeply she was moved when watching the birth of an elephant.2 recognizing that we can understand animals’ feelings is not an anthropomorphic delusion; we are indeed able to share emotions with animals, especially with species such as cats, because we share a common history with them. céline granjou— “the friends of my friends” 145 lestel suggests that humans might be a particular species in the sense that they are interested in a lot of other different species and can be friends with them. asking what friendship is, lestel cites the work of anthropologist shirley strum, who showed that with baboons friendship does not draw on feelings but on reciprocal favors and assistance.3 ethologists have described favored relationships between animals, including mutual assistance, toileting, sleeping together, and remembering one another. for example, some female grizzly bears raise their young, travel, and feed together. most academics have denied these relationships the quality of friendship because they do not consider friendship a scientific concept. in an attempt to define human exceptionalism academics have always sought some abstract notion beyond communication, as for instance the notion of cognitive skills. instead, lestel argues, we should pay more attention to the practical details of human-animal encounters, such as place and play. for lestel, sharing strong feelings with an animal is all about getting close to it, holding it back, and sharing objects and space with it. for instance, the artist jim nollman developed and tested the notion of inter-species music, where animals participate in the music proposed by the musician.4 today, we conceive of friendship in psychological terms and define it as feeling affection. lestel wants to return to a prepsychological approach to friendship, such as the one developed by philosophers from ancient times (aristotle, epicurus, cicero), who conceived of friendship as shared living and shared activities. lestel defines friendship as a “favored partnership”; it is a “longlasting attachment including non-utilitarian goals.” why do people have more and more pets today? lestel believes that our relationship to animals has changed greatly in the last century. it has become deeper and more diverse, in proportion to the humans’ metaphysical loneliness. for instance, people develop very strong relationships with parrots as pets. hence the idea that biodiversity loss, far from being a loss only of useful resources, means a loss of interlocutors. we have a vital need for creatures that are not “things” around us, as romain gary showed in his novel the roots of heaven5 addressing the thinking of the forerunners of elephant protection in the 1950s. animals stimulate human intelligence and emotion because of their irreducible diversity. and that diversity triggers thinking. that is why animals are very important to children, and representations of animals were very frequent in prehistoric times. we should not be afraid of blurring the boundary between people and animals. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 146 thinking is not essentially human; instead, it emerges from a crucial partnership between humans, animals, and plants. the human capacity for interspecies entanglements is unique. drawing on the chinese way of thinking, in which humans do not exist on their own but are constantly “plugged“ into other beings and connected to them, lestel proposes that we do not “make friends,” but rather “create ties.” he argues also that we are not self-contained bodies and minds, but rather a range of selfextensions that include familiar objects, places, animals, friends, and much more. lestel maintains that an animal that lives with a human is made into a person, following a process of ontological transmission. the notion of person is not a prerequisite for friendship, it results from friendship. philosophers promoting ecocentric ethics forget that animals have been a part of families for a long time. yet we still lack notions and words to understand properly animals and their relationships to humans. we are also unable to grasp properly the sense of funeral behaviors that have been observed in elephants and apes after one of their relatives dies. lestel aims to replace the romantic vision of friendship as affection with a topographical vision of friendship as attachment. being friends means cohabiting and sharing the same territories. with baboons, being a friend means being close in practice, sometimes even simply to sleep or to do nothing special. is it possible to be friend with a machine? lestel argues that we can be friends with artifacts as with animals, and that we can develop rich and fulfilling relationships with non-living entities. loving machines were created in japan at the end of the 20th century, such as the robot called tamagotchi. it needed to be fed, washed, and reprimanded, and it was able to grow or, by contrast, to die if it was not sufficiently cared for. and it happened to be a marketing success. this type of machine gives us the opportunity to forge new types of attachment and to enrich our lives with a new type of friendship. in order to understand them properly, we should not seek a clear-cut boundary between the living and the nonliving, and we should forget the deceptive opposition between nature and culture. finally, in les amis de mes amis lestel defends several interlinked theses. first, he argues that our psychological definition of friendship is only a specific case of a broader definition of friendship as “a particular investment at the margins of the self.” then he elaborates animals’ emotional and cultural lives. while drawing on a number of ethological examples of animals’ behaviors in their natural milieux (for instance baboons), lestel believes that we cannot really know animals’ feelings and representations. in fact, he is interested less in animals or in animal-human céline granjou— “the friends of my friends” 147 relationships than in the emotions animals trigger in humans. his main question is: how can we, as humans, understand and share feelings with animals? he argues that animals play an irreplaceable role in the constitution of the human self. that is why we need to consider more closely the assemblages of humans and non-humans to understand the way inter-species friendship impacts the constitution of the self. lestel also distances himself from environmental ethics, because he considers these ethics fail to address the fact that animals have always been part of us, of our families and societies. lestel elaborates a rich and original understanding of the significance of biodiversity loss, claiming that biodiversity loss could lead to a critical lack of interlocutors detrimental to the development of human consciousness, emotion, and intelligence. notes 1. dominique lestel. les origines animals de la culture (animal origins of culture). paris: flammarion, 2001; and l’animal est l’avenir de l’homme (animals are the future of humans). paris: fayard, 2010. 2. joyce poole. coming of age with elephants: a memoir. new york: hyperion, 1997. 3. shirley strum. almost human: a journey into the world of baboons. new york : random house, 1987. 4. jim nollman. the man who talks to whales (dolphin dreamtime 1987). boulder (colorado): sentient publications, 2002. 5. romain gary, the roots of heaven [1956]. new york: simon & schuster, 1958 . microsoft word thompson h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 kirrilly thompson and bradley smith should we let sleeping dogs lie… with us? synthesizing the literature and setting the agenda for research on human-animal co-sleeping practices introduction. human sleep practices are highly divergent across culture and time (blunden, thompson & dawson; worthman and melby; munroe, munroe, and whiting). in the same way that sleeping spaces in industrialized societies have increasingly become divided according to age (adult and child), so have spaces been segregated according to species (human and non-human animal), although many cultures have practiced or still practice co-sleeping. this is often related to crowding or a response to domestic spaces having no physical internal divisions, but also because co-sleeping is the norm for some cultures — devoid of the taboos of incest and bestiality, or the socio-cultural construction of sleep disorders that can be found at the core of (or indeed contribute to) solo-sleeping practices in other cultures. although co-sleeping in indigenous societies primarily involved humans (particularly children), it is likely to have also involved companion animals or pets. the practice of pet keeping dates back to paleolithic hunters and early agriculturalists, who kept animals for leisure activities (with inherent social and emotional rewards) and as functional assets (e.g., to assist in hunting or as educational and play “objects” for children [serpell]). whilst the sleeping arrangements of pets were not the focus of early anthropological accounts, human-animal co-sleeping has been widely recorded in ethnographies of indigenous australians. during cold nights, indigenous australians were often reported to sleep alongside their dogs for warmth (hamilton; meggitt; smith and litchfield). this practice is implicated in the common australian expression “three dog night”: the colder the night, the more dogs are needed to keep warm (breckwoldt). today, humans continue to show strong attachment to their pets, and often consider them important members of the family (archer). in return, companion animals are sources of unconditional support, love, comfort, security, and stability that also provide health benefits (smith). these benefits are felt strongly in australia, which has one of the highest levels of pet ownership in the developed world, with around sixty per cent of households owning at least one pet (australian bureau of statistics). pet ownership in australia has remained relatively stable during the past few years, current figures kirrilly thompson and bradley smith — “should we let sleeping dogs lie… with us?” 115 indicating that thirty-six per cent of households own dogs, and twenty-three per cent own cats (australian companion animal council). companion animals not only often live inside the home, but many also share their guardians’ beds or sleep in their bedrooms (beck and katcher). such practices are particularly meaningful in contemporary western cultures, where the parental bed has been increasingly sexually constructed. sleeping space has evolved over time, particularly around the end of the nineteenth century when the individual bed was regarded as an essential ingredient of civilized society, informed by ideas of privacy. “the bed remained a highly problematic, indeterminate space, facilitating deviant as much as civilized behavior, and giving rise to all manner of pathologies, perversities and phobias” (crook 15). in many westernized and industrialized nations such as australia, the majority of families encourage infants to sleep alone from any early age (blunden, thompson, and dawson). allowing animals in the private space of the bed and/or bedroom therefore indicates the status and value that is placed on many companion animals. some authors have alluded to the untested assumption that letting a dog sleep on the bed is indicative of a positive pet attachment (e.g., katcher, as cited by archer). franklin, for example, interprets pets in bedrooms as indicative of their status as intimate family members. beck and katcher go so far as to suggest that the “pet’s privilege of sharing the master’s bed elevates him [sic] above human children, who are usually banned from the parental bedroom at night” (20). unfortunately, little is known about the prevalence of human-animal co-sleeping relationships or their impact on sleep. the research reporting human-animal cosleeping practices is piecemeal at best, using data from non-dedicated or non-validated surveys (such as those undertaken by the pet care and pet food industry). an indicative picture of human-animal co-sleeping practices can be sketched by drawing from various studies that are based on a variety of tools and which span several decades and research populations. estimations of prevalence rates are often limited to online surveys or those conducted by commercial pet organizations. various studies from around the world report that approximately half of pet guardians let their pets sleep in their beds with them during the night (eg. katcher et al.; albert and bulcroft; westgarth et al.; overgaauw). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 116 the manifestation of this practice differs according to several factors, such as the type of pet — cats and dogs are the most frequent bed visitors, with cats more likely to sleep with the family than any other type (albert and bulcroft); the size of the pet: most dogs allowed in the bed are smaller breeds (eckstein); the number of children in the household, higher for those with no children (albert and bulcroft); and guardian characteristics, such as gender (more common in females) and ethnicity (higher in anglo-saxon than african american [brown, “ethnic”; brown, “companion animals”]). despite any benefits experienced by the pet owner or guardian, there are various consequences of having pets in bedrooms. these include health hazards, effect on sleep quality, and behavioral problems displayed by the pet, as well as its impact on the interpersonal relations of humans in the bedroom. health hazards: there are various health hazards associated with pet ownership that are accentuated by allowing pets into the bedroom and bed. these include immunologic responses resulting in allergic disease, asthma, and/or hypersensitivity pneumonitis; bites and scratches from pets causing tissue damage and inducing infections and infectious diseases associated with pets (see plaut, zimmerman, and goldstein for a comprehensive review). a dog sleeping in a family member’s bedroom may also be a risk factor for biting (messam et al.). the most susceptible include small children, pregnant women, and immuno-deficient patients (smith). however, overall health risks are relatively low — particularly if the animals are kept clean and routine veterinarian care is maintained. effect on sleep quality: while common causes of sleep disturbance involve partners (e.g., kicking, snoring, visits to the toilet) and children, having pets can also represent a significant cause of disturbance for those who allow pets in the bed or bedroom. for instance, the mayo sleep clinic in the us surveyed 300 patients with an existing sleep disorder, and found that fifty-three per cent of pet guardians who allowed their pet(s) to sleep in their beds were disturbed every night by the animal in some way. it is difficult to determine the significance of these disruptions, with only one per cent of patients feeling that their sleep was disrupted for more than twenty minutes on average per night (fayerman). smith et al. compared the self-reported sleep of pet versus nonpet co-sleepers, and found that sleeping with pets in the bed had a small impact on sleep quality e.g., time taken to fall asleep, and feelings of tiredness upon waking — a sign of disrupted sleep). the authors inferred that the continued practice of co-sleeping kirrilly thompson and bradley smith — “should we let sleeping dogs lie… with us?” 117 with pets indicates attendant benefits such as social support and social interaction, and increased feelings of personal security, despite any disadvantages. disruptions may be related to mismatches between human, dog, and cat core temperatures, as well as differences in sleep-wake cycles, as pets do not spend eight hours in a sleep state (see campbell and tobler). for example, adams and johnson examined the sleep-wake cycles of dogs in various urban backyards, and found that dogs had an average of 23 sleep/wake episodes (or 3 sleep/wake cycles per hour), with active sleep followed immediately by spontaneous arousal. they found that dogs are also responsive to auditory stimuli regardless of whether the sleep state was quiet or active (adams and johnson). their responses to such stimuli often led to dogs being a nuisance to people in the neighborhood (e.g. due to barking) and potentially disrupting the sleep of guardians and non-guardians alike. pet behavioral problems: jagoe and serpell found that dogs who are allowed to sleep in their guardians’ beds or bedrooms at night may experience such behavioral problems as an increase in competitive aggression (i.e., aggression when attention is paid to others; aggression to other dogs in the household) and separation-related problems (i.e., separation-related urination and defecation). beck and katcher describe a woman who complained that she was unable to make the bed in the morning because when her husband went to work, the dog would jump on the bed and growl, snap, or bite if she tried to remove him. although jagoe and serpell could not determine the direction of causation, they note it is likely that dogs sleeping with or close to the guardian will develop an “unbalanced” attachment for that person and thus react adversely to separation. another explanation may relate to the aforementioned impact of dog bedsharing practices on the ranking of household individuals — human and animal. the guardian may be forced to accept on overly attached canine sleeping partner to avoid nocturnal separation problems in the dog (jagoe and serpell). effect on interpersonal relationships: pets sleeping in their guardians’ beds can be a source of conflict for couples, sometimes leading to problems with intimacy, particularly if the pet is unwelcome to one partner. jagoe and serpell, for instance, describe a couple whose dog was interfering in their sex life. “the husband felt sexually inhibited and turned off when the animal was in the bed, yet his wife would not otherwise have intercourse” (50). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 118 broad as it may be, the literature on human-animal co-sleeping is risk-centric. that is, it is equated with risks to health or sleep hygiene, or considered a threat to the intimacy of couples. moreover, the practice is associated with deviant sexuality in the form of bestiality, or, at the least, unhealthy romantic attachments (beetz and podberscek; dekkers). this risk-centric bias, which emphasizes the disadvantages of human-animal co-sleeping, has contributed to the psychological, social, and cultural benefits of humananimal co-sleeping practices being overlooked and under-researched. why do people human-animal co-sleep? despite a lack of rigorous data on the prevalence of human-animal co-sleeping, there is no doubt that people continue to share their beds with pets. in some instances, the practice occurs despite negative impacts, such as an increase in the time taken to fall asleep (extended sleep latency), or sensitivity to sleep disturbance from animal noises (smith et al.). this raises the question of why people (continue to) co-sleep with pets. first, there are some very practical considerations that provide ready explanations. for example, some pets may be more distracting if they are not in their guardians’ beds. that is, they might scratch at doors or vocalize their attempts to sleep in beds with humans. voith describes a woman who allowed her dog to sleep in her bed (even though it would bite her during the night) because it refused to sleep on the floor and would bark incessantly if shut out of the room. moreover, some human sleepers who would prefer to sleep without pets might not have any choice, such as when the final decision is made by another human with whom they share their bed. second, there are also several theoretical and practical explanations that provide insight. attachment theory, originally developed by john bowlby, explains interpersonal relations between children and adults, whereby children feel secure in the presence of adults to whom they are attached (bowlby, attachment), and feel separation anxiety at the perceived shortor long-term loss of those “attachment figures” (bowlby, separation). the theory has been extended to discuss human relations with animals (beck and madresh; julius, beetz and kotrschal). whilst many people who feel attached to their pets have no need or desire to share their beds with them, attachment theory suggests that some humans are motivated to sleep with their pets in the bed to feel secure and avoid separation anxiety. further theoretical explanation for human-animal co-sleeping can be found in russell belk’s consideration of animals and pets as “extended selves” (“possessions”). belk considers the ways in which relationships with pets can be so important to the identity kirrilly thompson and bradley smith — “should we let sleeping dogs lie… with us?” 119 of some humans that pets might best be understood as special cases of extended human selves. he describes how animals (like objects, money, other people, prostheses, and so on) can become extensions or parts of human selves that “define who we are” (“possessions” 139). this idea is established empirically, not only in relation to typical pets such as dogs, but also to non-traditional companion animals such as horses (belk “metaphoric”). sue-ellen brown (“ethnic” and “companion”) similarly considers animals as “self-objects“ that are integral to human identity, sometimes surpassing the ability of other humans to provide a sense of self. the idea of animals as human extensions challenges the very question of why humans would want to sleep with pets in their beds at all. that is, if a pet is considered an extension of a particular human, it would be expected to accompany that human self in sleep. the concept of pet as extended self enables an immediate recognition that asking some people to sleep without their pets is akin to asking them to sleep without a part of their selves, and as absurd as asking them to leave their pets behind during evacuation from disasters (thompson). nonetheless, humans who consider or act as if their pets and animals are extended selves are unlikely to be accompanied by that pet throughout all their daily activities (such as work, travel, showering). therefore, the decisions humans make about where lines of pet accompaniment are drawn are complex and dependent upon other philosophical, psychological, cultural, emotional, and practical factors. future research on human-animal co-sleeping: setting the research agenda. the literature reviewed in this paper suggests that pet owners frequently share their beds with their pets, yet human-animal co-sleeping has been taken for granted, failing to attract dedicated interest from (or funding for) animal studies scholarship or sleep research. rather, the implications have been considered narrowly through a focus on threats to human health and social relations. as such, existing research can be considered both risk-centric and anthropocentric, providing only a partial understanding of human-animal co-sleeping and its multiple implications. to ensure a comprehensive and symmetrical consideration of the practice of human-animal cosleeping, there is a need to identify benefits or trade-offs and understand the implications from a bi-directional and relational perspective. as humans and animals exist in relation with (haraway companion and when species meet) and in “being alongside” (latimer) one another, the impact of pet-bed sharing from a relational humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 120 perspective seems warranted. to establish a more comprehensive body of knowledge on human-animal co-sleeping which is free of biases towards human beings and risk, we propose the following three broad areas of focus: on humans, on animals and on the human-animal relation. humans: in the preceding discussion, we proposed some practical and theoretical explanations for (continued) human-animal co-sleeping. to fully evaluate our propositions, there is a need to collect empirical data on motivations and rewards for human-animal co-sleeping, using inductive research techniques, such as open-ended surveys and interviews that can capture the unanticipated dimensions of human-animal co-sleeping. from a more positivistic perspective, there is a need for a dedicated and comprehensive survey of human-animal co-sleeping practices that combines and uses knowledge from the disciplines of sleep research and animal studies. as a minimum data set, and based on our own survey research (smith et al.), we recommend that the following four demographic questions be included in basic sleep research participant demographic collection, as well as in research on human-animal co-sleeping: 1) do you own a pet, 2) do you sleep with your pet, 3) where in the room is your pet (on floor, on bed, in bed), and 4) can the pet toilet independently (i.e., can it let itself in and out of the room for toileting without waking the respondent). the third question of the minimum data set on human-animal co-sleeping is designed to capture the location of the pet in relation to the human. this would enable an evaluation of any differences in sleep hygiene, quality, and quantity between pets being in the bedroom and pets being in the bed. the resulting knowledge could be used to assist those with sleep problems to review their sleeping practices and justify and support any behavior change interventions. for example, having pets in the same room rather than the same bed might provide an incremental pathway for necessary behavior change (as noted above), without causing undue emotional stress to the pet or guardian, or reducing the benefits that guardians enjoy when human-animal cosleeping. a particularly novel application for an understanding of the impact of the pet’s location in the bedroom supports the need to undertake more research on the impacts of humananimal co-sleeping on the sleep of children. triebenbacher found that “children perceive their pets as special friends, important family members, and providers of social interactions, affection, and emotional support” (191). the role of pets in children’s lives can change according to developmental stages, but robin and bensal identify their kirrilly thompson and bradley smith — “should we let sleeping dogs lie… with us?” 121 general roles as “parents” as well as transitional objects. psychotherapist d.w. winnicott discusses transitional objects in relation to children’s development, considering objects such as a baby’s favorite toy as mediating and crossing the boundary between inner mind and outer reality. the object is both independent of the baby and, consistent with belk’s “extended selves,” a part of the baby who “created” and modified it. if we replace the object with a pet (real or toy), the pet can be seen to be part of the child. as a result, a child required to sleep without a pet may experience difficulty falling asleep due to anxiety over the absence of something that can be understood as a part of the child. as transitional objects, there may be a role for pets in developing solo sleeping practices amongst children (where “solo” is understood to exclude other humans). parent-child co-sleeping is frequently constructed as problematic in western society (blunden, thompson, and dawson). however, pets could play a role as transitional objects (subjects) in encouraging solo sleeping practices amongst children who would otherwise seek comfort and security by sleeping in their parents’ or siblings’ beds (triebenbacher). research evaluating this proposition should compare real versus toy pets as transitional objects, and consider the moral and ethical implication of using pets for this purpose. beetz and podberscek, for example, found that amongst “male children with insecure/disorganized attachment, the interaction with a real dog rather than with a toy dog ... lowered salivary cortisol levels during a social challenge situation” (361). the greater ability for a real dog to serve as an attachment figure and reduce stress does not necessarily preclude the ability for a toy dog to provide some benefit. a toy dog may be a preferable alternative in many situations, especially where families may lack the space or resources to care for a real pet or where a householder may be allergic to other animals. research attention also needs to be paid to the potential disadvantages of humananimal co-sleeping in general, or of using pets specifically for the purpose of developing solo sleeping practices amongst children. for example, there may be instances where humans become dependent on the presence of pets to fall asleep. this may cause problems in relation to short-term changes to sleeping routines (traveling or going to hospital), as well as longer-term changes such as the unavoidable death of a pet. researching such cases would provide interesting perspectives on the social dimensions humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 122 of sleep, where “social” is defined in a way that includes “humans and other animals,” as is accepted practice in the field of animal studies. animals: the limited and disparate research on human-animal co-sleeping has been concerned with the impact of human-animal co-sleeping on human sleep quality and quantity. however, there is an equivalent need to consider the impact of human-animal co-sleeping on animals, especially in relation to their health and welfare. in the same way that there are moral and ethical considerations for working animals, such as those used in animal-assisted therapy (serpell), so too should the health and well-being of animals involved in human-animal co-sleeping be of central importance. concerns include the unlikely risk of anthroponotic diseases as well as negative impacts on animal social relations and behavior. for example, if attachment theory can be applied to an animal’s attachment to humans, could human-animal co-sleeping practices exacerbate its separation anxiety during waking hours when attachment figures are not physically present? where humananimal co-sleeping practices differ in a household with more than one pet (that is, one dog sleeps inside and another outside), there is a need to understand the impact on inter-pet relations. this is especially the case where negative inter-pet relations can lead to anti-social behaviors which can impact inter-personal relations (between husband and wife; for example, jagoe and serpell), jeopardize human health (through increased biting behavior; for example, smith) or cause community conflict (through barking complaints; for example, kobelt et al.). furthermore, as noted above animals have different circadian rhythms, temperatures, and sleep-wake cycles (campbell and tobler; adams and johnson). accelerometers may provide a non-invasive and cost effective method for determining circadian rhythms in pets, particularly dogs and cats (hansen et al.). human-animal relations: further research should be conducted that determines any significant relationship between objective scores on animal attachment scales such as the owner-pet relationship scale (winefield et al.), and the practice of human-animal cosleeping. this research could assist with an understanding of the role that attachment plays in decisions for humans and animals to co-sleep or in the impact of human-animal co-sleeping on attachment. it could also be used to critically review a fundamental assumption inherent in previous research that human-animal co-sleeping is indicative of positive attachment (e.g., katcher, as cited by archer). in addition to the use of surveys, researchers should employ open-ended techniques to consider the impact of kirrilly thompson and bradley smith — “should we let sleeping dogs lie… with us?” 123 human-animal co-sleeping on the human-animal relationship. where sharing a bed with a pet is shown to influence a particular kind of human-animal relation, research should consider the implications for human-animal relations where bed-sharing is improbable (with larger animals such as horses, for example). whilst human-animal cosleeping may be found to be indicative of positive human-animal attachment, the inability to share a bed (for health reasons or because the animal is large) or its nonpractice does not necessarily preclude particular experiences of positive or profound attachment between humans and animals. conclusion. the benefits of pet ownership and companionship have been extolled by researchers for several decades and by owners and guardians for centuries more. there is little doubt that pets contribute to the everyday experiences of humans, and some pets contribute to their “everynight” experiences too. in fact, more than half of the sixty per cent of pet owners and guardians in developed countries will spend approximately one third of their lives sleeping alongside their pets. in this paper, we have synthesized the scant research on the topic to establish the high incidence and significant implications of this taken-for-granted behavior for humans and animals and their relations with one another. it seems that humans and animals are not strange bedfellows after all. what kind of bedfellows they are remains to be determined. works cited adams, graham, and kevin johnson. “behavioural responses to barking and other auditory stimuli during night-time sleeping and waking in the domestic dog (canis familiaris).” applied animal behaviour science 39.2 (1994): 151-162. albert, alexa, and kris bulcroft. “pets and urban life.” anthrozoös 1.1 (1987): 9-25. archer, john. “why do people love their pets?” evolution and human behavior 18.4 (1997): 237-259. australian bureau of statistics. australian social trends. canberra, australia: australian bureau of statistics, 1995. australian companion animal council. “contribution of the pet care industry to the australian economy7th edition.” australian companion animal council, 2010. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 124 beck, aaron, and alan katcher. between pets and people: the importance of animal companionship. west lafayette, in: purdue up, 1996. beck, lisa, and elizabeth madresh. “romantic partners and four-legged friends: an extension of attachment theory to relationships with pets.” anthrozoös 21.1 (2008): 43-56. beetz, andrea, kurt kotrschal, dennis turner, karin hediger, kerstin unvas-moberg, and henri julius. “the effect of a real dog, toy dog and friendly person on insecurely attached children during a stressful task: an exploratory study.” anthrozoös 24.4 (2011): 349-368. beetz, andrea, and anthony podberscek. bestiality and zoophilia: sexual relationships with animals. west lafayette, in: purdue up, 2005 belk, russell. “metaphoric relationships with pets.” society and animals 4.2 (1996): 121145. _____. “possessions and the extended self.” journal of consumer research 15.2 (1988): 139168. blunden, sarah, kirrilly thompson, and drew dawson. “behavioral sleep treatments and night time crying in infants: challenging the status quo.” sleep medicine review 15.5 (2011): 327-334. bowlby, john. attachment: attachment and loss. 2nd ed. vol. 1. new york: basic books, 1999. _____. separation: anxiety and anger. vol. 2. london: hogarth, 1973. breckwoldt, roland. a very elegant animal: the dingo. north ryde, australia: angus and robertson, 1988. brown, sue-ellen. “companion animals as selfobjects.” anthrozoös 20.4 (2007): 329-343. _____. “ethnic variations in pet attachment among students at an american school of veterinary medicine.” society and animals 10.3 (2002): 249-266. campbell, scott, and irene tobler. “animal sleep: a review of sleep duration across the phylogeny.” neuroscience and behavioral reviews 8.3 (1984): 269-300. crook, tom. “norms, forms and beds: spatializing sleep in victorian britain.” body society 14.4 (2008): 15-35. kirrilly thompson and bradley smith — “should we let sleeping dogs lie… with us?” 125 dekkers, midas. dearest pet: on bestiality. trans. paul vincent. london: verso, 1994. dement, william, and christopher vaughan. the promise of sleep: a pioneer in sleep medicine explores the vital connection between health, happiness, and a good night's sleep. new york: dell 1999. eckstein, sandy. “pets in your bed.“ webmd. 2010. online. 14 jul. 14, 2014 fayerman, pamela. “pet’s love outweighs other factors for owners.” north bay nugget. 2 mar. 2002. n..p. franklin, adrian. animal nation: the true story of animals in australia. sydney: new south wales university press, 2006. hamilton, annette. “aboriginal man’s best friend?” mankind 8.4 (1972): 287-295. hansen, bernard, et al. “evaluation of an accelerometer for at-home monitoring of spontaneous activity in dogs.” american journal of veterinary research 68.5 (2007): 468-75. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. _____. when species meet. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2007. jagoe, andrew, and james serpell. “owner characteristics and interactions and the prevalence of canine behaviour problems.” applied animal behaviour science 47.1-2 (1996): 31-42. julius, henri, andrea beetz, and kurt kotrschal. attachment to pets: an integrative view of human-animal relationships with implications for therapeutic practice. toronto, ca: hogrefe, 2012. katcher, aaron, e. friedmann, m. goodman, and l. goodman. “men, women, and dogs.” californian veterinarian 2 (1983): 14–16. kobelt, amanda, p. hemsworth, j. barnett, and g. coleman. “a survey of dog ownership in suburban australia—conditions and behaviour problems.” applied animal behaviour science 82.2 (2003): 137–148. latimer, joanna. “being alongside: rethinking relations amongst different kinds.” theory, culture & society 30.7-8 (2013): 77-104. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 126 meggitt, mervyn. “australian aborigines and dingoes.” man, culture and animals. ed anthony leeds and andrew peter vayda. american association for the advancement of science symposium publication, 1965. 7-26. messam, locksley, p. kass, b. chomel, and l. hart. “the human-canine environment: a risk factor for non-play bites.” the veterinary journal 177.2 (2008): 205-215. munroe, robert, ruth munroe, and beatrice whiting. handbook of cross-cultural human development. new york: garland stpm press, 1980. overgaauw, paul, et al. “zoonotic parasites in fecal samples and fur from dogs and cats in the netherlands.” vet parasitology 163.1-2 (2009): 115-122. plaut, marshall, eugene zimmerman, and robert goldstein. “health hazards to humans associated with domestic pets.” annual review of public health 17 (1996): 221-45. robin, michael, and robert bensal. “pets and the socialization of children.” marriage and family review 8.3-4 (1985): 63-78. serpell, james. “pet-keeping and animal domestication: a reappraisal.” the walking larder: patterns of domestication, pastorialism and predation. ed. juliet clutton-brock. london: unwin hyman, 1989, 11-21. serpell, james, r. coppinger, a. fine, and j. peralta. “welfare considerations in therapy and assistance animals.” handbook on animal-assisted therapy (third edition): theoretical foundations and guidelines for practice. ed. aubrey fine. london: academic press, 2010. 481-503. smith, bradley. “‘the pet effect’: health related aspects of companion animal ownership.” australian family physician 41.6 (2012): 439-442. smith, bradley, and carla litchfield. “a review of the relationship between indigenous australians, dingoes (canis dingo) and domestic dogs (canis familiaris).” anthrozoös 22.2 (2009): 111-128. smith, bradley, kirrilly thompson, larissa clarkson and drew dawson. “the prevalence and implications of human-animal co-sleeping in an australian sample.” anthrozoös. in press. kirrilly thompson and bradley smith — “should we let sleeping dogs lie… with us?” 127 thompson, kirrilly. “save me, save my dog: increasing natural disaster preparedness and survival by addressing human-animal relationships.” australian journal of communication 40.1 (2013): 123-136. triebenbacher, sandra. “pets as transitional objects: their role in children's emotional development.” psychological reports 82.1 (1998): 191-200. voith, victoria. “attachment between people and their pets: behavior problems of pets that arise from the relationship between pets and people.” interrelations between people and pets. ed. bruce fogle. springfield, il: charles thomas, 1981, 271-294. westgarth, carrie, g. pinchbeck, j. bradshaw, s. dawson, r. gaskell, and r. christley. “dog-human and dog-dog interactions of 260 dog-owning households in a community in cheshire.” veterinary record 162.14 (2008): 436-442. winefield, helen, anne black, and anne chur-hansen. “heath effects of ownership of and attachment to companion animals in an older population.” international journal of behavioral medicine 15 (2008): 303-310. winnicott, d.w. playing and reality. london: tavistock, 1971. worthman, carol, and melissa melby. “towards a comparative developmental ecology of human sleep.” adolescent sleep patterns: biological, social and psychological influences. ed. mary carskadon. cambridge: cambridge up, 2002. 69-117. microsoft word kosut-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:2 mary kosut & lisa jean moore bees making art: insect aesthetics and the ecological moment humans are drawn to bees. unlike most familiar, flying insects such as mosquitoes or houseflies — those pests we impulsively dodge or swat — bees are likely to give us pause. their appearance, buzz, wax, honey, and the collective productivity of the colony itself, generates reverence and awe, even with the threat of a sting. it is not surprising that poets and visual artists are attracted to both the architecture of the hive and the aesthetics of their labor (steiner; brown). honeybees are uncommon insects. human interest in bees is documented across cultural contexts, from references in the bible and koran to images of bees in engravings, woodcuts, illustrations and other media. even the first humans’ visually depicted bees — representations of bees and ancient “honey hunters” can be found in numerous petroglyphs drawn on cave walls throughout europe, africa, asia and australia (crane).1 bees have been a part of visual culture since the prehistoric era, but current depictions are often framed by growing cultural concern surrounding the global threat of a “bee apocalypse” that has been widely publicized.2 colony collapse disorder or ccd, the elusive syndrome responsible for the mysterious disappearance and death of honeybee colonies has transformed the bee into a cause and a symbol of ecological frailty (moore and kosut). although agricultural records substantiate that bee colonies have dwindled throughout the last century, professional beekeepers, entomologists, and government scientists, agree that the current behavior of bees is unique, alarming, and potentially catastrophic. as anthropologist and beekeeper jake kosek succinctly remarks, “the state of the honeybee is dismal” (650). according to a u.n. report, of the 100 crop species that supply 90% of the world’s food, bees’ pollinate more than 70%.3 if honeybees became extinct the global diet would fundamentally change, as the bee is responsible for pollinating one third of food sources currently available. given the political buzz around bees, these “social insects” are on the cultural radar.4 our enmeshment with and dependence upon bees has come more sharply into focus. as bees continue to disappear from their local environments, they are ever-present in american popular culture. for example, there has been a surge of documentary films chronicling ccd, including the vanishing of the bees (2009), colony (2009), queen of the sun (2011), and most recently, more than honey (2013). they are now eco-political insects in a moment of ecological crises — a signifier of environmental awareness and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 2 green consumerism. bees’ fragility is part of the collective consciousness in many human social worlds. as art historian and animal studies scholar steve baker writes, “any understanding of the animal, and of what the animal means to us, will be transformed by and inseparable from our knowledge of its cultural representation” (4). within this backdrop, beekeeping has emerged as an urban hobby, as novices in their 20s-30s, referred to by our more seasoned informants as “hipster beekeepers,” are setting up hives on apartment rooftops and collective backyards in new york city and other major american metropolitan areas (moore and kosut). in bushwick, brooklyn, a gentrifying neighborhood filled with artist lofts and galleries, beekeeping has become linked with artist collectives and studios. in 2011, beehives were established on top of the venerable whitney museum of art on manhattan’s upper east side.5 importantly, the recent popularity of beekeeping is not limited to the unites states, or one particular demographic. in london, the number of hives has doubled within the past five years and there is concern over whether there are adequate pollination sources.6 the threat of bee extinction via ccd, and human efforts to save the bee, have in some cases lead to new problems for the health of bee colonies. human anxieties and our attempts to assuage them through well-intentioned interventions can further stress ecosystems. bees have always been in the city and in the art world, but they were usually obscured or taken for granted in both realms. we argue that throughout the 20th century they have largely been an absent presence in art. in other words, their labor is used without credit and is largely obscured within individual artworks. for example, for centuries comb, wax, honey, pollen, body parts, and bees themselves (alive and dead) have been used as a raw material or medium in artistic practice. in the technique of encaustic painting, colored pigments are added to beeswax and applied to wood, canvas, and other materials. the encaustic method was used in 6th century greek religious portraits, as well as by 20th century artists such as jasper johns and diego rivera, among many others. significantly, instead of solely using bee-derived materials to make works, bees themselves are now being made into art. artists are executing work with living bees in human/insect collaborations, transforming beehives into live site-specific art and bees into performance artists and sculptors. for example, in spring 2012 the storm king art center, an outdoor environmental sculpture park north of new york city, exhibited artist peter coffin’s (b. 1972) untitled (bees making honey), a seasonal site-specific sculpture consisting of a colony of bees tended by a professional beekeeper. [figure 1] works like untitled (bees making honey) speak to how animals are “made” in various cultural contexts (berger; baker, picturing; rothfels; landes et al.). mary kosut and luisa jean moore – “bees making art: insect aesthetics and the ecological moment” 3 figure 1: peter coffin, untitled (bees making honey), 2012, beehives and honey bees, dimensions variable, installation at storm king art center, mountainville, ny. courtesy the artist. in this essay, we consider how bees, represented in art, are framed by broader human relationships with honeybees in the early 21st century. these interspecies exchanges reveal how animals are transformed within aesthetic-cultural fields and the bleed between animal/human boundaries. looking at how the bee is engaged in art has the interdisciplinary advantage of connecting art history, animal studies, and the sociology of art to examine the postmodern animal as artistic collaborator. the bees’ representation in art worlds demonstrates how certain animals are identified as valuable, and culturally and aesthetically significant. although we include a discourse analysis of reviews and exhibition statements, as sociologists our primary focus is not the intent of the artist or whether or not the works are critically lauded or accepted as art by gatekeepers. and even though we offer a beecentered analysis, the question of whether bees are innately artistic is beyond the scope of this essay.7 rather, we explore what bees have made possible in art and how they are reckoned with through interspecies mingling in the wake of ccd and ecological crises. examining art illuminates a very specific cultural field energized by the bee beyond the industrial exploitation of their labor. art history analyses emphasize the form and content of artworks, while sociological investigations of art have traditionally de-centered the art object itself to examine the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 4 social context in which it is produced (becker; zolberg; inglis and hughson). as a relatively recent sub-discipline within sociology, the sociology of art has often distanced itself from art history and aesthetics, resulting in “blindness” to the actual art object (de la fuente). recent sociological studies of the arts champion the need to push the field further and towards a multi-disciplinary lens (inglis and hughson; becker). a “new sociology of the arts” has emerged that is in dialogue with art history and cultural studies projects that “share the assumption that art is a social construct, and that its production and consumption are thoroughly social in character” (de la fuente 423). drawing from this frame, we examine the content of bee-centered art works themselves and the cultural and ecological contexts in which they are made and received. this essay is not exhaustive of all works created with bees. our primary concentration is on art made within the last five years, after the emergence of colony collapse disorder in 2006, that consist of live bees (working in hives or in direct contact with humans) or sculptural work made by the purposeful channeling of bees’ creative labor such that the art object is co-created by the insects. in other words, the bee is the art, or is called on to make art in managed and obvious interspecies collaborations. these human/insect aesthetic collaborations emanate from within a cultural moment in which bee colonies are threatened. the bee crisis looms in the background as bees perform live, transforming objects and themselves into art. this is a salient moment for bees. they are most vulnerable as a species, and at the same time, seemingly most valuable to human beings. after discussing metaphorical representations of bees, we explore the turn toward the “live” animal in art and works dependent upon the bees’ participation and embodied labor. the artists’ dependence on the bees to execute the work echoes human reliance upon bees as pollinators in agricultural production. in both cases, the bees’ labor is concealed by how we align ourselves with these insects. it is clear that even with the best intent, humans appropriate/collaborate with animals in highly stratified circumstances. we track the bees’ path across human art worlds, attentive to the complex ecological, agricultural, and cultural systems that they constitute. in many cultural fields, bees reveal themselves as a highly generative species; one that humans have become dependent on. encountering animals: animal studies, ethics and art. the terms wild, feral, tame, exotic, and domesticated point to how we categorically construct nonhuman animals, and how we personally experience them. the interdisciplinary field of animal studies has broadened our understandings of the interactions and intersubjective exchanges between humans and animals in social worlds (sanders, understanding dogs; alger and mary kosut and luisa jean moore – “bees making art: insect aesthetics and the ecological moment” 5 alger; arluke; myers; raffles; taylor; demello). much of the influential work in this area centers on pets like dogs and cats, domestic companion animals with which we are intimately connected (see sanders; haraway, when species meet; companion species). there is also interactional research on animals not traditionally defined as pets, such as weider’s analysis of laboratory chimps and the concept of mindedness/intersubjectivity, whatmore’s study on elephants and tourism networks, and jerolmack’s ethnography of pigeons in new york city. animal studies scholarship confirms the extensive spectrum of animal/human relations, and the construction of the natural in its sundry forms. critical animal studies (cas), a more overtly politicized sub-field, proposes that we become advocates for animals and set aside our human impulses (best). this field is allied with animal liberation and activism, advocating the merger of theory and praxis. the question of whether artists can be trusted to act ethically and responsibly with animals is an important one. baker contends that we must presume that artistic practice is guided by ethical guidelines, otherwise there is a risk that the artwork itself will not be taken seriously. concern over the use of certain species in art is indicative of our uneven attachments to nonhuman animals and the inconsistencies in how we treat them (herzog). if dogs or cats were placed inside an installation for the duration of a gallery exhibition, some animal rights activists would be concerned for their safety. but ultimately, these are domestic pets and we have created a world in which it is “normal” for them to be contained indoors (haraway, when species meet; companion species) if treated humanely. humans are less likely to be concerned for insects because of their othered status — and because we, personally, kill these pests every day by stepping, swatting, and spraying. artist phillip johnson, whose 1934 installation at moma america can’t have housing, which included cockroaches, aptly notes that as pests they are “less ethically entangled than other animals” (aloi 6). certain species can be sacrificed with little fanfare, whether in the context of art worlds, systems of food production or everyday life. the differences in the revulsion quotient that is experienced by the thought of accidentally killing 1,000 bees in the process of making art to killing 1,000 kittens is noteworthy. however, numbers may have played a role in ethically driven criticism of damien hirst’s 2012 installation at the tate modern in london, which included two rooms of living butterflies. while critics lauded the exhibition, others outside of the art humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 6 world were outraged that 9,000 butterflies died during the staging of the work.8 butterflies, like bees, are among the insects that are culturally valued by humans. while butterflies are not interconnected with humans in food production or not typically viewed as integral to local urban ecologies, they are often portrayed as visually stunning creatures. in this way, they hold more aesthetic value rather than use-value to humans. necropolitics, who is let to die, is a register of how much investment we have in members of our own species and those of others species (mbembe). the necropolitical practices in art worlds demonstrate that the making of a work of art can sometimes trump the lives of certain nonhuman creatures, and in certain quantities. the field of posthuman studies has developed out of questions surrounding the construction of the “human” — an increasingly more complex entity to define in light of technological advancements (i.e., prosthetic limbs), hybridization, and genetic manipulation. posthumanism calls for “a deconstruction of symbolic, discursive, institutional, and material arrangements that produce the category of human as something unique, distinct, and at the center of the world” (pedersen 67). the human is no longer conceived of as the locus of all thought and action. it has been suggested that art offers a new frame to think through the animal question, and that artists have something unique to offer in considering the concept of the post-human animal (baker, artist/animal). aloi asserts that art can contribute to the definition of innovative and multi-focal perspectives on nature and the animal in order to move beyond humanism to unlearn the animal as we know it through contemporary art. what can contemporary interspecies bee/human art projects tell us about our shifting relationship to “nature” and the “animal” in visual culture? while it is bees that energize these collaborations, bees themselves may get lost through their entanglements with art worlds. or at minimum, humans have a difficult time acknowledging their enmeshment with bees as subjects or co-producers of social realities. the process of co-collaborating with bees is on a continuum with animal husbandry, whereby humans believe they are improving, adding value, or assisting bees — domesticating them for better purposes or those more important than their own natural inclinations. however, our three years of ethnographic fieldwork with bees and beekeepers in new york city shows that the relationship between bees and humans is more complicated than a merely top down power dynamic (moore and kosut). drawing from the perspective of science studies scholar bruno latour, we consider bees as a circulating reference. that is, bees are living material and cultural beings that do things by interacting and producing certain socio-cultural effects and affective facts. using a bee-centered approach, we examine how humans use bees as mary kosut and luisa jean moore – “bees making art: insect aesthetics and the ecological moment” 7 sculptors, in installations, and in interspecies performances, focusing on where human dominion is preeminent and inevitable. but we also suggest that interspecies mingling in art worlds may be part of the bees making, too (moore and kosut). we de-center the role of the human artist in order to bring the bee in as a co-collaborator, emphasizing the common worlds we share with other species (kirksey; raffles) and the generative nature of bees as “vibrant matter” (bennett). bennett’s concept of vibrant matter emphasizes the materiality and vitality of all objects (including nonhuman animals), and avoids “treating all objects and animals as if they are animated largely (solely) through human production (by being mixed with labor)” (kosek 669). our analysis seeks to wrangle bees as dynamic and multifaceted subjects/objects. bee-based art: from the metaphorical to the material. a cross-genre corpus of work — painting, performance, video, sculpture, and installation — exists as a material testament to how bees affect artists, either through ideas (observations generated from bees’ lives) or the use of bee-made materials, like wax or honey, in the process of making art. matthew barney, tom sachs, robert gober, lynda benglis, robert rauschenberg, and mark thompson are a few of the numerous american artists who have created sculptural objects, paintings or installations that are made possible because of the bee. for example, benglis’s “stroked” wall sculptures from the late 1960s and gober’s sculptures of human body parts from the 1990s are primarily constructed from beeswax. even though the works were made within different historical moments and represent disparate styles within the contemporary canon, they are materially linked through bees. arguably, one of the most important 20th century artists known for his work with bees and other animals is german born joseph beuys (1921-1986), who famously spent three days with a coyote in the 1974 performance piece i like america and america likes me. beuys’s obsession with bees was inspired by the writings of austrian social reformer and spiritual philosopher rudolf steiner (1861-1925). he was intimately acquainted with steiner’s work, and both men shared similar passions, a particular interest in honeybees, the spiritual world, and social theory.9 bees provided a way of theorizing the social and the supernatural, and offered a means to bring their ideas to practice, either through lectures, writings, and performances or the creation of material artifacts. although beuys made many artworks with beeswax as a central material, honey also became a medium and metaphor in his social sculptures. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 8 two of beuys’s most famous works included the literal and symbolic use of honey. the first took place in 1965 — a three-hour performance called how to explain pictures to a dead hare — in which the human artist was the central character. with his head masked with honey and gold leaf, he walked around the gallery with a dead hare in his arms silently explaining the significance of his art to the animal. beuys used the honey to comment on human consciousness: “using honey on my head i am naturally doing something that is concerned with thought. the human capacity is not to give honey, but to think — to give ideas … honey is doubtlessly a living substance. human thought can also be living” (adams 207). while beuys employs honey symbolically, and as a medium (a type of adhesive and facial paint), he also uses it in a ritualistic performance where honey, the contents of bee digestion produced in the “honey stomach,” mingles with human flesh. the interaction does not call bees to perform live, but uses the bees as metaphor and medium. almost a decade later, in 1977, beuys unveiled the installation honey pump at the workplace, which ran for a hundred days as part of a german exhibition. in this piece two ship engines pumped two tons of honey and 220 pounds of fat (margarine) through a labyrinth of clear plastic tubes above the exhibition space, which concurrently presented the beuys initiated “free international university for creativity and interdisciplinary research” — a think tank of sorts. the honey and fat circulated and churned through a sculptural nervous system. according to art historian david adams, honey pump was inspired by steiner’s bee lectures and his notion of the three psychological elements of the human being described in relation to parts of the body: “think with the nerve-sense system (head), feeling with the rhythmic system (chest), and willing with the metabolic-limb system (abdomen and limbs)” (adams 209). beuys made animals one of the main foci of his practice but in a “somewhat romanticized version of nature populated by symbols and poetic interpretations” (aloi 10). bees are not cast center stage as actors in his performances, that is, they are not called to be live participants or performers in interspecies collaborations. they are evoked, or implied — demonstrating the power of the bee even when it is not alive and physically present. the bee as a living subject may be absent, but it does leave evidence of its work. some visual artists harness the bees’ productive capacities in making honeycomb. through an anthropomorphic lens, there is much evidence to support the idea that bees are flexible and adaptable “natural sculptors.” even though beehives are typically cultivated in langstroth hives, the white rectangular wooden frames most of us are familiar with that are used in industrial agriculture, bees create comb and thrive in non-geometric and mary kosut and luisa jean moore – “bees making art: insect aesthetics and the ecological moment” 9 less structured dwellings. bees do not innately build comb within square-shapes, even though they have been described as mathematical builders. they adjust to new surroundings very well10 and can “sculpt” combs on different materials and objects — from wood armatures to synthetic molds of human bodies. canadian artist aganetha dyck (b. 1937), who has worked directly with bees for over two decades, has encouraged bees to build combs on banal and utilitarian objects like shoes, football helmets, and porcelain figurines, transforming the aesthetic value of common goods. while dyck describes her process as the altering of everyday objects through the work of bees, american artist hilary berseth’s (b. 1979) collaborations are much more intentional. in 2008, he exhibited two “programmed” hives at eleven rivington gallery on new york’s lower east side. by placing a pattern of foundation into the hive, he managed or “programmed” the bees so that the insects built honeycomb structures (sculptures). [figure 2] figure 2: hilary berseth, programmed hive #6, 2008. courtesy the artist. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 10 berseth, with the help of a local beekeeper, directed his collaborators by placing obstructions in the bees’ path that forced them to build different shapes. these obstacles of human intervention effectively direct the bees to make the art, not add to or alter a ready-made object as in dyck’s sculptures. natural honeycombs have no inherent currency in the art world [figure 3], and become valuable when built under the supervision of an artist. for example, according to this review the artists’ ingenuity at bee manipulation is what makes the work significant, coupled with the fact that the sculpture was executed by bees rather than crafted by human hands: the works are whimsical and intriguing and are made all the more interesting by the fact that they are bee-made. berseth was able to manipulate an organic natural process — the bees’ ability and need to form hives — to fit his artistic needs. he harnessed the natural construction talents of insects to create a sculpture that is unique and that represents a successful blending of the measured and the theoretically immeasurable.11 in this example the work is described as an assemblage of human/non-human collaboration that signals a symbiotic or idyllic relationship between species. it is presumed that bees will work through whatever physical challenges they are presented with or constraints placed upon them, whether it be foreign objects inserted into their hives or residencies in museums and galleries. the bees’ preferences as living organisms may be neglected in this process of human/insect cultivation, wherein the material produced by the bee has more currency than the insects themselves. directed to achieve a goal (cover a foreign object with honeycomb), bees easily become personified and anthropomorphized as willful co-collaborators and natural artists. despite that the fact that the art is a result of both insect and artist, humans take credit for them, receive rewards, and professionally thrive because of the bees' industriousness. the rewards are not equally shared and bees are not directing humans to complete creative tasks. yet at the same time, they can sting, withhold their honey, fly away, or escape. bee “agency” as it were (i.e., the bees’ free will and ability to decide a course of action) is not entirely socially defined or relative to human contexts. for example, bees express preferences in pollination, travel with purpose, communicate directions, and sting predators, not because we demand it of them, but because they are a purposeful and relatively autonomous species as compared to traditionally domesticated animals (moore and kosut). bees may be coaxed to make art objects through human direction mary kosut and luisa jean moore – “bees making art: insect aesthetics and the ecological moment” 11 and manipulation, but they are not wholly entrapped in art contexts. perhaps their unpredictability is another trait that attracts artists to collaborate with them. in many of the most recent artworks made with bees it is important to acknowledge that humans are also working, too. artists labor in the process of making the bees into insect artists collaborators, and installations — they set up hives, transport them into art spaces, work to keep them alive, theorize them, and produce aesthetic discourse about them. humans, and in particular artists, are in some ways bound by their decades of fascination with bees. it is as if bees captured our imagination and energized our actions, in some way compelling us to work with and or for them. we cannot overlook the fact that these tiny creatures, whose life expectancy averages about three months, have been a primary focus and catalyst in art. figure 3: natural honeycomb, photo by author the live animal: bees as performers and the hive as sculpture. in the western canon artists have portrayed animals for centuries – from dogs and birds in renaissance still life paintings, to stoic 18th century portraits of livestock, deer, and other animals in their natural habitats (lippincott and bluhm). there has been a shift of the representation of the animal from the classic through postmodern periods in which the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 12 animal itself is presented as the art object (aloi; baker, artist/animal; postmodern). the use of animal bodies — alive or taxidermy — has signaled a turn towards the “real” animal in art, rather than representations or depictions of animals. in some cases, the animal body is perceived as any other material used to make art, a medium akin to pigments, gesso or graphite. for example, richard serra’s live animal habitat (1966) exhibited in rome was made with 22 live and stuffed animals, incorporating hamsters, hens, doves, and a pig. more recently, artists have purposefully anthropomorphized animals as in catherine chalmers’s america cockroach (2003-2004) photo series. the cockroach – one of the most startling and revolting common insects — is literally taken out from dark corners and positioned in miniature domestic scenes, shown bathing, eating, playing cards and having sex. chalmers’s photographs employ the animal to create “a strange household world where the roach and nature are disguised to look like half-human aesthetic creations” (lin 25). in order to give the roaches an appearance of performing for the shots chalmers kills them first or temporarily gasses them with carbon monoxide so that they can be carefully posed. comparatively, bees are being used differently — in their live, unpredictable, natural state. they have performed together as a hive or in embodied bee-bearding performances with humans. bee bearding is an established practice usually executed by very experienced and seasoned beekeepers and entomologists. the act of bee bearding is rather spectacular and disarming, becoming a popular attraction in carnivals in the 1830s. it still remains a carnivalesque curiosity. american mark biancaniello, holds the 1998 world's record for wearing 87 pounds of bees. to create a bee beard, the queen bee is placed on the body so that the hive pursues her scent; where she goes the rest of the bees follow because all hive activities revolve around the presence of the queen. bee bearding is the creation of an imitation swarm, as it were, as humans manipulate bees into the act of swarming. swarming is a natural and non-aggressive event that typically happens in spring when a queen leaves a colony with a larger number of worker bees in search of a more suitable home. however, from a human perspective, ten thousand or more “loose“ bees can be read as nature out of control, generating fear and anxiety. bearding, especially upon the face and head looks perilous, as if the human might be subsumed by thousands of live, frenetically moving insects.the likelihood of receiving a few stings is inevitable, and even though only a small percentage of the population is deathly allergic, site-specific bee venom causes human flesh to heat, swell, itch and burn. in this social context, the bee is primarily cast as a naturally dangerous insect, not a social metaphor or industrious role model. mary kosut and luisa jean moore – “bees making art: insect aesthetics and the ecological moment” 13 for his film springtime, 2010-11, dutch artist jeroen eisinga (b. 1966) had his upper torso and head covered by 150,000 honeybees (the record is 350,000). as written in artforum, “the artist's aim was simply to create a strong, “sublime“ image. his intense, ritualistic, and technically impeccable black-and-white 35-mm film consists of a nearly twentyminute-long frontal shot of a man, the artist himself, sitting behind a table, during which he and the wall behind him are gradually covered by a swirling mass of bees.”12 [figure 4] in this example of human/bee collaboration, nature is simultaneously wild, but also transcendent and mesmerizing, like a lightening storm viewed at a safe distance. in bee bearding, interspecies co-mingling conveys an underlying tension because the bees are not entirely predictable. as one review states, eisinga is “selfindulgent and reckless, and probably happy to hear himself described that way.”13 this plays into the notion of a “wild” or “feral” construction of nature. and importantly, it is also nature taken out of context at the hands of humans. the risk in bee bearding plays on the theme of man vs. nature, for human excitement, sport, and spectacle. according to a curator at the hirshhorn museum in washington, d.c., “eisinga’s imagery draws on the legacy of saints and martyrs who were driven to extreme acts to prove their faith through endurance.”14 in springtime, it is the artist who endures his encounter with a possibly perilous species, but this encounter is not in the wild, it is meticulously planned, staged, performed, and documented for art world audiences. much like other types of performances of “extreme culture” such as climbing at dangerous altitudes or swimming unprotected with sharks, bee bearding involves confronting spectacular nature for the sake of thrill, awe, or art (kosut). in this regard, bees are likely to become temporarily othered as a nonhuman species — an insect pejoratively read as threat. notably, in the context of the ccd global crises, it is bees that are in peril due in part to their encounters with human interventions in the natural landscape. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 14 figure 4: jeroen eisinga, springtime, 2010-11. courtesy the artist © jeroen eisinga. as co-performers, the bees dictate the artist’s behavior (he is literally outnumbered) and ability to execute the performance successfully. performance art emerged after world war ii in the u.s. and europe, encompassing a vast range of styles, interpretations, and descriptions including live art, body art, fluxus, actions, demonstrations, and rituals. as art historian kristine stiles explains, there was a common ideological underpinning to the genre, “artists who began to use their bodies as the material of visual art repeatedly expressed their goal to bring art practice closer to life in order to increase the experiential immediacy of their work” (stiles and selz 679). but how do we conceptualize the bees’ subjective role in this example of interspecies performance? again, as in the honeycomb sculptures, the bees’ participation is triggered by a natural drive — following the queen. the bee appears to be performing itself, or arguably, a version of itself put into motion by human intention. yet, as derrida questions, the idea of the nonhuman animal as simply reacting to stimuli, as opposed to responding to it (in a measured, reflexive way indicative of humans), is an example of cartesian thinking that undergirds human/animal binaries. the artist’s engagement with bees is not exclusively on human terms, since bees do have drives, tendencies, wills, and preferences. the bees’ performance or enactments both limit and make possible the artistic production. as berger offers, animals do not exist in their “real” form in contemporary consumer culture but have been replaced by symbols to be observed. that is, we watch them at the zoo or the dog park, and in documentaries and films — as zoo animals, pets, and other representations of particular kinds of nature constructed within, and defined by, human contexts. mary kosut and luisa jean moore – “bees making art: insect aesthetics and the ecological moment” 15 the environmental movement — from eco-friendly consumerism to sustainability initiatives — has effectively set a stage for “green” nature. this relationship to the natural world centers on protection, preservation, and sometimes recovery, as in the idea of “greening the city” or “going green.” the rise of urban beekeeping across the united states is testament to the bees’ role in cultivating a more green and ecological city. there are certain nonhuman species that demand and receive more attention and are worthy of being saved. for example, since the 1970s, environmental groups have championed saving rhinos and tigers, two species most people have little contact with.15 within the ecological moment, bees have become a ready-made logo of all things green, a poster animal that we can rally around. this contemporary backdrop of human/bee relations sheds light on artists who establish colonies as living art objects. as discussed in the introduction, artist peter coffin’s apiary at storm king environmental sculpture park is presented as a natural artwork, albeit directed by human intent and couched within a very specific thematic exhibition on light. storm king’s website emphasizes the legitimacy of coffin’s hives as artwork, its function within the local ecology, and the interactive nature of the bees as highly performative: peter coffin’s practice involves working with familiar things — here, the sun, bees, and honey — to see them anew. that these small colonies also rely on the sun is a reminder of the sun's omnipotence. tour participants will receive a gift of local honey: a proposed answer to the whimsical question, ”what does light taste like?” … the park typically shows over sized sculpture by artists past and present. coffin’s innovative “untitled (bees making honey)” is not only an artwork, but also adds to the natural ecosystem of the park, which is set on 500 acres of landscaped fields, hills and woodlands. coffin’s piece will interact with the art center, as his bees thrive on its plants and flowers.16 the significance of bees as a species is framed around the import of sunlight and a professional beekeeper leads weekly tours, “educating participants about honeybees and their dependence on the sun for communication and survival.” coffin does not tend or cultivate the colony/installation per se, instead relying on experienced humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 16 beekeepers. regardless, the living sculpture functions both discursively and materially, as the bees pollinate the park’s plants and “interact” with visitors and other sculptures. in an analogous ecological framework, aganetha dyck (discussed previously) has collaborated in what she calls ”inter-species communication”17 with honeybees. akin to joseph beuys’s relationship to bees, dyck is a seasoned beekeeper who has worked closely with bees for 23 years. her work derives from a working knowledge of tending bees and a more environmentally green location — dyck has advocated for the importance of bees as a species before the emergence of ccd and the heightening of public concern across media platforms. in 2011, dyck exhibited “guest workers,” in which a beehive was installed in the confederation centre art gallery in prince edward island, canada.this sculptural/performance piece included a vent so that the bees had access to the outside world, where they could fly and gather pollen in fresh air. a description of the installation emphasizes a bee-driven perspective, “having live bees in the gallery creates complications, so the gallery is working with beekeeper geoffrey paynter to make the experience as comfortable as possible for the bees. at the same time they are providing the public with the opportunity to learn about these incredibly important insects, so essential to the cycles of growth in nature.”18 as in coffin’s piece, the bees are the art, and the exhibition is framed as an opportunity to learn about bees, not only revel in what they naturally do. importantly, the reality that placing a beehive out of place may not be preferable to bees and may create “complications,” is addressed in the making of the work. dyck’s artistic use of bees falls under the rubric of “animal-endorsing” artwork (baker). animal-endorsing art emphasizes the existence of the animal itself, and is typically in conversation with animal ethics, liberation and advocacy. according to her own blog dyck describes herself as an environmentalist and that her “recent research asks questions about the ramifications all living beings would experience should honeybees disappear from earth.”19 dyck’s approach stems from her own lifelong experiences tending bees, which many beekeepers describe as intimate and affective labor (moore and kosut). in her work there is an expression of ontological engagement with the bee, whereby the bee’s being is considered as crucial to the creation of the world, as well as the art objects. this perspective is akin to the emergent field of “multispecies ethnography,” a new genre and mode of anthropological research that seeks to bring species that are linked to human social worlds closer into focus as co-constitutive subjects (kirksey). multispecies ethnography resists the tradition of relegating mary kosut and luisa jean moore – “bees making art: insect aesthetics and the ecological moment” 17 nonhuman organisms to food, symbols, or a part of the landscape. it is bees that have enabled and generated the creation of the physical production of artworks that would not otherwise exist. just as they are responsible for pollinating much of our food supply, bees also have pollinated the arts both before and after the arrival of ccd. aesthetic interspecies exchanges. figure 5: bees working, photo by author we may take pleasure in insect poetics and visual representations that magnify their segmented bodies for the gaze of our human eyes [figure 5], but we rarely see the innately captivating qualities of insects in the context of everyday encounters. and yet bees are different than other so-called bugs, we are enmeshed with them through the process of pollination, and we as a species rely on their direct labor — honey, propolis, pollen, and wax. it is easy to speculate why artists collaborate with these particular insects over other invertebrates that see us as food or parasitic hosts (mosquitoes) or more arcane and nocturnal bugs like beetles or silverfish. bees naturally behave in ways humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 18 that are considered to be exemplary by cultural standards — they are said to have integrity, are committed, and will sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the hive and colony. they have been inscribed with the insect version of what sociologist max weber calls a “protestant ethic,” an ethos that drives them to work without question towards the goals of a greater social good. in this regard, bees are easily anthropomorphized and metaphorically convenient. many artists have capitalized on bees as a subject matter or metaphor because they are a “model insect” (moore and kosut). the aesthetic interspecies exchanges between humans and bees speak to our understanding of nature more broadly, and specifically, animals in art contexts. in the art projects discussed the bees do what they do instinctively, like following the queen to create a bee beard, or sustaining a colony through the process of making honey, building comb, laying eggs and tending larva. we employ them as natural and sometimes feral objects, and at the same time “culture” them by inviting them into artist studios, galleries and museums. but as the bees produce comb and maintain their hives, human interventions in the name of art may not be ideal for bees. regardless of the aesthetic object that is produced — sculpture, film, performance, installation — bees have been disrupted. in some respect bees have worked their own way into art worlds. that is, humans and bees co-constitute artworks that are made of multiple layers of coordination. in art, the bee as living nonhuman species has very little agency in the traditional ways we think of agency. bees can't decide for instance to be placed in a box, or elect to “donate” their honey for larger purposes. but in other ways, some types of human/bee artwork reflect the bees’ agency because their products, handiwork and lives are useful in theorizing and creating art. the slippage between nature/culture, animal/human, art/instinct, and subject/object are transgressed by the bees’ contemporary presence in art worlds. this movement outside of dichotomous thinking energizes us and inspires new ways of seeing, knowing and being. the bees are the ultimate agent in that their ability to sting, and the arcology of the hive generates artistic projects. arcology, a combination of the terms ecology and architecture, is a self-contained, high-density living environment that forms a fully functional agricultural and residential habitat with minimal waste. the respect shown for the egalitarian and efficient hive is an example of the natural world seemingly getting it right. in the wake of ccd, the bees’ disappearance renders the species even more valuable and precious to humans through the jeopardy of the idea of potential extinction. mary kosut and luisa jean moore – “bees making art: insect aesthetics and the ecological moment” 19 humans cultivate bees for different purposes in a variety of environments — from industrial agriculture and scientific research labs, to rural backyards and urban rooftops. the art world is another site in which we are entangled with this species. as art historian ron broglio writes, “the wonder of (animal) art is found in the play of surfaces … where exchanges take place. art brings something back from this limit and horizon of the unknowable; it bears witness to encounters without falling into a language that assimilates or trivializes the world of the animal” (xxiii). humans exhibit a degree of power through manipulations of the “animal kingdom,” but art can provide an opportunity to see the animal differently, so that we can contemplate the links between our vast aesthetic, cultural and ecological entanglements. notes 1. according to entomologist stephen buchmann, africa has the largest number of petroglyphs visualizing prehistoric bee/human intersections, many depicting the honeycomb in great detail (15). 2. in may 2013, an ominously titled article “russia warns obama: global war over ’bee apocalypse’ coming soon,” explained that russian president putin delayed a meeting with us secretary of state john kerry due to his “extreme outrage” over president obama’s protection of global bio-genetic seed manufactures monsanto and syngenta who use insecticides known as neonicotinoids that are believed to be responsible for the deaths of bees and other species. available here: http://www.eutimes.net/2013/05/ russia-warns-obama-global-war-over-bee-apocalypse-coming-soon/. web. accessed on july 10, 2013. 3. beeguardian.org. web. accessed on may 5, 2013. 4. sociobiologist edward o. wilson with his colleague bert holldobler, has dedicated much of his research to understanding the life of another social insect, the ant. wilson famously likened ant behavior to a form of socialism where self-sacrifice for the good of the colony is commonly practiced. 5. http://www.newyorker.com/talk/2012/03/12/120312ta_talk_tomkins web. accessed on april 17, 2013. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 20 6. dan charles, “why urban beekeeping can be bad for bees.” http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2013/08/12/211413350/londons-urban-beekeepers-arebad-for-bees-scientists-say. web. accessed on november 1, 2013. 7. aloi argues that the notion that animals do not make art is biased and human centric. instead of focusing on ‘art,’ a loaded word, he proposes that “if we consider creativity as the universal originator of all art, then we find that animals are surely capable of that, at times in ways that border on the understanding of the creative in humans” (xviii). for a discussion of the visual aesthetics of bees, evolution and color see “insects as art lovers: bees for van gogh” in the insect themed issue of antennae 3.2 (2007): 37-42. 8. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturenews/9606498/damien-hirst-condemnedfor-killing-9000-butterflies-in-tate-show.html. web. accessed june 20, 2013. 9. in 1923 steiner gave eight lectures on bees, highlighting the “unconscious wisdom” of the hive and what humans could learn from bees about themselves and the cosmos, asserting that we need to “study the life of bees from the standpoint of the soul.” 10. bees can live in tree trunks, underground, and in human constructed top-bar hives that allow them to create shapes that are non-linear. in our fieldwork, seasoned beekeepers described to us how bees live in mud and in abandoned foreclosed homes in florida. bees also adapt to different food supplies, even those that are not derived from local plants. for example, in spring 2010 in the redhook section of brooklyn, an increasingly gentrified neighborhood, bees’ started glowing red from gorging on maraschino cherry juice made at a nearby factory. their stomachs, and in turn their honey, was affected by the bright red dye alarming local beekeepers who were concerned that bees should be surviving on plants rather than sweetened syrup. susan dominus, “the mystery of the red bees of red hook,” new york times, 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/nyregion/30bigcity.html. web. accessed december, 11, 2011. 11. http://www.columbiaspectator.com/2008/11/05/columbia-graduates-beescollaborate-art-show. web. accessed april 15, 2011. 12. van der kroef, saskia. artforum 50.9 (2012): 325-326. mary kosut and luisa jean moore – “bees making art: insect aesthetics and the ecological moment” 21 13. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/12/bee-bearding-in-art_n_1202528.html. web. accessed january 30, 2011. 14. http://newsdesk.si.edu/releases/hirshhorn-announces-black-box-jeroen-eisinga. web. accessed march 24, 2012. 15. http://wwf.panda.org/who_we_are/history/seventies/. web. accessed november 3, 2013 16. http://inhabitat.com/nyc/storm-king-art-center-to-host-a-honey-bee-apiary-by-artistpeter-coffin/bees-theseanster93/. web. accessed july 2, 2011. 17. http://www.confederationcentre.com/en/news-read-more.php?news=115. web. accessed july 14, 2011 18. http://www.confederationcentre.com/en/news-read-more.php?news=115. web. accessed july, 14, 2011. 19. http://acidolatte.blogspot.com/2009/09/aganetha-dyck.html?zx=5d9a75cfffb0e186. web. accessed july 15, 2011. works cited adams, david. “the artistic alchemy of joseph beuys.” rudolf steiner. bees: lectures by rudolph steiner. barrington, ma: anthroposophic press, 1998. 189-213. alger, janet and steven alger. “beyond mead: symbolic interaction between humans and felines.“ society and animals 5.1 (1997): 65-81. _____. cat culture: the social world of a cat shelter. philadelphia: temple up, 2003. aloi, giovanni. art & animals. london and new york: i.b. tauris, 2012. arluke, arnold. “ethnozoology and the future of sociology.” international journal of sociology and social policy. 23.3 (2003): 26-45. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 22 baker, steven. picturing the beast: animals, identity and representation. manchester: manchester up, 1993. _____. the postmodern animal. london: reaktion, 2000. _____. artist/animal. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2013. becker, howard. “art as collective action.” american sociological review 39.6 (1974): 767776. _____. artworlds. berkeley: u california p, 1982 _____. “the work itself.” art from start to finish: jazz, painting, writing and other improvisiations. eds. howard becker, r. faulkner r. and b. kirshenblatt-gimblett. chicago: u chicago p, 2006. 21-30. bennett, jane. vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham and london: duke up, 2010 berger, john. about looking. new york: vintage, 1991. best, steven. “the rise of critical animal studies: putting theory into action for animal liberation into higher education.” journal for critical animal studies 7.1 (2009): 9-54. brown, eric. insect poetics. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2006. buchmann, stephen. letters from the hive: an intimate history of bees, honey, and humankind. new york: bantam, 2005. broglio, ron. surface encounters: thinking with animals and art. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2011. chittka, lars, and julian walker. “insects as art lovers: bees for van gogh.” antennae 3.2 (2007): 37-42. colony. dir. carter gunn and ross mcdonnell. fastnet films, 2009. mary kosut and luisa jean moore – “bees making art: insect aesthetics and the ecological moment” 23 crane, eva. the rock art of honey hunters. cardiff: international bee research association, 2001. de la fuente, eduardo. “the ‘new sociology of art’: putting art back into social science approaches to the arts.” cultural sociology 1 (2007): 409-425. demello, margo. animals and society: an introduction to human-animal studies. new york: columbia up, 2012. derrida, jacques. “and say the animal responded?” trans. david wills. zoontologies: the question of the animal. ed. cary wolfe. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2003. 121-146. eisinga, jeroen. springtime. 35mm to hd. cahir, co. tipperary, ireland, 2010-2011. haraway, donna. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. _____. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. herzog, hal. some we love, some we hate, some we eat: why it’s so hard to think straight about animals. new york: harper, 2011. holldobler, bert and e.o. wilson. the ants. cambridge: harvard up, 1990. inglis, david and john hughson, eds. the sociology of art: ways of seeing. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2005. jerolmack, colin. “primary groups and cosmopolitan ties: the rooftop pigeon flyers of new york.” ethnography 10.4 (2009): 435-457. kirksey, s. eben. and stefan helmreich. “the emergence of multispecies ethnography.” cultural anthropology 25.4 (2010): 545-576. kosek, jake. “ecologies of empire: on the new uses of the honeybee.” cultural anthropology 25.4 (2010): 650-78. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 24 kosut, mary. “extreme bodies/extreme culture,” the body reader: essential social and cultural readings. eds lisa-jean moore and mary kosut. new york up, 2010. 184-200. latour, bruno. pandora's hope: essays on the reality of science studies. cambridge mass: harvard up, 1999. landes, joan, paula lee and paul younguist. gorgeous beasts: animal bodies in historical perspective. university park, pa: pennsylvania university press, 2012. lin, tan. “the roach is not us.“ antennae 3.2 (2007): 22-27. lippincott, louise and andreas bluhm. fierce friends: artists and animals, 1750-1900. new york: merrell, 2005. pedersen, helen. “release the moths: critical animal studies and the posthuman impulse.” culture, theory and critique 52.1 (2011): 65-81. mbembe, achiles. “necropolitics.” public culture 15.1 (2003): 11-40. moore, lisa jean and mary kosut. buzz: urban beekeeping and the power of the bee. new york up, 2013. more than honey, dir. markus imhoof. kino international, 2013. myers, olin. “no longer the lonely species: a post mead perspective on animals and sociology.“ international journal of sociology and social policy 23.3 (2003): 46-68. queen of the sun: what are the bees telling us? dir. taggart siegel. evan schiller, 2010. raffles, hugh. insectopedia. new york: pantheon, 2010. rothfels, nigel. representing animals. bloomington: indiana up, 2002. sanders, clinton. “understanding dogs: caretakers’ attributions of mindedness in canine-human relationships.” journal of contemporary ethnography 22.2 (1993): 205-226. mary kosut and luisa jean moore – “bees making art: insect aesthetics and the ecological moment” 25 _____. understanding dogs: living and working with canine companions. philadelphia: temple up, 1999. steiner, rudolf. bees: lectures by rudolf steiner. barrington, ma: anthroposophic press, 1998. stiles, kristine and peter selz eds. contemporary art: a sourcebook of artists’ writings. berkeley: u california p, 1996. taylor, nicola. “‘never an it’: intersubjectivity and the creation of animal personhood in animal shelters.” qualitative sociological review 3.1 (2007): 59-73. vanishing of the bees. dir. george langworthy and maryam henein. hive mentality films & hipfuel films, 2009. weber, max. the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. [1905]. new york: routledge, 2001. weider, d. lawrence. 1980. “behaviouralistic operationalism and the life-world: chimpanzees and chimpanzee researchers in face-to-face interaction.“ sociological inquiry 50.3/4 (1980): 75-103. whatmore, sarah. hybrid geographies: natures cultures spaces. new york: sage, 2001. zolberg, vera. constructing a sociology of the arts. new york: cambridge up, 1990. microsoft word birke-cudworth pdf dummy.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:2 lynda birke species and power erika cudworth, social lives with other animals: tales of sex, death and love. basingstoke/new york: palgrave, 2001. 210 pp. ₤58/$85 hc. a sheep named bonnie gazes out from the front cover of social lives. bonnie, unlike almost all her conspecifics, lived to the age of fifteen. the photograph is striking: bonnie’s eyes keep watching you, and the image invites us to look at such animals and “to ask ourselves who they really are and how we might respond” (184). yet sheep do not usually fare so well; most, on the contrary, do not live beyond a few months, living and dying within the processes of food production. that sums up our highly ambivalent, and complex, relations with other species. on the one hand, many of us do indeed wonder who they are, and often single out specific individuals with whom we might have close relationships; on the other, the same species might meet (at best) with callous disregard from humans, or outright cruelty. and individuals move all too easily from being doted on to being discarded, if their behavior or appearance somehow does not fit human wants. and that was brought home to me when i read recently of one of the effects of economic recession ― a significant increase in the number of “companion” animals being maimed or murdered for “owners’” to claim on insurance.* human-animal relationships are indeed complicated. like other theorists in humananimal studies, cudworth is concerned to unpack some of this ambivalence and to move away from our belief in our own exceptionalism. but, crucially, she takes issue with the view (apparent in some theoretical writing about humans and other animals) that boundaries between “the human” and the “nonhuman animal” are collapsing. on the contrary, her point here is that our primary relationship with other animals is and remains one of social domination: rather, species ― and especially the human/nonhuman species boundary ― is an effect of social power, which produces the marginalization and exploitation of other animals. “we will not,” she argues, “see justice for animals by deconstructing species” (13). that emphasis on social power is a central tenet of her book: while she recognizes the importance of emphasizing that nonhumans, as well as humans, constitute and produce social relations, this does not go far enough precisely because it does not take into account relations of power. lynda birke — species and power 137 social lives begins with an exploration of sociological ideas around species, beginning with a critique and moving on to consider the influence of complexity theory. human relations with other species, suggests cudworth, operate through systems of domination which she calls “anthroparchy.” in her analysis of sociological concerns with species, she considers several theoretical positions that challenge our entrenched anthropocentric beliefs, albeit in rather different ways. to take one example, she discusses several theorists drawing on some version of social constructionism. that how we construct ideas of “animals” is crucial to our treatment of them matters, she argues, but it does not go far enough to address material relations. for that, we need a political language. however, the extension of concepts of rights and liberation to nonhuman animals is also fraught with difficulties, not least because they are, ultimately, rooted in humanism. one source of fruitful ideas comes, cudworth suggests, from recent feminist scholarship on intersectionality (e.g., nash, 2008; walby, 2009). this is concerned with ways in which different, but overlapping, discourses constitute and shape each other ― racism, sexism, colonialism, for example. but to this literature should be added a concern with species, how discourses of species produce notions of difference, and ― importantly ― how they produce structures of power. this goes beyond discussions of speciesism, which, she suggests, homogenizes species and does not adequately account for different forms of human exploitation of animals. this is, for cudworth, the central question for sociological analysis: how can we “account for species as discursively and materially constituted, as a system of power relations which is intersected by forms of intra-human difference and domination” (54)? to move toward such a sociology she suggests drawing on complexity theory, which focuses on connections and interplay between systems. these could, for example, be populations of organisms within a wider ecosystem. while the application of such ideas in sociology has been contested, it can offer a useful framework for “those of us trying to understand the relationships of species as political, and to see the social as something which is not exclusively human” (66). in this quest, cudworth proposed the term anthroparchy, to describe a social system in which humans are privileged. she defines it as “...a social system, a complex and relatively stable set of hierarchical relationships in which ‘nature’ is dominated through formations of social organization which privilege the human” (67). such privileging takes many forms ― using “nature” as resources in production, exploiting animals’ reproductive processes, domesticating them, destroying them or their habitats. she discusses these ideas through three case studies of human humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 138 animal relations: the consumption of animals for food; the industrialized production of animals for agriculture; and the keeping of companion animals in the household. it is these three examples which underpin the subtitle of her book ― sex, death, and love. the first case study thus focuses on meat-eating, seen as carnal desire (the “sex” of the title). here, she draws on carol adams’s work on the sexual politics of meat (adams, 1990), illustrating the discussion with examples from british meat culture, and extending adams’s argument to include the cooking of meat. “foodwork” ― preparing food and cooking ― is gendered. to give one example from cudworth’s analysis of food/cookery texts: recipes for boiling meat tend to utilize narratives of care (as do many of those for vegetable eating), while recipes centered on roasting or grilling convey masculinity, and are more likely to be sexualized. they are, moreover, heteronormative, conveying messages of heterosexual virility associated with meat consumption. real animals are (disturbingly) sometimes seen in recent representations of cooking; they are no longer “absent referents,” in adams’s phrase, when celebrity chefs murder them and eat them for television audiences. here, too, there are strong links to gender, as slaughter is constructed as a quintessentially masculine endeavour. consumption of meat in western culture is eroticized and gendered; it also entails the mass production and killing of enormous numbers of animals ― the “death” of the subtitle. species relations in intensive agriculture are, cudworth argues, “co-constituted with systemic relations of capitalism and colonialism .... [as well as] through gendered relations” (109). colonialism has long been apparent in meat production, as allegedly “superior” european breeds were used to usurp native breeds in many colonized countries; its current manifestation is in the new “cattle colonialism,” which facilitates the destruction of enormous swathes of rainforest. it is also manifest in the way that animal exploitation shifts between countries; as european legislation requires (marginally) better ways of keeping chickens, so economics will ensure that more chickens elsewhere will be kept in the worst and most industrialized conditions. drawing on interviews and textual analysis of people and organizations in meat production, cudworth explores the interlinked ways in which agricultural animals are oppressed. she notes that the “intersection of capitalist, colonialist and patriarchal relations is particularly marked in the meat industry” (136), examining in particular the gendering of meat animals and human dominance. not only is there a prevailing sexualized discourse among slaughterhouse workers, but there is a strong belief that it is a job for men; any woman doing so has to be “not like a woman at all,” as one informant told her. but this is only one aspect of the enormous machine that comprises lynda birke — species and power 139 the global exploitation of animals for food. as cudworth notes, at the same time that discourses of welfare proliferate around agricultural animals, so too do opportunities for greater oppression ― the practice of intensive dairy farming is now being imported to the uk from the us practices of keeping cattle in enormous feedlots. her third case study concerns “love” ― what many of us believe we feel in our close relations with companion species; these are animals whom we tend to treat as kin, whom we see most easily as “like us.” many of these animals are cared for, treated respectfully ― although many are not. and that goes to the heart of our ambivalence towards other animals: ultimately, we have power over these whom we claim to love ― the power to create identities, the power to control their lives, and the power to take their lives away. cudworth notes how our relationships with companion species in our households have changed historically, and draws on her own studies of humans living with dogs. although here, too, these interconnections are threaded through with wider exploitative relations, there are, she argues, important differences between companion and agricultural animals. keeping animals is certainly a form of domination, but it is also one in which it can be easier to acknowledge the mindfulness of animal others. she suggests that companion species relations may be messy, compromised and fraught with relations of power which are not benign. however, whilst companion animals may be legally defined as property, there is much that goes on in spite of the law.” (151; emphasis in original) her point here is that in many accounts of the domination of companion animals, there is little possibility for their agency, little way of understanding (for example) how dogs themselves sought contact with humans and co-construct the daily relationships we have with them. even training animals ― a process which at one level may entail domination ― needs animal cooperation for it to work well, a process of “trainingwith” rather than training-of. people living with companion animals are living in mixed-species communities ― cross-pack relations, in the words of donna haraway (2008) ― which require those involved to make accommodations. and humans adjust as well as dogs, even if they do hold more power. in my household, a new arrival ― a rescue lurcher called honey ― humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 140 means not only adjusting social dynamics between various humans and canines, but also physical adjustment in the form of higher shelves to hide grab-able food items. like cudworth’s interviewees, we readily accommodate our house, and blame ourselves if our lunch goes missing. like them, we all try to build cross-species communities in the house, or when out walking in the woods. like them, we try to understand the mindedness of these nonhumans who share our lives. and we can also share a recognition that our relationships with these dogs is indeed one enmeshed with structures of domination. “i am very much aware,” said one of her interviewees, “that i have the power, i have the power in this relationship.... i don’t want to abuse that power” (184). there can be love and companionship in our relationships with companion animals, just as there is a darker side, in the form of abuse and cruelty. cudworth recognizes that not all readers will agree with her argument that some human-animal relationships can include affectional ties. but, she points out, it is vital that we understand that domination is not homogeneous ― it can take different forms: an adequate sociological understanding of systemic domination cannot elide different forms of domination and degrees of exploitation and oppression. not all domination can be understood as the same quality. negotiating species in daily lives, the dogs and humans in my study practise companionship.... [perhaps these] relations between some humans and dogs are a glimpse of what can and might be, and a small opening into a world of potentially fruitful species co-habitations. (172) sociological inquiry has both elided forms of domination and paid insufficient heed to differences of species. recent scholarly interest in human-animal relationships goes a long way to redressing this legacy... but does it go far enough? throughout the book, cudworth references haraway’s recent work on companion species, because of the way this prioritizes the “sticky knots” of our intertwined lives with these animals. haraway’s work is fundamentally important, cudworth argues, because it emphasizes the social co-constitution of interspecies being. yet she is also throughout the book quite critical of haraway, on the grounds that the latter’s emphasis on naturecultures seriously underestimates the constitution of power, which structure our lives with other animals. she argues that haraway tells a partial story [in which] the wider context of human species lynda birke — species and power 141 domination is left untheorized.... domesticated animals exist in a context of dependency and social structures of human domination that haraway significantly underplays both at the macro and micro level ― coconstituted relations may also be those of inequality and oppression. (148) there will inevitably be many readers who disagree with this critique, or who take issue with cudworth’s use of complexity theory. there will also be those for whom her relative optimism regarding human relationships with companion species is anathema, as she acknowledges. yet for me, her detailed discussion of how our dominance of other species is constructed is critical. relations of power are indeed fundamental to thinking about human relationships with other animals ― even if, like cudworth, we feel that some relationships also include affectional ties. on this point, i concur wholeheartedly, that we need to find more nuanced ways of understanding different forms of oppression and the circumstances in which they play out. developing a sociology which is properly sensitive to species is crucial ― social life is never, and has never been, exclusively human. but it is also a social life profoundly shaped by inequalities and suffering, appearing in myriad forms. this is why we need more inclusive sociology ― and a more inclusive politics. sex, death, and love do indeed permeate all our relationships with other animals: we kill many, we cause immense suffering ― but sometimes, we look into animals’ eyes and wonder just who is gazing back. note *while that occasionally happens to humans, it is the apparent discardability of animals that i want to emphasize here. works cited adams, carol. the sexual politics of meat. cambridge: polity, 1990. haraway, donna m. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. nash, jennifer c. “re-thinking intersectionality.” feminist review 89 (2008). 1–15. walby, sylvia. globalization and inequalities: complexity and contested modernities. london: sage, 2009. microsoft word weisberg pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:1 zipporah weisberg “the simple magic of life”: phenomenology, ontology, and animal ethics believe in the simple magic of life, in service in the universe, and it will dawn on you what this waiting, peering, “stretching of the neck” of the creature means. every word must falsify; but look, these beings live around you, and no matter which one you approach you always reach being. — martin buber (29) this paper argues that french phenomenologist maurice merleau-ponty and baltic german zoologist jacob von uexküll's respective investigations into human and nonhuman ontology can make a major contribution to animal ethics. my overarching claim is that phenomenology can help deepen and enrich our understanding of animal ontology, and in so doing deepen and enrich our development of animal ethics. at the moment, peter singer’s reductive ontology of animals as primarily suffering beings — and his correspondingly simplistic ethical model, which is focused on preventing suffering — is still arguably the default position among both animal studies theorists and animal activists. singer’s assertion that the capacity to suffer is the threshold condition for ethical consideration (of a certain kind) is not in dispute here. it is goes without saying that the criterion of sentience is crucial to distinguishing between obligations we might have to living beings such as trees and conscious and feeling beings such as nonhuman animals. it also goes without saying that a being’s capacity to suffer ought automatically to entitle that being to full protection from torture, abuse, neglect, and other forms of physical and psychological suffering. what is in dispute here, then, is whether the capacity to suffer, though a necessary criterion, is also a sufficient criterion for developing a comprehensive and robust animal ethics. also in question here is the relatively narrow definition of suffering as physical and psychological pain that singer seems to take for granted at the expense of the recognition of the phenomenological nuances of animals’ intersubjective experiences as perceptual beings. with a weak conception of suffering at its foundation, singer’s ethics is unable to account for the substantive positive obligations we might have to other animals. worse, singer’s ontology of suffering, not to mention his preference-utilitarian framework, leave him unable to defend as a matter of principle nonhuman animals’ right not to be killed. my goal here is to take singer to task for these failures and to offer an alternative animal ontology and foundation for ethics by drawing on the as yet under-explored work of merleau-ponty and uexküll. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 80 to be sure, various animal ethicists have already offered correctives and alternatives to singer’s reductive ontology and ethics. martha nussbaum, for example, outlines a list of animals’ discrete capabilities and corresponding entitlements, while tom regan points out that many other animals experience a variety of complex emotional and cognitive states and therefore qualify as “subjects-of-a-life" with intrinsic value. partially as a result of these more nuanced ontologies, nussbaum and regan have presented more compelling theories of justice and rights than singer. there are mhowever, their respective theories are also limited — in nussbaum’s case by her refusal, like singer’s, to reject killing outright, and in regan’s case, by his contradictory appeal, if only strategic, to anthropocentric assumptions. animal ethologists such as marc bekoff and jonathan balcombe, among many others, have also made an enormous contribution to complicating and enriching our understanding of animal ontology and ethics. by providing us with reams of examples of animals’ complex emotional states, social needs, and moral capacities bekoff and balcombe have probably done more than anyone else to challenge our reductive ontology of animal life and, consequently, to posit a more robust set of ethical commitments. i suggest here that phenomenology can supplement and complement ethology by offering additional insight into animal subjectivity and intersubjectivity. it is unlikely that we can rely entirely on phenomenology to articulate a programmatic ethics. but we can certainly draw from it to help complete the picture of animal ontology and subjectivity that regan, nussbaum, bekoff, balcombe, and other animal studies scholars have begun to paint with brighter colors and more varied brush strokes than singer. while we cannot fully understand the internal subjective experience of other animals — and as we will see phenomenology helps illuminate this epistemic limit — phenomenology can help us understand some of the constitutive elements of animal subjectivity, in particular embodiment, perception, and world-making. out of these insights, phenomenology can offer at least four distinct contributions to animal ethics, which are as follows: first, by focusing on the shared embodiment of human and nonhuman animals, phenomenology challenges human-animal dualism not only by asserting animals’ ethically relevant ontological similarity to humans, but also humans' long-repressed or repressively desublimated animality, the latter of which tends to be glossed over in the effort to justify animals’ membership in the otherwise exclusively human community of ethical subjects. second, and as already noted, by detailing the key features of animal subjectivity outlined above, phenomenology both magnifies the potential delights of animal existence in optimal circumstances, and the profound horrors of animal ____________________________________________________________________ zipporah weisberg -“the simple magic of life”: phenomenology, ontology, and animal ethics 81 existence within the confines of the animal industrial complex. thus, it offers an even stronger incentive to put an end to animal exploitation. third, phenomenology provides a powerful basis for including a universal prohibition of killing animals for any reason other than as a last resort in circumstances of extreme and irreversible physical injury, disease, or illness. the fourth contribution phenomenology can make to animal ethics is in a slightly different vein than those i have just outlined: to inspire an ethos of reenchantment and a practice of epistemic humility towards other animals. by reenchantment i mean the cultivation of a sense of wonder and awe — not just at “wild animals” and “nature,” but all animals, including the most maligned and abused, such as rats, chickens, goats, mice, pigs, and all the other domesticated and undomesticated animals languishing in laboratories, factory farms, and other cites of violence and exploitation — as a means of challenging their brutal objectification and commodification under late capitalism. re-enchantment also engenders an epistemic humility, which embraces the limits of human knowledge and sets strict constraints on our epistemic goals and methods, thus offering an antidote to the recklessness and arrogance of modern instrumentalist science. it is important to clarify at the outset that i am not mobilizing phenomenology here for prescriptive or programmatic purposes — that is, to explore potential institutional or policy changes it could initiate. my goal is more modest than that. while the hope is that a phenomenologically inspired ethics will have concrete applications of that nature, my focus here is on the ways in which it can contribute to strengthening the theoretical foundations of animal ethics. while phenomenology alone cannot provide the basis for a comprehensive animal ethics, it can certainly complement, supplement, and correct some features of leading models. i will begin by elaborating on the strengths and weaknesses of singer’s, nussbaum’s, and regan’s ontologies and ethics, before moving on to consider how phenomenology might offer another platform for reimagining animal ontology and rethinking ethics beyond the human. singer's ontology and ethics of suffering. peter singer is credited for having made the first major intervention into the troubling legacy of cartesian dualism, which reduces animals to automata that ostensibly lack all the necessary criteria for ethical consideration, such as reason, language, autonomy, and moral agency. in his seminal book animal liberation (1975), singer famously argued, following jeremy bentham, that “sentience,” especially the capacity to suffer, which all animals with a central nervous humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 82 system possess, is the only morally relevant characteristic a being can possess or lack. “if a being suffers,” singer explains, “there can be no moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration” (8). whether or not a being can speak or exercise reason or whether he or she possesses moral agency or autonomy, therefore, has absolutely no bearing on whether he or she is deserving of protection from suffering. singer’s contribution to challenging age-old prejudices against animals cannot be overstated. the elimination of all other criteria save sentience as the basis for equal moral consideration is a radical move in the history of western moral philosophy, particularly at the time of singer’s initial intervention, and has important implications. if pigs’, chickens’, rats’, and monkeys’ capacity to suffer was actually taken into consideration as not just one, but rather the determining criterion for ethical consideration, the entire factory farming, experimentation, fur, and animal entertainment industries would have to be shut down immediately to put an end to the indescribable and interminable suffering they inevitably inflict on other animals. upon closer examination, however, there are numerous problems with singer’s approach. the first is that singer ultimately provides a reductive account of animal subjects as primarily suffering bodies, without acknowledging more than in passing other morally salient aspects of their subjective lives. granted, singer is doing this at least in part for strategic reasons. that is, he focuses on sentience not least to challenge critics who opt to measure a being’s moral value in terms of their degree of selfawareness or other, ultimately arbitrary, cognitive or physical capacities (practical ethics 64-66). nevertheless, and despite his best intentions, by focusing on sentience in general and presenting animals as primarily suffering beings, singer capitulates, without meaning to, to his opponents who, for different reasons, proverbially strip animals down to their bare essentials, and in so doing undermine animals’ claim to full subjecthood and to full membership in the ethical community of diverse individuals. it is one thing to be sentient, but it is quite another thing to be a psychologically, emotionally, and perceptually complex world-making being. only when these complexities are recognized will ethics be more than just a feeble hand held up in defiance of the most extreme forms of cruelty, and instead become an entire way of life — that is, a foundation for cultivating and living in thriving and peaceable interspecies communities. singer’s commitment to utilitarianism obstructs his view of this alternative destination for ethics, and he consistently returns to his default position of the necessary condition, which, though strategically useful as an intervention into the dominant, viciously anthropocentric philosophical tradition, can only go so far. ____________________________________________________________________ zipporah weisberg -“the simple magic of life”: phenomenology, ontology, and animal ethics 83 a second and more serious problem is that although singer recognizes the practical ethical requirement to boycott the industrialized killing of animals because of the suffering it inflicts, his focus on suffering prevents him from objecting to killing other animals, save those such as great apes, elephants, dolphins, and some species of birds, that are lucky enough to qualify as “persons” (or rational and self-conscious beings, aware of themselves as distinct entities with a past and a future) as a matter of principle (94). singer concedes that other birds, including those we torture and kill systematically in the animal industrial complex, may prove to be persons as well, and therefore may join the list of those whose lives are worth preserving irrespective of other considerations. but for now, the best we can offer them, in the context of consequentialism, is the much weaker argument that by killing them we deprive them of a pleasant or enjoyable life (120). but this leads us into two dead-ends, so to speak: first, it offers no protection from killing to animals who lead lives of misery, which is to say, all the animals routinely killed for food, experiments, and other purposes; and second, it reinforces a tired hierarchy of value that glorifies arbitrary capacities, in this case a sense of self and of the past and future. as singer puts it, when the chips are down, or “when there is an irreconcilable conflict between the basic survival needs of animals and of normal humans, it is not speciesist to give priority to the lives of those with a biographical sense of their life and a stronger orientation towards the future” (122). why narrow the scope of value this way? why not challenge ourselves to accept that having a certain kind of self-awareness and a corresponding sense of the past and future as we understand it is not all that counts? surely, not even humans’ selfawareness is limited to a rigid and rather superficial sense of the past and future. surely, like other animals, we too inhabit diverse spatio-temporal configurations shaped us much by perception, emotion, environment, desire, and intersubjective relations as by our plans for the future. why not entertain the notion that whatever form their sense of self takes other animals inhabit magnificent worlds of meaning of which to deprive them shatters not only their individual lives, but those of others with whom they have co-constructed and created those worlds? this is what phenomenology compels us to recognize. and this is what singer cannot, by virtue of his utilitarian convictions, abide. even if we put this concern aside, another one emerges. as a preference-utilitarian, singer must concede that the preferences of one group might trump those of another. this could mean that the preferences of animals not to suffer could trump the preferences of humans to consume their flesh and otherwise exploit them, but it could and indeed does also mean that as long as animals’ basic preference not to suffer is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 84 protected, there is no compelling reason not to kill them. and this is exactly the conclusion singer comes to: if most animals’ primary interest is in avoiding suffering, and if they do not have an interest in a continued existence per se — an assumption a phenomenological conception of animal subjectivity adamantly rejects — then subjecting animals to a so-called “painless death” for food production is not necessarily in violation of their interests or of the principle of equality (animal liberation 17). because he focuses exclusively on suffering, singer fails to recognize the other harms and injustices that are constitutive to killing, no matter how ostensibly “painless.” in short, if animals are seen as primarily seeking the limited interests of avoiding harm and seeking pleasure, but are otherwise not regarded as having meaningful interior lives, it is theoretically still possible to justify exploiting them as long as one does not violate those basic interests. any robust or meaningful animal ethics is incompatible with the permission to kill defenseless beings for human satisfaction and/or profit. as gary francione aptly notes, “singer regards most nonhumans as living in a sort of eternal present that precludes their having an interest in a continued existence” (18). a third and related concern with singer’s approach is that by characterizing animals as suffering beings, much of animal ethics, both in its theoretical and practical manifestations, has focused almost exclusively on how to minimize suffering at the expense of examining other positive duties we have towards other animals. as noted above, in order to prevent animal suffering, as singer understands it, factory farming would have to be abandoned. as long as the underlying attitude is that animals are ontologically inferior to human beings, the atrocity apparatus will remain in place. despite these shortcomings, singer’s ethical theory, with its conception of the animal as a suffering being at its center, remains highly influential among both scholars and activists, and has shaped how we define animals’ ethical entitlements and our ethical commitments to them. images of animal suffering are ubiquitous across the internet, and are frequently used by advocates to expose people to the brutal truth behind factory farming, animal experimentation, and other atrocities. efforts at reform tend to focus on how to reduce suffering, and ideally eliminate it. while these are all laudable campaign strategies and goals, there is a danger that emphasizing suffering to such an extent will inadvertently reify the majority of animals into little more than potentially or actually suffering beings, while their actual complexity (which, if we take our own blinders off, reveals itself everyday and in every context) remains obscured, to the detriment of real (rather than just token) ethical, and indeed, social, political, and historical transformation. ____________________________________________________________________ zipporah weisberg -“the simple magic of life”: phenomenology, ontology, and animal ethics 85 beyond animals as suffering bodies: nussbaum, regan, and bekoff et al. a number of other theorists have presented strong alternatives to singer’s account. it is beyond the scope of this paper to examine them all in detail, so i will limit my exploration here to a very cursory overview of martha nussbaum’s and tom regan’s respective theories of justice and rights, not least because they have resonated almost as widely as singer’s among animal ethicists nussbaum on capabilities and corresponding entitlements. nussbaum has challenged what she refers to as singer’s “homogenizing” tendencies by insisting that, while sentience might be a “threshold condition for membership in the community of beings who have entitlements based on justice” (“beyond ’compassion’” 309), other features of animal subjectivity must be taken into account, most notably animals’ various “capabilities,” the expression of which are necessary to their flourishing and the curtailment of which constitute injustice. in her words, “the capabilities approach finds ethical significance in the flourishing of basic (innate) capabilities — those that are evaluated as both good and central” and “it will also find harm in the thwarting or blighting of those capabilities.” she explains further that the “basic moral intuition” of the capabilities approach, “concerns the dignity of a form of life that possesses both abilities and deep needs. its basic goal is to address the need for a rich plurality of life activities” (frontiers 346). with different capabilities in mind, nussbaum distances herself from singer on the question of whether particular species membership has any moral relevance. for nussbaum, species is important inasmuch as different species flourish in different ways. while, for instance, a mentally challenged child might share some capabilities and needs with a chimpanzee, and while both are certainly sentient, the conditions for their flourishing are in fact are very different (“beyond ’compassion’” 310). this is an important distinction, and one that is not present in singer’s more sweeping criterion of sentience. in theory, acknowledging that different members of different species have different capabilities and needs would require that each being is ensured access to the necessary conditions for their particular form of flourishing. one problem with nussbaum’s analysis here, however, is her over-emphasis on species at the expense of the individual. capabilities may differ widely among members of the same species, just as they do among human beings. species obviously determines the range of capabilities, but not the specific expression or development thereof. nevertheless, nussbaum's move here, taken as a whole, is important. the recognition of the wide variety of animals’ capabilities generates entitlements that go far beyond the right not to suffer. nussbaum lays out a detailed list of entitlements humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 86 that other animals should be guaranteed — entitlements that loosely correspond to those afforded to human beings — including “life,” “bodily health,” “bodily integrity,” “sense, imagination, and thought,” “emotions,” “play,” and “control over one’s environment” (314-317). nussbaum boldly asserts that the protection and violation of these entitlements are issues of global justice, and calls for their entrenchment in national and international constitutions and agreements (317). these entitlements are comprehensive enough to protect animals from the most brutal forms of violence to which they are now routinely subjected in the animal industrial complex, and carry with them positive duties of justice to actively create the conditions for other animals' flourishing. and yet, as with singer, a lingering anthropocentrism undermines nussbaum’s commitments to her otherwise compelling theory of interspecies justice. although “life” is the first guaranteed entitlement, it appears that, in the end, it is not universally applicable and only protects against certain kinds of killing, namely, “gratuitous killing for sport” and “killing for luxury items such as fur" (314f). “the question of killing animals for food” is, nussbaum claims, “very difficult” to resolve. “the reason these cases are so difficult,” she argues, “is that animals will die anyway in nature, and often more painfully. painless predation might well be preferable to allowing the animal to be torn to bits in the wild or starved through overpopulation” (315). to suggest that the institutionalized killing of other animals does them a favor by providing them with a comparatively less violent or even painless death than they would meet in nature is nothing short of perverse, given the brutal methods required to kill thousands of animals en masse on any given day. the absurdity of nussbaum’s argument aside, her reluctance to oppose killing is inconsistent with her own theory of justice. in principle, nussbaum’s capabilities approach should provide a strong theoretical and practical basis for protecting animals from harms — including killing — and ensuring the conditions for their particular forms of flourishing are in place. yet her own biases prevent her from taking her own theory of justice to its logical end. regan on subjects-of-a-life and intrinsic value. tom regan, for his part, avoids the pitfalls of singer’s approach by positing that any being that qualifies as a "subject-of-a-life” has “intrinsic value” and is therefore always already deserving of protection from both exploitation and killing. like nussbaum, regan offers a more nuanced account of the subject than singer. he maintains that all beings are subjects-of-a-life who “see, hear, believe and desire, remember and anticipate, plan and intend,” who have a sense of the future and care about what happens to them, who experience “fear and contentment, anger and loneliness, frustration and satisfaction, cunning and imprudence,” who ____________________________________________________________________ zipporah weisberg -“the simple magic of life”: phenomenology, ontology, and animal ethics 87 exhibit “preferenceand welfare-interests,” and who have “psychophysical identity over time” (xvi). while some of the criteria listed here are specific to human-like cognition and consciousness, most of them are not, and in fact apply to a wide variety of other animals. therefore, regan argues in favor of universal veganism or a boycott of institutionalized harm and killing (xviii). however, in a disappointing move, regan redraws an arbitrary metaphysical (and ethical) line in the sand by suggesting that only “mentally normal mammals of a year or more” qualify as subjects-of-a-life. while his wish to avoid the unproductive debate about whether amoebae and paramecia ought to be granted the same ontological and ethical status as mammals is certainly valid, particularly in light of recent posthumanist musings on the agency bacteria and other microorganisms (see weisberg 106-109), excluding animals under one year of age is a bizarre move, given that the majority of animals tortured and killed in the animal industrial complex are no more than a few weeks or months old. while regan draws this line for strategic purposes, and clearly recognizes that animals under it are subjects-of-a-life, his concession to the anthropocentric tradition undermines the strength of his otherwise compelling case for animal rights. another concern is that regan reasserts human exceptionalist presuppositions by claiming that “human life contains within it the possibility of a richness not to be found in the life of other animals because, for example, of our advanced cognitive, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual capacities” (xvii). he does at least concede that this superiority has no moral weight and “provides no basis whatsoever for our exploitation of other animals.” however, as long as one species of animals is considered somehow ontologically superior to all the rest, there is always the possibility that it will claim more moral, legal, and other entitlements for itself at the expense of others. again, as with nussbaum, regan's ethical theory is not itself necessarily flawed. it is his inadvertent and/or strategic anthropocentrism that undermines his otherwise important, if incomplete, contribution. ethologists on animal emotionality, sociality, and morality. more recently, ethologists such as pioneering primatologist jane goodall, marc bekoff, jonathan balcombe, jeffrey moussaiff-masson, as well as other authors with scientific backgrounds such as jennifer s. holland (not to mention the growing number of animal caretakers and companions at sanctuaries and interspecies communities), have made especially meaningful inroads humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 88 into animal ethics by revealing the complexity and profundity of animal emotionality, sociality, and morality. building both on darwin’s work and on founding ethologist donald griffin’s insights into animal consciousness and behavior, contemporary ethologists have offered ever more in-depth and thorough observations and analyses of the ways in which mammals, birds, and fishes experience these and other emotions, including “grief, excitement, anticipation, bliss, rapture, embarrassment ... comfort,” as well as terror, trauma, boredom, depression, psychosis, loneliness, ecstasy, betrayal, curiosity, and many others (balcombe 33). dairy cows, for example, will struggle desperately to prevent their calves from being taken away from them, and will grieve for days once their babies are gone (having since been turned into veal calves, or future dairy cows and hamburger meat). other cows will often attempt to console a grieving mother by encircling her (“the hidden lives of cows”). the ethical implications of this richer ontology are already clear: insight into dairy cows’ experience of grief ought to give anyone who consumes dairy products under the assumption that the production of dairy is entirely separate from and/or not as harmful as the production of meat serious pause. balcombe also asks that we pay more attention to the importance of pleasure in other animals’ lives — in part so as to avoid reducing animals to suffering beings as singer does — and focuses much of his ethological work on exploring animal pleasure. balcombe describes the jubilation that dolphins express when they manage to disentangle themselves from fishing nets: they do nothing less than “leap repeatedly into the air, as though in joyful celebration” (166). he notes that, “when first let out into the fields following a long winter confinement, tear about the field, kicking their legs into the air" (166). again, the important ethical implications are immediately apparent. among other things, the recognition of animal pleasure draws attention to the grave injustice committed by a system of production that strips animals of everything but their suffering. but the recognition of animal pleasure, and the variety of ways it manifests itself, also provides a foundation for establishing how to enable pleasure. though i cannot enumerate a list of concrete entitlements or rights for reasons of scope, suffice it to say that the recognition of the vicissitudes of animal pleasure would entitle them to live in environments that are most conducive to experiencing pleasure (e.g., interspecies communities for domesticated animals, where they can choose where to roam and forage, who their friends are, and who they would rather avoid, what kinds of foods they would like to eat (not without due consideration of nutritional value, of course), and what activities they would like to engage in). ____________________________________________________________________ zipporah weisberg -“the simple magic of life”: phenomenology, ontology, and animal ethics 89 ethologists are also providing increasing evidence of many nonhuman animals’ profoundly moral sensibilities. for instance, in the following passage marc bekoff and jessica pierce list several examples of animals going to great lengths to offer aid and assistance to other animals in need: eleven elephants rescue a group of captive antelope in kwazula-natal; the matriarch undoes all of the latches on the gates of the enclosure with her trunk and lets the gate swing open so the antelope can escape.... a male diana monkey who has learned to insert a token into a slot to obtain food helps a female who can’t get the hang of a trick, inserting the token for her and allowing her to eat the food reward (ix). meanwhile, jennifer s. holland tells us of a macaque who adopted a stray kitten in indonesia (91), of a papillon dog who adopted a squirrel into her litter (131), and of pit bulls and a bulldog who consoled and cared for a grieving ferret (47). examples such as these abound in ethological literature, and demonstrate that many nonhuman animals are compassionate, empathetic, altruistic and caring, and have a strong sense of justice and fairness (bekoff and pierce x-xi). as a result of their participatory observations of animals’ lives, ethologists like pierce, balcombe, and bekoff dispense entirely with any last traces of anthropocentrism and unambiguously reject those hierarchical valuations of life which singer, nussbaum, and regan either deliberately reinforce or accidentally fall prey to. all of these authors provide glimpses of a richer ontology of animal subjectivity, a keener sense of the existential depth of animals’ lives. however, these glimpses too often appear as simply add-ons to, or qualifications of, the original singerian ontology of suffering, rather than offering a worked-out alternative conception of animal subjectivity. as we will now see, merleau-ponty’s and uexküll’s phenomenological analyses of subjectivity contribute to this project of elaborating upon animal ontology by introducing a whole new conceptual apparatus by which to capture yet more of the splendor of embodied existence. of particular relevance to our discussion are embodiment, perception, and world-making, to which we will now turn. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 90 phenomenological illuminations into animal ontology. flesh of our flesh: embodiment. the first fundamental contribution of phenomenology is to emphasize the significance of animals’ embodiment. embodiment here does not primarily refer to the fact of physical vulnerability — that after all is well-recognized in singer’s ontology — but rather to emphasize how subjectivity is tied to the perceiving body. jacob von uexküll and maurice merleau-ponty help rescue other animals from the oblivion of objectified existence to which they have been condemned for hundreds of years by relocating consciousness in the perceiving body. one of the chief goals of merleau-ponty’s phenomenological project was to uncover the dynamism, intricacy, and depth of human, and to a lesser extent, nonhuman subjectivity, which idealist, empiricist, and behaviorist perspectives had respectively occluded and/or denied. from the structure of behavior (1942) to his last posthumously published book, the visible and the invisible (1964), merleau-ponty’s main objective was to break out of these molds and blaze the trail towards an entirely new understanding of human and nonhuman animal beings as shaped primarily by their perceptual experience of and embeddedness in the world, a project uexküll was also devoted to, albeit from a scientific rather than a philosophical perspective. merleau-ponty was heavily influenced by uexküll's zoological writings and borrowed key concepts from him. merleau-ponty insists that the body is the seat of consciousness and that the embodied subject is always already in the world, never set apart from it: “rather than a mind and a body, man is mind with a body, a being who can only get to the truth of things because his body is, as it were, embedded in those things” (world of perception 43). the body is not passive, inert, mechanical, and unthinking; it is not a composite of parts or a sensory receptor, which through some kind of linear process computes sensory data into something meaningful for the subject, nor is it extended substance. the subject is not at one remove from its body. using himself as an example, he maintains, “i am not in front of my body, i am in it, or rather i am it” (phenomenology of perception 173). by insisting that he is his body, rather than merely in his body, merleau-ponty delivers the final blow to cartesian dualism. the body can no longer be regarded as a vessel for the mind and/or soul, nor are the body and the mind or soul inextricably linked: they are one and the same thing. this is a radical ontological claim and one that has major implications for animal ethics. for a start, with the body as the ground of subjectivity, it is no longer tenable to exclude animals, no matter what their proverbial species stripe, from membership in the community of subjects, or to hierarchize different creatures on the basis of their ____________________________________________________________________ zipporah weisberg -“the simple magic of life”: phenomenology, ontology, and animal ethics 91 possession or lack of any given set of traits, qualities, or capacities (such as the usual anthropocentric combination of reason, verbal language, and/or soul). to put it into crude syllogistic form, if animals are bodies, and bodies are subjects, animals are subjects. of course, animals’ historical designation as bodies qua sheer materiality, matter, and/or immanence, is part and parcel of their ruthless desubjectification and objectification. but, as we have seen, the body in merleau-ponty’s analysis means something very different than sheer materiality. embodiment is condition of embededdness in an infinite range of other phenomenal worlds teeming with meaningmaking beings. the body, merleau-ponty asserts, is “a nexus of living meanings” (175). the embodied subject is always already engaged in meaningful encounters with and in the world and the objects and beings it encounters (170). merleau-ponty’s theory of embodiment, which prioritizes the role of perception over cognition in shaping subjects’ lives, provides us with a new perspective from which to understand animal ontology. some might object here that if cognition is no longer relevant, then there is no meaningful ontological or ethical difference between trees, rocks, and animals. this would be a disastrous claim indeed, if this is what merleauponty is suggesting. but it is not. in fact, the crucial point merleau-ponty is trying to make is precisely the opposite: that the (human and nonhuman) animal body-subject is ontologically distinguished from other living beings and inanimate entities by virtue of its embodiment, which unlike the (differently valuable) existence of the aforementioned beings/things, is always already conscious and intentional, which is to say constantly generating meaning. traditionally, cognition is considered the distinguishing feature between not just living beings/things and animals, but between “higher” and “lower” animals. merleau-ponty gets around this problem, too, not by disavowing cognition, but by putting it in its place, as it were, as one among many rather than as the defining feature of subjectivity. while cognition is one element of human subjective experience, perception, as we will see below, takes precedence over cognition as the intermediary between subject and world (phenomenology 239). crucially, unlike cognition, which by certain definitions may be ascribed only to human beings or certain mammals, perception is something that all embodied subjects partake of. merleau-ponty’s analysis of embodiment is also important for animal ethics because, as ralph acampora explains, it shifts the burden of proof from the defenders of animal ethics and rights to its detractors. if we begin by acknowledging that we are always already caught up in the experience of being a lived body thoroughly involved in a plethora of ecological and social interrelationships with other living bodies and people, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 92 we “effectively transfe[r] the burden of proof from what has been denigrated as ethical ‘extensionism,’ or expansion ... to, instead, what we should rightly refer to as ethical isolationism or contraction (i.e., homo-exclusive anthropocentrism)” (5). in other words, in the framework of a philosophy of embodiment it is no longer a question of proving why other embodied subjects should be included in the ethical circle, but rather of proving why they ought to be excluded from membership in the first place. another important implication of grounding subjectivity in the body is that it potentially “re-animalizes” the human subject, an issue that is typically given much less attention in animal ethics than “humanizing” animal subjects (i.e., proving how similar they are to us). merleau-ponty makes this re-animalization of the human explicit in his later work. at one point, he proposed writing a book that would include “a description of man-animality intertwining” (visible 274). elsewhere he refers to “interanimal flesh,” or “interanimality,” which he defines roughly as “humanity that grounds the animal as animal, and animality that grounds man as man“ (smyth 178). we can understand this idea of “animality that grounds man as man” not in the sense that recognizing animals’ animality reinforces humans’ non-animality, but rather that humanity is nothing without animality (i.e. embodiment). bryan smyth notes that in his work on interanimality, “merleau-ponty was developing a view that revised the traditional hierarchical distinctions between human and non-human life and redrew them laterally as so many ways of being bodily with the common element of ‘flesh’“ (178). it is through, or rather as, flesh that one body-subject relates to or with another: “the thickness of the body, far from rivaling that of the world, is on the contrary the sole means i have to go unto the heart of things, by making myself a world and by making them flesh“ (135). flesh is not a physical substance but an “‘element’ of being,“ like earth, air, water and fire, “a sort of incarnate principle that brings a style of being wherever there is a fragment of being" (139). also pointing to the ethical potency of a theory of embodied intersubjectivity as laid out by merleau-ponty, elizabeth behnke suggests that, while merleau-ponty was not particularly concerned with the fate of nonhuman animals as such, his theories of intercorporeality, interanimality, ineinander (i.e. “intertwining” or “interpenetration,” a concept first introduced by husserl) and flesh clear the path for an “exploration of an intercorporeal/interspecies practice of peace” (94). she defines this practice of peace as the particular shift in bodily comportment [that] simultaneously transforms this situation from a spectacle i confront (and attempt to dominate from ____________________________________________________________________ zipporah weisberg -“the simple magic of life”: phenomenology, ontology, and animal ethics 93 the outside) to a co-situatedness, a situation of which i myself am a part and in whose dynamics i am always already participating, whether i realize it or not (96). the human-animal relationship manifested thus is not hierarchical, adds benkhe, “but a lateral relation of kinship, einfühlung [empathy], and ineinander among living beings“ (99). although merleau-ponty did not develop the ethical implications of this notion of ineinender, he certainly demonstrated that his iteration of phenomenology is mutually exclusive with species prejudice. it should be noted that the concept of flesh in particular is not without its problems. the principal risk is that it implies a collapse of ethically relevant ontological distinctions between human and nonhuman animal subjects and living beings such as trees and plants and other entities such as rocks. as noted above, it would be catastrophic for animal ethics if the substantive ontological distinctions between human and nonhuman animals and other beings and entities were ignored. it is unclear how far merleau-ponty was going with this conception of flesh as a universal element of being. however, one aspect of his theory of flesh can be mobilized to deepen our understanding of human and nonhuman animal ontology as characterized in part by a phenomenological corporeality, or conscious embodiment. the call to revive (or perhaps reinvent) the incarnate principle, which we have long since abandoned (or perhaps never upheld) is compelling. under the rule of cartesianism we have exiled ourselves from the raw, pulsing universe of enfleshed beings into an imaginary realm of pure spirit. from this lonely and awkward place, as if in punishment for our cosmic error, we have lost touch with the very source of being, which, as our everyday experiences and the most important aspects of our lives — our relationships with human and nonhuman loved ones — remind us, is touching flesh with flesh. flesh is the source of connection, affection, love, creation, movement, activity, and of course also pain and loss. animals are flesh of our flesh, and we theirs. that said, the danger of the concept of flesh outlined above might be so grave that it is best to leave it behind. certainly, there is plenty more in merleau-ponty’s theory of embodiment upon which to build a more robust ontology and ethics, especially his theory of perception and world-making, the latter of which he borrows from uexküll. tasting yellow, touching blue: perception and world-making. perception takes precedence over cognition in the phenomenological account of the subject. merleau-ponty explains humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 94 that the awareness of color and taste, for example, stem neither from ideas, nor from responses to stimuli, but rather from perceptual experience. merleau-ponty illustrates this aspect of perception by pointing to jean-paul sartre’s famous discussion of a lemon in being and nothingness (1943). the subject’s perception of the yellow color of a lemon cannot be severed from its perception of the sour taste of the lemon. as sartre puts it, “it is the sourness of the lemon which is yellow, it is the yellow of the lemon which is sour“ (qtd. in merleau-ponty, world 48). the same goes for the perception of other foods and other objects. sartre continues, “the fluidity, the tepidity, the bluish color, the undulating restlessness of the water in a pool are given at one stroke, each quality through the others.“ not suprisingly, uexküll makes a similar point when he suggests that “the sensation ‘blue’ becomes the ‘blueness’ of the sky, the sensation ‘green’ becomes the ‘greenness’ of the lawn, and so forth“ (48). the awareness of blueness and sourness neither stem from ideas, nor responses to stimuli, but rather from perceptual experience. we also learn that perception is never a one-sided affair. it is a multi-party exchange, which reconciles the perceiving subject and the objects of perception in a mutually enriching and reinforcing relation. david abram emphasizes the activity of both subject and object and also of the multiple ways a single subject can perceive and experience the same object, depending on the former’s mood. the subject and object are forever entangled in a dance, the steps of which are never quite the same with each passing moment (spell of the sensuous 57). the phenomenological recognition of the involvement of all the senses in participatory subject-object encounters also undermines both empiricist and idealist claims that we are passive recipients of sensory data or that we impose our own categories of understanding onto the world as sovereign subjects. in contrast to the objectivist position, which regards the world as passive and inert, the phenomenological position holds that both perceiver and perceiver are actively involved in an intentional co-constitutive exchange. this is not to attribute false agency to objects. but rather to emphasize that perception mediates and shapes the subject’s relationships with objects. the object itself “participates” in the exchange as a presence that is there prior to any conceptualization. further putting lie to the notion that animals simply react to external stimuli like a welloiled mechanism, merleau-ponty and uexküll both observe that each embodied subject dwells within a “perceptual field” or unique perceptual environment to which it relates as an extension of itself (merleau-ponty, phenomenology 4) — what uexküll termed the umwelt, a term that resonated deeply with merleau-ponty. the umwelt is not the earth as physical substance, but world of a living being, the world of significance. the umwelt ____________________________________________________________________ zipporah weisberg -“the simple magic of life”: phenomenology, ontology, and animal ethics 95 is not made up of objective phenomena. rather, as uexküll writes, “each and every living thing is a subject that lives in its own world, of which it is the centre” (52). moreover, the umwelt is never neutral, universal, or incidental, but is specific to each subject. what shines forth in one umwelt for one subject might fade into the background for another, depending on the subject’s mood or perceptual infrastructure (uexküll 97; merleau-ponty, phenomenology 4). each animal in fact co-constitutes its umwelt. there is “a mysterious relation with the animal and the milieu it resembles” (merleau-ponty, nature 185). it is as though each subject not only inhabits its umwelt, but blends in with it, as a part of it, and as its co-creator. this “mysterious relation” is both ontologically and ethically significant. an animal removed from her optimal environment in which she can co-create meaning with the subjects and objects around her in a way that provides her with the greatest fulfillment, and placed into a sub-optimal environment or worse, where she is forced into a new kind of phenomenological relationship that undermines the fulfillment of her phenomenological entelechy, is done a great injustice. as a concrete example, we might think of an orca removed from the ocean amongst its pod, and placed in a foreign environment, say a small tank at a water park. the orca continues to have a mysterious relation with its new umwelt, but the relationship is inevitably hostile, dysfunctional, and a source of misery. uexküll sheds further light on how animals create meaningful worlds for themselves in his discussion of objects as “carriers of meaning.” he explains that an object becomes a “carrier of meaning as soon as it enters into a relationship with a subject” (uexküll 140), and every carrier of meaning in turn “becomes the complement of the animal subject” (146). indeed, animals (human and nonhuman) never actually relate to “objects” per se but only to carriers of meaning, which they co-constitute (140). “every subject spins out, like the spider’s threads, its relations to certain qualities of things and weaves them into a solid web, which carries its existence” (52). the idea that specific carriers of meaning “carry” each animal's existence is compelling because it highlights just how richly textured every moment of an animal’s life is, whether in optimal or sub-optimal circumstances, or anything in between. it also draws attention to the uniqueness of every animal life: different objects carry different meanings for different individuals. these same carriers of meaning may not even be noticed by other subjects, let alone related to in the same way, for each subject has its own carriers of meaning (uexküll 140). with this in mind, we have yet stronger grounds for abandoning anthropocentric biases that lead to the hierarchical valuation of human above nonhuman animal life. what counts is not what meaning each object has to each humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 96 subject, but the fact that each object has some kind of meaning (or not) for each subject. overall, the concept of umwelt is important for rethinking human-animal relationality because it points to the holistic nature of animals’ subjective experience. this provides a better framework from which to construct an ethics that properly attends to all aspects of animals’ well-being — not just the physical or psychological, but also the phenomenological. the ethical upshots magnifying the delights and horrors of optimal and exploitative conditions respectively. one of the ethical upshots of this recognition of the perceptual complexity of animal existence is that if we acknowledge that the objects in the world form tapestries of meaning for other animals, just as do they do for us, and that each animal inhabits its own multidimensional world, it is that much more incumbent upon us to create the conditions for other animals to have free and unlimited access to these meaningful objects and worlds. by way of phenomenology, we have a better sense, in other words, of what constitutes delight, flourishing, and fulfillment for other animals, and are therefore in a better position to protect animals’ phenomenological well-being. merleau-ponty and uexküll’s characterization of human and animal subjects as embodied purveyors of meaning accords ostensibly mundane or instinctual activities such as foraging for and consuming food with a kind of existential depth, something that other theories of the subject do not necessarily capture, or at least not as vividly. we learn from phenomenology that in the process of rooting for food, or rolling in the mud, a sow is not simply blindly rehearsing a set of pre-established behaviors, but is in fact becoming and being who she is. the pig’s sense of satisfaction upon achieving her goal is not merely a result of being sated or cooled, but also an indication that she has just expressed herself meaningfully to, in, and with the world in general and her world in particular. when a hawk soars through the sky, he is not simply getting from point a to point b, but inhabiting what we might call from our (limited human) perspective a sky-world, but which, of course, he experiences in a way we cannot begin to fathom or explain with words. in short, phenomenology teaches us that other animals’ worlds are filled with multitudinous colors, sounds, tastes, and textures and therefore meanings we may not have access to. there are qualitative differences between how human and nonhuman animals experience their worlds, but so too are there qualitative differences between how each human experiences its world(s). an interspecies ethics celebrates this infinite variety as the wellspring of creative activity, connectivity, curiosity, and even ecstatic transcendence, albeit not transcendence over and above the body, but with it ____________________________________________________________________ zipporah weisberg -“the simple magic of life”: phenomenology, ontology, and animal ethics 97 and through it. to reiterate, we can never know the precise contents of an animal's conscious or lived experience — nor should we aspire to for this will be impossible without engaging in invasive and violent practices, which in any case would only yield distorted results — but, with the help of phenomenology, we can perhaps see a little more clearly how imbued with meaning and depth the most seemingly banal activities are for other animals. for example, we might surmise that in addition to taking on a secure “dwelling tone,” to borrow yet further from uexküll’s esoteric terminology, a hen’s nest may take on a “love tone,” for she knows her young, to whom she is tending so gingerly, will emerge from it one day. when she feels and hears the first pecks through their hard protective covers, the nest may take on a curiosity and excitement tone. and, of course, the same nest will take on an entirely different tone for each chick discovering it for the first time — the “effect tone,” perhaps, of the unknown. a cow munching on grass is not just revitalizing her store of energy. in the process of acquiring her next meal, she is not simply blindly rehearsing a set of pre-established behaviors. rather, she is becoming who she is and ought to be. her sense of satisfaction upon achieving her goal is not solely a result of being sated, but also an indication that she has just expressed herself meaningfully to and in the world. in their daily activities, animals are expressing their very essence, however fluid in evolutionary terms that essence might be. with the phenomenological conception of the subject in mind, we have to account not only for the absence of suffering, or even simply for what provides animals with pleasure, satisfaction, and the ability to develop their capabilities, but for the presence of speciesand individual-appropriate carriers of meaning. it also creates a new degree of attentiveness in us to other animals’ subjective experiences, thus inspiring yet more meticulous care and concern. it is not possible here to tease out in concrete terms what this new attentiveness would amount to, but it is clear that once we recognize the richness of animal existence and their perceptual sensitivity, nothing short of a complete transformation of their conditions of existence is necessary. at the moment, we entrap them in cold, sterile, drab worlds with carriers of meaning that, though we may not be able to capture the precise phenomenological experience, undoubtedly carry distressing meanings such as unwelcomeness, aloneness, sadness, and alienation, among other things. while phenomenology moves us away from the focus of animals as primarily suffering bodies, it does not eliminate suffering from its purview. rather, and indeed to the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 98 contrary, it provides greater insight into the phenomenological aspects of suffering, which are typically ignored. it thereby raises the stakes of the struggle for animal liberation. for example, when analyzed through a phenomenological lens the cruelties we inflict on other animals within the animal industrial complex are magnified ten-fold. in a phenomenological account, it becomes immediately and irrefutably apparent that to deprive animals of even one meaningful object (e.g. grass or sunlight) is already to strip them of several layers of meaningful experience, to say nothing of the devastation we cause when we deprive them of all their familiar carriers of meaning. new carriers of meaning undoubtedly present themselves in labs, factory farms, and other sites of violence. the white coat of the lab technician, for example, might be the white of terror, dread, fear, pain, and betrayal for a dog, cat, rabbit, macaque, or rat cowering in his cage or container. the smell of blood and gore emanating from the slaughterhouse is very likely the smell of desperation and anguish for the cow or pig waiting her turn. for the chimpanzee, the barren cage or crate very likely carries the effect tone, not of housing or protection, but of isolation, deprivation, boredom, and loneliness. for the circus elephant, the grey of her concrete cell is the grey of misery, while the grey of her fellow elephants, if only she could be reunited with them, would be the grey of security and contentment. for the self-mutilating mink in his outdoor cage on a fur farm, the white of snow is no longer the white of home and kin, but of hopelessness. thus, phenomenology reminds us that animals not only suffer physical pain and emotional anguish, but are also subjected to a process of total phenomenological distortion whereby every object in their environment, and indeed their own bodies, are a source of their own existential negation. since the animal is irrevocably shaped and transformed by her environment, if the environment and the activities possible within it are out of synch with what comes naturally to her, her life is stripped of the meaning that makes it worth living. it becomes abundantly clear that the only ethically sound solution from a phenomenological standpoint is to eliminate the infernal hellholes that constitute the animal industrial complex and to provide sanctuary and refuge to animals in welcoming spaces that are designed to provide optimal opportunities for their phenomenological unfolding as perceptual beings. fostering an ethics of empathy. in the end, phenomenology urges us to nurture and develop our repressed empathy for other animals. maurice hamington observes that merleau-ponty’s concept of flesh in particular kindles universal empathy, an empathy for others who are, in some sense, also constitutively a part of oneself. “on this account," hamington writes, “experience is understood as open ended both temporally and laterally across other bodies” (211). as different as each being is ontologically, we ____________________________________________________________________ zipporah weisberg -“the simple magic of life”: phenomenology, ontology, and animal ethics 99 all partake of the same elemental substance, and therefore can be said to share each other’s joys and pains. this fundamental mutuality is at the core of interspecies intersubjectivity, for it implies a community of embodied, enfleshed beings, who, as ontologically alien as they might otherwise be, are nevertheless always already conjoined by the shared experience of mortality. kenneth shapiro maintains that empathy “is the general access to the intended world of the other” (191). while conventional usages of the term empathy refer to feeling another’s suffering, a phenomenological usage refers to participating in another’s world, if only partially. he explains that from merleau-ponty’s perspective, “empathy is a second-order application of the notion of intentionality. empathic experience involves appropriating a second body that then becomes my auxiliary focus. though my lived body, i accompany yours as it intends an object” (191). empathy thus understood is much more comprehensive than simply feeling bad for another's suffering or imagining oneself in their proverbial shoes. phenomenological empathy involves perceptually accompanying another's body through its lived experiences, good and bad. the relocation of the subject and consciousness in the body intensifies our empathic attentiveness to other animals’ vulnerability. acampora suggests that the phenomenology of embodiment enjoins us to develop our intrinsic “corporal compassion" and cultivate a “post-humanist ethos of somatic sympathy” (237). regardless of the myriad variations among species, even a “minimal mutuality of common carnal nature suffices phenomenologically to establish compassionate concern for the other.” just being a body (i.e. an animal) is enough to warrant the adoption of a compassionate comportment, not as a matter of choice, but as a matter of permanent obligation. he echoes ecofeminists such as josephine donovan, carol adams, and lori gruen among others, who remind us that we are already empathically oriented towards other animals, but that our empathy has been actively suppressed as a means of perpetuating their exploitation. killing subjects, losing worlds: the insurmountable injunction against killing. more than just inspiring empathy, phenomenology inspires a prohibition on killing not least because it uncovers the radical violence and injustice that killing entails, something which, as we saw above, singer and nussbaum fail to do, and which regan could do better. a phenomenological ethics inspired by merleau-ponty and uexküll, however, does not allow for this kind of lingering and vicious anthropocentrism to undermine the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 100 commitment to protecting the lives of all embodied beings, irrespective of their capacity for future planning or even self-awareness. from a phenomenological perspective, whether or not an animal can be killed painlessly, as singer surmises, is irrelevant. to kill is, as regan insists, to subject an animal to the harm of deprivation. but, unlike regan’s deontology, which despite itself lapses into anthropocentrism by according greater value to human life, the deprivation is equal for any embodied being precisely because, as we have seen, each animal’s world is as meaningful to it as another world is to another animal. killing, simply put, is not a matter of extinguishing a life within a split second and never looking back. killing is a practice imbued with phenomenological meaning of its own, both for the killer and the killed. the killer shatters the continuity between himself and the animal he murders. he cuts off, as it were, his own flesh despite himself, which he then cannibalizes in the destructive act of consumption. he shatters his own creative world and replaces it with a death-world. one of the lessons we learn from merleau-ponty and uexküll’s phenomenology is that to kill a subject is to kill a whole world — indeed, an infinity of worlds. we have seen how animals co-create meaning with objects and subjects in their environments. as we noted above, perceptual embodiment is participatory, which means that it requires other subjects for it to take place. each time we extinguish an animal subject we extinguish the worlds she inhabited and also the worlds we and other embodied subjects would have co-created with her. to kill a single animal, then, let alone tens of billions, is to tear asunder the world, and the worlds that make it up. in his phenomenological analysis of species extinction, mick smith argues that extinction is “senseless” because it cheats the still living of the multitudinous “senses” the departed invited us to partake in while still of the earth (22). smith enumerates five devastating losses: (1) “the loss of a species of appearances in the world — of the innumerable ways in which beings become materially manifest in the world such that others sense their presence” and the loss of the possibility of “touching and being touched” by the extinguished ones; (2) “the loss of species of creative involvements in the world — of their unique contributions to and effects upon others and of the material possibilities offered through their worldly interventions”; (3) “the loss of a species of significance for the world” and the “curtailment of that species' (bio)semiotic potential”; (4) “the loss of a species of openness on the world — of phenomenological experiences of a sensed world,” that is, the loss of a particular phenomenological way of experiencing the world (as, for example, in “the dodo’s mode of experiencing the ecology of mauritius”); and (5) “the loss of a species constitutive of ecological community — where ecological community might be understood in terms of the combination and sharing of ____________________________________________________________________ zipporah weisberg -“the simple magic of life”: phenomenology, ontology, and animal ethics 101 all these senses (appearance, effect, meaning, phenomena) of the relations between all of these and all other things that together compose the world” (22). in other words, no loss is limited to the vanquished species themselves, but constitutes a phenomenological, as much as an ecological, loss for all. the first loss is the loss of the possibility of novel sensuous encounters, the second of the worlds that only the extinct could have co-created, the third the loss of a layer of “significance” that only the absent species (and its individual members) could have conveyed, the fourth is the loss of a particular world that would have been inhabited by the annihilated species, and thereby enriched the worlds of others, and the fifth is the loss of a member or members of a community whose flourishing depends on the presence of all. we can take smith’s argument a step further and argue that not only extinction, but also the mass murder of animals in the animal industrial complex — and, by extension, the homogenization of animals by way of selective breeding and genetic engineering — constitutes another profound loss: the loss of the brilliant constellation of unique worlds that we would co-create with animals were they able to construct their own worlds in a way that is continuous with their telos and phenomenological unfolding. the loss of each and every individual animal to our insatiable appetite for their flesh and body parts, to our callous indifference, to our sadistic fascination with violent power is a loss of the gentleness, respect and compassion that is integral to the survival of our species and of the earth itself. the injustice of killing is the injustice of robbing an animal of the meaningful life it would have otherwise led. phenomenology, in other words, compels us to recognize that killing an individual being is not an isolated act, but, if you will, an act of total and irreversible destruction against an entire community of phenomenological subjects. one can never recreate the world another created, even if one participated in its creation. a community is hurt not just by losing a friend, a mother, a sister, or a brother, but by losing the thick world of meaning the slain invited them to enter and with which their own worlds were built. we cannot rebuild the worlds we have lost, but we can prevent the loss of more worlds by adopting a phenomenologically grounded ethics of nonkilling. towards an ethics of re-enchantment and epistemic humility. while providing insight into the perceptual dimension of animal subjectivity, and thus offering a stronger foundation for developing an interspecies ethics, phenomenology also beckons us, and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 102 indeed requires us, to renounce any false sense of omniscience we might have, and instead to accept that only partial knowledge about other animals is ever possible. this in turn paves the way for a re-enchantment of the world. re-enchantment has been advocated by a variety of thinkers over the past two hundred and fifty years — from the romantics from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, to the early frankfurt school in the early to mid-twentieth century, and to contemporary ecophenomenologists such as neil evernden and david abram. the significant historical and contextual circumstances that distinguish the various thinkers from the traditions outlined above notwithstanding, they collectively aspire to restore a sense of awe, wonder, and humility towards the natural world and its inhabitants, which enlightenment rationality, industrialization, and, more recently, technological rationality — which reduces beings to objects of calculation and control in service of capital — have seriously undermined. for critical theorists generally, and ecophenomenologists in particular, the hope is that by engendering a renewed sense of appreciation for the magnificence of nature and nonhuman beings, a broader cultural shift will ensue which will redirect late modern society away from systemic barbarism and towards respectful, non-exploitative, and mutually reinforcing engagement with human and nonhuman beings. the assumption underlying the call to re-enchantment is that the drive for “progress” (qua industrial development, “economic growth,” scientific innovation and increasing control over and manipulation of nonhuman life) has produced a totalitarian apparatus of violence against nonhuman animals. re-enchantment can help counter these trends by offering an opportunity to revalue nonhuman beings from an entirely different vantage point. to be sure, re-enchantment is a seemingly abstract and intangible aspiration. but re-enchantment is not meant to be programmatic or to provide concrete solutions to the civilizational crisis we are facing. as evernden insists, “even to deal in terms of problems and solutions would defeat [the] purpose” of a discussion of reenchantment, because “it is in thinking in such terms that characterizes the conventional [instrumentalist] world-view and condemns us to continue in this path of existence” (140). in this vein, i argue that, while it cannot and ought not to provide practical solutions to various crises of our civilization, a progressive re-enchantment of the world can serve as the backdrop for the radical historical transformation that is required to overcome our culture of cruelty. overall, the goal of re-enchantment is to help us once again to “believe in the simple magic of life,” and so to salvage what remains of the dying world and its inhabitants. ____________________________________________________________________ zipporah weisberg -“the simple magic of life”: phenomenology, ontology, and animal ethics 103 phenomenologists’ explorations into the structure of animals’ experiences in general, and of suffering and flourishing in particular, foster re-enchantment by restoring depth and meaning to other animals’ lives, and also potentially augment our capacity for interspecies empathy. i suggest that phenomenology also nurtures re-enchantment by restoring a sense of mystery to the natural world and its inhabitants, which the project of modernity has made a concerted effort to destroy. by affirming that there is always already something that exceeds the grasp of our totalizing knowledge, phenomenology challenges us to proceed with perpetual humility. to claim to fully know another is to claim ownership over it, to dominate it, and to disenchant the world. to recognize and appreciate the other’s radical otherness, on the other hand, its ultimate uncontainability, unknowability, is to preserve the other’s freedom and to reveal the “the simple magic” of existence. uexküll’s project was to unearth the truth about the as yet unknown or misunderstood nonhuman world, but at the same time to revel in its inscrutability. he suggests, for example, that his phenomenological biology is meant to lead us on “a walk into unknown worlds,” not only to try to know those worlds, but also to enjoy the perpetual unknowability they confront and seduce us with (uexküll 41). merleau-ponty maintains that in breaking free from the confines of objectivism, the phenomenological reduction uncovers the “magic,” the nuances and unbridled vitality, of the phenomenal world (merleau-ponty, world 39). like modern artists such as paul cézanne, the phenomenologist brings the world and the perception of it back to life so that we are newly “filled with wonder” at the world. from this novel vantage point, the world appears “strange and paradoxical,” not in a derogatory sense, but rather in the sense of producing a feeling of rapture (phenomenology xv). abram, meanwhile, contends that we live in a magical world inhabited by an infinite number of beings we might (or might not) be able to perceive, but may not necessarily ever truly know. for abram, magic does not necessarily consist in contacting the supernatural or spirit-world per se, but rather in acknowledging that the world is inhabited by “multiple intelligences” whose intelligences are apparent, but not entirely accessible (becoming animal 269). simply by virtue of being a world populated by other perceiving subjects, the world is a magical place. this magical world is not a world projected in fantasy, but the world in its dense and exuberant materiality. the task is simply to open ourselves up to appreciating its splendor on its own terms (abram, spell 10). in restoring the earth and its nonhuman animal inhabitants to their resplendence by way of the phenomenological foray into their only partially accessible umwelten, re humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 104 enchantment provides a powerful form of resistance to technological rationality, which is expressly geared towards eliminating all the magic from living beings and reducing them to economic calculations of value. in the infinite repeatability it revolves around, mass production operates on a logic that is diametrically opposed to life itself. “the mass-produced artifacts of civilization, from milk cartons to washing machines and computers,” abram explains, “draw our senses into a dance that endlessly reiterates itself without variation" (spell 64). the repetition of form and content is the hallmark of late capitalist modernity, which spews forth not only identical inert objects, but also, barely-living-slave-commodities. as mass-produced objects in biotechnological laboratories, factory farms, and so on, nonhuman animals are condemned to a torturous uniformity and a ceaseless repetitive tedium. the re-enchanted world, on the other hand, is infinitely variegated and constantly surprises she who beholds it. “the patterns on the stream’s surface as it ripples over the rocks, or on the bark of an elm tree, or in a cluster of weeds, are all composed of repetitive figures that never exactly repeat themselves” (64). this unrepeatability and unpredictability of which abram speaks breaks every rule of rationalization. certainly, for animals to flourish as subjects, they must have the opportunity to engage with the world spontaneously and creatively. the recognition of another’s unknowability is also ethically powerful because it evokes and requires a renewed sense of humility from the human subject in the face of the notfully-knowable nonhuman other. the empathic understanding that one can “extrapolat[e] from merleau-ponty's corporeal epistemology is always partial, always incomplete, should always reflect a certain humility given its ambiguities, and yet it exists” (hamington 216). humility is a core value of any phenomenologist. “the philosopher [viz., the phenomenologist] … is a perpetual beginner, which means that he takes for granted nothing that men, learned or otherwise, believe they know” (phenomenology xv). what assures me that there is more to the other than meets the eye is that it existed “before,” or exists “outside” and beyond my encounter with it, and also that others perceive it too in ways that are meaningful for them, but not necessarily for me (abram, spell 39). furthermore, if we are “carnally embedded within the sensuous field,” we are bound by the limits of our own corporeality, and therefore “we have only a partial view of each entity or situation that we encounter; there is no aspect of this world that can be fathomed or figured out in its entirety" (abram, becoming 269). the acknowledged limits of the phenomenological analysis are indication enough that there is always so much more to the world than we can grasp at any given moment. in response to the instrumentalization of knowledge and animals in his time, michel de montaigne argued that it is a grave error to arrogantly assert “je sais tout” (“i know ____________________________________________________________________ zipporah weisberg -“the simple magic of life”: phenomenology, ontology, and animal ethics 105 everything”) rather than humbly asking the perennial rhetorical question: “que sais-je?” (“what do i know?”) (13). by admitting there will always be something in the other animal which remains beyond our grasp, there is less incentive to subject animals to cruel experiments in an attempt to extract every last iota of information we can from them in our mad rush for increasing scientific and technological power behnke maintains that embracing other animals’ unknowability is part and parcel of the “interspecies practice of peace.” by renouncing the claim to total knowledge about an animal other, one becomes more “responsive” to what it might be communicating to us. as she puts it, “adopting an interrogative attitude that relinquishes the project of knowing in favor of a responsive comportment … contributes to improvisational comportment in general and to the practice of peace in particular” (behnke 107108). the “improvisational comportment” is critical to creating peaceable relations because it allows both parties to break out of the molds into which they have been cast based on incorrect and prejudicial — but nevertheless widespread — assumptions. thus, while phenomenology inspires us to learn more, it also inspires us to take a proverbial step back, to relate to the nonhuman through a kind of humble disengagement, a letting-go and a letting-be. conclusion. without a rich ontology, a rich ethics is impossible to develop. phenomenology cannot provide this ontology or ethics on its own, nor need it do so. there are other accounts of animal ontology in animal studies literature that we can draw upon to develop stronger ethical frameworks than singer offers. but without phenomenology’s insights, our understanding of animal subjectivity will remain unnecessarily limited, and so will our ethics. i have sketched out what a phenomenologically inspired ethics would consist of: a firm prohibition of killing other animals and a stronger and more comprehensive commitment to ensuring that they have all the means possible to fulfill their phenomenological entelechies. adopting a phenomenological ethics also means letting go of our pursuit of knowledge-as-power over animals and relishing instead the mystery and magic of their existence. acknowledgments. the publication of this paper would not have been possible without the generous support of the abby benjamin postdoctoral fellowship in animal ethics and the invaluable guidance and feedback i received on various drafts from will kymlicka, sue donaldson, asher horowitz, john sanbonmatsu, and robert c. jones. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 106 works cited abram, david. becoming animal: an earthly cosmology. new york: pantheon, 2010. _____. the spell of the sensuous. new york: vintage, 1996. acampora, ralph. “toward a properly post-humanist ethos of somatic sympathy.” strangers to nature: animal lives and human ethics. ed. gregory r. smulewicz-zucker. . lanham: lexington books, 2012. 235-248 balcombe, jonathan. pleasurable kingdom: animals and the nature of feeling good. london: macmillan, 2006. behnke, elizabeth a. “from merleau-ponty’s concept of nature to an interspecies practice of peace.” animal others: on ethics, ontology, and animal life. ed. h. peter steeves. new york: suny press, 1999. 93-116. bekoff, marc. the emotional lives of animals: a leading scientist explores animal joy, sorrow, and empathy — and why they matter. novato: new world library, 2007. bekoff, marc, and jessica pierce. wild justice: the moral lives of animals. chicago; london: u chicago p, 2009. buber, martin. i and thou. trans. walter kaufmann. new york: simon and schuster, 1996. donovan, josephine and carol j. adams, eds. the feminist care tradition in animal ethics. new york: columbia up, 2007. evernden, neil. the natural alien: humankind and environment. second ed. toronto: u toronto p, 1993. francione, gary l. animals as persons: essays on the abolition of animal exploitation. new york: columbia up, 2008. goodall, jane. in the shadow of man. first mariner books edition. new york: mariner books, 2000. ____________________________________________________________________ zipporah weisberg -“the simple magic of life”: phenomenology, ontology, and animal ethics 107 gruen, lori. “empathy and vegetarian commitments.” the feminist care tradition in animal ethics. eds. josephine donovan and carol j. adams. new york: columbia up, 2007. 333-343. hamington, maurice. “resources for a feminist care ethics in merleau-ponty’s phenomenology of the body.” intertwinings: interdisciplinary encounters with merleauponty. ed. gail weiss. albany: suny p, 2008. 203-222. holland, jennifer s. unlikely friendships: 47 remarkable stories from the animal kingdom. new york: workman, 2011. masson, jeffrey moussaiff. the pig who sang to the moon: the emotional world of farm animals. new york: ballantine, 2003. print. merleau-ponty, maurice. nature: course notes from the collège de france. comp. dominique séglard. trans. robert vallier. evanston: northwestern up, 2003. _____. phenomenology of perception. trans. colin smith. london: routledge, 2002. _____. the structure of behavior. trans. alden l. fisher. pittsburgh: duquesne up, 2011. _____. the visible and the invisible. ed. claude lefort. trans. alphonso lingis. evanston: northwestern up, 1968. _____. the world of perception. trans. oliver davis. new york: routledge, 2004. montaigne, michel de. an apology for raymond seybond. trans. m. a. screech. london: penguin, 1993. nussbaum, martha c. “beyond ‘compassion and humanity’: justice for nonhuman animals.” current debates and new directions. eds. cass r. sunstein and martha c. nussbaum. new york: oxford up, 2004. 299-320. _____. frontiers of justice: disability, nationality, and species membership. cambridge, ma: belknap, 2006. regan, tom. the case for animal rights. berkely: u california p, 2004. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 108 sartre, jean-paul. being and nothingness. trans. hazel e. barnes. new york: washington square press, 1992. singer, peter. animal liberation. new revised ed. new york: avon, 1990. _____. practical ethics. third edition. cambridge: cambridge up, 2011. shapiro, kenneth. “understanding dogs through kinesthetic empathy, social construction, and history.” anthrozoös 3.3 (1990): 184-195. smith, mick. “ecological community, the sense of the world, and senseless extinction.” environmental humanities 2 (2013): 21-41. smyth, bryan. “merleau-ponty and the generation of animals.” phaenex 2.2 (fall/winter 2007): 170-215. “the hidden lives of cows.” people for the ethical treatment of animals, n.d. web. 19 may 2013. http://www.peta.org/issues/animals-used-for-food/factory-farming/cows/hidden-livescows/. uexküll, jacob von. a foray into the worlds of animals and humans with a theory of meaning. trans. joseph d. o’neil. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2010. weisberg, zipporah. “the trouble with posthumanism: bacteria are people too.” thinking the unthinkable: new readings in critical animal studies. ed. john sorenson. toronto: canadian scholar’s press, 2014. 93-116. microsoft word mccown -pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:1 julie mccown animating the corpse: the sutured hybridity of animal puppets in ladislas starewitch’s the tale of the fox in the 1937 stop motion film the tale of the fox, ladislas starewitch1 painstakingly recreates animal bodies, ranging from lions to flies, with astonishing detail; the animal puppets are capable of intricate and widely varied facial expressions and almost all possess unnervingly realistic mouths (lips, teeth, tongues, and even drool). these animal bodies, however, do not remain pristine and untouched; they are subjected to all manner of bodily indignities that leave them mutilated, scarred, or stripped to mere bones. the film does not hide the animal body, living or dead, from viewers. it refuses to let the viewer forget that these puppets represent physical animal bodies. this foregrounding of physical animal bodies has become a common feature of recent animal studies criticism. one of the most salient examples, but certainly not the only, is nicole shukin’s theory of animal capital with its rendering of animal bodies as both semiotic and material currency (21). this doubling of the animal body is also a feature of sarah kay’s work, particularly her examination of the ethical implications of medieval books in which animals are both the subject of the text and the material upon which the text is written. when describing “the uncanny conjunction of flayed skin in the text with the flayed skin of the page,” kay uses the term “suture,” which she defines as “a short-circuiting between the usually distinct levels of text and book which might entirely escape conscious perception, but which nevertheless obtrudes on the reader. the effect of this short-circuiting is uncanny in the sense that it insinuates a disturbance in the field of symbolization, even if this disturbance is not itself symbolized” (15).2 while kay refers to medieval texts and reading practices, i argue that this concept can be applied to films as well, particularly starewitch’s the tale of the fox.3 this application is apt given how film stock, like the medieval book, is created from animal bodies. as shukin explains, the gelatin used in film stock is made from the rendered “skin, bones, and connective tissue of cattle, sheep, and pigs” (104). in the tale of the fox, this contingency on animal material is complicated further because the film’s animal puppets were constructed from materials including wire, wood, and deer skin (pummell, “of rats and men” 61). the tale of the fox’s animal puppets are both a type of mimesis of animal bodies and products created from the remains of dead animals. starewitch not only relies on the skin of animals to create his animal puppets, but, to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 54 bring those puppets to life on film, he depends upon yet another group of dead animal bodies. therefore, i argue that shukin’s double animal sign of “disembodied signifier of seamless motion and mere material processed in staggering quantities at accelerating speeds through the abattoirs and reduction plants of the west” (111) is doubled again in the tale of the fox, as the double rendering of animals on film and in film stock merges with the double rendering of animals as puppets and puppet-making material, resulting in a state of sutured hybridity within the animal puppet bodies. in adapting the concept of suture from kay, i use the concept of “sutured hybridity” as a way of theorizing representations of animal bodies. the state of sutured hybridity occurs when an animal body (or a representation of an animal body) becomes the site of one or more sutures. i define suture as a site of short-circuiting in which two distinct levels are brought into contact, sutured or stitched together, to create a state of sutured hybridity, an intermediary zone that disturbs or unsettles the previous distinctions. the suture, with its medical connotations of stitched-together flesh, is dependent upon a material, physical presence, a dependence that distinguishes it from existing concepts of suture in film studies.4 this dependence also distinguishes sutured hybridity from the concept of liminality. while both concepts focus on the malleability of existing boundaries, sutured hybridity’s emphasis on physical, material animal bodies creates a kind of tangibility and concreteness not found in liminality. within the tale of the fox’s production, distribution, and narrative, a series of four sutures arise in the animal puppets. the puppets exist as sutured hybrid beings, occupying an intermediary zone where binaries converge. they are simultaneously products of a medieval past and a technologically mediated future, animal and human, alive and dead, and participants in a humanist and posthumanist discourse. each site of suture builds on the previous one, creating an increasingly complex, multi-faceted state of sutured hybridity that reveals how interactions between humans and animals primarily revolve around animal subjugation and agency. after tracing out these four sites of suture and analyzing how they impact animal representations, i conclude my essay by briefly contrasting the tale of the fox with wes anderson’s 2009 stop motion film fantastic mr. fox. juxtaposing the two films reinforces the complexity and contradictions of the tale of the fox’s depiction of animal bodies, as well as the animal puppets’ status as sutured hybrid beings. sutured hybridity and its attendant emphasis on physicality and materiality enable us to confront our moral and ethical responsibility to real animal bodies in a way not possible with previous critical interpretations of animal representation. sutured hybridity reinforces the reality that real animals and julie mccown – animating the corpse: the sutured hybridity of animal puppets in ladislas starewitch’s the tale of the fox 55 their systematic exploitation by humans always accompany, on some level, any representation of animals that we create. past and future: medieval fables and youtube videos. as an adaptation of the medieval fable of reynard the fox (based on the eighteenth-century version by johann wolfgang von goethe) and as a film that is most accessible as a series of youtube videos,5 the tale of the fox straddles very different historical periods. as a result, the film’s animal puppets reveal the way animal representation is defined by specific moments in human history and culture. in this way, the puppets reflect jonathan burt’s argument that animals can be “associated with the archaic and nostalgic” and “become central figures in the presentation of new and ‘progressive’ technology” (291). at the same time that the tale of the fox’s animal puppets adhere to medieval understandings of animals, particularly as they appear in the stories of reynard the fox, they also exist as reminders of an increasingly technologized society in which humans become further and further removed from real animals. the tale of the fox’s more disturbing, violent moments exhibit what simon pummell refers to as “the element of glee and sadism found in old folk tales” (“of rats and men” 61). starewitch’s use of the reynard story is fitting because, as one of the most notable fox figures in folklore,6 reynard is a cunning trickster figure whose fluidity and malleability make him an animal representation particularly well-suited for a discussion of sutured hybridity. the tale of the fox’s connection to the long tradition of reynard strengthens its animal puppets’ connection to medieval sensibilities about animal bodies, sensibilities inextricably tied to systematic exploitation of animals.7 the tale of the fox’s medieval heritage stresses the sutures in the animal puppets between human and animal and living and dead, while at the same time setting up its own suture. by returning to goethe’s version of reynard the fox, one can observe the bodily indignities and beatings with an emphasis on the animals’ skin or flesh. for example, the panther describes the wounds on the hare caused by reynard: “yon stands our timid friend; and in his flesh / you still may see his wounds all raw and fresh” (goethe 7). this threat of damage to animal flesh also comes from humans, such as the carter who considers making a cap and bag out of reynard’s skin (goethe 9). starewitch’s film intensifies this focus on the injury to animal flesh since the puppets’ physical presence mimics the physical presence of real animals in a way that cannot occur with the written fable and its accompanying illustrations. the effect of this physical presence can humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 56 be felt in a scene in the tale of the fox where the bear comes before the lion king after being beaten by humans (see fig. 4). the bear laments to the lion king, “i’ve had a beating, sire. i’m just a poor, bruised and battered bear, sire. […] the treacherous reynard set a bear-trap for me, sire. a whole gang of peasants set upon me and talked of selling my skin. it is horrible, but now that it is damaged, they let me go” (the tale of the fox). as the bear recounts the possibility of humans stripping him of his skin and selling it, viewers watch the badly beaten animal shudder and weep, a physical animal presence not found in the written story. despite being a pitiable situation, this scene is still pleasurable to view because viewers have a moment of sympathetic identification with the bear. the pleasurable quality of this identification is similar to kay’s argument that medieval readers derived pleasure in reading from “the potential mobility and contingency of skins that have been furnished for this purpose, and which the reader too can play with assuming” (24-25). the viewer’s ability to traverse temporarily the gap between human and bear is facilitated through the concept of suture in film studies. in this case, the suture comes to embody george butte’s characterization of sutures as a “deceptive consolations” (284). the bear’s body becomes the viewer’s body and the viewer momentarily assumes his battered, threatened skin, even while still realizing that as a human he or she is implicated in this type of commoditization and destruction of animal skin. in other words, the human viewer becomes conscious of the multiple levels of suture present in the animal puppet’s body. even as the tale of the fox engages with a medieval human-animal dynamic in which humans and animals maintain a close (and violent) relationship, it also reveals how technology increasingly mediates humans’ interactions with animals. this technological mediation creates what jonathan burt, among many others, refers to as “the disappearance of the animal” (290). akira mizuta lippit also theorizes on the “disappearing animal presence,” arguing that “modern technology can be seen as a massive mourning apparatus” for their absence (125). partly because of the system of animal capital shukin discusses, humans in a large part of the western world have become distanced from animal bodies and the ways they are exploited. this distance from animals leads, boria sax argues, to the revival of “some of the numinous qualities [animals] had in the archaic past” (276). a film like the tale of the fox enables a revival of what pummell terms “an essentially pre-cinematic culture of folklore and animism,” while at the same time “[presaging] the increasingly composite cinema which the digital future may bring” (“ladislaw starewicz” 125). the opening and closing scenes of the tale of the fox perfectly illustrate how the animal puppets evince the suturing of medieval past and technological future. the film opens with a monkey puppet acting as a film projectionist (see fig. 1). the projector begins to run a film within a film where a julie mccown – animating the corpse: the sutured hybridity of animal puppets in ladislas starewitch’s the tale of the fox 57 second monkey puppet provides a second framing device in the form of a le roman de renard book (see fig. 2). the monkey flips through the pages of the book, introducing each of the “heroes” of the story who pop out of the book’s pages, before the film moves within the book to tell the story of reynard. when the monkey introduces reynard, reynard hides behind his page in the book, tearing a hole in the page in order to peek through it. this manipulation of the page demonstrates the film’s heightened consciousness of the book as a physical object, which, like an animal body, is capable of manipulation and destruction. these nested framing devices produce a meta-awareness in which viewers perceive how this story is rendered through multiple levels of mediation: first through a book, then through a film within a film, before finally reaching the viewer. the viewer is only able to view the story’s animals from this triple remove. the remove actually becomes quadrupled in the twenty-first century because, for american audiences, the tale of the fox is available most readily as a series of six youtube videos uploaded in 2009. viewers’ distance from the animals is increased by the film’s virtual internet presence. although richard burt considers the effect of digitalization with dvd editions of films on “the integrity of the film object” (2), he does not consider youtube and its effect on the film. unlike computer-animated animals who never possessed material bodies, the tale of the fox’s animal puppets possess an original material presence that is then removed.8 while the youtube videos of starewitch’s film provide a remarkable level of access for both film scholars and stop motion fans who are grateful to be able to view the film in any form, the film’s fragmented state carries important implications for my argument. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 58 fig. 1. the monkey projectionist and human hand. (youtube. web. 20 march 2012.) fig. 2. the second monkey puppet in the film within a film (left). the monkey puppet introducing the book le roman de renard (right). (youtube. web. 20 march 2012.) the youtube videos result in fragmentation and a loss of corporeality for the tale of the fox that parallels the disappearance of the animal. lippit’s discussion of technology and animals, particularly his connection of visual mimesis and the animal gaze through their shared ability to create “the remove from fact that restores an awareness of the julie mccown – animating the corpse: the sutured hybridity of animal puppets in ladislas starewitch’s the tale of the fox 59 fact’s truth to the spectator” (121), helps illuminate the multiple levels of remove and mediation that occur in the youtube videos of the tale of the fox. the film’s rendering of animal bodies through book, film, and internet removes viewers from the fact of animal death while calling attention to this fact and mourning the loss of the corporeal animal body. lippit’s contention that animals are “unable to achieve the finitude of death” and “constantly move from one body to another, one system to another” (128), helps explain the sutured hybridity of the tale of the fox’s animal puppets. the animal puppets as representations of animals cannot, in fact, die the same way real, living animals can. unlike the undying animal specters of lippit’s theory, however, the tale of the fox’s animal puppets do maintain an immediate corporeal existence as physical puppets constructed from dead animals. in her critique of lippit, shukin, “[b]y implicating slaughter in the symbolic economy of cinema and cinema in the ulterior violence of animal disassembly, [resists] lippit’s valorization of cinema as a salvaging apparatus that shelters or encrypts vanishing ‘animal traits’” (103-04). then again, when a film features animal puppets, there exists the possibility of a compromise between lippit’s undying animal and shukin’s disassembled animal corpses. the animal puppets’ undying, virtual presence combines with an insistence on the animals’ material, physical presence, resulting in a suture (within the animal puppet body) between medieval past and technologically mediated future that unsettles traditional notions of history as linear and progressive. animal and human: anthropomorphism and puppets. in addition to facilitating the suture of past and future, the tale of the fox’s animal puppet bodies exhibit a second suture, between animals and humans, which intensifies their state of sutured hybridity. the film features anthropomorphic animals who speak, walk on two legs, wear clothing, and follow human systems of law and order. this anthropomorphism, however, is not a seamless blending of animal and human. rather, it displays, according to paul wells, the “tensions between animality and humanity” (understanding animation 63). pummell argues that starewitch “used animal characters to make us look at humans in the light of animals rather than the sentimental reverse” (“of rats and men” 61). although the human puppets’ sole function of chasing animals and beating them senseless appears barbaric and animalistic, the film does not so much depict humans becoming more like animals as show animals becoming more human. in fact, the animal puppets are far more detailed and fleshed-out than the small number of human puppets that appear in the film. while the smallest animal puppets were only humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 60 around one inch tall, the tallest puppet, the lion king, stood almost 3.5 feet tall (priebe 4-5). in contrast to the detail given to the animal puppets, the human puppets are far less carefully crafted and generally only appear in the film in long shots where the scale between animal and human is skewed. in one scene, reynard leads the humans to where wolf is trapped in the ice. as the camera cuts between reynard and the humans, it becomes difficult to distinguish the humans from the fox. all are clothed, running on two feet, and roughly the same size. reynard’s ears, snout, and tail are really the only signs of species difference. the human puppet bodies are of little consequence; they merely exist as undeveloped plot devices. starewitch chooses not to question the human body’s singular wholeness and integrity. this difference between animal and human puppets suggests a speciesist framework in which the animal body is regarded as somehow better suited to serve as a site of suture than the human body. in the tale of the fox, starewitch provides numerous close-ups of his animal puppets’ faces and mouths and often shows his puppets, particularly the lion king and reynard, touching or gesturing towards their mouths (see fig. 3). this focus on the animal face and mouth not only attests to the realistic quality of the animal puppets, but also prompts a moment of human identification with the animal. the prominence of mouths, which kay argues function as “a zone of high affect” that makes the face legible (27), combined with the animal puppets’ intricate facial expressions, creates a suture where the viewer registers both the animal and the human in the animal puppet. the melding of animal and human in the animal puppet body is taken to a further extreme with the puppet of reynard’s wife, who first appears holding an infant fox cub and nursing him with a baby bottle. when the bottle is empty, the fox cub pulls down his mother’s dress to suckle at a very humanlike breast, as opposed to a realistic fox teat. in this instance, the puppet’s body itself (not just its clothing) possesses both animal and human elements. since the image is a mother nursing her child, this confusion of animal and human bodies, even though it possesses a certain repellant quality, fosters a sense of connection and identification between humans and animals. it also speaks to the complexity involved in anthropomorphism. this complexity arises because, as sax argues, “no animal completely lacks humanity, yet no person is ever completely human. […] we merge with animals through magic, metaphor, or fantasy, growing their fangs and putting on their feathers” (277). merging the animal with the human through the fantasy of stop motion film, the tale of the fox’s animal puppets make it impossible to fully separate the human and the animal. julie mccown – animating the corpse: the sutured hybridity of animal puppets in ladislas starewitch’s the tale of the fox 61 fig. 3. close-up of the lion king’s mouth. (youtube. web. 20 march 2012.) fig. 4. the bear after being badly beaten by humans. (youtube. web. 20 march 2012.) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 62 in addition to the animals being bipedal and possessing human anatomy, another noticeable human trait of the film’s animal puppets is their clothing. the animal puppets wear elaborate medieval-era costumes, including coats trimmed with fur, prompting pummell to wonder: “what does it mean to dress animals in their own skin?” (“of rats and men” 61). the irony of dressing animals in fur coats plays on medieval texts that feature animal skins both as subject matter and book-making material where, “as the animals, burlesque-like, assume human clothing, readers may well see themselves as doing the converse and assuming animal hide” (kay 26). although kay discusses human-clothed animals in stories written down in medieval books made from animal skin, the sense of irony and suture between real animal skin and its representation is applicable to the tale of the fox, especially when considered alongside the role of animal bodies as material in film stock. the animal puppets’ clothing compounds the ironic suture between real animal skins and its representation, especially in two scenes where animals lose their clothing. in the first scene, the bear, as mentioned in the previous section, comes before the lion king after being beaten by humans (see fig. 4). he is battered and his clothes have been all but completely torn off. as the bear relates his story to the king, he uses a leaf to cover himself, as he is embarrassed by his nudity or, in derrida’s words, “ashamed of being as naked as a beast” (4). the animals in the tale of the fox are not the animals derrida describes as possessing the unique property of “being naked without knowing it. not being naked therefore, not having knowledge of their nudity, in short, without consciousness of good and evil” (4-5). as anthropomorphized animals, the film’s animals lack this unique innocence and adopt a human sensibility about clothing and shame. not all the animals, however, maintain this shame of nudity. at the film’s end, when one of reynard’s fox cubs, shown the whole film wearing a diaper, celebrates his father’s victory, the cub’s diaper falls down. while initially embarrassed by his nudity, the cub quickly changes his mind and flings the diaper off-screen while merrily announcing to the viewer the film’s end with the exclamation, “that’s all folks!” even though the fox cub is aware of his nudity, he no longer feels the human sense of shame. his tossingaway of his diaper signals starewitch’s intimation that there exists a basic level of animality that the fox cub embraces. despite his performance at the hands of starewitch, the fox cub is not completely mastered.9 when the fox cub revels in his nudity, the film is over; the animals are no longer performing and can return to their natural state, sans clothes. one final way animal bodies work to confuse the border between animal and human is when the lion king decrees that the eating of animals is forbidden in his kingdom. the julie mccown – animating the corpse: the sutured hybridity of animal puppets in ladislas starewitch’s the tale of the fox 63 written decree states: “so that peace may reign, our subjects are forbidden to eat each other. only vegetables, dairy produce, and fruit are permissible. from this day, the greatest love must reign in the land. offenders will be hanged. only the king shall be entitled to eat a little fresh meat on thursdays and sundays.” the film shows how this decree is entirely impractical, as virtually no animal follows it: the lion king and queen lioness eat meat, reynard eats meat, the rooster eats a fly, and the raven takes delight in the prospect of dining on fox meat. by eating animal flesh, the animal puppets enact a kind of identification with the animal that lippit “[likens] to an ingestion of the animal, invoking the transferential logic of sacrifice. by consuming the animal in identification, the subject undergoes a becoming-animal in an effort to disappear from the realm of responsibility” (121). starewitch’s film intimates that animals eating other animals is a natural occurrence that cannot be prevented and therefore should not be punished. because the animal puppets are constantly blurring the distinctions between animals and humans, the lion king’s decree of forced vegetarianism and its subsequent failure can be read in two ways. if the animal puppets are viewed as more animal than human, then their insistence on eating each other is an expression of their natural tendencies that humorously jars with the puppets’ anthropomorphization. as sutured hybrid beings that merge the animal and the human, however, the animal puppets emphasize a kinship between animals and humans, and suggest that humans, as animals, have a natural tendency to eat other animals. the question of whether or not this natural tendency is positive or negative goes unanswered. rather than use the suture between animals and humans as an opportunity to present viewers with a moral, starewitch leaves his film more open-ended. this reluctance to offer a clear-cut moral reflects both starewitch’s distaste for “disney’s neutered morals and cuddly creatures” (kewley) and his cultural grounding in the characteristic dark humor of the eastern european stop motion animation tradition, a grounding that can clearly be seen in starewitch’s early short films including the cameraman’s revenge and the ant and the grasshopper. nonetheless, the animal-human suture produces an interesting paradox regarding animal subjugation and its dependence on a distinction between animals and humans.10 within the film, the animal puppets resist the subjugation of humans and exist in a hybrid state that is neither fully human nor fully animal. outside of the film, the animal puppets are completely subject to their creator, ladislas starewitch. such an underlying paradox is tied inevitably to the sutured humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 64 hybridity of the animal puppet body as a site of both animal agency and complete subjugation. alive and dead: taxidermy animals and stop motion puppets. drawing on the ironic juxtapositions of death and life found in taxidermy, the tale of the fox’s animal puppets appear, not so much as realistic, live animals, but as realistic, dead animals preserved by humans. this taxidermy effect creates a third type of suture in the film where narratives of living and dead animals are brought together. this suture also further entwines humans and animals through a process of communion and physical intimacy. understanding the motivations behind traditional taxidermy and animatronics helps situate the tale of the fox within a larger tradition of depicting animal death and life. taxidermy focuses on the visual communion with the animal body constructed by the taxidermist. this visual communion foreshadows the technological mediation of animal representation discussed earlier. it also facilitates a connection between human and animal that would not have been possible without taxidermy because, as donna haraway observes of the taxidermy tableaux of the american natural history museum, “the animals in the dioramas have transcended mortal life. […] this is a spiritual vision made possible only by their death and literal re-presentation. only then could the essence of their life be present” (30). such a description applies not only to these specific animals in this natural history museum but to any animal representation. in becoming a representation, animals transcend their mortal life and are re-presented as something not present in reality. this re-presentation captures some kind of perceived essence of the animal that will serve a specific purpose for the human who has constructed this new version of the animal. building off this idea of a true essence in animal bodies, jane desmond connects the practice of taxidermy to animatronics, pointing out that both taxidermy and animatronics “are intensely ironic practices and call for a compelling intimacy between human bodies and animal ones” (159). that intimacy, however, “is always simultaneously marked by the distance and distinction between animals and humans” (175). this distance and distinction results because humans are the ones recreating and re-presenting the animal bodies, effectively subjugating the animal despite its communion with humans. anthropomorphic taxidermy, particularly from the victorian period in great britain, functions as an interesting analogue for the tale of the fox’s animal puppets. michelle henning notes that, with anthropomorphic taxidermy, the interplay between life and death mixes with an “anti-naturalistic” depiction of animals, revealing nature not “as something eternal and outside human culture, but as something which is both cultural and historical” (664). anthropomorphic taxidermy questions the traditional assumption julie mccown – animating the corpse: the sutured hybridity of animal puppets in ladislas starewitch’s the tale of the fox 65 that nature and culture are distinct categories, insisting rather that animal bodies are always already entangled with humans at specific historical and cultural moments. according to henning, there are limitations to anthropomorphic taxidermy that reveal the underlying subjugation of the animal body by humans: “the fact that the living animals’ bodies would not be able to manage the poses struck by their mounted skins heightens the sense that animals are being forced to populate human situations” (667). unlike the animals of engravings or illustrations, taxidermied animals possess a physical presence that materially links them to real animals and brings the human manipulation of their dead bodies to the forefront. elaborating on henning’s work on victorian anthropomorphic taxidermy, connor creaney focuses on how taxidermy tableaux are haunted by animal bodies: “these works are faithful to their anthropomorphizing vision to an unnerving degree, but are also haunted by these bodies’ prior autonomy” (16). this hauntedness combines with the “ghostly pseudohuman subjectivities” that inhabit the animal figures of taxidermy tableaux, resulting in an “[endless] flickering between body-and-object-states” (17). animal figures in anthropomorphic taxidermy tableaux suture both living and dead animal bodies and animal and human bodies. real animal death and loss of autonomy exist alongside the recreated animals’ illusion of pseudo-human lives, producing an endless tension between the two, as viewers are aware simultaneously of the animals’ former lives, their deaths, and their new “lives” as anthropomorphic animals. this tension, as it arises from the physical animal body, functions as a site of sutured hybridity. despite obvious similarities, traditional taxidermy and animatronics differ in important ways from anthropomorphic taxidermy and its analogue, the tale of the fox’s animal puppets. whereas traditional taxidermy and animatronics strive to construct ever more seamless depictions of realistic animal life, anthropomorphic taxidermy and starewitch’s animal puppets, in their re-creation of animal life from animal death, present narratives that do not endeavor to accurately represent reality. furthermore, animatronics differ from stop motion puppets because animatronics are separated from their human creators. an animatronic animal can be controlled via a computer where the human is either far away or not even present in the same room when the animal is brought to life. conversely, in stop motion, the filmmaker must manipulate by hand the animal puppet after every frame, resulting in a greater level of contact, of communion, between creator and animal creation. this lower-tech communion with the puppet body parallels the kind of communion with animal figures in anthropomorphic taxidermy. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 66 the suturing of death and life in taxidermy, animatronics, anthropomorphic taxidermy, and stop motion puppets bears some resemblance to discussions of life and death in animation theory, particularly cholodenko’s discussion of how the animatic “problematizes any simple distinction between life and movement, animism and mechanism, human and nonhuman” (“speculations” 501). animation theory’s discussion of life and death must be considered alongside distinctions between drawn and puppet animation because, as suzanne buchan notes, puppet animation “does have a direct relation to objects. yet these objects are artificially constructed, thus the representation of a puppet, although identical with the object represented, has a different quality than objects that are not manipulated or constructed” (30). while buchan calls attention to the different materialities of puppet animation and drawn animation, her distinction does not address the moral and ethical issues that arise in stop motion films that use real animal bodies in the creation of its puppets. although wells insists that “animators […] demonstrate a particular empathy and affiliation with their animal subjects” (the animated bestiary 192), he does not consistently account for differences in animation mediums, including puppets constructed from real animals. in contrast, the suture i discuss in this section, based as it is in taxidermy, foregrounds animal bodies and their very real presences. directly linking his work to that of taxidermists, starewitch’s early short films utilized the dead bodies of animals such as insects and birds as stop motion puppets. in 1910, starewitch’s passion for entomology led him to shoot a series of natural history films for a museum in lithuania (kewley). pummell recounts that, while shooting one of these films featuring a fight between two stag beetles, “one of the combatants died, so [starewitch] animated the corpse and discovered his vocation in life. [… starewitch] spent the rest of his life involved in the manipulation of dead or artificial animals to create tableaux vivants” (“of rats and men” 61). pummell’s use of the phrase tableaux vivants speaks perfectly to the anthropomorphic taxidermy influence i argue exists in the tale of the fox. taxidermy tableaux focus on creating a frozen moment of time in an animal’s life (either realistic or anthropomorphized). the tableaux of anthropomorphic taxidermy simply are brought to life in the tale of the fox.11 this re-animation of dead animals, however, is imperfect, for, as heather crow observes of starewitch’s insect films, the “slightly jerky quality of [starewitch’s] animation announces itself as a gestural after-life, an uncanny life within death” (60). along with the jerky animation, starewitch’s dead animal puppets suffer from, in donald crafton’s words, a “total lack of ‘cuteness’” that he argues is inherent in their taxidermic quality, a quality that becomes softened in the tale of the fox (242). while the taxidermic quality crow and julie mccown – animating the corpse: the sutured hybridity of animal puppets in ladislas starewitch’s the tale of the fox 67 crafton refer to is indeed softened in the tale of the fox, traces of its origins remain, both in the animal puppets’ appearance and in their actual construction. within the film, recurring skull and skeleton imagery reinforces the underlying paradox of animal life and death, constantly reminding viewers of both the physicality and mortality of the animals that the puppets represent. it also serves as a visual reminder of the largely invisible systems of animal capital by simultaneously representing the animals as whole bodies and reducing them to mere parts in a way that ironically hints at the tale of the fox’s reliance on dead animals. in an inversion of taxidermy’s role in producing hunting trophies, the wolf’s cabin features bare animal skulls mounted on the wall. in reality, hunting trophies only retain the animal’s hide, which is stretched over a modeled replica of the animal’s skull (desmond 161). while this inversion of the traditional hunting trophy reflects the fact that the wolf and his family consumed all of the animal’s flesh, leaving just the bone, it also serves as a visual reminder of animals’ physical, mortal bodies. this skeleton imagery recurs again when reynard plays with a bird skull while peeling and eating the last remnants of flesh from it and when reynard dreams of death as a hooded animal skeleton. even within the film’s wide array of skeletons, one scene stands out in the film for its use of an animal skeleton to engage with this issue of the living and dead animal body. in this scene, the rooster brings the dead body of his wife the hen, who was killed and eaten by reynard, before the lion king and his court. a sheet featuring the image of a bird skeleton covers the body; this sheet is removed, revealing the hen’s skeleton, still clothed, but picked clean of flesh. one of the hen’s baby chick’s sits next to the body, plaintively chirping, “mama,” while looking at the bare skull (see fig. 5 and fig. 6). the figure of the dead hen stands as a prime example of the sutured hybridity achieved by the animal puppets in the film. she blurs distinctions between animal and human because her body is not the squat, fowl-like body of a hen, but the elongated body of a human with distinct arms and legs upon which sits the head of a hen. furthermore, her corpse is posed and carried in a fashion traditionally reserved for deceased humans. along with this animal-human suture, the hen’s corpse or, rather, skeleton engages with the interplay between animal life and death that i have been discussing in this section. as a pseudo-skin, the skeleton sheet covers and protects the hen’s corpse, which has lost its original skin, while also hinting at the reality of animal death that lies underneath it. the disturbing and repellant quality of her skeleton (a quality intensified humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 68 by the plaintive baby chick) unsettles viewers by forcing them to confront the invisibility of animal death, an invisibility facilitated in many ways by systems of animal capital that shield the public eye from the slaughtering of animals for human consumption. this disturbing and unsettling quality also evidences the film’s foundation in medieval fables with the brutal violence it enacts on the hen’s body. fig. 5. the skeleton sheet covering the hen’s corpse. (youtube. web. 20 march 2012.) fig. 6. the corpse of the hen with baby chick in left hand corner. (youtube. web. 20 march 2012.) julie mccown – animating the corpse: the sutured hybridity of animal puppets in ladislas starewitch’s the tale of the fox 69 humanism and posthumanism: puppet automata and shared finitude. at the final site of suture, the tale of the fox’s animal puppets participate in both a humanist discourse founded on a notion of cartesian dualism and a posthumanist discourse that prompts a greater evaluation and consideration of nonhuman animals on the basis of cary wolfe’s concept of shared double finitude. starewitch’s animal puppets, in many ways, are a literal representation of descartes’s theory that animals are natural automata (61). in the tale of the fox, starewitch creates puppet automata that mimic the natural automata (animals). ironically, starewitch imbues his puppet automata not just with what descartes calls the “purely mechanical and corporeal motion” or “corporeal soul” of animals, but also the “incorporeal” or “thinking substance” descartes reserves for humans (61). in the film’s aforementioned opening with the monkey projectionist, it is important to note that this puppet, alone out of all the other animal puppets, is placed into the frame by a non-puppet human hand, which then admonishes the puppet with a wagging finger. in response, the indignant monkey sticks out his tongue at the human off-screen before starting the projector. this scene highlights the sense of human dominance that underlies the entire film. regardless of how the animals function within the film, they are still created and controlled by a human hand. by sticking out his tongue at the human hand, however, the monkey suggests that he possesses a mind capable of actively resisting his body’s subjugation by the human. other puppets, particularly reynard, also display this type of resistance.12 reynard not only outwits his fellow animals, but also successfully manipulates the humans to do his bidding on several occasions, most notably when he leads the humans to animals he has trapped (the wolf, bear, and cat) so that the humans can beat and maim the animals. reynard’s manipulation does not dismantle the anthropocentric hierarchy; the beatings of the wolf, bear, and cat are violent reassertions of humans’ ability to dominate and subjugate the animal body. rather, reynard’s tactics show an animal working within the existing hierarchy while still maintaining a sense of autonomy and agency. the sense of animal agency also surfaces at the film’s end when three animal puppets directly acknowledge the ending of the film, displaying a meta-awareness that they are participating in a performance being recorded on film: the fox cub throws aside his diaper, directly acknowledging the camera and audience as he announces, “that’s all folks!”; reynard appears outside of the book and closes it before bowing to the camera and audience; and the monkey projectionist turns off the projector before bowing to the camera and audience. this display of animal participation and awareness is cut short, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 70 however, when, as the monkey projectionist bows to the camera, the human hand from the beginning of the film reappears, grasps the monkey puppet by the ear, and yanks him out of the frame. the human hand then places a sign reading “fin” in front of the film projector and thus truly ends the film. the relationship between monkey puppet and human hand exemplifies the reality that a certain amount of antagonism must exist between humans and animals in order to preserve any kind of intelligible distinction between the two. karl steel suggests this antagonism between humans and animals functions as a necessary component in maintaining an anthropocentric hierarchy, concluding that “[d]ominance, and therefore the human, must fail where there is no suitable object to be dominated” (“how to make a human” 17). then again, the living human presence in the tale of the fox is only a hand, not a whole human body. this fragmentation of the human body suggests that human control of the animal body is partial and incomplete and that the animals represented by the film’s puppets do maintain a sense of agency in spite of human control. at the same time the tale of the fox’s animal puppets engage with and resist a humanist, anthropocentric discourse, they also participate in a posthumanist discourse, where the stressing of shared finitude suggests a greater consideration of nonhuman animals. part of the theory of posthumanism outlined by cary wolfe involves the necessity of “acknowledging that [the human] is fundamentally a prosthetic creature that has coevolved with various forms of technicity and materiality, forms that are radically ‘not-human’ and yet have nevertheless made the human what it is” (xxv). the prostheticity of the animal puppets recreates and re-inscribes the prostheticity of the human. animals are not pure, innocent beings of nature; they are historical and cultural subjects entwined with humans. the reality of the lack of distinction between nature and culture is more easily detected and expressed with animal puppets than with real, living animals. in addition to this prostheticity, the animal puppets also embody the two kinds of shared finitude, “two kinds of passivity and vulnerability,” that wolfe identifies: “the first type (physical vulnerability, embodiment, and eventually mortality) is paradoxically made unavailable, inappropriable, to us by the very thing that makes it available — namely, a second type of ‘passivity’ or ‘not being able,’ which is the finitude we experience in our subjection to a radically ahuman technicity or mechanicity of language” (88). according to wolfe, the two types of finitude are intertwined: “our relation to flesh and blood is fatefully constituted by a technicity with which it is prosthetically entwined, a diacritical, semiotic machine of language in the broadest sense that exceeds any and all presence, including our own” (92). the animal julie mccown – animating the corpse: the sutured hybridity of animal puppets in ladislas starewitch’s the tale of the fox 71 puppets, through their representation of animal bodies, speak to both kinds of finitude. the physical, mortal vulnerability obviously surfaces in the violence done to the animal puppets, particularly the scenes where the wolf, bear, and cat are beaten severely by humans. the tale of the fox’s insistence on injuring, killing, and stripping the flesh from animal bodies momentarily breaks the spell of the anthropomorphic fable, as we are reminded that these are animals with whom we share a certain corporeal vulnerability. while not as immediately visible as the first type of finitude, the second type of shared finitude of being bound by the prostheticity of language also appears in the film. its anthropomorphized animals can talk and are able to communicate with humans to some degree. the fact that the film is in french, however, creates a passivity or vulnerability for non-french speaking viewers, which creates a more readily visible identification with the animals. admittedly, such passivity or vulnerability exists at any point where there is the “ahuman technicity and mechanicity of language,” including for french-speaking viewers of the film. yet this effect becomes more visible when the language in question is not known. although there are english subtitles in the youtube videos of the tale of the fox, these subtitles introduce yet another level of mediation between the animal puppets and the viewer and another instance of how language renders a shared passivity and vulnerability. the shared passivity and vulnerability in the face of language becomes more complicated within the context of film. discussing the interplay between language and film, lippit writes: “film does not replace language, for it cannot exist without it. film displaces language, exposes the abyss that threatens to engulf every semantic signification. film parasitizes language, much as the animal does, drawing into its imaginary panorama that which remains undisclosed in discursive transactions” (124). in a sense, film lays bare the ways in which language restricts and confines humans and animals. film removes language from its usual space, effectively revealing the prostheticity of language. in using the verb “parasitizes,” lippit characterizes both the animal and film as parasites that exist at the expense of their host, language. unlike the passivity and vulnerability of wolfe’s second type of finitude, the idea of film and the animal as parasitizing language depends upon a certain degree of empowering agency. when viewed in this light, the tale of the fox’s animal puppets, in spite of their shared double finitude, possess agency in the sense that they lay bare the ways in which language, both the spoken french and written english, restricts and confines humans and animals. in having a french audio track and english subtitles attached to them, the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 72 film’s animal puppets (as parasites to language) reveal the technicity and mechanicity of language. this posthumanist discourse fuses with a humanist discourse in which the animal puppets are subjected to the technicity and mechanicity of animal puppet automata. this suture between humanist and posthumanist discourses unsettles distinctions as the animal puppets simultaneously exist as models of cartesian dualism and posthuman prostheticity that both fall victim to human subjugation and exert power as parasitic agents that expose these underlying systems. the tale of the fox peels back the skin of language to expose the visual spectacle of flesh and bone animal bodies. disavowal and compromise: the animal puppets of fantastic mr. fox. in his overview of the history of stop motion film, ken priebe notes that “nearly 80 years of history behind the theatrical puppet feature began with starewitch’s tale of the fox and has come full circle with wes anderson’s fantastic mr. fox,” a film whose visual aesthetic takes direct inspiration from starewitch’s film (57). despite this shared visual aesthetic, the animal puppets of fantastic mr. fox are not nearly as complex as the animal puppets of the tale of the fox. fantastic mr. fox relies on a disavowal of the physical animal body despite the realistic animal puppets. for example, the animals in fantastic mr. fox can be electrocuted (the cartoonish flashing of their skeletons occurs) but are apparently unharmed. when animals do die in the film, their eyes are replaced with x’s, which mark the only trace of death on their bodies. the corpse of the hen picked clean of flesh in the tale of the fox transforms in fantastic mr. fox into the familiar sight of a plucked, ready-to-cook chicken available at the grocery store. in order to be reminded that these puppets are representations of real animal bodies, the viewer has to seek out supplemental materials such as behind-the-scenes featurettes and the book the making of fantastic mr. fox. only then can one find the dissected animal puppet bodies, safely sheltered from the general public and given humane treatment in the “puppet hospital” (specter 50, 54, 55). this sanitization and sequestering of the animal puppet body mimics the removal of animal slaughter from the public sphere. furthermore, the gleeful sadism and rebellion of the tale of the fox’s animals becomes, in fantastic mr. fox, a meek submission to their fate as altered “wild” animals who must live in sewers and survive off of a cornucopia of synthetic and imitation supermarket food. while it is tempting to read this shift as a positive and pragmatic step for animals in a world so heavily contaminated by human presence, fantastic mr. fox’s animals’ fate comes across as melancholy and sterile. in order to achieve this new “wildness,” the animals must surrender a certain level of bodily autonomy. the animals cannot possess physical, mortal bodies of flesh and bone held together by skin. they must become like the “synthetic goose” and “artificial squab” on which they now subsist. in contrast to julie mccown – animating the corpse: the sutured hybridity of animal puppets in ladislas starewitch’s the tale of the fox 73 these “wild” animals, the tale of the fox’s puppets fiercely hold on to their physical bodies even in their fragmented, decorporealized state on youtube. conclusion: puppet hybridity and the trouble with animal (puppet) agency. in shukin’s double animal sign of disembodied signifier and mere material and kay’s sutured skin of the medieval book, traces of physical, material animal bodies remain. while these traces are subtly visible in the vellum pages of medieval books (the imperfections and veins in the skin/page remind readers that the book was once a living animal), the rendering of animals to produce film stock removes any recognizable visible trace of those animal bodies. in the tale of the fox’s animal puppets, the double rendering of animals as puppets and puppet-making material (a kind of twentiethcentury reworking of medieval vellum books) merges with the double rendering of animals on film and in film stock. this merge results in a state of sutured hybridity in which the dependence on a material, physical presence allows the tale of the fox’s puppets to achieve a far greater level of complexity and richness than those in fantastic mr. fox. the tale of the fox’s animal puppets burst at their seams with contradictions. refusing to settle on one side of a suture, they project an image of sutured hybridity in which they are both products of a medieval past and a technologically mediated future, animal and human, alive and dead, and participants in a humanist and posthumanist discourse. nonetheless, a persistent, nagging quandary plagues any reading of the tale of the fox’s animal puppets. can the film ever really depict animal agency if humans control the puppets? in other words, are the film’s attempts to show animal agency a perverse pantomime? if we view them purely as products created by starewitch, then the animal puppets truly cannot have agency. however, as representations of animal bodies and as sutured hybrid beings who unsettle numerous boundaries, the animal puppets do possess agency. regardless of the control or original intent of their creator, these animal bodies can be read by twenty-first century viewers as autonomous sutured hybrid beings who call us, as humans, back to a consideration of animal bodies and our moral and ethical responsibility to them. in case we have forgotten, the tale of the fox shows us what lies under the skin of an animal. acknowledgements. i want to thank dr. stacy alaimo for her guidance, feedback, and encouragement. this paper originated as a seminar paper in her animal studies graduate class. i also thank brian carroll, brittany whitstone, and charlie hicks for their valuable feedback and suggestions on earlier versions of this paper. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 74 notes 1. ladislas starewitch’s name has multiple spellings: ladislas starewitch, ladislas starevitch, ladislas starevich, ladislaw starewicz, or wladyslaw starewicz. the tale of the fox also goes by numerous names: the tale of the fox, le roman de renard, the tale of reynard, or reineke fuchs. for continuity, i use the spelling ladislas starewitch and refer to the film as the tale of the fox throughout the essay. 2. discussions of the uncanny feature prominently in animation theory. see paul wells, understanding animation (48-49); alan cholodenko, “introduction” to the illusion of life: essays on animation (29); cholodenko, “speculations on the animatic automaton” (500, 509); and heather crow, “gesturing toward olympia” (50, 56). 3. scholarship on the tale of the fox is limited in both scope and breadth. this essay aims to correct this paucity by providing a more detailed, scholarly evaluation of this understudied film. 4. in film studies, suture is defined as a narrative strategy or procedure employed by a film through relationships between shots and how they are cut and edited together (butte 297; silverman 195, 201). neither classical suture theory in which sutures function as “deceptive consolations” that evade the disturbing, discomforting experience of absence or butte’s revised theory of suture as a “narrative of embodied consciousness” (284, 288) applies here because, in my concept of suture, the act of suturing results in disturbance, and, although butte claims his approach reinstates the physical body, his theory of suture nevertheless foregrounds consciousness and subjectivity, relegating the physical body to the periphery. 5. while dvds of the tale of the fox have been released in other countries, these dvds are not only in region 2 or pal format but are currently out of circulation and only available as used copies at inflated prices. a region 1, us formatted dvd of the tale of the fox has never been released. for people in the us, the most accessible and feasible way to view the film is on youtube. all images are taken from screenshots of the youtube videos. the youtube videos are titled “the tale of the fox – wladyslaw starewicz (1930) part 1/6 (english subtitles)” and are uploaded by an individual with the username “missbilliedove.” 1930 reflects the year when filming was finished, not the film’s theatrical release date. julie mccown – animating the corpse: the sutured hybridity of animal puppets in ladislas starewitch’s the tale of the fox 75 6. see martin wallen’s discussion of foxes in folklore (39-71). 7. many critics have written about animals or “the animal” in medieval studies. see, e.g., karl steel, how to make a human; jill mann, from aesop to reynard; susan crane animal encounters; brigitte resl, ed. a cultural history of animals in the medieval age; aleksander pluskowski, ed. breaking and shaping beastly bodies, and the animal turn special issue of postmedieval. 8. see hye jean chung’s discussion of the material traces of computer animated animal bodies in the 2008 film kung fu panda (27, 32). 9. lorraine datson and gregg mitman argue that while anthropomorphism allows humans to “orchestrate” animal performance, “complete mastery is illusion” (13). 10. karl steel, in discussing the human-animal border in middle english literature, argues that “subjugation resolves the various, shifting boundaries between humans and nonhumans into a single line separating humans from all other living things” (“how to make a human” 7). 11. see heather crow’s analysis of the quay brothers’ stop motion films for a discussion of puppet gesture and movement. 12. this resistance can be traced back to goethe’s version of the reynard fable. wallen argues that goethe not only identifies with reynard, but “purifies vulpine intelligence of its roguish displays in order to draw out the aloofness of the fox, which belongs to no society” (53). by identifying with reynard and placing him outside a corrupt and sinful human society, goethe questions the superiority of the human. this questioning of the anthropocentric hierarchy carries over to the tale of the fox. works cited the animal turn. spec. issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2.1 (2011). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 76 buchan, suzanne. “the animated spectator: watching the quay brothers’ ‘worlds.’” animated ‘worlds.’ ed. suzanne buchan. eastleigh, uk: john libbey publishing, 2006. 15-38. burt, jonathan. “the illumination of the animal kingdom: the role of light and electricity in animal representation.” the animals reader. eds. linda kalof and amy fitzgerald. oxford: berg, 2007. 289-301. burt, richard. medieval and early modern film and media. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2008. butte, george. “suture and the narration of subjectivity in film.” poetics today 29.3 (2008): 277-308. cholodenko, alan. “introduction.” the illusion of life: essays on animation. ed. alan cholodenko. sydney: power publications, 1991. 9-36. _______.“speculations on the animatic automaton.” the illusion of life 2: more essays on animation. ed. alan cholodenko. sydney: power publications, 2007. 486-528. chung, hye jean. “kung fu panda: animated animal bodies as layered sites of (trans)national identities.” the velvet light trap 69 (2012): 27-37. crafton, donald. before mickey: the animated film 1898-1928. cambridge, ma: mit press, 1982. crane, susan. animal encounters: contracts and concepts in medieval britain. philadelphia: u pennsylvania p, 2013. creaney, connor. “paralytic animation: the anthropomorphic taxidermy of walter potter.”victorian studies 53.1 (2010): 7-35. crow, heather. “gesturing toward olympia.” animated ‘worlds.’ ed. suzanne buchan. eastleigh, uk: john libbey publishing, 2006. 49-62. datson, lorraine, and gregg mitman. “introduction: the how and why of thinking with animals.” thinking with animals. eds. lorraine datson and gregg mitman. new york: columbia up, 2005. 1-14. julie mccown – animating the corpse: the sutured hybridity of animal puppets in ladislas starewitch’s the tale of the fox 77 derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. ed. marie-louise mallet. trans. david willis. new york: fordham up, 2008. descartes, rene. “from the letters of 1646 and 1649.” the animals reader. eds. linda kalof and amy fitzgerald. berg: oxford, 2007. 59-62. desmond, jane. “displaying death, animating life: changing fictions of ‘liveness’ from taxidermy to animatronics.” representing animals. ed. nigel rothfels. bloomington: indiana up, 2002. 159-79. fantastic mr. fox. dir. wes anderson. 20th century fox, 2009. goethe, johann wolfgang von. reynard the fox: after the german version of goethe. by thomas james arnold, esq., with illustrations from the designs of wilhelm von kaulbach. new york: d. appleton and co., 1860. haraway, donna. primate visions: gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. new york: routledge, 1989. henning, michelle. “anthropomorphic taxidermy and the death of nature: the curious art of hermann ploucquet, walter potter, and charles waterton.” victorian literature and culture 35 (2007): 663-78. kay, sarah. “legible skins: animals and the ethics of medieval reading.” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 2.1. (2011): 13-32. kewley, pat. “love among the insects: the pioneering animation of ladislaw starewicz.” bright lights film journal 71 (2010). web. 10 april 2012. lippit, akira mizuta. “… from wild technology to electric animal.” representing animals. ed. nigel rothfels. bloomington: indiana up, 2002. 119-36. mann, jill. from aesop to reynard: beast literature in medieval britain. new york: oxford up, 2009. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 78 pluskowski, aleksander, ed. breaking and shaping beastly bodies: animals as material culture in the middle ages. oakville, ct: oxbow, 2007. priebe, ken a. the advanced art of stop-motion animation. boston: course technology, 2011. pummell, simon. “of rats and men.” sight and sound 5.5. (1995): 61. _______. “ladislaw starewicz: cut off their tails with a carving knife.” projections 5: film-makers on film-making. eds. john boorman and walter donohue. london: faber and faber, 1996. 119-25. resl, brigitte, ed. a cultural history of animals in the medieval age. oxford: berg publishers, 2011. sax, boria. “animals as tradition.” the animals reader. eds. linda kalof and amy fitzgerald. berg: oxford, 2007. 270-77. shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2009. silverman, kaja. the subject of semiotics. new york: oxford up, 1983. specter, michael. the making of fantastic mr. fox. new york: rizzoli, 2009. steel, karl. “how to make a human.” exemplaria 20.1 (2008): 3–27. _______. how to make a human: animals and violence in the middle ages. columbus: ohio state up, 2011. the tale of the fox. dir. ladislas starewitch. 1937. youtube. web. 20 march 2012. wallen, martin. fox. london: reaktion books, 2006. wells, paul. the animated bestiary: animals, cartoons, and culture. new brunswick: rutgers up, 2009. julie mccown – animating the corpse: the sutured hybridity of animal puppets in ladislas starewitch’s the tale of the fox 79 _______. understanding animation. london: routledge, 1998. wolfe, cary. what is posthumanism? minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2010. microsoft word weitzenfeld-demello-pdf-jgr h u m a n i m a l i a 6:2 reviews adam weitzenfeld a bold introduction to human-animal studies margo demello, animals and society: an introduction to human-animal studies. new york: columbia university press, 2012. 488p. $34.50. overview. in 2012 columbia university press released animals and society, the first textbook for the rapidly burgeoning, multidisciplinary field of human-animal studies [has]. while collections of primary source materials have been organized into readers and some books are self-titled introductory texts, animals and society is the only has textbook. margo demello is well suited to be its author. for years, demello has performed substantial service in the development of has through her work at the animals and society institute and several other has books she has written and edited. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 198 in addition, demello has had years of hands-on experience with a variety of nonhuman animals at home and at sanctuaries. the comprehensive 420-plus-page overview of has is written and structured to be accessible to those unfamiliar to the subject matter. animals and society is divided into 20 chapters, translating into a reading load of two 20-page chapters a week over a 10-week course. vocabulary is emboldened and usually clearly defined. gray “boxes” scattered throughout the book highlight legal documents, animal advocacy organizations, animal biographies, and anecdotes in the news. many topics are lightened up with bizzaro comics, while others are introduced with anecdotes from contemporary life or passages from classical texts. animals and society is also a great departure point for curious students. it offers an extensive index, a 36-page bibliography spanning multiple disciplines, and a handful of suggested books, films, and websites at the end of each chapter. further, most chapters conclude with an autobiographical essay by a researcher in has. these essays personalize the research and subject matter in each chapter, revealing the heterogeneous motivations and methodologies of researchers in the multidisciplinary field. however, conspicuously absent is a glossary of the vocabulary words emboldened throughout the textbook. a glossary would be much welcomed both for convenience and since some emboldened words are not defined in-text. the book also does not feature any discussion questions or classroom activities, perhaps leaving pedagogy concerns to demello’s previous publication, teaching the animal (2010). the textbook is divided into five parts: the social construction of animals, the uses of animals, the link between violence against humans and nonhuman animals, representations of animals in culture and media, and the study of and advocacy on behalf of animals. defining has. part one of animals and society serves to introduce has and describes the social construction of animals. as the first has textbook, demello’s introduction of has has more than immediate relevance. her introduction not only sets the stage for the rest of the book and the readers’ interest and experience, it exposes a new generation of college students — some of who may pursue a future in has — to the comprehensive research on the human-animal relationship. her definition of has and the following chapters thus may leave an enduring first impression on student attitudes toward nonhuman animals and has. adam weitzenfeld – “a bold introduction to human-animal studies” 199 in chapter one, demello answers the questions: what is has, why engage in it, what research methods are used, and what are its policy implications? the chapter opens with a demonstration that human interest in animals is ubiquitous, yet they have been largely ignored as subjects by most disciplines until now. given the ubiquity of animals in our everyday life, it is this lack of inquiry into human-animal relationships that is “bizarre,” not our interest in studying them (7). since the 1980s, has has developed out of multiand inter-disciplinary inquiry into the interactions between humans and nonhuman animals in society and culture. demello describes has as a holistic “way of seeing” that places our lives with animals into a social context (9). inquiring into our relationship with nonhuman animals means both understanding and questioning the taken-for-granted meanings and roles that we have assigned to them. demello acknowledges that many people drawn to such inquiry are personally invested in the well-being of nonhumans, yet is firm that has “is not about animal advocacy” (17). while “no scholarship is truly objective,” has is juxtaposed with critical animal studies, an academic discipline that does have “an explicit political agenda” (17). demello reassures her audience that, like other fields of study, has “adheres to the requirements of evidence-based scholarship” (17). after all, some has researchers are afraid that animal advocacy may “inhibit the growth of the field because many scientists will be threatened” (416). research into human-animal relationships may not be without its obstacles, but researchers in each discipline have their own methods. the results of has research have had real policy implications that have led to the proliferation of animal assisted therapy and the detection of domestic abuse. no policy implications that aid non-companion animals are named. however, demello’s decisive claim that has “is not about animal advocacy” comes under question throughout the book. a critique of animal use. in chapters two and three, demello presents a brief overview of the social construction of nonhuman animals across time and cultures, focusing on western classifications. the use of animals has particularly impacted the social construction of animals, especially the most significant categorization of animals as either wild or domestic. since how we classify animals impacts our treatment of them, we are confronted with the question of which stories we ought to tell about nonhuman animals. classification may be inevitable, but hierarchical ranking is not. demello proposes that seeing the world through nonhuman eyes may help us decide. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 200 part two is divided according to a variety of uses humans have applied to animals: sport, display, food, companion, research, and assistance. in chapters four and five, demello traces the shift in westerners’ relation to so-called wild animals from being respected to being eradicated, to being romanticized, to being bureaucratically killed. she also includes a list demonstrating how relatively recent most domestication has been in human history, and references the role that domestic animals had in the colonization and conquest of indigenous territories. domestication is depicted as an evolving process of engineering, body mutilation, and dependency. that nonhuman animals originally benefited from domestication is not disputed; however, demello asks her readers, “do modern domesticated animals [still] experience the same benefits?” (89). even more provocatively, she asks “[d]oes this unwillingness to release ourselves from our dependence on domestic animals stem from love, greed, selfishness, or a desire to dominate others?” (95). next, demello documents the consequences stemming from humans’ insatiable dependency on nonhuman animals. in chapter six, she writes on the various displays of animals — in zoos, marine mammal parks, racetracks, and fighting rings — arising from desires to see, to profit, and to dominate. the desire to see is the consequence of the disappearance of wild animals from everyday life. the history of animal displays is traced from ancient to modern times, before demello delves into the contradictions and harms of zoos and marine mammal parks. “is all this attention good or bad for the animals,” demello asks (100). after reading the tragic stories of keiko and tilkum, it is difficult to imagine any answer less critical than “bad.” chapters seven and eight repeat much from chapter five. here, demello juxtaposes two distinct categories into which animals are born with two very different outcomes: food and pets. first she describes the psychological and institutional production of “meat,” about which the public is largely ignorant. the “absent referent” and “carnism” are heuristic concepts for discussing the process by which violence against animals goes undetected via objectification, as well as the process by which the normality of meateating goes unquestioned via ideology. demello also juxtaposes the naturalness of a diet high in meat consumption with the diet of most westerners up until the 20th century. she describes the meat industry as “one of the nation’s most powerful businesses,” and details how technological inventions, vertical integration, lobbying, cronyism, marketing, and pr campaigns have resulted in current consumption levels (136). adam weitzenfeld – “a bold introduction to human-animal studies” 201 like meat-eating, pet-keeping has long been a universal practice but only exploded within the last century. the rise of a pet industry arose with urban living, smaller homes, more wealth, and a desire for children to model kindness. yet, despite all the affection pets bequeath upon humans, millions go homeless, and half of them (3-4 million) are killed every year due to lack of resources. again, demello is not too shy to describe the situation as one of “the most egregious examples of america’s throwaway culture” (162). in chapter ten, she writes about how species we designate as pets also serve people with disabilities, provide therapy, and serve in war, but that there are few studies on whether they also benefit from being used. chapter nine is more “balanced” than the previous chapters on animal use. here she begins by describing animal experimentation as “complex” and “controversial” (170). demello notes the contradiction that animals are sufficiently like humans to model human illnesses, yet sufficiently unlike humans to have a similar moral standing and the very illnesses (like depression) for which they are being tested on. she then presents the history of the anti-vivisection movement as well as moral and epistemological objections to animal experimentation. rather than asking if we should save the rat or a child, demello suggests we ask, “how can we save the child without sacrificing the rat?” (191). interlocking violence. after section two’s focus on the welfare of animals in various industries, section three is slightly more focused on how violence against animals impacts human welfare. chapter eleven is a sympathetic look into the lives of those who work in animal rescue, in shelters, on ranches, in labs, and in slaughterhouses. demello defines the method of participant observation and notes that it neither involves animals’ standpoints nor is it neutral. one phenomenon it discloses is that people who work with animals say that they love animals, yet their actions directly or indirectly harm them. for instance, shelter workers may cope with making end-of-life decisions by emotionally distancing themselves from their animals, and also sometimes — like the pet owners disposing of their animals — externalize the blame onto others. chapters twelve and thirteen are an account of violence against nonhuman animals and its intersections with violence against humans. dramatically, demello draws the reader’s awareness to forms of violence against animals that are so routine and displaced that the public is oblivious to them as violence. she classifies violence against humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 202 animals as institutional, culture-specific, and deviant. in the case of institutional violence, “[w]e not only tolerate violence … that is invisible and distant, we commission it” (239). in contrast, culturally-specific violence by ethnic minorities (e.g., dog slaughter and santeria) is very salient and frequently objectionable to dominant societal norms. finally, deviant violence is defined as that which is perceived as socially unacceptable and “unnecessary.” psychologists, social workers, and lawyers have established a consensus that there is a link between deviant violence to human and nonhuman animals, including the domestic violence and sexual abuse of women, children, and their pets. this link has also been theorized to occur at the institutional and cultural levels. first, social hierarchy in europe and asia developed out of the surpluses animal labor enabled, and has since taken on a new form within a capitalist economy (in which animal exploitation has increased exponentially for the profits of the rich). second, through the tactics of othering and essentializing, gender, racial, class, and species hierarchy are justified: “as long as there is a line separating some from others, then no group is safe from being on the losing side of it” (261). in addition to the link with domestic abuse, women and animals are linked in being historically defined by their bodies and reproductive abilities to serve male power and desire. likewise, people of non-european descent have historically been harmed from such a link through dehumanizing animal metaphors and being “treated like animals” through the policies of slavery and eugenics. demello, however, cautions animal activists on drawing analogies to other oppressions and targeting the actions of racial minorities since both potentially verge on racism. the role of animals in language, art, myth, and media are covered in the subsequent chapters of part four. the central theme is how animals are good to think with because they are both like and unlike humans. animals thus are a means for human reflection and projection (from practices of masculinity to criticisms of politicians). demello displays an impressive familiarity with cultural practices and stories, but at times the text is dry because it privileges numerous examples from many cultures over depth regarding any one culture. the tone is decisively less normative than previous chapters when cultural practices and beliefs outside of demello’s own are described (e.g,. animal fighting and animal sacrifice). nonetheless, ethical concerns are raised about the representation of animals in language — as pejoratives, idioms, and absent referents — as well as the use of wild animal actors and the voyeurism of wildlife. my favorite sections of part four are the appended essays. carol gigliotti’s experience role-playing an elephant, laura hobgood-oster’s enthusiasm for animals in christianity, and philip adam weitzenfeld – “a bold introduction to human-animal studies” 203 armstrong’s analysis of animals in literature add an extra layer of provocation and context to the chapters they follow. thinking, feeling, acting. animals and society concludes with a discussion of animal behavior, ethics, and advocacy. chapter seventeen opens by reminding us how much scientific and public opinion has changed over the last few decades. early ethologists theorized the evolutionary development of behavior in natural habitats, while comparative psychologists studied the environmental causes of behavior in labs. both fields generally avoided ascribing agency to animals. in the 1970s, primatology and cognitive ethnology changed this. since, researchers have concluded that many mammals and birds use tools and what might be called “language,” as well as displaying emotions like grief and empathy. further, animals such as chickens and fishes are now believed to have more complex mental lives than previously thought. demello asks “if these animals share so many mental and emotional capacities with humans, what does that mean about our treatment of them?” (372). chapter eighteen starts with a scenario in which intellectually superior extraterrestrials invade earth and begin farming humans. demello believes this is a good starting place for discussing animal ethics because it propels us into reflecting on moral value. the remainder of the chapter is a conventional narrative of the history of western moral attitudes regarding animals spanning from the pythagoreans to peter singer, but it also includes “other approaches,” such as the capability approach, virtue ethics, phenomenology, and feminist ethics of care. although speciesism is referenced earlier in several chapters, it is not defined until here (383). while demello does cover the most fundamental animal ethics, students would really benefit from supplementary material. the animal ethics reader may be one such complimentary text. the final two chapters are a look at the past and future of animal advocacy. demello traces the building sentiments toward animal protection after the age of enlightenment. in the 19th century animal protection was advocated by two movements: one for the prevention of cruelty to animals and children, and the other opposed to vivisection, comprised of abolitionists and suffragettes. while the former resulted in laws and spcas around the us, the latter accomplished little to protect animals. demello describes a few tactics practiced by contemporary animal advocates. she expresses favoritism toward welfare legislation over direct action, comparing the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 204 latter to tactics from the pro-life movement. while she does not acknowledge the victories such tactics contributed before the passing of the animal enterprise terrorism act, she does note the conspicuousness of the extra protections afforded to animal industries. demello concludes the book by noting the simultaneous increase in affection and violence toward animals, the legacy of “an enduring and necessary link” (420). final reflections. while there are other introductory texts for has, this is the most accessible for the students and teachers of a multior interdisciplinary introductory course. for more advanced or specialized has courses, animals and society may not be a good fit. demello has fit an impressive quantity and variety of information into the text, but not without sacrificing depth. organizing a new, interdisciplinary field is no easy task, and overall demello has done a very fine job. there is some tedious repetition, but the chapters have a logical flow and are of an appropriate and consistent reading length for an introductory class. one aspect of the book’s organization i considered odd: after reading so much on the social construction of animals the reader will not learn anything about the impressive capabilities of actual animals until page 360. placing cognitive ethology, ethics, and advocacy at the end of the book is climactic. it also creates a space at the end of a course for students to reflect on the treatment of animals and consider their place in the history of animal advocacy. on the other hand, tucking cognitive ethology and moral theory at the end of the book has the effect of diminishing their significance throughout the previous sections of the book — especially if these chapters end up being rushed or cut (as readings at the end of a quarter often are. introducing the material earlier in the class would give a greater appreciation of the social, cultural, and emotional aspects of nonhuman animal existence and better equip them with moral concepts (such as speciesism) during class discussions. the role of ethical theory in animals and society may be limited, but that is not to say the book lacks a normative edge. when i originally read that “[has] is not about animal advocacy,” i anticipated animals and society was going to walk a safe line, “balancing” the perspectives of animal activists with those profiting from the animal industries (17). needless to say i was surprised by the overall critical analysis of animal use, the structural analysis of violence against animals, the self-reflexive marking of anthropocentric bias, and the inclusion of provocative — if not radical — questions in nearly every chapter. (for those who identify with critical animal studies, animals and society[italics] is worth checking out for a very accessible analysis of violence against animals and interlocking oppressions). i imagine that most instructors will be adam weitzenfeld – “a bold introduction to human-animal studies” 205 comfortable with demello’s presentation of has; however, teachers with strong personal or professional investment in the use of animals may be less enthusiastic. having been immersed in has literature since 2006 and with no expectation of teaching an introductory to has course in the near future, i had little need to read animals and society. my interest came not from need, but from curiosity and care. how will the upcoming generation of students be exposed to has for the first time, i wondered. what meaning has been constructed from decades of multiand interdisciplinary research into human-animal relationships? after reading the book, i am prompted to additional questions. to what extent should the natural sciences (e.g., cognitive ethology, conservation biology, and urban ecology) play a role in an introductory course and has research in general? to what extent does ethical theory have value in an introductory has courses? how can has escape complicity in the objectification of animals through emphasizing the meanings humans assign to and the values humans reap from human-animal relationships? how can has at once adhere to rigor and “the requirements of evidence-based scholarship” and delve into the ambiguity of nonhuman animal perceptions, experiences, and desires through the sympathetic imagination? microsoft word mclaughlin-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:1 eimear mc loughlin #savebenjy: sexuality, queer animals, and ireland we are informed that if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge and sexuality since the classical age, it stands to reason that we will not be able to free ourselves from it except at a considerable cost: nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech, a reinstating of pleasure within reality, and a whole new economy in the mechanisms of power will be required. (foucault 5) in november 2014, benjy, a charolais bull in the republic of ireland, gained global fame for exhibiting behaviors antithetical to those commonly imagined of a bull. the bull only expressed sexual interest in weanling bulls and not in the heifers he was expected to impregnate. his sexual preferences sparked national and global action in the form of a crowdfunder campaign to save the bull from inevitable slaughter, since his actions were incompatible with the procreative emphasis of the livestock industry. #savebenjy, as the campaign was called, captures a marked shift in cultural attitudes towards homosexuality in ireland. this essay considers the discourse of sexuality, both in the historical and irish cultural context. foucault’s the history of sexuality vol. 1 (1976) identified how sex was brought into biological discourses, where it could be studied and explained and, by the nineteenth century, how heterosexual reproductive sex was promoted as the norm. same-sex non-reproductive behavior was made “deviant” with strict laws and prohibitions. in ireland, the doctrine of the catholic church emphasized chastity and restraint, and sex was confined to the married heterosexual couple, while same-sex non-reproductive activity was a criminal offence. however, the decriminalization of homosexual behavior has marked a gradual shift towards equality and tolerance in ireland. the prominence and popularity of #savebenjy is anything but coincidental. in may 2015, the referendum on gay marriage sought to legalize same-sex marriage. consequently, #savebenjy provides a timely lens through which to view irish attitudes towards sexuality, while also raising important questions around nonhuman subjectivity and personhood. ireland is the first country in the world to legalize same-sex marriage by popular vote. a mere 22 years after decriminalizing homosexual acts in the state, ireland has received global attention and adulation for recognizing that same-sex couples should have the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 110 right to marry, benefiting from all the same legal protections as heterosexual couples. the winning margin of 62% has been described as “a social revolution, an expression of decency and a country coming of age” (“as it happened”). ireland is in transition, moving away from catholicism towards an increasingly secular society, and the support and attention that #savebenjy attracted further reinforces the change in cultural attitudes towards homosexuality. the #savebenjy campaign has brought both human and other-animal homosexuality into the public sphere in ireland.1 the widespread support and global media coverage of this campaign, i contend, not only reflect a cultural context of sexual plurality but also a need for greater appreciation of the sexual multiplicity of non-human animals. in a world where heterosexual reproductive sexual activity is viewed as the norm, samesex non-reproductive sexual activity is seldom associated with non-human animals, even though homosexual behavior has been detected in more than 450 animal species around the world (bagemihl 12).2 the #savebenjy phenomenon allows for a deconstruction of our preconceived ideas of identity and sexuality, using concepts in queer theory and postmodern naturecultures.3 the repression of sex and sexuality in irish history has meant that to reach any sense of freedom, we must remove laws, open a dialogue, and recognize the intrinsic and non-threatening value of sex and sexuality in our lives. this essay is an “irruption of speech” (foucault 6) that hopes to elucidate the social implications associated with the imagining of a gay bull in contemporary catholic ireland. i categorize ireland as catholic, when in reality the country has become markedly secularized in recent decades. in the past 50 years, the influence of the catholic church has waned. the 1995 referendum to legalize divorce passed, although only by just over 9,000 votes, with a clear urban/rural divide reflecting the stronger influence of the catholic church in rural areas. in addition, scandals have exposed hypocrisy in catholic teachings and undermined the reputation of the catholic church in ireland (inglis). in early november 2014, a charolais bull in east mayo was reported by various global media sources as gay, from the irish independent to fox news, from nbc news australia to russia today. the bull had been purchased for breeding, but after three months none of the heifers was in calf. benjy was deemed healthy by an examining vet, so the farmer gave benjy more time in the herd. benjy, however, seemed only to mount the weanling bulls, showing no attention to the heifers. as benjy was too old to be castrated, the farmer decided to fatten him up for slaughter to recoup some of his lost earnings. it was ____________________________________________________________________ eimear mc loughlin -#savebenjy: sexuality, queer animals, and ireland 111 at this point that a local journalist heard about the “gay bull” and the story started to cause a stir. the animal rights action network (aran) heard about benjy and sought the support of gay uk magazine. together they launched a petition to raise £5,000 with crowdfunder to buy benjy from the farmer and transport him to hillside sanctuary in norfolk, where he would be free to be himself and die of old age. #savebenjy became especially newsworthy following the involvement of the simpsons’ co-creator and philanthropist sam simon, with #savebenjy being documented in news articles from chile to belgium. the crowdfunder campaign managed to raise £9,400 through the petition, including the significant donation of £5,000 from simon. this media attention was centered on the benjy’s perceived sexual preference. the involvement of gay uk emphasizes the aspect of the story that appealed to so many people. millions of animals are slaughtered annually for human consumption, but benjy was to be slaughtered specifically because he did not fulfil his role as an inseminator. his sexuality meant that he was only viable as meat. the discourses of queer theory and naturecultures illuminate the significance of both the campaign to save benjy and the support it received. michel foucault’s foundational the history of sexuality (1976) looks critically at sex and sexuality in the western context. my epigraph illustrates his view of the repression of sex as an expression of power by the bourgeois elite, what he calls biopower.4 foucault details how sexuality was “carefully confined” in the nineteenth century as the “conjugal family took custody of it and absorbed it into the serious function of reproduction. on the subject of sex, silence became the rule” (3). thus, during the victorian era, sex was considered legitimate only in a heterosexual marital relationship, and was not spoken of otherwise. prior to the early nineteenth century, sex and sexuality were more openly discussed in “shameless discourse,” but in the victorian era sex was denaturalized and became “utilitarian and fertile.” this purification of sex manifested itself through catholic doctrine in ireland, and homosexual non-reproductive sexual behavior was now identified as deviant. queer theorist gayle rubin describes mistreatment of homosexuals in the us during the 1950s, from frequent police raids to queer bashing. the us gay rights movement in the 1970s led to a rethinking of what it meant to be gay or lesbian, and brought about a radical new era when sexual preferences could no longer be viewed as legitimate grounds for discrimination. ireland’s movement towards becoming a more tolerant country would take another 20 years. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 112 in lessons in irish sexuality (1998) sociologist tom inglis examines the role of sex education in the formation of attitudes towards sex in ireland. most sex education literature produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was published by the catholic church, and espoused modesty, chastity, and restraint (29). sex and desire were heavily regulated in dating, dances, and all contact between the sexes (30). children were kept in the dark about matters of sex, subjects deemed appropriate only for adults. according to “how to talk to your child about sex,” the catholic church depicted homosexuals as being incapable of relating to each other except via genital contact: “these are a minority group and many of them regret that they seem unable to enjoy marriage and family life” (qtd. in inglis 160). homosexual behavior was regarded as a criminal offence in ireland until 1993, and homosexual people were equated with child molesters and prostitutes. in the 22 years since its decriminalization, attitudes towards homosexuality have improved: for example, the civil partnership of same-sex couples became legal in 2010 in ireland. the #savebenjy campaign began just before the irish republic voted in a referendum to change the constitution to legalize gay marriage in may 2015. while the laws criminalizing homosexuality have been removed, the inculcated attitudes towards homosexual behavior will not be reversed so easily. in thinking sex, rubin is eager to adopt a radical new discourse of sex and sexuality. both foucault and she argue against sexual biological essentialism. queer theorists see sexual identity as changeable and socially and culturally mediated rather than biologically predetermined. as rubin puts it: the belly’s hunger gives no clue as to the complexities of cuisine. the body, the brain, the genitalia and the capacity for language are necessary for human sexuality. but they do not determine its content, its experiences and its institutional forms. moreover, we never encounter the body unmediated by the meanings that cultures give to it. (149) in “queernaturecultures,” david bell identifies how the “problematic fixity” (139) of sexual essentialism means that queer theory can in fact be “at odds with the agenda of activists” (140). if sexuality is not an identity but an activity, as rubin claims, then sexual identity is unstable, whereas benjy was persistently referred to as “benjy the gay bull” in the media, reinforcing the belief that sexuality is a defining characteristic.5 queer theory suggests that sexual ability may be determined biologically, but the manifestations of sexuality and the emergent desires of an individual are culturally mediated. ____________________________________________________________________ eimear mc loughlin -#savebenjy: sexuality, queer animals, and ireland 113 queer theory’s rejection of sexual essentialism challenges the role of nature, which had long been used to normalize heterosexual activity and to discount homosexual activity. jovian parry discusses how reproductive heterosexual activity is used to reinforce claims of “naturalness” (9), while same-sex activity is demonized as “animalistic” (9). the #savebenjy campaign saw the seemingly innocuous behaviors of a bull become imbued with meaning and significance indicative of the irish cultural context. the manifestations of benjy’s body moved beyond the individual to the cultural, framed by the desire to normalize homosexuality in an increasingly secularized country. the utility of nature as a heteronormatizing force was influenced by two factors. the first was industrialization, which moved people away from nature and interactions with other animals. the second factor was that aspect of darwin’s theory that emphasized animals’ drive to reproduce and continue the species. this emphasis on heterosexual reproductive activity created a picture of the non-human animal as only engaging in sexual activity with the opposite sex, and inevitably has led to underrecording or -documenting of same-sex behavior in non-human animals. bruce bagemihl argues that any evidence of non-reproductive same-sex activity has been rationalized, in effect “explaining away” (122) any same-sex behaviors. published in 1999, bagemihl’s biological exuberance offers both a “wondrous bestiary” (265) chronicling the myriad of same-sex activities exhibited by a wide range of species, and an exploration of how non-reproductive homosexual activity in non-human animals is treated in scientific discourse. the #savebenjy campaign was treated as an oddity, but bagemihl demonstrates that homosexuality in animals is not a new phenomenon. he finds that homosexual activity exhibited by non-human animals, unless it is explicit sexual intercourse, is either omitted from research findings or insufficiently documented, being wrongly categorized under a number of other behaviors such as affiliation or dominance (107). bagemihl identifies hundreds of species, from bonobos to canada geese, from bottlenose dolphins to rhesus macaques, among whom homosexual behavior is prevalent. he also details the multiplicity of sexual behaviors found in same-sex pairings, from child-rearing arrangements to transsexualism and transvestism. he even distinguishes among types of homosexual behavior: for example, there is a relatively high prevalence of lesbianism in bonobos. while cattle are not documented in the bestiary, bagemihl does mention that homosexual activity has been evidenced in cattle (81). his bestiary systematically details the various forms of homosexual activity in humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 114 species and identifies courting behaviors, such as “strutting” amongst female sage grouse in a same-sex courtship (13). the expansive evidence of homosexuality in nature suggests that, if homosexual behavior is so widely prevalent in a variety of species, it is not “unnatural” for humans, that “naturalness is more a matter of interpretation than facts” (79). bagemihl details how many ethologists and other researchers disregarded any same-sex behavior that is not overt sex, calling it imitation of heterosexuality (pseudoheterosexuality), substitute activity in the absence of the opposite sex, a mistake, or a pathological condition, seeking to explain the behavior rather than understand it. bagemihl claims that the preconceived notions of heteronormative sexual activity in non-human animals are grounded in the traditional “noah’s ark view” of the animal kingdom, where “biology revolves around two sexes, male and female, with one of each to a pair” (36). ecologist joan roughgarden equates the homophobia in science with a “cover up” (128). the explaining away of animal homosexuality is not true of all researchers. paul vasey and anne innis dagg are identified by bagemihl as significant exceptions. bagemihl strives for an appreciation of the multiplicities of sex, sexualities, and genders amongst non-human animals in what he terms a biological exuberance (see also giffney and hird). biological exuberance is, above all, an affirmation of life’s vitality and infinite possibilities; a worldview that is at once primordial and futuristic, in which gender is kaleidoscopic, sexualities are multiple, and the categories of male and female are fluid and transmutable. a world, in short, exactly like the one we inhabit. (bagemihl 262) therefore, queer animals present us with an opportunity to revise our conception of the natural world as heterosexual and reproductive. #savebenjy provided an arena within which our cultural perceptions of sex and sexuality could be interrogated, while also opening a dialogue into homosexuality as part of a greater spectrum of sexuality. although #savebenjy attracted much support, the legitimacy of the gay bull was called into question by a national agricultural publication, which claimed that aran was using benjy merely as a “mascot” (kingston) for its own agenda. journalist and dairy farmer harold kingston in the irish farmer’s journal illustrates the most despicable aspect of the story from his point of view: “what is not normal is the attempt to make ____________________________________________________________________ eimear mc loughlin -#savebenjy: sexuality, queer animals, and ireland 115 this a gay rights issue. it is just another way to humanise benjy.” here kingston suggests that homosexuality is exclusive to humans. he identifies the comparison of animals to humans as the contentious issue in this case, where a bull needs to be rescued as if it is enslaved in the agricultural process, which he suggests “trivializes” the work of human rights groups. in reality, the contentious issue is rather that the sexual preferences of a bull are incompatible with and inconceivable within the livestock industry, and the only option available for a gay bull is to be slaughtered. in the nature-culture dualism paradigm, the animal is natural, devoid of culture, and the cultural connotations denoted by gay rights are an attempt to “humanise benjy” (kingston). furthermore, it is apparent that even the social connotations arising from the term “gay” are exclusively human, which communicates an anthropocentric view of non-human animal subjectivity and sexuality. kingston’s article reflects a pervasive attitude towards livestock as unthinking and sexually driven, rather than sentient and sexually selective. an unavoidable aspect of #savebenjy is the rural landscape within which it originated. ireland’s agricultural industry is male-dominated, with a recent study illustrating how women own a mere 12% of farms in ireland (healy). this male-dominated landscape contrasts strongly with the rest of europe, where one in four farms are owned by women (healy). while it is difficult to speculate on the pressures faced by farmers in terms of the heteronormatizing nature of rural communities, rubin theorizes that “dissident sexuality is rarer and more closely monitored in small towns and rural areas” (161). the coverage of #savebenjy opens a dialogue on homosexual activity in a landscape that survives and thrives on heterosexual reproductive non-human animal activity in a male-dominated landscape. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 116 as the #savebenjy story reached its “happy ending” with benjy being transported to hillside sanctuary in norfolk, the media reports decreased and benjy fell into anonymity once again. however, by this stage, it appeared as if benjy the actual living animal had become marginalized by the coverage. instead, he became elevated to a symbolic status; a google search of “benjy the gay bull” categorizes countless images of benjy superimposed onto a rainbow-colored background.6 benjy’s behavior challenged cultural perceptions of non-human animals as intrinsically heterosexual. his homosexual activity eluded normative sexual categories of ordering which are defined, discrete, and biologically determined. more importantly, benjy was no longer a charolais bull who engaged in homosexual activity; he became a symbol, a representative for the naturalness of homosexuality. the marginalizing of the bull to symbolic status denied benjy his agency; an agency that communicates sexual selection at odds with both the demands of the livestock industry and our preconceived notions of non-human animal sexuality. he is seen as a device to realize meaning and understanding for the human as he fragments normative perceptions of the natural world as rigorously heterosexual. in order to re-establish benjy’s agency, which challenges the limited boundaries of sexual categorization in human groups, it is imperative to find “ways of allowing matter to matter” (alaimo 55). ____________________________________________________________________ eimear mc loughlin -#savebenjy: sexuality, queer animals, and ireland 117 benjy’s popularity in the media was motivated by a desire to “condone human homosexuality” (parry 9) in the run-up to the gay marriage referendum. stacy alaimo details how the use of queer animals as a device against political hegemony and heteronormative bias would lead to these animals being used as proof of the animality of nature. she documents how the nature-culture dualism diminishes the agency of animals while also reducing them to a political device, so that their activities could be construed as “bestial perversions” (alaimo 55). finally, it further reinforces a tradition of categorization and identification, whereby subjects are defined by what they do. the #savebenjy case demonstrated all three reasons against using homosexuality in animals as proof that it is natural. benjy became a mascot (kingston), a victim (o'neill), and a tool to further the political agenda of both animal and gay rights (“save benjy”). while benjy’s agency was denied, the campaign inadvertently assigned benjy personhood, with benjy being referred to as “he” rather than “it” in the media coverage. benjy’s personhood challenges the species-level perception of cattle that distances humans from the non-human animals used in the food industry. in order to understand queer animals, alaimo employs haraway’s “naturecultures” as the environment within which fluidity and plurality of sexuality can be achieved. she shows how non-human animals are cultural beings entwined in social interactions. alaimo adopts a perspective similar to bagemihl’s, as she longs for a reconfiguration of the distinctions between nature and culture: to look at queer animals not as a moral model or embodiment of some static universal law, but in order to find, in this astoundingly biological exuberance, a sense of vast diversity […] and a proliferation of astonishing differences that make nonsense of biological reductionism. (alaimo 55) like bagemihl, alaimo embraces the multiplicity of sexuality in the non-human animal world and explains that such multiplicity cannot be categorized by the conception of gender as male or female typical of a nature/culture dualism paradigm. #savebenjy emphasizes how the theoretical foundations of the nature/culture paradigm are impracticable in the deconstruction of such events. the reporting of the #savebenjy phenomenon is testament to the limits in our understanding of non-human animal homosexuality, since the story was regularly categorized under topics such as “weird news” (gee). as alaimo says, “queer animals elude perfect modes of capture” (67). alaimo argues that the discourses of science are unable to make sense of the queer animal due to its multiplicity. she contends that nature/culture dualism restricts our humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 118 comprehension of sexuality as plural, plastic, and plentiful amongst non-human animals. for alaimo “queer desire” is a cultural entity in natural worlds, and because it is both natural and cultural, it can only be understood in a naturecultures context. this shift in focus from sexual activity to desire engenders a new perspective on sexuality that cannot be consigned to the natural. queer desire is a “reinstating of pleasure” (foucault 5) within post-modern naturecultures. the #savebenjy campaign was ultimately a “good news story,” as benjy was saved from slaughter and allowed to live a long life in a sanctuary. it sheds light on how contemporary ireland perceives sexuality, a sexuality that has been heavily regulated. while the work of bagemihl has furthered our insight into animal homosexuality as part of a greater repertoire of sexual behaviors, the heteronormative view of the animal kingdom remains “unrelentingly straight” (alaimo 56). an unavoidable factor in the #savebenjy phenomenon is the cultural context within which it arose, communicating an emergent trend where homosexuality is viewed as an acceptable form of sexuality. ireland has, in just over two decades, shifted from decriminalizing homosexuality to rallying for the rights of a gay bull to legalizing gay marriage. conversely, the marginalization of animal to symbolic status illustrates how benjy’s agency, which challenged cultural categorizations of sexuality, was denied while his personhood was recognized throughout the coverage. in the aftermath of the referendum, benjy, since castrated, has hit the headlines once again amidst claims that he is “not so gay after all” (“benjy the bull not so gay after all”) as he was showing an interest in a heifer by the name of jezebel. of course, the primary concern should not be whether benjy is gay, straight, or indeed, bisexual, as has been claimed (cruz). explicitly, #savebenjy, the story of a potentially homosexual charolais bull, reflected the transformation already underway in ireland as the historic gay referendum loomed. implicitly and most importantly, #savebenjy embodies the possibility of recognizing sexual plasticity that is not exclusive to humans but could in fact be shared by all animals human and non-human alike. notes 1. with the prevalence of social media, a twitter hashtag was quickly created when the story about benjy gained media coverage. this hashtag illustrates both the power of social media and the modes of communication in the digital age. #savebenjy was used not only on twitter but in other reports. ____________________________________________________________________ eimear mc loughlin -#savebenjy: sexuality, queer animals, and ireland 119 2. judith butler explores the hegemony of heterosexuality in gender trouble and bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex. 3. haraway uses “naturecultures” to illustrate the interwoven connectedness that exists between nature and culture; they are co-evolved, interdependent and inter-relational. 4. foucault’s term biopower explains how those in power seek to control the populations by a process of risk regulation; in contrast to sovereign power, biopower denotes firstly a disciplinary power that focuses on control of the body and secondly, a bio-politics which aims to regulate populations. 5. butler is resistant to the fixity of identity and contends that sex is a regulatory practice that produces the body it governs. sex materializes sexual difference, contributing to “the consolidation of the heterosexual imperative” (bodies that matter 12). 6. the rainbow is commonly associated with lesbian gay bisexual and transsexual agenda as it symbolizes diversity. works cited alaimo, stacy. “eluding capture: the science, culture, and pleasure of queer animals.” queer ecologies. ed. catriona mortimer-sandilands and bruce erickson. bloomington: indiana up, 2010. 51-72. “animal rights group launches bid to save benjy the gay bull from slaughter.” independent.ie. 13 nov. 2014. 2 oct. 2015. http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/news/animal-rights-group-launches-bid-to-savebenjy-the-gay-bull-from-slaughter-30741773.html “as it happened: ireland backs same-sex marriage.” rte.ie. 24 may 2015. 28 sep. 2015. http://www.rte.ie/news/2015/0523/703207-live-count/ bagemihl, bruce. biological exuberance. new york: st. martin’s, 1999. bell, david. “queernaturecultures.” queer ecologies. ed. catriona mortimer-sandilands and bruce erickson. bloomington: indiana up, 2010. 51-72. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 120 “benjy the bull not so gay after all.” sydneynews.com.au. 31 may 2015. 28 sep. 2015. http://www.news.com.au/world/breaking-news/benjy-the-bull-not-so-gay-afterall/story-e6frfkui-1227376452919 bielenberg, kim. “same sex, different ireland.” independent.ie. 31 may, 2015. 28 sep. 2015. http://www.independent.ie/life/same-sex-different-ireland-31261718.html butler, judith. bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex. new york: routledge, 1993. _____. gender trouble. london: routledge, 1990. cruz, eliel. “benjy “the gay bull” is actually bisexual.” advocate.com. 28 may 2015. 28 sep. 2015. http://www.advocate.com/bisexuality/2015/05/28/benjy-gay-bull-actually-bisexual foucault, michel. the history of sexuality. vol. 1. 1976. trans. robert hurley. new york: vintage, 1990. “gay rights timeline: key dates in the fight for equality.” nbcnews.com. 23 mar. 2013. 28 sep. 2015. http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/23/17418872-gay-rights-timeline-key-datesin-the-fight-for-equality gee, chris. “gay breeding bull faces slaughterhouse.” mirror.com.uk. 9 nov. 2014. 28 sep 2015. http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/gay-breeding-bull-faces-slaughterhouse4597633 giffney, noreen, and myna hird. queering the non/human. aldershot, uk: ashgate, 2008. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. ____________________________________________________________________ eimear mc loughlin -#savebenjy: sexuality, queer animals, and ireland 121 healy, alison. “women own just 12% of farms in ireland.” irishtimes.com.ie. 22 oct. 2014. 28 sep. 2015. http://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/women-own-just-12-of-farms-in-irelandforum-hears-1.1973345 inglis, tom. lessons in irish sexuality. dublin: u. college dublin, 1998. “ireland’s gay bull benjy saved from slaughterhouse following appeal.” foxnews.com. 18 nov. 2014. 28 sep. 2015. http://www.foxnews.com/world/2014/11/18/ireland-gay-bull-benjy-saved-fromslaughterhouse-following-appeal-backed-by/ kingston, harold. “farmer writes: animal rights groups and benjy the gay bull.” irish farmer’s journal. 24 november 2014. 28 sep. 2015. http://www.farmersjournal.ie/farmer-writes-animal-rights-groups-and-benjy-the-gaybull-169715/ o’neill, lauren. “simpson’s co-creator rescues gay bull from slaughterhouse.” cbc.ca. 19 nov. 2014. 28 sep. 2015. http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcommunity/2014/11/simpsons-co-creator-samsimon-rescues-gay-bull-from-slaughterhouse.html o’reilly, damien. “benjy, our gay bull.” rte. 2 dec. 2014. 28 sep. 2015. http://www.podcastchart.com/podcasts/rte-countrywide-podcast/episodes/benjy-ourgay-bull parry, jovian. “from beastly perversions to the zoological closet: animals, nature and homosex.” journal for critical animal studies 10.3 (2012): 7-25. roughgarden, joan. evolution’s rainbow: diversity, gender, and sexuality in nature and people. london: u california p, 2004. rubin, gayle. “thinking sex: notes for a radical theory of the politics of sexuality.” pleasure and danger: exploring female sexuality. ed. carol vance. boston: routledge, 1984. 267-319. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 122 “save benjy.” thegayuk.com. 20 nov. 2014. 28 sep. 2015. http://www.thegayuk.com/magazine/4574334751/news-official-campaignstarted-to-save-benjy-the-gay-bull/9044776 microsoft word kolb-shannon-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:2 reviews justin kolb a cat may look upon descartes laurie shannon. the accommodated animal: cosmopolity in shakespearean locales. chicago: university of chicago press, 2013. 290 pages. $78.00 hb; $26.00 pb; $14.49 kindle. there’s a cat watching me write this review. here at the american university in cairo, where i work, the boundaries between indoors and outdoors, animals and humans, are much less formal than at american campuses and the courtyard of this building is home to an extended family of semi-tame cats. the cats occasionally wander into the little cafeteria where i’m typing, and a kitten has just hopped onto a nearby chair, idly gazing at me, occasionally licking her chops. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 116 laurie shannon’s the accommodated animal sits under this animal gaze, recreating it through a rich selection of early modern english texts. shakespeare tends to make his appearances at the ends of chapters, when detailed discussions of commentaries on genesis, bestiaries, hunting guides, political pamphlets, and philosophical dialogues lead to new (if typically brief) readings of familiar figures like as you like it’s deer, “in their own confines with forked heads […] their round haunches gored” (shakespeare 2.1.24-25), shylock as “stranger cur” (1.3.116) in venice, or king lear’s lament that man is a “bare, forked animal” (3.4.107), lacking the natural protections beasts bear against the elements. starting in the first chapter, shannon seeks to recreate a pre-cartesian polity, a “zootopian constitution” (40), grounded in the six days of creation described in genesis. shannon argues that the early chapters of genesis “do not distinguish man and animal for every purpose,” but rather unite them as creatures, “living artifacts of creation in a shared status that is, at once, both contingent and stakeholding — the classic ambivalence inherent in the structure of the political subject as such” (40-41). this argument, which owes much to both bruno latour’s “parliament of things” (14445) in we have never been modern and julia reinhardt lupton’s influential article “creature caliban,” recasts nature as politics, with human beings as just one constituency among many, surrounded by other creatures who care little for our pretensions of dominance. creature is a marvelously rich term, derived from the futureactive form of the latin creatura, denoting, in lupton’s words, “a made or fashioned thing but with a sense of continued or potential process, action, or emergence” (1). the term thus links humans, animals, and other created things in a great drama of continual emergence. shannon notes that in all of shakespeare’s works, “animal” appears only eight time, while “beast” appears 141 times and “creature” 127 times (9). shannon argues, “before the cogito, there was nothing exactly comparable to “the animal” (9). while i believe shannon is positing far too sharp an epistemological break here, i appreciate the distinction she makes. her early modern world is populated by creatures, not animals, and those creatures exercise cosmopolitan rights of their own. many of these creatures are cats, and the power of a cat’s indifferent gaze to puncture fantasies of superiority is repeatedly invoked. cats look upon their humans in michel de montaigne’s “apologie for raymond sebond,”and jacques derrida’s the animal that therefore i am, the essays from which the accommodated animal departs. in john florio’s translation, montaigne asks, “when i am playing with my cat, who knows whether she have more sport in dallying with me, than i have in gaming with her?” (399). derrida stands naked before the irreducible peculiarity of his own “real cat, truly, believe me, a justin kolb – “a cat may look upon descartes” 117 little cat” (6), and uses this encounter to argue that montaigne’s “apologie” is “one of the greatest preor anti-cartesian texts on the animal” (6). descartes, and his reduction of animals to mere bête-machines in the discourse on method, is shannon’s great adversary, the devil in the garden, whose promises of human exceptionalism led to the fall of zootopia, the cleaving of the mind from the body, and the negation of animal reason, emotion, and desire. building on derrida in chapter four, shannon positions montaigne as the anti-descartes, lamenting that the “apologie” “is barely known, while the cartesian motto, ‘i think therefore i am’ has proven to be staggeringly durable” (186). shannon attempts to imagine a modern world in which montaigne, rather than descartes, defined humanity’s relationship to animals, pulling human beings into “the generall throng” (406) of creatures, rather than endorsing the “foolish-hardiness and self-presumining obstinacie” of “sequester[ing] ourselves from their condition and society” (186). the cat watches descartes write that she is a mere machine, and dismisses him with an indifferent gaze. shannon crafts this creaturely counterhistory from zootropic texts that cast human beings as ill-suited interlopers in an animal world. in shannon’s hands, these obscure texts become delights. chapter three uses giovanni battista gelli’s 1549 la circe, a series of dialogues in which ulysses tries and fails to convince the animals of circe’s island to return to their former, human forms, to recast lear’s lament that “unaccommodated man is no more but such a poor, bare, forked animal” (3.4.105-07) as awareness of the animal virtues denied to human beings. the second chapter takes its title from anthony weldon’s 1652 republican pamphlet a cat may look upon a king, whose frontispiece (pictured below), skewers the absolutist pretensions of james i with the sublimely bored gaze of the cat on the facing page. beneath james’ portrait sits a list of epithets for monarchs beginning with henry viii. this litany descends the great chain of being from divine “mars” to james’ sinister “vulpes” (fox), his son charles i’s “leo,” and ending in “nullus,” naming a republican future with no monarchs, only a great commonwealth of creatures in which human beings get no special status. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 118 we get a possible model for this republic in chapter four, where shannon describes the early modern night as a frontier beyond human rule. in its place, we find a nocturnal commonwealth of cats, described in william baldwin’s 1570 prose thriller beware the cat. baldwin’s protagonist, streamer, having dosed himself with pills, poultices, and potions made from pieces of a cat, a hare, a kite, a fox, and a hedgehog, finds himself able to understand the languages of animals. his once-quiet home is suddenly unbearably loud, as his newly sensitive ears are assaulted by the barking of dogs, grunting of hogs, wawling of cats, rumbling of rates, gaggling of geese, humming of bees, rousing of bucks, crowing of cocks, sewing of socks, cackling of hens, scabbling of pens, peeping of mice, trulling of dice, curling of frogs, and toads in the bogs, chirking of crickets, shutting of wickets, shirking of owls, flittering of fowls, routing of knaves, snorting of slaves, farting of churls, fizzling of girls, with many things else. (208) augmented cognition reveals a world much richer and more populous than previously believed. with his new ears, streamer eavesdrops on a moonlit court of cats, gathered to justin kolb – “a cat may look upon descartes” 119 hear charges against one “mouse-slayer,” whose testimony reveals a cat culture that both reflects and diverges from the daylight human culture. the cat empire stretches across england and ireland; its monarch rules by both “inheritance and our own election”; and features a “perversely feline,” to use shannon’s term, “law for adultery,” forbidding females from refusing “any males not exceeding the number of ten in a night” (209). against this orderly night-republic, baldwin contrasts the nocturnal humiliations of humans maladapted to the dark. bumps in the night send the denizens of a brothel screaming outdoors and collapsing into naked heaps in the street, their clothes — which, as king lear knew in his madness, are mere “lendings” from animals anyway (3.4.107) — left behind to reveal how unsuited humans are to the world they live in. the sun starts to set on zootopia in chapter five, as shannon charts the movement of animals, over the course of the seventeenth century from a realm of law they shared, at least partially, with humans, to the realm of scientific experimentation. if the cat serves as shannon’s symbol of cosmopolitan indifference to human claims of superiority, the dog serves as the unfortunate victim of the enforcement of those claims. this reflects shakespeare, who tended to use the dog as a figure for “revulsion and violent ejection from human company” (241). shylock is a “stranger cur” (1.3.116) in venice and “a staff is quickly found to beat a dog” (2 henry vi, 3.1.171). tracing the history of the expression “hang-dog look,” shannon describes the legal trials, and hangings, of misbehaving dogs in the early seventeenth century and the dogs cut open alive or suffocated in vacuum chambers in the scientific theaters of the late seventeenth century. drawing again on latour, and on steven shapin and simon schaffer’s the leviathan and the air pump, shannon argues that “in the spectacles of vivisection and the air pump, creatures were endlessly cast for seventeenth-century audiences as the ‘machines’ they allegedly already were” (226). the dog’s old legal status, however tenuous it was, dissolved, leaving it gasping to death in an airless class jar before assembled human beings. it’s a chilling portrait of modernity. shannon’s decidedly political approach to the problem of the early modern animal has its limits. her descriptions of a pre-cartesian zootopia sometimes seem to forget that animals were not treated so well by before descartes, either. a just commonwealth of humans and animals has been imagined, but never existed. the literary scholar’s humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 120 emphasis on shifts in language can also be misleading, as the medievalist karl steele notes in his own review of the accommodated animal: but in their concentration on words and terms, literary scholars perhaps more than others risk the danger of strong whorfianism, whose cure is close attention to practices rather than texts, if this precritical distinction can be momentarily allowed. while medieval and early modern people had no singleword corresponding to animals, they nonetheless still treated humans with a respect or at least pleasure afforded nothing else. while shannon’s contrast between montaigne and descartes is highly productive, she perhaps makes too much of the epistemological break between them. the language used to discuss animals changed, gradually, but human practices toward animals changed little over the course of the seventeenth century. but these are minor caveats. the accommodated animal offers us the chance to look back on the early modern era and its literature with cat’s eyes, and the new perspective alone is worthwhile. like the medicines applied by the protagonist of beware the cat, shannon’s book opens our eyes and ears a little wider, making us aware of the barking, grunting, chirping, mewling commonwealth that was always already around us. the kitten has grown bored with me and wandered away. it’s now curled up asleep on another chair across the room, blissfully indifferent to the people around it, confident that this world belongs to it. works cited derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. ed. marie-louise mallet. trans. david wills. new york: fordham up, 2008. latour, bruno. we have never been modern. trans. catherine porter. cambridge: harvard up: 1993. lupton, julia reinhard. "creature caliban." shakespeare quarterly 51.1 (2000): 1-23. montaigne, michel de. the essays of montaigne: john florio’s translation. ed. j. i. m. stewart. new york: modern library, 1933. justin kolb – “a cat may look upon descartes” 121 shakespeare, william. the complete works of shakespeare. 5th ed. ed. david bevington. new york: pearson longman, 2004. steele, karl. “first space; then, maybe, time: on laurie shannon’s accommodated animal and the heterogeneous then.” upstart: a journal of english renaissance studies. 7 nov. 2013. accessed 12 dec. 2013. http://www.clemson.edu/upstart/reviews/ accomodated_animal/accomodated_animal.xhtml microsoft word vint-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 2:1 sherryl vint biodialectics roberto esposito. bios: biopolitics and philosophy. translated by timothy campbell. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008. 304 pp. $22.50. this is the first english translation of work by roberto esposito, one of the major figures in italian biopolitical theory. esposito’s work is an intervention that tries to mediate between two dominant theorizations of the biopolitical in contemporary culture: a negative view which links biopolitics with expanding sovereign power and the paradigm of the concentration camp in the work of giorgio agamben (a thinker likely familiar to those interested in human-animal studies); and a positive view which connects biopolitics with the political energy of the multitude in the theory of michael hardt and antonio negri, thinkers less taken up in human-animal studies. esposito’s contribution to this debate is the paradigm of immunization, which he draws from the work of jacques derrida, and which functions for him as a model to explain the reciprocal relations between self and community. this mechanism can fail in two directions, either subsuming the individual in the community or emphasizing individualism to an antisocial degree. the paradigm of immunity mediates between these two extremes, both positing and negating community in a reciprocal and simultaneous movement: “rather than centered simply on reciprocity, community doubles upon itself, protecting itself from a presupposed excess of communal gift giving” (xi). esposito’s theorizations of biopolitics and community are potentially useful for thinking about the place of animals in human social and political structures, although esposito himself does not address this topic. the most important contribution of his work in this respect is that it allows us to think about subjectivity beyond the paradigm of liberalism and its inherent emphasis on human exceptionalism. esposito makes his arguments by tracing a genealogy of sovereignty and community that is at the center of other recently translated works such as foucault’s the birth of politics (2008) and derrida’s the beast and the sovereign (2009). however, his interest in rethinking from the basis of new conceptions of ontology rather than those of epistemology places his work closer to that of deleuze and guatarri. it also, to my mind, makes it difficult to conceive of ways in which his provocative theorization of new models of community and subjectivity might be effectively mobilized in a context sherryl vint — biodialectics 91 in which neoliberal biopolitical governance shapes day-to-day life for both humans and animals in pervasive and pressing ways. he begins with a critique of liberalism and disagrees with foucault that the power of the sovereign over biological life is a feature, specifically, of modernity; rather, he argues, three kinds of biopower preceded the period foucault addresses: organistic, anthropological, and naturalistic. what foucault did bring to light, however, was the nexus of individuals/power/the law that grounds modernity, and further the constitutive character of war as the origin and limit of politics. where esposito differentiates himself from foucault, however, is in the opportunities for action he sees as a consequence of this nexus. foucault, he argues, reduces the dialectic of politics and life to a choice of “a politics of life or a politics over life” (32). in the first instance, life either holds politics back as their natural limit or else it becomes subject to politics, and all biological functions are shaped and controlled for specific political ends. in the second instance, politics over life, biopolitics is turned into thanato-politics in which an excess of sovereign power, now floating free of the figure of the sovereign, causes the end of many lives and perhaps threaten life itself. esposito turns to his paradigm of immunization as a way out of this binary. in it, life and politics – or, in his language, bios and nomos – “emerge as two constituent elements of a single, individual whole that assumes meaning from their interrelation” (45). in the choice of power of life or power over life, esposito sees a fraught tension between a biopolitics that nurtures and advances a specific form of life it values and a sinister reverse impulse through which biopolitics destroys, excludes, and violates other forms of life. the complex enfolding of immunization presents a third way, a negative form of the protection of life: “it saves, insures, and preserves the organism, either individual or collective, to which it pertains, but it does not do so directly, immediately, or frontally; on the contrary, it subjects the organism to a condition that simultaneously negates or reduces its power to expand” (46). in this, esposito is drawing on hegel and the idea that the obstacle represented by the negation is simultaneously the source of the impulse for life to expand and develop. life, he argues, is best understood as an example of this dialectical drive toward new synthesis which is encapsulated in the figure of immunization. thus “immunitas is revealed as the negative or lacking [privative] form of communitas” (50): it is a defense against the expropriating/selfdestroying features of community but also what pushes that community to new configurations. all historic civilizations had immunization paradigms, esposito humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 92 contends, but in the modern age it is our “most intimate essence” (55): life “invents modernity as a historical and categorical apparatus able to cope with it” (55). a limited and negative model of the relationship between life and politics has been our liberal philosophical heritage, and thus our concepts of sovereignty, property and liberty are both inadequate and the source of the current trend in biopolitics toward thanato-politics. yet it need not be this way. liberalism reduces these concepts “to the security of the subject who appears to be the owner or beneficiary,” but this “is not to be understood either as a contingent derivation or as a destiny fixed beforehand, but rather as the consequence of the modality of immunity through which the modern thinks the figure of the subject” (56). the problems are threefold: a model of the social contract whose premise is the common vulnerability of all to be killed, producing the mutual and entwined emergence of individual rights and sovereign power; an understanding of property rooted in the sovereignty of the individual and the products of his labour, which too deeply entwines life with ownership, and produces a model of community as a zero-sum game of accumulation; and a notion of freedom that presupposes antagonism among individuals, in which “modern liberty is that which insures the individual against the interference of others through the voluntary subordination to a more powerful order that guarantees it” (72). the reconfiguration of liberty is the most crucial of esposito’s interventions; against this model, he offers a notion of more ancient, communal liberty that lies at the heart of his paradigm of immunization. esposito contrasts the inadequacy of these categories of political formation with the power of life thought via another kind of ontology. life is “always political,” he argues, not in terms of modernity’s “neutralizing mediation of immunitary nature” but “rather as an originary modality in which the living is or in which being lives” (81). he turns to spinoza and nietzsche, rather than to hobbes and locke, to offer another kind of philosophical foundation for social and political life (and a deep indebtedness to deleuze is also evident, if not directly addressed in the text). life as we understand it is stable and this is the problem; we need “something that is both more than life and other than life” (88) that can allow for superabundance and profusion pushed to an extreme, an excess. this concept of life is its real driving force, not a limited understanding of darwinism as a teleology of survival of the fittest. yet the risk is that life “freed from its restraints … tends to destroy and to destroy itself” (88). life should be “pure relation and therefore absence or implosion of subjects in relation to each other: a relation without subjects” (89). it is the logical categories of modernity (identity, causality, noncontradiction) that create a situation in which the impulses of life turn on themselves: such categories “construct barriers, limits, and embankments with respect to that sherryl vint — biodialectics 93 common munus that both strengthens and devastates life, pushing it continuously beyond itself. the procedures of reason raise up an immunitary dispostif against that vortex that in essence we are” (90). thus, the institutions of the state are all premised on the idea of the need to protect humans from the explosive power of vitality, of life unchanneled and unstructured. nietzsche, calling for humans to promote a vital force by belonging to what is not, cultivating “the self-generating capacity that degeneration has progressively consumed” (100), moves from the figure of the wolf-man, exiled from the community in hobbesian social theory, to that of a bacillus or tick “that sucks his blood and transmits it, now poisoned, to the rest of the species” (100). esposito finds inspiration in this metaphor – although he does not himself explore in detail the common use of animal figures and what this means for the place of non-humans in the bios community – but transforms it from the fearful image of poisoning to a more positive one of beneficial, reciprocal infection in his notion of immunization. in calling for the force of life to exceed its prescribed channels and for politics/community to overflow the boundaries of its current configuration, esposito is – in common with other theorists of the posthuman whose work has been valuable to human-animal studies – calling for a rethinking of what it means to be human. when humans refuse to be what liberal philosophy has constituted as “the human,” new possibilities emerge, including new models of the relationship between individual and community. esposito is fond of the image of pregnancy, of a being that is both one and two, of an individual that is both inside and outside, “the exterior of the interior, the common of the immune” (108), to represent this possibility. liberal philosophy, in contrast, has focused its energy on differentiating between binaries, specifically that between lives that matter and those that do not in biopolitical configurations. esposito examines this through the frightening exemplar of nazi policy, insisting upon the necessity of examining the full range of nazi biopolitical interventions in conjunction with one another: thus, it is not merely the concentration camp that interests him, but also the related policies fostering specific kinds of german life. his immunitary model requires that we understand them as two sides of the same project that makes one the necessary condition of the other. the crucial criterion is a biopolitics that becomes about a policing of norms. he argues that the concept of abnormality or deficiency is impossible in nature: “what appears as the social result of a determinate biological configuration is in reality the biological representation of a prior political decision” (120); that is, the human institution of a norm produces the idea that some biology is so labelled, or, more accurately, so is (esposito, recall, is interested in rethinking ontology). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 94 in our liberal heritage, natural law and positive law become confused and conflated, and this is what produces thanato-politics. through an examination of literary texts that epitomize the split this produces in human cultures – such as the strange case of dr jekyll and mr hyde (1886) and dracula (1897) – esposito traces a shift in the way the degenerate is thought of from “the other in man” to “the other from man” (126). the work of emerging eugenics biopolitics is “the task of translating these kinds of literary hallucinations into reality” (127). the model which links the body politic, the sovereign and the biological body conceptually now extends to a model in which the sick or diseased parts of said body need to be removed to promote life, thus rationalizing the mystifying logic of a biopolitics that protects life (in general) by destroying it (in particular). this is also confusion of the inside and outside, but not in the positive way esposito suggests notions of life might be mobilized. instead a discourse emerges about a life ‘not worth’ living, installing death in advance into certain lives, and “the result is the conceptual inversion that makes the victim himself the beneficiary of his own elimination. with birth constituting his illness, that is to say the fact of being born again the will of nature, the only way to save the defective person from such a subhuman condition is that of handing him over to death and thereby liberating him from an inadequate and oppressive life” (135). thus, esposito theorizes, what germany tried to defeat in their murder of jews and others was death itself, attempting to eliminate from its body politics those lives already marked by death and hence to expel death from its community altogether. in his final chapter, esposito argues that we are acting in a similar manner in the current political desire to protect the community from the threat of terrorism, preserving life by enacting death. the immunitary mechanism of community is now functioning in a suicidally excessive way, a kind of social autoimmune disorder: “just as in the most serious autoimmune illness, so too in the planetary conflict presently under way; it is excessive defense that ruinously turns on the same body that continues to activate and strengthen it” (148). esposito rejects both responses that suggest the only way to avoid repeating the horror of nazism is to create a concept of the human “as distinguished from other animal life” (150) and the conceptual distinction between (human) political life and (animal) biological life important to agamben’s theorizations and to the heideggerian dasein. he turns to phenomenology and specifically the work of merleau-ponty, whose theorization of the flesh offers an understanding of embodiment that short-circuits the body/body politic dynamic of liberalism: “inscribing the threshold that unites the human species with that of the animal in the flesh of the world, but also the margin that joins the living and the nonliving, merleau-ponty contributes sherryl vint — biodialectics 95 to the deconstruction of that biopolitics that had made man an animal and driven life into the arms of nonlife” (161-162). this more inclusive notion of the flesh prevents the autoimmune disorder: “if everything is the body, nothing will rigidly define it, which is to say no precise immunitary borders will mark and circumscribe it” (166). he also reconfigures notions of birth so that heredity and transmission of the same (that is, the absence of defects) no longer drive the ideal of the body and the body politic. instead, “the only way for life to defer death isn't to preserve it as such (perhaps in the immunitary form of negative protection), but rather to be reborn continually in different guises” (181). crucially, this ideal of unchallenged and unfixed vitality cuts through the gordian knot of the relationship between individual and community, so that neither needs to be sacrificed for the other: “the individual (or better, the subject) that is produced by individuating itself is not definable outside of the political relationship with those that share the same vital experience, but also with that collective, which far from being its simple contrary or the neutralization of individuality, is itself a form of more elaborate individuation” (181-182). finally, returning to spinoza, esposito argues for a new understanding of the norm in which it is not prescriptive but rather “the process of normativization is the never-defined result of the comparison and conflict between individual norms that are measured according to the different power that keeps them alive, without ever losing the measure of their reciprocal relations” (187). the norm, like the subject, is a flow, never a fixed point. thus, “completely normal isn't the person who corresponds to a prefixed prototype, but the individual who preserves intact his or her own normative power, which is to say the capacity to create continually new norms” (191). such a figure is the source for a new and positive biopolitics, to counter the negative nazi thanato-politics. in short, the functioning of the immune discourse works to immunize the community against attacking that which is other. further, this model requires acknowledging the interdependence of all life – including human life – on other forms of life. this is a valuable book for those interested in human-animal studies, although the abstract quality of esposito’s work may be frustrating for some. this is not a work of prescription or direct intervention, but rather one that challenges us to rethink entirely our models of sovereignty, community, property and subjectivity. such an entire reconceptualization is difficult and can be disorienting. at the same time, however, it is clear that the liberal model of society has done much to further the oppression of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 96 animals by humans, and thus the challenge posted by bios is well worth taking up. a productive possibility for human-animal studies scholars to think about here is that this model enables us to think about animal subjects and our relation to all life, not just human life, through a paradigm other than one in which the animal is always tied to evolutionary notions of before mankind. animals might, then, be thought of as after humanity or a new humanity. in particular, thinking through the immunitary mechanisms by which society attacks its others as an autoimmune disorder in which what is attacked is ‘really’ self could productively be deployed in further thinking about shared communities between humans and animals, such as those proposed in the work of jennifer wolch. in the theorization of the flesh, not the body, the human/animal distinction disappears along with all other norms. where we might go from this starting point is a question human-animal studies scholars may well wish to ask. acknowledgement i’d like to thank dr. david fancy, whose discussions of this text during our reading group were very helpful in shaping my thinking about this book. microsoft word bayer pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:1 ellen bayer what’s in it for the lobster? richard j. king, lobster. london: reaktion, 2011. 216 pp. $19.95. elisabeth townsend, lobster: a global history. london: reaktion, 2011. 144 pp. $15.95. on a recent trip up the downeast coast of maine, i was bombarded by signs advertizing lobster shacks —“eat-in or packed for travel!” a particular favorite presents a red lobster, sipping a martini, apparently delighted to find himself in a cauldron of boiling water. while i had no desire to eat them, the creatures themselves intrigued me. a boat tour of frenchman bay with a naturalist offered some basic insights, and it was with this rudimentary knowledge of lobsters and lobstermen that i approached richard j. king’s contribution to reaktion’s “animal” series, lobster, in an attempt to understand them from a photo by ellen bayer perspective other than that of culinary delight. the first chapter “what is a lobster?” certainly reinforces king’s claim that an answer the question remains elusive. he notes that, “no clear-cut definition of lobster exists for biologists or linguists” (16). king offers some relative constants in the anatomy of what we refer to as “lobsters,” introduces several of the predominant species from around the globe, and provides brief descriptions of some behaviors. given his predominantly western audience, king narrows his focus to the clawed lobsters found primarily in the gulf of maine and northern europe. while this does keep the text focused, it comes at the expense of any in-depth discussion of lobsters’ importance in non-western cultures. king’s main objective is “to examine if there is indeed something special about our perception of the lobster” from a variety of perspectives, from fishermen’s to filmmakers’ (21). king's work ultimately seems to suggest, though, that no matter from which perspective one views the lobster, all human perceptions of him are inextricably linked to the lobster's use value. in chapter two, titled “dissecting a bug,” king provides a more developed discussion of some defining biological characteristics of lobsters, including their anatomy, coloration, feeding and mating habits, moulting, and movements. unfortunately, king humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 102 uses the vivisection of a live lobster as a framing device. he enlists professor john geller, a marine biologist at moss landing marine laboratories in monterrey, california, to vivisect two lobsters that king has purchased from a local fish market. as professor geller prepares to make his first incision into the living female lobster, king reflects fleetingly on the ethics of the matter, which struck me more as a way to get past an obligatory topic than as demonstrating any real concern for the ethics of the act itself, and the timing of the question seems a bit after the fact. additionally, king’s use of the term “dissection” whitewashes the situation; he fails to acknowledge that this is indeed a vivisection. king seems to intend the operation as a tidy narrative structure for presenting the lobster anatomy, but it is completely unnecessary. given that geller has “led dissections of hundreds of lobsters, crayfish, crabs, and other marine invertebrates for thousands of students of marine biology” (22), he could easily have drawn on his experience to describe a lobster’s biological structure. king later offers to boil the animals for geller, justifying the vivisection, i suppose, by putting the carcass to “good use.” king also regrettably chooses impersonal pronouns when referring to this individual lobster: “geller put the female lobster he planned to dissect on its belly with its tail toward him, the ‘wild canada’ bands remaining around its claws” (31, emphasis mine), which reveals her role as an object — not an subject in her own right. she serves as the biological “lobster” in the abstract, and is then served for dinner. the disconnect between human and lobster here, and king’s failure to acknowledge or explore it, is the most problematic aspect of the text. i found king’s use of st. andrews, scotland, for his narrative frame in chapter three, “ancient, giant, and plentiful,” much more palatable, as he guides us through the lobstering landmarks of the village to introduce the historical relationship between humans and lobsters. this frame nicely segues into a brief overview of archeological finds, which indicate that, “humans have been using shelled marine creatures for food or bait as long as our ancestors have been sitting heavy-browed around a campfire” (55). king presents a solid range of visual and written texts, from a temple carving in egypt to the guinness book of world records, illustrating historical human relationships with the lobster, and goes on to introduce the first major lobster industry, begun in norway (as per request of the dutch) in the 17th century. this offers a nice transition to chapter four, “building a better lobster trap,” in which he outlines the rise of the global lobster industry, with a particular emphasis on north america and europe. king provides an informative overview of the trapping methods, industry regulations, and improved technologies that have shaped the lobster industry, and offers helpful commentary on the strengths and weaknesses of these aspects of the industry. ellen bayer— what’s in it for the lobster? 103 103 chapter five, “to boil or not to boil,” considers the edible lobster from the time of the romans to contemporary lobster festivals, offering evidence from a variety of sources spanning many historical periods and genres, including classical texts, fiction, cookbooks, historical publications, poetry, painting, and film. at times this feels almost collage-like, and i would have liked king to engage more with these materials. of course, a chapter of this title cannot avoid addressing the problem of preparing the lobster for consumption. as king notes, lobster is the one of the last animals that humans even now kill at home. he describes the standard methods of killing and which tastes best, then considers which might be more humane. he notes in passing that people are often troubled by the moral question of whether it is right to boil lobsters alive; he suggests that the jury remains out on whether they experience pain or not. since these are the big questions for consumers in regards to lobsters, king surely should have explored them further. i wanted to know more about the research on lobster suffering that he mentions. how do they react to different methods of killing? what are the competing scientific and philosophical thoughts on these reactions? how do humans negotiate this moral problem when they eat or cook lobster? king concludes with a quote from david foster wallace that suggests in the end one must rely on one’s individual conscience, but this does not satisfactorily address a most significant aspect of the human/lobster relationship. king’s passion for his subject rings clear in chapter six, “lobster tales,” and his expertise in the literature of the sea and genuine love for lobsters in literature and art are apparent. he has great fun helping the reader to stock her own personal lobster library. he observes that lobster tales tend to fall into three categories — lobster as undersea creature, lobster as prize, and lobster as symbol — and he examines several examples of each here, with his reading of george mackay brown’s poem, “lobster,” being particularly insightful. some of the other texts could have benefited from similar close (yet brief) analysis. king laments that in literature and the arts we see “our crustacean heroes in a vital, albeit supporting role” (131). it seems to me that this might also sum up lobsters’ role in all of their interactions with humans. the final chapter, “feelers,” is a nice send-off that briefly considers our future with the lobster by taking an around-the-world look at current lobster/human intersections. it sums up the significant themes, or lessons, of king’s lobster study, and the chapter serves as a nice bookend to the first chapter, reinforcing that we still have much to learn about the crustacean, and that our relationship with and perception continually change. while king does emphasize the difficulty of defining the lobster, i nevertheless expected a more developed discussion of lobsters themselves. like jacob bull’s humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 104 sentiment in his review of reaktion’s salmon,1 i wanted to hear more about the animal lobster beyond its use-value to humans. granted, the stated objective of the “animal” series is, “to explore the historical significance and impact on humans of a wide range of animals,”2 and perhaps the large number of different species makes blanket statements about lobsters difficult, but king nevertheless misses some opportunities to elaborate on the lives of lobsters outside of their places in human history. i wanted to hear these stories, too. the images incorporated into the text — of which there is a generous amount — deserve praise, both in terms of their smooth and effective integration and as complements to the written text. i did feel that some topics mentioned in captions merited a fuller treatment in the body of the text (such as, for example, the gloss over women’s apparently significant role in the lobster cannery industry), but overall, the images work as a helpful supplement to the written text and are an aesthetic treat to boot. elisabeth townsend’s lobster: a global history opens with an introduction of the same title as king’s first chapter “what is a lobster?” but the similarity ends there. while she does provide some detailed information about three types — clawed, spiny, and slippered — she introduces these species by posing the question, “but which should you eat?” thus, information regarding where and how humans consume lobsters guides townsend’s overview of each species. townsend’s book is part of reaktion’s “edible” series, and, true to the objective of the series, it is through the narrow lens of the history of lobsters as edible objects that she approaches them. it is perhaps unfair, then, to criticize townsend for supplying what readers of this series expect, but i nevertheless felt disappointed that the lobster never broke out of his role as food-item here. townsend’s use of gendered pronouns for referring to a specific, named, female lobster in the introductory chapter was a refreshing contrast to king, but she unfortunately abandons this in the rest of the book. townsend also expresses her concern that new technology designed to kill lobsters more quickly and humanely than current standard methods of boiling or slicing live lobsters will divorce us “from the primal experience of killing our dinner,” which puts us “in danger of losing the connection between the food we ingest and its origin” (8).3 while it’s true that most humans are dangerously disconnected from the food they eat, ultimately townsend’s principal worry stems from the possibility that, “the idyllic experience of eating a freshly boiled lobster on a coastal dock may become extinct” (8). ellen bayer— what’s in it for the lobster? 105 105 chapters one through three trace lobsters’ historical culinary evolution from stone age shell heaps to victorian sauces and on to their contemporary role as main event entrée. townsend integrates recipes from these historical time periods to illustrate the lobster’s rise in popularity with diners, which will appeal mainly to readers with an interest in how those who consumed lobsters in times past perceived and prepared them. her discussion of new “imitation” lobsters (seafood sold as lobster-like or passed off as lobster) serves as an interesting counterpoint to king’s insistence on the difficulty of defining lobsters; townsend explores this question in terms of the difficulty diners may have in determining whether what they are eating is truly lobster. this is one example of many that illustrates how a focus on the lobster as edible shapes townsend’s treatment of her subject. while both authors tackle similar topics we certainly get two very different “lobsters” from them.4 chapter four, “lobster controversies,” looks at a few central lobster-related disputes, but the question of whether or not they feel pain takes center stage. townsend looks at both sides of the issue in more depth than king does, but like him she reinforces her belief that there is no real consensus in the scientific community regarding this important aspect of lobster/human relations. both writers seem intent to remain objective on the issue, but i found townsend’s tone, at times, to be more contradictory than objective. this is particularly prevalent in chapter five, “killing and cooking (humanely).” the chapter’s title suggests that she gives lobsters the benefit of the doubt on the pain-debate, but townsend sometimes struck me as patronizing toward those who believe, or simply decide to act as if, lobsters can feel pain. her comments in response to a list of killing methods deemed inhumane by the royal society for the prevention of cruelty to animals (australia) such as, “so much for steaming on the beach” and “so now what’s the poor cook to do? convince the lobster to jump into the pot to save the cook the distress of killing it,” struck me as flippant and insensitive (85). when townsend informs the reader of the various methods restaurants employ to prepare live lobsters, she concludes, “most of the techniques are inhumane, assuming that term is relevant to such primitive creatures” (95). revealingly, the chapter highlights killing methods that will be least traumatic for the cook, and hedges by offering two perspectives that will allow diners to continue to eat lobsters unapologetically: a.) lobsters don’t suffer or feel pain anyway, or, b.) there exist humane (guilt-free) methods to kill lobsters. the final chapter, “the future of lobsters,” notes historical and contemporary concerns over declines in lobster populations and some of the regulations in place to ensure a sustainable industry. townsend takes a closer look at farming and restocking attempts humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 106 than does king, and details ways in which consumers can make responsible, sustainable choices when purchasing lobster. to her credit, townsend provides links to more sustainability-related websites than she does to cooking websites. clearly, though, the ultimate aim of lobster conservation is to ensure that future generations “have the pleasure of eating a lobster” (114), a sentiment more implied than directly stated in king’s text. a selection of historical and contemporary lobster recipes follows the final chapter. interestingly, the historical recipes make no mention of how to kill the lobsters, save one which instructs the cook to boil only live lobsters, never dead. the contemporary recipes, however, supply what townsend establishes as the most humane method for killing a lobster (chill/kill/boil), which seems to encourage the reader to err on the side of caution in the pain-debate. in short, townsend assumes those who pick up her book enjoy eating lobster, or are at least not opposed to the idea of doing so — admittedly, i fall into neither category — and i suggest that this is the best audience for her work. she laments technologies that disconnect humans from the food they ingest, yet i would argue that townsend is herself disconnected from the lobster as animal.5 her work does provide lobster-eating readers with information that will help them to make more informed and ethical choices in their consumption. the book is regrettably much less “global” than the title suggests, and townsend does not offer a rationale for her western-focus as does king. readers looking for a more interdisciplinary take on the intersections between humans and lobsters should opt for king’s book. his selection and incorporation of images is superior to townsend’s text, and his captions more helpful. unfortunately, neither book grants the lobsters a strong voice of their own, which is particularly lamentable with king, since his text comes from the “animal” series; thus, readers with an interest in human/animal studies will have to do much reading between the lines. notes 1. see humanimalia 1:2, http://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/issue02/reviews/bullsalmon.html 2. “animal.” reactionbooks.co.uk, 2011. 14 july 2011. http://reaktionbooks.co.uk/ series.html?id=1. emphasis mine. 3. later in chapter five, townsend seems to contradict her earlier lament of new killing technology and cites them as “a step in the right direction” (96). ellen bayer— what’s in it for the lobster? 107 107 4. king and townsend at times even present contradictory information, such as the discussion of the lobster’s brain by one marine biologist in king and the insistence by another lobster researcher in townsend that lobsters do not have brains. 5. take for example the caption to a photo of a lobster that reads, “the american lobster, nicknamed the maine lobster, has a pair of dangerous but delicious claws” (89). microsoft word solomon-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:1 daniel allen solomon interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla being hailed into a human-monkey world. she was not the very first monkey i had encountered in india, but she was the first monkey who allowed me to remain close to her for any length of time. it was entirely at her own insistence: we had met on the worn asphalt footpath that winds its way up jakhoo hill from the city of shimla below. the path goes up past colonial estates, houses, apartments; up through misty cedars and past vendors of snacks and sacraments; and eventually deposits a weary tourist or pilgrim on the grounds of a mandir at the hill’s crest, and into the midst of monkeys. i had already watched this monkey approach a man and a woman walking arm-in-arm. she had stopped them, like a security guard, by stepping out in front of them. when they halted, she investigated their bags, found nothing, and let them pass. so when she stood upright to reach at my satchel, i relented to her investigations. this happened in 2006, during my first trip to india. later i would gain a measure of competence in socializing with jakhoo’s monkeys that would allow me to be much more at ease in their presence, but at this moment my interlocutor had the advantages of confidence and concrete knowledge of how to relate to homo sapiens bodies. when she found that my bag’s zippers were fastened shut, she went behind me and grabbed the back pockets of my jeans. i had just enough time to congratulate myself for having slipped my wallet into my bag (as if she was interested in rupees) before i realized what she was actually doing. with one hand in each of my seat pockets, she hefted herself in two steps up my back and onto my shoulders. each of her hands held a lock of my hair and her feet grasped my shirt. except for the fact that she had mounted me, the monkey remained entirely nonviolent. i was enjoying the encounter, but i realized that i would need to be rid of her eventually. rather than risk my hands and face by trying to remove her manually, i decided to try to annoy her into fleeing. i bounced around, walked up the hill, jogged up the hill, and even jumped up and down a few times. but she took it all in stride. meanwhile, there were people passing us. i posed for photographs with tourists from haryana. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 2 after a few minutes i received some guidance at last: “baitho!” the order may have been meant for me or for the monkey, but i was the one who understood it and obeyed by sitting down in the middle of the path. coming down the hill to return to his station on the roadside was a vendor. he ran up to us shaking two bags of candy prasad — snack food meant as an offering for hanuman, the deity of the mandir. he gave the packets to the monkey, who grabbed them in a breath and leapt from my shoulders to the roadside. she was met there by an associate who in turn snatched a bag from her. i wasn’t yet able to have lengthy conversations in hindustani, but the vendor managed to express that i owed him ten rupees. this was the standard price. to the extent that humans are the actuators of this kind of behavior among the monkeys, the monkeys are also actuators of tolerance, fear, or adoration in the humans who participate in jakhoo society. my assailant was empowered to extort me by her own practical experience in engaging with humans. in turn the opportunity for her to gain such experience was provided for partially by the accommodations afforded to her and her kin by the human participants in jakhoo society. at jakhoo, the ostensible cause of this tolerance is the presence of the hanuman mandir at the hilltop. hanuman, not coincidentally, is himself either a monkey or very monkey-like.1 but the monkeys are not the passive recipients of human protections. nor are they simply taking an opportunity afforded to them by religiously minded devotees of hanuman and by the vendors and the tourist industry. rather, the monkeys should be understood as active, agential participants in the social construction of the interspecies polity at jakhoo. the social behaviors of jakhoo’s humans and monkeys are the material expressions of a long association between them around the site of the “monkey temple.” jakhoo’s monkeys are not nearly as welcome in the streets of the surrounding city of shimla, but their presence is more or less tolerated there as well. there is no clear boundary between the sacred zone in which monkeys are protected and the secular world in which animals must relent to human domination. yet the pro-monkey sentiment of shimlans is linked to the specific place of jakhoo hill. jakhoo — the hill, the mandir, and by extension the town around it — is the repository of human and nonhuman agency, understood as affective labor. taken as activity which shapes the world in which it occurs, but which is also an expression of that world, labor can describe the joint contributions of humans and monkeys to the construction of jakhoo hill, but only if it is expanded beyond a marxist concept of labor as the outcome of human planning. affect, in its most general sense, covers the nonlinguistic, irrational, and bodily aspects of communication; but affect does more than provide an addendum or commentary on the partially planned human artifices of language and architecture. daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 3 rather, insofar as our primate bodies are both vehicles of subjective meaning and aspects of the material-semiotic landscape, affect transcends the division between selves and others, subject and object, agent and environment. affect in this sense is the material expression of the history of social relations in a given landscape, an aspect of the landscape itself, and an activity that shapes the landscape. we could say that affect is what closes the loop between world and subject. affect is not the only kind of labor that shapes the landscape of jakhoo. there is building in the traditional sense, and monkeys and humans inevitably appropriate their environment with their own personal and species-specific purposes. but understanding that jakhoo hill is a landscape characterized by the material interactions of primate bodies allows us to recognize the monkeys’ contributions to the construction of the social space of jakhoo. this is important because, while there is some violence between primates on jakhoo hill, the situation is generally one of amicability. importantly, positive affect between the species also grounds the extension of relatively beneficent relations into the future. but in cities and towns throughout india, large-scale attempts at monkey removal have been the preferred means of dealing with pest monkeys conceived as a “menace.” in this context, translocation can often be understood as an expression of a strain of bourgeois environmentalism which has come to prominence in india over the past two decades and which seeks to expel backwards, non-modern, and aesthetically displeasing elements from indian cities. religious affection for monkeys is sometimes characterized as an example of the kind of backwards element that stands in the way of indian progress. while jakhoo hill appears to be a relatively secure and stable polity, wholesale translocation in other urban locales like delhi threatens to cauterize the affective feedback loop that promotes mutually amenable relations between the species. this could pose a serious threat to the future of a species whose success largely relies on association with human settlements. rhesus macaques: a “monkey menace?” the monkeys at jakhoo are mainly a kind of monkey known in english as a rhesus macaque, in latin as macaca mulatta, and in hindustani as bandar or lal bandar — “red monkeys.” outside of south asia, rhesus macaques are perhaps most commonly encountered as laboratory primates, and have been key animal models for research into polio, depression, maternal behavior, hiv, bioterrorism — the list goes on. in india, they are common urban animals. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 4 the fact that monkeys live in cities can be as surprising to an american like myself as the fact that there are no native monkeys in north america can be to some indians. how to communicate the peculiar fleshiness of a monkey-on-the-town to someone who has never lived alongside them? the niches occupied by urban monkeys might be compared to pigeons’ (rock doves, columba livia, kabutar), another south asian native who has spread around the planet alongside humans. like rhesus macaques, pigeons probably entered into their relationship with humans by way of “preadaptation” to life in cities. before their encounter with city-builders, rock doves were specialized cliffdwellers; over the millenia, human cities have unfolded before them not as obstacles inimical to their lives, but as sprawling galleries of nesting sites (rose, nagel, and haagwackernagel; haag-wackernagel). similarly, monkeys’ handiness and aptitudes for climbing turn the vertical surfaces of buildings into escape routes and playgrounds that are much more accessible to monkeys than to the humans who built them. like pigeons, rhesus are capable of activating potentials in the human-built environment that humans cannot access. unlike pigeons, however, rhesus are relatively large animals — adult males are around 53 centimeters long, and weigh about 7.7 kilograms; adult females are about 47 cm long and weigh around 5.3 kg (fooden). while there are large species who are prone to hijinks in my current californian homeworld — like coyotes, gray foxes, and raccoons — these cohabitants are nocturnal. rhesus are diurnal like ourselves, and all the more visible – and apparently brazen — for it. however, my first encounters with monkeys in india were not in-person. my arrival in india’s human-monkey worlds was mediated before anything else by the international and indian english language news media. i knew india’s monkeys first in terms of journalistic narratives of monkey danger: in the first decade of the 21st century, stories about conflict between humans and monkeys in india were a prominent news item there and abroad. mostly, the monkeys were blamed for stealing food and causing minor property damage, but inconveniences sometimes gave way to deadly encounters. though there have been other instances, the most famous recent victim of monkey violence was delhi’s deputy mayor s.s. bajwa, who apparently fell to his death after battling monkeys on his terrace (choudhury and singh). if not inflicting injury, the monkeys who figured in the news were bringing down the power lines (ani), defacing monuments (pradhan), disrupting transportation services (e.g., tnn, “monkey attacks passenger at railway station”), or even creating havoc at polls (dpa). one common element of journalistic tales of monkey menace was an explanation for non-indian audiences of how the simians were getting away with their misconduct: they were sacred to devotees of hanuman. the sacredness of monkeys is, to say the daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 5 least, not actually a universally held belief among indians nor even among hindus. but hanuman is one of the most popular gods in hinduism and other south asian religious traditions, and many of his numerous mandirs serve as rendezvous points for the monkeys and their allies among religious hindus and curious tourists. monkeys know that at these places people will come bearing edible gifts. in narratives of monkey menace, devotees of hanuman were sometimes blamed for luring monkeys into human contact with food on the basis of a bad faith anthropomorphism (or theomorphism). delhi primatologist (and oft-consulted public monkey expert) iqbal malik has complained more than once in interviews that the root problem of monkey trouble in delhi and other cities is that “the monkeys are considered as gods. but the gods become pests in a very short span of time” (lefkow; cf. watson). naturally, the fact that the danger of human-monkey interrelation goes both ways has not been lost on journalists and their informants. a 2002 report for the daily telegraph (london) by rahul bedi — a prominent journalist who has contributed a number of “monkey menace” stories to newspapers around the world since at least the early nineties — told the story of a monkey who had wandered into a temple in timmaganipalli, andhra pradesh, where he was taken as an incarnation of hanuman. bedi quoted an animals rights activist who described the monkey as old, with both of his legs paralyzed. when he and others concerned for the monkey’s welfare tried to remove him to a hospital, villagers interfered. eventually the monkey began to refuse to eat. though judges ordered that he be removed from the temple for medical care, he died before any action could be taken. news of his death traveled quickly. bedi, who is best known for his coverage of the trilokipur riots in the wake of indira gandhi’s 1983 assassination, summarized the role that monkeys play in journalistic narratives to me in a brief email exchange. he explained, “[monkey stories are] a dig at the ancient albeit irrational beliefs we as a society nurture for monkeys ... the army chief, police and all officialdom are tolerant of this menace, perpetuating these regressive beliefs that impinge destructively on many of our lives” (personal communication, 14 june 2009).2 bourgeois environmentalism and translocation. my sample of “monkey menace” stories coincides with the rise of what anthropologist amita baviskar has characterized as “bourgeois environmentalism,” a kind of environmentalism that does not take into account concerns with social justice characteristic of the grass-roots efforts that motivated previous forms of indian environmentalism (cf. gadgil and guha 1992; 1995), but rather focuses on calculations of security, sanitation, and beauty to fit the tastes of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 6 upper and middle class urban indians. the coincidence between bourgeois environmentalism and the stories of monkey menace that i read was made explicit for me by my particular subject position as a westerner who was consuming indian news made available on the internet. the connection between the “monkey menace” and bourgeois environmentalism is neoliberalism: the expansion of neoliberalism in india during the late 20th and early 21st centuries has had the effect of propagating a transnational and bourgeois vision of indian urbanity (dupont), while at the same time making indian products, services, and media more widely available in the west and expanding india’s virtual presence on the world wide web. this is to say that the monkeys were delivered to me by the same forces that created them as a “menace” plaguing india. one way to discipline monkeys for the sake of neoliberal bourgeois environmental aesthetics is translocation, the removal of unwanted organisms from the urban environment. translocation is where the coincidence between bourgeois environmentalism and discourses of monkey danger becomes material. translocation of monkeys is often carried out by wildlife officials or workers from conservation ngos. it consists of capturing monkeys and then releasing them in some distant, preferably less problematic locale. some translocation activities around rhesus and other primate species like baboons have achieved success in terms of permanently removing monkeys from one environment to another and providing those monkeys with a viable alternative home. shirley strum and other researchers and wildlife workers with the institute for primate research in nairobi translocated commensal olive baboons (papio hamadrayas anubis) from an area near an army installation where the crop-raiding monkeys were being shot, to ranches where they would pose less of a nuisance, and reported that they did well or better than expected in their new environments (strum). rhesus macaques who were removed from nearby the gurgaon air force base in haryana (near delhi) in 1998 were reported by the scientists in charge of the translocation to be doing well two years later (imam, malik, and yahya 2001). while translocation can be practiced in such a way so as to promote the well-being of some primates, it is also fraught as a management strategy. in situations where there are dense populations of monkeys, removing one set of monkeys from a given locale may only serve to create a “vacuum effect” where other monkeys of the same species as the removed individuals may simply translocate themselves into the resource-rich zone formerly occupied by the removed monkeys. i acquired the term “vacuum effect” from conversations with primatologist iqbal malik and from officials with the himachal pradesh wildlife department, but the vacuum effect phenomenon probably has been daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 7 recognized by monkey managers for a long time. rudyard kipling’s father, lockwood, wrote about it in his 1904 history of beast and man in india. noting that tradesmen in shimla had come to feel that there were “too many hanumans about,” kipling described the capture and relocation of offensive monkeys to a location out of town. the plan backfired, however, as the outcast monkeys simply followed the carts on which they had been transported right back to the city gates (kipling, 59-60). there can also be anthropogenic complications to translocations as well. in 1996, after receiving requests from local pandits (hindu religious functionaries), the chief conservator of forests (wildlife) for uttar pradesh gave the ok for a massive translocation of rhesus macaques from the holy city of vrindavan in uttar pradesh. the operation was carried out over a period of about two weeks in january of 1997 under the auspices of the world wildlife fund india. the team was initially driven off by a group of angry locals led by (different) local pandits. vrindavan’s rhesus macaques, the objectors held, are the descendents of lord krishna’s childhood playmates. they considered the monkeys to be an essential feature of the brij, a sacred region that includes vrindavan and all the places where krishna spent his childhood. though later excursions met with less resistance, captured monkeys had to be released under cover of night. in the end, over 600 of the city’s more than 1300 monkeys were removed to a forested area within mathura district. as stipulated by the mathura wildlife authorities, the monkeys’ new homes were within the traditional limits of the brij, but the release site was characterized by the authors as less than ideal on account of its proximity to villages (imam, yahya, and malik 2002). the major part of the monkey management efforts posted by the geographically overlapping governments of the national capital region and the municipalities of delhi this century have involved the mass translocation of monkeys out of the city and to ashola bhatti wildlife sanctuary. the sanctuary had been established as a protected area for wildlife in 1992, but the decision to use it as a depository for macaques who had been brought under municipal control was made only in 2007, in the wake of several years of increasingly shrill rhetoric in the newspapers, complaints from wealthy residents’ welfare associations,3 and disputes between the municipal corporation of delhi (mcd) and other delhi government bodies about whose responsibility monkey management ought to be. ashola had been under consideration by the forest department and animal advocacy groups for some time already. in august 2009, the mcd press officer deep mathur told documentarian jav douglas that 8,601 monkeys humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 8 had been captured and sent to the sanctuary since 2006 (personal communication, 12 july 2012). in a may 2012 interview with the new york times, the mcd’s chief veterinary officer, r.b.s. tyagi, stated that 13,013 monkeys had been sent to asholabhatti (vyawahare). what’s at stake: the continued possibility of coexistence. narratives of monkey danger and the backwardness of indians who support association with monkeys have at least two things in common with the effort to translocate monkeys from delhi. first, they are both monolithic in scale: menace narratives, especially those delivered to international audiences, depict india’s monkey problems as a national crisis, something that plagues the indian landscape and consciousness equally. similarly, efforts to translocate delhi’s rhesus are totalizing: the goal is to move every monkey out of delhi and into ashola, and to keep them there. the second commonality between translocation to ashola and menace discourse is that they are both propositions about the shape of indian cities to come. journalistic tales highlighting monkey hijinks and “regressive” human beliefs posit possible urbanities which are not yet extant, but which might be organized. monkey menace narratives are a symptom of a bourgeois environmentalism that selectively latches onto and amplifies some kinds of association — here, the association of monkeys with violent or backwards elements improper to urban landscapes — while ignoring or even obfuscating other associations, and effectively smoothing over the variety and complexity of extant relationships. noting that macaques who are commensal with humans may experience (alongside humans) the negative consequences of “ever-expanding human populations, increased movement of people within and between countries, and changing socio-economic conditions” (244), nancy priston and matthew mclennan have argued that urban indians’ changing attitudes towards monkeys can have negative consequences for rhesus macaques and their conservation. here, i second their recommendations that researchers and wildlife managers pay attention to the actual diversity of social relations that exist between the species, and that conservation strategies should focus on promoting tolerant attitudes and reducing negative interactions through a range of management strategies that should be tailored to specific situations of conflict. the stakes of totalizing management strategies are made clearer by translocation efforts in delhi, where the process is not reserved for monkeys. in the run-up to the 2010 commonwealth games, “mobile courts” were organized by the delhi social welfare ministry in order to confront, try, and remove beggars from the streets in short order (special correspondent). jhuggi colonies — temporary housing erected by the poor — daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 9 were destroyed (sidner). plans were formulated to erect bamboo walls around the remaining “slum” structures (nelson). more than 100,000 delhi residents became homeless in the period leading up to the games (banerjee-guha). besides the hardships endured by evicted individuals, there is also at stake the very possibility of integrating disenfranchized persons. when the poor and the indigent are systematically removed from the sight of the powerful, the powerful are denying themselves the opportunity to develop or maintain the ethical capacities required to accommodate disparate, disempowered others. what is removed from the urban environment may not be just monkeys, but the components of a world that fosters subjects who are capable of living alongside monkeys. i interpret the discourses of the monkey menace alongside large-scale translocation strategies as ways of imagining a baseline of order that is assumed to be implicit in a functioning modern polity, checking the extant situation against that ideal model for errors and paradoxes, and finally progressively improving either the categories or the material situation itself through judicial orders, law-making, and management.4 yet, actual social relations between monkeys and humans are too varied to be captured by totalizing schemes, nor by notions of backwardness, religion, and tradition. rather than attempt to wholly rewrite the text of social relations between the species — indeed, instead of attempting to delete the text of human-monkey social relations wholesale — might authorities instead act to conserve already working components of extant situations? religious affection for monkeys and playful secular interrelations, as they unfold at jakhoo, constitute an archive that might be drawn upon as a resource for negotiating future human-monkey politics. not only does jakhoo host an amicable cross-species polity, but it does so in the midst of a highly developed urban space, shimla. as the state capital and as a tourist destination, shimla is the largest urban agglomeration in the northwestern state of himachal pradesh, drawing in permanent and temporary residents from all over northern india and beyond. it is no mega-city, but it is urban and global, having been established as the summer capital of the british raj in the nineteenth century, and nowadays drawing heavily upon tourists, both foreign and domestic, for its economic success.5 the estimated resident human population of the city proper was put at about 171,000 in 2011 (“urban agglomerations/cities having population 1 lakh and above”). despite being a veritable stronghold of bourgeois environmental tastes, hundreds of monkeys live in and around the town. jakhoo hill is shimla’s major tourist attraction, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 10 and also a magnet for development money from investors. the mandir, and by extension the hill and the city, is a site of interspecies affective labor, which resonates beyond the human-monkey encounters that unfold there, and through ostensibly broader, ostensibly human, social worlds like politics, economy, religion, and governance. evolution and ecology of weed macaques. perhaps the most important point of common, material interest between humans and monkeys on jakhoo and everywhere is food. like many other urban animals, rhesus macaques’ diets and environmental tolerances are flexible. rhesus eat a wide range of food, including stems, shoots, leaves, grasses, eggs, the occasional invertebrate, soil, and fruit, but their diet varies from locale to locale and with the seasons (fooden). rhesus are suited for seasonal climates — their reproductive cycles may be timed to the rainy season and its vegetable bounty (kapil; siddiqi and southwick), but they may also be found in cold, mountainous regions like himachal pradesh, and arid zones like western rajasthan, where human presences have negated any reliance on seasonal food surpluses. it should not be held against the monkeys if the day-to-day demands that they make are for food and space, for these constitute key political problems for rhesus and humans alike. in the language of tom heinsohn, rhesus engage in human ethnophoresy: their distribution is facilitated by human activity. food, in its ecological, religious, and economic aspects, is what gathers humans and monkeys together. in terms favored by jane bennett, food is the problem around which an ontologically heterogeneous human and nonhuman polity coalesces (94-109). it is also through the medium of edible exchanges that monkeys effect larger and longer-standing impacts on their material-semiotic landscape. noting the geographical extent of human-macaque sympatry — throughout humanpopulated zones of south and southeast asia — primatologist alison richard has suggested that rhesus and a few other macaque species be included in an ecological taxon known as “weed macaques.” “weeds” are monkeys who specialize in making their livings in the margins around human camps. weed macaques are a polyphyletic group, meaning that the commensal tendencies shared by the separate species in the group are probably not inherited from a common weedy ancestor, but are more likely to be examples of convergent evolution. each species’ attraction to human-altered landscapes is an independent effect of natural selection; each species’ weediness emerges post festum, after the evolutionary fact of living on the boundaries of human settlement. following ardith eudey, alison richard et al. hypothesized that the proliferation of rhesus macaques’ immediate ancestors occurred concomitantly with the retreat of glaciers from the gangetic plains around 18,000 years ago, a change that daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 11 would have favored plant species who preferred forest edges and broken environments (eudey).6 the researchers suggested that the spread of human agriculture in india over the past 10,000 years also would have promoted these marginal plant varieties, elevating some of them to the roles of cultivar and crop. it is these marginal, broken environments which produce the plants that rhesus prefer to feed upon, and so the ancestors of rhesus macaques, monkeys who could tolerate proximity to humandisturbed environments and flourish on the bounty of food provided by agriculturalists, would have likely enjoyed an advantage that other macaque groups, better suited to the forested ice age ecology that preceded the current situation, could not (richard, goldstein, and dewar; cf. coppinger for a similar tale about wolf-dog transitions). in spite of a drastic depopulation event in the mid-twentieth century, when macaques were harvested from india and sent overseas to serve in anti-polio research, about half of the rhesus macaques in the world still live in india, and most of these monkeys (as many as 86%)7 live in or near human settlements (southwick and siddiqi).8 emergent from this long, intense, food-driven history is an entire genre of interspecies landscape which positively fosters human-rhesus association: the monkey temple. monkey temples are hindu mandirs (often but not always dedicated to hanuman) or buddhist stupas. the simian residents of monkey temples often make their livings on food taken from visitors, who may or may not be willing participants in the exchange; who may or may not see in the monkeys the visage of hanuman or an incarnation of the buddha; and who may or may not take joy in watching chickpeas and corn disappear into the hands and cheek pouches of monkeys. regardless of the intentions of temple patrons, the monkeys recognize and act on their advantage in such settings, and avail themselves in pushy or polite ways of the resources on offer. when i asked visitors to jakhoo mandir (or any of the other monkey temples i visited) why they were feeding monkeys, most assumed that i needed to be apprised of the relationship between hanuman and the monkeys, or of the power (shakt) that hanuman grants his devotees. yet, how the landscape of jakhoo is produced as a place where human dominance is not a foregone conclusion is more complicated than the intentions of its human patrons or the power of the god some of them adore. human-monkey relations at jakhoo. jakhoo’s rhesus macaques are not builders in the usual sense of the term, but they do bend the living landscape to their needs, and in the process leave their mark upon it. take the long, final stairway from the front gate of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 12 jakhoo to the mandir and its surrounding grounds. on the right as one steps between the stone lions and warriors who guard this lowermost entry point is a stone wall and, on top of that, a chain link fence. on the left is a railing, and beyond that a steep slope fit only for monkeys and crows. the first landing deposits visitors on a broad lawn, where, during my fieldwork, there was some plastic playground equipment. (younger monkeys often played there as their parents and elders munched on handfuls of grass.) lower down the stairs, on the slope, there are pines and a few examples of the deodar cedars that were so celebrated by shimla’s colonial founders. higher up, on the right, stands now the 108-foot tall hanuman murti that is, as ethnographer of shimla’s religions jonathan miles-watson pointed out to me, far too tall to realistically fulfill such a statue’s ostensible purpose of bestowing the deity’s beneficent gaze (darshan) upon devotees (cf. miles-watson). visitors nowadays will be impressed by the density of monkeys gathered at lord hanuman’s feet, but the fact is that even before the giant murti was completed in 2010 the stairway was one of the monkeys’ preferred haunts. more intimidating or wellconnected individuals and groups of monkeys would occupy the stairway for a while, taking a seat just off to the side of the path, on the ground, or among the beams that support the sheet metal canopy overhead, and holding it against other monkeys. i especially came to associate this stairwell with three females who kept company with one another here, and whom i, with no sure knowledge of their connections to one another, started to call “step sisters.” but many monkeys of different apparent ranks, sex, and age frequented the area. visitors carry all kinds of snacks up the hill with them, but the primary object of exchange in the stairwell and throughout the temple grounds is prasad. at jakhoo hill, this is sugar candy and dried chickpeas. in its technical religious definition, the term prasad refers to a gift of food or some other item to a deity, who has tasted it and returned it to the worshiper in a transformed, blessed state. proper prasad is the leftovers of a divine meal, the literal radiant excess of a gift that has already been consumed, but at jakhoo the term is applied to the candy in both its blessed and preblessed forms. sold alongside votive oils and incense, these candies are ideally meant as offerings to hanuman. the merchants of the shimla vegetable markets also supply the mandir with bucketfuls of corn, which are distributed to the monkeys in a flat eastward portion of the hilltop — just on the other side of the lawn from the stairwell — that was sometime around 2006 named “vanar rajya” (roughly, “monkey kingdom”) and designated as a space for feeding monkeys, which has been technically illegal everywhere else in shimla since 2004. daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 13 the monkeys insist on being fed. from the parking lot and on up to the lawns of the temple complex, the terrain immediately to either side of the stairwell is, like the high exteriors of other human structures, only traversable by humans with some effort, and it presents an ideal space for the macaques’ more aggressive foraging techniques. like other monkey species in the subfamily cercopithecinae, including baboons and vervets, macaques have cheek pouches. when they are presented with plentiful food, they tend to forage in a “retrieve-and-retreat” pattern wherein they gather as much food as they can in their hands and cheeks before retiring to denser cover to eat. at jakhoo this technique can be observed any time a large amount of prasad or corn is scattered for a group of monkeys — lower-ranking monkeys tend to snatch up as much food as possible and bound away. feeding like this minimizes exposure to predators, but is primarily useful for evading the aggression of higher-ranking troop-mates (cf. lambert). alternatively, higher-ranking monkeys can situate themselves, and their auras of dominance, in the midst of the food pool itself, effectively limiting their subordinates’ access to it. in those cases where their food source is a walking, talking, and potentially aggressive human, the retrieve-and-retreat pattern unfolds into snatching, and this is the end to which the monkeys have re-purposed the stairs at jakhoo. what i call snatching is a technique whereby a monkey takes something edible from another animal — at jakhoo, this could be a monkey, a human, or a dog — and flees to a spot where the mark can’t or won’t follow. thus, the reputation of some monkeys as raiders and robbers. but some people would object to labeling monkeys in this way. in hindustani you can say chheenana or jhapatana and it’s the same as “snatching,” but it’s not the same as stealing. the difference has less to do with the specific technique the monkey deploys to forage from humans and more to do with the affective resonance of the categories being spoken. once, when i suggested that monkeys stole, rob, or looted people (lootana), a teenage tout corrected me. he told me to “say snatch because loot is too harsh.” that happened in delhi, but goodwill like this is widespread: monkeys are thought of as chatur, which can mean “naughty” and “clever,” but which can also suggest innocent mischievousness. “chatur” is commonly applied to children or to the childhood forms of gods. childhood images of gods like krishna engaged in mischief as the butter thief makhan chor or maruti (hanuman’s childhood name) are the very archetypes of pyar, a hindustani word which can cover a range of sentiments expressed in english as love, dearness, or affection for something cute. though their stories do humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 14 yield moral lessons, contemporary permutations of makhan chor and maruti as the heroes of children’s movies, mascots for all manner of consumables and durable goods, and even (in the case of maruti) a popular model of car, suggest that the adoration and consumption of images of makhan chor and maruti may have more to do with consumer aesthetics than religion or adaptive behavioral tendencies. similarly, the tolerance that people extend to cheeky monkeys is hard to distinguish from the pleasure that monkeys’ friends and devotees derive from indulging them. unlike the butter thief, who could be neither caught nor punished by his mortal caregivers, young maruti was struck down by the thundering god indra when he mistook the sun for a mango and tried to eat it; and when he used his divine powers to be naughty, he was cursed by the sages to forget his supernatural abilities. likewise, monkeys are indulged and adored, but not allowed to get away with everything. at the foot of the hill and at jakhoo’s final stairway, vendors rent out rods to visitors for a cost of five rupees per stick, per day. these rods are less for walking than for tapping on the ground in front of approaching monkeys. after my initial encounters with the jakhoo monkeys in 2006 i learned to keep my glasses in my pocket as soon as i reached the top of the hill, and to carry a stick with me if i meant to mingle with monkeys. i never hit any monkeys; they knew what the rod was about, and as long as i made an effort to avoid being surrounded on the lawn in vanar rajya, it was easy to remind them to restrain themselves as they solicited me for food. my wife teresa, who accompanied me for portions of my fieldwork, didn’t carry a stick and couldn’t go without her glasses. the result: her glasses were stolen three times at jakhoo in 2009. on the other hand, no one among the temple staff or vendors carried a stick. some of them were not bothered by the monkeys at all, but prasad vendors and the canteen staff, who are compelled to defend foodstuffs, and the police, who are compelled to defend tourists, made better use of stones. faced with a staff who know how to draw the line with monkeys, the macaques focus on visitors, and many of them employ a technique that goes beyond snatching into a fairly straightforward ransoming scheme. this is why the monkeys were after teresa’s glasses, though any small object that can be retrieved-and-retreated from a human might suffice. once i watched one of the step sisters steal a sandal that a woman had left outside the mandir while she went inside to sing. she (the monkey) took the sandal, found a seat between my bench and another, and waited. for half an hour, she shifted the shoe between her hands and her mouth. when the woman returned, the monkey realized that the game was afoot and moved out of reach, onto a nearby sign. in this case, i pointed the culprit out to the mark, but usually the job of clarifying the monkeys’ demands to visitors fall upon the people who daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 15 would fulfill those demands, the regular prasad vendors. in this case, one of them, a former photographer and forty year veteran of the hill, mohan, moved in and engaged the thief with packets of candies. he retrieved the shoe with no trouble, and the woman paid him the cost of the prasad, ten rupees. most of the marks are unable to retrieve their stolen articles on their own. a lot can go wrong. if the visitor can’t summon the courage to approach the offending monkey and directly hand the food over, other monkeys may intercept the delivery. miscommunications can happen, and threats may ensue. there are signs posted in the entry stairwell and around the complex offering guidelines for interacting with monkeys, and many temple regulars are able to offer practical advice for the less savvy. even other visitors, coming down the hill, routinely pass on their recent experiences and new wisdom to upward bound newcomers. but there is no explicit rhetoric on how to negotiate a ransom, except: get some prasad. for these reasons intercession from a vendor or other temple personnel is usually required. no one ever imparted to me a secret technique for successfully delivering a ransom, but people who could complete the exchanges tended to express the difference as a matter of familiarity and courage. the prasad vendors, the cafe staff, and the taxiwalas didn’t explain their edge in terms of having mastered a particular technique for approaching monkeys, but they were ready to admit that the monkeys knew them, and knew that there would be consequences for unwelcome shenanigans. models of monkey agency: training, synergy, co-construction, labor. the frequency with which jakhoo’s monkeys mug and even extort humans leads many visitors to come to suspect that the monkeys and the vendors are in cahoots. the tenth edition of the lonely planet guide to india describes the situation at jakhoo as, “a simian scam, they’ll snatch spectacles off people’s faces as the café owner will bribe them with food to give them up” (singh et al., 232). when i asked a long-time resident and tour guide about the monkeys’ techniques, he intimated his suspicions (echoed by a few local taxi drivers and at least one young vendor who worked the hill) that they had been trained by the late husband of one of the elderly prasad vendors, aunty gooly. later, surrounded by her accompanying pack of dogs, i asked her. she laughed and denied it, saying of the monkeys and her husband, “they were just friends.” the vendors’ relationships with the monkeys are not premised, as many suspect, on training. it is likely that some degree of incidental training in the form of reinforcement humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 16 has transpired between the monkeys and the various human parties who have historically been imbricated in interspecies exchanges at jakhoo. in their instructive 2002 study of long-tailed and pig-tailed macaques (m. fascicularis and a nonweed species, m. nemestrina) who were trained to pick cocoanuts on plantations in thailand, cultural anthropologist leslie sponsel et al. argued that synergy between biological, economic, and cultural conditions prompted an “adaptive shift” in the thai macaques’ niches. though the cocoanut-picking macaques were trained — and thus were integrated into the power relations of plantation culture through human initiative — the stage for productive associations that were both liveable and fairly novel was still set by the pre-existing cohesion of multiple, material mutualities in humans’ and macaques’ lifestyles. training and its implication of a superior human agency does not exhaust macaques’ capacities for action in multispecies worlds. in the 1980s, primatologist bruce wheatley found that eighty per cent of aggressive solicitations (jumping and climbing on visitors) by long-tailed macaques (m. fascicularis, another species of weed macaque) at the monkey forests of padangtegal and sangeh in bali were rewarded with food, either from a frightened tourist, or from a photographer or other entrepreneur who would bribe the monkey to release the tourist (wheatley).9 yet, wheatley points out that the monkeys recognized farmers who were known to be violent and avoided those individuals when they came to the temple grounds, demonstrating that though the photographers may have been strengthening the monkeys’ associations between tourists and food, the monkeys were nevertheless discerning and self-directed in their depredations (ibid, 142). primatologist agustín fuentes has theorized human-monkey relations at hindu temples as an in-progress domestication event. in his studies of interspecies social behavior at monkey temples in bali, fuentes opposed the “relatively traditional domesticatory practices” involved in training a monkey as a dancer or a cocoanut picker — which were “practical (functional or productive in an economic sense) process[es] intentionally directed by humans to produce the desired outcome” — to the cultural inclusion and the architectural accommodation that humans effect for monkeys in monkey temple settings (fuentes 2007, 139). fuentes stressed the role that “human place” has in facilitating monkeys’ “potential participation in a human initiated domesticatory practice” (ibid., 133-134). fuentes’s emphasis on “place” disrupted the notion that domestication is primarily carried out by the willful action of humans, and instead theorized domestication as an evolutionary outcome tied to the broader daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 17 environment that humans help to make available to some of their nonhuman neighbors (cf. coppinger and coppinger; leach). fuentes later moved away from the term “domestication,” which connotes the domos, the place of human dominion. in a subsequent article he re-theorized monkey temple relations as a "coconstructed niche" instead of a “human place" (2010). rather than situating the monkeys as organisms shifting into a space provided to them ahead of time by humans — a human domos or domain — he re-presented the monkeys as competent co-manipulators of the environment alongside and through human activity. here, fuentes is building on what some ecologists and evolutionary scientists have called “niche construction” (laland and o’brien; odling-smee, laland, and feldman) and others have called “ecosystems engineering” (jones, lawton, and shachak 1994; 1997). both terms refer to behaviors that produce effects in the environment to the extent that the acting organisms can potentially modulate the selective pressures that shape their own evolution. both terms would include the goal-oriented work of humans, who coordinate their energies actively towards material goals through social exercises like politics and technology. but they would also include the unintended effects of humans and other organisms upon their host environment. fuentes expands the concept by reminding us that the niche occupied by temple monkeys and macaques throughout south and southeast asia is not exhausted by ecological or adaptive perspectives, but that “cultural elements are also at play in building and reshaping the local niches of the humans and macaques” (2010). indeed, human culture is a medium for macaque world-building, and vice versa. taken with richard et al’s weed macaque hypothesis, fuentes’s notion of niche coconstruction suggests that the macaques have been shaping their environment for perhaps the entire duration of their association with humans — at least since the retreat of the glaciers from the gangetic plains. moreover, this suggests that the phenomenon of the monkey temple itself emerges from the long commensal relationship, meaning that the relationship does not necessarily have its origins in human-initiated practices. to attribute a role to “cultural elements” is not to re-emphasize the preeminence of humans or human models of power at the monkey temple, but rather expands the realm of action in which humans and monkeys may effect changes in mutually sensible worlds. this contravenes the ontologies posited by menace narratives, which suppose monkeys as invaders or victims in a world set up by humans. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 18 fuentes, richard, eudey, and wheatley suggest that natural selection has operated upon rhesus and other weed macaques, favoring adaptive capacities that not only suited them for life among humans, but also drew them into more and more intense associations with their primate fellows even as they opened new opportunities for rhesus flourishing. through their cumulative material-semiotic effects in their environment, monkeys’ activities, intentional and unintentional, have shaped the world that shapes them. the co-construction of niches in this way bears a resemblance to the circuitous nature of labor and the subject as imagined by karl marx when he wrote that labor is a process in which a human “opposes himself to nature as one of her own forces.... by thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature (“capital i” 344). marx situated humans as embodied organisms among other forces of nature, but he still policed the line between human and animal agency by way of a cursory human exceptionalism. he noted, for instance, that the difference between the best of bees and the most talentless architect was the human’s ability to imagine or plan ahead of time what he might be building (“economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844”). despite this, and despite the defenses of human exceptionalism countenanced by many later marxists,10 a notion of non-intentional (and thus potentially nonhuman) worldbuilding labor was latent in marx’s work. the material relevance of nonhumans’ labor-input into an unimagined and not strictly intentional common environment — and the ramifications of this input for the shape of arriving worlds — has been demonstrated in the work of post-marxist scholars like timothy mitchell. mitchell has discussed how mosquitoes conspired with colonial mismanagement and warfare to co-construct a malaria epidemic in wwii-era egypt. while the mosquitoes did not plot beforehand to rain disease upon a vulnerable egyptian populace, their contribution to the conditions of both their own future and the future world of their human prey and exterminators were considerable. the partial synergy of a war-weakened economy, a nutritionally deprived and immunologically weakened human population, and the particular blindnesses of colonial forms of knowledge production made mosquitoes effective in human worlds and humans ineffective in mosquito worlds. like the mosquitoes of egypt, the monkeys have no state apparatus of their own, but they contribute materially to the conditions of existence which they and their commensal allies the humans share. while monkeys are calculative, recognizably political beings to the standard of any political scientist, it is the more diffuse and unintentional, mosquito-like effects of the monkeys’ social activity daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 19 that has the world-building consequence of continuing positive interrelations into the future. interpellation and affect. to describe the kind of labor through which monkeys recruit humans into the adaptive complex that constitutes their niche in human-monkey shared worlds, i deploy a notion of “interpellation.” i take the concept from the marxist philosophy of louis althusser, who used the phrase to indicate how institutions of the state “hail” subjects: how they interpose official semiotics (ideology) into a subject’s rubric for self-understanding and action in the world (1971). althusser’s notion of interpellation, however, was expressly linguistic and expressly ideological, which are two venues of social life to which monkeys do not have access. althusser’s famous example of a police officer calling to a citizen, “hey you there!” illustrates the difficulty in applying an interpellative model to nonhuman animals. for althusser, the hailed subject has been successfully produced as a subject of state power if he recognizes that the police officer’s hail was meant for him; at that point, the subject has no choice but to consider himself in relation to a social apparatus with the capacity to overpower him. articulation of the police officer (in his capacity as a police officer) to a subject renders that person a subject to state power. but how would this work in a mixed species polity, where not all of the participants have the same capacities for linguistic and symbolic behavior? one way in which monkeys may extend their forms of power to other primates is through the mutualities of evolutionarily related bodies. in his lecture “from versailles to cybernetics,” the anthropologist gregory bateson offered an example of hailing across species lines within the class mammalia: “when you open the refrigerator door and the cat comes up and makes certain sounds, she is not talking about liver or milk ... what she actually says is something about the relationship between herself and you. if you translated her message into words, it would be something like, ’dependency, dependency, dependency’” (478; cf. “problems in cetacean and other mammalian communication” 367). bateson remarked that the difference between the cat’s communicative technique and the human’s is that the human receives the cat’s message — a “μ-function” expression that comments upon a relationship rather than directly indicating a specific object in the world — and then deduces from that message what specific need the cat has. but the μ-expression also has the capacity to inflect upon future and past relationships, to set the stage for future encounters and future humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 20 commentary. challenged by a young zoologist to answer the question, “do dogs laugh?” mary douglas worked from a similar concept of laughter as a socially potent form of non-linguistic communication, which was an expression of “the social situation at a given moment, and also a particular contribution to that situation” (168). for douglas a guffaw was an expression of boldness as well as a motion that has the potential to embolden the listener; a snicker is both stifled and potentially stifling of further humor. in the same way, bateson’s cat’s meows extend and modulate the relationship of dependency into the future. though the theft, begging, and extortion of temple monkeys are rightly understood to be foraging techniques, they are also bodily expressions that simultaneously transmit and modulate significance. these μ-expressions are discussions (in bateson’s words) “of the pattern of relationships” (“from versailles to cybernetics” 372) and they are made possible by a “diffractive” kind of expression that is not limited by the logic of signs. that is, they are made possible by essentially political movements that “[do] not map where differences appear, but rather ... where the effects of differences appear” (haraway 1992, 300; cf. barad; cf. weaver 2013). the weight of a monkey on my back was an expression of power that was made possible by the coincidence of two primates who were accustomed to relating to their conspecifics in hierarchical ways, but also by our mutual situation in a socially constructed landscape that was enacted as a relatively safe zone for interaction by the movements of the bodies who inhabit it. inter-species interpellation at jakhoo, like the modulating action of laughter, is a process of affective labor. a relevant and widely cited notion of affective labor comes from the work of michael hardt and antonio negri, particularly from their books empire and multitude. there, hardt and negri posit affect as an external or social manifestation of inner states, which may be “produced or manipulated” by “affective labor.” locating affective labor in the emotional expressions deployed by “legal assistants, flight attendants, and fast food workers (service with a smile)” (multitude 108), they cast this kind of activity as “immaterial labor” that adds value to consumer experience. this formulation of affect is useful for how it recognizes the nonlinguistic, epi-rational phenomena that inflect upon value and meaning. such value-adding labor is characteristic of disembodied monkey discourse in the media, and of politicians’ political promises to deal with the monkey menace, but it is insufficient to describe the lasting material effects that transcend the moment of exchange. hardt and negri’s version of affect does not allow for it to be a constitutive part of social relations, as douglas’s model of dog laughter might. instead their affect continues to subordinate daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 21 nonlinguistic phenomena in the form of emotional or “immaterial labor” to the rational, calculative values of capitalism (cf. parreñas’s 2012 critique). affect in the sense that i am pursuing does not just register differences, and does not simply add something extra to use value. it is capable of transforming disparate kinds of bodies and entering them into political relationships. harlan weaver’s 2013 analysis of susan stryker’s trans-critical monologue, “my words to victor frankenstein above the village of chamounix” (2011) elucidates how political agency is activated through affective work. in weaver’s reading of stryker’s performance essay, affect is not just the means by which stryker signifies to her audience and readers her own rage at being pathologized, at being rendered monstrous as a trans person; her articulative motion goes beyond effective techniques for communication. stryker’s diffractive movements articulate her with other agencies. they transform her subjectivity from one that is characterized by an experience of alienation from its body, to a renewed intimacy with a transfigured and embodied political subjectivity “that aligns with the power of my being” (stryker 91; cf. weaver 2013, 298). in his recent auto-ethnographic piece, “the tracks of my tears,” weaver describes a similar diffractive transition in his own life, but here the transition and its attendant political resonances are effected not by the articulation of fiction and material-semiotic abjection, but by the coincidence of weaver’s emotional transformation with the situated emotional impact of a television show, pit bulls and parolees. when one of the show’s human protagonists got off parole and received a token of inclusion in the multispecies family fostered by a pit bull rescue center, weaver rediscovered — or, better, remade — his capacity to cry, which had been diminished since starting testosterone treatments. the “paired salvation narrative” of the show’s human and canine protagonists resonated with-and-against weaver’s specific experience of gender transformation, which was itself enabled by a companion pit bull-type dog: “as i edged into increasingly liminal embodiment, i realized that people did not mess with me when she was there, that my gender in many ways was facilitated by the space between us” (349). the resonance between the lives of the show’s protagonists and weaver’s own human-animal expression allowed him to “embrace and be moved by” a politically potent kinship that could be articulated to his embodied subjectivity in such a way as to produce the material effect of tears. weaver is enacted as, and exists as, a dogged subject. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 22 taken not as simply non-linguistic communication, but as a means of enacting a material, embodied politics with the potential to produce articulations across disparate bodies and political prerogatives, affect has subject-producing effects that mirror those of althusser’s linguistic model of interpellation, but evade the anthropocentric limitations of language and ideology. monkeys are rendered capable of interpellative movements by virtue of natural selection’s effects on their behaviors and bodies, yes, but they also cultivate agency over the course of practice in real-time encounters between fleshy primates.11 this is the manner of the constructive powers of monkeys suggested by fuentes in the phrase “coconstructed niche.” and it is also in this respect that we may talk about affect as a kind of labor, specifically as the labor that modulates future social and ecological relation — that is, labor that literally and materially builds a world. another instance of my interpellation into monkey power. one of the step sisters demonstrated to me the difficulty of trying to play dumb to monkey power. she had accosted a group of tourists from delhi, including men, women, and a girl. when i caught sight of them, the two parties were facing each other down on opposite sides of the stairwell. the step sister was on the slope side and the visiting group had drawn ranks behind one man who was holding his rented rod at the ready. the hair on the monkey’s back bristled and she made open-mouth threats. meanwhile, her child played a little higher on the steps, unconcerned. i went over to the human group to ask them where they were from. maybe i was being too blithe. i may have moved too suddenly or scared the step sister’s kid, who was some distance away from me; i remember the monkey child let out a squeak and, immediately, his mother jumped around and turned her threats towards me. by the time the step sister had turned her attention to me, teresa had joined me; as we had done before, we turned our backs on the distressed monkey and tried to opt out of the confrontation. by avoiding eye contact and social engagement, by presenting no challenge at all, we were attempting to make a statement of our non-involvement.12 it didn’t work this time. the monkey ran upon me from behind. she mouthed me on the ankle, through my jeans. i got the message and scooted up the trail, pushing teresa along in front of me with one hand and waving my stick behind me with the other — and so much for keeping monkeys at stick-length. she didn’t pursue us, but only after she had gone over the edge and down the slope some distance did teresa and i come back down the stairs to where the tourists from delhi were still waiting. the man who had been holding the sister at bay asked me if i wouldn’t mind escorting him and his family up the steps. i declined and they went up anyway. when i later told one of the daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 23 pandits about my run-in with the monkey, he reminded me that she could have done much worse, and suggested that she had restrained herself. what happened to teresa and me might have been similar to an encounter bruce wheatley described in the sacred macaques of bali. while studying the monkeys of padangtegal, he came upon a high-ranking male who had recently been injured by a farmer. three females, who had been grooming their injured friend, started to threaten wheatley. wheatley was cornered by one of them in a gorge and so he “simply let her bite” him through his pants. like the step sister, wheatley’s assailant only bit him once and not hard enough to draw blood. wheatley considered the episode a case of “redirected aggression from a farmer . . . in a symbolic sense” (wheatley 55). blowing off aggressive energies that cannot be otherwise released – for instance, against an armed farmer or a family of tourists – by picking on a lower ranking out-caste party is a well-known tactic among macaques and other species of cercopithecines, not to mention their more distant relatives, apes and humans. it can serve to divert intensifying violence onto a third party or to punish the relatives of aggressors (if the aggressors themselves are too powerful to be punished), and it might help to reinforce social bonds between those individuals who join the “scapegoating” (re: rhesus, cf. especially maestripieri). it also serves to affirm the status quo by introducing or reintroducing individuals into their place in the relevant political hierarchy. by accepting his fate, wheatley enabled the execution of a macaque political process. by this time in the fall of 2009, some of the jakhoo monkeys were getting to know me in a social sense. i was a human who spent a lot of time hanging out on the stairs. the young monkey who cried had already tested my tolerance by playfully and repeatedly bounding against my back on an earlier occasion, and his mother had been on hand for that. (in fact, her proximity had been the only reason i put up with the child’s behavior.) additionally, the mother would have known me as someone who sometimes waved his stick at monkeys trying to make a living. i suspect that in being party to the social relations opened to me by my interactions with her in the past — thanks to our previous affective work — i had put myself into a position where, even if i did turn my back on her as one might “play dumb” with a police officer calling to them, i could not resist interpellation into her world of power and meaning. i, like wheatley, became a facilitator of macaque political expression. not only this, but for the tourists from delhi, the incident also produced me as a plausible guardian against monkeys — in spite of having been soundly routed. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 24 monkeys’ particular modes of integration into jakhoo society have some attendant risks. monkeys living on jakhoo hill commit the same trespasses that delhi monkeys do, stealing food and laundry from residents and tourists residing on the lower portions of jakhoo hill, occasionally biting people, and even once reputedly killing a man;13 and likewise, they are harassed by dogs and stone-throwing, rod-wielding humans, and they can suffer from obesity or malnutrition as they feed themselves on the inadequate staples most easily available to urban humans. also, while their economic and religious ties means that the monkeys of jakhoo have some effective claim to life on the hill, many of shimla’s other macaques (and a few of jakhoo’s residents) have been rendered docile state subjects through the process of sterilization. while sterilization and rerelease preserves much of what works at jakhoo, and promotes a foundation for the reestablishment of amicable multispecies worlds in the future, it also demonstrates that the vulnerability that comes along with such openings is not evenly dispersed (cf. parreñas). yet, uneven distributions of vulnerability are what makes possible the articulation of monkey desires – that is, the monkeys’ connection with humans who are desirous of working within a space of differential vulnerability to monkeys is what allows them to enunciate efficacious political expressions. an available alternative to a stark political separation between primates. the specialized society i have described at jakhoo is a social zone in which the monkey and human participants are oriented toward one another in such a way as to make it possible for the monkeys to exert a measure of power over humans. this power does not rely upon language games nor upon the possession of an imagination that can be infected by ideology (not that this is absolutely outside the capacities of macaques), but upon the constructive sediment of affective relationships. for this reason, it would be incorrect to assert that that the monkeys have been trained intentionally or unintentionally by the humans of jakhoo; nor would it be accurate to portray monkey temples as instances in a process of domestication or domination. at jakhoo, the interpellative movements go both ways — monkeys are afforded social and material space in human worlds and humans are afforded roles in monkey worlds. the particular forms of power that monkeys ply are products of the affective labor of monkeys and humans who are predisposed for their own reasons to be amenable to one another’s presences in the particular landscape of jakhoo. jakhoo mandir demonstrates the paucity of political propositions that posit monkeys as necessary outsiders to urban environments — i.e., journalistic narratives of menace, and attempts to install an absolute separation between monkeys and the city. in the daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 25 evolutionary durée, monkeys have been living alongside humans and encountering all the joys and terrors associated with humans for thousands of years. they may have adapted to life alongside humans through the material mechanisms of natural selection, but over historical scales, monkeys have shaped shared worlds through niche coconstruction, an ongoing cultural process which can be understood as the partial materialization of human and nonhuman political-ecological agencies enacted through social and technological action as well as by means of affective labor. this means that the absolute transitivity of human power over nonhumans like monkeys is not an ontological given. it is contingent and historical, not a metaphysical fact. finally, just as human domination is not inevitable, the assumption of a purified, transitive human power over nonhumans is also not necessary for the production of mutually liveable conditions for monkeys and humans. acknowledgments. some parts of this text have been adapted from my phd dissertation, “menace and management: power in the human-monkey social worlds of delhi and shimla” (2013). the ethnographic elements of the narrative presented here are derived from interviews and participant observation with wildlife officials, animal welfare advocates, political activists, scientists, and temple personnel in shimla, aligarh, and delhi, and especially at jakhoo mandir, shimla’s famous “monkey temple” for the god hanuman. during my three trips between 2006 and 2010, i also learned from persons who lived alongside monkeys in more informal contexts, including merchants and vendors at jakhoo hill and other monkey temple sites in india. finally, i spent a lot of time with monkeys at jakhoo and everywhere i went — mostly as an observer, but sometimes as their victim, opponent, or accomplice. the large portion of this ethnographic research was funded by a dissertation research grant from wennergren. thanks especially to everyone who fed me, and to my readers for their insightful comments on drafts of this article: juno parreñas, aja smith, marissa smith, and harlan weaver. notes 1. most people do not mark a distinction between monkeys and vanar, the class of supernatural beings into which hanuman was born. while hanuman is customarily described as “the hindu monkey god,” there is a sentiment among some that it is insulting to refer to hanuman as a monkey. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 26 2. such “regressive” beliefs need not be religious, however. bedi’s story about “the monkey on a nation’s back” described the helplessness of security at the delhi excise department to keep a gang of seven monkeys from invading their offices and stealing booze. “each monkey must have drunk hundreds of bottles by now,” bedi quoted one official from the department’s laboratory. the dysfunction, “the monkey on a nation’s back in this tale could be government incompetence, the sort of everyday opportunism where a few bottles of booze might accidentally get stolen by — nudge, wink — “monkeys,” or actual monkeys. 3. rwas, resident’s welfare associations; what in the united states are called hoas, home-owners’ associations. 4. cf. the dual world-building movements of moderns, “purification” and “translation,” as described by bruno latour. 5. shimla’s tourists are mainly domestic in origin. according to the city development plan published by the municipal corporation in 2006, about 1.8 million tourists had visited shimla in the previous year. 96.6% of them were indians, and 36% came from punjab, haryana, and delhi. the authors of the cdp, infrastructure development limited, identified the small percentage of foreign tourists — about 3.4% — as an unexploited resource for the local tourist industry. they noted that the city had become a “bag-packing” destination with tourists of all types remaining in town, on average, for a mere one and one-third days. 6. this is something that humans and rhesus macaques have in common. the evolution of bipedality in human ancestors since the human-chimp common ancestor lived around five million or so years ago occurred in the context of the savannah mosaic environment of the great rift valley in eastern africa. the shift from a forested african landscape (populated by knuckle-walking arboreal apes) to a broken landscape of grasslands, woodlands, and wetlands (populated by bipedal hominin apes and others) was also brought about by climatic and geographic shifts comparable in scale to the recession of the glaciers from south asia (cf. laporte and zihlman). 7. southwick and siddiqi’s estimates of the percentage of rhesus living close to human settlements was calculated through a roadside survey method. being that roads themselves are human constructions, this method could conceivably skew the sample in favor of anthropophiliac monkey populations. daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 27 8. it is possible that the drastic depopulation of indian rhesus and the instability in their kin groups that resulted may have actually promoted an increase of monkeys in urban environments (malik and johnson). 9. long-tailed or crab-eating macaques (macaca fascicularis) are closely related to rhesus. 10. for instance, the marxist humanism espoused by erich fromm, but also recent reactions to the affective turn in critical theory, e.g., the stance taken by ruth leys in her work on neuroscience and emotion. 11. cf. the notion of “rendering capable” described by vinciane despret. despret describes a form of multispecies agency where actors of different types do not begin with certain a priori capacities, but instead become capable of action in situated networks of agents and technologies. her example is alex the african gray parrot’s celebrated talent for speech, which was a capability that he came by only in the context of his relationship with his teacher, irene pepperberg. despret emphasizes the differences between situations in which animals’ agencies are made possible, not the differences between species. 12. the specific technique of ignoring an aggressive cercopithecine monkey comes recommended by a female baboon described by dorothy cheney and robert seyfarth in baboon metaphysics, who was able to avoid a violent escalation and a test of her status in the baboon hierarchy by resolutely refusing to pay attention to the hysterical threats of an immigrant male. 13. in 2009, the story of a man who was killed by macaques on the ridge road in shimla was still in circulation years after it happened. the victim was driving his scooter around the lower elevations of jakhoo hill when he saw an injured monkey on the roadside. he stopped his vehicle and went to help. he might have been particularly pious or courageously kind, or he may have been simply ignorant of the danger. the injured monkey’s troop-mates were near the road, possibly high on an adjacent slope or just over the edge of the inevitable cliff on the opposite side, and when they saw the good shimlan lifting their mate, they failed to understand his purpose and attacked him. i get this story from ajay at the fair deal shop, from the owners and managers of doegar hotel, and from the local editor of punjab kesari newspaper. ajay and the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 28 editor recall that it was covered in local newspapers, but i never managed to locate a copy. works cited althusser, louis. “ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation).” lenin and philosophy and other essays. trans. ben brewster. new york: monthly review press, 1971. 14 july 2016. web. asian news international. “monkey menace leads to power outage in central delhi.” oneindia 15 apr 2008. 14 july 2016. web. banerjee-guha, swapna. “homeless in neoliberal cities: view from mumbai.” mumbai reader 10 (2011): 62-77. barad, karen. “posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 28.3 (2003): 801-831. bateson, gregory. “from versailles to cybernetics.” steps to an ecology of mind. chicago: u of chicago p, 2000. 477-485. _____. “problems in cetacean and other mammalian communication.” steps to an ecology of mind. chicago: u of chicago p, 2000. 364-378. baviskar, amita. “the politics of the city.” seminar (web edition) 2002. 13 may 2015. web. bedi, rahul. “4,000 attend funeral of mystic monkey.” the telegraph (london). 2 september 2002. independent.ie. 20 july 2016. web. bedi, rahul. “monkeys mock democracy. ” south china morning post 22 mar 1996. the monkey inspector’s report 24 may 2012. 15 may 2015. web. _____. “new delhi’s political elite living in fear of marauding monkeys.” the telegraph 8 aug 2014. 13 may 2015. web. daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 29 _____. “the monkey on a nation’s back.” the australian 26 mar 1998. the monkey inspector’s report 25 may 2012. 15 may 2015. web. bennett, jane. vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham, nc: duke up, 2010. chauhan, anita, and raghubir s. pirta. “socio-ecology of two species of non-human primates, rhesus monkey (macaca mulatta) and hanuman langur (semnopithecus entellus), in shimla, himachal pradesh.” journal of human ecology 30.3 (2010): 171-177. cheney, dorothy l., and robert m. seyfarth. baboon metaphysics: the evolution of a social mind. chicago: u chicago p, 2007. choudhury, karan and vijaita singh. “delhi dy mayor falls prey to simian wrath.” hindustantimes 21 oct 2007. 21 oct 2007. web. coppinger, ray and lorna coppinger. dogs: a new understanding of canine origin, behavior, and evolution. chicago: u of chicago p, 2001. despret, vinciane. “the becomings of subjectivity in animal worlds. ” subjectivity 23 (2008): 123-139. deutsche presse-agentur. “too much monkey business at indian election office. ”21 mar 1996. the monkey inspector’s report 24 may 2012. 13 may 2015. web. douglas, mary. “do dogs laugh?” implicit meanings: selected essays in anthropology. london: routledge, 1999. 165-169. dupont, véronique d.n. “the dream of delhi as a global city.” international journal of urban and regional research 35.3 (2011): 533-554. eudey, ardith. “pleistocene glacial phenomena and the evolution of asian macaques.” the macaques: studies in ecology, behavior, and evolution. ed. donald g. lindburg. new york: van nostrand reinhold, 1980: 52-83. fooden, jack. “systematic review of the rhesus macaque, macaca mulatta (zimmermann, 1780). ” fieldiana: zoology, new series 96 (2000): 1–180. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 30 fromm, erich. marx’s concept of man. frederick ungar publishing: new york. 1961. 185. transcribed by sam berner. 14 may 2015. <https://www.marxists.org/ archive/fromm/works/1961/man/> fuentes, agustín. “monkey and human interconnections: the wild, the captive, and the in-between.” where the wild things are now: domestication reconsidered. eds. rebecca cassidy and molly mullins. oxford: berg, 2007. 123–146. _____. “naturalcultural encounters in bali: monkey, temples, tourists, and ethnoprimatology.” cultural anthropology 25.4 (2010): 600–624. gadgil, madhav and ramachandra guha. this fissured land: an ecological history of india. berkeley: u california p, 1992. _____. ecology and equity: the use and abuse of nature in contemporary india. london: routledge, 1995. govindrajan, radhika. “monkey business: macaque translocation and the politics of belonging in india’s central himalayas.” comparative studies of south asia, africa and the middle east 35.2 (2015): 246-262. haag-wackernagel, daniel. “the feral pigeon.” research group integrative biology 1999. trans. derek goodwin. 1999. 13 may 2015. web. haraway, donna. “the promises of monsters: a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others.” cultural studies. ed. lawrence grossberg, cary nelson, and paula treichler. new york: routledge, 1992: 295–337. _____. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. hardt, michael, and antonio negri. empire. harvard up, 2000. _____. multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire. new york: penguin, 2004. heinsohn, tom. “animal translocation: long-term human influences on vertebrate zoogeography of australasia (natural dispersal versus ethnophoresy).” zoologist 32.3 (2003): 351-376. daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 31 imam, ekwal, iqbal malik, and h.s.a. yahya. “translocation of rhesus macaques from airforce station gurgaon (haryana) to the natural forest of firozpur-jhirka, haryana, india.” journal of the bombay natural history society 98.3 (2001): 355-359. imam, ekwal, h.s.a. yahya, and iqbal malik. “a successful mass translocation of commensal rhesus monkeys macaca mulatta in vrindaban, india.” oryx 36.1 (2002): 87-93. infrastructure development corporation limited. “shimla city development plan.” edited by himachal pradesh urban development authority. municipal corporation of shimla website (2006). 10 march 2014. web. jones, clive g., john h. lawton, and moshe shachak. “organisms as ecosystem engineers.” oikos 69 (1994): 373-386. _____. “positive and negative effects of organisms as physical ecosystem engineers.” ecology 78.7 (1997): 1946-1957. kapil, d.v. “depredation on cultivated crops by rhesus macaque and its control.” journal of tropical forestry 11.3 (1995): 238-243. kipling, john lockwood. beast and man in india: a popular sketch of indian animals in their relations with the people. london: macmillan, 1904. laland, kevin n. and michael j. o’brien. “niche construction theory and archaeology.” journal of archaeological method and theory 17.4 (2010): 303-322. leach, helen. “selection and the unforeseen consequences of domestication.” where the wild things are now. eds. rebecca cassidy and molly mullin. oxford: berg, 2007. 71-100. lambert, joanna e. “competition, predation, and the evolutionary significance of the cercopithecine cheek pouch: the case of cercopithecus and lophocebus.” american journal of physical anthropology 126 (2005): 183-192. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 32 laporte, leo f. and adrienne l. zihlman. “plates, climate and hominoid evolution.” south african journal of science 79 (1983): 96–110. latour, bruno. we have never been modern. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 2001. lefkow, chris. “shaking the monkey off their backs.” herald sun (australia) 30 december 1999. the monkey inspector’s report 24 may 2015. 14 may 2015. web. leys, ruth. “the turn to affect: a critique.” critical inquiry 37 (2011): 434-72. maestripieri, dario. macachiavellian intelligence: how rhesus macaques and humans have conquered the world. chicago: u chicago p, 2007. makwana, s.c. “field ecology and behaviour of the rhesus macaque, macaca mulatta. ii. food, feeding and drinking in dehra dun forests.” indian journal of forestry 2.3 (1979): 242-253. malik, iqbal, and r.l. johnson. “commensal rhesus in india.” review of ecology (terre vie) 49 (1994): 233–243. marx, karl. “capital i.” the marx-engels reader. vol. 2. ed. by r.c. tucker. new york and london: w.w. norton & company, 1978. 2 vols. marx, karl. “economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844.” the marx-engels reader. vol. 2. ed. r.c. tucker. new york: w.w. norton, 1978. 66–125. miles-watson, jonathan. “hanuman reshapes shimla’s landscape?” landscape, religion, and identity in shimla. november 8, 2010. 22 jun 2014. web. mitchell, timothy. rule of experts: egypt, techno-politics, modernity. berkeley: u california p, 2002. nelson, dean. “new delhi to hide slums with bamboo ’curtains’ during 2010 commonwealth games.” the telegraph 17 aug 2009. 13 may 2015. web. nettleton, steve. “monkey menace” 2000. 20 jun 2008. startv.com. daniel allen solomon – interpellation and affect: activating political potentials across primate species at jakhoo mandir, shimla 33 odling-smee, john, kevin n. laland, and marcus w. feldman. niche construction: the neglected process in evolution. princeton: princeton up, 2003. parreñas, rheana. “producing affect: transnational volunteerism in a malaysian orangutan rehabilitation center.” american ethnologist 39.4 (2012): 673-687. pirta, raghubir s., madhav gadgil, and a.v. kharshikar. “management of the rhesus monkey macaca mulatta and hanuman langur presbytis entellus in himachal pradesh, india. ” biological conservation 79 (1997): 97–106. pradhan, bharat. “monkey brings down taj mahal gate turret top.” rediff india abroad 15 may 2006. 13 may 2015. web. priston, nancy e.c. and matthew r. mclennan. “managing humans, managing macaques: human-macaque conflict in asia and africa.” the macaque connection: cooperation and conflict between humans and macaques. (developments in primatology: progress and prospects). eds. s. radhakrishna et al., new york: springer, 2013. 225-250. richard, alison f., stephen j. goldstein, and r.e. dewar. “weed macaques: the evolutionary implications of macaque feeding ecology.” international journal of primatology 10.6 (1989): 569–594. rose, eva, peter nagel, and daniel haag-wackernagel. “spatio-temporal use of the urban habitat by feral pigeons (columba livia).” behavioral ecology and sociobiology 60.2 (2006): 242-254. siddiqi, m. farooq and charles h. southwick. “food habits of rhesus monkeys (macaca mulatta) in the north indian plains.” ecology and behavior of food-enhanced primate groups. ed. j.e. fa and charles h. southwick. monographs in primatology. new york: alan r. liss, inc., 1977. 113-124. sidner, sara. “india razes slums, leaves poor homeless. ”cnn 14 jan 2009. 13 may 2015. web. singh, singh et al. india. vol. 10th. melbourne: lonely planet publications, 2003. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (fall 2016) 34 southwick, charles h., and m. farooq siddiqi. “population status of nonhuman primates in asia, with emphasis on rhesus macaques in india.” american journal of primatology 34 (1994): 51–59. special correspondent. “mobile courts to catch beggars.” the hindu 1 sep 2009. 13 may 2015. web. sponsel, l.e., n. ruttanadakul, and p. natadecha-sponsel. “monkey business? the conservation implications of macaque ethnoprimatology in southern thailand.” in primates face to face: the conservation implications of human-nonhuman primate interconnections. ed. a. fuentes and l.d. wolfe, 288–309. cambridge: cambridge up, 2002. strum, shirley. “measuring success in primate translocation: a baboon case study.” american journal of primatology 65 (2005): 117-140. stryker, susan. “my words to victor frankenstein. above the village of chamounix performing transgender rage.” kvinder, køn & forskning 3-4 (2011): 83-96. web. times news network. “monkey attacks passenger at railway station.” the times of india 21 apr 2012. 13 may 2015. web. “urban agglomerations/cities having population 1 lakh and above,” provisional population totals, census of india 2011. 2 feb 2014. web. vyawahare, m. “a conversation with: delhi’s wildlife warden.” the new york times/ international herald tribune, 2012. 12 march 2014. web. watson, paul. “sacred and sinister simians roam new delhi’s streets.” los angeles times 21 may 2001. 14 may 2015. web. weaver, harlan. “monster trans: diffracting affect, reading rage.” somatechnics 3.2 (2013): 287-306. _____. “the tracks of my tears: trans* affect, resonance, and pit bulls and parolees.” tsq: transgender studies quarterly . 2.2 (2015): 345-352. wheatley, bruce p. the sacred monkeys of bali. prospect heights: waveland press, 1999. microsoft word pdf template h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 jocelyne porcher the work of animals: a challenge for social sciences “i am a human being: i regard nothing of human concern as foreign to my interests” wrote the poet terence.1 the human sciences speak about human beings, and for human beings. they do not extend to cows, pigs or dogs. the separation, incongruity, and irreducible otherness between man and beast explains the distance between the human sciences and animals. for anthropologists, animals have always been part of human society, along with rites and folk tales, as well as in all that man has produced for his own use. however, despite the progress that anthropology has made with regard to animals, the process of domestication is still analyzed for the most part as the process of appropriation and exploitation of nature and animals, which, far from dissolving the otherness of beasts, helps on the contrary to distance them. the cow is hidden by the herd, affection by interest, the gift by predation and by the accumulation of capital. yet we could consider — and it is on this that i base my proposition — that what we call domestication is above all the cooperative process of inserting animals into human society through work2 which involves, as marx wrote, elements of exploitation and alienation, but also, and more particularly, the prospect of emancipation. my proposition is related to the applied social sciences in western societies. i consider — and it is without doubt a somewhat animist position — that human society is not a mixed or hybrid society that includes domestic animals — to describe it like this would not help me much — but that society is human with and indeed through domestic animals. man, with a capital “m” in anthropology, is a man: a man who is also a woman, and is also, by a mysterious alchemy in our relations, a cow or a pig. that which we define as “society” includes de facto human beings and domestic animals. together we form a social corps, less in the sense of durkheim and a biological metaphor than in a political sense, even if the former is not without interest in understanding why we eat animals — or do not eat them — and carry out organ transplants. we participate in the same social environment. i will go further: i think that class struggle, a concept that has found a new actuality in our liberal societies, also concerns domestic animals very closely. viewed in this light, domestic animals are not non-humans in philippe descola’s and bruno latour’s sense. i propose that the category of “human” without animals does not exist, even if animals, domestic or otherwise, need representatives. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 2 social sciences are directly concerned with members of the social organism, both known and unknown. terence could alternatively have written, “i am a human being, and i do not regard the cow as foreign to my interests.” why? because we have lived with animals for the past 10,000 years and we have developed as human beings in their company. “the cow” is not foreign to my interests, but in some ways only, as the cow has its world and we have ours. the world that we have in common, and on which the development and durability of our relations rest, is that of work. it is thanks to work that some aspects of the cow are known to us, and part of ourselves, as human beings, is known to the cow. even though sociology has already moved on from the idea that social sciences are only concerned with man, the subject of the work of animals remains strangely undervalued. yet above all, living with animals signifies working with them. the question of work is not a theoretical anecdote, it is at the heart of our lives and of the relations that we maintain with domestic animals (cows as well as dogs), and with certain “wild” animals, at work in animal parks, zoos, and circuses. what work do animals do? how do they change the nature of work? further, in the field of work, an attempt at a derridian deconstruction of “the essence of man” does not, in my opinion, complement anti-humanist animalism, which aims to give to animals with one hand what it is taking from human beings with the other. on the contrary, it is a question of returning to animals, and returning to ourselves, that which capitalism, scientism, and triumphalism have taken from us: knowledge of the broad but potentially profitable, intelligent, and sentimental composition of the ties between us. my intention is, on the one hand, to understand what position animals occupy at work in as concrete a way as possible, and on the other, to transform work with animals in a liberating direction. by doing this, i hope to assist in giving domestic animals justice — because it is time to give them justice before the wolves definitively wipe out the sheep —, and i hope to do justice to the extraordinary richness of our relations, and to the complex relationships that are incongruous from an evolutionary point of view, yet the most remarkable aspect of our existence. research without a subject. when i started to approach the question of animal work some years ago, i found myself facing the same sorts of problems that i had encountered while researching the love between farmers and animals. i was faced with scientific subjects that did not exist in terms of questions asked, as well as with an absence of adequate concepts to construct a research question. we lack an intellectual framework that would enable us to describe the communication, and love, between jocelyne porcher — “the work of animals: a challenge for social sciences” 3 farmers and their animals. how should one think about the implications of animals at work without a theory of work which is not, as understood since marx, anthropocentric? currently, there are no theories that can support sociological research into an animal’s work without attracting immediate criticism — that is to say, research into an animal’s subjective investment in work. the work of an animal is work without subject. the sow functions as a machine, but it functions in a sentient fashion, it is a living machine; we can’t walk all over it, but we can, in the pig farm itself, electrocute it in a box that capable engineers have designed for the purpose, and leave its body to compost in the farmyard, also using equipment designed for the purpose. donna haraway has broadened our perspectives into our relations with animals as companions, and, practically speaking, into our relations with farm animals, for example, in reference to respect. that is a priority for our dog or for a laboratory mouse, in relation to work. haraway, however, because she is a philosopher, does not look for the answers to such precise questions as mine, questions that concern zootechny and the sociology of work: what does “work” mean to an animal? because i have researched the very specific aspect of “becoming with” animals, suffering in the field of work, and more particularly the sharing of suffering between humans and animals, i think that the theoretical framework which i have used to understand the subjective relationship between humans and work, the psychosociology of work, and more precisely the psychodynamics of work, could help to explain the relationship animals have with work, in particular its ties with psychopathology and psychoanalysis. it was no accident that my research into the love farmers have for their animals led me to the psychodynamics of work; labor with animals involves joy and pain, but also more elusive aspects of the self, and supports the idea that “the ego is not master in its own house,” as freud put it (perhaps, incidentally, because the house has many more occupants than freud envisaged). the psychodynamics of work and animals. for christophe dejours, work psychodynamics is not only concerned with man but with work, and not only with the organization of work but also with more specific situations and their dynamics. it does not, then, exclude animals from an analysis of work. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 4 what are the key concepts in the psychology and the psychodynamics of work? how are they keys to access the answers to my questions? i cannot here develop an entire theoretical corpus, so i will limit myself to certain terms: subjectivity. supported in particular by michel henry’s research, subjectivity refers to affectivity, or to the life experienced by the living body, the suffering body. it does not see itself, it feels itself. this definition of subjectivity as affectivity is how farmers on the whole describe their relations with animals. the inter-subjectivity between animals and humans is a co-constructed affectivity, a shared approach to life — i would say to “true life”. living together. living together is a founding rationale of work. the position that i have developed uses multiple work rationalities in animal farming work as evidence: relational, concerning identity, economic, technical, moral… living with animals is the first rationale for their vocation for most of the farmers that i have encountered. economic rationales serve this purpose, and not the other way round. animals do not serve just to generate income; it is income that serves cohabitation with livestock. this primacy of work cohabitation is in evidence today in the destruction of farms, where suicide is becoming a frequent response to the dismantlement of human-animal partnerships by management. note that the partnership of man and animal is also to a large extent being decimated in agriculture, where there is a tendency for isolation to become the rule, and where the issue of suicides can no longer be ignored. (there are three times as many suicides amongst agriculture workers as amongst management.) centrality of work. work is central to the construction of identity and to the construction of social relations. i have observed to what extent work can construct or deconstruct men and animals in farming, how much it can sensitize or desensitize them. this defeat of social ties is not an unhappy chance; it represents an objective in itself, as is evidenced in this affirmation that le patronne des patrons3 addressed to journalists — “life, love and health are precarious, why should work be an exception to the jocelyne porcher — “the work of animals: a challenge for social sciences” 5 rule?” as marx said, the two main pillars that support our lives are love and work. and as dejours emphasizes, love is by definition unstable, and that is exactly why work must be a sustainable pillar. the sustainable pillar, with love, in our relations with animals is equally work and this is why it is important that it be solid and well-understood — so that we can make sense of our relations. in farming, however, this centrality of work is defeated by the livestock production industry, which reduces man and beast to their behaviors and standardized means of functioning. it is equally defeated by theories of animal liberation, which reject the question of work. i stress this because this seems to me to be important. why do animal liberators, many of whom claim to be political, even revolutionary in their doctrines, ignore the question of work, which is the political question par excellence? i believe it is because a political analysis of work with animals evidences the extreme closeness of man to beast, and the objective of animal “liberation” is in fact to separate them. work recognition is a recognition of ties. it is thus effectively revolutionary; too revolutionary without doubt for the followers of animal liberation, amongst whom some are more sensitive to the sirens of the bio-technical industry than to communal emancipation. real and prescribed work. in the psychology of work, this distinction between what determines the organization and effectiveness of work, which defines what work can be achieved, is particularly visible in work involving animals, for example in industrial swine production. workers (human) do not always do what they are supposed to do (for example, slaughtering a runt piglet) any more than workers (animal) do (for example, being a good mother; there is no lack of sows in industrial systems who refuse to be good mothers). it is flexibility of work procedures that allows individuals to keep on working, but at the same time to remain focused on work objectives, work objectives for individuals, which are not necessarily the same as those of the management. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 6 intelligence at work. one works first and analyzes later. this engagement of work intelligence demonstrates the pre-eminence of intuitive intelligence, as described by damasio, which moves more rapidly than our capacity for formalizing it. i think that animal work intelligence is precisely intuitive. cows do not tell themselves “here’s the farmer, he doesn’t look like he’s in a good mood today, i had better park my carcass out of his way.” they are not in a position to tell us all of that, but they do manage to communicate, because, after having observed the farmer, they organize their movements so as to avoid him, if he is in fact in a bad mood. this intelligence in action can be observed even if the work is invisible. it is invisible precisely because it is situated in the interstices of the prescriptions: there is work where there are no procedures. as a consequence, work is never simply its execution. there is always some conception, even when it is most taylorized. this has been demonstrated in our research into dairy cows in a system with a milking robot. even if the robotic system can apparently organize everything — sensors, animal selection and circulation, distribution of feed — there remains an interstice in which, however small it may be, animals can find some liberty of action. faced with constraint, this freedom of action manifests itself as a capacity for resistance, by, for example, the possibility of jamming the machine. indeed, we have seen a cow blocking the way to the milking robot by stopping in the doorway, nothing more, without moving except for increasingly stepping on the other cows who wished to go into the robot. the force with which this cow resisted took up a good half hour. cooperation, confidence, rules of work, collective… all these terms bring us back to the world of collective living at work. no work collective is efficient without the coordination that stems from procedures, but, additionally, no collective is effective without cooperation. cooperation cannot be imposed, it is conditional on individual freedom. an animal that does not want to cooperate cannot be constrained to do so. it can be forced by threats or by violence, but it can obey, as industrial farm workers know very well, while refusing acquiescence. jocelyne porcher — “the work of animals: a challenge for social sciences” 7 recognition. work can only reach its potential if it is recognized. i have demonstrated the necessity in farming of a double recognition that has passed unremarked: that is, the animals’ recognition of their farmers, and the farmers’ recognition of their animals. for if the animals are engaged in work, according to my hypothesis, they have a need that is not entirely natural, a need for recognition. it is with speech and petting that the farmers recognize their animals, and it is with trust and proximity that animals recognize their farmers. recognition, in the context of my research, is set both in the field of work (the dynamics of recognition), and in a more general field, that of mauss and his successor’s gift theory (caillé). to explain the point, i will briefly refer to the preface that alain caillé wrote for my most recent book (porcher). on the subject of fukishama, he tells us, we have heard lots of things that concern us all, but the fate of the animals who lived in that zone has received little attention. there were cows in fukishama, pigs no doubt, and chickens, dogs, and cats. the farmers were displaced but their animals stayed in the barn. yet despite the risk of contamination, caille stressed, farmers returned to feed their animals, risking their own lives. this facilitates our understanding of the gift theory in our relations with animals — attachment and responsibility. the farmers cannot abandon their animals to radiation, any more than shepherds can abandon their ewes to wolves. the animals in the zone have since been destroyed. i am a great reader and admirer of jiro taniguchi, the japanese manga author whom proust would have appreciated, who describes the relationship with animals in a style that is both accurate and touching. i thought about him while hearing about what was going on in his country, and i wondered if he thought that, as a farmer quoted by caillé explained, animals could understand us. the challenges facing this research. one of the most important challenges of this research is to remove domestic animals from the exclusive domain of the socalled “natural sciences,” where they do not have a great deal to do or to say. contrary to morgan’s canon of ethology — or the principle of parsimony, which advocates, as the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 8 term implies, not giving too much to animals when you can give them less — and contrary to the zootechnical canons, which hold that the more stupid the animals, the more profitable they are, and leads to enclosing cows and then going and cutting the grass to distribute to them in the trough — i propose placing the bar high enough to be of interest to both humans and animals. because, evidently, in zootechny, stupid animals go with stupid farmers, and when cows rediscover the pleasures of the pasture, the farmer rediscovers the skills that tie him to his land and his animals. integrating domestic animals into social and humanistic disciplines gives them a public, scientific chance to be what they already are for their farmers: to be emotional, intelligent, and endowed with compassion, tenderness, and humor. it also allows us to reconstruct work with animals by betting on the increase in our sensibilities, developing our potential for relations and for creations — that is to say by keeping to the promises of work. what are these promises for animals? what would “work” mean for an animal? that is the question. but there is also another corollary: what place does death have in work? can the death of animals be the ultimate end of work with domestic animals, both for them and for us? i do not have the answer to this question, and i think it should not be posed in too hasty a way, as if we already know the reply, as for example those intellectuals of whom i have spoken above do, for whom it might be preferable to propose eating in vitro meat to the general public rather than killing animals, because it is decreed at the very heart of our love for animals that we should liberate them, and become vegetarians. this question, in view of its difficulty, should only be researched in stages. we could pose, for example, this question: what possible economic, emotional, and social life expectations are there for a dairy cow? how does the death of a dairy cow matter? what kind of society must we construct to enable cows, pigs, and chickens to have a worthwhile life? what society can we construct so that we can have, alongside them, a life that reaches our highest expectations? from a political perspective, it is really this question that drives our research: we and domestic animals are working as one for industrial capitalism and finance, just as a simple peasant and his beasts worked as one for the bourgeois in the 19th century. we will not elevate domestic animals from their condition as beasts of burden without elevating ourselves. it doesn’t mean giving up our place on the podium; it means jocelyne porcher — “the work of animals: a challenge for social sciences” 9 making space for those who helped us to ascend there. it may make us appear less big, but to my mind, we will grow. notes 1. from “the self-tormenter,” trans. henry riley (1874), l.77. 2. the aim of our research is to conceptualize animal work that is to understand what work means for animals. see : http://www1.montpellier.inra.fr/anr-cow/index.php/fr/ translator’s note: president of the mouvement des entreprises de france (medef), the largest employers’ trade union in france. works cited caillé, alain. théorie anti-utilitariste de l'action. fragments d'une sociologie générale. paris: la découverte/mauss, 2009. damasio, antonio. descartes' error: emotion, reason, and the human brain. new york: penguin, 2005. dejours, christophe. travail, usure mentale. paris: bayard, 2000. descola, philippe. beyond nature and culture. trans. janet lloyd. chicago: u chicago p, 2013. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm, 2003. latour, bruno. politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy. trans. catherine porter. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 2004. porcher, jocelyne. vivre avec les animaux: une utopie pour le 21ème siècle. paris: la découverte, 2011. microsoft word sands-lorimer h u m a n i m a l i a 8:1 reviews danielle sands “rambunctious gardening”: conservation in the anthropocene jamie lorimer, wildlife in the anthropocene: conservation after nature. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2015. 264 pp. $87.50 (hb); $25.00 (pb). at once an empirically verifiable (if not yet conclusively verified) geological term and an imprecise shorthand for the contemporary human condition, the anthropocene invites interdisciplinary conversation. it reminds us of the permeable boundary between the practical and the theoretical, the tangible impact of the cultural imaginary, and the environmental devastation which our skewed self-perception has ultimately licensed. accordingly, the anthropocene has inspired discursive interventions from geography to law, literary studies to history, and philosophy to geology. yet these rarely transcend academic boundaries: astute and ostensibly political responses from the humanities, for example, tend to get stuck or stop short, preoccupied by the future of “anthropocene humanities” or too timid to explicitly engage with scientific data. such partial, incomplete responses leave the reader frustrated and powerless. one frustrated reader intent on composing a different kind of response is human geographer jamie lorimer, whose book wildlife in the anthropocene: conversation after nature promises to be “part critique, part manifesto” (6). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 112 lorimer’s aim to engage the theoretical with the practical is an admirable and ambitious response to the anthropocene challenge. the data upon which he draws is rich and varied; it includes conservation case studies, ngo campaigns, and wildlife films, which he uses to explore the complex relations between cultural representation and conservation practice. conservation models are assessed along dual lines, both for their practical effectiveness and the plausibility of their theoretical grounding. corncrake conservation in the hebrides is discussed as an example of the traditional model, which aims to limit ecological damage and preserve what remains of pre-existing ecosystems. this, for lorimer, “a mournful, nostalgic model for conservation” (96), is compared critically with more ambitious, open-ended projects, notably the oostvaardersplassen, a portion of land near amsterdam reclaimed from the sea and set aside for rewilding. whilst deviating from the bucolic idyll we have come to associate with “green” ecologies, lorimer argues that the latter courageously moves away from a regressive conservation grounded in a fixed notion of “nature” and reinforced by narcissistic logics, to an unknown future characterized by “emergent and unanticipated ecological properties” (108). it requires that we broaden our notion of conservation and resist the process of “greenwashing” (167) in which ecological value is deemed secondary to, or conflated with, aesthetic value. refreshingly, lorimer is attentive to the roles that affect and what he deems “nonhuman charisma” (35) play in conservational practice. lorimer’s endorsement of the ovp project over traditional models of conservation is underpinned by his argument that the latter remain rooted in a concept of nature whose conservational value is spent. “there has never been a singular nature to which we can return or against which we can dispute the authenticity of a purported reconstruction” (106), he contends, identifying the political dangers of such a concept, and turning instead to the “multinatural” (181). lorimer’s suspicion of “nature” echoes timothy morton’s uncompromising deflation of that “arbitrary rhetorical construct” (21-2) in his seminal book ecology without nature. whilst morton’s position is more theoretically assured, it lacks the practical supplement which lorimer’s account offers; we might, therefore, fruitfully consider the two as complementary. according to this reading, the ovp might be framed as a living fulfilment of morton’s vision of an “[e]cological thinking that was not fixated, that did not stop at a particular concretization of its object [which] would thus be ‘without nature’” (24). moving from critique to manifesto, lorimer pragmatically acknowledges the need for an alternative conservational principle to supplant “nature.” this he finds in “wildlife,” framed as flexible, plural, and progressive. he contends: “wildlife is thus multinatural. it is immanent. it is difference — where difference is intensive, concerned less with the danielle sands -“rambunctious gardening”: conservation in the anthropocene 113 diversity of current forms and more with the unruly potential to become otherwise. this difference matters. without it ecologies would cease to function” (181). here — in a confluence between contemporary philosophies of difference and an ecological practice underpinned by belief in the value of species diversity — lorimer grounds his anthropocene thinking. the shift in focus from nature to the multinatural coincides with related shifts in emphasis: from singular to plural, sameness to difference, purity to hybridity, and stasis to process. a familiar feature of twentieth and twenty-first century “continental philosophy,” in lorimer’s hands “the flourishing of difference” (6) becomes the cornerstone of anthropocene thinking and practice. here, “difference” is conceived as unruly and unmanageable, defying human prescription. whilst an unaffected celebration of difference, such as lorimer’s, is by now commonplace, largely divested of its philosophical history, as we find it here, the value ascribed to “difference” feels underspecified. is it ethical? philosophical? political? are the qualities that lorimer glorifies — hybridity, immanence, and the multinatural — advanced as good in themselves, or pragmatically, as better conceptual tools to achieve practical ends? by focusing primarily on the applied value of the anthropocene as a “necessary shock to environmental thought” (3) with the potential to raise awareness of inter-species entanglements, lorimer’s “part critique, part manifesto” approach permits little time for philosophical untangling. instead, lorimer aims at a practical intervention, endeavouring to track the anthropocene’s “emergence and leverage its conceptual and political potential to summon new modes of environmentalism” (179). for this to be entirely convincing, lorimer would need to strengthen the links between his practical proposals and the theoretical terminology which he harvests from latour, bennett, stengers, and others, which at times feels obstructive and disconnected. what does it mean, for example, to “figure this cosmopolitics as biopolitics” (183)? or for conservation to become an “indeterminate, performative simulation” (183)? lorimer’s impatient desire to engage immediately with the practicalities of anthropocene living is understandable, and much of what he suggests is convincing: his insistence on the value of affect in determining conservational practice; his attentiveness to context and geographical specificity in order to inaugurate a process of cross-species attunement; and perhaps most persuasively, his vision of a shift from the micromanagement of stewardship to a less prescriptive sense of difference in the form of “the cosmopolitics of rambunctious gardening” (184). ultimately, however, lorimer’s book induced in me a nagging concern that the philosophical shortcuts which it takes evade the alarming reality of the anthropocene. rather than compelling us to proceed along familiar theoretical trajectories more staunchly, or to cast off the theoretical humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 114 altogether, the anthropocene short-circuits our conceptual and ethical frameworks. it “blurs and even scrambles […] crucial categories,” timothy clark writes, and “manifests itself in innumerable possible hairline cracks in the familiar life-world, at the local and personal scale of each individual life” (9). as lorimer’s advocacy of alternative conservational practices attests, the challenge for both anthropocene scholarship and action is to acknowledge and explore these cracks, to brave an unknown future without retreating into the deceptive consolations of a conservational or theoretical past. works cited clark, timothy. ecocriticism on the edge: the anthropocene as a threshold concept. bloomsbury: london, 2015. morton, timothy. ecology without nature: rethinking environmental aesthetics. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 2007. microsoft word snaebjornsdottir-moore-kosut-pdf-jgr h u m a n i m a l i a 6:2 reviews bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir bee buzz....... lisa jean moore and mary kosut, buzz: urban beekeeping and the power of the bee. new york: new york university press, 2013. 241 pp. $85.00 hb; $26.00 pb. buzz is a book about human relationships with bees. its focus is mainly on honeybees, which is one type amongst a staggering 20,000 species of bee. it is a fascinating story of the many different approaches, theories, and practices by which humans exercise their role as “caretakers” of bees. written by sociologists hitherto used to immersing themselves in research related to different human subcultures, this book knowingly pushes human-centric boundaries in order to create an overall understanding of this insect animal other the book explores the life and biology of bees, their environmental impact and role in sustainable living, as well as their historical and cultural meaning in human-centric societies. bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir – “bee buzz…” 187 it is the result of three years of research in which the authors immersed themselves in numerous bee-related activities, including attending classes on beekeeping and acquiring first-hand experience through negotiating the keeping of bees in a public space, as well as attending to the hives and the bees within them. despite this, the authors have been keen to observe and maintain scientific objectivity in their research and are at pains to distance their own practical involvement from pure beekeeping. they do, however, gladly acknowledge that the intensity of their combined practical and theoretical research had an effect on them beyond their normal experience in other academic studies, and concede as a result a changed and enlarged perspective of this tiny insect being. the buzz streaks through what we have learned from the bees and their keepers, and it is the organizing principle of this book. we hope that you will also experience in a way the endorphin rush and exquisite pain of petting the bees, standing in the middle of the hive in flight, and getting stung. (14) this mix of practical information and emotional-affective study is sustained throughout the book. it is exactly the mix of methods and approaches that made this book special and intriguing. the different emphases within their specialties of sociology enable moore and kosut to conjure up an expanded image of the bee as a being who provokes wonder and amazement. kosut’s own research into the art world, for instance into the need for making art and the imperative towards associated critical and/or economic recognition, is interesting in this context, as the interdisciplinary research methods deployed for the authors’ research mirror much artistic research undertaken in preparation for the production of contemporary artworks. the book strategically avoids attempting to use the bee and the working organization of the hive as a metaphor for production (or indeed the art world), and focuses instead on creating an awareness of the deep-seated importance of our relation to bees by referring to and reflecting on the many cultural stereotypes projected through the ages onto this non-human animal being. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 2 (spring 2015) 188 through such recorded narratives we are also able to see the reciprocity of the relationship. humans project character and emotion onto the bees better to empathize with them and the hive; but the already established image of the ethical solidity of a working hive also encourages in their keepers certain values and behavior already held in high esteem in most western societies. chapters in the book entitled “entangling with bees” and “breeding good citizens” discuss the roles of the queen, drones, and worker bees, as well as the act of swarming. we learn how a hive has been used as a metaphor for the capitalist working ethos as well as for marxist theories of division of labor. the idea of superorganism that bees exemplify with their seemingly cohesive and collective communities of workers has been seen by many to resemble an industrial working machine. this image of the working machine is so embedded in our psyche that it is almost impossible to consider an alternative argument but we are cautioned again by the authors that the model of insect “superorganism” is a human construct. however, the power of bees’ cultural representations is indisputable, as is their individual and collective significance in historical and contemporary adoptions of apiculture as a metaphor in human warfare. many books have been written on bees and beekeeping but what makes this book different is how the authors avoid objectifying the bee and instead constantly refer to it as bound up in relation to a wider urban environment. many of those cited places are within new york city, and as such they are ultimately environments of interspecific social and cultural entanglements. the book stubbornly avoids removing the bee from its cultural enmeshing, and beekeepers’ stories about personal interaction with their bees together with descriptions of bee stings and protective clothing could be seen to kindle notions of an almost colonial microcosmic engagement with wildlife and wilderness. in this microscopic wilderness-construction it is, after all, the supremacy of human beings that prevails. that said, in the chapter “being with bees” we are reminded of, amongst other things, the sting and potential fatality of the bee’s venom. statistics in the us show that human deaths by bee sting, though fewer than might be expected, are recorded as 54 in the year 2000. the chapter explores more subtly what happens between bees and humans when they come into close contact with each other. we know from research that humans are profoundly affected by bees, and that this combination of positive and negative emotions simultaneously engenders a spectrum of affect from calm reflection to pain, and is part of the transformative bonding and ultimately love. moore and kosut refer to bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir – “bee buzz…” 189 this in the book as the affective buzz: “the affective buzz is a form of insect love, and also, similar to other types of love, it encompasses fear” (88). but what about the bee, how do bees feel about their human keepers? feelings and thoughts of the “other” are, of course, the constant imponderables in animal studies. how do we extract answers to our questions from a “silent” other, or perhaps not a silent other, but, in this case, a buzzing other. to translate the buzzing sound of a bee requires implicitly clumsy human interpretation of animal actions, which we then translate into human language as an embodied representation. the ability of the human to empathize is an (albeit contested) part of this equation, and may often be the most reliable tool upon which to rely. in “being with bees” individual stories of bee and human encounters are accounted for often by bee keepers and carers. in sampling a number and variety of stories, the proposal might be that in multitude these encounter tales will diffuse possible projections in which the bee and its behavior are made to stand as a cipher for specific human emotions, projecting instead not a definite image but an ever-emergent and increasingly complex index of experience. the theories of spinoza and deleuze and guattari on life and matter are present throughout the book, but it is jane bennett and her terminology of the “agentic asssemblage” from her book vibrant matter (2010) that gives the authors the inspiration to explore a two-species coexistence in a shared world. theoretical applications are used as a guideline in the book and placed in context with the practical enquiry and exploration of its subject. buzz is an accessible and highly informative read that can operate for readers on many levels. it is a timely investigation into a life of an animal insect that has been so closely related to humans through the ages. it is topical in that it seeks to open up and give insight into different research investigations underway to account for the decline of the bee and the impact this will have on the environment. it offers possible solutions to the future sustainability of bees without pointing fingers and engaging in blame. it does to the reader what it seemingly has done to the authors — that is to open up new spaces of knowledge so that we understand better the bee and ultimately to allow it productively to get under our skin. microsoft word gordon h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 reviews joan gordon of gods and men (and dogs) laura hobgood-oster. a dog’s history of the world: canines and the domestication of humans. waco, tx: baylor up, 2014. 188 pp. $29.94 hc. this modest volume does not mean to offer a startling new thesis about the origin and development of dogs, but it is a very readable account, especially strong in its discussion of dogs in ancient times. rather than a chronological history, hobsgoodoster organizes her book around six themes: hunting and herding, religious roles, healing and saving,” war and empire, breeding, and the “dog-human bond.” this scheme works well and avoids too much repetition, while moving swiftly through the ages in each section. other general histories of the co-evolution of dogs and humans exist, of course, although they are breezier in their approaches, including katherine rogers’s first friend: a history of dogs and humans (2005) and stanley coren’s the joan gordon — “of gods and men (and dogs)” 141 pawprints of history: dogs and the course of human events (2002). while hobsgoodoster’s book is by no means completist in its approach, it has a more scholarly development, well-supported in its claims, with extensive and useful endnotes and bibliography. it is a thoughtful, lively, and up-to-date introduction to its subject— sadly or perhaps fortunately, however, it is not from the dog’s viewpoint, as the title implies. the book’s introduction demonstrates the technique hobsgood-oster will employ throughout. she begins with a concrete example, in this case the story of laika, the first dog in space, and uses it as a working metaphor of dogs as human beings’ companions: “giant steps, like the rocket blast from earth into space, often accompanied by tragic moments such as the death of the canine cosmonaut laika, mark the human story” (2). the author continues throughout the book to acknowledge the mixed blessing that human companionship offers. chapter 1, “strangers no more: partners in the hunt and herd,” offers hobsgoodoster’s version of co-evolution, a variation on the coppingers’ famous thesis that dogs evolved through their own breeding around the middens of humans, shaped by their smaller flight distance (dogs: a startling new understanding of canine origin, behavior and evolution [2001]). citing developments in the field of zooarchaeology, hobsgoodoster theorizes that “humans had paired up with canines twice, once with the protowolf-dog before the ice age and then again after that cataclysmic period ended” (14). along with the usual changes that co-evolution wrought (floppy ears, curly tails, along with shorter flight distance) she points out how both dogs and humans changed their diets as humans grew more reliant on agriculture. while chapter 1 never gets past ancient rome, chapter 2, “journey to the afterlife: best friends forever,” moves back and forth between ancient burial practices and modern pet cemeteries to make an elegant point about the liminality of dogs as “providing a border between humans and nature ... hover[ing] between nature and culture, human and animal” (49). and, while showing how ancient dogs were honored by being buried with their human companions, hobsgood-oster also acknowledges that “this was likely not a choice made by the dogs ... it was not a timely death for the canines” (48). generally, her discussions of pre-historic archaeological evidence are fascinating. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 142 in chapter 3, “healing and saving: life is better with dogs,” hobsgood-oster jumps somewhat disconcertingly from ancient and medieval examples to contemporary ones. nevertheless, i was happy to learn about the sumerian-babylonian goddess gula, who was sometimes human in shape and sometimes a dog; and about the medieval saint guignefort, who was a dog through and through. i had been more familiar with the service dogs whom she describes in the second part of the chapter. the remaining three chapters cover pretty familiar territory. chapter 4 demonstrates how dogs used for warfare and conquest both suffered and caused suffering as they were manipulated by the powers of empire and colonization. (again, there is a large historical gap as hobsgood-oster leaps from william the conqueror to the american civil war.) chapter 5 discusses the plasticity of dogs and how extreme breeding practices have endangered their genetic health (think of the giant breeds and the english bulldog, for instance). the final chapter offers some summarizing remarks about human-dog interdependence. the last two chapters seemed less carefully written than the previous ones and i found myself wondering if they had been more rushed or if the author was less engaged with their content. this was particularly noticeable because the writing in the first four chapters was so skilled. i would also have liked more historical continuity in the book’s coverage but suspect that page limits may have played a role in its somewhat hurried approach. nevertheless, as an introductory text it was quite successful, and it also provided fascinating glimpses into the pre-historic traces of the dog that zooarchaeology makes available. whenever it seemed about to lapse into oversentimentalizing, as is so easy to do when talking about dogs, the novel resisted the impulse by emphasizing again the cost of hanging around with human beings. microsoft word latimer pdf dummy h u m a n i m a l i a 4:1 joanna latimer meadowarts’ house of beasts: reimagining human & non-human animal relations at attingham1 introduction. the exhibition house of beasts plays into and out of the history of people’s relationships with other animals, most particularly as they are represented by the national trusts preservation of attingham as an 18th/19th century dwelling. like the building and the landscaping the exhibition helps us to see the collection at attingham as important tools for displays of identity, particularly in terms of prestige and status, and for the enactment of both gender and class relations. but the exhibition does more than this: it helps unconceal some of the more invisible and implicit values and meanings that these human-animal relations embody. it draws our attention to how particular human-animal relations are also central to the celebration of human endeavor and to the emergence of new spheres of social, economic, and cultural life, such as science, industry, landscape architecture, technology and agriculture. in this paper i examine how some of these exhibits work through provocation to disrupt the orderings through which the national trust’s display of attingham as a particular world, a way of life, is presented. i suggest that we can think about what is being kept and cherished, cared for and nurtured, through how human-animal relations are dis-ordered by the exhibition. i suggest that it poses serious questions about human endeavor, and the problems of celebrating the human enhancement of nature that occurs in the process of building without thinking, of industry and endeavor without care. let us now travel to attingham and explore the kinds of human-animal relations that we can see there — the house and its collections, its landscape and its grandeur — through the eyes of the exhibition. animals all about us. as the trust represents it, attingham is usually seen as one of “britain's greatest contributions to western art: the country house, together with its collections and landscape setting” (the attingham trust). anne de charmant, the curator of the exhibition, stated during her public tour of the exhibition that we are used to seeing animals in sites like attingham in terms of decoration or emblems. the walls are adorned with paintings of elegant well-bred horses and dogs, hunting scenes, and picturesque landscapes, more animals are incorporated in wallpaper and ornaments. animals may be there in scientific collections joanna latimer — meadowarts’ house of beasts 113 — cabinets of insects carefully categorized, glass domes and cabinets of curiosities displaying exotic creatures, witnesses to human travel and the expansion of knowledge. outside, deer and exotic cattle decorate the parkland, while swans glide up and down the an elegant and picturesque turn of the river tern, the backdrop to the giant cedars of lebanon, which, like the vast scale of the neo-classical front of the house itself, testify to the grandeur and magnificence of the berwick family within, and of the architects, builders, gardeners, and landscapist, humphrey repton. animals are also often present in coats of arms and other emblems of genealogy and heritage. as de charmant noted in her presentation of the exhibition, recognizing and being able to interpret the mythic and other references in the use of animals as symbols in the decoration at attingham was all a part of displaying social status and position in the 18th century. it was one form of showing that you were educated enough to be in the know. within this perspective attingham is then a celebration of a way of life at the turn of 17th & 18th centuries: civilized, reasonable, elegant, and picturesque, in gentle pursuit of knowledge and progress. there are few intrusions of the passions of the romantic, or the mess and muddiness of the everyday life of humans and animals. there are no manure piles steaming in the stable yard, no servants cleaning the dog hairs off the carpets, no wigs being disinfested of fleas. in addition, the life of attingham is presented as a holistic one that is ordered and orderly, in which the human is in harmony with nature, and in which humans and animals are in their place. the collection, the landscape, and its representations by the nt represent a way of life intimately rooted in man’s relation to nature, particularly in relations with the animal and with other animals. we feel attingham is a dwelling with beasts within and without: a way of life in which nature and the social, human and the animal, are in intimate and orderly proximity. our visits and walks there help us to be included momentarily in this intimacy and this orderliness. we get a sense of how attingham would have been buzzing with the activities surrounding the estate’s role as a center for farming and the production of food, for sport, as well as a site where birds, bees, and other wild creatures thrived. house of beasts helps us to see how animals are all about us at attingham. but the exhibition also helps us to see that the attingham estate is a celebration of a form of social life on the verge of a proliferating division of labor through spheres of human endeavor that will become more and more specialized, and separated off. the production of food will become separated off from the everyday life of its consumption, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 114 and the science of farming will be undertaken far from the operations of the farm itself. the exhibition also draws our attention to, and provokes reflection on, how the form of civilization captured at attingham rests upon the ordering of relations between human and animal. this separation is evident not just in the division between his and hers wings, or upstairs and downstairs, or the outside and the inside, although these are important. rather, the exhibition makes visible all the work that goes into creating a world through keeping certain things apart to maintain a particular kind of order. a dwelling of distinction(s). so how does the exhibition help us to see attingham not just as a dwelling of distinction, but also as a dwelling of distinctions? i suggest that it does this through provoking moments of disconcertment. verran explores how bodily disconcertment may be understood as an expression of discomfort that we experience when there is a disordering of the taken-for-granted underpinnings, or conditions of possibility, of how we think the world. for example, at the opening of house of beasts i overheard one of two elderly women standing in front of one exhibit exclaim, “oh i don’t like that! that’s not what i call art. it’s horrible.” she turned away from the exhibit to the others present, pressing them into siding with her, but then was drawn back. she didn’t walk away, but tried to make sense of it; physically she was rooted to the spot, fascinated. something about the exhibit upset the world as she usually thought it; and because of this, because it confounded the usual ways in which things are ordered, it was, like dirt, good to think2 — and talk — about! our first moment of disconcertment comes when we enter the stables. instead of traces to remind us of horses snorting and shuffling in the stalls, with a pungent smell of horse bodies and hay, we come upon a film in which horses are occupying one of the most sacred of human spaces, a cathedral. they are there for the night, filmed secretly in their private and mysterious horse world, free to roam as if they are outside, grazing the floor, spooking at invisible fears, trotting around the knave and up the steps. joanna latimer — meadowarts’ house of beasts 115 kathleen herbert, stable (reprinted with kind permission of meadowarts) we hear their hoofs on the beautiful old stone and their breath, as they snort, disrupting the intense silence. we feel their otherness, and their strange freedom to occupy and disorder our world. this is what so astonishes — how the horses, in a strange inversion of the usual ordering of human-animal relations, appropriate the cathedral to make themselves at home. the juxtaposition and inversion of the usual order of things — the horses in the cathedral rather than in the fields or stables — reminds us not just of all the horses’ otherness but the work and the gift-giving that goes into their becoming a part of our world, of their becoming human. as we move into the house there are more surprises. many paintings in the house celebrate hunting — fox hunting, deer stalking, and hare coursing. but as we travel with house of beasts down into the housekeeper’s room we come across a tiny fox curled and nestled into an armchair, where we should find perhaps a cat or a small dog. and as you can see in the photograph of “refuge,” the chair is itself in a state of collapse, the distortion intensifying the disconcertment to come with the glimpse of the fox curled into its fold. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 116 nina saunders, refuge (reprinted with kind permission of meadowarts) “refuge” is thus a surprise, because, as anthropologist mary douglas suggests, the fox is “out of place.” in the usual ways of creating order at attingham, the fox should be in the woods and parkland ready to be chased by the hounds. we know now that foxes can be kept as pets just like dogs. but for those dwelling at attingham, the fox would never have been thought of in that way. the irony then is in the idea that such a house should give refuge to a creature usually figured as good for sport and a wily adversary. as we enter the kitchen we are still in the downstairs of the house, and we are in for another surprise. where there should be reminders of meat roasting over the fire, bread being kneaded and vegetables chopped on the worn and scrubbed surface of the kitchen table, game hanging in the game cupboard, all that wonderful downton abbey warmth and order, we are confronted with the luxuriousness and rich decorative beauty of game-bird feathers flowing in an exquisite river from one of the shining copper pots on the stove, like the magnificent and exotic tail of a peacock joanna latimer — meadowarts’ house of beasts 117 kate mccguire, evacuate (reprinted with kind permission of meadowarts) this beauty should be captured upstairs, in a still life with pheasant as a celebration of a particular kind of cultivated life. or we should come across the birds as we stroll outside, as the pheasants that strut and peck in the woodlands, a feature of the managed estate, husbanded to be ready for the shooting season. upstairs there are more surprises: clever inversions and transgressions of the usual order of things. amongst the portraits of prized animals, instead of a portrait of a prized bull or valued racehorse hanging over the mantelpiece, we find the portrait of the mundane, a dairy cow, “buttercup.” robert davies, buttercup (reprinted with kind permission of meadowarts) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 118 in the exquisite civilization of the library, with its books, ornaments, fireside, and comfortable chairs, where most aspects of human animality are erased, we encounter a herd of deer crashing through the door. susie macmurray, herd (reprinted with kind permission of meadowarts) the outside crashes into the inside, disturbing the peace; power is inverted and given to the deer, customarily represented in the picturesque of the age of reason as, in their relations with the human, the most timid of creatures. it is not simply a matter of valuing some animals over others by acknowledging them as companions. for example, as we walk our dogs along the pathways, we come across the sculpture of a dog made of all the comfortable clothes that the dog’s human family wears to take it on a walk – old socks, scarves, and so forth. joanna latimer — meadowarts’ house of beasts 119 des hughes, do you think of me often? (reprinted with kind permission of meadowarts) there are three important twists to this dog sculpture that provoke reflection. first, the dog is faceless; second, the comfortable clothes have been turned into a rusty chain mail, something that does not just protect the dog, but encases it; and third, the dog's posture. it sits like many dogs do when they have got something they are proud of, its paw resting on some doggy trophy, in triumph, but also in a kind of proud challenge. when we look closely the paw is resting not on a bone freshly redug from the garden, or even the carcass of a rotting and mouldy rabbit, but a human hand. the dog that bites (off) the hand that feeds it. reminiscent of the film in the stables, des hughes’s sculpture reminds us of all that the animals that we domesticate or make our companions do to gift us their closeness. i want to thus to suggest that the exhibition helps us to see, momentarily, how non-human animals have to “become” human if they are to be included in the domestic fold as companions. however, in the exhibition it is not only the animals that break free of where they are usually placed by the humans; in house of beasts the humans themselves morph into animals. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 120 marcus coates, red fox (reprinted with kind permission of meadowarts) in one of the corridors, a picture of a man-fox, blurred and red in a distant field at twilight — at first we think it is a fox, and only after a careful look down we realize that it is a man. a reminder for a moment of the animality in us, and all that we do to become the kind of human suggested by the order and civilization of attingham. by displacing, blurring and transgressing the usual distinctions that underpin how the life represented at attingham is ordered, these witty and clever exhibits disconcert. they help us to rethink the human-animal relations, the divisions and the distinctions that a way of life rests upon and provoke us to think about our own life with animals as well those in the past. becoming aware of these relations, particularly those that are the most taken for granted, is always a surprise. human endeavor: building without thinking. i want to now stress that the exhibits make incursions into the house and the parkland. these incursions bring into view the house as a representation of the emergence of modern forms of life, and the creation of a world that celebrates human endeavor. but in the form of civilization that we find at attingham human endeavor is to some extent tempered by its connections to the nature that it enhances. specifically, while the exhibition helps us to see the relationship between the house and the beginnings of new spheres of social, economic and cultural life — namely science, industry, landscape architecture, technology, and agriculture —, these spheres are still present and embedded in the everyday life of the park, and in joanna latimer — meadowarts’ house of beasts 121 everyday human-animal relations, however ordered, they are yet to become separated off into the distant domains of industrial agriculture or laboratory science. we experience the exhibits as gentle and strange transgressions, moments of disorder that provoke our reflection on the connections and disconnections, distinctions and divisions, that attingham relied upon to create a particular kind of dwelling. but it is also a monument to a way of building that is deeply connected to creating a life. in particular, our own animality is not made absent, but is represented in terms of its cultivation through human endeavor: the animals are represented as cultivated, bred, discovered, placed. the way of life organized around them that is celebrated by the art, in both the pictures and the landscaping, celebrates human endeavor. when in the right place, the pheasants and the deer are ornamental, they help make up the picturesque; but when the feathers and the antlers intrude presence into the civilization of the house, as in the exhibits “herd” and “evacuate,” they remind us that in this world they can only be picturesque where they are in place, ordered, and managed: deer need to be culled, pheasants need to be raised, bred, shot and eaten. the difference between building and producing in a dwelling such as attingham park is that the everyday workings of these spheres of life are visible, including the connections as well as the divisions and distinctions between humans and animals and between different kinds of animals. the work, the order, and the human endeavor can be seen as resting on keeping animals and humans in their places. the venison at the table were once the elegant deer adorning the park, the prize bull pictured in a portrait in the sitting room was once grazing the fields at the center of a herd of cattle, slaughtered and eaten when needed. these relations are transparent in the life at attingham, whereas increasingly how these relations work in terms of our own life have become hardly visible to us, except as consumers or on reality tv. tessa farmer’s work offers us as an allegory of what happens when human endeavor — building — happens without thinking, when we make a place in which we cannot dwell. tessa farmer’s & sean daniel’s video installation, “den of iniquity,” in the silver vaults in the basement of the attingham house offers us a vision of ourselves and of our relations to animals and to nature. “den of iniquity” is a short video revealing the industrious activities of what the artist calls her fairy species. all the elements of the video — the fairies and the other creatures depicted — are made up of bits and pieces of debris and dead insects the artist has humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 122 collected. the video shows the fairies dragging their latest prey, the carcass of a dead rat — back to their home, where they string it up by its feet, like any other dead carcass in an abattoir or game cupboard. the video shows the fairies’ different technologies and industries. for example, there is a honeycomb with bees trying to escape from their cells, and birds on nests laying eggs that roll down a fairy-made chute. the fairies’ egg laying machine (reproduced with kind permission of tessa farmer) the fairies have weapons and tools made out of bones. for example, one fairy hammers a pin through a moth carcass using a tiny bone. moths and butterflies are pinned to walls by the fairies for decoration. but later in the video we see the butterflies and moths pinned to the walls still flapping their wings. in this the video helps evoke an image of real cruelty. joanna latimer — meadowarts’ house of beasts 123 a fairy pinning the moth to the wall (reproduced with kind permission of tessa farmer) the fairy bashing another fairy off the honeycomb (reproduced with kind permission of david kipling) at one moment a fairy hammering bees back into their honeycomb turns to its companion in wickedness and bashes him with his bone, knocking him off the precipice. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 124 beauty and color come from the moths and butterflies murderously pinned with their delicate wings flapping, from birds ingenuously imprisoned on their nests as egg producers by the ribcages of other creatures that the fairies have killed, from their delicate eggs and the soft green moss. the film provokes because it shows endeavor without reflection, building without thinking a place in which it is hard to dwell, to inhabit. as the film draws to a close the color is drained out. what we see in the little black, winged fairies is an image of human industry, invention, and productivity, where what gets made is a dry and desiccated world of bones, and sand, and dust. beauty is entrapped in modes of production: what get created are the bare bones of existence — not a place to dwell. the fairies are wicked but they are also “us” — we know this because of how they use their hands, because of how they chatter away and exclaim to each other as they go about their work, and because of their sheer inventiveness — they make pulleys and all sorts of other technologies to do their work. what we see in the fairy species is an image of one species killing, dominating, and capturing other species in the making up of their world. the video offers an allegory of human industry and endeavor, but of a kind in which it is other creatures — bees, birds, moths and butterflies — that are being subjected by the fairies in the building of their fairy world. because what we see is the fairies exploiting, mastering, and subjecting nature to their will, endeavor here is pictured as what the philosopher martin heidegger calls building without thinking. thinking for heidegger is when we take care, and cherish, in our building, only then do we create a place to dwell: the manner in which we humans are on the earth, is buan, dwelling. this word bauen, however, also means at the same time to cherish, to protect, to preserve and to care for, to till the soil and cultivate the vine. such building only takes care… building as dwelling, that is, as being on the earth, however, remains for man’s everyday experience that which is from the outset “habitual” — we inhabit it …. (heidegger 349) the vision portrayed is of invention and technology harnessed to subsume nature to our will. there is no care or cherishing here. what the “den of iniquity” represents is human endeavor and enterprise building upon relations with animals and with nature untrammeled by care. joanna latimer — meadowarts’ house of beasts 125 making room for human-animal relations. the exhibition helps us to see complexity over the values being expressed at attingham park. this is not a matter of simplistic ideologies. the provocation of the exhibition — witty and troublesome — not only upsets the usual civilized divisions and modes of ordering through which animals, and the animal in us, is portrayed by the collection. we also see the stress on a civilization that enhances the world as it finds it; we see a world that celebrates the extension of human endeavor, but with attention to what it finds in the first place. this keeping as a form of care, a kind of latter day ecology, is evident in how the river, the hill, and the parkland come into a wonderful association through the placing of the bridge. as martin heidegger would suggest, there is a gathering: the locale comes into being where building creates a dwelling place through cherishing nature, not simply exploiting it. is it this that we celebrate when we visit parks such as attingham? the civilization being celebrated here keeps what is there in nature and builds on it, with harmony and balance. this of course requires knowledge. but at attingham knowledge and science are represented as still in balance with nature. for example, in the portraits of the berwick family’s racehorses and prize cattle we see the results of an emerging science of breeding as a science that is aimed at bringing out the best in nature rather than changing its fabric in a laboratory. in contrast, the exhibit by hugo wilson, entitled “modern farm animals,” and consisting of a box set of etchings of genetically modified animals, provokes reflection on those aspects of the attingham collection that celebrate the new sciences of breeding by getting us to think how far we have come from their balance. or will we in years to come celebrate dolly the sheep in the same way as the berwick’s celebrated their prize herd of cattle and racehorses, as testimony to the triumph of human endeavor? house of beasts invites us to a dialogue with our relation to nature, and to the animal, in terms of how we can balance our industry and our will to knowledge and power so that we might keep that balance and harmony with the non-human world. we get a glimpse of a vision, in which we remember how the worlds we make are co-constructed through cherishing our relationalities: an ecology of relations in which building is done with thinking, to make a place to dwell rather than merely to exist. acknowledgments. the author wishes to thank all at meadowarts. notes humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 126 1. presentation to the public symposium, “enquiries into the human and the animal,” the darwin festival, shropshire wildlife trust, shrewsbury, 18th february 2012 2. “lord chesterfield defined dirt as matter out of place. this implies only two conditions, a set of ordered relations and contravention of that order. thus the idea of dirt implies a structure of ideas. for us dirt is a kind of compendium category for all events which blur, smudge, contradict, or otherwise confuse classifications. the underlying feeling is that a system of values, habitually expressed in a given arrangement of things, has been violated.” (douglas 338) works cited douglas, mary. purity and danger. harmondsworth, middlesex: penguin. 1966. the attingham trust. (2012) http://www.attinghamtrust.org/. heidegger, martin. “building, dwelling, thinking,” in d. f. krell, ed. basic writings. london: routledge, 1978. verran, h. “imagining nature politics in the era of australia's emerging market in environmental services interventions.” special issue: “the politics of imagination.” j. latimer & b. skeggs, eds. the sociological review 59.3 (2011): 411–431. microsoft word granjou-descola-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:2 reviews céline granjou structures of experience and dispositions of being philippe descola. beyond nature and culture. [par-delà nature et culture. paris : gallimard, 2005.] translated by janet lloyd. chicago: university of chicago press, 2013. 488p. after the spears of twilight: life and death in the amazon jungle in 1993,1 influential anthropologist of nature philippe descola, a member of the collège de france, published beyond nature and culture in france in 2005. since then the book has been translated into several languages and it is now available in english. drawing on céline granjou – “structures of experience and dispositions of being” 135 ethnographical field-work among the achuar people in the amazon and on a comprehensive review of the literature in anthropology and ethnology (and to a lesser extent in philosophy, history, and cognitive sciences), beyond nature and culture offers an in-depth review of the ways humans have been living with animals and plants all over the world, underlining that the western opposition of nature and culture is a cultural exception. when i first read it a few years ago, i was struck by the convincing power of the book and by the fact that it enabled readers to truly imagine and feel how other people experience the world and non-human living beings (i. e. animals and, to a lesser extent, with plants and places) in an often very different way from our own. i was impressed both by the author’s ambition and by his success in demonstrating that considering nature as a distinct range of facts that humans can document through science is but an odd position resulting from the western philosophical history and leading to ethnocentric misconceptions. in documenting the ubiquitous presence of animals and plants in people’s lives and ontologies, i found that descola offered stimulating and refreshing insights into the nature/culture issue that has too often been addressed in an abstract and speculative way after callon and latour’s work in france. today when more and more attention is paid to human-animal (and human-plant) relationships in humanities (for instance in “multispecies ethnographies”2), descola’s book is of great interest for social sciences and humanities scholar interested in extending the circle of beings which matter so that it includes non-humans. foreword. descola aims to show that the opposition made in the west between nature and culture is far from being universal: it is but one vision of the world among others. from the point of view of a supposed jivaro or chinese historian of sciences, aristotle, descartes, or newton would not be considered discoverers of the rules of nature, but rather designers of a quite exotic cosmology drawing on an odd notion of nature in comparison with the rest of humanity. descola aims to renew anthropology so that it can both do justice to so-called ”primitive peoples” and meaningfully include nonhumans. part i. nature as trompe l’œil. while descola was doing field-work among the achuar, he first had the intuition that for most people there is no nature defined as a separated range of universal rules. he found that the achuar people did not consider hunting as a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 136 technical act but as a dialog between the hunters and the animals, and that the achuar women did not apply knowledge to grow plants, instead they dialogued with plants. for the achuar people, most plants and animals have the same kind of intentionality, feelings, social conventions, and soul as human people, and they are able to communicate. this type of relationship to non-humans is also shared by many other peoples in the amazon, in siberia, and in pacific islands. for these peoples, the forest is grown by a spirit in the same way as the garden is grown by people: the distinction western people make between domestic and wild (animals, areas etc.) is far from being a universal one. descola examines the genealogy of “naturalism,” which is the western people’s way of seeing the world (their ontology). he suggests that the emergence of perspective as a pictorial technique in the 15th century was an important starting point for the face to face encounter between people as individuals and nature. from the 17th century onwards the world was no longer represented as god’s creation but as a machine that could be dismantled by scientists. in fact, this representation can be traced back to ancient greece and to aristotle’s classification of the living beings as complexes of organs and functions independent from their relationships with their milieu. the christian religion elaborated the notion that people and nature are fundamentally different, and that humans are intended by god to govern nature. later on, nature came to be understood as a range of rules that human people could know; still later, society and culture also were studied by new social sciences. descola argues that we believe in the deceptive — yet very hard to extract — notion that there is only one way of knowing reality, which is western science, and that indigenous knowledge only imperfectly resembles it. in fact, judging other peoples’ realities according to our own experience of reality is not only disrespectful, it is also wrong. it prevents us from being aware of the other peoples’ creativity. we have to acknowledge that our way of knowing the world is only one century old; and we ought to stop using it as a universal standard to judge other peoples. we are only a particular case among a global grammar of ontologies. part ii. structures of experiencing. in this part, descola elaborates his theories and methods. drawing on cognitive sciences, he postulates that unconscious models of relationships and behavior organize the way people experience the world; these models are transmitted by the milieu and through education. céline granjou – “structures of experience and dispositions of being” 137 then he comes to his main thesis: there are four possible cosmologies depending on whether people consider other beings to be similar to themselves or different from themselves with respect to, on the one hand, physicality, and on the other hand, interiority. interiorities are similar physicalities are different « animism » « totemism » interiorities are similar physicalities are similar interiorities are different physicalities are similar « naturalism » « analogism » interiorities are different physicalities are different part iii. dispositions of being. then descola documents the four cosmologies’ main characteristics. in “animism,” people and other living beings have the same interiority (including intentionality, social customs, soul) but different physicalities. this does not mean that humans and non-humans are made of a different material but that the species’ biological equipments are different: they live in different habitats, they feed differently, and they have different shapes (which are like different clothes). sometimes a plant or an animal can metamorphose and take on the shape of a human in order to communicate more easily with him (or a human takes on the shape of an animal). the achuar people are used to saying that jaguars hunt and cook: this is not because they see jaguars hunting and cooking but because they think that jaguars see themselves hunting and cooking when they deal with their prey. “animism” is an ontology which pays much attention to perspectives, and in which shapes are unstable and identities are not easy to determine. “totemism” is a cosmology shared by the aboriginal people in australia, even with important differences across the country. the totem-animal (or the totem-plant) is not an individual with whom people have a relationship, instead it is the whole species. the totem-animal (or the totem-plant) expresses physical qualities (or inner qualities) that people share with the species. in many aboriginal languages the word “totem” means a part of the body or one of its substances, or a character shared by people and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 138 animals and plants, like for instance “round”, “fast”, “warm-blooded.” that is why, when presented with a picture of himself, an aboriginal man told the ethnographer that the person in the picture was as similar to himself as the kangaroo. aboriginal stories about the genesis of the world (before the so-called dreamtime) tell how people progressively broke away from conglomerates made both of human and non-human beings: that is why human people are made of a mixed material, which is the same as the material of the other species that were included in the conglomerate. “totemism” also exists outside australia, for instance in the united states, even if less pure (mixed with some “animist” notions). descola then comes back to “naturalism.” in this particular cosmology, all living beings share the same physicality: that means that humans and non-humans share molecules and metabolism, and all the living beings also share thermodynamic principles and chemical components with non living entities. yet only people have self-awareness. descola presents a number of theories contradicting “naturalism,” including ethological, cognitive, and philosophical theories. he makes clear that none of them really undermines the notion of a boundary between human people and most other living beings (notably plants). “analogism” is the main cosmology in western africa, pre-columbian mexico, ancient china, india, as well as in europe during the middle ages and the renaissance period. “analogism” is also to be found today in the practices of astrology, cartomancy, and numerology. for “analogist” peoples the world is made of very many different entities, and living beings are made of a number of various components (hence the notion of possession when one of these components wanders into another living being). similarities, symmetries, and analogies (for instance between the person, the society, and the cosmos) are needed to make order in this abundant and fragmented world: that is the goal of the many rites and prohibitions, determined by experts, featuring in “analogist” societies. “naturalism” can be considered the opposite of “animism” as in “naturalism” only nature is universal, whereas in “animism” only the status of person is universal. and the category of nature does not exist for “totemist” peoples (instead, all beings with the same totem are similar despite of some differences) nor for “analogist” peoples (instead, all living beings are different despite of shared points). part iv. on using the world. this part is devoted to the idea that different cosmologies have different institutions and different ways of knowing. for “animist” peoples, for céline granjou – “structures of experience and dispositions of being” 139 instance, most animals and plants have social institutions very similar to the human institutions, including kinship, leadership, ritual etc. totems are hybrid institutions including both human and non-human beings; in “totemism,” neither people nor animals or plants are really autonomous individual persons: they only help the dreamtime beings to keep creating the world in an on-going process. in “animism,” all beings are persons, so that eating raises a fundamental problem because one always eats another person: that is why hunting and cooking are always accompanied with various rituals. then descola addresses his own epistemological position. he concedes that he cannot escape “naturalism,” but his objective is to evade the idea that naturalism is the only way to truth: he wants to defend a universal theory that is at the same time relativist. part v. ecology of relationships. the last part addresses some of the different ways people can be in relationship with the world. it examines six types of relationship — exchange, donation, predation, protection, production, and transmission — and their influence on peoples’ institutions and practices. for instance, animal farming does not exist in “animist” peoples: this is not due to a lack of knowledge or of technical means, but rather to the fact that people have social relationships with animals and plants. “animist” people clearly prefer to exchange with other beings that are on an equal footing with themselves, rather than to protect them. descola also recalls that cosmologies do not depend on geography, environment, or culture, but on the peoples’ preferences for some ways of organizing how they experience the world. in the epilogue, descola points out that his idea was not to promote amerindian or aboriginal peoples’ wisdom as a model for western people. he did not aim to reform our institutions and our ways of thinking (clearly referring to bruno latour’s political philosophy and his proposal to overcome the “great divide” between humans and non-humans in a new “parliament of things”3) and he also distances himself from environmental ethics, including life-centred or ecocentric ethics, because he considers these ethics forget that nature, plants, and animals have already been part of many societies. he stresses that protecting nature as something radically different from us is pointless for many peoples whose everyday life involves being in tight relationship with or even being like some animals and plants. his book aimed to contribute to ongoing anthropological work in order to understand cultural diversity in a non humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 2 (spring 2014) 140 ethnocentric way. while it is not always an easy read (especially in the past parts), beyond nature and culture brightly manages to mix academic argumentation with a range of lively ethnographical examples and is written in a beautiful literary writing style. notes 1. philippe descola. the spears of twilight. life and death in the amazon jungle. [1993] . translated by janet lloyd. new york: the new press, 1996. 2. see for instance eben kirksey and stefan helmreich, “the emergence of multispecies ethnography.” cultural anthropology 25: 4 (2010). 545-576. 3. see bruno latour, politics of nature. how to bring the sciences into democracy. translated by catherine porter. harvard: harvard up, 1999; bruno latour, we have never been modern. translated by catherine porter. harvard: harvard up, 1993. microsoft word walls-poliquin h u m a n i m a l i a 4:2 alissa w. walls taxidermy as knowledge rachel poliquin, the breathless zoo: taxidermy and the cultures of longing. college station: pennsylvania state university press, 2012. 272 pp. $34.95 hb. 29.95 pb. it comes as no wonder that the new york times included rachel poliquin’s the breathless zoo among its best coffee table books of 2012, calling it one among a privileged selection of titles that “make an impression.” and in the case of poliquin’s book, this is an understatement. along with a rigorously researched and written text, the breathless zoo offers up an aesthetically enviable book design, which includes a collection of sumptuously colored images that often amaze, as frequently unnerve, but always leave the curious mind wanting more. the only thing truly bad about the breathless zoo, in my humble estimation, is that i didn’t write it. scholars and popular readers alike will envy poliquin’s clear, page-turning prose and the range of her references, from william shakespeare’s the tempest to roy rogers’s sidekick palomino trigger. what really makes this book an absolute requirement for anyone with an interest in animals, however, is poliquin’s command of taxidermy as a complex site of knowledge; in understanding the “who, what, when, where, why, and how” of taxidermy, we inevitably come to some essential, and often uneasy truths, about the relationship between human and non-human animals. her deeply insightful study of the cultural and material values of taxidermic fauna illuminates a range of powerful desires that humans have about both living and non-living animals. moreover, as the author herself argues, “far more than just death and destruction, taxidermy always exposes the desires and daydreams surrounding human relationships with and within the natural world” (6). this is not, then, just a story about human and non-human animals. rather, their relationship to one another speaks metonymically about the larger cultures of nature, about the ways that all animals, human and otherwise, find themselves evermore entwined in ways rarely made visible by human culture. poliquin organizes each chapter to address the various reasons that humans preserve non-human animals, from rare objects included in renaissance wunderkammern to memorials of deceased family pets. to flesh out, so to speak, each of these carefully researched chapters that contribute to the larger narrative of curating a persistent and embodied animality poliquin identifies seven unique expressions of human longing: alissa w. walls – taxidermy as knowledge 155 wonder, beauty, spectacle, order, narrative, allegory, and remembrance. poliquin organizes each chapter to speak to an aspect of human desire, and tells often-incredible stories about animals stuffed and otherwise preserved. situated in nineteenth-century england, and specifically the victorian era where, as the author argues, “taxidermy achieved its apotheosis” (10), the breathless zoo stands apart from other recent studies of taxidermy, such as pauline wakeham’s taxidermic signs: reconstructing aboriginality (2008), whose geopolitical center lies in north america. while both wakeham’s and poliquin’s books investigate the relationship between taxidermic animals and human animals, poliquin’s could go much further in exploring what animal studies scholar cary wolfe described in his animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory (2003) as, “the trope of the animal in the history of philosophy, and in contemporary popular culture, as the figure that is not merely below or beside ‘the human’ but actively constitutive of the human” (xiv). i found it startling that any discussion of taxidermic animals in natural history museums failed to address the “stuffed” humans, or mannequins, of indigenous peoples. poliquin does account for the multiplicity of animal subjectivity, or at least the range of ways in which taxidermic others are read, often metaphorically and in daily life, albeit through a human lens. but the breathless zoo often seems to assume, as wolfe has argued of “most ethical and political discourse,” “that the subject is always already human” (1). poliquin’s book focuses more on our relationship to them. while there are many areas where the power of these non-human animals on us is registered through such concepts as their ability to mesmerize with their aesthetic and magical forms and concepts, it would seem that these are still largely human concerns. what i will grant is that this new space of the biopolitical animal, the non-human animal that is mutually constitutive of the human animal, has not fully found its way into academic scholarship yet (including my own). the fields of animal studies, art history, political science, history, literature, and philosophy welcome wolfe’s approach in his before the law: humans and other animals in a biopolitical frame (2012). any weakness i have described here, however, is offset by the rich treasure trove of research, stories, images, literary allusions, and popular culture references poliquin delivers. while i do not want to provide a chapter-by-chapter excursus of her book, i found several moments in her narrative particularly resonant and worth observing here. the breathless zoo reveals some rather astonishing images and accompanying narratives, ones often reminiscent of nineteenth-century zoo displays and those on view at the mütter museum in philadelphia, pa — though these here are non-human humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 156 animals. a kitten with eight legs and two tails, an anatomically monstrous ocelot, and the artist tinkebell’s popple (2008), a taxidermic dog and cat stitched together to form a reversible purse, alternately feline handbag or canine pocketbook. these images serve different purposes depending on the interests of their makers, consumers, and other various audiences. some, such as the kitten, stand as wondrous marvels. others, like the ocelot, exemplify technical errors and “bad taxidermy” of a period before good taxidermists regularly achieved specimens demonstrating verisimilitude and/or notions of postmortem beauty. still others, as with tinkebell’s popple, challenge our sensibilities about which animals are deemed proper for certain roles in society (e.g. those that become our food, those we feed as pets, and those we deem proper to wear). chapters on spectacle and order present us with taxidermic tableaux of entertainment, reenactment, and pedagogical instruction. addressing the relationship between threedimensional stuffed animals and two-dimensional painted ones, poliquin discusses jules veraux’s arab courtier attacked by lions (1867) against the themes of exotic animals often represented by henri rousseau, as in his the hungry lion throws itself on the antelope (1905). both images display the bloody gore and anguish that typically accompany hunting scenes. as an art historian, however, i am not clear why rousseau’s work is better suited to this comparison than that of another french artist, eugène delacroix, particularly the lion hunt (1855). rousseau’s paintings are, as poliquin readily admits, the products of a self-taught artist whose work embodies more of a finde-siècle dreamworld than a romantic african hunt. granted, the choice of either artist ultimately tells us a great deal about the role of colonialist power in circumscribing human and non-human animal relations. the natural history museum in tring, england serves as a model of taxidermic display for poliquin’s inquiry. a display of zebras spurs her exploration into the complexity of taxonomic classification schemes, taking the work as carolus linnaeus as a bridge between older inefficient systems of organization and the binomials more familiar to the modern world. describing the plethora of zebra species and subspecies that emerged and confounded naturalists, poliquin explains the role of the museum as a site of instruction, teaching the public ways in which animals were similar and dissimilar to one another according to their orderly layout in the various galleries. these animals increasingly functioned solely as didactic tools in front rooms of natural history museums, shifting the research space of naturalists and modern scientists to the backrooms of storage and research — a transformation championed by charles darwin. this transition has continued to leave, much like we see (or do not see) in art museums today, most of the institution’s specimen collections behind guarded and temperature alissa w. walls – taxidermy as knowledge 157 controlled walls not available to the general public. poliquin provides, as visual testimony, a sublime photograph of curators among thousands of preserved birds in a football-field sized flat storage area at the smithsonian. the scene is enough to make any contemporary viewer shudder in simultaneous horror and delight. a similar effect runs throughout poliquin’s examination of narrative and allegory, which includes some eye-opening sections about the distinctions between large-game hunting in aristocratic europe and democratic america. the work of the artist angela singer also finds itself woven into this part of the breathless zoo, her vintage, reclaimed, and recycled taxidermic animals serving as some of kind contemporary vanitas, adorned with flies and flowers in equal measure, concurrently suggestive of nature and artifice. small “nuisance” animals posed in elaborate, yet quaint scenes follow these historical hunting and contemporary art practices. ermines engage in a well-mannered tea party, rabbit students practice their three r’s in chalk and slate for their rabbit teacher in a village school room, and a squirrel exhibits his western bravado atop a horse and saddle, his left paw tugging at the reins and his right waving his sombrero while he lets out mute yippee ki-yays. poliquin’s final chapter, on remembrance, meditates on taxidermy as a site of desire and loss, of “provocative animal-things” that “offer an overwhelming spectacle of beauty, death, tribute, love, and immortal longing.” the artist mark dion, who regularly engages the history of nature’s representations, called the breathless zoo “the new benchmark on the place of taxidermy in the social history of art, science, and popular culture” (223). dion includes a wealth of animals in his own artistic menagerie, with his recent den (2012) consisting of a stuffed brown bear hibernating in a manmade art cave atop a mound of human detritus. the sleeping bear stands as a taxidermic specimen, but also as the kind of super-sized stuffed animal children covet at carnivals. the bear is completely man-made. it is not really a taxidermic bear, but a representation of one. this piece, along with the zoological holdings of toys r us, warrants one more chapter in poliquin’s book. despite this small fact, poliquin’s book remains a visually and textually rich treasure trove of knowledge, and should be required reading for anyone in the field of animal studies, as well as anyone engaged in disciplines that interrogate the history of nature and its various representations, in word, image, and practice. we are fortunate to have the breathless zoo at our disposal. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 158 works cited dion, mark. den. oslo: forlaget press, 2012. wakeham, pauline. taxidermic signs: reconstructing aboriginality. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. wolfe, cary. animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. chicago: u chicago p, 2003. __________. before the law: humans and other animals in a biopolitical frame. chicago: u chicago p, 2012. richie nimmo h u m a n i m a l i a 6:2 richie  nimmo     the   bio-­‐‑politics   of   bees:   industrial   farming   and   colony   collapse  disorder     you   will   probably   more   than   once   have   seen   her   fluttering   about   the   bushes,   in   a   deserted   corner   of   your   garden,  without   realising   that   you   were   carelessly   watching   the   venerable   ancestor   to   whom  we   probably   owe  most  of  our  flowers  and  fruits  (for  it   is  actually  estimated  that  more   than  a  hundred  thousand  varieties  of  plants  would  disappear   if   the  bees   did   not   visit   them),   and   possibly   even   our   civilisation,   for   in   these   mysteries   all   things   intertwine.    maurice  maeterlink,  the  life  of  the  bee   (1901):  317-­‐‑18         many   have   argued   that   human   and   nonhuman   animals   share   profoundly   entangled   genealogies   and   histories   of   co-­‐‑ evolution  (haraway;  shepard).  this  is  certainly  true  of  humans  and  honeybees,  which   have  been  intimately  intertwined  for  much  of  human  history.  there  are  many  species  of   bees,  but  apis  mellifera   significant  presence    particularly   in  western  societies    at   least  since  ancient  egypt   (preston  8,  32;  wilson  1).  humans  have  shaped  and  reshaped  honeybees,  especially  in   the   modern   era,   through   selective   breeding,   intercontinental   transportation,   and   changing   beekeeping   practices;   but   bees   have   shaped   human   societies   perhaps  more   profoundly,   having   played   highly   significant   roles   in   human   food   production   and   material   culture,   as   reflected   in   the   exceptionally   rich   cultural   history   of   apian   discourse,   folklore,   and   symbolism   (ransome;   wilson).   honeybees   have   also   been   important  actors  in  world-­‐‑historical  events  such  as  the  european  colonial  settling  of  the   americas,   which   for   the   native   americans   was   synonymous   with   the   relentless      the   emergence  of  the  international  trade  in  sugar  and  the  dramatic  reduction  in   its  cost   in   the  first  half  of  the  19th  century,  honeybees  were  the  source  of  the  primary  sweetener  in   the   european   diet   (wilson   160,   161,   165).  meanwhile  mead    made   from   fermented   honey     was   the   staple   alcoholic   beverage  for  all   but   the  most  affluent,   being  much   cheaper  than  imported  wine,  which  was  the  main  alternative  (preston  31;  wilson  156-­‐‑ 160).  beeswax,  with  its  unusually  high  melting  point,  was  vitally  important  for  making   candles,   a   key   source   of   artificial   light   in   the   pre-­‐‑industrial   age.   although   today   the   importance   of   candles   has   been  diminished   by   electricity,   beeswax   is   still   used   as   an   ingredient   in   products   as   diverse   as   polishes,   electrical   transducers,   humanimalia:  a  journal  of  human/animal  interface  studies   volume  6,  number  2  (spring  2015)   2 and  cosmetics,  while   honey  continues   to   be   a   significant  commodity   and  is   now    alternative  to  sugar  (preston  48-­‐‑49,  97).  far  more   important   than  beeswax   and  honey  production,   though,   is   the  pivotal   role  of   bees   as   vectors  in  plant  pollination.       though  other  species  such  as  bumblebees  also  contribute  to  pollination,  honeybees  are   particularly   industrious   pollinators.   it   is   estimated  that   at   least   a   third   of   the   food   consumed  globally  by  humans  depends  directly  upon  insect-­‐‑pollinated  plants,  and  that   another   third  relies  upon   insect-­‐‑pollinated  crops  at  some  stage   in   its  production,  with   honeybees   making   by   far   the   greatest   contribution   (buchmann   and   nabham).   this   makes  honeybees   a   vital   part   of   the   agricultural   economy,  with   the   annual  monetary   salles,  settele  et  al.).  underpinning  their  agro-­‐‑economic  importance  is  the  role  of  bees  as   key  agents  of  ecosystem  fertility,  which  would  be  dramatically  curtailed  without  their   constant  labor.  einstein  is  often  reputed  to  have  said  that  if  bees  were  to  disappear  from   the  earth,  then  humans  would  have  only  4  years  left  (benjamin  and  mccallum  7).  the   veracity  of  this  attribution   is  very  doubtful,  but   its  persistence  since  the  middle  of  the   twentieth  century  underlines  the  popularity  of  the  notion  that  bees  serve  as  something   like   a   canary   in   the   coalmine   for   the   overall   health   of   the   eco-­‐‑system.   this   is   not   a   baseless  idea,  as  few  species  are  quite  so  sensitively  calibrated  to  their  environment  as   bees,  as  indicated  by  the  use  of  the  substances  that  accumulate  in  their  pollen  and  nectar   -­‐‑ stone).  this   in  turn  helps  to  explain  why  the  rapid  decline  in  honeybees  has  caused  such  alarm,  not   only   amongst   apiarists   and   entomologists,   but   also   among   environmentalists,   governments,  and  scientific  institutions.  as  claire  preston  elegantly  puts  it:       bees  stand  for  the  difference  between  the  life  and  death  of  our  species  and   of  our  planet,  as  agricultural  pollinators,  as  producers  of  food  and  light,  as   handmaidens  of  the  wild  vegetation  without  which  our  landscapes  would   be  eroded,  barren  and  empty  of  wildlife,  and  by  whose  efforts  our  soil   is   fertile.  (163-­‐‑165)     working  group  at  pennsylvania  state  university  engaged  in  researching  the  causes  of  a   spate   of   particularly   dramatic   honeybee   losses   amongst   us   beekeepers   that   autumn   (cox-­‐‑foster,   frazier,   ostiguy   et   al.).   it   was   intended   to   refer   to   the   phenomenon   of   sudden,   dramatic,   and   unexplained   losses   of   honeybee   colonies,   in   many   cases   involving  the  overnight  disappearance  of  vast  numbers  of  bees  with  hardly  a  trace.  the   richie nimmo the bio-politics of bees: industrial f arming and colony collapse disorder   3 apocalyptic   overtones   of   the   new   term   caught   the   public   imagination   and   quickly   became  ubiquitous  in  media  reports,  firstly  in  the  us  and  then  worldwide,  so  that  ccd   came   to   be  widely   perceived   as   a   new,   unprecedented,   and   urgent   crisis   not   only   of   honeybees   but   of   pollination   itself,   and   therefore   of   agriculture   and   food   production   (williams,  tarpy,  vanengelsdorp  et  al.).  in  fact,  it  is  doubtful  whether  ccd  was  as  new   and  unheralded  a  phenomenon  as  was  widely  assumed;  though  colony  losses  in  the  us   showed   a  marked   acceleration   from   2006-­‐‑7,   many   beekeepers   in   france   had   become   convinced   a   decade   earlier   that   the   worsening   trend   of   honeybee   losses   already   observable   at   that   time  was   linked   to   the   introduct name   for   products   manufactured   by   the   german   agrochemical   company   bayer   containing   imidacloprid     amongst   the   most   widely   used   of   the   class   of   systemic   pesticides   known   as   neonicotinoids   (jacobsen   90-­‐‑93).   the   decade-­‐‑long   struggle   of   french  beekeepers  against  neonicotinoids  was  effectively  internationalized  by  the  surge   in  publicity  surrounding  the  appearance  in  the  us  in  2006-­‐‑7  of  what  began  to  be  called       ccd  has   since   been   at   the   center   of   a   fierce   international   debate   among   beekeepers,   farmers,   pesticide   companies,   green   groups,   and   entomologists,   with   different   interested   parties   preferring   different   potential   explanations   for   the   collapse   in   bee   numbers.  candidates  for  a  cause  include:  the  rapid  global  proliferation  of  the  parasitic   varroa  mite  and  associated  viruses  introduced  into  previously  unexposed  and  therefore   highly   vulnerable   honeybee   populations   by   migratory   beekeeping   and   the   transcontinental   trade   in   bees;   loss   of   genetic   diversity   due   to   the   poor   breeding   practices   perpetuated   by   some   commercial   breeders   and   the   crowding-­‐‑out   of   native   pollinators;   intensive  use  of  honeybees   in  commercial  migratory  pollination   involving   the   long-­‐‑distance   transportation   of   bees   and   leading   to   intolerable   stresses   on   the   species;   the   effects   of   the   increasingly   frequent   unseasonal   weather   associated   with   climate  change  on   the  reproductive  and  foraging  cycles  of  bee  colonies;  and  changing   agricultural   landscapes   involving   the   loss   of   areas   of   diverse   flora,   such   as   the   wildflower  meadows  vital  in  sustaining  native  bee  populations  (vanengelsdorp,  evans,   saegerman,  et  al.;  williams,  tarpy,  vanenglesdorp,  et  al.  846).  so  far  none  of  these  has   emerged   as   an   exclusive   or   undisputed   causal   explanation   for   ccd,   and   there   is   a   growing   view   among   entomologists   that   all   or   many   of   these   factors   in   complex   interaction  are  likely  to  be  contributors  to  the  phenomenon  (neumann  &  carreck  1-­‐‑6).     humanimalia:  a  journal  of  human/animal  interface  studies   volume  6,  number  2  (spring  2015)   4 the   case   against   neonicotinoids   as   a   likely   principal   cause  was   nevertheless   deemed   sufficiently  compelling  for  the  european  union  to   impose  a  moratorium  on  the  use  of   neonicotinoid  pesticides  for   two  years   from  april   2013,   pending   further   research   into   their  effects  (eu  regulation  485/2013).  this  was  the  culmination  of  more  than  a  decade   of  campaigning  by  french  beekeepers  together  with  an  array  of    assorted  environmental   organizations  from  across  the  eu  and  beyond,  who  are  convinced  that  neonicotinoids   are  the  primary  cause  of  the  rapid  decline  in  honeybee  colonies  seen  around  the  world   since  at  least  the  1990s,  and  accelerating  since  2006-­‐‑7.  although  the  moratorium  was  a   significant  victory  for  the  beekeepers  and  their  allies,  it  is  set  to  expire  in  december  2015   and  has  already  been  subjected  to  vigorous  legal  challenge  by  pesticide  companies,  with   the  scientific  evidence  on  both  sides  being  fiercely  and  continuously  contested  (maxim   &   van   der   sluijs;   schmuck).   colony   collapse   disorder   then   constitutes   an   animal-­‐‑ technocultural   assemblage   of   formidable   complexity,   surrounded   by   considerable   controversy.       an  animal-­‐‑industrial  complex?  a  promising  approach  to  such  assemblages  might  be   derived  from  the  work  of  scholars  in  the  tradition  of  critical  animal  studies,  who  have   -­‐‑industrial   com -­‐‑39;   adams;   twine).   this   emphasizes   the   political-­‐‑economic   processes   that   underpin   changing  organizational  forms,  technologies,  and  practices  in  industrialized  farming  or   -­‐‑animal-­‐‑technological   assemblages   to  be  grasped  critically  as  moments  of  wider  structural  relations.  from  this  perspective,   -­‐‑increasing   interpenetration   of   agriculture,   advanced   technology,   banking   interests   and   critical   animal   studies   work   is   a   strand   of   liberationist   thinking   on   human-­‐‑animal   relations   that   regards  all  human   relations  with  domesticated  animals   as  by  definition   relations  of  ownership,  domination,  and  exploitation,  which  vary  only  in  the  degree  of   mastery   or   control   exercised   over   the   animal   (clutton-­‐‑brock).   the   concept   of   the   -­‐‑ -­‐‑59)   and   extends  its  logic  into  the  critical  analysis  of  agribusiness,  focusing  in  particular  upon  the   structural  transformation  of  animal  farming  since  the  mid-­‐‑20th  century.  thus  political-­‐‑ economic  processes  of  concentration  and  monopolization  are  shown  to  be  intrinsically   co systems  (winders  and  nibert).       conceptions  of  the  animal-­‐‑industrial  complex  have  been  informed  by  marxist,  feminist,   and,   to   a   lesser   extent,   foucauldian   theory   concerning   the   interface   between   the   richie nimmo the bio-politics of bees: industrial f arming and colony collapse disorder   5 economic,   the   political,   and   the   technological.   thus   technology   is   conceived   as   a   materialization  and  mediation  of  social  relations,  most  crucially  relations  of  power  and   domination.   numerous   scholars   have   shown   how   critical   theories   of   capitalist   and   disciplinary   technologies   need   not   be   restricted   to   the   analysis   of   relations   between   human   beings,   but   are   highly   applicable   to   the   intensive   animal   production   systems   characteristic   of   contemporary   agribusiness.   from   hog   production   in   intensive   confinement   systems   (novek),   to   computerized   and   mechanized   dairy   production   (holloway;  stewart  et  al.),  to  mechanized  and  automated  slaughter  (adams  62-­‐‑63),  the   role  of  technology  in  industrialized  animal  agriculture  is  grasped  as  a  means  to  enable   in  the  interests  of  increased  productivity,  efficiency,  and  profitability.  the  apparatus  of   intensive   animal   production   systems   can   thus   be   understood   as   assemblages   of   nonhuman  bodies.  there   are   indeed   striking  parallels  between   the   control   systems  of   industrial   animal   farming   and   the   logic   of   taylorism   and   scientific   management   as   strategies   of   increasing   control   over   the   laboring   human   body   within   capitalist   production  processes   in  order   to   facilitate  higher   rates  of   exploitation.  barbara  noske   a valorized   output:       interaction  and  contact  with   the  natural  environment   is  almost   felt   to  be   subversive:   much   anima better  still,  done  away  with.  all  animal  activity  must  be  directed  towards   cheap  and  rapid  production  of  human-­‐‑wanted  things.  (15)     the  model  for  such  intensive  animal  production  systems  and  the  clearest  expression  of   their   logic   is   often   taken   to   be   the   slaughterhouse.   it   is   significant   that   henry   ford   obtained   the   idea   for   his   assembly   line   method   of   production   from   a   visit   to   the   slaughterhouses   of   chicago,   where   he   observed   the   progressive   dismemberment   of   animal  carcasses  in  a  series  of  distinct  operations,  carried  out  by  workers  who  remained   stationary  whilst  the  carcasses  were  moved  from  one  operation  to  the  next  via  a  system   of  aeria its   logic   in   what   became   the   assembly   line   model   of   mass   automobile   production   humanimalia:  a  journal  of  human/animal  interface  studies   volume  6,  number  2  (spring  2015)   6 (adams   63;   rifkin   119-­‐‑120).   carol   adams   suggests   that   this   historical   intersection   of   animal  slaughter  and  capitalist  production  is  not   just  historical  but  structural,  arguing   capitalism   as   modern   capitalism   is   a   construct   built   on   dismemberment   and   in   the   slaughterhouse   this   process   of   fragmentation   is   fundamentally   a   process   of   transforming   living   subjects   into   economically   valorized   objects.       even  where  the  actual  death  of  the  animal  is  not  the  primary  output  or  product  of  the   industrial  process,  as  in  intensive  egg  or  milk  production  for  example,  the  process  can   still   be   grasped   as   one   of   objectification   and   de-­‐‑animalization,   in   which   the   specific,   irreducible,  and  qualitative  animal  is  made  absent,  rendered  non-­‐‑specific  and  fungible,   a   living  obj s   mechanistic  materialism.  central   to   this   transformation   is   the  work  of   translating   the   animal  subject  into  a  series  of  quantitative  measures.  as  hugo  reinert  puts  it:     within   the   agroindustrial   processing   apparatus,   distinguishing   traits   for   these     are   given   as   measurable:   processed   animals   are   specified   in   terms   of   quantifiable   attributes   such   as   age,   gender,   size,   lifespan,   growth   rate,   feed-­‐‑to-­‐‑weight   rations,   fertility,   offspring   survival   rates,  productivity  and  meat  yield.  (46)     critical   animal   studies   approaches   are   thus   underpinned   by   a   trenchant   critique   of   objectification,   reflecting   a   widespread   tendency   to   ground   the   critique   of   particular   forms  of  human-­‐‑animal  relations  in  an  ethico-­‐‑political  affirmation  of  the  subjectivity  of   nonhuman  animals  as  conscious,   social,  and  minded   individuals   (arluke  and  sanders   42-­‐‑48;  irvine).  as  a  critical  strategy  this  undoubtedly  has  many  strengths,  not  least  that   it  is  able  to  draw  upon  the  rhetorical  power  of  a  potent  blend  of  animal  rights  discourse   with   feminist   critiques   of   objectification   and   marxist   critiques   of   alienation   and   exploitation,   all   of  which  presuppose   an   affirmation  of   the   subject.   but   this   approach   loses  much  of  its  cogency  when  the  animals  in  question  are  quintessentially  collective  in   their   species-­‐‑being,   in   their   whole   mode   of   existence,   and   when   an   assertion   of   the   subject   status   of   individual   animals   cannot   therefore  hold   as   the  persuasive   center   of   critique,   and   begins   to   look   inappropriately   anthropomorphic   or   even  neo-­‐‑cartesian   (plumwood  152-­‐‑153).     any  critique  of  apiculture  rooted  in  a  condemnation  of  the  objectification  of  bees  means   understanding  bees  as  subjects   in  the  first  place,  equivalent   in  essence  to  cows,  sheep,   richie nimmo the bio-politics of bees: industrial f arming and colony collapse disorder   7 pigs,  and  indeed  humans.  this  would  seem  risible  to  many,  and  not  in  this  instance  due   to   any   knee-­‐‑jerk   anthropocentrism,   but   because   it   neglects   the   biosocial   specificity   of   apis  mellifera  in  an  attempt  to  assimilate  the  species  to  a  ready-­‐‑made  critique  conceived   almost   entirely   in   reference   to   vertebrates,   and   predominantly  mammals.   it   is   not   of   course   that   honeybees   are   unique   in   being   social   creatures    many  mammalian   and   non-­‐‑mammalian   species   are   social,   and   just   as   with   humans   this   does   not   rule   out   acknowledging   their   individual   subjectivity,  which   is   intimately   bound  up  with   their   social  existence  and  not  the  opposite.  but  the  sociality  of  bees  is  qualitatively  different,   consisting  not  of  subject  relations  between  anatomically  similar  individuals,  but  of  the   sort   of   absolute   biologically   embedded   collectivism   that   has   led   to   serious   scientific   -­‐‑ is,  where  the  colony  itself  is  considered  the  organism  rather  than  the  individual  bees  it   comprises  (tautz),  as  well  as  centuries  of  cultural  imaginings  concerning  the  nature  of    and  apian  social  organization  (wilson  106-­‐‑139).       nicely   sums   up   the   highly   asymmetrical   relationship   between   the   individual   and   the     or   most   thoroughly   social     form   of   sociality   recognized   by   sociobiologists  and  others  who  study  nonhuman  social  organization.  it  is  relatively  rare,   with  most  social  animals  exhibiting  a  lesser  degree  of  sociality.  eusociality  is  defined  by   several   characteristics,   including:   socialized   care   for   of -­‐‑existence   of   multiple   generations   of   adults   within   a   colony;   and   a   division   of   labor   between   specialized   behavioral   ularly   distinctive   aspect   of   eusociality   is   that   individuals   in   one   caste   will   lose   one   or   more   of   the   biological   capacities   of   the   individuals   in   another   caste   during   their   development,   so   that   the   fferentiated   anatomical   development   of   the   component   individuals,   such   that   the   interdependence   of   the   various  groups  comprising  the  colony  is  absolute.       of   the   colony.   the   queen   is   produced   by   the   workers   through   the   feeding   of   high   quantities  of  royal   jelly  to  a  selected  larva,  and  thus  becomes  far   larger  than  the  other   bees  and  the  only  reproductively  viable  female  in  the  colony.  the  queen  and  colony  are   then  able  collectively  to  determine  the  proportion  of  female  workers  and  male  drones   humanimalia:  a  journal  of  human/animal  interface  studies   volume  6,  number  2  (spring  2015)   8 amongst  the  brood,  depending  upon  the  age  of  the  current  queen;  the  female  workers   develop   from   fertilized  eggs  whereas   the  male  drones  develop   from  unfertilized  eggs   and   are   also   fed   differently   by   the   workers.   drones   do   not   forage,   make   honey,   or   participate  in  the  maintenance  of  the  hive,  their  sole  function  being  to  mate  with  a  new   queen  in  the  event  of  the  colony  swarming.  the  female  worker  bees  perform  the  entire   labor   of   the   colony   and   are   differentiated   into   age-­‐‑based   castes   with   different   roles,   including:   brood-­‐‑care   and   feeding;   maintenance   of   the   hive   including   honeycomb   construction  and  clearing  out  dead  bees  and  any  failed  larvae;  attending  to  the  queen;   carrying  water   into   the  colony   to  help   to  maintain   the  right   temperature;  making  and   storing  honey;  guarding  against  invaders;  and  finally  foraging  for  pollen  to  feed  to  the   larvae   and   nectar   to   turn   into   honey.   thus   honeybee   colonies   manifest   remarkably   complex  social  organization,  which  is  accomplished  not  by  large  individual  brains  but   by  biochemical  mechanisms  such  as  differential  pheromone  secretion  to  distinguish  one   caste   from   another;   hence   all   of   the   complexity   remains   at   the   collective   level,   the   individuals  being  mere   instruments  of  the  collective   intelligence  of  the  colony.  that   is   therefore   highly   problematic   to   assimilate   the   ultra-­‐‑sociality   of   bees   to   the   inter-­‐‑ subjective  models  of  sociality  that  underpin  critiques  of  objectification.       the  industrialization  of  bees.  the  commercial  use  of  honeybees  primarily  as  providers   ergone  a  marked  process  of  concentration  paralleling   the  development  of  agribusiness  more  widely,  with  the  rise   in  recent  decades  of   large   commercial   pollination   operations   geared   towards   fulfilling   the   pollination   requirements  of  very  large-­‐‑scale  monocultures.  this  is  at  its  most  dramatic  in  the  central   californian  almond  industry,  where  60  million  almond  trees  planted  in  grids  of  uniform   almonds  (singeli;  traynor).  the  precipitous  rise  in  global  demand  for  almonds  since  the   1990s   has   driven   the   move   towards   large-­‐‑scale   intensive   monoculture,   as   almond   farmers   have   sought   to   capitalize   upon   rising   prices.   this   in   turn   has   fuelled   a   huge   demand  for  pollination,  massively  outstripping  the  existing  pollination  capacity  of  local   pollinators,   and   leading   to   heavy   reliance   upon   long-­‐‑range   migratory   commercial   pollination,  with  millions  of  hives  being  trucked  in  from  across  the  us  and  even  flown   in  from  australia.  the  scale  of  the  demand  does  not   just  reflect  the  enormous  scale  of   almond   production   but   is   magnified   by   the   specific   pollination   requirements   of   almonds,   combined  with   the   particular   rationale   of   intensive   production   (mcgregor).   with  many  fruits,   such  as  peaches  or  apples,   it   is   the   fruits   themselves   that  are  eaten,   and  they  therefore  cannot  be  grown  too  densely,  as  this  will  tend  to  prevent  a  yield  of   richie nimmo the bio-politics of bees: industrial f arming and colony collapse disorder   9 large   and   attractive   fruits.  with   almonds,   it   is   the   pits   that   are   eaten   and   a   larger   number  of  smaller  fruits  is  actually  desirable.  thus,  rather  than  requiring  a  pollination   rate  of  around  10  percent  for  a  viable  crop,  with  almonds  almost  total  pollination  of  all   flowers   is   required   (singeli;   traynor).   moreover,   almonds   are   cross-­‐‑pollinating,   meaning  that  pollen  from  the  flower  of  one  almond  tree  cannot  pollinate  another  flower   on  the  same  tree  or  even  a  tree  with  the  same  genetics;  for  pollination  to  occur  the  bee   must  visit   a   flower  of  a  different  variety  of  almond   tree  whilst   still   carrying   the  alien   pollen,  before  it  returns  to  the  hive.       this  would  not  be  a  problem  under  normal  conditions  of  bio-­‐‑diversity  where  a  variety   of   types   of   trees   is   likely   to   be   growing   in   proximity.   under   conditions   of   intensive   monoculture,  however,  where  the  trees  are  essentially  clones  and  nothing  else  is  grown   for   thousands   of   acres,   it   is   a   significant   logistical   challenge.   consequently,   almond   farmers  must  grow  at  least  two  varieties  of  almond  trees,  which  are  usually  arranged  in   alternate   rows.   even   then   this   is   a   very   inefficient   trajectory   for   a   bee,   whose   sole   concern  is  to  gather  nectar,  and  bees  will  usually  prefer  the  next  nearest  flower,  which   tends  to  be  on  the  same  tree.  bees  will  only  visit  other  trees  before  returning  to  the  hive    for  each  flower  that  they  are  forced  to   look  slightly   further  afield   for  nectar.  these   factors   in  combination  mean  that  almond   orchards  must  be  super-­‐‑saturated  with  bees    at  a  level  of  around  2  hives  per  acre    in   order  to  achieve  commercially  optimal  levels  of  pollination,  resulting  in  around  1  and  a   half   million   hives   being   trucked   into   the   californian   almond   orchards   each   fruiting   season  (mcgregor;  traynor;  singeli).     almond  production   is   the  most  dramatic   case   of   an   intensive   industrial  monoculture   reliant  upon  commercial  apiculture  for  its  viability,  but  it  is  far  from  the  only  example.   the   unrelenting   logic   of   rationalization   and   intensification   is   driving   many   other   branches  of  agriculture  towards  this  model,  which  is  in  turn  driving  the  transformation   of   apiculture   along   similar   lines.   increasingly,   beekeepers   are   turning   away   from   relying   principally   on   honey   production   supplemented   by   occasional   commercial   pollination,  and  toward  a  focus  on  pollination  as  by  far  the  main  part  of  their  business.   though   it   is   most   advanced   in   the   us,   this   trend   is   global   in   scope;   large-­‐‑scale   monocultural   agricultural   systems   around   the   world   are   increasingly   and   (aizen  &  harder  915 18).       humanimalia:  a  journal  of  human/animal  interface  studies   volume  6,  number  2  (spring  2015)   10 moreover,  the  forms  of   intensive  monoculture  that  underpin  the  growth  of  large-­‐‑scale   commercial   apiculture   would   be   unthinkable   without   the   extensive   use   of   agrochemicals.   the   rapid  growth  of   agricultural   productivity   since   the   1950s  owes   as   much  to  the  increasing  use  of  fertilizers,  pesticides,  herbicides,  fumigants,  biocides,  and   insecticides   as   it   does   to   mechanization   and   the   development   of   new   agricultural   enabled   agricultural   productivity   to   be   raised   well   beyond   the   levels   that   would   otherwise   be   achievable.   indeed,   the   practices   of   late   modern   agriculture   are   so   thoroughly  permeated  with  chemicals  that  the  large  agrochemical  corporations  must  be   considered   key   political-­‐‑economic   agents   in   the   agro-­‐‑industrial   complex,   with   a   structural  role  comparable  to  that  of  the  major  food-­‐‑producing  multinationals.  but  just   as   the   benefits   of   agrochemicals   to   farming   productivity   and   profitability   are   well   known,   the   evidence   of   detrimental   and   escalating   environmental   consequences   has   silent  spring,  which  detailed  the   severe  bio-­‐‑diversity  and  habitat   losses  associated  with  the  growing  agricultural  use  of   highly  bio-­‐‑toxic  organophosphate  pesticides.       the   development   of   the   neonicotinoid   class   of   pesticides   was   hailed   as   a   significant   breakthrough,   offering   a   far   less   toxic   alternative   to   organophosphates,  which  would   achieve   similar   results   through   a   different   and   more   targeted   mechanism,   thereby   reducing  the  undesirable  impact  upon  non-­‐‑targeted  organisms  in  the  eco-­‐‑system.  bees,   in   common   with   all   insects,   were   known   to   have   been   highly   vulnerable   to   organophosphates,   but   were   supposed   to   be   relatively   protected   from   exposure   to   and  repeatedly  over  crops,  but  instead  can  be  used  more  selectively,  often  to  treat  seeds   before  planting,  because   they  are   taken  up  by   the  plant  and  become  sealed  within   its   cells.   in   theory   this  enables  neonicotinoids   to  effectively  repel   the   insects   that   feed  on   the  crops  without  harming  other  organisms  in  the  environment.  mammals  in  particular   are   believed   to   be   less   susceptible   to   toxic   effects   from   neonicotinoids   than   from   the   literature  was  as  follows:     we  have   to  protect   the   insects   that  help  us  while  getting   rid  of   the  ones   evelop  insecticides   that   are   safe   when   used   responsibly   and   correctly,   and   which   do   not   comply   with   the   tenets   of   integrated   pest   management.   they   can   be   applied   multiple   times   and   even   richie nimmo the bio-politics of bees: industrial f arming and colony collapse disorder   11 important   tool   in   sustainable   agriculture.   (http://www.cropscience.bayer.   com/en/products-­‐‑and-­‐‑innovation/brands/insecticides.aspx)     -­‐‑vaunted  precision  of  neonicotinoids  has   proved   far   more   unpredictable   when   taken   out   of   the   controlled   environments   of   selective  testing  and  unleashed  upon  the  formidable  complexity  of  the  real  environment   (suryanarayanan).   industry-­‐‑sponsored   tests  of   the  effects  of  neonicotinoids  upon  bees   conducted   prior   to   their   mass   commercial   release   have   been   shown   by   subsequent   independent   research   to   have   been  woefully   inadequate,   focusing   almost   exclusively   upon  establishing  lethal  doses,  with  very  little  consideration  of  the  longer-­‐‑term  effects   of   cumulative   sub-­‐‑lethal   doses   (maxim   and   van   der   sluijs).   moreover,   only   a   very   narrow   range   of   standard   routes   of   exposure   were   considered,   which   failed   to   take   account   of   the  possibility   of   exposure   through  dust,   nectar,   and  pollen.   there   is   now   growing   evidence   that   under   certain   conditions   neonicotinoids   can   become   concentrated   in   pollen   at   far   higher   levels   than  were   anticipated   or   claimed   in   initial   tests,  and  that  prolonged  and  cumulative  exposure  to  neonicotinoids  through  multiple   routes   of   exposure   results   in   symptoms   of   acute   nervous system   confusion,   such   as   failure  to  return  to  the  hive,  as  well  as  damage  to  the  immune  systems  of  bees,  both  of   which  are  closely  associated  with  colony  collapse  disorder  (goulson  983-­‐‑984).       it   might   reasonably   be   concluded   that   banning   or   severely   restricting   the   use   of   neonicotinoid   pesticides   represents   an   efficient   and   effective   single   solution   to   ccd.   that   has   proliferated   since   2007.   but   a   singular   focus   upon   neonicotinoids   fails   to   acknowledge   the   full   socio-­‐‑ecological   significance   of   ccd   and   overlooks   the   longer-­‐‑ term   problem   of   pollinator   decline.   indeed,   the   popular   understanding   of   ccd   as   a    western  honeybee  as  given  and  thus   fails  to  properly  address  the  decline  of  native  bees  and  the  many  other  pollinators  that   performed   the   work   of   pollination   perfectly   adequately   prior   to   the   globalization   of   apis  mellifera  and  the  industrialization  of  agriculture  (buchmann  &  nabham).  the  irony   is   that   the   international  proliferation  of   the  honeybee   is   intricately  bound  up  with   the   forms  of  agricultural  organization  that  have  not  only  led  to  the  steady  decline  of  native   bees   and   other   pollinators,   but   have   also   engendered   the   very   practices   of   intensification  which  meant  that  it  was  only  a  matter  of  time  before  something  like  ccd   developed.  thus  the  crisis  of  the  honeybee  is  really  a  crisis  of  the  current  agro-­‐‑industrial   food  system  at  large      a  system  so  heavily  reliant  upon  industrially  ratcheting  up  the   humanimalia:  a  journal  of  human/animal  interface  studies   volume  6,  number  2  (spring  2015)   12 pollination  work  of   a   single   species   is   patently  unbalanced,   lacking   in   resilience,   and   unsustainable.       bio-­‐‑power  and  resistance.   -­‐‑ industrial   comp reconceive   the   factory   farm  as   a   technopolitical   apparatus   of  disciplinary  power   over   vital   processes,   rather   than   as   a   system   of   domination   over   individual   nonhuman   subjects  as  such.  what  is  common  to  factory  farming  and  intensive  apiculture,  from  this   point   of   view,   is   not   the   objectification   or   exploitation   of   subjects   but   the   material   friction  between,  on   the  one  hand,   living  organisms  and  vital  systems  with   their  own   complex  rhythms  and  systems  of  bodily,  behavioral,  and  ecological  self-­‐‑regulation,  and   on   the   other   hand   industrialism,   understood   as   the   systematic   application   of   instrumental   and   calculative   rationality   to   the   organization   of   production   in   order   to   maximize   productivit complex   situations   and   systems   specialised   and   instrumentally-­‐‑directed   forms   of       the  subordination  of   living  processes  to  the   instrumental  calculus  of  productivity  can   be  grasped  as  a  form  of  biopower.  this  foucauldian  concept  has  already  been  extended   in  a  posthumanist  direction,  such  as  to  encompass  disciplinary  power  over  nonhuman   as   well   as   human   life,   by   a   number   of   animal   studies   and   posthumanist   scholars   (agamben;   stanescu;   novek   233-­‐‑ prescribed   and   desirable   ways,   and   the   sovereign   power   of   killing     the   power   of   lly  in  the  slaughterhouse    turns   out   to   be   a  moment   of   this   wider   biopolitics,   since   a   corollary   of   power   over   life   is   power  over  dying.  thus  both   the   factory   farm  and   the   industrial  monoculture   can  be   comprehended  as  technologies  of  biopower,  enacting  the  disciplinary  subordination  of   life   to  capital  accumulation  via  the  systematic  application  of  mechanistic  rationality  to   vital  processes.       as  scholars  in  critical  environmental  sociology  have  long  pointed  out,  complex  natural   systems   and   processes   are   amenable   to   only   so   much   human   manipulation   and   intensification  before  they  tend  to  reach  some  sort  of  critical  tipping  point,  giving  rise  to   any  number  of  unforeseen  consequences  (catton  and  dunlap;  benton;  dickens  100-­‐‑103,   115).   thus   there   is   causal   force   on   both   sides,   with   bios   always   retaining   some   irreducible  particularity,   some   internal   rhythm  or   self-­‐‑regulating  dynamic   that   cannot   be  eradicated  by  the  disciplinary  apparatuses  of   industrial  technoscience  but  at  best   is   richie nimmo the bio-politics of bees: industrial f arming and colony collapse disorder   13 displaced  and  suppressed,  to  emerge  again  in  some  other  form.  jane  bennett  articulates       the  will   and  designs   of   humans  but   also   to   act   as   quasi-­‐‑agents   or   forces   with  trajectories,  propensities  or  tendencies  of  their  own.  (viii)       thus  whilst  biopower  is  totalizing  it  never  achieves  totality,  for  if  discipline  is  endlessly   innovative,   then   life   is   irrepressibly   recalcitrant;  wherever   there   is   biopower,   there   is   bio-­‐‑resistance.   this   is   present   at   every   level   from   the   micro-­‐‑organismic,   to   the   behavioral,  to  the  ecological,  flowing  from  one  nodal  moment  to  another  and  expressing   itself  wherever  there  is  an  element  left  undisciplined  and  uncontrolled.  like  a  liquid  it   seeps   through   the   tiniest   cracks   in   the   edifice   of   power,  meeting   the  microphysics   of   domination  with  a  microbiotics  of  resistance.       the   spiraling   technocultural   arms   race   that   results   lies  behind   such  practices   as  mass   feeding  with   antibiotics,   tail   docking,  debeaking,   individual   confinement,   and   indeed   the  escalating  use  of  agrochemicals,  all  of  which  can  be  understood  as  the  ramping  up   of  technologies  of  control  in  response  to  the  unintended  consequences  of  earlier  control   measures.  the   suppress   the   tendency   of   living   things   in   particular   to   resist   their   complete   instrumentalization  and  machine-­‐‑like  functional  use.  this  is  not  of  course  resistance  in   any  conscious  or  purposive  sense,  which   is   to  say  in  the  humanist  sense  of  resistance,   but   rather   the   resistance  of  material   recalcitrance,  of  entropy,  and  of  a   chaos  which   is   such  obduracy,  each  technological  fix   is  temporary,  as  the  recalcitrance  of  bios  forever   re-­‐‑emerges   in   new   and   unanticipated   manifestations.   indeed   the   severity   of   the   unintended  consequences  often  parallel  the  ambitiousness  of  the  control  measures,  such   that   there   is   a   marked   tendency   for   forms   of   entropy   to   set   in   and   for   biological   processes   to   break  down  precisely  when   they   are  most   fiercely   instrumentalized   and   when   every   conceivable   variable   appears   to   have   been   reckoned   back   into   the   disciplinary   technology.   this   is   frequently   manifest   as   disease   and   contagion     principal  antagonists  of  the  bio-­‐‑political  logic  of  containment  and  separation    such  as   in  outbreaks  of  bse,  avian  and  swine  flu,  as  well  as  the  rise  of  antibiotic  resistance,  all  of   which  have  been  connected  with  the  practices  of  intensive  animal  farming.       humanimalia:  a  journal  of  human/animal  interface  studies   volume  6,  number  2  (spring  2015)   14 in  the  factory  farm  it   is  animal  bodies  that  are  the  object  of  bio-­‐‑power,  and  which  are   progressively   removed   from   the   natural   environment   and   into   highly   regulated   artificial   enclosures.   in   industrial   monoculture   it   is   the   environment   itself   that   is   the   object   of   bio-­‐‑power,   encompassing   the   complex   ecological   interrelationships   among   multiple   entities   including   plants,   animals,   insects,   the  material   qualities   of   soil,   and   myriad  micro-­‐‑organisms.  though  the  objective   is   the  same     to   increase  productivity    the  technological  dimensions  are  somewhat  different.  in  the  factory  farm  most  of  the   variables  at  play  are  amenable  to  a  relatively  high  degree  of  technoscientific  control,  in   the   field   far   less   so.   it   follows   that   there   is   a   correspondingly   greater   possibility   of   unintended  consequences   resulting   from  any  given   technological   intervention.  as  val   regard   for   effects   on   larger   self-­‐‑ indeed,   if  both  forms  of   intensive  farming  can  be  understood  as  factory  systems,   they   might  also  be  grasped  heuristically  as  ongoing  biopolitical  experiments,  the  one  under   laboratory-­‐‑like   conditions,   the   other   in   the   field,   where   the   parameters   of   the   experiment   are   harder   to   control,   its   limits   less   sharply   defined,   and   the   variables   at   play  highly  unpredictable  and  open-­‐‑ended.       conclusion.  this  article  has  explored  the  possibilities  of  an  analysis  of  apiculture   that   -­‐‑ animal  agriculture,  assessing  its  usefulness  and  limits  as  a  framework  for  grasping  the   specific  animal-­‐‑technocultural  assemblage  of  contemporary  apiculture,  and  developing   -­‐‑ the  phenomenon  of  colony  collapse  disorder.       the  paradigmatic  site  of  human-­‐‑ -­‐‑industrial   complex understood   through   the   terms   of   a   critique   of   the   slaughterhouse   as   a   site   of   mechanized   and   routinized   objectification.   such   a   critical   strategy   demands   the   acknowledgement   of   nonhuman   animal   subjectivity,   mindedness,   and   individuality,   which   then   becomes   the   basis   for   an   ethico-­‐‑political   critique   of   objectification.  whilst   acknowledging   its   potency,   i   have   argued   that   this   mode   of   critique   was   conceived   principally   in   reference   to   the   mammalian   and   avian   animals   that   make   up   most   honeybees.   it   was   argued   however   that   -­‐‑ might  yet  be  coherent,  if  the  model  of  the  factory  farm  is  reconceived  in  such  a  way  as   to  displace  the  centrality  of  the  subject  in  the  analysis.     richie nimmo the bio-politics of bees: industrial f arming and colony collapse disorder   15 rethinking   the   critical-­‐‑animal   account   of   the   factory   farm   requires   re-­‐‑examining   the   model   of   the   slaughterhouse   as   the   paradigmatic   site   for   the   systematic   negation   of   subjectivity,   the   transformation  of   living  animal   subjects   into  dead   commodities.  this   model   reinforces   a   view   of   the   factory   farm   as   a  machine   for   the   negation   of   living   subjects,  quite  literally  a  killing  machine  or  technology  of  death.  but  placed  in  the  wider   context   of   other   forms   of   animal   farming,   the   thanatopolitics   of   the   mechanized   slaughterhouse  looks  less  like  the  paradigmatic  model  for  animal  production  and  more   like   a   supplementary  moment   in  a  more   encompassing  biop understood,  the  core  processes  of  the   factory   farm  are  not  built  upon   the   sovereign  power  of  killing   subjects,   but  upon   the   disciplinary   subordination   of   living  materials   and   vital   systems   in   such   a   way   as   to   render  them  maximally  productive.  this  points  to  a  rather  different  sort  of  tension,  not   another  variant  of  the  subject/object  divide,  but  a  messy  and  material  friction  between   the   dominant   technoculture   of   capitalist   modernity   and   the   complex   ecologically-­‐‑ embedded  rhythms  and  processes  of  living  systems  which  provide  both  its  object  and   its  rapidly  deteriorating  conditions  of  possibility.     situating   colony   collapse   disorder   within   a   biopolitical   reading   of   intensive   animal   production  systems  in  this  way  avoids  too  narrow  a  focus  upon  specific  practices  which    however  significant    are  no  more  than  elements  of  this  complex  and  reflections  of   its   essential   logic,   such   as   widespread   pesticide   usage   or   migratory   commercial   pollination.  that   is  not   to  minimize   the   role  of  neonicotinoids  and  other  pesticides   in   pollinator   decline,   but   it   recognizes   their   embeddedness   within   the   self-­‐‑escalating   material   contradiction   between   a   technoculture   bent   upon   seeking   the   increased   productivity  of  living  systems  in  accordance  with  the  logic  of  industrial  capital,  and  the   unreflexive,   unconscious,   but   irrepressible   resistance   to   this   that   inheres   in   every   particle  of  those  biomaterial  systems.  honeybees  thus  emerge  not  simply  as  objectified   and   exploited   nonhuman   subjects,   but   as   vital   nodes   in   a   complex   techno-­‐‑ecological   assemblage     highly   vulnerable   to   the   agrochemical   technologies   pervasive   in   industrial  farming,  but  also  technologies  themselves,  and  indispensable  components  of   the   monocultural   systems   of   agricultural   production   that   increasingly   dominate   the   world  food  system.             humanimalia:  a  journal  of  human/animal  interface  studies   volume  6,  number  2  (spring  2015)   16 works  cited       adams,   carol   j.   -­‐‑industrial   complex:   an   eco-­‐‑ organization  and  environment  10.1  (1997):  26 51.       _____.  the  sexual  politics  of  meat:  a  feminist-­‐‑vegetarian  critical  theory.  1990.  new  york:   continuum,  2000.     agamben,  giorgio.  the  open:  man  and  animal.  stanford:  stanford  up,  2010.       aizen,   m.   a.,   s   is   current  biology  19   (2009):   915-­‐‑918.     arluke,  arnold,   and  clinton  r.   sanders.  regarding  animals.   philadelphia:  temple  up,   1996.     bayer   cropscience:   www.cropscience.bayer.com/en/products-­‐‑and-­‐‑innovation/brands/   insecticides.aspx.  web.  6  february  2015.     benjamin,   allison,   and   brian   mccallum.   a   world   without   bees.   london:   guardian   books,  2009  .       bennett,  jane.  vibrant  matter:  a  political  ecology  of  things.  durham,  nc:  duke  up,  2010.     benton  ted.  natural  relations:  ecology,  animal  rights  and  social   justice.   london:  verso,   1993.     buchmann,  stephen  l.,  and  gary  paul  nabham.  the  forgotten  pollinators.  washington,   dc:  island  press,  1997.       carson,  rachel.  silent  spring.  new  york:  houghton  mifflin,  1962.     -­‐‑exuberant   american  behavioral  scientist  24  (1980):  15-­‐‑47.       clutton-­‐‑brock,   j.  the  walking  larder:  patterns  of  domestication,  pastoralism  and  predation.   london:  unwin  hyman,  1989.     richie nimmo the bio-politics of bees: industrial f arming and colony collapse disorder   17   cox-­‐‑ group.  state  college:  pennsylvania  state  university,  2007.     dickens,   peter.   society   and   nature:   changing   our   environment,   changing   ourselves.   cambridge:  polity,  2004.     european   union   regulation   485/2013,   24   may   2013,   amending   implementing   regulation   (eu)   no   540/2011,   as   regards   the   conditions   of   approval   of   the   active   substances  clothianidin,   thiamethoxam  and   imidacloprid,  and  prohibiting   the  use  and   sale  of  seeds  treated  with  plant  protection  products  containing  those  active  substances.   official  journal  of  the  european  union.  l139:  12-­‐‑26.       fudge,  erica.  animal.  london:  reaktion  books,  2002.       ecological   economics  68.3  (2009):  810-­‐‑821.     goulson,   d.   journal  of  applied  ecology  50  (2013):  977-­‐‑987.       haraway,  donna.  the  companion  species  manifesto:  dogs,  people  and  significant  otherness.   chicago:  prickly  paradigm  press,  2003.     environment  and  planning  d:  society  and  space  25.6  (2007):  1041-­‐‑1060.     hurn,   samantha.  humans  and  other  animals:  cross-­‐‑cultural  perspectives  on  humans  and   other  animals.  london:  pluto  press,  2012.     irvine,  leslie.  if  you  tame  me:  understanding  our  connections  with  animals.  philadelphia:   temple  up,  2004.       humanimalia:  a  journal  of  human/animal  interface  studies   volume  6,  number  2  (spring  2015)   18 jacobsen,  rowan.  fruitless  fall:  the  collapse  of  the  honey  bee  and  the  coming  agricultural   crisis.  new  york:  bloomsbury,  2008.     maeterlinck,  maurice.  the  life  of  the  bee.  tr.  alfred  sutro.  london:  george  allen,  1901.     -­‐‑ european  environment  agency  report  no.1/2013.  late  lessons  from  early  warnings:  science,   precaution,  innovation.  european  environment  agency,  2013.  369-­‐‑406.     mcgregor,   s.   e.   insect  pollination  of  cultivated  crop  plants.   agriculture  handbook  no.   496.  washington,  dc:  us  government  printing  office,  1976.       journal   of   apicultural   research  49  (2010):  1 6.       noske,   barbara.  beyond  boundaries:  humans  and  animals.   1989.  new  york:   black   rose   books,  1997.       people:   sociological  perspectives  on   the  discipline  of  animals   in   society  and  animals  13.3  (2005):  221-­‐‑244.       preston,  claire.  bee.  london:  reaktion  books,  2006.     plumwood,   val.   environmental   culture:   the   ecological   crisis   of   reason.   london:   routledge,  2002.       ransome,   hilda   m.   the   sacred   bee   in   ancient   times   and   folklore.   1937.   mineola,   ny:   dover  publications,  2004.       society  and  animals   22   (2014):  42-­‐‑56.       rifkin,  j.  beyond  beef:  the  rise  and  fall  of  the  cattle  culture.  new  york:  penguin,  1992.     european   environment   agency   report   no.1/2013.   late   lessons   from   early   warnings:   science,   precaution,   innovation.   european   environment   agency,  2013.  401-­‐‑402.     richie nimmo the bio-politics of bees: industrial f arming and colony collapse disorder   19   shepard,  paul.  the  others:  how  animals  made  us  human.  washington,  dc:  island  press,   1996.     san  francisco  chronicle.  sfgate.com.  14  october   2007.  web.  22  february  2015.     phaenex  8.2  (2013):  135-­‐‑60.     addre sociologia  ruralis  53.2  (2013):  201-­‐‑222.       pri  12  jul  2011.  web.  6   22  february  2015.     suryanarayanan,   s.   s   of   insects  4.1  (2013):  153-­‐‑167.       tautz,   jürgen.  the  buzz   about  bees:  biology  of   a  superorganism.   berlin:   springer-­‐‑verlag,   2008.       traynor,  j.  almond  pollination  handbook.  bakersfield:  kovak  books,  1993.     -­‐‑ journal  for  critical  animal  studies  10.1  (2012):  12 39.     vanengelsdorp  d.,  et  al.   plos  one   4.8  (2009):  e6481.     williams,   g.   r.,   et   al.   bioessays   32.10   (2010):   845 846.       wilson,  bee.  the  hive:  the  story  of  the  honeybee  and  us.  london:  john  murray,  2004.     humanimalia:  a  journal  of  human/animal  interface  studies   volume  6,  number  2  (spring  2015)   20 tion   (2004):  76-­‐‑96.         microsoft word poliquin-landes-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:1 rachel poliquin how to see a magpie joan b. landes, paula young lee, and paul youngquist, ed. gorgeous beasts: animal bodies in historical perspective. college station: penn state university press, 2012. 258 pp. $49.95 (hb). a taxidermied magpie cocks its eye from the jacket cover of gorgeous beasts: animal bodies in historical perspective, the latest volume in the new animalibus series from pennsylvania state university press. barely contained by a bell jar, the magpie perches above a mound of miscellaneous shiny things. the bird has the neutral pose of a natural history specimen; the bell jar suggests the embalmed nature of victorian parlours. yet the heap of scavenged trinkets helps us see the magpie as an individual, a sentient creature with particular tastes and preferences. magpies are among the most intelligent animals. they are also one of the most aesthetically sophisticated. hoarding its pearls and silver spoons together with safety pins and keys, the magpie has its own aesthetic tastes that defy humans’ sense of value and worth. the magpie is part of marc dion’s artwork portrait of a collector (2004), a title which evokes a collector’s passion, personal value, and perhaps a touch of eccentricity. but which collector is on display? the magpie or the naturalist? or perhaps the collector is the pervasive human desire to bottle up the rest of nature for our contemplation and enjoyment? portrait of a collector has no straightforward answers, and it is surely no coincidence that the editors of gorgeous beasts chose dion’s magpie, a scavenger, a trickster, a collector, a renowned mimic, and a dead bird under glass, as their envoy. animal studies is innately pandisciplinary, and the animalibus series seeks to explore the resplendent, tragic, and indispensable roles animals have and continue to play within human lives and culture. and with that mandate, gorgeous beasts succeeds beautifully. edited by joan b. landes, paula young lee and paul youngquist, gorgeous beasts brings together nine essays by some of the most sophisticated voices within animal studies to explore the histories and desires shaping human encounters with other animals, both alive and dead. the volume delves into a fascinating range of topics from king lear’s call for civet musk to late victorian elephant hunting to the collapse of the grand banks cod fishery, and animals are explored as fashion, fetish, hunted amusements, captive entertainments, farm power, eatibles, art objects, science specimens, national treasures, even lethal weapons. the volume concludes with a conversation between dion, one of the most thought-provoking contemporary animal humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 180 artists, and the editors about his work amidst our broader animal relationships. part way through the discussion dion comments that “art speaks best when it defies the simplicity of right and wrong and attempts to give voice to the complexity of ambivalence, melancholy, mourning, uncertainty, and the complex, irritated state in which we often find ourselves when the contemporary society fails miserably to fulfil its promise of rationality, in other words, the absurd” (170). the remark is equally applicable to animal studies. the questions most worth asking never have easy or straightforward answers. as with art, the best critical work destabilizes traditional narratives with ambiguity and paradox. and most poignantly, the best work asks readers or viewers to question their own sense of place within the world. gorgeous beasts asks all the right questions. its animal bodies are provocative, unpredictable, and potent. meticulously researched and eloquently argued with clear, accessible language, the essays incite a knowing that grows beyond the page and into our daily lives with other animals. in their introduction the editors outline the difficulties at work in really seeing and connecting with animals. “animals are never just there to be seen, felt, or known. history situates them. culture appropriates them. science defines them in one way, affection in another” (3). seeing animals means seeing them through various long and thorny histories of representation which are shaped by the ever-shifting desires, fears, curiosity, and contradictions that color all our animal encounters. but like the magpie, animals are always more than objects of human contemplation and desire. after all, it is “bright and fecund bodies of beasts” that compel our desiring. animals always exceed human reckoning because “animals realize a life that exceeds the small circle of our so-called humanity, a full and feral life irreducible to reason and its pale twin, propriety” (1). for a subject that bites back, so to speak, animals prove reliably difficult to pin down. but if they refuse to be boxed into predictable roles, neither can they ever make a clean escape. then again, neither can we escape from them. and perhaps this is the most critical contribution of gorgeous beasts: there is no them and us. rather all animals — human or otherwise — are co-evolvers, co-habitants, and co-agents. our fates are utterly entwined. besides, neither humanity nor the rest of the animal kingdom has ever been viewed as a homogenous group. in his fascinating chapter, “the rights of man and the rights of animality at the end of the eighteenth century,” pierre serna unpacks the animals within the rhetoric of revolutionary france. as republican scientists worked to define who precisely was to enjoy the benefits of being “a political animal,” the boundaries between so called civilized man, barbarous peoples, inferior classes, and animals were rachel poliquin – how to see a magpie 181 drawn and redrawn in paradoxical ways. ron broglio’s chapter, “on vulnerability: studies from life that ought not to be copied,” examines a different sort of blurring between livestock and human laborers during britain’s eighteenth-century push for agricultural improvements. farmers have a visceral connection to their animals through their shared daily bodily labor, a connection that broglio sums up by their mutual vulnerability: “the argument of a shared animality is based not on the animal’s capabilities or on that of humans but on a mutual fragility” (87). that fragility becomes more apparent within the resonance of biopower. flattening any distinction between human and nonhuman animal laborers, biopower hinges their shared existence on statistical estimates, forecasts, and other such governmental technologies. similarly sajay samuel and dean bavington examine the interlocked fate of the grand banks’ fishermen and codfish at the hands of technocratic governmental science which “reduce fishermen’s forms-of-life to a form of life” and cod to a statistically declining biomass. each in their own way, the essays argue against the adequacy of fixed categories and render distinctions between humans and other animals either meaningless or obsolete. for example in “renaissance animal things,” erica fudge offers a highly creative analysis on the agency of animal matters — not living animals, but animal products. fudge proposes the new term “animal-made-object” to signify both an object constructed from an animal and the objectified animal (42). far from dead materials disconnected from the animals they once were, fudge shows such animal-made-objects as dog-skin gloves and civet musk to be potent things with the power both to construct and upset notions of being human. in “calling the wild” harriet ritvo reveals the ostensibly simple terms “wild” and “tame” to be far from the binary opposites they would seem to be, finding “wild” cattle in the earl of tankerville’s manicured park and “incontestably domesticated” sheep that are upheld as symbolic of their “untamed landscape” (114). animalizing the human takes a chilling turn in paul youngquist’s “the cujo effect.” youngquist traces the history of the massacre of jamaica’s maroon warriors in 1795. to quell the maroon uprising, british army unleashed bloodhounds trained by the spanish to hunt down and kill escaped slaves. within the rhetoric of british treaties, the maroons occupy a middle zone of “animal man” — at once human enough to treat with, but animal enough to hunt. in a remarkable rhetorical twist, youngquist shows how terror of the animal becomes a racialized sign of savagery. gorgeous beasts is abundantly illustrated with fifty images. the introduction alone has seven images of contemporary animal art (three amy stein photographs and four humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 182 works by dion), and the editors do an excellent job of setting the scene, so to speak, by highlighting the unsettling and unsettled resonance of animal imagery. they begin with one of stein’s photograph — a fox standing in the dark mouth of highway culvert — from her domesticated series. on closer inspection, the portrayal of animal wildness amidst urbanity becomes increasingly convoluted. the fox is taxidermied, which is to say, the fox was already been domesticated to death, already remade into a sign of animal liveliness, before it was used as a photographic prop. is there any foxiness left? perhaps not. but as the editors suggest, it does no service to the animal to see it only as human manipulation. after all the power of stein’s image resides quite precisely in the genuine fox that once was. “an image of a fox is a kind of compromise between its life and ours, a mingling of traces that produces a hybrid: neither quite fox nor quite human but something in between”(3). by acknowledging that there are no clear or definitive answers, the editors successfully open the doors to more productive lines of interrogations and a richer play of possibilities. although the subtitle of gorgeous beasts highlights the volume’s historical perspective, considering the introduction’s heavy emphasis on contemporary animal art and the closing conversation with dion, i was astonished (and somewhat disappointed) that only three of the nine essays focus on visual representations of animals and only one takes contemporary animal art as its main subject. in the concluding chapter, cecilia novero exposes the dark and deadly play of deceptions underlying conventional ways of seeing animals in daniel spoerri’s carnival of animals (1995) and his use of le brun’s seventeenth-century animal physiognomies. nigel rothfels also does a nice job of connecting historical images with contemporary art. exploring the appallingly fascinating images of hunters standing on the flanks of dead elephants, rothfels goes beyond a critique of blatant violence to unpack what precise the hunters are trying to say through such images and why. and joan b. landes examines the very different ways in which comte de buffon and pablo picasso both muddle naturalism and imagination in their beastly images. for a volume which challenges readers to rethink how they see animals both in historical and contemporary contexts, there are surprising weaknesses in how the images themselves are treated. some images are not read closely enough while others contribute little to the conversation. for example, landes notes the human expression of buffon’s orangutan but leaves other aspects of the image unexamined — particularly the grass huts in the distance and the animal’s walking stick. buffon’s horse and bull are also presented, and they too have human dwellings in the background, presumably their stables. is buffon suggesting that the orangutan likewise lives in the village? and rachel poliquin – how to see a magpie 183 if the ape’s expression transfigures him into a hairy human, what about the startlingly direct and intelligent gaze of the horse? ritvo’s discussion of the ancestral herdwick breed of sheep is accompanied by a 1882 photograph of a champion ram and his owner. the herdwicks were alleged to have a near mystical connection to their landscape, passing down topographical information generationally. all i see in the photograph is an especially hairy ram and a cantankerous man, and i am not quite sure why i should be looking. however, other images are far more successfully handled, and the most potent in volume is surely another photograph of a man and an animal, this one taken by carl akeley in 1896 and included in rothfels’ essay. a dead somali wild ass lies dead in the dirt; a shadow of akeley’s broad-brimmed hat and torso looms up from the bottom of the photograph, which was taken presumably moments after akeley shot the animal. the image is jarring, haunting, utterly spellbinding, and cannot but implicate the viewer in the deadly act. that shadow is our shadow. of the fifty illustrations, twelve are color plates, and all twelve plates are dedicated to dion’s work. this decision strikes me as especially odd. why is not at least one of stein’s photograph printed in color? certainly the discussion of spoerri’s taxidermied foxes would have benefited from a touch of color, if color was to be included. and while dion’s work is deserving of any and all attention, his images become an extraordinary coda as the volume suddenly burst into color when all the talking is done. as gorgeous beasts opens and closes with dion’s work, his art almost becomes the lens through which the entire volume is viewed and certainly adds an overarching visual structure to the book. however, this mishandling of images adds up to a minor criticism of an otherwise thought-provoking and question-filled volume that examines animal as kith and kin, as co-authors and co-inhabitants in an ever-shifting animal world. microsoft word gigliotti h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 reviews carol gigliotti animals/artists steve baker, artist | animal (posthumanities 23). minneapolis & london: university of minnesota press, 2013. 320 pp. $29.95pb. full disclosure: i am mentioned in steve baker’s book artist | animal, and i previously have published a dialogue with him about art and animals in my edited book, leonardo’s choice: genetics and animals. i know him personally and respect his writing. in fact, steve’s book the postmodern animal was an inspiration to me, not so much in his particular perspective, but in the fact that it was the first book i had come across that took seriously animal imagery in contemporary art and performance. perhaps the most important thing i should disclose at the outset is that i believe that animals are sentient, conscious, intelligent, and creative beings who are just as necessary to the world as human animals. carol gigliotti — “animals/artists” 129 all that being said, artist | animal is a necessary addition to the growing human-animal studies area. baker has been a supportive and crucial documenter of a growing body of art involving animals that few others in the art world have taken on as seriously and as carefully. he offers a relatively unique approach to the kind of art and cultural criticism he employs. baker interviews carefully chosen representatives of a broad spectrum of artists to focus on “the complex interplay of their work and their words” (18) in exploring their practice. this, in itself, is admirable. few cultural theorists, and baker may be said to fall under that heading, take seriously the words of visual artists. for many theorists, philosophers, critics and curators, artists often have been asked to be seen, but not heard. as susan sontag writes, “interpretation is the revenge of the intellect on art” (7). critics often disparage or ignore what artists say about their own work, only to inflict their own interests or preoccupations on the work that have nothing to do with the artists’ intentions. baker completed extensive interviews with the artists included in the book over many years, and these firsthand accounts by artists are invaluable records of this period in art history. one of the most important sections of the book, in my mind, is the chapter entitled “art and animal rights.” the three artists interviewed and discussed in the chapter, sue coe, britta jaschinski, and angela singer have not been easily received by the art world. coe is probably the best known, having been making work since 1977. but each of these artists’ work deserves more recognition than they have previously received and baker sensitively and carefully gives us the gift of their own insights on their work and practice. unlike some of the other artists included in baker’s book, these three are clear about their purpose and articulate about their practice, and baker makes a cogent and persuasive case for what art adds to growing questioning surrounding animals. but these three artists, and i would add mary britton clouse, are not only sure of their purpose, but also, none of them use live animals in any detrimental or harmful way, nor do they commission to have animals killed or captured or manipulated for their art. animals as beings of worth are prioritized in their work. so while there is much in baker’s book to recommend it, i still feel a level of frustration with other parts of the book. what i find disheartening in artist | animal is baker’s ambiguity about where he stands on the ways in which animals are used in art. and throughout the book there is a heavy reliance on the words “ambiguity” and “messiness,” not only as descriptions of the included artists’ practice, but at times as humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 130 justifications of artistic practices that involve animals, even when it means the animal does not outlive the inclusion in those practices. admittedly, those words have been used consistently in art criticism and art practice. having taught art for 30 years, i have used them myself in working with students, writing about others’ art, and thinking about my own. but baker uses these terms and “openness,” all garnering entries in the index, and others like “botched” and “flawed” so often that one begins to wonder if the repetition of these phrases are constructing the very thing he is critiquing, a rule-bound aesthetic — and ethics, but we will come back to that — that contemporary artists must follow or be ignored. after all, those words describe a particular kind of value when used to talk about art practice. granted, the artists included in the book describe their processes, and sometimes the works themselves, as having these qualities, but my problem is that in a number of works described in the book and in works included in the book, animals pay for these qualities with their well-being or even having their agency compromised by an artist, sometimes up to and including being killed. i realize one of baker’s goals is to let us as readers make up our own minds, and there are many moments when he makes himself clearer, as in a short section entitled, “on ethics.” he sees “how artists think and work” (65) as having a relevance for something other than a calculable ethics as envisioned, or at least hoped for, by philosophers such as alain badiou and jacques derrida. i do not disagree with him about the problems of an ethics that is forced, or calculative, such as utilitarianism, but there are other alternatives. if one is concerned, however, with a new ethics that includes animals in that concern, then their agency and worth seems to me to be the place to start. after all, we have already witnessed the results of the opposite for millennia. for instance, i greatly appreciate the book’s “afterword: art in a post-animal era?,” a rereading and disagreement — though baker finds that hard to admit — with cary wolfe’s wellknown essay juxtaposing the work of sue coe and eduardo kac (what is posthumanism? 145-168). up until the last paragraph, that is, when in the last words of the book baker appears to mesh work having real commitment to actual animals and their lives, such as that practiced by sue coe, with kac’s transgenic work, which does not. this is not to say that baker is for animals being killed in art. in probably his most unambiguous sentence in the book, he states: “this is not intended as a defense of either rat piece or helena” (17). the first is a 1976 performance piece in which rats were burned alive by the artist, kim jones, and the second is a 2000 piece called helena by marcus carol gigliotti — “animals/artists” 131 evaristti that placed goldfish in blenders which gallery audience members were free to turn on (they did). he goes on to say: the book’s contention — which it may or may not to be able persuasively to demonstrate — is that artists working in this field are well placed to devise forms of responsible practice: critical and improvisatory and material forms that side-step a rule-bound or unduly judgmental notion of ethics. (18) baker describes and discusses a number of pieces in the book that instead persuade me a “responsible practice” is something that needs questioning when animals are used by artists. further, how do animals fare when artists side-step an “unduly judgmental notion of ethics?” at the very least, it is counter-productive to separate ethics from aesthetic judgment while at the same judging artist’s work on the basis of a particular aesthetic also based on value judgments, as both aesthetics and ethics are. catherine bell’s performance piece, felt is the past tense of feel, in which she squirts the ink of 40 dead squid, recently caught specifically for this performance, into her mouth, does not in my mind fit with what i would call a responsible practice concerning animals. but, baker’s comments about watching the performance, “nothing (to this viewer, at least) seems ugly or repellent about this performance: it’s caring, attentive, beautiful” (20) make me even more concerned about justifying artists’ sidestepping ethics for the sake of a truth that seemingly only art can fathom. these squid were killed for this performance. true, killing animals is a widely practiced activity, but baker is willing to call this performance “almost posthuman”(39). for those that need a refresher, posthumanism questions our anthropocentrically structured “dogma that insists on an ontological difference — and the ethical consequences that follow from that difference — between homo sapiens and every other life form on the planet” (wolfe). killing squid does little to question that dogma in any consequential way. i point this out because baker often invokes posthumanists deleuze and guattari, and postmodernist donna haraway, in his iterations of both posthumanist and postmodern work. i see both, however, as limited in their real commitment to dismantle that ontological difference and then to act on the ethical consequences. these theorists are intellectually and linguistically gifted, offering us creatively articulate concepts, but do humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 132 they walk the walk? nicole shukin, in her brilliant book animal capital, says of deleuze and guattari’s “becoming” and “affects”: in the context of animal capital, there is a great deal at stake in romanticizing affect as a rogue portion of pure energy linked to animality as a state of virtual rather than actual embodiment.... at the very least, affect as an authentic animal alterity is impossible to distinguish from the intensities unleashed by capitalism. (32) in other words, what is at stake for actual animals in the midst of an unrelenting global capitalism is a virtuality that has become a fact of life: as a factory-farm unit hidden from view, as a mere repository for experimental drugs, as a mere clone or a genetic data vat, as a member of a vanishing species, among other unvirtuously virtual existences. richard iveson makes clear that the politics underlying deleuze and guattari’s enforced division between the categories of the wild and the tame are familiar structures of oppression — both traditional and contemporary. by way of the wild-tame dichotomy, deleuze and guattari reserve for humanity alone the possibility of encountering the timeless immediacy of “true nature” at and as the limit of language. moreover, they posit an undying and undifferentiated preoriginary domain of animality — an essential dissolution of life which renders as senseless the singular deaths of nonhuman animals. and finally, deleuze and guattari exclude from the “truth” of “nature” all of the nonhuman beings improperly contaminated by the anthropological machine of human recognition. (12) one cannot help but see the merging of individual animals into a mass of undifferentiated animality by deleuze and guattari as a typical colonizing move, one that historically does not bode well for the colonized. haraway, too, can be downright obstructive when it comes to inspiration for relationships with animals that do not rely on the same anthropocentric and chauvinist aspects of modern humanism she has critiqued throughout her career. zipporah weisberg’s brilliant critique of haraway’s theory of companion species, “the broken promises of monsters: haraway, animals and the humanist legacy,” helps us to understand how this theory, carol gigliotti — “animals/artists” 133 not only falls far short of any real challenge to the most problematic aspects of humanism outlined by haraway, but reveals a disturbing collusion with the very structures of domination she purports to oppose. (2) i have space to offer only one example weisberg explores in her essay. it concerns the word “curiosity” that baker uses in an early discussion about whether art is beyond moral criticism, something that i think is central to my problems with art | animal. baker specifically says, “that sort of question, binding together aesthetic and ethical value judgments is one that artists of jones’ [the maker of rat piece described above] generation had already had moved beyond” (11). what he does not say is that artists returned to that question, if they ever really abandoned it, in the 80’s and 90’s. witness, also, that we are still arguing about the possibility or impossibility of separating the two, whether we call it aesthetics and ethics or art and morality (gigliotti, “aesthetics of a virtual world”; gigliotti, leonardo’s choice). quoting john cage in 1968 as succinctly offering a more “contemporary” perspective when he said to artists, “‘value judgments are destructive to your business, which is curiosity and awareness,’” baker also offers a quote from haraway’s when species meet: “curiosity is not a nice virtue, but it does have the power to defeat one’s favorite certainties.” (the word “curiosity” also demands an entry in the index.) as weisberg points out, haraway’s use of the word “curiosity” to justify animal experimentation undermines her claim that animal experimenters are somehow not part of the western humanist project of instrumental domination of animals” — and of the earth, i might add — but “of a relentlessly historical and contingent kind” (77) of inequality. and if that reason seems not to work for you, haraway explains why there are a number of benefits to animal experimentation: “curiosity, not just functional benefit, may warrant the risk of ’wicked action’” (70). one cannot help but see in this quote a parallel with baker’s use of the word “curiosity” for justifying, or at least not judging or limiting, artists’ use of animals. is it not clear that artists using animals in ways that treat them as objects of curiosity, placing their welfare and their agency, perhaps even their lives, and as only secondary to the art practice itself, is just another way of enforcing anthropocentrism, the superiority of human needs and desires above all else? by all means read this book. there is much to be gained in the discussions within which it is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 134 involved. but, perhaps try reading it with the order of the title inverted, with the word animal preceding the word artist: animal | artist. works cited baker, steve. artist | animal. posthumanities series. vol. 23. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2013. _____. the postmodern animal. london: reaktion, 2000. gigliotti, carol. “aesthetics of a virtual world.” leonardo 28.4 (1995): 289-95. _____, ed. leonardo’s choice: genetic technologies and animals. dordrecht: springer, 2009. iveson, richard. “deeply ecological deleuze and guattari: humanism’s becoming animal.” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies 4.2 (spring 2013): 42-53. shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. posthumanities series. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2009. sontag, susan. “against interpretation.” against interpretation and other essays. 1961. new york: picador, 2001. 3-14. weisberg, zipporah. “the broken promises of monsters: haraway, animals and the humanist legacy.” journal for critical animal studies 7.2 (2009): 22-62. wolfe, cary. “discovering the human.” university of minnesota posthumanities series: university of minnesota, 2009. <http://www.uminnpressblog.com/2010/03/cary-wolfewhat-is-posthumanism.html> wolfe, cary. what is posthumanism? minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2010. 148-168. microsoft word lamarre-simondon h u m a n i m a l i a 4:2 thomas lamarre other selves are possible gilbert simondon. two lessons on animal and man. translated by drew s. burk. introduction by jean-yves chateau. minneapolis: univocal publishing, 2011. 88 pp. $19.95 pbk a central figure in french philosophy, gilbert simondon’s philosophy of individuation has influenced a range of french thinkers, among them gilles deleuze, félix guattari, georges canguilhem, isabelle stengers, and bruno latour, and may be situated alongside william james, henri bergson, alfred north whitehead, and other philosophers whose profound engagement with modern sciences led to emphasis on process and transduction that makes for an account of reality and experience very different from positivist, phenomenological, and psychoanalytic lineages of thought. given the dearth of translations of gilbert simondon’s work into english, new translations are very welcome. drew s. burke’s fine translation of simondon’s two lessons on animal and man constitutes an important contribution to the general effort to make the works of this major philosopher accessible in english. at the same time, it is somewhat disappointing that the first translation of simondon’s work in book format would be the text of two introductory lectures for a general psychology course addressed to first-year humanities students. what philosophers would wish their work represented by their lectures for freshmen — and not even the whole course, but only the first two lectures? there are reasons for this situation. the tendency has been to translate excerpts from simondon’s work, which has done a disservice to his reception by disrupting the systematic nature of his thinking. in response, his estate has decided only to allow translations of works published in book format. translations of his major philosophical works are apparently in preparation with university presses, but in the meantime, due to a resurgence of interest in simondon in france, his course lectures are being published. for the most part, the course lectures are as voluminous as his philosophical works, with the exception of his two lectures on animal and human: they appear in a remarkably small volume. as the shortest work in book format, these two lectures presented an unusual opportunity for translation. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 160 this is not to say that the lectures are not worth reading. on the contrary, simondon’s presentation is lucid, stimulating, and concise, reviewing the history of conceptual distinctions between human and animal and their implications for the field of psychology — in a mere fifty-seven pages. as such, despite its brevity, this book potentially offers new insights for the emerging field of animal studies, which is similarly interested in the relation between human and animal, striving to find new ways of negotiating their difference while forging new connections between fields that are commonly held apart: biology, anthropology, and psychology. indeed, the hallmark of simondon’s philosophy of individuation is that it systemically addresses the “individuals” associated with a range of disciplines, physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, psychology, sociology, and political theory — atoms, molecules, cells, organisms, machines, psyches, groups, and collectives. yet it addresses them from the perspective of ontogenesis, that is, the process of individuation. in the context of reading these two undergraduate lectures, however, what proves difficult is making the connections with simondon’s philosophy of individuation. after all, he is not presenting his philosophy; he is reviewing distinctions between animal and human within western philosophy. as such, we can at best try to tease out traces of his philosophy in the spin that he puts on his presentation of the human-animal relation. in effect, to situate these two lectures, one has to read closely, deep dig, and already know something of simondon’s philosophy. in his introduction, jean-yves chateau does an excellent job of making connections between the two lectures and simondon’s philosophy as a whole. drawing on simondon’s l’individu et sa génèse physico-biologique (the individual and its physicobiological genesis), chateau provides a precise, judicious statement of simondon’s emphasis on regimes of individuation. at the risk of needlessly repeating chateau’s discussion, but in the hope of drawing out the challenge of simondon for readers of this small tome, i would also like to address potential connections. chateau makes the key point: simondon is not interested in making a distinction between animal and human; simondon’s interest lies in the distinction between the psychical and the vital (22), or if you will, between the individuation studied through individuals within the disciplines of psychology and biology. herein lies the challenge of simondon’s approach for animal studies, theories of the posthuman, and psychoanalytic thought. simondon does not feel that it is enough to deconstruct, hybridize, or blur the distinction between animal and human. from the standpoint of the philosophy of individuation, such a distinction has no explanatory force to begin thomas lamarre – other selves are possible 161 with. it does not afford insight into ontogenesis. if read in light of simondon’s rejection of the animal-human distinction, the two lectures on human and animal prove more interesting, for he suggests that this distinction has already been overcome, dialectially. there has been “an evolution of scientific theory of the dialectical kind” (61). scientific theory reestablished the continuity between animal and human posited in the aristotelian lineage (thesis) through a reversal of its antithesis, that is, cartesian dualism (animal as res extensa, human as res cogitans). as a result, as synthesis, “what we discover at the level of … animal reality allows us also to think in terms of human reality, up to and including social reality….” (62). to get a better sense of what is at stake for simondon, we might characterize this synthesis as what foucault called the biopolitical: governing human populations on the basis of the same set of techniques used to measure animal populations and natural distributions of species. in other words, this form of power does not act primarily on the human psyche as sovereign power does. nor does it produce segregations in order to produce human subjectivities that are effectively self-governing, in the manner of disciplinary power. reductively speaking, in biopolitical power, the biological or vital dispenses with the psychological or psychical. the psyche or thinking becomes a sort of “spandrel” or “free rider,” to use stephen j. gould’s evolutionary terms. it remains (or becomes) a space left over where dialectical synthesis is not complete, being by nature impossible to complete. there is something at stake then in simondon’s response to this dialectical synthesis. to borrow from chateau’s formulation, simondon’s philosophy of individuation runs counter to the mere extension of the biological into the social, showing how “the general theoretical means at our disposal … cannot exclude the possibility of both of them [psyche and thinking] residing in a being starting from the moment it is alive” (2627). because res cogitans or the psychical cannot be excluded from the vital, “we cannot know in advance the capabilities of a being” (27), in affective, intellectual, or social terms. moreover, such capabilities cannot be considered in neutral terms; they imply problematics and struggle. if we cannot accept the biopolitical situation in which the biological extends into the social, we cannot simply return to the psychical by ignoring the biological either (psychoanalytic theory). nor it is enough to deconstruct or blur the relationships between human and animal. in an era in which human capital is able to exploit feeling and thinking as “free-riders,” that is, as unwaged labor, simondon’s invitation to fight for the capabilities of living bodies to determine their modes of social humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 162 interaction is timely indeed. i would thus like to suggest a title for a third, unwritten lecture by simondon on animal and human: other selves are possible. microsoft word vaught-patton h u m a n i m a l i a 4:2 jeannette vaught all hat, no cattle tracey owens patton and sally m. schedlock. gender, whiteness, and power in rodeo: breaking away from the ties of sexism and racism. lanham: lexington books, 2012. xxxii + 218 pp. $70.00 hb. this book may seem an odd one to review in this journal, as it does not make any claim to fitting within animal studies scholarship; in fact, it hardly concerns itself with animals at all. yet this monumental omission underscores the incredible importance of animal studies to contemporary scholarship in the humanities: in a book about an activity — and, to some, a profession — that essentializes several kinds of human/animal relationships across american history and culture, how can an examination of gender, race, and power completely ignore the animals involved in these dynamics? this disjuncture is ultimately what undergirds an uneven treatment allocated to gender and race in this book, and creates an impassible barrier to a full analysis of power in the context of rodeo. even in fairness to the authors, who explicitly did not set out to write a book about animals or human/animal relationships, their willingness to elide any kind animal analysis in rodeo speaks to the very real need for animal studies work in parsing problems of intersectionality. this is a pre-animal studies book in a post-animal studies world. tracey owens patton and sally m. schedlock take a communications-theory approach to rodeo, manifest in analyses of roughly 600 publicity photographs taken during the twentieth century, as professional rodeo evolved from wild west shows to its modern, corporatized format. patton is a professor of communication at the university of wyoming, and she became interested in the gendered discourse of rodeo through her then-undergraduate student, sally schedlock, who herself identifies as a lifelong rodeo competitor from an “agricultural background” (xi). they set out together to read this archive against its visual grain: the public photographic record, they argue, does not reflect the breadth, scale, and variety of womens’ and ethnic minorities’ involvement in rodeo across the twentieth century, but instead actively hides or controls their participation in the service of whitening the rodeo arena and subjugating women to supporting, sexualized roles. by narrowing their attention to publicity photos that appeared in rodeo programs, advertisements, and souvenirs, patton and schedlock are jeannette vaught -all hat, no cattle 151 able to focus on a fascinating primary trove, discerning the institutional narrative that rodeo created for itself over time contra to its actual historical trajectory. using what they describe as a combination of the sociologicallyand visual studiesderived methods of analytic induction and visual rhetoric, patton and schedlock divide their photographic data into six distinct categories that define both the subject matter and its chronology. given the visual nature of their materials, each category also reflects an aesthetic. the first six chapters proceed according to these categories, developing a narrative of change over time (from 1890 through the present) in how women were presented in rodeo publicity materials, alongside a historical analysis of how their participation in competition either reflected or challenged the visual record. they start in the 1880s with “cowgirls in early ‘equality,’” then move into the 20th century “as the neo-victorian ideal,” and transform over time into “pin-ups,” “sex kittens,” and most recently, “back to ‘equality.’” these chapters tie together a complex web of labor, economics, entertainment, and sexuality. for instance, chapters 3 and 4 examine how rodeo’s early efforts to organize into professional associations in the 1930s explicitly wrote women out of competition, leaving some women performers to seek work in hollywood either as un-credited stunt riders (62), the faces of marketing campaigns (64), or, increasingly, as screen supporters à la dale evans (82 ff.). early hollywood’s combined influence on audiences’ visual expectations and performer salaries, for instance, dovetailed with the continued tendencies of rodeo’s governing bodies to marginalize women from competition in favor of using their images for promotion. the authors trace this trajectory over the next chapters to show how the post-wwii pin-up cowgirl image converged with beauty pageant conventions to evolve into the rodeo queen. since “only women who abided by the rules were photographed” (84), and only women abiding by the rules were listed in programs, the authors make a compelling case for treating the extant visual record as evidence of a concerted and deliberate effort of erasure and control. however, despite their acumen in critiquing the workings of visual hegemony, the authors unilaterally call women in rodeo “cowgirls,” a term which, on the one hand, infantilizes women rodeo participants, and on the other, highlights the degree to which human and animal are co-constitutive in rodeo culture. the terms “cowgirl” and “cowboy” invoke a tri-species centaur of human, cow, and horse (though the last is implied). the animals are there, literally, linguistically, and liminally: they are the text and subtext, the mythological construction and the corporeal reality. the authors are partially sensitive to the racial history of the term cowboy (159), which originally referred to enslaved laborers in opposition to the term cowhand (both terms, we should humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 152 remember, distinguish labor in sharp contrast to the term “cattleman,” denoting ownership). yet ignoring the animal components of these terms overlooks the oddness of their contemporary persistence, and the common adoption of “boy” instead of “hand” during rodeo’s long process of whitening is one indication of patton and schedlock’s severely compromised treatment of race. the final chapter considers ethnic minorities separately, the authors reasoning that “[i]f we were to integrate the ethnic minority experience in rodeo into each and every chapter, we feel we would be, by default, privileging white experiences (male or female), as the ethnic minority would become lost, and just one image in a sea of whiteness and white images” (xxiv). yet i find three troubling aspects to this chapter: first, despite their justification, following six chapters about gender with one chapter dedicated to race still creates the unevenness they wished to avoid. second, it finally, though scantly, engages with the history of the cattle industry, which is absolutely central to the timeline of rodeo throughout this book. the authors restrict themselves to two pages tracing human involvement with cattle from the old testament and “cromagnon era” through north africa, spain, russia, the eastern bloc, and central and south america, arguing broadly that “[a]ncient global cultures shared threads of themselves to weave the complicated rodeo history tapestry” (147). this historical trajectory is too broad to critique incisively rodeo’s disenfranchisement of ethnic minorities. third, it almost completely ignores the racially problematic history of zoomorphism. despite schedlock’s personal involvement with ranching, she remains no less blind to animals, as if their presence is naturalized to the extent that they are invisible and unremarkable. this has enormous consequences for the authors’ treatment of race in this solitary chapter. by not connecting the animal body, and animality, to the operations of gender and race, many incredible photographs beg for deeper analysis. one, a 1904 image of noted african american performer bill pickett, shows him bringing an enormous steer to the ground by digging his teeth into the steer’s lip, all while dressed in toreador costumage. this arresting photograph merits only commentary on how pickett’s technique was “one of the greatest contributions to rodeo” (160) and became known as bulldogging (which abandoned teeth, and black competitors, in short order). aside from the shared result of wrestling a steer to the ground, what we today term “bulldogging” bears no resemblance to pickett’s, and without this image and its historical context the term makes no sense. left unexamined is that this terminology characterizes pickett literally as a bulldog, e.g., an animal, and that whitening the activity also quite literally defangs it. we must ask further: how are the power problems of race and gender at the center of jeannette vaught -all hat, no cattle 153 this book’s critique shored up by a black man’s teeth sunk into animal flesh? by black skin, hidden in an ethnic costume, performing a racialized animality that, in its complexity, confronts the legacy of slavery and conquest mythologized in cowboy culture? does not this image, as the antithesis of blonde, pristine rodeo queens on their groomed and shining horses a century on, pointedly illustrate the authors’ argument that the visual record of rodeo over time is an exercise in white sexuality? a series of “sex kitten” cowgirl photographs in chapter 5 ends in similar frustration. three photographs depict successful professional barrel racers (the only event in professional rodeo in which women compete) in various states of wet, outdoor undress: one opens her shirt and pours canteen water onto her breasts, head tilted back, eyes closed, mouth open; one coyly reclines naked in a shallow stream, ripples obscuring her breasts and crotch; one faces away from us, soaking in a steel water trough, her arms and blond hair draped over the tub, her clothes hanging on a nearby post. the authors tie these sexualized images to the historical marginalization of women in rodeo and to broader photographic contexts, concluding smartly “while nothing may have gotten between brooke shields and her calvin klein jeans, there is something getting between a cowgirl and her opportunity to compete in the arena” (120). yet, going unmentioned in their analysis is the presence of a horse looking at the women in each photo, ears pricked in interest, playing a strange role in the sexual politics at hand. patton and schedlock’s visual archive is vast, fascinating, and rich in analytical material, as is the sport of rodeo itself, and this book is exciting in its willingness to read the gaps in the archive and to approach rodeo from an academic perspective. yet the heart of the problem in this book is that the authors are only willing to be critical to a point. while they do critically document the silencing of rodeo’s historical diversity and account for the deliberate casting of women in prescribed visual and competitive roles, by remaining blind to animals they remain unequivocally supportive of the sport and of ranching culture, and hamstrung in their critiques. by simplistically positing that if rodeo would just allow women and minorities to compete on equal footing with white men everything would be great, the authors sidestep the possibility that destabilizing constructed gender and racial dynamics would unravel their celebratory “tapestry” of rodeo, revealing the animal and cultural brutality at its core. despite their critical analysis, patton and schedlock conclude with an ode to rodeo as a “dangerous, volatile, and truly beautiful sport” (207). with such an investment, perhaps seeing the animals is too much of a risk. microsoft word rothfels-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 2:1 nigel rothfels servants of ganesh servants of ganesh: inside the elephant stable (2006). mark dugas (producer, writer, camera, editor); piers locke (anthropological consultant, co-producer). ethnographic documentary. dvd format. 42 minutes. released by one world films. http://www.oneworldfilms.com/ (the film is currently being re-edited for distribution by octapixx.) a gallery of photographs from the project is located here: http://home.earthlink.net/~oneworldfilms/ piers_gallery/ the second time i watched this film, i saw it with my nineteen-year-old niece, who physically winced during several scenes. i asked her why she felt she responded the way she did and she said she didn’t like to see a baby elephant taken from its mother, tied up, and beaten. the first time i watched this film, i saw it by myself and found myself considering a long list of questions around such issues as directorial intent and how the camera is a perplexing presence in documentary film, perhaps especially in works where it is unacknowledged as a producer of actions and words. the distance between my niece’s response and my own was not simply the distance between our different capacities to empathize with an animal. my own response, i believe, was more a result of my current reading about the issues surrounding captive elephant management, animal rights activism, and ethnographic strategies of participant observation. my niece’s response, though, highlighted for me quickly that many people are likely to be upset by this important film. servants of ganesh introduces us to the khorsor elephant breeding center, a government-run stable or hattisar in chitwan, nepal. the film gives us glimpses into the daily lives and activities of the men who work at the elephant stables. the men are described as having committed their lives to the care of elephants; and the elephants themselves are seen as critical elements in the local tourist economy as well as irreplaceable tools in the protection and care of the chitwan national park as they carry scientists, poacher patrols, and park managers, and wardens into otherwise inaccessible areas. the men of the stable are portrayed as a brotherhood of predominantly tharu ethnicity dedicated to the elephants and traditions of worship and care for animals and gods. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 100 the central plot of the film focuses on the ritualized training of a three-year old elephant bull named paras gaj as he and his handler, satya narayan, pass through the ritual process of changing paras gaj from a young “wild” elephant who lived in companionship with his mother (a trained elephant at the stable) to a working elephant bonded to his human handler. the film shows the difficult process of separating paras gaj from his mother, the rituals associated with asking the gods to look benevolently on the training, the training sessions for paras gaj, and the nascent relationship between the young elephant and his handler. tharu elephant training practices, it is argued, are not the same as techniques used in other elephant range counties, and focus on building a relationship between the human and the animal based in religious ritual, especially practices of placating and appealing to the gods and in particular the hindu god ganesh. beyond these practices, however, we see the close binding of paras gaj to a training post, his obviously terrifying moments during night training when the keepers, who sing loud songs and bring flaming torches near the elephant, “massage” the elephant’s skin ― the keepers seek to desensitize the young elephant to human touch by constant physical handling all over his body. throughout these nights during which paras gaj can barely move because his legs have been bound together and his body has been secured to the training post, satya must try to stay on top of the young elephant and teach the elephant that he does not represent a threat. after the night training sessions, paras gaj is shown going through driving training during which he is tied to two other elephants. with satya on his back using two sharpened bamboo sticks to guide paras gaj, the young elephant is taught to be driven by an elephant handler on his back. eventually, the young elephant is seen walking beside the larger elephants through villages and along car-filled roads as he learns about the world of humans and working under his handler. the film has been shot and edited by mark dugas and is based in the ethnographic research of piers locke, currently a lecturer in anthropology at the university of canterbury in christchurch, new zealand. the film is intended to show how the elephant handlers of khorsor understand their own practices and traditions. the film is not the place to look for an analysis of the claims made by the elephant handlers, nor is it the place to find a broader discussion and critique of the traditions and contemporary practices of training and using working elephants in their range countries. it may well be that many viewers will focus, as my niece did, on the difficulties faced by paras gaj as he endures his training. other viewers will likely be swayed by the sympathetic account of satya narayan and his colleagues at khorsor. still other viewers will see this film as part of the dynamic and evolving discussion about the place and significance of captive elephant management, and the ways that elephants and humans do, in fact, nigel rothfels — servants of ganesh 101 make lives together. beyond all this, the film captures a moment in the history of the stables and the animals and people who lived there during the filming in 2004. several of the elephants in the film have now died as a result of an outbreak of tuberculosis; as of this writing, paras gaj continues on his path while satya narayan has retired. microsoft word hockenhull-bough h u m a n i m a l i a 4:2 jo hockenhull donkey tales: a story of pride and prejudice jill bough, donkey. animal series. london: reaktion books, 2011. 198pp. £9.99, $19.95 in the uk, when you think of donkeys you think of beach rides as a child or of eeyore from winnie-the-pooh; childhood memories of happy times. it is only later that your thoughts may turn to the harsh working life that is the reality for many donkeys worldwide. donkey numbers are falling in developed countries, with those that remain typically kept as companions or for breeding. yet these donkeys form the minority. in other parts of the world the donkey is a common sight, living out the vital role the species has played since its domestication as a working animal, beast of burden, means of transportation, and a crucial source of livelihood for many. jill bough does not pull any punches in the opening of her contribution to the reaktion animal series, donkey. by the end of the first paragraph she has firmly established that donkeys are not only “among the most used, and abused, animals in history” (7), but also that despite their valuable contribution to human society, both past and present, “we know remarkably little of their lives or their stories, or even their welfare” (7). as a welfare scientist with a lifelong soft spot for donkeys, my interest was immediately piqued. donkeys are often overlooked in the field of animal welfare research, which tends to focus on certain facets of the animal population — those kept on farms, in zoos, or as companions within the home. donkeys do not fit easily into any of these categories from a western-world perspective. while the welfare of working donkeys is increasingly being studied, our knowledge and understanding of the donkey as a species is far behind that of other domesticated animals. when considered at all, it is often as a smaller, longer eared relation of the horse rather than as an entity in its own right with unique physiology, needs, and behaviors. with this in mind, jill bough’s book provides a welcome source of information with an unashamedly pro-donkey slant. it is a sad reflection on human nature that despite the centuries of service donkeys have provided us they are still often viewed with contempt and derision. this is most visible in the numerous comparisons made with the other domesticated equid, the horse. donkeys have been treated as a common and inferior relation of the horse throughout jo hockenhull -donkey tales: a story of pride and prejudice 143 history. at its most basic level this comes down to the difference in status of those who employ them, reflecting the divisions engrained within society; donkeys tending to be “the beast of burden for those who could not afford a horse” (54), and for women, with horses more traditionally associated with men and the wealthy upper classes. donkeys were even employed on ancient trading routes to carry water for the horses that carried the precious goods, rather than being entrusted to carry these goods themselves (49). yet donkeys are remarkable animals, supremely adapted to the arid environments in which they evolved. they are able to work for longer, in dryer areas, with less food and water than horses, mules and oxon (8). they are less prone to disease, and as the roman commentator columella so eloquently put it, they are slower to “break down” than any other animal used for ploughing (52). their stoic, steady nature, while a cause of derision, is also a characteristic that has made the donkey so successful in their employ by humans. the book consists of five chapters, excluding the introduction, each covering a different aspect of the role and influence of the donkey in human society. chapter 1, “equus asinas: origins, domestication, breeds and characteristics,“ sets the scene, starting with the african wild ass, the ancestor of the domestic donkey. the donkey is the only domestic species that originated in africa and its domestication pre-dates that of the horse and the camel (27). since then, selective breeding by humans has led to the development of a staggering (and to me unexpected) 185 different breeds of donkey, each suited to different jobs and environments (32). in addition to their use as working animals, donkeys have also been prized for their meat and their milk at different times and locations throughout history, perhaps most famously in ancient egypt providing milk for cleopatra’s bath (39). chapter 1 also introduces the mule; the horse-donkey hybrid which typically possesses the best characteristics of both parents, the strength of the horse and the hardiness of the donkey (43). mules tend occupy an intermediate ground between donkey and horse, often but not always lacking the status of a horse yet not demeaned to the extent of the donkey. as such, the author includes mules in her consideration of the influence of the donkey on human society throughout the remainder of the book. donkeys in human history, mythology, and religion are covered in chapter 2. this chapter charts the rise and fall in changing attitudes towards the donkey throughout history to the present day. donkeys have been portrayed in various ways throughout humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 144 the ages: respected for their religious significance by the early egyptians (62) and later the christians (73), and used to symbolize sex by the minoans (66). the demonization of the donkey began in the late kingdom of ancient egypt and grew from there, with the donkey coming to symbolize all that was bad (65). yet, despite the enduring derision, it was in defence of a donkey that the first ever animal welfare prosecution was made, somewhat ironically given the paucity of welfare research undertaken on donkeys today. bill burns was convicted and fined for animal cruelty in the uk in 1822. the donkey in question even appeared in court in order to show the wounds that had been inflicted (56). this was a dramatic turnaround for an animal previously treated as the lowest of the low. although opinions towards the donkey did not change overnight, this was a significant step towards changing public perception not only of the way that donkeys were treated by humans, but animals in general. chapter 3, entitled “donkeys and mules colonise the americas, australia and south africa,“ portrays the critical role donkeys and mules played in colonization and their subsequent contribution to colonial societies. the importance of donkeys and mules at these times is often overlooked. when they were no longer of use, donkeys and mules were commonly turned loose and left to fend for themselves in these alien environments (78). the qualities of the donkey that were so valuable to the colonizers enabled them not only to survive, but often to flourish in their new environments. the long-term implications of the colonizers‘ “use and discard“ policy are being felt today, something those of us in the uk are generally unaware of. herds of feral donkeys are considered a major pest, particularly in parts of the us and australia, where they are perceived as competition for the cattle that have become the new animal of value to the human population. strategies have been developed to control and/or exterminate them. in some places these are more contentious than others. in the us public opposition was so great that legislation was subsequently passed to protect the free-living burros; by contrast, the citizens of australia appear unaware or indifferent to the eradication of their feral donkey populations (96). the sacrifice made by donkeys and mules in the service of humans throughout history in times of war is the subject of chapter 4. similar to their role in colonization, the importance of the donkey during war is frequently overlooked, with the contribution made by the horse being more commonly celebrated. from carrying water for roman troops, to transporting guns and wounded soldiers in the first world war, and more recently (and i feel horrifically) being used by the taliban in afghanistan as walking bombs, donkeys and mules have been immersed in practically every war fought since their domestication in some role or another. jo hockenhull -donkey tales: a story of pride and prejudice 145 on a lighter note, chapter 5 explores how donkeys have been portrayed through the ages in literature, film, and art. yet, there is a seriousness here too with the recognition that “how we perceive and represent animals will ultimately affect our treatment of them” (130). this statement has perhaps never been as significant as it is when applied to the donkey, especially in the western world where attitudes towards them are often “confused and contradictory” (129). the donkey featured highly in aesop’s fables, where it was typically depicted as foolish (131), and shakespeare frequently used the term “ass” to describe stupid or clownish figures in his plays (134). however in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attitudes began to change as animal welfare became a major social issue (154). more recently, positive traits of the donkey are increasingly being recognized and depicted — as loyal companions like eeyore in winnie-the-pooh (142) and donkey in shrek (143). donkey concludes with a timeline of key donkey events spanning from 8000bc to the present day. this remarkable history follows no consistent attitudinal pattern; for example, the uk legislation passed to enforce lunch breaks for working donkeys on blackpool beach in 2005 is followed by the mass slaughter of thousands of feral donkeys in australia in 2009, but it brings home just what a story of contrasts donkeys have had during their long association with humans. i found jill bough’s account of the donkey and its association with humans both easygoing and informative, and although at times the writing is somewhat awkward, i found it a good read. what really struck me, however, was the western perspective taken throughout. while this bias is understandable given the author’s background, it would have been interesting to learn more about our use of, and attitudes towards, donkeys in those regions of the world where they are most common today and still have an important role to play. this oversight leaves the reader with many questions — how are these modern day working donkeys depicted in the culture and art of their human societies? — perhaps opening the door for volume 2? in conclusion, while this may not be the book for you if you are seeking a view of donkeys’ history and role within human societies worldwide, donkey is a richly informative and enjoyable read for a donkey fan. microsoft word holmberg-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 2:1 tora holmberg animist hunting rane willerslev. soul hunters. hunting, animism, and personhood among the siberian yukaghirs. university of california press: berkeley and los angeles: 2007. 235pp. $24.95 this book is based on eighteen months of fieldwork among the forest-living male hunters of yukaghir. they hunt mainly elk, reindeer, and sable, but also bear and fox. the main theme of the book is that of animism―of ascribing personhood to non-human creatures such as the animals the yukaghirs hunt and the spirits that inhabit their world. rane willerslev’s main argument is that the yukaghirs of his study live a life in which they constantly move in and out of different identities, so that they live a life in a “hall of mirrors” world. the yukaghirs, in their in-between positions, come to form relational identities―through a continuous flow of identities. however, this moving inbetween does not erase a person’s identity. on the contrary, constituting difference or distance is highly important to avoid metamorphosis―a loss of identity when everything becomes one and the same. the second main argument is that animism as a cultural phenomenon has not been taken seriously by anthropologists, but has been rationalized as a flawed view of reality. the author shows how animism, through the practice of mimesis, forms a very rational or logical way of relating to the world, of being in the world. mimesis is understood as, “the meeting place of two modes of being-in-the-world―‘engagement’ and ‘reflexivity’―while also including other members of the mimetic family such as ‘sameness’ and ‘difference,’ ‘self’ and ‘other,’ ‘me’ and ‘not me’” (9). mimesis can also be understood in terms of creation of a second nature, a nature that is “reflexively aware of itself as standing somewhat apart from nature” (26, italics in original). the theoretical framework rests mainly on the work of anthropologist tim ingold, and is heavily inspired by his phenomenology and notions of embodiment. what strikes me when reading the book is how deeply rooted the rules of the game seem to be, that is, how the rules of hunting may vary in content across cultures, but how much they nevertheless are at play. i wonder how this trait could be understood in darwinian or marxist terms, or if another form of theory is needed in order to deal with what seems as a deep and common trait of human-animal encountering and living in tora holmberg — animist hunting 103 the world. the rules seem to function as a way to handle the inherent dilemma in killing other animals for one’s own survival (and/or pleasure). in this specific case, the yukaghir hunters, as willerslev shows, are afraid of spiritual counter-predation if they indulge in indiscrete hunting. they also fear that, since it is perceived as morally wrong to kill other animals, the spirits will come and take the hunter’s soul. ways of handling this particular dilemma are either to distort the hunt, to make the spirits think that someone else did the hunting, to share the prey, or to say that the animal gave itself up. there are some additional distinct codes of conduct expressed. the hunter should be modest and never brag about his achievements. on the contrary, he should rather understate the success of the hunt. he should also share the meat according to the principle of generosity. there are, according to the author, always two sides of the killing; one of over-hunting which is believed to increase the future animal population since the spirits of the animals are set free, and the other is the moral idea and strategy to keep the killing to a minimum. the hunters usually handle this dilemma by killing every animal that gets in their way, but stopping when the good luck seems to override what is considered “normal” luck. this way, the two logics of “overkilling” versus “not killing” seem to constitute each other as forms of resource and risk management strategies (49). moreover, the animals most desired for their meat are also seen as most moral, as pure, and thus most prominent moral dilemmas are involved in the killing. for example, one hunter states that when killing an elk or a bear, it sometimes feels as if he had shot a human. but he shoves these feelings away, or else he would “go mad from shame” (78). moreover, the yukaghir men in the study view other animals as persons, but only within defined relations that can be viewed as important: the elk within the hunting situation, the dog, the wolf. how is this achieved? the hunter takes the other’s perspective, and engages in perspectivism: “these are not alternative points of view of the same world, but rather result from a carrying-over of the same point of view into alternative realities” (87). every species, according to the hunters, will perceive the world from the same perspective as humans do, although what they will perceive will be entirely different, because of their species-specific embodiment and place. thus, perspectivism is about one view, but from different bodies. it is about incorporating the other, while staying the same, which is not an easy task for the hunter. the idea is perhaps best portrayed in this descriptive quote: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 104 for what takes place, it seems to me, is in fact a reciprocal mirroring of perspectives. while the elk sees its body through the hunter’s act of mimicry―that is, it sees its own species kind―the hunter sees the reflected image of his own body through the acts of the elk, mimicking his acts of mimicry. in other words, the hunter does not just see the elk walking toward him, but he also sees himself from the ‘outside’, as if he himself were the elk―that is, he adopts toward himself the kind of perspective that the other (as subject) has of him (as object). (98-99) moreover, the author discusses mimicking as making possible a sort of mimetic empathy with a corporeal dimension, a discussion that comes very close to ralph acampora’s notion of “corporal compassion,” or symphysis (2006) and could have been developed further. the book is full of thorough ethnographic notes and quotes from interviews, which in a very clever way enables the, at times complicated, theoretical apparatus to come through. there are several contributions in this book to the has field, although the author himself fails to acknowledge the connections. as i see it, the first one is obviously that the study contributes to the literature on hunting, in that it discusses the cross-cultural dilemmas inherent to hunting and killing animals. the second contribution is the discussion of personhood, personification, and trans-species engagement beyond the concept of anthropomorphism. i think the author is at his best when he engages different theories of the body and embodiment as a way to get at the yukaghir hunters corporal engagements with other animals, and their mimicking acts as being highly embodied as not animal, and not not animal. last but not least, i also think it contributes to an understanding of indigenous people’s engagement with nature and with other animals, which moves beyond a romanticism of them being closer to nature. if i would need to be critical about the book, it is precisely the fact that it does not engage with the has field. the analysis would have been even richer and the claims stronger, if the author had looked at other hunting studies, apart from a few anthropological accounts of some indigenous people, because it is truly striking how some of the hunting narratives and norms seem almost universal; the feelings of shame that need to be managed and the rules of the game and their enforcement (see for example marvin, and the animal studies group). i think that could have been done, without losing the specificity of the case. one example where this could have been done, which is in fact the weakest part of this book, is the section that deals with tora holmberg — animist hunting 105 seduction, sexuality, and hunting. in trying to understand the interconnectedness of sexuality and hunting, the author refuses the, as he calls them, “analogical” connections between human-animal relations and gender relations on the grounds that even though gender relations have changed, the imaginings stay the same. this is a very weak argument since it is a well known fact that the symbolic, cultural level changes very slowly. thus the author goes on to analysing this in terms of yet another analogy, namely the idea of risking to lose oneself both in hunting and in sexual encounters. it would, however, lie closer at hand to view this as a form of masculinity performance, but since the gender perspective is totally absent in willerlev’s analysis (“gender perspective” seems to equal comparing men and women, and since there are almost no women in the study, the author excuses himself from a gender perspective). looking at embodiment, hunting and mimicking through the lens of masculinity and animals, would have added some “meat” to this weak discussion. what if, for example, it is not, as the author claims, that the fact that women in the post-soviet context have moved away from hunting to paid labour in the village, and thus in a sense have left the men alone in their hunting world, is an indicator of the weak bond between masculinity and hunting, but instead a reason to believe the opposite: that in fact that the more women move away and the traditional bread winner masculinity is in a state of crisis, the more important the hunting become in order to become a man. the subsequent sections of the book, discussing humans and other animals as a continuum rather than as different kinds, and understanding animal personhood, are unfortunately almost similarly weak. it is a rather banal truth that there are always different frameworks simultaneously at work when perceiving other animals. we both worship and sacrifice, love and despise other animals. so do the yukagihrs, and there is nothing strange about that. what the author does not readily acknowledge is that just as for swedes, californians, or egyptians other animals’ personhoods are defined by their relations to humans, and not as anything innate. and surely the discussion of biologists’ views is simply wrong. here, the author would have gained a lot by looking at the interdisciplinary field of has and not just at anthropology. having said that mainly because a review needs to critique and not just praise, this is a truly wonderful book that will tell the reader a wonderful, intriguing and also deeply tragic story about hunting in siberia. works cited acampora, ralph. corporal compassion. animal ethics and philosophy of body. pittsburgh: u pittsburgh p, 2006. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 106 marvin, gary. “ritual, respect and dignity in hunting.” (unpublished paper.) slsa conference, 2009. the animal studies group. killing animals. chicago: u illinois p, 2006. microsoft word ito-uddin-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:2 reviews takashi ito rethinking the age of zoo reform lisa uddin, zoo renewal: white flight and the animal ghetto. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2014. xi + 277 pp. with 8 color plates. $98 hc; $28 pbk in may 2015, the takasakiyama zoological park in southern japan named a newborn japanese macaque after charlotte, a newborn british princess. the name was chosen after a public vote, reflecting the popularity of the british royal family and the cult of the cute (“kawaii”) in japanese consumer culture. upon announcement of the name, however, complaints were lodged that it was disrespectful to the british monarch, and the zoo officials were urged to imagine how people in japan might feel if a british zoo were to name a monkey after a japanese princess. the takasakiyama zoo was about to revoke the name, when it was confirmed that the british royal family was not offended. ironically, in january 2016, charlotte became “queen monkey” of takasakiyama, after the popularity vote dubbed “general election.” had she been named after the u.s. president, would the japanese zoo have taken the same course as the dresden zoo in germany several years ago to apologize for racial insensitivity and rename the primate? how would the japanese public have reacted had charlotte been a white thoroughbred or a galapagos penguin? answering these questions requires two things: an analytical frame of reference and coding schemes, and an understanding of contexts and circumstances in which zoos intersect with various realms of society. combining both approaches, lisa uddin’s zoo renewal: white flight and the animal ghetto offers takashi ito -rethinking the age of zoo reform 155 methodological insights that help us explore such crisscrossing human-animal boundaries and their racial connotations in the past and present. the book provides a history of zoos and urbanism in mid-twentieth-century america. the 1960s and 1970s can be called “the age of reform” in the official institutional history of american zoos: within these two decades, many aspects of zoo environments were dramatically improved for the wellbeing of animals, offering them a naturalistic living space. enchanted and educated, zoogoers came to realize their responsibility toward the natural environment. challenging this whiggish narrative of zoo reform, uddin presents a counter-analysis by disentangling racial undertones from contemporary commentaries on and spatial structure of reformed zoos. she argues that the euphoric lifestyle that renewed zoos presented to white, suburban zoogoers should be analyzed against the substandardized inner-city life of the nonwhite, which was associated with poverty, crimes, and riots, at a time of revolutionary change in urban geography and demography. zoo renewal comprises an introduction, five chapters, and an afterword, along with eight color plates, each of which is adeptly organized to substantiate its thesis that “zoos have choreographed built and imagined environments of normative whiteness, crisscrossing species lines with startling agility” (228). uddin begins with a question of why we feel bad at the zoo. while we are often disappointed to see its residents dull and motionless, watching them caged and exposed to inquisitive gazes makes us feel uneasy. the goal of the book is, however, not to prescribe remedies, but to unfold “the idioms and interactions through which feeling bad has been cultivated, amplified, relieved, and disavowed” (25). she claims that these idioms were racially loaded, as evident in the spatial interactions between zoo renewal and urban regeneration in the 1960s and 1970s. during this period of “white flight,” middle-class americans, by then consisting of various ethnic groups, were forced to reconfigure their racial and spatial identities. this acute concern underpinned the figurative re-creation of “whiteness” in zoos, as well as the presentation of particular animals as the embodiment of “white” hope. the book focuses on three institutes: the national zoo in washington, d.c., the san diego zoo, and the wild animal park in san diego county. as uddin admits, it is unclear to what extent these three represent american zoos in general, but the book’s in-depth analysis of the details and peculiarities of their spatial structure has established a baseline for that research that follows. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 156 chapter one, “shame and the naked cage,” discusses the emerging criticism against the modernist style in the 1960s and 1970s. the term “the shame of the naked cage” (48) was used by desmond morris, zoologist and author of the naked ape (1967) and the human zoo (1969), to condemn wildlife captivity in modernist-style buildings, a famous example of which was london zoo’s penguin pool, constructed in 1934. initially, modernist architecture was acclaimed for its aesthetic minimalism and transparency in which animals were expected to display their natural characteristics, but in the 1960s the virtue of simplicity turned into a feeling of shame about captive animals, who were exposed and vulnerable, without any hiding space or screen from the public gaze. importantly, this feeling was directed not only at animal inmates but also to other human residents in the city. the examination of three selected individuals including morris shows how the discourse of the naked cage “gained momentum by connecting zoo animals’ condition of nakedness to the condition of other urbanities in the 1960s and 1970s, mirroring white middle-class shame over racial injustice in america cities” (29). the second chapter, “zoo slum clearance in washington, d.c.,” discusses the intersections between zoo renewal and urban regeneration by analyzing the revitalization of the national zoo. as the postwar redevelopment highlighted the gaps between dark and black, and light and white aspects of life in the city, the rhetoric of a “zoological slum” gained such currency that the zoo was perceived as an ungovernable site, while slums were feared for their association with crimes and riots, and the imagined “animality” of black residents (74-90). the zoo’s close association with urban slums evident in an accident on may 16, 1958, in which a white young girl, julie ann vogt, was killed by a lion in the national zoo. while other causalities of black children in the zoo hardly counted, this particular incident brought accusations against idle keepers, abnormal animals, and incautious visitors, and strengthened the call for zoo revitalization. criticism of a “zoological slum” provided a platform for the friends of the national zoo to advocate pastoralism to renovate the zoo for white middle-class suburbanites. after twists and turns, the fond’s master plan for a pastoral zoo was transcended into the creation of an “urban sanctuary,” which aimed to return the escaped citizens back to the city “with the experience of a tangible human-animal proximity”(97). in the 1960s, the innovations in zoo’s architecture responded to the desire to reconstruct washington as a “city in park”; for instance, the great flight cage, monumental landmark aviary with grand vistas, was analogous to dulles international airport. by the 1970s, however, the monumental design had been replaced by the humanistic approach toward the re-creation of naturalistic environment. regarding this takashi ito -rethinking the age of zoo reform 157 change, uddin argues that “the return to a gentler and greener architecture represented a form of soft white power” (116). considering the physical and metaphysical body of the white bengal tiger mohini, chapter three, “mohini’s bodies,” explores how this “white power” projected racial anxieties onto animal display. initially, mohini, meaning “enchantress” in the hindi language, was esteemed for her exotic, noble indian origin, but this public image was sexually charged. contemporary commentaries employed a literary image of a harem courtyard, and in zoo photographs mohini was transformed into an odalisque. this sensual imagery stemmed from the orientalist conventions so much discussed by edward said, but mohini the odalisque was not entirely functioning. in the ceremonial meeting with the tiger on the white house lawn, president eisenhower looked disillusioned with her, as she declined to play an odalisque role and displayed her feline ferocity. in the 1970s, a new approach was taken to characterize mohini as an ideal white mother. this shift of focus from exotic to domestic occurred amid increasing concerns with family fitness and health, which influenced “the reproductive choices and outcomes of men and women to maximize the ‘quality’ and demographic count of white american bodies of northern european descent” (142). in the postwar time, eugenic ideas lingered in american popular culture, underlying the idealization of whiteness of the white tiger, as uddin notes: “by showcasing the breeding of its female white tiger as an attractive example of racial whiteness, the national zoo became one instance of eugenics’ continuity in a period of others” (143). this covert desire was only short-lived. after failed attempts to secure her lineage, mohini could no longer remain “animal articulations of human whiteness”(155). in chapter four, “white open spaces in san diego county,” the book turns from washington, d.c. to san diego and its two animal institutions. the identification of urban space as the site of poverty and violence, predominately inhabited by the black population, had as much influence over the san diego zoo as it had over the national zoo. by the 1960s to 1970s, san deigo had undergone a population explosion, and its suburbia developed north of the city, attracting many urban “refugees” from populated downtowns as well as from turbulent los angeles. indeed, the fears of race riots came true in these two cities, while the temptations of a suburban lifestyle grew. these changes in popular sentiments reflected the revitalization of the san diego zoo; uddin’s analysis of horn and hoof mesa, the zoo’s largest multiunit exhibit, is particularly interesting. horn and hoof mesa represented the ethos of suburbanism, characterized by ranch-style single-family houses, where middle-class whites could feel humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 158 “togetherness” of their own family. similarly, as far as media representation was concerned, horn and hoof mesas showed a family of only one species such as parenting deer and their calves in their proximate “togetherness.” another interesting example is the theory of “flight distance,” which states that animals should be given a certain physical distance from human observers or other species to feel safe and comfortable. uddin suggests that this notion also responded to suburbanites’ fears that other racial communities were stretching close to their residential area. the latter part of the chapter deals with the wild animal park, constructed in san pasqual valley. the surrounding peaceful agricultural landscape endowed the neighborhood with the imagined pristine glory of the anglo-american past. in this context, the exhibition of nonnative animals was as racially loaded as the revitalization of the san diego zoo. as uddin summarizes: indeed, local energy and empathy for the plight of endangered species drew directly from the society’s aesthetic power to renew a privileged history of unspoiled living and satisfy a white bourgeois desire for more personal space that was shared among different forms of suburban san diego life. (190) the racial elements also influenced the ways in which the animal wild park represented a herd of white rhinoceros from south africa. chapter five, “looking endangered,” investigates how these african newcomers gained a public spotlight and were then enshrined as vulnerable objects of worship. their arrival in 1971 responded to the transition of africa’s image from “dark continent” to the pristine fauna and flora (197). in this regard, uddin argues, the white rhinos were presented to satisfy the public’s yearning for intimacy with african wildlife, while concealing the historical backgrounds that made it once exploited and then worshiped. this argument has a historiographical significance: the postcolonial function of particular zoo animals as transforming the memory of past violence into the prospect of flourishing and nourishing offers a useful frame of reference, especially for a comparative analysis of zoos in different regions and time periods. for instance, the display of white rhinos can be compared with the wartime massacre of elephants in the tokyo imperial zoo and their postwar celebrated exhibition in the same space, as discussed in ian miller’s recent book. uddin, meanwhile, discusses the implication of “whiteness” of the white rhinos. the wild animal park tried to separate them from other less aesthetic rhinos and characterized their white body as proof of “just rhinos.” this representation paved the way for identifying the whiteness of white people exclusively by lack of any physical and behavioral attribute, hence “just human.” takashi ito -rethinking the age of zoo reform 159 lastly, uddin revisits the debate over woodland park zoo's hiring of kenyan tour guides. the context of this debate was different from that from the 1970s, but there are some connections. i perceived that whether the kenyan guides are associated with, or disassociated from, africa’s colonial past, and whether the image of “animality” is embedded therein, depends on the politics of collective memory — the politics of how to bridge the interpreted past to the imagined future. zoo renewal tells the history of american zoos no less than the contentious history in zoos, constituted by three entangled dichotomies: colonizing and colonized, human and nonhuman, and past and present. the strength of this book is the consistency in argument that helps us orient ourselves in the studies and histories of american zoos, and we can learn how to use theory to gain deeper understanding of zoos in general. nonetheless, the author’s use of sources leaves some ambiguity about whether a material is descriptive or prescriptive, and whether a statement is metaphorical or not. in some places, the discourse analysis becomes unintentionally misleading, or at least confusing, as it is not always clear whether it intends to show (a) what happened, or (b) what contemporaries thought of what happened, or (c) what the author thinks contemporaries thought of what happened. for instance, while the contemporary zoologist desmond morris deployed the term “the shame of the naked cage” to criticize zoos, uddin uses morris’s argument to discuss “shame and the naked cage” (title of chapter two, italicized by the reviewer), thereby connecting “the shame over captive wildlife with the shame over those other city dwellers” (51). the evidence of this cross-referenced “shame” seems to be drawn largely from analogy, but it should be grounded in the sources concerning urban planners and dwellers in question. in this regard, i wished to hear the voices of those who actually lived in cities as well as their own readings of such racial fears and hopes as discussed in the book. when unnamed black boys died from falling into the creek in the national zoo (76), how did their families and friends feel? further, how did they respond when sentiments for reform were suddenly stirred up upon julie’s death? displayed animals aside, how are these anonymous historical actors to be placed in uddin’s frame? the reception question is always a tricky one to answer, but it would remind us of the gaps remaining between their readings and our own. although i desired to know more about empirical aspects and individual perspectives, undoubtedly, zoo renewal makes an original, important contribution to the scholarship of zoo histories and human-animal studies as well as of the social and cultural history humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 160 of urbanism, environmentalism and identity politics in twentieth-century america. it is highly recommended to those interested in these and related subjects. works cited miller, ian jared. the nature of the beasts: empire and exhibition at the tokyo imperial zoo. berkeley: u of california p, 2013. said, edward. orientalism. new york: pantheon, 1978. microsoft word kalof-cronin h u m a n i m a l i a 4:2 j. keri cronin animal meaning linda kalof and georgina m. montgomery (eds.), making animal meaning. east lansing: michigan state up, 2011. 212 pp. $44.95 hb, 32.95 pb. a striking black & white photograph of a beluga whale in captivity appears on the front cover of this book. this image, taken by britta jaschinski, is repeated in the opening pages, just prior to the table of contents. the repetition and prominent placement of the image underscores its significance for the collection. the caption beneath the photograph inside the book’s cover reads: born in the wild waters of churchill river, manitoba, canada, and caught shortly after, this beluga whale came to new york aquarium in coney island in 1974. for 30 years she circled monotonously, silently in a small chlorine-treated, water-filled concrete tank, till she died in april 2004. this was her home but she didn’t live there! the photo is dedicated to her and all beluga whales in captivity. the decision to open an academic book with this image and these words serves as a poignant reminder that through our academic work in the fields of human-animal studies and/or critical animal studies there are real lives at stake. how we think about, represent, and theorize animals have very real consequences for living, breathing beings, and there is an increasing sense of urgency to our task. this connection between scholarly work and activism was reinforced for me this summer as i was reading making animal meaning. like many summers before, protests were regularly held at a marine animal theme park near my hometown. marineland in niagara falls, on, has been the target of animal rights activists for many years. there was an increased intensity to these protests this year as several former trainers at the park quit their jobs and brought attention to animal cruelty issues at marineland by telling their stories to reporters at the toronto star. marineland became a hot-button news item in ontario and beyond, and the protests at the park increased in size and intensity. i attended many of these protests and then, upon returning home, would sit at my desk and see the photograph of the beluga whale on the cover of making animal meaning. her story seemed even more significant each time i returned from a marineland protest. j. keri cronin -animal meaning 147 how can we bridge academia and activism in meaningful ways? what roles can something like a photograph or a written text play in this process? i have grappled with these questions a lot in recent months, and appreciate books like making animal meaning for providing a forum for thinking through some of the important ways in which representations of nonhuman animals collide with the physical, lived realities of the species we share the planet with. this book rejects the notion that animal meaning derived through representations is always dependent upon human modes of understanding: “while we have been busily sorting out the meaning of animals, they have been leaving their own traces and signs — thus actively creating their own meaning ” (ix). the combination of theoretical and observational essays attempt to make sense of this multiplicity of meanings and, for the most part, does so with an eye to what kinds of consequences these layered meanings might hold for living, breathing animals (including humans). i found etienne benson’s contribution to this volume, an essay entitled “animal writes: historiography, disciplinarity, and the animal trace,” to be an especially insightful account of the ways in which even the most anthropocentric forms of representation can be examined for traces of the nonhuman animal, lingering evidence about lives lived for those who stop and look for it. as benson argues, “everything we do, including writing, is shaped by our long evolutionary history of interactions with other animals and our present lived interdependence with them.” texts, photographs, and other objects created by humans about humans can, even unintentionally, shed light on the histories of nonhuman animals, histories that are not only framed through human points of reference. benson acknowledges that this can be challenging work, particularly when dealing with historical sources; however, he argues that we need to be prepared to think differently about what counts as a “primary source” for our research. this call to look beyond “human intentionality” (11) presents an especially important framework for scholars in the humanities and social sciences. attention to language as a framing device is addressed in a number of essays. clapperton chakanetsa mavhunga’s essay, “mobility and the making of animal meaning: the kinetics of ‘vermin’ and ‘wildlife’ in southern africa,” is an incredibly thoughtful account of how terms such as “pest,” “wild,” and “nature” are culturally determined categories that shift according to social, economic, political, technological, and cultural ideologies. likewise, analia villagra’s essay, “cannibalism, consumption, and kinship in animal studies,” focuses on the important differences that exist between humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 148 words like “murdered” and “poached,” questioning how differences in understandings of species are shaped depending on how and where these kinds of terminologies are used. villagra's essay opens with a description of a “murder,” the body of a gorilla being reverently removed from a forest in the democratic republic of congo. as villagra points out, the “unexpected application of human terms to the death of a gorilla” (45) has far-reaching consequences in terms of thinking about relationships between species. while i find villagra’s conclusion — that we can experience a sense of kinship with other species by consuming their flesh — troubling, this essay does succeed in challenging readers to think beyond assumed and inherited perspectives about the places occupied by specific species in our contemporary global culture. jane desmond’s essay, “animal deaths and the written record of history: the politics of pet obituaries,” is among the strongest chapters in making animal meaning. desmond carefully and critically considers the cultural meanings — both for human and nonhuman animals — associated with the process of memorializing through “pet obituaries.” desmond outlines the history of this form of writing, including the negative reactions that many people have had when a beloved dog or cat has been memorialized on pages of the newspaper typically reserved for notices of human death. the central argument of this chapter, that “pet obituaries are seen as dangerous by some precisely because they are a political act signaling the need for far-reaching ethical change” (99), underscores the complexities that characterize our contemporary relationships with nonhuman animals. as desmond rightly points out, only certain categories of animals are thought to be appropriate subjects for an obituary and, as she reminds us, not all humans have been permitted to be honored in this manner either. in other words, who gets to be the subject of an obituary is deeply political and historically contingent. it may be increasingly common (but certainly not yet uncontested!) for a cat or a dog to be memorialized in such a way; however, many significant social and cultural shifts would have to take place before our society would be ready for obituaries for animals killed as part of scientific research or slaughtered in the name of food production. at the heart of this chapter is the question of “social worth.” desmond argues that “the real threat of obits for animals is that they are a wedge into the epistemological boundary of the ‘worthy/not worthy’” (107). the inclusion of companion animals on the obituary pages of a newspaper troubles the boundaries of who gets included in definitions of family — not unlike the inclusion of same-sex partners in obituaries, desmond notes — and in so doing raises important questions about how individuals of all species are valued in our society. j. keri cronin -animal meaning 149 chapters such as meisha rosenberg’s analysis of certain kinds of dog breeds in contemporary popular culture, and benjamin arbel’s exploration of renaissance writing, underscore one of the central premises of this book: that understandings of the relationships between human and nonhuman animals is always historically and culturally contingent. further, rosenberg and arbel both highlight the ways in which systems of cultural representation — whether television advertisements or written texts — play in to the ways in which humans make sense of nonhuman species. both chapters offer detailed readings of select case studies to move beyond generalized patterns of thinking around complex topics such as race, gender, and religion, and how these, in turn, relate to dominant patterns of thinking about and interacting with nonhuman animals. likewise, sharon wilcox adams’s chapter, “on the trail of the devil cat: hunting for the jaguar in the united states and mexico,” carefully examines representations of this animal at different points in history. while she is interested in the specificity of the lived reality of the jaguar (panthera onca), she turns to patterns of its representation in her analysis. accordingly, she reminds readers that “while representation is a necessary and vital part of human communication, it must be considered critically,” that “through the process of representation jaguars are removed from their own animality, or jaguarselves, and enter cultural discourse as objects” (82). for adams this is not a negative thing per se. however, her research underscores the ways in which representations have, at times, come to stand in for the actual lived reality of the animal, often with troubling consequences. collectively, the essays in this book urge us to pay closer attention to the multiplicity of ways in which “animal meaning” (in all senses of the phrase) is both made and contested. making animal meaning is a thought-provoking, interdisciplinary collection and will have a broad appeal among scholars and students working in the fields of human-animal studies and critical animal studies. microsoft word macclellan-corbey-lanjou h u m a n i m a l i a 8:1 joel macclellan more ethics than politics, more animals than species raymond corbey and annette lanjouw, eds. the politics of species: reshaping our relationships with other animals. new york: cambridge university press, 2013. 310 pp. $140 (hb). the politics of species: reshaping our relationships with other animals (hereafter, the politics of species) is an interdisciplinary anthology that addresses the plight of nonhuman humans in a cultural landscape dominated by anthropocentric worldviews and institutional practices. not a paralyzed lamentation on the past and current state of human-animal relations, the book tries to understand how these relations came to be in order to transform them into relationships that do fuller justice to animals’ capacities and our human moral sensibilities. the politics of species is the material result of an interdisciplinary, closed roundtable of prominent scholars in animal studies, broadly construed, held in new york in august 2011. the arcus foundation — a private, global organization that promotes social justice, particularly lgbtq equality, and biological conservation, which also has the distinction of being the world’s largest private funder of great ape sanctuaries and conservation — organized the roundtable “to explore how humans define ‘others’ and position themselves in relation to those others…. [i]n the context of this debate, it is defined by species” (xiii). the anthology includes joel macclellan -more ethics than politics, more animals than species 121 contributions by the roundtable’s diverse participants, and is edited by raymond corbey and annette lanjouw, who are also contributors. corbey is a philosopher and anthropologist at tilberg and leiden universities, both in the netherlands. lanjouw is a vice-president of the arcus foundation and has academic training in biology and psychology and research experience in great ape ethology. the volume consists of 23 contributors to 20 essays, and these contributors reflect the true interdisciplinary nature of animal studies, with expertise from anthropology to zoology, also including architecture, english, education, environmental studies, gender studies, law, medicine, neuroscience, and psychology. while the disciplines of anthropology, biology, and philosophy are most prominent, many contributors’ backgrounds are multiand trans-disciplinary and include related, more practical work outside academia, including animal advocacy and environmental conservation. that said, most of the contributions are by single authors rather than joint authorship, and largely follow their respective disciplines in method and substance. for example, renowned biologist marc bekoff muses on whether he ought to have advised villagers to “euthanize” tigers that enter their villages (21), but this is fundamentally an issue of morality, not a biological question, and bekoff’s expertise is biology, not moral philosophy. this is but one example where increased interdisciplinarity, such as more collaborative pieces involving multiple disciplines and methodologies, would have been an improvement, but this true of animal studies more broadly. the audiences for which the politics of species is appropriate vary. most obviously, it is suited for animal studies scholars and for those outside animals studies looking to gain a foothold on the recent literature. the overall tenor of the anthology is towards a better scientific understanding of animals as subjects and the implications of these findings for human-animal relationships. that said, the essays are predominantly from the social sciences and philosophy, so those interested in the more hermeneutical side of animal studies are advised to look elsewhere. it would also be an excellent text for an animal studies survey course, but would likely need to be complemented by a monograph such as margo demello's animals and society: an introduction to humananimal studies (2012) or paul waldau's animal studies: an introduction (2013) in order to cover foundational issues in a more systematic way. the anthology is divided into three parts: (i) moving beyond speciesism, (ii) sentience and agency, and (iii) toward respectful coexistence. part i is largely diagnostic and analytic, in that it seeks to identify and critique the psychological, social, moral, economic, and political underpinnings that have allowed the current historically unprecedented levels of animal exploitation and domination in both scale and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 122 systematicity as a part of global, industrialized capitalism. part ii concerns some recent paradigm-altering work on animal agency. for too long, from 17th century mechanism through a behaviorism that is present even today, animals have been treated as objects, not subjects. as psychology slowly awoke from its behaviorist slumber and philosophy cured its verificationist-emotivist hangover, animals began to be recognized as at least feeling subjects in academia in the latter half of the 20th century. while the very idea that animals can also be agents in their own right continues to be met with resistance, the essays in part ii develop cognitively, emotionally, and agentially richer accounts of animals’ capacities. the essays in part iii are forward-looking and transformative pieces, seeking to reconceive, and more importantly, reimagine ways in which we can live in relations of respectful coexistence with animals in areas such as animal research, animal law, urban and suburban poultry husbandry, and human-primate shared communities. it bears mentioning at once that the title, the politics of species: reshaping our relationships with other animals, is somewhat misleading. at first glance, one might expect that the book is about environmental politics pertaining to, for example, the political dimensions of species conservation, but the book is not actually about biological species. rather, it is about reconceiving relations between humans and sentient animals largely considered as individuals, not species. secondly, one might also think that this is part of the political turn in animal studies, as seen, for example in so-called “critical animal studies,” and recent works in the philosophy of animal rights, such as sue donaldson and will kymlicka’s zoopolis (2011). to be sure, some contributions in the politics of species do concern politics. however, political analysis and discourse are relatively minor themes of the anthology. more prominent themes include critiques of speciesism, recent work on animal minds and agency, and new ideas as to how we should coexist with nonhuman animals, which is to say that most of entries are more moral, social, and legal in nature than political. so, what we really have here is a collection of new essays by prominent figures in animal studies, which is by no means a bad thing. on, then, to the essays themselves, beginning with the biologist marc bekoff’s “who lives, who dies, and why? how speciesism undermines compassionate conservation and social justice,” which leads off part i: moving beyond speciesism. in his piece, bekoff continues his work at the intersection of biological conservation and animal protectionism. what makes it most worthwhile is its discussion of new developments in research on animal minds, particularly invertebrates, many of which are turning out to have far richer behavioral repertoires than had been previously imagined, and which joel macclellan -more ethics than politics, more animals than species 123 might occasion a reassessment of their moral standing. bekoff addresses the moral significance of similarities and differences, the presences and absences of capacities in nonhuman animals. joan dunayer also addresses speciesism in “the rights of sentient beings: moving beyond old and new speciesism.” she provides a much-needed critical discussion of “old speciesism,” the view that, while we should extend moral consideration beyond the human species, we should only do so to members of species that have what we deem to be morally significant features. in short, old speciesism still requires nonhuman animals to be human-like for moral consideration. man is still the measure of all things, even if no longer the only valuable thing. she defends “new speciesism,” which does away with the anthropocentric bias of old speciesism, and claims that we should extend moral consideration and legal rights to all animals with nervous systems — even animals without a brain — invoking a principle of precaution. on her conception, all animals except sponges, which lack a nervous system, are morally considerable and possess rights. a worry with dunayer’s position is that it is highly averse to moral risk. while it is possible that cnidarians, which have a simple neural net, brainless barnacles, which are sessile organisms, and c. elegans, a 1mm worm with exactly 302 neurons, are sentient, the weight of evidence suggests that they are not. similarities are morally important, but differences can also make a moral difference. the philosopher david livingstone smith has long argued that dehumanization, “the tendency to conceive of groups of people as creatures that are less than human” (40), is central to committing horrific acts such as genocide, because it removes them from the sphere of moral consideration. in “indexically yours: why being human is more like being here than like being water,” he extends this notion to how we conceive of nonhuman animals in order to exploit them as we do. he argues that “human” does not designate a biological category, and as an indexical term “referring to someone as human is referring to them as a member of one’s own natural kind” (49). in short, being human means being “one of us.” he rightly notes that biological taxonomy should not be taken to have any moral implications. it is only when we impose the more valueladen folk taxonomies onto the biological world that such moral implications begin to develop. the core insight is that the otherization of groups of human beings is of a piece with the otherization of groups of nonhuman animals. the philosopher edouard machery’s “apeism and racism: reasons and remedies” examines what he calls “apeism” or “an indifference toward the welfare of apes” (54), particularly the inability to empathize with their suffering. he notes that one can be a speciesist without being an apeist, and that “the wrongness of apeism is easier to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 124 defend than the wrongness of speciesism” (55). but here machery may well be guilty of what dunayer termed “old speciesism.” machery considers three pragmatic strategies to reduce apeism: contact, enlightenment, and individualization. evidence from psychology suggests that contact with races other than one’s own undermines racism, and so machery argues that we should engage in contact with great apes through physical observation in zoos, research centers, sanctuaries, through ecotourism, and virtual observation via documentaries, in order to reduce apeism. machery does not address the moral hazards that institutions such as zoos and practices such as ecotourism pose, but he does recognize that contact alone is likely insufficient to counter apeism. after all, racism and sexism persist despite constant contact between the races and sexes. he instead considers a strategy of enlightenment in terms of increased education about apes’ cognitive capacities and increased emotional sensitivity to combat apeism, but ultimately rejects this in favor of what he calls “individualizing apes.” the strategy is to move away from conceiving of apes as groups or species and instead to think of them as individuals, because it will make it easier for humans to reject apeism and to extend moral consideration to them. in “’race’ and species in the post-world war ii united nations discourse on human rights,” raymond corbey argues that efforts to curb stereotypes often embody such stereotypes through analyses of international discourse on human rights after world war ii and the great ape project, which seeks to extend human rights to all other great apes. corbey critiques the human exceptionalism present in united nations’s humanist discourse, linking this to the judeo-christian tradition of human exceptionalism. most interestingly, he notes the strong anthropocentrism in contemporary contractualist moral philosophy in the works of charles taylor, jürgen habermas, and axel honneth, operating in the wakes of kant and rosseau, which, while now more multicultural, are still largely silent on the animals question. corbey laments the absence of recognition perpetuated by this stereotypical thinking about expanding beyond stereotypes. wrapping up part i, richard twine’s “addressing the animal-industrial complex” does just that. he is interested in furthering the “new” term “animal-industrial complex,” which he claims has not been used in academic publications prior to barbara noske’s work (1989). twine draws parallels between the military-industrial complex, prisonindustrial complex, the entertainment-industrial complex, and the pharmaceuticalindustrial complex, noting how these have incorporated animal exploitation. however, the concept of the animal-industrial complex is not new even if the terms are, and surely concepts and terms are not the same. for example, ruth harrison’s animal machines: the new factory farming industry (1964) was widely read and highly joel macclellan -more ethics than politics, more animals than species 125 influential — providing the empirical backdrop that made peter singer’s seminal animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals (1975) possible —, for exposing the largest aspect of the animal-industrial complex to the public. so, while not new, the concept of the animal-industrial complex is a profound one, and twine nicely describes how the various complexes reinforce each other in capitalist economies. leading off part ii: sentience and agency is lori marino’s “humans, dolphins, and moral inclusivity.” marino, a behavioral neuroscientist, argues that the evidence of dolphins’ and other cetaceans’ cognitive capacities provides “strong support for recognizing their status as individuals with basic rights comparable to those of humans” (95). she first discusses recent empirical research on the cetaceans’ brains, the ways they differs from primates’ brains, dolphin intelligence, and their complex social behavior and culture. she then provides harrowing accounts of the many ways in which humans use and abuse cetaceans, and the harmful effects this has on them. the most interesting part of the piece is marino’s conjecture that we would not allow such visible and wholesale slaughter of great apes or elephants (105), because marine mammals are more difficult for humans to identify with, since they look, move, live, and communicate so differently from us: “cetaceans ... represent extremes of similarities and differences that challenge our ability to recognize them as moral equals” (104). one worry is that marino bases cetaceans’ moral equality to humans on the basis of their cognitive similarity to us, yet her evidence is almost exclusively about dolphins, which are known to be the most intelligent cetaceans. whether whales and porpoises also merit moral equality will require further argumentation. in “the expression of grief in moneys, apes, and other animals,” anthropologist barbara j. king provides a nuanced analysis of grief in nonhuman animals, sensitive to the epistemological challenge of attributing emotions and other mental states to animals on the basis of their behavior. she begins by giving a range of conservative to liberal definitions of grief and love, including a discussion of when behavior does not meet the definitional criteria of grief. she then gives evidence of grief in chimpanzees, gorillas, and dolphins. she mentions her new book animals grieve (2013), which includes stories of mourning among domestic cats, dogs, rabbits, ducks, geese, and members of other species, which are surely more controversial, but does not discuss these cases further here. as the title suggests, in “great ape mindreading: what’s at stake?” philosopher kristin andrews addresses the question: what stands or falls with the claim that great apes cannot mindread? mindreading is “the ability to see that others have beliefs that could be true or false, which permits joint attention and shared intentions” (115). the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 126 dominant account is that humans differ from other apes because humans can mindread. andrews’s philosophical foil is christine korsgaard, a kantian ethicist who defends an interpretation of kantian agency. it nearly goes without saying that kant’s account of agency is (overly) intellectualist, and has generally negative implications for animal minds and moral considerability. andrews argues that, even if it turns out that great apes cannot mindread, they do nonetheless have the core elements necessary for agency, and so mindreading should not be a necessary condition for moral or legal standing. in short, andrews seeks to de-escalate the stakes of great ape mindreading. to do so, she argues that it is a mistake to include mindreading in our accounts of autonomous agency, that great apes are capable of attributing intentionality to others, and through self-creation and improvement, including through changes of personality and through teaching. daniel hutto, a philosophical psychologist, continues themes in andrews's piece, defending a more robustly non-cognitivist approach to understanding how great apes and humans engage with others in “intersubjective engagements without theory of mind: a cross species comparison.” hutto critiques cognitivist approaches exemplified by peter carruthers, who defends higher order thought theory of consciousness, and claims that having a theory of mind is necessary for phenomenal consciousness. for his part, hutto argues that we engage with other minds in ways which are “emotionally charged, enactive, and nonrepresentational,” rather than through the cognitive belief that they are conscious (127). he goes on to differentiate two levels of minding minds, one which is immediate and non-conceptual, and the other which is mediated and conceptual (129), which opens up the possibility that animals mind minds even if they are incapable of forming beliefs (135). he concludes that, while sentient nonhuman animals, particularly apes, may lack full-blown moral agency, their interpersonal actions may nonetheless be morally significant and that such apes are clearly morally considerable. transitioning from philosophy of animal minds to a much more practical inquiry, physical anthropologist lucy birkett and evolutionary primatologist william mcgrew question the moral permissibility of keeping apes in captivity, with the sole exception of sanctuaries for those incapable of being returned to the wild, in “unnatural behavior: obstacle or insight at the species interface”. they argue that captivity, through its various restrictions on liberty, spawns unnatural and sufficiently harmful behavior that it constitutes suffering. joel macclellan -more ethics than politics, more animals than species 127 jet bakels’s “animals as persons in sumatra” begins a portion of the politics of species dedicated to transspecies cultural anthropology, broadly construed. bakels’s piece catalogs human-animal relations in two traditional societies in sumatra, indonesia, the metawai tribesmen and the kerinci farmers. bakels argues that these non-western cultures have very different conceptions of the relationship between humans and animals, which can “inspire and inform the western struggle with moral inconsistencies with respect to animals” (156). the mentawaians attribute ensoulment and personhood much more broadly than in the west, even to the abiotic natural world and human artifacts, and their ethic emphasizes minimizing harm, which they regard as compatible with respectful killing and use of animals. in “interspecies love: being and becoming with a common ant, ectatomma ruidum (roger)” cultural anthropologist eben kirskey regards these ants native to central and south america as “agents of cosmopolitical assembly, conscious beings who become involved with other creatures through relations of reciprocity, kinship, and accountability (165). assuming this is not hyperbole, it appears that kirskey’s account is guilty of what gruen calls “over-empathizing” (discussed below) in his attribution of sophisticated mental attributes to ants. beginning part iii: toward respectful coexistence, but continuing the cultural anthropological portion of the text, is anthropologist agustín fuentes’ “social minds and social selves: redefining the human-alloprimate interface.” he argues that the moral similarity between humans and animals consists in our shared aspects of personhood. he argues for two claims: (1) evolutionary and ethnographic approaches to anthropology occasion a reappraisal of the human-primate relations, and (2) altruism and cooperation are keys to understanding these relationships (180). in “the human-macaque interface in the sulawesi highlands” anthropologist erin riley seeks to further the subfield “ethnoprimatology,” which seeks to bridge the divide between physical anthropology and cultural anthropology, which is a tall order considering their methodological and epistemological differences (189). she does so through a case study of macaques in sulawesi, indonesia. there, the lindu people, like many non-western cultures, have a conception of the human-animal relationship as more continuous and inclusive, which riley holds as promising for natural conservation (194-196). annette lanjou’s “the fabric of life: linking conservation and welfare” develops a view of biodiversity conservation that is also sympathetic to animal welfare. she recognizes that all species are important, yet acknowledges that so-called charismatic megafauna, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 128 which most easily foster environmental protection in the public imagination, should be leveraged. much like the world wildlife fund, she emphasizes flagship species in general and great apes in particular, which, if conserved, will indirectly protect many other species due to their large habitat requirements. while she acknowledges the tension between animal and environmental approaches, she does little to resolve this tension. molly mullin, a cultural anthropologist, explores the recent phenomenon of urban, domestic chicken farming in “home flocks: deindustrial domestications on the coop tour.” with “fowl visions” mullin endeavors to rear chickens of her own at her michigan homestead (209). she draws on this experience to explore coop tours, which are informal tours of chicken coops for fellow enthusiasts and other interested citizens. this is an interesting piece which complicates urban-rural divides, and explores the moral tensions which arise when caring for chickens yet also keeping them captive and killing them. yet these tensions are left largely unresolved; she considers various ways of procuring eggs, acknowledging that they could stop eating altogether, but defends her flock and her consumption of eggs on the grounds that she doesn’t “like to make such choices” (221), failing to acknowledge that this too is a choice. in “entangled empathy: an alternative approach to animal ethics,” philosopher lori gruen argues that the traditional model of extending moral concern from humans to other animals, as advanced by peter singer, tom regan, and others, often includes what has come to be known as the “marginal cases argument” for the moral considerability of nonhuman animals. while gruen has deployed this strategy in the past, she believes that it has not led to a fundamental shift in our treatment of nonhuman animals (224). as evidence, she cites the facts that in the united states at this time, we still used chimpanzees for invasive medical research and that whales and elephants are kept captive.1 gruen seeks an alternative model, leveraging feminist critiques of the assumed oppositional character of equality and difference, and rather than argue how we should extend moral consideration to animals, we should start with the fact that we are already in relationships with animals. this view seems similar to mary midgley’s notion of a “mixed community” developed in animals and why they matter: a journey around the species barrier (1983). this “entangled empathy” is where empathizing individuals “first respond with a precognitive, empathetic reaction to the interests of another” yet involves both affect and cognition (226). gruen takes it that some things are “proper objects of empathetic attention” (229), and devotes the rest of the essay to empathetic failures. she is sensitive to the worry that we might be guilty of anthropomorphism in our empathizing, of incorrectly attributing which she calls “over-empathizing.” joel macclellan -more ethics than politics, more animals than species 129 epistemic empathetic failure is addressable via increased understanding, but as gruen rightly notes, ethical empathetic failures are more difficult to address. while admittedly an underdeveloped sketch, entangled empathy is a promising alternative or complement to extensionist moral philosophy about animals. “extending human research protections to non-human animals,” by physician hope ferdowsian and attorney chong choe, makes the argument that principlism, an influential approach in medical ethics, especially the ethics of biomedical research, and which requires that our moral reasoning take into account and balance several irreducible moral principles, typically including autonomy, beneficence, and justice (ferdowsian and choe omit non-maleficence and add “vulnerability”), have more profound implications for research involving animal subjects than is typically realized. they apply these principles of medical ethics, concluding that animals need greater protections in research than they currently receive. in the volume’s final piece, “the capacity of non-human animals for legal personhood and legal rights,” renowned lawyer and animal legal advocate steven wise argues that we need to move from a legal conception of animals as things to a legal conception of animals as persons. he considers kant’s view of autonomy to be “full autonomy,” but recognizes lesser, “practical autonomies” as well, which in principle apply to at least some non-human animals. wise argues that practical autonomy is sufficient for the ascription of basic liberty rights. he then makes the case that at least chimpanzees possess attributes sufficient for practical autonomy, and therefore basic liberty rights. for more information on this legal project, see the nonhuman rights project. all told, the politics of species is a very strong contribution to the growing animal studies literature. as shown in this review, it skillfully blends both depth and practical application, as well including a wide diversity of topics and methodologies. the politics of species is a recommended read. note 1. yet, since the time of publication, the national institutes of health called for the retirement of almost all chimpanzees used in federal research in 2013, and in 2015, us fish and wildlife service listed all chimpanzees, including those in captivity as endangered. marine mammals, including whales, receive special protection under the marine mammal protection act (1972), and due to the popularity of the documentary blackfish, seaworld’s attendance and profit have declined considerably. in march of 2016, seaworld announced that they would discontinue captive orca breeding, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 130 effectively signaling that the present generation of captive orcas is also the last generation of captive orcas. lastly, the ringling brothers circus announced the retirement of elephants in 2015. while slower than one might like, fundamental change is certainly underway, at least with respect to the most sentient animals. microsoft word probyn-r pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 4:2 fiona probyn-rapsey stunning australia when australia’s national broadcaster, the abc, aired an episode of current affairs program four corners called “a bloody business” on 30 may 2011, it showed cattle being slaughtered in indonesian abattoirs without the use of stunning, and with the use of whips, blunt knives, and hoses. cattle were being tripped up with ropes, tails and legs broken, eyes gouged, tendons slashed. public reaction in australia was intense. the website banliveexport.com, set up jointly by the rspca and animals australia (both organizations had conducted the initial investigation), crashed on and off for the first couple of days following the broadcast: too many hits and too many people wishing to voice their opposition. the cattle in the videos were from australia and had been exported live to indonesia, where stunning is not used in 90% of its abattoirs. petitions were signed, downloadable letters to government ministers made readily available, video statements recorded and made. the campaign’s facebook community went from 16,000 to 25,000 in 24 hours — and it organized a national day of protest. the australian government acted quickly to ban all live exports to indonesia, a position from which minister joe ludwig then backed away under pressure from such industry groups as meat and livestock australia, as well as livecorp, and quite possibly, against the wishes of many of his own labor party members: “labor mps told the west australian there would be a ‘riot’ if the government resumed the trade without guaranteeing all australian cattle were stunned” (wright, probyn, and rickard). no such riot eventuated and eventually minister joe ludwig announced that the trade would be resumed, without any guarantee of stunning. in the months since then cruel practices within australian abattoirs (in regional victoria and new south wales) were also exposed in the press. in these examples, stunning technology is available and used and also violently misused. within weeks more footage of cruel practices in indonesian abattoirs emerged, highlighting the government’s failed efforts to reassure australians that australian cattle (as they were and still are repeatedly called) were not going to be subject to abuse when sent abroad. nobody who saw all this activity to end the live export trade (and to end animal cruelty in australian abattoirs) could say that australians did not care about the animals they had seen in the footage. what i want to tease out here is how the footage of cruel slaughter moved many, but moved most in the direction of insensibility, of advocating fiona probyn-rapsey — stunning australia 85 stunning as a solution to what they had witnessed.1 stunning is a process of anesthesia that is used primarily to “render animals insensible to pain and distress prior to the act of slaughter” (gibson, johnson, et al. 94). in australia, most abattoirs use what is called percussive stunning;2 a rigid cast of steel is propelled at the skull of the cattle, designed to concuss but not fracture the skull. performed effectively, adams and sheridan indicate that “stunning can make the act of slaughter free of pain and suffering” (x) because the percussive blast destroys the cattle’s capacity to perceive phasic and tonic pain faster than the pain receptors can process even the act of stunning (xiv). i shall return to this issue of effectiveness, and its relationship to pride, later in the essay. to begin with, i am interested to explore how stunning became such an important feature of public discussion, indeed, a point of national pride — something that australians are good at and good for. insensibility and compassion. the technology of stunning, and its resonance with insensibility as a solution to distress, resonates with human nervous systems (and also computer systems), in a way that warrants further cultural analysis. putting stunning in its broader cultural context situates it today as part of the intensification of factory farming over the last few decades, and the parallel intensification of social systems of denial that such farming practices also require. stunning is, ultimately, a device for intensification; it crashes, numbs, overloads, destroys capabilities and sensibilities. it is both a “compassionate device” for “minimizing pain and distress,” and a device implicated in the “war on compassion” that derrida describes as being central to the “unprecedented proportion” of this century’s “subjection of the animal,” in “conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous” (394). this is something, in the australian context, that i wish to focus on here: how stunning works to render insensible more than the cattle whose deaths begin with the act of stunning. derrida’s discussion of the ‘”war on compassion” is very useful here. derrida suggests that the “war on compassion” starts with the recognition of animal suffering. he quotes bentham’s famous footnote on animal rights, directing us to ask not, “can they reason? nor, can they talk? but, can they suffer?” (283). this, for derrida, “changes everything” because it shifts the focus from the logos, anthropocentric speech and reason, to what is for derrida “undeniable” and that is, animal suffering: “no one can deny the suffering, fear or panic, the terror or fright that humans witness in certain animals” (396). derrida goes on to say that bentham’s recognition of animal suffering leaves “no doubt either, then, for the possibility of our giving vent to a surge of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 86 compassion, even if it is misunderstood, repressed, or denied, held in respect” (397). that is, animal suffering is recognized even in the act of its denial — to “deny,” being “in denial” is thus still to know. or, as stanley cohen writes in states of denial: “denial is always partial; some information is always registered. this paradox or doubleness— knowing and not-knowing — is the heart of the concept” (22). derrida describes a war being “waged over the matter of pity” and he posits two sides to this war: “those who violate animal life but even and also this sentiment of compassion” on the one hand, and “those who appeal to an irrefutable testimony to this pity” on the other (397). stunning is one answer to bentham’s question “can they suffer?” but as an answer it does not “change everything,” as derrida suggests (396). indeed, stunning accelerates the process of turning cattle into meat, making them easier to handle, without struggle. stunning provides a remedy that expunges animal sensibility, animal fear, animal pain and distress, and isolates human recognition of or compassion for that suffering: as one report puts it ‘”stunning removes the hazards of pain and distress from the slaughter process” (adams and sheridan 75). as a technology of animal care and welfare, stunning has both human and animal applications. it puts animals out of our human misery, renders them and us insensible to slaughter, in different though interrelated ways. no doubt the desire for animals to be insensible to their own deaths is bound up with a human desire to be insensible to their deaths and to our hand in it. james serpell notes that cultures that routinely hunt or slaughter animals always have cultural mechanisms for expiating the death of the animal (185). these can include rituals of purification, thanks, myths of sacrifice, and ideas of animal inferiority. brian luke extends this by adding that a great deal of effort goes into blocking sympathies or compassion (136). noelie vialles’s ethnography of the abattoir also attests to how the cultural formation of the slaughterhouse is itself designed to distribute responsibility for the animal’s death amongst many hands, thus easing, perhaps, any individual sense of responsibility. the abattoir’s design might seek to avoid face-toface, eye-to-eye contact with the animal, and the cultural implications of acknowledging the animal’s gaze. her ethnography of the french abattoir asks: who kills the animals? the person who stuns it, or the person who bleeds it? not only is such a doubt formally possible; it exists in reality…. what we have here is not a series of operations but a disjunction — and even a double disjunction: between bleeding and death on the one hand; between death and suffering on the other. indeed, the first man does not kill, he fiona probyn-rapsey — stunning australia 87 anaestheticizes. the second (or third) does not really kill either, he bleeds an animal that is already inert and, in the terms that are in constant use “as if dead” ... we are left without any “real” killing at all. (159) distributing that “unreal killing” across many human hands reflects not simply an uncaring attitude towards the death of the animal, but the presence of caring, indeed the risk of caring, and in response, the construction of a “mechanism,” be it architectural or psychological, to “make killing somewhat more bearable” (136) to borrow brian luke’s phrase. the “unreal killing” that is performed across many hands also relies on detachment from others in the workplace, such that it is not “i” responsible for the death, but an other. no doubt this compartmentalization affects any collective worker identity, and charlie leduff’s examination of us slaughterhouses finds them to be racially stratified, intensely hierarchical, and beset by an annual 100% turnover of staff. sixteen million pigs made into pork annually, and 100% staff turnover. le duff finds the slaughterhouse to be, not surprisingly, bad for humans and catastrophic for animals. the unreality of killing is also disjointed by time and place in remote industrialized factory farms, in plastic wrapped “cuts” of renamed and repackaged animal body parts (see adams). the cargill beef slaughter plant manager describes his slaughter factory as being “like henry ford in reverse” (like a disassembly yard — a whole animal goes in and only parts come out) (“usa”). behind closed doors, wire fences, public secrecy is very much part of our ‘”ritual” to do what serpell says is characteristic of meat eating cultures: to expiate guilt associated with the death of the animal (185). and when our rituals are confounded, as it is in the four corners footage, the reaction is intense. what australian viewers might see in the indonesian abattoir runs counter to our own rituals of slaughter. there was no secrecy in that indonesian abattoir; indeed we were told that workers allowed themselves to be filmed. we expect closed doors, high fences. we expect shame, disgust. the footage allowed no stunning, of beast or viewer, and so we could not be oblivious to, or indifferent to, the reality of the cattle who are slaughtered and who struggle to survive it. the popular reaction against live export is thus not in any simple way about compassion for animals. it is also, following serpell, a confirmation of the profound attachment to our own rituals of slaughter. the emphasis, indeed perhaps anxious over-insistence on stunning, as a solution to this, indicates the shock not only of being confronted with violence to animals, but the desire to be kept in a state of numbed indifference and ignorance to that which we know not to know. and what we know not to know is that unstunned cattle struggle against death, express interests and a desire to live. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 88 comments on media sites, such as this one below, were not uncommon after the screening of the four corners story: ompman says: may 31, 2011 at 11:42 am iam a grown man this left me in tears an numb. (ompman) numbness is a protective device, both physiological and psychological, to shield from pain and distress. numbness, like the word “stun,” suggests a loss of feeling through having too many feelings. numbed or stunned, we are left unable to act, diminished by witnessing terror, much like the steer in the footage who stares ahead at fellow cattle being slaughtered in front of him, trembling violently. numbness can operate as one of those “complex obstacles between information and action” (295) that cohen seeks to understand in his study of denial. the intensity of the feeling is such that people want to look away, to go out of their way to avoid having to have that feeling again. those who close their eyes, do nothing, collude, enter a state of denial, knowing what it is that they wish not to know. they live with “elephants in the room” (zerubavel), with public secrecy, and are probably unbothered by that. for the numb and stunned that seek redress, who go on websites and social media to join a community of like-minded others, denial is also a factor. as kenneth shapiro points out, for animal activists and for those active in expressing a concern for animal welfare there is still a need to filter out (154-57); think of lyn white of animals australia with her camera in the slaughterhouse with those cattle as they are being slaughtered; she would have to close her mind to what was right before her, in order to do what she needed to. denial is not something that we, on a basic psychological level, can do without. denial is not a state of mind only held by those who are indifferent or politically numb. it is not the opposite of knowledge, or being in the know; it is more about “caring to know.” for stanley cohen, it is not knowledge that is the opposite of denial, it is acknowledgment that is “the active and infrequent opposite of denial” (249). denial is for cohen a matter of individual and cultural habits. taking up cohen’s and zerubavel’s discussions of denial, deidre wicks elaborates on the everyday social tact that goes into avoiding the subject of animal slaughter, in order to remain on the side of the well mannered: without conscious negotiation, people know which facts are better not noticed and which trouble spots to avoid. for instance, people do not fiona probyn-rapsey — stunning australia 89 consciously repress mention of slaughterhouses when they are guests at a bbq or dinner party where meat is being served. at the same time, they call on a common vocabulary to discuss the tenderness of the meat (not how young the animal was) and the “juiciness” of the steak (not how much blood and lymph fluid it contains). there is an unspoken, indeed unconscious agreement that such references would be bad manners or bad taste. this is why the mere presence of a vegetarian at a dinner table can make people uncomfortable. their presence raises into consciousness all those ideas and images so carefully “not known” and “not seen.” (wicks 188) stanley cohen argues that colonial states (like australia) that perpetuate public secrecy as a matter of course are “uncannily able to shut out or ignore the injustice and suffering around them ... not because of coercion but out of cultural habit” (5). thus, australia is well suited to value stunning because it is already attuned to a cultural habit of insensibility. the word “terra nullius” springs to mind as a good example of the cultural forgetting that w. e. h. stanner described as an australian habit, our “great australian silence” when it comes to aboriginal life and history (182). for stanner, it is not that stories, facts, events of australian colonial violence are actually “forgotten” in the sense of no longer known. it is, for him, a sort of violent unacknowledgment, what he calls a “structural matter,” “as if a view from a window” has been obscured (189). he complains of a “mass of solid indifference” to the fate of aboriginal people and history, and locates the twin significance of “disremembering” and mythologizing; that we resurrect proud (even stunning) monuments in place of fracturing memories of colonial terror (94). in terms of the indonesian abattoir controversy, we are repeatedly reminded that the cattle were australian, citizen livestock exposed to foreign cruelty. this again slips easily into the mythologizing and disremembering of australian practices; cruelty is something other countries practice; we are, instead, stunning. the banliveexport campaign that took shape was cautiously focused on extending australian standards abroad, something that complements colonial australian sensibilities, particularly in regard to not be “seeing” our own practices in the ways that others might: i don’t know if i can bring myself to watch this, just hearing about it is upsetting, i don’t understand why the religion requires cruelty, any humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 90 religion that requires torture of helpless creatures needs to be abolished, if that is truly what it endorses it needs to be outlawed. we have raised cattle on our property and have treated them well throughout their lives, made sure they were well fed, even treated them like pets. then we get out a professional butcher who kills them with 1 shot to the head so they are dead instantly. any sort of cruelty is totally unnecessary, people can still have meat on their table without animals suffering. unfortunately for some reason treating animals humanely seems to be a western concept. (bindi) such a comment highlights wicks’s observation that “animal cruelty and suffering is rarely (if ever) presented as part of our ‘normal’ daily life” (195). the ritual slaughter of animals, “pets,” in this expression of national pride and pride in being “western” thus involves ritualized understandings of “care” itself and one which divorces meat eating (pets included) from any concept of harm to animals. such comments demonstrate the ease with which rituals of slaughter are sanitized by cultural conventions that readily position other cultures as the source of animal suffering. this is where outrage at animal cruelty segues into radicalized and racializing expressions of shaming, or, more specifically, the racialized demand for shame; they should be ashamed of themselves. and australians, in making this demand, draw national pride up alongside stunning as something to be proud of, thus turning the horror that they encountered on the screen into something that brings forth expressions of pride. but how does national pride work to soothe in proximity to bodily terror: terror that is seen in the cattle in the footage and then accounted for, elaborated, shared, and mediated in countless online reactions from human viewers? these on-screen bodies in terror communicate that terror to the flesh of viewers trembling, moaning, and grimacing in front of the screen. how this gets translated or soothed by expressions of national pride is both fascinating and troubling. in their work with terror management theory, goldenberg et al. propose that a “wide range of human behaviors ... are influenced by the uniquely human knowledge of mortality” (200) and that mortality salience (consciousness of death) brings a defensive “faith in one’s worldview” or faith in a “cultural worldview” (202). what they call “distal defenses” rebuild self-esteem by esteeming the community of which we feel part. their study reveals that distal defenses in the form of faith in a cultural worldview, are aligned with xenophobia, as in: “mortality salience has been shown to have several outcomes: more positive evaluations of in-group members and those who praise one’s culture, and more negative evaluations of out-group members and those who criticize one’s culture’ fiona probyn-rapsey — stunning australia 91 (202). using this approach we might say that the horror of australian cattle being killed, resisting slaughter, provokes “mortality salience” which is, in turn, met by renewed faith in a cultural worldview; they should be ashamed of themselves, while we have reasons for pride. australia and indonesia: odd neighbors. that the terror of the cattle and the terror of seeing the cattle so treated could manifest in expressions of xenophobia is not surprising given the specific qualities of australia’s relationship with indonesia. kusumohamidjojo describes the two countries as “odd neighbours ... with almost nothing in common except the fact that they belong to the same part of the world” (145). philpott notes that australia demonstrates anxiety about indonesia’s predominantly muslim population (372), and as online comments regarding the four corners footage showed, australian respondents still harbor a fear that muslims are inherently cruel. this is despite animals australia pointing out on their website that halal slaughter does not allow animal cruelty and that stunning is acceptable. a press release from the australian federation of islamic councils was again put into circulation to counter the belief that live exports were a necessary condition for trade with predominantly muslim countries: “australian muslims are against animal cruelty.” on the australian media side, kelly notes that “for nearly three decades indonesia has been a bad news story for australia” (36), while according to kusumohamidjojo most of the “unnecessary trouble” is caused by the “self-righteous and noisy attitude of australia mass-media” (146). kelly indicates that the australian media has constructed “two stereotypes” of indonesians. the first is that indonesians are “innocent victims, for example through the tsunami and military repression, who deserve compassion and support” (37) which, according to rosihan anwar is then underwritten by resentment towards australian ”self-satisfaction,” proclamations of “how generous we are” (qtd. in reeve 74). the second stereotype of indonesians that kelly observes in the australian media is that of the “intolerant, corrupt and brutal nation too ready to use military force to impose its will” (37). kesavapany considers the strain in relations in terms of national “character” traits, which are themselves based on stereotypes, for example that australia “is a young and immigrant culture in an ancient culture [that] retains much of the feisty, frontier ethic ... there is stress on speaking openly and frankly, on giving as good as you get, on values like mateship, independence, ruggedness and toughness’ (kesavapany 28). this is contrasted with indonesia’s “stylized discourse, the virtue of restraint, the art of politeness and refined behavior, the qualities of humility and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 92 compromise, the language of indirect allusions” (28). indonesian anxieties concerning australia are, according to reeve, “regularly expressed in the letters section of the indonesian media” (70). reeve lists the mutual suspicions as: australia’s involvement in east timor, along with australia’s treatment of traditional indonesian fishermen; its alleged involvement in bugging the indonesian embassy; suspicions that australian ngos in papua are at least gleaning intelligence, at worst preparing for another east timor in papua; and, most recently, indonesian astonishment over australian reactions to the corby verdict (reeve, 2006: 70-71).3 the beef industry and live export have been chief amongst australia and indonesia’s short list of reliable connections, a sector notable for immunity to indonesian and australian diplomatic spats, even in the wake of east timor’s independence referendum in 1999 and eventual statehood. australia is the world’s largest supplier of live cattle, and indonesia is its largest single export market. between 2003 and 2009, annual live cattle exports from australia to indonesia nearly doubled to 773,000 head, an average increase of 19% a year’ and then in 2010 they dropped by 30%. in 2011, the indonesian government announced it would ban all live exports from australia “within a few years” (cochrane). both australian and indonesian officials stated that this had nothing to do with the temporary ban on live exports (roberts). so much mutual, official agreement between the usually mutually suspicious countries suggests that neither is interested in delving much further into the animal cruelty issues raised in both countries; both for the country that slaughters 90% of its cattle without stunning and for the country that knowingly sends them there. these mutual anxieties between the “odd neighbours” provide a defensive “cultural worldview” (goldenberg 203) for both. for australians such anxieties about indonesia might explain the expansion of a circle to include australian cattle while closing the circle on those who abused them. if and when animal welfare issues are racialized it works both ways, and for me, the pride expressed in stunning technologies betrays a thin and fragile defense, but one familiar, even standard, within australian discourses of willful forgetting. i for one became suspicious of the stunning refrain, and i wondered how many australians actually knew what stunning was, and how it worked. i certainly didn’t. fiona probyn-rapsey — stunning australia 93 the technology of stunning. welfare capabilities in australian slaughterhouses are, from the data collected in reports such as david b. adams and allan b. sheridan, far higher than those we can see in the footage of “a bloody business.” this is largely because of the use of stunning technology. when it works, stunning is undoubtedly better for the animal facing slaughter: “effective stunning eliminates both phasic and tonic pain. in particular, it will eliminate all subjective sensations of the physical slaughter process if performed in advance of that activity” (adams and sheridan x). adams and sheridan’s report is relevant to the controversies surrounding the indonesian abattoir footage because it provided the initial investigation with scientific (read: credible) evidence for why stunning is preferable to slaughter without stunning. this report is also unique for its attempt to describe death as a “process” and to make the “biological issues related to slaughter without stunning more accessible to a wider audience” (vii). the report offers no “value judgment” along the lines of “social acceptability of any form of slaughter” (iv), but it does conclude in favor of stunning as a more humane process of death; “stunning removes the hazards of pain and distress from the slaughter process” (75). despite its apparent desire to transcend “social” issues that involve value judgments,” the report is attentive to public policy; it seeks to “package evidence from science in a way that can inform public policy determination by decision makers in australia” (iv). as such i am tempted to think of australia as an added topic or subject of this report, let me be clear that i am not suggesting that national pride in stunning is an explicit topic or the concern of this report, but it may explain some of its mediations. as a public document this report entered into popular discourse with the four corners expose of the indonesian abattoirs. it is the standards of animal welfare indicated in the report that help reproduce the vantage point from which australians make those very value judgments that the report disavows. adams and sheridan’s report makes for heady reading. i have never read anything quite like it. in aiming to describe “death as a process” it includes assessments of livestock fear, rage, anger, pain, cardiac arrest, blood loss, concussion, brain death, the various effects of these elements of death, and how they interrelate in the process of slaughter. i found the report profoundly disorienting. i admit that a good part of this disorientation may be disciplinarily based. as someone trained in literary studies i do not often come across texts that describe animal death in such terms, let alone describe the gruesome experiments done in order to establish, scientifically, what death is. no doubt these sensitivities to disciplinary boundaries exist on both sides. the report uses humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 94 science as if that were able to be separated from other discourses and disciplines such as history (see pages 9-10), philosophy and religious studies (8,9), and even discourses of animal studies, animal rights and welfare, represented as “anthropocentric supplementary concerns about the killing of animals … [that] arise from the interests of people and are exemplified by the ethics of nature conservation and species conservation, which involve groups and populations rather than individual animals” (3). such concerns/ethics are not the concern/ethics of this report. its parameters are tightly measured but not controlled, because the very nature of the subject matter is intensely provocative. reading through this report made me highly agitated. some sections more than others made me conscious of my heart beating (seemingly such a clumsy mechanism up against that word “exsanguination”) and i could feel my neck too much and as a vulnerable, sliceable thin skin with muscles to be cut through, bled out. in other words, as i read through these accounts of the death of animals, my mortality was made salient. the terror that they describe (in order to mitigate) was made palpable in me. and as i was reading this to find out more about the proposition of stunning pride, the source of australian pride in stunning, i was not readily amenable to the reassurances that it provides to their “wider audience.” reading this report, i found myself at odds with its discourse of objectivity (one might say this is a typical “arts” approach!) but also, perhaps more surprisingly, with its math and its sense of scale. in 2010, australians slaughtered approximately nine million cattle to support, in part, a cultural habit of beef eating that sees australians consume approx 37.9 kg per person a year. by comparison, the united nations food and agriculture organization estimates that indonesians annually consume 2.4 kg per capita (cochrane). we’d better be sure that “stunning” is effective then, if we are to turn cattle into beef at such an accelerated rate. with nine million cattle slaughtered, a five per cent failure rate would see australian abattoirs commit as many breaches of animal welfare as the 500,000 “australian” cattle exported live to indonesia are subjected to. the sheer scale, the sheer number of cattle slaughtered in australia, as well as those who are exported live, makes a significant difference when welfare capacities are imagined in relation to scale and in relation to the mere humans who operate the machinery. nine million 100% effective stuns; australia’s top score. ineffective stunning means that the percussive instrument, the “gun,” is misplaced on the cattle’s heads. they might suffer fractured skulls rather than loss of consciousness (adams and sheridan 45). they might regain consciousness after non-penetrating captive bolt stunning or fiona probyn-rapsey — stunning australia 95 they might not be exsanguinated within the desirable twelve to twenty seconds. this time delay (between stunning and exsanguination) is a “major welfare issue” following a “reversible stun” (67). if a failure rate of up to five per cent is imaginable, or possible, then australian slaughterhouses that practice stunning are, with the far greater number of cattle that go though the gates, not as far removed from the indonesian statistics as might be initially assumed. and as adams and sheridan point out, cattle that are slaughtered with a “poor stun followed by a competent bleed” are “ranked equal in magnitude of its animal welfare impact to a ‘no stun with incompetent bleeding’” (17). where an animal is not immediately “restunned, it will be a source of additional pain and distress creating a situation that is worse for animal welfare than bleeding alone” (17). however, they conclude that this “does not apply in practice” because a “competent operator can make stunning 100% effective in practice and makes the final stage during the process of slaughter free of pain and distress” (17). the mantra of 100% effective is repeated throughout the report (xv, 17, 48, 67, 68,72, 73), with few references to how many cattle actually get this 100% effective stun: “possible risks for misstunning will not be realized if equipment is well maintained and adequate for the classes of animals involved and competent personnel are involved and properly managed” (emphasis mine: 67). surely these risk factors amount to a failure rate. and, as the authors indicate, “an unlikely occurrence in one of ten animals becomes a virtual certainty in large groups” (74). adams and sheridan make this point in relation to “unstunned animals,” but surely the amplification of risk in relation to size of the group applies also to stunned animals. i am thinking of australia’s nine million stunned cattle in terms of the amplification of human and technical “errors” resulting in deaths that are more painful and distressing than “unstunned” and bled animal deaths. might the “numbers” be more accurately brought together as a shared problem of animal suffering? adams and sheridan’s report is classically “disembodied” in the sense that it inhabits a paradigm of objectivity that privileges narrative transcendence, sometimes conflated with lack of feeling, which is in turn conflated with truth. and yet their report is absolutely not lacking in feelings or bodies; bodies and how they feel are the topic of almost every single paragraph; how the animal body dies, in stages, how the body’s mechanisms for fight or flight have to be managed and how important it is to factor in animal rage and anger in the process of slaughter. their preference for the word “distress” rather than “suffering” is also saturated with feeling. distress “suggests a state or condition that can be relieved” (6); suffering is semantically and clinically avoided, cannot be relieved, and so will not be re-lived in the text. these feelings inhabit humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 96 this text as both cultural and biological phenomena — and they are produced by the text itself, even if its explicit mode strives for a “de-passioned” form of knowledge (despret 131). to deny the body in the text by the use of “depassioned knowledge” is linked to not knowing what to do with the “numbness” that comes from watching the terror of the cattle in the footage. why? because both seek relief, over-privilege relief from negative feelings by embracing stunning. this belittles both the object of concern, the cattle, and the connections that are made between bodies that feel the sorts of pain and suffering so visibly and scientifically made manifest. rather than denying the embodied nature of our scientific (and unscientific) engagements with animals, we might think of using those mediations to widen the scope of investigation. despret writes: to “depassion” knowledge does not give us a more objective world, it just gives us a world “without us”; and therefore, without “them”—lines are traced so fast. and as long as this world appears a world “we don’t care for”, it also becomes an impoverished world, a world of minds without bodies, of bodies without minds, bodies without hearts, expectations, interests, a world of enthusiastic automata observing strange and mute creatures; in other worlds, a poorly articulated (and poorly articulating) world (despret 131). a poorly articulating world is numb, stunned, stupefied. a poorly articulating world is one that uses xenophobia as distal defense against confronting a shared problem of animal suffering, a problem shared between countries (indonesia and australia in this case) and shared between different kinds of bodies, both animal and human. the fact that we share this bodiliness with animals is routinely invoked as an existential problem to be overcome: “the body is a problem for humans because it reminds us of our similarity to other animals, which is threatening because it makes apparent our vulnerability to death” (goldenberg et al. 203). but what is a problem here is also in the context of, say, transpecies relationships, a significant way forward to doing justice to our complex interdependence, as despret’s work shows. the openness to affect, the openness to sympathetic imagination that is displayed by those who went numb (for instance) on watching the footage in the abattoirs, or those who shook and panicked alongside the cattle doing those same things, should not be required to deny their bodies’ affective engagement, their attunement (to borrow despret’s term) with the cattle. if the body that you are in contact with is a body in terror, then you would feel that terror too. learning to think with the body and its mortality rather than turning fiona probyn-rapsey — stunning australia 97 from it in terror to terrorize others is a task akin to building something out of this attunement. bruno latour, following despret, writes that “to have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning ‘effectuated,’ moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or non-humans. if you are not engaged in this learning you become insensitive, dumb, you drop dead” (205). thinking about the body as that which feels, fights back, articulates, and communicates, and which affects those it is with (even via the screen) is one way to move beyond the expression of pride in distributing numbness. their (indonesian) “shameless” animal cruelty helps to hide this. stunning is our own form of insensibility; a device that allows us to intensify and accelerate our consumption of cattle. we eat more, therefore we kill far more. stunning, with its connotations of the sublime is, as a word and a concept, well placed to articulate what exactly happened to australians when they took up stunning as a community standard, a point of national pride. notes 1. glenys oogjes, animals australia executive director, situates stunning as an australian community standard and is very critical of the farmer review panel for neglecting to mandate stunning: “much of the suffering documented in indonesia and indeed by animals australia in other live export markets, is the result of un-stunned slaughter. to not even include stunning in a recommendation ignores the elephant in the room and is completely at odds with the wishes of not only the australian community but with australian cattle and sheep producers” (“stunning”). 2. “percussive stunning devices employing an explosive charge are probably the most widely employed in slaughter of cattle in australia, whereas electrical stunning technologies are more employed for sheep, goats, poultry and ratites at the present time” (adams and sheridan 13). 3. schapelle corby is an australian woman who was convicted of drug smuggling and is serving a twenty-year prison sentence in indonesia for the importation of 4.2 kilograms of cannabis into bali. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 98 works cited australian federation of islamic councils. “australian muslims are against animal cruelty.” 24 feb. 2006. web. 8 jan. 2012. adams, carol. the sexual politics of meat. new york: continuum, 1990. david b. adams and allan d. sheridan. specifying the risks to animal welfare associated with livestock slaughter without induced sensibility. animal welfare branch, product integrity animal and plant health division, australian government department of agriculture, fisheries and forestry for the animal welfare working group of the animal health committee. canberra: primary industries standing committee of australia, 2008. bentham, jeremy. “of the limits of the penal branch of jurisprudence.” an introduction to the principles of morals and legislation. 1907. library of economics and liberty. web. 5 june 2011. bindi. “four corners puts live exports on the agenda.” david knox. tv tonight. 31 may 2011. comment posted online. 29 july 2012. “a bloody business.” four corners. abc australia. 30 may 2011. television. cochrane, joe. “the beef conspiracy.” the globe asia. 9 may 2011. web. 29 july 2011. cohen, stanley. states of denial: knowing about atrocities and suffering. london: polity press, 2001. derrida, jacques. ‘the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” critical inquiry 28:2 (winter 2002): 369-418. despret, vinciane. “the body we care for.” body & society 10.2-3 (2004):111-134. gibson, t. j.,et al. “electroencephalographic responses to concussive non-penetrative captive-bolt stunning in halothane-anaesthetised calves.” new zealand veterinary journal 57.2 (2009): 90-95. fiona probyn-rapsey — stunning australia 99 goldenberg, jamie lynn, et al. “fleeing the body: a terror management perspective on the problem of human corporeality.” personality and social psychology review 4.3 (2000): 200-218. kelly, pau. “an australian view: the outlook for the relationship.” different societies, shared futures: australia, indonesia and the region. ed. john monfries. singapore: institute of southeast asian studies, 2006. 34-40. kesavapany, k. “a regional view: the garuda and the kangaroo.” different societies, shared futures: australia, indonesia and the region. ed. john monfries. singapore: institute of southeast asian studies, 2006. 20-33. knox, david. “four corners puts live exports on the agenda.” tv tonight. 31 may 2011. web. 29 july 2011. kusumohamidjojo, b. 1986. “the indonesia-australia relationship: problems between unfamiliar neighbours.” australian outlook 40.3 (1986): 143-147. latour, bruno. “how to talk about the body? the normative dimension of science studies.” body and society 10.2-3 (2004): 205-229. leduff, charlie. “at a slaughterhouse, some things never die.” zoontologies: the question of the animal. ed. cary wolfe. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2003. 183-197. luke, brian. “justice, caring, and animal liberation.” 1992. the feminist care tradition in animal ethics, eds. josephine donovan and carol j adams. new york: columbia up, 2007. 125-152. ompman. comment posted. “four corners puts live exports on the agenda.” tv tonight. david knox. 31 may 2011. web. 29 july 2011. philpott, simon. “fear of the dark: indonesia and the australian national imagination.” australian journal of international affairs 55.3 (2001): 371-388. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 100 reeve, david. “strange, suspicious packages.” different societies, shared futures: australia, indonesia and the region. ed. john monfries. singapore: institute of southeast asian studies. 68-77. roberts, george. “indonesia to slash aussie beef imports.” abc news. dec 16 2011. web. june 7 2012. serpell, james. in the company of animals: a study of human-animal relationships. new york: blackwell, 1986. stanner, w.e.h. “the boyer lectures: after the dreaming.” 1968. the dreaming and other essays. melbourne: black inc, 2009. 240-324. “stunning the glaring omission in live export review.” animals australia: the voice for animals. 12 oct. 2011. web. 29 july 2011. shapiro, kenneth. “the caring sleuth: portrait of an animal rights activist. 1994. the feminist care tradition in animal ethics, eds. josephine donovan and carol j. adams. new york: columbia up, 2007. 153-173. “usa beef plant killing and processing 6,000 cattle a day.” meat trade news daily. 9 apr. 2011. web. 29 july 2011. wright, shane, andrew probyn, and jayne rickard. “state’s exporters losing $1m a day.” the west australian. 15 june 2011. web. 7 july 2011. vialles, noelie. animal to edible. trans j. a. underwood. cambridge: cambridge up, 1994. wicks, deidre. “silence and denial in everyday life—the case of animal suffering.” animals 1(2011): 186-199. zerubavel, eviatar. the elephant in the room: silence and denial in everyday life. oxford: oxford up, 2007. microsoft word marovich-wylie-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:1 reviews beatrice marovich “fear of the crocodile is the beginning of wisdom?” dan wylie, crocodile. london: reaktion books ltd., 2013. 222 pp. £ 12.95; $19.95. late in his book crocodile, dan wylie briefly references the fact that sigmund freud’s theory of the uncanny — das unheimliche, that paradoxical force in the psyche that both attracts us to, and repels us from, an object — was at least partially inspired by a crocodile tale, “the inexplicable,” by l.g. moberley. this connection between crocodiles and the uncanny seems rather coincidental — tucked away, as it is, in the final chapter of this dense little book. but if, for freud, the uncanny was a reminder of our own repressed impulses, it appears to me that the crocodile becomes a reminder, for wylie, of other repressions. chiefly, perhaps, the crocodiles of crocodile seem to stand as reminders of a repressed (particularly pre-modern) fear of and attendant reverence for this ancient creature. to be sure, this book — like others in the reaktion books animal series — is something of a survey. wylie covers a lot of territory and focuses not only on cultural history, but on natural history and species differentiation among crocodilians. he confesses, from humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 130 the outset, that the book is somewhat misleadingly named, as it topically treats not only “proper” crocodiles, but alligators, caimans, and gharials as well. the method wylie sets up for surveying the broad and complex history of the crocodilian — one that extends into most regions of the world — is to explore their stories by continent. he begins with africa (where this history is arguably richest) and ends with europe (where the presence of the crocodilian has been only more recently mediated through trade routes). casing such diverse geographical terrain gives wylie plenty of material to cover: from ancient history, to archaeology, folklore, costuming, art, medicine, scientific research, conservation, and pop culture. the content of crocodile is almost encyclopedic in its scope, and is a fascinating archive of detail. yet there is a thread that wylie illuminates in his introductory pages. he finds that, “surprisingly often, crocodilians have been worshipped, appealed to, represented and treasured, albeit almost always with a tinge of fearfulness” (8). thus this fear, and how it is eventually transformed, from a “fear of crocodiles to fear for them” (8), becomes an important theme of the book. those familiar with theories such as rudolph otto’s “idea of the holy” — exploring the entanglement of holiness with fear, reverence, and awe — will be unsurprised that crocodile often segues into matters often deemed spiritual or religious. wylie speaks about the importance, in north and west africa, of the crocodilian in divination, giving them what he calls a kind of “mystical significance.” particularly important in this context were gastroliths — stones from the stomachs of crocodiles. among the thonga of southern mozambique, says wylie, “if a chief were treated with suitable drugs, he could swallow a gastrolith, whence it would warn him of his death” (19). wylie also addresses the egyptian god sobek (or sebek, or suchos) — a virile divine who was held in special esteem in regions along the banks for the nile, often depicted with the rays of the sun god ra behind him. the crocodilian in this opening section of the book seems to take on a kind of spiritual power and potency. in the discussion that follows, of central & southern africa, wylie speaks not only of the “magical” associations that crocodilians often have with witchcraft. additionally, he notes, this is a region where it has become especially apparent that “associating crocodiles with spiritual power bleeds readily into political power, both symbolically and actually” (67). although napoleon himself was apparently given the moniker of “the corsican crocodile” (164), wylie here lists a host of african “strongmen” whose symbolic and actual association with the crocodile seems designed to increase their public sense of prowess and power. idi amin, of uganda, was alleged to keep beatrice marovich “fear of the crocodile is the beginning of wisdom?” 131 crocodiles on his property for the express purpose of feeding them the bodies of his political opponents. robert mugabe has embraced the symbol of the crocodile as a sign of his own political power (67). and south african apartheid-era president p.w. botha used the nickname “big crocodile” to capture “his reputation for political ferocity” (71). in south america wylie finds a rich diversity of caiman species, but less “crocodilian lore” of great and enduring cultural significance. in central america, however, he finds a mayan deity itzem na — a god of the elite — whose “heavenly guise” was that of a huge alligator (100). in north america, where alligators once inhabited a range that ran from the florida keys as far north as maryland, wylie does not find much notable crocodilian iconography. but he does note that, “like crocodilians elsewhere” the american alligator’s physical power came “to embody both ferocity” and, in different way “deceit” (108). wylie does find more mythical lore in australia where, he says, crocodilians seem to have occupied a place of importance in creation myths. this place of reverence, however, does not obviously translate into attitudes of respect. in the kimberley region wylie finds an origin myth in which crocodiles — attempting to steal the powerful fires that were meant for humans — are eventually gutted and stabbed as a cosmic revenge (121). wylie acknowledges that this sort of mythology does seem to hide an air of anger or grievance. but still, he argues, the postures revealed in these creation myths are “markedly distinct from that of european settlers on the continent,” for whom “fear and disgust” eventuated in “slaughter and commercial exploitation” (122). key for wylie here, it seems, is the combination of slaughter with colonial commerce and global capital. in this sense, perhaps, he echoes thinkers such as the australian philosopher val plumwood who is attacked by a crocodile and invests this encounter “with almost religious force.” plumwood, as wylie presents her in this narrative, does indeed find a kind of fear and revulsion in her crocodile encounter. but she differentiates this from the revulsion that is more typical of those from the modern west whose treatment of the crocodile is not only “rapacious” but “upstart” (127). it lacks history, context, legitimacy. pre-modern australia, then, seems to offer an illumination of what colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism lack in their engagement with crocodilians. in india, wylie finds an example of a modern, global, organization that is pulling from the ancient iconography of crocodilians in an attempt to protect it. species of gharial, he humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 132 reports, are often sought after in india — their eggs are collected for medicinal purposes, and the long snouts of the males are held to have aphrodisiacal properties. recently, the world wildlife fund has tried to “enhance respect” for these creatures by “distributing flyers that quote the bhagavadgita on the importance of the gharial in the sermons of lord krishna” (150). aspects of religious tradition are being actively recruited for the crocodile cause. in europe — where the crocodilian is not native — wylie finds little evidence of this otherwise ever-present fear and reverence for the crocodilian, beyond the attitude of cold exploitation generated by scientific modernity. as he puts is, “imperialist europeans regard crocodilians everywhere as grotesque, unnervingly sneaky and formidable, and therefore as primary targets for their rapidly developing armaments” (168). and yet, he does make note of the presence of crocodilians in illuminated manuscripts, and as (often troubling) emblems in christian allegories penned by monastics (154). additionally, he makes note of the fact that crocodile skins and skeletons were sometimes displayed — as if gargoyles — on the cornices of churches (161). their corpses also appeared as figures of awe on the ceilings of early modern “cabinets of wonder” (164). that is to say, there is evidence that the european fear of the crocodilian is not religiously irrelevant or without reverence of a sort. but it seems to lack meaning, or validity, in this account. in the end, there is something of a tone of lament to crocodile. citing the devastating statistics of the decimation of crocodilian species across the globe — as well as the sometimes encouraging attempts to restore these populations — the conservation of crocodilian species is obviously a concern that is just below the surface of this text. and the responsibility of, especially, european and american imperialism and industrialization in this decimation is impossible to deny. while wylie is explicitly clear that the tools of technological modernization are largely responsible for such phenomena, the suggestion also seems to stir just below the surface of his argument that perhaps there is a kind of repressed awe or fear-tinged reverence for the crocodile whose lack is also partly to blame for this devastation. there is, certainly, something disruptive about crocodilian iconography when we contemplate it from a contemporary american perspective. to imagine a crocodile fused with the figuration of a divine challenges a perspective on crocodilians that may have been unduly shaped by crocodile dundee or the performative stylings of a “crocodile hunter” like steve irwin. it is odd, perhaps, from our contemporary context to consider the crocodile as an ancient creature who has long inspired awe and beatrice marovich “fear of the crocodile is the beginning of wisdom?” 133 reverence. what is less clear, at least to me, is whether reverence and awe are things that stand any chance of combatting the commercial and industrial threats to existence that crocodiles face, today. awe and reverence — even the sorts tinged with fear — are not necessarily correlated with respect or a sense of ethical obligation. microsoft word erica fudge-b h u m a n i m a l i a 1:1 erica fudge at the heart of the home: an animal reading of mikhail bulgakov’s the heart of a dog when we try and contemplate who it is that we think we are in the world history has an important role to play. it can alert us to what we have lost; can point up how we have come to think what we think; and can remind us that what we think now will, inevitably, change — will be succeeded by other models, also temporary, also trying to make meaning out of who it is that we think we are. in these terms, the history of the human is not simply a history of progress from a “bad” model of who we are (aristotle’s sense of the human as special and separate from all animals; aquinas’s sense of the human as the only center of the moral universe, for example) to a “good” one in which our relationship with and location in the natural world is more fully acknowledged. rather, we should perhaps also view the place of our species as a shifting one in which processes of what could be termed humanning, unhumanning, and rehumanning are constantly taking place. darwin’s work is, of course, one key way in which the human of modernity finds itself unhumanned and rehumanned. evolutionary theory removes the boundaries between species — indeed, makes a concept of species almost irrelevant: “i believe that animals have descended from at most only four or five progenitors” (454 and 452) darwin wrote in the origin of species, thus rendering untenable “the belief that species were immutable productions” (on paleoanthropological struggles to define the human see mordsley). but even as it removes a previously unmoveable barrier between the human and the chimpanzee (see fudge 2000), darwin’s theory also places the human at the top of the evolutionary ladder: it is, after all, homo sapiens who is capable, at the end of the origin of species, of contemplating the “entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” it is only humanity, for darwin, which can assess the “grandeur in this view of life” (459). in this essay i will show how this history of humanning, unhumanning, and rehumanning gets played out in one early twentieth-century literary text. i will make the case that in mikhail bulgakov’s the heart of a dog, a text that has been most often read as a political allegory, we can begin to see what it might mean to discover that the human is, after all, an empty category: a verb rather than a noun. the immediate context of this novella is the early twentieth-century political upheaval in russia, but i want to argue that we should also regard contemporary scientific ideas about and uses of animals as significant. as such, my main argument is that reading the heart of a dog can remind us that we have, perhaps, never been as human as we 11 erica fudge – at the heart of the home might imagine, and that we are always in the process of experiencing and disavowing this (see wolfe, 6). alongside this sense of never having been the humans that we imagine that we are (and, i would argue, inseparable from it) is a recognition that how we read can help us to construct who we are. in this instance i will argue that an allegorical reading of the heart of a dog in which the dog has the role of a symbol supports the assumptions of the centrality and stability of the human, and that reading the heart of a dog as if it has something to say about humananimal relations begins to reveal how constructed that notion of the human really is. i. mikhail bulgakov wrote the heart of a dog in 1925, but it was banned by soviet censors before publication. an official russian edition did not appear until 1987, almost fifty years after bulgakov’s death. it was, however, published outside of the soviet union before then in the russian journal based in west germany, grani, in 1968. also in 1968 — an interesting year for philosophical constructions of the human — michael glenny’s english translation of the novella was printed by harvill press in london. it is apt that this was the year that the heart of a dog made its first appearance in print as, like louis althusser’s essay, “ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards an investigation)” — a key response to the events of may ’68 — bulgakov’s novella deals with links between revolution and identity. the heart of a dog tells the story of the famous doctor, professor preobrazhensky (a name that means ‘transfiguration’), and his experiment on a stray dog that he takes into his home. the professor transplants human testicles and a human pituitary gland into the dog and watches, astonished and appalled, as sharik the dog becomes a foul-mouthed, lecherous human who names himself poligraph poligraphovich sharikov (77). meanwhile, as sharik is becoming sharikov, the house committee in the professor’s apartment block is at loggerheads with him because he has more rooms than legally he is allowed under the new socialist regime. the professor regards the changes they are attempting to impose with horror: they would bring into existence not a new order but a new disorder, a world turned upside down: “so i can eat in the bedroom ... read in the consulting room, dress in the hall, operate in the maid’s room and examine patients in the dining-room,” the professor notes of the committee’s requests (30). the committee are not satisfied with interfering with the domestic architecture of preobrazhensky’s apartment, however: they also use the arrival of sharikov as a way of continuing to undermine the professor’s domestic life — demanding that sharikov be given identity documents (and thus officially have an identity) and, at one point, giving the man-dog a copy of engels’s letters to kautsky to read. they want him to become a good soviet citizen. finally, having put up with sharikov’s increasingly destructive behaviour, and having seen his previously edenic flat almost destroyed in a flood, caused when sharikov chased a cat into the 12 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) bathroom, the professor, the expert in rejuvenation, decides to reverse the experiment that has, ironically, aged him, and to return to the order of things before the experiment. he replaces the dog’s testicles and pituitary gland in sharikov, and at the end of the text sharikov the man has gone and sharik the dog has returned. the novella ends with the dog wondering about his headache and his scars, but feeling "very, very lucky" as he lies on the rug by the fire while his master continues his experimentation (128). critics have recognised that this tale can be read as bulgakov’s commentary on contemporary soviet history. it is an allegory which announces, as bulgakov himself put it in a letter to the soviet government, the dangers of “the revolutionary process” over “beloved and great evolution” (haber, 217). that is, that just as forced revolution in nature (figured in the transformation of dog into man) creates natural and domestic chaos, so the forced speeding up of change in the political order has likewise created social disorder in russia. thus, for ronald d. leblanc the heart of a dog is a “tale of transformation gone awry.” the experiment of man on dog is interpreted as an allegory of “the grand social experiment of creating a new species of human being; homo sovieticus” (leblanc, 58). it was perhaps for this reason that the “influential party figure” l.b. kamenev said of the book in 1925: “it’s an acerbic broadside about the present age, and there can be absolutely no question of publishing it” (curtis, 66 and 75). but the heart of a dog is more complex than this. leblanc, for example, goes on to discuss the imagery of eating in the novella, and the story of what he terms “cultural malnutrition” that can be found there (69). however, it is not just in the novella’s imagery that complexity can be found. the question of who is the text’s hero is rife with difficulties. lesley milne, for example, in a biographical interpretation of the novella from 1990, reads the “utterances” of the professor as being “generally held by western (and now soviet) critics to represent bulgakov’s own views, despite the mask of caricature that sometimes overlies the professor’s features.” but milne also notes that things are not that simple; not only is the professor, on occasion, a comic anachronism, as well as this “the dog partakes of the author’s omniscience” (milne, 62-4). likewise, in her discussion of the novella edythe c. haber first claims that preobrazhensky is the hero, but then also claims that that role is taken by the dog as well (haber, 207 and 210). such an interpretation is, like milne’s, a response to the narrative technique of the heart of a dog. it begins with sharik, the stray dog, telling his own tale (“ooow-ow-ooow-owow! oh, look at me, i’m dying” [5]); shifts, when the professor comes onto the scene, to the third person narrative voice (“the terrible snowstorm howled around the doorway…” [8]); is interrupted by the scientific notes of the professor’s assistant bormenthal (“the dog in the presence of zina and myself, had called prof. preobrazhensky a ‘bloody bastard”’ … [62]); and ends in the third person, with the dog as uncomprehending subject of the text and the professor as the allknowing, god-like scientist still experimenting, still creating (“that evening the dog saw terrible things. he saw the great man plunge his slippery, rubber-gloved hands into a jar and fish out a brain …” [128]). shifting species boundaries in the heart of a dog are thus echoed by the shifting narrative voices. 13 erica fudge – at the heart of the home we should beware, however, of reading the heart of a dog as a tale of animal rationality. indeed, if it is an allegory, such an interpretation is impossible for, as john simons has argued, in fables animals are “almost irrelevant. they are merely vehicles for the human and are not, in any way, presented as having physical or psychological existence in their own right” (simons, 119). but, because of the complexity of its narrative technique it is difficult to read bulgakov’s text as simply an allegory, because an allegorical reading that interprets the dog as always symbolising something else silences the presence of that dog as the suffering center of the story, and this is certainly what we have in the heart of a dog. a brief look at one other well known twentieth-century beast fable, animal farm (1945), allows us to see how this silencing works. if animal farm is interpreted as george orwell’s allegory of stalin’s ussr, then the animals as animals disappear from view and are replaced by the humans they symbolize. it is this kind of reading that provides the reason for the fulsome list “explaining” what each allegorical animal stands for in animal farm that is offered by mitzi m. brunsdale in her student companion to george orwell: “the pigs: the bolsheviks who launched the october revolution / the dogs: the soviet secret police (successively, the cheka, ogpu, nkvd, kgb) …” (128-9). this is a list that makes teaching the text simpler but also cancels the possibility of reading it as having anything to say about human-animal relations. in brunsdale’s terms, to read animal farm as a text that might have something to say about animals is to misread it. but in her current work susan mchugh is offering a counter to such a reading, and is interpreting animal farm as also being about animals and humans. hers is a reading that brings back into focus some moral questions about the use of animals in agriculture (see mchugh’s essay in this issue). it could be argued that this latter way of reading is typical of one kind of animal studies approach: it returns the animals to where they have always been in the first place; it reads what is in front of it as if it is what is meant and takes note of the presence of the nonhuman as meaningful in and of itself. but such a reading is also doing something else: refusing to simply interpret animals as symbolic is also a reminder that animals are, in such allegorical readings, absented in order for humans to be made central. regarding animals as only ever symbolic is part of the process of humanning: it reconstitutes the human even as it assumes the human to be a pre-existing category. (my reading of allegory here replicates martin heidegger’s reading of anthropomorphism as a mode of imagining that assumes the presence of a pre-existing and knowable thing called anthropos [see tyler, 273].) whether what can be traced through an animal-focused reading is about human-animal relations (mchugh’s reading of animal farm) or about human struggles to define themselves (my reading –— below — of bulgakov’s novella) is not the most important point. the most important point is that in both such readings the animals have been returned to the center stage — which is where they always were in the first place. like animal farm, the heart of a dog has been interpreted as an allegory, but as a more obviously complex one than orwell’s work is assumed to be; indeed, susanne fusso has argued that “bulgakov’s allegory is both broader and deeper than the political reading in the tradition 14 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) of animal farm implies” (fusso, 286). (although we should remember, of course, that any claim for the greater complexity of bulgakov’s novella is in danger of reiterating brunsdale’s assumption of the simplicity of animal farm.) diana l. burgin reads the heart of a dog alongside the myth of faust, frankenstein, and christian theology. henrietta mondry reads it not only as a comment on political ideas, but also alongside russian folk narratives in which dogs and humans are linked. she argues for the presence of a “significant mystical subtext” in the heart of a dog in which, at the novel’s end, the search continues to “return the dog and the man to the paradise from which they were both expelled when they were one” (mondry, 9). fusso suggests that what is central to the text is “the cult of the new in all its forms: technological, commercial, linguistic, and aesthetic.” here, the transformation of dog into man (and its reversal at the end) is read in broad terms to signify not only the “social and political themes, which lie relatively close to the surface,” but also bulgakov’s scepticism “about the possibility of instant, irreversible metamorphosis through the magical power of language” — which takes the form of advertising and propaganda (fusso, 386-7). i want to add another possible interpretation to these, an interpretation that, i hope, returns the dog to the center of the narrative, not so much where he belongs, as where he has always been. such a reading is based on the assumption that there are three levels of meaning in the heart of a dog, each parallelling the previous one, but each adding a new layer. as such, the political allegory that is found in the novella can be read as only one of a number of possible interpretations that are available simultaneously. ii. there is, then, unquestionably a presence of the social and political that is lurking in the apartment building in the form of the rules of the house committee (and thus in the rules of the soviet state). this is the realm of what althusser termed the repressive state apparatus. the professor’s struggle to maintain his living accommodation as he wishes is, on one level, a realistic recognition of the changes that were taking place after the revolution. but his dealings with the house committee are also an allegory of the struggle many russians were having to hold onto what they valued after the revolution. as well as this, to follow althusser’s lead once again, there are also structures in bulgakov’s novella that are ideological; that reproduce subjects through consent. the internalization of ideology is represented as we move further within the building. thus, in relation to the state-run apartment building as a whole, we can find what i am terming the first level of meaning in the text: its reflections on political issues. but if we shift the focus further inside, to the private apartment, a second level of meaning can be found. here the question is not about political, so much as domestic hierarchy, but upheaval is present once again. in the heart of a dog the order of the home is encapsulated in the relationship between the dog and his master, as is typical of much writing of the period (see fudge 2008, 25-33). here human 15 erica fudge – at the heart of the home status is secured by the dominion of the human and the obedient submission of the animal: obedience here signalling not only canine acceptance of human rules, but also canine agreement with human rules — an agreement that makes human dominion seem natural. sharik’s devotion to the professor is made clear in the opening pages of the novella: “i’ll follow you wherever you like,” he says to the man who appears to be his human saviour (12). if we turn to althusser we can see that sharik becomes a consenting subject of human dominion. althusser writes: the individual is interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall submit freely to the commandments of the subject, i.e. in order that he shall (freely) accept his subjection, i.e. in order that he shall make the gestures and actions of his subjection ‘all by himself’. (169; italics in original) once inside the professor’s apartment sharik, the stray, can no longer roam, and he becomes a house dog. his initial shame at this loss of liberty is quickly transformed into his belief that the collar he has been given is not simply a sign of his being owned, but allows him access to a world never available to him before. “a collar’s just like a briefcase,” he thinks, having walked past a policeman and the building’s doorman without trouble (46): it gives him a certain social status, a status denied to the homeless, masterless stray. the domestic order — hierarchical, anthropocentric — is internalised by the dog, who then, in althusser’s terms, subjects himself. this self-subjection is something that, on a political level, the house committee expect from the professor, and fail to receive. and it is the professor who, likewise, upsets the consensual relationship between pet and master that bulgakov presents. this happens when, following the professor’s experiment, sharik becomes sharikov: when dog becomes human. it is not just that obedience has gone: ‘“i didn’t ask you to do the operation, did i?’ — [sharikov] barked indignantly” (74). it is also that an unspoken law has been broken. if there is a taboo against eating pets, as marc shell has noted (shell, 131-3), there is also a taboo against experimenting on them — as the nineteenth-century vivisector claude bernard discovered to his cost when his daughter fanny, so the story goes, discovered him vivisecting her best friend’s pet: she became estranged from him and went on to form an animal welfare charity (guerrini, 91). thus, when preobrazhensky performs an experiment on the dog to whom he has given a home, and to whom he has become master, he is overturning a relationship that sits at the heart of the symbolism of that home and that is central to conceptions of domestic order. the experiment itself — not what it achieves, but the simple fact that it happens — is an act that overturns order. but we can go further than this: pet ownership is a relationship of difference and of order; it is paternalistic and hierarchical, and thus appears to support the binary opposition human/animal, which in turn creates the human as a category. but where pet ownership should mark out the humanity of the human, the professor’s use of the dog as an experimental tool 16 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) reveals that his humanity, their relationship, and the home are compromised. in the heart of a dog home is a place where the domestic cohabits with the scientific, where the dining room is next door to the surgery, where the private meets the public. this home is where the heart is, but one gets the feeling that the heart here is an actual organ rather than a metaphor. it is not a place of love, but a place of mere life. an allegorical reading misses this. such a challenge to order as can be found in the representation of the home in the heart of a dog thus parallels the wider upheavals that the professor sees in soviet society. a structure of order — i have termed it paternalist, one could also in this context call it tsarist — has been uprooted and chaos has followed. his experiment has brought the disorder of the political sphere inside. but i have already said that there is another version of inside also working in the novella. and this third level moves us from the apartment building, via the apartment, to the self. the nature of the experiment — what happens, not just the fact that it does happen this time — reveals another form of chaos, this time in the construction of the human as a species, and it is here, i think, that we should read the dog as a dog rather than as an allegory. iii. yvonne howell situates her interpretation of the heart of a dog within contemporary debates about eugenics and argues that the text’s “significance lies not in its overworked interpretation as an anti-soviet satire or as a warning against scientific hubris. rather it remains a brilliant exploration of the conundrum of where nature meets nurture in efforts to enhance humankind” (545). for her, the key context for the novella is the debate going on in the soviet union in the 1920s about the nature of the human after the revolution. the new social structure required new humans to live within it, and “[t]he architects of the revolution were confronted with the problem of constructing this new man, one who would be psychologically, physically, and culturally at home in the radically different society envisioned by communism” (546). howell traces different perspectives in the novel — eugenicist, culturalist, evolutionary, biologistic — that reflect existing theories of the time, and thus reads the heart of a dog as, on one level, non-allegorical. preobrazhensky’s experiment is based on real ideas. howell is right, i think, to remind us that the “real” outside of the heart of a dog is not only the political upheaval of the 1920s in the soviet union, but is also a particular scientific debate that was taking place at the time. and her recognition of this also begins to return the dog as dog to center stage. i want to do something similar by turning to another scientific context of the 1920s, which i think is central to the action of the heart of a dog. professor preobrazhensky is a specialist in rejuvenation. of the two of his patients we encounter in this text one is an old man made priapic by the medicine he has received, the other is a lecherous old woman with a young lover she is attempting to keep up with. both are represented as monsters. the professor undertakes such work only because he regards it as leading to a wider understanding: “you don’t think i do these rejuvenation experiments because of the money, do you? i am a scientist.” 17 erica fudge – at the heart of the home his experiment on sharik represents the scientist — rather than doctor — at work. by transplanting the pituitary gland and testicles of a dead criminal into the body of the dog preobrazhensky is attempting to investigate something with general implications: he was, he states, “concerned about something quite different, about eugenics, about the improvement of the human race.” he is not content with exploring the possibilities of changing the individual, but wants to explore “the universal human image” (109). but he has come to realize that the experiment on sharik is just as limited as the rejuvenation work he undertakes: that the pituitary is “the brain itself in miniature. and of no use to me at all” (109). but the science that underpins the professor’s work, while exaggerated and altered as is often the case in creative writing, is real. as adam roberts has noted of science fiction, the science aspects of novels need not be true, but they must “sound like scientific discourse” and must be “built on logical principles” (9). this is the case in the heart of a dog, and bulgakov’s use of contemporary scientific ideas reveals not just an allegorical possibility in the meaning of the experiment (“revolutionary process” is set against “great evolution”), but rejuvenation science becomes a means of exploring the wider implications for thinking about what it is that this thing called the human is in a moment after revolutionary change. in the early twentieth century interest in rejuvenation was sparked by experiments being performed in particular by two doctors: serge voronoff, a russian émigré living in paris, and eugen steinach, in vienna. using different techniques, and developing out of increased medical understanding of the role of the glands and their function in the body, both were convinced they had found a method of reversing the physical decline and loss of sexual potency that was understood to come with age. steinach’s method was to perform a kind of vasectomy on the male patient, allowing in theory for the growth of the “interstitial [i.e. testicular] tissue,” which would in turn enlarge the puberty gland, which would thus “secrete more testicular hormone than before” (armstrong, 49). an operation on women using the application of x-rays to the flesh surrounding the ovaries was also available, and lies at the heart of gertrude atherton’s 1923 bestselling novel black oxen, which was made into a film the same year. the title of the novel is taken from the final lines of w.b. yeats’ verse drama, the countess cathleen (1912): “the years like great black oxen tread the world, / and god the herdsman goads them on behind, / and i am broken by their passing feet” (yeats, scene 5). in a completion of the circle, yeats himself underwent the steinach operation in 1934 (see armstrong). voronoff’s method of rejuvenation was different from steinach’s and is the one that i am more interested in here. put simply, voronoff argued that the grafting of slices of monkey testicle onto the testicles of men would lead to rejuvenation. he began by experimenting with ageing rams in 1917, and the first experiment on a human male took place in 1920. as the historian of these experiments, david hamilton, has written, in explaining his use of the monkey as a donor, [voronoff] said that this choice was initially forced on him by the lack of human donor glands. however, he 18 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) found that not only did the monkey glands succeed, but they survived better than human glands, because of their “virility.” the monkey (a chimpanzee in his early work, a baboon later) was chosen simply because it was so close to man, and voronoff pointed out that this species shared many of the blood groups of man. (41-2) these monkeys and apes were perceived as purer — more natural — beings than humans, and thus as more virile. such purity was a belief that, as donna haraway has shown, can also be traced in developments in primatology taking place at the same time (haraway, 62). what is also clear from these experiments might appear somewhat paradoxical. on the one hand, the use of animals and animal matter in the transformation of human bodies reveals the closeness of humans and animals. but, on the other hand, the fact that humans can use animals as tools in their experiments itself draws a firm line between humans and all other species, and is an assertion of dominion. in a sense, voronoff’s work encapsulates the problem of the human that i am proposing: the performance of the experiment simultaneously reveals human animality and human dominion, and the human is unhumanned and humanned in one movement. one way around this paradox is, i think, found in the understanding that the animal grafts will actually enhance the humanity of the man receiving them; he does not compromise his human status, but rather becomes a kind of superman — mature, experienced, virile, potent (and it is no accident that the desire for virile mature men comes after the decimation of the population of young men which happened between 1914 and 1918). tarzan, first created by edgar rice burroughs in 1912, although never a recipient of an ape graft, becomes a kind of icon of this idea: he was, burroughs writes, “a perfect type of the strongly masculine, unmarred by dissipation, or brutal or degrading passions” (burroughs, 182). it seems paradoxical that his manliness comes from his apeliness, but contemporary conceptions of non-human primate purity might explain this. as with steinach’s work, culture responded to voronoff’s experiments revealing how famous — infamous — they were (see berliner). in 1922 another novel, this time a bitter-sweet comedy, was written about these rejuvenation experiments. the summary — “what this story is about” – from inside bertram gayton’s the gland stealers reads: gran’pa is ninety-five, possessed of £100,000, a fertile imagination, and a good physique. he sees in the papers accounts of professor voronoff's theory of rejuvenation by means of gland-grafting. nothing will satisfy him but that the experiment should be made on himself ... he acquires a gorilla, a hefty murderous brute, and the operation is performed with success. that is only the beginning ... inspired to philanthropy by the thrill of regained youth, gran’pa 19 erica fudge – at the heart of the home decides to take a hundred or so old men to africa, capture a like number of gorillas, and borrow their glands ... in this novel it turns out that it is not, after all, the experiment that has made gran’pa youthful, but hope. the gorilla is merely a living — castrated — placebo. voronoff was not the only surgeon to perform this kind of operation, however. in a 1968 letter preceding the publication of his translation of the heart of a dog michael glenny suggested that “bulgakov probably got the idea for [preobrazhensky] from a real russian rejuvenation surgeon, bogomolov, who was famous in the ‘twenties for his use of monkey glands’” (glenny, gle/2/1/1). and in america a quack, “dr.” john r. brinkley, set up his own clinic in kansas, where he used goat testicles, and came up with the advertising slogan, “you are only as old as your glands” (hamilton, 40). interest in brinkley can be traced in 1922, the same year as the publication of the gland stealers, in the buster keaton two-reeler, cops. in one scene keaton takes his thin, toothless and weary horse into a yard where a sign reads “dr. smith goat gland specialist.” the horse emerges frisking and performing leaps. a downtrodden keaton stands, looks at the sign, looks at the horse, looks down at himself, and with an embarrassed shrug reenters the yard on his own. a more serious account of a slightly different but analogous use of animal matter to aid rejuvenation is offered in arthur conan doyle’s sherlock holmes short story, “the creeping man,” which was first printed in the strand magazine in 1923. here the taking in of the animal comes to pass by other means, but the outcome is the same as in the other cultural representations of the rejuvenation experiments. holmes’ puzzle centers on the question, “why does professor presbury’s faithful wolf-hound, roy, endeavour to bite him?” (164). the answer, it turns out, is that professor presbury is no longer fully professor presbury. in an attempt to regain his lost sexual potency, the professor, an ageing academic, has been injecting himself with dr. lowenstein (“lion stone”) of prague’s “strength-giving serum” from the black-faced langur, the “biggest and most human of the climbing monkeys” (183). while the professor has gained vitality, he has begun to lose his humanity: “he was crawling, mr holmes — crawling! he was not quite on his hands and knees. i should rather say on his hands and feet, with his face sunk between his hands” (168). as holmes notes at the story’s conclusion, “it was the monkey, not the professor, whom roy attacked” (184). as in the heart of a dog, conan doyle links the experiment with different levels of chaos: the use of animal matter signifies human dominion, and yet what follows from it works in the other direction. the domestic disorder that first signaled the problem takes the form of the dog attempting to bite his master — reiterating the link between orderly dog ownership and orderly human status. in fact, the attempt to bite the master is imagined by holmes as a parallel event to the master’s animalization. we thus begin with the human — uncompromised in its power and superiority — and we end with the creeping man. but, of course, we never really begin 20 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) with the uncompromised human at all. instead there is the vision of the impotent human attempting to regain what has been lost: there is unhumanning and rehumanning. iv. the recognition of the ease of this slide from human power to human frailty is presented in a particular way in the heart of a dog. about halfway through the novella the professor’s assistant bormenthal rejoices at the apparent success of the experiment: “oh what a glorious confirmation of the theory of evolution! oh, the sublime chain leading from a dog to mendeleyev the great chemist!” (67). but six lines later his joy turns to despair as he realizes the wider implications of the professor’s discovery, when he recognizes that this chain is indeed an evolutionary one, and is not static like the classical great chain of being. bormenthal’s assertion of human superiority, illustrated by the figure of “mendeleyev the great chemist,” slides into a horror of what is still unknowable and as such is an acknowledgment of the limit of the human. if evolution provides a link between the dog and the great chemist, where is the boundary between animal and human? where is the difference? bormenthal writes: “now as i walk along the streets i look at every dog i meet with secret horror. god knows what is lurking in their minds” (67). suddenly — and logically — as human reason can transform a dog into a man, the specter of non-human subjectivity rears into view. such we might term a particularly post-darwinian scepticism (on pre-darwinian scepticism see fudge, 2006). if there is an evolutionary link between a dog and a human, how can one say for sure that there is nothing going on in the animal’s mind? where in the second half of the sixteenth century michel de montaigne wondered philosophically, humanely, “when i play with my cat, who knows if i am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?” (401), bormenthal has darwin to aid his contemplation of what jacques derrida has called “the abyssal limit” of the human (derrida, 381). how do we know our dogs aren’t contemplating us, rather than us contemplating them? the experiment, which should symbolize the absolute object status of the dog, in fact reveals that the separation of human and dog is impossible, and it is only a symbolic reading of bulgakov’s text that will miss this. only an analysis that pays attention to the animal will recognize that what is being held up for scrutiny in the heart of a dog is not only homo sovieticus, but homo sapiens more generally. bulgakov reveals the human to be an impotent, priapic, monstrous construction engaged in using animals as objects even while acknowledging the closeness of humans and non-humans. but as well as working within an existing philosophical framework, bulgakov also seems to outline some of the connections made later by althusser between the political sphere and human identity — a fact highlighted by the publication date of the english translation of the heart of a dog: political revolution also uproots personal identity. in this novella, as in wider speculations about the nature of the human by montaigne, derrida, and numerous others, there lurks at the heart of the home, then, a most unhomely being: 21 erica fudge – at the heart of the home unhomely meaning, literally, unheimlich, uncanny — defined by nicholas royle as: “a peculiar commingling of the familiar and unfamiliar. … it can consist in a sense of homeliness uprooted, the revelation of something unhomely at the heart of the hearth and home” (1). what bulgakov reveals to us is the most dislocated thing of all: the human. and sitting by its side, playing with it is, as ever, the animal. works cited althusser, louis. "ideology and ideological state apparatuses (notes towards a definition)," in lenin and philosophy and other essays. trans. ben brewster. london: nlb, 1971. armstrong, tim. “giving birth to oneself: yeats’ late sexuality.” yeats annual 8 (1991). 39-58. atherton, gertrude. black oxen. (1923) london: john murray, 1924. berliner, brett a. “mephistopheles and monkeys: rejuvenation, race and sexuality in popular culture in interwar france.” journal of the history of sexuality 13:3 (2004). 306-25 brunsdale, mitzi m. student companion to george orwell. london: greenwood press, 2000. bulgakov, mikhail. the heart of a dog (1925). trans. michael glenny (1968). london: harvill press, 1999, burgin, diana l. “bulgakov’s early tragedy of the scientist-creator: an interpretation of the heart of a dog.” the slavic and east european journal 22:4 (1978). 494-508 burroughs, edgar rice. tarzan of the apes (1914). london: penguin, 1990. curtis, j.a.e. manuscripts don’t burn: mikhail bulgakov: a life in letters and diaries. london: bloomsbury, 1991. darwin, charles. the origin of species (1859). london: penguin, 1968. derrida, jacques. “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” trans. david wills, critical inquiry 28 (winter 2002). 369-417. doyle, arthur conan. “the creeping man” (1923), in the case-book of sherlock holmes (1927). london: penguin, 1951. fudge, erica. “bad manners at the anatomist’s table: tyson’s pygmie and the naturalisation of truth,” in wendy wheeler ed., the political subject: essays on the self from art, politics and science. london: lawrence and wishart, 2000. 14-30 22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) _____. brutal reasoning: animals, rationality, and humanity in early modern england. ithaca: cornell university press, 2006. _____. pets. stocksfield: acumen press, 2008. fusso, susanne, “failures of transformation in sobač ’e serdce." slavic and east european journal 33:3 (1989). 386-99 gayton, bertram. the gland stealers. london: herbert jenkins, 1922. glenny, michael. the michael glenny archive, gle/2, housed at the school of slavonic and eastern european studies, london. guerrini, anita. experimenting with humans and animals: from galen to animal rights. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2003. haber, edythe c. mikhail bulgakov: the early years. cambridge, mass: harvard university press, 1998. hamilton, david. the monkey gland affair. london: chatto and windus, 1986. haraway, donna. primate visions: gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. new york and london: routledge, 1989. hirschbein, laura davidow. “the glandular solution: sex, masculinity and aging in the 1920s.” journal of the history of sexuality 9:3 (2000). 277-304 howell, yvonne. “eugenics, rejuvenation, and bulgakov’s journey into the heart of dogness.” slavic review 65:3 (2006). 544-62. keaton, buster, and eddie cline (dir.). cops. first national pictures, 1922. leblanc, ronald d. “feeding a poor dog a bone: the quest for nourishment in sobač ’e serdce.” russian review 52:1 (1993). 58-78. mchugh, susan. “animal farm’s lessons for literary (and) animal studies.” humanimalia, 1:1 (2009). www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/issue01/mchugh.html. milne, lesley. mikhail bulgakov: a critical biography. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1990. 23 erica fudge – at the heart of the home mondry, henrietta. “beyond scientific transformation in bulgakov’s heart of a dog.” australian slavonic and east european studies 10:2 (1996). 1-10. montaigne, michel de. the complete works. trans. donald m. frame. london: everyman, 2003. mordsley, jessica. “tracing origins in paleoanthropology.” the oxford literary review (special issue "derridanimals") 29 (2007). 77-101. roberts, adam. science fiction. london: routledge, 2000. royle, nicholas. the uncanny. manchester: manchester up, 2003. shell, marc. “the family pet.” representations 15 (1986).121-153. simons, john. animal rights and the politics of literary representation. basingstoke: palgrave, 2002. tyler, tom. “if horses had hands …’ society & animals 11:3 (2003). 267-81. wolfe, cary. animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. chicago and london: u of chicago p, 2003) yeats, w. b. the countess cathleen (1912). http://www.online-literature.com/yeats/ countesscathleen/5/ accessed 22/10/2009 microsoft word freeman-pollan h u m a n i m a l i a 1:1 carrie packwood freeman appetizing anthropocentrism michael pollan, the omnivore’s dilemma: a natural history of four meals. new york: the penguin press, 2006. 450 pp. $26.95 hb, 16.00 pb. it seems like ethics of what we eat has finally made it on the menu at bookstores these days, with popular books cropping up on agricultural ethics, factory farming, local and organic farming, and gmos, from such authors as barbara kingsolver (2007), bill mckibben (2007), eric schlosser(2001), derrick jensen (2004), matthew scully (2002), and peter singer & jim mason (2006). but perhaps no one deserves more credit for making food, especially meat-eating, a mainstream political issue than journalist michael pollan, author of several best-selling books on the topic as well as many indepth articles in the new york times magazine. in one of his most recent best-sellers, omnivore’s dilemma, he tackles his own ethical quandary over whether we should eat animals, and if so, under what conditions. with his characteristic depth and knack for embracing complexity, he follows four different nonhuman animals from their plant-based sources in either industrial corn, organic grains, pastoral grass, or forest vegetation to their eventual place on his plate via a factory farm (cow), industrial organic farm (chicken), eco-friendly family farm (chicken), and a hunting excursion (pig), even killing the animals himself in the last two instances. while he admits that meat-eating is both physically and morally messy, in the end he concludes that it’s not wrong in principle, so long as we americans pay attention to the practice, and support hunting or small-scale pastoral farming, because he deems them more ecologically responsible and humane than large-scale animal farming. as an animal rights activist and scholar, i experienced the typical mixed emotions i always encounter when reading pollan’s work. i start off being excited at his harsh critique of the meat industry and his seeming promotion of ethical vegetarianism as he ardently stands up for nonhumans, but i end up disappointed by his eventual convoluted justification for eating certain animals. it’s an exercise in frustration as my initial feelings of kinship and gratitude give way to a feeling of betrayal. the truth is that because he does not want to be a vegetarian, he never fully embraces that diet; hence his goal in this book is to find a way that he can feel good, or at least better, about eating animals. i’ve never encountered a meat-eater who agonizes more than pollan about the ethical complexities and transgressions of eating animals. most people who are upset by animal killing would just choose to look away, but his thesis is that seeing leads to 64 carrie packwood freeman – appetizing anthropomorphism caring and responsible choices, so he wants to be able to look, acknowledge, and still kill, but honorably. his descriptions of his experiences slitting chickens’ throats and shooting a wild pig are laudable for their honest self-reflection, combining abhorrence with a bit of pride. he does admit in the end that vegetarianism provides more moral clarity than his choice to eat meat (hence there’s less need for a herbivore’s dilemma book), similar to singer & mason’s (2006) claim that vegetarianism is, ironically, easier for americans than conscientious animal consumption. but pollan ultimately denigrates vegetarians as naïve and arrogant, as they fail to accept “reality.” reality for him is a biological history of humans as omnivores not herbivores, although he fails to engage theories of a herbivorous origin for homo sapiens (mason, 1997). and pollan’s vision is for humans to return to a supposed state of symbiosis and respect that is presumed (at an undisclosed place and time) to have existed between humans and the nonhuman animals they kill: that direction just happens to be the direction from which we came — to that place and time, i mean, where humans looked at the animals they killed, regarded them with reverence, and never ate them except with gratitude. (362) pollan believes this utopian vision of our past is possible for our future if slaughterhouses had glass walls. if americans were forced to confront the brutality, we would surely eat less flesh and demand more humane conditions: “maybe when we did eat animals we’d eat them with the consciousness, ceremony, and respect they deserve” (333). ironically, this solution could be accused of being more utopian and less realistic than a vegan’s vision of just eating plants. in addition to being accused of a certain naivete, vegans and animal activists are often othered by being referred to as “animal people” (a somewhat redundant title, as pollan acknowledges that we are all animals). this dissociation presumably gives pollan increased credibility with a mainstream audience, as he is not so “extreme” as to promote animal rights or veganism. his agenda is one with which most decent americans could presumably identify — animal welfare. he simply wants to eat meat with a clean conscience. in this way, he remains within what cox (2006) refers to as the “symbolic legitimacy boundaries” (61) of mainstream discourse. this does not help the cause of animal rights, as laveck (2006) and francione (1996) have argued that when animal advocates promote animal welfare as the goal, it reinforces a hegemonic discursive environment where an animal rights discussion, such as seriously considering veganism, becomes unreasonable and ridiculous. 65 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009 this is reinforced in pollan’s conception of veganism as one extreme (sentimentalism) and factory farming as the other (brutality), with his “humane”-meat-in-moderation solution being a reasonable compromise. it seems reductionist to characterize animal rights merely as excessive sentimentalism, when there are morally rational arguments made on its behalf (which pollan cites), where philosophers such as singer and regan align it with an anti-discrimination position such as feminism and civil rights, causes which one would likely not reduce to mere sentimentalism. perhaps more disturbing is how pollan often lumps these extremes of veganism and factory farming together, as if they are equally responsible for preventing americans from eating what he deems should be their natural diet: the disappearance of animals from our lives has opened a space in which there’s no reality check on the sentiment or the brutality; it is a space in which the peter singers and the frank perdues of the world fare equally well. (306) one can hardly claim that vegetarianism is faring as well as factory farming, and it seems untenable to imply that animal activists have an agenda like the meat industry, who prey on public ignorance and make billions in profit from consumers’ food purchases. pollan’s conclusion that factory farming survives only on people’s ignorance — “a journey of forgetting” (10) — is reminiscent of derrida’s (2004) prediction that the industrial violence against animals must change; the “spectacle man creates for himself in his treatment of animals will become intolerable” (71) because of the negative “image of man it reflects back to him” (73). pollan thinks that you cannot take true pleasure in eating until you not only visually acknowledge your meat production but participate in a more humane and sustainable form of obtaining it. in support of greater accountability and awareness, pollan advocates for increased integrity in pricing that accurately reflects food’s costs “honestly,” via paying more for more responsible production instead of buying “irresponsibly” priced cheap meat (243). in the end he thinks that the main right americans should have is to see what is going on and make up our own minds about its ethicality in hopes that we will begin to value food according to social responsibility standards, not just price. but advocates of animal rights will be left wishing his conclusion was not just the right for human consumers to look, and hopefully to make more informed choices, but the rights of other animals not to be used as mere food objects in the first place. 66 carrie packwood freeman – appetizing anthropomorphism i do give pollan credit for making an attempt to include an animal rights perspective over the course of an animal ethics chapter, but it is ultimately not much more than a sophisticated animal welfare position, as advocated primarily by singer (via animal liberation and personal emails with pollan). the utilitarian focus on suffering sets up pollan and the reader for the inevitable conclusion that it is ethical to eat nonhuman animals (presumably even if one does not need to) as long as their suffering is mitigated and they are given a happy life (either via a pastoral farm or freedom in the wild). while necessity for killing should receive greater consideration in pollan’s otherwise nuanced moral examination, it is largely overlooked in favor of emphasizing that eating nonhuman animals is natural and even ecologically beneficial. he is concerned with reducing animal killing and accuses vegans of killing more animals and being less ecologically sustainable than people who eat some grass-fed cows, citing davis’s (2003) study about small field animals inadvertently killed during mechanized crop harvesting. pollan did not cite matheny’s (2003) refutation that a vegan diet is responsible for one fifth as many animal deaths, as veganism makes more efficient use of the land. additionally, pollan argues the need to have animals on the farm for natural soil fertilization, which is a legitimate ecological issue, but does not offer other solutions of compost or human animal manure. one of pollan’s main theses in opposition to animal rights is that our relationship with domesticated farmed animals is symbiotic and not exploitative; therefore, if humans just allow other animals a safe and somewhat natural place for them to live for a period of time under our protection, they will earn a more humane death than they might have in the wild. pollan is sincerely concerned about animal welfare and embraces the utilitarian position that it is better to lead a happy life for a short time than never to have existed, so he criticizes the animal rights position as leading to farmed animal extinction. while it is true that most animal-rights positions argue against domestication (hall, 2006; regan, 1983), pollan’s position fails to acknowledge that most farmed animals have heartier and more robust ancestors that still exist in the wild. philosophers often have a field day with issues such as these, which might lead to a conclusion that all animal species, human included, have a moral obligation to breed, so long as some happiness will result. animal rights arguments do not oppose procreation, but they ask for nonhumans to be able to live freely and mate and breed on their own terms, not to have their lives managed via humans, no matter how benevolent. pollan characterizes nonhuman domestication as prey to be natural evolution, symbiosis, rather than conceiving of it as an inversion of nature where humans start to unnaturally control other species. one could acknowledge that this control is for purposes of securing excess food rather than for ecological reasons of basic necessity or 67 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009 the health of the ecosystem. pollan doesn’t consider questions of whether humans could be domesticated morally (by any species, even other humans) and whether it is natural for us to also be prey, as he rarely acknowledges our animality when questions of nature versus culture arise in debates over animal rights. it is only the nonhuman animals who are to be considered holistically as a species subject to nature’s rules, more so than being considered individually as human animals are. pollan’s inherent anthropocentrism is again revealed in a claim that “animal people” show contempt for nature and predation, implying vegetarians are ironically uncomfortable with acknowledging humans’ position as animals. for different reasons, derrida (2004) also critiqued a similar humanist paradox of animal rights, noting that it used humanist notions of rights to argue for a post-humanist position of nonhuman rights. i agree that animal rights advocates should emphasize human animality (freeman, 2008), but not just in the solely “negative” way that pollan does, relating our animal nature only to violence such as killing and rape. we can acknowledge our mutual status as animals who must kill to survive when necessary, yet still allow that kinship to enable us to see some “humanity” in other social animals, some of whom also make moral choices, including deciding who not to eat and generally avoiding enslavement and exploitation of others. but when it comes to pollan’s arguments in favor of natural predation, like many environmental ethicists, he advocates a holistic view of other animals as prey who must be sacrificed for the good of the species or ecosystem (including a pastoral farm ecosystem), yet he doesn’t then acknowledge that perhaps the human animal should also be considered holistically as a prey species under this nature-based moral logic with less respect for the individual. regan (2002) acknowledged this paradox of “environmental fascism” (107) in a holistic ethic, and argued that an individual ethic could extend from animals to plants to benefit whole ecosystems. i ask if our own cultural values which allow for a blend of individual and group rights can’t also be applied to human dealings with other animals, where we try to privilege individual rights as much as possible while still respecting the rights of the group. pollan’s astute acknowledgement that we may need two ethical systems — one for humans and one for nature — comes close to finding this balance, but it bifurcates humans from nature too drastically, while conveniently putting all other animals in the holistic category of nature not culture, allowing them to be sacrificed but not us. for those who want to explore animal welfare and ecological issues related to their food choices, this book is highly useful, but it does not serve as a reference for a fair perspective in support of veganism and animal rights. however, i find it to be a useful 68 carrie packwood freeman – appetizing anthropomorphism citation for environmental and animal welfare arguments that critique animal agribusiness, and it certainly would elicit interesting classroom debates on agriculture, meat-eating, and hunting. it addresses these moral issues in an accessible and fascinating, yet factual, scientific, and highly contextualized narrative that is especially good at connecting production and consumption and for showing us the true cost of our food choices — the toll that the standard american diet of the last half century is taking on other animals, public health, taxpayers, and the environment. whether or not you agree with his conclusion to be a conscientious omnivore, his complicated and highly self-reflective ethical journey to discover a way to morally eat other animals will likely have you agreeing that the politics of food is indeed ethically messy, and it’s hard to find a guilt-free lunch. references cox, j. robert. environmental communication and the public sphere. thousand oaks, ca: sage, 2006. davis, stephen l. “the least harm principle may require that humans consume a diet containing large herbivores, not a vegan diet.” journal of agricultural and environmental ethics 16:4 (july 2003). 387-394. derrida, jacques. for what tomorrow: a dialogue (cultural memory in the present) (j. fort, trans.). stanford, ca: stanford up, 2004. francione, gary l., rain without thunder: the ideology of the animal rights movement. philadelphia: temple up, 1996. freeman, carie packwood. struggling for ideological integrity in the social movement framing process: how u.s. animal rights organizations frame values and ethical ideology in food advocacy communication. (doctoral dissertation, university of oregon, 2008). dissertation abstracts international, aat 3325661. hall, lee. capers in the churchyard: animal rights activism in the age of terror. darien, ct: nectar bat press, 2006. jensen, derrick. a language older than words. white river junction, vt: chelsea green, 2004. kingsolver, barbara. animal, vegetable, miracle: a year of food life. new york: harper collins, 2007. 69 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009 laveck, james. “compassion for sale? doublethink meets doublefeel as happy meat comes of age.” satya (september 2006). 8-11. mason, jim. an unnatural order: why we are destroying the animals and each other. new york: continuum, 1997. matheny, gaverick. “least harm: a defense of vegetarianism from steven davis’s omnivorous proposal.” journal of agricultural and environmental ethics, 16 (2003). 505511. mckibben, bill. deep economy: economics as if the world mattered. oxford: one world publications. 2007. regan, tom, the case for animal rights. berkeley, ca: u of california p. 1983. _____. “how to worry about endangered species.” in d. schmidtz & e. willott (eds.), environmental ethics: what really matters, what really works. new york: oxford up, 2002. 105-108. schlosser, eric. fast food nation: the dark side of the all-american meal. boston: houghton mifflin, 2001. scully, matthew. dominion: the power of man, the suffering of animals, and the call to mercy. new york: st. martin’s griffin, 2002. singer, peter. animal liberation (2nd ed. rev.). london: random house, 1990. singer, peter & jim mason. the ethics of what we eat: why our food choices matter. emmaus, pa: rodale, 2006. microsoft word filippi pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 2:2 massimo filippi pissing angels translated by marco maurizi and irema della pina (this essay first appeared in italian as “angeli urinanti” in liberazioni: rivista di critica antispecista, no.1 [2010]: 81-91.) since its origins, western metaphysics has been concerned with the definition of humanity and what is proper to man (for instance when investigating language, reason, responsibility, independence and rights). this ontological tradition recognizes most, if not all, human properties as opposed to what is considered a non-human impropriety, traditionally articulated in terms of “natural” and “divine.” that is to say that the human territory borders on animality — the “natural” region closer to us — on one side, and on“angelity”— the mundane region of the “divine”— on the other. in short, the human being consists of a double lack: it lacks the shortcomings of other animals and the golden completeness of angels. yet this distinction between what is human, and what is “bestial” or angelic is far from being innocent. on the contrary, it hides a double move: by an appropriating exclusion — which degrades animals to things, goods, labor — and an ex-propriating inclusion — which equates ourselves to angels in order to deny our fragile and mortal corporeality. this double move allows us to place ourselves outside of nature and to have the whole of existence at our disposal as if we were its absolute owners. two recent books, though still within a framework of thought that remains all too human, might help us reconsider these human boundaries: the boundary with the other animals is the spirit of le mal propre by michel serres, whereas the boundary with angelic creatures is the matter of fallen angels by harold bloom. “everybody likes the smell of his own shit” [serres 8]. serres begins by posing a couple of questions: “how do living beings dwell in a place?,” how do they “appropriate their space, how do they dwell in it, how do they live in it?” (6). he continues with a long list of compelling examples that remind us that living and having are almost indivisible (how can someone live without having a nest, a den, a cave or a room?). as a consequence, he contends that “property is what is dirty” (7): the common practice humans and other animals use to acquire the property of what is beyond their massimo filippi — pissing angels 51 bodies — and therefore not immediately their own — consists of marking it, branding it, with their own physical traces:. i believe that the act of appropriating, which is necessary to survive, has an animal, ethological, corporeal, physiological, organic, vital origin … and that it does not derive from agreement or from some positive right. i can perceive in it a hint of urine, excretions, blood, decaying corpses … its foundation derives from the foundation … its foundation derives from the living or the dead body. (15; emphasis in original) other animals delimit their territory by marking it with whatever their body is able to emit — urine, howls, cheerful warbles. humans are no different: a soup smeared with saliva is no longer appealing to others and becomes our own, a bed soaked in sweat is repulsive to others and becomes our own, etc. following this line of intra-specific reasoning, serres interprets several cultural phenomena as biological marking as well: the birth of agriculture (taking possession of the land by laying manure, urine or faeces); the birth of a nation (whose territory is marked by the blood of dead soldiers); marriage (“thanks to his ejaculation of semen [a man] thinks he can appropriate those places where the act of his desire is accomplished” [31]), and the sacred (“the first human being that, after draining a child or a pig and after making him run around the perimeter of the spot, poured the sacrificial blood all over the place, could fence it and make a temple out of it” [37; emphasis in original]). however, unlike other animals, human beings seem to have no limits in this process of marking the existence: the growth of volume of rubbish, corporeal and physiological excretions — urine, sperm, blood, corpses … —, mark an extension of the appropriated space — lair, farm, town, village—, and a quantitative increase of those who appropriate — individual, family, nation … (37; emphasis in original) the mechanism we previously described is here fairly obvious: human beings lack the “natural” lack that delimits the emissions of other animals, the extent of the space where they can settle, and the number of possible owners. the absence of this lack generates an extraordinary and unsustainable excretion growth rate, which, according to serres, should be held responsible for two human and “cultural” phenomena: on the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 52 one hand, subjective excretions are being replaced by more objective waste matter (what we normally refer to as pollution) while, on the other side, appropriation is made more acceptable through a semiotic contamination (i.e., logos, brands, advertising, signatures, money) that colonizes the environment and domesticates humans and their own consciousness. hence, human property is takes shape, once again, by an opposition: the very growth of man’s appropriation becomes his property. for sure, animals, too, appropriate shelters for their dirt, but they do so [only] in a psychological and local way. homo [sapiens] appropriates the global physical world through his hard waste and […] the global human world through his soft waste. (55; emphasis in original) “dog shit.” we cannot deny serres’s observation of the growth and the modification of human excretions compared to those of the animals. similarly, we cannot ignore serres’s suggestion — even if it is only implied — that humans also delimit their own property with physical traces belonging to “our animal brothers” (41), taking possession of their bodies: [the animals] gave us their blood, their flesh, bones, skin. according to what unwritten right do we assume that animals, plants and the world belong to us? in short, that such sensations, such beings are given to us and we can quietly dispose of them? (29) the description that serres offers of the structure of those places defined by corporeal excretions is also correct: [this structure] consists […] of three layers. the first, the inner one, protects the inhabitant by its softness; the last, on the outside, threats eventual invaders with its hardness. holes, transits, doors, or porosities open up in the middle-layer […] making things close, go out, pass through, attack, hopelessly wait [….] that’s the triple way in which the boundary works: it defends, protects, interdicts or permits to pass through. (49) why, then, as mentioned before, do we consider serres’s analysis too “human?” the answer lies in his implicit acceptance of the [aforementioned] metaphysical ontology, an acceptance that justifies its conclusions. considering that what is proper to man is massimo filippi — pissing angels 53 shaped in opposition to the impropriety of the animal, we just need to (re)trace that “property” in order to put things back in order, to approach a more benevolent and less appropriating/polluting management of the world. indeed, the non-deconstructivist part of serres’s essay simply states that human beings must commit themselves to transform their condition from owners of the world to tenants of the world by abandoning the claim of property through physical emissions. in this way, they will bring cosmocracy and peace will come, conceived as a new age of a fleshless and therefore traceless man-god, a man that becomes disincarnated into god and a god that becomes incarnated into man, because the other is in the image of the one (77 ff.). the main problem is that serres’s thesis presupposes that human beings are able to give up their property (if by property we mean a bodily residence in the world). if physical beings can survive thanks to the marks that define their proper territory, this renunciation can only happen if we deny our animality. indeed, serres leaves no room for doubt on this matter: we must, then, rethink [the property right] and go beyond its actual form which is still too near to animal behavior. we must evolve, one more time, on the clumsy way of humanization. (72; emphasis added) little by little, we have to leave our animal condition behind: the condition of mammals or carnivores that urinate on the edges of their lair. who could ever believe that the cartesian motto — let’s control nature and make it our own — would have equated us to dogs and lions as for hardness’ concern, and to nightingales for the softness? poor descartes! he was doing nothing but confirming our animal customs. (26; emphasis added). that is to say, that what is proper to man consists of being able, unlike other animals, to get rid of his/her own body — a kind of excretion, deep enough to cancel the possibility to emit other excretions — to become spiritualized, to increase our speed until we detach ourselves from the earth and become absolute and free of boundaries (homo nullius that “belongs only to himself” [81]), displaced to a different place where we get the chance to look at “the world and to things as the total amount of stocks” (86). another, possibly more effective, way to evade the condition of abjection that the metaphysical tradition assigns to humans, is to depart from the meaningless search for humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 54 what is proper to man and move towards a different search, aimed at tracing the impropriety of animality that exists in man. here, two considerations that actually run throughout serres’s essay become fundamental. first of all: the property of animals is never private and never deprived (here to be understood as both proper and damaged: damaged qua proper and proper qua damaged); animals mark their territory through excretions, but they do not fence it off, so that it is never completely closed, it is always open and closed at the same time.1 some animals cannot trespass it while some others can. for instance, when a male lion marks his borders by urinating, some animals are not allowed to enter (other adult male lions) and some others are (female lions, puppies, and other species too, including the gazelles). what is proper to the animal is defined by being not proper (im-proper), the place of the animal is not based on a pure exclusion as it is the case for the metaphysical man — chiefly, it is a place of encounter, which of course can turn into a conflict. this is fairly evident when serres reminds us of the three forms of physical boundaries, a combination of hardness and softness made possible by an external excretion and therefore necessarily porous. surely private property is relevant to animals (other adult male lions cannot trespass it); yet only when referring to man does privation mean nothing but property. when the inside itself of our place is made dirty, taking all the softness away, the three kinds of borders turn into an impermeable, permanently closed barrier. animal properties, being improper, constitute a between, and can be run through by negativity; human private property on the other hand, pretending to be proper, denies the negation, denies the between that should form it, and takes the shape of exclusion and clash. the second consideration (which is deeply intertwined with the first one) is that excretions do not move in a single direction. even though we keep thinking that excretions move from the body to the environment and not the other way round, empirically speaking this is not the case, since the environment too can appropriate the body and make it dirty. for instance, mice hug the walls to get marked by their environment so that they can find the way back to their nests at the end of their wanderings. in other words, there is a bidirectional biosemiosis of scent marks that moves from the body to the environment and from the environment to the body. however, the bidirectionality of excretions is not just an empirical question, but also (and above all) an actual ontological issue: there is no such thing as a body and an extra-physical environment — this would again reflect a dualism still under the influence of a metaphysical exclusion of the animals. there is instead an environmental body, or a bodily environment, where leib “and” umwelt merge and trace each other: motility expands the animal body into massimo filippi — pissing angels 55 the environment, and sensorium expands the environment into the body. only the spiritualized body of the metaphysical human can sharply detach itself from the environment, whereas animal bodies and environment constitute another between. what runs between these two betweens, one correlated with the property (the proper, what is owned, and its characteristics) of the animals and the other correlated with the environmental body, is what serres misses: one correlated with animal property (and their proper, their owners and their characteristics) and the other correlated with the environmental body. it is then worth to re-examining the previous allusion to descartes, or better to what the “cartesian” brand stands for. if we follow adorno and derrida, descartes has indeed ratified our bestial customs (and bestiality is what is proper to man2), as serres maintains — not because he was assimilating us to dogs and lions, though, but rather because he was concealing that “the mansion of culture is built of dog shit” (adorno 366). because he was trying to remove the absolute other, the irredeemable that runs through us: physicality, animality, vulnerability, and mortality, the extra-logical and irrational element that should be part of a rationality that aims at being reasonable. in other words, the philosophical search for “what is proper to man,” as stated by derrida, should begin to follow (taking into account both following and being followed) the “monstrously other” (beast 108): one must not be content to mark the fact that what is attributed as “proper to man” also belongs to other living beings if you look more closely, but also, conversely, that what is attributed as proper to man does not belong to him in all purity and all rigor; and that one must therefore restructure the whole problematic. (56) once we have acknowledged the logic of the between, what is proper to man is what is improper to him/her. everything is a trace, and the human can be traced in the nonhuman, that pisses, “shits and fucks” (deleuze and guattari 1). man is also becomingtrace. the fallen angel’s dilemma. in fallen angels, bloom provides us with a definition of the human too, this time turning his attention not to animals but to angels. first, bloom tells us first that fallen angels are not necessarily demons or devils: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 56 “fallen angels,” though theologically identical with “devils” and sometimes with “demons,” retain a pathos and a dignity and a curious glamour. (13) he then explains that “the center of any discussion of fallen angels has to be adam, who seems to me far greater a fallen angel than satan” (20). this means that “fallen angel” and “human being” are “two terms for the same entity or condition” (53), “the angelic and the human are virtually identical” (56). following the gnostics, bloom goes on to affirm that the fall did not happen before the creation of adam, as saint augustine suggested, but on the contrary we fell at the very moment of our creation (28-29), in the moment when we became separate beings and, therefore, “subject to death”: we once were the immortal adam, but as soon as we became subject to death we became the fallen angel, for that is what the metaphor of a fallen angel means: the overwhelming awareness of one’s mortality. (63) we are irremediably fallen because we are indivisible from negativity, from death, and from illness. we fell because we are transient, finite, and mortal beings. it seems here that bloom suggests a vision of what is proper to man that includes the monstrous other. why, then, have we said that this essay still too human? it is because speciesism is so infesting that it keeps appearing where it should have been eradicated, and the “anthropological machine”3 that seemed to have been stopped for a moment keeps spinning back in haste. indeed, bloom agrees that the relationship between humans and fallen angels is mediated by the exclusion of animals and by the ontological difference between us and our body: the dilemma of being open to transcendental longings even as we are trapped inside a dying animal is the precise predicament of the fallen angel, that is to say, of a fully conscious human being. (63-64) what makes “a fully conscious human being,” what allows the mise-en-scène of the “fallen angel’s dilemma” is the fact that “we are trapped inside a dying animal.” there goes the never-ending litany of metaphysics again: death — the absolute impropriety — does not belong to us, it belongs to the animal body that holds us captive, a body in which we can incarnate or from which we can disincarnate but which is never us, our “poor living flesh” (landolfi 35). here the animal seems to point towards the impropriety of man, only to be denied once again through a divinizing purification: massimo filippi — pissing angels 57 otherness is the essence of the angels; but then it is our essence also. that does not mean that the angels are our otherness. rather, they manifest an otherness or potential akin to our own, neither better nor worse but only gradated to a different scale. (23) after getting rid of the animal, the otherness loses every monstrous connotation, it becomes a “potential” and can be used to describe a sort of theological taxonomy. darwin asserted that humans and animals differ in degree and not in kind. bloom instead, echoing the whole history of metaphysics, maintains this difference yet inclines toward the angel. surely we are mortal, but our mortality immediately takes the shape of immortality (regardless whether if it is religious or secular as in the hamlet’s dilemma), —the heroic, authentic, and anticipating awareness of one’s own death. as a consequence, the dilemma of the fallen angel concerns us and not the animals: as heidegger said, animals do not die, they simply perish (heidegger 291). following derrida once again, the endless list of ethological observations that show that some other species are also aware of death is not relevant for the present discussion. we should instead “restructure the whole problematic”; in other words, in order to move the emphasis from a “cognitive” experience of death to a corporeal one — the awareness of physical vulnerability —, it is necessary to affirm that what is proper to man is never pure, that it does not belong to him/her as a private property: mortality resides there, as the most radical means of thinking the finitude that we share with animals, the mortality that belongs to the very finitude of life, to the experience of compassion, to the possibility of sharing the possibility of this nonpower, the possibility of this impossibility, the anguish of this vulnerability, and the vulnerability of this anguish. (derrida, the animal 28) since our deep awareness of our own death is part and parcel of a vaster corporeal sympathy of shared vulnerability and nonpower, it would be challenging to exclude the animals from relationship with the fallen angel. the irredeemable rest. contrary to what our tradition proclaims, the borders between human, animal, and angelic are unstable and porous. angels and animals do not mark humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 58 ontological divisions, rather they are helpers that undermine our millennial vision of the world, thresholds towards the in-human. both the fallen angel (since it does not exist) and the pissing animal (since its existence is denied) are messengers of the negative: such a “potency of not,” despite being constantly ignored by our tradition, constitutes — along with the “potency of” — potency before turning into an act, as described by aristotle. fallen angels and pissing animals are figures for what could have been and did not become, for the infinite worlds that the creation of the present excluded from existence. therefore, they are different ways to state the same impropriety that is behind us, through us, and ahead of us. they mark the irredeemable rest that comes before (both ontologically and temporally) the division/characterization of bios; they allow us to think a zoē that, being impotence, cannot be saved, yet embodies the extreme and paradoxical hope of a possible redemption. this is why angels and animals are asking us to renew what we refer to as thought and, as a consequence, what we believe is, together with ethics and politics: in our culture, man has always been thought of as the articulation and conjunction of a body and a soul, of a living thing and a logos, of a natural (or animal) element and a supernatural or social or divine element. we must learn … to think of man as what results from the incongruity of these two elements, and investigate not the metaphysical mystery of conjunction, but rather the practical and political mystery of separation. […] it is more urgent to work on these divisions, to ask in what way — within man — has man been separated from non-man, and the animal from the human, than it is to take positions on the great issues, on socalled human rights and values. and perhaps even the most luminous sphere of our relations with the divine depends, in some way, on that darker one which separates us from the animal. (agamben 16) metaphors for the potency that precedes the act, angelic falls, and animal abjections dislocate ethics and politics from the province of what exists and from a transcendental ontology that speaks with the oppressive voice of “you must” or with the delirious voice of “i want.” the dislocation moves to a territory that can be traced by what could have been, and consequently hints toward a radically immanent ontology, to what we can (not) do in our condition of transient, pissing bodies. notes 1) this is why serres believes that “the womb, the bed and the tomb” are the “three fundamental places” of dwelling, that “the verb to dwell is connected […] to shelters massimo filippi — pissing angels 59 which are necessary in moments of weakness and fragility: the embryonic stage, the risk of the birth, the infant during lactation, the caress of the loving gift, the sleep, the peace, the refreshment … rest in peace; happy life, act of love, darkness of the tomb, horizontality of the night” (13-14) and that we can consider “places the sharing of habitable space, […] a necessary fragmentation […] for the continuation of life in general” (ibid.). 2) cf. jacques derrida, the animal 63-64; and the beast 140. 3) agamben, 33-39. works cited adorno, theodor w. negative dialectics. trans. e. b. ashton. ny: continuum, 1973. agamben, giorgio. the open: man and animal. trans. k. attell. stanford: stanford up, 2003. bloom, harold. fallen angels. new haven: yale up, 2007. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. trans. d. willis. ny: fordham up, 2008. —————. the beast and the sovereign, vol. i. trans. geoffrey bennington. chicago: u of chicago p, 2009. heidegger, martin. being and time. trans. j. macquarrie and e. robinson. oxford: basil blackwell, 1985. serres, michel. le mal propre : polluer pour s'approprier? paris: pommier, 2008. microsoft word mccorry-wadiwel-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:2 reviews seán mccorry “thus, i give up the spear!”: sovereignty and violence against animals dinesh joseph wadiwel, the war against animals. with a foreword by matthew calarco. leiden: brill, 2015. xii+302 pp. $75.00. what would it mean to think through the politics of human-animal relations by beginning not with an analysis of mutually enriching relationality, co-shaping, and becoming-with, but rather with an attentiveness to the violence of human sovereignty over nonhumans; a bloody, seemingly endless war carried out beneath a veneer of peaceable civility? how would we have to reorganize our politics, ontologies, and epistemologies to accommodate this primary fact of domination? these are the questions which animate dinesh wadiwel’s the war against animals, a timely and important contribution to a burgeoning literature on the politics — or more precisely, the biopolitics — of human-animal relations. as the title suggests, wadiwel’s book argues that our relations with animals constitute a war of unprecedented violence, albeit one which is radically asymmetrical and largely hidden from view. in wadiwel’s estimation, this state of war is licensed by the unlimited human sovereignty over the seán mccorry -“thus, i give up the spear!”: sovereignty and violence against animals 175 nonhuman, and this sovereign prerogative impacts on seemingly benign as well as nakedly violent aspects of human-animal relations. the war against animals makes the case for a significantly revised theory of political sovereignty which can account for the peculiar and excessive violence we humans do to our nonhuman others. engaging with animal-oriented political thinkers such as gary francione, will kymlicka, and sue donaldson, as well as familiar figures from european theory (foucault, derrida, and agamben are all discussed at length), wadiwel emphatically rejects the sovereign pretensions of humanity, which he identifies not only in the manifest violence of industrialized slaughter, but also in the quotidian (and supposedly peaceable) practices of living with companion animals. taking issue with kymlicka and donaldson’s analysis of animal sovereignties, and with the advocates of great ape sovereignty, wadiwel suggests that animal political agency must not be thought on the basis of their similarity to human forms of social organization; that is, on their ability to be incorporated within a humanist conceptual vocabulary of representation, citizenship, population, territory, and security. these inherited concepts are critiqued for belonging to a pernicious (and bloody) tradition of biopolitical sovereignty, and a tradition, moreover, which is thoroughly implicated in the human domination of nonhuman animals. if, as agamben describes, biopolitics is an expression of the distinction between humans and animals — a veritable moving zone of conflict — then we might perceive that any model of political membership that prescribes citizenship based upon inside/outside relationships will already be biopolitical, and will already reinscribe the borders between human and animal, even if the terms of that political membership might change. (248) the first two chapters of the war against animals carefully set out this critique of biopolitics, joining a growing literature on nonhuman biopolitics by scholars such as cary wolfe, nicole shukin, and matthew chrulew, among others. chapter 3 interrogates the logic of “immunity,” through which, “quite literally, we kill and make animals suffer to immunise (or securitise) a conceptualisation of the human” (60). reading francione together with karl marx and john locke, chapter 4 analyzes property rights as central to human sovereignty over animals. chapters 5 and 6 focus on the privatization of sovereignty; that is, “the process by which war is conducted utilising individual humans as agents within a broader conflict” (60). chapter 6 in humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 176 particular will be of interest to animal studies scholars who research companion animal relationships, as it contains a sustained critique of donna haraway’s important work on companion species. wadiwel argues that, in a state of generalized war against animals, personal actions work in concert with institutional forms of violence that constrain our companions in particular ways to meet human utility. epistemic violence allows us to name these relations, almost without a moment of self-reflection, under the guise of “friendship.” (219) chapters 7 and 8 engage directly with theories of sovereignty, with chapter 7 engaging with liberal theorists of animal sovereignty (discussed briefly above), and chapter 8 arguing that sovereignty itself is a “groundless claim” (62) through which humans declare their superiority over (and thus their right to dominate) animals following their victory over them. wadiwel argues that “force in this case precedes the epistemic claim of superiority, and not the other way around. human ‘superiority’ is nothing more that the artifice of our own practices of violent domination over other animals” (62). animal welfare advocates find little sympathy here. for wadiwel, welfare is best theorized as a strategy of power which, more often than not, is thoroughly complicit with (and indeed instrumentally invaluable to) the machinery of killing. referring to temple grandin’s famous curved corrals which spare cows destined for slaughter the spectacle of their peers going to their deaths, wadiwel argues that, in addition to accounting for the psychological “welfare” of the animals, “the curves are also there to subdue resistance and enable the effective and smooth process of slaughter, maximising human utilisation (and profit) value” (12). wadiwel’s critique of welfarism is central to his analysis of the relationship between sovereignty and the existing paradigm of animal ethics. in his account, sovereignty precedes ethics. we dominate animals because we can, and we retroactively construct myths of our own superiority to justify this domination. most animal ethics (and certainly all animal welfare theory) treat this domination as an established fact, and seek to negotiate the terms of our ongoing domination: we offer welfare to those we have dominion over, and wish to continue to dominate for our own benefit, but have the freedom to provide forms of limited consideration that do not temper our dominion right (captured perfectly in that diabolical phrase “unnecessary suffering”). (22) seán mccorry -“thus, i give up the spear!”: sovereignty and violence against animals 177 as an alternative to this, wadiwel proposes that we work to undo human sovereignty, rather than constructing an ethics which is antecedent to the fact of domination: “the challenge, the ethical challenge no less, is to identify and unpick sovereignty in the first instance, rather than attempt to construct an ethics after sovereignty has organised hierarchical divisions” (55). certainly, the war against animals will raise objections from scholars who are sympathetic to harawayan readings of human-animal relations. there is little sympathy in wadiwel’s book for the rhetoric of encounter, co-shaping, and relationality which are the hallmarks of the dominant theoretical perspective in animal studies. for wadiwel, in so far as these potentially enriching encounters with animals leave the presumption of sovereignty intact, they are just another front in an interminable war. his political investments place him closer to work done under the banner of critical animal studies, not least in his suggestion that veganism is a necessary but insufficient condition for the remaking of human-animal relationships beyond the prerogatives of sovereign domination. the war against animals is written in an engaging prose style, and is animated throughout by a refreshingly honest anger at the violence and horror of the human domination of animals. for those of us who are committed to ending — rather than managing — this violence, wadiwel’s book is an important and necessary intervention in animal studies scholarship. microsoft word gordon-pregowski-wlodarczyk h u m a n i m a l i a 8:2 reviews joan gordon running dogs of capitalist poland michał piotr pręgowski and justyna włodarczyk. free market dogs: the human-canine bond in post-communist poland. west lafayette, in: purdue up, 2016. xxiii + 186 pp. $34.95 pbk. i spent a year as a fulbright distinguished chair at marie curie skłodowska university in lublin, poland, where i taught in the american studies department and had a wonderful time. i had the opportunity to observe and meet a number of dogs when offduty and noticed a few differences between polish dogs and american ones. the most notable difference was how many fewer polish dogs had been neutered. more dogs in poland wore muzzles and fewer people cleaned up after their dogs. still, the dogs i met personally were affable family pets, able to get along with humans, other dogs, and, in one case, a charming tortoise, which is to say, they were very much like their american counterparts, if often of different breeds or of different versions of their breeds. so i was eager to see the more thorough and informed view of polish dogs that this volume provides. since 1989, when poland ended communist rule, it has changed markedly, and its relationship to pets has changed as it embraced capitalism and western social joan gordon – running dogs of capitalist poland 187 influences. free market dogs traces those changes from a number of disciplinary angles, with contributions from sociology, anthropology, literature, and the arts, as well as more concrete areas such as animal training. the brief introduction locates these changes and makes the convincing claim that the discussion here “can be generalized and may help readers understand the transformation to democracy and its impact on the postcommunist societies of the former eastern bloc” (xii). the introduction is followed by a helpful timeline, “four paws of the third republic of poland,” that draws parallels among political, economic, and animal-rights developments in poland. seven chapters by diverse hands form the body of the collection. the opening chapter, by editors pręgowski and włodarczyk, summarizes the position of dogs in democratic poland. they argue that “activism related to animals is influenced by poles’ increased feelings of agency as citizens of a democratic republic ” (2), although they find that such important institutions as animal shelters still leave a great deal to be desired. more developed, it seems, is the role of dogs (or, at least, their owners) as consumers. chapter two, “toward mutual understanding, respect, and trust: on past and present dog training in poland,” is by agnieszka orłowska, who is herself a dog trainer. the inclusion in an academic publication of an essay by a practice-based expert is welcome. the article begins with a broad historical summary of dog-training techniques before narrowing down to the specific polish context. orłowska points out that much information about animal behavior from the western sector was simply unavailable before 1989, and with this added information, attitudes toward dogtraining have changed, moving toward positive reinforcement and “emotionalcognitive education” (35). co-editor justyna włodarczyk contributes “canine performance sports in poland: another look at the dog training revolution.” again, training is the focus and again the author provides an historical perspective, although the emphasis in this chapter is more theoretical, using the ideas of foucault on power, for instance, while building on the previous chapter’s more practice-based approach. włodarczyk sees the new emphasis on agility sports in poland as “a sign that dog guardians are actively seeking new ways of interacting with their dogs: ways that reflect postmodern notions of identity, exhibit a changed understanding of what it means to care for a dog, and prioritize the nurturing of canine happiness over expectations of blind submission” (62). chapter four focuses on pedagogy, examining “dog-assisted therapy and activities in contemporary poland.” agnieszka wojtków’s contribution explores “dogoterapia” or “cynoterapia” in poland. she writes from experience, having worked in the field from 2006 to 2013. as with the other chapters, she begins with a general historical overview, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 1 (spring 2017) 188 moving to a summary of the subject in poland, and finally describing the state of the field at present. she emphasizes that country-wide standards are lacking but necessary, and suggests some of the problems in implementing such standards. i must admit that, as interesting and informative as the first four chapters were, i found the last three the most engaging. chapter five, “representations of dogs in recent polish memoirs and novels,” by małgorzata rutkowska, compares several polish examples of dog memoirs alongside american examples “to determine culture-specific differences in the way the human-canine relationship is experienced and shown” (108). while she finds a number of similarities “in plots and motifs,” she also finds significant differences. the most intriguing is how, while in american memoirs the dog functions as a “‘savior’ to his guardian,” in polish narratives it is most often the human who saves the dog. also thought-provoking is her finding that “polish books rarely end with the dog’s death or function as grief memoirs” (133) as american ones so often do. this chapter reflected wide reading in both american and polish literature and provided clear and thoughtful analysis. the sixth chapter considered how recent polish art has addressed the problem of animal testing, organized around the artistic treatment of laika, the dog sent into space by the soviet russian space program. “the future and the moment of animal suffering in space: representations of laika in polish contemporary art,” by dorota łagodzka, focuses on three representations of laika. after relating the story of the historical laika, she analyzes the works of art, and the chapter’s interest lies in the art works and their descriptions, rather than on more general theses and conclusions, offering an indirect reminder of how exciting polish contemporary art is. the final chapter, “pet cemeteries in poland and beyond: their histories, meanings, and symbolism,” is by co-editor (and the only male contributor), michał piotr pręgowski. following the standard general history of the subject, we learn that only after the fall of communism did pet cemeteries appear in poland although, as in the field of pet therapy, there are as yet no common standards for these cemeteries. the influence of catholicism is prevalent in the polish adoption of the custom, with few religious symbols present. nevertheless, the poles adapt their catholic practices to the mourning of pets. where every november 1 poles mark all saints day by visiting the graves of their loved ones, leaving flowers and votive candles, they now “mirror” this ritual in pet memorial day on the first sunday of october after october 4: the feast day of saint francis of assisi and world animal day (169). and although they do not mark joan gordon – running dogs of capitalist poland 189 the graves with crosses, they do often leave rainbow-colored pinwheels to symbolize the rainbow bridge evoked in american pet-mourning practice. this collection does not answer all my questions about polish dogs. i would still like to know why poles are reluctant to neuter their pets, for instance, and why, as i have also observed, they are so fond of miniature yorkies. but it is a solid, well researched, and insightful contribution to the social role of animals in changing political and economic climates. the emphasis on historical context throughout makes it accessible to people unfamiliar with polish history and culture, as well as to those who want to put that history and culture in a wider context. microsoft word sax-newkirk-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:1 reviews boria sax the cost of human exceptionalism pamela newkirk, spectacle: the astonishing life of ota benga. new york: harpercollins, 2015. 336 pp. $14.84 hc. in september 1906, a pygmy named ota benga was exhibited in a cage in the monkey house by the new york zoological park. bones were scattered around his enclosure, suggesting that he had been a cannibal, and a sign told of his provenance. an orangutan was later also placed in the cage, ostensibly to keep him company. benga brought in huge crowds, but the exhibit immediately provoked protests, especially from the african-american community. after a while, benga, who had up till then shown a pleasant disposition, became uncooperative and almost violent, so he was allowed to move freely on the grounds, but thousands of raucous tourists followed him about. after only about three weeks, the exhibit was discontinued. ota benga then lived in a series of foster homes. for a while, he managed to thrive in a rural community around lynchburg, va, where blacks retained some african traditions. he taught young men techniques of hunting, cooking, and gathering that he had learned in childhood, but he gradually became increasingly homesick. as world boria sax -the cost of human exceptionalism 149 war i began, his hopes of ever returning to his native land faded, and his friends dispersed. in 1916, benga committed suicide by shooting himself in the chest. ota benga is remembered today as a symbol of the close association at that time between science and racism, as well as because he remains surrounded by a good deal of mystery. there is certainly no shortage of records about him, but they are full of gaps and unreliable. pamela newkirk’s spectacle: the astonishing life of ota benga is not the first biography of him, but it is the most comprehensive to date. she has consulted a vast number of archival records, as well as newspaper and magazine articles, yet many key details, especially concerning how he was brought to the united states from the congo and the exact nature of his captivity, remain uncertain. such problems in reconstructing events are common in periods of genocide, such as, for example the armenian holocaust in 1915 or the holodomor (the artificially created famine in ukraine) in 1932. king leopold ii of belgium, who ruled the congo at the time benga was brought to america, was a despot on the scale of stalin, hitler, and pol pot. in 1884, the european states had held a convention in berlin, in which they divided africa among themselves, without the participation of a single indigenous representative from that continent. no country wished to govern the congo, since they judged that it would be unprofitable, but leopold persuaded the assembly to give it to him, not precisely as a colony but as a personal protectorate. he then made the congo profitable, by enslaving the entire country, at a cost of, according to most scholars, ten million human lives. though the historical episode is now largely forgotten, the name “congo” can still evoke a slight shudder of terror to this day. as newkirk recounts in detail, benga was first obtained by the explorer samuel phillips verner, along with a few other pygmies, for display at the saint louis world’s fair in 1904. in his earliest account, verner simply said that he had found benga in a remote part of the forest. in later accounts he claimed to have rescued benga from a tribe of cannibals, which, as newkirk points out, seems to be an incident borrowed from daniel defoe’s robinson crusoe, in which the hero rescues the black man who will become his devoted servant. subsequent accounts in verner’s writings and in the press generally mention cannibalism, but differ in their details. in some, he claims to have bought benga from his persecutors for a bolt of cloth and a pound of salt, but in his final version it was not him but the belgian army that saved the pygmy. after benga’s death, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 150 the lynchburg news reported that he had once told an unnamed individual that a white stranger, presumably verner, had kidnapped him at the age of 13, but there is no way to verify that account. benga returned home briefly after the world’s fair, but once again left with verner, this time for new york. in summary, it is uncertain whether verner purchased benga as a slave, captured benga, or simply offered the pygmy the opportunity to emigrate. the truth may be more complicated than any of those scenarios, and perhaps incorporates elements of each. whatever happened, as newkirk points out, benga had surely already been traumatized even before his departure. verner, as she amply documents, was, in addition to being mentally unstable, a racist and, even more significantly, an apologist for king leopold. newkirk ends her book with a passage of wonderful eloquence, modesty, and simplicity: “while a single volume cannot being to right the grave injustice that so tragically marked benga’s life, it can help untangle the web of egregious fallacies that mark our historical record and dishonor his memory” (260). without a doubt, she has succeeded in that goal. further progress will probably be made not by uncovering some long-lost document, since all records appear to be tainted, but by reconstructing the ambiance, and the way of thinking, that prevailed at the time. it is hard even to discuss the events without risking violations of good taste, but that, of itself, is a sign of unresolved tribulations. to head off accusations of such a transgression, i will say that the suffering of verner is obviously not comparable to that of benga. nevertheless, it seems to me likely that verner as well had been traumatized by what he witnessed in the congo, which might explain his constantly changing accounts. perhaps his claim to being a savior and friend to benga was not simply propaganda but also a psychological necessity, a way of dealing with extremely stressful events. although newkirk dismisses the possibility, i think the claim to friendship may have had, at least sometimes, an element of truth. after all, contradictions do not show whether one is lying or responding honestly, only that, whatever the intent, one is not doing a very good job of either. despite their vast differences, benga and verner had shared experiences that they could not communicate with anybody else. each was, nevertheless, a reminder to the other of events that both would have preferred to forget. i may be indulging in novelistic speculations here, but it is hard to understand the events in any other way. boria sax -the cost of human exceptionalism 151 our difficulty in understanding the incident is not due solely to either apologetics for king leopold or to repression of our racist past. the zoo in the early twentieth century was, in many ways, very much unlike the sanitized institution that we know today. people would often put on formal attire to visit, but, otherwise, it was a pretty rowdy place, and there was a good deal of interaction between animals and human beings. despite the claim of being educational, the zoos were often not very different from the side shows, “freak shows” if you will, in the circus. the zoo made very little or no pretense of placing the animals in a natural environment. there was, from our contemporary point of view, amazingly little care taken for safety of either of the animals or the people. one brilliant but eccentric herpetologist in chicago’s brookfield zoo allowed poisonous snakes to move freely about her office and possibly beyond, convinced that they had been tamed. the feeding of live rodents to anacondas was a popular, though controversial, event, which brought gasps of horror and fascination. people talked to and often fed the animals, even offering them alcoholic drinks. it was not unusual for indigenous people such as the inuit or sami to be exhibited alongside beasts, although placing a human being, benga, in the monkey house had been unprecedented. the boundary between human beings and animals was a constant source of boisterous, if uneasy, humor. it was not always easy to tell whether people were laughing at the animals, at themselves, or at society. it was not always easy to separate showmanship from science or entertainment from education. perhaps the public enjoyed the presentation of benga as a sort of proverbial “wild man,” including the titillating suggestion of cannibalism, while knowing full well that it was just a show. it could also be that benga, despite his traumatized condition, could have at times played along, acting out the role he had been assigned. he was at times characterized in the press as a “zookeeper,” and his purpose was to mediate between the animals and human beings. mostly to get a better idea of the prevailing ambience, i have done a bit of research myself into the early new york zoological park, especially in the archives of the new york times and other newspapers around the start of the twentieth century. after benga departed from new york, the gap he left was, within a few months, filled by a popular chimpanzee named baldy, who was constantly mentioned in the newspapers, and, though he did not cause as much controversy, may well have been as big an attraction as the pygmy who preceded him. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 152 indigenous people on public display were, at the time, shown in settings that emphasized their reputedly “primitive” character. the apes, by contrast, were presented in ways that made them appear as “human” and “civilized” as possible. at many zoos around the turn of the century, apes were taught to smoke pipes or cigars, drink wine, play musical instruments, and ride in carts drawn by dogs. at the new york zoological park, they would, among other acts, be displayed sitting at a table and drinking tea from fine china. an article in the portsmouth daily times dated october 3, 1910, tells how baldy, who had a reputation for unusual intelligence, was the first ape to learn to learn to eat with a knife and fork. he was then assigned to teach this skill to the orangutans, who sat with him in chairs around a table. soon, a quarrel broke out over food, and baldy hit one of the orangs with a chair. another incident, reported in the goshen mid-week news on october 31, 1911, seems very clearly reminiscent of benga. the authorities decided that baldy would be promoted to the rank of zookeeper, and he was given a custom-made uniform, including shoes to wear on the job. then it was time to show him about the entire zoo. everything went well, and a crowd of over a thousand visitors soon gathered to watch, until baldy entered the reptile house, and was spooked by the anaconda. he tore off his shoes, ran off, and started climbing around the grounds, tearing his uniform to shreds, until the keepers finally managed to lead him back to the monkey house. needless to say, the crowd loved the spectacle. baldy continued to represent the zoo, often dressed in human clothes, and greeted visiting dignitaries, including president taft, by shaking hands. none of this in any way constitutes a vindication of the new york zoological park. it is possible that the gesture of making baldy a zookeeper was even a way of mocking benga in absentia. furthermore, there is the question of exploitation of baldy, whose biography has yet to be written, and the other apes. the new york zoological park, as an ostensibly educational institution, was trying to popularize darwin’s theory of evolution, which was usually interpreted as a story of biological “progress,” to the masses. to dramatize the continuity between animals and people, they needed a figure to play the proverbial “missing link,” a role that was first taken by benga and later by baldy. the institution did not necessarily expect everyone to take their displays completely seriously, and, despite their pedagogic aspiration, they were presented in something like the spirit of vaudeville. baldy, in sum, was what the zoo authorities had initially intended benga to be. boria sax -the cost of human exceptionalism 153 the proverbial “missing link” is a sort of archetypal figure in modern culture, still played, with variations, by various celebrities, from pro-wrestlers to writers. the sharp division that we have made between the realms of nature and civilization creates a need for intermediaries. but the figure is ultimately a fantasy, as is the human exceptionalism on which it is based. any attempt to actually live, or to assign, that role will probably lead to tragedy, as the life of ota benga shows. figure 1. ota benga with a chimpanzee, from the logansport pharos tribune, sept. 29, 1906. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 154 figure 2. two pictures of baldy in his zookeeper's uniform, from a postcard published by the new york zoological park. microsoft word acampora-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 2:1 ralph acampora penguinalia stephen martin, penguin. london: reaktion, 2009. 224 pp. $19.95. it will be best for you to know something of the present reviewer’s background and predilections, in order that you may place my commentary in context. i consider myself a lifelong penguin aficionado: the fascination began in childish infatuation with form and appearance (those cartoon caricatures were so darn cute!), grew through textbook studies of life-cycle and natural history (actual birds described by ornithologists like roger tory peterson), and has produced an intellectualized affiliation and even totemism of personal vocation and human aspiration/adaptation (this animal can “fly” only by going deep down, like the philosopher’s untergang; wings of fantasy yield to acceptance of limits and cultivation of alternative aptitude, like happier members of homo sapiens). given these starting points, it should be no surprise that i find congenial the author’s approach to his subject via narratological identity interpretation: “our stories reflect the world around us and make us what we are” (167); “over the last 500 years the penguin has become a much loved and malleable symbol” within such storying (169). much of the book elaborates this overarching thesis. for stephen martin, “they [penguins] have become vehicles for the expression of our hopes, fears and humours” (105). indeed, the penguin sometimes serves as a mirror or doppelgänger of (hu?)mankind, “confuting that definition of man to be animale bipes implume, which is nearer to a description of this creature” (49). at other (though often linked) times, penguins take on the aspect of comedians or vaudeville characters—e.g., as “entertainers in zoos” (107). so close do these birds track our spiritual composition that martin observes “they began to convey messages, not just of life’s lessons but of other aspects of the human relationship to the world” (89). for example, penguins have served as envoys of environmentalism: “characters in the drama of man’s cruelty and carelessness of his impact upon the natural world” (115), they elicit an ecologic “sense of fragility or vulnerability” (165). last, lately yet not least, the penguin has played proxy roles in social controversies wherein the species or particular specimens become vectors of gender politics and/or family values concerning issues of homosexuality and/or monogamy (see chapter 5). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 98 martin closes his account with extended allusion to a factual tale that carries bioethical and ecosophic import—it’s the story of a penguin captured by aussie crayfishers, befriended cross-species (tamed/named), and lost back to the sea after an extended period among those featherless bipeds who live mostly on land. the final scene of departure is poignant, as recorded by one dr. nicholls: after mutually sporting about in the surf for a while, billy starts to hunt on his own—whereupon “we called to him by name, and, turning his head, he answered once or twice with a loud squawk, but kept paddling oceanwards all the time. he had suddenly realized that he was once again in the open ocean” (169, quoting hull). i cite this passage not to indulge hackneyed nostalgia for “nature’s call of the wild,” but rather to draw attention to a very different, even contrary, undertow—one we might call the cultural conscience of exclusionary language. for notice that the original storyteller used gendered/personalized diction in reference to billy-the-feral, whereas our author recounts the tale utilizing abstract/reifying indexicals and pronouns instead: “the erect-crested penguin that [not who] in 1910 made its [not his] appearance on a beach in lorne,“ afterwards it [not he] calmed down,” the fishermen “called out to the penguin, encouraging it [not him] to follow them,” and so on (169). this contrast shows, i think, a profound liability of perspective in martin’s social-historical method: “the penguin” can appear in this light always only as an object of human agency, never as a subject or locus of self-generating intentionality or meaning. possibly a pitfall of this reaktion series as a whole, it can and should be avoided nonetheless and i certainly hope at least some of the other authors manage(d) to grant their species greater voice(s). there are a couple other aspects of the book that potential readers might find it handy to know in advance. the photos and other graphics are various and engaging, though not always as well-woven into the writing as one would like (in this last respect it pales in comparison to my still-favorite illustrated piece of textual penguinalia, john sparks and tony soper’s 1967 classic penguins). martin does pretty well to provide global coverage—still, his antipodean pedigree and more generally commonwealth bias show through and may leave american or continental european (not to mention mainland asian or african!) audiences somewhat alienated. overall, this is a good—not great— volume: worth the money and time if readily available, but not something for which to go out of your way in hunting down or shipping from afar. microsoft word snyder-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:1 emily snyder the ugly animal: aesthetics, power, and animal-human relationality1 pigeon feces (photo by emily snyder) being situated in an ecological crisis for the past couple of decades, one can find numerous resources for thinking about the environment, nature, and animals. green politics deal with animal-human relations, albeit in very diverse ways. kerry h. whiteside describes ecological thought within english-speaking debates as too focused on anthropocentric versus ecocentric views — that is to say, protecting nature for our own human interests versus recognizing that nature has its own existence (2). in this latter part of the debate, nature is often romantically framed as pure, and as something emily snyder – the ugly animal 137 that is to remain untouched (haraway, when species meet [wsm] 10-11). whiteside sets up a discussion between english and french ecological thinkers, and argues that french accounts of ecology are quite different and offer something unique and necessary to this discussion. he describes, “french green theorists tend to study how conceptions of nature and human identity intertwine. they elaborate green thought more often by reciprocally problematizing ‘nature’ and ‘humanity’ than by refining the distinction between them” (3). whiteside characterizes french theoretical approaches as “noncentered,” as “skeptical humanism,” or “ecological humanism” (3). what whiteside speaks of is similar to posthumanism — a field of study that currently does not appear to be unique to english or french speaking theorists, despite whiteside's above claims. in its project of breaking down divisive boundaries and binaries that predominate in “western thought”2 posthumanism attempts to understand embodiment as a complex intermingling of the human, the animal, and technology (gane). posthumanism also aims to break down the divides of nature/culture and animal/human (amongst many other related binaries). further, it is described as “a condition of uncertainty” (gane 432), and n. katherine hayles remarks, “i regard the posthuman, like the ‘human’, as a historically specific and contingent term rather than a stable ontology” (160). in this essay, my focus will be on donna haraway and michel serres — both of whom are hesitant to be labeled posthumanists (haraway, “encounters” 102; haraway, wsm 17-19; wolfe xi). haraway and serres come from different philosophical traditions; perhaps not in the sense that whiteside speaks of concerning ecological focus, but rather, their genres and traditions of writing are quite different. i will focus on haraway’s when species meet (2008) (wsm) and serres’s the parasite (1982).3 though haraway and serres are rarely treated together, they are not far removed from each other. they have an unacknowledged, once-removed relationship via bruno latour (haraway is influenced by latour, and latour considers serres a mentor, however haraway speaks little of serres). haraway and serres are both concerned with relationality4 and aim to imagine an ethic of relating that does away with divisions between animals and humans, objects and subjects. they are both concerned with power. their approaches to relationality attempt to provoke readers to consider how to engage in interspecies relations in non-romanticized ways amidst untidy realities, and to consider the broader implications and impacts of such politics. they undertake this similar task of troubling inter-species engagement in different ways. i arrived at this place of bringing the two together by way of the pigeon, and its feces. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 138 the pigeon, largely via its feces, is an abject animal, particularly in north american urban centers. turning first to haraway to make sense of my relationship to this creature, i encountered a compelling, yet problematic, politics of animal-human relations premised on respect and caring. i believe haraway’s politics, while concerned with power and committed in theory to a practical, non-romanticized mode of relating with nature and animals, needs to be pushed further to engage more realistically with disgust. confronting the negative cultural discourses that construct the pigeon as a revolting “rat with wings” (jerolmack, “pigeons became rats”; jerolmack, “animal archeology”), i turned to serres’s work on parasites to think further about disgust. serres offers a parasitic relationality that is both potentially transformative and helplessly paralyzed and abusive. challenges arise as well when applying serres’s ideas to ugly animals. working between the complexities of haraway’s politics of respect and serres’s politics of abuse, i will try to articulate an approach to animal-human relationality more alert to the problem of disgust. aesthetic considerations, which are generally absent in haraway’s and serres’s work, are a key part of understanding how we get along. i believe haraway’s and serres’s insights must be pushed further, via aesthetics, to reflect more deeply on conflict and the power dynamics that saturate animal-human entanglement. an analysis of negative aesthetics in particular complicates politics and practices of living together and i consider how much ”indigestion,” as haraway advocates, we can handle in our politics (wsm 74). with human-pigeon relationality in mind, the main question guiding this discussion is: how might a focus on ugliness, disgust, and abjection help us to further understand animal-human relations in theory and practice? the notion of the ugly animal and a politics of disgust,5 when centered on the pigeon, suggest additional complexities and questions to be considered when articulating models of interspecies relationality. the mode of relationality i would like to articulate includes acknowledging that ugliness, disgust, and abjection are part of our everyday lives and relationships. i do not wish to reinforce the binary of beauty/ugliness or to essentialize particular traits in particular others. rather, i aim to dwell with the tension of acknowledging ”ugliness” as something that is simultaneously illusory and real — that is to say that ugliness can be complexly considered a social construction or just a form of categorization, as well as a lived reality that shapes the everyday. further, negative aesthetic judgments are culturally and time specific, they are not static. a politics of disgust encourages thinking about conflict and becoming uncomfortable with the categories and labels that ”we” use and how they fit into broader power structures. emily snyder – the ugly animal 139 by embracing disgust, and thus discomfort, one can allow conflict into our politics in ways that critically examine what sustains conflict and how it exists as it does, while also knowing that conflict cannot be eradicated (although it can be understood as fluid). this politics of disgust is also a challenge to ethics-based approaches to relationships premised on notions of openings and callings. as i discuss below, disgust abounds and it is crucial to recognize how it can more quickly lead to closure than to an opening in which one faces and acknowledges the other. while much of the discussion here is a critique of haraway and serres, i raise questions throughout that more generally aim to encourage animal studies scholars to face the limitations of our engagements with animals. haraway’s politics. throughout haraway’s work, one finds a variety of figures that aim to challenge boundaries and rigid categories — the cyborg (simians), monsters (“promises of monsters”), the coyote (“cyborgs, coyotes”), and most recently the dog. haraway maintains that these “figures are never innocent” (“cyborgs, coyotes” 338) and that her still popular cyborgs can be understood “as junior siblings in the much bigger, queer family of companion species” (csm 11). her recent focus on animals connects to her previous work on science and technology and can still be described as a feminist project: none of this work is about finding the sweet and nice — “feminine“ — worlds and knowledges free of the ravages and productivities of power. rather, feminist inquiry is about understanding how things work, who is in the action, what might be possible, and how worldly actors might somehow be accountable to and love each other less violently. (7) haraway's work on interspecies relations rests on the thesis that we must do away with human exceptionalism and eradicate the ”great divides,” as bruno latour names it, between nature and culture, animals and humans (wsm 9). we ought not believe that humans are better, that we are the opposite of animals, and that we exist independently from the rest of the living and non-living beings that make up the universe. this is not to say, however, that we are the same as animals. dealing primarily within western philosophical thought on animals, haraway calls for a recognition of co-species interdependence and entanglement within ”naturecultures.” while the term ”companion animals” is used most often to describe pets, work animals, and leisure animals, the term ”companion species” is much broader and is to include all “critters”6 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 140 on the earth (wsm 134-35; csm 14-15). it is important to note that haraway’s work emphasizes the tactile and the visual in face-to-face encounters with companion species, whether such encounters include a physical proximity or something more figurative or virtual. the relevance of this point will become clearer in my own discussion of aesthetics and disgust. in a somewhat levinasian tone, haraway contends that in co-constitution “the partners do not precede the meeting; species of all kinds, living and not, are consequent on a subjectand object-shaping dance of encounters” (wsm 4). the overall task in haraway’s politics is to ”become with” (a phrase she borrows from vinciane despret [wsm 16-17], conveying that it is in the encounter with another that we become who we are). for haraway “every species is a multispecies crowd” (165). to work with multispecies entanglement, haraway draws on isabelle stengers’s concept of cosmopolitics, which welcomes messy politics (106). for haraway, living with and becoming with has to cause indigestion, which is a call to embrace discomfort. yet how do we actually recognize the practice of becoming with, and what are the advantages of this approach to animal-human relationality? haraway emphasizes that each encounter has a material-semiotic aspect. we must interrogate the materiality and the historicity of each encounter — by considering the histories of all parts of the encounter (histories of place, space, race, gender, age, etc.) and how they converge to create a new one. we must be perpetually undoing and questioning the world around us if we are to become with, or to become worldly, as haraway advocates. a key part of embracing this relationality is respect. haraway insists that “species interdependence is the name of the worlding game on earth, and that game must be one of response and respect. that is the play of companion species learning to pay attention” (19). for haraway, “this truth-telling is about co-constitutive naturalcultural dancing, holding in esteem and regard that is open to those who look back reciprocally. always tripping, this kind of truth has a multispecies future. respecere” (“encounters” 111). respectful relationality is to lead to an ethics of flourishing — always asking “questions of who belongs where and what flourishing means for whom” (wsm 41) and being compelled toward “compassionate action” (134). thus, with haraway we find a politics of multispecies relationality premised on respect and caring. we must be “propelled by the tasty but risky obligation of curiosity among companion species, once we know, we cannot not know. if we know well, searching with fingery eyes, we care. that is how responsibility grows” (287). we appear to end up in the fantastic human-animal-technological power-saturated mess that haraway emily snyder – the ugly animal 141 desires. yet problems arise when applying haraway’s theory to ugly animals. despite her call for indigestion, the uglier the co-species get the more difficult it is to take up her politics. although haraway attempts to include history and power, she overlooks many of the hierarchical everyday realities that ugly animals are framed by. her politics of respect becomes particularly complicated when the animal-human encounter is imbued with disgust. how do we face and respect the pigeon? how do we face its feces, which has its own biological existence and characterizes the everyday in urban space? i turn to serres and the parasite to think further about these questions. “when parasites meet” acrylic painting by emily snyder7 (photo by shandie poitras) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 142 serres’s politics. serres’s work offers a parasitic relationality — a “flourishing” in which only those who can occupy the position of parasite benefit. he advocates “fuzziness” (57) in his theorizing and describes himself as a fly — “i guide myself by sound” (67). while it is said that “serres’ work does not lend itself to easy summary or application” (brown, “michel serres” 3), and that it “struggles against clarity” (wolfe xiii), i will offer a summary to apply it to everyday practice. serres describes the parasite as “about animals, our relations to our closest neighbors, to work, meals, sickness” (serres and latour 168). like haraway’s text it is a book about relationality and power. to understand relations and the collective, serres argues that we must turn to the parasite (parasite 185). “parasite” has three meanings: 1) a biological parasite, 2) a social parasite, and 3) static or noise (an understanding of parasite that is common in french but generally not found in english [schehr vii; wolfe xiii]). all three of these parasites are connected and feed on relationships. to be a parasite, one must always be last in the chain of relations; whoever is at the end gets to be parasite rather than be parasited (serres, parasite 4). serres’s conceptualization of relationality is premised on one-way relations. in a world full of parasites, there is no such thing as production, and nothing can be original, since everything is immediately parasited. this approach to relationality leads him to conclude that “abuse appears before use” (7) and that abuse value is a part of our relations the balance of exchange is always weighed and measured, calculated, taking into account a relation without exchange, an abusive relation. the term abusive is a term of usage. abuse doesn’t prevent use. the abuse value, complete, irrevocable consummation, precedes useand exchangevalue. quite simply, it is the arrow with only one direction. (80) cary wolfe argues that abuse value is not to be interpreted as violent, but rather as different from use and exchange value — “the latin prefix abmeaning ... ‘off or away from’” (xx). i disagree with wolfe's interpretation that abuse value is non-violent, given, as i discuss below, serres's problematic conceptualization of power. through these abusive relations, the parasite creates a “new“ logic (parasite 35). the typical understanding of exchange is that “it must be of the same order” as, for example, food for food. but the parasite does something else. it can, for instance, show emily snyder – the ugly animal 143 up as a guest, eat the food of the host, and give stories in exchange for the food.8 brown describes this logic of the parasite: analyse (take but do not give), paralyse (interrupt usual functioning), catalyse (force the host to act differently). this parasite, through its interruption, is a catalyst for complexity. it does this by impelling the parties it parasitizes to act in one of two ways. either they incorporate the parasite into their midst — and thereby accept the new form of communication the parasite inaugurates — or they act together to expel the parasite and transform their own social practices in the course of doing so. (“michel serres” 16-17) the parasite feeds on relations. communication is typically seen as occurring and as successful when two stations (for example, two people) are able to exchange ideas and communicate with one another, uninterrupted (brown, “parasite logic” 384). however, for serres, this conceptualization of communication is an illusion. brown explains, “serres inverts our usual sense of what is meant by communication, by displaying that it is noise and interruption which are fundamental to organising social relations” (384). for serres, there is always a third, always a parasite — its interruption is what makes the system work. every system, for serres, is mediated and messages are always manipulated (parasite 79). while this assertion is similar to haraway’s notion that all existence is a multi-species existence, serres’s tone is quite different with the inclusion of the third. the third is manipulative, not respectful. the parasite wants nothing to do with the stations themselves. being “at the intersection of relations” is “the most profitable [position]” if one wants to be in control (43). serres writes frequently about “the collective,“ which one can surmise is a social collective, though he does not commit to a coherent notion of it. he asks, “what […] is living together? what is the collective? i don’t know, and i doubt that anyone does. i have never read anything that taught it to me” (224-225). he contends that the collective lives in a black box; something happens in this black box, but we do not quite know what. for serres, whatever happens in the black box ought not be foolishly premised on harmony. our understanding of the collective needs to have “waves and shocks” and be “etched in acid, with a bitter, astringent taste” (13). this call is similar to haraway’s call for indigestion, and my call for discomfort and messiness; however, as serres’s humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 144 ideas are developed in practice, it is evident his politics differ both from haraway's and from mine. serres asks repeatedly if the system is infected or is itself an infection. he inquires, who will ever know if parasitism is an obstacle to its proper functioning or if it is its very dynamics? daily, general patterns of behavior depend on the answer to this question. if we eliminate these tie-ups, would a system still remain? is the system a set of constraints on our attempts at optimization, or do these latter, quite simply, produce the system itself? (27) while he often laments our current social condition in which exploitation abounds, and he seems to offer us a negative politics in which there is no possibility of change, he also argues that there is potential for transformation in the system. the chain of relations can collapse at the sound of a new noise. the chain is reordered, but whether it reorders itself with the same parasite on top, or with a new parasite that will redefine the system, remains unknown. lawrence r. schehr describes the parasite as “both the atom of a relation and the production of a change in this relation” (x). the reader is faced with many multiple meanings: the parasite is transformative, yet it paralyzes; it is silent, but it creates noise (parasite 237); it is quasi-object and quasi-subject (225); it is object and subject (15); it is host and guest (15); it controls and resists (6); it “[belongs] to order and disorder” (6); and it is human and animal. serres calls “man” “the universal parasite” (24). nature is dominated, “plants and animals are always his hosts; man is always necessarily their guest. always taking, never giving” (24). and as others before him, serres notes that in addition to dominating nature, ”man” turns also to dominating humans (24). this dominance is problematic for serres, and while it is not as explicit in his work in the parasite as it is in haraway’s text serres includes animals and nonhumans in his ideas on relationality. both haraway’s theory of respectful relationality and serres’s conception of parasitic relationality offer provocations for thinking about animal-human relationships. the next step in this analysis involves bringing aesthetics into the discussion to consider how we might think further about animal-human relationality. ugliness, disgust, and abjection. i understand ugliness to mean something that repulses, causes discomfort, and is unpleasant, as it causes a general incongruence with one’s beliefs about that which is pleasant. ugliness can induce a reaction of disgust, and emily snyder – the ugly animal 145 if this reaction is harsh enough, it can invoke a move to abject and to keep distance, either physically or cognitively, from that which is deemed ugly. aesthetics touches on all of our senses, including affect and embodiment, and ideologies running through aesthetic judgments work to sustain what is beautiful and ugly. aesthetic judgments are also fluid and change in relation to cultures and time. responses of disgust could be towards something material, virtual, abstract, or probable (shields 29).9 overall, there is a lack of research in the area of negative aesthetics.10 some common ways of framing ugliness, disgust, and abjection include biological theories, social constructionism, and psychoanalysis (meagher). here i take up social constructionism and traces of psychoanalysis (via kristeva). while reactions of disgust are felt in the body (ahmed; kristeva) as “a visceral difficulty” (meagher 24), i reject biological theories that argue there is something entirely instinctual in disgust reactions. i do not understand the ugly animal here as something inherently repulsive. ugliness and beauty are cultural reactions, which necessarily include the political. it is necessary to deconstruct claims about what is ugly and beautiful, and to examine the politics and power dynamics circulating in claims-making processes. this is especially crucial to do when theorists rely on arguments of “reason,“ which often works to assert claims as being “logical“ and “neutral.“ when writing on beauty and the sublime (and to a lesser degree ugliness), edmund burke offers the aesthetic experience as largely involving a sensory reaction, but also the use of reason, to understand our sensory encounters. he contends that beauty (which can cause feelings of love and happiness) is found in things that are small, smooth, have lines that flow, are delicate, and are a color that is “fair” (180-190). burke justifies the conclusions he comes to about these qualities of beauty by explaining that he is using reason, yet he does little to unpack why these qualities manifest beauty, and it is evident that his work is, as timothy morton argues, based on “ideologies of class and tradition” (18). burke’s 18th century ideas on beauty are similar to notions of beauty today, in that they rely on genderand race-based, heteronormative qualities that uphold particular normative standards often passed on as “natural” and “reasonable.” in her reading of kant gayatri chakravorty spivak shows that people in positions of privilege can determine what “reason” is and who can possess it. for spivak kant’s ideas on aesthetics rely on the possession of a rational will and a morality in response to experiences with nature; the “native informant” (spivak’s term) or the “raw man” (kant’s term) “has not yet achieved or does not possess a subject whose anlage or programming includes the structure of feeling for the moral” (14). christian helmut wenzel comments, “the task humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 146 that kant sets for himself is to explain taste in a way that takes into account the intuition that some aesthetic judgments are right and others wrong, although no rules for assigning aesthetic values can be given. the task is thus to avoid the two extremes” (12). but judgments are made in our society about what is right and wrong concerning beauty (as they were in kant’s time), and despite kant’s conviction that aesthetics and science are to be separate (wenzel 3), science and technology have been, and still are, employed by people in positions of power to merge aesthetics and social control. science and aesthetics are part of the same project (mosse). george mosse contends that racism was a central aspect of modernity in europe and was integrally connected to aesthetics.11 what was deemed beautiful was influenced by emerging ideas about science, as well as a religious resurgence. science was taken up, used to measure, calculate, and record the physical proportions and appearance of racialized others to determine not only their aesthetic worth, but intertwined with this their moral and cognitive capabilities. mosse notes that “the most ominous standard that was applied to racial classification during the eighteenth century was based upon aesthetic preferences that were necessarily highly subjective. the new emphasis on classical beauty set the tone. it led to a stereotype which would never leave racism from that day to this” (18). notions of animality and nature are deeply connected to stereotypes about race, gender, sexuality, and class, and to aesthetic judgments (mosse). haraway is attentive to complexities of race, gender, and animality in her work (although she does not link it to aesthetics per se), and serres, as i set out, does little to explicitly bring these realities into his analysis (and does not engage with aesthetics). too frequently work on aesthetics concentrates on beauty. ugliness, while certainly existing in relation to beauty, and vice-versa, needs to be theorized in depth, as it evokes different affective responses and carries different social and cultural values. it is unsatisfying just to infer from work on beauty what ugliness means and entails. likewise, it is inadequate to treat ugliness as an afterthought only to be accounted for by modifying work that is grounded in the beautiful.12 further disconcerting are approaches to ugliness in which moves are made to make the ugly beautiful. while the binary of beauty/ugliness is extremely problematic, michelle meagher's work insightfully suggests that dissolving one side of the binary into the other would actually work to entrench the binary further rather than to deconstruct it. in her analysis of the intentionally ugly paintings of female figures by jenny saville, meagher maintains that when viewers attempt to frame the grotesque images as beautiful, “rather than acknowledging and confronting disgust, disgust itself has been rendered disgusting and shameful” (29). i will return to this problem of trying to eradicate ugliness and emily snyder – the ugly animal 147 disgust below, though it is noteworthy than my intention in this paper is not to eliminate these concepts, to deny their existence, or necessarily to reconceptualize them as beautiul and pleasant. i aim to understand instead what can be learned about power and animal-human relationality when focusing on ugliness and disgust. beauty and ugliness are spectacular in many ways (particularly the sublime), but they are also quite everyday (zylinska; ngai). sara ahmed advocates that we should recognize emotions as “social and cultural practices” (cultural politics 9), and that notions of disgust, proximity, and fear of contamination are connected — “through disgust, bodies ‘recoil‘ from their proximity, as a proximity that is felt as nakedness or as an exposure on the skin surface” (83). feeling disgust, we distance the object and blame our reaction on it. she argues that “we need to account for how it is that the object of disgust impresses upon us, as if the object contained the ‘truth’ of our own response to it” (85). disgust plays out in relationships, through what ahmed calls “stickiness” (90). stickiness conjures up the idea that the reaction of disgust is caused by inherent qualities in the other; it is a threat to one’s own non-sticky surface. some people are treated as stickier than others — “feelings of disgust stick more to some bodies than others” (92). for example, the word “terrorist” sticks to specific racialized bodies (97). ahmed argues that in being disgusted by another, the other becomes abject — “to be disgusted is after all to be affected by what one has rejected” (cultural politics 86). citing julia kristeva, ahmed explains that “to abject something is literally to cast something out, or to expel something” (94). the abject is that which threatens the foundations upon which we live. these foundations include conceptions of life, health, and cleanliness, which are connected to and shaped by norms regarding morality (kristeva). invoking mary douglas, kristeva notes that the abject/excluded become abject in line with social systems/notions of social ordering (68). the abject other might manifest or be perceived as “unclean,” but what is really at stake are notions of the self and perceptions of one’s rightful place in a social system. thus the abject threatens “borders, positions, rules” (cultural politics 4), and ahmed explains “kristeva shows us that what threatens from the outside only threatens insofar as it is already within” (cultural politics 86). though ahmed’s and kristeva’s work focuses on human relations, it can be applied to animal-human relationality. i do not make these transitions between humans and animals as if to say they are the same — different humans and different animals are constructed and perceived in varying ways. but i have argued throughout that what we humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 148 think about animal-human relationality reveals the mess of ontological categories that merge in it. keeping pigeons out. a balcony in ottawa, ontario, canada (photo by emily snyder) discussion. haraway is committed to her ideas being applicable in practice (see thrift 189; braidotti 202). in her previous work before wsm, she maintains, “category-making is a labor process with its own materiality” (“cyborgs, coyotes” 335). she writes about “thinking technologies” (335) and notes that “overwhelmingly, theory is bodily, and theory is literal. theory is not about matters distant from the lived body; quite the opposite” (“promises of monsters” 68). serres echoes these sentiments that working with concepts is a means of practice (wolfe xxv; see whiteside 125-126 for a critique). haraway argues, “the task is to become coherent enough in an incoherent world to engage in a joint dance of being that breeds respect and response in the flesh … and then to remember how to live like that at every scale, with all partners” (csm 62, emphasis added). this task must always be done, as we are never finished learning, never finished becoming with (wsm 27). haraway and serres importantly demonstrate that emily snyder – the ugly animal 149 theorizing is a means of practice, yet as i argue below, through a focus on the pigeon, their conceptual practices seem in several ways to be quite impractical, particularly when considering ugliness and disgust. the pigeon is quite ordinary in the sense that those who live in urban spaces encounter it daily. while for some the pigeon may be a welcome creature in the city (or iconic of a city), there is no shortage of negative cultural ideas that work to reinforce that the pigeon is “out of place” (jerolmack, “animal archeology” 74; see also wolch on animals in urban centers). while the relationship of the human to the pigeon is sometimes positive (there are, for example, human-pigeon interactions focused on leisure, such as pigeon racing, homing pigeon activities, farm exhibitions etc.), i will focus on negative discourses, which are most dominant, to show that aesthetic norms work to sustain hierarchies and need to be made explicit in our politics. when thinking with haraway and serres, the challenge arises that the further one goes down the animal hierarchy, and the uglier the animals get, the modes of relationality that they suggest become more complicated to enact. both haraway and serres aim to problematize rigid categories, and haraway is eager to include all animals in the process. she writes of dogs, chickens, and flies, as well as bacteria and viruses that cannot be seen by the human eye. her politics aim to include the ordinary and to challenge human exceptionalism (wsm). yet how do we proceed in a manner that allows for these new conceptualizations while also taking into account the lived reality that the old conceptualizations matter and shape the everyday? with pigeons, the challenge is to recognize both that the label of parasite imposed upon the pigeon is a human construct, and that pigeons have the lived reality of being “pests” faced with diverse deterrence and extermination efforts. haraway’s ideas on situated knowledges are relevant to consider. situated knowledges means that at every encounter we are to call into question the power relations between species, their histories, and how we shape one another. by questioning these dynamics in each encounter, haraway suggests that we are able to account for the existing cultural norms, and also to think about how we might relate differently. there are several “knot[s]“ (wsm 19) or entanglements of interspecies relationality for thinking further about the pigeon, and about haraway's and serres's work. the pigeon has a long history of entanglement with humans. it has been kept for food (“animal archeology” 79-80; allen 91-100), used for medicine (allen 89-91) and for its feces or humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 150 guano (“animal archeology” 79; allen 89-90, 100-101); it has served as messenger (and thus been labeled a noble hero during times of war), and been a part of human leisure activities (“animal archeology”; allen). the pigeon has been employed to signify a variety of metaphors and symbols, from love and monogamy (as the bird is a rapid reproducer but generally mates “monogamously” [“animal archeology” 80]), to war hero (83-84), to ”’rats with wings’” (74), and the embodiment of disease (74; jerolmack, “pigeons became rats” 80). colin jerolmack argues that in the cultural hierarchy of animals, companion animals receive the most attention, followed by livestock, wildlife, while “‘nuisance’ or ‘pest’ animals” are situated at the bottom (“animal archeology” 75). technological and economic shifts shape perceptions of the pigeon. as humans domesticated and lived alongside pigeons, they discovered the bird’s unique “’homing ability’” (“animal archeology” 82). the trade in pigeons led to this realization, as the pigeons would make their way back the place they were traded from. jerolmack observes that “it was not long until humans began to selectively breed the most able pigeons to heighten this capability” (82). the pigeon’s ability to return home intact with important messages was taken up as a technological advance in many wars (82-84). during world wars i and ii, they were utilized as “a modern instrument of war” (83). expertise was developed and fostered by specific soldiers (“pigeoneers”) to work with them (83). with technological advances in communication, the “technology” of the pigeon became obsolete (84). jerolmack shows that once the use-value of pigeons shifted, negative relationships ensued (“animal archaeology”; “pigeons became rats”). while pigeons are used for leisure in farm exhibitions, and rural and urban pigeon racing (“animal archeology”), the urban pigeon is generally denigrated socially and culturally — symbolically and materially. another illustration of this shift in use-value and social standing concerns pigeon feces. when one speaks of the pigeon, it seems necessarily to include pigeon feces. their feces are easily encountered in contemporary urban environments and can (along with other referents, such as pigeon deterrents) stand in for the actual pigeon itself. historically, human relationships to pigeon feces were shaped by their health benefits and economic worth. one popular historical use of pigeon feces in north america has been for medicinal purposes (allen 89-90).13 they were considered medicinal cures for conditions ranging from from baldness to gout (89). another common use was as fertilizer (allen 100-101; jerolmack, “animal archaeology” 79-80). the work of didier gille is of value here, as it explores the changing relationships that humans have with animal feces, and the various symbolisms that can be attached to emily snyder – the ugly animal 151 them at different points in history. excrement was a welcome part of production and consumption in the city of the ancien régime. pits and collection areas for feces outside of artisans’ shops were viewed as positive status symbols (244). animals were valued in the city for their excrement, as it could be turned into production for fertilizer, to soften leather, and to help with other processes in the textile industry (as, for example, paper making). this is very unlike how we perceive pigeon feces in a north american city today. pigeon feces are now the “breeding ground” for parasitism and disgust. along with the economic and technological changes in its social position, the pigeon came to be seen as disgusting primarily through notions of disease connected to its feces. the city is now supposed to be a clean place. possible sources of “urban stagnation“ (for example, hospitals, cemeteries, garbage) were moved to the periphery of the 19th century city (gille 229), and ideas of a sanitary city continue today (jerolmack, “pigeons became rats” 73). in a clean city the pigeon is a threat — “the pigeon became merely a container of disease” (80). jerolmack notes that pigeons are also believed to be sickly because they eat our refuse (86). the concepts of disgust and abjection suggest that we perceive a threat in the other if it is deemed that it takes up that which we reject. kristeva reminds us, “filth is not a quality in itself, but it applies only to what relates to a boundary and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out of that boundary, its other side, a margin” (69). discussing serres’s parasite, isabella winkler remarks, “as the outside and the dirty itself, the parasite befouls someone else’s inside(s), and in doing so, appropriates what was not its own to begin with” (228). the foregoing paragraphs are an attempt at situated knowledge. to this encounter we would then need to add the specific history of each individual encountering pigeons and the broader social and cultural norms they are connected to. one concern about haraway’s practice of respectful relationality is that it is privileged. haraway is no doubt aware of the critique that she draws on privileged relations involving many privileged animals (for example agility training with expensive dogs). her book makes it clear that she is trying to work with what she might learn from these power dynamics (wsm). however, she does not adequately address the problem of a politics that requires substantial intellectual and material resources in order to better understand animal-human relations. it is challenging to consider how one might convince people to recognize that we exist in a co-constitutional relationship with other creatures. even more difficult is the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 152 question, how might one convince people to face the “disgusting other,” to dwell and think with a potentially uncomfortable, seemingly visceral encounter? are situated knowledges, driven by the mode of relating premised on respect, enough to convince one to take up the task of considering how the revulsion that one projects on the other is actually revealing about something disgusting in oneself? and how can this reflection account for both the personal and the social? including aesthetics in relationality brings in additional layers of complexity and additional histories to untangle (harsh bodily reactions in which disgust “feels instinctive” and “irrepressible” [meagher 31]) that involve queries about whether something is naturally ugly or displeasing, or whether our aesthetic reaction is culturally constructed. one widely held interpretation is that feces are gross — they smell bad, look disgusting, and are packed full of bacteria. but our relationship to feces is not that straightforward. many humans are willing to get very close to dog and cat feces and allow “pets” to defecate in their homes. disgust towards, and fear of, pigeon feces is especially heightened and frames the animal itself as diseased. jerolmack argues that the opinion that pigeons are diseased is more hype than anything — pigeon feces are no dirtier than excrement from the common tropical birds that many people love, kiss, and keep in their homes (“pigeons became rats” 84). even if the pigeon were diseased, it is important to ask how we implement a politics of respect with that which is physically threatening to humans. are sick and violent animals allowed to join the animal-human relationality proposed by haraway? how do we work with disgust in relationality, acknowledging that disgust is emotionally charged and leads to feelings of abjection sooner than to respect? how might we convince someone confronting a pile of pigeon feces that they ought to engage in a respectful relationship with all of the creatures that brought that excrement to be, as well as with the ones that live deep in every nook and cranny, coil and splatter? this relationship does not have to be one of liking the feces per se, but it should include thinking with the other. haraway acknowledges that when people look at species as a whole, there are particular ones that cause harsh reactions, for example “creepy crawlies” (wsm 10). further, she remarks about her encounters with feral cats that “becoming feral demands — and invites — becoming worldly just as much as any other species entanglements do. ‘feral’ is another name for contingent ‘becoming with’ for all the actors” (281). yet the reader is then given details about how to practice this relationality with less uncomfortable critters — dogs, the animals that we eat, animals in labs, and animals that we watch on television. haraway admits that “certain domestic animals have played the starring roles” but then suggests that the overarching emily snyder – the ugly animal 153 ideas ought to apply to all species. i am not convinced that her ideas trickle down the animal hierarchy to the lowest critters. while braidotti describes haraway’s dog as “a radical other” (202), i am still wondering how haraway’s and serres’s politics can engage with perhaps more intense radical others. a pigeon deterrent hovers over a train station in edmonton, alberta, canada (photo by emily snyder) what is particularly challenging when confronting the disgust imposed on the pigeon is that the pigeon symbolizes a multitude of interconnected strains of disgust, ugliness, and hatred. as ahmed puts it, “feelings of disgust stick more to some bodies than others” (cultural politics 92). in the pigeon, we encounter additional bodies denigrated via social and cultural discourses of disgust. other beings deemed to be pests, such as rats and cockroaches, stick to the pigeon (and vice versa) through phrases like “rats with wings” and “’cockroaches of the sky’” (jerolmack “pigeons became rats” 81).14 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 154 notions of disease and bacteria also stick to these already sticky, supposedly dangerous bodies. local governance strategies of extermination and pest control commonly label pigeons as vermin, alongside insects, and jerolmack notes that “over the last century, pigeons have been shot, gassed, electrocuted, poisoned, trapped, and fed contraceptives, among other such efforts to repel them including spikes and sticky gel on ledges” (“pigeons became rats” 72). moreover, pigeon deterrent efforts also rely on notions of predation and violence from other, more “useful” birds. the ultrasonic bird repellent, for example, is typically described as a device that “uses a natural predatory principle to scare unwanted birds” (bpc website). the physical (and moral) eminence of birds such as hawks and falcons, and the weakness of other bird species, are made use of in that “the bird chaser broadcasts a variety of naturally recorded bird distress signals and predator calls that frighten, confuse and disorient pest birds within the effective range”(bpc website). the pigeon is the primary “pest bird” that is joined by other nuisance birds, such as starlings and sparrows (bpc website). not only are these “pest birds” a threat to human enjoyment and use of the outdoors, but prospective customers of these ultrasonic products are warned that “pest birds create unsafe conditions, and cause untold billions of [dollars in] damage and maintenance costs, liability and risk exposure from accidents, pollution and disease” (bird-x website). discourses of risk, various social problems, and violence stick to the images and representations of products aimed at deterring and/or eliminating pigeons. in a context in which the pigeon is socially and culturally abject, angry images are employed to target them. the large inflatable bird (possibly an owl?) in the image above, for example, has a menacing look, which i suggest does more to cajole humans into scorning the pigeon than it does to actually deter pigeons themselves. by-laws that set out rules for human-pigeon engagement (for example, when pigeons can be kept on one’s property, fines for feeding pigeons) legally compel disdain for the pigeon and criminalize both the pigeon and those who might challenge the rules. notions of criminality therefore also stick to the pigeon. ideologies fuelled by racism and classism are deeply entangled in encounters with the birds, who are also now described as “feral pigeons” or “street pigeons” (“animal archeology” 78; “pigeons became rats” 81). connecting “homelessness” to pigeons draws on sentiments of disgust towards marginalized others who are violently labeled as threatening and less than human, and like animals. pigeons are also thought of as global creatures (“animal archeology” 88) and as morton notes in ecology without nature: rethinking environmental aesthetics ideas of nation and nature are interconnected (15).15 the potential exists for dubious claims that the pigeon is an immigrant who must prove that it belongs.16 emily snyder – the ugly animal 155 haraway remarks throughout when species meet that her goal is to deal with the messiness and harshness of animal-human relations, and she strictly rejects romanticizing nature and animals. braidotti comments that in general, haraway “is an utterly non-nostalgic post-human thinker: her conceptual universe is the hightechnology world of informatics and telecommunications” (198). haraway accepts many aspects of our current condition, including that there is violence in the world and that humans and animals suffer (although she wants to explore how we might suffer less or at least feel discomfort from this suffering). yet haraway still romanticizes. my concern about her romanticization has more to do with her embrace of respect, “getting on together with some grace” (wsm 15, emphasis added), caring, joy, and love. for her “caring means becoming subject to the unsettling obligation of curiosity, which requires knowing more at the end of the day than at the beginning” (36). her definition of caring resists romanticizing, but this approach is compromised by other assertions. for example, haraway contends that “to hold in regard, to respond, to look back reciprocally, to notice, to pay attention, to have courteous regard for, to esteem: all of that is tied to polite greeting, to constituting the polis, where and when species meet” (19). she asks of this relationality – “what if a usable word for this is joy?” (“encounters” 105). also, haraway claims that “to be in love means to be worldly” (wsm 97). we frequently read about her love of dogs. but what do we make of the task of becoming worldly with that which we might hate, dislike, or be disgusted by? can a politics of disgust work with a politics of respect? do we have to do away with ideas of ugliness, disgust, and abjection? and where might that lead us? how do we account for the ugliness that exists, and will continue to exist, in the world? more generally, is it even possible to respect all animals? commenting on artist patricia piccinini’s hybrid human/wombat creatures, haraway asks, “what do they contribute to the flourishing and health of the land and its critters [...]?” (288). what if they do not contribute to flourishing? to begin to address these questions, and to think further about discomfort, it is worthwhile to turn to haraway’s ideas on suffering. it is with haraway’s ideas on the suffering of lab animals, and more generally, the killing of animals for consumption, that serious problems arise in applying her theory of respect in practice. for the lab animal, or the cow heading off to slaughter, haraway encourages people to examine their connectedness to these others, to appreciate them as responsive and responding, and to share in the suffering. she explains, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 156 human beings’ learning to share other animals’ pain nonmimetically is, in my view, an ethical obligation, a practical problem, and an ontological opening. sharing pain promises disclosure, promises becoming. the capacity to respond may yet be recognized and nourished on this earth. (84) haraway does not oppose testing animals in labs or eating animals, as long as we can learn to be uncomfortable with these practices and to recognize that the logic for doing so will never be sufficient. she remarks, “i suggest that it is a misstep to separate the world’s beings into those who may be killed and those who may not and a misstep to pretend to live outside killing” (79). killing will happen. however, sharing suffering with lab animals and with the particular animals that get used for food will not do away with human exceptionalism, as haraway hopes. she comments, “i am [...] convinced that multispecies coflourishing requires simultaneous, contradictory truths if we take seriously not the command that grounds human exceptionalism, ‘thou shalt not kill,’ but rather the command that makes us face nurturing and killing as an inescapable part of mortal companion species entanglements, namely, ‘thou shalt not make killable’” (105-106). but haraway is making particular animals killable (lab animals and animals for food) while simultaneously saying that one should not classify animals as such. she separates extermination from her proposed relationality and insists we do away with exterminist behavior: “such criminality takes on special historical force in view of the immense, systematized violence against animals that deserves the name ‘exterminism’” (78; emphasis added). however, shared suffering and the violence done to lab animals and food animals are not framed as systematic violence; instead, they fall under her ethics of response and respect. haraway merges the ideas of discomfort and respect, and articulates a politics in which we must care for each other while simultaneously harming the other. she has acknowledged lived reality and structure, to a degree; however, her suggestions regarding how to act differently do not seem very different from how we actually behave now (except that perhaps some are now more uncomfortable about it). i fail to understand how it is respectful of the other to share in their pain, yet still to uphold the very system that makes that pain happen. in this context haraway’s ideas do not translate well into practice. is this a logic that haraway applies only in the animalhuman context? what happens if we try to apply it to human relations — to recognize that some behavior is systematic violence yet pretend that other targeted behavior is not, and to allow it to continue as long as we are unsettled by it? emily snyder – the ugly animal 157 all of these contradictions compel another question: can parasites be companion species? according to haraway, all creatures are companion species, thus perhaps the question needs to be asked differently: can parasites be worldly companion species? while wolfe argues that the presence of abuse value in parasitic relations is not exploitative, in serres’s depiction it seems to be exploitative indeed, as it is premised primarily on notions of one-way relations (parasite). although not directly commenting on parasites, haraway states, to be in a relation of use to each other is not the definition of unfreedom and violation. such relations are almost never symmetrical (‘equal’ or calculable). rather, relations of use are exactly what companion species are about: the ecologies of significant others involve messmates at table, with indigestion and without the comfort of teleological purpose from above, below, in front, or behind. this is not some kind of naturalistic reductionism; this is about living responsively as mortal beings where dying and killing are not optional. (wsm 74) further, haraway insists she is “advocating the understanding that earthly heterogeneous beings are in this web together for all time, and no one gets to be man” (82). but someone does get to be “man,” even in her own politics, despite her claims. in his work on the parasite serres asks, “how many of these rough political rats are there around us? how many of them break things they don’t understand? how many of these rats simplify? how many of them have built such homogeneous, cruel systems upon the horror of disorder and noise?” (14). serres’s ideas are fantastically harsh and treat dominating humans with their simple attitudes and policies toward animals and other humans as parasites. yet serres also asserts that everyone is a parasite in parasitic relationality and “we are all attacked, together” (8). while he means that the system that we live in is too simple and imposes violence on all of us, his framing of relationality and power remains problematic. i have two connected concerns here: first, serres has a tendency not to differentiate adequately between the parasites he speaks of; and second, his ideas about rupturing the system via noise are contradictory and oversimplified. what does it mean to claim that everyone is a parasite, or as yates remarks, that “all the guests are abusive” (201)? we learn from serres that the oppressed and the powerful can be parasites. brown describes of serres’s quasi-object, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 158 the token is a marker of the subject. she or he who is caught with the token is ‘it’, a subject. we others form the indivisible mass, we are the mute collective who will turn on the ‘i’, who is now victim, the excluded. the quasi-object marks out these ‘i’s, it is the moving back and forth of this marker, these provisional subjects. in this sense serres refers to the token as equally quasi-subject. but this pointing out is ambiguous. to be the ‘i’ is to enjoy a privileged position. one is able to influence the play — shoot for goal, make a heroic move. but equally one is potential victim — the fool, the one to be excluded. hence the collective turns around the endless selection and passing on of ‘i’s. (“michel serres” 21) anyone in this game can be a parasite. but structural realities and power dynamics are missing. while brown does not address the fact that some people rarely win at this game, nor does he describe who these people might be, he does note that the quasiobject moves within a social system and that “the quasi-object is only relatively undetermined, meaning that it can become embedded within a concrete, highly deterministic social practice” (22). explicit statements like this from serres are rare. he oscillates between acknowledging that some people are more oppressed than others and treating everyone as the same. in an interview with latour, serres remarks that perhaps no other period in history has seen so many losers and so few winners as our own. and time, because it advances through the acceleration of its exacerbated competitions and mimeticism (in science and elsewhere), produces and multiplies exponentially the great crowd of losers — of which everyone risks becoming a member, overnight — and shrinks the more and more rarified and exclusive club (i almost said ”pantheon”) of winners. what nation today, including our own, does not risk slipping into the third world? and what individual lives in the security of never falling, overnight, into the fourth world? (185-86). most certainly france does not “risk slipping into the third world” (186) or risk impoverishment as many other nations do (and actually experience). further, there are many individuals who do not risk plunging suddenly — ”overnight” — ”into the fourth world.” who is this undifferentiated mass, this ”great crowd of losers?” the fables he uses in the parasite to support his arguments do not acknowledge any social matters, such as sexism, racism, colonialism, and the ways that systemic social oppression and privileging operate. we learn little of how parasitic relationality plays out with actual people. serres does acknowledge at one point that many relationships are not equal, but he does not elaborate or explore this idea (parasite 53). emily snyder – the ugly animal 159 serres writes, “i no longer really know how to say it: the parasite parasites the parasites. in other words, any given position in the ternary model is, ad libitum, parasitic. who is the third? someone, anyone. the noise stops; someone leaves. someone, anyone: both formal and random” (55). but who gets labeled as a social parasite will not be “anyone” and this categorization is not “random.” further, it is quite predictable who the political parasites will be. serres is stuck between, on the one hand, lamenting that the system will never change, that he has written a “book of evil” (88), and, on the other, hoping for transformation. we read that “the master doesn’t move at all” (81) and that “the nightmare of the interminable series starts again; i have not stopped being [in] misery” (244). but serres repeatedly contradicts himself. he also writes that the system “collapses at the slightest noise” (11), and that “we have to get together, assembling, resembling, against whoever troubles our relations” (56). the description on the back of the 2007 english reprint of his book states that “by being pests, minor groups can become major players in public dialogue — creating diversity and complexity vital to human life and thought.” most definitely the oppressed can, and do, make noise and engage in dialogue, but in what ways are those who are marginalized heard (and what of the implications of referring to “minor groups” as “pests”?)? serres acknowledges that when interrupted by noise, the system might not be entirely transformed. in one rare instance he also acknowledges that the oppressed face obstacles, but he does not consider why this might be beyond fear of the powerful (59). i do not write “social” and “political” parasite in the way that i have above to claim that society has two tidy positions — the oppressed and the oppressor. power is far messier than this. serres understands the system as having multiple norms (wolfe xxii), and pushes for double meanings and “fuzziness” to affront simple systems that adhere to enlightenment logics (parasite 57). however, he overlooks hierarchies and binaries. maria assad, writing on serres and gender, contends that it is unfair of serres’s critics to argue that his work ignores gender, inasmuch as it is these very binaries that he is trying to do away with. this reasoning is insufficient. proposing a theory that is a challenge to hierarchies, binaries, and simplicity does not mean that one’s alternative social theories can ignore the lived reality of these very things that shape our lives. are serres’s ideas about interrupting the system with noise perhaps too simple because they are derived primarily from the logic of communication theory? is it possible that this theory accounts well for communication being parasited, falling apart, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 160 restructuring, but that a social and cultural system is too complex for this analogy?17 when defined by communication theory parasitic relationality fails to apply meaningfully to animal-human relations and ideas concerning disgust and ugliness. in what ways do we hear pigeons in urban space? does their capability to adapt continually to urban structures and space constitute an interruption? are the spikes and fierce looking plastic predators that adorn urban built environments symbolic of the pigeon’s capability to interrupt human exceptionalism? in his work on the natural contract, serres treats animals as actants that engage us in the act of listening (natural contract). however, serres’s approach to power is inadequate for explaining social structure and power dynamics, and the question of how we listen and respond is crucial. while the pigeon might have some space to “interrupt,” ultimately these disruptions occur within a system that normatively derides the pigeon, rather than humans, as the disgusting parasite. pigeon deterrent modifications in urban built environments reflect the criminality, disempowerment, and hoped for disappearance of the pigeon. a politics of disgust can help us to think beyond serres’s parasitic relationality and haraway’s respectful relationality. serres’s politics of abuse appears initially to allow for disgust and discomfort, but, while it is unlikely that serres would aim to make the ugly “beautiful,” we must consider how his conceptualization of power and refusal to acknowledge social structures and norms works against the inclusion of the pigeon and a politics of disgust. additionally, while haraway’s politics of respect aims to involve discomfort, introducing aesthetics, the pigeon, and its feces create the need for further theorizing. abjection, that is, to cast something out, is a kind of exterminist act. haraway is concerned with challenging extermination, since it makes particular critters killable and therefore has no place in her politics. however, she welcomes this reality only halfway. can a politics of respect recognize that abjection happens? how does one respect that which one ejects? my understanding of a politics of disgust is distinct from ange-marie hancock’s use of the term. in her work on welfare policy in the us, she argues that a politics of disgust is taken up against african american women based on the intersection of their gender, race, and class. she frames this disgust as a threat not only to this group of women but to everyone generally and a threat to what democracy ought to be. she advocates for the elimination of the use of disgust in politics. while i agree with hancock that disgust is social, cultural, and political, and that it needs to be interrogated, i depart from her in several ways. aesthetics is largely absent in hancock’s work. further, i apply ideas on disgust to animal-human relationships. most significantly, i do not aim to eliminate disgust. i do not mean to embrace disgust as an inherent quality, and i understand that emily snyder – the ugly animal 161 it can be detrimental to those labeled “disgusting,” but i do not think that disgust can be eliminated. the targets of disgust might shift, but disgust, like conflict, is pervasive. working with, rather than attempting to eliminate disgust, does not mean that we should then abandon critical interrogation of reactions and labels of disgust. challenges to the ideologies and violence that uphold others as disgusting are crucial. working with disgust involves attempting to recognize disgust realistically as something that is both socially constructed and a reality, as well as to understand how deeply intertwined an analysis of disgust is with an analysis of power and the reality of conflict. a politics of disgust, as articulated here, is in many ways an affront to particular ethicsbased approaches to relationships that focus heavily on notions of obligations, respect, response, and callings/invitations, which i contend many people do not actually experience when disgusted. while some might argue that this closure is the main problem — i.e., that there is a lack of reflecting on this reaction — i think that we need to dwell with disgust in a much more realistic way. by enabling ugliness, disgust, abjection and tension to be a part of understanding human and animal-human relationships, i suggest that we work with an ethics and politics premised on partiality — an approach to thinking about relationality that rids us of the notion that all humans ought to have some capacity for obligation to the other, and instead admits the reality that, while some might be on board with ideas for thinking differently, there is also a substantial portion of the population that might not agree with one’s propositions, care about them, or be willing to examine the contradictions and uncomfortable things in their own lives that are believed to be necessary or contingent upon one’s politics working. sianne ngai argues that “ugly feelings” are a way in to thinking about social problems (so too are “pleasant” feelings — see ahmed, promise of happiness). while it is very useful to work with openings, i suggest that animal studies scholars should face the limitations of our engagements with animals more practically and be more realistic about power and conflict. conclusion. kerry whiteside argues that a “noncentered” approach requires that, when we think about the environment, nature, and animals, we must problematize both human and nature rather than theorizing them in a way that reinforces a harsh division between them (3). while whiteside treats this approach as somewhat unique and refreshing, one has the impression, particularly after reading haraway and serres, that we are still left with the same problems concerning the environmental crisis and animalhuman relationships. haraway’s and serres’s texts on their own do not provide new humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 162 ways of understanding animal-human relationality, at least not one that is palpable in practice. neither text adequately addresses lived conditions and the real consequences of how power circulates in our society. haraway remains somewhat of a romantic, and she does not allow for as much indigestion as she suggests. with serres, one is faced with oversimplified ideas about power. the ugly animal remains a challenge. further, haraway’s and serres’s relationality-based approaches suggest presence from all involved in a given encounter. ”animals” might have no interest in ”humans” ”becoming with” them. the pigeon, its feces, and consequently a politics of disgust allow one to consider questions regarding the ways that consider ugliness, disgust, and abjection can be part of one’s politics. the most uncomfortable aspects of the pigeon, which are constructed and promoted by cultural discourses, help us to engage realistically with hierarchies and norms. negative aesthetics need to be explored as culture and time specific, as illustrated via the social, economic, and technological history of the pigeon. in the same vein, the additional complexities of affect and embodied reactions need to be accounted for when we think about how disgust circulates in our relationships. by focusing on the pigeon and its feces, i hope i have pushed haraway’s and serres’s ideas to arrive at a more uncomfortable place in practice. while the numerous questions throughout this paper encourage ongoing dialogue and reflection, notions of disgust, disease, revulsion, and even institutionalized aversion to the pigeon via urban policies, built environments, and extermination encourage working with the reality of closure, power, and ongoing contestation in our politics. notes 1. thank you to dr. val napoleon, dr. rob shields, and dr. sourayan mookerjea for their valuable feedback on earlier drafts of this essay. thank you as well to the two anonymous reviewers for their detailed, thoughtful comments. this research was supported by a canada graduate scholarship from the social sciences and humanities research council of canada. 2. a precarious set of terms accompany the word “western,” as for example “western thought,” “western culture,” and “western values.” when i use the term “western thought” i speak to not only normative political ideas that have originated in specific geographic regions, but also to the pervasiveness with which they spread in those regions and beyond physical place (“the west”). emily snyder – the ugly animal 163 3. why focus on the parasite and not serres’s work in the natural contract, which is a text explicitly about animal-human relations, perhaps even one that would complement haraway’s text? in the natural contract (1990), serres expands j.j. rousseau’s notion of social contract (which was only focused on humans) to bring in all of the other actors on this planet (wesling 193). similar to what we read in the parasite, all creatures in his work on the natural contract are both subject and object, and serres believes that “‘the earth speaks to us in terms of forces, linkages and interactions, and these suffice in the making of a contract’” (qtd, in wesling 196). as in haraway’s work, serres’s natural contract is understood, as donald wesling describes it, as a “link, knot, connection, bond” (196). further, whiteside notes that “serres reveals the forgotten role of contract in imagining relationships between human and nonhuman beings in terms of equilibrium, partnership, and reciprocal influence” (122). i am most compelled by the texts that i have chosen (the parasite and wsm), given their explicit discussions on relationality. the notion of parasitic relationality is particularly important to address considering the cultural construction of the pigeon as a parasite. i do not intend to set up my analysis in a way that depicts haraway and serres as completely at odds with each other. i am instead trying to work between ideas on relationality. 4. when i use the term ”relationality,” i am referring not just to the act or possibility of relating, but also to the ways in which relationships are social. my usage of ”relationality” has to do with social relationships and living together. 5. the term “politics of disgust” is also articulated elsewhere by ange-marie hancock. i discuss her conceptualization and use of this term, in relation to my own understanding of the term, in the discussion section of this essay. 6. haraway explains in a footnote that “critter” means, “a motley crowd of lively beings including microbes, fungi, humans, plants, animals, cyborgs, and aliens. critters are always relationally entangled rather than taxonomically neat” (wsm 330). 7. “when parasites meet” is a multi-media piece of art in which a video of pigeons and humans, along with urban audio, are projected onto four by four foot acrylic painting of pigeon feces shown in the photo above. the piece is about human-pigeon relationality and visually explores the questions about aesthetics, disgust, and abjection taken up in this essay. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 164 8. it remains unclear to me how this logic is new. it is difficult to understand serres’s assertion, as there is no real sense of time in his work because of his rejection of linearity and time periods. 9. though shields is not writing about disgust in his work, it is still important to consider. 10. when i use the term ”negative aesthetics,” i am referring to ugliness and disgust. 11. unfortunately, mosse neglects to bring gender and sexism meaningfully into his analysis throughout most of his book. sexism and racism are interconnected forms of violence and aesthetics, sexism, and social control are also deeply intertwined. 12. for an example of work that treats ugliness as its starting point, see ngai. in saying that she starts with ugliness, this is not meant to deny that ugliness exists in relation to beauty, nor to suggest that she leaves beauty unexamined. however, he work dwells on political aspects of ”the aesthetics of negative emotions” (1), which are too infrequently focused on. 13. pigeons themselves were also used for medicinal purposes (allen 89-91). 14. for a discussion on the emergence of these metaphors see jerolmack (”pigeons became rats” 81). 15. for an analysis of the interplay of animal care-taking, ethnicity, and nation, see also jerolmack, “animal practices.” 16. see jerolmack's note on sparrows as immigrants (”animal archeology” 76). 17. i do not mean to suggest here that communication is separate from social norms and dynamics. works cited ahmed, sara. the promise of happiness. london: duke up, 2010. emily snyder – the ugly animal 165 ahmed, sara. the cultural politics of emotion. edinburgh: edinburgh up, 2004. allen, barbara. pigeon. series: animal ed. jonathan burt. london: reaktion books, 2009. assad, maria. “‘being free to write for a woman’: the question of gender in the work of michel serres.” mapping michel serres. ed. niran abbas. ann arbor, mi: u michigan p, 2005. 210-225. bird-x. “ultrasonic bird repellers.” accessed 30 january 2013. web. bpc (bharat pest control services). “pigeon control services.” accessed 30 january 2013. web. braidotti, rosi. “posthuman, all too human: towards a new process ontology.” theory culture society 23.7-8 (2006): 197-208. brown, steven d. “michel serres: science, translation and the logic of the parasite.” theory culture society 19.3 (2002): 1-27. _____. “parasite logic.” journal of organizational change management 17.4 (2004): 383-395. burke, edmund. a philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. [1792]. basil: j.j. tourneisen, 2003. gane, nicholas. “posthuman.” theory culture society 23.2-3 (2006): 431-434. gille, didier. “maceration and purification.” zone 1/2. eds. jonathan crary et al. new york: urzone inc., 1986: 226-281. hancock, ange-marie. the politics of disgust: the public identity of the welfare queen. new york, ny: new york up, 2004. haraway, donna. companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago, il: prickly paradigm press, 2003. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 166 _____. “cyborgs, coyotes, and dogs: a kinship of feminist figurations and there are always more things going on than you thought! methodologies as thinking technologies.” the haraway reader. new york, ny: routledge, 2004. 321-342. _____. “encounters with companion species: entangling dogs, baboons, philosophers, and biologists.” configurations 14.1-2 (2006): 97-114. _____. “the promises of monsters: a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others.” the haraway reader. new york, ny: routledge, 2004. 63-124. _____. simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. new york, routledge, 1991. _____. when species meet. series: posthumanities vol. 3, minneapolis, mn: u minnesota p, 2008. hayles, n. katherine. “unfinished work: from cyborg to cognisphere.” theory culture society 23.7-8 (2006): 159-166. jerolmack, colin. “animal archeology: domestic pigeons and the nature-culture dialectic.” qualitative sociology review 3.1 (2007): 74-95. _____. “animal practices, ethnicity, and community: the turkish pigeon handlers of berlin.” american sociological review 72.6 (2007): 874-894. _____. “how pigeons became rats: the cultural-spatial logic of problem animals.” social problems 55.1 (2008): 72-94. kant, immanuel. critique of judgment. [1790]trans. john. h. bernard. new york: hafner press, 1951. kristeva, julia. powers of horror: an essay on abjection. [1980] trans. leon s. roudiez. new york, ny: columbia up, 1982. latour, bruno. politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy. trans. catherine porter. massachusetts: harvard up, 2004. emily snyder – the ugly animal 167 meagher, michelle. “jenny saville and a feminist aesthetics of disgust.” hypatia 18.4 (2003): 23-41. morton, timothy. ecology without nature: rethinking environmental aesthetics. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 2007. mosse, george. toward the final solution: a history of european racism. new york: howard fertig, 1978. ngai, sianne. ugly feelings. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 2005. prompt pest control service. “sonic bird repellent — bird chaser.” accessed 30 january 2013. web. schehr, lawrence r. “translator’s preface and translator’s introduction.” the parasite. michel serres. minneapolis, mn: u minnesota p, 1982. vii-x. serres, michel. the natural contract. [1990] ann arbor, mi: u michigan p. trans. elizabeth macarthur and william paulson, 1995. _____. the parasite. trans. lawrence r. schehr. minneapolis, mn: u minnesota p, 2007 (english version originally published 1982). serres, michel with bruno latour. conversations on science, culture and time. [1990] trans. roxanne lapidus. ann arbor, mi: u michigan p, 1995. shields, rob. the virtual. new york: routledge, 2003. spivak, gayatri chakravorty. a critique of postcolonial reason: toward a history of the vanishing present. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1999. thrift, nigel. “donna haraway’s dreams.” theory culture society 23.7-8 (2006): 189-195. wenzel, christian helmut. an introduction to kant’s aesthetics: core concepts and problems. oxford: blackwell publishing, 2005. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 168 wesling, donald. “michel serres, bruno latour, and the edges of historical periods.” clio 26.2 (1997): 189-204. whiteside, kerry. h. divided natures: french contributions to political ecology. cambridge: mit press, 2002. winkler, isabella. “love, death, and parasites.” mapping michel serres. ed. niran abbas. ann arbor, mi: u michigan p, 2005. 226-241. wolch, jennifer. “anima urbis.” progress in human geography 26.6 (2002): 721742. wolfe, cary. “bring the noise: the parasite and the multiple genealogies of posthumanism (introduction to the new edition).” the parasite. michel serres. minneapolis, mn: u minnesota p, 2007. xi-xxviii. yates, julian. “‘the gift is a given’: on the errant ethics of michel serres.” mapping michel serres. ed. niran abbas. ann arbor, mi: u michigan p, 2005. 190-209. zylinska, joanna. on spiders, cyborgs, and being scared: the feminine and the sublime. manchester: manchester up, 2001. microsoft word davis-chicken pdf dummy h u m a n i m a l i a 4:1 karen davis chicken wisdom annie potts. chicken. london: reaktion books ― animal, 2012. 216 pp. $19.95 pb. chickens are creatures of the earth who have been forced off the land. in western countries billions of chickens are confined in industrialized buildings, and billions more are similarly confined in africa, india, china, russia and other parts of the world where poultry factory farming is rapidly supplanting, or has already supplanted, traditional farming. if there is such a thing as “earthrights,” the right of a creature to experience the earth from which it derived and on which its happiness in life chiefly depends, then chickens have been stripped of theirs. chicken traces the history of chickens, from their earliest known ancestry dating to a “pre-chicken” fossil record of 50 million years ago, to the “post-chicken” of industrialized animal farming ― “post-chicken” meaning that the worldwide chicken industry is doing everything possible, from genetics to advertising, to destroy the chicken intrinsically and in public perception as a living being and fellow creature. author annie potts, a professor of english and cultural studies and co-director of the new zealand centre for human-animal studies at the university of canterbury, christchurch, does not view the human stranglehold on chickens lightly or approvingly. growing up in a rural town surrounded by poultry farms, she says she stopped eating chickens at an early age and cherishes a “strong love for chickens.” her book is “dedicated to all chickens born to and killed for agribusiness, scientific research and entertainment, and to those special humans who educate, advocate and provide refuge for these birds.” potts argues that the disparagement of chickens that dominates today’s popular culture is relatively new. chickens were the first farmed animals to be permanently confined, in vast numbers, in automated systems based on intensive genetic selection for foodproduction traits and reliance on antibiotics and drugs. in the 20th century, the poultry industry in the united states became the model for animal agribusiness throughout the world. roosters and hens went from being admired across cultures and time for “their vigilance, courage and loyalty to family or flock” to being caricatured as cowards and anthropomorphized as dim-witted. hens became “egg-laying machines.” chickens disappeared into “chicken.” karen davis — chicken wisdom 145 the disappearance of chickens into rhetorical anonymity and featureless buildings crammed with thousands of unseen birds has made it easy for the poultry industry, through advertising, cartoons, and other means, to devalue chickens publicly, just as it is busy eviscerating chickens biologically through its worldwide experimental programs in universities, genetics, and pharmaceutical laboratories. who knew or cared what happened to chickens as the flow of cheap chicken and eggs entered the market after world war ii? a friend of mine said that when she was growing up in north carolina in the 1940s and 1950s, every family kept a few chickens for eggs, but as soon as eggs started appearing in the grocery store, people stopped keeping chickens. not having to tend them was labor-saving, and store-bought eggs were cheaper than feed and other supplies. chicken surveys the uses of chickens going back 8,000 years or so in folklore, popular culture, and art, from the “mythologies of ancient cultures to the mundane realities of the contemporary kitchen.” four stages in the domestication of chickens, who evolved in the tropical forests of southeast asia and the rugged foothills of the himalayan mountains, are identified: religion, including ritual sacrifice of hens and roosters and worship of eggs as cosmic symbols; cockfighting; the 19th-century craze in europe and america of breeding “fancy” chickens for exhibition, an enthusiasm sparked in gentleman farmers by the importation to the continent of asian breeds of chickens; and the utility breeding of “egg-type” and “meat-type” birds which grew out of the fancy breeding frenzy to seal the fate of chickens in the 20th century. potts traces a persistent tension in the human relationship with chickens. on the one hand, chickens have been accurately and appreciatively portrayed in literature and the arts; on the other hand, chickens have been trapped in anthropomorphic symbolisms and superstitions that have nothing to do with chickens except in a distorted, speciesist way. in cockfighting and religious rituals, chickens are tortured, killed and characterized by practitioners as wanting to be sacrificed to human and deific desires. as bad as industrialization has been for chickens, people have been assaulting chickens for ages ― in staged cockfights, blood fiestas, voodoo rituals, hindu massacres, kaporos ceremonies, and more. chickens deemed “sacred” disappear into symbolic, sacrificial designations and uses that are as obliterating of their actual selves, as grisly and demeaning to them, as their disappearance into meat is. fortunately, a counter strain of empathy and understanding runs through the record. in the chapter called “chicken wisdom,” potts quotes people in previous centuries who humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 146 delighted in the devotion of roosters and hens to their families and the ability of chickens to bond with other species. the renaissance ornithologist ulisse aldrovandi wrote of a hen he raised “who would not go to sleep at night anywhere except near me and my books.” the eighteenth-century natural historian gilbert white wrote of the affection he observed between a hen and a horse whose mutual loneliness brought them together. the hen would approach the horse “with notes of complacency, rubbing herself gently against his legs, while the horse would look down with satisfaction, and move with the greatest caution and circumspection, lest he should trample on his diminutive companion.” this chapter provides important information about the intelligence, emotional sensitivities, social sophistication and sensory complexity of chickens, dispelling any notion that chickens are stupid or inferior beings. the idea that mammalian brains are superior to avian brains, or that “tiny things just can’t be intelligent or aware,” is discredited. potts explains that while the neuroanatomy of mammals and birds diverged during evolution, the mental development of both “has actually been convergent.” the cortical cells of mammals developed on the surface of the brain, while homologous cells in birds were retained “deeper within the cortex.” chickens have excellent hearing, full-spectrum color vision, discriminating smell and taste receptors, and acutely sensitive skin. their beaks, with which they explore their surroundings, forage for food, rake in nesting materials, preen their feathers, and defend themselves against predators, are endowed with special receptors enabling them to make “exact tactile judgments.” chickens love to sunbathe, dustbathe, and socialize together. their daily activities include playful chases, occasional spats, and vigorous vocal announcements ― crows, egg cackles, predator warnings, and “chook, chook, chook!” whenever food is found. chickens have singing sounds of contentment that resonate through the flock intermittently during the day and often as they are settling down on their perches for the night. they use their voices not only to exchange information intimately and across distances, but to express joy and enthusiasm as well as boredom, weariness and woe. having lived with chickens since 1985, i know that chickens are vibrant individuals, cheerful in all kinds of weather from sunshine to snow, and as potts shows through stories she relates, chickens assert “their own forms of agency and self-determination.” the vitality of chickens is crushed, however, by the poultry and egg industries, which operate unchecked by conscience or accountability. in the chapter “meat chicks and egg machines,” potts shows the horror to which humans have condemned chickens for karen davis — chicken wisdom 147 products we do not need and should not be eating. she writes that in modern societies, chicken have become denatured, depersonalized and even “de-animalized.” this summary is apt so long so we remember that the minds, consciousness, and sensitivities of billions of chickens, whose body parts are marketed disgustingly as “wholesome food,” remain intact. i personally have facilitated the recovery of hundreds of chickens rescued from poultry and egg operations. i have witnessed the revival of their personalities and selfconfidence under the influence of sunshine, fresh air, loving care, and loss of fear. they have been traumatized, and as potts writes, the suffering we inflict on chickens “seems set to intensify even further.” yet their proprioceptive awareness remains and will persist, i believe, in the form of phantom limbic ancestral memories, recalling who they are ontologically, before our punishing hands were laid upon them. in her “epilogue: appreciating chickens,” potts writes that alongside the terrible developments in poultry farming, there has been “a resurgence of interest in chickens as backyard helpers and cherished companions.” this interest is attributed to nostalgia for nature and a desire for contact with other species along with the activism and increased visibility of animal advocacy groups in north america, europe and australia. in britain in the early 1970s, clare druce and her mother violet spaulding launched chickens’ lib, the first advocacy organization in the world dedicated specifically to exposing the atrocities of modern poultry and egg production. clare druce, together with a beloved hen i rescued in maryland in 1985 named viva, inspired me to establish united poultry concerns in 1990. while the trend in urban backyard chicken-keeping has benefited chickens insofar as people who previously knew chickens only as food have discovered how delightful they are as living creatures, it has also attracted people who mistreat their birds and brag on the internet about their slaughtering activities; it has also fostered a bustling hatchery business entailing the same kinds of factory-farm cruelties and callousness that small farm practitioners and locavores claim to reject. sanctuaries such as united poultry concerns and chicken run rescue in the united states, and the british hen welfare trust in the united kingdom, have taken in many “casualties of the urban chicken movement,” but our ability to absorb even a fraction of these victims, of whom the majority are roosters, is limited. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 148 chicken is filled with exquisite photography and illuminating artwork from earliest times to the present. the visual art of marc chagall, mary britton clouse, sue coe, and others puts chickens involved with humans hauntingly before us. chicken concludes with the poignant story of mr. henry joy, a small white rooster whose rescuer and friend alisha tomlinson, in north carolina, arranged with area nursing homes and assisted living centers to visit residents as a “therapy chicken” to comfort and uplift their spirits. until he died suddenly in 2009, leaving behind two grieving hens and his bereft human companion, mr. joy brought cheer to people while educating the public through media and community appearances “about chicken sentience and intelligence, factory farming and the truth behind nuggets.” the pictures of mr. joy being tenderly and gently held in the hands of nursing home residents contrast grievously with images of the bleak fate from which chickens will never escape, unless we change our relationship with chickens and the natural world, or disappear entirely from the vast scene of suffering we have created on this planet. potts concludes her account with the therapeutic suggestion that “maybe we would all benefit from an audience with mr. joy. microsoft word peggs pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 2:2 kay peggs risk, human health, and the oppression of nonhuman animals: the development of transgenic nonhuman animals for human use. introduction. in may 2009, the journal nature published an article by erika sasaki et al. outlining a research development in biomedical science that, the authors argue, will provide new possibilities for using nonhuman primates in experiments for human health benefits. the authors claim that their research offers the potential for the reproduction of transgenic marmosets who, because of their “close genetic relations with humans” (523), might be extremely useful in advances designed to reduce the risks from a range of human health hazards. by conducting a critical analysis of the article, i will explore moral questions connected with experiments on nonhuman animals, in order to reflect upon assumptions central to claims about the progress that such nonhuman animal experiments are said to represent. my discussion is rooted in sociological theorizing about risk because, as sasaki and her colleagues’ work demonstrates, biogenetics is being used to amplify risks to nonhuman animal health for the purpose of reducing risks to human health. sociological theory allows us to examine assumptions about distinctions between humans and nonhuman animals, and among nonhuman animals, that intensify the commodification of nonhuman animals. critical discourse analysis allows us to unveil assumptions made by sasaki et al. that serve a logic of scientific advancement driven by human preoccupation with human benefits at the expense of nonhuman animals, which, i conclude, conflicts with human moral progress. my aims are reflected in the structure of the paper. the opening section explores risk and human health with a focus on the ways in which humans have sought, via biomedical research, to reduce human risks from health hazards. this is followed by consideration of how experiments using nonhuman animals have been utilized in the quest to diminish human health risks. this leads me to sasaki et al.’s (2009) article. by using a critical discourse analytical approach, i reflect upon notions of “progress” as rooted in the aspiration to transfer to nonhuman animals a range of health hazards that we seek to eliminate in the human. i conclude that interfering with the genetics of nonhuman animals with the aim of engendering in them a predisposition to develop health hazards that we want to eliminate in humans represents human degeneration rather than progress. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 50 human hazards, biomedical science and human health. owing to the way in which it pervades our lives, piet strydom brands risk the “signature of contemporary society” (4). risk is such an important aspect of our lives, according to ulrich beck, that it, rather than wealth, is the main principle around which inequalities are organized (risk society 19). risks are much publicized (tulloch and lupton 1) and in the current phase of modernity are most commonly associated with negative outcomes. consequently, the utopia of risk society remains peculiarly negative and defensive. basically, one is no longer concerned with obtaining something “good” but rather with preventing the worst… (beck 49; emphasis in original) in our desire to prevent the worst, zygmunt bauman observes, we are preoccupied with calculating the probability that the worst will strike, and consequently we live our lives in constant anxiety (liquid fear 11). the current phase of modernity “is a contraption attempting to make life with fear liveable” (6); our anxious lives are made more bearable if we can predict and control a range of hazards, including those associated with human health. but the hypervisibility of health risks compels us to contemplate the health hazards that we fear are lying in wait for us. we feel menaced by a range of (potential) health problems, even though our overall health has generally improved (busfield 299), and we are, by and large, freer from serious diseases than we were in the past (giddens, modernity 115). despite these improvements, human movement across the globe has led to a resurgence of older infectious diseases (such as tuberculosis) and the development of newer ones (such as hiv/aids) (turner, “social fluids” 8). in addition, the spread of new strains of contagious diseases (such as pandemic influenza) has resulted in additional worries about the development of conditions that might be resistant to known treatments. furthermore, genetic research has caused anxiety about individuals’ probabilities of developing specific genetic conditions (le breton 4). consequently, in terms of health, contemplating hazards and assessing risk are ubiquitous exercises. but human health is viewed as an accomplishment grounded in the wider remit of reflexive risk-monitoring (giddens 123). for anthony giddens, “reflexivity” involves the continual weighing of different positions in the light of new information, which enables us to develop strategies for avoiding putting ourselves at risk (20). thus, with respect to health, we are expected to assume responsibility for our (healthy) futures (smart 89); health is viewed as an individual accomplishment (clarke et al. 162). however, increased individual risk consciousness is associated with mounting dependence on expert kay peggs — risk, human health, and the oppression of nonhuman animals 51 systems (beck, risk society 4), and our project of health, of course, relies on scientific research aimed at minimizing human health hazards. responsibility for human health is constructed at the levels of the individual (e.g. in terms of a commitment to healthy behaviors) and the collective. at the collective level we expect, for example, biomedical research institutes and pharmaceutical companies to discover techniques for reducing human health risks. although such research can provoke further anxiety, as expert advice can be contradictory and because human intervention can generate conditions that are resistant to treatment (e.g., see bowcott 2) or can produce additional health hazards (e.g., see turner, “culture, technologies, and bodies” 35), biomedical science is usually commended for human health advances. human health is a collective achievement based in wider societal responsibility for (biomedical and other) developments designed to counter the possible ravages associated with human bodily vulnerability, human biology, human diseases, and human ageing. in this way, technological and scientific research points the way to a possible utopian future based on the human ability to prevail over our bodily limitations (turner, “culture” 19). this possible utopian future is grounded, however, in the past, present, and future commodification of millions of nonhuman animals. in terms of the past and present, the uk-based research defence society1 pays tribute to human medical advances that they commend as being founded in experiments using nonhuman animals (2), and sasaki et al. claim future potential for the use of nonhuman animals in experiments designed to achieve human health gains. these claims are contentious, not least because other scientists have pointed to the problems associated with the prediction of human health outcomes using nonhuman animal experiments (e.g., knight 96). nevertheless, biomedical science that uses nonhuman animal experiments is often eulogized. faith in science and technology to enable the calculation, control, restraint, or circumvention of human health hazards affords some comfort in our anxious lives. consequently, ours is an “age that is guided by science, an age that, in some way, chooses its ideals as well as its medicines and its breakfast foods on grounds provided by scientific research” (midgley 15; emphasis in original). although scientific breakth breakthroughs have not facilitated unfettered control over our (health) futures, the calculation of the probability of a hazard occurring is “the next best thing to (alas unattainable) certainty” (bauman, liquid fear 10). this dependence on scientific breakthroughs points to beck’s paradox (risk society 2), where risk society has been humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 52 produced by sophisticated, devastating, and potentially catastrophic scientific and technological developments, while at the same time scientific and technical developments also provide methods for risk reduction. this is evident in the area of human health. we anticipate a better and healthier life based in scientific and technological developments, but we also worry that scientific and technological endeavor will generate a feared disastrous future (4). for example, “genetic screening” is said to increase the potential for calculating individual predispositions to a growing range of genetic disorders, yet genetic screening might also generate “new forms of biological discrimination” (le breton 10-12). this could have devastating consequences for humans at risk of exclusion based in their genotypes (13) and, in an attempt to control feared genotypes, there is increased focus on genetic research. such research is leading to increased dependence on nonhuman animal experiments (brown and michael 3). individualization, biomedical science, and human values. although science has a paradoxical place in risk societies, not least because scientists often make contradictory claims (giddens, “risk and responsibility” 6), it seems nonetheless undeniable that science, as mary midgley suggests, is regarded as the singular form of rational thinking (14). the driving force of biomedical science is the desire to alleviate human health hazards, and it is the attachment to rational thinking associated with science and with human benefit goals that allows nonhuman animal experiments to be undertaken at all (emel and wolch 20; peggs, “nonhuman animal experiments” 16). in such experiments, nonhuman animals are exposed to risks that would be considered unacceptable for humans (henry and pulcino 306). of course, it is wholly reasonable that humans should try to reduce, and optimally to eliminate, the health risks that plague our lives, but this focus on our own needs limits our moral range to one that is increasingly individualized. individualization consists in the focus on “me” and “my” yearnings (beck and beck-gernsheim 95), and “my” incessant wants and needs include “my” wish to diminish or eradicate risks to “my” health. for bauman, this “me” society is characterized by a narrow moral scope in which individuals spend most of their lives pondering which goals to pursue rather than thinking about the means of achieving them (liquid modernity 2). and because we live our lives in states of perpetual anxiety, we spotlight our goals and focus on our own costs and benefits rather than on costs and benefits to others. if we scale up the individual “me” to include the human “us,” it is evident that in our focus on “our” health anxieties we imagine scientific progress in terms of health benefits for “us” at the expense of “the other,” the nonhuman animals.2 kay peggs — risk, human health, and the oppression of nonhuman animals 53 annually, over 100 million nonhuman animals are used in experiments worldwide (rowlands 124). although nonhuman animals have been used in experiments from living nonhuman animal dissections in ancient greece (see zola et al. 40) to the genetic modification of marmosets, there have been significant changes over time. for example, at present some nations declare that experiments on nonhuman animals must adhere to ethical codes (e.g. see commission of the european communities 60-61), whereas, as mark rowlands observes, if you were a nonhuman animal used in a seventeenth or eighteenth century cartesian scientific experiment, “you could expect to find yourself nailed to a vivisection board being slowly cut open. you would be conscious throughout”(3). but even given current ethical codes, rowlands warns, “our present day treatment of many animals is no better than that of the cartesian scientists …. in some respects we are much worse… at least they thought that animals were incapable of suffering” (5). historically, nonhuman animal experimentation has been used to provide the experimental method with an identity established in “science” rather than in the arts (rupke 7). the scientific enterprise lays claim to the generation of value-free “facts” obtained by the scientist, who is depicted as a “disinterested human observer” (adams 138). zuleyma tang halpin notes that accordingly “scientific objectivity necessitates the rejection of feelings in favor of intellect” and “the separation of the scientist as the thinking ‘self’ from the object of study, ‘the other”’ (285). nevertheless, as midgley observes, “scientific objectivity” is actually grounded in “a new scale of values, a new priority system, leading to particular political projects” (15). for example, norms and values associated with the intrinsic importance of (biomedical) scientific research are deeply entrenched in western societies (gray xiii-xiv), and within biomedical research (sasaki et al.’s research is evidence of this) human values ensure that it is the human who is prioritized. as jane welchman observes, within the biomedical community “it is widely held that partiality to human interests is not only defensible, but obligatory” (245). the view that partiality to human interests should be fundamental to biomedical research undoubtedly extends beyond the biomedical community to the wider public (e.g., see henry and pulcino 306). nevertheless, experiments using nonhuman animals are increasingly controversial (e.g, see henry and pulcino 305). researchers who use nonhuman animals in experiments usually have to engage in the moral debate about such experiments (michael and birke 189). this engagement is confirmed by statements made by, for example, the uk-based research defence society, which asserts that “…animal research has played a major part in developing improvements in human humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 54 health,” but “[t]he work we do is performed with compassion, care, humanity and humility” (rds 2). so, although the persistence of nonhuman animal experiments is deemed justifiable by constricted values that focus on ways of alleviating human suffering and illness (for discussion, see brown and michael 5), a broader vision extends beyond instrumental human costs and benefits to harms to nonhuman animals as well (e.g., see peggs, “nonhuman” 18). with this in mind i now turn my attention to an analysis of extracts from sasaki et al.’s article in order to consider notions of progress as associated with nonhuman experiments designed to diminish risks to human health. the “promise” of genetics: transgenic marmosets and the control of human health hazards. sasaki et al. claim that their results build on previous work that uses genetically modified nonhuman animals for biomedical research. the innovations sasaki et al. claim are two-fold. first, while previous developments in the construction of transgenic nonhuman animals have centered on mammals such as mice, the nonhuman animals used by sasaki et al. are marmosets who, as primates, are seen as particularly beneficial in biomedical research because of their “close genetic relations with humans” (523). second, the transgene used (in the form of a green fluorescent protein) was passed from parents to young, thus suggesting the potential for transgenic marmosets to pass on, for example, a human cancer gene, via natural reproduction (526). this is viewed as particularly beneficial, as it points the way to the establishment of colonies of nonhuman animals who could be born with human disease potential, ready at hand for biomedical experiments. the authors claim that their research results are consequently extremely important in research that seeks to advance human health (523). in their experimental use, nonhuman animals are “transformed from holistic ‘naturalistic’ creatures into ‘analytic’ objects of technical investigation” (lynch 266). thus, “the naturalistic animal provides the conditions for achieving the analytical counterpart” (280), and is transformed from nonhuman animal into paper (latour and woolgar 50). genetic research is a further element of this transformative process, as transgenic nonhuman animals carry a gene that is foreign to them, which amplifies their use “as models for many human diseases” (hessman saey 13). the development of transgenic marmosets follows the development of other transgenic nonhuman animals (schatten and mitalipov 515). the mouse “patented” as oncomouse is an example, where “foreign dna is inserted into the mouse genome” (ibid.), resulting in a transgenic mouse who “contains the myconcogene, and so has a predisposition to develop cancer” (patent watch 1). sasaki et al.’s research is viewed as a progressive step in transgenic technology because, according to richard ingham (1), “medical kay peggs — risk, human health, and the oppression of nonhuman animals 55 researchers have hankered for an animal model that is closer to the human anatomy than rodents,” as “disorders such as alzheimer’s and parkinson’s disease are too complex to be reproduced in transgenic mice and rats who are ‘the mainstay of preclinical lab work.’” (1). the possibility for biomedical experiments using transgenic marmosets represents, for these writers, progress towards the goal of reducing the risks associated with many feared human diseases. risk to human health is a ubiquitous topic, both in public discourses (recently seen in news media reports about pandemic influenza; see campbell 4) and in scientific discourses (seen in academic papers on the topic health and medicine, see wilkinson 93). because genetic information can be used as a starting point for the hypothetical projection of future health, david le breton declares, “everybody, even if they are in good health, is potentially sick without knowing it, by virtue of having a greater risk than others of developing a particular condition” (11). so the health destiny of individuals is located in their biology, and “genetic determinism,” as anne kerr and sarah cunningham-burley argue, “revitalises the modernist imperative to control human nature as never before” (289). predictive medicine associated with biomedical genetic research enables those with potential genetic conditions to be risk-assessed, and this assessment may be accompanied by ill-health control. thus nonhuman animal experiments that spotlight the prioritized value of human health are presented as progressive, and biomedical research that leads to such developments can receive high scientific acclaim. for example, robert winston, a uk-based medical researcher, proudly announces that “animal research contributed to 70% of the nobel prizes for physiology or medicine” (rds 2). the plea for scientific acclaim is evident in sasaki et al’s paper for, in terms of scientific innovation, they declare that to our knowledge, this is the first report of transgenic non-human primates showing not only the transgene expression is somatic tissues, but also germline transmission of the transgene with the full, normal development of the embryo. (525-6) as ingham (2) explains, the first transgenic monkey, born in 2000, could not pass on the “foreign gene” to reproductive cells (that is, sperm or egg), whereas sasaki et al. claim that the transgenic marmosets can reproduce “naturally.” of course, science seeks to “legitimate itself” (michael 315), not least via discourses that function to present the “potential” as “actual,” and we get a flavor of this in the extract above. in using humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 56 scientific discourses that are intended for the readers of the scientific journal nature, sasaki et al. are eager to persuade other scientists and “relevant social actors” that their “manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power” (haraway, simians 185), not least the potential to control human ill-health. stem-cell researchers gerald schatten and shoukhrat mitalipov seem convinced, as they describe the birth of transgenic marmosets as “undoubtedly a milestone” (515). of course, sasaki et al.’s “milestone” is a claim regarding the potential for rather than actual research into human disease; but this need not detain us here, as our concern is not the reliability of sasaki et al.’s work, but rather the moral underpinnings of their research. sasaki et al.’s research is grounded in notions of progress, i.e., progress based specifically in scientific discovery. in order to explore the discourses used by sasaki and her colleagues in their article, and to reflect critically upon the notion of progress in their research, i will apply critical discourse analysis to “analyse how social and political inequalities are manifest in and reproduced through discourse” (wooffitt 137). i will explore constructions of, and assumptions about, “progress” as it is associated with scientific “innovations” in the reduction of human health hazards, which serve to justify the continued, and indeed augmented, oppression of nonhuman animals. “promissory technology”: erika sasaki et al.’s experiments using transgenic marmosets. science is seen as the instrument with which humans can control the human body and control the hazards that impair it (haraway, simians 43). in this way, “hazards exacerbate the dependence of everyday life on science” (beck, risk society 161), and genetic biomedical research has become an important aspect of the human health project (newton 106-7). scientists argue that genes predispose certain individuals to particular conditions (kerr and cunningham-burley 289), and promissory medical science relies on gene research as a tool for influencing human health destiny. although tim newton (110) observes that a direct association between genetics and health seems to apply to few human diseases, and the association between genes and human health overlooks the “multifactorial” nature of human health, he notes that gene research nonetheless proclaims a utopian future. such research is not only used to control human genetics, it is also being used to manipulate the genetics of nonhuman animals in the cause of human health. thus, sasaki et al. claim that, [i]n particular, genetically modified primates would be a powerful human disease model for preclinical assessment of the safety and efficacy of stemcell or gene therapy. (523) kay peggs — risk, human health, and the oppression of nonhuman animals 57 the “sense of fatalism about genetic disease [that] ... internalises older notions of destiny” (kerr and cunningham burley 284) is countered by genetic research that “conjures up worlds where disease will be precisely targeted, human ageing retarded, and biology re-written” (newton 100). the imperfect “human biology [that is] ... in need of interventions, enhancements and improvements” (metzler 422) has found promise in genetic research. this “genomic futurism,” in newton’s phrase, depicts a “biopostmodernism,” “where the biological becomes as plastic as the social” (101). human biology is seen as malleable and open to human intervention (newton 110 ). in order to achieve this human malleability, sasaki et al. have set their sights on reproducing biologically malleable marmosets. sasaki and her colleagues promote this malleability as a progressive promissory technology, not least for enhancing stem-cell or gene therapies that are designed to reduce human health hazards. so sasaki et al. present their research as (potential) progress for humans. the “creation” of transgenic marmosets as human “models.” in the abstract of their article, sasaki et al. summarize their claim to the value of their work as follows: the successful creation of transgenic marmosets provides a new animal model for human disease that has the great advantage of a close genetic relationship with humans. (523) in biomedical research, nonhuman animals are conceptualized as “models” because, not being human, any effects in nonhuman animals can only imitate those that might occur in humans. accordingly, “model” refers to a version of human, a version that resembles the human and that can stand in for a human. but genetic research facilitates some remodelling of that which is deemed natural. the genetic makeup of the marmosets may have the potential to be refashioned in order to bring the marmoset closer to human by provoking a predisposition to the development of feared human health conditions. so the emphasis is not on the model as “a standard of excellence”; rather, the transgenic marmoset has the potential to be a “standard of imperfection,” whose manipulated genes might be a model for adverse human health conditions. the transgenic marmoset is represented as an artifact, because “model” also invokes an unreal, synthetic human-made “dummy,” reinforcing the notion that the nonhuman animal used in experiments is, as michael lynch argues, an “‘analytic’ [object] of technical investigation” (lynch 266), and as lynda birke suggests, “not quite an animal” (214). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 58 this human-made element is emphasized in sasaki et al.’s suggestion that they have “created” the marmosets. nonhuman animals used in laboratories are treated as scientific equipment (birke 210; lynch 266; midgley 149) rather than as conscious sentient beings who have desires and preferences (rowlands 23). sasaki et al. refer to the marmosets, as human-created scientific possessions who exist purely for the purposes of science, which cements their status as human possessions that exist for human use. as humanly “created” possessions “made” in a laboratory, these nonhuman animals appear to be synthetic commodities. their standing as synthetic tools rather than as natural beings accentuates their use value and appears to diminish any moral status that they might be accorded. however, as we have seen, sasaki et al. predict that, after the initial tampering with their genes, the marmosets will reproduce themselves without human interference. this move from human “creation” to natural reproduction does not seem to rule out the representation of the marmosets as human possessions; and indeed it strengthens their use value. according to sasaki et al.: these findings suggest that it should be possible to establish transgenic non-human primate colonies, opening the door to their use in biomedical research. (526) of course, via the transgenic modification of nonhuman animals, sasaki et al. are tampering with, rather than creating, nonhuman animals. via natural reproduction the scientists are hoping to facilitate an additional potential supply of “disenfranchised bodies” (adams 138) for use in the quest to reduce risks to human health. thus, the production of “primate colonies” could allay worries that this resource might falter. for sasaki et al. the progress associated with their notion of “creation” is founded in possession and use-value, but “creation” has further connotations, of course. the word “creation” invokes supreme powers found in religious narratives; via transgenesis sasaki et al. suggest that they have the potential to create beings in their own (human) image. however, these “creations” will not be any closer to human in outward appearance than non-transgenic marmosets, rather they have the potential for an inner closer “genetic relationship with humans” (sasaki et al. 523). in this regard, birke’s (219) observation that nonhuman animals used in experiments are “doubly othered ethically” is extended. the marmosets in sasaki et al.’s laboratory are doubly othered ethically, in birke’s terms, as they are “other” than human (confirmed by their use in the experiments that sasaki et al. have conducted and want to enable), and they are “not quite an animal” (because the actions against them would normally be kay peggs — risk, human health, and the oppression of nonhuman animals 59 forbidden outside the laboratory). they have the potential for a third otherness as well, because their status as transgenic would make them ethically “other” than marmoset. they would not be the same as “natural” marmosets, and consequently they may not receive the ethical consideration accorded to natural nonhuman primates (discussed below). it is this third dimension of ethical “otherness” (resulting from genetic tampering to engender enhanced genetic closeness to humans) that would augment their use value in scientific research focusing on reducing risks to human health. thus, the scientists are not claiming “creations” in the image of human perfection, rather they seek to “create” marmosets that embody the imperfections that humans seek to eliminate in themselves. this, of course, would be extremely regressive for the marmosets, as their propensity to develop human diseases would prevent them from being perfectly healthy marmosets. of course, such potential resonates with public fears about the blurred line between “new genetics” and “eugenics” (for discussion, see newton 102) and concerns about the morality of genetic modification (e.g., see macnaghten 535-6), which in turn echoes beck’s paradox (2). accordingly, fears associated with eugenicist notions of human genetic improvement appear to be produced by the self-same desire that applauds scientific enterprise that seeks to improve human (genetic) health. the scientific enterprise of sasaki et al. seems to engage with a form of triangulated eugenics, where human “perfection” is aided by means of human-induced nonhuman animal imperfection. so the progress that sasaki et al. claim requires the potential genetic deterioration (via the introduction of “faulty” human genes) of the marmosets, which would improve their use value to human health research because their genetic deterioration would have the potential to be employed for the (genetic) improvement of humans. such notions of progress are bound up with antagonistic conceptualizations of difference from and similarity to the human. risk, similarity and difference: the close genetic proximity of transgenic marmosets to humans. for sasaki et al., a key scientific value of transgenic marmosets is their “close genetic relationship with humans” (523). the plea to similarity with humans is central to biomedical research claims about the utility of nonhuman animal experiments because, without similarities, such research might be deemed futile. sasaki et al. claim that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 60 the use of transgenic mice has contributed to biomedical science. however, the genetic and physiological differences between primates and mice — including their neurophysiological functions, metabolic pathways and drug sensitivities — hamper the extrapolation of results from mouse models to direct clinical applications to humans. thus, the development of non-human primate models that mimic various human systems would accelerate the advance of biomedical research. (523) here we encounter paradoxical arguments about the utilization of nonhuman animals in biomedical experiments, a paradox that has been discussed extensively (e.g. see adams 52; brown and michael 10; peggs, “hostile world” 94). the paradox involves a scientific justification for nonhuman animal experiments due to sufficient similarity between humans and the nonhuman animals, and an ethical justification due to a sufficient difference between humans and nonhuman animals. as nik brown and mike michael observe, “similarity in one scientific respect is cancelled by dissimilarity in another” (10); in carol adams’s phrase, “animals are not like us so we can … animals are like us so we conclude…” (52). in terms of difference, the process of what suzanne michel calls, “hyperseparation” (where differences are magnified and similarities minimized) “sets up a hierarchy or unequal relationship” (165) with nonhuman animals categorized as inferior “other.” as janet alger and steven alger observe, the generalized demarcation between human and nonhuman animals is necessary to construct beings, who can be used, unimpeded by moral considerations. those we call animals can be experimented upon, forced to work for us, exploited for our entertainment, and eaten. (203-4) but, as we have seen, similarity is also imperative. for sasaki et al., the potential value of the marmosets is their similarity to humans (thus scientifically useful for use in experiments) while not being human (thus ethically acceptable for use in experiments). of course, sasaki et al.’s experiments are devoted to the development of transgenic marmosets who would be closer still to humans than marmosets whose genes have not been tampered with, because the ability to “mimic various human systems” associated with feared human health hazards would make transgenic marmosets particularly useful for such research. sasaki et al. make no mention of moral questions associated with using nonhuman animals in such research and make no reference to any ethical implications that could emerge from experiments using beings who, via scientific tampering, could be close(r) to human. it seems that any such discussion is obviated by the ethical approval they have gained for this work. they state that their research was kay peggs — risk, human health, and the oppression of nonhuman animals 61 “approved by the institutional care and use committee and were performed in accordance with central institution for experimental animals” (527), implying that ethical issues have already been overcome. the controversy associated with using nonhuman primates in experiments has been much discussed in academic literature (e.g., singer 139) and in a range of policy documents. for example, the commission of the european communities presents a special case for nonhuman primates because of “their genetic proximity to human beings” (15) regarding proposed changes to european union regulations on nonhuman animal experiments (for discussion see peggs, “nonhuman” 11-12). but the problematic hyperseparation of nonhuman primates from human primates is disregarded by sasaki et al. because it is specifically the proximity of nonhuman primates to human primates that, they argue, makes their use in experiments such a progressive step. sasaki et al. state that even though marmosets are less closely related to humans than either apes or old world primates, their potential as transgenic primate models of human disease means they may be uniquely valuable. (523) unlike great apes, who are often viewed as “honorary humans” (midgley 147), sasaki et al. have selected more genetically distant marmosets who are not so “honored.” indeed sasaki et al. claim that the transgenic marmosets have the potential to be at once “less closely related to humans” and have a “close genetic relationship with humans” (523). perhaps they intend this more distant closeness to defuse possible controversy. of course, the introduction of objectionable human genes into nonhuman animals who have a close genetic proximity to humans ethically counteracts sasaki et al.’s claim to “progress” in a case where there is an ethical position that problematizes experiments on nonhuman animals that have a close genetic relationship with humans. such an ethical position, evidently, entrenches the human-centred yardstick of moral worth that is used for deciding the moral position that is awarded in the “moral club” (rowlands 27). the moral unease that positions nonhuman primates above other nonhuman animals paradoxically amplifies michel’s (165) “hierarchy or unequal relationship,” because the hyperseparation of primates from other nonhuman animals is based in the value attached to human attributes. thus sasaki et al. assert that “[t]he use of transgenic mice has contributed to biomedical science” (523) and mice, like the rats to whom midgley refers (149), are often seen as laboratory equipment and thus are not granted humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 62 the moral value given to nonhuman primates. sasaki et al. claim that their research provides progressive potential on biomedical research that uses transgenic mice. even a human-centered ethic that regards nonhuman primates as having higher status than other nonhuman animals (let alone an ethic with a wider moral scope) would surely conclude that sasaki et al.’s research represents moral regression. conclusion. risk is such an important aspect of our lives, according to beck (19), that it is the current organizing principle. although beck focuses his discussion on the ways in which differences in susceptibility to risk (re)produces inequalities among humans, his observations are directly applicable to human and nonhuman animal power relations. in the area of human health this is starkly demonstrated. in seeking to reduce risks to human health, scientists persist in research that increases human-engineered health hazards in nonhuman animals, and there is potential for this as never before. technological developments mean that nonhuman animals are being genetically predisposed to develop human conditions that we wish to control within ourselves. in an effort to reduce human health hazards, scientific research like that undertaken by sasaki et al. amplifies the hazards that impose on the health of nonhuman animals by developing techniques that could provide further potential for the use of transgenic nonhuman animals in experiments for human health gains. thus, human health concerns are individualized; the commodification of nonhuman animals is accentuated via transgenic tampering, and the advances in this area contribute to the sustained view of nonhuman animals used in experiments as merely commodities to be used for human ends. although experiments using nonhuman primates are considered controversial by many, the proximity of nonhuman primates to humans makes them more functional for research aimed at reducing human health hazards. however, being “bred for purpose,” transgenic marmosets are triply othered ethically, which accentuates their distance from the ethical considerations that humans might give to their natural counterparts. of course, millions of nonhuman animals are experimented upon annually, and the majority of them are not nonhuman primates. presumed “natural” hierarchical distinctions between humans and nonhuman animals, and among nonhuman animals (with some being judged closer to human and thus more morally worthy), cement a hierarchy based in human attributes. deemed closeness to humans can, however, be a burden, due to the additional potential health gains that such closeness affords humans. the commodification of transgenic nonhuman animals is achieved by giving them the possibility of a predisposition to health hazards that we wish to eliminate in ourselves. like “oncomouse,” the potential development of transgenic marmosets heralds, in kay peggs — risk, human health, and the oppression of nonhuman animals 63 donna haraway’s terms, a “shift from kind to brand” (modest witness 65-6), a “brand” that embodies a desired potential for human health risk reduction by embodying undesirable human genetic material. of course, such developments are part of the process of the use of nonhuman animals in experiments that date back to ancient times. thus the transgenic nonhuman animals that are at the center of sasaki et al.’s research follow developments that have made possible the further utilization of nonhuman animals in experiments in past times. does sasaki et al.’s research indicate progress? in a prize-winning essay, the nasa researcher natalia alexandrov proposes that the use of “virtual twins”3 (which would evolve with each human for testing, assessing, and targeting medication and treatment) will herald the scientific future for the reduction of human health risks. she concludes: “this is the future of virtual twins. and no more animal testing” (6). such scientific research is surely progressive, as the reduction of human health hazards and the elimination of human and nonhuman animal harms would affirm both scientific and moral progress in biomedical science. this contrasts with the notion of progress suggested by sasaki et al., a form of progress that relies on the ancient (yet still contemporary) practice of experimenting on nonhuman animals. a wider moral scope extends beyond reiterating human superiority to bringing “the other” nonhuman animal back from “the wasteland of calculated interests to which it had been exiled” (bauman, postmodern ethics 84). interfering with the genetic makeup of nonhuman animals to engender an inclination towards feared health hazards that we seek to eradicate in ourselves represents moral degeneration rather than progress. whether nonhuman animals are deemed closer to or further from humans, surely they deserve as much protection from health hazards as we want for ourselves. notes 1. in 2008 the “research defence society” merged with the “coalition for medical progress” to form “understanding animal research.” this new group “aims to achieve broad understanding and acceptance of the humane use of animals in biomedical research in the uk, to advance science and medicine.” (understanding animal research 1). 2. i have discussed this elsewhere, e.g, “the social constructionist challenge to primacy identity and the emancipation of oppressed groups: human primacy identity politics and the human/ ‘animal’ dualism” (2009), and “human primacy identity politics, nonhuman animal experiments and the oppression of nonhuman animals” (in press). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 64 3. the development of a “virtual twin” would involve blood and tissue data from a new born baby being “transmitted to the simulation and modelling department of the regional medical centre,” so that an individual computational model will grow with the human. tests and check-ups throughout life would be used to update the model and drugs and treatments could be tested on the computational model (the virtual twin) to determine reactions in the human individual (alexandrov 28). works cited adams, carol j. neither man nor beast: feminism and the defense of animals. ny: continuum, 1995. alexandrov, natalia. “your virtual twin.” new scientist 2711 (3 june 2009): 28. alger, janet m. and alger, steven f. “cat culture, human culture: an ethnographic study of a cat shelter.” society and animals 7:3 (1999): 199-218. bauman, zygmunt. liquid modernity. cambridge: polity, 2000. —————. liquid fear. cambridge: polity, 2006. —————. postmodern ethics. oxford: blackwell, 1993. beck, ulrich. risk society: towards a new modernity. london: sage, 1992. beck, ulrich and beck-gernsheim, elisabeth. the normal chaos of love. cambridge: polity, 1995. birke, lynda. “who-or-what is the laboratory rat (and mouse)?” society and animals 11:3 (2003): 207-224. bowcott, owen. “one in three nurses ‘do not want swine flu vaccine.’” the guardian. august 18: 2009: 2. brown, n. and michael, m. “switching between science and culture in transpecies transplantation.” science, technology and human values. 26:1 (2001): 3-22. kay peggs — risk, human health, and the oppression of nonhuman animals 65 busfield, jean. “pills, power, people: sociological understandings of the pharmaceutical industry.” sociology 40:2 (2006): 297314. campbell, denis. “first swine flu vaccinations on the way for more than 13m britons.” the guardian. august 14, 2009: 4. clarke, adele e., janet k. shim, laura mamo, jennifer r. fosket, and jennifer r. fishman. “biomedicalizaion: technoscientific transformations of health, illness, and u.s. biomedicine.” american sociological review 68 (april 2003): 161-194. commission of the european communities. proposal for a directive of the european parliament and of the council on the protection of animals used for scientific purposes. commission of the european communities: brussels 2008/0211 (cod). 2008. crook, stephen. “ordering risks.” in risk and sociocultural theory: new directions and perspectives. ed. deborah lupton. cambridge: cambridge up, 1999.160-85. emel, jody & wolch, jennifer. “witnessing the animal moment.” in animal geographies: place, politics and identity in the nature-culture borderland. eds. j. wolch & j. emel. london: verso, 1998. 1-24. franklin, adrian. animals and modern cultures: a sociology of human-animal relations in modernity. london: sage, 1999. giddens, anthony. modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. cambridge: polity, 1991. —————. “risk and responsibility” the modern law review 62 (1): (1999) 1-10 gray, j. straw dogs: thoughts on humans and other animals. london: granta, 2003. greek, c. ray, and jean swingle greek. specious science: how genetics and evolution reveal why medical research on animals harms humans. new york and london: continuum, 2002. halpin, zuleyma tang. “scientific objectivity and the concept of ‘the other.’” women’s studies international forum 12:3 (1989): 285-294. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 66 haraway, donna j. simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. london: free association books, 1991. —————. modest witness@second millenium: femaleman meets oncomouse. london: routledge, 1997. henry, bill, and roarke pulcino. “individual differences and study-specific characteristics influencing attitudes about the use of animals in medical research.” society and animals 17: 4 (2009): 305-324. hesman saey, tina. “four marmosets are first transgenic primates: foreign gene successfully introduced and also passed on to offspring.” science news. 175:13 (june 20, 2009): 13. http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/44202/title/four_marmosets_are_first_tra nsgenic_pri... dowloaded 19 august 2009. ingham, richard. “world first: japanese scientists create transgenic monkeys.” afp. may 27 2009. http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/aleqm5gmnh_hguy6doveb_xdu4e wa4h23a. dowloaded 24 january 2011. kerr, anne, and sarah cunningham-burley. “on ambivalence and risk: reflexive modernity and the new human genetics.” sociology 34:2 (2000): 283-304. knight, andrew. “systematic reviews of animal experiments demonstrate poor contribution toward human health care.” reviews on recent clinical trials. 3 (2008): 89-96. latour, bruno, and woolgar, stephen. laboratory life: the social construction of scientific facts. london: sage, 1979. le breton, david. “genetic fundamentalism or the cult of the gene.” body and society 10:4 (2004): 1-20. lynch, michael e. “sacrifice and the transformation of the animal body into a scientific object: laboratory culture and ritual practice in the neurosciences.” social studies of science 18:2 (1988): 265-289. kay peggs — risk, human health, and the oppression of nonhuman animals 67 macnaghten, p. “animals in their nature: a case study on public attitudes to animals, genetic modification and ‘nature.’” sociology 38:3 (2004): 533-551 metzler, ingrid. “‘nationalizing embryos’: the politics of human embryonic stem cell research.” biosocieties 2:4 (2007): 413-428. michael, mike. 1992. “lay discourses of science: science-in-general, science-inparticular, and self.” science, technology and human values. 17:3 (1992): 313-333. michael, mike, and lynda birke. “accounting for animal experiments: identity and disreputable ‘others.’” science, technology and human values. 19:2 (1994): 189-204. michel, suzanne m. “golden eagles and the environmental politics of care.” in animal geographies: place, politics and identity in the nature-culture borderland. eds. j. wolch & j. emel. london: verso, 1998. 162-87. midgley, mary. the myths we live by. london: routledge, 2004. newton, tim. nature and society. oxford: routledge, 2007. patent watch. 2004. “oncomouse patent restricted in europe again.” nature reviews drug discovery 3:728 (september 2004). peggs, kay. “a hostile world for nonhuman animals: human identification and the oppression of nonhuman animals for human good.” sociology 43:1 (2009): 85-102 . —————. “human primacy identity politics, nonhuman animal experiments and the oppression of nonhuman animals.” in r. carter and n charles, eds. human and other animals: critical perspectives. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan (in press). —————. “nonhuman animal experiments in the european community: human values and rational choice.” society and animals 18:1 (2010): 1-20. —————. “the social constructionist challenge to primacy identity and the emancipation of oppressed groups: human primacy identity politics and the human/ humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 68 ‘animal’ dualism.” sociological research online 14:1 (2009). http://ideas.repec.org/a/sro/srosro/2008-57-2.html dowloaded 24 january 2011. research defence society. “medical advances and animal research. the contribution of animal science to the medical revolution: some case histories.” rds: understanding animal research in medicine and coalition for medical progress, 2007. 24 january 2010. http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/resources/document_library/download_ document/?document_id=8. rowlands, mark. animals like us. london: verso, 2002. rupke, nicholas, ed. vivisection in historical perspective. beckenham: croom helm, 1987. sasaki, e., h. suemizu, a. shimada, k. hanazawa, r. oiwa, m. kamioka, i. tomioka, y. sotomura, r. hirakawa, t. eto, s. shioszawa, t. maeda, m. ito, r. ito, c. kito, c. yahihashi, k. kawai, h. miyoshi, y. tanioka, s. habu, h. okano, and t. nomura. “generation of transgenic non-human primates with germline transmission.” nature 459 (may 28, 2009): 523-527. schatten, gerald, and shoukrat mitalipov. “developmental biology: transgenic primate offspring.” nature 459 (may 28, 2009): 515-516. shilling, c. the body and social theory. london: sage, 1993. singer, peter. unsanctifying human life. ed. h. kuhse. oxford: blackwell, 2002. smart, barry. facing modernity, london: sage, 1999. strydom, piet. risk, environment and society: ongoing debates, cultures, issues and future prospects, buckingham: open up, 2002. tulloch, j. and d. lupton. risk and everyday life. london: sage, 2003. turner, brian. “social fluids: metaphors and meanings of society.” body and society 9:1 (2003): 1-10. kay peggs — risk, human health, and the oppression of nonhuman animals 69 turner, brian s. “culture, technologies and bodies: the technological utopia of living forever.” the sociological review: 55:1 (2007):19-36 understanding animal research. about us . 25 november 2010. web. http://www.understandinganimalresearch.org.uk/about_us/ welchman, j. “xenografting, species loyalty, and human solidarity.” journal of social philosophy 4:2 (2000): 244-255. wilkinson, iain. risk, vulnerability and everyday life. london: routledge, 2010. wooffitt, robin. conversation analysis and discourse analysis: a comparative and critical introduction. london : sage, 2005. zola, j. c., j.a. sechzer, j.e. sieber, and a. griffin, a. “animal experimentation: issues for the 1980s.” science, technology and human values. 9:2 (1984): 40-50. microsoft word turner pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 4:2 stephanie s. turner relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy from the natural history museum to the art gallery: taxidermic aesthetics. the decades-old taxidermies of the natural history museum’s golden era of dioramas are beginning to show their age, and many curators are now faced with some tough decisions about whether to refurbish the taxidermied animals and their fading diorama “habitats,” auction them off, or even destroy them (poliquin 123-124; milgrom 160190). as merle patchett observes, other curators of these “uncomfortable reminders” of colonialism have shifted them from display to storage, removing them from public view yet maintaining them in museum archives (“putting” 12). meanwhile, outside the natural history museum, taxidermy as an art form (hunting trophies aside) has been flourishing (connor). this trend in “dead animal art,”1 which can be traced as far back as robert rauschenberg’s famous tire-and-goat taxidermy monogram (1959), is evident in the work of such contemporary mixed-media artists as damien hirst, mark dion, and polly morgan. many of these artists do more than merely incorporate the bodies of dead animals into their works; mastering the art of taxidermy themselves, some of them create their own mounts, mixing and matching animal parts and incorporating other objects into their artwork. by relocating taxidermied animals from natural history museums to art museums and galleries, these artists are also dislocating them from familiar natural history classification systems and established genres of natural history museum exhibition. out of context, the animal objects thus lose some of their aura as scientific artifacts as they gain an aura of objects d’art. one result has been a shift in the discussion of authenticity in animal representation that has been so central to natural history taxidermy (quinn). new ontological questions arise: how does the “realness” of a taxidermied animal in the art museum differ from its “realness” in the natural history museum? what sort of difference does the dead animal object make in this new space? mark dion’s installation mobile wilderness unit — wolf (2006) (fig. 1) illustrates the irony that can result from such relocation. cropping a diorama that features a single wolf standing next to a rock to fit on a small trailer, ready to be pulled along by a vehicle, the installation mockingly calls attention to the problem of verisimilitude of the taxidermy-in-a-diorama genre. such displays are fleeting, the installation suggests; their easy relocation as objects disconnects them from the actual living things they stand for. yet another layer of irony here, though, is that for dion’s installation to work, it must still “look real.” the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 2 discussion of verisimilitude in taxidermy representation is also therefore epistemological: what new meanings might the relocated and remediated dead animal object—together with the new target audience — create? what more can the viewer come to know about, say, humans’ relationship with wolves and their habitat from looking at dion’s installation? artwork incorporating taxidermy jars the viewer’s sensibility of what dead animal objects represent, and where and how they should be displayed. taxidermied animals displayed deliberately out of place or, in steve baker’s formulation, “botched” in some way, call upon the viewer to rethink human relationships with animal others or, at the very least, ponder “what it is to be human now” (baker, the postmodern animal 54). figure 1. mark dion, mobile wilderness unit — wolf, 2006, courtesy george kargl fine arts, vienna. photo lisa rastl cultural studies of artwork about taxidermy have affirmed these forms of animal representation as endemic to the larger field of animal studies. for example, ron broglio, in surface encounters: thinking with animals and art, explores how contemporary artists, including those working with taxidermy, are challenging the notion that animals “live on the surface of things” (xvi) because they are assumed to lack self-reflexivity. whereas broglio is concerned with the instantiation of animal corporeality in contemporary art — how an aesthetic encounter with animals opens up a shared space with the viewer — giovanni aloi is more concerned with the “deterritorialization” of animals in contemporary art (31-39) — how the current use of stephanie s. turner -relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy 3 real animals in art signals a seismic shift in our “relational modes” with animal others (xv). although aloi, in his chapter on taxidermy art, does mention photographic images of natural history taxidermy as “shattering the illusory aura of the diorama” (28-31), no systematic examination of photography of taxidermy in situ — photographs made within the natural history museum that are meant to be viewed in spaces dedicated to artistic practices — has been undertaken. scholarly interest in the cultural resonances of natural history taxidermy can be traced to donna haraway’s 1984 analysis of famed taxidermist carl akeley’s exhibits in new york’s natural history museum, created during the early twentieth century. haraway’s critical reflection on the ideological value that natural history taxidermy once held in gaining popular support for imperialist projects, along with its role in the development of museum exhibits, has been treated at length (see, for example, asma; patchett, “putting”). central to any close examination of taxidermy’s role in animal representation is the fascination it holds as a craft and creative process, how taxidermy, as a material practice, makes dead things life-like. art historian rachel poliquin observes in the breathless zoo that taxidermy, “straddling the nature-culture opposition [...] requires its own aesthetic vocabulary” (107). art critic steven connor, too, indicates a unique aesthetic surrounding taxidermy, one that, significantly for my analysis of taxidermy photography, is linked to its historical function as a predecessor to photographic documentation: “the art of taxidermy is an art that conceals art,” connor writes, “which aims to create something like a photographic sculpture of the animal” (3; see also poliquin, breathless 50). a natural history museum taxidermy presented as art confronts viewers anew with its construction as a cultural thing. in this aestheticized object, its historical lived reality is both erased and recreated in the object’s carefully crafted pose and the drama of its display. at the same time, however, as a work of art, the taxidermy calls for additional layers of perception: first it calls attention to itself as something created, something with a different kind of material reality than the thing it represents; then it asks the viewer to consider the significance of its relocation from its usual “habitat.” indeed, it is as if the aestheticized taxidermied animal has assumed a sort of agency. while still “real enough” to reference the actual animal, and perhaps, as well, its former surroundings, taxidermy in the art museum references a great many other cultural “habitats” — historical, social, geographical, ideological — that the animal and the viewer not only occupy together but also co-constitute. one example of such co-constitution is another humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 4 well-known work by dion, tar and feathers (1996) (fig. 2). this installation uses the tarred and feathered bodies of animals often considered “pests” (rats, cats, snakes, and crows) to reference the tarred and feathered bodies of black lynching victims, who were dehumanized in their treatment as slaves. the taxidermied animal as art object creates meanings beyond what it signifies as a representative type specimen. by exposing its cultural history and continuing significance, taxidermy art tends to reveal very little to the viewer about the actual animal whose skin it wears but suggests quite a lot about the circumstances that brought it to this place and create around it a new meaning. figure 2. mark dion, tar and feathers, 1996, mixed media, courtesy of the artist and tanya bonakdar gallery, new york in her essay “the matter and meaning of museum taxidermy,” poliquin describes this suggestiveness of taxidermy as its “provocative loquaciousness,” the “talkative stephanie s. turner -relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy 5 thingness” (125) of a once-living animal made to look alive and perhaps, too, anthropomorphized, as though it actually could talk back. this cultural thingness of the taxidermied animal proliferates when it is relocated to an art museum, raising not only the issues of the ethics of the post-colonial sourcing of the animals (desmond), but also the culpability of the viewer’s consuming gaze within that visual economy (baker, “‘you kill things’”). in other words, the viewer wonders, where did the animal bodies come from to make these things, and is it all right to look at them? baker suggests that such is the “pressing reality” of the animal body in dead animal art that viewers are called to respond as though its agency as a living being persisted after its death (“‘you kill things’” 78). part of this agency resides in the power the dead animal object has over the viewer to prompt a narrative imagining its (re)creation and (re)location. in the visual economy of taxidermy as art, the dead animal object invokes a consuming gaze that is both a product of our myriad relationships with non-human others as well as a reminder of the limits of those relationships. despite the viewer’s elaborate imagining of the animal others in taxidermy art, the pressing materiality of the once-living skin of the individual animal constitutes a boundary to what we can know about the animals on display. skin, therefore, is what mediates taxidermic aesthetics. many critics focus on the skin of the taxidermied animal — the only part of the animal that remains in a taxidermy, its residual “realness” — as a sort of permeable medium through which the viewer imagines a palpable connection with the animal other. according to art critic rikke hansen, skin, a border around our corporeal being that is a trait we share in common with other living things, becomes, in cultural terms, a kind of “unfinished project” in the western effort to keep human and non-human animals separate (10-11), much like the dubious cultural purpose human skin has long served in otherizing groups within our own species. this project proceeds in ambivalent ways: we define our humanity, in part, by our prideful lack of a hairy hide or feathery covering, yet we take animals’ skins from them to cover and adorn our own; we kill animals for all kinds of reasons — including, as the artist damien hirst puts it, simply “to look at them” (qtd. in baker, “‘you kill things’” 84) — then we recreate the dead animals from their skin so we can keep right on looking at them. in this sense, as rachel poliquin explores at length in the breathless zoo, the consuming gaze is also a longing gaze. we want more than just skin. ron broglio echoes hansen’s argument about the “unfinished project” that is skin. linking skin to surface, and surface to the “contact zone,” broglio uses mary louise pratt’s description of that social zone comprised of both peril and possibility in which unfamiliar others come into contact and negotiate humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 6 their differences (surface encounters 93). surface, then, is much more than just surface; it refers to the processes by which skin remediates. from animal skin to photographic image: proliferating surfaces. one striking trend in the visual economy that taxidermy seems to proliferate is the photography of natural history taxidermy in situ. increasingly, photographers have been making images of the taxidermies and dioramas in natural history museums. these images then make their way, in the flat surfaces of various lens-based media, into the art museum or gallery. unlike the artistic relocation or recreation of the sculptural dead animal object in the art museum, which then occupies that space as a remanufactured, and in that sense revitalized, corporeal entity, the photograph of the dead animal object remediates its talkative thingness spectrally, through what roland barthes would describe as the “irreducible singularity” (houlihan) of the frozen photographic image. in barthes’s famous formulation, “what the photograph reproduces to infinity has occurred only once: the photograph mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially” (barthes 4). barthes was moved to write his famous theory of photography in camera lucida after looking intently at a number of photographs of his recently dead mother. he was trying, as he put it, to locate her “essence” in the images (66). more than an act of mourning (dillon), however, barthes’s quest led him to the realization that the photographic image is distinct from other forms of representation in that it indexes a singular object in a particular moment of time. this indexing is much like the correspondence between a taxidermy and the living animal it represents (henning 138). in other words, the photograph and the objects arrested in its image (as with the taxidermy and the animal it represents) are more proximate to each other than, say, the objects represented in a painting are to the actual objects. at the same time, however, the photograph, whether film or digital, is also a material thing,2 and the photographic surface adds a layer to the dead animal object held in the viewer’s gaze, effecting perhaps a “safe” distance from the materiality of the actual taxidermy. further, this equivocal proximity, strangely enough, seems more apparent in older photographs, in photographs of old things, and in photographs that anticipate posterity (as in a photograph of an animal known to be critically endangered, or possibly already extinct). in this way, then, “every photograph” signals “the return of the dead” (barthes 8). given barthes’s formulation of the nearness of the photographic image to the actual thing it shows, what are we to make of the unrepeatable existentiality of the photograph of the taxidermy, the dead animal object that is itself “something like a photographic sculpture” (connor 3)? how does a photograph of a taxidermy mediate the “talkative thingness” of the actual thing (poliquin 125)? is it a difference in kind, of degree, or both? stephanie s. turner -relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy 7 many of the photographers making images of natural history taxidermy — diane fox and jason demarte, for example — emphasize the fabricated nature of their exhibition within dioramas. referencing events and objects beyond the frame, including sometimes the viewers themselves, these photographs implicate viewers in some larger cultural narrative about animal representation and the consuming gaze. other photographers working in this vein — nicole hatanaka, danielle van ark, and jules greenberg — make images of taxidermied animals in museum storage rooms and work spaces, rendering these archival holding areas a different kind of exhibit space. many of these photographers gesture toward a documentary genre, in effect creating a photographic archive of backroom collections. other photographers of taxidermied animals in storage, however, — sarah cusimano miles and mary frey — filter the images through more aesthetic modes, for example framing the subject as a still life or portrait, or manipulating photographic production processes to produce a certain affective engagement between the viewer and the image. the work of these photographers of natural history taxidermy and their diorama habitats remediates the taxidermied animal as a “questioning entity,” baker’s description (after derrida) of the excessive signification of animals as art (postmodern animal 76). given the correspondence between the indexicality of both taxidermy and photography (henning 138), how does this excessive signification filter through the combined surfaces of animal skin, the photographic lens, the materiality of the photographic image, and the viewer’s culturally layered perception? i consider here some examples of how photographers of natural history museum taxidermy are remediating dead animal objects. how does photography mediate the questions these entities ask? keeping in mind barthes’s point about the irreducible singularity of the photographic image, i frame my analysis using poliquin’s typology of taxidermy. because, as she puts it, taxidermied animals “always embody an excess that resists full disclosure” (“matter” 123), they seem not only to entice representational practices but to perpetuate representational desires. addressing the tendency of taxidermy to signify meaning in excess of its materiality, poliquin classifies the “talkative thingness” of taxidermied animals by the types of narratives they evoke: descriptive, biographical, cautionary, and experiential. in the descriptive mode, a taxidermy signifies on the basis of its “mimetic capacity” (128), that is, its resemblance to the living animal it once was. because it is “supposed” to represent that animal, however, ultimately it elicits in the viewer the realization that it stands in for others of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 8 its kind. the individual animal it once was is thus erased. by contrast, taxidermies that work in a biographical mode signify particularity; their representation relies upon supplementary documentation that details the historical facts of their acquisition. here, poliquin emphasizes the accrual of meaning as these objects “move between and interact with various social contexts” (129), which i would argue continues in their daily encounters with curators and visitors in the museum exhibit. the now-deteriorating taxidermies of natural history museums and the ironic self-reflexivity of taxidermies in art exhibits best exemplify the cautionary mode, which poliquin describes as the “admonition and censure” viewers experience when the taxidermy exhibit emphasizes the “loss and destruction of species and habitats” (129). cautionary modes of signification may overlap with experiential modes. experiential modes, according to poliquin, arise from a “visceral” encounter between the viewer and the dead animal object. in this mode of signification, the viewer is struck by the “embodied ‘thingness’” of the dead animal, the “strange aura” surrounding “lively yet dead creatures collected together for the purpose of looking” (129). eliciting an emotional response in the viewer that seems to be linked somehow to the interfaces of skin and surface, the experiential mode of taxidermic encounters may be the most useful category in poliquin’s typology as it illuminates the additional layers of signification created by lens-based media. as poliquin’s typology makes clear, even in a purely descriptive mode, taxidermy is loquacious; moreover, the fluidity of her typology makes excessive signification all the more likely. one question, then, is whether taxidermy photography can be effectively characterized by a typology developed to characterize material objects. to put it another way, what distinguishes the signification of the spectrally dead animal object remediated in the photograph from the signification of its materially dead counterpart in the diorama? inasmuch as a photograph is also a material object, it seems the question is answerable in part through poliquin’s typology. the very fact that so many photographers are focusing their attention on these objects suggests that they, too, may be asking similar questions in this case, practice thus precedes and is perhaps informing an aesthetic theory of taxidermic (and photographic) surfaces. like many of these photographers, i begin my investigation in the museum storage room. returning to connor’s comment that taxidermy is “an art that conceals art” (2), one might well wonder what goes on “back there,” behind the scenes, in making this art. a conspicuous absence of human presence is evident in many of these behind-thescenes photographs. in back room (2009), from nicole hatanaka’s series taxinomia, for example (fig. 3), the viewer is shown a length of pristine white storage cabinets over which presides a row of mounted rams’ heads. a grouping of headless antlers on an stephanie s. turner -relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy 9 figure 3. nicole hatanaka, back room, 2009, archival inkjet print, courtesy of the artist and the museum of comparative zoology, harvard university adjacent countertop catches the sunlight from a nearby window. the mimetic capacity that poliquin ascribes to taxidermy in the descriptive mode is obvious in the mounted animal heads, the familiar genre of taxidermy known as the hunting trophy. this genre, common both within the natural history museum and in other contexts, works in the descriptive mode by using the bodiless head of an animal to signify the whole animal as a representative — indeed a prize — specimen of its kind. as the viewer’s gaze moves to the next most prominent set of objects, however, the headless antlers, the mimetic effect diminishes somewhat in their haphazard organization. their disarray calls attention to the “social processes,” such as their procurement and preparation, that are “sidestepped” (poliquin, “matter” 128) in the descriptive mode of traditional natural history museum display. more enigmatically, in the background atop another cabinet, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 10 the viewer can detect (but just barely) an object resembling a monkey under a layer of transparent plastic wrap. the plastic covering further alludes to processes of preparation, storage, and restoration underway in this laboratory-like environment. the transparency of the dead animal object mounted in a pose typical of its kind — the descriptive mode of the taxidermy created for scientific reference in the museum — is ironically revealed here to be just that — a surface the viewer can see through. rather than narrating their status as typical specimens of science, then, these objects narrate their status as created artifacts. additional sheets of transparent plastic can be seen on the floor toward the back of the room, and again along the top of cabinet behind the rams’ heads. in poliquin’s typology, this proliferation of surfaces instantiated by the photograph renders the dead animal objects more biographical than descriptive. this effect is intensified by the photographer’s framing of their laboratory-like setting. the image depicts the spaces in which museum staff members do their work; the dead animal objects in this space accompany the workaday routine. figure 4. nicole hatanaka, storage, 2009, archival inkjet print, courtesy of the artist and the museum of comparative zoology, harvard university stephanie s. turner -relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy 11 the “fluctuation” that poliquin observes in the descriptive mode between “reading a taxidermy mount as a material presence of an animal and as an abstract marker within a theoretical [classification] system” (“matter” 129) is especially evident in another of hatanaka’s photographs from the taxinomia series, storage (2009) (fig. 4). in this image, the viewer is permitted a close-up look into one of these storage cabinets, glimpsing the back end of what appear to be a mounted deer, the tails of two other unidentifiable creatures, perhaps also mounted, and a large, unidentifiable boney object. here, the photograph, by mediating what is seen and especially how it is seen, filters the narrative the objects collectively tell. these neatly arranged objects in the storage cabinet are real animal things; they are so real, in fact, that their material presence fills the cabinet beyond the frame of its opening. with their descriptive tags, they could easily be shifted onto the exhibit floor and arranged in some sort of classificatory system for viewing. one tag, for example, describes the large bony object as “walrus,” though which part of the walrus this object could be is not clear. as the mysterious tags and selective framing of this photograph intimate, these varied denizens of a backroom storage cabinet resist such easy classification. conceptually, then, the storage cabinet in this image becomes another surface the viewer encounters, a sort of diorama in which an uncertain drama is being enacted. in describing the taxinomia series, hatanaka links the preservation of dead animal objects with their study. she wants to find out, in photographing these back rooms and the objects within them, “what gets preserved and what gets thrown away,” “which objects are put on a pedestal and which in a drawer,” “what determines value.” in attempting to deconstruct such binaries as “order and disorder, official and non-official, valuable and insignificant,” she is trying to “reframe the ways in which meaning may be constructed and interpreted” (taxinomia [artist’s statement]). as with dioramas created for public consumption, the objects in hatanaka’s photographs of sequestered dioramas do correspond to an ordering principle of selection of what gets preserved and ultimately represented. in this sense, they signify in a descriptive mode. yet by their very remediation through the photographer’s framing, which includes surfaces and interiors the viewer cannot fully see through or into, these objects also signify in a biographical mode. in this way, they continue to “accrue meaning,” evoking that which “enables their existence” (poliquin, “matter” 129). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 12 figure 5. danielle van ark, untitled, 2006, from the mounted life, courtesy of the artist hatanaka’s question about the value of these artifacts touches on their historical and epistemological significance. photography of taxidermy and objects related to taxidermy in museum storage rooms compels viewers to take stock of taxidermied animals as “surplus” objects in the imperialist accumulation of knowledge of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. one question these objects raise is whether natural science still needs all of these animal bodies, or whether their accumulation was more a matter of documenting territories conquered and resources gained. how and what do they still signify in the postcolonial era and relative stasis of museum storage rooms? the photographs of danielle van ark’s series the mounted life demonstrate some ways that natural history taxidermy photography extends barthes’s formulation of the photograph as a frozen moment in time to include a kind of motionless incipience in the image. in freezing time yet also suggesting some sort of future, they show how stephanie s. turner -relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy 13 photography of natural history museum artifacts behind the scenes remediates animal artifacts in an experiential mode. in one photograph from the series, a taxidermied deer seems to peer out from between two cabinets (fig. 5), in another a rhinoceros appears to gaze impassively over a work space (fig. 6). figure 6. danielle van ark, untitled, 2006, from the mounted life, courtesy of the artist something seems about to happen in these images despite the non-aliveness of their subjects and the conspicuous absence of human agents. the deer (fig. 5), “caught” between two metal cabinets, appears to gaze at something out of the frame; beyond the cabinets and out of focus near the edge of the frame of the image, a window, letting in natural light, suggests a way out — of both the storage room and the photograph. in contrast to a diorama exhibit, which in recreating the animal’s natural surroundings would elide any evocation of the taxidermied animal’s “desire” to be elsewhere, this humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 14 image evokes in the viewer a narrative of ungulate longing that exceeds the literal account of what the deer taxidermy is actually “doing” in storage. the donkey in another of van ark’s photographs (fig. 7) evokes a similar narrative of longing to escape from what appears to be a closet, and again, a shaft of natural light emphasizes its apparent captivity within this small space. significantly in this image, the viewer, sharing the donkey’s vantage point, is also waiting by the door. in terms of poliquin’s typology, these two images work in an experiential mode, drawing the viewer into the image to wait alongside the donkey. in this way, the incipience is co-constituted. in figure 6, a rhinoceros seems to impose itself on the unpopulated work space, its head jutting out into an apparent walkway while behind it loom two trash cans. what work is being impeded by this large animal? could the utility of taxidermy itself be in peril? in describing her work, van ark identifies an emotional impetus: “the way these animals are haphazardly stored by humans ... results in the most moving scenes” (qtd. in singer n.p.). the storage rooms in her photographs become, like those in hatanaka’s images, diorama-like in the dramas they suggest. precisely because of the haphazard juxtapositions of the denizens of these back room habitats indeed, precisely because they bear so little resemblance to the animals’ actual habitats — these interiors seem to give rise to a new afterlife for their occupants. still, it is only through the surface of the photographic image, which renders transparent what backroom storage cabinets, closed doors, and cluttered workspaces have made opaque, that the viewer can discern it. figure 7. danielle van ark, untitled, 2006, from the mounted life, courtesy of the artist stephanie s. turner -relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy 15 what of animal skins in museum storage that were never intended for display, for example, the drawers full of bird skins used by taxonomists? the spectral aspect of the taxidermy photograph is most evident in images featuring such artifacts. the images in jules greenberg’s series fallen, both descriptive and biographical, also evoke the spectrality of barthes’s formulation of the “irreducible singularity” of the photographic subject. what matters here is the indexical function of the animal body itself to the others of its kind, time, and place. while the real bird skin in the drawer indexes its relationship to others for a scientific purpose, the photographic bird skin gestures beyond the realm of literal description. as with hatanaka’s deliberate framing techniques, greenberg’s framing of the bird bodies establishes an other-than-scientific narrative. one photograph, for example shows a cropped image of a bird against a stark black background; tags tied to one of its legs identify the specimen and describe when and where it was taken. providing little context (for example, not showing the bird as an object in the museum’s archive of drawers), the photograph seems to function redundantly as a second index of this indexing. yet the artist’s cropping and minimal use of color re-present the specimen as biographical. the lack of head and color and the starkness of the tags against the black background shift the narrative of this bird specimen toward a subjective understanding of this bird in this time. considered in their entirety, the images in greenberg’s fallen series do more than merely archive the surplus contained in the natural history museum storage room. while in some of these images the viewer can see the taxonomically important identification tags, by the artist’s own account, these images are “elegiac”: “in the tradition of nineteenth-century postmortem photography,” she writes, “fallen offers a confrontation with the dead. in this sense, the series is a sort of ‘corpse meditation,’ like that practiced by buddhist monks who sometimes sit with dead bodies or stare at images of them for days, pondering the fleetingness of life and the inevitability of death” (greenberg, artist’s statement). the portrait-like photograph of two taxidermied owls with cotton stuffing for eyes exemplifies this idea. a cautionary reading of these images is also apparent in her selection of subjects. birds, she writes, have a “long symbolic history as both ominous harbingers of death and envied icons of freedom.” the fact that so many of them have been “stored in the darkness of closed drawers” elicits in greenberg a mourning response similar to the response elicited, as she puts it, by “the unrecounted ‘casualties of war’... whose deaths have been ignored, disavowed, or rationalized in the name of freedom, security, progress, and even peace” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 16 (greenberg). the cultural history referenced in the artist’s statement about these photographs further mediates their impact, effecting an experiential mode of viewing through the pathos of mourning. the surplus of dead animal bodies in museum storage rooms, which gives rise to a surplus of signification in taxonomy (see, for example, malone), also leads to surplus of photographic mediation in the works of sarah cusimano miles and martha frey. in miles’s series solomon’s house, the artist undertakes an elaborate digital photographic process involving multiple exposures of the same image using different focal points layered and stitched together in high-resolution composites that extend the depth of field. the effect, as she describes it, is to include “much more photographic information in the print than was possible to record in a single image” (miles 5). though placidly still-life-like in their composition, as in the photograph lilac-breasted roller (coracias caudate) with kumquats (2010) (fig. 8), these photographs nevertheless have a disquieting effect on the viewer, who is forced to contend with a “hyper-real photographic space” (miles 9) in which every detail is in the sharpest possible focus. figure 8. lilac-breasted roller (coracias caudate) with kumquats, from sarah cusimano miles’s solomon’s house series, 2010 stephanie s. turner -relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy 17 neither the human eye nor a single camera lens, on its own, can apprehend reality in this way. comprised mainly of the malleable skin of the once-living animal, these dead animal objects are also highly malleable as digital media. the malleability of images in digital media allows miles to “play with the truth-claim of the photograph” (miles 10). in red deer (cervus elaphus) with specimens (2010) (fig. 9), miles combines the layering of her photographic technique with the layering of the objects in the photograph, creating a proliferation of surfaces that the viewer might experience as crowded were it not for the formal composition the artist imposes on the objects. the image shows a deer skin carefully arranged in overlapping layers on what appears to be a bed of protective paper lining a metal shelf. although the skin of the deer and its hooves extend past the edge of the shelf, creating a destabilizing effect, the neat row of specimen jars lining the shelf above the deer skin serves to fix it in place. the truth-claim of this photograph — that it represents a singular moment in time — is called into question when the viewer apprehends the imaging process of the multiple exposures that create multiple layers. similar to the nature morte genre these two images reference, time seems to have stopped, even as the combined surfaces of animal skin and photographic image multiply. in this hyper-descriptive and subtly experiential mode, miles is thus able to negotiate for herself and her viewers what she considers to be the “contradiction of empathy for the organisms and consumptive fascination with the specimens” (miles 4), these “accumulated and warehoused” objects (miles 1). figure 9. red deer (cervus elaphus) with specimens, from sarah cusimano miles’s solomon’s house series, 2010 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 18 for a taxidermy to work in an experiential mode, according to poliquin, the viewer must not have to rely upon a descriptive text to discern what is going on; the encounter must be more of a “visceral” one, “a recognition of the embodied ‘thingness’” (“matter” 129) of the dead animal object. certainly this is the case in the photographs of mary frey’s imagining fauna series. like miles’s images, frey’s images create an affective engagement with the viewer through a deliberate photographic technique. unlike miles’s digital manipulation, however, frey achieves an experiential effect using a much older, nineteenth-century photographic wet-plate process known as the ambrotype. in imagining fauna, the one-of-a-kind, black-and-white images resulting from this process emphasize the tattered, reliquary aspect of the natural history taxidermy she chooses to photograph. in frey’s image black-tailed jack rabbit (2010) (fig. 10), a bedraggled rabbit, whiskers drooping, gazes resolutely beyond the frame just over the viewer’s left shoulder, the exposed armature of its left front leg betraying its taxidermic status. uneven tones, an artifact of the wet plate process, swirl around the image of the rabbit and along the borders. it is as if the image of the animal is being filtered through a dream. figure 10. black-tailed jack rabbit, from mary frey's imagining fauna series, 2008-2010 stephanie s. turner -relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy 19 frey’s artist’s statement explains how her chosen medium complements the subject matter in this series. comparing taxidermy with photography as both “enabl[ing] us to stare, scrutinize, and become voyeurs” (frey), she also links the “aging biological collections housed in science museums worldwide” with this old-fashioned imagemaking technique. “the fragility of an ambrotype’s glass substrate,” she says, “echoes” the fragility of these old taxidermy specimens. in light of poliquin’s point that experiential narratives are more likely to arise from “very old” taxidermy (“matter” 129), frey’s medium and subjects place her work decisively in this category. yet her images in the imagining fauna series signify in a cautionary mode as well. documenting the prospect of the imminent loss of vintage taxidermies perhaps soon to be discarded, they also summon in the viewer an anticipation of posterity. the talkative thingness of the taxidermied animal, represented in and remediated by the photograph, thus differs from that of the dead animal object both in kind and in degree. the contradiction of surplus and imminent loss of dead animal objects plays a key role in the signification of taxidermy photography, as do the photographic techniques of layering and framing. in the new context of art gallery space, with its discourses of curation, creation, and cultural critique, these concepts and technics establish aesthetic taxidermy photography as a co-constitutive medium. moving away from images of the natural history museum back rooms and storage cabinets into images of taxidermy on exhibit, i cannot help but notice, in contrast to their absence of living things, how peopled they are, and how variously the planes and surfaces of the exhibit spaces negotiate the interactions between the living and the dead. as photographer diane fox puts it, “nature comes to us, viewed through [the] glass windows” of zoos, natural history museums, and electronic screens (fox). in her unnatural history series of photographs of natural history museum exhibits, fox deliberately references this mediation by emphasizing the glass display cases of the exhibits, in effect creating whole new dioramas for the dead animal objects on display by incorporating equally spectral images of their living human visitors reflected in the cases. for example, in porcupine family, natural history museum of los angeles, los angeles, california (2011) (fig. 11), the viewer can clearly make out the lone porcupine taxidermy clinging stiffly to a tree in its diorama, while off to the lower right, reflected in the diorama’s glass case, the silhouettes of several human figures seem to hover above their own shadows, which create another layer of silhouette. still another layer of reflected silhouette — though of what, is not clear — is superimposed on these human figures which, in turn, are humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 20 superimposed on the limbs of the tree in the diorama, bringing the eye back to the porcupine. figure 11. porcupine family, natural history museum of los angeles, los angeles, california, 2011, from diane fox's unnatural history series similar to the photographic layering in miles’s museum storage room still lifes, fox’s museum exhibit images are also comprised of a complexity of layers, though in this case it is the layers of glass, light, and shadow that create a disorienting surplus of visual information within the images. although the viewer of this photograph seems to have the privileged vantage point of a straight-on, unobstructed view of the dead animal object within the “real” space of its glass encased habitat, the viewer is also challenged to navigate the photographic space between this real thing and the apparitions surrounding it. then, in an experiential flash of recognition, the viewer realizes the joke: she too is caught up in the consuming gaze of the silhouettes in the background, and it is she, along with her fellow museum visitors, that comprises the porcupine family in stephanie s. turner -relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy 21 the diorama, even as the lone porcupine in the tree seems to gaze at something else entirely beyond the frame of the photograph. in playing with multiple vantage points and transparent surfaces, fox’s unnatural history images also juxtapose the artificial “natural” environment of the diorama with the real built environment of the museum space. in the photograph wild dogs, california academy of sciences, san francisco, california (2010) (fig. 12), this juxtaposition is evident figure 12. wild dogs, california academy of sciences, san francisco, california, 2010, from diane fox's unnatural history series in the exterior wall of windows and support columns that are visible through the glass case of the diorama. here, the viewer, sharing the vantage point of the wild dogs, enters the photograph by becoming a witness, along with them, to the comings and goings of the museum visitors beyond the diorama. the view is through a glass case, as it is possible to see the light reflecting off the glass and below, in the right-hand corner of the image, a bit of the frame of the case itself. despite the anchoring effect of this bit of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 22 frame, however, the boundaries of the case are not entirely clear: the sandy ground on which the wild dog taxidermies stand gives way imperceptibly to the museum floor, and the heads of the taxidermied animals themselves seem to fade into the blurred silhouettes of the museum visitors beyond them. in fox’s photographs, the view into the natural world is thoroughly experiential, a “physical encounter between viewer and thing” (poliquin, “matter” 129) in which the viewer must grapple with the multiple interacting surfaces of the taxidermy on exhibit, in which everyone, both human and animal alike, within the frame and beyond, gets caught up. co-constituting surfaces: natural history taxidermy photography relocated. while natural history taxidermy photographers hatanaka, van ark, greenberg, miles, and frey emphasize the artifactual aspect of the dead animal object, its talkative thingness as a signifying surface that urges still more to be written upon it, other photographers gesture more broadly toward what has been, and could yet be, inscribed upon the dead animal object. these works point to the co-constitution of the photographic surface with broader cultural forces beyond the natural history museum. while fox’s photographs suggest a world outside the museum in the blurred movement of the visitors walking through the exhibit past museum windows, the work of jason demarte blatantly juxtaposes and layers the dead animal objects in their dioramas with other, obviously “faux,” objects not typically found in the natural history museum. forage (2007), for example (fig. 13), confronts the viewer with two images: one shows a taxidermy of an figure 13. forage, 2007, from jason demarte's utopic series stephanie s. turner -relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy 23 arctic wolf posed as if about to pounce on prey; below it another image shows a tv dinner in which the stylized colors of the food items are further offset by the garish orange of the compartmentalized plastic tray in which each item is embedded. this and other photographs from demarte’s utopic and nature preserve series, through juxtaposing and layering such obviously fabricated objects of modern consumer culture into the visual display of natural history museum artifacts, draw the viewer’s attention to the false reality of the taxidermy and diorama. calling into question the desirability of these highly manufactured items, demarte’s photographs also question the pleasure derived from viewing animal skins in simulated habitats.3 this question becomes even more pointed in photographs in which the dead animal objects that once populated the dioramas are replaced entirely by photographic images of guilty pleasure finger foods in animated poses: strips of fake bacon frolic across a windswept beach, fried chicken legs dance in a field of flowers, cheetos® line up in front of a butte. referring to the absent thing indirectly, these tasty faux food objects work in an indirectly descriptive mode, signifying the equally consumable animal that is represented, in the viewer’s recognition of the natural history museum exhibition genre, by the dead animal object of the (missing) taxidermy. the consuming gaze that taxidermies seem to invoke is at play here; there seems to be no escaping them, not even in their absence. once again, the joke is on the viewer: consuming these dead animal objects is a guilty pleasure; we crave them, though they lack corporeal substance (just as the faux food objects do). in his artist’s statement, demarte says that he is investigating “how our modern day interpretation of the natural world compares to the way we approach our immediate consumer environment.” our “unnatural experience of the so-called ‘natural’ world is reflected in the way we, as modern consumers, ingest products. what becomes clear” in making and viewing these images, he explains, “is that the closer we come to mimicking the natural world, the further away we separate ourselves from it” (demarte). many of the images in the utopic series further emphasize this separation by layering in the concept of the surplus value of consumable objects, calling into question the unnaturalness of the “use, toss, repeat” pattern of american consumer culture. in eager (2008), for example (fig. 14), colored dot stickers such as one might use to label items in a garage sale litter the beaver dam landscape of the diorama. such is the eagerness of beavers in building their dams that, like the acquisitive zeal of humans building the suburban housing developments that give rise to the very excess humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 24 necessitating garage sales, they may go a little overboard. art gallery visitors, recognizing themselves in this image of “eager beavers,” experience anew their distance from the natural world they occupy. demarte digitally layers the sticker dots onto this and other images in the utopic series to elicit a cautionary response in the viewer as well as an experiential one. figure 14. eager, 2008, from jason demarte's utopic series everything about these scenes is fake, these intrusive objects remind us; in attempting to preserve nature through the indexicality of taxidermy and photography, the best we can manage is ironic references to our own tendency to overconsume. the titles of demarte’s two series on natural history museum taxidermy, nature preserve and utopic, suggest the remediating potential of photography to relocate the dead animal objects and their faux habitats outside of natural history museum exhibit space. layering representations of traditional dioramas with references to contemporary cultural phenomena outside the purview of museum space, demarte’s highly evocative stephanie s. turner -relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy 25 photographs experientially refigure the taxidermied animal as a “provocatively visceral presence” (poliquin, “matter” 130) not only in art gallery space, but as a co-production with popular consumer culture. that the surfaces of natural history taxidermy are culturally layered and thus invoke further remediation and relocation characterizes the ambitious project of bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir and mark wilson to photograph every stuffed polar bear in the united kingdom, and after that to move a number of them into temporary new exhibit space. the resulting work, nanoq: flat out and bluesome: a cultural life of polar bears, operates in all four modes of poliquin’s typology. as a descriptive project, nanoq “presumes the mimetic capacity and value of taxidermy,” as poliquin puts it (128), in compiling a visual and textual catalogue of what turned out to be a total of 34 mounted polar bears in situ, “as they appear in their respective museums and private homes, on display, in storage, or undergoing restoration” (snæbjörnsdóttir and wilson, 13). the mimetic potential of these dead animal objects resides not only in the photographers’ visual documentation of the mounted bears’ various cultural habitats which include both public and private spaces. taking more than three years to carry out this documentary effort, snæbjörnsdóttir and wilson also painstakingly documented, through interviews with curators and private owners and by compiling whatever archival texts were available, the killing, mounting, and ownership lineage of each bear. this aspect of the project rendered it highly biographical, as well. each polar bear has its own story of acquisition and display, a story that necessarily includes human actors. regarding the bear in the dover museum, for example, we find that it was one of 60 polar bears shot in franz joseph land in the arctic circle between 1894 and 1897 by dr. reginald koettlitz, md. once mounted, the bear then spent more than 60 years in the reception/waiting room of the dover hospital, after which it was donated to the dover museum, where it was cleaned and restored in the 1980s (snæbjörnsdóttir and wilson 2006, 101). in compiling these detailed biographies, snæbjörnsdóttir and wilson mapped out the “cultural life” that the nanoq project narrates. according to the photographers, “we were aware that in undertaking the tracking down of bears, we were involved in a process that in some way mirrored the original acts of hunting. [but] it was a cultural hunt,” they clarify, one that was also about collecting (snæbjörnsdóttir and wilson 2006, 15). the somerset bear (fig. 15) biography exemplifies the personal aspect of collecting, as this bear is part of a larger private collection of antique artifacts. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 26 figure 15. bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir and mark wilson, somerset, 2004. status: adult, vertical mount; source: fox's glacier mint factory; acquired: 1973; donor: bought from the factory by the present owner's sister; preparation: unknown; current location: stands in the hallway of a private residence, somerset; notes: given to the present owner by his sister on his 21st birthday for snæbjörnsdóttir, collecting the polar bear photographs became a way of connecting to her own family history, since “snæbjörnsdóttir” translates from icelandic into english as “snow bear’s daughter.” in describing this connection, the artist asks, “what better way to find one’s bearings in relation to an unfamiliar environment to which one is nevertheless instinctively drawn, than to connect by means of a name to one of the most powerful icons on earth” (14)? while snæbjörnsdóttir’s personal connection to the polar bear constitutes, for her, an experiential mode of representation, her reference to the iconic status of the polar bear layers a more general cautionary element onto the narrative. an endangered species whose decline is virtually synonymous with anthropogenic climate change, the polar bear derives power even from its decline, as humans intervene to protect it and, by association, the entire planet. more than just a personal mission, then, nanoq also became a mission to relocate several of the polar bear taxidermies to an art exhibit space (fig. 16), where they could, as the artists put it, “generate a discourse in which audiences [would be] able to consider their relationship stephanie s. turner -relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy 27 not only to the ‘polar bears’ themselves, but to the history of their collection, presentation and preservation” (14). figure 16. bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir and mark wilson, exhibition at spike island, bristol, 2004 baker touches on the relational aspect of the nanoq exhibit in explaining the significance of the relocation of the polar bears into art space: “works of art are active things, actively to be engaged with” (baker, “what” 149). in this way, they become experiential to the wider viewing public; more than merely a collection of things, they become an opportunity for people to have “new experiences of the bears, new interpretations of their histories, new emotional responses to them, and new understandings of the spaces that the bears might come to occupy” (baker, “what” 154). snæbjörnsdóttir and wilson’s nanoq: flat out and bluesome: a cultural life of polar bears has become a touchstone project in the relocation of natural history taxidermy to art space (aloi 37-39; broglio, surface encounters 72-80; patchett “animal as object”). conclusion: surface tension. applying poliquin’s typology of taxidermy to its photographic remediation makes manifest a surface tension between viewer and image, between the consuming gaze and the object of desire. filtering the taxidermic surfaces humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 28 of dead animal objects through lens-based media seems to emphasize the complementary forces inherent in the four modes in which taxidermy signifies. the mimesis that is characteristic of the descriptive mode, for example, can be seen to invoke an erasure, as well, when the indexicality of the talkative thing to its referent is cropped, as in hatanaka’s and van ark’s images of taxidermies in storage cabinets; hazy, as in frey’s ambrotypes; or hyperreal, as in miles’s multiple exposures. what is more, the erasure inherent in the descriptive mode seems also to invoke a sort of testimonial aspect characteristic of the cautionary mode, as in greenberg’s images of fallen bird taxidermies that gesture toward other “ignored” and “disavowed” dead, and demarte’s consumerized dioramas dramatizing the unrequited desire of our separation from nature. as with the literal phenomenon of intermolecular forces creating a barrier between liquid and air and thus giving shape to liquid, as when rainwater forms beads on the surface of a newly waxed car, the surface tension developing from the photographic remediation of natural history museum taxidermy seems the inevitable result of the imbalance of energy in the tendency of taxidermic things to signify in excess of their skins, as poliquin so effectively describes (breathless). by talking their way out of their natural history museum via the lens-based media of these photographers, these dead animal objects seem restlessly to revise the larger narratives from which they have arisen, taking new shapes and creating new meanings in cultural practices of animal representation. acknowledgements: the author would like to thank susan ressler and michael j. faris for their contributions to this article. notes 1. the term “dead animal art” is most often associated with the work of the artists’ collective known as the minnesota association of rogue taxidermists (mart); it is the name of the website of mart founding member scott bibus. 2. that a digital image is as much a material object as an image produced analogically has been theorized at length. the camera’s capacity to record images is what gives those images material reality, according to mark j. p. wolf (419). paul m. leonardi argues for a definition of “materiality” in which matter is understood as anything with the stephanie s. turner -relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy 29 potential for the “practical instantiation of theoretical ideas” (n.p.) see also bolter and grusin, 105-112; and sassoon, 186-202. 3. in theorizing the difference between analog and digital photography, jay david bolter and richard grusin argue that photographs can be distinguished “on the basis of their claim to immediacy,” something the viewer desires as much, if not more, than their veracity. the irony with which fox’s and demarte’s photographs are intended to be viewed, by calling attention to the photographs themselves, remediate immediacy by privileging the representation of its desire (110). works cited aloi, giovanni. art and animals. london: i.b. tauris, 2012. asma, stephen t. stuffed animals & pickled heads: the culture and evolution of natural history museums. london: oxford up, 2001. baker, steve. the postmodern animal. london: reaktion books, 2000. _______. “what can dead bodies do?” nanoq: flat out and bluesome: a cultural life of polar bears. ed. bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir and mark wilson. london: black dog, 2006. 148-155. _______. “‘you kill them to look at them’: animal death in contemporary art.” killing animals. ed. the animal studies group. urbana: u of illinois p, 2006. 6998. barthes, roland. 1980. camera lucida: reflections on photography. trans. richard howard. new york: hill and wang, 1981. bolter, jay david, and richard grusin. remediation: understanding new media. cambridge, ma: the mit press, 1999. broglio, ron. “a left-handed primer for approaching animal art.” journal of visual art practice 9. 1 (2010): 35-45. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 30 _______. surface encounters: thinking with animals and art. minnesota: u of minnesota p, 2011. connor, steven. “such stuff as dreams are made on.” steven connor, 2009. web. 28 january 2012. demarte, jason. “artist’s statement.” jason demarte, 2009. web. 25 january 2012. desmond, jane. “postmortem exhibitions: taxidermied animals and plastinated corpses in the theaters of the dead.” configurations 16 (2008): 347-77. dillon, brian. “rereading: camera lucida by roland barthes.” the guardian 25 march 2011.web. 18 november 2011. fox, diane. unnatural histories. “artist’s statement.” diane fox photography, n.d. web. 18 november 2011. frey, mary. imagining fauna. “artist’s statement.” mary frey photography, 2008. web. 18 november 2011. greenberg, jules. fallen. “artist’s statement.” jules greenberg photography, 2005. web. 11 november 2011. hansen, rikke. “animal skins in contemporary art.” journal of visual art practice 9. 1 (2010): 9-16. haraway, donna. “teddy bear patriarchy: taxidermy in the garden of eden, new york city, 1908-1936.” social text 11 (1984): 20-64. hatanaka, nicole. taxinomia [artist’s statement]. nicole hatanaka, 2010. web. 11 november 2011. henning, michelle. “skins of the real: taxidermy and photography.” nanoq: flat out and bluesome: a cultural life of polar bears. ed. bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir and mark wilson. london: black dog, 2006. 136-147. stephanie s. turner -relocating “stuffed” animals: photographic remediation of natural history taxidermy 31 houlihan, kasia. (2004). “annotation of roland barthes’ camera lucida—reflections on photography (new york: hill and wang, 1981).” the chicago school of media theory, 2004. web. 10 november 2011. leonardi, paul m. “digital materiality? how artifacts without matter, matter.” first monday 15.6 (2010). web. 30 nov. 2012. malone, margaret e. “increasing the use and value of collections: finding dna.” ma thesis. baylor university, 2010. web. 18 november 2011. milgrom, melissa. still life: adventures in taxidermy. new york: houghton mifflin harcourt, 2010. miles, sarah cusimano. solomon’s house. mfa thesis statement. university of alabama, 2010. patchett, merle m. “animal as object: taxidermy and the charting of afterlives.” unpublished web article, 2006. _______. “putting animals on display: geographies of taxidermy practice.” diss., university of glasgow, 2010. web. 11 november 2011. poliquin, rachel. the breathless zoo: taxidermy and the cultures of longing. university park, pa: pennsylvania state up, 2012. _______. “the matter and meaning of museum taxidermy.” museum and society 6.2 (2008): 123-134. quinn, stephen christopher. windows on nature: the great habitat dioramas of the american museum of natural history. new york: abrams, 2006. sassoon, joanna. “photographic materiality in the age of digital reproduction.” photographs objects histories: on the materiality of images, ed. elizabeth edwards and janice hart (london: routledge, 2004): 186-202. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 32 singer, jill. “the making of the mounted life by danielle van ark.” sight unseen, november 2009. web. 11 november 2011. snæbjörnsdóttir, bryndís and mark wilson, eds. nanoq: flat out and bluesome: a cultural life of polar bears. london: black dog, 2006. wolf, mark j. p. “subjunctive documentary: computer imaging and simulation.” visual rhetoric in a digital world: a critical sourcebook, ed. carolyn handa.boston: bedford/st. martin’s, 2004. 417-433. microsoft word gordon pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 2:2 125 joan gordon serving the moral agenda tom regan and andrew linzey, eds. other nations: animals in modern literature. waco, tx: baylor up, 2010. xx + 214 pp. $29.95 pbk. i am teaching first year college composition this semester using a non-fiction animal studies anthology called social creatures: a human and animal studies reader, edited by clifton p. flynn (lantern books, 2008). we use its contents as springboards to analytic, documented essays, and the students find plenty to say: it has worked pretty well. it may not be an ideal introduction to animal studies — the animals reader: the essential classic and contemporary writings, edited by linda kalof and amy fitzgerald (berg, 2007) comes closer but it demands more reading and analytic skill than my students yet have. at my school, the second semester of the sequence uses literature for its inspiration so i have been looking for a suitable anthology with an animal studies slant. i had high hopes for this relatively small and affordable paperback by two eminent scholars in animal studies, but was disappointed. the collection has a twenty-page preface by linzey, followed by an eighteen-page introduction by regan. the preface explains the rationale for the book: to serve high school and college courses on animals in literature, to offer “writing of the highest quality” (xviii), focusing “almost exclusively on modern literature, especially fiction” that will be “accessible, even to newcomers to the field” (xix). the introduction offers an overview of the individual sections and selections. an overview of what human-animal studies is and of the major questions with which it grapples would also have been welcome in a text meant to appeal to newcomers. the readings themselves are organized into seven sections: “humans encounter other animals” (two selections), “other animals encounter humans” (three selections), “other animals as companions” (three), “other animals as prey” (four), “other animals as tools” (three), “other animals as food” (five), and an “epilogue” with one selection. among the authors represented are stephen crane, william saroyan, george orwell, bobbie ann mason, ernest hemingway, isaac bashevis singer, and alice walker. brief biographies of the authors of the selections follow, and then the acknowledgements. of the twenty-one selections, eight are non-fiction, all are prose, none is longer than fourteen pages, and their cited copyrights lie between 1896 and 1996: this is a very restrictive range of works, and the selections are not quite representative of “modern humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 126 literature, especially fiction” promised in the preface. a number of selections are excerpts or edited, although this is not always easy to detect, nor is it easy to tell original publication dates: for instance the excerpt from turgenyev’s sketches from a hunter’s album is copyrighted 1967, the date of its translation, while the work was first published in russian in 1852. not only would this have been useful for readers to know, it also puts into question any rationale about restricting the selections to modern works. one must rely on the acknowledgements at the end of the book to find out dates of publication and to determine if the selections are complete, edited, or excerpted, and even then, one may not find out. the reader is also left with a number of more substantial questions: why is there no poetry at all? why is there so much non-fiction? why is there an intended focus on modern literature, and, if that is justified, why is it not held to with consistency? these problems suggest a lack of concern for literary matters. in the preface linzey may provide an explanation for this lack of concern. the anthology is meant, he says, to be “text that employs the pedagogical power of literature, including fiction, to help illumine our moral relations with animals” (xviii). in other words, as i see the project, the literature has been chosen to serve the moral agenda rather than to interrogate and expand it: its existence is very much secondary to the primary focus on morality. this diminishes the value of literature and restricts the role of the reader and analyst: the selections become mere tools. i can imagine that this volume might serve as a part of a general course on animal studies, one that also included a collection of essays on the moral, philosophical, religious, sociological, or anthropological aspects of the field. i cannot imagine being able to use it in a literature course. there is too little here to carry a whole literature course, even at the high school level, and the range is too narrow to offer any indication of how literature deals with the issues of animal studies. there are certainly some fine works included: the highlights are bobbie ann mason’s “lying doggo” (1982), isaac bashevis singer’s “the slaughterer” (credited as 1983, but originally published 1967), and alice walker’s (nonfiction) “am i blue” (no date). other choices seemed less useful. i was surprised to see orwell’s “shooting an elephant” (1936), one of the most widely anthologized essays in english. cleveland amory’s “pilling the cat” (1987) seemed too trivial to include; hemingway’s “pleasures of hunting” was a questionable choice when “the short happy life of francis macomber” (1936) would have provided much more thought; and oriana fallaci’s “the dead body and the living brain” (1967) was both heavyhanded and incomplete. a more ambitious collection would have provided a very rich, complex, wide-ranging, and probing experience for students and for more general readers as well. it is a shame that the opportunity has been lost. i hope someone with joan gordon — serving the moral agenda 127 more interest in the potential of literature to expand our thinking rather than merely mirror it will produce a successful anthology: the need is there. microsoft word susan mchugh h u m a n i m a l i a 1:1 susan mchugh animal farm’s lessons for literary (and) animal studies everybody knows the disappearing animal trick: rabbit goes into the hat, magician waves wand, and presto! the magician displays an empty hat. simplistic though it sounds, this old act illustrates how literary critics historically have rendered the animal a non-issue. reading animals as metaphors, always as figures of and for the human, is a process that likewise ends with the human alone on the stage.1 now you see the animal in the text, now you don’t. researchers informed by cross-disciplinary discussions of how animals and animality more actively support the structures of human subjectivity do not necessarily dispel the magic of this method. since the 1980s, deconstructive literary theory in particular has worked to elaborate the operations of animality at the heart of identity, or, in literary terms, human subjectivity, in modernist narratives. often animal elements in this approach appear significant to texts only ever in relation to human subjectivity, so that literature seems to reify cultural critic john berger’s infamous claim that “animals are disappearing” in modernity (14). from this standpoint, literature, as both discipline and textual archive, would appear to be working at odds with animal studies, other approaches to the complicated ways in which animals function as social and textual agents. animal studies, an emergent field of academic inquiry that promises to supplement natural history with “unnatural” histories of human and animal life,2 starts from the quite different assumption that the presence of nonhumans is a cultural constant. focusing on how people make animal selves and others (dis)appear, animal studies therefore aims not to transcend disciplinary thought but rather to open biopolitical perspectives within and across structures of knowledge and feeling. this means that, while the deconstructive approach remains valid, its value remains limited without contextualization amid the richer courses charted from the crossroads of literary animal studies. interpretive patterns focused on literary representations of animals have been illustrating this point since as early as the 1970s, suggesting far different conclusions about the potentials for nonhuman presences in literary environments. in this respect, george orwell’s 1946 novel animal farm provides a curious case study in how ways of reading animals relate to the transformation of literature as a discipline more generally through structuralist and poststructuralist theory. readers who have studied literature at the secondary-school level since the 1950s certainly are prepared to appreciate animal farm’s allegorical meaning, generally understood as critical of the formation of the soviet state, if not to note how in this way the novel lends itself to the pedagogical aims of new criticism. that is, the symbolic values of orwell’s characters not only guide people in learning important events in human history but also ideally sharpen their critical faculties, prompting appreciation for this 25 susan mchugh – animal farms’ lessons novel along with all other literary representations of animals as concealing deeper (read: human) meanings. but doing so also involves studied avoidance of how orwell’s main characters work as farm animals, a critical problem that, as it begins to be addressed in literary discussions, also prompts broader concerns about what exactly happens to a discipline when these patterns of interpreting species begin to change. mapping these developing interests in fictional farm animals as animals, this essay briefly compares how the formation of human-animal relations in fictions of meat production provide peculiarly challenges for literary criticism, and with what implications for animal studies as well. recent critical discussions, for instance, of upton sinclair’s the jungle (1906) come to strikingly different conclusions about its relevance for animal representation, indicating that the difficulty of reading nonhumans as significant in these environments requires greater attention to the interplay of literary forms along with contents and contexts. to account for the progressive understanding of animal farm as a novel about animals in literary criticism, i situate the novel alongside other farm animal narratives, including orwell’s own account of the novel’s inception, as well as its ensuing film adaptations. this rich animal narrative history begins to explain how literacy, even visual literacy, shapes potentials for animal agency in literature and beyond. learning how to read this novel therefore suggests some important lessons for developments in (and between) literary and animal studies. animal subjects: from dead meat to feral agents. part of the difficulty with reading animal farm’s characters as animals is that farm animals have come to signify the erasure of subjectivity in the stories as well as practices of industrialized meat production. as a shared potential for all kinds of bodies, meat could be understood as deferring or erasing differences, whether human/ animal, subject/ object, etc.3 read as a literary symbol, however, it gains a more limited valence, signaling a state to which someone is reduced beyond recognition as a subject. in these contexts, representations of farm animals — rather, of people enmeshed with “what were once referred to as ‘farm’ animals” in meat work (tiffin 250) — get washed away, not only in seas of blood and gore but also along with people in histories of manufacturing. thus it could be argued that one of the most powerful ways in which the history of mechanized work profoundly transforms human life is by severing animal stories from these scenes. researchers from a broad range of perspectives have shown that systematic animal killing serves a variety of human interests, and more precisely the interests of some human groups against others, creating and reinforcing inequalities based on race, class, ethnicity, religion, and sex.4 while this complex and emergent picture of industrial meat production as the site of ongoing conflicts in human social representation is important, the ways in which literature becomes involved in these processes beg further questions about how meat production lines (de)form human and animal subjects in modernity.5 noting how industrial slaughter facility design—notably chicago’s union stockyards—influenced assembly-line techniques later 26 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) popularized by henry ford,6 vegetarian-feminist scholar carol j. adams claims that social changes follow from material changes. she concludes that there can be no “alternative endings” written into the literary canon, and advocates that like-minded critics work to “eviscerat[e]” the institution of literature, more specifically, to expose how the formal ideal of closure depoliticizes the story of meat (93-94). alternately foregrounding human and animal agents in slaughterhouse scenes, however, some patterns in literary representation challenge these conclusions by calling attention to the materiality of social forms and processes. the spectacle of dead and dying animals remains a central feature of exposé-style meat narratives like eric schlosser’s 2001 bestseller fast food nation, and extends at least a century back to journalist upton sinclair’s sensational 1906 novel the jungle. told from the perspective of a quickly disillusioned lithuanian immigrant named jurgis rudkus, sinclair’s novel lays bare the filth and misery of the chicago meatpacking industry, and consumers’ intense, immediate outrage at its revelations led in the same year as its publication to the passage of food safety laws. less obviously, the infamous public outcry inspired by the jungle illustrates the difficulty of reading any agents in scenes of industrial slaughter, let alone any forms of agency when farm life leads to this end. although sinclair wrote with concern for all kinds of lives on the disassembly line, he became embittered by the reforms implemented exclusively for the benefit of consumers, famously reflecting in his autobiography, “i aimed for the public’s heart, and by accident i hit it in the stomach” (autobiography 126). literary history only provides more justification for sinclair’s lament by pitting human against animal rights in interpretations of the jungle, obscuring how, even within the limited perspective of this narration, human and animal lives become entangled through mechanized means of disfiguration and killing. so, for instance, bertolt brecht cited the jungle as inspirational to his interest in marxist philosophy, and recycled sinclair’s anecdote of workers falling into lard vats (and consequently leaving the factory in lard cans) in his 1932 play saint joan of the stockyards, part of a series themed, “entry of mankind into the big cities.”7 brecht’s play strictly focuses on human tragedies, but its framing within precarious human-animal, urban-industrial transitions begins to explain what else can happen when animals in the jungle become visible as agents of destruction, including their own. initially jurgis, like so many other international tourists, marvels at the “wheel of fortune,” the massive and efficient mechanism through which pigs are made to power their own demise, leading critics like adams to despair of his story in discussions of animal politics.8 becoming part of the scene as a meatpacker, however, jurgis later learns to fear the precariousness of the system when pigs break loose on the factory line. moreover, the lives of human and pig become mutually threatened, as philip armstrong notes, and along the escaping pigs’ desperate lines of flight emerges a fleeting potential for animals to operate as “feral agents,” potentially writing new endings for all creatures deep within scenes of exploitation.9 though some still read the “diseased, rotten meat” as the story’s focus, and more specifically the meat as “a metaphor for 27 susan mchugh – animal farms’ lessons the diseased, rotten capitalist system” (patterson 63), closer attention to these alignments of humans and animals reveals far more complicated textual potentials. for, at a formal level, these and other uncertain interactions of farm animals and people meeting on the factory floor destabilize the authority of the eyewitness narrative, compromising the separation and elevation of the human subject even within the industry. offering similar glimpses of how meat animals operate as agents, contemporary meat stories such as ruth ozeki’s bestselling 1998 novel my year of meats and its very different source text, sue coe’s 1995 artist’s book dead meat, likewise use this narrative form against itself, only more deliberately contrasting it with visual forms of representation. elsewhere i have argued that such competing representational logics allow for the emergence of a range of agential possibilities from the precarious interfaces of bodies, machines, and representational media in the stories of animal lives and deaths from farm to plate, and so prove the most important links between animal farm and its ensuing narratives, chiefly the 1995 blockbuster film babe.10 but to elaborate how the technological agency of animals extends both forward to visual media literacy and back to farm narratives, the next section looks more closely at responses to animal farm in literary discussions, tracing some developments in the novel and its critical history that anchor potentials for animal agency in farm animal narrative. reading technologies and agents. for many viewers and critics, orwell’s novel — subtitled a fairy story — suggests a more obvious point of contrast to babe.11 this may be because these fictions are more alike in their differences from the theriophilic fable tradition; neither strives to ennoble animal nature, elevating it from the silly trappings of human culture, and both focus on the materiality of technology as a narrative force, only with conflicting conclusions.12 whereas babe takes a decidedly ambivalent position about the role of visual technologies in the construction as well as regulation of social divisions, including those of labor, gender, sex, and species, orwell’s animal farm implicates all technologies as unequivocally serving power. especially through engagements with the challenges of becoming literate in visual media, these fictions develop the mutual vulnerabilities of farm animals and humans. particularly given the tendency to read the novel as a human story, it is intriguing to note how its author writes of its conception. in the preface to the ukranian edition of animal farm, orwell offers two accounts of its origins, the first of which is: on my return from spain i thought of exposing the soviet myth in a story that could be easily understood by anyone and which could be easily translated into other languages. (“author’s preface” 405) colored by this account, the story reads easily as a parable of the 1917 soviet uprising. animal farm depicts a violent takeover of a british farm by its animals, a revolution led and later 28 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) usurped by the pigs. human attempts to regain control, rebuffed at first, eventually succeed because a few pigs move into the human farmers’ roles and exploit the “stupidity” of the other animals, eventually becoming in every respect indistinguishable from their original oppressors “to the creatures outside” (128). aided in part by this emphasis on perception and perspective in the final description of pigs transforming into humans, critical attention in recent decades has moved away from historical metaphor in favor of reading this novel as a straightforward animal narrative. more directly, this approach gains support from orwell’s alternate story of its creation. evoking the primal scene common to sigmund freud’s little hans, friedrich nietzsche’s fateful collapse, even novels as different as fyodor dostoyevsky’s crime and punishment (1866) and joseph heller’s catch-22 (1961), orwell writes that he witnessed a boy beating a carthorse, and then proceeded to analyze marx’s theory from the animals’ point of view. to them it is clear that the concept of a class struggle between humans was pure illusion, since whenever it was necessary to exploit animals, all humans united against them: the true struggle is between animals and humans (“author’s preface” 406). for many this passage seems proof that the novel is “really” about animals,13 if not a means of resolving debate about orwell’s difficulties with publishing a “kind of animal story that would never sell” (drabble 43).14 more than any final agreement about its one, true meaning, the precise struggle through which literary history has arrived at what now seems so patently obvious indicates what remains at stake for reading animals in and around disciplinary structures. the first to argue for the formal significance of this passage was not an animal studies scholar nor an animal rights activist but the novelist and marxist literary critic raymond williams, who in a monograph titled george orwell (1971) cites it as evidence against conventional interpretations of the novel as an analogy for the author’s final disillusionment with socialist politics. significantly revising his own argument from over a decade earlier that, if the pigs are “the hypocritical, hating politicians whom orwell had always attacked” and presented as such in 1984, then all the other animals must be aligned with the proles as “‘monstrous’ and not yet ‘conscious’” (culture 293), williams leads the long and difficult shift away from reading animal farm strictly in terms of human allegory. in the end, for williams, the difference of the pigs is a difference that matters, one that shows how the metaphor breaks down even within the text, because these animals become both collective exploiters and exploited. although he does not elaborate this point, it applies as well to a gaping hole in the plot, namely why there is never even any pretense of liberating the dogs of animal farm. instead, a litter of pups at the start are confiscated from their mother, secreted away while raised by one of the 29 susan mchugh – animal farms’ lessons pigs, and at a pivotal moment in the story unleashed against the other animals at the pig’s command. more than simply contradictory, this aspect of the story resists both metaphorical and anthropomorphic projection. these dogs remain dogs, serving not as extensions of anyone’s ego or symbols of any people but rather as an irreducible (in gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s terms) “demonic” or menacing figures nonhuman multiplicity. that all animals are not created equal, of course, is one of the more deliberate take-away messages of the novel. the newly liberated animals’ efforts to learn and to teach each other how to read emphasize that species differences encompass different ranges of abilities, and what is more that not all individuals are interested in or capable of maximizing these potentials. so the pigs can abuse their power simply by writing and then amending the new rules of the farm, their barely literate comrades of other species soon discouraged from (and by) reading their fate in erased and overwritten inscriptions. and in these actions, too, they create equivalences that approximate meat’s level, rendering themselves indistinguishable (or their porcine differences imperceptible) from the humans. the flexibility of species differences thereby upsets the foundations of human-animal along with other cross-species equivalencies through which allegorical interpretations might otherwise empty out the collective significance of communications and their breakdowns. for it is also significant, williams continues, that the novel becomes “unique among orwell’s books because it contains no orwell figure, no isolated man who breaks from conformity but is then defeated and reabsorbed,” and instead depicts a collectively distributed consciousnessraising that shifts sympathy to the other animals at the end: “what happens is a common, rather than an isolated experience, for all its bitterness; and the whine of ragged nerves, the despair of a lonely trajectory are replaced by an actively communicative tone in the critical narrative” (74). if this emphasis on communication, as both theme and sensation, distinguishes animal farm in the broader context of meat fictions from the jungle and other exposés that emphasize human individual concerns at the expense of a sense of community, then it also situates the novel more firmly within an under-appreciated literary tradition of barnyard revolts. farm animal agency: precedents and antecedents. orwell’s own carthorse-whipping scene also connects his novel back to an important (if also importantly unsung) literary predecessor to animal farm, that is, gene stratton-porter’s novel the strike at shane’s: a prize story of indiana (1893). stratton-porter’s novel is apparently the first to imagine abused farm animals assembling in opposition to human rule. but it does so to a very different end. solicited and published by the american humane society as (the title page proclaims) “a sequel to black beauty,” this fiction imagines a comparatively tame farm-animal uprising. here the whipping occurs within the story, at the beginning, and it prompts the animals to coordinate a more peaceful and temporary work stoppage, which enables the human farmer 30 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) and son to be persuaded by wife and sister to abandon the cruel ways of man. humans are chastened, but not evicted from farm animal life, an aspect that in part begins to explain the ending of animal farm. in keeping with the patriarchal meat tradition identified by adams as a hallmark of the literary canon, the strike at shane’s farmer explicitly does not relinquish manful control of the farm. for stratton-porter’s point is to demonstrate that human dominion exercised with love and kindness is essential to a profitable and godly farm; animal and human welfare are one. in pointed contrast, orwell imagines power as far more precariously contested by humans and animals via access to technology, an aspect of the fiction that its film adaptations increasingly connect to visual media literacy. in orwell’s animal farm the never-completed windmill, the symbol of a technological utopia, fails to deliver the animals from exploitation as workers, and instead becomes the means by which the pigs take the human role of working the animals to death. in the end, what makes pigs indistinguishable from humans is their coterminous dependence on and mystification of technology as a means of production, in relation to which the other animals become broken or naturalized neo-luddites. collapsing any spaces between humans and animals, this aspect of the novel lends itself to interpretation as ending any possibility of sustaining species distinctions.15 however, in the process, visual media become propaganda tools with which pigs, chief among them the boar napoleon, manifest control over other animals, a trope that bleeds into alternate potentials as it becomes materialized in film. from the novel’s mention of a propagandistic “portrait of napoleon, in profile, executed by [his henchman] squealer in white paint” (orwell 104), both film versions of animal farm construct increasingly elaborate animal relationships with visual technologies. joy batchelor and john halas’s 1954 adaptation (also the first british feature-length animated film, and the first ever to use animation as a medium for serious subjects16) imagines the animals becoming visually literate as part of their creation of an animal-centered social order. upon entering the human household, they recoil in terror from a photograph of their former master jones, unable to distinguish the real from the representation, until the brave but doomed plow-horse boxer smashes it. but by the end the pigs have plastered the farm with likenesses they have made of their own leader napoleon, and through their representations of this pig positioned upright, wearing medals and clothes, begin to enact the anthropomorphic transformation of their kind. this invention of a pig-propaganda machine, together with the altered ending that proposes a second animal revolution against both pigs and people, much more clearly than the novel makes the first animal farm film’s pig napoleon a stand-in for josef stalin (a point underscored by the recent revelation that its production was secretly funded by the cia). yet it is the ways in which this transformation continues through a much more recent film adaptation that suggest again how the novel has always been about reading animals. although in some ways clearly responding to the success of babe — most obviously by tacking on a frame story of an animatronically “talking” border collie mother and other characters likewise crafted 31 susan mchugh – animal farms’ lessons by jim henson’s creature shop — john stephenson’s 1999 film version of animal farm imagines animal engagements with visual media as still more actively shaping farm life. at the end, a close-up shot reveals a hoof reaching out to turn on a projector, which then runs a montage in the style of leni riefenstahl’s triumph of the will only starring the pig napoleon, who in this scene is also the pig-propaganda film’s only viewer. depicting the pig as clothed and standing upright by this point in the film, this revolutionary image of an animal making, acting in, and watching his own film again is contained by the conflation of literacy with human identification. what this version reinforces nonetheless is that integration with representational technologies means power; only by making themselves into movie meat do pigs become people. although with a negative valence, the films underscore a socially transformative potential for technological integration barely glimpsed by orwell’s fiction: what if the windmill had worked? what if the animals integrated machinery, say, to “green” farming for the benefit of all? through the films’ profoundly ambivalent social implications of farm animals and technological literacy, animal farm as novel and films connect to babe, and more recent fictions like margaret atwood’s oryx and crake (2003), which broaches “pharm” animal subjects as well. reading such creatures as agents thus offers a way of renewing the relevance of farm animal fictions, allowing for ways of understanding and owning shared responsibilities for the collective transformations of cross-species intimacies in technological environments. what is important to this discussion is not simply the generic or stylistic difference between these texts, but also the veritable sea change they gauge in the role of technology in production and in utopian thinking. most radically of all of these narratives, babe assumes panspecies visual media literacy throughout, a fantasy perhaps, but one that disables the human power of self-determination made available through visual technologies. again this potential might be seen to stem from orwell’s intimation that farm animals, like us, are never just dead meat walking but communicating, even ciphering beings. reading animals in fictions of revolt consequently involves “necessary failures,” ones that move toward a productive critique of the past and modeling future engagements for the common good.17 lessons for literature and animal studies. “you’d flunk the test if you said it was about animals,” ventured an undergraduate in response to the question: what had they learned about george orwell’s animal farm in secondary school before they were assigned to read it in college? “yeah,” another chimed in, “you’re supposed to say it’s about some war or something.” witnessing this exchange, i became acutely aware of why the premise of this essay might seem to some too hastily to dismiss the importance for orwell and others of animal farm’s allegorical values. by outlining the vagaries of literary criticism through the novel’s interpretive history, my point here is not presume that the soviet experiment is “over,” irrelevant, or in any other 32 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) way to be dismissed from discussions of the novel. quite the contrary, acknowledging it only clarifies how rare and amazing animal farm has always been for engaging so skillfully with its political moment. but it is no less important to recognize that the novel continues to find ways of moving readers, so many of whom agree that the pigs’ betrayal of the loyalty of the plowhorse boxer, selling him to the knackers and drinking away this blood money, always makes us cry. that said, it is also clear that in our own historical moment, characterized by ahistorical consciousness or, as frederic jameson puts it, “nostalgia for nostalgia,” it becomes all the more important to consider what is motivating scholars, critics, and even students increasingly to read animals as animals in (of all novels) animal farm. neither simply sacrificed nor gaining significance as “speaking meat,”18 across the traditions outlined above farm animals emerge as irreducibly social creatures in the interstices of the very representational media like novels that for so long have been seen as crafted only to give voice to human subject-forms. literary narratives include a still broader range of possibilities, including that meat itself can serve as an agent of protest,19 and in the few described above more precisely incorporate living meat animals as agents to sketch community formation, reformation, and revolt. as literary forms and theories follow them from the dis-assembly plants originating in nineteenth-century chicago meatpacking facilities through the tissue culturing laboratories dissembling carnal pleasures free of animal suffering in the twenty-first century, they provide much broader opportunities for thinking through the responsibilities of and for interpreting species. at the crux of interdisciplinary animal studies research, ways of reading animals become matters of life and death, as relevant to understanding the everyday conditions of companion species as they are to changing the scholarly habits of avoiding them. in this respect, literary history proves most problematic. as a field of knowledge arguably rooted in claims to have special access to textual interpretation, literary studies becomes a special target of concern for scholars in animal studies,20 in part because precious few literary critics have attempted to account systematically for the seemingly countless animal aspects of texts. yet dwelling on these deficits risks merely repeating the same old disappearing animal trick. reading animals requires more than just recognizing the failures of traditional humanist models that separate and elevate people over all “things” animal. always written, if not so often read, academic animal research need neither be conceived as free from politics (whatever that might mean) nor as a vehicle to be driven by animal rights or any other agendas. contributing to a crucible from which linguistic and other representational molds are cast, such work arguably becomes most effective in addressing the problems of species by introducing impurities, starting spits, sparks, fires that break the molds (or at least require refashioning) of humanist discourses. though by no means exclusive to literary studies, this process becomes visible in discussions that explicitly address: what exactly goes on in acts of reading and writing animals? 33 susan mchugh – animal farms’ lessons notes 1. see erica fudge, "at the heart of the home: an animal reading of mikhail bulgakov’s the heart of a dog" (in this issue) who explains this complex “humanning” process, whereby animals are “absented in order for humans to be made central,” in greater detail. 2. nigel rothfels uses this phrasing to clarify the important difference between natural and cultural histories of animals, the former working to situate nonhumans in their “native haunts” and the latter to clarify their positioning in “such human environments as museums, books, circuses, and zoos” (6). 3. writing about the painter francis bacon, philosopher gilles deleuze clarifies that meat operates as “zone of indiscernibility” between humans and animals: “meat is not dead flesh [. . ..] bacon does not say ‘pity the beasts’ but rather that every man who suffers is a piece of meat. meat is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernibility” (21). bacon’s own famous line follows: “if i go into a butcher shop, i always think it’s surprising that i wasn’t there instead of the animal” (qtd. in deleuze 22). 4. jonathan burt outlines how, in early twentieth-century britain, the conflation of “orderly and mechanistic” with “unseen and unheard” slaughterhouse regulations in turn became an instrument of racism, providing a rationale of efficiency for attempts to ban schechita and dabh, respectively, the jewish and muslim methods of slaughter (“conflicts” 258). he concludes that industrial slaughter practice therefore operates as “one of the constituting elements of our particular social identity” (268). for a case study of how social divisions were reinforced by the industry at the same time in the us, see jimmy m. skaggs’s analysis of how the 1919 chicago race riot was fueled by the meat factory owners’ decision to recruit black workers, “who were less likely to be union members” than their white counterparts, to stem the tide of organized labor in the industry, and “set back unity and cooperation in the yards for at least ten years” (118). see also roger horowitz’s elaboration of the us pork industry’s overtly racist, classist, and nativist strategies for “upscaling” sliced bacon consumption in the early twentieth century (68), and its abuse of women sausage-makers that inspired the equal opportunity employment commission’s 1969 banning of sex-based discrimination (99-100). 5. hilda kean rightly notes that processes shaping “the modern person” include the centralization and enclosure of animal slaughter from public view, which was well under way in the nineteenth century (27). comparing the visual economies of animals in film, zoo display, and slaughterhouses in the early twentieth century, burt extends this claim to consider how these structured acts of seeing also contribute to the formation of “the modern animal” (“illuminating” 208). 34 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) 6. many years later, ford reflected that he got “the idea” for his famous assembly line factory design “from the overhead trolley that the chicago packers use[d] in dressing beef,” which he understood to be “the first moving line ever installed” (81). 7. frederic grab substantiates this point through a direct reference to sinclair in a 1920 review authored by brecht, and cites “lifelong friend and co-worker elizabeth hauptmann” for the broader perspective on how the play fits in their oeuvre (9). brecht’s elaboration of this play as “non-aristotelian drama” intimates how individual roles, scripted by groups pitted against each other in the meatpacking industry, evoke a more profound breakdown in form, in which “certain modes of representation are destroyed by the demonstration of their social function” (qtd. in grab 13). 8. marian scholtmeijer points to sinclair’s disruption of traditional representational linkages, arguing that it contributes to the further victimization of animals: “the metaphoric use of animals vacillates because it is not grounded in narrative allegiance with the animal” (151). 9. illuminating his theory of “feral agency,” armstrong points to this moment in the narrative to argue, “the fates of the human and non-human elements of the system are conjoined; the desperate unpredictability of the animal matches that of the workers, and all are equally vulnerable to the butcher’s knife and the boss’s gun” (137). 10. see my essay “bringing up babe,” especially pp. 151-52. 11. philip kemp’s review is typical in arguing that babe comes up short against “a much more trenchant farmyard fable, animal farm” (40). 12. kenyon-jones defines theriophily as both a “long classical and renaissance tradition” and “a philosophical stance which satirizes human pretensions by reminding us of our kinship with animals, and contrasts overweening human folly with animals’ instinctive wisdom” (12). 13. d.b.d. asker points to this passage as distinguishing “those interested in socialism disinterestedly, and those interested in it from the point of view of power” (65). more recently, jeffrey moussaieff masson claims it “astonishing” that such a “revolutionary comment about humans and animals has been effaced from the public record!” (239, n.4), and helen tiffin in turn reads as “a classic example of the disappearance of animals as characters in their own right” (252). 14. in a 1944 letter to a russian literary scholar, orwell predicts that this “little squib” will prove “so not ok politically that i don’t feel certain in advance that anyone will publish it” (“letter to gleb” 96), and wrote to another correspondent after its 1945 publication that the novel was left “lying in type for about a year because the publisher dared not bring it out until the war was over” (“letter to frank” 109). abbot gleason elaborates that “publishers [were] unwilling to 35 susan mchugh – animal farms’ lessons challenge the russophile sentiments of the english public (and to a degree, government) by publishing animal farm” (82). orwell wrote that he was “surprised by [the novel’s] friendly reception,” noting too that “the first edition of 6000 copies sold out immediately” (“letter to frank” 109). 15. this point extends giorgio agamben’s argument about the “intimate caesura” of the in/human, which concludes in an orwellian vein: human “concentration and [presumably panspecies] extermination camps” emerge not in the conventional terms of man’s dehumanization of others but rather as “an extreme and monstrous experiment” proceeding from the divisions “between the human and the inhuman, which has ended up dragging the very possibility of the distinction to its ruin” (22). 16. daniel j. leab cites batchelor’s own account in masters of animation to note how the latter “gloried in the fact that ‘the medium of animation had never tackled such a subject’” (238), and also details halas and batchelor’s amazing journey in hiring a few key former disney staffers and securing clandestine cia funding to produce their version of animal farm. 17. rather than enacting a historic break with modernist sensibilities, as fredric jameson explains, these “necessary failures” work to “inscribe the particular postmodern project back into its context, while at the same time reopening the question of the modern itself for reexamination” (postmodernism xvi), a point that in part guides my assumption that babe is a postmodern text. 18. the phrase “speaking meat,” a sort of ego-projection of a human moral conscience, is val plumwood’s, and she uses it to explain self-reflective responses to babe that included the consequent publication of babe’s vegetarian cookbook. this aspect leads fudge to conclude that, in contrast to its source novel’s emphasis on cross-species “understanding” (animal 87), the film’s use of anthropomorphism leads to an “expansion of the empire of the human” (88). 19. this point is informed by robert mckay’s exploration of the possibility for telling a nonhuman-centered story through a simultaneously abject, animal, and “protesting agency” that puts authority under erasure (330). in a reading of deborah levy’s diary of a steak, an experimental literary intertext that is narrated from the perspective of a beefsteak infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (bse, or “mad cow disease”) during the outbreak crisis of 1990s england, mckay argues that the fragmentary form of this narrative, rather than obfuscating its meaning, provides a complex means by which the text renounces “the ability to define the animal” (314). 20. in the opening of the animal estate, which many see as a landmark text in animal studies, harriet ritvo distinguishes her focus on “texts produced by people who dealt with real animals” from “[c]anonical art and literature” as well as “the large literature of fable and 36 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) fantasy” because, she says, the latter provide little if any reliable evidence of the frequent human-animal interactions in the nineteenth-century britain (4). over a decade later, christine kenyon-jones points to this example in her study of british romantic writing in order to argue for the special value of literary language, particularly metaphor, as “more honest” about its “rhetorical manipulations” than “straightforward” forms of writing (8). in spite of these different assumptions about the value of literariness, both implicitly affirm steve baker’s conclusions about the importance of textual and other representations, namely, that “unmediated access to animals” is a fantasy (10). works cited adams, carol j. the sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory. new york: continuum, 1991. agamben, giorgio. the open: man and animal. trans kevin attell. stanford: stanford up, 2004. armstrong, philip. what animals mean in the fiction of modernity. new york: routledge, 2008. asker, d.b.d. the modern bestiary: animals in english fiction, 1880-1945. lewiston, ny: edwin mellen, 1996. atwood, margaret. oryx and crake. new york: doubleday, 2003. baker, steve. picturing the beast: animals, identity, and representation. 1993. champaign: u of illinois p, 2001. berger, john. “why look at animals?” about looking. london: writers and readers, 1980. 1-26. brecht, bertolt. saint joan of the stockyards. 1932. trans. frank jones. bloomington: indiana up, 1969. burt, jonathan. “conflicts around slaughter in modernity.” animal studies group. killing animals. urbana: u of illinois p, 2006. 120-44. _____. “the illumination of the animal kingdom: the role of light and electricity in animal representation.” the representation of animals. ed. steve baker. spec. issue of society and animals 9:3 (2001): 203-228. coe, sue. dead meat. new york: four walls eight windows, 1995. deleuze, gilles. francis bacon: the logic of sensation. 1981. trans. daniel w. smith. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2003. 37 susan mchugh – animal farms’ lessons deleuze, gilles and félix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1987. dostoevsky, feodor. crime and punishment. 1866. trans. jessie coulson. new york: norton, 1989. drabble, margaret. “of beasts and men: orwell on beastliness.” on nineteen eighty-four: orwell and our future, 38-48. ford, henry. my life and work. garden city, ny: doubleday, 1922. fudge, erica. animal. london: reaktion, 2002. _____. “at the heart of the home: an animal reading of mikhail bulgakov’s the heart of a dog." humanimalia 1: 1 (2009). www.depauw/humanimalia/issue01/fudge.html. gleason, abbott. “puritanism and power politics during the cold war: george orwell and historical objectivity.” on nineteen eighty-four: orwell and our future, 73-85. _____. jack goldsmith, and martha nussbaum, ed. on nineteen eighty-four: orwell and our future. princeton: princeton up, 2005. grab, frederic. introduction. saint joan of the stockyards, 7-17. heller, joseph. catch-22. new york: simon and schuster, 1961. horowitz, roger. putting meat on the american table: taste, technology, transformation baltimore: johns hopkins up, 2006. jameson, fredric. postmodernism or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. durham: duke, up, 1991. kean, hilda. animal rights: political and social change in britain since 1800. london: reaktion, 1998. kenyon-jones, christine. kindred brutes: animals in romantic-period writing. burlington, vt: ashgate, 2001. king-smith, dick. babe the gallant pig. rpt. of the sheep pig. 1983. new york: crown, 1995. 38 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) leab, daniel j. “animators and animals: john halas, joy batchelor, and george orwell’s animal farm.” historical journal of film, radio, and television 25:2 (2005): 231-49. masson, jeffrey moussaieff. the pig who sang to the moon: the emotional world of farm animals. new york : ballantine books, 2003. mchugh, susan. “bringing up babe.” camera obscura 17:1 (2002): 149-87. mckay, robert. “bse, hysteria, and the representation of animal death: deborah levy’s diary of a steak.” killing animals, 145-69. orwell, george. animal farm. 1946. new york: harcourt, 1954. _____.“author’s preface to the ukrainian edition of animal farm.” as i please, 1943-1945. vol. 3. the collected essays, journalism, and letters of george orwell. ed. sonia orwell and ian angus. 4 vols. new york: harcourt, 1968. 401-406. _____. “letter to gleb struve.” as i please, 1943-1945. vol. 3. the collected essays, journalism, and letters of george orwell. ed. sonia orwell and ian angus. 4 vols. new york: harcourt, 1968. 95-96. _____. “letter to frank barber.” as i please, 1943-1945. vol. 3. the collected essays, journalism, and letters of george orwell. ed. sonia orwell and ian angus. 4 vols. new york: harcourt, 1968. 402. _____. “some thoughts on the common toad.” in front of your nose, 1945-1950. vol. 4. the collected essays, journalism, and letters of george orwell. ed. sonia orwell and ian angus. 4 vols. new york: harcourt, 1968. 141-45. ozeki, ruth. my year of meats. new york: penguin, 1998. patterson, charles. eternal treblinka: our treatment of animals and the holocaust. new york: lantern books, 2002. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate: the english and other creatures in the victorian age. cambridge: harvard up, 1987. schlosser, eric. fast food nation: the dark side of the all-american meal. boston: houghton mifflin, 2001. scholtmeijer, marion. animal victims in modern fiction: from sanctity to sacrifice. toronto: u of toronto p, 1993. 39 susan mchugh – animal farms’ lessons skaggs, jimmy m. prime cut: livestock raising and meatpacking in the united states, 1607-1983. college station: texas a&m up, 1986. tiffin, helen. “pigs, people, and pigoons.” knowing animals. ed. laurence simons and philip armstrong. boston: brill, 2007. 244-65. williams, raymond. culture and society, 1780-1950. london: chatto and windus, 1958. _____. george orwell. new york: viking, 1971. microsoft word piskorski-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:1 rodolfo piskorski vicious circles: intersections of gender and species in darren aronofsky’s the fountain introduction. intersectional theory emerged in the field of law as an attempt to understand oppression and injustice that did not work according to stable racial and/or gender identities (grillo 18). its focus on the intersecting nature of sources of oppression sought to address the problem of policy making, which, by adhering to identity politics, did not reach the individuals who were most in need of assistance — exactly those who were vulnerable to multiple forms of injustice and who did not register in policy makers’ grid of stable identities. if policies directed towards black populations missed the vicissitudes of living as a black woman, women’s politics sometimes overlooked women who also had to live with the marking of race. despite the radical changes in practical governmental practices requested by intersectional theory, it has been embraced and absorbed as a staple tool in critical theory and feminist criticism (deckha 249). i am interested, however, in the potential available in intersectionality for reading texts — literary, cinematic, and others — as products and producers of ideology. despite its origins in the field of law, and its admirable commitment to make theory practicable, intersectional theory offers important tools for literary and cultural theory and criticism, even if that represents a step “back” towards a textual and theoretical dimension, which goes against the central argument in intersectionality that says we must look at actual instances of othering that are not textual in nature. i will risk this so-called “return to the text” in an attempt to show how productive intersectionality can prove to be when we need to read intersections of discourses of othering that will still seem new and difficult to pinpoint. i am referring to the complex and sometimes polemic connections between the mark of species and the other, “traditional” marks of difference. if, as dechka explores, many objections can be easily raised against the inclusion of the category of species in intersectional analysis (251), perhaps a return to the text is exactly what is needed in order to show how all marks of difference are, indeed, interrelated with animal exploitation. as the feminist critique once turned to films and the way they construct subjectivities to show the pervasiveness of the discourse of sexual difference — and the importance and scope of its critique —, the posthumanist critique of human superiority can gain much from exposing how texts rodolfo piskorski -vicious circles: intersections of gender and species in aronofsky’s the fountain 81 deploy multiple discourses of difference together with speciesism in order to activate and, perhaps, potentialize them. cary wolfe’s analyses of jonathan demme’s film the silence of the lambs and of ernest hemingway’s novel the garden of eden explore how the discourses of gender, race, and class are potentialized in their articulation with the discourse of species in the texts’ internal organization of ideologies. although he does not use the term intersectionality, i believe his readings can justly be called intersectional and they point towards the importance of the employment of intersectional theory as textual criticism to reveal still invisible interconnections between discourses of human and animal inferiority. as i will attempt to show in my reading of the fountain, it is not possible to fully read the film’s gendered and colonial discourse on transcendence and immanence without highlighting its dependence on the discourse of species that it tries to conceal. gender difference and the three storylines in the fountain. the fountain can be easily shown to be arranged around the male-female binary, and it stresses the structural importance of this dichotomy both through the epigraph on adam and eve taken from the book of genesis,1 and through its fragmented plot structure. by fragmenting its plot into three separate storylines that are all concerned with gender difference, the film tries to establish the man-woman pairing as the natural and timeless foundation necessary for the discussion of its issues: death, (im)mortality, transcendence, and love. the main plotline (which i will call the “present” storyline) is set in an unnamed city in north america, where scientist tommy (hugh jackman) tries to deal with his sick wife izzy (rachel weisz). she is writing a book set in 16th century spain named the fountain, which turns out to be the second plotline (later on referred to as the “spain” storyline) in this three-part narrative. in her story, isabel, the queen of spain (also played by rachel weisz) sends one of her best soldiers, tomás (played by jackman as well), along with a small troupe into central america in order to find the biblical tree of life. these two plotlines are intersected with a third, less narrative one, which i will call the “space” storyline, in which a bald jackman is living within a great glass orb, supposedly in the far future, which is drifting in outer space. in the center of the orb is a great, aged tree that he addresses as he would a lover and, as he looks up at the stars that he can see beyond the glass ceiling of the orb, he tells the tree they are almost at their destination, assuring it/her that it/she will be able to survive. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 82 although the main storyline is the present’s, this overtly visual film begins by exploring the imagery available in its spain and space narratives, with a lax sense of plot. we are greeted with a thrilling sequence of suspenseful scenes, which include fights between spanish settlers and native americans, only to be taken by surprise by the slow, silent scenes set in space, which are filled only by the protagonist’s quiet rituals. the circle, as a motivic shape, reemerges time and again in both storylines, in the form of rings, glass cases, floor tiling, stars, tattoos and the glass orb itself, which is the set for the space storyline. while the protagonist is addressing the tree, apparently remembering his actual lover, rachel weisz appears next to him in the orb. by the means of his memory we are taken to the present and to the first scene that is actually plot-driven, one which will prove to be of key importance to the tying of other narrative threads. izzy appears at the doorway of tommy’s office, insisting that he take a walk with her to admire the first snow. he rejects the offer, claiming to have too much work, and she leaves clearly disappointed. he stands up to follow her, calling out her name, but he is stopped by a co-worker who urges him to come to the surgery room, and we see a shot of izzy walking out of double doors into blinding daylight, into which her white-clad figure gets fused (see fig. 1). fig. 1. first scene of the present storyline, showing izzy’s figure getting diffused against the daylight. the circle motif can also be seen, on the shapes created by the lighting on the floor. rodolfo piskorski -vicious circles: intersections of gender and species in aronofsky’s the fountain 83 as such, the plot of the film is framed by a classic domestic couple drama in which the woman wants them to spend some quality time together, whereas the man sees the importance of keeping on working. tommy’s point-of-view shot of izzy’s going out into the sunlight (and having her silhouette lost in it) is important in the way it marks the woman as immanent, as if she were almost blurring with her environment. it will be especially important later as light becomes another one of the visual motifs of the film. we slowly understand the relevance of this quick conflict to the characters when we learn how important it is for tommy to work and for izzy to spend time with him: he is a scientist who is researching brain tumors in monkeys and since she has a brain tumor, he believes he can help if he overworks trying to find a cure that might work for her. she, on the other hand, feels that death is close and thinks that it might be more important that they spend their time together. the seemingly trivial matrimonial conflict over time management is thrust into the center of the film in the form of its main conflict: two different stances towards the imminence of death, both sutured into and equated with gender difference. while tommy assumes the “masculine” outward role of the explorer and penetrates the skulls of monkeys in order to postpone the unknowable other — death —, izzy takes on the more “feminine” inward stance of finding in death a sort of grace and awe, learning to deal with something growing in her body as a kind of reversed pregnancy. the duality is set for us from the start, with the quotation of the bible. the edenic fall marks the beginning of the human condition as we know it, the inevitability of death being one of the main differences between life in paradise and outside it. but the quotation establishes the human condition — mortality — as essentially the condition cast upon a (heterosexual) couple. the consequence is that the main issue of the film turns out to be that we must be able to understand how to work out the mysteries of the heterosexual union and the difference of the sexes in order to understand the mystery of death and human mortality. however, in its attempt to universalize this conflict by transporting it to the past and the future, the film ends up exposing how the drama over mortality and desire for transcendence is not only undercut by gender difference, but that the gender discourse actually depends on and at the same time produces other differences which make itself possible. therefore, the spain storyline intersects the issue of immortality (which, for the film, is ultimately a question of gender) both with colonial practices and with the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 84 western exploitation of nature. in its turn, the present shows how tommy and izzy’s gender conflict depends upon the appropriate handling of animal bodies in the laboratory. and, finally, the space storyline translates the conquering logic into hyperbolic space travel. but above all, a closer look can show us how tommy and izzy, separated as they may be in their differently-gendered stances, are actually reproducing the same logic of oppression. for both tommy’s quest for immortality and izzy’s attempt at immanence are inevitably marked by a species difference that presupposes the different ways in which humans and animals are allowed to die. in the next sections, i will explore how the discourse of gender difference ends up entangled with other ideologies in the film’s multiple storylines. gender and colonialism in the spain storyline. in the spain storyline we are presented both with a transcription of the present conflict, which is supposed to strengthen its validity, and with many plot elements that will help us to understand the rest of the film’s narrative. isabel, the queen of spain, is seeking immortality on earth in her attempt to find the edenic tree of life and is accused of heresy by the main spanish inquisitor. as he manages to prosecute more and more of the queen’s allies as heretics, claiming their lands in the process, he succeeds in slowly taking over the spanish territory from isabel. the conflict between male and female stances before death is reinscribed in the spain storyline to the extent that the inquisitor’s growing power is equated to a degenerative disease.2 as such, tomás’s initial answer to this inquisitorial cancer is to murder the inquisitor with a crossbow, but he is stopped at the last moment by another soldier of the queen, who says she does not see the death of the inquisitor as a solution. her plan is to send tomás into central america, where she believes a priest has found the edenic tree of life, in order to bring her evidence of immortal life. just like the scientist in the present, tomás wishes to kill the “cancer” eating up isabel’s “kingdom,” while she desires to seek a victory over death by means of a mystical relationship to it. not only does the film translate its gender conflict from the present to 16th century spain, but also the colonial discourse inherent in this quest into central america has been shown to be deeply set up upon a gender logic. as pointed out by paul brown, the colonial project is organized around goals of social order, indoctrination of native peoples, and the fulfillment of the empire’s supposed destiny of superiority. further, according to him, “the whole struggle, fought on the grounds of psychic order, social cohesion, national destiny, theological mission, redemption of the sinner and the conversion of the pagan, is conducted in relation to the female body” (206). his analysis rodolfo piskorski -vicious circles: intersections of gender and species in aronofsky’s the fountain 85 centers on english colonizer john rolfe’s letter seeking the acceptance from his governor of his marriage to pocahontas. brown shows how colonial practices both signify the colonized peoples and lands as feminine, and thus available to be controlled and penetrated, and also legitimize its goals by the means of a discourse of civility which is tied to a feminine idea of purity (207). pocahontas serves as an example of both practices, since she is to be dominated by western discourse but also to have her true female nature saved from godlessness and barbarity by civility. another good example of a female figure which is used as a colonial mascot is miranda in shakespeare’s the tempest. according to ania loomba, she “provides the ideological legitimation of each of prospero’s actions” (330), as far as he claims that his domination of the island and its inhabitants was done for the sake of her well-being and education. the spain storyline in the fountain, too, ends up resorting to the colonial discourse in order to move forward its narrative of gender difference. or, like in the tempest, the gender component is co-opted as legitimation for the colonial enterprise. the territoriality at stake in the spain storyline is ultimately a question of sexual politics. the inquisitor expresses that he wishes the queen to be hanged as a witch as he marks off in a map another part of spain of which he has obtained control by the means of his inquisitorial prosecutions. tomás, on the other hand, addresses her as he would a goddess, establishing the other pole of the virgin/whore duality at play in catholic imagery (loomba 328). if the inquisitor’s territorial expansion in spain (which is referred to as “she”) is signified in relation to isabel’s witch-like heresies, tomás’s invasion of central america is carried out in order to save the queen and her kingdom from the corruption the inquisitor represents. once again, the tempest offers us a good model of the logic of domination that sustains colonial practices. as also pointed out by loomba, prospero’s slavery of caliban is defended on the basis that caliban attempted to rape miranda (330). the figure of the black rapist and the threat it represents to the white woman work, then, as a justification for colonial domination of natives, which is carried out for the sake of the safety of civilized women (loomba 325). the inquisitor’s expansion within spain is seen by tomás as nothing short of an attempted rape on his queen and his motherland, and it is his validation for conquering central america. it is important now to highlight that tomás’s mission, as john rolfe’s, is not limited to the sacred protection of a virginal queen. as brown shows, rolfe has to firmly establish humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 86 that his wish to marry pocahontas is not only due to his sexual desire for her, and that he wants above all to espouse her in order to teach her civility and to carry out the governor’s intentions in the colony (206). later on in his letter, however, he must stress the importance of sexual union with her so that they can fulfill their godly mission of raising a family and “labour in the lord’s vineyard” (207). colonization, then, is not only carried out as a politics of the sexual desire of natives and white women, but is also a crucial tool in asserting heteronormativity. or, as i have stressed before, it can work both ways — the heterosexual family and its function in capitalist civilization are also used as tools in order to validate colonization. therefore it’s crucial that the male-female couple, which i claimed to pervade the structure of the film, reemerges in the relationship between a queen and her conquistador. the queen isabel asks tomás to kneel before her and, as the two of them are inscribed by the circle outlined by the floor tiling (see fig. 2), she gives him a ring representing his promise to save spain and her commitment to be his eve should he find eden. she promises him that, if he finds the tree of life, “together [they] will live forever.” as such, the film reinscribes its heterosexist assumption that the issue of human mortality and the mystery of death is dependent upon a revisitation of the edenic union of man and woman as the natural set up for completeness, and this idea is strongly highlighted by the reoccurrence of the circle as a motivic shape. fig. 2. isabel and tomás, shot from above, stand within a tile circle, the motivic shape in the film that represents the wholeness available to heterosexual coupling. the light motif can also be seen in the way the daylight flooding from the door illuminates only isabel, so that in close-up her face looks drenched in light while his remains in shadows. rodolfo piskorski -vicious circles: intersections of gender and species in aronofsky’s the fountain 87 it’s important to remember that the spain storyline is the outcome of izzy’s writing in the present and can be said to represent her feelings. while later on in the present narrative she will realize that she does not identify with tommy’s increasingly desperate attempts of finding a cure for her, and that perhaps accepting death is a victory greater than curing it, in her book (which she has almost finished when the present storyline starts) her doppelgänger isabel does not want to die and sees her salvation as a job for her loyal horseman, whom she will award with her sexuality. although isabel, unlike izzy, does not embrace death, she is against killing the inquisitor (which would mean curing the cancer) and believes in the possibility of “living forever” that lies in the together-ness of man and woman. and, in its attempt to universalize this possibility, the film exposes how the gender difference essencial for the sacralized dimension of heterosexual coupling is deeply intertwined with colonialist logic. gender and animal exploitation in the present storyline. the colonialist practices depicted in 16th century spain reemerge in the present against another other — the animal body. it is interesting to note how the colonial point-of-view is introjected into the present storyline by means of various devices, as if establishing present-day america as an heir to the discourse of colonial domination. the first of these devices is the insertion of the whole spain storyline as a book izzy is writing, but this is not all: after the climax of the first scene in the present, we get a shot of mayan ruins and we are led to believe we are going back to following the spanish story. but the camera dollies out to reveal the ruins are nothing but a picture framed on a wall in tommy and izzy’s house, and we are still following tommy after he left work in the present storyline. another interesting feature is the fact that their house is furnished mostly with dark wooden furniture, and that, together with its low-key lighting and big windows and doors, gives it an austere spanish look reminiscent of the past storyline. just as their house decoration stresses their co-optation of the spanish colonizer’s pointof-view, the framed picture reinserts central america as the colonial other, now domesticated. it is also enlightening to observe that izzy as protagonist, and not as her own creation isabel, first appears in the film only after the twenty-minute mark. although she, alongside tommy, is at the center of the film’s gendered conflict, it is clear that she occupies a passive slot in an active-passive model of storytelling. she is the one who is sick and the one who has to deal with death, but we are called to inhabit the subject humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 88 position of tommy as he thinks of new ways to deal with her body as an object to be protected and saved. however, this territorialization of her body for the sake of her well-being, besides echoing the colonial logic of invasion in the name of women’s safety, is achieved by the means of a similar territorialization of the bodies of animals. the similar forces of corporification and objectification that affect women and animals have been noted by feminists and posthumanist authors alike, and is of special relevance to what has been called ecofeminism. carol j. adams has explored, in her book the sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory (1990), “how the institution of speciesism … transcodes the edible bodies of animals and the sexualized bodies of women, inscribing both in what karen warren calls a shared ‘logic of domination’” (wolfe and elmer 104-5). warren stresses that many feminists consider that “farming, animal experimentation, hunting, and meat-eating are tied to patriarchal concepts and practices” (xiii) and that they depend on and reproduce the intrinsic dialectical logic of dualisms such as “reason/emotion, mind/body, culture/nature, human/nature, man/woman” (xii). warren’s “logic of domination,” which upholds mutually reinforcing dichotomies such as empire/colony, culture/nature, civilized/barbaric, and man/woman, not only feeds the discourse of colonialism but also the discourse of scientific exploration and domination. maneesha deckha explores how science, allied to colonial interests, managed to produce species difference from the marks of race and gender and vice-versa. she notes how darwin’s theories of biological continuism between humans and animals created a humanist anxiety which was allayed by transcoding darwinism into the social dimension (251). the ascent towards civilization was seen as the telos of the properly evolved human animal, whereas racial, cultural, and gendered others were seen as less human in their distance from civility and, therefore, more animal-like (252). by interposing these others between themselves and animals, white male colonizers were able to evade anxiety and to create a science out of the dualistic logic of domination. this science, in its turn, is responsible for the new kind of colonization — based on “scientific” exploration and redescription — of animal and female bodies in the 19th and 20th century. although the observation that women and animals are conditioned to the “same general structure of ‘othering,’” to use wolfe and elmer’s phrasing (105), is a valid and sharp conclusion, we must remain aware that the film asks us to consider how izzy’s body is objectified in totally different ways from the exploitation of the body of the monkey tommy is experimenting on, donovan. interestingly, the film postpones the rodolfo piskorski -vicious circles: intersections of gender and species in aronofsky’s the fountain 89 moment in which it reveals that tommy is a scientist researching brain tumors in monkeys by many minutes. since we still do not know izzy has a brain tumor, we can only assume tommy’s frustrated reaction in learning of the experiment’s failure in the first scene of the present storyline is related to his inability to help his patient. despite the fact that we cannot see donovan at all, the suspenseful atmosphere of the scene is entirely channeled towards his delicate life and death situation. even though the word “euthanize” is thrown around and seems to hang in the air, we have no reason to believe donovan is not human, and we follow tommy into the next room as he throws his gloves on the floor and crouches against the wall feeling defeated and nervous. a long silence follows, his colleagues watch him as he struggles to accept the fact, when suddenly, while looking up at a circle of light on the ceiling, he is struck by an idea. he suggests that they try using a compound they had experimented on the previous year, “from that tree, that one from central america” (aronofsky), creating one of the first unexplained plot connections between different storylines. it’s interesting to highlight the way in which tommy’s almost miraculous idea to stop the tumor’s growth (and, consequently, death) is indebted once again to a heterosexist encoding. he has the stroke of inspiration while looking up at the motivic circular shape of light and his idea includes “a tree from central america”, a description which signifies it along the edenic tree of life of the previous storyline. and, finally, as explaining to his colleague antonio how they can combine this compound with another, he tells him to “picture them side by side. fold them into each other, like two lovers, woman on top.” to which an amazed antonio replies: “they have complimentary domains!” beyond the sci-fi jargon is the seed of the idea that we can perhaps unravel the mystery of mortality if we manage to combine two opposite but complementary parts, the two halves of the yin-yang, man and woman, body and soul, reason and emotion. only after we are back at the surgery room, when they are testing their new compound, do we get a shot of donovan and realize he is a monkey. that leaves us with the impression that tommy’s overreaction was due to his concern for the monkey, but only a minute later donovan is reinscribed within the “logic of domination” when tommy confesses to his boss lillian that he is there for izzy. the hiding of the monkey and its ultimate effacement by izzy’s own disease only highlights the anxieties related to the use of animal bodies for human interests that the film is trying to silence. by keeping humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 90 the monkey from view and then later brushing him aside with tommy’s fear of losing his wife — which the narrative wants us to identify with — the film performs a clever trick in deflecting attention from the exploitation carried out in the name of the preservation of the divine-like connection between man and woman. the fact that tommy’s failure at curing the monkey means above all the endangering of his union to izzy is signified by his agitation at having lost his wedding ring in the surgery room, again a symbol for the completeness of the union of man and woman. therefore, despite the similar objectification suffered by women and animals, the subjectivity which the film is invested in producing for izzy demands that she rises above her connections with animality. jacques derrida points out how “carnivorous sacrifice is essential to the structure of subjectivity,” and he defines his diagnosis of western metaphysics as “carnophallogocentric” to the extent that it is defined as a grid in which autonomy is “attributed to the man (homo and vir) rather than to the woman, and to the woman rather than to the animal” (qtd. in wolfe and elmer 100). the animal sacrifice he inscribes as essential to the discourses of subjectivity can be established as a “place left open, in the very structure of these discourses (which are also ‘cultures’) for a noncriminal putting to death” of the animal (quoted in wolfe and elmer 100). this “place left open” in the production of subjectivity is exactly what the film is interested in producing in order to mark donovan’s death as ethically acceptable. because the conservation of the heterosexual couple is constructed as crucial to the very understanding of human condition, it works as a legitimation for the thing-like treatment donovan is given. again, as it tries to translate its gendered conflict into new languages, the film intertwines the gender difference with one more mark of differentiation — in this case, the discourse of species. both the fact that the maintenance of the heterosexual couple depends on the exploitation of an animal body, and the fact that the very objectification of the animal is possible only in terms of gender difference, express how ineluctably entwined the film constructs the discourses of gender and species to be. it’s important to realize, then, how the film plays out the important function intersectionality can perform as a tool for textual criticism. as judith butler puts it, “it seems crucial to resist the model of power that would set up racism and misogyny and homophobia as parallel or analogical relations, [because this model] delays the important work of thinking through the ways in which these vectors of power require and deploy each other for the purpose of their own articulation” (qtd. in wolfe and elmer 99). rodolfo piskorski -vicious circles: intersections of gender and species in aronofsky’s the fountain 91 the constitutive dimension of the intersections between multiple discourses of difference, such as gender, class, race, and species, have been pointed out elsewhere.3 instead of quoting such analyses, i hope my reading of the fountain may effect a similar argument for the constitutive nature of discourses of difference. for, even if izzy (or queen isabel) is not located at the intersection of different forces of oppression, the discourses which operate on her and include her as element depend either on her objectified body or her privileged status in order to manifest themselves in other oppressed bodies — such as colonized lands or the animal. gender and species in the politics of transcendence. the fountain can easily be demonstrated to work with dialectical modes (in the hegelian sense) of understanding death and humanity, the same way it deals with the dialectical male/female binary. hegel’s thought was perhaps best explored by alexandre kojève’s lectures in the 1930s, which sought to close-read hegel in connection with the new philosophical paradigms of the 20th century — the thought of heidegger being one of them (bataille 9). his lectures were, however, only published in the 1940s based on his students’ notes. this points to the importance of kojève’s reception to the understanding of his analysis of hegel’s thought. georges bataille was one of his assiduous students, and his writings on kojève will prove illuminating for reading the fountain’s hegelo-heideggerian metaphysics of death, and its inevitable connections to the discourses of gender and species. the main principle in hegelian dialectics is negation, by the means of which a thesis can negate its antithesis and acquire its identity, or recognition. human history is, according to hegel, a product of human action, which is nothing but a patient process of consecutive acts of negation (bataille 10). negativity thus emerges as the ultimate concept in dialectics, which will put it in motion so that it can produce both the human and his history. the first negative action in the production of the human is the negation of nature and of its animal origins. the human can actually be human, in hegelian terms, “only to the degree that he transcends and transforms the anthropophorous animal which supports him, and only because, through the action of negation, he is capable of mastering and, eventually, destroying his own animality” (agamben, the open 12). and according to hegel, this negativity that is so crucial for humans’ very humanity find its ultimate expression in death. “if the animal which constitutes man’s natural being humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 92 did not die, and … if death did not dwell in him as the source of his anguish … there would be no man or liberty, no history or individual” (bataille 12). this means that the linguistic, dialectical human depends on its relationship with death, inasmuch as it is the ultimate manifestation of the negativity that gives humans the power to rise above nature and animality. this unbreakable connection between, on one hand, the human relationship with death and, on the other, the human’s negative relation to animality, is precisely what i argue to be the issue at play in the fountain’s narrative and it is also deeply heideggerian in formulation. according to heidegger, “mortals are they who can experience death as death. animals cannot do so. but animals cannot speak either. the essential relation between death and language flashes up before us, but remains still unthought” (qtd. in calarco 18). we can see in heidegger’s philosophy, too, the connection between humanity and death, to the degree that dasein, the mode-of-being supposedly characteristic of the human, can only produce itself by the means of the negativity that is available to it in its relationship to death. it is only in its contemplation of the nothingness that would exist on the other side of death that the human can rise to its ultimate dialectical nature of self-recognition (agamben, a linguagem e a morte 14). according to hegel, the human, by means of its dialectical understanding, is able to separate the discreet elements that are immersed within nature and to identify individual concepts and units as “constitutive elements from the totality” (bataille 14). but this separation implies the work of negation and, if the human must negate nature in order to separate its elements (and to separate itself from it), it must negate its own animal nature: “he is not merely a man who negates nature, he is first of all an animal, that is to say the very thing he negates: he cannot therefore negate nature without negating himself” (bataille 15). the important role of death as the source of the negativity that will make possible the separation of nature into elements (and of the human from its animal body) already outlines for us the note-worthy separation between immanence (totality) and transcendence (human’s relationship to death). in immanence, there can exist no “pure abstract i, which is essentially opposed to fusion” (bataille 15) and death is not indefinitely postponed as to be available in its inaccessibility. death is inscribed within the totality of immanence, as it supposedly is for animals. as defended by heidegger, no animal can experience its individuality because it does not possess the understanding necessary to isolate the elements from the totality. and in such understanding lies the possibility of death: rodolfo piskorski -vicious circles: intersections of gender and species in aronofsky’s the fountain 93 to separate itself from the others a fly would need the monstrous force of understanding; then it would name itself and do what the understanding normally effects by means of language, which alone founds the separation of elements and by founding it founds itself on it, within a world formed of separated and denominated entities. but in this game the human animal finds death. (bataille 15) this model of dialectical subjectivity is what we see at play in tommy’s characterization in the fountain. he is transfixed by the possibility of death embodied in izzy’s sick body inasmuch as this death makes possible the very negativity which enables his selfrecognition. it is only because he sees himself, izzy, and their union as “separated and irreplaceable” (bataille 16) — a realization which death alone permits — that he is so frightened by the idea of disappearance inherent in dying or in izzy’s death. tommy’s and the film’s strategic disavowal of animal death is, then, fully understandable in its function of enabling the dialectical construction of human individuality by the means of the negation of the animal. the sacrifice which derrida diagnoses at the heart of subjectivity is the same animal sacrifice which bataille identifies as the way humans can actualize death in order to liberate the power of its negativity for creating humanity out of animality (bataille 18). thus, it is important for tommy to keep death distant in order to mark it as inaccessible and his relationship to the world as transcendental. there can only be transcendence if a foreign dimension is kept inaccessible or ultimately external. that is why it is so relevant that izzy’s characterization in the film is constantly being underscored as immanent. the first instance of izzy’s immanent relationship to death is the first scene of the present storyline s described above, in which we see her blending with the light coming from outside. but this relationship is also repeatedly reinscribed in her insistence on talking about death and perhaps accepting it, as opposed to tommy’s irritation at her immanent mysticism and his desperate attempts at reversing death so as to keep their relationship transcendental in nature. gradually izzy’s similar fear before death (which can be detected in her character isabel’s desire for immortality) becomes an acceptance. when tommy learns that she has been losing “sensitivity to hot and cold,” a symptom of the progression of the disease, he is alarmed and wishes to call the doctor, but she explains to him that she “feel[s] different, inside. … every moment. each one” (aronofsky), to which he can humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 94 only shake his head in disbelief, unable to understand what is happening to her. izzy is going through a process of reinscribing death in an immanent relation to her environment, which is strongly signaled by the way she feels it in her own body, to the point that classic dialectical oppositions such as hot and cold seem to lose meaning for her. what the film presents us as its narrative arc is the gradual conversion of tommy into the values izzy is learning with her new relationship to death. and it’s interesting that we don’t even need to look at the film’s distribution of gender codes to see the gender component intrinsic in the difference between tommy and izzy’s stances — hegel’s own theory of dialectics is already inherently gendered. hegel opposes man’s (sic) understanding to the “pure beauty of the dream, which cannot act, which is impotent” (bataille 16). beauty is equated to immanence, inasmuch as it “is on that side of the world where nothing is yet separated from what surrounds it” (bataille 16). here hegel’s (and also kojève’s and bataille’s) language, which opposes the words “man” and “beauty,” already inscribes transcendence (along with understanding and negativity) as opposed to immanence in a gendered grid of male subject and female object. “beauty cannot act. … through action it would no longer exist, since action would first destroy what beauty is: beauty, which seeks nothing, which is, which refuses to move itself but which is disturbed by the force of the understanding” (bataille 16). the hegelian model of male understanding and female beauty perfectly describes the cinematic representations which mark tommy and izzy respectively as transcendental and immanent — and these characterizations as gendered. as mentioned before, izzy as a character acts very little and is rather acted upon by tommy. the quest for her cure is taken solely by him and the filmic conventions of lighting and framing establish tommy as the center of narrative identification and izzy of scopophillic objectification. this is clearly seen in the scene described in the beginning of the article. after tommy climbs up the stairs of the museum and reaches the landing, he turns around looking for izzy. on the floor immediately behind him is a great, crisp circle of light which he does not step into. he stops at the very edge of it and walks to the left of the frame to look for izzy (see fig. 3). rodolfo piskorski -vicious circles: intersections of gender and species in aronofsky’s the fountain 95 fig. 3. tommy does not step into the circle of light on the floor. izzy then shows tommy a mayan book that represents their creation myth, and while she tells him that the first father sacrificed himself to create the world, we get a shot of tommy shaking his head in disgust. izzy insists on the idea of “death as an act of creation” (aronofsky), but tommy changes the subject and walks away to get the car to drive her to the doctor. as mentioned before, she stares at him with a troubled look before fainting and falling down into the circle of light. before she falls, however, we get a slow-motion shot of tommy catching her. once again her immanence is highlighted by the way her body, dressed in white, seems to blur with the light, while tommy, who is usually shot in shadows, wearing dark clothes, can be seen in stark contrast to the source of light (see fig. 4). izzy’s immanence is not, however, analogous to the immanence of the animal who, according to hegel and heidegger, can have no relation to death. in her specific treatment of her own immanence we can see how the discourse of species works in metaphysical formulations of humans’ exceptional being-towards-death. what is important for izzy in her reinscribing death in an immanent relationship is the quest for a meaning for life which only a “transcendental” death can bring. here it’s important to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 96 clarify the paradoxical “transcendence in immanence” that she is seeking, because it is exactly what sets apart the possibilities of death available for her and for donovan. fig. 4. izzy faints into the circle of light and is caught by tommy. perhaps it’s illuminating to revisit the spain storyline to understand the difference between transcendence and transcendence in immanence. the stakes of the war between “cross and crown” are clearly the politics of transcendence. the inquisitor fears the liberation from death that an elixir of immortal life may entail and the obsolete role of the church in a world where people could find transcendence in life. as he pronounces over the sobs of his prosecuted heretics: “all flesh decays, death turns all to ash, and thus death frees every soul” (aronofsky). in the inquisitor’s address, we have the model of classical western transcendence in which a vertical relationship to a dimension which is marked as out of reach (in this case, god and heaven) is the source of meaning to a transcendental life such as the human’s. just as kojève diagnoses hegel’s philosophy as a philosophy of atheism (bataille 10), for the protagonists of the fountain, who live in a world after the nietzschean death of god, transcendence cannot be counted on in the shape of a divinity or an afterlife. that is precisely why there is such a strong emphasis in the disconcerting otherness of death in atheist philosophies such as hegel’s and heidegger’s, because the inaccessibility of death remains the only guarantor of human transcendental nature. as bataille puts it, “for the judeo-christian world, ‘spirituality’ is rodolfo piskorski -vicious circles: intersections of gender and species in aronofsky’s the fountain 97 fully realized and manifest only in the hereafter. … this means death alone assures the existence of a ‘spiritual’ or ‘dialectical’ being, in the hegelian sense.” (12). but izzy’s slow movement towards the threshold of death prevents her from using it for the establishment of her transcendental nature. she cannot, however, die like an animal, that is, with no awareness of death or with no sorrow over the loss of her life, or she might disturb the discourse of species which poses humans as sacred or nullify the animal sacrifice which hegel purports to inaugurate humanity. her attempt in finding “transcendence in immanence” can be best understood in alignment with philosophical formulations that try to address the zeitgeist of late capitalist individualism, which leaves no room for traditional transcendence. french pop-philosopher luc ferry, whose books' titles and sales figures could almost place them in the self-help section, offers one of the best diagnoses of late capitalist bourgeois spirituality, along with a philosophical model tailored to meet its needs. he argues that human life (and especially the human life of our loved ones) is the only remaining sacred thing in western society. the values for which people died in the past, he argues, such as god and the nation, no longer incite the feeling of sacredness in people and are not able to give meaning to their life. according to him, “the sacred did not disappear, it only changed places and is now embodied in humanity. we have moved on from a vertical transcendence — god, the nation, the great utopias — to a horizontal transcendence — men” (ferry; my translation). as such, his philosophy is most convenient for an historical moment of managerial states and biopolitics, where the state takes it upon itself to care for the biological life of its population as its most valuable asset. in the same move, in globalized postmodernity, middle-class values which originated with the birth of capitalism and of the nuclear family tend to be the focus of state policies, instead of its own expansion and upkeep. according to ferry, “in western societies, politics, instead of being an end in itself, becomes a support for private life” (my translation). this cultural and political panorama is exactly the one izzy and tommy find themselves in, and her attempt to give meaning to her dwindling life is a postmodern woman’s answer to death in a world without the transcendence of a god or a cause to die for. exactly because hegelo-heideggerian death cannot work for her sense of transcendence as it can for tommy, she needs to find a way of incorporating death into her “totality” so as to give an absolute, sacred meaning to her human life — she must humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 98 find the absolute in immanence. according to ferry, “in the old days, the absolute was a transcendental thing, that is, superior to us, such as god and eternity. … but now it is in us, which i call ‘transcendence in immanence’” (my translation). we can see her approaching this kind of transcendence in immanence in the way she feels a kind of blessed state in her acceptance of death. after waking up from her seizure in the museum, she tells tommy that she “wasn’t afraid. … when i fell, i was full. held,” to which tommy answers “i know, i caught you, i held you!”, failing to understand that it is not his attempts of caring for and curing her that are making her feel more human. her book is also one way to achieve that. by inscribing her own conflict with mortality in the story of queen isabel, she’s creating the fiction she needs to give meaning to her life (and death). she tells tommy her book starts in spain but ends in xibalba, the star the mayans believed to be their underworld, where the souls go to be reborn. but in the mythless world of 21st century america mayan myths are nothing but trivia, and she needs to find her mayan transcendence elsewhere. she tells a reluctant tommy about her views on a possible life after death: she recounts a story she heard from a mayan guide about his father, who had died and had “lived on” through the tree that was planted on top of his grave. “he said his father became part of that tree,” izzy says. “he grew into the wood, into the bloom. and when a sparrow ate the tree’s fruits, his father flew with the birds. he said death was his father’s road to awe” (aronofsky). izzy’s use of fiction, both in the form of the book she’s writing and the pieces of mayan myths she brings together for the sake of comfort, is also explored by bataille as a crucial element in the human’s relationship to death. precisely because death only comes when we die, it is important that we become aware of its potential for negativity in life, so that death’s creative potential for action can be unleashed. that is why sacrifice and the spectacle of death are necessary to the human’s understanding of death. without such representation, argues bataille, “it would be possible for us to remain alien and ignorant in respect to death, just as beasts apparently are. indeed, nothing is less animal than fiction, which is more or less separated from the real, from death” (20). by the means of a reworking of death in her book, izzy makes it clear that her immanence was never supposed to be like the immanence of the animal, and that the discourse of species is a fundamental component in the metaphysical philosophies of death and mortality. but so is the discourse of gender, as the main conflict of the film makes very clear. rodolfo piskorski -vicious circles: intersections of gender and species in aronofsky’s the fountain 99 now that we have established exactly what kind of transcendental immanence izzy is reaching for, we can say that the theme of the film is tommy’s gradual acceptance of her feminine stance before the possibility of immanence. the gender component reemerges when izzy gives tommy pen and ink for him to finish her book for her. if her book represents the fiction responsible for her transcendence over the animal, izzy needs the man-woman coupling to actually achieve it. but not only that, we can read her dependence on him to finish her book as the marking of the ineffectuality of female writing. a woman’s fiction, the film seems to tell us, can only take them so far. now it’s imperative that tommy is converted into her system of beliefs in order to finish the fictional creation of their especially human way to die. as such, the word “finish” becomes a kind of aural motif in the film together with the circle as a visual one. as she insists that he finishes the story, he says he doesn’t know how it ends, to which she replies that he will. due to an unlucky coincidence, tommy hears that the compound from the tree in central america started reducing donovan’s tumor only seconds before izzy dies from a cardiac arrest in the hospital. now the main issue for tommy is to know how to “finish” their fiction, how to achieve absoluteness together with izzy as she instructed him to do. he seems to sense that he must take the path of the transcendental immanence of the acceptance of death, only if just revealed by his desperation in still not finding his lost wedding ring. the tip of the pen izzy gives him becomes a visual obsession in the film as the phallic device which will grant him the power of writing that will conclude their fiction of a sacred union, which she was unable to do by means of her female writing. the clash between the shapes of the phallic pen and the feminine circle point to the internal conflict experienced by tommy, and reaches its climax when, unnerved that he has lost his wedding ring, he tattoos a new ring using the pen and the ink izzy gave him. by now the resolution of the conflict is clear — tommy will only find his absolute transcendence in his immanence with izzy when he gives in to what the circles represent, which is a feminine acceptance of death. although the film foreshadows his conversion visually, he still takes a long time to come round. in izzy’s burial, tommy reacts aggressively to lillian’s eulogy, which speaks appraisingly about the politics of transcendental immanence. she says, while tommy shakes his head angrily, that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 100 we struggle all our lives to become whole, complete enough when we die, to achieve a measure of grace. few of us ever do. most of us end up going out the way we came in: kicking and screaming. but somehow izzy, young as she was, she achieved that grace. in her last days she became whole. (aronofsky) despite the speciesist disavowal of human’s mammalian birth, lillian’s eulogy sounds for tommy as a an unnecessary renunciation of the special human condition. he storms out in her speech, only to tell her later that “death is a disease” and that he will find a cure. picking up the clues left by izzy, he believes he is fulfilling her wish when he plants a tree over her grave and, with the aid of the mysterious compound from the tree in central america, he is able to stunt the effects of aging so he survives into the far future, when he is able to scoop the tree which has grown on izzy’s grave into the spherical spaceship we see in the space storyline, and fly with it/her in the direction of xibalba, a dying star whose explosion he believes will make them live forever together. of course, the interpretation given above to what is actually happening in the space storyline is my own, and there are other possible readings that the film accommodates, especially due to the elliptical nature of this third plotline. however, i believe this arrangement of the elements is the one which best sums up the issues which were left open over the course of the film. we see once again the clash between pen and circle as he tattoos one more in a series of rings around his arm, which he has added over the years to the wedding ring tattoo. in a way, we can read the entire space storyline as tommy’s misunderstanding of izzy’s beliefs. the hyperbolical space travel he engages in as another form of expansion and conquering (which is added to the invasion of central america and the exploitation of monkeys’ bodies) seems to be the masculine, logocentric, and technophillic attempt at understanding what izzy meant by death’s being a road to awe. as the tree gives signs of dying before they reach the star, the space tommy despairs with disappointment and grief. at this moment, both izzy and isabel appear inside the orb and tell him to “finish it.” tommy’s face is finally drenched in white light as he happily says to himself “i’m gonna die!”, to which the izzy in the orb answers “together we will live forever.” he finally catches up with the visual imagery that foreshadowed that he had to embrace death. at this climactic moment, when he is about to accept death coming from an exploding star, the film takes us back to the domestic drama of the first scene, in which they were rodolfo piskorski -vicious circles: intersections of gender and species in aronofsky’s the fountain 101 arguing over time management. the scene plays again, but this time he follows her out of the double doors and into the sunlit snowy landscape. with this plot device, the film validates its concern with mortality and transcendence as nothing but an allegory of the couple’s melodrama of trying to accommodate gender difference in the everyday life of a heterosexual relationship. the scenes that follow function only to conclude this train of thought in the way they work with sexual and orgasmic imagery. we are led through the conclusions of both spain and space storylines, as tomás finally reaches the tree of life hidden in a mayan pyramid and space tommy reaches the dying star. tomás penetrates the tree with a phallic dagger and drinks of its sap, only to “die of life” as flowers sprout out of his wounds and mouth, apparently in consonance with the idea inherent in the french expression for orgasm, petit mort. while space tommy is bracing himself for the explosion of the star, the ring isabel gave tomás appears to him, and as the apotheotic music swells, he puts on the ring. the star bursts, disseminating flecks of light and making the tree inside the orb bloom. the final scene shows us the quiet moment when tommy planted the seed on izzy’s grave. the film closes, then, with a sequence of images of sexual fulfillment and of male procreative dissemination and insemination as a final translation of the potentiality of the unity of man and woman to signify possible human transcendence over animality in postmodern times. conclusion. i hope to have shown how the fountain is invested in creating a discourse of possible human relationships to death as deeply gendered inasmuch as it requires the heterosexual coupling as a set-up. also, in its attempt to validate its gendered main conflict, the film exposes how discourses of gender difference end up producing and depending on other discourses of oppression, such as speciesism, colonialism, racism, heterosexism, and technophillia. finally, i believe my analysis shows the potential for intersectional theory — allied to other strains of criticism, such as posthumanism and ecofeminism, as well as to philosophy — to be used as a tool for textual criticism to the extent that it offers possibilities to identify how ideologies of difference are mutually constitutive and reinforcing. notes 1. “‘therefore, the lord god banished adam and eve from the garden of eden and placed a flaming sword to protect the tree of life’ – genesis 3:24” (aronofsky). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 102 2. tomás describes the inquisitor as “an enemy thriving within her [spain’s] borders, feasting on her strength,” and the queen pronounces that “the beast runs amok in my kingdom. … and now he’s sharpening his talons for one more fateful push. my salvation lies in the jungles of new spain” (aronofsky). 3. see deckha; and wolfe and elmer. works cited adams, carol j. the sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory. new york: continuum, 1990. agamben, giorgio. the open: man and animal. 2002. trans. kevin attel. stanford: stanford up, 2004. _______. a linguagem e a morte. 1985. trans. henrique burigo. belo horizonte: ufmg, 2006. aronofsky, darren. dir. the fountain. regency, 2006. bataille, georges. “hegel, death and sacrifice.” 1955. trans. jonathan strauss. yale french studies 78 (1990): 9-28. brown, paul. “‘this thing of darkness i acknowledge mine’: the tempest and the discourse of colonialism.” william shakespeare,. the tempest (a case study in critical controversy). ed. gerald graff and james d. phelan. london: palgrave macmillan, 2000. pp. 205-229. calarco, matthew. “heidegger’s zoontology.” animal philosophy: essential reading in continental thought. ed. matthew calarco and peter atterton. london and new york: continuum, 2004. pp. 18-30. deckha, maneesha. "intersectionality and posthumanist visions of equality." wisconsin journal of law, gender & society 23.2 (2008): 249-267. rodolfo piskorski -vicious circles: intersections of gender and species in aronofsky’s the fountain 103 derrida, jacques. “’eating well,'’ or the calculation of the subject.“ 1992. trans. peter connor and avital ronell. positions…: interviews, 1974-1994. ed. elisabeth weber. stanford: stanford up, 1995. 255-287. ferry, luc. “entrevista com luc ferry.” superinteressante. abril.com, jul. 2008. 21 sep. 2010. grillo, trina. “anti-essentialism and intersectionality: tools to dismantle the master's house.” berkeley’s women law journal 10 (1995): 16-30. loomba, ania. “from gender, race, renaissance drama.” william shakespeare, the tempest (a case study in critical controversy). ed. gerald graff and james d. phelan. london: palgrave macmillan, 2000. pp. 324-335. warren, karen. “ecological feminist philosophies: an overview of the issues.” ecological feminist philosophies (a hypatia book). ed. karen warren. bloomington: indiana up, 1996. pp. ix-xxvi. wolfe, cary and jonathan elmer. “subject to sacrifice: ideology, psychoanalysis, and the discourse of species in jonathan demme’s the silence of the lambs.” animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. chicago and london: u of chicago p, 2003. 97-121. wolfe, cary. “fathers, lovers, and friend killers: rearticulating gender and race via species in hemingway.” boundary 2 29.1 (2002): 223-257. microsoft word noll pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:1 samantha noll metaphysical separatism and its discontents kelly oliver. animal lessons: how they teach us to be human. new york: columbia university press, 2009. 376 pp. $29.50 pb in animal lessons: how they teach us to be human, kelly oliver critiques a fundamental precept in the history of philosophy called “metaphysical separatism,” the view that humans and animals are fundamentally different types of beings (9). rather than accept this view, oliver examines key philosophical texts in the western tradition to show how their writers utilized animals to forward projects aimed at defining humanity. according to oliver, such projects were pursued at the expense of animals (8). in these works animals have been tamed, dissected, devalued, and/or maimed. they have been conceptualized as so radically “other” that they are not even recognized as “other.” oliver examines how these animals break free of or defy the philosophical arguments made at their expense. for her, these escaped animals break down the dichotomy and force us to rethink our conceptions of autonomy, kinship, humanity, and animality. oliver argues that many of our most important contemporary ethical questions are connected to the separatist project. atrocities such as genocide and torture are often justified by comparing, and thus reducing, the worth of the victims to that of animals: “without interrogating the man/animal opposition on the symbolic and imaginary levels, we can only scratch the surface in understanding the exploitation and genocide of people and animals” (19). the main project of animal lessons is thus to challenge the presumptions of humanism and to interrogate the human/animal dualism. it is a project that oliver sees as essential for fully addressing numerous other contemporary ethical questions. animal lessons: how they teach us to be human is in six parts: “what's wrong with animal rights?,” “animal pedagogy,” “difference ‘worthy of its name’,” “it's our fault,” “estranged kinship,” and “psychoanalysis and the science of kinship.” each one largely consists of chapters devoted to critiquing the work of thinkers such as rousseau, heidegger, kristeva, beauvoir, herder, derrida, lacan, levinas, freud, and merleau-ponty. as stated above, her critique is focused on how animals were used by these philosophers and on teasing out how animals have failed to be contained by their arguments. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 122 readers of humanimailia will certainly be interested in all chapters, of which i will discuss two distinctive ones below. i have chosen these two because they highlight the basic structure of the other chapters, and because they illustrate the overarching strengths and weaknesses of the book. specifically, the first chapter that i discuss, on rousseau, displays a key weakness, and the second, on simone de beauvoir, illustrates a strength. in “you are what you eat: rousseau’s cat,” oliver explores three distinctive readings of rousseau, by jacques derrida, paul de man, and jean starobinski. she begins by briefly outlining how rousseau utilizes animals in his work. for rousseau, how human beings treat animals directly correlates to different social organizations and personal identities, and that social organizations correspond to humans’ relation to animals. there is the “savage hunter,” the “barbaric herdsman,” and the “civilized farmer.” to become civilized, one must move away from killing and eating animals and towards cultivating one’s food (51). thus, within this view, we humans are basically what we eat. “savages” are wild because they eat wild animals, herdsmen eat domestic animals and thus are domestic, and civilized, or cultivated, people eat cultivated crops (52). rousseau also argues that our advantage over animals was originally secured through appropriating their knowledge (such as the knowledge that chestnuts are good to eat). in the same way, language, or the very thing that we use to distinguish ourselves from animals, is also an “assimilation of animal sounds” (62). for rousseau, humans assimilate animals in three ways: we assimilate their knowledge, their bodies, and their calls, and then bury or separate ourselves from this assimilation. thus, according to oliver's reading of rousseau, both human society and language can be seen as responses to animals (66). oliver next critiques two well known readings of rousseau by derrida and de man that contribute to metaphysical separatism. here she argues that the interpretations offered by derrida and de man involve human language “erupting” out of and as separate from nature, in contrast to rousseau’s conception of language as evolving from and replying to nature. for oliver, these two readings reinforce a conception of humans and animals (and indeed the rest of nature) as fundamentally different beings. she feels, however, that rousseau can offer an alternative way of conceiving animals and humans that does not involve conceptualizing them in this dualistic fashion. to elaborate this view, oliver turns to a third reading of rousseau, by jean starobinski (68). samantha noll — metaphysical separatism and its discontents 123 starobinski’s interpretation points to a conception of humanity as a species with the capacity for both listening and responding. this brings with it ethical obligations to all other forms of life (68). for oliver, starobinski’s reading offers a dynamic alternative to derrida's and de man's readings of rousseau because, in his view, we are defined not by our ability to speak but by our ability to listen and respond. we respond to nature because we are a part of it, and we respond to animals because we are animals. this ability to respond “begets a responsibility or moral obligation” (72). for starobinski, “ethical obligation begins in the conversation between man and nature” (73). starobinski’s interpretation of rousseau points to an ambiguity that opens up a space for thinking about responsitivity and listening in ethical, rather than metaphysical, terms (71). it also dissolves the metaphysical separatism that is foundational in derrida's and de man's readings. oliver ends the chapter with a look at the later derrida, where he questions the use of the general term “animal,” and by postulating her own questions dealing with human blindness to our animal kinship or pedagogy (78). oliver begins the chapter “the beaver's struggle with species-being: de beauvoir and the preying mantis” with a critique of beauvoir's second sex (155). for oliver, beauvoir’s argument for the equality of the sexes rests upon the essential inequality of both women and animals. beauvoir claims that while both men and women have an animal nature, it is not this animal nature that reduces women to the status of “a second sex.” rather, women are reduced to this status because of their connection to their reproductive role. beauvoir claims that females are seen as inferior to males in all species and not just within human society (156). thus the category “second sex” applies to all animals that are female. in addition, women have more reason to hide their animality than do men because their equality rests on transcending their “natural” reproductive role. men, for beauvoir, transcend their animality because of their ability to project themselves into the future; women must also separate themselves from animality if they want to be equal with men (162). oliver argues that this claim is based upon metaphysical separatism or assumed hierarchies between men and women and humans and animals. for beauvoir, while other female animals have a fixed identity that is determined by biology (because female animals are caged by their ability to reproduce), only human females, as human beings, have the capacity to transcend evolution and rise above their “biological destiny.” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 124 in sum, oliver argues that for beauvoir women are worse off than other female animals because their childbirth is more painful, and because their reflective nature makes knowable the limiting nature of their reproductive role (173). indeed, while beauvoir claims to be trying to undermine patriarchal stereotypes, her argument is ultimately built upon the claims that man is fundamentally different from other animals, and that women can only become equal with men if they acquire traditionally masculine traits and make the animal radically “other.” thus, beauvoir values production over reproduction, and does not question how her conception of “life” is value laden. oliver concludes by observing that beauvoir's conception of “man” as a superior being able to conquer animals and dominate the earth does not seem as romantic as it was during beauvoir's time, because we now live with the knowledge of global warming and the depletion of resources (174). for oliver, this conception of what it means to be human and the metaphysical separatism at its foundation can destroy humanity's future. i have discussed these two chapters in order to illustrate the strengths and weaknesses of animal lessons: how they teach us to be human. i believe the book has two main flaws. first, while oliver does lay out her thesis in the first chapter of the book, it is often difficult to find her specific voice in the individual chapters. the chapter on rousseau is a good example of this tendency. while reading it, one first works through the arguments of rousseau, and then of derrida, de man, and starobinski, but it is difficult to pick out oliver's own line of thought. in several sections i found myself puzzling over whether a particular argument presented was oliver's, one of the other philosopher's, or a particular reading of that philosopher by oliver. this makes reading the chapters arduous and confusing, especially for readers not familiar with the fields of animal metaphysics or animal ethics. in addition, most of chapters in animal lessons: how they teach us to be human focus on continental philosophers. while this provides a strong grounding in animal metaphysics within this particular tradition, it ignores the work done within the analytic and american philosophical traditions, such as peter singer, tom regan, and donna haraway. this focus on the continental tradition is also a strength; animal lessons is an excellent introduction to animal metaphysics from this perspective. i would not hesitate to recommend it to someone desiring background knowledge in the field. it would also be excellent to use in the classroom. a second strength is that oliver provides illuminating critiques of and insights into these historically difficult texts. there are a handful of samantha noll — metaphysical separatism and its discontents 125 chapters where her voice is strongly heard, and i feel that these, such as the one on simone de beauvoir, are the best in the book. animal lessons is a valuable and much needed addition to the relatively new field of animal metaphysics. it is particularly useful for teaching, as it outlines and critiques a rich assortment of texts dealing with how we conceptualize both animals and humans. in addition, kelly oliver's critique of metaphysical separatism within the philosophical tradition and her connection of this concept to important contemporary ethical questions, such as genocide and torture, are interesting in and of themselves. microsoft word armstrong-macgregor pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 4:2 philip armstrong beyond the great rupture arthur macgregor, animal encounters. human and animal interaction in britain from the norman conquest to world war one. london: reaktion books, 2012. 552 pp. $ 60.00 hc. arthur macgregor’s animal encounters is a substantial book, in more than one sense. physically speaking it’s a formidable volume: a hardback of 552 pages, quarto sized, with 66 color and 95 black and white illustrations. even more impressive, though, is the weight, depth, and breadth of macgregor’s scholarship. animal encounters covers an entire millennium, yet manages to bring exceptional detail to a great diversity of topics within the chosen geo-cultural parameters. having declared my overall admiration, i want to state an initial criticism before discussing the volume in depth: the title is misleading. the phrase “animal encounter” suggests (to me) a kind of engagement that is spontaneous, potentially surprising, openended and multi-directional — as does, to some extent, the word ”interaction” (which appears in the subtitle). yet those categories of encounter most likely to produce mutuality, wonder, or unpredictability — the kinds of interaction most capable of destabilizing relations of domination between humans and other animals — are explicitly excluded from this study: interspecies companionship, non-predatory engagement with wild nature, experiences with exotic animals, imaginative representations of human-animal relations. eschewing these topics, macgregor’s book concentrates instead on the various traditions, practices and systems by which the british population has made use of nonhuman animals over a thousand years. indeed, the author declares at the outset that his focus is upon “the material culture of animal exploitation” (7). of course any work of scholarship operates within certain parameters and makes certain exclusions, so i should reiterate that my criticism here is aimed at the inaccuracy of the book’s title, not the scope of its content. (having said that, i believe there’s one especially unfortunate exclusion in the above list, to which i’ll return in due course.) those domains of human-animal relation on which this book does concentrate are vast in scope and massively significant. yet macgregor marshals his material with virtuoso clarity. the structure that organizes the book as a whole is repeated within each chapter: a general overview followed by sections devoted to particular practices or philip armstrong – beyond the great rupture 131 species, each of which traces developments over the course of the millennium. readers seeking a reference work to delve into for information on particular topics will discover an abundance of quite self-contained historical essays, while those who follow the discussion from start to finish will be rewarded with a comprehensive and colorful general history woven from a great many interconnecting strands of detail. such is the diversity of material that even a reader familiar with some aspects of this history is bound to encounter new things. among the surprises that awaited me, for example, were the british beaver, the tradition of fishing with cormorants, the wild white cattle of chillingham park, and the cultural complexities of swan-keeping. each chapter deals with one of the main categories of human exploitation of animals (with the significant but understandable exception of marine animals). chapter one covers use of “the ubiquitous horse” for transport, communications, warfare, sport and leisure; chapter two hunting and falconry; chapter three other kinds of animalfocused ”sport” including pigeon-racing, wildfowling, fishing, and the baiting of bulls, bears, badgers, and other species. chapter four, “the living larder,” deals with the provision of foodstuffs via the keeping of poultry, pigeons, swans, pond-fish, rabbits, and bees. and chapter five, “animals on the farm,” first outlines historical patterns occurring across the agricultural sector — changes in composition of livestock populations, developments in ploughing and transport, the emergence of selective breeding or “improvement” — and then provides species-specific accounts of cattle, sheep, goats, pigs, horses, donkeys, and mules. macgregor’s introduction straightforwardly declares his historiographical approach. “others have delved in greater depth into the moral and philosophical dimensions of human involvement with the animal world: from this point it will be rather the physical dimensions — the material culture — of these relationships that occupy us and which form the primary concern of this study” (19). elsewhere a statement like this might seem like an alibi for a failure in self-reflexivity, or a willed blindness to the ideological or epistemological assumptions and shortcomings of one’s scholarly approach, but not here. throughout the book, without recourse to theoretical jargon, macgregor remains sensitive to the continuities and differences between the past and the present, as well as to the continuities and differences amongst and between humans and other animals. the appeal of his approach resides largely in a kind of humility in the face of the material: rather than processing his sources through a heavy theoretical machine, macgregor allows them to speak for themselves as much as possible. he quotes at length, choosing colorful and apposite extracts that evoke historical realities with a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 132 vividness that no summary narrative or interpretive discourse could achieve. a similar function is performed by the sumptuous images. there are quite a number of these but the text is not over-burdened with them. this is not a pictorial history, and the writing indisputably — and deservedly — occupies the foreground. of course, from a human-animal studies perspective, the critical question is whether or not a work attends to the interests of nonhuman animals themselves, rather than simply using them as data for the anthropo-solipsistic reinscription of human concerns. macgregor confronts this issue in his preface: “many of the encounters described below were bloody and their end predictably violent. no moral standpoint is taken here — not out of lack of conviction because it would be inappropriate and counter-productive in such an investigation” (8). while in a way this is reasonable and accurate — the book is not a work of advocacy — macgregor does actually take a certain kind of ethical approach. his discussion insistently registers, with understated but cumulative force, the gaps and silences in the record that mark the ways in which animals bore the cost, most often with great suffering and in huge numbers, of the human practices described. in dealing with traditions that were designedly cruel, such as bear-baiting, macgregor doesn’t need to add anything: he lets the practitioners speak for themselves, as in robert laneham’s sadistic account of a bear-baiting arranged for queen elizabeth in 1575 (208). such quotations allow the reader to confront not only the extreme suffering involved, but also the radical historical disjunction in attitudes whereby the early modern viewer’s pleasure in the spectacle was proportionate to the intensity of the animal’s mutilation and distress. mostly, though macgregor is dealing with situations in which the suffering or death of animals is considered simply irrelevant to the interests of the humans making use of them: as a result no contemporary record of the animals’ experience exists. yet in these cases, too, macgregor recognizes the interests of the animals and the price they pay for human benefit. for example, on the arrival of stock animals from the countryside into the towns, he writes: “whatever their destiny, few animals entering the towns profited from the experience. cattle and sheep met their end in the shambles and slaughterhouses whose reputation for squalor and inhumanity was legendary” (17). on the endless and varied labors of horses throughout the period under discussion: “retirement was indeed a concept unfamiliar in the horse world, most working animals being driven until they dropped and buried where they died, generally after being relieved of their hide for use in covering carriages, weaving into traces or plaiting into whiplashes for chastising the next generation of drudges” (23). on the high rate of philip armstrong – beyond the great rupture 133 human injury and death in medieval tourneys, jousts and tournaments: “no one bothered to comment on what happened to the horses, but casualties must certainly have been common and severe” (75). on the widespread practice of gelding lambs by hand: “leonard mascall’s [1620] observation that ‘by cutting and gelding of them by unskilfull persons, many doe perish and die thereon’ must cloak a legion of painful deaths over the centuries” (457). and one last example: discussing the nineteenthcentury tradition of livestock painting, macgregor notes that painter james ward frequently “found his subjects (having already reached the peak of their condition) were destined for imminent slaughter, requiring him to work all night by candlelight before they were dispatched the following morning” (433). animal encounters, then, works hard to make its history of human-animal relations as three-dimensional as possible, by determinedly acknowledging that this history didn’t just happen to its human participants. another way in which scholars can recognize the lives and deaths of actual animals is by examining the roles played by nonhuman species in the shaping of so-called human history. thus macgregor discusses the use of horses in warfare throughout the period under discussion, and gives a fascinating account of the role of the pigeon post in world war one. sometimes he inserts human-animal relations unexpectedly into great historical turning-points, as when he remarks that one of the aims of the magna carta was “to redress in favour of the barons the tendency of the monarchy to designate increasing tracts of forestae regis” (103) – that is, to wrest from the sovereign’s control a greater proportion of the symbolically and materially rich forested hunting-grounds. in regard to the larger story of class hierarchy, that great theme of british history, macgregor extensively documents the role of various modes of hunting and stockkeeping in the elaboration, display, control, and enforcement of social rank and privilege. the various elements discussed above make animal encounters a highly satisfying and generous work of scholarship. but what about the book overall? at the more general level, what argument about human-animal relations does macgregor provide? if one were to emphasize the (very brief) framing comments (the first couple of pages of the introduction followed by the few pages of the epilogue), where macgregor places his history of eleventhto early twentieth-century britain in the context of contemporary life, one could gain the impression this volume confirms john berger’s famous and influential argument about human-animal relations under modernity: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 134 namely, that today’s post-industrial and urban-centred societies are pathologically isolated from “the animal world“ (and from ‘nature’ generally), in sharp contrast to the lives of “our” ancestors (that is, the ancestors of people of european descent) (berger 12). “until the very threshold of our own era,” writes macgregor in this mode, “which for present purposes is taken to date from the increasingly mechanized carnage of world war one, the lives of the human and animal populations in britain as elsewhere were interlinked to an extent that today seems scarcely imaginable.” today, by contrast, ”[o]ur largely urbanized society … may form a media-inspired and highly impressionistic view of the animal world, but for the majority it is a world now remote and disconnected from daily life” (11). this grand historical narrative — i will call it the ”great rupture” theory of human-animal relations — undoubtedly contains important elements of truth, but it also cries out for qualification, and in some ways for contradiction. for example, human-animal studies must take seriously the power and variety of relationships between urbanized, modern, post-industrial humans and their animal companions. macgregor, as i mentioned near the start of this review, rules out consideration of “domestic pets” (18-19). unfortunately this exclusion provides unwarranted reinforcement of the great rupture theory. in berger’s version pets are the urban, consumerist substitute for authentic (that is, rural) quotidian human-animal interaction. my hunch is that, had macgregor investigated the changing role of companionate relationships with animals across his chosen historical span, his findings would have significantly complicated this dichotomous paradigm. animal encounters offers only tantalizing hints of this possibility, for example by quoting, in regard to seventeenth-century hunting dogs, gervase markham’s observation that the beagle “may be carried in a man’s glove, and [is] bred in many countries for delight only” (118). there are two other necessary qualifications to the great rupture theory, however, for which macgregor’s book — despite its apparent subscription to the theory in the preface and epilogue — provides abundant evidence. first, in berger’s overly cut-anddried version, human-animal relations outside of modernity are implausibly utopian — as embodied by his approving comment that a peasant is both “fond of his pig and … glad to salt away its pork” (berger 5). macgregor offers a far more realistic and variegated view of non-modern human-animal relationships, including detailed accounts of precisely the kinds of venal, cruel, callous, instrumentalist, and objectifying attitudes that berger tends to characterize as unique to modernity. the second way macgregor corrects the great rupture theory — and this constitutes, i think, his book’s most important and persuasive general contribution — is by showing philip armstrong – beyond the great rupture 135 that many aspects of animal exploitation we characterize as “industrial“ were actually present far earlier than the great rupture narrative allows — that is, before the industrial revolution, and in some cases well before the seventeenth century. thus, for example, macgregor describes the transport — albeit on foot (or hoof) — of cattle, sheep, and poultry in their collective thousands from their pastures to very distant endpoints: “their progress to market involved epic journeys in herds of perhaps some hundreds along the green drove roads that formed an alternative communications network proliferating over hundreds of miles of countryside” (17). meanwhile the carrier and pack-horse system “facilitated a remarkable degree of progress [in the nationwide expansion of industry and trade] even before the development of longdistance carrying by means of wheeled transport on the well-made turnpike roads that underpinned the industrial expansion of the eighteenth century” (52-3). industrialized technology, then, in the forms of the railway and telegraph, may have intensified and expanded these human-animal networks of transport and communication, but it did not inaugurate them. similarly, many of the commercial roles we think of as peculiar to later capitalism — those of entrepreneurs, brokers and agents — were proliferating in british agriculture well before industrial capitalism. “from the early medieval period a whole raft of professional entrepreneurs emerged who took it upon themselves to source these supplies [of livestock] and to oversee their sale in the market place,” writes macgregor, adding that “[w]ool merchants … must be considered amongst the earliest commodity brokers” (17). somewhat later, “the early 1500s” brought “the emergence of a new class of butcher-grazier” who deployed “extensive flocks undergoing fattening at the hands of increasingly prosperous yeoman farmers, before final delivery for slaughter” (415). in the century that followed, these wealthy graziers and members of the new yeoman class were able to take over the leases of pasturelands and stock seized as a result of enclosures and the dissolution of the monasteries (417). macgregor also shows that various other features of agricultural commerce we might consider peculiarly modern were already present in medieval agriculture. selective breeding, for example of horses, took place from the twelfth century in the monastic estates, “the most progressive and orderly establishments of their day” (24). regulation, control and transport of wild populations (usually deer) were undertaken as early as the thirteenth century, and on a large scale by the time of the tudors (112). transnational trade networks existed from the very beginning of macgregor’s period: “the monasteries — and especially the cistercians, first established in england in 1128 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 136 — play[ed] a major role in promoting wool-growing and in forging links with continental markets” (461). macgregor even identifies the operation, again long before industrialization, of some strikingly “intensivist” modes of farming, such as the cramming of calves to produce white veal (454), or the recorded expectation that a medieval shepherd could geld 100 lambs in three hours and shear 90 sheep in a day (457-8). in addition, when macgregor’s narrative does deal with the beginnings of industrialization proper, it demonstrates how pre-industrial practices interwove with, laid the groundwork for, or continued alongside the new mechanized technologies — thus, once again, providing a history more continuous and multifaceted than the “justso story” of the great rupture. “the coming of the railways,” macgregor writes, “by no means rendered [horse-drawn] carts and wagons redundant on the roads but it changed immeasurably the way they operated…. [t]he numbers of horses employed by the railway companies to gather in freight to the terminuses and to distribute it at the other end of its journey greatly exceeded those rendered redundant by the steam engine” (61). elsewhere he tells us that “the advent of developing mechanization” created “a whole new range of duties” for horses: “many of the machines that ultimately would be powered by steam were originally driven by treadmills — the very word has come to signify unremitting toil — and the fact that horsepower is even today the unit by which mechanical output is measured tells us all we need to know about the former universality of the pony in powering virtually every device that could not be more efficiently driven by wind or water” (73). in all these ways, then, macgregor’s account fragments the received narrative of a great rupture between modern humans and animals — a rupture that is industrial, capitalist, technological, and monolithic — into a whole series of developments, some occurring as far back as the medieval period, that made it increasingly easy, convenient and profitable for (european) human beings to separate themselves from animals and thereby exploit them as a resource and en masse. anyone committed to understanding that complex history, and perhaps challenging its legacy, will find animal encounters a rich, accessible and authoritative book. work cited berger, john. “why look at animals?” about looking. new york: random house, 1980. 1-26. microsoft word kendall-morwick-taylor etal pdf dummy h u m a n i m a l i a 4:1 karalyn kendall-morwick thinking otherwise about animals nik taylor and tania signal (eds.), theorizing animals: re-thinking humanimal relations. brill: leiden, the netherlands, 2011. 293 pp. $121.00. as i write this review, the need to “re-think humanimal relations” seems to be staring me in the face. on one side of my computer monitor sits a stack of books with animalstudies titles; on the other rests a stray cat i am attempting to rehome. in a community with a significant stray and feral cat problem and a recently closed animal shelter, i felt strangely exhilarated to cross paths with a cat i could unambiguously help. young, cute, and gregarious, he seemed, in the rescuer’s lingo, “highly adoptable.” but his positive result on an fiv test has complicated matters. unwilling to have him destroyed or re-release him into the free-roaming population, i am left contemplating the ethical ambiguities of interspecies life as i post fliers with endearing photos undercut by that loaded trio of letters. why save this cat when so many of his more adoptable brethren remain homeless? at what point is his confinement in my spare room (away from my own disgruntled cats) an unacceptable trade-off for a future i may not be able to secure? and even if i succeed in finding that elusive “good home,” what of the animals whose suffering produces the commercial pet food he would almost certainly be fed? can i justify my commitment to this animal as anything more than an attempt to avoid dirtying my hands with the messy consequences of companion-species entanglements? it is with such questions in mind that i approached theorizing animals, the 11th volume in brill’s human-animal studies series. the purpose of this volume, according to series editor kenneth shapiro of the animals and society institute, is to tackle “one of the important challenges facing the emerging field of human-animal studies: the development of theory” (ix). in pursuit of this goal, editors nik taylor and tania signal have compiled ten chapters from contributors representing a range of social science and humanities disciplines (although the social scientists outnumber the humanities contributors by an approximately two-to-one margin). the result is a wide-ranging and useful, if somewhat uneven, volume that productively highlights some of the central tensions in the vibrant and polymorphous field of human-animal studies—in particular, the relationship between theory and practice and the related friction between posthumanist and liberationist/abolitionist approaches. despite these tensions, “the imperative that theory be coupled to action” echoes throughout the collection, from humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 150 lynda birke’s preface and taylor’s introduction to jonathan balcombe’s concluding remarks (286). theorizing animals is divided into four parts. part one brings sociological and philosophical perspectives to bear on the “meta-theoretical question” embedded in its title, “knotty problems: to theorize or not?” (ix). peter beatson undertakes the daunting task of “contribut[ing] clarity and order to the myriad forms that humananimal interactions can take, to the wide diversity of academic disciplines involved in the study of those interactions, and to the many sites where active intervention on behalf of abused animals occurs” (22). to this end, he maps seven overlapping spheres that surround and inflect all human/animal relations: nature, demography, economy, politics, community, welfare, and culture. the result is not a theory per se but a “heuristic check list” to aid theorists in recognizing the complex and “mutually determine[d]” forces at play in all cross-species entanglements (22). lisa kemmerer makes the case against theory, pointing to humans’ “track record” of generating theories about human and nonhuman “others” that serve only to legitimize oppression (74). convinced that theory is a “luxury of the elite” that inevitably enshrines our anthropocentric worldview, she urges her readers to “quit talking and writing” and instead turn our attention to “the critical task of animal liberation” (82). i found this section to be the most disappointing of the four because the authors’ nearexclusive focus on animal victimhood precludes serious consideration of nonhuman agency. certainly, as beatson observes, “human domination of animals is the most deeply entrenched and widespread form of oppression and exploitation” (51). yet despite his insistence on the “mutual determination” of human and nonhuman lives, his view of culture as an exclusively human “invent[ion]” (a claim balcombe refutes with evidence from his own discipline of ethology) limits beatson to theorizing animal agency as a mere byproduct of human endeavors: “only through becoming the objects of human conscious activity” do animals play a role in determining the shape of cultures that remain fundamentally human (23-24). similarly, kemmerer’s insistence that we never theorize about animals except by attempting to “see ourselves in [their] reflective eyes” leaves little room for recognizing agency in the countless nonhuman beings who are radically and compellingly unlike us (82). her oversimplification of human/animal relations—coupled with her reliance on sources of the sort frowned upon even in undergraduate work—left me disappointed precisely because i share her frustration with some animal studies scholars’ failure (or refusal) to act in ways that reflect their ostensibly posthumanist convictions. ironically, her chapter left me convinced that, without necessarily equating posthumanism with veganism, we need karalyn kendall-morwick — thinking otherwise about animals 151 theory to keep us honest as we strive to become more just in our relations with other animals. happily, the remaining chapters offer more satisfying considerations of interspecies agency (and implicitly illustrate the useful aspects of beatson’s model). part two, “animals and modernity,” opens with mary murray’s critique of the erasure of nonhuman agency from marxist accounts of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. she argues that the “speciesist social relationships” that underwrite modern agribusiness and other animal enterprises “have actually been constitutive of modern capitalism, rather than simply an effect of capitalism” (88). in murray’s formulation, exploited animals, though dismissed by marxist theory as mere “instruments of production,” come to resemble the proletariat par excellence (103). claire molloy analyzes the social and cultural conditions surrounding the uk’s dangerous dogs act 1991 as a potent manifestation of the construction and management of risk within reflexive modernity (110). she maps the constellation of “public anxieties” that has informed the cultural construction of “dangerous dogs” since the 1970s, including “discourses of antisocial behavior, masculinity, violence, the erosion of national identity, social responsibility and drug culture” (107). in particular, she traces the legal and social disenfranchisement of pit bulls and pit bull owners by a society eager to reaffirm “hierarchical divisions” within and between species (127). gavin kendall likewise addresses the management of animal bodies within rationalized modernity, yet he proposes that the view of modernity as marked by a “draining of the ‘heat’ from our relationships with animals” is only part of the story (136). companion species relationships, he notes, have in some ways become “hotter,” with pets “mov[ing] from the outside kennel into the house” (136). moreover, the growing popularity of whale watching and other forms of ecotourism signal a persistent desire and capacity for “hot” encounters, reminding us “that the coldness of rationalization was always somewhat warmed by tradition and ritual” (144). part three, “animal performers,” offers two approaches to conceptualizing such encounters. gregory s. szarycz applies theories of performance and performativity to animal performances. while acknowledging that such acts are human-scripted and thus reflect human assumptions about animals, he notes that the concept of “the performative” destabilizes “distinction[s] between appearances and facts, surfaces and depths, illusions and substances,” making it difficult to dismiss animal performers as mere props or proxies (153). discussing performances ranging from the highly scripted movements of lipizzaner stallions to the “unscripted behaviors” that attract whale humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 152 watchers, szarycz concludes that “the most important factor” in animal performances is their capacity to underscore nonhuman agency: “in performance, animals reveal something we did not know of them” (169, 171). philip armstrong reaches similar conclusions in his examination of the ever-generative subject of the animal gaze. drawing a parallel between derrida’s famous encounter with the cat and his own unease while gazing at a tiger in london’s regent’s park zoo, he proposes that such encounters problematize john berger’s oft-cited theory of the disappearance of “real” animals in modernity. tracing a history of the animal gaze beginning with ancient accounts of its “physical” and even prehensile powers, he points to 17th-century geometrical theories of vision as a turning point whereby “visual agency” shifted to humans, supporting berger’s thesis (178, 182). however, the renewed fascination with the animal gaze in postmodern literature and in ethological studies that position (or rather expose) the human observer within “the visual field” reveals its power to undercut the primacy of the human gaze and to challenge us “to learn from animals as well as about them” (196-197). the contributors to part four, “forward thinking,” test the potential of actor-network theory (ant) to help us think otherwise about our interactions with nonhuman animals. nik taylor takes her own discipline of sociology to task for restricting its understanding of “the social” to “the human” (205). sociology, she argues, cannot adequately address “the animal question” until it radically rethinks “the social question” (204, 203). to this end, she presents an admirably lucid overview of ant as a promising alternative to anthropocentric social theory. acknowledging that “ant is an analytical approach, not a moral one”—a fact that is “not unproblematic for humananimal scholars”—she nevertheless views ant’s abandonment of hierarchical thinking as “a starting point for the generation of knowledge which aims to emancipate animals” (215-216). while a discussion of “[h]ow this emancipation might look” might be too much to ask (and taylor brackets it as “beyond the scope” of her chapter), her analysis, like kemmerer’s, left me with doubts about whether the goal of emancipation is compatible with a properly posthumanist understanding of humanimal relations (215). without discounting the very real and terrible suffering to which humans routinely subject other animals, if we are all part of a vast, entangled network, what are they to be emancipated from? the remaining chapters suggest alternatives to the well-meaning but perhaps simplistic rhetoric of liberation by exploring two dramatically different modes of be(com)ing with other animals. kirrilly thompson examines “the transformative and generative potential of human-horse riding relationships” through the lens of “the centaur karalyn kendall-morwick — thinking otherwise about animals 153 metaphor” (222). she contrasts two forms of the rider-horse relationship in the spanish bullfight to show how riding methods and technologies can both enhance and impair the relationship’s “inherent centaurability” (221). while thompson acknowledges that “it is the rider who is ultimately the instigator of the riding relationship,” she maintains that approaches and equipment that foster “mutual attunement” enable the rider-horse relation to become more than the sum of its relators (230, 243). eva hayward uses her own response to a jellyfish exhibit at the monterey bay aquarium to illustrate how “aquarium-goers [might be] shaped and reshaped by the immersive space of the displays, the movements and corporealities of the non-humans, and the architecture of animal capitalisms” (259). building on donna haraway’s trope of diffraction and karen barad’s related theory of intra-action, she coins the term “ciliated sense” to describe the experience of “sensually cohabit[ing] with illuminated jellies,” sensing with and through these invertebrates via the display apparatus (274, 267). while hayward acknowledges the jellies’ captivity, she insists that “there needs to be some recognition of [their] participation in worldhood” (275). by underscoring the jellies’ agency rather than their victimhood, she intimates that any theorizing about our ethical relations with nonhuman animals must begin by acknowledging the mutually constitutive effects of our material interactions. through such contributions, theorizing animals makes good on its promise to serve not just as “an academic exercise” but as “the beginning of a prescription for change” (17). its daunting price tag means that this paperback volume is best suited for academic library collections. this is unfortunate because it runs counter to the spirit of the editors’ laudable aim of bridging the gap between theory and activism/advocacy—or, in the respective words of birke and balcombe, between the “ivory towers” into which “nonhuman animals are (slowly) creeping” and the “‘real world’ environments...where we may wonder if people are getting the message” (xvii, 286). nevertheless, this is a useful and accessible collection that will be of interest to seasoned human-animal studies scholars and can also serve to introduce relative newcomers to the field. microsoft word barlow-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 8:2 matt barlow enchanted bee-ings: encounters and movements beyond the human xanthorrhoea [yucca] & honeybee, south australia, 2014 (image by author). we can feel that their march across the landscape is intentional. we cannot deny; they are going to a place they have in mind. that’s where we’re headed now. — carl safina (beyond words 8) encounters with enchantment. honeybees (apis millefera — henceforth, simply “bees”) have maintained a mystical, symbolic, and material presence in human imaginations and livelihoods for millennia. whether as representations carved atop ancient egyptian tombs, cave drawings of ancient honey hunters in australia, or references to bees in the bible and the koran, material evidence suggests that bees have played a significant role in the lives of humans since the beginnings of history.1 a voluminous literature details the behavioral and physiological patterns of the honeybee (lindauer), the development of global apiculture (jakobsen), and the historical and contemporary uses of bees in warfare (lockwood). absent from these discussions is a recognition of the affective and inspirational relationships that continue to emerge between humans and bees. it is this absence that this paper seeks to remedy. it does so by working through a contemporary model of enchantment explicated by political theorist jane bennett. using enchantment as a kind of theoretical (and ontological) anchor, i wish to investigate different ways of matthew barlow -enchanted bee-ings: encounters and movements beyond the human 151 knowing bees, moving (with) bees, entangling with bees, and eventually arriving at an anthropology of being with bees, an anthropology of “bee-ing.” it is a story that speaks to science, history, agriculture, environments, ecologies, politics, and technologies; a story concerned with touch, taste, sound, love, fear, “hope in blasted landscapes” (kirksey, et al. 29), “dreams and nightmares” (raffles 3). it is a response to the realization that, despite the odds, a particular kind of flourishing between humans and bees continues to erupt amid the kaleidoscope of contemporary lives. enchantment, as bennett presents it and as i wish to use it, is when “a condition of exhilaration or acute sensory activity” induces a feeling of being “simultaneously transfixed in wonder and transported by sense, to be both caught up and carried away” (enchantment 5). the word enchantment derives from the french verb chanter, to sing, and lends itself to the way bees “cast a spell with sounds,” so that, once one becomes attuned, the sound of the hive “moves like water around and inside your ears,” acting as an organic white noise machine that “stimulates, calms, or soothes you” (moore & kosut 95-96). bennett specifically cites “the discovery of sophisticated modes of communication among non-humans” and being “struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and the everyday” as junctures likely to induce moments of enchantment (op. cit., 4). employing this model of enchantment will, i argue, enable me to unpack the ethereal inter-species encounters that emerge between humans and bees, and to aid in articulating an anthropology that moves beyond the human. the power that bees have over humans is evident from the many books that deal with encounters between them. it involves passion and efficacy that moves beyond scientific or journalistic commentary. beekeepers and scientists alike describe being overwhelmed by what moore and kosut have termed the “affective buzz” of being with bees (88). karl von frisch, a father of ethology and author of the dancing bees (1927/1954), described this as falling “irresistibly under the spell of the honey-bee” (raffles 174); half a century later, urban bee-keeper meg paksa similarly declares her “immediate reverence for what goes on in the hive” (moore & kosut 104). by analyzing these encounters and others like them, and how these encounters have changed over time, i hope to render enchantment palpable as a useful way of comprehending efficacious inter-species encounters. i do this in defense of a world that has “become neither inert nor devoid of surprise but continues to inspire deep and meaningful attachments” (bennett 4). these attachments work in opposition to tales of disenchantment in which modern life — from the turn of the 19th century until the present — is increasingly characterized by an “alienated existence on a dead planet.” ultimately, i hope to move, following phillippe descola, “beyond nature and culture,” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 152 toward an anthropology that finds joyous encounters between species just as analytically enticing, and theoretically rich, as disastrous ones. knowing (without knowing) bees. one of the first modern writers to describe enchantment with bees was the poet, playwright, and amateur biologist maurice maeterlinck, whose the life of the bee (1901) portrays how “the image of the beehive conjures orderliness, virtue, peacefulness and a pervasive honeyed sweetness,” which he likened to a childhood sense of wonder at the world (mathews 159). maeterlinck was particularly enchanted by the ability of the bees to make collective decisions, the greatest of which, in his eyes, was the seemingly spontaneous decision to swarm. maeterlinck called this “the spirit of the hive.” he noticed that a bee colony would leave its hive when it was at its zenith, when stocks were at their highest, the pollen at its most tempting, and the brood at its healthiest. to recognize this was to realize that perhaps humans could learn something from bees about becoming better stewards of earth and its inhabitants: where is the fatality here, save in the love of the race of to-day for the race of to-morrow? this fatality exists in the human species also, but its extent and power seem infinitely less. among men it never gives rise to sacrifices as great, as unanimous, or as complete. what far-seeing fatality, taking the place of this one, do we ourselves obey? we know not; as we know not the being who watches us as we watch the bees. (47) maeterlinck proposed that in the presence of bees, humans are “confronted by the enigma of intellect, of destiny, will, aim, means, and causes; by the incomprehensible organisation of the most insignificant act of life” (38). becoming enchanted by bees was, for him, a realization and a recognition that bees had a form of collective agency, that they acted in particular ways for particular ends, which he could not fully comprehend. learning more about how bees went about their lives left maeterlinck with more questions than answers about both bees and his own place in the world as a human being co-existing with them. this challenged the “fantasy of human exceptionalism” dominant in europe at the turn of the 20th century, as well as “the great divides of animal/human, nature/culture, organic/technical, and wild/domestic” that modern science hinged upon (haraway 11, 15). a generation later prominent ethologist and fellow nobel laureate karl von frisch documented a similar enchantment with honeybees in his magnum opus, the dancing bees. matthew barlow -enchanted bee-ings: encounters and movements beyond the human 153 through numerous experiments “of exceptional elegance” von frisch’s work established that bees possess language, “the capacity long definitive of humanity” (raffles 171). he did so by demonstrating that individual bees were able to communicate non-symbolically, using experience and memory to convey to the rest of the colony the direction, distance, and quality of a food source. von frisch noticed that returning foragers would perform repeated movements in the hive that attracted the attention of the other bees. to account for this phenomenon, he explored how the bees were conveying information to each other; that is to say, he was primarily concerned with semiotics. he found that the bees were dancing, and that this dancing conveyed complex information to the rest of the hive. a brief digression here into the language of the honeybee may be valuable for understanding the complexity of the enchantment von frisch felt for his bees. essentially, von frisch saw that the foraging bee, upon returning to the hive, performs her2 “dance” on the landing pad of the hive (von frisch called it “the dance floor”) by vigorously wagging her abdomen while walking in the direction of the food source. she then moves into the darkness of the hive and reconfigures “the indexical association between the dance floor and the food source,” in order to perform the same dance on the vertical wall of the hive (raffles 180). to do this, she recalls the direction of the sun in relation to the food source on the outbound flight, and transposes that to an angle that relates to gravity, also accounting for the movement of the sun during the time it has taken to return from the food source. the bees in the hive not only know immediately the direction of the food source, but are also able to identify the type of flower through the scent of the returning forager, and the quality of the nectar from the taste of the pollen on its skin. astonishingly, by recognizing patterns of polarized light invisible to humans, all this is accomplished even when the sun is obscured by clouds. von frisch’s research revolutionized ethology and extended human understanding of insects to include those small agencies that reside in the actions of bees. small agencies, as bennett, drawing on darwin, describes them, are those seemingly insignificant actions such as pollination (by bees) and fertilization (by worms) that leave lasting effects on other life around them, and are examples of the complex ways in which life on earth depends upon co-existence and mutual flourishing (vibrant 94). von frisch’s discoveries stood in opposition to many dominant theories in animals studies of the early to mid-twentieth century, which generally reduced animal communication to “simple stimulus responses, such as reflexes and tropisms” (raffles 178). von frisch’s conclusions do not suggest that honeybees are somehow like humans, that we exist in and understand the world in similar ways, but rather that “the honeybees’ humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 154 repertoire exceeds functional explanation and biochemical predictability,” and as such shifts scientific discovery beyond the “metaphor of the machine” (raffles 198). in understanding how complex creatures like bees communicate, for instance, humans are faced with increasingly important decisions as to how to go about reconfiguring the nature of their relationships with them outside theology and the dominant binaries of nature/culture, human/nonhuman. as bennett proposes, complex modes of communication found in non-humans challenge common ideas of what it means to be human, and can render attachments between species more palpable and audible (enchantment 4). these discoveries help break down the notion that humans are at the top of the so-called “animal kingdom.” they also invite further investigations into how other animals are different from humans, recognizing that they have distinct modes of operating in the world that are often beyond explicit human comprehension. as such, they provide us with enchanting encounters that remain within scientific, secular modes of thought that emerge within a scientific and technological framework. a number of recent ethnographies aim to give life to these affective ways of learning from animals, plants, and other sentient beings (cf. kohn; kimmerer; cruikshank; de la cadena), and becoming attuned to different approaches to understanding the ways in which human and non-human beings exist in the world. affective enchantment was the medium through which maeterlinck and von frisch came to believe that humans are not exceptional, but part of a collective of species that together bring the planet into existence, and that when humans pay sufficiently close attention to such cross-species encounters, they will learn a great deal about others and themselves. enchantment is one mode of becoming attuned to these agencies, requiring a recognition of nonsymbolic forms of communication among species. unfortunately, despite the efforts of those like maeterlinck and von frisch, honeybees (along with most other insects) have continued to occupy a “relative blind spot in our moral and cultural, even our ecological, imaginations” (mathews 160). it was not until bees began to disappear in unprecedented numbers in 2006 that modern humans were challenged to change their attitudes toward them and their environment. it was through catastrophe, not discovery, that it became the “insects’ turn to come into focus.” movements. although bee populations have gone through periods of decline and regeneration over the last century, what began to occur in north america around the beginning of the 21st century was on many accounts unprecedented (kosek 650). bees were not just dying, they were disappearing, seemingly without a trace, in epic proportions. this cataclysm became known as ccd, or colony collapse disorder, and it focused attention on the honeybee as never before. there is no single cause for ccd, matthew barlow -enchanted bee-ings: encounters and movements beyond the human 155 but rather an accumulation of viruses, parasites, poor breeding practices, exhaustive commercial migratory pollination routes, and increasingly volatile weather patterns that have together contributed to the phenomenon (nimmo). addressing the issue has been more difficult than anticipated, and today bee populations in the agricultural industry remain at risk. ccd has moved bees into “the realm of animal politics, at the intersections among environmental issues and the politics of food production” (moore & kosut 48). people have become urgently interested in the well-being of the bee, and have begun to see bees not merely as potentially harmful pests, but as animals whose crucial role as pollinators and sources of inspiration is integral to the future (as it is to the history) not only of the human species, but of life on earth. this symbolic shift is mirrored by a material one, whereby bees are now welcomed into cities in an attempt to provide them refuge. yet cities, almost by definition, are human spaces. they are filled with the buzz of human activity, a steady hum that reminds us of the things humans do with the things they have created, and which often exemplify the separation between wild and domestic space. domesticity can be defined in this sense as synonymous with “tame” — to be kept by humans in a private setting in an existence characterized by discipline and restraint. something that is deemed “wild” can be understood as an organism in an environment that is not domesticated or cultivated — a concept often assumed to be synonymous with uncivilized and primitive, uncontrolled, and, in a sense, free. in proposing the separation between wild and domestic as a precursor to other dualisms such as nature and culture, urban and rural, anthropologist phillipe descola helps us to understand how the convergence of bees and humans in urban, domestic settings such as cities challenges our neat definitions of such terms. as anna tsing states, “it is this tension between their domestic embodiments and refusals that makes honeybees interesting as creatures of nature; they defy human control even as they exemplify domesticity” (120). when bees move into cities, either of their own volition or that of humans, they force their human counterparts to let go of full control of the situation and to work with bees on their terms, to synchronize with their biological and behavioral patterns of production and reproduction. by welcoming bees into cities, they are re-defining the categories constructed to separate human from non-human life. the collapse of the honeybee as an agricultural tool comes at a time when the meanings of terms such as wild, domestic, urban, rural, natural, and cultural, appear to be dissolving, leaving in their wake something more like an assemblage3 of humans and non-humans “striving to coexist in common worlds” (moore & kosut 89). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 156 exploring the phenomenology of beekeeping in an urban context, and the motivations of this new breed of beekeepers in new york, lisa jean moore and mary kosut discovered a “pleasantly motley crew of people, embodying different personal styles, political perspectives, and manners of beekeeping” (buzz 3). they had to overcome many methodological difficulties in their research, including how to write ethnographically about relationships between insects and humans, and to conduct participant observation across both species. they began by enrolling in an introductory beekeeping course led by urban beekeeping enthusiast jim fischer. the classroom itself presented practical and professional challenges; moore and kosut found they were “simultaneously taking notes about bees combined with learning how to be a beekeeper, while also attempting a sociological meta-level analysis of who was in the room and thinking about their concerns and connections to other humans and european honeybees” (4). once they had the skills of novice beekeepers, and had discovered a sense of “bee fear as well as bee love” (5), moore and kosut established beehives in a local college and attended lectures about urban beekeeping at diy educational collectives around the brooklyn area. in the course of their three-year research, they interviewed more than thirty urban beekeepers with varied experience, performed hive inspections at numerous locations, and attended special bee events throughout new york. as an “api-ethnography,” their book buzz engages bees as informants, with the aim of learning “from consorting with the bees themselves” (36). moore & kosut’s ethnography reveals that bees, humans, and the matter of contemporary urban life become entangled with unusual vitality in new places “made meaningful over time because [they are] embodied, lived in” (22). in the wake of ccd, urban beekeeping has emerged as a cultural practice marked by “the marvellous erupting amid the everyday” (bennett 8), in which bees find refuge from the harmful agricultural practices that seem to be decimating their populations, and where humans can escape the stress of inner-city living. together, humans and bees have adopted new urban sensibilities that could transform urban spaces into places made meaningful through their shared experiences. for the humans, these experiences are suffused with feelings of enchantment, wonder, and awe. the movement of honeybees into the urban landscape in the wake of cataclysm provides a fine example of how “space is transformed into place as it acquires definition and meaning” (tuan 136). moore & kosut’s ethnography is a testament to ways in which new york rooftops, for example, spaces often cluttered with garbage, bird droppings, and air-conditioning units, are being transformed into places made meaningful through enchanting interactions between humans and bees. these matthew barlow -enchanted bee-ings: encounters and movements beyond the human 157 experiences often take the form of responsive human-insect gestures, which include affective signs and acts that are “not necessarily reciprocal, or fixed, but are emergent and in motion,” such as humans speaking in hushed tones and moving slowly, or the sound of the hive when it is agitated or calm (moore & kosut 89). they also take the shape of meditative, ritualistic experiences involving “echoes and reverberations” that are made and heard, but “not necessarily understood” (as maeterlinck and von frisch came to know without knowing). moore and kosut found that new york was suddenly filled with “dense places of intersection for humans and non-humans” (22), defined by an exposure to “the caress and sting of new experience” (tuan 137). if attitudes towards bees, and the places where humans and bees interact, are to become definitive — providing a new meaning for previously unused spaces — “they must be cultivated by practice, and the name for sustained, value-laden attitude practice is ritual” (grimes 135). i suggest that urban spaces are being made meaningful (that is, in tuan’s terms, being turned into places) through the semiotic interactions that emerge between humans and bees in the form of rituals. i wager that one of the primary reasons why these interactions became a kind of interspecies ritual is the enchanting nature of the relationships that emerge there. by working through ideas of representational semiosis that move the concept of language beyond the human we can begin to understand beekeeping as a “responsive performance of mind/body and bee” that enacts the world, giving it definition and meaning (moore & kosut 92). entanglements. before analyzing some accounts of what i consider to be human/bee ritual, it is necessary to become open to what eduardo kohn has coined an “anthropology beyond the human,” in which a recognition of the semiotic nature of life leads to the notion that humans and other animals are able to communicate through non-symbolic signals. building upon 19th century meditations on semiotics by charles sanders peirce, kohn argues that non-symbolic representations in the form of icons (which embody likenesses, such as phasmatodea — the family of insects more commonly known as “stick insects”) and indices (impacted by the objects they represent, such as when dark clouds suggest it might rain) are “more susceptible to the qualities, events, and patterns of the world” than symbolic reference (5). beekeeping, as an interspecies ritual, is predicated on beekeepers becoming attuned to these other representational modes of communication. in subversive spiritualties: how rituals enact the world, anthropologist frédérique apffel-marglin shows (in agreement with the work of ronald grimes) that “rituals are radically creative: they enact the world in concert with its humans, non-humans, and other-than-humans” (apffel-marglin 15). of particular relevance here is the recognition that for all species “the world comes into being through intra-actions that typically take the form of rituals, those carefully orchestrated intra-actions meant to bring about a liveable world” (162). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 158 “intra-action,” as karen barad defines it, is “the mutual constitution of entangled agencies,” where distinct (though relational and not absolute or pre-determined) agencies emerge through their intra-action (33). in other words, we become who we are by what we do with others. by using the prefix intrainstead of inter-, barad signals that actions (or gestures) help to define creatures and the other entities around them, none of which are predetermined wholes interacting with one another. this is emblematic of the notion becoming with, where “the partners do not precede their relating” (haraway 17). this action-oriented view of the world places movement and entanglement at the heart of life on earth, recognizing that beings and entities do not occupy static spaces, but rather are made, nurtured, and woven through intra-actions that “propel the continuity of this common world” (apffel-marglin 162). highlighting intra-activities between humans and horses, maurstad et al. point to barad’s framework as a way of unpacking “intercorporeal moments of mutuality” between riders and their horses (324). we can, in this way, suggest that urban beekeeping has emerged as a particularly efficacious ritual, dense with intra-actions between humans and bees, intra-actions that happen through non-symbolic sensory representations such as particular sounds and movements, or gestures. these intra-actions bring the world into being and foster interspecies relationships that re-contextualize human/non-human hierarchies, where the agentic capacities of bees and humans are actualized “into an achieved continuity, into an achieved liveable and regenerated world” (apffel-marglin 163). awareness and attentiveness, which according to many of moore & kosut’s informants is heightened when in the presence of bees, are what apffel-marglin claims separate rituals from everyday actions. ritual in this sense is the embodiment of enchantment. if the senses are attuned, tuned up, and recharged while one is enchanted by something, and if attentiveness and awareness define ritual practice, it becomes clear that the stories of urban beekeeping are contemporary accounts of interspecies ritual. in this light, the agency of both the bees and their human co-inhabitants become manifest, as urban beekeepers “develop routines that enhance their aptitude at hearing bees — going slowly, being deliberate, breathing deeply, paying attention, and speaking in hushed tones” (moore & kosut 98). beekeeping, as a ritual marked by intra-actions between humans and bees, transforms urban locations into places of reverence made meaningful by the range of particular human and nonhuman relationships that emerge there. this way of thinking about relationality comports with raffles’s notion that places are “always active, always being made, always in process and practice,” in a constant feedback loop of action and affect (183). it is through the intra-actions between humans and bees that “place, economy, and history are made” in unlikely urban matthew barlow -enchanted bee-ings: encounters and movements beyond the human 159 locations. it is perhaps through reconfiguring urban beekeeping in this way that moore & kosut came to consider bees as “cultured beings that traffic between worlds of the hive and of the urban landscape” (36). this way of thinking about representation and relationality represents a critical rethinking of anthropology that moves beyond nature/culture and human/nonhuman dualisms to recognize that “animals and plants and places are people too,” where people become open to the ecological and ethical possibilities that emerge through ritual enactment of the world together with other entities (grimes 133). they also fundamentally re-think how realities are formed, by drawing attention to the different discursive-material realities that emerge through inter-species intra-actions. paraphrasing apffel-marglin, neither waves nor particles are truer or more real than the other, but rather “constitute complementary moments of reality” (63; my emphasis). it is here that a reconfiguring of urban beekeeping as a ritualistic urban practice made meaningful by the semiotic intra-actions between humans and bees returns us neatly to bennett’s concept of enchantment, where ritual involves moving moments that often lie “buried in our innermost being” (tuan 136). moving moments. if we take seriously grimes’s claims that “everything depends on which people at which time in which specific place are engaging in which ways of ritualizing their relations with nature,” and that “all social behaviour is not only ritualized but necessarily ritualized,” we affirm that an anthropology beyond the human must encompass a renewed concept of “ritual performance [as] a primary way of becoming attuned to the planet,” where “people behave more responsively, [and] thus more responsibly” with the animals, plants, and the places that surround them (133134). i would now like to place bennett’s model of enchantment within the conception of performative rituals promoted here by apffel-marglin and grimes. i wish to come to terms with the “corporeal cues and intimate moments where beekeepers intersect with the hive, as not only vulnerable but also sensual bodies” (moore & kosut 92). i wager that these intimate moments, moments of enchantment, moving moments, emerge within the intra-actions that occur between humans and bees in urban places made meaningful by those same intra-actions, and that the ritual performance of beekeeping involves resonances that extend beyond those moments and into our everyday lives. i would like to take a close look at a passage by meg paska, a young beekeeper from new york whose insights feature heavily throughout buzz: i think i kind of understand why [people] are just blown away. i feel like for a long time, i had a lack of spirituality and this lack of god in my life humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 160 in some way and i am not like a religious person at all, i don’t subscribe to any sort of dogma. but after a while you start to feel a lack in your life. so when i started keeping bees, a light bulb went off and i felt sort of an immediate reverence for what goes on in the hive. partially because it is still outside the realm of complete understanding. and i personally think that if there are magical creatures in the world, honeybees are those creatures. (moore & kosut 103-104) paska recognizes that her immediate reverence for the hive might be due to the fact that she cannot completely understand what is happening in it, but that “knowability is based on intrinsic self-similarity” (kohn 86), and that this semiotic knowing exists pervasively throughout all biological life. this may be reconceptualized as “the attribution by humans to non-humans of an interiority identical to their own,” which “justifies extending a state of ‘culture’ to non-humans … including ritualized conduct and deference to conventions” (descola 129). ritual, in this sense, can operate between species through their shared interiorities; that is, through their shared propensities to conduct a life intrinsically mediated by its semiotic constitution. it is “not through their souls that humans and non-humans differ but through their bodies.” developing an anthropology along these lines demands an acceptance that “there exist other kinds of thinking selves beyond the human” (kohn 94). i suggest that the engagements now occurring between humans and bees, on the presupposition that humans have a duty to “save the bees” from ecological cataclysm (or at least to engage with them in more complementary ways), are motivating moving moments between humans and bees that require being attuned to the unexpected affinities we share with them, while also recognizing the differences that distinguish the many kinds of selves that populate the urban landscape. many urban beekeepers now ask bees to reciprocate with similar acknowledgements, by deciding not to suit up when they perform hive inspections, in order to connect more deeply with them: i cannot tell you how every single one of your movements is very, very different when you’ve got no gloves, no veil, nothing. you just move in a different way, you think in a different way, your whole inner attitude becomes different, and then you realize “this is something to aim for … in your relationships with bees.” (green & ginn 163) matthew barlow -enchanted bee-ings: encounters and movements beyond the human 161 claudia, a “severe german woman with wide acclaim in the field of natural beekeeping” (157), provides an excellent example of the ways in which “attentiveness to the points of view of other organisms … allows us to create an affectionate relationship despite the fact that our worlds are so different” (kohn 96). the affect that claudia embodies suggests a consciousness, intention, and energy that emerge through “this kind of thick encounter” (green & ginn 164). it is in this way that when we ask for recognition of the other, and make ourselves vulnerable to their sting, “we are not asking them to see us as we are,” but rather asking them to see us as who we might become through our shared experiences and vulnerabilities. these entanglements are punctuated by enchanting moments that move us to transformation, and bring to the foreground the “ethical heart of alternative beekeeping,” where what is at stake is not only “the beekeepers continued being in the world, the chance that these bee-lovers might leave the hive different from when they approached it,” but the continued existence of the bees themselves. haraway provides a different example of enchantment as the shared experience between “play-constituted beings,” where joy-enticing signals “usher us over the threshold into the world of meanings that do not mean what they seem to mean” (240). when cayenne’s (haraway’s now famous canine companion’s) “entire bodily being glows as if in the phosphorescent ocean” after playing, it signals the unexpected conjunctions and co-ordinations of creatively moving partners in play [that] take hold of both and put them into an open that feels something like an eternal present or suspension of time, a high of “getting it” together in action. (241) might this resemble the feeling of enchantment that beekeepers feel when, after years of training, they are able to tend their hives without any protective equipment, when they can “sidle up and partner with bees” to create a “type of collaborative free-form dance” (moore & kosut 97)? can we say that the bees are also enchanted by this communion because they are not stinging their human coinhabitants? might this be what is happening when the tone of the buzz that a hive produces changes from the “a-sharp of a pissed off hive” to the “g-sharp of a happy hive”? (94). such encounters and moving moments, motivated by love, fear, sound, touch, and awareness, are examples of the way enchantment “hits one as if from out of the blue, without warning,” and are reminders of the forces inherent in life itself (bennett, enchantment 169). they also embody the idea that an “ecological society must work directly on attitudes” which shape reactions to encounters with other ways of being humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 162 (morton 127). the locations of such encounters are not static, but moving. they encapsulate “a surprising encounter, a meeting with something that [we] did not expect and [are] not fully prepared to engage” that can help cultivate meaningful places out of urban spaces (bennett, vibrant 5). furthermore, by inviting the “wild” into their backyards and onto their rooftops, humans are challenging the material and conceptual boundaries that exist between humans and non-humans. we can no longer speak of nature “out there,” for “nature” is here. “nature” is everywhere, and “nature” is nowhere. humans are (part of) nature, and becoming attuned to the life cycle of bees and the way that they exist in the world is just one way which this is becoming realized. by inviting bees into cities, we are creating geographical, social, political, economic, and emotional places with them. toward an anthropology of bee-ing. i have covered a lot of ground; from placing enchantment alongside scientific enquiry, to cataclysm as a point of departure for a discussion of the transformation of urban spaces made meaningful through the ritual intra-actions that take place there, to the enchanting moments that animate our existence in a world that continues to surprise and inspire deep connections between all life forms. what this story presents then are ways to enjoy the world through becoming open to enchanting encounters with bees that might promote more complementary forms of inter-species engagement. locating moments of enchantment within encounters with bees nudges us toward an understanding of the world in which our senses are more finely tuned, where non-symbolic communication is recognized to mean something. enchantment is the moment that the world opens itself up to joyful new experiences marked by renewed enthusiasm for life, where language means more than words. we might, in this way, realize that what joins maeterlinck, von frisch, paska, and the anthropologists, philosophers, geographers, and political theorists who study them, is that they have been struck by moments of enchantment that have shaped the way that they interact with the beings around them. they actualize into motion the idea that “affective fascination with the world thought to be worthy of it may help to ward off the existential resentment that plagues mortals, that is, the sense of victimization that recurrently descends upon the tragic (or absurd or incomplete) beings called human” (bennett, enchantment 12). morton suggests that “coexistence implies encounters between strange strangers,” encounters that are “loving, risky and perverse,” and that “the fact that the strange stranger might bite [or in this case sting] is the least of our worries” (80-81). i agree with the sentiment (that there are issues of much larger scales such as extinction and biodiversity loss at play); however, maybe morton is wrong on one account, maybe the matthew barlow -enchanted bee-ings: encounters and movements beyond the human 163 sting is where it all begins, as a warning that our movements and our gestures are not considered enough, that we are not engaging fully on the bees’ terms. at the conclusion of buzz, moore & kosut offer two possible options for future relationships between humans and bees: radical disengagement and ethical engagement (216). this article has attempted to suggest ways in which we might be able to promote the latter. to become open to new experiences between species we need to “envision alternatives to the very lives we are living” (peterson 239). we need to find ways of joining ideas and narratives of “biocultural hope” to practices and policies that manifest ethical engagement with other species (kirksey, et al. 29). by finding new ways to think about, analyze, and practice urban beekeeping, we are providing just one example of how we might engage ethically with the rest of life on earth. as anna peterson states, “our world is full of wounds, human and nonhuman … the point however is that we are not alone in it,” and it is in “defending what we love against further wounding, [that] may well be the meaning of ethics” (op. cit., 239). for bennett, “ethics requires both a moral code (which condenses moral ideas and metaphysical assumptions into principles and rules) and an embodied sensibility (which organizes affects into a style and generates the impetus to enact the code)” (enchantment 131). now, if we can (brazenly) accept as a moral code the promotion of ecological awareness that seeks to minimize the harm and suffering caused to all lifeforms on earth (in this instance we have been concerned primarily with honeybees), might we also be able to accept enchantment as the embodied sensibility that generates the impetus to enact the code? if enchantment is the medium through which we are able to find complementary communion with other species, and given the importance of bees for life on earth, then finding ways to promote enchanting moments between humans and bees must be ethical. being struck by moving moments of enchantment propels us toward joy, and joy is, unlike enchantment, something that can be cultivated through practice. by practicing joy, we are practicing ethics. bees are mirrors; by defending them, we are defending ourselves. but they are also windows; glimpses at a future made possible by a reconfiguring of our entanglements with them. mobilizing enchantment, ritual, science, and ecological awareness into one ethical framework that seeks to propel more prosperous engagements with bees is an endeavor that is worth attempting, if humans are to find ways to cultivate ecological praxis. by pointing toward an anthropology of bee-ing, i am suggesting ways of cultivating action that is thoughtful, and acting thoughtfully is to begin thinking in a way that promotes action with others that can flourish into the future. if anthropology is to find ways to account for the varied ways places acquire meaning through inter-species relationships, it must find ways to articulate and analyze the enchanting moments that promote humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 164 ethical behavior between species. it is in this way that this paper promotes “forging concrete alliances among social and environmental worlds in the historical present, and caring for other beings and things,” in ways that might generate “openings for more audacious hopes” (kirksey, et al. 57). ultimately, what is being suggested is a way to engage more openly, and more fully, in a world where coexistence (or a more astute understanding of existence) is a prerequisite for flourishing. the call to enchantment with bees, through the method of ritual as a way to conceptualize meaningful semiotic exchange, is at the heart of that suggestion. this will be not only an ethical engagement, the likes of which is called for by moore & kosut, but a way of life that moves closer to realizing its joyous potential. notes 1. see ransome, the sacred bee in ancient times and folklore (1937); buchmann, letters from the hive: an intimate history of bees, honey, and humankind (2006). 2. all foragers are female worker bees, accounting for the vast majority of honeybee populations. 3. “living, throbbing confederations … of humans and their (social, legal, linguistic) constructions” and “some very active and powerful non-humans: electrons, trees, wind, fire, electromagnetic fields”, which enable “a theory of action and responsibility that crosses the human non-human divide” (bennett, vibrant matter 24). works cited apffel-marglin, frédérique. subversive spiritualties: how rituals enact the world. oxford up, 2013. barad, karen. meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. duke up, 2007. bennett, jane. the enchantment of modern life. princeton up, 2001. _____. vibrant matter: the political ecology of things. duke up, 2010. buchmann, stephen. letters from the hive: an intimate history of bees, honey, and humankind. bantam, 2006. matthew barlow -enchanted bee-ings: encounters and movements beyond the human 165 cruikshank, julie. do glaciers listen: local knowledge, colonial encounters, and social imagination. u of british columbia p, 2005. de la cadena, marisol. earth beings: ecologies of practice across andean worlds. duke up, 2015. descola, phillippe. beyond nature and culture. u of chicago p , 2013. green, kelsey, & franklin ginn, “the smell of selfless love: sharing vulnerability with bees in alternative apiculture.” environmental humanities 4 (2014): 149-170. grimes, ronald r. rite out of place: ritual, media, and the arts. oxford up, 2006. haraway, donna j. when species meet. u of minnesota p, 2008. jacobsen, rowan. fruitless fall: the collapse of the honeybee and the coming agricultural crisis. bloomsbury, 2008. kimmerer, robin wall. braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. milkweed editions, 2013. kirksey, eben, nicholas shapiro, & maria brodine. “hope in blasted landscapes.” the multispecies salon. eben kirksey, ed. duke up, 2014. kohn, eduardo. “how dogs dream: amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement.” american ethnologist 34:1 (2007): 3-24. _____. how forests think: toward an anthropology beyond the human. u of california p, 2013. kosek, jake. “ecologies of empire: on the new uses of the honeybee.” cultural anthropology 25:4 (2010): 650-678. lindauer, martin. communication among social bees. [1961]. harvard up, 2013. lockwood, jeffrey. six legged soldiers: using insects as weapons of war. oxford up, 2009. maeterlinck, maurice. the life of the bee. ballantyne, hanson & co., 1901. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 8, number 2 (spring 2017) 166 mathews, freya. 2001. “planet beehive.” australian humanities review 50 (may 2011). maurstad, anita, dona david, & sarah cowles. “co-being and intra-action in horsehuman relationships: a multi-species ethnography of be(com)ing human and be(com)ing horse.” social anthropology 21.3 (2013): 322-335. moore, lisa jean, & mary kosut. buzz: urban beekeeping and the power of the bee. new york up, 2013. morton, timothy. the ecological thought. harvard up, 2010. nimmo, richie. “the bio-politics of bees: industrial farming and colony collapse disorder.” humanimalia 6.2 (spring 2015): 2-20. peterson, anna l. being human: ethics, environment, and our place in the world. u of california p, 2001. raffles, hugh. insectopedia. pantheon, 2010. ransome, hilda. the sacred bee in ancient times and folklore. [1937]. dover, 2004. safina, carl. beyond words: what animals think and feel. henry holt, 2015. tsing, anna l. “empowering nature, or: some gleanings in bee culture.” naturalizing power: essays in feminist cultural analysis. ed. sylvia yanagisako & carol delaney. routledge, 1995. 113-43. tuan, yi-fu. space and place: the perspective of experience. u of minnesota p, 1997. von frisch, karl. [1927]. the dancing bees: an account of the life and senses of the honey bee. methuen, 1954. microsoft word murphy-pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:1 graham j. murphy insectalia technics jussi parikka. insect media: an archaeology of animals and technology. university of minnesota press: minneapolis and london: 2010. 281pp. $25.00 jussi parikka=s insect media: an archaeology of animals and technology is a collection whose raison d=être is found in the “nonhuman”: the animal world in general, especially entomological worlds marked by multiplicity and metamorphosis, as well as “media technologies of modernity that are defined by wavelengths, speeds, and slowness that are beyond the world of the unwired human being” (203). it is a complex and multifaceted study informed by media theory, posthumanism, animal studies, and techno-cultural research and application, diverse disciplines that converge into what parikka calls “insect media,” a “transversal” field that moves from 19th-century thinking about animals (particularly the growth of entomology) into 20thand 21st century considerations of swarms, network culture, and the “transmutation of bodies and their sensoriums,” including new “diagrams of tapping into and capturing such bodies in technocapitalist projects” (205-06). insect media maps this “transversality” in seven chapters carefully organized into two sections. section one — “nineteenthcentury insect technics: the uncanny affects of insects”; “genesis of form: insect architecture and swarms”; “technics of nature and temporality: uexküll’s ethology”; “metamorphosis, intensity, and devouring space: elements for an insect game theory” — addresses themes encompassing “scientific research and biology to science fiction, the physiology of movement and perception, avant-garde aesthetics, and the noncartesian philosophy of the early twentieth century” (xxx). section two — “animal ensembles, robotic affects: bees, milieus, and individuation”; “biomorphs and boids: swarming algorithms”; “sexual selection in the biodigital: teknolust and the weird life of sras” — is largely situated post-wwii and articulates such technological environs as cybernetic loops and perception qualities that link machines and animals, as well as the inspirations of swarm behavior upon the development of semi-intelligent systems. included in parikka’s nonhuman studies are forays into art and popular culture before insect media concludes with a lengthy analysis of lynn hershman-lesson’s teknolust (2002), a film about self-replicating automatons (sra) that is “a peculiar intervention into the practices and representations of biodigitality as it has been discussed since the 1990s” (171). the two sections are separated by an intermezzo and bracketed by both a prologue and an epilogue that are extremely effective in encapsulating the main arguments parikka advances in this deft study of “insect media.” graham j. murphy — insectalia technics 117 in the acknowledgements, parikka dedicates insect media to “milla: we hate insects and spiders together but love things material, not least cultural theory” (vii). as the product of someone who hates insects, insect media is a truly remarkable achievement for its dexterous handling of the materiality of a “transversal” field that is grounded in entomology, but by no means restricted to it. parikka organizes his study around biopower and intensity (“[a] differing force of creation, a becoming, an intensity creates what we perceive” [xxii]), the relationality and intensive potentials of assemblages (“compositions, affects, and passages in a state of becoming and a relationality that is the stuff of experience” [xxv]), and diagrammatics (“spaces of possibilities or topologies of potential singularities that are the potential modes of actualization of a certain body plan” [xxvii]). parikka acknowledges he cannot address all the various articulations and permutations of “insect media,”but what nonetheless emerges is an inspired project that maps the contradictory attitudes towards insects and technologies in late-victorian culture, the appositionality of instinct/intelligence and perception/sensation, insect cities and theological notions of divine architecture, biopolitics and rational management of bodies, swarming behaviors and technologies, metamorphosis and game theory, surrealism and avant-garde artists, cybernetic zoology and hylomorphism, bee waggling and ant pheromones, biomorphs and boids, and new ai and a-life. insect media is assisted by parikka’s keen ability to synthesize and deploy a range of cultural theorists, including henri bergson’s bio-philosophy, william morton wheeler’s myrmecology, jakob von uexküll’s ethology, richard dawkins’s biomorphism, roger caillois’s work on mimicry, or karl von frisch’s studies of bee waggling as a linguistic system. the unifying thread, however, is the central importance of not only insects but animals in toto: “it is crucial,” parikka writes, “to recognize their position in the history of media and their value for a media theory of individuation and nonhuman animal bodies. we have to be aware of the material specificity and framing of contemporary digital technologies, where the specificity stems both from an account of the singularities in current network protocols and software and from the ‘animal’ mode of digital culture” (203). insect media might appear in danger of collapsing under the weight of a potentially cacophonous array of cultural theorists, but parikka helps readers navigate the theoretical terrain with a clear critical arc and indispensable summaries in key sections to maintain connections from one chapter to the next. there are some irritations, however, that find insect media buckling in a few instances. first, while the book adroitly deploys complex critical approaches without sacrificing too much of its coherence, there are moments when parikka appears too-readily humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 118 enthralled in his own critical acrobatics to clearly illuminate some of the critical theory. this is particularly notable in the use of baruch spinoza and gilles deleuze and félix guattari: readers less familiar with these theorists’ works will likely find the learning curve a little too steep as too few handholds with which to grasp the material are offered by parikka. prior grounding in spinoza and especially deleuze and guattari would certainly be an asset to the dedicated reader. in addition, the organizational structure of section two is generally less fluid than section one: whereas the latter moved forward from one chapter to the next in a seamless manner, the former is noticeably choppier and resonates less effectively, at least when compared to section one. as a cultural studies scholar whose primary work is the overlap of science fiction/utopia studies and animal studies, my only persistent frustration has to do with parikka’s handling of art, avant-garde aesthetics, and popular culture. on the one hand, parikka does a generally admirable job of exploring cultural articulations of a “transversal insect media” in diverse art forms: hershman-lesson’s teknolust, lewis carroll’s alice in wonderland (1865), samuel butler’s erewhon (1872), sarah peebles’ electroacoustic insect groove (2006), jean painlevé’s le vampire (1945), or the winnipeg art gallery’s “bug city” exhibition (2005-‘06) all make appearances, albeit theorized in an at-times unbalanced manner, as some are the subject of scrutiny while others only warrant a few remarks. on the other hand, parikka repeatedly acknowledges the seeming importance of (literary) science fiction for his project, but he effectively does nothing substantial with this content. at one point he remarks that the uncanny worlds of insects encompassed “genealogies of weird creatures but also a potential future of novel forms of life. here the rise of the science fiction genre of weird, often enormously sized insectoid creatures is to be noted, at times also part of popular discourse” (24-25). this is all parikka offers on the subject. in exploring the relationship between insect imagery, fordist organization, and fears of mechanization, parikka quickly points to such early twentieth-century dystopias as e. m. forster’s “the machine stops” (1909), karel čapek’s r.u.r. (1921), josef and karel čapek’s the insect play (1921), and fritz lang’s metropolis (1927) as exemplars of the “insect machine,” a dehumanizing, emotionless society whose insect mechanicality “developed into an influential trope that has continued to be recycled in various productions from science fiction to other forms of popular culture” (43). this material could have been developed in greater detail and expanded to include other contemporaneous dystopias, including yevgeny zamyatin’s we (1921) or aldous huxley’s brave new world (1932). it would also have been interesting to observe graham j. murphy — insectalia technics 119 parikka’s critical apparatus applied to science fiction’s refurbishment (not its recycling) of a “technics of nature” that doesn’t immediately superimpose a “dystopia” designation upon utopias constructed (literally or figuratively) around insect colonies: charlotte perkins gilman’s herland (1915), john wyndham’s consider her ways (1956), frank herbert’s hellstrom’s hive (1973), james tiptree, jr.’s “houston, houston, do you read?” (1976), or stephen baxter’s coalescent (2003) are all narratives that come immediately to mind as equally useful in this enterprise. in this vein, h. g. wells’ the first men in the moon (1901), frederick philip grove’s consider her ways (1947), theodore sturgeon’s the cosmic rape (1958), or bernard werber’s les fourmis (1991) might have helped expand parikka’s critical engagements with hive collectives and a deleuzian/guattarian becoming-insect, theoretical conceits that are prominent in insect media. parikka’s handling of the instinct/intelligence dialectic also seems perfectly primed for frank herbert’s the green brain (1956), bruce sterling’s “swarm” (1982), or rudy rucker’s the hacker and the ants (1994). finally, parikka assesses 1980s-era software and digital spaces as “more akin to the cartesian space of coordinate systems as a reservoir of possibilities that was introduced in william gibson’s idea of cyberspace than it is an understanding of the relations of extensions and mutuality that other discourses have been trying to promote” (152-53). the spectre of gibson later reappears: “[t]he ‘coding’ of life in informatic units results not in a geometrical data structure, as in william gibson’s neuromancer, but in an imaginative view of biodigital creatures as affective, interacting, folding in with various cultural forces” (176). once again, parikka devotes no significant attention to neuromancer (1984), a book he has brought into the dialogue that could lend itself nicely to discussions of “insect media,” considering the ubiquitous posthuman cyborg bodies populating its fictive techno-capitalist environs that, on more than one occasion, reference insect imagery and deploy hive consciousnesses. in sum, i remain unclear if parikka’s science fiction references are meant to speak for themselves or if these are again instances of the terrains he admits he cannot adequately cover. if the former, there is a communication gap or problem with transmission; if the latter, one may be legitimately frustrated that print-based science fiction offers nothing more to the arguments of insect media than un-theorized throwaway references. in its scope, sophistication, and exposition, parikka=s insect media: an archaeology of animals and technology reminded me in some ways of both n. katherine hayles’ how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics (1999) and cary wolfe’s animal rites: americanculture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory (2003); insect media might be thought a hybrid of hayles and wolfe. in any event, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 120 humanimalia’s readers would be well-advised to acquire parikka’s insect media because, in spite of the irritations i have outlined, its successes overwhelmingly eclipse its weaknesses. it intersects with diverse critical fields and should appeal to a wide range of scholars, including animal studies scholars who have an interest in insects, but by no means is it only about the “insect” of “insect media.” parikka’s insect media is an astonishing (and highly recommended) study that succeeds admirably in underlining “the need to rethink the material basis of contemporary media condition and produce much more complex intuitions that take into account a certain ‘activity of matter,’ nonhuman forces expressing themselves as part of this media assemblage of modernity” (xx). microsoft word icr h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 reviews istvan csicsery-ronay eyes/open jean-christophe bailly. the animal side. new york: fordham up, 2011. 87 pp. $65.00 hb, $18.00 pb. this dazzling little book arrived in my office one day entirely unexpectedly. i was previously unfamiliar with jean-christophe bailly, a professor at the école nationale supérieur de la nature et du paysage in blois, a respected poetic essayist in france, and sometime collaborator with the philosopher jean-luc nancy. the animal side, first published in france in 2007 and masterfully translated by catherine porter, who has also translated pierre bourdieu, luce irigaray, tzvetan todorov, and louis marin, consists of twenty-eight chapters, none longer than three pages, suggesting a highly poetic philosophical history of the relationship between human and non-human animals. bailly goes over some familiar territory covered by european animal philosophers: the open, becoming-animal, the self-quarantining of the human, and the implications of animal umwelten. but bailly is concerned less with what agamben calls istvan csicsery-ronay— “eyes/open” 181 the anthropological machine — the conceptual protocols enforcing human exceptionalism in the natural world — than with the awareness shared by human and non-human animals, and which they stimulate in one another. philosophical and scientific attention share an all too human desire to define clearly and sharply — whether it is a matter of species taxonomy or of dasein and bios. these language games have already distanced themselves from real encounters among animals, closing the open, bailly might say, of the indefinite, evolving, infinitely complex feeling of sharing the world, and indeed of co-creating it. encounters with non-human animals create a sense of profound personal experience, a “vision, nothing but a vision … but clearer than any thought” (3). because of its privacy and depth of feeling, it almost embarrassing to express — the embarrassment of being inconsistent or incoherent, unable to defend one’s words against the claims of reason. bailly confronts this embarrassment head on: i have become aware, stratagems and efforts notwithstanding, that declarations of intense feeling on the subject of animals quite often not only fall flat but give rise to a sort of embarrassment, rather as though one had inadvertently crossed a line and gotten mixed up in something untoward, or even obscene. nothing is more painful, then, than the choice one has to make: pull back discreetly or forge ahead obstinately and speak out. the truth is that a point of solitude is always reached in one’s relations with animals. (4) the animal side is bailly’s effort to speak from the solitude. how does one speak about one’s relation to the non-human animal world without escaping into concepts that can’t help but seem sentimental or anthropocentric even at their most anti-humanist? in the end, it is the task of poetry. bailly discreetly name checks agamben, derrida, and deleuze-guattari, with stronger endorsements of uexküll, merleau-ponty, and benjamin, but it is rilke and other artists of the open that dominate the discourse of the animal side. in its way, the book is an answer to the eighth duino elegy with exactly the opposite conclusions to heidegger’s seminal commentary. bailly begins by describing a striking encounter with a deer while driving his car on a dark country lane. he carefully follows the beast as it bounds down the road in the cone of the headlights until it finds an escape path into the surrounding darkness. this humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 182 moment when two worlds — two “modalities of being” (2) — almost collide but instead uneasily overlap leads bailly into meditations on the primal relationship between animals and humans depicted in the lascaux cave painting, then the gradual breaking of what bataille calls the animal-human “bond of intimacy,” first in agriculture, and then the virtual elimination of the animal side through industrialization. bailly’s differs from many similar accounts in his emphasis on the notion that animals and humans — all the heteromorphs who live in enclosed bodies and are thus subjects forced to move and look in search of food and shelter — are in fact constantly aware of each other. consciously or not (the distinction does not truly matter here) they know that the world they see is seen by others, and that they are constantly seen by other observing agents. bailly’s focus on seeing draws a great deal from walter benjamin’s meditations on aura. it is the eye — shared by almost all beings who must draw their nourishment from others — that creates the commonality of animal awareness. a beautiful chapter on bats shows that for bailly the gaze is not exclusively a matter of eyes.1 the originality of the animal side is in the way bailly conveys a world constructed by the dynamic, alert network of relations among reciprocally observing animal-beings, following, fleeing, gazing in pensive wonder, tentatively approaching, and quickening at the sight of each other. bailly’s history of the broken intimacy between animals and humans emphasizes its effects on mutual awareness. he traces increasingly difficult attempts to re-establish the solidarity of human and non-human animals by artists — shamanistic empathy (quirkily analyzed via a scene from jim jarmusch’s dead man), fascinated following (through uccello’s the hunt in the forest), respect for animal innerness (through caravaggio’s rest on the flight into egypt and piero di cosimo’s a satyr mourning over a nymph), to kafka’s drive to make the animal speak about its own world in human language, and contemporary french artist gilles aillaud’s encyclopedia of all animals, including the minerals. the animal side joins a discussion that has occupied european animal philosophy in recent years regarding the relationship of the animal gaze to humanism’s radical division of the human from the non-human animal. that discussion begins with heidegger’s now familiar critique of rilke’s poetic claim in the eighth duino elegy that human consciousness is trapped in its own self-regard, able to view “the open” only istvan csicsery-ronay— “eyes/open” 183 “reflected’ in animals’ eyes.” heidegger argued that rilke overestimated animal awareness and underestimated the human. only human beings are able to see the open — the always as yet undetermined space of potential and freedom — because it must be discovered and brought to consciousness. animals do not discover; they, as rilke has it, exist in the presence of creaturely being and see no need to discover or to invent, to force the hidden world to manifest itself and to shape it. the eye or the look of animals has become a core motif in european critiques of humanism, building as it does on the central role of the gaze in the work of benjamin and lacan, and appearing as forming tropes in writings by levinas, derrida, cixous, irigaray, and agamben. a long, rich literary tradition precedes them. the animal side should be read in this tradition of asking: what does the animal see that the human does not, or even, how different is the non-human animal from the human one when we see each other? bailly’s book can also be profitably read as an extended complement, and perhaps critique, of agamben’s the open. agamben too explores the way heidegger (mis)reads rilke in order to reinscribe the humanist “caesura” between the human and the animal to demonstrate human superiority, a caesura that the anthropological machine ceaselessly reproduces. bailly and agamben agree on this reading of heidegger and rilke, but the differences between their tropes and angles of approach is striking. for agamben, as indeed for most european animal philosophers, the discovery of the caesura is a task of deep textual analysis and historical reflection in the deferalized laboratories of the apartment and library. agamben’s path in the open leads him from illuminated manuscripts to the writings of uexküll, to a near-borgesian moment of discovery of a transcription error from one of benjamin’s handwritten manuscripts. this path of textual refinement leads him in the end to affirm that the open lies in “division of division,” the radical deconstruction of the essences on which discursive operations such as the animal/human quarantine depend. the open, for agamben, as indeed for heidegger, is a matter of enormously disciplined thought. direct experience with animals is a relatively rare event in european animal philosophy. it might be attributed to the rapid disappearance of animals from cities, where most philosophers work, and to the keeping of only a few companion pets in urban dwellings. derrida’s now iconic encounter with the petit chat, cixous’s love letters to her cats, levinas’s equally well-known story of the dog bobby, are among the few examples of continental philosophical reflection on animals that seems generated by humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 184 actual human-animal encounters. agamben recounts no meetings with actual animals in the open; it is a book of glosses. one might say it lacks the experience of animals, and indeed an account of experience with them. for many readers, the abstraction of animals in theoretical literature is an obstacle, creating the impression of stubborn anthropocentrism even in the midst of anti-humanist critique. the precise meanings of words become the field of battle, even when the object in question does not use them. even if they are intended to show that animals are not poor in the world, they mainly succeed in showing that humans are rich in words. the animal side approaches the subject on a different path. the book is full of animals. some are paintings, some are fictions, but many are real: the deer in the headlights that opens the book, swarms of starlings over the loire at sunset, an eagle sitting in a kenyan tree, the quasi-sacred, village-supported cats of vernazza, and many, many others. at every step, we feel that the categories bailly uses for approaching animal existence are approximations forced by his persistent awareness that he lives in a world that is lived-in and seen by myriads of other sentient beings. the animal side does not praise a zen-like abdication of language; it leads readers to an all too human point where experience and language intersect, to poetic knowledge. bailly does not withdraw entirely from the politics of human-animal relations. he imagines that the human world potentially could be re-organized by acknowledging the mutual intersections of the diverse umwelts.2 for bailly, uexküll’s notion of an umwelt, far from being an enclosure, an absolute ontology, as heidegger believed, is constantly restructured intuitively and reflexively in response to other umwelts. for bailly, an umwelt designates the open network of possibilities around every body of behavior, the skein that every animal forms for itself by winding itself into the world according to its means, with its nervous system, its sense, its shape, its tools, its mobility. (48) the world itself is, quoting merleau-ponty, “the envelopment of the umwelten in each other” (50) empirical biology tends to focus on those forms of animal attention that are most human-like. hunting for prey, alertness to danger, seeking out mates, finding materials for nests, etc. are arguably roughly analogous to active human projects. bailly focuses instead on what we might call surplus attention, the constant alertness of gazing beings, istvan csicsery-ronay— “eyes/open” 185 which for bailly is the basis of responsiveness to the world. bailly calls this state “pensitivity.” the gaze gazes, and the unformulated is, in it, the pathway of thought, or at least of a thinking that is not uttered, not articulated, but that takes place and sees itself, holds itself in this purely strange and strangely limitless place which is the surface of the eye. (14) pensitivity is an experience produced in profound solitude. typical of his approach, bailly identifies an image of it in a surprising detail of caravaggio’s painting rest on the flight into egypt. in the midst of a company of human and angelic figures, the eye of a donkey appears to gaze out at the human viewer. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 186 it is never a good idea to credit painters with ideas they did not have … but the fact remains that this gaze is there, with its reserved steadiness, its insistence, and the dimension it opens up in the scene, whatever else may be said about it, is nevertheless a moment of pure pensitivity, pure movement, not understood, in the damp opening of the eye that sees, that sees what it cannot grasp, and that, grasping what it does not grasp, gazes without end. (33) this quality of pensitivity can easily be confused with contemplation, and by extension the animal side might be read as a book in the contemplative tradition. in another striking chapter, bailly traces the origins of the notion of contemplation to roman augurers’ practice of designating a templum, a section of sky into which birds would fly and gain prophetic meaning. contemplation then, even if it implies withdrawal from everyday business, involves the highly active installation of boundaries within which animals can become signs for human designs. with industrialization, contemplative istvan csicsery-ronay— “eyes/open” 187 thought (la pensée) for human beings increasingly becomes laborious, exemplified in rodin’s thinker, “the very image of concentration that needs to look like an allegory of work, the very image, in the end, of a gaze closed to the open…” (21). pensitivity, as a result, is strong in animals, and weak in humans. the animal side can be read as an attempt to record, or at least to suggest, pensitivity in human language, which puts it in league with the artists rather than the philosophers. and yet it is not entirely inaccurate to see the book as contemplative. the poem — or here, poetic essay — is itself a kind of templum, and bailly’s book has a project not so distant from augury: to imagine animals as partners in transforming the given world into imagining, thinking, and making-art. animals provoke our poetry; it is the language of poetry that imitates the open, in its suggestion and polysemy. levi-strauss’ famous axiom that “animals are good to think with” is an implicit inspiration of the animal side. but bailly moves beyond the structuralist symbolist’s tacit kantianism. bailly concludes his book with a remarkable hymnic invocation of plotinus, for whom material things become thoughts embodied, and through the contemplation of animals, who like us are aware and embedded in meaning, even if not in interpretation, we recognize not only a world that is not us, but that we are also not us: the animal, having evaded its condition as object of thought, itself becomes thought, not inasmuch as it thinks or might think (in the end, what does it matter!), but because it is. (57) less like a rilke elegy than a book of neruda odes, the animal side honors animals’ articulation of the open through the templum of poetry. notes 1. nonetheless, the modality of bats’ minds, famously discussed by thomas nagel and his critics, should raise the question whether all the dominant senses create the same kind of psychic metabolism. at the very least, one may ask whether bailly supports a hierarchical distinction between animals with active eyes, and animals who use other senses to navigate in the world. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 188 2. in a footnote, bailly gestures to derrida’s encounter with his cat in “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow)” as a good start for this politics, but takes it no further. it is hard to imagine how such a radical sense of awareness and encounter can be converted into collective action. microsoft word geroux-uexkull pdf dummy.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:2 142 robert geroux umwelt, biology, and bio-politics: a foray into uexküll's world jakob von uexküll. a foray into the world of animals and humans, with a theory of meaning. trans. joseph o’neil. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2010. 248 pp. $25.00. the juxtaposition of the subject’s goals and nature’s plan also allows us to get past the question of instinct, which nobody can make sense of anyway. does the acorn need an instinct in order to become an oak? or does a bunch of osteoblasts work instinctively to form a bone? (uexküll, 92) there cannot be any philosophy of the individual and the exercise of thought cannot have any other outcome than the negation of individual perspectives. a basic problem is linked to the very idea of philosophy: how to get out of the human situation (george bataille. theory of religion. trans. by robert hurley. new york: zone books, 1992.) it might be too much to state, as bataille does, that philosophy’s “very idea,” that is to say its fundamental orientation or problematic, lies in an approach to the aporetic and the apophatic, in an erotic appetite for erasure, or in a libidinal drive to surmount the human situation. too much for philosophy (or should i say too much for some philosophers?) perhaps, but not too much for the narrower and younger field of human/animal studies, which is self-consciously (and not always successfully) located and situated at this fraught intersection of limits. the theriophilic critique of human excellence and virtues, the aggressive pursuit of posthumanism, the appetite for new forms of liminal communication and collective action: all of these commitments are driven by a kind of anxiety about the lasting influence of anthropocentrism. together we want to get out of being human, move past its limits and maybe more emphatically leapfrog over its liabilities and interspecies debts. an impossible task, yes, something like jumping over one’s shadow. but if what we want is a vision which disorients, undermines and deconstructs the human perspective, then we have no better place to turn than to the work of jacob von uexküll. antihumanist philosophers from heidegger to deleuze have realized this, and some of the most challenging aspects of their visions represent a tracing/tracking of his congeries of animal concepts. for this reason alone, a new, clear, and compelling english translation of uexküll is cause indeed for celebration. there are some potential concerns with aspects of uexküll’s thought that robert geroux — unwelt, biology, and biopolitics: a foray into uexküll’s world 143 remain to be uncovered, as we will see, but joseph o’neil and the university of minnesota press should be commended for making this text available and approachable to readers without a working knowledge of the text’s original german. i. life/spores. we can begin our review with uexküll’s life, which was as broad-ranging and expansive as his work. its arc can be described as follows: birth (1864) into an estonian/german aristocratic family, study in heidelberg, followed by work in paris and then many years in naples, followed in turn by the financial ruin of wwi and its aftermath, and finally, only late in life, settlement, stability, and indeed prominence in hamburg until his death in 1944. the vision presented to us in the foray into the worlds of animals and humans was composed during the relatively early years of a center he founded, the institut für umweltforschung. the work of that research center bore the imprint of his leadership and ideas, representing an excellent example of “normal science” in the kuhnian sense of the term. unpacking and enumerating the aspects of that vision is difficult, and perhaps best done by means of words which are evocative of deleuze and guattari’s (uexküllian) “becoming-animal,” that is, elemental orderings in vertical and horizontal space, a planar examination of mobile thought that operates in both a constellated or sporadic form (on one level), and in a more subterranean rhizomatic fashion (on another level). addressing the constellated/sporadic plane first, uexküll’s project moves forward by means of particular examples, creating a tight focus around a multitude of non-human life forms. uexküll’s tick is the most famous (and compelling) example, but he also addresses the lifeworlds of spiders and flies, hermit crabs and anemones, jackdaws and cats, molluscs and starfish, and so on. each organism in its particular ecology or umwelt receives a limited number of perceptual cues: the tick for example may live in a forest canopy full of birdsong, the sound and smell of rushing water, the abrupt rush of spring winds, but the only mark it attends to is the “smell” of butyric acid released by a proximate mammalian being. this “perception mark” (merkmal) activates the release of the tick’s legs, which in turn allows it to drop onto the mammal that presumably moves beneath it. uexküll’s term for this activation is “effect mark” (wirkmal), which when activated erases the perception mark that set it off. this circuitry of perception and effect marks traces the outer boundary of animal life in its interdependent but contextually discrete instantiations. the animal’s umwelt is this delimitation. in another study that giorgio agamben considers at length, uexküll considers the relationship of spider and fly: the spider does not and cannot “know” the fly in a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 144 comprehensive objective sense, and yet the dimensions of the spider’s web are attuned in a delicate fashion to the proportions of the fly’s body. the trap that the spider sets is sensitive to the fly’s perceptual apparatus, moreover, even to the point of crafting its strands in such a manner that they become invisible to the fly’s eye. as agamben comments in a chapter of his work the open, “the two perceptual worlds of the fly and the spider are absolutely uncommunicating, and yet so perfectly in tune that we might say that the original score of the fly, which we can also call its original image or archetype, acts on that of the spider in such a way that the web the spider weaves can be described as ‘fly-like’” (agamben 42). the circuitry of perception and effect marks turns out to be variegated and flexible enough to knit together the life processes of many beings, even above and beyond their individuated horizons of understanding. to say that the spider wills an innovation in web-making that consciously accommodates the archetype of the fly is to misunderstand its cognitive power; it is something like presuming that the tick wills an especially selective olfactory sense to attune itself to the mammals that pass beneath it. in both cases, there is an operative logic at work, and one that makes fascinatingly rapid adaptations, considering the constantly changing nature of biological forms, as well as the larger dynamic biosphere in which they live. this logic is one that emerges from within the formal life of interdependent organisms, and is meaningful because of that frame, but it gains its holistic sense from a larger and more encompassing principle. that principle, moreover, stands above and beyond human perception which is itself limited and constrained by means of its own umwelt. this is a point to which we will return shortly. ii. rhizome. we have already moved beyond the sporadic examination of constellated beings to the deeper question of meaning and morphogenesis. for uexküll, any particular umwelt is an elaborate and intricate construction of an inseparable unity, a holistic system of organism and world. its emergence and elaboration is an organic logic that arises out of the living processes of the subject, in an avowedly meaningful expression of vitality. o’neil’s new translation includes uexküll’s essay a theory of meaning, which speaks in these terms by comparing two processes of agglomeration, ordering, and formation. consider, uexküll says, the “play of clouds in the wind,” which cohere into shapes and onto which we project certain images and meanings but in the end are nothing more than “the product of changing winds and strictly obey the law of cause and effect” (uexküll 151). consider in contrast, he says, the parachute form of the dandelion seed, or the fruit of the linden. here the formal process of biological adaptation occurs as it were not from the outside, but from within. “in this case, the wind is not the cause of the development of form, as with the clouds, but rather, the forms are adjusted to the meaning factor ‘wind,’ which they utilize in different ways for robert geroux — unwelt, biology, and biopolitics: a foray into uexküll’s world 145 scattering seed” (uexküll 151). what we call the living processes of the subject can in some sense be described as this form-giving movement in growth and adjustment, delimited by a complex choreography or score of interaction between organism and environment, or subject and object. if on the one hand the being in question does not and cannot hear or comprehend the composition as a whole, it is clearly not the case on the other hand that no music is being made. the multitude of processes at work operate and circulate symphonically. this is true at the microscopic level of tick and mammal, spider and fly, dandelion seed and wind, and it is also true at the biospheric level. music is meaning, moreover, as uexküll argues: the question as to meaning must therefore have priority in all living beings. only once it is solved does it make any sense to research causally conditioned processes, since the activity of living cells is directed by their self-tones (uexküll 151). this raises an important question, however, one situated at the intersection between epistemology and ontology. to be sure, uexküll’s antihumanist, antidarwinian ecology wants to rise above the cartesian prioritization of the (human) subject over the (animal/machine) res extensa. in doing so, however, we have to ask whether he replaces descartes’ secular mathesis with a world in which the ecologic of every umwelt represents a kind of hermetic “soap bubble” that seals-off consciousness from the socalled real world. in other words, if all consciousness is intentional, if every strand that connects subject to object is conditioned or structured a priori by “tones” of expectation, what happens to the possibility of an encounter of purity, immediacy, or full naiveté? can the world be experienced without mediation? uexküll seems to close off this possibility at the very end of his foray, when he makes two assertions: first, when we transfer our study of umwelten from animals to human beings, we find here as well proliferation rather than unity. when we attempt to coalesce or cohere the swarming, buzzing multiplicity of human worlds and reduce them to a single unitary sense, we find chaos and confusion. nothing fits together. viewed from one perspectival stance light has a particulate reality, whereas from another it exists as a wave. only one of these realities can be true, and yet of course both are. and so on. uexküll makes a further point, however, which finds continuity, sense and meaning behind this anti-realist profusion of contradictions: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 146 the role nature plays as an object in the various environments of natural scientists is highly contradictory. if one wanted to sum up its objective characteristics, only chaos would result. and yet, all these different environments are fostered and borne along by the one that is inaccessible to all environments forever. forever unknowable behind all of the worlds it produces, the subject – nature – conceals itself (uexküll 135). so for uexküll a unitary principle exists, a principle which we can speak of in shorthand as nature, or if one prefers, “nature,” which the translator o’neil leaves capitalized in order to emphasize two things, namely its subjective aspect – nature is a subject above and beyond all particulated and particular subjects – and its unknowability/inaccessibility. without question there is a quasi-religious thrust working here, a rhetorical emphasis that calls our attention to the meaning and importance of nature in a particular way. this is an important point, and by way of closing, i want to say two things about this emphasis, the first being historical and the second being political. iii. conclusion. first, this articulation merely reiterates an overdetermined aspect of the modern world, as well as a central part of the scientific context where it seems at first glance so alien and strange. the radical decentering of the human subject and the end of perceptual immediacy are as old as the copernican revolution. they are overdetermined moreover by articulations in contexts as seemingly distinct as theology (pascal’s notion of deus absconditus), political theory (hobbes’ position on nominalism and the limits of language), and perhaps most emphatically, reflections on modern and contemporary art. the loss of immediacy and a corresponding awareness of multiple (and often inconsistent) forms of mediation are fundamental aspects of modern selfreflection; in a way, uexküll’s work does the most straightforward thing possible: in its scientific anti-realism, it merely reminds us that a world of epistemological mediation exists for all beings. humans and animals alike inhabit meaningful but distinct phenomenological environments. within the frame of this statement, however, we cannot avoid the question of religion. emphasizing fragmentation, disunity, comprehensive disorder/chaos in nature is really nothing more than asserting (along with saint paul) that all creation is fallen. this is the second point i want to address. uexküll’s emphatic reference to a subject beyond the infinite plurality of subjectivities, as well as the priority placed on the unknowability of that subject, these are without question remarks shaped and structured however indirectly by an appreciation of negative theology. this sensibility comes to us, robert geroux — unwelt, biology, and biopolitics: a foray into uexküll’s world 147 moreover, mediated through uexküll’s formidable influence on a generation of philosophical readers, the most important and influential of whom was of course heidegger. it is not difficult to engage in a reading whereby uexküll’s vision is translated into a philosophical/political position of quietism (at best), or right-wing mysticism or messianism (at worst). in other words, a line can be drawn between uexküll’s vision of nature and heidegger’s infamous (gnostic?) late words that “only a god can save us now.” this is a problem. the problem is compounded when one digs deeper into uexküll’s turn from theoretical biology and ethology to his positions on political topics. without finding him guilty by association, he kept the company of unsavory characters: his resolute antiliberalism (no crime in itself) cleaved him to writers like the english nazi sympathizer houston stewart chamberlain, one of whose unfinished manuscripts uexküll translated as natur und leben (1928). his antagonism towards charles darwin was only part of a more generally hostile orientation towards anglo-american ethics and the capitalistic practice it underpinned. untangling the conceptual threads connecting this critique to his theoretical biology is a large project desperately in need of undertaking; my sense is that we are at a very early stage in this process, comparable perhaps to the years just preceding works on heidegger and politics. geoffrey winthrop-young’s afterword to this edition helps us here, but the evidence thus far is mainly inconclusive; it’s not that the “jury is out” on the issue of uexküll and politics, rather the trial hasn’t really begun. we’re still hearing opening arguments. all the same, it’s not difficult to see the problematic direction of a description of a nation or volk in terms that echoes the subtle, meaningful (and in the end, mysterious) description of subject to world in uexküll’s understanding of umwelt. it’s not difficult to imagine the construction of an organicist “biology” of the nation or even the state, and indeed this is the thrust of uexküll’s staatsbiologie (1920; revised 1928, 1933), which should be of special interest indeed to historians of antiliberal and antidemocratic political thought. so: uexküll’s political vision remains (for this theorist at least) mostly uncharted territory; we can be sure, however, that the resurgence of interest in his compelling vision of an anti-darwinist, antihumanist theoretical biology will lead to further studies in this direction. it will be interesting to see how these studies shape his reception and reputation. at this point, however, it’s hard to imagine a work or a writer more provocative and compelling, and more important to the field of human/animal studies. microsoft word chrulew pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 2:2 matthew chrulew reversing extinction: restoration and resurrection in the pleistocene rewilding projects the insistence that one cannot construct wilderness as one might fabricate a shopping mall or engineer a vehicle, and thus must preserve the dwindling national parks that remain, is a long-held idea in american environmentalism. aldo leopold, for example, wrote in his influential essay on wilderness as land use: “wilderness certainly cannot be built at will, like a city park or a tennis court” (76). the answer, thus, is preservation: “the practical point is that if we want wilderness, we must foresee our want and preserve the proper areas against the encroachment of inimical uses” (76-7). or as a series of advertisements proclaimed through blueprints of famous natural artifacts such as a giant sequoia tree or yosemite falls presented as technical specifications or “construction plans”: “it’s not like we can make new ones.” however, in the context of widespread habitat and biodiversity loss and extinction, for many the preservationist imperative has come to seem too little and too late. most everywhere, the encroachment leopold refers to has already happened, often long ago, and what remains is a continuum of more or less cultivated or degraded landscapes. if one retains the notion of wilderness as entirely “untrammeled,” in no way impacted by human intervention, this leads to a depressing, even apocalyptic state of affairs often described as the “end of nature.”1 what if there is no such wilderness to preserve? indeed, what if wilderness is long gone, destroyed by anthropogenic and/or climatic factors over ten thousand years ago, as in the case of the north american and siberian steppe ecosystems and their charismatic megafauna? one challenging response to this situation is that proposed, and indeed begun, by scientists such as paul martin and sergei zimov, who insist that today the task is to create new wilderness through what is known as restoration or even resurrection ecology. for such “pleistocene rewilders,” it is as if we can, and indeed must, make new ones. to build wilderness is here no longer a contradiction in terms but an ethical obligation. such paradoxes have long been debated among environmental philosophers, conservation biologists, and their interlocutors. decades ago, polymath frederick turner proposed “inventionist ecology” as a new environmental ethic that sought, not to segregate pristine areas from human defilement, but to actively create “synthetic matthew chrulew — reversing extinction: restoration and resurrection in the pleistocene rewilding projects 5 landscapes.”2 today, the emerging paradigm in conservation biology challenges the conventional isolation of fragmented islands of wilderness with an ambitious model of regrown networks. the proponents of “rewilding” seek to re-establish long-term ecological resilience on a continental scale by restoring disrupted biological functions, such as natural fire regimes and regulation by predators and other highly interactive keystone species.3 as caroline fraser puts it in her compelling album of “dispatches from the conservation revolution”: “rewilding is about making connections. forging literal connections through corridors. creating linkages across landscapes and responsible economic relationships between protected areas and people. forging links between ourselves and the intact ecosystems we need to survive” (343). worldwide, countless projects in restoration ecology assume a great degree of interventionist responsibility in seeking to understand and recreate otherwise degraded or vanishing ecosystems. yet pleistocene rewilding, which seeks to reconstruct extinct, prehistoric ecosystems, is different again; indeed, these “wildly imaginative, even romantic” proposals and experiments, fantastic or even impossible as they seem, make otherwise controversial rewilding efforts seem staid and “prosaic” (299). there is a wonderful, oft-quoted line in kim stanley robinson’s important science fiction novel red mars: “a scientific research station is actually a little model of prehistoric utopia” (310). nowhere does this statement seem more true than in pleistocene park, a self-described “experimental wildlife preserve” in north-eastern siberia (chapin n.p.). as its creator, russian scientist sergei zimov, puts it, “we propose to create a grassland ecosystem maintained by large northern herbivores similar to that which existed in siberia 10,000-100,000 years ago during the late pleistocene” (zimov, et al. “pleistocene park” 1). the hope is that the reintroduction of animals such as yakutian horses, moose, reindeer, and bison will convert the mossdominated tundra back to the grassy steppe that prevailed in the ice age. most remarkably, the site is also envisaged by some as the eventual home of resurrected mammoths, should the controversial project to use cloning or backbreeding to bring the species back from extinction find success. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 6 sergei zimov (photo by laurel mcfadden) zimov’s pleistocene park is the forerunner of a utopian proposal that has recently been debated among conservation biologists in the united states. paul martin and others have argued that populations of african and asian elephants, among other “exotic” species, should be introduced into north america to fill the niches once occupied by mammoths and other extinct megafauna. such pleistocene rewilding projects represent a new modality in the process of civilizing nature that defines the history of wilderness areas, challenging many long-held preservationist assumptions. in particular, they stand opposed to the dominant paradigm for which the natural state of wilderness which must be protected is that encountered at the beginning of european colonization, suggesting on the contrary that what is natural is not simply “pre-european” but entirely “pre-human.” while this vision retains the frontier ideology of a pristine nature, the baseline for such true wilderness is displaced much further back in time to the prehistoric period, before any human occupation. the irony is that this prehuman nature is conceived as something that modern humans must take it upon themselves to actively recreate. zimov admits that “the concept of pleistocene park might initially seem like a science fiction story” (zimov, et al. “pleistocene park” 8). and as might be expected, journalistic reporting on pleistocene park, and particularly on the related attempts to resurrect the mammoth, has been unable to resist framing them by reference to jurassic park, the crichton novel and spielberg film. in his systematic review of the scientific and ethical controversy over mammoth cloning, salsberg chastises the media for this “rash sensationalism,” calling instead for “[r]easoned discourse on the ethical, legal and social implications of the resurrection of an extinct animal” (3). but exploration of the utopian (and dystopian) cultural narratives of science fiction, as well as other narrative modes of matthew chrulew — reversing extinction: restoration and resurrection in the pleistocene rewilding projects 7 thought such as myth, should not be excluded from reasoned discourse about these projects, precisely because they inform so much of the thinking and motivations involved. the establishment of wilderness areas simulating a prehistoric ecosystem in which anthropogenic extinctions have been reversed is nothing if not an exercise in scientific myth-making. indeed the ecotopian tradition within science fiction shares much of the ethos of zimov’s pleistocene park project. rethinking utopia in an environmental frame, imagining a future regressed beyond civilization, the “new ecotopias” described by robinson in the introduction to his anthology future primitive, “cobble together aspects of the postmodern and the paleolithic” (11). the scientific activity of pleistocene park is strongly tied to such increasingly germane literary themes. indeed it has often been argued that movements to protect wilderness areas, and the sciences that support them such as conservation biology, are saturated with mythic narratives and utopian desires. the idea of wilderness has always partaken of a certain utopianism, leading to no end of debates over the contradictions involved when humans attempt to define and manage areas of nonhuman wildness.4 in order to take account of the utopian ambitions of the pleistocene rewilding projects without losing sight of the historical and material dialectic in which these dreams are played out, i will conceptualize them as heterotopias, “real places … which are something like countersites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which … all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted” (foucault 24). chaloupka and cawley have argued that understanding wilderness areas as heterotopias allows us to deconstruct the binary divide between nature and culture without at the same time sacrificing all worthwhile conceptions of the natural and nonhuman to the omnipresence of artifice and construction. if we accept the “open secret” of the designed nature of wilderness as a site of the wild other, they argue, we can still take seriously the possibility of wilderness as “countersite”— a wild antagonist “at tension with modernity but also at tension with any romantic conception of the ‘natural’” (14). zimov established pleistocene park in 1989 as a radical experiment in wildlife reintroduction and restoration ecology, with the ultimate goal of the reconstitution of the mammoth steppe ecosystem. it is run by a nonprofit organization, with governmental support from the republic of sakha-yakutia, and administered by the northeast science station in cherskii, russia, a base for research in arctic biology and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 8 geophysics of which zimov is director. the 160km2 (40,000 acre) preserve is surrounded by an enormous buffer zone of 600 km2, which will be used to augment the park as the animal populations grow. consisting of one-third each of meadow, forest, and shrubland, it still retains populations of much of the pleistocene flora and fauna, which, though presently marginalized by the dominant mosses, are predicted to thrive once again following experimental interventions into the composition of the ecosystem. this in large part consists of the reintroduction of “sufficient densities” of large herbivores such as horses, bison, reindeer, moose, musk-oxen and the like. it is expected that these grazing mammals will disturb the dominant moss and allow the grass to return, transforming the terrain from tundra-taiga back to steppe and thereby stabilizing the soil. among the social and ecological benefits zimov predicts are the provision of habitat for endangered predators such as siberian tigers, “a sustainable food source for northern peoples and a model for reconstruction of grazing ecosystems throughout the world” (zimov et al. “steppe-tundra transition” 783). it is also intended to contribute to global warming counter-strategies, as stabilized grassland will help prevent the carbon reservoir held in the permafrost from being released into the atmosphere.5 the reintroduction of wildlife to siberian habitats, like the proposed american translocations, is explicitly intended to test scientific theories about ecological relations among animals, vegetation, and climate, particularly the causes of pleistocene megafauna extinctions. zimov argues, in accord with martin, that large mammals play a greater role in maintaining their ecosystems than has often been recognized; they are not determined by, but in fact in many ways determine the composition of flora. against the climatic (“overchill”) hypothesis, which proposes that ecosystem transformations as a result of climate change led to the mass extinctions at the end of the pleistocene, zimov accepts the controversial overkill hypothesis, which ties the extinctions to the expansion of human hunting. the loss of keystone herbivores as a result of overexploitation by homo sapiens could itself have unbalanced the ecological makeup of the region, precipitating a conversion from grassy steppe to mossy tundra. if zimov is right, then the reintroduction of grazing mammals largely absent for ten millennia should in fact increase vegetation productivity, promoting a return to the steppe grassland that prevailed in the time of the mammoths (zimov 798). a similar proposal has recently received significant attention in the united states. paul martin, the foremost proponent of the overkill theory of pleistocene megafauna extinction, has made the counterintuitive suggestion that we “bring back the elephants!” martin argues that the elephants’ proboscidean cousins, mammoths and mastodons, were essential to the ecology of north america. their anthropogenic matthew chrulew — reversing extinction: restoration and resurrection in the pleistocene rewilding projects 9 extinction as the result of overhunting by the clovis culture has left a glaringly empty environmental niche, unfilled for millennia and awaiting replenishment.6 a prominent commentary piece in nature (followed by another in american naturalist) by a number of scientists (including martin, dave foreman, and michael soulé) has put this idea square on the agenda of conservation biology: “we advocate pleistocene rewilding — reinstituting ecological and evolutionary processes that were transformed or eliminated by megafaunal extinctions — as a conservation priority in north america” (donlan et al., “pleistocene rewilding” 661; donlan et al., “re-wilding” 913). this plan, which clearly falls within the genre of utopian thought, proposes the establishment of largescale nature preserves in places such as the great plains, where the large mammals lost to human hunting in the pleistocene will be returned or replaced with suitable surrogates. for pleistocene rewilders, ecological configurations previously considered intact are in fact, in relation to prehistoric baselines, lacking component species with important roles (such as predation, seed-dispersal, or browsing), the loss of which led to ecosystem decline. they thus propose interventions in wildlife reintroduction and ecosystem restoration on an enormous scale, both spatially and in terms of evolutionary time, such as relocating endangered african megafauna to american plains to rebuild pleistocene fauna assemblages, a serengeti of the new world. this proposal, along with zimov’s pleistocene park, has received a significant amount of attention from the press as well as dissenting scientists. their explicit aim was to reinvigorate ailing, doom-and-gloom environmentalism with a positive proposal for thriving, reconstructed wildlands, rather than reserves operating as little more than palliative hospices. they have been criticized on a number of points: as taking attention away from more pressing conservation and reintroduction tasks, and undermining attempts to address the complex political problems impacting on wildlife preservation in africa; as potentially exposing humans and livestock to dangerous predatory animals; as taking the design and management of nature to a new level of hubris; as focusing on charismatic megafauna to the detriment of smaller species; as threatening indigenous animals and potentially causing harmful ecological effects (such as diseases) through introducing exotic species.7 such controversy shows the potential for this debate to interrogate forcefully the values and practices of conservation science. there is much in these pleistocene rewilding projects that is familiar from the history of wilderness preserves and national parks. the major justification for pleistocene park is, of course, the scientific project of studying an extinct ecology. it is the ethically humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 10 interested science of conservation biology that frames the rewilding proposals; while the methods and scale may differ, their ultimate goal is still the conservation of biodiversity. and both parks also envisage the potential for ecotourism, once sufficient number and variation of animals has been established. considering the declining numbers of visitors to national parks, and the greater numbers attending zoos, they argue that the draw card of appealing charismatic megafauna in a semiwild state will have significant economic effects in creating an ecotourism industry: “pleistocene rewilding would probably increase the appeal, social benefits, and economic value of both private and public parks and reserves” (donlan et al., “pleistocene rewilding” 666). even the siberian park, despite its forbidding distance and severe weather, has been imagined as a tourist destination, a unique safari park to which adventure tourists will no doubt journey. yet these proposals also differ in significant ways from the parks and wildlife refugia with which we are familiar. according to the title of william cronon’s controversial paper, “the trouble with wilderness” is “getting back to the wrong nature.” this “wrong nature” is the “wilderness myth” of a pure, pristine environment entirely separate from the corrupting influence of humanity; in the words of the us 1964 wilderness act, “an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man.” this critique of the wilderness myth by thinkers such as cronon and callicott is well-established, and among environmental philosophers, conservation biologists and restoration ecologists, debate continues as to precisely what is the “right nature” to be “gotten back to” in the establishment of reserves. according to the pleistocene rewilding projects, the “right nature” is that lost at the pleistocene/holocene border, about 12,000 years before the present. as denevan and others have shown, the north american environment was not a pristine wilderness prior to european colonization in 1492, having been extensively modified by its native inhabitants. the pre-columbian era is thus not the ideal goal for conservation efforts; the previously universal assumption of precolonial wilderness has been dislodged by studies in evolutionary ecology informed by an awareness of longer time scales. donlan et al. argue that if we take into account what the paleontological record tells us about the ecological history of a region, we must recognize the major impact made not just by european colonizers but by homo sapiens as such: “the late pleistocene arrival of the very first americans and the contemporaneous extinctions constitute a less arbitrary benchmark” (“pleistocene rewilding” 664). relying on an image of “man the hunter” as having contributed heavily to the global extinction of megafauna, they seek thus to redefine the yardstick for true wilderness in prehistoric terms.8 this temporal overhaul matthew chrulew — reversing extinction: restoration and resurrection in the pleistocene rewilding projects 11 has not gone unchallenged. callicott, for example, argues that their evolutionary timescale should be refined to an ecologically more appropriate scale of centuries. yet there is something almost inevitable about the lure of this prehistoric, prehuman wilderness. in exposing one myth, the pleistocene rewilders simultaneously double-down on another. the utopian conception of wilderness is not relinquished but pushed back in time and populated with remarkable prehistoric beasts. for example, martin writes: i define “the last entire earth” differently than did thoreau. prehistorians find that any given land begins to lose its wilderness not when the first europeans arrive, but when the very first humans do. in the americas true wilderness was more than 10,000 years gone by the time columbus reached our shores. it disappeared with the megafauna, whose calls gave voice to the forests and prairies. (twilight 183) though he may refine thoreau, martin still draws from him: there is still such a thing as the “last entire earth,” and it is this untouched wilderness, prior to all human contact, that must be esteemed. this is hardly turner’s “inventionist” gardening, which in accepting the responsibility of humanity to steward the world of which it is a product, thereby placed trust in the capacity of our species to recognize, create and indeed be natural beauty. rather, pleistocene rewilders are charged with producing their own erasure. in their judgment, our species’ own anthropocentrism warrants this misanthropy. to this extent the pleistocene rewilding project represents the ultimate realization of the wilderness ideal, taking the dualistic divide between humanity and nature to its extreme. indeed, 12,000 b.p. is a much more fertile scene for the mythical exploration of the relation of “man” to the natural world. the columbian threshold of 1492 was always complicated by the presence of native americans, who, despite being ideologically defined as leading ecologically harmonious lives, it was still found necessary to incarcerate on reservations to provide land for settlement and to ensure that the wilderness would fit its “untrammeled” definition. contemporary rewilders are careful to avoid being seen to pass judgment on indigenous peoples; instead they transfer responsibility “to our species as a whole” (martin, twilight 54). such visions of homo sapiens as in itself environmentally destructive evade the political and economic humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 12 distinctions that conservationists have often found troubling. this universalized insistence that the very presence of humanity despoils nature obscures the modern development of industrial and global capitalism and its profound intensification of anthropogenic environmental impacts. contemporary pleistocene rewilding thus perpetuates, even completes, the myth of depoliticized wilderness and its corollary metaphysics of man. the pleistocene epoch here provides the ideal milieu for a drama of human origins. in another twist of what giorgio agamben calls the “anthropological machine” (37-8), western civilization once more puts into question its very humanity through a narrative of hominization, of the becoming-man of man: “his” (pre)historic emergence, the attendant extinctions and environmental destruction, and the redemptive chance to reverse this. scientists’ efforts to restore the natural balance reiterate the central mythical structure of christianity (the paradise-fall-redemption narrative) in the familiar guise of wilderness preservation. though a significantly secularized, scientific version of this story, informed by our contemporary consciousness of eco-apocalypse, it is no less mythic in the manner in which it encompasses the entire history and responsibility of an originally sinful humanity — indeed, the very emergence of human historicity through the sacrifice of the “animal.” the enormous present-day cultural significance of anthropogenic environmental destruction, species extinction, and climate change gives the scientific overkill hypothesis a distinctive narrative appeal. this is the story of humanity as briefly told by zimov: starting with unpretentious ambitions to survive in a hostile environment, homo ended up assuming the powerful role of ecosystem terminator. the mammoth ecosystem was the first large-scale victim, but the global destruction of grasslands only accelerated in the holocene when people invented agriculture and began raising cattle. (zimov 797) this narrative is given more extensive and nuanced attention elsewhere, but the fundamental coordinates remain in place: the emergence of homo sapiens as hunter constituted an ecological event that fundamentally altered the ecology of the world, producing extinctions wherever this new super-species traveled.9 stoczkowski has analysed the recurring configurations of such narratives of hominization and their easy ideological manipulation. our contemporary awareness of environmental destruction intensifies our reception of this distinctive fable of humankind’s power to make extinct. matthew chrulew — reversing extinction: restoration and resurrection in the pleistocene rewilding projects 13 as turner argues, this account of mankind’s “original sin” provides the context for modern attempts at redemption through recreating the lost eden: “zimov’s plan for pleistocene park, though modest on the surface, strongly dramatizes the mythos of human beings standing in for the divine in caring for nature, including the salvific work of recreating it” (“stories” 61). sayre summarizes the logic succinctly: “if the mammoth was driven extinct by humans, as paul martin believes, it follows that humans might atone for that sin by reintroducing the proboscidean order to north america” (83). indeed, the ethical language of guilt and atonement, loss and redemption, is explicit in the arguments of pleistocene rewilders: “humans were probably at least partly responsible for the late pleistocene extinctions in north america, and our subsequent activities have curtailed the evolutionary potential of most remaining large vertebrates. we therefore bear an ethical responsibility to redress these problems” (donlan et al., “re-wilding” 913). the perception of human culpability for the extinction of prehistoric animals such as the mammoth is at the base of the desire to resurrect or simulate them today. in order for such a narrative to function, its narrators must be able to suggest a qualitative distinction between the environment “then” and “now.” for restoration or rewilding to be justified, the area at present must be seen as relatively impoverished. zimov wants to restore the boggy tundra and taiga to the glory of the pleistocene steppe. the current mossy environment is understood as unproductive, indeed “almost lifeless,” in comparison to the bountiful grassland it once was, capable of supporting large populations of herbivores and their predators. similarly, donlan et al. speak of “degraded systems” dominated by “pests and weeds,” in comparison to the “reinvigorated” ecosystems they envisage. justifying such distinctions is a complex task in the context an ecological paradigm that no longer accepts the clementsian telos of natural balance or an “original” condition, describing instead a flux of ever-changing nature. while they assert the scientificity of their pleistocene benchmark, rewilders inevitably draw on cultural values in its justification. sayre situates martin’s project (and by implication the broader pleistocene rewilding) within the history of american colonialism and nationalism, and particularly the eighteenthand nineteenth-century obsession with the mammoth as an original, charismatic, even totemic inhabitant of the continent. he describes how “euroamericans claimed god’s favor for their progress and used the mammoth as a totem for humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 14 their appropriation of the continent’s ancient natural history” (79).10 plans today to rewild america must be seen in continuity with the late eighteenth-century “dispute of the new world,” which saw naturalists like jefferson defending the size and vigor of american fauna against its european detractors like buffon. there is a long history of the american environment, for all its sublime and impassable beauty, being seen as in some way lacking (even “impotent,” in this masculinist discourse of virility) — particularly in terms of its capacity to conceive and nourish charismatic megafauna. though thoreau would elsewhere bemoan his “tamed” and “emasculated country” (i to myself, 261), there is in his famous essay on walking an interesting polemic directed against buffon’s denunciation of the poverty of american nature, of its degraded and emasculated flora and fauna. after quoting a claim to the contrary that new world landscapes are larger and more vibrant than those of the old (everything being higher, bluer, more intense, larger, and longer than those of his rival), thoreau remarks: “i think that in this country there are no, or at most very few, africanæ bestiæ, african beasts, as the romans called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for the habitation of man” (walking, 15). the embarrassing north american lack of megafauna becomes in thoreau’s rhetoric a rather convenient superiority that allows one the comfort of an outdoors lifestyle free of predation. but contemporary pleistocene rewilders can no longer accept such rationalizations; for them, the land is so “peculiarly fitted” for human habitation precisely because the first wave of human overhunting made it so: exit mammoths, lions, and those wonderful sloths. for sayre, “martin in effect argues that buffon was right after all. holocene (that is, post-ice age) america, as measured by the size of its native quadrupeds, is impoverished compared to eurasia” (80). as martin would later put it, “lewis and clark should have found ‘great claw,’ just as jefferson hoped” (twilight 55). this lack, which, contra thoreau and jefferson, they join buffon in bemoaning, brings them not only to imagine, but to seek to bring about, a rewilded north american landscape where one might indeed encounter some africanæ bestiæ in one’s walks through what might once again become the new world. the debate over reintroducing surrogates of extinct species from other bioregions is in large part a contest over the meaning of “native.” this discourse of nativeness and its troubling racial undertones has long been a contested and controversial element of environmentalism.11 in pleistocene rewilding, “deep time lags” in ecological readjustment make possible the introduction of would-be native proxies (barlow 171). as part of what turner calls “the family restoration drama of extinction reversal narratives” (“stories” 63), the rewilding proposals speak of “restor[ing] equid species to their evolutionary homeland” (donlan et al., “re-wilding” 914), and “initiating a north matthew chrulew — reversing extinction: restoration and resurrection in the pleistocene rewilding projects 15 american repatriation” (donlan et al., “pleistocene rewilding” 670). their arguments are permeated with the language of belonging, arguing for a more fundamental “nativity” conceived not in hundreds but rather tens of thousands of years: “even in strictly genealogical terms, it is clear that certain supposedly ‘alien’ mammals have a valid prior claim to the continent. at higher taxonomic levels, some of the ‘natives’ are considerably less american than certain ‘foreigners’” (martin, “pleistocene niches” 219). martin even speaks of empty ecological niches as “job opportunities” for foreign animals, though he does stop short of invoking the statue of liberty’s credo (“give us your endangered, your near-extinct, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free…”). as soulé once put it, while “[f]or many north american ecologists, the psychological adjustment to biogeographically recombined communities will be painful … [a] cheerful way of viewing such faunal mixing is that it represents the restoration to the nearctic of the great paleomammalian megafauna” (235). while there are attempts to undermine this discourse of nativity, such as callicott’s argument that “place of evolutionary origin, far from being a necessary condition of a species nativity, is not even a sufficient condition” (415), the pleistocene rewilders’ critics draw equally on these tropes. for example, rubenstein et al. seek to reassert the accepted meaning, repeatedly applying the title “natives” only to species present in columbian historical time; they propose instead that “one might consider expanding reintroductions of some of north america’s own megafauna … to other portions of their known recent (i.e., historical) ranges.” (235). thus while both sides of the debate might disagree over the precise composition of a “native” ecosystem, their dispute remains within this discourse of bioregional purity. the attempt to reimagine elephants as flagship species of north america, of enormous symbolic as well as material worth, thus draws on this long-held desire to restore to american nature — and thus to the overall health, vitality, and esteem of the people and nation — some of its lost grandeur. with similar nationalist enthusiasm (stone, mammoth 40; turner, “stories” 68), russian news reports on pleistocene park consistently emphasize that the current u.s. projects are following in the footsteps of russian science. siberia is conceived as the mammoth’s homeland, haunted by an extinct creature who belongs to the landscape, a terrain that is incomplete without its flagship species. in both cases, the notions of public good and environmental commonwealth are familiar from the discourse of national parks for the enjoyment of the people. flora and fauna are understood as a public heritage, part of their “birthright,” the soul of the nation. but rather than, as previously, being conceived as a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 16 legacy that was pristine at the sovereign moment of the nation’s institution, this national heritage is one of which the people were robbed before they even arrived on the land. this retrojection of responsibility for ecological imperialism onto the earliest human immigrants obscures the enormous environmental impact of western colonialism and the contemporary capitalist civilization that would remake the world according to the dictates of its science. much environmental philosophy has argued that wilderness areas are as much technological artifacts as natural objects. the proposals of the pleistocene rewilders bear this familiar contradiction: for all their thoreauvian emphasis on a last entire earth, they plan to bring this lost state back into being through unprecedented intervention. while pleistocene park’s utopian goal is an ecology representative of the siberian steppe before human impact, this end can only be achieved through the most sophisticated of scientific and technological activities, such as terraformation and species reintroduction. this is in itself nothing new; as soulé predicted in 1990, “restoration ecology and conservation biology will tend to merge because most so-called wild places on the planet will be relatively denatured and will need intensive rehabilitation and management.” (234). noss similarly argued that, “in almost all cases, representing ecosystems in protected areas of sufficient size to assure viability is possible today only through restoration. for future parks or wilderness areas to represent the diversity that greeted the first european visitors, they will have to be ‘grown rather than decreed’” (529-30). he thus encouraged restoration ecologists (whose initial tendency and capacity had been relatively small-scale) to “think big.” but in order to represent the diversity that greeted the first human (rather than european) “visitors,” pleistocene rewilders must think more than big; they must think mammoth. eschewing the “handsoff approach” (donlan et al., “re-wilding” 914), they propose not just preservation, nor indeed restoration, but the resurrection of the ecosystem itself — the siberian and north american mammoth steppe in all its primeval grandeur. the extent of intervention could be understood in terms of baudrillard’s conception of “simulacra.” while zimov began with the use of sophisticated computer modeling of ecosystems, he progressed by seeking to repeat his models in the ecosystem itself: “a large-scale reintroduction of mammalian grazers to tundra would be the best experimental validation of our simulation model” (zimov et al., “steppe-tundra transition” 782). as he states elsewhere, “[s]cientifically, pleistocene park is important because it directly tests the role of large herbivores in creating and maintaining grassland ecosystems, something that can only be surmised but not proven from the matthew chrulew — reversing extinction: restoration and resurrection in the pleistocene rewilding projects 17 paleorecord” (zimov 798). it is precisely through real-life, full-size simulation of a pleistocene ecosystem that he sought to test his hypotheses about the functioning of said ecosystem. here, indeed, the map and the territory entirely coincide. the most spectacular interventionist undertaking associated with pleistocene rewilding is the project to resurrect the extinct woolly mammoth itself. it was the discovery of mammoth bones that was in part responsible for raising, in victorian science, the very possibility of the extinction of an entire species, previously considered impossible on theological grounds.12 having since been prominent in debates over the mechanisms of extinction (the overkill, overchill, and overill hypotheses), mammoths are now central to plans to overturn it. cloning has been proposed as an important technology in the conservation of endangered animals.13 others hope that extracting dna from frozen mammoth carcasses emerging from the siberian tundra will enable them to return the species to the world. many have expressed concern at the ethical implications, while others have insisted that it is simply not possible, with the dna being too fragmented and degraded.14 while not central to either the russian or american rewilding initiatives, this project does crystallize their logic of redemption and renewal, in which extinct species and ecosystems are no longer incontrovertibly lost; rather than an eternal end, extinction is now seen as reversible. for turner it is the conceptual framework of genetic science that makes it possible to imagine escaping the black hole of extinction. she describes the impact of “genome time,” where what was once articulated as a long, irreversible evolutionary process is now seen as an endless stream of data, of permutations subject to human control. in allowing animal species to be conceived as made up of information — which, despite the extinction of the species, can still be found in the frozen carcasses of mammoths — genetics performs a significant epistemological revolution: “in genome time, evolutionary histories, including extinction narratives, are revised, forestalling or even reversing absolute endpoints in the endless reproducibility of the dna code” (“stories” 59). extinction thus becomes “open-ended”; what once was lost can now be returned. this applies not only to the more speculative mammoth resurrection, but also the pragmatic measures of zimov, martin, and the like, who lobby for the replacement of extinct animals through the introduction of surrogate species as “taxon substitutions.” zimov’s logic is that since “the area near cherskii formerly supported large herds of bison, a large-bodied bison that was morphologically similar to the present wood bison humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 18 of northern canada” (zimov, et al., “pleistocene park” 2), then the introduction of canadian bison to fill this now-empty ecological niche is justified. martin and others make similar claims for the role of elephants in the great plains. the capacity of anthropogenic climate change to put certain species of plants and animals at risk of extinction makes translocation or “assisted migration” of nonhuman environmental refugees to suitable habitat an unfortunate necessity. as barlow puts it, “as climate shifts regionally (and globally), where might threatened species be encouraged to go, and how will they get there?” (167). turner argues that in the prevailing discourse of “genome time,” genetic similarity is enough to render two species “equivalent” in terms of their suitability to inhabit an environment. however, it is not such internalities, but in fact the externalities of ecology — which defines animals in terms of their functions within an ecosystem — by which such arguments are framed. similar functional roles in an ecosystem (such as eating moss or weeds) are seen to qualify species as proxies or “ecological analogs.” once again, while these controversial proposals do undermine a certain idea of bioregional purity (which only considers animals as native if they were present in the historical memory of current inhabitants), they in fact do so by reference to a purity of a deeper kind. and yet, for all their managerial character, underlying these species reintroduction proposals is a robust conception of ecology that considers animals to be important agents in managing ecosystems precisely through their “intensive disturbance.” zimov argues that “[g]rowth of grasses in the current tundra environment is stimulated by … intensive disturbance by humans … or animals” (zimov et al., “steppe-tundra transition” 774). such intervention might be conceptualized, following foucault’s work on governmentality, as a form of “environmentality,” the management of nature through its particular, nonhuman forms of agency, so as to encourage its own selfsufficiency. certainly, the wild becomes considered as programmable, and governed according to scientifically defined elements.15 yet as foreman puts it, “the goal of wilderness designation is not only to prevent destruction of untrammeled places, but also to help ecosystems become self-regulated (self-willed, untrammeled) again” (194). eschewing the apocalyptic logic of zoological gardens and frozen genetic archives that function as perpetual arks, the rewilding projects refuse to wait for the cessation of habitation destruction. instead, they make the utopian claim that if you bring them, it will grow. it is through the return of the animals — and their intensive impact on what are considered degraded ecosystems — that their habitat is to be restored. indeed, the importance placed on the reintroduced animals’ strenuous environmental interventions is such that ecologist paul koch suggests that “it may not be radical matthew chrulew — reversing extinction: restoration and resurrection in the pleistocene rewilding projects 19 enough” if “bison and other grazers won’t inflict sufficient damage on the mosses. mammoths and woolly rhinos … were more effective landscapers, clearing snow, rooting up vegetation, and knocking down bushes and small trees” (stone, “a bold plan” 33). thus koch advocates introducing asian elephants and white rhinos to pleistocene park, a proposal that he imagines would drive ecologists “apoplectic.” but though the mammoth’s possible extant surrogates might not be suited to the siberian climate, and though the attempts to resurrect living mammoths to inhabit the park might never come to fruition, zimov has his own method of replicating the enormous beast’s impact on the vegetation. at the pragmatic scientist’s disposal is another, rather atypical surrogate for the effect of the mammoth on his neo-pleistocene ecosystem: listed among the park’s facilities is a decommissioned soviet tank. the tank (photo by laurel mcfadden) this obsolete piece of military equipment is today reused for the purposes of scientific devenir-mammouth. laurel mcfadden gives an account on her blog of her time at pleistocene park as part of an arctic photography project, in which she describes a trip she took on the recycled war machine: sergei drove like a man with a vendetta against trees. oblivious to old pathways in front of us, he chose instead to verve off and pulverize everything in our path. the entire purpose of the tank is to mimic the damage that a mammoth would cause, so, in sergei’s words, “the mammoth is not careful, we are not careful.” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 20 the tank episode confirms in dramatic fashion that pleistocene park is not your ordinary conservation project. zimov’s mad mammoth jaunt perfectly dramatizes the conflicts endemic to resurrection ecology, juxtaposing the hard-headed ecologist’s perception of the degraded tundra needing “disturbance” with the landscape photographer’s sentiments at the ripping up of trees. in the employment of a tank as the surrogate for the mammoth’s dominant and vigorous role as ecosystem engineer, the ghosts of soviet military strength and the ghosts of siberian megafauna overlap at the forefront of russian science. in the absence of revivified mammoths brought back from the abyss of extinction, it seems, a tank will have to do. exploding some trees (photo by laurel mcfadden) pleistocene park, and the analogous sites proposed for north america, are fascinating contemporary heterotopias, “other spaces” of biological practice and ecological dreaming. in our age of technological globalization, these uncanny reconstructions of ancient ecologies present a striking anachronism, strung between the prehistoric and the futural. rather than simply conserving the dwindling remains of a supposedly pure wildness, they imagine and conjure the future return of dislocated and even extinct animals and plants, or their representatives from other regions, and situate these animals and their habitats as themselves productive agents in the process of rewilding. in this peculiar biogeography, what we naively understand as “native” and “exotic” species are deliberately combined according to a scientific plan that aspires to matthew chrulew — reversing extinction: restoration and resurrection in the pleistocene rewilding projects 21 prehuman plenitude. fully accepting of anachronistic and anatopistic floral and faunal mixing, and at the same time nostalgic for a pristine and impossible humanless utopia, they embody and intensify the famous contradictions that inhabit wilderness philosophy. as heterotopias that “effectively enact” a prehistoric utopia in a real geographical place, they put in question, not any particular element of society, but rather history and civilization themselves, and their subject the human species. but just to that extent, we must wonder how far they are the product of a culture that has yet to fully confront the natural history of that species, and the ecological history of its own colonial and capitalist modernity. in our tinkering with the anthropological machine after the end of nature, we can no longer be content simply to highlight the performative contradiction of recreating wilderness through human technology. yet the sacrificial anthropology of pleistocene rewilding hoards to the human such power and blame that it can only imagine and assent to a nature redeemed from humanity as such — which remains, ironically, an overkill of anthropology. acknowledgments this essay was greatly enriched by the german historical institute’s “civilising nature: national parks in transnational historical perspective” conference in washington, june 2008. thanks also to participants at the minding animals conference in newcastle, july 2009, to the journal editors and reviewers, and to deborah bird rose for insight and patience. i am grateful to laurel mcfadden for permission to use her photographs. notes 1. the touchstone statement of this position is mckibben. 2.turner’s provocative essays in harper’s include “cultivating” and “field guide.” for discussion, see baldwin, de luce, and pletsch; and o’sullivan and pletsch. 3. a recent plea for rewilding comes from the somewhat mellowed pen of once notorious monkey-wrencher dave foreman. for analysis of rewilding the world over, see fraser. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 22 4. see, for example, baldwin, de luce, and pletsch; cronon; callicott and nelson; nelson and callicott. 5. see zimov, schuur, and chapin. 6. see martin, “the last entire earth”; martin and burney; martin, twilight. 7. for a sample of criticisms and defences of pleistocene rewilding, see “back to the future”; rubenstein et al.; caro; hintz; barlow 169-173; fraser 294-299. 8. on the motif of “man the hunter” in post-war anthropological thought, see cartmill. 9. on the overkill hypothesis, see, for example, martin and klein; macphee; flannery 173-205; foreman 25-44; martin, twilight 48-57. 10. for more on the mysterious beasts sought by frontiersmen, see semonin. 11. see, for example, coates; o’brien. 12. on the scientific upheavals caused by mammoth remains, see van riper. 13. see lanza, dresser, and damiani; chrulew. 14. for accounts and analysis of the mammoth resurrection projects, see stone, mammoth; salsberg; tschentscher. 15. on the government of nature, see darier; rinfret. works cited agamben, giorgio. the open: man and animal. trans. kevin attel. stanford: stanford up, 2004. “back to the future.” the economist 18 august 2005. <http://www.economist.com/node/4292600> baldwin, a. dwight, jr., judith de luce, and carl pletsch, eds. beyond preservation: restoring and inventing landscapes. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1994. matthew chrulew — reversing extinction: restoration and resurrection in the pleistocene rewilding projects 23 barlow, connie. “deep time lags: lessons from pleistocene ecology.” gaia in turmoil: climate change, biodepletion, and earth ethics in an age of crisis. ed. eileen crist and h. bruce rinker. cambridge: mit press, 2010. 165-173. baudrillard, jean. simulacra and simulation. trans. shiela glaser. ann arbor: u of michigan p, 1994. callicott, j. baird. “choosing appropriate temporal and spatial scales for ecological restoration.” journal of bioscience 27:4 (2002): 409-20. callicott, j. baird and michael p. nelson, eds. the great new wilderness debate. athens: u of georgia p, 1998. caro, t. “the pleistocene re-wilding gambit.” trends in ecology and evolution 22:6 (2007): 281–283. cartmill, matt. view to a death in the morning: hunting and nature through history. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1993. chaloupka, william and r. mcgreggor cawley. “the great wild hope: nature, environmentalism, and the open secret.” in the nature of things: language, politics and the environment. ed. jane bennett and william chaloupka. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1993. 3-23. chapin, terry. northeast science station website. january 28, 2011. <http://terrychapin.org/station.html> chrulew, matthew. “managing love and death at the zoo: the biopolitics of endangered species preservation.” australian humanities review (forthcoming 2011). coates, peter. american perceptions of immigrant and invasive species: strangers on the land. berkeley: u of california p, 2006. cronon, william, ed. uncommon ground: rethinking the human place in nature. new york: w. w. norton, 1996. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 24 —————. “the trouble with wilderness; or, getting back to the wrong nature.” in cronon. 69-90. crichton, michael. jurassic park. london: arrow, 1991. darier, eric, ed. discourses of the environment. malden: blackwell, 1999. denevan, william m. “the pristine myth: the landscape of the americas in 1492.” in callicott and nelson. 414-442. donlan, josh, et al. “re-wilding north america.” nature 436:18 (2005): 913-14. —————. “pleistocene rewilding: an optimistic agenda for twenty-first century conservation.” the american naturalist 168:5 (2006): 660-81. flannery, tim. the eternal frontier: an ecological history of north america and its peoples. melbourne: text publishing, 2001. foreman, dave. rewilding north america: a vision for conservation in the 21st century. washington: island press, 2004. foucault, michel. “of other spaces.” trans. jay miskowiec. diacritics 16:1 (1986): 22-27. fraser, caroline. rewilding the world: dispatches from the conservation revolution. new york: metropolitan books, 2009. hintz, john. “some political problems for rewilding nature.” ethics, place and environment 10: 2 (june 2007): 177-192. lanza, robert p., betsy l. dresser, and philip damiani. “cloning noah’s ark.” scientific american (november 2000): 84-89. leopold, aldo. “wilderness as a form of land use.” in callicott and nelson. 75-84. macphee, ross d. e., ed. extinctions in near time: causes, contexts, and consequences. new york: kluwer academic/plenum publishers, 1999. matthew chrulew — reversing extinction: restoration and resurrection in the pleistocene rewilding projects 25 martin, paul s. “pleistocene niches for alien animals.” bioscience 20:4 (1970): 218-21. —————. “the last entire earth.” wild earth 2:4 (1992/93): 29-32. —————. twilight of the mammoths: ice age extinctions and the rewilding of america. berkeley: u of california p, 2005. martin, paul s. and david burney. “bring back the elephants!” wild earth 9 (1999): 5765. martin, paul s. and richard d. klein, eds. quaternary extinctions: a prehistoric revolution. tucson: the u of arizona p, 1984. mcfadden, laurel. “day 322: pleistocene park.” may 21, 2008. <http://coldphoto.blogspot.com/2007/06/day-322-pleistocene-park.html> mckibben, bill. the end of nature. new york: random house, 1989. nelson, michael p. and j. baird callicott. the wilderness debate rages on: continuing the great new wilderness debate. athens: u of georgia p, 2008. noss, reed f. “wilderness recovery: thinking big in restoration ecology.” in callicott and nelson. 521-39. o’sullivan, gerry and carl pletsch. “inventing arcadia: an interview with frederick turner.” the humanist 53:6 (nov/dec 1993): 9-18. rinfret, sara. “controlling animals: power, foucault, and species management.” society & natural resources 22 (2009): 571-578. robinson, kim stanley. red mars. london: harpercollins, 1992. —————. ed. future primitive: the new ecotopias. new york: tor, 1994. rubenstein, dustin r., et al. “pleistocene park: does re-wilding north america represent sound conservation for the 21st century?” biological conservation 132 (oct 2006): 232-38. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 26 salsberg, corey a. “resurrecting the woolly mammoth: science, law, ethics, politics, and religion.” stanford technology law review 1 (2000): 1-30. sayre, gordon. “the mammoth: endangered species or vanishing race?” journal for early modern cultural studies 1:1 (2001): 63-87. seddon, philip j. “from reintroduction to assisted colonization: moving along the conservation translocation spectrum.” restoration ecology 18:6 (nov 2010): 796-802. semonin, paul. american monster: how the nation’s first prehistoric creature became a symbol of national identity. new york: new york up, 2000. soulé, michael e. “the onslaught of alien species, and other challenges in the coming decades.” conservation biology 4:3 (1990): 233-39. stoczkowski, wiktor. explaining human origins: myth, imagination and conjecture. cambridge: cambridge up, 2002. stone, richard. “a bold plan to re-create a long-lost siberian ecosystem.” science 282:2 (oct 1998): 31-34. —————. mammoth: the resurrection of an ice age giant. cambridge: perseus publishing, 2001. thoreau, henry david. i to myself: an annotated selection from the journal of henry d. thoreau. ed. jeffrey s. cramer. new haven: yale up, 2007. —————. walking. pennsylvania state university, 1998. <http://www2.hn.psu.edu/faculty/jmanis/thoreau/walking.pdf> tschentscher, frank. “too mammoth an undertaking.” science 286:10 (dec 1999): 2084. turner, frederick. “cultivating the american garden: toward a secular view of nature.” harper’s 271 (aug 1985): 45-52. —————. “a field guide to the synthetic landscape: toward a new environmental ethic.” harper’s 276 (april 1988): 49-55. matthew chrulew — reversing extinction: restoration and resurrection in the pleistocene rewilding projects 27 turner, stephanie s. “open-ended stories: extinction narratives in genome time.” literature and medicine 26:1 (spring 2007): 55-82. van riper, a. bowdoin. men among the mammoths: victorian science and the discovery of human prehistory. chicago: the u of chicago p, 1993. zimov, sergei a. “pleistocene park: return of the mammoth’s ecosystem.” science 308:6 (may 2005): 796-98. zimov, sergei, v.i. chuprynin, a.p. oreshko, f.s. chapin, j.f. reynolds, and m.c. chapin. “steppe-tundra transition: a herbivore-driven biome shift at the end of the pleistocene.” the american naturalist 146:5 (1995): 765-94. zimov, sergei a., edward a. g. schuur, and f. stuart chapin, iii. “permafrost and the global carbon budget.” science 312:16 (june 2006): 1612-13. zimov, sergei a., f. stuart chapin, iii, and melissa chapin, “pleistocene park: reestablishment of a functional steppe ecosystem in northeast siberia.” 1-9. may 20, 2008. <http://www.faculty.uaf.edu/fffsc/pleistocene%20park%20cana%20-%20eco.pdf> microsoft word grebowicz-pettman-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:1 margret grebowicz the holographic human dominic pettman. human error: species-being and media machines. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2011. 360 pp. this tour de force work consists of a series of attempts to articulate and correct some metaphysical errors in humanist, anti-humanist, and posthumanist literature. perhaps the greatest and most general “human error” that this book manages to correct is the exclusion of the machine from the literature of the animal turn. even current talk, on the heels of giorgio agamben, of the anthropogenic or anthropological “machine” falls short of really exploring the technological nature of humanist logic. from the first page, which places us in front of our tvs, watching planet earth on the discovery channel, through chapters that examine voice recording technologies, the camera, the telephone, the turing test, time capsules, and crude oil extraction, pettman’s engagement with the question of the animal is deeply technologically inflected. this is to be expected given pettman’s other work, like love and other technologies (2006), in which he shows that our most erotic, libidinal, and “spiritual” modes of being depend on tools, prosthetics, and media, all in the business of trying to capture the elusive human element, that mythic thing that sets us apart from “other animals.” in fact, we not only depend on technologies for our most human modes of being, but these modes themselves are technologies. pettman amends agamben’s insight with a more complex machinery, or three machines together working as one: “crudely put, ‘the world’ is no more and no less than the ‘objective’ interaction of the anthropological machine, the zoological machine, and the medialogical machine (as opposed to the first framing and determining the other two)” (205). this negentropic tendency towards complexification, as well as the possibility that we may all be automata (which has haunted philosophy since descartes looked out his window) is at the heart of pettman’s own style, marked by quick, intelligent puns and bursting at the seams with multi-directional references to high and low culture, so that rather than the expected, linear experience of reading a book, one undergoes something that feels more like an interactive digital humanities experiment. this is more than a response to the general demand to write differently, a serious demand, as pettman and the philosophers whose authority he invokes (derrida, haraway, agamben, deleuze and guattari, lyotard, and baudrillard) know all too well. the nature of the subject calls for what pettman calls a “methodology of metonymy.” “human error is evident humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 170 wherever human eyes care to look without the rose-tinted glasses bequeathed to us by our forebears. a critique of such, figured in the singular, understands that the subject itself is holographic. that is to say, the mythic, originary error is fractured into an infinite number of micromistakes, which themselves comprehensively reflect the primal image…” (34). the human poses unique challenges to the practice of critique. for those of us interested in the special place reserved for sexuality in the production of the human, this book houses some great metonymic moments, including a history of court cases in which animals were prosecuted in bestiality cases for seducing humans, a great reading of the closeted gayness of timothy treadwell in werner herzog’s grizzly man, and a reading of steven soderbergh’s film the girlfriend experience in relation to the fuel economy. the latter appears in the excellent fourth chapter, “the war on terra: from political economy to libidinal ecology,” which (finally!) includes the voice of jean-françois lyotard in the conversation about sustainability. pettman gives a detailed, edgy reading of lyotard’s early and under-read work, libidinal economy, for today’s politics of expenditure, scarcity, and desire, deftly invoking one of lyotard’s own critical paradigms, namely bataille. this chapter also includes readings of timothy morton, allan stoekl, and bernard stiegler, in the course of a sophisticated analysis of the outermost metaphysical limits of the very notions of ecology and sustainability, words we habitually throw around as if we knew what they meant. even rapper nelly makes an appearance in the problematics of today’s terminal capitalism, in what is possibly my favorite passage in the book: “[lyotard] thereby rather gleefully removes the ever-beckoning exit sign from the constantly burning movie palace of contemporary life. but in the same gesture, he grabs the microphone and announces, ‘ladies and gentlemen, it’s getting hot in here. so take off all your clothes.’” (182) the book’s title and cover, which shows a man observing a mouse with some sort of visual prosthesis attached to his head, leads one to believe the book is about animals and not about the environment. but chapter four is a significant contribution to the environmental humanities and could (perhaps even should) be developed into a booklength work in its own right (with a very different cover). in his conclusion, pettman raises an excellent point regarding the methodology of critiques of anthropocentrism. they tend to lead to more and more anthropocentrism precisely as they center on the limitations of the human capacity to truly, deeply, freely self-reflect. he calls it “metanarcissism.” “there is a jouissance in being confronted by our limitations. we can be mesmerized by our own capacity to be captivated” (204). in other words, all this literature about how we have never been human is still talking about us, and perhaps more ecstatically than ever. there is an air of amateur porn about margret grebowicz – the holographagic human 171 this spectacle of human weakness in the face of anthropogenesis, and “one cannot help but wonder about the relation between simulation and stimulation” when the anthropogenic machine is a mirror to which we find ourselves constantly and irresistibly drawn in order to watch ourselves caressing ourselves (206). far from being passive victims of the machine, we participate in it like the gambling addict pulling the lever. this book does a wonderful job of showing that our relationship to our humanity is not merely ideological, but (auto) affective, or that foucault’s power/knowledge hybrid must be extended into something like power/knowledge/desire. of/for what? the anthro-machine itself is not one thing, but “is customized by all of us, according to the protocological limits of our conceptual inheritance,” so the answer to this will always itself be customized (10). as pettman points out, when scholarship in this area is critical of other scholarship in this area, it is on the grounds of some illicit anthropocentrism or humanism being snuck in through the back door. this is especially evident in pettman’s own reading of what might be called the derrida-haraway encounter in haraway’s book, when species meet (although it is not a real encounter, since derrida died prior to the publication of when species meet and his own book, the animal that therefore i am, and thus cannot respond). derrida exposes the humanism in levinas, haraway exposes the humanism in derrida, and pettman exposes the humanism in haraway: “despite its open, curious, worldly intentions, haraway’s love for her dog still shows subtle signs of circulating within a familiar libidinal economy…” (95). haraway, however, is a very different sort of thinker, always at a slight distance from the boys’ club of postwar continental theory, and i worry that pettman may be too quick in using the same tools on her work that he uses on agamben and others. she knows, for instance, that the accepted forms of pet-love fall prey to projective narcissism and parochialism (89), and is very critical of pet keeping on those grounds, calling for a levinasian type of love between companion animals. she knows that writing about domestic animals and the economy of the family evokes familiar structures and figures, and that is largely what sets her apart from the thinking of becoming-animal. the figures she puts at the center of her ethical questions — the service dog, the foetus about to be aborted, the experimental animal, the chicken about to be eaten — are ones about which we cannot weave the kinds of fantasies about becoming-them that we can about peregrine falcons (95-101), bears (47-50), and totemic rabbits (44, and the author’s latest book, look at the bunny: totem, taboo, technology [2013]), precisely because we have never been not-them. thus, the criticism that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 172 haraway keeps it too close to home misses the mark, in a sense, since she never strives to leave home in the first place. but even this, the only moment that gives me pause, contributes to what i consider a great strength of this book, namely the way it invites discussion and continuation of its own, unlimited project. pettman’s metonymies form an ecstatically fragmented work that begins in media res and need never end. the derrida-haraway encounter is one of many conversations in this work that could go on forever, precisely because pettman has framed it so well and linked it so intricately to other texts of philosophy and pop culture. i agree completely, for instance, that haraway’s own charge that derrida strays so far from home that he falls into anthropocentric narcissism — because in all his meditations on what man calls “the animal,” he never once wonders what the animal is thinking — is too dismissive, and that his exhaustive critique of the forgetting of the animal from “the supposedly antihumanistic turn of postwar continental philosophy” is a much greater resource for haraway’s work than she has so far allowed it to be (94). in particular, derrida’s articulation of the ontological presuppositions, or, to use pettman’s term, micromistakes behind the question “does the animal speak?” is in productive alignment with haraway’s ongoing struggle to work out what she means by “semiotic agency” in the case of animals, a fascinating problem that continues to haunt posthumanist scholarship in spite of the obvious anthropocentrism and -morphism governing all imaginaries of what counts as language. in connection with these concerns, the very short, third chapter, “after the beep” takes up the role that voice recording plays in the “endless identity crisis known as humanity” (126). given the privileged status of language in the production of the human, and the history of the claim that the speaking animal can never be merely more than a machine-like imitation of true, human speech (right down to the great ape sign language experiments), pettman is correct to amend the current literature with a cultural history of the obsession with recording the human voice. these are the particular moments that hooked me, but i predict that readers will find their own customized hooks in human error, and find themselves inspired to write from one of the many starting points this fascinating book presents. beyond its rather fuzzy and mobile boundaries lies the vast sea of human micromistakes yet to be cataloged. musing about the boundary of a work or a discourse, pettman openly invites us to do just this: “the true traffic in ideas allows for the fact that grass will grow on both sides of the fence. judging degrees of greenness can thus be a collective project.” (34) microsoft word brown-gordon-pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:1 joan gordon loop-holes of possibility in the literary imagination laura brown. homeless dogs and melancholy apes: humans and other animals in the modern literary imagination. ithaca, ny: cornell up, 2010. xi + 156 pp. $35 hc. laura brown is the wendell anderson professor of english and a vice-provost at cornell university, and has a specialty in 18th-century english literature with interests in gender, race, and imperialism. homeless dogs and melancholy apes is, then, a literary examination of the roles of these two animals primarily in 18thcentury english literature as it works through matters of gender, race, and imperialism. the preface tells us that the book arose from an undergraduate seminar on “the idea of the pet in literature and history” (ix), and perhaps for this reason, or perhaps because brown prefers it, the book is written in a very clear and direct style. the preface also asks “which literary animal most fully expresses the raw alterity of animal-kind? which are most evidently people in animal suits?” (ix). at least for the purposes of this volume, the answer to each question is: dogs and apes. this is a slim volume, and even so, it feels padded. here lies its major fault, which i would like to get out of the way now, before i move on to the content of the book and to its virtues. many points are made repeatedly, major ideas are developed with more leisure than is effective, plots are given with too much detail, many quotes are offered in support of points when fewer would have been satisfactory: all this suggests that turning a collection of articles into a book (three of the five chapters had appeared in some form previously) was harder than had been expected, a lesson i must keep in mind myself as i write article after article on similar subjects. a smaller fault lies in the choice of books. not being an expert on the 18th century, i found the scope of earlier texts enlightening and am eager to explore a number of the works she mentioned. but why does brown then skip most of the 19th century and close with a single work from the 20th, paul auster=s timbuktu (1999)? perhaps it would have been good as well to justify why she selected the two animals on which she concentrates, dogs and apes, but there is so much literature on each, and they do seem so central to our concerns about other animals, that this did not bother me as much. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 109 the book=s introductory chapter, “speculative space: the rise of the animal in the modern imagination,” begins with a lovely reading of melincourt; or, sir oran haut-ton (1818) by thomas love peacock. sir oran is a noble and gallant orangutan, and brown offers supple interpretations of the novel that illustrate the theses she will be tracking: that the animal=s portrayal “evoke[s] animal-kind in order to define and advance prominent concepts of human virtue,” that he is used satirically “to undercut such ideals,” and that “new depictions of nonhuman animals might lean on antique or established traditions” (3); but also that sir oran interrogates notions of the great chain of being (4), that he “embodies the modern question of the role of speech in defining the human,” that he “references the contemporary humanitarian movements that advocated the custodianship of animals,” “reproduce[s] a disturbing contemporary fantasy of ape-human miscegenation” (5), and, in short, “provides an object lesson in the flexibility of the representation of animal-kind in the modern period” (6). this clear and flexible multiple reading is typical of brown=s best development and it outshines the merely repetitious sections. the chapters that follow alternately discuss of apes and dogs in literature to demonstrate her claim that “the aesthetic effects of animals and the kinds of conceptual or ontological thinking that they inspire are inseparable and systematically coordinated” (21). further, they allow us to imagine new ways of thinking about human and animal difference that are unavailable to conventional understanding: they are good, as levi-strauss says, to think with. chapter two, “the mirror scene: the orangutan, the ancients, and the cult of sensibility,” looks at the 18th-century consideration of the ape as a reflection of the human, a view that emphasizes similarity rather than difference. brown sees two theses at work: first, that “mythological beings are replaced by apes” in this age of reason, and second, that attitudes of the time “anticipate notions of natural sensibility by projecting, through extended accounts of ape behavior, this being=s inherent modesty, sympathy, and benevolence.” the two theses, she says, “operate through two of the most prominent cultural and aesthetic modes of the period � the neoclassical and the sentimental” (29). brown then examines a variety of 18th-century non-fiction accounts of apes, paying particular attention to edward tyson=s orang-outang, sive homo sylvestris: or, the anatomy of a pygmie joan gordon — “loopholes of possibility in the literary imagination” 110 (1699). the book=s title indicates how fluid the terms were at the time for what is actually a chimpanzee, even including a term later associated with the bushmen of africa. this elision, brown makes clear, does not so much suggest that “pygmie” humans are really a species of “lower” animals but that humans are very similar to apes. she cites linnaeus: “i can discover scarcely any mark by which man can be distinguished from the apes” (32). an accretion of examples leads her to claim convincingly that in the eighteenth-century imagination ... the hominoid ape is not a singular or a coherent individual.... [but] a composite being, stitched together from remnants of past traditions and awkwardly linking those precedents with contemporary anecdote and empirical observation. (35). her further discussion of anatomy of a pygmie; richard blackmore=s popularization of it (lay-monastery, 1714); the composite entity martinus scriblerus=s parody of tyson, an essay of the learned martinus scriblerus, concerning the origine of sciences (1728); gulliver=s travels (1726); and the contemporary accounts of “the five-month period in 1738 when a young chimpanzee ... was put on display” in london (53) illustrate how the growing interest in species taxonomy and the sentimental values of the sensibility cult converge to produce a relativist view of the relationship between humans and other animals. by this time, i was making note after note connecting these works, and brown=s readings of them, to frankenstein (1816). and that is how she ends the chapter, seeing “shelley=s monster [as] ... a weird collation of the accounts and images that created this being in the eighteenth-century imagination” and “as a companion text to the contemporaneous melincourt” (62) discussed in the introductory chapter. no direct connections, however, are made with issues of race, gender, or imperialism, although brown supplies plenty of material for the reader to make those connections. the tempest=s (1611) caliban also anachronistically haunts the chapter, but he makes no appearance either. obviously, the chapter is good to think with and it certainly makes me want to read melincourt and reread gulliver. indeed, i found this chapter to be the most stimulating, successful, and well developed of the book. it will be very useful for those of us in animal studies who are considering the recent spate of ape fictions such as sara gruen=s ape house (2010) and benjamin hale=s the evolution of bruno humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 111 littlemore (2011), alongside all the ethological and sociobiological work by frans de waal and others. while there is also a rich contemporary literature about dogs and quite a few ethological books as well, the next chapter, on dogs, did not seem as useful to me. chapter three, “immoderate love: the lady and the lapdog,” describes an “inter-species intimacy” both satirized and sentimentalized in 18thand 19thcentury fiction. as pet-keeping changes “the human relationship with nonhuman animals” (67), the pet begins to “play a complex cultural role in this period: as commodity, companion, paragon, proxy, and even kin” (69). brown links this way of thinking about animals to colonialism, slavery, and misogyny. she looks at “the misogynist tradition of the 1680s and 1690s” in poetry, finding, with perhaps too exhausting a series of examples, that “the lapdog seems to be both an inappropriate or perverse sexual partner for the woman and also a metonym for female sexuality” (82). in these works, as in later satirical works about women and their dogs, brown sees that “the structures of sudden inversion that derive from augustan satire and that provide the figure of the lady and lapdog with its distinctive impact continue to inform that depiction of animal-kind” (77). the fourth chapter, “violent intimacy: the monkey and the marriage plot,” considers how athe monkey is the missing link between satiric treatments of marriage in the early eighteenth-century dramatic comedy of manners, on the one hand, and one of the major canonical idealizations of marriage in the domestic novel of the latter part of the century, on the other” (91). brown uses as examples frances burney=s evelina; or, the history of a young lady=s entrance into the world (1778) and several plays, including william taverner=s the artful husband (1735) and, more famously, william wycherly=s the country wife (1675), in support of her thesis. unfortunately, the chapter gives too much plot summary and quotation and too little analysis to be effective. it improves at the end when brown begins to link the observations to some more general comments on how these works “open up a range of dissonant views of companionate marriage” (110), but the hints of relevance to growing racism in portrayals of apes as colonialism increases are never developed. joan gordon — “loopholes of possibility in the literary imagination” 112 like the second chapter, the book=s final one, “dog narrative: itinerancy, diversity, and the elysium of dogs,” makes us want to seek out and read several works of fiction: cervantes=s el coloquia de los perros {the dialogue of the dogs] (1613) and francis coventry=s the history of pompey the little; or, the life and adventures of a lapdog (1751) among them. also like the second chapter, brown makes stimulating use of these works. she summarizes the chapter=s major themes: by using or ventriloquizing human language, by occupying the traditionally human-centered role of literary protagonist, by wandering through the diverse world of human experience, by occupying the place of the displaced or the dispossessed as well that [sic] of privilege or fashion, and by undercutting claims to genealogical hierarchy and social regulation, the imaginary dog creates a unique cultural opportunity to consider an alternative to the structures and limits of the present day. (138). the chapter=s only weakness is the lack of transition or justification when brown suddenly moves on to paul auster=s timbuktu. nevertheless, that novel does, like the earlier ones brown discusses, offer an elysium of dogs, a dog-paradise (138) for itinerant creatures that “indicates the speculative space that animal-kind lends to the human imagination” (143), a place margaret scott gatty, in the novel worlds not realized (1856), calls “a loop-hole of possibility” (qtd. 138). i wish that the entire book were as strong as chapters one, two, and five, that the connections to race, gender, and imperialism had been more thoroughly developed, and that less valuable space had been taken up by summary and repetition, but the volume will nevertheless be very helpful for scholars who explore those very gaps. the book itself therefore provides “a loop-hole of possibility” to think with. microsoft word ark h u m a n i m a l i a 1:2 lynda birke filling the ark leslie irvine, filling the ark: animal welfare in disasters. philadelphia: temple university press, 2009. 166 pp. $24.50. as i write this, news comes in of the devastation wrought by the terrible earthquake in haiti. media coverage shows harrowing pictures of people being pulled from the wreckage, or of rows of bodies in makeshift mortuaries. the horror is made worse because the country is very poor, with many people living in shanty towns, and because air and sea ports are wrecked, making additional difficulties for those bringing in international aid. gradually, the scale of the human tragedy becomes clear, and every day the newspapers tell us more about rescue attempts and the gruelling problems facing survivors. but inevitably, and perhaps rightly, they will concentrate on the human story: what they will not tell us is that many of the tens of thousands who lost their lives this week will not be human. quite soon after the earthquake struck, a parallel rescue attempt began, and the animal relief coalition for haiti was established1 to provide mobile clinics for nonhumans injured in the crisis. leslie irvine’s book, filling the ark, examines human responses to animals’ needs following such disasters. reports from haiti followed a typical pattern: first, the breaking news of the calamity; then, accounts of the numbers of people dead or missing, followed after a short while by reports (usually via email to those of us on animal listservs) of animal rescue efforts. laudable though these activities (and the speedy response of global internet communities) are, the response begs one important question: which animals will be rescued? as irvine notes, it is overwhelmingly pets who will be brought to clinics, and pets who will be taken to temporary shelters. irvine’s book underlines, and sheds new light on, our complex and ambivalent relationships with other animals, or the rest of the natural world. at times, individual animals count: as rescue teams dealt with the aftermath of katrina, each animal was allocated a data card, to facilitate matching animals with their guardians. efforts were made to provide rescue plans to allow companion animals to be taken to safety. meanwhile, animals who live only as numbers have no such luxury. 134 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) other animals — on farms, in laboratories — will undoubtedly lose their lives in the earthquake/flood/fire, and will suffer horribly. but their deaths and agonies will pass unnoticed. for chickens and other agricultural animals kept under intensive conditions, natural disasters such as hurricanes bring not only devastation but also an aftermath of unimaginable suffering. automated feed and drink dispensers fail, as does the waste removal machinery; and so too the air conditioning, allowing the temperature inside animal sheds to rise inexorably. irvine tells of several examples — of chickens in collapsed broiler houses in ohio, of the more than 35, 000 animals who drowned in the flooding following a storm at the texas medical center. their suffering goes unremarked. their deaths do not count, either. rather, irvine emphasises, the deaths of some animals only “count” if they were killed by human hands — in laboratory procedures, for example, or at the slaughterhouse on the way to becoming meat. accidental death of these thousands of sentient creatures is categorized as a “nuisance,” as loss of data — or money. it is not categorized as loss of life. after hurricane rita, news reports mentioned in passing the deaths of thousands of cattle: the reports referred to how the farmers were hurt, the rice fields were seriously harmed, but the cattle “merely” lost (23). moreover, that so many animals could be drowned in flooding in laboratories ought to be seen as neglect on the part of the authorities: yet, “i found no cases in which federal funds were withheld, nor ...any cases in which labs were charged with violations of the animal welfare act in the aftermath of a disaster,” irvine comments (99). filling the ark is a fascinating account of the heroic efforts made by people in animal rescue organisations to help reduce loss of life. people and organizations work hard to set up temporary animal shelters for rescued pets, or to remove injured birds from oilspills or collapsed chicken sheds. they sometimes go to extraordinary lengths to help a single animal. unlike leslie irvine, i have not been involved in such work, and reading about how people faced these herculean tasks filled me with admiration. and, i confess, even though lab animals are a particular interest of mine, i realized i hadn’t thought enough about what happens to them in disasters. it is not, however, altogether a story of triumph over catastrophic evil. as irvine points out, it is not only the fact of the disaster, but also how rescue operations are organized, that can make a difference to survival. just as the lack of infrastructure hindered humanitarian aid attempts in haiti, so too does the absence of structure get in the way 135 lynda birke — filling the ark of aiding animals. thus, her aim in the book is to examine how we make decisions about the treatment of animals. what happened after hurricane katrina, she suggests, was disaster piling on disaster. animal helpers struggled to find food and housing for those they rescued — problems that were then exacerbated by several organizational failures. animals, like some groups of people, are particularly vulnerable in emergencies. this is not so much because of the effects of the disaster itself (although poorer people, for example, may live in structurally less safe areas, so making them more vulnerable), but has to do with the way that rescue plans are implemented. for animals, problems resulted from rescue plans that were less than clear, combined with human ranking of the worth of various animal kinds. many people struggled to ensure the safety of their companion animals after katrina. if someone walked away from their house with an animal inside, it is easy, then, to see them as villains, as completely uncaring. but many people were forced by rescuing authorities to leave their dearly loved animals behind — far from villains, they were victims, irvine points out. and not only were some forced to abandon their pets, but others had to witness their animals being murdered — officials were shooting stray animals in the streets in dallas, for example. in one well-publicized case, a dog was wrenched from a small boy’s arms, because pets were “not allowed” on the bus (23). and, of course, many animals that were rescued were never able to be reunited with their owners — there were simply so many animals that it was difficult to find specific individuals. tragic though the stories were of lost or killed pets, one positive change followed katrina. the u.s. government signed into law the pets evacuation and standards act (pets), which required state and local authorities to include pet animals in their disaster plans. in that sense, the pets act is good news — at least some animals stand a reasonable chance of help. however, the act only stipulates that people will be allowed to take their animals with them; it does not ensure that they do, and many people — who perhaps live in earthquake or hurricane-susceptible zones — do not adequately plan. how many, for example, have a cat basket for every single cat in their household? in taking us through details of how disasters or their aftermath can cause animal suffering and death, irvine does not flinch from naming the extent of the problems and cover-ups. it is not just the disaster itself, but also social and cultural consequences, which impact animals. all of these show up the cracks in our categorization of other 136 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) beings and their worth, and indicate that it is human actions in the wake of disasters which put many animals at risk. but her aim is to do more than analyse the ways in which plans were, or were not, implemented; rather, she uses the examples of responses to previous disasters to make policy recommendations, ranging from lists of recommended actions for individual guardians of companion animals to more extensive challenges to governments and commercial enterprises regarding intensive animal use. these are, i think, one of the strengths of this book. while i found filling the ark thought-provoking, i felt a little uneasy about the metaphor of the title, and with which the book begins — the ark. partly, that unease springs from the religious connotations, and partly from the biblical assumption that other animals go in two by two, male and female (clearly, noah was not a biologist). and i would be concerned if we left the fate of all these animals to one man (or deity): it requires coordinated work from a large number of people to effect a rescue. such nit-picking aside, one question remained for me. after reading through the list of recommendations, i was left wondering how harassed rescue agencies would make sense of them in the field. to be sure, irvine’s main point is that what matters is having coherent policies and good organization in advance of disasters, which should include adequate planning. but the problem remains that many animals are property in western legal and cultural frameworks,2 and so it comes down to individual “owners” whether or not proper provision is made. irvine is not sanguine about the difficulties we face in implementing adequate policies. she recognises that, for companion animals, responsibility resides with the guardian who may quite get around to making contingency plans for disasters that may never happen. but we can help animals in disasters, irvine maintains, primarily by making them less vulnerable. “doing so,” she points out, “involves rethinking our uses of animals” (123): these more radical recommendations for other animals are ones that accord well with the concerns of anyone working in animal advocacy — for example, that institutions do not pack large numbers of animals into huge sheds which cannot easily be evacuated. the argument for farm animals is one for sustainable agriculture, and in laboratories, for considerable reduction of animal use — not easily attained goals, to be sure, but goals to aim for, nonetheless. what can happen to intensivelymanaged animals in disasters serves to underline how inhumane are the conditions in 137 lynda birke — filling the ark which such animals live. we should not have to wait for the next disaster to demand change. notes 1. set up by the world society for the protection of animals, and the international fund for animal welfare. 2. except wild animals. all companion animals, and those kept by humans in captivity for any purpose, “belong” to someone in law. for discussion of this point, see gary francione. rain without thunder: the ideology of the animal rights movement. philadelphia, temple up, 1996. microsoft word bayer pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 2:2 ellen bayer working with sentient property rhoda m. wilkie, livestock/deadstock: working with farm animals from birth to slaughter. animals, culture, and society series. philadelphia: temple up, 2010. 248 pp. $29.95 a few years ago, i worked with a writing student who decided to develop a project about his pigs for the local agricultural show. he described the meticulous attention he paid to his animals and the long hours spent each day prepping them for the county fair. he cleaned, fed, and cared for them, and genuinely enjoyed their company. he took pride in their fine quality, but he also seemed to perceive them as friends: he loved his pigs. if you have been to a county agricultural fair, you know that many of the livestock show animals are auctioned afterward. my student’s pigs were no exception, and each year his prized pigs were sent off after auction, either for breeding or for slaughter. i found it difficult to reconcile this student’s contradictory relationship with his pigs. he had expressed such affection for them, and yet didn’t bat an eyelash about their ultimate fate. incredulous, i asked if he ever wanted to keep a special pig instead of sending it off; he replied, his father would never allow that. they were a farming family, and keeping a pig simply was not done. i detected a sense of unease when i broached this topic, as if perhaps there had been a pig or two he would have preferred to keep, but ultimately he saw this as the way things work on his family’s farm. this scenario, which is in no way unique, baffled me at the time, and it came to mind as i read rhoda m. wilkie’s livestock/deadstock. her work offers insight into this sort of human-animal relationship. rhoda m. wilkie calls our attention to a critical gap, an “interspecies blind spot,” in sociological research of human-livestock interactions: the voices of people directly involved with the production of food animals from birth to slaughter, and the ways in which they view and understand their interactions with the animals with which they work, have not been given due consideration (2). her aim is to present a more nuanced look at human-animal relations, and to challenge the one-dimensional assumptions that are typically made about livestock producers’ attitudes toward and perception of farm animals. wilkie notes that much of the literature on livestock production has been developed by animal advocates, many of whom have no first-hand experience with livestock, leading to static representations of commercial animal production (i.e. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 126 intensive production is bad and the workers are uncaring) and overlooks the possibility that some handlers may have more dynamic experiences with livestock. wilkie argues that this bias in the available resources, coupled with our tendency to view livestock production through the lens of factory farming, does not present a complete picture. to obtain a fuller view of human-livestock relations, we must look at operations that vary in scale and purpose, as well as speaking to persons “who breed, rear, show, fatten, market, medically treat, and slaughter livestock,” in order to understand how they “perceive and make sense of their interactions with the animals that constitute the center of their everyday working lives” (2). indeed, this seems to be a significant oversight in discussions of interspecies connections, and wilkie’s book takes an important step in opening up new avenues of discourse. wilkie supplements her study with field research conducted in northeastern scotland, which has a reputation for producing beef cattle. she employs an ethnographic approach, shadowing and interviewing people who represent a range of roles in the production process. this includes “thirteen farmers and stockmen, eighteen mart [livestock market] workers and auctioneers, twelve hobby farmers, five veterinary workers, and four abattoir workers” (189, n. 22). her interviewees and the responses they elicit demonstrate the variety of attitudes toward and interactions with livestock that are possible throughout the process of production, and wilkie effectively incorporates the information obtained from this research into her text. the first-hand accounts are quite revealing, and they are an important component of wilkie’s larger project to understand the human-animal relationship from the perspective of the producers. that said, i wondered how representative this sample of interviewees was of human-livestock interactions in a broader sense. i am not trained in sociology, but my reaction to her study sample was to question if this snapshot of livestock production is perhaps, in part, influenced by the specific region and culture studied; would investigations in other national and international regions produce similar findings? while she is clear about the source of her field data, wilkie’s text as a whole doesn’t address human-livestock relations solely in britain (although this does tend to be her focus.) her work examines aspects of european, australian, and american production as well, which could possibly lead the reader to infer that her field research can be applied similarly to these regions. wilkie closes the book with a call for further research, and it would be interesting to see what similarities are found in other locales. chapters two through five offer insight into several larger factors that contribute to contemporary human-livestock interactions. chapter two provides a brief overview of the domestication of wild animals and how this evolved into the industrialization of ellen bayer — working with sentient property 127 livestock production. wilkie provides a succinct but useful overview of domestication and the development of industrialized cattle production, which helps to contextualize her larger points, and she manages not to get bogged down by, or privilege, debates over the who/how/when/where/why of domestication. as she says, “irrespective of how it arose, domestication of the ‘big five’ animal species all these years ago has an interspecies legacy that is as significant now as it was then, albeit for different reasons” (24). wilkie describes the changing role of livestock in the united states and the rise of the feedlot system (which relied on specialized labor), and she explains that increased demand, both in the u.s. and britain, coupled with improvements in refrigeration technology at the end of the nineteenth century, mark the rise of the industrialization of food production. the chapter also considers the integral role good stockmen play in production, and notes that they have become difficult to find. while formerly underappreciated, good stockmanship has come under the industry’s radar, albeit for economic purposes. since research shows that good stockmanship “enhances animals’ well-being and productivity,” industrial producers have incentive to adopt such practices (35). interestingly, the cultivation of empathy on the part of workers toward animals may soon be employed to further production, and wilkie is careful to mention the problematic nature of this: “but adopting such a calculative perspective, irrespective of how understandable it may be, diminishes the stockperson-animal interface to little more than another productive factor that needs to be understood so it can be fully exploited” (36). what this economic-fuelled research fails to take into account is the stockmen’s understanding of their relationships to these animals, which is exactly what wilkie’s work aims to do. chapter three looks at the gendering of the production process and of the animals involved. again, wilkie provides a brief historical overview of women and men’s changing roles in animal production that efficiently contextualizes the gendered nature of livestock production today. she notes that as farms increased in size and became more industrialized, labor was divided in new ways. in addition to production roles, the types of animals with which men and women should work, and the animals themselves, were also gendered in interesting ways. for example, several women wilkie interviews see all cattle, regardless of their gender, as “male” because they are larger and more aggressive than sheep. she also found that gender stereotypes continue to play a significant role in the types of interactions with and attitudes toward animals that are deemed suitable for each sex. wilkie notes that gender and gendering is an “under-explored aspect of contemporary agricultural life,” and her work opens up humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 128 opportunities for further exploration of this fascinating component of human-animal relations (43). the ways in which livestock is marketed and valued is examined in chapter four. wilkie explains the rise of the auction system in britain and illustrates the central role auctioneers play today in assigning value to livestock. what this chapter reveals is that there are a plethora of factors that determine the value of livestock, because they have no fixed, standard value and, as such, require an auction system in order to be marketed, valued, and sold. her interviews with auctioneers are particularly revealing, as each man describes his methods in the “price discovery” process (78). whereas in the nineteenth century cattle would be assessed based on conformation, from a butcher’s perspective, today such factors as the number of people there to bid, the seller’s and buyer’s expectations, the career path of the animal (will it be used for breeding or fattened for slaughter?) and supermarket prices, to name a few, are taken into consideration as auctioneers attempt to gauge where to start the bids. wilkie’s experience at the mart reveals that animals’ values are assessed in differing ways once in the sale ring. she notes that animals sold for breeding are kept in the ring longer; potential buyers are allowed to inspect the animals more closely, auctioneers provide more background information on the animals, and they move the sale along more slowly. prime animals that are ready for slaughter are sold much more quickly and their value is more easily determined, because they are assessed primarily on conformation and fatness. as her later chapters echo, the amount of individual attention an animal receives seems to correlate directly with the way it is perceived by handlers. the breeding cow that is inspected by a farmer at auction will be treated more like an individual than the prime cattle that is sold for slaughter, which will be treated as a commodity. this becomes a recurring theme of wilkie’s book as she works to reveal the multiple factors that determine how livestock are perceived by the people who work with them. what i find troubling — and wilkie does eventually address this — is that, in the end, all of these animals are seen as commodities. the breeding cow may be treated as an individual in the sale ring, and she may live for ten years in the farmer’s barn, but she is still assessed in terms of how productive she might be, and she too will one day make her way to the slaughterhouse when she can no longer be productive in the breeding shed. as i will elaborate below, while i concede it is important not to view livestock production in a one-dimensional way, i found it difficult to understand how not being viewed as a commodity at some points in its life by some persons would do the animal much good in the end. wilkie’s work certainly makes me appreciate the dynamic and multi-faceted relationship many producers have with these animals, but ellen bayer — working with sentient property 129 this almost never alters the end result of this relationship: the livestock returns to its commodity status. wilkie’s examination of hobby farmers serves as an interesting counterpoint to commercial farmers. chapter five points to the current appeal of hobby farms and demonstrates the various roles they play, from conserving rare breeds to providing meat for niche markets. what is of most importance here is the hobby farmer’s relationship with and perception of his animals and how this differs from commercial farmers. many of wilkie’s respondents maintained that their animals had to “pay their own way” (91), but this didn’t necessarily mean they were killed, and not all hobby farmers ate their own animals (although some certainly did.) wilkie notes that because most hobby farmers don’t rely on their animals for their sole source of income they can afford to view their animals as pets, and many of them name and form emotional attachments to their animals. wilkie posits them as “productive outdoor pets” (111) and indicates that the small herd sizes allow hobby farmers to see their animals as individuals. wilkie concludes that increased interest in hobby farming will reconnect its new enthusiasts with farm animals, “many of which are destined for their plates” (114). how this will change human-livestock relations, she says, is yet to be seen, and i believe this is an important element for further research. at a time when so many consumers view their meat as coming from the grocery store, not from a living animal, it is important to examine how increased interaction with food animals may shape one’s perception of them and influence one’s food choices. chapters six through eight get to the core of wilkie’s investigation and examine more directly the human-livestock relationships she observed and, i suggest, they present her most important findings. they also begin to address the concern i voiced above regarding the fact that producers may see some animals as individuals for a period of time, but they are almost always re-commodified and sent to slaughter. chapter six is primarily concerned with tracing the shifts in the legal status of livestock and how this relates to their perceived status. wilkie’s overview shows how far animal welfare guidelines and legislation in the united states lag behind europe, in part because of the industry’s influence in the u.s. in 1999 european legislation acknowledged livestock as “sentient beings.” this elevated status, while recognizing animals as more than “things,” raises other moral dilemmas. that livestock are both legally sentient and legally property is problematic, and wilkie shows how this paradox also perplexes those who produce livestock. what is of importance to wilkie here is that, despite that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 130 livestock are legally property, they can sometimes be perceived as non-commodities. while this does not alter the legal status of livestock, and most will be re-commodified, the author claims, “it is precisely these types of experiences and perspectives that shape the diverse, dynamic, and contradictory nature of people’s perceptions of and interactions with productive animals in everyday life” (122). wilkie admits that there’s a fine line between producers’ perception of livestock as commodity or sentient being, but, she argues, that their perception is not static is important. she employs the term “sentient commodity” in order “to draw attention to the ambiguous and shifting perceived status of livestock and people’s cognitive and emotional attempts to negotiate this fine line in practice” (123). wilkie seems to anticipate her reader’s reaction to the idea that animals’ commodity status can be “temporarily suspended;” as i noted above, i found it difficult to appreciate the full weight of this because i am troubled by the fact that the animals are re-commodified in the end. wilkie claims, “if we simply dismiss these experiences by arguing that the animals remain commodities legally, regardless of how producers perceive them, then we are disregarding some of the practical, cognitive, ethical, and emotional challenges faced by those who work directly with livestock” (127-8). the author does convincingly suggest that approaches that fail to take the producer’s perspective into account don’t provide a complete picture of human-livestock relations, and the later chapters in the book demonstrate the extent to which livestock workers grapple with the challenges they encounter. chapter seven provides insight into the multiple factors that can determine the level of engagement, or disengagement, workers will develop with livestock. wilkie contends, “the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors of byre-face [cowshed] workers cannot be uncoupled from the productive role of both humans and animals in the practical division of labor (e.g. breeding, storing, and finishing) or the socioeconomic context in which commercial and hobby farming take place” (129). what her field research reveals is that the amount of time spent with an animal, the worker’s role, the “career path” of the animal, and the scale of the operation are some of the key factors that determine the level and type of engagement producers have with livestock. some of wilkie’s interviewees note that a breeder will spend considerably more time with his animals and will interact with them more. a breeding cow may be on his farm for ten years, so he has the opportunity to know her as something more than a generic cow. the finisher, on the other hand, who simply fattens cattle up for slaughter, is less inclined to engage with his animals. these cattle are relatively self-sufficient, and the main objective is for them to eat and build up bulk. the finisher spends only three months with the cattle, and is more likely to perceive them as a herd, not individuals. wilkie’s research certainly substantiates her claim that “animals can be located and relocated along a ellen bayer — working with sentient property 131 status continuum that ranges from commodity to companion,” and she demonstrates that producers can have positive interactions and relationships with their livestock, but her findings also have larger, more troubling implications. while wilkie doesn’t examine factory farms, her research points to possible outcomes of such large-scale operations. if the size of the operation and the opportunities for interaction determine a worker’s level of engagement with and perception of livestock, then this surely does not bode well for the factory farmed animal or the workers at such institutions. wilkie’s findings imply that nuanced interactions with livestock become difficult in more mechanized, industrial production contexts. given that such a large proportion of the world’s animal-based food is produced in industrial operations, it seems imperative that further research be conducted to assess how workers in this particular context understand their relationship to livestock and to what extent the production context limits their level of engagement. livestock/deadstock explores several paradoxes inherent in livestock production, from producers claiming to love animals while also using them as tools to the slaughtering of animals only when they are healthy, and chapter eight returns to what is called “‘the constant paradox—the definition and treatment of animals as functional objects, on the one hand, and sentient individuals, on the other’” (148). the “constant paradox” seems to be most palpable during the slaughter stage of the production process. this chapter illustrates the severe discomfort many producers and slaughterers feel for this final stage. what is particularly striking about wilkie’s findings is the extent to which producers deny their own involvement in the slaughter stage and the contempt they display for those who work there. what comes to the foreground in this chapter is that many people who produce livestock are troubled by sending the animals to slaughter, and some slaughterhouse workers find it difficult to work at some parts of the disassembly line (such as stunning cattle or slitting their throats). while those outside of production may be tempted to imagine all producers and slaughterers as cold and uncaring about killing animals, wilkie’s research indicates that, at least in her sample set, those who work within the industry face challenges that have not been fully appreciated. one recurring motif throughout this chapter is the significant level of denial on the part of producers about the end stage of production. many of the workers wilkie interviews employ euphemisms, such as “going away” or “down the road,” to describe where their stock are headed after auction. many simply can’t, or won’t, allow themselves to think about what happens to their livestock next. some even create a sort of fantasy to help them ignore the true fate of the animals. one mart worker explains, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 132 “‘when i finish work at the end of the day, i don’t think about what happens to them afterward. i can’t, really…. it’s probably easier to think that it all stops here. they leave on the floats, and they all live happily ever after’” (152). another respondent speaks of how she can handle delivering her stock to the slaughterhouse, “‘but i don’t want to see them going down the chute and actually having the bullet put in their face — don’t want to see that, hear that, or know about that. as far as i’m concerned, they left me healthy, and i’m looking for that check the next day. but i could not see them being shot. that’s not my job’” (143). wilkie suggests that it is the division of labor in the production of livestock that enables such willful ignorance of the endpoint. what is so interesting is that in earlier chapters wilkie’s subjects tend to believe that livestock are bred for slaughter, that’s their “job,” but when it comes to the thought of the animals going down the chute, producers have difficulty stomaching the idea and work hard to deny their responsibility. the desire to shift responsibility for the death of an animal is also seen at the slaughterhouse, and again the division of labor makes this possible. because the animal is first shot in order to stun it, and then its throat is slit, who kills the animal is less clear. like the farmers, slaughterhouses employ “verbal concealment” in order to re-conceptualize the work they do; “butcher” and “slaughterhouse” become “meat plant and “meat factory,” while “slaughterman” becomes “meat designer” (156). what does this mean in terms of human-animal relations? if people can rationalize the production and consumption of animals, why does no one want to accept responsibility for the killing of animals that is the necessary end point of that? of course, the obvious answer is provided by the interviewee: it’s easier this way. while wilkie’s book is important for showing this under-explored side of slaughter, there seems to be much room for further investigation into this perplexing denial of responsibility for the animal’s death, from the consumer who purchases the product to those who produce and slaughter it. what wilkie’s book shows is that there are several ethical, emotional, and practical challenges that producers and slaughters face that are full of contradictions, and readers are given the opportunity to appreciate these experiences from a multi-dimensional perspective. the final chapter points to the larger significance of wilkie’s research and articulates her contribution to the field while also calling for additional studies. previous studies had not taken the livestock worker’s perspective into consideration, and wilkie urges scholars not to overlook this central player in human-livestock relations; she suggests, “the actions, attitudes, and feelings of byre-face and slaughter-face workers are absolutely central to how livestock are managed and produced and should therefore be explicitly factored into lay and professional debates about food-animal production” (184). after reading the full text, i felt convinced on this point. ellen bayer — working with sentient property 133 i must admit that i entered wilkie’s book with certain reservations. as a vegan and animal advocate, i was resistant to the text initially because i feared her research might be used as an apology for producers of animal food, as a way to make readers feel better about eating meat because at some point someone might not have seen the animal as a commodity. i was pleased that wilkie did not take this route. she indicates in the opening chapter that she maintains a vegan diet, which perhaps helped me, personally, to follow her into this world. what i found is that wilkie remains impressively objective throughout the work; she insists from the start that this is not a book about ethics, and she adheres to her mission of investigating how producers of livestock negotiate the various challenges they encounter in their relationship to the animals. as noted above, at times i found it difficult not to consider the ethical questions raised by some ideas expressed in the text. i also feel that we cannot so easily dismiss looking at production through a factory farm lens. while i certainly appreciate the nuanced and ambiguous relationships that wilkie’s work reveals, the animal products most consumers purchase will not come from the region or productive context wilkie studies. wilkie also notes that her work focuses primarily on cattle and sheep, and, given that poultry and pigs are typically produced by intensive methods, it seems likely that research into human-livestock relationships in those contexts may result in very different findings. that said, i think wilkie’s work is an important first step in the development of a more complex understanding of human-livestock relations and it opens up a range of possibilities for further research — and reinforces the critical need for such work. the book will appeal to a broad audience, from those interested in sociology and psychology to human-animal studies and animal advocacy. whether i like it or not, humans will continue to consume animals, and producers will continue to be central to the production process. from an animal-welfare perspective, continued study of the human-livestock interface could potentially improve conditions for workers and animals alike, although there is the possibility that a deeper understanding of human-livestock relationships could also become just another tool for the industry to exploit. microsoft word war horse h u m a n i m a l i a 1:2 lynda birke war horse war horse, a play produced by the national theatre, u.k., in conjunction with handspring puppet company.1 performed at the new london theatre. “vous êtes en picardie,” reads the signpost as we drive through northern france. every time i pass it, i think about the wars which savaged the europe i later grew up in. they cost millions of lives: but not all of those lives were human. untold numbers of horses, dogs, and pigeons were sent off to “take part” in these wars of human making. one estimate for the number of horses killed in the great war of 1914-1918 is eight million, approximately a million from britain alone. my thoughts about the agony and death of these animals is made more poignant because my usual reason for driving in france is to transport my own much-loved horses to competitions. being a horse-lover, however, meant that as a child, i tried to avoid seeing pictures illustrating the carnage of the fields of flanders and the somme during the great war. i had seen enough bomb sites when i was growing up in london after the second war, and could not bear to think of the misery of the animals forced into battlefields. so it was with a little trepidation that i went, the evening before remembrance day, to see war horse performing in that same city. “you must go”, advised horsey colleagues — “but take plenty of handkerchiefs.” i did. and i needed them. the children’s novel on which the play is based is a story told through the eyes of a horse, who finds himself facing the horrors of 1914 europe. narration as though through the eyes of an animal is not new — think of black beauty, for example. but converting that story into a production for the theatre is a much bigger challenge. although a number of “equestrian dramas,” featuring real horses, were staged in the early nineteenth century (hartnell and found, 1996), real animals are rarely used on the stage now. how, then, to tell the story, when the main protagonists are equine? and how to tell the story through the horse’s eyes? war horse brings the horses to life through puppets — and not only horses, but also crows, a goose, and flying songbirds, as well as some of the soldiers. the handspring puppet company2, from south africa, had been involved in producing lifesize animal puppets before, starting with a depiction of the rehabilitation of a chimpanzee to the 123 lynda birke – war horse wild, and moving on to a giraffe, before they took on horses. to depict animals with some accuracy is no mean feat, especially when the basic structure of the puppet is made of cane, plywood, and light fabric (yet strong enough and large enough to bear the weight of a rider), while the puppeteers operate some of them from outside. yet accuracy — in the sense that the audience believes in the life of the animal depicted — is just what they have achieved. the novel’s author, michael morpurgo, pointed out that having the horse actually speak would not have worked (interview), but horses express themselves through bodily movement, particularly ears and tails, and there is indeed something of the spirit of the horse in the way the puppets move. such bodily expressions tell the story. war horse is partly a tale of a horse sent off to war, and partly a love story, centered on the relationship between joey and the boy albert, who is so distraught when joey is taken away, that he lies about his age and follows his horse to the front. the tale begins in the quiet village of iddesleigh, in rural devon, where the narracott family manage their farm. “my earliest memories are a confusion of hilly fields and dark, damp stables,” says joey in the novel, “but i remember well enough the day of the horse sale. the terror of it stayed with me all my life” (2007: 3). the foal is pushed into the sale ring, while the auctioneer shouts the virtues of the “red-bay” thoroughbred/ draught horse cross. albert’s father bids for him, and brings him home, where albert tries to befriend the terrified colt. for the next three years, albert deepens his relationship with joey, and they spend hours galloping around the devonshire countryside. their playfulness is interrupted only when albert is forced to attempt training joey to pull a plough, as a result of a drunken bet placed by his father. but their peaceful idyll comes to an end with the outbreak of war, and officers come to the village in search of horses for the war effort. no longer cantering around the gentle hills of the west country, instead joey must face disciplined military training, where he meets topthorn, the spirited mount of another officer (fig. one). to begin with, the two horses are mistrustful and threaten each other, but this sparring is soon replaced by friendship, and side by side they face the arduous and terrifying sea journey to belgium, and the noise and horror of the battlefield. joey’s rider in these early stages of his military career is captain nicholls, a gentle man who takes his sketch book everywhere and draws pictures of the horses and his surroundings. this motif of the sketchbook inspires the artwork which forms the backdrop to the play, imagined through the eyes of the set designers; thus, part of the backdrop is a torn fragment from the imaginary sketches (butler, 2008). 124 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) figure one: joey and topthorn meet for the first time3 soon, they find themselves in the thick of battle, and nicholls leads the charge. but the mounted cavalry stood little chance against machine guns, and nicholls — along with many horses — is killed. “we had won, i heard it said; but horses lay dead and dying everywhere,” recalls joey in the novel (52). he gets another rider, trooper warren, who looks after joey and “lifts his spirits” through some harsh winter weather. later, they go once again into battle. but this time there is yet another weapon to face — barbed wire — and many of his equine comrades are caught up in it, to face lingering deaths. joey and topthorn, however, are bred to be hunters and succeed in jumping the wire, only to land up in the middle of enemy lines. here, near the field hospital, they encounter herr hauptmann, who demands that they be treated as heroes. hauptmann treats them kindly, and recognises that they are fine horses. later, he has to use them in harness, to pull a field ambulance. seeing that joey is already familiar with such work, he is mystified — using such animals as cart-horses is proof to him that the british truly are mad: “that’s what this war is about, my friend,” he tells joey, “it’s about which of us is the madder. and clearly you british started with an advantage. you were mad beforehand” (76). 125 lynda birke – war horse in the meantime, albert has received a parcel from the front; he opens the parcel, containing the sketchbooks of captain nicholls, and including drawings of his beloved joey. despite being too young, albert runs off to enlist and manages to persuade the officer that he is really nineteen. the play then shifts between albert’s experiences in the trenches (and constant search for his horse), and joey’s continuing experiences alongside his friend topthorn. for a while, the horses’ lives are a little easier, as they find themselves housed at a french farm, where the young daughter, emilie, befriends them. even this brief respite comes to an end, though, and emilie is distraught when the farm’s horses are requisitioned by the german forces and must go off again, this time having to pull gun carriages. now, they no longer have dedicated riders, and do not get the same level of care; they must flounder through thick mud, in freezing rain, and put up with multiple injuries. such conditions facilitate illness, and topthorn develops a respiratory infection and weakens; eventually, and inevitably, he cannot go on, his heart gives up and he collapses besides joey. for a moment, “he lay where he was, breathing heavily and lifted his head once to look at me. it was an appeal for help — i could see it in his eyes. then he slumped forward on his face, rolled over and was quite still.... i knew instinctively that he was already dead, that i had lost my best and dearest friend” (2007: 114). as if that is not enough horror for joey to face as he stands forlornly alongside the body of his friend, there is a distant rumble. tanks appear. terrified, he runs — and gallops straight into barbed wire. exhausted, distressed, he tried in vain to extricate himself, only to find it tightening and ripping into his legs, already injured and sore. finally, he sinks to his knees, and realizes that he is in no-man’s land, between the lines. after a while, however, he hears voices, and is found by two soldiers, one german and one welsh, from each side of the strip. trying to communicate across language barriers, they toss a coin to decide who will take joey over to his side — the welshman wins, and joey is led off and taken care of at the veterinary field hospital. in morpurgo’s novel, albert has found his way to this hospital and is working in the stables, where his colleague scrapes mud off and recognises joey from the description. the play, however, dramatizes this scene further as we find albert with a mask on his face, suffering from the effects of tear gas (figure two). he faintly hears mention that there is a horse nearby. completely unbelieving, he makes the whistle to which he had 126 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) trained joey years before — and joey comes, hobbling and tentative, toward him. reunited, they return once more to the countryside of devon, now changed forever. figure two: after tear gas and barbed wire, albert and joey are finally reunited. the story thus has a happy ending. but it is about the awfulness of war, and we encounter much of that along the way. not only are people and horses brutally killed, but the horror is reinforced by the puppet crows who land quickly on the bodies of those killed, including that of the badly injured mare whom albert puts out of her misery with his knife. the ghastly scenes are, however, lightened occasionally with humor; there is the goose chasing people, and repeatedly slamming its beak into the farmhouse door as a result. there is the banter between soldiers as the british army men try to speak french (poorly, and with cockney accents). perhaps, as some theatre critics have claimed, the plot of the story is overly sentimental; some also suggest that the human characters are a little wooden (see billington, 2009). but reviewers agree that the stars of the show are undoubtedly the horses — and audiences concur: the play has been a huge success, regularly selling out, and regularly reducing audiences to tears. i am not an expert in theater studies, nor a historian of war, but i am passionate about horses, and have lived with them all my life. i too cried my eyes out throughout the production. if experts in stage production can criticize aspects of this dramatization, i simply focussed on the characters of the horses. these are brilliantly done, making them believable — so believable that i had to look away and whimper when albert ends the mare’s suffering, and so believable that i too grieved for topthorn. 127 lynda birke – war horse the audience can always see the puppeteers; you can see how they work the mechanisms that move the horses’ legs, and you can watch how they manipulate the horses’ ears. at times, i knew i was observing large puppets, so i did not flinch (too much) when the horses jumped the wire directly towards us. but what is fascinating to me is how easily my mind shifted, and i no longer saw the puppeteers: at that moment, the puppet became a horse, an animal just like the ones with whom i share my life. the leg movements were similar enough, while the emotional expression was indeed the language of horses. we cannot know how real animals interpret our representations of them. joey and his friends have done performances with live horses — both at cheltenham race meetings, and on the london stage. for one horse, meeting the puppet joey was (predictably) terrifying, and he had to be coaxed past. but he did not terrify everyone. kelly marks, a british horsewoman trained by the well-known american horseman monty roberts, went to london for a “platform performance.” usually, this entails famous actors or celebrities appearing in a performance: in this case, kelly took part — along with her horse, american pie. marks recalls how easily pie dealt with the whole thing, trusting her completely, and coping with going in the elevator as well as the peculiar contraption that is joey. acknowledging that we do not know what pie was thinking, the horse was “looking, sniffing at joey as though he were real,” said marks (pers.comm.). pie may well know that joey is not really a horse — but is prepared to greet him as though he is (fig three),4 just as i was prepared to believe in these horses and all that represent. figure three: do i know you? pie meets joey (photo: simon palmer) 128 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) the story of war horse draws on the many meanings we attach to horses — nobility, strength, courage, stoicism, for example. “where in this wide world can man find/ nobility without pride/ friendship without envy/ or beauty without vanity?” asks ronald duncan in his poem to the horse.5 the poem goes on to say that: “england’s past has been borne on his back/all our history is his industry;/ we are his heirs/ he our inheritance” (duncan, 1994). more accurately (and english nationalism aside), it is most of human history that is borne on the backs — and blood — of horses. and it is that fact that war horse underlines. in his preface to the novel, morpurgo writes that there is an old painting in the village hall in iddesleigh. the painting, by captain nicholls, is of joey in the autumn of 1914. the picture is faded now, but when morpurgo wrote the novel, there were a few in the village who still remembered joey as he was. the story was written, the author tells us, “so that neither he nor those who knew him, nor the war they lived and died in, will be forgotten” (2). bonds between people and animals have often been used to depict humanity and compassion, even in the face of the horrors of war. kean (1998) points out the contemporary popularity of fortunino matania’s 1916 picture of a man saying goodbye to his dead horse while the line of action moves away in the background. the image was used by the blue cross to raise money for animal hospitals, published alongside a poem: “goodbye old man; goodbye my dear old comrade!/ at last our true and tender love must cease/and i, alone and sad, go forth to battle/ while here your war-torn body lies in peace” (laurence, cited in kean, ibid.p.173). horses (or dogs) elicited sympathy and caring, despite the surrounding carnage, while being portrayed as just as heroic as their human counterparts — a double theme threading throughout war horse. the tragedy for nonhumans at the end of war is that few return — even those who survived the killing fields were simply sold on, despite their poor condition. many dogs and horses were simply put down at the end of the war, because it was easier and cheaper than trying to rehabilitate and rehome large numbers of war-weary animals (kean, 1998:176: the same happened after the second world war). this was not, i should emphasize, unusual: animal charities at the beginning of the 20th century had been much concerned about the export of old, worn-out horses to continental europe (and they continue to campaign against long-distance transport today: see for example world horse welfare.6). the satirical magazine, punch, carried a cartoon at the time, in which a thin and exhausted horse looks at the customs official on arrival in antwerp from britain. asked if he has anything to declare, the horse replies: “only this, that i’m ashamed of my country” (reproduced in brown, 1974). 129 lynda birke – war horse themes of nationhood intertwine with how we think about other animals. in contrast to the shame epitomized in the cartoon, it is a commonplace in the u.k. to think of ourselves as a nation of “animal lovers” (as well as being the “mad british” to which the german officer referred). liking animals seems to be tied into the british psyche — or at least it seems so until we confront the daily abuses of animals which happen here as elsewhere. throughout the victorian period, there had been growing concern for animal suffering, alongside the expansion of empire which in many ways facilitated such abuse. war horse makes reference to justifications for britain’s entry into that war, particularly appeals to defending the british empire. but although joey originates from devon, in the west of england, his relationships with humans cut across mere national boundaries, and his very presence seems to facilitate communication between humans across language barriers.7 those who fall under the spell of this beautiful horse come from different countries (and different countries within the u.k), and different backgrounds; but they are united in seeking to care for him. joey’s positioning across national borders is clear in the narrative as the fog clears to find him in the slick mud of no-man’s land: here, he moves uncertainly from one side to the other until the two humans, from different sides, can communicate with each other. europe was never to be the same again, after wwi. the pastoral peace evoked in joey’s youthful gallops across rolling hillsides began to disappear; the era of the horse as transport came to a close, agriculture and rural social life began to change dramatically, while over the next few years, thomas hardy’s enduring image of the “man harrowing clods ... with an old horse that stumbles and nods” (“in time of ‘the breaking of nations’”) began to fade from the british countryside. the story of war horse reminds us of those changing rural landscapes, but at the same time resonates, just like hardy’s poem, with a sense of eternal values — in particular, the bond between human and horse. that is, in part, the appeal of war horse, and is no doubt a factor in its huge success. this is not, however, the only factor in its popularity as a stage production. morpurgo commented, in an interview, that when he first wrote the novel, it was assumed that young people were not very interested in history, especially the first world war. but, he says, britons have since “... become used to seeing coffins coming home draped in the union jack and suddenly the whole business of what happens when you go to war has come home. maybe that is also part of what has struck a chord in war horse, maybe the suffering that we know goes on and we know perfectly well went on in the first 130 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) world war is relevant now and not passé. sadly war seems to be this endemic situation that human beings live through” (interview). that immediate sense of the horror of war — the noise, the chaos, the carnage — comes across in the national theatre’s production of war horse — one reason, perhaps, why the play is becoming used by many schools to teach early twentieth century history. to me, however, what the story underlines forcibly is our complex relationship to the animals we humans use. we understand them as comrades in battle, expecting them to have courage, to show heroism; yet we subsequently send them off to be slaughtered for meat when they are surplus to our requirements. we routinely subject them to atrocities of all kinds, and yet we can have close and passionate bonds with them. and it is just those bonds that war horse evokes, which drew tears from me and so many others in the audience. it is the tragedy of war that so many lives, of so many species, are lost; but it is the joy of realizing interconnections with other animals which inspires so many of us. all my life, i have been fortunate enough to experience bonds with horses; these are often large animals, which could be classed as hunters — just like joey. i think of this when i gaze at those fields in eastern france; i think of those horses with whom i have relationships and think of their kindred, buried in the soil. they have no graves, and few memorials. that is why war horse matters. notes i am very grateful to kelly marks for taking the time in her busy schedule to talk to me about pie’s encounter with joey, and for sharing the photograph of the two meeting (fig three). 1. the play is based on the novel, war horse by michael morpurgo, adapted by nick stafford and directed by marianne elliott and tom morris; set designs by rae smith. it is currently playing at the new london theatre, drury lane, london, until october 2010. it may subsequently be produced in new york in 2011. a dvd, “making war horse,” telling the story of how the play came about, is available from the national theatre website. 2. see http://www.handspringpuppet.co.za for background to the company. 3. illustrations for figs 1 and 2 are from the programme photographs for the new 131 lynda birke – war horse london theatre. 4. marks also notes that the puppeteers had had little or nothing to do with horses before the production, but that they “went with their feelings” after spending some time observing horses and going on courses. american pie was a “problem pony” before marks trained him, regularly bucking off the rider; now, however, he is a highly successful winner in various competitions in the uk. 5. this poem is regularly read aloud at the end of the horse of the year show in the u.k and is thus well known to many british horse people. 6. in the novel, being sold on is indeed the fate of joey’s comrades, although the production of the story for theatre does not include this. for information about the world horse welfare campaign, see: http://www.worldhorsewelfare.org/helptomorrow/long-distance-transportation 7. though perhaps the presence of the horses does not transcend social class in quite the same way. the two leading horses are themselves part-thoroughbred, so élite among horses, and are the mounts of officers, while albert — from the rural working class — is a foot soldier in the trenches and later in the veterinary hospital. still, the beauty of the horses does seem to appeal in the play to a variety of soldiers, from varying social backgrounds. works cited billington, michael. review of war horse for the guardian, april 6th 2009 (p.32, review section). butler, robert. “rae smith and the art of war horse.” article reproduced for programme, new london theatre. 2008 brown, antony. who cares for animals? 150 years of the rspca. london: heinemann, 1974. duncan, r. “the horse.” the poetry of horses. ed. olwen way. london: j.a.allen, 1994. 132 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) hartnoll, phyllis, and peter found. "equestrian drama." the concise oxford companion to the theatre. 1996, encyclopedia.com. 16 nov. 2009. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1o79-equestriandrama.html kean, hilda. animal rights: political and social change in britain since 1800. london: reaktion, 1998. making war horse, dvd. national theatre and seventh art production, 2009. morpurgo, michael. interview for the official london theatre guide, november 9th, from website (www.officiallondontheatre.co.uk) 2009. morpurgo, michael. war horse. london: egmont (originally published 1982 by kaye and ward), 2007. microsoft word ohnuma-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:2 reiko ohnuma animal doubles of the buddha the life-story of the buddha, as related in traditional buddha-biographies from india, has served as a masterful founding narrative for the religion as a whole, and an inexhaustible mine of images and concepts that have had deep reverberations throughout the buddhist tradition. the basic story is well-known: the buddha — who should properly be referred to as a bodhisattva (or “awakening-being”) until the moment when he attains awakening and becomes a buddha — is born into the world as a human prince named prince siddhārtha. he spends his youth in wealth, luxury, and ignorance, surrounded by hedonistic pleasures, and marries a beautiful princess named yaśodharā, with whom he has a son. it is only at the age of twenty-nine that prince siddhārtha, through a series of dramatic events, comes to realize that all sentient beings are inevitably afflicted by old age, disease, death, and the perpetual suffering of samsara, the endless cycle of death-and-rebirth that characterizes the buddhist universe. in response to this profound realization, he renounces his worldly life as a pampered prince and “goes forth from home into homelessness” (as the common buddhist phrase describes it) to become a wandering ascetic. six years later, while meditating under a fig tree (later known as the bodhi tree or tree of awakening), he succeeds in discovering a path to the elimination of all suffering — the ultimate buddhist goal of nirvana — and thereby becomes the buddha (the “awakened one”). he preaches his first sermon — setting into motion the wheel of the dharma (or buddhist teaching) — and gathers disciples around himself, thus initiating the saṃgha (the monastic community of monks and nuns). after forty-five years of peripatetic wandering around north india, spreading and solidifying the dharma, the buddha dies at the age of eighty — or, more properly, he attains parinirvāṇa, “final nirvana” or a permanent release from all suffering and from the cycle of samsara. traditional buddha-biographies from india that relate this founding narrative have been studied and mined in depth by the academic discipline of buddhist studies for perhaps two hundred years, and the story has been read, analyzed, and explicated through a great variety of interpretive lenses. yet two centuries’ worth of work on the rich narrative traditions surrounding the life of the buddha have thus far still failed to pay any sustained attention to the episodes in his life involving close interactions with animals. though such episodes are few in number, those that exist employ animal characters in profoundly interesting ways that are worthy of careful analysis. animals humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 2 appear in the buddha’s life-story not as incidental creatures, but as effective and valuable tools that perform certain functions in the depiction of the buddha’s character. in this article, i look at the narrative traditions surrounding two animals who play a significant role within the buddha’s life-story — a horse named kanthaka, who appears at the beginning of the buddha’s career, and an elephant named nāḷāgiri, who appears at the height of the buddha’s power. the sources i draw upon are traditional buddhabiographies composed in sanskrit (s.) and pāli (p.) and dating anywhere from the first or second centuries bce up to the sixth century ce — including the buddhacarita, mahāvastu, lalitavistara, and saṅghabhedavastu portion of the mūlasarvāstivāda vinaya (all in sanskrit), the nidānakathā (in pāli), and the abhiniṣkramaṇa sūtra (originally composed in sanskrit but now preserved only in chinese) — as well as shorter biographical passages from several pāli canonical and commentarial works. because my discussion is aimed at a general audience who may not be familiar with indian buddhism, i have avoided referring to the (often unwieldy) names of individual texts, although they should be clear from my citations. with the exception of those passages quoted from samuel beal’s english translation of the abhiniṣkramaṇa sūtra (inaccessible to me in the original language, since i do not read chinese), all translations appearing in what follows are my own. in interpreting the narrative traditions surrounding kanthaka and nāḷāgiri, i will argue that both animals can be seen as “doubles” or shadows of the buddha — illuminating his character through identification, contrast, or parallelism with an animal “other.” the doubling of a human character by means of an animal alter-ego is common, of course, in many traditions of literature. because human beings are animals, yet also define themselves in opposition to all nonhuman animals, there is a simultaneous kinship and otherness in humanity’s relationship with the animal. this flexible interplay between identity and difference makes animality a fruitful resource for defining what it means to be human. and since the buddha, in some sense, constitutes the ultimate human being, we should not be surprised to find that his character is clarified through the functioning of such animal “doubles.” as doubles, however, kanthaka and nāḷāgiri function in significantly different ways. i will argue that the horse kanthaka serves as a scapegoat for the buddha, absorbing some of the blame and moral censure that are due to him, yet without tainting his perfect character. the elephant nāḷāgiri, on the other hand, serves as a billboard for the buddha’s power and charisma, allowing these features of the buddha’s character to be publicly displayed to the cosmos at large. yet even while these “doubles” of the buddha are made to serve their functions as scapegoat and billboard, the texts in question also engage in several strategies of asserting human reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 3 superiority to animals and human dominance over the animal world. the buddha, too, thus shares with the rest of humanity a contradictory desire to both dominate and find oneself reflected in the animal “other.” animals and humans in a buddhist worldview. because the dynamic of kinship versus otherness in humanity’s relationship to the animal differs significantly from one cultural context to another, a brief word about how this dynamic operates within a traditional buddhist worldview is perhaps called for, before turning to consider kanthaka and nāḷāgiri’s functioning as animal “doubles.” traditional buddhist thought lacks the modern, scientific notion that human beings are animals; there is, for example, no sanskrit term that refers to “(human and nonhuman) animals” without also including a variety of other types of beings, such as gods, demons, and spirits. nevertheless, the essential kinship between human beings and animals is emphasized in several ways: both animals and human beings belong to the larger category of “living beings” (s. sattva, bhūta, or prāṇin), and thus, both are subject to the moral forces of karma and the endless cycle of death and rebirth known as samsara. in practice, this means that animals can be reborn as human beings, and human beings can be reborn as animals—which significantly weakens the boundary between them. in fact, every human being has been an animal during countless of his or her previous lives, just as every animal has been a human being. one ethical result of this fluidity is the buddhist belief that both human beings and animals are worthy of moral consideration and compassionate treatment—as reflected in the first and most important precept of the buddhist moral code, which prohibits the taking of any sentient being’s life. in these and other ways, buddhism provides certain resources allowing human beings to experience kinship with the animal world around them—seeing animals as “a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.”1 on the other hand, buddhist thought equally emphasizes the otherness of animals and the hierarchy between human beings and animals by seeing them as two wholly distinct realms of rebirth (s. gati) — with human beings classified as a “fortunate realm of rebirth” (s. sugati), brought about by positive moral deeds and involving pleasant and beneficial karmic rewards, and animals being classified as an “unfortunate realm of rebirth” (s. durgati), brought about by negative moral deeds and involving unpleasant and deleterious karmic rewards. human beings are thus categorically superior to animals, and human exploitation and abuse of animals — while certainly not condoned — tends to be taken for granted and is frequently depicted in indian buddhist texts. in scholastic sources, moreover, great care is taken to maintain the ontological distinction humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 4 between the human and animal realms: though an individual being, over time, can (and often does) move back and forth between them, the categories themselves remain distinct. perhaps the most significant difference between human beings and animals, according to a famous passage in the pāli milindapañha, is that while animals may possess some elements of reason or rationality (p. manasikāra), their mental faculties are ayoniso (p.) — “disorderly,” “distracted,” or “superficial” — rather than yoniso (p.), “systematic” or “sustained” (trenckner, milindapañho 32). animals thus have enormous difficulty controlling and cultivating their minds or “maintaining calm mental states” (harris 208). more importantly, animals lack the crucial human faculty of prajñā (s.) — “wisdom,” or the ability to attain discriminative insight into the nature of reality. it is for this reason that animals are relatively lacking in moral agency and are “not capable of growth” in the teachings of buddhism (oldenberg 1:62) — the animal rebirth being one of the eight “wrong times and wrong occasions for living a spiritual life” (morris 4:225). indeed, the animal’s lack of prajñā, as schmithausen and maithrimurthi have stated, constitutes “the decisive difference between man and animals, and the one which, from a buddhist point of view, constitutes the essential superiority of human existence over animal existence” (87). thus, although the boundary between human beings and animals may be drawn differently in traditional india than it is in the western theological and philosophical traditions, we still find the same basic dynamic between kinship and otherness, identity and difference, attraction and repulsion, in humanity’s relationship to the animal. this dynamic makes the animal particularly effective in serving as a “double” for the human. kanthaka in the great departure. one of the most significant moments within the lifestory of the buddha is the sequence of events through which prince siddhārtha renounces his worldly life as a prince to become a wandering ascetic — events which are collectively referred to as the great departure. the great departure is a major turning-point within the life-story, for it represents the crucial moment — later repeated, in a sense, by every buddhist monk and nun — when prince siddhārtha renounces worldly life and all of its attachments (including wealth, kingship, marriage, and children) in favor of life as a celibate ascetic devoted to spiritual pursuits. and it is at this crucial juncture that a horse — the magnificent horse kanthaka, “eighteen hands in length ... and thoroughly white, like a bleached-out shell” (fausbøll 1:62) — effectively fulfills certain functions within the story. reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 5 kanthaka is closely identified with the bodhisattva from the very moment of his birth through the tradition of the seven “co-natals” — seven people, animals, or objects that came into existence at exactly the same moment as the bodhisattva was born, most of which were destined to play an important role within his life. kanthaka is always included in this list, in addition to other crucial figures such as the bodhisattva’s future wife yaśodharā, his future charioteer chandaka, and the bodhi tree underneath which he would succeed in becoming a buddha. this tradition of the seven co-natals has the effect of suggesting that the bodhisattva’s future destiny is assured from the very moment of his birth and that other living beings — including kanthaka — must live parallel lives in order to play their necessary roles in the unfolding of this destiny. kanthaka’s status as a co-natal immediately elevates him above all other horses, as well as individualizing him such that he is no longer just a generic embodiment of the “horse” species. kanthaka’s uniqueness is further reinforced through the fact that he has a name (which is relatively unusual for the animals featured in indian buddhist literature) and through his elaborate physical description, which makes him worthy of being associated with the bodhisattva. kanthaka is “an excellent horse, endowed with strength, spirit, speed, and good lineage” (johnston 1:55); his “limbs have the finest features” and he is “ready, swift-footed, and moves with the foremost grace” (senart 1:156); in fact, he is “capable of traversing the entire universe from end to end ... yet still make it back before breakfast-time to forage and eat his meal” (fausbøll 1:64). clearly not your ordinary horse! kanthaka features most centrally in the episode of the bodhisattva’s great departure. the basic story is the same in all sources: determined to renounce worldly life and become an ascetic, prince siddhārtha, in the middle of the night, wakes up his charioteer chandaka and asks him to prepare the horse kanthaka. overcoming various obstacles and benefitting from the help of the gods, who have caused everyone in the palace to sink into a heavy slumber, the three of them succeed in passing through the locked gates of the city and escaping from the kingdom. they travel through three kingdoms in a single night and arrive upon the banks of the anomā river at sunrise, whereupon prince siddhārtha dismisses chandaka and kanthaka to continue on his journey alone — cutting off his royal topknot and throwing off his princely clothing in favor of the rags of a wandering mendicant. the first thing we should notice is that throughout this sequence of events, kanthaka is not merely an animal upon which the bodhisattva happens to ride, but is instead humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 6 depicted as an active, conscious, and willing participant — one who is keenly aware of the bodhisattva’s quest and closely identified with it. in one biography, for example, as soon as chandaka begins to saddle him, kanthaka immediately understands: “this saddling is very tight; it is not like the saddling of other days.... it must be that my master wishes to go forth on the great departure this very day!” in response, he neighs loudly out of joy, and “the sound of it would have spread throughout the entire city, but the gods silenced it, so that nobody could hear it” (fausbøll 1: 62). in another source, kanthaka assures himself: “there will be no danger, misfortune, or calamity for me, when i am carrying the world-protector! each and every deity celebrates [me], for i am the vehicle for the guide of the world!” (tripathi 195). and in another source, kanthaka tells us that when he learned of the bodhisattva’s intention to renounce the world, “i gave rise to abundant joy. i was happy and elated, and i fervently wished for [him to succeed]!” (jayawickrama 119). throughout this sequence, then, there seems to be a concerted effort to fuse kanthaka’s will and motivation with those of the bodhisattva himself. the bodhisattva also seems to recognize the importance of kanthaka’s assistance, for in several sources he speaks directly to the horse, asking kanthaka to help him with his renunciation and giving him credit for the part he will play in bringing about the bodhisattva’s buddhahood. thus, in one text, he asks kanthaka to “exert yourself with speed and valor” and “act such that i may attain the deathless state!” (johnston 1:56) — and in another text he tells kanthaka that “when i have awoken to perfect full awakening, i will be grateful to you” (gnoli 2:91). in such passages, kanthaka appears not as an ordinary beast of burden who cannot help but respond to the master’s whip, but rather, as a fully autonomous actor who has the choice to participate in the bodhisattva’s quest and to share in its ultimate reward. though animals in buddhist doctrine are generally devoid of such moral agency, kanthaka’s agency in this episode is a direct reflection of the bodhisattva’s own. attributing such agency to the horse furthers the close identification this episode seeks to establish between kanthaka and the bodhisattva’s impulse to renounce. in some passages, moreover, kanthaka’s physical “carrying” of the bodhisattva upon his back is explicitly compared to the future buddha’s spiritual “carrying” of the world from this shore of samsara to the farther shore of nirvana (a common metaphor). in one text, for example, he says directly to kanthaka: “tonight, dear kanthaka, carry me across in a single night, and through you, i will become a buddha and carry across the world, together with its gods!” (fausbøll 1:62). thus, the bodhisattva acknowledges that he will become a buddha through kanthaka’s assistance, and the horse’s physical “carrying across” is directly parallel to the buddha’s spiritual “carrying across” from this shore of suffering to the reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 7 farther shore of peace — a parallelism that is concretized when kanthaka crosses over the anomā river in a single leap to land “on the farther shore” (fausbøll 1:64). kanthaka’s movements as a horse are thus a physical foreshadowing of the buddha’s saving work as a buddha. our sources thus make it very clear that kanthaka is not just an ordinary, generic horse who happens to be ridden by the bodhisattva on this particular evening. instead, kanthaka is a named, individualized, completely unique being, born at the same moment as the bodhisattva, destined from the moment of his birth to play a role in the bodhisattva’s great departure, fully conscious of the role that he plays, and closely associated with the bodhisattva’s impulse to renounce the world. in all of these senses, kanthaka can be described as a “double” of the bodhisattva — an animal “other” who silently reflects and reinforces the will, motivations, and actions of the bodhisattva himself. the functions such an animal “double” might fulfill will hopefully become apparent as we continue the story from here. kanthaka as the buddha’s scapegoat. at daybreak, on the banks of the anomā river, the bodhisattva engages in a number of actions that clearly indicate, as john strong has noted, that he is “making himself into a monk” (60) — actions, in fact, that would later come to be ritually reenacted by candidates for monastic ordination in many buddhist cultures. these actions vary slightly from one source to another, but generally include: cutting off his hair with a sword, throwing his topknot into the air (where it is caught by deities and enshrined within heaven), removing his royal garments and jewelry, and putting on the rags of a wandering mendicant. the final act within this sequence is the dismissal of chandaka and kanthaka: “chandaka, my friend,” he says, “take my ornaments and kanthaka and go. i will go forth!” (fausbøll 1:64). as strong has noted, “the dismissal of chandaka and kanthaka is important because they represent the bodhisattva’s last tie binding him to his home” (60). indeed, from this point onward, the bodhisattva is completely alone, and the gods, who had played such a major role in the great departure, now seem to retreat from the scene. in fact, i would argue that the dismissal of chandaka and kanthaka represents a crucial turning-point within the buddha’s life-story — the exact moment when the bodhisattva makes a decisive break with his former life as a prince and severs all of the emotional ties still binding him to his home. the great significance of this moment — the need to mark this moment in some manner — is suggested in several sources. in one source, the location of the dismissal is later commemorated by a shrine called the “turning back of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 8 kanthaka” (fausbøll 1:63), and in another source, as soon as the bodhisattva dismounts from his horse, he declares: “this is the last time i will ever dismount from my steed; and this is the spot where for the last time i have alighted” (beal 140). yet another text tells us explicitly why the moment is so significant, for with the dismissal of chandaka and kanthaka, the bodhisattva “cut the bonds that tied him to his home, threw all of it away, and departed with indifference” (senart 2:166). it is in this context that the bodhisattva’s final interactions with chandaka and kanthaka become significant. in several sources, chandaka either argues against the bodhisattva’s decision to renounce the world or expresses the wish to join him in his renunciation. these discussions are sometimes quite lengthy; in one biography, for example, the back-and-forth dialogue between the bodhisattva and chandaka goes on for almost fifty verses and functions as an extended discourse on the possible arguments one might make both for and against the practice of world-renunciation (a discourse that was well-developed in premodern india). the bodhisattva’s final interaction with kanthaka, on the other hand, is dealt with more briefly — but packs a greater emotional punch: the excellent horse kanthaka licked the bodhisattva’s feet and shed warm tears. the prince stroked the horse with his hand ... and spoke to him like a friend: “don’t cry, kanthaka, you’ve shown what a good horse you are! be patient, and this exertion of yours will quickly bear fruit.” (johnston 1:65) in another text, kanthaka himself recalls of this moment: “i licked his copper-nailed feet all over and wept as i watched the great hero leaving” (jayawickrama 170). if we consider the contrast between the bodhisattva’s final interaction with chandaka and his final interaction with kanthaka, we can see that the two characters are performing different functions, brought about by their human-vs.-animal status. the human character of chandaka allows for a conversation to take place: the bodhisattva can explain his motivations in renouncing the world, and chandaka can argue against him or express a wish to join him. rational arguments both for and against the practice of world-renunciation can be expressed in order to justify the bodhisattva’s departure. with kanthaka, however, such rational discourse is not possible — for kanthaka, as an animal, is unable to express himself through human speech, nor is he capable of understanding complex arguments concerning renunciation.2 thus, in lieu of words and arguments, we instead get a focus upon the physical manifestations of kanthaka’s reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 9 enormous grief: he licks the bodhisattva’s feet, he weeps, and he looks at the bodhisattva for as long as he can. the emotional poignancy of this scene, the collective grief brought about by the prince’s rejection of worldly life, the cruelty of the prince’s severance of all emotional ties — all of these elements of buddhism’s founding story (and, i might note, the “founding story” for every monk and nun) are far better captured by the mute animal kanthaka than by the talkative human chandaka. it is precisely because kanthaka is an animal, i would argue, that he becomes the bearer of all of the emotional consequences of that original act of severance — from family, community, and kingdom — that gave birth to the buddhist path. displaying an animal’s response to the bodhisattva’s departure allows these emotions to find powerful, yet also silent, expression. kanthaka seems to mourn the prince’s loss of worldly life on behalf of the prince himself — and because kanthaka is an animal, this moment of poignant mourning is allowed to remain unopposed by any rational justifications or opposing reasons. one sense in which kanthaka serves as a scapegoat, then, is by acting as a kind of container for all of the highly fraught emotions surrounding the bodhisattva’s departure — a container that is definitively separated from the bodhisattva upon the riverbank, so that the bodhisattva can continue on “with indifference.” while some sources tells us that kanthaka actually died out of grief right there on the riverbank, i would here like to focus on the alternative plotline found in some of the other sources, according to which kanthaka does not die at this point, but returns to the capital city of kapilavastu along with chandaka. now that he has been separated from the bodhisattva, he is full of grief, a mere shell of the magnificent horse he once was: the powerful horse kanthaka walked onward, soberly and exhausted in spirit. though he was still adorned with ornaments, now that the bodhisattva had abandoned him, he seemed bereft of majesty.... he neighed loudly and pitifully again and again. even though he was hungry, he did not welcome or consume the grass and water along the road, as before. (johnston 1: 77) in another text, kanthaka is so weakened by grief that it takes him eight days to get back to the city, even though the journey out had taken only a single night (beal 146). it is within the context of this scenario that an even stronger sense of kanthaka’s functioning as a scapegoat comes into play. for as soon as he returns to kapilavastu, kanthaka seems to become a convenient target for the loved ones the prince has left humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 10 behind — an object of longing, blame, and censure who, as an animal, is powerless to defend himself or respond. the bodhisattva, in a sense, is spared from bearing the brunt of these emotional reactions because kanthaka — his animal scapegoat — bears them for him. in several sources, this sequence begins with a rather heartbreaking episode in which the human inability to interpret animal sounds correctly comes into play. according to one text: entering the king’s residence, kanthaka looked around with eyes full of tears and let out a loud neigh, as if announcing his grief to the people. then the birds living within the king’s residence and the favored horses tied up nearby, assuming that the prince had returned, echoed that horse’s cry. and the people standing near the king’s harem apartments, deceived into an abundance of joy, thought to themselves: “since the horse kanthaka is neighing, surely the prince has arrived!” (johnston 1: 80) kanthaka neighs out of grief — yet his animal cry is ambiguous and is misinterpreted even by the other animals, resulting in an animal cacophony that deceives the palace folk into thinking that the prince has returned. this is followed by a long and pathetic description of the women of the palace rushing “hopefully” toward chandaka and kanthaka, only to discover that the bodhisattva is not with them, whereupon they weep, wail, faint, swoon, and beat their breasts in a great paroxysm of grief. similarly, in another text, upon entering the palace complex, kanthaka neighs “in recognition of his home” — whereupon people come rushing to their windows, crying out, “the prince has come back! the prince has returned!” upon seeing that they have been deceived, however, “they left their places of observation in sorrow and retired within the precincts, weeping and with great lamentation” (beal 147).3 the ambiguity of kanthaka’s neighing thus causes a cruel deception of the loved ones the prince has left behind. this episode seems to set up kanthaka as an object of blame and censure — which then comes to fruition in the reactions to the horse of the bodhisattva’s wife yaśodharā and his father king śuddhodhana. the wife responds to the horse with a poignant mixture of both longing and anger. in some texts, it is the emotions of grief and longing that seem to predominate: upon seeing kanthaka, she throws her arms around the horse’s neck and “babbles and laments incoherently” — “alas, kanthaka, noble [horse], my husband’s companion, reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 11 where did you take him?” (tripathi 192-93). in other texts, however, grief and longing quickly morph into accusation and blame: yaśodharā, weeping, threw her arms around kanthaka’s neck and said: “where have you taken the prince, kanthaka? how have i offended against you and chandaka such that you would take the prince and leave while i was happily sleeping? now i and the sixty thousand women of the harem have been made into widows!” (senart 2:189) in another source, in fact, her words are full of anger and vitriol, and it is once again the frustrating unreliability of the horse’s neighing that comes to the fore: this horse kanthaka must surely wish me misfortune in every way, since he took away from here my everything, at night, while people were sleeping, like a jewel-thief!.... today, he neighs loudly, as if he were filling up the king’s abode. but when he was carrying away my beloved, this vile horse fond of ignoble deeds remained mute. for if he had neighed, waking up the people, or made a noise on the ground with his hooves, or produced a loud sound with his jaws, then i wouldn’t be experiencing such grief. (johnston 1:83-84) despite the seeming contrast yaśodharā draws between her husband — “my everything” — and kanthaka — “this vile horse fond of ignoble deeds” — it is clear that kanthaka can be seen here as a substitute for the bodhisattva, a scapegoat for the bodhisattva, and a convenient target for all of the turbulent emotions yaśodharā feels toward her husband. (we should remember, after all, that the buddha’s buddhahood was only made possible by a husband’s sudden abandonment of his wife.) the bodhisattva is spared from suffering the full onslaught of these emotions because his horse is there to do it for him. the bodhisattva’s father, king śuddhodhana, also takes this opportunity to vent his feelings upon the animal scapegoat. “lying on the ground and looking up at the horse with eyes full of tears,” he wails: o kanthaka, after doing so many favors for me in battle, today you have done me a great disfavor!—for you have carried off into the forest my beloved ... as if you were an enemy, even though you are a friend. so take humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 12 me to him today, or go there quickly and bring him back! — for i cannot live without him, just as one whose disease is advanced cannot survive without the right medicine. (johnston 1:90-91) king śuddhodana not only castigates the horse as an “enemy,” but also seems to place his very life in the horse’s hands, threatening to die if kanthaka does not undo the enormous damage he has brought about. in arguing that kanthaka here fulfills the classic functions of a scapegoat, it is important to point out that chandaka, too, plays this role to some extent; in fact, in several sources, the accusations yaśodharā levels against chandaka — how could you let him leave? why didn’t you wake anyone up? — are even more extensive than the accusations she levels against kanthaka. nevertheless, there are several important differences between chandaka and kanthaka, differences that are the direct result of kanthaka’s animality. one difference is that kanthaka, as a horse, is able to serve as a physical object of yaśodharā’s longing. given the cultural context, it would be inappropriate for her to throw her arms around a human male such as chandaka, and equally inappropriate for her to engage in physical contact with an impure or lowly animal, such as a dog, pig, or jackal. but she can throw her arms around kanthaka the horse, clinging desperately to the horse as a stand-in for her absent husband — for the horse is a highly favored animal in india, replete with royal and aristocratic associations (doniger). in just the same way, king śuddhodhana can lie on the ground and look up at the horse — a highly inappropriate posture if the object of his gaze were a human being subservient to the king. kanthaka’s animality and his specific status as a horse thus allow for raw expressions of intimacy that are unencumbered by the norms of behavior operative among humans. a second and more important difference between chandaka and kanthaka is that kanthaka — as an animal — cannot defend himself or respond. lacking the ability to express himself through human language, he can only mutely absorb (and thus nullify?) the anger and blame being cast his way. in fact, it is striking to note, in one source after another, that chandaka feels compelled to speak on kanthaka’s behalf and defend the noble horse against these accusations. in one text, for example, he pleads with yaśodharā: “please do not blame kanthaka, my queen, nor should you be angry with me! know that we are completely guiltless” (johnston 1:84). in another, he likewise protests: “what wrong have i committed? for i cried out in a loud voice — and kanthaka, too, as he was taking the prince away, neighed loudly, yet none of you woke up!” (senart 2:189). the very fact that chandaka feels compelled to provide a defense reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 13 for the defenseless horse further highlights the animal’s complete inability to speak up on its own behalf. the muteness of the animal and its inability to communicate thus make it a more effective scapegoat. a final feature that distinguishes chandaka from kanthaka is the fact that kanthaka dies. whereas chandaka survives the attacks upon his character and later goes on to become a monk, kanthaka does not. in one biography, kanthaka’s death is a direct result of the accusations made against him by the bodhisattva’s father: “the horse kanthaka having heard the reproachful words of the king in his affliction, unable to bear the sorrow that afflicted him, lay down and died” (beal 151-52). in other sources, it is more generally the result of his continuing grief at being separated from the bodhisattva. especially poignant is a passage in which kanthaka starves himself to death out of grief, despite the desperate measures people take to save his life: sweetmeats coated in honey were placed before him, and other foods and sweetmeats, fit for a king, were piled up before him — yet kanthaka did not eat. constantly remembering the bodhisattva, he wept. some women of the harem used their regal and costly garments of cotton, silk, and wool to wipe away kanthaka’s tears. others stroked his head, others his neck, others his back ... flanks ... forelegs ... joints ... tail ... and hooves. others held morsels of food coated in honey up to his mouth.... yet kanthaka would not take food. unable to see the bodhisattva, starving himself out of grief for the bodhisattva, kanthaka died. (senart 2:189-90) kanthaka’s death immediately after bearing the brunt of the anger, blame, and other negative emotions vented by the bodhisattva’s loved ones reinforces his function as a scapegoat. first, he is closely identified with the bodhisattva and the bodhisattva’s impulse to renounce the world. then, the two of them are wrenched apart, and it is kanthaka alone, as the bodhisattva’s substitute, who returns to bear the consequences of the prince’s departure. after mutely absorbing blame and moral censure on behalf of the absent bodhisattva, kanthaka dies, thus nullifying and taking these negative emotions away. though chandaka, too, fulfills some of these functions, kanthaka’s animality, muteness, and death make him a more effective scapegoating vehicle. the final step in this scapegoating process, i suggest, is to reward or compensate the scapegoat in some way — and this is brought about by kanthaka’s immediate rebirth as a deity in heaven. “as soon as he died,” we are informed, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 14 he was reborn among the gods of the trāyastriṃśa heaven.... he was a god of great supernatural power and enormous authority, and he surpassed the thousands of other gods who had been reborn there before him in the ten divine qualities — that is, divine lifespan, appearance, happiness, sovereignty, retinue, forms, sounds, smells, tastes, and touches. (senart 2: 190) thus, kanthaka is assaulted with blame and criticism and suffers death as a result, yet he is also amply rewarded by an immediate rebirth in heaven. here, we should observe that the quick death of an animal, followed by its immediate rebirth in one of the lower heavens of the buddhist cosmos — usually as a result of giving rise to “faith” (prasāda) in the physical presence of the buddha — is a very common motif in buddhist sources from india and constitutes a standard way of depicting the highest spiritual attainment that one can gain within the body of an animal.4 while adhering to this common pattern, however, the sources pertaining to kanthaka’s death and rebirth in heaven seem particularly concerned with the theme of compensation. in several sources, in fact, we later hear kanthaka — now reborn as a deity — explicitly emphasize the causal connection between his role in the great departure and the fruit he now enjoys: “because of that auspicious deed, i am now enjoying this fruit.... see how this pure deed succeeded for one who was only a horse!” (senart 2:195) in such passages, we see how determined the tradition is to compensate the animal scapegoat. the same animal whose neighing was confusing or deceptive, who was blamed as a “vile” and “ignoble” beast, and who suffered starvation and death as a result now appears in a form that can confidently reassure us that he was perfectly willing to perform this role and enjoyed a more-than-adequate divine reward. human language replaces muteness, and divine rewards make up for the abuse and mistreatment suffered earlier. here, the scapegoating process has come full-circle and reached its satisfying resolution. kanthaka as sacrificial animal. in kanthaka’s functioning as the bodhisattva’s scapegoat, there is a sacrificial logic at work, and kanthaka can be likened to a sacrificial animal — one who is closely identified with the sacrificer and loses his life on the sacrificer’s behalf, allowing the sacrificer to undergo a profound transformation and often serving as a scapegoat for the sacrificer’s moral failings. this analogy with animal sacrifice is intended to be loose and suggestive only, for there is no explicit invocation of sacrifice within our sources. nevertheless, in spite of buddhism’s thoroughgoing condemnation of the pre-buddhist brahmanical vedic tradition of animal sacrifice that reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 15 preceded it, it has been shown, time and again, that buddhist discourse in india remained deeply indebted to the logic, imagery, and themes of vedic sacrifice.5 kimberly patton has enumerated four cross-cultural features of the sacrificial animal, and it is striking to note the extent to which these four features, taken together, constitute an almost-perfect reflection of the concerns driving the depiction of kanthaka. first, she notes, animals offered for sacrifice “must be ‘perfect’ according to certain ideologically determined categories: male, unblemished, and whole; they must be in the prime of life” (394) — which is reminiscent of kanthaka’s physical description as a magnificent and powerful white stallion. second, patton notes, the animal victim must be depicted as a willing participant in the sacrifice and as assenting to its own demise; it must be “an active, even self-conscious ritual participant” and “never divested of agency and free will” (396) — just as we have seen to be the case for kanthaka’s willing and conscious participation in the great departure. third, the sacrificial animal is characterized by extreme individualization and elevation above all others of its type; by being chosen for sacrifice, it is uniquely removed from “a life among countless other domesticated animals” to become “a player in a sacred drama,” one who bears “a kind of charged individuality” (397) — features, as we have seen, similarly brought about by kanthaka’s personal name and his status as a “co-natal” of the bodhisattva. and fourth, far from suffering a cruel and ignoble death, the sacrificial animal’s already semi-divine state “is often rendered permanent, and its eschatological future assured in a kind of glistening light” (401). here, she cites the vedic horse sacrifice or aśvamedha as her primary example, noting that according to brahmanical vedic texts, “the horse will dwell among the gods” and undergo a “spectacular apotheosis” by means of its sacrifice (401). thus, a hymn from the ṛg veda directly addresses the sacrificial horse and asserts: “you do not really die through this, nor are you harmed. you go to the gods on paths pleasant to go on” (o’flaherty 91-92; qtd. in patton 401) — just as we see kanthaka immediately reborn as a god in heaven who can confidently reassure us that he is happy with his reward. all four features of the sacrificial animal enumerated by patton, then, apply equally to the horse kanthaka — and this is because, i would argue, a similar sacrificial logic is operative in both cases. just as the animal in a vedic sacrifice is closely identified with the sacrificer, so the same is true of kanthaka’s close identification with the bodhisattva, who is sacrificing his former life and identity as a prince. just as the animal in a vedic sacrifice is elevated, individualized, consecrated, and made sacred prior to its death, with its death resulting in a powerful release of vital energy that either transforms the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 16 sacrificer or purifies his misdeeds (or both) — so the same might be said of kanthaka, whose death simultaneously allows the bodhisattva to annihilate his identity as prince siddhārtha, turn himself into a fully enlightened buddha, and expiate the guilt and blame he might otherwise incur for abandoning his worldly duties. the practice of sacrifice may be absent from our story, but the same basic logic is at work: kanthaka, the buddha’s animal scapegoat, is sacrificed upon the altar of the buddha’s quest for buddhahood. though he is, of course, amply rewarded for the role that he plays, the memory of the horse’s pain still lingers. for it isn’t kanthaka the talkative deity who finally moves us. it is kanthaka the horse — weeping, grief-stricken, refusing oats and honey, and mutely licking the bodhisattva’s feet with affection. billboard for the buddha: the elephant nāḷāgiri. just as kanthaka might be seen as a “double” of the buddha at the very outset of his career, so another animal serves a similar function at the height of the buddha’s power. this is the cruel and fierce elephant nāḷāgiri, sent forth on a rampage in order to kill the buddha, yet instantaneously tamed and made docile by the enormous power of his presence. in the following, i will argue that nāḷāgiri serves as a billboard for the buddha’s power and charisma. the buddha’s effortless and instantaneous taming of the maddened elephant nāḷāgiri dramatically demonstrates to the cosmos at large his absolute mastery over the forces of nature, animality, and passion. yet while nāḷāgiri is thus dominated, vanquished, and reduced to the status of a helpless billboard, this billboard also shares in the identity of the one whose powers it advertises. the buddha thus experiences both kinship and otherness in his relationship to the animal. the episode involving nāḷāgiri takes place within a larger cycle of stories involving the buddha’s arch-enemy devadatta. according to various sources, devadatta was the buddha’s cousin and joined the saṃgha (the community of monks and nuns) shortly after it was established. his early career as a monk seems to have been exemplary, but over time, he grew more and more jealous of the buddha’s fame and charisma and became determined to replace the buddha at the head of the saṃgha. eventually, this results in devadatta undertaking three attempts to assassinate the buddha. in his first assassination attempt, he dispatches a series of men to go and kill the buddha, but all of them are overcome by the buddha’s majesty as soon as they approach him and end up becoming devoted lay-followers. in his second assassination attempt, devadatta climbs to the top of a mountain and hurls down a great stone in the buddha’s direction. at the last minute, however, two lower mountain peaks magically come together to intercept the stone, and only a tiny fragment hits the buddha. finally, in his third attempt, devadatta bribes the king’s mahouts to get the fierce war elephant nāḷāgiri intoxicated reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 17 on liquor and to set him loose on the road where the buddha is walking for alms, confident that nāḷāgiri will attack and kill the buddha. but this attempt, too, is foiled when the buddha unhesitatingly approaches nālāgiri, suffuses him with waves of benevolence (s. maitrī), and reaches out his right hand to stroke the elephant’s forehead, whereupon nāḷāgiri is immediately tamed: he falls at the buddha’s feet, listens to a few words of the dharma preached on his behalf, and becomes docile and nonviolent forever after. as a result of these many misdeeds, devadatta is ultimately swallowed up into the lowest hell of the buddhist universe.6 the episode involving the buddha’s confrontation with nāḷāgiri thus takes place within a larger cycle of episodes, all of which allow the buddha to demonstrate his overwhelming power and majesty. in particular, we should note the utter ease and effortlessness with which the buddha foils the three attempts upon his life. in each case, the threat is neutralized immediately and with virtually no effort on his part. in fact, as the buddha himself notes, “it is impossible, monks, it cannot come to pass that a buddha would lose his life by being attacked by another. monks, buddhas do not attain final nirvana by being attacked” (oldenberg 2:193). perhaps it is also significant that by means of these three attempts, the buddha is shown to have mastery over human beings, the world of nature, and the animal realm, respectively. while the buddha himself remains passive and serene, each one of these realms responds, willy-nilly, to the force of his presence, becoming a billboard for his extraordinary power. man vs. beast. keeping this larger context in mind, let us take a closer look now at the nature of the buddha’s encounter with nāḷāgiri. throughout his lifetime, the buddha encounters a great variety of men, women, animals, deities, and supernatural beings, and these encounters take many different forms — involving teaching, worship, friendship, patronage, and hostility. yet the buddha’s encounter with the elephant nāḷāgiri is not an ordinary or typical encounter, by any means. instead, it is constructed and set up as a direct confrontation between man and beast. the buddha can be seen as the quintessential man; in fact, he is referred to as the “great man” (mahāpuruṣa), one who brings to perfect fulfillment all ideal human qualities — qualities that define what it means to be human and that distinguish human beings from the brutish animal realm. standing opposed to the buddha as the quintessential man is nāḷāgiri as the quintessential beast. elephants, though often idealized in buddhist literature and attributed with many noble and quasi-human qualities, are also one of the paradigmatic “wild” animals, associated with the forest, the jungles, and the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 18 wilderness. nāḷāgiri embodies these “wild” qualities to an extraordinary degree, for he is described as a “fierce, cruel, man-killing” elephant (fausbøll 5:333-34), one who “approaches as if death itself were attacking” (horner 210). as he rushes toward the buddha, he utterly destroys all signs of human civilization (such as houses, buildings, and gateways) and kills many people and other animals along the way. his entire body is “dyed with blood,” his eyes are “permeated by an inner blaze,” and he “devours [the remains of his victims] like a man-eating demon.” significantly, at the time when this episode takes place, nāḷāgiri is also described as “flowing with the juice of musth in seven places.” musth is a periodic condition experienced by male elephants and characterized by soaring levels of testosterone, sexual passion, extreme violence and aggression, and a telltale secretion from the elephant’s temporal glands. the features of musth were well-understood in the elephant-lore of ancient india (known in sanskrit as gaja-śāstra), and the elephant in musth is frequently used in sanskrit literature as an image of uncontrollable aggression and sexuality (sukumar 48-51). not content with the level of ferocity available through the condition of musth alone, however, our sources also tell us that the mahouts have fed nāḷāgiri abundant liquor to make him intoxicated, as well as striking him with spears and lances in order to further enrage him. nāḷāgiri is thus a perfect embodiment of brutish animality and passion, unchecked by any restraint and mindlessly driven forward by the natural impulses of sexuality, violence, and aggression — an extreme embodiment of the difficulty all animals experience in controlling and calming down their mental faculties. as such, he stands opposed to the perfect man represented by the buddha — one who has restrained, suppressed, and finally eradicated all passions and afflictions in favor of civilized human qualities that need to be cultivated. indeed, the buddha stands at the very apex of the human’s ability to engage in conscious mental cultivation, whereas nālāgiri is motivated solely by animal instinct, uncontrolled passions, and intoxicating drink. the confrontation between them — the confrontation between man and beast — is thus a direct contest between brute, animalistic passion and the human capacity for selftransformation. the animality of nāḷāgiri is thus central — and this is clearly recognized by the buddha himself, who refers directly to nāḷāgiri’s unfortunate rebirth “from an inferior animal womb,” as a result of which he “takes delight in killing others and destroying their lives” (gnoli 2:189). nāḷāgiri’s animality is also central for devadatta, for in formulating his plan, he refers explicitly to the fundamental difference between human beings and animals: reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 19 no human being is able to approach the ascetic gotama once they have seen his beautiful and majestic person. but the king has a fierce, cruel, man-killing elephant named nāḷāgiri, who knows nothing about the virtues of the buddha, dharma, and saṃgha — and he will be able to kill him. (fausbøll 5: 333-34, emphasis added) repeatedly referring to the elephant as one who “knows nothing” about buddha, dharma, and saṃgha, the story emphasizes the lack of discriminative insight (prajñā) that buddhist doctrine characterizes as most distinguishing the animal from the human, and forever condemning the animal to behavior driven primarily by passion (schmithausen and maithrimurti 87). human beings endowed with prajñā and thus capable of knowing the virtues of buddha, dharma, and saṃgha — devadatta suggests — could never go through with actually killing the buddha (as he learned, no doubt, from his first attempt at assassination). it is in this sense that the contest between the buddha and nālāgiri can be seen as a contest between man and beast. at the same time, however, we should further understand that this confrontation between paradigmatic man and beast is also a contest between nirvana and samsara. nāḷāgiri can be seen as an embodiment of the forces of samsara, whereas the buddha embodies the ability — belonging to human beings alone — to overcome the forces of samsara and attain the goal of nirvana. in fact, it is quite clear that the confrontation between the buddha and nālāgiri is a shadow-image of the buddha’s original battle with māra (a divine personification of death and desire) on the night of his awakening — or that which allowed him to attain nirvana in the first place (bautze-picron). significantly, the figure of māra — ruler and fundamental embodiment of the forces of samsara — is commonly depicted as riding upon an elephant in musth (ramanathapillai), and he presides over troops that are characterized, first and foremost, by animality — described as having the faces of horses, buffaloes, asses, goats, rams, camels, deer, lions, tigers, panthers, bears, dogs, hogs, cats, ravens, cocks, vultures, eagles, and fishes (johnston 2:192; jones 2:364). animality is thus used in the battle with māra to represent the nefarious forces of samsara, which find their most potent expression in the maddened elephant in musth. in a further parallel with the nāḷāgiri episode, the buddha, in a famous gesture, defeats māra by extending the fingers of his right hand and touching the earth as witness to his virtue and merit — just as he later tames nāḷāgiri by extending his right hand and gently stroking the elephant’s forehead. and just as nāḷāgiri responds to the buddha’s touch by falling at the buddha’s feet, so does māra’s elephant “fall to the earth on his knees” (fausbøll humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 20 1:74) at the moment of the buddha’s attainment of buddhahood. the contest between the buddha and nāḷāgiri is thus symbolic of the larger cosmic drama pitting the freedom of nirvana against the bondage of samsara. yet it takes the particular form of man confronting beast. in this contest between man and beast, between animalistic passions and human selfcultivation, between the forces of samsara and the human ability to attain nirvana, it is obvious who must prevail — definitively, completely, and instantaneously. multiple versions of the story make this victory clear. according to one version: then the blessed one suffused the elephant nāḷāgiri with thoughts of benevolence. and the elephant nāḷāgiri, permeated by the blessed one’s thoughts of benevolence, lowered his trunk, approached the blessed one, and stood before him. the blessed one stroked the elephant nāḷāgiri’s forehead with his right hand, and spoke to him in verse.... then the elephant nāḷāgiri took dust from the blessed one’s feet with his trunk, sprinkled it over his head, and shrank away, moving backward for as long as he could see the blessed one. then the elephant nāḷāgiri went to the elephant stables and stood in his own stall. and in this way did the elephant nāḷāgiri become tame. (oldenberg 2:194-95) in another version, the buddha again suffuses nāḷāgiri with benevolence and “summons him in a gentle voice,” whereupon the elephant opened his eyes, and when he beheld the beauty and splendor of the blessed one, he felt a thrill. his state of intoxication was brought to an end through the power of the buddha, and he lowered his trunk, shook his ears, and came and fell at the buddha’s feet. (fausbøll 5:336) again, the buddha speaks to him briefly and strokes his forehead, “and from then on, he became extremely gentle and was hostile toward no one” (fausbøll 5:336). similarly, in a third version, the buddha suffuses the elephant with benevolence, “with his heart calmly pervaded by compassion,” and the elephant, the tendrils of his heart made soft by that suffusion of benevolence, became aware of the fault of anger within him. unable to stand before the blessed one, due to shame, he fell down with his head at the feet of the blessed one, as if he were entering the earth. (horner 212) reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 21 again, the buddha strokes his forehead with his right hand and preaches to him briefly, whereupon “that noble elephant attained discernment and became like the most welltrained disciple endowed with ethical conduct and good behavior. thus did the blessed one ... tame the noble elephant” (ibid.). the brute physical strength of the maddened elephant is thus no match for the buddha’s virtue of benevolence (maitrī), assiduously cultivated over millions of lifetimes. the human ability to cultivate spiritual qualities such as benevolence and compassion is thus seen to prevail over the animalistic impulses of violence, sexuality, and aggression. man overcomes beast — and nirvana conquers samsara — in an effortless and spectacular display. thus is human dominance over the animal world (and everything that it stands for) definitively proclaimed. elephant vs. elephant. the dramatic opposition i have thus far drawn between paradigmatic man and beast is complicated, however, by the contrasting kinship between humans and animals — or, in this case, the fact that animals in buddhism are not solely the embodiments of brutish instincts and uncontrollable passions, but are, in fact, capable of some limited degree of reason, rationality, moral agency, and mental control (even if they do pale in comparison to human beings in regard to these abilities). similarly, the buddha himself, despite being the ultimate human being, is not merely a “great man,” but is also frequently likened to powerful male animals — sometimes referred to, in fact, as a “great lion” (s. mahāsiṃha), a “great elephant” (s. mahānāga), or a “bull of a man” (s. narārṣabha) (powers). in specific regard to elephants, for example, the buddha is frequently associated with a magnificent white elephant — his conception occurring when his mother dreams of a white elephant entering her right side — and is often metaphorically described as an elephant. elephant imagery is pervasive in buddhist literature, and the violent and passion-ridden elephant in musth (as embodied by nāḷāgiri) stands at one end of a continuum that includes, on its other end, the noble and compassionate white elephant sometimes associated with the buddha. in fact, as rajmohan ramanathapillai has noted, the buddhist path of spiritual transformation can be envisioned as a sort of continuum of different kinds of elephants: this continuum is illustrated with mara’s musth elephant on the left (imperfection); earthly gray male elephants in the middle (potential to be tamed); and the perfect white elephant on the right. this image of a sacred white elephant embodying love and compassion illustrates the ... perfection toward which one must strive. (32) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 22 the suggestion being made here, of course, is that in the contest between human and beast, the beast is not something wholly “other” to the human; in fact, it is really the beast that lies within the human himself that must be vanquished and transformed. the buddha’s utter dominance over nāḷāgiri is thus counterbalanced by a certain necessary kinship between them: both must be elephants. this simultaneous parallelism and hierarchy come out clearly in the episode itself. thus, in one source, when the mahout releases the fierce elephant against the buddha, this is described as one elephant being released to pursue another elephant: “then he sent that elephant, glorious among elephants ... to kill that other glorious elephant, the elephant-among-sages” (horner 210). later on in the story, these two opponents are referred to as the “buddha-elephant” and the “elephant-elephant” (horner 211). the two figures are obviously parallel — since both are “elephants” — yet the buddha is insistent on asserting the superiority of one elephant over another. in one text, he says to nāḷāgiri, “elephant, do not mess with the elephant[-among-men], for messing with the elephant[-among-men], elephant, leads to suffering!” (oldenberg 2:194). in yet another source, the contrast drawn is between the “buddha-elephant” and the “animal-elephant,” and the buddha states forthrightly: “nāḷāgiri, you are an animalelephant, but i am the buddha-elephant!” (fausbøll 5:335-36). the recognition of one “elephant’s” dominance over another — and thus, of a simultaneous kinship and hierarchy in humanity’s relationship to the animal — even becomes a marker for one’s commitment to buddhism. for as the buddha and nāḷāgiri approach each other, huge crowds of people gather to watch. according to one source, “those among them who were non-believers, had no faith, and were of weak intellect” immediately assume that the huge and powerful animal nāḷāgiri will easily injure the weaker human being. but “those among them who were believers, who had faith, who were wise, learned, and intelligent” understand that the human “elephant” will prevail, and joyfully think to themselves: “soon, my friends, one elephant will come into conflict with another elephant!” (oldenberg 2:194). in another source, the non-believers again assume that since nāḷāgiri “does not know the virtues of the buddha, [dharma, and saṃgha], he will destroy the golden-colored body of the ascetic gotama and bring about his death.” but those who have faith confidently declare: “today, for sure, there will be a battle between the buddha-elephant and the animal-elephant, and we will see nāḷāgiri be tamed through the buddha’s incomparable sport!” (fausbøll 5:335). those who have faith in buddhism are thus depicted as understanding both the parallelism and the hierarchy between one elephant and the other. they know that man and beast reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 23 are co-existent, but also believe in man’s ability to overcome and dominate the beast that lies within. the human being’s impulse toward simultaneous identification and dominance in relation to the animal is not unique to indian buddhism, but seems to be a common dynamic in many cultural contexts. erica fudge has described this dynamic through the insight that “anthropocentrism creates anthropomorphism” — that is, the desire to see human beings as central leads inevitably to contrasting human beings with animals, yet this contrast is only made possible by admitting a certain likeness between them. speaking of early modern english culture, she observes that in writings dealing with the animal, the animal is represented as the antithesis of the human. but in presenting the animal as the thing which the human is not — begging to be eaten, for example — writers give animals a status, that of beggar, which undermines the desire to make a clear separation between the species. to assert human supremacy writers turn to discuss animals, but in this turning they reveal the frailty of the supremacy which is being asserted. paradoxically humans need animals in order to be human. the human cannot be separated because in separation lies unprovability. (4) fudge’s insight allows us to recognize the buddha’s dependence upon nāḷāgiri to showcase his own humanity and adds a certain sense of poignancy to their encounter. the buddha’s absolute mastery over the maddened elephant nāḷāgiri is powerful and impressive, indeed. yet it also suggests something about the frailty and fragility of the human project of attaining buddhahood — which finally depends, for its recognition, upon the miserable states of existence that surround it. the buddha’s dependence upon nāḷāgiri becomes especially clear, moreover, when we consider his overwhelming concern with public display. a grand public spectacle. the buddha’s disquieting eagerness to confront nāḷāgiri — which stands in contrast to the detachment one would ordinarily expect from him — is evident in several sources. in one source, for example, the buddha’s disciples, aware that the elephant has been let loose, urge him not to enter the city for alms but to remain within the safety of the monastery. in other words, why not avoid this dangerous situation altogether? the buddha, however, insists upon entering the city and confronting the elephant. “tomorrow,” he declares, “i will tame the elephant nāḷāgiri, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 24 perform a miracle, and destroy the heretics!” (fausbøll 5:334). on the following morning, moreover, he orders all of the monks residing in the eighteen surrounding monasteries — some five hundred monks altogether — to enter the city along with him, thus engineering a grand public procession through the streets of the city. once they enter the city and the monks see nāḷāgiri rushing toward them, they again urge the buddha to turn back, but the buddha replies, “don’t be afraid, monks! i am capable of taming nāḷāgiri.” at this point, a number of other people attempt to save the buddha’s life by offering to confront the elephant in his place — but the buddha makes it clear that he alone must do the taming. a monk named śāriputra, seeing himself as the “son” of the buddha and observing that “when a duty arises for the father, it is indeed the burden of the eldest son,” declares — “i alone will tame him!” the buddha, however, sharply admonishes him with an aggressive statement of the absolute superiority of his power over that of his disciples: “śāriputra, the power of the buddha is one thing; the power of his disciple is something else altogether. stop it.” eighty other senior monks make the same request, but the buddha refuses them all. finally, the buddha’s personal attendant ānanda, “being unable to comply [with the buddha’s command] because of his powerful affection for the teacher,” yells out, “let this elephant kill me first!” (fausbøll 5:335). he throws himself in front of the buddha and refuses to move, even after the buddha has commanded him three times, whereupon the buddha makes use of his supernatural powers to forcibly pluck ānanda out of the way and deposit him back among the other monks. clearly, the buddha is concerned that he alone should confront the elephant. these details make it clear that in addition to demonstrating man’s superiority over beast, the buddha is equally concerned with showcasing his absolute dominance over all other male disciples. there is a strongly gendered element to the scene, embodied by the buddha’s “macho” attitude and his aggressive belittlement of his male disciples’ inferior powers. the buddha is representative not so much of human potential as a whole, but of male humanity — he is the ultimate man, described in one text as “the man, the true man, the great man, the bull man, the substantial man, the hero man, the elephant man, the lion man, the kingly man ... the chief man, the thoroughbred man, the foremost man” (senart 2:415).7 this ultimate man then goes on to demonstrate his protective powers over women and children, as well. for immediately following the failed interventions of śāriputra and ānanda, a mother carrying a baby on her hip and running away from nāḷāgiri in a state of panic accidentally drops her baby in the path of the maddened elephant. the buddha saves the baby by directly challenging nāḷāgiri: “hey there, nāḷāgiri” — he yells — “they did not get you drunk reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 25 on sixteen pitchers of liquor so that you could seize somebody else; they did it so that you could seize me!” (fausbøll 5:336). the buddha alone — as ultimate man and ultimate father — must demonstrate his mastery over the maddened elephant. throughout this assertion of the buddha’s superior masculinity, there is also a strong emphasis on the presence of spectators and the element of public display. in one text, we are told that “people climbed up onto terraces, balconies, and rooftops” (oldenberg 2:194) to watch the confrontation, and once the elephant is tamed, they honor the nowdocile elephant “with fragrant garlands of flowers, sandalwood, perfumes, aromatic powders, ornaments, etc., and wave banners of cloth on all sides,” while “the drums of the gods resound against the surface of the sky” (horner 211). the drama of man’s instantaneous victory over beast thus becomes a mass public spectacle and ritualistic display taking place in the very heart of the city. far from edifying just a single animal, moreover, the buddha’s taming of nāḷāgiri has far-reaching salvational reverberations that become famous in later buddhist history. in one text, it is said that as a result of the taming of nāḷāgiri, “eighty-four thousand living beings drank the nectar of immortality,” whereupon the buddha left the city “like a warrior who has won a victory” (fausbøll 5:337)—and in another text, it is “ninety million living beings” (trenckner, milindapañho 349) who instantaneously attain nirvana. the taming of nāḷāgiri thus takes on not only public, but perhaps even cosmic, proportions. it is all of these elements taken together that lead me to view nāḷāgiri not merely as a “double” of the buddha, but more specifically, as a billboard for the buddha’s power, charisma, and masculinity. through his instantaneous taming of nāḷāgiri, the buddha’s absolute mastery and dominance over the forces of nature, animality, and passion are spectacularly displayed before an audience of cosmic proportions. at the same time, however, this billboard necessarily shares in the identity of the figure whose power it advertises: man and beast remain locked together in a symbiotic relationship. nāḷāgiri and the spanish bullfight. my interpretation of the buddha’s encounter with nāḷāgiri has been inspired, in part, by garry marvin’s classic analysis of the spanish bullfight (la corrida de toros), which bears several striking similarities to the nāḷāgiri episode. in brief, marvin argues that the bull in a spanish bullfight is a pure embodiment of nature, while the human matador who confronts it is a pure embodiment of culture. as an embodiment of nature, the bull must be a toro bravo or “wild bull” — specially bred to possess the fierce and aggressive qualities of a good fighting bull and distinct from the ordinary domesticated bull subject to human control. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 26 moreover, the bull must never before have encountered a man with the cape — thus ensuring that the animal is free of any “training” or “learning” and is acting on instinct alone. in contrast, the matador, as an embodiment of culture, is seen as the absolute epitome of spanish cultural values — as reflected in his elaborate, gold-embroidered “suit of lights” (which emphasizes culture through exaggeration), and his repertoire of highly controlled and stylized movements within the bullring. the meeting of matador and bull is thus not a meeting between an ordinary human being and an ordinary animal, but is instead constructed as an encounter between paradigmatic man and beast. in the drama of the bullfight, the bull is removed from his own realm of nature (the rural countryside) and brought into man’s realm of culture; thus, the bullfighting arena (a symbolic town square) must always be in an urban location, never in a rural area. a direct confrontation between man and bull takes place, and — if all goes well — the man succeeds in controlling and finally killing the bull, thus demonstrating the superiority of culture over nature in a grand public spectacle that always involves the active participation and enthusiasm of a crowd of spectators. what do these spectators come to see? “in a sense,” marvin observes, “the matador ... is a representative of humanity; he is a figure in whom key human qualities valued by this culture are epitomized, and it is those qualities the audience comes to see asserted” (142). in order for this display to be meaningful, however, there must be a real threat of danger to the man. everybody in the audience knows that the bull is physically stronger than the man, and the only way the man can control and overcome the bull is, first, by using his human intelligence (which the bull lacks) and, second, by successfully suppressing his own animalistic instincts of fear and terror. “if the matador kills successfully he shows that he has not succumbed to the threat posed by the animal; he has dominated it and, through his mastery of it, triumphantly asserted his humanity” (141). thus, the bullfight is “a cultural event which puts the definition of humanity ... in jeopardy precisely so that it may be dramatically reaffirmed” (141). though i cannot do justice here to the many details of marvin’s analysis, i hope that its possible parallels to the nāḷāgiri episode will be obvious. nāḷāgiri’s status as an elephant in musth, further enraged by the use of intoxicating drink, runs parallel to the bullfight’s insistence on a specially-bred toro bravo who has never encountered a bullfighter before — both cases reinforcing the animal’s status as a pure embodiment of animal passion, unchecked by any training or restraint. though it is perhaps more of a stretch to draw parallels between the buddha and a spanish matador, both figures do exemplify the human being’s unique ability to cultivate certain culturally-valued reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 27 qualities (such as benevolence and compassion in the case of the buddha), as well as constituting paradigmatic embodiments of human intelligence and self-control. in both scenarios, we see an insistence on the confrontation taking place within the very heart of human habitation (the city), as well as in the presence of a large crowd of spectators. in both cases, as well, there is a necessary element of risk, with the spectators understanding that the buddha might be killed, just as the matador might be gored. thus, in both cases, we have an event “constructed in such a way that the imposition of human will is extremely uncertain because of the difficult circumstances; a situation which in turn generates tension, emotion and dramatic interest” (marvin 131). if the situation does result in human victory, the cathartic effect upon the audience is thereby dramatically intensified — as attested by the “ninety million living beings” who attain nirvana. the gendered aspect i have attributed to the buddha’s contest with nāḷāgiri is even more apparent in the spanish bullfight. marvin observes that “although ... the fundamental distinction in the arena is between human and animal, one cannot fully understand the corrida without understanding that it is a totally male-orientated event, and that the values which underlie it and give cultural sense to it are essentially masculine values” (142). thus, matadors — like buddhas — must be men, and there is great ambivalence shown toward the few rare female bullfighters who exist. likewise, the bull must also be male, even though females of the species (wild cows) are equally capable of showing the aggressive qualities of a good fighting bull. there is a strong feeling within the culture that the bullfight must pit one male against another — just as it is equally difficult to imagine nāḷāgiri as a female elephant. moreover, since domesticated male animals are generally castrated in order to make them more amenable to human control, the fighting bull, as a representative of pure nature, must be left un-castrated — just as the elephant in musth is characterized by soaring levels of testosterone and sexual passion. further suggesting the theme of male sexuality, the matador in spanish culture generally has the reputation of a sexual playboy or lothario — yet he is also expected to refrain from sex in the period just before the bullfight, since the bravery he needs to face the bull is believed to reside within his testicles. similarly, the buddha’s permanent state of celibacy suggests the enormous male sexual potency he has been able to redirect into cultivating the spiritual qualities of buddhahood. because the gendered aspect of the bullfight is so explicit and overt, it can help us to discern a similar dynamic in the buddha’s confrontation with nāḷāgiri — which is necessarily a contest pitting male against male. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 28 marvin’s analysis of the spanish bullfight is equally illuminating, however, when we consider the differences between the matador/bull encounter and the buddha’s confrontation with nāḷāgiri. one difference is that the nature/culture, body/mind, or human/animal oppositions expressed so starkly in the spanish bullfight are significantly weaker in the buddha’s encounter with nāḷāgiri — for the buddha, as we have seen, is himself celebrated for his powerful physicality, while animals in buddhist thought possess elements of reason and rationality. this difference is reflected in the different outcomes characteristic of each scenario. while the matador expresses dominance over the bull by physically killing him, the buddha expresses dominance over nāḷāgiri by suffusing him with waves of benevolence (maitrī) — an auspicious mental quality that nāḷāgiri, as an animal, is perhaps unable to cultivate on his own, but can ultimately benefit from with the help of the buddha. thus, rather than being vanquished and killed, nāḷāgiri emerges from the encounter with a pacified mind and becomes “like the most well-trained disciple endowed with ethical conduct and good behavior.” human dominance over the animal world here takes the gentler form of a compassionate infusion of ideal human virtues into the recalcitrant mind of the animal. nevertheless, the basic dynamic of simultaneous kinship and otherness is still present. one final aspect of marvin’s analysis of the bullfight that is highly suggestive when applied to nāḷāgiri is the contrast he draws between the bullfight and another cultural context in which an animal is brought under control: the taming and training of a horse. in spanish culture, the taming of a horse is referred to as desbravando, which literally refers to the “de-wilding” of the horse, or “bringing the animal under control, making it manageable and subjecting its will to that of humanity” (133). this “breaking” of the horse’s will is then followed by the process of domando (“training”), which consists of training the horse to perform certain useful functions, such as accepting a saddle and harness, responding to the will of the rider, and so forth. this entire two-step process (desbravando and domando) is highly gradual in nature, occurring over a significant period of time. moreover, it takes place within a restricted context (such as a ranch), rather than being displayed for public view. it is when viewed against this context that the special nature of the bullfight becomes clear. in the bullfight, desbravando and domando are dramatically condensed into a very short period of time, as the matador simultaneously breaks the will of the bull and exerts control to make the bull do exactly what he wants it to do — with the bull being killed once this process has reached a climax. this entire spectacle, moreover, is enacted in public, before an enormous crowd of spectators. in the bullfight, the cultural values implicit in the taming and training of horses are thus given dramatic expression in a highly potent and public form. reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 29 exactly the same contrast can be drawn between the buddha’s taming of nāḷāgiri and the gradual training of an ordinary monk — which is, in fact, sometimes likened to the gradual training of a horse. in one famous discourse, for example, the buddha says to a man named bhaddāli: suppose, bhaddāli, that a skillful horse-trainer obtains a good thoroughbred horse. at first, he subjects him to wearing the bit. as he is being subjected to wearing the bit, the horse is restless, squirming and struggling because he has never been subjected to that before. but through constant and gradual practice, he comes to excel at it. when, bhaddāli, the good thoroughbred horse ... has come to excel at that, then the horsetrainer further subjects him to wearing a harness.... [in a similar manner, the horse-trainer teaches the horse to keep in step, go in a circle, drag the hooves, race, gallop, etc. — with the horse gradually getting used to each skill.] the good thoroughbred horse, bhaddāli, who possesses these ten qualities is considered to be worthy of the king, the possession of the king, the mark of the king. (trenckner, majjhima nikāya 1:446) the buddha then compares this process to the training of a monk, saying that a monk who gradually comes to possess the ten qualities of right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration, right discernment, and right deliverance becomes “worthy of offerings, worthy of hospitality, worthy of gifts, worthy of reverential salutations, an unsurpassed field of merit for the world” (trenckner, majjhima nikāya 1:447). this discourse is not alone in making such a comparison; in fact, multiple discourses make similar comparisons between the gradual training of a horse and the gradual training of a monk. it is against this larger context that the buddha’s confrontation with nāḷāgiri takes on a greater significance: unlike the ordinary process by which a buddhist monk is only gradually brought under control in a step-by-step disciplinary process, the buddha’s taming of nāḷāgiri presents the entire buddhist path of self-transformation in a highly condensed and potent form. for as soon as he encounters the buddha, nāḷāgiri’s will is immediately broken, he falls down at the buddha’s feet in complete submission, he engages in the proper ritualistic behavior (taking dust from the buddha’s feet and sprinkling it over his head), and he is instantaneously transformed into a “well-trained disciple.” thus, while the everyday hard work of buddhist self-transformation may normally happen gradually and behind the monastery walls, the buddha’s taming of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 30 nāḷāgiri broadcasts this achievement to the cosmos at large — a display made possible through the functioning of nāḷāgiri as the buddha’s billboard. conclusion. in constructing the life-story of the buddha, early buddhist authors in india were faced with a number of competing and contradictory demands. on the one hand, the buddha had to be depicted as an ordinary, ignorant human being (much like you or i) in order to make him into an accessible model of emulation and convince other people that the path he had followed to the eradication of all suffering was within the reach of every human being. but on the other hand, in order to be worthy of respect and veneration, the buddha also had to be depicted as an ultimate human being, free of any imperfection or taint. these and other competing demands create a tension in the buddha’s personality that constantly needs to be managed as the life-story proceeds. buddhist authors in india display enormous creativity in negotiating this process successfully, whether through imagery, metaphor, human characters, or narrative tropes. as i have hopefully demonstrated, at least some of this burden is borne upon the backs of animals like kanthaka and nāḷāgiri, who serve as the buddha’s animal doubles and thus allow the larger life-story to draw upon both the kinship and the otherness that characterize humanity’s relationship with the animal world (and with everything that animality stands for). moreover, like draught animals laboring underneath the hot sun, these animal doubles are all the more effective because they are mute and operate silently. as hoyt long has noted, “as the animal ‘other’ has not the means to voice any objection, at least linguistically, it has proved all the more useful for the acquisition and reinforcement of stable notions of the human ‘self’” (24). notes 1. this phrase is attributed to thomas berry (although without a specific citation) and serves as the epigraph to waldau and patton. 2. buddhist literature features both speaking and non-speaking animals, but those who speak are most often limited to animals who are previous births of the buddha. with ordinary animals, the assumption is that although they are sometimes capable of thinking in human language and understanding human language, they remain incapable of speech itself. 3. interestingly enough, this is immediately followed by another episode (perhaps occurring at just the same time?) in which it is chandaka’s human voice that is misinterpreted by the animals, causing them to cry out in joy at the prince’s return. regardless of whether an animal’s sounds are misinterpreted by human beings, or a reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 31 human being’s language is misinterpreted by animals, both passages speak to the frustrating inability to communicate across the human/animal divide. 4. for a discussion of this common motif, see appleton. 5. for a few examples of this argument, see egge, gummer, and wilson. 6. for a convenient collection of passages from the pāli canon relating to devadatta and translated into english, see nanamoli. 7. for a study of the buddha’s masculinity, see powers. works cited appleton, naomi. narrating karma and rebirth: buddhist and jain multi-life stories. cambridge: cambridge up, 2014. bautze-picron, claudine. “antagonistes et complémentaires: le lion et l’éléphant dans la personnalité du buddha.” penser, dire et représenter l’animal dans le monde indien. ed. nalini balbir and georges-jean pinault. paris: librairie honoré champion, 2009. 523-71. beal, samuel, trans. the romantic legend of sȃkya buddha: from the chinese-sanscrit. london: trübner & co, 1875. doniger, wendy. “a symbol in search of an object: the mythology of horses in india.” a communion of subjects: animals in religion, science and ethics. ed. paul waldau and kimberley patton. new york: columbia up, 2006. 335-50. egge, james r. religious giving and the invention of karma in theravāda buddhism. curzon studies in asian religion. ed. sue hamilton. richmond, surrey, u.k.: curzon, 2002. fausbøll, v., ed. the jātaka together with its commentary, being tales of the anterior births of gotama buddha. 7 vols. london: trübner, 1875-97. fudge, erica. perceiving animals: humans and beasts in early modern english culture. 2000. urbana: u illinois p, 2002. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 32 gnoli, raniero, ed. the gilgit manuscript of the saṃghabhedavastu, being the 17th and last section of the vinaya of the mūlasarvāstivādin. 2 vols. serie orientale roma. ed. giuseppe tucci. no. 49. rome: istituto italiano per il medio ed estremo oriente, 1977-78. gummer, natalie. “sacrificial sūtras: mahāyāna literature and the south asian ritual cosmos.” journal of the american academy of religion 82.4 (2014): 1091-1126. harris, ian. “‘a vast unsupervised recycling plant’: animals and the buddhist cosmos.” a communion of subjects: animals in religion, science, and ethics. ed. paul waldau and kimberley patton. new york: columbia up, 2006. 207-217. horner, i. b., ed. madhuratthavilāsinī nāma buddhavaṃsaṭṭhakathā of bhadantâcariya buddhadatta mahāthera. oxford: oxford up (for the pali text society), 1946. jayawickrama, n. a., ed. vimānavatthu and petavatthu. pali text society text series, no. 168. london: pali text society, 1977. johnston, e. h., ed. and trans. the buddhacarita or acts of the buddha, by aśvaghoṣa. 1936. new enlarged ed. 2 vols. in one. delhi: motilal banarsidass, 1984. jones, j. j., trans. the mahāvastu. 3 vols. sacred books of the buddhists, vols. 16, 18, and 19. london: luzac, 1949-56. long, hoyt. “grateful animal or spiritual being? changing conceptions of deer in early japan.” japanimals: history and culture in japan’s animal life. ed. gregory m. pflugfelder and brett l. walker. michigan monograph series in japanese studies, no. 52. ann arbor: university of michigan center for japanese studies, 2005. 21-58. marvin, garry. bullfight. oxford: basil blackwell, 1988. morris, richard, ed. the aṅguttara-nikāya. 5 vols. and index. london: pali text society, 1885-1910. nanamoli, bhikkhu, trans. the life of the buddha, according to the pali canon. kandy: buddhist publication society, 1992. o’flaherty, wendy doniger, trans. the rig veda. harmondsworth: penguin, 1981. reiko ohnuma -animal doubles of the buddha 33 oldenberg, hermann, ed. the vinaya piṭakaṃ, one of the principal buddhist holy scriptures in the pāli language. 5 vols. london: williams and norgate, 1879-83. patton, kimberley. “animal sacrifice: metaphysics of the sublimated victim.” a communion of subjects: animals in religion, science and ethics. ed. paul waldau and kimberley patton. new york: columbia up, 2006. 391-405. powers, john. a bull of a man: images of masculinity, sex, and the body in indian buddhism. cambridge: harvard up, 2009. ramanathapillai, rajmohan. “a forest ride on wild elephants: the philosophy of wilderness in buddhism.” gajah 30 (2009): 29-33. schmithausen, lambert, and mudagamuwe maithrimurti. “attitudes towards animals in indian buddhism.” penser, dire, et représenter l’animal dans le monde indien. ed. nalini balbir and georges-jean pinault. paris: librairie honoré champion, 2009. 47-121. senart, émile, ed. mahāvastu avadānaṃ. le mahāvastu: texte sanscrit publié pour la première fois et accompagné d’introductions et d’un commentaire. 3 vols. paris: société asiatique, 1882-97. strong, john s. the buddha: a short biography. oxford: oneworld publications, 2001. sukumar, raman. the story of asia’s elephants. mumbai: marg foundation, 2011. trenckner, vilhelm, ed. the majjhima nikāya. 4 vols. london: pali text society, 18881925. trenckner, vilhelm, ed. the milindapañho, being dialogues between king milinda and the buddhist sage nāgasena. london: williams and norgate, 1880. tripathi, shridhar, ed. lalita-vistara. 2nd ed. buddhist sanskrit texts, no. 1. darbhanga: mithila institute, 1987. orig. pub. 1958. waldau, paul, and kimberley patton, eds. a communion of subjects: animals in religion, science, and ethics. new york: columbia up, 2006. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 2 (spring 2016) 34 wilson, liz. “human torches of enlightenment: autocremation and spontaneous combustion as marks of sanctity in south asian buddhism.” the living and the dead: social dimensions of death in south asian religions. ed. liz wilson. albany: state u new york p, 2003. 29-50. microsoft word savvides-dummy.docx h u m a n i m a l i a 3:1 nikki savvides “loving-knowing” women and horses: symbolic connections, real life conflicts and “natural horsemanship” since the late nineteenth century, female authors have suggested that western women and horses have an innate connection. often, the connection is categorized in terms of female “empowerment” and “liberation,” with the rise of female equestrianism playing an important role in overcoming women’s oppression and status as incomplete “others” in masculinized society. in this paper i analyze the symbolism of woman-horse relations in western literature and culture. i argue that the symbolic “connection” between women and horses has had important sociopolitical outcomes in terms of the status of both female and animal others. i also argue that such symbolism does not necessarily translate into real life, in which woman-horse relations often involve elements of danger and conflict. by interpreting and analyzing interviews undertaken with australian horse-owning women, i show that literary and cultural representations rely on romanticized views of both horses and women that do little to elucidate the complexities of interspecies relations, or to contribute to a practical framework for cooperative training relations between humans and horses. using the work of feminist theorists concerned with human-animal relations, i argue that understanding other species requires both emotional responses to animals and experience-based knowledge of relating to other species. i also argue that gender-specific ways of relating to horses limit broader engagements with these animals and suggest that all humans, regardless of gender, have the potential to develop cooperative relations with animals through the discipline of training. research shows that approximately eighty percent of the riding population in the western world are female (birke 221; burr 1; pierson 86). this is suggestive of a particular connection between women and horses that has been considered by several scholars. burr argues that women have a particular affinity for horses, and implies that women are less likely to be aggressive towards these animals than men, ideas similarly expressed by barclay and robinson, who view the relationship as unique. however, there is little research that provides evidence to support this idea, with most scholarship relying on women’s own idealized interpretations of a perceived “connection” with these animals. scholarship that links horse riding to embodiment theory, such as that by female theorists game and probyn, is also problematic in this sense. using deleuze and guattari’s theory of “becoming animal,” both authors suggest that human/woman and horse may develop connections through affective bonds. for probyn, “becoming-horse” operates as “a nikki savvides — “loving-knowing” women and horses: symbolic connections, real life conflicts and “natural horsemanship” 61 strategy for figuring the undoing and the redoing of the lines between and among entities” (62). embodiment theory is somewhat useful from this perspective, as it allows for an understanding of how relations might be forged across species. however, embodiment theory does not address the real practice of human-animal relations. i support haraway’s criticism of “becoming-animal” being a “sublime” theory based on the idea of “exceptional” individuals, one that appears to ignore the gritty and mundane aspects of human-animal relations (when species meet, 28). horse riding is undeniably an embodied activity, but it is one that also requires a great amount of effort, training, and patience, what hearne calls “the discipline of horsemanship” (135). as such, embodiment theory is limited in its ability to recognize that women might have difficulties in their relations with horses. in this light, it is necessary for research to be undertaken that acknowledges the affective or emotional feelings humans have for horses, while also understanding the complexities and actual processes involved in developing woman-horse connections. scholarship that focuses on the connection between women and horses often does so without accounting for the particularly westernized, middle-class nature of womenhorse relations. horse riding is symptomatic of what veblen has termed the behavior of the “leisure class,” and what rojek has described as a “status-placing activity” (211). further, as i will discuss later in the essay, women’s involvement in equestrian pursuits has its roots in the british and european suffragette movement and its offshoots in other western colonies such as australia. the location of these activities and the distinction of equestrian pursuits from others involving horses in both western and non-western countries posits the research as relevant to a specific group of women and to specific cultures. as a middle class australian woman who rides and trains horses, i am also aware that my subjectivity is influenced by these matters. woman-horse relations are borne out of a symbolic woman-animal connection that is located in a dualistic separation of feminized “nature/emotion” from masculinized “science/rationality,” part of what plumwood terms “the interwoven set” that construes “reason and emotion … in terms of radical exclusion” (168). plumwood views the categorization of what is “merely emotional” as tied to a rationalist understanding that “emotions involve qualities or express needs of the kind shared with animals, and are therefore both inferior and not truly human” (168). she links the dualism inherent in this categorization to “[t]he opposition between care and concern for particular others and generalized moral concern,” which she believe “is associated with the opposition between public (masculine) and private (feminine) realms” (plumwood 171). that women and animals are posited as “inferior” in this sense is symbolic of what haraway views as a fracturing of women and animals from the “one”: the autonomous (masculine) self (simians 154; 177). the dualism is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 62 therefore representative of the exclusion of women and animals from masculinized society. in their shared excluded position at the border of personhood, the status of women and animals might be considered similar, “not because their logic is necessarily similar, but because their history is so” (midgley 74). for midgley, such consideration involves the notion of equality, what she terms the “natural need for freedom” that is shared between women and animals (70). finding such “freedom” can work as a product of woman-animal relations, with the woman-horse connection in particular acting symbolically as a liberating and empowering force from a political, social, and personal perspective. one of the earliest examples of the woman-horse connection as socio-political symbol appears in anna sewell’s novel black beauty. published in 1877, the novel provides a literary representation of the situation in which women and horses found themselves in the victorian era. it is semi-autobiographical, being more an expression of female identification with horses than an actual tale of woman-horse relations. it is also told in the first “person”: from the perspective of the equine protagonist. black beauty describes his life in detail, from his upbringing on a country estate to his slow descent into an overworked, mistreated carthorse. though he eventually ends up happily retired, his friend, a fiery chestnut mare named ginger, does not fare so well. she collapses, skinny and ill from years of abuse, whilst pulling a cart on the cold streets of london. her master continues to beat her as she dies. black beauty and ginger embodied the suffering of many horses in the victorian era who were “living machines to be bought and sold like commodities, valued only rarely as natural beings” (mcshane and tarr 18). sewell provides readers with a different view of horses, one which valued them as sentient and as worthy of empathy and compassion. yet black beauty was also representative of its author’s own suffering. sewell was restricted from many aspects of society not only because of her gender, but also due to a crippling injury as a teenager that left her an invalid. she also suffered under the “vigilant care of her domineering mother” (dorré 168), a devout quaker and moralist (chitty 110-114), which further limited her involvement with the world outside her home. these conditions fostered a kinship with horses, her “only true form of motility,” that weekly drew her carriage from home to church, and those others that she saw treated poorly in the cab ranks and fields in and around london (chitty 1971). as dorré suggests, sewell writes herself-as-horse, enacting “a double displacement of the self in terms of both species and sex ... in order to address issues of physical as well as psychological abjection” (168). in doing so, the novel acts as a “source of empowerment” for sewell. sewell implies a connection between female oppression and animal suffering, one which parallels midgley’s argument for the similarly excluded position of women and animals in masculinized society. so, too, is the suggestion that women and nikki savvides — “loving-knowing” women and horses: symbolic connections, real life conflicts and “natural horsemanship” 63 animals might be liberated through their connection evident in black beauty. the author was liberated through the horse; so too was the horse liberated through sewell. the novel was instrumental in the banning of a device known as the “bearing rein” in 1911. the bearing rein restricted the movement of the horse’s head, engendering many physical problems, including damage to the horse’s windpipe and the significant shortening of its life (ryder 95). further parallels between the status of horses and women can be drawn through this element of physical domination for, as dorré argues, women were similarly restricted and physically harmed through corseting, with both women’s and equine “fashions” creating “bodies [that] perform[ed] work in the culture specifically when bound” (158). as a result of these designs, equine and female bodies were made both culturally useful and “safe,” women’s overflowing flesh, analogous to potential rebellion, was reined in by tight-laced corsetry, just as the horse’s wild potential was suppressed by straps of leather pulled tight through rings of steel. elements of domination and control restricted individual female and equine bodies during the late nineteenth century throughout britain and europe and indeed in colonies such as australia. however, increasingly, at least for middle and upper class women, horses represented liberation. women’s growing involvement in equestrian sports at this time was a manifestation of the changing status of both women and horses, and women’s climb into the saddle was, quite literally, a significant event in feminist terms. women riders known as “amazons” in england (cf. david) and “amazons” or “écuyères” in france and throughout europe (cf. weil) were persistent reminders of changing attitudes towards women, both in sport and in broader society. middle and upper class amazons resisted “traditional definitions of femininity” (david 182). their gender was ambiguous, with the adoption of breeches or trousers worn under riding skirts at the end of the nineteenth century suggesting masculinity “lurking beneath this proper façade” (185). furthermore, the introduction of “cross saddle” riding attire for women at the turn of the nineteenth century (202) allowed them “not only playfully [to] appropriate elements of masculine costume in the form of the riding habit, but to attain real power and educational autonomy” through their involvement in equestrian sports (197). for women of this era, equestrian pursuits had the potential to improve their status. horse riding was: transforming and liberating … [offering] … women unprecedented opportunities to free themselves from some of the more entrenched and pervasive tenets of the victorian ideology of femininity (mccrone 2). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 64 as powerful individuals who could match men in their equestrian prowess, these women further challenged stereotypical gender roles by moving out of the home and into the fields and stables, the traditional realm of men and the working class (weil 5-6). to use haraway’s term, the transforming and liberating qualities of the amazon’s involvement with horses thereby operated as the “cyborg” product of their connection, the “fusion of non-whole ‘others’” (woman-horse) providing a model for resistance outside of concepts of “wholeness” and “masculine autonomy” (simians 177). by becoming liberated both through and with horses, british and european women engaged with the broader suffragette movement. this involvement eventually expanded to colonies such as australia.1 the connection between western women with and through horses continues to be represented in contemporary literature, influencing women’s ideas about horses from a young age. as haymonds explains: girls in pony books are transformed by their association with ponies into physically adept, brave riders, tackling their own problems, and getting some measure of control in their own lives. in turn, neglected, wild or unmanageable ponies are transformed into sleek, shining horses ... fitting mounts for heroes (51). novels such as enid bagnold’s national velvet and sharon wagner’s gypsy from nowhere are among the multitude of stories i devoured as a horse-mad girl. both novels stress the innateness of the girl/woman-horse connection, a connection that for the female protagonists of the books is dually liberating and empowering. for bagnold’s velvet, who is “hung up in life,” horses engender a transformation into “a wonder, a glory, a miracle child” (bagnold 208); for wagner’s invalid protagonist wendy, the horse gypsy makes her feel “as though the sun was shining inside of her” (wagner 210). yet both novels hint that there is more to girl-horse relations than innate, liberating connections. velvet’s horse, the pie, is wild and unpredictable, though she learns to control him. wendy has been made invalid from a riding accident in which her horse was killed. the element of danger inherent in their relations contradicts the otherwise harmonious images of girl and horse. these relations are not, in probyn’s words, “a wild running together of horse and girl” (39), nor are they, in game’s, a process of “absorbing horse, taking horse into our body” (9). the concepts of “togetherness” and “absorption” preclude both danger and potential conflict. as a girl caught up in these stories i did not consider, as hearne describes, the fact that horses “have not by and large read [such stories] ... they know the wrong story, or else they didn’t get the chance or refused to read the ending where things come out okay” (126). believing stories about innate and harmonious connections, and ignoring the danger lurking below the surface, was what led me to nikki savvides — “loving-knowing” women and horses: symbolic connections, real life conflicts and “natural horsemanship” 65 endure broken ribs and multiple concussions after terrifying flights across rough terrain on runaway, uncontrollable horses. thinking that i had a natural way with horses, like my heroes in pony stories, did not translate into real life. there was more to riding and training horses than love and emotional responses. growing into a woman who had learned about the danger inherent in relating to horses, i became surprised at the number of books written by horse-women who continue to believe in an innate connection. linda kohanov’s the tao of equus, betsy kelleher’s sometimes a woman needs a horse, and a recent two-volume essay compilation entitled of women and horses (including chapters by horse-women deborah day, kim mcelroy, mary midkiff, and cherie king) are, among many others, a reflection of women’s relations with horses. these are semiand autobiographical works, which invariably describe woman-horse relations as based on three specific concepts: “love,” “emotions,” and “empowerment.” for day, the connection between women and horses “requires an empathy that only a deep and abiding love can create” (47). for kelleher, horses and women share “a precious bond ... a very real form of love” (20), while for mcelroy, horses allow women to “define and expand our awareness of our inner selves” (28). kohanov describes the horse as an “emotional mirror” (13), helping women deal with their personal issues by allowing them to: reach a new state of knowing, a state that integrates feeling, intuition, relationship, and preverbal body wisdom with ... focus, will, inventiveness, and problem solving abilities (95). some authors stress that the connection is founded on what they view as specific tenets of femininity. for midkiff, women have “an innate ability to read emotions,” allowing them to have a natural “intuition” with horses (82). similarly, king believes that the “bond between women and horses may be innate,” linking it to women’s “nurturing abilities” (142). however, the authors do not provide any in-depth theories as to how such connections play out in day-to-day experiences of riding and training, nor do they discuss or acknowledge the possibilities for the presence of danger and conflict in woman-horse relations. their idea of an innate connection appears as a romantic ideal that has little grounding in reality, fitting into the genealogy for the symbolic connection between horses and women, but contributing little to any understanding of horse riding and training in practice. while the symbolic connection between women and horses has evidently meant much for numerous horse-women, the assumption that women are inherently emotional, nurturing beings is problematic. the concept of an innate connection operates within dualistic understandings of both gender and species, positing humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 66 women and animals as the “passive, intuitive, emotional, weak and submissive” side of the emotion/rationality dichotomy (plumwood 103). gendered assumptions about women and animals also limit any recognition of interspecies relations that are not necessarily harmonious. they wrongly suggest that women can relate to animals without the necessary effort, training, and patience required. in this way, assumptions about an innate woman-horse connection do not contribute to a productive analysis of the complexities of these relations. in undertaking a more productive analysis, the significance of such romanticized feelings about horses should not necessarily be discarded, but should be recognized as only one way of understanding woman-horse relations. emotional responses to horses, including “love” and “nurturing” are useful ideas if they can be combined with a rationalized perspective based on knowledge and experience, conjoining two sides of otherwise dualistic approaches to human-animal relations. to follow bulbeck, combining an emotional approach to animals with knowledge gained from experience is the key to enacting what she calls “loving knowing” animals (155-180). such an approach to human-animal relations requires combining “the affective and intellectual domains” (202). loving knowing is significant in the context of woman-horse relations, as it might allow women to transcend purely emotional responses to horses and the concept of “innateness,” replacing this with an awareness of the need to include experience-based knowledge in their dealings with horses. further, the concept of incorporating both emotion and experience into training parallels hearne’s argument for cooperative human-animal relations built on “shared commitments and collaboration, on a mutual autonomy” through which “love” is combined with education (52-54). the interviews.2 for the purposes of this research i undertook twenty-two interviews with australian women aged between 18 and 65, each of whom owned at least one horse. they lived throughout australia, although most were located in the eastern states. while some women lived on rural properties and cared for their own horses, other women lived in urban areas and had their horses on agistment. the interviews were the result of a particular desire to seek female, australian horseowners who had sought to improve their relations with their horses. inspired by recent research undertaken by miller and lamb and birke, i was interested in investigating the contemporary equestrian “revolution” which has seen an increase in the numbers of riders using non-traditional methods, usually termed “natural horsemanship.” according to birke, in natural horsemanship: [t]he emphasis is on kindness, with particular emphasis on communicating with — and learning to understand from the horse’s point of view — the natural behavior of horses … natural nikki savvides — “loving-knowing” women and horses: symbolic connections, real life conflicts and “natural horsemanship” 67 horsemanship methods offer something that will give [riders and trainers] a closer, more trusting, relationship with their horses (218). such methods therefore differ from more traditional training methods (such as those involved in dressage and show jumping) by placing less emphasis on competitive success and more on the development of relations between horse and human. the interviews were inspired by my own involvement in the natural horsemanship “movement” in sydney, australia. my observation of the large number of women involved in the natural horsemanship workshops i attended on a monthly basis led me to wonder what it was specifically that drew women to natural horsemanship as a training method, and whether it appealed to them more than other methods of training. having attended the workshops with a horse with which i was having training problems due to numerous psychological and physical issues that caused him to buck, i soon found that many of the women attending the natural horsemanship workshops were also dealing with similar “problems.” i grew particularly interested in exploring whether women had found natural horsemanship a successful means to overcome these problems. i hypothesized that improved “connections” with horses might be the reason that women turned to these methods. the interviews certainly highlighted the concept of “connection” with almost all interviewees making reference to either this term or similar ones, including “relationship” and “partnership.” most interviewees mentioned training “problems,” with many suggesting that such problems engendered conflict in their relations with their animals. the concept of conflict became of interest to me as i analyzed and interpreted the interviews, since it challenged the notion of a “connection” between women and horses. it also became apparent that women’s lived experiences with horses contradicted the romanticized views many held about their abilities and connections with horses. rather than providing quantitative material for analysis, the interviews were qualitative and conversational, allowing the interviewees’ anecdotes to speak for themselves. some were undertaken in person, while others were conducted via email or telephone. formally structured, the questions were always the same and were asked in the same order, but the interviews allowed room for the interviewees’ own comments. the interviewees were able to talk as much or as little as they wished about the topic, and most talked at length about their experiences. analysis was conducted using the coding method proposed by strauss (1987). interview transcripts were “fractured” and read in minute detail in order to recognize and interpret categories of similarity. from these i was able to draw specific conclusions, and remained open to the idea that these conclusions would continually change as the analysis progressed and the themes of the interviews became more apparent (strauss 29). the coding operated within a framework that aimed at viewing how humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 68 interviewees’ experiences with horses fit into or challenged existing literature on woman-horse relations. further, the coding was aimed at analyzing how the lived experience of woman-horse relations could be contextualized within the work of the aforementioned feminist theorists, providing an analysis of woman-horse relations from a feminist perspective. emotional responses were elicited by all the interviewees, who commonly professed “love” and “passion” for their animals when asked to describe their relations with their horses. most viewed their horses with familiarity, with some individuals describing horses as their “best friends,” “friends and equals rather than subordinates,” and “partners.” such expressions appear to be common among australian horse-owning women; research undertaken by burr demonstrates that horses fit into “requisite definitions of family” for many, and that their relations are characterized by “co-habitation; mutual intimacy and affection; constancy; participation in family rituals; mutual language and shared activities” (4). for some interviewees, love and familiarity were accompanied by the assertion that the interviewees have a “special way” with the horse. some were convinced that their gender (femininity specifically) made this possible, paralleling the attitudes represented by the literary texts. as one interviewee stated: because i am a woman i have that certain ability to understand and be understood by nature … horses look into a woman’s soul and see a kindred spirit. another believed that “women have an eternal, ‘earth’ connection to animals.” however, such ideas were revealed as idealistic when both (and many others who expressed similar feelings) acknowledged that conflict existed in their relations with their horses. many interviewees described “problems” in their relations caused by what were commonly termed either “misunderstandings” or “communication” problems, as one expressed: “[the horse] did not understand what i was saying to him.” communication plays an important role in the training and riding of horses, with body language in particular allowing humans to convey messages to horses and horses to “read” the human’s body in semiotic fashion (brandt 303). through riding and training, humans and horses “co-create a system of language ... through the medium of the body ... a third language that enables the two to create a world of shared meaning and foster a deeper understanding of each other” (313). for this reason the human trainer or rider “must become comprehensible to the horse, and to be understood is to be open to understanding” (hearne 107). the mutuality implied by a co-created language system can be corrupted through misunderstandings between horse and human which may “cause one or the other to nikki savvides — “loving-knowing” women and horses: symbolic connections, real life conflicts and “natural horsemanship” 69 react in a manner that may be harmful to both” (brandt 309). such reactions on the part of the horse often manifest themselves in what equine ethologists call “conflict behaviour,” including bucking, rearing, bolting, and refusing to.3 these behaviors are often the cause of injury to riders, and also may cause injury to the horse if the animal is to fall or run into an object at high speed. other forms of injury to horses may be caused by the rider’s response to the conflict behavior. some interviewees described using punitive measures against the horse in cases of conflict, including whipping the animal. often, such behavior occurred after the horse had “bucked” or “played up,” to use two interviewees’ terms. in some cases, punitive responses to horse (mis)behavior followed injury caused to the woman in a riding accident. almost all interviewees had been involved in such accidents. one interviewee stated that accidents occurred because: my relationship with my horse seemed to involve us fighting with one another constantly. this response demonstrates that misunderstandings between women and horses are potentially injurious to the formation of cooperative relations. for many interviewees, the romantic ideal of the horse was evidently at odds with the conflict they experienced in real life. as one interviewee expressed: [although] i love [my horse] more than anything else in the world ... he is not always easy to get along with … [w]e have a lot of problems with misunderstanding [sic]. another similarly stated: i never seemed to be able to have the sort of relationship i wanted with my horse ... he was always throwing me off and that caused me to be scared about riding. one even expressed feeling “betrayed” by her horse, a humanized response to conflict behaviors which would seem to stem from the same emotional response to horses that amount to feelings of love and familiarity. loving horses and being “betrayed” by them seems to make matters worse. as one interviewee explained, she would grow angry and whip her horse for perceived misbehaviors because she would “take things personal [sic].” statements like these contradict expressions of love and familiarity, highlighting the tension between connections and conflicts between women and horses. they suggest that emotional responses and love are not enough of a foundation for woman-horse relations to be built upon, and that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 70 humanized views of horses do little to contribute to human understandings of these animals. while seemingly incompatible with the romantic ideal of the unique woman-horse connection, the matter of conflict highlighted the need for the interviewees to improve their relations with their horses. conflict often provided the impetus for the interviewees to learn new methods of training, and as a result many said that they turned to natural horsemanship to help with training problems. this fit into the observations i had made while attending natural horsemanship workshops. interviewees expressed interest in natural horsemanship because of its focus on what several interviewees described as “understanding” the horse and “communication”/”communicating with the horse.” other participants hoped natural horsemanship would teach them about “partnership” and to “think more about what the horse experiences in training,” thereby demonstrating that they desired greater knowledge about training, and many interviewees expressed that they had gained such knowledge through natural horsemanship. for one interviewee, natural horsemanship helped her overcome training problems by “giving me perspective of how horses learn and feel,” which “completely changed my attitudes about training.” for others, natural horsemanship similarly taught them that training had “to be negotiated with the horse,” and that “horses need input too.” for one, training was seen as developing a “conversation” between horse and human. these responses suggested that both reciprocity and cooperation were forged as a result of training and that through natural horsemanship women learned ways to more effectively engender the sort of co-created system of language on which cooperative, mutually communicative relations are founded. significantly, many interviewees stressed the hard work involved in training in such a way, with one interviewee describing the process as requiring “absolute devotion.” for another, learning natural horsemanship: was like learning to ride again in some ways ... i had to reprogram some of the responses to behaviour that i did automatically [and gain] a whole new area of knowledge. another further expressed the cooperative nature of natural horsemanship by suggesting that training was a two-way process: much of [learning natural horsemanship] meant i seemed to be being trained more than my horse was! ... i was trained to be a better trainer, and as a result i have a better relationship with my horse. nikki savvides — “loving-knowing” women and horses: symbolic connections, real life conflicts and “natural horsemanship” 71 interestingly, almost all interviewees expressed pleasure at learning how to communicate with and understand their horse, despite the level of work involved. for example, one interviewee stated that: [my horse] is more forward, happier and obedient … he no longer sticks his ears back when i put my leg on, he no longer kicks out or bucks when i ask him to go forward … i can fully trust my horse now. many also believed that their horses were “happy” as a result of natural horsemanship and that this had strengthened their relations. for instance, as one interviewee explained: [my horse is] happy to see me … i know this because he comes towards me when i have the halter or saddle now instead of running away. the pleasure achieved through cooperation and communication sits in stark contrast to the conflicted relations that the women and horses had previously experienced. the perceived mutuality of pleasure also demonstrates how cooperation in training forges relations in which human and animal might, in haraway’s terms, “discover happiness together” (companion species manifesto 52 [emphasis mine]). beyond symbolism, women and horses learning to relate in such a way experience a connection which is not innate, but which is based in the hard work of training. training in such a way would seem to be the key to forging cooperative connections. the gendered nature of relations between women and horses would seem to preclude any apparent “connection” between men and horses. yet my experiences, the interviews, and indeed some literature revealed that man-horse connections are significant both within the equestrian world and in the lives of women who train in natural horsemanship. this is because natural horsemanship is predominantly taught by male trainers and riders.5 for instance, while the workshops i attended were hosted by a female trainer, the trainer had learnt her methods from pat parelli, a male trainer based in the usa whose methods are popular throughout the western world. parelli sits alongside other influential male trainers such as monty roberts, mark rodney, clinton anderson, and steve jeffries in the world of natural horsemanship. there are few women in similar roles worldwide, with notable female trainers such as julie goodnight being in the clear minority. many female trainers are also taught in the methods of trainers such as parelli. the predominance of men in dominant positions within the disciplines of natural horsemanship shows a marked disparity between the gendering of horse riding and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 72 training as “female,” not only in books but in terms of the numbers of women involved in equestrian disciplines within the western world. further, in their roles as “leaders” of both horses and of women, male trainers hold a position in natural horsemanship which is suggestive of confidence in their own abilities to teach and to impart knowledge.4 this paper does not aim to speculate on the exact role that men play in natural horsemanship. this is an area that warrants further investigation. however, their dominance in these training methods is suggestive of continuing dualistic relations between women and men, and between men, women and horses. such suggestion is further implied by the obvious gendering of the term “horsemanship.” importantly, the predominance of men as “teachers” of natural horsemanship does not preclude either women’s symbolic connection to horses, nor their ability to develop cooperative real-life training relations with these animals. understanding the specificities of woman-horse relations in practice, as opposed to generalized symbolic connections, shows how humans might question assumptions to forge cooperative and communicative relations based on both loving and knowing horses. in this sense, training is both cross-gendered or gender aspecific, with the relations between human and animal individuals mattering first and foremost. the significance of woman-horse relations lies within women’s identification and emotion for horses as their liberators from oppression. however, the symbolic nature of their connection offers a romanticized perspective on woman-horse relations that does not accurately reflect women’s real life experiences. literary representations of woman-horse relations make broad assumptions about women that suggest that such connections are innate to women, operating as a consequence of women’s “emotional” nature. such assumptions tie in with problematic, longstanding binary understandings of both gender and species that do little to expand our understanding of human-animal relations. challenges to both gendered assumptions about “love” and “knowledge” provide the potential for developing cooperative connections between women and horses in the face of conflict, an idea examined through the context of interviews undertaken with a number of australian women who had sought improvements in their relations with horses. the interviews revealed that natural horsemanship helped women to train horses in a way that incorporated both loving knowing horses and a focus on cooperation, an individualized approach to interspecies relations which combines emotional responses with knowledge gained through experience. the paper has also highlighted the fact that connections exist between men and horses, showing that the potential for cooperative relations between horses and humans regardless of gender. nikki savvides — “loving-knowing” women and horses: symbolic connections, real life conflicts and “natural horsemanship” 73 in challenging the assumption that women and horses share an innate connection, the wealth of literature that romanticizes woman-horse relations appears to be less than useful in providing practical information about riding and training. indeed in many cases, including my own experiences, such literature might be seen to contribute to the appearance of conflict in woman-horse relations by giving women incorrect ideas about horses and their behavior. nonetheless, such stories endure precisely because they give women an ideal to work towards when they decide to ride and train horses. for this reason, when combined with experience and knowledge, such ideals make an important contribution to our understandings of woman-horse and human-horse relations. in the broader context of human-animal relations, the concepts of loving knowing and cooperating with animals might also hold stead, demonstrating that our emotional responses to animals can be used to forge relations based on knowledge about the particularities of both other species and our own. notes 1. see kay “a window of opportunity” (2008) and “it wasn’t just emily davison!” (2010). 2. the interviews were conducted and compiled throughout 2007 and 2008 for my ma thesis, "training companions: ethical relations between horse and human in the practice of dressage," at the university of sydney. 3. see mcgreevy, et al. “bolting” is a term used to describe the flight action of a horse which, tuned out to its rider’s aids, accelerates into an out-of-control gallop. 4. men also play a significant role in other equestrian disciplines such as dressage and showjumping, where they are often successful as competitors, and as trainers of both horses and less experienced riders. 5. part of this confidence is seen in the aggressive marketing employed by many male natural horsemanship trainers. for instance, pat parelli’s “parelli natural horsemanship” (pnh) requires students to participate in costly programs, to purchase dvds and pnh-branded training aids in order to complete the courses set by pnh. works cited bagnold, enid. national velvet. london: pan books ltd., 1978. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 74 barclay, harold. the role of the horse in man’s culture. london and new york: ja allen, 1980. birke, lynda. “’learning to speak horse’: the culture of ‘natural horsemanship.’” society and animals 15 (2007): 217-239. brandt, k. “a language of their own: an interactionist approach to human-horse communication. society and animals. 12:4 (2004): 299-316. bulbeck, chilla. facing the wild: ecotourism, conservation and animal encounters. london: earthscan, 2005. burr, sandra. "pet, pal or privileged human: exploring the relationship between women and horses.” paper presented at animals and society ii: considering animals conference, hobart, australia, 3-6 july 2007. chitty, susan. the woman who wrote black beauty: a life of anna sewell. london: hodder and stoughton, 1971. day, deborah. “the horse as god’s instrument of teaching”. of women and horses. ed. gawani ponyboy. irvine, ca: bow tie press. 2000. 43-48. david, alison m. “elegant amazons: victorian riding habits and the fashionable horsewoman”. victorian literature and culture 30.1 (2002): 179-210. deleuze, gilles and felix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. trans. brian massumi. 5th ed. london and new york: continuum, 2004. dorré, gina marlene. “horses and corsets: black beauty, dress reform and the fashioning of the victorian woman.” victorian literature and culture 30.1 (2002): 157178. game, a. “riding: embodying the centaur.” body and society. 7.4 (2001): 1-12. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto: dogs and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. —————. simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. new york: routledge, 1991. nikki savvides — “loving-knowing” women and horses: symbolic connections, real life conflicts and “natural horsemanship” 75 —————. when species meet. minneapolis, mn and london: u minnesota p, 2008. haymonds, alison. “rides of passage: female heroes in pony stories.” in a necessary fantasy? the heroic figure in children’s popular culture. eds. dudley jones and tony watkins. new york: garland, 2000. 51-72. hearne, vicki. adam’s task: calling animals by name. pleasantville, ny: akadine, 2000. kay, joyce. “it wasn't just emily davison! sport, suffrage and society in edwardian britain.” the international journal of the history of sport. 25.10 (2008): 1338-1354. —————. “a window of opportunity? preliminary thoughts on women’s sport in post-war britain.” sport in history. 30.2 (2010): 196-217. kelleher, betsy. sometimes a woman needs a horse. enumclaw, wa: pleasant word, 2004. king, cherie. “the beauty and potency of the bond.” in of women and horses. ed. gawani. ponyboy. irvine, ca: bow tie press, 2000. 161-168. kohanov, linda. the tao of equus: a woman’s journey of healing and transformation through the way of the horse. novato, ca: new world library, 2007. mccrone, kathleen e. sport and the physical emancipation of english women, 1870-1914. london: routledge, 1988. mcelroy, kim. “the ancient call”. of women and horses: more expressions of the magical bond. ed. gawani ponyboy. irvine, ca: bow tie press, 2005. 27-30. mcgreevy, paul d., andrew mclean, amanda k. warren-smith, deborah goodwin and natalie waran. “defining the terms and processes associated with equitation.” in proceedings of the 1st international equitation science symposium 2005. eds. paul d. mcgreevy, andrew mclean, amanda k. warren-smith, deborah goodwin and natalie waran. broadford: australian equine behaviour centre, 2005. 10-43. mcshane, clay and joel tarr. the horse in the city: living machines in the 19th century. baltimore: johns hopkins up, 2007. midgley, mary. animals and why their matter. athens, ga: u georgia p, 1983. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 76 midkiff, mary k. “an intuitive edge.” in of women and horses. ed. gawani ponyboy. irvine, ca: bow tie press, 2000. 81-88. miller, robert m. and rick lamb. the revolution in horsemanship and what it means for mankind. guilford, mt: the lyons press, 2005. pierson, melissa h. dark horses and black beauties: animals, women, a passion. new york: norton, 2000. plumwood, val. environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason. new york and london: routledge, 2002. probyn, elspeth. “becoming horse: transports in desire.” outside belongings. ed. elspeth probyn. new york: routledge, 1996. 37-62. robinson, ian h. “the human-horse relationship: how much do we know?“ equine veterinary journal. 28 (suppl.) (1999): 42-45. rojek, chris. “reviewing veblen's view of the rich.” peace review, 11.2 (1999): 211217. sewell, anna. black beauty: the autobiography of a horse. norwich: jarrolds and sons, 1877. strauss, anselm l. qualitative analysis for social scientists. cambridge: cambridge up, 1987. veblen, thorstein. the theory of the leisure class. [1899].with an introduction by martha banta. oxford: oxford up, 2007. wagner, sharon. gypsy from nowhere. racine, wi: golden press, 1972. weil, kari. “purebreds and amazons: saying things with horses in late-nineteenth century france.” differences: a journal of feminist cultural studies. 11.1 (1999): 1-37. microsoft word holmberg pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 2:2 tora holmberg unfamiliar biological futurities: animals in techno-science one other thing also remains for certain, which is that whether increased biological control comes to be fulfilled as a promise or as a false hope in the context of transbiology is a question we will reckon better if we know our cyborg history. (franklin, “the cyborg embryo” 179) sarah franklin’s comprehensive work in feminist science and technology studies is probably well known to most of humanimalia’s readers, but most certainly not to all. although much of her research involves the bio-technological use of other animals and the far-reaching cultural consequences and contexts of this kind of animal experimentation, franklin’s way of approaching human-animal relations is perhaps unfamiliar to most readers. thus the aim of this brief introduction is to contextualize the scopes and arguments of franklin’s paper, “future mix: remodelling biological futures” (in this volume), into more familiar human-animal studies terms, themes, and ongoing debates. the article itself is an account and an analysis of an art/science/communication school project, initiated and performed by, among others, franklin herself. within the project, pupils in a london school were supposed critically to engage with imaginable bio-technological futures concerning, for example, cloned and transgenic animals. the project resulted in an art exhibition in which some students chose to embody — to mimic — dolly the cloned sheep and to think about the future(s) through her bovine mind and words. human-animal divide. agamben, in his book the open (2004), discusses what he calls the “anthropological machine,” meaning the scientific, philosophical, and cultural construction of the “human” as set apart from, yet always in relation to, other animals. ”homo is a constitutively ’anthropomorphous’ animal […] who must recognize himself in a non-man in order to be human” (27). being human is a constantly rehearsed recognition based on separation, in which animals are said to lack human qualities (be it language, capacities to experience existential issues, memories or ideas of future and death). thus the “human” is constructed as a positive category and the “animal” a negative one. this separation not only degrades animals (as many philosophers and ethicists have pointed out), but as a consequence threatens to put humans at risk of animalization. while agamben does not critically engage with the “animal-side” of the bond, his ideas can easily be transferred to thinking about concrete cases of human tora holmberg — unfamiliar biological futurities 61 animal relations and concrete animals (the tick is the only animal present in his book, used only to discuss heidegger’s point that animals are “poor in world”; see also oliver). “human exceptionalism” also has great consequences for the environmental crises and climate change that we are facing today. in franklin’s work, bio-technology’s production of clones and transgenic organisms can be understood as a process that reproduces, and at the same time ultimately challenges, the great modern divide between humans and animals. dolly represents the increasing ability to introduce new forms of transfer into the processes of reproduction and heredity, as well as the possibility of translating these into new applications that promise to improve agriculture and human health. in particular, she represents the possibility, or threat, of a kind of technology transfer — from sheep, ovis aries, to humans, homo sapiens sapiens. she thus stands for the desire to distinguish the animal from the human, and to prevent their mixture, while also, paradoxically, embodying their ever more proximate union — and the fallacy of such a dividing line between them. (dolly mixtures 30) others have pointed at the subversive potentiality of this ambiguity, and of the possibilities of transgressing the human/animal divide. challenging human-animal divides may possibly change what heidegger calls “the open” in the long run, and thus change our oppressive practices towards other animals. one needs of course to ask oneself, “what’s in it for the animals” (cf. birke “naming names”)? the question is also, can we legitimate the use of other animals in animal experimentation? animal experimentation is a highly ethically ambiguous practice (cf. birke, arluke & michael). on the one hand, we use other animals to improve the health of our own species. on the other hand, through this research, it becomes clear how similar other animals are to us. thus the anthropological machine produces some powerful dilemmas and paradoxes that science, its publics, and, not least, people who work in laboratories must confront (ibid). it has been argued that such dilemmas produce a kind of institutional shame that sometimes makes scientists hide what they are doing, they keep the experiments secret (cf. holmberg & ideland, “secrets and lies” [2010]). transgenic animals are products of what sarah franklin terms transbiology —describing the contemporary organization or rather re-organization of living matter, of what foucault named “life itself” (cf. franklin, “cyborg embryo”). transbiology not only humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 62 describes the bio-medical practice of today, but also captures the postmodern diffusion of science into all imaginable spheres of society: from popular culture to politics and economics. franklin builds on haraway, and suggests that in the same way as the cyborg was helpful to understand then contemporary couplings of biology, technology and informatics (cf. haraway, modest witness [1991]), transbiology can be used as a figurative troop, a tool to understand our contemporary norm in biology — as “not only born and bred, or born and made, but made and born” (franklin, “cyborg embryo” 171). “like the cyborg embryo, transbiology is a mix of control and rogue, or trickster, elements” (ibid). transbiological offspring, such as dolly or the more mundane transgenic mouse, help to highlight the transgressive intervention underway, in which traditional views of sexuality, genealogy, body, reproduction, kinship, and species become challenged. but one must also ask, what are the consequences of this technological and cultural episteme for the mice, or rats, or sheep? and, as critics such as lynda birke would argue, transgenic animals can be viewed as a manifestation of masculine ideals of transcendence and limitlessness (birke, feminism and the biological body 164). transgenesis is not inherently good; it needs ethical considerations and critical political evaluation (cf. twine). transgenic animals – dilemmas and debates. clones and transgenic animals can thus be viewed as ambiguous and problematic creatures that crawl over human and animal as well as many other modern boundaries: between nature and culture, science and technology, organism and innovation, to name just a few (cf. haraway, modest witness). these animals carry a magnitude of meanings, something that franklin addresses in her paper; they signify scientific progress and embody hope for revolutionary breakthroughs that will lead to cures for human suffering (see also holmberg & ideland, “selective openness”). mike michael points out that these expectations can be viewed as performative. for example, in the negotiations that go on in animal research ethics committees, any purpose linked to possible scientific breakthroughs is sufficient to justify animal experiments (see ideland). transgenic animals also stand in for dystopic science future narratives, representing frankenscience (as franklin notes in her essay in this volume). however, they are also living laboratory animals, and as such, subjects of their own life worlds. ralph acampora has conceptualized the life world of an experimental animal as a carceral one, meaning that the animal’s “environment is dominated by the overarching fact of bars, or walls, or fencing — hence the rodents come to phenomenally assimilate the carceral into the carnal” in a kind of “jailhouse body” (corporal compassion 99). the transgenic animals are also subjects for animal welfare concerns. problems specific to transgenic animals described in the literature include the “surplus animals” that are used in production and breeding, the physical tora holmberg — unfamiliar biological futurities 63 and emotional burden put on the animals used for production (especially on the female donors and surrogates), and the prevalence and risk of unexpected phenotypes (cf. schuppli, fraser & mcdonald). other difficulties specific to transgenic animals are assessments of the phenotypic and welfare status of genetically modified (gm) animals, rapidly being codified into fixed knowledge with the establishments of central databases with associated data to phenotypes deemed specific to transgenic animals (cf. nuffield research council). haraway argues in when species meet that humans and other animals are “messmates,” meaning that we as companion species are always part of ongoing relationships, and that these are messy, complex, reciprocal, and asymmetrical, and analogously, franklin speaks of “mixmates” in her paper. haraway has argued that perhaps it is not possible to imagine that we could do without animal experimentation, but that we need to find responsible practices. in the laboratory context, she uses the term “sharing suffering” to describe such experimental ethics. sharing suffering means being responsible and response-able, in a reciprocal manner, to the needs of laboratory animals (species 77). however, it has been argued that haraway’s concepts overprivilege the idea of mutual relationships, ignoring the vast power imbalance between researcher and experimental animals, and thus does not explicitly bring to the fore the fact that the animals do not choose to give their suffering bodies and lives to science, but rather such work is forced upon them (see adams, “the animal manifesto” [2006]). in acampora’s words, it could be argued that the lab animal experiences the world in a way that removes her ability to be fully herself with laboratory humans — who is equally prohibited from being with the animal. moreover, transgenic animal research is also corporate research, involved in capitalist logics and politics (emel & wolch 154; see also twine). karen rader speaks of experimental animals as “scientific capital.” this is also highlighted in franklin’s own dolly mixtures, in which the complex connections between agriculture, business and science are unfolded (see also franklin, “sheepwatching”). challenging silences? there seems to be an endlessly rehearsed theme when it comes to transgenic and genetically modified animals: in research and in public discourse, they are portrayed as sources of future salvation from human illnesses; they embody hope and expectations of future scientific breakthroughs. because of its frequency, this theme can be characterized as transgenic noise. however, there are also striking silences humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 64 when it comes to ethical and welfare concerns (holmberg & ideland, “transgenic silences”). the project future mix is situated in a certain kind of public setting, that of a london school. helena pedersen argues in animals in schools: processes and strategies in humananimal education that animals are at once visible and invisible in school curricula. on the one hand, the role of animals in human societies is often discussed — in animal experimentation, hunting, zoos, and so on. the norms regarding human use of other animals are nevertheless seldom challenged. on the other hand, animals are often invisible, as in for example the taken-for-granted use of milk and meat in school canteens. this invisible teaching of animals’ place in human society, of the speciesist ideology, is what pedersen calls the “zoocurriculum.” franklin’s project, which in her own words lies between bio-art and science communication, can be seen as an attempt to break with this silence. the students in the paper do engage with animal welfare, and perhaps in ways that were not intended by the initiators of the project. franklin, in her conclusion, reflects upon the ways in which the students’ interpretations of and artful engagements with dolly seem to “see the future from her eyes,” thereby in a sense combining a “speaking from,” “speaking among,” and “speaking with,” which is something other than “speaking for” someone. eva hayward writes that animals are always “troubling the language that attempts to name them. in this way, non-human animals seem to put an oral void into language. animals cannot be named without invoking the limits of the process of naming” (260). answering this dilemma, hayward has developed the concept of “speaking nearby” animals as an ethical and methodological tool meant to help avoid the pitfall of speaking for the other, without being left only with the option of silence. perhaps future mix could be interpreted as a means of speaking nearby, thus creating some noise about animals in techno-science. works cited acampora, ralph. corporal compassion. animal ethics and philosophy of body. pittsburgh: u pittsburgh p, 2006. adams, carol j. “an animal manifesto. gender, identity, and vegan-feminism in the twenty-first century.” parallax 12:1 (2006): 120-128. agamben, giorgio. the open. stanford: stanford up, 2004. birke, lynda. feminism and the biological body. edinburgh: edinburgh up, 1999. tora holmberg — unfamiliar biological futurities 65 —————. “naming names – or, what’s in it for the animals?” humanimalia, 1:1 (2009). 26 february 2011. http://www.depauw.edu/humanimalia/issue01/birke.html birke, lynda, a. arluke, m. michael. the sacrifice: how scientific experiments transform animals and people. west lafayette: purdue up, 2007. emel, jody, and jennifer wolch. “witnessing the animal moment.”animal geographies: place, politics, and identity in the nature-culture borderlands. ed. wolch, j. emel, j. london: verso, 1998. franklin, s. “the cyborg embryo: our path to transbiology.” theory, culture and society 23:7-8 (2006): 167-188. —————. dolly mixtures. the remaking of genealogy. durham, nc: duke up, 2007. —————. “sheepwatching.” anthropology today 17:3 (2001): 3-9. haraway, donna j. modest_witness@second_millenium.femaleman _meets_oncomouse. new york: routledge, 1997. —————.simians, cyborgs and women. the reinvention of nature. new york: routledge, 1991. —————. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. hayward, eva. “lessons from a starfish.” queering the nonhuman. ed. noreen giffney and myra j. hird. farnham: ashgate. 2008. holmberg, tora, and malin ideland. “secrets and lies. ‘selective openness’ in the apparatus animal experimentation.” public understanding of science, published online first 24 august. 2010. —————. “transgenic silences. the rhetoric of comparisons and transgenic mice as ‘ordinary treasures.’” biosocieties 4:2 (2009): 165-181. ideland, malin. “different views on ethics. how animal ethics is situated in a committee culture.” journal of medical ethics 35:4 (2009): 258-261. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 66 michael, mike. “futures of the present: from performativity to prehension.” contested futures: a sociology of prospective techno-science. ed. n. brown, b. rappert, and a. webster. aldershot: ashgate, 2000. nuffield council of bioethics. the ethics of research involving animals. london: nuffield council of bioethics, 2005. oliver, kelly. animal lessons. how they teach us to be human. new york: columbia up, 2009. pedersen, helena. animals in schools. processes and strategies in human-animal education. west lafayette: purdue up, 2009. rader, karen ann. making mice. standardizing animals for american biomedical research, 1900-1955. princeton: princeton up, 2004. schuppli, c., d. fraser, and m. mcdonald. ”expanding the three rs to meet new challenges in humane animal experimentation.” atla 32 (2004): 525-532. twine, richard. animals as biotechnology. ethics, sustainability and critical animal studies. london: earthscan, 2010. microsoft word torssonen h u m a n i m a l i a 7:1 sami torssonen sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance introduction. the commodification of livestock welfare has recently become a prominent topic of discussion among producers, retailers, nongovernmental organizations, policy makers, and academics. welfare is increasingly considered “a win-win opportunity for animals, farmers and consumers,” as the title of a 2012 conference organized by fao and the slow food organization proclaims, since “farming practices that take into account high animal welfare standards guarantee greater productivity, better quality, more food safety and added value for farmers” (the food and agriculture organization of the united nations). commodification is not expected to happen by itself, however. the european union’s 2012 animal welfare strategy, published at an event titled “empowering consumers and creating market opportunities for animal welfare” (european commission, “animal welfare”), propounds active “valorization of welfare standards as a means to enhance competitiveness of eu food industry” and attempts to seize “every opportunity to express in economic terms the value added by animal welfare policy” (european commission, “communication from the commission” 4, 7). the texts quoted above, and many others like them, are part of a process through which the production and sale of livestock welfare has recently become feasible. operational welfare measurement systems have been developed for use in livestock production facilities (e.g., blokhuis). a plethora of assessment, certification, marketing, and education schemes have been introduced (schmid and kilchsperger). studies on the welfare market are proliferating (norwood and lusk 302–305). together these developments enable the production of livestock welfare for sale, i.e. its production as a commodity (marx, capital 125-177). this article studies the emergence of commodified livestock welfare. it shows that livestock welfare commodification has never been an exclusively economic phenomenon. rather, it has been steered by attempts at purposive social coordination, here called governance. the article coins the notion “sellfare” to describe this complex of livestock welfare commodification as governance. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 24 the article takes a historical approach to sellfare. it outlines a chronological history of welfare governance and welfare commodification. in so doing, it traces sellfare’s contemporary aspects back to their circumstances of emergence. sellfare thus appears as a complex of historical “layers,” each of which has accumulated over a different time period. the article shows that many of sellfare’s layers are quite old, but that they have only come together in the 1990s as commodified welfare. the word “sellfare” itself combines three historical layers, each of which the article discusses in turn. the simplest and most long-standing of sellfare’s layers is “fare,” as in “how do you fare?” or “fare well.” fare refers to generic human concern for non-human thriving. the article begins by tracing such concern back to a contradiction within domestication. it shows why humans and “their” animals have never been able to journey (old english faran) together without trouble. the second historical layer contained within sellfare is “welfare.” in this article, welfare refers to the well-being of industrially-produced non-human subjects as governed by a state-civil society dynamic. the roots of welfare lie in 19th century liberal fare governance. welfare was only perfected, however, in the scientific regulation of the 20th century livestock factory. up to the 1980s, welfare was a largely legislative instrument that worked by shielding livestock from some of the effects of their commodity status. the article outlines the emergence and development of welfare in sections four, five, and six. the “sell” of sellfare, finally, connotes the addition of commodification as an instrument of welfare governance since the 1990s. for the first time in history, sellfare enables the mass production of scientifically-measured thriving for the purpose of selling it. contrary to previous welfare governance, livestock suffering becomes a resource rather than a problem: public concern for livestock thriving now enables the sale of scientifically-certified welfare products. the article outlines the current form of sellfare in section seven. it concludes by reflecting on sellfare’s future development. to ground the analysis, the next section situates the article in previous literature. it reviews recent discussions on ethical consumption, welfare governance, and welfare commodification. afterwards, the discussion turns to the article’s central theoretical concepts, i.e. “commodification,” “relation,” “contradiction,” and “governance,” and the data used. ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 25 approach and literature. during the past two decades, several bodies of social-science literature have emerged around topics that touch on livestock welfare commodification. the largest of these discusses what might be called ethical consumption (see vitell; röcklinsberg and sandin). the ethical-consumption literature emphasizes themes such as performed identities (schaefer and crane), followed frames (bateman, fraedrich, and iyer), consumption as voting (shaw, newholm, and dickinson), limited possibilities (barnett et al.), ideology (žižek, first as tragedy 51–69), and expressed preferences and conquered market failures (norwood and lusk). this literature is, however, by itself insufficient to account for sellfare, which also concerns production and governance. more promising are inquiries into various stakeholders’ attempts at livestock welfare governance. these include analyses of welfare in food policy (bennett), industry responses to welfare demands (adams), welfare in quality assessment and food chain transparency (blokhuis et al.), welfare as a bridge between science and society (blokhuis), welfare as a perpetuator of species privilege (cole), attempts to construct an international trade regime for welfare (hobbs et al.), and possible futures of welfare governance (p. ingenbleek et al.). freidberg, in particular, describes an “ethical complex” of nongovernmental organizations, media exposés, and retailers that governs the agro-food supply chain. these treatments do not discuss commodification as a form of governance. the analyses closest to this article concern livestock welfare “commodification,” “marketization,” “economization,” or “market policy.” these works emphasize the factors that render welfare producible and salable at various points in the commodity chain. buller and roe, for instance, periodize the historical development of the british poultry market from marketization in the 1980s through differentiation, eu-imposed labeling, and finally choice editing by retailers. buller and cesar analyze the discourses of eating welfare produced by french food marketers. miele and lever highlight the role of welfare science in constructing a “civilized” market. a number of authors have also given political-economic rationalizations for state intervention in the welfare market (e.g., harvey and hubbard; ingenbleek et al.). the existing analyses of commodification lack, however, the long historical perspective that is provided here. this article adopts a marxian understanding of commodification as the process through which goods become producible for sale. commodities are defined as useful products of quantities of average labor time that exchange with each other in ratios that are expressed by their prices (marx, capital 125-177). commodification thus requires that livestock welfare humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 26 become useful, producible, and salable. this is not a trivial requirement. welfare commodification has many historical preconditions, including public concern, government intervention, scientific measurement, and certification. this article focuses mainly on the emergence of such conjunctural preconditions of welfare production, and less on systemic factors. in other words, the article belongs with the discipline of history rather than that of economics despite its focus on commodification. two theoretical concepts of marxian historiography are of particular relevance to the discussion that follows. first, phenomena are here conceived as layered accumulations of historic relations (marx, grundrisse 105–106). the article shows how the relations that now underlie sellfare have emerged and developed. second, relations may be contradictory insofar as their relata depend upon each other but also negate each other, such as with wage labor and capital. as contradictions build up, a phenomenon may become torn by multiple axes of contradiction that are internal to it and affect its development (althusser 87–128). the article teases out five such relational contradictions of sellfare and its aspects. in addition to marxian vocabulary, the article draws on governance studies. “governance” is here understood to mean purposive societal coordination through means such as hierarchies, markets, and networks (cf. bevir 162–164). the concept can, furthermore, be disaggregated into historical periods or “hegemonic concepts of control” (overbeek 7). one of these is neoliberal governance that, since its emergence in the 1970s (harvey 51–108), has put a particular emphasis on utilizing hierarchies and networks to impose market-like relations as solutions to perceived problems. sellfare is an effect of neoliberal governance that makes livestock welfare producible for sale on the market as a response to public concern over livestock welfare. it is thus not reducible to direct economic pressures, but also presupposes attempts at conscious regulation by non-market civil-societal and state actors. the analysis is based on readings of secondary scholarship in english and german. in addition, less-researched recent developments are analyzed through publicly available documents on welfare commodification. this approach has several limits. developments outside old core capitalist countries cannot be properly accounted for. the history presented here is also what some would call “teleological” (woods, “from cruelty to welfare” 166) or “presentist” (seidman), but what could equally well be called “reading the past from the present”s point of view.” the article does not account for what could have been, what is no more, or what is dormant or minor. ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 27 a corollary limitation follows from the fact that the article is, in the words of deleuze and guattari, a taproot rather than a rhizome (5). sellfare is the shaft at the center of the inquiry, and everything else is oriented towards it. despite this, capital is not construed as a transcendent subject of history. the narrative here is more akin to a history of beginnings, in which phenomena and contradictions appear for whatever reasons (which are accounted for in a limited way) and then coalesce into capital and governance. it is only after many coincidences and co-options that sellfare emerges from a constellation of interspecies sensitivity, governance, science, and quality policy. the animal connection and domestication. the profound societal and individual significance of human relations with other animal species is well known. livestock systems occupy approximately 30 percent of the world’s ice-free terrestrial surface and boast an economic value in the trillions, a nutritional value in the tens of percentage points, a yearly death toll in the tens of billions, and substantial consequences for the environment and public health (thornton; steinfeld et al.). companionship relations between humans and non-human animals are widespread, profoundly affecting the health, education, and social lives of those participating in them (friedmann and son). large industries operate in fields like companion animal retail, grooming, health, nutrition, and insurance (e.g., american pet products association). non-human animals make prominent appearances in childrens’ earliest vocabularies (p. c. lee 194–195), religious texts (bryant), metaphors (talebinejad and dastjerdi), and rorschach test ink stains (mason). animal use has been subject to regulation in contexts as different as ancient egypt, imperial rome, and the european union (clutton-brock; li). if widespread and active nurturing relations between humans and non-human domesticated animals did not exist, sellfare would not be possible. the existence of such relations is, however, far from self-evident. paleoanthropologist pat shipman’s search of the scientific literature only turned up one report of wild non-human primates adopting and nurturing individuals of another species (shipman, “the animal connection and human evolution” 4). if other primates do not engage in interspecies domestication, why do humans? shipman presents a coevolutionary animal connection hypothesis that, though fairly recent, partial, and somewhat controversial (7–14), is supported by a great deal of evidence from multiple disciplines (hodgson and helvenston; helvenston and hodgson; budiansky 33–41; zeuner 36–46). relative to similar work that focuses less on the species relation (mithen 256–259), shipman’s account is also well equipped to explain why animal suffering recurs as a societal problem and why humans often desire non-human animal thriving. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 28 shipman argues, based mainly on archaeological and fossil evidence, that the animal connection is a product of a long coevolutionary process in which humans and nonhuman animals have become increasingly entwined with one another (shipman, “the animal connection and human evolution”). first, approximately 2.6 million years ago (cf. domínguez-rodrigo, pickering, and bunn), the utilization of stone tools began to move early members of the genus homo into a predatory ecological niche. preyand predator-related knowledge started to become an adaptive advantage to early humans. second, beginning approximately 200,000 years ago, the importance of symbolic information, ritual, and transgenerational knowledge transfer as organizers of early human behavior started to grow. much of the evidence of this development, such as ritual skulls, is non-figurative and thus difficult to interpret in terms of species relations. the content of figurative prehistoric art is telling, however: non-human animal themes are overwhelmingly common, whereas other potential topics such as humans, tools, landscapes, and plants are rare. shipman interprets this as an indication of the importance of the storage of animal-related knowledge in the evolution of symbolic communication. third, beginning perhaps as early as over 32,000 years ago, humans domesticated dogs and then, beginning approximately 12,000–10,000 years ago, several other non-human animal species (cf. larson et al.). shipman reads domestication as an extension of previously evolved affinities and accumulated knowledge: the link between human and non-human animals was now sufficient to take the animal connection to a new level. she characterizes the process of animal domestication, as opposed to plant domestication, as follows: because we have the potential to communicate much more directly with animals than with plants, the process of domesticating an animal is much more intimate, personal, and psychologically powerful. i suggest that the process of domesticating an animal is basically the process of creating a genetically encoded potential for a mutual language or communication system, based on a set of shared values. (shipman, the animal connection 197) according to zeder (239–50), the domestication process of different non-human animal species probably took various shapes: some scavenged their way into human society, others turned from wild prey into managed herds, and some were purposefully ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 29 adopted by humans. all of the non-human animals that ended up domesticated were, however, to some extent pre-adaptively compatible with human society in terms such as social structure, sexuality, and dietary propensities. there were often adaptive benefits to domestication in forms such as biomass provision and conversion, surplus storage, security, and labor. domesticated non-humans were also protected from extinction, which was the fate of many of the species on which early humans preyed (barnosky). by 2500 bce, all of the most important contemporary domestic species were found in some societies (clutton-brock 77). earlier species boundary practices such as predation, spiritual reverence, and artistic use were complemented by new practices of caring, breeding, and production. the evolutionary trajectories of all of the involved species were affected by the process of domestication. domesticated animals came under constant selective pressure from humans, whereas humans were selected for traits that facilitated dealings with domesticates and their products. as a consequence, domestic animals and humans grew increasingly dependent on each other. contemporary domestic breeds often retain juvenile characteristics of their species to adulthood exhibiting, among other traits, pronounced gregariousness, submissiveness, and non-aggressiveness, as well as reductions in wariness, response to stimuli, brain size, and capacity for certain kinds of problem-solving (smith and litchfield; gepts et al. 232–239). the bodies, minds, and cultures of humans have also become further attuned to domestic breeds’ products, diseases, communication, emotions, and behavior (o’brien and laland). despite these adjustments, problems such as zoonotic diseases, dietary drawbacks (cordain), and mutual violence have continuously plagued the species boundary of humans and domesticates. shipman’s animal connection hypothesis describes the emergence and persistence of the reciprocal conditionality of humans and domesticates. this societal and bodily connection emerged together with a degree of mutual intersubjectivity. without this intimate connection there could be no sellfare. the existence of sellfare could even be considered as indirect abductive evidence for shipman’s hypothesis. shipman’s hypothesis has, however, a second, equally important implication for an analysis of sellfare. the animal connection arguably internalizes a contradiction between sensitivity and instrumentality. on the one hand, the connection evolved out of (and into) a need for mutual understanding, bodily dependence, and jointly structured social relations. on the other hand, it evolved out of (and into) the often instrumental humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 30 and inherently asymmetrical relations between predator/prey, domesticator/ domesticated, and labor/means of production. in some ways, human and non-human domesticates are of the same whole; in other ways, their relations are permeated by violent enactment of difference. human recognition of non-human suffering is a corollary of abuse, as anna williams has argued. the contradiction internal to the animal connection is arguably the main reason why non-human thriving in the face of human usage has engendered concern throughout written history (preece). this old, generic form of human concern for non-human thriving is here called “fare” for short (cf. buller and cesar). generic fare only exists, however, in historically specific relations. as the next section shows, for example, fare and its governance were altogether different in the 18th and 19th centuries than they are today. the 18th and 19th centuries: the emergence of liberal fare governance. although the animal connection and its regulation are truly ancient, sellfare is more specific than any animal connection and any regulation. sellfare consists in entities such as states and civil-societal actors publicly valuing and manipulating the thriving of a population of animals. the preconditions for this liberal fare governance layer of sellfare first emerged during the 18th and 19th centuries, when fare became part of a regulatory process of public debate and governance. this section describes the emergence of the mediatized state–civil society dialectic of liberal fare governance, presents an integrative interpretation of its conditions of possibility, and discusses its relationship with contemporary sellfare. the analysis pulls together three explanatory strands from the literature on 18thand 19th-century fare governance. first, what could be called the humanitarian strand concerns changes in the emotional and moral aspects of the animal connection. second, the governance strand focuses on the changing role of the animal connection in societal coordination. third, the modernism strand emphasizes human perceptions concerning, and capacities for, rapidly manipulating themselves and their environment. the backdrop of liberal fare governance is formed by the process of capitalist modernization that culminated in the 18th and 19th centuries. this process transformed the relationships among the public sphere, the state, and the market in parts of europe and its imperial sphere (habermas). technological developments in the relations and forces of production instilled confidence in the human capacity to intervene in nonhuman and human constellations. contractual relations and notions of far-reaching ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 31 causal culpability proliferated, implying a heightened sense of moral responsibility (haskell, “capitalism and the origins of the humanitarian sensibility, part 1”; haskell, “capitalism and the origins of the humanitarian sensibility, part 2”). science increasingly emphasized the unity of life, and humans were either demoted to animals or glorified with characteristically human traits (franklin 25–26). morals, knowledge, and mettle came together at the elite-exclusive, bourgeois public sphere of newspapers, salons, parliaments, and societies (fraser, “rethinking the public sphere”). the ills spewed forth by the “satanic mills” (polanyi 41) of capitalism came to be governed through a mediatized process of civil society-state interactions. this process is taken here to be the defining characteristic of liberal governance. non-human animals were embroiled in the metamorphosis of society that modernization entailed. beginning in the 17th century, animals were increasingly produced for sale as commodities, or “live stock” (hribal 438). concern for them was famously mediatized in william hogarth’s mid-18th century commercial pamphlets that denounced the horrors and moral consequences of animal cruelty (kalof 124–164), proffering the commonplace modern depiction of animals as the helpless objects of human gaze and depredations. practices changed alongside representations: pets became prevalent conduits of demonstrative consumption and class affiliation (brantz 78–79), rendering many humans subject to the affectations of idle non-humans. the harsh lives of commodified animals at the hands of their working-class handlers remained visible, however, in cattle drives, traffic, and print. the 19th century saw the creation of societies that attracted influential members with words like vegetarian, vivisection, tierquälerei [animal abuse], and protetrice [protection] (guither 1–5; zerbel 1–82; kete, “animals and human empire” 3). these sought publicity, lobbied for legislation, and sometimes also enforced regulation that the police and magistrates were unable or unwilling to implement (favre and tsang). national animal laws increased in number, regulating behaviors such as “publicly or scandalously torturing animals” (second german reich, 1871) and “shameful, indecent treatment causing scandal in a public place” (the russian empire, 1864) (hardouinfugier 176). the property status of non-human animals was universalized, and practices of legally punishing animals disappeared from europe and the u.s. by the end of the 19th century (ritvo 1–5; legge and brooman 37). the notion of public cruelty was central to early liberal fare governance. an important reason for this is to be found in old elite anxieties that were now increasingly targeting humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 32 the proletariat (kelch, “a short history of (mostly) western animal law: part 1”; kelch, “a short history of (mostly) western animal law: part ii”): witnessing and partaking in cruelty was thought to have a dangerous effect on the working class (crossley 35), that beastly other of the composed modern gentlefolk. early british animal protectionists, for example, took themselves to be in the business of the “suppress[ion] of dangerous elements of human society” (kete, “animals and human empire” 2). influential social reformer jeremy bentham argued that “habits of cruelty” and “antisocial propensities” ought to be “repressed” by only allowing the infliction of non-human suffering on respectable grounds (which his utilitarian theory supplied) (bentham). in france, the proponents of the 1850 anti-cruelty grammont law successfully appealed to the elites’ fresh fear of the underclass after the uprisings of 1848 (kete, the beast in the boudoir 4–7). the practical implementation of 18thand 19th-century fare governance included statesponsored children’s anti-cruelty education in france (stock-morton 184), activists patrolling the streets as law enforcers in the u.s. (favre and tsang 15–17), and the military suppression of cruel entertainment in britain (turner 138–139). unsightly and unclean slaughter was increasingly concentrated within large, municipal compounds that were hidden away from urban centers (a. j. fitzgerald). a similar process was underway for animal markets by mid-19th century (philo 666–670). the livestock system was being civilized (cf. tester 66). the scope of fare governance expanded towards the end of the 19th century. steampowered animal transport grew explosively and was governed, in some countries, for both sanitary and sentimental reasons (woods, “from cruelty to welfare” 15; council of europe publishing 177–178). regulation continued on slaughterhouses, the conveyor belts of which reputedly inspired ford motor company employees to perfect the iconic auto assembly line (p. y. lee; horowitz 37). the scientific clout of animal experimenters continued to balloon, and anti-vivisectionists achieved their first legislative victories. in some cases, the opponents of vivisection allied with anti-positivist, aristocratic, and ecclesiastical elites that resisted the increasing authority of the empirical sciences (bromander); in other cases, with socialists and feminists (lansbury). value and other forms of power flowed ever faster through an ever larger number of non-human bodies, channeled by the criticism that was often integral to them. in sum, the 19th century saw the emergence of a crucial aspect of sellfare: the governance of fare within a mediatized state-civil society dialectic. scandalous public exposés and various forms of fare intervention came to complement each other. liberal ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 33 fare governance also began to subtly change the motivation of animal regulation. it increasingly treated animals as subjects whose sentiments were valuable as such, yet simultaneously used them to affect human populations. the contradiction between non-human animals as a means and object of liberal fare governance emerged. this contradiction is often mistaken for straightforward benevolence, such as when kelch argues that modern law “protected animals for their own sakes” (“a short history of (mostly) western animal law: part ii” 3) as opposed to older religious and economic reasons. such formulations overemphasize the degree to which non-human animals have ever been the sole object of liberal fare governance. at the end of the 19th century, a number of 21st century sellfare’s aspects were still missing. the mechanized, capital-intensive, cramped livestock rearing factory was absent, although branches of livestock production did increase their productivity substantially (federico 71). one of the most important objects and contexts of today’s welfare governance and sellfare was thus lacking. governance rarely concerned animal husbandry, rather focusing on transport, slaughter, and entertainment. animal thriving was also not reliably measurable. although scientific interest and knowledge concerning animal emotions and behavior did emerge particularly towards the end of the century (e.g., darwin), these were not yet institutionalized as disciplines. scientists working with living and healthy animals were a minority compared to those using dead or dying ones (burkhardt 1–126). laboratory environments for studying and manipulating animal behavior and emotion were nearly non-existent (cf. gray). perhaps most importantly, however, the governance device of animal “welfare” itself was absent. the first echoes of welfare governance could certainly be heard in notions such as “happiness” and “suffering,” but it was not possible to operationalize these existing conceptual tools for the manipulation of animal thriving in production. although some socialists and feminists began to include non-human animals in their demands (kean), the emblematic wohlfahrtsstaat [welfare state] of late 19th century germany was for humans only (petersen and petersen). it would be overly bold to claim that sellfare was impossible at the turn of the century, but the requisite technoscience, governance devices, and production conditions were nonetheless still largely absent. to produce livestock welfare for sale would have been excessively difficult. to encourage such production through policy was inconceivable. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 34 many phenomena that are important to contemporary sellfare only emerged or consolidated during the 20th century. the early 20th century: livestock factories and welfare governance. systems for raising substantial numbers of livestock in cramped conditions already existed in the 19th century. one might cite, for example, late 19th century urban dairies (woods, “from cruelty to welfare” 17), large pig sties (malcolmson and mastoris 72–87), and feedlots (cronon 223–224) as such. on the whole, however, various types of outdoor production and relatively small-scale indoor systems dominated livestock husbandry. it is difficult to pin down why this began to change precisely when it did, in the early 20th century. a general causal analysis of the industrialization of livestock husbandry should certainly mention late 19th century technological developments like fermented silage fodder becoming common (wilkinson, bolsen, and lin) and easing seasonal feed availability variations (federico 10), the growing viability of refrigerated railroad cars for meat transport (white), and the propagation of agricultural economics, education, and statistics (runge). towards the end of the 19th century, increasing affluence among parts of the world’s population resulted in the demand for livestock products growing faster than supply (federico 26–28). the vertical integration of farming increased and lobbyists consolidated (franklin 130–135). in some cases, such as the agro-industrial revolution of the u.s. midwest, these factors came together with astonishing consequences (page and walker). regardless of the specific etiology one opts for, it is beyond doubt that in the first half of the 20th century, new kinds of livestock production systems emerged from the broader process of fertilizer-, combustion-, credit-, and modernism-inflamed agricultural industrialization (d. fitzgerald). the novel systems kept animals at increasing densities, were increasingly mechanized, specialized, capital-intensive, or indoors, and competed on an equal footing with more extensive systems. it was only in the second half of the 20th century, however, that various kinds of livestock factories began definitively to eclipse other production systems (norwood and lusk 42–43; blokhuis 19–26). total agricultural workforces plummeted by up to 80 percent between 1938 and 2000 in western europe, while fixed capital stocks remained stable or expanded (federico 42– 64). the spread of livestock factories exacerbated the contradiction that was already inherent in animals as commodities (gunderson, “from cattle to capital” 267). an exploding number of affective beings were now reduced to commodities and hidden from the consumers of their flesh, deepening the dialectic of alienation and exposé that ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 35 had begun in the 18th century. the ascendancy of livestock factories was sealed by antibiotics and interventionist state policies that emphasized food quantity and structural change in agriculture (winter, fry, and carruthers 312). the subsumption of animals into commodities was far from perfect, however, and production systems varied with region and species. from the start, some proponents of livestock factories argued that intensive indoor systems in fact benefited animals by protecting them (woods, “rethinking the history of modern agriculture” 174–176). such claims were forcefully challenged with the onset of the tumultuous 1960s. books like silent spring (1962) in the u.s. and animal machines (1964) in britain sparked controversy around the moral, ecological, and societal consequences of intensive livestock production (carson; harrison, carson, and dawkins). these were soon translated into numerous languages. livestock factories increasingly transitioned from the producer’s private sphere to the sphere of public concern. as a british government official noted in 1964, “a sort of factories act for animals” seemed worth considering (quoted in woods, “rethinking the history of modern agriculture” 18). it is in this environment that livestock welfare governance began to consolidate in postwar britain, from whence it gradually spread across the anglophone hegemony. according to woods, references to livestock “welfare” surfaced in british debate during the 1950s (woods, “from cruelty to welfare” 15–16). at this point, “welfare” still connoted livestock thriving in a generic and non-specific sense. a specific meaning only developed after the british ministry of agriculture, fisheries and food mandated a group of scientific experts “to examine the conditions in which livestock are kept under systems of intensive husbandry and to advise whether standards ought to be set in the interests of their welfare, and if so what they should be” (brambell 1). this so-called brambell committee’s influential 1965 report, in some ways reminiscent of factory inspectors’ reports from a hundred years earlier, embraced an understanding of welfare as “both the physical and mental wellbeing of the animal.” the welfare status of an animal, it argued, could be known through “scientific evidence available concerning the feelings of animals that can be derived from their structure and functions and also from their behavior.” the rapporteurs considered welfare compatible with intensive production and even useful to improving productivity (brambell 9, 63). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 36 livestock welfare passed into british law in 1968, and much of the ministry’s policy was rebranded under the new moniker (woods, “from cruelty to welfare” 18–19). that same year, the european convention for the protection of animals during international transport was opened for ratification carrying numerous references to “welfare” (the council of europe). during the treaty process, “welfare” was translated verbatim into the languages of the participating nations. forms such as “wohlbefinden” [wellbeing], “benessere” [wellbeing], and “gerove” [welfare] were given precedence over previous vocabularies such as the german “artgerecht” [species-appropriate]. woods gives a number of possible reasons for why “welfare” was adopted in british livestock legislation (woods, “from cruelty to welfare” 18–19), some of which are also applicable to welfare’s spread to other national contexts. the reasons can be combined and reformulated into the following three items: first, it would have been controversial for the government to imply that “cruelty” or “suffering” existed in livestock factories. second, “welfare” evoked the condescending christian sensibility of caritas [charity], but also suggested a connection with the fashionable welfare state. third, cruelty policy was traditionally the remit of the home office, which is why agriculture, fisheries and food was eager to construct itself a new domain in welfare policy. woods’ account (woods, “from cruelty to welfare” 14) consciously omits one very important reason for welfare legislation: “animal welfare” had the benefit of being previously familiar from the rhetoric and research of the animal experimentation lobby, such as the universities federation for animal welfare (founded in 1926 as the university of london animal welfare society) and the animal welfare institute (founded in 1951 in the u.s.). welfare had also made a legislative appearance in 1966 in the u.s. when a laboratory animal welfare act had been adopted after a media scandal around animal research (adams and larson). in sum, the early 20th century saw the emergence of two important aspects of sellfare: livestock factories and scientific livestock welfare governance. two other aspects were still missing in the 1960s, however. first, animal welfare science consolidated largely after scientific welfare governance. animal welfare was not widely accepted as a scientific concept at the time of the brambell committee (broom, “a history of animal welfare science” 124), and little academic infrastructure existed for it. although animal behavior had become a respectable and feasible object of science since the emergence of ethology and comparative psychology in the first half of the century (burkhardt), these disciplines were dominated by approaches that were strongly skeptical of non-human mentation (rollin) and thus rendered questions concerning welfare difficult to answer. ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 37 second, the notion of scientific livestock welfare as a product quality attribute was still inconceivable. welfare as quality only became intelligible as a result of a broader societal transformation that began after the 1960s. the last part of the article discusses the way in which these two developments, animal welfare science and welfare quality, emerged. the late 20th century: welfare science and quality. as early as 1947, a laboratory animal handbook of the universities federation for animal welfare promoted a “realistically humane policy based on objective fact” (quoted in haynes 8) that would draw on research into non-human animals’ contentment and pain. at the time, however, such knowledge was virtually non-existent. the federation began sponsoring research for the benefit of laboratory animals and sound experimental design in the 1950s (kirk 250–252). agricultural science departments also began using the influx of post-war productivist policy funds to study the associations of livestock fare and productivity (e.g., sandilands). developments of this kind explain why, when ethologist w.h. thorpe of the aforementioned brambell committee reported to the british government in 1965, he already had a literature to draw on, even if this was not a welfare science literature as such. scientific attention truly turned towards animal welfare in the 1970s amidst growing public concern. rigorous definitions, valid indicators, telling indices, and robust causal relations were constructed to ground concepts such as those mentioned by thorpe (e.g., duncan and wood-gush). during the 1980s, something like a disciplinary orientation was gathered under the notion of measurable welfare (dawkins; blackshaw; broom, “animal welfare: concepts and measurement”). this was followed by rapid increases in publications and institutionalization in the 1990s (lawrence 5–8). the scientific literacy of stockpeople, among other characteristics, came to be seen as an important guarantor of the welfare and productivity of intensively-produced livestock (hemsworth and coleman vii-viii). the consolidation of welfare science rendered it, as alistair lawrence describes the development of his discipline, less “curiosity driven” and more “policy driven,” and hence perhaps more “efficient” at promoting welfare (lawrence 4). one reason for this was probably that welfare science was directly funded and steered by policy drivers. in its second framework programme between 1979 and 1983, the european communities in particular emerged as one of the most important supporters of welfare science. an ec commission report from 1986 rationalized the funding as follows: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 38 the pressures of the market-place have resulted in most animal production systems becoming more intensive in an effort to hold products at price levels acceptable to consumers, while, on the other hand, public opinion pressure (not always well informed), which is against certain aspects of modern systems, has been building up. scientific answers are needed to help avoid the impasse of these two pressures meeting head on. (commission of the european communities, coordinated agricultural research — a record of achievements 28) as welfare science entwined with policy, it was also inflected by the factories it was tasked with reforming. husbandry systems and industrial practices, such as debeaking or tail docking, became a common starting point for welfare research (cunningham; stookey and goonewardene). welfare science became a component in what could be called protectionist scientific welfare governance: a loosely science-based, largely legislative form of governance that utilized subsidies and restrictions to govern massproduced animals so as to manage the reduction imposed upon them. words like “schutz” [protection], “skydd” [protection], and “suojelu” [protection] commonly replaced or accompanied welfare vocabularies under variants of such governance (eu enforcement network for animal welfare lawyers and commissioners). even as protectionist welfare governance was solidifying, however, some of its foundations were being undermined by the very circuit of value it was structured around. the relatively unfettered governments of the post-war accumulation regime were being restrained by liberalization, with capital picking up speed, covering ground, and coercing into competition. butter mountains were growing as symbols of the inefficiencies of state intervention under fluctuating markets. state-produced public goods were appearing increasingly bland and uniform in comparison to private production, especially as firms were pushed towards product differentiation due to the saturation of markets for mass-produced goods (streeck). quality management systems spread copiously (e.g., kelemen) from their seedbed in warfare and manufacturing. post-modern citizens were being encouraged to take responsibility for themselves in the spirit of self-service democracy (eriksson and vogt). protectionist livestock factory legislation was slowly complemented by minor forms of market-based governance. livestock product quality certification systems, such as the french government’s label rouge [red label] (1960s) and the private scharrel [free range] (1970s) in the netherlands, acted as explicit higher-standards alternatives to livestock ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 39 factories and legislation (schmid and kilchsperger 233–240). although some of these early initiatives coupled commercial benefits with various notions of fare, their advantages were mainly identified with increased productivity and tastier or safer products (e.g., bieleman 279; fanatico, born, and conner). welfare was not yet for sale as such. welfare science was not yet capable of robustly abstracting livestock welfare into a single index in the mid-1980s (blackshaw). the 1990s and onwards: the birth of sellfare. by the mid-1990s, european livestock production and its governance had changed visibly from the post-war situation, and the outlines of sellfare were readily discernible. “mad cow disease” was endemic in the media. deteriorating consumer perceptions of the safety and quality of industriallyproduced food (e.g., alvensleben), together with the associated fall in food prices, were driving demand for standards. agricultural certification systems were multiplying rapidly (areté 4), and welfare had become central to several of these (e.g., neuland). liberalization was incentivizing the creation of new market-based and “multifunctional” policy instruments such as the organic system (huylenbroeck and durand 1–83; vogel). private and state actors were building new consumption spaces alongside and inside productivist intensification (potter and tilzey 584). the eu’s agricultural policy focus was on quality over quantity (commission of the european communities, com [85] 333 final, perspectives for the common agricultural policy [communication of the commission to the council and the parliament]), and research funding was being directed towards discovering how to best produce welfare for sale (european commission, ethical, legal and socio-economic aspects of agriculture, fisheries and food biotechnology. an overview of research activities 1994-2002 — programmes fair and biotech [fp4] quality of life programme [fp5] 28,34). by the end of the decade, eu legislation had classified non-human animals as sentient. since the 1990s, sellfare has expanded rapidly and left its mark on a wide spectrum of phenomena. numerous product labels and brand strategies have integrated welfare components (schmid and kilchsperger). a voluminous academic and report literature on welfare markets and supply chains has emerged (miele and lever; brook lyndhurst ltd.; gracia, loureiro, and nayga), a substantial portion of it directly or indirectly driven by state actors. operational welfare measurement and certification systems have been developed, the most prominent of these being the massive 14-million-euro eu project welfare quality® (blokhuis) that is now in the process of being adopted by many private and government initiatives. the demand, supply, and “transparency” of sellfare have been supported by education aimed at the regulators, assessors, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 40 consumers, and producers of welfare (schmid and kilchsperger; kilchsperger, schmid, and hecht; evans et al.). celebrity chefs have allied with non-governmental organizations for “high welfare and a fair deal” (compassion in world farming). trained welfare assessors have begun touring production facilities in order to link marketable welfare claims with production practices and animal indicators (roe, buller, and bull). efforts at international standardization have been made, sometimes with the explicit purpose of facilitating welfare trade (thiernmann and babcock). private, thirdsector, and state bureaucracies have begun cultivating commodified welfare and addressing the manifold practical difficulties that derive from the abstraction and rationalization characteristic of it. despite its consolidation, sellfare is far from stable and universal. there is substantial variation among regulations, proficiencies, attitudes, and interpretations everywhere within sellfare (kjaernes, miele, and roex; spoolder et al.), all of which must be mitigated to some degree as welfare is abstracted into a freely exchangeable commodity. for example, norwegian empty nesters in welfare quality® focus groups didn’t trust product labels (evans and miele 85). they also felt that welfare should be staterather than market-regulated, that they did not know enough to arbitrate on welfare, and that the killing of welfare animals remains problematic. comparable moments of cognitive dissonance are undoubtedly still the norm rather than the exception within sellfare. expert certification and education are needed to set minds at ease. even with such efforts, however, consumers’ willingness to pay for welfare products remains rather limited. although potential and actual welfare premiums (gracia, loureiro, and nayga; norwood and lusk 258–352) or market shares (schulze) may in some cases reach tens of percentage points, they are still low enough that some aspects of welfare production remain hard-pressed to meet all consumers’ intuitive understandings of “welfare.” miele and lever have argued that sellfare may, despite its failings, improve the welfare of livestock by drawing attention towards it and by preparing ground for future progress (miele and lever). the same process, however, also has a reverse side: sellfare is not only promoting welfare, but also adjusting it. welfare quality®, for example, consulted citizens and experts for a definition of welfare. the resultant definition would have ranked half of european livestock production units as “unacceptable,” so it was watered down in the final solution (miele et al. 115). other cases in point include the welfare gas and electrocution chambers of the industry-funded welfur system (mononen et al. 368) and the freedom food system’s welfare cctv cameras for slaughterhouse laborers (royal society for the prevention of cruelty to animals). it is ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 41 hardly surprising, then, that before economists can conduct willingness-to-pay experiments on welfare products, they must correct their subjects’ understandings of what welfare means in the context of the livestock industry (norwood and lusk 258– 352). commodified welfare is differentiating itself from non-commodified welfare, and adjusting the latter in the process. in addition to redefining welfare, sellfare also relocates the welfare question from the sphere of the citizen to that of the consumer. consumers are now “voting every day in favor of products that have implemented these animal welfare standards,” as excommissioner john dalli proclaims in a video of the eu’s welfare campaign, “everyone is responsible” (dg health and consumers). the contradiction between citizen and consumer is, however, difficult to paper over. by way of example: people prefer and vote for laws that prohibit whole classes of animal products, producing public rather than private goods (norwood and lusk 342). they bid differently in public-good welfare auctions than in product auctions (258–352). they express greater welfare interest in surveys (european commission, attitudes of eu citizens towards animal welfare) than at supermarket counters. the consumer-citizen is a beast riven by a contradiction that cannot be dissolved by re-education. some people will, furthermore, refuse both interpellations. this is why coercive apparatuses such as europol’s antiterrorists (europol, te-sat 2011. eu terrorism situation and trend report 2011 22) or the public-private “joint forces against violent animal rights extremists” (europol, “joint forces against violent animal rights extremists”) must stand ready. conclusions. as has been shown above, sellfare inherits four contradictions from earlier historical configurations and gives rise to a fifth. the first contradiction, between sensitivity and instrumentality, has plagued the human-non-human animal boundary since the emergence of the animal connection. this contradiction has frequently given rise to fare, i.e. human concern for non-human animal thriving. it was only in the 18th and 19th centuries, however, that fare came to be manipulated through the mediatized state–civil society dialectic of liberal fare governance. this gave rise to the ongoing contradiction between subjectivized animals as a means and object of liberal fare governance. after the second world war, livestock factories exacerbated the contradiction inherent in animal commodities. public spectacle followed, and states responded with scientific livestock welfare governance. governance helped steer welfare science in a policydriven and factory-centric direction. in the 1990s, scientifically-measured welfare humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 42 entwined with agricultural quality, consolidating livestock welfare commodification as governance and internalizing a contradiction between consumer and citizen at the heart of sellfare. although sellfare is a continuation of several long historical processes, it differs from older modes of governance that do not encourage the production of welfare for sale. it subjects livestock welfare directly to competition and compels producers to manufacture welfare as cheaply as possible. sellfare thus encourages the reduction of welfare into its commodity aspect, repeating the process that is at the root of welfare problems in the first place. unlike protectionist governance, sellfare also confronts livestock suffering as a resource rather than as a problem. as ryan gunderson puts it in his critique of ethical food, “the very same mechanisms that cause capitalism’s discontents are marketed as their own remedy” (“problems with the defetishization thesis” 6). finally, sellfare shifts the responsibility for livestock suffering from states and producers to consumers. this shift is part of a broader development in food governance that julie guthman (264) calls a “neoliberal anti-politics that devolves regulatory responsibility to consumers via their dietary choices.” sellfare is not static, however. its constituent parts are constantly in flux. if, for example, recent desensitization technologies such as in vitro [outside the living body] meat and the reduction of livestock sentience through genetic manipulation prove viable (cf. shriver), sentient livestock may become obsolete. this would likely dissolve the contradiction of sensitivity and instrumentality that sellfare depends on. desensitization has, however, proven vulnerable to public scandal around “frankenmeat” (boyle and news) in ways that sellfare has not. the irony becomes palpable when one recalls welfur’s electrocution chambers. even if consumers find sellfare preferable to desensitization, the skeletons in sellfare’s closet are haunting enough that resistance is to be expected. policy-driven welfare science is particularly open to accusations of treating livestock as a means rather than an object. criticism does not, however, necessarily challenge sellfare or its aspects. as slavoj žižek points out, subjects need not believe or accept a notion for it to function; they only need to act according to it (the sublime object of ideology 28–30). even if the imperfections of welfare production were suddenly widely recognized, consumers might be inclined to blame themselves and demand more expensive welfare products rather than question sellfare as such. ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 43 one possible form of resistance to sellfare’s responsibilization of consumers is to reemphasize the citizen aspect of welfare governance and call for a return to legislation over commodification. this answer would be in line with the cries for global keynesian democracy (patomäki) and emancipatory protectionism (fraser, “a triple movement?”) that have become fashionable of late. although protectionism is unlikely to dissolve sellfare’s contradictions, it may improve the prospects for governing some of them. empowered governments could, for instance, more effectively steer consumption away from animal products by combining welfare measurement with other policy tools (cf. vinnari and tapio). this theme cannot be fully pursued here, but a thorough discussion of protectionism and sellfare is worthy of future inquiry. whatever path sellfare takes, one thing is certain: sellfare’s complete undoing is unlikely. the technology for rendering welfare interchangeable with other abstract measurables will not go away. new vistas for both centralized and dispersed coordination are open, for good or for ill. value and other forms of power now flow through sentient beings in ways that were previously inconceivable. consider, for example, the recent interest in measuring and governing human well-being (davies). when read together with sellfare, this gives rise to as-yet unexplored possibilities of human welfare commodification. here, too, the application of power trumps its abolition. works cited adams, benjamin, and jean larson. “legislative history of the animal welfare act.” usda national agricultural library — animal welfare information center. n.p., 2012. 5 aug. 2013 . http://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/pubs/awa2007/intro.shtml. adams, ronald j. “fast food and animal rights: an examination and assessment of the industry’s response to social pressure.” business and society review 113.3 (2008): 301–328. althusser, louis. for marx. london: verso, 2005. alvensleben, reimar v. “lebensmittelskandale und ökoprodukte — wie verbraucher qualität und risiken wahrnehmen.” lohmann information 4 (2002): n. pag. 1 nov. 2013. http://www.lohmann-information.com/content/l_i_4_02_artikel5.pdf humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 44 american pet products association. “industry statistics & trends.” n.p., 2012. 11 oct. 2012. http://www.americanpetproducts.org/press_industrytrends.asp marketed in the eu member states.” 2010. http://ec.europa.eu/agriculture/quality/certification/inventory/inventory-dataaggregations_en.pdf barnett, clive et al. “consuming ethics: articulating the subjects and spaces of ethical consumption.” antipode 37.1 (2005): 23–45. barnosky, a. d. “assessing the causes of late pleistocene extinctions on the continents.” science 306.5693 (2004): 70–75. bateman, connie rae, john paul fraedrich, and rajesh iyer. “framing effects within the ethical decision making process of consumers.” journal of business ethics 36.1-2 (2002): 119–140. bennett, r.m. “farm animal welfare and food policy.” food policy 22.4 (1997): 281– 288. bentham, jeremy. “to the editor of the morning chronicle.” morning chronicle 9 mar. 1825 : 2. bevir, mark. a theory of governance. berkeley: u california p, 2013. bieleman, jan. five centuries of farming: a short history of dutch agriculture, 1500-2000. wageningen: wageningen academic publishers, 2010. blackshaw, j.k. “objective measures of welfare in farming environments.” australian veterinary journal 63.11 (1986): 361–364. blokhuis, h j et al. “measuring and monitoring animal welfare: transparency in the food product quality chain.” animal welfare 12.4 (2003): 445–455. blokhuis, h.j. improving farm animal welfare: science and society working together: the welfare quality approach. wageningen: wageningen academic publishers, 2013. ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 45 boyle, alan, and science editor nbc news. “it’s (not) alive! franken-meat lurches from the lab to the frying pan nbc news.com.” nbc news. n.p., 4 aug. 2013. 23 jan. 2014. http://www.nbcnews.com/technology/its-not-alive-franken-meat-lurches-lab-fryingpan-6c10835458 brambell (chairman), f.w.r. report of the technical committee to enquire into the welfare of animals kept under intensive husbandry conditions. london: her majesty’s stationery office, 1965. brantz, dorothee. “the domestication of empire.” a cultural history of animals in the age of empire. ed. kathleen kete. london: berg, 2011. 73–93. bromander, lennart. “the vivisection debate in sweden in the 1880s.” vivisection in historical perspective. ed. nicolaas a. rupke. london: taylor & francis, 1990. 214–236. brook lyndhurst ltd. are labels the answer? barriers to buying higher animal welfare products. a report for defra. london: n.p., 2010. http://randd.defra.gov.uk/document.aspx?document=ci0102animal_welfare_final_rep ort.pdf broom, d. m. “animal welfare: concepts and measurement.” journal of animal science 69 (1991): 4167–4175. _____. “a history of animal welfare science.” acta biotheoretica 59.2 (2011): 121–137. bryant, edwin. “strategies of vedic subversion — the emergence of vegetarianism in post-vedic india.” a communion of subjects: animals in religion, science, and ethics. ed. paul waldau. new york: columbia up, 2006. 194–203. budiansky, stephen. the covenant of the wild. why animals chose domestication. new haven and london: yale up, 1992. buller, h., and e. roe. “commodifying animal welfare.” animal welfare 21 (2012): 131– 135. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 46 buller, henry, and christine cesar. “eating well, eating fare: farm animal welfare in france.” international journal of sociology of agriculture and food 15.3 (2007): 45–58. burkhardt, richard w. patterns of behavior: konrad lorenz, niko tinbergen, and the founding of ethology. chicago: u chicago p, 2005. carson, rachel. silent spring. boston: mariner books/houghton mifflin, 2012. clutton-brock, juliet. “how domestic animals have shaped the development of human societies.” a cultural history of animals in antiquity. vol. 1. oxford: berg, 2007. cole, matthew. “from ’animal machines’ to ’happy meat?’ foucault’s ideas of disciplinary and pastoral power applied to ’animal-centred’ welfare discourse.” animals 1.1 (2011): 83–101. commission of the european communities. com (85) 333 final, perspectives for the common agricultural policy (communication of the commission to the council and the parliament). brussels: n.p., 1985. 23 oct. 2013. http://ec.europa.eu/greenpapers/pdf/green_paper_perspectives_for_cap_com_85_333.pdf _____. coordinated agricultural research — a record of achievements. luxembourg: office for official publications of the european communities, 1986. compassion in world farming. “chicken out! campaign for a free range future.” n.p., 2013. 9 jan. 2014. http://www.chickenout.tv/ cordain, l. “implications of plio-pleistocene hominin diets for modern humans.” early hominin diets: the known, the unknown, and the unknowable. ed. p. ungar. oxford: oxford up, 2007. 363–383. council of europe publishing. ethical eye — animal welfare. strasbourg: n.p., 2006. cronon, william. nature’s metropolis: chicago and the great west. new york: w.w. norton, 1991. crossley, ceri. consumable metaphors: attitudes towards animals and vegetarianism in nineteenth-century france. peter lang, 2005. ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 47 cunningham, d. l. “beak trimming effects on performance, behavior and welfare of chickens: a review.” the journal of applied poultry research 1.1 (1992): 129–134. darwin, charles. the expression of the emotions in man and animals. london: john murray, 1872. 7 may 2013. davies, william. “the political economy of unhappiness.” new left review 71 (2011): 65–80. ii. dawkins, marian stamp. animal suffering: the science of animal welfare. london; new york: chapman and hall, 1980. deleuze, gilles, and félix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 1987. dg health and consumers. europa — animal health & welfare — animal welfare — everyone is responsible — video. 03:55-04:07: n.p., n.d. film. domínguez-rodrigo, manuel, travis rayne pickering, and henry t. bunn. “reply to mcpherron et al.: doubting dikika is about data, not paradigms.” proceedings of the national academy of sciences 108.21 (2011): e117–e117. duncan, i.j.h., and d.g.m. wood-gush. “frustration and aggression in the domestic fowl.” animal behaviour 19.3 (1971): 500–504. eriksson, kai, and henri vogt. “on self-service democracy configurations of individualizing governance and self-directed citizenship.” european journal of social theory 16.2 (2013): 153–173. eu enforcement network for animal welfare lawyers and commissioners. “national animal welfare legislation.” n.p., n.d. 9 jan. 2014. http://lawyersforanimalprotection.eu/ national-animal-welfare-legislation european commission. “animal welfare — international conference on the eu animal welfare strategy.” n.p., 2012. 14 nov. 2012. http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/health_consumer/dyna/enews/enews.cfm?al_id=1212 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 48 _____. attitudes of eu citizens towards animal welfare. n.p., 2007. 15 june 2012. http://ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_270_en.pdf _____. “communication from the commission to the european parliament, the council and the european social committee on the european union strategy for the protection and welfare of animals 2012-2015.” n.p., 2012. 26 apr. 2012. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/txt/?uri=celex:52012ae1305 _____. “ethical, legal and socio-economic aspects of agriculture, fisheries and food biotechnology. an overview of research activities 1994-2002 programmes fair and biotech (fp4) quality of life programme (fp5).” ed. s. caro. directorate-general for research, 2002. https://ec.europa.eu/research/biosociety/pdf/agrofood.pdf europol. “joint forces against violent animal rights extremists.” n.p., 2011. 30 may 2012. https://www.europol.europa.eu/content/press/joint-forces-against-violent-animalrights-extremists-1023 _____. te-sat 2011. eu terrorism situation and trend report 2011. n.p., 2011. 29 june 2012. https://www.europol.europa.eu/sites/default/files/publications/te-sat2011.pdf evans, adrian et al. the provision of educational materials about farmed animal welfare: a comparative report. welfare quality reports, 2010. http://www.welfarequality.net/everyone/44898/7/0/22 evans, adrian, and mara miele. consumers’ views about farm animal welfare part ii: european comparative report based on focus group research. welfare quality reports, 2008. http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/cplan/sites/default/files/wqreport-5_0.pdf fanatico, anne, holly born, and betsy conner. “label rouge: pasture-based poultry production in france.” attra 2010. 13 dec. 2013. https://attra.ncat.org/attra-pub/summaries/summary.php?pub=224 ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 49 favre, david, and vivien tsang. “the development of anti-cruelty laws during the 1800s.” detroit college of law review 1.1 (1993): n. pag. 7 may 2013. http://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1146&context=facpubs federico, giovanni. feeding the world: an economic history of agriculture, 1800-2000. princeton: princeton up, 2005. fitzgerald, amy j. “a social history of the slaughterhouse: from inception to contemporary implications.” research in human ecology 17.1 (2010): 58–69. fitzgerald, deborah. every farm a factory: the industrial ideal in american agriculture. new haven: yale up, 2010. fraser, nancy. “rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy.” social text 25/26 (1990): 56–80. _____. “a triple movement?” new left review 81 (2013): 119–132. ii. franklin, adrian. animals and modern cultures: a sociology of human-animal relations in modernity. london: sage, 1999. freidberg, susanne. “the ethical complex of corporate food power.” environment and planning d: society and space 22.4 (2004): 513–531. friedmann, erika, and heesook son. “the human-companion animal bond: how humans benefit.” the veterinary clinics of north america. small animal practice 39.2 (2009): 293–326. gepts, paul et al., eds. biodiversity in agriculture: domestication, evolution, and sustainability. new york: cambridge up, 2012. gracia, azucena, maria l loureiro, and jr. nayga. “valuing an eu animal welfare label using experimental auctions.” agricultural economics 00 (2011): 1–9. gray, philip howard. “spalding and his influence on research in developmental behavior.” journal of the history of the behavioral sciences 3.2 (1967): 168–179. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 50 guither, harold d. animal rights: history and scope of a radical social movement. carbondale: southern illinois up, 1998. gunderson, ryan. “from cattle to capital: exchange value, animal commodification, and barbarism.” critical sociology 39.2 (2011): 259–275. _____. “problems with the defetishization thesis: ethical consumerism, alternative food systems, and commodity fetishism.” agriculture and human values (2013): 1–9. guthman, julie. “commentary on teaching food: why i am fed up with michael pollan et al.” agriculture and human values 24.2 (2007): 261–264. habermas, jürgen. the structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. cambridge, ma: the mit press, 1991. hardouin-fugier, elisabeth. “from animal suffering to animal welfare: the progressive attainment of animal rights in europe.” ethical eye — animal welfare. council of europe publishing, 2006. 171–184. harrison, ruth, rachel carson, and marian stamp dawkins. animal machines. boston: cabi, 2013. harvey, david. a brief history of neoliberalism. first edition. new york: oxford up, 2005. harvey, david, and carmen hubbard. “reconsidering the political economy of farm animal welfare: an anatomy of market failure.” food policy 38 (2013): 105–114. haskell, thomas l. “capitalism and the origins of the humanitarian sensibility, part 1.” the american historical review 90.2 (1985): 339–361. _____. “capitalism and the origins of the humanitarian sensibility, part 2.” the american historical review 90.3 (1985): 547–566. haynes, richard p., ed. animal welfare. competing conceptions and their ethical implications. dordrecht: springer netherlands, 2008. ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 51 helvenston, patricia a., and derek hodgson. “wild thing, i think i love you.” current anthropology 52.3 (2011): 433–433. hemsworth, paul, and grahame coleman. human-livestock interactions: the stockperson and the productivity and welfare of intensively farmed animals. wallingford, uk; cambridge, ma: cab international, 2011. hobbs, a. l. et al. “ethics, domestic food policy and trade law: assessing the eu animal welfare proposal to the wto.” food policy 27.5-6 (2002): 437–454. hodgson, derek, and patricia a. helvenston. “the emergence of the representation of animals in palaeoart: insights from evolution and the cognitive, limbic and visual systems of the human brain.” rock art research 23.1 (2006): 3–39. horowitz, roger. putting meat on the american table: taste, technology, transformation. baltimore: the johns hopkins up, 2006. hribal, jason. “’animals are part of the working class’: a challenge to labor history.” labor history 44.4 (2003): 435-453. huylenbroeck, guido van, and guy durand. multifunctional agriculture: a new paradigm for european agriculture and rural development. aldershot: ashgate publishing, 2003. ingenbleek, paul t.m. et al. “eu animal welfare policy: developing a comprehensive policy framework.” food policy 37.6 (2012): 690–699. ingenbleek, paul t.m., et al. “a scenario analysis on the implementation of a farm animal welfare assessment system.” animal welfare 20 (2011): 613–621. kalof, linda. “introduction — ancient animals.” a cultural history of animals in antiquity. vol. 1. oxford: berg publishers, 2007. kean, hilda. “the ’smooth cool men of science’: the feminist and socialist response to vivisection.” history workshop journal 40.1 (1995): 16–38. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 52 kelch, thomas g. “a short history of (mostly) western animal law: part 1.” animal law 19 (2012): 23–185. _____. “a short history of (mostly) western animal law: part ii.” animal law 19 (2013): 347–497. kelemen, mihaela. “too much or too little ambiguity: the language of total quality management.” journal of management studies 37.4 (2000): 483–498. kete, kathleen. “animals and human empire.” a cultural history of animals in the age of empire. ed. kathleen kete. london: bloomsbury academic, 2011. 1–24. _____. the beast in the boudoir: petkeeping in nineteenth-century paris. berkeley: u california p, 1994. kilchsperger, rahel, otto schmid, and judith hecht. animal welfare initiatives in europe — technical report on grouping method for animal welfare standards and initiatives. deliverable no. 1.1 of econwelfare project. frick, switzerland: research institute of organic agriculture fibl, 2010. 9 jan. 2014. http://www.econwelfare.eu/publications/econwelfared1.1-final_updateoct2010.pdf kirk, robert g.w. “the invention of the ’stressed animal’ and the development of a science of animal welfare, 1948-1986.” stress, shock, and adaptation in the twentieth century. eds., david cantor and david ramsden. rochester: u rochester p, 2014. 241– 259. kjaernes, unni, mara miele, and joek roex. attitudes of consumers, retailers and producers to farm animal welfare. welfare quality reports, 2007. 18 september 2015. http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/cplan/sites/default/files/wqreport-2_0.pdf lansbury, coral. the old brown dog: women, workers, and vivisection in edwardian england. madison, wis.: u wisconsin p, 1985. larson, greger et al. “rethinking dog domestication by integrating genetics, archeology, and biogeography.” proceedings of the national academy of sciences (2012): n. pag. 9 oct. 2012. http://www.pnas.org/content/109/23/8878.full.pdf#page=1&view=fith ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 53 lawrence, alistair b. “applied animal behaviour science: past, present and future prospects.” applied animal behaviour science 115.1–2 (2008): 1–24. lee, patrick c. “the human child’s nature orientation.” child development perspectives 6.2 (2012): 193–198. lee, paula young, ed. meat, modernism, and the rise of the slaughterhouse. durham: u new hampshire p, 2008. legge, debbie, and simon brooman. law relating to animals. london: cavendish, 1997. li, chien-hui. “a union of christianity, humanity, and philanthropy: the christian tradition and the prevention of cruelty to animals in nineteenth-century england.” society and animals 8.3 (2000): 265–285. malcolmson, robert, and stephanos mastoris. the english pig: a history. london: hambledon continuum, 1998. marx, karl. capital. a critique of political economy. volume one. trans. ben fowkes. london: penguin, 1976. marx, karl. grundrisse: foundations of the critique of political economy. trans. martin nicolaus. london: penguin, 1993. mason, jim. “animals — from souls and the sacred in prehistoric times to symbols and slaves in antiquity.” a cultural history of animals in antiquity. vol. 1. ed., linda kalof. oxford: berg, 2007. 17–45. miele, m. et al. “animal welfare: establishing a dialogue between science and society.” animal welfare 20.1 (2011): 103–117. miele, mara, and john lever. “civilizing the market for welfare friendly products in europe? the techno-ethics of the welfare quality® assessment.” geoforum 48 (2013): 63–72. mithen, steven. the prehistory of the mind: a search for the origins of art, religion and science. london: orion, 1998. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 54 mononen, j et al. “the development of on-farm welfare assessment protocols for foxes and mink: the welfur project.” animal welfare 21.3 (2012): 363–371. neuland. “die geschichte des neuland-vereins.” n.p., n.d. 17 dec. 2013. http://www.neuland-fleisch.de/verein/geschichte.html norwood, f. bailey, and jayson l. lusk. compassion, by the pound: the economics of farm animal welfare. new york: oxford up, 2011. o’brien, michael j., and kevin n. laland. “genes, culture, and agriculture.” current anthropology 53.4 (2012): 434–470. overbeek, henk. global governance, class, hegemony: a historical materialist perspective. amsterdam: vrije universiteit, department of political science, 2004. 6 june 2014. page, brian, and richard walker. “from settlement to fordism: the agro-industrial revolution in the american midwest.” economic geography 67.4 (1991): 281–315. patomäki, heikki. the great eurozone disaster. from crisis to global new deal. first edition. london; new york: zed books, 2013. petersen, klaus, and jørn henrik petersen. “confusion and divergence: origins and meanings of the term ’welfare state’ in germany and britain, 1840–1940.” journal of european social policy 23.1 (2013): 37–51. philo, chris. “animals, geography, and the city: notes on inclusions and exclusions.” environment and planning d: society and space 13.6 (1995): 655-681. polanyi, karl. the great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time. 2nd ed. boston: beacon press, 2001. potter, clive, and mark tilzey. “agricultural policy discourses in the european postfordist transition: neoliberalism, neomercantilism and multifunctionality.” progress in human geography 29.5 (2005): 581–600. preece, rod, ed. awe for the tiger, love for the lamb: a chronicle of sensibility to animals. routledge. new york, london: ubc press, 2002. ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 55 ritvo, harriet. the animal estate: the english and other creatures in the victorian england. cambridge: harvard up, 1987. röcklinsberg, helena, and per sandin, eds. the ethics of consumption: the citizen, the market, and the law. wageningen: wageningen academic publishers, 2013. roe, e., h. buller, and j. bull. “the performance of farm animal assessment.” animal welfare 20.1 (2011): 69–78. rollin, bernard e. “scientific ideology, anthropomorphism, anecdote, and ethics.” new ideas in psychology 18.1 (2000): 109–118. royal society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. “rspca welfare standards for farm animals – new standards and guidance requiring the installation of cctv in abattoirs (mammals).” 2011. 10 jan. 2014. http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/user_upload/animalwelfare/rspca_welfare_standards_f or_pigs_2010.pdf runge, c. ford. “agricultural economics: a brief intellectual history.” center for international food and agricultural policy working paper (2006): n. pag. 21 aug. 2013. http://ageconsearch.umn.edu/bitstream/13649/1/wp06-01.pdf sandilands, v. “david wood-gush the biography of an ethology mentor.” applied animal behaviour science 87.3–4 (2004): 173–176. schaefer, anja, and a. crane. “rethinking green consumption.” globalisation and equity: proceedings of the 26th annual macromarketing conference. ed. don r. rahtz, pierre mcdonagh, and d. bouchet. williamsburg, usa: the college of william and mary, 2001. 178–195. 8 nov. 2013. http://oro.open.ac.uk/1956/ schmid, otto, and rahel kilchsperger. overview of animal welfare standards and initiatives in selected eu and third countries. frick, switzerland: research institute of organic agriculture (fibl), 2010. 15 june 2012. http://www.econwelfare.eu/publications/econwelfared1.2report_update_nov2010.pdf humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 56 schulze, birgit, achim spiller, and daniela lemke. “glücksschwein oder arme sau? die einstellung der verbraucher zur modernen nutztierhaltung.” zukunftsperspektiven der fleischwirtschaft — verbraucher, märkte, geschäftsbeziehungen. eds. achim spiller and birgit schulze. göttingen: universitetsverlag göttingen, 2008. 465-488. seidman, steven. “beyond presentism and historicism: understanding the history of social science.” sociological inquiry 53.1 (1983): 79–91. shaw, deirdre, terry newholm, and roger dickinson. “consumption as voting: an exploration of consumer empowerment.” european journal of marketing 40.9/10 (2006): 1049–1067. shipman, pat. “the animal connection and human evolution.” current anthropology 51.4 (2010): 1–21. _____. the animal connection: a new perspective on what makes us human. new york: w. w. norton & company, 2011. shriver, adam. “knocking out pain in livestock: can technology succeed where morality has stalled?” neuroethics 2.3 (2009): 115–124. smith, bradley philip, and carla anita litchfield. “how well do dingoes, canis dingo, perform on the detour task?” animal behaviour 80.1 (2010): 155–162. spoolder, hans et al. econwelfare findings, conclusions and recommendations concerning effective policy instruments in the route towards higher animal welfare in the eu. n.p., 2011. http://www.econwelfare.eu/publications/econwelfared0.5_findings_conclusions_and_ recommendations.pdf steinfeld, henning et al. livestock in a changing landscape, volume 1: drivers, consequences, and responses. washington, d.c.: island press, 2010. stock-morton, phyllis. moral education for a secular society: the development of moral laique in nineteenth century france. albany: state u new york p, 1988. ____________________________________________________________________ sami torssonen – “sellfare: a history of livestock welfare commodification as governance” 57 stookey, j. m., and l. a. goonewardene. “a comparison of production traits and welfare implications between horned and polled beef bulls.” canadian journal of animal science 76.1 (1996): 1–5. streeck, wolfgang. “citizens as customers.” new left review 76 (2012): 27–47. ii. talebinejad, m. reza, and h. vahid dastjerdi. “a cross-cultural study of animal metaphors: when owls are not wise!” metaphor and symbol 20.2 (2005): 133–150. tester, keith. animals & society. the humanity of animal rights. london: routledge, 1991. the council of europe. european convention for the protection of animals during international transport. n.p., 1968. http://conventions.coe.int/treaty/en/treaties/html/193.htm the food and agriculture organization of the united nations. “animal welfare: a win-win opportunity for animals, farmers and consumers.” gateway to farm animal welfare. n.p., 29 oct. 2012. 13 nov. 2012. http://www.fao.org/ag/againfo/themes/animal-welfare/news-detail/en/c/164058/ thiernmann, a.b., and s. babcock. “animal welfare and international trade.” revue scientifique et technique/ office international des épizooties 24.2 (2005): 747–755. thornton, philip k. “livestock production: recent trends, future prospects.” philosophical transactions of the royal society b: biological sciences 365.1554 (2010): 2853– 2867. turner, e. s. all heaven in a rage. london: open gate press, 1992. vinnari, markus, and petri tapio. “sustainability of diets: from concepts to governance.” ecological economics 74.0 (2012): 46–54. vitell, scott j. “consumer ethics research: review, synthesis and suggestions for the future.” journal of business ethics 43.1-2 (2003): 33–47. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 58 vogel, david. trading up: consumer and environmental regulation in a global economy. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1997. white, john h. the great yellow fleet: a history of american railroad refrigerator cars. san marino: golden west books, 1986. wilkinson, j. m., k. k. bolsen, and c. j. lin. “history of silage.” silage science and technology. eds. dwayne r. buxton, richard e. muck, and joseph h. harrison. madison: american society of agronomy, 2003. 1–30. williams, anna. “disciplining animals: sentience, production, and critique.” international journal of sociology and social policy 24.9 (2004): 45 57 winter, m, c fry, and s.p carruthers. “european agricultural policy and farm animal welfare.” food policy 23.3–4 (1998): 305–323. woods, abigail. “from cruelty to welfare: the emergence of farm animal welfare in britain, 1964–71.” endeavour 36.1 (2012): 14–22. _____. “rethinking the history of modern agriculture: british pig production, c.1910– 65.” twentieth century british history 23.2 (2012): 165–191. zeder, melinda a. “pathways to animal domestication.” biodiversity in agriculture: domestication, evolution, and sustainability. ed. paul gepts, et al. cambridge: cambridge up, 2012. 227–259. zerbel, miriam. tierschutz im kaiserreich: ein beitrag zur geschichte des vereinswesens. bern and frankfurt am main: peter lang, 1993. zeuner, frederick. a history of domesticated animals. london: hutchinson of london, 1963. žižek, slavoj. first as tragedy, then as farce. verso, 2009. _____. the sublime object of ideology. london: verso, 1989. microsoft word iveson pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 4:2 richard iveson deeply ecological deleuze and guattari: humanism’s becoming-animal introduction. in recent years there has been a great deal of interest in the philosophy of gilles deleuze and félix guattari from within animal studies, particularly in the chapter of a thousand plateaus (1980) entitled “1730 — becoming-intense, becoming-animal, becoming-imperceptible….” this is not surprising perhaps — alain badiou, whose own philosophy is resolutely anthropocentric, has criticized deleuze and guattari for having produced what he considers to be an ignoble “animal” philosophy.1 recent examples of such texts which, albeit from a variety of viewpoints and in varying degrees of depth, engage specifically with deleuze and guattari’s notion of “becominganimal” include electric animal: toward a rhetoric of wildlife (2000) by akira mizuta lippit, steve baker’s the postmodern animal (2000), james urpeth’s essay “animal becomings” in animal philosophy: essential readings of continental thought (2004), donna haraway’s when species meet (2008), insect media: an archaeology of insects and technology (2010) by jussi parikka, and susan mchugh’s animal stories: narrating across species lines (2011). one of the main reasons for this interest is that, famously or infamously, deleuze and guattari appear to give to nonhuman animals an access to a “becoming” that is equal — in power, in affect — to those valorized becomings open to the human animal: “[a]ffects and powers,” they write, “grip every animal in a becoming just as [non moins] powerful as that of the human being with the animal” (thousand plateaus 266). as i will demonstrate, however, upon closer reading it soon transpires that the equality marked by that “just as” is just as quickly refused. indeed, in being “just as” or “no less” [non moins] powerful, an implicit division between a nonhuman animal-becoming and a human becoming-animal is already marked. this will in turn enable a better understanding of the politics underlying the drawing of a rigorous division between the categories of the wild and the tame — a politics which ultimately derails the ethical and reiterates instead structures of oppression that are at once traditional and contemporary. treating animals. before we can approach the discontinuity between human and animal, however, a discontinuity which in fact serves to prohibit nonhuman becoming despite its commensurate powerfulness, it is first of all necessary to consider deleuze and guattari’s division of all nonhuman animals into three categories: oedipal animals, richard iveson -deeply ecological deleuze and guattari: humanism’s becominganimal 35 state animals, and demonic animals. oedipal animals are “individuated animals, family pets, sentimental,” whereas state animals are those animals treated so as “to extract from them series or structures, archetypes or models.” finally, the valorized category of demonic animals are those “pack or affect animals that form a multiplicity, a becoming, a population, a tale [à meutes et affects, et qui font multiplicité, devenir, population, conte]” (265). these three categories, however — oedipal, state, and pack — are far less secure and far more complex than is generally taken to be the case. to begin with, these divisions are divisions only of degree and of contingency: there is always the possibility that a given animal … will be treated as a pet [soit traité comme un animal familier] … it is also possible for any animal to be treated [être traité] in the mode of the pack … even the cat, even the dog. … yes, any animal is or can be a pack, but to varying degrees of vocation that make it easier or harder to discover the multiplicity, or multiplicity-grade [de teneur en multiplicité], an animal contains (actually or virtually according to the case). (265-6) moreover, we can see that what have been thus divided are not “actual” nonhuman animals. the categories denote, that is to say, neither a zoological classification nor even what for deleuze and guattari constitutes the reality of nonhuman animals, as we shall see. rather, the three categories represent the three possible ways in which nonhuman animals might be treated [traité], that is, in which they might be constituted in relation to humans: a dog can be treated as a pack, a panther can be treated as a “pet” or as a model. in short, oedipal, state, and demonic are not three ways of being-animal, but rather three ways in which humans may produce other animals. we are thus contained within an (actual or virtual) human domain, constrained within the anthro-tropo-logical machine of human recognition and of the proper and improper ways of re-presenting a nonhuman being. whether that is as a “pet” or as a “pack,” this exceptional tropological function, this uniquely human capacity to constitute something as something, is itself symptomatic of an all too familiar human-animal discontinuity founded upon the possession of language being awarded to human animals alone. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 36 what then, do deleuze and guattari consider the “reality” of nonhuman animals, outside of their categorization? only in answering this question does it become possible to understand the privilege accorded to the category of the demonic, a category which, first of all, is not in fact that of a band or pack of animals (plural). rather, for deleuze and guattari the animal — that is, this singular animal, this nonsubstitutable living being more commonly defined as a single, autonomous organism — is always already pack: “we do not wish to say that certain animals live in packs [vivent en meutes] … what we are saying is that every animal is fundamentally [d’abord]a band, a pack” (264). “the pack,” they continue, is “animal reality” (267). in other words, every individuated nonhuman animal is, first of all, is at first [d’abord], a pack. this is “its” mode, “its” way of being rather than simply a quality or a distinguishing mark: “it [sic] has pack modes, rather than characteristics, even if further distinctions interior to these modes are called for” (264, translation modified). every nonhuman animal thus “is” in a mode of being-pack, rather than “pack” being simply or only a mark — constituted by an human-animal relation — of and as “animal reality.” every animal is a pack then, but not every animal is treated as a pack. in being treated or constituted as an oedipal or state animal, this being-pack that an animal contains is rendered merely “virtual” in that her “multiplicity-grade” is necessarily hard to discover. by contrast, those animals constituted as demonic pack-animals, insofar as the metaphorical vehicle that is such a relation properly signifies, or at least corresponds to, the essential “reality” of nonhuman animals, therefore retain in and as that relation the “actuality,” the sense, of their “proper” way of being. it is just such a “vocation” that keeps them at the greatest distance both from their domestication by way of “petty” human “sentimentality” and from the reduction to state characteristics. a proper vocation, in short, which ensures that they remain both “wild” and “real.” the reason for this demonic propriety is that pack animals, in contrast to both the pet and the model, form a multiplicity that presupposes contagion rather than filiation and involutions rather than hereditary production and sexual reproduction. “bands,” deleuze and guattari write, both “human and animal, proliferate by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes” (266). however, it is in following this catastrophic contagion or contamination that we discover, in what is perhaps the central passage of the “1730” plateau, the positing of an absolute separation: these multiplicities with heterogeneous terms, cofunctioning by contagion, enter certain assemblages [agencements]; it is there that human beings effect their becomings-animal [opère ses devenirs-animaux].… the richard iveson -deeply ecological deleuze and guattari: humanism’s becominganimal 37 pack is simultaneously animal reality and the reality of the becominganimal of the human being; contagion is simultaneously animal populating [peuplement animal], and propagation of the animal populating [or “stocking”] of the human being [et propagation du peuplement animal de l’homme] (267, translation modified). being-pack therefore is the reality of the animal, the way of being of animals is the entering of assemblages by the contagion that is animal populating. at the same time, the pack is the reality of human becoming-animal, in contrast to being-human, insofar as the human being can effect [opère] a becoming-animal by entering the being-pack of a certain assemblage that is a contagion which propagates or passes over the animal populating of the human. the way of being-pack that is animal populating can, in other words, be passed on or over to human beings, enabling them to enter the assemblages that effect their becoming. only in this way can the human being become animal. this is not to say, however, that the human enters the reality of the animal. rather, as we shall see, this “reality” of every other animal remains absolutely discontinuous with human being. the human privilege of becoming-animal. despite their scorn for “ridiculous evolutionary classifications à la [konrad] lorenz, according to which there are inferior packs and superior societies” (264), deleuze and guattari not only reduce all other animals to the general category of “the animal” in opposition to “the human” (albeit while calling for further “internal” differentiation), they in fact place human culture over against “the true nature [la vraie nature]” of every other living being. this “true nature”—the totality of “[u]nnatural participations” of nonhuman becoming—“spans the kingdoms of nature” (266-7, translation modified). becoming, in other words, the entering of assemblages by contagion, is the reality of nonhuman being. “each multiplicity,” they write, “is symbiotic; its becoming ties together animals, plants, microorganisms, mad particles, a whole galaxy” (275). thus, whereas for deleuze and guattari “the human” retains the potential to enter becomings-animal (which is not an animal becoming), the nonhuman animal “exists” in a permanent becoming, “in” this “truly natural” mode of being-pack that “is” the cosmological one-all of life. it thus follows that the human is always already outside of the “true nature” of permanent becoming. consequently, as we shall see, humans are necessarily humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 38 condemned to the “stupidity [bêtise]” of language, and henceforth to relating to animals as animals, be that as oedipal, as state, or as demonic. we are now better placed to understand the valorization — the higher degree — of the demonic as category, insofar as the determination of the categorical animal predicate relates only to human entry, or its refusal. always already outside of “nature,” the human being nevertheless comes to approach true nature from which it is disposed through an anthropomorphic positing of the demonic. in other words, the metaphorical relation—the as such which at once remarks the displacement of the human from nature — between the “demonic” and the multiplicity-grade that “is” the reality of animals performs and, in so doing discloses, its discontinuity from human being. a disclosure, moreover, which is at once the possibility of entering a properly human becoming. this opposition between becoming and being, in a vertiginous oscillation between figure and figured, is represented on the one side by the “demonic” wolf and on the other by the molarized oedipal dog. whereas even within the anthropomorphising relation the wolf retains, in her distance from the molarized human, her essence as an “actual” animal, the essential reality of the dog has, by contrast, become merely virtual, and has become so as a result of “contamination” by a properly human iterability and thus temporality. moreover, it is this oscillation, this undecidability, which permits the making-virtual of the reality of an animal in relation to the human: dogs can be pack in that they are pack, but as (anthropomorphic molarized) dogs this being-pack is effaced. an effacement that ensures the impossibility of disclosing a potential human becoming by way of an encounter with an oedipal or state animal. a dog, however, this nonsubstitutable dog, has pack as his or her way of being, a reality which as such cannot be expropriated without her ceasing to be a dog. without, in other words, this dog ceasing to be nonhuman and thus becoming human instead—an impossible expropriation within deleuze and guattari’s human-animal division. for deleuze and guattari, therefore, the question of the animal is always and only a question of how “animals” are treated (traité) within a discourse that remains essentially human. given the contempt displayed by deleuze and guattari for “actual” so-called “pets,” however, it would nonetheless seem that the proximity to the human does somehow, albeit impossibly, impinge upon the way of being-animal. an anthropomorphism made literal, made flesh, so to speak, dogs and cats are thus somehow humanized in spite of their essential becoming. within the reading being attempted here, however, both the “tame” and the “wild” are necessarily pure anthropomorphisms, a hierarchical ranking richard iveson -deeply ecological deleuze and guattari: humanism’s becominganimal 39 only in relation to the potential disclosure of human becoming. nonetheless, this division of a putatively homogeneous “animal reality” solely for human purposes—as the means of a theoretical disclosure of human ends — has devastating results for those nonsubstitutable living beings who fall outside of the valorized category. such contempt for the “pet” and, to an even greater extent, for those unmarked categories of “instrumentalized” animals such as cows and sheep and of those undomesticable animals who inhabit the domestic such as foxes and rats, thus amounts to a simple prejudice for the victim of its own posited schema. insofar as it discloses — as a purely anthropocentric concern — becoming as such, with “the animal is pack” the entire economy of deleuze and guattari’s becomings thus finds its center. becomings-animal, they write, “are segments occupying a median region. on the near side, we encounter becomings-women, becomings-child … on the far side, we find becoming-elementary, -cellular, -molecular, and even becomingsimperceptible” (274). between the betweens in that it occupies the privileged place of entry, such a placing necessarily cannot be a horizontal measure of closeness or distance to the molarized human being. at the same time, however, insofar as the undifferentiated “existence” of nonhuman animals “is” permanent becoming, neither can it be positioned along a vertical hierarchy.2 there can, in short, be neither measure nor order because nonhuman being is becoming—a permanent becoming, moreover, which is at once the paradox of timeless stasis in that there can be no rupture, no revolutionary coming to be in its absolute dissolution. in other words, a nonhuman animal cannot come to be other because “the animal” is becoming. being human, therefore, is to reserve for itself alone the potential for becoming other, for which “animal reality” provides the entry and the vehicle. becoming-animal is thus for deleuze and guattari an essentially human affair. having nothing to do with animals, becoming is rather a uniquely human property: the becoming human of human being. furthermore, for deleuze and guattari “the animal”— and indeed, “the true nature” that is the totality of nonhuman being, of the one-all of life — is a priori excluded from this circular movement going from anthroprojection to point of entry that is access to the being of becoming from within the molarized everyday. here then, we discover a similar structural disavowal, albeit substituting “becoming” for “knowing,” as that which for heidegger gives to the human dasein alone both the “possibility of existence” and “a positive possibility of the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 40 most primordial kind of knowing” (being and time 62, 195). the “demonic” animal in this sense provides for deleuze and guattari their own point of departure. and yet, it still remains to ask, how is a permanent becoming possible? how do such becomings take place, yet without making sense? it is here that we find a certain hesitancy when, in their discussion of lévi-strauss, deleuze and guattari raise the question of what, or who, an animal comes to be in becoming: “lévi-strauss is always encountering these rapid acts by which a human becomes animal at the same time as the animal becomes … (becomes what? human, or something else?)” (thousand plateaus 262). given the reality of permanent nonhuman becoming, the question necessarily remains unanswerable. “becoming,” they write, “produces nothing other than itself” (262). however, in the pure potentiality that is permanent becoming, nothing can be produced (or, rather, reproduced) in that it necessarily consists of the suspension and withholding of all actualized possibilities, and is thus precisely that which an “i” — as actualized possibility — can never experience. and indeed, as will become clear, it is specifically this “i” that is refused by deleuze and guattari to all but human being, thus dissolving nonhuman being within the impossibility of possibility.3 in summary, as both entry and model for becoming, animals initially appear as valorized above the human animal, and yet this is a would-be valorization, which takes the very thing being valorized away from nonhuman animals and reserves it for the human alone. animals remain suspended in the senseless undifferentiation of an ahistorical stasis, a permanent fluid (non)assemblage of eternal (non)becoming. animals, in other words, lack the becoming-space of time and the becoming-time of space. in contrast, it is only the time-bound human — time-bound in being disposed outside the “true nature” that is perpetual becoming — who can thus enter into an assemblage. “the human” becomes, that is, only at the borderline between “beinghuman” and “true nature.” hence, the human comes into being at and as the limit of finite “human being” and infinite being as such, on the border between the possible and the impossibility of possibility. in becoming, write deleuze and guattari, “the demon[ic] functions as the borderline of an animal pack into which the human being passes or on which his or her becoming takes place, by contagion” (272, emphasis added). here, deleuze and guattari are once again differentiating between the contagion that is “animal populating” and the “propagation” of the “animal populating of the human being” (267). between, that is to say, the way of being of nonhuman animals and at once that on which human becoming takes place. here, then, there is an richard iveson -deeply ecological deleuze and guattari: humanism’s becominganimal 41 absolute discontinuity between man and nature, with the latter the eternal background upon which, at the border, human animals alone can affect their becomings-other by way of the demonic. deeply ecological deleuze and guattari. this distinction between humanity and true nature thus places deleuze and guattari’s project in proximity with the definitions of “wild nature” as posited by deep ecologists such as arne naess, george sessions, and bill devall.4 such deep ecological representations of nature have, however, increasingly come under attack for proposing what is seen by many to be a rather naive and nonreflexive essentialism. anthropologist and philosopher barbara noske, for example, argues that deep ecological ideas of nature — tend to be part of a wilderness ethic which totally overlooks sentient individuals in favor of species, collections of species and habitats of species. deep ecologists give narrow and essentialist definitions of nature. the only nature worth talking about is wild. as a result, domesticated nature, feral nature, or anything which does not constitute “the wild” — including humans themselves — tends to be disqualified as nature. it is not the real thing.… for deep ecology the dichotomy between humanity and nature is final (beyond boundaries xi, emphasis added). while there is an argument to be made that noske’s representation of deep ecology is itself rather narrow and essentializing, it is nonetheless important to note that she is concerned here not with individual viewpoints, but rather with what she considers — quite correctly — to be a general tendency of deep ecological representations of nature. indeed, it is this tendency which, insofar as it remains largely unexamined by the practitioners of deep ecology themselves, often results in a somewhat naive discourse insofar as it remains blind to its own presuppositions. in devall and sessions’s foundation text deep ecology: living as if nature mattered (1985), for instance, we find innumerable casual references to an apparent human/nature dichotomy that is at other times explicitly refused (nor is it insignificant that "nature" is capitalized throughout). the essence of deep ecology, for example, is at one point defined as “to keep asking more searching questions about human life, society, and nature as in the western philosophical tradition of socrates” (65). in short, while not all deep ecologists would suggest that the dichotomy between humanity and nature is final or absolute, the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 42 simultaneous reliance on this binary as an organizational tool at the very least suggests a certain blindness as to fundamental presuppositions revealed by the use of language itself. similarly, noske’s critique of deep ecology as tending toward a deeply romanticized view of “the wild” is difficult to refute. turning to devall and sessions’ deep ecology once again, we discover an admiring, large-print citation of an obscure text by henry david thoreau which reads: "life consists of wildness. the most alive is the wildest. not yet subdued in man, its presence refreshes him…. there is the strength, the marrow, of nature. in short, all good things are wild and free" (qtd. 109). the wilderness, write devall and sessions, is for deep ecologists a “sacred space” of “freeflowing nature” within which humans may seek “communion with wild animals” (111112). indeed, the earth itself must be viewed as a “resource that sustains our humanity” (111). remaining with our specific focus, however, one can already begin to understand why a reading of deleuze, with or without guattari, which aligns his project with that of deep ecology is not necessarily a misreading. most telling, perhaps, is the familiar deep ecologist argument, put forward at various times by baker brownell, paul shepard, and others, which claims that “humans need wild animals in their natural habitat to model themselves after and become fully human; domesticated pets and farm animals provide pathetically inadequate substitutes” (172). robert hurley, however, detects the connection even in deleuze’s early text spinoza: practical philosophy (1970), claiming that deleuze in fact offers a model thus far lacking in deep ecologist “modalities of interaction” (“introduction” ii). with a clear reference to deleuze’s later work with guattari, hurley describes this model as “the composition of affective relations between individuals, together with the ‘plane of consistency’ on which they interact, that is, their ‘environment’” (ii, emphasis added). while this notion of “individuals” (inter)acting on or upon their “environment” already suggests a very traditional dichotomy, hurley touches on the specific problematic being traced here when he affirms that this environment is “not just a reservoir of information … but also a field of forces whose actions await experiencing. in a human sense, it can be called the unconscious, or at least the ground on which the unconscious is constructed” (ii). here then, the unconscious is the properly human, and is constructed upon the (natural) environment. richard iveson -deeply ecological deleuze and guattari: humanism’s becominganimal 43 i will return to this notion of the deleuzian unconscious in a moment, but first let us further consider some points of crossover between deleuze and guattari's process philosophy and the prescriptive discourse of deep ecology. as we have seen, for deleuze and guattari as for hurley “true nature” is relegated to a timeless background of permanent becoming from which only humans are excluded and that, in being entered in those exceptional encounters deleuze and guattari call becomings, can only ever be written upon. compare this with arne naess's claim that the higher understanding characterizing the deep ecological perspective is a direct consequence of encounters between “nature” and individual human beings. during these exceptional encounters, the habitual sense of one’s being an individual, windowless monad breaks down, giving way to an experience of the unlimited that naess describes as “oceanic,” and which deleuze and guattari call absolute deterritorialization. by way of such encounters, the limitations of human being are overcome, the experience of the oceanic allowing the human, in naess's well-known phrase, to “think like a mountain.” here, then, could we not also say that the deterritorialized oceanic opens the possibility of “becomings-mountain”?5 in the opposite direction, one can similarly detect something of deep ecology’s “macho ethic” in the structure of deleuze and guattari’s becomings, insofar as nonhuman animals provide the actively human entry into becoming, effecting itself upon the receptacle that is true nature in what is at once a masculine, phallicized penetration and (be)coming over of the exoticized timeless wild.6 man never exists-in-relation with other animals, but rather and necessarily enters a presumably feminine nature from outside. here, we find the same essentialist romantic topos that organizes both aldo leopold’s liberalist “land-ethic” (a touchstone discourse for deep ecology) and the deep ecological defense of hunting.7 returning now to robert hurley’s reading of the deleuzian unconscious, we find that hurley merely reaffirms without question the decentering of consciousness by the unconscious as a uniquely human property. indeed, it is exactly this traditional exceptionalism which “grounds” deleuze’s relegation of infinitely diverse nonhuman worlds to that of a homogeneous timeless background.8 it is thus far from incidental that, in his reading of the place of bêtise (“stupidity”) in deleuze’s difference and repetition, philosopher jacques derrida discloses the deleuzian unconscious as being “inconsistent.”9 for deleuze, as derrida shows, bêtise is “a problem of thinking” that is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 44 proper to man alone, indissociable from its relation to individuation as such which operates — as the groundless ground (ungrund) — beneath all forms (“transcendental ‘stupidity’” 49). animals, by contrast, “are in a sense forewarned [en quelque sorte prémunis] against this ground, protected by their explicit forms” (deleuze difference and repetition 190, qtd. in derrida “transcendental ‘stupidity’” 51). it is only the human, therefore, who “remains nevertheless as an undetermined freedom in relation with this groundless ground, and that’s where [a] properly human stability comes from” (“transcendental ‘stupidity’” 56). proceeding to put this distinction into question from both sides, derrida argues, first, for the necessity of a nonhuman relation to this ground that is “as abyssal as with man,” and second, as to the impossibility of an absolute distinction between explicit(animal) and implicit(human) forms. in so doing, he ultimately discloses the very traditional gesture underlying the deleuzian human-animal distinction: that of the properly human capacity to constitute itself as an “i,” and thus of the identity of bêtise and “the thing of the i, of the ego” (58). thus, writes deleuze, stupidity is neither the ground nor the individual, but rather this relation in which individuation brings the ground to the surface without being able to give it form (this ground rises by means of the i, penetrating deeply into the possibility of thought and constituting the unrecognized in every recognition) (difference and repetition 190, qtd. in derrida “transcendental ‘stupidity’” 57) nonhuman animals, however, cannot be excluded from this “transcendental stupidity” that constitutes “the unrecognized in every recognition,” in that such a bêtise is precisely that of the trace: the double movement of protention and retention that marks technicity at and as the origin of all living being and haunts every idealization through which a being makes sense.10 the fault. central here is the structure of iterability, which can be equally described as the indissociability of the taking place and the having taken place that is this “relation in which individuation brings the ground to the surface without being able to give it form” (deleuze, difference and repetition 190), and as the “phenomenological fold … that separates being from appearing. the appearing of being, as such, as phenomenality of its phenomenon, is and is not the being that appears” (derrida, “spectres of marx” 1812). refused to nonhuman animals by deleuze in 1968, the very same refusal of the iterability of the trace remains to organize deleuze and guattari’s human-animal richard iveson -deeply ecological deleuze and guattari: humanism’s becominganimal 45 distinction in a thousand plateaus.11 by way of the wild-tame dichotomy, deleuze and guattari reserve for humanity alone the possibility of encountering the timeless immediacy of “true nature” at and as the limit of language. moreover, they posit an undying and undifferentiated preoriginary domain of animality — an essential dissolution of life which renders as senseless the singular deaths of nonhuman animals. and finally, deleuze and guattari exclude from the “truth” of “nature” all of the nonhuman beings improperly contaminated by the anthro-tropo-logical machine of human recognition. insofar as for deleuze and guattari nonhuman animals exist in permanent becoming, we can now understand why they must leave open the question of who or what a nonhuman animal becomes in becoming. insofar as an animal cannot become human, which is the exception from, and the lack of, the eternal becoming that is the reality of the animal, she or he can therefore never become anything or anyone at all. indeed, for deleuze and guattari an animal — this dog or that wolf — is never an “i,” never a “who” or even a “what,” never a “he” or a “she” or an “it.” furthermore, “the human” may enter a (properly human) becoming only because he or she is excluded from the reality of the animal, an exceptionalism which presupposes the constitution of the human in originary lack. it is this “lack” that, insofar as it constitutes the plane of transcendence, reserves the possibility of human becomings-animal or, better, of becoming-other than human being (cellular, molecular, etc.). in short, the human, and the human alone, is constituted in and as the lack that is bêtise, in and as the unrecognizable, the méconaissance, which exceeds all recognition. in being refused entry into language and thus finitude, nonhuman ways of being thus lack everything predicated upon this properly human lack: not only technics, language, time, and historicity, but also society, politics, ethics, law, and historiology.12 this notion of an originary human lack is, of course, very familiar, belonging as it does to what derrida calls “the tried and true biblical and promethean tradition” (the animal 122). that we should discover this tradition as supporting the valorization of the wild in writers who otherwise work with such originality and creativity to interrupt that very tradition is perhaps not that surprising, however. as derrida writes, one finds “the same dominant” throughout western philosophical discourse, “the same recurrence of a schema that is in truth invariable” (45). a schema, derrida continues, in which — humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 46 what is proper to man, his subjugating superiority over the animal, his very becoming-subject, his historicity, his emergence out of nature, his sociality, his access to knowledge and technics, all that, everything (in a nonfinite number of predicates) that is proper to man would derive from this originary fault, indeed, from this default in propriety — and from the imperative necessity that finds in it its development and resilience (45). positing an entry into becoming which effects itself upon the timelessness of the wild, whether that “wild” is called “prelapsarian innocence” or “true nature,” thus reproduces this dominant schema. a schema which dissolves the vast diversity of nonhuman animals in a becoming-nature which necessarily lacks both responsibility and respond-ability. an absolute senselessness, in other words, from which a line of flight is ontologically impossible. despite the positing of a potential for nonhuman animals to be gripped by a becoming “just as powerful as that of the human being with the animal,” the subjugating superiority of man’s emergence from a feminized nature and hence humanist exceptionalism is necessarily left unchallenged. put simply, the apparent valorization of the (wild) animal remains essentially within the neighborhood of “the human” with all that that implies for a consideration of ethics. naturalizing the colonialism of “true nature.” we can now understand how the drawing of a simple division between the wild and the tame reiterates contemporary structures of oppression, reinscribing the exceptional humanist privilege and thus remaining enchanted within a narcissistic privileging of the reflected human self. we can see too that the division of nonhuman animals into either the “wild” or the “tame” is, above all, a question of familiarity, that is, of the dogmatism that ensures a restricted ethics despite the apparent affirmation of “other” others. barbara noske expresses this clearly when she describes the prioritizing of wild animals over their domestic kin as “the other racism” (xii). as a consequence of human “contamination,” as we have seen, the proper ways of being-dog, for example, have been rendered merely virtual according to deleuze and guattari and disqualified as “unnatural” by deep ecologists. dogs, therefore, are not, or are no longer, “the real thing.” in this, i will argue in conclusion, deleuze and guattari inevitably reiterate a logic of colonialism which serves to constitute subjugated beings as deserving of oppression — an oppressive logic that tends to contaminate any number of animals, both human and nonhuman. this de-realizing contamination is, in short, a displacement of nonhuman animals by and within human language which renders their nonsubstitutable beings as mere simulacra. richard iveson -deeply ecological deleuze and guattari: humanism’s becominganimal 47 this reproduction of certain animals as “not real,” that is, as “pale imitations” of their idealized wild counterparts and/or forebears, is at once christianized discourse and imperialist logic. put simply, the platonic economy of mimēsis with its devalorization of the simulacrum produces a symbolic economy and specious logic of oppression that ensures that colonized beings must, as a result of their oppression, become somehow dull and stupid and thus — albeit ex post facto — materially and economically deserving of being exploited and oppressed.13 hence, as david nibert observes, the capitalist exploiter of the coloured workers … consigns them to employments and treatments that [are] humanly degrading. in order to justify this treatment the exploiters must argue that the workers are innately degraded and degenerate, consequently they naturally merit their condition.… this, then, is the beginning of modern race relations. it was not an abstract, immemorial feeling of mutual antipathy between groups, but rather a practical exploitative relationship with its socio-attitudinal facilitation (17). we can thus more clearly understand noske’s contention that the devalorization of domestic and domesticated animals constitutes the “other racism.” just as there is nothing “natural” about the capitalist exploitation of colored workers, in the same way the antipathy towards instrumentalized, and thus commodified, nonhuman animals is nothing natural. rather, it comes to be “natural-ized” as a result of practical exploitative relationships along with the co-constitutive reproduction of socio-attitudinal facilitation. here, too, we further disclose the “macho ethic” underlying the discourses of deleuze and guattari and of deep ecology. the idealizing of the “naturally” wild, unconstrained by time and uncontaminated by domestication, accords, as karen davis writes, “with the ‘masculine’ spirit of adventure and conquest,” which in the west looks down on those beings constituted as “unnatural, tame, and confined.” in this, davis continues, the “analogy between women and nonhuman animals overlooks perhaps a more specifically crucial comparison between women and farm animals” (193). one thinks humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 48 most obviously here of reproductive rights, or the curtailing thereof by means of forced conception, be it by physical force — rape in whatever form or species—or by way of the prohibition of contraception and/or abortion. indeed, it is impossible to understand the economy of speciesism that organizes the wild-tame dichotomy without also attending to its coextensivity with other vectors of power. once again, karen davis is helpful here. “not only men,” she writes, “but women and animal protectionists exhibit a culturally conditioned indifference toward, and prejudice against, creatures whose lives appear too slavishly, too boringly, too stupidly female, too ‘cowlike’” (196-7). it is this entanglement of difference and indifference that gives us one way of understanding that which derrida has famously termed “carnophallogocentrism.”14 within its network of inculcation, the gendering of singular nonhuman animals is thus of the greatest importance. to summarize, despite the apparent valorization of (wild) animals, deleuze and guattari’s notion of becoming nevertheless remains essentially enclosed within the narcissistic mirror of “the human.” such is the high-walled enclave safeguarded by immigration police and so-called pest-controllers tasked with defending the indivisibility of the border, and of the impossibility and impassability of the ethical space beyond. in this sense, “immigration police” and “pest-controllers,” in seeking to conserve an imaginary space of order by displacing others, can thus be considered metaphors of each other, mutually rearticulating an inviolable property and propriety constructed upon the refusal of hospitality. here then, the “proper” of deleuze and guattari’s human is shown to depend upon a withholding of the offer of hospitality to all those who share our space and take our time but who are not “us.” instead of the placing of restrictions organized around the wild-tame dichotomy, however, a general ethics (in itself a tautology) must by definition concern the giving of hospitality to all those other living beings who already find themselves excluded from it. without this, the contemporary structures that oppress human as well as nonhuman animals will ultimately remain both intact and in force. notes 1. for a great many of us, of course, such a charge would be wholly positive. it should be noted too that, according to badiou’s theory of the subject, nonhuman animals are necessarily condemned to an eternal oppression for which redress is neither possible nor richard iveson -deeply ecological deleuze and guattari: humanism’s becominganimal 49 sought. this follows from badiou’s claim that oppression is never to be fought against, but rather is always and only a consequence of the appearing of a human subject of truth. see logics of worlds: being and event 2, 60ff. 2. see a thousand plateaus: “the error we must guard against is to believe that there is a kind of logical order to this string, these crossings or transformations. it is already going too far to postulate an order descending from the animal to the vegetable, then to molecules, to particles”(275). 3. in an often overlooked but nonetheless extremely important essay entitled “the animals: territory and metamorphoses,” jean baudrillard suggests that deleuze and guattari’s use of “the animal” as a model of the absolute deterritorialization of desire is paradoxical, arguing instead that nonhuman animals are in fact territorial beings par excellence(“the animals” 137). in this paper, which is practically a primer for the constitution of animal studies, baudrillard offers an alternative notion of alliance to that proposed by deleuze and guattari, one which depends first of all upon the destruction of the “diabolic” symbolic division of species that necessarily constitutes humanism with “[a] logic parallel to racism” (133), and recognizing instead that every territory is a space of “insurmountable reciprocity” (141 n3). for a more scathing — although somewhat unfocused — critique of deleuze and guattari’s use of “the animal,” see also xavier vitamvor's “unbecoming animal studies” in the minnesota review. no. 73/74 (2010), 183-187 (thanks to the anonymous reviewers at humanimalia for drawing my attention to this article). 4. for a related critique, see bruno latour, politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy. 26-29. 5. on this, see the interview with arne naess, reproduced in devall and sessions, deep ecology, 74-76. 6. as regards the “macho ethic” saturating this plateau, with obvious spleen donna haraway in when species meet wonders whether it would be possible to “find in philosophy a clearer display of misogyny … it took some nerve for d&g to write about becoming-woman just a few pages later!” (30). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 50 7. given the entangled vectors of power, it is not by chance that such a defense, in at least one of its major variants (what marti kheel calls the “holy hunter” defense), depends upon the claim that the nonhuman animal chooses to end her life for the benefit of the (generally male) human hunter. a claim which “has no more validity than the idea that a woman who is raped ‘asked for it’ or ‘willingly’ gave herself to the rapist” (kheel “license to kill” 104). on the philosophical mysticism of “holy hunters,” see the works of deep ecologists holmes rolston, paul shepard and, in particular, gary snyder. for leopold's “land ethic,” see a sand county almanac: with essays on conservation from round river. oxford: oxford university press, 1966, 237-64. 8. jean baudrillard, in his remarkable essay “the animals” first published in 1981 (see note 3, above), already makes the point that, “if formerly the privilege of man was founded on the monopoly of consciousness, today it is founded on the monopoly of the unconscious” (138). nonetheless, he continues, one can at least hope that this refusal of the unconscious, repression, and the symbolic to all other animals will, sooner or later, cause us to “put in question once again the validity of these concepts, just as they govern and distinguish us today” (138). 9. in addition to the english language version entitled “the transcendental ‘stupidity’ (‘bêtise’) of man and the becoming-animal according to deleuze” (2002) cited here, see the slightly different original version that makes up part of the fifth and sixth seminars collected in the first volume of the beast and the sovereign. as derrida himself demonstrates throughout, the translation of bêtise by stupidity is far from satisfactory (as indeed is the point made, in different ways, by both derrida and deleuze), and hence in the following it will for the large part be left untranslated. 10. on this, see jacques derrida’s now canonical essay “différance” in margins of philosophy. trans. alan bass. chicago: university of chicago press, 1984. 1-28. 11. on the taking place having always already taken place as that which defines both iterability and “living being,” see my “animals in looking-glass world: überhumanism and posthumanism in heidegger and nietzsche.” humanimalia i:2 (spring 2010), 46-85. 12. on jacques lacan and the notion of a nonhuman “lack of lack,” see derrida “and say the animal responded?” in the animal that therefore i am, 119-140. richard iveson -deeply ecological deleuze and guattari: humanism’s becominganimal 51 13. it has been convincingly argued that the domestication of nonhuman animals results in a decrease of brain size which both inhibits new characteristics and favors pathological conditions. this is not, however, a justification for exploitation, not a cause, but only its effect. a shameful effect, moreover, which in fact argues against the intensive imposition of non-mutual domestication. 14. see “‘eating well,’ or the calculation of the subject.” works cited badiou, alain. logics of worlds: being and event, 2. trans. alberto toscano. london & new york: continuum, 2009. baker, steve. the postmodern animal. london: reaktion books, 2000. baudrillard, jean. “the animals: territory and metamorphosis.” simulacra and simulation. trans. sheila faria glaser. ann arbor: u michigan p, 1994. 129-43. davis, karen. “thinking like a chicken: farm animals and the feminine connection.” carol j. adams & josephine donovan (eds). animals and women: feminist theoretical explorations. durham & london: duke up, 1995. 192-212. deleuze, gilles. difference and repetition. trans. paul patton. london & new york: continuum, 2004. _____. spinoza: practical philosophy. trans. robert hurley. san francisco: city lights books, 1988. deleuze, gilles, and félix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. trans. brian massumi. london & new york: continuum, 2004. derrida, jacques. “différance.” margins of philosophy. trans. alan bass. chicago: u chicago p, 1984. 1-28. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 52 _____.“‘eating well,’ or the calculation of the subject.” trans. peter connor & avital ronell. points… interviews 1974-1994. stanford: stanford up, 1995. 255-287. _____. spectres of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. trans. peggy kamuf. new york: routledge, 2006. _____. the animal that therefore i am. trans. david wills. new york: fordham up, 2008. _____. “the transcendental ‘stupidity’ (‘bêtise’) of man and the becoming-animal according to deleuze.” ed. erin ferris. derrida, deleuze, psychoanalysis. ed. gabriele schwab. new york: columbia u p, 2007. 35-60. _____. the beast and the sovereign, volume one. trans. geoffrey bennington. chicago & london: u chicago p, 2009. devall, bill, and george sessions. deep ecology: living as if nature mattered. layton, utah: gibbs smith, 1985. haraway, donna j. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. heidegger, martin. being and time. trans. john macquarrie & edward robinson. malden, ma & oxford: blackwell publishing, 1962. hurley, robert. “introduction.” gilles deleuze. spinoza: practical philosophy. trans. robert hurley. san francisco: city lights books, 1988. iveson, richard. “animals in looking-glass world: überhumanism and posthumanism in heidegger and nietzsche.” humanimalia 1:2 (spring 2010). 46-85. kheel, marti. “license to kill: an ecofeminist critique of hunters’ discourse.” carol j. adams & josephine donovan (eds). animals and women: feminist theoretical explorations. durham & london: duke ups, 1995. 85-125. latour, bruno. politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy. trans. catherine porter. cambridge, ma & london: harvard up, 2004, 26-29. richard iveson -deeply ecological deleuze and guattari: humanism’s becominganimal 53 leopold, aldo. a sand county almanac: with essays on conservation from round river. oxford: oxford up, 1966. lippit, akira mizuta. electric animal: toward a rhetoric of wildlife. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2000. mchugh, susan. animal stories: narrating across species lines. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2011. nibert, david. animal rights human rights: entanglements of oppression and liberation. lanham, maryland: rowman and littlefield, 2002. noske, barbara. beyond boundaries: humans and animals. montreal, new york and london: black rose books, 1997. parikka, jussi. insect media: an archaeology of animals and technology. u minnesota p: minneapolis and london: 2010. urpeth, james. “animal becomings.” animal philosophy: essential readings in continental thought. ed. matthew calarco and peter atterton. london: continuum, 2004. 101-110 vitamvor, xavier. “unbecoming animal studies.” the minnesota review 73/74 (2010): 183-187. microsoft word miller-pig pdf dummy h u m a n i m a l i a 4:1 alyce miller hogritude brett mizelle. pig. london: reaktion books – animal, 2011. 224 pages, $19.95 pb. i open with a confession to my addiction to the reaktion animal books, a wonderfully quirky series focusing in each gorgeously illustrated volume on a particular non-human animal: the dog, the horse, the snail, the frog, the bear, and so on. part natural history and part cultural studies, and readily accessible to any curious reader, these small, elegant books are single-authored by a panoply of writers representing numerous fields of interest, all of whom bring a unique passion to bear on the subject. brett mizelle’s pig is no exception. the only surprise here is that it took so long for the series to get around to “pig,” an animal that makes my own top ten list, and which mizelle, a professor of history and american studies, describes as being “good to think with” (26) and “structurally and symbolically significant in the making of human society and culture across the globe” (7). throughout the fast-paced eight chapters that compose this engaging book he does just that, opening with the challenges even of trying to define a pig, given the variety within the species around the globe, tracing the role of pigs as “associate,” food, and symbol, and ending with a call for appreciation of “hogritude: the practical condition and mythical essence of just being a pig” (181). put another way, what does thinking about pigs tell us about ourselves? pig is a beautiful book, rich in surprising facts and details that illuminate the contradictions of a shared history “not always marked by alienation” (26). according to mizelle, the human-pig connection is historically bound, starting with “domestication” about 9,000 years ago, in both eastern turkey and china, though dna studies suggest “multiple local domestication of pigs” (18). the arrival of pigs in the new world, important for both food and trade, eventually led to both the more modern development of the pork industry (chicago and cincinnati were the main sites) as well as the conception of the pig as a nuisance animal, dirty, destructive, and vilified. accruing from numerous details of historical and cultural interactions with pigs is a prismatic portrait of an animal who still tends to elicit two main responses: “utilitarian-they are tasty to eat ― and ambivalent, if not negative” (116). the influence of religious views of “the pig” are as complex as they are deep. from muslim and jewish prohibitions to christian ambivalence, the pig became a vector of both otherness (the alyce miller — hogritude 165 pig as dirty and disgusting) and a way of identifying otherness (christians eat pork; jews don’t). mizelle even entertains the possibility that the evolutions of religious animosities toward the pig stems, in part, from the fact that pigs eat the same food humans do, and therefore provided stiff competition for resources. mizelle offers up evidence of the pig as a kind of mirror held up to our very human-ness, citing similarities humans share with pigs (anatomically and physiologically, which ironically also make them prize subjects in medical experimentation), and the resulting shame felt over our kinship or identification (120). in the chapter “good pigs and bad pigs” mizelle explores how human associations with pigs carry tremendous symbolic weight: “pigs provided a useful way for an emergent middle class to distinguish themselves from the masses .... pigs increasingly became objects of hatred and abuse as they were herded into cities and appeared in slums” (117). class differences are also illustrated in particular choices of pig meat: salt pork for the poor, bacon and ham for the elite. mizelle devotes an entire chapter, “meat,” to the production and modern changes in the breeding, farming, and consumption of pigs. “pork is the most widely eaten meat in the world,” he writes (65). “the average american still eats 51 pounds of pork per year, the majority of it processed as bacon, lunch meats, hot dogs, sausage and ham” (65). within the history, mizelle carves out some room for exploring the moral and ethical critiques of current confined animal feeding operations and factory farming. noting the sharp decrease of family farmers and the globalization of the pork market, he cites problems with genetic modifications like pse pork, and the stress levels of animals living monotonous, confined lives. “it turns out that if workers physically touch pigs, let them out of their crates for walks, and give them things to play with, their stress levels go down.... but this degree of interaction is no longer possible in large-scale hog farming” (83). mizelle ends the chapter lamenting the fact that most of us will not “encounter living pigs in the future, much less has a direct relationship with these remarkable animals” (93). and what make pigs so remarkable? for one, they are highly intelligent, social, and “enthusiastic,” with an exceptional sense of smell. in “human-pig partnerships,” truffle-hunting, mine-detecting, and pigs in entertainment are cited as examples of cross-species interactions. in addition, pigs have influenced our language (the slang “pig” for “police,” “hog heaven” for paradise, pigs as metaphors for happiness, as well as gluttony, etc.). one detail, which caught my eye, was an alleged mistranslation of the middle english word “pygg” that mizelle claims refers to a special clay used for making jars that yielded the linguistic shift to “piggy bank.” while this is apparently humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 166 true, the oed also demonstrates that some early uses of the word “pygg” refer to the animal as well. our literature has both revered and condemned the pig; children’s literature has brought us the beloved, anthropomorphized protagonist wilbur from charlotte’s web and the poignant sidekick piglet from winnie-the-pooh. cute, humanlike pigs are staples of children’s cartoons. mizelle skims quickly over the keeping of pigs as companion animals, a surprising oversight in an otherwise thorough account of the human-pig connection. in addition, his brief, awkward tipping of the hat to gender (men as “chauvinist pigs” and the conflation of women’s bodies with those of “animals”) struck this reader as ambiguous and under-examined. the strength of mizelle’s otherwise charming and provocative book lies not only in the care with which he condenses a great deal of material into a compact, and fast-paced read, but the implicit understanding that if we are to write and talk about non-human animals in the 21st century, we cannot do so without examining our own conflicted relationships with them. the story that mizelle tells about the pig turns into many stories and, not unlike our relationships to other animals we consume, these multiple narratives put us face to face with our own moral schizophrenia regarding animals we both anthropomorphize and consume. microsoft word markowitz herzog pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 2:2 lee j. markowitz is speciesism inevitable? hal herzog, some we love, some we hate, some we eat: why it’s so hard to think straight about animals. ny: harper. 336 pp. $25.99 hb. “i only care about humans, apes, and dogs.” after hearing a relative make the above remark, i pondered several questions. first: why would someone care about only humans, nonhuman apes, and dogs? then: how could his perspective be so common as to be unsurprising to most people? do most people’s thinking about, and behaviors toward, different animal species reflect logically defensible reasoning or intuitions that are never closely scrutinized? which should they reflect? in some we love…, hal herzog, a distinguished scholar of human-animal relations, discusses research and theory on human thinking about, and attitudes towards, animals. three (often implicit) themes recur: (a) humans’ thinking about nonhuman animals (hereafter “animals”) tends to be both speciesist and illogical;1 (b) for the most part, there is no moral problem with such speciesist thinking and behaving; and (c) such thinking and behaving are inevitable. on (a), herzog and i agree. ultimately, however, i believe that although the herzog introduces important ideas to readers, his conclusions regarding points b) and c) provide an unjustifiably narrow view of human behavioral capacities and are likely to reinforce speciesism. there are two major strengths of the book. first, herzog introduces readers to many illogical, speciesist aspects of humans’ relations with animals and to their harmful consequences. second, herzog discusses a wide range of biological, psychological, and social factors (henceforth “biopsychosocial”) behind our thoughts about and behavior towards animals. for example, as herzog explains, there are approximately 65,000 species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish, but humans care about only a few of them. further, people do not select these favored few based on logical criteria. instead, one of the most powerful factors is the “cuteness” of the animal. herzog relies on evolutionary psychology to explain this common finding: animals that look like human infants (e.g., large faces, foreheads, and eyes) are given more favorable treatment than animals that appear less attractive to humans (the “cute response”). such a preference was necessary for our species’ survival, but it unfortunately plays a role in the exploitation of animals that we do not find cute. herzog notes also the widespread public opposition to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 122 cockfighting, but not to meat eating, noting that “thousands of times” (150) more chickens have died due to humans’ food preferences than to cockfighting, and that “it is hard to deny that there is less suffering caused by cockfighting than by our apparently irresistible demand for chicken flesh” (170). herzog takes up the ethics and biopsychosocial factors regarding several other practices, including pet-keeping, animal research, and meat consumption. i applaud him for introducing these issues to readers and covering them both thoroughly and engagingly. unfortunately, throughout the book, herzog reinforces the notions that there is no problem with illogical, speciesist thinking, and that it is impossible to overcome speciesist thinking, anyway. there are speciesist statements throughout the book, including, for example, “i would sacrifice a lot of mice to find a cure for cancer” (11) and his belief that such research is “perfectly reasonable” (219). however, his most powerful and disappointing statement comes on the last page. after discussing the logical contradictions in humans’ thinking about animals, herzog concludes, “i have come to believe that these sorts of contradictions are not anomalies or hypocrisies. rather, they are inevitable. and evidence of our humanity” (279, emphasis added). herzog’s view that non-speciesism is doomed to fail is also reflected in his coverage of vegetarianism (a non-speciesist diet). for example, the three sections on vegetarianism are titled: “the case of meat-eating vegetarians,” “meat avoidance and eating disorders: the dark side of vegetarianism,” and “why do most vegetarians return to eating meat?” in passing, the reader will find a positive statement about vegetarianism (e.g., health benefits), but the bulk of the discussion comprises unbalanced negativity. finally, herzog is surprisingly hostile towards those fighting to end speciesism. for example, he refers to joan dunayer’s nonspeciesist ideology as “foolish” (254) and believes she is merely “caught in the grip of a theory.” it is not clear why herzog takes such a partisan, speciesist approach. insofar as the goal of the book was to introduce the study of human-animal relations to readers, taking such a partisan approach seems unnecessary. in fact, there is the risk that providing such unbalanced coverage will interfere with the reader’s ability to form his or her own views. i believe herzog’s coverage of speciesist thinking is not only unbalanced but also misleading. specifically, i challenge herzog’s claim that illogical, speciesist thinking is “inevitable” (279). my challenge relies on the combination of three lines of theory and research. first, there is evidence that as result of evolution, humans feel empathy towards victims being harmed and/or treated unfairly (e.g., de waal, altruism”; haidt & joseph, “intuitive ethics”). second, it is clear that this empathy can be directed towards animals (e.g., furnham, “personality”; hills, “motivational bases”). third, lee j. markowitz — is speciesism inevitable? 123 leading theorists argue that evolution has armed us with tremendous (although not infinite) flexibility in our thinking, feeling, and behaving (buss, “human nature and culture”; de waal, our inner ape). by combining these three points, i believe the human capacity for empathy can be directed towards animals and that this empathy can motivate human beings to re-examine their beliefs and practices. indeed, it is hard to reconcile the existence of approximately two million american vegans (e.g., 2009 harris interactive poll) with herzog’s claim that illogical, speciesist thinking is inevitable. the flexibility that evolution has equipped us with has likely enabled a wide range of beliefs about and practices involving animals — ranging from severe exploitation to compassion. it would seem more realistic to argue that a nonspeciesist,2 vegan life philosophy is within the reach (but perhaps on the outer edge) of human evolutionary capacity, although severe animal exploitation is also within our evolutionary capacity. with these two opposing capacities and with the extent of unnecessary animal exploitation and suffering also in mind, i believe it is the responsibility of social scientists to research and report the factors necessary for bringing out the compassionate, empathic elements of human nature. specifically, they ought to determine what environmental circumstances are necessary to activate and maintain humans’ evolved capacity for empathy towards animals. an additional (and related) objective ought to be determining how to reduce speciesism by utilizing what they have learned about other forms of prejudice, attitudes, and persuasion. unfortunately, herzog’s view on the inevitability of illogical, speciesist thinking may have precluded him from raising such issues. as a consequence, readers are unlikely to realize the critical role social scientists can play in reducing humans’ speciesist thinking. in short, i praise herzog for raising many important issues and for covering relevant social science engagingly. however, i believe the conclusions he draws are more likely to reinforce than to challenge speciesist thinking and exploitative behavior. unfortunately, readers are likely to view humans’ thinking as hopelessly speciesist rather than to realize the power they have to reduce if not overcome their speciesism. notes 1. despite the subtitle of the book, herzog neither states what “thinking straight” about animals means nor describes what behaviors it would entail. in the review, i offer my understanding of his usage of the term. i use the term “speciesist” to describe the view humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 124 that an individual’s worthiness of moral consideration depends on the species to which he or she belongs (singer, animal liberation). 2. whether it is more accurate to describe vegans as “low in speciesism” rather than “nonspeciesist” is unclear. however, herzog appears to conceptualize speciesist thinking merely dichotomously (either present or not present — and in all cases, it is present). i believe there is much more meaningful variation in such thinking, and social scientists can play a critical role in reducing speciesist thinking, thus sparing many animals from exploitation works cited buss, d. “human nature and culture: an evolutionary psychological perspective.” journal of personality, 69:6 (2001): 955-978. de waal, f. our inner ape. new york: berkley, 2005. de waal, f. b. m. “putting the altruism back into altruism: the evolution of empathy.” annual review of psychology, 59 (2008): 279-300. dunayer, j. speciesism. derwood, md: ryce, 2004. furnham, a., mcmanus, c., & scott, d. “personality, empathy and attitudes to animal welfare.” anthrozoos 16 (2003): 135-146. haidt & joseph (2004) “intuitive ethics: how innately prepared intuitions generate culturally variable virtues.” daedalus 133 (fall, 2004): 55-66. hills, a. (1993). “the motivational bases of attitudes toward animals.” society & animals: journal of human-animal studies 1:2 (1993): 111-128. singer, p. animal liberation: a new ethics for our treatment of animals. new york: random house, 1975. sinno – review of olszok, the libyan novel beyond allegory: human–animal encounters and mutual vulnerability in the libyan novel nadine a. sinno review of: charis olszok, the libyan novel: humans, animals and the poetics of vulnerability. edinburgh studies in modern arabic literature. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2020. xi + 308 pp. £24.99 (pb); £75.00 (hb) nadine a. sinno is associate professor of arabic in the department of modern and classical languages and literatures at virginia tech,blacksburg, va, usa. email: nadine7@vt.edu book review mailto:nadine7@vt.edu in the libyan novel: humans, animals and the poetics of vulnerability, charis olszok provides an innovative exploration of the libyan novel, situating her analysis within an integrative theoretical framework that successfully leverages critical concepts from animal studies, ecocriticism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism, all the while elucidating libya’s sociopolitical realities and the ways they have shaped the poetics of modern libyan fiction. employing the concept of “creaturely vulnerability”, which emphasizes the shared precariousness of all species, she investigates human-animal encounters and persuasively argues that in the libyan novel, animals often feature “both as symbols of paradigmatic human political exclusion, and as embodiments of an existence beyond political demarcations” (18). as such, her nuanced analysis eschews any reductionist readings of the animal characters in the libyan novel as sole ideological ciphers, mere national allegories, or purely literal beings. olszok’s study encompasses an ambitious corpus of novels by renowned and lesser-known authors, male and female, writing from inside libya and the diaspora in arabic, french, and english, spanning from the 1960s generation until 2011. the authors include but are not limited to al-ṣādiq al-nayhūm, aḥmad ibrāhīm al-faqīh, ibrāhīm al-kūnī, ʿabdallāh al-ghazāl, manṣūr būshnāf, muḥammad al-aṣfar, razzan naʿim al-maghrabi, aḥmad yūsuf ʿaqīla, aḥmad al-faytūrī, najwā bin shatwān, kamal ben hamida and hisham matar. throughout her study, olszok emphasizes the libyan novel’s deep rootedness in the qurʾan, popular folklore, and sufi traditions — particularly as they reiterate the interconnection and mutual vulnerability of all human and nonhuman makhlūqāt [creatures]. by doing so, she elucidates the ways in which the novels engage in intertextual dialogue with other relevant texts and traditions, ensuring that her interpretation remains properly contextualized. employing a postcolonial, ecocritical lens, the first chapter in part i, “survival”, highlights the “hybrid aesthetics” in al-nayhum’s min makka ila huna (1970, from mecca to here), al-faqīh’s fiʾran bila juhur (2000; homeless rats, 2011) and al-kūnī’s nazif al-hajar (1989; the bleeding of the stone, 2002), focusing on the authors’ juxtapositions copyright © 2022 nadine a. sinno this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 275–280. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.10900 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10900 sinno, review of olszok | 277 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) of realist narratives with fables and their depictions of individual and communal crises. in all three novels, olszok demonstrates, animal characters allegorize the precarious lives of marginalized populations and societal and ecological violence, while also asserting their own sentience, vulnerability and, ultimately, equal right to pursue rizq [sustenance] and survival. examining a handful of other novels by the same authors, chapter 2 shifts to a more political emphasis. in this chapter, olszok diligently excavates the primordial imagery and discourses that permeate her selected novels, showing how they construct the past as “confusion and transgression, rooted in a trajectory of exile and loss”, thereby illustrating the predicament of the “outcast intellectual” (66). importantly, olszok draws nuanced connections between the select libyan novels and other non-western and western texts including, ibn al-muqaffaʿ ’s kalīla wa-dimna, the thousand and one nights, pre-islamic poetry, tayeb salih’s seasons of migration to the north, george orwell’s animal farm and franz kafka’s “a report for an academy”, in addition to biblical and qurʾanic narratives. titled “signs and cityscapes”, part ii focuses on the significance of animals and statues in the libyan novel, demonstrating how they often signify historical (or future) trauma and violence, sufi discourses, buried political messages, melancholic landscapes and ominous environmental degradation within and beyond libya. in chapter 3, olszok provides exquisite close readings of al-kūnī’s altibr (1989; gold dust, 2008) and al-ghazāl’s al-tabut (2004, the coffin) and al-khawf abqani hayyan (2008, fear kept me breathing). one of the chapter’s many strengths is olszok’s attentive treatment of the camels that appear in al-tibr and al-tabut. she demonstrates how despite the variations in the camels’ statuses, and their presences and absences in the narratives, both novels echo “the transgression and disintegration embodied by the qurʾanic nāqa [female camel]”, as manifested through “deep-seated social and environmental imbalance” (99). crucially, in both novels, the journeys undertaken by the male protagonists conclude “not with wealth, dominion and ideal masculinity, but failure, lack and death.” therefore, the sufi journey “turns to vulnerability, as the self is opened to the 278 | sinno, review of olszok humanimalia 13.1 (2022) universe through physical suffering, and land and creatures are animated through shared melancholy and fear” (100). in its focus on the intersection of war and violence, human–animal companionship and mystical signs, the chapter reiterates olszok’s thesis on creaturely vulnerability as it relates to timeless spiritual sufi discourses, as well as precarious material conditions, including political instability and the plundering of earthly resources, in modern libya and the rest of the world. chapter 4 shifts its focus to the struggle and devastation of the libyan city — often demonized by al-qadhafi — as represented in būshnāf’s al-ʿilka (2008; chewing gum, 2014), al-aṣfar’s sharmula (2008, sharmoula salad) and naʿim al-maghrabi’s nisaʾ al-rih (2010, women of the wind). the chapter explores būshnāf’s employment of the chewing gum and human-turned-statue to explore difficult themes including economic and sociopolitical ruin, mindless consumption, censorship, and haunting stories of subjective and systemic violence in libya. in addition, it examines al-aṣfar’s deployment of the trope of the sharmūla, a local salad that evokes “unbounded hospitality” (149) and the mournful gazelle whose tours become “peppered with recent and historical suffering” (147) to explore both the oppression of the state and the potential “lines of flight”. the chapter concludes with an examination of nisaʾ al-rih, which depicts women’s struggles against both patriarchy and political oppression. while the theme of creaturely vulnerability (and solidarity) remains central to olszok’s analysis, the novel does stand out from the other novels analysed by virtue of its largely human-centered plot and poetics. examining novels in arabic, english, and french, part iii, “children of the land”, primarily focuses on childhood as an articulation of creaturely vulnerability, demonstrating the precariousness of transitioning from childhood to adulthood and the bumping up of childhood wonder against harsh material realities, societal pragmatism, and traumatic histories — that often do not bode well for the future of the land and its residents. in chapter 5, for example, olszok demonstrates how aḥmad yūsuf ʿaqila’s al-jirab: hikayat najʿ (2006, sinno, review of olszok | 279 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) a sack of village tales) and aḥmad al-faytūrī’s sarib (2000, a long story) depict human–animal encounters, including life-changing incidents such as the slaughter of the protagonists’ beloved goat and gazelle respectively, as means of depicting profound creaturely interconnection, as well as the precarity of impending adulthood. in the same chapter, olszok provides a textual analysis of najwā bin shatwān’s wabr al-ahsina (2006, the horse’s hair), showing how this novel, which portrays the shared suffering of mother and daughter and casts doubt on the desirability of life, further illustrates libya’s harsh sociopolitical conditions and the sense of “primordial pessimism” (190) that underlie the libyan novel. while olszok’s analysis of this novel is certainly persuasive, the creaturely vulnerability manifested in this novel tends to center on the struggles of human or pre-human creatures (e.g. the fictionalized adam and eve and the unborn child), more so than those of nonhuman animals. chapter 6 provides a study of kamal ben hamida’s french-language novel, la compagnie des tripolitaines (2011; under the tripoli sky, 2013), and hisham matar’s english-language novel, in the country of men (2006), reiterating the centrality of creaturely vulnerability, while also addressing the challenges of “linguistic exile” and the “burden of representation” (201) with which libyan authors in the diaspora must contend. similar to the aforementioned arabic libyan coming-of-age novels, ben hamida’s and matar’s narratives, as olszok successfully demonstrates, articulate children’s harmonious connections with the natural world, as well as their subsequent dejection as they encounter present and past, personal and national, traumas that inevitably taint and transform their childhood while elucidating their families’ and nation’s difficult memories and histories. the libyan novel is theoretically grounded, original, and passionate — olszok’s care for the novels she writes about, the environment, and libya comes through in her writing. the book is as thought-provoking as it is heart-wrenching in its intimate and honest depiction of the libyan people’s suffering, human–animal companionship, and environmental degradation, as represented in modern libyan 280 | sinno, review of olszok humanimalia 13.1 (2022) fiction. this is the first english-language monograph that examines the libyan novel and that embraces an ecocritical, animal-studies approach to interpreting arabic literature. the author’s comparative perspective ascertains the libyan novel’s polyphonous, multi-layered engagement with numerous texts and worldviews across times, cultures and geographies. olszok’s timely engagement with the increasing precariousness of country and cosmos will resonate with readers and provide a valuable source for future studies on arabic literature, postcolonial ecocriticism, and animal studies. crucially, the libyan novel affirms that despite the scarcity of english translations and relative lack of english-language scholarly studies of modern libyan fiction, the libyan novel undoubtedly enriches arabic and world literature. olszok’s book promises to diversify and invigorate theoretical fields such as postcolonialism and ecocriticism — making it even more worthy of further critical attention. microsoft word salzani pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 2:2 carlo salzani animal rights: mapping the debate gary l. francione and robert garner, the animal rights debate: abolition or regulation? columbia university press, new york, 2010. 288pp., $24.50 / £17.00 pb tony milligan, beyond animal rights: food, pets and ethics. continuum, london, 2010. 168pp., £12.99 pb 1. the heterogeneous galaxies of studies revolving around the issue of animal ethics agree on one point: nonhuman animals endure unacceptable levels of suffering due to human exploitation, and this suffering ought to be eliminated. for the rest, philosophers and activists working in this field agree to disagree: they disagree on the moral status of nonhuman animals, on the major goals of pro-animal activism, on the actions to be taken to ameliorate animals’ conditions, on the strategies to adopt, and on the results achieved by the various movements to date. the diversity of theoretical positions and practical approaches, and the growing number of works addressing the problem, have generated an intense internal debate. two books published in 2010, gary francione and robert garner’s the animal rights debate and tony milligan’s beyond animal rights, help giving a sense of what is presently going on in philosophical circles and mapping the theoretical territory of the animal ethics discourse. the two books certainly do not (and do not claim to) cover the entire territory, nor attempt to summarize the entire debate; rather, the three authors offer three distinct — and discordant — positions which, though all advocating a revolution in the human treatment of animals, are as distant as the stars in a constellation. francione and garner argue that the debate between abolition and regulation of the human use of animal is at the center of modern animal advocacy, and propose two solid and consistent set of arguments: francione is in favor of the abolition of the human use of animals, while garner defends a protectionist approach, according to which at least some uses of animals may be justifiable. milligan, on the other hand, does not propose a thesis or a consistent “package,” but rather attempts a different approach which explores different issues in different ways without relying on fixed and one-dimensional baselines. 2. the animal rights debate consists of three parts: a first chapter in which francione defends the reasons of animal rights, a second chapter in which garner defends the carlo salzani — animal rights: mapping the debate 135 reasons of animal protectionism, and a third part reporting a dialogue between francione and garner which re-proposes and expands the arguments presented in the two previous chapters. in the first chapter, francione argues that the animal rights theory, when properly understood, requires the abolition of animal use and equates thus “animal rights” with “abolitionism.” the “rights” of animals are encapsulated in one right: the right not to be treated as the property of humans, from which derives the recognition that we should stop our institutionalized exploitation of animals, cease bringing domesticated animals into existence, and stop killing non-domesticated animals. the label “animal rights” is therefore misused when adopted for any measure thought to benefit animals in some ways, and this misuse, he argues, has caused a great deal of confusion in the social discourse concerning animal ethics. his argument is in fact explicitly and sharply directed against what he calls the “new welfarist” position, which focuses on the regulation of animal exploitation and is represented here by garner. the discussion begins precisely with the rejection of the fundamental premise of the animal welfare approach, that is, that animal life has a lesser moral value than human life, and that, therefore, it is morally justifiable to use animals for human purposes as long as they are treated “humanely.” the abolitionist position states instead that all sentient beings have the same moral value as humans and that we have therefore a moral obligation to abolish animal use irrespective of how “humane” our treatment of animals may be. “sentience” as a “means to the end of continued existence” (francione and garner 15) confers a right to life which protects the right holder irrespective of gains and consequences: “right” is thus defined as “a way of protecting an interest,” and “the interest is protected even if the general welfare would be increased or improved if we ignore that interest” (20). this entails both a rejection of the “welfarist” position defended by garner and of the utilitarianism à la peter singer, whom francione aggregates to the “new welfarism” (on this garner disagrees). for such a position, veganism is the only “clear and unequivocal moral baseline” (22). francione fiercely attacks therefore the claim that the regulation of animal use provides significant protection for animal interests: because animals are chattel property, that is, economic commodities, animal welfare regulation can provide very limited protection for animals, cannot reduce animal suffering in any significant way, and will not lead to either the reduction or the abolition of animal use. on the contrary, francione argues that animal welfare reforms generally increase production efficiency so that it actually humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 136 becomes cheaper to produce animal products. even worse than that, welfare reforms do make the general public feel more comfortable about animal exploitation, and lead to the disturbing partnership between animal advocates and institutionalized exploiters. the main point is though that animal welfare laws do not question use and purport only to regulate treatment; that is, for them, “the moral issue is not that we are using animals, but only how we use them, and that our use of nonhumans is morally justifiable as long as our treatment is acceptable” (57). moreover, both lawmakers and organizations (francione’s main examples are peta and the american humane association) defer to the industry to set the standards for “humane” care: therefore, “the level of protection for animal interests is linked to what is required to exploit animals in an economically efficient way” (29). the critique of the “welfarist” position is aimed at the defence of the abolitionist position against claims that it is unrealistic, idealistic, utopian, and does not provide any practical normative guidance: francione argues that the animal rights position does indeed offer a plan for practical incremental change that has ethical veganism as its foundation. what is required is a “paradigm shift” away from the status of animals as “property” and towards the position that animals are “moral persons,” which is inconsistent with any animal use, however “humane.” ethical veganism as “definite normative guidance for incremental change” becomes thus “the only position that is consistent with the recognition that for the purposes of being treated as a thing, the lives of humans and nonhumans are morally equivalent,” and “must be the unequivocal moral baseline of any social and political movement that recognises that nonhuman animals have inherent or intrinsic moral value” (62). on a social level, this translates into “creative, non-violent education about veganism and the need to abolish, not merely regulate, the institutionalized exploitation of animals” (64). the polemical note on which francione concludes his chapter gives a sense of the heated tones and of the litigiousness that characterize the debate within the so-called animal-rights camp: “welfare reforms are probably worse than useless in that they actually encourage people to feel more comfortable about animal exploitation and encourage the perpetuation of our moral schizophrenia” (84-85, emphasis added). 3. robert garner begins his chapter on an apparently more restrained tone: he does not want to criticize animal rights per se, and even states that “a great deal of the ethics of animal rights is convincing” (103). however, soon after he adopts a language that is not second to francione’s in harshness and condemnation: what he opposes is the “abolitionist” version of the animal rights theory, which he characterizes as “fundamentalist,” “inflexible,” and “dogmatic”; like a fundamentalist religion, it is carlo salzani — animal rights: mapping the debate 137 based on “essential truths” and on an “unwillingness to compromise” in order to achieve incremental short-term goals that fall short of the ideal end point; as such, it is irreconcilable to the “political art of the possible” (104). garner advocates the position francione called “new welfarism” but that he prefers to label “animal protectionism,” which defends a “politics” of incremental and “feasible” legal reforms aimed at ameliorating the conditions of animals. in the attempt to provide the ethical parameters on which this “politics” is founded, however, garner puts forward a striking argumentative line. he writes: “it is important to distinguish here between what is prescribed by ethics and what is achievable politically or strategically. in the case of ethics, we are dealing with normative arguments that are a qualitatively different kind from empirical ones” (105). this premise leads to the conclusion that “we should therefore seek to avoid confusing pronouncements on the treatment of animals that our ethics lead us to suggest and pronouncements about what we think is politically feasible at any particular time” (ibid.). this argument would of course not make sense philosophically without the following specification: “animal welfare amounts to applying utilitarianism for animals, but the ethical treatment of humans is to be judged in an entirely different way, in the sense that significant human interests cannot be traded off in a similar way” (108). that could be summarized by saying that ethics applies only to humans, whereas an empirical and disenchanted realpolitik applies to animals. that is, only humans have rights. the moral baseline of garner’s position is thus that “humans are morally superior to animals but that, because animals have some moral worth, we are not entitled to inflict suffering on them if the human benefit thereby resulting is not necessary” (107). though he rejects the accusation, it is hard not to consider garner’s position, at least to some extent, as a form of “speciesism.” in order to justify philosophically the animal welfare ethics, garner proposes thus the usual arguments against animals’ “personhood,” which lead to the conclusion that, “although it is wrong to kill an animal, it is not as great a wrong as killing a human” (107). the moral baseline becomes thus: “animals have a right not to suffer rather than a right to life and liberty” (128), and the rationale of the animal protection movement is identified therefore in the concept of “unnecessary suffering.” contra francione, garner argues that neither veganism nor the abolition of animals’ property status are necessary conditions for the advancement of animal rights. the focus, on the contrary, must be on the fact that most, if not all, of the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 138 ways in which animals are currently treated are unnecessary in the sense that they do not produce human benefits or that such benefits can be achieved in other ways. this provides a great political advantage: “focusing on what is unnecessary has the crucial strategic utility of maximizing public and movement support” (142). the issue remains, for garner, the disconnection between ethics and politics, and great part of his chapter is thus devoted to demonstrating that the abolitionists’ “moral crusade” does not work: “insofar as the moral crusade strategy is not accompanied by alternative political campaigns that aim at legislative change, it is deeply flawed” (147). the important question is that of agency and of a political strategy designed to achieve legislative change. and since in the political arena it is interests rather than ideas that are the main determinant of public policies outcomes, and since interests are associated with important social groupings, garner advocates some kind of pragmatic lobbying: “animal advocates should look for social groupings, interests and corresponding ideological tradition that can justify or, even better, require the incorporation of animal interests” (155). hence, in the pursuit of allies, the animal protection movement should be “flexible” and recognize that different allies and different ideological traditions may be appropriate in particular circumstances. pragmatism should move the focus away from a moral explanation and toward a political explanation for our action. garner is aware, however, that this pragmatism lends itself to easy criticism. in particular, his insistence on adhering to the “moral orthodoxy” — a term repeated throughout the chapter — constitutes a strong argument against the effectiveness of the reforms he proposes. it is important, he argues, to be aware of the real disparity between some modern animal ethics and the “moral orthodoxy” that dominates the way animals are thought about in our societies. but — as he acknowledges — the risk of conforming too much to what he calls the “community’s narrative discourse” is that it results in a defence of the status quo (168). his pragmatism, that is, can easily be accused of conformism and even of conservatism. though aware of the philosophical fragility of his “political art of the possible,” garner decides to conclude by re-asserting the necessity of this fragility: “a valid moral discourse about animals must take into account both ethical principles and the dominant narrative about their status. this narrative is at present dominated by welfare principles, but of course this may change in the future. it remains the case, however, that in the animals debate, there is a need for the ethics to be checked by the narrative if it is to speak affectively to an important contemporary concern” (ibid.). carlo salzani — animal rights: mapping the debate 139 4. francione and garner, though at the opposite poles of the debate, both provide a theoretically and practically consistent “package.” moreover, their arguments are designed as much against the opponent’s position as for an affirmative thesis; their tone, therefore, is often more defensive than proactive. a much more nuanced discussion of these themes is offered by tony milligan’s beyond animal rights, which not only questions the limits of the “animal rights” debate and of the language of “rights,” and attempts thus to open up the discussion to a wider number of ethical concepts, but also gives their due to a wide range of counterarguments, which are exposed and analyzed beyond the emotional bias of activism and proselytism. milligan does not only offer a different take on the themes of food, pets, and experimentation, but rather proposes an approach as distant from francione’s puritanism as from garner’s pragmatism: a pluralist ethics which allows to be constrained by a variety of reasons. like garner, milligan does not rejects tout court the idea of animal rights, but believes that we are liable to miss a great deal if we appeal only or primarily to the language of “rights”: he argues that we have a “much richer body of ethical concepts at our disposal” (milligan, ix) concerning harm, cruelty, care, brutality, authority, suffering, and well-being, which help us articulate our relations to each other and to other creatures. unlike the language of “rights,” which is used intermittently, these concepts are part of our everyday lives as ethical agents and are thus in almost daily use. they constitute the necessary background for any rights claims, which, if they can sometimes “clarify” matters, tend to make sense only against this broader picture. the ways of our daily interaction with other humans and other creatures are informed by a wider range of ethical concepts, which must therefore also constitute the armature of any ethical deliberation. milligan thereby positions himself within the tradition of “practical deliberation,” which does not appeal to any “knock-down argument” for or against animal rights, nor restricts the analysis to one (or few) big claim(s), but rather considers a variety of factors in order to construe a richly argued ethical pattern. this is a position milligan explicitly calls “pluralist”: we do not need, he argues, a single, “sovereign” concept; we do not need to enshrine a single concept (rights, consequences, the good, virtue) as sovereign over all moral deliberations; what we do need is instead a rich ethical vocabulary. pluralism allows our actions to be constrained by a variety of reasons rather than reducing our deliberations down to a “single binary matter of deciding that everyone should do one thing or else that they (we) should all do the opposite” (milligan, xi). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 140 himself a vegan, milligan recognizes that not everybody has the same reasons as him to adopt this diet. the language of “rights,” he contends, erases all cultural, social, economic or class differences and rather encourages precisely the all-or-nothing approach that necessarily ends up in philosophical, practical or ethical impasses. the background idea that guides the book is that of the “scale of reasons,” whereby ethical deliberation is contextualized within a range of historical, cultural, economic, or even health factors. milligan does not shun, however, to make some stronger statements: it is one of the premises of the book that most of the readers — especially healthy and reasonably well-off urbanites — probably do not have enough good reasons to eat meat produced through cruel systems of industrial farming; in turn, the fact that we tolerate such systems weakens — if not invalidates — our moral authority in other areas, in particular with regard to animal experimentation for serious purposes. but milligan is often too eager to balance any such claim with counterarguments whose value he attempts to assess. each chapter guides thus the reader through philosophical patterns which explore the arguments pro and contra meat-eating, vegetarian vs. vegan, pet-keeping and scientific experimentation. the bulk of the book is devoted to the analysis of meat-eating, since this is “at the core of our ways of relating to animals” (milligan 5). milligan guides the reader to explore first the arguments and background picture any ethical analysis should consider, in order to construe then his own argument based on the relation between eating-well and well-being. one of the aims of the book is to wrestle vegetarianism/veganism away from the accusation, or even self-representation, of “puritanism” — of which francione could be an example — which for milligan limits and misrepresents the ethical stakes of the no-meat choice. he then explores the “interests” and “benefits” of farmed animals, and the ecological implications of the debate. he never dismisses any idea or argument, but rather analyzes them through to their final consequences, and at time this leads him to concede terrain to arguments (mostly of ecological order) against a universal vegetarianism. the last two chapters consider (briefly) the issues of pet-keeping and of scientific experimentation with animals. unlike francione and garner, whose disagreement is internal to the animal ethics camp, milligan opens up the discussion to a greater range of inputs, which help nonetheless to locate the debate against a wider background. what milligan does not offer, unlike francione and garner, is a political strategy: he proposes a personal analysis of a number of issues based on a pluralist set of considerations, which however ends up often in an argumentative stalemate or in a sort of situational ethics. unlike francione’s and garner’s, his voice is not that of an activist, but rather that of a philosopher, sometimes carlo salzani — animal rights: mapping the debate 141 too detached and doubt-ridden to be able to offer the simplification that action requires. his book is therefore to be read in the context of a wider discourse. together with francione and garner, milligan provides some coordinates to orient the reader within the current philosophical and practical debate concerning animal ethics. microsoft word heymans pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:1 peter heymans eating girls: deleuze and guattari’s becoming-animal and the romantic sublime in william blake’s lyca poems it is perhaps illustrative of animal philosophy’s strong intent to establish itself firmly in serious academia that it has recently shown interest in gilles deleuze and félix guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, a concept which is so abstrusely theoretical and abstract that it appears to say very little on the animal as we know it.1 in her latest study when species meet (2007), donna haraway has rejected not only deleuze and guattari’s lack of concern for the real animal, but also their deeply-rooted contempt for the family pet, which they take to be a pitiful receptacle for the ungratified oedipal sentimentality of the childless, the old, and the lonely. “i am not sure,” haraway (30) reflects, “i can find in philosophy a clearer display of misogyny, fear of aging, incuriosity about animals, and horror at the ordinariness of the flesh, here covered by the alibi of an antioedipal and anticapitalist project.” criticizing the high-flown abstractness of deleuze and guattari’s theory in more epigrammatic terms, she writes: “this is a philosophy of the sublime, not the earthly, not the mud” (28). i want to show in this paper that haraway is speaking more than she knows here, and that the concept of becominganimal is, indeed, rhetorically and structurally indebted to the discourse of the sublime, that amphibious aesthetic of fear and wonder that is believed to have emerged in a firstcentury greek rhetorical treatise, moved to center-stage in the nature poetry of the romantics and the aesthetic theories of edmund burke and immanuel kant, and has invited renewed and expanded interest in the writings of jean-françois lyotard, slavoj žižek, and many other postmodernists.2 by relating becoming-animal to the romantic sublime, i do not seek to deprive deleuze and guattari’s concept of its ecological significance, however — as haraway purports to do. quite the opposite, i want to demonstrate that both the sublime and the dynamic of becoming-animal, despite their subjectivist preoccupation with human identity and consciousness, can bear important relevance to the study of human-animal relations. i will illustrate this relevance with an ecocritical reading of william blake’s lyca poems, “the little girl lost” and “the little girl found,” both published in his songs of innocence and of experience (1794), which engage the aesthetic of the sublime in a way that accords closely with the poststructuralist dismantlement of human subjectivity. nature and animality in the romantic sublime. the aesthetic of the sublime was first theorized by the greek critic longinus in his first-century rhetorical treatise peri humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 2 hypsous (on the sublime), which examined the stylistic nature and psychological effects of overwhelming language. “[b]y true sublimity,” longinus asserted, “our soul somehow is both lifted up and — taking on a kind of exultant resemblance — filled with delight and great glory, as if our soul itself had created what it just heard” (42). although longinus also attends to the beauty and power of nature, it is essentially human language that transports both speaker and listener, writer and reader out of their bodies and beyond material reality: “sublimity,” then, “is the resonance of greatness of mind” (51-52). as critics have shown, however, longinus’s subjectivist model was not the most influential one when it finally reached britain in 1554.3 aesthetic taste in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it seems, remained more oriented toward impressive natural objects than impressive texts or speech. admittedly, the theories of thomas burnet, john baillie, and joseph addison show great sensitivity to the sublime as a rhetorical effect, yet they still locate the cause of that effect primarily in the natural world and its divine creator. in “an essay on the sublime” (1747), for instance, john baillie argues that any “object can only be justly called the sublime, which in some degree disposes the mind to this enlargement of itself, and gives her a lofty conception of her own powers” (88). baillie, in other words, still believes that sublimity is a material quality, albeit one which requires subjective feeling to be revealed as such. it was mainly under the influence of edmund burke and immanuel kant that the central focus in the aesthetic experience shifted to the interpreting subject, and that the sublime came to be seen as a quality lying not so much in the physical world as in the eye and imagination of the beholder. in his empirical study a philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful (1757), burke interpreted the sublime as a psychologically and physiologically disturbing experience of terror. “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger,” he wrote, “that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime” (36). burke’s theory emphatically distanced itself from earlier objectivist models in its focus on “the ideas of pain and danger” and in its interpretation of material nature as only a source of the sublime. and yet, his compulsive interest in the classification of these natural sources, in conjunction with his frequent backsliding into a materialist idiom, shows just how difficult it was to disengage oneself from the natural sublime. in the following passage, for instance, burke ascribes the difference between beauty and sublimity to a distinction between domesticity and wildness. in other words, while we are fond of that which succumbs to us, it is the uncontrollable and excessive that we tend to find awe peter heymans — eating girls 3 inspiring. the passage is also interesting in that it illustrates burke’s sustained interest in animality: an ox is a creature of vast strength; but he is an innocent creature, extremely serviceable, and not at all dangerous; for which reason the idea of an ox is by no means grand. a bull is strong too; but his strength is of another kind; often very destructive, seldom (at least amongst us) of any use in our business; the idea of a bull is therefore great, and it has frequently a place in sublime descriptions, and elevating comparisons. […] we have continually about us animals of a strength that is considerable, but not pernicious. amongst these we never look for the sublime: it comes upon us in the gloomy forest, and in the howling wilderness, in the form of the lion, the tiger, the panther, or rhinoceros. (60-61) burke’s preference throughout the enquiry for the experience of the sublime over the beautiful brings to mind deleuze and guattari’s penchant for the wild pack animal and what haraway (29) describes as “their disdain for the daily, the ordinary, the affectional rather than the sublime.” 4 although both john dennis and joseph addison had already signaled the importance of terror in the psychology of the sublime, it was burke who popularized the view of the sublime as an oxymoronic sensation, inducing both attraction and repulsion or what he called a “delightful horror” (67). in kant’s idealist model, formulated in his critique of judgment (1790), the sublime triggered a similarly mixed feeling and instilled a “negative pleasure” (129). we cannot represent the overwhelming natural object, which is too vast or powerful to frame, kant believed, but at least our transcendental faculty of reason can represent this impossibility of representation. in this display of socratic table-turning, we manage to transcend not only our own epistemic failure but also the physical source of terror and the empirical world at large. the kantian sublime thus “reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of [nature] and a superiority over nature on which is grounded a self-preservation of quite another kind than that which can be threatened and endangered by nature outside us” (145). arguably, it is kant’s idealist power fantasy and its lack of interest in material reality that has inspired scholars such as donna haraway to construe the sublime as a disembodying and self-empowering experience of ekstasis, transporting the self beyond animality and nature. a number of ecocritics, however, have suggested that the sublime occasionally dramatizes an experience of intense embodiment, rooting the subject humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 4 firmly in the visceral and biological. in beast and man (1979), most notably, mary midgley takes issue with kant’s sublime and its tendency to recuperate natural magnitude as a mere symbol of our rational power and subjective autonomy (346). she draws attention to a scene in iris murdoch’s the sovereignty of good (1970) to illustrate how the overwhelming insight into “the sheer alien pointless independent existence of animals, birds, stones and trees” can throw us out of our ethereal self-centered perspective, thus granting us an insight into biological interdependence and our fragile physicality: i am looking out of my window in an anxious and resentful state of mind, oblivious of my surroundings, brooding perhaps on some damage done to my prestige. then suddenly i observe a hovering kestrel. in a moment everything is altered. the brooding self with its hurt vanity has disappeared. there is nothing now but kestrel. and when i return to thinking of the other matter it seems less important. (murdoch 84) midgley’s theory was not without its shortcomings, addressing as it did the sublime in a rather cursory, hit-and-run way at the end of a voluminous study. in a belligerent response, keith tester pointed to the “feelings of horror, fear, and loathing” (30) provoked by burke’s model to drive home that “the sublime cannot be the basis of a morality” and that “beast and man turns around an empty rhetoric” (31). midgley’s ecological rehabilitation of the sublime, indeed, offered a rather biased account, which underplayed the sublime’s psychology of terror and all too eagerly foregrounded its cathartic emotions of “admiration, reverence and respect,” which burke (53) in fact only considered residual effects of the sublime. christopher hitt’s article “toward an ecological sublime” (1999) formulated a more convincing environmentalist interpretation, as it acknowledged the sublime’s alienating violence and problematized rather than simply brushed aside its inherent tendency towards self-apotheosis. relying on neil evernden’s the social creation of nature (1992), hitt assembles an ecological model that follows kant’s trajectory without subscribing to its logocentrism or anthropocentrism. hitt mostly draws on evernden’s description of a violent confrontation with nature’s otherness, a confrontation that is so unmediated and powerful that it instantly short-circuits the subject’s rationalizing skills and cleanses its “conceptual pollution of nature” (evernden 50). “the initial reaction,” evernden writes, “to the awareness of something existing other than me is, surely, astonishment: radical astonishment. if, in the narcissistic dawn of a person’s awareness, there comes a realization that this ‘center’ is not unique, the world reels” (111). hitt (613-14) rightly peter heymans — eating girls 5 wonders to what extent this unsettling insight into nature’s otherness differs from kant’s subjectivist and profoundly anti-environmental sublime. the difference is, he argues, that this ecological sublime “is only possible outside the realm of conceptualization […]. by contrast, the estrangement of subject and object mandated by the kantian sublime depends […] on logos — on the emergence of what kant calls ‘reason’” (614). in kant, he concludes, the triumph of reason humiliates nature; in the ecological sublime the triumph of nature humiliates reason (616-17). whereas kant’s sublime, in other words, uproots the human mind and transports it to transcendental heights, the ecological sublime stimulates a profound awareness of our interaction with the material world as organic beings. in samuel taylor coleridge’s “the rime of the ancient mariner” (1798), for instance, the terrifying confrontation with the gruesome water-snakes — “slimy things did crawl with legs / upon the slimy sea” (125-26) — arrests the mariner’s appropriation of nature by violently cleansing the physical world of human meaning and restoring the animal’s otherness in a kind of return of the repressed. instead of carrying the mariner upwards through a platonic flight of the mind, this sublime experience emphasizes his vulnerability as a corporeal being and fosters an ecological understanding of natural interdependence. in an overly scholastic and somewhat tame conclusion, then, the mariner lectures: “he prayeth well, who loveth well / both man and bird and beast” (612-13). becoming-animal and the sublime. it is no coincidence that deleuze and guattari first elaborated their theory of becoming-animal in their study on franz kafka, an author whose writings frequently explore species mutations and feature both animalized humans (gregor samsa, the hunger artist) and humanized animals (red peter, josephine).5 kafka’s interest in animality certainly ties in with his general concern with the oppressed and the marginal, but when the travelling salesman gregor samsa wakes up one morning to realize he has changed into a cockroach, kafka is doing more than just making literal or explicit the capitalist dehumanization of labor. gregor’s becoming-animal, deleuze and guattari argue, is not so much a logical, if extreme, outcome of his loss of humanity as it is a positive, emancipating dynamic of selfreinvention that “stake[s] out the path of escape” and that allows him to roam freely below the radar of the patriarchal and the capitalistic (kafka 13). “gregor becomes a cockroach,” they write, “not to flee his father but rather to find an escape where his father didn’t know to find one, in order to flee the director, the business and the bureaucrats” (kafka 13). it is also in kafka: toward a minor literature (1975) that deleuze and guattari’s lack of interest in the animal’s biological nature and social emancipation becomes most evident. “kafka’s animal tales,” they assert, “were written just before the trial or at the same time as it, like a sort of counterpoint to the novel which liberates itself from all animal concern to the benefit of a much higher concern” (15).6 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 6 that deleuze and guattari’s concept of becoming-animal takes little or no interest in animal life is not necessarily a shortcoming on their part, however. despite their frequent reliance on a zoological lexicon, after all, they never claimed that becominganimal developed from a deeply moral concern with the rights and relevance of the non-human. even so, why introduce a concept as morally charged as animality in an ethical and biological discourse when one is not fundamentally interested in it? more questionable still is deleuze and guattari’s tendency to reduce animality to a site of non-identity, social anarchy, and freewheeling sexual desire, as if dogs cannot be patriarchal fascists and pigs cannot have oedipal fixations. while they repeatedly urge woman to become-woman, they never encourage the non-human animal to becomeanimal, a neglect that demonstrates not only their poor zoological knowledge but also their lack of insight into the biology of ideology. deleuze and guattari’s deliberate obscurantism and typically postmodern suspicion of rhetorical clarity renders their theory resistant to straightforward explanation and, what is worse, extremely prone to misinterpretation. problematically enough, becominganimal constitutes an autological concept that rigorously practices what it preaches. if it lacks stable, linear meaning, this lack is precisely one of its defining characteristics and serves to underline deleuze and guattari’s general distrust of semantic stability and transparency. to formulate a straightforward definition of becoming-animal, then, would run counter to its precepts and eviscerate the concept of its meaning and strength. is it, nevertheless, possible to strip becoming-animal of deleuze and guattari’s obscure jargonizing and rhapsodizing without domesticating it into a tame schoolbook definition? deleuze’s use of the concept in his study francis bacon: the logic of sensation (1981) might create some much-required transparency. bacon’s portraits often remove the personality and humanity of their subjects by distorting their faces into amorphous heads and reducing their bodies to lumps of flesh and meat. bacon does not simply transform or deform his characters into beasts, but he creates a graphic interspace where species attributes conjoin and engage in a monstrous assemblage, the dynamism of which is brought home by bacon’s long, curving brush strokes. the people in his portraits, as a result, no longer look like humans, but neither have they much in common with any animal we know. bacon’s paintings, deleuze clarifies, establish “a zone of the indiscernible, of the undecidable, between man and animal” (bacon 21). becoming-animal, indeed, is a reciprocal process of desubjectification and designification that explodes the human-animal dualism and configures an extremely volatile and protean concept of identity out of its debris, an identity fluctuating along peter heymans — eating girls 7 the constantly changing dynamic of becoming, not firmly based on the ontological stability of being. what deleuze and guattari aim to deconstruct, however, is not so much the humananimal dichotomy as dualistic thinking in general. in a thousand plateaus (1980), the second volume of their double study capitalism and schizophrenia, they take up the concept of becoming-animal again to open up its meaning by juxtaposing it with a number of other becomings. man, they argue here, should reject his inclination towards binary and rigidly centralized systems of thought by becoming-animal, becomingwoman, becoming-girl, becoming-nomad: in short, by becoming-minoritarian. all these becomings are becomings-molecular, a concept deleuze and guattari define in opposition to molarity: “the animal, flower, or stone one becomes are molecular collectivities, haecceities, not molar subjects, objects, or form[s] that we know from the outside and recognize from experience, through science, or by habit” (plateaus 303). whereas the molar pertains to firm, stable and centralized blocks of being, such as the state or the family, the molecular involves a heterogeneous and chaotic group or pack that swarms too quickly and erratically to be controlled by an immobile, legislating center. these becomings-molecular, then, participate in a larger epistemological and political project which seeks to subvert the monopolistic dominance of the tree model in western thinking (family trees, biblical trees of knowledge, darwin’s tree of life, chomsky’s grammatical tree) and to replace this so-called arborescent model of classification with a rhizomatic system, that is, “an acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a general and without an organizing memory or central automaton, defined solely by a circulation of states” (plateaus 23). this rhizomatic model privileges chaotic excess over ascetic structuralism, fragmentation over unity, wildness over domesticity, or — in aesthetic terms — sublimity over beauty. deleuze and guattari’s critical silence on the sublime is surprising, especially considering the concept’s commanding position in postmodern thinking and the interest deleuze had previously expressed in kantian aesthetics.7 although the sublime and becoming-animal conceptualize a very similar confrontation with an otherness (transcendental, natural, animal, racial, sexual) that arrests the self’s cognitive skills and that uproots and transports the subject beyond a certain threshold, very few critics, in fact, have cared to comment on, if they noticed at all, the extent to which deleuze and guattari’s concept is indebted to the aesthetic of the sublime. in his article “what does becoming-animal look like?” (2002), steve baker offers an interesting discussion of species transgressions in contemporary visual and performance arts, drawing on deleuze and guattari’s theoretical apparatus and in particular on their claim that “writing is a becoming” (plateaus 265). baker, however, never refers to the sublime, even humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 8 though his analysis of the writer’s and artist’s self-transformative professions frequently enters its discursive territory, as when he quotes a fragment from the feminist writer and philosopher hélène cixous. cixous describes the creative act as both an exhilarating and terrifying experience: “to be lifted up one morning, snatched off the ground, swung in the air. […] to fall asleep a mouse and wake up an eagle! what delight! what terror” (qtd. in baker 75). that delight and terror — the two dominant emotions of the sublime — recur time and again, baker notices, in the artist’s creative encounter with animality (84). when describing their shark encounters, for instance, the british artist duo olly and suzi talk about “the wonder, the horror” of the experience (qtd. in baker 84). even when baker questions the relevance of the aesthetic of the beautiful in postmodern animal art (93), he fails or chooses not to make what could have been an insightful excursion into burkean or kantian aesthetics. let us briefly look at the epistemological, ontological, and moral similarities between the romantic sublime and the dynamic of becoming-animal. the object triggering the experience of the sublime, such as a storm or predator, defies easy conceptualization and thereby calls into question our rational grip on the empirical world. in thomas weiskel’s semiotic analysis, the sublime “is that moment when the relation between the signifier and signified breaks down and is replaced by an indeterminate relation” (qtd. in portia williams weiskel xiii). weiskel’s apocalyptic interpretation of the sublime as an epistemological breakdown resonates in deleuze and guattari’s definition of becoming-animal. “to become animal,” they write, “is […] to find a world of pure intensities where all forms come undone, as do all the significations, signifiers, and signifieds, to the benefit of an unformed matter of deterritorialized flux, of nonsignifying signs” (kafka 13). while the romantic sublime initially triggers a disintegration or becoming-animal of the subject, it only seems to do so in order to construct and legitimate an even more enclosed and centralized identity afterwards.8 and yet, the traumatic memory of the sublime significantly spoils the pleasure of this reconstruction and turns it into a very mixed experience. the impression remains that the mind forms only a very fragile unity that can easily be undone and shattered again. even if kant’s recomposed subject looks more seamless and self-contained than ever before, kant cannot rule out the possibility that next time the sublime recuperation of the self will be less successful and will give birth to a hideously fragmented creature like frankenstein’s monster, with the stitches still visible. it is this trauma of the sublime which increasingly came into focus during the eighteenth century and which relates the sublime most intimately to deleuze and guattari’s theory of becoming. peter heymans — eating girls 9 in a treatise of human nature (1739-40), david hume rejected the idea central to kant’s and burke’s aesthetic theories, which suggested that the sublime mixture of pain and pleasure ultimately consolidates a sense of self: there are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity. the strongest sensation, the most violent passion, say they, instead of distracting us from this view, only fix it the more intensely, and make us consider their influence on self either by their pain or pleasure. (299) just as deleuze and guattari deny the existence of a stable metaphysical sense of identity, hume argued that we have no “idea of self” (299) and that we “are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement” (300). while the romantics dramatically exploited that humean condition in which the subject lacked any ground and threatened to disintegrate into thin air, in the end they still chose to fixate the molecular flux into a stable molar centre, whether it be kant’s logocentrism or burke’s phallocentrism. this final, compensating phase of the sublime, however, does not drastically reduce its similarity to the dynamic of becoming. deleuze and guattari, too, recognize that — to repeat brian massumi’s metaphor (48) — all muck eventually becomes rock and all molecular systems sooner or later coagulate into stable molar ones: “no flow, no becoming-molecular,” they write, “escapes from a molar formation without molar components accompanying it” (plateaus 334). the dynamic of becoming combines a destructive process of fragmentation with a creative process of transformation, a double movement that also characterizes the experience of the sublime. the kantian self primarily draws on the material world to inflate its own subjectivity, so that the limitlessness of the seascape or the awe-inspiring power of the tiger eventually come to signify the infinite power of human reason. in his “essay on the sublime,” by the same token, john baillie writes that “[t]he sublime, when it exists simple and unmixed, by filling the mind with one vast and uniform idea, affects it with a solemn sedateness; by this means the soul itself becomes, as it were, one simple grand sensation” (97). this introjection of otherness to aggrandize the power of the self is a very risky undertaking, however. in line with the homeopathic principle, burke argued that terror causes a brief moment of mental instability which may cure the subject of a “dangerous and troublesome incumbrance” (123). while he puts the emphasis in his theory on the curative and invigorating rather than the potentially humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 10 psychotic effects of the sublime, it is difficult to ignore the risk of permanent mental trauma. when he writes, for instance, that during the experience of astonishment “the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it,” burke (53) seems to describe a pathology of clinical shock and obsessive neurosis possibly leading to schizophrenia. weiskel similarly suggests that the sublime may conclude with madness: “if you do not recover from the second phase, you are likely to replay the precipitating occasion in an involuntary repetition compulsion (like the ancient mariner), a disorder burke finds frequent in madmen” (97). these schizophrenic effects would come to the foreground in postmodern theories on the sublime. fredric jameson, for example, relates burke’s aesthetic of fear to the “schizophrenic dissolution of the boring old bourgeois ego” in consumer culture (“pleasure” 71). he interprets schizophrenia in a lacanian sense, as a disruption of the relationship between signifier and signified: “when the links of the signifying chain snap,” jameson writes, “then we have schizophrenia in the form of a rubble of distinct and unrelated signifiers” (postmodernism 26). jameson’s semiotic approach to schizophrenia calls to mind weiskel’s sublime as well as deleuze and guattari’s process of becoming-animal. the difference is that while deleuze and guattari unreservedly celebrate the schizophrenic’s transcendence of binary thinking, jameson takes a more ambivalent view. on the one hand, he seems to mourn the late capitalist loss of meaning and subjectivity, and writes that “schizophrenic experience is an experience of isolated, disconnected, discontinuous material signifiers which fail to link into a coherent sequence. the schizophrenic does not know personal identity” (“postmodernism” 119). on the other hand, jameson recognizes that in its cultural manifestations, schizophrenia “becomes available for more joyous intensities, for precisely that euphoria which we saw displacing the older affects of anxiety and alienation” (postmodernism 29). it is this positive evaluation of sublime schizophrenia as a creative rather than destructive frame of mind that we also come across in deleuze and guattari’s theory and in romantic texts such as “the ancient mariner.” allowing several, conflicting identities to thrive within the same mental space, the schizophrenic, deleuze and guattari believe, constitutes a becoming or a body without organs, a being-in-progress that escapes the molar processes of dualization and linear signification. the schizoid, they argue, “does not reduce two contraries to an identity of the same; he affirms their distance as that which relates the two as different” (antioedipus 85). peter heymans — eating girls 11 the keyword that links the schizoid effects of the sublime to deleuze and guattari’s becoming is contagion. becoming-animal, deleuze and guattari claim, does not spread through procreation between two creatures of the same species in a straight line of descent, in the way that a father “becomes” his daughter. instead, it spreads “by contagion, epidemics, battlefields, and catastrophes,” and proliferates in a horizontal line between heterogeneous elements, such as a human and an animal (plateaus 266). the sublime has similarly been conceived of as a contagion that catches the subject by surprise and contaminates its thinking with power, insight and rhetorical wit or, if things go wrong, with disorientation and hysteria. for longinus, sublime passion induces a kind of delirium or “madness” in the orator (51). commenting on longinus’s rhetorical model, philip shaw claims that “one does not learn the sublime; one catches it, like a divine contagion” (13). the rhetorical sublime inflames not only the speaker but also the listener. in clio; or a discourse on taste (1769), james usher writes that the “enthusiastic orator expresses his own feelings, and his discourse is infectious” (152). the eighteenth-century scottish philosopher, thomas reid (178) suggests that “no passions are so infectious as those which hold of enthusiasm” and burke similarly talks about “the contagion of our passions” (160). if the sublime is an epidemic discourse inducing obsessive neurosis and schizophrenia, then the beautiful is an aesthetic of mental stability and physical relaxation, an aesthetic that eventually engenders — in a straight line of descent — a unitary and homogeneous subject. unlike the sublime becoming, the beautiful does not transform the self by contagion or violent intrusion, but, as burke writes, “we enter willingly into a kind of relation with” beautiful objects and experience “love, or some passion similar to it” (39). this affection is not the passionate, self-forgetful feeling or “exercise in depersonalization” that deleuze and guattari have in mind when they talk about love (plateaus 40). sexuality, they argue, is a self-undermining experience that produces “the becoming-woman of the man and the becoming-animal of the human” (plateaus 307). burke, who wanted to avoid such a loss of male subjectivity at all cost, emphatically distinguished love from physical desire and lust. beauty is a “social quality,” he wrote, and “the passion caused by beauty, which i call love, is different from desire” (39, 83). burke’s aesthetic, critics have noticed, presents an oedipal sublimation of desire, whereby the subject’s lust for the mother is purified into a love for the beautiful and its sentiments of fear and loathing towards the father are sanitized into noble expressions of awe and admiration.9 this oedipalization of desire is one of the main targets of deleuze and guattari’s criticism in their study anti-oedipus (1972), the first volume of capitalism and schizophrenia. desire, they claim, needs to be controlled by the family’s triangular relationship because it “is revolutionary in its essence […] and no society can humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 12 tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being comprised” (anti-oedipus 126-27). even though deleuze and guattari introduce becoming-animal as an emancipating dynamic that liberates minoritarian individuals from patriarchal control, their philosophy remains characterized by moral ambiguity and seems — very much like the sublime — to operate above party politics. since they regard the political establishment as an arborescent or molar organisation through and through, it is only logical that their concept of becoming remains far removed from any institutionalized political programme. brian massumi’s attempt at pinpointing some historical manifestations of a molecular politics illustrates just how closely deleuze and guattari’s philosophy leans towards anarchy (120-21). he includes, among others, the student riots of may ’68, squatters and extraparliamentary greens in northern europe, and the radical splinter groups of feminism and other liberation movements. more importantly, massumi points out that political systems rarely manifest themselves as purely molar or molecular bodies: “a society […] is an endless tug-of-war between the cancerous limitative body without organs of fascism-paranoia and the viral nonlimitative body without organs of anarchy-schizophrenia” (119-20). deleuze and guattari similarly emphasize that the distinction between the arborescent and the rhizomatic is not absolute and that even the extremely molar organization of the fascist state draws on rhizomatic strategies to propagate its ideas. in the same vein, the sublime is primarily an aesthetic category without straightforward moral implications. thomas weiskel, for instance, very aptly concludes that anyone who reads into the tradition of speculation about the sublime knows in what a variety of ideologies the sublime moment finds a central place. what happens to you standing at the edge of the infinite spaces can be made, theoretically, to “mean” just about anything. (28) the beautiful and sublime in blake’s lyca poems. when william blake wrote and designed his illustrated collection songs of innocence and of experience (1789-1794), he meant to create a total work of art in which word and image worked in tandem and supplemented rather than simply complemented each other.10 what is striking about the visual designs is that nearly all of them depict trees, roots, branches, or leaves, botanical elements that underscore the environmentalist character of the poems and make explicit the pastoral tradition within which blake was writing. saree makdisi has singled out two types of trees in blake’s plates: the isolated, vertical tree, which functions as a symbol of autocratic oppression and also figured in burke’s and peter heymans — eating girls 13 wordsworth’s writings as an organic metaphor for conservative morality and traditional class hierarchies; and an extremely flexible kind of tree, which seems to curve strangely in the wind or to mutate halfway into a horizontal bush (177-78). it is this dynamic species that makdisi links, if tentatively, to deleuze and guattari’s rhizomatic system of thought. the chaotic knitwork of trunks and branches that frames the songs indeed serves as a particularly fitting image of the rhizomatic power structure which blake seems to advance in his poetry, that is, a power structure where patriarchal centers appear either absent or emasculated, and where it is instead heterogeneous packs of children, outcasts, and animals that dictate the verse. mary and rodney baine have signalled, moreover, that blake’s poetry and designs abound with species transformations and becomings whereby humans and animals come to participate in an economy of humanization, dehumanization, and rehumanization (573-75). especially in blake’s later work, vincent arthur de luca points out, this loss and recovery of selfhood takes on a very physical character and often induces a sublime effect (73). in line with the experience of the sublime, the metamorphoses in blake’s poetry highlight the traffic between the self and other, and in doing so, demonstrate the fragility and mutability of the human subject. this sublime traffic is, importantly, a two-way movement that affects the animal and the human alike, and that provokes both humanizations and animalizations. in jerusalem (1804-1820), for instance, “lion, tyger, horse, elephant, eagle, dove, fly, worm” all appear to “humanize / in the forgiveness of sins” (98: 4345).11 in vala, or the four zoas (1797-1807), on the other hand, it is humans who lose their subjectivity and regress into animal forms: “then he beheld the forms of tygers & of lions dishumanizd men / many in serpents & in worms stretchd out enormous length” (“night the sixth” 70: 34-35). 12 first included in songs of innocence (1789) but relocated to experience when the combined volume songs of innocence and of experience was published in 1794,“the little girl lost” and “the little girl found” further develop the songs’ thematic interest in the child’s rite of passage from a dualistic worldview to one that integrates and reconciles opposites, such as domesticity versus wildness, feminine love versus masculine sexuality, infancy versus parenthood, and human vulnerability versus brutal violence. in the first poem, the prepubescent girl lyca wanders off from her parents and is eventually adopted or abducted by a pack of lions, tigers, and leopards. in the second poem, the parents meet the “beasts of prey” in a surreal and terrifying encounter, which unexpectedly concludes with a millennial scene of reconciliation as the parents follow the animals into their cave to find their daughter lyca. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 14 on an aesthetic level, the two poems record the transition from the naively pastoral world of the beautiful to the ambiguously chaotic realm of the sublime. enticed by “wild birds song,” the seven-year-old lyca strays into “the desart wild” to eventually encounter “the beasts of prey” that “come from caverns deep” (“lost” 16, 7, 34, 35). the “lovely lyca,” as blake characterizes her time and again, presents an obvious image of burke’s and kant’s aesthetic of the beautiful, which was typically seen as a feminine category, and reduced woman to a passive object of male desire. beauty, burke argued in his enquiry, “is highest […] in the female sex,” and “almost always carries with it an idea of weakness and imperfection” (100). that the girl falls asleep before the beasts of prey arrive only compounds her weakness and reinforces her function as an object of burke’s concept of the beautiful. when lyca, then, ventures into the desert, she enters the no man’s land of the sublime, where both moral and species boundaries appear extremely precarious. the inhabitants of blake’s desert — lions, leopards and tigers — represent the typical features of the sublime, such as wildness, exoticism, and terror. wild animals recur as symbols of the sublime in blake’s poetry. in “the tyger” and “night,” both published in the songs, the predator produces the characteristically burkean mixture of admiration and terror, and in doing so, reflects blake’s ongoing struggle to formulate a satisfying answer to the theological problem of evil, a problem famously expressed in that line from “the tyger”: “did he who made the lamb make thee?” (20). that moral question is also left open in the lyca poems. while the animals are initially negatively characterized as “beasts of prey,” a few lines later the lion receives the epithet “kingly” and in “the little girl found” it even appears to wear a “crown” (“lost” 34, 37; “found” 37). the animals’ habitat is similarly first referred to in “lost” as “caverns” and “caves,” but it becomes a “palace” in “found” (“lost” 35, 52; “found” 43). since their moral nature and motives remain obscure throughout, it is not entirely clear whether the lion’s licking and the lioness’s undressing of lyca should be interpreted as expressions of sexual or carnivorous appetite or, more innocently, as parental gestures of care and concern: while the lion old bowed his mane of gold, and her bosom lick, and upon her neck, from his eyes of flame, ruby tears there came; while the lioness peter heymans — eating girls 15 loosed her slender dress, and naked they conveyed to caves the sleeping maid. (“lost” 43-52) blake’s pronouncedly sexual imagery and the soft-core pornographic designs have motivated a number of critics to read the lyca poems as a sexual initiation or what robert gleckner describes as a “rape of experience” (223).13 gleckner’s interpretation fits the category of the sublime, which has similarly been conceived of as a masculinist discourse of rape and sexual harassment. in his treatise the grounds of criticism in poetry (1704), for instance, the english dramatist and critic john dennis describes the sublime as a “pleasing rape upon the very soul of the reader” (37), and in the ideology of the aesthetic (1990) terry eagleton similarly indicates that it is “a lawless masculine force which violates yet perpetually renews the feminine enclosure of beauty” (54). the bestial rape — or near rape — of lyca, then, drives home how the aesthetic of the beautiful in both burke and kant is constantly under the threat of being overpowered and ingested by the masculinist sublime. the psychological effects of the sublime surface most dramatically in the second poem, in which the parents encounter the wild animals and are eventually escorted to their daughter. this encounter is first presented as an immobilizing experience of fear and terror until the lion licks the mother’s hand, and the parents’ initial feelings of horror are replaced with a sense of “deep surprise” and “wondering,” also the primary emotional response to the sublime (“found” 34, 35). “the passion caused by the great and sublime in nature,” burke writes in his philosophical enquiry, “is astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror” (53). the licking, which still looked ambiguously sexual and carnivorous in the first poem, now appears as an unequivocal act of sympathy and initiates a millennial reconciliation of opposites. such a radical change also characterized the moral trajectory of blake’s “night,” but there the reconciliation between predator and prey was only achieved after the violent catharsis of slaughter and ingestion, something that is perhaps implied in the lyca poems, yet never made explicit: when wolves and tigers howl for prey, they pitying stand and weep; seeking to drive their thirst away, and keep them from the sheep but if they rush dreadful, the angels, most heedful, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 16 receive each mild spirit, new worlds to inherit. […] and now beside thee, bleating lamb, i can lie down and sleep; or think on him who bore thy name, graze after thee and weep. for, wash’d in life’s river my bright mane for ever. shall shine like the gold as i guard o’er the fold. (“night” 25-32, 41-48) focusing on the politics of meat in “night,” gleckner maintains that “[t]he lion achieves pity by giving vent to his wrath; the lion becomes the lamb by devouring the lamb” (124). gleckner’s interpretation of ingestion as a symbolic process of introjection implicitly draws on freud’s anthropological discussion of cannibalism in totem and taboo (1913). “by incorporating parts of a person’s body through the act of eating,” freud argues, “one at the same time acquires the qualities possessed by him” (82). this belief in the transfer of psychological qualities between the eater and the eaten also affects non-cannibalistic dietary habits and explains certain social food restrictions. “a woman who is with child,” freud points out, “will avoid eating the flesh of certain animals for fear that any undesirable qualities they may have (cowardice, for instance) might be passed over to the child that is nourished by her” (82). in blake’s “night,” then, there is both a physical and psychological transfer. the lamb becomes the lion or at least becomes part of its physiology, and the lion becomes the lamb by inheriting its meekness, passivism and vegetarianism. lyca’s becoming-animal. from the beginning of the poems, lyca’s human nature is called into question by the etymological origin of her name, which derives from the greek word for wolf. as a portrait of a lupine child of sorts, blake’s double poem partakes of the romantic interest in the noble savage and, more specifically, in infants that had been raised by animals and had developed into an in-between species. while there existed no scientific consensus on the meaning of these feral children, they suggested that the human subject was a seriously fragmented and changeable creature, split between its animal nature and human nurture.14 the becoming-animal of these savage children, deleuze and guattari argue, peter heymans — eating girls 17 is not a question of a real production, as if the child “really” became an animal; nor is it a question of a resemblance, as if the child imitated animals that really raised it; nor is it a question of a symbolic metaphor, as if the autistic child that was abandoned or lost merely became the “analogue” of an animal. (plateaus 301) similarly, lyca’s becoming-animal is not produced by a conscious imitation or identification with the animal, but it is the outcome of her inscription in what jacques derrida calls the “sacrificial structure” of sexual and dietary consumption (112). it is in sexuality, deleuze and guattari write, that man becomes woman and that the human becomes animal (plateaus 307). although they stress that this sexual becoming does not require bestiality, lyca’s transformation seems triggered by an inverted form of zoophilia, whereby the animal engages in a sexual relationship with the human. stripped of her clothes, lyca is reduced to flesh for both carnivorous and sexual consumption. the idea of being eaten — by humans or other animals — is traditionally considered unnatural and horrifying because it redefines the power relationship between the eater and the eaten, and implies a final and irreversible loss of human subjectivity and agency. not surprisingly, the bible regarded the denial of a proper burial and the resultant risk of becoming food for carrion eaters as extremely degrading punishments. goliath, for example, threatens to feed david’s body to scavengers: “i will give thy flesh,” he says, “unto the fowls of the air, and to the beasts of the field” (1 sam. 17: 44). to become prey or meat, indeed, implies a passivity and objectification to which usually only non-human creatures are subjected, and it is thus a kind of becominganimal. “meat,” deleuze writes in his discussion of francis bacon’s portrait studies, “is the common zone of man and the beast, their zone of indiscernibility,” and he quotes a fragment from an interview with bacon, saying: “of course, we are meat, we are potential carcasses. if i go into a butcher shop i always think it’s surprising that i wasn’t there instead of the animal” (bacon 23, 24). even the ingestion of an animal that had died a natural death or had been killed by other animals was considered taboo in the bible, since it bypassed human involvement and animalized the eater into a scavenger. in leviticus (17: 15) it is said that “every soul that eateth that which died of itself, or that which was torn with beasts, whether it be one of your own country, or a stranger, he shall both wash his clothes, and bathe himself in water, and be unclean until the even: then shall he be clean.” it is these unclean, almost contagious acts of becoming-prey or becoming-scavenger that deleuze and guattari seem to be thinking of when they formulate their theory of becoming-animal, which displays very similar viral characteristics. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 18 in the first poem, “the little girl lost,” however, lyca’s dehumanization results not so much from a subversive becoming-animal as from a degrading animalization and infantilization, rhetorical mechanisms which also characterized burke’s and kant’s aesthetics of the beautiful. burke’s recurrent association of the beautiful with the feminine and the domesticated created the impression that women were mere pets or, in mary wollstonecraft’s wording, “gentle, domestic brutes” (101). in a vindication of the rights of woman (1792), wollstonecraft argued that women’s strength of body and mind are sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty, to the desire of establishing themselves, — the only way women can rise in the world, — by marriage. and this desire making mere animals of them, when they marry they act as such children may be expected to act: — they dress, they paint, and nickname god’s creatures. (83) wollstonecraft’s criticism is pertinent in that it emphasizes how the sexual objectification of woman goes hand in hand with the patriarchal domestication of child and animal. “men,” she writes, “try to secure the good conduct of women by attempting to keep them always in a state of childhood” (101). immature, speechless and alluring, lyca, then, is the personification par excellence of burke’s beautiful, and as such finds herself reduced to the status of an animal well before the beasts of prey have a first sniff at her body. in view of this, the wild animals and their stripping of lyca’s clothes only take the girl’s animalization to a more extreme and explicit level. but what is the difference between woman’s becoming-animal and her beinganimalized? in the sexual politics of meat (1990), carol adams has amply demonstrated that woman is always already engaged in a desubjectifying process that reduces her to a bestialized object of desire. both woman and animal, she claims, are first objectified, then fragmented into consumable body parts (breasts and genitalia, or spare ribs and steaks), and finally visually and orally ingested (47). adams’s moral evaluation of the mechanism of animalization, needless to say, is quite different from deleuze and guattari’s. while adams regards the bestialization of woman as a masculinist strategy to muzzle and consume female otherness, deleuze and guattari interpret becominganimal as an emancipating movement that liberates woman and animal from their second-rate positions within patriarchal society. interestingly, the main targets of adams’s sexual politics — objectification, fragmentation, and consumption — refigure in deleuze and guattari’s theory as the primary instruments in a deconstruction of the male subject. what makes objectification and fragmentation victimizing mechanisms, then, is not so much their intrinsic structure as their exclusive application to woman peter heymans — eating girls 19 and animal. instead of trying to reassemble a stable sense of female or animal identity and reaffirm a dualistic conception of gender and species — as feminist and animal rights groups might want to do — deleuze and guattari seek to dismember, disorganize, and ingest man like an animal, so that man becomes what they call a body without organs. man, too, should — to put adams’s phrases to new use — be “rendered being-less,” “severed from [his] ontological meaning,” and finally subjected to a total “annihilation of […] identity” (47). the victimizing process of animalization only turns into the emancipating performance of becoming-animal when it affects both parties equally and thereby undercuts the idea of a stable human and animal identity. “man becomes animal,” deleuze writes, “but he does not become so without the animal simultaneously becoming spirit, the spirit of man” (bacon 21). this spiritualization of the material body is precisely what happens in “the little girl found” when the lion is stripped of its physicality and transforms into “a spirit arm’d in gold” (36). as their speech, tears, and palace bear out, the beasts of prey now appear to display human and superhuman characteristics without, however, entirely losing their animality. so, while in burke’s aesthetic of the beautiful the discourses of animalization and infantilization forced woman to regress to the pet-like state of the child or the childlike state of the pet, in blake’s poetics of becoming these discourses are enlisted in a subversive programme that seeks to counteract the marginalization and consumption of female and animal otherness by staking out a zone of indiscernibility where both man and woman, human and animal are stripped of their identity and species. it is not just that humans become animals and that animals become humans, but more that the signifier of species loses its stable significance and becomes, as deleuze and guattari would put it, undone. it is no coincidence that the passage into experience crucially hinges on the girl and not on, say, woman or man. as deleuze and guattari argue, “[t]he girl and the child do not become; it is becoming itself that is a child or a girl” (plateaus 306). they explain this somewhat vaguely as follows: girls do not belong to an age group, sex, order, or kingdom: they slip in everywhere, between orders, acts, ages, sexes; [...] the girl is the becomingwoman of each sex, just as the child is the becoming-young of every age. (plateaus 305-306) becoming-animal opens up an escape or line of flight from arborescent structures and, more specifically, from the oedipal family. that the parents eventually find lyca should not imply that they re-establish closure and that the arborescent family is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 20 reinstated. while there is no radical parricide as deleuze and guattari may propose, there is no return of the oedipal family either, as the poem’s title might misleadingly suggest. lyca’s passage into experience is not a passage into the arborescent stability of adulthood, but it causes a caving in of patriarchal structures and transports man, woman and animal into the ontological flux of girlhood.15 in blake, the child does not become “father of the man,” as wordsworth famously put it, but man becomes child, becomes girl. following the predators into their palace, the parents now emulate their daughter’s becoming and enter the community of the beasts of prey: then they followed where the vision led, and saw their sleeping child among tigers wild. to this day they dwell in a lonely dell, nor fear the wolvish howl nor the lion’s growl. (“found” 45-52) it is these packs of animals and not the individualized pet or the mythical beast that trigger the subject’s becoming. wearing a crown and characterized as “kingly,” the lion in the lyca poems, however, seems to represent a fairly stable nucleus of power in the group’s hierarchy, and recalls not the pack animal, but what deleuze and guattari classify as the mythical or state animal. state animals, they say, embody arborescence and appear “in the great divine myths, in such a way as to extract from them series or structures, archetypes or models” (plateaus 265). even so, since the lion operates as a mediator between the human and the animal, and invites the girl and her parents into a becoming, it may also function as what deleuze and guattari elsewhere in their study call the “exceptional individual,” which is “a specific animal that draws and occupies the borderline, as leader of the pack,” and which triggers the becoming-animal of the molar subjects outside the pack (plateaus 268, 271). “[w]herever there is multiplicity,” they write, “you will also find an exceptional individual, and it is with this individual that an alliance must be made in order to become-animal” (plateaus 268). it is in its unstable and inconclusive reconciliation between self and other that blake’s sublime most emphatically takes issue with burke’s and kant’s models. while burke’s peter heymans — eating girls 21 sublime animals — such as “the tiger, the panther, or rhinoceros” (60) — immobilized the subject into submissive veneration of patriarchal power, and kant’s sublime concluded with the return of a unitary and re-empowered self, blake’s sublime creates an arena where human and animal continually move in and out of the center without ever settling into fixed identities, or lodging themselves into static hierarchies. the open-ended narrative of the lyca poems underlines how blake’s characters are all engaged in a monstrous becoming-animal that, as deleuze and guattari phrase it, “has neither beginning nor end, departure nor arrival, origin nor destination” (plateaus 323). we should be careful, however, of loading blake’s sublime and deleuze and guattari’s theory of becoming-animal with too much environmentalist freight. though michel foucault hailed anti-oedipus as “a book of ethics” and a practical guide for the “revolutionary militant” (xv), the moral programme that deleuze and guattari formulated there and elsewhere remains — often intentionally — fraught with ambiguity and contradiction. my reading of blake’s lyca poems should have made clear that if deleuze and guattari charge the girl with great revolutionary power, they also reduce her to a sacrificial victim, whose body has to be consumed — sexually or gastronomically — in order to free man and woman from oedipal desire and patriarchal exploitation. interestingly enough, this dubious recuperation of sexual victimization as a form of female empowerment also emerged in the romantic discourses of the beautiful and sublime. aside from animalizing woman, burke’s aesthetic of the beautiful also threatens to animalize and disempower man, who — mesmerized and tongue-tied by woman’s beauty — constantly stands in danger of losing his self-control and becoming a passive object of his own sexual desire. frances ferguson has pointed out that beauty “recurs throughout the enquiry in the form of a seductive and indirect assault on the reason” (51). lacking the self-preservative agenda of the sublime, moreover, the beautiful does not caution us against the danger we find ourselves in: it is an alluring trap in which we are caught obliviously and, as ferguson puts it, “leads us toward death without our awareness” (52). burke, then, unwittingly invests the beautiful with sublime power, enslaving man and forcing him to becomewoman. this menace of the beautiful object becomes clearest when burke describes the physical appeal of the female body: observe that part of a beautiful woman where she is perhaps the most beautiful, about the neck and breasts; the smoothness; the softness; […] the deceitful maze, through which the unsteady eye slides giddily, without knowing where to fix, or whither it is carried. (105) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 22 unable to fixate on a steady point, the male objectifying gaze finds itself rendered rudderless and powerless. inadvertently, woman’s beauty may thus have a sublime effect on man, an effect burke tried to inoculate his theory against by keeping woman at a safe distance and emphasizing that the beautiful should on no account be confused with sexual desire or lust, which involves “violent and tempestuous passions” (83). if for burke sexual desire was something to be feared, sanitized, and oedipalized, blake as well as deleuze and guattari praised it precisely for its destabilizing potential. despite this liberating power of female sexuality, however, it remains morally questionable, at the very least, to interpret the eating of girls and other animals as an experience of female and animal emancipation. so, where does the ecological significance of blake’s sublime and deleuze and guattari’s becoming-animal lie? perhaps we should revisit haraway’s scathing attack on the immorality of becoming-animal. it is surprising that haraway dismisses the ethical working of deleuze and guattari’s theory when, as several critics have signalled, her own cyborg is so closely related to their body without organs.16 both creatures are anti-oedipal (haraway in “a cyborg manifesto”: “the cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family” [151]), they are hybrids (“the cyborg appears in myth precisely where the boundary between human and animal is transgressed” [152]), anti-transcendental (“the transcendent authorization of interpretation is lost, and with it the ontology grounding ‘western’ epistemology” [153]), and both are also the monstrous products of an asexual union (“we require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender” [181]). since the cyborg and the body without organs are so intimately affiliated, i suggest — in what may seem a perverse act of deconstruction — using haraway’s own cyborg to point out the ecological potential of deleuze and guattari’s becoming-animal. the emancipatory potential of the cyborg, haraway believes, resides in its ability to immobilize and transcend dualistic thinking: “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (154). it is difficult here not to be reminded of deleuze and guattari’s becoming-animal or blake’s lyca poems. for blake as for deleuze and guattari, the hybrid body’s sublime resistance to aesthetic and biological representation stakes out a site of organic renewal and social emancipation, a site where the subject is immune to the patriarchal procedures of dualization, centralization, and marginalization. like deleuze and guattari, haraway is aware of the risks involved in this hybrid state. if peter heymans — eating girls 23 becomings also emerge in fascist ideologies and contribute to their rapid metastasization, a cyborg world can similarly announce “the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet, […] the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war” (154). liberation, haraway believes, lies in the ability to inhabit a hybrid perspective on reality and to keep an eye on both the promises and perils of this new cyborg state. “single vision,” she writes, “produces worse illusions than double vision or many-headed monsters” (154). the moral potential of the cyborg, then, resides not in its fragmented ontological reality (which is morally ambiguous), but in the fragmented epistemology or multiple vision it inspires. similarly, deleuze and guattari’s becoming is far from an inherently moral dynamic, but its dogged resistance to identity-thinking and to essentialist concepts of subjectivity presents the opportunity to move beyond phallocentric and anthropocentric notions of ontology and morality. like blake’s poem “the sick rose” — in which a worm penetrates a flower and both form a monstrous and ambiguously sexual alliance — deleuze and guattari’s becoming-animal is about accommodating strange bedfellows and celebrating unusual partnerships. rather than outlining a finished and stable system of ecology, it opens up a much-needed, if speculative and risky, path of escape from conventional conceptions of human-animal relations. notes 1. see, for instance, steve baker’s “what does becoming-animal look like?” (2002), lori brown’s “becoming-animal in the flesh: expanding the ethical reach of deleuze and guattari’s tenth plateau” (2007), james urpeth’s “animal becomings” (2004), and louise economides’s “romantic individualism, animal rights and the challenge of multiplicity” (2007). 2. see lyotard’s lessons on the analytic of the sublime (1991) and žižek’s the sublime object of ideology (1989). for a very accessible yet nuanced historical overview of the sublime and its scholarly interpretations, see philip shaw’s study the sublime (2006), published in the new critical idiom series. 3. see samuel monk (20) in the sublime: a study of critical theories in xviii-century england, and marjorie hope nicolson (29-31) in mountain gloom, mountain glory (1959). “historians and critics,” nicolson stresses, “have done little justice to english genius and originality, so far as the sublime is concerned. almost unanimously they have insisted that the conception of sublimity as it developed in the eighteenth century had its origin in a rhetorical treatise, that it was the result of ideas expressed in the peri hupsous of the pseudo-longinus, as translated and interpreted by boileau in 1674” (29). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 24 4. shaw ascribes burke’s preference for the sublime over the beautiful to three phobias: “the lapse of the extraordinary into ‘custom’; the collapse of masculinity in the face of female languor; and the fall of heroic identity into social mediocrity” (63). 5. deleuze and guattari had in fact already talked about the process of becoming in anti-oedipus (1972), published three years before kafka: toward a minor literature (1975). 6. steve baker (95) already pointed to the anthropocentric tone of this passage in his essay “what does becoming-animal look like?” 7. see deleuze’s kant’s critical philosophy (1963) and especially the section “the relationship between the faculties in the sublime” (50-52). 8. neil hertz points out that “although the moment of blockage might have been rendered as one of utter self-loss, it was, even before its recuperation as sublime exaltation, a confirmation of the unitary status of the self” (53). peter de bolla (6) similarly argues that the romantic sublime typically produced an autonomous human subject. 9. for a discussion of the oedipal characteristics of burke’s aesthetic, see neil hertz (53), ronald paulson (69-70), and thomas weiskel (92-97). 10. for an analysis of the visual designs in the songs and of their importance for the interpretation of the poems, see zachary leader (37-59). 11. all references to blake’s poetry are to the complete poems of william blake (1977). 12. vincent arthur de luca has spotted a burkean sublime in these lines: “not only do the mutants of these visions become ‘terrors,’ sources of astonishment, but, in a grimly ironic fashion, they themselves become subjects of sublime effect. the ‘dishumanizd’ men of the first passage undergo (as serpents) the experience of incorporating the infinite within the self (‘stretchd out enormous length’), or they attain ‘height’” (74). 13. mary and rodney m. baine construe the poems as “journeys into the sexuality of adulthood, of experience” (576). zachary leader (39) points out that lyca’s premature age seems to dismiss a sexual interpretation, but since the designs depict a much older girl, he suggests her age might be merely symbolic. peter heymans — eating girls 25 14. for a discussion of feral children and their implications for evolutionary science, see adriana benzaquén’s encounters with children (2006) and douglas candland’s feral children and clever animals (1995). 15. deleuze and guattari’s interpretation of girlhood as a pre-oedipal and antipatriarchal stage invites comparison with julia kristeva’s “feminine semiotic,” a concept she developed in her study revolution in poetic language (1974). reacting against lacan’s symbolic order, which represents the world and language of the father, kristeva’s semiotic refers to prelinguistic drives or feelings that the child experienced before the oedipal relationship with the father was established. “the semiotic,” anthony elliott clarifies, “is present in the rhythms, slips, and silences in speech; and it is subversive of the law of the father since it is rooted in a pre-patriarchal connection with the feminine” (46). it is not exclusively feminine, however, since it is pre-oedipal and thus precedes sexual difference. 16. in his recent study on ceasing to be human (2011), for instance, gerald bruns closely links the cyborg to the body without organs, underlining mainly their moral relationship: “from a deleuzian standpoint, a cyborg is a ‘line of flight’ that escapes the segmentarity of molar organizations. it is not just a kind of entity (a hybrid) but a body without organs whose desires are mobile, unregulated, and […] capable of multiple forms of satisfaction – in other words, open to experiment. so not surprisingly the cyborg inhabits a ‘zone of indiscernibility’ between human and animal, even to the point of rescuing bestiality from its long-standing residence as a taboo. […] another way to put this would be to say that the cyborg rescues animals from the ‘binary machine’ that opposes them to human beings” (74-75). for a discussion of the relationship between haraway’s cyborg and the sublime, see joseph tabbi’s postmodern sublime (1995). works cited adams, carol j. the sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory. oxford: polity, 1990. baillie, john. “an essay on the sublime.” 1747. the sublime: a reader in british eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. ed. andrew ashfield and peter de bolla. cambridge: cambridge up, 1996. 87-100. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 26 baine, mary r. and rodney m. “blake’s other tigers, and ‘the tyger.’” studies in english literature 1500-1900 15.4 (1975): 563-578. baker, steve. the postmodern animal. london: reaktion, 2000. ―――.“what does becoming-animal look like?” representing animals. ed. nigel rothfels. bloomington: indiana up, 2002. 67-98. benzaquén, adriana s. encounters with children: temptation and disappointment in the study of human nature. montreal: mcgill-queen’s up, 2006. blake, william. the complete poems of william blake. ed. alicia ostriker. harmondsworth: penguin, 1977. brown, lori. “becoming-animal in the flesh: expanding the ethical reach of deleuze and guattari’s tenth plateau.” phaenex 2.2 (2007): 260-278. bruns, gerald l. on ceasing to be human. stanford: stanford up, 2011. burke, edmund. a philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. 1757. oxford: oxford up, 1998. candland, douglas keith. feral children and clever animals: reflections on human nature. oxford: oxford up, 1995. coleridge, samuel taylor. poetical works. ed. j.c.c. mays. 6 vols. the collected works of samuel taylor coleridge. vol. 16. princeton: princeton up, 2000. de bolla, peter. the discourse of the sublime: readings in history, aesthetics and the subject. oxford: blackwell, 1989. deleuze, gilles. francis bacon: the logic of sensation. 1981. trans. daniel w. smith. london: continuum, 2004. ―――. kant’s critical philosophy. 1963. trans. hugh tomlinson and barbara habberjam. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1984. peter heymans — eating girls 27 deleuze, gilles, and félix guattari. capitalism and schizophrenia: anti-oedipus. 1972. trans. robert huxley, mark seem, and helen r. lane. london: continuum, 2004. ―――. capitalism and schizophrenia: a thousand plateaus. 1980. trans. brian massumi. london: continuum, 2004. ―――. kafka: toward a minor literature. 1975. trans. dana polan. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1986. de luca, vincent arthur. words of eternity: blake and the poetics of the sublime. princeton: princeton up, 1991. dennis, john. the grounds of criticism in poetry. 1704. the sublime: a reader in british eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. ed. andrew ashfield and peter de bolla. cambridge: cambridge up, 1996. 35-39. derrida, jacques. “‘eating well,’ or the calculation of the subject: an interview with jacques derrida.” who comes after the subject? ed. eduardo cadava, peter connor and jean-luc nancy. new york: routledge, 1991. 96-119. eagleton, terry. the ideology of the aesthetic. oxford: blackwell, 1990. economides, louise. “romantic individualism, animal rights and the challenge of multiplicity.” rhizomes: cultural studies in emerging knowledge 15 (2007). 1 feb. 2009. <http://www.rhizomes.net/ issue15/economides.html>. elliott, anthony. social theory since freud: traversing social imaginaries. new york: routledge, 2004. evernden, neil. the social creation of nature. baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1992. ferguson, frances. solitude and the sublime: romanticism and the aesthetics of individuation. new york: routledge, 1992. foucault, michel. preface. capitalism and schizophrenia: anti-oedipus. 1972. by gilles deleuze and félix guattari. trans. robert huxley, mark seem and helen r. lane. london: continuum, 2004. xiii-xvi. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 28 freud, sigmund. totem and taboo. 1950. trans. james strachey. new york: routledge, 1999. gleckner, robert. the piper and the bard: a study of william blake. detroit: wayne state up, 1959. haraway, donna j. “a cyborg manifesto: science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century.” 1985. simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. new york: routledge, 1991. 149-181. ―――. when species meet. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2007. hertz, neil. the end of the line: essays on psychoanalysis and the sublime. new york: columbia up, 1985. hitt, christopher. “toward an ecological sublime.” new literary history 30.3 (1999): 603-623. hume, david. a treatise of human nature. 1739-40. harmondsworth: penguin, 1986. jameson, fredric. “pleasure: a political issue.” the ideologies of theory: essays 1971-1986. volume 2: syntax of history. new york: routledge, 1988. 61-74. ―――.“postmodernism and consumer society.” the anti-aesthetic: essays on postmodern culture. ed. hal foster. port townsend: bay p, 1983. 111-125. ―――.postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism. durham: duke up, 1991. kant, immanuel. critique of the power of judgment. 1790. ed. paul guyer. trans. paul guyer and eric matthews. cambridge: cambridge up, 2000. kristeva, julia. revolution in poetic language. 1974. trans. margaret waller. new york: columbia up, 1984. leader, zachary. reading blake’s songs. boston: routledge & kegan paul, 1981. longinus. on the sublime. trans. james a. arieti and john m. crossett. new york: edwin mellen p, 1985. peter heymans — eating girls 29 lyotard, jean-françois. 1991. lessons on the analytic of the sublime. trans. elizabeth rottenberg. stanford: stanford up, 1994. makdisi, saree. william blake and the impossible history of the 1790s. chicago: u of chicago p, 2003. massumi, brian. a user’s guide to capitalism and schizophrenia: deviations from deleuze and guattari. cambridge, mass.: mit, 1992. midgley, mary. beast and man: the roots of human nature. 1979. rev. ed. new york: routledge, 2002. monk, samuel. the sublime: a study of critical theories in xviii-century england. new york: modern language association, 1935. murdoch, iris. the sovereignty of good. new york: routledge, 1970. nicolson, marjorie hope. mountain gloom and mountain glory: the development of the aesthetics of the infinite. 1959. seattle: u of washington p, 1997. paulson, ronald. representations of revolution (1789-1820). new haven: yale up, 1983. reid, thomas. essays on the intellectual powers of man. 1785. the sublime: a reader in british eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. ed. andrew ashfield and peter de bolla. cambridge: cambridge up, 1996. 178-179. shaw, philip. the sublime. new york: routledge, 2006. tabbi, joseph. postmodern sublime: technology and american writing from mailer to cyberpunk. ithaca: cornell up, 1995. tester, keith. animals & society: the humanity of animal rights. new york: routledge, 1991. urpeth, james. “animal becomings.” animal philosophy: essential readings in continental thought. ed. matthew calarco and peter atterton. london: continuum, 2004. 101-110 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 30 usher, james. clio; or, a discourse on taste. 1769. the sublime: a reader in british eighteenth-century aesthetic theory. ed. andrew ashfield and peter de bolla. cambridge: cambridge up, 1996. 147-156. weiskel, portia williams. “a personal introduction.” the romantic sublime: studies in the structure and psychology of transcendence. by thomas weiskel. baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1976. xii-xv. weiskel, thomas. the romantic sublime: studies in the structure and psychology of transcendence. baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1976. wollstonecraft, mary. a vindication of the rights of woman. 1792. ed. miriam brody. london: penguin, 1992. žižek, slavoj. the sublime object of ideology. london: verso, 1989. microsoft word steinberg-rudy pdf dummy.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:2 gary steiner kathy rudy's feel-good ethics kathy rudy, loving animals. toward a new animal advocacy. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2011. 288 pp. $ 24.95 hc. i was watching an episode of jeopardy a couple of months ago in which, during the postadvertisement banter with the host, a contestant who identified herself as a veterinary student said something to the effect that she “loves animals! some of them i love to pet, and some of them i love to eat!” given the evangelical tone of her recent book loving animals: toward a new animal advocacy, one might be excused for supposing that kathy rudy pushes for something fundamentally different than the sentiments expressed by that jeopardy contestant. and yet by the end of the book, one finds no meaningful difference between the two. indeed, one finds in rudy's book a conspicuous example of what martha nussbaum once called a troubling “self-serving inconsistency” in our judgments about the moral status of animals and what gary francione has characterized as our "moral schizophrenia" regarding animals.1 rudy's aim in loving animals is to “undertake and attend to significant emotional shifts concerning animals for animal rights to become a more mainstream movement”; this requires a “step back from the rational principles employed by many animal advocacy philosophies to examine the emotional and spiritual connections that, for many, produced the desire for change in the first place” (x). rather than proceeding from abstract rational reflections and the endeavor to articulate determinate principles governing our relationships to animals, we need “a more sophisticated understanding of the role of affect and emotion in the building of a contemporary animal advocacy movement” (xiii). rudy hastens to note that this does not mean that reason should be sacrificed to emotion altogether. she acknowledges that “reason and emotion are inextricably intertwined” (xvi), and she correctly observes that “focusing entirely on emotion can quickly lead us to an impoverished sentimentality” (xvii). but instead of exploring the relationship between reason and emotion and considering the proper role of reason in moral reflection, rudy develops a central argument that exhibits its own kind of impoverished sentimentality ― one according to which husbanding, killing, eating, experimenting on, and perhaps even wearing animals is completely permissible, provided that we “love” them. gary steiner — kathy rudy’s feelgood ethics 131 the inner logic of rudy's position is largely obscured by her proclamations, found on virtually every page, of profound love for animals. that logic proceeds from the proposition that because the lives of human beings and non-human animals are inextricably intertwined, it is unrealistic to pursue courses of action that would seek to separate the two. following donna haraway, rudy suggests that “human and nonhuman animals are enmeshed in a world that requires sacrifice on both parts.... [s]uch interconnection, even when it requires suffering, is sacred" (xix). this appeal to the sanctity of sacrifice loses its initial plausibility once it becomes clear that the only beings called upon in rudy's world to make any real sacrifices are non-human animals. apart from stories such as one about rudy sitting in her car crying for hours when she had to find a new home for one of her dogs, or one about how the local farmers from whom rudy obtains meat feel so very bad when they take their animals to the slaughterhouse, there is little if anything in this book that shows any recognition of or commitment to the prospect of human sacrifice on behalf of non-human animals. for example, rudy argues that, “given the shrinking space of the undeveloped ‘wild’ world, those animals that can learn to live in connection with humans may have the best chance for survival” (112). in other words, rather than stand idly by and let wild animals become extinct as human beings expand their dominion over the natural world, we ought to let private individuals keep wild animals such as lions and tigers in humane sanctuaries. to the objection that this kind of confinement would be a gross infringement on the liberty of wild animals, rudy responds that the only relevant considerations are whether the animals are happy and whether they seem to be leading “fulfilled lives” (118). after all, rudy visited a big-cat sanctuary and saw a group of lions playing with pumpkins (113). they were happy and fulfilled! rudy never considers whether this is a rather myopic perspective on the situation in which those lions found themselves ― one can imagine human convicts playing football on a prison yard and an unsophisticated observer remarking that the prisoners appear to be having a rousing good time. nor does rudy even once consider the possibility that we human beings could endeavor to curtail our encroachments upon wild spaces, in order to leave wild animals what little dignity they may still be able to enjoy. indeed her pragmatic orientation prevents her from doing so. she states continually in the book that radical approaches to the moral status of animals will never succeed; for example, “veganism is a radical lifestyle change that most of society will never embrace” (104). thus rudy would presumably say that it is unrealistic to expect human beings to make the enormous humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 132 sacrifices that would be entailed by a call to preserve existing wild spaces. but if this is the case, then why should we suppose that human beings would be willing to make any of the large sacrifices that would be called for by her ethic of loving animals? rudy never resolves this tension between resigned pragmatism and idealistic sentimentality in loving animals. instead she pushes for a set of highly anthropocentric conclusions about the proper treatment of animals that share a great deal with the welfarist and utilitarian positions that she purports to find deficient. rudy pushes for her conclusions by rejecting abolitionism and the analogy that many abolitionists (myself included) draw between animal husbandry and slavery. abolitionism mistakenly assumes that animals “are a kind of self-determined nonhuman subject that can operate in the world uncoerced by culture, the state, needs, desires, identity, commitments, or the necessities of everyday life” (5). but many human beings, rudy observes, do not possess this kind of freedom; a fortiori it makes no sense to attribute it to non-human animals. rather than seeking an ideal of total animal liberation from influence by human beings, we ought to recognize that domestication is a bargain made by some animals with human beings whereby animals sacrifice “some of their freedoms” in exchange for “food, shelter, belonging, and love” (5). this gross mischaracterization of abolitionism is vital to rudy's endeavor to argue for the permissibility of practices such as meat eating. abolitionism expresses no necessary commitments regarding the kind of freedom animals possess, nor does it suppose that animals could ever live completely free of human interference ― any more than liberal political theory, in proclaiming that human citizens have a fundamental right not to be interfered with by other citizens in the exercise of their freedom, supposes that no citizen will in fact ever be interfered with. what abolitionism argues is that animals possess the capacity for self-determination and have the right not to be interfered with in the conduct of their lives. abolitionism never denies that different subjects are involved in mutual relationships with other subjects. what it does deny is that human subjects enjoy the prerogative to decide what is and is not in the interests of non-human animals, particularly when these decisions invariably cater to the desire of human beings to eat, wear, experiment upon, and otherwise use animals. nowhere is the desire to rationalize human prerogatives more evident in loving animals than in rudy's defense of meat eating. having rejected abolitionism on the unargued and extraordinarily dubious grounds that it would lead to the complete extinction of non-human animals (5f., 8, 192), rudy makes the following claims: that the push for veganism is “part of what keeps rescuers from embracing a broader advocacy agenda” gary steiner — kathy rudy’s feelgood ethics 133 (61); that a strict vegan agenda ignores “the millions of americans now seeking a better relationship with both earth and animals” (74); that the rightist appeal to inherent worth is “highly subjective” (99); and that “animals who have a happy, drug-free, and relatively long life can be ethically consumed, along with their products like eggs and milk, as long as those are harvested morally as well” (75). rudy attempts to support this last claim by attributing to non-human animals a desire to sacrifice themselves for our gustatory pleasure: “farm animals pay their dues in life with their products and flesh, but they would rather have lived and loved and played in the sun and the dirt and the rain, than not to be born at all” (99). the animals we slaughter for our meals “would want to pay us back for all the love we had given them in their lives” (77). i'm not quite as sure about all this as rudy is. josephine donovan once suggested that “we should not kill, eat, torture, and exploit animals because they do not want to be so treated, and we know that. if we listen, we can hear them.”2 here it becomes clear why rudy is at pains to deny the analogy to slavery: if she acknowledges that husbandry is an encroachment on the freedom of animals comparable to the encroachment on human freedom constituted by slavery, she cannot make it look as if animals are clearly better off in conditions of subjection to human control. in this connection richard sorabji wonders whether a group of slaves would clearly be better off being maintained as slaves, if the alternative would be that “the enslaved race would dwindle.”3 nobody can honestly purport to know what decision an animal would make if faced with the choice between existing to be killed for human enjoyment and not existing at all; nor should we rush to assume, as rudy does, that all animals would make the same decision, namely to sacrifice themselves for human beings. my own position on the matter is that, in light of the fact that the vast majority of human beings have a pronounced interest in a certain outcome ― consider the “millions of americans,” rudy included, who are determined to eat meat and consume other animal products ― we ought to proceed from the assumption that the animals in the equation do not want to be sacrificed. “rather than positing a rebuttable claim in favor of humans in cases of conflict with animals, we really ought to take as axiomatic a rebuttable presumption in favor of animals.”4 such a presumption is intended to protect animals from the selfserving inconsistency and moral schizophrenia that characterize not only existing human-animal relations but also the world according to kathy rudy, who claims that “the question of whether it’s ethical to kill animal for meat still haunts” her (95), but whose moral misgivings disappear altogether when she is overcome by the “fantastic” taste of the locally farmed meat she loves to eat (82). rudy, who continually appeals to the revelatory power of narrative in helping us get our moral bearings, seeks to bolster humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 134 her claims about the appropriateness of eating animal products by telling the sad story of her own year-long attempt to live as a vegan, a year during which by her own account she ate a steady diet of highly-processed vegan junk food, as if the only choices faced by human beings were vegan snack food or meat (75ff.). in passages such as this, if only against her own intention, rudy shows narrative to have as many dangers as virtues. she also invokes the old saw that “some people need some amount of animal protein to thrive” and the feeble claim that veganism “lets people off the hook for all the other ways we oppress animals” (105). if only it did. rudy offers a comparable rationale for practices such as animal experimentation (157, 170f.), hunting (194f.), and the confinement of wild animals (151): that it is better for animals to exist and be “sacrificed” for the sake of human beings than not to exist at all, and that animals want to make this sacrifice for us. rudy advances this logic against the background of a worldview according to which humans and animals are inextricably involved with one another in such a way that sacrifices on both sides are necessary. but rudy says precious little about the sacrifices that human beings ought to make. i have noted already that she never considers the possibility that human beings ought to endeavor to lessen their impact on the natural world; instead, rudy requires animals to accommodate themselves to our desires and (supposed) needs, as when she states that only those wild animals that could learn to live subject to domestication stand a chance of surviving in a world in which human beings are the dominant species (151). nowhere does rudy express any concern for the many animals that could or would not accommodate themselves to human beings. (by the same token, she never confronts the manifest contradiction between eating animals such as chickens and pigs, which she seems to love to eat, and the abhorrence with which she would presumably receive the recommendation that she eat her beloved pet dogs once they have lived a “sufficient” amount of time.) more importantly, nowhere does she suggest that human beings should learn to live in accordance with non-human animals’ ways of being; she continually frames the problem as one of animals having to accommodate themselves to humans, which leaves me wondering exactly what sort of mutuality and reciprocity rudy ultimately has in mind. are we human beings required to make any real sacrifices on behalf of animals? apparently we are not: we still get to eat animals, have them as pets, experiment on them, hunt them, in fact do pretty much everything we were doing to them before, provided that we do so “with love.” and we may be glibly assured that this is all just fine with animals who, very conveniently for us, cannot register their disapproval in any manner that a typical human being would be forced to recognize to be disapproval. gary steiner — kathy rudy’s feelgood ethics 135 rudy's brand of morality is what i call “feel-good ethics, ethical commitments and sensibilities that permit us to express general abhorrence at the treatment of oppressed groups such as animals but do not push us out of our comfort zones by requiring us to take concrete steps to ameliorate the oppression that we so abhor.”5 rudy, for her own part, maintains that by appealing to feeling rather than to cold rationality she is articulating an ethical view that does better justice to animals. “affect,” she believes, “begins not with an abstract commitment to a philosophical principle, but with love for and connection to other beings.... there [is] no way principles ... would work in resolving our conflicts. life is too complicated and sometimes you have to put your principles aside to do what is right” (214). notwithstanding her passing suggestion that reason and affect must mutually inform one another (215), kathy rudy has put reason and principles aside. but i am not convinced that she has done so in order to do what is right. notes 1. martha c. nussbaum. "animal rights: the need for a theoretical basis" (review discussion of steven m. wise, rattling the cage: toward legal rights for animals). harvard law review 114 (2001): 1548; gary l. francione. introduction to animal rights: your child or the dog? (philadelphia: temple up, 2000). ch. 1. 2. josephine donovan. "animal rights and feminist theory." signs: journal of women in culture and society. 15.2 (winter, 1990). 375. 3. richard sorabji. animal minds and human morals: the origins of the western debate (ithaca: cornell up, 1993). 215f. 4. gary steiner. animals and the moral community: mental life, moral status, and kinship (new york: columbia up, 2008). 109. 5. gary steiner. animals and the limits of postmodernism (new york: columbia up, 2012, forthcoming). microsoft word gordon-wolf pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 4:2 joan gordon wolf in chic clothing garry marvin, wolf. animal series. london: reaktion, 2012. 199 pp. $19.99 pbk. distr. by u. of chicago p. this is the last volume thus far, alphabetically at least, of reaktion’s handsome series of volumes on the evolutionary, sociological, cultural, and artistic histories of individual species (the first, alphabetically, is ant, and we await zebra — we can hope that aardvark, too, is in the offing). the series was conceived by its editor john burt as a sort of collection of rough guides to animals rather than places, covering ”natural historyslash-evolutionary history at the beginning of the volume, then the cultural history later on” (burt qtd. in banks). like the rough guides, these books are meant to appeal to a wide variety of people, to both experts and casual tourists. and like every other volume in the series, wolf is just 190 by 135 mm (or about 7 ½ by 5 ½ inches) in size, around 200 pages long, with approximately 100 illustrations in both black and white and color sprinkled throughout. every volume’s cover has a similar layout, including a slash of color for the top third of the cover and the remainder in sophisticated black (although the slash of color in this case is silver). it would be very tempting to subscribe to the whole series, in order to admire their mass presence on a bookshelf (although, even with the 25 per cent discount for doing so, that would come to close to $800, so perhaps not). i have only two: the volume under consideration and dog by susan mchugh (2004). i wouldn’t mind owning boria sax’s crow (2004) or maybe writing hippopotamus. wolf, after a brief introduction, consists of five developed chapters: ”canis lupus,” a brief evolutionary and ethological introduction to the species; ”lupophobia,” an historical and cultural overview of the wolf as hated predator; ”lupicide,” about the destruction of wolves; ”lupophilia,” about more positive views of wolves; and ”rewilding,” about their reintroduction into their former habitats. these chapters are followed by a timeline, references, a bibliography, and a list of relevant associations and websites. the volume ends with a modest index. as the introduction notes, ”the wolf of this book is largely the wolf of western cultures and western imaginings and representations” (10). the organization by attitudes works surprisingly well and sorts out, to some extent, to a chronological story of the wolf’s position in human culture. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 138 ”canis lupus” begins by discussing the emergence of the species from cynodictis to cynodesmus to tomarctus to the divergent evolutionary paths of wolves and foxes and, by the late pliocene, forms of canis, and ”emergent wolf species” (13). the chapter discusses relative sizes of these species as a way to differentiate them. while the chapter is profusely illustrated, it does not include an illustration of the relative sizes and appearance of these animals, as i remember seeing in the american museum of natural history. this is the first of several moments in the book where the illustrations did not advance or relate to the discussions. this chapter also exhibits another block to its acceptance by a wide range of readers. the style is quite dry, employing the kind of technical language that, as eileen crist usefully points out, treats the animal as an object, so that its behavior is described ”as something that happens to an animal, rather than an active accomplishment” (5). crist differentiates this from ”the ordinary language of action” which ”is oriented toward the behavior’s intrinsic meaning, including the subjective experience in (and of) the world that the behavior expresses and embodies” (4). ”objective” technical language mirrors the careful avoidance of anthropomorphism of scientific discourse, and marvin is very careful in that regard. but technical language is also very stiff. we see the struggle in the following passage: having only one breeding pair, with the more mature taking care of the less mature, might be interpreted as a form of individual and communal altruism for the benefit of all. however, young adults may possibly also gain from the experience of caring for young pups when they later mate and become parents. (22-23) passive voice, emotionally flat language, cautious qualifications, technical rather than anthropomorphic terms, make for a slow slog of a read that will not appeal to a wide audience. i understand that the author is trying to avoid any kind of anthropomorphism, but not all anthropomorphism is sloppy sentimentality; some of it is valuable comparison by analogy, as frans de waal and other ethologists have pointed out. a careful deployment of the livelier ”language of action” such as de waal, boria sax, and other popularizers of ethology have used to great effect, would lend this volume more appeal without sacrificing its integrity. nevertheless, the chapter makes a number of fine points. its discussion of howling and its various functions and modalities, recognizing how ”wolves live in a multi-sensory social world in which members of the pack organize their lives through complex philip armstrong – beyond the great rupture 139 signalling,” was fascinating (27). the consideration of the structures of wolf packs dismantles cesar milan’s facile ”alpha male” training model by suggesting instead that ”conflicts within the pack” can be seen ”as the result of intra-family squabbles rather than as struggles for power” (33). note that in these two quoted passages, the writing is also livelier, closer to naturalists’ ”language of action” than to scientists’ technical language. indeed, they demonstrate a constructive and responsible level of anthropomorphism. ”lupophobia” is the first chapter to add cultural history to the mix and begins with an evocation of angela carter’s superb ”the company of wolves” (1984). marvin goes on to compare the attitudes toward wolves of nomadic herders who regard wolves ”as simply doing something natural” (37) and of pastoralists, for whom ”wolves became unwanted, often feared, intruders into human affairs” (36). the pictures accompanying this section, from goya and doré to religious manuscripts and illustrations for aesop’s fables, are wonderful. next, marvin explores lycanthropy, which he usually calls, awkwardly,”werewolfery.” in both cases, however, the emphasis is on description rather than analysis, so that the significance of these portrayals of wolves, their social, religious, and symbolic implications, are diminished or missed. as the chapter segues to little red riding hood and ends with the nazi identification with wolves, such implications could have offered a very rich discussion. ”lupicide” traces the growing determination in both europe and north america to systematically destroy the wolf population from charlemagne in 812 until the recognition in 1973 in the us of the wolf as an endangered species. the descriptions of the trapping of wolves in the american west are especially powerful; marvin draws parallels between the attitudes of the hunters toward the wolves and those toward famous human outlaws. neither here, nor in the previous chapter, is the other parallel drawn between the eradication of wolves and similar projects to eradicate ”undesirable” or ”dangerous” human populations, but it is difficult not to make the connection. the illustrations for this chapter do not always seem relevant to the subjects being discussed. why, for instance, is there a photo of scientists at the bureau of biological science studying a variety of animal skulls, including, one assumes, those of wolves? ”lupophilia” describes more sympathetic views of wolves, beginning with those of native americans for whom ”there was no notion of wilderness as either a physical or cultural environment set apart from humans into which they ventured as into alien humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 140 space” (122). next, marvin considers stories of children raised by wolves, both mythical and historical, and includes some lovely pictures of romulus and remus and the benigna lupa. again, there is less analysis and more description than one would like. the chapter also discusses the role of symbolic wolves in the boy scouts and the growing respect for wilderness in the us toward the end of the nineteenth century. marvin relates aldo leopold’s conversion to the cause of the wolf after he kills a pack of wolves in a moving section (143-144) and follows that with a fairly scathing description of farley mowat’s never cry wolf (1963) as ”anthropomorphic soap opera” (145). he contrasts this with what he sees as a more realistic treatment in jean craighead george’s 1972 children’s book, julie of the wolves. the chapter continues with discussions of clarissa pinkola estés’s popular psychology text, women who run with wolves (1992), the movie dances with wolves (1990), and prokofiev’s peter and the wolf (1936). the illustrations for this chapter are equally eclectic (or perhaps haphazard?), including two cheesy ”new age” postcards. the final chapter,”rewilding,” cannot, of course, acknowledge the very recent resumption of wolf hunting in the us. instead, it offers the more cheerful subject of the ”natural recolonization or repopulation by wolves and their deliberate reintroduction in areas from which they had previously been eradicated” (172). this very brief chapter offers more arguments against their rewilding than it does for, and neglects to connect the attitudes toward their reappearance with similar attitudes toward human migrations, but it does have an interesting paragraph on japan’s attitude ”in terms of a symbolic process of atonement for the sins of the destruction of wild environments” (179). the subject of rewilding is a rich one that i would have liked to see more fully developed. i am sure that many of my reservations about the volume are connected to the restrictions of the series, and, in spite of the rather stiff prose and lack of analysis, i found it a useful introduction to a creature who is, in western eyes, a combination of the folkloric, the historical, and the familiar. when we think of the wolf, we cannot help but associate her with the big bad wolf, the settling of the american west, and the dog in our living room. i am happy to have this chic volume on my shelf and will certainly consult its useful perceptions as well as the bibliography, timeline, and list of websites. philip armstrong – beyond the great rupture 141 works cited banks, eric. ”animals reconsidered.” the chronicle review: the chronicle of higher education. 18 oct. 2009. web. 29 dec. 2012. crist, eileen. images of animals: anthropomorphism and animal mind. philadelphia: temple up, 1999. microsoft word baynes-rock h u m a n i m a l i a 7:1 marcus baynes-rock converging on ancient bones: a review of the evidence for the close relatedness of humans (homo sapiens) and spotted hyenas (crocuta crocuta) introduction. spotted hyenas — africa’s second largest of carnivores — are adaptable, highly social creatures living in fission-fusion groups of between five and ninety individuals (holekamp). group members adhere to a strict social hierarchy in which females are dominant and cubs inherit social ranks just below those of their mothers. on maturity, males normally disperse and join nearby groups where they acquire the lowest rank (east and hofer). in many ways hyenas are like humans to the extent that they have earned the (dubiously anthropocentric) title of “honorary primate[s]” (despret 360). they are highly intelligent and adept at cooperative problem solving, flexible with regard to the landscapes they occupy, have a rich vocabulary of sounds with which they communicate, adhere to dominance hierarchies, and enjoy eating meat (holekamp, sakai and lundrigan; theis et al.; drea and carter). ironically it is this likeness to humans that brottman (114) argues underpins the projection onto hyenas of the worst of human attributes. to say that hyenas have a bad reputation needs little qualification. from the time of aristotle, hyenas have been historically vilified and with a few exceptions are loathed across the african continent and beyond (glickman; baynes-rock). hyenas evoke strong reactions in humans, and as anyone who has studied hyenas knows, humans elicit strong reactions from hyenas. nevertheless, these two species are usually studied separately. until recently, studies of free ranging spotted hyenas have primarily been undertaken in national parks, national reserves, and conservation areas where there has been a limited human presence. few have been conducted in non-protected areas where hyenas and humans co-occupy the landscape (see for example abay et al.; yirga & bauer). indeed, of the twenty hyena study areas listed in holekamp and dloniak, all but three are national parks, national reserves, conservation areas, or game reserves. while some of these studies examine hyenas’ responses to tourism and pastoralist encroachment (see for example boydston et al.; kolowski & holekamp; kolowski et al.), those that are concerned with hyenas “natural” behaviors neglect to include humans. scientists note that gregariousness and vigilance in hyenas evolved as adaptations to the need to defend resources against competitors, but these hypothesized competitors only include lions and other carnivora as effectors in hyena evolution (see for example smith et al., “social and ecological determinants” 631). meanwhile, humans are only humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 2 discussed where hyenas are argued to be their analogues in the evolution of social intelligence (smith et al., “evolutionary forces” 298; holekamp, sakai and lundrigan 545; but see pangle and holekamp 264). while the studies themselves do not abnormalize the co-occurrence of humans and hyenas, i argue that their chosen locations reflect conceptions of hyenas “natural” ecologies as being exclusive of humans. as i will show below, such conceptions disregard not only the influence of humans and hyenas on each other’s evolutionary histories, but the place of humans in so-called “natural” processes (evernden 35). daniel gade’s account of historical relations between humans and spotted hyenas in the horn of africa challenges such conceptions. in his paper, gade describes how the persistence of hyenas in the region is a “vestige” of an ancient relationship in which both humans and hyenas changed and adapted to the presence of the other (625). he offers a bio-cultural framework for better understanding the ongoing patterns of “predation, competition and complementarity” in the horn. accordingly, “nature” and “history” meld together so that the present is but a window looking into an ongoing ecological process that began millions of years ago when humans and hyenas first crossed paths on the african savannah. here i review the archaeological evidence for these processes which in light of gade’s thesis demonstrate how the similarities between humans and hyenas are not coincidental. rather these reflect a relatedness to hyenas that is integral to the human condition and vice versa. evidence digested. as far back in human evolutionary history as evidence permits us to see, the presence of hyenas in ancestral human landscapes is always implied, if not positively attested to by their bones and teeth marks. the story of this relationship begins on the african continent around 4.4 million years ago. at a place now known as aramis, in the middle awash in ethiopia, ancient antelopes and rhinoceroses grazed alongside old world monkeys who had descended from scattered trees to find food. remains of six individual ardipithecines indicate that ancient hominins were there as well, alternating between frugivorous predictability in the trees and omnivorous opportunity at ground level in a mosaic environment of grasses, scattered trees, and stands of forest (suwa et al.; white et al. “macroverterbrate paleontology” 89). so too were hyenas present. in fact almost all of the remains of the ardipithecines from that place and time have been heavily “ravaged by hyenas, most likely crocuta dietrichi, the precursors to modern spotted hyenas (louchart et al. 66). the most famous fossilized ardipithecine, known as “ardi,” came from aramis and her remarkable state of preservation is due inversely to hyenas, as it is they who crunched, digested, and scattered so much of the other evidence in that locality. ardi died in a ____________________________________________________________________ marcus baynes-rock – “converging on ancient bones” 3 swale and was quickly buried before her remains were trampled by hippos. she escaped the local hyenas’ jaws and powerful digestive juices to return to the surface 4.4 million years later to inform palaeoanthropologists of the nature of her species (white et al., “macroverterbrate paleontology” 78). prior to the discovery of ardi, the only evidence for ardipithecus’ existence was a collection of undigested teeth, a basicranium fragment, and some shattered, gnawed arm-bone elements (white, suwa and asfaw 308). it is that destructive capacity of ancient hyenas that has made palaeoanthropology the treasure hunt that it is (kruuk, hunter and hunted 104), making a find like ardi, with postcranial skeleton uneaten, so rare as to make her and her discoverers famous. if not for hyenas, there would have been hundreds of such specimens bequeathed to us, bleached by the sun and buried beneath years of sediment to be unearthed later with the help of tectonic processes of the rift valley. if not for hyenas, ardi would have been just another near-complete ardipithecine. half a million years later and 800 kilometers southwest of aramis, in the turkana basin, hominins of another species lived and died on a plain beside a river channel. those prehumans were individuals of the species australopithecus anamensis who comingled with bush-pigs, monkeys, and hippos in their food quest (schoeninger, reeser and hallin 203). as with the ardipithecines, the remains of the individuals from the turkana basin have been thoroughly modified; all from kanapoi and several from allia bay were “ravaged” by carnivores, so all that remains are some teeth and long bone ends (coffing et al. 58; leakey, m. g. et al., “new specimens and confirmation” 65; ward, leakey, m. & walker 198). unsurprisingly, there were hyenas there, too; members of an indeterminate species who were the most common carnivores in the fossil assemblages (leakey, m. g. et al., “new four-million-year-old hominid species” 571). later still, 3.6 million years ago, at a place now known as laetoli in tanzania, a volcano now extinct was belching ash into the air above an ancient landscape that was not dissimilar from that of the present. the ash fell with rain and filled wide depressions in the ground surface, creating beds of light grey mud, across one of which three hominins ventured onto the plains from the woods to the south. there were three individuals, a male, a female and a juvenile — the earliest known nuclear family —, and their footprints became incontrovertible evidence of the bipedality of their species. the sodden ash crystallized and cemented quickly in the heat of the sun. then, soon afterwards, another layer of sodden ash filled the depressions, miraculously preserving the moment in time for palaeontologists to discover millions of years later (leakey, m. d. and hay 318). and among the other animals whose footprints were preserved at humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 4 laetoli were the ubiquitous hyenas. a musukuma tracker employed to identify the species represented in the numerous animal footprints that criss-crossed the ancient cement identified eight trails made by hyenas (320). the respective hyenas walked, loped, and cantered their way across the cement; one of them leaving prints averaging 125mm x 102mm (length x breadth). that was a large hyena, as large as a modern crocuta, the ancient species of which was one of the five hyaenid species recorded at laetoli (barry 240). it may not have been proof of competition or conflict, but it was incontrovertible proof of coexistence, early in human evolutionary history. that was the time of the emergence of spotted hyenas (turner 256). while designated the same genus, crocuta, those ancient hyenas were not identical to those of the genus that are extant in africa today. the bone cracking and carcass lifting adaptations of modern spotted hyenas evolved at different times in their history, and the suite of adaptations that define spotted hyenas as they are known today only evolved one million years ago (lewis and werdelin 93). however, early spotted hyenas were sufficiently adaptable to have been able to disperse into asia during the late pliocene (rohland et al. 2435). it is difficult to determine the relationship between hominins and spotted hyenas early on in our history of coexistence, not least because it is difficult to determine the adaptive niches of each species. but assuming that spotted hyenas hunted, then a ground dwelling bipedal primate would have been likely prey, as humans are to this day in africa (kruuk, hunter and hunted 65). whether the australopithecines were in competition with the hyenas is less determinate as they left no evidence that they were exploiting carcasses (although see mcpherron et al.). it was their descendants who would leave substantial evidence of a crossing over into the adaptive niches of hyenas. contested bones. at around 2.4 million years ago, there emerged the first creatures in the human evolutionary line to be regarded — or at least named — as human: homo habilis. if ever there were hominins whose adaptive niches had such a great degree of overlap with those of hyenas, it was homo habilis. louis and mary leakey first discovered these hominins’ fossils in olduvai gorge, tanzania, and gave them their specific name because of the material remains in association with which they had been found (leakey, tobias, napier 9). the name means “handy man,” and the material remains were stone tools: cobbles that had been struck with other stones to produce flakes with which the hominins cut flesh and tendons from the remains of dead ungulates, while the cobbles themselves were used to smash open long bones so that the fatty marrow could be removed. much has been extrapolated from those few bones, cobbles, and flakes, as numerous models of adaptation and resource acquisition have ____________________________________________________________________ marcus baynes-rock – “converging on ancient bones” 5 emerged and been contested. yet all have had to include the presence and influence of hyenas. during the 1970s and 80s, there was considerable debate in palaeoanthropological circles about the importance of scavenging as a human adaptation and what it revealed about homo habilis’s ecological niches. initially, glynn isaac interpreted accumulations of bones and artefacts from olduvai gorge and koobi fora, kenya, as evidence for scavenging of body parts from kills or natural deaths and transportation of those parts to home bases where they were shared with other group members (isaac 532). the scavenging hypothesis was born. in 1980, bunn (575) examined the assemblages, finding cut marks and fractures which were consistent with isaac’s supposition that meat consumption was important at that stage of human evolution; however, he noted that the mode of acquisition remained uncertain. according to bunn (576), there was a complex interplay of hominin carnivore activities involved in the bone accumulations, and it was not possible to rule out hunting. using a scanning electron microscope, potts and shipman identified one assemblage from olduvai (flk zinjanthropus) that contained bones bearing carnivore tooth marks overlain with cut marks from stone tools (shipman, “ancestors” 24). shipman argued that the hominins were opportunistically scavenging bones from large carnivores, not for meat, but for tendons which were utilised for binding items (“early hominid lifestyle: hunting and gathering or foraging and scavenging?” 36; “early hominid lifestyle: the scavenging hypothesis” 9). however, shipman concurred with isaac and proposed that scavenging was an adaptive complex integral to the evolution of bipedalism and tool-use (“ancestors” 26). lewis binford entered into the debate, questioning whether the “tiny morsels of dried or desiccated meat” from the scavenged bones were sufficient to foster an adaptive complex (binford 302). yet bunn and kroll (439), having compared the flk zinjanthropus assemblage with modern hyena dens, directly contradicted binford’s findings and argued that hominins had full access to meaty carcasses from confrontational scavenging; the confrontation being primarily with hyenas. the debate over the circumstances that had led to the formation of the bone assemblages led to a series of actualistic studies over a period of fifteen years. several researchers attempted to replicate as closely as possible the conditions in which the bones had accumulated, and all of the studies involved hyenas. between august 1983 and june 1984 robert blumenschine of rutgers university conducted research in serengeti national park and ngorongoro crater to assess which scavenging opportunities and strategies might have accounted for the abovementioned humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 6 assemblages. blumenschine concluded that the only alternative to confrontation with, and risk of predation by, spotted hyenas was to scavenge from natural deaths in riparian woodland (blumenschine 388). furthermore, blumenschine and cavallo (76) proposed that hominins supplanted some hyena species, which led to those species’ extinctions at the end of the pliocene. binford, mills and stone conducted field experiments to determine the effects of hyena activity on bone assemblages similar to those found at olduvai and koobi fora. they noted that the ways in which hyenas scattered bones indicated that hominins at olduvai were accumulating bones scavenged from hyenas (binford, mills and stone 132 ). gary tunnell spent five and a half months patrolling an area around olare orok stream in the masai mara in 1984. he found that lions killing more than they could consume provided numerous passive scavenging opportunities, but those were constrained by the presence of hyenas (tunnell 117). the author concluded that familiarity with the local lion pride would have paid dividends for hominins; however, the presence of hyenas as competitors and predators on the hominins themselves would have been a “major problem” in habitat selection (122). marie selvaggio (“carnivore tooth marks and stone tool butchery” 217) drove around the serengeti and ngorongoro areas, locating carnivore kills and measuring the amount of food available after the carnivores had abandoned the carcasses. she found that without confrontational scavenging, the only resource available to hominins was marrow, which could be accessed with hammer stones (227). selvaggio’s findings (“evidence for a three-stage sequence” 200) contradict those of binford, mills and stone, and suggest a three stage carnivore-hominin-carnivore feeding sequence whereby hyenas were scavenging from hominins. in all of the above studies, there was a trend towards viewing human ancestors and hyenas as being in direct competition over the same resources. brantingham (327, 329) saw such models as problematic, arguing that co-evolution of different species in competition over the same resources inevitably led to “character displacement,” in which sympatric species’ morphological or behavioral traits diverged. he compared olduvai and koobi fora assemblages with modern carnivore assemblages and argued that hominin feeding strategies were not directly comparable to those of spotted hyenas, but intermediate between modern wolves and modern hyenas (343). however, brantingham qualified that, recognizing that the bones from the olduvai level flknn2 (an accepted hyena accumulation) fell within the range of hominin food transport strategies. indeed, hominins might have been utilizing food procurement and transport strategies that differentiated them from modern spotted hyenas, but the same may have been the case for the ancestral hyenas with whom they were competing. after all the physiological adaptations that are definitive of modern spotted hyenas, including post ____________________________________________________________________ marcus baynes-rock – “converging on ancient bones” 7 cranial morphologies that allow them to pursue prey over long distances, have only been present in the species for the past one million years (lewis and werdelin 93; lansing et al 305). hyenas have never been trapped in a timeless present, but have changed and adapted to the presence of some very dangerous hominins, who in turn had to adapt to the presence of hyenas. beyond the studies focused on the composition of the bone assemblages, further studies examined modifications to the bones themselves. selvaggio and wilder used casts to measure tooth marks left by carnivores on the surfaces of the fossil bones in the sample from flk zinjanthropus. they concluded that the bones were first modified by flesh eating felids, then by hominins, and then hyaenids who accessed any grease or tissues remaining (selvaggio and wilder 468). however, they did not make it clear how this feeding model was arrived at, other than that there were multiple carnivore taxa involved. dominguez-rodrigo and piqueras (1387) challenged selvaggio and wilder’s findings, arguing that tooth pits alone could only be used to differentiate large from small taxa and not individual species. they compared length and breadth ratios of different species to demonstrate that there were not sufficient differences to be able to identify species in the archaeological record. they conducted yet another actualistic study in africa and found that little flesh remained after lions had first access to carcasses. additionally, the study found that carcasses found in riparian woodland provided less flesh than those found in open country, directly contradicting blumenschine’s findings. dominiguez-rodrigo concluded that hominins must have had had first access to carcasses in a two stage sequence in which hominins preceded hyenas (43). more recently dominiquez-rodrigo and barba argued (188) that pits which were originally considered to be carnivore tooth marks were in fact evidence of bioerosion and that the only evidence for carnivore action is the absence of cancellous bone, consumed by hyenas. blumenschine et al. refuted (422) dominiguez-rodrigo and barba’s claims, citing flaws in methodology, sample sizes, and analysis, where the researchers had failed to recognize key differences between tooth pits and bioerosion. they reiterated that there would have been a passive scavenging niche available to a quick-witted hominin in plio-pleistocene east africa, and that there needed to be an accurate way of discriminating different carnivore species by measurement of tooth marks. in all, the only consistent thread throughout the debate over the taphonomic processes which created the bone assemblages is the “likeness” of humans and hyenas converging on the same resources. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 8 dispersals. such is the influence of olduvai gorge over constructions of prehistory that it has even lent its name to a span of geological time, the olduvai subchron. this marks a period during the matuyama magnetic reversal, 1.8-1.7 mya, in which the earth’s poles were flipped for a short time — a hundred thousand years is a short time, geologically speaking — and then flipped back: a reversal within a reversal (cox, doell and dalrymple 1541). however, the olduvai subchron is not just a geomagnetic flipflop, standing alone in the long geological record of pole reversals. it marks an important boundary between two epochs, the pliocene and the pleistocene. it was during this brief time that the relatives of the olduvai hominins began to disperse out of africa, after which they rapidly colonized much of the eurasian landmass (however, see morwood and jungers for their argument of a previous dispersal of australopithecines). what is significant in the story of the first human diaspora is that they did not do it on their own; rather, the first human travellers out of africa were in the company of other species, notably hyenas. the inherent ambiguity and paucity of the evidence for the first human dispersal out of africa is such that the reasons for the dispersal and the directions in which the hominins dispersed are the subject of much speculation. the olduvai subchron marks a point in western eurasia’s prehistory in which there was a faunal turnover, named the “wolf” event after a species of canid, canis etruscus, which makes its first appearance in the fossil record of europe at that time (azzaroli 119). so too at that time, several african species — including monkeys, hippos and zebras — were expanding their ranges northwards and eastwards through the levant and possibly across the narrowed straits of gibraltar into western eurasia. fossils have been found from seven african genera which appeared in both europe and asia after the matuyama reversal, including hominins and hyaenids (gibert et al. 36; arribas and palmqvist, “the first human dispersal to europe” 55; o’regan et al. 1348). arribas and palmqvist noted (571) the close association of three of the african taxa, suggesting that there was an ecological interdependence between the three. the first were homo ergaster, hominins who had thrived in the competitive conditions in east africa and were apparently adaptable enough to be able to infiltrate the northern latitudes with their marked seasons (stiner, “carnivory, coevolution, and the geographic spread” 8). the second were megantereon whitei, heavily built saber-toothed felids who were powerful enough to capture prey many times their weight but too specialized to be able to consume entire carcasses (turner and antón, the big cats 124; kruuk, hunter and hunted 110). that left a niche available for both the hominins and the third members of the carnivore guild, pachycrocuta brevirostris. these giant hyenas, with heads as large as those of modern male lions (turner and antón, “the giant hyaena” 459), were supposed to have made a ____________________________________________________________________ marcus baynes-rock – “converging on ancient bones” 9 living cleaning up the leftovers from the kills of the abovementioned sabre-toothed felids. such was the extent of the expansion of the range of the “superabundant” pachycrocuta (turner, antón and werdelin 684), and the impact and influence that it has had on the fossil record, that martínez-navarro suggested (210) that the early pleistocene faunal turnover should be re-named the “pachycrocuta brevirostris event.” if only the name rolled off the tongue as easily as “wolf.” spotted hyenas were already present in eastern eurasia by the time the carnivore guild arrived. in some places they must have been replaced by the larger pachycrocuta, as fossils of the two species have rarely been found in the same deposits (although see patnaik and nanda 135). megantereon, pachycrocuta, and homo persisted on that continent, appearing together in deposits from spain to georgia to china (gibert at al. 36; boaz et al. 231; gabunia et al. 24) until 0.5 million years ago, which marked the replacement of oldowan with acheulian type stone tools and the disappearance of the saber-toothed cats and giant hyenas. interestingly, the appearance of acheulian tools in africa, one million years earlier, has been held to be implicated in the demise of megantereon and pachycrocuta on that continent (arribas and palmqvist, “on the ecological connection between sabre-tooths and hominids” 581; arribas and palmqvist, “the first human dispersal to europe” 73).* spotted hyenas, however, persisted in eurasia, in the face of faunal turnovers and new technologies, so that 0.8 million years ago they crossed into europe west of the caucases in what has been called the crocuta crocuta event (martinez-navarro 213). intense glacial cycles saw the ebbing and flowing of many of the african species in europe, so that when ice sheets advanced to their southernmost limits the only african species that remained in europe were humans and spotted hyenas (lambeck, esat and potter 199; stiner, “carnivory, coevolution, and the geographic spread” 7). it is difficult to determine the kind of habitat to which spotted hyenas were best adapted, as they preceded humans into the british isles when ice sheets retreated leaving tundra and herds of reindeer and mammoth (gibbons 490). yet in southeast asia, their remains have been discovered in association with “wet, tropical forest fauna”; they occurred with orang-utans and pandas in thailand (schepartz, miller-antonio and bakken 6). towards the end of the middle pleistocene, the archaic humans in europe, the neanderthals, were replaced by modern homo sapiens. we know the european hyenas tolerated modern humans for some time after the disappearance of neanderthals because the modern humans made art of them. one ivory sculpture from la madeleine in france depicts a hyena, ears folded, heaving backwards as if in a tug of war over a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 10 carcass (kurtén 72). it indicates a degree of familiarity that the artist had with hyenas and their salience in her imagination that led her to see one in a piece of antler. another depiction, also found in france, is the only known palaeolithic painting of a hyena, appearing on one of the cave walls in grotte de chauvet (chauvet, deschamps and hillaire 110). the image of a solitary hyena in a cave which features scores of lion images is poignant. while lions were still comparatively abundant in the upper pleistocene and persisted in europe into classical times (quammen 25), hyenas in eurasia were on the way out. after millions of years of persistence in the face of human presence and harsh conditions, hyenas could not adapt successfully to the modern human presence when combined with encroaching forests and competition from wolves (stiner, “comparative ecology and taphonomy” 782). the species disappeared from europe and asia just prior to ten thousand years ago, briefly dwarfing in the middle east, as if making one last effort to persist before withdrawing completely into the continent of their genesis (garrard 272; rabinovich 30). in pleistocene africa, there had been no sudden changes to drive the spotted hyena population over the edge of extinction; no forests encroached to limit their ranges; there was no sudden appearance of socially and technologically novel humans competing for similar resources. in africa, hyenas and humans had emerged together, the former making alterations to the remains of the latter as they discarded the pieces for future discovery (see for example tappen 40; shreeve 44). thus, as the humans gradually transformed their technologies and their food procurement strategies, the hyenas had time to adapt to the increasingly dangerous primates whose descendants spread out and displaced less human-savvy hyenas. hence, the first real shock to those african, human-adapted hyenas came when europeans began colonizing the continent south of the sahara and, all too quickly, exterminated hyenas from southern africa (gade 613). hyena is human-like. the theory of biologist jakob von uexküll (theoretical biology; “the theory of meaning”) provides a framework for integrating the evolutionary histories of humans and hyenas and reconceptualizing the two species as intrinsically connected. according to the theory, an organism and its environment constitute a unified whole. an organism exists within a meaningful umwelt, a surround world, replete with signs from which the organism takes cues and responds (“an introduction to umwelt” 107; a foray into the worlds of animals and humans 53). while this is the core of von uexküll’s theory, it is not his account of sign-processes that i draw on in my analysis here. instead, it the way in which von uexküll conceives of umwelts as interconnected. even though von uexküll rejected darwinist views of evolution based ____________________________________________________________________ marcus baynes-rock – “converging on ancient bones” 11 on mechanistic causation (kull 6), his theory still encompasses ways in which evolved adaptations foster the convergence of organisms’ umwelts. von uexküll outlines two ways in which organisms’ adaptations might reflect those of other organisms in their umwelts. one he calls interadjustment, where the organism is adapted to the form or behavior of another organism or material object. an example would be a western spinebill and an adenanthos flower; the curvature of the bird’s bill is a perfect fit for the curved tube of the flower, allowing the spinebill access to nectar in return for delivering pollen to other flowers (newland and wooler 635). the second kind of engagement occurs under what von uexküll calls the organism’s “counterframework” (theoretical biology 171). in this case, the base of the adenanthos flower is vulnerable to another kind of bird, the silvereye, who uses her beak to puncture the flower and extract nectar without taking on board any pollen. while these two kinds of engagement are distinct, they are in fact two sides of the same coin; they both reflect a “likeness” between organisms. von uexküll provides an example of this using a spider and a fly. a spider’s web is an example of interadjustment. the web is in effect a representation of the size, shape, and habits of a fly (“the theory of meaning” 66). it needs to be thus in order for the web to be effective in catching flies. but in relation to the spider’s web, the size, shape, and habits of the fly constitute the fly’s counterframework. and when combined, these represent a likeness between the two types. as the spider’s web is fly-like in order that she catches flies, the spider, by nature of her construction of a fly-like web — her interadjustment — must also be fly-like. meanwhile the fly, by nature of his vulnerability to spiders’ webs — his counterframework — is spider-like. in this way, the umwelts of spider and fly converge not just through proximity during spider’s capture of fly in the here and now, but through their likeness to each other which they inherit from evolutionary processes. the implications of this in terms of the hyena-human relationships are profound. von uexküll’s theory compels us to conceive of hyenas as more than bodies in landscapes (buchanan 36). every hyena is an accumulation, not only of the relations through which she has been engaged during her lifespan, she is also a convergence of threads of relations reaching back into evolutionary time, across the landscape, and forward into the future (ingold, lines 100). every hyena is a congeries of other species on whom her ancestors preyed and by whom they were preyed upon, with whom her ancestors have come into conflict, or coexisted towards mutual benefit. as such, we find that in reserves and national parks where the majority of hyena studies are undertaken, something important is missing: humans and human competition. this is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 12 unproblematic if the object of a study is to determine what it is hyenas are doing in the present time in a place where humans are absent. however, many studies are aimed at understanding spotted hyenas “in themselves,” and this is a problem. these studies subscribe to an axiom by which the elimination of human “noise” from the hyenas’ environments supposedly brings us closer to accessing an ultimate hyena reality (lopez 80). this in turn is a corollary of the western scientific perspective which holds that wild animals — real wild animals — are those untainted by human contact (ingold, the perception of the environment 67). but as i have demonstrated, human contact is probably one of the most significant factors in the evolutionary processes from which modern spotted hyenas have emerged. certainly lions and various species of ungulates have also impacted on hyenas’ evolutionary and contemporary histories; the former constitute a major cause of hyena mortality and the latter eliminate the poorest hunters. but this in no way detracts from the importance of humans as quick-witted prey, confrontational competitors at carcasses, and deadly enemies in hyenas’ umwelts. even if there was a singular ultimate hyena reality — which i argue there is not — then it would have to include hyenas’ human-likeness. by the same token, this likeness of humans to hyenas undermines human exceptionalism. the humanist ethos grounded in judeo/christian doctrine and cultivated in the enlightenment project trips up on the bones over which our human and hyena ancestors competed. and this is not just because our ancestors have proven to be diffident, opportunistic scavengers, rather than dominant hunters holding dominion over the other creatures of the savannah. it is because it shows that the very essence of humanity is something more than human. while humanism recognizes genetic relatedness and a shared biological framework, this is superficial likeness (rose 59-60). what it fails to recognise is the “likeness” of humans to hyenas and other animals in an entangled, uexküllian sense. it is not just that humans and hyenas both evolved from a small shrew-like species all those millions of years ago following separate phylogenetic paths from a unifying origin; it is that they evolved together and among other species within ecological communities of interadjustments and counterframeworks. as the profound fear hyenas exhibit when faced with humans anticipates the lethality of the latter, so too our costly, lipid dependent brains and capacity to form boisterous mobs anticipate competition with hyenas over marrow-rich bones. while hyenas’ nocturnal boldness towards humans anticipates our limited visual acuity at night (kruuk, the spotted hyena 144; baynes-rock 119), the predilection of human children to climb trees anticipates the hard, ground-adapted paws of hyenas which keep them from scaling heights. as such, we must conceptualize humans as a congeries of species — notably hyenas — who emerged together over evolutionary time within ____________________________________________________________________ marcus baynes-rock – “converging on ancient bones” 13 ecologies of competition, conflict, and coexistence. the human characteristics which are held to separate humans from animals are in fact markers of our close relatedness within adaptive ecologies (deanne-drummond 177). indeed, without the threat from, and competition with, hyenas, whatever species might have evolved from those early bipedal primates would certainly not have been human. our brainy, antagonistic, sociability evolved in the presence of hyenas, with whom our ancestors competed and coexisted and who simultaneously evolved to accommodate our dangerous forebears. this in turn is why it is misguided to remove humans from the worlds of hyenas (and other animals) in order to understand them. the humanness of humans is not background noise preventing access to those animals’ true beings. rather, it is an integral part of those animals in the same way as those animals are an integral part of what it is to be (more than) human. conclusion. i began here with an account of how spotted hyenas are studied in areas exclusive of human bodies and argued that this reflected a conception of “real” hyenas as those untainted by human contact. the conceptions which underpin this approach to hyena studies conflict with a substantial body of evidence which demonstrates a long, shared evolutionary history. when the earliest bipedal hominins were establishing a niche at ground level, ancient hyenas were present, preying upon the small primates and disarticulating their dead bodies. from there, human ancestors gradually encroached on the adaptive niches of hyenas. homo habilis adopted carnivory, utilizing carcass-based resources and becoming, as david quammen said, “more human by acting like hyenas” (quammen 328). so closely comparable were the meat-eating primates and the long-necked carnivores that they dispersed together and co-occupied much of the eurasian landmass beyond the continent of their emergence. ice sheets advanced and retreated and faunal compositions changed, but there was always a constant: humans and hyenas, and this was unaltered until the end of the pleistocene. meanwhile, in africa the hyenas persisted in the face of human competition and persecution and only recently have their ranges contracted dramatically because of this. in light of this evidence, i argue that the notion of “real” hyenas as those untainted by human contact is erroneous, precisely because of the indelible marks inscribed on each species by the other through millennia of competition, conflict, and co-existence. these marks, i suggest gather meaning in light of the theory of jakob von uexküll, which allows us to see organisms as adaptive, congeries of other species. hyenas are the way they are due in large part to adaptation to a human presence, so any understanding of hyena behavior should recognize their human-likeness; it should account for the ways in which humans figure in the make-up of hyenas. so too humans are adapted to hyena humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 14 presences. as such, a human body is more than an individual organ representing a single species; it is a confluence of evolutionary histories, and other species expressed in an organism which is never exclusively or merely human. note * these authors also argued for a carnivore-hominin-carnivore feeding sequence, basing their argument on none other than the bone assemblage at flk zinjanthropus. works cited abay, g. y., et al. “peri-urban spotted hyena (crocuta crocuta) in northern ethiopia: diet, economic impact, and abundance.” european journal of wildlife research 57.4 (2010): 75965. arribas, a., and p. palmqvist. “the first human dispersal to europe: remarks on the archaeological and palaeoanthropological record from orce (guadiz-baza basin, southeastern spain).” human evolution 17.1-2 (2002): 55-78. _____. “on the ecological connection between sabre-tooths and hominids: faunal dispersal events in the lower pleistocene and a review of the evidence for the first human arrival in europe.” journal of archaeological science 26 (1999): 571-85. azzaroli, a. “quaternary mammals and the ‘end-villafranchian’ dispersal event — a turning point in the history of eurasia.” palaeogeography, plaeoclimatology, palaeoecology 44 (1983): 117-39. barry, j.c. “large carnivores (canidae, hyaenidae, felidae) from laetoli.” laetoli: a pliocine site in northern tanzania. eds. m.d. leakey and j.m. harris. oxford: clarendon press, 1987. 235-58. baynes-rock, m. hyenas like us: social relations with an urban carnivore in harar, ethiopia. phd diss, macquarie university, 2012. binford, l.r. “human ancestors: changing views of their behaviour.” journal of anthropological archaeology 4 (1985): 292-327. ____________________________________________________________________ marcus baynes-rock – “converging on ancient bones” 15 binford, l.r., m. g. l. mills, and n. m. stone. “hyena scavenging behavior and its implications for the interpretation of faunal assemblages from flk 22 (the zinj floor) at olduvai gorge.” journal of anthropological archaeology 7 (1988): 99-135. blumenschine, r.j. “characteristics of an early hominid scavenging niche.” current anthropology 28.4 (1987): 383-94. blumenschine, r.j., and j. cavallo. “scavenging and human evolution.” scientific american 267.4 (1992): 90-96. blumenschine, r.j., et al. “carnivore tooth-marks, microbial bioerosion, and the invalidation of domínguez-rodrigo and barba’s (2006) test of oldowan hominin scavenging behaviour.” journal of human evolution 53 (2007): 420-26. boaz, n. t., et al. “large mammalian carnivores as a taphonomic factor in the bone accumulation at zhoukoudian.” acta anthropologica sinica 19 (2000): 224-34. boydston, e. e., et al. "altered behaviour in spotted hyenas associated with increased human activity.” animal conservation 6 (2003): 207-19. brantingham, p.j. “hominid-carnivore co-evolution and invasion of the predatory guild.” journal of anthropological archaeology 17 (1998): 327-53. brottman, m. hyena. london: reaktion books, 2012. buchanan, b. onto-ethologies: the animal environments of uexküll, heidegger, merleauponty, and deleuze. albany: suny p, 2008. bunn, h. t. “archaeological evidence for meat-eating by plio-pleistocene hominids from koobi fora and olduvai gorge.” nature 291 (1981): 574-77. bunn, h. t., and e. m. kroll. “systematic butchery by plio/pleistocene hominids at olduvai gorge, tanzania.” current anthropology 27.5 (1986): 431-42. chauvet, j. m., e. b. deschamps, and c. hillaire. dawn of art: the oldest known paintings in the world. new york: h. n. abrams, 1996. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 16 coffing, k., et al. “four-million-year-old hominids from east lake turkana, kenya.” american journal of physical anthropology 93 (1994): 55-65. cox, a., r. r. doell, and g. b. dalrymple. “reversal of the earth’s magnetic field." science 144.3626 (1964): 1537-43. deanne-drummond, c. “re-imaginando a imagem de deus: natureza humana, evolução e outros animais.” estudos teológicos 54.1 (2014): 171-85. despret, v. “sheep do have opinions.” in making things public: atmospheres of democracy. eds. b. latour and p. weibel, 360-70. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2006. domínguez-rodrigo, m. “hunting and scavenging by early humans: the state of the debate.” journal of world prehistory 16.1 (2002): 1-54. domínguez-rodrigo, m., and r. barba. “new estimates of tooth mark and percussion mark frequencies at the flk zinj site: the carnivore-hominid-carnivore hypothesis falsified.” journal of human evolution 50 (2006): 170-94. domínguez-rodrigo, m., and a. piqueras. “the use of tooth pits to identify carnivore taxa in tooth-marked archaeofaunas and their relevance to reconstruct hominid carcass processing behaviours.” journal of archaeological science 30 (2003): 1385-91. drea, c. m., and a. n. carter. “cooperative problem solving in a social carnivore.” animal behaviour 78 (2009): 967-77. east, m. l., and h. hofer. “male spotted hyenas (crocuta crocuta) queue for status in social groups dominated by females.” behavioral ecology 12. 5 (2001): 558-68. evernden, n. the social construction of nature. baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1992. gabunia, l., et al. “current research on the hominid site of dmanisi.” eraul 92 (2000): 13-27. gade, d. w. “hyenas and humans in the horn of africa.” geographical review 96.4 (2006): 609-32. ____________________________________________________________________ marcus baynes-rock – “converging on ancient bones” 17 garrard, a. n. “community ecology and pleistocene extinctions in the levant.” hominid evolution and community ecology: prehistoric human adaptation in biological perspective. ed. r. foley. london: academic press, 1984. 260-77. gibbons, a. “once-balmy climate lured humans to england early.” science 308 (2005): 490. gibert, j., et al. “spanish late pliocene and early pleistocene hominid, palaeolithic and faunal finds from orce (granada) and cueva victoria (murcia).” human evolution 14.1-2 (1999): 29-46. glickman, s. e. “the spotted hyena from aristotle to the lion king: reputation is everything.” social research 62. 3 (1995): 501-37. holekamp, k. e. “spotted hyenas.” current biology 16.22 (2006): 944-45. holekamp, k. e., and s. m. dloniak. “intraspecific variation in the behavioral ecology of a tropical carnivore, the spotted hyena.” advances in the study of behavior 42 (2010): 189229. holekamp, k. e., s. t. sakai, and b. l. lundrigan. “the spotted hyena (crocuta crocuta) as a model system for the study of the evolution of intelligence.” journal of mammalogy 88.3 (2007): 545-54. ingold, t. lines: a brief history. oxon: routledge, 2007. _____. the perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. london: routledge, 2000. isaac, g.l. “aspects of human evolution.” evolution from molecules to men. ed. d. s. bendall. cambridge: cambridge up, 1983. 509-43. kolowski, j. m., and k. e. holekamp. “effects of an open refuse pit on space use patterns of spotted hyenas.” african journal of ecology 46 (2007): 341-49. kolowski, j. m., et al. “daily patterns of activity in the spotted hyena.” journal of mammalogy 88.4 (2007): 1017-28. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 18 kruuk, h. hunter and hunted: relationships between carnivores and people. cambridge: cambridge up, 2002. _____. the spotted hyena: a study of predation and social behaviour. wildlife behavior and ecology. chicago: u chicago p, 1972. kull, k. “jakob von uexküll: an introduction.” semiotica 134. 1 (2001): 1-59. kurtén, b. pleistocene mammals of europe. london: weidenfeld and nicolson, 1968. lambeck, k., t. m. esat, and e. k. potter. “links between climate and sea levels for the past three million years.” nature 419 (2002): 199-206. lansing, s. w., et al. “taphonomic and zooarchaeological implications of spotted hyena (crocuta crocuta) bone accumulations in kenya: a modern behavioral ecological approach.” paleobiology 35.2 (2009): 289-309. leakey, l. s. b., p. v. tobias, and j. r. napier. “a new species of the genus homo from olduvai gorge.” nature 202.4927 (1964): 7-9. leakey, m. d., and r. l. hay. “pliocene footprints in the laetolil beds at laetoli, northern tanzania.” nature 278 (1979): 317-23. leakey, m. g., et al. “new four-million-year-old hominid species from kanapoi and allia bay, kenya.” nature 376 (1995): 565-71. _____. “new specimens and confirmation of an early age for australopithecus anamensis.” nature 393 (1998): 62-66. lewis, m. e., and l. werdelin. “patterns of change in the plio-pleistocene carnivorans of eastern africa: implications for hominin evolution.” hominin environments in the east african pliocene. eds. r. bobe, z. alemseged and a. k. behrensmeyer. dordrecht: springer, 2007. 77-105. lopez, b. h. of wolves and men. new york: charles scribner’s sons, 1978. ____________________________________________________________________ marcus baynes-rock – “converging on ancient bones” 19 louchart, a., et al. “taphonomic, avian, and small-vertebrate indicators of ardipithecus ramidus habitat.” science 326 (2009): 66. martínez-navarro, b. “early pleistocene faunas of eurasia and hominin dispersals.” out of africa i: the first hominin colonization of eurasia. eds. j. g. fleagle, et al. dordrecht: springer, 2010. 207-24. mcpherron, s. p., z. alemseged, c. w. marean, j. g. wynn, d. reed, d. geraads, r. bobe, and h. a. béarat. “evidence for stone-tool-assisted consumption of animal tissues before 3.39 million years ago at dikika, ethiopia.” nature 466 (2010): 857-60. morwood, m. j., and w. l. jungers. “conclusions: implications of the liang bua excavations for hominin evolution and biogeography.” journal of human evolution 57.5 (2009): 640-48. newland, c. e., and r. d. wooller. “seasonal changes in a honeyeater assemblage in banksia woodland near perth, western australia.” new zealand journal of zoology 12 (1985): 631-36. o’regan, h. j., et al. “hominins without fellow travellers? first appearances and inferred dispersals of afro-eurasian large-mammals in the plio-pleistocene.” quaternary science reviews 30 (2011): 1343-52. pangle, w. m., and k. e. holekamp. “functions of vigilance behaviour in a social carnivore, the spotted hyaena, crocuta crocuta.” animal behaviour 80 (2010): 257-67. patnaik, r., and a. c. nanda. “early pleistocene mammalian faunas of india and evidence of connections with other parts of the world.” out of africa i: the first hominin colonization of eurasia. eds. j. g. fleagle, et al. dordrecht: springer, 2010. 129-43. potts, r., and p. shipman. “cutmarks made by stone tools on bones from olduvai gorge, tanzania.” nature 291 (1981): 577-80. quammen, d. monster of god: man-eating predator in the jungles of history and the mind. new york: w. w. norton and co, 2003. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 20 rabinovich, r. “man versus carnivores in the middle-upper paleolithic of the southern levant.” archaeology of the near east v: proceedings of the fifth international symposium on the archaeology of southwestern asia and adjacent areas. eds. h. buitenhuis, et al.: arc, groningen, 2002. 28-45. rohland, n., et al. “the population history of extant and extinct hyenas.” molecular biology and evolution 22.12 (2005): 2435-43. rose, d. b. wild dog dreaming. charlottesville: u virginia p, 2011. schepartz, l. a., s. miller-antonio, and d. a. bakken. “upland resources and the early palaeolithic occupation of southern china, vietnam, laos, thailand and burma.” world archaeology 32.1 (2000): 1-13. schoeninger, m. j., h. reeser, and k. hallin. “palaeoenvironment of australopithecus anamensis at allia bay, east turkana, kenya: evidence from mammalian herbivore enamel stable isotopes.” journal of anthropological archaeology 22 (2003): 200-07. selvaggio, m. m. “carnivore tooth marks and stone tool butchery marks on scavenged bones: archaeological implications.” journal of human evolution 27 (1994): 215-28. _____. “evidence for a three-stage sequence of hominid and carnivore involvement with long bones at flk zinjanthropus, olduvai gorge, tanzania.” journal of archaeological science 25 (1998): 191-202. selvaggio, m. m., and j. wilder. “identifying the involvement of multiple carnivore taxa with archaeological bone assemblages.” journal of archaeological science 28 (2001): 465-70. shipman, p. “early hominid lifestyle: hunting and gathering or foraging and scavenging?” animals and archaeology: hunters and their prey. eds. j. clutton-brock and c. grigson. oxford: british archaeological reports, no. 163, 1983. 31-49. shipman, p. “ancestors: scavenger hunt.” natural history 93.4 (1984): 20-27. _____. “early hominid lifestyle: the scavenging hypothesis.” anthroquest 28 (1984): 9-10. shreeve, j. “the evolutionary road.” national geographic. july (2010): 34-67. ____________________________________________________________________ marcus baynes-rock – “converging on ancient bones” 21 smith, jennifer, et al. “evolutionary forces favoring intragroup coalitions among spotted hyenas and other animals.” behavioral ecology 21.2 (2010): 284-303. _____. “social and ecological determinants of fission-fusion dynamics in the spotted hyaena.” animal behaviour 76 (2008): 619-36. stiner, m. c. “comparative ecology and taphonomy of spotted hyenas, humans, and wolves in pleistocene italy.” revue de paléobiologie, genève 23.2 (2004): 771-85. _____. “carnivory, coevolution, and the geographic spread of the genus homo." journal of archaeological research 10.1 (2002): 1-63. suwa, g., et al. “the ardipithecus ramidus skull and its implications for hominid origins.” science 326 (2009): 68. tappen, n. c. “circum-mortem damage to some ancient african hominid crania: a taphonomic and evolutionary essay.” the african archaeological review 5 (1987): 39-47. theis, k. r., k. m. greene, s. r. benson-amram, and k. e. holekamp. “sources of variation in the long-distance vocalizations of spotted hyenas." behaviour 144 (2007): 557-84. tunnell, g. g. “the origin of genus homo: hominid/predator co-evolution.” is our future limited by our past? proceedings of the third conference of the australasian society for human biology. ed. l. freedman. perth: centre for human biology, 1989. 113-28. turner, a. “extinction, speciation and dispersal in african larger carnivores, from the miocene to recent.” south african journal of science 81 (1985): 256-57. turner, a, and m antón. the big cats and their fossil relatives. new york: columbia up, 1997. _____. “the giant hyaena, pachycrocuta brevirostris (mammalia, carnivora, hyaenidae).” geobios 29.4 (1996): pp. 455-68. turner, a, m antón, and l. werdelin. “taxonomy and evolutionary patterns in the fossil hyaenidae of europe.” geobios 41 (2008): 677-87. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 22 von uexküll, j. a foray into the worlds of animals and humans [1934]. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2010. _____. “an introduction to umwelt.” semiotica 134.1 (2001[1936]): 107-10. _____. theoretical biology. london: kegan paul, trench, trubner & co, 1926. _____. “the theory of meaning.” semiotica 42.1 (1982): 25-82. ward, c., m. leakey, and a. walker. “the new hominid species australopithecus anamensis.” evolutionary anthropology 7 (1999): 197-205. white, t. d., et al. “ardipithecus ramidus and the paleobiology of early hominids.” science 326 (2009): 64-86. _____. “macrovertebrate paleontology and the pliocene habitat of ardipithecus ramidus.” science 326 (2009): 87-93. white, t. d., g. suwa, and b. asfaw. “australopithecus ramidus, a new species of early hominid from aramis, ethiopia.” nature 371 (1994): 306-12. yirga, g., and h. bauer. “prey of peri-urban spotted hyena (crocuta crocuta) in southeastern tigray, northern ethiopia.” asian journal of agricultural sciences 2.4 (2010): 124-27. microsoft word davis et al pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 4:2 dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles “riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships introduction: setting the scene. human-animal relations have recently become revitalized as topics of interest among social scientists. variously called anthrozoology (herzog 17), multi-species ethnography (haraway, species meet 1, companion 3-10; hamilton and placas 253), anthropo-zoo-genesis (despret 113), and multispecism (wolfe 1), these approaches, along with posthumanism (wolfe xxiv), emphasize innovative ways to bring non-human animals into the realm of cultural analysis. they share a critical approach to what they characterize as traditional, western notions of a nature-culture divide, and seek new ways to grapple with the complex kinds of relationships that humans form with nonhuman animals (ingold, humanity 14,15), or as pálsson states, “new ways of seeing things mixing” (biosociality 290). these attempts to grapple may be expressed in more general, macro terms of species meeting as forms of co-being, being with, contact zones, or areas of entanglements among humans and other species (haraway, species meet 301; ingold, humanity 23) where “crossing species boundaries does not threaten identity but defines it” (pálsson, biosociality 306). relations between individual members of two species overwhelmingly feature rather generic expressions of relationships between humans and their domestic pets, mainly cats or dogs (herzog, king, schaffer). an exception here would be haraway’s highly personal and detailed depiction of her relationship with her agility sport dog, cayenne pepper (species meet 205). yet, horses both as a species and as particular individuals have captured the imagination of a number of social scientists. a number of studies feature rider and horse as a pair and describe the roles of embodiment and bonding in developing a sense of partnership between horse and rider that challenge hegemonic dualisms of horse as nature and human as culture (game, hook, wipper). others grappling with a nature culture divide feature styles of relating to or more grounded (literally) interactions with horses, such as a gendered mutual corporeality (birke and brandt 189), embodied intersubjectivity (brandt 299, 300), and the comparison of new american styles of natural horsemanship to british traditional horsey worlds (latimer and birke 21, 22). casting a much broader net, other equine studies have related horsehuman relationships to more far ranging cultural and environmental contexts, such as dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles -“riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships 55 the development of horse cultures on the american great plains (wissler) or in indoeuropean cultures (anthony) or ecological and land management issues raised by wild mustangs in the american west (dalke). less attention is paid to potential roles that the local physical environment or terrain where riding takes place can play in the development of particular horse-human relationships. rose refers to the ownership of contiguous properties among wealthy fox hunting enthusiasts in pennsylvania, and helmer provides us with insights into the backstage cultural geography of backstretch culture at a harness racetrack. perhaps the author who features landscape the most in her cultural analysis of a horse culture is lawrence, whose book on rodeos analyzes the importance of landscape in the development of ethos in the cowboy horse culture in the american west. on a more micro level, among analyses that focus on individuals of different species meeting, or focus on specific interspecies pairs, terms like deep engagement and forms of we (haraway, species meet 11), partnerships, shared personhood (fuentes 125), significant others or otherness (haraway, companion 16), sensations of closeness (smuts 108), and companion species come into play. two viewpoints emerge as central to the presentation of data and analysis that follows. first, as hayward, an advocate of multispecies ethnography notes, animals should be viewed as acting on us in “surprising and nuanced ways” rather than just as passive reflections of human intentions (584). and second, as tallbear (2), also a proponent of multispecies ethnography, states, any anthropological approach to studying the social relations between human and non-human animals must take into account their location within their physical and social habitats. this account of horse and rider pairs who participate in well-established but differing equestrian sports pays special attention to “contact zones” by viewing non-human animals (horses) as acting not “on” but with us (as humans) across a variety of physical habitats, specified as terrains ridden upon and social habitats expressed as shared horse rider sport cultures and identities. not only do attributes of horse and rider construct each other; landscapes ridden also have a kind of engagement or encounter value generated in mutual adaptation (c.f. pálsson, biosociality 301, who does not speak of horses), in that they play active thematic roles in shaping paired identities. theory and method: communalism and biosociality. working over thirty years ago, lawrence, in her excellent book rodeo: an anthropologist looks at the wild and the tame humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 56 grappled with american hegemonic dualisms concerning humanity’s place in nature. the dilemma for lawrence was that while her ethnographically thick data showed that cowboys, in relation to various types of rodeo animals — most particularly horses — both reified and transgressed dualisms of wild/tame, nature/culture, mutuality/control, and free/not free, there was little theoretically that enabled her to deal with these transgressions. more recent approaches, like pálsson’s 1996 paradigm of communalism (communalism 72-76) for the study of human-environment relations—which in its 2009 guise becomes “biosociality” (biosociality 289) — dismisses dualism by rejecting radical separations of nature and society, and object and subject.1 these approaches share a number of features that guide the present study of entanglements between humans and their horses. first, pálsson’s (communalism 68, 69,73; biosociality 203) view of humans as being at an interface with or in nature invokes notions of contingency, reciprocity, and exchange, and draws on a language or dialogues of personhood and close personal relationships. second, humans (and, we would add, their horses) are seen as engaged in situated practical acts and actions within the wider communities to which they belong. this means that tacit everyday knowledge and direct engagement with everyday tasks trumps abstract separations of body and mind. the proper unit of analysis is no longer the autonomous individual separated from the social world by the surface of the body. rather, the importance of empathy, connectedness, and trust is stressed. third, communalism and biosociality dismiss dualism. both approaches call for complicated and contextualized forms of thick description and the avoidance of simplistic or rigid classificatory schema (pálsson, biosociality; see also fuentes). fourth, biosociality invites the invention of new distinctions, where dualisms can take different forms that do not carry the main connotations associated with nature-culture discourse. communalism and biosociality, thus, decenter analysis by calling for new classificatory schema that may involve a reshuffling of nature and society (pálsson communalism 72; biosociality 391). 2 when we began this study our intention was to examine horse-human relationships as points of entanglements, most particularly forms of bond or bonding in a variety of environmental settings and equestrian sports. what we did not anticipate was the degree to which discourse on environment, as terrain traversed by horse and rider together, would be used to construct a shared sense of identity between horse and rider. this takes the form of self and other that serves to pair horse and rider in a shared sense of personhood and uses open and closed spaces and terrains ridden as a marker in the self and significant othering (c.f haraway, companion 129) of horse-human pairs in different equestrian sports, in ways that both decenter and reshuffle interrelations among human, horse, and environment. with pálsson’s four features in mind, our goal dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles -“riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships 57 is to move beyond general statements about horse-human relations to identify and elucidate the various permutations and combinations that horse, human, environment; horse-human environment; and human, horse-environment may take, as is illustrated in narratives of practice in a selected sampling of equestrian sports, which feature and give importance to different “grounds” to be covered. this article constitutes an analysis of narrative data collected in sixty open-ended interviews3 with us midwestern and north norwegian horse people who participate in different equestrian sports and ride within a variety of local settings. this approach serves not only to decenter analysis, challenge, deconstruct, and reconstruct boundaries between nature/culture, horse/human, and self /other. a grounded, practice-theory approach also focuses on privileging our informants’ own words, experiences, and understandings, even if they elude more standard forms of categorization or dominant discourses (wardlow 5). our open-ended interviews generate narratives that reveal what naomi quinn (2), a cognitive anthropologist, calls “culture in talk”— as quinn states, “discourse is duplex; it both enacts and produces culture.” in this study we focus our attention on different cultures of horsemanship (patton 87, wipper 49, 50) among dressage riders, eventers, endurance riders in the midwest united states, and icelandic gaited horse riders in north norway. although we are primarily concerned with terrains ridden and how they affect horse and human personhoods, we are sensitive to the fact that we also elicit national differences. we are all accomplished equestrians4 and have collected our data at a variety of venues, including local barns and riding facilities, competition events and clinics, and riding clubs. we have all used our common-interest, friendship groups to recruit participants for this study. identity, co-agency, and terrain. we start with a sense of personal identity and interactive agency with their horses that was expressed in the all the narratives of our rider-informants. but within these narrative domains of agreement or overlap, in everyday practice signifying differences emerge. while by far the most distinguishing feature of the horse-rider experience was whether one rode (in circles) within the confines of walls, or a fenced arena, or in the great outdoors, the types or features of terrain and actual spaces involved also emerged as crucial to identity-making within different equestrian sport cultures in the narratives of informants. moreover, some terrains ridden receive minimal alteration for the sport and remain “natural,” while humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 58 others are civilly engineered or “cultured” at great expense, or kept in shape (literally) with a fine-tooth comb. all of the riders in this study share three common features of relationship and ecology. the first is a sense of identity, in that association with horses, whether life-long or a relatively recent, shapes a sense of self or personal identity for the rider (davis and davis, lawrence). second, a sense of shared identity with the horse, as well as interactive agency or partnership, also comes through in all the narratives (argent 159). third, in each case environment or ecology is referred to more in terms of situated practical acts, as in terrain covered or the ground beneath a horse’s feet, rather than abstracted visions of getting to scenic vistas. each of these is considered briefly in turn. as we will see, identity construction in equestrian sports can take a series of different and differentiating turns. yet when it comes to the “who am i” questions of construction of self (neisser 3,4), informants state that riding, or the association with horses, is a defining feature of their selves. for some it is a simple statement of identity. sky relates, “i’m not much of a people person. i like animals better.” hester, an eventer, states, “riding is a very important part of my identity of who i am.” similarly, judy, an eventer turned dressage rider, says, [riding] “is the person i am. if somebody says ‘what do you do?’ i say ‘i ride horses.’ you ask someone else and they say ‘i’m a doctor or an accountant;’ i never said that i did anything but ride horses. that’s what i do.” according to xena, a dressage rider, “horses are who i am. they become such a part of you they make you who you are.” black bear, an endurance rider, is more explicit about the making of self. “my daughter kate is who she is today because of her relationship with horses. it made her a young woman who is not afraid of anything, is willing to take on any challenge and simply refuses to be told something can’t be done.” tee, another endurance rider, humorously says, “we board horses so my life is poop.” if black bear’s statement sounds quintessentially, egocentrically us/american (lindholm 393), the norwegians are less inclined to be self-revelatory. ola, for example, in the sample, remarks, “since childhood the horse has been stuck to my skull.” these statements of self show how (cf. pálsson, communalism 72; biosociality 391) the language and positioning of personhood and identity becomes integrated into humanhorse nexus. haraway (species meet 11) refers to multispecies ethnography as an exploration of new forms of being “we.” argent (159) states that a horse is not just an object of study but a co-agent in creation of culture and identity. despret (111) refers to anthropo-zoo-genesis as two forms of interspecies body-to-body attunement. birke and brandt (188), hook dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles -“riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships 59 (18), brandt (299), and game (1) refer to the practice of riding, using terms like intercorporeality, embodiment, interactionist communication, and embodying the centaur to bridge the horse-human boundaries. patton (88) refers to dialogue and negotiation between horse and rider (trainer). speaking specifically of a prominent eventer and her horse, wipper (62, 63) refers to a partnership as a potentially fragile combination of compatibility, mutual respect, trust, confidence, and close communication between horse and rider that sometimes needs to be rebuilt. these kinds of references also flow through all the narratives evoking notions of contingency, reciprocity, and exchange. empathy, connectedness, and trust, rather than autonomy, become stressed (c.f. pálsson communalism 77; biosociality 296). bodies of horse and rider merge or connect. lynn and morgan are both dressage riders. according to lynn, riding “is a kind of mutual and natural (w/horse) multi-tasking. you focus in with two bodies.” and morgan: “it’s amazing when you and your horse can work together without a species barrier.” as he became more experienced, ola admits that “at first it was just riding sputtering around the forest on a horse. it was fun but later it becomes more interplay (between horse and rider).” trust is also an issue. judy has this to say about riding the cross-country phase of eventing: “on the crosscountry, to do it, you just have to trust him and he has to trust you. you both have to have the mindset that you’re going for the next fence, whatever it is. one of you doubts or hesitates, it’s all over.” co-agency as expressed by sky and fefe becomes more explicit when discussing the terrain or environment. the narratives from sky, fefe, and chisum demonstrate (cf. pálsson communalism 72; biosociality 289) challenges to rigid classifications or boundaries between nature as horse and environment, on the one hand, and culture as the rider on the other. sky becomes tearful as she says, in endurance you and the horse are doing it together and it’s natural. in endurance you’re a team … you do it for a sense of accomplishment, against yourself, against the trail and with the horse. it’s about the bond .… i think we have a telepathic connection (he knows what way i want him to go); if you don’t have that you need another horse. fefe, a norwegian, speaks of how he and his horse navigate the terrain: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 60 i ride to get out in nature in a very different way. there are strong legs that can carry me on the back. i can walk terrain that i do not usually encounter. i can walk in the forest, mountain, paths, jump over ditches, walk around lakes, move farther than i can walk in a much shorter time. my horse and i, we both enjoy it being out in the forest with nature to see to observe and to listen, we do that together. on a more psychic level chisum relates how “horse people develop a kind of ‘sixth sense’ while learning and feeling what the horse is experiencing.” he goes on to say that humans could benefit from this type of interaction themselves.5 within their discourse, these riders tacitly reinvent or recreate their own dualisms when it comes to macro, basic level distinctions that are drawn between two types of riding environments, having the net effect of joining horse and rider as defined by the kinds of grounds or terrain (environment) they move over together. walls: nesting equestrian and equine ecologies. although it was not asked for or anticipated in any of the discussion format questions, the predominant theme that distinguished types of riding environment was the mention of arena riding, most commonly and derogatorily referred to as “riding with walls,” contrasted with riding “in nature” as a less confined or unconfined setting. felix, an endurance rider, bluntly states, “we don’t ride indoors.” others, like norwegians aurora and henrietta, learned to ride indoors as preparation for going out. henrietta says that she needed to learn “in the arena so i can ride outside of it. for example, in the woods there are all these trees and i am hysterical about having my knees bang into trees. it surely helps knowing how to steer the horse. it’s more fun spending time in the woods.” aurora expresses a similar notion: “i learned to ride in a ring and then got outside. at first it was inside walls around, around and around in the riding hall. that did not give the same joy as being allowed to ride the path through the forest, to get out in nature. i never was a skier. i preferred to be carried up the mountain top.” ola, who conducts tours for an international clientele, says that, “we have people who have been riding 20 years and they have never saddled a horse, or ridden outdoors. they have been riding in a riding hall. we ride out here. there is a slope down to the sea. they can barely sit in the saddle.” sky and t, endurance riders, compare endurance terrain, which they see as natural, with the unnatural terrain of other horse sports. sky says, “if you’re going around the show ring it’s repetitive for the horse, whereas on the endurance trail you are always seeing something new…if it’s the same trail you’re riding out there is always something new, and it’s totally like i say, natural.” according to t, in “the arena you dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles -“riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships 61 trust the arena to hold you in. hunter-jumpers ride in a very controlled environment in the arena.” rigmor refers to the complications of riding in arenas with lots of other horses. dressage riders, however, are the prototypical and unapologetic arena rider. yet even for them the arena as terrain to be ridden, though largely unstated unless asked specifically about it, is extremely important. narratives also show that horses and their humans are engaged in practical situated actions within wider communities in which they belong and with which they are identified or identify (cf. pálsson communalism 64; biosociality 290). as sky and t’s comments illustrate, riders have an elaborate sense of how the navigation of different terrains relates to different cultures in different equestrian sports. in fact, susanna states that, “different sports have different cultures.” although others have tackled cultural differences among horse sports,6 wipper (50) and patton (92, 93) both do comment on how these fail to deal with horse-human relationships; however, terrain as a major component of enacting horse cultures, and of creating new categories of self and other, receives no mention at all. once we move beyond riding, with or without walls, we can also see how “fields of action” literally and figuratively become domains revealed in the narratives that link terrain to a shared experiential psyche of the horse-human pair. for example, ajay, now a dressage rider, states that, “eventers live on the edge, but they are looser, freer and more laid back (any horse will do). dressage riders want the perfect 20meter circle. endurance riders go for the fun. it’s not so much about results.”ajay, like many of the other informants in this study, has participated in multiple equestrian sports. these include dressage, saddle seat, endurance, and trail riding. we now turn to elaborate on these differences with special attention of the roles of terrain in shaping the entanglements and histories of horse-rider pairs. horses & terrains traversed. terrain emerges as an important element in the entanglements of nature-culture, horse-human relations and paired horse-human identities, mentioned in the narrative that goes well beyond the set piece of ‘walls’. examination of narrative data shows that different equestrian sport activities and cultures find distinguishing expressions in talk. each sport has its own characterization or classificatory schema of how terrain — whether artificially engineered as in dressage and eventing or natural as in endurance and icelandic horse riding — affects the horserider pair and the riding experience. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 62 tropes or schemas of identity, shared personhood or “we” (both as horse-human pair and sport culture) as they relate to terrain covered, are presented within each of the following sections. we start with dressage riders, who ride on the most constructed terrain and move through eventers to endurance, to gaited riders who engage terrain at more and more “natural” levels. by describing how the practitioners of different equestrian sports represent themselves, their horses, and the terrain they traverse through discourse, we aim to present a more complicated and contextualized (c.f., fuentes 128) or nuanced (cf., hayward 584) view of the areas of entanglements (c.f., haraway, species meet 301) or reshufflings (c.f., pálsson, biosociality 290) among humans, horses and the environment. dressage — arenas and deep thinkers. technically, the french term dressage means training of the horse. the australian dressage trainer and philosopher, paul patton (86), describes dressage as a sophisticated kind of language where the rider and horse communicate through subtle (to the point of invisible to the observer) movements and gestures. it is an ongoing conversation that relies on the horse’s extremely fine sense of touch. dressage riders, more than in any of the other sports mentioned, ride in arenas or with walls in an engineered or constructed environment. dressage riders are especially concerned with “the footing,” or quality of ground underneath their horse’s hooves. a decent dressage arena will cost between 8 and 20 thousand dollars to make. arenas must be level, and there are exact standards for expensive and artificial footing. there are three layers of material used, and the arena should be dragged and watered every day. if it is not up to acceptable standards, riders will refuse to ask their horses to work on it. particularly at the upper levels, a horse may be injured if he places his foot, during a complex movement like piaffe, on uneven soil. the arena itself is circumscribed in letters that mark specific points in the performance space. complex tests must be memorized outlining specific patterns to be ridden that will utilize all the ground space of the arena. a sense of micro-management defines the sport, and riders must be familiar with all points in the arena marked by these letters. circles are required to be round and exact, as specified by meters, gait transitions or movements must take place at specific letters or between them. dressage riders consider themselves and their horses to be highly schooled. it takes long periods of intense and highly structured training to produce a dressage horse and rider. the self-identified dressage riders of this study are largely at the lower levels of the sport, even though some have been riding for many years. still their comments dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles -“riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships 63 exemplify key elements of their sport’s culture in terms of how they characterize the horse rider relationship as cerebral and the “environment’” as being in the “zone.” missy makes the following observation on mutual concentration of horse and rider with an example of their experience at a recent show. it was a hot and humid day. when my turn came i was ready to enter the ring. horse and i started our test. we came down the center line and were entirely in the zone. it was going to be a good ride. as we came to a halt to salute the judge, i noticed the judge was waving her hand and all the other people were waving their hands too. i kept riding and people started yelling “stop!” a sudden storm had started and there was lightning all around us. i hadn’t noticed any of it. morgan, who refuses to take her horse out on the trail because he is so unpredictable outside the arena, refers to an interior or mental “aha moment” when riding her dressage horse. this defines the zone or contact zone. “i like the times when i have 'aha moments,' when my horse and i figure out something together. it’s amazing when you and your horse can work together without a species barrier between you.” morgan actually describes one of her horses as pedantic, and she means it in a positive sense. she describes herself in this manner. i approach riding the same way i approach everything else. i’m very curious. i want to understand. not just technically but philosophically and theoretically what i’m doing. to make it more intellectually challenging and fun for me i have to say “what is this horse thinking? what does this horse think about what we are doing to him?” i do a lot of visualizing when i ride. lynn also refers to the focus and intensity of dressage riding that she seeks, as compared with what she describes as the sociability of riding on the trail. i like the intensity — that focus factor — that thinking where i have to put her haunches, what foot is striking and is she bearing her weight correctly? am i shifting my weight correctly? i like that feeling of being humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 64 focused on what i’m doing — as opposed to eventing where you have to trust the horse to do it. even when i was little, i didn’t want to trail ride. i wanted to learn technique. lynn goes on to say that she is drawn more to the horse’s brain than anything else (such as its breed or physicality). the horse-rider relationship in dressage is the most interior or cerebral in equestrian sport; given a predictable environment the horse and rider will perform together. patton refers to dressage as a “sophisticated language” or “ongoing conversation between horse and rider” (86), where the horse and the horse’s performance answer the rider’s questions. dressage relies on the horse’s “extremely fine sense of touch” and the rider’s sensitivity to his or her own body. missy speaks of this in terms of being in the zone, establishing a sense of mutual purpose between herself and her horse, where the outside world, as a given, can be ignored. morgan describes her dressage rides with her horse as mindful activities. she is a philosopher in the saddle, thinking with and through her horse. intensity, focus, touch, technique, and micromanagement, similarly, find mention in lynn’s narrative. mutual focus, intensity, attunement, interiority, and micromanagement emerge as words that dominate dressage-speak about the horse-human relationship among dressage riders. there is a kind of bounded interiority to the sport. horse and rider interacting and moving together are the environment. the physical world outside the pair demands attention, because where you are and where you are going in the arena counts. to say that the terrain or ground is unimportant misses the fact that it is supposed to be well groomed to exacting standards, in order for the horse and rider to focus attention on the task at hand. within a predictable and clearly marked arena, horse and rider can concentrate on each other and not be distracted by whatever goes on in the immediate environment outside of the arena. although it is supposed to be good for the dressage horse to have days off in the guise of trail riding, unlike the endurance, eventing, and icelandic horses, they are not expected to traverse demanding terrain. these horses are highly bred and very expensive. riders do not want to risk injury.7 eventing: a pair of adrenaline junkies. like dressage, eventing calls for more technically engineered environments. while eventing goes from beginner, novice levels all the way to the olympic level, the midwestern u.s. informants from this study, like dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles -“riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships 65 the dressage riders, are at the lower levels of the sport but are already socialized into its major tropes. events include a fairly low-level dressage test and a stadium or open jumping segment. fence heights are modest, but even in the stadium part of the competition the terrain is not necessarily even. it is, however, the cross-country section that defines the sport and its human-horse practitioners. the cross-country segment of the event is considered the major challenge for eventing. cross-country courses are set out to cover a predetermined distance and involve a variety of fences and elements that present different challenges. topography makes the sport. some eventing courses are situated on a varied natural landscape that includes hills, woods, and natural streams or water. but within this natural landscape event courses are peppered with jumps, including challenging elements8 such as water, drops, and various kinds of ditches. colorful, solid jumps come in combinations or elements that test the athletic ability and courage of horse and rider. eventing is considered an equalizing sport. it does not take an expensive horse to do it. riders wear safety vests and helmets. eventing, like rodeo bronco riding, is considered to be a dangerous sport, because the jumps are solid and the pace is fast over uneven ground. events take place in all kinds of weather (except winter snow and thunder storms), but the ground and water elements (in particular) are very expensively engineered for safety of footing. various types of spikes or cleats are set into the horse’s shoes, depending on ground conditions. the event riders in dona’s sample of event riders self-stereotype themselves and their horses as adrenaline junkies. for example, judy refers to a time in her life when she rode and showed appaloosas as “riding in circles.” eventually she came to eventing. here is how she describes it. (note that in the last exchange judy collapses herself and her horse into “i.”) judy: i got tired of going around in circles. i have a friend who owns a horse and she’s the same as she was 35 years ago. she’s never done anything or gone anywhere. she just likes to ride down the road. i just know if i was going to just ride down the road i wouldn’t ride anymore. unless it could be trail riding in beautiful places and camping out, then maybe i could do that. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 66 dona: what about the environment? you talk about riding in circles. eventing involves landscapes, varied terrain and stuff; does that affect your enjoyment of it or strategy for it? judy: for walk, trot or canter, there’s no adrenalin flow. there’s a huge rush after you’ve completed a cross-country course—especially in a competition. put me in a go box at an event and say go; i’m going. i’m not refusing. i’m not stopping. and the adrenalin rush when you cross the finish line is unlike anything you’ve ever felt. it’s almost like a drug; and it’s so much fun. it’s not how high did i jump; it’s that i got around the course. xena and hester share judy’s sentiments. xena states, “eventers are the crazy people who want an adrenalin rush and are going to bust their butts no matter what happens to them. they get on and go. they are going to fall off on the cross country course, break a rib, get back on and keep going for the adrenalin rush—that high.” to hester, riding is a rush, but when you’re on top and you shift your weight or point him to jump over some gigantic brightly-painted carving of a beaver and he does it the two of you become embodied and it’s not just the imagination. you have become the centaur. you have become part of him [the horse]. it’s not projection. it’s happening because you work together and it’s really cool. it’s a rush. it’s a rush even if you’ve been doing it all your life. it’s a rush to do so little and to get so much in return. wipper describes eventing, at its advanced levels, as the most grueling test of allaround horsemanship of any equestrian sport. (endurance riders may well disagree.) although competing at lower levels judy, hester, and xena would agree. in her article on partnerships formed with accomplished event riders and their event horses, wipper states that riders do not want an automaton (a subtextual reference to dressage horses) for a partner but a free striding and happy horse with whom he or she can communicate (54). like judy and hester, a key theme wipper notes is that an eventer’s horse and rider must be confident together. the rider navigates the terrain. she chooses the course to be jumped, regulates gait, speed, and direction, but depends on the horse to jump the obstacles. the horse must be brave and want to jump them cleanly. trust or trusting your horse to do his job and face the challenges of the course is also a theme expressed by our sample of event riders. dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles -“riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships 67 eventers are supposed to be able to event in all kinds of weather except lightning and snow. a great deal of attention is paid to the safety of the footing or ground the horse and rider traverse; for example, high level competition courses include drainage systems that work for the entire course. jumps that involve water have exacting standards that must be met in terms of footing, since safe grounding works to maintain a horse’s (and rider’s) confidence. conditioning is certainly important with the eventing horse, but confidence, trust, and adrenalin are the central themes that emerge in their discourse. judy recounts that on the cross-country course she concentrates so much on the moments and the flow of the ride, that she actually has little memory of the ride itself once she has finished. when horse and human are traversing a terrain situated or engineered to challenge the sensorium, physicality, and stimulus-response skills of both horse and rider, the pair becomes merged in a fast paced mutual effort in which one becomes lost in the other in a kind of mutual adrenaline rush. adrenaline rushes and confidence are also important themes that emerge in the discourse of endurance riders, but notions of conditioning, a respect for and appreciation of nature, along with a sense of rugged individualism predominate in their narratives. endurance: conserving energy and logging miles together. endurance is a competitive sport that involves long-distance riding over diverse and difficult terrain. endurance riders emphasize the naturalness of the sport for their horses. being in partnership with horses is an essential part of the endurance experience, but so is “being in the environment.” endurance riders train and condition their horses to navigate challenging and sometimes dangerous terrain. endurance riders and their horses are expected to be strong and stoical to endure and log many miles together. while daily conditioning may be done from home, endurance riders travel widely for competitions, where they ride on mapped-out courses, or over preset trails of varying lengths. arabians, noted particularly for their stamina, are the preferred breed of horse for the sport, but a wide variety of horses participates. endurance rides are conducted in the natural landscape (with permission from land owners), with relatively little manipulation or change of the landscape except for mapping and marking the trails and clearing dangerous spots (for example, trimming branches, and monitoring wet places like bogs) on the day of the race. endurance riders humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 68 expect competition venues to include a range of topographical features, including rivers to cross, steep inclines to climb, rocky ground to navigate, as well as expanses of prairie and forests. riders travel point to point or in sets of predetermined loops. at set points on the ride horses are evaluated by a vet and held for a determined amount of time before being allowed to continue the race. condition and conditioning emerge as important themes in the narratives of endurance riders, as do miles ridden. twenty-five to 35 mile rides are called limited distance, and 50-100 mile competitions are considered to be true endurance rides. gaits and speed of gait are up to horse and rider to determine, as are strategies for riding diverse terrain, but the first to finish wins. hot shoe sue aptly sums up endurance riding for sarah: endurance riders … it’s not a sport for whiners. there is congeniality on the trail. the horse is trained as an athlete that does lots of miles. it’s not a public sport. it’s people who want to see the country and you don’t need to dress up or mind being wet or tired. it’s finishing, not winning. it’s the guts and glory of riding over terrain that is not in the best of conditions. it’s a survival sport, not a beauty pageant. it’s not so much an issue of skill as it is you and the horse versus the trail and it all comes down to how you manage your horse and what kind of animal he is. unlike competition events in dressage and eventing, where “the ride” takes minutes, endurance rides last for long periods of time. for example, the tevis cup in the sierra nevada mountains is a length of 100 miles that must be completed within 24 hours. harriet says, “i did my first 25 at nine, my first 50 at ten and my first 100 at thirteen.” similarly, black bear states, “i train for longevity, not the first 500 miles but the thousands of miles they will do over their lifetime.” hot shoe sue proudly relates that, “my horse is coming up on 7,000 miles. i raised him since he was four—now he is 15.” other themes also emerge in the narratives. felix talks about miles ridden like other endurance riders, but he also how miles and time in the saddle enhance rider-horse communication — or getting to know one’s horse. “i’ve ridden 25,000 miles in the last 20 years. you ride a horse 1000 miles and all of a sudden you start learning what an ear flick means on this horse. when we ride we go 4 or 5 hours and think nothing of it. few people do that and very few horses can.” lee refers to goals and the sense of accomplishment that comes with endurance riding. “you set your own goals and they can change depending on what you are doing. it can be getting in the top 10, conditioning the horse or gathering the mileage.” t likes the sense of accomplishment dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles -“riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships 69 when you’re done. sky is a bit more explicit as she characterizes endurance riding as a “grass roots” activity that one does for a sense of accomplishment against oneself and against the trail, as well as to form a bond with one’s horse. energy, stamina, and toughness are prized qualities of the horse and rider. sky says, “i had a horse that was hyper, extremely high energy. i had to ride her and ride her. somebody joked; you should go on an endurance ride.” black bear says “i had this horse who was dangerous on the ground but he was the toughest creature i have ever known in my life. he was built of steel. he died just 3 miles short of 4,000 miles.” likewise for harriet, “i did the tevis — it took 24 hours. it was scary as heck. i threw up. i was miserable but i did it.” hot shoe sue states, “this is not a sport to dress up for; you don’t mind being dirty and you don’t mind being tired.” endurance riders prize their sport, speaking of it as a natural activity that takes place in a natural environment and is enjoyed by both horse and rider. according to hot shoe sue, “if a horse likes to go forward they will do this. most of the horses that do this are successful and enjoying what they do and they’d rather do it than stand around in a stall and go into an arena for an hour or two a day.” sky says, i like endurance because you’re out in a natural area and you’re doing what comes natural to the horse — not forcing them to do something that’s not natural like reining or jumping. this is something they like to do. you have a connection with the horse and that is probably the main reason. on the endurance trail you are always seeing something new—in the show ring it’s repetitive, you see nothing new. similarly, harriet says, “endurance riders do it for the love of seeing the country, the love of a good horse, and having a horse that will last a long time.” daisy mae also raises a theme we see among the norwegians, when she says that with “riding you get to see so many places you can’t get to on foot.” endurance riders, like hot shoe sue, felix, and sky speak of miles logged, stoicism, and energy. conditioning of the horse is central in all the narratives. they also position endurance as the most natural of equestrian sports for the horse. terrain is varied and can be quite dramatic and involves creeks, hills, forests and occasionally concrete. the course must have access to water. although races are held in extremes of weather, and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 70 although racing across the saudi arabian desert characterizes the epitome of the sport, endurance races are not conducted in ice and heavy snow. in a number of ways endurance riders repeat themes used by lawrence to describe the american cowboy. the difference is that while the cowboy tames the wild horse to conquer nature, the endurance riders and their horses conquer or tame nature as a partnered pair. in the narratives of endurance riders like hot shoe sue, although nature (literally and figuratively as something to be traversed) is appreciated, it is horse and human who together master or conquer it. the horse and rider relationship of endurance events evoke themes of rugged individualism (being out alone, facing challenges and enduring adversity), heroic stoicism, silent suffering, hard work, and the ability to function in a risky environment. they portray themselves as rugged and durable, values they hold to be quintessentially american. yet many of these views characterize the north norwegians and their narratives of the icelandic horse. icelandic gaited: a versatile horse and a varied landscape. terrain is important among the norwegian icelandic horse enthusiasts, where one’s immediate, natural environment offers a variety of terrains. although native to iceland, the icelandic horse is in a sense pan-nordically adapted. icelandic horses are used in competitions that are about showing gaits. the dream of any icelandic horse rider would be to have an oval track arena meeting international standards for gaited riding competitions. it is in the flat arena that the gaits are shown. the riders in this study, however, have no access to a competition arena, so training for gaited riding must take place in other venues. smaller arenas are artificially made, but nature is also used. bushes are circled around to train flexibility, and hills are ridden up and down to strengthen the hindquarters of the horse. flexibility and strength enables the highly prized rhythm, cadence, speed, and action in all gaits — especially pace and tölt.9 the horses are also ridden, in all kinds of weather, on tour in the mountains. physical terrain for riding in arctic coastal norway consists of sea and mountains divided by small narrow strips of land and forest. since there is no timber production and the forest is made of small trees, there are very few dirt roads on the terrain. riders make their own paths, using the area close to where they keep their horses on a daily basis. in addition, riders use the terrain to tour, since norwegians believe that their horses need to relax from training in nature much as their riders do. unlike the case of endurance riders who do not race (but may train) in the midwestern u.s. winter months, gaited riders ride all year round. snow closes off the forest paths for most of the winter (december-may), but people still ride on roads in snow-plowed areas. horses’ hair is allowed to grow, and they are not covered with blankets but, in the arctic dark time, they are lit with reflectors when riding. riders also use head lights on their helmets, as well as warm and water resistant clothes. as dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles -“riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships 71 norwegians say “there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.” on her first ride on a icelandic horse, dona was told the horse was naturally hardy, did not need to be conditioned to go up and down hills all day, and was the epitome of sure footed — dependable on any terrain and in any kind of weather. tölt as a gait unique to the breed, is non-jarring and makes icelandic horses a very comfortable ride. in coastal troms (where anita conducts interviews), one does not have to travel to varied terrains or to engineer them. they are dramatically there for everyone. standing on almost any road, farm, café, or stable the visual image is varied—lots of sea, a small narrow strip of farmed land, a small strip of forest, trees growing up to about 100-200 meters above sea level, and mountains often covered with snow all year round. the highest mountains range around 1,000 meters. forests are mainly populated with birch and other minor brushes, natural to the region, as well as introduced pine. most icelandic horses are kept between sea and road or road and forest; riding occurs over small hills. terrain like uneven or soft forest bottoms and rocky seashores are not good for tölt. marshlands can be dangerous; some are crossable and some will sink you. although none of the informants have indoor arenas, they do have access to a level outdoor riding surface of some kind. given the steep hills, such arenas have to be artificially made. machines are used to create a small surface for dressage work, but most riders use nature in ways that both enhance the quality of the gaits and the quality of horse-human relationships. in the norwegian narratives nature becomes more elaborately themed—not so much as something to be mastered, but something to be a part of, to be experienced and felt. among the norwegians the outside is brought into the inside and vice-a-versa. fefe says, “it is wonderful to get out in nature and not be like a hard man, one can be a bit soft now and then … a bit open to new thoughts and ways of being. being allowed in the forest is like meditation, nearness to animals, birds, which i am interested in, crops … it’s incredible what you see.” anita’s informants use the term cozy in a number of narratives to describe the pleasures of riding in nature. norwegians believe their horses need variety. susanna states that she rides one day on the trail (for stamina and variation) and the next day practicing for competition. norwegians believe their horses need variation. she states that “the trail is more cozy.10 on the trail there is less stress. you load your backpack with food and relax on the top of the mountain.” similarly emerita expresses the difference between the riding school and the icelandic horse humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 72 environments: “when one is out in nature on a hike in the woods, fields, and sea shore, it is just the coziness of enjoying nature, being outside, sitting on the horse. when i ride in the arena, just following another person, it is like work. in the arena i get frustrated because i feel i am not mastering it. taking a hike with the horse outside though is fantastic.” ola and katla both refer to the thrill of establishing a relationship with the horse in which the horse can sometimes take the lead. katla, whose “parents introduced her to riding so she could get fresh air and run around a bit,” has this to say: i feel no particular joy when i ride in an arena with others. i do not like being evaluated on the basis of my horse’s achievement or training. i like to establish my relationship with her in the paddock and then ride her afterwards with just my mind. when i ride on the trail, i think “now we stop’” and she stops. when we ride in the hills, i do not have to steer her. if she understands what i want she does it. i really enjoy being outdoors. i enjoy being in touch with myself and my horse. when it comes to riding, it is about getting out in nature away from people. i like to ride up in the mountain where the air is fresh. riding on the trail is a good way of being out in nature. katla takes her children out riding so that they can learn this. ola also points out the importance of letting the horse enjoy some natural freedom and of stimulating him with a variety of places and activities. you can ride a horse up and down. i think it is important to let the horse run. it is important to let him stretch. it’s important to let the horse fly off and get a real “yippee!” kick his hind legs and have full speed. i think that is important. i seldom ride the same routes. it’s much more positive to ride different places. it’s very fun to herd sheep or cows in the forest. you never know where you might go. horses like that. they like the physical challenges to work themselves a bit. while the discourse of endurance riders and eventers can detail the challenges of riding in adverse weather, the norwegians, with their slogan that there is “no bad weather, only bad clothes,” melds with an approach to riding in nature, shown within narratives, that further express a connoisseurship of nature through being open to multiple factors and attuned to a diversity of surroundings. although riding the same terrain and dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles -“riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships 73 performing the same exercises involves some repetition, agnes is never bored. she says, with a twist of humor, “today i will ride on the road. yippee! of course not every day is fun, the weather may be bad, but it is strange as soon as you are on the horse’s back you forget everything, you just ride.” isis says, “i enjoy riding in the forest very much, and preferably not talking very much. i’m a nature person also with the horse. but riding the horse in the forest is the whole package. i can ride and bring my fishing pole.” similarly, urdur refers to the mixed wildlife that one can encounter, saying, riding is about getting out in nature, moving through it with the horse; only that way can you get around more without any disturbing sounds of motors. i compare it to being at sea in a sailor rowboat, moving through the water without a sound. riding about being with animals in nature too. riding a horse, one comes closer to wild animals; we meet a lot of elk and moose, and the horses can stand pretty close to them. you have to be careful not to get between a moose and her calf, and also horses can bolt from moose. yesterday i experienced a wonderful trip. it was sultry and damp, the forest was dense with nearly tropical scents. i took a long tour around the island and explored a new area in the north, by the seashore … you can have all the nuances. we cantered a bit and tölted a bit, then we just walked through the forest. of course, you can experience this on foot, but you can’t reach such great distances as with a horse, plus one would not have the feeling that one is together with the animal on that journey. the narratives show that the norwegian informants, although less self-revealing (compared to americans), speak more about the environment as a “nature” to be seen and experienced in a unique way on the horse than is the case for any of the other sport groups or equestrian cultures in our study. katla’s statement about riding as a good way to be out in nature and urder’s that “riding is with animals and nature too,” are reminiscent of pálsson’s (biosociality 74) description of ancient scandinavians as seeing their lands as an extension of their own nature. maurstad (37) also describes how contemporary north norwegians open their selves up to and embody the very land and sea-scapes that surround them. narratives illustrate how riding a horse in nature engages the senses and the emotions. katla, savoring the fresh mountain air, allows her horse to take the lead and to go where the horse wishes, and feels good being connected with her horse and with the nature that surrounds them. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 74 in a recent newspaper article (rein) on the nordlandhest/lyngshest, a north norwegian breed of horse, the horse is presented as being a symbol of the nordic people, mixed and versatile; the same could be said for the icelandic horse and the mixed ecologies or varied terrains in arctic norway. urdur states that “all the time i have been in north norway i have seen the landscape through a rider’s eye and thought, gee, here would be a nice place to ride.” horses, humans, and the environment in the gaited sport narratives are themed as varied, mixed, and versatile. isis, for example appreciates the versatility of a horse in “that it does everything.” norwegians do not only ride outdoors. they are an outdoors people. as ernst says, “i was very active outdoors even before i bought a horse. i ski all winter.” surrounded by the “nature” they seek, unlike the dressage riders and eventers who must have their terrains engineered with predictable elements, and the endurance riders who travel to good and mixed terrains, the norwegian narratives privilege depictions of a varied terrain or environment that is always there, all year round. the horse becomes a strategy for getting into it, travelling over it, and letting it come over you. rounding up: equestrian-equine ecologies of personhood. taking the perspective that a separation between human and non-human interactions can be too sharply drawn (arluke and saunders 42), seeking new ways to bring human-horse relationships into cultural analysis, and drawn to exploring new ways of bridging or conflating nature/culture dualisms, we have collected and analyzed narratives from participants in different equestrian sports. haraway refers to human-nonhuman animal relations as knots “of species co-shaping one another in layers of reciprocating complexity” (species 42). clearly, a sense of reciprocal partnership both in terms of embodiment and shared task at hand characterizes our horse rider pairs. in all of these equestrian sports the rider identifies and bonds with the horse. the horse, as a partnered “we” through his or her very horsiness, aids in the co-construction of the rider’s identity and sense of personhood. this transgresses the nature-culture divide and also marks horse people as different from non-horse people. xena’s statement to the effect that horses have made her who she is, or ola’s statement that horses are stuck to his skull, reflect styles of selving where personhood and identity are reciprocally positioned in a horse-human nexus. what comes through in all the narratives is a deep sense of engagement with the horse and a sense of shared personhood, or we-making, as being in “it” together. this kind of layering or nesting of reciprocal identities or partnerships of significant otherness has already been noted in the horse and human relationship literature (brandt, birke and brandt, game, hook). dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles -“riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships 75 we attempt to bring another layer of reciprocating complexity to the unraveling of haraway’s knot in which terrains ridden emerge as important, variable, and identityforming aspects of what actually constitutes the “it” of being in it together. our aim is to demonstrate complex ways in which terrains traversed by horse-rider pairs affects a complex series of interwoven constructions of shared ecologies of horse-rider relations, identities, personhoods, and psyches. comparative analysis of discourse from dressage riders, eventers, endurance riders, and icelandic gaited horse riders reveal thematic differences that distinguish the practitioners of each sport. as we conceptualized this study of horse-human relationships, we assumed that collecting narrative data from a range of horse sport enthusiasts would provide us with a variety of perspectives, where culture would emerge in talk (quinn) and data would bubble from the ground up (see note 3). we sought informants who had long-term, first-hand, practical experience with horses. we did not anticipate or recognize the thematic salience or importance of terrain in the narratives until we began to pool our data. terrains covered, as well as shared equestrian sport cultures, constitute another contact zone, entanglement, or new way of mixing that in the narratives we collected demand, select for, or elicit, similar skill sets and responses from horse and human. morgan, lynn and missy tell us how dressage horses and their riders become mutually and reciprocally attuned, focused, and in-touch as they micromanage their way moment by moment over well engineered, predictable, geometrically detailed terrains. dressage horses and their riders are deep thinkers. the narratives of xena, hester and judy—all eventers—stress the importance of a shared sense of trust, lack of fear, and confidence with the horses as they speed over tricky jumps and civilly engineered terrain of cross-country courses designed to challenge both of them and get their adrenalin rushing. endurance riders are rugged individuals, like hot shoe sue, sky and felix, who relate how their horses log mile after mile over varied and challenging terrain, where energy, stamina, conditioning, and stoic endurance guarantee survival, if not winning, for both human and horse. the hardy icelandic gaited horses and their allweather, hardy norwegian riders, like katla, fefe, and agnes bring training into a mixed and versatile outdoors, where together they relax, breathe in the fresh air, and open their selves and senses up to becoming immersed in the region’s distinctive nature. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 76 by adapting gisli pálsson’s concepts of environmental communalism and biosociality to the discussion and analysis of the kinds of entanglements that emerge when riders of different equestrian cultures speak of riding their horses in different environments or over different terrains, we have attempted to decenter analysis away from universal, western dualisms. we have also endeavored to show how, although entanglements are situated differently for each equestrian sport culture, horse and human are paired together, defined, distinguished, and identified by the environments they work within.11 although our data help to move analysis away from a monolithic discussion of horse and rider, new dualisms and categories do emerge. first, all riders draw distinctions between riding within walls and outside of them, and second, they differentiate between terrains ridden in terms of how natural or artificially engineered (for the respective sports) they are. notes 1. pálsson’s animal of choice in 1996 is fish. in 2009 it has become the likes of biologically engineered, alzheimer’s pigs. briefly, pálsson contrasts communalism to paternalism and orientalism. while paternalism as a human practice and strategy is associated with protecting the environment, orientalism is associated with exploiting it. communalism, however, rejects the radical separation of nature and society and emphasizes the notion of dialogue. by biosociality pálsson refers to contemporary biotechnology as it conflates the dualism of nature/culture as in, for example, as in the practice of using animals as spare parts for humans. 2. similarly, posthumanism (wolfe xxiv), as a new mode of philosophy and interpretation, also rejects classic humanist divisions of borderlines drawn between self/other, mind/body, and society/nature, and calls for a decentering of the human as a strategy for engaging problems of anthropocentrism and speciesism. posthumanism sees bodies as both open and closed, stressing the embodiment and embeddedness of human beings in both a biological and a technical world 3. anticipating that our data would bubble from the ground up and reflect culture in talk (quinn 2005), we have all asked the same general questions. they are: 1) why do you ride? 2) tell me about your life as a rider. 3) how does this relate to the kind of person you are? 4) how does riding relate to other aspects of your life? and 5) how is your experience the same or different from the experiences of other people? transcribed interviews are from 5 to 20 pages long, single-spaced. in our quotations we have eliminated para-language such as “um” and “okay” but have transcribed directly from dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles -“riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships 77 interviews even if grammatically incorrect. anita’s interviews were conducted in norwegian. she translated them into english. 4. in this sense we are doing what patton (84) terms as a kind of double writing or what jackson calls anthropology at home. dona has one horse, while anita and sarah each have two. dona trains for eventing, sarah is an endurance rider, and anita rides icelandic gaited horses. each of us has participated in a number of equestrian sports. dona and sarah have been riding since early childhood, whereas anita began as an adult. dona has ridden with anita in norway and anita has ridden in south dakota with dona. 5. not one of our informants mentioned the fact that as domesticated animals horses have no agency or choice when it comes to their use in these sports. yet, as patton (97) notes, human-nonhuman animal relations should not be regarded as incomplete versions of human-human relations but must be regarded as complete versions of relations between two different kinds of animals. the uniqueness of the horse and the human define the relationship, but a caveat is in order, because all experienced riders may quibble about black bear’s view of horse intelligence and yet agree that they can be dangerous to humans. black bear, like a number of informants, notes that, “horses can kill you. they are very large and not too bright animals that can kill you. i don’t mind loving a horse. i don’t mind respecting them. i don’t mind just enjoying being around them. but when i am with a horse it is very important that a horse knows who is in charge because they can kill you. if you spoil a horse it will run over you.”lee’s approach is certainly more paternal than communal. she states: “i’m a christian and in the bible we were given dominion over the animals, so to me that means we were given the responsibility to look after these animals so that is what we do.” 6. various horse subcultures have been explored. among these are thoroughbreds (case), saddlebreds (clatworthy), harness horses (helmer ), and fox hunters (aversa). 7. dona went on a trail ride with a dressage rider who did not know that her horse could actually go up and down a 75-degree incline. 8. the amount of civil engineering that goes into an eventing course in the u.s. midwest can be considerable. it costs thousands of dollars to engineer a safe water jump where humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 78 the horse will be confident about the footing, e.g., with sandy, non-slippery rather than muddy bottoms. one event course in minnesota rises out of flat prairie. all its impressive hills had to be built. 9. icelandic horses are gaited horses. four-gaiters do tölt in addition to the walk, trot, and canter. five-gaiters do an additional gait called pace. tölt is a four beat gait, like the walk, only much faster. tölt rapidly covers the terrain and may be easy for the rider to sit. a fourth two beat gait or pace is most difficult to master. the gaits are natural to the horse, but must be further developed through training and mastered by the rider. dressage work is incorporated into icelandic horse training, but riders differentiate themselves from dressage riders by emphasizing the speed and action required of icelandic horses in competition. at competition, action, rhythm, cadence and speed are valued. the idea is for the horse to engage his hind. 10. translating koselig as cozy is close but fails to capture the sense of deeply felt relaxation, appreciation, and camaraderie that comes from being with horses in nature. 11. because we have chosen to emphasize how these various categories of riders wish to define themselves and their horses vis-a-vis other riding sports we have tried to capture the differences that come through in the narratives. this obscures a considerable amount of overlap, as some dressage pairs trail ride, some endurance riders were once jumpers, and, although they don’t use the terms, endurance and gaited groups have their adrenalin junkies, while eventers must master dressage…etc. appendix: list of informants informants who participated in the study are listed below. they are listed, by gender and locality, beginning with youngest and ending with oldest age groups—from age 20 to 70 and above. riding interests are divided into categories: icelandic gaited, dressage, eventing, endurance, trail, and pleasure/casual. while informants from the trail and pleasure/casual groups are included in the riding in arenas versus outdoors sections of the article, the paper focuses on the first four groups. originally we intended to include midwestern trail riders in this analysis but manuscript length prescriptions prevented us from doing so. there is considerable overlap among the first four categories. riders move from one sport to another over their life cycles and eventers, for example, my compete at both dressage and eventing competitions. as stated in the article, our informants are largely at the lower levels of expertise and practice in their chosen sports. we identify them by primary interests in terms of training and competition. dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles -“riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships 79 susanna-f (norway, icelandic gaited); isis-f (norway, icelandic gaited); olga-f (norway, icelandic gaited); pixie-f (us midwest, trail); rebecca-f (us midwest, pleasure/casual); deany-f (us midwest, pleasure/casual); cleo-f (us midwest, endurance); jz-f (us midwest, eventing); laura-f (us midwest, dressage); blondie-f (us midwest, dressage); xena-f (us midwest, eventing); niki-f (us midwest, trail); harriet-f (us midwest, endurance); emma-f (us midwest, dressage); barbara-f (us midwest, dressage); bella-f (us midwest, dressage); hk-f (us midwest, eventing); agnes-f (norway, icelandic gaited); aurora-f (norway, icelandic gaited); sophie-f (norway, icelandic gaited); katla-f (norway, icelandic gaited); lucy-f (us midwest, trail); halla-f (us midwest, eventing); lynn-f (us midwest, dressage); missy-f (us midwest, dressage); ola-m (norway, icelandic gaited); ernst-m (norway, icelandic gaited); becca-f (us midwest, endurance); rigmor-f (norway, icelandic gaited); urdur-f (norway, icelandic gaited); emerita-f (norway, icelandic gaited); henreitte-f (norway, icelandic gaited); kane-m (norway, icelandic gaited); sophia-f (us midwest, trail); karen-f (us midwest, pleasure/casual); bernadette-f (us midwest, pleasure/casual); chisum-m (us midwest, trail); tess-f (us midwest, trail); sally-f (us midwest, trail); buster-m (us midwest, pleasure/casual); black bear-f (us midwest, endurance); lee-f (us midwest, endurance); nell-f (us midwest, pleasure/casual); morgan-f (us midwest, dressage); ajay-f (us midwest, dressage); daisy mae-f (us midwest, endurance); t-f (us midwest, endurance); lara-f (us midwest, , pleasure/casual); sky-f (us midwest, endurance); edie-f (us midwest, dressage); bonnie-f (us midwest, pleasure/casual); judy-f (us midwest, eventing); hester-f (us midwest, eventing); katie-f (us midwest, eventing); krusty-f (us midwest, dressage); fefe-m (norway, icelandic gaited); felix-m (us midwest, endurance); red-m (us midwest, trail); hot shoe sue-f (us midwest, endurance); doug-m (us midwest, pleasure/casual) works cited anthony, david. the horse, the wheel, and language. princeton, nj: princeton up, 2007. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 80 argent, gala. “do clothes make the horse? relationality, roles and statuses in iron age inner asia. “ world archaeology 42.2 (2010): 157-174. arluke, arnold, and clinton sanders. regarding animals. philadelphia: temple up, 1996. aversa, alfred. “foxhunting: a patrician sport.” review of sport and leisure 6.1 (1981): 83-110. birke, lynda. “learning to speak horse: the culture of "natural horsemanship.” society and animals 15 (2007): 217-239. _______. “talking about horses: control and freedom in the world of ‘natural horsemanship.’” society and animals 16 (2008): 107-126. birke, lynda, and keri brandt. “mutual corporeality: gender and horse/human relationships.” women's studies international forum 32 (2009): 189-197. brandt, keri. “a language of their own: an interactionist approach to human-horse communication.” society and animals 12.4 (2004): 299-316. case, carole. “deviance as a rational response: disguise deceit and conspiracy among racehorse trainers.” deviant behavior 8 (1987): 329-342. clatworthy, nancy. “social class and value factors in saddle-horse showing.” free inquiry in creative sociology 9 (1981): 135-138. dalke, karen. “mustang: the paradox of imagery.” humanimalia 1.2 (2010): 1-11. davis, dona and dorothy davis. “dualling memories: twinship and the disembodiment of identity.” the ethnographic self as resource: writing memory and experience into ethnography. ed. peter collins and anselma galinat. oxford: berghahn, 2010. 129-149. despret, vinciane. “the body we care for: figures of anthropo-zoo-genesis.” body & society 10.2-3 (2004): 111-134. dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles -“riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships 81 fuentes, agustin. “the humanity of animals and the animality of humans: a view from biological anthropology inspired by j.m. coetzee's elizabeth costello.” american anthropologist 108.1 (2006): 124-132. game, ann. “riding: embodying the centaur.” body & society 7.4 (2001): 1-12. hamilton, jennifer, and aimee placas. “anthropology becoming...? the 2010 sociocultural year in review.” american anthropologist 113.2 (2011): 246-261. haraway, donna jeanne. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago up: prickly paradigm press, 2003. _______. when species meet. minneapolis: u of minnesota p., 2008. hayward, eva. “fingereyes: impressions of cup corals." cultural anthropology 25.4 (2010): 577-599. helmer, james. “the horse in backstretch culture." qualitative sociology 14.2 (1991): 175-195. herzog, hal. some we love, some we hate, some we eat: why it's so hard to think straight about animals. new york, ny: harper, 2010. hook, kristina. “transferring qualities from horseback riding to design.” nordichi 10. 2010. 226-35. ingold, tim. “an anthropologist looks at biology.” man 25.2 (1990): 208-229. _______. humanity and animality. companion encyclopedia of anthropology. (pp. 14-32.) new york: routledge, 1994. jackson, anthony. anthropology at home. london: routledge, 1987. king, barbara. being with animals. new york, ny: doubleday, 2010. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 82 latimer, joanna, and lynda birke. “natural relations: horses, knowledge, technology.” the sociological review 57.1 (2009): 1-27. lawrence, elizabeth a. rodeo: an anthropologist looks at the wild and the tame. knoxville: university of tennessee press, 1982. lindholm, charles. culture and identity. boston: boston up, 2001. maurstad, anita. “cultural seascapes as embodied knowledge.” mutuality and empathy: self and other in the ethnographic encounter. eds. anne sigfrid grønseth and dona davis wantage, uk: sean kingston pub, 2010. 35-48. neisser, ulric. “concept and self concepts.” the conceptual self in context. eds. ulric neisser and david jopling. cambridge: cambridge up. 1997. 3-12. pálsson, gisli. “biosocial relations of production.” comparative studies in society and history 5.2 (2009): 288-313. _______. “human-environmental relations: orientalism, paternalism and communalism.” nature and society: anthropological perspectives. eds. phillipe descola and gisli pálsson. london: routledge, 2003. 63-81. patton, paul. “language, power and the training of horses.” zoontologies: the question of the animal. ed. cary wolfe. minneapolis, mn: u of mn press, 2003. 83-99. quinn, naomi. finding culture in talk: a collection of methods. new york: palgrave, 2005. rein, marit. “blest om hest” [publicity on horse.] nordlys 16.03 (2012). rose, dan. “quixote's library and pragmatic discourse: toward understanding the culture of capitalism.” anthropological quarterly 64.4 (1990): 155-168. schaffer, michael. one nation under dog. new york, ny: henry holt, 2009. smuts, barbara. “reflections.” the lives of animals. ed. amy gutmann. princeton, nj: princeton up, 1999. 107-120. dona davis, anita maurstad, and sarah cowles -“riding up forested mountain sides, in wide open spaces, and with walls”: developing an ecology of horse-human relationships 83 tallbear, kim. “why interspecies thinking needs indigenous standpoints.” society for cultural anthropology culture @large forum. web. april 2012. wardlow, holly. wayward women. berkeley, ca: u california p, 2006. wipper, audrey. “the partnership: the horse-rider relationship in eventing.” symbolic interaction 23.1 (2000): 47-70. wissler, clark. “the influence of the horse in the development of plains culture.” american anthropologist 16.1 (1914): 1-25. wolfe, cary. what is posthumanism? minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2010. microsoft word freeman-rose pdf dummy h u m a n i m a l i a 4:1 carol freeman love and the dingo deborah bird rose. wild dog dreaming: love and extinction. charlottesville and london: university of virginia press, 2011. 184 pp. $29.50 hc, $16.50 pb. the most effective agent in the extinction of species is the pressure of other species. (a.r. wallace, island life. london: macmillan, 1895) the cover of wild dog dreaming features a tinted black and white photograph of a young dingo in outback queensland. the gaze and stance of the animal implies uncertainty, as if he or she is lost and appealing for help to the human taking the photo. however, rose’s book is not so much about the dingo as a species and the many dilemmas and arguments that proliferate around this animal’s continued existence in australia, as it is about the book’s subtitle: the concepts of love and extinction. an uneasy connection between the figure on the cover and the title of the book may not be immediately apparent to readers, whether familiar with australian fauna or not. dingoes arrived in the country about 4,000 years ago, probably from asia with waves of human migration, but their future as a pure breed is now threatened by interbreeding with “feral” domestic dogs. the term “wild dog” refers to dogs introduced by european settlers, dingoes, and their hybrids. the specific extinction rose writes about in this book presumably concerns the animals whose dna is identified with the original immigrants from asia. most of these animals are on fraser island off the north east coast of australia, where they are prevented from breeding with other dogs. some remote populations are also considered close to “pure,” but systematic dna testing to support this claim is difficult.1 “dreaming,” as rose tells us, is used by indigenous aborigines to refer to what is understood in their world view as “the creators, the origins, the process of creation, the continuities of coming into being and coming into pattern” (11). while some of these terms and ideas may not be fully discussed, by the end of the book the significance of both aboriginal cultural values and the ideas of a number of western philosophers and ecologists in regard to extinction has been thoroughly explored. wild dog dreaming offers a rare, positive approach to considering the difficult and deeply concerning phenomenon of global extinctions in the anthopocene. rose writes with heartfelt conviction from the perspective of history, ethics, religion and philosophy. she carol freeman — love and the dingo 155 makes her case with reference to the place of animals (human and nonhuman) in relation to each other and the biosphere. the book is meditative and reflective, rather than analytical, and rose is in no doubt about the responsibilities of humans to the occupants of the earth and appeals to her readers to embrace life, with all its complexities and contradictions. she begins her book with a second compelling image: the skinned bodies of dingoes hanging by their hind feet from a tree not far from canberra, the national capital of australia. the sight of this “strange fruit” deeply affects her. dingoes and creation stories provide a touchstone throughout the book while she refers to her aboriginal teacher old tim and the thoughts of a range of western philosophers. rose hopes at least to begin to “mend the world” (5), and to this end includes a series of very personal stories, with her experiences related in a tone that is conversational and even confidential ― it is accessible writing. while her intended audience is obviously more than academic, the bulk of her book discusses the sometimes weighty and disparate views of, among others, emmanuel levinas, donna haraway, val plumwood, robyn eckersley, michael soulé, martin heidegger, and lev shestov. later, the custom of talking around a campfire is used to bring these thinkers together in a discussion that “keeps the stories rolling.” rose is not looking for final meanings, but letting “the flow of ideas take them into new places” (15). these and other conversations raise ethical questions related to the problem of species extinction. she asks, how do animal deaths relate to human death ― particularly massacre, genocide, and mass slaughter? the reality of animal death is confronted with an equanimity not often found in theoretical books in a passage where the dead body of a hunted animal is being prepared to be eaten. rose’s response to the heat and smell of the body is almost identical to my reaction in a similar situation, when a just-caught rabbit was skinned and quartered on a cracked glass table in a shack by the beach. it is a scene i remember with great clarity, so suddenly in touch with the sensory details and undeniable facts of this kind of death. the lesson here is that the industrialized killing of animals in western society and the distance we then have from them is echoed in the remoteness of extinction to our daily lives: isolated glimpses of polar bears on television reinforces indifference. resistance to looking the animal in the face and confronting the difficult questions associated with human-animal relations is dealt with through a discussion of levinas’s essay “name of a dog.” rose anguishes over the inability of levinas to connect with the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 156 dog bobby as an ethical, communicable being. she notes the strength of the human/animal boundary in western thought ― “the tyranny of the abstract over the living reality of the world” (31) ― and what she sees as the strengthening of these barriers by science. she feels that levinas maintains the boundary between animals and humans ― even in the face of his love for the dog bobby ― to save the idea of man, as well as the idea of god (40). this failure is an emptiness, a disappointment, that rose finds profoundly disturbing. she compares this erasure to the attitude of david lurie toward the dog who forms a bond with him in j. m. coetzee’s disgrace and sees his turning away from the animal’s fate as the “disgrace” of the book’s title. a significant portion of wild dog dreaming is devoted to a discussion of ideas about god, the bible, and the absence of certainty in the present era. while talking of loneliness, despair, existentialism (which she perceives as appearing with the absence or death of god) and the breaking down of dualisms ― for instance, the boundary between nature and culture ― new questions arise concerning our relation to nonhuman animals. some queries that rose poses are: if we are like them, do we lose our sense of having a unique origin and destiny? if we are not like them, are we isolated? to whom are we accountable? who are we with them, and then again, who are we without them? (48). interspersed with these considerations are stories from the dry and remote simpson desert and rose’s conversations and walks with aboriginal men from the yarralin community in australia’s northern territory. old tim has a particularly rich connection with dingoes through shared kinship, a wealth of creation stories, and “a passionate attachment” to his wild dogs. these passages bring both specific instances of what she talks about in other parts of the book and universality to her discussion. again and again the importance of human-animal connection, entanglement, symbiosis, mutuality, webs of exchanges, and interdependence are stressed. she points out the urgency of recognizing these connections as the earth faces potentially catastrophic changes in climate and the extinction of a great number of animals and plants. aboriginal culture, beliefs and practices are a constant example of alternative ways of thinking about and living in the land, while also offering a different way of managing human life and death. there are also facts and assessments about the place of dingoes in white australian and ecological contexts ― dingo fences, poisoning techniques and the a� itudes of pastoralists, the dingo’s howl and possible extinction, the role of dingoes as apex predators in maintaining biodiversity, and the effect of habitat clearing. but, more often, rose veers away from current issues concerning specific human-animal interactions, such as dingo attacks on humans, the eating of dingoes by aboriginal people, attitudes carol freeman — love and the dingo 157 to interbreeding, and the significance of the idea of pure breed dingoes. one of the other absences from rose’s book is any mention of the very recent extinction of the thylacine, a native forerunner of the dingo in australia. many scientists believe that competition from dingoes resulted in the disappearance of thylacines from mainland australia, while the species survived on the island of tasmania where the dingo did not exist, although this is not conclusive. evidence from tasmania and mainland rock engravings suggest that the position of the dingo in the mainland biosphere and the treatment the species is now experiencing, along with their place in aboriginal culture and the terms used to describe them, are strikingly similar to those encountered by the thylacine. necessary aspects of rose’s discussion are ideas of suffering and grief. as with other elements in the book, biblical figures and commentaries, or aboriginal ways of dealing with these issues, either introduce or are at the center of her dialogue. in yarralin community the dropping of 1080-poison dingo bait by aircraft on their traditional land is perceived as an outrage and raises protests. 1080 poison is not only toxic to dingoes, but also to many other species. it can take 2-12 hours for an animal to die; it causes disorientation, muscle tremors and convulsions.2 1080 remains in the flesh and bones of the poisoned animals, which then becomes a problem when their bodies are eaten by scavengers. rose is right to question indifference, power, and the paradoxes involved in this situation. while the few remaining pure breed dingoes are protected under some australian state laws, hybrid and wild dog numbers are increasing and they can be shot on sight. the difficulty of determining one from the other where interbreeding continues makes the eradication of dingoes both likely, and an implied rather than explicit desire. rose returns to levinas via michael fagenblat’s statement that he ends up with “an ethics that is so impassive, indeed formal, that it risks itself becoming pure theory” (quoted on 103) and by this circuitous route comes back, quite surprisingly, to extinction. these webs of connection, in themselves, underscore the argument she is making. it is with immense skill and intelligence that this network of threads is woven, but rose does not answer the questions that were on my lips: if dingoes are endangered ― how many are left? what is the biological connection between dingoes and wild dogs? how does this connection relate to the idea of “extinction?” likewise, the issues and problems involved in dingo conservation are left to be addressed by other writers and discovered by the reader. a highlight of the book occurs in chapter 10, where there is an imaginary discussion with a group of philosophers, including old tim, around a campfire. ilya prigogine humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 158 says immutability is certain, predictable. plumwood sees a connection between death and certainty, and says plato was working towards an account of life that would sustain immortality in the face of death ― modernity, of course, has “proved incapable of offering a life-affirming account of death” (114). tim tells a story where one part of a human lives on after death. shestov points out that death entails grief and loss, but tim says it does not involve “nothingness” ― the nihilism shestov has wri� en about. i particularly enjoyed the idea of haraway’s dog, cayenne, bounding into view with donna: she has written about heidegger’s “the open,” a zone or process where humans come face to face with the nothingness that gives rise to being. haraway encounters animal others in “the open” and she argues for “world making that affirms and enhances like in connectivity and without hierarchy” (117). the conversation closes with shestov’s spirited response to god and the world: god-craziness . . . one of the last chapters of rose’s book begins to deal with humans as prey, but only in a historical sense: her indefatigable exuberance intervenes, so that observations slide into a discussion of the bible’s song of songs, the metaphysics of love, sensuality and ecological erotics, and back to her thesis that connections are powerful: love and death exist in dynamic balance. the difficulties of perceiving and sustaining this balance are glaringly obvious in the stories that are currently being played out in australia. in june 2012 the deputy coroner of the northern territory, with tears in her eyes, delivered the final verdict in what was probably the most fraught case of human/animal interaction in the country’s history. more than 30 years earlier, lindy chamberlain claimed her baby was taken from her tent by a dingo while the family were camping at uluru, a red stone monolith in central australia that is a popular tourist site and sacred to the anangu people of the area. however, she was charged with murdering her daughter azaria and spent three years in jail. after many years of attempting to formally receive exoneration for her child’s death, this fourth inquest concluded that a dingo had, indeed, taken her baby. adrian franklin, in an article “dingoes in the dock” published in a recent edition of new scientist, anticipates how the azaria chamberlain finding might impact on conservation efforts for the dingo: if the conservation movement insists on unrealistic conceptions of the dingo, as happened with fraser island, then the future of the species in australia does not look good. attacks may continue, with culling of problem animals the inevitable result. 3 carol freeman — love and the dingo 159 however, if it is finally accepted that a dingo killed azaria, and that dingoes naturally have a complex repertoire of behaviors that include symbiotic and predatory associations with humans, then it can be assigned its place on the landscape as a dangerous animal and conserved as such animals are everywhere, with its separation from people given due weight.4 i have a quibble with one aspect of the book’s publication that was perhaps outside the control of its author, but i think is worth mentioning. the publisher’s “news release” included with my copy is headed “wild dog dreaming animal extinction: the anomaly of human-driven disaster.” the release then claims that “the endangered dingo of australia is not the first animal to face extinction, but its story is particularly disturbing as it is the first to be caused by a single species: our own.” this failure to acknowledge the many species already driven to extinction by humans in this anthropocene era ― for example, the passenger pigeon in usa, the falklands islands wolf, the thylacine in tasmania, the dodo in mauritius ― is disturbing, and i can only encourage authors to be vigilant in picking up errors such as this, perhaps made in haste or without fully understanding the text. but this is a minor concern about a book that is sure to interest and inspire rose’s many admirers, as well as readers who access her writing for the first time. wild dog dreaming proposes an attitude toward life and death that is challenging and invigorating: through coupling love and extinction humans may be able to make a difference ― a unique answer to the sixth great extinction event and one of the most important problems of our time. notes 1. see colong foundation for wilderness nomination: http://www.colongwilderness. org.au/files/pages/dingo-nom-text.pdf 2. from a brochure 1080 & dogs don’t mix, published by the fox free taskforce, tasmanian department of primary industry, water and environment, which i picked up in the waiting room of my local veterinarian. 3. see leah burns et al on the subject of dingoes on fraser island, including the recommendation that an ecocentric ethic hould be applied: it is human, as well as nonhuman animals, that need to be managed: georgette leah burns and peter howard, “when wildlife tourism goes wrong: a case study of stakeholder and management issues regarding dingoes on fraser island, australia.” tourism management 24.6 (2003): 699-712 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 160 http://www98.griffith.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/handle/10072/6029/when_wildlife...?seq uence=1 ; georgette leah burns, jim macbeth and susan moore, “should dingoes die? principles for engaging ecocentric ethics in wildlife tourism management.” journal of ecotourism, 10.3 (2011): 179-196. 4. adrian franklin, “dingoes in the dock.” new scientist, 20 february, 2012. http://www98.griffith.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/handle/10072/6029/when_wildlife...?sequence=1 http://www98.griffith.edu.au/dspace/bitstream/handle/10072/6029/when_wildlife...?sequence=1 salzani, review of bosco/latini theriotopologies carlo salzani review of: lorella bosco and micaela latini, eds. animals and humans in german literature, 1800–2000: exploring the great divide. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2020. xviii + 160 pp. £58.99, hb. carlo salzani is a research fellow at the messerli research institute of vienna, austria, and a faculty member of the paris institute for critical thinking (pict). email: carlosalzani@gmail.com book review mailto:carlosalzani@gmail.com in the animal that therefore i am, jacques derrida suggests that it is in the texts by “poets or prophets” that something like a true thinking of the animal should be sought.1 the texts written by philosophers and scientists, on the contrary, are unable to really “encounter” the animal other, since they rest on the traditional dichotomy that divides the observing human subject from the animal reduced to a passive object. a similar argument was famously put forward by j. m. coetzee’s protagonist elizabeth costello in the lives of animals, where philosophers and poets are juxtaposed with only the latter being granted true access to the authentic, bodily presence of the animal, often also despite themselves.2 the advantage of literature and poetry over philosophy, the argument goes, is that they can bypass the narrow constraints of reason — traditionally the main discriminating feature between humans and nonhumans and thus also the main anthropocentric bias — and try to access otherness through imagination, bodily feelings, and empathy. this vantage opens up a whole field of investigation that should be seen not as alternative but rather as complementary to traditional — logocentric and thus still all too anthropocentric — animal ethics. the presence of nonhuman animals in the cultural imagination is immemorial. in his seminal 1980 essay “why look at animals?” john berger argued, for example, that, like the first painting, the first metaphor must also have been an animal.3 however, the field of “literary animal studies” offers a different approach: the focus here is not (or not only) the symbolic or semiotic role animals are assigned in literary works (if one is fond of academic compartmentalization and labels, this could be the purview of “cultural animal studies”), but rather — or also — the ways in which literature and poetry can offer a different access to animal subjectivity and life. of course, this new access rests on new “scientific” findings in disciplines such as ethology, comparative or animal psychology, and many others. there1 jacques derrida, the animal that therefore i am, trans. david willis, ed. marie-louise mallet (new york: fordham university press, 2008), 14. 2 j. m. coetzee, the lives of animals (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1999). 3 john berger, “why look at animals?” in about looking (london: bloomsbury, 1980), 3–30. copyright © 2022 carlo salzani this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 299–306. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.10901 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10901 salzani, review of bosco/latini | 301 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) fore even this quite specific field, as is by now commonplace to say, must be interdisciplinary. but literary animal studies ideally challenges precisely the anthropocentric premises of “science”, i.e., the division between subject and object, and thereby also the consequent bias of human supremacy. the animal sought in this field of research is certainly “created by words” (x), but these very words challenge the literality of animals and literal representation as such. in their introduction to this new collection, animals and humans in german literature, 1800–2000, editors lorella bosco and micaela latini adopt the theoretical grid recently proposed by german literary scholar roland borgards (a theoretical grid that also explicitly structures most chapters of the book), according to which there are essentially two roles that can be assigned to animals in literature: they can act either as “semiotic” animals — that is, they are endowed with a semiotic function, they symbolize or represent something else, usually some human concern — or as “diegetic” animals — animals who have a place as living beings in the diegesis, that is in the narrative representation.4 the wager of literary animal studies is precisely to discover the diegetic animal in fictional representations and under the multiple layers of the cultural imagination of different epochs. literary animal studies, bosco and latini write, rejects the anthropocentrism of the semiotic animal, of the animal as mere literary motif; but it cannot be said to be theriocentric either, since its animals are “made of words”, and it cannot but focus on the interaction between diegesis, history, cultural context, and poetics. hence, bosco and latini adopt a different label, also proposed by borgards,5 namely “theriotopologic”: it is precisely its topology, its positioning between animality, cultural space, and social order, that allows literary animal studies to question categorical assumptions and perhaps to present a different access to animal otherness. 4 roland borgards, “tiere in der literatur — eine methodische standortbestimmung,” in das tier an sich. disziplinenübergreifende perspektiven für neue wege im wissenschaftsbasierten tierschutz, ed. herwig grimm and carola otterstedt (göttingen: vandenhoeck & ruprecht, 2012), 87–118. 5 roland borgards, ed., tiere. ein kulturwissenschaftliches handbuch (stuttgart: metzler, 2016), 226–7. 302 | salzani, review of bosco/latini humanimalia 13.1 (2022) on these premises, the essays collected in this volume focus on a specific cultural space and tradition, the german-speaking literature of the past two centuries. in germany, like elsewhere, the manifold domain of animal studies has quickly caught up with the anglo-american lead and has become a burgeoning field of research. this book however belongs less to the german branch of literary animal studies than to the international field of german studies with a focus on animality, or to the international field of literary animal studies with a focus on german literature, since not only is it written in english (the academic lingua franca), but most of its contributors are italian germanists or work in italy. it could even be argued, therefore, that this volume has more to do with the contemporary flourishing of animal studies in italy (where it is by now well established across academic disciplines and in society at large; one example among many is the recent volume edited by felice cimatti and myself) than with the german state of this research field.6 or perhaps it reflects the cross-pollination of different disciplines and different national contexts, which is a significant characteristic of animal studies as such. in this volume, the scope of the analysis is quite broad (1800–2000), and the ten chapters here included certainly cannot aim at completeness or exhaustiveness. but they do indeed cover a lot of material touching not only the canonical works but also a wide range of writings and representations. the ten case studies display a wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches as well, but the general goal is the “quest” for the diegetic animal, for the repressed or forgotten traces of an active role nonhuman creatures have played in literature as they have elsewhere. the chapters are quite equally distributed to cover the two centuries, whereby the first four chapters analyse works from the nineteenth century, the fifth chapter functions as a sort of junction between the two centuries, chapters six to nine focus on twentieth-century works, and the last chapter analyses a novel from the early twenty-first century. 6 felice cimatti and carlo salzani, eds., animality in contemporary italian philosophy (cham: palgrave macmillan, 2020). salzani, review of bosco/latini | 303 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) in chapter one, grazia pulvirenti and renata gambino explore heinrich von kleist’s drama penthesilea (1808) explicitly employing borgards’s theoretical grid. in this drama, they argue, horses, elephants, and especially hounds are portrayed as autonomous characters that not only are central to the dramatic action, but also form a sort of cross-species community where humans and nonhumans coshape each other. it is perhaps not irrelevant that the human part of this community is composed by the amazons, the female warriors fighting the greeks in the trojan war, whose queen is penthesilea: according to the traditional western idea of humanity, women (especially when they do not comply with the submissive role assigned to them by patriarchy) are closer to animality than to humanity — and in fact kleist’s play culminates in the queen, accompanied by her hunting dogs, literally tearing apart with hands and teeth the body of achilles in a frenzy of “animal” fury. the animalized woman is also the topic of chapter two, in which sonia saporiti focuses on the retelling of the myth of melusine, the snake woman, by ludwig tieck (1800). saporiti’s perspective is however more psychoanalytical, and rather than seeking the diegetic animal she explores the remainders and traces of animality that the western tradition imposes on femininity. although this point is not thematized by the authors, in these two chapters the diegetic animal is also the “woman”, the barbarian (the amazons), the corporeal, “nature’s being”, the “animal part” that the western tradition has often expelled and excepted from humanity “proper”. chapter three is paradigmatic of the quest for the diegetic animal: here roland borgards himself reads a little-known story by e. t. a. hoffmann, “haimatochare” (1819), about a louse (whose scientific name, haimatochare, means “delighting in blood” in greek) in colonial hawai‘i, using bruno latour’s actor-network theory. borgards shows how latour’s theory allows us to identify animal agency beyond the constraints of traditional human “abilities,” and, moreover, that this “agency” in turn questions and deactivates the zoological hierarchies and taxonomies of western colonialism — and human exceptionalism more generally. the true potential of the diegetic animal is in fact the critique of human exceptionalism in304 | salzani, review of bosco/latini humanimalia 13.1 (2022) trinsic to and hidden in every literary animal representation. in chapter four, federica claudia abramo performs the same critique of the species boundaries in her reading of georg büchner’s play woyzeck (1837), highlighting, however, not shared agency but common submission: abramo adopts a biopolitical perspective to show that, through woyzek’s madness, the human is animalized and domesticated, but, on the other hand, through his personal relation with a horse, the animal is also humanized. the biopolitical frame, highlighting the common subjection and exploitation of humans and nonhumans, contributes to the erosion of species boundaries. chapter five by oliver jahraus analyzes the presence and meaning of horses in a number of texts from the nineteenth and twentieth century, focusing in particular on two novellas, one by hugo von hofmannsthal and the other by alexander lernet-holenia. this chapter not only presents a wider focus that traverses the turn of the twentieth century, but is also more theoretical and further supports the general framework proposed by the two editors in the introduction. the main focus here is not animalization, agency, or biopolitical commonality, but rather empathy: jahraus argues that, against the mechanistic view of science and most philosophy, literature searches, exposes and illuminates what he calls the “soul” of animals, that is their emotional, psychological, and even intellectual dimension that can elicit empathetic feelings and thereby bridge the “great divide”. thus literature, jahraus argues, is a “school” of mutual acknowledgement and empathy. in the past few decades, this argument has had a number of important proponents, from iris murdoch to martha nussbaum, from mary midgley to cora diamond, j. m. coetzee, and others — though none are mentioned in this volume. this is, moreover, an argument that provides a strong theoretical support for literary animal studies, since it endows the quest for the diegetic animal with an ethico-political thrust that sometimes remains all too implicit. and the fact that this is the case in most chapters of this volume is perhaps a shortcoming. however, by identifying and illuminating the traces of nonhuman animals in literary and poetic works, literary animal studies does salzani, review of bosco/latini | 305 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) emphasize that the cultural imagination, just like human life and community more generally, is co-shaped by humans and nonhumans. this, in itself, is already something of an ethico-political intervention. and thus even the “mere” literary analysis of the presence of mice in the writings of kafka, musil, and benjamin, as performed by micaela latini in chapter six, is important, since it shows how this presence is grounded in the common life and destiny that humans and mice shared in the trenches of world war i. this comparative approach is particularly fruitful because it emphasizes the transversal presence of themes and motifs that illuminate each other in the comparison. the same holds for chapter seven, in which isolde schiffermüller again compares texts by rilke, musil, and kafka to argue that, in the first half of the twentieth century, the literary and philosophical representation of nonhuman animals was a sign and symptom of a profound crisis in literature and the humanities that questioned the traditional definition of humans and their place in the world. schiffermüller essentially follows the analysis of the human–animal relationship proposed by giorgio agamben, but also refers to this questioning role of the animal presence in literary texts as “zoopoetics”, a term that has a much wider scope and that she has been using for a long time but that unfortunately she leaves here undefined and unexplored.7 chapters eight and nine explore the animal presence in the entire œuvre of two authors: jelena reinhardt focuses on elias canetti’s work, and raul calzoni on that of w. g. sebald. both chapters argue that in the two writers the presence of nonhuman animals is pivotal in the search for a nonor post-anthropocentric perspective, which in canetti is also part of a dismantling of the traditional idea of humanity, whereas in sebald it revolves around the shared vulnerability of the body. reinhardt focuses in particular on the idea of metamorphosis, which, she argues, threatens and finally dissolves the species barriers in canetti’s depiction of humans and animals; 7 see isolde schiffermüller, “das grübeln der tiere. zur zoopoetik franz kafkas,” studia theodisca 10 (2003): 37–49; “kleine zoopoetik der moderne. robert musils tierbilder im vergleich mit franz kafka”, in die kleinen formen in der moderne, ed. elmar locher (bozen: sturzflüge, 2001), 197–218. cf. kári driscoll and eva hoffmann, eds. what is zoopoetics? — texts, bodies, entanglement (cham: palgrave macmillan, 2018). 306 | salzani, review of bosco/latini humanimalia 13.1 (2022) calzoni, on the other hand, shows how in sebald the animal is a figure of common suffering that could, or should, lead to an alternative reading of history. in these two chapters the traces of the diegetic animals are almost invisible, and it is rather the semiotic function that informs the analysis. this is of course partially the case also in other chapters of this volume (especially chapters two, six, and seven), and the slippage between the two functions is a general risk of literary animal studies, since the line dividing the diegetic from the semiotic animal is rather blurred — both are ultimately “made of words”. in the final chapter, lorella bosco reads the figure of the lion in sibylle lewitscharoff’s 2011 novel blumenberg, born out of the philosopher hans blumenberg’s lifelong fascination with this animal (and of the recent volume that collects his texts on this subject under the title lions).8 though the lion here is a figment of the imagination of an imaginary version of the german philosopher, bosco emphasizes that for lewitscharoff the animal presence retains its “oddness” and enigmatic nature that complicates or deactivates any exclusively anthropocentric (i.e. purely semiotic) reading. the animals of literary animal studies are certainly “made of words” and only intermittently and contingently succeed in breaking the constraint of their semiotic cage. but the semiotic/diegetic schema is only one possible way of approaching the animal question in literature, and even if the editors of this volume present it as their theoretical grid, the chapters here collected use also a combination of other theoretical approaches, all of which ultimately converge in contributing to the reconceptualization of animality and of human– animal relations. this is, i would argue, what makes this field — and this book — interesting and valuable. 8 hans blumenberg, lions, trans. kári driscoll (london: seagull books, 2018). amberson, review of cimatti/salzani animal immanence deborah amberson review of: felice cimatti and carlo salzani, eds. animality in contemporary italian philosophy. cham: palgrave macmillan, 2020. xvii + 341 pp. €130.79 (hb & pb); €96.29 (eb). deborah amberson is associate professor of italian studies in the department of languages, literatures, and cultures at the university of florida, gainesville, fl, usa. email: dambers@ufl.edu book review felice cimatti and carlo salzani open their kaleidoscopic collection of essays by confronting the stubborn cultural bias that sees italy, like other catholic countries of southern europe, supposedly falling short of anglo-american thinking regarding the so-called animal question. arguably, this entire volume sets out to prove if not the exact opposite, then that the italian contribution to thinking animality, human and non, is a very particular one, heterodox within the western philosophical tradition. the volume’s central and recurrent contention, echoed across many of its chapters, is that italy’s philosophical difference constitutes a means to “deactivate” the “metaphysical distinction between the animal and the human” (10), a way to thwart that tenacious dualism that represses nonhuman and human animality alike in order to construct human subjectivity upon language and consciousness. the cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa and, of course, the identification of humanity with the former, risks trapping even those who denounce the cartesian hierarchy based on species because “when one wants to criticize it, one must first accept it” (7). as animal advocates struggle for the recognition of the dignity or the cognitive acuity of this or that species — mostly the large primates — they end up doing little more than moving the boundaries between the cartesian categories. for cimatti and salzani, the point is rather to make “inoperative the privileged role language and consciousness always played within western metaphysics”, a task to which italian theory can rise because, they claim, it has never embraced a “neat boundary between human and non-human, consciousness and unconsciousness, res cogitans and res extensa” (7–8). perennially late to the party — whether that party is the one at which nations are built, national languages are forged, industrial revolutions are launched, or, in some cases, schools of art and thought are organized — italy often finds itself playing catch-up. following on the heels of roberto esposito, cimatti and salzani recast italy’s philosophical “belatedness”, its apparent distance from the tendencies that underpin other national traditions, as a strength. in this very belatedness, they write, lies an explanation for italy’s philosophical difference, “the very reason and rationale of this volume” (4). italian copyright © 2022 deborah amberson this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 281–288. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.10899 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10899 amberson, review of cimatti/salzani | 283 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) thought, they declare, has always sought out that which lay beyond its disciplinary borders, manifesting a “centrifugal penchant for the other” that, ultimately, constitutes its “most original feature” (4). what esposito and, in turn, cimatti and salzani discern in italian thought is a sustained engagement with life, a circumstance that has meant that, though born and named in france, biopolitics grew up in italy (6). it is also why italian philosophy has, more than others, “fleshed out” that relationship with animality which generates thought itself (6). this timely volume sets out to explore the “different and often discordant fashions” in which italian thinking has “come to terms with its outside in the form of animality” (6). animality in contemporary italian philosophy broaches the multifaceted question of animality with a tripartite organization. the first part, titled “animality in the italian tradition”, is the shortest, encompassing only three chapters. characterized as “historico-descriptive” (10), this section plots out italy’s contribution to the animal question in the spheres of philosophy and animal advocacy. cimatti himself opens the section with “animality and immanence in italian thought”, an exploration of italy’s circumvention of cartesian dualism, a chapter that constitutes a central pillar of the volume and to which i will return. luisella battaglia’s chapter, “aldo capitini, animal ethics, and nonviolence: the expanding circle”, comes next. here, battaglia presents and assesses the thought of aldo capitini, a representative figure within twentieth-century italian animal advocacy whose philosophy of nonviolence and ethics of responsibility set him up as a “true prophet” of bioethics (60). in the third and final chapter, “what is italian antispeciesism?”, giorgio losi and niccolò bertuzzi survey the various activist threads within italian animal advocacy, clarifying key terminology and challenging the practical and ethical force of an activism grounded within mainstream neoliberalism as opposed to a more radical resistance that deliberately sets itself up as a counter-hegemonic practice. as a whole, this opening section reinforces the claim, presented in the introduction, that italian philosophy has always reached out toward the “non philosophical” (6); it is not easy to discern a stable boundary separating the more conventionally theoretical side of the question from the practices of care and resistance humanimalia 13.1 (2022) 284 | amberson, review of cimatti/salzani enacted by what we might term the activists of the debate. here, thinking seems to turn always and inevitably toward an engagement with the world, an impression the editors have rightly orchestrated for the reader who moves from francis of assisi’s sermons to the birds (24–26) to the story of scilla, a calf who took it upon himself to swim the sicilian strait to escape the abattoir (87). the volume’s second section, entitled “animality in perspective”, offers six chapters that explore animality across a range of thinkers and fields. here too, thinking remains firmly rooted in practice. this is true as it relates to the strictly biopolitical, explored in depth in the first two chapters addressing two central pillars of italian biopolitical thought, namely giorgio agamben in carlo salzani’s chapter, “beyond human and animal”, and roberto esposito in “deconstructing the dispositif of the person”, written by matías saidel and diego rossello. it is also true as it relates to the theological and the quandary of animal suffering, explored in the concluding chapter, “paolo de benedetti: for an animal theology” by alma massaro. the remaining chapters are equally embedded in questions of practice, exploring the various hues of the animal question in three fields of thought: posthumanism in giovanni leghissa’s chapter, marxism for marco maurizi’s, and feminism in federica giardini’s contribution. among the principal strengths of this section is the way in which the editors have allowed the various inflections of the animal question to emerge in full. the chapters even embrace the contradictions within a single field as, for example, in maurizi’s mapping of the term animality through a range of marxist schools, underscoring its inconsistent deployment within the writing of a single (and foundational) figure like engels (161–162). what becomes crystal clear across these chapters is that animality has never been a fixed given; it is instead a category applied inconsistently, invoked to demarcate humankind from some scarcely defined other, deployed as a weapon to marginalize one specific subgroup of humans, or proposed more positively as the basis for a duty of care. roberto marchesini explicitly addresses the ambivalence of animality in the opening pages of his chapter, “philosophical ethology amberson, review of cimatti/salzani | 285 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) and animal subjectivity”, included in the third and final section, the hardest to pin down. though characterized by the editors as being “more speculative” and offering “more theoretical chapters” that might serve as “‘fragments’ of an extremely diverse and articulated debate” (14), the volume’s third part, “fragments of a contemporary debate”, actually seems to engage in a more sustained manner with the sphere of life, signalling a myriad of practices that might shape artistic, scientific, and political activism. the section begins in the slaughterhouse with massimo filippi, whose chapter, “‘il faut bien tuer’, or the calculation of the abattoir”, offers a geometrically structured, derrida-inspired reflection on a fabulistic human subjectivity constructed on the butchered bodies of our nonhuman animal kin. from here we move to marchesini’s aforementioned chapter which, sidestepping consciousness as a criterion of subjectivity and looking to the descriptive sciences for a less discriminatory framework, charts a human and nonhuman animal subject projected outward towards the world in a relation of openness grounded in the endowments employed by each species to shape their being in the world. from here we shift to the explicitly political as laura bazzicalupo, in “from renaissance ferinity to the biopolitics of the animal-man”, delves into the political deployments of animality and the persistently troubling ambivalence of the naturalization of human life. valentina sonzogni’s chapter takes us to the realm of artistic practice, exploring a sampling of artworks controversial for their incorporation of animal bodies, living and dead, and posing some key ethical questions about artistic freedom and public sensibilities regarding corpses, human and non. the focus of leonardo caffo’s final chapter, “animality now”, is the present and the future. gathering many of the concepts, methodologies, and figures explored over the course of the volume and casting them outward again in a variety of directions all at once, caffo, with urgency and creative energy, imagines the end of philosophy, fallen silent when a future generation, which only now appears on the horizon, will speak with a voice that “will now be animal” (320). while the volume offers an impressive assortment of perspectives on animality and animals in contemporary italian thought, it is worth delving into the central theory of italian philosophical difference. humanimalia 13.1 (2022) 286 | amberson, review of cimatti/salzani co-editor cimatti’s volume-opener, “animality and immanence in italian thought”, serves as a type of “meta-introduction to the rationale of the volume” (11), presenting content and positions that echo through many of the chapters. reprising the thesis of the introduction, namely, that italian thought offers a conceptual thread able to sidestep the cartesian dualism that separates humanity from animality and animals, cimatti maps out this alternative italian philosophical genealogy, starting with francis of assisi’s embrace of a nonhierarchical principle rooted in the diversity of life, and moving through philosophical and literary figures including dante alighieri, giordano bruno, and giacomo leopardi. saint francis serves as the foundation for a vision of animality grounded in immanence as his engagement with life in all its diverse forms, his preaching to the birds, his embrace of poverty, all stem directly from a refusal not simply of anthropocentric hierarchies but of any form of transcendence, anything that would distance a being from the world and from the form of life appropriate to its own self. animality becomes “the model of a perfect human life” (27). to embrace animality opens the way to a holy life for to live beyond need is to live a blessed life: “a bird’s life, for francis, is a blessed life because it does not desire anything else than what is already at its disposal” (25). italian renaissance naturalism, in particular the thought of bernardino telesio, giordano bruno, and tommaso campanella, also features centrally in cimatti’s nonhierarchical italian vision of animality, setting the stage for repeated echoes across several chapters. described by cimatti as presenting a “genuinely uninterrupted mutual contamination” between humanity and animality (33), italian renaissance thought and, especially, the political thought of niccolò machiavelli acquires a notable weight in the volume. specifically, the figure of the centaur as deployed by machiavelli returns numerous times, first through the lens of saidel and rossello’s assessment of esposito’s thought, again in giardini’s reflections on sexual difference, and, finally, in bazzicalupo’s chapter on the political deployment of animality. saidel and rossello spell out the centrality of the centaur to this italian thinking of animality, writing that the human-equine hybrid “seeks to account for the corporeality, vitality, and contingency amberson, review of cimatti/salzani | 287 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) of politics” and, in opposition to hobbes’s leviathan, indicates the “place of the immanentization of antagonism instead of the realm that excludes conflict as such” (116). this repeated return to italian renaissance thinkers is welcome indeed as animal studies has too often been dominated by a focus on the twentieth century, leading to the mistaken impression that humanism and early modern thought more broadly represented a monolithic anthropocentrism intent only on proclaiming humanity as the measure of all things. cimatti and salzani’s volume confirms the importance of a developing field of scholarship that identifies a multiplicity of renaissance humanisms and, even, a renaissance posthumanism. here, i would like to repurpose machiavelli’s centaur and, indeed, machiavelli himself to underscore another welcome hybridity that echoes throughout the volume: namely the fact that, beside the philosophers, we find close to an equal number of literary figures. machiavelli himself straddles philosophy and literature; though he might be better known globally as a political thinker, his literary texts are an undisputed part of the italian canon. a reader might infer that animality can be broached adequately only by a thinking that is both philosophical and literary. it can be no coincidence that cimatti’s own chapter underscores the porosity of the border between literature and philosophy, placing francis of assisi beside dante and leopardi, two figures that, like machiavelli, straddle the literary and the philosophical. cimatti easily finds relevant thinking in the literary, discerning resonances of francis’s animality of immanence both in dante’s lark from paradiso xx (31–32) and leopardi’s reflections on the “animal model” (43). the reader should not be surprised to find repeated reference to other italian authors and poets such as pier paolo pasolini, elsa morante, italo calvino, and ivano ferrari. after all, esposito, as underscored by the editors in their introduction, stressed that italian philosophy was not practiced by “‘professional’ philosophers,” suggesting instead a philosophical practice characterized by a refusal of “neat distinctions” and a preference for what the poets produce, namely a “natural blending, where all human categories get confused” (9). this interest in the literary is not limited to the editors. for example, in his analysis of the italian schools of marxism, maurizi humanimalia 13.1 (2022) 288 | amberson, review of cimatti/salzani draws on morante, calvino, and pasolini, going so far as to affirm the “superiority of the poetic imagination” on citing pasolini’s equation of animals going to slaughter with humans being deported to the nazi camps (171). and, finally, caffo’s closing chapter explicitly embraces what its author terms a “simple and literary style” (303). precisely because the porosity of the border between philosophy and literature is so persistently evident here, i feel the volume would have benefitted from a chapter explicitly addressing literary practice, even if only to challenge any assumptions regarding disciplinary norms. such questions remain pertinent. for as jacques derrida, a philosopher cited throughout the volume, wrote, “thinking concerning the animal, if there is such a thing, derives from poetry. […] it is what philosophy has, essentially, had to deprive itself of”.1 the world of artistic creation is incorporated through sonzogni’s chapter on animal bodies in contemporary art. but here the questions, however significant and well-formulated, remain ethical and practical rather than conceptual. the editors do indicate a desire to limit their critical bibliography to thinkers who develop a “notion” of animality as opposed to authors who simply speak of “dogs and lizards” (46, n.1). however, this need not exclude the literary, as the editors know. given the extent to which they draw on literature, there can be no doubt that they fully accept that “notions” are developed programmatically in novels and that thinking takes place in poetry. referencing a recent text by marchesini, cimatti and salzani acknowledge that animality remains “a maze of clichés, preconceptions, biases, and vested interests” and that the task of philosophy (and, i would suggest, culture more broadly) is to emancipate animality from the “straitjacket imposed on it by the western cultural tradition” (10). the editors certainly make the case that italian thinking has a crucial role to play in this project, as its disciplinary flexibility opens the animal question up to a “wider consideration, breaking the narrow limits of orthodoxy” (7). this important and opportune volume seeks to do precisely this, practicing a thinking that “begins with, arises from, and is in a constant and essential relation with animality” (7). 1 jacques derrida, the animal that therefore i am, trans. david wills, ed. marie-louise mallet (new york: fordham university press, 2008), 7. microsoft word tonnesen pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 2:1 morten tønnessen is a wolf wild as long as it does not know that it is being thoroughly managed?1 the current situation of the scandinavian wolf involves a strange paradox: the future of the wolf, a master of seclusion, apparently depends on its being managed by conservationists to an extent that makes the very notion of “wild wolves” appear dubious. the wolves, of course, are not always aware of what is being done for their sake, and when they do encounter wildlife managers the encounter is as a rule an unpleasant one (the encounter with humans is not supposed to be a pleasant experience for a wild animal such as the wolf). whereas a wolf’s life might actually be saved by conservationist intervention through the use of helicopters and tranquilizers, with the aim of medical/surgical treatment, for instance, what the wounded or sick animal experiences is rather that it is hunted, captured, and forcefully incapacitated. even more telling than these modern fairytales of wildness is the fact that with widespread use of modern technologies such as radiocollars, the wolf is no longer the one in the human-wolf relationship that has the best overview of the whereabouts of the other. that used to be the normal position of the wolf — consider næss’ dated statement that wolves “are rarely seen and very careful to stay out of trouble. there is therefore a reasonable chance that the life communities comprising a (fairly small) number of wolves will persist” (239). in the case of non-radiocollared wolves, however, the wolf may still have the best overview. one might be tempted to state that the wolves of scandinavia are actually no longer wild, but that this, alas, is kept secret from the wolf. for all the wolf knows, it is still a wild animal — and it still behaves like one. but are we justified in claiming that a (more or less) free-ranging wolf is truly wild, simply because it does not know that it is being thoroughly managed? background. the animal population to which my research is devoted is the recovering gray wolf (canis lupus) population on the scandinavian peninsula, which is situated close to the southern part of the norwegian-swedish border, mostly on the swedish side. the rationale for the choice of these particular study animals can be summarized in three points. first, wolves are among the most adaptive mammals on earth, as evidenced by today’s enormous variety of dog (canis familiaris) breeds. second, wolf management is typically controversial, and not less so in the otherwise peaceful scandinavian context, where it has given rise to a symbolic strife between rural humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 2 traditionalists (sheep farmers, hunters) on one side, and conservationists popularly associated with the government and urban elites on the other. third, the current scandinavian wolf population has been monitored and sampled practically speaking since its foundation 20-30 years back. as a result, there is a rich scientific literature on the topic which is close to unique in its scope. researchers from six institutions partake in the scandinavian wolf project (skandulv), and more than fifty people are involved in field work (pedersen et al. 6).2 policy differences reached the headlines early in 2001, when permission was given in norway to hunt nine wolves, despite protests from swedish officials (cf. cinque 7-8). the swedish parliament originally outlined a policy according to which large carnivores would be allowed to spread within their natural habitats, but after the first legal hunt for more than a generation this january – in which 4,500 eager hunters took part – future population targets are now up for debate. norwegian authorities on their part have operated with a zone inside which wolves will generally be tolerated (last revised in 2004). at present there are around four times as many wolves in scandinavia as there are field workers associated with skandulv. the wild, the shy, and wilderness. the topic of wildness is a matter of ongoing debate in the wildlife management community. in the scope of this essay i will relate it solely to questions of shyness and actual human interference (especially on the management side). in terms of being shy and fearful, the wolves on the scandinavian peninsula clearly qualify for the term “wild” — they have retained their fear of people. the degree of human interference, however — including the facts that these wolves are familiar with several human artifacts/constructions, and that they are dependent on wildlife management – seems to suggest that shyness is not a sufficient criterion for wildness. two studies have been conducted to investigate scandinavian radiocollared wolves’ tolerance of the presence of humans, by wam and karlsson et al. wam found that 123 out of 125 trials with five wolves resulted in the wolf running straight away, and concluded that these wolves were shy animals, showing no sign of habituation (karlsson et al. reached a similar conclusion). “instinctively a wolf in scandinavia today knows it should avoid approaching persons,” notes wam (28), alluding to the evolutionary law of the survival of the shyest. the bed site preference of the wolves indicates their ability to learn. prior to being disturbed, the wolves used overlooking sites high in the terrain, while after being disturbed they typically sought secluded sites. wam estimates the chance of a hiker being confronted by a wolf in scandinavia as practically nil. this assertion is reinforced by an independent finding that only a tiny morten tønnessen — is a wolf wild as long as it does not know it is managed? 3 minority of dog owners whose dogs were attacked by wolves saw any sign of the wolves prior to the attacks (backeryd 11). part of the controversy in the norwegian public debate on wolves concerns whether or not the current wolves are to be regarded as native animals. given their russian origin (all current wolves originate from immigrants from the east), one recurring argument goes, they can hardly be considered as endangered — the scandinavian wolf is dead and gone. in the scandinavian context there is no doubt that today’s wolves are endangered, by illegal hunting and a still pressing risk of inbreeding. unlike in older times, the current wolf population has to navigate within a so-called multi-use environment, with plenty of human footprints. in norway, the extent of wilderness areas (defined as areas more than 5km from a major technical infrastructure) is estimated to have declined from 48% in 1900 via 34% in 1940 to 12% in 2003. this process has for the most part not been directly correlated with historical wolf extinction. in the south of norway, wolf extinction (in functional terms) preceded most wilderness loss, rather than being caused by it. what killed the original scandinavian wolf was not the loss of wilderness areas in itself, but rather the human claim to areas that went along with it (and that in part preceded wilderness loss). human interference in wolf ecology — mortality. the local specimen of the human species no doubt influences scandinavian wolf ecology at many levels, ranging from constitution of the prey base to habitat preferences and movement patterns. in this section, however, i will point to a connection which comes into particularly sharp focus. wolf mortality is beyond doubt dominated by human causation. the first wolf in the modern population to die of old age was a 14-year old alpha female found dead the winter of 2002-2003. her death is reported by olsen, who observed that mortality was high even before the fairly recent leap in mortality. her survey encompassed 84 retrieved dead wolves, 18 of which were radiocollared. only roughly one out of five of the wolves died of natural causes. vehicle trauma (wolves hit by cars or trains) was the single most frequent cause of death, causing more than one out of four deaths. from another point of view shooting appears as the cause of more than half of all deaths. these include wolves hunted legally and illegally, and further wolves shot to protect livestock. according to olsen’s math 51% of the 81 wolves with known causes of death “were probably shot to death,” but this does not include four wolves categorized under disease/anomalies, which were shot because of their bad condition, or a juvenile female that was shot after being observed with a serious injury on a hind leg. as a matter of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 4 fact, 59% were shot to death. counting these, the proportion effectively dead from human-related causes is not 82%, as olsen reports, but 87%. management-related deaths alone account for more than two out of five deaths included in the study. a more recent survey of wolf mortality (liberg et al.) estimates that natural causes of death account for around a fifth of overall mortality. here, illegal hunting is estimated to account for half of the chance a wolf has of dying in each single year. if that assessment is correct, an estimated 136 wolves (plus/minus 56) were killed illegally 1999-2006. further evidence of illegal hunting is reflected in the fact that three of the wolves killed in traffic in olsen’s survey had old gun wounds. liberg et al. report 11 similar cases among retrieved dead wolves. human artifacts in the life-world of wolves — captures. in a multi-use landscape, even shy wolves inevitably come in contact with human artifacts and constructions – though these objects might have a very different significance for the wolves (if any), and might not be associated with humans. in general scandinavian wolves tend to avoid areas with human activity. roads and railway tracks are a deterrent or an attraction depending on the season (olsen 21). in winter they provide useful paths saving wolves from the efforts of hiking in heavy snow (hence vehicle trauma). in addition to cars, trains, snowmobiles, bullets, etc., wolves might encounter even more products of civilization as a direct result of management policies. in scandinavia these include helicopters, various electronic installations making use of light or sound (e.g., radios with timers) in order to scare wolves, labels and instruments such as plastic ear-tags and radiocollars weighing up to a kilo (arnemo and fahlman 7), as well as medication, including sedatives and penicillin, which are routinely used during surgery in the field. before a legal hunt is licensed, attempts are made to protect livestock with various physical obstacles, or to scare the preying wolf with shots, shouts, throwing of stones, etc. nine of the ten wolves in olsen’s study that were shot to death to protect livestock were shot by licensed state game wardens from helicopters, all in norway. helicopters are also used when wolves are darted and chemically immobilized as part of captures where tissue samples, hair samples, feces, edta blood, and serum are collected. during captures, wolves are often partially awake. “animals that have been captured before (especially wolves),” note arnemo and fahlman, “will usually run for cover when they hear the helicopter” (6). during the last two decades, more than 2,000 captures of freeranging brown bears, wolves, wolverines, and lynx have been carried out in morten tønnessen — is a wolf wild as long as it does not know it is managed? 5 scandinavia. skandulv started capturing wolves only in 1998, but had after five years captured 52 wolves, 16 of which had been immobilized two or three times (olsen 17). on viability, dependency and long-term management goals. surely members of an animal species can die by the hand of human beings and yet be wild animals. the particular mortality of scandinavian wolves nevertheless demonstrates an overwhelming human impact on local wolf ecology, not least due to the role of management and of vehicle trauma. the most telling facts represent incidents of wolf encounters with human artifacts and constructions. returning to my initial question, we might well look to the future, to the long-term goals of wildlife management. my view is that wildness has to go beyond appearances. the long-term goal of wildlife conservation should be to restore the independent viability of wildlife. this contrasts with the dependent viability of wild species associated with continued management (for an example of dependent viability, think about dogs — cf. the fact that feral dogs “are not reproductively self-sustaining, suffer from high rates of juvenile mortality, and depend indirectly upon humans for food, co-optable individuals, and space” [boitani and ciucci 49]). the long-term goal of wildlife management, in other words, should be to make itself redundant. that being said, there is no doubt that in today’s situation emergency measures are required, and that an “end of management” can only justifiably come into effect after fundamental societal changes have taken place (and even then non-intervening observations should take place, to monitor population levels etc.). it appears to be intuitively true that the more we favor the wolves through conservation measures, the better. the long-term goal of management, however, should be that human societies as a whole neither favor nor work against the wolf. for this somewhat utopian goal to be realized, a cultural change is required, after which people will no longer assume a human monopoly on land use and on prey species. people will further have to perceive co-habitation with wolves and other wildlife species as natural, desirable, or tolerable. until then, the conservation of the scandinavian wolf will remain a struggle that depends not so much on what is biologically possible as on what is culturally possible. closing note: on arne næss’ philosophy of wolf policies. i have great respect for the work of arne næss.3 but in his suggestions for wolf policies, it becomes evident that he had trouble, at least in this case, with translating fundamental norms into workable humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 6 operational principles. næss’ 1974 article “self-realization in mixed communities of humans, bears, sheep, and wolves” says little about wolves, and his emphasis is on pointing out that their cultural setting is very different from that of bears: “there is a great respect for bears, whereas wolves are more dreaded than respected” (239). part of the trouble is that næss in the very same article argues that value attribution can be based on the common considerations of laypeople. that may work for the wellrespected bears, but not so well for the traditionally demonized wolf. what status is the wolf to have, if the sole criteria for attributing moral status are the culturally problematic judgments of the locals in any given community? næss’ positive contribution in his 1974 article is his principled talk about ”mixed communities,” and the general, egalitarian norms/maxims of self-realization, selfdetermination, etc. in næss and mysterud we are told that a mixed community ”must be defined in such a way that humans and limited groups of animals that play a more or less well-known role in human affairs are included as members” (341). a mixed community implies awareness of the other, but not necessarily physical nearness. in that article, wolves’ predation on sheep is dealt with in some detail. the only norms that are treated extensively concern individual suffering. the authors attempt to do away with numerical considerations by introducing norms such as this one: ”severe suffering endured by a living being x is of no less negative value than severe suffering endured by a living being y, whatever the species or population of x and y!” (345). additional norms are introduced to stress that population numbers do not matter. but how do we compare the torment of hundreds of sheep in the moments preceding wolf predation, and the distress of thousands of survivors — on top of the partly irrational fear of tens and hundreds of thousands of people — with the joys and sorrows of a few wolves? in the case of wolf predation on sheep, næss and mysterud suggest a compensation scheme (such a scheme is in effect today). but if the coexistence of wolves and sheep farmers causes insoluble problems, we are told ”territorial changes must be considered: the removal of wolf or sheep or farmers” (352). will the mixed community turn out to be but a utopia? ecological segregation may work in norway, a sparsely populated country, but in the inhabited parts of the world such strategies are hardly viable: mixed communities are a must. ironically, by choosing wolves and sheep as their study animals (as have i in my ongoing research), næss and mysterud in effect reproduce erroneous popular perceptions giving exaggerated weight to sheep in the perception of wolf ecology. (in fact, scandinavian wolves eat 1. elk, 2. roe deer, and 3. beaver.) why base conservation policies on such misleading terms? morten tønnessen — is a wolf wild as long as it does not know it is managed? 7 arne næss did not provide a solution to the (perceived) problem of wolf conservation in scandinavia. but he was clear in his value statements — and he and mysterud were right in observing that “unfortunately, experts and researchers have a tendency to avoid norms and values at a fundamental level” (346). to make such value statements today, i repeat, “is a social obligation” (347). notes 1. this work has been carried out partaking in the research projects the cultural heritage of environmental spaces: a comparative analysis between estonia and norway (eea–etf grant emp 54), dynamical zoösemiotics and animal representations (etf/esf 7790), and biosemiotic models of semiosis (etf/esf 8403). the research was further supported by the european union through the european regional development fund (centre of excellence cect). 2. it should be noted that i myself am not a part of skandulv. 3. cf. tønnessen 2003, an article devoted to interpretation of the deep ecology platform. works cited arnemo, jon m., and åsa fahlman, eds. biomedical protocols for free-ranging brown bears, gray wolves, wolverines and lynx. tromsø: norwegian school of veterinary science, 2007. backeryd, jessica. “wolf attacks on dogs in scandinavia 1995–2005: will wolves in scandinavia go extinct if dog owners are allowed to kill a wolf attacking a dog?” student paper (slu no. 175). uppsala: sveriges lantbruksuniversitet, 2007. boitani, l. and p. ciucci. “comparative social ecology of feral dogs and wolves.” ethology ecology & evolution 7:1 (1995): 49-72. cinque, serena. i vargens spår: myndigheters handlingsutrymme i förvaltningen av varg [in the tracks of the wolf: the use of discretion by public officials in the management of swedish wolf policy]. doctoral thesis. göteborg: göteborgs universitet, 2008. karlsson, j., m. eriksson and o. liberg. “at what distance do wolves move away from an approaching human?” canadian journal of zoology 85:11 (2007): 1193-1197. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 8 liberg, o., h. sand, p. wabakken, and h. c. pedersen. dödlighet och illegal jakt i den skandinaviska vargstammen [mortality and illegal hunting in the scandinavian wolf population]. viltskadecenter report no. 1-2008. linnell, john d. c., jon e. swenson, and reidar andersen. “predators and people: conservation of large carnivores is possible at high human densities if management policy is favourable.” animal conservation 4:4 (2001): 345–349. naess, arne. “self-realization in mixed communities of humans, bears, sheep, and wolves.” inquiry 22:1-4 (summer, 1974): 231-241. næss, arne, and ivar mysterud. “philosophy of wolf policies (i): general principles and preliminary exploration of selected norms.” philosophical dialogues: arne næss and the progress of ecophilosophy. ed. nina witoszek and andrew brennan. lanham: rowman & littlefield, 1999. 339-359. (reprinted with minor revisions from article in conservation biology 1 (1987): 23-34.) olsen, marianne linder. causes of mortality of free-ranging scandinavian grey wolves 19772003. project paper. tromsø: the norwegian school of veterinary science, 2003. pedersen, h. c., s. m. brainerd, o. liberg, h. sand, and p. wabakken. ulv ― bestandsdynamikk, levedyktighet og effekter av uttak [wolves – population dynamics, viability and effects of alpha-individual loss]. report commissioned by norwegian authorities. trondheim: nina [norwegian institute for nature research], 2003. tønnessen, morten. “umwelt ethics. “sign systems studies 31:1 (2003): 281-299. wam, hilde. wolf behaviour towards people: the outcome of 125 monitored encounters. masters thesis. ås: norwegian agriculture university, 2003. woodroffe, r. “predators and people: using human densities to interpret declines of large carnivores.” animal conservation 3:2 (2000): 165–173. h u m a n i m a l i a 1:1 lynda birke naming names — or, what’s in it for the animals? ‚most of them accepted namelessness with the perfect indifference with which they had so long accepted and ignored their names‛ *ursula k. le guin, ‚she unnames them‛ (1987)] in le guin’s story, the animals do not much care about the names we have given them — the ‚generic appellations *…+ and all the linnaean qualifiers that had trailed along behind them for two hundred years like tin cans tied to a tail.‛ the (human) narrator gives the names back, recognizing that their names had stood between her and them. once they were unnamed, ‚how close i felt to them….they seemed far closer than when their names had stood between myself and them like a clear barrier: so close that my fear of them and their fear of me became one same fear‛ (195). naming, describing other animals is, in the story, a way of not communicating, of not understanding who they are. some years ago, shapiro (1993) urged the development of human-animal studies in ways that respected nonhumans, and treated them as beings with their own interests — interests which may or may not include how we name them. since then, humananimal studies has thrived — in new courses, books, and journals such as this one — alongside calls to ‚bring animals in‛ to areas of academic inquiry previously closed to them. all these endeavours are to be welcomed: among other things, they facilitate wider cultural change toward respect and cooperation with the other species inhabiting this earth. it is one thing to consider animals within wider intellectual concerns, however, but it is sometimes another to respect them for themselves, or for our research inquiries to yield benefits for them. whenever i review papers for journals, or read much of the published literature, or do my own research in human-animal studies, i often find myself thinking — but what’s in it for the animals? how could/might they benefit? do they? does this research i read about take seriously the animals' points of view — or only the viewpoint of the humans thinking about animals? that is, are the animals going to be completely indifferent to our endless ways of renaming them?1 my purpose in this paper is to speculate around these questions, not to answer them definitively. rather, i seek to provoke discussion. perhaps i, or we, cannot really know their points of view, though that does not absolve us of the responsibility of trying to think about them. i approach these questions from the perspective of someone who feels that bonds with various nonhumans are essential to my life (even if those nonhumans are indifferent to my tedious spouting of written words at the computer, unless i name aloud important things, like ‚walk‛, or ‚carrot‛, depending on whom i am addressing). 2 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) a second reason for asking about what’s in it for animals comes from my own, rather uncomfortable, positioning atop the divisions of academia. in part, i do science studies, including sociological work having to do with the place of animals in society. but i’m also an ethologist, working sometimes in animal welfare. to me, all kinds of inquiries into how we humans relate to nonhumans are fascinating: but how much do they make the world better for animals? in animal welfare science, the purpose of the research is arguably fairly explicit — to discover ‚what is good‛ for animals and to make recommendations.2 yet how well do any of these areas of inquiry tell us about who animals really are? about what is in it for them? i also consider these questions important because human-animal studies (has), like women’s studies and environmental studies, grew partly out of political activism; in this case, animal advocacy has contributed to the corpus of knowledge we call has. whatever position one takes in relation to animal politics, there is a principle behind it of trying to organize politically on behalf of animals — of trying to do ‚something for animals‛ — which matters. here, i want to draw parallels from my experiences of relationships between feminism and academic women’s studies. animals may be ‚good to think with,‛ as some would have it, but that alone is no good to them unless the thinking is accompanied by change. without change among humans, perhaps most nonhumans are likely, as le guin suggested, to agree ‚enthusiastically to give their names back to the people to whom — as they put it — they belonged‛ (194). clearly, this paper is personal opinion: it is not a research report, nor a thorough review. opinion it may be, but it’s a viewpoint honed through years of work in various aspects of human-animal relating, and through many years spent contemplating underlying intellectual chasms. what it is is a plea for scholars to pause, to ask more overtly what the animals might think about what we do, about whether who they are really informs our work on the limits of research. there are many reasons for the recent growth in intellectual interest on the theme of nonhuman animals. one is the increased questioning of modernist ideas of ‚nature,‛ as something separate from us humans, which has spurred a great deal of inquiry into how we use, and have in the past used, concepts of ‚nature‛ and ‚animals‛ (franklin and white, 2001). a second, related, factor has been the (slow) recognition in the social sciences that the beings who make our social world work are not only human (noske, 1989), so that to understand social processes and cultural change requires us to trace many different networks — human and animal, human and machine (latour, 1993). in relation to scholarly inquiry in has, i want to focus on two areas, animal welfare research and sociological studies. i do so simply because these are the two — admittedly disparate — areas in which i personally work. my question — what’s in it for the animals? — has its origins in part in my own interests in ideas of animal rights (however problematic that term) and animal agency. it also derives from my frustration at having to work in two different areas, with different methodologies and assumptions, but which both have to do with humans and their relationships with nonhumans. while there is undoubtedly much interest in has in taking 3 lynda birke – naming names: what’s in it for the animals? interdisciplinary approaches (and this journal is testimony to that), disciplinary divides still seem to get in the way. now, i think it’s reasonable to assume that most people in any area of has are interested in real animals, and would generally support ideas of animal agency and strive for their wellbeing. and there is some cross-over, as is evident in the membership of organisations like isaz.3 yet there is also mistrust, even incomprehension (different methods, different approaches, different jargon). so, despite years of specializing in interdisciplinary work in various guises, i still find myself having to move between two disparate worlds, speaking different languages — sometimes, in welfare science, sometimes, in sociological/humanities approaches to animals. i rather doubt that animals’ interests are best served by such moving around. what i want to do here is to sketch out some gaps in what these two worlds contribute to our thinking about animals, as well as acknowledging their benefits. from the perspective of research in animal welfare and behavior, for example, ‚what’s in it for animals‛ might well be improvements in their living conditions and quality of life. there is now greater awareness in ethology of animal consciousness, cognition, and emotion, which might be said to benefit animals through broader cultural awareness of our animal kin. there are also many studies in animal welfare science, which often focus on specific potential problems to the animal — such as ways to reduce stereotypies in captive animals, how to train lab monkeys better to accept interventions and so minimize pain and suffering, how to reduce stress in farm animal transport, and so on. as long as we go on using animals in these particular ways (and that is a significant caveat), then surely finding out how to make animals comfortable matters.4 there are, however, limitations to these studies, arising partly because scientific approaches — with their focus on controlling variables — constrict what conclusions can be drawn. for example, reviewing dog welfare and housing in kennels (which might be for temporary accommodation or in the process of rehoming), taylor and mills (2007) suggested that the predominance of quantitative measures in science limited our understanding of welfare and stress, not least because it means that individuals and their specific needs are not considered. as a result, we do not have enough knowledge about dogs’ experiences of living in kennels — their points of view. what slips out of the scientific approach, then, is context and the specific lives of individual animals. part of that context, for many animals, is humans. we are often the ones who can make their lives comfortable (providing dogs with a good home, for instance), or uncomfortable (say, by expecting farrowing sows to remain in crates for our convenience). so what about sociology — one part of the study of what humans do? how much context does that provide — and can that tell us much about animals’ points of view? in many ways, ‚bringing animals in‛ to the social sciences has indeed become highly fashionable, and ‚animal issues‛ of all sorts of journals are appearing. yet, animal presences might also be said to be absent, or at best a very spectral presence. reviewing the positioning of animals in recent social science, irvine (2007) suggests that sociology tends to act as though individual selves are not important in the creation/production 4 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) of social life, let alone animal selves. rather, it focuses on social processes and not the selves who are part of them. in that sense, for all the enthusiasm to bring animals in, animals’ experiences would not seem to be critical. irvine goes on to point out that, despite such assumptions, there is plenty of evidence that nonhuman animals have selves, that they can attribute feelings and meanings, and can share a focus of social attention — as, indeed, her own research on dog-human relationships attests (irvine, 2004). rarely, however, does sociological inquiry consider animals' interests in that inquiry. many sociological studies tend to focus on how animals, as generalities, fit into human social processes and structures (my own work on horsepeople’s cultures included: birke, 2007). these might indicate ways in which human attitudes impact upon animal lives, but do not explicitly include animal experience and subjectivity in the study — just as ethological studies rarely explicitly address the human context. these are limitations imposed by the specific methodological approaches of the respective disciplines. what we are evidently not doing well enough, then, is to examine the relationships between people and animals and how those are experienced by either partner5 (melson, 2002, makes a similar point regarding psychology). how can we go about examining the processes of enmeshing, of coming together, that create a relationship, when we are beset by disciplinary boundaries? since the success or failure of those relationships have massive implications for animal wellbeing — even for their lives — then that seems to me to be an important deficit that we should address much more explicitly. perhaps then there is some research, in animal welfare and other areas, which has the potential to reduce future animal suffering, and perhaps to change human attitudes. but, the very qualities that can make good research (careful manipulation of variables, for instance, in the case of science) can also entail the exclusion of context. i suspect that much research in humananimal studies is motivated from our individual experiences of bonding with specific nonhuman others: it is a pity, then, that the research we generate so often ignores precisely that individual other, whose personal experiences drown in a sea of generalisations. who is s/he, this other one whom i write about in research papers? what would be her/his point of view? while those questions may not always be addressable in human-animal studies, there are many times that i think they should be asked. on politics and accountability. intellectual interest in animals developed partly out of the social movements of the 1970s, which galvanized inquiry in many interdisciplinary fields. human/animal studies grew, like women’s studies and environmental studies, in response to particular social and political questions.6 and it retains that dual interest — both in abstract ideas regarding how we think about nonhumans, and in practical aspects, such as what happens in laboratories and animal shelters. yet the parallel with feminism should give us pause for thought. women's studies began out of liberation politics in the early 1970s. it represented a concern to analyze and understand the intellectual and theoretical underpinnings of the injustices that we saw all around us. alongside 5 lynda birke – naming names: what’s in it for the animals? working on campaigns (promoting women's reproductive rights, for example), we looked at what we were being taught within the universities — only to discover just how deep-seated were the sexist biases prevailing throughout the academic disciplines. to get these issues aired within the patriarchal structures of knowledge and teaching we call academia was a considerable challenge. too often, we were told that we were not being ‚objective‛ and that we should not be bringing political radicalness into intellectual life. we met much opposition; but, eventually, we succeeded in getting women's studies courses onto curricula, women's studies journals into the libraries, and feminist viewpoints into several parts of mainstream thinking. there are, inevitably, drawbacks to such growth in the ivory towers, however. as feminists involved in 1970s struggles for women’s liberation sometimes ruefully acknowledge, the subsequent rise of academic women’s studies was, initially, a cause for celebration — at last! — women’s issues were being taken seriously. but then it became institutionalized, often removed from connection with the activism that once drove it. over the years, i seemed to be teaching fewer and fewer students who had much inkling of what the women’s movement had meant. as a result, the original radical challenge to mainstream orthodoxy became diluted. abstract theory, not practice, seemed all too often to become paramount.7 so, too, has has begun to enter the mainstream, with the rapid proliferation of journals and undergraduate courses. now even in the mainstream, that concern to investigate further our relationship with nonhumans has the potential to contribute to sociocultural change, to enable us to take nonhuman animals more seriously as conscious, sentient beings. in that sense, it could be said to be beneficial for animals in a generalized way, in that it gets a few more humans on their side (or at least enables understanding of how animal suffering is engendered by human cultures). these may, however, be limited gains. attempts at legislative reform, such as the recent animal welfare act in the u.k., are no doubt in response to changing political and social mores: public opinion is now less supportive of some uses of animals. but, of course, nothing much changes, because the law cannot challenge the fact of those uses.thus, britain may have one of the most highly regulated systems in the world regarding the use of animals in laboratories.yet as critics have often pointed out, this simply means that animal use is regulated; the fact of animal use in painful experiments remains unchallenged. at an academic level, while many contributors to these inquiries are indeed informed by radical ideas about nonhuman animals, acceptance in academia is not conducive to them. a recent editorial in the journal of critical animal studies (best & gigliotti, 2007) makes this point, arguing that more radical politics tends to be excluded (its own remit stems from academic interest in the politics and ideas of animal liberation). integration into the academy thus brings with it the risk that the links to a politics that once informed it begin to unravel. there is, then, a danger that has is in the process of becoming, as women's studies has sometimes done in my experience, too theoretical and too little informed by practice. if so, then — like women’s 6 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) studies — it would be in danger of losing any ability to make change for animals. to lose that link to activist politics and to the possibilities for change would for me be a terrible mistake.8 still, despite all the difficulties, women's studies did lead to a growth in research explicitly informed by feminist values. in particular, i want to draw attention here to debates about what constitutes feminist research: among other things, that can include debate over how to do responsible research, studies that are accountable to the people who are subjects of the research (skeggs, 2001). accountable research, feminists usually argued, was research that rejected objectivist assumptions that researchers could stand apart from their subjects. it was, furthermore, research which involved the subjects at different stages, as well as involving the researcher in the communities being investigated. we do not expect to involve animals in the research except as subjects of it.they cannot usually report back to us their experience of research, at least not verbally. unless that is, they are apes who have learned human language skills. one researcher did just that, asking bonobos she was working with what they thought their priorities in life were: and just as tellingly, contrary to the usual tenets of academic practice, their names appeared as co-authors of the paper (savagerumbaugh, wamba, wamba and wamba, 2007). such team-work may not be possible working with all kinds of animals (and still begs the question of our utilitarian relationship with other species and the accountability of the research itself), but it does bring nonhuman interests into the picture. in debates about feminist participative research practice, advocates knew that there will always be a power imbalance (who, after all, has the academic status and final responsibility for the project?); but it is important, they argued, that researchers remain sensitive to this and always seek to minimise the imbalance. at the least, research should bring no harms: at best, it could promote empowerment. with regard to studying animals, researchers might for example consider the ethics of particular projects, rejecting any that are seen to harm or compromise the welfare of the animals. but it is less easy to do research which, in effect, empowers animals. accountability toward our animal subjects, however, needs to do more than that — to effect change in the way that animals are treated there needs also to be change in policy. writing about research into animal welfare, for example, whay (2007) points out that research on welfare along with assessment of risk factors can give us a good idea how the quality of life of domestic animals could be improved. but what matters most is policy and implementation: if guardians of animals pay no heed then the research has done little to change the lot of animals. accountable research should, at the least, indicate potential policies. at present, we humans take on the position of speaking for animals, of championing what we think are their causes. if the constituency under discussion were a human one, there would ensue debate about listening to the voices of those whose interests were not served by the prevailing position — much as black women’s voices had to be heard to overcome the predominance, in 1970s feminism, of white, middle class experiences. humans are inclined to think that nonhuman animals are not a political constituency, nor that they have a voice on such 7 lynda birke – naming names: what’s in it for the animals? matters. perhaps — although that may simply be that we have not yet managed to hear. in the meantime, we should strive for accountability, for effective changes. so, to ask ‚what’s in it for animals?‛ is partly to plead for greater accountability to the animals we bring into our studies. to think about that question is not only to ponder what they might think about it, but also to consider whether our investigations can help to bring about change — in the ways we think about them and their abilities, in the ways we treat them, in the ways we respect — or not — the places they live.that is, perhaps, not the remit of many academic inquiries. but thinking about politics has always been within the remit of fields like women’s studies, which sought to challenge — and change — the oppressions besetting women throughout the world. in my view, it should remain within the remit of human-animal studies. animals may indeed be supremely indifferent to the names we give them: but they are not indifferent to the naming of oppression. acknowledgements. many thanks to richard twine, erica fudge, and consuelo rivera, for reading/ commenting on these ideas in earlier drafts. and, of course, eternal thanks to the many nonhumans who make various comments on my work, usually of the form ‚any food yet?‛ notes 1. one form our naming takes is to speak about the generic ‚animals,‛ the nonhumans. this includes a multitude of different species types and different relationships with humankind. i use the term here because it is precisely in their counterpoint to humans that we can talk about ‚bringing them in.‛ but we should remember that it glosses over the enormous diversity of other species, and simultaneously commits the error of separating ‚us‛ from ‚them.‛ hence, i sometimes use the awkward phrase ‚nonhuman animals‛ to remind us that we too belong to this generalization. 2. although, as gary francione has argued (francione, 1996), a great deal of animal welfare work, both research and hands-on practice, can be said to shore up existing inequalities and modes of oppression for animals. this ‚new welfarism‛ is, to him, flying in the face of animal rights. 3. the international society for anthrozoology. 4. see note (1). 5. that is, the bulk of has studies might focus on the effects of human on animal or vice versa, but few address the detailed day-to-day development (or not) of a relationship. 6. particularly after the publication, in 1975, of peter singer’s animal liberation. 7. if i want to ask what is in it for animals, i should also question how much academic feminism did for women: to be sure, there were some gains, but nowhere near as many as feminists had hoped for. i should also add that telling this story of loss of activism is one particular narrative of feminist history — for discussion see hemmings, 2005. 8 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) 8. i realize that ‚activism‛ here spans a great many perspectives and tactics — not all of which i might agree with. however, it is the broad impetus of activism, of political struggle for change on behalf of animals, that i think we must retain. works cited arluke, arnold. ‚a sociology of sociological animal studies.‛ society and animals 10:4 (2002). 369-374. best, steven, and carol gigliotti. ‚introduction.‛ journal of critical animal studies 5:2 (2007). accessed 8/2/09; http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/jcas/journal birke, lynda. ‚'learning to speak horse’: the culture of ‘natural horsemanship.‛ society and animals 15:3 (2007). 217-240. davis, h. and d. balfour. the inevitable bond: examining scientistanimal interactions cambridge: cambridge up, 1992 francione, gary. rain without thunder: the ideology of the animal rights movement. philadelphia: temple up, 1996. franklin, adrian, and robert white. ‚animals and modernity: changing human–animal relations, 1949–98.‛ journal of sociology 37:3 (2001). 219 -238. irvine, l. 2004. if you tame it: understanding our connection with animals. philadelphia: temple university press. irvine, leslie. ‚the question of animal selves: implications for sociological knowledge and practice.‛ qualitative sociological review 3:1 (2007). 5-22. hemmings, clare. ‚telling feminist stories.‛ feminist theory 6:2 (2005). 115-139. latour, bruno. we have never been modern. hemel hempstead: harvester wheatsheaf, 1993. le guin, ursula k. ‚she unnames them,‛ in ursula le guin, buffalo gals and other animal presences. santa barbara, california: capra press, 1987. melson, gail f. ‚psychology and the study of human-animal relationships.‛ society and animals 10 (2002). 347-352. noske, b. humans and other animals: beyond the boundaries of anthropology london: pluto press, 1989. savage-rumbaugh, s. k., and wamba, k., wamba, p. and wamba, n. ‚welfare of apes in captive environments: comments on, and by, a specific group of apes."‛ journal ofapplied animal welfare science 10:1 (2007). 7-19. shapiro, ken. ‚editor’s introduction.‛ society and animals 1:1 (1993). 1. skeggs, beverley. ‚feminist ethnography,‛ in p.atkinson, a.coffey, s.delamont, j.lofland and l.lofland (eds). a handbook of ethnography. london: sage. 2001 http://www.criticalanimalstudies.org/jcas/journal 9 lynda birke – naming names: what’s in it for the animals? taylor, k.d. and mills, d.s. ‚the effect of the kennel environment on canine welfare: a critical review of experimental studies.‛ animal welfare 16:4 (2007). 435-447. whay, h.r. ‚the journey to animal welfare improvement.‛ animal welfare 16:2 (2007). 117-122. microsoft word moe pdf dummy.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:2 aaron moe zoopoetics: a look at cummings, merwin, & the expanding field of ecocriticism1 i know the butterfly—and the lizard—and the orchis. are not those your countrymen? ~ emily dickinson that is the kind of poetry i bring to your attention today: poetry that does not try to find an idea in the animal, that is not about the animal, but is instead a record of an engagement with him. ~ j. m. coetzee introduction. ever since its inception, ecocriticism has been interdisciplinary. recently, however, several scholars have begun redrawing the interdisciplinary boundaries in order to include and emphasize the agency of nonhuman animals.2 lawrence buell compares ecocriticism to a constellation, which helps frame the emergent focal points (133): humans are not the only beings who exhibit agency within environments; one can integrate ideas from animal-studies scholars, ethologists, and rhetoricians who no longer see language as a hallmark of human exceptionality. these interdisciplinary sources become, in a sense, stars that reframe the patterns of ecocriticism. i introduce the term zoopoetics into ecocritical discourse. as poetics is, in part, the study of what poetry does—what it accomplishes as a verb—zoopoetics provides a theoretical focus to explore what a poem does—as a verb—to our understanding of and relationship with nonhuman animals. are animals glossed over in a text? are animals portrayed as having agency? if so, what is the impetus for that agency? how does the text complicate the human/animal divide? is human exceptionality questioned or affirmed? i see zoopoetics further clarifying ecopoetics, as defined by jonathan bate. for bate, ecopoetics “engage[s] imaginatively with the non-human” (199).3 despite the fact that bate highlights how “whales can commit suicide,” “animals feel pain,” and an environment is something that all animals “share” (177, 188), the definition of ecopoetics goes in one direction. though the fundamental premise for ecocriticism is that all that exists is dynamically interrelated, bate’s definition excludes the ways nonhuman animals engage the “human other.” later, bate further explores this imaginative engagement with the nonhuman, drawing on heidegger’s idea of dwelling (258-266). in poetry, thought, language (1971), heidegger develops the interdependency aaron moe — zoopoetics: a look at cummings, merwin, and the expanding field of ecocriticism 29 between poetry and dwelling: “poetry and dwelling belong to one another ... [for] poetry, as the authentic gauging of the dimension of dwelling, is the primal form of building” (227). “building” refers to the cultivation of a sense of poetic dwelling on earth. but for heidegger (and therefore bate), the capacity to dwell poetically is restrictively a human affair. nonhuman animals vocalize and gesture, but their signsystems surely do not approach poetic dwelling. i extend bate’s definition of ecopoetics by focusing on how nonhuman animals also dwell on the earth, engaging imaginatively with their own kind, with other species, with their environments, and with the humanother. ecocritics at times indirectly gloss over the agency of nonhuman animals. for instance, in this compost (2002) jed rasula explores how poetry functions as a “kind of echolocation” that empowers humans to become deeply connected with their environment (8).4 poetry helps cultivate a sense of place for the human, but this cultivation hinges on the metaphor “poet-as-bat.” the underlying assumption is that bats (and other nonhuman animals) only navigate space whereas the human transforms that space into place through dwelling poetically. these fundamental definitions in ecocriticism assume that the human is the one who engages the “non-human,” thereby eclipsing how nonhuman animals also engage other beings and environments, and this oversight, as slight as it may seem, contributes to what cary wolfe calls the “institution of speciesism” (2)—a discourse that routinely exhibits a “fundamental repression” that takes “for granted the subject is always already human” (1). pronoun use in popular parlance belies this repression—animal as “it”—for objects do not have agency, and such use hints at a more entrenched ideology that shapes how one understands and interacts with the “other.” what if other animals also dwell on the earth, cultivating a sense of place? zoopoetics helps augment a paradigm shift in which the agency of nonhuman animals is taken more seriously within both the humanities and ecocriticism, but this agency needs clarification.5 the following section clarifies this agency and consequently provides a theoretical basis for the next section where i apply zoopoetics to a reading of cummings’s and merwin’s poetry. defining zoopoetics. unlike the term ecopoetics, few scholars or theorists have used the term zoopoetics. most famously, jacques derrida mentions the term in passing when talking about his cat: “the cat i am talking about does not belong to kafka’s vast zoopoetics” (6)—suggesting merely the abundance of animals within kafka’s stories. derrida then moves to his deconstruction of the human/animal binary within western philosophy, and never returns to the concept of zoopoetics. often, when a scholar uses humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 30 the term, she or he simply quotes derrida but gives little attention to defining it (for an example, see danta 160). however, in animals, technology, and the zoopoetics of american modernism (2008), christopher white begins to develop the concept of zoopoetics, drawing on derrida’s use and conflating it with thomas sebeok’s work on zoosemiotics. white’s third chapter focuses on the “zoosemiotic tour de force” of faulkner’s as i lay dying ([1930] 115), suggesting that, in general terms, zoopoetics illuminates the commonality between human and nonhuman signing. the notion of zoosemiotics extends zoopoetics, but zoopoetics can encapsulate more than the signsystems of nonhuman animals. zoopoetics is best understood as a poetry that revisits, examines, perplexes, provokes, and explores the agency of the nonhuman animal. though this definition has many possible trajectories, in what follows i establish three premises for this agency: nonhuman animals dwell imaginatively, rhetorically, and culturally on the earth. the concept of the imagination has a rich history, and the application of such a faculty to nonhuman animals invites dissent. a specific definition is therefore needed. i use the term to describe the capacity that enables any animal to innovate, think, project, problem solve, teach, learn, and pretend. for instance, orca whales demonstrate “clear examples of vocal culture, with pod-specific dialects ... and interclan (but not intercommunity) whistle similarity ... that is believed to be used to maintain group cohesion” (sargeant and mann 161). we now know this, yet the question still remains whether a clan’s vocal culture “proves” an imaginative quality as defined above. do the differing dialects emerge through word play, emulation, “secret handshakes,” and then transmission? such may be the case. orcas demonstrate another behavior that further indicates they possess imagination. a few adult whales generate a wave that washes over an ice floe, pushing a seal from safety and into the water. moments later, the seal is back on the ice floe in clear sight of the orcas. notably, a young orca observes this behavior, and seems to watch as the adults undertake the task a second time. though interpretations are necessarily speculative, this behavior suggests that 1) at some point, an orca or group of orcas discovered that they could use a wave as a tool to wash a seal into the water; 2) orcas improved upon this discovery with other innovations until the technique became what it is today: a few adults generating a wave with flawless coordination; 3) the hunting technique is passed vertically from generation to generation through intentional teaching, i.e., pretending to hunt for the benefit of the younger generation; 4) the vocal culture and the bodily gestures of the clan must be sophisticated enough to collaborate and communicate that it is time to pretend to hunt, or rather, that it is time to teach; 5) the adults must project into the future and grasp the importance of passing down the behavior to the young generation; and 6) the young aaron moe — zoopoetics: a look at cummings, merwin, and the expanding field of ecocriticism 31 orca must also have the capacity to project into the future, to imagine the possibility of making a wave in order to eat. we do not know if later the young orca attempts to make a wave, and if the adults understand the vocalization and gesture of the attempt and then rally to support the acquisition of the tradition. such a scenario seems tenable, though, and the entire process demonstrates how orcas innovate, think, project, problem solve, teach, learn, and pretend. the imaginative capacity is not unique to orcas, for in the planet earth episode on humpbacks, we discover a similar example of innovative breakthroughs (fothergill). the cinematography focuses first on a circle of bubbles erupting at the surface of the ocean, piquing one’s curiosity. then the cameras move underwater to capture several humpback whales working together, coordinating bursts of air from their blowholes, spiraling around innumerable unseen krill, corralling them before turning toward the now dense cloud of krill in order to feast. such behavior moves beyond the traditional view of “instinct” and into the reality that such a ritual is a learned behavior, passed down from one generation to another. the footage begs us to speculate that, at some point, a group of whales collectively discovered that such a technique was possible. perhaps one whale had the initial, innovative idea. she or he had to realize that bubbles could become a tool and that a group could work together to corral the krill. they had to communicate through gestures and vocalizations embedded within those gestures. to accomplish such a feat of innovation and communication, the whales must have the capacity to imagine. it is easier to attribute an imaginative faculty to cetaceans than to a mere insect. another episode from planet earth, however, suggests otherwise. the narration establishes the insidious nature of the cordyceps fungus (fothergill). when the fungus infects an ant, the fungus spreads to his or her brain, making the ant crawl deliriously upward. after the ant dies, the fungus sprouts out of the ant’s brain, grows several inches, and then buds spores. if an infected ant crawls above the colony, the fungus could infect them all. remarkably, in one moment of the episode, the camera captures some of the ants hauling away an infected member. the narrator interprets this action as precautionary and preventative, for they carry the ant far from the colony and drop him down to the jungle floor. again, such behavior moves beyond mere “instinct,” for the ants had to observe the erratic behavior of the infected ant, recognize the causal link between such behavior and the imminent danger to the colony, conclude, communicate through embodied signs, and act. ants—as well as humpback whales and orcas—are not passive humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 32 beings functioning on mindless instinct; rather, they demonstrate agency through their imaginative capacities. another indication that nonhuman animals possess an imaginative quality leads us to the second facet of agency that underwrites zoopoetics: nonhuman animals are rhetorical beings. they gesture, and when they vocalize, the sounds are always already embedded in these gestures. to make a gesture, all animals must perceive an audience and have a purpose. the ability to create a gesture, deliver it to an audience, and achieve a specific purpose indicates the rhetor possesses some level of imagination. indeed, all animals participate in what george kennedy calls “rhetorical energy.” he uses the trope of taxonomy to remind us that human language is but one expression of thought and emotion.6 comparing each sign-system (human and nonhuman) to types of species, he then queries what the common genus might be. through this trope, kennedy establishes an evolutionary framework for readers to contemplate the origin of language. the origin of human language, its genus, is “rhetorical energy”: rhetoric in the most general sense may perhaps be identified with the energy inherent in communication: the emotional energy that impels the speaker to speak, the physical energy expended in the utterance, the energy level coded in the message, and the energy experienced by the recipient in decoding the message. (2) he sees semantics as only “one vehicle of rhetoric” and identifies some of the “universal rules of rhetorical code” that all animals (and even plants) share (3, 10). essential to his argument is the axiom that rhetorical energy is “present in physical actions, facial expressions, gestures, and signs generally” (4), and because this rhetorical energy is “prior to speech” (4), it is something in which all animals participate: “we [all animals] share a ‘deep’ universal rhetoric” (6).7 much of his support for this argument comes from his studies and observations of the rhetorical energy infusing the rituals of crows, but he extends the observation to other animals: a kind of proto-rhetoric can be said to exist in those creatures that can react to a challenge by change of color or shape or by spewing out some substance as does an octopus. some action produces sound, which other creatures can perceive although the originator of the sound may not. many insects create sound instrumentally, by sawing a part of the anatomy on aaron moe — zoopoetics: a look at cummings, merwin, and the expanding field of ecocriticism 33 another. a rattlesnake’s rhetoric consists of coiling or uncoiling itself, threatening to strike, and rattling its tail, which other creatures hear, even though a rattlesnake is itself deaf. (12-13) admittedly, a rattlesnake’s rattle emerged not through innovation but rather through natural selection. however, many species have developed dialects within the vocalizations of their species. such behaviors are not rendered passively, like the rattlesnake’s rattle. they emerge from the innovations of a being whose agency is driven by a sense of rhetoric. these observations augment a shift from holding human language as separate and superior to all other forms of communication to recognizing human language as embedded in the rhetorical energy exhibited by myriad other social, interactive, communicative beings with whom we co-inhabit the earth. even a human word is always already embedded in some gesture—whether that gesture involves typeface, font-size, and a host of formatting decisions or involves intonation, inflection, amplification, pitch, facial expression, bodily tilt, etc. rhetorical energy always buoys up a word, and if seen dialogically, it always affects the word’s meaning. in this light, zoopoetics helps diffuse the boundary between the human and the animal as it explores and exposes the rhetorical energy in spheres shared by all animals. 8 the imaginative capacity of nonhuman animals, coupled with the “deep universal rhetoric” shared by all animals, establishes a framework to enter into the third facet of agency, the argument that nonhuman animals are cultural beings. in the introduction to the question of animal culture (2009), laland and galef share their solicitation of several “established authorit[ies] on either social learning or a related field” to enter into a focused debate (2). they asked each contributor whether “animals have culture,” and requested that each response should both define the concept of culture and provide evidence that supports their position (2). those that argue for animal culture point out “behavioral variation underpinned by social learning, group specific repertoires, or the diffusion of innovations,” while those that argue for a fundamental difference between animal traditions and human culture argue that social learning mechanisms are different between human and nonhuman animals and that the latter do not demonstrate “cumulative culture” (10). this debate and the tension surrounding it exemplify donna haraway’s work on “odd boundary creatures” that have a “destabilizing place in the great western ... narratives” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 34 (2). she continues, “[t]hese boundary creatures are, literally, monsters, a word that shares more than its root with the word, to demonstrate. monsters signify” (2). chimpanzees and great apes, for example, destabilize the assumption that only humans have culture. an increasing number of nonhuman animals also demonstrate that they are boundary creatures as well who possess imagination, rhetorical energy, and a degree of culture, including dolphins, humpbacks, finches, mockingbirds, rats, crows, and ants, all of whom the question of animal culture discusses. william mcgrew, one of the first ethologists to argue for primate culture, contends that the gestures of nonhuman animals—such has hand-clasp grooming (47)—ought to be taken seriously as the development of culture (54), although he is hesitant in his argument, questioning whether we trust the meaning of words or the gestures in which those words are embedded (i.e., “this is fantastic!”—followed by an eye roll). mcgrew, though, ought to have listed the many gestures that create human culture, without which its cultural richness would be drastically diminished. handshakes, hugs, bows, kisses, high-fives, fist-bumps, secret-handshakes, winks, nod of the head—all of these gestures for greeting and departing vary across groups and enrich the sense of belonging. they help define culture. it may be time, then, to consider gestures as fundamental generators of nonhuman culture as well. sometimes nonhuman animals develop maladaptive behaviors that spread through the species by social learning (laland et al. 177). these behaviors can damage an ecosystem, as is indeed the case when the nature/culture binary extends to nonhuman animals, which, in turn, further extends ecocritical discourse by acknowledging the impact nonhuman cultures have on an environment. hal whitehead writes with a tone of urgency: “if animals have what we call culture in humans, we should say so both for accuracy and so that its implications, both biologically and in other realms, such as ethics ... can be assessed” (149). humans are thus guilty of extinctions and of the cultural effacements of endangered species whose populations are no longer large enough to support the diversity and richness of innovative, socially learned behaviors that generate culture. if ethologists recognize a nature/culture binary in nonhuman animals and push for the ethical implications of effacing nonhuman animal cultures, the humanities ought to have insights to contribute as well. from the evidence outlined above, it seems appropriate to view the differences between human and nonhuman cultures to be in degree rather than in kind. we have no way of knowing whether adult orcas tell a story as they teach their young how to use a wave to wash a seal off an ice floe—whether they somehow communicate “we are passing this down to you as it was passed down to us.” there are no museums, or books, or artifacts aaron moe — zoopoetics: a look at cummings, merwin, and the expanding field of ecocriticism 35 to commemorate and preserve the “oral” tradition of vocalizations embodied in gestures that adult orcas employ while teaching, and therefore orca culture is much more ephemeral than human culture, but this seems to be a difference, again, in degree and not in kind. just as kennedy sees rhetorical energy as the common genus of all animals out of which myriad sign-systems emerge, so it seems plausible that many animals share a common origin, or genus, of culture. the premise of zoopoetics, therefore, is that nonhuman animals have agency as imaginative, rhetorical, and cultural beings. these three facets are interrelated, for animal culture could not exist if not for the rhetorical energy shared between individuals who possess a faculty of the mind to imagine the interplay between purpose, audience, and medium (the rhetorical energy of the gesture). this threefold premise, in turn, provides focus for the reading of poems to explore how they expose these capacities of nonhuman animals. the zoopoetics of cummings and merwin. though zoopoetics could be applied to the works of many poets, this paper focuses on e. e. cummings and w. s. merwin. together, their work spans nearly a century and therefore highlights the enduring investigations into the borderlands where humans and animals converge.9 cummings and merwin may seem at first to be a strange pairing of poets. if cummings is the poet who looks, merwin is the poet who listens. the former is often reduced to his exuberant celebration of a mudluscious spring, while the latter explores ecological questions with a pensive existentialism. though merwin has explored many forms of poetry, he never imitates nor resembles cummings’s innovative (and controversial) forms. despite these differences, several commonalities draw these poets together. both move beyond merely writing about animals. they have developed, like kafka, a “vast zoopoetics” (derrida 6), but instead of using animals as parable, cummings and merwin explore the agency of nonhuman animals in ecosystems outside the text. to clarify, kafka’s animals have agency, but they are often anthropomorphized figures serving to further the metaphysical inquires of the given parable. after looking at kafka's vast zoopoetics, one does not gain insight into the agency of nonhuman animals that exist outside of the parable. cummings and merwin, though, tend to explore the agency of an animal stripped (as much as possible) of the anthropomorphized construct. moreover, there is a reciprocity of agency. the human engages the “other,” but the “other,” likewise, engages the human. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 36 another similarity is that both poets argue for the reader to be a performer, an essential premise to their poetics. in “coney island,” cummings compares the spectators of the circus to the participants of the roller coaster: whereas at the circus we are merely the spectators of the impossible, at coney we ourselves perform impossible feats—we turn all the heavenly somersaults imaginable and dare all the delirious dangers conceivable; and when, rushing at horrid velocity over irrevocable precipices, we beard [sic] the force of gravity in his lair, no acrobat, no lion tamer, can compete with us. (258) moments later in the essay, cummings emphasizes with all capital letters “the audience is the performance, and vice versa,” and then he suggests that this will become a “formula” he intends to “make the most of” (258). though merwin’s idea of the dialogical interplay between text and reader is far from that of a rollercoaster, he nonetheless places responsibility upon the reader’s performance of the poem. one of the reasons he eradicated all punctuation from his poetry in the middle of the moving target (1966), never to return to using it in his many publications thereafter, was that he wanted the reader to “pay attention to things” (folsom et al. 62). an absence of punctuation entreats the reader to listen actively—a crucial concept in merwin’s poetics—to the “weight of the language as it move[s]” (folsom et al. 62). both poets developed a poetics that deepens the reader’s experience of poetry by inviting him or her to move beyond observation and into performance. along with these similarities, both poets founded their poetics upon a humble understanding of poetry, language, and the extra-textual. merwin’s definition of form, for instance, hints at a broader scope of poetry. he defines poetic form as “the setting down of a way of hearing how poetry happens in words” (“open form” 295): poetry is a happening, which is similar to how cummings saw poems as verbs, and this happening may occur somewhere other than on a page. “the cold before the moonrise” exemplifies how merwin’s poetics often gravitate away from human language to some of the other places where poetry happens: it is too simple to turn to the sound of frost stirring among its stars like an animal asleep in the winter night and say i was born far from home aaron moe — zoopoetics: a look at cummings, merwin, and the expanding field of ecocriticism 37 if there is a place where this is the language may it be my country (ll. 1–7) the infinitive, “to turn” carries an august resonance throughout merwin’s work as his poems turn from an egocentric or anthropocentric paradigm toward a zoological, ecological, and therefore interrelated ways of being. here, he turns through listening to the “sound of frost,” and he hears the infinitesimal quietness of molecules colliding and crystallizing. he wants the “place where this is the language” to become his “country.” through the trope, merwin undermines a national identity by suggesting that he wants a “country” that places him directly in contact with the language of the earth. the language merwin speaks of is, of course, the “sound / of frost stirring,” but he charges this language with the dialogical energy of a simile. by comparing the stirring of frost to an “animal asleep / in the winter night,” merwin animates the frost. as an animal stirs due to his or her agency, so the frost stirs as a result of some other, deeper, working within the earth. and as the stirring frost enhances our conception of a sleeping, dreaming animal, we may recognize that the speaker of this poem yearns for a place where this rhetorical energy is a language and a home. strikingly, this “place” becomes the poem, not because of the meaning of the words, but because an onomatopoetic hiss of s’s permeates the first three lines, allowing a portion of the rhetorical energy of the frost’s animated whispering to seep into the poem. likewise, cummings fundamentally situated his poetry within the greater context of the extra-textual earth. similar to merwin, he knew that poetry happens in other places than words. it exists within the gestures of animals, an idea he makes explicit in his discussion of sea life: “the fluent technique of seals and of sea lions comprises certain untranslatable idioms, certain innate flexions, which astonishingly resemble the spiritual essence of poetry” (“circus” 256). here, cummings conflates the gestures of poetic form with the gestures of animals, and this concept underwrites many of his typographical explorations where the gestures and vocalizations of nonhuman animals disrupts human language thereby creating an interspecies convergence. cummings not only discusses these ideas in prose, but he also explores them in his poetry. in an early poem (1919-1920)—one that therefore establishes a perspective of animals that helps illuminate his life’s work—cummings gravitates to the rhetorical energy of a green bird: in front of your house i stopped for a second in the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 38 rain,in the spring. at the window only your hands beautifully, were (and the green bird perched carefully upon a gesture knew me.) (ll. 1–10) cummings juxtaposes two moments. the speaker of the poem stands in the rain and first sees a woman’s hands in the window and then sees a green bird. the parentheses reverse the expected hierarchy, for what is inside them (the gesture of the green bird) becomes even more rarified, private, and significant than what is outside (rain, window, hands). the poem hinges on the line breaks and spacing of the final lines—in other words, in the gestures of the poem itself. the bird could have been perched upon the eaves, a branch, a mailbox, a fencepost, a curb, etc., and the line break creates suspense and intensity that otherwise would not be there. when we read that the bird perches upon a “gesture” another line break allows us to linger in this word. the poem, like the bird, gestures to entreat us to contemplate the particular bodily expression, tilt of head, and look of an eye that exhibited enough rhetorical energy to communicate to cummings, at least, that the bird “knew” him. consequently, the poem reverses another expectation. one may expect a bird poem to engage a nonhuman “other” and to contribute to the epistemological process of the human knowing that “other”; instead, the human becomes the “other” that the bird engages through its own epistemological process. as the bird gestures, so does the poet (through the poem’s form), and this reciprocity of agency generates an interspecies borderland amidst the poem’s seeming simplicity. many of cummings’s poems use language to explore the complex movements of acrobatic beings. his grasshopper and cat poems (“r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” and “(im)c-at(mo),” for instance, both exhibit a fractal textuality: the “leap” of the grasshopper occurs on several different scales, as does the “flip” of the cat (moe, “chaos” 20-23; moe, “autopoiesis” 114-16). if we think of cummings’s grasshopper poem in the context of gestures we discover a profound statement about movement, rhetorical energy of nonhuman animals, and language. cummings allows the rhetorical energy of the grasshopper’s leap to disrupt the traditional patterns of human language: aaron moe — zoopoetics: a look at cummings, merwin, and the expanding field of ecocriticism 39 r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r who a)s w(e loo)k upnowgath ppegorhrass eringint(o athe):l ea !p: s a (r riving .grreapsphos) to rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly ,grasshopper; (ll. 1–15) the poem “reads” grasshopper, who as we look up now gathering into the leap arriving as to rearrangingly become grasshopper—with three scrambled, frenzied spellings of “grasshopper” throughout. many readers, though, stop here and think only of these moves as “gimmicks” rather than as philosophical musings about what it means to exist in the “now” or in what cummings called the verb. the textual and extra-textual grasshopper epitomizes this, for her or his antenna and foot (the “a” on the far right of the poem and the “s” on the left) break out of the strictures of the box, leaping out of the poem (terblanche, “fluid” 135; nänny). this larger leap contains several other leaps of letters (moe, “chaos” 20-21), one of which contains a tremendous amount of linguistic energy: “grreapsphos.” here, cummings renders the “grass” lowercase and has the “hopper” leap out of the grass, beginning with the lowercase “h” (webster 111). and yet, the text leaps backwards—reppoh—surprisingly, just like the extra-textual animal. amidst these larger leaps, cummings’s fragmentation exhibits the paradoxical wholeness within each part. the fragment “ea” encapsulates a wholeness of the motif of the animal’s “:l / ea / !p:,” for the fragmentation generates rhetorical energy as the uppercase “a” leaps out of the word into the blank space within the poem, which reenacts the extra-textual energy of the leaping grasshopper. in this way, the poem confronts the reader with the energy of the animal in a fresh and surprising way.10 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 40 and if we linger within the poem, we recognize that this manifestation of the grasshopper’s energy results not only in the frenzied gestures of its leap but also in the embedded sounds within those leaps. terblanche observes that the poem exhibits many of the sounds that are prime examples of a zoosemiotics: various whirring and clicking sounds of the leap, familiar to anyone who has been surprised by it as has the speaker in this instance, are onomatopoetically suggested by the creative rearrangement of letters on the page: examples include “r-p”, “s-s”, “g-r”, “rhr”, “ss”, “ph”, “rr”, and “grr.” (“incredible” 16) the poem moves beyond simply reenacting the grasshopper’s leap through a creative rearranging of language. the rhetorical energy and zoosemiotics of a grasshopper infuse human language, thereby creating a porous, interspecies borderland. the grasshopper, as a being with agency, enters into the cultural construct of human poetry. we can only reach this realization, though, when we recognize that cummings’s visual poems often contain an innovative, auditory dynamic. in the poem “(hills chime with thrush),” cummings observes behavior suggestive of hummingbird culture. provocatively, the poem begins by parenthetically acknowledging the presence of thrush in the nearby hills. the behavior, then, of the two hummingbirds, which the following stanzas focus on, is embedded within the greater context of the cultures of other birds. the poem, therefore, exhibits multiculturalism: the culture of thrush, the culture of hummingbirds, and the culture of humans represented by the sign-system of the english language. cummings’ language is ruptured, indicating how the gestures and vocalizations of thrush and hummingbirds destabilize traditional poetics and consequently the assumption that only humans possess poetic dwelling. to use haraway’s language, the birds demonstrate in all of their signifying power: (hills chime with thrush) a hummingbird princess floats doll-angel-life from aaron moe — zoopoetics: a look at cummings, merwin, and the expanding field of ecocriticism 41 bet:to;bouncing,bet the ruby&emerald zigging he of a zagflash king pounc es buzzsqueaking th ey tangle in twitter y t wofroing chino ise r(!)i(?)e(.)s (ll. 1-19) for readers who have not witnessed the cacophony a “t / wofroing” frenzy generates, the following image may be helpful. a rufous “zagflash[es]” and “buzzsqueak[s]” near a female ruby-throat: (photo by stull, used with permission) the rapidity of flight, gestures, and vocalizations may cause viewers to dismiss the activity simply as noise rather than to accept it for a rich, layered, and nuanced interaction between birds. for the same reasons, readers may dismiss cummings’s poem, at first, because of the seeming random rupture of words. this rupture, though, like that in the grasshopper poem, is a result of the poem becoming a multi-species humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 42 borderland. by infusing the poem with the embodied sign-system of hummingbirds, cummings allows the words to become an arena of gestures themselves, with surprising bursts of capital letters and sudden breaks of words. specifically, in the final three lines, the energy ruptures and refigures three words—hi, noise, cries—into “chino / ise // r(!)i(?)e(.)s.” the permutation suggests that the vocalizations and gestures, which to some people are nothing more than noise and cries, are multifaceted, ranging from the welcoming “hi” to exclamatory “(!)”, inquisitive “(?)”, and declarative “(.)” gestures. these vocalizations and gestures contribute to the cultivation of hummingbird culture, and though some ethologists would hesitate at such a claim until more data definitively “proves” that this behavior is an accumulative, social tradition that differs enough from other populations of hummingbirds, cummings does not wait. to use j. m. coetzee’s idea, cummings engages the spectacular and capricious behavior of hummingbirds— but he goes one step further. the poem becomes a place where the hummingbirds engage us. from hummingbirds, to grasshoppers, cats, green birds, seals, and sea lions, cummings’s poetry exhibits not merely an abundance of animals; rather, his poetry becomes a porous borderland where nonhuman animals enter and engage the reader. zoopoetics exposes this borderland through highlighting how cummings’s animals are presented as having imagination, rhetorical sensibility, and incipient culture. similarly, the moves merwin crafts urge the reader to listen to the weight of the language as it moves, and in the following poem, the movement of the language—its form—entreats the reader to sense the august movement of the poem’s subject, a whale. in “leviathan” merwin writes heavy, sonorous, alliterative verse, full of present participles that heave forward, as well as many hyphenated words that reinforce the idea that one word cannot hold such a sublime creature. the first sentence ranges across several lines, further emphasizing that the leviathan may be too robust for any sentence, or poem for that matter: this is the black sea-brute bulling through wave-wrack, ancient as ocean’s shifting hills, who in sea-toils traveling, who furrowing the salt acres heavily, his wake hoary behind him, shoulders spouting, the fist of his forehead over wastes gray-green crashing, among horses unbroken from bellowing fields, past bone-wreck of vessels, tide-ruin, wash of lost bodies bobbing no longer sought for, and islands of ice gleaming, aaron moe — zoopoetics: a look at cummings, merwin, and the expanding field of ecocriticism 43 who ravening the rank flood, wave-marshaling, overmastering the dark sea-marches, finds home and harvest. (ll. 1-12) the poem allows the elemental energy of the leviathan’s movement to enter language. the reader, then, engages the energy even if only a fraction of it. when this happens, the agency of the whale infuses the boundary between humans and animals, thereby creating, like cummings’s poems, a place for interspecies convergence. merwin wrote many other poems that explore whales, including “the shore.” seen from the perspective of zoopoetics, “the shore” laments the loss of culture experienced by blue whales. the poem begins by establishing how blue whales could once “hear another / whale at the opposite end of the earth” (ln 2-3), and yet how the “sounds of hollow iron charging / clanging through the ocean” (ln 7-8), combined with the “harpoons of humans / and the poisoning of the seas” (ln 9-10), has made it so “a whale can hear no farther through the present / than a jet can fly in a few minutes” (ln 11-12). the loss of hearing—of listening, which again, is the ever-present motif in merwin’s work—is catastrophic. the poem hints at the extinction of whales by harpoons—which is abominable enough—but focuses on the consequences for the surviving whale(s). they cannot hear each other, and therefore they are cut off from social interaction. as the many ethologists discuss in the question of animal culture, cetaceans have developed vocal variations and nuances that distinguish one group from another, so when a whale becomes a solitary sojourner, she or he loses that sense of belonging. in the final two stanzas, merwin juxtaposes a gathering of blue whales with a solitary wanderer, leaving the reader to infer that something has been lost: in the days of their hearing the great blues gathered like clouds the sunlight under the sea’s surfaces sank into their backs as into the water around them through which they flew invisible from above except as flashes of movement and they could hear each other’s voices wherever they went once it is on its own a blue can wander the whole world beholding both sides of the water raising in each ocean the songs of the blues that it learned from distances it can no longer hear humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 44 it can fly all its life without ever meeting another blue this is what we are doing this is the way we sing oh blue blue (ll. 13-24) the last two lines emanate a tone of anguish, “this is what we are doing,” but we may wonder, what is “this”? it is not simply driving a species into extinction; rather, it is how an imminent extinction likewise effaces culture for the survivors. merwin, though, is not concerned only with the large, endangered species that readily capture the imagination; “common” animals also captivate him. in the early eighties, merwin undertook an exercise to distill the poetic moment as briefly as possible. in an interview, he shares his aim: “i wanted to see what it was that made a poem complete as a small, if not the smallest, unit; it was a way of discovering what was the single thing that would stand by itself” (folsom et al. 44). he did not intend to experiment with the tradition of haiku, but the outcome resulted in a book of haiku-esque tercets, finding the islands. the poems often present the reader with observations that establish the context for the poem’s turn, and many of these observations and turns glimpse the ways nonhuman animals engage environments, for instance, a lizard: rain on the tin roof lizard hands on the tin ceiling listening the turn occurs between the second and third line. the vivid image of the lizard with her or his “hands on the tin ceiling” contextualizes the “listening,” and as the reader lingers in the final word, several suggestive ideas emerge. the lizard engages the vibrations of the rain through his or her hands—hands being a prominent symbol of agency11—and therefore, this listening happens through the tactile intimacy of feeling, more like a blind person reading braille. listening is, for merwin, one of the most indispensible attributes of poetic dwelling. the poem does not venture into the mind of the lizard to ascertain how the phenomenological experience impacts the lizard’s psyche, nor should it. in light of derrida’s limitrophy, the poem leads us into the abyssal limit between the human and the animal. in this borderland, we are invited to imagine the vibrations of rain humming beneath the poised hands of a being fully engaging her or his environment. as discussed earlier, merwin turns toward the language of the earth—the “sound of frost stirring”—and desires such a place to be his “country.” part of his turning involves exploring not only the mammals and reptiles of the earth, but insects as well. one poem aaron moe — zoopoetics: a look at cummings, merwin, and the expanding field of ecocriticism 45 in particular from rain in the trees (1988) celebrates the rhetorical energy of insects. an insect may not, at first, capture the imagination like a leviathan, but merwin’s “after the alphabets”—like cummings’ “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r”—cultivates a respect and admiration for the agency of insects who dwell imaginatively upon the earth through their unique register of language: i am trying to decipher the language of insects they are the tongues of the future their vocabularies describe buildings as food they can depict dark water and the veins of trees they can convey what they do not know and what is known at a distance and what nobody knows they have terms for making music with the legs they can recount changing in a sleep like death they can sing with wings the speakers are their own meaning in a grammar without horizons they are wholly articulate they are important they are everything (ll. 1–13) “after the alphabets” revisits the idea from “the cold before the moonrise” as the speaker turns toward a nonhuman sound, to a language other than the alphabet of human discourse. the notion that insects hold the “tongues of the future” resonates with the apocalyptic motif throughout merwin’s work, and therefore this homage to the insects is simultaneously an elegy to the mammals. this is the language that will endure long after homo sapiens vanishes from the planet. some readers may think merwin forces the idea that insects possess enough cognition and memory to recount metamorphosis (ln 9); however, the planet earth footage of ants carrying away members infected by the cordyceps fungus suggests otherwise. some insects demonstrate they recollect former events. perhaps it is the size of insects that “permits” some people to dismiss them as lesser beings, when according to merwin, they are “wholly articulate” through sounds that are embedded within their bodily gestures, such as their ability to make “music with the legs” or sounds “with wings.” the poem does not explicitly suggest an insect culture emerges from the gestures and embedded sign-systems of insects, but it nonetheless points in that direction. beekeepers, for instance, often speak of a particular hive’s “personality,” suggesting humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 46 variances in culture between subpopulations of the species. the queen bee determines the behavior, and it spreads through the hive not because of genetic determination but rather by social interaction. merwin’s use of linguistic metaphors of “vocabularies,” “tongues,” and “grammar” suggest that insects possess the foundation for culture to emerge, albeit a culture of a different degree than that of humans. this culture of embedded signs within rhetorical gestures allows these social beings to interact, engage, and thrive. earlier in rain in the trees (1988), merwin includes a philosophical poem concerning language. without the context of his other works, we may be tempted to interpret the poem solely in human terms. however, in light of the poems explored in this essay, “utterance” makes a profound statement about all manifestations of rhetorical energy: human, nonhuman, and perhaps even elemental: sitting over words very late i have heard a kind of whispered sighing not far like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark the echo of everything that has ever been spoken still spinning its one syllable between the earth and silence (ll. 1–8) this “kind of whispered sighing” and “echo of everything that has ever / been spoken” includes nonhuman registers. merwin listens for that “one syllable” that is “still spinning” and forming and surfacing, and though human words contribute to the spinning of the one syllable, so does the language of insects, the language of the earth, the “wind in the pines,” the “sea in the dark,” the sound of frost stirring, a lizard’s posture of listening hands, and the vocalizations and gestures of the leviathans of the deep. in this way, merwin explores how nonhuman animals have agency as they interact with their kind, other species, and environments as makers of “utterances.” conclusion. though cummings’s and merwin’s forms differ drastically, they share a similar zoological vision—one that subverts the humanist tendency to dismiss nonhuman animals. both poets complicate and extend the limit between the human and the abyss of the animal; both poets slowly gnaw away at the deeply rooted speciesism within western ideology; both poets perceive the nonhuman animal as interacting with a given environment; both poets rupture and destabilize the western narrative that aaron moe — zoopoetics: a look at cummings, merwin, and the expanding field of ecocriticism 47 perceives the human to be the sole possessor of imagination, rhetoric, and culture through observing and exploring how many nonhuman animals demonstrate these qualities as well; and both poets, therefore, published poems that, when discussed from the perspective of zoopoetics, become borderlands where the agency of human and nonhuman animals converge. this borderland is only possible because the poems exhibit a typographical arrangement, meter, image, or sound that demonstrates (in haraway’s sense of the word) the gestures and vocalizations of extra-textual, nonhuman animals. in other words, they allow nonhuman “texts” to interact and infuse human texts. such moves, however, provide only an initial grounding for the potential of a zoopoetic approach to literary studies. just as multiculturalism redrew the boundaries of the traditional literary canon, zoopoetics redraws boundaries to include nonhuman texts. for instance, when discussing place in an ecocritical course, the class could speculate that if nonhuman animals have agency as rhetorical beings, they may, in fact, construct meaning out of experiences that happen in specific places. elephants pause along their migratory journeys where other elephants, in past migrations, died. these spaces for the elephants become charged with memory, meaning, and significance, transforming them, and the elephants generate enough rhetorical energy around such places for us to see they grieve. zoopoetics grants a framework, then, to take seriously the rhetorical energy of nonhuman animals rather than dismissing such observations under the misunderstood fallacy of anthropomorphism. likewise, zoopoetics helps reframe the constellations within the poetic tradition. we teach scansions of hopkins’s sprung rhythm and dickinson’s slant rhymes. in order to balance the narrow repertoire of the poetic text, discussion ought to include scansions of the gestures and vocalizations of nonhuman animals. if humpback whale songs demonstrate repetitive sounds—playful rhyming—and if these rhymes are one of the ways in which the dialects differentiate, thereby creating cetacean culture, then after scanning “i dwell in possibility,” a class could scan a series of whale songs, already available online. in this way, the classroom would epitomize merwin’s turning towards the earth to discover the other places where poetry happens, and, in turn, such a process would cultivate the art of listening. likewise, cummings saw how the rhetorical energy of seals and sea lions exhibits untranslatable idioms, and one could integrate these idioms into assigned readings. moreover, after an exploration of his hummingbird poem, a class could watch a video, in slow motion, of the “t / wofroing” frenzy (l. 17). the class could give the behavior a basic, rhetorical analysis simply identifying when one bird humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 48 enters into a rhetorical situation, crafting a text with a specific purpose for a specific audience. we should not limit scansion or rhetorical analysis to human texts; the gestures and expressions of nonhuman animals could be explored as well. if ecocriticism evolves not as waves but as expanding, nonlinear patterns of constellations (buell 133), zoopoetics exposes new patterns within existing constellations. the expanding field is best understood as constellations within constellations, patterns within patterns that, like ecosystems, interact in dynamic ways. these new patterns contribute to the shift within the humanities in which nonhuman animals are taken much more seriously on a theoretical and practical level. for this to happen, though, the humanities, literary studies, and ecocriticism must take seriously the implications of merwin’s “utterance.” not just human vocalizations and gestures— but also those of insects, leviathan, lizards, hummingbirds, thrush, grasshoppers, green birds, ad infinitum—contribute to the spinning of that one syllable. acknowledgements. i thank christopher arigo, patricia ericsson, valerie stull, peter moe, the e. e. cummings society, and the many reviewers for the comments, conversations, insights, and breakthroughs that have helped refine my thoughts on zoopoetics. and i thank rebecca, whose ear, turned to the meadowlark, always inspires me to listen. notes 1. i capitalize cummings’s name based upon the arguments made by norman friedman. 2. see, for instance, isle’s 2010 “the special forum on ecocriticism and theory.” jim warren, robert wess, and astrid bracke reexamine the interdisciplinary boundaries of ecocriticism, and greta gaard and helena feder call specifically for these new boundaries to include and emphasize nonhuman animals. gaard extends simon estok’s work on ecophobia and speciesism (gaard 650-51; estok 208) while feder extends glotfelty’s use of “the social” (feder 776; glotfelty xix). other examples include louise westling, who argues for a paradigm shift towards a more informed understanding of nonhuman animals (qtd. in arnold et al. 1104), and greg garrard, who recently revised his chapter “animals” to highlight the work being done in animal studies. 3. bate’s definition of ecopoetics resonates with kevin hutchings’ articulation of ecocriticism’s foundational premise that “literature reflects and helps shape human responses to the natural environment” (1, my emphasis). bate, of course, specifies what aaron moe — zoopoetics: a look at cummings, merwin, and the expanding field of ecocriticism 49 this response looks like for humans, but both definitions implicitly exclude possibilities that nonhuman animals likewise respond with agency. 4. rasula draws on calvin martin’s idea, from in the spirit of the earth (1993), that a human is “fundamentally an echo-locator, like our distant relatives the porpoise and the bat” who uses “words and artifice” as the “primary instruments of self-location” in order to discover a sense of place within the biosphere (8). 5. sarah mcfarland and ryan hediger’s introduction to animals and agency contributed to my understanding of the agency of nonhuman animals. 6. for a summary of the controversial reception of “a hoot ...”—and a defense of its ideas—see debra hawhee. 7. in “the origin of metaphor: the animal connection,” shepard observes a host of animal infinitives within human language that suggest an etymology, not in latin or greek, but in the rhetorical energy of animals. he writes, “the great zoo of animal infinitives—to bear, to lark, to hound, to quail, to worm, to badger, to skunk—is likewise irreducible” (9). though shepard does not use the term “rhetorical energy,” he surmises how these words emerged from humans who, as hunters and gatherers, engage with the gestures of nonhuman animals that quail, bear, lark, hound, worm, and badger. 8. because poems often explore the rhetorical energy of human gestures and expressions, zoopoetics is not limited to nonhuman actors; rather, it is a useful term to explore rhetorical energy whenever and wherever a life-form makes such energy manifest. two poems readily come to mind: rilke’s “the spanish dancer” and brooks’s “we real cool” (rilke 43; brooks 547). both poems use words to explore the rhetorical energy emanating from the human body. in “the spanish dancer,” the energy is erotic, and rilke compares the dancer’s arms and castanets to an “aroused” rattlesnake and rattle. though there are complications with the comparison of the female, erotic body to an animal, from the perspective of rhetorical energy, the comparison highlights how the human exhibits a rhetorical energy shared by other animals. in “we real cool,” the youth playing hooky utter few words—“we / sing sin” (ln 5)—and even then the emphasis is placed on the way they deliver the words rather than on the words themselves. they express their defiance in their strut. brooks observes this, and then uses language to convey the rhetorical energy of their gestures. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 50 9. derrida’s theory of “limitrophy” has shaped my thinking on the borderlands where humans and animals converge. derrida speaks of the “abyssal limit” between the human and the animal, and how he aims to extend the limit through “complicating, thickening, delinearizing, folding, and dividing” it (29). i see the limit as a porous edge where the energy from multiple species ebbs and flows. 10. see also moe, “urban.” 11. for an excellent discussion of the hand as a symbol of agency, see stephanie rowe. works cited arnold, jean et al. “forum on the literatures of environment.” pmla: publications of the modern language association of america 114.5 (1999): 1089–1104. bate, jonathan. the song of the earth. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 2000. bracke, astrid. “redrawing the boundaries of ecocritical practice.” interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment 17.4 (2010): 765–767. brooks, gwendolyn. “we real cool.” twentieth-century american poetry. ed. dana gioia, david mason, & meg schoerke. new york: mcgraw-hill, 2004. 547. buell, lawrence. the future of environmental criticism: environmental crisis and literary imagination. malden: wiley-blackwell, 2005. coetzee, j. m. et al. the lives of animals. ed. amy gutmann. princeton: princeton up, 1999. cummings, e. e. “coney island.” 1926. another e. e. cummings: a mind-bending selection of the avant-garde cummings—poetry and prose. ed. richard kostelanetz. new york: liveright, 1998. 257–260. –––––. “(hills chime with thrush).” 1958. complete poems, 1904–1962. ed. george j. firmage. new york: liveright, 1991. 747. –––––. “(im)c-a-t(mo).” 1950. complete poems, 1904–1962. ed. george j. firmage. new york: liveright, 1991. 655. aaron moe — zoopoetics: a look at cummings, merwin, and the expanding field of ecocriticism 51 –––––. “in front of your house i.” 1920. complete poems, 1904–1962. ed. george j. firmage. new york: liveright, 1991. 982. –––––. “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r.” 1935. complete poems, 1904–1962. ed. george j. firmage. new york: liveright, 1991. 396. –––––. “the adult, the artist, and the circus.” 1925. another e. e. cummings: a mindbending selection of the avant-garde cummings—poetry and prose. ed. richard kostelanetz. new york: liveright, 1998. 252–256. danta, chris. “kafka’s mousetrap: the fable of the dying voice.” substance 37.3 (2008): 152–168. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. ed. marie-louise mallet. trans. david wills. new york: fordham up, 2008. estok, simon c. “theorizing in a space of ambivalent openness: ecocriticism and ecophobia.” interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment 16.2 (2009): 203–225. feder, helena. “rethinking multiculturalism: theory and nonhuman cultures.” interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment 17.4 (2010): 775–777. folsom, ed, cary nelson, and w. s. merwin. “‘fact has two faces’: an interview with w. s. merwin.” the iowa review 13.1 (1982): 30–66. fothergill, alastair. planet earth. bbc worldwide americas inc., 2007. film. friedman, norman. “not ‘e. e. cummings’.” spring: the journal of the e. e. cummings society 1 (1992): 114–121. –––––. “not ‘e. e. cummings’ revisited.” spring: the journal of the e. e. cummings society 5 (1996): 41–43. gaard, greta. “new directions for ecofeminism: toward a more feminist ecocriticism.” interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment 17.4 (2010): 643 –665. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 52 garrard, greg. ecocriticism. 2nd edition. new york: routledge, 2011. glotfelty, cheryll. “introduction: literary studies in an age of environmental crisis.” the ecocriticism reader: landmarks in literary ecology. ed. harold fromm & cheryll glotfelty. athens, ga: u of georgia p, 1996. xv–xxxvii. haraway, donna. simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. new york: routledge, 1991. hawhee, debra. “toward a bestial rhetoric.” philosophy and rhetoric 44.1 (2011): 81–87. heidegger, martin. poetry, language, thought. trans. alfred hofstadter. new york: harper & row, 1971. hutchings, kevin. “ecocriticism in british romantic studies.” literature compass 4.1 (2007): 172–202. kennedy, george a. “a hoot in the dark: the evolution of general rhetoric.” philosophy and rhetoric 25.1 (1992): 1–21. laland, kevin n., and bennett g. galef. “introduction.” the question of animal culture. ed. kevin n. laland and bennett g. galef. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 2009. 1–18. laland, kevin n., jeremy r. kendal, and rachel l. kendal. “animal culture: problems and solutions.” the question of animal culture. ed. kevin n. laland and bennett g. galef. cambridge: harvard up, 2009. 174–197. mcfarland, sarah e., and ryan hediger. “approaching the agency of other animals: an introduction.” animals and agency: an interdisciplinary exploration. boston: brill, 2009. 1–20. mcgrew, w. c. “ten dispatches from the chimpanzee culture wars.” the question of animal culture. ed. kevin n. laland and bennett g. galef. cambridge: harvard up, 2009. 41–69. martin, calvin luther. in the spirit of the earth: rethinking history and time. baltimore: johns hopkins up, 1993. aaron moe — zoopoetics: a look at cummings, merwin, and the expanding field of ecocriticism 53 merwin, w. s. “after the alphabets.” the rain in the trees. new york: alfred a. knopf, 1988. 50. –––––. “leviathan.” 1956. the first four books of poems. port townsend: copper canyon press, 2000. 141–42. –––––. “on open form.” 1969. twentieth-century american poetics: poets on the art of poetry. ed. dana gioia, meg schoerke, & david mason. boston: mcgraw-hill, 2004. 294–295. –––––. “rain on the tin roof.” finding the islands. san francisco: north point press, 1982. 27. –––––. “the cold before the moonrise.” 1967. the second four books of poems. port townsend: copper canyon press, 1993. 110. –––––. “the shore.” 1983. flower & hand: poems 1977–1983. port townsend: copper canyon press, 1997. 151–52. –––––. “utterance.” the rain in the trees. new york: alfred a. knopf, 1988. 44. moe, aaron. “autopoiesis & cummings’ cat.” rupkatha journal: on interdisciplinary studies in humanities 3.1 (2011): 110–20. –––––. “chaos & the ‘new’ nature poem: a look at e. e. cummings’ poetry.” ct review 32.1 (2010): 11–24. –––––. “cummings’ urban ecology: an exploration of eimi, no thanks, & the cultivation of the ecological self.” interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment. 18.4 (2011): 1–26. nänny, max. “on ‘r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r’.” modern american poetry 2000. 26 aug 2010. web. rasula, jed. this compost: ecological imperatives in american poetry. athens, ga: u of georgia p, 2002. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 54 rilke, rainer maria. the selected poetry of rainer maria rilke. trans. stephen mitchell. new york: vintage, 1982. rowe, stephanie. “no human hand? the ourang-outang in poe’s ‘the murders in the rue morgue’.” animals and agency: an interdisciplinary exploration. ed. sarah e. mcfarland & ryan hediger. boston: brill, 2009. 107–128. sargeant, brooke l., and janet mann. “from social learning to culture: intrapopulation variation in bottlenose dolphins.” the question of animal culture. ed. kevin n. laland and bennett g. galef. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 2009. 152–173. shepard, paul. “the origin of metaphor: the animal connection.” encounters with nature: essays. ed. florence r. shepard. washington d. c.: island press, 1999. 7–17. stull, dean. hummingbirds. 06 july 2008. terblanche, etienne. “e. e. cummings’ fluid ‘objectivity’: a deep ecological response to michael webster’s ‘the new nature poetry and the old’.” spring: the journal of the e. e. cummings society 13 (2004): 128–142. –––––. “that ‘incredible unanimal/mankind’: jacques derrida, e. e. cummings and a grasshopper.” journal of literary studies 20.3–4 (2004): 218–247. warren, jim. “placing ecocriticism.” interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment 17.4 (2010): 770–772. webster, michael. “e. e. cummings: the new nature poetry and the old.” spring: the journal of the e. e. cummings society 9 (2000): 109–124. wess, robert. “the theory ecocriticism needs.” interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment 17.4 (2010): 762–765. white, christopher. animals, technology, and the zoopoetics of american modernism. dissertation. pennsylvania state university, 2008. whitehead, hal. “how might we study culture?: a perspective from the ocean.” the question of animal culture. ed. kevin n. laland and bennett g. galef. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 2009. 125–151. aaron moe — zoopoetics: a look at cummings, merwin, and the expanding field of ecocriticism 55 wolfe, cary. animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. chicago: u of chicago p, 2003. microsoft word irmscher-donald-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:1 reviews christoph irmscher paying mr. bewick diana donald, the art of thomas bewick (with contributions by paul f. donald). london: reaktion books, 2013. 328 pp. + 60 color plates, 150 halftones. £40.00; $65.00. the story goes that, sometime in the 1810s, william proctor, a poor carpenter’s apprentice from the northumbrian countryside, would walk sixteen miles on weekends just to gaze at a window of a taxidermist’s shop in newcastle. afterwards, young proctor would walk home again, as hungry as he had come, dreaming that at least some of the treasures he had seen would one day be his. but what he most specifically coveted was not one of the birds, but a book, in two volumes, the history of british birds (1797; 1804), engraved and partially written by one mr. bewick, known also for his earlier work on quadrupeds (1790). proctor saved up all the money he could and, on his next visit in town, gathered up his courage, walked into the store, and asked the price of the two volumes. mr. bewick, who happened to be present himself, told him that each humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 124 of them was 13s, which happened to be exactly the amount proctor had saved up. proctor asked if he could just take one of the books and return for the second volume later, when he had the money. bewick, in his broad northumbrian dialect, declined. he did not do business that way, he said. but when he saw the disappointment in the young man’s face, he softened, told him to take both volumes and pay for them when he could. proctor eagerly grabbed the books, but he did not get very far. three or four miles out of newcastle, as a friend recalled later, proctor sat down by the side of the road and began reading. “so absorbed did he become in their contents that he did not cease reading until darkness set in and compelled him to desist” (robinson xiii). six weeks later he returned, with the full amount, and bewick was so pleased that he declined payment: “well, my lad, i trusted thee when i did not know thee, here’s thy money back” (robinson xiii). william proctor went on to become the keeper of ornithological collections at the durham museum of natural history. in 1834 and 1837, he traveled to iceland; apparently, he was the first to suggest that the great auk might be extinct. the story captures nicely why bewick appealed to so many of his contemporaries, and it reinforces what diana donald, in this lavishly illustrated tome, tells us about his art. the immersive experience bewick’s illustrations of birds afforded — precisely the reason that young proctor got so distracted that he forgot where he was — was the direct result of his innovative handling of the end-grain woodblocks he used. a fairly simple but ingenious trick, the lowering of the wood around the edges of the image, allowed him to create the illusion that his vignettes had no boundaries, and to erase the space between representation and reality. bewick’s innovative use of white line engraving opened up new possibilities for the handling of light and shade, while his decision to place his animals in their appropriate habitats further created the sense that one got a glimpse of nature itself, rather than looking at a specimen in a museum. thomas bewick was a complicated man, full of contradictions. a visionary artist, he was also, in the words of his modern editor, a “jobbing tradesman-engraver” (199); hence his insistence, when proctor first approached him, that he get fully paid. but apart from being a “northumberland clod,” as john ruskin somewhat contemptuously called him, his best woodcuts — and this was ruskin’s view, too — rose to the sophistication of dürer prints (202). and, as the example of proctor’s transformation from carpenter to museum curator shows, bewick was immensely successful in imparting the importance of scientific literacy to the common people. christoph irmscher – paying mr. bewick 125 yet a friend of ordinary folks he always remained. one of eight siblings, thomas bewick knew the nature of hard work. his father’s income came from a rented colliery, and he grew up among the people he frequently portrayed in his work — the hardfaced beggars, limping cripples, demobbed soldiers, and rough-and-tumble children featured in his so-called “tail-pieces” or smaller vignettes that he would print at the end of textual descriptions. an ardent abolitionist, pacifist, and supporter of the american revolution, bewick nevertheless stopped short of directly challenging the status quo. but his desire for peace and harmony did not prevent him from mocking the empty rhetoric the ruling classes employed to justify war, and he readily condemned the exploitation of both working people and working animals. in one his most memorable tailpieces, a donkey rubs his backside against a memorial stone where the words “battle … splendid victory … immortal” are still legible (119). for bewick the boundaries separating humans from animals were porous at best. in her search for influences, donald points to jeremy bentham, who deplored the fact that humans had relegated animals to the status of things, although he remained hesitant to accept that there were close ties between humans and animals. it seems, however, that bewick in his art did not want to make any such distinctions. in his world, both humans and animals exist in a constant state of degradation. we see horses left outside in driving rain; a dog discovering her drowned puppies, or a sullen performing bear led to the next town, with a joyless circus monkey holding on, for dear life, to its back. while bewick at least officially never questioned the supremacy of humans, his own work often confronted him with evidence to the contrary. maybe this is why his version of fables of aesop (1818) turned out to be somewhat of a disappointment, in donald’s estimation. bewick is at his best when he trains his unsparing look on examples of human cruelty to animals, when there’s no room for moral uplift or pithy maxims. fables of aesop does include one of the most haunting images in bewick’s oeuvre: an old, emaciated, soaking wet horse passively awaiting its own death, as if there were nothing else to do in the world. bewick was still working on a version of that image when he confronted his own death in 1828. hardly more than ribs and bones, the animal in that last, unfinished print, a decrepit memento mori, offers a stark contrast with the lush farmland bewick has chosen as a background. in the distance, dark clouds are gathering. a year before, bewick had told a friend that he was “becoming like an old horse,” too: “even with whipping & spurring he cannot with his load climb the hill as he used to do” (175). in a related vignette, he imagined his own coffin being carried out humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 126 of his childhood home, towards the river where a boat was waiting, the northumbrian version of charon ready to carry him across (123). bewick was not a scientist, a term that was coined only a few years after his death. donald is candid about what she deems his “insouciant attitude to taxonomy” (59), but she also emphasizes the significant contributions he made to ornithology, the care he put into the accurate representation of a bird’s plumage or the selection of species-appropriate habitats. true, he did not feature seasonal or sexual variations, and salient facts about the behavior of his birds he addressed, if at all, in his descriptions or in the tailpieces. but bewick’s representations of birds were based on personal observation wherever possible, and with the descriptions — which in the second volume of birds were entirely bewick himself — he tried to account for the nuances of color his woodcuts could not convey. christoph irmscher – paying mr. bewick 127 donald has much to say about the wider cultural context, from oliver goldsmith’s poetry to the labor activism of william cobbett, within which to understand bewick’s work, and she provides rich detail about his continuing influence on ruskin or the brontës. what became clear to me, though, was the extent to which bewick’s reach extended far beyond his native britain. for example, john james audubon and “old bewick” met in 1827, when the french-american naturalist was spending a week in newcastle, although by then audubon was already amply familiar with bewick’s achievements (audubon, writings and drawings 803). in 1821, when he was traveling down the mississippi, audubon carried a copy of history of british birds in his pocket, crowing with delight when the long-legged plover (the stilt sandpiper), a small shorebird he saw in new orleans, corresponded so “nearly” to bewick’s description (writings and drawings 99). in fact, “bewick’s birds” inspired not only individual plates in birds of america (irmscher 80-81, 90) but shaped the very idea of the later, smallformat edition of the same work, the so-called “royal octavo”: “bewick’s size would prove best if the wood cuts were equally good,” audubon wrote to his son victor in 1833 (audubon decided to use lithographs; writings and drawings 823-824). like bewick, audubon limited himself to portraying one species per plate, portraying every feather of their bodies and their habitats with the same fastidiousness that bewick had humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 128 brought to his task. but what bewick had relegated to his tailpieces — the awareness that death hovers on the brink of everything humans or animals do — in audubon’s best plates takes center stage. this awareness was what induced audubon, in one of the earliest plates in birds of america, to feature not just one but two peregrine falcons on a bare ledge, a male and a female, their beaks bloody from their gruesome breakfast, their eyes turned towards us, the viewers, in full recognition of our own predatory instincts (birds of america, plate xvi). neither bewick nor audubon, however, was able to realize the inevitable conclusion to be drawn from such insights about our relationship with animals: that our shared mortality should, in an increasingly fragile world, make us not the dispensers and administrators of their dying, but their companions in life. works cited audubon, john james. the birds of america, from original drawings. london: the author, 1827-1838. _____. writings and drawings. ed. christoph irmscher. new york: library of america, 1999. bewick, thomas. the complete illustrative work. ed. nigel tattersfield. 3 vols. new castle, delaware and london: oak knoll press and the british library, 2011. irmscher, christoph. “audubon goes north.” cultural circulation: dialogues between canada and the american south. ed. waldemar zacharasiewicz and christoph irmscher. vienna: austrian academy of sciences press, 2013. 77-97. robinson, robert. william bewick: his life and times. newcastle: printed for r. robinson, 1887. microsoft word sax pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:1 boria sax “listen to the animals”: a manifesto on animal husbandry jocelyne porcher. vivre avec les animaux: une utopie pour le xxie siécle. paris: éditions la découverte/m.a.u.s.s., 2011. 162 pp. 15 €. today, in the words of eric eliason, “by any economic or physical health measures, the benefits to humans of domestication have been dubious at best, as any cat owner who racks up hundreds of dollars of veterinary and food bills a year, or any tourist watching thousands of cattle range unmolested at will downtown in any indian city, or any vegetarian activist or college nutrition textbook reflecting on the relative calories per acre efficiency of any protein-rich crop plant versus any livestock species will tell you” (eliason 34-36). if human beings are truly the “dominant animals,” why did they enter into relationships that, by any pragmatic measure, demanded so much and offered them so little? porcher's explanation in vivre avec les animaux is that the relationships in domestication, specifically in animal husbandry, are not utilitarian. this was, and remains, a way of life founded on reciprocity between people and animals. it was made possible by killing and eating animals, but that was not its major purpose. it offered people the satisfaction of living with the animals, communicating with them, and participating with them in common endeavors, while the animals gained a steady supply of food, protection against predators, and human companionship. the relative security enabled the animals to participate in human society, thus developing feelings and modes of perception that were previously inaccessible to them. the awareness of animals and their ways of responding, in turn, permeated human society. if that seems paradoxical, it may be a bit less so if we consider that, as porcher points out, virtually all domestic animals, including dogs and cats, are killed eventually by people. it is only being eaten that distinguishes pets from farm animals, and the act of eating a creature can entail a certain intimacy. in addition to enabling people to care for larger numbers of animals, use of animals as food brings a certain reciprocity to their relationship with people, which may be lacking with many pets. perhaps most importantly, it acknowledges the integration of both people and their animals into the cycle of life and death, a subject that has now become repressed in much of human society. boria sax — “listen to the animals”: a manifesto on animal husbandry 127 the idea that the self is not entirely unitary is now commonplace, yet it is still usually developed only in highly abstract terms. very few thinkers have explored the implications of that view with as much specificity as porcher, who examines the consequences of intersubjectivity and distributed consciousness for human-animal relations. she does not take the individual for granted as the ultimate unit of fairness and reciprocity, nor as the only possible bearer of rights and obligations, and points out how those who work closely with animals, particularly non-industrial farmers, often feel at one with them. one startling example of the bond between farmers and non-industrial animals is given by alain caille at the beginning of the introduction to porcher’s book. he reports that after the nuclear accident at fukushima all people were ordered to evacuate the surrounding area, leaving 100,000 animals of traditional japanese farmers. the farmers then, at very considerable risk to their lives, returned to feed their animals, knowing full well that none of the meat could be sold. the animals had originally been destined for the dinner plate, but abandoning them to starvation would, the farmers felt, be a violation of the reciprocity that lay at the heart of their relationship. porcher’s vision of human animal relations governed by intersubjectivity has some resemblance to theories of a social contract, since much of its foundation lies in reciprocity. the underlying metaphor of a social contract, however, is a legal document, where terms are written out in specific detail and fixed until there is a formal modification. a relationship based on intersubjectivity, by contrast, is, like a human friendship or marriage, subject to continual change. for those who work very closely with animals, there can be a fusion of identity between human beings and their nonhuman companions. industrial farming was, in porcher’s view, not an extension of traditional animal husbandry but a new phenomenon. it mirrors and contributes to the objectification of both human beings and animals in the modern era. the industrialized farms are directed not toward producing animals but producing flesh, a goal that will find its ultimate consummation in the development of in vitro meat. though they speak in the name of liberation rather than efficiency, many animal activists in promoting the development of in vitro meat align themselves with agribusinesses, to foster an industrial model and sever the bond between animals and human beings. porcher does not mention it, probably because her subject is farm animals rather than pets, but this parallels a development with companion animals. digital animal humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 128 companions such as tamagotchis, petz, foopets, furbies, paroes, and so on, which their advocates claim can alleviate loneliness and improve health in much the same way as real ones, are gaining in popularity. despite the increased attention given to humananimal relations by scholars over the past few decades, our bonds with animals are becoming increasingly remote, and could disappear entirely. yet porcher remains optimistic. since it is not the culmination of any particular logic of history, industrial agriculture may prove to be a transitory phenomenon. in an era when human beings often feel increasingly dependent on, and even dominated by, their machines, people may look increasingly to animals for emotional and spiritual support. as in the past, we will enter into new partnerships with other creatures, the terms of which are unpredictable. but the fundamental creativity, of both animals and human beings, at work in the development of these bonds gives ground for hope. porcher recommends that we abandon the distinction between nature and civilization, and with it the subsidiary distinctions between wild and domestic animals, as well pets, working animals, and livestock. these impose artificial structures on our relationships with other creatures, which prevent them from developing organically. almost all other utopian visions are based on the assumption that human beings can control their own destiny, at least if they can summon sufficient force of will. this one, on the contrary, is based on the idea that we should give up control or, rather, the illusion of control. we should acknowledge that we are not, have never been, and never will be dominant. our relations with animals and the environment are reciprocal, and we should “listen to the animals” for guidance. and yet, like almost all other utopian visions, this one is open to charges of oversimplification, naiveté, and excessive romanticism. there are good reasons to believe, though porcher suggests otherwise, that industrial reforms or vegetarianism may improve the lot of farm animals. a plausible case can be made for the usefulness of in vitro meat and, for that matter, digital pets. though her analysis is quite specific in other respects, those who are drawn to political activism may regret the lack of a detailed program. for anthrozoologists who are attracted to porcher’s vision yet have reservations, this book will at least suggest a course of further study. a massive amount of scholarship over the past few decades has been devoted to the relations between people and pets, yet bonds between farmers or herders and their animals are widely assumed to be utilitarian and, therefore, ignored. porcher has shown that these relations can be fully boria sax — “listen to the animals”: a manifesto on animal husbandry 129 as intimate and complex as those between human beings and “companion animals,” and, therefore, equally worthy of investigation. work cited eric a. eliason, “great plains coyote coursing: biofacts and a new folkloristic understanding of animals,” wild games: hunting and fishing traditions in north america, eds. dennis cutchins and eric a. eliason (knoxville: university of tennessee press: 2009). microsoft word varsava-zoopolis pdf dummy h u m a n i m a l i a 4:1 nina varsava radically reasonable politics: animals rights and liberal democracy donaldson, sue, and will kymlicka. zoopolis: a political theory of animal rights. oxford: oxford up, 2011. 329 pp. $29.95. hc. sue donaldson and will kymlicka maintain that the animal movement, a movement which, as they note, has never seen much success anyway, is mired in deficient theories. the authors suggest that animals do not have a chance without a meaningful place in politics. they seek to “shift the debate about animals from an issue in applied ethics to a question of political theory” (12). donaldson and kymlicka are on board with the objective of traditional animal rights theory—to end the human exploitation of nonhuman animals—but they believe that animal rights advocates have gone about it all wrong. at the outset, zoopolis presents the “three basic moral frameworks” found in animalinterested literature; these are the welfarist approach, the ecological approach, and the basic rights approach (3). animal welfarists hold that there is nothing wrong with humans using other animals for their own interests, provided the use is humane. the question, of course, of what humane and inhumane treatment consists of is up for debate and in my opinion irresolvable anyway. the ecologists have as their primary concern ecosystems as wholes, of which animals are parts, but not privileged members. unlike these first two moral frameworks, the basic rights approach, which the authors refer to as “animal rights theory” or “art,” insists that nonhuman animals, by virtue of their sentience and subjectivity, possess inherent worth; they are “selves” who have experiences and feelings that matter, and are accordingly owed certain inviolable rights. donaldson and kymlicka accept this position fundamentally; they argue, however, that the basic rights approach has largely neglected our “relational duties” to nonhuman animals: “duties arising not just from the intrinsic characteristics of animals . . . but from the more geographically and historically specific relationships that have developed between particular groups of humans and particular groups of animals” (6). in other words, they argue for a situated ethics, where specific rights and responsibilities are context-dependent. moreover, while art has traditionally focused on our negative duties towards animals—basically our responsibility not to interfere in their lives— donaldson and kymlicka insist that animals also deserve positive rights—for example, to legal representation, health care, and even property. the zoopolis authors argue that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 168 animal rights theory is in need of a political framework, and in particular a liberal democratic one. they focus on the concepts of citizenship, denizenship, and sovereignty as key to establishing a rights-based position for nonhuman animals in a world where no one, regardless of species, remains unaffected by, or indifferent to, the actions of human beings. the authors divide nonhuman animals, roughly, into three categories: domesticated animals, wild animals, and liminal animals. domesticated animals, they argue, deserve citizenship rights alongside human citizens. donaldson and kymlicka resist the abolitionist argument, defended most notably by gary francione, which holds that domesticated animals are inevitably exploited animals and that, therefore, relations between humans and domesticated animals are necessarily unjust. the authors are slightly misleading in their construal of the abolitionist position. they suggest that abolition here means abolition of domesticated animals, which is not exactly correct, even though the abolition of domesticated animals is an eventuality of the abolitionist argument as conceived by francione and others. abolitionists seek to abolish all animal exploitation. donaldson and kymlicka are themselves abolitionists of a sort—it’s just that they believe ending animal exploitation and keeping domesticated animals are compatible. they believe that “[r]elations between humans and domesticated animals can be reordered in a just way if they are reconceived along the lines of membership and citizenship” (73). in other words, we can establish ethical relationships with the domesticated animals amongst us by granting them a nuanced form of citizenship. the authors maintain that the traditional idea of citizenship, both in the popular imagination and political theory, over-emphasizes and over-values rational and intellectual capacities—to the detriment of not only nonhuman animals but also many humans, including the mentally disabled. in order to make space for nonhuman animals within citizenship theory, donaldson and kymlicka turn to the idea of “dependent agency,” which has been developed extensively in the disability movement. nonhuman animals, like many (and arguably all) humans, depend upon others to attend to and facilitate their agencies. as the authors note, domesticated animals express their needs and desires to us “[t]hrough a vast repertoire of vocalizations, gestures, movements, and signals” (109). domesticated animal citizenship would accord rights to domesticated animals based on their needs and desires, and out of respect for their agencies; these rights, in the authors’ imagination, would include the right to socialization, freedom of movement, and political representation. above all, “a citizenship approach asserts the fundamental equality of all members of the nina varsava — radically reasonable politics: animal rights and liberal democracy 169 community” (155)—and so, in donaldson and kymlicka’s view, applying a citizenship model to domesticated animals would make obsolete their exploitation. in contrast to domesticated animals, wild animals are not part of human society, and do not, in general, rely upon humans to meet their needs and wants. it would not make sense, then, to grant them membership in human communities; indeed, it would do them no good. instead, with respect to wild animals, donaldson and kymlicka turn to the concepts of international justice and sovereignty. “[w]e need to think about wild animal communities,” they write, “as organized and self-governing communities” (166). we need, accordingly, to respect their right to sovereignty—to autonomy and selfdetermination. this means only interfering in wild animal communities when doing so would facilitate them in their own self-determined projects. it also means reducing the inordinate degree of risk we impose upon wild animals—by, for example, “rethinking our highways in many ways: relocating them away from large wildlife populations; creating buffer zones, travel corridors, and tunnels; lowering speed limits and redesigning cars” (189). most drastically, respecting the sovereign rights of wild animals would mean “an end to expansion of human settlement” (193). because all livable territory not presently settled by human beings is occupied to some degree by wild animals, and given the tremendous destruction that human settlement wreaks on wild animal communities, further human encroachment on sovereign animal territory is morally indefensible. in sum, donaldson and kymlicka’s approach to wild animals defends their sovereignty “on the grounds that there is a great moral value at stake in the autonomy of wild animal communities, and that establishing relationships of sovereignty is the best way of respecting those moral values” (207). liminal animals constitute the final category of nonhuman animal addressed in zoopolis. donaldson and kymlicka criticize animal rights theory for largely ignoring these animals, neither wild nor domestic, and thereby perpetuating the false wild/domestic dichotomy. “from a legal and moral perspective,” they attest, “[liminal animals] are amongst the least recognized or protected animals” (211). liminal animals are those animals—including, for example, raccoons, rats, and crows—who have not been domesticated by humans, but nonetheless share spaces and resources with human communities. donaldson and kymlicka argue that liminal animals are best served through a denizenship model: “denizenship combines secure residence with exemption from, or reduction of, some of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship” (230). in this model, liminal animals would be protected from the mass extermination that they are humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 170 so often subjected to, and their way of life in human-animal society would be rightly secured. “the values of liminal denizenship,” the authors note, “are in fact the same as for domestic co-citizenship and wild animal sovereignty—values of moral equality, autonomy, individual and communal flourishing” (251). zoopolis presents a meticulously principled, thorough—and maybe, hopefully, even realistic—theory, which in many ways improves upon preexisting theories of animal rights. donaldson and kymlicka’s argument is weakened, however, by a number of specious analogies that they draw between human and animal situations. perhaps the most conspicuous of these is their comparison of human slaves and domesticated animals. they point out that americans abolished slavery without abolishing the individuals themselves who had been slaves; therefore, they argue, we can abolish the exploitation of domesticated animals without abolishing the animals themselves. they use this analogy to counter the claims of animal rights theorists like francione, who argue that the existence of domesticated animals is inherently unjust. donaldson and kymlicka do not acknowledge a crucial difference between human slaves and domesticated animals: that is, human slaves are not biologically slaves; there is nothing inherent about their position as slaves in human society—which is why the abolishment of slavery did not entail the abolishment of the individuals themselves. in the case of domesticated animals, however, groups have been biologically, and in many cases irreversibly, altered through human intervention. while humans were able to extinguish slaves qua slaves—we have no way of extinguishing domesticated animals qua domesticated animals, without, that is, extinguishing the animals themselves. donaldson and kymlicka fail to engage genuinely with the argument against domesticated animals because they fail to consider the primary point: that to a large extent at least, domesticated animals were specifically bred to be subordinate and subservient—characteristics that are difficult if not impossible to separate from a condition of exploitation. their sloppiness with this analogy and others, analogies that are not anyway essential to their argument, detracts unfortunately from their otherwise exceptionally well-reasoned theory. with zoopolis, donaldson and kymlicka want “to shift the animal question from applied ethics to political theory” (263, n.22). it seems to me that a human-animal political theory is precisely an applied ethics, but maybe that’s beside the point. any theory of animal ethics that cares about real animals ought to be political—zoopolis not only makes this point, but itself makes a great contribution towards the politicization of animal ethics. the book, however, is far from alone in its endeavor to connect animal ethics and political theory; increasingly, the animal question is gaining ground in nina varsava — radically reasonable politics: animal rights and liberal democracy 171 political discourse. siobhan o’sullivan’s animals, equality, and democracy (2011), for example, develops a liberal democratic theory of animal rights (which incidentally reaches conclusions very different from zoopolis); and alasdair cochrane’s introduction to animals and political theory (2010) surveys contemporary western political theory and its relation to nonhuman animals. as donaldson and kymlicka maintain, political terms and concepts help specify our duties to animals (208). animal rights do not become tangible, however, without legal support; and as anyone working in animal rights is well aware, the law has a long way to go to catch up with ethics. while radical in many of its prescriptions—universal veganism, for example, and nonhuman sovereignty and citizenship rights—zoopolis is ultimately a highly judicious book. donaldson and kymlicka show not only how unethical, but also how egregiously unreasonable, humans have been in their relations with nonhuman animals. zoopolis offers a sturdy step towards the establishment of an ethically-informed place for nonhuman animals in the political and legal systems of what is, as of yet, an unconscionably speciesist zoopolis. the question remains whether we will take it. krauss, review of coates copyright © 2024 emelia quinn this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 310–320. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 “a satire is when it’s the same as here but there’s animals in it.” emelia quinn review of: robert mckay and susan mchugh, eds., animal satire. palgrave studies in animals and literature. cham: palgrave macmillan, 2023. xii + 431 pp. 14 illus. $159.99 (hb). emelia quinn is assistant professor of world literatures and environmental humanities at the university of amsterdam, netherlands. email: e.j.quinn@uva.nl book review http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 mailto:e.j.quinn@uva.nl in a 2014 episode of stewart lee’s comedy vehicle entitled “satire”, british stand-up comedian stewart lee explains satire to his audience: “if anyone ever says to you ‘what’s a satire?’ and you want to look clever […] a satire is when it’s the same as here but there’s animals in it.” if this seems simple enough, he then offers some words of mocking caution to his viewers: “not everything with animals in it is a satire. don’t get carried away, people at home, if you’re out and about, and you see a little vole by the canal, cleaning its whiskers. don’t be looking at it thinking, ‘oh is this supposed to be theresa may?’ it doesn’t know. the vole doesn’t know what that is, it’s not interested. not all animals are trying to satirize things.” offering a definition of satire that is itself satirical, lee’s skit nonetheless relies on our recognition of the close imbrication of animals and satire. as robert mckay and susan mchugh’s 2023 co-edited volume animal satire attests, the history of satire is a history of satirical animals, with animal satire employed to mock the politically powerful for over 2500 years. it is thus particularly surprising that animal satire, at least according to mckay and mchugh, remains largely unaddressed in academic criticism, with almost no scholarship to date having explored the link between animals and satire in any depth.1 as academic heavy weights in the field of literary animal studies, and series editors (alongside john miller) of palgrave studies in animals and literature, in which this edited volume sits, mckay and mchugh are well positioned to address this critical lacuna. however, positioning such work within the field of animal studies is not without its challenges. for one, as mckay and mchugh acknowledge, satire is “deeply invested in the figure of the human” (13). satirical animals often appear as little more than allegories for human experience with seemingly little to say about actual animals (or the disinterest, as lee notes, in wry fashion, that such animals would likely have towards human political affairs). this investment 1 a caveat absent from the introduction is that such an absence is a perhaps better defined as an absence from anglophone scholarship. copyright © 2024 emelia quinn this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 309–320. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18487 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18487 quinn, review of mckay and mchugh | 311 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) in human allegory implicates animal satire in a troubling anthropocentricism that is antithetical to the aims of much of the work of contemporary animal studies. a further challenge is that academic attention to animal satire is an activity seemingly always at risk of becoming itself a self-satirizing enterprise. academia has indeed long been a target for satire. matthew hosty’s chapter on animal satire in the ancient greco-roman tradition, for instance, asserts the long lineage of satirical animal academics, where in both batrachomyomachia and a fragment from timon of phlius, we encounter scholars “as small, plump, harmless, and prone to ferocious battles.” hosty acknowledges that “like many of the best satires, it is a verdict that remains uncomfortably recognizable to this day” (71). for mchugh and mckay, this is related to the fact that satire’s exposure of humanity’s folly is accompanied by an implicit educative function: disabusing human self-importance with the aim of promoting self-reflection and change in a way that imbues the satirist with their own air of authoritative self-importance (aptly performed by lee above) that is itself ripe for satirical treatment. mchugh and mckay thus argue that “the best satire” must remain “excoriatingly aware of any authority’s potential subjection to ridicule, of the very pompousness of the corrective purpose itself” (13). mckay and mchugh are at pains throughout their introduction to stress that the best academic work on animal satire must remain similarly aware of its own potential to be subject to satire. if the pretentions and petty rivalries of academia seem to be an easy satirical target, this seems to be doubly the case when it comes to scholars working in animal studies. i am all too aware of the ways in which academic work on animals can incite derision, as someone who was recently somewhat bemused to discover that a 2016 article i had written on vegan reading practices had been promoted to the 53,000 followers of the twitter account “new real peer review” as a satirical example of the excesses and lack of scholarly rigour of the humanities. as mckay and mchugh observe, academic concern for animals is “an irresistible subject to be satirised” (28). many high-profile academic hoaxes of recent years have incorporated humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 312 | quinn, review of mckay and mchugh animals into their sham papers, part of a reactionary politics that relies on the “the silliness of the very idea that […] animals are meaningful or might have interests at all (let alone rights)” (25), often with the intention of satirizing work promoting the rights of other minority subjects. for mckay and mchugh, their response to the risk of being satirized before they begin is an irreverent “hee-haw” (28). this asinine response is a recognition and reclamation of the folly that might be attributed to their volume. it is also a stubborn insistence that a closer consideration of the animals of animal satire, and animal satire itself, is an important and intellectually valuable enterprise. as mckay and mchugh argue, “despite the reactionary uses to which animal satire has often been put,” animal satire possesses an “indefinite but nevertheless unique capacity to advance multispecies politics” (27). we might read this statement as much as an assertion of the value of animal satire as an assertion of the value of animal studies scholarship in the face of its increasingly public lampooning. the comic “hee-haw” also attests to the light-hearted spirit with which mckay and mchugh have approached animal satire, refusing to commit the perhaps cardinal human folly of reading satire with a straight face. while a weighty and academically rigorous volume, animal satire makes room for multiple comic digressions. david brooks provides three satirical pieces for the volume, labelled as satiric interruptions between sections: “the hall of the sovereigns”, “a slaves’ revolt”, and “how to slaughter a human”. a fourth interruption by human mcstew (mchugh’s comic pseudonym) provides a final satiric conclusion, “the need for giant ape protection: a petition to the unesco world heritage committee.” these satirical offerings join mchugh and mckay’s introduction, a list of selected animal satires for further reading, and eighteen essays by scholars working across literature, history, media studies, geography, classics, and creative writing. the essays are divided into three parts, arranged chronologically with broad temporal divisions: part i considers classics and the medieval and renaissance periods; part ii the period from early modernism through to high quinn, review of mckay and mchugh | 313 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) modernism; and part iii the contemporary. in evidence of the proposal that “satire is more usefully understood as a practice than as a genre […] or mode” (21), the formal remit of the collection is also broad, spanning novels, short stories, plays, periodicals, films, television, and social media posts, and ranging across high and low brow genres, from canonical authors such as virginia woolf to seth macfarlane’s family guy. the principal achievement of mckay and mchugh’s playful and rich volume is the exposition of what animal satire can do, across a wide range of contexts. one of the most noteworthy achievements praised in the volume is satire’s ability to advocate for better treatment of animals. while the human focus of satire limits its ability to foster empathy for animals themselves, it does prove effective at exposing the pernicious human attitudes undergirding their mistreatment. jennifer schell’s chapter, for instance, draws on nicole seymour’s concept of “bad environmentalism”2 to argue that the 1850 letter “a polar whale’s appeal” is a prescient example of the effective appeal of irony and humour over sentimentalism in the service of environmentalist activism. paul fagan’s essay argues that frances power cobbe’s 1877 satire the age of science allowed her anti-vivisection and women’s rights message to reach a broader public audience than it otherwise might have. and mo o’neill’s chapter, while acknowledging the “inherent risk of political satire being taken seriously by those it lampoons” (237), considers the value of the satirical efforts of the humanitarian league in revealing the consequences of a human society that has normalized the processes by which animals are rendered absent referents. brooks’ satiric interruptions to the volume also gesture to the ability of animal satire to critique anthropocentrism, refusing to position animals as mere allegories for human concerns by offering forceful critiques of the horrors of speciesism. “how to slaughter a human”, for instance, educates a society of pigs on how to prepare a human for consumption, satirizing, in the process, meat-eating practices and drawing attention to human brutality towards animals raised for slaughter. 2 nicole seymour, bad environmentalism: irony and irreverence in the ecological age (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2018). humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 314 | quinn, review of mckay and mchugh beyond activism on behalf of animals, erica fudge’s illuminating essay on ben jonson’s 1606 volpone tells us how animal satire can aid our understanding of human–animal relations. fudge’s essay is one of the standout contributions to the volume, establishing in clear terms what a study of animal satire can contribute to the discipline of animal studies. fudge begins by challenging the conventional wisdom that beast fables only ever explore the human condition, with animals as mere vehicles for the human. expounding the relation of volpone to contemporaneous christian beliefs about the fall from grace, fudge argues that in this period, the human was seen as under threat, like the animal, of becoming wild without due rational control and taming. however, because of their god-given capacity to act with reason, humans could fall further and become worse than animals, since the latter acted only by their nature. reading volpone in this way disrupts humanist ideas of a rigid separation between human and animal and makes visible “how humans were once viewed as inseparable from animals” (110). for fudge, such a reading demonstrates that “being a human is a product of a group of ideas that are in action at a particular moment; that that human is situated, constructed, and so can change” (110). fudge’s analysis chimes with the concerns of much contemporary theory, akin, for example, to sylvia wynter’s work on the overrepresentation of man,3 or cary wolfe’s work on posthumanism,4 and speaks to the growing desire to rethink and reposition the idea of the human in the age of the anthropocene. for fudge, “that thing called the human is not and never has been permanent, and it might be that it is in the beast fable — the most anthropomorphic of all genres, the place where animals speak in human voices in order to voice human concerns — that we are offered the best starting point to engage with that idea” (114). peter sands’s essay on satirical misanthropy in kurt vonnegut’s galápagos similarly considers how satire can work to challenge the permanence of the idea of the human, turning not to the past of 3 sylvia wynter. “unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument.” the new centennial review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. 4 cary wolfe, what is posthumanism? (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2009). quinn, review of mckay and mchugh | 315 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) beast fables but to imagined beast futures. sands considers vonnegut’s satirical novel as a reconfiguration of anthroponormativity (“the discourse that takes the human as the measure for both affirmative and pessimistic visions of futurity” [294]) by imagining “a future constituted according to an animal norm whereby the values of foreseeable, planned, or programmed futures are underwritten by the logics of creaturely chance and evolutionary contingency” (294). the misanthropy of galápagos is thus presented as “a strategy for problematising the process whereby human identity — even as the object of disdain — is constituted as the norm” (294) and for imagining “a form of futurism that need not exclusively disavow the masterful human subject, but rather denature its exclusive hold over the future as an object of knowledge and hope” (309). beyond a consideration of what animal satires do, mckay and mchugh are also interested in addressing the question of why animals are so prevalent in satire. they note that gilbert highet’s 1961 the anatomy of satire, the only academic text they cite as having paid any close attention to animals in satire, “has little specific to say” (11) about this question. they therefore position animal satire as an attempt at an answer. however, while the form of the edited collection is well suited to the task of drawing out the varied functions of animal satire, able to cover a broad range of overarching themes and trends via the collective scholarly knowledge of academics working across different periods and disciplines, it is limited in how much detail and focused attention it can pay to the question of why animals and satire seem so inextricably linked. the question is indeed only fleetingly addressed by a handful of the contributors and a monograph on the topic remains a desirable addition to the field. in their introduction, mchugh and mckay do note that one reason for the prevalence of animals in satire is that “animals and their ways of life are so conventionally and comprehensibly reduced to stereotypes and because such stereotypes can in turn be manipulated to epitomize any aspect of folly that the satirist wants to mock” (8). this, however, is just one of many reasons, with this justification largely inadequate as a rationale for animal studies scholars to invest humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 316 | quinn, review of mckay and mchugh attention in animal satire. several contributions to the volume seek to demonstrate, by contrast, the potential agency that remains for satiric animals beyond such stereotyping, suggesting that a better answer to the question of why is found in the animal’s status as an outsider or other to human culture. this is the argument made by adam james smith and ben garlick in their co-authored chapter on eliza haywood’s the parrot. considering haywood’s 1746 periodical, they acknowledge that while, on the one hand, haywood’s avian narrator is “quasi-allegorical stand-in for a range of human agents, which include but are not limited to women writers, slaves, colonial subjects, and jacobite sympathisers,” it is also, on the other hand, very much a parrot: “an exotic outsider who looks askance at human activities, rendering the familiar unfamiliar and revealing false assumptions, hypocrisies and absurdities that the quotidian world of the reader has normalized and rendered invisible” (140). smith and garlick thus refuse the claim that animals are solely allegorical presences in satire and suggest that their presence as animals also matters. julia ditter’s chapter on saki’s short stories makes a similar claim, arguing that “the animals of saki’s short fiction are […] not merely satirical symbols or allegories to describe the human: they are agentic characters and subjects, crucially shaping the meaning of these stories and engaging readers in reflections about human-animal relations” (244). for ditter, what renders animals an apt force for satire is the fact that they can look back at us. of saki’s short story “tobermory” she comments that “like derrida’s cat, tobermory looks back at humans, but he also shares a perspective on what he sees” (259). referring here to jacques derrida’s famous reflections on being looked at naked by his cat,5 to be regarded by the animal other is to recognize that the animal has a perspective regarding us. this investment in animal perspective is also evident in christopher douglas’s chapter on nineteenth-century children’s it-narratives, where the cat of felissa is seen as party to the secret of the moral bankruptcy of the human elite. 5 jacques derrida, the animal that therefore i am, trans. david wills, ed. marie-louise mallet (new york: fordham university press, 2008). quinn, review of mckay and mchugh | 317 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) perhaps most interesting, at least for me, is the unarticulated anxiety in these readings regarding not just what it might mean, on an ontological level, to recognize that animals can look back at us, but to acknowledge that the assessments of such observing animals would not be favourable to humans. even our most intimate companion animals may secretly despise us. such satirical animals, in this sense, are not simply convenient devices that offer an outsider perspective on humanity (as in any of the other inanimate objects popular in the it-narratives that douglas considers) but confront us with the fact that we are being watched each day by real animals and, more troubling, that they do not like what they see. jason hribal’s fear of the animal planet (2011) and, more recently, ron broglio’s animal revolution (2022) have demonstrated the prevalence of both a fear of, and desire for, animal vengeance in the contemporary period, and the frequency of news stories and creative fictions that promote animal resistance to their human captors. david brooks’s “a slaves’ revolt” fits this trend by fictionalizing a lost history of pig revolt against their human captors. while working to satirize the history of human colonialism, brooks’ short piece also works to forcefully critique human domination of animals and practices of meat eating through a vision of animal revolt. the idea of animal revolution does seem an inescapable site of satire. as broglio notes, “animal revolution is a good joke. the idiocy of the position makes us laugh.” however, for broglio, our craving for, and fellow feeling with, popular animal revolutionaries means that while “we stand within a cultural circle that gets the joke,” we also “extend ourselves outside the circle through a sympathy with the revolutionary beasts.” in his own defence of the value of satirical animals, broglio argues that the joke therefore “holds in suspense other possibilities and other possible communities yet to come.”6 mckay and mchugh make a similar claim as to the possibilities for thought opened by animal satire, whether in ditter’s sense that saki’s stories acknowledge animals “alternately as individual agents, co-habitant species, companions, and a collective 6 ron broglio, animal revolution (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2022), 53. humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 318 | quinn, review of mckay and mchugh force” (247–48), or in sands’s argument of the possibility of envisioning a future constituted in accordance with an animal, rather than anthropocentric, norm. productive possibilities are also revealed through what we might ostensibly label as anti-animal satires. by way of example, we might consider how even the most disparaging of animal studies satires, in the form of the hoax papers detailed in mckay and mchugh’s introduction, tend to do as much to disparage animal studies as to support its work, revealing the threatening instability caused by work challenging anthropocentric value systems and exposing a level of vehemence against concern for other lives that seems itself to be irresistibly satirical. as kári driscoll has argued, the animal hoax, “reveals more about its perpetrators than it does about the object of their scorn,” and he encourages us, rather than simply dismissing the academic hoax “as a misguided and ultimately reactionary gesture — though it is that — [… to] take it seriously as an object lesson on the importance of the question of the animal.”7 while the tripartite structure of animal satire suggests distinct periods of animal satire, the edited collection form means that mckay and mchugh’s volume doesn’t offer any explicit reflections on the transitions and shifts in animal satire across time. i was left wondering whether there is a case to be made that certain forms of animal satire, such as those involving animal revolution, have become less funny, or at least less amenable to satire, in recent years. we might look, by way of example, at the vast tonal difference between the 1968 planet of the apes (listed on mckay and mchugh’s list of prominent animal satires), and the 2011 remake rise of the planet of the apes. the former offers an overt (and campy) political satire of capitalist human society while the latter insists on the agency of its genetically modified apes in a distinctly non-satirical rejection of their cruelty at the hands of humans. while the idea of an ape society previously allowed for a playful lampooning of human society, its remake offers a speculative exploration of the consequences of human 7 kári driscoll, “perpetrators, animals, and animality”, in the routledge handbook of perpetrator studies, ed. by susanne c. knittel and zachary j. goldberg (london: routledge, 2020), 192–93. quinn, review of mckay and mchugh | 319 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) attempts at mastery over the animal world. that our exploitation of the natural world now threatens human extinction and promises that the future is indeed more than likely to be animal rather than human, means that the idea of an ape society is perhaps no longer so easy to read as mere anthropomorphic allegory. at the very least we might anticipate that the growing climate of misanthropy in our present age may contribute to and influence the future development of contemporary animal satires. in their introduction, mchugh and mckay note that the key vision of satirical humanism is the idea that humanity is inescapably entangled with folly: “a deep susceptibility to stupidity that is thought to be more truly human than any particular political or moral error” (15). this general despair with humanity’s inescapable folly seems to characterize both misanthropic and satiric work. sands’ chapter is worth again singling out for praise as a welcome reflection on the misanthropic underpinnings of the satiric impulse. drawing on tom tyler’s work on the possibility of misanthropy without humanity, sands offers a critique of the misanthropic position through its failure to account for its own human positionality where “misanthropy’s dissident vehemence fuels the satirical irony of its tunnel-vision, only drawing the human further into focus as the object of universal and passionate disdain” (293). this observation is perhaps akin to the bad satire implied in mchugh and mckay’s introduction: a satire that fails to acknowledge its own impulses towards pompous authority. both misanthropy and satire thus seem to require a component of self-loathing that is at risk of simply perpetuating that which it avers. while misanthropy continues to envelop contemporary society, often as a response to the climate crisis and animal exploitation, what many of the contributions to this volume show, not least fudge and sands, is that animal satire, and its misanthropic impulses, offers an opening to new ways of interrogating the human from within its bounds. in this challenging of the human and opening out into a world of talking animals, we are encouraged to see satire, to repeat mckay and mchugh’s optimistic refrain, as possessing “unique capacity to advance multispecies politics” (27). humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 320 | quinn, review of mckay and mchugh animal satire, taken as a whole, is an expansive volume that offers reflections on the how, what, and why of animal satire. the volume will likely appeal to many kinds of readers and promises to draw a wider readership to a consideration of literary animals. it provides much-needed attention to the place of animals in satire, offering a history of animal satire from the plays of aristophanes to satirical birds on twitter. in the process it shows what satire can do for animals, in terms, for instance, of advancing animal rights messaging, and chimes with recent work (most notably seymour’s) that seeks to establish the significance of humour and irony for environmental and animal activism. in the process, mckay and mchugh demonstrate that while animal studies may itself often be the target of satirical critique, satire is just as powerful as a weapon for animal studies scholars to wield themselves. if this seems itself to be a satirically circular proposition, mchugh and mckay encourage us to respond to such charges with a simple hee-haw. microsoft word googasian h u m a n i m a l i a 6:1 reviews vicky googasian reading in the zoopolis aaron m. moe. zoopoetics: animals and the making of poetry. lanham, md: lexington books, 2014. 150 pp. $80 (hb). i began reading aaron moe's zoopoetics during an afternoon at the beach. it was a blustery northern california day, and i took the opportunity between the introduction and the first chapter to fly a kite with some friends. i was hard at work trying to keep the kite aloft between the ocean on one side and the cliffs on the other, when a red tailed hawk suddenly drifted into view over the top of the bluffs. i do not think it had the slightest interest in the kite — but it was clear from my position on the ground that the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 136 hawk was the original whose effortless motion the kite was built to copy. i couldn't hold both fliers in focus at the same time; i had to land the kite and watch the hawk instead. moe's book is about precisely this kind of inter-species mimesis. zoopoetics interrogates the manifold ways humans make things — kites or poems — in imitation of other animals, their movements, bodies, and gestures. as he puts it, “zoopoetics is the process of discovering innovative breakthroughs in form through an attentiveness to another species’ bodily poiesis” (10). moe tracks zoopoetic tendencies through the work of four major american poets: walt whitman, e.e. cummings, w.s. merwin, and brenda hillman. his quartet divides nicely down the middle: on the one hand, whitman and cummings establishing a sort of origin story for the role of zoopoetics in american formal experimentation: moe credits multi-species poiesis for whitman’s long sentences and cummings eclectic punctuation, to name just a few examples. at the other end of the american poetic tradition moe sees merwin and hillman as developing a slightly different breed of zoopoetics, this one characterized by its response to ecological crisis and mass extinction in the late 20th and early 21st century. this is the zoopoetics of animal absence. though moe does trace some lines of influence among his chosen poets — he devotes some space in particular to highlighting the surprising archival relationship between cummings and whitman — his project is not primarily to develop a literary-historical arc. rather, the strength of moe’s work lies in its provocative, creative, and frequently surprising close readings, and in the way zoopoetics reanimates poems with the flickering shadows of animal bodies. i would argue that moe’s book contains a second, unspoken thesis, one more to do with reading practice than with the making of poems per se. over and over again, zoopoetics insists that the best way to read an animal poem (at least one produced in the attentive disposition moe sees as prerequisite for poiesis in the first place) is to hold both poem and animal in focus at the same time. a good example is moe’s reading of cummings’ “(im)c-a-t(mo),” which takes its lead from a letter cummings wrote to his japanese translator describing the behavior of a falling cat. moe brings to bear his own knowledge of cat bodies and motions to track the twirling trajectory of the cat’s fall and recovery through the poem’s layout, typography, and punctuation. the reading depends on some attention to cats and their doings: both their “marvelous ability to leap off of air” and their propensity to “save face” (76). the virtuosity and knowingness of this reading does justice to persistent demands within ecocriticism for rejuvenated critical attention to the natural world. one might place moe alongside john rowlett, vicky googasian — “reading in the zoopolis” 137 who wrote in the ecocriticism special issue of new literary history about the need for literary critics to become practicing ornithologists. rowlett suggests that readings of bird poems can be significantly enriched by knowing something about birds — in his example, it's important that yeats' falcon is a gyrfalcon, a species known for not minding human handlers, thus the widening gyre. moe's readings frequently follow a similar arc, and his own wide-ranging interest in animal behavior is showcased in the interludes between chapters, brief vignettes that recount engaged encounters between humans and other animals. ultimately, if there’s a critical imperative hidden in zoopoetics, it’s the insistence that we allow poetry and animal bodies to overlay one another in translucent palimpsests of meaning — we can’t read poems without reading animals first. but what is truly refreshing about moe’s readings is that they actually suggest poetic projects in delightful surplus of the responsible ethic of attentiveness moe champions in his introduction. i like moe's etymological idea of attentiveness as “a stretching toward something else” (24), but i sometimes wonder if this word is accurate for the myriad ways species actually meet. there’s something eye-opening, for example, about randy malamud’s suggestion “that we might at least consider the desirability of knowing animals, in the future, less than we have done in the past and present — to spare them the fate that is consequent upon our knowing them increasingly intently ... knowing them to death” (38-9). despite its emphasis on attentiveness, i think moe’s zoopoetics achieves this tricky epistemic balance quite nicely. zoopoetics might encapsulate what nonhumans can teach us about making and reading poetry, but the poetry in question hardly fixes animals as transparent objects for the human gaze. consider moe’s reading of whitman’s “a noiseless patient spider,” which begins by establishing the poem’s iconicity, the way its soft sounds and long lines mimic the spider's own creative practice. reading the poem this way requires that we pay attention to the lives of spiders and the work of web-weaving, but moe does not end by treating whitman’s poetic as an exercise in natural history. it is, after all, a poem about the most fragile of connective tissues between self and other, and moe’s consideration of the spider, like whitman’s, leaves him to note that “one reels at the abyss” between human and arachnid. moe gets here via derrida, but this moment struck me as an example of the kind of astonishment cora diamond describes in her well known essay on “the difficulty of reality and the difficulty of philosophy” as the natural product of our humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 6, number 1 (fall 2014) 138 exposure to the difficult realities of otherness. one particular accomplishment of moe’s book is the demonstration that we can arrive at this astonishment via close reading: that close reading does not necessarily bring us close to other animals, but rather quite accurately captures through its practice the whole range of startled, bewildered, confused, and astonished responses we frequently express toward other species. one can track this complexity of response through moe’s analysis from whitman forward. it’s there in his reading of cummings’s “t,h;r:u;s,h;e:s” when moe discovers in the line breaks not a solidly reassuring poeisis but “the state of not quite-ness,” a dormant way of being alive. it’s there in particular in the chapters on merwin and hillman, both poets of animal absence, from whom moe shows us how to read for the places where zoopoetics do not function, as when the “heaving movement” of the whale drops out of merwin’s “for a coming extinction,” and leaves us with only its “bewildering absence” (100). in these last two chapters, the potential of zoopoetics to speak to species extinction becomes explicit — we see that loss of biological life also robs us of possibilities for poetic form. if zoopoetics can be politically engaged, this is the avenue by which such engagement occurs. for this reason, brenda hillman’s practical water is an inspired choice as the topic of moe’s closing chapter. in his search for traces of the “multispecies polis” in hillman’s work, moe demonstrates how close reading, seemingly the most apolitical of devices in the critic’s arsenal, can be used to deepen and color the zoopolitical valences of a work of poetry. moe puts hillman in conversation with percy shelley, who saw the poets’ unacknowledged legislation operating by means of imaginative sympathy, or rather, “imagination enlarged by a sympathy” (qtd in moe 131). moe suggests that hillman’s sympathy “expands further” than shelley’s, “due to her attentiveness toward and empathy with the many animals facing extinction” (132). this claim quietly proposes an intriguing possibility: that in zoopoetics we find a vehicle for a difficult literary task, namely, the invocation of sympathy not for an individual, but for an entire species. for, after all, moe’s zoopoetics is about the lives and bodies of species, not individual animals. in this sense, zoopoetics is a poetics for the 21st century, the age of mass extinctions, in which we desperately need a literature capable of cultivating impossible kinds of sympathy. zoopoetics argues that the sympathetic imagination can use poetic form to expand both the scope of the human perspective and to transcend the confines of the lyric i. vicky googasian — “reading in the zoopolis” 139 apart from these epiphanies, moe’s book will best suit those interested in the pleasures and possibilities of reading poetry, not those who want to use poetry as an entry point into the theoretical discourses of animal studies or posthumanism. moe does have some favorite theorists, namely donna haraway and paul shepard, whom he uses to situate his reading practices within the burgeoning tradition of posthumanist thought. but zoopoetics is not as much interested in speaking back to or expanding this tradition as it is in revitalizing the ways we read and write poems. this is a book not about theory but about multispecies praxis, and as its aristotelian argument suggests, its most thrilling contribution will be its propensity to inspire mimesis. one wishes, upon finishing zoopoetics, to learn to imitate aaron moe: to read with newly renewed consciousness of the animal lives and bodies that already dwell in the poetic canon we know and love. works cited diamond, cora. “the difficulty of reality and the difficulty of philosophy.” philosophy & animal life. new york: columbia up, 2008. 43-89. malamud, randy. poetic animals and animal souls. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2003. rowlett, john. “ornithological knowledge and literary understanding.” new literary history 30.3 (summer 1999): 625-47. microsoft word holmberg-rudy pdf dummy.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:2 tora holmberg narrative, affect, love and confusion kathy rudy, loving animals. toward a new animal advocacy. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2011. 288 pp. $ 24.95 hc. “what is love? oh, baby, don’t hurt me, don’t hurt me, no more” (haddaway, 1993) social science has recently witnessed what can be called an affective turn, particularly within cultural studies. emotions, sensations, and affect become highlighted as objects of study as well as as research tools to help understand contemporary phenomena. animal studies have witnessed a similar trend, and scholars such as ralph acampora, josephine donovan, vinciane despret, eva hayward, and donna haraway have sought to understand what affect and corporeality mean in terms of interspecies communication and the generation of more ethical relationships with other animals. whether the answer to these questions read “symphysis,” “attention,” “anthropo-zoogenesis,” “impression,” or “response-ability,” these authors and others carefully engage with both the philosophical and political implications of living with other animals. the book under review can be read in light of these recent concerns. what role could affect play in animal advocacy? could love towards, for example, pets contribute to a more ethical treatment of other animals? and, could this transformative power be the constituent of a broader social movement, based not on the reason of right or utility, but on emotional and spiritual connectedness across species? these are some crucial questions raised by ethicist, feminist/queer, and animal-studies scholar kathy rudy in her new book entitled loving animals. the author is clearly frustrated by the fact that although endless numbers of animals are mistreated, even tortured, in the meat industry, pet business, and science labs, the opposition is mute. we are, at the beginning of the 21st century, witnessing a striking silence and acceptance of the malicious treatment of other animals. there are of course exceptions, and rudy talks about three promising, yet in her opinion misguided, fractions. first, the animal rights movement is a courageous thorn in the side of capitalist animal use. rudy acknowledges that all successful movements such as the gay and the women’s movements were based on cutting edge, as well as separatist, ideology. however, the animal rights movement, by remaining extremist in for example advocating veganism, has failed to found a broad acceptance and thus any true achievements. similarly, the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 124 utilitarians who believe that reason will do the work, fail to recognize that the rationality that they advocate may just as easily lead to increased distance in regards to animals (17). third, the animal welfare advocates, driven by empathy for animals and often spending their lives helping individual animals in shelters or sanctuaries, fail to transform existing power relations, their work merely reforming or even worse, legitimating, human exceptionalism. even animal studies get its share of criticism, when it is said to be too jargon ridden and distant from actual animals and real politics (21). these are all well rehearsed criticisms, but the fresh take on them is to introduce affect as a transformative force, and narrative as the means to make it happen. rudy lets her own experiences as well as interviews and encounters with others in various animal contexts form narratives of and with other animals. these stories are used in order to argue for and against existing doxa within philosophy and animal studies. thus, the book builds on animal ethics in the above respects (animal rights, utilitarianism, welfare), but adds a dimension to what rudy considers the incomplete picture drawn by philosophy (xvi). in rudy’s words, loving animals applies the concept of affect to the language of ethics, activism and advocacy. throughout the book, i will suggest that because who we love is always a question of politics, the greatest resource we have in the struggle for animal advocacy is the deep connections many of us form with other animals. we need to value animals more because their radical otherness contextualizes our lives. (25) one radical conclusion is that not only do we need to acknowledge love of animals in order to change their lives, but also to change our human ones. the book is divided into an introduction, six main chapters, and a concluding discussion. it draws on a rich amount of data, both secondary and the author’s own, and the argumentation is generally well reinforced, even though the prose is often unnecessarily wordy. in chapter one, rudy outlines what she considers the problems of animal advocacy as it stands today in the us, and sketches the foundation for the affective approach. as stated above, rudy describes the pitfalls of various existing perspectives and the need for a joint take on animal politics. one could argue that rudy could have been more careful in painting the picture. activists are portrayed as too extreme, which rhetorically allows the author herself to appear as reasonable. the second chapter concerns pets, and rudy’s own dogs – resident as well as foster ones – provide our guides to the world of animal rescue and advocacy. it is well known that there are more and more pets in western households creating space for puppy mills and urban pet tora holmberg — narrative, affect, love and confusion 125 breeding, and increasing numbers of abandoned and unwanted pets. as a consequence, the shelter movement is thriving but the shelters are overpopulated. there are pure breed shelters for dogs (such as beagles or pitbulls), non-kill shelters, dog pounds, cat shelters, and so on. millions of healthy cats and dogs are killed annually, just in the us. rudy argues that a change in practice can start with the love of a dog, thus the fact that so many people actually interact with other animals on a daily basis can provide the fertile soil, a petri dish, for cultivating better understanding of the conditions of other animals like abandoned pets, meat animals, or captive wild ones. rudy provides rich stories of her own dogs, and how they came into her family. her most telling and moving story is about her own identity as a dog lover, as one who cannot be named. is she queer since she chooses to live her life with non-human companions? “it’s not so much that i am no longer a lesbian, then, it’s that the binary of gay and straight no longer has anything to do with me. my preference today is canine” (41). in the next chapter, “the animal on your plate,” rudy takes the reader through her own painstaking worries over meat eating, the wrongness of industrial animal production, and her meeting with local free-range farming as a solution. rudy advocates a middle or third way between veganism on the one hand and the over-consumption of heartlessly produced meat on the other. in order to get more people on board the animal movement, the “localvore” version of ethical meat consumption could be a means, providing a promise that one can both have the cookie and eat it (although, a whole lot less than before). once again, the highly personal stories, this time of local farmers and their free ranging pigs and chicken, provide an entrance to discuss difficult identity issues: what, when, and whom should i eat? vegan feminists say that engaging in violent food practices – that is, eating meat – means that one ultimately consumes violence. i think they are right. but i also agree with rudy that no food practices are innocent, and appreciate the very difficult task that she takes on in trying to work out, on a personal level, a good enough practice. one important issue that the author brings up is the importance of combining concerns for animals, the environment, and human health. but the problem remains: how to end the horrendous industrial conditions for billions of animals. it certainly cannot change through a change in consumer practice alone. chapter four discusses so-called wild animals in captivity and the author asks the intriguing question: is it really bad for animals to be kept by humans? through the stories of big-cat sanctuaries and exotic animal owners, we learn how the love of individual animals can transform relations as well as individuals. here, terms like feral, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 126 wild, and domestic are set rocking. similarly, the proper place for animals is questioned. for example, one story surrounds a southern woman, sally, who keeps a 400-pound tiger called charles in her back yard. the facilities are tailor made to allow charles to run around and to play with sally, to shelter him from rain and sun. charles also has his own bed next to sally’s, where he sleeps at night (128). in rudy’s stories, while zoos pretend to make the environment as habitat-like as possible and minimizing interaction with people, some private owners treat their wild animals as pets and spend hours training and playing with them. rudy discusses this finding in terms of nature/culture crossing and our ingrained ideas about domestication as a one way street, and states that the humans are similarly transformed through the interaction with the animals. native american chuck, who states that he became more closely connected to his roots through interacting with the family’s wolf, serves as an example. however, the conclusion that it may be better for individual animals to be captive/tamed is problematic, since it obscures the bigger picture: the exploitation of nature, wrecking habitats, and killing wild animals. chapter five concerns laboratory animals, a category of animals that in the us is more or less without any legal protection. here the author paints a picture of fierce controversy between animal rights activists and scientists. the fear of animal activists has, according to rudy, made animal experimentation a secret and hidden enterprise. the most perverse example of this is the recent legislation in the usa that designates all kinds of protest against animal abuse in corporate forms, including university based animal experimentation, as acts of terrorism (162). again, the author is searching, through stories, for a third way. perhaps some experimentation is necessary, but it should be performed by people who really care for the animals, she argues. this chapter is not so well researched, perhaps because the author had difficulty finding experimenters willing to be interviewed, and rudy was refused access to university facilities. i could not agree more with the fact that transparency is important and that care, in fact love, is essential to provide better lives for these animals (holmberg). openness in animal experimentation exists in other countries, for example in sweden, where pharmaceutical companies invite school classes as well as interested others, to visit their premises, including the animal houses. some scientists go public in order to explain the role of animal experimentation. however, as i have argued elsewhere, this openness is selective, thus contributing to a status quo between science and the publics (holmberg & ideland). and rudy is wrong to blame the activists for the lack of transparency. it is like blaming radical feminists for men’s violence worldwide. the two greatest obstacles for real reform (i admit, not revolution) of this area are the lack of legislation, statistics, and education, on the one hand, and the standardization doctrine tora holmberg — narrative, affect, love and confusion 127 of science, on the other. as long as these animals are not granted legal protection (as in the us), and the use of them is not registered, available statistics will be lacking. education of staff is another important issue, and in europe, felasa (federation for laboratory animal science associations) is working to standardize training for animal technicians as well as researchers. moreover, the standardization doctrine in science prevents local initiatives in providing, for example, better/larger cages, enrichment, and feed. this is a dimension that rudy neglects, which unfortunately, along with the lack of stories, makes this chapter a rather poor one. the last chapter is entitled “clothing ourselves in stories of love,” but it is not really about clothing. this is unfortunate, i think, since the production of fur, leather, and shoes, is an under-researched area of animal studies. instead, the author uses clothing as a metaphor for thinking about affect and embodiment. the concept of affect helps make this visible, especially the emotional bonds many of us feel with pets, farm animals, or wildlife. these bonds are not add-ons to an already established human identity; they are circuits of exchange that direct our actions and ethics. these relationships change us on the deepest level. (193) this takes the author to the realm of spirituality, and she reflects on how the notion of “sacrifice” could be enhanced to encompass thinking about the role of pets, farm animals, wild life, and laboratory rodents, as well as the role of humans: we all sacrifice in order to live better and fuller lives (194). this is a rather troubling metaphor with roots in world religions as well as in more pagan belief systems, and to suggest that animals can choose to be sacrificed for the benefit of humans is problematic to say the least. rudy ends her survey with one last story of her family of six dogs, and how she had to choose between two of them for the benefit of the pack, thus highlighting how love always comes with other affects like agony, guilt, sorrow, and pain. love is not an easy task, but it is, according to rudy, the only route in order to be fulfilled. the strength of this book is, as the reader probably has noticed, the stories. they are moving, seductive, intriguing, troubling, and utterly provocative. moreover, rudy does not avoid many difficult and politically charged issues like meat eating or animal experimentation. her difficult goal is to broaden the agenda and to meet the opponents half way through the introduction of third way solutions. as an eye-opener and a discussion generator, i have to admit that although i do not agree with many of the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 128 conclusions, this book works well and will no doubt stir a heated debate. as a scholarly book, it has some serious problems. it uses references loosely and selectively, and does not build on, for example, the work on affect and ethics introduced in the beginning of this review. thus, the notion of becoming human through the corporeal interaction with, and love of, other animals is theoretically undeveloped ― and that is a shame. further, while using narrative as a technology for change rudy is far too ignorant of her own use, and thus reproduction, of discourse through the use of terms like “food animals,” “pets,” “euthanasia,” and “sacrifice.” she does not recognize her own rhetoric when positioning others as extremists, and her third way as a solution. in addition, the narrative methodology, however useful, is too anecdotal for academic standards and often leade to sweeping, almost universal, conclusions. these general issues aside, i would like to expand on some more specific issues, before concluding. first, i find it wrongheaded to blame animal rights activists and vegans for dominating the discourse of animal liberation. vegan animal advocates fend against a society that has a radically different view of animals. arguing that veganism would erase all farm animals is downright silly; many vegans refrain from eating animals as a political strategy, not as an end in itself. two to three percent of the us population is vegan, some for quite other reasons than animal ethics. thus, the core problem is not the vegans, but the bulk of people that simply do not care about animals at all. second, rudy argues that we need to open the hearts of these people to the needs of other animals. that is of course a good idea. but, following rudy’s own reformist agenda, why not do this by attending to the law? if things are going to be improved with regard to pet overpopulation or lab research for example, the protection of animals must be regulated. again, the problem is less the proclamation that animals should have rights, but that humans need to have obligations and responsibilities. here, i think the uscenteredness of rudy’s analysis is problematic, since it obscures the perspective. again, i will use sweden as an example. although cat overpopulation is an urban problem, there are hardly any homeless dogs. why is that? one reason is the mandatory tax and registration system that prevailed between 1923-1996, putting dog owners in a position of accountability. the new animal welfare act white paper suggests mandatory registration for cats. looking for stories elsewhere, rudy could have elucidated the pet problem from a sociological angle, blaming the lack of welfare state involvement along with capitalist profit making, a coupling named neo-liberalism. a third criticism is the lack of problematization of “love.” what, in kathy rudy’s view, is love? where are the feminist-studies lessons to be learned? feminist care ethics has taught us that love is not a pure feeling or ethical space, but a troublesome and power tora holmberg — narrative, affect, love and confusion 129 loaded relationship full of exploitation and even wickedness. this is not to say that love cannot be a useful tool for exploring the human/animal bond and expanding ethical concerns, but a more thorough investigation of this literature and a sophisticated treatment of power would have strengthened the arguments and perhaps might even have made rudy choose some different conclusions, for example regarding the love of experimental animals as a guarantee for better treatment. instrumentalization, making others objects for our own good, is part of all relationships, and particularly so in animal experimentation. in fact, it is part of loving relations as well. this means that we can both harm and kill, in the name of love. in spite of the criticism above, i want to conclude that i appreciate rudy’s take and that the personal style of narrating makes a strong rhetorical device that convinces me of the authenticity of the book’s intentions, and its usefulness in fulfilling the aims: to move its reader through narratives. works cited acampora, ralph. corporal compassion. animal ethics and philosophy of body. pittsburgh: university of pittsburgh press, 2006. despret, vinciane. “the body we care for. figures of anthropo-zoo-genesis.” body & society, 10(2-3), 2004: 111-134. donovan, josephine. “animal rights and feminist theory.” the feminist care tradition in animal ethics, eds. donovan, j., adams, c.j., new york: columbia university press, 2007: 58-86. haraway, donna j. when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008. hayward, eva. “fingeryeyes: impressions of cup corals.” cultural anthropology, 25 (4), 2010: 577-599. holmberg, tora. “mortal love. care practices in animal experimentation.” feminist theory, 12(2), 2011: 147-163. holmberg, tora, ideland, malin. “secrets and lies. ‘selective openness’ in animal experimentation.” public understanding of science, published online 24 august, 2010. microsoft word byrke herzog.pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 2:2 lynda birke eat, love, hate hal herzog. some we love, some we hate, some we eat: why it’s so hard to think straight about animals. new york: harpercollins, 2010. 336pp. $25.99 pb. “why is it so hard to think about animals?” asks herzog in the introduction to the book. we are, as he cogently argues, highly inconsistent in our dealings with animals — as the title of the book makes plain. there are indeed some animals we love, with whom we share our lives and affections; there are others we hate, or fear, and try to exterminate; there are still others destined for food. and this is not only a distinction of how we use different species: individuals of one species may be treated quite differently by humans in various contexts. think, for example, of horses, who are pets as well as partners in competition in my household, but are seen as a primary source of food in other places. or mice, who can become our saviors when they bear our diseases in medical research, or — perhaps in the same lab — can be pests bringing in unwanted diseases. herzog explores the myriad paradoxes in human dealings with animals, from cockerels to cats to cows. our dealings with other species often (perhaps usually) defy logic. in his introduction, he tells the stories of people who choose to eat some animals and not others, making apparently arbitrary decisions; of the colleague who woke up one day and released his caged cockatiel, as he now felt it to be wrong (and despite realizing that she would probably not survive), of the implications for his own family keeping a pet snake — who would need to eat. herzog faced this dilemma when an animal rights activist asked him about his pet boa constrictor, saying that she had heard that he was feeding kittens to his snake. that provocative question made him sit up and think hard about how we make ethical distinctions with regard to animals. what, he asks, is morally preferable — keeping a predator who eats canned meat or one who eats small animal carcasses? to some, it might seem preferable to feed the bodies of kittens that had been killed by the local animal shelter, than to give the snake other pet animals (such as the mice some snake owners might buy from the pet shop). but how and why do we decide what is ethical? herzog is, undeniably, right that we are morally inconsistent in our thinking about other animals — even (or perhaps especially) those of us who work in animal studies or activism. i do not deny that i live with predators — i share the house with three dogs — and if they do manage to kill a rabbit or a hare i am upset. yet i also know that two of them are hunters — one is a greyhound, and one a lurcher (the third one is a border humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 116 collie, bred to chase sheep instead). i am a lifelong vegetarian, yet i know that if the doctor prescribes any medicines for me, they will have been tested on animals. herzog has also long been working in animal studies, and tells us of how he became increasingly fascinated by these moral inconsistencies. how, he ponders, can so many people (he cites 60 % of americans) believe both that animals have the right to live and also that people have the right to eat them? he explores a wide variety of issues and data — from purported connections between cruelty to animals and violence to people, to the paradox of nazi animal protectionism, to our relationships with dogs, to hunting and cockfighting — just about all our dealings with other species are profoundly complex. our behavior toward other species, and the language we use to describe them, betray our deep ambivalences. herzog notes the extensive euphemisms we use — we talk about “culling” or “sacrifice,” rather than killing lab animals, for example. take one example from the many that herzog examines — cockfighting. illegal both here in britain and in many states of the us, it persists underground. it is also loathed by many people, who consider the bloody practice of pitting cocks against each other to be abhorrent. driving on a very hot day to a meeting with someone who keeps fighting cocks, herzog passes a large truck, stacked with crates packed to the brim with live chickens, bound for the slaughterhouse. working out the cage numbers, he calculates “that’s over 1000 animals on each truck, the chickens crammed together like anchovies packed in a jar of oil.” and however gruesome the cockfight might be, he realizes, many, many more chickens end their lives in this kind of transportation misery (and often inhumane slaughter), to contribute to the “six-piece mcnugget happy meal” just down the road (150). herzog recounts how he managed to befriend people who were cockfighters, and was trusted enough to be allowed to attend. cockfighting is taken very seriously by practitioners; they maintain bloodlines as carefully as the horse racing industry, and run the fights according to strict protocol. more relevant, though, is that they do not consider what they do to be cruel. they emphasize that the fight is only the culmination of a long period of caring for the animal. one fighter told herzog: “you will never find a nicer group of people. where else can you go where that much money changes hands on a nod without any controversy? cockers are gentlemen” (163-64). and these are men who claim to “love their chickens.” they provide them with “the best” food, the best housing, and daily care. lynda birke — eat, love, hate 117 cockfighting illustrates well the complex relationships we have with other animals. it may indeed end in a vicious bloodbath, but the life of the gamecock until that time is, herzog notes, rather more comfortable than that of the average broiler chicken — who lives and dies in unimaginable squalor and discomfort. this is not to exonerate the fights; rather, it is to emphasize that how we require animals to live matters, perhaps as much as how we impose their manner and time of death. cockfighting is, moreover, an example of how human relationships with animals play out within the context of human social divisions — gender and social class, for instance. not only are cockers almost entirely men, but cockfighting is seen by many to epitomize poor, rural, working-class communities — unlike some other sports using animals. “like cockfighting,” notes herzog, “horse racing represents a confluence of gambling and suffering. but unlike cockfighting, thoroughbreds are the passtime (sic) of the rich” (172). some we love, some we hate, some we eat ranges widely, drawing on many different examples of our bewildering ambiguities about other animals. the style of writing is friendly, drawing on many anecdotes: herzog often recounts tales of animals who helped him to unravel human stories, or of particular people he has met whose beliefs about animals illustrate the paradoxes. he tells, for example, of how his labrador, molly, inadvertently allowed him to discover the clandestine world of cockfighting; deciding to cure molly of chasing chickens, he sought some of his own, and met a breeder of game cocks in the process. or he tells contrasting stories of people living with animals: the bond may work well, and provide person (and perhaps the animal) with companionship and quality of life — or it may fail. sarah, an administrator at a veterinary hospital, for instance, wanted a dog, but when she and her husband acquired two animals, they rapidly became the “dogs from hell”; eventually, the marriage could not take the strain. the many anecdotes make for “a good read”; they bring a personal touch. to read about sarah, or nancy, or molly, is to contemplate real people, and real animals — and the dilemmas of real-life decisions. the easygoing style means that the book will have popular appeal — even while it engages with a set of really thorny issues. herzog weaves between the paradoxes well, forcing us to confront ambivalences we probably knew we had, and to realize others we did not know about. and he connects these moral inconsistencies to other, wider, questions. one example is his discussion of gender (a theme he has written about also in the research literature in human-animal humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 118 studies). gender undoubtedly has an impact on our behavior toward animals: women outnumber men in animal activism, and are more likely to become animal hoarders. sadistic abusers of animals, on the other hand, are more likely to be men. yet there is also plenty of overlap; some women shoot animals to death in hunting (seen as a masculine endeavor); many men work hard in animal protection (sometimes seen as a female preserve). and despite gender stereotypes, there is actually little scientific evidence to differentiate women and men in terms of attitudes, he suggests. it is just those abilities to make connections while appealing to a wider public and at the same time asking awkward questions that make this a noteworthy book. it poses many questions that are not asked often enough. take one example, from an issue i am particularly interested in — what happens in animal labs. herzog points out the contrast between “good” mice (those intended for research) and “bad” mice (those, usually escapees, who run wild and are seen as pests). he explores, too, the (considerable) variability of judgments from different institutional ethical committees on the same experimental protocols. and he discusses in detail the legal framework in the united states, which makes a distinction that is completely incomprehensible to anyone living in the united kingdom: in us law controlling animal research, rats, mice and birds don’t count as animals. that attention to fine details of our moral distinctions is a strength of this book. it is one thing to be an advocate for animals, or an animal rights activist; it is quite another to think through and confront the incoherency of many of our ethical positions. i found hal herzog’s discussions of his own personal ambivalences about our use of animals refreshing. he does not shy away from admitting his own unease and difficulties — so exposing himself to criticism for precisely the inconsistency that forms the focus of the book. the easygoing style of writing, too, introduces readers to many complex philosophical and scientific issues. the book has evidently been widely picked up and its issues discussed in the media, so that it reaches a wider public than many of our academic journals can. its accessibility makes it appealing to many people outside the narrow frames of human-animal studies or animal activism, and its many anecdotes of our inconsistent behavior provides a good base for teaching and discussing questions of moral ambiguity and decision-making. that said, i have some reservations. first, the style is certainly easygoing. yet it is precisely that quality that i sometimes found difficult. of course, that is partly because it is not intended to be academic, and i am a university professor: i always want to check sources, and find it frustrating when they are not supplied except as generalized lynda birke — eat, love, hate 119 further reading (as is the case here). but i also felt that the style did not quite work for readers outside north america. any references to american baseball or popular culture go right over my head, and the particular kind of culturally specific, jokey, writing sometimes fall flat for me. perhaps i am alone in this, and i’d be interested to see how my students in the uk react. it would be a pity if they were to miss the point of the debate because they couldn’t quite “get” the text. i also had reservations about the discussions of vegetarianism — and i have no doubt that hal herzog will smile when he reads this. as a vegetarian, i have had many times to confront the challenges: you can’t get enough protein; the diet is bland; you are hypocritical because you don’t eat animals but you do live with dogs..... etc. etc. etc. i refuse to be intimidated by them. but i did feel that the several discussions of vegetarians who had given up and begun to love raw steak, or who had become ill or anorexic, a little irritating. to be sure, i’ve met ex-vegetarians who tell me they didn’t feel healthy enough: then i find out they are lousy (or lazy) cooks who paid no heed to a balanced diet. it was, i think, the references to vegetarianism that made me wonder if there was an underlying question that assumed that we can arrive at a morally consistent positioning. certainly, these are good examples of our confusions; yet i ended up feeling that there was a subtext — “why be veggie?”— which i found at odds with the open-mindedness herzog displays in his approach to so many of the issues raised here. too often, it seemed, the book was emphasizing ways in which vegetarianism falls short of some ideal. yet can we ever achieve an ethically pure stance? i doubt it. i know full well that taking any moral position cannot be done absolutely, and that almost everything that we do means compromise. that does not, however, mean that i want to take no moral position. inconsistent? hypocritical? perhaps, but maybe a pragmatic and partial position is the best we can do. my second problem is that, while herzog notes that species differences matter, at least some of our collective ambivalence arise precisely because of our ingrained habit of generalizing to “animals.” one reason why “it’s hard to think straight about animals” is that “animals” is such a catch-all word. sometimes, and for some species or individuals, we move “the animal” into our human family — whether that is dogs living literally within our family home, or primates who we come to realize have cognitive abilities “like ours.” some of the dilemmas herzog documents arise when we disagree, or humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 120 cannot make up our minds, about where (or if) boundaries might be drawn; it is practically impossible to be consistent about “animals” when we often make decisions about particular individuals or species, or in relation to specific (human) uses. one example: herzog suggests that “[i]f you really want to know how people feel about the treatment of animals, follow the money” (40). he then goes on to note the large sums of money given to animal protection organizations, but notes that far more money is put into killing animals — buying hunting supplies, the meat industry, pest control, and so on. we are inconsistent about “animals” in part because we make distinctions between them. it is almost impossible to avoid collapsing species variation into the generic animal — in herzog’s book, or, indeed, in this review. but it is an issue which human-animal studies needs to grapple with more explicitly — and which i would like to have seen brought out more in this book, if only to clarify when we are being inconsistent about “animals” or about specific species or types. what is being accomplished when we use the animal word? quibbles aside, what the book acknowledges is how so many of us feel a deep need and connection to the nonhumans around us. herzog’s book will no doubt have popular appeal for that very reason: but, as he notes, what we also learn from these studies is the very complexity of our attitudes towards others (be they others of any species, including our own). the anomalies and contradictions are, he concludes, inevitable, and they reveal that “...our…relationships with the animals in our lives—the ones we love, the ones we hate, and the ones we eat—are….more complicated than we thought” (279). there is plenty of work, then, to be done in animal studies and animal activism if we are to understand those contradictions. microsoft word bull-birke-hockehull-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 7:1 reviews jacob bull humanimal methods and methodologies lynda birke and jo hockenhull, crossing boundaries: investigating human-animal relationships. leiden: brill, 2012. 255 pp. €95.00; $124.00. if we are to follow derrida (and his cat) and recognize the multiplicity of beings so frequently caught up in the collective noun “animals,” we as researchers need to revisit, adapt, and create methods anew. the methods that build insightful accounts of the social and cultural dynamics of one group of animals (such as humans) do not necessarily transfer onto different species. the ways we understand pigs, bonobos, or dogs do not automatically map onto one another. this is a truism — but it reminds us how crucial questions of methodology and method are in the development of the transdisciplinary research area, (hum)animal studies. this collection by lynda birke and jo hockenhull is an important intervention in the literature, as it brings these issues jacob bull – humanimal methods and methodologies 135 to the fore and examines the politics and processes of crossing (many) boundaries. the book brings together a range of scholars from across the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences to discuss what and crucially, how they investigate human-animal relationships. the collection offers accounts of how relationships between humans and animals are formed and how they work in everyday spaces from laboratories to farms to homes. the chapters describe how people bond with specific animals, become companions, and become aware of the “mindedness” of the animal other (3). at its core, the book asks “how can researchers work most effectively to investigate how relationships are forged” (4). it achieves this goal. in doing so, it does not produce a single methodology and method that might be utilized to insert the animal into existing understandings of our social world. given the diversity emphasized above, such a disciplining project is bound to fail. rather, what the chapters offer is a series of accounts of what and how we might learn across disciplinary and species bounds as we do research into humananimal relationships. the accounts are sometimes far-reaching, sometimes vulnerable, regularly challenging, thought-provoking, and engaging. in chapter 2, nicola taylor reviews the various ways that sociology has engaged with animal presence. taylor reminds us that methods and methodologies are political, as the way we approach research and the tools we use shape which animals are included and excluded from research, and, significantly, how they are included in the research. józsef topál and márta gácsi echo this point in chapter 8, as they observe that dog lovers, zoologists, and ethologists all create different dogs. rather than arguing that any one method or constellations of methods is more appropriate, taylor suggests that the success of methods should be assessed through the degree to which they overcome unhelpful binaries (48). successful methodologies, therefore, might make “new” species visible, or make species visible in different ways. for example, they might engage with less “linguistic orientated” texts, such as film or images. in this way, researchers might make space for and centralize animals by not relying on linguistic methods that exclude them a priori (46-47). moreover, we can take a further step and recognize that “linguistic orientated” methods such as literary analysis or interviews do not exclude animals per se — dogs might literally and figuratively bark throughout interviews with their owners —, rather, it is how we read the voices and noises of animals as they interrupt linguistically orientated readings. but making such a methodological step, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 136 while it changes how animals might be included, can also bring us up against disciplinary heritages. henry buller in chapter 3 continues the focus on the politics of methodologies, as he attends to food and eating as “an active expression of, and not a replacement for, animal vitality” (61). this move is political, in that it both makes a statement about how we approach human-animal relationships and offers a different vocabulary for intervening in the politics of contemporary agricultural practice. continuing this line, buller highlights that such new methodologies also need new methods that “re-vitalise” (65) research. while buller documents the power of these methodologies in farm systems, he also articulates the difficulty of mobilizing them in arenas where traditional forms of social science, science, and accounting are entrenched. chapter 4 discusses relationships between people and guide dogs, and offers insight into an area where animal agency is central. marc higgin uses ethnography and interviews to describe not the social world of a guide dog or a person guided by a dog, but a shared social world. a world where dog and human move forward together (86). higgin made space for animal presence in the linguistically orientated methods of interviews by trying to pay attention to those un-articulated moments in the humandog interaction, and feeding them back into the research process. in addition to being an interesting account of the co-construction of human-guide dog subjectivities, the chapter also operates as a good vignette of the relationships assessed through this book. the relationships are specific — by which i mean often between humans and one species, breed or individual; they are often sustained — that is they are built up through repeat encounters over time; they often have particular spatial dynamics in that they are located on a farm, in a laboratory, or at home (though of course these categories are not mutually exclusive, as discussed by pär segerdahl in chapter 7), and are often grounded in corporeal meetings. these corporeal meetings might be the specificities of organs (such as measuring heart rate in people and horses to monitor interspecies commonalities and dissonance in humanimal meetings, chapter 1), the corporeal action of eating and assimilation of flesh that is embedded in buller’s discussion of animal vitality, or the corporeal bonds built through guiding as discussed by higgin in chapter 4. chapter 5 makes this corporeal element even more explicit, as diane dutton emphasizes kinesthesis in human-animal relationships. in her chapter dutton uses phenomenological theory to discuss how phenomena emerge from intersubjective encounters across species divides. according to dutton, a phenomenological approach jacob bull – humanimal methods and methodologies 137 foregrounds the embodied character of the human-animal encounter. it is animal bodies, bodies that move, respond, and direct our attention that should be at the center of human-animal studies. such a focus can transcend old boundaries, as it emphasizes kinship and commonality across species bounds. phenomenologically informed methodologies and methods might also offers routes to better science. intercorporeality — an articulation of the social and material elements of embodiment — defines our interactions, including interactions between species. recognition of intercorporeality, fundamental as it is to how relationships are forged, might lead to better understandings of humanimal relations. resonating with some of what was raised in the preceding chapter, chapter 6 calls for increased attention to the emotive and transformative elements of human-animal encounters. sue dawson develops methods of “organic inquiry,” foregrounding emotion in companion animal relationships. in many ways, this chapter deals with questions of method most directly. it documents what the author did in her attempts to investigate human animal relationships in a frank, open style that does not always characterize our discussions of methodology and method in human-animal studies. using meditation, stream of consciousness writing, and expressive artworks, organic inquiry methods attempt an “active engagement with the sacred” (115). organic inquiry is a personal account which foregrounds situatedness. the question of “what happens when different notions of the sacred collide?” is left hanging, but the chapter does explicitly engage with questions of method in ways that some of the other chapters do not. this volume, along with recent publications such as the collection brought together by kirksey and helmreich under the theme “multispecies ethnography,” timothy hodgett and jamie lorimer’s recent paper, and buller’s review of animal geographies all address questions of humanimal methodologies and methods. within these wider debates, i would call for greater attention to the distinctions between questions of methodology (i.e. approach) and method (i.e. what tools we use). i would submit that such distinctions are important; while we might be able to agree on common methodologies that give us better descriptions of our more-than-human social worlds, methods are always more species/individual specific. for example, buller in his timely and farreaching commentary discusses how hayden lorimer’s (2006 and 2010) work on reindeer and seals “draws in ethology, historical archives, walking, running and, in the latter paper, the occasional exchanges of look” (buller 5). while we might agree that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 138 multi-species ethnography might be an appropriate methodology for a range of species, the methods used to develop geographies of reindeer or seals might not transfer to for example slugs (ginn) or ticks (hatley). as buller notes, much of the development of humanimal methodologies and methods involves “animals to which we, as humans, are already close and friendly with” (6). i would suggest that animals that are not so “nearby” might require the use of different methods. this varied relevance of particular methods to different species (and individuals) calls us both to question how methodologies and methods create different animals (as discussed most directly in chapters 3 and 8 of this volume), and also to ask how the animals we engage in animal studies shape the methodologies and methods we use? as mentioned earlier, the relationships attended to in this book are very particular, and consequently the animals are limited those who are capable of the specific, sustained, located, and corporeal meetings addressed. this is not to point to a “lack,” the collection already does so much, but rather to foreground how attention to animals that “easily bear our ocular scrutiny” (to borrow myra hird’s fabulous phrase) plays out in terms of methodologies and methods. this dynamic i would argue has at least two strands. the first is the meeting of animals and disciplines, the second a question of agency. the first point is that there are significant methodological and method limits on which animals we can engage in animal studies research. many of us do not have the microscopy skills or the access to laboratories that would be required if we were to engage with questions of life that is not “big like us” (hird). these limits are in part disciplinary. the organizational structures, financial institutions, and disciplinary interpretations of “good science” mean that some animals can disrupt some methodological machines more than others” — different animals can feature in different disciplines differently (see earlier discussion of taylor, chapter 2 and topál and gácsi, chapter 8). this is why the conversations included in this volume are so important, and why the transdiciplinary conversations of animals studies are so exciting. my second point is that with regard to method and to a certain extent methodology, animals have an opportunity to intervene in the research process. this agency, might be limited, but given that, as birke and hockenhull note in chapter 1, the burden of learning to communicate across species lines so often lies with animals (19), we should focus on, amplify, and maybe celebrate this moment when animals can be more active in the research process. my argument here is that as we conduct a research project from a particular disciplinary standpoint, employing given methodologies and accepted methods, when those methods fail because of the creaturely presence we are attempting to engage, we witness animal agency in the research process. my articulation of the jacob bull – humanimal methods and methodologies 139 dynamics between methodology, method and species echoes segerdahl’s discussion of the multi-species cultures created through ape-language research. as he documents the various success and failures in ape language research he illustrates how methodologies and methods are “binding” and “blinding.” in a discussion of the chimpanzee nim’s “failure” to acquire forms of human language, segerdahl describes how this was a product of the methodological blindness of the lead scientist involved in the project. that lead researcher, herbert terrace, employed a methodology invested in the human-animal divide that attempted to impose language across the divide through special training methods. the scientists were then “surprised” that the result of their experiments was an ape demonstrating learned responses to specific stimuli rather than a language-capable ape. nim was caught in a kind of “double captivity,” to use segerdahl’s phrase (143), caught in physical captivity and unable to exceed the language bounds imposed by the methodology. in contrast, segerdahl’s description of sue savage-rumbaugh’s work with the bonobos panbanisha and kanzi documents a meeting that is physically and methologically less constrained. according to segerdahl, play was an important mechanism by which kanzi learnt language. and while play is never free from bounds, in this setting it was disruptive and shaped a method that enabled kanzi to learn language, rather than to be trained as nim was. sue adapted to kanzi, engaging with him in a variety of locations beyond the training of the laboratory or classroom. as segerdahl observes, savage-rumbaugh’s methodology transcended the laboratory and the humanly controlled conditions of laboratory work. these “bonobos developed language in the kitchen, in the forest, in the car, in sue’s home: in everyday activities going on all the time in their cross species relations with humans” (147). in contrast with nim, who was engaged through training methods, kanzi was engaged through playful methods that enabled him to learn language that could then be tested in the laboratory. from segerdahl’s chapter, it appears that the disruption caused by kanzi wanting to play resulted in savagerumbaugh changing her approach to language acquisition and consequently how she developed theoretical debates. in my reading, this demonstrates not only how different methodologies and methods enable animals to feature in research differently, but also how the animals might have agency and bring about changes in method and methodology. my argument here can be seen as a less ingestion orientated and more general mode of revitalising as discussed by buller in chapter 3. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 7, number 1 (fall 2015) 140 while not engaging with questions of agency per se, chapter 8 also ties together issues of species and individual animal histories with questions of methodology and method. psychology and ethology approaches are blended in the chapter through an adaption of the “strange situation test”. crossing boundaries between research on humans and dogs, topál and gácsi, use this test to analyse and predict dog behaviour. the chapter concludes with a discussion of how this method might map across species bounds as it engages with data for wolves and dogs with different histories, comparing data on puppies, adult dogs and shelter dogs. by so doing it offers further evidence of how both species and individual animal histories are important in our discussions of methodology and method. in the final chapter in this collection, francoise wemelsfelder offers a clear story about crossing boundaries in animal welfare science. she documents how different methodological perspectives such as foregrounding communication in discussions of subjectivity and using body language as a key indication of animal expressiveness required the carving out of conceptual space in the welfare science paradigm. wemelsfelder points to a paradox in mechanistic science whereby the traces of animality are removed from descriptions of animal life, thereby creating a void into which anthropomorphisms are drawn. the banishing of animal viewpoints according to wemelsfelder result in mechanical understandings on animal sentience that are necessarily anthropomorphic. in contrast, wemelsfelder’s methodological shift acknowledges the animals’ animality, and through the implementation of methods of assessment that “may be unconventional, [but also] work scientifically” (240) she produces both better science and better animal welfare. this dual benefit of “better science’ and “better relationships” is the overarching theme of the book and core to what can be achieved through attention to humanimal methodologies and methods. we need conversations like these to develop better descriptions of our shared social worlds, to develop better policies and better relationships with humanimal cohabitants of every kind. they give us space to discuss how transdisciplinarity meetings might enable methodologies that negate unhelpful binaries, they give us space to develop tools that might include different animals or engage animals differently. they give us opportunity to grapple with animal agency as we revitalize disciplines. the principle aim of this book is to examine how researchers can work effectively to examine how human-animal relationships are forged (5). the collection clearly achieves that aim as the contributions discuss and negotiate the crossing of boundaries such as those between species or the challenging of assumed lines drawn from disciplines, jacob bull – humanimal methods and methodologies 141 through methodologies to methods. some of the chapters are more empirical, some are more experimental; some are the conclusion of years of experiments with methods some are documentations of the processes of methodological change. the book as a whole represents an important contribution to a fundamental discussion in animal studies – namely an attention to not only what we do when we do animal studies, but also how we do it. works cited buller, henry. “animal geographies ii: methods.” progress in human geography (online first, 2014): 1-11. ginn, franklin. “sticky lives: slugs, detachment and more-than-human ethics in the garden.” transactions of the institute of british geographers 39 (2014): 532–544. hatley, james. “blood intimacies and biodicy: keeping faith with ticks.” australian humanities review 50 (2011). 30 sept. 2015. http://www.australianhumanitiesreview.org/archive/issue-may-2011/hatley.html hird, myra, j. the origins of sociable life: evolution after science studies. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2009. hodgett, timothy, and lorimer, jamie. “methodologies for animals' geographies: cultures, communication and genomics.” cultural geographies 22.2 (april 2015): 285-295. kirksey, eben and helmreich, stefan. “the emergence of multispecies ethnography.” cultural anthropology 25(2010): 545-76. lorimer, hayden. “herding memories of humans and animals.” environment and planning d: society and space 24 (2006): 497-518. lorimer, hayden. “forces of nature, forms of life: calibrating ethology and phenomenology.” taking place: non-representational theories and geography. eds., ben anderson and harrison paul. london: ashgate, 2010. fudge, the history of animals in the present moment rumination 2.0 the history of animals in the present moment erica fudge professor of english studies school of humanities university of strathclyde, glasgow email: erica.fudge@strath.ac.uk humanimalia 13.1 (fall 2022) mailto:erica.fudge@strath.ac.uk copyright © 2022 erica fudge this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 253–264. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.11282 sixteen years ago does not feel like the distant past to someone who studies the early modern period, even though things in 2022 do feel very different for all sorts of reasons to 2006, when i wrote my first “rumination” for h-animal.1 those sixteen years have seen some substantial developments in animal history. there, things have expanded beyond what anyone might have imagined. indeed, in an article from 2016 joshua specht proclaimed the “triumph” of animal history, arguing that it is no longer emerging, but “has arrived”.2 along the way, new scholarship has challenged earlier debates substantially — to the extent that i would say that during that sixteen-year period, i have had my mind changed. i in the first wave of what we might now include in our history of animal history, a key issue was representation, and how human documents and events constructed animals. foundational to this first wave, and all that has followed, was harriet ritvo’s the animal estate: the english and other creatures in the victorian age (1987). it was in this study that, for example, dog shows emerged not only as events that had a history that might be mapped alongside agricultural shows, the trade in pets, and so on, but also as possessing meanings that raised questions about victorian conceptions of nation, racial purity, and class. all of these issues, ritvo showed, were intimately entangled with the display of dogs and, since her work, non-humans have never been disentangled from such human constructions in animal history.3 the question that logically followed from this was: if the materials used by historians to build their narratives of the past were always human-made, how could our work counter anthropocentrism? how could we acknowledge that, from a species perspective, the documents of the past were written by the victors, as walter benjamin put it, and still attempt to challenge that victorious perspective?4 animal 1 fudge, “history of animals.” 2 specht, “animal history,” 326. 3 for a recent example, see pearson, dogopolis. 4 benjamin, illuminations, 248. http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.11282 fudge, rumination 2.0 | 255 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) history could end up just being a history that unpicked the ways in which human cultures portrayed animals and used those portrayals of animals to think about themselves and their human others. this issue was the focus of my 2002 essay “a left-handed blow”. in it, i proposed that in that unpicking, it might be that we would come to recognize that not only were the animals we could access in our research constructed by humans, but so were the humans: our “natural” place as superior species was a product of centuries of very human work. unthought anthropocentrism, i suggested, might be undermined by acknowledging this, and perhaps focusing specifically on this anthropocentrism in our historical work. such a perspective challenged the idea that humans were separate from the non-human world — that nature was simply a resource or a backdrop for human life — and that human life was the only possible focus of historical scholarship, and this impacted our understanding of different aspects of the past. jonathan burt’s animals in film (2002), for example, showed the centrality of animals to the development of this new medium in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. burt argued that animals were not only objects of the human gaze: in the process of apparent objectification, filmmakers had to construct new technologies to capture the non-human lives. animals made so-called human culture change. under the influence of work such as that by burt, the focus of my thinking shifted from the issue of representation to considering agency and the question of how we might think about animals as actors in the past.5 breaking the link between agency and intention as constructed by a cartesian notion of (solely human) self-awareness, work in animal studies was showing how agency might be constructed through networks rather than via individual intention. this conceptualization was framed in relation to actor network theory, which i first encountered in chris philo and chris wilbert’s introduction to animal spaces, beastly places, and was later construed through the use of the deleuzian conception of agencement in 5 fudge, “history of animals”. 256 | fudge, rumination 2.0 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) vinciane despret’s work.6 animal history was also beginning to recognize that agency could be unintentional. virginia dejohn anderson’s creatures of empire: how domestic animals transformed early america (2004), for instance, argued that domestic animals breaking down a fence did not know they were going to impact human relations and showed that in their actions they were unwitting agents of change in english colonists’ relations with their indigenous neighbours. finally, work has engaged with the idea that agency could be exercised by a group rather than an individual. in a 2020 article, rohan deb roy has shown how the collective agency of white ants “added to the everyday chaos of the [british colonial] administration” in india as the insects consumed paper and wood, “which were among the most crucial material foundations of the nineteenth-century colonial state.”7 acknowledging the impact of animals on human cultures thus offered an opportunity to place those animals at the centre of historical work, and just as historians were showing how live animals might be recognized as agents in shifting relationships, so too was the dead matter they could be transformed into being interpreted in new ways. thing theory offered a way to claim agency, not only in the living creatures but also in the animal-made-objects: that is, the animals made into objects, but also the objects made from those animal things.8 leather, meat, wool, silk and so on previously had their place in historical studies in relation to analyses of agricultural production, economic development, and trade relations. using thing theory, i suggested that their animal origin might be brought to the fore and the implicit assumption that matter from a living creature was simply evidence of untrammelled human power come under scrutiny. ian f. macinnes, for example, traced the centrality of both the live animals and their dead products in the use and naming of streets in london, arguing persuasively that “early modern england was not just a nation that turned animals into objects on a large scale; it was a nation that was produced by animals, an animal-made-object-on a national scale.”9 6 philo and wilbert, animal spaces, 14–23; despret, “from secret agents”. 7 roy, “white ants”, 415. 8 see brown, “thing theory”; fudge, “renaissance animal things”. 9 macinnes, “cow-cross lane”, 86. fudge, rumination 2.0 | 257 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) ii this inclusion of the agency of the animal-made-object rather than just the animal has been only one of the ways in which the animal history has shifted its focus over the past sixteen years. but perhaps the most significant development can be found in the various attempts to understand the experiences of the animals of the past themselves. this is something that did not factor into the histories that focused on questions of representation, which assumed that past animals’ experiences were not available to us (and i had certainly assumed that). new methods, new cross-disciplinary engagements, however, have offered new opportunities for historians. recognizing that other animals engage with the world in a way that is very different from our own has a long history,10 but it is only in recent years that scholarship has begun to explore what that might mean for how we include the animals of the past in our work. chris pearson contemplated the nineteenth-century city through a dog’s nose, for example; and sarah cockram pondered on the experiences of the pets we see in italian renaissance portraiture.11 what did the touch across species — the hand stroking the animal’s head — mean for the human, but also for the dog back then? such explorations have emerged out of an engagement with work from sensory history, but also with scholarship from some very different fields of study, including veterinary medicine, animal welfare science, and ethology.12 here, current studies of physiology and behaviour undertaken in the presence of living animals are offering possibilities for understanding those long-gone animals of the past.13 in an essay from 2017, i wondered “what was it like to be a cow?” no definitive answer can be given, of course (although i would not have been able to give a definitive answer to “what was it like to be a child?” either), but i nevertheless attempted to think about cows’ 10 see fudge, brutal reasoning. 11 pearson, dogopolis; cockram, “sleeve cat”. 12 for work on sensory history, see smith, “producing sense”. 13 see, for instance, wemelsfelder, “science of friendly pigs”, and wemelsfelder et al., “assessing the ‘whole animal’”. 258 | fudge, rumination 2.0 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) sentience and their particular experiences of the world through an engagement with current animal science.14 i was not the first to attempt this: in her 2013 history of trained elephants in the nineteenth-century, entertaining elephants, for example, susan nance took us closer to the animals themselves by engaging with studies by contemporary ethologists. and, in an article from 2022, jonathan saha took this a step further and read the elephants of myanmar’s past through an ethological and an ecological lens. elephants’ experiences of enforced labour were central to his analysis, but so was the world those elephants created for other creatures — such as for the frogs who might live in the puddles that formed in the elephants’ footprints, and whose own security was undermined when the wild elephant populations started to decline. such scholarship is a great distance from animal history’s first focus on issues of representation and shows how broad the field has become in its methodology as well as in the range of its potential foci. and the unsolvable difficulties that remain central (the impossibility of ever really knowing what it was like to be a cow), alongside the very wide range of possible foci for our research (animals were everywhere in the past), mean that it is unlikely that the field will ever stop developing. but one thing is certain: future work will have to take on board, more perhaps than it has in the past, the pressing problems we are facing today. what does it mean for animal history that we are now living in the anthropocene? what can this work do in response to a recognition of the cosmically destructive power of the human? iii the geological transition from holocene to anthropocene — the date of which is disputed — reflects the belief that the current epoch can only be understood as having been created by what chris otter has termed “deliberate acts of sentient creatures”; that is, by humans.15 our species’ impact (and, we should of course remember that the actions that have caused change are not equally shared 14 see also fudge, “milking other men’s beasts”. 15 otter, “the anthropocene in british history”, 569. fudge, rumination 2.0 | 259 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) among all humans16) is now so indelible that it can be traced at the level of geology, and so the planet can only be understood today through attending to those human actions. this focus on the role of homo sapiens might seem to mark a return to a kind of anthropocentrism that animal history has been advocating that we move away from. it might appear, that is, to necessitate a reversion to a concentration on our own species. otter, however, has rightly written that work in human-animal studies has much to offer to present and future discussions of the planet: “the concept of the anthropocene […] essentially argues that the history of human societies cannot be separate from the histories of climate, the life of nonhuman species and the earth’s biogeochemical cycles.”17 thinking the anthropocene, in short, is rethinking the human and its history: it is our implication in our environment, and our being part of a continuum of species that is crucial. such a claim undoubtedly reinforces the value of animal history, but i think we need to contemplate not only how central animal history might be to discussions about the anthropocene, but also what it can do in the anthropocene. how can the work of animal historians engage in the ongoing and pressing debates about current human actions and their impact on the planet? in a roundtable discussion from 2020, organized by the journal agricultural history, when both the anthropocene and covid-19 were framing discussions, sandra swart offered a suggestion. she spoke of the past as “usefully unfamiliar”.18 for swart, animal history can have a role in providing an alternative way forward by offering a view of the past that emphasizes multispecies living. in a piece from 2021 introducing yet another special issue — this time of the south african historical journal — which focused on environmental history and the anthropocene , swart reiterated this sentiment: “historians do what we have always done — we simply point out that it was not always so. we make the familiar strange.”19 16 on this question see chakrabarty, “anthropocene time”, 9–11. 17 otter, “the anthropocene in british history”, 569. 18 way et al., “roundtable: animal history”, 455. 19 swart, “at the edge of the anthropocene”, 9. 260 | fudge, rumination 2.0 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) zoltán boldizsár simon takes a very different view in a 2017 article in the anthropocene review. for him, making the past strange is not enough. a “future prospect” in which “human activity transforms the environmental conditions,” he writes, “creates a demand for preventive action, accompanied by a strong sense of urgency.”20 such preventive action requires a wholly new notion of history; one that is non-processual and is, in his words, “capable of recognizing the unprecedented.”21 the issue, then, is about how — and even if — we can write histories of and in the anthropocene. for simon, historicizing the anthropocene might domesticate it, make it familiar and so remove the sense of urgency that is required in response to it. for that reason our histories need to do something else. dipesh chakrabarty has likewise argued that the recognition that we are now living in the anthropocene asks us to move in different directions from our established paths; for him, we need to engage with humans as agents in a new way. where otter focused on “deliberate acts of sentient creatures,” chakrabarty sees something rather different that resonates with concerns in earlier animal history: just as animal historians have been rethinking the agency of the non-human, so, for chakrabarty, the agency of the human needs to be reconsidered. he argues that our current moment “leaves us with the challenge of having to think of human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at once.” these scales, he writes, are the human as “a purposeful biological entity with the capacity to degrade the natural environment,” and humans as “a geophysical force.”22 the purposeful entity is one that we are familiar with, but the second scale of human agency chakrabarty proposes, is somewhat alien, and it is in this that he differs from otter. this conception of agency requires us to figure the single human as also part of a general category — “humans” — which, in turn, needs to be conceived of not so much as a species but as a “geophysical force.” as such, chakrabarty’s reading undermines our highly valued idea of individuality in a way that otter’s “sentient creatures” does not quite do. indeed, for 20 simon, “facing the unprecedented”, 241. 21 simon, 244. 22 chakrabarty, “postcolonial studies,” 1. fudge, rumination 2.0 | 261 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) chakrabarty the conceptualization of humans as a “force” pushes us to think about our own species in ways that are almost inorganic: he suggests that humans possess “some nonhuman, nonliving agency.” and herein lies the problem: “we cannot ever experience ourselves as a geophysical force,” he writes, “though we now know that this is one of the modes of our collective existence.”23 following chakrabarty’s argument, continuing to write histories of multispecies worlds can no longer be a satisfactory response to the anthropocene, as there is a danger that such would be telling only half the story — would be ignoring our role as inconceivable “geophysical force”. but how do we write histories that ask our readers to encounter what chakrabarty calls their own “nonontological agency”?24 indeed, can such histories be written? that is a genuine question. what if we came at this from a different angle and attempted to write animal histories in which the place of humans as purposeful biological entities was recognized as the preferred option — a kind of historical choice so embedded in our sense of self and in our cultures that it has been naturalized to be the truth (capital t)? this sounds similar to something i proposed back in 2002, when i suggested that animal history might find value in recognizing that the human as an individualizable, intending, agency-full being was a creature constructed by very human work. but i think chakrabarty’s ideas ask us to go further: he is not thinking about the question of representation, but is addressing very urgent environmental issues. de-individualization can, of course, reiterate the de-humanizations that have haunted the past, and our writing of that past, in its treatment of its others by dealing in statistics, by generalizing individual experience out of the picture. such work is not so different from that which henry buller has seen in operation in industrial agriculture.25 rather, chakrabarty is inviting us to address a new conception of the human, and as such to write new histories of species. 23 chakrabarty, “postcolonial studies”, 11; italics in original. 24 chakrabarty, “postcolonial studies”, 13. 25 buller, “individuation”. 262 | fudge, rumination 2.0 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) how might this be done? how might we contemplate our species in its interactions with the rest of the natural world in this light? julia adeney thomas offers one suggestion that resonates with work in animal studies, influenced as it has been by donna haraway’s conception of companion species.26 thomas has argued that a “microbiological view of ‘the human’ forces historians to grapple with the idea that each ‘individual’ is better understood as a collectivity of species, and ‘humanity’ as an archipelago of multiple, dependent life forms.” but it is not only at the level of individual that we come undone in her analysis. the thing called the human as species can be challenged too. thomas writes: while about 99.9 percent of our human dna is shared, our microbial cells may have as little as 50 percent of their genetic profile in common. from the perspective of human solidarity, this finding is disturbing. if 90 percent of my cells are bacterial and half of those have different dna sequences than yours, then on a cellular level it is not as clear that we are the “same species,” as other branches of biology and most recent histories define us.27 this is a kind of defamiliarizing of the human that fits with swart’s conception of the role of history, and perhaps takes it a step further. it begins to uproot — or at least starts to dig up — entrenched understandings of the human as a species and as an individual. it challenges ideas that “we” (an even more hypothetical conception than ever) are separate from animals; that “we” are creatures capable of dominating “our” environment and all the beings in it. such understandings of human exceptionalism have led us to where we are now: drowning our neighbours, killing our kin, destroying our home. we need, urgently, to reconnect with our planet, and recognize ourselves as inseparable rather than special; reliant upon rather dominating. chakrabarty and thomas have raised important questions for us to consider; and pursuing ways of addressing those questions could be what animal history works to do in the anthropocene. 26 see haraway, companion species manifesto. 27 thomas, “history and biology”, 1595. fudge, rumination 2.0 | 263 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) works cited anderson, virginia dejohn. creatures of empire: how domestic animals transformed early america. oxford: oxford university press, 2004. benjamin, walter. illuminations. translated by harry zohn. edited by hannah arendt. london: fontana press, 1992. brown, bill. “thing theory.” critical inquiry 28, no. 1 (2001): 1–22. https://doi. org/10.1086/449030. buller, henry. “individuation, the mass and farm animals.” theory, culture and society 30, nos. 7/8 (2013): 155–75. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276413501205. burt, jonathan. animals in film. london: reaktion books, 2002. chakrabarty, dipesh. “postcolonial studies and the challenge of climate change.” new literary history 43, no. 1 (2012): 1–18. chakrabarty, dipesh. “anthropocene time.” history and theory 57, no. 1 (2018): 5–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12044. cockram, sarah. “sleeve cat and lap dog: affection, aesthetics and proximity to companion animals in renaissance mantua.” in interspecies interactions: animals and humans between the middle ages and modernity, edited by sarah cockram and andrew wells, 34–65. london: routledge, 2018. despret, vinciane. “from secret agents to interagency.” history and theory 52, no. 4 (2013): 29–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/ hith.10686. fudge, erica. brutal reasoning: animals, rationality and humanity in early modern england. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 2006. fudge, erica. “the history of animals.” h-animal, h-net: humanities and social sciences online. published on may 25, 2006. https://networks.h-net.org/ node/16560/pages/32226/historyanimals-erica-fudge. fudge, erica. “a left-handed blow: writing the history of animals.” in representing animals, edited by nigel rothfels, 3–18. bloomington: indiana university press, 2002. fudge, erica. “milking other men’s beasts.” history and theory 52, no.4 (2013): 13–28. https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10682 fudge, erica. “renaissance animal things.” in gorgeous beasts: animal bodies in historical perspective, edited by joan b. landes, paula young lee, and paul youngquist, 41–56. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2012. fudge, erica. “what was it like to be a cow?: history and animal studies.” in the oxford handbook of animal studies, edited by linda kalof, 258–78. new york: oxford university press, 2017. haraway, donna j. the companion species manifesto. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. macinnes, ian f. “cow-cross lane and curriers row: animal networks in early modern england.” in the routledge handbook of shakespeare and animals, edited by karen raber and holly dugan, 77–89. new york: routledge, 2021. nance, susan. entertaining elephants: animal agency and the business of the american circus. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press, 2013. otter, chris. introduction to “roundtable: the anthropocene in british history.” journal of british studies 57, no. 3 (july 2018): 568–72. https://doi.org/10.1017/ jbr.2018.79. pearson, chris. “a walk in the park with timmy: history and the possibilities of companion species research.” the wild no. 1 (2009): 87–96. pearson, chris. dogopolis: how dogs and humans made modern new york, london, and paris. chicago: university of chicago press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1086/449030 https://doi.org/10.1086/449030 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413501205 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413501205 https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.12044 https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10686 https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10686 https://networks.h-net.org/node/16560/pages/32226/history-animals-erica-fudge https://networks.h-net.org/node/16560/pages/32226/history-animals-erica-fudge https://networks.h-net.org/node/16560/pages/32226/history-animals-erica-fudge https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10682 https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2018.79 https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2018.79 264 | fudge, rumination 2.0 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) philo, chris, and chris wilbert, eds. animal spaces, beastly places: new geographies of human-animal relations. london: routledge, 2000. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate: the english and other creatures in the victorian age. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1987. roy, rohan deb. “white ants, empire, and entomo-politics in south asia.” the historical journal 63, no. 2 (2020): 411–36. https://doi:10.1017/ s0018246x19000281. saha, jonathan. “accumulations and cascades: burmese elephants and the ecological impact of british imperialism.” transactions of the royal historical society (2022), 1–21. https:// doi.org/10.1017/s0080440122000044. simon, zoltán boldizsár. “why the anthropocene has no history: facing the unprecedented.” the anthropocene review 4, no. 3 (2017): 239–45. https:// doi.org/10.1177/2053019617742170. smith, mark m. “producing sense, consuming sense, making sense: perils and prospects for sensory history.” journal of social history 40, no. 4 (summer 2007): 841–58. https://doi. org/10.1353/jsh.2007.0116. specht, joshua. “animal history after its triumph: unexpected animals, evolutionary approaches, and the animal lens.” history compass 14, no. 7 (2016): 326–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12322. swart, sandra. “at the edge of the anthropocene: crossing borders in southern african environmental history.” south african historical journal 73, no. 1 (2021): 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1 080/02582473.2021.1939768. thomas, julia adeney. “history and biology in the anthropocene: problems of scale, problems of value.” the american historical review 119, no. 5 (2014): 1587–1607. https://doi. org/10.1093/ahr/119.5.1587. way, albert g., william thomas okie, reinaldo funes-monzote, susan nance, gabriel n. rosenberg, joshua specht, and sandra swart. “roundtable: animal history in a time of crisis.” agricultural history 94, no. 3 (summer 2020): 444–84. https://doi.org/10.3098/ ah.2020.094.3.444. wemelsfelder, françoise. “a science of friendly pigs … carving out a conceptual space for addressing animals as sentient beings.” in crossing boundaries: investigating humananimal relationships, edited by lynda birke and jo hockenhull, 223–50. leiden: brill, 2012. wemelsfelder, françoise, tony e.a. hunter, michael t. mendl, and alistair b. lawrence. “assessing the ‘whole animal’: a free choice profiling approach.” animal behaviour 62, no. 2 (august 2001): 209–20. https://doi. org/10.1006/anbe.2001.1741. suggested further reading brantz, dorothee, ed. beastly natures: animals, humans, and the study of history. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2010. kean, hilda and philip howell, eds. the routledge companion to animal-human history. new york: routledge, 2019. nance, susan, ed. the historical animal. syracuse, ny: syracuse university press, 2015. roscher, mieke, andré krebber, and brett mizelle, eds. handbook of historical animal studies. berlin: degruyter oldenbourg, 2021. shaw, david gary, ed. “does history need animals?” special issue, history and theory 52, no. 3 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1017/s0080440122000044 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0080440122000044 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019617742170 https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019617742170 https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2007.0116 https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2007.0116 https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12322 https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2021.1939768 https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2021.1939768 https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/119.5.1587 https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/119.5.1587 https://doi.org/10.3098/ah.2020.094.3.444 https://doi.org/10.3098/ah.2020.094.3.444 https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.2001.1741 https://doi.org/10.1006/anbe.2001.1741 boast, review of braverman animal nullius hannah boast review of: irus braverman, settling nature: the conservation regime in palestine-israel. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2023. 362 pp. 47 b&w photos. $116.00 (hb), $29.00 (pb). hannah boast is chancellor’s fellow at the university of edinburgh. email: hannah.boast@ed.ac.uk book review irus braverman’s settling nature: the conservation regime in palestine-israel is an invaluable primer on contemporary environmental issues in the region. braverman argues that nature conservation is a system through which israel enacts palestinian dispossession. nature’s invisibility as a political tool, she writes, makes it “the settler state’s strongest weapon for territorial takeover” (14). this is an important contribution to scholarship on israeli settler colonialism where, partly for the same reason, nature is under-explored. the readability of settling nature makes it an excellent introduction to the environmental dimensions of a much-studied conflict, complementing alon tal’s classic pollution in a promised land (2002) with updated examples and a sharper political lens, and providing a more systematizing approach than penny johnson’s engaging companions in conflict: animals in occupied palestine (2019). scholars in animal studies, environmental history, settler colonial studies, and political ecology will recognize the resonances between israeli environmental practice and settler colonies elsewhere, which braverman explicitly invokes. settling nature will find a home on undergraduate and graduate courses on animals and environment, enabling comparative study of a region that confronts us with stark and ongoing illustrations of the inextricable relationship between conservation and colonialism. braverman has established herself as a key figure in animal studies through works including zooland: the institution of captivity (redwood city: stanford university press, 2013), which considers the recent self-fashioning of zoos as institutions concerned not with exhibiting animals, but saving them. her newer works, such as coral whisperers: scientists on the brink (2018) and blue legalities: the life and law of the sea (2020, co-edited with elizabeth r. johnson) examine issues in marine conservation. in settling nature, braverman returns to the topic of her first book, planted flags: trees, land, and law in israel/palestine (2009). planted flags examined the politics of tree-planting, particularly the pine and the olive, which have totemic roles in israeli and palestinian environmental imaginaries. settling nature collects some of braverman’s recent essays on environmental politics in palestine-israel, the term she now prefers for its copyright © 2023 hannah boast this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 399–407. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.16417 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.16417 boast, review of braverman | 401 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) capacity to indicate one conjoined political and geographical unit (on which, more below). these essays are revised alongside previously unpublished work to produce a hyper-contemporary book with an eye on longer historical contexts. settling nature is home territory for braverman in another sense. israeli by birth and now living in the united states, braverman includes personal insights from her childhood and compulsory army service in the israel defence forces (idf). it was in israel that she began to understand that the landscape she had “previously perceived as a neutral backdrop to my life course, was in fact actively produced, idealized, and normalized” (ix). she reflects on her time as a nature educator to idf recruits: “not only was i being indoctrinated but i was also indoctrinating others to the value of nature and to its powerful connection with the jewish people” (xi). these insights into the political valences of nature underlie her wider work. in settling nature they inform her concept of “settler ecologies”. this term indicates the manifold and contradictory imaginaries and practices that shape israeli relations with and actions towards nonhuman nature. readers might question the need for another term alongside “environmental colonialism”, “green militarism”, “ecological imperialism”, and so on. is this braverman’s own planted flag? after initial scepticism, i found myself ultimately persuaded. settler ecologies captures the common thread across different zionist environmental imaginaries that have prevailed over time yet achieve similar ends. the capacious notion of “ecologies” unites the imaginary, material and scientific features of zionist environmental thought and practice, highlighting their pervasive structural force. braverman is a legal ethnographer and her primary method is interviews with scientific and conservation elites. in settling nature, her interlocutors are officials from the israel nature and parks authority (inpa), a state agency to which she has privileged access as an israeli who previously worked with the country’s conservation establishment. braverman analyses two facets of nature protection in palestine-israel — nature reserves and legal protections of particular species — using a biopolitical framework that will be familiar humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 402 | boast, review of braverman to readers of her work. israel’s conservation laws are strong, with twenty-five percent of the country designated as nature reserve or national park (2) and wild animals “legally protected unless stated otherwise” (8). settling nature alternates between these topics to produce a total picture of an israeli “conservation regime” that functionally erases the green line, the internationally recognized 1949 armistice line which served as israel’s border until its territorial encroachments of the 1967 war. while this claim may not seem controversial to those less familiar with regional debates, braverman’s analysis, as she notes, places her in an unusual political space occupied by the far right and far left (11). in mainstream israeli and international understanding, palestine-israel comprises two spaces: israel, a democracy governed by law, and the occupied territories, an extra-legal space whose status is endlessly deferred to future negotiations. by contrast, braverman turns to conservation law in order to argue that palestinians and israelis live under a single regime. though she characteristically and perhaps wisely refrains from spelling out the implications, this aligns her work with a growing trend in academia and activism towards viewing israel as an apartheid state. settling nature combines political acuity with rich detail. it covers “vultures, goats, fallow deer, goldfinches, gazelles, wild asses, camels, boars, cows, olive trees, and za’atar and akkoub” (xiii). the latter two are wild plants favoured in palestinian cuisine that have become potent national symbols, in part because of israel’s criminalization of palestinian foraging. braverman examines landscapes including the negev/naqab desert, the galilee, east jerusalem, and the west bank, analysing “green grabbing”, the theft of territory, and what she terms “blue grabbing”, the settler theft of palestinian springs. braverman considers legal cases against palestinian, bedouin, and druze defendants accused of encroaching on wild nature for practicing traditional lifeways; environmental harm caused as a result of their dispossession by israel; or building on their own land after it has been enclosed by israel within a nature reserve. these cases reveal the false separation between humans and nature on which israeli settler ecologies are premised, and the oscillation between ruthless “hyperlegalities” and “arbitrary and even boast, review of braverman | 403 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) whimsical” (174) applications of law through which israel enacts dispossession in the name of nature. they also offer an unusual take on israeli “lawfare”, though this is not braverman’s focus.1 crucially, these case studies demonstrate the persistent dignity of palestinians in the face of israel’s violent conservation regime. animal studies scholars will notice from the above that injustice against humans is a core preoccupation for braverman, and as she is aware, this is not a text significantly concerned with animal agency. in my view this is appropriate to the subject, and what braverman’s work loses in attention to posthumanist or multispecies thought, it gains in lucidity and ethical credibility. braverman is conscious of the role of culture in shaping environmental attitudes, policy and management, something which remains rare in political ecology. following palestinian scholar edward said, braverman knows that a compelling story underlies every powerful territorial claim, and that a landscape must be rescripted in the imagination before being remade in practice (62). she references sources including founder of political zionism theodor herzl’s 1902 utopian novel altneuland, canonical israeli and palestinian poets yehuda amichai and mahmoud darwish, mark chagall’s paintings, and the wanted 18, a 2014 film which records palestinian efforts to smuggle cows into the west bank during the first intifada. literary scholars will be interested to see braverman’s references to amitav ghosh, whose the nutmeg’s curse (2021) provides a touchstone for her readings of the environmental impacts of colonialism. critic rob nixon also appears, not for his relevant if overused concept of slow violence, but his earlier insights as a south african compelled to perceive the flora and fauna of his homeland anew in the light of a developing political consciousness. braverman’s cultural references, if always brief, illuminate her account of israeli and palestinian efforts to associate themselves and each other with different animals and plants. in one remarkable example, braverman describes israel’s reintroductions of the 1 eyal weizman, the least of all possible evils: humanitarian violence from arendt to gaza (london: verso, 2011); craig jones, the war lawyers: the united states, israel, and juridical warfare (oxford: oxford university press, 2020). humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 404 | boast, review of braverman supposed fauna of the bible. a retirement project of former 1948 war general avraham yoffe, the project began with the illegal smuggling of fallow deer on the last el al flight out of tehran in 1978 (58). this animal “return” helped naturalize the jewish return to palestine-israel and erase the intervening palestinian history, much like israel’s often dubious biblical archaeology projects (braverman discusses both in chapter three). this seemingly incongruous proximity between militarism and environmentalism is typical, braverman shows, of the fluid interchange between military institutions and personnel in israel (and, as rosaleen duffy writes, of militarized conservation elsewhere).2 a key body is the inpa’s paramilitary arm, the green patrol, also established by yoffe. notorious for its evictions of bedouin in the negev/naqab, the green patrol enacts a range of extreme and illegal tactics in the name of the “protection of national lands” (46) while allowing the inpa to remain at one remove from this violence. braverman also discusses the green claims of the idf, which are undermined by the environmental impacts of its actual practices (20). in this way her work aligns with a growing area of research on environmental impacts of war.3 yet settling nature is not just a simplistic argument about greenwashing. braverman’s concern is not to catch israeli agencies out for past mistakes or portray israeli conservation as a colonial front. instead, she shows that colonialism and environmentalism have always been deeply, troublingly intertwined. braverman’s interlocutors repeatedly describe israel as a defender of the universal cause of nature, even making bizarre claims that animals try to stay within israel’s borders. this reflects a wider national and international perception of israel as uniquely committed to the environment, which she defines as “ecological exceptionalism” 2 rosaleen duffy, security and conservation: the politics of the illegal wildlife trade (new haven, ct: yale university press, 2022). 3 see benjamin neimark, oliver belcher, patrick bigger, “us military is a bigger polluter than as many as 140 countries — shrinking this war machine is a must”, the conversation, 24 june 2019, https://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter-thanas-many-as-140-countries-shrinking-this-war-machine-is-a-must-119269; mark griffiths, “the geontological time-spaces of late modern war”, progress in human geography 46, no. 2 (2021), 282–98; and the work of conflict and environment observatory (ceobs). this topic has received wider attention since russia’s 2022 invasion of ukraine. https://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter-than-as-many-as-140-countries-shrinking-this-war-machine-is-a-must-119269 https://theconversation.com/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter-than-as-many-as-140-countries-shrinking-this-war-machine-is-a-must-119269 boast, review of braverman | 405 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) (81). braverman shows that these perceptions are part of a binary and mutually reinforcing israeli environmental schema that positions israelis and palestinians as diametrically opposed. projects like biblical reintroductions associate israel with “wild” animals like the fallow deer and gazelle, reinforcing its environmentalist image. palestinians are associated with “problem” species like black goats, jackals, and feral dogs, and viewed as responsible for the environmental decline early zionist settlers perceived on their arrival in palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. leaders like david ben-gurion, chaim weizmann, and yosef weitz saw palestine as a terra nullius that could only be redeemed by european and american technology paired with jewish labour, in a vision inspired by european colonial projects. braverman adds the notion of “animal nullius” (169), highlighting the zionist perception of palestine as empty not only of humans, but of wild animals. restoring animals thus became part of restoring the land to its rightful jewish owners. similarly, israeli care for animals is positioned by braverman’s present-day speakers in opposition to palestinian cruelty. love of animals becomes part of a justification for israeli sovereignty that disregards palestinian ecologies. to say that israelis and palestinians have been associated with particular species is not to say these attachments are fixed. braverman identifies intriguing moments at which affiliations have changed or been claimed by both sides, as she did for the olive tree in planted flags. in chapter four, she documents the story of the black goat, once seen by british and israeli rulers as a primary cause of desertification enabled by palestinian overgrazing, now understood as a valuable part of the mediterranean ecosystem. while the state once persecuted goat herders, inpa buys goats and trains druze shepherds in how to manage them. if this might seem like a renewed appreciation for palestinian farming, it is only on israeli terms, in which israel is the ultimate arbiter of environmental knowledge. in this sense, braverman astutely argues, practicing palestinian traditions becomes a form of self-dispossession that reaffirms jewish land ownership and nativeness (119). humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 406 | boast, review of braverman these moments nevertheless suggest fractures at which alternative ecologies might emerge, and indeed braverman notes that a central aspiration of her project is to reveal “decolonized” or “unsettled” ecologies. yet her examples are few and she never seems entirely convinced by her own arguments, inadvertently indicating the limitations of these terms. the primary example, to which she returns in the conclusion, is her own intervention to persuade palestinian zoologist mazin qumsiyeh to accept help from an israeli veterinarian in saving two poisoned golden eagles, against qumsiyeh’s objection to working with his colonizer (240–241, 265– 6). braverman is reflective and i sympathize with her desire to save the eagles, yet i found this story discomfiting rather than optimistic. braverman’s reliance on timothy morton’s remarks about coexistence in her conclusion also felt incongruous. the evidence presented up to this point seemed precisely to highlight the inadequacy and simplification of morton’s theorizing, and in turn, the failure of the environmental humanities to thoroughly reckon with power — as braverman so brilliantly does. braverman’s final photo caption, which cites a wry line from mahmoud darwish on the merits of the donkey as a figure of stoic resistance, felt more promising (266). yet exactly how the donkey might contribute to undoing settler ecologies remains unclear. as an israeli anthropologist alert to her positionality, braverman is reluctant to comment closely on palestinian practices, while her method of interviews would present practical issues. nevertheless, i suspect that greater attention to palestinian environmentalism might generate the “decolonization” of settler ecologies she wishes to see. this might include the efforts to reclaim native plants (159) and consolidate palestinian ownership of springs through picnics that braverman touches on (196), or art initiatives like vivien sansour’s palestine heirloom seed library and the sakiya collective. in spite of these criticisms, settling nature is an important intervention that foregrounds palestine-israel as a crucial context for animal boast, review of braverman | 407 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) studies. introducing the notion of settler ecologies,4 it offers a wealth of examples that show how conservation law enables israeli settler colonialism. settling nature arrives amid an emerging field of research on animals and environment in palestine-israel.5 as such, it heralds the arrival of a new and vital cross-pollination between political ecology and environmental humanities. 4 charis enns and brock bersaglio settler ecologies: the enduring nature of settler colonialism in kenya (toronto: university of toronto press, forthcoming). 5 see irus braverman, ed., “environmental justice, settler colonialism, and more-thanhumans in the occupied west bank”, spec. issue, environment and planning e: nature and space 4, no. 1 (2021); tamar novick, milk and honey: technologies of plenty in the making of a holy land (cambridge, ma: mit press, forthcoming); sophia stamatopolou-robbins, waste siege: the life of infrastructure in palestine (stanford, ca: stanford university press, 2019). microsoft word pmla h u m a n i m a l i a 1:2 joan gordon animal or animality? pmla, vol. 124, no. 2, march 2009 — special section on animal studies the march 2009 pmla (publications of the modern language association) devotes over 100 pages to the convergence of animal studies and literature. just as the may 2004 issue that devoted itself to the “special topic: ‘science fiction and literary studies: the next millennium’” marked a certain juncture at which the grand old dame of american literary scholarship nodded in recognition of sf, so too does the issue under review here acknowledge her approval of this growing field of study. there are differences, of course. the sf issue was devoted entirely to its “special topic,” while in the present issue “theories and methodologies: animal studies” must share room with a “victorian cluster,” and another “theories and methodologies: medieval studies in the twentyfirst century.” if typeface is any indication, clusters and special topics, which are capitalized, are more significant than theories and methodologies, which are not. apparently, then, the field of animal studies and literature has not yet received full approval of this particular arbiter: certainly, it has not yet had time to develop such a vast repository of criticism as sf had before receiving its nod. on the other hand, the special issue on science fiction, “coordinated” by marleen s. barr and carl freedman, was not so successful as its luminary line-up of contributors might promise, and its cover, which included an actual bug-eyed monster, did nothing to advance sf’s seriousness of purpose in academe. the relatively modest offering on animal studies offers more rigorous thinking, on the whole, and has a perfectly splendid cover, in the form of a detail of an “ex libris” from 1407, lush with animal imagery. the parts of the issue devoted to animal studies consist of a guest column at the front of the journal by marianne dekoven called “why animals now,” then the “theories and methodologies” section of 103 pages with twelve relatively short articles (all under 10 pages in length), followed by an article by cary wolfe under the heading “the changing profession” called “human, all too human: ‘animal studies’ and the humanities,” and, off in the section on medieval studies, an article by bruce holsinger, “of pigs and parchment: medieval studies and the coming of the animal.” the result is quite substantive, if slightly mysterious. was there a guest editor? is there a particular rubric for “theories and methodologies”? are they somehow different from “clusters” or “special topics”? 139 joan gordon – animal or animality? marianne dekoven’s introductory column on “why animals now?” begins with a gloss of myrtle’s puppy in the great gatsby (1925) and then points out quite sensibly that “all literary representations of animals no more form a unified or even meaningful category than do those of women or the working class” (363). she sees “most work in animal studies” as “motivated either by direct advocacy for animals or by the connection of animals with other subjects of political advocacy” (367). she, as do several other contributors, introduces the question of terminology—is it “animal studies” or “animality studies?” in an endnote, she differentiates the two terms, so that “animal studies” is more concerned with “animal advocacy and ... the human-animal relation” and “animality studies” is the practice of “theorists of the posthuman, who want to move beyond the human-animal distinction” (368). maybe. the first of the articles under the “theories and methodologies” heading is the compact and elegantly reasoned “the eight animals in shakespeare: or, before the human” by laurie shannon. its subject is not the animals in shakespeare but the significance of how seldom the word “animal” occurs in shakespeare. while that word only occurs eight times, “beast” occurs 141 times and “creature” 127 (474). the significance for her is that “animal” becomes the word of choice only after the human exceptionalism of cartesian dualism: “to put it in the broadest terms: before the cogito, there was no such thing as ‘the animal’” (474). “animal” is the word to use, then, when other species are relegated to some separate, inferior, and invisible category. nigel rothfels has written importantly about the history of zoos (savages and beasts: the birth of the modern zoo [2002]): here he gives a brief overview, concluding that “people go [to zoos] not because they fail to see the limitations of the place but because they are searching for the possibilities” (486). susan mchugh follows with an exhaustively and exhaustingly endnoted “sketch of the history of literary animal agents” (492). both of these articles will be useful for readers new to the field of animal studies but they do not offer new thinking. presumably, they were not meant to. michael lundblad’s very short “from animal to animality studies” is a plea to differentiate between the two terms that dekoven mentioned in her column, although his distinctions differ from hers: for him “animal studies” refers to advocacy discussions and “animality studies” to “work that expresses no explicit interest in advocacy” (497). the article makes frequent use of the locution “i want to...,” as in “i want to associate animal studies...” (496), “i want to argue for ‘animality studies’...” (497), “i want to identify...” (497), and “i also want to acknowledge...” (497). 140 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) unfortunately, whatever we may want, only time will tell what terminology will dominate the discussion. it may become more useful to make these differentiations, or it may become more helpful to have a term that encompasses both advocacy and thinking about animals (or creatures, for that matter). i myself want terminology that avoids separating advocacy from discipline. i want cross-fertilization and hybrid vigor rather than pure breeding. i want animal studies, apparently. a further objection for me lies in the definition of “animality” that emphasizes the separation between human and animal, as in “a quality or nature associated with animals,” including “natural unrestrained unreasoned response to physical drives or stimuli” in the first definition, and “the animal nature of human beings” in the second (merriam-webster’s online dictionary). yep, i want animal studies: we can be animals, too. ursula k. heise’s “the android and the animal” addresses what she calls “animality” studies, using, among other science fiction works, dick’s do androids dream of electric sheep (1968), tepper’s the family tree (1997), and oshii’s anime ghost in the shell 2: innocence (2004). she sees “recent science fiction” as “structurally split[ting} the figure of the alien into the android and the biologically altered, evolved, or cyborgized–animal” (504). often, she believes, science fiction “tend[s] to articulate humanist perspectives that sit uneasily with the hybrid and clearly posthuman social and biological environments they portray” (508), although she sees exceptions in both tepper and oshii, in whose works “human consciousness is not a priori set apart as unique” (509). i might add a number of other works, from le guin’s collection buffalo gals and other animal presences (1987) to karen traviss’s six-volume the wess’har wars (2004-2008) to her list of exceptions. while the number of exceptions suggests that the “humanist” generalization may not be the rule, the article was nevertheless stimulating and made good use of the ideas of barbara herrnstein smith and cary wolfe in its argument. two articles explored the use of animals in american literature: these would, i suppose, be fairly clear examples of “animality” rather than “animal” studies, if we want to make the differentiation. susan m. griffin’s “understudies: miming the human” looks at mary wilkins freeman’s collection of stories about animals and flowers as asking the question “who are the understudies and who are the leads—animals or humans?” (511). colleen glenney boggs examines emily dickinson’s use of animals, and claims that dickinson “locates animal presence in orthography, in writing itself” (538). both articles are clearly reasoned and convincing. una chaudhuri’s compelling argument in “‘of all nonsensical things’: performance and animal life” is that “if language is indeed a barrier [to understanding between the 141 joan gordon – animal or animality? species], then the quest for a deeper, richer mode of understanding the animality we share with nonhumans might logically lead one to the embodied arts of performance” (520). when she says, “determinedly material and immanent, performance animalizes philosophy” (522), we realize how difficult it is to separate “animal studies” from “animality studies.” indeed, since this article, and heise’s, discussed above, are both so strong, they persuade me, at least, of the hybrid vigor of a more inclusive view of the field, one in which advocacy is not hived off from other aspects of study. rosi braidotti’s “animals, anomalies, and inorganic others” also deploys hybrid vigor as she works to “deterritorialize, or nomadize, the human/animal interaction” (526), declaring that “the animal can no longer be metaphorized as other but needs to be taken on its own terms” (528). in fact, all the other articles under consideration, including the one in the section on medieval studies, have something to say about both advocacy and more literary matters, so none of them would fit the narrow field of “animality studies” as defined by dekoven and lundblad. bruce boehrer’s “animal studies and the deconstruction of character” claims that “the notion of character develops in english writing as an early effort to evade this philosophical crisis: as a means of manufacturing and perpetuating the distinction between people and animals” (543). he makes the elegant point that “the study of rhetoric and the study of natural history, the study of people and the study of animals, emerge as parallel expressions of the same taxonomic impulse” (544). kimberly w. benston’s “experimenting at the threshold: sacrifice, anthropomorphism, and the aims of (critical) animal studies” uses wells’s the island of dr. moreau (1886) to develop her argument that “cultural animal studies [another variation in the terminology] becomes a project capable of identifying the conceptual machinery manufacturing our contradictory relations to animals” (551). neel ahuja reminds us, in “postcolonial critique in a multispecies world,” that although “histories of race and empire have shaped the field imaginary of species studies [yet another entry in the terminology contest] from its inception” (556), they are not the same: “if we are to take seriously nonhuman performance and representation, we must acknowledge the monkey’s own gaze” (560). the article in medieval studies, “of pigs and parchment: medieval studies and the coming of the animal” by bruce holsinger, looks at the phenomenon of animal trials that extended well beyond the medieval era and reminds us that medieval texts were written on parchment, the skins of pigs, concluding that “the animal’s mec, its ‘me,’ holds up an ethical mirror to the centuries of slaughter that gave us a millennium of medieval writing” (622, emphasis in original). 142 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) under the heading “the changing profession,” cary wolfe offers a valuable overview of the field of animal studies. he reminds us that the idea of the animal as separate from human “is better seen as marking a brief period ... bookended by a preand posthumanism that think the human/animal distinction quite otherwise” (564). he goes on to summarize major events, works, journals, and so on, in the fast-growing (and broadly understood) field. he warns us against turning animal studies, a term that aligns it too closely, he believes, to cultural studies, into a branch of humanism by making it a site for “the sort of ‘pluralism’ that extends the sphere of consideration (intellectual or ethical) to previously marginalized groups without in the least destabilizing or throwing into question the schema of the human who undertakes such pluralization” (568). this point extends nicely from ahuja’s acknowledgment of the monkey’s gaze. wolfe’s summary of animal studies provides both a helpful introduction to newcomers and thoughtful insights for those familiar with the field, along with an extensive and useful works cited. this special issue of pmla provides, then, a helpful introduction to animal studies for scholars who want to use its theories and methodologies for their investigation of literature, and some thoughtful insights for people on both sides of the animal studies/literary criticism equation. like most issues of pmla, it suffers from some very dry, dense, and dull prose in places, but it is a genuine contribution to our field. for readers who would like a livelier, though still academic, introduction, however, i would direct them to the 23 october 2009 issue of the chronicle review. there one finds four articles under the heading “confronting the animal.” first is an overview of the field by jennifer howard called “creature consciousness.” next is a short article on morality in animals, “moral in tooth and claw” by jessica pierce and marc bekoff. jeffrey j. williams provides a sketch of donna haraway’s work (“donna haraway’s critters”), and the section concludes with a review by eric banks of the animal series from reaktion books. no new insights here, nor does the chronicle introduction provide a huge range of sources, but it is a much more accessible introduction. it might make a suitable introduction to the pmla issue. although the exact rubric of the pmla issue remains mysterious, as does its process of selection, the section on animal studies and literature nevertheless serves both literature and animal studies well. castelló, review of calarco copyright © 2025 pablo p. castelló this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2025): 258–268. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 in pursuit of animal justice pablo p. castelló review of: matthew calarco, the three ethologies: a positive vision for rebuilding human–animal relationships. animal lives. chicago: university of chicago press, 2024. 135 pp. $24.00 (pb). pablo p. castelló is a research fellow at the animal law and policy program at harvard law school. email: castellopablop@gmail.com book review http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 mailto:castellopablop@gmail.com matthew calarco’s the three ethologies offers a new vision for human–animal relationships. one of the key aims of this book is to provide both a novel conception of what it means to lead a good life and, importantly, how to live it. in other words, calarco’s book gives readers not only a normative compass by which to make moral judgements and decisions, but also practical tools to lead just lives and become the kinds of subjects who can pursue such lives. the three ethologies is a must-read for anyone interested in questions related to what it means to forge just and good human–animal relationships. calarco’s main argument is that leading these kinds of lives requires undertaking ethology at three levels: mental, social, and environmental. the term “ethology”, and especially what calarco conceives as ethological practice — decisively influenced by the greek notion of askesis [ἄσκησις], or disciplined practice — plays a pivotal role in the book. its etymology combines the greek words ethos [ἦθος] and logos [λόγος]. where the latter denotes “the study of”, the former points in three directions: “the formed character or habituated dispositions of an individual”; the “shared practices and relations that constitute a given social order”; and finally, the “dwelling places of animals and human beings” (5). from this, calarco derives his three ethologies, and divides the book’s chapters up accordingly. in what follows, i begin by summarizing the three central chapters of the three ethologies in order to extract how the book can help us to become more animal-oriented subjects. i suggest that it pushes us to develop an attunement to the social and environmental relations that constitute the fabric of our human–animal socio-political lives. i then provide a modest correction of calarco’s reading of the literature regarding social ethology. i conclude by discussing a crucial notion of calarco’s philosophy that brings the three ethologies together: syn-theoria, or seeing-with others. copyright © 2025 pablo p. castelló this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 2 (2025): 257–268. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.22629 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.22629 castelló, review of calarco | 259 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) mental ethology calarco’s first chapter meticulously analyses joe hutto’s seven-year study of mule-deers in wyoming.1 one of this chapter’s most important contributions is its ability to bring forth practical and methodological tools for turning anthropocentric human subjectivities into more animal-like subjectivities. this means that, as most humans are not subjectively equipped to understand nonhuman animals’ own points of views, their voices, and forms of life, a process of resubjectification is necessary to attend to animals’ lives. to grasp the significance of calarco’s intervention, we need to first learn about hutto’s remarkable research and how he conducted it. hutto did not move to a ranch in the american west intending to conduct an ethological study. he saw himself as a land manager, a meat eater, and a hunter. yet things would change when a doe started appearing at his kitchen window. soon after this first visit, the doe — who hutto and his partner, leslye, would come to call rayme — returned every afternoon with her family members. hutto describes how rayme sought them out, was curious about them, and tried to be close to them. encounters of this kind continued to occur for about two years. one day, one of the deers, whom they called raggedy ann, began to trust hutto completely, effectively accepting him as a member of the deer herd. as calarco recounts the story: “[hutto] describes this as a ‘profound’ and ‘amazing’ moment in which raggedy ann’s body relaxed, her eyes softened, and she walked straight up and touched him” (17). calarco identifies in hutto’s predisposition to be led by the deers a key aspect of the three ethologies’ methodology. hutto carefully observed deers’ behaviour, their movements, vocal communications, and gestures, learning how to behave in a more deer-like manner. moreover, he met the deers in their home, in their territory, and on their terms. by assimilating himself to mule deer behaviour, hutto 1 i speak of “mule deers” because, as jonathan balcombe argues in relation to fishes (as opposed to fish), the term “mule deer” masks the idea that mule deers are individuals. see jonathan balcombe, what a fish knows: the inner lives of our underwater cousins (london: oneworld publications, 2017). humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 260 | castelló, review of calarco began to move in a “gentler, humbler, more patient” manner, for “[a] r rogance or swagger” was simply intolerable in the herd (19). by becoming a member of the herd, hutto learned to see each deer “as a distinct individual, with its own body markings, disposition, and personality” (17). his attentiveness to each deer’s uniqueness enables him to forge different relationships with those members of the herd who wish to interact with him, for hutto respects the deers’ agency and does not interact with those who do not eagerly seek to interact with him. these profound relationships enable him to “get a feel for the lived experience of the deer themselves” (19). hutto’s ethological practice can serve as an example for ethnographers, ethologists, and philosophers of ethology of how to conduct ethically good research. yet calarco also points out that hutto’s humble disposition and openness to change enabled a process of subjective transformation that would have profound normative and practical consequences. when one of the deers passed away, for instance, hutto experienced this loss as “not just akin to the death of a family member” but rather as “the death of a family member. and when the herd is in the crosshairs of a gunsight, hutto sees it not from the perspective of the human hunter but from the perspective of the deer who are under threat” (21). all of this matters because, as calarco argues elsewhere, most humans’ subjectivities are anthropocentric.2 hutto’s ethology, however, illustrates how such anthropocentric subjectivities can change. indeed, what calarco takes from hutto’s ethology is that good human–animal relationships emerge as processes of resubjectification that not only expand our understanding of who belongs to our families, but also open us to reconsidering to which families we belong. environmental ethology calarco begins the second chapter by turning to linda hogan’s poetry. the aim of this chapter is to explore the concept of land, and 2 see matthew calarco, thinking through animals: identity, difference, indistinction (stanford: stanford university press, 2015) and the boundaries of human nature: the philosophical animal from plato to haraway (cambridge: cambridge university press, 2021). castelló, review of calarco | 261 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) how our animal relations and existence are inextricably tied to it. to do this, calarco draws on indigenous scholarship. more specifically, he explores hogan’s the radiant lives of animals in order to illuminate how human–animal relationships might be grounded not on mastery but a “kind of deep seeing in which we gradually catch fuller sight of the underlying fabric of our surrounding world and the patterns and connections that bind and loosen relations” (73). here, calarco argues that an environmental ethology entails developing an ethical sensibility that acknowledges the historical colonization of most land, as well as “coming to grips with the colonial wound” (97). calarco’s analysis finds two reasons that explain why animal ethics and animal studies scholarship have not been sufficiently attentive to addressing colonialism and its impact on both human and nonhuman peoples. first, his diagnosis identifies a “methodological individualism” that prioritizes the welfare of individual animals, placing environmental concerns on a secondary plane. second, when pro-animal scholars seek to address environmental problems for animals, they usually focus on “intentionalism”, a term calarco uses to refer to “people’s intentions when making decisions” (93). he suggests that this is a problem because environmental harms are often the result of “indirect and unintentional acts” and “the beings or systems suffering harm can be challenging to delimit and are often transindividual” (93). for this reason, he proposes that a more systemic and structural approach is needed. thus, calarco perceptively draws attention to how climate change, colonization, and the destruction of our human and nonhuman environments are co-constituted. for example, calarco notes the west’s tendency to dominate other life forms has had a profound impact on wild animal habitats and our shared planet more generally. oceans have been progressively acidified, which impacts trophic chains. a significant number of animals are forced to migrate due to rapid shifts in the climate and food availability, which leads many of them to encounter new predators and diseases. this has led, and is going to lead, to the death and extinction of countless animals and animal species. humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 262 | castelló, review of calarco in a more positive and affirmative tone, an environmental ethology involves putting land at the centre. following glen sean coulthard (yellowknives dene), calarco conceives land not as “an object to be owned but [as] a complex field of relations and processes by which a people is formed and sustained” (85). land includes both the physical area usually associated with the notion of land, as well as “people and animals, rocks and trees, lakes and rivers, and so on”.3 calarco advises his readers to be cautious and not to confuse this list with the full apprehension of what land means, for “the key ontological category in considering this indigenous conception of land is relation” (85–86). this means that attending to the land involves paying attention to the relations that form specific territories, “the complex web of individual and extra-individual forces, systems, and assemblages that constitute the world of a given people or community” (86). note that calarco’s emphasis on the notion of relation goes beyond the kinds of individualist frameworks that have characterized much animal studies and animal rights scholarship, aligning instead with ecofeminist and indigenous scholars who have long argued for relational ontological frameworks.4 this chapter also leaves us with a set of questions for further reflection that speak to both the work of animal rights theorists as well as animal activists: “how might animal studies be transformed if it took on board this sort of vision of being responsible to the land? what kind of questions would come to the fore? how might current campaigns and struggles at the heart of the animal rights movement be reassessed and reconfigured?” (89) social ethology calarco begins his third chapter by describing his encounter with an american crow. as calarco routinely put out water for squirrels every morning, he began to realize that he was being watched by a group of crows. one of the crows would follow his movements 3 glen sean coulthard, red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2014), 61. 4 see val plumwood, feminism and the mastery of nature (london: routledge, 1993); margaret robinson, “veganism and mi’kmaq legends”, canadian journal of native studies 33, no. 1 (2013): 189–96; and lori gruen, entangled empathy: an alternative ethic for our relationships with animals (new york: lantern books, 2015). castelló, review of calarco | 263 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) intently, flying closer to him “than other birds dared to, and seeming to find [him] and [his] family of great interest” (41). calarco and his family reciprocated and started to observe the crow with similar interest. they named the crow patches due to his singular white markings. one day, patches did something that none of the other birds had done before. he perched on the porch railing of calarco’s home, which, calarco explains, is a “vulnerable place for a large bird, since it is just a few feet from [their] living room window and the front door” (42). calarco and his family thought that perhaps patches was thirsty. but as the water bowl remained full, it then occurred to them that perhaps he was hungry. or, because it was nesting season, perhaps patches’s mate and nestlings were in need of food. they “put some peanuts out beyond the porch and waited to see what would happen” (42). patches did not eat the nuts but, rather, took a fair number of them in his beak and left. patches, along with calarco and his family, established this new routine that patches had requested. calarco and his family tracked patches and found out that he was “indeed feeding a mate and nestlings high in a pine tree about fifty yards from [their] house” (42). after a few weeks, patches, his mate, and the nestlings showed up in front of calarco’s home. the nestlings grew up and other crows joined the family to form a murder of seven crows or so. it quickly became part of their social lives — the crows, calarco and his family — to engage with each other. patches requests food every day by perching on the porch railing; calarco and his family gladly acquiesce to these requests. the crows also care for calarco and his family by telling them, for example, when a coyote is close to their home. further, patches “occasionally leaves small items — gifts, perhaps — on [their] porch” (43). calarco explains that for him and his family: “these crows are now kin; they play a prominent role in our lives, as we do in theirs” (43). for calarco, this opening vignette exemplifies the ways that human and nonhuman animals are socially entangled. a few aspects of this encounter resonate with calarco’s previous work, where he humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 264 | castelló, review of calarco impels readers to be “like” animals.5 the way this story begins also has strong resonances with hutto’s ethological project. patches, like raggedy anne, is the one who initiates this relationship by making a request. both calarco and his family see patches as a being who deserves recognition and who is owed responsivity. in doing so, calarco and his family are displacing themselves from the centre, and creating the social conditions for patches to establish the terms of their relationship. recall that one of the meanings of ethos is “custom, in the sense of the shared practices and relations that constitute a given social order” (48). calarco’s account of social ethology shows that: at stake in the practice of social ethology […] is a reconsideration of the very nature of the social bond — a term that should be understood to include, among other links and ties, companionship, kinship, friendship, association, alliance, assemblage, family, and community — as it is enacted and transformed among animals and between and among human beings and animals. (49) calarco’s account of the social bond thus seeks to disrupt the dominant conception of social life, troubling “boundaries and fixed territorial markers such as the family unit and the state” (49). in this vein, he asks a set of forward-looking questions such as: “what if, instead of taking the extant social order and its governing principles and categories largely for granted, we sought to conceive of the social bond as something that is inherently open-ended — as something that emerges in and through experimenting with new relations that undo old configurations and open up different potentials and possibilities?” (50). a modest correction before concluding, i offer one modest correction to the reading of the literature on social ethology presented in the three ethologies. i do so because i believe critical theorists and critical animal studies scholars are sometimes biased against work framed as “liberal”. 5 calarco, thinking through animals. castelló, review of calarco | 265 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) by dismissing the work of certain liberal theorists, the critical traditions are missing a great opportunity to learn with and from liberal authors who have made crucial contributions to understand the political and normative import of agency, community, and the strong attachments of animals to their territories. to be more specific, the conceptualization of social ethology in the three ethologies engages the political turn, which is a subfield of animal rights theory seeking to build just political institutions and processes for human and nonhuman animals alike.6 sue donaldson and will kymlicka’s zoopolis has been pivotal in shaping the political turn, which calarco’s book (55–59) engages at some length. donaldson and kymlicka argue that domesticated animals should have citizenship rights because they are members of human–animal mixed communities: they contribute to reproducing the socio-political fabric of political communities through their emotional support, forced labour, and by complying with social norms. zoopolis’s differentiated theory of animal rights also contends that wild animal peoples should have a collective right to self-determination because wild animal communities have their own forms of social organization, cultures, and are attached to their familiar territories. the reading we get in the three ethologies of donaldson and kymlicka’s work suggests that zoopolis offers crucial ideas for making “thoroughgoing changes to a wide range of structures and institutions” (57). however, calarco also depicts donaldson and kymlicka’s work as being committed to liberalism’s “emphasis on the sociopolitical significance of individuals” which “is ill-suited to deal with the complex issues that surround animal collectives and assemblages” (58). this representation of zoopolis, and liberalism more generally, is widespread within certain circles of critical animal studies, but requires revision on at least three fronts. first, by drawing on relational accounts of the self in feminist and disability studies, zoopolis conceptualizes an interdependent subject shaped by the relationships, communities, cultures, and material 6 alasdair cochrane, robert garner, and siobhan o’sullivan, “animal ethics and the political,” critical review of international social and political philosophy 21, no. 2 (2018): 261–77. humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 266 | castelló, review of calarco environments in which they are enmeshed.7 this kind of rationale has led donaldson and kymlicka in more recent work to draw on distributed accounts of agency, considering how socio-political, intersubjective, and infrastructural factors can act as a “holding environment”.8 their argument is that our holding environments can enable individuals and peoples’ agency or, they can, instead, suppress it. second, donaldson and kymlicka are likely to be the authors within animal rights theory who put more weight on the notion of community, and the importance of community to political life.9 as mentioned earlier, donaldson and kymlicka argue that one of the key rights that should be recognized for wild animals is their collective right to self-determination and sovereignty. crucially, the holder of such a right is not an individual, but a people. as donaldson and kymlicka themselves put it: “where peoples have an ‘independent existence’, ‘place value upon it’, and ‘resist’ alien rule, and where they have ‘recognisable interests’ in their ‘social organisation’, then we have the moral purposes that call for sovereignty”.10 third, calarco’s environmental ethology is, in fact, much closer to donaldson and kymlicka’s zoopolitical project than calarco himself concedes, for donaldson and kymlicka argue that the “collective forms of life [of wild animal communities are] anchored to specific territories and ecological niches”.11 they also demonstrate “how the social and material context holds [animal] people’s identities and subjectivities” and how wild animal territories act as “the durable repositories of collective identities and aspirations,” reminding 7 sue donaldson and will kymlicka, zoopolis: a political theory of animal rights (oxford: oxford university press, 2011), 83–84. 8 donaldson and kymlicka, “doing politics with animals”, social research: an international quarterly 90, no. 4 (2023): 621–47 (639). 9 see their extensive discussion on this point beyond zoopolis: sue donaldson and will kymlicka, “interspecies politics: reply to hinchcliffe and ladwig,” the journal of political philosophy, 23, no. 3 (2015): 321–44; charlotte blattner, sue donaldson, and ryan wilcox, “animal agency in community: a political multispecies ethnography of vine sanctuary,” politics and animals 6 (2020): 1–22; sue donaldson, “animal agora: animal citizens and the democratic challenge,” social theory and practice 46, no. 4 (2020): 709–35; and donaldson and kymlicka, “doing politics”. 10 donaldson and kymlicka, zoopolis, 173. 11 donaldson and kymlicka, “interspecies politics”, 335. castelló, review of calarco | 267 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) “individuals who they are and how they belong together”.12 all of this is to say that donaldson and kymlicka’s liberal work is not solely individualist; it also illuminates the normative significance of the relational and communal aspects of animals’ lives, how wild animal communities’ identities and sense of belonging are attached to their territories, and how their territories act as holding environments.13 accounts of social ethology such as calarco’s fail to incorporate the important political and collective dimensions of animal life advanced by authors like donaldson and kymlicka. it is my contention that the dominant reading of donaldson and kymlicka’s work in certain circles of critical animal studies should be corrected. otherwise, the field will miss the opportunity to enrich itself from projects that have made valuable contributions. conclusion: toward seeing-with others the three ethologies’ intervention in the literature is of paramount importance, as it provides fundamental conceptual and practical tools to forge good and just human–animal relationships. calarco masterfully reads a wide range of texts — from hutto’s ethological study of a mule deer herd in wyoming to hogan’s poetry and ancient greek philosophy — to engage in what he describes as “deep ethological practices” (107). calarco’s perceptive book is not, or not only, a theoretical text for philosophers to contemplate while sitting on their armchairs at home; the three ethologies captures a way of life grounded on “the practical ideal” that calarco calls “syn-theoria, or seeing-with others” (108). seeing-with other animals is imbued with “an affirmative passion” that seeks to behold the world and see it “with fresh eyes — an activity the ancients called theoria” (108). there are two main differences between the ancients’ theoria [θεωρία], understood as a way of seeing, and calarco’s. first, in contrast to greek philosophers such 12 donaldson and kymlicka, “doing politics”, 639–640. 13 for an example of how donaldson and kymlicka’s work can illuminate the social lives of animals, see pablo p. castelló, “the fabric of zoodemocracy: a systemic approach to deliberative zoodemocracy,” critical review of international social and political philosophy (2025): 1–26. humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 268 | castelló, review of calarco as aristotle, calarco insightfully argues that “the ideal of syn-theoria animating the three ethologies presumes that animals themselves theorize” (110). this means that “animals behold the world in modes specific to their subjectivities and communities, and that they do so in ways that are worth trying to understand, respect, and even inhabit” (110). second, for the ancients, theoria was a self-sufficient activity practised by individuals. for calarco, by contrast, syn-theoria is relational at its core and impels us to see communally, “with and through others” (111). recall here, for example, how hutto was accepted by the mule deer herd and how his subjectivity was transformed by seeing with and through the deers. in closing, calarco acknowledges that syn-theoria does not, and cannot, promise happiness and flourishing; neither in the sense of the ancient greeks, nor in the sense of more modern conceptions of happiness, such as that of utilitarianism. instead, practising the three ethologies with other animals is a dangerous risk because “the world is not constituted to ensure the happiness and flourishing of either animals or human beings — a point that holds true in any age, but especially in ours, characterized as it is by widespread and rapid degradation of living conditions across several registers” (116– 117). this means that seeing-with other animals and being attuned to their ways of life is likely to also make us more attentive to the ways they grieve, suffer, and experience the loss of their territories, habitats, and cultures. calarco’s book does not hide away from the dire reality of our epoch. instead, it calls us to face it, “to risk everything”, to be exposed to both “the very worst and the very best”, and to do our best to lead a good life (116). the three ethologies does this because it is not written for those who seek to lead a happy life. no, the three ethologies is a book written “for those of us desiring to pursue a worthwhile life (and death) with animals in the age we find ourselves in, few other paths remain open” (116). microsoft word borrell pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:1 sally borrell still life/nature morte carol freeman, paper tiger: a visual history of the thylacine. human-animal studies series. leiden and boston: brill, 2010. xiv + 287pp. €90, $128 pb. in 1936, the last captive thylacine or tasmanian tiger died in beaumaris zoo, its species dramatically depleted since the european settlement of australia. there has been no conclusive proof of the species’ survival in the wild and it is now considered extinct. however, even during their existence, thylacines were the stuff of legend, and their disappearance ended neither the tales of sightings nor the scientific and popular fascination with the species. from 1999 to 2005, the australian museum even undertook an ambitious project to clone the species from preserved specimens, but this was abandoned due to the degradation of the “ancient dna” that scientists had to work with. on an historical level too, understandings of the species are hampered by incompleteness and distortion of records. zoologist eric guiler has highlighted the scapegoating of the thylacine as a sheep-killer and the unreliability of records made during successive bounties (1985, 1998). more recently, robert paddle (2000) and david owen (2003) have provided further attempts to sift fact from fiction in order to shed light on the history of thylacines. carol freeman’s paper tiger explores another dimension of the story of this lost species, showing how visual representations of thylacines reflected, contributed to and perhaps exacerbated the discourses surrounding their extinction. the first chapters explore sketches, woodcuts and lithographs produced during the nineteenth century, along with the texts that accompanied them in zoological and natural history publications. freeman shows how myths, scapegoating, tasmanian bounties, and artistic license shaped these representations of thylacines, even after live ones appeared in european zoos. comparing british and continental “imagetexts,” she argues that less sympathetic british depictions of the thylacine were more influenced by and had more influence on colonial australian perspectives. an interesting relationship between images also surfaces: a taxidermy museum specimen or a zoo sketch in an influential publication could become the source for multiple adaptations. the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s also saw the rise of a powerful association between the thylacine and european wolves, which freeman sees as significant in the quick uptake of bounty hunting. images from this period often feature gothic european wilderness, and texts emphasize sheep-killing. freeman also finds more positive “naturalistic” illustrations sally borell— still life/nature morte 109 from this time, but notes that these were not readily available to australian readers, who had far greater access to sensational newspaper illustrations. with the possible exception of these latter images, the material so far leaves one feeling thankful that photographs of thylacines also exist as a point of reference. however, the next two chapters demonstrate that photography was mediated, too, although its messages could still conflict with existing convictions about the species. pictures from a washington zoo are described as lending dignity to thylacines, whereas london examples show confined animals and accompanying texts suggesting that they deserved such treatment. however, freeman comments that there is little evidence for this in the pictures, creating a “slippage between image and text” (186). later, zoo settings were edited out and replaced with painted landscapes or erased altogether. in one striking case, freeman finds evidence that a thylacine photographed stealing a chicken was in fact a taxidermy mount. this therefore “constitutes a refusal to allow photography to change earlier perceptions” (218). the book’s final chapter brings the story of the thylacine’s depiction into the present, discussing various logos and emblems. freeman observes that while such images maintain awareness of the species, they obscure its fate by using it signify other things. she concludes that in the history of the thylacine, “the relation between images and extinction has a complex, circular effect where pictures reflected, reinforced, shaped and encouraged destructive attitudes and actions” (242). she calls for skepticism and analysis of representations of animals in general: “responsible representation … should not be an unreasonable expectation” (246). on finishing this book, the reader comes away with a sense of valuable insight into a complex and tragic history that is generally presented with admirable thoroughness. one area that might perhaps have been explored is indigenous responses to commercial thylacine imagery, something david owen discusses in his book, but aboriginal perspectives are largely outside the range of paper tiger’s inquiry. another area where there is scope for expansion is in the chapters on photography. these could have included the interesting film footage made in various zoos, which offers additional evidence of the ways in which thylacines were regarded and treated in captivity. however, while these points might have added further dimensions to the discussion, their absence certainly does not detract from a fascinating text enriched by many images. eighty illustrations punctuate the text, including twenty-one color plates. highlights include contrasting lupine and “naturalistic” versions of a pose borrowed from joseph wolf; one shows a shadowy, windswept animal that would not look out of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 110 place on the cover of a gothic novel, while the other is a lifelike engraving of thylacines in an inviting, realistic setting. the photographic images are also striking, as zoo settings appear as particularly miserable, or disappear entirely to leave the animals looking like mounted specimens, apparently motionless in the absence of space in which to move. the sheer variety of images makes them appear to represent multiple different species, and this in itself illustrates the range of different perspectives on the thylacine. overall, freeman’s take on this remarkable subject is detailed and convincing, with a good balance between close readings and discussion of their implications. her clear, accessible style makes the book a pleasure to read. in sum, paper tiger makes a valuable contribution to the understanding not only of thylacines and their extinction, but also of the impact of human constructions of other species and the ethical implications of this for animal representation. works cited guiler, eric. thylacine: the tragedy of the tasmanian tiger. oxford: oxford up, 1985. ―――, and philippe godard. tasmanian tiger: a lesson to be learnt. perth: abrolhos, 1998. owen, david. thylacine: the tragic tale of the tasmanian tiger. crows nest: allen and unwin, 2003. paddle, robert. the last tasmanian tiger. cambridge: cambridge up, 2000. motamedi fraser, review of baratay writing on the animal’s side mariam motamedi fraser review of: éric baratay, animal biographies: toward a history of individuals. translated by lindsay turner. animal voices / animal worlds. athens: university of georgia press, 2022. 240 pp. $28.95 (pb) mariam motamedi fraser is a reader in sociology at goldsmiths, university of london. email: m.motamedi-fraser@ gold.ac.uk book review mailto:m.motamedi-fraser@gold.ac.uk mailto:m.motamedi-fraser@gold.ac.uk in animal biographies: toward a history of individuals, historian éric baratay harnesses biography as form and method in order to “truly cross over to the animal’s side, overturning previous sources, discourses, and perspectives” (15). the book is comprised of a short, dense, introduction, four parts, and a conclusion. each of the parts contains at least two animal biographies, and two commentaries (one that precedes the biographies, and one that follows). the parts demonstrate what biography as a form can achieve with regard to recognizing and understanding something of an individual animal’s life, how that life is shaped by the era in which the animal lives, and by the social and cultural generations to which they belong. it is an absorbing and affecting book, politically ambitious, and empirically challenging. political, because this is what “deny[ing] or grant[ing] a history to the other” is (190); and challenging, because as lindsay turner observes in her translator’s note, “the history of animal–human relationships has been rife with misunderstandings; it is, in a way, a history of failed translation” (xv). baratay’s answer to that failure is to work harder — which means working more experimentally — at achieving the “scientific goal” (xviii) of imagining what it feels like to live an animal’s life. science, imagination, animal experience. bringing together this unlikely trio is the daunting task that baratay sets himself in this book. to be clear: there are no caveats here with regard to accessing an animal’s feelings, as one finds, for example, in andré krebber and mieke roscher’s animal biography: re-framing animal lives. where krebber and roscher propose that the aim of animal biography is “to account for [animals’] individuality without having to read their minds, reconstruct their feelings or infer their intentions”,1 baratay argues by contrast that this is precisely the aspiration: to adopt the individual animal’s “point of view” and “to understand what it lives, experiences, and feels” as such (8). he calls this process “restoring existence”. it means illustrating what the biography of an individual animal’s existence would look like when it is no longer “simply [a pretext] for talking about humans” (15), as it often is in official historical sources. 1 andré krebber and mieke roscher, eds., animal biography: re-framing animal lives (cham: palgrave macmillan, 2018), 2. copyright © 2023 mariam motamedi fraser this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 409–418. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.16417 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.16417 motamedi fraser, review of baratay | 411 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) in the first part of the book, those sources are various kinds of records pertaining to the lives of two animals: an unnamed giraffe who was gifted to king charles x from muhammad ali of egypt in 1825; and warrior, a horse whose service in world war i ensured that he became “one of the most celebrated equines of the british world” (35). both times, after reading baratay’s summaries of these animals’ lives as they are portrayed in historical documents (and, in warrior’s case, memoirs), i believed i had learned something genuine about them. both times, i was wrong. baratay’s restitution of the giraffe’s and of warrior’s experiences renders transparent the role played by official documents in erasing individual animal lives, not least by expurgating the reality of what they endure in service of more flattering portraits of their conditions, and of their relations with their human handlers: the physical and emotional constraints and coercions, the boredom, the casual disregard, the numerous implications that flow from human ignorance, incomprehensibility, and lack of compassion and empathy. it makes for grim reading. violence is laid bare here not in the abstract, or at the level of the collective, but in the concrete reality of an individual animal’s experiences. how to experience these animal experiences? key among the tools that baratay has at his disposal is writing itself, in both its linguistic and visual dimensions. with regard to the former: in a fascinating discussion (which deserves further exploration), baratay argues that language must be transformed so radically that it no longer supports the bifurcation of the world into the “human actor” on the one hand, and “the rest as object” (13) on the other. baratay’s use of the word “actor” is intriguing, because it implies that his primary goal is to identify animal agency. yet nearly all the biographies bear testimony to the fragility of the animals’ possibilities and choices in the face of the almost limitless power that humans wield over them. moreover, baratay is critical of what he describes as “the current spread of concepts of animal agents and agency forged in the anglo-american world […which] justifies the observation of interactions to see what effect animals have on humans but does not require going much further in the study of these animals” (6–7). as i understand it, “going much further” means conceiving of animals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 412 | motamedi fraser, review of baratay as individuals, persons, subjects (8) who, because they are subjects and not objects (to return to the issue of the bifurcation of nature in language), have experiences and feelings which are significant in their own right, and which actively include experiences and feelings of things being done to them. therefore, in an effort to avoid descriptions which erase the experience of the animal, baratay creates linguistic constructions “in which the animal ‘sees themselves’ or ‘feels themselves’ shot, struck, or taken, instead of ‘being’ shot, struck, or taken — the form to which we are more accustomed but which puts the human in the active tense and the animal in the passive” (13–14). both the translator and the author are sensitive, perhaps over-sensitive, to these constructions, nodding in agreement with an imaginary reader that yes, yes, this is odd indeed, odd to the eye and to the ear in the mind, but let us assure you, you will quickly become accustomed to this, will come even to appreciate it. which, in fact, i did. the technique works most powerfully in the first two parts of the book, “restoring existence” and “sensing experiences”, in which baratay helps the reader to “sense […] sensings” (54, original emphasis). this is especially important, baratay writes, because it is humans’ systematic inattention to, and even denial of, such sensings — sensings “triggered by sight, hearing, touch, and smell and expressed by quivers, sensations, images, and mental associations” (53) — that has enabled us to “treat animals however we like” (53). it is as well to be forewarned that this is so, as baratay reconstitutes the sensings of the donkey modestine over the miserable twelve days she spent with the writer robert louis stevenson, and the sensings of the bull islero, in his final deathly fight with the torero manolete. in modestine’s biography, baratay translates stevenson’s “day-by-day — even sometimes hour-by-hour” (56) account of his travels through france into a granular, exacting account of modestine’s sensings. the analysis could not be more careful, or finely wrought. baratay includes, for example, the implications, for modestine, of the gradient of the hills she has to ascend or descend — “16 percent incline, 1 km” (57, original emphasis) — while at the same time battling with her fatigue, trying to balance and rebalance the packs with which she is overloaded, struggling with the pain in her hooves and, above all, motamedi fraser, review of baratay | 413 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the torment of the streaming wounds inflicted by stevenson’s blows. modestine “concentrates on the agony of her effort” and for this reason “probably,” baratay writes, “can barely pay attention to the smell of the fresh grasses […] to the birdsongs and musical sounds rising from an open building (the church of saint-martin-de-fugères)” (58). as for the sensings of islero, this is an account of the bull’s terrifying, sickening, last minutes: … return of predator [manolete] … charging towards the widest and most agitated part, head lower and lower, heavier and heavier … passing of predator above … impossible to raise head, even horizontally, to leap in order to gore … difficult to brake, to go in the other direction … movements, automatic … several times, same thing … stop … foggy perception of uproars (79). the dots serve to break up the already short phrases that baratay deploys in order to suggest “the necessary haste of perceptions, emotions, and actions in the face of danger, but without asserting any basic mindset” (72). this then is the second dimension of writing that baratay exploits: writing in its visual, typographical, aspect, and it does a lot of work in this book. for islero’s biography, baratay weaves among these short phrases his own explanations, which appear in brackets, in a smaller and different font, as well as the reactions of the bullfighter manolete, his team, and the public, which also appear in smaller type, in block quotations. it makes for a rather intimidating page, but perhaps that is the point: the ugliness of the bullfight is deepened by the stop start stuttering contrasts (especially between islero’s and human perspectives) that are captured in the layout of the text. “readers can let themselves be carried along with islero” (72). these three words, “can let themselves”, are revealing. inadvertently, they capture the tension that lies at the heart of baratay’s biographies, and which amounts to more than a balancing act between being scientific but not reductive, imaginative but not literary, anthropomorphic without idealizing or romanticizing (13). it is the tension between baratay’s acknowledgment that any interpretation humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 414 | motamedi fraser, review of baratay is necessarily limited by embodied human subjectivity — “our gaze is partial and relative” (12) — and his critique, developed more fully elsewhere, of “a certain scholarly infatuation with cultural studies since the 1980s.”2 this infatuation has led humanities and social sciences methodologies to be reduced to “an exercise in deconstruction and close examination of social discourses” and, more urgently, to an eclipse of analyses of real animals by that of representations.3 if baratay’s readers can allow themselves to be “carried along with islero”, this is because, regardless of the very different epistemological statuses of the wide range of sources on which baratay draws,4 all are based on direct observation. hearsay is rejected (199n4). the criteria for qualification as a source, or “[w]hat is necessary,” as baratay puts it, “is human interest in real facts and gestures, human attention to them, and then representation in a way that does not completely obscure them beneath subjective interpretation” (12). to social scientists and humanities scholars who intuitively baulk at this notion of “real facts and gestures,” baratay replies: “[o]ur obvious limits must not lead to the lazy declaration that the search for exterior realities is impossible […]. our surrounding environment is not reducible to our perceptions” (12). baratay is certainly not lazy when it comes to searching for exterior realities. the stories that his sources tell are all cross-referenced with, and augmented by, further relevant information. by the “geographical guides and topographical maps” (56) of the day in the biography of modestine, for example; by physiology, neurology, and biochemistry in the biography of islero; by details of the hunting cultures of france and britain in the biography of the dog pritchard, who, in moving between them, was obliged to work out and to adapt to their different traditions and expectations. baratay also makes use of the “richest contemporary ethological knowledge or hypotheses” (12) not only to better convey to his reader what a particular individual 2 éric baratay, “building an animal history”, trans. stephanie posthumus, in french thinking about animals, ed. louisa mackenzie and stephanie posthumus (east lansing: michigan state university press, 2015), 3. 3 baratay, “animal history”, 4. 4 including literary sources, letters, correspondences, memoirs, biographies, diaries and journals, academic articles, obituaries, local papers, cartoons, photographs, and a film. motamedi fraser, review of baratay | 415 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) might have experienced in particular situation given their corporeality and capabilities — we understand, for example, the physiological and emotional misery that followed for the giraffe when her food was placed on the ground (27) — but also to question and, often, correct the interpretations and explanations of his sources. in the summer of 1915, for instance, while warrior was waiting for his owner jack seely to return, “he is shaken by the noise of a shell that has just split open the horse next to him” (45). but warrior does not run. “was this absolute serenity, as jack assumes upon his return, or was warrior rather glued in place by shock?” (46). it is a good question, and one that baratay asks several times of warrior. it stands in sharp contradistinction to both the official accounts of the time and the celebrations of warrior since, many of which have a class interest in portraying this particular horse as imperturbable. i noted earlier that baratay considers his book to be political because these biographies are histories of “the other”. but one might also identify its politics in its attention to singular individuals, which goes against the routine numbering-up of animals, and the perceived “eternality” of species. if baratay barely recognizes this, it is because he considers “the advent of the individual” in science, which he dates from the 1950s, to have “overturned existing ethology completely” (6). since i am not convinced that the individual has overturned anything much at all in science, and especially not the category of species (although their relation may be being refigured), i greatly welcomed baratay’s work in the third and fourth parts of his book, in which the empirical histories he brings to the study of individual animals offers a substantive challenge to the idea that a species of animal remains the same over time. in the third part of the book, baratay describes the era, from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, during which chimpanzees were subject to “humanization” (84) — which means “westernization” (91). he explores how this defined the lives and capabilities of consul, who lived at manchester’s belle vue zoological gardens from 1893 to 1894, and of meshie, who lived in the house (or rather, often, in a cage in the basement of the house) of the naturalist henry cushier raven from 1930 to 1934. baratay demonstrates both how overdetermined consul’s humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 416 | motamedi fraser, review of baratay and meshie’s opportunities were by this agenda, and also how they were on occasion able to overturn it, either by understanding what was required of them and exploiting it, or by trying to escape. in the fourth part of the book, baratay offers his reader a masterclass in the denaturalization of animals, by way of the historicization of dogs’ behaviours and cultures. this is necessary, because although geography — and, one might add, ecology — encourage ethologists to be attentive to how animal behaviours are influenced by environments (and vice versa), history and biography, with their temporal dimensions, are “assumed to be reserved for humans” (12). in baratay’s view, experiments in ethology, prior to the 1960s, fail to show evidence of the transformation of animal behaviours and cultures over time because they are “limited by the remoteness of the issues, and more importantly by the false certainty of fixed behaviors.”5 with regard to dogs specifically, canine scientists “quickly transformed [contemporary domestic dogs] into the universal, timeless, ‘natural’ dog.”6 i would support and extend baratay’s case here by noting, first, that when it comes to canine ethology, “usable experiments” (i.e. experiments which illustrate that behaviours are not fixed) date not to the 1960s but to the late 1990s.7 and, second, that the consequences of this lengthy omission have been exacerbated by the concentration of the major part of canine research, today, on domesticated dogs who live and / or work in the global north. what is the defining characteristic of the “timeless” dog in this majoritarian canine ethology? i have argued that it is their supposed orientation towards humans.8 although baratay never says this himself, the value of his four biographies of dogs lies precisely in their challenge to this assumption. thus, the reader can identify in baratay’s biographies a clear contrast between three late-nineteenth-century dogs (who are bummer, 5 baratay, “animal history”, 13. 6 baratay, “animal history”, 9. 7 baratay, “animal history”, 13. 8 see mariam motamedi fraser, dog politics: species stories and the animal sciences (manchester: manchester university press, 2024), especially chapters four and five. motamedi fraser, review of baratay | 417 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) lazarus, and pritchard), whose lives appear to have been more or less their own, and the lives of thomas mann’s dog, bauschan (or, in english translations, bashan; 1915–1920), and colette audry’s dog, douchka (1954–1960), whose lives depend very much on the humans with whom they cohabit. although bauschan did not exactly live with the manns, he did live in parallel with them, and experienced, according to baratay, the “reciprocal sociality” (154–55) that is often said to define dog–human relations today. thirty-five years later, that sociality has morphed into a form of life so intolerable that a dog must be drugged, as was douchka, in order to endure it. none of these generations of dogs, baratay reminds his reader, are more essential or more authentic or more real than any other (as some ecological behaviourists would claim of today’s street dogs, for example); rather, it is “a matter of adaptation” (190). or not. douchka “suffers a separation anxiety that few dogs in previous generations lived” (172). in his conclusion, which brings the book up to the present day, baratay warns that such is the fate that now threatens cats, or rather “dogcats” like jonah (2008–), who are becoming increasingly like dogs (186): jealous, lonely, anxious, stressed. so much for reciprocity. does baratay’s experiment, especially his experimental mode of writing, work? not always. one of the most jarring moments in the book for me was baratay’s description of how consul the chimpanzee “saw himself euthanized on saturday, november 24, toward the end of the afternoon, with a chloroformed handkerchief that put him to sleep and then stopped his breath” (99). perhaps death is a sensing too far. or perhaps the rendering of animal experiences into human language, and then from french into english, is a translation too far. the question “does this experiment work?” is important, though, because convincing his reader not only that these animals have points of view, but that this is what their points of view feel like, is, for baratay, an exercise in science, by which he means an exercise in clarifying, without simplifying, complexity (xviii). crossing over to the animal’s side, baratay writes, is “justified and it is scientific, in that it allows us to understand what was previously hidden, to better understand animals, and to ask new questions” (10). humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 418 | motamedi fraser, review of baratay by this definition, baratay nearly always succeeds, and in this book, “nearly” is of considerable political and ethical import. from the epigraph onwards, reservations, provisos, and qualifications with regard to the aims, methods, and achievements of animal biographies abound. why? because modesty, i think, is a necessary part of the book’s ambition (and therefore, presumably, a necessary part of its science). “there is no question that we must cross over to the animal’s side,” baratay writes, before adding, touchingly, “yet we are only humans” (9). we cannot stop being human, he acknowledges, and any access to otherness that we have, as humans, is limited. but for baratay this represents “neither an impossibility nor a reason to give up” (9). indeed most valuable about this book, or “[t]his quest” (9) as baratay puts it, is the effort itself: [the quest for animal points of view] is first and foremost an intention, a method that would help us decenter ourselves and approach the animal, demonstrating both empathy (a capacity to perceive the animal’s state) and sympathy, not foreclosing any possibility in advance. and this must all happen in the knowledge, even as we push against barriers, that actually entering different worlds remains a horizon (9). baratay’s quest, through which optimistic pragmatism runs like a silver thread, is defined by its generosity of heart and spirit. this book is an invitation to its reader to have the courage to match it. microsoft word miller pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 2:2 alyce miller just don’t call me “mom”: pros and cons of a family law model for companion animals in the u.s. at the annual veterinarian visit for my two cats and dog, i am cheerily addressed as “mom.” moments later, the vet, readying to take a routine blood sample from my dog grover, turns to reassure, “don’t worry, mom, this won’t hurt your baby.” though my unfiltered gut reaction might best be described as annoyance, i toss off a joke that any critter emerging from my body wouldn’t have four legs and fur. in other words, “just don’t call me mom.” the vet looks surprised. clearly, she’s wondering why i resist what many view as a harmless or even complimentary designation of the relationship many humans claim to share with companion animals. but i’m unable to offer a ready substitute. like many, i eschew the word “pet,” and often opt for “companion animal,” since we do live together inside a house, they share my bed, we play together, and i talk to them (and, i might contend, they talk back through body language and vocalizations). the vet may well call my pets family, but the law refers to them as my property, pure and simple, just like a sofa or car. i can pretty much do whatever i want with my companion animals, as long as i do not blatantly violate the often rather minimal and toothless anti-cruelty statutes of indiana (farm animals are not even covered under these rules). i can leave them outside, tie them up, sell them, dump them at the shelter, put them in cages. the law would not allow me to do any of these things with my own offspring. the law, sometimes a mechanism for social change, just as easily functions as a tool for maintaining the status quo. it is, simply put, often far behind the times. for animals, u.s. law currently offers the possibility of two options: either juristic personhood (which some animal rights scholars argue for) or thinghood, and it has traditionally settled on the latter. animals owned by humans, whether they are pets, working, or farm animals, are considered “personal property.” yet the reality is that animals, whether or not they have status as companions (e.g., wildlife, farm animals, zoo animals, and indeed the entire universe of non-human animals), are not “things.” nor are they people. alyce miller — just don’t call me “mom”: pros and cons of a family law model for companion animals 91 for the purposes of this essay, i will explore a very small piece of this complex puzzle, particularly as changing attitudes and cultural practices regarding companion animals generate a shift toward the “pet as family” model in law. in part, this is a direct response to growing public sentiment about the intimate role of animal companions in family life. in a recent online harris poll from 2007, 93% of americans with dogs and 89% of those living with cats proclaimed their companion animals “members of the family.”1 these figures jibe with other surveys, like the oft-quoted associated press poll, which additionally demonstrated that single women are the most likely to consider pets as members of the family.2 a booming pet industry confirms that americans spend billions of dollars a year on pet food, accessories, travel, pet sitters and daycare, and veterinary services.3 more and more pet owners include pets in traditional family activities, including holiday gift exchanges, vacations (witness the rise in pet-friendly hotels!), play dates, dog camps, doggy daycare, indoor living, and high-end pet food.4 of course, not all pets are so “lucky,” and many continue to be neglected, abused, and abandoned. however, some legislation and the legal system have finally begun to crack under pressure to acknowledge that, yes, maybe there is something different about companion animals, who deserve more beyond the basic protections every states provides in animal anti-cruelty statutes.5 writers like marjorie garber, donna haraway, and carolyn knapp have insightfully theorized various possibilities for illuminating the bond between people and their pets (in particular, dogs). the claims that such friendships and reciprocities specifically between people and dogs do, in fact, exist find support beyond these writers’ sharp observations and almost ethological approaches to the animals in their own lives. recent evidence of the historical co-evolution and dynamics that emerged between early humans and the dog’s ancestor, the wolf, are buttressed by ongoing scientific research into the unique interactions between dogs and people.6 dogs, of course, are just one of many kinds of animals whose primary purpose is to offer companionship to human beings, and my own experience living almost my entire life in the company of cats is reflected in the words of chris j. cuomo, who writes, “living with cats is seeing how their small furry faces express emotions, desires, preferences, pain. my knowledge of my cats’ faces is in significant ways, the same kind of knowledge that i have of a human friend’s face. i’ve seen that expression before” (138). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 92 so how might the law better begin to o address and accommodate these special relationships? at the moment, the family paradigm provides something of an analogy, or even a bridge, as evidenced in the explosion of requests for pet trusts,7 pet custody determinations, and various torts cases that may well include requests for noneconomic damages (typically available only for loss of human life or injury). and while most courts at all levels are still very reluctant to accept a legal outcome that veers toward implying animal companions are not property, many arguments being made in courts across the country on behalf of companion animals rely heavily on illuminating the “member of the family” role the animal plays in the humans’ lives. while strategically we find it useful to reach for tools that make life better for animals, i find myself questioning whether the benefits of a “family model” really outweigh the disadvantages, not just to companion animals, but all the other animals not included in the moral compass of the rosy fiction of “family.”8 if i am not a parent, not even in loco parentis, and these animals are not my children, and yet they are clearly different from my real property and other possessions (i may love my house and my subaru, but certainly not the way i love grover, and the two cats, buckminster and bird), how do we find language for this bond within a legal system that remains grossly inflexible? more than an exercise in conceptual or linguistic gymnastics, this question goes straight to the heart of defining our responsibilities to and expectations of the animals we choose to call our companions. in striking contrast, parents have numerous legal duties to their children, most of which exist to protect and promote the child’s welfare and safety (compulsory education, medical care, the duty to intervene if the child is in danger, etc.). pet owners have very few (mostly just providing food, water, and some version of shelter) and, excepting anti-cruelty statutes that require someone to refrain from abusing and neglecting an animal, most laws regarding animals center on the welfare and safety of human beings (e.g., leash laws, rabies vaccinations, etc.). even when i substitute for “pet” and “pet owner” the current term of art “guardian,” i know it has no legal weight, though arguably perhaps it does, as some proponents maintain, move us at least symbolically away from the concept of a property model to one that sounds frankly more, well, familial, which of course puts us back in parent/child land. and though the term “guardian” has replaced “owner” in some city and county statutes relating to animals — an effort to recalibrate our perceptions of what we owe our animals — the word does not have the force of the law behind it.9 alyce miller — just don’t call me “mom”: pros and cons of a family law model for companion animals 93 on the other hand, an advantage of the parent/child model may be that it reminds us we are dealing with sentient beings whose lives are inextricably woven into ours, that they are dependent on us, and that we are responsible for more than just the bare minimum in terms of their health, safety, and welfare. maybe even their happiness? it is possible that the family model provides an imperative to take better care of these animals. though i often resort to using “guardian,” it too remains problematic, despite its connotations of “caretaking.” legally, “guardian” applies to adult human beings with a legal responsibility to either human children or disabled adults in our care, and it also may contribute to the infantilization of these animals in our care. companion animals are neither human nor disabled, nor are they children for long. so how to characterize and categorize the interactions and responsibilities and dependencies in a way that can be codified, and still to reflect the complex interactions that evolve between people and pets without relying on anthropocentric models? before i fully understood the “breeding world” of animals i fell for the “family model” on a breeder’s website. until then i had always adopted shelter cats. but i fell in love with the bengal, in a photo someone showed me, completely ignorant of the realities of the breeding world, which is dominated by folks who promise everything from good health to good temperament. though i prided myself on doing careful research, visiting the home cattery, and spending time with the breeder and her animals, i was fooled by the family atmosphere and the promises that “you know what you’re getting with a purebred.” i was also unaware of the problems of overbreeding that contribute to the surplus of cats that end up unwanted. after all, breeding is a business. in addition, bucky, like bird, both purebred bengals, shouldn’t even exist. like many purebred cats, contrary to the claims of breeders, bengals are high on the list of cats with behavior problems, and my cats are no exception. wonderfully smart, active, and sweet, but also highly-strung, bengals like bucky and bird are the brainchildren of a woman named jean mills, who originated this hybrid back in the late ‘60s by breeding an asian leopard cat to a domestic cat, to appeal to people like me who love the look of the wild. these cats are hard-wired for action. they are climbers and leapers. they act out. they can be temperamental. they are clever and funny. they are affectionate. cat and dog breeder websites often rely on language like the following from a bengal breeder site: “all babies are raised in the home, in a family environment, with children and other humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 94 pets. agapebengals takes care in the placement of our babies and will only allow them to go to approved homes” (3). or this: “should you have any questions about your bundle of fur after it leaves our nest, please know we consider to be extended members of our family” (4). over and over, testimonials on the websites and breeder home pages employ a similar rhetoric, the animal as “baby,” the act as “adopting,” the clients as parents. certainly, living all together, participating in one another’s daily routines, my animals and i exert influences on one another (bird has taught me to play “plastic straw cat chess,” and grover believes whenever the phone rings that someone is calling for a dog hike), so together we create a whole new configuration which, in some superficial ways, might resemble a family. all three of my animals seem to enjoy music, and one cat prefers cat grass over catnip. how do i know? he told me. i have cried to my animals, they have seen me through hard times. grover lay for days on end in the hospital bed where my father was dying; my cats kept me company through a divorce. we nap on the sofa together, we watch movies (well, okay, i watch the movies and the animals sleep on me). and yet it seems i am still implicitly compelling animals to take on a variety of family roles: sometimes children (cats are almost exactly infant-sized, lap dogs are just that), sometimes parent (a dog who protects, for example), or even a life partner (an animal to whom we tell our troubles and who helps provide emotional stability for those who are either single or in unsatisfying relationships). marjorie garber asks, “why is it sometimes easier to say ‘i love my dog’ than ‘i love my spouse’? dogs, we often say, offer unconditional love, where human lovers and human beloveds are often, well . . . all too human in their inconsistencies, frailties, and willfulness. but what is ‘unconditional love,’ and what are the conditions that produce and nurture it?” (14). it is important to ask in return, is our love for our animal companions as unconditional as the love garber claims they offer us? it is true that our expectations of unconditional love and obedience are often undercut by the actions and personalities of the actual animals themselves, when they do not conform to our hopes, and under the law we have the right to tie them out back, give them away, surrender them to shelters, or have otherwise healthy animals euthanized. alyce miller — just don’t call me “mom”: pros and cons of a family law model for companion animals 95 on this point donna haraway observes that “the status of a pet puts a dog at special risk in societies like the one i live in — the risk of abandonment when human affection wanes, when people’s convenience takes precedence, or when the dog fails to deliver on the fantasy of unconditional love” (38). i add to this list the potential inability of the dog (or any pet) to deliver on the fantasy of unconditional compliance, for which there is no legal remedy. in her terrific memoir pack of two, dog-obsessed carolyn knapp explores and critiques her bond with lucille as an object of human self-definition, and observes the dangers of projecting our many desires and anxieties onto the animals we call “companions” (54). the idea of “pet as family” may engender false expectations and frustration when the pet does not perform the expected roles. and even at its best, is love enough? we certainly cannot legislate emotions among animals and people any more than we can among people, but we can legislate the roles and responsibilities that govern our relationships. instead of referring to themselves as “pet owner” or “guardian,” some prefer to call themselves “caretaker,” which sounds kinder than “owner,” but again traditionally applies to someone hired to care for real property or paid to look after a minor child or a disabled adult. so none of these terms — pet owner, guardian, caretaker — comes close to being an accurate expression of the reciprocities involved in living with companion animals. we can debate “guardian versus owner,” and even more broadly-construed concepts like “stewardship versus dominion” (linzey 29), because language does, of course, both shape and reflect our practices, as well as characterize the duties imposed by those practices. and, in the law, definition and categories are everything. for now, any change in terms remains purely symbolic, because animals, in the eyes of the law, remain property. let me say it again. animals are property and we own them.10 because i live alone with three companion animals, i am solely responsible for their care, feeding, safety, and well-being. every day i make decisions for them, not unlike what one would do for any dependent: i choose what and when they eat, what toys humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 96 they have, how many walks grover gets, what vaccinations to give them, when to take them to the vet, and so on. grover and i attended dog training so i could learn how to communicate basic commands to him, like sit, heel, down, stay, and drop it. i took him regularly to the park to meet other dogs because i wanted him to be socially confident. and though i am considered by friends and family to be a “good pet owner,” not a day goes by that i don’t find myself musing on the meaning of this odd experiment in animal domestication in which we are engaged. i’ve lived with pets longer than without them, and over the years, particularly as basic practices of pet owning have evolved, my views on pet owning have been transformed through both my work in animal law and the courses i teach, like “animals and ethics” and “the literary and legal animal.” i cannot consider it to be a natural, unquestioned act to own a pet. and yet, pet owning in the u.s. is at an all-time high.11 recent legislation and court action in the expanding arena of animal law12 relating to increased protections for companion animals have exploited the family analogy, for better and for worse. many more lawyers stand ready to draw up legally enforceable pet trusts, or in divorces or separations to help settle custody disputes, using a version of the “in the best interest of the child standard.” there are also attorneys who, under the right circumstances, may pursue veterinary malpractice cases on behalf of the owners. more and more, courts are addressing housing disputes involving “no pets” policies and anti-discrimination laws. there are damage cases arising from wrongful death or injury of a companion animal. criminal laws also encompass domestic violence and state anti-cruelty laws, and in the last few years more states are beginning to include legislation that acknowledges the well-established link between the two.13 many state bar associations with animal law sections or committees now offer continuing legal education classes with titles like “animals are family, too.”14 in both principle and as a practical matter i am certainly willing to convince fellow attorneys that the “animals as family” model has legal merit, particularly since it is often linked to developing and strengthening legislation to insure better treatment for the animals in our lives. in fact, i have presented enthusiastically at continuing legal education classes on such topics as pet trusts, pet custody, and valuation,15 and i agree, in part, with other animal advocates who view these as progressive steps toward carving out more legally enforceable protections. alyce miller — just don’t call me “mom”: pros and cons of a family law model for companion animals 97 recently in indiana, a group of lawyers received approval for the first animal law section of the indiana state bar association. not surprisingly, the start-up was controversial, since “animal law” is often conflated with “animal rights,” and mentioning “animal rights,” one of the most misunderstood terms of the century, often has the same effect of dropping a ticking bomb in a room, especially in a state where farming, hunting, and fishing are important businesses. in fact, concern was expressed from a number of quarters that the committee might be composed of a bunch of “wildhaired animal rights activists”16 or “members of peta.” our first cle course was (frankly, to my disappointment) as conciliatory and noncontroversial as could be, as evidenced by the twee title, “fuzzy financials.” we strategically agreed to focus on companion animals, since most people can support the idea that companion animals or pets deserve humane treatment, though one of the speakers arriving in a floor-length mink coat did blurt out, before presenting on tax issues relating to pet trusts, that, yes, she likes her pets just fine, but if they ever needed surgery, she’d be quick to euthanize them. when i started law school ten years ago, very few people had ever heard of “animal law,” including the faculty at the institution i attended. in fact, i was teased mercilessly. typical jokes, even from good friends, ran along the predictable lines of “so how are those raccoons going to pay you?” after a mere decade, however, animal law is no longer a laughing matter. many u.s. attorneys and law firms are incorporating animal law into their practices, in part because it is income-producing, a product of mainstreaming, and in part because their human clients expect it.17 that animal law as its own discipline has been elevated in status is probably a good sign, though it is important to understand the very real distinction between practicing animal law and practicing animal rights law. “animal law” per se does not signify any particular philosophy regarding the moral status of nonhuman animals. put another way, an animal lawyer might well defend a client whose dog has bitten the mail carrier, or assist a client with a contract for the purchase of an expensive racehorse, or defend a veterinarian accused of veterinary malpractice. until indiana’s bar law section began offering cle’s, the only available cle that i was able to find online in the state was directed to attorneys who wished to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 98 protect medical researchers from animal rights “extremists.” animal rights law, however, is specifically geared toward the ending of all exploitation of non-human animals. while “better cages” is the goal of the welfarist, “empty cages” becomes the goal of rightists. at heart and in spirit i’m an animal rightist, and subscribe now to a fairly basic principle: we human animals should do as little to interfere with or cause harm to nonhuman animals as possible. even “pet owning,” regardless of whether we dress it up in language of guardianship or animal companionship, or rely on historical and scientific evidence of co-evolution, remains problematic for me, an issue i struggle with regularly, in part because companion animals are now being specifically bred, modified, and developed for the purpose of giving us pleasure. additionally, the overabundance of these animals, many of whom are sold as commodities in pet stores and by breeders, creates an even greater ethical dilemma when there are too few good homes for them, and many end neglected, abandoned, abused, and even euthanized.18 when we participate in pet-owning, when we rescue animals from shelters, we still participate in a multi-billion dollar industry that exploits other animals for veterinary medical research and pet food, and ultimately views animals as commodities in a largescale business. when my three animals are no longer with me, will i ever “own” another pet? i don’t know. would my life be less rich without them? absolutely. when, on the one hand, we refer to our companion animals as “family,” while legally they remain our property, the clanging bell of cognitive dissonance is hard to ignore.19 there is no law, for example, preventing us from choosing to end a pet’s life, or giving the animal away. the animal has no say in the matter and, unlike other family members, it has no legal voice. laws were written to govern the relationships among people, and ever since common law labeled animals “property” we have had to wrestle with this problem. being a real companion to the animal, loving the animal, walking the dog, playing with the cat, and touching the animal are not requirements. in addressing the special loyalties exhibited by dogs, in particular, animal psychologist/philosopher konrad lorenz reminds us of “affection’s claim,” and the responsibilities that a “dog’s fidelity” engenders (543-545). how might affection’s claim be codified? is it even possible? garber describes dog love as “local love, passionate, often unmediated, virtually always reciprocated, fulfilling, manageable. love for humans is harder . . . . [d]og love is not an alyce miller — just don’t call me “mom”: pros and cons of a family law model for companion animals 99 evasion or a substitution. it calls upon the same range and depth of feelings that humans have for humans” (14). as has become increasingly obvious over the last century and a half, animals are not only sentient, living, breathing beings, and not “things,” they are also full of capabilities we are still just beginning to understand.20 but “personhood” has been reserved for human beings (not all human beings have historically had personhood, of course),21 although in one exceptional twist of irony and a strange history leading to a controversial supreme court case from 1886, “corporations” became the one nonhuman entity to have been granted legal personhood.22 they are view as “juristic persons.” animals are not. over time, despite the slow turns of the creaky wheels of justice, the law has begun rumbling down a bumpy road through a changing landscape. the categories we assign certain animals and our human relationships with them, even within the same species (a pet pig is assigned a different status from a pig raised for food) determine their fates. the same speciesism that promotes notions like “dolphins and great apes should be singled out for special treatment because they are so intelligent” is at work in the case of companion animals. the special status is based not on the type of animal or “how like us it is,” but the purpose for which human beings use that animal. the dog lounging on her $100 dr. foster and smith orthopedic bed in the living room is given an intrinsic value by her human owner that is not extended to the caged lab dog being mutilated for organ transplant experiments. the difference? the dog on the fancy bed was lucky enough to be loved by his human guardian. unfortunately, the family law model has the potential to create moral blindness, to make us feel better about the way we are treating certain kinds of animals, particularly the ones who are most visible in our lives and whose purpose is companionship. but the dog we select and feed and love and maybe sleep with, take trips with, and consider “family” is otherwise no different from the dog used in medical research. or, is it possible that the dog owner now viewing her responsibilities to her beloved dog within the context of a family law model might be compelled to work to extend similar moral consideration to the more invisible lab dog? humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 100 the label of companion animal is certainly not limited to dogs and cats and can easily include popular animals like horses, rodents, birds, snakes, and other animals that human beings keep for companionship and pleasure. why then is there one rabbit we love and train to use the litter box and cuddle with, and yet think nothing of putting another one under the broiler. one we call “family,” and the other one we call “dinner.” the law offers protections for one and not the other. the only difference is that we have conferred, with a certain arbitrariness, on specific individual animals this special status that deems mistreatment or harm of them morally reprehensible, if not outright illegal. one rat sold at the local pet store goes home to a child who loves it and plays with it, recognizing that rats are social and intelligent. her rat buddy in the same cage is purchased by a “herp” to feed a python, where it may sit for hours or days in terror waiting for the snake to strike. though rats, mice, and birds are popular pets, more than 90% of animals used in research are, yes, rats and mice, and birds, too, all of whom, unlike other animals in research, are exempt from any protections under the animal welfare act.23 in other words, the majority of animals — farm animals, wildlife, research animals — remain not only consumable resources, but out of the reach of any protections and advantages a family model might offer, regardless of their species. though many pet owners have taken legal action when their companion animals have been harmed, injured, or killed, in the majority of u.s. states courts have made it clear that in such cases they will stick to “fair market value” of the animal in question, and will not recognize claims like negligent infliction of emotional distress. in some states, like tennessee, alaska, and kentucky, courts have ruled more sympathetically, if the behavior of the defendant rises to the level of outrageous intention. in some important lower court cases the emotional bonds between human beings and their companion animals who have been injured or killed are recognized in decisions which, even if not decided in favor of the plaintiff on the particular facts of that case, clearly leave open the possibility of, for example, for non-economic damages, especially in cases involving the intentional infliction of emotional distress.24 but even so, such theories are still anthropocentric at their core, given that it is not the animal’s own intrinsic worth that is valued, but the human plaintiff’s relationship with the animal that determines the animal’s worth.25 alyce miller — just don’t call me “mom”: pros and cons of a family law model for companion animals 101 though it is gaining some legal ground, the family model applied to our companion animals remains, for me, double-edged. if it could result in a larger cosmic, philosophical acknowledgment of the familial bonds of all living creatures, it might be more clearly an avenue to pursue. but instead, i continue to wonder if too much of our legal energy is being directed toward the animals we treasure the most emotionally, allowing us to ignore the plight of the staggering numbers of animals we cause to suffer as we raise, mutilate, kill, and consume them for food and clothing, and in the name of research. does the rise, in both theory and practice, of a “family model” for companion animals blind us to the gritty realities of most animals whose lives are equally at the mercy of human actions? does the family model inadvertently promote legalized speciesism, operate as a shorter-term panacea, and undermine a longer-term goal of bettering the lives of all animals? or, as i sometimes hope, might the model help make inroads into the law itself for rethinking the property status of all animals in the possession of humans, with the potential for a positive trickle-down impact on all animals? though the family model arguably offers a natural analogy for lawyers, it is possible that we are furthering our moral schizophrenia by privileging particular groups of animals, based not even on species, but on context. garber writes: dog stories find a place in our ongoing folklore as the real embodiment of what we would like to think were “family values” among other human beings. sheba, a rottweiler mix in oakland park, florida, was chained up by her owner after giving birth to nine puppies. the owner, who didn’t want the pups, buried them alive, but sheba broke from her chains and dug them out. the puppies–and the heroic mother–were rescued; the owner faced charges of animal abuse . . . . in another very similar incident, the mother dog rescued her puppies from a trash compactor into which the owner had tossed them. in default of any consensus about social planning, family planning, even what constitutes “the family,” in a populace increasingly weary of economic struggle and social divisiveness, “family values,” like other values, are — it is fascinating to note — now humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 102 often passed on in popular culture not through human stories, but through stories of, and love for, dogs. (15) on this brighter side of “dog family values,” as garber describes them, might this offer human beings a model for familial devotion, perhaps suggesting that invoking the family model could increase empathy and appreciation, and reduce the moral distance we often keep from non-human animals? might it offer a practical framework (and concession) as we move legally to improve the status of all animals?26 the risk in taking an all-or-nothing approach in fighting for the day when all animals, to borrow singer’s word, are “liberated” from human interference and allowed to be left alone, is that since that is an unlikely result, all animals could end up in limbo, with no room for compromise. in an ironic twist, applying the family model to companion animals is highly controversial and widely denounced, for very different reasons, by those at the opposite end of the spectrum: big agri-business and factory farming, hunters, and researchers who routinely use animal subjects in experiments, just to name a few, whose extreme fears run along lines of the “slippery slope” argument. these powerful groups exert great political force and billions of dollars to oppose any legislation that would increase protections in general for animals and create impediments to their professions.27 the stance of the very powerful american veterinary medical association (avma), for example, is to oppose adamantly any possibility for the recovery of non-economic damages in veterinary malpractice suits, claiming that such costs will discourage applicants from pursuing veterinary school and will put practicing veterinarians out of business. the reality is these suits are rare, and since the suits have been allowed, there’s been no major increase, and the vast majority of plaintiffs never prevail, as the standard of proof is so high.28 the avma provides an interesting example of a group opposed to the family model, particularly since, as my opening anecdote suggests, the veterinary industry may want it both ways. many vets invoke in their practices the “family model,” either explicitly or implicitly, by encouraging pet owners to think of their animals as important as family members to encourage them to attend to the animal’s health care with diligence, investing more and more in the medical treatment of their animal companions (often referred to as “clients”). this may be good for the animals, but is also good for the vets. alyce miller — just don’t call me “mom”: pros and cons of a family law model for companion animals 103 every year, like many pet owners, i receive in the mail appointment reminders from my vet for dental cleaning and annual vaccinations, just as i would from my own health care provider, and when my companion animals become ill, there appears a limitless list of referrals to specialists, including oral surgeons and dermatologists, for innovative treatments.29 many veterinary offices now offer information brochures on pet health insurance, which is paid by a monthly premium, and functions very much the way private-pay human health insurance does (including rules about pre-existing conditions, etc.). in addition, many veterinarians offer in-home services, including euthanasia for terminally ill pets, cremation as an option for the deceased, and even condolence cards acknowledging the loss. while this is not an indictment of those delivering sound medicine to our animal companions, it is hard not to think that if they invite us to view our animals as family members, then logic would dictate we, as consumers, should also have available, in cases of medical negligence, legal recourse to claims of emotional distress for malpractice that results in harm or death. observing my own companion animals, i wonder if it really benefits them to be considered family members. if they are family members, then what sort are they precisely? do we need to broaden our notion of “family,” as the law is currently being challenged to do by the changing demographics that include configurations including gay marriage, open adoption, assisted-reproductive therapy, extended and blended families? even so, the family model, no matter how it broadens for people, may not be appropriate for animals. in addition to anthropomorphizing animals by asking us to “love our animals too much,” it may encourage us to forget that they are animals at all, and to be viewed as “little fur babies,” substitutes for children, to be doted on and pampered, stuffed with treats, and expected to respond to us as people would. the anthropomorphizing can be damaging on both sides, when pet owners interpret their pets’ behaviors through the lens of human emotions. “my cat’s mad at me,” “my dog’s disappointed,” “my rabbit understands me when i’m sad.” though it may crack open the door of certain legal advantages, the family model as a legal tool remains controversial for a number of the reasons explored here. in addition, it is an assimilative, anthropocentric model inviting direct comparisons between animals and people, with all the expectations that naturally ensue. so when i say, “don’t call me mom,” i return to the question with which i began. what exactly am i to these three sentient beings who play such important roles in my life, and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 104 how can the law best accommodate our various roles? i tentatively try out “friends.” no, it’s my fantasy. friendship is something one both consents to and engages in, and while i like to think that my two cats and dog stick around because i am special and they choose to be with me, i keep grover leashed so he will not disappear after a chipmunk, and i don’t put bucky and bird at risk to roam freely among all the dangers outdoor life holds. because the very lives of pets are “artificial,” meaning that these particular animals would not exist if people had not developed animals specifically for these purposes, it is purely an intellectual exercise to ask what would my animals do if they were left alone to their own devices.30 the fact is, we have altered their behaviors, as well as their bodies, historically through breeding and forced accommodations to human life, in order for them to become suitable for “companionship.” in addition, even when it works to an animal’s advantage, the family model fits philosophically into a welfarist notion of animals, in which the focus is to try to improve the lives of those animals bred, sold, rescued, and adopted for the purposes of companionship with human beings. the purpose is not to “free” them or to leave them alone to live their own lives, or to slowly spay and neuter pets out of existence, as some rightists would argue. in the family model, any animal acquired strictly for the purposes of companionship seems likely to fill the bill, so that it is really our proclaimed affection that has the potential to be legally protected, and not the animal itself. this is why the farmer who claims to love his beef cattle, as one lawyer-farmer in my cle class challenged me to believe, cannot turn around and claim emotional distress and “non-economic damages” if someone else slaughters them first. at best, he might get fair market value, but that would be the extent of it. nor is it likely he would choose to write up a pet trust31 to provide for any hogs he might precede in death, or to work out a “pet custody arrangement” for the disposition of his sheep should he and his spouse divorce.32 so it is, in my other life as a pro bono attorney that i make my welfarist concession and reluctantly subscribe to the family model for animal companions, if for no other reason than it may improve the lives of some animals, and perhaps help gain some of the force of the law behind it. in my legal life, i advocate pet trusts (i included pet trusts in my own will), believing that once one accepts responsibility for the animal in one’s life, one should at the very least make legally enforceable provisions for the animal should one die first. and, no, one cannot leave one’s estate or money to one’s beloved cat. property cannot inherit property.33 alyce miller — just don’t call me “mom”: pros and cons of a family law model for companion animals 105 yes, the family model may help some animals — those animals we lavish most of our love and attention on — gain more legal protections and reflect the intimate bonds through legislation that benefits animals. despite my own ruminations on the ethics of pet owning, there is no doubt that companion animals occupy a special and important status in our lives, and the practice of pet owning is likely to continue. exiting the vet’s office recently one afternoon with a prescription for prozac in hand for bucky, who was expressing some unexplained misery through inappropriate elimination and attacks on his beloved bird, i wonder again what it is we are asking of these animals we call our family when we expect them to conform to our lives. if bucky had his way, he would be terrorizing the neighborhood, not confined to three storeys of a small house. but instead i have forced a compromise: the tri-level outdoor cat cage i call the “catarium” must suffice for his forays into the wilds. and here i am, pills in hand, going home to these wild simulacra i adore, about to make yet another decision on their behalf. what am i now? if not “mom,” then what? keeper? drug pusher? when i walk in the door, all three are there to greet me. i get down on my knees and let them swarm over me. though they are all close in size and shape, even with my eyes closed i know each one’s body intimately, the particularity of tails and ears, the smell and texture of fur. we are indeed a funny mixed-species tribe, and perhaps our union is familial. whatever description i choose remains symbolic, reflective of how i interpret the dynamic between us at any given moment, and difficult to codify legally. at the very least, i suppose, the family model may push us a bit more toward reevaluating the legal “thinghood” of all animals who touch our lives, whether they are urban wildlife, the animals sacrificed in research, farm animals, or pets. in the meantime, i’ll keep struggling with the question of who really benefits more from this odd arrangement of living with animals and what it means. notes 1. see “pets are members of the family,” online harris poll, http://www.allcreatures.org/articles/cac-petsare.html humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 106 2. ibid. 3. participation in the “pet industry” is another form of complicity, but remains too big a topic to undertake here. the breeding, buying, and selling of animals for pets, as opposed to adopting from rescues or shelters is one aspect. another is the very question of whether we should have “pets” at all. legal scholar and gary francione has suggested on more than one occasion that his goal is to see pets spayed and neutered out of existence. his writings boil down to one basic concept: animals have the right not to be treated as the property of humans. period. 4. for an entertaining, and eye-opening romp through the new world of privileged pets, see michael schaeffer 2009 bestseller, one nation under dog. 5. currently, 46 of the 50 u.s. states have enacted felony statutes for certain kinds of cruelty to animals. while some of these laws remain more symbolic than others, given that enforcement remains a huge issue, the point is that states voters and legislators have seen fit to enact laws that are animal-centered rather than human-centered. the animal legal defense fund (aldf ) releases an annual report ranking the animal protection laws of every state based on their relative strength and general comprehensiveness. in the 2009 report, the top five states with the strongest anti-cruelty laws were california, illinois, maine, michigan, and oregon. the worst states were hawaii, idaho, mississippi, north dakota, and kentucky, with kentucky at the very bottom. “year end study names 2009s ‘five best states to be an animal abuser’,”animal legal defense fund (aldf). web. december 16, 2009. http://www.aldf.org/article.php?id=1143 6. for an excellent summary of this history, i highly recommend the nova special, “dogs decoded” (2010), now available on dvd, which explores new genetic discoveries on not only the genetic origins of the dog, but “the science” behind the special bond between people and dogs. “dogs decoded” (dir. dan child). pbs. dvd. alyce miller — just don’t call me “mom”: pros and cons of a family law model for companion animals 107 7. although it is up to each state whether or not to recognize pet trusts, their creation is allowed for in the uniform probate code, and as of 2011 forty states now recognize pet trusts. 8. it is important to mention that a number of legal scholars argue that “property status” is a double-edged sword, that without being designated “property” animals would have no one in a position to pursue legal remedies on their behalf. 9. for more on the guardianship campaign, please visit their website for a list of communities that have adopted this language on animal tags, kennel forms, public park signs, etc. http://guardiancampaign.com/guardiancity.htm 10. no one owns those wild animals who live in their own habitats, not even the owners of the land on which the animals reside. however, game laws and other government rules and regulations generally dictate the “taking” of wild animals, through trapping, hunting, fishing, and other forms of extermination. 11. in his provocative essay “the pet world,” paul shepherd argues that pets, whom he describes as “civilized paraphernalia” and “deficient” animals, confuse our notions of the “wild,” without which we cannot be restored to wholeness. 12. “animal law is, in its simplest (and broadest) sense, statutory and decisional law in which the nature—legal, social or biological—of nonhuman animals is an important factor.” (waisman, et al. xvii). 13. statistics vary, but according to a report by the humane society of the united states, 71% of pet-owning women, who are victims of domestic violence, report abuse, harm, and death to family pets by their batterer. 75% of these incidents occur in the presence of children. cf. http://www.americanhumane.org/about-us/newsroom/factsheets/animal-abuse-domestic-violence.html 14. course sponsored by new jersey animal law committee, atlantic city, n.j. 2010 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 108 15. valuation concerns the recovery beyond the fair market value of an animal and refers to non-economic damages for the injury or death of companion animals. in the world of law, damages are divided into two categories: compensatory and punitive. the point of compensatory damages is to make a plaintiff whole again, and to restore things to where they were. they are not meant to punish, and take two forms: economic (tangible injuries like loss of income and medical expenses) and non-economic, which can include pain and suffering, loss of companionship, and emotional distress. some jurisdictions may also permit such claims s as loss of enjoyment of life and other unquantifiable injuries. under emotional distress, it’s helpful to distinguish between that which is intentionally inflicted and that which is the result of negligence. the goals of punitive damages are not only to punish the defendant for conduct, but to act as a deterrence to future wrongs, as well as discourage others from engaging in the conduct. 16. i do not know the origins of this phrase, but have heard it with some frequency on both television shows and in life, and it may have been exactly the image of animal activists that the federal government wanted to invoke for the larger public when it passed the controversial animal enterprise terrorism act in 2006. 17. thanks to campaigns by organizations like the animal legal defense fund (aldf), hsus, aspca, peta, etc., the previously “invisible” cruelties to animals, such as abuses at factory farms, animal cruelty and domestic violence, and animal hoarding, have become more visible, and therefore less tolerated. early animal cruelty laws in england stemmed from the cruel treatment, usually in the form of beatings, of work animals like horses, on city streets, in plain view of passersby. 18. according to the hsus, an estimated 6-8 million cats and dogs enter shelters each year, and 3-4 million (almost half) are euthanized by shelters each year. “pet overpopulation estimates.” humane society of the united states (hsus). web. november 23, 2009. http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/pet_overpopulation/facts/overpopulation_estima tes.html 19. some animal rights advocates, such as legal scholar david favre, have argued for a new classification for pets known as “sentient property” (not a sofa), which would take alyce miller — just don’t call me “mom”: pros and cons of a family law model for companion animals 109 into account the fact that animals feel pain and can suffer. david favre also argues that animals in general might benefit from a recategorization from “property” to something he calls “equitable self-ownership.” see his now classic essay, “equitable self-ownership for animals,” and also his most recent essay, “living property: a new status for animals within the legal system,” in which he makes a very strong argument that nonhuman animals should possess and exercise legal rights. another legal scholar, and great apes activist, steven wise has argued that primates might be singled out as deserving of a new status closer to that of human animals. while the law historically moves much more slowly than public sentiment and changing times dictate, it seems that in 2011 we are in an interesting time of legal action occurring in this area of animal law, and we can learn much by observing the roller coaster ride of case law and statutes from different states. 20. philosophically, the property status of animals stems from antiquity, the start of which is often credited to aristotle, who in politics wrote that all nonhuman animals were created for the sake of humans. his view that animals lacked rational soul, later merging with christian notions of humans having been created in the image of a divine creator, prevailed until the 17th and 18th centuries, when descartes and various other philosophers, influenced by “science,” began to shift the larger “world view,” though it wasn’t much help to animals, who were still acknowledged not to be rational and in descartes’ view, were simply machines who could not feel. still, our modern view, influenced by the grandfather of utilitarianism, jeremy bentham, is shaped by the irrefutable knowledge that animals have the capacity to suffer, and this is one of many characteristics that distinguish them from other “real property.” 21. for an example of people without “personhood,” see dred scott v. sanford 60 us 393 (1857), in which the u.s. supreme court ruled that slaves are not citizens, but are property of their owners, and congress has no right to deprive citizens of their property. 22. see santa clara co. v. southern pacific railroad, 118 u.s. 394, 1886, which held that corporations were recognized for the purposes of the fourteenth amendment. the benefits attached to the juristic personhood of corporations have been expanded humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 110 through a number of cases, including the most recent, citizens united v. federal election committee, 130 s.ct. 876, 2010. 23. the animal welfare act (awa), signed into law in 1966, and enforced by the usda and aphis, is the only federal law governing the treatment of animals in research and other uses like transport, exhibition, etc. in addition, fish and frogs are not covered under the act, nor are animals who are used for food. 24. some examples: in washington, in womack v . von rardon (2006), a cat owner sued a minor (and parents) after the minor doused her cat in gasoline and set him on fire. the court held that “for the first time in washington, we hold malicious injury to a pet can support a claim for, and be considered a factor in measuring a person’s emotional distress damages.” 25. in 2002 tennessee enacted a statute known informally as the “t-bo law,” named for congressman steve cohen’s dog. this is the first statute in the u.s. ever to provide noneconomic damages up to $5000 (for a cat or a dog). the language of the statute is quite interesting, as it is very similar to the language for the loss or injury of a human family member: “these damages are not for the intentional infliction of emotional distress of the owner or other civil claim, but rather for the direct loss of ‘reasonably expected society, companionship, love and affection of the pet.’” alaska recognizes a cause of action for intentional infliction of emotional distress for intentional or reckless killing of a pet animal. see mitchell v. heinrichs. in this case, the court went on to say, “the challenged conduct must have been so outrageous in character, and so extreme in degree, as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency, and to be regarded as atrocious, and utterly intolerable in a civilized community.” alaska also allows for punitive damages for the killing of a pet, but again the plaintiff must produce evidence that the defendant’s conduct was outrageous, such as evidence that the acts were performed with malice, bad motive, or reckless indifference. kentucky’s famous animal law case burgess v. taylor (2001 ky ct. of appeals) the tort of intentional infliction of emotional distress is determined by the conduct of the offender than the subject of the offense. in washington’s womack v . von rardon (2006), the court held that “for the first time in washington, we hold malicious injury to a pet can support a claim for, and be considered a factor in measuring a person’s emotional distress damages.” 26. it is now well-established that domestic violence and animal abuse are deeply connected. a new jersey study found that in 88 percent of families where there had alyce miller — just don’t call me “mom”: pros and cons of a family law model for companion animals 111 been physical abuse of children, there were also records of animal abuse. of 50 shelters surveyed to which women and children had escaped from domestic violence, 85% reported that women in their shelter talked about pet abuse, 63% of children talked about pet abuse, and 83% said that they had observed the coexistence of domestic violence and pet abuse." cf. “domestic violence against family pets inclusion very important.” change.org. web. 2010 http://www.change.org/petitions/view/domestic_violence_against_family_pets_inclusio n_very_important as of 2010, 17 states have enacted legislation to include pets in protective orders. cf. rebecca wisch, “domestic violence and pets.” animal legal and historical center. michigan state university college of law. web. 2010 http://www.animallaw.info/articles/ovusdomesticviolencelaws.htm 27. the responses by such highly-organized groups recently here in indiana during legislative discussions of “the puppymill bill” and the “anti-dog fighting bill” made these realities even more acute. the center for consumer freedom, a front for alcohol, restaurant, food, and tobacco industries, backs ads and exerts political pressure to create obstacles for advocacy groups from the humane society to mothers against drunk driving. cf. humane society of the united states (hsus), “center for consumer freedom: nonprofit or shill?” web. nov. 6 2009 http://www.humanesociety.org/issues/opposition/facts/center_for_consumer_freedom. html 28. several factors must be proven under a traditional malpractice claim to recover damages for injury to an animal under a veterinarian’s care. first, the defendant must be under a duty of care toward the animal in question. this means that the veterinarian had accepted responsibility to treat the animal that the owner brought to his or her office. second, the actions or inaction of the veterinarian must have fallen below the professional standard of care. expert testimony from other veterinarians is often used to establish that the defendant-veterinarian’s conduct fell below the professional standard. this varies according to the state, but generally it means that the veterinarian did not act with reasonable skill, diligence, and attention as would ordinarily be expected of other veterinarians in the community. third, this deviation from the standard of care must have been the cause or proximate cause of the animal’s injury. in the first example above, the veterinarian’s inaction with fido caused the dog to die. similarly, the veterinarian’s inoculation of fifi also caused injury to her. with proximate humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 112 cause a malpractice plaintiff must show that the veterinarian’s actions set in motion a train of events that brought about the injury to the animal without the intervention of any other independent source. finally, the injury or harm resulted in damages to the plaintiff, meaning not just to the animal in question. while this may seem odd at first blush, it stems from the fact the animal injured is not a party to the lawsuit. thus, the owner must show that he or she suffered some loss (monetary and, infrequently, emotional). (cf. wisch.) 29. one friend of mine has spent close to $8000 for knee replacements and joint treatments for her beloved dog; another has spent $5000 for radiation treatment for a cat with cancer. 30. one of the most touching moments in my animals and ethics class involved a question from a very tender-hearted student who, after reading that day’s assignment on farm animals, asked, “but if we stopped killing the farm animals and freed them, where would they go?” i had to explain that farm animals, like “pets,” probably would no longer exist. 31. pet trusts are spelled out in the wills and trusts code, and it is left to each state to determine whether pet trusts are available. though arrangements can be made through contract for the continued care of a companion animal after an animal dies, pet trusts are legally enforceable. 32. in a number of animal custody cases, the evolving, unwritten standard petitioners and their attorneys borrow from is that of “best interests of the child,” so that in a number of more recent pet custody cases, the court, if so inclined (and some courts aren’t inclined), might be willing to consider evidence such as who has primarily cared for the animal (including medical receipts), who has the most time for the animal, and who is overall best situated to give appropriate care. 33. depending on the state in which one lives, in preparing for the possible death of a pet owner, pet trusts may be available, or care for the animal may be arranged by contract. 34. in a number of animal custody cases, the evolving, unwritten standard petitioners and their attorneys borrow from is that of “best interests of the child,” so that in a number of more recent pet custody cases, the court, if so inclined (and some courts aren’t inclined), might be willing to consider evidence such as who has primarily cared alyce miller — just don’t call me “mom”: pros and cons of a family law model for companion animals 113 for the animal (including medical receipts), who has the most time for the animal, and who is overall best situated to give appropriate care. works cited aldf. “year end study names 2009s ‘five best states to be an animal abuser’,” animal legal defense fund (aldf). web. december 16, 2009. http://www.aldf.org/article.php?id=1143 cuomo chris j., and lori gruen. “on puppies and pussies: animals, intimacy, and moral distance.” daring to be good: essays in feminist ethico-politics. ed. bat-ami bar on and ann ferguson. ny: routledge, 1998. 129-142. citizens united v. federal election committee, 130 s.ct. 876 (2010). dred scott v. sanford 60 us 393 (1857). favre, david. “equitable self-ownership for animals,” 50 duke l.j. 473 (2000). 473-502. —————. “living property: a new status for animals within the legal system,” 93 marquette l. rev. 1021 (2010): 1021-1070. francione, gary. animals, property, and the law (ethics and action). philadelphia: temple up, 1995. humane society of the united states (hsus). “facts about animal abuse and domestic violence.” web. 2001. http://www.americanhumane.org/aboutus/newsroom/fact-sheets/animal-abuse-domestic-violence.html garber, marjorie. dog love. ny: simon and schuster, 1996. haraway, donna j. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. knapp, caroline. pack of two: the intricate bond between people and dogs. ny: dial, 1999. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 114 linzey, andrew. why animal suffering matters. oxford: oxford up, 2009. lorenz, konrad. “affection’s claim.” the animal ethics reader, 2nd edition. ed. susan j. armstrong and richard g. botzler. ny: routledge, 2008. 543-545. santa clara co. v. southern pacific railroad, 118 u.s. 394. (1886) schaffer, michael. one nation under dog: adventures in the new world of prozac-popping puppies, dog-park politics, and organic pet food. ny: henry holt, 2009. shepard, paul. “the pet world.” the animal ethics reader, 2nd edition. ed. susan j. armstrong and richard g. botzler. ny: routledge, 2008. 551-553. wisch, rebecca f. “overview of veterinary malpractice.” animal legal & historical web center, 2003 (updated 2010). web. michigan state university, detroit college of law. http://www.animallaw.info/articles/qvusvetmal.htm. waisman, sonia s., bruce a. wagman, and pamela d. frasch. “preface to the first edition.” animal law cases and materials, 2nd edition. durham, nc: carolina academic press, 2006. wise, steven. rattling the cage: toward legal rights for animals. cambridge, ma: perseus, 2001. gundermann, review of weil copyright © 2024 christian gundermann this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 328–339. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 don’t let them eat horse christian gundermann review of: kari weil, precarious partners: horses and their humans in nineteenth-century france. animal lives. chicago: university of chicago press, 2020. xiv + 217 pp. 32 illus., 4 in colour. $97.00 (hb), $32.00 (pb). christian gundermann is associate professor of gender studies at mount holyoke college, usa. email: cgunderm@mtholyoke.edu book review http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 mailto:cgunderm@mtholyoke.edu i first came across kari weil’s work when, in the early 2010s, i was putting together the syllabus for my first college course in critical animal studies. grappling with how to teach the animal liberation and abolitionism paradigms of such foundational figures as peter singer, tom regan, and gary francione, i found in weil’s 2012 book thinking animals one of the clearest, most compelling discussions of what frustrated me about this discourse: that it was so utterly removed from real experience with animals. when figures like francione speak of the elimination of all domestic animals as the solution to human domination, weil writes, we are not being led towards a reasonable outcome, but rather “the law professor’s sacrifice of the animals for his ‘idea of the world.’”1 later i learned that weil was, like myself, a horse person, which further confirmed that i needed to follow her work. the format of this review is much too brief to do justice to the breadth of topics, fields, and disciplines covered in weil’s fascinating new book, precarious partners: horses and their humans in nineteenth-century france. it runs the gamut from visual art to public health debates concerning the slaughter of horses; from military history to the circus and city street as novel sites of a horse-centred entertainment culture; from the history of science to science’s refutation of magnetism, all the while peering through a feminist lens to parse how precisely horses figured in the construction and negotiation of class and gender norms in nineteenth-century france. the book’s introduction, “the most beautiful conquest of man?” theorizes the centrality of horses as partners (and perhaps mirrors?) to humans by way of a foundational feminist text, gayle rubin’s “the traffic in women”. even though the concept of purity of blood is arguably not deployed for the first time in european history through the invention of the english thoroughbred, weil comments on the predominance of this new breed of horse in nineteenth-century french equestrianism and culture at large. it came to “constitute an essential currency within the increasing traffic in horses during the century,” and “the animal equivalent of gayle rubin’s ‘sex/gender 1 kari weil. thinking animals: why animal studies now? (new york: columbia university press, 2012), 136. copyright © 2024 christian gundermann this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 327–339. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18809 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18809 gundermann, review of weil | 329 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) system,’ those arrangements by which society transforms biological sexuality into products of human activity” (14). the thoroughbred (pur-sang in french, or “pure blood”), the obsession with which was an expression of nineteenth-century french anglomania, became not only “the epitome of beauty and nobility” in reference to horses, but also to human beings to denote “a born lawyer or businessman or […] a woman of good breeding” (16). as such the horse as “race/breed” drove the century’s obsession with eugenics and degeneration. weil then explains that the essays that make up the chapters of the book analyse the fact that “in life or in literature and art, the horse was ‘the animal’ most familiar to nineteenth-century thought” and that it “inspired fundamental changes in human–animal relations” (17). chapter one, “heads or tails: painting history with a horse”, is an essay on the role of horses in french painting, and the transformation of that role over the course of the nineteenth century. weil argues that this transformation worked toward acknowledging horses as partners, and “hence agency becomes especially visible in horse paintings […], which also constitutes a significant challenge to any lingering acceptance of the cartesian idea of the animal machine” (22). centre stage in this chapter is occupied by théodore géricault because this artist’s painting “defies human separation from nature as it confuses hierarchies of human and horse as conqueror and conquered” (24). géricault, an artist who was “deeply intimate with horses” and “also rode with what has been called a ‘suicidal passion’” (26), created an œuvre in which horses are “what could be called a queer other who challenges both anthropocentric and gender norms” (25). in weil’s reading, this queer subversion of the human / animal separation produces in géricault’s painting head of a white horse (1815) an “alert but melancholic look [that] lingers and beckons me. this is the face described by emmanuel levinas” (33). the chapter ends in yet another provocative resituating of queerness, this time in reference to the painter’s obsession with equine rear ends, on which he himself seems to pun through a provocative book cover “invit[ing] the viewer to part the slightly opened canvas and enter through the rear” which resembles the rump of a horse (43). humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 330 | gundermann, review of weil chapter two, “putting the horse before descartes: sensibility and the war on pity”, analyses the shift in public consciousness, beginning in the late eighteenth century, away from descartes’s condemnation of entertaining any sort of empathy for animals, who in his view are unfeeling machines and therefore cannot suffer. this shift ultimately gave rise to the first animal protection legislation in france during the nineteenth century. while animal protection may have been “less a response to animal suffering than a means to condemn the abusive behavior of those who worked with animals” (45), under the concept of “pity” human empathy began to be “regarded as humanity’s most honored sentiment” (47). however, this valorization of sentiment was later consciously combatted. “[t]he violent, emotional extremes of the terror would lead to a retreat from sentimentalism and the demise of an emotionally informed politics” (49), reestablishing cartesian rationality, which prominently affected public policy around animals. in weil’s analysis, “our relations […] with horses in particular provided a testing ground for determining what role, if any, pity should play in public life” (50). in this context, the “excesses” of pity are predictably gendered so that it is “woman, who tends to show an overabundance of pity toward animals, often at the expense of attention to other humans (such as her own family)” (52). in a different register, and by way of reference to the poet charles baudelaire’s paradigm-shifting critique of pity not as the opposite of rationality, but as a type of feint of emotion, weil ends the chapter with a discussion of translation, which, as derrida once noted, is both necessary and impossible: “translation, in the form of reading and thinking the mute eloquence of those animals that we cohabit with, is our impossible obligation, a necessary step toward rendering our freedom, and our pity, just” (62). chapter three, “making housework visible: domestication and labor from buffon to bonheur”, returns to the history of painting, and centres its discussion on the prominent animal painter rosa bonheur. i discuss weil’s analysis of bonheur’s painting in greater detail below, so i shall refrain from any further commentary on chapter three in this summary. likewise as regards the fourth chapter, “let them eat horse”, which treats systematic government policies to gundermann, review of weil | 331 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) habituate the french population, especially the working classes, to consume horse meat. chapter five, “pure breeds and amazons: race, gender, and species from the second empire to the third republic”, is a discussion of the architectural mid-century modernization of paris (also known as “hausmannization”) which opened up large sections of the city for the middle classes to display themselves and their latest fashions. horses came to play a central role in these displays as the formerly aristocratic equestrianism transformed itself into a bourgeois sport, particularly in the ways in which horses allowed women to remake their gender performativity. the role of the amazon, or écuyère, became a way for women not only to transcend class barriers, but to display ambiguous forms of sexuality. “unlike […] the harlot, the amazon’s enjoyment depended not on a man, but on a horse” (105). in the popular memoires of céleste mogador, horses even rescued women from a “melancholy future as wife and mother” (108). weil briefly mentions the work of feminist scholars like donna haraway, marjorie garber, and alice kuzniar on “dog love” to suggest that she, weil, may be engaging here in the reconstruction of a history of women’s horse love. through the analysis of several cartoons and popular magazines, the author acquaints us with prominent popular female figures, especially the jewish circus écuyère adah isaacs menken. this rich chapter, which in itself contains enough material for an entire book, is really the blueprint for a reinterpretation of women and race in modernity, negotiating the double helix of progress and degeneracy, but unlike the work of elisabeth bronfen, for example, where this reading focuses on the relationship of femininity and death, weil discusses the role horses played in refashioning femininity. chapter six, “‘the man on horseback’: from military might to circus sports”, also focuses on gender politics, but here concentrates on the remaking of masculinity in nineteenth-century france as seen through the changing relationship between men and horses. while the previous chapter concerned itself with the ways that women appropriated horses as a vehicle for refashioning femininity, here weil analyses “how men sought to take back the virility of the horseman humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 332 | gundermann, review of weil and of the horse […] by reclaiming the equine’s physical and sexual potency for themselves” (132–33). these negotiations intersect with social class-based negotiations. while aristocratic men had used horses to display their will, courage and virility for centuries, the display of virility itself became problematic for bourgeois men because it “was a sign that one was not noble and was merely imitating nobility” (135). weil does not wade deeply into the foucauldian discovery that the latter part of the nineteenth century was the birth moment of modern homosexuality, but she nevertheless alludes to the fact that these negotiations around visual displays of masculinity, and even the paranoid dynamics around imitation, invoke what eve sedgwick would have called homosexual panic: the display of virility on horseback became tainted “with the feminizing effects of spectacle and the homoerotic possibilities of being a male object of the male gaze” (136). the chapter ends with a section on the new sports and hygiene movements. the discussion focuses on popular scientists’ attempts to reframe horseback riding as invigorating sport as well as model training, especially for “inferior beings […] whether they be animals, women, or people of color” (148). weil does not fail to point toward the eugenics-inflected “anti-degeneration” discourses of the late nineteenth century: “‘if we want to obtain a race of thoroughbred humans, we must use the procedure undertaken to obtain a thoroughbred horse. let us first create strong and robust individuals who will be, if current prudishness will pardon the term — the stallions of the future’” (149). chapter seven, “animal magnetism, affective influence, and moral dressage”, steers the ending of the book in a new and different direction. taking off from the freudian metaphor of the unconscious mind as a “trojan horse”, weil affirms that in nineteenth-century psychological discourse “psychologists and writers often turned to horses to test or illustrate aspects of subjectivity that could escape conscience or consciousness […] to warn of those beastly forces, shared by horses and humans alike” (156). with the growing interest in hypnosis toward the end of the century, horses and animal magnetism are discussed as models for understanding affective influence, and particularly for influencing “the masses in the service of gundermann, review of weil | 333 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the state” (159). whilst there is, once again, a lot of terrain covered in the course of this chapter, weil ends with a discussion of the philosopher of language stanley cavell and the poet and dog and horse trainer vicki hearne, both of whom theorize the question of training not so much as a unilateral flow of influence and hypnotism as in gustave lebon’s fantasy of “educating the masses” following the model of horse training as a kind of programming of the mind, but rather as a mutual language game. training, in this sense, is not (ab) using the sensibility, suggestibility, or “capacity of psychological attunement” (172) that characterize horses, but rather “a means of developing a language that both parties can speak and so learn to say something new” (173). and furthermore, “training is a means of entering a relationship and developing a language shared by horse and rider […] with which each can be said to speak, not merely to react” (173). perhaps most sharply, “[s]usceptibility, the capacity to be affected […] is not the same as subjugation,” and training is therefore always “mutual training” (174–75). finally, weil’s “afterword” closes with a profound and moving reflection on the “horse as witness” (176). horses, who have now largely disappeared from human life, “have a point of view […], one we would do well to consider” (177). weil wonders what the eye of the horse as witness “might be seeing that we miss” (177). i will now turn to a number of arguments from several different chapters that struck me as particularly interesting. the chapter titled “let them eat horse” especially shook me, with its repulsive and terrifying detail about slaughter practices. as weil points out, “the first real efforts to legalize hippophagy took place in 1856” (86). by 1910, “france had become the ‘horseflesh center of the western world’” (84). equally appalling is the numbing betrayal exemplified by how quickly and seamlessly horses will pass from a cherished intimate partner to a brutalized bleeding carcass in the great urban metropolis of paris where close corporeal relationships with horses had become commonplace for the middle classes. add to that that the nineteenth century is the era of rationalism, science, and the humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 334 | gundermann, review of weil grand biopolitical management of life as resource, and that it saw as well the incipient emancipation of the alienated urban working classes. within this cauldron emerges the utilitarian discourse of horse slaughter as the means of making use of horses’ bodies, even after their labour had been exploited to the point of breakdown, in order to feed the malnourished workers and thereby improve their productive capacity. horse slaughter was thus portrayed as both useful and humane. in other ways, horse slaughter was meant to put a rationalist end to the growing animal sympathy movements. as the second chapter demonstrates, the nineteenth century saw the beginnings of animal protection legislation. yet the return of cartesian rationalism to mainstream politics combated emotional political investments. furthermore, weil explains that even “socialists of the time, including karl marx, feared that a growing animal protection movement would reduce sympathy for the working class — those for whom horses were their livelihood — if not shore up the moral superiority of the middle class and their love of pets” (55). this attitude continues to have resonances today where struggles for animal protection are still often countered with the sentiment that existing resources, be they material or emotional, must be reserved for, or at least prioritize, humans experiencing systemic exploitation and injustice. weil elaborates these themes in a slightly different key in the final chapter, where she explores how horses’ sensitivity and susceptibility — ultimately what makes them exploitable to human greed and abuse, or trainable as our “precarious partners” — was resisted in rationalist nineteenth-century france because it undermined the enlightenment subject: “it was a refusal to acknowledge our human animality, our susceptibility to be affected by others — human and animal — in ways we cannot always know or control” (175). how we understand influence, will, and sympathy are shown to be “a function of many partnerships between humans and horses”, some of which weil explores in this volume (175). the profound equine (and human) susceptibility, the “capacity to be affected”, and the difficult but necessary task of distinguishing it from falling prey to gundermann, review of weil | 335 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) subjugation, is one of the book’s central themes (174). weil’s interest lies with historical evidence where, their “susceptibility” notwithstanding, horses are seen as agential partners to humans, not as hapless victims of domestication. in rosa bonheur’s horse-themed paintings, for instance, weil seems to have found a paragon of this type of ambivalent and rich entanglement with horses, a belated ally in her critique of francione’s abolitionism. where thinking animals points out the “shameful” lack of imagination in abolitionism’s insistence on freedom as an empty “untethered-ness” that can only be found in death (the death of animals, to be sure), bonheur’s paintings make palpable the rich potential of artistic as well as quotidian collaborations between horses and people: “bonheur is the saint-simonienne on horseback who partners with her mounts to ‘rehabilitate the flesh’ (human and animal) and turn both toward the collaborative task at hand” (80). bonheur was born in 1822 and died in 1899. she was best known as an animalière (a painter of animals) and reached visibility as a painter and sculptor from the late 1840s forward. she is probably among the most recognized female painters in nineteenth-century france. in weil’s text, we learn that bonheur challenged social norms not only with her crossdressing lesbianism, but also in her questioning of animals’ lack of agency in human society. her portrait of the godolphin arabian, the legendary english thoroughbred foundation stallion, depicts the horse in an exuberant fight with another stallion over the mare roxana. the painting tells the heroic, as well as hackneyed, story of heterosexual romance that finally results in reproduction, and more specifically in the foundation of the english thoroughbred, and therefore in human fame and profit. one can easily imagine what an abolitionist reading of this painting and its mythology would be. weil suggests that “what makes this significant for bonheur, however, is that the agency and the labor behind the making of the breed are animal” (65). in a manner akin to donna haraway, who suggests we reconsider domestic human–animal relations along labour-focused marxist lines,2 weil also emphasizes that 2 “the marx in my soul keeps making me return to the category of labor, including examhumanimalia 14.2 (2024) 336 | gundermann, review of weil bonheur “seeks to make this work visible not only in animal resistance but also in the very capacity for cooperation and partnership” (66). in a return to her earlier critique of singer’s model of animal liberation, weil finds in bonheur precisely the instantiation of domestic human–animal relations as a partnership bitterly repudiated by abolitionists: “[i]t was not just animal ‘freedom’ or wild nature as unencumbered by social constraints that was relevant for bonheur, but animal freedom as necessarily structured and restrained by relations with other animals and humans. rather than animal liberation, bonheur envisioned a kind of interspecies collaboration in which the freedoms of disparate partners may not be equal, but nevertheless inspire the curiosity, reciprocity, and affection that many theorists today consider to be our obligation” (67). domestication, then, ceases to be a synonym of enslavement, but an ambivalent marker of potential, agency, and interspecies collaboration. i believe that this argument, however tricky and vulnerable to purist notions of liberation it may be, is particularly relevant at this historical moment where the abuse of horses in exploitative sports contexts is once again in the spotlight. from the numerous, and dramatic, deaths of horses on the racetrack, to the ongoing scandals surrounding dressage competition over the spectacularization and subjugation of dressage horses on the international scene all the way to the olympics, animal liberationists are demanding the shutdown of all public sports activities involving horses, and ultimately even the end of all riding. the abuse is real, no doubt, and the disciplines are in dire need of oversight, regulation, and reform. this indisputable crisis notwithstanding, weil’s scholarship shows us the histories and complexities of human–equine partnerships, proving that there is value in continued collaborations between humans and horses. it is curious how much weil’s description of bonheur as a rider, writer, and painter resembles the dramatic innovations of ining the actual practices of extraction of value from workers. my suspicion is that we might nurture responsibility with and for other animals better by plumbing the category of labor more than the category of rights.” donna haraway, when species meet (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008), 73. gundermann, review of weil | 337 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) horsemanship by the nineteenth-century master horseman françois baucher, whose name is most strongly associated with the equestrian concepts of lightness and voluntary collaboration. in baucher’s system, the horse is asked and allowed, not coerced, to execute a movement. his or her intelligence, understanding, and collaboration are presumed and cultivated. the rider’s physical influence on the horse is to be minimized right from the beginning of training. baucher was specifically known for developing a method to work with the horse’s natural balance and improve it for the task of carrying a rider, rather than to impose the artificial balance of the ancienne école of versailles. weil suggests that bonheur’s painting of horses at liberty produces a “transfer of her own restraint and compulsion to her horses.” in her paintings, the free horses (without rider) produce “movements that are usually induced by a rider, and that these horses achieve them on their own is indicative not only of bonheur’s controlled brush but also of the horses’ self-determination. this combination of freedom and training is what bonheur sought” (80). some of the resonances between weil’s characterization of bonheur’s paintings and baucher’s method are striking, particularly the conjunction of freedom and training. baucher’s influence on french and international horsemanship in the nineteenth century cannot be overstated. with his aesthetic and relational principles, developed in the manège and his prolific written œuvre, and exhibited in countless public performances, baucher paved the way toward modern dressage. this is true also in the sense that it was some of his pupils and pupils’ pupils, most notably general albert-eugène-edouard decarpentry, who in the 1950s wrote the dressage rules for the fédération equestre internationale, the governing body of international equestrian competition. if, then, there is one question i would bring to weil’s text, it is about the nearly complete absence of baucher’s figure in a book that covers a lot of terrain as far as the role of horses within nineteenth-century french culture, and the enormous transformations that this culture underwent. from an equestrian perspective, baucher humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 338 | gundermann, review of weil reformulated the classical versailles school of french horsemanship, which formed the commonly agreed upon basis of all dressage training, and adapted it to modern riding, updated the rider’s relationship with his mount centering it in lightness and collaboration, and produced these changes in the context of french “anglomania” on which weil has otherwise much to say. baucher and his pupils no longer rode the classical horses of iberian lines that defined the versailles school. instead, they adopted the modern english thoroughbred, which had been bred with a very different balance and different purposes in mind, most notably “open forward riding.”3 given the centrality of baucher in these developments, as well as his relative absence in english-language equestrian discourse and therefore his need of a new cultural ambassador, his equal near omission in weil’s text is baffling.4 i believe weil’s rich and passionate explorations of bonheur’s art would have benefitted from being put in conversation with baucher. he was the quintessential nineteenth-century french equestrian artist. his innovative training method was based on recognizing and engaging the intelligence and agency of horses, an attitude that weil identifies in bonheur’s paintings. had she woven her discussion of bonheur into the rich fabric of baucher’s legacy, weil could have augmented her analysis of equine agency in french culture by considering the importance that baucher holds today in horse training when understood as artistic dialogue with horses.5 unlike in the dominant conception of dressage as an equine sport where the horse serves as a tool or instrument akin to a bicycle or a motor vehicle, mechanistically executing what the rider instructs him or her to do, in artistic (also sometimes called “academic”) dressage, 3 see donna landry, noble brutes: how eastern bloodstock transformed english culture (baltimore, md: john hopkins university press, 2009). 4 the most extensive of weil’s scarce references to baucher comments on his gender politics: that women should “ride only calm and well-trained horses.” although mentioning that he was a “celebrated riding master and advocate of haute école dressage”, she never explores the content of his fame (8). 5 as galadriel julie sparrow — the moderator of the sometimes turbulent, france-based facebook group françois baucher, which has more than 7,600 members  —  put it in a presentation at a colloquium commemorating the 150th anniversary of baucher’s death, on 14 march 2023 at the garde républicaine in paris: “le bauchérisme c’est quand l’équitation devient art” [baucherism happens when equitation becomes art]. gundermann, review of weil | 339 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) horse and rider are dance partners choreographing performances together in an improvised manner. what matters in this distinction is what weil already found to be true about bonheur’s paintings: that horses appear as active, intelligent agents. as the renowned twentieth-century baucherist rené bacharach put it, in artistic dressage “la matière grise devrait jouer un rôle plus important que la quincaillerie” [grey matter should play a more important role than hardware].6 equitation, in other words, is a meeting of minds rather than mind (human) over matter (horse). this, once again, resonates with the ending statements in weil’s last chapter on training as a way of developing a common language between rider and horse. 6 rené bacharach, réponses équestres (lausanne: p.-m. favre, 1987), 64. microsoft word van dooren rose pdf dummy.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:2 thom van dooren & deborah bird rose storied-places in a multispecies city all that is unhuman is not un-kind, outside kinship, outside the order of signification, excluded from trading in signs and wonders. — haraway, modest_witness@second_millenium recognising earth others as fellow agents and narrative subjects is crucial for all ethical, collaborative, communicative and mutualistic projects, as well as for place sensitivity. — plumwood, environmental culture introduction. over fifty per cent of the world’s human population now lives in cities, and the rate is increasing exponentially. at the same time that humans are making their way to cities, or finding their rural homes overtaken by urban development, many other animals are also making the shift to urban life. for them also, the reasons for urbanization, while complex, include the same two major constellations of causes: animals are choosing to move into city spaces, and animals are finding their homes overtaken by cities. meanwhile, a growing interest in “biodiversity” and “urban nature” has made us aware like never before of the many animals that reside in our cities — some newly arrived, others pre-dating the city itself. to draw attention to animals in city spaces is, in itself, nothing new. as hilda kean reminds us, “non-human animals have long been recognized as inhabitants of the metropolis” (54). in this paper, however, our focus is on the specific ways in which some animals make their homes in urban places. focusing on a small colony of penguins and a flying fox camp, both located in sydney, australia, we are interested in exploring how these animals understand and render meaningful the places they inhabit. our thinking here is rooted in a notion of places as relationally constituted: that is, an understanding in which animals, sites, and stories all shape, and are shaped by, entangled and circulating patterns of intra-action.1 in contrast to some previous work on narrative and place that has focused exclusively on humans, in this paper we are concerned to ask: what might it mean to take storiedplaces seriously as multispecies achievements? in situating this discussion in urban environments, we highlight the value of an attentiveness to nonhuman storying of places: namely, its ability to provide new perspectives on the world, and in so doing to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 2 draw us into deeper and more demanding accountabilities for nonhuman others. our accounts of penguins and flying foxes work to disrupt both the singularity of humancentrism and dualistic notions of animals “out of place” in cities. the alternative ways of knowing and interacting with urban places offered by penguins and flying foxes have the potential to open up possibilities for a more equitable multispecies city, a task that is particularly important for those species that are in some way tied or drawn to specific city places, and perhaps especially, in these perilous times, for those whose future is endangered. to this end, this paper makes an argument for an ethics of conviviality that is urbanbased, emplaced, embodied, and enlivened through multiple stories enacted and expressed by multiple species. places are materialized as historical and meaningful, and no place is produced by a singular vision of how it is or might be. in short, places are co-constituted in processes of overlapping and entangled “storying” in which different participants may have very different ideas about where we have come from and where we are going. what would it mean, in a multispecies context, to negotiate “across and among difference the implacable spatial fact of shared turf” (massey 3)? what would it mean to really share a place? part i: storied-places in animal worlds. a great deal of recent work in human geography, anthropology, and philosophy has emphasized the more-than-material dimensions of “place” — albeit with a focus on human relationships with place. the great philosopher of place edward casey has been at the forefront of this scholarship, and has documented in his work the history of western modernity’s lack of interest in theory and philosophy of place, as well as the more recent reinvigoration of place.2 central to casey’s analysis is the fact that a living being is emplaced through its body: that places are formed between bodies and the terrains they inhabit. within this nexus of body and terrain, specific places become sites of meaning. in addition, what has emerged from the work of casey and others is an insistence on the more than “physical” nature of place: “a place is not a mere patch of ground, a bare stretch of earth, a sedentary set of stones” (casey, "how to get" 26). instead, these theorists have pointed to the embodied, situated, kinetic and narratival nature of place — highlighting the way in which places are understood and embedded in broader histories and systems of meaning.3 but stories and meanings are not just layered over a pre-existing landscape. instead, stories emerge from and impact upon the way in which places come to be — the material and the discursive are all mixed up in the making of places, as with worlds more generally.4 deborah rose & thom van dooren — storied places in a multispecies city 3 if we accept this notion of place, however, an important question remains before us, namely, who stories (in the active voice) these places? whose stories come to matter in the emergence of a place? in particular, we are concerned to ask: what might it mean to take storied-places seriously as multispecies achievements? more concretely, what would it mean to take seriously the way in which some specific animals story their specific places? the early twentieth century estonian biologist jakob von uexküll offers us perhaps the first systematic way into the these kinds of questions. his concept of an organism’s umwelt — the recursive perceptual life-world that characterizes organism and surrounds — has profoundly influenced several generations of thinkers (as carefully documented in a recent, and extremely rich, study by buchanan). uexküll proposed to investigate how environments are meaningful to animals — how the “life story” of an animal develops according to its own perceptions and actions. not content to view animals as objects, uexküll proposed a much stronger view of emplaced, embodied animals with a subjective experience of the world (buchanan 2). buchanan argues that uexküll’s great achievement was to produce an intersubjective account of nature (28). contemporary research within fields of ethology, philosophy, sts, biosemiotics and multispecies ethnography are developing this wave of thought.5 our thinking draws on this exciting and growing body of research, directing it toward a particular focus on story, and its intra-actions with place. in this context, we are working with a broad notion of “story”: a story is that which emerges out of an ability to engage with happenings in the world as sequential and meaningful events. william cronon has drawn an instructive distinction here between “narrative” and “chronology”, and while his analytic focus is on humans, his distinction is broadly applicable across many life forms.6 chronology, cronon asserts, is a telling of events that simply places them in chronological order. in contrast, narrative, or story, renders meaningful those events in relation to each other and to the wider context of their occurrence. we will set aside for the moment the question of what might be involved in telling a narrative, whilst focusing on an enlarged understanding of narrative itself. for if a multispecies approach to storied-places is to have credibility, we must consider the question: are animals narratival subjects in their own right? the work of paul shepard offers us an avenue into understanding the way in which many nonhuman animals render their experiences and perceptions in the manner formulated by cronon, that is, as successive and meaningful events. shepard draws on the concept of time-binding, as discussed by loren eisley in particular. time-binding is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 4 the process that connects one event to another, into a sequence with meaning. shepard offers the example of the story-making through which an animal weaves sounds, smells or other experiences into a meaningful sequence so as to, for example, determine if a predator is drawing nearer or farther away, and on this basis make life or death decisions about what to do (shepard 16). other examples abound, and our case studies will take up the analysis in relation to specifics. for now it is sufficient to state that that which bridges the gap between one event and another (indeed, that which defines one event as different from another and thus actually constructs it as a unit) in a way that produces meaning is narrative. in this sense narrative is a quality of the lives of many (probably most) nonhuman animals (crist, images of animals 170-1). our intention here is to point to a kind of minimal storying that will subtend our exploration of the specificities and possibilities of the storied worlds in which many animals dwell. what interests us is the fact that the experiences of many nonhuman animals are rendered meaningful by them in a way that might be recognized and thought about through the familiar lens of “narrative.” most particularly, we are interested in applying this account of storying to our understanding of some animals’ engagements with places. as such, our analysis is set within time, and stories are both individual and inter-generational, with the effect that stories are both generated and received. it is worth recalling that to be set within time is not necessarily to be harnessed to western concepts of linear time. the significance of narrative is in the meaning-making that connects the lives of living beings to the worlds they inhabit. the stories we examine are set within irreversible time in the sense that they are transmitted across generations, but they involve returns, recursions and innovations as well as linearities. the analysis we offer explicitly rejects the idea that narrative is an anthropocentric “proper,” that is, another of the many attributes carefully defined and (mis)identified in the ongoing effort to locate a capacity unique to the human that can do the work of holding us apart from the rest of the animals.7 at the core of our thinking about multispecies storying is the willingness to recognize storied-experience in nonhuman places — to accept nonhumans as “narrative subjects” (plumwood 175) with their own abilities to trade in “signs and wonders” (haraway, modest_witness 8). the ability to construct a storied experience of the world (as we have described above), and so to interact with places (and a world more generally) as personally significant and meaningful, does not require the capacity to tell that story to another (in whatever fashion), although it may include that. deborah rose & thom van dooren — storied places in a multispecies city 5 while this is a mode of engaging with the world that is probably shared — in various forms — by a wide range of animals, the storied-engagement with place outlined in this paper should be understood as just one general way in which nonhumans might develop place-attachments, and so just one set of the many possible ways in which nonhumans might make an ethical claim on us in relation to a place. the nonhuman weavers of the stories we outline below possess various cognitive, social, and experiential capacities. taking up this focus is part of an effort to “thicken” these nonhuman subjects, to begin to give fuller accounts of the specific ways that little penguins and flying foxes make themselves at home in specific places within the greater city of sydney. rendering these relationships intelligible is a core prerequisite for the kind of conviviality, the ethics of sharing places, that we will propose in the final section of this paper. while we potentially leave ourselves open to the charge of anthropomorphism in the use of this language and indeed this lens through which to view the world, we take these charges to be ill founded. as the accounts of penguins and flying foxes offered below make abundantly clear, the capacity to experience places as meaningful and significant is one that is shared well beyond the human species. eileen crist’s work on anthropomorphism in animal minds leads her to assert that there is no neutral language for describing animal behavior/mind; and the absence of the continuities that are labelled “anthropomorphism” by some scholars all too often reinforces an entrenched “mechanomorphism” that simply obviates or negates animal mind (crist, images of animals 121-22). this context requires us to develop a language that is capable of prompting recognition of similarity and responsibility, between embodied, social creatures. “storied-places” and an ethics of conviviality provide one such language. an analysis that links story, place, and the more-than-human world confronts several fascinating questions: how would we (humans) know that an animal is enmeshed in a storied-place and is participating in, shaping, and being shaped by that story? our path into this issue looks at narrative as action. where do animals go, and what do they do? we are proposing that in many cases their actions articulate a narrative of place and thus indicate the construction/inhabitation of a storied world. part ii: penguins. just inside the mouth of one of australia’s busiest harbors, sydney harbour, on a headland that is on one side lapped by the calm waters of the harbor and on the other by the waves of the pacific ocean, lives a tiny colony of penguins. they are little penguins — in size and name — eudyptula minor, meaning “good little diver.” these penguins are members of the world’s smallest penguin species: standing 30cm humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 6 tall and weighing around 1kg. like all penguins, the members of this colony have a strange relationship with the land. since their distant ancestors abandoned the skies for a life beneath the waves, they have become increasingly awkward and vulnerable out of the water. and yet, they are unable to completely give up their tie to dry land. perhaps if they had been marine mammals they would have evolved internal gestation, “the key to the totally aquatic existence of cetaceans and dugongs” (davis and renner 88). but as birds, as egg layers, they need the land to reproduce. perhaps if they had been marine reptiles, they would have been able to come up onto the beach in a single night, deposit their eggs — like the sea turtles — and then disappear back into the ocean. but as birds, penguins are “homotherms,” and so “their eggs must be kept warm for development to take place” (davis and renner 88). and so it is this unique biology — a bird that lives under the water — that has given rise to penguins’ special relationship with the land; or more accurately, their relationships with the very few specific places that they come ashore each year to reproduce. for these are specific places; not at all interchangeable, carrying the past experiences of individuals and the generations before them. photo by m. kuhn the breeding area of the manly colony is one such place. but in addition to its penguin residents, it is a place inhabited and shaped by a large number of humans and other species. since the mid 19th century, not too long after european settlement of the deborah rose & thom van dooren — storied places in a multispecies city 7 (human) colony of new south wales (nsw), this area has been a central site for beach recreation for the residents of australia’s largest city. initially accessed by ferry, the seaside destination boasted that it was “seven miles from sydney, and a thousand miles from care.”8 now, over a century later, manly has been well and truly subsumed within the ever expanding limits of the greater city of sydney. as one of sydney’s most iconic beaches, the number of human visitors and residents in manly have steadily increased over the past several decades. highly sought after coastal and harbor front properties have led to increasing densities of residential development and one of the fastest rates of population growth in the state (abs). while some of the land used for nesting by the manly penguin colony is located along the coastline of a small national park, most penguins breed on land that is now either public or located alongside residential properties (o’neill 2). the history of the penguin colony at manly is not well known. there is documentary evidence for its existence since the early twentieth century, but it is widely thought to be much older. over the years, perhaps centuries or longer, these penguins have adapted their breeding behavior to the unique local environment — in the absence of tussock grass and sandy soils, which in other places penguins would dig burrows into, members of this colony located in sandstone country, have primarily utilized rock crevices for their burrows (bourne and klomp 131). since european settlement, members of the colony have been required to again adapt their breeding behaviour, this time to make use of as well as gain protection from, a changing urban environment. manly penguins are sometimes now to be found nesting in the dark and dry places underneath houses, sheds, boats and more. as bourne and klomp note; “these modifications to their nesting behaviour have enabled little penguins to persist in the densely urbanised environment of sydney harbour” (bourne and klomp 131). but, while these penguins have found a way to co-habit with people, it has not been without significant cost. manly is now the only spot in a harbor once rich with penguin colonies, where survival has been possible — and likely in greatly diminished numbers. while other colonies of penguins once nested all along the south east coast of australia and at several other places in and around sydney harbour, this tiny colony of around 60 breeding pairs is now thought to be the last on the nsw mainland. over the past hundred or so years, all of the other colonies have disappeared. as the last mainland colony in the state, in 1997 the manly penguins were declared an “endangered population” under the nsw threatened species conservation act 1995. despite its protected status, this colony continues to face a range of obstacles to its survival; in particular, the loss of habitat through ongoing development, increased disturbance by humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 8 people (including noise, light and entanglement in fishing lines), and predation by several species, perhaps most importantly domestic dogs, but also foxes, cats and others (van dooren). in light of all these threats, the continued presence of penguins might make little sense to people: year after year they return to a place that is each time more built up, more noisy, more dangerous than the previous year. and yet, if you place an obstacle in a penguin’s path — between it and its burrow — it will push and manoeuvre with astonishingly unfaltering determination to return to its breeding place. quite simply, this is because, from a penguin’s perspective, one burrow is not just as good as any other. from the beginning, penguins are connected to their place of hatching. little penguins are philopatric, a term that literally means “love of one’s home,” and in biology describes a process in which an animal returns to its place of birth or hatching to themselves reproduce. it is not clear how, or precisely when, this attachment to a natal place develops. for roughly the past half century, curious biologists have moved seabird hatchlings of different ages between colonies to see where they would return to. what seems to have emerged from all this geographical disturbance is that philopatric attachment develops at some point between hatching and fledging.9 chris challies’ work in new zealand indicates that for little penguins, translocation has to occur prior to 55 days of life for the new location to be treated as “home” (gummer 26). however it develops, this strong philopatry means that roughly two to three years after fledging — once they have reached sexual maturity — most surviving little penguins will find their way back to their natal place to breed for the first time. while a very few individuals do opt to breed in a colony other than the one in which they were hatched, once they have bred in a place for the first time — irrespective of whether they were hatched there — penguins have a very high degree of fidelity to that place (called “site fidelity”). interestingly, this fidelity is often very spatially specific, with penguins not only returning to the same general area, but usually to the exact same nest or burrow each year. but this nest fidelity is not absolute. several of the studies that have explored little penguin fidelity in detail — in colonies in australia and new zealand — have found that birds are significantly more likely to change nests if they were unsuccessful in their previous breeding attempt (reilly and cullen 81; johannesen, perriman and steen 245; bull).10 various explanations have been offered for this site fidelity, including the fact that it may enable birds to retain high-quality nests, and ones with which they are familiar. it may also minimize the time required to prepare a nest/burrow, and increase a penguin’s chances of reunion with a past mate — in addition to site fidelity, little penguins also display fidelity to their breeding partners, perhaps especially partners with whom they have bred successfully in the past.11 these explanations for deborah rose & thom van dooren — storied places in a multispecies city 9 fidelity are often interpreted through the lens of the notion of “competitive advantage” that is at the heart of sociobiology (crist, images of animals 123-65). more specifically, the advantages conferred by site fidelity are thought to improve penguins’ breeding success. while this may well be the case, we should be careful about allowing these evolutionary explanations to become exhaustive accounts of animal behavior. doing so commits the error of mistaking function for motivation (de waal 280), and, even more problematically, it does so in a way that all too often negates or obviates richer notions of nonhuman cognitive life.12 in short, all of the practical advantages of fidelity — which make good evolutionary sense — tell us practically nothing about how the imperative to be reunited with a place or a partner is experienced by individuals and comes to animate their understandings, actions and relationships. ultimately, wherever they go to breed, for little penguins the presence of a colony is all important. as with many other seabirds, is seems that little penguins will not nest in a place where other birds of the same species (conspecifics) are not present. in this context, the sight and sound of other birds seems to play an important role in penguins coming ashore — in fact, even after establishing nests in an area, penguins will usually gather in a group out to sea (called a “raft”) and come in to the beach as a group. if juvenile birds return to their natal place to find it abandoned, it is unlikely that they will attempt to breed there. these comments point to a general pattern of terrestrial behavior for little penguins. while there is certainly a great deal of individual variability in breeding and site fidelity that should not be forgotten in the search for species specific generalities,13 it seems fair to say that penguin relationships with breeding places like manly are the result of complex interactions between inherited and learned behaviours and ideas. while we cannot claim to really understand the full significance of these places from a penguin’s perspective, it seems that a variety of factors influence these relationships: initially there is a pull to return to a natal site, that is then influenced by some specific changes in the site — in particular with reference to other penguins’ presence, as well as individual’s own accumulated experiences in that place — perhaps, in particular, past breeding success or failure. places, stories and penguins all emerge here in a process of entangled becoming (cf. barad, meeting 294). of course, the specific biological, geological and historical features of only some landscapes make them suitable for penguin habitation. but in addition, penguins alter places through processes of burrowing, breeding, hunting, excreting, and more — in fact, excreta from penguins and other sea bird is often a particularly humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 10 important component of the nutrient cycles of small coastal islands — depositing nitrogen and phosphorus (muller-schwarze 26). penguins and landscapes shape each other through the medium of a story that binds them together, a connection that is in some sense remembered, re-configured, and ultimately passed on to the next generation of penguins through their connection to a specific site determined by the cumulative experience of their forebears. stories are not just layered over penguins or places here, but are active participants in the production of both. ultimately, it is through the coming together of penguins, places, and stories that vital connections with safe lands beyond the edge of the water are maintained across generations, in no small way enabling the continuity of the species. this is a relationship that goes well beyond what we ordinary mean by “habitat” — a term which seems to summon in the mind a purely physical set of relationships and features. in this context, habitat emerges as a largely interchangeable place: as is clear in the oxford english dictionary definition of the term, which notes that it is “chiefly used to indicate the kind of locality, as the sea-shore, rocky cliffs, chalk hills, or the like” (emphasis added). as long as a locality possesses the requisite ecological and biological characteristics it will be “suitable habitat” for the species. for example, in the case of little penguins, breeding habitat cannot be too warm (as they overheat easily on land); it must be close to a suitable food supply (because they cannot swim too great a distance while incubating eggs and guarding chicks); it must provide dry and secure burrows within easy distance of the water; and, it must also be home to a significant number of other little penguins. as we have seen, while all of these characteristics are important they are far from being all that there is to the ways in which little penguins know and value their breeding places. any piece of land that meets these requirements is not just as good as any other. only one colony is “home,” and within it, likely only one burrow. more than the sum of their ecological parts, these places carry penguin histories and stories. in focusing exclusively on “habitat” in accounts of penguin breeding places, we provide a framework of thought in which it is far easier to deny, or conveniently forget, both the real significance of penguin relationships with these particular places, and the fact that penguins inhabit their own richly meaningful and storied worlds. in lestel’s terms, penguins — like many other animals — are generators (and inheritors) of meaning (9). part iii: flying foxes. just after sunset every night in sydney tens of thousands of grey-headed flying foxes leave their camps in the tall trees and fly out on their nightly quest for food. blossom chasers with a taste for fruit when pollen and nectar are not available, they navigate the city following water ways and other landmarks, dodging deborah rose & thom van dooren — storied places in a multispecies city 11 skyscrapers and power lines, drawing on their senses of sight and smell, and communicating with each other about where food is to be found. their nightly travels take them through parks, streets, and people’s backyards foraging for both native and introduced foods. before dawn they return to their home camps where they spend the day hanging upside down in sociable clusters that look like odd bundles of fruit. these flying mammals love to camp together; documentation exists for the fact that some camps of some species numbered in the millions (eby, “seasonal movements” 553), but those numbers are no longer encountered. the species that is most common in sydney is the grey-headed flying fox (pteropus poliocephalus).14 like the other australian pteropus species, they navigate principally by sight, feed exclusively on plant foods, and are among the largest flying mammals on earth. with their long-distance capacity to pollinate and disperse seeds, they are a keystone species for the survival of the plants and ecosystems that depend on them. if flying foxes become extinct, either wholly or “in the wild,” that which remains of australian native forests will also be imperiled. photo by d. rose humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 12 their numbers have declined by 30 percent in ten years, and it is now estimated that the population is halving every 6.5 years (booth et al. 11). the conditions of this vastly increased “modern mortality” include habitat destruction, persecution and killing (martin and mcilwee 98), and increasingly involve periodic starvation events as well as summertime mass deaths from heat stress (hall and richards 50). after decades of efforts to eradicate this “pest,” and with massive loss of habitat, this species was listed as threatened under the commonwealth environment protection and biodiversity conservation act 1999. at the same time, because they eat fruit out of orchards when their preferred foods are not available to them, they are still regarded as pests, and every year the national parks and wildlife service of new south wales, the body that has the legislative duty to protect them, also issues licenses to kill them. like little penguins, flying foxes are notable for their site fidelity. there are six main flying fox camps in sydney, and these camps highlight many of the problems and possibilities encountered by an endangered species in the city. nomadism and site fidelity are the two major trajectories of flying fox life. the nomadic pattern is to follow the blossoms, spreading out in smaller groups when food is dispersed, and congregating in larger groups when food is localized and abundant. camps are sites to which the flying foxes return year after year to give birth and, later, to mate. maternity camps are where flying foxes gather for protection of the very young, and are often where mothers give birth. later in the annual cycle males establish mating sites on particular branches which they scent mark and defend against take-overs by other blokes. according to hall and richards (64), both grooming and vocalizing are important social activities, and with over thirty different calls, all of which are entirely audible to humans, flying foxes are generally classed as “noisy.” in sum, life inside the camp has a rowdy character that changes with the demographics and intentions of the inhabitants. flying foxes accomplish their mobility and their fidelity through what hall and richards call “geographical memory” (104). this memory includes the camps where they were youngsters learning to fly, and contributes to a desire to return to that home. it will come to include the camps where mating took place, and will foster a return to that camp, perhaps even a return to the same branch on the same tree. it will include all the navigational signals that enable flying foxes to negotiate terrains by night both for local foraging and for long-distance travel. geographical memory is not solely individuated, for while each flying fox must, it would seem, have his or her own memory, a great deal of communication takes place, and knowledge of the experience of one is transmitted to others. peggy eby describes camp sociality as spatially and temporally fluid. some flying foxes are always leaving, and they do not all go to the deborah rose & thom van dooren — storied places in a multispecies city 13 same places. some return, and others arrive from elsewhere; they bring reports of what they have encountered. in eby’s view, information exchange is a significant source of knowledge amongst flying foxes.15 stories, therefore, are both localized and detailed, as well as extensive and pathed. most of all, they engender an incredible determination to return to a camp, or, if the camp has become permanent, to stay. stories of place involve time and motion for flying foxes and for humans. the subjectivity of the story weaver is situated in the present moment, a place that connects with other times and places. the present moment — the emplaced now — is a site from which and toward which wider stories are generated and converge. in the words of paul ricoeur, the “now” is “constituted by the very transition and transaction between expectation, memory, and attention” (16). his approach helps us think of “now” as a practice, and his interactive definition seems to work as well for flying foxes as for humans. a flying fox story of a particular place appears to be a shared project, as it is sustained both by those who stay and those who depart and return. in both cases (and most flying foxes do both at different times), the element of return offers a key to the story — the return depends on memory, and demonstrates intentionality. bracketed by the sense of past (having been here) and future (going there again), there is a moment of choice, a trajectory of storied possibility connecting past and future, and constituting intentional action in the on-going entanglements of creature, place and story. storiedplaces, therefore, both camps and paths, are known and experienced through memory and expectation, through embodied knowledge of distance and proximity, through past stories and shared stories, and through individual determination both to travel and to return. while the size of camps is shrinking, duration of inhabitation is being extended. in recent years, more and more flying foxes are becoming sedentary, and most new permanent camps are in cities or suburbs. urban areas loom large in this story because they afford new survival opportunities for flying foxes, but they also offer their own hazards: electricity wires, barbed wire, netting badly placed over fruit trees in suburban back yards, obstacles such as tall buildings and airplanes, and dogs, among others. in place of dispersed, patchy sequential abundances of high quality food, cities offer continuous supplies. often the food is not the high quality nectar and pollen that flying foxes prefer, and some of the camps are sub-optimal in terms of microclimate, but it seems that growing numbers of flying foxes are exchanging nomadism for sedentarism , and thus are choosing reliability, albeit of poor quality, over the increasing unpredictability they encounter as nomads. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 14 the most spectacular sydney camp is in the royal botanic gardens. this heritage precinct is located at the edge of sydney harbour; it is an easy walk from circular quay and the opera house, and for the past fourteen years it has hosted a permanent flying fox camp whose numbers vary from 6,000 to 22,000 (dunleavy). the trees they have chosen to camp in are heritage trees, deemed to be valuable because of their rarity; they are non-native trees and they have suffered under the continuous presence of flying foxes (leishman). in the years prior to the designation of grey-headed flying foxes as an endangered species, numerous methods were used to try to get rid of the unwanted camp. tactics included ingenious methods such as lacing trees with bundles of python excrement (olfactory deterrence; pythons are one of the main predators of flying foxes), and lacing trees with fermented prawn paste (taste aversion). more seriously disturbing was the use of noise harassment in the form of a computer controlled system that blared out a variety of electronic sounds, randomly selected, setting up “a whirling effect of reverberating noises that creates a ‘discomfort zone.’” when first tested (in 2001) the effect was to reduce the numbers of flying foxes in the target area by 90 percent. those who refused to leave were males who had staked out mating territories and were completely unwilling to give them up (richards 198-199). since those trials in 2001 the numbers of flying foxes in the area has continued to increase. then in 2010 the botanic gardens was granted permission by the federal minister for the environment to embark upon a thirty-year process of expelling the flying foxes through the use of noise harassment. many concerned citizens have participated in public fora where they articulate their objections to the expulsion. in newspapers, on blogs, in legal challenges, and public events including educational events, people have remarked upon the inappropriateness of causing extreme stress to members of an endangered species for any purpose at all. many remark upon the fact that this is a camp to which flying foxes have demonstrated extreme fidelity and, in its functions as both a maternity camp and a mating camp is crucial to reproduction. one of the scientists who works with flying foxes, karen parry-jones, points out that one of the great benefits to humans is that the botanic garden is located far from residential neighborhoods; to shift the “problem” from that location is merely to dump it somewhere else. no one knows where the flying foxes will go, if and when they do. it is quite probable that the one large camp will break up into numerous smaller camps, and one can’t help but wonder about the merit of transforming one problem into many.16 deborah rose & thom van dooren — storied places in a multispecies city 15 photo by nick edards in light of our argument in this paper, the flying foxes of sydney have inhabited the city in ways that perfectly demonstrate a mutually beneficial entanglement of multispecies stories. the quality of life for both flying foxes and humans in the downtown area of this large and beautiful city is a case of symbiotic mutualism. flying foxes have a camp where they have prospered, set in the center of a city surrounded by residential areas that have been extensively planted with both flowering natives and introduced trees such as figs. in addition to these specifically urban plantings, flying foxes are sustaining their co-evolved mutualists in sydney’s national parks, state forests, conservation reserves, regional parks, and nature reserves, of which there are over forty in the greater sydney region. humans, both tourists and residents, flock to the downtown area and take time to enjoy the flying foxes in the camp by day (they are sufficiently habituated to humans to not be bothered by people and cameras). in the late afternoon people watch the flying foxes belly dip in the lagoon, and in the evening they watch the flyout. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 16 we wonder at the human determination to break up this mutuality, and about the longterm decision to assault a flying fox camp with aggressive measures aimed toward absolute expulsion. one of the most haunting challenges to our imagination concerns the destruction of camps. casey’s observation that to be emplaced is also to face the “unhappy prospect” of becoming unplaced (getting back xii), gestures toward the anguish of those whose homes are no longer inhabitable. given the flying foxes’ intense determination to return to or remain in camps where they have mated and given birth, the experience of those who return to find that the home camp has been rendered uninhabitable or even razed must be stressful and demoralizing in the extreme. as with the penguins, for whom a burrow is far more than habitat, flying foxes inhabit not just trees but worlds of meaning. as we imagine the experience of loss in light of our analysis of stories, memory, expectation and desire, we can see that the loss of a place to which flying foxes had formed attachments would leave them with much of their knowledge, memory, meaning, and sociality shattered. part iv: urban convivialities: attentiveness to these kinds of tangled multispecies stories — histories of flying foxes and penguins in city places, newly arrived or predating the city itself — work to disrupt the long western tradition of thinking in terms of an urban/rural dualism in which the city is seen as a strictly human space. as recent scholarship — especially from human geographers — has so clearly demonstrated, nonhumans have always been a part of the fabric of city places; all cities are inescapably multispecies affairs — for better or worse (davison and ridder 306). as in many other places, however, the presence of animals in australian cities has almost always been entirely on human terms.. some animal species are welcomed as pets, but they are required to behave in particular ways (especially in public spaces). other animals are tolerated as long as they stay in certain places — like the zoo or the park. yet other animals that once lived in cities — livestock and poultry, for example — are now excluded from some urban spaces altogether.17 meanwhile, until very recently, the “wildlife” in our cities has been comprised almost exclusively of those species that happen to have been able to take advantage of, or simply survive in, urban environments (usually without drawing too much attention to themselves). whether nesting under the eaves of a building or taking up residence in backyards, parks, or elsewhere, these species have had to fit into human plans and spaces. they have lived in cities on our terms, or not at all, and while cities have offered new niches and foods, they have also offered new perils. it is in this context that we tell our penguin and flying fox stories, bringing to the fore other ways of storying city places. emerging out of these stories we encounter an deborah rose & thom van dooren — storied places in a multispecies city 17 opening into an ethic of conviviality for a genuinely inclusive multispecies city: a city that provides a space for the flourishing of as many different forms of life as possible. here, “conviviality” points to a “kind of being together that is not reducible to shared identities — rather, it is a practice of temporary identification with others in a shared place. to make connections with others to cultivate the life of a city” (fincher and iveson). “identification,” in contrast to “identity,” does not require that we share an essence or even a project, but simply that we are attentive to another’s presence, to their way of being in a place. in the context of urban planning, conviviality cannot be engineered but it can be both accommodated and planned for.18 conviviality thus requires that we make an effort toward inclusiveness, that we endeavor wherever possible to make room for that other in our activities in shared places.19 with the exception of some recent work on “transpecies urban theory,”20 however, it seems fair to say that the inclusivity imagined for many contemporary cities — under banners like “multiculturalism” and “cosmopolitanism” — is limited to human diversity in its many forms. despite the relative lack of interest in urban ecology and its environments – an interest that is now fortunately, but slowly, growing 21 — it is clear that learning to live with nonhuman animals in city places is a vitally important task for our time. as more and more land is developed, and more and more people move into cities, urban environments are becoming increasingly important habitat for many species, while also providing the only encounter that many people have with nonhuman animals — encounters which may be important for human quality of life as well as for instilling much needed conservation values.22 the stories, places, and animals (human and not) that we have woven together here, offer some partial glimpses into the life of one multispecies city. in highlighting some of the ways in which this city and these places have been, and continue to be, home to penguins and flying foxes (as well as, we can safely assume, many other kinds of animals), our account aims to unsettle the hegemony of the anthropocentric city. in the case of manly, the stories that we tell about these beaches may center on their place within a larger city, but this is undoubtedly not the way that penguins know this place. they likely have very little sense of the city that lies beyond the foreshore. penguins surely operate with an entirely different geography of this place, an entirely different sense of what it means, but also of the way in which it fits into and relates to the places around it. like humans, penguins too experience the shoreline as a liminal zone at the edge of comfort and daily experience — but for them, unstable and exposed on land, it is the water that dominates life. from this perspective, manly is not a city at humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 18 all, but a foreshore connected to an ocean and a harbor rich with the fish and squid so necessary for successful breeding. it is a rocky place that provides unconventional but solid burrows for protection from predators; burrows that include rock cavities, but also the dark and dry places underneath houses, sheds, boats and more. perhaps more than any of the current advantages or disadvantages that it offers, manly is a “home place” for these penguins. it is a place intimately known, used for generations, and although we understand little about the impulses or mechanics of philopatry and other forms of avian fidelity, it is clear that it is a place that calls out to be returned to. the story of flying foxes takes us away from the sea and into the air, but many of the issues are the same. the city, from a flying fox point of view, is seen from above. looking down, the relevant sights and smells are the flowers and the fruit. flying out across the city, navigating by rivers and by memory, heading toward the night time meal, flying foxes dodge all the obstacles that for humans most materially constitute the city. when they look down, they probably do not notice humans at all. but humans, when they look up, see these glorious creatures racing across the sky. they fly along city streets sometimes almost parallel with elevated train lines. people have evening parties in their yards, and the flying foxes fly over. if the trees are in flower, flying foxes “join the party”, contributing their scratchy noises and their sociable chatter. as journalist james woodford wrote, “watching bats silhouetted against the stars is one of the greatest, but little known, pleasure of life” (woodford). we can now see that the place of wildlife in the city opens our engagement with the urban in ethically compelling ways. the city is not so much an objective fact as it is a specific material mode of storying — a way of understanding relating and becoming. it is a story, told and enacted by many creatures. and ultimately, this intersection of multiple storied-places and their tellers gives rise to an ethical question of particular importance for this time of anthropogenic change called the “anthropocene”: are we able to engage meaningfully with very different ways of knowing and living in a place? what would it mean, in a multispecies context, to really share city places? this question is so novel in western thought that it is important to recall that many cities in the world appear to be imagined exactly as multispecies shared spaces (fuentes, for example). but precisely because it is novel for us, we can take it as the beautiful challenge that it is: to bring story, place and animals (nonhuman and human) into a shared story that we call a city. in the multispecies city, stories are often incommensurate, but also overlapping, adjacent, and entangled. places are differentiated, and by their very difference can be understood to be complementary. humans do not live in burrows or tree tops; there is room for everyone. flying foxes deborah rose & thom van dooren — storied places in a multispecies city 19 pollinate the trees, penguins return to a busy harbour in the winter, and children are tucked into bed at night to hear flying fox chatter and penguin song. the more-than-human city as a zone of entangled lives and deaths is an understanding yet to be fully realized. this staggeringly vivid, multi-storied, dynamic, entangled, and often divided account of a city in the anthropocene is, in itself, indicative of another “story,” using the term as we have defined it. it is a sequence of events with pattern and meaning, and what it tells us is that the story of the human-centric city is over: “zoöpolis is the name of the present and of the future” (haraway "zoöpolis"). but that is an understanding unevenly distributed amongst humans, and as a consequence, penguins and flying foxes continue to suffer. the lives and deaths of these creatures are here with us, entangled with ours, and short of ecocide they will remain so. their presence can be understood as an ethical call, and the call can be experienced as a responsibility. in addition to responsibilities toward specific creatures and their desire, indeed need, to return to, or continue to inhabit, their storied-places, there is the wider responsibility to decentre the often taken-for-granted human-centric experience of the city. this will mean profoundly unsettling our understandings of these most settled of places. we will need to learn to see our human edifices, for example, not only as the congealed evidence of our ingenuity and handiwork but also as myriad opportunities and obstacles, delights and disasters, for nonhuman others. in the great, open-ended, multi-voiced conversations of the storied-places that are cities, some species have fared far better than others, and all have frequently been sacrificed for the needs or convenience of homo sapiens. despite the considerable challenges and threats that cities produce, penguins, flying foxes and numerous animal-others continue to make their homes alongside people, for better or worse, often finding opportunities in the most unlikely of places. much of what they respond to in the city was not meant for them, and the fact that they neither know nor care about that fact is in itself humbling. an ethics of conviviality puts the burden back on humans: to find multiple, life enhancing ways of sharing and co-producing meaningful and enduring multispecies cities. image credits little penguin photo: photo by m. kuhn, reproduced under a cc by-nc-sa 2.0 license. (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mkuhn/76381326) flying fox photo 1: photo © d. rose. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 20 flying fox photo 2: photo © nick edards. permission to reproduce granted. notes 1. on entanglement, see barad, meeting the universe halfway. 2. see casey, “getting back 3. see malpas; ingold. for a general overview of these discussions, see light and smith. 4. see haraway modest_witness; barad "posthumanist." 5. see fuentes; bekoff; haraway, when species meet; crist, images of animals; hoffmeyer; mazis; rose, cooke and van dooren; chrulew. 6. on this topic, also see white. 7. see lestel. 8. see curby. 9. see serventy et al. 10. in addition, the study by johannesen et. al. suggests that this willingness to change nests may be, to some extent, dependent on the availability of (what a penguin considers to be, and a biologist can recognise as) a “superior nesting site” (245). another study, focusing on the manly colony’s closest penguin neighbors – at lion island, in the mouth of the hawkesbury river – found a high degree of nest fidelity, but did not detect any significant relationship between breeding success and nest changes (rogers and knight). 11. see rogers and knight. 12. see crist, images of animals. 13. see crist, “walking on my page.” 14. for further information on flying foxes see rose 15. see eby, the biology and management of flying foxes in ns. 16. the least ephemeral forms of public debate are available on the web in the form of articles, blogs videos, and television programs. see for example: peril and beauty in the lives of flying foxes http://www.ecologicalhumanities.org/peril.html; remnant deborah rose & thom van dooren — storied places in a multispecies city 21 emergency artlab's sydney botancal gardens, barangaroo x-tension main video: http://vimeo.com/17506825; remnant emergency artlab's bat-human project: http://www.remnantartlab.com/the-bat-human-event; http://www.edo.org.au/edonsw/site/pdf/casesum/110303bat_advocacy_casenote.pdf; http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3000668.htm. all accessed 29 november 2011 17. see philo; gaynor. 18. see peattie. 19. steve hinchliffe and sarah whatmore have also explored the possibility of a “politics of conviviality” in their work on urban nature (hinchliffe and whatmore). there are several points of convergence in our uses of the term “conviviality,” and we are generally sympathetic to their project. our work in this area, however, draws more heavily on ethology and ecology in an effort to better understand how some specific nonhumans understand and relate to their specific city-places. this approach is guided by the notion that genuine conviviality in shared 20. see wolch, west and gaines; haraway “zoöpolis.” 21. see davison and ridder; lunney and burgin urban wildlife. 22. see lunney and burgin, “urban wildlife management.” works cited “australian bureau of statistics: regional population growth, australia (3218.0).” 2010. 30 march 2010. <http://www.abs.gov.au/>. barad, karen. meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke up, 2007. —————.. “posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 28.3 (2003): 801-31. bekoff, marc. “animal passions and beastly virtues: cognitive ethology as the unifying science for understanding the subjective, emotional, empathic, and moral lives of animals.” human ecology forum 13.1 (2006): 39-59. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 22 booth, carol, et al. why n.s.w. should ban the shooting of flying foxes. sydney: humane society international, 2008. bourne, j., and n.i. klomp. “ecology and management of the little penguin eudyptula minor in sydney harbour.” urban wildlife: more than meets the eye. eds. daniel lunney and shelley burgin. mosman, nsw: royal zoological society of new south wales, 2004. 131-37. buchanan, brett. onto-ethologies: the animal environments of uexküll, heidegger, merleauponty, and deleuze. albany, ny: suny press, 2008. bull, leigh. “fidelity and breeding success of the blue penguin eudyptula minor on matiu-somes island, wellington, new zealand.” new zealand journal of zoology 27 (2000): 291-98. casey, edward. getting back into place: toward a renewed understanding of the placeworld. bloomington, in: indiana up, 1993. casey, edward s. “how to get from space to place in a fairly short stretch of time: phenomenological prolegomena.” senses of place. eds. s. feld and k. basso. santa fe, nm: school of american research press, 1996. 13-52. chrulew, matt. “managing love and death at the zoo: the biopolitics of endangered species preservation.” australian humanities review 50 (2011): 137-57. conder, pamela. with wings on their fingers: an intimate view of the flying-fox. sydney: angus & robertson, 1994. crist, eileen. images of animals: anthropomorphism and animal mind. philadelphia: temple university press, 1999. —————. “walking on my page”: intimacy and insight in len howard's cottage of birds." social science information 45.2 (2006): 179-208. cronon, william. “a place for stories: nature, history, and narrative.” the journal of american history march (1992): 1347-76. deborah rose & thom van dooren — storied places in a multispecies city 23 curby, pauline. seven miles from sydney: a history of manly. manly, nsw: manly council, 2001. davis, lloyd s., and martin renner. penguins. new haven: yale up, 2003. davison, aidan, and ben ridder. “turbulent times for urban nature: conserving and re-inventing nature in australian cities.” australian zoologist 33.3 (2006): 306-14. de waal, frans b.m. “putting the altruism back into altruism: the evolution of empathy.” annual review of psychology 59 (2008): 279–300. dunleavy, gabrielle. “flying foxes evicted from gardens ‘to drive sydney batty.’” sydney morning herald. 14 may 2010. online. eby, peggy. “seasonal movements of grey-headed flying-foxes, pteropus poliocephalus (chiroptera: pteropodidae) from two maternity camps in northern new south wales.” wildlife research 18 (1991): 547-59. —————. the biology and management of flying foxes in nsw. sydney: nsw national parks and wildlife service, 1995. fincher, ruth, and kurt iveson. “conviviality as an ethics of care in the city.” a manifesto for living in the anthropocene. eds. katherine gibson, ruth fincher and deborah bird rose. forthcoming. fuentes, agustin. “naturalcultural encounters in bali: monkeys, temples, tourists, and ethnoprimatology “ cultural anthropology 25.4 (2010): 600-24. gaynor, andrea. “animal agendas: conflict over productive animals in twentiethcentury australian cities.” society and animals 15 (2007): 29-42. gummer, h. chick translocation as a method of establishing new surface-nesting seabird colonies: a review. department of conservation, wellington: doc science internal series 150, 2003. hall, leslie , and greg richards. flying foxes: fruit and blossom bats of australia. sydney: unsw press, 2000. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 24 haraway, donna. modest_witness@second_millenium.femaleman©_meets_oncomouse™: feminism and technoscience. new york: routledge, 1997. —————. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. —————. “zoöpolis , becoming worldly, and trans-species urban theory: for old cities yet to come.” paper presented at playing cat's cradle with companion species: the wellek lectures, uc irvine, usa, 2011. hinchliffe, steven, and sarah whatmore. “living cities: towards a politics of conviviality.” science as culture 15.2 (2006): 123-38. hoffmeyer, jesper. signs of meaning in the universe. trans. barbara j. haveland. bloomington: indiana up, 1996. ingold, tim. “building, dwelling, living: how animals and people make themselves at home in the world.” the perception of the environment: essays on livelihood, dwelling and skill. london: routledge, 2000. johannesen, edda, lyndon perriman, and harald steen. “the effect of breeding success on nest and colony fidelity in the little penguin (eudyptula minor) in otago, new zealand.” emu 102 (2002): 241-47. kean, hilda. “traces and representations: animal pasts in london's present.” the london journal 36.1 (2011): 54-71. leishman, alan. “the history of grey-headed flying-foxes in the royal botanic gardens, sydney.” (2007). 2 january 2012. <http://www.sydneybats.org.au/cms/index.php?id=11,61,0,0,1,0>. lestel, dominique. “the philosophical stakes of ethology for the 21st century.” paper presented at the history, philosophy and future of ethology. macquarie university, sydney, australia 2011. lestel, dominique, and christine rugemer. “strategies of life.” research eu: the magazine of the european research area november (2008): 8-9. deborah rose & thom van dooren — storied places in a multispecies city 25 light, andrew and jonathan m. smith, ed. philosophy and geography iii. lanham, ma: rowman and littlefield, 1998. lorimer, jamie. “living roofs and brownfield wildlife: towards a fluid biogeography of uk nature conservation.” environment and planning a 40 (2008): 2042-60. lunney, daniel , pat hutchings, and dieter hochuli. the natural history of sydney. mosman: royal zoological of nsw, 2010. lunney, daniel, and shelley burgin. “urban wildlife management: an emerging discipline.” urban wildlife: more than meets the eye. eds. daniel lunney and shelley burgin. mosman: royal zoological society of new south wales, 2004. 1-7. —————., eds. urban wildlife: more than meets the eye. mosman: royal zoological society of new south wales, 2004. malpas, jeff. place and experience: a philosophical topography. cambridge: cambridge up, 1999. martin, l., and a. p. mcilwee. “the reproductive biology and intrinsic capacity for increase of the grey-headed flying-fox poliocephalus (megachiroptera), and the implications of culling.” managing the grey-headed flying-fox as a threatened species in nsw. eds. peggy eby and daniel lunney. sydney: royal zoological society of new south wales, 2002. 91-108. massey, doreen. “geographies of responsibility.” geografiska annaler: series b (human geography) 86.1 (2004): 5-18. mazis, glenn. “the world of wolves: lessons about the sacredness of the surround, belonging, the silent dialogue of interdependence and death, and speciocide.” environmental philosophy v.ii (2008): 69-92. muller-schwarze, dietland. the behavior of penguins: adapted to ice and tropics. albany: suny press, 1984. npws. endangered population of little penguins eudyptula minor at manly, recovery plan. hurstville: nsw national parks and wildlife service, 2000. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 26 o’neill, lisa. manly little penguin project: monitoring report, may 2008: report prepared for: biodiversity conservation section, metropolitan branch and the little penguin recovery team, 2008. peattie, lisa. “convivial cities.” cities for citizens: planning and the rise of civil society in a global age. eds. mike douglass and john friedmann. chichester: john wiley & sons, 1998. 247-53. philo, chris. “animals, geography, and the city: notes on inclusions and exclusions.” environment and planning d 13 (1995): 655-81. plumwood, val. environmental culture: the ecological crisis of reason. new york: routledge, 2002. reilly, p.n., and j.m. cullen. “the little penguin eudyptula minor in victoria, ii: breeding.” emu 81.1 (1981): 1-19. richards, g. c. “the development of strategies for management of the flying-fox colony at the royal botanic gardens, sydney.” managing the grey-headed flying-fox as a threatened species in nsw. eds. peggy eby and daniel lunney. sydney: royal zoological society of new south wales, 2002. 196-201. ricoeur, paul. “the history of religions and the phenomenology of time consciousness.” the history of religions: retrospect and prospect. ed. j. kitagawa. new york: macmillan, 1985. 13-52. rogers, t., and c. knight. “burrow and mate fidelity in the little penguin eudyptula minor at lion island, new south wales, australia.” ibis 148 (2006): 801–06. rose, deborah bird. “flying fox: kin, keystone, kontaminant.” australian humanities review 50 (2011): 119-36. rose, deborah bird, stuart cooke, and thom van dooren. “ravens at play.” cultural studies review, 17.2 (2011): 326-343. serventy, d.l. , et al. “fledgling translocation and philopatry in a seabird.” oecologia 81 (1989): 428-29. deborah rose & thom van dooren — storied places in a multispecies city 27 shepard, paul. the others: how animals made us human. washington d.c.: island press, 1996. uexküll, jakob von. a foray into the worlds of animals and humans, with a theory of meaning. trans. joseph d. o’neil. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2010. van dooren, thom. “invasive species in penguin worlds: an ethical taxonomy of killing for conservation.” conservation and society 9.4 (2011): 286-298. white, hayden. “the value of narrativity in the representation of reality.” the content of the form: narrative discourse and historical representation. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 1987. 1-25. wolch, jennifer. “anima urbis.” progress in human geography 26.6 (2002): 721-42. wolch, jennifer r., kathleen west, and thomas e. gaines. “transspecies urban theory.” environment and planning d 13 (1995): 735-60. woodford, james. “the swingers.” sydney morning herald 4 april 2003. online. hill cat–human intersubjectivity cat–human intersubjectivity and joint meaningmaking within multispecies families and communities kristine hill humanimalia 15.1 (fall 2024) abstract: this paper examines unstructured interview transcripts from case-studies of cat-human relationships, using the framework of interspecies intersubjectivity. adopting a qualitative thematic approach, this study explores how interspecies relationships are formed and performed within the context of multispecies families and communities. themes emerged relating to how the cats in this study became integrated into multispecies families and communities, through mutual trust-building, interspecies communication, and joint meaning-making. examples of co-creation of meaning within the cat-human relationships included special vocalizations or signals with shared meaning that were co-developed over time. all the cats exerted their agency in some manner that influenced human behaviour. most notably, by convincing their guardian to let them out to roam and to trust them. although undoubtably influenced by their kittenhood experiences, individual personalities rendered some cats inherently more eager to roam and others more content to stay home. this study highlights several friendships formed between cats and nonguardian humans and provides insight into how cats integrate themselves into their communities. furthermore, it demonstrates how cats are proactive in the process of becoming members of multispecies families. keywords: intersubjectivity; felis catus; sociality; cat–human relationships; multispecies families; hybrid communities bio: kristine hill earned her phd in anthrozoology from the university of exeter in 2023. her doctoral research focused on discourses surrounding roaming cats (felis catus) and cat–human relations. other academic areas of interest include more-than-human families, griefwork, animal representations, animals and tourism, and cat–human cultures. kris is a trustee of the society for companion animal studies (scas), and co-founder of anthrozoology as international practice (aip), and the cat academic think tank (ecatt). visit kris’s website to learn more about her projects and interests: https://academiccatlady.com/ email: tinehill@gmail.com orcid: 0000-0002-3429-5818 copyright © 2024 kristine hill this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 1 (2024): 45–74. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18145 https://academiccatlady.com/ mailto:tinehill@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3429-5818 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18145 hill , cat–human intersubjectivity | 47 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) the ability to communicate with others is paramount to the survival of a social species such as humans (homo sapiens) and wolves (canis lupus). sociality can be broadly defined as the inherent ability of individuals to function within social groups, either with conspecifics or other species. unlike the ancestral wolves from which dogs (canis familiaris) evolved, the progenitor species of domestic cats (felis catus) did not have complex social organizations and lived predominantly solitary lives.1 brown and bradshaw suggest that, given the solitary nature of the progenitor species and the relatively short time since the cat became domesticated, it is likely that traits surrounding sociability and communicative capabilities are far from a state of evolutionary equilibrium.2 given the multitude of recently evolved behavioural traits in domestic cats, signals, both intraand interspecific, may still be evolving biologically as well as culturally within cat and cat–human communities.3 research into expressions of feline emotion supports the notion that guardians may be best placed to receive and interpret communication signals from their cats.4 but what are some of the ways in which a mutual understanding is achieved by individual cats and their humans? here i attempt to answer this question and gain an understanding of how meanings are made and communicated within the cat–human dyad. i examine how relationships and meanings are formed across species by focusing on cases of cats and humans who have an established relationship. intersubjectivity refers to the shared space between conscious (subjective) minds where shared meaning can be made. the recognition that other-than-human animals also possess subjective minds led scholars to develop a concept of interspecies intersubjectivity.5 in their ethnographic study of a cat shelter, janet and steven alger found cats would learn what volunteers were trying to communicate (such as “come over here”) 1 driscoll et al.,“the taming of the cat”, 71–72; turner, “social organisation”, 64. 2 brown and bradshaw, “communication”, 38. 3 natoli et al., “coexistence”. 4 quaranta et al., “emotion recognition”. 5 e.g., aaltola, “empathy, intersubjectivity”; alger and alger, “beyond mead”; hurn, “intersubjectivity”; irvine, “animal selfhood”; smuts, “between species”. 48 | hill , cat–human intersubjectivity humanimalia 15.1 (2024) and developed their own signals to communicate with volunteers.6 the algers’ examples included cats indicating where on their body they wanted to be scratched or modifying vocalizations to solicit food, and these behaviours were adjusted in accordance with how particular humans responded.7 the potential intersubjective nature of feline–human relationships is further evidenced by behavioural and psychology studies. one study found that human guardians could identify the context of a given vocalization for their own cats, but not of an unfamiliar cat.8 from the feline side, it has been demonstrated that many cats learn their own names and can discriminate the names given to cohabiting cats from random words.9 although humans and cats are subject to the cognitive and behavioural characteristics of their respective species, as individuals their capacity to co-create meaning are not limited to conspecifics. cats and humans might not always understand what the other is trying to communicate, but the literature supports the assertion that the potential exists for both species to develop signals with shared meaning. this paper examines how cats relate to their humans and other animals through the lens of interspecies intersubjectivity and joint meaning-making. i performed a qualitative thematic analysis of case studies of cat–human relationships situated within multispecies homes and communities (shared spaces). i explore how interspecies relationships are formed and performed within the context of multispecies families and hybrid communities, concepts that recognize interspecies relationality, other-than-human animal agency, and attempt to decentralize the human.10 methods ethical approval for this study was granted by the university of exeter’s department of sociology, philosophy, and anthropology (spa) ethics committee on 01/08/2019. all participants provided informed 6 alger and alger, “cat culture, human culture”, 201–2. 7 alger and alger, “cat culture, human culture”, 209–10. 8 ellis et al., “human classification”, 629–31. 9 saito et al., “domestic cats”. takagi et al., “cats learn”. 10 charles, “post-human families?”; fox, “animal behaviours”; irvine and cilia, “more-thanhuman families”; lestel, “hybrid communities”; panelli, “more-than-human”. hill , cat–human intersubjectivity | 49 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) consent and were given the opportunity to read the manuscript and request further amendments to protect their identity. the cat–human case studies the case study approach sought to examine cat–human intersubjectivity (joint meaning-making) and the different types of relationships that are formed between cats and non-cat animals (including human guardians and friends), both inside and outside their home. insights into multispecies cohabitation, meaning-making, and social interactions between community members of different species arose from preliminary analysis undertaken concurrent with recruitment and data collecting. participants were recruited via a saturation sampling method, characterized as an ongoing process of collecting and analysing case studies until data is repeated and nothing new is emerging.11 these formed the basis of the thematic analysis adopted here. potential participants were sought via distribution of a flyer shared via twitter and (with permission) on cat-related facebook groups. recruitment began in may 2020 and ran concurrently alongside data collection and preliminary analysis, with the final interviews taking place in july 2021. i originally sought cat–human dyads where the cat regularly roamed, or where a formerly outdoor cat adjusted to living indoors. the relationship criterion was that it should have existed for several years. however, a couple of participants described how their cats would befriend and visit human neighbours. because my approach to recruitment and analysis overlapped, i was able to explore this further by recruiting additional participants who had formed lasting relationships with neighbourhood cats. this allowed me to explore a newly emerging theme (cat–human friendships outside the family) from the perspective of the befriended human. thus, the case studies represent two distinct but sometimes overlapping types of cat–human relationships: 1) cats and their human guardians, and 2) felines who visit a human who is fond of them, but who does not assume responsibility (“friend” in table 1). the first category includes former free-living (unowned) cats who became part of a human household. cats’ names were not 11 saunders et al., “saturation”, 1901. 50 | hill , cat–human intersubjectivity humanimalia 15.1 (2024) anonymized because their given names were often integral to the narratives. all human participants gave consent for their cat’s name to remain unchanged, but the human participants and identifying place names are anonymized. human participants are referred to by their cats’ names followed by “human” (for guardians) or “friend” (for non-guardians). for example, mimi’s guardian (abbreviated to mih) and sam’s friend (sf) (table 1). relationships between the human and their cats ranged from just over one year to nearly fifteen years. one participant lived in italy and the rest were resident in the uk. mh had spent time in kenya with her cats. participants all spoke english as a first language. one participant was asian-american, and the rest were caucasian. all participants except ph were female, and none were living alone with their cat(s). the impact of changing family dynamics on individual cat–human relationships were a prominent topic of discussion, and at the time of the interview mh and fkh each had a young child and palh two teenagers living at home. mih, ch, ph, mh, sf, and mf indicated they were university educated, and mih holds a phd with a focus on human–animal studies. furthermore, mh trained and practiced as a small-animal veterinarian for several years before moving into a more research-orientated career. also of relevance is that ch has studied feline behaviour and is a volunteer within a cat welfare organization. case studies were comprised of an unstructured interview (25–80 minutes in length) conducted via video chat, ongoing electronic exchanges (email or text), and shared photos and videos. footage of cats appearing on the video chat recordings, together with shared photos and videos provided additional context and limited visual assessment of feline body language. however, i remained cognizant of the fact that there was insufficient information for a meaningful ethological analysis. interviews were transcribed from eight case-study interviews and annotated with notes related to mannerisms and any interactions between cat and human participants captured on camera. transcripts were copied to an excel worksheet and divided into rows of “time bites” consisting of ~2–6 sentences, identifiable by a hill , cat–human intersubjectivity | 51 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) timestamp corresponding to the recording. columns were added into the excel worksheet to link chunks of timestamped text to the speaker (interviewer or interviewee initials), any annotations (laughing, cat appearing on camera, etc.), and initial coding themes. this first round of coding entailed making notes in the excel worksheet columns, concurrent with rewatching the recording.12 thematic analysis i applied a thematic analysis approach that borrows from phenomenological inquiry, in that it attempts to understand lived experiences and interspecies intersubjectivity, or joint meaning-making. the primary concern is with how to appropriately visualize and describe the newly discovered phenomena, rather than explain the underlying causal mechanisms.13 however, subjective and objective knowledge are intertwined, and all knowledge ultimately rests on inner evidence — the individual’s intuition and lived experience.14 the thematic approach allows meaning to be derived from the diverse and rich datasets that arise from unstructured interviews. during analysis i paid particular attention to how the humans described their cats’ behaviour and personality, and the relationships they developed with these cats. my primary goal is to describe these within the context of three thematic groups related to, 1) the integration of cats into multispecies families, 2) how cats and their guardians communicated and built relationships, and 3) how cats interacted with their more-than-human neighbours. these themes enable a systematic approach to understanding how participants think about family, relationships, and responsibilities towards cats who are bought into homes or roam neighbourhoods. they enable examination of relationships from which multispecies families are formed, while recognizing not all cat-guardian relations are inherently kinship bonds. furthermore, they seek insight into feline agency and the active role cats play in the development of interspecies intersubjectivity with humans. 12 for more details of how this was performed, see hill, “a right to roam?”, 71–77, 236–42. 13 staiti, “the pedagogic impulse”, 40. 14 neubauer et al., “how phenomenology can help”, 92. 52 | hill , cat–human intersubjectivity humanimalia 15.1 (2024) results & discussion 1. integration into multispecies families the case studies reveal how cats became integrated into multispecies families through mutual trust-building and interspecies communication. my analysis began by looking at the various ways the cats in this study joined multispecies homes, and how both felines and humans navigated the process. examples ranged from human-led adoption to cat-led integration (table 1). ph and his wife actively sought out a cat to join the family and adopted their cat, phoebe, from a local animal shelter. palh and her partner adopted prr as an adult cat needing rehoming, and a year later decided to adopt a kitten (apollo) when a friend’s cat became pregnant. conversely, luka showed up one day and endeared himself to palh and the family. conkey was a “foster fail” and remained a permanent member of ch’s multispecies family.15 fantastic and kapow 15 a “foster fail” is term used by animal shelter staff, volunteers, and fosterers to describe table 1: overview of case studies human acronym relationship to cat(s) main cat name(s) notes location mih guardian mimi former feral (first called gollum, then sméagol, abbreviated to smeemi, and then mimi). uk (rural) fkh guardian fantastic, kapow former feral cats, roaming uk (urban) ch guardian conkey former street cat/stray, roaming (other cats stay inside) italy (urban) palh guardian prr, apollo, luka luka was a stray who moved himself in uk (urban) ph guardian phoebe roaming uk (urban) mh guardian memphis, tambo roaming uk (urban) sf friend sam neighbourhood cat uk (urban) mf friend morgen neighbourhood cat uk (rural) hill , cat–human intersubjectivity | 53 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) were taken in by fkh as young “feral” cats who required time and patience to build trust with their human.16 although mimi eventually became a house cat, in the beginning he kept his distance and resisted attempts to help him. most likely mimi had never previously interacted much with humans, but he was older and in need of veterinary attention when mih first started to provide food for him. luka was an example of a cat who arguably first initiated integration into his now family. based on how palh described him as emaciated and in poor condition when he first showed up, luka was likely on the streets for quite some time. despite appearance and behaviours that indicated a stray or abandoned former companion cat, luka had not been neutered or microchipped and no one came forward to claim him.17 palh said she first noticed luka sitting on the windowsill interacting with apollo (a cat who had been part of the family since kittenhood). soon after, luka came into their home and made himself part of the family. because luka was so comfortable indoors and around people, and because he used the litter tray immediately, palh ascertained that he must have been “somebody’s cat” at some point.18 likewise, although conkey was bought in off the streets as a cat who had not been microchipped or neutered, he was immediately at ease around people. because of this, the volunteers in the rescue centre decided not to release him to their colony of free-living cats. conkey and luka’s instant trust of their new human family members can be contrasted to that of fantastic and kapow, and of mimi, who took much longer. trust building and adult socialization the reason fantastic, kapow, and mimi took longer to trust their humans and integrate into a human household may be because they were not fully socialized to humans during kittenhood. early research demonstrated a window for socialization of cats to humans a companion animal who endeared themselves such that their temporary caregiver adopted them permanently. 16 free-living (“unowned”) who were never socialized to humans as kittens. 17 desexing and microchipping are generally considered practices of “responsible pet ownership” in the uk. fox and gee, “great expectations”, 51–52. 18 interview with palh, 13:59. 54 | hill , cat–human intersubjectivity humanimalia 15.1 (2024) closes around three months of age, and suggested adult cats rarely adjust well to a life with humans if they do not experience positive interactions with humans as kittens.19 however, these early socialization studies were controlled over relatively short timeframes and given more time (and need) cats may be socialized as adults.20 fantastic and kapow were not handled and probably had minimal human contact prior to being adopted by fkh at around 9 months of age. fkh said the vet even warned her they were “feral cats”, implying they would not make good companion cats.21 despite being from the same litter, fantastic became socialized fairly rapidly whereas kapow took longer and never entirely became at ease with other people, fkh said. with kapow, fkh said she would go into the room he was hiding in and just lie on the floor a few times each day. this went on for several weeks, until, she said, “eventually he came out and just sort of sat next to me and just looked at me”.22 fkh said at first kapow backed away when she stretched her hand out, but eventually came up and sniffed her fingers and let her tickle under his chin. this he seemed to like and from then on accepted her presence but remained very aloof for quite a while. fkh believed fantastic, who more-or-less accepted being handled right away, influenced kapow’s more gradual acceptance. fantastic opened up to other people relatively quickly too. fkh described how he would sit beside her and use her as a buffer when people visited. she said, “he trusted i’d keep him safe”.23 eight years later (during the interview), fkh called them “a pair of pampered moggies” who were “pretty cuddly really considering how they were to start with”.24 however, fkh explained that both cats would still hide if a stranger came into the house, and they would not allow anyone to approach them on the street. she said that fantastic will generally warm up to most people who visit regularly, but kapow will only trust a select few 19 turner, “the human–cat relationship”, 194–95. slater and shain, “feral cats”, 47. 20 hill, “a right to roam?”, 164–66. vojtkovská et al., “changes in sociability”, 22–23. 21 interview with fkh, 9:49. 22 interview with fkh, 15:23. 23 interview with fkh, 16:12. 24 interview with fkh, 16:12. “moggie” is a british term of endearment for a generic cat who does not have a pedigree nor pedigree-like traits. hill , cat–human intersubjectivity | 55 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) friends and family members. fantastic and kapow were born and raised by a mother who was socialized to humans. although they were apparently left alone by their mother’s guardian, and would have missed the four-month window of socialization to humans, as kittens they likely would not have learned from their mother to be overly fearful of humans (as their mother was apparently socialized). some cats may be born with a genetic disposition to adjust to changing circumstances, despite not having been fully socialized as kittens. salonen et al., looked at ten feline behavioural traits across seventeen breeds and detected breed differences for both social and non-social behaviour, which were independent from circumstantial variables.25 furthermore, the friendliness of the father was previously shown to be an important determinant of kitten personality, and because the father rarely plays a role in kitten rearing, this is likely genetic.26 therefore, fantastic, and to a lesser extent kapow, could have inherited behaviour traits from either or both parents that enabled them to better socialize as adults. although both cats looked very much the same and were from the same litter, it is possible that they had different fathers, which could also explain their different personalities.27 alternatively, kapow may have experienced trauma prior to being adopted that fkh was unaware of. either way, the difference in sociability of these two littermates emphasizes how cats are individuals whose potential to become socialized to humans as adults will vary based on circumstances, experiences, and inherited personality traits (nature and nurture). mimi likely lived most of his life apart from humans, and when he was older and in need of medical attention took much longer and even more patience from his human to build up enough trust to receive the care he needed. when mih first moved to a remote location in a rural area of the uk, she would notice various free-living cats would come and go. when she first started putting food out for mimi, whom she originally named gollum, he would “hiss and snarl 25 salonen et al., “breed differences”. 26 mccune, “the impact of paternity”, 114–19. 27 natoli et al., “mate choice”, 463. 56 | hill , cat–human intersubjectivity humanimalia 15.1 (2024) and back away flattened to the floor”.28 these are behaviours associated with unsocialized cats, and especially when such reactions continue during subsequent interactions, they are less likely to simply be expressions of fear induced by a change of circumstances.29 in their study of sociability of cats brought into a shelter, vojtkovská et al., reported that cats who were initially rated with unfriendly or neutral scores often improved significantly over a one-year period.30 this suggested that adult socialization can occur to some degree, as appears to be the case with mimi, fantastic, and kapow. injury, sickness, or a recognition that they need help may underpin a cat’s decision to take the risk of trusting a human and/or facilitate adult socialization. mih said that after about six months of providing food for mimi every day she noticed how his eye looked badly infected and set up a trap to catch him. the fact that mih said it took several weeks before she was able to get him into the cat box, strongly suggested he really had never been socialized to humans. a former companion animal, even after many years surviving without human intervention would likely take much less time to build trust or be at ease around an unfamiliar human. in the study conducted by vojtkovská et al., all unsocialized cats were confined to a shelter and treated the same, but not all the cats improved their sociability score and those that did progressed slowly.31 conversely, mimi was not confined and had agency in how he responded to mih’s presence. once captured and taken to the veterinary practice, mimi was operated on to remove an in-grown eyelash that had become infected. because he needed a course of antibiotics, mih said she had to keep him in a crate for about ten days. mih recalled how he was extremely angry about this and would hiss and snarl and try and attack her, even when she was offering food. after the course of antibiotics mih said mimi, who was still called gollum at the time, looked in much better health. he was also keen to get away from his human caretaker. after releasing him, mih recalls how he ran off into 28 interview with mih, 02:02 29 slater et al., “physical and behavioral measures”, 1221–24. 30 vojtkovská et al., “changes in sociability”, 22–23. 31 vojtkovská et al., “changes in sociability”, 22–23. hill , cat–human intersubjectivity | 57 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) the fields rather than head to the outbuildings where he had previously hung out. he disappeared for several days and mih remembered thinking they would probably never see him again. however, that was not the case and when he returned several days later, mimi seemed to have decided to trust the human who had taken care of him. mih shared the story of how one morning she let max (her beloved canine friend) out and watched as he went running over to the outbuildings to meet gollum [now sméagol, which eventually became abbreviated to smeemi and then mimi], who came out of the outbuildings to meet. he let max lick his face and groom him, and when mih went out and put more food down for mimi, he let her sit down next to him. recalling how she sat next to mimi while max continued to groom him, mih muses whether he saw that max trusted her and so therefore concluded she must be trustworthy. alternatively, mih wondered if maybe it was because mimi was feeling physically better after his course of antibiotics. “i don’t know but it was like there was a real personality change in him, and he let me put the food down, and he still growled and hissed but he didn’t try and hurt me or attack me”.32 mimi went on to become a loving housecat in his later years, and this “personality change” likely reflects a case of adult socialization. nonhuman mediators examples emerged from the case studies whereby established other-than-human members of a multispecies household were integral to the integration of a new feline family member. prior to his adoption by ch, leo and his previous human were regularly visited by conkey. when leo joined the family, it was conkey who ch said helped him and another cat, leon, adjust to each other’s presence. fkh explained that it was apollo who first started interacting with luka who had turned up one day (two months prior to the interview) at the window where apollo liked to sit. when luka became part of the household both apollo and prr immediately accepted him. max, mih’s beloved german shepherd was integral to mimi’s socialization and integration into a multispecies household. however, unlike with 32 interview with mih, 05:55. 58 | hill , cat–human intersubjectivity humanimalia 15.1 (2024) luka, apollo, and prr, the bonding was not immediate. mih said max was quite respectful of the personal spaces of cats, and a bit wary of them. however, mih noticed that when she let max out, he would gravitate more and more towards the outbuildings and that gollum [mimi] would come out of the shed to meet max. she explained how max would sit a little apart while mimi ate until they gradually became more and more comfortable in each other’s company. after mimi had returned from wherever he disappeared to upon being released following treatment for his ingrown eyelash and infection, mih said she would sit next to max while he groomed mimi. eventually mimi started initiating physical contact whenever mih put out food, namely pushing his head against her hand. this is a classic example of affiliative behaviour occurring between a socialized cat and a human they feel bonded too.33 then mih recalled how one morning mimi was sat on the doorstep, so she left the door open and put the food just inside the house. from then on, if the door was open, mimi would come into the house and even get up on the sofa. mih remembered he was smelly and would spray urine in the house. however, they put a litter tray down for him and “he did start using it in the end for the most part”.34 from this point on, mimi seemed to progress rapidly to become human-friendly in a relatively short space of time. this can be contrasted to the slow progress in the beginning, when he resisted attempts to persuade him that humans could be trusted. 2. relationship-building and communication prominent themes related to relationship building and communications were a recognition of the need to respect feline agency, which often conflicted with concern and anxiety over the cat’s safety. however, mutual trust-building and various forms of cat-human communication were key to navigating conflicting interests. how do cats communicate with humans, and vice versa? it is well documented that free-living cats who are raised in colonies do not 33 finka, “conspecific and human sociality”, 298. vitale and udell, “the quality of being sociable”, 15–16. 34 interview with mih, 07:49. hill , cat–human intersubjectivity | 59 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) have the same level or diversity of vocalizations as those raised in human households. cats develop auditory communications intended specifically for their humans and use vocalizations more frequently when communicating with humans than with other cats.35 cats can recognize the names given by humans to other feline family members, and possibly to other human family members too, and conversely cats develop distinct calls that their humans can often recognize.36 in the context of a cat-human relationship, a cat will learn what signals their humans respond to. ellis et al., measured the ability of ten guardians to recognize the context of their cat’s vocalizations versus those of random cats. contexts in which the vocalizations were exhibited were during food preparation, when food was being withheld, cats negotiating a barrier (trapped in a room), and attention solicitation. although a relatively small sample size, forty percent of participants in the study were able to correctly identify the vocalizations that belonged to their own cats, but none of the participants scored higher than would be expected by random chance when vocalizations belonged to an unfamiliar cat.37 the study suggested that cats created communications that their own humans are able to interpret, even if it did not happen in the majority of cases. furthermore, familiarity with the cats seemed to be prerequisite to the ability to understand what a cat is attempting to communicate. ch described how conkey communicated his desire to roam outside, and this understanding led to her accommodate what she perceived to be his wishes (and there is no indication these were not conkey’s wishes). when ch first accompanied conkey on his ventures outdoors they would come back in together and take the stairs. however, according to ch, it was conkey who first decided and communicated that they should take the elevator instead. ch explained how in the early days she would sit on the step and wait for conkey, but one day he just sauntered passed and walked through the open elevator door and sat there looking at her. surprised by this, ch decided 35 reviewed by turner, “the mechanics of social interactions”. 36 ellis et al., “human classification”, 629–31. takagi et al., “cats learn”. 37 ellis et al., “human classification”, 631–32. 60 | hill , cat–human intersubjectivity humanimalia 15.1 (2024) to let him ride the elevator with her to see how he would react. since then, he regularly took the elevator and amused the neighbours by sitting outside the elevator door waiting for them to open it so he could ride with them. talking about how memphis learned to come to a whistle, mh said she “trained him” and “could go out and stand in the street and whistle and he would generally turn up within five minutes”.38 mh said her daughter (aged 3) tried to whistle because she observed how her mother used this signal to call memphis and tambo. memphis would walk alongside mh to the local shops and back, something she said just happened — memphis decided to follow her, and it became a habit. ch said she also sometimes accompanied conkey on walks, but this shared activity started off as something more intentional. with conkey, the walking together was part of the process of conkey transitioning from an indoor-only cat to one who goes out to roam. ch has studied feline behaviour and was reluctant to use the term “training”. she said she preferred to answer questions such as “are you training him?” with “no, we’re doing a programme” or “i’m just accompanying him [on a walk]”.39 although some might describe the learning process that led to conkey understanding the “come home” call (key-jangling) as training, ch preferred to think of it in terms of the co-creation of mutually understood signals. she said, “he taught me things” and “we developed, or i developed with him, certain signals and clicks”.40 ch said that most of the time conkey comes when she calls him, and other times he will answer back with his distinct “meow” as if to say, “i’m over here, wait for me”.41 ch shared a video clip of conkey coming home in response to her jangling keys and calling his name. in the clip, ch can be seen shaking keys with conkey casually walking towards her. as he approached ch his tail was erect and slightly bent at the end. at the end of the clip, conkey walks right up to ch and 38 interview with mh, 53:08. 39 interview with ch, 18:01. 40 interview with ch, 16:44. 41 interview with ch, 17:07. hill , cat–human intersubjectivity | 61 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) head bops her hand and enjoys a chin rub, which, combined with the “tail up-bent tip” posture, is indicative of affiliative behaviour. 42 the video concluded with conkey leading the way back home. learning results from experiences, which may or may not be construed. training is an active process whereby behaviour is manipulated and modified until an individual has learned how to perform a specific activity or fulfil a specified role. donna haraway refers to “multidirectional relationships in which always more than one responsive entity is in the process of becoming”.43 this is essentially the seat of intersubjectivity, with the contact zone providing a space to develop a “response-able” relationship. haraway asserts that “partners do not preexist their relating; the partners are precisely what come out of the interand intra-relating of fleshly, significant, semiotic–material being”.44 it is worth noting that haraway is a dog trainer who participated with her canine partners in dog agility competitions.45 and while haraway’s approach might be more enlightened than traditional dog training methods such as adverse stimuli or negative reinforcement, they are nonetheless driven by a human desire for the dog to cooperate in a certain way.46 in other-than-human animal training there is invariably a power imbalance with the human trainer assuming the superior role. companion animals, and especially dogs, are “trained to meet human cultural expectations”.47 in this respect, cats may have benefited from the widespread assumption that they are not as “trainable” as dogs.48 however, with an increasing trend of “adventure cats” and leash walking, especially in the united states, this might be cause for concern for more introverted felines whose guardians are not sensitive to their needs and desires.49 rather than broad generalizations about cats, those concerned with feline welfare should promote the recognition of cats as 42 cafazzo and natoli, “the social function of tail up”, 61–64. 43 haraway, when species meet, 71. 44 haraway, when species meet, 165. 45 haraway, companion species manifesto, 11. 46 vieira de castro et al., “dog training methods”. 47 lewis, “a biosemiotic perspective”, 771. 48 bradshaw, “normal feline behaviour”, 417. 49 moss, adventure cats. also see https://www.adventurecats.org/. https://www.adventurecats.org/ 62 | hill , cat–human intersubjectivity humanimalia 15.1 (2024) individuals and encourage guardians to seek a mutual understanding with their cats. amelia lewis asserts a paradigm shift towards dynamic semiosis and mutual understanding would “lead toward an acceptance that training is not the most enlightened way of communicating with other species”.50 essentially, rather than “communicating to”, we should endeavour to “communicate with” other animals. biosemiotics is the study of prelinguistic meaning-making, and involves body language and vocalizations that express desires, moods, or ideas that can be decoded by the recipient. all animals with subjective minds, including humans, use body language and symbolic actions to communicate within, and between species, and to develop mutual understanding. this pre-linguistic signalling is often considered a secondary or supplemental form of communication between adult humans.51 however, for infants, humans with mental or physical impairments, and those who have not learned a shared linguistic language, non-linguistic communication becomes primary. thus, while the development of complex linguistic systems increases the capacity for intersubjective communication, these are not essential. the algers assumed a theoretical perspective of symbolic interactionism to study both feline–feline and human–feline relationships.52 symbolic interactionism explains the negotiation of meaning as an interactive social process that is in constant flux, with meaning being created, reproduced, and modified via social interaction.53 language can be defined as a system of symbols that “provides a means to negotiate meaning, to assign names, to engage in discourse, and to build systems of knowledge”.54 symbolic interactionism requires a sense of self, and a system of symbols that can be interpreted and is more than simply being a response to a stimulus. furthermore, the sense of self emerges from a series of social interactions that 50 lewis, “a biosemiotic perspective”, 778. 51 cartmill, “overcoming bias”. 52 alger and alger, “cat culture, human culture”, 200; cat culture, 10–11. 53 see aksan et al., “symbolic interaction theory”, 902-4; alger and alger, “beyond mead”, 67; blumer, “symbolic interactionism”. 54 irvine, “sociology and anthrozoology”, 124. hill , cat–human intersubjectivity | 63 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) were originally defined as being exclusive to human linguistic communications.55 however, we communicate differently with different humans, depending on age (baby versus adult), senses (using visual signals to communicate with hearing impaired individuals), level of shared spoken language, etc. furthermore, a complex human language is not necessary to produce shared meaning, and sign processes are not exclusive to humans. eduardo kohn writes that “the transspecies semiosis that emerges in human–animal interactions exhibits characteristics that go beyond what we would traditionally identify as human forms of representation.”56 likewise, cats arguably use different forms of expressions to communicate to a human than they might with another cat. we do not communicate with a cat the same way we might communicate with a human, and vice versa. neither do we communicate in a “cat language” but co-create a transspecies form of communication. a classic way of developing joint signals involves food, which is something that various training methods have built upon. if a cat asks for food and receives a treat, they will repeat that same signal.57 cats in this study also developed different strategies to get their human’s attention. for example, palh said apollo likes to ask for treats by standing on his hind legs and reaching up with a front paw. fkh said if one of her cats was in trouble the other would come and get her. she referred to this action as “to lassie” meaning they behaved like the tv dog lassie, namely by alerting a human and leading them to a person in trouble.58 the first time this happened fkh said she took a while to understand what was going on. someone staying in the house had inadvertently shut a sleeping fantastic in her wardrobe before leaving that morning. fkh described how later that day kapow was meowing, walking away, stopping, and meowing at her again like he wanted her to follow him, which she eventually 55 mead, “individualistic and social theories”, 144–52. 56 kohn, “how dogs dream”, 7. 57 bradshaw and ellis, the trainable cat, 25–40. 58 lassie was an american television series that followed the adventures of a female collie dog named lassie and her companions, both human and other-than-human. the original show ran from 1953 to 1973, and a canadian remake aired from 1997 to 1999. 64 | hill , cat–human intersubjectivity humanimalia 15.1 (2024) did. then she said when he got to the guest room door he stopped and started meowing and standing up with his paws on the door. it was at that point that fkh said she heard a faint “meow” and realized fantastic was in there and found him in the wardrobe. apparently both cats have now done this a few times. another time was when kapow got stuck under the bed and fantastic started dancing around fkh’s feet until she followed him upstairs to the bedroom. at the time, kapow was recovering from an injury and had stiches and was on medication, meaning he was probably more distressed about being trapped than he otherwise would have been. these are all examples of cats using biosemiotics signals to communicate with their humans, who were ultimately able to decode the meaning (or at least they believed they understood correctly). 3. multispecies neighbourhoods as hybrid communities the notion of more-than-human communities attempts to decentralize the human within a post-humanist framework of multispecies interactions.59 this aligns with theories of more-than-human families, where the boundaries between human and nonhuman members are blurred but not erased.60 however, multispecies households and communities are simply spaces occupied by more than one species, and the relationship between a guardian and their companion animal need not by necessity be a familial bond. dominique lestel proposes the concept of “hybrid communities” to understand the relationship between humans and other animals that coinhabit the same space.61 these hybrid communities share common interests, attempt to reconcile conflicting interests, and in doing so co-create shared meanings. nathalie blanc describes a hybrid community as one “in which living beings (subjects, individual persons in varying degrees), live together, and share: meanings (semiotics), interests (conflicting spaces), affects (emotional and psychological dimension)”.62 59 panelli, “more-than-human”, 82. 60 charles, “post-human families?”; fox, “animal behaviours”; irvine and cilia, “more-thanhuman families”. 61 lestel, “hybrid communities” 67. 62 blanc, “animals in the midst”, 413. hill , cat–human intersubjectivity | 65 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) roaming companion cats become part of a larger, multispecies community, interacting with human neighbours, other domesticated animals, and wildlife. many cats have social lives independent of their guardians. cats in the case studies who roamed outside unaccompanied were memphis and tambo (mh), fantastic and kapow (fkh), phoebe (ph), conkey (ch), sam (sf), and morgan (mf). sf and mf were human neighbours who sam and morgan had befriended, respectively, and whose company they enjoyed. these cats are not only members of multispecies families, but also part of a larger hybrid community. strife with and dangers from human neighbours examples of cats being welcomed visitors by their human neighbours included accounts from mh, ch, sf, and mf. however, not everyone appreciates feline visitors. aside from the potential ecological impact of cats on many ecosystems, hunting habits are points of contention amongst bird-enthusiasts and a cause of disgruntlement or outrage amongst neighbours.63 mh said she sometimes came across threads on social media about how cats should be kept inside, and that these can get quite heated. emotive and sometimes cruel comments targeted at guardians who allow their cats to roam were prominent throughout my analysis of user comments responding to media related to roaming cats.64 the anonymous commenting function facilitates this type of bullying or threatening behaviour, but mh said she experienced it once in the form of a handwritten note pinned to her door. she explained the gist of it was “look after your cat better otherwise we’ll call the rspca on you”.65 mh found this very upsetting, and suspected memphis was probably going into someone’s house and stealing food or making himself comfortable. although nothing more transpired, mh said that after that incident she was somewhat unsettled. another time mh remembered feeling her cats’ safety was being threatened was a few months prior to our interview. the incident involved a man with a greyhound who was using the carpark behind their house to walk the dog. she said, 63 hill, “feral and out of control”, 145–46. 64 hill, “a right to roam?”, 80–229. 65 interview with mh, 46:17. 66 | hill , cat–human intersubjectivity humanimalia 15.1 (2024) “although the dog was on a lead, he would stand there and let it bark”.66 mh said she felt like “he was coming and deliberately using her cats for the dog’s entertainment”.67 mh recognizes this fear likely stemmed from when she first worked as an inner-city vet and had to treat several cats who were victims of a gang of teenagers intentionally setting dogs on them. these stories shared similarities to the discourses examined regarding the fears of the possible dangers posed to roaming cats, which are not always unfounded.68 it is not that guardians in this study are unaware of the risks posed to their roaming cats or that they do not care enough. as illustrated by the narratives of ch and mh, the decision to allow their cats to roam was not taken lightly. however, the guardians ultimately believed it to be in the cats’ best interests to have their choices and agency respected. multispecies community belonging a big part of roaming for some cats appears to be socializing and exploring the human world, and engaging with the humans who inhabit it. while, mimi, phoebe, fantastic, and kapow are mostly socially exclusive to the humans they have bonded too, memphis, sam, morgan, and conkey enjoy human company and will readily befriend humans outside of their home. soon after he was permitted to go off by himself, ch tells how conkey started frequenting and visiting neighbours’ apartments. conkey got to know most of the neighbours and they him. if they are around, one of the apartment block neighbours will ring the doorbell for conkey when he gets out of the elevator. sometimes ch will accompany conkey on short walks, and several people who ch does not know will come up and say hi to conkey. since he was a kitten, memphis has sought human company and befriended the neighbours wherever they have lived. mh first found out about this aspect of his social life after returning from vacation, when the friends who were feeding him informed her memphis had 66 interview with mh, 56:40. 67 interview with mh, 56:50 68 elliott et al., “responsible cat ownership”, 703; van eeden et al., “putting the cat”. hill , cat–human intersubjectivity | 67 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) gone missing. they put out “missing cat” flyers, and the neighbour memphis had chosen to stay with contacted them. this man knew memphis as the cat who came around every day at around 11 a.m. for fish. in mh’s absence memphis spent more and more time with the fish-providing man and decided to stay over until mh returned. cats are often perceived as aloof and independent companion animals, and free-living, unsocialized cats are often assumed not to want or need human company.69 however, cats are often misunderstood as both a species and as individuals. eriksson et al., reported that, although cats appear unaffected by being left home alone, they initiated greater contact-seeking behaviour following a prolonged separation from their person, implying that the human is an important part of their social environment.70 rather than get distressed about his human’s absence, it would seem memphis just went off and found company elsewhere. after the family moved to a village when he was around age three, memphis continued to befriend humans, acquiring names such as fluffy and misha. for example, the couple who called him misha he visited regularly over a period of several years. their current home is close to the centre of town, and mh said both cats now interact regularly with many of the same people. they live near a cathedral and the groundsman knows both memphis and tambo. not long after they had moved in, memphis started wandering over to the groundsman for a stroke, or to get his tummy tickled. the groundsman became endeared by both cats and started growing catnip especially for them. a week prior to our interview, mh was in a zoom meeting with a colleague who recognized memphis on camera. this was another example of how much mh is unaware of memphis’s social life. during the conversation she learned how her colleague would drop his wife and daughter off in the cathedral carpark, and the daughter looked forward to seeing the “cathedral kitty” (aka memphis). memphis enjoys the attention and will often just sit on a local war memorial while being photographed by tourists. sometimes they will share their food with him, which he likes even more. 69 finka, “conspecific and human sociality”, 298. 70 eriksson et al. “cats and owners interact”. 68 | hill , cat–human intersubjectivity humanimalia 15.1 (2024) mf does not know who morgan’s people are, or even if he has a home. however, he is healthy and well fed, but not by mf, who claims to have never given him food. his other humans likely do not call him morgan, which is a name that mf and her partner gave him. mf and her partner had very little experience of cats, but found morgan’s bold but friendly disposition endearing. at first, mf said she was concerned morgan might be a stray so she sent some photos to a friend who apparently knew about cats. this friend reassured mf that morgan looked well fed, healthy, and likely had a home. he does not visit every day and will sometimes go for a week without visiting. morgan enjoys sitting on the sofa with the young couple, or keeping them company while they work at the computer. unlike mf, sf does know sam’s family, who live a few houses down. sam’s humans even made a special cat door in the fence so he can continue to visit now his arthritis makes climbing the fence challenging. sam has been visiting sf and her mother since he and his family moved in around ten years ago. sam continued visiting after they got a new kitten, bella, and the two cats would play together. when they first met, bella was a kitten and sam seemed to know to play gently with her. bella sadly died aged only six, but sam continued to visit, and was a big comfort to both sf and her mother. roaming cats also interact with other species in ways that are not hunting and killing them. mh recants how, when he was younger, memphis could sometimes be seen trotting behind, or walking companionably alongside a fox. she said neither fox nor cat seemed afraid nor overly excited, and just accepted each other’s presence. however, memphis was less sure of the rabbit who lived in the garden they later shared with a neighbour just after they had returned to the uk (with tambo in tow). this companion rabbit had run of the garden and would try and chase both memphis and tambo, but only tambo had any interest in playing. memphis would just run off. the cats in the case studies are also different in their affinity towards other cats. memphis is wary of other cats and does not seek out feline company. phoebe keeps her distance more out of fear, which can be attributed to her having been traumatized by a cat bite she hill , cat–human intersubjectivity | 69 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) had received prior to adoption. because there are a lot of cats where they live, this is a bit of an issue. sometimes she will start hissing and shaking and gets distressed if there is another cat around or has been in their garden. conversely, sam and conkey are confident and sociable around members of the same species. conkey befriended leo during his regular visits to one of the neighbours (where leo lived at the time) and the two got along well. this pre-existing friendship with conkey helped leo adjust to a multi-cat household. likewise, apollo befriended luka prior to him becoming part of the family, which may have helped with his integration. conclusions this study demonstrated how different cats functioned within multispecies households and navigated relationships with both cat and non-cat animals, including guardians and other humans. differences in adaptability to changing circumstances, such as the arrival of new family members, moving house, etc., could in part be explained by what the cats were reported to have experienced in their lifetime, but also brought to the forefront the importance of recognizing cats as individuals. as barbara smuts laments, “we humans relinquish personhood over and over due to our failure to recognize the subjectivity and individuality of members of other species.”71 likewise, cats cannot be understood by simply reducing them to genes, biology, and environmental input. like humans, cats are beings who are more than the sum of their parts. this study provides insight into how relationships are formed between cats and humans, and how individuals of each species engage with transspecies communication within and beyond their homes. all case studies demonstrated the intersubjectivity of cat-human relationship-building as both species attempted to understand and trust each other. several limitations were inherent to my case study analysis. primarily, in accessing the feline perspective. any interpretations of feline behaviours were derived from second-hand accounts, to which the interviewee had invariably pre-assigned meaning. this 71 smuts, “between species”, 125. 70 | hill , cat–human intersubjectivity humanimalia 15.1 (2024) is problematic because it relies on the assumption that cat guardians know their cats well enough to understand what they were feeling or thinking. furthermore, cats who may not be genetically predisposed to sociality will be less likely to engage in interspecies intersubjectivity, especially if not fully socialized to humans during kittenhood. therefore, the recruitment phase was inherently bias towards cases involving cats who are more social. another aspect to note is that participants were influenced by cultural constructions of “responsible pet ownership” promoted in the uk, such as desexing, and the notion that cats need to roam outside to live happy and healthy lives.72 the examples of cat–human intersubjectivity described here are embedded within that culture, and interspecies intersubjectivity may manifest differently in places where free-living (unowned) cats are more common, and are either cared for or persecuted. furthermore, my thematic approach guided the analysis of multispecies families and communities towards preconceived concepts. nonetheless, this provided a framework to examine facets of interspecies intersubjectivity within the contexts of cat– human relationships and multispecies families. acknowledgements this paper is based on research undertaken as part of my doctoral studies, and an earlier version comprises chapter 7 of my phd thesis. my supervisor prof. samantha hurn provided support and guidance throughout my doctoral studies, for which i am most grateful. fellow postgraduate researchers and others are also deserving of thanks for their insightful feedback whenever i presented my workin-progress. many thanks are owed to the anonymous peer reviewers and editors for their insightful and helpful comments. their time and effort are very much appreciated, and i believe their valuable input helped strengthen the paper. i am most indebted to the case study participants who took the time to share their stories with me. truly i enjoyed the privilege of sharing a glimpse into the diverse and rich lives of these much-loved cats. 72 fox and gee, “great expectations”, 51–52; hill, “to roam or stay home?”, 8–9. hill , cat–human intersubjectivity | 71 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) works cited aaltola, elisa. “empathy, intersubjectivity, and animal philosophy.” environmental philosophy 10, no. 2 (2013): 75–96. https://doi.org/10.5840/ envirophil201310215 aksan, nilgun, buket kısac, mufit aydın, and sumeyra demirbuken. “symbolic interaction theory”. procedia—social and behavioral sciences 1, no. 1 (2009): 902–4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. sbspro.2009.01.160 alger, janet m., and steven f. alger. “beyond mead: symbolic interaction between humans and felines.” society and animals 5, no. 1 (1997): 65–81. https://doi. org/10.1163/156853097x00222 alger, janet m., and steven f. alger. “cat culture, human culture: an ethnographic study of a cat shelter.” society and animals 7, no. 3 (1999): 199–218. https://doi. org/10.1163/156853099x00086 alger, janet m., and steven f. alger. cat culture: the social world of a cat shelter. philadelphia, pa: temple university press, 2003. blanc, nathalie. “animals in the midst of cities.” biosemiotics 13, no. 3 (2020): 411–29. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304020-09389-6 blumer, herbert. symbolic interactionism: perspective and method. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall, 1969. bradshaw, john. “normal feline behaviour: … and why problem behaviours develop.” journal of feline medicine and surgery 20, no. 5 (2018): 411–21. https://doi. org/10.1177/1098612x18771203 bradshaw, john, and sarah ellis. the trainable cat: a practical guide to making life happier for you and your cat. new york: basic books, 2017. brown, sarah l., and john bradshaw. “communication in the domestic cat: withinand between-species”. in turner and bateson, the domestic cat, 37–60. cafazzo, simona, and eugenia natoli. “the social function of tail up in the domestic cat (felis silvestris catus).” behavioural processes 80, no. 1 (2009): 60–66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. beproc.2008.09.008 cartmill, erica a. “overcoming bias in the comparison of human language and animal communication.” proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america 120, no. 47 (2023): e2218799120. https://doi. org/10.1073/pnas.2218799120 charles, nickie. “post-human families? dog–human relations in the domestic sphere.” sociological research online 21, no. 3 (2016): 83–94. https://doi. org/10.5153/sro.3975 driscoll, carlos a., juliet clutton-brock, andrew c. kitchener, and stephen j. o’brien. “the taming of the cat.” scientific american 300, no. 6 (2009): 68–75. elliott, alicia, tiffani j. howell, emily m. mcleod, and pauleen c. bennett. “perceptions of responsible cat ownership behaviors among a convenience sample of australians.” animals 9, no. 9 (2019): 703. https://doi. org/10.3390/ani9090703 ellis, sarah l. h., victorial swindell, and oliver h. p. burman. “human classification of context-related vocalizations emitted by familiar and unfamiliar domestic cats: an exploratory study.” anthrozoös 28, no. 4 (2015): 625–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/0 8927936.2015.1070005 eriksson, matilda, linda j. keeling, and therese rehn. “cats and owners interact more with each other after a longer duration of separation.” plos one 12, no. 10 (2017): e0185599. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0185599 https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil201310215 https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil201310215 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2009.01.160 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sbspro.2009.01.160 https://doi.org/10.1163/156853097x00222 https://doi.org/10.1163/156853097x00222 https://doi.org/10.1163/156853099x00086 https://doi.org/10.1163/156853099x00086 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-020-09389-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-020-09389-6 https://doi.org/10.1177/1098612x18771203 https://doi.org/10.1177/1098612x18771203 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2008.09.008 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2008.09.008 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218799120 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2218799120 https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.3975 https://doi.org/10.5153/sro.3975 https://doi.org/10.3390/ani9090703 https://doi.org/10.3390/ani9090703 https://doi.org/10.1080/08927936.2015.1070005 https://doi.org/10.1080/08927936.2015.1070005 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185599 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185599 72 | hill , cat–human intersubjectivity humanimalia 15.1 (2024) finka, lauren r. “conspecific and human sociality in the domestic cat: consideration of proximate mechanisms, human selection and implications for cat welfare”. animals 12, no. 3 (2022): 298. https://doi. org/10.3390/ani12030298 fox, rebekah. “animal behaviours, posthuman lives: everyday negotiations of the animal–human divide in petkeeping.” social & cultural geography 7, no. 4 (2006): 525–37. https://doi. org/10.1080/14649360600825679 fox, rebekah, and nancy r. gee. “great expectations: changing social, spatial and emotional understandings of the companion animal–human relationship.” social and cultural geography 20, no. 1 (2019): 43–63. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017 .1347954 haraway, donna j. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. haraway, donna j. when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008. hill, kristine. “feral and out of control: a moral panic over domestic cats?” in anthrozoology studies: animal life and human culture, edited by irina frasin, george bodi, sonia bulei, and codrin dinu vasiliu, 123–57. cluj-napoca: presa universitară clujeană, 2022. hill, kristine. “a right to roam? a transspecies approach to understanding cat–human relations and social discourses associated with freeroaming urban cats (felis catus)”. phd diss., university of exeter, 2023. hill, kristine. “to roam or stay home? understanding ‘pet parenting’ types in relation to the indoor/outdoor cat debate.” anthrozoös (2024). https://doi.org/10.1080/08927936.2024 .2360788 hurn, samantha. “intersubjectivity.” in humans and other animals: crosscultural perspectives on human-animal interactions, edited by samantha hurn, 125–38. london: pluto press, 2012. irvine, leslie. “a model of animal selfhood: expanding interactionist possibilities.” symbolic interaction 27, no. 1 (2004): 3–21. https://doi.org/10.1525/ si.2004.27.1.3 irvine, leslie. “sociology and anthrozoology: symbolic interactionist contributions”. anthrozoös 25, no. s1 (2012): 123–37. https://doi.org/10.2752/17 5303712x13353430377174 irive, leslie, and laurent cilia. “more-thanhuman families: pets, people, and practices in multispecies households.” sociology compass 11 (2017): e12455. https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12455 kohn, eduardo. “how dogs dream: amazonian natures and the politics of transspecies engagement.” american ethnologist 34, no. 1 (2007): 3–24. https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.3 lestel, dominique. “hybrid communities.” angelaki 19, no. 3 (2014): 61–73. https:// doi.org/10.1080/0969725x.2014.976049 lewis, amelia. “a biosemiotic perspective on reward-based animal training techniques.” biosemiotics 14, no. 3 (2021): 767–82. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s12304-021-09447-7 mccune, sandra. “the impact of paternity and early socialisation on the development of cats’ behaviour to people and novel objects.” applied animal behaviour science 45, nos. 1–2 (1995): 109–24. https://doi. org/10.1016/0168-1591(95)00603-p mead, george herbert. “a contrast of individualistic and social theories of the self.” in mind self and society from the standpoint of a social behaviorist, edited by charles w. morris, 222–26. chicago: university of chicago press, 1934. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani12030298 https://doi.org/10.3390/ani12030298 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360600825679 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360600825679 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1347954 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1347954 https://doi.org/10.1080/08927936.2024.2360788 https://doi.org/10.1080/08927936.2024.2360788 https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2004.27.1.3 https://doi.org/10.1525/si.2004.27.1.3 https://doi.org/10.2752/175303712x13353430377174 https://doi.org/10.2752/175303712x13353430377174 https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12455 https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.3 https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725x.2014.976049 https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725x.2014.976049 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-021-09447-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12304-021-09447-7 https://doi.org/10.1016/0168-1591(95)00603-p https://doi.org/10.1016/0168-1591(95)00603-p hill , cat–human intersubjectivity | 73 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) moss, laura j. adventure cats: living nine lives to the fullest. new york: workman publishing company, 2017. natoli, eugenia, emanuele de vito, and dominique pontier. “mate choice in the domestic cat (felis silvestris catus l.)”. aggressive behavior 26, no. 6 (2000): 455–65. https://doi.org/fp3gcm natoli, eugenia, carla litchfield, and dominique pontier. “coexistence between humans and ‘misunderstood’ domestic cats in the anthropocene: exploring behavioural plasticity as a gatekeeper of evolution.” animals 12, no. 13 (2022): 1717. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ani12131717 neubauer, brian e., catherine t. witkop, and lara varpio. “how phenomenology can help us learn from the experiences of others.” perspectives on medical education 8, no. 2 (2019): 90–97. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037019-0509-2 panelli, ruth. “more-than-human social geographies: posthuman and other possibilities.” progress in human geography 34, no. 1 (2010): 79–87. https://doi. org/10.1177/0309132509105007 quaranta, angelo, serenella d’ingeo, rosaria amoruso, and marcello siniscalchi. “emotion recognition in cats.” animals 10, no. 7 (2020): 1107. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10071107 saito, atsuko, kazutaka shinozuka, yuki ito, and toshikazu hasegawa. “domestic cats (felis catus) discriminate their names from other words.” scientific reports 9, no. 1 (2019): 5394. https://doi. org/10.1038/s41598-019-40616-4 salonen, milla, katariina vapalahti, katriina tiira, asko mäki-tanila, and hannes lohi. “breed differences of heritable behaviour traits in cats.” scientific reports 9, no. 1 (2019): 7949. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-01944324-x saunders, benjamin, julius sim, tom kingstone, shula baker, jackie waterfield, bernadette bartlam, heather burroughs, and clare jinks. “saturation in qualitative research: exploring its conceptualization and operationalization.” quality and quantity 52, no. 4 (2018): 1893–1907. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-017-0574-8 slater, margaret r., laurie garrison, katherine miller, emily weiss, natasha drain, and kathleen makolinski. “physical and behavioral measures that predict cats’ socialization in an animal shelter environment during a three day period.” animals 3, no. 4 (2013): 1215–28. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani3041215 slater, margaret r., and stephanie shain. “feral cats: an overview”. in the state of the animals iii, edited by deborah j. salem and andrew n. rowan, 43–53. washington dc: humane society press, 2005. smuts, barbara. “between species: science and subjectivity.” configurations 14, no. 1 (2006): 115–26. staiti, andrea. “the pedagogic impulse of husserl’s ways into transcendental phenomenology.” graduate faculty philosophy journal 33, no.1 (2012): 39–56. https://doi.org/10.5840/gfpj20123313 takagi, saho, atsuko saito, minori arahori, hitomi chijiiwa, hikari koyasu, miho nagasawa, takefumi kikusui, kazuo fujita, and hika kuroshima. “cats learn the names of their friend cats in their daily lives.” scientific reports 12 (2012): 6155. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-10261-5 turner, dennis c. “the human–cat relationship.” in the domestic cat: the biology of its behaviour, 1st ed., edited by dennis c. turner and patrick bateson, 193–206. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1988. turner, dennis c. “social organisation and behavioural ecology of free-ranging domestic cats.” in turner and bateson, the domestic cat, 63–70. https://doi.org/fp3gcm https://doi.org/10.3390/ani12131717 https://doi.org/10.3390/ani12131717 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-019-0509-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/s40037-019-0509-2 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132509105007 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132509105007 https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10071107 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-40616-4 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-40616-4 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44324-x https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44324-x https://doi.org/10.1007/s11135-017-0574-8 https://doi.org/10.3390/ani3041215 https://doi.org/10.5840/gfpj20123313 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-10261-5 74 | hill , cat–human intersubjectivity humanimalia 15.1 (2024) turner, dennis c. “the mechanics of social interactions between cats and their owners.” frontiers in veterinary science 8 (2021): 650143. https://doi. org/10.3389/fvets.2021.650143 turner, dennis c. and patrick bateson, eds. the domestic cat: the biology of its behaviour. 3rd ed. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2013. van eeden, lily m., fern hames, richard faulkner, andrew geschke, zoe e. squires, and emily m. mcleod. “putting the cat before the wildlife: exploring cat owners’ beliefs about cat containment as predictors of owner behavior.” conservation science and practice 3, no. 10 (2021): e502. https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.502 vieira de castro, ana catarina, ângelo araújo, andré fonseca, and i. anna s. olsson. “improving dog training methods: efficacy and efficiency of reward and mixed training methods.” plos one 16, no. 2 (2021): e0247321. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal. pone.0247321 vitale, kristyn r., and monique a.r. udell. “the quality of being sociable: the influence of human attentional state, population, and human familiarity on domestic cat sociability.” behavioural processes 158 (2019): 11–17. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.beproc.2018.10.026 vojtkovská, veronika, eva voslářová, vladimír večerek, and lenka tomečková. “changes in sociability of shelter cats.” journal of veterinary behavior 49 (2022): 20–7. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jveb.2021.10.012 https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2021.650143 https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2021.650143 https://doi.org/10.1111/csp2.502 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247321 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0247321 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2018.10.026 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beproc.2018.10.026 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2021.10.012 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2021.10.012 microsoft word symposium pdf dummy h u m a n i m a l i a 4:1 sophie davies, gareth thomas, and karolina rucinska review: the house of beasts’ symposium: enquiries into the human and the animal. darwin festival, shropshire wildlife trust, shrewsbury 18th february 2012. introduction. the symposium was a part of the new exhibition of contemporary art, house of beasts, celebrating the history of animal-human relations, organized by meadow arts and funded by the arts council. it took place from july 2011-july 2012 in the stables, mansion, and parkland of attingham park in shropshire, a national trust property. the exhibition includes work inspired by attingham's history and highlights the importance of its animal population, both past and present, and the role they have played in the history of the estate. the contemporary art works explore our interactions with animals—domestic, wild, or tamed—living alongside us or sharing our living space. these relationships can range from highly emotional ties, as in the case of pets or horses, to purely economical ones, as in industrial farming. they can also be symbolically complex, as in decisions about which animals are eaten and how they are eaten. they can be based on esteem and curiosity, as in decorative artefacts, portraits of prize cattle, or naturalists’ collections. equally, they can prove overtly hostile, as in the case of pests such as moles, insects, or rats. at attingham, distinct personages throughout the centuries have illustrated aspects of these relationships through the art works and artefacts collected and displayed there. the symposium reviewed here was a public event organized as part of shrewsbury’s darwin festival. it brought the curator and four of the artists involved in the exhibition into conversation with scientists and leading academics on human-animal relations. disciplines represented ranged from human geography to evolutionary biology, the humanities, and sociology. the symposium explored the cultural, philosophical, and ethical significance of ideas about the human and the animal (including the difficulty of thinking of humans as animals), as well as of human-animal relations, such as those portrayed in the exhibition. the symposium examined how the art show and its placement in the house and grounds provokes surprise. the speakers evoked, and provoked, reflection on the social, ethical, and cultural significance of human and nonhuman animals’ interactions, as these are embedded in the collections and history of attingham and in our own day-to-day lives. sophie davies, gareth thomas, & karolina rucinska— the house of beasts symposium 137 the aim of the symposium was to engage with emerging sensibilities and to question human and nonhuman animal relations as these involve issues of ecology and sustainability. the organizers’ objective was to offer complementary perspectives to scientific (often darwinian) views on nonhuman animals. a video-recording of the symposium can be accessed at: http://vimeo.com/ channels/beasts2012. there were question and answer sessions throughout the day and, at the end, we three summed up the papers and posed questions to each of the speakers present. in what follows, we present these summaries and comment on their significance for understanding human and non-human animal relations and for thinking with the human and the animal. human-animal relationships, human-animal relatedness and questioning the essence of human nature. professor david kipling from the cardiff university school of medicine opened with an exploration of “genetics, evolutionary biology and humananimal relations.” as an integral part of the “tree of life” animals, he pointed out, share a surprisingly large amount of biology with “non human animals,” and homo sapiens are consequently not so different from their non-human counterparts. kipling discussed a number of the different ways in which humans view non-humans—as food, as beasts of burden, as companions, as objects of curiosity and wonder, and finally as agents of pestilence and disease. these are the kinds of relations, kipling observed, that have been variously depicted in the art showcased in the exhibition. kipling noted that we tend to privilege humans over other animals, and that we tend to privilege certain animals over other kinds, judgments that are often distant from our biological relatedness and are indeed based upon quite other factors. kipling explained how the high value of our biological relatedness to animals to biomedical research affects his own work. because fruit flies are biologically very similar to humans, scientists can begin to make inferences about humans from research using the flies. in the second talk of the day sophie molins, an artist and photographer based in london, presented her photography to the audience, including a collection entitled “zoo,” which consists of photos of animals in window reflections in new york city. the inspirations for this collection are in the notion of human oppression of primal instincts. molins raised the question of whether we humans are constrained by our humanity, which we perhaps wear as a mask. molins’s piece “a sundial in moonlight” is a commissioned work of interactive video art and is displayed as part of the house of beasts exhibition. visitors are invited to witness the tale of the second lord berwick’s overzealous affections for his wife, sophia, upon whom he bestowed an extravagant music box. the artwork depicts this music box—shaped as a monkey playing a harp— humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 138 suffused by the sentiment, as described by molins, that “a man overwhelmed by mood is like a sundial in moonlight telling the wrong time.” molins’s piece also depicts the division of male and female halves of the house by a great staircase. professor henry buller, a “non-human” geographer from exeter university, closed the first session of the morning with a discussion of the way humans relate to non-humans through movement. animal movement, the potential of animal movement, motility, and the resultant agency have provided foci for both philosophical and representational accounts of the non-human animal. in contrast to some of the ideas presented by kipling, this opens up a way of seeing animals that is less hierarchical and more ethical. buller drew upon a rather charming example of a chimpanzee that sheltered itself from the rain using its hands. the three talks of the first session each approached notions of an inherent ‘”human nature” differently. are humans distinct from other animals? or is the human/ animal distinction in need of reconsideration? on the one hand, kipling identified the biological similarities, yet both kipling and molins indicated that in some situations there is a relationship between humans and animals that can be distinguished from the way that animals relate to other animals. buller, by contrast, highlighted some of the social similarities shared by human and non-human animals, making a careful attempt to use the human/non-human distinction as opposed to the human/animal distinction. animal death and troubling the human-animal dichotomy. this disruption of the human-animal dichotomy, and whether we must revisit and renovate our current conventions, was a theme continued in the second cluster of the symposium, which included presentations by dr. mara miele, a senior fellow in the city and regional planning department at cardiff university, and daphne wright, an artist living and working in bristol. deviating somewhat from the introductory session with regard to the subject of animal death, the presenters discussed the symbolically complex relationship between human and animal in very different sets of circumstances: food production and art. miele’s opening presentation directed attention to the former. she invited audience members to join her on a journey through a slaughterhouse, an institution devoted to the “choreography” of killing animals. miele described the constellation of techniques, technologies, and tools that help qualify the killing as “humane.” from hairnets and uniforms to equipment bleakly bearing the label poultry processing solutions, such technologies are valuable for our understanding the humane, and thus concurrently the non-humane, practice of killing animals. following a dissection of the obscure concept of “care” applied during slaughter, miele concluded sophie davies, gareth thomas, & karolina rucinska— the house of beasts symposium 139 that distinguishing animal slaughter as “humane,” the end point of which results in bird-dom being reimagined as food-dom, is always fragile and disputed. by inviting the audience into an invisible and often hidden world, miele helped the audience to think through the suffering of, and human relationships with, certain animals. through her analysis of the chicken death production line, we see how slaughter is at once an ideological, ethical, cultural, economic, scientific, and technical practice. for miele perhaps the most significant relationship between the human and animal is the one between food and an acceptable kill. artist daphne wright continued the theme of animal death by explicating how animal imagery is used in her artistic practice. stating her own intention to celebrate animals following death, wright engrossed the audience with a slideshow of her diverse artworks, including looking for the home of the sickness, domestic shrubbery, and where do broken hearts go. wright’s animal sculptures were initially inspired by the desire to underscore the difficulty of securing access to animal bodies intended solely for artistic purposes. this was illustrated most profoundly in wright’s story of primate—a cast of a euthanized monkey—which elicited hostility and opposition from scientific professionals. wright sketched out the strange quality of the “death mask” worn by her sculptures, particularly in primate and also stallion, a full size cast of a dead horse. for wright, far from creating a more realistic representation of animality, the porcelain death mask, that is, “painting death back into the face,” brings the animal, paradoxically, to life, and endows the animal with more human characteristics than it was perhaps afforded whilst alive. in this exploration of the history of still life and the beauty of death, wright intended to highlight the hinterland between human and nonhuman, and to question whether the human is there or not there. wright views the death mask as lying somewhere in between, in the other-worldly. wright’s and miele’s presentations shared similar yet distinct means of thinking through animal death. whilst miele discussed animal death in relation to slaughterhouses and “humane” killing, wright honored animal death by endowing each sculpture, or work, with a death mask. the common ground established involves not only encountering complexity in accessing the animal body, but also raises issues surrounding our (acceptable) treatment of—and interactions with—animals, or rather animals of a specific kind. human-animal relationship(s), hierarchical comprehensions, and what it is to be human. beyond animal death, the dislocation of the seemingly rigid human-animal humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 140 dichotomy was further explored in the third cluster, which welcomed professor erica fudge, from the english department at university of strathclyde, robert davies, a photographer and artist based in worcestershire, and tessa farmer, an artist based in london. each speaker offered perspectives for thinking through the social, cultural, philosophical, historical, and ethical significance of how human and (non-human) animals interact. this byzantine affiliation, bound up in intricate symbolic meaning, and potentially eliciting both fascination and antagonism, was discussed in relation to economic and emotional relationships, how we view the human when examining other animals, and how animals contribute to human understanding and the making, and unmaking, of the world. fudge began with an absorbing discussion of cow-hood in the seventeenth century. she outlined two problems associated with contemplating animals of the past: i) animal minds are ultimately inaccessible to humans, and ii) animals in the past do not leave us many records of their lives. exploring the problems and potentials of attempting to recover animal lives of the past, fudge chronicled the story of elizabeth elsing of topsfield, a “woman of idle and disorderly life, a milker of other men’s beasts, and a hedge-broker.” while affirming that we can never penetrate the secret internal stirring of animals, fudge called for “imagining in historical writing” and hoped to achieve it by beginning to imagine what it might be like to perceive as a cow. such creative thinking, not fixed by the limitations of human physiology or the observable realities of the world, might also, for fudge, allow us to tend to our imperfections. not only may imagining help us understand the past and write fuller histories, it may remind us that we are, essentially, limited beings. fudge identified the economic and nutritional importance of dairy cows in the 17th century, the value of milk to a family, and how a stranger entering a cow’s space, and milking it, would have been a disruptive event. for fudge, this indicated that one of elsing’s offences may have been her illicit and unsettling approach to the animal. the sociological value of considering cow life was debated later, with a particular focus on the notion of gift exchange—the cow as both giver and gift—, and gendered interpretations of elsing’s offences, particularly the “milking of other men’s beasts.” fudge concluded by proposing that the case of elizabeth elsing and a distinct engagement with a world the cow occupies can be read not only as social, political, and criminal history, but also of animal history, prompting us to acknowledge the necessity of engaging with other ways of being in the world, both animal and human. the dialogue surrounding the relationship(s) formulated between the human and the animal was continued by artist robert davies. davies began by discussing his work sophie davies, gareth thomas, & karolina rucinska— the house of beasts symposium 141 entitled insects, for which he collected dead insects in his studio as artistic material. he then introduced the audience to his recent work, animals, which engages the differences between representing the animals we encounter as food, as pets, and in leisure. distinguishing two separate groups of animals, racehorses and farm animals, davies urged the audience to acknowledge the hierarchical distinctions inherent in our understanding. davies used his exemplary groups to draw contrasts between the famous and invisible animal, animals held in high esteem and animals identified in terms of food production, and animals endowed with human-like traits (such as strength, bravery, spiritedness, intelligence) and animals belonging to the world of the beast (measured by productivity and conversion). his magnificently detailed portraits concentrate on the small fry, that is, the ignored, relegated, and lowly-prized animals. throughout his work, davies strives to re-imagine and restructure our thinking by viewing all animals equally. this is best epitomized in “buttercup,” an imposing drawing that depicts a cow in the very same way horses were represented in earlycentury equestrian portraits. this traditional rendition of animals of a less desirable kind intends to capture and question our disparate responses to different animal types, particularly those used in food production. playfully referring to himself as the “militant of the slaughterhouse,” davies outlined his main goals for the graphic series, namely to show the majesty of all animals and to make people aware of what they do when they sit at the dinner table. davies’s passionate reinterpretation of the humananimal relationship has broader implications for this inherent, taken-for-granted distinction. the use of names for titling his work, for example, disrupts the relationship by humanizing an entity formerly distinguished as other. what is more, davies shows that even by looking at the animal, whether the racehorse or the cow, we look, in chorus, at the human and what the human values. the themes outlined above, namely how our understanding of the human-animal distinction has been blurred, was explored further by artist tessa farmer. farmer closed the third session with a description of her work with “skeleton fairies”: half-human, half-insect creatures. farmer’s art, self-described as “fantastical but grounded in reality,” translates myth into nightmare by depicting fairies, perceived popularly as genial and good-natured beings often with supernatural powers, as a dark, mischievous, and threatening species. farmer’s creations inhabit a temporary state somewhere between the beautiful and the uncanny, life and death, human and animal. farmer walked the audience through the details of her designs, including the process of minimizing the height of the fairies (many are barely 1cm tall), collecting the necessary humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 142 insects for artistic material, and how the pieces became more visual and violent as work progressed. farmer’s depictions of, in her words, “the alien” presented images of fairyon-pest, or rather pest-on-pest, chaos and chaotic relations. farmer followed with a screening of her visual installation “the den of inquity,” an animation series communicating the stories of these skeleton fairies. enigmatic and amusing, farmer’s creatures are part of a dark mythology of creatures engaging in torturous practices on other beastly forms, reminding of the cruel realities of life cycles. farmer’s cryptic creations could be interpreted as allegories of the human race that kills, dominates, and captures the world. “the den of inequity,” in particular, can represent a tale of human endeavor. weaving a fantasy drawn from literature, legends and imagination, farmer’s quirky and macabre artwork uncovers the world of competition often overlooked in depictions of the natural world. such creations, ultimately, portray the powerful supremacy exercised by the human, as tormentors, over the animal. being with animals as a way of understanding past, present and future. in the third and last cluster of the symposium professors terry mardsen and joanna latimer began to piece together responses to the call for reimagining the complex network of humananimal relationships through examinations of their embodied structures, namely agriculture and dwelling. for both, processes of embodiment (breeding, milking, eating, riding, living with) through ordered economic, social, cultural practices were taken for granted, and then became disembodied. professor terry mardsen, director of sustainable places research institute at cardiff university, spoke of his work tracing animal, place, and people as closely connected, interwoven, and complex systems. these systems, marsden argued, are of crucial importance in new sustainable agriculture: one that places an animal in it. marsden listed vulnerabilities and instabilities within the agri-food systems, which have far reaching yet immediate consequences in terms of food security, food scarcity, inherited ecological crises, inequalities between animals as well as between human-animals, etc. many responses to these problems — for example genetic modification of pigs to reduce phosphorus in manure — are being presented as sustainable, without serious enquiry into the meaning and quality of sustainability. according to marsden, it is rare nowadays for questions to be raised about the ways in which “greening” is being achieved, which is precisely why it needs to be examined. marsden offered as a model the yakutian cow, which is cherished and praised for what she is, gives to, and cocreates with the yakutian people. the ensuing discussion raised the problem of what to sophie davies, gareth thomas, & karolina rucinska— the house of beasts symposium 143 do with already existing breeds and practices if new relations like the yakutian cow are made the norm. professor joanna latimer, an ethnographer of scientific and medical practices, took the audience on a virtual tour in and around attingham house, and the house of beasts exhibition itself, identifying the original cultural ordering of domains — human, domestic animal, wild animal, food animal, etc. — that latimer, the artists, the curator, and the speakers dis-ordered for the audience and the visitors to the attingham house. latimer introduced the concept of an “art of dwelling” derived from the works of heidegger, weber, and strathern. latimer began her tour through the house of beasts with a short video by kathleen herbert entitled “stables,” in which four horses roam freely in gloucester cathedral. from stables to the kitchen, from the entrance to the drawing rooms, from the masculine to the feminine side of the house, from gardens to the fields, from the upstairs to downstairs, in each space latimer uncovered an animal within the humananimal dwelling. she detailed how the artists of the exhibition provoked a disorientation of cultural categories of animal place (for example: a fox in the woods) by siting animals out-of-place (a fox hidden in a deformed chair by a fireplace) in the house of beasts. the strength of this event was in the creative way it merged art and science, feelings and thoughts, in order to explore human-animal relationships. the success of the symposium suggests the need for more events organized in such way, and for opening new chapters in the academic literature as well as in everyday life. acknowledgements. many thanks to cesagen, cplan, the insitutute of sustainable places research institute, meadowarts, shropshire wild life trust, the arts council for their support. microsoft word franklin pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 2:2 sarah franklin future mix: remodelling biological futures introduction. while much of human-animal studies concerns the question of the human-animal border (how it is both maintained and dissolved, how it might be challenged or re-imagined, what are its ethics and its politics), a difficulty surrounds the question of where this question can be asked from. much of donna haraway’s recent work, for example, addresses the ethics of situation — exploring not only what are the questions to be asked, but how are they situated, and the politics of their location. haraway begins her most extended consideration of this question to date, when species meet (2008), with a reading of derrida’s influential essay “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow)” (2002), in which derrida reflects upon an encounter in which, naked in his bathroom, he engages with his cat. the questions haraway asks in this instance concern the meaning of both situated knowledges and responsive thinking — in other words, the hows, the wheres, and the whos of the “animal question,” as well as its “whats.” derrida’s essay about his cat draws on one of the most important themes in his work as a whole, deriving from his dialogue with the work of martin heidegger, and often concerning the role of human speech. following the ancients, and in particular plato, speech for heidegger is definitive of a human tradition that is, to put it bluntly, profoundly threatened by modern technology — for example even by the typewriter. in a famous passage from heidegger’s “what is called thinking,” which has been cited by many animal studies scholars (and which is crucial to derrida’s work on animals), he describes the crucial difference between animals and humans as the animal’s lack of a hand: “apes, too, have organs that can grasp, but they do not have hands. the hand is infinitely different from all grasping organs—paws, claws, or fangs — different by an abyss of essence. only a being who can speak, that is, think, can have hands and can be handy in achieving works of handicraft” (16). the hand, for heidegger, is not only the essence of humanity because it is “handy” in the sense of hand-related skills, such a cabinetry or knitting. as heidegger explains: the craft of the hand is richer than we commonly imagine. the hand does not only grasp or catch, or push and pull. the hand reaches, extends, receives and welcomes – and not just things: the hand extends itself, and receives its own welcome in the hands of others. the hand holds. the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 68 hand carries. the hand designs and signs, presumably because man is a sign. two hands fold into one, a gesture meant to carry man into the great oneness. the hand is all this, and this is the true handicraft. (17) heidegger’s commentaries on the human hand have been the subject of much commentary, in part because they are so central to his overall philosophical concern with human being-ness, but also because they are, like much of heidegger’s writing, somewhat cryptic. he claims, for example, that “the hand’s gestures run everywhere through language, in their most perfect purity when man speaks by being silent” (16). this is because the hand, while practical and useful in a utilitarian way, is also a sign of a sign — a sign of signing, perhaps, but also of the human as a sign of itself. above all the pointing or signing hand enables thought: it is co-extensive with, one with, human thought. as heidegger says: “every motion of the hand in every one of its works carries itself through the element of thinking, every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element. all the work of the hand is rooted in thinking” (16). a critique of the essentialist logic of heidegger’s “handism” — his handthropo morphism, to coin a phrase — was at the heart of derrida’s 1987 essay on the german concept of geschlecht, also translated as “species.” in “geschlecht ii” (1987), derrida is critical of the way in which heidegger has (mis) “handled” the “question of man”— in part by equating it with an unexamined, essentialist (and, derrida implies, racialist) history of “a certain humanism, a certain nationalism, and a certain europocentric universalism” (168). he describes heidegger’s version of “i think and therefore i am not animal” and “my hand is the sign and means of my thought and their unity as my being” (my paraphrasing) as “dogmatic” (173). derrida goes on to claim that heidegger’s position on human exceptionalism is diagnostic of its profound essentialism (“a decisive symptom concerning the essential axiomatic of the given discourse”) and he dismisses it as tautological: “this traditional statement presupposes an empiric or positive knowledge whose titles, proofs, and signs are never shown” (ibid.). perhaps these were some of the thoughts occurring to derrida in his bathroom, naked in front of his cat. certainly he was thinking about animal thinking, and about the meaning of the silence of his cat, for, as haraway notes in her reading of derrida’s reflections on his wordless encounter: “he did not fall into the trap of making the subaltern speak” (21), noting that derrida concedes that “it would not be a matter of ‘giving speech back’ to animals but perhaps acceding to a thinking …that thinks the absence of the name as something other than privation” (derrida 416, cited in haraway sarah franklin — future mix: remodeling biological futures 69 20). as far as haraway is concerned, this questioning response to responding (“whether it is possible to know what respond means, and how to distinguish a response from a reaction” 20) is a helpful advance over the assumption that animals can only think like we do, or not think at all. but it is still not a very co-present thought-process with the animal to figure out what this silence might mean. hence haraway’s emphasis on a more companionate, enduring, prolonged, mutually curious, interactive redefinition of something more … er, humanimalian. in her quest for a more fully companionate version of what thinking, responding, or speaking – or knowing – animals might involve, we are reminded of haraway’s earlier essay on “situated knowledges,” published in 1988. like derrida’s critique of heidegger’s essentialism and anthropomorphism, which ultimately take for granted the very presuppositions that need explaining, haraway’s 1988 essay is aimed at the tautological reasoning underlying the supposedly universal and value free model of scientific objectivity. in the same way that derrida is, above all, critical of the “we” heidegger assumes when he describes, for example, “we men,” so too is haraway concerned with the problem she describes as “the radical historical specificity, and so contestability, of every layer of the onion of scientific and technological constructions” (186), a “we” from which certain categories of persons (women, natives, the poor, the deviant, etc.) are excluded in the name of “neutrality,” “facts,” and “truth.” as humanimalistic readers of haraway may recall, one of the primary examples supporting her conclusion that “only partial perspective promises objective vision … feminist objectivity is about limited location and situated knowledge” (190) is what she has learned from walking her dogs “and wondering how the world looks without fovea and very few retinal cells for colour vision” (190). we may think the photograph, the ultrasound scan, or the microscope enhance objective vision, but, haraway insists, these technological eyes each offer their own “highly specific visual possibilities” each of which “shows us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building in translations and specific ways of seeing” (190). it is from this point of view that haraway argues derrida did not go far enough in his effort to explore his cat’s response to him in their brief encounter. the cat, for example, disappears from his essay henceforth, and haraway concludes that derrida thus “failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning” (21). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 70 therefore, as a philosopher he knew nothing more from, about, and with the cat at the end of the morning than he knew at the beginning, no matter how much better he understood the root scandal as well as the enduring achievements of his textual legacy. actually to respond to the cat’s response to his presence would have required his joining that flawed but rich philosophical canon to the risky project of asking what this cat on this morning cared about, what these bodily postures and visual entanglements might mean and might invite, as well as reading what people who study cats have to say and delving into the developing knowledges of both cat-cat and cat-human behavioural semiotics when species meet. (22) the rest of haraway’s book, as readers of this journal will appreciate, concerns the question of what an ethics of co-responsiveness between humans and animals has involved, does involve, and could involve beyond the mere philosophical acknowledgement of a deficit chronicled by derrida and his ilk. however readers may judge haraway’s success or failure in this endeavour, there is no doubt either that she has assiduously mapped this terrain in a highly original and creative manner, nor that she has placed an ethics of play and curiosity as forms of knowing at the centre of this deliberately polemical project. haraway’s book can be read as a personal and practical guide to what humanimalian companionship does or might involve or require, but it also deserves credit as a reinvention of philosophical method that is as fundamentally post-cartesian as it is pro-canine. back to school. there were many reasons i was strongly reminded of haraway’s longstanding concerns with animalist perspectivalisms, situated knowledges, and playas-philosophy while i was involved in the school sci-art project did not, at its outset, have an animal focus. having read portions of the draft of haraway’s book, and heard many of its central arguments in talks she had given, i had adopted some of her “dog’s eye view” methodologies myself — not least while i was writing about dolly the sheep in dolly mixtures (2007). together haraway and i had visited the outstanding animal scholar thelma rowell and her soay sheep in yorkshire, where, like haraway, i had been taught useful lessons about how sheep recognitions of each other help us to see how very little we know about what the term “society” even means. this was the question with which i ended my book dolly mixtures, by suggesting that we not only have more in common with sheep than we think, but that dolly’s genealogy is increasingly our own — biologically, technologically, and culturally as well as socially. sarah franklin — future mix: remodeling biological futures 71 in a way, this is exactly what heidegger warned against – as have his students, including, for example, jürgen habermas, hannah arendt, and herbert marcuse in their outspoken critiques of technology.1 a counter-question question, as derrida argues, is whether technology is already a mediating force that belies the very distinction between humans and animals heidegger takes as his tautological first premise.2 arguably, we would not be living in such close proximity to so many sheep without agriculture or domestication, for example, and it is just as useless to define human sociality as if these ubiquitous proximities were anything less than formative of who “we” are as it is to insist that agriculture is purely natural. agriculture is a good example of the complex mix of the animal, the human, and the technological that categories such as “nature” are no longer adequate to describe. however, the means of addressing these complexities are less “ready to hand,” as heidegger might have put it — or at least so far as the established canon of philosophy, including derrida, is concerned. haraway suggests otherwise. in her view we are being “co-worlded” with animals all the time, in every way we can imagine, at every layer of the onion of our being and theirs. she also argues this is nothing less than the most important ethical and political question we need to take seriously in the name of “thinking” about “being”— and she claims, like many feminist theorists, that it is the “being with” of being that matters to its politics. my own work has largely involved questions of the human and the technological, and has only recently “gone animal.” i was myself led in the animal direction by dolly herself, who was, somewhat in contrast to her fame as a clone, a very demanding individual. this was one of many paradoxical features of dolly’s identity that led me to consider her origins in more detail. in the end, dolly mixtures is a book that asks how we might understand the thick genealogies of contemporary innovations in reproductive biomedicine and bioscience through the novel biological relations to nonhuman animals they produce, taking “biological” in this instance to include connections produced and shaped through biological science — and thus our “kinship” with dolly the sheep (to whom i argue we are biologically related).3 how these new “biological relations” are engendered by both old and new technological capacities and animal connections is the one of the important questions dolly ‘stands for’ as an iconic companion animal. a task thus remains for the humanimalistic scholar of elucidating such animals — their ontologies, their politics, their ethics, or their “stakes,” as haraway would put it. work in the “new kinship studies” in anthropology has begun to explore how these new biotechnological relations are perceived, represented, and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 72 enacted in contexts such as assisted conception,4 genetic diagnosis,5 and gamete donation,6 as well as how meanings created in these sectors borrow from, and travel to, other contexts of the (reor de-) biologization of relationality.7 in a parallel, sometimes overlapping, universe, work in the animal studies area has explored changing understandings of biological ties in contexts as diverse as agriculture,8 domestication,9 evolution,10 zoology,11 biological oceanography,12 and tourism,13 among others. in the following analysis i consider how these two sets of questions about technology, biology, and kinship overlap in the context of an experimental pedagogical project in a british high school. through a case study of a school art-science project, called “future mix,” which concerned the new possibilities opened up by transgenesis, cloning, regenerative medicine, and stem cell science, i consider how both ethical and practical questions raised by new biological connections take shape pedagogically in a classroom, and aesthetically in student artworks. i suggest that the results of this experimental sciart school project provide engaging and instructive resources in the task of fleshing out new biological connections, such as those implied (and forged) by the cultivation of, for example, admixed human-animal hybrid embryos. at a moment of considerable public debate over such questions, in britain and beyond, the future mix project sought to explore the future of recombinant biological substance not only in the abstract, or literally (as in “the biological facts”), but through collective acts of artistic creation which took place interactively over time. to the extent dolly is what roy willis called a “signifying animal,” one of the things i have suggested she stands for is that existing definitions of biology “have been, in a sense, remixed, resequenced, and provided with a novel form of amplification” (22). here was a chance to participate in a project that stretched the envelope of mixtures even further. from the outset, i was very interested to see where future mix would lead. as described on the project website (www.futuremix.org.uk), future mix was designed “to generate discussion on transgenic research among a young audience” using “a fresh approach to the potentials, challenges, and questions of this cutting edge research” that involved “bring[ing] together art and science inventively and playfully.” a collaboration between artakt (www.artakt.co.uk), an art and science consultancy, and the wellcome trust, the project built on previous exhibits and collaborations broadly contributing to the artistic movement known as bioart,14 while also drawing its inspiration from the increasingly complex fusion between sci-art and science communication. the project team included an artist (carl stevenson), two scientific advisors (myself and chris mason, a biologist from university college london), the director of artakt, caterina albano, and her team based at central st martin’s college sarah franklin — future mix: remodeling biological futures 73 of art and design in london, as well as teachers from the participating high school and representatives of london’s royal institution. future mix was developed and managed by artakt as part of their distinguished history of national and international collaborations focused on art, science and the body, including the highly successful exhibit spectacular bodies at london’s hayward gallery in 2000.15 over the summer of 2007, the team worked together with staff at south camden community school in central london to devise a syllabus that would introduce students to new areas of bio innovation with a view both to informing them about these areas as part of their formal science curriculum, and generating imaginative, artistic responses to the possibilities they offered. the students were to show their art work as part of a larger exhibit, “crossing over: exchanges in art and biotechnologies,” to be held at the royal institution (one of the uk’s oldest and most prominent science museums in mayfair) as part of its re-opening in 2008. in designing the lecture-artwork sessions scheduled for september and october 2007, the team quickly encountered a revealing difficulty that came to dominate our initial preparations, namely how to avoid reproducing the most clichéd versions of our topics with which we were all familiar from the media, and which might be considered “obvious” jumping off points for teaching. this “jurassic park” dilemma proved to be a problem of anticipation in several senses. as we anticipated how the students might view topics such as cloning, stem cells, cybrid embryos, or regenerative medicine, we found ourselves struggling to avoid the stock “frankenscience” scenarios with which these issues are routinely associated.16 while familiar, and an obvious point of reference, these tabloid translations of new technology unhelpfully rely on staple plots of rogue scientific discovery and monstrous-offspring to evoke bio-shock, horror or disgust. similarly, we determined that both the deliberately provocative versions of bioscience conveyed in bioart projects such as eduardo kac’s “gfp bunny”17 and the “monster movie” mode of bio-horror familiar from popular cinema (e.g. species [1995], alien [1979]). these were genres of cultural anxiety we wanted not only to avoid but to challenge, in which engineered humans and animals are ubiquitous symbols of moral degeneration. our official goal, as stated in the project application to the wellcome trust, was to encourage students to “imagine the next generation through art and science” and our unofficial task was to accomplish this without resorting to clichés. as a consequence, chris and i quickly realized we faced a doubled-pedagogical load in stimulating students to engage imaginatively with the future possibilities of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 74 regenerative biology, while also seeking to produce an antidote, or counter-genre, to predictable images of cloning, transgenics, and tissue engineering that are routinely either techno-utopian (e.g., genetic enhancement) or dystopic (e.g., margaret atwood’s oryx and crake [2003]). our formula for engaging students was to attempt to anchor all of the sessions in actual laboratory work, linked to practical clinical applications, with a view to keeping the case studies narratively simple but empirically detailed. often veering quite far out of our way to avoid provoking knee-jerk responses to highly polarized debates such as those over gm foods or “mad cow” disease, we chose a translational idiom in the double sense of using near-to-clinic applications as pedagogical devices to offer students practically-orientated future biotechnological imaginaries with which to work.18 we chose four areas: cloning, regenerative medicine, gene therapy, and life-extension technologies for short powerpoint lectures that chris and i devised and taught in fifteen minute segments at the beginning of each session. future mix was intended to “explore the boundaries between human and non-human, nature and artefact, science and art” and “to critically and imaginatively engage with biomedicine and bioscience through scientific presentations and artistic experiments.” in addition to a syllabus and an art installation, the course was intended to create an online resource for high school science teachers. in designing our lectures we carefully selected “crossover” topics that would combine some basic science with a range of translation-near applications, leaving enough room for these to be explored in a simple in-class art workshop that would follow up on key themes. together, these preliminary lectures and art “practicals” would aggregate into a culminating exhibit (we hoped), which might involve a combination of visual, virtual, sculptural and textual components (we reassured each other somewhat anxiously that all of this was indeed a realistic scenario as the start of the school year marched rapidly toward us). predictably, in practice, it was all much more “off plan.” although the project did eventually meet all of its goals — or even exceeded them, depending on your point of view — there were many points at which we wondered where on earth we were headed, never mind how we would ever get there. as caterina, our director, dryly observed on our first day in class, in october 2007, amidst a volume of noise and a level of chaos i initially found completely intimidating, “i am not sure a team of six will be enough.” renowned for their uneven educational quality, under-resourcing, and overcrowding, british “comprehensives” are the equivalent of us public high schools, only more markedly subordinate to private secondary education, known in the uk as either public or grammar schools. south camden community school (sccs) is a comprehensive adjacent to the british library and the new st pancras station, and is sarah franklin — future mix: remodeling biological futures 75 large by british standards, with 1500 pupils. it is ethnically diverse with more than 80% immigrant children, mostly boys from recently immigrated families, many of which are muslim from somalia and bangladesh. a larger than average number of students at sccs come from families on income benefit, and many fewer go on to higher education — thus earning the school the official status of “deprived” (“deprivation” is determined in the uk by the ratio of the proportion of students who receive free school lunches to the school’s average scores on national exams). nonetheless, south camden community school is seen as a rising star. the teaching staff at the school has often been praised for its dedication and under its dynamic head teacher, rosemary leeke, sccs has begun to rise in the crucial ofsted ratings, and sent its first graduate to oxbridge in 2008. everything is relative, of course. on the first day we began teaching it took more than 10 minutes simply to get the 30 or so students to be quiet, so that chris could begin his lecture. to exercise more control, ty, the science teacher, originally from hawaii, began serving detentions on the particularly rowdy students — which then meant he had to leave the room with them. of course, while he was out in the corridor ministering to his miscreants things got even more out of control inside the classroom. by the end of the first “lecture” it was pretty clear to chris and me that we would have to mc as well as teach, and that “discipline” was probably going to be much less useful than a loud voice and a sharp sense of humor. since the combination of a lecture and an art project in a one hour slot — meaning actually 50 minutes — was ambitious to begin with, we kept the first week simple by getting the students to draw parts of their bodies they would, and would not, consider replacing, and then explaining why. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 76 (photo by sarah franklin) we became more ambitious in week two, for which, following my short presentation about dolly’s origins in a project to provide treatments for cystic fibrosis, carl designed an art project involving each student “cloning” his or her hand in plaster of paris. needless to say this activity was exuberant and exhausting, as well as very messy.19 but we were on a roll. carl had a preternatural calm about him that made me wonder at times if he had been molecularly altered for urban high school teaching. but in fact he simply had a lot of experience and a very good understanding of how to give our wordy science lectures an imaginative handle the students could literally grab onto. (heidegger would have had a field day.) the next phase of artwork (following chris’s lecture on regenerative medicine) involved smashing the plaster of paris hands with a hammer, while photographing each stage to make a time-lapse movie of the hand’s gradual disintegration into rubble. (here derrida might have stepped in.) run backwards, the hand’s reconstitution looked like regeneration, and run as a loop the effect was oddly mesmerizing, as the hand regrew and disintegrated in a cyclical sequence that looked seasonal — like a tree shedding its leaves, and thus “natural.” certainly, the students thought it was engaging — they had stopped being late for classes and begun to come up with new ideas for projects. the next step was to add sound to the films, using the open source software audacity, which allows users to “clone” sections of recorded speech — again, running them backwards or forwards in loops. these cloned audio tracks were then spliced together to form an audio commentary/ backdrop to the regenerating hand movies — forging a simple but suggestive interplay between biological and digital “cloning” (as well, as it happened, between “handing” and thinking). sarah franklin — future mix: remodeling biological futures 77 one thing quickly led to another up until the christmas break, and along with increasing momentum, the project steadily gathered interest and participation until it had literally become a “pet project” for the entire school. by the time of the launch of future mix in early february, everyone was talking about the elaborate display in the school’s main lobby that grew more crowded by the day. the scene was indeed both unusual and intriguing. in her own paddock, lined with astroturf, a life-size plaster of paris dolly the sheep stood surrounded by visual and digital artwork on wall-mounted monitors. on her sculpted white body were written messages from students—mostly about what it would be like to be her in the future. the messages were printed in a font composed of “cloned sheep letters” formed by groups of students dressed as sheep, who lay on the floor of the gymnasium to make a separate photograph for each letter. on the walls, floor, and furniture — everywhere — were more messages, and on computer terminals around the room the students’ films of their artwork were being shown. (photo by sarah franklin) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 78 i was taken aback when i walked through the school’s main entrance into the brightly lit and festive lobby. it was a typically cold and rainy february evening — already dark as night by 5pm. i had not seen carl, ty, or the students since chris and i had finished our lectures in december, and i had no idea what to expect. the amount of time, care, thought, and passion that had gone into the exhibit amazed me, as did the depth of insight conveyed by the show. it was like entering a nativity scene morphed with a high-tech media installation, and narrated on the back of an illuminated manuscript, who was also a sheep (the new vellum). not divine, but ovine — or both — the final exhibit was better than many i had visited on similar themes in leading national galleries. the students were also transformed: polite, friendly, and relaxed, they could not have been more poised — or proud. after taking my coat and offering me a drink they escorted me around. i was still damp from the light evening rain and entirely lost for words, stunned by the brightly lit and vibrant scene in front of me. some of the students sat inside the paddock alongside dolly, while others showed their classmates more of the online environment that could be viewed on laptops in various parts of the room. everyone seemed very satisfied with the outcome. a reporter from the local press was taking interviews and photographs. sarah franklin — future mix: remodeling biological futures 79 the unifying theme that had clearly emerged was the alphabet, or sheep-a-bet, that formed the recurring motif of the exhibit’s components — its spine, its skin, and its dna. the cloned sheep letter alphabet recapitulated the “abcs” of cloning and regenerative medicine the students had been taught in the classroom, but they had personalized these, and converted them into a form of address — not so much posing questions to the future but to the figure who was seen to embody a shared but uncertain biological futurity, namely dolly. through the cloned sheep alphabet the students had created the building blocks of a new language not only by themselves, but also literally with themselves. moreover they had formed all of the individual letters as a group—or flock. in another online film on the website, the flock posed questions among themselves as clones — waving to the viewer, creating a friendly interface, of the kind dolly herself is often associated with—a soft and woolly gateway to the future of biological control. (i encourage readers to visit the waving sheep-a-bet flock “in person” on the project homepage, www.futuremix.org.uk.) (photo by sarah franklin) in contrast to the frequent depiction of dna as a disembodied code, the clonagrams sent by the students to dolly used embodiment and companionship as the medium for their message. playing with the cloning theme’s endless chains of association, they clearly revelled in its pleasantly repetitive possibilities to perform imitation, mimicry humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 80 and masquerade, and they had mobilized these possibilities in the form of conversational play. in a third artwork series depicted on the website, the large white sheep (dolly) was used as a message board to display a series of questions about the future and toward cloning. as she is shown rotating on screen, pop-up questions in balloons would “translate” the various words on her body—in a kind of cartoon whiteboard dialogic of call and response: clockwise: “if i lived to be 300 years old?” “i would be lonely if everyone else died before me.” “would i get lazy if i had that much time?” counterclockwise: “i only want to live to eighty.” “everyone around me would die but i would keep on living.” “i would have time to do more good things.” “what would it feel like to meet my great, great grandchildren?” similarly, the students’ questions transcribed onto dolly’s body addressed the advantages and disadvantages of immortality and cloned identity – often with reference to relationships, belonging, and identity. “if i wasn’t a clone i wouldn’t feel left out.” “i always have someone to play with with a similar personality to my own.” “it’s like having another brother or sister – i am never alone.” “i will always have a compatible organ donor.” sarah franklin — future mix: remodeling biological futures 81 “it’s weird because i am always surrounded with others who look like me.” “do we have the same thoughts or the same personality?” (2 clones ask at once) “everyone looks like me, which gets boring. who is the real me?” “sometimes we get on but sometimes i hate myselves.” reflecting on cloning with a class of students who made creative use of diverse media — including themselves — to pose questions about the future of bioscience and biomedicine proved a useful experience for me, not least by providing a contrast to the insights gained through ethnography or more conventional academic research. both science studies and cultural studies approaches seemed overly literal, serious, and narrowly academic compared to the student’s playful multi-perspectival responses to dolly, their dialogic interpellation of her as themselves, and their “imaginative but real” engagement with her future connections as a cloned sheep. their ability to respond as individuals and as a group, and to translate their responses into an artistic interface, which is now also an online educational portal, reminded me of the value of artistic license to provoke and inquire without any necessary expectation of finding “answers.” it also reminded me of the sociality of thought, which is at its best when it is both serious and allowed to play. i recalled with a newly acquired appreciation of their irrelevance my initial hesitations and concerns — the “double anticipatory dilemma” chris and i had experienced trying to imagine means of engaging with a biotechnologically engendered futurity that eschewed the well-worn genres of enhancement, disaster, or disgust. in evaluating future mix, i saw that the students (and carl) had understood this challenge much better than i had from the outset. i stood in admiration of the students’ ability and willingness to put themselves into the picture of what unfamiliar biological futures might mean, and not only for what we understand as humanity. despite the relative absence of animals from our initial syllabus, they had presciently chosen “the animal we already are” in replicating dolly. future mix, it seemed to me, had more than passed our “ear mouse test” — the measure of its ability to create new idioms and interfaces, rather than clichés, through which to engage with uncertain biofuturities. the ear mouse — an experiment in tissue engineering whereby a human-looking ear was grown on a scaffold on a mouse’s back — has become one of the most iconic images of transgenic futures because of what it looks like: it looks like a human ear humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 82 growing on a mouse’s back, creating a contrast that serves as a signature for the transgenic imaginary we might call future mix as future shock. the ear mouse, and its vivid, or even lurid, visual associations, was the kind of “mixture” that inspired future mix (in part as a tribute to some of leonardo’s chimerical creatures). the irony, from a literal point of view, however, about the ear mouse is that there is nothing transgenic about it at all: it is simply a mouse that has been made to grow new skin over a scaffold shaped like a human ear. it is 100 percent mouse, but disturbing because it looks human. dolly is the reverse image to the ear mouse, in the sense that what is remarkable about her is that despite being the “poster sheep” for high tech bioscience, she looks perfectly normal. what struck me about the students’ readings of dolly in future mix was the extent to which they had successfully shed the ear mouse imaginary, and instead made such an effort to enter dolly’s world, and to see the future from her eyes. what has remained with me most about their engaging installation was its tone — combining a “speaking from,” a “speaking among,” and a “speaking with” to arrive at something other than “speaking for,” or “speaking to” (they thus also produced an eloquent alternative to the often patronizing context of science communication). in contrast to the familiar format of debate over the social impact of biotechnology, so often staged and performed through recitations of fact vs. fiction and stock for and against positions, the students managed to be practical, empathetic, critical, and insightful, while also creating an original interpretation that above all was based on proximity. future mix thus took me down a different path of thinking about how to imagine, to respond to, and to represent the new “biological relatives” in our midst. it also made me think about these issues from a different point of view — that of an inner city high school filled with teenagers approaching the end of formal secondary education. as a result, i was better able to appreciate a defining feature of mainstream debate about future biological possibilities, including new biological ties to animals, which are their distance, remoteness, and lack of connection. drawing on their own bodies, experiences, relationships, and conversations as resources, the students forged a material-semiotic connection of shared substance with an imagined figure of a lonely future clone based on an iconic animal model. they achieved this through an artistically expressive tool (the sheep-a-bet) that was itself a symbol of their own companionship and sociality, as well as a vehicle for communication. with their alphabet they had initiated a dialogue, which was recorded in corporeal, bodily, fleshy writing. literally glued together to form the surface of her skin, the students’ messages to dolly used the sarah franklin — future mix: remodeling biological futures 83 language of form as content—conveying proximity, humour, identification, belonging, concern, curiosity, and attention through their laboriously constructed mode of address. by this means the students engaged unfamiliar biotechnological possibilities and entities by socializing them, using conversation, co-habitation, costume, choreography, and correspondence. their approach was respectful but playful—literally a bit of a romp, as the process of posing for the letters had clearly involved quite a few collective contortions on the gymnasium floor. dolly’s role in this dialogue was to function as a friendly interface in between the familiar world of the farmyard and the future of biological control — and it is a role by which she is increasingly defined, most often, as in this case, by people who are remote from her in both time and space. this is why dolly’s function as a figurative icon is the reverse of that performed by ear mouse — whose eye-catching mixed morphology is so influential because it perfectly matches expectations of what recombinant or transgenic biological futures will look like and will mean (horror, loss of humanity, degeneration). although strange, the ear mouse is iconic because she performs the familiar form of strangeness we expect: she is phenotypically hybrid in a manner that appears visually to confirm an interspecific pedigree that is not in fact hers (for she is “pure mouse,” as it were).20 this contrast, in addition to helping us parse genres of biotechnologicallyassisted genealogy, points to the changing role of companion species in what might be considered either the next phase, or the seamless continuation of, domestication (and not only as it has been understood so far, but in terms of its “structuring absence” in the haunting form of animal-human bonds that mock these categories’ distinctiveness). in a future hall of landmark hand-made mammals, we might imagine a series of dioramas: the dupont/harvard oncomouse, dolly the cloned sheep, the babraham institute’s geep and shoat, and the human-cow cybrid embryo. the scene is apt both because it begs the question of what kind of staging this would be, and asks where its edges are (is the fancy pigeon hand-made too? the nude lab mouse?). why not go back to the offspring of walter heape’s eighteenth-century experiments with embryo transfer from a rabbit to a hare? or the early ivf experiments with golden hamsters at the worcester foundation for experimental biology in the 1940s? john gurdon’s cloned frog families? for that matter why not robert bakewell’s dishley sheep? or darley arabiana? as such a hall would make clear (and much of bioart precisely depicts the surreal/ baroque/ masquerade/ grotesque, etc. of our past and future connections to animals), humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 84 we have forged and mapped our definitions of species, domestication, and genealogy through companion animals in a wide variety of contexts from the beginning. true, a transgenic may be a quantum leap away from a selectively bred dairy ruminant, a pet cat, or a thoroughbred, but these imbrications share a common ancestry in made kinds. this ancestry is mixed, fluid, and remains biologically under-described — the very categories used to secure its borders (species, breed, gene, kin, lineage, kind, geschlecht) are undone by the force of events and the aggregation of historical change. it is not only biological futures that remain uncharted. in the same way histories of trans-oceanic trade and colonialism reshape our understandings of domestication and environment, so too questions of biological form can be recast as diasporic genealogies (norway rat, american gray squirrel, english spaniel, barbary sheep). as haraway has shown, the history of attempts to classify or order animal cohabitants, significant others, and surrogates — the model organisms, pure bred lines, experimental colonies, livestock, pets, wild types, studs, mutants, hybrids, chimaeras and clones —shows that they are too densely historically interwoven to be neatly secured by law, principle, or decree.21 they are unstable, and it is one of the primary shifts in anthropological models of domestication that it has come increasingly to be understood as a disciplining process that also generates disorder.22 stefan helmreich has described “the way culture eddies into nature to transform it” (7), and there is no doubt these eddies make us what haraway in when species meet calls “messmates” with other animals and the ecosystem in the process. fitting, then, that the messy substances plastering together dolly’s body at the centre of future mix would offer the suggestion of trans-substantiation for a companionate collage of bodies and a classroom meeting of minds. these were lessons the future mix project confirmed. in language that privileged care and concern over certainty, proximity over distance, and exploration over denunciation, the clonagram conversation with dolly opened a space in which viewers were presumed to be “mixmates.” the work of the future mix collective — which included professional artists but was primarily led by high school students — provided a model of pedagogy as well as art in making its form part of its message about the uncertain futures of bioscientific innovation. during a period in which new biological ties between scientific research, national identity, human and animal reproductive substance, and the future of healthcare and agriculture are being significantly remolded, such guidance is especially appreciated. in all of these respects future mix reframed—or possibly even domesticated—the future of biological control within a model of companionate sarah franklin — future mix: remodeling biological futures 85 relationality anthropologists are likely to recognize as more prehistoric than posthuman. more to the point, however, are the ethics of “the animal question” this project articulates more clearly than much contemporary anthropology, or, it would appear, than most of western philosophy. in response to the question of what is being said about dolly in this project, there are undoubtedly significant absences, such as the fact that domesticated sheep are bred almost entirely for human purposes, and so was dolly. neither the pedagogical input to the course nor the art exercises emphasized human-animal questions, thus reinforcing a consistent absence of attention to this topic. and we might add that using dolly as a figurative doppelganger is merely once again to impose on animal bodies the burden of human wants. that said, however, the project did arguably achive an important lesson at the level of form—in terms of how the conversation was imagined and revealed, and in terms of how the students and their animal were situated in this encounter. as a lesson, that is, not only in not giving back speech, but attempting to do so, an encounter is at least staged and prefigured in which the very technics of speech, of language, of words, have been reconstituted for a specific task. perhaps even this recognition alone —of the need for reinvention of the most basic means of conducting a new kind of ethical dialogue about the biological futures humans and animals share — is something even dolly herself might respond to. notes 1. for an interesting argument against these positions, see the craftsman (2008), by richard sennett, himself a student of arendt. 2. such a question would be more in line with the work of marx and engels, who see the hand itself as a form of technology. see further in raymond tallis’s the hand: a philosophical inquiry into human being (2003). 3. so too are humans increasingly intimately connected to the biological colonies, or lines, of banked human stem cells that comprise a new demographic dimension to the human population, while also being one of its new “tools.” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 86 4. see edwards, born and bred: idioms of kinship and new reproductive technologies in england (2002); edwards et al, technologies of procreation: kinship in the age of assisted conception (2nd edition) (1999); franklin, embodied progress: a cultural account of assisted conception (1997); strathern after nature: english kinship in the late twentieth century (1992) and reproducing the future: anthropology, kinship and the new reproductive technologies (1992). 5. see finkler, experiencing the new genetics: family and kinship on the medical frontier (2000); franklin and roberts, born and made: an ethnography of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (2006); and rapp, “cell life and death, child life and death: genomic horizons, genetic diseases, family stories” (1999). 6. see konrad, nameless relations: anonymity, melanesia, and reproductive gift exchange (2005). 7. see carsten, cultures of relatedness: new approaches to the study of kinship (2000) and after kinship (2004), franklin and mckinnon’s relative values (2003); strathern, 1999 & 2005. 8. see franklin, dolly mixtures: the remaking of genealogy (2007). 9. see cassidy and mullin, where the wild things are now: domestication reconsidered (2006). 10. see haraway, when species meet (2007). 11. see ritvo, the animal estate: the english and other creatures in the victorian age (1989) and the platypus and the mermaid and other figures of the classifying imagination (1997). 12. see helmreich, alien ocean: anthropological voyages in microbial seas (2009). 13. see desmond, staging tourism: bodies on display from waikiki to sea world (1999). 14. see anker and nelkin the molecular gaze: art in the genetic age (2004); kac signs of life: bio art and beyond (2007); and da costa and philip, tactical biopolitics: art, activism, and technoscience (2008). sarah franklin — future mix: remodeling biological futures 87 15. see kemp and warner, spectacular bodies: the art and science of the human body from leonardo to now (2000). 16. see turney, frankenstein’s footsteps: genetics and popular culture (1998). 17. see kac, “transgenic art” (1998) and signs of life (2000). 18. somewhat paradoxically, and idealistically, we were aiming for imaginative trajectories that would “keep it real.” 19. i still have clothing from which some of the plaster has been impossible to remove. 20. and see ahmed, strange encounters: embodied others in postcoloniality (2000) on “familiar” strangeness. 21. see friese (2008). 22. see cassidy and mullin (2007). works cited ahmed, sara. strange encounters: embodied others in postcoloniality. london: routledge, 2000. anker, suzanne and nelkin, dorothy. the molecular gaze: art in the genetic age. cold spring harbor, ny: cold spring harbor laboratory press, 2004. carsten, janet, ed. cultures of relatedness: new approaches to the study of kinship. cambridge: cambridge up, 2000. carsten, janet. after kinship. cambridge: cambridge up, 2004. cassidy, rebecca and mullin, molly, eds. where the wild things are now: domestication reconsidered. london: berg press, 2007. da costa, beatriz and kavita philip. tactical biopolitics: art, activism, and technoscience. mit press, 2008. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 88 desmond, jane. staging tourism: bodies on display from waikiki to sea world. chicago: u of chicago p, 1999. edwards, jeanette. born and bred: idioms of kinship and new reproductive technologies in england. oxford: oxford up, 2000. edwards, jeanette, franklin, sarah, hirsch, eric, price, frances and strathern, marilyn. technologies of procreation: kinship in the age of assisted conception (2nd edition). london: routledge, 1999. finkler, kaja. experiencing the new genetics: family and kinship on the medical frontier. philadelphia, pa: u of pennsylvania p, 2000. franklin, sarah. embodied progress: a cultural account of assisted conception. london: routledge, 1997. —————. dolly mixtures: the remaking of genealogy. durham, nc: duke university press, 2007. franklin, sarah, and susan mckinnon, ed. relative values: reconfiguirng kinship studies durham, nc: duke up, 2001. franklin, sarah, and celia roberts. born and made: an ethnography of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis. princeton: princeton up, 2006. friese, carrie. “models of cloning, models for the zoo: rethinking the sociological significance of cloned animals.” biosocieties 4 (2009):367-390. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. —————. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008 helmreich, stefan. alien ocean: anthropological voyages in microbial seas. berkeley: u california p, 2009. kac, eduardo. signs of life: bio art and beyond. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2007. sarah franklin — future mix: remodeling biological futures 89 —————.“transgenic art.” in ars electronica '99 life science. gerfried stocker and christine schopf, eds. vienna and new york: springer, 1999. 289296. kemp, martin and warner, marina. spectacular bodies: the art and science of the human body from leonardo to now. london: hayward gallery publishing, 2000. konrad, monica. nameless relations: anonymity, melanesia, and reproductive gift exchange. london: berghahn books, 2005. rapp, rayna. “cell life and death, child life and death: genomic horizons, genetic diseases, family stories.” remaking life and death: towards an anthropology of biomedicine. sarah franklin and margaret lock, eds. santa fe, nm: school of american research press, 2003. 129-164. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate: the english and other creatures in the victorian age. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1989. —————. the platypus and the mermaid and other figures of the classifying imagination. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1997. sennett, richard. the craftsman. london: penguin, 2008. strathern, marilyn. after nature: english kinship in the late twentieth century. cambridge: cambridge up, 1992. —————. reproducing the future: anthropology, kinship and the new reproductive technologies. london: routledge, 1992. turney, jon. frankenstein’s footsteps: genetics and popular culture. new haven, ct: yale up, 1998. willis, roy. signifying animals: human meaning in the natural world. london: routledge, 1994. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 90 microsoft word dalke h u m a n i m a l i a 1:2 karen dalke mustang: the paradox of imagery what is a mustang? or, more importantly, what do we imagine it to be? in accounts of the history of the wild horse, the mustang wavers between being a pest to be eradicated and a cultural symbol worthy of protection. how can one animal evoke such passionate and conflicting responses? my paper explores how different images influence beliefs and ultimately the management of mustangs on american public lands. thomas and thomas state, “if men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences” (571-572). this idea provides a way to discuss the controversy surrounding the management of mustangs. as latour and haraway remind us, mustang images transcend binaries of the real and the imaginary or human and nature, creating a hybrid that is constantly shaping and being shaped by culture, technology, nature, and people. what the mustang means to culture changes, depending on representations, images, and symbols. the mustang’s various images are not objective truth, but are subjective understandings; depending on the experiences or context of the viewer, the mustang can be seen as an object of beauty or as a pest to be eradicated. while the wild freeroaming horse and burro act (1971) provides a standard process for managing all mustangs by the bureau of land management (blm), it does so with little regard for the varied meanings these animals have for united states citizens. local interpretations of the law vary, however, based on an individual’s or group’s image of the animal. these public images are important because they tell us about the cultural context. on one hand, historical and beautiful images of the mustang attract tourists to public lands and small towns that they may never otherwise visit. some of these western towns rely on the money generated through this tourism. at the same time, public lands possess energy resources, and the mustang herds complicate the extraction of these resources. in this way, what was once a historic and beautiful animal becomes a competitor standing in the way of human progress. unless the blm confronts this perception, it could ultimately result in the extermination of free-roaming mustangs (“factsheet”). this article uses an anthropological approach to study the position of the mustang in american culture. historically, anthropology has focused on the exotic, which, peirano suggests, creates a geographic and cultural distance between researchers and their studies. by investigating cultures other than their own, anthropologists have created the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 98 construct of the “other,” which has created a “discourse of alterity” (thomas 3), or, as traube would argue, results in viewing the world as binary contrasts, sorting behavior into opposed spheres such as nature vs. culture. societies follow different customs regarding which animals are deemed edible, which animals have ritual uses, which animals are scorned, prohibited, and tabooed, and how animals are ranked, both in comparison to one another and in comparison to humans. animal classifications are not naturally given, but rather a matter of language and culture. in the united states, according to the binary model, culture is associated with humans and nature is associated with other animals. animals then become the other and ultimately inferior to humans, a belief supported by our christian theology: “god gave humans absolute rights to use animals as they saw fit” (franklin 11). in comparison to other species, however, the mustang does not fit into just one culturally constructed category; a mustang can be both wild and tamed. leach, douglas and tambiah recognize that when a species straddles binaries it is likely to be viewed negatively and demonized, and this is so for the mustang. this essay, therefore, examines american culture from a less traditional approach, one which allows us to address many concerns, including geographical boundedness and “non-places.” understanding what a mustang means no longer requires physical proximity with the animal. further, with increased technology and mobility, the movement or flow between cultures becomes increasingly important, creating images, representations, and symbols that merge into belief systems about the mustang. different communities of sentiment emphasize one understanding of the mustang over other possible interpretations, resulting in the sponsorship of a particular management approach over all others. in modernity at large, appadurai discusses how communities of sentiment created through media and travel shape images, while di leonardo would add that they blur the boundary between the animal and what it means. how we think about the mustang has real consequences for its management. according to arluke and sanders, although mustangs arguably have a unique physical being, “they are given a cultural identity as people try to make sense of them, understand them, use them, or communicate with them” (9). this complex identity, coupled with the fact that the determination of their destiny rests in urban centers devoid of direct contact with the mustang, allows images to be easily manipulated. the blm manages mustangs as if they mean the same thing to everyone, an approach that, as couldry suggests in inside culture: reimagining the method of cultural studies, often results in ongoing controversy, in this case, between the blm and the public. because images of karen dalke – mustang: the paradox of imagery 99 mustangs lie within an embedded cultural context, anthropological inquiry offers the best approach for uncovering complex meanings and contributing to their humane management. constructing the mustang. in 1807, zebulon pike, on his journey from mexico to texas, coined the term mustang, referring to the wild horse herds he encountered. prior to this time, a variety of terms were used to refer to horses discarded by ranchers or indians in the west: mestenada (mustang horse stock), cimmaron (runaway slave), and marron (ownerless animal of domestic breeds) (dobie 94); the term mustang, an english corruption of the spanish word mesteno, has endured (thomas 30). the mustang has not changed as a species, but with the urbanization of the west, federal protection, and containment on public lands it has been constructed in many ways. as kirkpatrick says, to the wildlife purists, the wild horse is not even considered a legitimate claimant to the title of wildlife. the thoroughbred breeder and other enthusiasts of the domestic horse world see only ugly, ill-proportioned “jugheads” that have let their genes go to seed, so to speak. those with an appreciation for history see an animal that changed the very destiny of man here and abroad. those who are especially fond of u.s. western history see the horses as a legacy left by our forebears, both native and immigrant. the western rancher sometimes sees only a ward of the state that is eating grass that might better go to his cattle or sheep. finally, members of congress see the wild horse as a fact of life that generates a great deal of their mail and a species that can consume federal dollars on the same scale they can consume grass. (157) a mustang is more than just an animal; it is the creation of interactions between people and images in a world of cultural, economic, and political agendas.1 the diversity of images kirkpatrick describes is echoed in the comments of an initial interview: “if you talk to ten different people about mustangs, you will get ten different responses to what they represent…. it is a very emotional issue”(dalke 79).1 there is not one mustang, but many images of mustangs, which are used to further socio-political agendas. the three images most used are the historical icon, the pest, and the object of beauty; the mustang as a historical icon has allowed for the protection of the animal, but this image does not always assist in its placement in domestic settings, while the mustang as a pest is best understood in contrast to its image as an object of beauty. all of these images give insight into what a mustang means to post-industrial united states culture and they humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 100 may simultaneously contribute to the animals’ eventual demise. constructing these images is complex; the media, personal experiences, and an ever-changing cultural context create many impressions of mustangs that ultimately must be managed by the blm, but once these images have entered the socio-political arena, such complexity is lost. mustang as a historical icon. the images the wild horse evokes are directly tied to its history in the united states. this is not surprising, since the dialectic between structure and human action is always set within a particular spatial and temporal context of power relations.2 however, space and time are no longer thought of as bounded entities, but rather as flows. as appadurai says: modern nationalisms involve communities of citizens in the territorially defined nation-state who share the collective experience, not of face-toface contact or common subordination to a royal person, but of reading books, pamphlets, newspapers, maps, and other modern texts together. in and through these collective experiences of what benedict anderson calls “print capitalism” and what others increasingly see as “electronic capitalism” such as television and cinema, citizens imagine themselves to belong to a national society. the modern nation-state in this view grows less out of natural facts-such as language, blood, soil, and race-and more out of a quintessential cultural product, a product of the collective imagination. (161) appadurai’s comment illuminates the quandary of the wild horse. in many respects it is an icon of national freedom produced through media images, but fed to an urban public relatively isolated from the public lands where the mustang roams. this dissonance between the actual experience of the mustang and the barrage of historical images it evokes allows a variety of beliefs about the wild horse to emerge and gain a following. the exchange of information results in the wild horse becoming a product of a collective imagination that views it as an icon of freedom. the image of the wild horse becomes more precarious when political, social, and economic forces enter into the context. while the wild free-roaming horse and burro act establishes mustangs as a natural heritage species, providing protection from harassment and abuse, the law does not change the many conflicting beliefs that people have about them. the title “natural heritage species” was designated because of the claim that mustangs are not wild like karen dalke – mustang: the paradox of imagery 101 the wolf, nor domesticated like cattle. the title protects mustangs, but it also distinguishes them from wild animals, placing them somewhere between wild and domestic, placing them in a category of ferality. the title can be manipulated to show the importance of the wild horse as a symbol or discounted as a title employed simply to protect an animal that otherwise referred to as feral: “the issue of feralization and the use of the word ‘feral’ is a human construct that has little biological meaning except in transitory behavior, usually forced on the animal in some manner” (fazio 3).this different approach to history and time has extraordinary impact on mustang management agendas. although horses originally evolved in north america, they are not considered indigenous. they became extinct and were reintroduced by the spanish. according to budiansky, during columbus’ second voyage to the new world, he arrived at hispaniola with 24 stallions and 10 mares (40). other explorers, such as coronado and de soto, also brought horses to the new world. although these conquistadors had contact with the plains indians, their short expeditions did not allow enough time for the native americans to learn how to adapt the horses to their culture. since native americans did not confine their horses, however, it was the first time that horses could escape man’s domination and graze and breed upon the open plains (ryden 290-294). in many respects, this was the beginning of the american mustang and legends that would impact culture. the impact of the horse once it was adapted to the native american cultures was profound. the period from 1640-1880 has been called the period of indian horse culture, with the horse becoming a vital form of transportation. in addition, it aided in the exploration of the west, was used on the first farms, provided the fastest medium for communication prior to the telegraph, and permitted the mounted cavalry to become a fixture in newly opened regions of the west (caras 149-150). not only did the horse perform many functional roles, both flores and ryden describe how it influenced every aspect of life, including material culture, gender relations, and the creation of stories, art, and ceremonies, enduring as a symbol to the present day. the association among mustangs, the west, and cowboys was indicative of this time period. as cattle production became important to the american economy, ranchers came to view the mustangs as competitors and pests. at the turn of the century, mustangs were rounded up and killed. later, in the 1920s, they were used as horsemeat in pet food. during the great depression and throughout world war ii, horsemeat became a staple humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 102 in the diet of americans and europeans. throughout the first half of the twentieth century, ranchers eliminated the challenge of competitive grazing by poisoning water holes and shooting wild horses on sight (wheeler 27). between 1900 and 1950, more than a million mustangs were killed, the slaughter often condoned by and paid for by the blm: “some [mustangs] were riddled with shotgun pellets and dragged aboard trucks half dead, others had their nostrils tied with baling wire, their legs broken, their eyes gouged out” (“fight” 48). in many respects, mustangs were viewed as pests competing for valuable forage, but in the 1950s issues concerning humane treatment began to emerge, shedding new light on the mustang. local legends, tourism brochures, television, the internet, and other forms of media convey images of the mustang that associate it with different times in its history. in this community of sentiment, the mustang is most strongly associated with cowboy culture. in the early nineteenth century, cowboys were not respected figures; compared to sheepherders, cowboys were ethnically diverse, young, and had little money. tyler, in his book, the cowboy, repeatedly stresses how the cowboy, who broke wild horses, represented all that was uncivilized. the mustang came to represent freedom, independence and the uncivilized merely by its association with the cowboy. the mustang in association with the cowboy continued to be transformed through oral legends, dime novels, wild west shows, and movies. television began to reach more people than any other mode of communication by the mid-twentieth century, creating mythology about cowboys and mustangs, and viewers believed what they saw. even cowboys began to conform to the televised images of themselves: “romanticism about the mustang was born alongside this reinvention of cowboys and the west” (herzog and galvin 77-92). the mustang becomes an object of beauty and wonder as it moves across an idyllic, natural landscape. the mustang is no longer an animal, but an image of an animal contextualized in romanticism. today, according to lloyd, “there is no longer a frontier to conquer, yet americans still identify with the values cultivated by generations of ranchers, independence, endurance, freedom, family, and kindness” and through images created by television and other forms of media (1). whether these are truly values of the west or something created by television and the movies is uncertain, but it does not really matter. historians argue that the west as an open and individualistic frontier is an oldfashioned idea or myth, but it is nevertheless part of the american intellectual landscape (etulain 42-45): much of what people believe about the west is mythology karen dalke – mustang: the paradox of imagery 103 and its history is a combination of images, representations, and symbols. depending on the marketing strategy, the mustang becomes an icon of individualism, an ambassador of the old west, or the epitome of the true american (figure 1). figure 1: mustang: image of cultural icon although the purpose of the image may change, the wild horse exemplifies in every case the most resonant american value: freedom (bellah 1985). take as an example the ford mustang, a fixture in american popular culture since1964 that owes much of its appeal to its four-legged namesake. the marketing strategy attracts individuals who want a free-spirited and nonconformist approach to their driving experience. at the same time, it influences how people understand mustangs and “know” what they are like. in essence, the mustang is once again recreated in popular culture, linking us to our history. although there is no direct contact with the animal, people imagine what it must be like based on its association with a car. the mustang becomes a powerful and independent creature that savors its freedom. viewing a mustang as an historical icon has protected this animal since the creation of the wild free-roaming horses and burros act, but it also limits the mustang’s full incorporation into american culture. mustangs, because of their status, are not quite like the domestic horse, but also are not fully wild, resulting in contradictory management approaches some blm agents are focused on an adoption strategy, which assumes their domesticity, while others focus on adaptation, treating the animals as wild. neither approach has proven to be a successful solution to the management of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 104 mustangs for a variety of reasons. for one, managing nearly 200 hundred ranges in ten states through governmental authorities who are primarily located in washington, d.c. is an overwhelming task. also at issue is that both adoption and adaptation strategies are concerned with minimizing program costs and adhering to legal constraints, often at the expense of the animals when environmental disasters such as droughts and fires occur or when political agendas are more concerned with natural resources on public lands. finally, while adoption and adaptation strategies do work together as management tools, implementation often results in emphasizing one to the exclusion to the other. the wild free-roaming horse and burro act prevents euthanasia of mustangs, except in special health situations. each year, however, more mustangs are captured than are adopted, resulting in placement at holding facilities where they require shelter, food, and medical treatment. according to gorey, the cost of this program to taxpayers was $38.8 million in fiscal year 2007 (4). when there are too many animals in holding facilities, creating opportunities for more adoptions becomes the primary management approach, since euthanasia is not an option. the adoption orientation emphasizes how the mustang can become a pet or show horse, pushing the mustang into the domesticated category. this strategy is not overtly discussed at roundups because people immediately see the mustang through a domesticated lens: “wow, look at that one! what a pretty horse…such a kind eye!” (dalke 124). these comments made during the trapping process focus on capturing animals that the public will likely adopt because of their color, temperament, or their resemblance to images on tourism brochures or movie posters that emphasize a blm media campaign of “adopt a living legend…” while adopting a historical icon is enticing, horsemanship skills that have been disappearing since the introduction of the car are needed to assure success (mcshane and tarr 180-181). as a result, too often people without these skills are adopting an image that they find difficult to manage, and these negative adoption experiences perpetuate myths about mustangs: 1) they cannot be tamed, 2) they are dumb and inbred, 3) they are only worth the $125 adoption fee, and 4) they are ugly and have poor conformation (gentzler, n.p). the responsibility is not placed on the human trainer, but rather on the “wild” animal. skeptics of the adoption approach often view the mustang as a wild animal and want to manage it for adaptation and survival on public lands. the adaptation management strategy focuses on the horse in its wild and free-roaming state, and relies on science and technology. because most blm agents have a background in animal science, they view the horse as another animal that must be managed as part of a larger system, and adaptation orientation is often a more karen dalke – mustang: the paradox of imagery 105 comfortable fit with the multiple use strategy of public lands. the blm manages public lands for all types of animals and uses, with little concern for individual animals or a particular species. according to the wild free-roaming horses and burros act, nearly 200 different mustang populations must be viewed equally, all within a multiple-use emphasis that focuses on maintaining viable and sustainable public lands. imagining the mustang through a historical lens does not always match the physical appearance of mustangs on the range. at roundups where the mustangs are captured for potential removal in an effort to maintain public lands, comments from influential humane groups or local citizens question the blm’s ability to successfully implement an adaptive approach: “those horses lived out there for years surviving in places no respectable horse would live, and they did just fine. those ranchers destroyed the range, and now they complain about too many horses. that is all the blm is worried about” (dalke 124). comments such as this suggest that the blm is concerned with doing a job but is devoid of any commitment to preserving a historical icon. the expectation is that mustangs will be beautiful like the images in magazines, movies, or the internet. when mustangs look less colorful or smaller than imagined, questions emerge regarding the skills of the blm: “i don’t know what the bureau of land management is doing. i have lived here over 20 years and when i first came to this canyon the horses were larger and better looking” (ibid). when there is a discrepancy between images and the actual animal, the blm management style is called into question. it is true that selection of certain animals could alter the herd over a period of time, but environmental catastrophes on public lands can also contribute to physical changes in mustangs. in either case, the blm often chooses alternatives that do not satisfy any group. the blm is in a precarious position. if it manages horses by selecting for color and size as advocates for increasing adoptions recommend, it may not contribute to the animals’ viability on public lands. if the blm manages for adaptation, less colorful and smaller mustangs may not meet expectations of potential adopters. yet the blm focuses on practical management with little regard to historical importance, causing the issue to resurface especially during difficult socio-economic times (warrick and eilperin). the mustang as a historical icon changes to an animal that has outlived its utility when wildlife advocates, cattlemen, and recreational groups emphasize other animals (e.g. wild animals to hunt or publicly grazed cattle) as more important contributors to local economies, often using images of less colorful and adaptive mustangs to enhance their agenda. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 106 challenges to the historical importance of the mustang culminated in the 2004 “burns amendment sec. 142. sale of wild free-roaming horses and burros,” a rider furtively attached to the consolidated appropriations act of 2005, which allows for the sale of mustangs and for their potential slaughter, and was signed into law by president bush on december 8, 2004. this one small action by then-senator burns of montana eradicated more than thirty years of grassroots advocacy and legislative protection, suggesting euthanasia of excess mustangs in holding centers as the only viable alternative. the mustang’s image as a historical icon is reduced to a frivolous fancy that must be replaced by the “real” needs of a post-industrial nation attempting to meet its insatiable consumption of natural resources. on one hand, the wild horse is valued for its historical association with the west. on the other hand, it is believed, “if you can’t hunt it, and you can’t eat it, and you can’t wear it – and i can’t sell it – it should not be allowed on my public land” (ryden 291). the mustang as a historical icon has become both an image of beauty and a useless entity not worthy of protection. one man’s pest is another’s object of beauty. the encroachment of urban areas on wilderness areas is an obvious reality, but our public lands, although intensely managed, maintain the dream that there are parts of our country not yet civilized by human hands. both what is “real” and what we “create” influence how we see the world; the mustang and the beliefs about it tie us not only to our history but to our place in nature and whether they are accurately portrayed does not really matter according to carlson in the book the cowboy way. although sociobiology is a controversial field, the concept of biophilia helps explain the quest of humans to become part of the whole (sabloff 53-54). according to wilson, the biophilic tendency is nevertheless so clearly evidenced in daily life and widely distributed as to deserve serious attention. it unfolds in the predictable fantasies and responses of individuals from early childhood onward. it cascades into repetitive patterns of culture across most or all societies, a consistency often noted in the literature of anthropology. these processes appear to be part of the programs of the brain. they are marked by the quickness and decisiveness with which we learn particular things about certain kinds of plants and animals. (85) the need to believe in wide-open spaces and beautiful animals creates a relationship with a greater whole, as edward abbey states: “a man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, power karen dalke – mustang: the paradox of imagery 107 lines, and right-angled surfaces. we need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. we need a refuge even though we may never need to go there” (129). there is a positive emotional attachment to this image regardless of the location of the viewer, and it cannot be discarded with rational arguments. understanding images of mustangs requires an examination of opposing beliefs; as the old saying goes, “one man’s trash is another’s treasure.” what makes something valuable? the implementation of the wild free-roaming horse and burro act inadvertently created a commodity, which, according to marx, is “an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another” (n.p.). marx goes on to discuss the difference between the two powers of a commodity, use value and exchange value. use value is when a commodity fulfills a particular human desire and is qualitatively different from exchange value as it cannot be easily quantified. use value as theorized by marx extends beyond simple, pragmatic uses (such as the mustang for transportation or labor power) and can incorporation notions of aesthetic or spiritual use. for example, how do you quantify the feeling evoked by mustangs running across the open desert with manes and tails waving in the wind? the picture below attempts to capture this feeling that can enhance our lives aesthetically and spiritually, yet such values are often not incorporated into discussions of the economic value of mustangs as a commodity. (figure 2). figure 2: mustang: image of beauty humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 108 images like the one above meet emotional needs, but do not provide the total picture of the mustang. learning about mustangs through media images and living with the animals in a community are very different experiences. managing horses from a distance is possible, but it requires sensitivity to those living near mustang ranges. discussions at public hearings reveal the difference between beauty and the reality of animal management. for example, at a national blm meeting, an animal advocacy group member said, “if we are going to consider them wild, then they need to fend for themselves and there is going to be starvation!” (dalke 80). some gasped at the statement, but it was obvious that wildness and strength were defining elements of her imagery. upon further discussion, it became clear that the speaker believed that these mustangs could overcome anything, and if starvation did occur it would be a quick and only a few would be impacted. being from an urban center in the east, she had not experienced the animals or the public lands directly; she did not understand how a mustang could not find enough to eat on several thousand acres, nor had she seen them starve. in this scenario, the image was so strong it blocked the realities of the local conditions. believing that these strong, beautiful, independent creatures can survive in any condition, she advocated a laissez-faire management style. on the other hand, what makes a mustang beautiful locally is an animal that is healthy and attractive to tourists. while proximity to mustangs might suggest that management will focus on the animal, assuring that it is healthy and attractive, there is little acknowledgement that local communities may be acting in their own best interests rather than in that of the mustangs. letting an animal starve, as in the previous scenario, does not make sense to local communities trying to attract tourists; viewing emaciated mustangs meandering across a desert negates the imagery that tourists seek. locals, who make comments such as “they [u.s. department of interior] don’t know what we need out west” and “we have lived with these animals for all our life; we should be able to manage them” believe they—not the national management—know what is best for the mustangs, essentially claiming that beautiful horses are created out of less governmental intervention (dalke 69). managing mustangs at the local level seems to make sense, since people live in the same conditions as the horses. without a larger entity focusing on the mustangs, however, local communities seeking laissez-faire management from the federal government may act in the best interest of their human populations creating the image of the beautiful mustang requires an emic (insider’s) and etic (outsider’s) understanding of geography, history and politics. the beautiful mustang karen dalke – mustang: the paradox of imagery 109 becomes an image used not only by those who claim it as a national symbol, but also by those who see it as part of their unique local culture. for those who do not live in close proximity to a range, where they think a mustang lives and where it actually lives are not the same thing. what makes a mustang beautiful in the abstract is its association with the uncivilized or the “natural.” at a tourism summit in utah, it was stated, “people from the east coast have no frame of reference for how big our state is and the farther away they come from, the wilder they want it…wild rivers, wild horses, wild indians (benson). belief in a place where nature determines survival intertwines itself with a laissez-faire management style that could potentially contribute to the starvation of thousands of animals. at the local level, creating mustangs that are visually pleasing to tourists could lead to deformities and potentially harm the viability of the herds. assuring that mustangs will endure requires recognition that beliefs and imagery impact management decisions at every level. the image of the beautiful mustang is not is not used for a single ideological agenda, but is one that can be mobilized to argue a number of positions. it is less about the animal and more about human desires. the same can be said when viewing a mustang as a pest. figure 3: mustang as pest in capital, vol. 1, marx identifies the second power of a commodity as its ability to be exchanged for another commodity: exchange value. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 110 the image of a mustang as a commodity means different things, depending on the commodity definition used. in the highly complex cultures in which the mustang is embedded, however, the local understanding does not always match the national economic agenda. photographs like figure 3 can convince a national public that mustangs are straggly animals draining needed dollars from an already challenged economy. the pest image is often easily accepted, as it fits well with other cultural beliefs, according to moran in people and nature. first, the united states embraces the belief that humans have superiority over all other animals; second, we live in a culture of individualism; and finally, these conditions exist in a society focused on capital accumulation. when pressed to make a decision between human needs and mustangs, the answer seems simple, especially when photographic evidence (figure 3) is emphasized in newspapers and television coverage. the diversity of mustangs across ranges has complicated the management of these animals; what is interesting about every example is that when the horse is given a special title, it is valued more and people want to protect it. during the congressional hearings of 1971, the issue of selectively “breeding back” to the “real” spanish mustang arose. at that time, dna analysis did not exist, but particular color patterns and skeletal structures suggested an association with the spanish barb or andalusian horse. since no hard scientific data could establish the difference, a law protecting all wild horses emerged. it was not until years later that with the discovery of mtdna analysis these observations regarding unique traits would be validated (oelke 19-20). it should be noted that there are no “pure” mustangs living in the wild and there is no way to completely confirm breed lines of these animals. depending on where one goes in the west, mustangs managed by the blm vary in color, size, and conformation due to environmental conditions and original stock in these areas. as stated earlier, all mustangs are of spanish descent to some degree since no horse could be found in the united states until the spanish reintroduced them to the continent. after analysis, two guiding principles separate spanish mustangs from other blm mustangs: 1) spanish mustangs tend to be of a certain color or pattern of color, and 2) when a herd has been identified as spanish there appears to be more human intervention, emphasizing a conformation standard. although no one would say directly that the spanish mustangs were more valued than other blm mustangs, observations revealed that people would most often categorize and remark about features associated with the spanish mustang including color or striping on the legs. the more i spoke with people involved with mustangs, i came to learn of other “special” mustangs (e.g. the nokota horse of the dakotas, the spanish karen dalke – mustang: the paradox of imagery 111 colonial horse, the kiger horse, and the sulpher horse in utah). although domestically bred horses can be sold for millions, the following story by jeff barnard gave legitimacy to these claims: when the bidding started saturday on a 6-month-old kiger mustang filly fresh off the range 91-year-old retired wildlife biologist bob smith sat in the front row and kept his yellow bidding card held high. smith had agreed to pay a record $19,000 for the privilege of adopting the wild horse of his dreams. ‘most wild horses are just that, feral horses,’ said smith, looking like anything but a high roller in a crumpled felt hat, faded green quilted jacket, and frayed tan slacks. ‘but these are the spanish mustangs.’ the attempt to protect mustangs as an exchangeable commodity both helps and hinders their management. if a herd gains a special status, it is more easily marketed to the public, and adoptions increase. however, once the horses are adopted, private citizens begin breeding these mustangs. these bred mustangs now compete with animals managed by the blm. bred mustangs merge the hardy quality associated with blm mustangs with human selection for marketable traits: height, conformation, color. the creation of these special mustangs creates a different other, making blm mustangs of even lesser value. because scenarios like this continue to emerge, the blm has had to adapt its management style, while combating culturally constructed beliefs. the current approach to elevating blm mustangs focuses on ability rather than conformation in an event called the mustang makeover. “the mustang makeover” is an annual event that teams horse trainers from a variety of training specialties (e.g. dressage, reining) with blm mustangs. the trainers are given 100 days to work with the animal, culminating in a competition for prize money. after the competition, the horses are auctioned off to the public. this event increases the placement of mustangs and dispels the myth that they cannot be trained. the event has been received favorably by the public as a spectacle of interspecies communication, but this new approach may lose its effectiveness after several events show that the mustang can be trained like any other horse. if this occurs, the mustang must compete with many different breeds. the underlying motivation is to create a commodity that has exchange value. although the “mustang makeover” is the current approach to promoting the placement of mustangs, it is still subject to the laws of supply and demand. this trained group of mustangs will likely find placement, but it is only a small number of the 25,000 animals in holding facilities. once again, those other animals are imagined to be useless. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 112 treating a mustang as a commodity with exchange value enables the placement of some animals, but further marginalizes others. mustangs and domestic horses are the same species; both types of animals exist along a continuum of conformation and ability standards. the worth of these animals is a human construction. the image of a pest rests upon the belief that humans are outside of nature and able to assess the value of other living creatures. the mustang is embedded in a culture dictated by the laws of supply and demand. if humans need raw materials on public lands, they have the power to perpetuate the pest image. devaluing the mustang eliminates competition over finite resources and allows for its extermination while rationalizing its extermination as part of the quest for human survival. conclusion. initially this study was intended to be a traditional ethnography of the american west. ethnography gives texture and meaning to often abstract concepts that can only be understood through participant observation. to understand what a wild horse is and what people think it is once required, from the perspective of traditional ethnography, being around animals and the people who live near or care for them by visiting ranges and participating in gathers. but as the world changes, there is less opportunity to study cultures that are isolated from the larger global system. there was no classic site for studying the mustang. it required weaving together seemingly disparate actors and sites from different conceptual and physical spaces and following the images of mustangs was a way to follow the flows of knowledge. the internet, media images, museums, travel brochures, and tourists are all elements that construct mustang images and link local communities to national and transnational communities of sentiment. constructing mustang images is a cultural process. it is not linear or rational. to many biologists and environmentalists, the mustang is an invasive species. examining the images of the mustang through an anthropological lens recognizes it as a cultural symbol of great significance and diversity. reducing any entity to just its biological and ecological usefulness disregards its cultural importance. technology provides us with the illusion that images are factual, but we must remember that they are taken by an individual who has a personal understanding embedded in a cultural context. the mustang has not changed, but its cultural image is in constant flux. since the passage of the wild free-roaming horse and burro act of 1971, the blm has had the responsibility of managing wild horse herds throughout the american west. although the blm has done a great deal to manage these horses from a biological and wildlife management perspective, it has paid little regard to cultural understanding of karen dalke – mustang: the paradox of imagery 113 the public images of the mustang. images do matter when it comes to managing mustangs and must be part of the equation if mustangs are to endure on our public lands. notes with special thanks to jessica demovsky and katie stilp. 1. quotations from anonymous interview subjects are taken from my 2005 dissertation, the real and the imagined: an ethnographic analysis of the wild horse in the american landscape. works cited abbey, edward. desert solitaire: a season in the wilderness. new york: mcgraw-hill, 1968. appadurai, arjun. modernity at large: cultural dimensions of globalization. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1996. ―――. “topographies of the self: praise and emotion in hindu india.” language and the politics of emotion. ed.catherine a. lutz and lila abu-lughod. cambridge: cambridge up, 1990. 92-112. arluke, arnold, and clinton sanders. regarding animals. philadelphia: temple up, 1996. barnard, jeff. “filly fetches top dollar at auction.” los angeles times october 24, 1999.. web. february 2010. http://articles.latimes.com/1999/oct/24/news/mn-2575325 bellah, robert n. habits of the heart: individualism and commitment in american life. berkeley: u of california p, 1985. benson, lee. “wild queries about travel in wild utah.” deseret news (salt lake city) 24 may 2000: deseretnews.com. 27 july 2000. web. http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=336&dat=20000524&id=g9iraaaaibaj&sjid =_u0daaaaibaj&pg=5695,4126512 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 114 budiansky, stephen. the nature of horses: exploring equine evolution, intelligence, and behavior. new york: free press, 1997. carlson, paul, ed. the cowboy way: an exploration of history and culture. lubbock: tx: texas tech up, 2000. caras, roger. a perfect harmony: the intertwining lives of animals and humans throughout history. new york: simon and schuster, 1996. consolidated appropriations act of 2005. pub. l. 108-447. 118 stat. 2809. 8 dec. 2004. couldry, nick. inside culture: reimagining the method of cultural studies. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, 2000. dalke, karen. the real and the imagined: an ethnographic alaysis of the wild horse in the american landscape. diss. uw-milwaukee, 2005. di leonardo, micaela. exotics at home: anthropologies, others, american modernity. chicago: u of chicago p, 1998. dobie, j. frank. the mustangs. boston: little brown and co., 1952. dougherty, elizabeth. “the balance of practice.” (2004). elizabeth dougherty, left brain: right brain. 25 feb. 2010. web. http://www.elizd.com/websiteleftbrain/essays/practice.html douglas, mary. purity and danger. london: routledge and kegan paul, 1966. etulain, richard. “land of crumbling myths.” christian history 19.2 (2000): 42-5. “factsheet on challenges facing the blm in its management of wild horses and burros. bureau of land management. u.s. department of the interior, n.d. 7 july 2008. web. http://www.blm.gov/wo/st/en/prog/wild_horse_and_burro/wh_b_information_center/b lm_statements/new_factsheet.html fazio, patricia mabee. “wild horses as native north american wildlife.” wild horse and burro diary 43.1 (2003): 1-3. “the fight to save wild horses.” time 12 july 1971: 48-51. karen dalke – mustang: the paradox of imagery 115 flores, dan. “the horse nations endure.” unbroken spirit: the wild horse in the american landscape. ed. frances b. clymer and charles r. preston. cody, wy: robert rinehart, 1999. franklin, adrian. animals and modern cultures: a sociology of human-animal relations in modernity. london: sage publications, 1999. gentzler, toni. “national wild horse and burro news.” u.s. department of the interior, bureau of land management. spring 2001. gorey, t. “fact sheet on challenges facing the blm in its management of wild horses and burros.” u.s. department of interior, bureau of land management. u.s. department of interior, bureau of land management, 2008. sept. 2008. helmer, james. “the horse in backstretch culture.” qualitative sociology 14.2 (1991): 175-95. herzog, harold a., and shelley l. galvin. “animals, archetypes, and popular culture: tales from the tabloid press.” anthrozoos 5.2 (1992): 77-92. kirkpatrick, jay f. into the wind: wild horses of north america. minoqua, wi: northword p, 1994. lawrence, elizabeth atwood. hoofbeats and society: studies of human-horse interactions. bloomington: indiana up, 1985. leach, edmund. “anthropological aspects of language: animal categories and verbal abuse.” new directions in the study of language. ed. eric lennenberg. cambridge, ma: mit press, 1964. 23-64. lloyd, jillian. “urban cowboys long for life on the range.” the christian science monitor 29.35 (2000): 3. marx, karl. “capital, vol. 1: the process of the production of capital.” marxists internet archive. marxists internet archive admin committee, 1999. 6 jan. 2009. web. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/cw/volume35/index.htm humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 116 mcshane, clay and joel tarr. the horse in the city: living machines in the nineteenth century. baltimore: the johns hopkins up, 2007. moran, emilio. people and nature: an introduction to human ecological relations. oxford, uk: blackwell, 2006. oelke, hardy. born survivors on the eve of extinction: can iberia’s wild horse survive among america’s mustangs? wipperfurth, germany: ute kierdorf verlag, gut dohrganl, 1996. peirano, mariza. “a guide to anthropology in brazil.” vibrant 2.1-2 (2005): 54-87. redner, harry. conserving cultures: technology, globalization, and the future of local cultures. lanham: rowan and littlefield, 2004. ryden, hope. america’s last wild horses. new york: lyons press, 1990. ―――. “managing mustangs in deep ignorance.” the magazine of defenders of wildlife oct. 1977: 290-94. sabloff, annabelle. reordering the natural world: humans and animals in the city. toronto: u of toronto p, 2001. tambiah, stanley j. “animals are good to think and good to prohibit.” ethnology 5 (1969): 423-59. thomas, heather smith. the wild horse controversy. new york: a. s. barnes, 1979. thomas, william isaac, and dorothy swaine thomas. the child in america: behavior problems and programs. new york: knopf, 1928. traube, elizabeth. “popular in american culture.” annual review of anthropology 25 (1996): 127-51. tyler, ron. the cowboy. new york: ridge press, 1975. warrick, joby, and juliet eilperin. “big energy in the wild west.” the washington post 410 oct. 2004, national weekly ed. web. october 16, 2004. karen dalke – mustang: the paradox of imagery 117 wheeler, david. “the far country: wild horses, public lands, and the little book cliffs of colorado.” journal of the western slope 13.1-2 (1998). wild free-roaming horses and burros act of 1971. pub. l. 92-195. stat. 1971. wilson, edmund o. biophilia: the human bond with other species. cambridge: harvard up, 1984. microsoft word braverman-pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 5:1 irus braverman animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city introduction. humans purposefully bring certain animals into the city where they care for them: dogs and cats in the home, chickens and goats in the yard, and elephants and tigers in the zoo. some animals escape their designated spaces and survive in the city to breed, such as monk parakeets in new york. humans living in cities also intentionally create habitats for certain animals: hummingbirds, ospreys, trout, and bass. still other animals — bedbugs, pigeons, norway rats, gulls, squirrels, and canadian geese, to name a few — come to the city uninvited and thrive in the urban habitat. the large mass of nonhuman animals in cities constitutes what is referred to in animal studies literature as a “shadow population” or a “subaltern animal town” (wolch, west, and gaines 736). whereas a large and growing literature is dedicated to studying the regulation and the policing of human populations in the city, not much has been written about the regulation and policing of animals in this space. animal studies in contemporary urban theory are also quite rare (lorimer; wolch, west, and gaines 735). this article contributes to the growing fascination with animals in the city by discussing the following questions: how are urban animals classified by animal laws? which urban animals are protected, and which are unprotected, by law? and, finally, how do humans and animals work with and around the various legal classifications? while many of the animal classifications discussed in this article are not limited to cities — and, in fact, some are even defined by their occurrence outside cities — i have chosen to focus on legal classification in urban spaces because the condensed human-animal relationship in the contemporary city results in more frequent clashes between various human-animal trajectories than it does in less human-populated areas. legal norms are often premised on assumptions about human agency. accordingly, the modern project of policing animals in the city does not target animals directly. rather, it is performed through the regulation of humans. in this sense, the story of policing animals in modern time is inevitably a story about policing humans. i use the term “zooveillance,” in my article “foucault goes to the zoo,” which may be useful in this context. there, i argue that traditional definitions of surveillance should expand beyond irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 105 human animals to encompass nonhuman animals and inanimate things. zooveillance — or the regulation of “bio” and “zoe” — conveys certain aspects of governing humans that are less visible otherwise. this article considers the conflicting interests that arise through the policing of humans who attempt to bring chickens back into cities, practice religious beliefs through animal sacrifice, or keep non-traditional pets such as the potbellied pig. furthermore, this article demonstrates that animals, too, practice some form of agency — referred to by bruno latour as “actancy,” the diversity of which is fully deployed without having to sort in advance the ‘true’ agencies from the ‘false’ ones” (55) — and that, at the very least, animals affect laws by their physical mobilities, or what mike michael refers to, in his piece “roadkill,” as “animobilities” (279; see also philo and wilbert; wolch and emel 1998). accordingly, wild or feral animals move about in trajectories that often bring them into zones of human settlement, where they encounter humans who move along their own trajectories. the initial focus of “animobility” scholarship has been on the physical geographies of animals. this article extends the meaning of animobility to explore the ways in which animals are affected — and, in fact, constituted — by law, as well as the ways in which they affect and constitute law. specifically, i ask how animobility in contemporary american cities translates into the animals’ legal mobility, and how laws can adapt to animobility and the ensuing mobilegality by setting “traps” that then immobilize the animals. this article demonstrates, finally, that law is not a static narrative that produces monophonic meaning, but a living process that feeds on, and depends upon, dynamic humannonhuman assemblages. the different modes of classification discussed here — body, taxonomy, and law — provide a yardstick by which to think of the rigidity and flexibility of mobilegality itself, constituting a matrix for the mobilization of legality. structurally, i begin by introducing michael’s term “animobilities,” its uses in animal studies scholarship, and my extension of this term to include animal law. second, i present and discuss the central technology by which law governs animobility: classification. i contemplate the project of legal classification in general and the dominant legal paradigm of animal classification — the protection of animals — in particular. third, i explore specific animal classifications: wildlife, pests, companion animals, and livestock. in each category, i discuss instances of reordering and reclassification so as to demonstrate the inherent messiness and fluidity of animal regulations. fourth and finally, i explore the interrelations between law and animobility humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 106 by studying particular classifications as these are enacted and enforced in buffalo, new york. throughout, i study the interrelations between “animobility” — the animal’s physical agency through movement — and the animal’s legal mobility: its mobilegality. the article draws on a survey of animal ordinances, codes, regulations, and case law, mostly from the city of buffalo and from new york state. these explorations of legal texts are supplemented with semi-structured, in-depth interviews conducted with six officials who enforce animal regulations in buffalo, including officers from erie county’s society for the prevention of cruelty against animals (spca)1 — the largest local organization in new york and the second oldest in the country — and a new york state authorized wildlife nuisance removal expert. the interviews were conducted in october 2011 based on an initial reference from buffalo zoo’s director to the executive director of the local spca, barbara carr. from that point on, interviewees were selected based on a snowball, or chain referral, sampling (biernacki and waldorf), a widely used method in qualitative sociology that relies on referrals by initial people who know others that are of research interest. finally, the article also relies on newspaper articles and internet sources. animobilities and mobilegalities. in his article “roadkill,” science and technology studies scholar mike michael traces some of the ways in which roadkill is culturally constructed as a means of reflecting upon the relationalities among humans, nonhuman animals, and technology. here is how he explains his choice to focus on roadkill rather than on what he considers to be the major western animal classifications: there are innumerable other configurations of humans, animals, and technologies that one could draw upon — companion animals, animals in the laboratory, domesticated animals on the farm, protected animals in the wild — all, in one way or another, are “technologized” and “culturalized.” these are increasingly subject to social scientific analysis. roadkill, by comparison, is a rather neglected and, on the face of it, minor category of animal. yet, in some ways this is what makes roadkill interesting. (michael 281) the issue of roadkill, michael continues, raises the essential question about what an animal is and what it signifies in contemporary western culture. “clearly,” he says, “the social, economic, and cultural role of animals in the west is enormous. as object, as subject, as beast, as friend, as exemplar of species, and as idiosyncratic individual, the animal pervades western culture” (michael 281). furthermore, michael highlights the irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 107 importance of addressing the geography and mobility of animals. there are, he observes, standardized human views about what sort of animal belongs in what sort of space. chris philo and chris wilbert state similarly that: [z]ones of human settlement (“the city”) are envisaged as the province of pets or “companion animals” (such as cats and dogs), zones of agricultural activity (“the countryside”) are envisaged as the province of livestock animals (such as sheep and cows), and zones of unoccupied lands beyond the margins of settlement and agriculture (“the wilderness”) are envisaged as the province of wild animals (such as wolves and lions). (11) humans classify animals in ways that inscribe them into bounded spaces and places — what jennifer wolch and jody emel call, in the preface to their edited collection animal geographies, “borderlands” (xvi). such classifications are also translated into legal norms that both naturalize and justify animals, granting them an authoritative voice that reinforces their effectiveness in the world. the animals, for their part, make their way across these borderlands in a number of ways. michael is interested in those animal movements — or animobilities — in which the animals move along trajectories that in turn encounter the human trajectories and out of which emerges, among other things, their cultural classification as roadkill. animobility, in other words, is the animal’s particular physical actancy within complex socio-geographies. some animals, like pigeons, live almost exclusively within “human habitats.” these animals “pollute” our streets. when animal and human trajectories collide in the built environment, to the extent that animals cannot be tamed or controlled, there is an underlying existential human experience of social disorder. the capacity of flight makes the pigeon a particularly effective transgressor. while we have legislated spaces for these birds out of existence, we cannot put up fences or easily set traps to limit their “animobilities.” they can freely move across state and national borders, having no regard for territory and the definitions that humans give it (18-19). jerolmack implies that by its defiance of human borders, the pigeon’s physical mobility presents a serious challenge to law’s territorial nature, thus demonstrating how legal matters have limited bearing on questions of animality. however, jerolmack’s idea of laws as operating within static territorialities — and that of animals as subverting this kind of law — is too simple on both accounts. i propose, somewhat differently, that humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 108 although many official laws indeed attempt to confine the animals’ physical movements through their rigid classification, animals, humans, and legal administrators may subvert such modalities, complying, defying, and creating new “laws in action” that push toward more nuanced human-animal relationality. rather than thinking of law as separate from matter, then, we might benefit from understanding that law, too, is bounded — defined, even — by the very materialities that it seeks to rule. such interplays between animal-human bodies, taxonomic configurations, and legal norms translate into dynamic interplay between states of stasis and states of flux. at the same time, i would not want to give an impression that the modern landscape is more forgiving to animals than it actually is. whereas flux is pervasive, there is also a fair amount of rigidity and consistency, especially when classification is concerned. in what follows, i trace some of the legal classifications of animals and explore the imbricated animal-human mobilities and immobilities that both trigger these classifications and ensue from them. classification in animal laws. laws order messy materialities, inscribing them onto neatly organized classification schemes. for law to regulate animals, animals must first be defined and sorted. the fundamental project in the regulation of animals in the city is thus their sorting into various legal classifications. according to the website for the international commission on zoological nomenclature, animal-related legal norms largely rely on the linnaean classification of kingdom animalia by phylum, class, order, genus, and species. in addition, laws classify animals according to their relationship with humans. consequently, the vast majority of the animal kingdom falls into some or all of the following legal orders: wild, domestic, agricultural, pests, and laboratory animals. each legal category represents a particular configuration of human-animal relationship that manifests in specific temporalities and materialities. the animal’s legal categories — effectively, law’s “animal kingdom” — are not always consistent, nor are they mutually exclusive. for example, a bee may be desirable and thus legally protected as a pollinator and honey-maker but undesirable and thus unprotected when aggressive and stinging, and geese may be protected when defined as wild animals, but can simultaneously be defined as agricultural property to be raised and slaughtered, as game to be hunted, or as a nuisance to be culled. animal classifications also change with time and place. the american peregrine falcon was protected in 1970 through its listing as an endangered species but was delisted from protection in 1999 after the population’s successful recovery. city by city and state by state, laws differ in terms of keeping animals such as honeybees, potbellied pigs, and exotic animals in the city. these examples highlight the importance of classification for irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 109 law’s effectiveness in the world. at the same time, they also illuminate the various challenges to law’s categorical imperative, especially when it involves the regulation of nature in the city. in this context, law’s biggest challenge is that nature, by its very definition, cannot be ordered. protecting humans and animals. alongside their extensive use of linnaean classification, laws classify animals according to the level of legal protection they offer from human-inflicted harm. every animal is classified as either “protected” or “unprotected,” which then defines the legal actions humans may, or may not, take with regard to the animal and its habitat. for protected animals, “no person shall, at any time of the year, pursue, take, wound or kill [them] in any manner, number or quantity, except as permitted by… law” (n.y. envtl. conserv. law §11-0107). nor can any person “buy, sell, offer or expose for sale, transport, or have in his possession any [animal] protected by law” (n.y. envtl. conserv. law §11-0107). by contrast, upon their classification as “unprotected,” animals are subjected to an array of legal norms that prescribe human behavior in using, taking, or harming them, such as the regulations on pest removal. according to animal geography scholars jennifer r. wolch and jody emel, invisible lines “historically divided the animal world into those worth protecting because they were seen as either part of nature (wildlife) or the human community (pets), and those not worth protecting because they were neither (farm animals) and constituted sources of profit and value” (14). in an interview, barbara carr, executive director for the society for the prevention of cruelty against animals (spca) serving erie county, uses the term “protection” in two ways. first, she says, laws protect humans from animals.2 second, laws protect animals from humans.3 the animal’s legal classification as “dangerous” under the first form of protection grants humans the authority to sentence this animal to death. frequently, the definition of “dangerous” extends to the perceived public health risk that animals pose to humans. rabies and lyme disease provide an example for ways in which public health concerns trump every other classification of the animal (steere), thereby “trapping” its animobility. my focus here, however, is on the protection of nonhuman from human animals. as evident from the definition clause of new york’s environmental conservation law, the protection narrative is quite central to animal laws: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 110 5. a. “unprotected wild birds” means the english sparrow and starling, and also includes pigeons and psittacine birds existing in a wild state, not domesticated.4 b. “protected birds” means all wild birds except those named in paragraph a of this subdivision..... 7. “protected insect” means any insect with respect to the taking of which restrictions are imposed by the fish and wildlife law or regulations of the department pursuant thereto.5 this language demonstrates the centrality of classifying animals as “protected” and “unprotected” by law. the implications of such human protections are stated through the rest of this law, which clearly prescribes a regime whereby animals are better off having protections than not having them. as i show here, the removal of human protection often places the animal “outside” of law, making it subject to human extermination. new york’s environmental conservation law also presents other central animal classifications: “wild” and “companion” species and “hybrids” and “feral” animals. here, again, from the statute itself: 6. a. “wildlife” means wild game and all other animal life existing in a wild state, except fish, shellfish and crustacean.... e. “wild animal” shall not include “companion animal” as defined in section three hundred fifty of the agriculture and markets law. wild animal includes, and is limited to, any or all of the following orders and families: (1) nonhuman primates and prosimians, (2) felidae and all hybrids thereof, with the exception of the species felis catus (domesticated and feral cats, which shall mean domesticated cats that were formerly owned and that have been abandoned and that are no longer socialized, as well as offspring of such cats) and hybrids of felis catus that are registered by the american cat fanciers association or the international cat association provided that such cats be without any wild felid parentage for a minimum of five generations, (3) canidae (with the exception of domesticated dogs and captive bred fennec foxes (vulpes zerda)), (4) ursidae, (5) all reptiles that are venomous by nature, pursuant to department regulation. irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 111 these statutory classifications draw heavily on scientific distinctions, such as those between felines and canines (or “felis catus” and “canidae”). whereas in the past, such distinctions relied largely on the animal’s phenotype, they are increasingly based on the animal’s genomic identity. for example, the current definition of “cat” depends upon the animal’s pedigree for a minimum of five generations. this current reliance of law on genetic definitions indicates a move away from michel foucault’s observation that, “the plant and the animal are seen not so much in their organic unity as by the visible patterning of their organs. they are paws and hoofs, flowers and fruit, before being respiratory systems or internal liquids” (149). genomic identification relies precisely on the animal’s genetic code, which cannot be identified by the untrained eye but may only be established by expert authorities. in any case, this statute demonstrates law’s obsession for ordering things, alongside its anxiety about its limited capacity to define what is innately shifting and unstable: nature. the following section explores the project of animal classification, arguing that it is the central technology for governing animals in the city. i focus, specifically, on wild animals, pests, pets, and livestock. in each case i ask: what are the relevant legal classifications and how do they affect animobility? animal classifications: wild animals, pests, pets, and livestock. in ”legal tails” and ”a study of animals and law in the american city,” i discussed in detail the project of animal classification in the city. this section provides a condensed version of that project and adds to it by highlighting the mobility of animal classifications. as i mention earlier, new york state defines wildlife as “all animal life existing in a wild state” (n.y. envtl. conserv., §11-0103). the federal definition is no less circular in its definition of wildlife as any “wild member of the animal kingdom whether alive or dead, and regardless of whether the member was bred, hatched, or born in captivity, including a part, product, egg, or offspring of the member” (16 u.s.c.a. §668ee).6 a federal code on endangered species prescribes that endangered “fish or wildlife” may be “any member of the animal kingdom, including without limitation any mammal, fish, bird (including any migratory, nonmigratory, or endangered bird for which protection is also afforded by treaty or other international agreement), amphibian, reptile, mollusk, crustacean, arthropod or other invertebrate, and includes any part, product, egg, or offspring thereof, or the dead body or parts thereof” (16 u.s.c.a. §1532). the animal’s legal classification as “wild” carries with it a set of physical implications. a wild animal may receive additional protection, especially if it is also classified as endangered or threatened. wild animals commonly receive less protection than pets under criminal anti-cruelty acts (frasch et al. 10-11). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 112 additionally, many states and cities set limitations on the private ownership of wild or exotic animals (frasch et al. 10-11).7 for example, new york state’s environmental law prescribes that “the state of new york owns all fish, game, wildlife, shellfish, crustacea and protected insects in the state, except those legally acquired and held in private ownership. any person who kills, takes or possesses such fish, game, wildlife, shellfish, crustacea or protected insects thereby consents that title thereto shall remain in the state for the purpose of regulating and disposition” (n.y. envtl. conserv. law §11-0105). furthermore, in new york wild animals are state property even when they reside on one’s private property. as such, they are subject to various requirements. for example, new york general municipal laws state that: “with the exception of pet dealers, every person owning, possessing, or harboring a wild animal or a dangerous dog within this state shall report the presence thereof to the clerk of the city, town, or village in which such wild animal or dangerous dog is owned, possessed, or harbored” (n.y. gen. mun. law §209-cc). although legal norms define certain animals as wild, there is no bright-line rule for determining their wildness. in fact, american courts have inconsistently applied different criteria when considering the classification of animals as wild. for example, in state v. mierz (1995), the washington state supreme court ruled that the statutory term “feral domestic mammals” refers to cats and dogs that have escaped their owners, as opposed to wild animals such as coyotes. although to a casual observer a tame coyote and a feral dog may seem undistinguishable, the coyote’s wild origins and the dog’s domestic origins provide legal grounds for their legal distinction. ruling on this case, the court held that the feral dog may be kept as a pet, but that the possession of the tame coyote is prohibited (city of rolling meadows v. kyle, 1986). courts in new york approached the same definition differently. in a case from the 1800s, a new york court determined that the geese in question were tame and not wild because they were gentle, would eat from one’s hand, and had lost the disposition to fly away (trover amory v. flyn, 1813). in a more recent case that concerned a squirrel kept in captivity without a license, an ohio court found that the squirrel had already exceeded the natural life expectancy of squirrels in the wild and was therefore no longer wild (division of wildlife v. clifton, 1997). although the legal classification of animals as “wild” is ostensibly rigid, static, and predefined, it nonetheless allows the negotiation of different mobilegalities that then translate into softer human-animal materialities. yet whereas some of the mobilegalities mentioned above occur because of the different classification of animals across irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 113 jurisdictions, legal systems, and time, in other cases the disparity is a result of the different human uses to which a particular animal is put (e.g. domestic versus agricultural) that affect which laws are applied in the first place. animal and human physicalities, temporalities, and social relations thus create the foundation for their subsequent classification into particular legal categories. in addition to the animals’ mobilegalities between a variety of classifications, animals can also be categorized simultaneously under multiple classifications. despite their appearance, then, such animal classifications are not necessarily exhaustive or exclusive. thus, for example, in certain circumstances wild animals can simultaneously be defined as pests. federal law defines the term “pest” as: (1) any insect, rodent, nematode, fungus, weed, or (2) any other form of terrestrial or aquatic plant or animal life or virus, bacteria, or other microorganism (except viruses, bacteria, or other micro-organisms on or in living man or other living animals) which the administrator [of the environmental protection agency] declares to be a pest. (7 u.s.c.a. §136; emphasis added) in other words, a pest is an organism declared by a legally authorized officer as such. although state laws generally follow the wording of the federal model (n.y. envtl. conserv. law §33-0101), certain governmental agencies have utilized a narrower definition of the term. according to new york’s agriculture and markets law, for example, a pest is “any invertebrate animal, pathogen, parasitic plant or similar or allied organism which can cause disease or damage in any crops, trees, shrubs, grasses or other plants of substantial value” (n.y. agric. & mkts. law § 149; emphasis added). other statutes provide different definitions of pests. for example, a florida statute designates pests as “an arthropod, wood-destroying organism, rodent, or other obnoxious or undesirable living plant or animal organism” (fla. stat. an. §482.021; emphasis added), whereas an ordinance from arkansas grants cities and towns the authority to “prevent injury or annoyance within the limits of the municipal corporation from anything dangerous, offensive, or unhealthy and cause any nuisance to be abated” (ark. code ann. §14-54-103; emphasis added). as is evident from the language of these laws, the definition of pest animal is highly relational and dynamic. one animal body can be classified differently by different laws humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 114 and in different spaces and times. specifically, a pest is currently defined by many laws based on the human relationship to a certain animal as a nuisance and as annoying or obnoxious. it is thus “a term that is nicely ambiguous in being simultaneously technical and moral” (fine and christoforides 375). for example, whereas pigeons were once treasured for their cultural value, they are increasingly regulated as “rats with wings.”8 once a protected wild species in new york state, currently “the local legislative body of any city, town or village may issue a permit to any person to take pigeons at any time and in any humane manner in such municipality, so long as the legislative has found that pigeons within such municipality are a menace to public health or a public nuisance” (n.y. envtl. conserv. law §11-0513). again, the mobilegality of pigeons is defined through the interrelations among body, classification, space, and time. of all pest subcategories, the most “outlawed” are those that humans have purposefully or inadvertently introduced to a new environment outside of their natural range, also defined as “non-native,” “alien,” or “invasive” species. according to executive order 13112 that established the national invasive species council, a pest is deemed “invasive” when it “does or is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to human health.” additionally, under the lacey act, if the species is particularly harmful or injurious to “human beings; the interests of agriculture, horticulture, forestry, or wildlife; or wildlife resources,” it is banned from importation and violations are punishable by up to six months in prison and a $5,000 fine.9 if we were to imagine a spectrum of human-animal relations, pests and invasive species would fall on one end and pets or companion species on the other. although pets are not confined to the city, their swelling numbers in american urban settings make them quintessentially urban animals. their ownership and control by humans in the policed space of the city, as well as their significant emotional role in the american family, may serve to explain why the pet is a highly regulated animal classification.10 for the most part, in the modern era pets are controlled and policed through their human caregivers or “spokespersons.”11 yet similar to the other animal classifications discussed here, an animal’s classification as a pet or a companion animal is also far from static. historically, common law distinguished pets from farm or working animals based on their added “intrinsic value.” as a result, courts often refused to expand the term pet to include cats, assuming that they had no intrinsic value (frasch et al. 8).12 more recently, however, the code of federal regulations (cfr) defines a pet as an animal that has traditionally been a pet, with the exception of wild animals. in the wording of the regulations: “any irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 115 animal that has commonly been kept as a pet in family households in the united states, such as dogs, cats, guinea pigs, rabbits, and hamsters. the term ‘pet’ excludes exotic animals and wild animals” (9 c.f.r. §1.1.). a pet animal is thus defined according to the particular human-animal relations in the relevant case, rather than based on the type of animal or the place and time of such relations. new york state regulations are clearer but still quite broad in their definition of a pet as “any domestic animal that has been adapted or tamed to live in intimate association with people but is not limited to dogs, cats, rodents, fish, birds, snakes, turtles, lizards, frogs and rabbits” (n.y. gen. bus. law §750-a). birds, reptiles, amphibians, and other animals may also be defined as companion animals. for example, a new york court recently held that a goldfish was a companion animal under an anti-cruelty statute. in that case, the boy who owned the goldfish regularly attended to it and even named it after himself (people v. garcia, 2006).13 the legal classification of the animal was constituted based on the human-animal relationship established in the particular case rather than by the specific physical or classificatory identity of the animal. courts have also considered other circumstances such as the duration of the animal’s captivity, its training, and its behavior to find that a monkey was a domesticated pet, as in the case of city of rolling meadows v. kyle, but that a pet monkey was a wild animal under a rabies control statute, because monkeys are not a “common domestic species,” in the case of keeble v. cisneros. alongside wild, pest, and pet animals, humans also grant animals certain levels of protection based on their classification as farm animals or livestock. title 7 of the united states code annotated defines “livestock” as: cattle, elk, reindeer, bison, horses, deer, sheep, goats, swine, poultry (including egg-producing poultry), fish used for food, and other animals designated by the secretary (at the secretary’s sole discretion) that — (a) are part of a foundation herd (including producing dairy cattle) or offspring; or (b) are purchased as part of a normal operation and not to obtain additional benefits under this subchapter. (7 u.s.c.a. §1471) in giles v. state (1980), a new york state court held that livestock are domesticated animals in that they are considered naturally harmless and docile through many years humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 116 of close contact with people. other courts distinguish agricultural domestication from domestic pets whose principle role is companionship. this distinction was particularly helpful in light of the key role of livestock in providing human food and thus in ensuring public safety and food security.14 the legal distinction between farm and pet animals and the physical consequences that ensue — namely, the inclusion of pets in the city, and in human homes in particular, and the exclusion of farm animals from the city — did not always exist as such. preindustrial city dwellers used to put up with noise, odors, pestilence, and disease associated with livestock animals, which were frequently also members of the household (butler 199). with the technological advances and changes in urban design over the last 150 years, horses have largely been replaced by trains and automobiles, and slaughtering and preserving meat occurs, for the large part, outside the city, before the dead meat is brought into urban markets (butler 199). urban planners have actively propelled this exodus of animals from the city: land use regulations and zoning policies segregate agriculture from residential, commercial, and industrial activities (butler 200). at the same time, animal control ordinances have established rules regarding the care and keeping of livestock. generally prohibitive of many livestock activities, such ordinances have effectively banned all animal farming in towns (butler 200). in the last decade or so, however, the local foods movement has gained traction in many american cities and urban agriculture is again on the rise. cities are also increasingly heterogeneous and culturally diverse, giving rise to a plurality of socio-legal cultures. as a result, livestock is finding its way back into the city. legal classifications are mobilized to reflect, enable, and regulate these changes. the mobilegality of farm animals — namely their physical movement into urban space through legal action — comes hand in hand with additional legal limitations to the materialities of these animals, and especially to their identities and numbers. even the animal’s sex is highly regulated in many laws. for example, although in many jurisdictions chickens are allowed back into cities, few cities have allowed roosters back in without significant restrictions. specifically, cleveland allows roosters although its law specifies that it is unlawful “to keep or allow to be kept any animal or bird that makes noise so as to habitually disturb the peace and quiet of any person in the vicinity of the premises” (cleveland, ohio, code §347.02[g]). similarly, stamford, connecticut, allows roosters but specifies that, “no person shall keep any rooster in such location that the crowing thereof shall be annoying to any person occupying premises in the vicinity. upon complaint of any such person so annoyed, the director of health shall have authority to order the owner of such rooster to remove the same so that such irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 117 annoyance shall cease” (butler 25). as a result, some anticipate that “mute roosters may soon become popular in cities.” again, human-animal relationalities (here, rooster noise that offends human senses) are translated and inscribed into legal norms (i.e., roosters are prohibited from crowing in the city) that in turn translate into animal materialities (roosters possibly becoming mute). from a slightly different angle, animals exercise their own mobility when their eggs produce roosters, causing regulatory reactions by humans. i have explored how traditional classifications play out within particular legal norms and in between various legal systems. the intersections of animobilities and mobilegalities become even more complex as they travel in between different jurisdictions at different temporalities, spatialities, and cultural contexts. indeed, different states and municipalities use different classifications to refer to the same animal species, and this species can be defined differently under different laws (frasch et al. 7). for example, a pig or a horse may be a companion animal under anti-cruelty provisions or livestock under provisions regulating agribusiness. the animal’s legal classification already folds within it a range of spatial and temporal assumptions. furthermore, legislatures often reclassify animals. in missouri, for example, ostriches were reclassified from exotic animals to livestock (frasch et al. 7). similarly, certain humans have taken to keeping vietnamese potbellied pigs as pets in their home, a contested behavior in municipalities with zoning or public health codes against keeping livestock in the confines of the city.15 the issue was resolved with different outcomes in different municipal jurisdictions. in certain cities, livestock is defined by its purpose for farming, therefore allowing the keeping of pigs as pets because pets have no farming purpose when living in a house. where certain municipalities outlaw pigpens rather than pigs, pigs are allowed within the house because it is clearly not a pen. finally, where pigs and pigsties were explicitly forbidden as nuisances in health codes, no exception for pet pigs was permitted: in these municipalities a pig is a pig — and always a forbidden nuisance. these examples demonstrate the power of legal norms to enable or disable the animal’s mobility in between particular classifications, thus prescribing its material fate in the city. the legal classifications that i have laid out here would be of little consequence in the material world if not for the authority that enforces them in the everyday space of the city. the last section of this article explores the role of public law enforcers, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 118 nongovernmental organizations, and private sector animal control businesses in buffalo, new york, in enforcing mobilegalities. mobilegalities in buffalo, new york. new york state’s environmental conservation law defines how the domestic and wild classifications of dogs and coyotes are to be enforced. the statute stipulates an exhaustive list of public officials who are permitted to kill these animals: 4. at any time (a) any environmental conservation officer, dog warden, forest ranger or member of the state police, anywhere in the state, (b) any member of any town police within the limits of the town of which such member is an officer, (c) any member of the westchester county parkway police on any park, parkway or reservation owned or controlled by the county of westchester or (d) any member of a police force or department of any county, city, town or village in which such member has jurisdiction and is regularly employed may kill any dog pursuing or killing deer and any coyote killing a domestic animal (n.y. envtl. conserv. law §11-0529). article 26, section 371 of the new york state agriculture and markets law authorizes peace officers to summon or arrest any person that perpetuates an act of cruelty upon an animal protected under the law (n.y. agric. & mkts. law §371). in massachusetts and new york, agents of humane societies and associations are appointed as special officers and authorized to enforce statutes criminalizing animal cruelty (n.y. agric. & mkts. law §371).16 erie county’s spca is the largest organization in new york state and the second oldest not for profit organization in the country. three of its officers are authorized to act as peace officers for the enforcement of animal cruelty laws.17 “we don’t practice speciesism,” spca director barbara carr tells me during a tour of the organization’s premises, pointing to cages with starlings, cats, dogs, rats, snakes, goats, roosters, even a turtle.18 but animal laws often do, carr laments. for example, she says, whereas dogs are subject to detailed regulation, new york state has no cat control enforcement and of all pets, only dogs are required a license. hence, a citizen is allowed to hold up to four dogs but an unlimited number of cats. carr mentions in this context a woman who hoarded forty-four cats in her home. she was given a warning, but not arrested. “if she had kept her cats clean and safe we wouldn’t be able to do anything,” carr complains.19 irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 119 according to carr, 150 wildlife species reside or move through the city of buffalo at any given time. new york state’s department of environment and conservation enforces wildlife and conservation issues, and the spca’s wildlife administrator enforces all issues of care and cruelty pertaining to such wild animals. carr explains, however, that conservation and animal cruelty laws do not always coexist. perhaps the most apparent clash between them, she notes, regards the conservation clause that states: “no person shall willfully liberate within the state any wildlife except under permit from the department (n.y. envtl. conserv. law §11-0507).” the spca’s wildlife administrator joel thomas tells me that nuisance laws further dictate that upon capturing a wild animal, one must choose between two alternatives: either to euthanize the animal or to release it on the edge of one’s private property. “they want the animal gone,” thomas explains about the motivation behind these laws (interview). such prohibitions from keeping wild animals as pets (n.y. envtl. conserv. law §110512)20 and, according to thomas, from releasing them back to the wild stand in stark contrast to animal cruelty statutes, which altogether prohibit “every act, omission, or neglect, whereby unjustifiable physical pain, suffering or death is caused or permitted” of animals, broadly defined as “every living creature except a human being.” the situation is further complicated by a good samaritan clause, which provides that one may hold an injured wild animal for twenty-four hours for the purpose of transporting it to a state licensed rehabilitator. as i explain shortly, the rehabilitator, too, may release the animal to the wild only under limited conditions (n.y. envtl. conserv. law §110919). to understand these conditions, one must become familiar with pest control practices in new york state. pests may be characterized by the weak human protections prescribed to them by law; they are the epitome of “outlaws” in the sense espoused by giorgio agamben in homo sacer: their bodies are banned and they may be killed by anyone, or at least by authorized officials. a few quotes from buffalo’s pest removal companies demonstrate this approach. good riddance is a local company that removes pests in buffalo and its surrounding area. the company’s website assures potential clients that its staff will leave behind “a safe, clean environment free of odor and harmful bacteria” and promises that “whatever type of pest is bothering you, anywhere in western new york, good riddance can deal with it, removing your problem immediately.” an environment with animal pests is presented as hazardous, dirty, and harmful, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 120 compactly packaged as a “problem” to be removed. pest removal thus restores the clean, sanitary, and safe space of the city. mike hutchins from buffalo, new york, is a certified wildlife remover. despite their definition as wild, hutchins explains, these animals are relatively unprotected by law because of their parallel classification as “nuisance.” hutchins tells me that he traps various wild animals, including skunks, moles, pigeons, canada geese, moles, mice, and bats, and that he performs all wildlife trappings “in a humane manner” (interview). along these lines, hutchins proudly says that he uses trapping as his sole mode of operation. working in the business for over twenty years, he is also proud that he deals only with animals that “cause a problem.” in his words, “seeing a squirrel or a skunk in someone’s backyard is not reason enough for me to take action.” “although many city people would rather not see any animals at all in their backyards,” he explains. “it’s not the animals’ fault that they were stuck being born in a place with houses.” according to hutchins, an animal becomes a problem “if they’re in your house or causing damage to your property.” consequently, the most important distinction in his work is that between “nuisance” and “normal” animals. whereas animals are welcome in the home when classified as pets, they become persona non grata when classified as wild, and when the animals are defined as nuisance animals they may legally be “removed” as such. the definition of a nuisance animal is anything but simple, however. alongside the classification of species, this definition includes the particular location of the animal. for example, a state park in williamsville hired hutchins to remove six beavers that were damming near the old steel plant and causing floods that “endangered the roads.” “if they had dammed two-hundred feet away they’d be fine,” hutchins explains. in this instance, however, the beavers had to be euthanized. the particular intersection between the beavers’ animobility and their ensuing legal classification in this case has thus resulted in their extermination. another important topic in this context is that of “release upon capture.” to qualify as a new york state nuisance removal expert, hutchins was required to complete a license test. upon the annual renewal of this license, hutchins receives an updated list of animals that are prohibited from “release upon capture.” “any species that is likely to contract rabies is subject to this prohibition,” hutchins explains. “raccoons, beavers, squirrels, chipmunks, skunks, coyotes — they can’t be relocated, they have to be euthanized.” when i asked how he felt about this prohibition, hutchins said: “it isn’t the most pleasant thing in the world — but it’s the law.” hutchins predicts that new irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 121 york state will follow in the footsteps of many states that have already outlawed all animal releases. “soon,” he says, “you’re not going to be able to release anything.” by prohibiting the bleeding of animal classifications into one another — and, in this context, by establishing that an animal may not be returned to the wild once it is touched by humans or enters a human home — conservation laws attempt to transfix wild animals within their classificatory order. often, however, the legal norm itself provides a way out of the prohibition from releasing certain nuisance animals back into the wild. for example, new york homeowners are currently allowed to release nuisance animals on the edge of their property. hutchins routinely uses this exception when he obtains consent from homeowners to release animals he captures into their private property. “but only if it’s a suitable environment for them,” he clarifies, adding that the weather could also determine the fate of the captured animal. “if it’s february, for example, it’s better for the squirrels that i don’t release them into the woods,” he says, which again highlights the dynamic aspects of law in action. “so i use a lethal trap.” law, then, sets up “traps” for animobility by dictating the actions of human enforcers, who must then release the animal in a specified way (to a rehabilitator, or at the edge of the property), or altogether “remove” it. there are additional ways to overcome the legal prohibitions regarding animal releases beyond those defined on the books. although his expertise is in trapping and, at times, killing animals, hutchins develops intimate relations with some of the animals he traps. in the following story, hutchins provides an example of such a relationship and the negotiations of mobilegalities that ensued: once i was called to take care of a dead skunk. it turned out that the skunk was not really dead, so i loaded him onto my truck. somehow he managed to get out of his container and found a comfortable spot to sleep in. i would give him food and he would come out at night and sleep in my truck in the day. he got friendly with me and i would talk to him and all. he would come right close to me and look me in the eye. they don’t know that they should be afraid of humans. three weeks later, he “accidentally” got let loose. i figured that he was strong enough that he would survive. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 122 rather than being an exception to the law, i would offer that this is the common state of law, which is in fact enforced by humans who experience their own relationship and exert their particular actancy with respect to nonhuman animals. officially, while professional wildlife removers are restricted from keeping wild animals for over twenty-four hours, they are allowed — required, even — to kill them. similarly, while urban dwellers are permitted to hunt unprotected wildlife in the city, they are prohibited from keeping them as pets (n.y. envtl. conserv. law §11-0103).21 put differently, someone could send her dog to hunt wild bunnies, but she could not keep these bunnies as house pets. through policing the behavior of pet owners and wildlife inspectors, legal norms activate and reinforce the boundaries between pets and wild animals, effectively trapping both their animobilities and mobilegalities. not only do legal norms affect animobilities directly, then, they also do so indirectly, through the regulation and policing of humans who come into contact with these animals. buffalo’s peace officers enforce another boundary: that between pet animals and livestock. in certain instances, the cultural diversity of buffalo’s residents conflicts with municipal codes on livestock keeping and slaughtering. for example, in 2010 the city passed a chicken ordinance that stipulated chickens as the only farm animal allowed into the city (buffalo, n.y., code §341-11.2 [2010]). “chickens are allowed, but roosters aren’t,” explains spca director carr. “sometimes the eggs hatch, and you get males,” she continues. “you basically need one male, but what do you do with the rest? so we end up holding them here [in the shelter]. last year we had fifteen roosters.” evidently, farm animals are regulated according to their use for humans (e.g., producing eggs) and their interference with civilized urban life (e.g., crowing at inconvenient hours). the regulation of farm animals in buffalo also illuminates certain cultural and racial divides between the city’s human residents. carr tells me, for example, that “the biggest proportion of farm animals that end up in the shelter are from the city rather than from the surrounding rural areas” (interview). this, she explains, is a direct result of buffalo’s large refugee population that holds a different cultural understanding of animals than that prescribed by official laws: “they buy a goat in the market and they think they can slaughter it in their home. but then someone tells them it’s illegal here, and the next thing we know there’s a stray goat roaming the streets.” while the spca’s policy is not to arrest or press charges in those instances where cultural difference is at issue, certain cases nonetheless face “zero tolerance,” in carr’s words. carr explains, for example, that “eating one’s dog would not be something i would be willing to tolerate.” irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 123 whereas the laws on the books are not always observed, the ethical agendas of law enforcement officials play a crucial role in determining the animals’ fate in the city. the strongest clashes between certain human-animal cultural practices and law enforcement occur over the topic of religious sacrifice, for example in shamanic and santería practices (carr, interview). “there was this gentleman from cuba,” chief officer armatys of the spca explains, this guy was killing chickens and ducks and you name it. when we rolled up with the city of buffalo police there were dead animals all over the place, in the backyard and the garage and the guy had a claw hammer and that is how he was killing the animals. he was hitting them over the head; there were feathers on the claw hammer. so we… seized the animals, about 15-20 of them, as an emergency situation because a lot needed medical care.... we charged him with animal cruelty. his defense was, “this is what we do in cuba.” but this is new york state and it is [against] the law. we seized the animals, they put him on probation and he was not allowed to own any more animals for a period of a year. (interview) how can american cities prohibit the sacrifice of animals without infringing upon the right to free exercise of religion? (johnson 1313). the controversial supreme court case church of lukumi babalu aye, inc. v. city of hialeah (1992) exposed such tensions between the free exercise of religion and animal protection. there, the court held that the religious sacrifice of animals falls under the protective umbrella of the first amendment’s free exercise clause (holzer 80). the case considered the rights of santería believers in florida that were sacrificing animals in violation of the city of hialeah’s animal cruelty ordinance. since animal sacrifice is an important aspect of the practice of santería and the city ordinance had no other reason to justify prohibiting animal sacrifice other than its distaste for the religious practice of these individuals, the court found the law unfair and in violation of the first amendment.22 following this foundational decision, when aiming to design municipal laws and ordinances that protect animals, city governments must demonstrate that “societal interests” outweigh “the religious protections afforded by the constitution” (johnson 1325). cities can, in other words, override some of the barriers to animal sacrifice with humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 124 localized laws for “zoning, regulation, and licensing” of animals and the prohibition of any “animal killings” regardless of religious beliefs (johnson 1325). along these lines, buffalo, new york’s city code for slaughter houses prohibits the “rendering of dead animals” unless animals are killed for human consumption in a licensed slaughterhouse. this norm indirectly prevents the religious sacrifice of animals (buffalo, n.y., code, ch 391, §12). officer armatys describes his enforcement of the code in the buffalo region: we have had several cases where people were going to use animals and cut the throats of the animals. and what helps us a lot in areas like buffalo, cheektowaga, west seneca, [is that] you are not allowed farm animals in the community. so that gives us the right to seize the animals.... [w]e have already talked to the district attorney’s office. if we roll up on a situation where someone is abusing the animal, we have right to seize the animal. let them prove in court that it is for their religious rights. but if we see an animal being abused we are going to act on that. (interview) these stories illuminate what glen elder, jennifer wolch and jody emel have called “place-based animal practices” (73). in their words: [p]lace is also implicated in constructing the human-animal divide. when distinct, place-based animal practices are suddenly inserted into new locales by immigrants and are [sic] thus decontextualized conflict erupts. those newcomers who violate or transgress the many-layered cultural boundary between people and animals become branded as “savage,” “primitive,” or “uncivilized” and risk dehumanization, that is, being symbolically allocated to the far side of the human-animal divide… animal practices have thus become tools of a cultural imperialism. (73) new york is not exceptional in this regard. municipal codes that regulate human practices toward animals are often ethnocentric in that they prescribe a particular human-animal relationship. but while laws on the books set strict parameters on this relationship, legal enforcement is slightly more flexible and discretionary (as long as the practices do not include eating dogs), thereby allowing for higher animobilities and mobilegalities than the language of the law seems to dictate. conclusion. animal studies scholars speak about “animobility” to express the independent physical trajectories of animals that do not always coincide with those of irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 125 humans. my article contributes to this scholarship by highlighting an additional dimension of animal-human relations in the city: law. although many perceive law as static and fixed — and its effects on human-animal relations as similarly stagnating — i have offered a more nuanced account of how animal laws work. the article first explored law’s prominent technology — classification — and its construction as a combination of science and various levels of human protection. next, the article provided anecdotal references from four central legal animal categories (wild, pest, pet, and farm animals) and from a variety of animals (dogs, coyotes, goldfish, potbellied pigs, roosters, and skunks) to demonstrate how laws are both triggered and bound by the shifting materialities of animal-human relationships, as much as they also bind and enable these materialities in the first place. these relationships are constantly in flux, as the various factors illuminated by this article — taxonomy, law, time-space, and materiality — constantly shift. to complicate matters, this article also conceived law as a multi-sited and plural regime that encompasses official state norms, religious traditions, and enforcement practices. alongside the dynamic elements of law, its mobilegality, law’s classificatory regime is at the same time quite rigid and static. indeed, law constantly pigeonholes animals into fixed classifications. moreover, a considerable effort goes into keeping animals confined within such classificatory domains. operating this way, law often traps animobilities. the prohibitions from keeping wild and farm animals as pets, and those that prohibit treating pets as pests or pests as pets—all point to the desire of lawmakers to keep animals under the tight controls and within the confines of their classifications so as to keep cities safe, sanitized, and free of animal nuisances. at the same time, animals and humans also express their own mobilities, transgressing and challenging their legal classifications and forcing lawmakers and enforcers to adapt or develop new legal traps. finally, mobilegalities are themselves constrained—by their own taxonomic and legal heritage, by technological limitations, and by human and nonhuman biological capacities. notes 1. the author interviewed two of erie’s officers who are authorized by the new york state to act as peace officers for the enforcement of animal cruelty law. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 126 2. these protections, carr adds in her interview, are typically in title 7 of the united states code, which regulates agricultural animals and is enforced by governmental animal control agencies (7 u.s.c. §141-150). in buffalo, new york, the city’s animal control agency is in charge of enforcing the first type of laws, those that protect humans from animals in the city. here is how kelly mccartney, director of animal control for the city of buffalo, describes such legal protections: “we are trying to control animals roaming at large [such as] unlicensed dogs and dogs off the premises without tags. the other thing that the city handles a lot is dangerous dogs. if somebody were to be bitten by a dog and were to seek medical treatment, or the dog control officers were on the scene or were at least called to the scene, then of course we tell those people that they have an option to file a dangerous dog report. so, again, the city animal shelter or the dog control officers are in court with the dangerous dogs where a special term judge would then determine the disposition of that dog. . . . it’s very, very seldom that a judge would deem an animal for euthanasia. usually they do restrictions such as fencing, altering the animal if it’s not altered, muzzling on walks, not being left unattended” (interview). 3. such protections include title 18, chapter 3 of the united states code, which governs crimes against animals, birds, fish, and plants (18 u.s.c. §42). 4. bill number s1255 proposed an amendment to exclude the monk parakeet from “unprotected birds” in order to protect feral breeding populations escaped from the exotic pet industry and naturalized in the north east. recently, s1255-2011 defined monk (quaker) parakeets protected birds. 5. definitions, n.y. envtl. conserv. law §11-0103; see also utah’s definition of wildlife as: “ (a) crustaceans, including brine shrimp and crayfish; (b) mollusks; and (c) vertebrate animals living in nature, except feral animals.” utah code ann. §23-13-2. 6. for more on the definition of wild, and its distinction from tame in particular, see chapter 2 of braverman, zooland. 7. following the ohio incident, the humane society came out with a rundown of the five worst state laws restricting exotic animals: north carolina, missouri, nevada, ohio, and oklahoma. the website also states that, “with little oversight of exotic animal ownership, states like west virginia, wisconsin and alabama are not far behind in terms of regressive policies. some states that previously had no restrictions on exotic pets have enacted prohibitions in recent years — such as washington, kentucky and irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 127 iowa — putting them now among the best in the nation (see “ohio incident renews call for north carolina to pass law to ban dangerous exotic pets”). originally, at least, the state ownership of wild animals was not enacted for the animals’ benefit. more likely, it is a result of the public trust doctrine that was a reaction to the european situation in which the nobility was said to own all the animals on their land, thereby putting the citizenry at a lower status (thanks to the anonymous reviewer of this article for this comment). 8. see jerolmack, supra note 15, for a description of how the pigeons were a bird admired and hunted in new york in the early 1900s. in the 1940s and 1950s, pigeons were increasingly seen as a nuisance and potential health threat, leading to bans on feeding pigeons and instances of poisoning or shooting them. in the 1960s, two deaths were rhetorically linked to pigeons, resulting in their renaming as “rats with wings” and in the public’s call for their extermination in the city. 9. for a summary of the lacey act (18 u.s.c. 42), see the fish and wildlife service injurious wildlife factsheet; florida has the largest problem of invasive reptiles and amphibians in the world. the introduction of new species — claimed to be largely a result of pet stores that sell exotic animals — includes snails and snakes that pose a danger to the health and safety of plants, animals, and humans. in reaction to this growing concern, florida’s legislature enacted laws prohibiting the introduction of nonnative reptiles and amphibians, and in fact banned individuals from owning large reptiles: see kaczor. 10. in contemporary united states, dogs are the quintessential pets. as major subjects of human care, dogs are also controlled by a detailed set of regulations that include matters such as proper shelter, restraints, licensing and identification, and medical treatments. see, for example, buffalo, n.y., code §78-11, which provides detailed instructions about a “public pound”, seizure, redemption periods and impoundment fees, adoption processes and fees, and further licensing requirements); many states also mandate rabies vaccinations for dogs with accompanying fees and certification. see, for example, s.c. code ann. §47-5-60; additionally, requirements for the design of dog shelters can be very precise. according to an oklahoma statute, for example, dog breeders must provide at least the following for an enclosure with one dog: “the mathematical square of the sum of the length of the dog in inches (measured from the tip of its nose to the base of its tail) plus 6 inches; divided the product by 144, times 2. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 128 mathematically, the space the commercial pet breeder must provide for the first dog equals 2 x [(length of dog in inches + 6) x (length of dog in inches + 6)/144].” (okla. admin. code §532:15-3-3; finally, dog “disposal” is heavily regulated, as federal norms define proper ways to transport and sell dogs: see 7 u.s.c.a. §2131. the cremation of a dog in new york is considered a transaction and regulated by the general business law: see n.y. gen. bus. law art. 35-c. clearly, then, the animal’s legal classification as a dog and a pet results in a broad set of material consequences, such as the size of their enclosure and limits upon their numbers in a given household. 11. on how the term “spokesperson” is advanced by actor network theory scholars to highlight how humans have come to speak for nonhuman things, see callon. 12. for how the court refused to expand an animal cruelty statute beyond the precise wording of the statute: “equine animal, bovine animal, sheep, goat and pig,” see commonwealth v. massini, 188 a.2d 816 (pa. super. ct. 1963). 13. in this case, the court considered the scope of new york law for aggravated cruelty and its application to a pet goldfish. the dispute turned on whether the goldfish was a “companion animal” under the statute to constitute a felony. the defendant had stomped to death the pet goldfish of a nine year-old boy, and the court found that child’s pet goldfish fell within the meaning of “companion animal” under the statute, and thus the defendant was convicted of aggravated cruelty to animals in violation of agriculture and markets law §353a (1). 14. however, some regulations are less clearly connected to health. for example, one statute concerning bridge tolls states that, “any toll gatherer . . . may stop any person with automobiles, wagons, carts, or other vehicles . . . , and all horses, cows, cattle or other animal or animals, from entering. . . until the toll herein provided for shall have been paid.” n.j. stat. ann. §27:19-29. 15. this paragraph is drawn from herbster. 16. see also n.y. agric. & mkts. law §74, for a definition of “feral” as an undomesticated or wild animal. feral animals may include untamed buffalo, dogs, horses, etc. that face starvation, infection, and attacks from other animals. feral animals also face “eradication by humans” using various techniques; the aspca defines “stray” as an animal that has become lost or abandoned but is tame and comfortable around people. as such, stray animals are more dependent on humans for survival and irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 129 are not able to cope with life in the wild: see the american society for the prevention of cruelty to animals (aspca) website. 17. similarly, arluke collected participant observation and interview data from thirty animal police officers working for the massachusetts society for the prevention of cruelty to animals (mspca) in boston and the american society for the prevention of cruelty to animals (aspca) in new york over the period of a year (arluke). 18. the term “speciesism” is defined by the merriam-webster dictionary-encyclopedia as “1: prejudice or discrimination based on species; especially: discrimination against animals; 2: the assumption of human superiority on which speciesism is based. 19. carr describes in her interview how, in 2010, the spca took in 7,047 cats and 4,247 dogs; for a more detailed account of dog laws in american cities, see braverman “legal tails: policing american cities through animals.” 20. “1. no person shall knowingly possess, harbor, sell, barter, transfer, exchange or import any wild animal for use as a pet in new york state.” 21. see also n.y. envtl. conserv. law §11-0103. 22. see haupt (847) for a discussion of how, if the city ordinance had not been specific to the practice of santería but aimed at protecting animals and ensuring the health and safety of the city population, the ordinance may not have been overruled as violating the first amendment, and for background on the tension between religious freedom to sacrifice animals and animal cruelty laws. for suggestions on the goals of the santería religion and federal acts protecting cruelty against animals do not coincide, see sanchez 227. works cited agamben, georgio. homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. stanford: stanford up, 1998. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 130 armatys, michael. chief officer erie county spca, in buffalo, n.y. onsite interview. 10 oct. 2011. arluke, arnold. brute force: policing animal cruelty. west lafayette, in: purdue u p, 2004. the american society for the prevention of cruelty to animals. web. 1 feb. 2013. beck, alan m. the ecology of stray dogs: a study of free-ranging urban animals. west lafayette, in: purdue up, 1973. biernacki, patrick, and dan waldorf. “snowball sampling: problems and techniques of chain referral sampling.” sociological methods and research 10.2 (1981): 141-163. braverman, irus. “zooveillance: foucault goes to the zoo.” surveillance & society 10 (2) (2012): 119-133. _____. “legal tails: policing american cities through animals.” urban policing, securitization, and regulation. eds. randy k. lippert and kevin walby. new york: routledge, 2013. 130-144. _____. “a study of animals and law in the american city,” in law’s idea of nature, keith h. hirokawa, ed. cambridge: cambridge up, forthcoming. _____. zooland: the institution of captivity. stanford: stanford up, 2012. butler, william h. “welcoming animals back to the city: navigating public health tensions of urban livestock to achieve healthy and resilient communities.” journal of agriculture, food systems, and community development 2.2 (winter 2011-2012): 193-215. callon, michel. “some elements of a sociology of translation: domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of st. brieuc bay.” power, action, and belief: a new sociology of knowledge? 32.4 (1986): 196-223. carr, barbara. executive director, erie county spca. onsite interview, buffalo, ny. 5 oct. 2011. irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 131 douglas, mary. purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo. new york: routledge, 2002. elder, glen, jennifer r. wolch, and jody emel. “le pratique savage: race, place, and the human-animal divide.” animal geographies: place, politics, and identity in the natureculture borderlands. london: verso, 1998. executive order 13112. national invasive species council. united states department of agriculture, 26 june 2012. web. 1 feb. 2013. fine, gary alan, and lazaros christoforides. “dirty birds, filthy immigrants, and the english sparrow war: metaphorical linkage in constructing social problems.” symbolic interaction 14.4 (1991): 375-393. foucault, michel. the order of things. new york: routledge, 1966. frasch, pamela, et al. animal law in a nutshell. st. paul, mn.: west, 2011. good riddance inc. 28 aug. 2013 haupt, claudia e. “free exercise of religion and animal protection: a comparative perspective on ritual slaughter.” the george washington international law review 39.4 (2007): 839-947. herbster, andrea hart. “more than pigs in a parlor: an exploration of the relationship between the law and keeping pigs as pets.” iowa law review 86. 339 (october 2000). holzer, henry m. “contradictions will out: animal rights vs. animal sacrifice in the supreme court.” animal law 1 (1995): 79-84. huss, rebecca j. “custody, and estate planning issues relating to companion animals.” university of colorado law review 74.181 (winter 2003). hutchins, mike. licensed wildlife remover. pseudonym for protection. telephone interview. 7 oct. 2011. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 132 international commission on zoological nomenclature. web. 28 aug. 2013. jerolmack, colin. “how pigeons became rats: the cultural-spatial logic of problem animals.” social problems 55.1 (2008): 1-28. johnson, caroline e. “protecting the animals: the free exercise clause and the prevention of ritual sacrifice.” florida state university law review 21.4 (1994): 1295-1326. kaczor, bill. “florida has the worst invasive reptile, amphibian problem.” associated press. 2011. web. 15 sept. 2011. latour, bruno. reassembling the social. an introduction to actor-network-theory. oxford: oxford up, 2005. lorimer, jamie. "living roofs and brownfield wildlife: towards a fluid geography of uk nature conservation." environment and planning a 40.9 (2008): 2042-2060. mccartney, kelly. director of buffalo animal control, department of public works, city of buffalo n.y. telephone interview. 14 oct. 2011. michael, mike. “roadkill: between humans, nonhuman animals, and technologies.” society and animals 12.4 (2004): 278-298. “monk parakeet.“ wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 16 jan. 2013. web. 6 oct. 2011. “ohio incident renews call for north carolina to pass law to ban dangerous exotic pets.” the humane society of the united states. 21 oct. 2011. web. 15 may 2012. philo, chris, and chris wilbert. “animal spaces, beastly places: an introduction.” animal spaces, beastly places: new geographies of human-animal relations. eds. chris philo and chris wilbert. new york: routledge, 2000. 1-34. sanchez, mercedes a. “is the death knell sounding for animal rights? the sacrifice of animals for religious purposes under the guise of the first amendment right to the free exercise of religion.” st. thomas law review 7 (1994): 217-815. “speciesism.” merriam-webster dictionary-encyclopedia. web. 1 feb. 2013. irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 133 steel, carolyn. hungry city: how food shapes our lives. london: vintage books, 2009. steere, allen c. “lyme disease: a growing threat to urban populations.” proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america 91.7 (1994): 2378-2383. thomas, joel. wildlife administrator, erie county spca. onsite interview, buffalo, ny. 12 oct. 2011. u.s. fish & wildlife service. “injurious wildlife a summary of the injurious provisions of the lacey act (18 u.s.c. 42; 50 cfr 16).” july 2007. pdf file. web. 2 feb. 2013. wolch, jennifer r., kathleen west, and thomas e. gaines. “transspecies urban theory.” environment and planning d 13.6 (1995): 735-760. wolch, jennifer r., and jody emel, ed. animal geographies: place, politics and identity in the nature-culture borderlands. london: verso, 1998. cases cited state v. mierz, 901 p.2d 286 (wash. 1995). city of rolling meadows v. kyle, 494 n.e.2d 766 (ill. app. ct. 1986). trover amory v. flyn, 10 johns. 102 (n.y. sup. ct. 1813). division of wildlife v. clifton, 692 n.e.2d 253 (ohio 1997). commonwealth v. massini, 188 a.2d 816 (pa. super. ct. 1963). people v. garcia, 812 n.y.s.2d 66 (n.y. app. div. 2006). city of rolling meadows v. kyle, 494 n.e.2d 766 (ill. app. ct. 1986). keeble v. cisneros, 664 f.supp. 1076 (tex. 1987). giles v. state, 431 n.y.s.2d 781 (n.y. ct. cl. 1980). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 5, number 1 (fall 2013) 134 statutes cited n.y. envtl. conserv. law §11-0107 (mckinney 2011) n.y. senate-assembly bill s1255 (2011) 7 u.s.c. § 141-150 (west 2011) 18 u.s.c. §42 (west 2012). n.y. envtl. conserv. law §11-0103 (mckinney 2011). utah code ann. § 23-13-2 (west 2011). n.y. envtl. conserv. law §11-0105 (mckinney 2011). state ownership and control, n.y. envtl. conserv. law § 11-0105. n.y. gen. mun. law §209-cc (mckinney 2011). 7 u.s.c.a. §136 (west 2011). n.y. envtl. conserv. law §33-0101 (mckinney 2011). n.y. agric. & mkts. law §149 (mckinney 2011). fla. stat. ann. §482.021 (west 2011). ark. code ann. §14-54-103 (west 2011). n.y. envtl. conserv. law §11-0513 (mckinney 2011). 18 u.s.c. 42 (west 2011). s.c. code ann. §47-5-60 (2011). okla. admin. code §532:15-3-3 (2011). irus braverman -animal mobilegalities: the regulation of animal movement in the american city 135 7 u.s.c.a. §2131 (west 2011). n.y. gen. bus. law art. 35-c (mckinney 2011). 74 u. colo. l. rev. 181. 9 c.f.r. § 1.1 (2011). n.y. gen. bus. law § 750-a (mckinney 2011). 7 u.s.c.a. §1471 (west 2011). n.j. stat. ann. §27:19-29 (west 2011). cleveland, ohio, code ch. 347, §347.02 (g) (2010). n.y. agric. & mkts. law §74 (mckinney 2011). n.y. envtl. conserv. law §11-0529 (mckinney 2011). n.y. agric. & mkts. law §371 (mckinney 2011). buffalo, n.y., code §341-11.2 (2010). buffalo, n.y., code §391-12. (2011). buffalo, n.y., code §78-11 (2011). microsoft word walker pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 4:2 alyssa chen walker bringing the laboratory dog home: elizabeth stuart phelps and the antivivisection narrative “we are told that there is no need of any public sensitiveness on this subject [and that] there must be no lifting of the veil to the outside multitude.” — dr. albert leffingwell, vivisection (1884) “they try to pacify the public by crying that there is no pain, -but details, taken from laboratory records, tell the story.” — sarah nelson carter, for pity’s sake (1897) “the situation in the united states is extremely volatile. over the last five years, exposés by animal rights activists … have highlighted glaring inadequacies in the current system of control.” — dr. judith hampson, chief animal experimentation research officer, royal society for the prevention of cruelty to animals (1987) “the men and women who broke into the laboratories ... had to make sure that people got enough of a peek behind the scenes to realize that the ‘science’ was worthless.” — peta president ingrid newkirk, free the animals (2000) vivisection exposed. historically, the purpose of antivivisection rhetoric has been to expose scientific atrocities inflicted on animals in laboratories. the quotations introducing this essay offer an epigraphic slice from this discursive tradition. animal experimentation became a source of public debate in the united states following the laboratory revolution in medical science during the 1860s and 1870s. as early as 1867, the american society for the prevention of cruelty to animals (aspca) in new york, under the leadership of henry bergh, publicly decried animal experimentation and advocated legislative prohibition of the practice. inspired by their british allies, who successfully shepherded through parliament the cruelty to animals act of 1876, american humane activists sought to expose the frightful inner workings of the vivisection laboratory to public scrutiny. in an effort to raise public awareness, the american anti-vivisection society (aavs) began distributing images of vivisected animals at community gatherings and state fairs. the exhibit committee of the aavs humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 102 even produced a traveling display of vivisection tools and practices, which it launched in philadelphia in 1910. antivivisectionists on both sides of the atlantic employed metaphors of exposure and unveiling in representations of their humane labor. this discursive practice framed anticruelty reform as the inevitable consequence of disseminating the unvarnished truth about vivisection among the people. in 1882, bergh himself thematized the notion of cutting to the facts, so to speak, with his ironic and provocative lecture title: “vivisection vivisected.” while spcas and other humane organizations served as the official mouthpieces of the movement, a diversity of social groups, including teachers, clergy, scientists, and club women, contributed to the fin de siècle antivivisection effort. these groups exercised manifold forms of social influence and adopted such varied persuasive modes as lecturing, pamphleteering, letter-writing, and front-parlor pontificating. though ranging in style and effectiveness, antivivisection texts were characteristically disturbing in their graphic descriptions of animal suffering. armed with firsthand knowledge, antivivisection scientists published alarming descriptions of the “dimlighted underground dungeons” in some of the nation’s preeminent medical colleges (leffingwell, the vivisection question 47). “in the august name of science,” testified dr. albert leffingwell, “animals have been subjected to burning, baking, freezing; saturation with inflammable oil and then setting on fire; starvation to death; skinning alive; larding the feet with nails; crushing and tormenting in every imaginable way” (“vivisection in america” 136). clergy, teachers, and reform-minded women embedded the scientists’ graphic accounts in moral arguments about the debasing nature of violent acts on those who perform them. humane writers hoped to restrict or abolish vivisection by shining a light on the scientists’ secret world of animal suffering. “i have seen a great deal of vivisection,” british surgeon francis cann reflected, “and i think if the people were only allowed to see these operations, there would very soon be an end put to them” (the zoophilist 46). the laboratory dog in fictional space. in a prefatory note to her antivivisection novel, trixy (1904), american author elizabeth stuart phelps propounds a democratic vision of humane fiction as a purveyor of moral light and verity to the literate public: “[a] novel, which cannot be a homily, may be an illumination. this one approaches regions whose very existence is unknown to the majority of readers, and doubted by many intelligent and kind-hearted people. i take this opportunity of saying that i am familiar with the map of these dark sections of life and know whereof i write” (vii-viii). imaginative literature, she suggests, might add emotional heft to the antivivisection platform by exposing murky terrains of inhumanity to the light of public consciousness. phelps alyssa chen walker — bringing the laboratory dog home: elizabeth stuart phelps and the antivivisection narrative 103 suggests that the novel form, unlike the polemic or the homily, invites particularly vivid experiences of identification with its human and canine characters. the moral and social impact of the humane novel supposedly emanates from its power to usher readers through clandestine geographies, otherwise unknown or inaccessible to them. curiously, while phelps’s preface braces readers for a tour through the coarse underworld of mercenary dog-trafficking and scientific torture chambers, it also makes a point of characterizing this imaginative journey as an “approach” rather than a full exposure to the dark regions of animal vivisection (trixy vii). phelps’s narrative, in other words, is itself a restricted site from which grisly scenes of canine torture are conspicuously and deliberately omitted. “if trixy were a polemic,” phelps elucidates, “there might be presented a variety of authentic physiological diversions as sad as they would seem to be incredible. such being the material of the apostle rather than the artist, these pages have been closed to scenes too painful for admission to them” (trixy vii). at various moments in her story, phelps peels back the veil on the scientist’s privileged institutional domain, but rarely does she grant more than a glimpse at the horrors that reside therein. while the vivisector-dog interactions in trixy supply moments of high drama and suspense, most of the novel’s interspecies relationships unfold outside of the laboratory. why is the laboratory relegated to peripheral space in a narrative concerned primarily with scientific experimentation and in a genre predicated on the graphic exposure of vivisection? vivid descriptions of the animal laboratory, which serve as the focal point of other humane discursive forms, are intended to shock audiences into political action. yet, authors who dwell on the flesh-carving in the laboratory run the risk of turning sensitive readers away. if the details prove too grotesque or technical, then readers with weak constitutions might avert their attention from the bloody spectacle and, by extension, from the plight of the laboratory dog. in shielding readers from scenes of savagery, phelps also interpellates them as part of a “humane” public invested in keeping the “vagaries of science” and the “shames of the human race” in check (trixy 160). in a direct address to her imagined audience, she vows to steer clear of “sights which the readers of these pages could not bring their delicate sensibilities to witness, facts which you who follow this narrative would not permit its writer to relate” (trixy 160). this meta-textual moment simultaneously conjures into being an ideal reading public and circumscribes its values. it also indicates that the novel will not rely on humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 104 realist descriptions of mass slaughter in the laboratory to galvanize its audience to join the antivivisection cause. phelps’s insistence on a sanitized narrative codifies the vivisection laboratory as a site too real for realist fiction. the unspeakable realities of the laboratory cannot be signified in the context of humane literature, as they belong to a realm beyond fiction. trixy retains its fictional status by re-contextualizing the laboratory dog as both a cherished family member and as private property with sentimental and market value. for this reason, the home (as the seat of familial intimacy) and the court (as a site for formalizing property claims) assume central positions in phelps’s narrative topography. unlike the antivivisection polemic, which functions as an exposé of the morally intolerable treatment of animals, phelps’s fictional work builds pathos for laboratory dogs by envisioning them as treasured members of the american household and as defensible property in the context of the courtroom. the movement of phelps’s canine characters among the home, the laboratory, and the courthouse generates what i henceforth refer to as “the stolen-pet plot,” a coinage that implies the dog’s contextcontingent status as cherished dependent and private property. in delineating humane and inhumane behavior in these three narrative sites, phelps presents sharply gendered portrayals of human-canine interactions, such that appropriate treatment of dogs is necessarily appropriately “feminine” or “masculine.” the interruption of these gendered relationships by dog-bandits and vivisectors undermines heteronormative family values, as the filching of the family pet disrupts the maternal imperative of woman and violates the property rights of man. although phelps relies on conventionally gendered depictions of interspecies relations in trixy, she nevertheless resists the widespread fin de siècle habit of placing ethical concern for animals under the special purview of women. her multi-contextual portrayals of interspecies interactions, instead, frame the antivivisection cause broadly as a “human” concern and as a litmus test for a particularly american sense of “humaneness,” which translates here as a [compensity]propensity/capacity for mercy toward the weak and a respect for private property. by tracking phelps’s canine protagonists through the narrative nerve-centers in trixy and several other dog-themed works, this essay illustrates how the stolen-pet plot construes vivisection as a threat to the most sacrosanct of american values. it argues, furthermore, that by explicitly rejecting graphic descriptions à la the antivivisection polemic, phelps constitutes a humane reading public lauded for its gentle feeling and acute sensitivity to suffering. alyssa chen walker — bringing the laboratory dog home: elizabeth stuart phelps and the antivivisection narrative 105 digging up phelps’s antivivisection fiction. during the three decades preceding houghton, mifflin and company’s release of trixy in 1904, elizabeth stuart phelps attracted an enthusiastic readership for her popular fiction and wrote numerous influential essays in support of temperance, woman suffrage, labor reform, coeducation, and other contemporary social causes. undoubtedly, phelps is best known for her popular “gates” novels, which offered utopian visions of heaven to a nation still reeling from the devastation of the civil war. the first volume in the gates series, the gates ajar (1868), launched phelps’s literary career, achieved mass-circulation in the united states and england, and attracted the attention of famed literary “power couple,” james t. fields and annie adams fields, who were instrumental in the book’s publication. beyond the gates, the gates between, and within the gates (a dramatization serialized in mcclure’s magazine) followed the first novel in 1883, 1887, and 1901, respectively. in addition to the smash-hit gates books, phelps’s fiction and nonfiction prose appeared frequently in periodical flagships, such as the atlantic monthly, harper’s new monthly magazine, the independent, and woman’s journal. although phelps’s literary appeal dwindled after her death in 1911, she garnered popular and critical acclaim during her lifetime and bequeathed a vast legacy to the history of letters. today, this literary boon remains largely untapped, except by a small cohort of scholars engaged in the important enterprise of documenting phelps’s participation in the antebellum women’s movement. on phelps’s contribution to humane reform, however, literary critics have been either reticent or apt to interpret her portrayals of animal exploitation as “symbolic” of women’s oppression (kessler 111). carol farley kessler’s characterization of phelps’s “anti-vivisection concern” as “an indirect expression of her feminist interests” is typical of this scholarly approach (111). kessler has emphasized those aspects of phelps’s fiction which imply that “women were treated by men as pets, vivisected as experimental subjects” (111). ronna coffey privett, similarly, has summed up trixy as a story about “intelligent, loving dogs whose mute cries for help often resemble women in society who are voiceless without the vote and who depend upon their ‘masters’ to save them from their inhumane situations” (246). ann douglas wood has argued that many prominent nineteenth-century women, including phelps, believed that “male doctors were performing a kind of ‘vivisection’… on their female patients” (48). in “‘the fashionable diseases’: women’s complaints and their treatment in nineteenth-century america,” wood documents the rhetorical associations these women forged between the abuse of laboratory animals and the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 106 treatment of female patients for “mental illness, ‘nervous’ conditions, and sexual difficulties” (25). she credits (in a footnote) phelps’s antivivisection novels with making the broader symbolic link between “male cruelty in vivisection [and] male cruelty in marriage” (wood 49). wood concludes her essay with the assertion that phelps made “no pretense of interest in medicine as a science” but viewed the field purely “as a weapon in a social and political struggle for power between the sexes” (52). while phelps undoubtedly drew provocative parallels between vivisection and sex discrimination, my study suggests that her animal advocacy was more than merely metaphorical or analogic. her commitment to the antivivisection cause, as we shall see, was ardent, enduring, and multi-faceted. the plight of laboratory animals occupied a significant portion of phelps’s professional energy during the final decade and a half of her life. her prominence in the antivivisection movement even inspired public denunciations from leading u.s. scientists, including one harvard physiologist who singled her out in an 1899 issue of the philadelphia medical journal for her “maudlin sentimentality” and refusal to “listen to the facts” (journal of zoophily 127-128). between 1901 and 1904, phelps delivered three addresses on the subject of live-animal experimentation to the massachusetts state legislature and wrote several antivivisection pamphlets, including a plea for the helpless (1901), vivisection denounced (1902), and vivisection and legislation in massachusetts (1902). she also published three antivivisection works, in addition to trixy, that remain to be critically excavated after more than a century of dust-gathering. five years prior to the publication of trixy, phelps wrote an initial stolen-pet tale, loveliness, which appeared in the august 1899 issue of the atlantic monthly and was reprinted in giftbook form by houghton, mifflin and company later the same year. loveliness introduces a trademark feature (also exhibited in trixy) of phelps’s antivivisection fiction: the pairing of a disabled or orphaned child with a loyal canine companion. the abduction of a silver yorkshire belonging to an “invalid child” named adah supplies the story’s precipitating complication (loveliness 22). wracked with a “gallopin’ heartbreak” over the loss of her only playmate, adah deteriorates “to a little wraith” (loveliness 27, 20). a thorough search of the city’s underground dog-trafficking network by adah’s father culminates in the yorkshire’s nick-of-time recovery from the vivisection laboratory at the “famous medical school of the university of st. george” (loveliness 31-32). the joyous reunion of dog and girl sends “peals of laughter and ecstatic barks” through the “happy house” (loveliness 41). in october 1908, woman’s home companion published phelps’s short story, “tammyshanty,” which also celebrates mutual affection between dogs and children. alyssa chen walker — bringing the laboratory dog home: elizabeth stuart phelps and the antivivisection narrative 107 the story features orphaned newsboy peter “jacket” roosevelt tammany and his irish terrier, tammyshanty. when a private experimenter notorious for vivisecting dogs in his home laboratory abducts tammyshanty, jacket enlists the help of a humane philanthropist, a reporter, a policeman, and two young officers of the newsboys’ association. pooling the adults’ professional expertise and the newsboys’ “subterranean intelligence,” jacket ascertains that the vivisector has imprisoned tammyshanty in his robustly secured laboratory (“tammyshanty” 9). when a mob of outraged newsboys encircles the vivisector’s home demanding the dog’s release, the “fugitive physiologist” absconds by moonlight with a throng of canine captives (“tammyshanty” 62). the street-smart mob overtakes the vivisector, however, and jacket reclaims his beloved companion. in the same year that woman’s home companion published “tammyshanty,” the magazine also serialized phelps’s second antivivisection novel, though life us do part. the work, which houghton, mifflin and company promptly released in book form, echoes trixy in several respects. both novels feature dog-loving society women caught between dueling male suitors. like protagonist miriam lauriat in trixy, cara sterling in though life us do part acts as guardian to a canine survivor of vivisection. cara’s enterprising cousin, reverend sterling hart, discovers that clyde the collie once suffered a stint as the experimental subject of a “rising young physiologist” at the local university (though life us do part 7). as it happens, the vivisector, dr. thomas frost, is also one of cara’s eager suitors. the lack of sensitivity that serves dr. frost well in the vivisection laboratory translates poorly into the romantic arena, and his affection for cara remains unreciprocated at the story’s conclusion. this thwarted marriage plot of 1908 is strikingly reminiscent of the interspecies love triangle phelps portrayed four years earlier in trixy. delicate readers. it is reasonably clear that what attracted many readers to trixy was phelps’s literary reputation. having achieved widespread name-recognition by the 1880s, phelps enjoyed a broader circulation for her humane texts than did most antivivisection writers of the era. more often than not, antivivisection literature was hampered by its self-selecting audience. although the aavs and other humane organizations sent pamphlets and periodicals to libraries, social clubs, schools, and cabstands, they struggled to expand subscription lists beyond a loyal core. in both the united states and britain, the movement’s leading periodicals, such as the journal of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 108 zoophily, our dumb animals, the anti-vivisectionist, and the zoophilist, attracted audiences consisting largely of true believers. the graphic content in these publications, which included visual materials copied from scientific manuals, served to confirm what most readers already knew or suspected about vivisection. although britain’s the anti-vivisectionist ran such gruesome material that it issued warnings to those coming “fresh to the subject,” the weekly’s editorial staff nonetheless encouraged the public to confront the horrors of modern physiology: we would again remind our readers that, though engravings illustrative of vivisection may usually be found on our second and third pages, the sight of them, so horrifying to many, may be entirely avoided by leaving the first two leaves of the journal uncut. that they are of the utmost value in bringing a distinct idea of what vivisection is to the minds of those people who come fresh to the subject, is beyond question. people often have no notion of the reality until they are shown these perfectly authentic illustrations, taken from the actual work of the vivisectors themselves; but when they see them, there is no need of further argument to produce conviction. this is the purpose for which they are intended. (37) while this warning adds a layer of anticipatory horror (and allure) to the experience of viewing the ravaged animal body, it also betrays an underlying anxiety about the reader-text relationship. will the average reader, who happens upon an antivivisection tract, consent to view what is said to be unviewable? as we shall see, phelps circumnavigates the problem of recoiling readers by omitting graphic images altogether. since phelps’s humane fiction circulated in the mass market, it attracted readers from all sides of the anticruelty debate. in this respect, phelps was not remarkable among writers of imaginative literature. contemporary authors in england, canada, and the united states promoted compassion for animals by writing anticruelty stories for popular audiences. animal “autobiographies,” such as anna sewell’s black beauty (1877), marshall saunders’s beautiful joe (1893), and virginia sharpe patterson’s dickey downy (1899), dismayed readers with their dolorous first-person accounts of suffering at the hands of humankind. mark twain’s “a dog’s tale,” which first appeared in the december 1903 issue of harper’s, chronicles the life of a mixed-breed dog whose cherished pup succumbs to a physiological experiment. like other animal alyssa chen walker — bringing the laboratory dog home: elizabeth stuart phelps and the antivivisection narrative 109 autobiographies, “a dog’s tale” mobilizes sentiment by encouraging readeridentification with its sympathetic and psychologically complex narrator. to a much higher degree than the animal autobiography, phelps’s antivivisection narratives foreground human-canine relationships outside of the scientific laboratory. the implied reader of phelps’s fiction is necessarily a stranger to the savage underworld of animal experimentation. possessing a delicate nature evocative of gentle womanhood, this figure shrinks from sensational violence as a matter of course. in contrast to writers of antivivisection tracts and animal autobiographies, phelps spares her readers from the sight of the eviscerated dog, for fear that they might “lose” their senses. indeed, antivivisection literature deplored the desensitization of medical students to the suffering of laboratory animals. this blunting of sentiment, which hardened the budding scientist, threatened to destroy the gentle reader for whom “sensitivity” was an essential trait. for this reason, phelps’s trixy encourages readers to identify not with the shocked (and ultimately insentient) bodies in the laboratory but rather with the gentle creatures inhabiting the spaces of humanity. the stolen-pet plot in trixy. what makes trixy such a rich object of analysis in terms of phelps’s antivivisection corpus is that it combines several features of her other canine tales. like loveliness and “tammyshanty,” trixy follows the narrative trajectory of a dog abducted from a particularly vulnerable child. (the boy hero in trixy is both disabled and orphaned.) the novel also resembles though life us do part in various respects, such as its inclusion of man-woman-man and man-dog-woman triangles. of further interest is the fact that trixy represents phelps’s first novel-length articulation of the stolen-pet plot. the stolen-pet plot in trixy actually concerns two snatched dogs: caro the cocker spaniel and trixy the poodle. the latter dog, who is the precocious companion of a poor tenement boy named dan badger, earns her master’s keep by performing clever tricks and acrobatics for crowds of friends and neighbors. among trixy and dan’s most zealous supporters is miriam lauriat, a soft-hearted philanthropist and tenement owner. in addition to overseeing her properties and ministering to the city’s downtrodden, miriam serves as the fawning owner of a timid black spaniel called caro. despite the doting vigilance of their human caretakers, both trixy and caro fall victim to mercenary pet-traffickers, who illicitly supply local scientists with animal test humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 110 subjects. in a well-secured basement laboratory at the prestigious galen medical school, trixy and caro languish in a room full of unfortunate animals, all awaiting sacrifice in one of the nation’s many “slaughter-houses of science” (trixy 256). the chair of the physiology faculty and head researcher at the galen vivisection laboratory is miriam lauriat’s suitor, dr. olin steele. once a sensitive young medical student who shuddered at the sight of animal suffering, dr. steele now performs live-animal dissections with the steady hand of a seasoned vivisector. compelled by professional aspirations and institutional pressure, he makes the colossal blunder of performing a series of experiments on his paramour’s beloved caro. luckily, caro and trixy manage a narrow escape from the laboratory before dr. steele and his colleagues can administer their lethal knife-cuts. caro, understandably, emerges from the harrowing experience far worse for wear. the dognapping incident at galen results in a public scandal, a courtroom battle, and the permanent estrangement of olin steele and miriam lauriat. in an ultimate blow to his ego, dr. steele’s case is prosecuted by his chief rival for miriam’s affection: the modest and upstanding lawyer, philip surbridge. a stark contrast to dr. steele, philip surbridge is a man of “perennial sympathy” and uncalculated self-sacrifice (trixy 200). the prosecution presents a cogent case against the galen medical school, and by the trial’s end dr. olin steele is personally and professionally shattered. in a final irony, the vivisector finds his death-bed vigil attended only by his loyal saint bernard, barry. at home with his canine companion, dr. steele is haunted by the ghosts of his former vivisection subjects and wretchedly cries out, “poor things! poor things!” (trixy 279). like thomas frost in though life us do part, olin steele proves the cad of phelps’s love plot when his ruthless professional aspirations render him unredeemable as a romantic hero. miriam’s disbelief that “any true woman [could] take a vivisector’s hand” suggests the extent to which the narrative’s romantic and humane storylines are intertwined (trixy 274). in choosing the humane man over the inhumane self-promoter, miriam also exhibits her sound judgment, moral fortitude, and readiness to face the challenges and responsibilities of marriage. phelps concludes her story on a bright note with the tail-wagging reunion of the dogs with their owners and a pledge of romantic devotion between miriam and philip. bringing the plight of the laboratory dog home. dr. steele’s bedroom hallucinations of his animal victims bring the specter of the vivisected dog into the domestic sphere. here, dogs that he formerly conceptualized as scientific material are re-imagined as pets. envisioning laboratory animals against a domestic backdrop forces dr. steele to draw a connection between the scores of dogs he sacrificed in the name of scientific alyssa chen walker — bringing the laboratory dog home: elizabeth stuart phelps and the antivivisection narrative 111 progress and his beloved boyhood companion, barry. the domestic space recontextualizes (for dr. steele and phelps’s readers) anonymous scientific subjects as precious members of human families. stirred by “momentary contact with life and love” in the canine form of barry, dr. steele recognizes in each of his former victims a value apart from their instrumental function in the laboratory (trixy 265). gripped by this awful recognition, his “fevered brain” conjures up a phantasmagoric processional of “mute and sentient” creatures (trixy 266, 265). no longer perceiving these creatures as anonymous test subjects, dr. steele re-encounters them as the “domestic animals that comfort our homes” and the “little spirits, born to be playthings for children” (trixy 265-266). this solemn processional triggers the terrible epiphany that dr. steele’s victims belonged to the same docile society as barry. it also transforms the interchangeable animals of the laboratory into precious individuals. once dr. steele comprehends the animals’ familial status as former or potential domestic pets, he recognizes their individuality. as the ghosts pass by his bed, dr. steele searches the eyes of “each martyred creature” and confronts its uniqueness (my emphasis) (trixy 265). he even pays special homage to certain individuals: a greyhound he vivisected in vienna, a kitten from his medical school days, and, lastly, miriam’s precious spaniel. throughout trixy, phelps juxtaposes the instrumental attitude of the vivisector toward his anonymous mass of dogs with the pet-lover’s valuation of the individual animal. a heated exchange between miriam lauriat and olin steele, which takes place prior to the latter’s sickbed revelation, encapsulates these two contrasting sensibilities. hoping to vindicate himself for vivisecting miriam’s dog, dr. steele explains that he was unable to distinguish caro from the multitude of nameless test subjects in the laboratory: “there wasn’t one chance in a million that--i didn’t know it was your dog! you know i didn’t!” “you knew,” said miriam coldly, “that it was somebody’s dog—a cherished one. he was gentle. he was high-bred.--and there was this.” she drew the tarnished silver collar from her pocket, and with shaking fingers put it into his hand. steele’s white face turned a ghastly gray. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 112 “i give you my word i never saw this before!” “are you not the head of your department? where does responsibility lie if not on you? this collar came out of your laboratory yesterday morning. how many other lost dogs have the faculty of galen college unlawfully taken besides mine?”[…] “what is one dog--what are ten thousand dogs compared with the life of one baby?” he demanded fiercely. miriam now turned her averted head, and, for the first time that morning, looked him straight in the eyes. the misery in them held her rising denunciation back. “you have tormented many dogs. how many, i do not want to know. have you ever saved the life of one baby?” (trixy 217-219) dr. steele’s attempt at personal absolution hinges upon the interchangeability of all animals that are no longer or not yet pets. in the context of the physiology laboratory, each dog is an equally expendable unit of living matter. the validity of dr. steele’s research depends on the homogenizing reduction of “half a hundred dogs” to “half a hundred living brains” (trixy 55). miriam’s hostility toward olin steele stems largely from the fact that caro bore the distinguishing markers of a pet. his silver collar, gentle disposition, and high breeding imply that he was not simply owned but domesticated into a privileged social class. from these signs, dr. steele ought to have recognized caro’s special status as a “cherished” pet. the scientist might have vivisected countless other animals without a twinge in his cold conscience, but should not he have realized that this dog was imbued with sentimental meaning and even social status? in the homogenizing and objectifying context of the laboratory, however, dr. steele views caro as just another experimental subject. domestic space in trixy, therefore, is crucial for producing the dog’s status as a pet and for codifying certain interspecies relationships as familial. for these reasons, the home is an indispensible narrative space and the main site for generating pathos in relation to canine characters. the home is also a site of cathexis where humans invest particular canine bodies with incredible importance and treasure individual dogs as outlets for emotional energy and expression. once a dog is chosen for a pet, its personal value to its owner may be limitless. from the perspective of its caretaker, a single pet can matter alyssa chen walker — bringing the laboratory dog home: elizabeth stuart phelps and the antivivisection narrative 113 more than ten thousand laboratory dogs or even one human baby. the novel’s domestic scenes essentially familiarize anonymous laboratory animals, endowing them with names, personalities, families, and deep personal meanings. the primary way that phelps familiarizes the laboratory dog is by invoking maternal caretaking imagery. she often feminizes interspecies relationships in the home, construing the dog as a child substitute. as the above passage reveals, dr. olin steele considers vivisection justifiable if it saves “the life of one baby.” miriam lauriat, on the other hand, views vivisection as intolerable because she relates to her dog as if he were a baby. the frontispiece of the novel visually reinforces the narrative’s infantilization of the canine. the color plate depicts a domestic scene in which miriam lauriat comforts her surrogate human child, dan badger, while the infantile caro reposes in a bassinette at her feet (figure 1). an upright and square-shouldered male figure, who turns out to be philip surbridge, gazes out the window, thus completing the heteronormative family scene. notably absent from phelps’s stolen-pet stories are visual representations of vivisection laboratories. loveliness gestures toward the horrors of vivisection through artist sarah s. stilwell’s visual rendering of a dognapping, but none of stilwell’s illustrations depicts the laboratory itself. figure 1. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 114 like their accompanying visual representations, phelps’s textual descriptions stress the familial nature of human-dog interactions in the home. trixy contains countless scenes in which dogs appear as children and their human guardians as parents. this analogy works well as an affective device because it aligns the dog with a culturally valued lifeform: the human baby. it also possesses symbolic purchase due to the literal and psychological propinquity of pets and babies in the western bourgeois family. in his psychological investigation into the social construction of “pets” as a cultural category yi-fu tuan describes the human child as a pet par excellence. he explains, “whatever views a mother may have toward her infant, in the actual practice of mothering she has to treat it as an incontinent young animal and even as a thing … the small child is a piece of wild nature that must be subdued and then played with — transformed into cute, cuddly beings or miniature adults as the mother or the surrogate mother sees fit” (tuan 115). tuan classifies mother-to-child and owner-to-pet relationships as intimate. what exactly does this intimacy entail? he elaborates, “gestures of physical intimacy may express equality and brotherhood: picture two friends with their arms around each other’s shoulder. on the other hand, more often and (i believe) more deeply, they presuppose inequality: picture a mother hugging her child, a horsewoman patting the flank of her steed, or think of such historical bonds as that between a knight and his squire, a man and his valet” (tuan 163). while these forms of intimacy may have a positive impact on both the empowered and the dependent party, they are characterized as much by dominance as by affection. the reunion between miriam and caro, which follows the latter’s death-defying escape from galen laboratory, evokes stock images of intimacy between mother and baby. miriam — an unmarried, self-supporting property owner — invests her maternal energy in caro rather than a human baby. instead of marrying into a domestic situation, miriam keeps her own home by renting domestic space to others (in the tenement she owns). her financial independence buys her time to choose between suitors and allows her to support the alternative family she has formed with her elderly aunt and dog. caro compensates for the fact that miriam is a professional woman with an already established domestic situation. she enthusiastically directs her maternal feelings at caro who, in turn, looks to her for comfort and protection. seeing miriam for the first time since his abduction, the “deeply loved” and “exquisitely cherished” spaniel struggles “to crawl,” like a baby, toward his mistress (trixy 188-189). miriam “stoop[s] to lift” caro and holds “the little creature in her arms — its face against her own, its paws around her neck” (trixy 189). she then becomes “absorbed in a series of efforts to induce the dog to swallow some milk” (trixy 191). “it was not,” we are told, “until she alyssa chen walker — bringing the laboratory dog home: elizabeth stuart phelps and the antivivisection narrative 115 had succeeded in these attempts [to feed caro], and caro had fallen asleep, that she recovered in some degree her own composure” (trixy 191). in this moment of domestic intimacy between human and dog, phelps idealizes miriam’s single-minded (or what tuan might call “overbearing”) ministrations to caro’s needs and celebrates her “maternal” lack of self-concern. phelps further underscores the familial status of the novel’s pets by repeatedly rendering them as child-like. just as caro crawls and coos like a baby, trixy the poodle resembles a child and relates to her human caretakers accordingly. on several occasions, trixy’s guardian, dan badger, characterizes her as a child in a dog’s body. addressing the audience of a theatrical performance, at which trixy dons a “little white tulle-covered dress,” dan proclaims, “you see her now, ladies and gentlemen, a little dog in child’s clothes; but you wouldn’t understand mebbe as well as i do--that really, trixy is a child in dog’s clothes” (trixy 73, 75). as part of the evening’s repertoire, trixy parades on two legs, curtsies, leap-frogs, rides a teeter-totter, somersaults, sings, dances, and plays with various toys. for the finale, she prances into miriam lauriat’s lap, wrapping “both paws around the young lady’s neck” (trixy 76). in this pose, the pair radiates the exalted bearing of an interspecies pietà. “the face of the dog could not be seen,” phelps continues, “and its child’s dress and infantile attitude gave a strange impression, as if some new madonna, gently owning her kinship to the subject races, had arisen to protect them” (trixy 76-77). this scene of familial intimacy foreshadows the later integration of dan and trixy into miriam’s household. following the traumatic episode at galen laboratory, philip surbridge tells miriam’s aunt that her niece “has adopted the lad--and trixy--into the family” (trixy 230). aunt cornelia, aghast, exclaims, “she might give trixy a high chair” (trixy 231). indeed, she might. the domestic spaces in trixy produce intimate bonds between humans and dogs akin to those of family members. as sterling hart remarks of his cousin’s dog in though life us do part, “i’m rather fond of clyde myself. he’s been in the family a good while” (54). while phelps’s canine protagonists retain their child-like qualities outside of the home, their status as family pets is violable, unstable, and always under threat. the precariousness of the dogs’ domestic position stems in large measure from an incongruity between narrative constructions of intimacy and private ownership. the tension between these two concepts inheres in the paradoxical notion of “pet ownership,” in which dogs are at once family members and owned objects (that may be humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 116 bought, sold, or stolen). although the dogs in phelps’s antivivisection stories may feel as though they belong in a particular place or with a particular person, their lawful homes are not necessarily “where their hearts are.” a passage describing the turmoil trixy experiences while imprisoned at galen suggests the complexities and contradictions associated with her position as a stolen pet. phelps writes: “for two weeks the french poodle had been bewildered by the agony of homesickness. torn from its master, from its home, from its occupation, it had fallen into lethargy that had dispossessed it of its natural reason. now, after the last desperate and futile attempt to break or gnaw the rope, the baffled creature had cast itself upon the floor. in that moment of exhaustion, memory flooded its brain. with a bound the dog leaped to its feet. it uttered a short, piercing bark of triumph. suddenly trixy had found herself” (trixy 162). trixy’s “homesickness” indicates that she feels dispossessed of her proper place and of her occupation as a theatrical show-stopper. she is a lost dog in two senses: dan has lost possession of her and she has lost a sense of herself and her place in the world. in the galen laboratory, trixy’s feelings, faculties, and unique traits are irrelevant. she matters only as an object of scientific inquiry. yet, sadly, she retains the old loyalties, desires, and affections of a pet. she feels dispossessed because her owner has been dispossessed of her. phelps’s inconsistent use of pronouns (i.e., it, she) in the above passage and elsewhere in the novel reflects trixy’s paradoxical position as both a child-like individual and an object of property. dogs in court: the question of ownership. dogs — as mobile, sentient, and selfdirected property--have a tenuous relationship to their homes and human intimates. they can stray, run away, or get lost. dognappers can coax them with treats, snatch them from yards, or intercept them during unaccompanied walks. both trixy and caro temporarily lose their familial status when black-market dog bandits steal them from their homes. ironically, dan and miriam’s best recourse for restoring trixy and caro’s family position is to invoke their legal status as property. for both humans, this strategy ultimately proves effective in regaining custody of their canine companions. much of the drama in trixy derives from challenges to owners’ legal claims to their dogs. a dispute over caro, in fact, drives a bitter wedge between olin steele and miriam lauriat. when dr. steele finds miriam cradling “his” missing dog (who turns out to be her lost pet, caro) in her arms, he blurts out, “why, that’s my dog! where did you get it? i’ve been all morning hunting for it” (trixy 193). dr. steele recognizes the animal as his professional possession, the live instrument of “his own work” (trixy 193). miriam challenges his professional claim to caro with the sentimental rejoinder: “the dog is mine. this is caro. i lost him two years ago. i thought he was dead. i never cared alyssa chen walker — bringing the laboratory dog home: elizabeth stuart phelps and the antivivisection narrative 117 for any other dog” (trixy 198). miriam’s expressions of love for caro prove less effective, however, than her invocation of legal rights to him. only after she produces caro’s collar and licensing tag does dr. steele finally capitulate. unlike the relatively quick resolution to the dispute over caro, the battle for trixy plays out in a very formal and public arena. in fact, the dispute culminates in a courtroom trial that pits little dan badger against the heavyweights of the galen medical establishment. again, dan’s recovery of his beloved companion hinges on the construction of the dog as private property. as attorney philip surbridge reminds the court in his closing statement, the case boils down to “respect [for] the sacredness of property” (trixy 256). in order to bolster dan’s ownership claim, philip surbridge submits into evidence a torn blanket on which the boy had indelibly scrawled: “this belongs to trixy badger. she is a little white dog. she belongs to daniel e. badger, 123 blind alley. if lost, please return her” (trixy 252). the blanket, recovered from an ash barrel outside of galen’s vivisection laboratory, sways the judge in dan’s favor. following the revelation of the blanket, there is no longer any question in the judge’s mind that “the dog was stolen” by galen’s canine banditti (trixy 257). the blanket (an object evocative of both childhood and domestic space) not only implies trixy’s familial situation but also serves as evidence of dan’s prior possession of her. like caro’s silver collar, trixy’s blanket indicates a specifically classed ownership. the modest blanket with its handwritten message suggests a working-class affiliation, and it raises the possibility of a non-sentimental attachment to the dog. dan loves trixy but also relies on her as a source of income. the judge’s ruling, thus, protects an investment that is both sentimental and economic. the disjuncture between intimacy and ownership is a driving force behind all of phelps’s stolen-pet plots. loving and caring for a dog is not, as we have seen, enough to establish legal ownership. human caretakers (as well as vivisectors) bear the burden of establishing a legal right to their dogs under the laws of private property. although the court intervenes favorably on behalf of dan and trixy, phelps critiques humane law enforcement as incommodious and insipid in certain circumstances. difficulties arise for the human protagonists in both “tammyshanty” (1908) and phelps’s canine-themed story, “jonathan and david” (1904), when legal conceptions of ownership fail to coincide with interspecies bonds based on mutual intimacy and cohabitation. in “tammyshanty,” the dog license stands as a synecdoche for humane law and poses a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 118 significant obstacle for poor jacket tammany, who cannot afford the city’s pet-licensing fee of two dollars. through the generosity of a senior officer of an unnamed humane organization, jacket eventually acquires a dog-owner’s license at the city hall for his “mongrel” terrier, tammyshanty. when a dognapper abducts tammyshanty, jacket naively assumes that the license will expedite his companion’s recovery. jacket scours the city with unflagging persistence, greeting countless strangers with his robotic query: “say, mister, hev you seen a lost dog anywheres? a licensed dog?” (“tammyshanty” 8). the law, jacket eventually realizes, can bestow ownership but not necessarily protect it. bolstered by “a mob” of humane citizens, jacket finally recovers his dog from the vivisection laboratory. his humble interspecies “family” remains intact only through the generosity of a concerned public. phelps’s short story, “jonathan and david,” also suggests a disjuncture between bonds of intimacy and legal ownership. like jacket tammany in “tammyshanty,” jonathan perch is initially unable to purchase a license for his beloved dog due to a lack of financial resources. although jonathan cannot assert legal ownership of david the collie without the two-dollar license, he nevertheless proves a scrupulous caretaker to his canine charge. throughout the narrative, phelps feminizes jonathan’s nurturing relationship to the dog with whom he dutifully shares “his fire, his food, his bed, his mind, his heart, his past, [and] his future” (“jonathan and david” 365). in establishing the pair’s familial bond, phelps recounts how jonathan “guarded [david] anxiously from every snow-storm, covered the shivering little body with his own ragged comforter a dozen times a night, brooded over him like a mother through distemper and teething, and patiently educated the growing dog with the passion and the opportunity of love and leisure” (“jonathan and david” 365). at times, jonathan even addresses david with the affectionately diminutizing salutation: “why, you’re nothing but a baby — you!” (“jonathan and david” 365). despite jonathan’s parental devotion, he knows that he is not david’s “lawful owner” (“jonathan and david” 370). “you’re a tax-dodger…,” he regretfully informs the dog, “it’s my fault, david. i can’t pay. i can’t get together two dollars — not any way. i’ve only got seventy-six cents. your taxes are most two months overdue. i’ve been so worried i can’t sleep” (“jonathan and david” 366). jonathan fears that if he does not purchase the license soon, then the city dogcatcher will destroy david. hoping to save david from this fate, jonathan sells him to a conman for the price of a dog license. with no foreseeable way of recovering his dog, jonathan lapses into a depression. as in “tammyshanty,” it is not the court that intervenes on jonathan’s behalf but the humane public that effects the eventual return of david to his loving home. alyssa chen walker — bringing the laboratory dog home: elizabeth stuart phelps and the antivivisection narrative 119 without the economic advantages of the middle-class pet owner, jacket tammany and jonathan perch must rely on a sympathetic public to restore their interspecies families. their predicament underscores the importance of humane citizens, whose random acts of charity hold the long arm of physiology at bay and compensate for the limited protections offered by the legal system. while “tammyshanty” and“jonathan and david” end with happy reunions between guardian and dog, both stories present interspecies relationships based solely on love and cohabitation as tenuous. the home in phelps’s antivivisection fiction fails to sustain the family bond it produces between its human and canine inhabitants and, ultimately, proves an ineffective barrier against unwanted penetration from both authorized and illicit intruders. creating exigency: “yours may be such a household.” to underscore this point in her humane narratives, phelps calls attention to the liminal sites between the home and the streets. in trixy, for example, a dog-bandit abducts trixy from the open area just outside of dan’s tenement building. in “tammyshanty,” the dognapper takes the even bolder step of breaching jacket’s living quarters (presumably nabbing tammyshanty through a broken window). describing jacket’s frantic search of his tenement, phelps emphasizes the porosity of domestic space. snow drifting through shattered windows suggests the utter violability of the home structure. tammyshanty’s vulnerability to abduction is compounded by the fact that he spends the majority of his time sitting at broken windows, reposing on the tenement stoop, and patrolling the alleys surrounding his home. windows, doorways, and stoops are conspicuous features of the urban architecture in all of phelps’s antivivisection works. her canine characters and their human caretakers spend an inordinate amount of time gazing through, sitting at, and lingering near these liminal sites. the color illustrations in loveliness suggest the importance of these spaces in phelps’s narrative landscape. with the exception of the story’s frontispiece (a portrait of loveliness), its illustrations all depict characters in liminal positions: adah keeping vigil at her windowseat, a dognapper stealing loveliness from his family’s doorstep, and adah and loveliness skipping down a path in their yard (figures 2, 3, 4). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 120 figure 2. figure 3. figure 4. alyssa chen walker — bringing the laboratory dog home: elizabeth stuart phelps and the antivivisection narrative 121 as we have seen, phelps’s canine abduction narratives complicate popular conceptions of the home as a safe, private, and impenetrable space for interspecies families. that dogs spend much of their time in the liminal territory between the home and the street (e.g., yards, stoops, doorsteps, gardens) makes them all the more vulnerable to abduction. the dog, whose familial status is produced by and sustained in the home, faces innumerable risks when removed from its domestic situation. like slippery tentacles stretching out from the laboratory, mercenary dog-suppliers extend the reach of the scientific establishment into the city streets, the public parks, the yards, and even the homes of america’s animal lovers. the ease with which dognappers violate domestic space feeds our horrifying sense that public and private spaces can never exist in total isolation from each other. by the 1908 publication of “tammyshanty,” phelps’s vivisection laboratory and private home have become one and the same. although the home laboratory in “tammyshanty” remains unsignified as a narrative space, it literalizes the anxiety that modern science knows no limits. in populating her stories with dog bandits and private vivisectors, phelps generates exigency for the antivivisection cause by suggesting that anyone’s dog may be stolen from anywhere at any time. she decreases the emotional distance between the reader and the anonymous laboratory animal with her subtle insistence that this could be your dog. rather than exposing her readers to mass suffering in the laboratory, phelps individualizes the laboratory dog and frames humane activism as a defense of family bonds and private property. although the laboratory remains an unsignified space in phelps’s narrative, it is nonetheless an ever-present and indispensible nerve-center of her antivivisection fiction. the specter of the laboratory always looms at the narrative outskirts, and its vast network of dognappers poses a constant threat to the sanctity of the interspecies home and to pet owners’ property rights. the laboratory constitutes what michel foucault might have called a heterotopic site, or an “other” space that exists simultaneously within and outside of society. foucault described such sites as “outside of all places,” even if locatable in physical reality (24). we might conceptualize phelps’s laboratory, then, as a kind of disaffective heterotopia in which scientists violate legal and social standards of behavior toward animals. as a negative mirror of the interspecies home, the laboratory threatens to destroy the values and meanings that owners invest in their pets. in phelps’s antivivisection fiction, the laboratory is an unseen space yet also “the greatest reserve of the imagination” (to borrow foucault’s language again) (27). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 122 the terrifying ubiquity of the laboratory implies that every pet owner ought to support the antivivisection platform so that miriam and dan’s story does not become their story. in a stirring recapitulation of dan’s ordeal, philip surbridge admonishes the dog-loving public: “[dan’s] tragic experience is one of hundreds that never reach the knowledge of the public, or the protection of the courts. the merciful dénouement of this dark tale does not often await the bereaved household that has mysteriously lost its dumb and cherished friend. yours may be such a household. mine might be such bereavement. we, too, may be elected to share this fate into which the physiology of our day drags the animal and the human too” (trixy 255). philip surbridge confronts his audience with the harrowing suggestion that all domestic pets are vulnerable to abduction, even those ensconced in warm, nurturing homes. yet, the true rhetorical force of his monologue emanates from its portrayal of both the animal and the human as victims of modern physiology. framed in this way, vivisection’s most sinister corollary is what surbridge calls the “bereaved household.” the private bourgeois home, which contemporary print media rhapsodized as the nucleus of emotional fulfillment and a refuge from the burdens of the outside world, is the unexpected casualty of physiological science run amok. in its idealized form, the american home fostered affective bonds, proper sociability, and kindly care for dependent beings. as the locus of childrearing, it also supplied the principal context for instilling in future generations the domestic virtues of empathy, self-restraint, and fair play. in antivivisection fiction of the period, threats to the home are embodied differently by the mercenary dognapper and the vivisector. the dognapper, who ostensibly participates in the black-market animal trade out of economic necessity, breaches his victim’s home clandestinely and with utter anonymity. the vivisector, by contrast, enters domestic space through the legitimate avenues of middle-class sociality and with a range of possible motives. in trixy, dr. olin steele gains access to miriam lauriat’s home through culturally sanctioned protocols of courtship and with the intention of securing a suitable wife. while an attractive prospect by measure of his wealth and social position, dr. steele lacks the requisite personal qualities for intimate companionship and, consequently, poses a liability to any domestic dependents that might come under his purview. as miriam lauriat realizes, marriage to such a man likely would produce a home bereft of “tenderness,” “kindness,” “sympathy,” and “the daily shelter of a safe character” (trixy 298). indeed, dr. steele’s scientific ethos contravenes the culture of compassionate selfrestraint in which the turn-of-the-century family ideal was rooted. his professional alyssa chen walker — bringing the laboratory dog home: elizabeth stuart phelps and the antivivisection narrative 123 mandate compels him to devalue or deny any phenomenon that defies explanation by the scientific method, and his quotidian practice of brutality blunts his emotional acuity. dr. steele even contends, for example, that maternal affection does not exist because he is unable to observe it in the brain cells of vivisected dogs (trixy 54). this finding inspires him to undertake a follow-up investigation into the existence of love. for two months, dr. steele probes the brains of laboratory animals in an effort to collect material evidence of love. but love, we are told, was too evasive: “it was not to be cut out by a scalpel or grasped by pincers; and dr. steele therefore [wrote] a paper, learnedly contending that love was only a greek hypothesis, a psychic disease, the dream of the past, the illusion of the present, and did not exist” (trixy 55). dr. steele’s thesis on love’s nonexistence, for which he is awarded the highest degree in physiological science, renders him inadmissible to the affective realm of domestic life. he, thus, constitutes an antagonist on multiple narrative registers, serving as the embodiment of the novel’s most reviled values, the foil to its dog-loving characters, and the chief impediment to its romance plot between miriam lauriat and philip surbridge. through this interplay of the romantic drama and the stolen-pet plot phelps’s narrative achieves its most unsettling tensions and satisfying resolutions. the antivivisection novel insists — by means extrinsic to journalism, polemic, and other generic forms — that readers envisage the modern physiologist in a variety of social contexts and relationships. the figure of the vivisector-as-suitor compels readers to project into the sanctified realm of nurturance, intimacy, and tender care the habitual violence of the physiology laboratory. imagine, the narrative exhorts us, this type of man as a husband and father! in conveying her antivivisection message as romance fiction, phelps suggests the broad horizons of moral decay engendered by the physiologist in american society. ultimately, it is in the familiar roles of lover, husband, father, and friend that the vivisector threatens to extend his deleterious social influence. for miriam lauriat, whose independent income, discerning judgment, and secure living arrangements permit her to defer marriage or forsake it altogether, the vivisector proves only a temporary vexation. but even the redoubtable heroine of trixy succumbs briefly to the vivisector’s wiles, leading us to wonder what might become of a woman with meager resources and clouded judgment. as miriam herself predicts, such a person would sacrifice an essential part of her gendered identity, as no “true woman” could ever “take a vivisector’s hand” (trixy 274). although trixy concludes with a scene of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 124 domestic tranquility, it augurs only darkness and disquietude for the bereaved family of the vivisector. trixy is as much about the cruelty that humans inflict on dogs as it is about the suffering that human beings impose on themselves. the novel’s interlocking plots beg the question: what type of humans should we — phelps’s “intelligent and kind-hearted” readers — strive to be? the story’s haunting displacement of the vivisector and his canine victims into the domestic arena encourages readers to define and defend the structuring values of their most intimate spaces and relationships. in the context of phelps’s literature, dogs make compelling figures because they mediate the range of emotional and physical geographies that underpin american social life. reduced to a grotesque spectacle, the dog of the antivivisection polemic bears scant resemblance to its former self and inspires revulsion as much as sympathy. to phelps’s mind, society was best-served when canine bodies remained intact both in the laboratory and in literature. in dog love, a cultural study of human-canine relationships in the united states, literary scholar marjorie garber notes that humane organizations exist in order to moderate our species’ staggering propensity for inflicting pain on the weak. yet, she reflects, “‘humane societies’ … evoke in their very titles the good qualities of human beings: kindness, mercy, compassion” (garber 15). to be human is to exist in a natural state that encompasses a full range of flaws and brutalities. to be humane, however, is to adhere to a socially prescribed standard of compassion. in defining the cultural parameters of humaneness, phelps’s narratives stayed well within the bounds of popular fiction and, therefore, appealed to a broader segment of the reading public than did other humane discursive forms. writing against the conventions of the antivivisection exposé, phelps upheld reader-sensitivity as a hallmark of humaneness rather than an obstacle to it. it would seem that the antivivisection novel, as she conceived it, is intended not so much to accommodate gentle readers as to create them. acknowledgements: this essay benefited from the insights of anne c. herrman, belinda miles chen, esther newton, jeremy weijerman, participants of the college english association borders conference, and the journal editors and anonymous reviewers. june howard deserves a special mention for encouraging my early interest in elizabeth stuart phelps. alyssa chen walker — bringing the laboratory dog home: elizabeth stuart phelps and the antivivisection narrative 125 notes 1. vivisection refers to the scientific practice of experimenting on live animals. the term is a compound of the latin words, vivus (living) and sectio (cutting). vivisection, thus, denotes “the cutting of the living.” in the context of western medicine, the tradition of live animal experimentation can be traced as far back as the mid-fifth century bce, when alcmaeon of croton sliced the optic nerves of living animals and documented their ensuing blindness. vivisection became a source of public controversy in the united states during the latter half of the nineteenth century. the rise of the antivivisection movement was coeval with the institutionalization of experimental physiology in american universities. public reprehension reached a fevered pitch at the turn of the century, when physiology became a standard course of the medical curriculum. for a historical account of the vivisection controversy in western societies, see nicolaas a. rupke’s vivisection in historical perspective (1990). 2. see, for example, susan coultrap-mcquinn’s doing literary business: american women writers in the nineteenth century (1990), carol farley kessler’s elizabeth stuart phelps (1982), and ronna coffey privett’s a comprehensive study of american writer elizabeth stuart phelps, 1844-1911 (2003). 3. a more recent essay by lori duin kelly chronicles phelps’s serious engagement with the antivivisection movement in massachusetts. kelly, nevertheless, frames phelps’s disapprobation for vivisection as part of a larger concern with the mistreatment of human patients by physicians. 4. ann douglas wood has published most of her scholarly works under the name ann douglas. 5. it was not uncommon for fin de siècle antivivisection stories to feature “home laboratories.” a notable example is mark twain’s “a dog’s tale” (1904). 6. for an interesting analysis of the relationship between graphic antivivisection materials and constructions of femininity, see susan hamilton’s “‘still lives’: gender and the literature of the victorian vivisection controversy” (1991). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 126 7. in addition to the novels and short stories discussed here, phelps wrote several other fictional works that discuss vivisection and thematize human-canine love. her novel walled in (serialized in harper’s bazaar between dec. 1906 and dec. 1907) celebrates the bond between a disabled professor and his canine companion. phelps’s chapter in the collaboratively written novel, the whole family (1908), makes explicit references to vivisection, though only in passing. 8. phelps likely named her fictional medical school for galen of pergamum (c. 130-210), who served as a physician to marcus aurelius and authored a treatise on live-dissection techniques. 9. this sentimental scene in trixy recalls other death-bed revelations in nineteenthcentury american literature, such as eva’s vision of heaven in harriet beecher stowe’s uncle tom’s cabin (1852). notably, phelps and stowe were neighbors in andover, massachusetts from 1851 to 1864. phelps revered stowe and admired the ethical content of her fiction. 10. sigmund freud’s concept of cathexis refers to the concentration of mental or emotional energy on an object, person, or idea. this concept is implicit in much of freud’s work and is discussed explicitly in studies on hysteria (breuer and freud 1895), “project for a scientific psychology” (1895), and jokes and their relation to the unconscious (1905). 11. it is likely that phelps modeled dr. steele’s “one-baby” speech after a comment made by harvard university president, charles william eliot. eliot, who served as harvard president from 1869 to 1909, popularized the pro-vivisection argument that the lives of thousands of animals are worth less than the life of one human child. eliot’s remark came on the heels of the 1894 development of an antitoxin for diphtheria. 12. as katherine c. grier explains in her history of pets in america, the “domestic ethic of kindness” was expected to encompass both the human and nonhuman dependents of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century household. works cited the anti-vivisectionist 17 jan. 1880: 37. alyssa chen walker — bringing the laboratory dog home: elizabeth stuart phelps and the antivivisection narrative 127 breuer, josef, and sigmund freud. studies on hysteria. (1895) trans. james strachey. new york: basic books, 2000. carter, sarah nelson. for pity’s sake. boston: dewolfe, fisk & company, 1897. coultrap-mcquinn, susan. doing literary business: american women writers in the nineteenth century. chapel hill: u of north carolina p, 1990. foucault, michel. "of other spaces.” diacritics 16.1 (1986): 22-27. freud, sigmund. jokes and their relation to the unconscious. (1905) trans. james strachey. new york: w.w. norton, 1960. _______. “project for a scientific psychology.” (1895) the complete psychological works of sigmund freud. standard ed. vol. 1. london: hogarth, 1953. 283397. garber, marjorie. dog love. new york: simon & schuster, 1996. grier, katherine c. pets in america: a history. chapel hill: u of north carolina p, 2006. hamilton, susan. “‘still lives’: gender and the literature of the victorian vivisection controversy.” victorian review 17.2 (1991): 21-34. hampson, judith. “legislation: a practical solution to the vivisection dilemma.” vivisection in historical perspective. ed. nicolaas a. rupke. new york: routledge, 1990. 314-339. journal of zoophily 8 nov. 1899: 127-128. kelly, lori duin. “elizabeth stuart phelps, trixy, and the vivisection question.” legacy 27.1 (2010): 61-82. kessler, carol farley. elizabeth stuart phelps. boston: twayne publishers, 1982. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 2 (spring 2013) 128 leffingwell, albert. vivisection. new york: john w. lovell company, 1889. _______. “vivisection in america.” animals’ rights. henry s. salt. new york: macmillan, 1894. 135-168. _______. the vivisection question. second edition. chicago: the vivisection reform society, 1907. newkirk, ingrid. free the animals. new york: lantern books, 2000. patterson, virginia sharpe. dicky downey: the autobiography of a bird. philadelphia: a.j. rowland, 1899. phelps, elizabeth stuart. the gates ajar. boston: fields, osgood, 1870. _______. “jonathan and david.” harper’s monthly magazine aug. 1904: 365-373. _______. loveliness. boston: houghton, mifflin, 1899. _______. “the married daughter.” the whole family: a novel by twelve authors. new york: harper, 1908. 185-218. _______. “tammyshanty.” woman’s home companion oct. 1908: 9-62. _______. though life us do part. boston: houghton mifflin, 1908. _______. trixy. boston: houghton, mifflin, 1904. _______. walled in: a novel. new york: harper, 1907. privett, ronna coffey. a comprehensive study of american writer elizabeth stuart phelps,1844-1911. lewiston, new york: edwin mellen p, 2003. rupke, nicolaas a. vivisection in historical perspective. new york: routledge, 1990. saunders, marshall. beautiful joe: an autobiography. philadelphia: griffith & rowland p, 1893. alyssa chen walker — bringing the laboratory dog home: elizabeth stuart phelps and the antivivisection narrative 129 sewell, anna. black beauty: his grooms and companions. the autobiography of a horse. translated from the original equine by anna sewell. first ed. london: jarrold & sons, 1877. tuan, yi-fu. dominance and affection: the making of pets. new haven: yale up, 1984. twain, mark. “a dog’s tale.” new york: harper, 1904. wood, ann douglas. “‘the fashionable diseases’: women’s complaints and their treatment in nineteenth-century america.” journal of interdisciplinary history 4.1 (1973): 25-52. the zoophilist 2 july 1888: 46. microsoft word karlsson pdf dummy.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:2 fredrik karlsson anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism a project has been underway in human-animal studies to redefine anthropomorphism from being viewed as an absolute fallacy to a linguistic habit that may or may not be used fallaciously.1 this project has often taken form as resistance against mechanomorphism, i.e. the habit of attributing mechanical properties to nonmechanical entities. those who avoid analogies that use human terms in referring to non-human animals, the argument goes, will instead use mechanistic ones to make those analogies, because we inexorably do make analogies. in order to avoid comparing obviously living animals to dead machines, we should instead make anthropomorphic projections. animals would then be acknowledged as fully living beings with agency and a certain authority.2 this paper proposes to call into question the dichotomizing view that anthropomorphism is necessarily incompatible with mechanomorphism. i will argue that the progress that has been made in reforming the notion of anthropomorphism can also be helpful for understanding mechanomorphism more generously. indeed, both anthropomorphic and mechanomorphic thinkers must agree, and actually do seem to agree, that the ultimate issue at hand is not which morphism to use, but to find appropriate ways to communicate percepts of animals, and, through them, to understand non-human animals to the fullest extent possible. the meaning of anthropomorphisms. anthropomorphism is the habit of using terms salient for human traits to refer to non-human traits. the term thus implies a distinction between human beings and other beings, which makes it a position that is increasingly questioned. with increasing intensity, the human/non-human dichotomy is being deconstructed, linguistically blurred, analytically criticized, or simply discarded in human-animal studies. the disruption of the human/non-human dichotomy invalidates many conventional habits of communicating about animals. as a consequence, the contemporary academic movement of human-animal studies that is characterized by such relativization of “the animal” demands better ways to talk and think about nonhuman animals. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 108 anthropomorphism is one of the linguistic habits that, in its traditional and rather naïve form, is questioned in contemporary human-animal studies. nevertheless, the everyday linguistic habits of anthropomorphism may contain vital insights that assist us in establishing better habits for talking about animals. anthropomorphism may reflect how terms based in human experiences and preserved in human languages can be projected onto those who share neither the experiential pool nor that kind of language (e.g. non-human animals). a critical understanding of anthropomorphism might then help human-animal studies to project human notions onto animals and challenge the view that the above mentioned experiential pool is uniquely human. the ambiguity of anthropomorphism may be said to arise from the co-incidental expression of two ideas: first, that it can be meaningful to talk selectively about human beings (anthropo-), and, second, that terms developed in a certain context may be applied to another context (-morphism). those who think about animals may need the -morphism of anthropomorphism badly enough to accept the term until we pry out the essentializing aura of anthropo-. it has been claimed that it is intrinsic to human nature to conceive of other beings as having human characteristics (hume xix). while not confirming such an essentialist claim, some results from psychological studies do confirm that it is common for people to anthropomorphize both natural and artificial entities, although the tendency varies in strength and is not universally observed (waytz et al. 221-22). this view resonates with the contemporary understanding of anthropomorphism as an inevitable part of our language and percepts that does not necessarily imply an error (daston and mitman 6).3 at the same time, the accusation of anthropomorphism has long been a feared judgment about people’s perceptions of animals, implying a category mistake, or a fallacy in interpreting facts (midgley 331).4 it is unclear whether such critics understand anthropomorphism as making comparisons of analogy or of homology. if anthropomorphism is understood as making homologous comparisons, then the criticism may be understood as a warning against presuming unwarranted similarities between human beings and other animals. if anthropomorphism is instead understood as making analogous comparisons, then the criticism may be understood as a wish to prohibit certain linguistic manoeuvers when talking about animals. the former interpretation is the less problematic one,5 although there are certain occasions, as demonstrated below, where the latter kind of criticism is deployed. fredrik karlsson — anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism 109 anthropomorphism may involve analogies of physical, psychological, or cultural terms (everndon 52–55; waytz et al. 220). physical anthropomorphism was originally a heresy, (mis)used to make claims about the form of god and other divinities.6 today, physical anthropomorphism is uncontroversial, perhaps thanks to its use in the rationale underlying animal experimentation (everndon 54). psychological (also called emotional and mental) anthropomorphism, ascribing a human-like mind and emotions to animals, has long been controversial within science (midgley 332; kennedy 151-60), although many signs point to a change in attitude.7 the issue is further complicated by differing opinions concerning the observability of mental states.8 the animal sentience that is implied by psychological anthropomorphism has had far-ranging consequences for ethical theory.9 cultural anthropomorphism, using notions of human culture to explain animal relations, is also controversial. donna haraway, for example, uses museum dioramas to argue that such visualizations of animals are used to reconfirm patriarchal values of transcendence over bodily vulnerabilities (haraway 26–58). it has been argued that contemporary trophy hunting carries similar values (kalof & fitzgerald 119-22). wildlife television shows arguably reconfirm both gender and sexual stereotypes (ganetz 208-09). even darwinist theory and contemporary, biological research, it has been suggested, carry such values.14 anthropomorphism is, thus, a composite notion. the simplistic idea that anthropomorphism is a vaguely defined, absolute flaw of thought seems ungrounded, considering the diversity of views surrounding the notion. instead, anthropomorphism may be viewed as a functional method of understanding otherness (doniger 33-34). furthermore, while the presumptuousness of some anthropomorphism is problematic, anthropomorphic projections per se are not (rollin 130–1; mitchell 102). it has also been pointed out that not granting non-human beings human-like traits can be as great a flaw in interpreting facts as claiming the opposite – it all depends on the actual nature of the non-human being in question (doniger, loc. cit.). anthropomorphism is, then, sometimes conceived to be an intellectual sin per se, while it may actually be an epistemically neutral or even potentially benign linguistic and perceptual habit of analogy that co-incidentally, and perhaps unfortunately, is used with high frequency in brash statements. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 110 anthropomorphic or technical descriptions? opponents of the use of anthropomorphic projections have sometimes been associated with mechanistic views of animals.11 this is not always the case, however. pamela asquith, for example, admits to the emotional life of animals while arguing that “nonhuman rationality,” which would include emotions, can be described without using anthropomorphism. she argues that the combination of predictability, confirmed observations, and behaviorist terminology can be sufficient. that said, i will elaborate on an opponent to anthropomorphism who does indeed show quite strong mechanistic tendencies in order to prepare an opening for some kinds of mechanomorphic thinking in the realm of human-animal studies. john s. kennedy’s the new anthropomorphism (1992) is a major work opposing anthropomorphism in ethology. kennedy portrays anthropomorphism as a “creeping” (166) and “dangerous” (159) “disease” (160). he identifies an anthropomorphic tendency in the neobehaviorism of ethology. the “old,” explicit anthropomorphism was done away with by the radical behaviorists, but as behaviorism was adapting to a more complex view of the causality of animal behavior it also became vulnerable to unconscious anthropomorphic assumptions (4, 157). kennedy’s remedy is to use technical language that leaves aside all references to an inner life when describing animal behavior (161-7). kennedy admits that anthropomorphism is inherent in human language (5, 160). he even grants that anthropomorphic language has heuristic functions, but insists that it should only be understood metaphorically (9, 88–9, 162–4). as an approach for directly describing animal behavior, anthropomorphism necessarily mis-attributes properties, not the least among them conscious intentionality, to animals (31–2, 157–8). kennedy supports this claim principally by insisting on the distinction between evolutionary causes and proximate causes. evolutionary causes describe why a behavioral pattern has been established within a species, while proximate causes are part of the description of how this behavioral pattern is manifested by an individual representative of the species (49-54), reflecting the distinction between why and how, and, thus, seems useful enough. kennedy's way of proposing and using the distinction, however, also involves mechanistic assumptions. the distinction is expressed by an analogy to a missile. a heat-seeking missile is constructed for a purpose and therefore the missile moves in accordance with a purpose; the missile itself, however, cannot be considered purposeful. the evolution of fredrik karlsson — anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism 111 an animal’s behavioral pattern follows certain evolutionary purposes and therefore the animal moves as if it were reflecting such purposes, but the animal itself cannot be called purposeful (68-75). to insist that certain non-human animals do have a conscious purpose for their actions (e.g. eating because of hunger, or fleeing because of fear) would be as presumptuously anthropomorphic as would the ascription of purposefulness to missiles. the analogy to machines is an appropriate pedagogical approach to the extent that it clarifies the distinction between “why” and “how” in behavioral issues. the reader is expected to understand that kennedy uses the apparent intentionality of missiles as a metaphor to explain that animal behavior may not be easy to explain after all. but kennedy says more than what such a metaphor would allow. he also uses the comparison between animals and missiles in a homologous sense. not only should the reader accept her own limitations in understanding animals, she should also accept that animals are not consciously intentional. why? because, the argument goes, missiles are not consciously intentional. the analogy is originally about a conceptual distinction, but is then thwarted and carried too far. animals cannot, prima facie, sensibly be compared to missiles. using missiles as a metaphor for animals can only be about establishing apparent intentionality, which is a common and typical property of both groups. kennedy, however, tacitly turns this analogous comparison into a homologous one, involving full-natured animals and full-natured missiles ― “animals are (in a specific sense) like machines” turns into “animals are machines.” kennedy speaks appreciatively of the view that animals are complex machines consisting of physiological mechanisms honed by natural selection. he further argues that this is not at all reductionist because the complexity of animal behavior is honored by the view (2-3, 62-3, 121). these statements do not comport very well with his claim that his aim is merely to point out that it is wrong to assume animal minds, not that they may not exist (157-8). to assume that animals are like machines is usually associated with the assumption that they do not have minds. still, the ambivalence in attitude about the existence of animal minds makes it clear that his reasoning, including the suggested solution to anthropomorphic errors, does not rely on denying the existence of animal minds. it might be combined with theories that assume the existence of animal minds, as long as the arguments for such an assumption do not rest on fallacious anthropomorphism. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 112 the solution of describing animal behavior in technical, allegedly objective language may further support the suspicion of an underlying mechanistic view. it might also, however, be understood as a call for a less biased language in describing animals. other sections of kennedy's text can be interpreted as attempts to develop a method for studying animals with an open mind about differences from human beings that may or may not be combined with the mechanistic view. the analogy to heat-seeking missiles, misformulated as it may be, might then be understood as treating animals as mindless things methodologically, in order not to misunderstand their inner life. to speak only of physiological mechanisms might be a sign of humility before all the possibilities of animal natures. although the formulation of the analogy gives the impression that animals are believed either to be conscious in a goal-directed sense or not to have minds at all, it should actually be understood as saying that a human-like (i.e. goal-directed) mind should not be projected onto the animal without further evidence, in order to preserve all other possibilities. other instances of kennedy’s reasoning contain the same kind of interpretive ambiguity. for example, he views intentionality as inappropriate for descriptions of animal behavior. instead, he recommends describing behavioral patterns as harmonizing with other such patterns in the same individual (87). this would allow animal behavior to be conceived as a self-referential, harmonious network, as opposed to implying human-like motivation. this might be viewed as stemming from a mechanistic view of animals. if, on the contrary, the use of behaviorist language is viewed analogously, then the avoidance of intentionality-oriented explanations seems to be inspired by the desire to keep open the possibility of animal minds without biases of human-likeness. another, similar, example is kennedy’s reluctance to attribute cognition to animals (102-3). the case may be interpreted as a refusal to entertain the possibility that any non-human animals have cognition. still, it might be understood as a wish to preserve all the possibilities of different kinds of animal cognition (as well as the possibility that there is none) until we know more. since kennedy claims that we cannot assume whether animals have consciousness or not, the latter interpretation is preferable. the option of cleansing anthropomorphism from academic thought may, thus, be founded on a concern for animals. it is actually the same kind of concern as that of scholars who worry that the mechanomorphism of authors such as kennedy fredrik karlsson — anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism 113 misrepresents animals. both share the concern for describing animals well. this interpretation of kennedy, however, assumes a generous reading of an otherwise ambiguous text. i will shortly elaborate on the rationale of one of kennedy’s critics in order to develop this thought. kennedy's approach is based on the claim that the use of technical language attempts to avoid ordinary language’s tendency to treat animals as acting subjects (asquith 2). technical language thus creates a space where perceptions of animals can be explained without the normative disturbances of everyday language, allegedly avoiding anthropomorphism (crist 2–6). eileen crist disputes this notion that technical languages are neutral. in images of animals (1999), crist argues that the use of technical language in descriptions of animals is no less normative, and no less prone to mistakes, than explicitly anthropomorphic approaches. she, too, directs her attention to the sciences of animal behavior, but suggests an alternative solution. technical descriptions of animals, she claims, generalize the animal to the extent that particular, real animals disappear (92). the descriptions are instead flooded by technical terms that make the animal merely a symbolic carrier of the underlying theory or paradigm in question. anecdotal descriptions using everyday language, filled by anthropomorphic terminology, can, by contrast, acknowledge individual animals with all their particularities (68, 84-5, 90). informal, everyday language, in crist’s view, implies that the acts of animals are meaningful, authored, and continuous. it does not, as technical language does, dichotomize the percepts and descriptions of animal acts into subjective and objective aspects (4, 38-9). such a dualism between object and subject creates a mechanistic view of animals. instead of human terms, mechanical terms (perhaps primarily the sign of the nonliving instrument) are transferred to animals; instead of anthropomorphism, mechanomorphism (9). anthropomorphism bridges the objective and the subjective aspects of percepts. animals should, crist contends, be described by active verbs where the animal is the grammatical subject (77-8, 82). “the grub is witnessed as owning a world and authoring the work of its world. it thus becomes a subject” (82). crist here uses the early naturalists’ concept of lifeworld to make her point. the intention is not to claim that grubs consciously hold a worldview. rather, she views anthropomorphic descriptions as helping the perceiver to gain an understanding of the actual animal as being alive, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 114 and that this understanding may involve more than general facts of physiology. anthropomorphic language reminds us that the apparent object is a subject, or rather a quasi-subject/quasi-object. it is itself, beyond our construed categories. the particulars of the circumstances under which grubs pursue an authored and coherent life may remain to the greater part obscure and indescribable, and we may be forced to retreat to terminology carrying uniquely human notions in order to make some headway. such terminology, albeit imprecise, acknowledges the variety of individual animals in a way that technical language never can, according to crist. the lack of substantial general content in such language suggests that the animal has a role in a greater context to which human beings also belong. that role means that even the acts of a grub are authored, meaningful, and continuous, whether they are conscious or not. anthropomorphic language is a reminder both that the describer, too, is an animal, and that the grub, too, is fully alive. the grub and the human are both, to an extent, part of the same environment. if human lives are authored, meaningful, and coherent, then the grub's life is as well – but in a sense that may escape human language. anecdotal descriptions of grubs or wasps or ants by the early naturalists may not provide correct information about insects in general, but they do, instead, remind us of the significance of each wasp's life by making analogies to human lives. quite obviously, this approach to anthropomorphism is not anthropocentric, but is based rather on the notion that there is no dichotomy between “nature” and “man.” kennedy and crist obviously approach anthropomorphism, as well as animals, quite differently. kennedy is happy to use mechanistic terminology, while he considers human-oriented terminology to be saturated with misleading normativity. crist promotes the opposite view. crist recommends flourishing descriptions of animals, while kennedy wants to take the minimalist skeptic’s path. (crist, incidentally, does not agree that science takes a minimalist stance.) kennedy wants measurable, scientific truth, while crist wants to provoke the interpretation of percepts. crist promotes an individualist and situational take on animals, while kennedy frames animals as part of a generalizable community, namely a scientifically defined species. even so, there are also important similarities. both are concerned with describing the animal well. kennedy focuses his arguments on biases of human-likeness, while crist criticizes overly rationalized generalizations. even if this similarity also contains differences in the concept of the animal, both insist on carefully considering tacit prejudices in descriptions of animals. both authors are troubled by descriptions using tacitly connotative terms. they agree that people should be freed from normativity that fredrik karlsson — anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism 115 channels perception through stereotypical notions. kennedy’s salvation is the alleged value-neutrality of numbers and technical terms, while crist wants to give us an imaginative normativity that helps us to see the agency and authority of particular animals. in spite of such similarities in purpose, the debate between authors like kennedy and crist has become dichotomous. the promotion of anthropomorphic language is rarely understood as compatible with the scientific approach to animal behavior. those who prefer to use technical language instead refine behaviorist terminology and other methods to avoid anthropomorphism, without ever mentioning criticisms of implicit mechanomorphism. this is unfortunate, as this issue is not ultimately about human ideology, as both crist and kennedy admit, but about animals and describing them well. a short overview of the debate over critical anthropomorphism will show that using refined anthropomorphism may not always contradict the simultaneous use of mechanomorphism. critical morphisms. critiques like crist’s are in line with the view that anthropomorphism is an efficient communicative strategy, instances of which may or may not contain errors. the notion of critical anthropomorphism was introduced in order to provide criteria by which erroneous anthropomorphisms can be distinguished from valid ones. importantly, since the term “critical anthropomorphism” was first introduced by burghardt, morton et al., it has been associated not only with a refinement of anthropomorphic descriptions, but also with the view that scientific and empathetic approaches to study animals can and should be combined. many authors of critical anthropomorphism repeat mary midgley’s suggestion that (psychological) anthropomorphism is worthy of trust if the emotion and the creature that is claimed to feel it are sufficiently familiar. emotions involve an observable attitude that can assist us in gaining knowledge about the emotion, and thus confirming the anthropomorphic language we use (midgley 331–8). for example, it has been suggested that if there is observational evidence of causal similarities to human states, then anthropomorphism is appropriate (mitchell 114). another suggestion is that critical anthropomorphism is attained if the observable properties building a definition of the human correlative can also be observed among animals (mcgrew 72–87). this approach thus utilizes commonly observable aspects of the surroundings in order to validate anthropomorphism. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 116 another approach is used by wemelsfelder et al. they employ statistics to identify significant commonalities of test subjects’ descriptions of animals. the descriptions consisted of adjectives such as “irritable” and “playful,” and were thus instances of psychological anthropomorphism. the statistical method correlated the uses of various terms and resulted in graphical representations of consensus profiles. because similar terms were grouped together, it could be concluded that the test persons indeed described a common experience. rather than letting the anthropomorphism depend on observable similarities between human and animal, this approach attempts to identify intersubjective content in reported experiences. critical anthropomorphism would, then, be understood phenomenologically. a further approach may be to evaluate the use of anthropomorphism in terms of the purpose of the particular practice in question. for example, prediction is often viewed as the functional purpose of science. in correlation with this, it has been suggested that if the attribution of emotional states repeatedly correlates with successful predictions of behavior, then such anthropomorphism is valid for ethology (andrews 52). alternatively, it is possible to argue that simplicity is a core value of science, and that any methodology, including anthropomorphism, can be approved if it correlates with simplicity.12 if anthropomorphism is used in other practices, where other values are important, then the evaluation of anthropomorphism changes accordingly. understood in this way, this approach has an underlying, pragmatic rationale. perhaps other kinds of critical anthropomorphism can be distinguished. these three examples are, however, sufficient to show that the debate over critical anthropomorphism spans several and quite different approaches. furthermore, they also show that, in spite of their differences, all approaches to critical anthropomorphism relate in some way to science. this association with science is obvious in the first and third approaches. the second approach is associated with phenomenology, which has sometimes invited anti-scientific (or, at least, anti-mathematizing) rhetorics. wemelsfelder et al.’s methods, however, are clearly described and of a repeatable nature.13 also, they have been repeated, confirmed, and controlled for confounding factors.20 positivistically inclined empiricists may not agree that what is claimed to be observed by wemelsfelder et al. can be observed. that, however, would demonstrate differences between positivism and phenomenology towards mentalism, intersubjectivity, and the scope of perception, rather than showing that wemelsfelder et al. do bad science. and no-one should be surprised to find differences between positivism and phenomenology. fredrik karlsson — anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism 117 the debate over critical anthropomorphism has, thus, always acknowledged the importance and utility of science. at the same time, it has also been made clear in the very same debate that one of science's most characteristic features ― technical language ― carries an inherent risk of fallacious mechanomorphism. a resolution might be found without banning scientists from the discourse. it may be possible to use scientific thinking substantially in the debate over appropriate descriptions of animals without accepting technical language. it might be possible to build on values such as repeatability, predictability, simplicity, and/or other typically scientific values, while avoiding the linguistic habits that have traditionally been cultivated by the scientific community. the question remains, why would we accept at the outset an approach that forbids or avoids a certain way to express ideas? and by which kind of mechanomorphism are we offended? if the suggestion is to ban analogies using mechanical terms in descriptions of animals, in what way would that be more precise than a general ban on analogies using human terms? the case should rather be conceived as one about resisting homologies rather than analogies made between machines and animals. it is true that descriptions of animals consistently using behaviorist terminology, or expressing physiological or cellmolecular functions, give the impression that animals are robots. if one insists that scientific methodology must describe the entirety of animals, then such an impression seems valid. but if we consider scientific methodology to be characterized by, for example, repeatability and intersubjectivity, and that scientific results are simply the kinds of results that such methods produce, then a description of animals based on scientific results could safely be put at the side of, rather than on top of, descriptions resulting from other methodologies. it might be the case, nevertheless, that some descriptions, no matter whether they imply homologies to machines or not, are wrong. that should invite the development of sophisticated tools to distinguish appropriate descriptions critically, rather than the suggestion that certain kind of terms should be banned. my goal here is to improve the ways in which we describe animals. the scope of descriptive tools needs to be constructively and critically broadened in order to improve the opportunities to describe a greater range of aspects of animals. if analogies in mechanical terms are understood to add to such a range, rather than to invalidate all humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 118 other descriptive aspects, then such terms may very well improve descriptions of animals. if we hope to develop criteria that distinguish excessively romanticizing and misleading anthropomorphic projections from critical anthropomorphism, we must also admit that similar tools may very well distinguish between, for example, the misguided reductionism of some technical language and critically employed technical language that reflects the results of scientific methodology. this specific example builds on the already established distinction between methodological and ontological reductionism. the debate over critical mechanomorphism would surely benefit from the debate over critical anthropomorphism, inspiring phenomenological or pragmatic approaches. conclusion. eventually, one hopes, talk of critical anthropomorphism and critical mechanomorphism will be harmonized to become a discussion about critical morphisms, rather than promoting or forbidding the use of certain kinds of terms. the goal should be to make critical use of terms in order to describe, at least tentatively, agents about whose subjectivity we can have little secure knowledge. the prefixes anthropoand mechano-, implying essentialist kinds of terms and natures, may safely be forgotten when we are equipped with an ever increasing range of critical tools of description. another, and more important, reason to avoid the contempt for mechanical terms is, i would claim, that they may help us to understand the very animals that are supposed to be described. it is true that scientific models often make particular animals invisible, as crist argues. but again, is the problem scientific methodology, or scientism? is the particular grub finding its way through a decaying tree-trunk made invisible in the category of “species” and associated, generalized physiological and anatomical models because of the models and means for studying the grub, or is it because the model is mistaken to be the only possible world the grub can have? taken, truly, as an oh-sohuman attempt to understand the world, is it really so contemptible to describe a grubworld as also being affected by quaternary codes of deoxyribonucleic acid, or to describe its behavior in pseudo-geometrical terms? the rigor of scientific methodology may often force the use of technical language and mechanical terms, but the very same rigor makes such a methodology trustworthy. genes and proteins, behaviorist descriptions, and statistical representations are incomplete descriptions of animals, but they often reflect something true. if we believe it is necessary to describe animals as having agency and behavior, as being both leib and fredrik karlsson — anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism 119 physiology, then it would be helpful, if not indeed necessary, to expand approaches of critical morphism into a tool-box for thinkers. notes 1. see daston and mitman. 2. see crist; de waal. 3. see also crist; elliot. 4. see also fisher; mameli and bortolotti. 5. see fisher. 6. see daston. 7. see schönfeld; andrews; asquith. 8. see fisher. 9. see singer; regan; donovan. 10. see andersson & eliasson. 11. see crist; de waal. 12. see sober. 13. see wemelsfelder et al., “spontaneous qualitative assessment.” 14. see minero et al.; wemelsfelder et al. “effect of perceived environmental background”; napolitano et al. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 120 works cited andersson, måns s., and miriam a., eliasson. ”hur görs djur? könsstereotyper och andropocentrism i studier av andra arter än homo sapiens.” [how are animals made? gender stereotypes and androcentrism in studies of other species than homo sapiens] kvinnovetenskaplig tidskrift [journal of women studies] 2–3 (2006): 65–76. andrews, kristin. “politics and metaphysics? on attributing psychological properties to animals.” biology and philosophy 24.1 (2009): 51–63. asquith, pamela j. “of bonds and boundaries.” american journal of primatology 73.3 (2011): 238–44. crist, eileen. images of animals. philadelphia: temple up, 1999. daston, lorrain. “intelligences: angelic, animal, human.” thinking with animals. ed. lorraine daston and gregg mitman. new york: columbia up, 2005. 37-58. de waal, frans. “anthropomorphism and anthropodenial: consistency in our thinking about humans and other animals.” philosophical topics 27 (1999): 255–80. doniger, wendy. “zoomorphism in ancient india: humans more bestial than beasts.” thinking with animals. ed. lorraine daston and gregg mitman. new york: columbia up, 2005. 17-36. donovan, josephine. “attention to suffering.”’ journal of social philosophy 27.1 (1996): 81–102. elliot, nils lindahl. “signs of anthropomorphism.” social semiotics 11.3 (2001): 289–305. everndon, neil. the social creation of nature. baltimore: john hopkins up, 1992. fisher, john. “disambiguating anthropomorphism: an interdisciplinary study.” perspectives in ethology: vol. 9. ed. p. p. g. bateson and peter h. klopfer. new york: plenum, 1991. ganetz, hillevi. “familiar beasts. nature, culture and gender in wildlife films on television.” nordicom review 25.1–2 (2004): 197–213. fredrik karlsson — anthropomorphism and mechanomorphism 121 haraway, donna. primate visions. london: routledge, 1989. hume, david. the natural history of religion. stanford, ca: stanford up, 1957. kalof, linda, and amy fitzgerald. “reading the trophy: exploring the display of dead animals in hunting magazines.” visual studies 18.2 (2003): 112–22. kennedy, john s. the new anthropomorphism. cambridge: cambridge up, 1992. mameli, m., and l. bortolotti. “animal rights, animal minds, and human mindreading.” journal of medical ethics 32 (2006): 84–9. mcgrew, william c. chimpanzee material culture. cambridge: cambridge up, 1992. midgley, mary. beast and man. london: routledge, 2002. minero, michela, maria vittoria tosi, elisabetta canali, and françoise wemelsfelder. “quantitative and qualitative assessment of the response of foals to the presence of an unfamiliar human.” applied animal behaviour science 116.1 (2009): 74–81. mitchell, sandra d. “anthropomorphism and cross-species modeling.” thinking with animals. ed. lorraine daston and gregg mitman. new york: columbia up, 2005. 100117. morton, david b., gordon m. burghardt, and jane a. smith. “section iii. critical anthropocentrism, animal suffering, and the ecological context.” the hastings center report 20.3 1990: 13–9. napolitano, fabio, giuseppe de rosa, ada braghieri, fernando grasso, aldo bordi, and françoise wemelsfelder. “the qualitative assessment of responsiveness to environmental challenge in horses and ponies.” applied animal behaviour science, 109.2–4 (2008): 342–54. regan, tom. the case for animal rights. berkeley: u california p, 1985. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 122 rollin, bernard e. “anecdote, anthropomorphism, and animal behavior.” anthropomorphism, anecdotes, and animals. ed. robert w. mitchell, nicholas s. thompson, h. lyn miles. albany: state u of new york p, 1997. schönfeld, martin. “animal consciousness.” perspectives on science 14.3 (1996): 354–81. singer, peter. animal liberation. new york: new york review book, 1975. sober, elliot. “comparative psychology meets evolutionary biology.” thinking with animals. ed. lorraine daston and gregg mitman. new york: columbia up, 2005. 85-99. waytz, adam, john cacioppo, and nicholas epley. “who sees human? the stability and importance of individual differences in anthropomorphism.” perspectives on psychological science 5.3 (2010). 219–232. wemelsfelder, françoise, e. a hunter, michael t. mendl, and alistair b. lawrence. “the spontaneous qualitative assessment of behavioural expression in pigs.” applied animal behaviour science 67 (2000): 193–215. –––––. “assessing the ‘whole-animal.”’ animal behaviour 62.2 (2001): 209–20. wemelsfelder, françoise, ian nevison, and alistair b lawrence. “the effect of perceived environmental background on qualitative assessments of pig behaviour.” animal behaviour 78 (2009): 477–84. microsoft word copleand-armstrong h u m a n i m a l i a 1:1 marion w. copeland an animal-centric literature philip armstrong. what animals mean in the fiction of modernity. new york: routledge, 2008. isbn 978-0-415-35839-2. 225 pp. $110 hb; 35.95 pb in his third chapter, “rendering the whale,” armstrong explains what he sees as modernity’s critical failure to account adequately for what the whale—or any otherthan-human animal—means to humans, and its total failure to account for what the other-than-human animal means to itself. since he believes melville is vitally interested in the possibility that the whale possesses “an active independent agency, a resistance to human projects and projectives,” this means that in armstrong’s opinion (and i have to agree) the novel has been largely misunderstood. some critics have adopted what robert zoeller calls ahab’s "transcendental version of moby dick as calculating, ‘deliberative, rational and malignant’” (qtd. in armstrong 102), a description more accurately applied to ahab himself. on the other hand, zoeller (the salt sea mastodon 1973), adopting the anthropocentric euro-american assumption that “conscious intelligence,” and therefore agency, belong to “humans alone,” sees the whale as a naturalistic being enslaved by “instinct” (103). “rendering the whale,” explores, as the chapter’s title implies, the largely anthropocentric historical context of the novel. this consists of “the three intertwined meta-narratives of [humans] of the time: a still potent christian theology, a dominant and expanding industrial capitalism, and an emergent evolutionary science” (115). the first two “maintain […] both an absolute anthropocentric confidence in the invincibility of human enterprises, and an equally anthropocentric impermeable dualism between human and animal based on the former’s allegedly unique capacity for calculated intention.” the third provided melville with a the vision of animal agency distinct from how ahab, as either avenger or whaler, viewed moby dick, and, according to armstrong, that provides the major and overlooked thrust of the novel. read as armstrong reads it, moby dick, poised on the cusp of modernity, becomes a primer for an evolving human awareness of the agency and intentions of other-thanhuman-animals and for a literature that reflects and encourages that awareness. his readers have been prepared for this insight by armstrong’s careful search for animal presence and significance, and for suggestions of both animal agency and a “methodological vocabulary” capable of “articulating animal agency in robinson crusoe 71 marion w. copeland – an animal-centric literature and gulliver’s travels (chapter 1) and frankenstein and the island of doctor moreau (chapter 2). by clarifying how defoe, swift, shelley, and wells, though drawn to a vision of animal agency not dissimilar to melville’s, fail to realize it, armstrong establishes the strength and pervasiveness of western culture’s anthropocentrism. his discussions of these novels are in themselves convincing arguments for how much animal presence and meaning has simply gone unnoticed—or at least unacknowledged by critics. each of these classic texts anticipates a truly animal-centric literature. that they fail to produce more than a ghostly semblance raises in itself significant historical and thematic issues inseparable from the human-animal conundrum, and are well worth the time of any reader interested in animal studies. the chapter following armstrong’s discussion of moby dick considers the work of upton sinclair, d. h. lawrence, and ernest hemingway, tracing the ways in which “the growing influence of positivist science and industry and capitalism” denigrated any emotionally laden relationships between humans and animals as “immature and unrealistic” largely by confining “them to the socially disempowered spheres of feminine domesticity, maternity, and child-rearing” (134). in an earlier essay, “moby dick and compassion,” armstrong wrote: because the notions of “anthropomorphism” and “sentimentality” often are used pejoratively to dismiss research in human-animal studies, there is much to be gained from ongoing and detailed analysis of the changing “structures of feeling” that shape representations and treatments of nonhuman animals. literary criticism contributes to this project when it pays due attention to differences in historical and cultural contexts.1 though the jungle takes readers at least twice into the thought process of “[w]hat the hog thought […], and […] suffered” in the slaughter house, the novel has never been read by literary critics as an argument for “the liberation of farmed animals” (140). perhaps that is because, as armstrong suggests, sinclair himself buries the issue under his exposure of the physical and mental suffering of the slaughterhouse’s human workers, a suffering of more immediate concern to his readers. a similar recognition of and turning away from giving equal weight to human and other-than-human rights and welfare characterize hemingway’s animals and, to a lesser degree, lawrence’s as well. as armstrong observes: “it is not until the second half of the 20th century […] that literary narratives have begun to produce animal histories” that are not overshadowed by human history and concerns (162-163). such “histories,” treating the 72 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) stories of individual nonhumans so that they are understood to be themselves rather than stand-ins for either “wild animality” or the human condition—selves rather than metaphors — are considered in the final chapter of what animals mean. armstrong’s final chapter—“animal refugees in the ruins of modernity”— traces humanity’s growing awareness of the fragility rather than the invincibility of the natural world and, therefore, of the lives dependent upon its increasingly “claustrophobic and denatured environments” (170). less convinced that he himself is not invincible, modern man seeks to control and manage the natural as well as the civilized world. “under modernity,” armstrong writes, all the human structures that circumscribe animal life—farms, zoological parks, slaughter houses, fisheries, nature reserves—become sites for scientific manipulation […], frankensteinian workshops [...], spaces created by and for the purpose of experimentation with the organic world. (181) many of the novels considered in this chapter—novels like timothy findley’s not wanted on the voyage—are set in such spaces. in them humans and their anthropomorphic god are cast as scientific experimenters, too often either mad or senile, and other animals as their experimental subjects. the problem with such spaces is, as randy malamud noted in his reading zoos, that confinement areas “remove (for the most part) animals’ capacity for agentive resistence to interaction with humans, and subject them to constant surveillance and control. they commodify the experience of human-animal interaction and perpetuate the belief that humans have the right to manage the natural world” (175). that conclusion leads armstrong to overlook any positive developments in modern and contemporary literature’s depiction of nonhuman animal characters. some of the novels discussed—findley”s and hoeg’s woman and ape, along with barbara gowdy’s the white bone—do present readers with animal-centric depictions of nonhuman animals as the protagonists of their own life stories, even though those stories are set in spaces that are controlled by humans. instead, armstrong focuses on novels that are not animal-centric, like russell hoban’s turtle diary, yann martel’s the life of pi, and coetzee’s disgrace. although usually characterized as animal novels, these texts follow some of the earliest texts armstrong considers in presenting nonhuman characters either as under human control, without agency or intention, or, in the case of martel, 73 marion w. copeland – an animal-centric literature used solely as metaphors in what armstrong reveals to be “a rhapsody to the power of the (touristic, all-consuming, privileged, globalized, western) human spirit” (179). without question, armstrong’s clear-minded readings of these novels are long-overdue and invaluable correctives, akin to his reading of moby dick in chapter 3. my objection is that they are in fact so powerful and convincing that they lead him (and consequently his readers) to an understandable but incorrect judgment about the current state of animal-centric literature and, by extension, animal studies. nor is armstrong alone in this overreaction to the negative. it stems from at least two of this final chapter’s major sources, marion scholtmeijer’s animal victims in modern literature (1993) and randy malamud’s reading zoos: representations of animals and captivity (1998). like them, armstrong becomes the prisoner of the very metaphor he uses to focus his discussion—ruins and refugees. very like readers determined to see nonhuman animal agency as a threat to human agency, and nonhuman animal equality as a threat to human supremacy, armstrong falls victim to the power of his own argument. and therefore, like scholtmeijer and malamud, he concludes the book with a dispiriting emphasis on “the severely disabling effects” such “regimes of taste” and assumption can have on “the socially transformative function of literature.” while that emphasis is in part a fair conclusion to chapter 5, it fails as an uncontested conclusion to the whole thrust of either armstrong’s book or final chapter. depressed at the current state of human-animal relations the novels he considers reveal, he became blind to the fact that writers like melville, findley, and coetzee have created works intended (in armstrong’s own words) to “dismantle such regimes, in order to re-engage literary fiction with the most vital and intimate of contemporary structures of feeling,” “narratives that attempt translation between the animals we are and the animals we aren’t” (225). what animals mean needs, then, is an “afterword.” despite the lack of an adequate conclusion, what animals mean deserves to be read as an accurate history of the evolving of an animal-centric literature and adequate critical approach that heralds a sea-change in modern western euro-american humans’ attitudes toward and treatment of other animals. consequently, what animals mean is an essential book for anyone involved in animal studies and everyone concerned with animals in literature. (armstrong's bibliography of primary and secondary sources should provide the beginning of a must-read list). i think it very likely that, as readers of malamud were gratified with his visionary 2003 follow-up to reading zoos, poetic 74 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) animals and animal souls (which armstrong does not reference), armstrong’s readers can anticipate a sequel from him that is less the captive of a metaphor, more in touch with the animals and the literature that foregrounds them. with readings such as armstrong provides here and a glass half full instead of half empty, readers will discover in our literatures, past and present and future, narratives that depict nonhuman animal selves and subjects as accurately and convincingly as they depict human animal characters. such characters promise that our fiction, by tapping into the narrative (or sympathetic or metamorphic) imagination that has always mediated between species and is responsible for the animal-centric story that lingers in legend, folklore, myth, and the oral and written literatures of human cultures world-wide, will evolve toward contemporary narratives capable of revealing to human readers what nonhuman animals mean to themselves as well as to us. notes philip armstrong, “moby dick and compassion.” society & animals 12:1(2003): http://www.psyeta.org/sa/sa12.1/armstrong.shtml the animals’ point of view the animals’ point of view andré krebber review of: chiara mengozzi, ed. outside the anthropological machine: crossing the human–animal divide and other exit strategies. perspectives on the nonhuman in literature and culture. london: routledge, 2021. vii + 283 pp., 23 b/w ill. £104.00 (hb); £29.59 (pb, eb) andré krebber is a lecturer in history and human–animal studies at the university of kassel, germany. email: krebber@uni-kassel.de edition number perspectives on the non-human in literature and culture edited by chiara mengozzi outside the anthropological machine crossing the human-animal divide and other exit strategies book review mailto:krebber@uni-kassel.de whatever happened to giorgio agamben in human-animal studies? after the translation and publication of his book the open in 2003 it seemed as if his work was showing up everywhere in academic and political circles concerned with the social treatment of animals. at least in my experience, however, agamben disappeared just as quickly, and one does not come across his work nearly as much in current writings in human–animal studies. according to chiara mengozzi’s new edited volume outside the anthropological machine, such absence might have something to do with agamben’s theorizations of the “anthropological machine”, the device with which he explains the production of human culture by way of its dualistic separation from the animal. firstly, mengozzi writes, “agamben does not describe both sides of the anthropological machine, neglecting what consequences it implies for the life of animals”. and secondly, “he does not indicate what strategies one needs to adopt in order to render the machine inoperative” (1). whether or not this truly is the case is a question for another time and place. but if human–animal studies has tended to foreground both the lived reality of animals and the everyday applicability of its political thought, then agamben’s ideas may indeed look like a dead end. mengozzi goes on to raise another, potentially more deep-seated reason for agamben’s disappearance from critical animal discourse: his theism. mengozzi herself remains ambiguous on the issue. she is quick to point out that agamben’s religious ruminations shouldn’t be dismissed too readily as they may very well provide a fruitful path of inquiry. yet at the same time she reiterates blanket suspicions against the religious, “given that the three major monotheistic religions, far from questioning the anthropological divide, played a significant role in establishing the man-animal binary that allows the machine to function”; consequently, the essays she has curated for this volume engage “in a more secular approach, leaving aside the sphere of the religious” (2). perhaps it is this general suspicion that also has distanced animal scholars from the open. in my opinion, however, it would be worth revisiting this side of agamben’s work, as it might provide some answers to the open questions that mengozzi critiques. copyright © 2022 andré krebber this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 289–297. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.12701 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.12701 krebber, review of mengozzi | 291 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) outside the anthropological machine takes a different route. in her introduction, mengozzi makes a case for how we might render the anthropological machine inoperative by confronting humans with the otherness of animals. yet, despite the prominence of agamben in the book’s title, readers coming to the volume in the hope of learning more about his work, theistically or otherwise, will be disappointed. only four of the fifteen chapters engage with agamben’s work, and none do so in appropriate levels of depth. mengozzi’s introduction uses agamben as little more than a stepping-stone. even her characterization of the anthropological machine remains superficial at best, adopted as a general shorthand for the attempts of humans in the western world to distinguish themselves from and raise themselves above other animals. mengozzi might argue that the chapters are both the explication and unmaking of the anthropological machine. yet nowhere does the concept of the anthropological machine serve as a critical tool of reflection that would allow us to evaluate the papers’ propositions as exit strategies. agamben’s absence is in and of itself not necessarily a problem, especially since the contributions to the volume and their collation are perfectly capable of standing on their own. yet it is odd that a book titled outside the anthropological machine contains only a handful of superficial and incidental mentions of its central concept. the book, it seems to me, makes visible here a tendency in human– animal studies discourses to reproduce rather than re-evaluate established narratives. indeed, it is a commonplace in human-animal studies to start from the observation that animals have been forgotten and written out of human societies, and in the present volume the anthropological machine serves as a convenient shorthand for this narrative. however, while there may have been a (short) time in history when this observation had merit, i wonder whether human– animal studies has not undermined this very claim in recent years, as its scholars have brought to light a much more granular and complex recognition of the problem of interspecies relations throughout history. agamben’s disappearance from animal studies discourses, then, may equally be explained by the very explosion of research in human–animal studies since the 2000s, which in various forms might question the use of the anthropological machine as concept. 292 | krebber, review of mengozzi humanimalia 13.1 (2022) to be clear, not every book has to reflect on such questions — by exploring the perspective and experience of nonhuman animals, outside the anthropological machine makes a different, but no less interesting and weighty contribution. however, by framing the volume’s essays as exit strategies from agamben’s anthropological machine, it surrenders the possibility of questioning whether (post-)enlightenment society really is as dualistic as it appears to be, and consequentially whether such dualism might be the primary problem that we face. instead, it seems time to re-evaluate and rewrite the stories we tell in human–animal studies. the contributions in mengozzi’s volume provide ample starting points for such re-evaluation. as a way of disrupting our societal dealings with other animals, mengozzi embraces the recognition that “animals are simultaneously like us and different from us (but each of them in their particular way) and that their life is neither inferior nor superior than [the lives of] humans” (3–4). this recognition represents a dual movement for mengozzi. on the one hand, it requires us to recognize animal lives as being meaningfully and agentially engaged with the worlds in which they live. on the other, it necessitates an unlearning of our anthropocentrism. mengozzi highlights three challenges that face us when we think through these problems: the relegation of humans from the centre to the “margins” of (historical) narratives; the need to refocus on the relational exchanges between humans and animals and how they aid or hinder “genuine encounters”; and the difficulties of leaving our own human world and entering the animals’ world on their own terms (5). following russian formalist critic viktor shklovsky, mengozzi argues that the technique for tackling these challenges is a thoroughgoing defamiliarization of ourselves as “humans” and a concomitant familiarization with the world of the animal. overall, i found the chapters in the volume excellently curated in responding to these challenges. each makes an original and thought-provoking contribution beyond its immediate empirical concerns while opening up new ways of thinking about and with animals. i would hope that outside the anthropological machine bekrebber, review of mengozzi | 293 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) comes one of those edited volumes that stands the test of time. the volume’s chapters focus on the by-now well-trodden track from the nineteenth century to the present. across the fifteen chapters readers hear from both established and emerging scholars. while europe provides the geographical centre of gravity, the volume balances perspectives on western europe with those from central and eastern europe. analytically, the book develops, as much as this is possible in a traditional edited volume, an arc from the potential of registering and representing the agency of animals in history and literature towards the possibility of adopting the animals’ view in cinematography and video games. it is this analytic arc that makes the book more than the sum of its parts. the first three essays — éric baratay’s “a giraffe’s journey to france (1826–1827): recording the encounter from the animal’s point of view”, violette pouillard’s “structures of captivity and animal agency: the london zoo, ca. 1865 to the present times”, and rachael l. pasierowska’s “atlantic history from the saddle: the role of horses in the slave-trading atlantic world” — experiment, successfully to my mind, with the potential of using a variety of sources to reconstruct the lived experiences of animals in specific historical settings. through a careful reflection on the challenge of understanding the viewpoint of an animal from human-authored sources, baratay reconstructs how the nameless giraffe that was gifted to king charles x of france in 1826 by egypt’s muhammad ali pasha al-mas’ud ibn agha might have experienced the journey from marseille to paris. baratay applies a scientific method to writing an animal’s biography that builds on ethological reflections of the existing source material. pouillard continues baratay’s concern with the experience of the animal but turns to considering the physical environment of captivity as a way to reconstruct the animals’ experience of and agency in the zoo through the architectural changes of the monkey dwellings in the london zoo. pouillard reveals this story not so much as one of improvement, but as one of continual limitations on the animals’ agency through their physical environment. pasierowska, finally, turns our attention to the changes in the atlantic world, both in the northern and southern hemisphere, during the age of slavery. reading together a 294 | krebber, review of mengozzi humanimalia 13.1 (2022) range of different specific cases of horse-human relationships, she proposes that the history of the horse allows us to connect the histories of the various peoples and groups across the americas and write a cross-continental and cross-social atlantic history. michał krzykawski’s chapter shifts the inquiry to a theoretical reflection on the contradictions of a carnivorous lifestyle under capitalism, and as such is somewhat at odds with the other papers in the first section. reading the advent of cultured meat as a radical disruption of the carnivorous foundations of modern western society, the chapter makes the argument that cultured meat might help us move towards a world beyond animal suffering. krzykawski’s essay thus provides a bridge from the previous historical readings to the final two chapters of the section that explore, through literary analyses, how humans struggle to recognize the nonhuman in the world. in “laika’s lullabies”, anita jarzyna provides a comparative reading of different literary forms (newspaper stories, poems and a graphic novel) and their (in)capacity to capture the subjectivity of the famous russian street and space dog laika, highlighting the graphic novel as a genre that proves particularly well suited to recognizing laika’s tragic fate without overwriting her agency. in the second chapter, chiara mengozzi argues that existing analyses of karel čapek’s 1936 novel the war with the newts are symptomatic of an obstinate tendency within criticism to centre the world on the human, even or perhaps especially when confronted with an anti-anthropocentric novel such as this. to counteract such readings, mengozzi offers a non-anthropocentric reading that suggests history will continue even without the presence of humans. the volume’s middle section switches the perspective to the interrogation of animal–human encounters and how they affectively interfere with our sense of a discrete, autonomous human self. in their essays, maria p. gindhart and quentin montagne trace these ideas in the zoo and the aquarium, respectively, as spaces that promise humans close encounters with animals. gindhart continues in the wake of the previous two essays by showing how certain narrative and medial approaches construct and affect encounters between keepers, visikrebber, review of mengozzi | 295 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) tors, and nonhuman animal inhabitants in the zoo. montagne shifts the attention to the boundary between human spectators and animal attractions in public aquaria and traces the attempts to create an unmediated encounter with marine animals by trying (yet ultimately failing) to sublate this boundary. kari weil’s “flesh, fur, and forgetting” departs from another institutionally framed encounter, namely the exhibition “no life lost” (2016) of taxidermied horse skins by berlinde de bruyckere and her collaboration with author j. m. coetzee. in weil’s case, it is the sensation of touch, or indeed our shrinking from it, that creates the boundary between humans and animals. weil shows how de bruyckere’s and coetzee’s languages reestablish a trust in touch that thereby opens up a memory of our shared animality. as weil draws on touch as mutual bond between humans and animals, eva voldřichová beránková’s chapter recenters the potential of our encounters by showing how the literary decadents of the nineteenth century positively embraced their disparagement as “strange animal species” by their opponents to “transcend the human– animal dichotomy” (185). voldřichová beránková argues that the decadents not only advocated for the better social treatment of animals, but also used their literary works to explore animals’ experiences as models of an alternative perception of the world. the book’s final section deepens the pursuit of this latter question, thus continuing a conversational line that stretches across the individual contributions of the volume. the first three chapters here — by anne simon, kári driscoll, and jonathan pollock — continue voldřichová beránková’s engagement with literature and its many constructive and deconstructive strategies as a means to recognize the perspective of animals. simon intriguingly explores how human language can serve to make legible the expressions, emotions, and affects of other animals. since human language evolved not just in conversation with other animals, but from a shared communicative space with other animals, who rely equally on figuration and rhetoric in their lives, she argues that humans can in fact speak for other animals. “human” language thus becomes a tool not just for human expression but for other animals’ expressiveness as well. driscoll in turn proposes that zoopoetics, by bringing to light the indetermi296 | krebber, review of mengozzi humanimalia 13.1 (2022) nacy of literary meaning, might be able to break the current totalizing conception of community as necessarily human and anthropocentric. through an engagement with the voice of mice — or rather the painstakingly constructed absence thereof — in franz kafka’s “josefine, the singer or the mouse folk”, driscoll shows how zoopoetics can interrupt the separating and unifying voice of this anthropocentric totality, opening it up to that what does not fit into this totality. finally, pollock reads the poem “pretty” by stevie smith to show, via uexküll, merleau-ponty, deleuze, guattari, and ovid, how the beastly quality of language — in which “words can ‘become’ just as living organisms can” (241) — invokes ‘unhuman’ affective repertoires. these literary analyses are complemented by the volume’s final two essays which explore how visual techniques engage with the perspective of other animals. in “cameras that pose as animals” concepción cortés zulueta analyses the deployment of animal perspectives in film. she highlights the defamiliarizing potential of animal point-of-view shots, which not only invite us to see through another’s eyes but compel us to consider that animals have their own irreducible perspective. this idea is pushed from passive viewership into a more active participation in michael fuchs’ essay on video games, “playing (with) the non-human”. in keeping with mengozzi’s overall intention of the volume to embrace how animals are both like and unlike us, fuchs reflects on the limitations of inheriting the experience of a bear as it is rendered by the development (and what he considers to be the failure) of the game bear simulator. while i found all contributions highly readable and instructive, the great accomplishment of the volume is, in my view, the rich cross-connections that emerge between the essays. thus, when fuchs echoes rosemary sullivan’s words that “language is one of the tools we use to … explain and master nature” (269) — a claim that is convincing for fuchs’s reading of bear simulator — one is instantly thrown back to simon, driscoll, and pollock for further depth and potential alternative routes of inquiry. there are, of course, criticisms that can be levelled. as intriguing and enriching as baratay’s mediation of ethological and historical perspectives is, for example, krebber, review of mengozzi | 297 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) i am not convinced that his approach avoids any anthropomorphism (37). especially when it comes to inheriting the point of view of an animal, there is something disconcerting in the wholesale rejection of all forms of anthropomorphism, as this categorically denies the animal a large repertoire of experiences. hence, i remain critical of the absoluteness of baratay’s concern, his juxtaposition of an allegedly non-anthropomorphizing scientific vocabulary with a supposedly unjustly anthropomorphizing literary approach. some readers might also find krzykawski’s chapter too suggestive, sweeping, and meandering in its theoretical readings, while claiming a radicality it never fully clinches. and although hinting at the historical context in which her texts are situated, jarzyna’s reading of them could have reflected more upon the difference in historical situations in which they are placed and their temporal distance to the event. similarly, cortés zulueta and fuchs may too hastily assume that techniques like pov and first-person simulation are animal perspectives in the first place. despite the fact that these essays ultimately judge these techniques as failures, more time could have been spent reflecting on what it means for a human viewer to receive the offer of an alternative, nonhuman perspective. but these are critiques that build on the achievements of the essays, and they thus point to how the volume as a whole broadens and advances our understanding of animal–human relations and the place of literature within them. o’key, review of parreñas extinction in the postcolony dominic o’key review of: juno salazar parreñas, decolonizing extinction: the work of care in orangutan rehabilitation. experimental futures. durham, nc: duke university press, 2018. 288 pp.; 7 illus. $26.95 (pb). dominic o’key is a leverhulme early career fellow in the school of english at the university of sheffield, uk. email: d.okey@sheffield.ac.uk book review mailto:d.okey@sheffield.ac.uk the headline figures are stark. since 1970, population sizes of wildlife have decreased by sixty percent. by the end of this century, half of all wild species are predicted to become extinct. this is the sixth mass extinction event. but what does it look like on the ground? how does this dramatic process of ecological loss transform human-animal social relations? and how does anthropogenic extinction connect to capitalism and colonialism? step forward juno salazar parreñas’s decolonizing extinction, a vibrant and ambitious contribution to the environmental humanities broadly and extinction studies specifically which interrogates how “colonial legacies and postcolonial institutions impact the way orangutans live and die” (4). a work of history, ethnography and theoretical intervention based on seventeen months of fieldwork in sarawak, malaysian borneo, decolonizing extinction explores the complicated, precarious, and caring relationships between humans and endangered orangutans at two conservation sites. the first, batu wildlife centre, is an enclosed nature reserve and sanctuary, built in 1975 and surrounded by a cement plant, housing developments, and agricultural farmland. a second site, lundu, was opened in 1997 to safeguard the growing orangutan population. yet due to the partial privatization of the forestry department (the date of this privatization goes curiously unspecified), both centres are run as public-private initiatives by the forestry corporation, relying on conservation tourism for funding and volunteer labour. as a participant-observer, parreñas shadowed the two centres’ staff — caretakers, forest rangers, and volunteers — in their work to rehabilitate orangutans into semi-wild creatures. by telling their stories in granular detail, parreñas paints batu and lundu as instructive sites for thinking through the sixth extinction. instructive, first, because batu and lundu reveal how anthropogenic extinction connects to colonialism and capitalism. sarawak is a semiautonomous state of malaysia that is “treated as an internal colony” (2). with its partial postcolonial autonomy, and its vulnerability to deforestation, monocropping and oil palm plantations, sarawak is a frontier for extinction-driving industries. instructive, second, because batu and copyright © 2022 dominic o’key this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 315–319. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13255 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13255 o’key, review of parreñas | 317 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) lundu also point towards alternative futures. the work of orang utan rehabilitation is such a demanding form of cross-species labour, parreñas argues, that it develops new human–animal relations, that is, new ways of “experimentally living together, feeling obliged to others, without a sense of safety or control that requires violent domination” (185). parreñas draws these two threads together powerfully in her closely-observed study of the keeper layang — his animal husbandry routines, his contempt for monocultural oil palm cultivation, and his ultimate death from pneumonia after rescuing endangered wildlife from bakun dam. decolonizing extinction is divided into three sections. each deepens parreñas’s investigation into extinction and conservation in the postcolony. in the first, she explores how people build relationships with members of a species famous for solitude. tracking the development of conservation practices from the early experiments of the 1950s to the professionalized 2010s, parreñas notes how a once dominant practice of “ape motherhood” — a way of instilling orangutan independence, developed by barbara harrisson — has recently been replaced with a decidedly more “tough love” (34) approach, a rejection of “tender human–animal intimacy” (52) involving the physical punishment of unruly apes. in the second section, parreñas considers the problem of “enclosure” from a multispecies perspective. by focusing on the forced copulation of orangutans in nature reserves, parreñas develops an understanding of how conservation “inflicts new forms of violence” (84) on female orangutans. because the focus of conservation is on increasing the population size, rather than stopping deforestation, female orangutans are burdened with conservation’s reproductive futurism, and are thus regularly forced into sexual encounters they patently do not desire. at the same time, this section on enclosure also links indigenous and proletarian struggles to nonhuman extinctions, as parreñas demonstrates how human and nonhuman communities have been jointly displaced by hydro-electric dam developments. the third section turns to the future. here parreñas analyses how extinction is prey to financial speculation. sarawak’s conservation 318 | o’key, review of parreñas humanimalia 13.1 (2022) industry is funded by public-private partnerships. thus the preservation of species becomes desirable only if it can offer a future return on investments: orangutans become assets, and the wildlife centre becomes a commercialized hospice that profits from species scarcity. under capitalism, then, the future of conservation is bleak: “i suspect,” parreñas writes, “that orangutan survival will rely on institutionalization, whether in wildlife centers or in zoos. this future seems especially likely when agricultural industries in borneo continue to convert biodiverse forests into mono-crop plantations” (177). yet decolonizing extinction finds hope in the difficult, quotidian labour of multispecies work, in the “fleeting intimacies” (8) between human workers and endangered apes. by bringing feminist care ethics and animal studies into contact with extinction science and colonial history, parreñas reaches her titular hypothesis: that the “everyday but extraordinary work of care that happens here in sarawak’s two wildlife centers […] is an effort at decolonizing extinction” (6). parreñas contends that the work of cross-species care contains a promise, a “serious reconsideration of the current norms and practices around how we share this planet” (8). meticulously researched, decolonizing extinction tells a powerful story of how colonial histories and postcolonial presents inform the sixth extinction. but with the stakes of extinction and climate collapse so high, it is striking that the book is ultimately so modest in its conclusions, and so hazy about what “decolonizing extinction” actually looks like. parreñas tries to escape such neat clarifications and categorizations by insisting early on that “to decolonize extinction is to resist definitively saying what should be or ought to be” (7). yet at the same time she opts to follow posthumanist, decolonial, and new materialist thinkers in her conception of decolonization as a “fundamental reorientation toward others, especially nonhuman others, in which we accept the risk of living together” (27). but this is a notion of decolonization that, while characterized as a risk, has been largely emptied of its historically oppositional militancy, recast as a personal position — a reorientation — rather than a collective struggle. o’key, review of parreñas | 319 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) parreñas’s definition of extinction also needs scrutinizing. in the introduction she writes that, from a “multiscalar” perspective, extinction as such, just like individual death, is an entirely natural “condition of planetary living” (9). hence, for her, “the challenge of decolonizing extinction […] is not to end extinction, but to consider how else might it unfold for those who will perish and for those who will survive” (9). yet this argument rests on the idea that the sixth extinction is a natural process, a mere continuation or intensification of the background extinction rate that undergirds biotic processes. in actual fact, the sixth extinction is a socially-produced mass extinction, a crisis of capitalism that is not “inevitable” (9) as parreñas implies, but the outcome of particular histories and interests that can actually be organized against. extinction as such may be biological, but the sixth extinction is historical. parreñas makes no claims to solve or resolve extinction. her focus throughout the book is limited, mostly productively so, to the question of how mass extinction transforms the ways humans and animals live and die together. but if decolonizing extinction “is not an attempt to try to stop it” (9), then is our only option a form of managed decline, in which we care for endangered species as they slide into oblivion? this runs the risk of emphasizing a passive acquiescence to capitalism’s extinctions rather than agitating for our collective liberation from them. we can demand more, both conceptually and politically, from decolonization. herman, review of lin may saeed lin may saeed and post-anthropocentric art david herman review of: robert wiesenberger. lin may saeed: arrival of the animals, with contributions by mel y. chen, lin may saeed, and birgit mütherich. ex. cat. williamstown, ma: clark art institute; new haven, ct: yale university press, 2020. 144 pp.; 70 colour ill. $35 (paper). david herman is an independent researcher based in st. petersburg, florida. book review this exhibition catalogue, painstakingly compiled, invitingly designed, and meticulously edited, documents an exhibition of work by the german-iraqi artist lin may saeed (born 1973) that was held at the clark art institute in williamstown, massachuchetts, from july 21 to october 25, 2020. the volume captures the chief focus of the exhibition, namely, saeed’s decades-long concern with the forms — and formal representation — of creatural life, in all of its diversity and specificity, and with asymmetrical power relationships between humans and other animals. on her website (www.linmaysaeed.com), in reference to the ancient stories that make up the epic of gilgamesh, parts of which date back to the eighteenth century bce and which already highlight “the discord between humans and nature”, saeed writes: since around the mid 70s, the idea of animal rights / animal liberation has formulated a fundamental civilisation critique, the logic of which calls into question the whole of cultural history. the logic of which calls for a new interpretation of cultural history regarding the power relationships of humans and animals. under this aspect, the call of “back to nature”, familiar from environmental movements, is also obsolete. there is no way back. the objective is to develop a world in which humans and animals can live peacefully with each other, beyond historical experiences. the works by saeed included in the exhibition at the clark and further contextualized in the volume can be viewed as attempts to model such a world. more specifically, saeed’s oeuvre embodies artistic practices that, in holding up for scrutiny the anthropocentric institutions and attitudes that have shaped the history of human–animal relationships, outline possibilities for a post-anthropocentric future. the volume takes its title from a text by elias canetti that imagines animals rising up against human domination, with the artist and other contributors exploring both human–animal conflicts and the types of cross-species communality to which genuine animal liberation might lead. in addition to plates showing the sculptures, paintings, drawings, and other artefacts included in the exhibition, the volume contains an informative, well-contextualized introductory essay by the copyright © 2023 david herman this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 209–216. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.11906 http://www.linmaysaeed.com http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.11906 herman, review of saeed | 211 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) curator, robert wiesenberger, titled “speciesism: on the work of lin may seed” and encompassing works beyond those featured at the clark; several animal fables authored by saeed herself, presented both in the original german and in translation; an excerpt from a 2005 essay by the german sociologist and animal activist birgit mütherich, translated into english for the first time as “the social construction of the other: on the sociological question of the animal”; an essay written specifically for the volume by mel y. chen, titled “the gate and the unreachable”; additional plates showing other relevant works from the clark art institute’s permanent collection; and installation views of the artefacts on display coupled with a complete history of the solo and group shows in which saeed’s works have previously been exhibited. it should also be noted that a “virtual tour” of the exhibition, narrated by wiesenberger, is available online.1 saeed’s art, across its many forms and formats, approaches human– animal relationships both diachronically and synchronically. more precisely, her works model an aesthetic purpose-built both for tracing out genealogies of speciesism — richard ryder’s term for attitudes and practices that favour humans over other animals solely on the basis of species characteristics — and for registering its destructive effects across various cultural settings at any given historical moment. on the one hand, saeed’s oeuvre includes freundschaft / friendship (2010), whose portrayal of two hominid figures creating animal-focused cave art evokes the lascaux paintings from the palaeolithic period (17). in representing these prehistoric figures producing non-anthropocentric art, saeed reflexively imagines how homo sapiens can (re)gain access to cross-species communities via artistic practices that decentre the human. likewise, in a charcoal drawing titled cro-magnon (2019), which was included in the exhibition, saeed pictures an encounter between another early modern human and a small equine animal, again mining the prehistoric past for hints about how to achieve a post-anthropocentric future (45). here the human figure, seated on his haunches such that he does not tower over the animal, touches his counterpart head to head and right 1 clark art institute, “virtual tour of lin may saeed: arrival of the animals”, youtube video, 28 december 2020, https://youtu.be/qdjbg_jogwk. i am grateful to bob mckay for providing a pointer to this virtual tour. https://youtu.be/qdjbg_jogwk humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 212 | herman, review of saeed hand to front left hoof, establishing a bodily symmetry that bespeaks affection and affiliation rather than any attempt to assert hierarchical dominance. also featured in the exhibition was a mixed-media work titled hawr al-hammar / hammar marshes (2020), which portrays animals amid the marshlands in iraq that are thought to have been the basis for biblical accounts of the garden of eden. given the destruction of the marshes under saddam hussein and the drought that currently threatens efforts to reclaim them (18), saeed’s work effectively rewrites the narrative of the fall, tracing it back to speciesist attitudes that license the extirpation of animal habitats and give rise to anthropogenic climate change. in this same connection, note that many of the works on display were fashioned from the notoriously nonrecyclable, nonbiodegradable material technically termed expanded rigid polystyrene plastic but better known by its trademarked name of styrofoam (13). saeed thus engages with the legacies of human–animal relationships not only through the forms she creates but also through one of her favoured media — given that the lifespan of styrofoam extends forward indefinitely into the future. on the other hand, saeed explores the consequences of speciesist attitudes in the contemporary moment, laying foundations for post-anthropocentric art by staging more or less openly violent scenes of human–animal conflict in the here and now. in a painting titled aynoor (2020), for example, a line splits the canvas in two, corresponding to the stark division between orienting to a cow as the experiencing subject of a life versus the faceless source of leather products, made from the cow’s body after the animal is slaughtered through violent practices that are, today, commonly hidden from public view (64). other works by saeed focus on more visible—and more explicitly violent— human–animal confrontations. works such as ankunft der tiere / arrival of the animals (2009) and war (2006), for instance, evoke direct, physical conflict between homo sapiens and, metonymically at least, all other animals (22; 65), whereas the sculpture toreador gate (2019) uses bullfighting to emblematize the violence bred by anthropocentric institutions (28–29). in this last work, chen argues in their contribution to the volume, nested gate-like shapes highlight humans’ only mediated access to aspects of animal life, which therefore remain herman, review of saeed | 213 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) unreachable and potentially unknowable. for chen, taking their cue from saeed’s critique of carsten höller’s use of live animals in an exhibition titled soma (20), the artist’s emphasis on animals’ unreachability is a strategy for signalling and indeed promoting their resistance to human control — a resistance arising not only from bodily struggle but also from a kind of figural uncapturability, an elusiveness that gives the lie to humans’ representational schemes and the speciesist notions in which they are all too often grounded. along these same lines, in a series titled the liberation of the animals from their cages, saeed transforms the means of animal confinement into plinths on which various sorts of creatures are displayed. she thereby suggests how uncoupling morphology from mythology — that is, compelling viewers to come to terms with the concrete specificity of animal bodies rather than encountering them through the filter of prior figurations — can have an uncaging effect.2 in these works, saeed’s art can be described quite literally as an art of animal liberation. with the middle section of the volume given over to vivid colour plates representing saeed’s engagements with the structure and genesis of human–animal relationships, wiesenberger’s introductory essay provides context for viewing her art as a response to and critique of speciesism. pointing to several key themes running through her work — namely, a concern with the plasticity of both form and material, the promotion of friendship across species lines through an emphasis on biocentric rather than anthropocentric world views, and the historical interinvolvement of animal liberation and anti-patriarchal, pro-labour, and other progressive movements — wiesenberger also comments on the timeliness of an animal-focused exhibition 2 that said, as suggested by her redeployment of biblical imagery in hawr al-hammar / hammar marshes, saeed does draw on established narrative traditions as another resource for countering anthropocentrism. thus, wiesenberger notes that in seven sleepers (2020), saeed reimagines the legend of the seven sleepers of ephesus, according to which seven victims of religious persecution evaded harm by sleeping for centuries in a cave (12). in saeed’s sculpture, the species identities of the sleepers are not clear in every case, and the dog who merely guards the mouth of the cave in some versions of the story is here included among the sleepers (66–67). likewise, chen argues that in another sculpture titled st. jerome and the lion (2016), saeed refuses to cast the lion in reductive terms, as merely grateful to the saint for removing the thorn from his paw; instead, he remains a predator for whom this human helper potentially constitutes food. works of this sort, for chen, “re-present iconic stories in a way that opens up a productive gap between the philosophical possibility of figural release and the seeming pragmatics of animal liberation” (97). humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 214 | herman, review of saeed during a period of mass extinctions. “against this backdrop,” he writes, “animals arrive in saeed’s work to live with humans, to rebel against them, or to reoccupy the spaces that were once theirs; in other words, they return” (11). the extract from mütherich’s essay on “the sociological question of the animal” likewise brings into view important themes with which saeed’s work is in dialogue. these themes include the variability of cultures’ taxonomies of creatural kinds; the speciesist separation of humans from other forms of animal life (e.g., via conventions for linguistic usage that, in german, include the pairs essen / fressen, sterben / verenden, and gebären /  werfen, meaning to eat, to die, and to give birth, respectively, with the first term in each pair reserved for humans and the second for other animals [88]); and the use of the putatively nonrational animal as a conceptual and figural resource for othering processes more generally, whereby, historically, “all groups of humans that could be described as lacking reason, as being governed by their instincts […] were largely regarded as being without rights and as subjects or even objects to be dominated” (90). as previously indicated, chen’s essay on the role of the gate and the idea of the unreachable in saeed’s work also affords invaluable context. it builds on mütherich’s argument by emphasizing how the notion of unreachability or uncapturability runs counter to the philosophical underpinnings of colonialist domination. for chen, more broadly, the idea of the unreachable animal disrupts othering processes that link “certain denigrated human animals with certain other debased animals”; these processes achieve trans-species scope through “a cynical state calculus of expulsion, displacement, captivity, violence, control, extraction, and exploitation” (100). here it is worth dwelling on chen’s analysis of one of the written fables also included in the volume, in which the issue of (un)reachability comes to the fore. as chen notes, in the fable featuring a dog confined to a laboratory cage and fated to die after being subjected to a research experiment (82–83), the (dreamed?) verbal exchange that the dog has with a wolf while walking in the woods one night is presented without quotation marks. at first blush the reported exchange thus has the appearance of indirect discourse, which conveys (some of) the content of the animal interlocutors’ remarks without purporting herman, review of saeed | 215 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) to capture it verbatim. given that, as chen puts it, the dog’s “‘speech’ […] does not come in quotes” (98), readers might infer that his account of being experimented on until he dies has the merely partial accessibility of indirect speech reports, with saeed thereby foregrounding how “the idea of reachability — or unreachability, for that matter — requires the imagination of a gap over which relating, or relatedness, is a possibility, not a given” (98–99). syntactically as well as typographically, however, the speech reports in this fable can be described as instances of direct discourse, with saeed using colons to set off the dog’s and the wolf’s utterances from the surrounding narration, and the pronouns shifting from third to first person when each animal becomes the focal figure in the discourse.3 should a direct-discourse reading therefore be preferred here — with the result that the dog’s and wolf’s experiences and viewpoints acquire a higher quotient of reachability than they would have on the indirect-discourse reading? chen’s own use of scare quotes around the word speech when they refer to the dog’s account reinforces the claim of only partial reachability, by suggesting constraints on the possibility of cross-species communication. at the same time, however, chen draws on bénédicte boisseron’s afro-dog: blackness and the animal question (columbia university press, 2018) to highlight the potential for trans-species acts of defiance against processes of animalization in the guise of othering — acts that, if they can be understood as such, are by that very fact reachable. mirroring aspects of saeed’s own artistic practice, chen’s discussion points to an unresolvable tension between the reachable and the unreachable in attempts to move beyond anthropocentric aesthetics. at issue is a tension between the project of developing means — forms, materials, techniques — that can accommodate nonhuman subjects and their modalities of experience, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, the imperative of framing that same project as exploratory, provisional, and unfinalizable, such that anthropocentric arrogance can be replaced with humility vis-à-vis claims about the nature and scope of interspecies relationships. 3 significantly, and apropos of mütherich’s analysis, in the original german, when the dog reports that he faces death in the laboratory the following day, he uses the verb sterben rather than verenden: “morgen wird ein langer tag und ich muss sterben” (“tomorrow will be a long day and i must die”) (82; 83). humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 216 | herman, review of saeed this tension, for which saeed’s own works provide both a descriptive and an analytic vocabulary, itself refuses to be reconciled with the statement by the artist that serves as the epigraph for chen’s essay. writing about the inexcusability of subjecting animals to the structural violence with which they are presented in at least some works of l’art pour l’art, saeed remarks: “the animal is the unreachable. animals must be liberated” (quoted by chen, 94). as saeed’s own practice demonstrates, though, the art of animal liberation entails not severance from but greater engagement with other forms of creatural life. at stake is a strategy for taking into account the lived realities of the artist’s animal interlocutors in which an emphasis on equal status and overlapping interests, not homogenizing sameness, figures as a guiding aesthetic principle. the pangolin liberated from its cage, like the dog freed from the laboratory or the calf removed from the shadow of slaughter, has indeed become unreachable in one sense; but in another sense, such unreachability is made salient by the role that it plays in a dialectic that also involves recognition, relationality, understanding. the second part of this dialectic is reflected, for example, in the way animals return the viewer’s gaze in a number of saeed’s works, including the camels featured in doha (2019) and the liberation of animals from their cages xxiii /djamil gate (2020) (42; 54– 55); the manatee seeking shelter from the climate crisis in weather relief (2017) (15); and members of the multispecies group, including cows, a duck, and a lobster, portrayed in the liberation of animals from their cages xvi (2014) (18). more generally, saeed’s oeuvre demonstrates that if post-anthropocentric artistic practices must, by definition, work to defamiliarize habituated assumptions about animal lives, they also entail exploring species-specific preferences and requirements, which must be honoured if the autonomy and agency of animals, and the inviolability of other-than-human worlds, are to be recognized and preserved. the import of arrival of the animals can thus be summed up, at least in part, by adapting a phrase from immanuel kant: unless it acknowledges unreachability, art that seeks to move beyond anthropocentrism will be empty; but unless it also leaves open possibilities for engagement and understanding across species lines, post-anthropocentric art will be blind. alvey, pachyderm matriarchy pachyderm matriarchy elephants and authorship in the land of the akeleys, 1912–1940 mark alvey field museum of natural history, chicago humanimalia 14.1 (fall 2023) abstract: one of the essential backstories of donna haraway’s essay “teddy bear patriarchy” is the biography of celebrated collector/taxidermist carl akeley, and his vision for the african hall at the american museum of natural history (amnh) in new york. the “authors and versions” section of haraway’s essay examines expedition stories recorded by carl akeley, his first wife, delia denning akeley, and his second, mary jobe akeley, to interrogate the issue of authorship, and build a case for an alleged cover-up of delia’s contributions by “the official scientific community”. the present article pursues a reading of “authors and versions” against a more robust historical background, including published sources, and primary archival materials, in order to deepen, and correct, the broader story of the authorship and intellectual labour behind the amnh african hall, in particular the purported suppression of delia akeley’s voice and labour. keywords: carl akeley, delia akeley, mary jobe akeley, american museum of natural history, donna haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy” bio: mark alvey’s research interests include the art and inventions of carl akeley, and american television of the 1960s. his publications have appeared in natural history, screen, journal of the history of collections, framework, the global sixties, and the international journal for the history of engineering and technology, and in several edited volumes on film and television. he has worked in a variety of roles at chicago’s field museum since 1990, and currently serves as academic communications manager. email: malvey@fieldmuseum.org orcid: 0000-0001-8538-0732 copyright © 2023 mark alvey this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 83–136. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.12591 mailto:malvey@fieldmuseum.org https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8538-0732 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.12591 alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 85 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) it has been fascinating to watch the academic and public perception of museum taxidermy and dioramas evolve from boring and outmoded to enchanting and trendy over the past decade (especially for someone who has found them enchanting for five times that long).1 donna haraway’s 1984 essay “teddy bear patriarchy” was far ahead of the curve in terms of scholarly discourse on the “spiritual vision” enabled by taxidermy. it is probably not necessary to advise a reader of this journal that the thrust of “teddy bear patriarchy” (hereafter tbp) is a contemplation of the akeley hall of african mammals at the american museum of natural history (amnh) in new york, grounded in contextual stories about celebrated museum explorer and taxidermist carl akeley’s expeditions, and explorations of his representational vision in taxidermy, photography, and motion pictures. the essay made its mark primarily for its unpacking of the range of ideological discourses underpinning the amnh african hall, but it also includes perhaps the best concise biography of akeley ever written, and powerfully perceptive passages on the mesmerizing power of taxidermy and dioramas — their capacity for “the achievement of a vision of transcendence”, as author rachel poliquin puts it.2 the fact that tbp is cited in so many works in the wave cited above underscores the role the essay played in sparking the renaissance of interest in the art of taxidermy, and putting it on the scholarly radar for the millennium to come. arguably more important, it was ahead of its time in interrogating museum presentation in light of underlying colonialist and racist discourses, and how those undercurrents informed museum pedagogy. 1 the revival of interest is discussed in a 2015 article in the smithsonian magazine: m. blitz, “why taxidermy is being revived for the 21st century,” smithsonianmag.com, 19 june 2015, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-taxidermy-being-revived-21stcentury-180955644/. the 2019 documentary stuffed by erin derham is an even more recent high-profile example of the “rediscovery” of taxidermy as an art form (the film’s website is http://www.stuffedfilm.com/). there has been a particular renaissance of scholarly interest in taxidermy and dioramas since 2010. a partial list of books would include morris, history of taxidermy; thorsen, rader and dodd, animals on display; poliquin, breathless zoo; landes, lee, and youngquist, gorgeous beasts; davenne and fleurent, cabinets of wonder; tunnicliffe and scheersoi, natural history dioramas: history, construction, and educational role; scheersoi and tunnicliffe, natural history dioramas — traditional exhibits for current education themes; aloi, speculative taxidermy; andrei, nature’s mirror. 2 poliquin, breathless zoo, 107. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-taxidermy-being-revived-21st-century-180955644/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/why-taxidermy-being-revived-21st-century-180955644/ http://www.stuffedfilm.com/ 86 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the connections haraway makes are rich, provocative, and often convincing, although sometimes undermined by her peremptory (rather than analytical) presentation of the african hall’s and the american museum’s meanings, which are posited as monolithic and unambiguous. moreover, the essay omnisciently posits the effects and experiences that museum visitors purportedly draw from the exhibits, and thus, in sociologist michael schudson’s words, “falls fully into the trap of leaving the lived social experiences of audiences to the side.”3 in practice, tbp is not really concerned with mining the museum’s meanings (in its halls or in visitors’ heads) as much as exploring the broad and diffuse institutional-ideological context behind its presentation — that is, the myriad connections that haraway makes in support of the notion that akeley “crafted the means to experience a history of race, sex, and class in new york city.”4 i have emphasized these two words because they are critical, indeed a linchpin to a major component of haraway’s argument. carl akeley and his collaborators crafted a foundation for constructing meanings and making interpretations; how, and whether, all those pieces come together to actualize such an experience, and for whom, is an open question, and one which will be explored below. equally critical is the essay’s treatment of the pivotal issue of akeley’s authorship of the hall. this is the focus of a section entitled “authors and versions”, a detour into discourses that ostensibly informed the creation of the african hall — notably, expedition stories recorded by carl akeley and his first wife, delia denning akeley, aka “mickie”, and his second, mary jobe akeley (fig. 1). (since all three of the principals share the same last name, i will refer to each of them by their first names throughout.) haraway uses certain tales from the 1909– 11 amnh expedition to examine the issue of authorship in order “to probe more deeply into the tissue of meanings and mediations making the specific structure of experience possible for the viewer of the dioramas of [the amnh] africa hall”. this examination is grounded 3 schudson, “cultural studies”, 386. 4 haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy”, 152. unless otherwise indicated, all references are to the revised version published in the haraway reader. references to this version will hereafter be cited parenthetically as “tbp” in the main text. alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 87 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) in “questions about authorized writing enforced by publishing practices and about labor that never issues in acknowledged authorship.” in short: “whose stories appear and disappear in the web of social practices that constitute teddy bear patriarchy?” (tbp 176). to answer this question, haraway seeks “to tease apart the sources for a major event in carl’s life, an elephant mauling in british east africa in 1910” — that is, narratives by the three akeleys related to the mauling and its aftermath — to build a case for “the official scientific community’s covering up [of] delia’s role in carl akeley’s explorations in favor of the story of mary jobe” (tbp 193n26). however, “authors and versions” is beset with several problems, notably “oddly ahistorical history” (in schudson’s words),5 a dearth of documentary evidence, and significant historiographical inaccuracies. while the idea of an institutional conspiracy/cover-up has obvious appeal in support of a case for authorial suppression, the claim has no foundation. the problems with the case are rooted both in theoretical approach and historical method, as i will show below. most fundamentally, the argument for authorial validation and suppression, grounded in a meta level re-framing of the three varied and somewhat rashomon-like versions of the 1910 events, is built on just one published work by each author, overlooking a wealth of other official/authorized published sources dating from the 1910s through the 1930s — despite ostensibly having drawn on “correspondence, annual reports, photographic archives, and artifacts in the amnh” (tbp 193n26).6 and finally, in the climax of the section, haraway misinterprets a set of archival photos to construct an incident that supposedly informed the african hall, but which never actually happened. the present article examines the “authors and versions” section of tbp against a more robust historical background — primarily published sources, both “authorized” and (arguably) unauthorized, 5 schudson, “cultural studies”, 386. 6 the only sources directly cited and quoted from are carl’s 1923 memoirs (in brightest africa), mary’s 1940 biography of carl (the wilderness lives again), and delia’s 1930 jungle portraits (all of which will be cited in full later). haraway also mentions as sources world’s work magazine articles written (separately) by mary and carl (which were repackaged in their books), and their 1932 book lions, gorillas, and their neighbors (erroneously dated as 1922), but without specific attributions to content therein. figure 1: the three akeleys. top to bottom: delia j. akeley in 1915; mary jobe akeley, circa 1926; carl akeley, circa 1914. delia: carl e. akeley, “elephant hunting on mount kenya,” american museum journal 15, 7 (november 1915). public domain image. mary: image # 314406, american museum of natural history library. carl: american museum journal 14, no. 5 (may 1914). public domain image. alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 89 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) supplemented by archival materials, dating between 1912 and 1940 — in order to deepen, and correct, the broader story of the authorship and intellectual work behind the amnh african hall, in particular the purported cover-up or suppression of delia’s voice and labour. building on this foundation, the paper explores some concrete connections between the means and the meanings — that is, between authorial discourses and potential audience experience. the ultimate goal is to construct a more accurate and nuanced account of “[w]hose stories appear and disappear in the web of social practices that constitute teddy bear patriarchy” (tbp 176), and how those stories are, or aren’t, manifested in the amnh african hall. tales of the tuskers the elephant portion of the 1909–11 amnh expedition was a long and arduous one for its participants, and has confused many an akeley chronicler — not least because carl’s own accounts, the benchmarks for most scholars, are often convoluted and meandering, mixing events from different expeditions based on themes (like elephants’ amazing capacity for stealth) rather than chronology or geography.7 thus, in order to elucidate the pertinent elephant tales as clearly as possible, i begin with a brief sketch of the scope and outcomes of the 1909–11 amnh expedition, and also that of carl and delia’s first elephant foray to kenya in 1906 for the field museum of natural history (fmnh) in chicago, since the latter hunt, and some of elephants killed on the trip, figure prominently, albeit unwittingly, in tbp. the 1905–06 field museum british east africa expedition was carl’s second collecting trip to africa (the first being an expedition to somaliland for the field in 1896). carl’s post-trip report to the fmnh provides a good overview of the expedition, and the elephant adventures are well described in a subsequent article by carl and a book chapter by delia.8 one of carl’s main goals on this trip was african 7 the two major biographies of carl are bodry-sanders, african obsession, and kirk, kingdom under glass. both books confuse many events and timelines of the akeleys’ elephant hunts, some fairly significantly. 8 field museum, annual report 1907, 130–33; carl akeley, “elephant hunting on mount kenya”, 323–38; delia akeley, “my first elephant”, 8–30. 90 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) buffalo for a habitat group, but he hoped to get permission to hunt elephant as well, and in july he hired professional hunter r.j. cuninghame with that in mind, a point whose importance will become clear shortly. pending permission to hunt on mt. kenya, the crew bided their time for three weeks in the aberdare mountains, during which period akeley bagged his first elephant, a single-tusked specimen. in august 1906, after colonial authorities gave the green light to hunt elephants on mt. kenya, carl killed two elephants that were not suitable for mounting (one of which had charged him).9 these two bulls exhausted his permits, so he summoned delia, who also had a license to take two bulls. a two-day stalk ended with delia bagging her first specimen, a hunt celebrated by carl in a 1915 american museum journal article. after six days of skinning, salting, and packing, the safari set off on the trail of another herd, and encountered a bull with tusks that, in carl’s words, “were the big pair that we had often seen in our ‘pipe dreams.’”10 delia brought this one down as well, and as carl wrote, its tusks set “[t]he record elephant for a woman, and with her first, the record pair for a sportsman’s license in british east africa.”11 only the skull and tusks of delia’s second bull were saved. although carl had envisioned a small herd of elephants for the field museum, he made do with what he had, mounting his aberdares bull and delia’s first bull in a battle pose (hiding the missing tusk on his) and creating what would become an iconic group. “the fighting african elephants”, aka “the fighting bulls”, have stood in the museum’s main hall (at both of its locations) since 190912 (fig. 2). carl resigned from the field after completing the group and became a contract collector and taxidermist, primarily for the amnh. the akeleys returned to eastern africa in 1909 for that museum, with the primary goal of collecting specimens for an elephant group, a trip 9 carl akeley, “elephant hunting on mount kenya”, 324. delia confirms this account save for one detail, stating that carl was “charged twice by elephants that he did not want but he had to kill them,” in “my first elephant”, 25. since carl did not want them, and did not keep the skins, we can only conclude that they were not suitable for display. 10 carl akeley, “elephant hunting on mount kenya”, 332. 11 carl akeley, “elephant hunting on mount kenya”, 336. 12 the field was originally housed in the vacated palace of fine arts from the world’s columbian exposition; it moved to its present location in 1920–21, opening its doors in may 1921. figure 2: “the fighting bulls” in the rotunda of the original field museum building, 1909. the elephant on the left is delia’s first; the one on the right was collected by carl. courtesy, field museum, csz29277_a. photographer charles h. carpenter. 92 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) that would take them from kenya to uganda and back, and last for two years. briefly, in november of 1909 the amnh group met up in uganda with theodore roosevelt, who, with his son kermit, was collecting specimens for the smithsonian. the akeleys and roosevelt had first met at a white house dinner in 1906, where carl’s tales of africa convinced the then-president to pursue a safari there.13 seeking to mount an ele phant family group at the amnh, carl wanted a cow (two, according to some sources) and a “toto” (baby) as well as some bulls. a herd was encountered, roosevelt took one cow on his own, after which the herd charged, and a second cow was killed with shots from the entire party. a third cow, which charged the group after the initial round of shooting, was reportedly taken by roosevelt. shortly thereafter, kermit killed a male toto for the group. the first two cows and the toto were saved for the amnh, as was the toto, while the third was cut up for souvenirs.14 carl and delia’s subsequent elephant trek took them from kenya to uganda and back over five months, finally ending in june 1911. elephants collected for the amnh group on this second portion of the expedition were a young bull killed by delia in march of 1911, and, finally, a large bull, killed by carl in april, both in uganda. several other elephants were killed and not saved, as we will see, and carl collected a bull for the milwaukee public museum as well. back at the amnh, carl spent nine years mounting the herd (fig. 3), with his male as the lead bull, accompanied by roosevelt’s first cow and kermit’s toto, and delia’s bull watching the herd’s back. the group, dubbed “the alarm”, was expanded to eight elephants in the 1930s with specimens collected by others. the 1909–11 amnh expedition, and the resulting elephant group, is the focus of haraway’s dissection of the matter of authorship, to which we now turn. 13 haraway erroneously reports that carl and roosevelt first met in africa in 1906 (tbp 167); roosevelt did not visit africa until his 1909 safari, post-presidency. carl recalls the dinner in in brightest africa (158–60), and roosevelt mentions it in his 1909 book on the trip, although he misremembers the year. see roosevelt, african game trails, 399. 14 the various accounts of the roosevelt hunt by the participants are quite congruent. see carl akeley, in brightest africa, 161–62; carl akeley, “elephant hunting in equatorial africa”, 43–62; carl akeley, first uganda journal (november 1909 to september 11, 1910), private collection; roosevelt, african game trails, 401–2; mccutcheon, in africa, 143–152. figure 3: the amnh herd in 1923, not long after its completion. from left to right: carl’s uganda bull, kermit roosevelt’s “toto”, teddy roosevelt’s cow, and delia’s “rear guard”. image # 310463, american museum of natural history library. 94 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) mauling and morale “authors and versions” begins with a discussion of carl’s account of the 1910 mauling, which is drawn from his memoirs, in brightest africa. haraway asserts that carl’s secretary, dorothy greene, was his ghostwriter, citing mary’s 1940 biography of carl (the wilderness lives again) in support of this point, although mary makes no such claim in the book. “who wrote in brightest africa?” haraway asks. “to insist on that question troubles official versions of the relations of mind and body in western authorship” (tbp 177).15 in fact, the question, and the answer, are fairly straightforward: mary, our primary source, and an “authorized” author, reports that carl wrote the book with dorothy greene’s assistance. second, haraway settles the question by tacitly acknowledging carl’s authorship throughout this section of the essay.16 carl may have been too restless to sit down at a typewriter, but his facility with a pen — a knack for vivid description, dramatic suspense, and dry humour — is evident in a wealth of letters and field journals in his own hand, and reports that pre-date greene.17 it is certainly possible that carl had a ghostwriter for his published works, but there is no concrete evidence that he did. and, we should add, if he did, that author must bear the responsibility for the racism pointed out by haraway and other authors in the writings attributed 15 earlier, on page 158, haraway offers a quotation from akeley’s memoirs, attributing it to “his ghostwriter, the invisible dorothy greene.” the evidence for the claim is mary’s disclosure in her biography of carl that he was loathe to sit down and write, prompting his publisher to station a stenographer behind a curtain and record his tales for publication. carl later hired greene as a secretary, and as mary reports, greene transcribed carl’s notes, took notes during conversations with visitors to his studio, and took dictation while he sculpted — evidence of a secretary/editor, not a ghostwriter. see mary jobe akeley, the wilderness lives again. 16 “carl akeley’s story of his encounter…” (tbp 177); “akeley tells…” (178); “carl and mary jobe akeley’s books…” (179); “akeley describes…” (185). 17 carl was an adept writer when the need or opportunity presented itself, whether in reports or field journals and letters (written by hand in jungle camps). numerous examples of carl’s unpublished prose are available in the amnh archives, e.g.: typescript report of field museum british east africa expedition, 1907. mss .a344, box 1, folder 14. mary jobe akeley papers. american museum of natural history research library special collections. carl’s 1910–11 journals contain many evocative passages about his experiences. the most readily available is “second uganda journey”, cea diary typed, mss .a344, box 1, folder 9, mary jobe akeley papers. to be clear, carl wrote the journals in his own hand from camp in africa; dorothy greene was not along on the trip. alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 95 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) to him (as well as the often convoluted and ambiguous chronology of his narratives previously noted).18 the mauling itself will be a familiar story to some readers. in june 1910, a huge bull elephant caught carl by surprise on mt. kenya, rammed him with its forehead, and crushed him to the ground. only the impact of a tusk with a tree root, carl surmised, saved him from being killed. as recounted by carl and delia, and retold by haraway, his crew of kikuyu porters thought he was dead, and sent runners to camp for delia, who arrived more than a day later, and cared for him until a doctor could reach them (tbp 177–8).19 his recuperation took three months. haraway takes carl’s first-person account as authoritative, and the narrative thread throughout the “authors and versions” section stipulates his authority as an author, based on his established public image as a champion of wildlife, a scientist, and a brave yet modest hunter-explorer. next comes mary’s treatment of the mauling incident, as presented in the wilderness lives again. as haraway points out, mary makes a major emendation to the mauling episode in her version — by completely erasing delia from it, and substituting kikuyu guide/gunbearer wimbia gikungu, aka “bill”, as carl’s rescuer/nurse. this is significant in the context of whose stories get told, and we’ll return to it. in addition to this scene, haraway also briefly recounts mary’s sketch of carl’s first post-mauling elephant hunt, in which he wounded but did not kill a bull elephant (eventually found more than a year later), much to his shame (carl also recounts the incident in in brightest africa, world’s work, and his journal) (tbp 179).20 18 some narrative threads in carl’s memoirs are notoriously hard to follow, especially in regard to his various hunts, which often blend together unless read closely and repeatedly, ideally against the backdrop of expedition journals and reports. haraway makes note of the “casual and institutional racism” in in brightest africa (tbp 179), and bodry-sanders’s also calls out the racism in his writing in african obsession (219–25). 19 carl’s account appears in in brightest africa (47–51), and in delia’s “jungle rescue” (10, 36, 38–39). a revised version of that article appears as a chapter in delia, jungle portraits. 20 haraway surmises that the account was taken from a field journal, but it is in fact lifted, in a very close paraphrase, from in brightest africa (in the chapter on “bill”, however, not the one on elephants, as one might expect). compare mary’s account in the wilderness lives again (124–26), to carl’s full account in in brightest africa (137–41). carl relates the story in carl akeley, “elephant” (73–91), and in first uganda journal. 96 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) haraway highlights the fact that much of the wilderness lives again is borrowed verbatim from in brightest africa (asserting that the quoted passages have “no typographical differentiation from the rest of the text”, although they are in fact set off by larger paragraph breaks and a slight [~ 0.5 mm] difference in line height, easy to miss). for haraway, mary is “the inspired scribe for her husband’s story” whose “self-construction as the other is breathtaking in its ecstasy” (tbp 179), presumably because of this wholesale lifting of passages from carl’s memoirs; whether this diminishes or reinforces her authorship is a conundrum (tbp 179). since the subject at hand is authorship, it should be emphasized that while mary does not acknowledge a ghostwriter or co-author anywhere in the wilderness lives again, in her preface she does thank none other than dorothy greene, whom mary hired as her secretary after carl’s death.21 haraway does not posit greene as a ghostwriter for mary, although it’s a virtual certainty that she provided the same services for mary that she did for carl (transcribing notes and dictation, per mary). while we can’t be certain of greene’s contributions to the wilderness lives again, archival sources reveal that mary considered hiring a ghostwriter when planning the book, and interviewed at least one experienced candidate, so there may have been an uncredited scribe.22 in any case, haraway ratifies mary as the author of the wilderness lives again, a biography in which the author “pictures herself as carl’s companion and soul mate”, but not “his co-adventurer and buddy hunter”. no evidence is offered for how mary pictured herself, but the “buddy hunter” trope is obviously a rather snide interpretation of delia’s imagined self-definition (also asserted rather than evidenced). in terms of authorial status, haraway places mary in the camp of “authorized writing”, although the rationale is not made clear — the book was not published by the amnh, although mary does list three amnh-related honorifics under her name on its title page. what is certain is that, for haraway, after 21 mary jobe akeley, wilderness lives again, x. 22 mary told field museum director d.c. davies that she had discussed the assignment with writer french strother, who had ghostwritten henry morgenthau’s autobiography. mary jobe akeley to d.c. davies, may 1, 1928, director’s papers, 1928, field museum archives. alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 97 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) mary killed a lion on the couple’s 1926 expedition, “her status was enhanced by this most desirable transforming experience” (tbp 180). then comes delia. haraway devotes the bulk of her attention in “authors and versions” to delia and her 1930 book jungle portraits, notably her accounts of the post-mauling rescue, and another recuperation hunt (subsequent to the wounding incident that mary relates in the wilderness lives again), which carl undertook, in delia’s words, “to settle the question of his morale.”23 haraway kicks off this section with the curious claim that “delia does not bear the authorial moral status of the artist-scientist, carl akeley, or his socially sure second wife” (tbp, 180). although “authorial moral status” is not defined, presumably it means bona fides or credentials. in that context, by 1930 delia had co-managed two africa expeditions with carl, led two more for the brooklyn museum (1924–25 and 1929), written two books, a book chapter, and numerous magazine articles (e.g. for the saturday evening post, collier’s, the mentor, the century), in addition to giving many lectures.24 she was also a member of the society of woman geographers (swg), an organization composed of women “who have added to the world’s store of knowledge concerning the countries on which they have specialized, and have published in magazines or in book form a record of their work.”25 her contemporaries included aviator amelia earhart, anthropologist margaret mead, explorer-writer grace gallatin seton, educator lucy sprague mitchell, and mountaineer annie peck.26 this curriculum vitae is surely sufficient by any measure to endow delia with “authorial moral status”. and we must conclude that if the “transforming experience” of killing one lion endowed mary with authorial status, the killing of multiple 23 delia akeley, jungle portraits, 87. 24 delia’s books and magazine articles are listed in the bibliography. 25 this passage from a swg newsletter is quoted in ware, still missing, 121. 26 on delia’s swg activities see, for example, “mrs. putnam home; gets city’s homage”, new york times, june 21, 1932, 1–3 (“mrs. putnam” is amelia earhart putnam); “mrs. seton is hostess — entertains 26 members of women geographers at greenwich”, new york times, may 26, 1933, 23; “women geographers to tell adventures”, new york times, january 12, 1936, 94. a complete list of swg members from 1925 to present can be found on the society’s web site at http://www.iswg.org/resources/member-files#m. http://www.iswg.org/resources/member-files#m 98 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) specimens of many species — many ungulates, four elephants (including the ones at the heart of haraway’s discussion), and two lions to mary’s one — affords delia parallel, if not superior, status. the allusion to delia’s social “sureness” seems to be rooted in her hardscrabble beginnings on a wisconsin farm, which haraway sketches in a footnote (tbp 193n26). by the time delia wrote jungle portraits, however, in addition to her celebrity as an explorer-author, she had, for example, dined with theodore roosevelt at the white house in 1906, lunched with him again in uganda in 1909, and been an invited guest at a reception he hosted for explorers, hunters, and naturalists in 1928. she had, further, entertained a variety of vips, from explorers, to inventors, to movie stars, to bankers, at the manhattan apartment that she and carl shared, and hosted many society of woman geographers events in new york.27 delia’s authorial moral status and social sureness, firmly grounded in her scientific credentials and social standing, was ironclad. more to the point, what defines authorized or official writing? the boundaries between official and unofficial are not demarcated in tbp, but it is a critical question in terms of authorial validation and suppression. at minimum we must presume that the rubric includes publications generated by the american museum, and accordingly must note that delia is very much present in amnh journal articles early in the genesis of the african hall. a 1914 article on the planned hall features a photo of delia standing atop an elephant she killed (her first), captioned “mrs. carl e. akeley, who accompanied her husband during three years of african field work”28 (fig. 4.). delia is also highlighted in many expedition tales published by carl in the journal.29 and delia herself penned an article about african monkeys in 27 “roosevelt guests of honor at party”, new york times, may 8, 1928, 32. both of the major biographies of akeley refer to the sort of guests that carl and delia were entertaining. see bodry-sanders, african obsession, 152, and kirk, kingdom under glass, 254. several swg events hosted by delia are cited in note 33. 28 dickerson, “new african hall planned”, 175–88. 29 carl akeley’s “elephant hunting on mount kenya” is wholly devoted to delia’s 1906 elephant hunting experiences. carl notes that delia collected “the best bull” in carl akeley, “hunting the african buffalo”, 154. figure 4: a shot of delia posing with her first elephant. the event occurred on mt. kenya, august 27, 1906 on the field museum british east africa expedition. from m.c. dickerson, “the new african hall planned by carl e. akeley”, american museum journal 14, no. 5 (may 1914). public domain image. 100 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the amnh journal’s december 1918 issue (the couples’ separation earlier in the year notwithstanding).30 in short, delia was “authorized” as both a subject, and an author, by the amnh itself. on the other hand, although carl’s memoir and mary’s books were not published by the amnh, haraway marks them as authorized writing, perhaps because the authors were associated with the amnh (carl as a contractor and mary as an advisor, in later years). in that light, we must also include versions of the amnh elephant expedition published by three other writers who were official members of the 1909 uganda segment of carl and delia’s amnh expedition and whose accounts must therefore also be considered “authorized”: former president theodore roosevelt (also a patron and honorary fellow — and his father a founder — of the amnh), chicago tribune cartoonist j. t. mccutcheon (an invited participant who killed one elephant for potential inclusion in the amnh group), and james l. clark, carl’s top protégé at the amnh, who spearheaded the african hall after carl’s death.31 (the three clearly possessed authorial moral status as well.) as bona-fide members of the amnh expedition, their published accounts of delia’s participation, and her solo hunting accomplishments while carl was hunting elsewhere — not as his “buddy hunter” — must be added to the corpus of authorized stories behind the amnh africa hall, all of which collectively comprise an official, authorized testament to delia’s role in the fieldwork that informed it. status aside, the critical issue for haraway regarding delia is that “[her] tales clarify the kind of biography that was to be suppressed in african hall” (tbp 180). delia “produced a biographical effect at odds with the official histories,” haraway holds, in part because she related “the messiness behind the ‘unified truth’ of natural history museums” (tbp 181). as with authorial moral status, exactly what constitutes “the official histories” is not made plain. the argument about delia’s contrariness is based on the fact that her stories in jungle portraits described the hardships of fieldwork, emphasized her role in carl’s 30 delia j. akeley, “notes on african monkeys”. 31 roosevelt, african game trails; mccutcheon, in africa; clark, trails of the hunted. alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 101 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) expeditions, and “showed pique” at the attention given to carl’s exploits. yet delia’s accounts of the trials of fieldwork are completely congruent with carl’s own published recollections of his adventures in in brightest africa and magazine and journal articles, and also chime with his field journals, which recount the trials of expeditions, including accidents, stampedes, fever, collapse, and depression.32 indeed, in her own 1918 amnh article, delia offers the (uncensored) observation that after the mauling, carl “used to get worried and become despondent because he was convalescing slowly and his work was making no progress.”33 dangers and challenges were part of the drama of expedition life, not dirty little secrets. nevertheless, in haraway’s view, delia’s audacity marks her as the wife who “foregrounded her glory at the expense of her husband’s official nobility,” in contrast to mary, “the wife who devoted herself to her husband’s authorship of wilderness” (tbp 181). a reading of the wilderness lives again largely bears out this description of mary, but the charge against delia is fraught with interpretive license. to be sure, delia’s chapters in jungle portraits are self-serving; she was obviously keen to highlight her contribution to the elephant expedition, and to akeley’s vision of the amnh africa hall. her desire for due credit is surely understandable, having slogged through bamboo forests in 100°f heat, managed the camp, collected specimens, faced charging elephants, nursed carl back from the edge of death (more than once, by his own account), and cared for him during his three-month recuperation after the mauling. but these accounts do not diminish carl’s “official nobility” in any sense; if anything, they complement it. delia does indeed present herself in quasi-heroic terms when relating the weeks following the mauling, and depicts carl as a feeble shadow of his pre-mauling self — but 32 in “elephant hunting in equatorial africa” carl mentions discouragement, “physical disabilities” (54), and, after escaping an elephant stampede, homesickness (53). in “elephant hunting on mt. kenya” (38), he writes of being “greatly discouraged” (324) and remarks on “the weariness and disappointments of a hard day of fruitless hunting” (328). field journals offer much more detail, e.g., “after three hours hard going i collapsed”; “my feet were in awful shape. felt that i could not go again for several days”; “it had been a discouraging day.” from “second uganda journey”, mary jobe akeley papers. 33 delia akeley, “notes on african monkeys”, 683. 102 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) carl acknowledges his condition himself in in brightest africa, and a reading of his post-mauling field journal (which was freely available in the amnh archives when tbp was written) reveals that delia was not exaggerating about his health, which was marked, in his own telling, by frequent collapses, fevers, and aborted treks, even after his “recuperation”.34 if delia’s account of the partnership during this period is somewhat self-aggrandizing, it is also accurate — and her telling has the weight of authorial moral status, not only because of her bona fides as an expedition leader and collector, but first-person veracity as well. delia did not “foreground her glory” at carl’s expense, but simply reiterated her role in the events — a role that carl had documented years earlier. his published accounts of their treks together recorded, and indeed celebrated, delia’s bravery, wit, wisdom, and markswomanship — notably, but not limited to, in brightest africa (published well after they separated) and the multiple american museum journal articles noted earlier (the latter certainly institutionally authorized sources). as nigel rothfels points out in his insightful essay “trophies and taxidermy”, carl “repeatedly admired” delia’s calm resolve as a hunter in his writings.35 to dismiss delia as a “co-adventurer and buddy-hunter” diminishes her fundamental contributions to the expeditions that she was part of. in short, there is no basis for the claim that delia’s accounts constituted “the kind of biography that was to be suppressed in african hall” — carl himself, presumably the most authoritative author of all, told the same kinds of stories, and indeed some of the same stories, both about “the messiness” behind natural history museums, and about delia’s skills, contributions, and labour. as for delia’s own “unauthorized” narrative — which was really no more unauthorized than any of carl or mary’s books, as noted above — if there is any hint of “pique”, it would not have been sparked by carl’s achievements, which she continued to celebrate publicly and privately long after his death, but by mary’s efforts to silence her 34 see in brightest africa and “second uganda journey”. 35 rothfels, “trophies and taxidermy”, 126. alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 103 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) and obscure her contributions after carl died. mary’s delia-free version of carl’s life was the most obvious example of this, but her campaign to silence delia began long before her 1940 book. in 1928 mary approached macmillan publishing in an attempt to stop the publication of delia’s book “j.t. jr.” the biography of an african monkey. against the advice of friends and legal counsel, delia wrote in a letter to amnh president f. trubee davison that she “ignored this and similar instances of her [mary’s] insidious propaganda because i did not want to break the fine thing that i helped to make,” presumably meaning the amnh african hall.36 the same year, likely unbeknownst to delia, mary and carl’s brother lewis made similar efforts to block delia’s access to records and photographs at the field museum for a book they believed she was planning.37 delia also complained to davison about certain “misinformation emanating from the museum” regarding the 1909 amnh africa expedition in the museum’s journal, and “[a]nother more serious matter,” that being mary’s 1930 youth-oriented book, adventures in the african jungle (compiled by mary after carl’s death, under carl and mary’s byline). the book included, in delia’s words, “a distorted rehash of chapters taken from his [carl’s] own book”, and several chapters that were “full of inaccuracies and libelous statements” constituting “a direct challenge to my veracity.”38 davison replied, explaining the errors in the amnh’s journal and promising they would be rectified — and they were — but he punted on the issue of mary’s book and her interference, saying he felt these matters were “wholly personal affairs between you and her.”39 lewis akeley revisited the purported delia biography of carl in 1936 with letters to the directors of the amnh and fmnh, urging them not to assist her (for the record, she never wrote such a book).40 36 delia akeley to f. trubee davison, june 4, 1936. central administrative archives, american museum of natural history library, file 1178.4. 37 lewis akeley to d.c. davies, may 3, 1928; mary jobe akeley to d.c. davies, may 1, 1928. director’s papers, field museum archives, 1928. 38 delia akeley to davison, june 4, 1936. 39 f. trubee davison to delia akeley, june 29, 1936. central administrative archives, american museum of natural history library, file 1178.4. 40 lewis akeley to roy chapman andrews, december 12, 1936; lewis akeley to s.c. simms, december 12, 1936. mss .a344, box 3, folder 11. mary jobe akeley papers. 104 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) such were the attempted suppressions of delia’s stories, which she was able to deflect, perhaps in part thanks to the toughness she developed during her early farm life, and certainly via the authorial moral status she developed during her expedition experiences, both for the amnh and, later, for the brooklyn museum. while mary’s complete obliteration of delia from her biography of carl was a decade off when jungle portraits was published, delia was clearly aware of mary’s earlier efforts. her magazine articles in the 1920s, her chapter in all true!, and her books, especially jungle portraits, can be seen as attempts to write herself back into the story of the emerging amnh african hall — not inserting herself into someone else’s story out of egotism or petulance, but restoring her role in the story, which had been publicly documented by carl in his writings, and adding her perspective. this is crystal clear in her explanation for giving her first-person account of carl’s mauling and rescue: the thrilling story of the accident and his miraculous escape from a frightful death has been told many times by himself from the lecture platform. but a personal account of my equally thrilling night journey to his rescue through one of the densest, elephant-infested forests on the african continent is not nearly so well known.41 in haraway’s telling, the most serious attempt to efface delia’s authorial status came from delia herself, by obscuring her role in the shooting of his morale-restoring bull elephant, in an ostensible episode of authorial self-sacrifice to support “official” accounts. as the following section documents, however, this claim is the result of confusion and confirmation bias. the (imaginary) elephant in the room the climax of “authors and versions” concerns a dramatic elephant hunt in which, in haraway’s telling, delia misrepresents her own role in order to glorify carl — a conclusion drawn from an unfortunate misinterpretation of archival evidence. the occasion in question was carl’s first successful post-recuperation elephant hunt (versus the 41 delia akeley, jungle portraits, 233. alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 105 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) earlier incident of the wounded one that got away, as recounted by mary). haraway’s source is delia’s jungle portraits chapter entitled “elephants in the fog”. “carl was still searching to restore his endangered ‘morale’,” haraway relates, which ultimately led to “a dangerous hunt terminating in a thrilling kill marked by a dangerous charge,” although delia “demurred on who fired the fatal shot” (tbp 181). this is partly accurate — delia reports that she and carl fired “in unison” at the charging bull.42 however, as haraway herself points out, delia credits carl with the kill in the caption of a photo that depicts carl recumbent, smoking his pipe, atop the dead elephant: “carl akeley and the first elephant he shot after settling the question of his morale.”43 this is where the confusion begins. haraway declares that a reader will not find that particular photograph of akeley in any other publication than delia’s. further, my hunt in the [american] museum’s archive for the image of akeley lounging astride his kill caught delia in a lie (hoax?) about that elephant. but the lie reveals another truth. the accompanying photos in the archive suggest a version of reality, a biography of africa, which the museum and its official representatives did not want displayed in their halls or educational publications. (tbp 181) the 1985 social text version of “teddy bear patriarchy” is even blunter about delia’s veracity: “delia was lying about that elephant, as the photos which accompany hers in the archive demonstrate.”44 haraway goes on to construct the alleged lie/hoax narrative from the archival photos. (for the sake of clarity, i have added figure numbers from the present article in square brackets to the relevant passage from tbp.) [t]he particular elephant with the lounging carl [fig. 5] could not have been killed on the occasion delia described. the cast of characters evidences a different year; a picture clearly taken on the same occasion shows the white hunter, the scotsman richard john cunninghame [sic], hired by akeley in 1909 to 42 delia akeley, jungle portraits, 94. 43 delia akeley, “elephants in the fog”, plate facing page 90. qtd in tbp 181. 44 haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy,” social text, 48. 106 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) teach him how to hunt elephants, lounging with delia on the same carcass [fig. 6]. the museum archive labels the photo “mrs. akeley’s first elephant.” it is hard not to order the separate photos in the folder into a narrative series. the next snapshot shows the separated and still slightly bloody tusks of the elephant held in a gothic arch over a pleased, informal delia [fig. 7]. she is standing confidently under the arch, each arm reaching out to grasp a curve of the elephantine structure. [haraway further notes that the arms of two african assistants can be seen supporting tusks.] the last photograph shows a smiling cunninghame anointing mrs. akeley’s forehead with the pulp from the tusk of the deceased elephant [fig. 8]. she stands with her head bowed under the ivory arch, now supported by a single, solemn african man. the museum’s spare comment reads, “the christening.” (tbp 183) according to haraway’s interpretation, the photos of delia and her trophies illustrate “a version of reality” that the amnh suppressed — abetted by delia — documenting a scenario in which delia killed the elephant on which carl reclines, thus rendering her caption for the photo a lie. and, at the end of the section, haraway suggests that delia obscured the story of her “sacrament” of first blood in order to support the “authorized” story of carl’s “fusion of art and science” (tbp 183) — meaning, presumably, carl’s amnh elephant group. there are several problems here, all emanating from haraway’s admitted confirmation bias (“it is hard not to order the separate photos in the folder into a narrative series”, tbp 182). first, while haraway asserts that the lounging carl photo had been published only in delia’s book (suggesting a conspiracy of suppression), it had, in fact, been published at least once previously, in a 1927 reminiscence by carl’s former taxidermy assistant at the field, clarence dewey, with a caption reading “akeley reclining on a big bull elephant he has captured.”45 more important, the rest of the photos of delia do not attest to a reality the amnh wanted to obscure, because all of them had 45 dewey, “my friend ‘ake’”, 388. figure 5: carl reclining on the bull elephant he killed on september 6, 1910, on the amnh expedition. the specimen was not saved. image # 240928, american museum of natural history library. figure 6: r. j. cuninghame (l) and delia posing with her first elephant, collected on the fmnh expedition, august 27, 1906. from carl e. akeley, “elephant hunting on mount kenya”, american museum journal 15, no. 7 (november 1915). public domain image. figure 7: delia posing under an arch formed by the tusks of her second field museum elephant, taken on september 7, 1906. the size of the tusks set a record for a female hunter in kenya. from carl e. akeley, “elephant hunting on mount kenya”, american museum journal 15, no. 7 (november 1915). public domain image. figure 8: r. j. cuninghame “bloods” delia’s forehead with the pulp from a tusk of her first field museum elephant. from carl e. akeley, “elephant hunting on mount kenya”, american museum journal 15, no. 7 (november 1915). public domain image. figure 9: r. j. cuninghame and delia posing with her second 1906 field museum elephant. from carl e. akeley, “elephant hunting on mount kenya”, american museum journal 15, no. 7 (november 1915). public domain image. 112 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) been published in the american museum journal and/or in national geographic in the 1910s and 20s, well before delia’s book.46 thus, this version of reality — and delia’s hunting prowess — was not hidden, but openly celebrated in published sources by carl and the amnh. in addition, these sources and photos were available to verify that the three photos of delia, which haraway takes to be the elephant on which carl is smoking his pipe, actually depict the two elephants delia collected four years earlier, on the 1906 fmnh expedition. even a cursory inspection of the setting and specimens in the first two photos referenced in the essay (notably the backgrounds and the size of tusks) reveals that these are different elephants, killed on different occasions.47 such evidence is perhaps easy to miss, or misinterpret, but again, the events were documented in published sources. the elephant depicted in figs. 3 and 5 is delia’s first, collected in kenya in august of 1906 for the field museum.48 delia’s anointing by the guide, richard cuninghame (fig. 8), marks the occasion — “first blood”. cuninghame is present in these photos because, as noted earlier, carl hired him as a guide on that expedition (as recounted by both carl and delia in their accounts of the trip).49 carl did not employ cuninghame on the 1909–11 amnh trip; the “lovable scotchman”, as delia called him, guided theodore roosevelt on part of his 1909 expedition, but was not with carl and delia on their 1910 elephant adventures.50 next, the “ivory arch” framing delia (fig. 7) is formed by the tusks of her second field museum tusker, the record-setter discussed earlier, 46 the “arch” photo (fig. 7), the blooding photo (fig. 8), the photo of delia and cuninghame with her first fmnh bull (fig. 6), and another of delia and cuninghame with her second fmnh bull (fig. 9) appear in carl akeley, “elephant hunting on mount kenya”, 333. the arch photo (fig. 7) also appears in carl akeley, “elephant hunting in equatorial africa”, 808. 47 in fig. 5, sunlight is visible between clumps of trees behind carl and his bull, while in fig. 6, cuninghame and delia are backed by dense jungle. a dead elephant weighing five to seven tonnes would not, and could not, have been moved for a photo opportunity with the resources at hand circa 1910 (a dozen kikuyu porters); the animals were skinned and disarticulated where they fell. in addition, a moment’s examination of the tusks of “mrs. akeley’s first elephant” reveals that they are much larger than carl’s. 48 the collection date is from the 1905–06 field museum british east africa expedition field note book, field museum mammals catalog room. 49 delia tells of hiring cuninghame in “my first elephant”, 9; carl notes that this was cuninghame’s first experience as a guide, in “elephant hunting on mount kenya”, 325. 50 delia uses this term of endearment in “my first elephant”, 9. alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 113 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) which was collected just over a week after the first, in september 1906 (cuninghame and delia posed with that one too, in a published photo [fig. 9]).51 besides the chronology as recorded by carl and delia, the fact that the tusks are from two different animals can be easily seen by comparing delia’s height in relation to each set of tusks: the tusks of the second bull (arch) are larger by several feet than those of the first (blooding) — the two sets together, in fact, set another record for kenya.52 again, all of these photos of delia and her fmnh elephants had been published in magazine articles in the 1910s. admittedly, delia may have caused some confusion by publishing the arch photo — the tusks from her second bull — in 1931, in a book chapter entitled “my first elephant”.53 and carl certainly contributed to the confusion of future researchers by taking many of his field museum photographic negatives to new york when he moved there in 1909, and where they ended up in the amnh archives. however, the story of these elephants need not have been pieced together from disordered archival photos, since they, and others, had been rendered in published accounts by moral-status equipped authors, in many cases in amnh publications, as the african hall was in the works. besides the fact that these photos of delia depict elephants killed four years before the one with lounging carl, a trove of written evidence, published and archival, attests that carl did indeed kill that specific bull — and that, by his own admission, he saw it as a test of his “nerve”.54 delia did not obscure her role in order to give carl 51 the date is from the 1905–6 field museum british east africa expedition field note book. 52 see carl akeley, “elephant hunting on mount kenya”, 336. 53 delia akeley, “my first elephant”, 8. the first two sentences of the article establish the year, the location, and the museum sponsoring the trip. 54 evidence that carl killed the bull on which he is pictured relaxing with his pipe: • besides delia’s account in jungle portraits and dewey’s published acknowledgement, there are four other accounts of the incident, three from carl and one from delia. see first uganda journal; delia akeley to tom and winifred akeley, october 29, 1910, cea, expeditions: africa, amnh 1909–1911, mss .a344; mary jobe akeley papers; carl akeley to wilfred osgood, december 6, 1910, dept. of zoology akeley correspondence, field museum archives; “carl e. akeley and his work”, mentor, 25. the latter three accounts allude to carl’s “morale” or “nerve” being tested, and none, including delia’s letter, mention delia being present on that hunt. 114 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) “official” credit for this elephant — on the contrary, she literally gave him his moment in the sun, smoking his pipe on the back of the specimen. delia did not erase herself from this story; indeed, she was keen to highlight — and perhaps even overstate — her role in the event. it is possible that she added some dramatic colour to her telling, notably a furious elephant charge that nearly trampled some children, and her own shots at the beast. these are elements that are missing from the other, much more perfunctory, accounts of the incident, which do not mention delia being present. but in terms of carl’s recuperative return to elephant hunting, there was no erasure, no lie, no hoax. as a final stroke to clinch delia’s purported self-erasure from the story of the african hall, haraway connects the fieldwork photographs to the mounted amnh elephant herd. the “christening” photo, haraway declares, “stands a fixed witness in akeley african hall to its dismembered double in the photograph” (tbp 183). thus, haraway posits the photo as evidence of a trophy for which delia was denied credit in the exhibit hall. however, that elephant is not part of the amnh group, since it was killed four years earlier on a field museum expedition, and still stands in that museum today (fig. 10). and carl’s “morale bull” isn’t on display in the amnh group either — carl did not save it — thus, it is not part of the discourses that inform the • the specimen and the setting in the photo do not match any other akeley fmnh or amnh elephant expedition photos; all the amnh elephant photos except for this one match up to known animals that were either saved as specimens or cut up for meat and/or ivory. • as attested by many such photos in the field museum and amnh archives, carl and delia (and theodore roosevelt) posed with their own kills, not someone else’s — e.g., the photos of delia with her field museum bulls (figs. 4, 6 and 9), and delia with her young amnh bull (fig. 12). it was routine to “fire in unison” at elephants, which were not easily killed; the hunters would determine credit for the kill shot. • finally, the lounging carl photo is labelled “kenia, africa” in the amnh archives. carl killed only two kenya elephants on this expedition: the “the morale bull”, on september 6, 1910, and the one he wounded two weeks earlier, which was found dead a year and a half later, with which he obviously could not have posed. the conclusion that carl killed the bull in the photo is inescapable. and to circle back to the issue of authorship: delia tells us the photo depicts the “morale bull”, so she has authorial moral status; she was there (and likely tripped the shutter on the camera). figure 10: “the fighting bulls” as they appear today at the fmnh, chicago. delia’s is the larger bull, on the left. © the field museum, gn92050_053ed. photographer john weinstein. 116 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) hall.55 haraway doesn’t specify which elephant in the amnh herd is the one she imagines to be depicted in the photos; the large lead bull would be the most fitting candidate for a wife’s self-effacement, but as noted above, that specimen was collected at a later time and place (april 1911, in uganda).56 in any case, knotting together the events and the evidence in their proper order reveals, quite simply, that the disputed photo depicts just what delia said it did, carl smoking his pipe on the back of “the first elephant he shot after settling the question of his morale.” that said, it is important to emphasize that delia does have a specimen in the amnh elephant group, which haraway overlooked: the young male watching the herd’s back, aka “the rear guard” (fig. 11). as noted earlier, delia took this specimen in kenya, in march 1911, whereby hangs another tale. carl and delia had tracked a small herd, finally spotting two potentially suitable young males. carl identified the one he wanted for the group; he and delia were both to fire at it (as was common practice), but delia misunderstood which was the desired specimen. as carl wrote in his journal, “[t]he wind changed and the elephants were uneasy; we shot and to our mutual surprise, two elephants dropped dead.”57 upon inspection, they decided that delia’s was the better of the two, and it became the rear guard in 1919 (a year after carl and delia separated). carl included this story in his 1912 national geographic elephant hunting article, accompanied by a photo of delia posing with her specimen (fig. 12).58 the january 1936 issue of natural history (the renamed american museum journal) credited the specimen to j. t. mccutcheon due to a misinterpretation of a note in carl’s 55 in his journal entry for september 6, 1910 carl writes that he “sent to camp for porters to carry in skull — ear — 2 feet & pieces of skin.” first uganda journal (november 1909 to september 11, 1910), private collection. 56 carl mentions the big bull in the amnh herd in multiple places, for example, in brightest africa, 42–44; “elephant!”, 59. bodry-sanders mistakenly posits another elephant as carl’s capstone specimen: see african obsession, 137–39. the biographer quotes from a 1911 letter from carl akeley to john mccutcheon describing a huge elephant that carl killed; however, as carl records in his field journal, he decided to sell the tusks of that animal, and let the local villagers cut it up for meat. 57 march 16, 1911 entry, “second uganda journal”. 58 carl akeley, “elephant hunting in equatorial africa”, 800. figure 11: “the rear guard” (left) as it appears today at the amnh, new york. © david klinck. figure 12: delia (left) seated on “the rear guard” in 1911. from “elephant hunting in equatorial africa with rifle and camera,” national geographic magazine 23 (1912). public domain image. alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 119 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) field report.59 delia complained, and the error was corrected in the journal later in year.60 (mary, of course, credits carl with both the big bull and the rear guard in an appendix to the wilderness lives again.)61 the herd was expanded from four elephants to eight in the 1930s, but the original group was collected by a who’s who of authorized authors: carl, theodore roosevelt, kermit roosevelt, and delia.62 whatever authorial input delia can be said to have made to the backstory of the african hall, the contribution of a ten-foottall, five-tonne elephant (before taxidermy) was a very tangible one. authors and erosion a tale of authorial suppression, if true, would have served as a fitting segue to tbp’s ensuing sections on the diminution of the role of african labour to scientific expeditions, and the ideologies behind the amnh’s pedagogy about nature. however, “authors and versions” does not actually analyse the various authors’ versions to weigh their “authority”, or examine if and how these stories relate to the 59 for the erroneous attribution see “rear guard”, 4. f. trubee davison explained the mistake in a letter to delia, noting that carl’s field report stated that “a young bull was killed by john t. mccutcheon and added to the collection”, which the magazine staff took to mean that it was chosen for the group. as mccutcheon notes in his own book on the trip (in africa), all parties were collecting specimens for possible inclusion in the amnh african hall; mccutcheon’s elephant is still in the collection. davison assured delia that a correction would be printed in natural history, and “other official records.” davison to delia akeley, june 29, 1936. 60 the correction was acknowledged in natural history 38 (september 1936), 175. 61 mary jobe akeley, wilderness lives again, 378. in another case of alleged erasure, bodry-sanders speculates that carl tried to deny delia credit for the rear guard out of vindictiveness, based on the claim that “there is no evidence in the accession record for this animal at all” (african obsession, 151–152). but, in fact, delia’s young bull is listed in the amnh mammals catalog; the biographer apparently confused it with carl’s big bull, which is listed on a different page. 62 to head off another potential conspiracy theory, we should note that bodry-sanders speculates that carl may have substituted someone else’s specimen for teddy roosevelt’s elephant cow in the amnh herd (african obsession, 151), a surmise inspired by a note made in the mammal collection catalog listing the locality as meru (rather than the uasin gishu plateau, where tr and akeley hunted). but the same note credits roosevelt for the specimen. roosevelt collected elephants for the smithsonian at meru before joining carl for the amnh hunt, offered some to the amnh, but none were accepted — and all are accounted for in other museums. the locality entry was most likely made by a curator or other staffer who knew that roosevelt collected at meru, either from african game trails or tr’s letters offering specimens, and jumped to an erroneous conclusion. 120 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) discourses that informed the african hall, nor does it connect any of the discourses to audience experience (on which more later). there is a sense that the core rationale for discussing authorship was not to bolster the thesis of the power of patriarchy in constructing the discourses that underpin the african hall, as much as to tell an interesting story. by her own admission, haraway pursues the discussion of the three mauling-related narratives because “it leavens my story of the structure and function of biography in the construction of twentieth-century primate order” (tbp 176) — lightens up the theoretical discussion with some human drama, in other words. haraway would not be the first author to get caught up in the drama of the “romantic akeley triangle” (to quote a 1926 newspaper headline marking carl’s death), nor the last.63 it seems clear that in composing “a tale of the commerce of power and knowledge in white and male supremacist monopoly capitalism”,64 the discovery of mary’s erasure of delia, and a disordered set of archival photos, suggested an ancillary tale of authorial suppression. haraway uses several lines from joanna russ’ how to suppress women’s writing as an opening epigraph for the musings on authorship: she didn’t write it. she wrote it but she shouldn’t have. she wrote it, but look what she wrote about.65 in effect, these statements not are presented as hypotheses to be tested, but axioms to be reinforced, with no need of question or challenge. the argument operates from foregone conclusions about authorial status, interprets just three texts — only one of which omits delia — in order to align with those conclusions, while overlooking numerous contrary sources, and then by way of confirmation, three archival photos are confidently connected in an erroneous narrative. as with much theoretical work from the 1980s and 90s, in the 63 kaufman, “death breaks romantic akeley triangle.” both bodry-sanders, in african obsession, and kirk, in kingdom under glass, revel in the saga of desertion, divorce, and animosity. 64 haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy”, social text, 21. this phrase is omitted from later versions. 65 russ, how to suppress women’s writing, 76; qtd. in tbp, 176. alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 121 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) (slightly paraphrased) words of film scholar david bordwell, such an approach “does not ask particular questions and reason out possible answers, rejecting and refining them and weighing the comparative advantages of competing explanatory frameworks.” rather, it “starts with a doctrinal abstraction and draws on [textual] phenomenon as illustrative examples.”66 in practice, “authors and versions” does not examine authorship to see “whose stories appear and disappear”, but rather posits suppression as a given, asserts it rather than substantiating it, and substitutes confirmation bias for documentation and evidence. the larger question — how carl, mary, and delia’s various versions of their elephant adventures shape potential meanings for visitors — is forgotten, amidst the story of divorce and duplicity. but the answer is there, nonetheless: the three akeley author’s stories serve as a kind of spectral backstory “behind” the african hall, one that, as discussed in the next section, the majority of visitors could never know or experience. the answer to the previous question, “whose stories appear and disappear”, is that carl, delia, and mary’s stories all appear, and none disappear, in “official” discourses from the hall’s formative years — and there was no cover-up by the “official scientific community” of delia’s role in the expeditions of which she was a part. the historical timeframe of the hall’s development is a critical aspect of the vitality and visibility of these discourses. for one thing, work on the project ceased in the mid-1910s. as carl recalled later, when germany invaded belgium in august of 1914, “the trustees decided to postpone the undertaking for a few months until the trouble in europe was over. the months stretched into years, and african hall remained a structure on paper.”67 this moratorium effectively put an end to virtually all official discourses about the project until the mid-1920s, although carl kept an ember alive by continuing to write about his african experiences. it is true that after carl and delia separated in 1918, delia had no further role in developing or promoting the hall, which might be tempting to take as an institutional or personal “erasure” — except for the fact that there was no hall to 66 bordwell, “historical poetics of cinema”, 387. 67 carl akeley, “african hall”, 11. 122 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) promote until the mid-1920s, by which time delia was launching her independent career as an explorer and author. we should note that when the herd was unveiled in 1922, an announcement in natural history credited carl with both the big bull and the rear guard.68 this certainly could have been a case of conscious suppression, rooted in bad blood between the couple (their divorce would be finalized the following year), but it could also have been a result of the vagaries of recordkeeping, and/or editorial looseness in fact-checking — the locality and timing for carl’s big bull in the announcement are incorrect as well.69 in addition, carl was proprietary (and could get a bit salty) about getting official credit as collector of specimens secured on his permits and prepared by him — even those killed by the roosevelts.70 he was the collector of record for all of the specimens from the expedition, regardless of who killed them, and his name is listed in the “collector” column of the amnh mammal catalogue for all of the 1909–1911 specimens. certain entries were annotated later to acknowledge some of the roosevelts’ and delia’s contributions, but not all, while john mccutcheon’s name is not associated with any of his specimens. in any event, the postponement of the african hall project and the passage of time eroded the contributions of all three of the akeleys. by the time the hall officially opened in 1936 (with only half of the dioramas finished), carl was ten years dead, and the design and scope had progressed beyond his original plan. the january 1936 issue of natural history (the renamed amnh journal) is entirely devoted to 68 natural history 22, 1 (january–february 1922), 89. the entry reads: “the female was secured especially for this group by colonel roosevelt during his african expedition of 1909 and was shot while charging. the little one was shot by mr. kermit roosevelt south of mt. elgon. the two male elephants were taken by mr. akeley near mt. kenia earlier in the same year.” 69 carl collected his bull in uganda’s budongo forest, 400-plus miles west of mt. kenya, more than a year and a half after roosevelt hunt. 70 when amnh assistant curator of mammals herbert lang corresponded with carl in 1924 asking for information about the roosevelt specimens, akeley responded thus: “your records on the old female and calf are not quite right. they were shot on the uashin [sic] gishu plateau near mt. elgon. while they were shot by colonel roosevelt and kermit, they were not contributed by them as they were shot on my license, in my presence, and at my request.” carl akeley to herbert lang, august 26, 1924. private collection. alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 123 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the (renamed) akeley memorial hall of african mammals. delia is not mentioned in any of the issue’s thirteen articles — nor, perhaps curiously, is theodore roosevelt — while mary is mentioned only in a few passing acknowledgements, and there is comparatively little, indeed surprisingly little, of carl. the first article, by amnh trustee daniel pomeroy, celebrates carl and his work, but the bulk of the publication covers expeditions and exhibits carried out by others after his death, and plans for the future expansion of the hall. the introduction to the issue observes that the hall reveals africa “as carl akeley dreamed”, but also underscores the idea that the hall “was accomplished by the skill, artistry, and infinite labor of a large staff of workers in the department of arts, preparation, and installation.”71 pomeroy’s article notes that after his death, carl’s protégés carried on “under the guidance of dr. james clark, whose long association with akeley makes him such an expert director of the project.”72 similarly, in the 1936 amnh annual report, carl is credited for the original vision, but clark gets the accolades for “the planning of the remarkable groups” and, with his crew of assistants, for “the artistic and mechanical work.”73 by 1936, carl’s spirit could be said to hang over the hall that bore his name, but it is clark who takes centre stage in the amnh publications as the presiding artistic genius behind the planning, design, lighting, and of course, taxidermy, in the new africa groups.74 a decade after carl’s death, a whole new set of authors was “writing” the african hall. authors and audiences it is clear that multiple authors were responsible for crafting the narratives manifested in the african hall. but who were, and are, its readers? although haraway repeatedly refers to “the viewer” and presents the discussion of authorship as context for probing the “meanings and mediations” that make “the specific structure of experience possible for the viewer”, as noted earlier, the essay does 71 “glimpses into the african hall”, 3. 72 pomeroy, “akeley’s dream comes true,” 10. 73 the american museum of natural history, sixty–eighth annual report for the year 1936 (may 1, 1937), 57. 74 pomeroy and clark, the complete book of african hall. 124 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) not ultimately connect the varied discourses to the experience of actual museum visitors (“leaving the lived social experiences of audiences to the side”, to recall michael schudson’s words). museologist phaedra livingstone has observed that haraway’s description of the moment of communion between viewer and diorama “is poetic but lacks the pedestrian ring of an average visitor interview transcript”, thus marking a disconnect between visitor research and theoretical meditations like haraway’s.75 this disconnect led livingstone to survey “casual adult visitors” to an african wildlife diorama at the royal ontario museum in toronto to determine whether “the meaning they make of the displays [is] anything like haraway’s.” the results were mixed, but overall tended not to support such interpretations.76 this is not to diminish the power of haraway’s vivid theoretical narrative, or to suggest that she should have conducted surveys of the amnh’s visitors. indeed, visitor studies were all but unknown in the museum world in the mid-1980s, and in the realm of cultural studies, reception theory was just emerging.77 “privileged” interpretations from critics and theoreticians ruled the day, and offered rich readings. the problem, as schudson and livingstone suggest, is simply that tbp alludes to meanings and experiences purportedly activated by visitors, but makes no attempt to illuminate them. the effect is to conflate meanings (which are constructed by audiences) and theoretical interpretations (which are constructed by scholars). still, haraway’s references to audience experience in the broader context of authorship, and livingstone’s experiment, suggests consideration of possible concrete points of intersection between museum discourses and real audiences. 75 livingstone, “imaginary places”, 197. 76 livingstone, “imaginary places,” 205. some respondents (seven out of thirty) identified the animals in the lion group as a family (thus “applying an anthropocentric and gendered analogy to make sense of the staging of the animals”), but the author “did not find visitors articulately explaining experiences of a timeless moment with an undead king of the jungle.” 77 the seminal text in museum visitor studies is falk and dierking, the museum experience. a stimulating overview of the rise of reception theory is holub, “american confrontations with reception theory”. alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 125 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the narrative at the beginning of tbp traces the experience of a hypothetical visitor walking through the amnh, although the perspective articulated can only be read as haraway’s. as livingstone suggests, ultimately “[t]he experience haraway describes is liminal and private,” and haraway herself acknowledges that the visitor’s experience “will be intensely personal”. 78 accordingly, rare would be the museum-goer who had absorbed the vast human and institutional backstory necessary to activate the meanings haraway ascribes to the african hall (except of course, latter-day students and academics who are familiar with tbp, a limited but verifiably real population).79 haraway herself admits this in one spot, apropos of the story behind carl’s gorilla diorama: “but the viewer does not know these things when he sees the five animals in a naturalistic setting” (tbp 157). much the same could be said for most of the intricate historical-ideological backdrop of discourses that the essay weaves together — for example, the typical viewer of the gorilla diorama would surely not conjure up, as haraway does, a parallel between akeley and his gorilla, and frankenstein and his monster, based on the fact that both pairs had climactic encounters on mountains. such poetic flashes and intertextual connections, of course, are part of what makes the essay compelling, but the perspective from which an academic critic interprets the dioramas is hardly congruent with that of the typical visitor. as livingstone observes, “[o]ne cannot generalize the experience and critique of an expert viewer to stand in for the average visitors reading of a display, nor of course will the average visitor response offer the nuance of an expert criticism.”80 intuition suggests, and visitor research bears out, that some of haraway’s readings, especially early in the essay, are congruent with those of what livingstone calls the “average” or “casual” visitor — for example, interpreting the groups depicted in dioramas as families. the more intertextually and theoretically charged 78 livingstone, “imaginary places”, 205. 79 over the past few years, i have led several college classes on tours of the museum where i’m employed, all of which had been assigned to read tbp before their visit. one student on the most recent tour was a little behind in the reading, and a classmate summarized the essay for him as follows: “it says taxidermy is racist and colonialist.” thus, tbp readers are indeed a set of real visitors whose perceptions are informed by the backstory presented in the essay. 80 livingstone, “imaginary places”, 206. 126 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) readings — frankenstein, “the hygiene of nature”, validated and suppressed authorship — emanate from the “expert” realm. considering how we might connect authors and discourses to visitor experience requires that we not only distinguish between “casual” museum visitors and professional critics/theorists, but also identify which generation of amnh visitors we might be envisioning, and which african hall. haraway clearly posits a 1982 visitor, but the historical discourses charted in the essay framed the hall for audiences in the 1910s, 20s, 30s, and beyond. and there were multiple versions of the hall: a 1914 scale model, open to donors and the public, a small temporary installation that opened in 1925 (with the four elephants plus temporary lion and gorilla dioramas), the half-finished hall unveiled in 1936, and the further iterations of the 1940s and 1950s. and besides the questions of which audiences and which african hall are the targets of analysis, we must ask what the literal discourses were that those audiences were exposed to as part of the amnh experience, in the exhibit hall itself, or through ancillary sources. the american museum journal is one forum that would have shaped the experience of a subset of “real” visitors during the hall’s genesis — that is, amnh members, who received the journal as part of their membership. these vintage publications would inspire and inform few visitors today, but during the formative years of the african hall they undoubtedly shaped amnh members’ experience with official backstory, from expedition stories — including delia’s exploits — to essays on animal behaviour, taxidermy technique, and the design of the hall. indeed, the museum’s educational aims, imputed but little evidenced in tbp, were a frequent theme of the journal during the seminal years of the african hall. these texts explicitly articulate how the museum envisioned its role and effect in communicating with audiences, and also provide reactions and insights from educators in terms of the museum’s impact on their efforts, and even on individual students.81 81 the entire november 1911 issue was devoted to the museum’s role in public education. in addition to articles from the amnh staff on such topics as the “evolution of the educational spirit in museums”, and the “educational value of the american museum” — and one on the appeal and educational value of habitat groups — there were testimonials from schools and teachers. american museum journal 11, no. 7 (november 1911). alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 127 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) and what of the information conveyed in the halls themselves, via signage and labels? exhibition labels of the 1920s, written by scientists, tended to be loaded with copious information; hundred-yearold signage (if it has been retained at the amnh) would reveal what explicit and immediate discourse was offered to visitors to the hall. there is no signage visible on the very earliest photos of the completed amnh herd, but by 1923, the year after it was unveiled, a label was added to the base in the front, reading as follows: african elephants mounted by carl e. akeley and intended for the central group of the projected african hall which will form part of a section of the museum to be erected as a memorial to theodore roosevelt. the relative minimalism of the information is interesting. the wording suggests the label is something of a temporary placeholder, but even so, it seems remarkable that only the taxidermy and the future african hall are highlighted. we can’t be sure what other copy might have been present in the hall, but this small label certainly seems to have been the primary “messaging” for the elephant group. barring any other evidence, it appears that at that moment in time the amnh had no interest in expanding on the exploration, adventure, and largerthan-life personalities — neither the akeleys nor the roosevelts — that comprised the expedition, or imparting information about elephant biology, behaviour, or conservation. in the context of whose stories appear, the roosevelt connection is diffuse at best; the african hall, renamed the akeley hall of african mammals when it opened in 1936, can be accessed through, but is not a part of, the roosevelt rotunda. all this raises the question of what explicit discourses were available to visitors when haraway surveyed the elephants circa 1982, and what stories were told, and what credit was given, in the label copy displayed.82 no signage is visible on the base in photographs 82 in the original version of the essay haraway states that she “read” the dioramas in march of 1982. haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy”, social text, 59n15. 128 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) of the group (after it was expanded to eight specimens) through the 1950s and 60s. however, as of 1983 a bronze plaque had been mounted at the front of the herd.83 this plaque remains there today, and reads: east african elephant (loxodonia [sic] africana peeli) four of the elephants in this group, including the large bull, were collected and mounted by carl akeley in the 1920s. the additional elephants were collected in 1933 by mr. & mrs. f. trubee davison and lt. e. r. quesada, usa. [a second paragraph lists the names of financial contributors.] the omission of delia is unsurprising given the erosion of her fame, and the fact that dioramas were still in their quiescent period, but the absence of theodore roosevelt’s name is somewhat remarkable, and perhaps counterintuitive. in the context of the broader discourses sketched by tbp, one might expect roosevelt to be highlighted as the embodiment of “the effective truth of manhood”, which the essay tells us the african hall was designed to promote. in practical terms, it seems curious that the museum chose not to exploit whatever historical aura or pr value roosevelt’s name might bring to the group. it seems too early for any uneasiness over roosevelt’s colonialist baggage to have been an issue — especially considering it would be another thirty years before the statue of roosevelt in front of the amnh was removed for its racist implications.84 perhaps it was simply the passage of time and the decline in cachet  — and / or the fact that carl was the collector of record — that led both roosevelt and delia to be excluded from this sketch of the elephants. at any rate, besides this text, there is another plaque not far away from the herd that memorializes carl and the african mammal hall named for him, and that’s it — nothing else about the elephants. thus, while we can’t be sure how much exposition was 83 many photos of the “the alarm” dating from the early 1920s to the 2010s can be seen on the amnh’s digital archives, at http://images.library.amnh.org/digital. the keywords “akeley elephants” will yield the most manageable results. 84 small, “removal of a theodore roosevelt statue begins.” http://images.library.amnh.org/digital alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 129 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) present in the hall from 1921 through the ensuing decades, today there are no other explicit discourses about the akeleys and their elephants in the hall for visitors to absorb. and it is concrete discourses like member publications and exhibition labels that connect directly to the visitor experience — texts that can be considered for their function in illuminating the story of how the animals came to be put on display, in documenting and recognizing the contributions the authors of that story, and in shaping audiences’ experience and perceptions of the animals, their lifeways, threats, and so on. visitor studies indicate that educational or interpretive information displayed in an exhibition hall, and diorama displays in particular, does generate informed perception on the part of visitors.85 the same cannot be said for books and articles that circulate in the world beyond the museum’s walls. haraway posits carl’s in brightest africa, mary’s the wilderness lives again, and delia’s jungle portraits as the key texts in her exposé of suppression; yet these books can hardly be said to have shaped experience for most audiences in any generation. schudson crystallizes this apropos of delia’s omission from the wilderness lives again: “haraway does not show what this absence signifies for the exhibits in african hall — or that it signifies anything at all for how to read african hall or how to understand the social construction of scientific knowledge.”86 certainly, those visitors who read the books during the days of the akeleys’ celebrity, or, in later years, akeley aficionados or taxidermy buffs who found them in used bookstores or online, would flash on that backstory as they viewed the elephants and other groups, recalling the “messiness” of fieldwork, its triumphs, exhaustion and mishaps, and delia’s contributions (in two of the three volumes). those who have not read these works have to create their own story. further, the capacity to “experience a history of race, sex, and class in new york city” would not be activated by carl’s or delia’s or mary’s writings, but by meta-discourses like haraway’s. 85 many such studies are covered in tunnicliffe and scheersoi, natural history dioramas: history, construction, and educational role, and scheersoi and tunnicliffe, natural history dioramas — traditional exhibits for current education themes. 86 schudson, “cultural studies”, 391. 130 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) that history certainly resonates in the larger discourses amidst which the hall was developed — expedition stories, books, articles, lectures, conferences, and so on. but can it really be read in the hall itself? the means for such a reading must be mined from the historical discourses in play when the african hall was developed; the meanings and mediations haraway arrays depend on that knowledge — on research, in other words. they are clearly those of a highly informed and imaginative academic critic, not a “typical” museum visitor. this is more than rewarding enough for the reader of tbp, and as noted earlier, the essay has armed generations of students and scholars with an ancillary discourse against which to read the african hall. however, those meanings are not explicitly inscribed in the hall itself — “the viewer does not know these things” — rather, they are potential meanings, co-existing with many other potential meanings that will be activated by the individual viewer. the resurrection of the authors erosion can erase traces of the past, but as any palaeontologist will tell you, it can also reveal them. the opening of the amnh african hall in 1936 corresponded with the beginning of the end of the “golden age” of dioramas, at least as far as habitat groups featuring megafauna. this was no doubt partly driven by increasing public consciousness of, and sensitivity to, the very real threats to many of these large mammals. as veteran amnh taxidermist steve quinn writes, many species “were becoming so endangered in their native habitat that collection for display was deemed unacceptable.”87 another factor, at large museums like the amnh and the fmnh, was that the halls designed to house these groups were getting full. in the 1940s and 50s both museums, their african mammal displays complete, shifted to north american mammal groups, and then to birds. television, in almost ninety per cent of american households by the end of the 1950s, provided stiff competition to museums — and also brought wildlife into the living room via shows like walt disney’s disneyland (1954–58) and walt disney presents 87 quinn, windows on nature, 21. alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 131 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) (1958–61), zoo parade (1950–57), and mutual of omaha’s wild kingdom (1963–71).88 “by the late 1950s,” quinn observes, “the popularity of the diorama as an exhibit medium was waning.”89 accordingly, as changing tastes and trends eclipsed the perceived cachet and “relevance” of taxidermy and dioramas, so did their authors fade into relative obscurity. most of carl’s work remained on display in new york, chicago, and milwaukee, but, increasingly considered dusty and passé, it was not much of a legacy; the celebrated explorer-artist whose efforts once made headlines was, to the degree that he was remembered at all, a quaint relic. delia hung up her rifle and pith helmet in the early 1930s, but remained active in the society of women geographers. she remarried in 1939, and lived a quiet life until her death in 1970, at age 100.90 mary ended her african travels in 1947, and retired to her home in mystic, connecticut as a relative recluse.91 with the “rediscovery” of taxidermy and dioramas over the last decade or so by academics and artists, carl and delia have been resurrected in the public consciousness; mary, less so. carl has had several biographical treatments in the past dozen years, is treated in most of the books cited in the first paragraph of this paper, and many more, and is celebrated in tens of thousands of online articles as a master taxidermist, explorer, and “badass”. at least one high-profile american actor has evinced interest in bringing akeley’s story to the screen; a hollywood “biopic” may just be a matter of time. delia too has been treated in several volumes on female explorers, and is likewise extolled as an explorer, hunter (and yes, “badass”) in her own right on countless websites.92 over the past 88 eighty–six per cent of american homes had television sets by 1959. “six of seven homes now have tv sets,” broadcasting, august 3, 1959, 74. 89 quinn, windows on nature, 21. 90 most sources put delia’s age in 1970 at 95, drawing on fagg olds, women of the four winds, which based delia’s age on family lore. census records confirm delia’s birth year as 1870. 91 see mckay, “mary lee jobe”. 92 for example, fagg olds, women of the four winds; zanglein, the girl explorers; mcloone, women explorers in africa; willman, “mimic-women”; mccalman, delia akeley and the monkey. 132 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) decade, the present author has consulted with more than a halfdozen authors and/or filmmakers working on biographical projects focused on delia. it is especially telling that when the amnh published a blog celebrating women’s history month a few years ago (on its official website, amnh.org), it included delia (with margaret mead and others), while mary was nowhere in sight.93 all of this recognition is legitimately celebratory and honorific, but it also reflects the recognition that, like classic taxidermy, carl and delia have become exploitable commodities for both museums and academics. delia’s fame may have eclipsed mary’s because she partnered with carl longer, and worked with him during the most productive and transformative stages of his artistic career, but also because she was a productive explorer and museum collector in her own right.94 on the other hand, mary’s post-carl career of travel, writing, and conservation advocacy can be seen as a direct extension of carl’s work.95 delia forged a more distinct path, starting even before carl’s death, with her two expeditions to the congo for the brooklyn museum, and scientific pursuits and publications that were unconnected to his work. indeed, it seems clear that the divorce propelled delia on her own independent course, surveying new regions of africa, and 93 “celebrating women’s history month at the museum.” https://tumblr.amnh.org/ post/140281350894/celebrating-womens-history-month-at-the-museum, march 1, 2016. 94 delia assisted carl with his pivotal “four seasons of the virginia deer” at the fmnh, which karen wonders, in her masterful study of habitat dioramas, calls “the first large mammal groups with painted backgrounds to be displayed in a scientific institution,” and which, as pat morris has observed, “stimulated many american museums to build major habitat groups of their own in the ensuing ten years.” see wonders, habitat dioramas, 135; morris, history of taxidermy, 319. for more on delia’s contributions to the four seasons see alvey, gnoske and janelli, “akeley’s four seasons”. the field museum years were carl’s most productive in terms of taxidermy and dioramas; he executed more than forty groups and mounted more than one hundred animals. he completed no permanent dioramas at the amnh, and his taxidermy mounts there consisted of four elephants, five gorillas, six lions (which were later dismantled), and one okapi. 95 mary visited africa twice more, in 1935 on an amnh expedition, and in 1947 to survey wildlife preserves at the invitation of the belgian government, trips that were clearly extensions of carl’s work. she wrote seven more books after the wilderness lives again, some drawing on her expeditions with carl, one on her solo trip for the amnh, and one on game reserves in the belgian congo. she also served as an advisor to the amnh for decades. see mckay, “mary lee jobe”. besides the wilderness lives again, mary published seven other books on various aspects of african exploration, animals, and conservation; two of them listed carl as first author, and drew on his previously published writings. https://tumblr.amnh.org/post/140281350894/celebrating-womens-history-month-at-the-museum https://tumblr.amnh.org/post/140281350894/celebrating-womens-history-month-at-the-museum alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 133 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) pursuing her own interests. had she and carl stayed together, she likely would have continued as a partner to carl — a partner with a great degree of authority, and an important contributor to his projects, but still a partner rather than an autonomous leader. rather than being erased by divorce and duplicity, those circumstances incited delia to pursue her own interests, and generate her own discourses (it is notable that she produced her first publication the year she left carl). as far as the amnh african hall, delia akeley is abundantly present in officially sanctioned discourses about it, both published and archival. the words and the work of each of the akeleys inform the hall in varying ways, as do larger social and cultural discourses. but the meanings evoked by those discourses, whether concerning sex, race, class, exploration, or authorship, arise at the moment of an individual viewer’s communion with a given diorama or group. the capacity to construct those meanings is ultimately a function of who is “reading” and when (1922, 1936, 1982, today), the knowledge they bring to the experience, and the connections they are equipped to make. acknowledgements the author expresses sincere thanks to the two anonymous reviewers of the manuscript for their insightful comments, which greatly strengthened the paper. eternal gratitude also to tom gnoske (chief preparator and assistant collections manager of birds at fmnh — and taxidermist and akeley scholar) for intensive discussions over many months that clarified the timelines and localities of the many akeley elephants — and for coining the “morale bull” epithet. and finally, special thanks to greg raml and rebecca morgan at the amnh library and nina cummings at the fmnh photo archives for expertly (and patiently) wrangling archival photographs, and to john weinstein and david klinck for their fine photographic eyes. 134 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) works cited akeley, carl e. “elephant hunting in equatorial africa.” american museum journal 12, no. 2 (february 1912): 43–62. akeley, carl e. “elephant hunting in equatorial africa with rifle and camera.” national geographic 23, no. 8 (1912): 808. akeley, carl e. “elephant hunting on mount kenya,” american museum journal 15, no. 7 (november 1915): 323–38. akeley, carl e. “hunting the african buffalo,” american museum journal 15, no. 4 (april 1915): 151–61. akeley, carl e. in brightest africa. garden city, ny: garden city publishing, 1923. akeley, carl e. “elephant.” boys’ life, may 1924, 6, 58–59. akeley, carl e. “african hall — a monument to primitive africa.” the mentor, january 1926, 10–22. akeley, delia j. [writing as mrs. carl e. akeley]. “notes on african monkeys.” the american museum journal, 15, no. 8 (december 1918): 670–83. akeley, delia j. “report of the museum’s expedition to africa,” the brooklyn museum quarterly 12, no. 3 (july 1925): 126–32. akeley, delia j. “among the pigmies in the congo forest,” the brooklyn museum quarterly, 13, no. 1 (january 1926): 2–11. akeley, delia j. “monkey tricks,” the saturday evening post, september 18, 1926, 36, 30, 107ff. akeley, delia j. “baboons,” the saturday evening post, january 15, 1927, 12–13, 75ff. akeley, delia j. “crocodiles,” the saturday evening post, july 28, 1928, 34, 39–40. akeley, delia j. “j. t. jr.”: the biography of an african monkey. new york: macmillan, 1928. akeley, delia j. “jungle rescue,” collier’s national weekly, february 11, 1928, pp. 10, 36, 38–39. akeley, delia j. “the little people,” the saturday evening post, march 3, 1928, 16–17, 158ff. akeley, delia j. “elephants in the fog,” the century, october 1929, 120–129. akeley, delia j. “on wings of fire,” st. nicholas, 17, no. 3 (1930): 149–163, 236. akeley, delia j. jungle portraits. new york: macmillan, 1930. akeley, delia j. “my first elephant.” in all true: the record of actual adventures that have happened to ten women of today, 8–30. new york: brewer, warren & putnam, 1931. akeley, carl e. and mary l. jobe akeley. adventures in the african jungle. new york: dodd, mead, 1930. akeley, carl e. and mary l. jobe akeley. lions, gorillas and their neighbors. new york: dodd, mead, 1932. akeley, mary jobe papers. american museum of natural history research library special collections, new york. akeley, mary l. jobe. carl akeley’s africa: the account of the akeley-eastmanpomeroy african hall expedition of the american museum of natural history. new york: dodd, mead, 1929. akeley, mary l. jobe. the swan song of old africa. new york: american museum of natural history, 1932. akeley, mary l. jobe. restless jungle. new york: r. m. mcbride, 1936. akeley, mary l. jobe. the wilderness lives again. new york: dodd, mead, 1940. akeley, mary l. jobe. rumble of a distant drum; a true story of the african hinterland. new york: dodd, mead, 1946. akeley, mary l. jobe. congo eden. new york: new york: dodd, mead, 1950. aloi, giovanni. speculative taxidermy: natural history, animal surfaces, and art in the anthropocene. new york: columbia university press, 2018. alvey, pachyderm matriarchy | 135 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) alvey, mark, thomas p. gnoske, and john janelli. “akeley’s four seasons: a vision, an obsession, and sixteen deer.” natural history 129, no. 9 (oct. 2021): 37–39. andrei, mary anne. nature’s mirror. chicago: university of chicago press, 2020. american museum of natural history. sixty-eighth annual report for the year 1936. may 1, 1937. bodry-sanders, penelope. african obsession: the life and legacy of carl akeley. fort lauderdale, fl: batax museum publishing, 1998. bordwell, david. “historical poetics of cinema,” in the cinematic text: methods and approaches, edited by r. barton palmer, 369–98. new york: ams press, 1989. “carl e. akeley and his work.” the mentor, june 1924, 20–28. clark, james l. trails of the hunted. boston: little, brown and co, 1928. davenne, christine and christine fleurent. cabinets of wonder. new york: abrams, 2012. dewey, clarence. “my friend ‘ake’.” nature magazine 10 (december 1927): 388. dickerson, m.c. “the new african hall planned by carl e. akeley.” american museum journal 14, no. 5 (1914): 175–188. director’s papers, 1928. field museum archives. falk, john howard and lynn d. dierking. the museum experience. washington, dc: whalesback books, 1992. field museum of natural history. annual report of the director to the board of trustees for the year 1907. chicago, il: field museum of natural history, 1908. “glimpses into the african hall,” natural history, 37 (january 1936): 3. haraway, donna. “teddy bear patriarchy: taxidermy in the garden of eden, new york city, 1908–1936,” social text 11 (winter, 1984–1985): 20–64. https://doi. org/10.2307/466593. haraway, donna. “teddy bear patriarchy: taxidermy in the garden of eden, new york city, 1908–1936.” in the haraway reader, 151–197. new york: routledge, 2004. holub, robert c. “american confrontations with reception theory,” monatshefte, 81, no. 2 (summer, 1989): 213–25. kaufman, i. [writing as “william weer”] “death breaks romantic akeley triangle,” the brooklyn daily eagle, december 5, 1926, a-23. kirk, jay. kingdom under glass. new york: henry holt, 2010. landes, joan b., paula young lee, and paul youngquist, eds. gorgeous beasts: animal bodies in historical perspective. university park, pa: pennsylvania state university press, 2012. livingstone, phaedra. “imaginary places: museum visitor perceptions of habitat dioramas.” in natural history dioramas: history, construction, and educational role, edited by sue dale tunnicliffe and annette scheersoi, 195–208. dordrecht: springer, 2015. lunde, darrin. the naturalist: theodore roosevelt, a lifetime of exploration, and the triumph of american natural history. new york: crown, 2017. mccalman, iain. delia akeley and the monkey: a human–animal story of captivity, patriarchy and nature. collingwood, australia: black inc., 2022. mccutcheon, john t. in africa. indianapolis: bobbs-merrill, 1910. mckay, mary. “mary lee jobe.” in notable american women: the modern period (a biographical dictionary), edited by barbara sicherman and carol hurd green, 8–10. cambridge, ma: belknap press of harvard university press, 1980. mcloone, margo. women explorers in africa. mankato, mn: capstone press, 1997. morris, p. a. a history of taxidermy: art, science and bad taste. ascot: mpm publishing, 2010. https://doi.org/10.2307/466593 https://doi.org/10.2307/466593 136 | alvey, pachyderm matriarchy humanimalia 14.1 (2023) “museum notes.” natural history 38 (september 1936): 175. poliquin, rachel. the breathless zoo: taxidermy and the cultures of longing. university park, pa: pennsylvania state university press, 2012. pomeroy, daniel e., “akeley’s dream comes true.” natural history 37 (january 1936): 5–10. pomeroy, daniel e., and james l. clark. the complete book of african hall. new york: american museum of natural history, 1936. quinn, stephen christopher. windows on nature: the great habitat dioramas of the american museum of natural history. new york: abrams, 2006. rothfels, nigel. “trophies and taxidermy.” in landes et al., gorgeous beasts, 117–36. “the rear guard.” natural history 37 (january 1936): 4. roosevelt, theodore. african game trails. new york: scribner’s, 1910. russ, joanna. how to suppress women’s writing. austin: university of texas press, 1983. scheersoi, annette and sue dale tunnicliffe, eds. natural history dioramas — traditional exhibits for current education themes. cham, switzerland: springer, 2019. schudson, michael. “cultural studies and the social construction of ‘social construction’: notes on ‘teddy bear patriarchy’.” in from sociology to cultural studies: new perspectives, edited by elizabeth long, 379–98. malden: blackwell, 1997. small, zachary. “removal of a theodore roosevelt statue begins,” new york times, january 20, 2022, c, 2. https:// www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/arts/ design/theodore-roosevelt-statuenatural-history-museum.html “some african hall chronicles.” natural history, 37 (january 1936): 25–28. thorsen, liv emma, karen a. rader and adam dodd, eds. animals on display: the creaturely in museums, zoos, and natural history. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2013. tunnicliffe, sue dale and annette scheersoi, eds. natural history dioramas: history, construction, and educational role. dordrecht: springer, 2015. ware, susan. still missing: amelia earhart and the search for modern feminism. new york: w.w. norton, 1993. willman, michele r. “mimic-women: twentieth-century american women on the edges of exploration.” phd diss., university of north dakota, 2017. https://commons.und.edu/theses/2381 wonders, karen. habitat dioramas: illusions of wilderness in museums of natural history. uppsala: uppsala university, 1993. zanglein, jane. the girl explorers. naperville, il: sourcebooks, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/arts/design/theodore-roosevelt-statue-natural-history-museum.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/arts/design/theodore-roosevelt-statue-natural-history-museum.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/arts/design/theodore-roosevelt-statue-natural-history-museum.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/19/arts/design/theodore-roosevelt-statue-natural-history-museum.html _hlk137564047 microsoft word karnicky pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:1 jeffrey karnicky ornithological biography, animal studies, and starling subjectivity at the end of his recent study of literary birds in british romantic and contemporary native american poetry, skylark meets meadowlark: reimagining the bird in british romantic and contemporary native american literature (2009), tom gannon writes: the tempting (at least implicit) conclusion of many works similar to mine runs as follows: know other animals; know thyself better. the modern environmentalist version of this dictum tells us to save other species and the wilderness — for us, either for our own enjoyment or our own survival. but what an insult to other species that is, and what ultimately anthropocentric gall. (316; emphasis in original) this notion of birds as either a means of appreciating nature or of understanding the human place in the world is a common thread that runs through the history of much american writing about birds, from walt whitman=s claim in 1878 that, after listening to some birds sing for half an hour, “i have a positive conviction that some of these birds sing, and others fly and flit about here, for my especial benefit” (113), to henry david thoreau=s claim in 1854 that he was “neighbor to the birds” (58). but perhaps it is john james audubon, in both his birds of north america (113) and his ornithological biography (1831), who lays the groundwork for seeing birds as “for us.” audubon published the first volume of his ornithological biography in 1831. the book described the habits of, and audubon=s interactions with, all of the bird species that audubon painted for his birds of north america (1827-39). while audubon was not the first to write about the life history of birds, the ornithological biography=s combination of natural history, emotion, and biography is unique. part of the ornithological biography is “conscientiously packed with physical facts and measurements, close-up observations about how each bird hunted for food, chose its roosting place, fought, sang, played, courted, nested, and nursed its young” (forkner xiii). for my purposes, the more interesting parts of the ornithological biography are those in which audubon writes of his impressions of a bird=s character and of his interactions with individual birds. many of the accounts describe birds in terms of human values and emotions. the bald eagle is a “selfish oppressor” and “rank coward” with a “ferocious, overbearing and tyrannical humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 32 temper” (audubon 160, 163). the purple (common) grackle has “nefarious propensities” and is “full of delight at the sight of the havoc which he has already committed” (36), to cite just a few examples. audubon also writes anecdotally of his and others= encounters with individual birds, whether it is the bravery of an injured bird that has just been shot, or the character of birds kept as pets by audubon or his friends. these stories seem to be direct precursors of what could be called a more recent genre of “bird biography” in which a young, injured, or sick bird (or even an egg found in a nest) is raised in a human home. margaret stanger=s that quail, robert, published in 1966, can arguably be seen as the beginning of the specific type of modern bird biography in which i am interested. robert tells the story of a couple on cape cod who bring an abandoned quail egg into their living room. the egg hatches, and the bird becomes imprinted on the humans. she lives with them for many years and becomes a part of the family. this structure informs nearly all bird biographies. a wild bird — egg, nestling, just fledged, or injured — is brought into a home, named (fairly often given a male name when later the bird is revealed to be female, as is the case here), and becomes a part of the household — not quite as domesticated as a cat or dog, but not wild either. after robert, one can read of peepers the talking starling (2004), arnie the darling starling (1983), hummingbird in my house: the story of squeak (1991), rosie: my rufous hummingbird (1995), jayson, the true story of a 20 year old blue jay (2004), and wesley the owl (2008). all of these books, to a greater or lesser degree, hinge on a dual recognition. wild birds are brought into a human habitat and become domesticated. wild birds are rejected by the newly domesticated bird as a humanizing narrative takes shape. at the same time, the human moves toward the bird, seeking, but ultimately failing, to understand the bird=s “nature.” in short, gannon=s “anthropocentric gall” has been the dominant form of bird biography through the twenty-first century. this mode depends on the type of recognition and individuation that can be characterized as interpellation. in bird biography, birds become subjects as they enter into a relationship with humans through what louis althusser calls interpellation: “a material ritual practice of ideological recognition in everyday life” (173), such as a handshake or a statement like ahello, my friend@ (176). through such “hailings,” one “becomes a subject” (176), an individualized body called into an ideological system. althusser, following freud, writes briefly of “the specific familial ideological configuration” (176) into which infants are born. two of the key means by which a newly-born infant is interpellated are naming and sexing. as althusser writes, “it is certain in advance that it [the infant] will bear its father=s name, and will therefore have an identity and be irreplaceable@ (177). jeffrey karnicky — ornithological biography, animal studies, and starling subjectivity 33 likewise, the infant will “’become’ the sexual subject (boy or girl) which it already is in advance.” both of these hailings are key components of “the rituals of rearing and then education in the family” that transform an individual into a subject. these rituals, so familiar within families that they might seem invisible, are, in fact, the narrative content of most bird biographies. that is, bird biography, as a genre, is all about the interpellation of birds: from an undifferentiated population of birds out there “in the wild,” individual birds are called into human familial structures. this strain of interpellation also runs through recent iterations of animal studies, as exemplified in the work of jacques derrida and donna haraway, two critics who problematize interpellation by pushing it to its limit on the border between the individual and the population. this line of thought points toward a way of thinking differently about animals, a mode of thought that gannon also points toward in his discussion of birds. gannon seeks a way of encountering birds that does not view them simply as the unknowable other to a human self: “yes, we can know that real crow poking outside in the garbage, shitting irreverently on our suv. in fact, we need to know that bird, this animal, and know that we, too, are animals, however cursed we are by some tragic, speciesist, center-of-the-cosmos hubris” (316). gannon provides a number of ways of producing this knowledge, mainly through a “critique of the literary use of birds as types and categories” (313). more specifically, gannon argues that contemporary native american poetry can “offer us the best opportunity” for interspecies communication that can “cross the border of species” (301). perhaps the strongest example of this border crossing in gannon=s study is his reading of sherman alexie=s “avian nights” (2003), a poem gannon calls “an amazing deconstruction of human and avian difference” (299). the section of the poem that gannon analyzes focuses on a group of european starlings living in a family=s attic, and later exterminated. the poem concludes by asking a question: tell me: what is the difference between birds and us, between their pain and our pain? we build monuments; they rebuild their nests. they lay other eggs; we conceive again. dumb birds, dumb women, dumb starlings, dumb men. (76-80) gannon writes, “what is the difference, indeed? ... both are ‘dumb,’ finally ... humans and birds are just plain stupid, as earth-dwelling organisms irrationally attached to their own” (301). the main difference between starling and human here could be seen humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 34 as one of embodiment. earlier in the poem, alexie writes, “but if god gave them opposable thumbs, /i'm positive they would open the doors /of our house and come for us as we sleep” (72-3). the starling, of course, does not have opposable thumbs, but it can make its voice heard. both birds and humans, for gannon, are “inordinately prone to articulate that attachment in songs of love, in songs of mourning. birds and humans are both inveterate users of language, finally” (301). gannon sees the starling speaking back to the human in a kind of dialogue. i want to make a slightly different argument. the european starling, a bird that confounds easy categorization as either individual or population, provides another way of thinking about birds differently. starlings, in their multiple ways of being in the world, exemplify felix guattari=s non-dialectical theory of subjectivity, from his the three ecologies (1989). instead of thinking of the subject in terms of self and other, guattari writes of “existential refrains” that redefine “the relationship between subjectivity and its exteriority” (27). the subject, in this formation, finds its coherence as it responds to, and at the same time reshapes, its surroundings. listening to the starling=s existential refrain can provide a way of encountering a bird=s point of view. such listening leads away from ornithological biography as a form of writing that serves as a means of interpellation and toward an understanding of bird subjectivity that sees and hears all birds differently. an examination of starling subjectivity can show that starlings have their own way of being in the world. they are also the ultimate companion species to humans, as their population growth parallels human alteration of the environment. thus, starlings are an important site for thinking about the kinds of ethical relations that exist between human and nonhuman animals. in this ethical relationship starlings have benefited immensely since their affinity for humans has helped them to increase their range and population — starlings have survived and thrived in a human-created world. and, from a human perspective, starlings can provide a non-interpellative way of thinking about and living in this world. ornithological biography. in his essay, “audubon=s ornithological biography and the question of ‘other minds’” (1997), james w. armstrong writes that the biography works as a companion to audubon=s more well known book of bird paintings, birds of america, in that it provides a means of comprehending the interiority of birds through writing that visual representation cannot achieve alone. he writes, “audubon=s need to portray the inner state of birds pushed him towards narrative, for he had to provide the context in which these interior states might arise and be exteriorized — and thus be recognized by us” (armstrong 115). it is thus through narrative that audubon hoped to show readers that birds were “not merely automatons ... but subjects in the fullest sense of the jeffrey karnicky — ornithological biography, animal studies, and starling subjectivity 35 term — beings with consciousness and volition” (112). in other words, audubon employed narrative to call birds into a human framework in which birds, like humans, would be granted the special form of subjectivity that relies on a communicable interiority. through his painting and writing, audubon sought a way for humans to recognize birds as fellow subjects. one prominent example of how audubon used narrative to argue for the subjective experience of birds can be found in his discussion of what he calls “one of the most interesting of the birds indigenous to the united states of america,” the wild turkey (2). audubon tells a story of a male turkey “which had been reared from its earliest youth under my care, it having been caught by me when probably not more than two or three days old” (14). this bird “became so tame that it would follow any person who called it, and was the favorite of the little village” (14). while tame, the turkey did not associate with the domestic turkeys at the house. instead, it would spend the night alone on the roof. as the turkey grew, it would spend “a considerable part of the day” in the woods and “return toward night” to its roost. eventually the turkey flew away and did not return. when it had been gone for several days, audubon happened to be hunting near some lakes five miles from his home, when he saw “a fine large gobbler cross the path before me, moving leisurely along” (14). he sends his dog after the bird. the animal went off with great rapidity, and as it approached the turkey, i saw, with great surprise, that the latter paid little attention. juno was on the point of seizing it, when she suddenly stopped, and turned her head towards me. i hastened to them, but you may easily conceive my surprise when i saw my own favorite bird, and discovered that it had recognized the dog, and would not fly from it; although the sight of a strange dog would have caused it to run off at once (14). the turkey recognizes the dog, and unrecorded by audubon, the dog seemingly recognizes the turkey, as juno stops and turns to audubon instead of seizing the bird. audubon notes that he brought the live turkey home with him. he then tells how it was “accidentally shot, having been taken for a wild bird” the next year by someone who did not immediately recognize the turkey as audubon=s pet, until it was brought to audubon “on being recognized by the red ribbon which it had around its neck” (14 ). reflecting on the turkey=s recognition of juno, he asks: “pray, reader, by what word will you designate the recognition made by my favorite turkey of a dog which had long been associated with it in the yard and grounds? was it the result of instinct, or of reason — an unconsciously revived impression or the act of an intelligent mind?” (15). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 36 audubon never answers these questions. how to account for this recognition seems less important than the act of recognition itself. the turkey sees juno; juno sees the turkey. the turkey does not flee and the dog does not attack. the man does not shoot. all of these acts go against instinct. and it is this moment of recognition that overrules instinct. the three actors — audubon, juno, and the turkey — all recognize each other as subjects. the turkey recognizes juno as a specific subject, a dog not to be feared and fled from. likewise, juno recognizes the turkey as not just any member of the undifferentiated population of wild turkeys in the woods, but as a specific known subject. what seems astounding about this encounter is that the dog then seems to communicate this to audubon, through a turn of the head. as juno looks at audubon, the mutual recognition, or hailing, is complete. one cannot overemphasize the importance of mutual recognition here. had the “favorite turkey” not been recognized, audubon, who notes that he was hunting, would have most likely shot the bird, and juno would have then “seized” it. but this does not happen. even a casual reader of the ornithological biography will note that refraining from shooting a bird is an event of great consequence for audubon, who continually notes the great pleasure of procuring one more specimen. but why does mere recognition prevent the bird from fleeing and the dog from biting? the dog saw the turkey as somehow different from other game birds. while it is not clear that the turkey is capable of reason, it seems to have learned something during its time as a pet. it knew, unlike other wild turkeys, that certain dogs and humans would not harm it. it learned to recognize individuals of those two species. it saw audubon and juno, and in a sense, interpellated them as subjects, even as friends who meant it no harm. the bird affirmed audubon=s existence and audubon spared the bird=s life. instead of a hunting story, audubon tells an interpellation story. this exact form of interpellation story can be traced through contemporary bird biographies. margaret stanger=s that quail, robert is marked with many scenes of recognition and response. soon after hatching in the kitchen of her caretakers, the fledgling northern bobwhite, “even at the age of about an hour ... had followed the sound of human voices and found the first living creatures it was to encounter — two human beings” (14).1 from this moment of imprinting, the bird favors human company and rejects birds. many moments of interpellation follow. the bird is named, sexed (incorrectly, as is discovered a year later when “he” lays an egg), and banded so that “he was legally registered and perhaps protected for the future” (25). after robert=s banding, stanger refers to her “new status of ornithological citizenship” (25). the bird is jeffrey karnicky — ornithological biography, animal studies, and starling subjectivity 37 house trained and “developed a feeling of complete security and confidence toward any and all humans” (23). paired with her security around humans was a fear of birds. robert either cowers in fear or completely ignores any birds she encounters on the front lawn of her house. stanger writes that “on several of robert=s outdoor excursions his own quail family, all twelve of them, were often quite near him. there was never the slightest sign of recognition, much less reunion, on either side” (20). stanger concludes, “robert had repudiated her own kind in favor of her human environment” (104). stanger writes, “we should have realized earlier than we did that far from having a bird in captivity, we were helplessly and hopelessly ensnared and enamored” (16). according to stanger, who was a retired child psychologist, robert had “spectacular” developments in vocabulary and personality. she notes the “distinctive chirps” (16) that robert made in different circumstances. perhaps most interestingly, she thinks of robert as an individual, intelligent subject. in discussing robert=s behavior, stanger asks, “can there be any question as to her intelligence?” (68). robert clearly recognized, remembered, and acted differently toward different humans. some she seemed to think of as friends; some she disliked and avoided. in a sense, then, robert and the multiple humans she encounters mutually recognize one another — human looks at bird and bird looks at human. the title of the book, that quail, robert, sums up her relationship with humans perfectly. “that” marks her as a specific quail, easily recognizable and distinguished from the innumerable wild birds in her vicinity. “robert” marks her naming, obviously, and also the fact that she is no longer just an anonymous member of a quail population living outside. robert and audubon=s “favorite turkey” exemplify the interpellative aspect of bird biography. but it is not only agame birds@ like quail and turkeys that are subject to this form of narrative. hummingbirds, robins, and owls have their own bird biographies. narratives of domesticated animals, such as ducks and parrots, also abound. perhaps most interesting, though, are the biographies of a so-called invasive species that is sometimes seen as vermin and sometimes seen as a companion species: the european starling. the european starling, sturnus vulgaris, is the most common bird in america. an estimated 200,000,000 european starlings live in north america, all descended from 160 birds released in new york=s central park in 1890 and 1891. these birds were released by eugene schieffelin, a member of the american acclimatization society, a group that sought to establish american populations of every bird mentioned in shakespeare=s plays. these introductions failed to produce sustainable populations, except for that of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 38 the starling. european starlings quickly spread across america, partially due to their ability to adapt to and thrive in human-altered environments, especially cities and farms. at least partially due to its proximity to humans, the european starling is also the most frequently exterminated bird in america. in 2008, 1,703,697 starlings were “lethally controlled” by u.s. wildlife services (usda, “animals” 373). starlings tend to flock in agricultural areas, eating and spoiling cattle feed, spreading disease, and damaging crops. the starling is not protected by the migratory bird act; most licensed wildlife rehabilitators will euthanize any injured starling brought to them. starlings can also be a threat to other cavity-nesting birds, such as red-headed woodpeckers. but, even as starlings are seen as little more than vermin in many contexts, their flocking behavior has inspired poets and mathematicians. starlings are also one of the most commonly domesticated “wild” birds. there are many stories of pet starlings; they are named, cared for, taught, and loved. they are mourned when they die. mozart had a pet starling; when it died, mozart held a funeral and wrote a poem for it. he wrote, “my heart / is riven apart. /oh, reader! shed a tear, / you also, here” (qtd. in west 107). today, memorial web pages for deceased pet starlings are common.2 and while most wildlife rehabilitators will not care for injured starlings, many humans have adopted starlings and raised them as part of the family. izumi kyle tells the story of “kuro,” a starling she rescued when she was 12. “he was just a small, featherless hatchling that had fallen out of a nest at my primary school. two children were teasing him, so i took him away from them and brought him home in a styrofoam cup” (kyle). the kyle family adopts kuro, so that “our house was his home and our family lived in his cage!” (kyle). kuro learned to mimic familiar sounds, “he could say ‘good bird!’, ‘pretty bird!’ ‘kiss!’, ‘kuro stay!’ and many combinations thereof, as well as whistle many tunes including the william tell overture and ‘pop goes the weasel’”(kyle). kuro lived for a record 19 years; on his death, his family “was devastated and felt an incredible loss.... i still think about him often and remember all the wonderful experiences as if it was yesterday. i tear at times thinking about him and have many dreams that he is still with us” (kyle). arnie, the darling starling was brought into the house of margarete sigl corbo, and raised as a member of the family. corbo=s book, written with diane marie barras, hits all the interpellative notes of bird biography. arnie is rescued from the wild when corbo sees that he has fallen from his nest: “he stared past a conical, tightly shut infant jeffrey karnicky — ornithological biography, animal studies, and starling subjectivity 39 beak, his darkly bright eyes insisting, ‘take me home. immediately’” (2). after resistance — “he=s just a wild bird. he doesn=t need a name ... he does not get a name” (14) — he is named. “i=d surrendered to the inevitability of arnold as an appellation” (21). he is set free and returns numerous times (47, 126-127). he is described as a human infant and child throughout the text, until corbo finally notes, “he was family” (52). arnie ages, eventually dies, and is mourned. gently as a feather floating on a breeze, arnie slipped from this life on february 11, 1983. he would have been four years old that may. his body rests beneath a lush canopy of daisies in margarete=s yard, but in the hearts and memories of the many people he touched, arnie=s spirit is vibrantly alive and as indestructible as dandelions — and starlings. (231) i will let these two examples stand for the stories of other named starlings such as salem, stormy, jedda, murphy, and rudy.3 clearly, these birds form strong bonds with humans. humans who see starlings as companion species interpellate the birds into human society in the traditional way. starlings, like other birds subject to biography, are sexed, named, raised as children, cared for in their old age, and mourned in death. ornithological biography, then, achieves its purpose of rendering birds as subjects. bird biography attempts to find evidence of bird interiority and make this interiority manifest and communicable. bird biography argues, implicitly and/or directly, for birds as quasi-human subjects. birds become companions to humans as they enter into human conceptions of the world. this relationship between birds and humans bears comparison to other human-animal pairings, such as the more common relationship of humans and dogs. in the companion species manifesto (2003), donna haraway famously writes of how she and her dog become companions to one another. we are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand. we are, constitutively, companion species. we make each other up, in the flesh. significantly other to each other, in specific difference, we signify in the flesh a nasty developmental infection called love. this love is an historical aberration and a naturalcultural legacy. (3) what haraway writes of her dog is also true for the companion relationship between starlings and humans who live together. that is, “love” seems to be the clearest definition of the basis for corso=s affinity for arnie, kyle=s for kuro, and mozart=s for his starling. at the same time, though, many of these relationships are written in a manner humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 40 that haraway wants to resist. in her discussion of human-dog agility training in when species meet (2007), haraway writes that a dog is “not a furry child” (213). as i hope to have made obvious, bird biographers see their bird subjects precisely as feathered children. perhaps something is lost in this humanizing of birds. in its many attempts to communicate the interior life of birds, ornithological biography takes its interpellative practice as natural, as something that does not call for any kind of reflection or analysis. but animals might have another way of living in the world. the developing discourse of animal studies can offer a means for thinking differently about human-bird companionship. deconstructing bird biographies. in the animal that therefore i am (2008), jacques derrida deconstructs the oppositional terms, as used throughout the history of philosophy, of human and animal. he shows how man has categorized, named, and made other the concept of “animal.” derrida examines what this opposition hinges on, and he explores what thinking beyond this opposition might look like. for cary wolfe, derrida=s book “is arguably the single most important event in the brief history of animal studies” (570), precisely because of this deconstruction of the human/animal dialectic. through derridean-inflected animal studies, according to wolfe, “we are returned to a new sense of the materiality and particularity not just of the animal and its multitude of forms but also of that animal called the human” (572). that is, in deconstructing the human/animal binary, both terms can become reconfigured, as the dominant term, “human,” is shown to depend on what derrida calls the “subjection of the animal” (derrida 25). derrida asks, “is being-with-theanimal a fundamental and irreducible structure of being-in-the-world, so much so that the idea of a world without animals could not even function as a methodological fiction?” (79). the short answer to this question is “yes.” and, as i will argue, starlings can offer proof that a world without animals cannot be thought. nonetheless, bird biographies implicitly adopt, and confirm, the humanist modes of “reading, interpretation, and critical thought” (572) that wolfe describes. more importantly, in order to participate in these “humanist modes,” ornithological biography buys into a humanist mode of being, embodied in interpellation and grounded in derrida=s “subjection of the animal.” for the humanist, the animal has no name and no ability to speak of itself, or of others for that matter. according to derrida, “the animal is a word, it is an appellation that men have instituted, a name they have given themselves the right and the authority to give to the living other” (23). by naming other forms of life “animal,” man places jeffrey karnicky — ornithological biography, animal studies, and starling subjectivity 41 animals in a separate category. likewise, philosophy denies animals language: “all the philosophers we will investigate say the same thing; the animal is deprived of language” (32). the animal cannot name itself; it cannot even respond to its naming by man. in short, the animal is seen as incapable of response. animals become an other to be “subjected to farming and regimentalization at a demographic level unknown in the past ... all of that in the service of a certain being and the putative well-being of man” (25). philosophy and the production of meat for human consumption are linked by a belief in a man/animal dialectic that remains immovable. animals are not humans; humans are not animals. this is at the heart of what derrida calls “this event — that is the unprecedented proportions of this subjection of the animal” (25; emphasis in original). derrida coins the word animot (a combination of the french for animal and word), as a marker of how one might take apart the dialectic. “animal words” might make clear that the concept of the animal is “neither a species nor a gender nor an individual, it is an irreducible multiplicity of mortals” (41). he goes on to write, “we have to envision the existence of ‘living creatures,’ whose plurality cannot be assembled within the single figure of an animality that is simply opposed to humanity” (47). how can this idea, as he suggests, be “envisioned”? according to derrida, “it would not be a matter of ‘giving speech back’ to animals but perhaps of acceding to a thinking, however fabulous and chimerical it might be, that thinks the absence of the name and of the word otherwise, and as something other than a privation” (48). the absence of human language, then, is not a lack. forgetting language for the moment, what becomes important is remembering the act of the cat looking. “the animal looks at us, and we are naked before it. thinking perhaps begins here” (29). bird biography pauses, as derrida does, at this moment when the animal looks back with its own point of view. but bird biography obscures this point of view precisely through interpellative acts. in order to be rendered as the subject of a biography, the bird=s point of view has to be covered over through humanizing practices such as naming. naming a bird erases its point of view. robert, kuro, and arnie are cut off from any subjectivity outside of the human households in which they live. according to donna haraway, this pause marks the limit of derrida=s thought. in when species meet, haraway writes, “with his cat, derrida failed a simple obligation of companion species; he did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning” (20). from within the realm of philosophy that he deconstructs, derrida humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 42 cannot find a space for his cat to look back. haraway writes that derrida “did not seriously consider an alternative form of engagement either, one that risked knowing something more about cats and how to look back, perhaps even scientifically, biologically, and therefore also philosophically and intimately” (20; emphasis in original). in her reading of the animal that therefore i am, haraway argues that derrida cannot imagine what his cat sees because of his focus. “he came right to the edge of respect ... but he was sidetracked by his textual canon of western philosophy and literature” (20). as haraway notes, “somehow ... the cat was never heard from again in the long essay dedicated to the crime against animals” (20). in short, haraway locates the limit of derrida=s thought in the cat=s gaze that allows him to begin his inquiry. the shared gaze undermines the structure of derrida=s system — right from the start, as haraway shows, he stops short of engaging an animal=s otherness. haraway writes that while “derrida is among the most curious of men” (20), in the face-to-face encounter with his cat he became “incurious” (20). but just as derrida=s cat marks the limit of his thought, it is a bird, the steller’s jay, that marks a limit of haraway=s interrogation of the always contingent “dividing line” that marks “life-and-death relations between human and nonhuman animals” (296). in a short chapter of when species meet called “becoming companion species in technoculture,” haraway describes her work with a group called “forgotten felines” to capture, sterilize, and vaccinate a group of feral cats living in a barn in sonoma county, california. the cats are then “released” with the understanding that the cats will be fed by humans for the duration of the cats’ lives. the local raccoons and steller’s jays continually raided “the cats’ food arrangements with aplomb” (279), as the humans took part in an “arms race” (279) to secure the cats’ food. but the human-supplied cat food is not the only thing eaten in this multispecies encounter. one cat is found dead “with her front leg torn off, presumably by a raccoon” (279). and the cats, of course, do not stick to their human-supplied diet of cat food. haraway hopes that the cats “will have a fine life keeping the rodents in check” (278). she also notes that the cats kill and eat some steller’s jays. she writes, “i don’t care when i see steller’s jays feathers littering their hunting grounds; those avian populations are not threatened by domestic cats around here” (280). the cats take precedence over the other animals — rodents, raccoons, and birds — living near the barn. haraway writes, “our loyalty seemed due the cats and not the jays and raccoons, because we had produced the food competition and invited — really engineered — the cats into semidependence on us” (279). how was this engineered semidependece produced? and to what effect? jeffrey karnicky — ornithological biography, animal studies, and starling subjectivity 43 a key step in this engineering is an “incuriosity” similar to the one haraway found in derrida’s interaction with his cat. she writes, “i do remember the statistics of songbird kills by even well-provisioned pet cats in many places — enough to destabilize populations and add to the threat to already threatened species. i wish i knew the score in my region, but i do not” (280). based on this missing information about her region, haraway goes on to ask a series of questions. would i kill our feral cats if i learned they were a problem for the local quail or other birds? ... would i know if our dusky-footed wood rat or deer mice populations were in trouble? does provisioning feral cats carry obligations to follow through on questions of species diversity and ecological balance in microregions? (280-281) haraway is not interested in answering these questions; rather, she uses them to establish the complexity of the “multispecies relationships” at work in this specific setting. she writes, “nothing about the multispecies relationships i am sketching is emotionally, operationally, intellectually, or ethically simple for the people or clearly good or bad for the other critters” (280). for the semi-feral cats, this statement is true — it is not abundantly clear whether “trap-neuter-release” (tnr) is good or bad — their lives may be better than those of the wholly feral cats, but it is certainly worse than that of indoor cats. even the name of this practice is in dispute. while tnr is most common, forgotten felines defines its practice as the “ttvar-m method of feral cat control. trap, test, vaccinate, alter, release and maintain” (“forgotten felines”). haraway, in the questions she asks, shows the complexity of the issue for the people involved. for the rodents and birds involved, however, this situation seems a bit less complex, since they are being killed. some people have even called for the caretakers of feral cat colonies to be prosecuted under the migratory bird act or the endangered species act (tnr reality check). haraway=s short chapter gestures at this complexity but does not address it. her curiosity here is not strong. of course, no writer can follow through on all the paths opened up by his or her work. nonetheless, i remain stuck on haraway=s remark that “i don=t care when i see steller’s jays feathers littering their hunting grounds.” the choice to favor the cats over the birds and mice is the kind of choice that haraway notes has to be made all the time in multispecies encounters. clearly, not every species can win. but the alliance with the cats seems to violate at least two of three “tempting moves” haraway calls for avoiding in multispecies encounters: humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 44 one must actively cast oneself with some ways of life and not others without making any of three tempting moves: (1) being self-certain; (2) relegating those who eat differently to a subclass of vermin, the underprivileged, or the unenlightened; and (3) giving up on knowing more, including scientifically, and feeling more, including scientifically, about how to eat well — together. (295) while she is not self-certain, her analysis does include the rodents as vermin, even as she parenthetically brackets this categorization: “(i will leave unexamined the implicit category of vermin)” (280). more importantly, in not seeking answers to her questions about bird populations, haraway has given “up on knowing more” (280) about this “microregion.” my point here is not to point out a weakness in haraway=s argument. instead, i want to draw a provisional parallel: haraway=s jays equal derrida=s cat equals audubon=s turkey equals robert the quail, arnie the starling, and all subjects of bird biography. that is, each of these specific animals marks the limit of a system of thought that seeks to engage the animal. and this limit is marked by interpellation. in a short ”philosophical postscript” on interpellation that haraway appends to “becoming companion species in technoculture,” she writes, “today, through our ideologically loaded narratives of their lives, animals ‘hail’ us animal people to account for the regimes in which they and we must live. we ‘hail’ them into our constructs of nature and culture, with major consequences of life and death, health and illness, longevity and extinction” (when species meet 278). i want to think about two reciprocal hailings that take place here: the humans= hailing of the cats and vice versa, and the humans= hailings of the jays and vice versa. this pair of reciprocal hailings highlights one important differencecthe cats are interpellated into life and the jays are interpellated into death. what can account for this important difference? the cats are interpellated in multiple ways; they are familiarized with people, vaccinated, spayed or neutered, fed, and named. haraway writes that the cats have “been interpellated into the modern biopolitical state” (277) and have therefore “earned names to go with their historical identities and subject status” (277). readers are introduced to “spike (black male), giles (black male), willow (dark gray tabby female), and max (light gray tabby female” (277). this naming and sexing, as haraway notes, functions as a marker of the humans= ability to think of them as individual subjects with specific, historical identities. when species meet is rife with named, individual, nonhuman animals — cayenne pepper (dog), bahati (dog), (26), donna (human), and even more abstractly, “chicken little” to stand in for domestic chickens in chapter ten. jeffrey karnicky — ornithological biography, animal studies, and starling subjectivity 45 the jays and rodents are never brought into this naming regime — the jays only have their species marker “stellers’” and the rodents are barely even described at the species level. they get interpellated into the human system as populations, where the life of one is interchangeable with the life of another, so long as the population is not endangered. haraway says, “those avian populations are not threatened by domestic cats around here” (280), so “i don=t care” if the cats kill them. one steller’s jay is no different from another. any jay may survive by eating cat food or may itself become cat food. likewise, the rodents might be “dusky-footed wood rat[s] or deer mice” (280). my provisional conclusion, then, is that naming as a process of individuation opens a path into an ethical multispecies relationship that is much more careful and nuanced than the relationship engendered when the species involved are not named beyond the species level. cats, dogs, primates, and other individualized subjects become central to multispecies relationships, while birds and rodents (among others) become liminal and therefore much more easily endangered by these relationships. in her discussion of derrida, haraway argues that his approach cuts him off from “a mortal and finite knowledge that understands [in derrida=s words] ‘the absence of the name as something other than a privation’” (21). for the jays and rodents, haraway and forgotten felines have interpellated them into just this realm of name-absent privation. they have no names, and thus no individuation. they exist only as a species or a population. in this case, haraway=s curiosity does not go beyond cats, specifically named cats. unnamed populations are at the limit of individuation and subjectivity. bird biography, of course, does move past the species level as it grants certain privileges to named birds. as they enter into a family assemblage, bird subjects reach their limit as named and humanized, that is interpellated, beings. in writing the life stories of birds, biographers bring birds into a human ethical framework. birds become understood only as they are subjected to the human. named, individualized, interpellated birds are separated out from an undifferentiated population. the only birds that bird biography sees and hears are the ones that are given human qualities. it is only through this biographical subjection that birds are heard. the european starling, though, a bird that speaks both metaphorically and literally, might provide a way of thinking around this limit. starling subjectivity. humans view starlings in two seemingly incompatible ways: as pests to be exterminated and as companion species to be cared for and learned from. parts of this contradiction can perhaps be explained by starling behavior: as undifferentiated flocks, starlings become vermin when in proximity to humans; when humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 46 flocks take to the sky, they become inspiring. individual starlings mimic sounds and follow eye-gaze direction, so they seem to be interacting with humans in a one-to-one manner. from a human perspective, in face-to-face encounters, starlings seem to have two sensory aspects of subjectivity as they respond to sound and sight — they seem to see and hear other starlings, other birds, and humans. huge flocks of starlings, on the other hand, are faceless, and thus awe-inspiring and/or threatening. starlings exist as both undifferentiated population and individualized subjects. in flocks, starlings follow a simple rule that produces complex results. in his essay “going parallel” (2000), about “the polarities of self/other within contemporary technoscientifically inflected culture” (56-7), brian rotman describes the emergence of complexity from such simple starling behavior as “the fact of their flocking, the emergence of a routine or algorithm with a complex dynamical profile from the simultaneous, identical, and simple activity of individuals” (56). this complex, dynamic system flows from one simple rule: each starling in a flock does what its six closest neighbors do. in this way, following rotman, one can say that starling flocks are serial and parallel at the same time. flocks exist in “two modes,” as rotman writes, “the serial, which consists of doing one thing after another (the whole flock forming itself and moving through time) and the parallel (each starling flying in concert with the others) doing many things at once” (57). a recent study suggests that starling vision is a key element of flocking behavior. that is, starlings do what their six or seven closest neighbors do by watching them. they act in a serial manner that is, in fact, also parallel. they are both individuals, responding visually to their neighbors, and flock, acting as a cohesive unit. this flocking behavior serves an evolutionary purpose because it helps starling flocks confound predators such as peregrine falcons. this adaptive behavior produces a secondary effect from a human perspective: beauty. in his essay, rotman asks, “do starlings have any inkling of how majestic and beautiful their flocking is? is there a starling sublime?” (56). he cites richard wilbur=s poem, “an event,” which describes a starling flock as “like a drunken fingerprint across the sky!” (qtd. in rotman 56). of course, it is these same sublime flocks that are often exterminated. a usda “fact sheet — controlling starling damage at feedlots” notes the damage starlings can do. they cause harm through “consumption of cattle feed” that “can be a significant economic hardship to producers”; their “[f]ecal contamination of cattle feed and drinking water can create disease hazards for cattle, especially calves and pregnant cows”; “fecal contamination, nesting materials and bird carcasses on and in structures and farm equipment such as dispenser pumps, grinder/mixers, augers, and vehicle engines, can jeffrey karnicky — ornithological biography, animal studies, and starling subjectivity 47 hamper farm operation, and cause costly property damage.” in urban settings, “problems can range from excessive noise to large quantities of excrement deposited on sidewalks, cars, and buildings.... starlings have transmitted encephalitis and ornithosis” (vantassel). it is also worth noting that in their native habitat, starlings are seen as a food source for humans in europe; in france, starling pate is readily available. in short, depending on the context, starling flocks are majestic, threatening, inspiring, expendable, and edible. starlings use vision to stay in flocks; another aspect of their visual ability might help explain their status as companion animals. starlings can follow human eye gaze, and they seem to understand what it means to be looked at. a recent study gives what the authors call “the first explicit demonstration of a bird responding to a live predator=s eye-gaze direction” (carter et al. 1709). as prey animals, starling flocks require vigilant attention to predator threats. since eye gaze direction is a common signal of intent for mammalian predators — which simply means that a mammal usually looks at its prey before striking — recognition of being looked at gives starlings a acompetitive advantage@ (1709) over birds that might not be able to read eye gaze direction. starling biographies often write of visual contact between bird and human. as i discuss above, corbo=s first encounter with arnie is one of eye contact, as corbo “reads a message in his darkly bright eyes” (2). likewise, their last encounter is also visionbased. as arnie is near death, “he gazed up at margarete with love shining in his eyes, breathed a tired sigh, and rested his head against her chest” (231). while there is no scientific evidence linking an ability to recognize a predator=s eye gaze and the ability to make eye contact, corbo=s suggestion that arnie communicated with her visually is at least plausible. starlings are also excellent mimics, to the point that they might seem to engage in conversation and respond vocally to human prompts. in their essay “mozart=s starling,” meredith west and andrew king have noted that companion starlings give humans “a sense of shared environment with another species, a sensation hard to forget” so that humans become “beguiled by the chance to glimpse a bird=s-eye view of the world” (113). how close can humans come to understanding what the starling=s point of view might be? in striving to get a glimpse of a starling=s point of view, i do not want to pursue the question of whether or not a starling has a theory of mind. as carter et al. point out in their discussion of the eye-gaze experiment, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 48 while we do not deny the interesting possibility that starlings might have a cognitive appreciation of the knowledge state of their predator through recognizing the predator=s visual perspective, this type of explanation may not be necessary. the starlings’ responses in these experiments could be explained as a result of innate tendencies and conditional learning during their experience prior to the study. (1713) a theory of mind is not necessary to understand the effects produced by starling eyegaze recognition. carter, et al. write that the behavior works regardless of what the mechanism driving it may be: whether or not the responses involve some sort of mental attribution or theory of mind, and whether or not they are innate or acquired, the result is that starlings are able to discriminate the very subtle eye-gaze clues of a nearby live predator and adjust their anti-predator responses to fluctuations in predation risk in an adaptively beneficial manner. (1714) in other words, the result does not explain what is happening in a starling=s brain when it responds to the eye-gaze of a predator. and such an explanation is unnecessary. inferring a theory of mind from this behavior would be nothing more than conjecture. likewise, ascribing a theory of mind, or even a clear reason, to starling mimicry seems impossible and unnecessary. so what do these starling interactions with their environments tell us about their point of view? in recognizing eye-gaze direction, do starlings know that a predator is looking at them? do they know that the body attached to those eyes wants to consume them? in mimicking and “talking” to humans, do starlings know that they are engaging in conversation? in flocks, do starlings have a mental awareness of the simple, visually guided rule of proximity that guides their collective behavior? do they know that they are behaving collectively? do they know they are flocking to avoid a predator? do they know that their singular action benefits the individual and the flock? do they know that their flocks are beautiful? these questions are impossible for us to answer. but humans can understand something about a starling=s point of view. we configure subjectivity as individual or collective, as serial or parallel, as named or unnamed, as pet or food, as person or nuisance, but there is no reason to believe that this configuration is correct; there is no reason whatsoever to believe that birds categorize the world in this way. recognition is not in and of itself part of a self/other dialectic. birds recognize others, but not necessarily as others. tom jeffrey karnicky — ornithological biography, animal studies, and starling subjectivity 49 gannon writes: “i would contend instead that subject and object, self and nature, are false dualisms: when you can make the imaginative leap that ’you’ is also a bird, another species, whether this is only metaphorically or mystically true, in the western scheme of things, the world will be a better ecological place” (316). i agree with gannon that “subject and object” do not provide a way for understanding bird subjectivity. but i want to emphasize something different than gannon=s important reminder that birds should not be perceived dualistically. birds do not exist in the traditional dialectic interpellative understanding of subjectivity. humans certainly understand starlings this way, but that is no reason to assume that starlings see and hear things in the same way. in his work on how subject formation occurs, félix guattari writes of “different ways of being” that he calls “existential refrains.” rather than seeking a theory of mind, or any evidence of interiority, guattari bases his understanding of subjectivity in external effects. he writes, “it is less a question of having access to novel cognitive spheres than of apprehending and creating, in pathic modes, mutant existential virtualities” (chaosmosis 120). guattari deemphasizes traditional notions of subjectivity that locate the self within an egoshaped mind or body. instead, he stresses the ways that the bodies and minds interact with and influence the world around them. to apply this understanding to starlings and other birds, one can say that bird/human relations should not be configured around a recognition of an interior consciousness that would be evidence of subjectivity. rather, interactions can be seen as a matter of “apprehension,” of having an effect on. from this perspective, bird biography that interpellates birds as human subjects also serves to obscure what might be unique to bird subjectivity. named, individualized birds might be thought to have a mind, but such an understanding says more about human perceptions of others than it does about birds. guattari writes that “different ways of seeing and of making the world, different ways of being and of bringing to light modalities of being” (121) can be found in listening to existential refrains. in “mozart’s starling,” west and king provide a way of thinking about a bird=s point of view from a non-human perspective. they explore “the idea that hand-reared birds perceive their human companions in terms of the social roles that naturally exist among wild birds” (110). that is, a hand-reared, or companion, bird might perceive the human other as bird in an act of orni-pomorphism. in a starling=s eyes and ears, a human is a starling. as bird behavior changes over time, interactions with other members of their species alters. west and king note that, “in the case of captive birds, humans become the companions for all seasons, with the nature of the relationship shifting with the changing development and hormonal cycles in a bird=s life” (110). that is, birds might humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 50 see human-birds as parents, mates, rivals, flock members, etc. this bird apprehension of humans runs parallel to the human apprehension of birds. to use the language of deleuze and guattari, this apprehension could be called a double capture: the becoming-bird of the human and the becoming-human of the bird. such a becoming is not an imitation or even a similarity. deleuze and guattari write that “becoming is involutionary, involution is creative.... to involve is to form a block that runs it own line ‘between’ the terms in play and beneath assignable relations” (deleuze and guattari, 238-9). this formulation of becoming is not grounded in the subject; it is a movement between subjects that reconfigures both. understood as an involvement or an apprehension, the varying nature of the becoming-bird of the human makes sense as humans are constantly reconfigured by birds. interactions between humans and birds, then, might create an existential refrain through which the boundaries of self and other, or human and bird, become blurred. from this perspective, starling mimicry may be more than just mimicry. west and king write that “for many birds, acoustic communication is as much visual as vocal experience” (110). in experiments, birds mimicked less in the company of only tapes. when exposed to living beings in a social environment, mimicry increased. mimicry might be thought of, then, as a means of social interaction. west and king posit the following hypothesis. we propose that some birds use acoustic probes to test the contingent properties of their environment, an interpretation largely in keeping with concepts of communication as process of social negotiation and manipulation.... like bats or dolphins manipulating sounds to estimate distance, some birds may bounce sounds off the animate environment, using behavioral reverberations to gauge the effects of their vocal efforts.... [not] for self-reflection but instead a social sounding board with which to shape functional repertoires. (113) mimicry is an affective interaction with the world. it is even a model for being in the world. starlings manipulate their environment with sound and vision, responding to things near them, be they the six or seven nearest starlings in a flock, or the human companion sharing living space. starlings have a guattarian notion of being in the world — forming new alliances, or “mutant existential virtualities,” with every vocal or visual apprehension of the world. in a thousand plateaus, deleuze and guattari write of mimic birds, “imitation may not be the best concept for these phenomena, which vary according to the assemblage into which they enter.... it is less a question of imitating a jeffrey karnicky — ornithological biography, animal studies, and starling subjectivity 51 song than of occupying corresponding frequencies” (331). mimicry becomes a means of interacting with the world; it becomes more of a call and response than an imitation. the starling emits a sounds and the world responds. interiority, in the sense of a theory of mind, is not necessary to understand the world this way. what counts are exterior effects — a starling=s voice and sight alter the world as he/she perceives it; what is inside their heads is less important than the effects produced in the world. subjectivity is more of a moving outward than a looking inward. guattari’s non-dialectic configuration of subjectivity is useful here, because it does not seem limited, in the way an interpellative sense of self/other is, to human subjectivity. all living things can be said to have an existential refrain. in mapping these refrains, guattari writes in the three ecologies, “what we must emphasize here is that the work of locating these existential refrains is not the sole province of literature and the arts — we find this eco-logic equally at work in everyday life, in social life at every level, and whenever the constitution of an existential territory is in question” (46). if one defines “social life at every level” as broadly as possible, to mean any possible interaction that takes place, the existential refrain of a starling can be seen and heard because it is clear that starlings affect the world through their sight, hearing, and vocalizations. in a sense, it becomes impossible for something not to have an existential refrain. every thing is alive, in this sense, every thing is affecting the world. starlings, and all birds, are always apprehending and creating, in pathic modes, ways of being. a return to quails, and to audubon, can help make this point. in looking at how audubon attempts to communicate bird subjectivity, armstrong looks closely at audubon=s painting of, and writing about, bobwhite quails. he cites audubon=s discussion of his painting of a group of quails under attack from a hawk: “the different attitudes exhibited by the former cannot fail to give you a lively idea of the terror and confusion which prevail on such occasions” (qtd. in armstrong 113). armstrong questions whether readers and viewers will trust audubon=s representation of quail interiority, whether readers will believe that quails can indeed feel the terror that audubon illustrates. armstrong writes, “we do not necessarily trust him when he says he has got the interiority of his subjects right” (113) because we are “rather inclined to dismiss such claims as examples of anthropomorphism” (113). armstrong rhetorically asks, “do bobwhites feel terror?” (113). from his perspective, we cannot answer this question because we cannot escape skepticism; we cannot access a quail=s mind through audubon=s representations. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 52 armstrong=s logic seems correct here. he argues that audubon’s painting and writing are evidence only that audubon is “a thinking subject,” who in turn asserts that the quail is too. armstrong writes, “the presence of other minds — in this case, of the birds’ minds or feelings — can only be asserted by the testimony of a thinking subject, as such a testimony is not a ‘representation’ of nature: it is rather more like a promise, or an affidavit” (114). from this perspective, readers and viewers only have access to quail interiority through audubon’s assertion that the quail does indeed have a mind. from an interpellative perspective, we can only see audubon’s dramatization of quail subjectivity: audubon says that he saw bobwhite quails responding with terror, and thus becoming subjects, but the only evidence is audubon’s representation of this moment. one can never be fully sure that birds are responding to a human hailing in an understandable manner. what audubon sees, and paints, as terror, might be a marker of a completely different interior state. but the problem here is not audubon’s failure to create a completely convincing illustration of a bird’s mind, which seems impossible. rather, the problem is one of recognition within a specific way of understanding subjectivity. as a question of recognition, the equation of expression that would make quail terror understandable in terms of human terror must fail. but rather than seeing audubon’s quail portrait as unconvincing evidence of an interior state of mind made manifest in the body, the painting can be considered as an illustration of affect. there is little doubt that a group of quail, or any prey species, under attack from a predator will react by fleeing. but this flight need not be seen as a reflection of an interior state of mind that would always remain inaccessible. flight in response to attack does give evidence that something is happening; that the quails in audubon’s painting are responding to the diving hawk is beyond dispute. audubon portrays what guattari would call the quail=s “capacity to be affected” by other things. bobwhite quails respond to danger just as robert the quail responded to his environment, just as audubon’s turkey responded to juno, just as arnie the starling responded to corbo. my point is not that all of these responses are the same — they are, in fact, radically different — but that they are all reconfigurations of subjectivity. recognizing affective responses as forms of subjectivity should be a key task of animal studies. in her essay, “literary animal agents” (2009), susan mchugh sees “animal studies researchers as united by a commitment not so much to common methods or politics as to the broader goal of bringing the intellectual histories and values of species under scrutiny” (488). this configuration of animal studies would interrogate what actually happens in interspecies interactions. such interactions can be seen as what jeffrey karnicky — ornithological biography, animal studies, and starling subjectivity 53 mchugh calls “markings of potentials for different orders of agency beyond the human subject” (487). bird/human interactions can be one place where such “different orders” might be found, especially if these interactions are understood outside of a dialectic, interpellative understanding of subjectivity. birds might be understood not as an other that reflects a human self, but as living beings acting in a world that is not dependent on a human definition of self centered around the “i.” derrida, in his discussion of kantian ethics and animals, notes the importance of the “i,” as well as its human-centeredness. the “i,” according to derrida, is what humanity denies to the animal. deprived of this “i,” derrida writes, “the animal will lack any ‘i think’ as well as understanding and reason, response and responsibility” (94). what is at stake here is where the animal resides in an ethical system — on what side of the life and death line it is likely to end up. derrida writes that there is no simple way to include the animal within a kantian (or, more broadly, any philosophical) system. he writes, “it is not just a matter of giving back to the animal ... the i of automonstration. it is also a matter of questioning oneself concerning the axiom that permits one to accord purely and simply to the human or to the rational animal that which one holds the just plain animal to be deprived of” (95; emphasis in original). to encounter animal, or more precisely for my purposes, bird, subjectivity would mean an abandonment of the whole system that relies, at base, on the assumption that humans have an “i” that all other animals lack. derrida offers no way to move beyond this “giving back”; he notes the complications involved when he writes, “one could go a long way in multiplying these indices and examples, something i don=t have time to do” (95). derrida’s gesture here, though, implies that it is the exclusive ascription of the “i” that cannot hold up to close scrutiny. in short, there is no clear dividing line between the human, rational animal that can say “i” and the just plain animal who lacks both an “i” and rational thought in a different register, cognitive ethologist marc bekoff, who, according to haraway, has “met the gaze of living, diverse animals and in response undone and redone [himself and his] science” (21), offers a means for understanding animal subjectivity that does not depend on the presence or absence of an “i.” in minding animals: awareness, emotions, and heart (2002), bekoff succinctly asks, “should we be more concerned with species and their survival than with individuals and their well-being?” (141). he offers no easy answer. he writes, “once an individual animal has been identified and named, there is an immediate change in the way he or she is perceived” (45). but bekoff is not talking about a lost objectivity; such a thing does not exist. he continues, “i do not have any problem naming animals, and i know of no evidence that unequivocally shows that naming animals produces less reliable scientific results than humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 54 referring to animals with numbers” (47). here, bekoff discusses how naming affects human understanding of animals in the realm of scientific study. his endorsement of “biocentric anthropomorphism” (48) provides access to “other animals’ behavior and emotion” (48). at the same time, bekoff does not think that naming and other forms of anthropomorphic language “force us to discount the animals’ point of view” (48). his formulation of what an animal=s point of view might be resonates with a noninterpellative understanding of bird subjectivity. he writes that “perhaps some animals simply do not need to know who they are” (97) in the way that humans do. instead of a dualistic self/other mode of bodily awareness, bekoff posits another way of thinking about individuation. “while individuals surely need to know that they are not another individual, this does not mean they need to be self-aware. rather, it is necessary and sufficient only that they have a sense of their own bodies and body awareness.... knowing who you are is not necessarily ‘better’ than knowing you are not another individual” (97). bekoff’s decoupling of bodily awareness and self-awareness is key. the ability to be an actor in the world does not depend on a human theory of interiority. one does not need to be an “i” to respond. bekoff writes that “animals do not have to write autobiographies” (97). it is precisely in this not writing that bird subjectivity is most apparent. in not writing autobiographies, birds offer evidence that they are not, to return to gannon=s formulation, “for us.” leaving behind “anthropocentric gall” might require leaving behind the dialectic, interpellative “i” that grounds a widespread understanding of human and nonhuman subjectivity in both bird biographies and animal studies. humans and starlings. in her essay, “naming names — or what=s in it for the animals?,” lynda birke asks some important questions, often ignored by practitioners of animal studies, about the relationships between humans and animals. she writes, “whenever i review papers for journals, or read much of the published literature, or do my own research in human-animal studies, i often find myself thinking — but what=s in it for the animals? how could/might they benefit? do they? does this research i read about take seriously the animals’ points of view — or only the viewpoint of the humans thinking about animals?” (1). birke=s questions draw attention to the actual animals being researched and written about. i want to attempt to answer her questions as they apply to the relationships between humans and starlings. how might starlings benefit from animal studies? what can animal studies learn from starlings? birke writes that animal studies has “the potential to contribute to sociocultural change, to enable us to take nonhuman animals more seriously as conscious, sentient beings. in that sense, it could be said to be beneficial for animals in a generalized way, in that it jeffrey karnicky — ornithological biography, animal studies, and starling subjectivity 55 gets a few more humans on their side” (5). certainly, starlings might benefit in this way. study has shown that starlings have a mind, that they communicate, that they have an awareness of others. such knowledge, though, probably will not lead to concrete benefits for starlings. to be blunt, animal studies can do little to benefit starlings. a feedlot damaged by starling excrement will not change its extermination practices based on knowledge that starlings probably have some sort of consciousness. but, as a species, starlings have already greatly benefited from human actions. their entire north american population exists because of human intervention — from their nineteenth century introduction in new york to human alteration of habitat. starlings thrive in human-altered environments. farms and feedlots provide them ample food and habitat, as do urban and suburban environments. starlings inhabit every state in the continental united states. their estimated us population of 200 million is not too far behind the human population of the same area. in short, starlings are incredibly common. one might say that they are the ultimate companion species, sharing every environment that humans have created in america. but what of a starling’s point of view? i have argued that one cannot know what is happening in a starling=s mind. but i also want to emphasize the idea that starling subjectivity does not depend on a human understanding of interiority. starlings do not live dialectically, and animal studies can learn something from this. another of birke=s questions proves useful here. as she seeks “to examine the relationships between people and animals and how those are experienced by either partner” (7), birke asks, “how can we go about examining the processes of enmeshing, of coming together, that create a relationship?” (7). to apply this question to my research, i ask: what does the human-starling relationship of the last two hundred years in america tell us about how humans and starlings inhabit the world as companion species? in her “animals, anomalies, and inorganic others” (2009), rosi braidotti argues that human-animal relationships are essentially a matter of what she calls “affirmative ethics” (529). braidotti rejects human-animal relationships that are grounded in metaphor and dialectical thought. for braidotti, “animals are no longer the signifying system that props up humans’ self projections and moral aspirations” (528). the sly fox, the brave eagle, and other animal symbols obscure the actual lived experiences of both humans and animals. braidotti argues that animals bypass the “dialectics of otherness” (526) that has served to create a human-centered “normativity” (526). if we “relate to animals as animals ourselves” (526), braidotti writes, a new “bioegalitarianism” (526) might be brought into existence. starling-human relationships provide one way of understanding this worldview. braidotti calls for “the recognition of transspecies humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 56 solidarity on the basis of our being in this together — environmentally based, embodied, embedded, and in symbiosis” (530). humans and starlings are the perfect embodiment of this transspecies relationship. the symbiosis between humans and starlings was not designed by either species; nonetheless, it is so firmly entrenched in america that one can hardly find one species without the other in close proximity. from braidotti’s viewpoint, such proximity creates the necessity of an ethical relationship. “the ethical relation is essentially a matter of affinity: being able to have positive encounters with another entity.... by entering into affirmative ethical relations, becoming animal ... engenders possible futures. they construct possible worlds through a web of sustainable interconnections” (531). humans and starlings have created a world. where there are starlings, there are humans. where there are humans, there are starlings. thinking about the vastness of this specific companion species relation can lead to new ways of understanding consciousness itself. braidotti writes, “consciousness is an unfolding of the self onto the world and an enfolding within the self of the world. what if consciousness were, in fact, just another cognitive mode of relating to one=s environment and to others?” (530). from this perspective, human consciousness and starling consciousness are not all that different. both can be understood as a means of being in the world. that is, starlings interact with and respond to the world just as humans do. such an understanding of the world does not privilege human interiority; interpellation is not the only way of being a subject in this world. the starling-human world shows just how common and widespread companion species relationships are. at the end of when species meet, donna haraway writes, “animals are everywhere full partners in worlding, in becoming with. human and nonhuman animals are companion species, messmates at table, eating together, whether we know how to eat well or not” (301). starlings are a literal embodiment of this claim. companion species encounters constitute the world in mundane, everyday ways. haraway writes of “the ordinary knots of daily multispecies living in a particular place and time” (300); the humanstarling companion species relationship is a perfect example of just such an embodied, historically specific, and common relationship. the human-starling relationship in twenty-first-century america grew from its textual roots by historical accident — starlings are the only species introduced by eugene schieffelin that established a thriving population in america — and has become a daily marker of the enmeshed, embodied companion species relationships that exist everywhere. there are starlings in my back yard as i write this. i can hear them and see them if i look out the window. if i go outside, they will probably fly off. they are alive. and they have a point of view. jeffrey karnicky — ornithological biography, animal studies, and starling subjectivity 57 notes 1. in the first few chapters of the book, when robert is assumed to be male, stanger uses masculine pronouns when referring to robert. stanger switches to feminine pronouns after robert lays an egg. for the sake of clarity, i will use feminine pronouns when discussing robert. 2. see, for instance, baby bird at <http://starlings_babybird.homestead.com/ babybird.html> and in memory of skywalk at <http://www.angelfire.com/biz3/starnus/ skwalk.html>. 3. links to information about these pet starlings, and many others, can be found at starling talk at < http://www.starlingtalk.com/links.htm>. works cited alexie, sherman. “avian nights.” new letters 69.4 (2003): 21-23. althusser, louis. “on ideology.” 1969. lenin and philosophy and other essays. transl. ben brewster. london: monthly review press, 1971. 103-126. armstrong, james w. “audubon=s ornithological biography and the question of ‘other minds.’” animal acts: configuring the human in western history. ed. jennifer ham and matthew senior. new york: routledge: 1997. 103-126. audubon, john james. ornithological biography, or an account of the habits of the birds of the united states of america : accompanied by descriptions of the objects represented in the work entitled the birds of america, and interspersed with delineations of american scenery and manners. 1831. pittsburgh: university of pittsburgh, digital research library. 4 dec. 2007. online. 15 aug. 2010. —————. writings and drawings. 1831-1839. new york: the library of america, 1999. bekoff, marc. minding animals: awareness, emotions, and heart. new york: oxford up, 2002. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 58 birke, lynda. “naming names—or, what=s in it for the animals?” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies. 1.1 (sept. 2009): 1-9. http://www.depauw.edu/ humanimalia/issue01/birke.html braidotti, rosi. “animals, anomalies, and inorganic others.” pmla: publications of the modern language association of america. 124.2 (mar. 2009): 526-532. carter, j., lyons, n. j., h. l. cole, and a. r. goldsmith. “subtle cues of predation risk: starlings respond to a predator=s direction of eye-gaze.” proceedings of the royal society: biological sciences 1644 (2008): 1709b1715 corbo, margarete sigl, and diane marie barras. arnie the darling starling, boston: houghton mifflin, 1983. deleuze, gilles, and felix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. trans. brian massumi. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 1987. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. ed. marie-louise mallet. trans. david wills. new york: fordham up, 2008. forkner, ben. “introduction: writing the american woods: the journals and essays of john james audubon.” john james audubon. selected journals and other writings. new york: penguin: 1996. i-xlii. forgotten felines of sonoma county. “forgotten felines of sonoma county.” n.d. online. 19 september 2009. gannon, tom. skylark meets meadowlark: reimagining the bird in british romantic and contemporary native american literature. lincoln, nb: u nebraska p, 2009. guattari, félix. the three ecologies. 1989. trans. ian pindar and paul sutton. new brunswick, nj: athlone p., 2000. —————. chaosmosis: an ethico-aesthetic paradigm. trans. paul bains and julian pefanis. bloomington in: indiana up, 1995. haraway, donna. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2007. jeffrey karnicky — ornithological biography, animal studies, and starling subjectivity 59 —————. the companion species manifesto. new york: prickly paradigm press, 2003. izumi, kyle. “kuro.” n.d. online. 10 apr. 2010. mchugh, susan. “literary animal agents.” pmla: publications of the modern language association of america. 124.2 (2009): 487-495. rotman, brian. “going parallel.” substance: a review of theory & literary criticism. 29.1 (2000): 56-79. tnr reality check . “tnr reality check: basic info.” 2010. online. 12 sept. 2010. stanger, margaret a. that quail, robert. new york: lippincott, 1966. thoreau, henry david. walden, or life in the woods. 1854. new york: dover, 1995. united states department of agriculture. “fact sheets — controlling starling damage at feedlots.” 16 mar. 2010. online. 15 aug. 2010. —————. “animals taken by component/method type and fate by the wildlife services program — fy 2008.” 2009. online. 373. 10 sept. 2010. vantassel, stephen m., scott e. hygnstrom, dennis m. ferraro. “urban pest birds: controlling damage.” u. of nebraska, lincoln extension. 2010. online. 10 sept. 2010. west, meredith j., and andrew p. king. “mozart’s starling.” american scientist. 78.2 (1990): 105-114. whitman, walt. specimen days. 1883. new york: dover, 1995. wolfe, cary. human, “all too human: ‘animal studies’ and the humanities.” pmla: publications of the modern language association of america. 124.2 (2009): 564-575. microsoft word pollock pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 2:1 greg pollock the cannibal-animal complex in melville, marx, and beyond it has become axiomatic for a number of philosophic, political, and technoscientific research agendas that the categories “human” and “animal” do not mark a rigorous division. it is equally axiomatic that they continue to function strategically in the distribution of power. this essay aims to thicken the genealogy of the post-human (or post-animal) moment by looking at two concepts caught between liquidation and enforcement of the human-animal border: cannibalism and marxist economic critique. cannibalism, because if we are all in some sense “animals” we find ourselves wary of eating our kin, yet anxious about the way that “cannibalism” has been historically entwined with euro-american imperialism. marxism, because it often leverages itself implicitly or explicitly against an animal incapable of labor, class struggle, and history, and yet it suggest that capital erases the ontological privilege of the human. two of melville’s novels and selections from marx’s works illustrate the development of cannibalism and animality as a complex for policing the borders of modern capitalist consciousness. typee, melville’s first and most successful novel in his lifetime, hinges on an arousal of fear that the narrator is living among cannibals in the marquesas islands. seeing through the cannibal’s eyes, the narrator encounters the functional lack of distinction between human “flesh” and animal “meat.” in like manner, marx’s representations of animals and his rhetorical uses of cannibalism show a fraught relationship between the inhuman and political economic critique. in contrast to typee and capital, i argue that moby-dick establishes a hospitable relation to cannibalism, enabling a more nuanced conception of animals and ethics. cross-textual comparison can thus show how cannibalism and “the animal” are bound together through economic categories of production and consumption. before looking at how these texts organize this conjuncture, “the cannibal” and “the animal” should be placed in historical and theoretical context. the cannibal-animal complex. the “cannibal” proper belongs to the imagination of europe entering the age of modern exploration. actual “cannibals” have never existed. william arens makes the most extreme case against the objective existence of cannibalism, arguing that anthropology is fundamentally cannibalistic of non-western cultures and discoveries of cannibalism have been projections. “[f]or layman and scholar alike the idea of cannibalism exists prior to and thus independent of evidence” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 10 (22). in anthropology, a “discipline which feeds on its own inadequacies,” the structure of cannibalism creates an echo chamber of projection and discovery (6). arens’ critique is well taken, particularly considering the projects that the “discovery” of cannibalism has authorized, but it is unclear whether anthropophagy is merely unsubstantiated, as he argues in reviewing the material record, or impossible, as his portrayal of anthropological epistemology implies. assuming that the anthropologist can never see past her reflection transforms a particular moment in anthropology into an ahistorical constant, and so recreates the epistemic impermeability arens means to critique. for this reason we must be attentive to the difference between “anthropophagy” and “cannibalism” and the conditions of possibility attached to each. peter hulme negotiates between these meanings, arguing that there is creditable evidence of anthropophagy but that “cannibalism” is a discursive product of the western gaze: “the primal scene of ‘cannibalism’ as ‘witnessed’ by westerners is of its aftermath rather than its performance” (2). even these indirect depictions are underwhelming: “here is one of the earliest descriptions of the ‘cannibal scene’: a few bones lying around, and then removed by one of the ship’s officers, as mementos perhaps” (obeyesekere 9). dr. chanca, the physician on columbus’ expedition and author of the description, “was not even present at the scene, yet he writes with authority, a feature of much of the writing on cannibalism and savagism in general” (9). as the trope settles into the imaginary of colonial modernity, dr. chanca’s unconvincing report becomes a full-blown “cannibal feast” (10). if cannibalism existed as part of the modern project of differentiation—in which the cannibal would be an absolute other, the one who destroys the boundary between self and other—the weakening of that project has shifted the function and location of cannibalism (walton 4-6). instead of reinforcing divisions between civilized and savage, normative and deviant, here and there, cannibalism today is typically invoked as a counter-hegemonic trope. one version presents capitalism and colonialism as the real cannibals (king 112-21). another version calls attention to the tiny rifts within the modern body politic by concentrating on individual anthropophages, like the fictional hannibal lecter or real jeffrey dahmer and armin meiwes (walton 125-6). today “we” are the cannibals, both macroand micro-cosmically, rather than “they”; but this “we” is understood to bear within it the division that formerly constituted the other. a similar shift occurs concerning the location of animality with respect to humanity. giorgio agamben gives an exemplary account of how the human is located at the split between “human” and “animal” (much as the postmodern citizen is constituted atop greg pollock — the cannibal-animal complex in melville, marx, and beyond 11 potential cannibalism): “anthropogenesis is what results from the caesura and articulation between human and animal. this caesura passes first of all within man” (79). it is this rupture, then, that defines the human’s specific character and, ironically, re-separates humans from animals: we are animals but also uniquely aware that we are other-than animals. the conditions for the emergence of this recuperative humanism, argues akira mizuta lippit, lie in the disappearance of animals from daily life over the past (approximately) two centuries. as animals vanished and new technologies changed the human world, “animals symbolized not only new structures of thought but also the process by which those new thoughts were transported” (lippit, electric 2). technology and animal converged in figures like bergson’s cinematograph: “as a hybrid analogue for knowledge, the cinematograph renders the mind as a technological apparatus, the machine as a form of animal” (91). although quite different from bergson’s method, freud’s theorization of the unconscious similarly broke new ground by neither “exiling animality to the domain of alterity (a realm of unreachable absence) nor domesticating it into a subdivision of the human order” (94). the post-metaphysical understanding of “the animal” within “the human,” despite appearing across a range of otherwise heterogeneous discourses, is tied to changes in the presence and function of concrete animals in the social life of the western world, especially their obsolescence as laborpower. the paradox of modern animality, then, is that as animals disappear, “the animal” appears. this animal, now frequently preceded by the definite article, is not an empirical entity so much as a technology for cultivating and defining modern sensibility. i use “technology” here in the expansive sense dominic pettman develops to describe any exteriorization of the self that extends one’s range of action. in this sense, animals have long been “technologies” for extending the reach of humans, but part of the importance of “the animal” proper is its ability to distinguish a properly (modern) human form of life defined by its mediatory status (as per agamben). the motivation lippit identifies behind “the animal” is precisely the need for a figural tool to extend understanding. the animal is both a technology and the other of technology. pettman helps us circumvent this apparent contradiction by denying any “human” preexisting the act of technical extension: “there was no ‘inside’ before the moment of exteriorization which created an ‘outside’” (18). following this logic into the various humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 12 forms of exteriorization, pettman therefore argues that “love, technology, and community are in fact terms which designate the same phenomenon or process,” insomuch as they are all coincident with the moment of exteriorization (17). we can add to this list the historical phenomenon called “the animal.” while we might be inclined to debunk and discard this figure—since it is of recent vintage and intended for questionable ideological work—i am inclined to think with it for the time being as an historically available, though heretofore excluded, mode of community. as long as it does not exclude animals, or reintroduce the exceptionality of homo sapiens, “the animal” might be useful. one way in which the site of the animal has been thought as a mode of community has been through the marxist concept of class. animals and humans are exploited in many of the same ways, suggesting these groups are part of a single class (perlo 306-7). but as ted benton argues, being exploited in like manner does not necessarily constitute those beings as having the same capacity for political action (77-8). certain forms of political activity enabled by the concept of class would be foreclosed if nonhumans were included in the class definition, because they are not able to participate in such activity, and this foreclosure would ultimately be detrimental to the struggle against exploitation of humans and nonhumans. for this reason, benton argues we should retain the concept of “class” in its classical marxist formulation as specific to humans while adding other forms of collectivity to the critical lexicon (74, 79). cary wolfe’s mapping of the humanist grid, organized by the “(impossible) purity” of the poles “humanized human” and “animalized animal,” explains how class-like isomorphisms can appear in human-animal relations without limiting critique to “class.” living beings tend to wind up in the middle, some mixture of humanized animal and animalized human, aligning with pettman’s thesis on the simultaneity of interiorand exterior-ization. wolfe observes that “humanism’s investment here is more in the ongoing viability of this grid structure than in any specific designation per se,” much as capitalism’s investment is in exploitation of labor rather than any specific group as beneficiary of that exploitation (102). to see the animal only as the lowest rung on the social ladder, however, is to occlude the potential for such a substrate figure— even and especially because it is imaginary—to suggest openings for change in the structure of the grid itself (massumi 2-3). holding together wolfe’s ideological critique with pettman’s insistence that the subject is constituted as movement, and building on the historical connection between “the animal” and trans-subjective motion in lippit’s reading, an historicized version of freud’s unconscious can help us navigate a kind of greg pollock — the cannibal-animal complex in melville, marx, and beyond 13 “grid in motion” in which oscillation between cannibal and animal creates a critical interference on the frequency of political economy. lippit shows that the animal is the cultural unconscious of “the unconscious”; where freud sees the animal as a givenness through which to explicate the inexplicable, lippit finds a general tendency of modern thought with a material history. attention to the production of “the animal” then becomes a way to historicize modern claims about human nature. but while lippit is correct to link the appearance of “the animal” to a decrease in visible working animals, it should also be noted that animals did not literally vanish from existence. nor is the subjective frame that produces the image of animals as perpetually disappearing into “the animal” ideologically neutral. this perceptive habit is fundamentally part of the idealism marx identifies with the bourgeois ideology of capitalism: from concrete to abstract, sensuous to sensuoussupersensuous, animals to animal. in this spirit we should take lippit’s gesture as exemplary and discern, beneath the apparent finality of the disavowed animal, the ongoing struggle of animals to assert their being against the phenomenology of disappearing. there is again something of class struggle: the struggle for workers to be visible as workers instead of the myriad other identities through which they have been made unrecognizable (hribal, “jesse”). the forced disappearing of animals is attended by the energetic appearance of cannibals. like the animal, the cannibal performs a labor of subjectification, cultivating the proper affects of the modern citizen. crystal bartolovich reads the fantasy of cannibalism as a figure of total consumption that, if indulged by capitalist subjects, would end the investment cycle (211-14). though capitalism cultivates endless desire, it must check the realization of that impulse lest it destroy capitalism. at the same time, of course, the cannibal did material work as the savage face that launched a thousand imperial ships and, once “civilized,” as the work force of those colonies (indeed, doing the kind of menial labor otherwise reserved for animals). what is of relevance to this study is the way in which the always-appearing threat of cannibalism is increasingly important for policing excess desire with the development of capitalism (on into our own time) parallel to the always-disappearing animal that continually extends the horizon for producing the human into freud’s unconscious and agamben’s anthropogenesis. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 14 an anticipation of this connection between animal and cannibal can be found in an image from 1525 in which new world cannibals are identified as other-than-human by distinctly canine snouts (klarer 391). here cannibalism transforms the transgressor’s body to reflect its exclusion from humanity. at the same time, the cannibal must be human to be a cannibal rather than merely an animal. the troubled ontological status of the cannibal and the epistemological difficulty of finding a decisive difference are resolved by importing the difference between human and animal. this supplementary discourse, however, is itself polyvocal. the unification of human and animal is a classical figure for the positive resolution of earthly strife and confusion, as agamben notes, as much as a marker of the savage within human time (1-3). mario klarer shows that discourse on the new world, like agamben’s image, borrows frequently from the classical lexicon. indeed, klarer demonstrates that the new world was conceived as simultaneously utopian and barbarous (390-1). the double movement by which cannibalism and animal figuration combine in this image support bartolovich’s argument: new world plenitude threatens to liberate capitalism’s consumptive desire, and so is both utopian and apocalyptic. the projected mixtures of human and animal, human and consumer/consumable, are those that modern consciousness lives to clarify, and in which it fears to drown like narcissus. we tend to find that by the nineteenth century cannibals need not be as fantastically animalized as the canine new worlders. for melville the play between these tropes can be subtle and effective. wolfe’s ideological critique and pettman’s repurposing of eros describe the two values of this condensation: on one hand, the slippage between cannibal and animal creates a flexible, mobile ideology for authorizing violence against whatever is animalized (notably non-europeans), and the cannibal as object of imperialism incarnates that animalized human; on the other hand, the movement between figures is a possibility for new communities, realizing the utopian fantasy of early american discourse and its precursors in classical myth and christian communion. by taking note of the cannibal-animal complex that develops with capitalism, lippit’s demonstration of “the animal” as the unconscious of freud’s unconscious can be turned back on itself. the repression of “the animal” is itself a ruse to perpetuate a concept, this imaginary “the animal,” that has a specific purpose in the capitalist imaginary. what remains unspoken in “the animal” is the economic system for which this eminently contradictory concept makes sense; and as we have seen, these contradictions are smoothed over by reference to a parallel discourse on cannibalism, itself internally divided, and which also has its sense in relation to the demands of modern capitalism. these two discourses are mutually disrupting—if we are all animals then there are no cannibals, and if there are cannibals then we might as well be greg pollock — the cannibal-animal complex in melville, marx, and beyond 15 animals—and so are bound together in such a way as to reinforce imperialist capitalism and blackmail any skeptics of one discourse through the other. we will try to accept both later in this essay so that we may be skeptical of what we please. to understand this peculiar double-bind, the concept of the unconscious, slightly reconfigured, proves valuable. we can turn freud on his head as marx once did with hegel, keeping in mind that, as althusser adds, marx also says he extracts the kernel of hegel’s truth from its chaff—a gesture of repetition, but one which fundamentally changes the borrowed structure (althusser 89-92). claiming an unconscious relation between the cannibal-animal and capitalism does not amount to saying that one is the secret of the other, but that the relation called “unconscious” is more general and nonhuman than an anthropological psychoanalysis could claim, as avery gordon suggests in reading the nascent moments of freud’s thought (45-9). the extension of the unconscious to nonhumans is not so far-fetched today. expanding on thomas sebeok’s work on zoosemiotics, michael ziser reads lacanian psychoanalysis as deeply rooted in primatology and the exchange of signs between humans and nonhumans (14-20). but one need not go farther than what freud always maintained—that the unconscious is irreducible to consciousness, that the conscious mind is not sovereign over the unconscious—to see that freud’s copernican revolution must eventually revolutionize itself. the unconscious, after so many self-reflexive reversals, emerges not so much as a thing or a place but as the in-between of transmission. slavoj žižek provides insight into the mechanism of this disappearing: ...if we seek the “secret of the dream” in the latent content hidden by the manifest text, we are doomed to disappointment: all we find is some entirely “normal”—albeit usually unpleasant—thought, the nature of which is mostly non-sexual and definitely not “unconscious.” (12) while žižek’s own conception of the unconscious differs from that advanced above, his observation that the unconscious is not revealed in latent content bears repeating. across the multiple frames of “manifest” and “latent” content, the movement between two layers of consciousness, or two layers of a text, is what we call “unconscious,” not what is latent. the unconscious’ sign is its constant self-concealment, conjuring forth a plenitude of images (like the cinematograph) to hide the operation of the thing itself. we thus return to a description of the unconscious that resembles nothing so much as humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 16 the uncategorizable labor of a pack animal. positioning animals at a site of transition, in contrast to the ontological animal of freud’s unconscious, prevents the mistake of discovering “the secret of the animal” as the latent content of capitalism or cannibalism. rather, by adopting a modified theory of the unconscious we can better describe the role of animals and “the animal” in constructing capitalist ideological closure. we can take this one step further: such a revised unconscious prevents us from reducing animals to pure transition. deleuze’s reading of spinoza on affect is a useful counterweight to the modern tendency to collapse animals entirely into the disappearing structure of the unconscious. deleuze reiterates spinoza’s distinction between affect and affection. an affection is a feeling wrought by extensive interaction with another body; affect is the dimension of intensive change. the difference allows for both eternity (a dimension without temporal change) and duration in spinoza’s system: “the affection envelops an affect....it envelops a passage or a transition” (deleuze 3). the affection is “eternal” in its singularity but these eternities “envelop” the affect that persists. we can almost say: animals are to “the animal” as affection is to affect. but this idealizing gesture subtracts bodyliness from “the animal,” giving us hardly an animal at all. like humans, animals are always in transition across affect and affection, a transition between the fixity of space and the passing of time. we are right to think animals in transition but not to reduce them to pure movement. deleuze’s spinoza enriches our understanding of the unconscious and its fundamental antianthropocentrism, counseling against the reification of the animal/animals divide that subtends capitalist anthropology. typee as cannibal-animal discourse. melville’s typee provides a curious example of a text that deploys conventional imperialist-capitalist anxieties about cannibalism and animalization while also avoiding any final declarations that would solidly establish the boundary of the self. in one sense this indeterminacy is the endless frontier of manifest destiny, the “imperial self” that wai-chee dimock criticizes, but it also leaves that self perpetually vulnerable (7-8). recalling hulme and obeyesekere on the absences in the cannibal scene, consider melville’s observation that: it is a singular fact, that in all our accounts of cannibal tribes we have seldom received the testimony or an eye-witness to the revolting practice. the horrible conclusion has almost always been derived from the secondhand testimony of europeans, or else from the admissions of the savages themselves, after they have in some degree become civilized. (234) greg pollock — the cannibal-animal complex in melville, marx, and beyond 17 the epistemological critique is partly conventional, part of a long-running counter discourse on cannibalism. melville also shrewdly indicates the role of “cannibalism” in establishing oneself as “civilized”: learning to use this accusation is the passport for marquesans to move from one category to the other. the natives’ strategic mastery of “cannibalism” presents melville’s narrator with a conundrum. prior to arriving in the marquesas islands, he learns that “the natives of all this group are irreclaimable cannibals”; but on arriving, the western-friendly happar, “disclaimed all cannibal propensities on their own part, while they denounced their enemies—the typees—as inveterate gormandizers of human flesh” (24-5). it is difficult not to suspect that the happar have cracked the code of “cannibalism” and put it to their own political use; hence it also becomes questionable whether they might be cannibals in disguise. the implication is that anyone who uses the label “cannibal”— perhaps even europeans, at the limit of this paranoid logic—should be suspected of hiding his or her own cannibalism. to treat “cannibal” as a natural signifier risks becoming victim to the “real” cannibals, wherever they may be. melville’s narrator deserts his ship and flees into the jungle. there he injures himself and falls in amongst the typees who, apparently fluent in the meta-language of cannibalism, claim that the happar are the real cannibals. the typees buttress samuel otter’s claim that “cannibalism is not the ultimate sign of difference in melville’s narrative … [but a] stage prop with which to frighten his audience and build narrative suspense” (16). conversely, cannibalism makes “ultimate difference” into a stage prop and identity into a stage. whether out of paranoia or performance, signs of cannibalism begin to manifest. first the narrator catches a “slight glimpse” of three shrunken human heads as they are being “hurriedly envelop[ed] in the coverings from which they had been taken” (231). “two of the three were heads of the islanders; but the third, to my horror, was that of a white man,” the narrator notes, continuing, “although it had been quickly removed from my sight, still the glimpse i had of it was enough to convince me that i could not be mistaken” (233). the will to knowledge over-reaches its grasp in the certainty of the “could not.” the narrator does not claim merely that he was not mistaken, but that he “could not be mistaken,” a level of certitude which, given that he caught only a glimpse (as he says several times), seems patently untrue. or, to read this humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 18 through arens, it is true that he “could not be mistaken” because his anthropological epistemology ensures that he finds evidence of savagery. the heads are “evidence” of cannibalism by way of a general discourse on savagism. ironically, the heads “in a state of perfect perfection” (231) are quite the opposite of the incorporative annihilation or total consumption of cannibalism. instead, they are frightfully close to capital: the congealed product of a human body made ageless. as fetishes, the heads both evoke the repressed labor of capital—the source of fetish value—and challenge the historical superiority of capitalist societies. melville’s description of the heads as “a fearful memento of the event” is close to obeyesekere’s account of dr. chanca discovering “a few bones lying around, and then removed by one of the ship’s officers, as mementos perhaps” (9). fetishism, like cannibalism, is an unreliable signifier of the civilized-savage divide. soon the narrator catches another “slight glimpse” of seemingly incontrovertible evidence. after a festival he finds a previously unnoticed canoe-like vessel and, prying up its covering, sees within “the disordered members of a human skeleton, the bones still fresh with moisture, and with particles of flesh clinging to them here and there!” (238). “taboo! taboo!” yell the chiefs. “puarkee! puarkee! (pig, pig),” exclaims korykory, the narrator’s attendant. the narrator takes both cries to be dissimulations. clearly, as the written description states, he has found “a human skeleton.” setting aside the question of what is really in the canoe—a question that, intentionally or not, becomes hyperreal in typee—kory-kory’s alternative “reading” of the carcass melds the epistemological problem of cannibalism with the ontological problem of the animal. as in the image of canine cannibals, the category “animal” clarifies an epistemological problem—we know an animal when we see it—but prompts the ontological question of what is an animal. conversely, we know what a cannibal is—a human man-eater—but not who is a cannibal. the remains of the feast, regardless of provenance, speak to both questions simultaneously. this double address short-circuits the alternation that allows the cannibal-animal complex to function. a jumble of bloody bones glimpsed momentarily could just as well be a human as a similarly sized mammal; one could as well be stranded with cannibals who transgress the borders of the self, as fêted by hosts who enforce a healthily modern distinction between human and animal. greg pollock — the cannibal-animal complex in melville, marx, and beyond 19 with this “last horrid revelation...the full sense of [the narrator’s] condition rushed upon [his] mind with a force [he] had never before experienced” (238). the narrator resolves to escape at any cost. but, as he acknowledges in a following soliloquy, his hosts’ intentions remain inscrutable. “a thousand times i endeavored to account for the mysterious conduct of the natives.... what could be their object in treating me with such apparent kindness, and did it not cover some treacherous scheme?” (239). the typees’ inexplicable kindness only further confirms them as cannibals, but such an incongruous conclusion (that nice people must want to eat you) also places a special emphasis on the “puarkee” scene as the moment the narrator decisively turns from epistemological aporia to active escape attempt. between the manifest content of a carcass and shrunken heads, and the (now confirmed) latent content of anthropophagy, the unconscious connection of cannibal discourse is activated by a scene of reversibility between human and animal. perhaps most frightening for the westerner, it is the victim, not the perpetrator, who becomes indistinguishable from an animal. otter’s observation that “the most penetrating assault envisions the body not as meat to be sliced and devoured but as a text to be engraved and read” can be deepened by recognizing that “meat” is not a natural category but a function of the inscription of animals as wolfe’s animalized animal (otter 10). the phenomenology of “meat” requires a total inscription of defacement, the ultimate horror in otter’s reading (adams 74-5). the cannibal scenery of typee momentarily produces different possibilities for the shape of cannibalism and animality in the world. if one looks through the cannibal paradigm, the bones appear as an animalized human; through the animal paradigm, as humanized animal. the narrator and reader are temporarily positioned in the intermediate parallax view where both paradigms obtain: all fleshly beings are potentially human and animal. what can be “glimpsed” from this position is the contingency of the self as a production and that production as an economic function. the narrator considers one such case in which an old chief, who, actuated by a morbid desire for notoriety, gave himself out among the foreign residents of the place as the living tomb of captain cook’s big toe! ... this result was the making of his fortune; ever afterwards he was in the habit of giving very profitable audiences to all curious travellers [sic]. (234) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 20 consumption and production are doubled. there is the physical consumption of the toe and the figurative consumption of the cannibal spectacle by travelers, out of which the chief produces his commercial living and the spectators produce him as bona fide cannibal. the theoretical or metaphorical production of the self, like agamben’s human situated astride the ontological caesura, is made tangible and lucrative in the cannibal economy. this quotation, as well as that in which the narrator reflects on the unreliability of second-hand reports of cannibalism, fall in the short space between the discovery of the heads and the carcass. the motivation for the excursuses is apparently psychological: the narrator is being skeptically objective, or he is trying to convince himself that he is not among cannibals. the additional effect of this excursus is to connect the cannibalanimal complex—the dehumanized heads, the bloody bones—through a set-piece that refers to and unsettles economic categories. the loosening of production and consumption by the notorious chief is then part of the process running from preserved head (caput, the root of capital) to taboo puarkee. the sequencing can also be theoretically inverted: the contradictions in production and consumption of the notorious chief, indicative of a broader theoretical problem for specular capitalism, are held together by the cannibal-animal complex. the limitation of typee is that it recoils on glimpsing the cannibal-animal. typee limns the faces of its unconscious via the negative, so that when they coincide the effect is stark horror. and yet, from a perspective marked within the text and its tradition, nothing seems more idyllic than for the narrator to remain among the typees and reconcile himself to a cannibalism without “cannibalism.” this possibility of a nonmodern and non-capitalist ethics will be the question put to moby-dick. before turning to moby-dick, however, a detour into marx’s texts provides a complementary construction of the relation between the cannibal-animal and the economic. if this reading of typee is valid and generalizable, the effects of the cannibal-animal complex will not be limited to literary treatments of cannibals and animals, but will be detectable in the connective tissue of economic analysis itself. marx and the economic problem of the cannibal-animal. in the 1844 economic and philosophical manuscripts marx uses an enlightenment caricature of animals to highlight the freedom of humans. “they [animals] produce only under the compulsion of direct physical need, while man produces when he is free from physical need and only truly produces in freedom from such need” (fromm 102). in the german ideology, written a few years later, marx again uses animal lack to highlight the capabilities of humans: greg pollock — the cannibal-animal complex in melville, marx, and beyond 21 “where there exists a relationship, it exists for me: the animal does not enter into ‘relations’ with anything, it does not enter into any relations at all. for the animal, its relation to others does not exist as a relation” (37). though conventional in its subordination of animals to humans and in its lack of substantiating evidence, marx foreshadows the post-metaphysical conception of humans and animals found in heidegger and agamben. the animal whose “relation to others does not exist as a relation” is the reciprocal figure of the human constituted around ontological rupture whose non-relation to others exists as a relation. even in capital, after the supposed break between the “early” and “mature” marx, we find uncritical cartesian dogma concerning animals. we presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. a spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. but what distinguishes the worst of architects from the best of bees is this: that the architect raises a structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. at the end of every labour process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. (283-4) in a move that would surprise many marxists, the idea “in imagination” displaces “reality” as foundation. elsewhere marx is keen to criticize those who offer pleasing ideals as recompense for real inequities, or who explain material processes as effects of dialectics of ideas (“theses on feuerbach”). when it comes to animals, however, marx re-creates an economic division allowing one group to benefit from the labor of the other while denying historical significance to the laboring group. despite the tendentious choice of examples—bees and spiders rather than, say, dogs or horses—the animals marx cites are functionally productive, apparently intentional and, unlike machines, do not require a supplementary human hand or mind to accomplish their tasks. one might also question whether activities in which human workers realize a pre-given plan are the definitive form of free human labor. an artist wrestling with a protean idea during the process of creation might just as well be considered distinctively human. on the other hand, an architect who draws up a plan and abandons it to others to implement, or the masons and carpenters realizing the architect’s blueprint, have a less dialectical relationship with the world and each other than the self-actualizing spider. the comparison between bee and architect serves to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 22 efface the laborers that have historically realized such imagined structures from the pyramids to the present. the problem with animal labor in capital is not an isolated instance in marx’s oeuvre. rather, as derrida argues in specters of marx, it is part of the general ontological problem of the commodity. because the commodity does not acquire its exchange value in relation to fixities (labor time and usefulness of a commodity vary by social conditions) but through the way that human society relates to itself through commodities, the commodity comes alive. the social current of labor metaphorically passes through the frankenstein’s monster of the commodity, causing it to sit up and speak. this new problematic, “at the same time, life, thing, beast, object, commodity, automaton—in a word, specter,” conjures the paradox of “automatic autonomy, mechanical freedom, technical life” (152-3). the vivification of the object dislocates the uniquely human character of predicates like “freedom” and so, as in pettman’s moment of interior-/exterior-ization, transforms the human. in classical marxism this transformative process pertains primarily between humans and commodities, but logically it seems to affect animals no less in their roles as laborers and raw material. perhaps marx’s speciesism is recuperable as political strategy (perlo 304-5). a degraded animal provides a foil for human freedom and a point of leverage for criticizing inhumane working conditions. the mechanized animal contrasts with workers’ ability to intentionally transform their circumstances. but marx also represents workers’ selfdetermination as a matter of historical necessity: workers must come to control the means of production because of the logic of capitalism, not simply because they wish it so. the mixture of freedom and necessity in the marxist political project creates the “moral paradox” that “capitalism is regarded as an agent of ‘progress’ because it starkly reveals the necessity of the historical voyage toward utopia; but on the other hand, capitalism is also viewed as a bloody and barbarous system” (phillips 185). the idealized animal—idealized in terms of dehumanization, that is—provides a means of tipping the scales toward revolutionary consciousness, assuring us that humans really do have the capacity for intentional action even if it is also historically determined. to neutralize the way in which the animal exposes certain problems for marxist materialism, cannibalism appears: “marx imagined capitalism as cannibalism with two ends in mind: to emphasize the sheer brutality of the profit-motive as a measure of human affairs, and to emphasize the profound irrationality of a system that must perforce devour itself” (phillips 185). cannibal and animal supplement each other in moving the marxist paradox of necessity and freedom from aporia to activism, suggesting their broader role in the unconscious of political economy. greg pollock — the cannibal-animal complex in melville, marx, and beyond 23 moby-dick and ethics after cannibalism. whereas marx subtracts animals from the labor process proper, moby-dick tells a story of production with an excess of animals. moby-dick can be read with some success as an allegory of the way in which capital emerges from the exclusion of one commodity to serve as universal equivalent (money, in a word) of all the rest (capital 159-62). whales play the part of commodities, mobydick the part of capital. thus whale products or byproducts fulfill the functions normally served by different commodities: whale bones have repaired the pequod (70); whale ivory replaces the leg of ahab (109); men fry their biscuits in whale oil (241), or eat it as a steak (235); whale oil provides light (236); and the whale provides protective clothing for the mincer (325). if whales furnish different use-values, whale oil takes on the position of money, a commodity differentiated by its unique standing as general equivalent. whale oil is potential energy: it can be burned to produce energy and so do work, be liquidated at market for profit, or be reinvested as capital in the process of rendering more oil. the economy of whaling that melville presents thus naturally moves from relative exchange values between different use-values to a universal equivalent that collapses useand exchange-value (money is useful in that it can buy something useful) and posits a singular whale-form: moby-dick. that oil is derived from actual whales is consistent with the lingering connection between the money form and its genesis among commodities. capital differs from money by taking this process one step further, excepting itself even from materiality. so too moby-dick has the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” of capital (capital 163). he is everywhere and nowhere, organizing the hunt and preventing its completion. moby-dick is a legendary whale; the book itself; a chapter entitled “mobydick”; the subject of a multiply-framed anecdote in “the town-ho’s story”; a mirage in “the spirit spout”; and the virtual image evoked by its doppleganger/foil, the giant white squid (225-6). ironically, the squid, the natural enemy of the sperm whale, is that which best represents moby-dick, condensing in its seething coils the heterology of mobydick’s own body. that moby-dick is most visible in all its/his multiplicitous glory as the squid testifies to the extent to which moby-dick is defined by exclusion from his genetic context, in the same way that capital arises from and is excluded from the world of commodities. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 24 moby-dick can thus be read as an allegory of capital (or of capital) in the same way that lippit finds “the story of capital discovered in the narrative of human-animal relations” in the massacre/slaughter of eisenstein’s strike (“death” 14). on this reading, whales would be sacrifices in the movement of metaphor: moby-dick is really about capital. or, capitalism is really about violence against animals. such an allegorical reading is useful as a starting point to mark how the novel successfully evokes the incorporation of animals into capitalism. it is also useful for showing the failure of such an allegorical or sacrificial reading. first, moby-dick works quite hard to upset the possibility of univocal signifier-signified relations, most aggressively in “the whiteness of the whale,” but unmistakably throughout. second, melville pays considerable attention to whales as things in themselves, first through the expansive “etymology,” and then in chapters on the history of whaling and whale physiology and taxonomy. whales themselves, not just the “truth” one can produce from them, are valued in moby-dick. third, melville tropes on cannibalism in such a way as not just to question the sacrificial structure of humananimal relations, but to make it into a veritable möbius strip. human and animal or economy and nature become as manifest and latent content: contingent descriptions that are necessarily reversible. moby-dick departs from other texts similarly bound to such modern divisions in that it tries to imagine a hospitable relation to the animals and cannibals that it cannot yet engage without violence or fumbling. thus moby-dick celebrates whaling as a bloody contest and, at the same time and without falling into “false consciousness,” evokes tenderness toward sick and nursing whales (armstrong 102-3; schultz 104-6). turning to the novel’s cannibal discourse can explicate the coexistence of these conflicted valences. in the “spouter-inn” where ishmael lodges before going to sea the walls are decorated with “cannibal” weapons mixed with broken harpoons (27). he soon learns that his bedmate is out late peddling “his head” about town, though it turns out that he is not selling his own head but several preserved ones. at last ishmael grows weary and takes to bed. when his bedmate enters in the dark, his face alarms ishmael with its “dark purplish, yellow color, here and there stuck with large, blackish looking squares” (33). but when he realizes “they could not be sticking-plasters at all” (34) another hypothesis comes to mind: “i remembered the story of a white man—a whaleman too—who, falling among the cannibals, had been tattooed by them. i concluded that this harpooneer, in the course of his distant voyages, must have met with a similar greg pollock — the cannibal-animal complex in melville, marx, and beyond 25 adventure” (34). the cannibal enters in the indeterminacy between savage and savaged. defacement does not automatically mark one as other, but, as in this moment of suspense, prevents the placement of the defaced in a humanist grid. ishmael is prepared to accept his strange appearance—“it’s only his outside; a man can be honest in any sort of skin”—but as the evidence mounts he is forced to recognize that queequeg matches the profile of a cannibal (34). after a brief altercation the innkeeper placates ishmael to his great amusement: “didn’t i tell ye, he was a peddlin’ heads around town?” (36). deflated, ishmael’s only complaint is that queequeg is smoking in bed, which queequeg politely desists. “i turned in, and never slept better in my life” (36). but melville does not let the matter end with a picaresque bracketing of the cannibal encounter. ishmael awakes to find “queequeg’s arm thrown over me in the most loving and affectionate manner. you had almost thought i had been his wife” (36). this time ishmael does not repeat his hysterical performance but welcomes the arm, reflecting on the curious sensations it conjures for him. very early in the novel, then, the taboo value of “cannibalism” is separated from the actually existing person called “cannibal,” creating an affective-cognitive space in which to dwell on, and with, what is not understood. reflecting on a childhood experience of “a supernatural hand seemed placed in mine,” ishmael says that ...whether it was a reality or a dream, i never could entirely settle.... now, take away the awful fear, and my sensations at feeling the supernatural hand in mine were very similar, in their strangeness, to those which i experienced on waking up and seeing queequeg’s pagan arm thrown round me. (37) the subtraction of “the awful fear” could equally well define the change in the affective meaning of epistemological uncertainty from typee to moby-dick. after suspending the ideological value of cannibalism found in typee, ishmael becomes a carnivalesque version of arens’ anthropologist playfully discovering cannibalism everywhere. the pequod is “a cannibal of a craft, tricking herself forth in the chased bones of her enemies” (70). the crew is “chiefly made up of mongrel renegades, and castaways, and cannibals” (158), in which “cannibal” presumably denotes islanders like queequeg but could as well attach to any crew member. ishmael dilates on this possibility to declare, “your true whale-hunter is as much a savage as an iroquois. i myself am a savage, owning no allegiance but to the king of cannibals; and ready at humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 26 any moment to rebel against him” (222). the primal scene of patricide is turned insideout; the father whom one kills and consumes to inaugurate the regime of civilization is himself already a cannibal. cannibalism becomes a universal condition, “the universal cannibalism of the sea,” binding humans and nonhumans at the site of consumption (225). the ecstatic peak of this discourse resembles norman o. brown’s vision of apocalypse: “to restore to trees and flowers their original animality; their original spirituality; their original humanity” (16). humans, sea creatures, and even the timbers of the ship are imbued with cannibalism. a positive affective relation to cannibalism enables this transcendent vision but does not remove the capacity for differentiation. having passed through the apocalypse of universal cannibalism, the differentiation of self and other will appear as an ongoing ethical project rather than ideological given. as stubb eats a whale steak by the light of whale oil, ishmael opines, go to the meat-market of a saturday night and see the crowds of live bipeds staring up at the long rows of dead quadrupeds. does not that sight take a tooth out of the cannibal’s jaw? cannibals? who isn’t a cannibal? i tell you it will be more tolerable for the fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine ... than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy patè-de-foie-gras. (242) if the “gormandizers of human flesh” were feared in typee (25), here it is the “enlightened gourmand” whose gluttony goes too far. speaking from within the position of universal cannibalism—who isn’t a cannibal?—ishmael revives the capacity for value judgment as a relative and contingent position. to say that it will be more tolerable for the fejee does not require claims of pure innocence or guilt. such a construction of moral judgment does require the continued re-evaluation of one’s current and possible relations to fellow cannibals, much as matthew calarco argues for the ongoing deconstruction of vegetarian or vegan practices from within those practices (197-8). ishmael earlier asks “who ain’t a slave” (21), using the same grammatical construction as “who isn’t a cannibal?” to interrogate slavery. stubb asks fleece, the ship’s cook and a slave, to prepare a whale steak for him. stubb then berates fleece for his ineptitude, prompting fleece to say that stubb is “more of a shark dan massa shark hisself” (240). the shared construction is not coincidental. in both cases the point of comparison greg pollock — the cannibal-animal complex in melville, marx, and beyond 27 (cannibal, shark) is one that is excluded from civilized humanity as its archimedean point. but ishmael does not say that stubb is a cannibal or a shark, and thereby ground his critique in the presupposition that those are naturally abhorrent. ishmael’s moral joust—are you better than a cannibal or a shark?—functions without presupposing any figure of absolute (human) immorality or (animal) amorality. rather, such a construction of judgment requires one to state in what way the action of a shark or cannibal is functionally better or worse than an alternate “civilized” action. in the case of the sharks, “[eating] till those entrails seemed swallowed over and over again by the same mouth, to be oppositely voided by the gaping wound” (243), insatiable appetite suggests a comparison between stubb and the sharks. on one hand this is merely the logic of universal cannibalism crystallized; but on the other, as fleece seems to intend, the thoughtlessness and speed of the sharks’ self-consumption should be avoided by humans and sharks alike. “your woraciousness, fellow-critters, i don’t blame ye so much for; dat is nature, and can’t be helped; but to gobern dat wicked natur, dat is de pint,” fleece preaches to the sharks (238). the judgment “more of a shark” here has less to do with unique qualities of sharks—they seem to be in exactly the same post-lapsarian moral situation as ourselves—than with their embodiment of consumption run rampant. fredric jameson’s description of capitalist stasis through constant change, “a steady stream of momentum and variation that at some outer limit seems stable and motionless,” could equally describe the sharks as they become one mouth and one wound (17). indeed, the sharks’ jaws continue to open and close even after “the individual life had departed,” suggesting an automatization of consumption dangerous to one’s degree of autonomy and even more so for those who live among them: “one of these sharks almost took poor queequeg’s hand off” (243). if we cannot avoid cannibalism, we can at least try to attenuate our consumption for the sake of our fellow cannibals and orchestrate the distribution of violence more equitably than in a slave-based economy or the production of patè-de-foie-gras. as deleuze says of spinoza, the ethics of trans-species cannibalism “is a functionalism, but a very beautiful functionalism.” conclusion. one more example will bridge the historical gap between melville and marx and ourselves, hopefully suggesting the continued importance of cannibal-animal discourse for our own situation. in when species meet haraway recounts coming to santa cruz and being invited to partake of the placenta from a friend’s recent birth (2934). as might be expected, this event sparks considerable conversation. the ambiance of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 28 passionate discussion around the placenta leads into a parallel scene of a pig roast (2968). the pig roast is probably more normatively palatable, but, as haraway makes clear, this is a matter for close argumentation: “reasons were well developed on all sides; commitments to very different ways of living and dying were what needed to be examined together, without any god tricks and with consequences” (298). the juxtaposition of the feasts of the pig and the placenta—which is not cannibalism, but is close enough to evoke its problematic—necessitates a clarification of how, precisely, these types of bodily consumption are different (or not). however one feels about these scenes of eating, their ability to elicit strong reactions speaks to the continuation of the cannibal-animal complex as source of anxiety and potential for awakening the “beautiful functionalism” of moby-dick’s cannibal ethics. the rupture between animals and “the animal” continues to provide a site for thinking about ethics as it passes, in a relation i have argued is continuous with but modifies freud’s unconscious, through the fantasy of cannibalism. if the parable of the pig and the placenta is not enough to show the survival of this structure, the epilogue to armin meiwes’ story seizes on the cannibal-animal complex with startling clarity: meiwes, the “german cannibal” who consensually killed and ate a man, has since become a vegetarian—although he does not recommend others follow his example (hall, “cannibal”). demystifying “cannibalism” is not enough to put it to rest, any more than rendering animals as “the animal” solved the challenge of the nonhuman. a more extensive conception of the unconscious, one that traverses the materiality of beings in the world and so relates to economic systems as well as individual psyches, can contribute to a better practical engagement with our theoretical inheritance. works cited adams, carol. the sexual politics of meat. new york: continuum, 1990. agamben, giorgio. the open: man and animal. trans. kevin attell. stanford: stanford up, 2003. althusser, louis. for marx. trans. ben brewster. london: verso, 2005. arens, william. the man-eating myth. oxford: oxford up, 1979. armstrong, philip. what animals mean in the fiction of modernity. london: routledge, 2008. greg pollock — the cannibal-animal complex in melville, marx, and beyond 29 barker, frances, peter hulme, and margaret iversen (eds). cannibalism and the colonial world. cambridge, u.k.: cambridge up, 1998. bartolovich, crystal. “consumerism, or the cultural logic of late cannibalism.” in barker. 204-237. benton, ted. “marxism and the moral status of animals.” society and animals 11:1 (2003): 73-9. brown, norman o. apocalypse and/or metamorphosis. berkeley: u california p, 1991. calarco, matthew. “deconstruction is not vegetarianism: humanism, subjectivity, and animal ethics.” continental philosophy review 37 (2004): 175-201. deleuze, gilles. "cours vincennes: spinoza." january 24, 1978. trans. timothy murphy. les cours de gilles deleuze. august 23, 2010. <http://www.webdeleuze.com/php/texte.php?cle=14&groupe=spinoza&langue=2>. derrida, jacques. specters of marx. trans. peggy kamuf. london: routledge, 2004. dimock, wai-chee. empire for liberty. princeton: princeton up, 1991. fromm, erich. marx’s concept of man. trans. t. b. bottomore. new york: continuum, 1994. gordon, avery. ghostly matters. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. hall, allan. “world’s most famous cannibal becomes a vegetarian.” november 20, 2007. mail online. the daily mail. january 20, 2010. <http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-495132/worlds-infamous-cannibalvegetarian.html>. haraway, donna. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. hribal, jason. “jesse, a working dog.” november 11, 2006. counterpunch. january 20, 2010. <http://www.counterpunch.org/hribal11112006.html>. hulme, peter. “introduction: the cannibal scene.” in barker. 1-38. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 30 jameson, fredric. the seeds of time. new york: columbia up, 1996. king, c. richard. “the (mis)uses of cannibalism in contemporary cultural critique.” diacritics 30:1 (2000): 106-23. klarer, mario. “cannibalism and carnivalesque: incorporation as utopia in the early image of america.” new literary history 30:2 (1999): 389-410. lippit, akira mizuta. “the death of an animal.” film quarterly 56:1 (2002): 9-22. ―――. electric animal. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. marx, karl. capital. trans. ben fowkes. new york: penguin: 1992. ―――. the german ideology. amherst, ny: prometheus books, 1998. ―――. “theses on feuerbach.” 1969 [1845]. marxists.org. january 20, 2010. <http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm>. massumi, brian. parables for the virtual. durham: duke up, 2002. melville, herman. moby-dick. new york: norton, 2001. ―――. typee. new york: penguin, 1996. obeyesekere, gananath. cannibal talk. berkeley: u california p, 2005. otter, samuel. melville’s anatomies. berkeley: u california p, 1999. perlo, katherine. “marxism and the underdog.” society and animals 10:3 (2002): 303-18. pettman, dominic. love and other technologies. new york: fordham up, 2006. phillips, jerry. “cannibalism qua capitalism: the metaphorics of accumulation in marx, conrad, shakespeare, and marlowe.” in barker. 183-203. schultz, elizabeth. “melville’s environmental vision in moby-dick.” interdisciplinary studies in literature and environment 7:1 (2000): 97-113. walton, priscilla. our cannibals, ourselves. urbana: u illinois p, 2004. greg pollock — the cannibal-animal complex in melville, marx, and beyond 31 wolfe, cary. animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. chicago: u chicago p, 2003. ziser, michael. “animal mirrors.” angelaki 12:3 (2007): 11-33. žižek, slavoj. the sublime object of ideology. trans. john barnes. london: verso, 1989. o’brien embraicing the radical cartographies of the doggy dérive apace dog walking, kinaesthetic empathy, and posthuman ethos in the great north woods susan mchugh university of new england humanimalia 14.2 (spring 2024) abstract: researching nonfiction writing about where you call home is one way of appreciating conservation challenges. living at the edge of the great north woods in maine, i have found this work to be enriched by daily dog walks that cumulatively mark changes across time. structured as a seasonal cycle, this essay ponders an idiosyncratic collection of evidence of more-than-human comings and goings, witnessed on two feet, accompanied by four more, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. by writing about encounters with wildlife at close range, i reflect on specific ways in which my reading and dog walking practices together inspire extensions of empathy toward the ineffable relations that structure nature–culture borderlands. becoming attuned to the critters within and without, betwixt and between house and home through extensions of kinaesthetic empathy, my hope is to model the development of a posthuman ethos through developing a storied appreciation for the elusive, unnamed intimacies of nonhuman neighbourliness that include, but are not limited to, witnessing dying and death. keywords: maine; great north woods; dog walking; canine–human relations; ecocriticism; kinaesthetic empathy; nonhuman nonstandard intimacy; posthuman ethos bio: susan mchugh, professor of english at the university of new england, usa, researches and teaches literary, visual, and scientific narratives of cross-species relations. she is the author of three monographs: dog (2004), animal stories: narrating across species lines (2011), and love in a time of slaughters: human-animal stories against genocide and extinction (2019). she has coedited several academic volumes, including posthumanism in art and science: a reader (2021) and animal satire (2023). mchugh serves as co-editor of two book series, palgrave studies in animals and literature and plants and animals: interdisciplinary approaches. she is editor-in-chief of the interdisciplinary academic journal society & animals. email: smchugh@une.edu copyright © 2024 susan mchugh this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 113–145. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.14951 mailto:smchugh@une.edu http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.14951 mchugh , apace | 115 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) “yesterday was my seventy-fifth birthday,” my neighbour announced, “so i walked all the way from here to my daughter’s house, almost thirty-six miles.” what could i say? “congratulations, dear! you’re an inspiration.” “me? no. you’re the inspiration. out here every day, walking your doggie.” my neighbour’s point was not to brag on himself. he’s a humble fellow, like most people who have spent their whole lives here in maine, at the edge of the great north woods. no, he was calling me out as a compulsive dog-walker. it’s not just next door who notices. in the public library, on the roadside, in shops, really all around the area, mainers see me for what i am. “you’re that woman out all hours with the dog,” i’m told. if they’re old-timers, then it’s “the one who was always walking that big black dog.” i may not get very far through snow, sleet, freezing rain, sunny heat, and especially gloom of night. sometimes my human partner makes us three. but every day out i go, leashed to our dog. our love for each other and our world grows apace. on a good day, our so-called empty walks for canine comfort can stretch on for hours, during which we gather news about fellow travellers. our dog’s data collection requires long inhalations, giving me plenty of opportunities to check my own perceptions. largely self-confined to my own little dog-centred world, i am alternately startled, saddened, thrilled, and profoundly humbled by what daily, dog-induced observations teach me about forces larger than all of us. structured as a seasonal cycle, this essay ponders an idiosyncratic collection of evidence of more-than-human comings and goings, witnessed on two feet, accompanied by four more, in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. i am inspired by my friend kenneth j. shapiro’s concept of kinaesthetic empathy extended across species lines, a phenomenological approach to studying nonhuman life that accounts for the investigator’s own potentials for embodied mobility. shapiro developed his method through attunement to 116 | mchugh , apace humanimalia 14.2 (2024) his own yard dog in rural maine: watching his watch dog, who was also watching being watched, shapiro realized that he was becoming simpatico with the dog’s interests and needs.1 expanding the application of kinaesthetic empathy to daily dog walking likewise implicates me as a participant-observer. often, i follow the dog’s interests to take a different direction from my own inclination, making way for the development of a posthuman ethos. moving together away from a static self, we enter a zone that is not centred on human perception, and so make way for storying appreciation for the elusive, unnamed intimacies of nonhuman neighbourliness. poet robert frost captured the human ethos of our new england region with the lines in “mending wall” about good fences making good neighbours. the stone walls around here have long since slid into disrepair, whether by the geological forces, elves, and hunters’ hands implied by frost himself, or by the bulldozers, skidders, and thieves’ hands doing the damage closer to my home. what remains is proof of the gist of the poem: that something in nature doesn’t like or love walls, and that neighbourliness isn’t always about goodness. for ecocritics, badness gains new appeal through nicole seymour’s diagnosis of the problems of extremism in the naturalist tradition. whether emphasizing gloom-and-doom or giddy-kiddie visions, longstanding nature-story patterns privilege and secure the pure and sanctimonious, all too often at the expense of others, as seymour argues in bad environmentalism.2 for me, writing about dog walking close to home foregrounds the challenges of self-reflexivity in embracing the queer and diverse, the unexpected and unforgettable, even the messy and gross realities of life and death across species lines. i learn a lot that is not overtly taught, not least how essential nonhuman companionship becomes to the social life of an introvert. yet, you wonder, who is our dog? somewhat confusingly, “our dog” anchors my experience of living with another human and a sequence 1 shapiro, “understanding dogs”, 194. 2 seymour, bad environmentalism, 3–4 mchugh , apace | 117 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) of two dogs, first sabena and now brunhilde. the dogs never knew each other, yet both have been my near-constant companions and kept my academic work relevant. walking with sabena helped me to begin to theorize a tradition of feminist dog writing that i later identified with liberatory and even life-saving potentials. but it is the practice itself that persists in my life after sabena, with brunhilde, that inspires me here to review all of the raw data as a means of mapping something much bigger than any of us as individuals: an emerging sensibility of the convergence of dog ownership and walking into a shared, complex, and emergent posthumanist practice of environmental responsiveness. my influences include contemporary dog writers across genres and disciplines such as deborah bird rose, colin dayan, donna haraway, laura jean mckay, and justyna włodarczyk, whose work provides abundant justification for positioning everyday canine-human relations as entangled in broader cultural discourses, and whose kindness and generosity in interpersonal communications has been positively inspirational. together they inform my sense of a posthuman ethos that necessarily acknowledges — whether by speaking to, correcting, or writing towards — the foundational gaps between the human and other animals, even humanity’s best friend. there’s no denying that walking with a large dog provides more than a semblance of security to an absent-minded professor who presents as female. to those who dismiss my attachment to the leash as purely selfish or cruelly domineering, i counter that protection goes both ways. family dog walks in the many parks and public lands in central massachusetts are among my fondest of childhood memories. seeing one of our off-leash dogs kill a porcupine is one of the most traumatic. the dog lived because our veterinarian miraculously removed all of the quills, only after a long ride there, while we struggled to keep the dog from bashing his head against the car windows in utter agony. other dogs of my childhood had their skulls smashed in abandoned leg-hold traps, were shot by game wardens, and became roadkill. given the choice, i keep dogs close. fig. 1 zoomies. photo by mik morrisey © 2023. mchugh , apace | 119 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) no more than four miles or so in diameter, the narrow range of our dog walks spotlights different flourishings and vanishings in our locale. although covering very little territory, we traverse varied terrain, starting up on the granite-ledge ridge where our house sits, down into the valleys below, but never quite over or beyond the next ridges. commercial apple orchards are planted along much of our street, and a few hayfields edged with stone walls remain from the days when the human neighbours would all have been farm families. but most of the land has grown back into woodlands, mixed hardwoods, and evergreens, with vernal pools, year-round swamps, and streams. in the bottom of the valley to the east, a fair-sized brook feeds a giant glacial pond, all draining toward the androscoggin river, which eventually meets the atlantic ocean. sometimes the atlantic feels very close. although we are thirty miles inland, as the crow flies, the air can smell of salt when there is a stiff breeze coming up the river valley, or in the humid stillness that precedes a thunderstorm. on the ridge with the steepest drop, a tiny commercial alpine ski area miraculously persists, despite steady regional declines in annual snowfall. its network of wooded glades and open runs bleeds into even more extensive nordic ski, snowmobile, and fat-bike trail systems that, for most of the year, dog and i have to ourselves. this land, like most of maine, is privately owned, but the landowners allow access to the public. it is an evolving situation that has its problems, no doubt about it. in a recent chance conversation with another neighbour — him cross-country skiing alone, me snowshoeing with dog, with the whoops and giggles of a busy day at the ski area providing background noise — i found myself agreeing that there is nowhere else on earth that we’d rather live. because he’s the president and i’m a board member of our community’s nordic ski association, we also share concerns about what the future holds. as someone whose day job is reading, researching, and teaching literary, visual, and scientific narratives of cross-species relations, i can’t help but collect stories, and notice changes. 120 | mchugh , apace humanimalia 14.2 (2024) autumn even if you’ve lived here all of your life, waking up to maine’s fall foliage season in full bloom can take your breath away. all it takes is a cool august night to light up a branch here, a tree there. peak colour historically doesn’t arrive until early october. but the new normal of prolonged summer droughts sets the swamp maples in the bottomlands in full cry before we get back into the habit of closing the windows at bedtime. the most glorious of all, sugar maples are often to be found near the oldest houses. i learned while reading robin wall kimmerer’s braiding sweetgrass that they are leftovers of the victorian custom of planting them in pairs to mark the homes of newlyweds.3 many more maples fed syrup operations — such as the one that was credited with financing the story behind living the good life for scott and helen nearing, whose maine estate is now the non-profit good life center — but those large-scale ones have grown fewer and farther between throughout the region. long before talk came of climate change, everyone my age and older remembers news reports portending sugar maple die-off as the result of acid rain, the atmospheric condensation of fossil-fuel pollution. for us, the few large specimens that remain are beacons for nostalgia, glowing in their autumnal glory. the encroachments of a pale yellow on the foliage palette points to another factor: the displacement of natives by hardier, invasive norway maples. the pathways of our dog walks are littered with less of the vivid orange, red, and mixed-colour leaves typical of swamp and sugar maples, and more of the norway’s uniformly yellow ones, often dotted with brown fungal infections called tar spots. our dog likes them all the same, in our snapping-at-leaves-tossed-on-a-breeze games. contradictions cloak the autumn landscape. morning mists are made glorious by the first frost to touch cinnamon ferns, plants that become most pungently themselves only when dying. good rain years 3 kimmerer, braiding sweetgrass, 70 fig. 2 hunting season. photo by mik morrisey © 2023. 122 | mchugh , apace humanimalia 14.2 (2024) bring forth an abundance of chanterelles, black trumpets, and chicken-of-the-woods mushrooms. apples galore, free for the filching, lull me into the story of fall as the season of bounty, abundance, and plenty. puppy passions for eating apples are quickly outgrown, but catching and chasing play with “snackballs” returns each year with the ripening fruit, and ends when a hard freeze makes the apples rot. losses abound, too. by law, dogs and humans must don blaze orange throughout november, which is open season on deer, but we do so also in the months before and after. in surrounding towns, one woman was killed five years ago and another ten years earlier by hunters who thought they saw deer and lawfully opened fire. wardrobe malfunctions can be serious safety concerns. despite the occasional gunshots, it is an absence, a quietude, that audibly marks the seasonal turning point. late-life maine resident henry beston’s bestseller the outermost house was written on and about the same migratory flyway, only several generations ago and a fair bit south of here, on the great sand dunes of cape cod. reading and teaching it heightened my appreciation for the gathering disappearance of birdsong that precedes the migrants’ annual departure. still, the silence becomes harder to hear. i follow the newspaper column of local ornithologist and retired biology professor herb wilson, full of names and numbers that indicate incrementally changing departure and arrival times for various songbird species accruing over my time here, along with steadily falling numbers for so many. fortunately, it’s not all bad news. flocks of eastern bluebirds always appear astonishing, particularly when feeding on staghorn sumac berries, perching their mostly cobalt-blue bodies on bright red panicles that are three or four times their size. old neighbours have pointed me to the nesting boxes they purpose-built to attract bluebirds, and explained that they add dried mealworms to their feeders to get them to stay. wilson’s column confirms: though twentieth-century records indicate they were a rare sighting this far north, bluebird range has crept up this far in maine. mchugh , apace | 123 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) one september morning, a bluebird flying up from and down to the same spot on the road drew me and our dog to a horrible sight: a smear of blue feathers and blood was all that was left. the grotesque tableau only grew worse by our afternoon walk, with the addition of the distraught mourner, also killed by a car. one man’s meat is another’s consternation, observed my spouse.4 we are not just annoyed by the increasing traffic drawn to the corn maze, fright nights, and ever more attractions added to the commercial orchard. our dog alerts me to ever more roadkill, and i’ve learned to carry a flashlight to alert approaching drivers to our own presence. municipal police are called to kill any deer injured in car crashes. if they’re locals, they in turn call somebody who wants the meat to come and get it. the rest of the roadkill disappears in a matter of days without human help, carried off, whole or in bits, by scavengers and opportunists, one wild animal’s flesh being another’s food. mast years for the oaks lead to notable upticks in squirrel and chipmunk carnage. i do my best to keep our distance, but even so will never forgive myself for hustling the dog by one bloodied grey squirrel, left lifeless except to blink. for these reasons and more, our walks each autumn trend off these beaten tracks. mowed well into the season, the orchards are an easywalk option on days too windy, mucky, or otherwise unconducive to being in the woods. the many deer paths threading through the large swaths of fields left to brambles entice the dog with their unmistakable pellet-like piles of poop. regular dusk and dawn sightings of small groups explain why the same road crossings are dotted with dainty hoofprints. deer do well here, at least in terms of numbers. but we share our troubles too. 4 in apparently coining this phrase, my spouse sounded so much like e. b. white (who moved to maine before publishing his best-loved novel, charlotte’s web) that i misremembered the origin. hours of poring over what i thought was the source, white’s essay collection one man’s meat, i am rewarded instead with the famous author’s description of local schoolchildren’s preference for walking to hitching rides in cars: “although i am motorized to a degree, i enjoy living among pedestrians who have an instinctive and habitual realization that there is more to a journey than the mere fact of arrival” (111), charmed to think that white is describing maine children of the same generation as my walking-enthusiast neighbour, with whom i began this essay. 124 | mchugh , apace humanimalia 14.2 (2024) one unusually warm day, i turned a corner on one of the woods paths to startle a group of at least three, who bounded off before even the dog clocked that they were real. onward we walked in their wake, only later realizing our mistake. returned home, i gave up counting after picking the seventy-fifth deer tick off her. i don’t even want to remember all the ones that i picked off myself, for ticks are vectors of lyme disease, anaplasmosis, and many more debilitating and potentially deadly zoonoses. winter years with the requisite two weeks of constant, below-freezing temperatures that keep tick populations at bay are becoming things of the past. the tick-prevention pills i force on our dog each month and the lyme jab that she gets from the veterinarian each year are meant to keep us all safer. but nothing spares me and my kind from being responsible for the vanishing snowpack. each winter, our dog and i seem to travel farther and farther on frozen bare ground than we used to along snow-covered trails. the local snowmobile club maintains part of a network that could take us from our back door to québec, in theory anyway. until they rerouted their trails to avoid the pond altogether, their snow groomers arrived after the pond iced in. it used to be safe to assume it would stay solid for months, but weird thaws are the new norm. ever-higher air temperature records might be expected so close to the gulf of maine, now known as the fastest-warming expanse of ocean on the planet. when the snow falls deep, the groomers are a welcome sight, guaranteeing us a respite from the heavy work of breaking trail. club leaders grumble about the dwindling spirit of volunteerism, but it is hard to attract new blood to a dying pastime. snowmobiles and their riders now disappear under thin ice with such regularity that maine enacted a law charging the cost of their removal to the owner, or their estate. miscalculations can be deadly. only once have i been stopped and quizzed by a game warden during a search for a snowmobiler gone missing, who was later found drowned in a pond in the next town over. that scared me off venturing onto pond ice anymore, mchugh , apace | 125 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) or letting our dog off leash on the beach until the pond is well iced out in spring. with increasing regularity, the dog can drink from one or all of the streams we cross year-round. there and on the pond’s edge the mud and snow sometimes record the distinctive handand footprints of raccoons, coming to fish or wash their food. one year, a long cold and clear snap between big snowstorms allowed us to track them back to a nest in an ancient, hollowed-out sugar maple, from inside which mom and her three kits blinked back at us in the dawn light. the tree came down a few years ago when the forest was logged. although the family had long since flown that particular coop, we have not spotted another racoon nursery. their tracks confirm their persistence though, adding to the list of reasons that our dog stays leashed in the woods. the waddling gait of porcupines leaves beautiful lines of perfectly symmetrical, curvy groove patterns in fresh snow. like raccoons, they are nocturnal, rarely seen by us except in winter. just about the same tiny size, oval shape, distribution, and colour of the cones that carpet the woods under hemlocks, porcupine poop pellets point us to where to look up in order to spy them in the overstory, curled up snoozing on cold sunny days. from below, they look like large fur balls, precariously perched along boughs way up in the largest trees that grow on the southeast side of the ridge, enjoying protection from predators along with strong winds. on the ground, the pee-dribbled trails they wear down in the snow thread together the shelter of big trees, underground hidey-holes, and visibly damaged younger trees where they feed on tender bark. dogs of all stripes are compelled to try to kill porcupines, and in turn can be killed when quills that aren’t removed migrate into the dog’s internal organs. ordinarily, porcupines are keen to shimmy up trees, keeping well away from us. a few years back, our nordic ski club issued an alert about one apparently blind, elderly porcupine, who lived another year despite bumbling around everywhere at all hours. somehow, i got the dog turned around quickly from every one of our close encounters. 126 | mchugh , apace humanimalia 14.2 (2024) after a heavy snowstorm marked by the kind of high winds that used to seem strange, but now knock down massive white pines like so many matchsticks almost every year, another porcupine was not so lucky. the storm was followed by a sunny sunday that drew out an unusually large crowd of snowmobilers. from our snowshoe-blazed link trail to the house, we spied a bewildered porcupine pointlessly pacing in circles, betraying the signs of severe head injury. was it blown out of a tree during the storm? clipped by a snowmobile? both? the porcupine disappeared after nightfall, easy pickings for fisher cats. north america’s largest weasels, fisher cats leave distinctive hopping pairs of footprints, roundish in front, oblongish in back, which each winter confirm their nightly hunts for smaller mammals. dogs always want to check their movements. one early morning in deep snow, our extraordinarily excited dog announced that we were hot on someone’s trail. it wasn’t the sight so much as the distinctive pig-cat squeal-hiss that startled us to a screeching halt, gaping as the large fisher cat lolloped away. over the years i have heard them again, even gotten into a long call-and-response exchange with a lovelorn individual one spring night, but never again set eyes on a fisher cat, dead or alive. the tall white pine trees along our ridge are conducive to nesting ravens. there is always a flock around somewhere, and they have our number. edgar allen poe chose one to star in his most famous poem precisely because, like parrots, they can plausibly repeat human words. but i have come to think that poe also was treated to something of the prankster in them. first thing one morning, a pair of juveniles locked talons to propeller themselves toward me and the dog while we were still in the driveway, parting just inches before they hit the pavement. they flew away unscathed, all in good fun. it was no fun, however, one winter day to see a flock mobbing an owl, taking turns hitting their increasingly unsteady target on a downward flight path. owls similarly take any opportunity to kill ravens. the feel of a great horned owl swooping low overhead while mchugh , apace | 127 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) i skied the moonlit orchard quelled any doubts that they have the advantage after nightfall. but the strangest winter sight of all made it so that i see the largest of our corvids as ordinary (quoth poe’s raven) nevermore. one february, hundreds upon hundreds of ravens gathered in and around an ancient white pine, their usual range of croaks, clicks, grocks, and other sharp vocalizations all given way to gentle murmuration. they crowded close, grooming each other or repeatedly turning over pieces of bark with their beaks. days went by, and they lingered on in this manner, unperturbed by our comings and goings for dog walks. then, as quickly as they gathered, they vanished. in english, “an unkindness” is one of the collective nouns for ravens, but i distinctly prefer another, “a conspiracy of ravens”, after learning that what i witnessed was exceptionally rare roosting behaviour for ravens in the eastern united states, according to bernd heinrich’s ravens in winter and mind of the raven.5 in light of his many substantial scientific contributions to the understanding of wild raven behaviour, largely via his maine field research station located several towns north of here, i was shocked to read heinrich lamenting never having witnessed a ravens’ congress. heinrich also gave me a new appreciation for orange cheese doodles, each of which has the same high fat content as a grasshopper. on particularly cold days, a few ravens know to choose perches where they catch my attention out the windows, and draw me out of the house to share the dubious human industrial achievement of fluorescent-orange crap-food extruded from a pipe. the ravens don’t always take them, at least not while we are watching. spotting an orange flash in a black bird’s beak sometimes days, weeks, even months later, while out walking, confirms that ravens cache these treats. 5 for parallel descriptions relayed by heinrich from other observers, see heinrich, ravens in winter, 159–60; and heinrich, mind of the raven, 24. fig. 3 on the trail. photo by mik morrisey © 2023. mchugh , apace | 129 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) spring spring becomes interesting when the snowpack lingers. old-school gardeners take heed not to set out tender plants before our memorial day holiday on the last weekend in may, before which hard freezes are still possible, if also less probable. known by locals as poor-man’s fertilizer, the last snow falls more typically now in april, when peas, radishes, and hardy greens might be sprouting in the garden. although march vies with february for the heaviest snowfall, strong nor’easters  —  which is what we call the storms that swirl back on a northeasterly gale from the gulf of maine — can bring deep snow late into spring, not only blanketing but also revealing the stirrings of new life. one mid-march morning, a large doglike, except distinctly pigeon-toed track appeared on the main snowmobile trail up from the valley behind our house, laced around and across by smaller but otherwise identical prints. consulting my dog-eared copy of olaus murie’s a field guide to animal tracks confirmed it was a black bear sow, roused from denning with her new rambunctious cub. several towns northwest of here and half a century ago, louise dickinson rich wrote in her maine memoir we took to the woods of being more concerned when coming across strange boot prints than spotting a bear’s tracks.6 i’d say the sentiment still rings true. one person was killed by a great white shark off the maine coast a couple of years ago, for the first time here in recorded history, but there has never yet been a fatal black bear attack. still, caution is warranted. my joy at seeing this proof of their persistence was surpassed only by gratitude for their shyness, for our dog would not be so easily persuaded that getting between mother and cub is dangerous. apart from scat in the orchard, the only other sign of bear life was a lone track in the snow down close to the pond, following a freakish thaw in january, when bears used to not be expected to be out and about. 6 rich, we took to the woods, 91 130 | mchugh , apace humanimalia 14.2 (2024) dog delights crop up in spring as well. a chance find of an antler during the shedding season can serve as a go-to chew toy throughout the year. our native whitetail deer can grow quite large here. but a big buck’s hoofprints may not be what they seem. only by seeing their paths cross in low snow have i learned to distinguish the dragging-toe gait of moose from the crisp outlines of deer hooves. unlike deer, moose have become more precious. conversations with maine hunters notoriously stop short with their line: a moose feeds a family of four for the winter. especially away from wealthy coastal communities, subsistence requires traditional ecological knowledge and understanding. along with foraging, fishing, and running trap lines, hunting helps locals make ends meet, while maintaining heritage ties to the land and waterways. their stories of harvesting moose these days frequently feature bony-looking adults covered in thousands of ticks, and carcasses of calves thus bled to starvation. drive north, and it becomes easier to spot moose from the car. but here, i have only ever seen a moose on two occasions, thanks to dog walking. when our current dog brunhilde was a pup, she and i hadn’t made it out of the driveway one fine daybreak before being rushed from behind by a large animal that to my bleary perception appeared to be the biggest, ugliest whitetail fawn ever. pup meanwhile exchanged play bows with the baby beast, who then ran back behind the house before i woke up to what the big jug-head and pure-brown, spotless cape meant: a moose calf. the sight of such an unlikely creature beggars the imagination. during breakfast, years earlier, i looked out the window and wondered why a strange horse was running across the neighbours’ yard. the penny dropped; the toast fell out of my hand. later i learned that, at about the same time, our dog was out walking downhill from the house with her other human, who confirmed their own sighting of the self-same moose, maybe just minutes before. both were seen in late may, by which time most of our winged travellers are back, their adult males robustly adding to a glorious daily mchugh , apace | 131 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) dawn chorus. a few years before i was born, later-in-life maine resident rachel carson first sounded the alarms about the ecological fragility of the seasonal soundtrack in silent spring. i have no way of knowing how much quieter springtime has become here since then, but i feel seen as part of the problem when reading carson’s critique of “a world where a flea bites a dog, and dies because the dog’s blood has been made poisonous,” presumably by the same chemicals i feed mine to kill ticks.7 dog heads swivel toward a particularly loud, shrill, or otherwise noticeably different birdsong, but identifying its source is another matter. in another memoir, my neck of the woods, louise dickinson rich made a pact with her friend to learn one new species of bird each year “for the next fifty years, and die ornithologists,”8 with the added practicality of being able to impress the friend’s hotel guests from away. (in maine, everyone agrees that you’re either a mainer, born here of people from here, or you’re from away.) reading that detail made me self-conscious that, at best, i have struggled to identify one new bird species each year, though not for lack of trying. for years, i puzzled over the charismatic, black, white, and orangey-yellow-patched flock that summered in the same disused hayfield near the pond — evening grosbeaks? some kind of oriole? surely not one of the legions of yellow warbler species — before it clicked that their burbling banter, sounding like nothing so much as the ambient sound of the bridge of the old starship enterprise, inspired onomatopoeia: they are bobolinks, a species in steep decline throughout our region as a direct result of losing these tall-grass nesting areas. our dog encourages my observations by needing to rest her hot belly on choice areas of muck, in that field where the water table runs high. we have learned to look out for new ways to cool off when the sun blazes. daytime high temperatures keep breaking records, and long before the dog sheds her winter coat. 7 carson, silent spring, 39. 8 rich, my neck of the woods, 28. 132 | mchugh , apace humanimalia 14.2 (2024) before the trees leaf in with welcome shade, the bare woods amplify the haunting calls of loons who summer every year on the pond, and thereby confirm when it has iced out. our dog rejoices to swim again as soon as possible, but it’s usually july before i can linger in the water comfortably. the sun sometimes warms the shallow sandy edge, but frosty feet are a small price to pay for canine amusement. a streamside path down to the pond is the most reliable place to spot spring ephemerals like trilliums, false heliotropes, ferns’ fiddleheads unfurling, and, my favourite, the chartreuse plants locally called skunk cabbages for their low-lying, stinky flowers. insects feeding on them make possible still more returns. usually, at the end of april or beginning of may, i can be counted on to exclaim aloud another regional moniker — peepers! — heralding the emergence of one of the earliest of our several species of singing frogs. hearing them is a sure sign that winter is over. their collective chorus builds up to a crescendo of evensong that can be downright deafening close to the water’s edge. quieter folk depend on these elusive bodies of water as well. when rapid thaws and heavy rains turn the trails into a morass, our dog and i return to walking the roads in time to see and sometimes deter reptiles and amphibians from risking their lives to bask in the heat radiating from pavement. i am too clumsy and fearful to trust myself to handle snakes, so with the dog’s help i try to shoo them back into hiding in the hedgerows and stonewalls that line the roadside, otherwise giving them a wide berth. walking by where neighbours had just quit working on their stonewall one evening, i was startled by a yard-plus-long milk snake hunting whoever was thus exposed. i couldn’t believe my eyes until i read henry beston’s spouse elizabeth coatsworth’s description of “the mistress” of a neighbouring household regularly encountering another humongous specimen “in the attic, where it had gone apparently ratting,” i believe her when she says it was a habit for which they were especially welcomed in old maine houses.9 9 coatsworth, country neighborhood, 108 mchugh , apace | 133 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) snakes move along, but newts and salamanders usually freeze up instead at my gesticulations, so i have learned to scoop them into my pockets and walk them far off the road, begging our dog for calm so that i can deposit them somewhere safe. sometimes they kick, but mostly they seem to bear the transport well. a leaf stirring on an otherwise still early evening turned into my first sighting of an incredibly huge, ten-inch-long spotted salamander. in my incredulity, i simply followed it to a roadside wall. i doubled down on providing transport assistance after the dog’s other human explained that, when he was fixing the stone wall in the woods behind the house, he immediately replaced a rock that covered a gathering of dozens of tiny newts. with the proliferation of big night events and information, all geared to galvanize public interest in these ever-more endangered species’ propensities for road crossings on the first warm wet evening, i am learning ways to improve my do-gooding. having washed my hands before leaving the house minimized my chances of contaminating with my own skin oils that last ice-cold bullfrog that i relocated to a neighbour’s cow pond. springtime means rejoicing in cacophony, which we feed in different ways. i take the veil called a bug baffler throughout may because i’m allergic to black flies, often mockingly referred to as maine’s state bird. they help remind us that life in tropic times is challenging. breeding relentlessly in the running water of late spring until summer heat makes them drowsy, they have the same biting-lapping mouthparts as related species like green-head, deer, and horse flies that chew bloody holes in our skin, also painful and itchy, just larger and later in summer. most people only notice native mosquitos after being bitten, but the invasive species in contrast are distinctly audible, sometimes so large that you can count the stripes on their backs. as carson documented, their capacity to serve as disease vectors inspired the noxious spread of the chemical ddt, now banned as hazardous to healthy bodies and ecosystems.10 10 carson, silent spring, 114 figure 4 dogwalking ii. photo by mik morrisey © 2023. mchugh , apace | 135 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) most unwelcome to me, however, are the european brown-tail moths, to which i am among the few who are highly allergic. their caterpillars shed hairs bearing a toxin that burns like poison ivy, so understandably birds are reluctant to eat them. scars remain on my skin from horribly itchy, raised welts that can take weeks to heal. the toxin persists up to three years on the caterpillars’ microscopic hairs, raining down from infested treetops throughout late spring and swirling around on dry days throughout the year. after their population mysteriously crashed a century ago, they remained only where they first arrived, on the coast of maine. their move this far inland has been accelerated by severe droughts attributed to climate change along with their ability to pupate on humans’ vehicles. science has yet to identify the definitive reason why we’re currently experiencing what may be a cyclical resurgence, but it’s certainly a new reason to curtail walks on hot days. summer all summer long, we head for the pond, where all dogs appreciate long drinks, if not refreshing swims. they also can enjoy each other’s off-leash company a few mornings a week at the community yacht club. on the club’s floating docks, it is easier to spot different fishes along with the occasional turtles, ducks, and geese that hatch along the shore. one time we sat quietly as a curious loon approached, dove under, then surfaced close by, only on the other side. in their presence it is easy to forget loons’ fragility, to recall instead henry thoreau’s description in walden of “perhaps the wildest of sounds that is ever heard here, making the woods ring far and wide,” their “looning” sounding “more like a wolf than any bird.”11 we have seen only one loon pair hatch a chick on the pond during our time here. smaller but likewise charismatic, kingfishers sound an alarm often echoed by loons and amplified by ospreys. all alert us to the arrival of a bald eagle, whom every one of them loathes. eagles are notorious scavengers, and we have seen them bully smaller birds into giving up their prey. with populations down to a few hundred in the 11 thoreau, walden, 163. 136 | mchugh , apace humanimalia 14.2 (2024) decade in which i was born, bald eagles’ comeback had been the biggest conservation success story of my lifetime. seeing these interactions heightened my awareness that eagles eat loon chicks, and led me to learn that both species are now seen as threatened by chronic lead poisoning via fishing tackle. eagles are magnificent soaring in the sky, but harder to take at close range. at the club one morning, a doubled version of the peal call that signals death or danger in old-west movies, but stuck obnoxiously on repeat, led us to two bald eagles locked in a screaming match. hawks whistle, ospreys chirp, turkey vultures hiss, but our biggest raptors just sound awful. summer sounds are typically far more beautiful. because it is the twenty-first century, i was able to identify the most beautiful of summer birdsongs indoors, in the dead of winter, and as a result of reading carolynn van dyke’s essay on medieval literary representations of birdsong in the palgrave handbook of animals and literature. her citation of an ornithologiest’s description of the hermit thrush as north america’s nightingale piqued my curiosity, leading to the cornell ornithology lab’s online archives.12 the sound then coming from my laptop instantly transported me from a cold february afternoon to a sunny june morning. the sensibly sleepy dog let it lie, but in my mind we were out of the snowbound house onto the green leafy trails facing the pond. there, a hillside stream has long since carved out a natural amphitheatre which attracts the most talented avian singers. a few years back, when hermit thrushes also nested next door to our house, i noticed the difference in skill and range between the performances of a bumbling beginner, relegated to a shabbier stage, and his virtuoso relative who claimed the choice venue in the neighbourhood for showcasing his own exceptional talent. last year, there was only one hermit thrush fellow, an inferior singer who occupied the prime real estate, so i assume that our superstar is no more. perhaps the newcomer’s skills will improve over the years. 12 van dyke, “chaucer, lydgate, and the half-heard nightingale”, 129. mchugh , apace | 137 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) summer days stretch on and bring all sorts out of the woodwork. in a field annually disturbed by haying only once and late in the season, a red fox den turns out cubs nearly every year. an abundance of mice, chipmunks, and squirrels draws them to the stonewalls along the roadsides in search of easy prey. the concentration of the hunt sometimes overpowers their wariness, affording us an occasional glimpse, however unwanted. last year, a fox killed two of the five children that were born under our garage to an exceptionally large, silvery old grandmother woodchuck. her resourcefulness in keeping the remaining three alive, however, made it easy to see in her the spirit of her own ancestor who schooled gluskabe (a.k.a. glooscap), her grandson and the culture hero of our region’s first peoples.13 this year, on the other side of our city, a rabid fox mauled an elderly woman walking her dog, an incident that reminds me that foxes are best observed with caution. a curious incidence of a wild turkey following a fox across the road at dusk was explained only after we ventured closer and could finally see the chick dangling from the fox’s mouth. like eagles, wild turkeys have made an incredible rebound from near extinction in my lifetime. our resident flocks are no longer to be seen around our house, now that a neighbour has started encouraging his hunting dogs to kill them. yet they persist as a large flock or two, circumnavigating his property. i can never get over the unlikeliness with which they take flight with a palpable whoosh up into the big white pines. multiple toms can be heard gobbling away at each other into early summer. before the snow melted completely, one year a tom marched down the driveway on display, puffed-out feathers making him look ten times bigger. a less predictable story is the persistence, or rather the permutation, of eastern timber wolves through hybridization with coyotes. they can be heard yip-yip-yipping on still moonlit nights year-round, but i notice them most in the warmest months, likely because then i’m out later and longer with our dog. there is so much going on 13 dana et al, “still they remember me”, 56-57 138 | mchugh , apace humanimalia 14.2 (2024) outdoors as the days grow longer that it is easy to linger. i nibble the ripening strawberries, which are followed by raspberries, then blueberries (the only ones that dogs seem to like), then blackberries, all the while marvelling at the succession of flowering plants, the flights of the bats who live in the siding of our house, the fireflies flashing to each other from mid-air and in the long grass, that is, until the coyotes start up. three of them can sound like thirty. but are they dangerous? north of here, in eastern canada, a young singer-songwriter on a solo hike became the only known north american to be killed by coyotes, their abruptly changed behaviour believed to have followed from their becoming habituated to running down moose.14 the wide-ranging amounts of (grey? algonquin?) wolf dna in them further complicates the picture. on one of our regular walking routes through the woods behind our house, the dog’s other person once had to stare down a large, bold loner in broad daylight, who looked and acted far more wolflike than like coyotes, who are typically shy. a few weeks later, a neighbour lost a similar staring contest; she holed herself up in her horse barn and called for help, although the critter had melted back into the woods before her spouse arrived with a gun. large doglike turds filled with grey squirrel hair are left in the middle of our driveway intentionally, according to our dog. she examines them carefully. hearing their vocalizations on a latenight empty walk also sharpens the dog’s curiosity, even as it tightens my grip on the flashlight and the leash. i pick up our pace back to the house. as august nights grow shorter, one of the pond’s many kinds of dragonfly comes up the hill. it is a species of large blue ones — blue dashers? eastern pondhawks? great blue skimmers? i really ought to try harder at species identification — and together they engage in a high-speed, looping flight display so beautifully choreographed that they never bump into us, each other, or anything. seeing fewer each night portends the end of the season, as does the sound of another late arrival. like opossums, cicadas have been moving steadily northward because average temperatures 14 gehrt et al., “severe environmental conditions”, 354. mchugh , apace | 139 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) are rising. amid the din of native grasshoppers and crickets, i have begun to hear one, maybe a handful into early september, all abruptly curtailed by the first frost. conclusions afoot audubon’s christmas bird counts, turtle roadkill surveys, and other numerical accountings are important but impersonal tools for measuring transformation within local ecologies. as ursula heise argues in imagining extinction, collecting and crunching numbers lends a false sense of priority to red-listing narratives that all too often inspire affective extremes, whether of indifference to or fixation on suffering, mourning, and melancholia.15 situating anthropogenic extinction as bridging the storyworlds of humans and other animals requires more creative and localized methods, including the ones that environmental field philosopher thom van dooren models in flight ways as a series of scientifically informed stories of species extinction told in terms of unravelling lifeways at the frayed edges of human lives.16 my own experiments in storytelling here aim similarly for holistic analysis of several kinds of animals inhabiting the same space differently, picking up or picking at threads that might unstitch or weave tighter understandings of our contributions to each other’s lives and deaths. what are you to make of it all, you travellers from away, reading this in the future? you have joined me for a while along the paths of growing intimacies, both at close range with dogs, and at distances with wild neighbours. you making time to read this adds something special to the admixture of love and mourning that characterizes kinaesthetic empathy in a world encountering catastrophic losses. to enrich monitoring practices regarding endangered species, we have to work together to develop more ways of outlining choices and responsibilities in encounters beyond the all too academic fiction of being a know-it-all, and far away from what another friend donna haraway critiques as the “god-trick” of scientific objectivity.17 when targeted 15 heise, imagining extinction, 62. 16 van dooren, flight ways, 147. 17 haraway, simians, cyborgs, women, 189. figure 5 cooldown at the stone wall. photo by mik morrisey © 2023. mchugh , apace | 141 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) for environmental monitoring, the animals in my life are netted to be counted, saddled with invasive monitoring devices, catalogued as corpses, and, yes, even counted at christmas. what we need to work on is growing appreciation for what they see when they look at us looking at them, and how we might respond better to their responsiveness, all as part of the everyday work of becoming neighbourly. i approach them here in writing as in life, as partners in crafting stories of what lauren berlant, writing with michael warner, posits as the nonstandard intimacies through which all of our lives become quietly structured, if not always entirely enriched.18 berlant was also a friend, and the genius of their vision long ago empowered me to research further the queer counter-public potentials for humans who find themselves never in social isolation while dog walking. engaging in the practice over time has brought me closer to my dogs and in turn into closer range with the endangered animals, plants, forests, and their lifeways populating our fleeting everyday lives, sharpening our senses and awareness that living with always borders living without wild animal neighbours. so i conclude by way of a few strong impressions. winter solstice came and went yesterday, a glorious cold sunny one with just enough snow, perfect for skiing out the back door into the new year. growing up closer to thoreau’s walden pond than to our pond here, i could expect snow to stick by the end of november. that was decades ago, and now a heavy snowfall in december can melt away completely before the new year arrives. here in these foothills of the foothills of the white mountains, we feel lucky to ski natural snow before january, and even so sometimes have to wait well into that month for the gifts that snow brings. writing this next paragraph a few days later on a january morning, just in from a walk out the back door, makes me ever more grateful for life in the great north woods. people come from all over the world to enjoy the lush summers, to marvel at how they shade into the fireworks of fall colours, but maine forests are beautiful in all 18 berlant and warner, “sex in public”, 559. 142 | mchugh , apace humanimalia 14.2 (2024) seasons. bob ross of the joy of painting tv show fame could not have worked his magic better than the weather so far this year at dusting our evergreens with just enough snow to vary the views each day. snow amplifies rosy-fingered dawns, blinding-white middays, and burning sunsets across the landscape, along with the blueblacks and silvery moonlights of long winter nights. even if so much of the colour eludes her vision range, our dog ensures that i appreciate them all. months will pass before rising sap turns the dormant grey-brown bark of hardwoods into a startling range of colours, especially in the upper branches where some become more vibrant than their own blossoms, leaves, berries, even the birds to follow. for now, i enrich my research and writing by reading the snow’s ever-changing record of a rich diversity of wild neighbours, and by attending to our dog, who helps me to see the myriad of ways in which others also benefit from the bounty of our woodlands home. a week or so after writing those last paragraphs, i returned from a dog walk still shaking from an encounter with an exposed ribcage much bigger than my own, upended on a bloody fur cape, with four legs akimbo but somehow still attached, and the head, which at first i thought was missing, twisted under the whole frightening mess. in the instant of discovery, i’m not sure if a human corpse could have terrified me more than that dead deer, the snow around the remains carpeted with the doglike tracks of coyotes. on reflection, i realize that i write compulsively, trying to rationalize it — it’s what predators do, maybe the deer was already hit by a car, they don’t live forever — and become all the more aware of my complicity, rattled. largely unwritten here, humans are unsettling, too, only in different ways. before he passed away a few years ago, one neighbour explained that he had lived here all his life, on land his family has owned under their own english surname since before the american revolution. another neighbour with a french surname called attention to her own potentially longer heritage claim, despite having grown up downtown in rented millworker housing along the river, before moving up to the ridge forty-five years ago. she has mchugh , apace | 143 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) assembled many clues that her grandmother was native american, only no genealogical records, just memories of an eerie silence about that branch of the family tree. a major waterway, the androscoggin river traditionally served the wabanakis — the collective term for the maliseet, mi’kmaq, passamaquoddy, and penobscot “peoples of the dawn land” — as a route for trade, hunting, and fishing. near the local airport, remains of hunting settlements date back ten thousand years, long before eurowhite people like me embarked on genocidal campaigns spun from conflicts that my schoolbooks named king philip (not metacomet)’s war, king william (not castin)’s war, and other bloody periods of settlement history, whereby british and french colonial powers exploited inter-tribal tensions. stolen land was denuded by commercial logging, old growth prevented from resurgence by agriculture, and major waterways poisoned with the effluence of now-defunct textile and paper mills. dams are being dismantled, and waterways cleared of industrial refuse, in efforts aided by federal anti-pollution laws enacted during my lifetime. it remains anyone’s guess whether the abundance of anadromous fishes like alewives and salmon will ever return here to auburn, a place once called amitgonpontook, meaning the place to dry fish for food over winter. these species are incredible voyageurs from fresh to saltwater and back, and their recovery bears and shares human influences. every year, the state fish hatchery stocks our neighbourhood pond with alewives in an effort to restore the great fish runs of yore. there is no point in trying to bring back landlocked trout, who are outcompeted by smallmouth bass introduced sometime in the last century, as well as by abundant native perch species in that particular body of water. our dog sometimes joins me in watching fish swim, jump, and feed on other nonhumans. high levels of mercury, pfas, pcbs, dioxins, and other toxic substances accumulating in large specimens prompt the state to issue ever more restrictive fish consumption advisories. pregnant women and children are the targets only doubtfully spared exposure by such efforts, but wildlife enjoys no such advocacy and no illusions about choice. 144 | mchugh , apace humanimalia 14.2 (2024) where is this all going? i’d like to think that sharing this with you makes me a better posthuman neighbour, and inspires greater appreciation for the positive environmental potentials for dog walking. living through covid times has brought new encounters with losses, poignantly of loved ones, along with new appreciation for how everyone shares lives with so many others. these days, we don’t have to be zoonotic disease experts to appreciate that wildlife structures our own experiences as domestic creatures more than we’ll ever know. by sharing some of what i have learned from perambulating with constant canine company, my hope is to inspire extensions of empathy toward ineffable relations that make people more at home in nature. dog walking can literally get us out of the house and thereby prepare us to embrace the practicalities of changes that are necessary to mitigate global threats to cross-species coexistence. bibliography berlant, lauren. “intimacy: a special issue.” critical inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 281–88. https://doi.org/10.1086/448875. berlant, lauren, and michael warner. “sex in public.” critical inquiry 24, no. 2 (1998): 547–66. https://doi. org/10.1086/448884. beston, henry. the outermost house: a year of life on the great beach of cape cod. new york: doubleday, doran, 1928. carson, rachel. silent spring. 1962. new york: ballantine, 1985. coatsworth, elizabeth. country neighborhood. new york: macmillan, 1945. dana, carol a., margo lukens, and conor m. quinn. “still they remember me”: penobscot transformer tales. vol. 1. boston: university of massachusetts press, 2021. dayan, colin. with dogs at the edge of life. new york: columbia university press, 2015. van dooren, thom. flight ways: life and loss at the edge of extinction. new york: columbia university press, 2014. frost, robert. “mending wall.” north of boston. london: david nutt, 1914. gehrt, stanley d., erich m. muntz, evan c. wilson, jason w. b. power, and seth d. newsome. “severe environmental conditions create severe conflicts: a novel ecological pathway to extreme coyote attacks on humans.” journal of applied ecology 60 (2022): 353–64. https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14333. haraway, donna j. simians, cyborgs, women: the reinvention of nature. new york: routledge, 1991. haraway, donna j. when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008. heinrich, bernd. mind of the raven: investigations and adventures with wolfbirds. new york: harper collins, 2000. heinrich, bernd. ravens in winter. 1991. new york: simon & schuster, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1086/448875 https://doi.org/10.1086/448884 https://doi.org/10.1086/448884 https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14333 mchugh , apace | 145 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) heise, ursula k. imagining extinction: the cultural meanings of endangered species. chicago: university of chicago press, 2016. kimmerer, robin wall. braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. minneapolis: milkweed editions, 2013. mchugh, susan. “allowed.” in exploring the animal turn: human–animal relations in science, society and culture, edited by erika andersson cederholm, amelie björck, kristina jennbert, and annsofie lönngren, 219–21. lund: pufendorf institute, 2014. mchugh, susan. “bitch, bitch, bitch: personal criticism, feminist theory, and dog writing.” hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy 27, no. 3 (2012): 616–35. mchugh, susan. love in a time of slaughters: human-animal stories against genocide and extinction. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2019. mckay, laura jean. the animals in that country. london: scribe, 2020. murie, olaus. a field guide to animal tracks. 1954. boston: houghton mifflin, 1974. nearing, helen and scott. living the good life: how to live sanely and simply in a troubled world. new york: schocken, 1970. poe, edgar allan. the raven and other writings. 1845. new york: aladdin, 2012. rich, louise dickinson. my neck of the woods. philadelphia, pa: j.b. lippincott, 1950. rich, louise dickinson. we took to the woods. philadelphia, pa: j.b. lippincott, 1942. rose, deborah bird. wild dog dreaming: love and extinction. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2011. seymour, nicole. bad environmentalism: irony and irreverence in the ecological age. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2018. shapiro, kenneth j. “understanding dogs through kinesthetic empathy, social construction, and history.” anthrozoös 3 (1990): 184–95. thoreau, henry david. walden or, life in the woods. 1854. vancouver, bc: engage classic, 2020. van dyke, carolynn. “chaucer, lydgate, and the half-heard nightingale.” in the palgrave handbook of animals and literature, edited by susan mchugh, robert mckay, and john miller. 127–40. cham: palgrave macmillan, 2021. white, e. b. one man’s meat. 1944. gardiner, me: tilbury house, 1994. włodarczyk, justyna. genealogy of obedience: reading north american dog training literature, 1850s–2000s. leiden: brill, 2018. _hlk136349009 _hlk136349060 _hlk136344743 _hlk146105159 _hlk146105391 _hlk146105439 _hlk146105515 _hlk146105587 _hlk146105666 _hlk146108131 _hlk146105780 _hlk146105865 _hlk146106057 _hlk146106141 _hlk146106292 _hlk136348961 microsoft word minding animals intro pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 2:2 rod bennison, linda williams and siobhan o’sullivan minding animals – the human re-engagement with animals we are honored to be joint guest editors of this edition of humanimalia which showcases three of over 400 papers presented at the first minding animals conference. it is pleasing to see that this and many other journals are publishing papers from the conference. in july, 2009, the first international conference on society and animals: minding animals was held in newcastle, australia, and styled heavily on the title and contents of the book by marc bekoff (minding animals: awareness, emotions, and heart. oxford: oxford up, 2002). the conference sought to further develop the burgeoning transdiscipline of animal studies through an engagement of academics with animal advocates and activists, scientists, bureaucrats, and other animal practitioners. included in this edition of humanimalia are three papers given at newcastle which are excellent exemplars of the depth and scope of what was presented and experienced at minding animals. many of the delegates and artists traveled from distant parts of the globe to be at this exceptional event. they all shared the one common concern, a desire to learn more and be part of the experience of human nonhuman animal interrelationships. the disciplines represented included veterinary science, sociology and geography, biology and ecology, anthropology and literature, art and music, to name just a few. the aim of this special edition is to provide a snapshot of what was presented from three distinct disciplines represented in newcastle. matthew chrulew presents an analysis of the concepts of wilderness and place; marc fellenz considers the place of nonhuman animals in environmental aesthetics; whilst kay peggs ponders the predicament of humans and other animals in biomedical research. nevertheless, they all have a common theme, a new re-engagement by human animals with nonhuman animals (hereafter referred to as animals). in considering all three papers, one is reminded of the overall objective of minding animals, of what the conference sought to achieve. humans are but caretakers of and participants in life on earth and it is essential to remain focused on the interconnectedness of that life. minding animals is not just about the need to ‘mind animals’, but to take stock of our human actions and what those actions mean to animals and the planet more broadly. when people from various backgrounds and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 2 (spring 2011) 2 interests get together, then that shared knowledge can be utilized to improve planetary life and in the case here, of human animal interrelationships. to that extent, this is why minding animals 1 was so hugely successful, and probably why the momentum for holding a minding animals 2 has not waned (more of this later). the three papers presented show that the answers to the many problems that we face are complicated, as they are uncertain and often contradictory. specifically, human relationships with animals are, almost always, particularly complex. matthew chrulew considers the disturbing possibility of the disappearance of animals and ecologies across the planet, including the loss of all wildernesses, at least as fashioned by preservationists, and moves by some to restore or rebuild lost ecologies. re-wilding and the place of animals in that consideration becomes the focus of chrulew’s analysis. as humans seek to restore and protect larger swathes of land as national parks and engage in more minimalist conservation measures, or if we as a species more controversially seek to re-wild nature, then re-wilding and restoration projects have direct and major implications for large numbers of animals. chrulew’s skilful overview of the paradoxical nature of the arguments in support and against the conservationist paradigm is intriguing as much as it is complex. we are left to ponder whether we should be conserving “the dwindling remains of a supposedly pure wildness,” whether by reintroducing species in degraded areas is even sound, and whether the endeavor of re-establishing mammoths is no more than science fiction. marc fellenz’s view of environmental aesthetics and the place of animals in his worldview has been influenced strongly by his own aesthetic appreciation of nature, by his philosophical worldview which questions more traditional ethical models, and the aesthetic theory that was developed of plotinus. fellenz believes that aesthetic encounters with nature and animals may be an integral factor in re-engaging with animals. he develops the view that kinship is paramount in that re-engagement. the kinship model developed by fellenz provides for a positive re-engagement with animals based on the senses what one experiences when one encounters nature directly; similar to that experienced when appreciating artwork or a vista. the paper grapples with the many layers that are experienced in creating this sense of kinship and of reflecting on and relating to nature. rod bennison, et al — minding animals – the human re-engagement with animals 3 kay peggs tackles the controversial exploitation of those many millions of animals used in biomedical research for supposed improvements in human health. pegg questions, in light of complex procedures and animal abuses more generally, the actual goal of such research. disturbingly, peggs introduces us to transgenic marmosets who are, because of their close genetic similarity to humans, central to such research. these human relations are transformed to advance the human condition. the ethical justification for such experimentation is lost in an hierarchical layering of animals as tools of research. peggs unequivocally reminds us that biomedical research is part of rationalist science that exposes animals to risks that would be unacceptable for humans to endure. the questions that need immediate resolution revolve around what should be done to cease invasive and exclusionary procedures on animals, whilst at the same time maximizing human health. in short, we need to be more mindful of animals. minding animals has offered much in our understanding and appraisal of human animal interrelationships. but, as these three papers show, we must do more. we need to develop greater levels of compassion and respect so as to rebuild our connections to nature and with animals. minding animals 1 and the presentations and connections made there have gone a long way to facilitate these connections within the academy and beyond. it is the intention to continue to do just that. the inaugural minding animals conference was incredibly successful, as have been all the pre-conference events. more of these events are planned before the next and follow-on conferences. minding animals 2 will take place in july 2012 in utrecht, the netherlands. we invite you to join us for another memorable and earth changing event. for more information on minding animals 2, see: http://www.mindinganimals.com rod bennison honorary fellow, macquarie university, sydney, australia; emails: ozrodoz@gmail.com or mindinganimals@gmail.com linda williams associate professor, art, environment and cultural studies, and honours program director, rmit university, melbourne, australia; email: linda.williams@rmit.edu.au siobhan o’sullivan research fellow, school of social and political sciences, university of melbourne, australia; email: siobhano@unimelb.edu.au sandhar, review of walther disorderly theory jason sandhar review of: sundhya walther, multispecies modernity: disorderly life in postcolonial literature. environmental humanities. waterloo, on: wilfrid laurier university press, 2021. x + 270 pp. ca$85.00 (hb). jason sandhar is assistant professor of global and eighteenth-century british literature at the university of windsor in ontario, canada. email: jason.sandhar@uwo.ca book review in the two decades since philip armstrong urged postcolonial and animal studies scholars to find common ground against “that notion of the human that centers upon a rational individual self or ego”,1 a small but robust body of theory and literary criticism has demonstrated how we cannot analyse colonial history without taking interspecies entanglements into account. a welcome contribution to postcolonial animal studies, sundhya walther’s multispecies modernity: disorderly life in postcolonial literature explores animals in indian fiction, journalism, film, and autobiography across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. over five chapters, the book argues that human–animal encounters in indian literary and cultural texts can signal “disorderly” forms of multispecies living that challenge “orderly” narratives of indian modernity and nationhood (12). while walther draws on myriad theoretical approaches following the animal turn in humanities scholarship (in both postcolonial criticism and beyond), her core argument concerns how animals can be understood as subalterns: marginalized populations excluded from political power in colonial and postcolonial contexts. using examples from literature and the visual arts, walther posits that interspecies subalternity suggests alliances between people and animals that disrupt concepts of modernity inherited from enlightenment thought. the book demonstrates evidence of expansive research, and walther’s theorization of interspecies alliances is intriguing. however, more could have been done to demonstrate how the book’s call for “alliances” between species follows from the subaltern condition, as there are moments here when the argument seems to take for granted one’s “otherness to the sovereign human” as sufficient grounds for interspecies solidarity. additionally, the analysis feels disjointed at times, as walther draws on an expansive range of theorists and methodologies to make broad claims about ideology and the postcolonial state that sometimes seem misaligned with a given chapter’s literary examples. expanding on classic texts by gayatri spivak and dipesh chakrabarty, the introductory chapter theorizes the subaltern as a multispecies 1 philip armstrong, “the postcolonial animal”, society and animals 10, no. 4 (2002): 413–19. copyright © 2023 jason sandhar this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 419–428. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.15839 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.15839 sandhar, review of walther | 421 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) construct. walther focuses first on spivak’s “epistemic fracture”, the way subaltern representation by a society’s elites repeatedly stages that representation’s failure, rendering human subalterns and mainstream society unknowable to one another. extending spivak’s formulation to the mutual incomprehension between animals and humans (16), walther posits that the “other side of difference” — the unbridgeable gulf between mainstream society and the subaltern — might also include other unknowable beings like non-human animals (15). anticipating pushback from postcolonial scholars allergic to human–animal comparisons, walther emphasizes that she does not want to draw parallels between subaltern species. rather, she reads “the other side of difference” as a phrase that positions animals and subaltern humans as distinct groups that share the experience of exclusion from mainstream indian society. walther then turns to dipesh chakrabarty’s programmatic theorization of “subaltern histories” to compensate for spivak’s assertion that the subaltern cannot speak (chakrabarty devised multiple orders of history, or what walther calls “narrative 2s”, to account for unofficial narratives that can trouble official history or “narrative 1s” — again, walther’s term). arguably, chakrabarty reproduces subaltern silence, as spivak’s critique rests on the premise that the inclusion of the disenfranchised into mainstream discourse in any context (university curricula, the professional sphere, or mainstream publishing, for instance) will always exclude some people at the bottom. by this logic, chakrabarty’s “subaltern” history is a misnomer, as hegemonic discourse would ultimately absorb narrative 2s into a hierarchical structure predicated on the ongoing exclusion of oppressed histories beyond a given narrative 2’s ambit. walther’s workaround for subaltern exclusion is not entirely clear, and at this juncture the overall argument for alliances and interspecies subalternity also starts to feel underdeveloped. she suggests that “alliances between history or narrative 2s” can enable us to locate “forms of subaltern speaking that, though they require our attention, do not necessarily need to be entirely accessible to history or narrative 1s to be effective as ways of speaking” (18, emphasis in humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 422 | sandhar, review of walther original). in other words, subaltern speech can be understood as something we infer but can never know. alliances, in turn, suggest a form of multispecies subaltern “speech” that rumbles beneath mainstream history. while walther reframes chakrabarty’s narrative 2 from a knowable historical category to an awareness of our epistemological limits, she leaves unanswered how or why precarity between species implies affinities between them. granted, interspecies alliances can complicate the glut of scholarship on interspecies conflict in the postcolony. yet walther’s justification for interspecies alliances seems circular insofar as she takes marginalization as its premise. that is, it seems reasonable to conclude that clashes between precarious people and animals come about from competition for limited resources. if this is the case, then human–animal alliances would have to preempt, or at the very least account for, the scarcity problem. walther, however, does not explore this conundrum. additionally, walther’s call for interspecies alliances does not clearly address how the subaltern speech problem might apply to animals. spivak argues that subaltern humans do, in fact, speak — the issue at stake is that subaltern speech is unintelligible to non-subalterns because we relegate the subaltern to a state of abjection that dwells in an ontological void. in other words, it is not that subalterns cannot speak so much as we choose not to hear them — the subaltern always and already represents an excluded social and philosophical excess, the negative category against which we circumscribe the structures we inhabit. to make a claim about animal subalterns, walther would have to first justify why we would map the problem of human subaltern speech upon beings who literally do not speak. even if we imagined a speaking animal, the category of “animal subaltern” would oblige us to assume that we do not understand the speaking animal on the same terms that we do not understand the speaking human subaltern (this is not to deny that humans oppress animals — rather, the terms upon which we oppress them are not necessarily reducible to how we oppress other humans). walther states that she is not conflating humans and animals when she evokes spivak’s epistemic fracture (15–16), but the epistemic fracture sandhar, review of walther | 423 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) does not strike me as a limit point of understanding through which we can assume multiple expressions of incommensurability; rather, it seems to suggest the condition upon which the human subaltern speaks and is not understood. while walther could have done more to demonstrate how interspecies subalternity lends itself to alliances between marginalized people and animals, the remainder of the introduction admirably troubles animal representation in visual art and literature. to some degree, walther reminds us, we cannot escape our assumptions about animals. to connect with other creatures, we must assimilate what we believe to be their lived experiences into human sensibilities, all while remaining mindful of how the assumptions that undergird our beliefs about an animal’s perspective preclude our ability to know the animal at all. only then might we consider different animal representations in the literary and cultural texts under analysis. while some writers want to know what the animal feels, finds walther, others use the figure of the animal as a device to defamiliarize human experience. walther concludes that the point is about neither knowing nor using animals, but about how indian writing and visual art can disrupt popular assumptions about animals and people in indian modernity. the first chapter interrogates mainstream conservation discourses, reading jim corbett’s 1944 collection of hunting tales, man-eaters of kumaon, against amitav ghosh’s the hungry tide. walther finds that conservation biologists during the colonial and post-independence eras have managed ecological space by dividing people, animals, and plants into discrete zones determined by commercial interests (33–34). she then explores how corbett and ghosh’s texts feature conservationists who violate the boundaries that divide these zones. for walther, the conservationist’s privileged status between civilization and the wilderness represents an ideological excess, or exception to the rules of conservation that, paradoxically, holds those rules in place. walther is a wonderful close reader, and her analysis of corbett’s man-eaters of kumaon, in particular, is excellent. focusing on how corbett frames the tiger humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 424 | sandhar, review of walther as both an object of desire and an autobiographical tool, walther considers how the text leaves undecidable colonial power’s “attachment to boundaries and the compulsion to transgress those boundaries, between orderly division and disorderly encounter” (39). the tiger in ghosh’s the hungry tide, meanwhile, operates as a ghost of sorts. here, walther advances a double critique. she argues that ghosh’s tiger, at the text’s manifest level, signals western conservation’s failure to segregate species spatially and conceptually. yet the tiger’s ineffability also escapes the novel’s explicit valorization of “subaltern spirituality” as an antidote to conservation (60). walther then considers how the novel’s narrative structure duplicates conservation’s spatial and conceptual boundaries even as its content challenges how conservationists organize people, animals, and environments. walther’s second chapter uses mohandas k. gandhi’s an autobiography: my experiments with truth and vikram chandra’s red earth and pouring rain to explore questions of eating animals and indian nationalism across three big historical moments: the 1857 rebellion, independence struggles by elite hindus during the 1930 and 1940s, and the contemporary bharatiya janata party’s (bjp) embrace of religious orthodoxy. bucking scholarship that downplays gandhi’s preoccupations with diet, walther demonstrates how my experiments with truth grounds the abstract political principle of ahimsa (which roughly translates to non-violence) in the vegetarian body. while gandhian ahimsa ostensibly proposes a radically egalitarian politics, walther contends that the conservative bjp has used ahimsa and vegetarianism to exclude indian muslims from the contemporary national imaginary. she then turns to chandra’s red earth and pouring rain, which focuses on the 1857 rebellion, to demonstrate how popular perceptions of indian nationalism have long relied on the exclusion of muslims. while the chapter provides good insights into how some conservative hindu movements have used vegetarianism and non-violence to exclude muslims, it feels incomplete without a discussion of caste or gandhi’s fraught relationship with dalits (erstwhile “untouchables” excluded from india’s fourfold caste hierarchy). indeed, dalit writers sandhar, review of walther | 425 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) and activists have long deployed art and literature to contest gandhian ahimsa and caste hinduism’s vegetarian ethic. engagement with texts about cattle slaughter and meat eating — such as omprakash valmiki’s “the killing of a cow”; amitabh’s “the cull”; or chandramohan sathyanathan’s “beef poem” — would have both substantiated the book’s interest in subaltern life and challenged recent scholarship that rushes to celebrate gandhi while turning a blind eye to the controversies that surrounded him. chapter three pivots to companionate relationships, offering a fresh perspective on postcolonial criticism’s longstanding concerns with “home” and “nation”. analysing domestic space in anita desai’s clear light of day and r. k. narayan’s the man-eater of malgudi, walther considers how these texts complicate elite partition-era narratives of nationhood. while both novels explore interpersonal relationships through material and conceptual partitions, walther suggests that animals’ indifference to human boundaries complicate existing scholarship on clear light of day which has, thus far, largely limited itself to human interactions. chakrabarty’s subaltern history frames walther’s reading of desai, which investigates how domestic space in the novel represents both exclusion and sanctuary from the public realm. whereas animals, women, and the disabled have been excluded from elite independence narratives, the house in clear light of day signals a counter-discursive space that enables free movement and engagement between people and animals. walther extends her considerations of counternarratives, nationalism, and animals in desai’s text to taxidermy in narayan’s the maneater of malgudi. here, walther considers how narayan turns “the nation” into a taxidermized object. if taxidermy, like text, repeatedly fails to contain the thing it claims to represent (by virtue of the fact that the representation of a thing is not the thing-in-itself), walther asks how “nationhood”, as a representation of a people, similarly escapes narrative containment. the connection here feels somewhat forced, however, as walther does not demonstrate how the difference between representation and object, in the contexts of taxidermy and text, scale up to a critique of nationhood-as-representation in the man-eater of malgudi. humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 426 | sandhar, review of walther while nationalized industries and big government defined post-partition india under the leadership of jawaharlal nehru, the late twentieth century witnessed the country’s transition to global capital. the contemporary indian city became a global metropolis, and in chapter four walther highlights urban interspecies encounters in aravind adiga’s the white tiger and a series of headline-making leopard attacks in mumbai. aligning herself with more-than-human geographers who advocate for urban spaces that accommodate all types of creatures (not just humans and companion species), walther complicates sue donaldson and wil kymlicka’s formulation of the animal denizen, urban creatures who are not quite domesticated nor wild (171). whereas donaldson and kymlicka define denizens as precarious “outsiders” who inhabit urban spaces (migrant workers, for example, or urban wildlife like foxes or raccoons in the case of non-humans), walther argues that literary works can imagine forms of interspecies “ungovernability” that complicate the denizen’s liminal status (172). the chapter attends, first, to animal metaphors in aravind adiga’s the white tiger. while the literary analysis is cogent, it feels disconnected from the chapter’s argument about ungovernability, the metropolis, wildlife, and denizens: walther emphasizes instead how the novel hints at multispecies alliances when its protagonist, balram, encounters the eponymous tiger at a zoo, only to undermine such a possibility after balram uses his transformative encounter with the tiger to murder his employer and launch his own startup. the chapter then turns to sanjay gandhi national park in mumbai. analysing newspaper accounts about leopards who attacked an informal settlement at the park’s boundaries, walther considers how indian media excludes wild animals and the urban poor from contemporary ideas about mumbai as a world-class city. walther argues that if urban developers, journalists and the middle class are serious about the democratic values that undergird modernity, then they must help dismantle the social and interspecies hierarchies that marginalize mumbai’s animals and the poor. in between these chapters are three “provocations”, short discussions of indian visual artists sakshi gupta, sujatro ghosh, and jagannath pand. presenting elephant sculptures made from scrap sandhar, review of walther | 427 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) materials, photographs of women wearing cow masks, and collages with hyenas and pigeons in urban spaces, walther states that these intermezzos “are not intended as fully realized analyses; rather, they set up little spaces for reflection that keep open the questions of the previous chapter while unfolding toward the ideas of the next” (27– 28). while enjoyable and engaging, more could have been done to demonstrate how each provocation expands upon and segues into the chapters surrounding it. finally, in a short postscript, walther cites a 2014 incident in which a man entered a tiger enclosure at the national zoological park in delhi. the media used grisly videos from onlookers to sensationalize the encounter. walther suggests that the media narrative absolved the zoo of any culpability, imposing sole responsibility upon the man for alcoholism or mental illness. to provide an alternative reading of the incident, walther cites john berger’s critique of the way zoos transform animals into “simulacra of themselves” (212). she asks how the man’s actions might be read as a violation of spatial and conceptual boundaries that are, themselves, predicated on the violent appropriation of animal lives for human consumption. walther then considers whether literary representations of animals recreate the zoo’s logic. she concludes that any interpretation of nonhuman animals appropriates the animal, yet that appropriation can also urge us to imagine more equitable (or less inequitable) forms of interspecies communion. while it could have delved deeper into subaltern alliances, multispecies modernity ably synthesizes critical animal studies with postcolonial criticism to provide fresh and provocative close readings of human–animal encounters in indian literature. the book could have moved beyond texts by middle-class and elite authors to ground the animal subaltern in literature by and about the subcontinent’s marginalized groups. indeed, greater engagement with historically excluded communities such as adivasis and dalits would have strengthened walther’s claims about interspecies subalternity. the book also tends to focus on charismatic animals like tigers, dolphins, and cows. more texts that feature insects, fish, or humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 428 | sandhar, review of walther strays — which have not received as much critical attention in postcolonial animal studies — could have generated reflection on how and why we value some animals more than others (the chapter on desai and narayan, which features lizards, birds, and a housecat, starts moving toward a more complex understanding of how we think about quotidian creatures). all told, however, multispecies modernity makes a valuable and learned contribution to postcolonial animal studies. arnds, review of seeber et al. animals and exile peter arnds review of: ursula seeber, veronika zwerger, doerte bischoff, and carla swiderski, eds. mensch und tier in reflexionen des exils. exilforschung 39. berlin: de gruyter, 2021. viii + 408 pp.; 51 b&w, 20 colour illus. €39.95 (paper & ebook). peter arnds is associate professor of comparative literature and fellow at trinity college dublin. email: arndsp@tcd.ie book review mailto:arndsp@tcd.ie this book focuses on the connections between human exile and nonhuman animals, on aspects of dehumanization, on animals as companion species during the searches humans undertake to find sanctuaries, and on the cultural representation of human–animal relationships under totalitarian rule, specifically of jews driven into exile during the third reich. the various highly readable chapters explore how home, exile, and the return from exile configure in view of migrating animals in literature and film; they furthermore highlight how animals become companions during exile, allowing those exiled to cope with and work through their trauma of expulsion; and, finally, they engage with a rhetoric of dehumanization in the concentration camps. the cultural and biopolitical history of dehumanization teaches us that certain animal figures have been used more than others for the purposes of delegitimating human subjectivity. in the european middle ages, for example, those committing heinous crimes were often expelled and abandoned to the state of nature, where they would be characterized as wolves. nowadays, undocumented migrants who leave their homes in search of sanctuaries around the globe have been figured as “swarms” of insects (david cameron) or even “cockroaches” (katie hopkins) by state leaders and the populist right alike. contemporary world literature has seen an increasing trend in representing migration in terms of human–animal relations. authors such as francisco cantù in the line becomes a river (2018), sarah hall in the wolf border (2015), or norbert scheuer in winterbienen (winter bees, 2019) and die sprache der vögel (2015, english translation the language of birds, 2017) use animals — wolves, bees, or migratory birds crossing afghanistan — in the narrative contexts of war, trauma, exile, and migration. they do so in order to contrast the violent global scenarios created by humans with the “natural” world of animals. one of the chief purposes of mensch und tier in reflexionen des exils [humans and animals in reflections on exile] is to highlight the benevolent effects of animals on traumatized humans in exile. it achieves this goal though a series of multi-faceted analyses. the copyright © 2023 peter arnds this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 205–208. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.12612 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.12612 arnds, review of seeber et al. | 207 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) chapters include such fascinating material as friederike middelhoff’s essay on the metaphorics of migratory birds in german romantic literature. middelhoff shows how birds function as tropes for exile, wandering and the return home, as well as the binary of animal instinct versus human intentionality. while the focus of this book is on german culture, there are also some unique and highly original analyses of visual art. heike klapdor’s evocative reading of lassie come home (1943), for example, interprets the film as a reflection of jewish exile in light of the holocaust. this is ground-breaking material, as is joela jacobs’s chapter on how the nazis’ politics of racial hygiene and aryan superiority extended to an ideological abuse of species such as rabbits, bees, and other insects in children’s literature. all chapters probe the blurred and shifting boundaries between humans and animals, from the ostensible contradictions between the nazis’ caring treatment of some animals while they slaughtered millions of humans to the role of the werewolf in coming to terms with the trauma of expulsion and exile in curt siodmaks’s film the wolf man. i read brigitte mayr’s and michael omasta’s chapter on the wolf man with heightened interest, as its cultural history of werewolves in the context of the exile and persecution of jews and gypsies advances existing scholarship on wolves, migration, and matters of race, a topic i have likewise explored in my writing. several chapters focus on the roles animals play in processes of social integration during exile. here again, we can find some highly original documentation, such as katja zaich’s chapter on the persecuted jews who hid inside the amsterdam zoo during the german occupation of the netherlands, living next to the cages and working closely with the animals. for several authors here, such as anthony grenville and burcu doğramacı, animals even become the protectors of human life, as they offer opportunities for humans to work through trauma. the book draws heavily on donna haraway’s concept of companion species, particularly in the chapters by jennifer taylor, lisa rettl, and barbara weidle, which mark the benefits of the presence of animals in the lives of traumatized refugees such as charlotte bondy, wilhelm marbach, or erna pinner. it is another humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 208 | arnds, review of seeber et al. strength of this volume that it describes in detail the biographies of these exiled artists. mensch und tier in reflexionen des exils is also unique in that it features two appendices on the boundaries between humans and animals, one consisting of reviews of similar studies, the other presenting four topic-related short stories. lore segal’s story “death of the water bug” in particular raises the question: which animals get privileged as companion species? to my mind, the story reflects what, in his book the wild ones, jon mooallem has described as the beauty factor or cuddliness factor of species like the dog, the bear, and the butterfly, which contrasts with other species that are generally loathed and have served as figures in the logic of dehumanization, such as insects. “insects are the human other,” says lore segal whose story is part of a literary revival of texts that move the world’s “less perfect creatures” (aristotle) onto centre-stage, including rawi hage’s cockroach and ian mcewan’s the cockroach. apart from a few exceptions (such as middelhoff’s essay) the primary focus of mensch und tier in reflexionen des exils is on exile during the third reich. yet this volume has a special relevance for our age in which millions are driven from their homes, the right continue to adopt the rhetoric of dehumanization, and social integration in places of exile poses great challenges. these links between the nazi years and current times are hinted at but left unaddressed by the book. one would thus hope for further reflections on human– animal relations in exile, specifically for studies that build theoretical and representational links between the third reich and contemporary scenarios of forced migration (such as the ukraine crisis) and their biopolitics. microsoft word armbruster-mchugh pdf dummy h u m a n i m a l i a 4:1 karla armbruster cross-species intimacies from guide dogs to artificial meat susan mchugh, animal stories: narrating across species lines. minneapolis: u of minnesota p, 2011. 280 pp. $25.00 pb. on the cover of susan mchugh’s book, the subtitle “narrating across species lines” bisects the title “animal stories” at a forty-five degree angle. this cover image astutely captures the general thrust of this work of criticism, which provides a number of new angles on literary and visual narratives featuring nonhuman animals — narratives ranging from genre fiction (baynard kendrick’s mystery novels featuring a blind war veteran who works as a private investigator with his guide dog) to classic literature (george orwell’s animal farm) to film (babe) to photography (sue coe’s dead meat). mchugh’s central task is to explore when and how such narratives deconstruct the supremacy and inevitability of the humanist subject. she begins by challenging the assumption that nonhuman animals in these texts merely reflect human beliefs, fears, and desires. joining recent work in science studies that reconceptualizes agency as more-than-human, she sets out to show the many ways that “other creatures become important not as supplements to human subject forms but rather as actors joining us in continuously shaping this one alongside a range of other narrative forms” (3). thus, the questions she asks go beyond what types of relationships are represented between humans and other animals to how the texts affect and even enact intimacies between species. the cross-species relationships that mchugh examines are organized into two parts. the first, “intersubjective fictions,” explores narratives of two little-studied types of human-animal partnerships: blind detectives who work with guide dogs and female jump jockeys and their horses. while mchugh situates the development of these narratives in its cultural and historical context (down to the role that changing styles of women’s underwear played in the evolution of professional riding by women and girls), her primary focus is, of course, the possibilities for intersubjectivity between humans and other animals. disappointingly, she finds, moments of real, mutually constitutive partnership — such as the “complete-only-with-a-dog sense of self” (50) that can occur for humans who work with dogs in various capacities — are often overshadowed or undermined by a persistent focus on the achievements of human humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 162 individuals (and this trend seems especially prevalent when the narratives are presented through film and television). however, mchugh notes, fictions that “fram[e] food and sex as sites of entanglement ... elaborate how more generally human-animal relationships mutate into the worldly structures of non-human-centered agency” (4), and these mutations are the subject of the book’s second part, “intercorporeal narratives.” noting the ways that modern petkeeping culture controls and limits the sexuality of pets, she finds challenges to this regime in the pet memoir — most prominently in the works of british writer j.r. ackerley. mchugh’s primary argument in this chapter elaborates the parallels between the difficulties posed for ackerley’s german shepherd queenie (a.k.a. tulip), a purebred who chooses to mate with a mongrel, and for homosexual men by the dominant “culture of breeders” (153). she is especially interested in situations where a third agent destabilizes culturally sanctioned couplings, creating a “sodomite culture” of multiplicity that acts as an alternative to “closed, interiorized selves with identities affixed in binary terms” (154). her final chapter, on stories of meat animals and pigs in particular, charts the way that the industrialization of modern agriculture (including genetic engineering and artificial meat) has catalyzed works like babe and margaret atwood’s oryx and crake, which do not pit humans and animals against each other but show agribusiness as a “threat to whole ways of life shared across species” (202). as part of this analysis, mchugh finds some surprising examples of humans and animals intermingling in positive ways: yes, most viewers anticipate and root for the happy barnyard community that emerges in babe, but how many of us have viewed the genetically altered hybrids in oryx and crake as “extend[ing] the sense of barnyard as ongoing community relations” (207)? one of the most innovative aspects of mchugh’s book is her interest in narrative forms and the ways they can “serve as spawning grounds for forms of species and social agency” (19). she begins by challenging the widely held view that the novel’s success is due to its emphasis on the individual human subject, asserting instead that its rise as a genre grows from its “usefulness for experiments with multiple perspectives and processes that support models centered on agency rather than subjectivity” (1). she finds visual narrative forms especially useful for experimenting in this way, as when the giggling mice that periodically appear at the edges of the screen and read the cuecard-like intertitles in the film babe provide a “figuration of multiplicity” (198), and she even explores visual elements within written texts, such as the opening scene of the novel national velvet, in which the girl velvet brown plays with cut-out images of karla armbruster — cross-species intimacies from guide dogs to artificial meat 163 famous horses — in other words, uses visual media to imagine her potential sporting life with horses, as mchugh points out (79). mchugh also provides a nicely even-handed examination of the role of technology in these narratives, pointing to not just the ways it has constrained the lives and interactions of humans and nonhumans alike, such as the role of television in eroding a sense of interspecies teamwork in national velvet, but also the ways it can break open oppressive discursive structures, as when the televised sheep-herding trials in babe help bring about a happy ending, “a cyborg vision of machine-human-animal integration that defies so much of the history of meat processing” (193). as must be clear by now, mchugh’s discussion of animal stories finds and follows nearly countless analytical trails to hunt down both the ways these narratives escape and even challenge humanist ideology as well as the ways they are limited by it. this wide-ranging inquiry gives the book great interest and energy, but it also means that at times the reader is given just a peek down a side-path before the journey continues in a different direction; in addition, the darting, exploratory nature of her writing style sometimes requires careful concentration to keep the main path of the argument in sight. for readers interested in truly original insights into twentieth-century animal narratives and their intersections with lives shared across species, though, these minor challenges are well worth it. hardt dangerous play dangerous play orcas, mêtis, and the global lockdown deborah hardt university of wollongong in dubai humanimalia 15.1 (fall 2024) abstract: since 2020, orcas off the coast of the iberian peninsula have been ramming boats, causing damage and, in some cases, sinking vessels. some scientists are reluctant to call the events intentional acts of aggression and report that what the orcas are doing can be categorized as play. this paper investigates the potential connection between what has been called the “anthropause” that took place during the covid-19 lockdown and the start of new orca behaviours. it will propose that the orcas are indeed playing but not in the way that has been described by the scientific community. instead, i argue, the orcas’ behaviour embodies the greek idea of mêtis, a concept that employs a cunning intelligence to outwit stronger opponents. i theorize that the orcas are motivated to keep human interference in their waters at bay and use physical violence under the guise of play to achieve this goal, challenging the narrative of human exceptionalism in the process. keywords: orca; strait of gibraltar; mêtis; animal revolt; animal resistance; anthropause bio: deborah hardt is an assistant professor in the media department at the university of wollongong in dubai. she holds an m.a. in media studies from the new school in new york and a ph.d. in philosophy from the european graduate school in saas-fee, switzerland. email: dhardt@uow.edu.au orcid: 0009-0001-1186-5697 copyright © 2024 deborah hardt this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 1 (2024): 135–162. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.19193 mailto:dhardt@uow.edu.au https://orcid.org/0009-0001-1186-5697 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.19193 hardt , dangerous play | 137 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) in late 2023, the american comedian josh johnson began his stand-up routine with a line that elicited a hearty bout of laughter: “i don’t know if you all have heard, but... the orcas are at it again.”1 the comedian was referring to the unusual behaviour iberian orcas have been exhibiting in the waters around the strait of gibraltar. the clip made the rounds on social media as it had been so widely reported that it is now a well-known phenomenon and meme. since 2020, orcas, also known as killer whales, have been interfering with vessels off the coasts of spain and portugal, often with agonistic outcomes at unprecedented rates.2 between may 2020 and the end of july 2024, 804 “interactions” were recorded, defined as orcas responding to the presence of boats and approaching them. of the 804 interactions, approximately 10 percent did not include physical contact, while 32 percent did include physical contact but did not result in damage. of the remaining interactions, the orcas caused damage to varying degrees: in 38 percent of cases, damage to the vessels did not disturb navigation, while 20 percent of the time, physical contact with vessels impeded navigation. during this period, eight boats sank as a result of damage, with water ingress.3 two dominant theories have been put forward to explain the potential reasons for this behaviour. one suggests that it is a type of play. as orcas have high cognitive abilities, they reproduce behaviours through social learning. this type of engagement with boats may be natural curiosity, a behaviour that is similar to socializing or fads.4 a second theory is that this behaviour is the result of an adverse event, where one or more of the orcas had a negative encounter of anthropogenic origin.5 several scientific reports about the phenomenon have stated that there is no evidence the new behaviours were aggressive on the whales’ part and concluded that the use of words such as 1 johnson, “orcas vs yachts”. 2 esteban et al., “killer whales of the strait”, 1700. 3 lópez, email correspondence, august 28, 2024. 4 “interactions”, 15. 5 esteban et al., “killer whales of the strait”, 1706; lópez and esteban, “development of a scientific study”, 44. 138 | hardt , dangerous play humanimalia 15.1 (2024) ‘aggression’ or ‘attack’ to describe such interactions is inappropriate.6 this contradicts the opinions of some sailors who see the behaviour as threatening, frightening, and indeed aggressive. mariners who travel through what is being called “orca alley” are using deterrent methods, most of which are illegal under eu law.7 these methods have proven to be largely ineffective and pose significant risk to the iberian orcas as they are critically endangered.8 social media posts reflect a social-justice explanation for the phenomenon, as some have interpreted the orcas’ behaviour as an underclass revolt against the elite.9 memes on social media and t-shirts display sayings such as “capsize the rich” and “join the orca uprising.” in his stand-up routine, johnson played off this idea, highlighting that the orcas have, in a sense, become gangsters who are striking back at the “one percent”: “who would have thought that the orcas would be the ones to step up?”10 a potential factor that has received little to no attention is the timing of these incidents. the first reports of orca incidents took place in may of 2020, a few weeks after the covid-19 pandemic lockdown measures had been relaxed and humans returned to their normal activities. the pandemic temporarily halted global shipping schedules, fishing boats, and pleasure vessels in the western mediterranean, but when traffic started back up after the first lockdown, the interactions began.11 whether or not this is a coincidence or a factor in the orcas’ new behaviour raises larger questions about humanity’s influence on animal wellbeing. this paper intends to open new areas of speculation around the orca events, paying particular attention to notions of intentionality, and poses the following questions: are these incidents examples of 6 “interactions”, 14; lópez and esteban, “development of a scientific study”, 11. 7 “interactions”, 19. 8 esteban and foote, “orcinus orca̛ .” 9 ashcraft, “solidarity!” 10 johnson, “orcas vs yachts”. 11 the executive summary of the international whaling commission from 2024 noted that gtoa-cemma and circe are in the process of examining the potential correlations between changes in vessel traffic and the emergence of the behaviour. results are forthcoming. hardt , dangerous play | 139 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) orca resistance? is there a possible connection to the covid-19 lockdown? and how can we interpret this new behaviour in the waters around the strait of gibraltar? to address these lines of inquiry, the article will be organized into three sections. first, i will look at the notion of animal resistance and detail the orca incidents happening around the iberian peninsula. second, i will explore the potential connection between these behaviours and the timing of the covid-19 global lockdown, also known as the “anthropause”. finally, i will argue that what the orcas are undertaking can be theorized as animal resistance, and that their actions, whether viewed as explicitly aggressive or as a form of play, engage with the greek concept of mêtis [μῆτῐς]. in the conclusion, i will consider the ways that orcas are pushing humanity to reinvent relations between all living species. i. animals and resistance to attempt to understand what is happening with the orcas in the region around the iberian peninsula, it is worth turning first to the topic of animal resistance, in which there is a growing interest within animal studies. in society at large, animal defiance is frequently dismissed and labelled as misbehaviour, stubbornness, or an accident. the donkey who refuses to pull the cart, the dog who refuses to stay off the couch, and the tiger who kills his circus trainer: all are forms of resistance as they can be defined as disobeying and challenging authority. a growing number of scholars are exploring animal resistance and the concomitant anthropocentric mechanisms that undermine animals who oppose their own exploitation. jason hribal focuses on animal resistance and animal labour and capital, effectively arguing that animals are part of the working class. he has painstakingly researched accounts of individuals who resist in places such as zoos and the entertainment industry, thereby giving a voice to the thousands, if not millions, of animals who fight against human sovereignty. for example, hribal recorded events in the life of an orangutan named fu manchu at the omaha zoo, who kept a piece 140 | hardt , dangerous play humanimalia 15.1 (2024) of wire hidden in his mouth to pick the lock and escape multiple times.12 orangutans at the san diego zoo escaped repeatedly and each time, additional steps were taken to secure the exhibits. during construction, all orangutans were kept out of sight, apparently for fear that they would watch what security measures were being installed and figure out how to disarm them. an adult female named kumang was not deterred and escaped several times, once by enlisting her daughter to use a wooden mop handle to ground the electric wires so she could safely climb out. as hribal summarizes, kumang and her daughter had “figured out the basic principles of electricity”.13 animals used in the entertainment industry who resist their captivity often attract media attention, such as the famous magicians’ siegfried and roy’s white tiger, mantacore. when roy horn commanded mantacore to do a trick they had performed countless times, he refused. to correct him, horn hit him on the head with his microphone to get him to obey. instead, mantacore took a swipe at horn, who fell to the floor. mantacore grabbed him by the neck and dragged him backstage. the magicians claimed that mantacore actually saved horn, who they said had suffered a stroke while onstage before the attack; mantacore supposedly pulled horn offstage to help him. as kelly oliver writes, “roy’s accident reveals the illusionist’s most profound illusion: that he can master animals”.14 it took four people and a fire extinguisher to get mantacore to release horn, who was rushed to the hospital. he suffered a stroke during the attack and with massive blood loss and punctures to his carotid artery, he flatlined. he was eventually brought back to life, but his health and livelihood would never be regained.15 orcas in marine parks have resisted their human trainers for decades. court records show that seaworld has documented over one hundred instances of orcas resisting authority and being aggressive 12 hribal, fear of the animal planet, 116; cf. linden, parrot’s lament, 146–48. 13 hribal, fear of the animal planet, 116. 14 oliver, animal lessons, 1. 15 leckart, wild things. hardt , dangerous play | 141 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) toward trainers in the space of twenty years. this number is certainly higher, as small nicks and aggressions are often not reported.16 tilikum, the now well-known orca who violently killed his trainer and two other people, is an example of captive orca resistance that has been addressed by scholars. several explanations were put forward to make sense of this violence, most of which did not attribute intentionality to the act. some animal rights groups said that tilikum was psychotic from decades in captivity, but hribal writes that he was not crazy and that his resistance was intentional. tilikum’s decision to drown his trainer was a bold and purposeful act: “call the orcas criminals. […] but don’t say they are victims who didn’t understand what they were doing.”17 ron broglio uses art, philosophy, and literature to help understand the stories of animals who escape death on the way to the slaughterhouse, animals who disrupt, jam, and ruin technology, as well as animals that simply inconvenience human plans in day-to-day life. for example, sheep in the united kingdom cross over cattle grids to reach greener pastures by ingeniously rolling themselves over the grate; and a male chimpanzee in a zoo in sweden planned his attacks by collecting and storing stones that he could later throw at zoo visitors.18 broglio’s research addresses animal revolution in philosophical terms while grounding his conceptions in corporeality, vulnerability, and animality. notably, he broadens our understanding of how animal resistance takes countless forms.19 sarat colling’s book animal resistance in the global capitalist era documents more examples of individual animals who resisted confinement and torture in an effort to gain their freedom. one story is about old whitey, a steer who repeatedly broke out of his confinement at a large ranch and hid in the diablo mountains before finally being killed by the rancher.20 his struggle for freedom highlights the 16 hribal, “tilikum”. 17 hribal, “tilikum”. 18 broglio, “incidents”, 17, 26. 19 broglio, “incidents”, 22. 20 colling, animal resistance, 26. 142 | hardt , dangerous play humanimalia 15.1 (2024) depth of resistance experienced by animals in captivity. colling argues that animals who escape their exploitation gain sympathy and empathy when humans see the animal not as a commodity but as an individual being with the desire to live. she argues that all animals are political and social beings and that their efforts to escape oppression are not extraordinary, but commonplace.21 crucially, she encourages readers to listen to animals and see them as agents of their resistance, not dependent upon human “saviours”, and in this way, humans can move forward in solidarity with animals to oppose and fight for their freedom from exploitation and early death. the iberian orcas started their unusual activity in may of 2020, and the reported stories of these interactions share similarities. for example, in july, a crew reported that nine individual orcas were ramming the boat’s hull with their bodies, destroying the rudder, disabling the engine, and spinning the boat 180 degrees in the process. while one of the sailors radioed for emergency help, the crew prepared to abandon the ship as it floated rudderless for over an hour. the whales continued their assault and called to each other, their whistles so loud that the crew had to shout to each other in order to be heard.22 six days earlier, in the strait, a pod of four orcas stopped another vessel. they rammed the boat, tipped it sideways, and turned it around for almost an hour before they stopped. the night before, there was another attack in the same waters. a fifty-foot private vessel went from travelling at eight knots to an abrupt standstill. confused, the crew turned their lights on the surface of the dark water and realized it was a group of orcas who had stopped the boat and reversed its direction. attempts to correct the vessel’s trajectory failed, as each time they put the ship back on course, the orcas would turn them back around. one of the passengers said it felt like the orcas were trying to lift the boat out of the water. finally, just two hours before this attack, on a different boat in the strait, a single sailor was relaxing and listening to music when he heard and 21 colling, animal resistance, 86–89. 22 smillie, “‘i’ve never seen’”. hardt , dangerous play | 143 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) felt something “like a sledgehammer” as the orcas hit and turned his boat 180 degrees with incredible force. the whales dislodged the autohelm and steering cables and lifted the vessel six inches out of the water.23 the harassment continued, and in september 2020 the spanish coast guard banned smaller boats due to the threat the orcas posed.24 further, in 2023, an orca rammed a yacht off the coast of scotland, raising the idea that perhaps the behaviour was spreading.25 as the orca-on-vessel violence persisted, the new yorker noted in an article titled “the year of the orca” that it is difficult to ignore what many journalists and the public are concluding: these attacks appeared to be intentional.26 in april 2024, these same orcas were spotted off the coast of northern spain, a hundred miles from where they are normally found during this time of year, circling a boat. while not engaging with the vessel, these orcas are deviating from their habitual migration patterns, baffling scientists.27 in the facebook group “orca attack reports”, which has over 75,000 members, sailors share tactics for sailing through “orca alley” and chronicle their attempts to stop orcas from harassing their vessels (firecrackers and banging on metal are among the methods employed). there are also apps to track orca sightings and interactions.28 whales have engaged violently with sea vessels in the past. a sperm whale sank a whaling boat in 1820, and after a rescue boat came to scoop up the crew, a killer whale attempted to sink that boat as well. nathaniel philbrick’s book in the heart of the sea recounts these attacks and writes that killer whales had been known to repeatedly ram and sink wooden yachts.29 in 1972, a wooden sailboat carrying a british family that was circumnavigating the globe was damaged by a killer whale. the vessel sank and the family struggled to survive 23 smillie, “‘i’ve never seen’”. 24 reuters, “spanish coastguard”. 25 hoare and joekendijk, “orca rams”. 26 riederer, “year of the orca”. 27 baker, “infamous boat sinking orca”. 28 “orca attack reports”, https://www.facebook.com/groups/435540734439160/. 29 philbrick, heart of the sea, ch. 5 “the attack”, ch. 7 “at sea”. https://www.facebook.com/groups/435540734439160/ 144 | hardt , dangerous play humanimalia 15.1 (2024) on a life raft, spending a total of thirty-eight days lost in the pacific, before eventually being rescued by a japanese fishing trawler. the ordeal was documented in the book survive the savage sea.30 these incidents, along with a handful of others like them, demonstrate that there is a precedent for such behaviour among orcas. none of these incidents, however, either historical or more recent, involve violence directed specifically at individual humans. there are no records of orcas killing a human in the wild.31 ii. the anthropause and potential behavioural explanations in 2020, the world health organization declared a global pandemic, which led to unprecedented changes in how humans and nonhumans alike conducted their lives. the world came to an abrupt halt in a globally coordinated effort to stop the spread of the virus. the pandemic afforded scientists, biologists, and ecologists an extremely unusual opportunity to study humanity’s impact on the planet, as it has now been considered a “biocultural event” and led to reductions in fossil fuel consumption and noise pollution worldwide.32 a group of ecologists and biologists dubbed this event the “anthropause”, defining the term as “an unusual, substantial, temporary, continental-to-global-scale reduction in human mobility”.33 the result of the drastic slowing of human activity led to short-term environmental improvement. at this point, i want to speculate that the anthropause influenced the iberian orcas and is a potential factor in their new behaviours. studies of sound levels reveal the degree to which human activity affects the environment. one report found that the covid-19 “quietus” led to as much as a 50 percent reduction in seismic noise. humans create not only surface disturbances but also noise that “extends for many kilometers radially and hundreds of meters in depth”.34 one 30 robertson, survive the savage sea; cf. hattenstone, “we pledged.” 31 esteban et al., “killer whales of the strait”, 1700. 32 searle et al., “after the anthropause”, 74; manning et al., “effect of covid-19”, 2. 33 rutz, “studying pauses and pulses”, 158. 34 lecocq et al., “global quieting”, 1338. hardt , dangerous play | 145 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) study tracked global-scale seismic noise generated from cities, railways, and other forms of transportation and found that the “length and quiescence of this period [march to may 2020] represent the longest and most coherent global seismic noise reduction in recorded history, emphasizing how human activities affect the solid earth”.35 some studies revealed that animals shifted how they communicated during the anthropause. with less noise pollution, birds lowered the volume of their singing and even the structure of their songs.36 anthropogenic noise poses a serious threat to marine populations. worldwide, marine shipping accounts for 90 percent of international trade.37 over the past century, there have been substantial increases in marine shipping, a trend that is projected to continue. the low-frequency, high-energy noise from these vessels travels across hundreds of ocean kilometres and throughout entire ocean basins.38 orcas, whales, and dolphins depend on acoustics for navigation, hunting, reproduction, and communication. over the past two decades, researchers have recognized that marine noise pollution is a major threat to cetacean well-being.39 adverse effects for orcas, other whales, and dolphins include: a reduction in communication range, disruption of reproductive behaviours, increased energy expenditure as animals travel further for food as noise prohibits access to important habitats, increased stress, temporary or permanent loss of hearing, physical injury inducement, and, in some cases, death.40 reports demonstrate that cetaceans are negatively affected by anthropogenic noise. marine traffic in north america came to an abrupt halt for two days immediately after the events of september 11, 2001. in the bay of fundy in canada, scientists studied north atlantic right whales’ stress levels by testing the faecal glucocorticoid, 35 lecocq et al., “global quieting”, 1342. 36 derryberry et al., “singing”. 37 unctad, review of maritime transport. 38 national research council, ocean noise, 6, 65–67, 89, 93, 128. 39 dearden et al., “covid-19”, 6–7. 40 richardson et al., marine mammals and noise; parsons and dolman, “noise as a problem”. 146 | hardt , dangerous play humanimalia 15.1 (2024) a non-invasive method for studying physiological responses of wildlife to stressors. results showed that decreased marine noise during those two days lowered stress levels in the whales.41 a study involving endangered killer whales in the salish sea documented changes in behaviour when marine vessels voluntarily slowed their speed when travelling through a 16-nautical mile stretch. results from the decrease in noise suggested that orcas had improved foraging experiences, potentially leading to an overall improvement in the population’s health.42 a different study on the effects of naval sonar on free-ranging cetaceans, including pilot, sperm, and killer whales, found that orcas showed a combination of the highest severity scores and the widest distribution in received sound pressure levels, including many at received levels below 120 db. the data indicated strong behavioural changes in orcas, including prolonged avoidance and cessation of foraging (with a severity rating of 7 out of 10, 10 being the most severe) and moderate avoidance of the sound source (severity rating of 6 out of 10). the study found that there were no experiments involving killer whales during which no response to the sonar was scored.43 anthropogenic noise is a concern for wildlife management and conservation, to such an extent that litigation related to the reduction and control of manmade noise has made it to the supreme court of the united states.44 studies illuminate the changes that took place in the waters around the iberian peninsula starting in march of 2020, when the lockdowns were most extreme. the western mediterranean’s strait of gibraltar, along with the panama canal, the bosphorus strait, and the strait of dover, is one of several marine choke points where heavy traffic from cargo ships, tankers, fishing vessels, cruise ships, and pleasure vessels pass. the western mediterranean was the area with the most drastic reduction in marine activity during the first months of the pandemic; the number of tankers was reduced by 22.2 percent 41 stevens et al., “quieter ocean”, 2. 42 joy et al., “potential benefits,” 17. 43 miller et al., “severity of behavioral changes,” 386–88. 44 stevens et al., “quieter ocean”, 2. hardt , dangerous play | 147 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) and recreational vessels showed a significant decline of 93.7 percent. overall, there was a 62.2 percent decrease in traffic across all marine vehicles in the area during mid-april. however, fishing, cargo, and tanker vessels made a swift recovery after the lockdown conditions were lifted. while passenger vessels, such as cruise ships, remained the most affected, and their numbers were slow to recover despite the ease of lockdown conditions, recreational also boats exhibited a fast recovery, restarting their activities in mid-july.45 the iberian orcas are an endangered group comprising only around thirty-nine individuals.46 the organization grupo trabajo orca atlantica (gtoa), who have been studying the iberian killer whales for years, concluded that, within the group, there are fourteen orcas engaged in these interactions and are collectively known as “gladis”, with distinguishing second names. gladis was chosen because it references one of the animals’ first vernacular labels, orca gladiator.47 the genus name orcinus refers to orcus, the roman god of the underworld. orcinus has been interpreted as “of or belonging to the kingdom of the dead” or simply, “from hell”. both terms reflect humanity’s historical fascination with — and fear of — the animals’ strong and threatening presence.48 two main scientific hypotheses have been proposed to explain the orcas’ behaviour. the first theorizes that these incidents reflect a form of self-induced curiosity or play. the orcas, it is thought, are fascinated by moving vessels that can be turned or stopped with contact. this theory works well to explain the juvenile orcas’ behaviour.49 previous examples of what has been categorized as playful behaviour, are often raised when exploring this theory. for example, in 1987, a female orca in a pod off the northwest coast of the united states was seen carrying a dead salmon on her head. others soon copied her and suddenly salmon “hats” were in fashion. the 45 march et al., “tracking the global reduction”, 3–4. 46 esteban et al., “killer whales of the strait”, 1700. 47 lópez and esteban, “development of a scientific study”, 14. 48 ford et al., killer whales, 69. 49 lópez and esteban, “development of a scientific study”, 44. 148 | hardt , dangerous play humanimalia 15.1 (2024) behaviour eventually went out of style.50 when the orcas in the strait began nudging and ramming yachts and sailboats, many in the scientific community classified the behaviour in a similar way: a type of play that was catching on with others. the second hypothesis is that there could have been an adverse incident of anthropogenic origin, where one of the orcas was injured, or they witnessed others from their group being injured, which in turn triggered the behaviour.51 of the fourteen, gladis blanca — one of the most active orcas in the group — was thought to fit well with this hypothesis as she, along with gladis negra, was recorded with bodily wounds in 2020, although the origins of the injuries were not confirmed.52 several whales have suffered lacerations and even amputations as a result of interacting and competing with fishermen who hunt tuna in the same waters.53 as scientists have noted, killer whales employ two strategies for feeding on tuna: active hunting and depredation from longline fisheries.54 the orcas scan the waters for fishing boats that have tuna caught on a line and try to pull the tuna off the line before they are reeled to the surface by the fisherman.55 this poses a threat to the orcas, who can and have been injured by the boats as well as the lines. conclusions by the scientific group gtoa point to the behaviour of the orcas as “cautionary”, meaning that the orcas stop the boats in a precautionary manner to prevent future harm from occurring.56 compelling evidence that supports the hypothesis, they argue, is the story of gladis blanca, an adult female who is estimated to be around twenty years old. in galicia in 2015, she was seen interacting with fishermen and sailboats, without making contact. yet since 2020, she has been observed as one of the most active orcas engaging with vessels in the region. in 2021, she had a calf, and scientists 50 mcknight and ross, “malice, mischief or fad?” 51 lópez and esteban, “development of a scientific study”, 45. 52 lópez and esteban, “development of a scientific study”, 15. 53 esteban et al., “killer whales of the strait”, 1700. 54 guinet, et al., “killer whale predation,” 111. 55 esteban et al., “dynamics of killer whales”, 31. 56 lópez and esteban, “development of a scientific study”, 45. hardt , dangerous play | 149 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) believed that she would stop interacting with boats to reduce the risk of injury. instead, she continued to go under the boats, accompanied by her offspring. there is extrinsic motivation for this type of action and the goal is to prevent further harm. as biologist alfredo lópez notes, “what moves her to do that is stronger than motherhood for her, it is not a game at all, it is something very serious that she executes with precision”.57 some in the media have latched on to the theory of responsive behaviour, going as far as calling it revenge, which makes for a compelling narrative. ultimately, however, scientific reports find that the orcas behaviour is not aggressive. “we analyzed terminologically the terms attack and aggression, it has not been possible to relate the interactions between orcas and boats with this terminology […] we have found no reason to classify the events as: aggressiveness, anger, hostility or violence.”58 one reason for this is possibly because scientists fear any language that implies that the orcas are a threat to humans and capital interests would trigger retaliation. they are concerned to such an extent that, in the fall of 2023, a group of thirty marine scientists published an open letter urging the media not to call the behaviour “attacks”, despite the patterns that can appear to contradict that premise.59 the covid-19 and subsequent lockdowns provided nonhuman animals with a taste of what life could be like with minimal human-generated disturbances. it was arguably the quietest period experienced in marine environments since the start of the industrial revolution. over the course of decades, anthropogenic noise from shipping, recreation, and fishing vessels increased incrementally in the waters around the iberian peninsula. during the lockdown, the abrupt decrease in traffic in these waters, the reduction in human noise pollution, and the improvement in air and water quality were likely detected by the orcas; they could perceive the differences between the before, during, and post-lockdown periods. there are several 57 lópez, email correspondence, august 28, 2024. 58 lópez and esteban, “development of a scientific study”, 11. 59 barrett-lennard, “open letter regarding killer whales”. 150 | hardt , dangerous play humanimalia 15.1 (2024) reasons why the orcas would be motivated to resist human presence in their waters. habitat loss, competition for food, and the physical risks in their environment — such as dangers posed by fishing lines and boat motors — make their survival precarious. the return of humans to orca territory post-lockdown was a jarring contrast to the “quietus” that marine life had been experiencing. the shift back to the pre-covid state meant that the habituation time, where animals become used to a disturbance over a longer period, was dramatically shortened and the return of potentially threatening anthropogenic noise levels was abrupt. the influence that the anthropause had on the orcas’ behaviour deserves further investigation. according to a recent report from the international whaling commission, this possibility is being scientifically studied and reports are forthcoming.60 iii. mêtis and orca resistance the fact that orcas are disrupting boats and marine traffic is indisputable. occam’s razor would suggest that the simplest and therefore most likely explanation is that their goal is to stop the boats from moving. while orcas could cause damage in several ways, they primarily choose to go after the rudder, the crucial piece of equipment that allows the vessel to sail. the narrative that says the orcas are not purposeful in their actions dismisses the bravery and tactical precision that certain members are undertaking. they are attempting (and often succeeding) to steer the boats off course or make them inoperable. i agree with the perspective that gladis blanca and others are working with precision to prevent further harm, and i also agree that the behaviour is a type of play, but not in the sense that some scientists are suggesting. instead, i propose that the orcas’ actions can be understood in terms of the ancient greek concept of mêtis [μῆτῐς], which refers to cunning intelligence, used to outwit opponents by using a combination of savvy, skill, and subterfuge.61 mêtis is a creative practice of crafty resourcefulness that is used in uncertain times 60 “interactions”, 15. 61 mentz, shipwreck modernity, 77. hardt , dangerous play | 151 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) against adversaries that have the upper hand. mêtis is wily; some might even refer to it as cheating or unfair play. it is a weapon or strategy employed by those in a weaker position. in their work, cunning intelligence in greek culture and society, marcel detienne and jean-pierre vernant outline several key characteristics of mêtis. first, mêtis gives the underdog an advantage: “in some cases, it will be considered the result of cheating since the rules of the game have been disregarded. in others, the more surprise it provokes the greater the admiration it will arouse, the weaker party having, against every expectation, found within himself resources capable of putting the stronger at his mercy”.62 this is not an ideal way to compete if one is a devotee of good sportsmanship and fair play, but if winning is the ultimate goal, then mêtis is a boon for the weaker opponent. mêtis appears in the iliad with the story of a young charioteer, antilochus. although his horses are inferior and he stands no chance of succeeding, antilochus uses mêtis to gain an advantage and win. a characteristic of mêtis includes skilful timing and meticulous observation to pounce at the precise moment.63 as such, antilochus sees an opportunity in one muddy section of the course that has narrowed after a rainstorm; here, he drives his chariot obliquely in front of his more experienced competitor, risking a crash. this manoeuvre looks like an accident to his opponent, who — although he has the advantage of superior horses — is forced to rein them in to avoid disaster. additionally, there is an element of deceit in mêtis. antilochus comes across as inexperienced and foolish; his rivals believe that the dangerous manoeuvre is the result of carelessness and a lack of control. he appears to be something he is not in order to fool his opponents, whose superior age, experience, and horses should have given them a clear advantage.64 in the practice of everyday life, french philosopher michel de certeau discusses the concept of mêtis as a dynamic opportunity for the 62 detienne and vernant, cunning intelligence, 13 63 detienne and vernant, cunning intelligence, 12–14. 64 detienne and vernant, cunning intelligence, 22. 152 | hardt , dangerous play humanimalia 15.1 (2024) weak to utilize tactics against the strong. he investigates the ways that those who appear to be passive and compliant with the rules operate in everyday life. this extends to the “age-old ruses of fishes and insects that disguise or transform themselves in order to survive, which has […] been concealed by the form of rationality currently dominant in western culture”.65 certeau draws our attention to the tactical manipulation of everyday practices that can transform what is happening just under the surface. as a means for the disempowered to shift unequal power relationships, mêtis can be adapted to describe orca behaviours. using this framework, we can theorize how the orcas are creating a secondary production of the “image” that assumes their actions are unintentional. certeau encourages paying attention to the images produced — not by the creators of the images — but by those who orchestrated a secondary reading, a “production hidden in the process of utilization”.66 he likens this to a way for the weaker of the two parties to turn the tables on the more powerful. in this way, orca ‘play’ deceives some observers into believing that these are trivial antics, but they are far from mindless or unsophisticated and are just as legitimate as overt political rebellion. certeau further clarifies two methods for achieving goals: tactics and strategies. strategies are available to those who are automatically assumed to possess subjectivity. strategies are for those with a sense of power and autonomy, such as a proprietor, a city, or an enterprise.67 tactics, on the other hand, are used by the underdog — those without autonomy or access to strategy. a tactic is the stealthy, inventive, and creative approach for those without automatic subjectivity; tactics are for the “other”.68 the general practices that certeau describes as tactics are mêtis. they provide ways for the weak to achieve victory over stronger opponents, allowing the disadvantaged to take advantage by using “clever tricks, knowing how to get away with things”. it 65 certeau, practice of everyday life, xi. 66 certeau, practice of everyday life, xiii. 67 certeau, practice of everyday life, xix. 68 certeau, practice of everyday life, xvii–xx. hardt , dangerous play | 153 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) is “poetic as well as warlike,”, suggesting that these tactics are evidenced in other texts; certeau points to sun tzu’s the art of war and le livre des ruses: la stratégie politique des arabes as examples.69 assessing media coverage about animals who resist, it is clear that it is uncommon to categorize animal acts of resistance as intentional. as certeau notes, one of the characteristics of mêtis is that it does not rely on rationality, going against predominant western thought when it comes to animals. it is not rational to attribute intentionality to animal actions; animals are considered to be instinctual and thus incapable of premeditation and agency. research that describes nonhuman animals — even our closest nonhuman relatives, primates — as capable of what we think of as revolt is difficult to find. due to humanity’s reluctance to recognize the possibility of revolt outside of its own proper experience and framework, it can be useful to turn to other theories of resistance in marine animals. in his article “do fish resist?” dinesh wadiwel looks at industrial fish farming, also known as aquaculture, and resistance. as wadiwel incisively writes, the fact that humans must invent strategies and engineer technologies to counter the problems that arise when humans try to catch fish is proof in itself that these animals resist. he argues that the difficulties fish pose to humans attempting to harness them proves their ability to oppose their exploitation. while the term ‘harvest’ is often used by the industry, it is misleading as it implies that fish are ready and waiting to be used by humans. the truth is that the industry had to develop new technology in order to manipulate the fish, such as the use of lights in pens to influence behaviour and measures to control metabolism in order to reduce aggression, countering the fight that fish mount against their own torture and eventual death. as he puts it, “these technologies […] have been formed against the creative resistance of fish”.70 fahim amir echoes these logics and provides an example of pigeon resistance in urban settings. the development of strategies 69 certeau, practice of everyday life, xix. 70 wadiwel, “do fish resist?” 202, 219–220. 154 | hardt , dangerous play humanimalia 15.1 (2024) to counter pigeon agency is evident in the metal prongs and cut glass attached to ledges on buildings in cities. these inventions exist because of a power struggle; amir sees such developments in city planning as a result of the conflict between pigeons and the humans who want them to go away.71 adopting wadiwel and amir’s framework, we may regard the fact that humans are developing strategies to manage the difficulties posed by the orcas as an indication of resistance. sailors are firing flare guns, pouring diesel into the water, releasing sewage, and blasting heavy metal music to dissuade orcas from damaging their boats and hindering their movement.72 the proof of their agency lies in the fact that humans are working to mitigate the inconveniences, loss of property, loss of income, and other threats posed by the orcas as they confront the human presence in their waters. in addition, scientific groups are working to find solutions to manage the threat the orcas present. all of this supports the view that the orcas’ behaviours count as resistance.73 wadiwel draws on michel foucault, who questioned how we understand knowledge, how the ‘truth’ conditions what is possible, and how that, in turn, determines relationships of power. foucault allows us to see that resistance can be understood as engaging agentially without having to demonstrate a certain cognitive capacity, which supports the view that fish can resist even though their intelligence (as well as their sentience) remains a scientific question mark.74 while there is evidence that orcas, like other cetaceans, are highly intelligent in ways that humans tend to frame and value intelligence (i.e., they share common cognitive capacities with humans), expecting that an animal must possess an arbitrary set of cognitive skills that are common in humans in order to be seen as capable of resisting human oppression is a slippery slope. while the requirement might make it easier to argue that the elephant, orca, and chimpanzee can resist and revolt, it leaves out the vast majority of 71 amir, being and swine, 37. 72 lópez and esteban, “development of a scientific study”, 38–39. 73 “interactions”; lópez and esteban, “development of a scientific study”, 5.5.2 “security protocol development”. 74 wadiwel, “do fish resist?” 203. hardt , dangerous play | 155 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) the animal kingdom, ignoring the possibility that even the tiniest of creatures are able to resist humanity’s attempts to control, exploit, or eliminate them. in his article “‘when they fight back’: a cinematic archive of animal resistance and world wars”, geoffrey whitehall writes that there is enough proof in animals’ actions to merit recognition that they are resisting and rebelling, and that it should not require further context. hand-picking flashy examples of resistance, such as the killer whales who have turned against their trainers in marine parks, is unjust to animals. there are countless rebellious actions undertaken day in, day out, year after year, by millions, if not billions of animals, both wild and tame, that resist human sovereignty and oppression.75 the fact that news articles focus on more spectacular incidents undermines the ongoing state of nonhuman resistance to human domination. resistance can take many shapes and yet can instigate change and exact consequences. although the orcas of the iberian peninsula are not captives, like the orcas working for seaworld, they are nevertheless subject to the powers of human capitalistic enterprises. the enormous size and technical capabilities of container ships, fishing vessels, and cruise ships not only impose restraints on orca mobility and threaten their wellbeing, it also limits the scope of their response to humans intruding in their territory. as certeau reminds us, these tactics — as opposed to strategies — are the choice for those who face devastating retaliation if they are more openly defiant. orcas are primarily attacking smaller vessels and avoiding larger boats and commercial enterprises; scientists theorize that the rudders on the smaller boats are a more attractive object. it denies that the orcas have any notion of what they are doing, failing to entertain the idea that they are not engaging with commercial vessels because it is riskier, so they choose only those vessels where they are less likely to become victims of retaliation or incur injury. they are choosing to approach boats that pose fewer risks. this is not a coincidence. it is a calculated choice. 75 whitehall, “when they fight back,” 283–85. 156 | hardt , dangerous play humanimalia 15.1 (2024) detractors who argue against the notion that animals can revolt often raise the issue of intent. however, when looking at the rebellious activities performed by human populations in precarious situations, as in the case of enslaved people and peasants, it is practically impossible to obtain evidence that proves the intent behind these acts.76 when it comes to defining the parameters of what counts when it comes to animal revolt, it is vital to note that the same structure of domination also defines and reinforces these rubrics. intent is a state of mind, and positing it as a requirement to prove that an action was meant as rebellion is onerous, not only for humans but certainly also for nonhuman animals.77 it is an anthropocentric hurdle put in place to dismiss the notion that animal violence qualifies as revolt, and it is misguided. the question should not be, “what are the intentions of these animals when they resist, and what is their goal?” but rather, “what is the institution of their repression?” this is an indicator of what types of resistance are available. provided that the institutions are doing their job, it follows that forms of resistance may be extremely limited, leaving the informal or subversive as the only option.78 political scientist aylon a. cohen proposes that analysing modes of political exclusion is a pragmatic approach to understanding animal resistance or revolt. they argue that animals, by the act of resisting and creating conflict, automatically insert themselves into the realm of politics as subjects with agency, regardless of whether the actors acknowledge or speak of this conflict.79 put differently, animals should not be excluded from the political sphere and burdened by a requirement to provide human-designated proof of intent. critical interpretation and evaluation points to the fact that nonhuman animals express agency and purpose in moments of insubordination and violence. their corporeal communication implicitly implies intent. within posthumanist and new materialist paradigms, there is growing recognition of the significance of corporeality, or “the role played 76 scott, weapons, 290. 77 mcgary and lawson, between slavery and freedom, 46. 78 scott, weapons, 299. 79 cohen, “from mute objects,” 250. hardt , dangerous play | 157 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) by the body as a visceral protagonist within political encounters”, as diane h. coole and samantha frost write.80 when animals resist with their bodies, it is a non-linguistic speech act that, like all speech acts, requires interpretation.81 as james scott observes, purpose and motive are “inscribed in the acts themselves”.82 if there is a pattern of resistance and it continues in any form, it indicates intent. ignoring commands, feigning ignorance, slowing down, making vocal complaints, breaking equipment, refusing to move, and engaging in confrontation by violently ramming sailboats all demonstrate the intent to disobey authority, to resist, and to revolt.83 what the orcas are doing is resistance; it is purposeful and intentional. both homer’s mêtis and the tactics described by certeau help contextualize orca behaviour. approaching unannounced, disabling a crucial piece of equipment, and, even when the vessel sinks, not harming human life — these are the sly, cunning, and effective forms of rebellion that mitigate the potential for dangerous retaliation from humans. though they are endangered, the fourteen orcas opposing human presence in their waters are captivating the attention of millions around the world. the orcas’ resistance to humans intruding into their territory continues to make headlines and will be the subject of study for years to come. conclusion animals have always resisted human authority. it is, as some have argued, the norm and not the exception.84 it goes largely unrecognized because of embedded anthropocentric systems that prioritize human worth, dominion, and self-defined human intelligence above all else. animals who defy human sovereignty are discounted so that we can continue the unmitigated violence against them.85 80 coole and frost, new materialisms, 19. 81 cohen, “from mute objects”, 251–252. 82 scott, weapons, 301. 83 best, “animal agency”. 84 whitehall, “when they fight back,” 283. 85 colling, animal resistance, 58; cf. wadiwel, “do fish resist?” and hribal, fear of the animal planet. 158 | hardt , dangerous play humanimalia 15.1 (2024) this paper has argued that the timing of these attacks, which began soon after the covid-19 lockdowns were lifted, raises questions about the sensitivity of wildlife to human activity. i argued that the anthropause is a factor in the start of these behaviours, as anthropogenic noise poses a serious threat to cetacean wellbeing, and the orcas around the strait of gibraltar likely noticed the abrupt return to pre-covid sound levels. what some scientists are calling orca “play” is not without purpose. orcas such as gladis blanca are going after vessels, using precise and savvy tactics to disrupt commerce, inconvenience sailors, and damage property. i proposed that it is a type of play: a cunning and intentional tactic to subvert human authority. the orcas are practicing creative resistance by engaging with mêtis. this aligns with the findings of researchers, such as the gtoa, who have argued that the behaviours were motivated by an incident of anthropogenic origin. in the view that i have advanced, orcas are opposing the foreign presence in their waters in a calculated and serious manner without incurring lethal retaliation. the iberian orcas are shifting power relations by turning the tables on humans who tread in their waters. the proposition that the orcas are engaging in this behaviour with intention and that they are working with precision to stop boats from going through their territory raises crucial issues. if orcas are doing this to stop human intrusion, it would require reflection on our part — a moment of accounting. we would need to consider that, in order to get this behaviour to stop, we might have to take our boats out of the water. our species is typically unwilling to make a sacrifice so large for the sake of another species. to credit the scientists’ concern, history has shown that humans are more likely to destroy animals than change their behaviour.86 as human-centred narratives are challenged, acts of animal resistance and revolt will become more obvious. with this shift, the discourse on moral obligation toward nonhuman others will take on a 86 humane society international, “human–wildlife coexistence”, https://www.hsi.org/issues/ human-wildlife-conflict/. https://www.hsi.org/issues/human-wildlife-conflict/ https://www.hsi.org/issues/human-wildlife-conflict/ hardt , dangerous play | 159 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) sense of urgency, and a more co-habitable future will become feasible. in the current challenges we face, it becomes clear that we humans have a decision ahead of us. what may be required of humanity in this age of increasing clashing needs and limited resources is what french philosopher michel serres calls “cosmic humility”.87 the orcas are taking action to help rouse humanity from its stupor. they are demanding that we pay attention. 87 serres, “natural contract”, 12. works cited amir, fahim. being and swine: the end of nature (as we knew it). translated by geoffrey c. howes and corvin russell. toronto: between the lines, 2020. ashcraft, kady ruth. “solidarity! orcas are sinking the rich.” jezebel, 24 may 2023. https://www.jezebel.com/solidarityorcas-are-sinking-the-rich-1850470136. baker, harry. “infamous boat-sinking orcas spotted hundreds of miles from where they should be, baffling scientists.” live science, 16 april 2024. https://www.livescience.com/ animals/orcas/infamous-boat-sinkingorcas-spotted-hundreds-of-milesfrom-where-they-should-be-bafflingscientist. barrett-lennard, lance. “open letter regarding killer whale behaviour around boats.” raincoast conservation foundation. 21 november 2023. https:// www.raincoast.org/2023/11/openletter-regarding-killer-whale-behaviouraround-boats/. best, steve. “animal agency: resistance, rebellion, and the struggle for autonomy.” dr. steve best, 25 january 2011. https://www.drstevebest. wordpress.com/2011/01/25/animalagency-resistance-rebellion-and-thestruggle-for-autonomy/. broglio, ron. “incidents in the animal revolution.” in beyond human: from animality to transhumanism, edited by charlie blake, claire molloy, and steven shakespeare, 13–30. london: continuum international, 2012. certeau, michel de. the practice of everyday life. translated by steven f. rendall. 3rd ed. berkeley: university of california press, 2011. cohen, aylon a. “from mute objects to militant subjects: the politics of rebellious animals.” in subjectivation in political theory and contemporary practices, edited by andreas oberprantacher and andrei siclodi, 237– 63. london: palgrave macmillan, 2016. colling, sarat. animal resistance in the global capitalist era. east lansing: michigan state university press, 2021. coole, diana, and samantha frost, eds. new materialisms: ontology, agency, and politics. durham, nc: duke university press, 2010. dearden, amber, jennifer chapman, aroha miller, valeria vergara, marty haulena, lindsaye akhurst, lauren dares, and amy rowley. “covid-19: a story of marine mammals. ocean watch spotlight.” vancouver: ocean wise conservation association, 2020. https://www.jezebel.com/solidarity-orcas-are-sinking-the-rich-1850470136 https://www.jezebel.com/solidarity-orcas-are-sinking-the-rich-1850470136 https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/infamous-boat-sinking-orcas-spotted-hundreds-of-miles-from-where-they-should-be-baffling-scientist https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/infamous-boat-sinking-orcas-spotted-hundreds-of-miles-from-where-they-should-be-baffling-scientist https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/infamous-boat-sinking-orcas-spotted-hundreds-of-miles-from-where-they-should-be-baffling-scientist https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/infamous-boat-sinking-orcas-spotted-hundreds-of-miles-from-where-they-should-be-baffling-scientist https://www.livescience.com/animals/orcas/infamous-boat-sinking-orcas-spotted-hundreds-of-miles-from-where-they-should-be-baffling-scientist https://www.raincoast.org/2023/11/open-letter-regarding-killer-whale-behaviour-around-boats/ https://www.raincoast.org/2023/11/open-letter-regarding-killer-whale-behaviour-around-boats/ https://www.raincoast.org/2023/11/open-letter-regarding-killer-whale-behaviour-around-boats/ https://www.raincoast.org/2023/11/open-letter-regarding-killer-whale-behaviour-around-boats/ https://www.drstevebest.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/animal-agency-resistance-rebellion-and-the-struggle-for-autonomy/ https://www.drstevebest.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/animal-agency-resistance-rebellion-and-the-struggle-for-autonomy/ https://www.drstevebest.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/animal-agency-resistance-rebellion-and-the-struggle-for-autonomy/ https://www.drstevebest.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/animal-agency-resistance-rebellion-and-the-struggle-for-autonomy/ 160 | hardt , dangerous play humanimalia 15.1 (2024) derryberry, elizabeth p., jennifer n phillips, graham e derryberry, michael j blum, and david luther. “singing in a silent spring: birds respond to a half-century soundscape reversion during the covid-19 shutdown.” science 370, no. 6516 (2020): 575–79. https://doi. org/10.1126/science.abd5777. detienne, marcel, and jean-pierre vernant. cunning intelligence in greek culture and society. chicago: university of chicago press, 1991. esteban, ruth, and andrew d. foote. “orcinus orca (strait of gibraltar subpopulation).” the iucn red list of threatened species (2019): e.t132948040a132949669. https:// dx.doi.org/10.2305/iucn.uk.2019-3. rlts.t132948040a132949669.en. esteban, ruth, alfredo lópez, álvaro garcia de los rios, marisa ferreira, francisco martinho, paula méndezfernandeza, ezequiel andréu, et al. “killer whales of the strait of gibraltar, an endangered subpopulation showing a disruptive behavior.” marine mammal science 38, no. 4 (2022): 1699–1709. https://doi.org/10.1111/mms.12947. esteban, ruth, philippe verborgh, pauline gauffier, joan giménez, christophe guinet, and renaud de stephanis. “dynamics of killer whale, bluefin tuna and human fisheries in the strait of gibraltar.” biological conservation 194 (2016): 31–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. biocon.2015.11.031. ford, john k. b., graeme m. ellis, and kenneth c. balcomb. killer whales: the natural history and genealogy of orinus orca in british columbia and washington. 2nd ed. vancouver: ubc press; seattle: university of washington press, 2000. guinet, christophe, paolo domenici, renaud de stephanis, lance barrettlennard, john k. b. ford, and philippe verborgh. “killer whale predation on bluefin tuna: exploring the hypothesis of the endurance-exhaustion technique.” marine ecology progress series 347 (2007): 111–19. https://doi. org/10.3354/meps07035. hattenstone, simon. “‘we pledged not to eat each other’: the family that was shipwrecked for 38 days.” the guardian, 23 july 2024. https://www.theguardian. com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/jul/23/thefamily-that-was-shipwrecked-for-38-days. hoare, philip and jeroen hoekendijk. “orca rams into yacht off shetland in first such incident in northern waters.” the guardian, 21 june 2023. https://www. theguardian.com/environment/2023/ jun/21/orca-rams-yacht-off-shetlandfirst-such-incident-northern-waters hribal, jason. fear of the animal planet: the hidden history of animal resistance. petrolia, ca: counterpunch; oakland, ca: ak press, 2010. hribal, jason. “tilikum and the fall of seaworld.” counterpunch, 6 january 2017. https://www.counterpunch. org/2017/01/06/tilikum-and-the-fall-ofsea-world/. “interactions between iberian killer whales and vessels: management recommendations.” madrid: miteco, 2024. https://www.miteco.gob.es/en/ biodiversidad/temas/biodiversidadmarina/habitats-especies-marinos/ especies-marinas/bm_hayem_em_ orcas.html johnson, josh. “orcas vs yachts, i give the ick, and more.” performed at the new york comedy club. youtube. 22 november 2023. https://youtu.be/h9vk-upmng. joy, ruth, dominic j. tollit, jason wood, alexander o macgillivray, zizheng li, krista trounce, and orla robinson. “potential benefits of vessel slowdowns on endangered southern resident killer whales.” frontiers in marine science 6 (2019): 344. https://doi.org/10.3389/ fmars.2019.00344. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abd5777 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abd5777 https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/iucn.uk.2019-3.rlts.t132948040a132949669.en https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/iucn.uk.2019-3.rlts.t132948040a132949669.en https://dx.doi.org/10.2305/iucn.uk.2019-3.rlts.t132948040a132949669.en https://doi.org/10.1111/mms.12947 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2015.11.031 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2015.11.031 https://doi.org/10.3354/meps07035 https://doi.org/10.3354/meps07035 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/jul/23/the-family-that-was-shipwrecked-for-38-days https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/jul/23/the-family-that-was-shipwrecked-for-38-days https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/jul/23/the-family-that-was-shipwrecked-for-38-days https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/21/orca-rams-yacht-off-shetland-first-such-incident-northern-waters https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/21/orca-rams-yacht-off-shetland-first-such-incident-northern-waters https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/21/orca-rams-yacht-off-shetland-first-such-incident-northern-waters https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/21/orca-rams-yacht-off-shetland-first-such-incident-northern-waters https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/06/tilikum-and-the-fall-of-sea-world/ https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/06/tilikum-and-the-fall-of-sea-world/ https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/01/06/tilikum-and-the-fall-of-sea-world/ https://www.miteco.gob.es/en/biodiversidad/temas/biodiversidad-marina/habitats-especies-marinos/especies-marinas/bm_hayem_em_orcas.html https://www.miteco.gob.es/en/biodiversidad/temas/biodiversidad-marina/habitats-especies-marinos/especies-marinas/bm_hayem_em_orcas.html https://www.miteco.gob.es/en/biodiversidad/temas/biodiversidad-marina/habitats-especies-marinos/especies-marinas/bm_hayem_em_orcas.html https://www.miteco.gob.es/en/biodiversidad/temas/biodiversidad-marina/habitats-especies-marinos/especies-marinas/bm_hayem_em_orcas.html https://www.miteco.gob.es/en/biodiversidad/temas/biodiversidad-marina/habitats-especies-marinos/especies-marinas/bm_hayem_em_orcas.html https://youtu.be/h9-vk-upmng https://youtu.be/h9-vk-upmng https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2019.00344 https://doi.org/10.3389/fmars.2019.00344 hardt , dangerous play | 161 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) landauro, inti, andrei khalip, and janet lawrence. “spanish coastguard bans small sailboats after damage from orcas.” reuters, 24 september 2020. https://www.reuters.com/article/spainsailing-killerwhalesidinkcn26f34z. leckart, steven, host. wild things: siegfried and roy. apple podcasts. 2022. https://podcasts.apple.com/ us/podcast/wild-things-siegfriedroy/ id1599176021. lecocq, thomas, stephen p. hicks, koen van noten, kasper van wijk, paula koelemeijer, raphael s m de plaen, frédérick massin, et al. “global quieting of high-frequency seismic noise due to covid-19 pandemic lockdown measures.” science 369, no. 6509 (2020): 1338–43. https://doi.org/10.1126/ science.abd2438. linden, eugene. the parrot’s lament: and other true tales of animal intrigue, intelligence, and ingenuity. new york: plume, 2000. lópez, alfredo, and ruth esteban. “development of a scientific study on the interaction of the population of orcas (orcinus orca) in the strait of gibraltar with vessels, for the design and proposal of prevention, action and management measures.” atlantic orca working group (gtoa), november 2021. https://www. orcaiberica.org/en/catalogo. manning, primrose, elisabeth dawson, christina tholander, and maud bonato. “the effect of covid-19 lockdown restrictions on self-directed behaviour, activity budgets, movement patterns, and spatial use in semi-captive african elephants (loxodonta africana).” applied animal behaviour science 266 (2023): 106007. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. applanim.2023.106007. march, david, kristian metcalfe, joaquin tintoré, and brendan j. godley. “tracking the global reduction of marine traffic during the covid-19 pandemic.” nature communications 12 (2021): 2415. https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41467-021-22423-6. mcgary, howard, and bill e. lawson. between slavery and freedom: philosophy and american slavery. bloomington: indiana university press, 1992. mcknight, matt and jane ross. “malice, mischief or fad? orca experts intrigued by boat bumpings.” reuters, 20 july, 2023. https://www.reuters.com/ business/environment/malicemischief-or-fad-orca-experts-intriguedby-boat-bumpings-2023-07-20/. mentz, steve. shipwreck modernity: ecologies of globalization, 1550–1719. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2015. miller, patrick j. o., petter h. kvadsheim, frans-peter a. lam, paul j. wensveen, ricardo antunes, ana catarina alves, fleur visser, lars kleivane, peter l. tyack, and l. doksæter sivle. “the severity of behavioral changes observed during experimental exposures of killer (orcinus orca), long-finned pilot (globicephala melas), and sperm (physeter macrocephalus) whales to naval sonar.” aquatic mammals 38, no. 4 (2012): 362–401. https://doi.org/10.1578/am.38.4.2012.362. national research council. ocean noise and marine mammals. washington, dc: the national academies press, 2003. https://doi.org/10.17226/10564. oliver, kelly. animal lessons: how they teach us to be human. new york: columbia university press, 2009. parsons, chris, and sarah dolman. “noise as a problem for cetaceans.” in oceans of noise: a wdcs science report, edited by mark simmonds, sarah dolman, and lindy weilgart, 54–59. chippenham: whale and dolphin conservation society, 2004. https://uk.whales.org/ wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2018/08/ oceans-of-noise.pdf https://www.reuters.com/article/spain-sailing-killerwhalesidinkcn26f34z https://www.reuters.com/article/spain-sailing-killerwhalesidinkcn26f34z https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wild-things-siegfriedroy/id1599176021 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wild-things-siegfriedroy/id1599176021 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wild-things-siegfriedroy/id1599176021 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abd2438 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abd2438 https://www.orcaiberica.org/en/catalogo https://www.orcaiberica.org/en/catalogo https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2023.106007 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2023.106007 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22423-6 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-22423-6 https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/malice-mischief-or-fad-orca-experts-intrigued-by-boat-bumpings-2023-07-20/ https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/malice-mischief-or-fad-orca-experts-intrigued-by-boat-bumpings-2023-07-20/ https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/malice-mischief-or-fad-orca-experts-intrigued-by-boat-bumpings-2023-07-20/ https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/malice-mischief-or-fad-orca-experts-intrigued-by-boat-bumpings-2023-07-20/ https://doi.org/10.1578/am.38.4.2012.362 https://doi.org/10.17226/10564 https://uk.whales.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2018/08/oceans-of-noise.pdf https://uk.whales.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2018/08/oceans-of-noise.pdf https://uk.whales.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2018/08/oceans-of-noise.pdf 162 | hardt , dangerous play humanimalia 15.1 (2024) philbrick, nathaniel. in the heart of the sea: the tragedy of the whaleship essex. new york: penguin books, 2001. richardson, w. john, charles r. greene, jr., charles i. malme, and denis h. thomson. marine mammals and noise. san diego: academic press. 1995. riederer, rachel. “the year of the orca.” the new yorker, 28 december 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/ culture/2023-in-review/the-year-ofthe-orca. robertson, dougal. survive the savage sea. london: elek books, 1973. rutz, christian. “studying pauses and pulses in human mobility and their environmental impacts.” nature reviews earth and environment 3, no. 3 (2022): 157–59. https://doi.org/10.1038/ s43017-022-00276-x. scott, james c. weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance. new haven, ct: yale university press, 1985. searle, adam, johnathon turnbull, and jamie lorimer. “after the anthropause: lockdown lessons for more-thanhuman geographies.” geographic journal 187, no. 1 (2021): 69–77. https:// doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12373. serres, michel. “the natural contract.” translated by felicia mccarren. critical inquiry 19, no. 1 (1992): 1–21. http://www. jstor.org/stable/1343752. smillie, susan. “‘i’ve never seen or heard of attacks’: scientists baffled by orcas harassing boats.” the guardian, 13 september 2020. https://www. theguardian.com/environment/2020/ sep/13/the-tale-of-the-killer-whales. stevens, paige e., veda allen, and jason n. bruck. “a quieter ocean: experimentally derived differences in attentive responses of tursiops truncatus to anthropogenic noise playbacks before and during the covid-19related anthropause.” animals 13, no. 7 (2023): 1269. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ani13071269. united nations conference on trade and development (unctad). review of maritime transport. new york: united nations. 2018. wadiwel, joseph dinesh. “do fish resist?” cultural studies review 22, no. 1 (2016): 196–242. https://doi.org/10.5130/csr. v22i1.4363. wadiwel, joseph dinesh. the war against animals. leiden: brill, 2015. whitehall, geoffrey. “‘when they fight back’: a cinematic archive of animal resistance and world wars.” review of international studies 49, no. 2 (2023): 278–99. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s0260210522000468. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2023-in-review/the-year-of-the-orca https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2023-in-review/the-year-of-the-orca https://www.newyorker.com/culture/2023-in-review/the-year-of-the-orca https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-022-00276-x https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-022-00276-x https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12373 https://doi.org/10.1111/geoj.12373 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343752 http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343752 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/13/the-tale-of-the-killer-whales https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/13/the-tale-of-the-killer-whales https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/13/the-tale-of-the-killer-whales https://doi.org/10.3390/ani13071269 https://doi.org/10.3390/ani13071269 https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v22i1.4363 https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v22i1.4363 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210522000468 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210522000468 microsoft word traisnel pdf dummy.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:2 antoine traisnel zarathustra’s philosafari a human being may well ask an animal: “why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?” and the animal would like to answer, and say: “the reason is i always forget what i was going to say”—but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent: so that the human being was left wondering. — friedrich nietzsche, untimely meditations since aristotle infamously defined man as a “speaking animal” (zoon logon echon), language has often been employed by philosophers to trace the demarcation line distinguishing the animal from the human.1 in an ironic gesture, nietzsche suggests that language might not simply be the human’s privilege over animals that are presumed to be speechless, but rather the symptom of his compulsion to express himself, his having “forgotten how to be silent” (108),2 or better, his having forgotten how to forget. it is not language as such, nietzsche tells us, that distinguishes men from animals, but the use humans make of it. it is the human’s ex-pression – his propensity to speak in order to extract himself from life (which the genealogy of morals describes as a stream of forgetfulness) and, as a result, to negate his animal nature – that makes him a specific kind of animal: “the animal with red cheeks” (zarathustra 112), “the animal with the right to make promises” (the genealogy of morals 57), “the animal not yet properly adapted to his environment” (beyond good and evil 62). the human’s supposed superiority is thus not inherent in his exceptional or divine nature; rather, it is merely an aftereffect of a language that “overnames” (überbenennt), to borrow walter benjamin’s terminology, and thereby grants the human the illusion of “being above the animals.” for benjamin, too, the problem is not language “as such” (überhaupt) but human language (die sprache des menschen), which says and assumes too much. benjamin’s reading of the scene where adam names the animals in genesis illuminates nietzsche’s intuition about the animals’ muteness. in “on language as such and on the language of man,” nature – as opposed to just the animals, as suggested in my epigraph – is deprived, not of “language as such,” but of the gift to name in order to know. whereas “god made things knowable in their names” (my emphasis), man, “however, names [things] according to knowledge.” with this, benjamin suggests that human language is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 84 characterized by a tendency to overname. “things have no proper names except in god,” benjamin writes, for in his creative word, god called them into being, calling them by their proper names. in the language of men, however, they have been overnamed. there is, in the relation of human languages to that of things, something that can be approximately described as “overnaming”—the deepest linguistic reason for all melancholy and (from the point of view of the thing) for all deliberate muteness. [im verhältnis der menschensprachen zu der der dinge liegt etwas, was man als »überbenennung« annähernd bezeichnen kann: überbenennung als tiefster sprachlicher grund aller traurigkeit und (vom ding aus betrachtet) allen verstummens.] (benjamin 2004:68-73).3 in contrast with nietzsche, benjamin claims that nature’s muteness does not originate in forgetfulness but in sadness: nature is not only sad because it is mute; it is mute because it is sad to have been named by man (if benjamin were nietzsche, he would perhaps call the human the happy animal). both thinkers, however, deride the epistemic pretensions of human language. in human, all-too human, nietzsche writes: language as putative science. the significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. to the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animals: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world (16). refusing the christian postulate according to which “the soul” comes prior to and therefore is the condition of thought, modern philosophy, in the wake of descartes, has affirmed that thinking is the condition of emergence for the human subject (“on truth and lies in a nonmoral sense,” aphorism 54). for nietzsche, however, this gesture only replaces one given source of spiritual agency (“the soul”) with another one (“the mind”). in so doing, philosophy has perpetuated the christian devaluation of the body that for nietzsche is the unacknowledged source of all human knowledge: “you [the despisers of the body] say ‘i’ and you are proud of this word. but greater than this – antoine traisnel — zarathustra’s philosophari 85 although you will not believe in it — is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say ‘i’ but performs ‘i’” (62). nietzsche notes that it is an illusion to think that “i” am the master of my thoughts: “a thought comes when ‘it’ wishes” and “i” am left to interpret and synthesize it a posteriori (beyond good and evil, aphorism 17). the subject “i” should be recognized for what “it” is, namely, a grammatical placeholder for an unascertainable subject. asking his reader to purge himself of his metaphysical and alltoo-humanist prejudices, nietzsche endeavors to “naturalize humans” (gay science 109) by regarding them as animals. such an endeavor does not call for a preconceived idea of animality but rather demands the positing of a spectatorial relation to the animal seen from a distance.4 what does it mean, i ask, to look at humans as animals? and to look at animals as animals? this formulation is not a mere tautology, for the animal “as animal” is not the “real” animal, nor is it the animal “as such,” which heidegger, in the fundamental concepts of metaphysics, distinguishes from the human precisely by depriving it of the ability to “hav[e] a relation toward beings as such” (heidegger 1995, 337). heidegger calls this (linguistic) ability to seize things in themselves and for themselves logos apophantikos. the “animal as animal” cannot be seized in itself, indeed it is never identical to itself but always perceived and conceived as animal. evidently, this analogical detachment does not apply solely to the perception of animals, in the objective sense of the genitive, but can arguably be extended to everything. my contention is that the lesson that “everything is in a perspective” is taught by zarathustra’s animals. zarathustra, i argue, deploys a nonapophantic grammar that shuns the petrifying copula “is” for the dynamics of the conjunction “as.” these two small, seemingly innocuous words “share a common root” according to heidegger (ibid. 338) but prove, in fact, radically different. before attributing the privilege of seizing the world “as such” to the human, heidegger ponders over the strange kinship that binds the “is” and the “as,” hypothesizing that the latter might be necessary for our capturing or grasping (erfassung) of beings and of the world: “perhaps that very relation in which the ‘as’ and the ‘as’-structure is rooted is the relation that also makes it possible to get a view of something like being [so etwas wie sein in den blick zu nehmen], so that the ‘as’structure and being intrinsically hang together in some sense [so dass „als“-struktur und sein in sich in irgendeinem sinne zusammenhängen]” (ibid. 338). while evidencing an affinity between two objects, the operator “as” also signals an irreducible distance, which heidegger believes can be abolished in human language through the use of the copula. contrary to the animal, which heidegger describes as “poor-in-world” (weltarm), man is “world-forming” (weltbildend). in other words, an animal relation to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 86 the world is governed by the regime of the “as,” whereas human relations are characterized by the possibility of the “is,” which enables man to access being “as such.” for nietzsche, the human is not granted such a privilege. in the very last page of the animal that therefore i am, derrida writes: is there a relation of apprehension to the being “as such”—the “ontological difference,” therefore — to the being [être] of the being [étant], such that it lets the being of the being be, such as it is, in the absence of every kind of design, living? it is evident that the difference between nietzsche and heidegger is that nietzsche would have said no: everything is in a perspective; the relation to a being, even the “truest,” the most “objective,” that which respects most the essence of what is such as it is, is caught in a movement that we’ll call here that of the living, of life, and from this point of view, whatever the difference between animals, it remains an “animal” relation. hence the strategy in question would consist in pluralizing and varying the “as such,” and, instead of simply giving speech back to the animal, or giving to the animal what the human deprives it of, as it were, in marking that the human is, in a way, similarly “deprived,” by means of a privation that is not a privation, and that there is no pure and simple “as such.” (derrida 160; emphasis added) following derrida, i read zarathustra as a sort of zoological excursion, mapping a series of human-animal encounters in which the human is but one species among others. zarathustra is our tour guide during this philosafari, as he may be an incarnation of “the acknowledging one5 [who] walks among men as among animals”* and not “as if among animals” (my emphasis). the “as if” appears already to presume too much; it is the modality of a modern philosophy that is constantly seeking out new horizons, new conceptual conditional clauses, new “what ifs.” seeing the human as an animal is crucial for nietzsche, who refuses to grant the former any exceptional status. let us consider three significant stations along zarathustra’s journey (safar in swahili) to examine the tension between the two regimes of perception guided by the “as” and the “as if” and to probe the potential of zarathustra’s external gaze on the human as animal. spectatorial distance. nietzsche’s bestiary is so unique within western philosophy that it cannot be reduced to a simple metaphoric system. querying the place it occupies in antoine traisnel — zarathustra’s philosophari 87 the economy of nietzsche’s oeuvre, elizabeth de fontenay laments the philosopher’s tendency to allegorize the animal. allegory is understood by fontenay as a rigid, oneto-one framework of equivalences in which the signifying figures are, in principle, entirely subsumed by the idea they present. according to fontenay, zarathustra’s allegorical inclination does violence to the animal by capturing it in a dragnet of tropes and instrumentalizing it for strategic ends, thus paradoxically resuming the very gesture of the metaphysical tradition that nietzsche’s hammer sought to knock down (fontenay 609). one cannot entirely disagree with fontenay’s argument: zarathustra’s tutelary companions — the eagle and the serpent, “the proudest animal under the sun and the wisest animal under the sun” (53) — are endowed with undeniable allegorical prestige; doubtless, the “amen”-able donkey and the glazed cows have not been chosen for legendary brightness; and, to be sure, the lion licking zarathustra’s tears should be read as announcing the impending accomplishment of the prophet’s last prediction. zarathustra’s animals are burdened with a lot of figurative baggage. they are not observed by the honed gaze of the naturalist but are seen from an allegorical distance. as in a safari, the reader walks among the animals and yet is isolated from them.6 like the flâneur who sees “the city as hunting ground,” the reader “feels himself viewed by all” yet simultaneously “utterly undiscoverable” (benjamin 1999:420). this double regime of visibility is characteristic of the dialectic of the flâneur, with whom benjamin associates “the gaze of the allegorist” or “the gaze of the alienated man” (ibid. 10). contrary to fontenay, i do not interpret the remoteness of zarathustra’s gaze as the symptom of a metaphysical aloofness. rather, i see this allegorical distance as necessary in order to unsettle both a strictly figurative viewpoint and a naturalist perspective on animal life.7 when benjamin invokes the remedial potential of allegory, it is not because of the symbolical reconciliation it appears to promise – whereas fontenay aspires to a metaphor-free idiom overcoming the “great divide”8 between man and animal – but, on the contrary, because allegory is, in deleuze’s words, a “power of figuration” that “uncovers nature and history according to the order of time.”9 in his book on the german baroque trauerspiel, benjamin suggests that allegory exhibits the irremissible breach (sprung) between figure and figuration and, in so doing, does not entirely erase all traces of the signifier (in this case, the animal as token or signifying “detail”) in the act of signification. though the elements constituting the baroque allegory appear as arbitrary surrogates for the transcendent truth that they purportedly represent, they are not entirely expunged of their idiosyncratic properties. as “signifying property, the ‘detail’ [in allegory] is devalorized with respect to a criterion of value modeled on an ideal of identity as essentially self-contained or self-present” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 88 (weber 241; emphasis in original). yet it is also valorized, samuel weber adds, for its very detailedness, which is the condition of the indexical “potency” with which it is endowed. in other words, the detail is not entirely subsumed in the higher meaning it manifests but needs to be perceived as detail. without being able to further elaborate the conception of allegory delineated in the trauerspiel book, i believe that the scopic distance at stake in zarathustra is radically different depending on whether one adopts fontenay’s or benjamin’s perspective. i contend that the spectatorial politics of zarathustra’s philosafari is crucial to understanding his relationship to animality. in order to nuance fontenay’s charge, yet without reading the animal metaphor with tautegorical binoculars,10 it is necessary to take a closer look at zarathustra’s grammar. human as animal. the first station i will read is the scene that takes place just after zarathustra has “withdrawn from mankind” for the second time. before returning from his solitude, zarathustra declares that the thinker’s “speculations should be bounded by conceivability” (110*): one has to be able to conceive – in the most physical sense of the term, understood as becoming pregnant11 – that which governs one’s life. accordingly, nietzsche advocates the substitution of the conceivable, earthly, and joyful übermensch for the notion of an unconceivable, ethereal and misanthropic god. such an enterprise requires the use of a grammar that is capable of translating the complex interrelationality of conceivableness instead of one that promotes a purely platonic intelligibility. upon this meditation, the narrator reflects upon the notion of compassion and feels compelled to rectify a rumor concerning zarathustra: my friends, your friend has heard a satirical saying: ‘just look at zarathustra! does he not go among us as if among animals?’ but it is better said like this: ‘the acknowledging one goes among men as among animals.’ (emphasis in text, 112*) zarathustra walks among men who observe him looking at them. the scopic interplay of this scene shows that the spectator is never just a spectator but is always exposed as an object of attention in return. the anonymous commentators denounce zarathustra’s antisocial behavior and deride what they regard as his moralistic pretension: look at him, who walks among us as if he was not a part of “us,” as if he was better than “us.” us men. but zarathustra’s voice does not come from above, and his fables are not moralistic.12 the reformulation offered by the narrator troubles the anthropocentric antoine traisnel — zarathustra’s philosophari 89 prejudice of the first sentence, which clearly postulates that “us” cannot be assimilated to animals without the intervention of a derealizing “as if” (wie), echoing the “once upon a time” of tales and parables. the acknowledging one (der erkennende) does not take for granted any specific knowledge about what he witnesses. while it retains a certain distance between the two objects compared, the “as” (als) disquiets the classical dichotomy between the human and the nonhuman.13 we could gloss the two sentences thus: 1. zarathustra goes among men as he would if men were animals (but they are not, this is pure speculation). 2. the acknowledging one goes among men as he would if men were animals (and they may well be). zarathustra — if he is the acknowledging one in question14 — is not animalizing men in order to debase them; on the contrary, he calls into question the discursive grounds on which the ontological barrier that separates human from animal has been established. language has long been thought to be the decisive criterion justifying this classic partition. nietzsche seems to agree, but he operates a subtle, if radical twist by suggesting that the difference might not result so much from the animal’s speechlessness, but rather from the unacknowledged illusion produced by a moralizing and petrifying usage of “our” human language.15 in the preface to the genealogy of morals, nietzsche asks his reader to reassess the logical connectors that articulate “our” systems of value: “do our ideas, our values, our yeas and nays, our ifs and buts grow out of us with the necessity with which a tree bears fruit—related and each with an affinity to each, and evidence of one will, one health, one soil, one sun” (16; emphasis in original). human language, with its immoderate use of “as ifs” (i.e. of speculations unbounded “by conceivability”) has lost touch with its animal self. this may be how nietzsche’s famous aphorism describing “the internalization of man” should be understood: …thus began the gravest and uncanniest illness, from which humanity has not yet recovered, man’s suffering of man, of himself — the result of a forcible sundering from his animal past, as it were a leap and plunge into new surroundings and conditions of existence, a declaration of war humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 90 against the old instincts upon which his strength, joy and terribleness had rested hitherto. let us add at once that, on the other hand, the existence on earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future, that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered. indeed, divine spectators were needed to do justice to the spectacle that thus began and the end of which is not yet in sight — a spectacle too subtle, too marvelous, too paradoxical to be played senselessly unobserved on some ludicrous planet! (genealogy 85; emphasis in original) the human seems to be in denial, refusing to recognize his kinship with non-human animals, inventing “new conditions of existence” that ironically appear to be unconditional. nietzsche reveals the scopic nature of humanist egotism: requiring a witness whose grandeur is worthy of his narcissism, man invents transcendental omniscient spectators characterized by their inconceivableness and their irreducible remoteness. this invention of a purely objective viewpoint is what michel de certeau calls “the exaltation of a scopic and gnostic drive” (92). it seems that it is precisely this god’s eye perspective – this unbridgeable epistemic distance authorized by the “as if” — that zarathustra aspires to call into question. the thinker observes his object at a distance, but the detachment is only temporary because he is not operating with hypotheses and categorical imperatives but instead is reflexive (erkennend) and part of the very spectacle he beholds. this does not mean that all differences are abolished. if the acknowledging one is (presumably) a human being, this does not prevent him from momentarily estranging himself from a humanity conceived in opposition to animality (agamben 37). let us remember that the passage under study here belongs to the chapter entitled “of the compassionate,” in which the narrator rejects the christian notion of compassion but not compassion in itself: “and if i am compassionate then it is preferably from a distance” (112). nietzsche’s idea is not to enforce “some homogeneous continuity between what calls itself man and what he calls the animal” (derrida 30); derrida warns us against such bêtises. no, the distinction between men and animals is maintained throughout zarathustra, only this distinction is neither unconditional nor transhistorical. and it is certainly not natural.16 antoine traisnel — zarathustra’s philosophari 91 animal as animal. asking his interlocutors to re-evaluate often-undisputed human exceptionalism, zarathustra finds himself estranged from the community of men and returns to his cave. in the final section of the book, he is goaded by his animals in a humorous reversal into trying one final time to teach his fellow humans the meaning of the übermensch. zarathustra turns himself into a “fisherman” “cast[ing] [his] golden fishing-rod” into “the human sea” (252). the christ-like prophet who announces the overcoming of the human gathers disciples around him as he climbs the mountain. after his conversation with the ugliest man (275), zarathustra feels “chilled and alone” (279). suddenly, he inexplicably grows “warmer and more cheerful”: “‘what has happened to me?’ he asked himself. ‘something warm and living refreshes me. . . . already i am less alone; unknown companions and brothers circle about me, their warm breath touches my soul’” (280). when zarathustra looks around, he is surprised to find out that the unidentified warmth emanates from a nearby gathering of cows. the cows ignore zarathustra as they are fascinated by a peaceable sermonizer, “the voluntary beggar,” who tries to “persuad[e] the animals to have no fear of him” (280). disgusted by the society of humans, the beggar wants the cows to instruct him in the art of rumination: “if we do not alter and become as cows [wie die kühe], we shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. for there is one thing we should learn from them: rumination [das wiederkaüen]” (my emphasis, 280). while the preacher “chews the cud” over the necessity to enbovine himself, reducing the cows to exemplary specimens as he meditates on the benefits of vegetarianism and of slow intellectual ingestion, another instantiation of the speculative “as if,” the cows observe him with amazement: “the cows, however, looked on and were amazed” (281). the animals — in this excerpt behaving like “real” cows, not emblematic figures — become spectators of this surreal scene. we could say that nietzsche portrays “signifying cows,” to play on henry louis gates jr.’s influential concept, figures that operate as signifiers yet refuse to be reduced to the conceptual signification that the anxious philosopher seeks to impose on them. the comical quality of the passage is underlined a few pages later, after the agitated beggar explains why he fled the community of men and “came to these cows”: “thus spoke the man of peace and himself snorted and perspired as he spoke: so that the cows were again amazed” (281). these apparently trivial details draw the reader’s attention to the uncanniness of the quasi-encounter between thinkers who use cows as models of wisdom and “real” cows standing before them, amazed, rendered speechless, so to speak, by what they see. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 92 such dissymmetry shows that the animalization of the human does not culminate in an ideal interspecific synthesis. desiring to learn the secret of rumination from the cow’s mouth, the voluntary beggar is mocked by the silent surprise he inspires in the object of his contemplation. this scene, of course, will recall any number of colonial contexts in which the “outsider tourist” seeks enlightenment from a bemused “fetishized other.” the beggar dreams of an unmediated relationship with the animals (“i have already been talking to [the cows] half a morning and they were just about to reply to me” [280]), but all they repay him with is a confused stare. the animals do not fail to respond to the cow whisperer; rather, it is he who is unable to see what their response is, as the cows silently “stand and look at [him].” paraphrasing the french poet francis ponge, one could say that humans speak as animals remain silent. the “as” should be understood as a temporal and causal connector, but also as comparative conjunction: humans speak while, because, and in the same way that animals remain silent. the satirical tenor of the narration does not suggest that the human cannot be taught the art of rumination, or that such an endeavor is laughable; such a conclusion would miss the radical criticism of the carno-, logicoand anthropocentric frame of reference conducted in zarathustra. on the other hand, the subtle irony of the scene shows that the decentering of the human — heralding the coming of the übermensch — does not amount to a sheer elimination of differences between animal species. in spite of the uncanny intimacy zarathustra experiences with the cows, they remain unapproachable. once again, nietzsche moderates the “difficult relations” between the humans and their “animal relatives” thanks to spectatorial distance. only this time, instead of the cuvierian taxonomic drive of the zoologist,18 the reader catches a glimpse at animals looking back at men. übermensch as postman. the dialectic of distance and proximity at work in zarathustra requires that closer attention be paid to the intermediary nature of the human subject – recurringly defined as “a rope, fastened between animal and übermensch” (43*) – by examining a scene where the animal speaks directly to zarathustra. such apparent lack of mediation is surprising, as it seems to abolish the distance carefully preserved by the “as” throughout the book. when one looks closely at the passage, the transgressive communication between human and animal has nothing to do with a holy communion. thanks to nietzsche’s cautious rhetoric, what heidegger calls zarathustra’s “poetic force,” the scene does not impinge on the general logic of the narrative. in “afterthoughts on animal world,” akira mizuta lippit writes: “surprisingly, heidegger [who adamantly denies the possibility of an animal open19] grants to zarathustra and his animals a world to frame their interaction” (801). heidegger finds zarathustra’s proximity with animality justified by its poetics, i.e. by the significant antoine traisnel — zarathustra’s philosophari 93 rhetorical (as opposed to logical) and sensual (as opposed to sensible) quality of nietzsche’s language: zarathustra’s animals are all the more implacable inasmuch as we hear them—not expressing certain propositions or rules or admonitions—but saying from out of their essential natures what is essential, and saying it with growing lucidity through the palpable presence of sensuous imagery. sense-images speak only to those who possess the constructive energy to give them shape, so that they make sense. as soon as the poetic force—that is, the higher, constructive energy — wanes, the emblems turn mute. they petrify, become sheer ‘façade’ and ‘ornament’ (qtd. by lippit 801). zarathustra’s animals are not simply reified — fontenay would say allegorized. heidegger’s word-choice is of interest here. in the english translation, the animal is “petrified,” literally, “turned into stone.” this is evocative, given that in the fundamental concepts of metaphysics heidegger describes stones as being worldless (weltlos) while he grants the animal a world, albeit with limited access to it (weltarm). in this quote, it seems that the animals are slipping into the muteness (verstummen) and worldlessness of stones after rising briefly into the world-formation of humans. the german, however, merely says that the animals fall into or are reduced to mere façade and window dressing (sie fallen herab zur “fassade” und “staffage”). heidegger’s terms indicate that zarathustra’s animals return to their natural flatness and lowliness after having been bequeathed a certain human depth and stature by dint of the “higher constructive energy” of the poem. more importantly, however, heidegger writes that one hears the animals “saying from out of their essential natures what is essential [aus ihrem wesen das wesentliche sagen].” the intrinsic ambivalence of his phrasing recapitulates exactly the way in which animals encounter their human counterparts in zarathustra: they speak in the name but also from outside of their essential natures. zarathustra’s animalization is problematic for heidegger insofar as it exposes him “to the contagion of their world poverty” (lippit 802). in sum, for heidegger, when he speaks with his animals, zarathustra loses the world-making potential of language; for nietzsche, on the other hand, it is language — a certain speculative and not specular use of language — that made humans lose the world and their relationship to their animality. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 94 characteristically, the longest conversation zarathustra has with his animals occurs when they teach him the lesson of the eternal return. supposedly trapped in their own silence, condemned to a repetition that situates them outside of history, the animals represent the heraclitean creatures par excellence. heidegger notes that the animals speak about what they symbolize — i.e., “the eternal recurrence of things.” what he does not seem to notice is that the animals do not so much speak to zarathustra — and, contrary to what adrian del caro writes, they are not just “using his words” (413); nothing indicates that zarathustra is the owner and origin of the words he utters, let alone that the animals are “essentially no different than the negative zarathustra imitators (dwarf, foaming fool) – at best innocent by virtue of being animals” (ibid.) – but rather they speak for him. teaching him that he is “the teacher of the eternal recurrence [wiederkunft]” (237), the animals literally put words in zarathustra’s mouth (which is not to say that they themselves are the owners and origins of the discourse): ‘and if you should die now, o zarathustra: behold, we know too what you would then say to yourself – but your animals ask you not to die yet! ‘you would say. . . . ‘“now i die and decay,” you would say, “and in an instant i shall be nothingness. souls are as mortal as bodies. ‘“but the complex of causes in which i am entangled will recur – it will create me again! i myself am part of these causes of eternal recurrence. . . . ‘“i shall eternally return to this identical and self-same life, in the greatest things and in the smallest, to teach once more the eternal recurrence of all things, ‘“to speak once more the teaching of the great noontide of earth and man, to tell man of the übermensch once more”’ (237-238*). the discourse is framed by a double layer of quotation marks. not only do nietzsche’s animals speak, but they speak on behalf of the human who will then be sent in the world to preach the good news. the passage suggests that zarathustra is not driven by his mind but, as heidegger saw it, by his animals, which might be understood here as standing metonymically for his animal nature. nietzsche derides the christian and cartesian conceptions of disembodied subjects, affirming that if there is a “philosophy of the future,” it must be physical and not metaphysical, or, as del caro puts it, it needs to be “grounded on the earth.” moreover, the animals’ ventriloquism also hints at the permanent circulation of forces between the humans and the world in and by which they live. antoine traisnel — zarathustra’s philosophari 95 this scene echoes nietzsche’s own “experience of inspiration” as described in ecce homo apropos his writing of zarathustra. nowhere near the demiurgic poet promoted by a certain romantic ideal, the philosopher portrays himself as a simple mediator: …one is merely an incarnation, merely mouthpiece, merely medium of overwhelming forces. the concept of revelation—in the sense that suddenly, with indescribable certainty and subtlety, something becomes visible, audible, something that shakes one to the last depths and throws one down—that merely describes the facts. one hears, one does not seek; one accepts, one does not ask who gives; like lightning, a thought flashes up, with necessity, without hesitation regarding its form — i never had any choice (ecce homo 300; emphasis in original). the affirmation of life taught by zarathustra is the affirmation of a force that exceeds the limitations of the human self and of the human will (its operation is distinctly involuntary). the lesson of the eternal recurrence of things is not a matter of cognition (or volition) but of recognition of one’s human condition, that is, of the fact that one is not an unconditional (nor an unconceivable) being. there is no need to look for a justification in ulterior world — like the afterworldsmen do (58-61) – beyond this one world. in this light, the übermensch — a concept i have chosen not to translate as either “superman” or “overman” — is to be understood as the reconnection of humans with the world they dreamed themselves detached from. the übermensch is the one who has renounced the harmonious unity of the anthropos, the one who acknowledges and embraces his relational constitution, his entanglement with the “complex causes” that create him over and over again. barbara herrnstein smith has suggested that the übermensch might be translated as “the postman.”20 this translation strikes me as extremely promising given that, on the one hand, the prefix post renders the idea of being “over” man conveyed by the german über, and, on the other hand, the quotidian figure21 of the postman suggests that the übermensch is not the transcendental telos of the human – let us remember that he will not come at the apocalyptic end of the day but in the “great noontide,” when there is no shadow to speak of, and thereby little possibility to draw from one’s shadow a platonic idea of oneself – but his translator, his mediator, his messenger. this is why the animals tell zarathustra that he shall teach the world – not just his fellow humans – that “the middle is everywhere” (234). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 96 not only does nietzsche aim to overturn the metaphysical and eschatological project that the human constitutes by imagining the postman as an intermediary being, but he also warns us against the temptation of a teleological interpretation of darwin’s the descent of man, a title that may lead us to believe that evolutionism delineates a form of necessity staging the emergence of humanity as the ultimate chapter in the history of the world (see gay science 109, and cox 101-105).22 the postman is not coming after the human, who is not coming after the animal. such a chronological sequence is not what nietzsche’s animals are teaching zarathustra. the post in postman has to be understood like that of postmodernism, less as a temporal marker than as critical appendix. the postman is the one who, embracing his animal nature, “does not overlook sensual pleasures” and is endowed with “wild wisdom” (109). according to vanessa lemm, “nietzsche welcomes the return of the animal because he sees, in animality, a force that disrupts the human being’s identity. it is a return that destabilizes what is in view of what shall be…. [b]ecoming overhuman points to a movement of excess and an extension of the human that leads it beyond its all-too-human form” (23). focusing on the idea that man is “the animal with the right to make promises,” lemm recalls that promises are not just constative; they are also performative speech acts that contribute to the elaboration of the sovereign subject lemm understands to be the übermensch, a subject that refuses to remain identical to itself and constantly alters itself.23 this refusal of stabilization — the adoption of the regime of the “as” over that of the “is,” the “as such,” or the “as if” — is performed in the text through different rhetorical and grammatical tactics that prevent the formation of any absolute certitude: the human is at odds with the world in which he lives, but this sense of inadequacy does not result from an ontological discordance. i have tried to argue that this sense of inadequacy is often conveyed in zarathustra by a spectatorial disjointedness that supposes an irreducible remoteness. this remoteness is less the pseudo-neutral detachment of scientific or metaphysical observers than the humorous or ironic – or allegorical, in benjamin’s sense – distance necessary to disrupt the classical homogeneity of the human. the human is seen as an animal that (who?) sees the human in return, and even puts words in his mouth. the uncanny proximity with the animal undermines the dream of a perfect epistemic comprehension of nature. in a sense, nietzsche offers a revaluation of the eye, understood as the quintessential organ of humanism. significantly, it is such a revaluation that derrida retains from the often-cited scene of nietzsche’s demise: we all know about the episode in turin … where [nietzsche’s] compassion for a horse led him to take its head into his hands, sobbing…. antoine traisnel — zarathustra’s philosophari 97 now if tears come to the eyes, if they well up in them, and they can also veil sight, perhaps they reveal, in the very course of this experience, an essence of the eye…. the eye would be destined not to see but to weep. for at the very moment they veil sight, tears would unveil what is proper to the eye (in memoirs of the blind qtd. in wolfe 142). nietzsche’s madness cannot be dissociated from this moment of empathy, from this encounter with the non-human, this “animal relation” with another animal. at the very end of the book, when his animals have brought him the sign he has been waiting for, zarathustra grows silent: his heart, however, was loosened, and tears [thränen] fell from his eyes down upon his hands. and he no longer paid attention to anything, and sat there motionless and no longer warding off the animals. then the doves flew back and forth and sat upon his shoulders and fondled his white hair and did not weary of tenderness and rejoicing. the mighty lion, however, continually licked the tears that fell down zarathustra’s hands, roaring and growling shyly as he did so. thus did these animals [also trieben es diese thiere.] (334-325; emphasis added) this scene can be regarded as an example of compassion at a distance: once again, the teaching, if teaching it is, comes from the animals. it is the animals who show what compassion looks like. thus spoke zarathustra. thus did his animals. notes 1. philosophy often has “man” as its subject instead of the less exclusionary “human.” when he mentions what has been translated as “the overcoming of man,” nietzsche uses the more generic “mensch.” for a discussion of gender and the translation of übermensch as “superman” or “overman,” see avital ronell (80). 2. references to thus spoke zarathustra will be indicated directly in parentheses. i will use r. j. hollingdale’s translation. any modification of the translation will be indicated by an asterisk (*). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 98 3. translating verstummens as “deliberate muteness” seems problematic. benjamin is not as categorical, as is shown by his use of the adverb annähernd; “falling silent” or “being reduced to silence” might be more accurate to describe the effect of overnaming “from the point of view of the thing.” 4. i use spectatorial in the classical sense of the term, as positing an autonomous subject supposedly detached from the object he is watching. i see nietzsche as complicating this definition by emancipating the spectator, to use rancière’s vocabulary, from his supposed passivity and revealing his interlockedness with the world observed. the term philosafari echoes wittgenstein’s concept of “seeing-as.” in his discussion of jastrow’s “duck-rabbit,” wittgenstein suggests that the difference between “seeing” and “knowing” is far less evident than we usually think (“wann würde ich’s denn ein bloßes wissen, kein sehen, nennen?”). 5. the german “der erkennende” does not necessarily imply human agency, while hollingdale’s translation does (“the enlightened man”). thomas common’s “the discerning one” is not entirely satisfactory either because it does not render the reflexivity suggested by er-kennende, literally the “re-cognizing” or “acknowledging one,” in contrast to wissender, the “knowing one.” by privileging acknowledgment over knowledge, zarathustra underlines the irreducible belatedness, or better untimeliness, inherent in the process of cognition. 6. fontenay compares nietzsche’s menagerie to a zoological garden: “son bestiaire philosophique, à la différence des tropes du scepticisme, loin de réussir par surcroît quelque relève de l’abstrait dans la singularité, la diversité et le concret, quelque sauvetage des phénomènes, a manqué la bigarrure muette de la vie animale, tout comme le jardin zoologique anéantit l’être de ceux qu’il prétend exhiber” (610). while i agree that zarathustra’s reader is turned into a voyeur, i don’t think the animals are simply held captive of their metaphorical function. one need only recall, for instance, the lifelike description of bovine amazement (281) or of the docile tarantula (123) to see that nietzsche is a careful observer of the animal world. vanessa lemm sees nietzsche’s animal-metaphors as “overflow[ing] with life while universal concepts and abstract thinking exercise restriction and control over the artistic expression of animal life” (119). in opposition to a metaphysical linguistic tradition ordering knowledge and positing things-in-themselves, nietzsche valorizes relational, poetic language, understood here as a language that has not erased its metaphorical nature. of course, these two languages are not essentially different, but lemm describes the former as secondary, coming from the human (thereby more anthropocentric) and the latter as antoine traisnel — zarathustra’s philosophari 99 coming to the human and therefore “free from anthropomorphism” (120). while i would qualify this statement, i find the distinction to be both pertinent and useful. 7. see christoph cox’s excellent nietzsche: naturalism and interpretation. ensuing the death of god, cox writes, nietzsche attempts “to translate man back into nature” (beyond good and evil 230) by pursuing a new naturalism that does away with metaphysical dualisms without falling into senseless relativism. he avoids such a pitfall by recognizing the irreducibility of “interpretation” — which cox prefers to the misleading “perspective,” thereby unhitching interpretation from the simplistic analogy between seeing and knowing (113-114) —, that is, of an aesthetic relationship to the world the human is a part of. though in this essay i focus on the spectatorial, thus mainly scopic, relationship humans entertain with animals, i want to insist that the safari is a synesthetic experience insofar as it places the spectator in sight but also on site, that is, among the animals. 8. in we have never been human, latour claims that modernity faces an unprecedented crisis: the proliferation of hybrids confuses the theoretically incommensurable horizons of scientific facts and sordid politics, which is progressively forcing us — us pseudomoderns — to reconsider the great divide between knowledge and power, science and politics, nonhumans and humans. we can no longer deal simply with “things-inthemselves” or with “humans-among-themselves,” latour claims, and we must now replace “societies” with “collectives,” understood as “associations of humans and nonhumans” (4). this crisis, latour adds, is the “crisis of the critical stance.” it may be useful here to recall that “crisis” and “critical” share a common etymology. such a linguistic stuttering, typical of latour’s irony, shows that modernity is both profoundly critical — in the sense that it is constituted by a number of foundational crises and determined by a set of radical discontinuities (epistemological, social, discursive) — and yet deeply acritical — protected as it is by its refusal to call into question the ontological distinction between humans and nonhumans, subjects and objects, politics and science (11). the emergence of modernity is coterminous with the birth of the human as we know it and, simultaneously, though this reality is obfuscated, with the birth of the nonhuman (13). having established this monstrous kinship, latour makes a strange move. in order to escape the confines of our modernity (a modernity whose constructedness is now recognized), he suggests that we reconcile the two meanings of the word “representation” (29) and that we extend democracy to things (12). in the chapter entitled “revolution,” latour claims that “what sartre has said of humans — that their existence precedes their essence — has to be said of all the actants: of air’s humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 100 spring as well as society, of matter as well of consciousness” (86). what he professes is the disappearance of the subject/object dichotomy to the benefit of variable agency. in other words, latour is telling us that we have never been human, if the human is understood to be radically different from the nonhuman. yet, latour does not suggest that we get rid of the figure of the human, but only of this “reduced form of humanity” that is the modern man (138). latour prophesies that humanity can maintain itself only by sharing itself with the mute forces or quasi-objects it used to consider radically foreign and by acknowledging its being part of a network that it imagined itself disconnected from. 9. “walter benjamin made a decisive step forward in our understanding of the baroque” writes gilles deleuze, “when he showed that allegory was not a failed symbol, or an abstract personification, but a power of figuration entirely different from that of the symbol: the latter combines the eternal and the momentary, nearly at the center of the world, but allegory uncovers nature and history according to the order of time” (the fold 143). 10. fontenay criticizes michel haar for arguing that zarathustra’s animals exist independently from — or at least are irreducible to — the concepts they stand for (fontenay 600). 11. the translation of “denken” by “conceive” seems particularly adequate insofar as, on the next page, zarathustra affirms that “the creator himself to be the child new-born must be willing to be the mother and endure the mother’s pain” (111). 12. “when zarathustra once told [the story of the adder’s bite] to his disciples, they asked: ‘and what, o zarathustra, is the moral of your story?’ zarathustra answered the question thus: ‘the good and just call me the destroyer of morals: my story is immoral’” (93). see also this passage in ecce homo, about nietzsche author of zarathustra: “i have not been asked, as i should have been asked, what the name of zarathustra means in my mouth, the mouth of the first immoralist: for what constitutes the tremendous historical uniqueness of this persia is just the opposite of this. zarathustra was the first to consider the fight of good and evil the very wheel in the machinery of things: the transposition of morality into the metaphysical realm, as a force, cause, and end in itself, is his work. but the question itself is at bottom its own answer. zarathustra created the most calamitous error, morality; consequently, he must be the first to recognize it” (ecce homo, 327-328). antoine traisnel — zarathustra’s philosophari 101 13. this is supported by the fact that der erkennende wandelt unter menschen als unter thieren is almost anacoluthic while wandelt zarathustra nicht unter uns wie unter thieren? is perfectly grammatical. 14. my thanks go to zachary sng, who drew my attention to the fact the antonomasia can be read as a specimen of “being-as” or “being seen as.” 15. significantly, language seems to have replaced action in zarathustra’s journey. every station of his pilgrimage is punctuated by a speech. the recurrence of the incantatory “thus spoke zarathustra” places the emphasis on the singularity of each of the utterances: the “thus,” here, does not index a logical necessity but rather underlines the baroque mannerism of zarathustra’s harangues, which are meant less to edify than to stir their interlocutors. they are events more than sermons. while zarathustra’s teaching may at first appear doctrinal — in the same way that nietzsche’s aphorisms seem to proclaim general truths whereas they aim to shatter the certitudes of commonsense — it never establishes knowledge but rather seeks to provoke a reaction. 16. “once the straightforward truth of our human distinctiveness is unsettled by the straightforward truth of our animal identity,” writes barbara herrnstein smith, “there’s no point, or at least no more obviously natural point, beyond which the claims of our kinship with other creatures — or, indeed, beings of any kind — could not be extended; nor, by the same token, is there any grouping of creatures, at least no more obviously rational grouping, to which such claims might not be confined” (154). 17. one will remember how nietzsche justified his aphoristic style in the preface to the genealogy of morals, published two years after thus spoke zarathustra, writing: “to be sure, one thing is necessary above all if one is to practice reading as an art in this way, something that has been unlearned most thoroughly nowadays — and therefore it will be some time before my writings are ‘readable’ — something for which one has almost to be a cow and in any case not a ‘modern man’: rumination” (emphasis in original, 23). 18. in an insightful parenthesis, deleuze uses an animal metaphor to describe this classificatory inclination as limiting — and limited by — its reactive nature: “(thus knowledge gives life laws that separate if from what it can do, that keep it from acting, that forbid it to act, maintaining it in the narrow framework of scientifically observable reaction: almost like an animal in a zoo. but this knowledge that measures, limits and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 102 moulds life is itself entirely modeled on reactive life, within the limits of reactive life)” (nietzsche 100). 19. as agamben makes clear, heidegger’s reflection on the human/animal difference is for the most part based on a form of spectatoriality that greatly differs from nietzsche’s: “at work in both nietzsche and rilke is that oblivion of being ‘which lies at the foundation of the biologism of the nineteenth century and of psychoanalysis’ and whose ultimate consequence is ‘a monstrous anthropomorphization of. . . .the animal and a corresponding animalization of man. [for heidegger, however,] only man, indeed only the essential gaze of authentic thought, can see the open which names the unconcealedness of beings” (agamben 58). for heidegger, the human gaze is characterized by a “proximity,” an “essentially unmediated and immediate irruption of being into beings” from which the animal is “excluded,” while for rilke – whose “basic poetic experience is not at all distinct from the basic position of nietzsche’s thinking” – “the animal sees more than man does, for the animal’s gaze is not trammeled by any objects but can go on infinitely, in some unknown way, into the objectless.” in the eighth duino elegy, rilke writes: “and we: spectators [zuschauer] always and everywhere, / to whom all is turned and never out there!” for the poet, the human can only catch a retrospective glimpse of “the open” by looking at the animal, which he deems unmediatedly connected to the whole: “what is outside we know from the animal’s / visage alone” (emphasis in original). heidegger observes: “it is almost as if in [rilke’s] poetry there is operative an unlimited and groundless hominization of the animal, by which the animal, with respect to the original experience of beings as a whole, is even raised above man and becomes in a certain way a ‘super-man’” (parmenides 141-161). 20. i thank barbara herrnstein smith for this brilliant, off-the-cuff remark. with the postman, i embrace all the valences that derrida attributes to the prefix “post” in the post card, especially the sense of a necessary lag between the sending (envoi) and the reception. it is noteworthy that the “late nietzsche” thought of himself as writing posthumously for an audience that had yet to be invented, hence perhaps zarathustra’s address to “everyone and no one.” the “post” of “posthumously” indexes less a mere latency than the inherent untimeliness of great books. only under certain conditions will the book encounter its readers, who need new ears and new eyes to perceive “the most distant things.” the rest can neither see nor hear yet. “the rest are merely mankind” (the antichrist 125). antoine traisnel — zarathustra’s philosophari 103 21. in grounding the nietzsche rhetoric of earth adrian del caro makes a convincing case for a “quotidian nietzsche” (212-221), suggesting that instead of “questions such as what is the human being, why are we here, what is our fate after death, how do we reconcile with god etc, ‘we must again become good neighbors of the closest things and no longer gaze contemptuously beyond them toward clouds and nocturnal monsters’ (hh ii/2 16)” (219 ; emphasis in original). this revalorization of the quotidian — “nutrition, place, climate, recreation, the entire casuistry of selfishness,” but also one’s shadow (del caro 399) — is less an egocentric withdrawal than a call to be more attentive to an environment to which the human has gradually grown indifferent. nietzsche’s prayer is reminiscent of thoreau’s treatment of animals as “brute neighbors” in walden or his appeal to what a politics of “nextness,” which implies a form of proximity to as well as an irreducible distance from one’s object (see stanley cavell, conditions handsome and unhandsome). 22. nietzsche repeatedly derides this anthropocentric pretension: “and when it is all over with the human intellect, nothing will have happened. for this intellect has no additional mission which would lead it beyond human life. rather, it is human, and only its possessor and begetter takes it so solemnly — as though the world’s axis turned within it. but if we could communicate with a gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. there is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately swell up like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing” (on truth and lies in a nonmoral sense). 23. there is an ongoing debate underlying this question. some understand the übermensch as the ultimate sovereign subject able to promise indefinitely, while others see the “sovereign individual” described in the genealogy of morals as a problematic figure who complies with the “slave morality” and thus cannot be identified as the übermensch. for a clarification of this debate, see christa acampora’s “on sovereignty and overhumanity” and paul s. loeb’s commentary of acampora’s essay, “finding the übermensch in nietzsche’s genealogy of morality” (78-79). appealing to performativity might be a promising way to resolve lemm’s seemingly contradictory definition of sovereignty as constant alteration. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 104 works cited acampora, christa davis. “on sovereignty and overhumanity. why it matters how we read nietzsche’s genealogy ii.2.” revised and republished in critical essays on the classics. nietzsche’s on the genealogy of morals. ed. christa davis acampora. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2006. 147-162. acampora, christa davis, and ralph r. acampora. a nietzschean bestiary. becoming animal beyond docile and brutal. lanham. md: rowman and littlefield, 2004. agamben, giorgio. the open. trans. kevin attell. stanford: stanford up, 2002. benjamin, walter. the arcades project. trans. howard eiland and kevin mclaughlin. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1999. —————. selected writings. edited by marcus bullock and michael w. jennings. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 2004. caro, adrian del. grounding the nietzsche rhetoric of earth. berlin: walter de gruyter, 2004. certeau, michel de. the practice of everyday life. trans. steven f. rendall, berkeley: u california p, 1984. deleuze, gilles. nietzsche and philosophy. trans. janis tomlinson. new york: columbia up, 1983. —————. the fold. leibniz and the baroque. trans. tom conley. u minnesota p, 1992. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am (following). trans,. david wills. new york: fordham up, 2008. fontenay, élisabeth de. le silence des bêtes. la philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité. paris: fayard, 1998. haar, michel. “les animaux de zarathoustra.” alter (alt), revue de phénoménologie. n°3 (1995): 319-43. antoine traisnel — zarathustra’s philosophari 105 heidegger, martin. the fundamental concepts of metaphysics. world, finitude, solitude. trans. william mcneill and nicholas walker. bloomington, in: indiana up, 1995. —————. gesamtausgabe. ii. abteilung: vorlesungen 1923-1944. band 44. nietzsches metaphysiche grundstellung im abendländischen denken – die ewige wiederkehr des gleichen. frankfurt am main: vittorio klostermann, 1986. —————. die grundbegriffe der metaphysik. welt – endlichkeit – einsamkeit. frankfurt am main: vittorio klostermann, 1983. —————. parmenides. trans. andré schuwer and richard rojcewicz. bloomington, in: indiana up, 1998. latour, bruno. “will non-humans be saved? an argument in ecotheology.” journal of the royal anthropological institute v. 15 (september 2008): 459-475. —————. we have never been modern. trans. catherine porter. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 1993. laycock, steven w. “the animal as animal: a plea for open conceptuality.” animal others. on ethics, ontology, and animal life. ed. peter steeves. albany: state u new york p, 1999. 271-284. lemm, vanessa. nietzsche’s animal philosophy. culture, politics and the animality of the human being. new york: fordham up, 2009. lippit, akira mizuta. “afterthoughts on the animal world.” mln 109.5 (1994): 786-830. loeb, paul s. “finding the übermensch in nietzsche’s genealogy of morality.” journal of nietzsche studies. 30 (autumn 2005): 70-101. nietzsche, friedrich. the genealogy of morals and ecce homo. trans. walter kaufmann and r.j. hollingdale. new york: vintage, 1989. —————. human, all-too-human. trans. r.j. hollingdale. cambridge: cambridge up, 1996. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 106 —————. thus spoke zarathustra. trans. r.j. hollingdale. new york: penguin, 1969. —————. the twilight of the idols and the anti-christ: or how to philosophize with a hammer. trans. r.j. hollingdale. new york: penguin, 1990. —————. untimely meditations. trans. r.j. hollingdale. cambridge. cambridge up, 1983. ronell, avital. fighting theory. champaign: u illinois p, 2010. smith, barbara herrnstein. scandalous knowledge. science, truth and the human. durham, nc: duke up, 2005. weber, samuel. benjamin’s -abilities. cambridge, ma: harvard up, 2008. wolfe, cary. what is posthumanism? u minnesota p, 2009. microsoft word bolla hovorka pdf dummy.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:2 andrea k. bolla and alice j. hovorka placing wild animals in botswana: engaging geography’s transspecies spatial theory introduction. geographers are well positioned to contribute to understanding of interspecies mingling within the realm of critical animal studies, given their grounding in spatial theory and their focus on human-environment relations as a central object of study. animal geographers have joined the ranks of such scholars over the past two decades, and now consider nonhuman animals as beings with their own lives, needs, and even self-awareness, rather than as mere entities to be trapped, counted, mapped, and analyzed (philo 54). more specifically, animal geographers explore how animals are “placed” by humans both conceptually and materially, invoking a transspecies spatial theory to explain and unravel the complexity of human-animal relations. our aim in this paper is to engage transspecies spatial theory and illuminate the dynamics of human “placement” of animals and resulting human-animal encounters through a case study of wild animals in kasane, botswana. first, we explore human imaginings of wild animals based on respect for and exploitation of nonhuman animals that together shape dominant conservation and tourism agendas, and fix wild animals in discrete “protected areas” across the landscape. second, we explore the transgressions and mingling among species that emerge from such essentialist conceptual and material placements. these encounters reinforce human imaginings of wild animals by generating fear-based responses and “problem animal” discourses, which ultimately reaffirm ideas and practices associated with wild animals’ proper place as being within bounded spaces. we offer an explicit overview and engagement of animal geography theory, emphasizing human placement of animals as a key tenet to understanding human-animal relations. further, this article features an empirical study of specifically african interspecies mingling, a topic which to date has not featured prominently in critical animal studies or animal geography scholarship.1 transspecies spatial theory. humans place animals in a variety of imaginary, literary, psychological, and virtual spaces, as well as in physical spaces as diverse as homes, fields, factories, zoos, and national parks. this occurs through classification schemes whereby humans neatly identify, delimit, and position animals in their proper conceptual and material space relative to themselves and to other animals (philo and wilbert 5-6). such placements dictate where animals belong, where they should go, how andrea k. bolla & alice j. hovorka — placing wild animals in botswana: engaging transspecies theory 57 long they should stay, how they should behave, what use they have (to humans), and how humans interact with them. in turn, these placements are necessarily spatial and have important consequences for the extent to which different animals are included and/or excluded from particular spaces (philo 51-52). certain types of animals are contested and excluded from human homes and neighborhoods because they are deemed wild, dangerous, or unhygienic, while others are included because they are considered tame, clean, or charismatic (philo and wolch 108). many human discourses contain within them a definite imaginative geography, which serves to position “them” (animals) relative to “us” (humans) in a way that links the conceptual “othering” (setting them apart in terms of character traits) to a geographical “othering” (fixing them in world places and spaces different from those that humans tend to occupy) (philo and wilbert 10-11). space, while appearing initially unproblematic, takes on an active role in the production and reproduction of human and animal positionality. space is never simply where things happen (wolch and emel xiv) or a stage for human action, innocent in its role in shaping human affairs. according to lefebvre, “space is a social product.... [t]he space thus produced also serves as a tool of thought and of action.... [i]n addition to being a means of production it is also a means of control, and hence of domination, of power” (lefebvre 26). rather, the spatial expression of species hierarchy across the physical landscape reinforces ideas about the proper place of particular animals (and particular humans) and animals in relation to humans. power relations between humans and animals are actively engaged through space as based on human placements (of animals) and animal transgressions (of human placements). although conceptual and material placement of animals by humans often results in a stark, essentialized, fixed spatial expression (where humans prefer animals to remain outside the perimeter of human existence), in reality there exists a more complex imaginative geography of animals whereby human-animal encounters are varied, multi-dimensional, and frequent. further, the human-animal relationship is not one-directional, with only humans exerting power and agency through placement of animals; animals also exert their own power and agency through actions and potential intent. animals often end up accepting, evading, or transgressing the places to which humans seek to allot them. some animals can be taught which places are out of bounds, while other animals will wander in and out of the relevant human spatial orderings without necessarily knowing that they are doing this (thus ranging from transgression of to resistance to human spatial practices) (philo and wilbert 22). ultimately, the extent to which animals humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 58 accept, evade, or transgress the places to which humans seek to allot them reinforces or counters human placements, generating a relational negotiation of physical boundaries and discursive imaginaries. to this end, animals themselves figure in socio-spatial practices of inclusion/exclusion and are influential actors in the human-animal relationship. whatmore describes this as a “relational effect generated by a network of heterogeneous, interacting components whose activity is constituted in the networks of which they form a part” (whatmore 28). as such, the role and significance of animals is essentially produced and developed through encounters between people and animals whereby human spatial practices are based on economic, political, social, and cultural requirements, and animal agency comes in relation to such practices (philo and wilbert 24). spatial inclusions and exclusions of particular animals by humans are bound up in the more symbolic dimensions of encounters between humans and animals, which animal geographers attempt to unravel by teasing out the numerous social, political, economic, and cultural pressures shaping these relationships (philo and wolch 110). on the ground, human-animal and spatial relations are scrambled and destabilized in a number of ways that makes the dual conceptual and material placements of animals both extremely interesting and difficult to decode. transspecies spatial theory, as detailed above, reflects foundational tenets of animal geography scholarship aimed at illuminating the place of animals in society and disrupting the assumed dichotomy between humans and animals. since the mid-1990s, these core concepts have been applied to and extended through various case studies documenting human-animal relations. of particular relevance to this paper are recent animal geography extensions into transspecies urban theory, which challenge the ideas that cities are the exclusive domains of humans (wolch 726) and that animals do not live or belong in urban (human) space. empirical studies illuminate the minglings and transgressions that occur when animals (as assumed non-urban dwellers) enter into or reside within defined “human” space of the city. possums in sydney, australia, monkeys in singapore, and chickens in gaborone, botswana, as well as broader commentaries on cattle in london and chicago (and attitudes towards animals in los angeles, usa), provide insights into the intricacies of human-animal relations despite the rigid ways in which humans define the place of animals as necessarily “outside of” cities.2 recognizing the presence or even agency of urban animals (whether permanent or transient) is essential when detailing and explaining urban form and function, as well as daily lives of urban residents. this paper extends transspecies spatial theory beyond these urban iterations to include non-urban areas (thus considering both kasane township and chobe park in botswana) and multifaceted interspecies mingling that occurs when animals transgress into human areas (kasane) and humans transgress into andrea k. bolla & alice j. hovorka — placing wild animals in botswana: engaging transspecies theory 59 animal areas (chobe). it also offers an empirical study of specifically african humananimal relations, which to date has not featured prominently in animal geography scholarship or critical animal studies. methodology. interpretivist in nature, this empirical investigation of wild animal placement in botswana uses qualitative research design to facilitate inductive contextualization and “thick description,”3 capturing human perceptions, beliefs, and meanings associated with animals. it develops geographical constructs of conceptual and material placement through in-depth examination of and exposure to human-wild animal encounters, instead of entering the field with a set of given constructs or assumptions of how those encounters evolve or ultimately occur.4 it acknowledges the situated knowledge of human subjects involved in the research, recognizing that knowledge is based on social constructions of reality and mediated through the positionality of both the researcher and the researched.5 in this case, animals are represented through interpretations of human researchers and human respondents. (figure 1) our investigation features botswana as a study site, a landlocked nation bordered by south africa, namibia, zambia and zimbabwe (see figure 1). botswana’s human population of 2,065,398 (government of botswana http://www.gov.bw/en/ accessed humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 60 january 26 2012). is relatively small in proportion to its vast terrain, resulting in a low mean population density of approximately three persons per square kilometer (united nations environmental programme-world conservation monitoring programme). botswana’s wild animal population is extensive and diverse. of the twenty-seven central species featured in the nation’s wildlife statistics for 2006, ranging from elephants to baboons, eland to ostrich, there is an estimated population of 454,246 wild animals (republic of botswana, “botswana environmental statistics”). notably, the nation is home to the largest population of african elephants, at approximately 120,000 to 150,000 in the northern region (republic of botswana, “wildlife statistics”). eighteen percent of the country’s land is designated as protected areas, consisting of four national parks (gemsbok, chobe, nxai pan, and makgadikgadi pans) and three game reserves (central kalahari, moremi wildlife, and khutse), which contain and conserve the nation’s wild animals. an additional twenty-one percent of lands are defined as wildlife management areas (wmas), which are stretches of land bordering protected areas, acting as buffer zones and migratory corridors to support the ecological functions of protected areas (republic of botswana, “wildlife statistics”) (see figure 2). almost ninety percent of botswana’s human population lives along the better-watered, more fertile eastern regions along the north-south band, which follows the main road and rail routes linking south africa, botswana, and zambia.6 this stretch of land hosts the urban centers of gaborone (the capital city, largest human population) and francistown (the country’s most industrialized urban center, second largest human population), as well as other major human settlement areas, including palapye, serowe, and mochudi. andrea k. bolla & alice j. hovorka — placing wild animals in botswana: engaging transspecies theory 61 (figure 2) data collection took place from may to july 2008 and included purposive, semistructured interviews, secondary data review, and participant observation. interviews were conducted in english with fifty-seven people, including local citizens, natural and social scientists, researchers, representatives of local and foreign non-governmental organizations, international conservationists, tourism operators, traditional leaders, and government officials at the ministry of environment, wildlife, and tourism and the department of wildlife and national parks. the broad range of respondents facilitated rich and diverse insights into environmental values, ideas about appropriate humananimal relations, and the extent of local knowledge of and experience with various types of wild animals.7 identification of the study sample occurred through snowball sampling, whereby each respondent interviewed was asked to identify other potential respondents with the target characteristics.8 secondary data included a review of academic literature on wild animals in botswana from the perspectives of cultural and physical geographers, ecologists, biologists, and policy analysts; sites of public discourse, such as print media, national policies, laws and programs dealing with wild animals; media campaigns; documents supplied by government and ngos; and written stories and folklore about wild animals. participant observation occurred through informal conversations, direct observation, and active participation in activities that facilitated first-hand encounters (e.g. accompanying government officers on game drives, encountering wild animals in homesteads, etc). while kasane, chobe district, features as a case study for this paper, data collection took place in various locales in botswana. data analysis was informed by literature reviews, secondary data, interview transcripts, field observations, and prior knowledge/capacity to recognize themes in the data. primary and secondary data were analyzed by means of content analysis, a coding scheme for artifacts of social communication.9 two separate stages of content analysis were conducted: revealing themes from semi-structured interviews and secondary data, and establishing potential links between the conceptual and material placement of wild animals in botswana. textual passages were examined for internal meanings, assumptions, and beliefs, and extracted passages were then organized according to emerging themes. passages associated with each theme were examined further to create more specific, refined ones, which were organized under three chief categories: what constitutes “wildlife,” wild animals as a useful natural resource (positive perceptions), and wild animals as harmful (negative perceptions). individual themes (sub-categories) within the latter two categories include: wild animals as economic development tools, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 62 as integral to ecological systems, as recreationally valuable, as a source of nutrition, and as symbols, which are linked to wild animals as a useful natural resource, while threats to pastoral livelihoods and human lives were identified as sub-categories for conceptualizations of wild animals as harmful. in the first stage of analysis, the three sets of themes were examined for inter-relationships and situated within the context of the broader literature review. in the second stage of analysis, data was triangulated by merging information from secondary data, interviews, and observations in order to link wild animal discourses and social constructions with material places and reveal relations between humans and wild animals in particular spaces placing wild animals. both humans and wild animals inhabit and live in kasane, botswana, within a large variety of discursive and spatial settings, and meet one another through frequent and multi-faceted encounters. wild animals are “imagined” or conceptually placed through human ideas and classifications wrapped up with both human respect for and exploitation of, in particular, charismatic fauna such as lions, leopards, elephants, buffalos, rhinos, zebras, and giraffes. wild animals are also “fixed” or materially placed in discrete spaces across the landscape, specifically within chobe national park (see figure 3), which contain animals that are the source of both human wonderment and economic use value. yet these essentialized placements are more complex in everyday life: humans move in and out of the national park while wild animals move in and out of the human settlement of the kasane township. such interspecies encounters generate fear-based responses and “problem animal” discourses, which in turn reaffirm ideas of the proper place of wild animals, and justify practices that keep them contained within these discourses. the remainder of this paper details human-wild animal relations in kasane, botswana, through the lens of transspecies spatial theory. andrea k. bolla & alice j. hovorka — placing wild animals in botswana: engaging transspecies theory 63 (figure 3) imagining & fixing. imaginaries of african wildlife in popular culture evoke scenes of exotic animals running freely and exuding raw untamedness across wide-open savannahs. indeed few scenes of nature are more breathtaking for humans than giraffes gliding gracefully through the acacia landscape or a family of elephants frolicking at a watering hole or a lion sitting majestically amongst the tall grass (see figures 4 and 5). human wonderment at such charismatic fauna has spurred enthusiasm for containing them, for example within national parks, conservation areas, and game reserves, in order for both gazing upon them and protecting them from humanity. in turn, the ecological valuing of wild animals, and the ethical belief that they should be sheltered from humans, have provided humans with numerous economic benefits. wild animals as resources for and foundations of tourism activities have generated income and national pride, ultimately reinforcing protectionist paradigms in the human-animal relationship. further, protectionism takes on a spatial expression necessarily delineating rigid boundaries and containing “us” in human settlements and “them” in protected areas. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 64 (figure 4; photo by aneta karnecka) in botswana, the physical placement or fixing of wild animals in discrete spaces emerged largely from the contemporary international conservation agenda. traditionally, local chiefs held ownership and responsibility for wild animals, focusing primarily on hunting activities for self-sufficiency for hundreds of years,10 with animals left to roam freely across the landscape. the british colonial government installed in 1885 a “fortress” style of conservation based on a largely state-owned and centralized resource management scheme.11 under this scheme, wild animals were reified as exotic beings and government officials established bans, quotas, and licenses to limit indigenous hunting practices.12 to some extent wild animals were privileged over indigenous humans during the colonial period and euro-american ideas of conservation became prominent conceptualizations with regard to the human-animal relationship based on the uniqueness of africa’s “eden” of wild animals.13 state preservationist policies led to the establishment of two protected areas during the early 1960s, namely chobe game reserve (1960) and central kalahari game reserve (1961). andrea k. bolla & alice j. hovorka — placing wild animals in botswana: engaging transspecies theory 65 (figure 5; photo by june liversedge) at the same time, however, several aspects of colonialism in bechuanaland (now botswana) were exceptional in the region, whereby tribal authorities continued to hold legal rights to benefit from wildlife, and some rights of management; while game was ultimately state property, hunting concessions enhanced tribal coffers.14 further, bechuanaland did not have strict laws and practices of racial segregation found in other southern african nations, with many local settlers marrying africans and with social networks exhibiting an exceptional degree of cross-cultural communication. thus, preservationist policies in botswana were not only the product of european conservationist ideas. they also emerged through converging views of conservation amongst disparate groups, including chiefs, hunters, white adventurers, and international organizations, all of whom came to see preservationist policies as being in their interest. establishment of moremi park (1965), for example, emerged from localized practices protecting wildlife from depredations of illegal south african hunting parties and ensuring future domestic use.15 protectionist conservation agendas in bechuanaland, and later botswana, therefore influenced human-animal relations through the physical (spatial) separation more so than through state political appropriation and control over wild animals. at independence in 1966, the government of botswana continued its conservationist agenda by establishing chobe national park (1967), makgadikgadi pans and nxai pans (1970 as game reserves, 1992 as national parks), and khutse game reserve (1971). in addition to protected areas aimed at wild animal conservation, wildlife management areas (established through the tribal grazing land policy of 1975) serve as corridors for migratory species between protected areas; these also act as buffer zones between humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 66 human settlements and protected areas (republic of botswana, “botswana environment statistics”). in 1989, the government decentralized its wild animal management scheme to further include local communities living close to protected areas in decision-making structures; the aim of community-based natural resource management is to allow local communities increased benefits from containment of wild animals for conservation and tourism purposes.16 this recent conservation trajectory reinforces the importance of separating wild animals from humans in order to protect the former (and possibly the latter, as is discussed later), yet reduces local human concerns regarding their lack of access to animals.17 land allocations continue for the purposes of wild animal conservation, including kgalagadi transfrontier park (2000) and the kavango-zambezi trans-frontier conservation area (currently under development). the physical arrangement and delineation of animals from human zones is reflected in the kasane area of botswana, located in the northern-most chobe district, at the corner of the caprivi strip of namibia to the north and west, zambia to the north, and zimbabwe to the east (republic of botswana, "population and housing") (see again figure 3). the primary wild animal zone is chobe national park. the area originally hosted a large settlement whose inhabitants were the san people (basarwa). they were hunter-gatherers who lived by moving from one area to another in search of water, wild fruits, and animals. the san were later joined by groups of the basubiya people and later, around 1911, by a group of batawana led by chief sekgoma. when the country was divided into various land tenure systems early in the twentieth century, the larger part of the area that is now the national park was classified as crown land. the idea of creating a national park was first inspired by the desire to protect wild animals from extinction and to attract tourists. in 1932, 24,000 square kilometers in chobe district was declared a non-hunting area. the following year, the protected area was increased to 31,000 square kilometers. a decade later, heavy tsetse fly infestations led to the project’s collapse. in 1957, a reduced area of 21,000 square kilometers was proposed as a game reserve. it was then gazetted as chobe game reserve in 1960, and seven years later was declared a national park totalling 10,589 square kilometers (republic of botswana, “botswana environment statistics”). in 1975, the large settlement based on the timber industry at serondela gradually moved out, and chobe national park was finally “emptied of human occupation.” finally, in 1980 and 1987, the boundaries were altered to increase the park to its current size (botswana tourism board, “tourism board”). chobe national park is home to a variety of animal species and hosts the largest population of elephants on the african continent, with an estimated 30,348 individuals living in the park (republic of botswana, “wildlife statistics”). the riverfront also provides a vital source of water, particularly during the dry winter months, for large andrea k. bolla & alice j. hovorka — placing wild animals in botswana: engaging transspecies theory 67 herds of cape buffalo, along with waterbuck, lechwe, puku, giraffe, kudu, roan, sable, impala, warthog, bushbuck, monkeys and baboons, together with predators such as lion, leopard, hyena, and jackal, converging upon the river to drink. the river also supports populations of hippopotamus and crocodile (botswana tourism board, “travel companion”). the township of kasane is the primary human settlement, situated on the south bank of the chobe river and the north-eastern boundary of the park (republic of botswana, “chobe district”). kasane has experienced an average growth of 5.83 percent between 1991 and 2001 with 7,638 people living in the town and village (republic of botswana, “population and housing”). its strategic location along the main tourist sites, namely, the okavango delta and victoria falls, zimbabwe, and its recognition as an international tourist destination, have led to its recent expansion and to increased tourism-related employment opportunities for batswana people (republic of botswana, “chobe district”). botswana’s wild animal management strategy has long been grounded in environmental discourse that privileges “pristine nature” in ecologically demarcated zones of “wilderness.”18 while humans are established as gatekeepers of these zones, they are clearly identified by scientists, conservationists, and government officials as the “other” who does not belong. according to the botswana tourism board, “parks and reserves have been established for the protection of the wildlife. here, in the wilderness of botswana, it is you who are the intruder and your presence is a privilege” (botswana tourism board, “botswana tourism board”). hence, socially constructed “wildlife places” exist beyond the realm of human occupation, intervention, and control, where humans are necessarily and literally out of place. these spaces are reserved as sites of quiet observation based on the belief that, as one local tourist operator put it, “animals are not to be disturbed [by people] in their territory.” further, wild animals and their designated spaces are viewed as key components in broader environmental models of harmony and sustainability.”19 as noted by a senior game reserve staff member: “wildlife is necessary to maintaining an ecological balance. without wildlife everything [would be] out of kilter.” a volunteer at cheetah conservation botswana echoes this sentiment saying, “[wildlife is] part of the ecology, part of the system.... so, how can it not be there? it doesn’t make sense.” finally, botswana’s wild animal management strategy is grounded in ethical discourse recognizing the intrinsic value of animals, well beyond their utility to humans.”20 local conservation agencies frequently engage this ethical principle in campaigns soliciting support and funds. cheetah conservation botswana, for example, highlights the cheetahs’ unique physiology, specifically its humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 68 ability to achieve “breathtaking acceleration” and speed, as a means of urging people to commit to its protection (cheetah conservation botswana). through the conservation agenda, humans imagine wild animals in botswana as part of pristine nature and as ecologically valuable beings with intrinsic value. the spatial implications of this agenda emerge from human containment of wild animals into fixed spatial boundaries of protected areas essentially “for their own good.” yet the containment of animals in a fishbowl is also “good for humans,” given the income generated from tourism founded upon the viewing of (or hunting and killing of) animals. hence, human wonderment at wild animals, the catalyst in part for the conservation agenda, has met up with an objectification of “them” for economic gain. as such, human ecological imaginings of wild animals are necessarily wrapped up with socio-economic valuing of them. according to a dwnp staff member, “wildlife conservation is very important in botswana because without wildlife our economy would suffer,” or, as a local citizen noted, “we have to protect [wild] animals because they give us employment. people have jobs because people come from all over the world to see the animals we have.” the government of botswana is actively promoting wild animal-based tourism as an alternative engine of growth to strengthen and diversify the economy (republic of botswana, “botswana environment statistics”). the sector currently stands as the second largest contributor to gross domestic product (9.5 percent), generating us$1.6 billion per annum, second only to the profitable diamond mining industry (world travel tourism council). approximately 15,000 people are directly employed in this sector with an additional 58,783 people employed indirectly, representing 10.6 percent of total employment (botswana tourism board, “tourism industry”). it is projected that by 2018, tourism’s gdp contribution is expected to rise to 11.9 percent of gdp or approximately us$2.4 million and to employ 13.2 percent of the human population (world travel tourism council). in kasane, wild animal tourism directly employs forty percent of the people (world travel tourism council; atlhopeng, et al.) and provides employment indirectly to industries such as art galleries, internet cafes, and souvenir shops. wild animals are encountered through game drives, guided walks, boat cruises, elephant-back safaris, a crocodile farm, a snake park, and walks with meerkats. the tourism board urges visitors to “feel the rush of adrenalin as a lion seeks its prey in savuti or elephants in the chobe feed just beside your vehicle” (botswana tourism board, “bajanala”). as one kasane resident explained, “it’s nice to have animals because it brings tourists. we are working here because of tourists; we are paid because of them. if they are not coming, it means there will be no business. that’s why i think it andrea k. bolla & alice j. hovorka — placing wild animals in botswana: engaging transspecies theory 69 is important to have [wild animals].” furthermore, the economic contribution of wild animals extends to community and household levels by way of cbnrm programs where local trusts and individual households benefit directly from locally organized viewings or hunts of particular species.21 as of 2002, community-based organizations involved in cbnrm generated approximately 84.5 million pula (approximately usd13 million) (republic of botswana, “wildlife statistics”). in sum, wild animals are imagined as exotic beings and as representatives of pristine nature that must be conserved and protected for their own good, as well as for humans’ moral satisfaction and personal enjoyment. that wild animals, through their containment in protected areas, bring economic gains to human citizens of botswana further reinforces and justifies their place in discrete spaces across the landscape, separate from human settlements. hence human conceptual and material placements of wild animals are mutually constituted and grounded in human wonderment at and economic use value associated with these nonhuman animals. transgressing & mingling. both humans and wild animals move across the physical boundaries of chobe national park and kasane township, thus transgressing the essentialized placements as detailed above. humans move in and out of the national park to gaze at wild animals, while wild animals move in and out of the human settlement to explore and forage. the resulting interspecies mingling is dynamic and multi-faceted, and reflects more complexity of human-animal encounters than human practices of placement suggest. on the one hand, humans use and inhabit chobe national park through numerous tourism and conservation activities. for example, camping is permitted in designated areas, albeit in limited numbers, and chobe game lodge offers more luxurious accommodation for safari tourists; game drive trucks and boats comb the landscape continuously during operation hours. other activities revolve around conservation and protection of wild animals: the department of wildlife and national parks maintains park infrastructure, and the anti-poaching unit patrols the area to deter illegal hunting. researchers and scientists also maintain a presence in chobe national park, conducting aerial and ground population surveys, or in-depth biological studies, such as those of lion or elephant populations around savute camp. given this human presence, wild animals have become habituated to people, their vehicles, and their machinations (see figure 6). it is not uncommon to observe numerous safari vehicles converge on a particular place to ensure tourists come away with authentic safari experiences. this humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 70 was the case during field research in 2008, when tour operators spotted two lions eating an impala along the riverbank; within moments, five vehicles and three boats surrounded the scene, yet the lions seem undeterred by the audience. these scenes are commonplace within the park boundaries. wild animals nevertheless become agitated by humans: for example, elephants often “mock charge” vehicles deemed too close. safari operators are mandated to keep respectful distance, however, to avoid such provocations. ultimately, these encounters of wild animals by humans within chobe national park reaffirm human wonderment at animals, justifying rationales for containing them for their own protection and generating tourist dollars through their viewing. (figure 6; photo by andrea k. bolla) on the other hand, wild animals use and inhabit kasane township despite official efforts to keep them within park boundaries. warthogs, for example, have become regular town residents, frequenting grocery stores and roadsides, and humans have become habituated to their presence and familiar with their behaviors. warthogs have integrated themselves into the form and rhythm of kasane; humans refer to them as “only warthogs” living around and with them, and express mild annoyance when the warthogs unexpectedly wander into traffic. larger animals, such as elephants, also frequent kasane streets or riverbank areas, as evidenced by the billboard in kasane shown in figure 7; hippopotami, hyenas, buffalo, leopards, and lions often come during hours of darkness to scope out food and water sources. wild animal transgressions into human spaces may be attributed to a variety of motivations. for example, animals may be searching for food sources (e.g. warthogs seeking out garbage piles or elephants seeking out tree foliage) that are easy to attain or simply available, given andrea k. bolla & alice j. hovorka — placing wild animals in botswana: engaging transspecies theory 71 “overcrowding” in chobe park as found in a recent wildlife survey commissioned by the government of botswana (elephantswithoutborders.org). transgressions may also be attributed as a consequence of the natural habitat range of key species who necessarily traverse the landscape beyond park boundaries. some kasane residents see animals as a part of their daily experience that they enjoy. as one participant explained, “it’s nice to have animals because it’s entertaining. because where there [are] no animals, it’s like boring.... let me take a walk and see something,” and “the elephant and buffalo, they are just behind my house because where i am staying, it’s at the end; it’s the bush and in the evening they start walking, elephants and buffalo. you start hearing hyena and lions.... it’s nice.” humans are at times empathetic for such transgressions, noting animals “getting lost” and ending up in the (figure 7; photo by andrea k. bolla) town. at times people are annoyed at their presence, such as one resident who remarked: “elephants are very dangerous. they will just come right up near the house where the children are and eat the food i grow for my family. they have enough food out there and should not be coming here to eat.” the majority of human kasane residents, however, fear wild animals transgressing national park boundaries, viewing them as harmful, dangerous, and threatening. stories abound of wild animals inflicting injury or death on humans. numerous participants recalled media reports to illustrate humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 72 the need to keep animals within the park. one resident stated: “[elephants] attack some of the people; i can’t remember how many, but more than five. [elephants are] dangerous.” another participant spoke of a story she had heard in the community: “[a] taxi driver says that zimbabwean ladies were attacked by elephants. now i am afraid of animals.” human residents discuss strategies to manage fearful encounters. one noted, “[we] ask [each other] how to tackle this animal because they are all over. they say if you see a hyena you have to take something like a log and put it on top of your head; it won’t attack you.” others had individualistic strategies: “if i come across a certain animal i can just walk away without disturbing it. may be dangerous if you come up very close, but if you are a distance away it will not harass you. if very far, you can just walk. if it is where you are going, go back. do not proceed. go back.” kasane residents take measures to avoid wild animal encounters by, for example, not traveling by foot after dark. fear of wild animals is closely connected not only with bodily harm and fear of encounter, but also with threat to human livelihood, especially damage to crops and livestock, given increased competition for space and food amongst various animal species.22 in kasane, the lack of molapo farming (crops produced on arable flood plains), which is common in other settlements found along the river, is largely attributed to destruction by wild animals of crops and livestock (republic of botswana, “chobe district”). parry and campbell conducted studies in the chobe enclave and mababe depression, which revealed that 78 percent of crop farmers and 59 percent of livestock owners complained of crop raiding by wild animals. schiess-meier, et al., examined the impact of wild animal predation on livestock in the kweneng district, claiming that 0.34 percent of the livestock in the region (or 2.2 percent per farmer) were being depredated annually (1269-1270). in sum, while human transgressions into chobe national park generate interspecies minglings that reaffirm wonderment at wild animals, animal transgressions into kasane township generate minglings that largely inspire fear. this in turn has major implications for further human conceptual and material placements of wild animals, as discussed below. re-placing. interspecies encounters primarily generate fear amongst human kasane residents and thus facilitate and justify numerous practices that serve to re-establish wild animals in their “proper” place. this re-placement occurs through everyday activities physically to keep wild animals away from humans, and through broader discourses highlighting “problem animals” to reaffirm the need to do so. first, dwnp staff regularly patrol kasane township, and coax or chase wild animals back to chobe national park using scaring techniques, such as gunshots or thunder flashes, to remove andrea k. bolla & alice j. hovorka — placing wild animals in botswana: engaging transspecies theory 73 them and deter them from returning. government encourages preventative techniques in addition to these reactive ones, encouraging farmers to practice proper husbandry methods (e.g. kraaling domestic animals at night) or natural means (e.g. chili pepper for elephants) to deter wild animals (republic of botswana, “botswana environment statistics”; republic of botswana, “wildlife statistics”). recent infrastructural developments in kasane include electrified game fences to keep wild animals within the park boundaries. this has decreased available corridors and physical spaces for animals, and increased conflicts among wild animal species. stand-offs between elephants and baboons, for example, occur with increasing frequency as both groups try to access chobe river. other practices involve translocation of individual animals by government or by human citizens; tranquillizers and cages are used to subdue the animals in question and they are whisked away to areas some distance from human zones. outright killing of wild animals is prohibited, save for the most extreme cases. anecdotal evidence, however, points to the increasing frequency of animal death at the hands of, in particular, local farmers. second, these human practices to keep wild animals contained within chobe national park are both justified and reinforced by broad discourses of “problem animals” expressed through both tourism and government agendas. tourism brochures, for example, state: approach big game with caution; don’t make any unnecessary movements or noise, and be prepared to drive on quickly if warning signs appear (if, for instance, an elephant turns head-on to you and flaps its ears). keep down-wind if possible; remember that just about any wild creature can be dangerous if startled, irritated or, most importantly, cornered. do not under any circumstances cut off an animal's line of retreat. (botswana tourism board, “tourism board”) these instructions reaffirm separation of humans from wild animals and establish proper behavior of humans when in national park areas. further, problem-animal discourse is a major fear mechanism through which humans imagine and fix wild animals into national parks. the government recognizes the challenges of interspecies mingling, particularly outside of park boundaries, given that wild animals can negatively impact humans; it identifies particular “problem animals” as those posing a threat to human property, lives, and livelihoods, and those difficult for humans to defend themselves against (republic of botswana, “wildlife statistics”). those labeled humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 74 problematic for 2003 include lions, leopards, elephants, hyenas, wild dogs, and cheetahs at the top of the list. other species with numerous recorded human ”incidents” include kudus, jackals, crocodiles, pythons, hippopotami, baboons, steenboks, porcupines, buffalo, caracals, and duikers (republic of botswana, “wildlife statistics” [67]). in chobe district, a total of 304 “problem animal incidents” took place with mortality culminating in the killing of 30 lions, 84 leopards, 5 hippopotami, 42 elephants, 4 cheetahs, and 2 each of buffalo, crocodiles and wild dogs (republic of botswana, “wildlife statistics” [69-70]). in june 2010, two young problem elephants were killed when they entered the yard of a kasane resident. such incidents and general conflict between humans and wild animals is escalating, given animal transgressions into kasane township, as well as with the expansion of human activities into areas previously dominated by wild animals (republic of botswana, “wildlife statistics”). conclusion. this paper illuminates human placement of and encounters with wild animals in kasane, botswana. human imaginings of wild animals based on both respect for and exploitation of nonhuman animals together shape dominant conservation and tourism agendas, and fix wild animals into discrete protected areas across the landscape. yet humans and wild animals transgress their designated spaces and mingle with one another in chobe national park, as well as in kasane township. these interspecies encounters are dynamic and multifaceted; they generate both wonderment (for human tourists within the park) and fear (because of wild animal presence in and around the town). such encounters reinforce and justify human imaginings and fixings of wild animals, prompting fear-based responses and “problem animal” discourses, and re-placing animals into where they belong. this explicit engagement of transspecies spatial theory highlights human conceptual and material placement of animals as a key tenet to understanding human-animal relations. it also brings to the fore geographical perspectives within critical animal studies in order to further explore the ways in which humans position themselves relative to animals and how these dynamics play themselves out in daily lives and particular contexts. looking at both humans and animals in and out of place extends the lens with which we consider how essentialized human spaces (e.g. urban settlements) and animal spaces (e.g. national parks) create conceptual and physical boundaries that are transgressed by numerous species, both human and nonhuman. human ideas about animals are produced and reproduced through voluntary encounters, such as those experienced by tourists within chobe park, as well as through involuntary encounters, such as those experienced by kasane shoppers surprised by andrea k. bolla & alice j. hovorka — placing wild animals in botswana: engaging transspecies theory 75 warthogs. human choice and control of animal-based encounters necessarily shape whether these are positive or negative, as premised upon notions of who belongs and does not belong in a particular place. recognizing that space, and indeed context, matter in terms of resulting ideas (about animals) and actions that occur (towards animals) provides us with insights into how particular space-based scenarios and placements may generate particular human-animal encounters. we can use such insights to think further about (un)intended outcomes of spatial planning arising from human realms that create such spatial arrangements in the first place and shape humananimal relations as a result. acknowledgements we would like to thank all those who participated in the research and those who provided in-kind assistance, including the department of environmental science at the university of botswana, staff at the department of wildlife and national parks, and officials at the ministry of environment, wildlife, and tourism. thank you to rené véron, anne milne, and david burnes for their insights and support. funding was generously provided by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada. photo and map credits figure 1: map of botswana adapted from the botswana tourism board “botswana tourism”; the world bank group. figure 2: map of national parks, game reserves and wmas, cso, “wildlife statistics.” figure 3: map of kasane, chobe national park and surrounding areas, cso, “wildlife statistics.” figure 4: giraffe in tall grass. photograph by aneta karnecka. national geographic: photo of the day. national geographic, 15 feb. 2010. web. 30 nov. 2010. <http://photography.nationalgeographic.com/photography/photo-of-the-day/giraffetall-grass/#caption>. figure 5: black-maned kalahari lion. photograph by june liversedge. roar: lions of the kalahari. national geographic. web. 30 nov. 2010.. <http://www.nationalgeographic.com/ roar/photogallery/photo2.html>. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 76 figure 6: elephants and vehicle in chobe national park, botswana. photograph by author. 2008. karnecka, aneta. figure 7: elephant billboard at the kasane entrance, botswana. photograph by andrea k. bolla. 2010. notes 1. exceptions in geography include hovorka, “transspecies theory”; whatmore and thorne, “elephants on the move”; whatmore and thorne, “wild(er)ness.” 2. on australian possums, see power; on singaporean monkeys, see yeo and neo; on chickens in gaborone, see hovorka, “transspecies urban theory”; on urban cattle, see philo; on los angeles animals, see wolch, brownlow and lassiter. 3. see geertz. 4. see orlikowski and baroudi; walsham. 5. see haraway; willis. 6. see department of town and regional planning; joyce. 7. see gullo, lassiter, and wolc. 8. see hoggart, lees, and davies. 9. see berg. 10. see cullis and watson. 11. see phuthego and chanda. 12. see mbaiwa, parry, and campbell; twyman, “livelihood opportunity”; twyman, “natural resource use.” 13. see adams and mcshane andrea k. bolla & alice j. hovorka — placing wild animals in botswana: engaging transspecies theory 77 14. see bolaane. 15. ibid. 16. see arntzen, “main findings.” 17. see boggs. 18. see adams and mcshane 19. see arntzen, “economic view on wildlife.” 20. ibid. 21. see blaikie. 22. see carlsson; hemson; mbaiwa; verlinden; verlinden, et al. works cited adams, jonathan s., and thomas o. mcshane. the myth of wild africa: conservation without illusion. berkeley: u of california p, 1992. adams, william m. green development: environment and sustainability in the third world. second ed. london: routledge, 2001. arntzen, jaap w. “an economic view on wildlife management areas in botswana.” cbnrm support programme occasional paper (no. 10). gaborone: printing and publishing company botswana, 2003. arntzen, jaap w., d.l. molokomme, e.m. terry, n. moleele, o. tshosa, and d. mazambani. “main findings of the review of community-based natural resource management projects in botswana.” cbnrm support programme paper, iucn/snv and car, 2003. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 78 atlhopeng, julius, chadzimula molebatsi, elisha toteng, and otlogetswe totolo. environmental issues in botswana – a handbook. gaborone: light books, 1998. berg, bruce l. qualitative research methods for the social sciences. boston: allyn & bacon, 2001. blaikie, piers. “is small really beautiful? community-based natural resource management in malawi and botswana.” world development 34.11 (2006): 1942-1957. bolaane, maitseo. “chiefs, hunters and adventurers: the foundation of the okavango/moremi national park, botswana.” journal of historical geography 31.2 (2005): 241-259. boggs, l. “community power, participation, conflict and development choice: community wildlife conservation in the okavango region of northern botswana.” evaluating eden series discussion paper no. 17. iied. international institute for environment and development, london, 2000. botswana tourism board. “botswana’s tourism industry.” bajanala n.d. ─────. “botswana tourism board.” botswana tourism board 11 july 2010. <http://www.botswanatourism.co.bw/>. ─────. travel companion: northern botswana. gaborone: botswana tourism board, 2008. carlsson, karin. mammal communities in the southern kalahari: differences between land use types and seasons. msc thesis. uppsala university, 2005. cheetah conservation botswana. “cheetah conservation botswana.” cheetah conservation botswana 20 june 2010. <http:// www.cheetahbotswana.com>. cullis, adrian, and cathy watson. “winners and losers: privatising the commons in botswana.” securing the commons series no. 9. iied. international institute for environment and development, london, 2005. department of town and regional planning. national settlement policy. gaborone: government printer, 1998. andrea k. bolla & alice j. hovorka — placing wild animals in botswana: engaging transspecies theory 79 geertz, clifford. “thick description: toward an interpretive theory of culture.” the interpretation of cultures: selected essays. ed. clifford geertz. new york: basic books, 1973. 3-30. gullo, andrea, unna lassiter, and jennifer wolch. “the cougar’s tale.” animal geographies: place, politics, and identity in the nature-culture borderlands. eds. jennifer wolch and jody emel. london: verso, 1998. 139-161. haraway, donna. “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature. ed. donna j. haraway. new york: routledge, 1991. 183-201. hemson, graham. the ecology and conservation of lions: human-wildlife conflict in semiarid botswana. diss. university of oxford, 2003. hoggart, keith, loretta lees, and anna davies. researching human geography. new york: oxford up, 2002. hovorka, alice. “entrepreneurial opportunities in botswana: (re)shaping urban agriculture discourse.” journal of contemporary african studies 22.3 (2004): 367-388. ─────. “transspecies urban theory: chickens in an african city.” cultural geographies 15.1 (2008): 95-117. joyce, peter. this is botswana. london: new holland, 2005. lefebvre, henri. space. trans. donald nicholson. oxford: blackwell, 1984. mbaiwa, joseph e. “wildlife resource utilization at moremi game reserve and khwai community area in the okavango delta, botswana.” journal of environmental management 77.1 (2005): 144-156. ministry of finance and development planning. national development plan 9. gaborone: government printer, 2003. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 80 mokolodi nature reserve. “mokolodi nature reserve.” mokolodi nature reserve 10 september 2008. <http://www.mokolodi.com>. orlikowski, wanda, and jack baroudi. “studying information technology in organizations: research approaches and assumptions.” information systems research 2.1 (1991): 1–28. parry, david, and bruce campbell. “attitudes of rural communities to animal wildlife and its utilization in chobe enclave and mababe depression, botswana.” environmental conservation 19.3 (1992): 245-252. philo, chris. “animals, geography, and the city: notes on inclusions and exclusions.” animal geographies: place, politics, and identity in the nature-culture borderlands. ed. jennifer wolch and jody emel. london: verso, 1998. 51-71. philo, chris, and chris wilbert. “animal spaces, beastly places: an introduction.” animal spaces, beastly places: new geographies of human-animal relations. ed. chris philo and chris wilbert. new york: routledge, 2000. 1-34. philo, chris, and jennifer wolch. “through the geographical looking glass, space, place, and society-animal relations.” society and animals 6.2 (1998): 103-118. phuthego, t.c., and r. chanda. “traditional ecological knowledge and communitybased natural resource management: lessons from a botswana wildlife management area.” applied geography 24 (2004): 57-76. power, emma r. “border-processes and homemaking: encounters with possums in suburban australian homes.” cultural geographies 16 (2009): 29-54. republic of botswana. botswana demographic survey. gaborone: central statistics office, 2009. ─────. chobe district development plan 6: 2003-2009. gaborone: government printer, 2003. ─────. central statistics office. population and housing census. 28 september 2008 <http://www.cos.gov.bw>. andrea k. bolla & alice j. hovorka — placing wild animals in botswana: engaging transspecies theory 81 ─────. botswana environment statistics. gaborone: central statistics office, 2008. ─────. wildlife statistics 2004. gaborone: central statistics office, 2005. schiess-meier, monika, sandra ramsauer, tefo gabanapelo, and barbara konig. “livestock predation—insights from problem animal control registers in botswana.” journal of wildlife management 71.4 (2007): 1267-1274. twyman, chasca. “livelihood opportunity and diversity in kalahari wildlife management areas, botswana: rethinking community resource management.” journal of southern african studies 26.4 (2000): 783-806. ─────. “natural resource use and livelihoods in botswana’s wildlife management areas.” applied geography 21.1 (2001): 45-68. united nations environmental programme—world conservation monitoring programme. “world database on protected areas.” united nations environmental programme-world conservation monitoring programme 1 november 2007. <http://sea.unep-wcmc.org/wdpa/>. verlinden, alex. “human settlements and wildlife distribution in the southern kalahari of botswana.” biological conservation 82.2 (1997): 129-136. verlinden, alex, jeremy s. perkins, mark murray, and gaseitsiwe masunga. “how are people affecting the distribution of less migratory wildlife in the southern kalahari of botswana? a spatial analysis.” journal of arid environments 38.1 (1998): 129-141. walsham, geoff. interpreting information systems in organizations. chichester: john wiley and sons, 1993. whatmore, sarah, and lorraine thorne. “elephants on the move: spatial formations of wildlife exchange.” environmental planning d: society and space 18.2 (2000): 185-203. ─────. “wild(er)ness: reconfiguring the geographies of wildlife.” transactions of the institute of british geographers 23 (1998): 435-454. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 2 (spring 2012) 82 willis, jerry w. foundations of qualitative research: interpretive and critical approaches. thousand oaks: sage publications, 2007. wolch, jennifer r. “anima urbis.” progress in human geography 26.6 (2002): 721-742. wolch, jennifer r., kathleen west, and thomas e. gaines. “transspecies urban theory.” environment and planning d: society and space 13.6 (1995): 735-760. wolch, jennifer, alec brownlow, and unna lassiter. “constructing the animal worlds of inner-city los angeles.” animal spaces, beastly places: new geographies of humananimal relations. ed. chris philo and chris wilbert. new york: routledge, 2000. 71-97. wolch, jennifer, and jody emel. “witnessing the animal moment.” animal geographies: place, politics, and identity in the nature-culture borderlands. ed. jennifer wolch and jody emel. london: verso, 1998. xi-26. world travel and tourism council. “wttc highlights botswana travel & tourism potential.” world travel and tourism council 3 january 2009. <http://www.wttc.org/>. yeo, jun-han, and harvey neo. “monkey business: human-animal conflicts in urban singapore.” social & cultural geographies 11.7 (2010): 681-699. microsoft word julie uirbanik h u m a n i m a l i a 1:1 julie urbanik “hooters for neuters”: sexist or transgressive animal advocacy campaign? “it’s sexist because it promotes the stereotypical role of women as sex objects.” — (ellie) “hooters for neuters” is a phrase that will stick with me for a very, very long time which makes it a marketing dream come true. if a leftist-feminist-hippie-blue-state-liberal like me laughs out loud at that, then they did something right.” — (kate) with over 400 locations in 42 states and 24 countries, the united states-based hooters restaurant chain has become incredibly successful during its 26 year history. it is a neighborhood-style bar/restaurant that features good food, lots of sports, and, the main attraction, scantily-clad “hooters girls” servers. according to their website, the company believes the hooters girls are as socially acceptable as a dallas cowboy cheerleader, a sports illustrated model, or a radio city rockette. the chain, however, has also attracted its share of critics for promoting stereotypes of women as sexual objects purely there to serve and entertain men — note the innuendo of the word hooters (aka breasts). the link between hooters and animal advocacy via “hooters for neuters” campaigns first came to my attention through a letter published in best friends magazine in 2006 by “disgusted.” best friends animal sanctuary is one of the largest no-kill shelters in the united states and is located in kanab, utah. disgusted was “disappointed that best friends, a very classy organization, would align itself with something as demeaning to women as the restaurant hooters,” and argued that not only was best friends promoting misogyny, but also that best friends would probably not align with a business that promoted bigotry against other groups (e.g., african americans) (disgusted 43). the editors’ response was to state that “saving animal lives was our prime concern, and getting dogs and cats fixed plays a huge part in this. it’s easy for the public to ‘tune out’ the regular spay/neuter appeals, but something like this cuts through the chatter and makes an impact” (ibid). “hooters for neuters” clearly “cuts through the chatter” in multiple ways. the campaign intersects with issues of social movement strategies around animal advocacy, and with issues of gender and animals with respect to where and how stereotypical gender categories are challenged or reinforced in nature-society interactions. in this article i use the lens of animal geography to explore the controversy over the place of “hooters for neuters” in the animal advocacy movement at large. by place i mean both the literal, unique constellation of human and natural features that come together in a particular setting (e.g., a hooters restaurant) as well as a more metaphorical notion of place, as in role/location in “the order of things” (e.g., the place of gender in animal advocacy). while place does designate the particular, place is not static, in that the identity of a place can shift, as can its purpose and the identities of those 41 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) using/moving through it. the challenge from an animal geography perspective is to understand how and why literal places become, exist, or dissipate as particular sites of human-animal interactions, as well as how metaphorical placements of categories related to human-animal interactions move in and out of being. the “hooter for neuters” campaigns have brought into being a new, literal place for humananimal interactions. the goal of this article is two-fold: first, to examine what this new place means in relation to existing spay/neuter programs run through shelters and clinics, and second, to explore how “hooters for neuters” “fits in” with other gender-based animal advocacy campaigns. the opening quotes and letter to the editor highlight the underlying controversy: is “hooters for neuters” promoting sexist animal advocacy in the name of pet overpopulation? if so, is this wrong? in essence, are “hooters for neuters” campaigns “out of place” in the animal advocacy movement? can “hooters for neuters” be understood as a transgressive campaign — one that helps bring the politics of animal overpopulation into people’s everyday lives in addition to providing a specific place where male attitudes towards companion animals can be recalibrated? or is it something in between? to explore this controversy i have broken the article into five sections. after setting the context for both pet overpopulation and animal geography, i provide an overview of “hooters for neuters” before turning to the “sexist” or “transgressive” readings of this spay/neuter strategy. the data used for this research comes from both primary and secondary sources. primary sources include publicly available materials such as websites, newsletters, and personal communications. secondary sources include news articles, online blogs and public discussion boards. context of pet/overpopulation and spay/neuter campaigns. there is no doubt that the united states is a nation of pet lovers. according to the humane society of the united states (hsus), the nation spends over $40 billion per year on companion animals, which include some 75 million dogs, 88 million cats, and untold millions of rodents, birds, reptiles, and fish (hsus). there is a cable channel dedicated to all things animal (animal planet), and reality shows like dog whisperer and it’s me or the dog, which help humans relate to their animals so that the entire household is healthy and happy. shelter adoption is promoted in such venues. today many people know that adopting an animal from a shelter saves an animal’s life, but many people do not realize the full extent of the problem of dog and cat overpopulation. the hsus estimates there are around 70 million stray cats and dogs roaming the country at any given time, due to abandonment, uncontrolled breeding, and running away/escaping. for animals who do make it to a shelter (between 6-8 million), only about half (3-4 million) are adopted out. the other 3-4 million are euthanized. that is anywhere from 342-456 dogs and cats per hour 365 days a year. it is not only a heavy emotional toll on the humans who have to “put down” such a constant stream of living beings that are otherwise healthy, but it is also an increasing financial burden to local state, county, city, and private shelters. upwards of $2 42 julie urbanik – “hooters for neuters” billion are spent every year on the intake, care, and euthanasia of these “surplus” animals (ibid). while animal advocacy groups work to find ways to address pet abandonment and escaping/running away, shelters, animal control agencies, and veterinarians all agree that promoting and instituting spay/neuter programs is a key ingredient to getting a handle on pet overpopulation (looney et al.; mcneil and constandy).1 the problem is that humans find myriad reasons not to participate in spay/neuter programs. some of the more common ones include: it is cruel to the animal, it is too expensive, personal and home protection, they don’t want the animal to get fat and lazy, they want to breed their purebred/special animal, religious views, and, perhaps most important for this article, people (mainly men) do not want to have “emasculated” animals (blackshaw and day; neville and jones; oxford lafayette). while there has been controversy among veterinarians about the age at which to perform gonadectomies, the evidence suggests that these surgeries help companion animals live longer, and help reduce the chance of fights, roaming, scent marking, or general animal delinquency, in addition to preventing overpopulation (frank; kustritz; spain et al.). furthermore, there does not seem to be a social stigma to being “fixed” among animals — but, according to groups on the front lines of why people are or are not getting their animals spayed/neutered, many men continue to view their male pets as personifications of their own egos and libidos. this concern about emasculinization is so well-known that one company, cti corporation, developed neuticles — testicular implants for dogs, cats, and even livestock. with neuticles you can have the best of both worlds — neuter your animal, yet maintain the “intact” appearance. a high-end pair costs more than $1100 — without the surgery (cti). since most people argue they cannot afford to pay for a gonadectomy, it is highly unlikely that neuticles will solve the problem of pet overpopulation. the challenge, then, is how to convince the vast majority of the population to spay/neuter. traditional campaigns like the one shown in figure 1 attempt to guilt people into these surgeries. the image is as depressing as it is shocking — seeing a puppy with pleading eyes in front of a pile of dead animals is certainly not the image most people want to take away with them as they adopt (or think about adopting) a companion animal. i argue that this image also reinforces negative ideas about animal shelters themselves. instead of the shelter being a place to celebrate a new companion, these campaigns instill notions of shelters as places that are terrible prisons, places where all they do is kill, places that are not welcoming, and places of judgment and unacceptance. while the intended message is to show how shameful and thoughtless it is to figure 1 43 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) contribute to pet overpopulation, some psychologists argue that ads like this actually reinforce behavior, because it is subtly telling us that not spaying/neutering is the norm — and thereby actually reinforcing unwanted behavior (battista). if you really want to change people’s behavior, psychologists claim you need to define a new, preferred norm — in this case to spay/neuter —, and to encourage people to join in, rather than trying to shame them out of undesirable behavior. apparently, shocking images and moral outrage are weak arguments, compared to the behavior of one’s peers. as one advocate said: “like it or not, those of us in animal protection are in the marketing business,” and in relation to the animal the undesirable behavior to change is the casual neglect and/or abuse of pets through refusing to spay/neuter (ibid). so the new norm should be thoughtful caregiving towards animals, especially by men. but how to change the message? one part of the answer may be to shift the message and the geography. placing geography, gender, and animal advocacy. as stated in the introduction, place is a complex term in geography and can be applied to actual geographic locations, as well as to more metaphorical or symbolic systems of classification. geographers have been interested in understanding places in two main ways (cresswell; staeheli). the first is to explore how a particular place has been defined over time, what its purpose is/has been, and whether or not its use/existence is being contested in some way by different groups. the second is to examine the ways in which social identities are actively constituted in particular places. in other words, depending on one’s social location, personal behaviors/ identities may be enabled or constrained because of being in a certain place. mapping this interplay of identity and place becomes complicated, as neither places nor identities remain perfectly static over time or perfectly isolated from other places and other identities. therefore, the task of the geographer studying place is to hold all of these notions in tension with each other to reveal a fully contextualized explanation of everyday life in everyday places. the subfield of animal geography also takes as one of its central themes how place shapes, and is shaped by, different constellations of direct human-animal interactions, as well as the interactions of multiple human groups around one specific human-animal relationship (philo & wilbert; wolch et al.2003; wolch & emel). for example, kay anderson has demonstrated through an historical case study of the adelaide zoo how all zoos have shifted their meanings over time (e.g., colonial power, leisure, education), even as they are continually used to reinforce arbitrary boundaries between humans and animals (anderson). and while zoos are places within cities, animal geographers have also done extensive work on the place of animals in urban areas as a whole. animals (e.g., feral cats, livestock, “pests”), depending on their categorization by different human stakeholders (e.g., caregivers, law enforcement, ranchers, residents, scientists), are seen as “in place” or “out of place,” and treated very differently by urban human inhabitants (gullo; griffiths et al.; philo; wolch 1995). 44 julie urbanik – “hooters for neuters” with respect to animal advocacy practices, geographers have studied how place-based advocacy plays a large role in shaping human-animal relations (urbanik). kersty hobson highlighted how advocacy work to save the sun bear from bear bile farms in china was dramatically helped by the first sanctuary that, as a place, allowed advocates and researchers to more fully understand the lives of sun bears and to educate others about their personalities (hobson). suzanne michel also found that places are profoundly effective at shifting people’s attitudes towards wildlife through her study of golden eagle rehabilitation centers and public education projects (michel). by engaging people in an everyday politics of care through their relationships with the eagles, michel argues that people’s identification with and attitudes towards nonhuman others can be radically altered. i contend that the “hooters for neuters” campaign is a shift in where animal advocacy takes place — moving it away from traditional sites such as zoos and rehabilitation centers —, and assessing the effectiveness of such a campaign can help shed light on new forms of animal advocacy rooted in strategic geographies. those working under the umbrella of human-animal studies have long realized that gender plays an important role in human-animal relationships (a more detailed focus on sexism and animal advocacy will be taken up in a subsequent section). whether the issue is gendered power relations within the animal advocacy movement or the relationship between male violence towards women and animals, it has been clear that “doing gender“ is deeply entwined with the nonhuman (adams; adams and donovan; donovan and adams; kruse; luke). just as geographers have demonstrated that place is key to human-animal relationships as a whole, they have also explored how place is implicated in the male-female-nonhuman nexus. one of the earliest examples is emel’s study of how european masculinity, through notions of virility and progress, led to not only near total eradication of wolves, but also went hand in hand with the eradication of native americans in the american west (emel). this notion of “frontier masculinity“is still having an impact on the treatment of wolves today in places like alaska (anahita and mix; connell). we saw above that zoos reinforce human-animal boundaries, but zoos and big game hunting have also gone hand in hand with colonization and consolidation of western male power structures over “other“ lands, people, and animals (elder et al.; ryan). even within urban areas, as seen in a case study of dog-stealing in victorian london, which highlighted how both dogs and women were confined to domestic captivity, masculinity and femininity have been historically linked (howell). geographers have also explored how women’s attitudes towards animals are dependent on their socio-economic location, and how gender influences perceptions of categories of animals (wolch and zhang; wolch et al. 2000; brownlow and lassiter). “hooters for neuters“ is a complex intersection of gender identities. the hooters restaurants themselves are imbued with stereotypical gender roles, where heterosexuality is the norm and women are constructed as objects for men’s pleasure. “hooters for neuters" is attempting to counteract a stereotype that men are averse to spaying and neutering, yet in a context that reinforces traditional male roles. it is a campaign that 45 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) attempts to disrupt and change gendered behaviors towards companion animals by taking advantage of the gendered behaviors themselves. as we will see, it is a controversial, but potentially transformative tactic. what is key to glean from animal geography is that how humans construct interactions with animals is fundamentally connected to where these interactions happen. where and in what places do we, as humans, build what paechter calls “communities of practice“ with animals? paechter, focusing on gender, argues that “we can use the idea of communities of practice as a way of thinking about the formation and perpetuation of localized masculinities and femininities” (70). indeed, if learning gender is situated in social contexts, then so too is learning “human“behaviors towards animals. while animal shelters have traditionally served as “communities of practice“ with respect to companion animals, the messages and practices associated with positive animal treatment have been clearly limited to those who actually go to a shelter. if the problem of a lack of spaying/neutering can be attributed in part to a certain construction of masculinity, and men that identify themselves in this way will not come to shelters, then a new geographically-based strategy may be in order. if you change the place, can you challenge the masculine social construct that inhibits some men from acting to help solve the pet overpopulation problem? enter “hooters for neuters.“ the “hooters for neuters“ campaign and controversy. “no more homeless pets“ is a program of best friends in utah. the program’s directors were concerned about a lack of male participation in their “big fix“ spay/neuter campaign, and wondered if there was a more effective way to target men. there was a thriving hooters restaurant in salt lake city, and it turned out the franchise owner was a great animal lover, so the two decided to come together to “help the animals“ (fell). hooters corporate structure permits local franchise owners to participate as contributing local corporate citizens in whatever ways they see fit. in fact, hooters does have a large commitment to charity work, and has raised over $8 million for a variety of charities since 1992. the first “hooters for neuters" events were held in salt lake city in 2005 (see figure 2). temma martin, spokeswoman for “no more homeless pets“ said at the time that: “we hope that this lighthearted approach to a serious issue will encourage pet owners to get their animals fixed at a very low cost in a safe environment” (erickson). we can see in this flyer that the target audience is the “stereotypical“ man. by using a police officer, a motorcyclist, a sports fan, and an “inshape“ man the organizers are trying to be inclusive of a variety of men who have companion animals (fell). the use of three white men and one that appears to be hispanic coincides with the figure 2 46 julie urbanik – “hooters for neuters” demographics of salt lake city. we also see dog breeds that most people would consider “manly“ (german shepherds, rottweilers, pitbulls); but also a small chihuahua — a breed not unknown for its toughness, attitude, and “cuteness“ factor. the hooters girls are smiling and fawning over both the men and dogs — clearly making everyone happy. the event and advertising were designed to create an atmosphere of fun, sharing, and human-animal community at a place where many men already enjoy being — a far cry from judgmental or depressing. since 2005, there have been a variety of “hooters for neuters“ events in at least twelve states (see appendix 1 for a complete listing). mobile spay/neuter clinics have been brought to restaurant parking lots, while car washes, bikini contests, yard sales, and dog washes have been used on-site to raise money for local shelters. thousands of dollars have been raised and hundreds of animals spayed or neutered. the argument of animal advocacy groups is that this is helping to control the pet overpopulation problem, assist local private and state facilities with fundraising and reducing the number of animals they have to kill, and finally, it challenges men to change what their concept of “macho” is. according to one of the organizers, “there is definitely a mindset among some men about the importance of keeping males intact. we wanted to take on that mindset and those myths head on. it is our belief that spay/neuter is the answer to the pet overpopulation problem so we need to address myths and misconceptions like this” (erickson). for the hooters restaurants, this is a way of getting publicity; it fits in with their charity work on issues from childhood disease research and breast cancer awareness, to supporting strong families and a sense of community. in 2006, “hooters for neuters“ ran into a glitch in los angeles. hooters approached l.a. animal services, saying they wanted to sponsor a bikini contest to raise money for spay/neuter programs. l.a. animal services, overwhelmed and underfunded, agreed and a flyer was posted to advertise the event (see figure 3). after seeing the flyers, local feminists brought it to the attention of city council members who proceeded to criticize the event for being degrading to women — even though it was not citysponsored. city controller laura chick said: “are we going backward here? we are a city with all kinds of progressive programs that empower women and end discrimination in the workplace, and now we’re being connected with a hooters bikini contest. it isn’t right” (associated press). city councilwoman jan perry said the event “crosses the line” (ibid). animal services and hooters tried to appease the critics by changing the flyer from a bikini clad woman to a dog in a hooters shirt (see figure 4), but the damage was done and figure 3 47 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) animal services said they would not accept any funds that were raised for them by the event (pattanayak 2006). in the end, the event was held, but all the proceeds went to a local private shelter, the amanda foundation, instead of into the la system, which euthanizes around 19,000 animals per year (this number does not include privately run shelters in the area) (hymon). women opposed to the event weren’t the only women that were vocal in taking sides on this issue. playboy covergirls-turned-animal rights activists the barbi twins said that city leaders should take part in the contest. they argued that men are historically less likely to have their pets spayed or neutered, so a bikini contest was the ideal way to spread the message. sia barbi stated that “when it comes to animals, i think that sexism should (be secondary) to the epidemic of animal overpopulation,” and added that “we’d rather the women get mad at us for doing playboy than get mad at hooters for trying to do a good thing” (knbc). here we have the crux of the issue – is this campaign selling sex to help animals or is it a subversive and effective campaign that is helping animals and challenging stereotypical male behaviors towards nonhumans? "hooters for neuters“ as sexist. according to the hooters corporation, “the women’s rights movement is important because it guarantees women have the right to choose their own careers, be it a supreme court justice or a hooters girl” (hooters). being able to do what you want with your career is a goal of the woman’s movement, and many hooters girls feel profoundly empowered by their jobs — they are able to feel beautiful, learn how to stand up for themselves, and to earn a decent living (k.h.; loh). but it is also a goal of the women's movement to encourage women to have an empowered sexual identity. what counts as empowered has long been up for debate and policing within feminisms. the issue of sexuality has been a defining issue for feminisms. many third wave (~1990s on) feminists have argued that a woman can and should be empowered by her sexuality. this has meant that the claim of second wave and/or more traditional feminists that the sexual objectification of women and the focus on extreme sexual femininity (e.g., marilyn monroe style) is part of the destructive system of patriarchy no longer holds as much sway as it once did. instead, what has occurred is the rise of what has come to be called “lipstick feminism,“ in which women claim actively to choose the “sex kitten“ stereotype and choose to feel figure 4 48 julie urbanik – “hooters for neuters” empowered by it (levy 2005). these feminists are comfortable with pornography, attending strip clubs, wearing sexually suggestive clothing, and focusing on beauty. they also, however, see themselves as intelligent, driven, and with the capacity to do what they want with their lives. many feminists have responded to these claims by arguing that these women are deluding themselves, and have so deeply ingrained patriarchal, sexist views of women that they have learned to objectify themselves — viewing themselves only through their sexuality, just like sexist men (donovan and adams). there is no doubt that women are objectified as sexual objects over and over again in society. one can browse the newsstands for publications like hooters magazine, maxim, or playboy, turn to catalogs like victoria’s secret, or wildly popular softcore porn, like girls gone wild. that sex sells is certainly not a new idea, and therefore some feminists argue that instead of an empowered sexuality, these “lipstick feminists“ are simply giving the patriarchal system what it wants. male subjectivity becomes even more dependent on objectifying women. when the use of the “sex kitten“ or “lipstick feminist“ style is brought into the political realm of animal advocacy the result is the same. instead of learning to see and understand the whole woman and the whole animal, both remain objects under the male gaze, because the presentation style reinforces sexist practices rather than challenges it (adams). ecofeminists, those who combine their environmental and feminist concerns, have worked hard to demonstrate the link between the patriarchal oppression/domination of women to the human domination of animals (adams; donovan and adams). their main argument is that all systems of oppression/ domination are interlinked, and that one can’t alter one without altering them all. for example, in their view one cannot, as a feminist, work to liberate women if one is simultaneously a racist or engaged in animal abuse. it is the very hierarchical and dualist mindset that essentializes distinctions such as man/woman, human/animal, white/black, which leads to discrimination, mistreatment, objectification, and violence, which must be dismantled. to argue, as many lipstick animal activists do, that “if it helps animals, it is justified“ (see next section) is like arguing that if animal exploitation helps humans, it is justified. from this ecofeminist perspective neither is justifiable. we cannot fight animal exploitation without challenging patriarchy, and we cannot challenge patriarchy without fighting animal exploitation. using sexism to “sell“ animal welfare is detrimental, because it reinforces social power systems that harm people and animals. there has already been a history of controversial “sexist“ campaigns within the animal advocacy community, with people for the ethical treatment of animals (peta) as the key instigator. for several years now, they have provoked feminist outrage with a slew of campaigns about fur, meat eating, and cosmetics testing, using scantily clad and/or naked celebrities who volunteer their time and bodies. some of the more famous women include model/actresses pamela anderson, eva mendes, charlotte ross, and alicia silverstone (see figure 5). 49 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) while peta points out that they are 1) willing to do anything to help animals, 2) use only people who volunteer their services — which includes both men and women, and 3) believe using celebrity and sexuality for a cause is better than using it for nothing, critics argue that their actions do nothing to help animals and everything to reinforce sexism as a social norm (moore). for example: the maxim-like peta ads, the vegan vixens, the strip club: all are saying it's okay to buck the stereotype of real men eat red meat, because here are some naked ladies to reassure you that you're still a superhetero manly man! almost as if they're saying, you won't even miss eating meat, because you'll get to look at so much of it! (ann) the only “message“ of these ads, political speaking, is that in the pursuit of promoting vegetarianism/animal rights and encouraging people to stop objectifying animals, it’s perfectly ok to objectify women as much as possible. (ruxandra in ellie) but more than that, what do naked celebrities do for the animals? if it were so effective, why are celebrities not stripping to end the genocide in darfur or for other causes? no one is questioning the right to be nude. it’s a question of why it’s done, and what’s accomplished. (ellie) turning back to the “hooters for neuters“ events, it now becomes very clear why these events are seen as sexist and part of the same gimmicky practices that have long been considered problematic within the feminist and animal advocacy communities. “hooters for neuters,“ following the feminist criticisms here, is not a place of gender transgression, but instead one directly rooted in the patriarchal mindset of women’s bodies as objects only of pleasure. indeed, it is a place where women are the “meat“ just as much as the once living animals that are the literal meat being served to the male clientele by the women, even as they come to spay/neuter their animals – all objects and all there for male enjoyment. “hooters for neuters“ as transgressive gender-based animal advocacy. while the above concerns and criticisms are very strong, i argue that there is a case to be made for “hooters for neuters“ as a transgressive campaign. i will do this by situating “hooters for neuters“ within a larger context of gender-based animal advocacy by both men and women to link to the role of place in creating new communities of practice with respect to gender and gender and animals. to begin, i’d like to start with two quotes from a protracted online debate about hooters, sexism, and animal advocacy: figure 5 50 julie urbanik – “hooters for neuters” although some may find a bikini contest distasteful (i do not. yes, i’m female, and yes i consider myself a feminist). i find that the number of sentient, dependent, choiceless creatures killed daily in shelters across america is the real obscenity. (ameme in ellie) you might find it interesting to consider that it is the societies that allow women to wear revealing clothing in which women have the most rights and the most power. likewise, it is the societies that punish women for wearing revealing clothing in which women have the fewest rights and the least power — they are considered chattel who must do as they are told. should women only be allowed to participate in activism if they promise not to show their bodies or use their bodies as a political statement? if a person chooses to use his or her physicality and sexuality to convey a message of his or her choosing, aren’t those who would censor him or her, even if their motives are good, also somewhat guilty of disrespect and repression? (vegswimer in ellie) these quotes demonstrate that not all feminists would read “hooters for neuters“ as a reinforcement of sexism. they raise the issue of choice in defining one’s own sexuality, one’s moral compass, and one’s linking of the two. in fact, many women today are choosing a selfdefined empowered sexuality as an explicit part of their animal advocacy work. three such examples include the vegan vixens, the barbi twins, and the suicide girls who did an anti-fur campaign for peta (see figure 6). the vegan vixens are a group of four female “eco-entertainers“ from los angeles who “educate the public about health and fitness, animal issues, planet stewardship and climate change in a fun, exciting way” (vegan vixens)(figure 7). they have made multiple music albums, have an ecofriendly fashion line, and are in the process of developing a pin-up style cookbook. their views of men include: “guys who fight dogs, rope baby cows or who hunt are not sexy to me, but mean…vegan men are sexy, compassionate and strong and that is a big turn on!” (ibid). figure 6 figure 7 51 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) the barbi twins are “international celebrity models turned celebrity health spokeswomen turned animal activists” and conduct their animal advocacy work through their organization the kitty liberation front (klf)(figure 8). these women have posed for playboy, but have also publicly struggled with eating disorders and have published cookbooks advocating an “eco anti-diet.” the suicide girls are an online “vibrant, sex positive community of women (and men)” founded in 2001 “on the belief that creativity, personality and intelligence are not incompatible with sexy, compelling entertainment and millions of people agree” (suicide girls). suicide girls post photos of themselves and develop their own views and practices about sexuality regardless of mainstream conceptions and/or judgments. the website has been so successful that they receive over five million hits a month and have a clothing line and a new book of nude photos. in 2008, a few dozen suicide girls teamed up with peta to do a print campaign to raise awareness about the cruelty of fur — the “ink not mink“ campaign saying tattoos are much “cooler“ than wearing dead animals (eubanks). what all three of these groups have in common is their commitment to female sexual empowerment and animal advocacy. these women enjoy feeling beautiful, feel empowered by their feminine sexuality, and want to be able to use it for a good cause; all of them agree that changing male attitudes towards animals can be very effectively done through more sexualitybased actions and don’t see what they are doing as degrading (peta; subramanian). a second point to consider here is that there is a larger history of women’s “body activism.’’ over the last several decades we have seen a variety of women’s political actions based on practices that are stereotypically feminine, such as weaving yarn during the women’s pentagon protests of the early 1980s, or weaving yarn through trees and logging equipment to protest logging. recently, two women’s organizations in california have taken the tactic that getting naked gets results (see figures 9 and 9a). breasts not bomb is a grassroots movement. they are dedicated to empowering women to “speak out for a world that remembers what is sacred and honors the mother” (sglaser). they use political street theater and bare their breasts in public, which, they argue, serves as an excellent forum to speak about the vulnerability of humanity and the earth. figure 8 figure 9 52 julie urbanik – “hooters for neuters” unreasonable women baring witness has also been using nudity to protest the war in iraq. the justification, according to the organizer, is that “it gets your attention — doesn’t it?” (sheehan). albeit the women in these campaigns are not dressing or posing provocatively,we still see the same “objectification” of women’s bodies and the same mindset that “sex sells,” but i could not find any documented public examples of feminists or anti-war activists who felt that the tactic of stripping went over the line. why would it be acceptable in one case and not another, when in all cases the women are proactively stating their dedication to the cause and consenting to using their bodies as political statements? for example, on a blog by breasts not bombs, a member writes: though some critics may say that we are acting inappropriately, indecently, immorally, we say that it is our right, guaranteed by the constitution to express free speech, using our bodies as signs and symbols as long as we pose no danger. we believe that breasts symbolize the most non-violent representation of the world at peace. our breasts never hurt anyone and never will. the juvenile response of the police, media and socially retarded audiences are other reasons to restore respect and protection to women. (sglaser) and donna sheehan states in her vision of baring witness that: it is no accident either that women would choose to get naked for the sake of peace and justice. for baring witness is about using the greatest weapon women have, the power of the feminine, the power of our beauty and nakedness to awaken our male leaders and stop them in their tracks. in this way baring witness is about heightening the awareness of human vulnerability. (sheehan) should we also read these two campaigns as sexist and reinforcing sexist stereotypes of women as objects, or claim that these women are somehow deluded by internalizing a patriarchal mindset? these women, like those doing animal advocacy work, recognize that there is a need to try different approaches to reach into a masculine mindset, which they argue is rooted in violence, and to make space for new male behaviors — behaviors rooted in concepts of figure 10 53 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) compassion and caring for all living things. in essence, these women are doing the same thing as the vegan vixens and barbi twins: choosing to use an empowered femininity and celebration of women’s bodies to conduct consciousness-raising campaigns among men. the third point to make here regarding gender-based animal advocacy work has to do with two other examples of targeted outreach to men, neither of which has suffered rejection or criticism for supporting stereotypes of men in specific ways. the first example comes out of los angeles through a program of the california-based friends for animals called “downtown dog rescue.” originally started by lori weise to help the local homeless care for their animal companions, the program has expanded to include low-income areas such as watts. lori’s special affinity for pitbulls, a breed popular among both groups for protection, and used by many for fighting and for displaying “manliness,” has led her to work with people who have very different ideas than hers about what an animal is for and how to relate to it. she has noted that, after all, “these are people who kill people [speaking about those in gangs], why would they give a shit about dogs?” (weise). it was apparent to lori early on that another middle-aged white woman coming into these neighborhoods and telling people what to do was not going to work. after connecting with local trainers and community leaders, lori became a trusted, legitimate presence on the streets. she claims that it was because “she didn’t preach,” and that she mostly listened and shared her stories. the first major event she put together was “pimp your pit” in 2006 (see figure 11). with funding from a variety of sources and the city of los angeles’s mobile spay/neuter program, she was able to bring together a temporary community of people who owned pitbulls and other big breeds. while the city itself and many local animal advocacy groups were worried about gang violence, this event, and events since then, have all gone off without incident, thanks to lori’s street connections who help provide security and “put the word out” that these events are special. the “pimp your pit” event was a play on the then popular mtv show pimp my ride, on which mechanics would give people’s car “cool” makeovers. the message of the flyer is clear — if these black men can “fix” their pitbulls and still be cool, then so can you. subsequent events continued the play on popular culture (“get fixed or die trying” playing off rapper 50 cent’s hit song, “west coast customized“ playing off of the popular west coast choppers brand), as well as to the idea of family in the african-american communities with such events as “family dog“ (see figure 12). the message of “family dog“ is that a “real” man takes care of his whole family, and that includes the animals. figure 11 54 julie urbanik – “hooters for neuters” these events and the daily work of the organization have resulted in the spaying/ neutering of around 1500 animals each year and have provided a different sense of community and human-animal relationships for those who have worked with the group. in lori’s view, what has made these events successful is their openness. she does not force people to get their animals into surgery; instead, people (mainly men) can mingle together and learn from her and from one another. in essence, these events provide a place where a new community practice can potentially take hold — in a way very similar to the hooters events. should these events be stopped because they play into a hyper-masculine gang culture and incorporate terms like “pimp”? while lori concedes that it is possible to make this case, she believes that it would be “ignoring the reality” of the communities she is working with — a reality rooted in gangs, poverty, and urban survival, where just pulling off an event without violence is a victory in its own right. on the other side of the country in new york city, is an organization called rescue ink (see figure 13). the following self-description comes from their website: “you take a look at us, and maybe your first reaction is to cross to the other side of the street. just remember to look both ways before you do. we're not a gang, vigilantes or a social organization, but we do have that certain ‘in your face’ style when it comes to animal abusers.” these men came together based on their love of tattoos, various vehicles, and animals, but as the image makes clear they are very “manly” men. they are willing to do whatever it takes to help animals, even if it means pushing the limits of the law. they see themselves as working in conjunction with other animal advocacy organizations, because figure 13 figure 12 55 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) they believe “the problem of animal abuse and neglect has grown beyond the resources of the existing animal welfare agencies” (ibid). isn’t this group reinforcing the stereotype of the “macho" guy in the same way as those who charge hooters, the barbi twins, and the vegan vixens with reinforcing the stereotype of women as “sexpots”? they display the same uniformity in appearance (tattoos, shaved heads, big muscles, even a biker “uniform”) that we see with the sexy peta girls (thin, pretty, sexy/slightly slutty uniform — unless they are naked). there are no skinny men, men without muscles, or men in frilly clothing. there is an obvious heterosexual norm as the undercurrent beneath all of these gender-based animal advocacy groups/events. so this group, like downtown dog rescue, is playing into, and arguably promoting, stereotypes of men that have not been known for their compassionate behavior towards any living thing. but this, in my argument, is even more of a reason to read these gender-based animal advocacy projects as transgressive. while they might be fulfilling the stereotype of male biker in appearance, their actions to rescue animals transform that identity into something new, into one that says i’m more than a stereotype — listen to what i am saying and doing. in this case, like the “pimp your pit” and “hooters for neuters” events, rescue ink is providing a new place for a new male identity — a literal and figurative place. rescue ink are saying that yes, you can be a biker and look as scary as you want, and still have compassion towards animals. for example, big ant states in his online self-description: big ant feels that having a house full of wonderful creatures provides an environment that is both stress free and nurturing. big ant is an old school guy who loves harleys and hotrods. he's a guy who can be warm and funny, or (if the situation merits) can be a scary and menacing presence. big ant believes that animal abusers are weak, and he will not tolerate them. (rescue ink) it is in fact no long acceptable to be the stereotypical male biker/gangster who doesn’t care about anyone else — human or animal. in this section i have demonstrated that “hooters for neuters” is clearly not the only genderbased animal advocacy practice out there. not only are there a variety of men and women using their own notions of empowered masculinity and femininity to influence human treatment of animals, but other women are using the “power of the feminine” in political ways to challenge the male culture of violence as it is related to war and environmental destruction. in the case of the gender-based animal advocacy, they may be drawing on stereotypical views/practices of masculinity and femininity, but they are also demanding new behaviors from those around them. men are not “hot” for the vegan vixens unless they are animal-compassionate, and for rescue ink abusive men are not “men” at all. to interact with any of these groups one is forced to hear their political message about animals, and thereby see them as more than their 56 julie urbanik – “hooters for neuters” appearance, whether one wants to or not. in this reading, “hooters for neuters” is a place where men can test out new, animal compassionate, practices of masculinity. conclusion. “hooters for neuters” as a place-based campaign has raised hackles around the “proper” use of sexuality and gender identities for animal advocacy. as a specific place, the hooters restaurant, we see a variety of identities coming together — on the surface we have the stereotypical gendered male and female roles, along with animal advocates trying to raise money to get people to spay/neuter their animals to avoid having to euthanize so many. this can easily be read as a continuation of both stereotypical roles — women as objects and men only doing something so they can “get some,” and, therefore the claim that they are selling sex to promote animal advocacy is valid to a certain degree. however, simply claiming that “hooters for neuters” campaigns are only stereotyping and place animals above women in a hierarchy of oppression reinforces categories of men and women as good/bad and reinforces identities as static, rather than as evolving, shifting, or self-defined. the hooters girls are actively choosing a life that they want. many consider themselves subversive feminists and choose to be empowered to use their sexuality just like the vegan vixens, barbi twins, or unreasonable women baring witness. the men who attend these events and have their animals spayed/neutered can do so among other men and see that it is not so traumatizing to their egos to have their companions “fixed.” they can see also that there is a new culture of “macho compassion for animals” (maybe compassionate masculinity rather than frontier masculinity) out there they can be a part of. feminists, animal advocates, and animal geographers alike have written about the importance of developing “ethics of care and responsibility.” the attempts to judge, to police, and to refuse new forms of gender-based actions and identities echo the ultimately losing early spay/neuter campaigns. how can new identities and practices be created without a place for them to be tried out in? if communities of ethical animal practices are the goal, then policing and controlling how those communities come about seems counterproductive in the face of the alternative. appendix 1: listing of “hooters for neuters” events by state ca: 1) city of sacramento animal care services (www.cityofsacramento.org/generalservices/animal-care/documents/volnews_nov07.pdf) 2) “hooters for neuters" and la animal services ‘near’ event il: illinois humane society (www.illinoishumane.org) ky: ky humane society (www.kiss989fm.com/cccommon/news/sections/newsarticle.html?feed=283307&article=5630382 ) 57 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) ok: ok alliance for animals (www.animalsheltering.org/publications/magazine/back_issues/asm_mar_apr05.pdf) nj: nj aid for animals (www.njafa.org/homeindex.htm); nm: nm no more homeless pets coalition (www.bestfriends.org/allthegoodnews/nmhpnews_081504.cfm) nv: heaven can wait sanctuary (www.nootersclub.org/documents/) ok: ok alliance for animals (www.animalsheltering.org/resource_library/magazine_articles/mar_apr_2005) sc: humane society of north myrtle beach (http://www.humanesocietynmb.org/newsandevents.html) tx: 1) feral friends animal rescue (www.feralfriends.org/specialevents_recent.php) 2) animal aid humane society waco (suzie wiseman, personal communication, 14 april 2008) 3) greyhound adoption league of dallas (www.pegasusnews.com/events/2008/jun/21/102432/) ut: no more homeless pets (www.utahpets.org) va: prince william county spca (www.pwspca.org/events.htm) note 1. this is not to say that gonadectomies are without controversy. for example, clare palmer and yi-fu tuan have thoughtfully explored the connections between spaying and neutering and notions of human power and dominance over “pet” animals. this article, however, is not focused on the debate over gonadectomies but on the strategies used by those who support this as one of the solutions to excess companion animals. works cited adams, carol. the sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory. new york: continuum, 1990. adams, carol and josephine donovan, ed. women and animals: feminist theoretical explorations. durham, nc: duke up, 1995. 58 julie urbanik – “hooters for neuters” anahita, sine and tamara mix. “retrofitting frontier masculinity for alaska’s war against wolves.” gender and society 20.3 (2006): 332-353. anderson, kay. “culture and nature at the adelaide zoo: at the frontiers of ‘human’ geography.” transactions of the institute of british geographers 20 (1995): 275-294. ann. “the sexual politics of no meat.” feministing.com 13 february 2008. 7 july 2008. <feministing.com/archives/008601.html>. associated press. “l.a. shoots down ‘hooters for neuters’.” msnbc online 28 june 2006. 26 march 2008. <www.msnbc.msn.com/id/13597837>. battista, francis. “follow the crowd! you’ll be a real individualist.” best friends magazine march/april (2008): 55. blackshaw, j.k. and c. day. “attitudes of dog owners to neutering pets: demographic data and effects of owner attitudes.” australian veterinary journal 71.4 (1994): 113-116. connell, r.w. “the big picture: masculinities in recent world history.” theory and society 22 (1993): 597-623. cti, inc. “neuticles.” cti neuticles 1 may 2008. < www.neuticles.com/>. davies, gail. “virtual animals in electronic zoos: the changing geographies of animal capture and display,” in philo and wilbert, 243-267. disgusted. “letters.” best friends magazine jan/feb (2006): 43. donovan, josephine and carol adams, ed. the feminist care tradition in animal ethics. new york: columbia up, 2007. downtown dog rescue. “events.” downtown dog rescue 1 march 2008. <www.downtowndogrescue.org/events.htm>. elder, glen, jennifer wolch, and jody emel. “le pratique sauvage: race, place, and the humananimal divide,” in wolch and emel, 72-90. ellie. “response to from population to peta: what’s on our radar this week.” grist: environmental news and commentary 21 september 2007. 12 april 2008. <www.grist.org/etc/gristlist/2007/09/21/>. 59 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) emel, jody. “are you man enough, big and bad enough? ecofeminism and wolf eradication in the usa.” environment and planning d: society and space 13 (1995): 707-734. erickson, tiffany. “hooters pushing neuters.” deseret morning news. 20 september 2005. 26 march 2008. <findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4188/is_20030920/ai_n11416060>. eubanks, kevin. “suicide girls bare all in peta 2’s latest anti-fur ad.” the peta files. 19 february 2008. 3 march 2008. <blog.peta.org/archives/2008/02/suicidegirls_ba.php>. fell, erin. personal communication. 1 january 2009. frank, joshua. “an interactive model of human and companion animal dynamics: the ecology and economies of dog overpopulation and the human cost of addressing the problem.” human ecology 32.1 (2004): 107-130. griffiths, huw, ingrid poulter, and david sibley. “feral cats in the city,” in philo and wilbert, 56-70. gullo, andrea, unna lassister, and jennifer wolch. “the cougar’s tale,” in wolch and emel, 139-161. hobson, kersty. “political animals? on animals as subjects in an enlarged political geography.” political geography 26 (2007): 250-267. hooters. “did you know? hooters facts.” hooters restaurants 14 april 2008. <www.hooters.com/about.aspx>. howell, phillip.“flush and the banditti: dog-stealing in victorian london,” in philo and wilbert, 35-55. (hsus) humane society of the united states: the crisis of pet overpopulation. 4 may 2007. humane society of the united states. 15 april 2008 <www.hsus.org/pets/issues_affecting_our_pets/>. hymon, steve. “animal services benefit a bust.” la times 28 june 2006. 2 february 2008. < articles.latimes.com/2006/jun/28/local/me-bikini28>. kate. “response to lynn harris’ 'hooters for neuters' is a no go.” salon.com 28 june 2006. 26 march 2008. < www.salon.com/mwt/broadsheet/2006/06/28/hooters_for_neuters/index.html>. k.h. the hooters girl 5 may 2008. <http://www.thehootersgirl.blogspot.com/>. 60 julie urbanik – “hooters for neuters” kitty liberation front. “about us.” kitty liberation front 25 april 2008. 6 june 2008. <www.thekittyliberationfront.org/about.htm>. knbc. “barbi twins ask city to rethink opposition to ‘hooters for neuters.’” knbc.com 28 june 2006. 26 march 2008. <www.knbc.com/print/9443090/detail.com>. kruse, c. “gender, views of nature, and support for animal rights.” society and animals 7 (1999): 179-198. kustritz, margaret. “determining the optimal age for gonadectomy of dogs and cats.” journal of the american veterinary medical association 231.11 (2007): 1665-1675. levy, ariel. female chauvinist pigs: women and the rise of raunch culture.new york: free press, 2006. loh, juliana. “a hooter’s girl perspective: the modern day courtesan.” chief magazine 2006. 26 march 2008 < http://chiefmag.com/issues/1/features/hooters-girl-s-perspective/>. looney, andrea et al. “the association of shelter veterinarians veterinary medical care guide for spay-neuter programs.” journal of the american veterinary medical association 233:1 (2008): 74-86. luke, brian. brutal: manhood and the exploitation of animals. chicago: u of illinois p, 2007. mcneil, jean and elisabeth constandy. “addressing the problem of pet overpopulation: the experience of new hanover county animal control services.” journal of public health management & practice 12.5 (2006): 452-455. michel, suzanne. “golden eagles and the environmental politics of care,” in wolch and emel, 162-190. moore, heather. “peta replies.” peta: where only women are treated like meat 27 november 2001. 21 february 2008. < www.nostatusquo.com/aclu/peta/peta.html>. neville, peter and russell jones. pet sex: the rude facts of the life for the family dog, cat, and rabbit. london: pan macmillan, 1993. oxford-lafayette humane society. “animal overpopulation.” oxford-lafayette human society 7 october 2007. 11 november 2008. <www.oxfordpets.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=61&itemid=63 >. 61 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) paechter, carrie. “masculinities and femininities as communities of practice.” women’s studies international forum 26.1 (2003): 69-77. pattanayak, saswat. “'hooters for neuters' influence city department” women’s rights employment law blog june 2006. 26 march 2008. <womensrightsny.com/blawg/archive/2006/06/hooters.html>. peta. “suicide girls for peta 2.” peta 2 on youtube 14 february 2008. 12 december 2008. <www.youtube.com/watch?v=kxxfaxktcoy>. philo, chris. “animals, geography, and the city: notes on inclusions and exclusions,” in wolch and emel, 51-70. philo, chris and chris wilbert, ed. animal spaces, beastly places: new geographies of humananimal relations. new york: routledge, 2000. rescue ink. “about rescue ink.” rescue ink 8 august 2008. <www.rescueink.org/about.php>. ryan, james. “hunting with the camera: photography, wildlife and colonialism in africa,” in philo and wilbert, 203-221. sglaser. “breasts not bombs.” breasts not bombs blogspot 24 september 2007. 3 march 2008. < breastsnotbombs.blogspot.com/>. sheehan, donna. “the vision.” baring witness 11 march 2008. <www.baringwitness.org>. spain, c. victor, janet scarlett, and katherine houpt. “long-term risks and benefits of earlyage gonadectomy in dogs.” journal of the american veterinary medical association 224.3 (2004): 380-387. staeheli, lynn. “place.” the companion to political geography. ed. john agnew. malden, ma and oxford: blackwell, 2003. 158-170. subramanian, sunny. personal communication. 12 december 2008. suicide girls. “about suicide girls.” suicidegirls.com 1 april 2008. <suicidegirls.com/about/>. urbanik, julie. “locating the transgenic landscape: animal biotechnology and politics of place in massachusetts.” geoforum 38 (2007): 1205-1218. vegan vixens. “meet the vixens.” vegan vixens 1 april 2008. <www.veganvixens.com/index.php?page=meet> . 62 julie urbanik – “hooters for neuters” weise, lori. personal communication. 7 january 2009. wolch, jennifer. “zoöpolis,” in wolch and emel, 119-138. wolch, jennifer and jin zhang. “siren songs: gendered discourses of concern for sea creatures.” a companion to feminist geography. ed. lise nelson and joni seager. malden, ma: blackwell, 2005. 458-485. wolch, jennifer, jody emel, and chris wilbert. “reanimating cultural geography.” handbook of cultural geography. ed. kay anderson, mona domosh, sarah pile, and nigel thrift. london: sage, 2003. 184-206. wolch, jennifer, alec brownlow, and unna lassiter. “constructing the animal worlds of innercity los angeles,” in philo and wilbert, 71-97. wolch, jennifer and jody emel, ed. animal geographies: place, politics and identity in the natureculture borderlands. london: verso, 1998. arseneault and collard, crimes against reproduction crimes against reproduction domesticating life in the animal trials jesse arseneault concordia university rosemary-claire collard simon fraser university humanimalia 14.1 (fall 2023) abstract: secular animal trials were coincident with witch trials across europe from the 1200s–1700s, peaking between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. the trials’ similarity extends beyond simultaneity. both forms of trials were preoccupied with what we call reproductive crimes: criminalized perceived deviance from reproductive norms that codified into an order facilitating the rise of capitalist modernity. in this paper we discuss secondary sources concerning the animal trials alongside feminist theories of reproduction, domestication, and anthropocentrism to suggest that animal trials, like witch trials, are sites of struggle over the domestication of reproduction. the animal trials are specifically a site of negotiation concerning the nonhuman world’s position within an ascendant domesticated reproductive order. in the trials, the domestication of reproduction thus entangles with the anthropocentric domestication of the nonhuman world. the empirical base of our analysis focuses on three arenas in which animals were incorporated into juridical structures as criminal subjects: bestiality, infanticide, and witch trials. the first two involved animals being tried directly in french courts, while the latter involved animals being implicated in british trials as witches’ familiars. together, these appearances of animals provide an introductory window into how human–animal relations were 1) shaped by the reproductive anxieties and politics of the late middle ages and early modern period in these countries, and 2) marshalled towards the assembly of domesticated reproductive norms whose legacies persist into current frameworks of gendered and interspecies relationality. this imposition of a gendered order onto animality evidences the extent to which gendered systems of reproduction govern not only humans but also a wider terrain of life. keywords: law, reproduction, domestication, anthropocentrism, animal trials, witch trials jesse arseneault is an associate professor in english at concordia university in montreal, canada. he is also the current president of the canadian association for postcolonial studies (caps) and co-director, with rosemary collard, of society, politics, animals, and materialities (spam). primarily located in the field of african cultural studies, his research focuses on animal studies, postcolonial theory, queer theory, and the environmental humanities. email: jesse.arseneault@concordia.ca rosemary-claire collard is a human geographer and political ecologist who draws on feminist political economy and primary research to shed light on the root drivers of extinction and declining wild animal abundance. she is the author of animal traffic: lively capital in the global exotic pet trade (duke, 2020) and co-editor of critical animal geographies: politics, intersections and hierarchies in a multispecies world (routledge, 2015). she is an associate professor in geography at simon fraser university. email: rcollard@sfu.ca copyright © 2023 jesse arseneault and rosemary-claire collard this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 1–41. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.11727 mailto:jesse.arseneault@concordia.ca mailto:rcollard@sfu.ca http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.11727 arseneault and collard, animal trials | 3 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) secular courts across europe from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries put various domesticated animals (such as pigs, donkeys, bulls, dogs, and horses) on trial for crimes including bestiality, infanticide, and property damage.1 these trials were arguably commonplace across continental europe,2 and while it is tempting to cast them as relics of a superstitious past, the timing of the trials alone complicates such an easy dismissal.3 while american historian e. p. evans’s study of animal trials dates the earliest recorded incident as occurring in the year 824 against a labour of moles in the aosta valley, the trials peaked in the early modern era, specifically the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries — regarded as “an age of ‘comparative enlightenment’” relative to the middle ages preceding it.4 historians also emphasize that the trials “were serious proceedings, carried out by professional lawyers […] sanctioned by bishops, and often discussed by university professors”.5 legal scholars, too, challenge the supposed discontinuity between the “brutality” of animal trials, which often ended in animals’ deaths, and the contemporary situation where animals are routinely killed for threatening property or human life, without formally being tried in court.6 considering the continuities between the supposedly archaic trials and the treatment of animals today, in this paper we suggest that the animal trials offer an oblique view into an emerging politics of reproduction at that time, and particularly the position of animals within those politics. while a varied and insightful set of scholarship has considered what the animal trials tell us about contemporary 1 by contrast, wild animals like insects and rodents were tried in ecclesiastical courts, typically as groups accused of damaging crops. for discussion of these ecclesiastical trials, see leeson, “vermin trials”; cohen, “law”; dinzelbacher, “animal trials”; girgen, “historical and contemporary prosecution”. 2 carson, “trial of animals and insects”, 411. 3 girgen, “historical and contemporary prosecution”. 4 finkelstein in cohen, “law”, 17; see also hyde, “prosecution of lifeless things” for detail on animal trials (and those of inanimate objects) that extend from ancient greece into the periods we discuss in this paper. 5 dinzelbacher, “animal trials”, 406. 6 see girgen, “historical and contemporary prosecution”; beirne, “the law is an ass”; sykes, “human drama”. 4 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) human–animal relations and animal law, no scholars have considered how the animal trials shaped and were shaped by the reproductive politics of their time. this is a significant omission for two reasons: first, as several scholars have noted and as we discuss below, the animal trials are geographically and temporally coextensive with the witch trials, which have been theorized as a potent site of reproductive politics.7 second, the crimes featuring most prominently in secular animal trials can be interpreted as reproductive. by “reproductive crimes” we mean behaviours deemed criminal for their perceived deviance from an assemblage of reproductive norms — norms concerning one’s conduct regarding sex, family life, child-rearing, intimacy — that are later codified into an order in capitalist modernity. the two most common crimes for which animals were tried in secular courts were bestiality (usually prosecuted under the rubric of “buggery” or “sodomy”) and infanticide — crimes notable for their ostensible infringement on reproductive norms of proper sexual conduct and child-rearing, respectively. to these reproductive crimes we add a third for which animals were not tried directly but in which they were implicated: that of being a witch’s “familiar”, an animal considered a supernatural entity who assisted witches in their diabolical rites. in witch trials in england, especially, animals were commonly accused and punished for their perceived complicity in witchcraft, which manifested in what was cast as unnatural sexual or familial intimacy between these animals and women accused of being witches. in all three of these crimes, animals were viewed as a disturbance to social norms regarding domestic reproductive order. in this paper we explore the reproductive political dimensions of these crimes, focusing especially on bestiality and infanticide, particularly in france8 (though the prosecution of these crimes occurred across europe) and familiars in witch trials in england. looking to these two emerging states, in our view, helps to illuminate 7 federici, caliban; fissel, vernacular bodies; farrell, “witch hunts”. see also rowlands, “witchcraft”, for a careful and nuanced review of scholarship on the witch hunts, with particular attention to the role played by gender and patriarchy. 8 dinzelbacher notes that france was one of a few european regions that “had a comparatively high number of animal trials” (“animal trials”, 411). arseneault and collard, animal trials | 5 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the diverse origins of a socioeconomic order that later proliferated around the globe when both states indelibly shaped the world through various forms of colonialism. while reproductive politics varied across time and space in europe over the early modern period, there were common threads concerning proper reproductive conduct, including what constituted appropriate relations between humans and animals, and the role of the state — emerging in its modern form — in promoting and enforcing this conduct. during the early modern era, when the animal and witch trials peaked, both reproductive and species orders were becoming more “domesticated”. we conceive of domestication broadly, following geographer kay anderson, as involving racializing, colonial, patriarchal, and ecological processes of separating and mastering “the animal” within (via the mind–body dualism) and outside the human (via the human– animal dualism).9 we focus on two modes of domestication in particular: first, the emergence and consolidation of a normative, gendered social order and division of labour in which women became responsible for the “unproductive” and unpaid work of social reproduction — a division that feminist political economists have long argued is essential to the development and functioning of capitalism.10 second, the attempted domestication of the nonhuman world, which directs nonhuman bodies and energies toward capital accumulation, fitting neatly alongside enlightenment notions of animals as mechanistic automata, and colonial processes of “improvement”.11 drawing together feminist theory that outlines and connects these two modes of domestication, legal and historical scholarship on reproductive politics, and secondary sources on the animal trials, in this paper we consider how the animal and witch trials codify the contested position of the nonhuman world within overlapping and hardening domesticated, reproductive, and anthropocentric 9 anderson, “a walk on the wild side”. 10 federici, caliban; mies, patriarchy and accumulation; fraser, “contradictions”. 11 anne mcclintock notes the close ties between domestication of nature and colonial enterprise, explicitly tying it to gendered frameworks this paper interrogates (imperial leather, 34). julietta singh, in unthinking mastery, also foregrounds colonial mastery’s effects on nonhuman lives. a large body of work explores the relationship between domestication and capitalism, e.g. tsing, “unruly edges” and shukin, animal capital. 6 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) orders.12 understanding anthropocentrism as an “interrelated and interlocking set of meanings and practices” that “reproduce a privileged space for the human”,13 we foreground how gendered frameworks of domestication undergird the animal trials and their legacies in ways that implicate both human and nonhuman lives. in doing so, we build from the close parallels some scholars observe between the animal trials and the witch trials.14 the trials occurred across similar periods and geographies, and they are, we suggest, mutually implicated in emerging reproductive frameworks. while the animal trials appear to have preceded the witch trials, for the most part, both occurred from the thirteenth to eighteenth centuries across europe, concentrated in france, italy, and switzerland. the frequency curve of animal trials overlaps with that of the witch trials, both peaking in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.15 treatises on witchcraft, such as the malleus maleficarum, and on animal trials, like the de exorcismis, informed both types of trial, and were even published together, seen as relevant to each other’s machinations, particularly concerning exorcism.16 in switzerland, italy, and france, beginning in the fifteenth century, another type of animal trial emerged that borrowed elements from the witch trials: individual animals were tried in secular courts, charged with supernatural behaviour, always found guilty, and killed on a witches’ pyre.17 as the discipline of demonology spread and began to influence popular consciousness, animals, as we will see, became viewed as “active agents in diabolic rites”.18 as feminist political economist silvia federici writes of the witch trials, “such was the presence of animals 12 our reliance on secondary sources for the paper’s analysis means we are limited by others’ interpretations of the trials. we have sought to mitigate this limitation by triangulating where possible among the secondary sources, and capturing corrections of the historical record where they exist (e.g. friedland, seeing justice done; beirne, “a note”). we thank the anonymous reviewers for their recommendations of further secondary sources, which were helpful in this effort. 13 calarco, “being”, 416. 14 cohen, “law”, 12; leeson, “vermin trials”. 15 leeson, “vermin trials”; dinzelbacher, “animal trials”; van bruaene, “revolting beasts”. 16 cohen, “law”. 17 cohen, “law”, 34. 18 cohen, “law”, 30. arseneault and collard, animal trials | 7 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) in the witches’ world that one must presume that they too were being put on trial”.19 these trials were neither a vestigial, irrational throwback to the “dark ages”, nor did they operate through purely “rationalistic” logics. both, as federici describes in reference to the witch hunts, were a “transitional phenomenon, a sort of ideological bricolage” that combined “elements from the fantastic world of medieval christianity, rationalistic arguments, and modern bureaucratic court procedures”.20 historians’ reflections on how the witch trials resulted from an exchange or compromise between learned and popular ideas is equally true of the animal trials.21 as a transitional phenomenon, the witch trials were a place where ideas about reproduction (and the state’s role in it), supernatural and secular power, and gender and sexuality were assembled through centuries-long debate. the animal trials were also part of this process, a site of social struggle over the role of the natural world, especially animals, in the reproductive and anthropocentric orders of the time. while the law through the period of the animal and witch trials might appear anthropocentric in its scope and execution, the former reveal how the norms of reproduction extended beyond human lives, even when the letter of the law applied to humans only. understanding the reproductive norms that incorporated animals into a punitive structure for a lengthy period of european history, we suggest, promises to shed light on how the current absence of animals as subjects in legal proceedings is actually a mode of governing their bodies by rendering them nonsubjects and mere property. the removal of animals from legal subjectivity today parallels federici’s account of the removal of reproduction from labour; both processes are indicative of a biopolitical system governing reproductive bodies by way of exclusion. the animal trials participated, if ambivalently, in the broad historical process of turning animals into property, acknowledging their 19 federici, caliban, 194. 20 federici caliban, 203. 21 on witch trials, see dolan, dangerous familiars; on animal trials, see cohen, “law”. 8 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) agency while simultaneously depriving them of it by imposing gendered norms of reproduction on them. on the one hand, the trials centrally acknowledge animals as having the capacity to act; on the other hand, as allie terry-fritsch argues, accused animals underwent a “calculated stripping of identity” during animal trials: “instead of a recognizable subject that was connected to the community through shared physical characteristics and social history, the convicted offender was ‘defaced’”, that is, violently deprived of identity and recognizable social value.22 in this way, animals entering the juridical arena as legal subjects and being subjected to their punitive outcomes in the animal trials were violently incorporated into (and subsequently objectified within) the capitalist reproductive order that was emerging — albeit unevenly — across much of europe between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, as we explore in our next section. mechanistic thinking is implicated in both modes of violence and desubjectification. as federici observes of social processes in which witch trials were implicated, by the seventeenth century, the “machine was becoming the model of social behaviour”, which achieved “the mechanization of the proletarian body and its transformation, in the case of women, into a machine for the production of new workers”.23 at the same time, cartesian ideas about “beast-machines” or animals as automata were taking hold, albeit slowly and not without contestation.24 if animal trials equally factor into the production of the mechanized social body, following foucault’s discipline and punish, punitive processes might be said to be violent not only because of what they destroy but also because of what they produce.25 the reproductive crimes that dominated animal and witch trials normalized gendered and ecological forms of reproduction, contributing to the creation of a domestic order that sustained the mechanization of the social by quelling disturbances to reproductive processes. in this analysis 22 terry-fritsch, “animal trials”, 56. 23 federici, caliban, 145 and 12. 24 sahlins, 1688. 25 see also friedland, “beyond deterrence”. friedland takes up foucault’s work to analyse the “positive” power of the animal trials, exploring not only what behaviours they deterred but also those they encouraged. arseneault and collard, animal trials | 9 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) we presume that governance of social life required control over ecological reproduction, by which we mean the life-sustaining capacities of the crops needed to sustain a growing population and the animals needed to support its labour force. punitive outcomes we reference below (as well as instances in which animals were spared from punishment) assemble notions of animality primed for induction into this domesticated order, expunging noncompliance to order through death and (more rarely) rewarding docile domesticated behaviour. the bulk of our paper considers what the three criminal acts of bestiality, infanticide, and being a witch’s familiar suggest about nonhuman lives’ implication in early modern reproductive norms that established one of the conditions of possibility for capitalist (re)production. but first we sketch the historical context and our approach to domestication as an imperial process, building from theorists who foreground domestication’s interlinked (but non-identical) gendered, ecological, and racialized dimensions. theorizing domestication across reproductive and anthropocentric orders in the early modern period, many european states, emerging in protean modern form, began claiming jurisdiction over marriage and family formation and directly intervening into the reproductive lives of their citizens. states’ efforts to regulate reproduction are often attributed to their interest in promoting population growth, which was seen as politically beneficial, expanding kingdoms’ wealth and power by bringing more soldiers, laborers, and taxpayers, particularly in a time of anxiety over population instability arising from war, famine, disease, and harvest failures.26 several feminist historians of the early modern era show, however, that prevailing ideologies and norms around gender and sexuality are also part of the story, especially the conviction that marriage and child rearing were of central importance to “stabilizing the political order”, encouraging social discipline and obedience.27 in european states like france and england, 26 tuttle, conceiving. 27 tuttle, conceiving, 7; berry and foyster, the family; hanley, “engendering”; amussen, “being stirred”; fissel, vernacular bodies. 10 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) early modern political wisdom held that “the health and security of the nation […] rested on the stability of family life”;28 that “orderly households anchored an ordered society”;29 and that the origins and nature of monarchical power were a natural extension of the paternal power of a conjugal household.30 increased legal regulation of reproductive life (including marriage, birth and child rearing, and inheritance) was also a way for early modern states to enact power.31 in pursuit of power, population growth, and this stable domestic base, the early modern state began intervening into the reproduction of its citizens. in france, this intervention occurred through what sarah hanley calls the “family–state compact”: a bundle of state regulations and bureaucratic procedures that brought family formation and reproductive customs under patriarchal and parliamentary control and supervision.32 the new regulation took particular aim at “the female realm of pregnancy and childbirth” and included several “pronatalist” policies, or policies intended through incentive and punishment to “promote both population growth and the extension of the gendered identities associated with procreation and childrearing”.33 for example, a 1666 royal edict in france granted full exemption from royal taxation for men who fathered twelve or more “legitimate” children.34 in doing so, the state “claimed the realm of licit, reproductive sexuality as proper terrain for government intervention”.35 at the same time, the state began criminalizing and punishing deviation from reproductive, sexual, and family norms. although the church had long forbidden certain acts, such as non-procreative sex, across europe in the sixteenth century, early modern states began to assume and extend jurisdiction over these matters.36 repro28 berry and foyster, the family, 8. 29 amussen, “being stirred”, 73 30 tuttle, conceiving. 31 hanley, “engendering”. 32 hanley, “engendering”, 6. 33 hanley “engendering”, 15; tuttle, conceiving, 3. 34 hanley, “engendering”, 12; tuttle, conceiving. 35 tuttle, conceiving, 8. 36 rapaport, “mad women”. arseneault and collard, animal trials | 11 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) ductive crimes, or what frances dolan calls domestic crimes, rose to prominence in law and the public imagination in the early modern period.37 infanticide had long been policed by the church, but its criminalization intensified through new laws in france and england. under an edict by henry ii in 1556, france declared clandestine pregnancy and childbirth a “serious and detestable” crime and began condemning to death women convicted of killing unbaptized babies.38 in 1623, the english parliament passed the act to prevent the destroying and murthering of bastard children, which punished with death any unmarried woman who concealed the death of her child. this act made alleged infanticides the only crime for which it was the defendant’s responsibility to establish her innocence rather than the crown’s responsibility to prove guilt — a legal stipulation that remained in place until 1803.39 historians have noted that incomplete record-keeping makes it impossible to know how many cases of infanticide were prosecuted and how common the crime was.40 existing records do indicate prosecution increased significantly after the passage of the 1623 statute in england.41 records also highlight the gendered nature of infanticide, with women representing nearly all of the accused.42 this was also true of witchcraft, which was itself, as federici reminds us, frequently cast as a reproductive crime, with witches accused of aborting pregnancies or causing male sterility.43 these crimes against reproduction were not only formally registered in law but also accompanied by a wave of popular discourse. in sixteenth-century england, “witches who harmed children and mothers who murdered their babies became stock characters in a newly emergent print marketplace”.44 following the 1623 statute making infanticide a capital offense, popular representations of infanticide proliferated 37 dolan, dangerous familiars. 38 hanley “engendering”, 11; tuttle, conceiving. 39 rapaport, “mad women”, 549-50; dolan, dangerous familiars; sauer, “infanticide”. 40 gowing, “secret births” 41 dolan, dangerous familiars, 124. 42 dolan, dangerous familiars, 124; dean, crime. 43 federici, caliban; also see dolan, dangerous familiars; jensen, the path of the devil. 44 fissel, vernacular bodies, 3. 12 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) and suggested the crime was widespread.45 women accused of witchcraft and infanticide — most often poor, single women — were sensationalized, thus indicating that they were threats to domestic order and stability.46 unruly nonhuman agents were also criminalized by the increasing state focus on reproductive order. in thinking through the implications of domestic order for nonhuman bodies, it is important to note that at this time the position of the natural world was in flux. long held popular conceptions of animals as conduits between the human and the supernatural world, as endowed with magical powers of their own, or as humans’ superiors, were clashing with the ascendant learned enlightenment view of the animals as mechanistic, devoid of agency and inferior to humans.47 an escalation in large-scale material interventions into the nonhuman world accompanied this shift. animal and plant domestication was of course occurring long before the early modern period, but an interest in bringing the nonhuman world under the human thumb, and interventions to attempt this, intensified in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the emergence of world-transforming colonial projects like natural history collecting and resource extraction, zoological gardens and royal menageries, and what crosby calls ecological imperialism.48 at the same time, the nonhuman world also became more regularly drawn on as a metaphor or foil for sovereign power. peter sahlins argues that louis xiv often rooted his authority in the natural world, specifically through symbolic representations he constructed in the royal menagerie at versailles, “a living metaphor of royal authority and aristocratic civility”.49 constructed as the menagerie might be, its symbolic currency naturalized sovereign authority. these two modes of attempted domestication — the formation of a domestic, gendered reproductive order, and the ordering and 45 malcomson, “infanticide”; dolan, dangerous familiars. 46 dolan, dangerous familiars. 47 cohen, “law”; sahlins, 1688. 48 burton and mawani, eds, animalia; tilley, africa; sahlins, 1688; sahlins, “royal menageries”; grigson, menagerie; crosby, ecological imperialism. 49 sahlins, ‘royal menageries”, 239. arseneault and collard, animal trials | 13 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) mastery of the nonhuman world — are not the same, but they share logics and bleed into each other discursively and materially. as carolyn merchant famously argues, the rise of mechanistic thinking during the early modern period was central to the oppression and domination of both women and nature.50 anna tsing finds material connections between domestication as a physical enactment of power over nature, and domestication as a social project of ordering reproductive life according to a gendered division of labour, even farther back in time. she observes that “domesticating agricultural grains transformed [the bodies of] women”, rapidly increasing population expansion but also heightening the risk of death during pregnancy and confining women to the domestic sphere.51 moreover, ecologically transformative processes such as the british enclosure acts of the seventeenth to the early twentieth centuries, which privatized vast swaths of previously commonly held land across the nation, were accompanied by moral discourses of bodily enclosure most acutely felt in the policing of women’s behaviour and sexuality.52 in all of these cases, the gendered domestic and the ecologically domesticated call upon and recall one another, and the close ties between domestication of the nonhuman world and the policing of women’s reproduction come to light. increasingly, from the seventeenth century onwards, women were closely associated with unreason and nature; in this regard, women were cast in opposition to civilizational projects, and where legality was concerned, even justice itself.53 here, we extend this history of domestication to particular cases of criminalizing animals, within which animals who were seen as 50 merchant, the death of nature. see also mcclintock, imperial leather and schiebinger, nature’s body. 51 tsing, “nine provocations”, 239. tsing notes of the neolithic period that “the high carbohydrate diets of the starch-heavy grains of domestic cereals would have increased the frequency of ovulation. women seem to have begun reproducing earlier and had more babies. meanwhile, women’s stature decreased due to the change in diet. biological anthropologists have argued that the death of women in childbearing, rather than being a species problem of our famed big heads, becomes acute only with grain domestication, when nutritionally stressed young women whose pelvises have not reached earlier sizes start bearing young.” 52 burt and archer, enclosure acts. 53 pateman, “‘the disorder of women’”. 14 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) disrupting reproductive orders by committing infanticide or “abnormal” intimacy with humans were condemned to violent punishment. the intersection of the realms of reproductive politics and animality collided with particular potency in secular courts of law, specifically in animal trials and witch trials that featured “familiars”. in what follows, we discuss three examples from the annals of these trials in each of the categories of bestiality and infanticide, focused on france, and the crime of being a witch’s familiar, in england. for the first two crimes, we draw especially from what remains the most comprehensive account of the animal trails: e. p. evans’s the criminal prosecution and capital punishment of animals, among other more recent original surveys of the animal trial archives.54 aiming more to furnish a broad, structural sense of the relationship between animal trials and reproductive order, as opposed to a place-based understanding of the trials, our paper foregrounds a few exemplary trials that illustrate this relationship. while this structure cannot hope to be comprehensive, it provides an introductory window into how animal trials, in their various times and places, participated in the assembly of reproductive norms whose legacies persist in current frameworks of gendered and interspecies relationality. bestiality while legal processes in europe during the middle ages were heterogeneous and dynamic, an increasing persecution of non-procreative sexual acts began across much of the continent as early as the twelfth century. ruth mazo karras traces the specific emergence of state violence against same-sex sexuality as of this period. building on john boswell’s work, she argues that “in the thirteenth century […] legal systems began to adopt strict penalties (and sometimes enforce them) and churchmen, following the particular lead of thomas aquinas, used the discourse of ‘nature’ to cast any 54 evans, criminal prosecution; macgregor, “criminalizing animals”. historians have found flaws in evans’s compiled records of animal trials (see beirne, “a note”, and “the law is an ass”) and have critiqued evans’s “evolutionist and positivist perspectives” (srivastava, “‘mean, dangerous, and uncontrollable beasts’”, 2). nevertheless, evans’s text is still acknowledged as the “most relied upon” (sykes, “human drama”, 278n31), and the most “comprehensive account” of the trials (grier, “childhood socialization”, 118n50). arseneault and collard, animal trials | 15 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) nonreproductive sex as deeply deviant”.55 panics about the crime of sodomy — as well as other nonreproductive sex acts such as masturbation — grew in burgundian bruges in the late fourteenth century56 and in germany and switzerland from the early fifteenth century.57 while not identical in their legal processes and punishments, these contexts nonetheless speak to the emergence of the reproductive ordering of social life we traced above, a phenomenon that accelerates and homogenizes with the advent of biopolitical capitalism. bestiality was a central part of that emerging reproductive order. if, in various parts of europe during the late middle ages, an increasing trend toward reproductive order banished non-procreative sex, bestiality is perhaps most exemplary of illicit, non-procreative sex, particularly for the way that congress with nonhuman life metonymized the human violator’s transgression from civility to inhumanity.58 bestiality also perhaps best exemplified a crime against nature in the western christian tradition, in which nature “referred to the hierarchical order of god’s creation, where every living thing had its determined and appropriate position”.59 in sweden, after bestiality was named a capital crime in 1442, “approximately six hundred to seven hundred persons, mostly male adolescents and young men, were executed, together with hundreds of cows and mares and a smaller number of sows, ewes, and bitches”.60 punishments for this crime were frequent and severe, and in france (the context we turn to below in an analysis of one particular trial) they typically required “that the bodies of the offenders were completely eradicated through the full-scale destruction of fire”.61 even in places where animals were not directly put on trial themselves in prosecuted cases of bestiality, 55 karras, “regulation of sodomy”, 969. 56 boone, “state power and illicit sexuality”. 57 puff, sodomy. 58 bestiality trials were not limited to europe, but extended to european colonialism from the middle ages into the nineteenth century. for more details, see bazant, “bestiality” for an analysis of bestiality in colonial latin america, and tortorici, sins against nature, for inquiry into bestiality prosecutions in colonial new spain. 59 liliequist, “peasants against nature”, 393. 60 liliequist, “peasants against nature”, 394. 61 terry-fritsch, “animal trials”, 76. 16 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) they were invariably incorporated into the proceedings via their spectacularly violent punishments, and they accentuated the inhumanity of the perpetrator. in that animals in the trials emphasized the perpetrator’s transgression beyond humanity, they reveal how the law’s reproductive imperatives extended their power to govern nonhuman life. the law did so by establishing appropriate relations between human and animal and punishing exceptions to these relations.62 animal studies has troubled the exceptionality of bestiality within legal and cultural discourse, exposing that the spectacle of interspecies sex as a singularly transgressive violation also allows a society dependent on animal labour to occlude the fact that its social structure involves multiple kinds of everyday violations of animal life, many of which are sexualized. as kathy rudy convincingly argues,63 bestiality figures as an exceptional and obscene violation despite the myriad ways animals are regularly subjected to a range of practices more physically violent — practices that require sexual contact between humans and other species (such as animal breeding) not regarded as obscene at all.64 colleen glenney boggs also emphasizes that the supposedly asexual role of the pet in modern times is deeply embedded in the sexual structure of the family, even when sex between human members of the family and its pet is prohibited.65 in the context of the animal trials, norms governing interspecies sex, particularly those applied to animals who were the presumably unwitting accomplices to the crime, shed light on how the punishment of bestiality, rather than a way to exclude animals from sexuality with humans, is actually implicated in the formation of a gendered and sexualized reproductive order that governs human and animal life. 62 a clear distinction between human and animal was central to medieval epistemologies, making the transgression from humanity to animality particularly severe. as joyce salisbury argues, medieval ideas about animality contrasted contemporary understandings of the animal as a biological entity, in which humans are considered animals. by contrast, “medieval thinkers repeatedly defined humanity by trying to establish a clear boundary between humans and animals” (salisbury, “human beasts”, 9; cf. salisbury, beast within). 63 rudy, “lgbtq…z?” 64 see also brown and rasmussen, “bestiality”; gillespie, “sexualized violence”. 65 boggs, animalia americana. arseneault and collard, animal trials | 17 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the bestiality trial of jacques ferron in vanvres provides a useful starting point for thinking through this order. the trial is unique in evans’ account for the restraint it showed in punishing an offending animal, given that in the many bestiality trials occurring in france and elsewhere in western europe from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, both the animal and the offending human were almost invariably put to death.66 convicted of “coition with a she-ass” in 1750, ferron was sentenced to death, whereas the animal was acquitted on the ground that she was the victim of violence and had not participated in her master’s crime of her own free will. the prior of the convent, who also performed the duties of parish priest, and the principal inhabitants of the commune of vanvres signed a certificate stating that they had known the said she-ass for four years, and that she had always shown herself to be virtuous and well-behaved.67 the citizens of the commune “were willing to bear witness that she is in word and deed in all her habits of life a most honest creature”, resulting in this uncommon acquittal.68 evans acknowledges that “as a piece of exculpatory evidence [this incident] may be regarded as unique in the annals of criminal prosecutions”.69 indeed, the reference to the animal’s “free will” is singular in evans’s commentary on the animal trials, and the archival work of other scholars.70 free will here is a significant counterpoint to the frequency with which 66 evans (criminal prosecution, 146–51) details many bestiality trials in over this period. of the nine mentioned in this short portion of the book, six occurred in france, two in germany, and one in britain. of those trials noted in france, ferron’s is the only one in which one of the parties’ lives was spared. evans notes that “this disgusting crime appears to have been very common; at least ayrault in his ordre judiciare, published in 1606, states that he has many times (multoties) seen brute beasts put to death for this cause” (148). according to evans, buggery with an animal “was uniformly punished by putting to death both parties implicated” (147). he also notes the 1532 criminal code of the emperor charles v, which “ordained that sodomy in all its forms and degrees should be punished with death by fire”, with animals being shown mercy only in cases where there was reason that “the punishment of the sodomite should be mitigated” (151). 67 evans, criminal prosecution, 150. 68 evans, criminal prosecution, 150. 69 evans, criminal prosecution, 151. 70 also see liliequist, “peasants against nature”; macgregor, “criminalizing animals”; tortorici, sins against nature. 18 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) animals, despite being implicated in trials via their spectacular executions, do not “become the subjects of the histories we write”.71 being exceptional in the secular trials of animals, it also counters the removal of agency that accompanies frameworks of animal life prevalent in anthropocentric capitalism. even though the animal trials offer some acknowledgment of animal agency by holding them accountable for their “crimes”, they also culminated in the removal of this agency with animals’ criminalization and punishments. for human and animal perpetrators of “buggery”, punishments were typically spectacular. when crossing species lines, according to evans, the death penalty for the crime of buggery usually involved both human and animal being burned alive.72 he also adds that executioners had significant agency in the spectacle of punishment as well, and “often indulged in capricious and supererogatory cruelty in the exercise of their patibulary functions”.73 nonetheless, though both the sparing of the donkey and the mention of its “free will” in ferron’s trial might be exceptional, it merits mention here for being no less an act of subjection to anthropocentric and reproductive regimes than punishment would have been. read under foucault’s account of the shift from sovereign to disciplinary power,74 the parallel shift from spectacles of punishment such as earlier centuries’ more common burning at the stake to an ostensibly more humane treatment of animals embodied by the sparing of the donkey, emphasizes that the latter is no less power-laden than the decision to put her to death would have been. indeed, lurking under the surface of the benevolent defence of the donkey is the imposition of gender on the animal: the projection of “virtuous and well-behaved” qualities onto her body assures her safety from death but ushers her into a gendered framework of power. moreover, in her characterization as a victim of the carnal desires of one man, she emerges as a passive being compliant with anthropocentric codes 71 tortorici, sins against nature, 127. 72 evans, criminal prosecution, 147. 73 evans, criminal prosecution, 146. 74 see foucault, discipline and punish. arseneault and collard, animal trials | 19 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) of gendered behaviour. the donkey, an animal already immersed in the everyday practice of forced physical labour, becomes even more docile under a framework of gender that corrals the animal into a domesticated framework. this incident also reveals how gendered and anthropocentric paradigms intersect in the “domestic”, as discussed above. on the one hand, the domestic connotes the economic devaluation of reproductive labour (its coding as feminine and “non-work”), as well as the removal of reproduction from the public sphere and its confinement to the private realm that was largely achieved by the end of the seventeenth century.75 on the other, as “domestication”, the domestic connotes the process by which humans exercise control over other species. both the domestic sphere and animal domestication are implicated in the creation of a reproductive order, in which women’s bodies and ecologically “wild” zones are converted to suit the productive capacities of capitalist natures.76 with this framework in mind, a double domestication takes place in the context of the donkey, as she is both domesticated into labour for the human and narrativized as a gendered subject. jens rydström’s commentary on the “heterospecial” character of bestiality trials lends credence to this gendered reading.77 he posits that trials involving male humans and female-coded animals “did not threaten the masculinity of the perpetrators but rather enhanced it and made it grotesque”.78 in the case examined here, the deviance of the act itself does not disrupt domesticated order as it consigns the donkey to the status of a feminized victim of monstrous masculine incursion against the order of nature. tsing cautions against critical frameworks that posit domestication as a unidirectional form of power, as humans exercising power over animality, instead framing it as a broad structure governing human and nonhuman life; with tsing’s framing in mind it is useful to position bestiality trials such as the one above within a broader context 75 federici, caliban, 92. 76 tsing, “unruly edges”, 146. 77 rydström, sinners and citizens, 18. 78 rydström, sinners and citizens, 18. 20 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) of juridical power negotiating reproductive norms for all life, both human and animal. more than mere “human control over other species”, tsing posits that such ideals of domestication emerge from “an ideological commitment to human mastery”, a fantasy of human agency and domination that obscures humans’ dependence on other species.79 in the case of the ass, even while she may be subject to the human who owns her, she enters the field of human relation presumably because of a need for her labour. the gendered language of her exoneration at trial, however, sustains the illusion of human mastery as her life and existence are spared through a mythology of virtuous feminine docility. to live, she must be doubly subjected: first to criminal prosecution, and second to gendered frameworks of submission. the above example indicates how the contributions of animal labour to domesticated order diminish in a fiction of anthropocentric mastery. moreover, the juridical structure assembled out of this trial naturalizes an ideal of submissive femininity by deriving it from the donkey as a mobile symbol of nature, an ideal that reflects appropriate modes of gendered behaviour back onto the human. the order we trace here, then, is not confined to any one side of the species binary, instead indicating a mode of governance that enrols both human and animal in the public arena of the trial. read in this way, just as a gendered domestic order is not only concerned with the subjugation of women, but the confinement of bodies to a binary structure of gender (even while some bodies inherit more privilege within that system than others), anthropocentric order does more than simply subjugate animals under humans. it also indicates a broader social structure that acts on those humans governing animal lives by circulating appropriate modes of human–animal relationality and gendered behaviour through the spectacle of animal punishment and rare cases of exoneration. the gendered crime of bestiality works to curtail sexual practices perceived as a threat to reproduction. in the following section we expand on how animals relate to a figure at the heart of reproductive order: the child. 79 tsing, “unruly edges”, 144. arseneault and collard, animal trials | 21 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) infanticide like bestiality, infanticide figures as an explicit attack on reproductive order, and thus animals accused of infanticide were seen as unruly disruptors of the sanctified structure of the family. today, the child is a central and sacralized figure within reproductive imaginaries, replete with projections of innocence and vulnerability that sustain affective investment in capitalist futurity and devalue non-procreative sexuality and community. this has been well documented by queer studies’ critiques of heteroreproductive futurity,80 for which the sexual structure of the family sustains reproductive order, as well as national and communal futurity. while the animal trials of course precede queer studies’ contemporary understandings of heteroreproductive futurity, they nonetheless play into historical assemblages of it in important ways, and feminists’ and historians’ accounts of the witch trials confirm the emergence of an order that increasingly secured reproduction through the demonization of those disruptive to that order.81 while children did not have the same sacred position within society during the early modern era, this was a period when children and their position in society became a prominent site of scholarly and religious interest.82 authorities and writers began to view children as vehicles for wider societal reform.83 alongside this shifting position of the child, the state began incentivizing and regulating reproduction, as discussed earlier. infanticide was a key piece of such regulation and was a crime of which animals were also accused. below, again focusing predominantly on france, we examine evans’s accounts of infanticide from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries alongside broader legal frameworks for this crime that emerged in the sixteenth century. while occurring in different times and places within french history, the trials and frameworks examined here evidence the assembly of reproductive order we trace in this paper, in 80 edelman, no future; halberstam, in a queer time and place. 81 federici, caliban; dolan, dangerous familiars; fissel, vernacular bodies. 82 french, “locating the early modern child”. 83 whitmore, “childhood in early modern england”. 22 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) which the child functions as a symbol of procreative sex’s potentiality to reproduce life in a social and biological sense and — when the victim of violence — its vulnerability. the animals who were accused of and subsequently punished for infanticide were enrolled in this narrative as violators of a reproductive order of family life. their public and spectacular deaths enshrined the ascendancy and extensive reach of this order as it incorporated nonhuman life, which is what we expand upon in this section. infanticide trials thus offer a useful metric for thinking through animals’ position in relation to reproductive order. as paul freidland notes of pre-modern france, “infants were eaten by animals — usually pigs — with surprising frequency”, with “more than thirty documented cases of pigs who were accused of homicide, and this number only includes those cases whose records have survived”.84 in that such trials were arguably common and spectacularly violent in their handling of animal execution, they attest to the emerging visibility of reproductive and domestic orders that provide the conditions of possibility for biopolitical capitalism. looking at the trial of a sow and her piglets in 1457 allows an examination of the extension of the reproductive structure we trace here into the world of nonhuman life. the sow in question was convicted of “murder flagrantly committed on the person of jehan martin, aged five years, the son of jehan martin of savigny”, for which she was sentenced to be “hanged by the hind feet to a gallows tree”.85 as evans 84 friedland, seeing justice done, 1. friedland notes of the execution of the sow of falaise that “neither the crime itself, the judicial proceedings, nor the punishment were all that unusual in premodern france.” friedland is not alone in noting the frequency of infanticide trials in france even with the few surviving records of them. based on archival work on the trials, macgregor suggests that animals (particularly pigs) committing infanticide was common in medieval france, and that the punishment of the animal most often involved hanging. macgregor concludes with reference to one infanticide trial from 1378 in auxonne that “there is no sign of concern or surprise about the events described” and suggests that “animal executions were simply seen as a part of judicial action” (“criminalizing animals”, 4–7). evans (criminal prosecution, 138–45) details twelve animal trials for infanticide in france and germany between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries, with only one animal pardoned from execution. 85 evans, criminal prosecution, 153. while the term infanticide arguably does not apply to the death of a five-year-old, for our purposes, the position of the infant within reproductive orders — where the infant embodies reproduction’s potentiality and vulnerability — applies equally to the child, as discussed earlier. arseneault and collard, animal trials | 23 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) details, “her six sucklings, being found stained with blood, were included in the indictment as accomplices; but ‘in lack of any positive proof that they had assisted in mangling the deceased, they were restored to their owner.’”86 what does the assignment of culpability to pigs mean in the context of a gendered system of reproduction? furthermore, how is the drama of punishment and acquittal here productive of a system that privileges procreative sex through the figure of the human child? in the condemnation of the sow to death and the acquittal of the piglets, the trial establishes a dichotomy between the figures of the violent mother and the innocent child; even animals — however outside the sexual structure of the family they are presumed to be — do not escape enrolment within that structure. the domestic order of the family, as the sow takes on the guise of the monstrous mother and the piglets become projections of childhood innocence, sustains a narrative of the innocent child through the violent expulsion of the violent mother who “flagrantly” flouts its sacred position. insofar as norms of reproduction, even applied to animals, are vitalized by societal frameworks of gendered order, there is a stark overlap between the demonization of women and mothers so prevalent in infanticide cases and that of nonhuman animals. from the middle ages to the early modern period in france and elsewhere in europe, emergent anxieties consolidated control over errant and unruly bodies within populations, especially women who threatened or simply did not conform to patriarchal family structures. trevor dean accordingly notes the gendered character of infanticide throughout the middle ages, with women almost invariably being the subjects of infanticide prosecutions despite being a minority in crimes and felonies overall: “gender dictated women’s generally lower participation in crime, but also the specific pattern of their criminality”.87 an increasingly punitive approach to infanticide coalesced from the late middle ages into the early modern period in various parts of europe, with punishments varying from fines to penance or whippings.88 in the particular case of premodern france, anxieties about infanticide 86 evans, criminal prosecution, 153. 87 dean, crime in medieval europe, 78. 88 obladen, “from sin to crime”. 24 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) ran rampant, and were often punished with the death penalty. there were exceptions to these punishments, as sara mcdougall’s work on infanticide in medieval france shows: while death sentences were common, given a “general reluctance to carry out executions”89 authorities regularly pardoned women so accused. executions were less common prior to the sixteenth century,90 but became more common during and following it when several authorities passed stricter laws punishing women who committed infanticide with the death penalty. as of 1582 in dijon, death sentences were more frequently doled out for infanticide.91 this persisted through a rising hysteria in france during louis xiv’s regime in the seventeenth century, when authorities believed thousands of babies were being killed by their parents, which tuttle diagnoses as “a sign of elite anxiety about the murderous social disorder and wastefulness represented by illicit sexuality”.92 while this section of our paper deals with cases in premodern and early modern france, other instances of infanticide are useful for thinking through the emergence of a gendered, capitalist reproductive order derived from the social norms of various times and places. thus, dolan notes that in seventeenth-century britain “child murder and […] the obsession with representing it pervade[d] the culture”.93 these representations also coincided with an increased suspicion toward maternal “authority and agency”, associating it with “violence and crime”, with fathers’ roles in children’s lives being represented far more euphemistically than mothers’.94 in britain, whether cases of child death involved actual infanticide was not always clear, as according to fissel, “most who were prosecuted [for infanticide] were single women whose newborn children had been found dead, perhaps stillborn, perhaps killed at birth by intention or neglect”.95 more generally, whether agents of infanticide or not, sin89 mcdougall, “pardoning infanticide”, 231. 90 dean, crime in medieval europe, 79. 91 farr, authority and sexuality. 92 tuttle, conceiving the old regime, 33. 93 dolan, dangerous familiars, 126. 94 dolan, dangerous familiars, 127. 95 fissel, vernacular bodies, 77. arseneault and collard, animal trials | 25 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) gle women were viewed with particular suspicion. as dolan writes, “popular representations of infanticide and witchcraft explicitly target those women who live outside direct male supervision”, and these “accounts of infanticide and witchcraft demonize women’s self-assertions as attacks directly on the family they stand outside (and so, the logic goes, therefore against): such women slaughter infants, undermine domestic production, and hold secret rites”.96 the contexts above do not necessarily refer to animality, but they provide a groundwork for thinking through how those outside of a family order were positioned as threats to it and expunged from it through punishment, a process eventually extended to animals associated with this perceived threat. constellations of reproductive order and the punishments for violating it, as we suggest, also assimilated animal life; in the process of punishing animals for crimes against reproduction, the law extended reproductive order beyond the human and naturalized it by attaching to animals as figures of nature. the imposition of a gendered order onto animality evidences the extent to which gendered systems of reproduction govern not only humans but also life itself. indeed, animal trials for infanticide cannot be easily dismissed as mere deterrents to potential human perpetrators, nor can they be easily read as a way to hold liable the owners of the animals in question; the animals themselves were the subjects of the trials even if, as we argue, the making of animals into legal subjects was integral to their later unmaking as social subjects. according to evans and in striking contradistinction to current legal prosecutions of animal-on-human violence, the humans owners were not held liable for the infanticidal crimes committed by their animals: “in general, as we have seen, the owner of the blood-guilty beast was considered wholly blameless and sometimes even remunerated for his loss”.97 one case in the abbey of josephat near chartres in 1499 cites owners being punished because they were negligent of a child killed by a pig but, importantly, not because of “any proprietary responsibility for the infanticidal animal”.98 96 dolan, dangerous familiars, 14. 97 evans, criminal prosecution, 155. 98 evans, criminal prosecution, 154. 26 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the question of animal agency in infanticide trials remains contentious, particularly regarding whether animals were tried as animals or hominized in the process of becoming the subject of a criminal trial. various scholars of the trials suggest that animals themselves were implicated in a juridical order as agents against reproduction in violent punishments for killing children.99 nonetheless, persistent debates on whether animals were tried as proxies for humans bearing the consequences of anthropocentric social norms have coalesced around a prominent case whose particulars have been misreported through several retellings in animal trials scholarship: the infamous story of the “sow of falaise”. while occurring earlier than the trials we discuss here, its persistence in animal trials scholarship merits attention. the sow in question, convicted in 1386 of infanticide after she had entered the room of an infant and begun consuming his face, was “found guilty of the crime, and was condemned to be dragged through the streets of the town — probably tied to a hurdle that was attached to a horse or donkey — and then hanged at the place of justice, the usual punishment for those who had been convicted of homicide”.100 in evans’s account, and others preceding and following, the trial takes on a curious spectacle of interspecies drag in which, “as if to make the travesty of justice complete, the sow was dressed in man’s clothes and executed on the public square near the city hall”.101 freidland, though, issues a correction: the sow was in fact never dressed in human clothing, and this detail was an embellishment added to the original account by the abbé langevin in his 1826 supplément aux recherches historiques sur falaise.102 despite its apparent falsity, this myth has until recently remained unquestioned in both academic and popular retellings. the persistent mythology of this incident, however historically inaccurate, merits some attention for the way it foregrounds the tenuous boundary between human and animal in current understandings of 99 evans, criminal prosecution; friedland, seeing justice done; macgregor, “criminalizing animals”. 100 friedland, seeing justice done, 1. 101 evans, criminal prosecution, 140. 102 friedland, seeing justice done, 5. arseneault and collard, animal trials | 27 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) legal proceedings governing infanticide in medieval france. jen girgen’s reading of the myth suggests it embodied “an effort to make the animal more humanlike (perhaps to impart a moral lesson on the people witnessing the event[)]”103 and that it gave “the proceeding the semblance of human trials”.104 katie sykes likewise reads the trials as not being entirely about or for the animal. for her, “animals’ presence […] in human courts of law is […] always derivative and always mediated, and animals are always metaphorically dressed up in clothes that do not belong to them.”105 to make this argument, however, is to presume that such (proverbial and literal) clothes belong to humans, rather than having been constructed and imposed on the human — even formative of the human — by gendered histories of belonging. just as humans can be brought into gendered, juridical orders through both the law and norms of dress, the pig in its mythical clothing may be as well. while such accounts read the pig as a stand-in for the human, one wonders why critics might not instead take a lesson from drag culture in which the clothes common to one gender on the body of its ostensible opposite parodies the very notion of the original gender.106 one could extend this reading to the myth of the sow of falaise’s interspecies drag to question the legitimacy of the human-animal binary. given the falsity of the claim that the sow was dressed in human clothing, however, this reading falls apart. though not entirely. one does not need the spectacle of human clothing in either the 1457 trial of the sow and her piglets or the infamous 1386 trial of the sow of falaise to note that the law here does not merely include animals as proxies for humans but operates over a gendered domain of life itself in which animals are conscripted into an anthropomorphic version of legal subjectivity. sykes’s attention to animals in metaphorical clothes that do not belong to them emphasizes their adornment in all the trappings of a trial even without the materiality of clothing. but to read the executed animal as 103 girgen, “historical and contemporary prosecution”, 98n4. 104 girgen, “historical and contemporary prosecution”, 118. 105 sykes, “human drama”, 280. 106 butler, gender trouble, 136–39. 28 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) a mere metaphor — and how could we, given the visceral and spectacular public violence enacted on the physical animal? — obscures the materiality of the process taking place: the bringing of the animals to the city hall, imprisoning and feeding them before execution, the mangling and maiming of their bodies, the application of punishments reserved for homicide (apparently) irrespective of species. as terry-fritsch argues of the animal trials, “using the guise of humanity to figuratively transform the convicted animals, and the guise of animals to figuratively transform the convicted humans, the government presented offenders to the populace as unrecognizable subjects that no longer fit within the symbolic order of community life.”107 legal authority thus did not stop at the human but extended across the species boundary by applying the attire of criminality to both human and animal. the bringing of the animal to the site of societal governance emphasizes animals’ incorporation into the order it represents, even as abject figures expelled from its protections, enfolding them in the guise of the criminal subject; human clothing is thus redundant to the material processes already taking place. animals tried for bestiality and infanticide were cast as disruptors of domesticated life — to procreative sex and the child, respectively. on occasion, as in the case of the pardoned she-ass and piglets, animals could also be deemed innocent using the same hetero-patriarchal logics that inform the reproductive order they were accused of violating. in the final “crime” we examine, these threats combine in the potent figures of the witch and her familiars. familiars both the murderous mother and the witch were figures united by the threat they posed to children and reproductive order. the figure of the witch disturbed domestic orders, frequently cast as threatening a specifically reproductive stability: causing impotence, killing children, or making crops fail. as such, witchcraft was often understood as a domestic crime. witches were also typically depicted as being “engaged in a demonic form of domesticity” of their own — undertaking wicked deeds such as brewing potions and fire-roasting 107 terry-fritsch, “animal trials”, 55. arseneault and collard, animal trials | 29 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) a victim’s hair and nail clippings — “in inversions of the housewifely tasks of cooking and gardening.”108 among these perceived demonic inversion of domestic life, witch’s maternal relationship with “familiars” captured particular attention in pamphlets and accounts of witchcraft.109 familiars were generally small companion animals who were thought to act as witches’ emissaries, carrying out harmful acts on their behalf, especially inflicting harm on children. mary fissel suggests that witches’ relationships with their familiars were especially portrayed by “images of anti-mothers, a kind of double perversion of the maternal relationship”, where not only did women-castas-witches kill babies and children instead of nurturing them, but they also lavished improper maternal attention and affection on their animal familiars.110 in this section we consider this relationship in more detail, looking for what the witch trials suggest about how animal familiars were positioned in relation to the domesticated reproductive orders witches threatened. to do so we look to england during the early modern period. whether there were animal trials in england is a matter of debate.111 regardless, as the criminologist piers beirne maintains, animals did still appear in british criminal processes — most prominently in the witch trials. familiars featured in as many as sixty to seventy-five percent of english witch trials from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, with the first recorded instance of familiars in trial evidence in 1530 and the last in 1712.112 while familiars scarcely appeared in witch trials in continental europe, english witchcraft lore — including popular pamphlets and legal texts — regularly emphasized the relationship between witches and their familiars.113 108 dolan, dangerous familiars, 181. 109 dolan, dangerous familiars; fissel, vernacular bodies 110 fissel, vernacular bodies, 80. 111 see beirne, “a note”. 112 serpell, “guardian spirits”, 162, 164; parish, “paltrie vermin”, 5. 113 dolan, dangerous familiars; garrett, “witchcraft”. historian james serpell suggests several possible explanations for why familiars were prominent in british witch trials but appeared so rarely in witch trials in continental europe: pet-keeping was potentially more common in britain, english prosecutors of witchcraft were more “prejudicial and puritanical” about pet-keeping; there were differences between english and continental european witchcraft laws, texts and models, such that official witchcraft texts 30 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) frequently depicted with accused women at witch trials, familiars were usually small animals found close-at-hand, in or at the margins of the home: toads, cats, dogs, ferrets, bees, birds, flies, moles, mice, rabbits, rats, or snails. they shared with witches a domestic familiarity that made the threat they were seen to pose especially disquieting, because it arose from “inside the household or hover[ed] at its margins”, within communities.114 these familiar animals’ presence in the witch trials suggests that witchcraft laws and trials were not only about determining and debating the level of “domestic threat” of particular people — usually women — but also the level of threat and proper place of “relatively autonomous beings”: animals with whom people closely shared space but did not entirely control.115 despite being co-inhabitants, familiars did not contribute to domestic life: aside from possible companionship, and except for a few animals (such as chickens, rabbits, and bees), they did not provide anything useful like food or materials (there are no records of farm animals like cows, sheep, or pigs as familiars). nor are they predominantly vermin (with the exception of rats, mice, and moles), who were at the time in england subject to a long-standing vermin eradication program.116 vermin and farm animals arguably had a more clear-cut place in the domestic order, even if they occasionally upset that order. in an era that largely preceded popular pet-keeping, were “familiars” friends or foes? where did they belong in the rising anthropocentric and domestic orders of the time? ultimately, material from the witch trials and popular accounts of the trials at the time suggest that these animals and women were perceived as living together too in england reflected more popular beliefs about witches (as opposed to a more elite version of witchcraft law that developed in continental europe) and more focused on witches acting as solitary individuals, not a collective (serpell, “guardian spirits”, 181). in her book witchcraft in england, barbara rosen also makes this latter point, explaining that in continental europe, the “affectionate” relationship between the witch and the devil “took the form of surrender and worship, and bestiality with demons”, whereas in england it was “expressed by the cosy, slightly perverted relationship of a lonely, poverty-stricken woman to her pet animal” (32). 114 dolan, dangerous familiars, 175. 115 serpell, “guardian spirits”, 158. 116 lovegrove, silent fields; mcdonagh and daniels, “enclosure stories”; cragoe and mcdonagh, “parliamentary enclosures”. arseneault and collard, animal trials | 31 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) closely, with suspect intimacy, or what will mckeithen in a related current context calls “strange intimacy”,117 that was framed as reproductively — sexually or maternally — deviant. some scholars suggest that familiars were a precursor to more widespread practices of pet-keeping, and that the single, elderly, poor women who were most often accused of witchcraft and who came to embody the figure of the witch, may have tended to keep animals as pets.118 pet-keeping did not become socially acceptable in england until the tail end of the trials, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.119 in the preceding centuries, although many royals in france, england, and elsewhere kept individual dogs, birds and other animals, pet-keeping outside of royal court was viewed as dangerous and “morally suspect” because it blurred the line between human and animal.120 witches were accordingly seen as personifying their familiars in alarming ways, by giving them names and feeding them, prefiguring the antipathy toward the contemporary figure of the “crazy cat lady”, as fiona probyn-rapsey observes.121 james serpell argues that this popular view of “familiars” preceded the concept’s acquisition of formal, legal recognition in the witch trials.122 but it would be a mistake to view familiars as purely a product of “popular culture and folklore that positioned animals, imps, and fairies as intermediaries between humans and the numinous supernatural.”123 demonology also played a central role as a learned discipline, detailing how familiars were witches or demons in animal form. as non-innocent participants in the practice of witchcraft, familiars were “creatures with agency, demons in corporeal form”, whose existence and actions “were evidence of the permeable boundary that existed between humans and animals, the presence of demonic ritual and blood-feeding among practitioners of 117 mckeithen, “queer ecologies”. 118 serpell, “guardian spirits”. 119 ritvo, the animal estate; tague, animal companions. 120 thomas in serpell, “guardian spirits”, 159–60; tague, animal companions. 121 probyn-rapsey, “crazy cat lady”; also see mckeithen, “queer ecologies”. 122 “guardian spirits”, 160. 123 parish, “paltrie vermin”, 2. 32 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) magic, the moral and theological depravity of witchcraft, and the transgression of nature that lay at the heart of the witch.”124 part of witches’ and familiars’ transgression of nature was coded specifically as a disturbance of a “natural” domestic order. the witch–familiar relationship registered as reproductively disturbing or warped in two key ways. first, at times, the relationship was sexualized and eroticized.125 federici notes a “constant identification between female sexuality and bestiality” in the witch trials.126 the perceived intimate relation between familiar and witch was consistent with the view that the latter engaged in sexual acts with the devil and demons — at times in animal form. witches and their familiars were therefore figures aligned with the deviant spectre of bestiality that also inflected the animal trials. dolan describes how popular pamphlet accounts of english witchcraft during the time of the trials “reveal a prevalent association of witchcraft with sexualities constructed as evil and unnatural because of their association with the devil; with animals; and with postmenopausal women, whose desire was assumed to be boundless, unsatisfiable through socially acceptable means, and destructive because it could not be (pro)creative.”127 familiars were cast as active partners, even initiators, of interspecies sexual relations that upset both reproductive and anthropocentric orders. second, and even more commonly, witches were viewed as attempting to mother their familiars in depraved ways, feeding and nurturing them and, in a practice that received the majority of witch hunters’ attention, letting their familiars suckle blood at their skin. the notion of “bloodsucking familiars” was first recorded in ursula kemp’s 1582 trial for witchcraft, after which point it “became increasingly stereotyped and exaggerated, and the search for bloody marks or spots began to expand to include lumps, boils, hernias, warts, excrescences, supernumerary nipples, or any accessory protuberance 124 parish, “paltrie vermin”, 2. 125 dolan, dangerous familiars, garrett, “witchcraft”. 126 federici, caliban, 194. 127 dolan, dangerous familiars, 213. arseneault and collard, animal trials | 33 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) on the body that could be construed as the site of the familiar’s recent gustatory attentions.”128 by the peak of the english witch trials in the mid-seventeenth century, the practice of suckling familiars was considered so integral to witches in their relationship with their familiars that seeking out marks from this suckling “became an almost mandatory part of the judicial process”.129 while the familiar is in the first case conjured as a witch’s demonic sexual partner, in the second, it is construed as a “demonic infant […] in an obscenely distorted inversion of the mother–child relationship.”130 the obscenity again stems from the transgression or even inversion of both reproductive and anthropocentric norms. in this anti-maternal mythology, women direct their reproductive energies not toward human children but rather to nonhumans. serpell describes how “this image of the postmenopausal crone giving suck to her demonic animal companion — this grotesque mixing of animal and human categories, reproductive roles, and body fluids — was virtually tailor made to provoke horror, revulsion and sanctimonious outrage in the puritanical minds of early modern englishmen”, for whom — protestants and puritans among them — mixing with animals was “morally degrading”, as they were to “suppress the growling of the ‘beast within’”.131 the imagined act of suckling familiars is doubly transgressive. with one move, both the domestic and anthropocentric orders are warped, and there is a compounding or redoubling of the two distorted orders onto each other — improper mothering and improper species mixing — in one monstrous act. the spectacle of obscenity associated with the unruly intimacies between witches and their familiars, much like the criminalization of deviance in bestiality trials, orients social desire toward more appropriate and (re)productive forms of sexuality. these instances of human–animal care being rendered immoral close down the intimacies available to both parties, redirecting them toward reproductive roles conducive to a biopolitical anthropocentric social order. 128 serpell, “guardian spirits”, 178. 129 serpell, 159. 130 serpell, 181. 131 serpell, 181. 34 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) conclusion secular animal trials, which primarily dealt with crimes against reproduction, involved animals who were already moving in and out of human communities. they were all “near-at-hand” — whether donkeys in the case of bestiality, pigs in the case of infanticide, or those animals at the margins of the domestic in cases of witches’ familiars. the juridical trial might be read as a way to bring animals and the humans with whom they related in line, a way of exercising power over an increasingly unruly menagerie of interspecies relations as european states were encroaching into nonhuman space and sedimenting the position of animal life within the functioning of socioeconomic life. these trials document not only attempts at producing a juridical order governing these relations, but also its failures as desires, acts, and agencies deemed deviant by legal powers violently unsettled anthropocentric and reproductive norms, as well as human mastery. towards what other horizons of possibility might such failures of human mastery gesture? recalling julietta singh’s work on failure as refusal of mastery, a tool to inhabit social norms differently “vital to the project of shaping a dehumanist politics to come”, what possibilities do the animal trials offer to a contemporary world in which domesticated animals are almost completely disregarded, confined in hidden spaces like factory farms, recognized only as property?132 the project of devitalizing anthropocentric mastery is ever more urgent as the reproductive orders we examine in this paper, which took hold in europe from the late middle ages onward, have spread across the globe through various waves of colonialism. while this paper focuses primarily on france and england, reproductive order extended (and continues to extend) through colonized geographies via the imposition of european norms of domestication and the reduction of human life to property in various slave trades.133 european 132 singh, unthinking mastery, 22 133 crosby, ecological imperialism; mcclintock, imperial leather; bennett, being property. several scholars also foreground how european notions of animality play into constructions of race and racism. in addition to bennett, see enders, “homicidal pigs” for details on animal trials of pigs in relation to antisemitism and jackson, becoming human for detail on ties between animality and blackness in the antiblack imagination. arseneault and collard, animal trials | 35 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) states’ legal apparatuses, including animal trials, reached beyond their borders into colonized lives and lands, imposing an order that sought to supplant longstanding indigenous socialities and ecologies.134 as scholars working on unceded territories in what many call canada, our project is conscious of the way that our own colonial and capitalist government reduces animalities and ecologies to mere commodities, a legacy inherited from colonial europe. while the latter is a concern for a future analysis, we hope to have offered here some groundwork for thinking through how domestic orders in europe extend through the many geographies where it violently intervened and where its imposed orders continue to be contested. especially crucial to our analysis is the notion that the animal trials reveal how, within europe’s borders, sovereign authority had to negotiate with and quell animal (and human) agencies threatening to its hold over reproduction. if the animal trials are repositories for the making of the europe the world now knows — the one whose domesticating effects have spread across the globe and reduced animals and wider ecologies to inert resources — they also potentially hold promise for its unmaking. they demonstrate that the reduction of animal and other forms of reproducible life (given the heterogeneous and sometimes contradictory approaches to it within the trials) was never certain even from within the europe that has become a global centre of imperialist power. that is, in that our paper has focused almost entirely on the assemblage of juridical structures that eventually banish animal life to the realm of reproducible property, they also hold promise for their disassembly. in the early twenty-first century when the complete subjugation of domesticated animal life has become so commonplace as to appear natural, the animal trials gesture toward a longue durée in which the role of animal life in human affairs is still being negotiated, a lengthy period during which the naturalization of a resolutely anthropocentric mode of social organization is not yet a given. in parallel to feminists’ efforts to denaturalize reproduction’s relegation from a legitimate form of labour to a 134 belcourt, “animal bodies”; kimmerer, braiding sweetgrass; simpson, as we have always done; whyte, “reflections”. 36 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) domestic service by exposing its history of emergence alongside capitalism, a look into the animal trials foregrounds the processes of subjugation through which europe makes animal life into commodified property. for those who insist on the animal trials as an absurd anachronism, there might be another possibility: in the trials’ sometimes violent negotiations with animal presence in human social life — however imperfect they may be — they serve as a potent reminder that there are other possible ways of relating to animal life than capital’s totalizing mastery allows. acknowledgements thanks to sadie barker for her expert research assistance, and to the fonds de recherche du québec — société et culture (frqsc) for providing financial support for her position. we also thank juliane collard for her helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. we gratefully acknowledge two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable engagement with the paper, and editors kári driscoll and marianna szczygielska for their timely work guiding the paper through the review process. arseneault and collard, animal trials | 37 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) works cited amussen, susan dwyer. “‘being stirred to much unquietness’: violence and domestic violence in early modern england.” journal of women’s history 6, no. 2 (summer 1994): 70–89. https://doi. org/10.1353/jowh.2010.0321. anderson, kay. “a walk on the wild wide: a critical geography of domestication.” progress in human geography 21, no. 4 (1997): 463–85. https://doi. org/10.1191/030913297673999021. anderson, kay. “‘the beast within’: race, humanity, and animality.” environment and planning d: society and space 18, no. 3 (2000): 301–20. https://doi. org/10.1068/d229. bazant, mílada. “bestiality: the nefarious crime in mexico, 1800–1856.” in sexuality and the unnatural in colonial latin america, edited and translated by zeb tortorici, 188–212. berkeley: university of california press, 2016. beirne, piers. “the law is an ass: reading e. p. evans’ the medieval prosecution and capital punishment of animals.” society & animals 2, no. 1 (1994): 27–46. https://doi. org/10.1163/156853094x00063. beirne, piers. “a note on the facticity of animal trials in early modern britain; or, the curious prosecution of farmer carter’s dog for murder.” crime, law and social change 55, no. 5 (2011): 359–74. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611011-9291-8. belcourt, billy-ray. “animal bodies, colonial subjects: (re)locating animality in decolonial thought.” societies 5 (2015): 1–11. https://doi. org/10.3390/soc5010001. bennett, joshua. being property once myself: blackness and the end of being. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2020. berry, helen and elizabeth foyster, eds. the family in early modern england. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2009. https://doi.org/10.1017/ cbo9780511495694. boggs, colleen glenney. animalia americana: animal representations and biopolitical subjectivity. new york: columbia university press, 2013. boone, marc. “state power and illicit sexuality: the persecution of sodomy in late medieval bruges.” journal of medieval history 22, no. 2 (1996): 135–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/s03044181(96)00001-2. brown, michael and claire rasmussen, “bestiality and the queering of the human animal.” environment and planning d: society and space 28, no. 1 (2010): 158–77. https://doi.org/10.1068/d5807. burt, rirchard and john archer, eds. enclosure acts: sexuality, property, and culture in early modern england. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 1994. burton, antionette and renisa mawani, eds. animalia: an anti-imperial bestiary for our times. durham, nc: duke university press, 2020. butler, judith. gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. new york: routledge, 1990. calarco, mathew. “being toward meat: anthropocentrism, indistinction, and veganism.” dialectical anthropology 38, no. 4 (2014): 416–429. https://doi. org/10.1007/s10624-014-9349-y. carson, hampton l. “the trial of animals and insects: a little known chapter of medieval jurisprudence.” proceedings of the american philosophical society 56, no. 5 (1917): 410–15. http://www.jstor. org/stable/984029. cohen, esther. “law, folklore and animal lore.” past & present 110, no. 1 (1986): 6–37. https://doi.org/10.1093/past/110.1.6. https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2010.0321 https://doi.org/10.1353/jowh.2010.0321 https://doi.org/10.1191/030913297673999021 https://doi.org/10.1191/030913297673999021 https://doi.org/10.1068/d229 https://doi.org/10.1068/d229 https://doi.org/10.1163/156853094x00063 https://doi.org/10.1163/156853094x00063 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-011-9291-8 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10611-011-9291-8 https://doi.org/10.3390/soc5010001 https://doi.org/10.3390/soc5010001 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511495694 https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511495694 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0304-4181(96)00001-2 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0304-4181(96)00001-2 https://doi.org/10.1068/d5807 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-014-9349-y https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-014-9349-y http://www.jstor.org/stable/984029 http://www.jstor.org/stable/984029 https://doi.org/10.1093/past/110.1.6 38 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) cragoe, matthew and briony mcdonagh. “parliamentary enclosure, vermin and the cultural life of english parishes, 1750–1850.” continuity and change 28, no. 1 (2013): 27–50. https://doi. org/10.1017/s0268416013000118. crosby, alfred. ecological imperialism: the biological expansion of europe, 900–1900. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1986. dean, trevor. crime in medieval europe: 1200–1550. london: routledge, 2001. dinzelbacher, peter. “animal trials: a multidisciplinary approach.” journal of interdisciplinary history 32, no. 3 (2002): 405–21. https://doi. org/10.1162/002219502753364191. dolan, frances. dangerous familiars: representations of domestic crime in england, 1550–1700. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 1994. edelman, lee. no future: queer theory and the death drive. durham, nc: duke university press, 2004. enders, jody. “homicidal pigs and the antisemitic imagination.” exemplaria 14, no. 2 (2002): 201–38. https://doi. org/10.1179/exm.2002.14.1.201. evans, e. p. the criminal prosecution and punishment of animals. new york: e. p. dutton and company, 1906. farrell, molly. “witch hunts and census conflicts: becoming a population in colonial massachusetts.” american quarterly 71, no. 3 (september 2019): 653–74. https://doi.org/10.1353/ aq.2019.0048. federici, silvia. caliban and the witch: women, the body and primitive accumulation. new york: autonomedia, 2004. fissel, mary. vernacular bodies: the politics of reproduction in early modern england. oxford: oxford university press, 2004. foucault, michel. discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. translated by alan sheridan. new york: pantheon books, 1977. fraser, nancy. “contradictions of capital and care.” new left review no. 100 (july/august 2016): 99–117. https:// newleftreview.org/issues/ii100/articles/ nancy-fraser-contradictions-of-capitaland-care. french, anna. “locating the early modern child.” in early modern childhood, edited by anna french, 3-15. london: routledge, 2019. friedland, paul. “beyond deterrence: cadavers, effigies, animals and the logic of executions in premodern france.” historical reflections/ réflexions historiques 29, no. 2 (2003): 295–317. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1349-21720-5_9. friedland, paul. seeing justice done: the age of spectacular capital punishment in france. oxford: oxford university press. garrett, julia. “witchcraft and sexual knowledge in early modern england.” journal for early modern cultural studies 13, no. 1 (winter 2013): 32–72. https://doi. org/10.1353/jem.2013.0002. gillespie, kathryn. “sexualized violence and the gendered commodification of the animal body in pacific northwest us dairy production.” gender, place and culture 21, no. 10 (2014): 1321–37. https:// doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2013.832665. girgen, jen. “the historical and contemporary prosecution and punishment of animals.” animal law 97, no. 9 (2003): 97–133. https://www. animallaw.info/article/historical-andcontemporary-prosecution-andpunishment-animals. gowing, laura. “secret births and infanticide in seventeenth-century england.” past & present 156 (1997): 87115. https://doi.org/10.1093/past/156.1.87. grier, katherine. “childhood socialization and companion animals: united states, 1820–1870.” society and animals 7, no. 2 (1999): 95–120. https://doi. org/10.1163/156853099x00022. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0268416013000118 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0268416013000118 https://doi.org/10.1162/002219502753364191 https://doi.org/10.1162/002219502753364191 https://doi.org/10.1179/exm.2002.14.1.201 https://doi.org/10.1179/exm.2002.14.1.201 https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2019.0048 https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2019.0048 https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii100/articles/nancy-fraser-contradictions-of-capital-and-care https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii100/articles/nancy-fraser-contradictions-of-capital-and-care https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii100/articles/nancy-fraser-contradictions-of-capital-and-care https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii100/articles/nancy-fraser-contradictions-of-capital-and-care https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21720-5_9 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21720-5_9 https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2013.0002 https://doi.org/10.1353/jem.2013.0002 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2013.832665 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2013.832665 https://www.animallaw.info/article/historical-and-contemporary-prosecution-and-punishment-animals https://www.animallaw.info/article/historical-and-contemporary-prosecution-and-punishment-animals https://www.animallaw.info/article/historical-and-contemporary-prosecution-and-punishment-animals https://www.animallaw.info/article/historical-and-contemporary-prosecution-and-punishment-animals https://doi.org/10.1093/past/156.1.87 https://doi.org/10.1163/156853099x00022 https://doi.org/10.1163/156853099x00022 arseneault and collard, animal trials | 39 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) grigson, caroline. menagerie: the history of exotic animals in england, 1100–1837. oxford: oxford university press, 2016. halberstam, jack. in a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives. new york: new york university press, 2005. hanley, sarah. “engendering the state: family formation and state building in early modern france.” french historical studies 16, no. 1 (1989): 4–27. https://doi. org/10.2307/286431. hoffer, peter. murdering mothers: infanticide in england and new england, 1558–1803. new york: new york university press, 1981. hyde, walter. “the prosecution of lifeless things and animals in greek law: part ii.” the american journal of philology 38, no. 2 (1917): 285–303. https://doi. org/10.2307/289426. jackson, zakiyyah iman. becoming human: matter and meaning in an antiblack world. new york: new york university press, 2020. jensen, gary. the path of the devil: early modern witch hunts. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2007. karras, ruth mazo. “the regulation of ‘sodomy’ in the latin east and west.” speculum 95, no. 4 (2020): 969–86. https://doi.org/10.1086/710639. kimmerer, robin wall. braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge, and the teachings of plants. minneapolis, mn: milkweed editions, 2013. leeson, peter. “vermin trials.” the journal of law and economics 56, no. 3 (2013): 811–36. https://doi.org/10.1086/671480. liliequist, jonas. “peasants against nature: crossing the boundaries between man and animal in seventeenthand eighteenth-century sweden.” journal of the history of sexuality 1, no. 3 (1991): 393– 423. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3704309. lovegrove, roger. silent fields: the long decline of a nation’s wildlife. oxford: oxford university press, 2007. macdougall, sara. “pardoning infanticide in late medieval france.” law and history review 39, no. 2 (2021): 229–53. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s0738248020000267. macgregor, lesley. “criminalizing animals in medieval france: insights from records of executions.” open library of humanities 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–15. https:// doi.org/10.16995/olh.319. malcomson, robert. “infanticide in the eighteenth century.” in crime in england 1550–1800, edited by j. s. cockburn, 187–209. london: routledge, 2020 [1977]. mcclintock, anne. imperial leather: race, gender, and sexuality in the colonial contest. new york: routledge, 1995. mcdonagh, briony and stephen daniels. “enclosure stories: narratives from northamptonshire.” cultural geographies 19, no. 1 (january 2012): 107–21. https://doi. org/10.1177/1474474011427361. mckeithen, will. “queer ecologies of home: heteronormativity, speciesism, and the strange intimacies of crazy cat ladies.” gender, place and culture 24, no. 1 (2017): 122–34. https://doi.org/10.10 80/0966369x.2016.1276888. merchant, carolyn. the death of nature: women, ecology and the scientific revolution. new york: harper & row, 1980. mies, maria. patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale: women in the international division of labour. london: zed books, 1986. obladen, michael. “from sin to crime: laws on infanticide in the middle ages.” neonatality 109, no. 2 (2016): 85–90. https://doi.org/10.1159/000440876. parish, helen. “‘paltrie vermin, cats, mise, toads, and weasils’: witches, familiars, and human–animal interactions in the english witch trials.” religions 10, no. 2 (2019): 134. https://doi.org/10.3390/ rel10020134. https://doi.org/10.2307/286431 https://doi.org/10.2307/286431 https://doi.org/10.2307/289426 https://doi.org/10.2307/289426 https://doi.org/10.1086/710639 https://doi.org/10.1086/671480 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3704309 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0738248020000267 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0738248020000267 https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.319 https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.319 https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474011427361 https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474011427361 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2016.1276888 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2016.1276888 https://doi.org/10.1159/000440876 https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10020134 https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10020134 40 | arseneault and collard, animal trials humanimalia 14.1 (2023) pateman, carole. “‘the disorder of women’: women, love, and the sense of justice.” ethics, 91, no. 1 (1980): 20–34. https://doi.org/10.1086/292200. probyn-rapsey, fiona. “the ‘crazy cat lady.’” in animaladies: gender, animals and madness, edited by lori gruen and fiona probyn-rapsey, 175–86. new york: bloomsbury, 2019. puff, helmut. sodomy in reformation germany and switzerland, 1400–1600. chicago: university of chicago press, 2003. rapaport, elizabeth. “mad women and desperate girls: infanticide and child murder in law and myth.” fordham urban law journal no. 33 (2005): 527–69. https:// ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj/vol33/iss2/8. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate: the english and other creatures in victorian england. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1987. rosen, barbara. witchcraft in england, 1558–1618. amherst: university of massachusetts press, 1991. rudy, kathy. “lgbtq...z?” hypatia 27, no. 3 (summer 2012): 601–15. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2012.01278.x. rydström, jens. sinners and citizens: bestiality and homosexuality in sweden, 1880–1950. chicago: university of chicago press, 2003. sahlins, peter. “the royal menageries of louis xiv and the civilizing process revisited.” french historical studies 35, no. 2 (2012): 237–67. https://doi. org/10.1215/00161071-1498463. sahlins, peter. 1688: the year of the animal in france. new york: zone books, 2017. salisbury, joyce e. the beast within: animals in the middle ages. new york: routledge, 1994. salisbury, joyce e. “human beasts and bestial humans in the middle ages.” in animal acts: configuring the human in western history, edited by jennifer ham and matthew senior, 9–22. new york: routledge, 1997. sauer, roger. “infanticide and abortion in nineteenth-century britain.” population studies 32, no. 1 (1978): 81–93. https:// doi.org/10.2307/2173842. schiebinger, londa. nature’s body: gender in the making of modern science. new brunswick, nj: rutger’s university press, 2004. serpell, james. “guardian spirits or demonic pets: the concept of the witch’s familiar in early modern england, 1530–1712.” in the animal/human boundary: historical perspectives, edited by angela creager and william chester jordan, 157–90. rochester, ny: university of rochester press, 2002. shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2009. simpson, leanne betasamosake. as we have always done: indigenous resistance through radical resistance. indigenous americas. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2021. singh, julietta. unthinking mastery: dehumanism and decolonial entanglements. durham, nc: duke university press, 2018. srivastava, anila. “‘mean, dangerous, and uncontrollable beasts’: mediaeval animal trials.” mosaic: an interdisciplinary critical journal 40, no. 1 (2007): 127–43. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/44030162. sykes, katie. “human drama, animal trials: what the medieval animal trials can teach us about justice for animals.” animal law no. 17 (2010): 273–311. https://www.animallaw.info/sites/ default/files/lralvol17_2_251_0.pdf. tague, ingrid. animal companions: pets and social change in eighteenthcentury britain. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2015. terry-fritsch, allie. “animal trials, humiliation rituals, and the sensuous https://doi.org/10.1086/292200 https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj/vol33/iss2/8 https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/ulj/vol33/iss2/8 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2012.01278.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2012.01278.x https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-1498463 https://doi.org/10.1215/00161071-1498463 https://doi.org/10.2307/2173842 https://doi.org/10.2307/2173842 https://www.jstor.org/stable/44030162 https://www.jstor.org/stable/44030162 https://www.animallaw.info/sites/default/files/lralvol17_2_251_0.pdf https://www.animallaw.info/sites/default/files/lralvol17_2_251_0.pdf arseneault and collard, animal trials | 41 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) suffering of criminal offenders in late medieval and early modern europe.” in visualizing sensuous suffering and affective pain in early modern europe and the spanish americas, edited by heather graham and lauren g. kilroyewbank, 53–81. leiden: brill, 2018. tilley, helen. africa as a living laboratory: empire, development, and the problem of scientific knowledge, 1870–1950. chicago: university of chicago press, 2011. tortorici, zeb. sins against nature: sex & archives in colonial new spain. durham, nc: duke university press, 2018. tsing, anna lowenhaupt. “nine provocations for the study of domestication.” in domestication gone wild: politics and practices of multispecies relations, edited by heather anne swanson, marianne elisabeth lien, and gro b. ween, 231–51. durham, nc: duke university press, 2018. tsing, anna lowenhaupt. “unruly edges: mushrooms as companion species.” environmental humanities 1, no. 1 (2012): 141–54. https://doi.org/10.1215/220119193610012. tuttle, leslie. conceiving the old regime: pronatalism and the politics of reproduction in early modern france. oxford: oxford university press, 2010. van bruaene, anne-laure. “revolting beasts: animal satire and animal trials in the dutch revolt.” in the anthropomorphic lens: anthropomorphism, microcosmism and analogy in early modern thought and visual arts, edited by walter melion, bret rothstein, and michel weemans, 19–42. leiden: brill, 2015. witmore, michael. “childhood in early modern england, c. 1500–1700.” representing childhood, an online project directed by marah gubar. university of pittsburgh, 2005. https:// www.representingchildhood.pitt.edu/ early_modern_child.htm. whyte, kyle powys. “reflections on the purpose of indigenous environmental education.” in handbook of indigenous education, edited by elizabeth ann mckinley and linda tuhiwai smith, 767–87. singapore: springer, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3610012 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3610012 https://www.representingchildhood.pitt.edu/early_modern_child.htm https://www.representingchildhood.pitt.edu/early_modern_child.htm https://www.representingchildhood.pitt.edu/early_modern_child.htm _heading=h.30j0zll grigorovich, the line is death copyright © 2024 imogen grigorovich this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 290–300. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 the line is death: animal fugitivity and urban planning imogen grigorovich review of: maan barua, lively cities: reconfiguring urban ecology. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2023. viii + 373 pp. 53 illus. $30.00 (pb). and peter s. alagona, the accidental ecosystem: people in wildlife in american cities. oakland: university of california press, 2022. xvi + 276 pp. 10 illus. $26.95 (hb) imogen grigorovich is a research master’s student in comparative literary studies at utrecht university, netherlands. email: imogenwf@gmail.com review article http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 mailto:imogenwf@gmail.com le corbusier’s the city of to-morrow and its planning (1929), a foundational work of urban planning theory, imagines the city by reducing it to a diagrammatical map of paths, lines, and curves. lamenting that the cities of his time were built for pack-donkeys rather than men, le corbusier aligns humans and animals with different urban geometries. man’s preference, he argues, lies with the straight line, as he “walks in a straight line because he has a goal and knows where he is going”. the pack-donkey, on the other hand, prefers curves and open spaces: he “meanders along, meditates a little in his scatter-brained and distracted fashion, [. . .] zigzags [and] takes the line of least resistance”.1 for le corbusier, the line represents the triumph of human reason over other animals and the animality we share with them. the line asserts mastery and control over one’s passions. the modern city, thus, must “live by the straight line”, constructing its buildings, sewers, tunnels, highways, and pavements as linear throughways for human navigation. in the face of such efficiency, the curve of the pack-donkey’s way becomes a “ruinous, […] paralyzing thing”.2 le corbusier’s visions for the city of to-morrow shaped much of western urban architecture of the twentieth century. the pursuit of efficient, logical form wrought havoc on urban animal life: walls and fences cut off well-trodden paths, and the proliferation of motorways introduced new, deadly dangers into established habitats. in his preference for a specific kind of geometry, le corbusier neglected the needs of urban animals, and cities re-structured by his philosophy made animal life precarious, forcing them to rapidly adapt to human-centred patterns of urban living. two recent publications push against the established canon of urban planning literature. in lively cities: reconfiguring urban ecology, maan barua explores aspects of urban animal life that often go ignored by post-corbusierian city planning. barua takes the language of canonical urban theory and repurposes it to work against itself, developing a “polyphonic” (18) account of the city, what he calls “the urban 1 le corbusier, the city of to-morrow and its planning (new york: dover, 1987), 40. 2 le corbusier, city of to-morrow, 46. copyright © 2024 imogen grigorovich this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 289–300. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.19062 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.19062 grigorovich, the line is death | 291 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) in a minor key” (14), that is lively and sensitive to how urban space is shaped by heterogeneous and “meshworked arrangements” (16) of human and nonhuman protagonists. exploring the lives of macaques and cows in post-independence delhi and parakeets in contemporary london, barua writes against the received wisdom that cities are made by humans for humans, showing how people and animals find novel ways of living together despite the segregated forms imposed by urban planning. taking a different approach, peter s. alagona’s book the accidental ecosystem: people in wildlife in american cities traces the history of animal presence in american cities, looking at the evolution of the relationships between human and animal co-habitants through the establishment of the united states to the present. such a bird’s eye view of american urban histories allows alagona to trace the construction of the contemporary common-sense ideas of urban animality and showcase the shifting nature of the city’s relationship to its animal others. investigating the ways in which urban flora and fauna have been shaped by decisions that did not take them into consideration, alagona argues that the recent explosion in urban wildlife has “happened largely by accident” (2). alagona calls for a wider awareness of how our urban decisions will shape the ecosystems of animal others “for generations to come” (7). together, the two books call for a new approach to urban planning. in paying attention to the diverse ways human and animal others coinhabit urban spaces, barua and alagona argue that animal others are vital and active participants in the shaping of our urban landscapes. to account for their presence, we must make space for both the man and the pack-donkey. oppressive diagrams barua’s investigation begins at a moment when human-drawn city diagrams collide with the fleshy materiality of the animal body. connaught place, delhi’s upmarket business district suddenly comes to a halt when a rogue rhesus macaque climbs up the pipes, loses its footing, and falls into the district’s main transformer (25). the macaque’s humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 292 | grigorovich, the line is death death, which causes an electrical outage that lasts for hours, marks just one moment of delhi’s complex relationship with the primates, who are both venerated and construed as nuisances (33, 36). a closer look at delhi’s electrical infrastructures exposes another conflict of interest. the drawing and redrawing of delhi’s electrical grids is an effort of co-production not only between the macaques and the authorities but also the people living near the electric lines. attempts by delhi’s energy grid authorities to impose order and bring the populations into what barua calls “the ambit of capital” — through installing electric meters and assigning each household a unique grid number — have had to contend not only with the monkeys but also with the realities of “informal urbanization” (40). away from the sight of delhi’s authorities, illegal power lines are drawn by urban katiyabaaz — delhi’s unsanctioned professional electricians. the katiyabaaz, operating precariously at the margins of society, establish connections from the discom transformers into urban homes, opposing state-sanctioned impositions of order (42). the new lines are then repurposed by the macaques, who use the new pathways to traverse the city. stories of city planning are dominated by neatly drawn diagrams. yet in delhi, the diagrams of the electric grid are not able to keep up with the constantly evolving landscape of electric lines that are illegally drawn, repaired, and chewed through. imposed electrical infrastructure is repurposed and redesigned by both macaques and humans, who draw new connections and sever old ones, providing marginalized homes with electricity and the monkeys with new pathways of urban travel. on the other side of the globe, urban grids face similar challenges from local wildlife. in describing the birth and growth of american cities after the second world war, peter alagona discusses how a myriad of factors, such as “new roads, zoning laws, government-backed mortgages, and the postwar baby boom” have contributed to the development of vast suburban areas, whose sprawl encroached onto territories previously surrendered to nature (46). the ecological impact of postwar suburbs was devastating, ravaging the area’s wildlife, paving over habitats, and polluting waterways. grigorovich, the line is death | 293 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) diverse ecosystems were replaced with uniform green lawns, which caused the landscape to be dominated by relatively few grass species (46–47). yet the very developments that have devastated existing ecosystems unwittingly created fruitful conditions for the emergence of new ones (49). species such as white-tailed deer, coyotes, and black bears, who were able to adjust to human behaviours, soon found themselves encroaching back into the suburbs. adapting more nocturnal life cycles, they commuted to suburban zones to search for food in the copious waste the suburbs produced (50, 65, 84). residents of the american suburb whose interactions with animals were limited mostly to their pets, and who were largely unaccustomed to hunting and trapping thanks to the decline of both practices in the twentieth century, now had to contend with the evolving nature of their habitat, and share their living space with wild, and sometimes dangerous, animal others (46). such developments were most unwelcome. the encroaching animals were treated as intruders and met with violence and ostracization (79). mass media stoked the fire, as sensationalized narratives pitted humans against wildlife, often by echoing the “paranoid, racist, and xenophobic tropes of the day” (78). the police, mobilized to maintain the idyll of the suburb, proved inadequate at managing the crisis. cullings of coyote and bear populations were resource-intensive yet ineffective, failing to address the main reasons for the proliferation of urban wildlife, namely the food-rich ecosystems created by aggressive suburban zoning efforts and lacklustre waste management (79). since what drew animals towards the city remained unchanged, coyotes and bears that were captured or killed were soon replaced by others, wandering in from nearby forests (96). like in delhi, solutions to problems of cohabitation that imposed human-centred notions of order did not yield the desired results. instead, successes came from unlikely sources — as was the case with steve searles, the “bear yeller” who was hired to rid the californian town of mammoth lakes of its bear problem (97). quickly realizing that killing the bears was of no use, searles turned to other tactics such as hazing and intimidation while, at the same time, urging humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 294 | grigorovich, the line is death the city to secure its trash and educate its citizens on proper conduct (97). searles’s strategy, which made peace with the bears’ presence and respected their intelligence, is credited with dramatically reducing the conflict between the people and bears of mammoth lakes (98). as the above examples make clear, infrastructure is not the sole domain of humans. we must therefore contend with the fact that the city we built and delineated will be used not only by us. we must make peace with the fact that our infrastructure will be repurposed, our zones breached and reinscribed by animal others. urban planning that is sensitive to the animal, then, must not rely solely on static diagrams to understand the city, and must instead keep itself open to the possibilities of change engendered by the urban animal. troubled categories the animal in the city muddles not only the drawn boundaries of city zones but also the very categories we use to discuss it. changes to the landscapes of american cities and the increase in sightings of wildlife in the suburbs have troubled conventional american wisdoms, which split animal presence into zones, with the city inhabited by companion animals, the countryside inhabited by livestock, and the wilderness as the province of wildlife. while bears and coyotes crept into the city from the forests, domesticated and captive animals escaped from their homes and cages and made a life for themselves on the city streets. both alagona and barua are concerned with the ways categories simplify our understanding of urban animal life. alagona showcases the true complexities of urban ecosystems by looking at the floridian wilderness. florida is home to an astonishing number of exotic animals: some five hundred species roaming free. once introduced to the ecosystem, many exotics breed in the wild for prolonged periods and, seemingly, have no intentions of leaving. the vectors for the animals’ introduction into the wild are numerous. in the aftermath of hurricane andrew, for example, more than three hundred species broke free from their enclosures in zoo miami (153). grigorovich, the line is death | 295 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) another contributor to the movement of exotic species into the floridian wilderness is the exotic pet trade. today, illegal wildlife trading is a massive industry worth tens of billions of us dollars, dealing in thousands of species worldwide, with american cities like miami being home to thousands of captive exotic animal species (156). thanks to a culture of interest around exotics, lax regulations, and individual convictions, animals escape or are set free, creating disparate populations of wild exotics who then proceed to intermingle with the captive animals. the constant flows of capture, release, and recapture, alagona argues, break down the barriers between native and exotic, wild and captive animals (6). attempting to regulate which animals should be allowed to exist in ecosystems is often a sisyphean task — once an animal has taken root in an ecosystem, their removal proves to be an endeavour that does much ecological damage with little upside. alagona is particularly critical of the industry of wildlife damage management (wdm) which deals with animal removal and pest control (170–71). pest control is a private-run industry whose methods and goals often conflict with those of conservationists and urban ecologists (170). lethal pest control has devastating effects on ecosystems: because poisons take time to kill the animals that eat them, this leads to the chemicals being ingested by predators who feed on common pests, thereby weakening the very populations which help control the city’s pest problem (178). lethal means of removal are also ineffective at actually reducing pest populations. one of the most damning statistics alagona presents is the reported tenfold increase in the number of “wildlife-related incidents” between 1994 and 2003 despite the continued efforts of pest control companies to cull pest numbers (176). instead, in many social animals, culling leads to explosions in population growth to replace the dead, as well as to the deaths of “high-ranking individuals” and their replacement with younger, less experienced specimens (177). such replacements “scramble social structures and territorial boundaries” and make the animals much harder to predict and deal with in the future (178). ultimately, alagona argues that the category of “pest” that the wdm uses lacks concrete definition — “the same creature humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 296 | grigorovich, the line is death may be a pest to one person in one context and a benign, valuable, or even endangered species to another person in another context” (170). the vagueness of the definition leaves pest control susceptible to enforcing normative social values, eliminating animals that may not do much quantifiable damage because of social stigma and prejudice. barua, too, is interested in the breakdown of categories that urban animals engender. through his investigations of the history of the parakeet in the london metropolitan area, barua shows how the bird’s presence complicates notions of domesticity and wildness. caught in africa and south asia and transported to london, parakeets have long been caught in a complex web of movement of lively capital (105). but birds fly away. escaped parakeets from different locales band together and interbreed, which leads to new mutations and genetically distinct populations (132). to account for the parakeets’ constant movement between capture, escape, and recapture, barua introduces the notion of ferality to describe a kind of life that resides in between the categories of wild and domestic. being neither fully native nor fully foreign, parakeets occupy a precarious position within the city. concerns about feral animals can often echo racist and xenophobic anti-immigrant sentiments (106). through examining the “politics of hospitality” at the site of the bird feeder, where citizens of london often deny the birds feed to prioritize the native species, barua highlights a “micropolitics of race” (151) in which concerns about booming parakeet populations map onto “broader anxieties over the arrival of human migrants and the threats they purportedly pose to britain” (151–52). feral parakeets are, then, fugitives of the urban landscape. living together the fates of fugitive animals are intertwined with the fates of human fugitives. looking back to delhi’s macaques, barua focuses on local practices of human–simian cohabitation. thanks to the animal’s religious connection to lord hanumān, the city’s inhabitants often feed the monkeys as a way of appeasing the deity (67). such acts of human–animal interaction run against official city grigorovich, the line is death | 297 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) policy. the macaques’ boisterous presence disrupts the vision of delhi as a “modern, clean and globalized capital”, and delhi authorities have a long history of attempting to expel, resettle, and regulate the “monkey menace” (67, 69). however, officials’ attempts to rid the city of macaques, which involve restrictions on feeding practices and catch-and-release programs, treat the humans and animals as “docile bodies that power can work on from without”, rather than as individuals with complex, embodied relations to their places of dwelling (86). cataloguing this history, barua criticizes the effectiveness of such modes of governance. in their place, he calls for “vernacular practices” — practices that “unfold through cofabrications between human[s] and other-than-human[s]” (89–90). one such practice is the work of langur-wallahs, workers who navigate city streets imitating the calls and behaviours of langurs, whose calls and acts of aggression frighten macaques (90). langur-wallahs’ methods of macaque regulation takes macaques to be knowledgeable, social beings, who inhabit the urban world alongside us and are able to respond to human communication (95). barua is careful not to imply that vernacular practices run in opposition to practices of state violence. on the contrary, he emphasizes how langur-wallahs are often employed by the state to enforce a certain city aesthetic which puts the animal out of view of the urban. existing on the margins of society, langur-wallahs are themselves vulnerable: their employment is precarious, deeply tied to the fates of the monkeys (91). vernacular practices, however, treat the macaques as capable agents of urban life, transcending the city’s anthropocentric governance. fugitive practices of cohabitation can also be seen in barua’s recounting of the troubled histories of delhi’s urban cows. urban cattle populations have, historically, played an important role in delhi life and are “intrinsically enmeshed in an intensely contested politics” (193). such politics have often been actuated through urban planning: in 1962, driven by the pressures of modernization and concerns over cleanliness and civic sensibility, the delhi municipal committee commissioned the design of the delhi masterplan, a work of humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 298 | grigorovich, the line is death city planning that included the removal of cattle from delhi streets as one of its objectives (203). in the years since, the municipality has made multiple attempts to restrict the ability of cattle to navigate the city. borrowing from deleuze and guattari, barua calls such attempts to segregate living space and separate cattle from urban life the “striation” of urban space, juxtaposing the restricted landscapes of post-masterplan delhi to the “smooth space” of unrestricted cattle movement (196). attempts to striate urban spaces have, however, been repeatedly stifled by the combined fugitive efforts of cattle and their sympathizers. cattle owners were often unwilling to restrict the movement of their animals, and often trained their cows spot municipal staff sent to catch them, and to resist capture by lying “motionless on the ground as if dead” (210). their neighbours would also alert the cows when they saw the municipal chowkidars approach (205, 210). such fugitive resistance made attempts to impose order difficult and costly. in fact, the more resources were pulled into catching the cattle, the more the map proliferated with smooth spaces, as cows and people worked together to break down the diagrammatic, state-imposed zoning barriers (221). to find such smooth spaces in the striated city, barua follows the daily walk of kaali, one of the urban cows living in delhi. kaali’s journey through the city, “a slow but steady walk”, takes us through shops whose owners feed her roti, alongside roads bustling with traffic, and through the many “piles of ephemeral garbage”, in search of food and quiet dwellings (196). in tracing kaali’s everyday movements, we see the various ways in which cattle are integrated into the urban circuits, “bring[ing] to the fore a smooth cartography of delhi that emerges in spite of the enclosure of pastures and the urbanization of erstwhile grazing grounds” (199). despite the presence of human-erected barriers and enclosures, delhi urban cows and their human accomplices trace fugitive trajectories through the city. in doing so, they destabilize the aesthetics of the city and allow us to be privy to a different kind of urban life, one that acknowledges the city as co-constituted by human–animal relations. grigorovich, the line is death | 299 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) however, while animal fugitives find ways to cross imposed borders, barua is quick to point out that the city can introduce other dangers into animal life. in their travels through the city, delhi bovines, for example, are constantly exposed to “a toxic ecology of hazardous substances”, which are damaging to the cows’ health (264). the cows regularly consume life-threatening amounts of plastic, and necropsies often uncover “twenty to thirty kilograms” of the material in the cows’ stomachs (264). in living together with animals in the city, we must also take into account the ways in which the animals’ lives are complicated, shortened, and deadened by the presence of human waste. epilogue: the curve is freedom/the line is death le corbusier’s emphatic calls for cities to prioritize the straight lines of human convenience at the expense of the curves of “the pack-donkey’s way” have dominated the discipline of urban planning of the last century. to this day, diagrams and maps that segregate urban life into neat blocks and zones drive policy and characterize urban living in many urban centres, including delhi, london, and miami. yet, as barua and alagona repeatedly show, animals, with and without human help, routinely trespass the zones to which they are confined, escape their cages and enclosures, infiltrate human spaces, and build their lives enmeshed in city space, tracing their own pack-donkey’s ways, finding pack-donkey’s resources and creating pack-donkey’s habitats in the linear mazes of human cities. furthermore, urban animals, through their existence in-between categories and their frequent movements across them, throw into question the very words we use to know them, showcasing the oppressive and bloody histories of categories such as “pest”, “feral”, and “wild”. once animals appear in the city, they cannot be easily wished away. efforts to remove animals from urban spaces are often costly, ineffective endeavours that do untold harm to the ecosystems, the people, and the animals. the moral of looking at urban animals is evident — city planners of the present and future must make peace with living beside animals. however, to live together we must think and plan differently, think outside of the efficiencies humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 300 | grigorovich, the line is death of the line and the simplicity of border-zones, and instead take the city for what it truly is: a space in which the trajectories of human and animal life endlessly intertwine with one another. the two books explored in this review complement each other. in accidental ecosystems, alagona provides a lucid account of the complex history of urban planning and its impact on urban animal life, underscoring the many missteps and missed opportunities as well as celebrating the often accidental and unintentional successes. barua’s lively cities adds to and recontextualizes alagona’s accounts by providing a rich and evocative theoretical framework for thinking the city in a minor key — a framework that understands the animals as capable agents in the urban environment, and sees the city as a stage for human–animal interaction. taken together, they mount a powerful critique of the urban planning policies of london, delhi, and various us cities. in addition to critique, however, they show how city planning should be done — giving us a glimpse of the cities of the future, peeked at through cracks in the wall, through broken fences, and unlocked gates. such alternative cities no longer live and die by the line. instead, they embrace animal others as cohabitants whose paths through the city, non-linear as they are, have a right to exist. together, alagona and barua imagine a different city of to-morrow: one that does not centre the line, with its ideals of anthropocentrism and reason, but instead permits the presence of the curve, following with interest and curiosity the urban animals as they make their way. _heading=h.17dp8vu _heading=h.49x2ik5 _heading=h.3l18frh _heading=h.4h042r0 weston, the habit in cohabitation the habit in cohabitation (or, how to meet a tiger on the path) kath weston university of edinburgh and university of virginia humanimalia 13.1 (fall 2022) copyright © 2022 kath weston this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 45–78. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.11542 abstract: as human and nonhuman animals increasingly share space, however enthusiastically or reluctantly, the concepts of habit, cohabitation, and habituation bear further scrutiny when applied to these makeshift arrangements. many researchers have argued for greater recognition of the ways in which more-than-human relations are historically situated. yet they sometimes unwittingly re-impart a timeless quality into their accounts by invoking a discourse of habit, especially when rendering field observations in the present tense. “habit” and its cognates map fixed attributes onto animals. this essay critically examines the temporality embedded in the usage of “habit”, “cohabitation”, and “habituation” in discussions of human– nonhuman animal relations, arguing that a discourse of habit traps animals in an ethnographic present of the sort long critiqued within anthropology in its (post)colonial application to humans. studies of human–tiger relations in rajasthan, india, and auto-ethnographic material on human–bear relations in alaska suggestively illustrate what a more sophisticated historical orientation has to offer by moving discussions of multispecies relations beyond the tropes of encounter and blurred human/nonhuman boundaries. acknowledgment that nonhuman animals have historically inflected backstories, even when their experiences are not accessible to humans, is a step in the direction of more expansive possibilities for co-worlding. keywords: animal studies, temporality, cohabitation, habituation, environment, india, north america bio: kath weston is professor of anthropology at the university of virginia and british academy global professor at the university of edinburgh. her books include families we choose; traveling light: on the road with america’s poor; and animate planet: making visceral sense of living in a high-tech ecologically damaged world. email: weston@virginia.edu orcid: 0000-0002-9524-7334 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.11542 mailto:weston@virginia.edu https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9524-7334 weston, the habit in cohabitation | 47 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) as human and nonhuman animals increasingly share space, however enthusiastically or reluctantly, the concepts of habit, cohabitation, and habituation bear further scrutiny when applied to an emerging array of makeshift accommodations in more-than-human relations. many researchers have argued for greater recognition of the ways in which more-than-human relations are historically situated. yet researchers have also sometimes unwittingly ended up re-imparting a timeless quality to even the most sophisticated accounts by implicitly or explicitly invoking a discourse of habit, especially when rendering field observations in the present tense. “habit” and its cognates map fixed attributes onto animals, regardless of the historical/ecological circumstances cited to explain those attributes in any given instance. this essay critically examines the temporality embedded in the usage of “habit”, “cohabitation”, and “habituation” in discussions of human–nonhuman animal relations. it argues that the discourse of habit can trap animals in an ethnographic present of the sort long critiqued within anthropology in its (post)colonial application to humans. one alternative to this practice of entrapment is to approach morethan-human animals as what mahesh rangarajan calls “animals with histories,” instead of treating them as members of species with fairly set characteristics who make cameo appearances in ecological histories, ethnographies, and field studies. the tigers and elephants, beavers and bears, racoons and coyotes who “inhabit” the following paragraphs are accordingly not denizens but visitors: guest instructors, if you will. their stories nudge discussions of multispecies relations beyond the colonial trope of encounter and the blurring of human/nonhuman boundaries toward temporally more diverse accounts that honour the impact of previous events on even the most creative efforts to negotiate those boundaries. although humans may lack access to more-than-human memories and experiences, an acknowledgement of animals’ historically inflected backstories opens more expansive possibilities for co-worlding. my provocation begins, notwithstanding the subtitle of this article, with bears. and not even with bears as such, but with bears that 48 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) loom large in the imagination of humans, bears who take shape through fantasy confrontations in a meadow or in the woods, before those “encounters” ever materialize on the banks of a river or at a campsite. other animals will join these spectral cousins of ursus arctos in due course. our guest instructors share a membership in animalia charismatica: the club for charismatic animals whose fates are increasingly mediated by the threats and charms they exert in the minds of humans.1 under such imaginatively inflammatory conditions, how are nonhuman animals and human animals supposed to live together? more specifically, how does the common socio-temporal framing of our interactions with reference to animals’ habits and behaviours influence the prospects for all concerned? if, as i will argue, the static yet cyclical time-out-of-time of habit (the habit in “cohabitation” and “habituation”) provides an unsatisfactory, even injurious, way of characterizing our mutual accommodation, how might humans begin to reconceptualize such relations? when i travelled to alaska for the first and only time, back in the 1980s, the ever-present instructions about how a person should conduct themselves if ever they meet a bear made a lasting impression on me. you saw handy educational tips posted at visitor centres, in campgrounds, on bulletin boards in laundromats and supermarkets and government offices. surprisingly, all those posters, leaflets, and pamphlets did not add up to any consensus about what to do. one would advise us to stay very quiet and still, while another stressed the importance of backing away slowly. one might suggest that we try climbing a tree, while yet another would point out that bears, too, can climb trees (more quickly than one might expect). the next bit of unsolicited advice would urge us, as relatively scrawny humans, to hold out our arms to make ourselves appear bigger and more intimidating. “intimidating, compared to a bear? good luck with that!” 1 which is not to imply that unheralded stories of species judged by humans to be less charismatic have nothing to teach (see van dooren, a world in a shell), merely that a focus on animals whose stories already appeal to diverse constituencies of humans provides a strategic “way in” to a discussion of the longstanding preoccupation with habit in conceiving more-than-human relations. weston, the habit in cohabitation | 49 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) i thought to myself. i practiced, feeling a bit ridiculous, but remained far from convinced. a little further down the road, i would come across a reminder to try to remain calm and inconspicuous rather than panic if a bear decided to rear up on its hind legs. this behaviour was apparently not some precursor to a ferocious attack, like the ones depicted in hollywood movies. on the contrary, the advisory materials maintained: standing up on two hind paws was an innocuous habit bears had developed because they have poor eyesight but a keen sense of smell. by repositioning their noses at a certain height, they could get a better whiff of their surroundings. none of these universalized explanations and instructions mentioned indigenous modes of signalling human presence to passing bears, such as the way anishinaabe trappers might pause to offer tobacco to them when moving through the forest.2 bells tied to backpacks to warn bears of the approach of a human along the trail were almost as ubiquitous in that part of the world as posters filled with cohabitation instructions. how all this was supposed to work when alaska’s roaring spring streams drowned out the delicate jingle and jangle that accompanied human footfalls was anyone’s guess. i dutifully fastened a bell to my gear anyway. the devil is in always in the details, i supposed, and for humans, anyway, they say it’s the thought that counts. although most of this sage advice was meant to be protective, even lifesaving, not all of it was tendered in earnest. a few pedagogical entries in the “human–bear encounter” genre incorporated gallows humour, of the sort that prompted one ranger to post behind glass a cartoon of bears sitting around a fire stirring a big pot of stew. in a carnivalesque interspecies riff on cannibal stories — from the shape of the pot alone, you knew what was in that pot — one very satisfied-looking anthropomorphic bear had turned to its companions to remark, “i just love it when they play dead!” the ranger who posted the cartoon admonished campers, in a more quotidian register, to forbear — no pun intended — from creating 2 see willow, “conceiving kakipitatapitmok,” 269. 50 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) conditions that would encourage human–bear interactions in the first place. keep a tidy campsite. hang food on ropes over tree branches and never, ever, take food with you into your tent. the best course of action apparently was to allow cohabitation by humans and bears to work itself out in parallel rather than intersecting lives, like staging a farce in which the characters are constantly cycling on and off the stage, missing one another on the way in and out by a hair’s breadth. the best encounter was no encounter. in crafting this opening passage about campers and bears who decamp for sites otherwise claimed by humans, i have utilized a methodological technique i have developed elsewhere called an “ethnographic stopgap”.3 ethnographic stopgaps feature vignettes repurposed from a researcher’s memory in such a way as to apply ethnographic training and an ethnographic sensibility to past events that occurred outside the context of any formal fieldwork. for instance, it may be impossible at a remove of several decades to locate an unnamed ranger who presided over a campground that no longer exists, much less the source for notices and cartoons casually pinned to vanished bulletin boards. yet ethnographic stopgaps like these can be invaluable when laying the groundwork for an inquiry. points embedded in the stopgap narrative illustrate, frame, and foreshadow points that will feature in the ensuing argument, while calling attention to the need to augment research in specific areas. for the purposes of this essay, the specifics of what to do when meeting a bear in the woods (or for that matter, when meeting a foraging bear in your kitchen) are beside the point. it is the very ubiquity of contradictory advice and its temporal framing that i find revealing. bears appeared in these posted warnings and lists of helpful tips as creatures of regular comportment and habits, habits that it was incumbent upon humans who wished to share space with them to study. bear sightings in these imaginary meetings floated free in what anthropologists would call an ethnographic present. the lumbering protagonists of a million cautionary tales might exhibit the occasional change in behaviour — as, for example, when 3 weston, animate planet; weston, “the ethnographer’s magic”. weston, the habit in cohabitation | 51 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) humans corrupted them by leaving bags of chips unsecured at a picnic site — but humans almost never imagined the bears that fascinated them as having a history. like nonhuman animals more generally, bears were said to be “creatures of habit” (or, sometimes still, instinct), but on this journey, the non-indigenous humans whose hopes and fears revolved around meeting bears seldom accorded bear sociality much diachronic complexity. the habit in cohabitation all animals famously have a specific habitat: a region, complete with other fauna and flora, where humans say they belong, or by some definitions, “naturally” live. being animals themselves, humans also lay claim to habitat, but to the degree that humans have adopted a colonizing stance toward a range of ecosystems, their claims have tended to be more overbearing. headlines such as “potential human habitat located on the moon” (or any number of exoplanets) illustrate this differential.4 both sorts of animals, human and nonhuman, can in-habit and potentially co-habit, ecologically speaking. these terms share the sense of something present, something settled, no matter how it was acquired: a type of settled inclination, as well as, potentially, a shared space of geographical residence. when it comes to climate change, however, all bets are off as to who belongs where and how long any particular species can hang on amidst the accelerating transformations. rampant urbanization, forced migration, and escalating extinctions make it all the more urgent to think carefully and critically about the present-tense orientation and cyclical temporality associated with “habit” in dreams of multispecies cohabitation, as well as the prominence of habit more generally in accounts of animal life. there is a repetitiveness to habit that will not serve or survive the challenge of climate change, practically or theoretically. and that may not be such a bad thing, if the goal is to arrive at a more subtle understanding of the temporal dimensions of any grounds where human and nonhuman animals meet. 4 “potential human habitat located on the moon,” science blog, 23 oct. 2017, https:// scienceblog.com/497066/potential-human-habitat-located-moon/; cf. messeri, placing outer space. https://scienceblog.com/497066/potential-human-habitat-located-moon/ https://scienceblog.com/497066/potential-human-habitat-located-moon/ 52 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) the etymological root of “habit,” habere, has signified variably over the centuries: to have and to hold, to be situated, to wear, but also to have in mind. temporally speaking, habits combine aspects of fixity and cyclicality. they are notoriously hard to break, should anyone care to try. that makes them static, to the degree that they are well-established and relatively impervious to change. yet recurrence is also a key feature. no single incident can constitute a habit. habitual actions are the ones that happen again, and again, and again. in the way habit yokes fixity (the “same” behaviour) to recurrence, habit exists both in and out of time. but not just any time; for the cyclical time of repetition is not the linear time of history, a point that will become important as this essay unfolds. within the fields of animal behaviour and animal psychology, the heyday for explicitly framing research in terms of habit was the early twentieth century. this was a period in which the scottish biologist e. s. russell could proclaim, “everything in the animal life is under the dominion of habit,” and only rarely would a colleague blink.5 habit had begun to displace an older concept, instinct, once widely enlisted to explain animal behaviours deemed to be characteristic. unlike instincts, habits could be acquired within the course of a lifetime. in 1922, knight dunlap, president of the american psychological association, tried to resolve the debate about whether instincts even exist by arguing that instinct and habit were one and the same.6 others treated the two concepts as distinct but allied, contending that “the bonds of instinct and habit […] cause the situation to produce the act.”7 such moves to amalgamate habit with instinct elided a longer history of philosophical debates in which habit could feature not as mindless behaviour but rather as a form of knowledge.8 during this period, habit formation emerged as a hot new area of investigation, with researchers championing the virtues of mazes and 5 russell, form and function, 29. 6 dunlap, “identity of instinct.” 7 thorndike, animal intelligence, 18. 8 carlisle, on habit. weston, the habit in cohabitation | 53 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) white rats for unlocking its secrets.9 not to be outdone, other scholars launched experimental inquiries into “the formation of a simple habit in guinea-pigs”10 or “the relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit formation in the kitten.”11 although the focus was ostensibly on animal learning, the hope of extrapolating the findings about kittens or rats to human behaviour often shadowed such british and american studies. susan zieger, for instance, has shown how habit lost some of its culturally positive connotations of discipline and order when it became part of a generative discourse that surrounded the victorian invention of the addict,12 newly figured as a tragically divided self, possessed by something called a “drug habit.” researchers who wanted to help human animals “kick the habit” hoped to gain insight into addiction from a better understanding of how all those white rats became fixated on rewards. the animals who appear in various iterations of animal studies today might seem far removed from the creatures of habit who populated twentieth-century research in experimental psychology and animal behaviour. contemporary researchers seldom propose to study animal habits per se. they seem to have fallen out of enchantment with habit: “a wonderfully old-fashioned, antiquated, antediluvian word,” as cultural theorist geeta patel puts it, one that was “so ordinary that it almost slipped by without notice. both trivial and fraught with meaning; not worthy of attention and unpacking; a throwaway, but also something we glom onto as having the kind of import that it magnetises, draws, and seizes analytic impetus to itself.”13 these days, animal behaviourists have become more interested in the frisson of innovation than the conservative impulse of constancy.14 environmental geographers have tried to convey the less predictable, less cyclical sensory diffuseness of animal interactions by 9 e.g. maupin, “habit formation in animals,” 574. 10 grindley, “simple habit in guinea-pigs,” 127–147. 11 dodson, “relation of strength,” 330–336. 12 zieger, inventing the addict. 13 patel, risky bodies, 24. 14 reader and laland, animal innovation. 54 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) elaborating nuanced concepts such as “animals’ atmospheres”.15 multispecies ethnographers find themselves observing more-thanhuman interactions in settings so altered by industrialization, pollution, wildfire, roadbuilding, climate change, and even conservation that the repetitious behaviour embedded in habit will not suffice.16 none of these researchers any longer approach animals as rigidly bounded organisms with a species-specific portmanteau of set habits that they lug around. and yet… and yet. the temporality of “habit” persists. despite the calls for recognition of the “entangled histories” of human and more-than-human organisms,17 despite the epochal time invoked by notions of an anthropocene and an age of extinction,18 despite the aspirational efforts devoted to “making kin” and “making-with”,19 it remains quite common for researchers across disciplines to frame their accounts of animals either in the present tense, or in the attenuated past of recent trips to the laboratory or the field. from there, it becomes easy for even the most sophisticated investigators to credit animals with the kind of repetitive actions and regularized attributes that might have been familiar to researchers of earlier generations. previous formulations were simpler: brown bears feed on salmon, when they have a chance; antelopes, not so much. in the twenty-first century, habit discourse takes a bit more sleuthing to discern. golden bell frogs, in one instance, surprise humans by thriving in toxic dumping grounds instead of the remediated habitats prepared for them. anthropologists then worry about caring for said frogs who have become “dependent on” toxicity.20 cue the legacy of habit, quietly mediated by notions of addiction and habit formation, refigured as learning to adapt. repetition retooled, with just enough plasticity to evade extinction. 15 lorimer et al., “animals’ atmospheres.” 16 kirksey, emergent ecologies; münster et al, “multispecies care”; petryna, “wildfires at the edges”; van dooren, world in a shell. 17 tsing et al., feral atlas; tsing et al., arts of living. 18 bastian, “encountering leatherbacks”; rose, wild dog dreaming; rose et al, extinction studies. 19 haraway, staying with the trouble. 20 kirksey, “chemosociality in multispecies worlds,” 24. weston, the habit in cohabitation | 55 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) this legacy association of animals with habits also persists in the acronyms used to represent certain technologies focused on animals. the horse automated behaviour identification tool, or habit, for example, is an animal–computer interface, still in the design phase, for analysing horse–horse and horse–human interactions. assuming all goes well, the uk-based habit project proposes to use cutting-edge technology to automate the generation of ethograms, which aspire to “comprehensive descriptions of the characteristic behaviour patterns of a species”.21 early twentieth-century biologists and experimental psychologists would have found little to quibble with there. in another part of the world, habit stands for “human–animal bond in tennessee”, an organization that brings community volunteers and veterinarians together to sponsor pet visitation programs in care homes, retirement centres, and residences for children with special needs.22 then there is the habit in cohabitation, that yearning desire in a multispecies key to somehow find a way to “get along”. cohabitation typically involves a desire to share space rather than cede space, to come to some sort of proximate accommodation, in contrast to coexistence, which at the scale of a wildlife corridor or a planet might not involve everyday interactions. to coexist, at a minimum, requires humans to create the conditions in which other animals can thrive rather than perish; to find a way to interrupt the sixth mass extinction, with or without our paths regularly crossing. cohabitation additionally requires more quotidian negotiations over space, lest you relocate the woodchuck that has decimated your garden to the other side of the river, while your neighbours across the river are busy relocating the woodchucks with whom they have lost patience over to yours. a friend in small-town virginia calls this the “annual woodchuck exchange”. assuming you can see the folly and have no wish to endanger animals by displacing them, how are negotiations over the shared space implicit in cohabitation to be conducted? here, the process of knowledge production about animals becomes important. if your understanding of animals is indigenous, you might begin by 21 north et al., “habit: horse automated behaviour identification tool,” 1. 22 see https://vetmed.tennessee.edu/outreach/habit. https://vetmed.tennessee.edu/outreach/habit 56 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) reflecting upon responsibilities to particular species, or how “the long arc of colonialism” and dispossession has brought things to a certain pass.23 but if your understanding of animals draws on a steady diet of habits and static attributes served up by media shows about wildlife, you might say to yourself, “racoons are nocturnal, so they can have the run of the yard at night when i’m sleeping. hmm, maybe i’ll find a more secure lid for that bin.” not a bad idea about the bin. notice, however, that to narrate matters this way applies a single temporal frame to the animal: the continuous present tense of habit, filled with enduring repetitive actions and inclinations that may vary seasonally yet always cycle back to where they started. to all appearances, a reasonable compromise about how to share space. but then suppose you keep spotting a “nocturnal” racoon lurking about during the daytime, getting up to all sorts of things that you might regard as mischief. a discourse grounded in habit does not offer much scope for figuring out why, for asking how the racoon’s actions relate to past events and changing conditions, much less coming to some sort of accommodation. sharing the same habitat with humans is one thing; habituation is quite another. as a “multidimensional, mutual, and complex process in which humans and animals continuously and reciprocally adapt to each other”, habituation unfolds in processual time over the course of days, weeks, even years.24 like the habit in cohabitation, the habit in habituation is never neutral. researchers often want the great apes and meerkats they study to become habituated, all the better to study them.25 they work hard at “the interface” to reduce any fear response to humans. they learn to discern which bits of the settings, in which the interaction takes place, affect the habituation process.26 they may even end up questioning the tendency to approach animals as bounded scientific objects who engage in person-to-person relations, arguing that there are better ways to 23 hatfield et al., “indian time,” 1; whyte, “our ancestors’ dystopia now.” 24 hérnandez tiénda, et al., “the habituation process,” 1. 25 hanson and riley, “beyond neutrality.” 26 alcayna-stevens, “inalienable worlds.” weston, the habit in cohabitation | 57 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) understand habituation’s transformative properties.27 over time, lys alcayna-stevens contends, the researchers also change, cultivating their senses and shifting somatic modes of attention in order to dwell in familiarity with their more-than-human research collaborators.28 they may come to perceive, with the subtlety of a michelle bastian, that temporal differences distinguish one animal from another in relation to their surroundings: “a jaguar’s time is tethered to its shifting prey, a turtle’s to the amount of plastic in its gut.”29 these relations are not static, but in this literature, the habituation that renders human/non-human animals knowable to one another takes place within a time frame of ongoing “encounters” that rarely investigate a deeper past. of course, there is another side to habituation. what happens outside of research settings when humans charge more-than-human animals with developing “bad habits”? for bears, rooting around in trash cans is a classic “bad habit”, frequently portrayed as addictive. for elephants, pulverizing months of human labour invested in carefully tended crops might guarantee a meal, but for farmers, it often counts as a “habit” that is is ruinous. for snakes, it might be the “bad habit” of returning again and again to the crawlspace under a house, long after wearing out an already ambivalent human welcome. these are animal equivalents of the pictures of slovenly glue-sniffing “juvenile delinquents”, displayed on schoolroom charts of bad habits from the 1950s and 1960s, that admonished human children to “straighten up”.30 human animals with a bit of spare change can take workshops on how to “creatively engage” with habits they hope to modify, but what are their nonhuman relatives to do? in wildlife management settings, a verdict of “habituation” to humans may come with a death sentence, or at the very least, 27 candea, “habituating meerkats.” 28 alcayna-stevens, “habituating field scientists.” 29 bastian, “encountering leatherbacks,” 30. 30 for a more contemporary example, tendered in earnest, see cherry hill’s “bad habits in horses” chart, which foregrounds many scenarios in which horses prove less than cooperative when working with humans, including “barn sour,” “can’t catch,” “halter pulling,” and “striking — taking a swipe at a person with a front leg”. 58 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) transportation and exile. “habituated” nonhuman animals are the ones who have become too comfortable with human company, or to flip the terms, too close for human comfort. rather than owning up to the latter — the part that human comfort, safety, and judgment play in this state of affairs — “habituation” arrives to place the onus on the condemned animal. the following example, taken from a blog post about coyotes that frequent human neighbourhoods, is fairly typical: “depending on a coyote’s level of habituation, it’s potentially reversible with hazing. however, a specific coyote preying on livestock or demonstrating habituation beyond the point of reversal could justify lethal removal.”31 this blog’s author is reasonably sympathetic to the coyotes, in the course of making the point that killing coyotes can have the paradoxical effect of increasing their population. yet someone who sees “lethal removal” as the only answer to coyotes in a human neighbourhood could and generally would use “habituation” in the same way, as though the term were a neutral descriptor of the animal’s behaviour. to be clear, by taking a more critical look at the usage of “habit” and its incorporation into related terms such as “habitat”, “cohabitation”, and “habituation”, i am not arguing that twenty-first-century animals of different sorts lack habits. clearly, they, we, do not. for most humans, that point can be driven home by asking them to eliminate filler words such as “uh” and “erm” from their speech, or by trying to live without their phones for a day. nor am i attempting to adjudicate the question of whether “targeted lethal removal” is an ethical way to treat animals, or whether it helps or hinders subsequent multispecies conflicts. if anything, the particular “habits of mind” and narrative conventions employed by human animals when they evaluate the merits of conservation proposals require further scrutiny. in feral, a book that looks at rewilding proposals through a bit of a rose-tinted lens, environmentalist george monbiot tells the tale of a landowner who, after months of listening to biologists explain the details of a beaver reintroduction experiment in britain, objected to beavers coming into his river and eating up his fish, still having failed to 31 scrofano, “killing coyotes.” weston, the habit in cohabitation | 59 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) realize that beaver diets are herbivorous.32 a local reporter who turned up to watch one of the beaver releases did not do much better: “is this where they’re releasing the badgers?” “they’re not badgers, they’re…” “bloody hell, look at the size of that otter!”33 “habits of mind” seems as fair a way as any to characterize the socially configured sticking points that contribute to these sorts of comical yet highly consequential misperceptions. at the same time, however, there are ways in which the discourse of habit that insinuates itself into discussions of multispecies cohabitation can get in the way of multispecies endeavours. even, and perhaps especially, for humans who work diligently to educate themselves about socalled animal habits in a well-intentioned move to come up with creative ways to live beside or amongst them, as i did on my alaska sojourn. this confusion is down to what the discourse of habit backgrounds and conceals by distilling repetitive actions into attributes, allying itself with the colonial stance of encounter, and most significantly, confining nonhuman animals in a timeless present by eviscerating them of their histories. europe and the animals without history the critical stance towards the discourse of habit developed here harks back to a moment in the 1980s, when the anthropologists eric wolf and johannes fabian staged influential critiques of the way that the routinized incorporation of certain modes of temporal description into ethnography had allowed anthropologists to keep the people they studied at a safe distance. safe, as in no threat to the power relations that accorded the ethnographer a position of privilege; no threat to racialized assumptions about “western” superiority haunting the text, and little threat to the ways in which imperialism continued to shape an emerging postcolonial order. in time and the other: how anthropology makes its object, fabian discussed epistemological practices and literary devices that insistently 32 monbiot, feral, 79. 33 mobiot, 81. 60 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) relegated subject-objects of anthropological study to an allochronic time grounded in a denial of coevalness with the researchers dedicated to producing knowledge about them.34 allochronic time did more than other: it primitivized the other by allowing researchers to occupy a today already edging over into tomorrow, while relegating the people they studied to representatives of the past. what perpetuated all of this in an avowedly postcolonial era? one key culprit was the quotidian deployment of the present tense in ethnographic accounts. readers of anthropological monographs had become inured to sweeping statements, unmoored from any historical provenance, about how the so-and-so’s wear x, do x, eat x, whereas the such-and-suches are accustomed to y. there were certainly allusions to change in these monographs, particularly when the topic was urbanization, but change tended to ally itself more with a sense of contingency in a comparative now-and-then framework (“continuity and change”) than with any sort of historical periodization. at the time fabian published his critique, many anthropologists did not seem to perceive a contradiction in couching analyses of admittedly changing field sites in the present tense. and what were their analyses filled with? processes, practices, kinship systems, rituals, and the like, with the occasional old-school reference to customs, all of it cycling around and around again to produce implicitly primitivized descriptions. in europe and the people without history, published just a year before fabian’s time and the other, eric wolf had taken aim at anthropology’s penchant for conceiving societies holistically for the purposes of exploring their differences, as though they were isolated from one another, rather than grasping the ways in which even the most remote (remote from whom?) societies had been interconnected with others over the course of millennia.35 to grasp these interconnections, the fuzzy concept of “change” would not be enough. “change” could be, and had been, applied ethnographically to shore up the primitivism of the ethnographic present. by assigning change 34 fabian, time and the other. 35 wolf, europe and the people. weston, the habit in cohabitation | 61 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) to european modernity, many writers had implied that nothing much had changed in so-called “simpler” societies until europeans stumbled across them. wolf argued not for “continuity and change”, but for history, and for understanding the importance of the imperial ventures that had so profoundly shaped the “now” of ethnographic observation. unless all humans (not just the descendants of europeans) could be understood as having history, there would be no remedy for the denial of coevalness that fabian identified as a consequence of a long line of (mostly white) anthropologists who had persistently othered certain humans by trying to make them do the forced labour of representing a timeless “primitive” past. even back then, decades before our current more-than-human multispecies conversations, animals were in the picture. do i need to reiterate that these were not breathing, scuttling, diving, ambling, nesting, slithering animals, but rather members of the animalia charismatica club whose spectral presence infused conversations about “human dignity” and “full humanity” in the shadow of nineteenth-century social evolutionism and its academic attendant, scientific racism? it is this still-pervasive legacy of racism, garbed in the deadly trappings of civilization, that makes it so tricky to suggest that nonhuman animals, too, have a claim on social scientific abstractions such as culture and, as i am arguing, history. laura ogden makes precisely this point about white supremacy’s nefarious manipulations of animality when she puts together a case for the value of thinking about the travels and geographic redistribution of animals as diasporic.36 this kind of move entails traversing the very line between humans and animals that many people of colour have fought hard to reinscribe by taking a stand on their humanity and calling out the racism in imagery that would depict them as animals with a nonhuman aspect. they understand in their bones that to do otherwise in societies that accord animals only the barest life when unindentured to human management may shore up the forces already at work that treat people of colour as though 36 ogden, “the beaver diaspora”. 62 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) their lives were of no consequence.37 in creative dialogue with this body of work is joshua bennett’s moving analysis of the identificatory embrace of certain animals as kin and twinned captives in african american literatures of resistance.38 to chip away at human exceptionalism in a white supremacist context like this is necessarily politically complicated, and an important point to keep in mind as the argument develops. the evolution of animals might seem incompatible with the ethnographic present because evolution unfurls in geologic time, yet a mythic era of pre-human animality often anchors the epochs of evolution’s narration. both the progressive upward mobility stories of social evolutionism and the environmentally conditioned development narratives of natural selection feature animals living in knee-jerk responsiveness to their surroundings before a lucky few stepped out into human exceptionalism. this mythic time spools out into an ethnographic present that has given ample play to ahistorical concepts such as instinct and habit. nonhuman animals might fashion a tool or two, if they are crows or chimpanzees, and engage in other inventive or deliberative activities once thought to be human-specific. but as quickly as the latest scientific study documents a cockatoo “spontaneously” straightening a wire to fish for food, these observations are taken out of time to produce revisionary discourses about behaviour and habits, or equally static qualities such as “animal intelligence”. judging by most accounts, the lives of the animals “left behind”, the ones who took a detour onto other branches in a forest of evolutionary trees, the ones who never became humans, lack history. starfish and coyotes, tigers and bears, are regularly inserted into ecological histories as characters representative of a specific species who fill ecological niches and so on, but the activities and predilections of specific living nonhuman animals are rarely narrated historically. what might this attachment to thick descriptions of animals without history be missing? 37 gilmore, golden gulag; jackson, “animal”; garcia, “sensing incarceration”. on the pervasiveness of human attempts to manage nominally wild animals, see tønnessen, “is a wolf wild”. 38 bennett, being property once myself. weston, the habit in cohabitation | 63 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) springing the trap of the ethnographic present; or, how to meet a tiger on the path surprising only to those still implicitly committed to the project of primitivizing others, the humans who live in and around land designated as tiger reserves in india are not suspended in some eternal ethnographic present. nor are the tigers themselves, when there are any to be found in these set-aside areas. if humans were captives of an unchanging present, indigenous groups and pastoralists would not have been displaced to create these reserves, nor would they have had to contest the tenets of fortress ecology for a right to remain on ancestral land in close proximity to what has only relatively recently become a protected species. if tigers were whiling away their days in some unchanging never-never land in which their lives could be adequately described in terms of habits and behaviours, there would be a lot more of them around. this may sound obvious, but the ramifications of viewing these behaviours, habits, and habituations in a more historical light are considerable, for the tigers and humans involved, of course, but also for their efforts to reach some sort of understanding. in my book animate planet: making visceral sense of living in a hightech ecologically damaged world, i recounted environmental historian paul greenough’s description of how gujars who lived and worked in and around what became the sariska tiger reserve in rajasthan, india, approached a tiger when they happened to come across one on the path. they have devised a protocol — an etiquette, if you will — for how to meet and greet a tiger, complete with specific vocalizations, that has proved remarkably successful in terms of minimizing human casualties. paul greenough calls this “interspecies accommodation,” no projection into the imputed mind or gaze of another creature necessary to carry it off.39 39 weston, animate planet, 30–31. there were, and are, other communities living in the area as well. in addition to gujars (65%), members of the focus groups assembled for greenough’s study included “meenas (31%), banjara, rajputs, brahmins, snake charmers (self-identified), bhalaai, raiger, and maali farmers”. see doubleday, “human–tiger (re)negotiations”, 156. 64 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) unlike the pedagogical advice about bears i received in alaska, this elaborate protocol was not framed as a set of self-defence instructions, but rather as a tiger-specific variation on the respectful greeting a member of this community might offer upon meeting another human animal. theirs was a sort of knowledge production — honed over decades, perhaps even centuries — that scientific studies and government surveys seldom reconnoitred.40 it was also a far cry from european legacy conceptions of tigers and lions, including john locke’s description of them as “wild savage beasts with whom men can have no society nor security”.41 if the goal of this protocol was “interspecies accommodation”, as opposed to the dreaded “habituation”, it had seemed to work. but would it always work? could a protocol like this be picked up, taken out of its sociohistorical context, and used to mediate tiger-human relations elsewhere? or even in the same spot, somewhere farther down the path in terms of chronological time? if limited human knowledge about tiger habits and behaviour was the main issue, then surely tiger-human relations could be improved by drawing on the sort of closely observed local knowledges that had produced such guidelines. one might expect the repertoires developed by local communities at sariska to be transferable, at least to some degree. to my knowledge, no one has tried such an experiment, but a more recent study at the sariska reserve seems to suggest that such protocols might not be easily transferable. at least, not without accounting for animals with history. many things have impacted more-thanhuman relations in and around the sariska reserve since greenough recorded his observations. back in the 1980s, mining for limestone and other minerals introduced new sounds, new chemicals, and a labour force recruited from far afield into the reserve. court orders in the 1990s directed hundreds of these mining operations to close, 40 this is, of course, not the only location or modality in which the production of interspecies practical knowledge goes on. semaq beri foragers, to take but one other instance, developed a sophisticated vocabulary for odours as they followed paths through forests on the malay peninsula, attending to the scent of tiger urine and learning to recognize the smell of pregnant animals in order to avoid hunting them. see bower, “foragers show off” and majid and kruspe, “hunter-gatherer olfaction”. 41 locke, two treatises of government, 126. weston, the habit in cohabitation | 65 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) but the ban on mines inside the protected area proved difficult to enforce.42 the ability of the reserve’s land base to continue to support tigers had come into question on many occasions, particularly given the lack of corridors to allow “its” tigers egress should resources within the reserve turn out to be inadequate to sustain them.43 scandals ensued, as tiger reserve managers around the country were accused of cooperating with poachers, puffing up tiger tallies, and planting fake pugmarks to try to hang on to their jobs.44 people began to wonder if there were any tigers left at sariska at all. in “human–tiger (re)negotiations: a case study from sariska tiger reserve, india,” kalli doubleday examines the responses of local people to the reintroduction of tigers to the sariska reserve after the government confirmed the absence of tigers within its boundaries in 2005. it might be easy to conclude, as the government’s status of tigers in india 2018 report does, that such reintroduction programs have been an unmitigated success, given that tiger counts inside the reserve and across the country have ticked up from that low point.45 doubleday, however, paints a more complex picture by taking into account how members of local human communities perceived the reintroduced tigers and what the implications might be for understanding “the human dimensions of rewilding”.46 this research calls the very concept of reintroduction into question, in the sense that locals insisted they had been newly introduced (not reintroduced) to a very different set of “familiar yet foreign” animals who had no historical relationship to them or to the reserve. many of the people doubleday interviewed called the new tigers “vagabonds”, using emotionally laden terms such as awaara. human wanderers and vagabonds have long occupied a prominent place in popular culture in india. to take but two examples: the lyrics of 42 jacob and jain, “despite ban, mines thrive.” 43 such informed doubt persists. see, for instance, the comments by ghazala shahabuddin of the centre for ecology, development, and research in dehradun in ghai, “sariska’s tiger reserve”. 44 awasti, “pug marks hide”; mathur, crooked cats. 45 jhala, qureshi, and nayak, status of tigers. 46 doubleday, “human–tiger (re)negotiations”, 148. see also mathur, crooked cats. 66 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) indian rapper badshah’s recent single awaara glorify basti youth who roam the galis (narrow lanes) of delhi, for whom “har din hai celebration, na koyi destination” (“each day is a celebration without any destination”).47 awaara might just as well call to mind the eponymous 1951 film by raj kapoor, a classic “hindi social” that focused on the oppressive conditions that led its main character into a life of crime. the film’s hit song, awaara hoon (“i’m a vagabond”), urged a sympathy for the wanderer that few of the people interviewed by doubleday were prepared to extend to the “new” tigers. “[losing the old tigers] was painful. they were like family members and they had separated areas, and they use[d] to stay in their fixed areas,” one participant in the study explained. “but not these new tigers, they can go anywhere.”48 villagers who had felt safe around the old tigers described becoming quite fearful of the newly introduced ones, who showed up unexpectedly in the midst of villages and seemed to have no understanding of how to live in this place. there had once been reliable passageways through the landscape where the old tigers did not trouble humans, villagers said, even when met on the path, whereas the new tigers, with their vagabond ways, did not know how to conduct themselves and could pose a threat anywhere. in hindi cinema, not to mention awaara-themed rap songs, it is not just the body that wanders: the heart (dil), too, can turn vagrant. doubleday makes excellent use of work in animal geography to underscore the importance of ties to place in negotiations between humans and tigers at sariska. the study also suggests there was something more temporal at play.49 villagers were quick to situate the newer “vagabond” tigers within a comparative framework that repeatedly juxtaposed the less well-regarded qualities and behav47 badshah, “awaara (feat. reet talwar)”, 2020; see https://www.lyricstranslation.in/2020/11/ awaara-lyrics-english-translation.html, accessed 9 july, 2022. 48 doubleday, “human–tiger (re)negotiations”, 161. 49 this is not to say that animal geography has uniformly focused on space and place to the exclusion of temporality. some researchers have, for instance, drawn on topology to apply the concept of spacetime compression to observed interactions. however, by and large, this area of research has not attended closely to history as a temporal mode that bears on narrative constructions of animal behaviour, interaction, and placemaking. https://www.lyricstranslation.in/2020/11/awaara-lyrics-english-translation.html https://www.lyricstranslation.in/2020/11/awaara-lyrics-english-translation.html weston, the habit in cohabitation | 67 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) iours of the “vagabonds” with those of “the olden tigers of sariska”.50 one compared the new tigers to the jersey cows introduced by the british: “foreign” animals that could not compare to desi (native, “of the country/land”) cows. many portrayed the old tigers as respectful and cultivated, more refined, like a daughter who has had an education, and emphasized that the old tigers had maintained spiritual connections to the land and local temples that the new tigers lacked. the old tigers understood that they were supposed to give way if they met humans on the path in order to let them pass. the newer tigers stood their ground and could be confrontational. in sum, doubleday concludes, “the people of sariska perceive the new and old tigers as distinct nations with differing histories, contradictory intentions, and divergent spatial-understandings [sic].”51 much of the sariska story is site-specific, but it does gesture toward a larger lesson about meeting up with nonhuman animals in an increasingly dislocated world. namely, that the ability to arrive at some sort of multispecies accommodation may well depend upon a better understanding of the multiple paths that lead parties to a crossroads in all their “habitual” and “behavioural” finery, paths that trail behind them distinctive histories. for humans whose families had sourced livelihoods at sariska for generations, that history included their own displacement from the site in the 1970s to make way for the creation of a tiger reserve out of the wildlife park established in 1955. shifting human residents out of the reserve created different sorts of human traffic through the park as villagers entered and exited on a daily basis to collect fodder and to milk livestock that grazed within the boundaries. for tigers transported to sariska as part of the reintroduction program, that history was a bit harder to trace and remained opaque to the villagers, although, significantly, the villagers recognized that history was there. it included whatever shifting conditions had shaped the tigers’ lives before translocation, while they were coming of age at ranthambore national park, where a “tiger special tour” still topped the list of “ranthambore best sellers.”52 50 doubleday, “human–tiger (re)negotiations,” 157. 51 doubleday, 158–59. 52 see the ranthambore national park website: https://www.ranthamborenationalpark.com https://www.ranthamborenationalpark.com/how-to-reach.html 68 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) through the minefield of social science concepts, with elephants the sariska reserve in india is far from the only place where researchers have found themselves reaching for concepts that will allow them to go beyond overgeneralized notions of species change as they attempt to grasp the nuances of how animals (both human and nonhuman) are responding to conservation efforts and loss of “habitat”. in an important contribution to this line of inquiry, “animals with rich histories: the case of the lions of gir forest, gujarat, india”, mahesh rangarajan contends that gir lions possess not only memory, but memory of memories, and that taking their capacity for memory into account is crucial for understanding the potential for humans and large carnivores to negotiate shared space, as increasingly it seems they must. rangarajan makes a case, on which i have built, that nonhuman animals like these lions are “products of history”; no more and no less so than their human counterparts.53 although the lions of gir might not have shared the kind of historical consciousness that allows humans to reimagine the past “in multiple, contested ways to debate how the present came to be”, their capacity to remember and to learn meant that their experiences over time left impressions which they could access in a meaningful way, and which in turn influenced their actions.54 mark elbroch makes a similar point about instances of animal reciprocity which depend on memory, as when cougars have shared their kills in anticipation of a future return of the gift.55 in the current era of multispecies ethnography, many observations about animal capacities have unsettled the human/nonhuman animal binary along the lines rangarajan suggests. there are antecedents for multispecies ethnography that stretch back to the nineteenth century, such as lewis henry morgan’s the american beaver and his works, based on research undertaken at the suggestion of some of morgan’s anishinaabek (ojibwe) acquaintances. this 1868 53 rangarajan, “animals with rich histories”, 109. 54 rangarajan, 125. 55 elbroch, cougar conundrum. weston, the habit in cohabitation | 69 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) monograph included thick descriptions of the goings-on at a beaver lodge that morgan observed from the bank, as well as a chapter titled “animal psychology” in which morgan stages an impassioned argument for the existence of animal memory. gillian feeley-harnik’s revisionist reading of morgan’s piece as a proto-ethnography offers an early example of troubling the human/nonhuman animal divide by displacing ethnography from its then-accustomed sphere and applying the concept to animals other than humans.56 laura ogden’s more recent thought experiment makes a similar move by applying the concept of diaspora — another historically inflected category previously reserved for humans — to beavers as a way of calling attention to the oppressive power relations involved in scattering their populations.57 yet this way of historicizing the experiences, capacities, and movements of nonhuman animals remains uncommon. the special issue of history and theory in which rangarajan published his “animals with rich histories” essay solicited its articles in response to the question: “does history need animals?” as humanity’s footprint continues to expand and discussions about cohabitation gain urgency, it may be time to turn that question on its head by asking, “do animals need history?” in response to that query, i want to take the argument about animals with history in a slightly different direction here, in order to consider what attunement to historical factors has to offer by way of supplementing other social science concepts that are commonly enlisted to account for the more social and idiosyncratic sides of animal behaviour, including personality, intergenerational training, culture, and adaptation. unlike history, these have increasingly become go-to concepts when trying to explain what heretofore might simply have been recorded as a change. consider the implications of applying these disparate social science categories to some rather straightforward observations about the actions of elephants (elephants lately) that have generally struck humans 56 feeley-harnik, “lewis henry morgan.” 57 ogden, “the beaver diaspora.” 70 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) as remarkable. documented incidents have depicted members of an older generation of elephants showing the next generation how to surmount human-installed barriers such as walls, how to lift electrified wires with their tusks, and even how to traverse minefields safely.58 any, or all, of the social science categories just mentioned could be applied to these elephant observations by way of illustration or explanation. until an observation is replicated, the action may be described as a quirk or a talent of a particular animal and thus put down to character or personality. “personality” has the advantage of getting away from overgeneralized attributions that treat behaviours as characteristic of members of an entire species, but when linked to discourses of “habituation” and to behaviours that humans find inconvenient or threatening, “personality” can also get a particular animal killed.59 alternatively, the safe passage of mother and baby elephant through a minefield might be heralded as an outcome of teaching or training, which would be couched as socialization in a more human register. the concept of socialization features a transmission model for knowledge in which one generation passes knowledge on to the next. those who favour a more situated understanding of knowledge production might quibble, arguing that knowledge cannot always be so neatly packaged into bits for onward transmission.60 yet socialization does underscore the relevance of memory and intergenerational communication for interpretations of animal behaviour. then there’s culture, an anthropological workhorse of a concept whose intimate entanglement with racialization and nationalism has inspired round after round of critique.61 a “they too have culture” 58 marshall, “elephants ‘learn’”; rangarajan, “a giant in peril”. 59 see mathur’s crooked cats, which follows the fate of tigers and leopards assigned to the “man-eating” or “crooked cat” category for reasons variously ascribed to their idiosyncratic character, bad treatment at the hands of humans, etc. 60 maan barua, for example, implicitly argues for the situatedness of knowledge production among animals by contending that political ecology needs to credit the degree to which materials — in this case, landmines, in his case, alcohol — mediate relations between humans and elephants. see barua, “volatile ecologies”. 61 bauman and briggs, voices of modernity; king, gods of the upper air; wagner, the invention of culture; williams jr., rethinking race. weston, the habit in cohabitation | 71 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) approach to animal sociality provides some long-overdue recognition for collectively developed aspects of what nonhuman animals do, as well as what they refrain from doing. but “culture” adopts no particular temporal stance toward the doing of it. one culturalized account might be written in the timeless ethnographic present (“sea otters use rocks as tools!”). another equally culturalized account might approach culture as something shaped over time (archaeological techniques “could tell us more about how long [otters] have been using tools”).62 in either case, “culture”, like “personality” and “socialization”, is no substitute for history. likewise for “adaptation”, which is often forward-looking in its focus on what an animal might be adapting to, and which need not attend very closely to whatever has gone before. all of which brings the discussion back to history, and whatever value history may have for elucidating the things that happen when a more-than-human assortment of animals meets. what is history, after all? in his novel, the ministry for the future, kim stanley robinson supplies a lyrical definition, offered from history’s point of view: everyone talking together makes something that seems like me but is not me. everyone doing things in the world makes me […]. i am the tide running under the world that no one sees or feels. i happen in the present but am told only in the future, and then they think they speak of the past, but really they are always speaking about the present. i do not exist and yet i am everything.63 the historical absence in animal studies that i have flagged in this essay does not involve the reconstruction of past animal lives or a search for traces of their “now-absent presence” of the sort already perceptively undertaken by historians such as etienne benson, erica fudge, and harriet ritvo.64 my concern is to open a space for inquiries that recognize the impact of historical events and historical 62 combs, “sea otters”. 63 robinson, ministry for the future, 386. 64 benson, “animal writes”; fudge, quick cattle and brutal reasoning; ritvo, noble cows and the animal estate. 72 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) conditions on living animals, a longue durée that exceeds the biographical lifespans of both those animals and the “writing animals” (a.k.a. humans) who reside amongst them.65 to do that, it is not enough to stipulate that history matters. one must attend to the limitations of the temporal registers produced by filtering animals through a discourse of habit, cohabitation, and habituation, which tacitly reinscribes living animals within an ethnographic present. history in this sense is a shorthand for whatever lands a raccoon in a situation that elicits behaviours never before seen by humans. history is a shorthand for the circumstances that propel human and nonhuman animals into collaboration or conflict, circumstances that may or may not permit them to pursue parallel lives. history is shorthand for the building of the wall, the mining of the field, the opening that materializes in the shape of a culvert, the laying of the railway tracks, and the arrival of the road. history makes it possible to connect the dispossession and relocation of the villagers at sariska with the dispossession and relocation of the “new” tigers by viewing both within the same frame. history offers less characterological ways to narrate movement and transience so that the next time someone argues that “responsible coyote management […] includes differentiating between a transient or a resident”,66 the fixity of such categories begins to dissolve. history is the famine or the war that drives elephants across a border, the meandering line of trampled fields, and the reconfigured “habits” of starving animals. history is the care and feeding of elephants for deployment on the battlefield, their pivotal role in state formation on the indian subcontinent, and their subsequent marginalization as technologies of warfare, long before they ever saw the inside of an elephant sanctuary.67 history shadows the coyote with a vagrant heart as he wends his way into the city where the climate change conference is meeting. 65 for further reflections on writing about animals as a writing animal, see benson, “animal writes”. 66 scrofano, “killing coyotes.” 67 trautmann, elephants and kings; see also rangarajan, “contrasting fates.” weston, the habit in cohabitation | 73 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) history is also replete with tales of the failure of human attempts to understand what it is like to be that coyote, not to mention, as moral philosopher thomas nagel once famously argued, what it is like to be a bat: it will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. in so far as i can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. but that is not the question. i want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. yet if i try to imagine this, i am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.68 fortunately, making worlds together as animals with diverse histories does not require the kind of human empathy that relies on such flights of fancy. indeed, it can be presumptuous, even dangerous, to put that sort of imagination to work.69 the very elusiveness that has helped some species persist in close proximity to humans has also allowed them to alternately signify excessive threat and virtual harmlessness to humans, neither in measures fully deserved.70 history is a way out of captivity within this particularly treacherous form of the ethnographic present, a refusal of an animal’s timeless induction into the animalia charismatica club. animals that are human become conversant with other animals based on what vinciane despret has called “partial affinities.”71 those affinities, while limited, can be powerful. they can shake you. listen to eastern shoshone anthropologist ren freeman, reflecting on the through-line of dominance and control that links the idea of 68 nagel, “what is it like to be a bat?,” 439. 69 but see also, notwithstanding these caveats, rane willerslev on the importance of such acts of embodied imagination to yukaghir hunters in siberia, who viewed them as integral to the success of the hunt. 70 gilman, “chasing ghosts”, 31. 71 despret, “responding bodies”. 74 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) wildlife management to earlier histories of dispossession: “‘what has happened to them’ — wild horses — ‘has happened to us’”.72 the recursiveness of habit offers little to help make sense of the insidious effects of this colonizing stance in negotiations over shared space. humans do not need to be able to find a way into the memories or the received wisdom acquired by tigers and bears, beavers and bats, in order to hold open a place for the existence of their backstories, to narrate the actions of animals as drawing on something other than an endless now, to consider how those histories might be bound up with the paths that humans trail behind them, and to adjust our co-worlding strategies accordingly. acknowledgements many thanks to the organizers of the 2021 “meeting grounds: mutual ethics and action in animal studies, ecocriticism, and posthumanism” virtual symposium at loyola university and the sensational ecologies summer programme at the university of sussex for invitations to deliver online keynotes that inspired this essay. thanks, too, to mahesh rangarajan for his insights, to which this essay owes so much, and to jonathan favini for bringing laura ogden’s work to my attention. two anonymous peer reviewers offered sharp-eyed suggestions that vastly improved the essay, although i of course remain responsible for its remaining flaws. geeta patel has been an inspiration throughout: everything i write is that much stronger due to her inquisitive, critical, steadying influence. i am also extremely grateful to the british academy for the award that serendipitously supported this research while archives were closed during lockdown and to the university of edinburgh for hosting me on that award. 72 lezak, “all my relations”, 31. weston, the habit in cohabitation | 75 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) works cited alcayna-stevens, lys. “habituating field scientists.” social studies of science 46, no. 6 (2016): 833–853. https://doi. org/10.1177/0306312716669251. alcayna-stevens, lys. “inalienable worlds: inter-species relations, perspectives, and ‘doublethink’ in a catalonian chimpanzee sanctuary.” the cambridge journal of anthropology 30, no. 2 (2012): 82–100. https://doi. org/10.3167/ca.2012.300206. awasti, kirtiman. “pug marks hide the truth.” down to earth. 15 march 2008. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/ forests/pug-marks-hide-the-truth-4296. barua, maan. “volatile ecologies: towards a material politics of human–animal relations.” environment and planning a: economy and space 46, no. 6 (2014): 1462–1478. https://doi.org/10.1068/a46138. bastian, michelle. “encountering leatherbacks in multispecies knots of time.” in extinction studies: stories of time, death, and generations, edited by deborah bird rose, thom van dooren, and matthew chrulew, 149-186. new york: columbia university press, 2017. bauman, richard and charles l. briggs. voices of modernity: language ideologies and the politics of inequality. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2003. bennett, joshua. being property once myself: blackness and the end of man. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2020. benson, etienne. “animal writes: historiography, disciplinarity, and the animal trace.” in making animal meaning, edited by linda kalof and georgina m. montgomery, 3–16. east lansing: michigan state university press, 2011. bower, bruce. “foragers show off superior smell skills.” science news (feb. 17, 2018): 10. candea, matei. “habituating meerkats and redescribing animal behaviour science.” theory, culture & society 30, nos. 7–8 (2013): 105–128. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276413501204. carlisle, clare. on habit. london: routledge, 2014. combs, sydney. “sea otters use tools, too. now scientists look at their ‘archaeology.’” national geographic march 29, 2019. https://www. nationalgeographic.com/animals/ article/sea-otters-archaeology-tooluse-california, accessed july 9, 2022. despret, vinciane. “responding bodies and partial affinities in human–animal worlds.” theory, culture & society 30, nos. 7–8 (2013): 51–76. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276413496852. dodson, j. d. “the relation of strength of stimulus to rapidity of habit-formation in the kitten.” journal of animal behavior 5, no. 4 (1915): 330–336. https:// doi.org/10.1037/h0073415. doubleday, kalli f. “human–tiger (re) negotiations: a case study from sariska tiger reserve, india.” society and animals 26, no. 2 (2018): 148–170. https:// doi.org/10.1163/15685306-12341498. dunlap, knight. “the identity of instinct and habit.” journal of philosophy 19, no. 4 (1922): 85–94. https://doi. org/10.2307/2939673. elbroch, mark. the cougar conundrum: sharing the world with a successful predator. washington, dc: island, 2020. fabian, johannes. time and the other: how anthropology makes its object. new york: columbia university press, 1983. feeley-harnik, gillian. “the ethnography of creation: lewis henry morgan and the american beaver.” in relative values: reconfiguring kinship studies, edited by sarah franklin and susan mckinnon, 54–84. durham, nc: duke university press, 2001. feeley-harnik, gillian. “lewis henry morgan: american beavers and their works.” https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312716669251 https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312716669251 https://doi.org/10.3167/ca.2012.300206 https://doi.org/10.3167/ca.2012.300206 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/forests/pug-marks-hide-the-truth-4296 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/forests/pug-marks-hide-the-truth-4296 https://doi.org/10.1068/a46138 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413501204 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413501204 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/sea-otters-archaeology-tool-use-california https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/sea-otters-archaeology-tool-use-california https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/sea-otters-archaeology-tool-use-california https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/sea-otters-archaeology-tool-use-california https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413496852 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413496852 https://doi.org/10.1037/h0073415 https://doi.org/10.1037/h0073415 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-12341498 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-12341498 https://doi.org/10.2307/2939673 https://doi.org/10.2307/2939673 76 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) ethnos 86, no. 1 (2019): 21–43. https://doi. org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1619605. fudge, erica. quick cattle and dying wishes: people and their animals in early modern england. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 2018. fudge, erica. brutal reasoning: animals, rationality, and humanity in early modern england. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 2019. garcia, macario. “sensing incarceration: mobility, animacy, becoming human.” ph.d. dissertation, anthropology, university of virginia, 2019. ghai, rajat. “sariska’s tiger reserve status needs reconsideration.” down to earth. last updated 20 feb. 2019. https://www. downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlifebiodiversity/-sariska-s-tiger-reservestatus-needs-reconsideration--63303. gilman, sarah. “chasing ghosts: the human relationship with cougars has more to do with story than science.” high country news 52, no. 3 (march 2020): 30–33. gilmore, ruthie wilson. golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing california. berkeley: university of california press, 2007. greenough, paul r. “bio-ironies of the fractured forest: india’s tiger reserves” in in search of the rainforest, ed. candace slater, 167–203. durham, nc: duke university press, 2003. grindley, g. c. “the formation of a simple habit in guinea-pigs.” british journal of psychology 23, no. 2 (1932): 127–147. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1932. tb00655.x. haraway, donna j. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham, nc: duke university press, 2016. hanson, katherine t. and erin p. riley. “beyond neutrality: the human primate interface during the habituation process.” international journal of primatology 39, no. 5 (2018): 852–877. https://doi. org/10.1007/s10764-017-0009-3. hatfield, samantha chisholm, elizabeth marino, kyle powys white, kathie d. dello, and philip w. mote. “indian time: time, seasonality, and culture in traditional ecological knowledge of climate change.” ecological processes 7, no. 25 (2018): 1–11. https://doi. org/10.1186/s13717-018-0136-6. hernández tienda, clara, et al. “the habituation process in two groups of wild moor macaques (macaca maura).” international journal of primatology 43, (2022): 291–316. https://doi.org/10.1007/ s10764-021-00275-7. hill, cherry. “bad habits in horses.” horsekeeping llc. last updated 2006. https://www.horsekeeping.com/horse_ behavior/bad_habits_chart.htm. jackson, zakiyyah iman. “animal: new directions in the theorization of race and posthumanism.” feminist studies 39, no. 3 (2013): 669–685. https://doi. org/10.1353/fem.2013.0024. jacob, nitya and rimjhim jain. “despite ban, mines thrive in sariska reserve.” down to earth. 15 may 1993. https:// www.downtoearth.org.in/coverage/ despite-ban-mines-thrive-in-sariskareserve-30946. jhala, y. v., q. qureshi, and a. k. nayak, eds. status of tigers, co-predators and prey in india 2018. summary report, tr no./2019/05. new delhi: national tiger conservation authority, government of india; dehradun: wildlife institute of india, 2019. king, charles. gods of the upper air: how a circle of renegade anthropologists reinvented race, sex, and gender in the twentieth century. new york: doubleday, 2019. kirksey, eben. “chemosociality in multispecies worlds: endangered frogs and toxic possibilities in sydney.” environmental humanities 12, no. 1 (2020): 23–50. https://doi.org/10.1215/220119198142198. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1619605 https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2019.1619605 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-biodiversity/-sariska-s-tiger-reserve-status-needs-reconsideration--63303 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-biodiversity/-sariska-s-tiger-reserve-status-needs-reconsideration--63303 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-biodiversity/-sariska-s-tiger-reserve-status-needs-reconsideration--63303 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/news/wildlife-biodiversity/-sariska-s-tiger-reserve-status-needs-reconsideration--63303 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1932.tb00655.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8295.1932.tb00655.x https://doi.org/10.1007/s10764-017-0009-3 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10764-017-0009-3 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13717-018-0136-6 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13717-018-0136-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10764-021-00275-7 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10764-021-00275-7 https://www.horsekeeping.com/horse_behavior/bad_habits_chart.htm https://www.horsekeeping.com/horse_behavior/bad_habits_chart.htm https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2013.0024 https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2013.0024 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/coverage/despite-ban-mines-thrive-in-sariska-reserve-30946 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/coverage/despite-ban-mines-thrive-in-sariska-reserve-30946 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/coverage/despite-ban-mines-thrive-in-sariska-reserve-30946 https://www.downtoearth.org.in/coverage/despite-ban-mines-thrive-in-sariska-reserve-30946 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-8142198 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-8142198 weston, the habit in cohabitation | 77 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) kirksey, eben. emergent ecologies. durham, nc: duke university press, 2015. lezak, stephen. “all my relations: buffalo, wild horses, and the politics of belonging on the wind river reservation.” high country news 53, no. 12 (2021): 22–31. https://www.hcn.org/ issues/53.12/indigenous-affairs-wildlifewild-horses-buffalo-and-the-politicsof-belonging. locke, john. two treatises of government. edited by thomas i. cook. new york: hafner press, 1947. lorimer, jamie, timothy hodgetts, and maan barua. “animals’ atmospheres.” progress in human geography 43, no. 1 (2017): 26–45. https://doi. org/10.1177/0309132517731254. majid, asifa and nicole kruspe. “huntergatherer olfaction is special.” current biology 28, (2018): 409–413. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.12.014. marshall, leon. “elephants ‘learn’ to avoid land mines in war-torn angola.” national geographic online. published 16 july 2007. https:// elephantswithoutborders.org/ downloadspapers/elephantslearn.pdf. mathur, nayanika. crooked cats: beastly encounters in the anthropocene. chicago: university of chicago press, 2021. maupin, oakland. “habit formation in animals.” psychological bulletin 18, no. 11 (1921): 573–620. https://doi. org/10.1037/h0075710. messeri, lisa. placing outer space: an earthly ethnography of other worlds. durham, nc: duke university press, 2016. monbiot, george. feral: rewilding the land, the sea, and human life. chicago: university of chicago press, 2014. morgan, lewis henry. the american beaver and his works. j.b. lippincott, 1868. münster, ursula, thom van dooren, sara asu schroer, and hugo reinert. “multispecies care in the sixth extinction.” theorizing the contemporary, fieldsights (january 26, 2021). https://culanth.org/fieldsights/ series/multispecies-care-in-the-sixthextinction. nagel, thomas. “what is it like to be a bat?” the philosophical review 83, no. 4 (1974): 435–450. https://doi. org/10.2307/2183914. north, steve, carol hall, amanda roshier, and clara mancini. “habit: horse automated behaviour identification tool: a position paper.” proceedings of the 2015 british hci conference, university of nottingham eprints (2015). https://doi.org/10.13140/ rg.2.1.3395.0881. ogden, laura a. “the beaver diaspora: a thought experiment.” environmental humanities 10, no. 1 (2018): 63–85. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-4385471. patel, geeta. risky bodies and technointimacy: reflections on sexuality, media, science, finance. seattle: university of washington press, 2016. petryna, adriana. “wildfires at the edges of science: horizoning work amid runaway change.” cultural anthropology 33, no. 4 (2018): 570–595. rangarajan, mahesh. “animals with rich histories: the case of the lions of gir forest, gujarat, india.” history and theory 52, no. 4 (2013): 109–127. https:// doi.org/10.1111/hith.10690. rangarajan, mahesh. “contrasting fates: india has kept its elephants but china has only a few.” the telegraph online. 14 dec. 2020. https://www. telegraphindia.com/opinion/india-haskept-its-elephants-but-china-has-onlya-few/cid/1800436. rangarajan, mahesh. “a giant in peril: elephant conservation in india.” the telegraph online. 14 june 2020. https:// www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/ elephant-death-in-wayanad-kerala-agiant-in-peril/cid/1780926. https://www.hcn.org/issues/53.12/indigenous-affairs-wildlife-wild-horses-buffalo-and-the-politics-of-belonging https://www.hcn.org/issues/53.12/indigenous-affairs-wildlife-wild-horses-buffalo-and-the-politics-of-belonging https://www.hcn.org/issues/53.12/indigenous-affairs-wildlife-wild-horses-buffalo-and-the-politics-of-belonging https://www.hcn.org/issues/53.12/indigenous-affairs-wildlife-wild-horses-buffalo-and-the-politics-of-belonging https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517731254 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517731254 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.12.014 https://elephantswithoutborders.org/downloadspapers/elephantslearn.pdf https://elephantswithoutborders.org/downloadspapers/elephantslearn.pdf https://elephantswithoutborders.org/downloadspapers/elephantslearn.pdf https://doi.org/10.1037/h0075710 https://doi.org/10.1037/h0075710 https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/multispecies-care-in-the-sixth-extinction https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/multispecies-care-in-the-sixth-extinction https://culanth.org/fieldsights/series/multispecies-care-in-the-sixth-extinction https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914 https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914 https://doi.org/10.13140/rg.2.1.3395.0881 https://doi.org/10.13140/rg.2.1.3395.0881 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-4385471 https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10690 https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10690 https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/india-has-kept-its-elephants-but-china-has-only-a-few/cid/1800436 https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/india-has-kept-its-elephants-but-china-has-only-a-few/cid/1800436 https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/india-has-kept-its-elephants-but-china-has-only-a-few/cid/1800436 https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/india-has-kept-its-elephants-but-china-has-only-a-few/cid/1800436 https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/elephant-death-in-wayanad-kerala-a-giant-in-peril/cid/1780926 https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/elephant-death-in-wayanad-kerala-a-giant-in-peril/cid/1780926 https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/elephant-death-in-wayanad-kerala-a-giant-in-peril/cid/1780926 https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/elephant-death-in-wayanad-kerala-a-giant-in-peril/cid/1780926 78 | weston, the habit in cohabitation humanimalia 13.1 (2022) reader, simon m. and kevin n. laland, eds. animal innovation. oxford: oxford university press, 2003. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate: the english and other creatures in victorian england. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1987. ritvo, harriet. noble cows and hybrid zebras: essays on animals and history. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2010. robinson, kim stanley. the ministry for the future. london: orbit, 2020. rose, deborah bird. wild dog dreaming: love and extinction. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2012. rose, deborah bird, thom van dooren, and matthew chrulew, eds. extinction studies: stories of time, death, and generations. new york: columbia university press, 2017. russell, e. s. form and function: a contribution to the history of animal morphology. london: john murray, 1916. scrofano, gina. “does killing coyotes increase their population?” straight twist. 24 feb. 2019. https://www. straighttwist.com/post/does-killingcoyotes-increase-their-population. thorndike, edward l. animal intelligence: experimental studies. new york: macmillan, 1911. tønnessen, morten. “is a wolf wild as long as it does not know that it is being thoroughly managed?” humanimalia 2, no. 1 (2010): 1–8. https://doi. org/10.52537/humanimalia.10090. trautmann, thomas. elephants and kings: an environmental history. new delhi: permanent black, 2015. tsing, anna lowenhaupt, jennifer deger, alder keleman saxena, and feifei zhou, eds. feral atlas: the more-than-human anthropocene. stanford, ca: stanford university press, 2021. tsing, anna lowenhaupt, heather anne swanson, elaine gan, and nils bubandt, eds. arts of living on a damaged planet: ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2017. van dooren, thom. a world in a shell: snail stories for a time of extinctions. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2022. wagner, roy. the invention of culture. chicago: university of chicago press, 2016. weston, kath. animate planet: making visceral sense of living in a high-tech ecologically damaged world. durham, nc: duke university press, 2017. weston, kath. “the ethnographer’s magic as sympathetic magic.” social anthropology / anthropologie sociale 26, no. 1 (2018): 15–29. https://doi. org/10.1111/1469-8676.12492. whyte, kyle powys. “our ancestors’ dystopia now: indigenous conservation and the anthropocene.” in the routledge companion to the environmental humanities, edited by ursula k. heise, jon christensen, and michelle niemann, 206–215. london: routledge, 2017. willerslev, rane. soul hunters: hunting, animism, and personhood among the siberian yukaghirs. berkeley: university of california press, 2007. williams, vernon j., jr. rethinking race: franz boas and his contemporaries. lexington: university press of kentucky, 1996. willow, anna. “conceiving kakipitatapitmok: the political landscape of anishinaabe anticlearcutting activism.” american anthropologist 113, no. 2 (2011): 262–276. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15481433.2011.01329.x. wolf, eric. europe and the people without history. berkeley: university of california press, 2010. zieger, susan. inventing the addict: drugs, race, and sexuality in nineteenth-century british and american literature. amherst: university of massachusetts press, 2008. https://www.straighttwist.com/post/does-killing-coyotes-increase-their-population https://www.straighttwist.com/post/does-killing-coyotes-increase-their-population https://www.straighttwist.com/post/does-killing-coyotes-increase-their-population https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10090 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10090 https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12492 https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-8676.12492 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01329.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2011.01329.x _hlk102467584 mccartney animal drag animal drag the critical and conscious performance of animality nicola mccartney central saint martin’s, university of the arts, london humanimalia 14.2 (spring 2024) abstract: this essay proposes animal drag as an activist performance in which a human critically and consciously performs animality to de-centre the human. dress and adornment are key to its dissidence. animal drag’s potential is demonstrated through an analysis of terry notary’s performance of a nonhuman primate within ruben östlund’s 2017 film the square. drawing on posthuman studies, scholarship on subordinated groups and from the field of animal studies, the reading of this performance shows how animal drag inherently queers humanist and essentialist notions of classification, particularly the human / animal divide. paying homage to drag, the essay demonstrates how the material and social semiotics of performance can render transparent the constructions of race, coloniality, ability, and gender, as much as species — in other words, “doing human”. through theories of dress and prosthesis, highlighting how techne facilitates in-between and “becoming” states, and affect theory, this article argues that humans and nonhumans might share vulnerabilities via animal drag. culture is understood through language and dress, which have been mobilised to construct otherness. as such, this essay posits that animal drag should take place within capitalist culture industries, as both weapons and targets, to undress powers present and performed. animal drag is offered as both practice and theory, content and form. keywords: animal drag; posthumanism; nonhuman; performance; drag; animality bio: nicola mccartney is a senior lecturer in cultural studies on the fashion and jewellery and textiles programmes at central saint martins, university of the arts, london. she also works across fine art and for external institutions, such as the national gallery. nicola has undertaken artistic residencies overseas and in the uk, including yinka shonibare’s studio. her monograph, death of the artist: art world dissidents and their alternative identities (2018) is published with i.b. tauris of bloomsbury. nicola has been a trustee of the association of art historians, and a getty scholar in los angeles. email: n.mccartney@csm.arts.ac.uk orcid: 0000-0003-4438-5689 copyright © 2024 nicola mccartney this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 259–287. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.12928 mailto:n.mccartney@csm.arts.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4438-5689 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.12928 mccartney , animal drag | 261 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) i have always been intrigued by nonhuman animal guises and they have long inspired my researching, inventing, and painting. for example, in my 2018 monograph death of the artist, i wrote about the use of gorilla masks by the artistic collective the guerrilla girls. while i now see such work as mistaken in its assertion that these feminist artists could avoid the trappings of traditional gender stereotypes by dressing as nonhuman animals, the work of undertaking such analysis made clear that nonhuman animals are neither vacuous nor neutral symbols or metaphors. indeed, while acknowledging how the gorilla masks served as tools for the group’s anonymous political activism, they also provoked serious questions around race. to perform as a nonhuman animal is, perhaps unsurprisingly for readers of the present journal, incredibly complex. it can often serve to perpetuate species stereotypes, whether by overlooking ethics of consumption and exploitation, or by being used for shallow, anthropomorphic allegories. many strands of scholarship and art advocating for social justice have taken up allied discourses of the nonhuman animal but there is a gap where these could come together through focussed discussions of adornment and performance. together, these are key interfaces for artists seeking to question animality, where cultural constructs can be critiqued through the material and social semiotics deployed. i call these acts and their analyses animal drag. some philosophers discussed in this essay have worked to destabilize arbitrary human / nonhuman animal divides, while other scholars have already analysed acts of what i perceive as animal drag. in 1994, for example, catriona sandilands’s poetic manifesto “lavender’s green?” referred to drag as a tool for queering environmentalism, “to suggest that ‘nature’ may be partially performative, and to challenge the boundaries between ‘truth’ and ‘artifice’.”1 in 2004, feminist scholars lynda birke, mette bryld, and nina lykke built upon theories of performativity to argue that co-dependent human-animal interrelating, such as observable in the case of laboratory rats, shape human / animal behaviours. they introduced the term “animaling” 1 sandilands, “lavender’s green?”, 23. 262 | mccartney , animal drag humanimalia 14.2 (2024) to “describe how we culturally produce the human / animal divide”.2 while the authors do not reference drag directly, they do posit that “animaling can shift perspective from animal essences to a study of the material-semiotic performativity of human / animal” relationships.3 their example follows real life nonhuman relationships but i argue that we might understand such complex constructs and divisions through animal drag without further displacing the nonhuman. building on karen barad’s work, they also argue that, while language, culture, and discourse matter as part of bridging and dismantling binaries, so too does phenomena and materiality. it is here that i think adornment and dress play a critical role and require more focused attention. i further read mel y. chen’s 2010 critique of the portrayal of the chimpanzee in the film max, mon amour (1988) as an example of critical discourse on animal drag. the plot of the film follows a british diplomat in france who hires a secret detective to follow his wife, suspecting her of an affair. it transpires that she has rented a separate apartment and that her live-in lover is a chimpanzee she calls max. max is played by an uncredited human actress, alisa berk. chen traverses film studies, linguistics, queer theory, critical race theory, costume studies, animal studies, and more, as part of their “invitation to consider queer-trans animality”.4 their discussion foregrounds cultural productions that “castrate” the nonhuman animal, interrogating problematic discourses of sexuality and race. chen’s analysis demonstrates how multi-faceted animal drag can be but perhaps also why we need a defining proposition for its scope and agency. the term animal drag itself is not entirely new, but it is yet to have been theorized as a distinct methodology. in 2011, scholar deborah ferreday used the term “animal drag” when she published on the cultural phenomenon of the cervine and its community, drawing on gaming, fashion, and the problematic nature of language. for ferreday, animal drag was both a gateway and limitation for those 2 birke, bryld, and lykke, “animal performances”, 168. 3 birke, bryld, and lykke, “animal performances”, 169–70 4 chen, “animals without genitals”, 294. mccartney , animal drag | 263 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) wishing to queer the boundaries of the human. animal drag was also used in the title of the 2012 phd submission of anna m. giannini, which contended “that performances of [nonhuman] animal characters […] have more to do with communicating assumptions about human identity than with [nonhuman] animals themselves”.5 while this is true in certain circumstances, this essay contends that it can also be otherwise, particularly if the performance is conscious and critical, as drag’s artform can be. in a 2015 article, nicole seymour interrogated what she claims to be animal drag by the cast of jackass, arguing that they embody the pain of the nonhuman animals they engage with. she concludes that such enactments “reminds us of how urgently we need performative, camp, queer, and trans* cultural forms to address questions of the animal and environment”.6 thus, i do not claim to invent the term but to propose, define, and demonstrate animal drag as an inherently critical and political, cultural act. animal drag has not yet been recognized as a particular modality, nor identified as a genre of practice and theory. however, it deserves credit for holistically rupturing several aspects of humanism through a singular niche but tactical act. identifying animal drag means we can recognize and create more acute protests that work beyond, in-between, and outside problematic boundaries and binaries, including those of academia. it also means, as seymour calls for, collating and mobilizing performative, trans-cultural forms that address pressing ethical questions related to our relationships with nonhuman animals. animal drag: a preliminary definition it feels counter-intuitive to set boundaries for defining animal drag. when speaking about my work, i have been asked whether it takes place in “fancy dress” or literature, for example. i want it to be theoretically plastic and, in the future, to spill over into pictorial representations and different histories, to be analysed through law or by the social sciences and further afield. but to begin, i use the example 5 giannini, “animal drag”, iv. 6 seymour, “alligator earrings”, 275. 264 | mccartney , animal drag humanimalia 14.2 (2024) of an ape being performed by a semi-fictionalized human performance artist within the 2017 film the square. the film is set in the eurocentric, neoliberal culture industry of a stockholm museum — an archetypal site of contemporary humanism, one might argue. the actual nonhuman animal in this case study is not present. while other species do camouflage themselves and perform as others in acts of survival, or even mimic their human companions, drag here is primarily understood as a human practice of performance, often including traits of exaggeration and parody. judith butler wrote of drag that it is important to remember that “we are actually in the presence of three contingent dimensions of significant corporeality: anatomical sex, gender identity, and gender performance”.7 moreover, none of these three may align with the other. as an act of drag, animal drag is thus a complex practice in which the performer might not anatomically match with how they identify, nor what they are performing; there could be three different modes of animality or species all present at once. this inherently queers humanist and essentialist notions of classification and being. following noreen giffney and myra hird in queering the non/human (2008), i take queering to mean “unpick[ing] binaries and reread[ing] gaps, silences and in-between spaces […] these concern genealogies, aims, priorities, interconnections with activism and other theories and fields, and the thorny issue of who gets to decide on all of this.”8 i do not though mean to refute scientific distinctions between multiple species, which is different to binary notions of sex and gender. rather, animal drag highlights the somewhat arbitrary divisions between humans and “animals” that derrida pointed out in 1997 when he coined the term “animot”.9 in the same way that gendered drag destabilizes notions of gender, animal drag destabilizes “humanness” and its cultural productions of “animality”. “human” can be performed, gate-kept, and constructed, much in the same way as race, class, ability, and more. in so doing, animal drag unsettles the hierarchies these prop up and which have been responsible for countless acts of exploitation. 7 butler, gender trouble, 187. 8 giffney and hird, queering the non/human, 5. 9 this was in a lecture later published in english as the animal that therefore i am. mccartney , animal drag | 265 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) through the following case study, i define animal drag as an activist performance in which a human critically and consciously performs “animality” in order to de-centre humanism, with dress and adornment as key aspects of its dissidence. because it ruptures culturally curated hierarchies, intended or not by the artist in question, there is similar agency in its analyses. animal drag is both practice and theory. adornment through drag is defined in the wider sense as any form of body modification, be that material, habitual, or temporal. each of these involves a form of “putting on” by adapting or altering oneself. animal drag, therefore, takes as its meeting point for analyses two juxtaposing elements against which man defined himself as superior: adornment, as a sign of culture, and the nonhuman animal, as the antithesis of cultured. for subordinated groups who have been treated as “less than human”, the nonhuman animal is sometimes a metaphor (and kin) of oppression. in the following scene of animal drag, however, the human is highlighted as a culturally gate-kept subjectivity, forever untenable for some (and let’s not forget the ways that some human groups are often treated as less than some nonhuman animals). we know that nonhuman animals have been used as exploited vehicles for inequality, such as in settler colonial projects of animal agriculture, or the use of feathers as part of sexist consumption habits. the nonhuman animal has therefore been read separately as conceptual content and material form in many theories of ethical living. this proposition demonstrates that, in animal drag, the nonhuman animal is both content and form at once; the performance/analyses is critical and conscious of its act and materials. as the following example demonstrates, what makes animal drag most potent is its ability to capture many intersections of identity politics with animality simultaneously. this may include class, disability, gender, sex, race, coloniality, and much more, in addition to species, within the one performance. animal drag thus sits in the middle of a venn diagram of multiple disciplines and methodologies: it might utilize art history, film studies, or any platform the performance takes place on/ in, while it traverses interdisciplinary scholarship, always working in 266 | mccartney , animal drag humanimalia 14.2 (2024) a bid to agitate societal and cultural divisions to generate new and hopeful conversations around post-anthropocentric, non-normativity. throughout my analysis, i draw on key ideas from posthumanist scholars donna haraway, rosi bradotti, and patricia maccormack that support the de-centring of the human. acknowledging that all subjects are racialized and cannot “become” human comes from the work of zakiyyah iman jackson. i advocate that animal drag does not attempt to “become” or mimic other species, with reference to gilles deleuze and félix guattari and queer theorist jack halberstam, but that drag’s exaggerated art-form might be weaponized; whereby its seemingly dangerous reproduction of stereotypes might parody and thus critique the continuum of white cisheteropatriarchy and the resulting knotted ideologies of civility, coloniality, and species. i highlight how social and material cues are interrupted as part of resisting normative categorization, as drag has historically done. i primarily define performance through the work of feminist and queer theorist judith butler. i assert that adornment can be read as techne through david wills’ work on prostheses, which can both aid and other the being utilizing it. finally, i advocate that (performed but felt) shared vulnerabilities across (imagined) species might produce more empathy and connection, an affect leading to more critical and conscious audience receptions on questions of animality. i conclude by paying homage to how drag has theoretically and historically informed the concept of animal drag while demonstrating that it also has a real history of life and death of its own for its “passing” survivors. i open up definitions of the nonhuman animal and acknowledge that the human is problematically dominant in this proposition but that, by working from within institutionalized notions of culture, animal drag is better able to rupture the hierarchies present and performed. the arrogance of the human species has played a significant part in the loss of up to half of the world’s nonhuman animal populations in just the past few decades. so, as an act that asks us to reconsider anthroponormative positionality and performative behaviours that have impacted the life and death of others, animal drag is important and worth focused critique and celebration. fig. 1 terry notary as oleg in the square, directed by ruben östlund (magnolia pictures, 2017) 268 | mccartney , animal drag humanimalia 14.2 (2024) animal drag in action in the square, the actor terry notary performs as a nonhuman primate to challenge the status quo of toxic masculinity, anthropocentric thinking, and the art world’s white elite, itself a microcosm of wider structural power imbalances.10 set in stockholm, the film follows a curator undergoing an existential crisis while simultaneously being responsible for the museum’s next big show, featuring a conceptual, public artwork, “the square”. this work is channelled through a nightmare pr campaign that would be more comical if the misdirection of funds and patronizing intentions weren’t so painfully realistic. while christian, the protagonist, comes to reconsider his own ethics and private responsibilities, the audience is drawn into reflecting on the paradoxes of the art world — its capitalist and elitist regime, market driven campaigns and obtuse, exclusive language, all the while ostensibly providing public education and spaces to provoke larger questions around life and altruism. to celebrate the opening of the “the square”, a private dinner is organized for the museum’s patrons and sponsors, something very common in the art world. during the dinner, the audience is called to attention, the lights are dimmed, and an anonymous audio announcement is made to the guests: “welcome to the jungle”, complete with recorded noises of birds and other jungle evocations. this quietens the room with suspense as it becomes apparent that there is to be a “sideshow” attraction. real-life, specialist nonhuman animal actor and choreographer terry notary, of the most recent planet of the apes franchises (2001–present), then enters through double doors playing the role of oleg, a performance artist, who begins to roam the room as a nonhuman primate. oleg fills the role of court jester, clown or even minstrel, in the uncomfortable way that the artist, here, is clearly the spectacle to entertain, and not to be viewed as an equal. guests initially chuckle and clap with nervous excitement, though it soon becomes apparent that this artist takes his role very seriously. 10 see mccartney, “in light of #metoo”. mccartney , animal drag | 269 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the artist performs as a heterosexual, masculine ape, with the aid of arm-extensions to better drag as the nonhuman animal and embody an apelike gait. the prostheses are evident, discarded and donned when oleg (or notary) deems it necessary for his performance. he is also topless, wearing dark, flexible but tight-fitting trousers; he is not naked, nor has any makeup or material attempt been made for the artist to look like a nonhuman primate. notary’s bare chest is also relatively hairless in contrast to what or whom he is embodying through oleg, perhaps an ironic and unintended reminder of his human grooming choices. further, there is no cgi, thus the sheer transparency of this drag and its techne or materiality makes its manifestation and critique even more pertinent. that this performance generates so much discomfort for all involved is more impressive given how obviously curated it is from the outset. the announcement had also warned, “remain perfectly still […] safe in the knowledge that someone else will be the prey.” this further others the artist, simultaneously generating fear. the audience stills while he circles their tables, picking at their hair, ridiculing one man, and going on to confront another who assumes a more stereotypically masculine response. they “square off”, so to speak, but this human animal ends up leaving the dinner, unable to assert himself outside of cultural norms. the tension is palpable for all except the “wild” and “curious” embodied nonhuman primate, “set free” in the realms of “civilization” at its uttermost extremes of culture — the art world’s finest people in their place of worship and leisure; the museum and “private view”, dressed in black-tie, a sartorial reminder of classification and divide. these human animals are in drag too, performing their privileged status even among other humans, and not just though adornment, but also their habitus: table manners, self-restraint, and language. arguably, they are performing cis-species drag; “doing” the human. as discomfort mounts, christian tries to draw oleg back into the “real world” by using his human name and clapping to end the performance, to save face at yet another disaster for “the square” and, presumably, in fear of further humiliating and thus losing patrons and sponsors due to an artwork seen as having gone too far. this form of curatorial directing is a privilege afforded to the dominant 270 | mccartney , animal drag humanimalia 14.2 (2024) classes and reminds us of museums’ cultural gatekeeping. however, the embodied nonhuman primate does not recognize christian’s human call — oleg will not be told when to switch his art on and off. guests look down to avoid being picked on while he is erratic and unpredictable; launching onto tables and making loud calling noises, he soon settles on a woman he seemingly tries to flirt with. once she retracts her attention, the embodied nonhuman primate physically handles her and pins her down. this scene is particularly uncomfortable as dominations of sex, gender, and sexuality are emphasized. eventually, one male-presenting (sartorially aided) guest comes to her rescue and pulls her away. many other men then join in, pinning down and beating up the embodied nonhuman primate. this act inherently reinforces ideas of white female fragility that play into racialized ideas of abusers, victims, and saviours at the expense of marginalized persons.11 the scene ends. we are not sure how the embodied nonhuman primate exits — as oleg, himself a character performed by notary, or if he continues his animal drag until physically debilitated and removed from the room, perhaps by security. for the viewers of the film, he thus conceptually remains in drag. animal drag analyses in the square, the artist’s embodied nonhuman primate performance explicitly satirizes and problematizes issues with class, gender, sexuality, and species. but racialization also implicitly shapes all subjectivities. oleg and the audience are all white, much like most of the capitalist art world, but we can also read the embodied nonhuman primate as a metaphor for historical instances of racist entertainment exploitation, alongside the idea that oleg is introduced as a “jungle threat”, where racist connotations can be made around perceptions of bestiality and so-called savage behaviour. this scene lends itself to challenging antiblack connections made between the african diaspora and animality,12 but also evokes the idea that non11 see phipps, “white tears”, and davis, “rape, racism”. 12 see jackson, becoming human. mccartney , animal drag | 271 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) human animals cannot be said to “have” race the way that humans experience it, yet they are inherently racialized.13 i do not believe that notary is attempting to speak on behalf of others or perform blackface but his own ethnicity complicates the way that racialization exceeds and works though bodies in this scene. coloniality is also a perpetual overtone where civility is upheld in the way the character of oleg needs to be justifiably tamed or eliminated. oleg’s arm-extensions, or crutches, can be perceived as disability aids, which both aid and ostracize him. here, readings can be made between those who are often marginalized but nominally incorporated into society, oscillating between enfreakment and mainstreaming.14 wills’s foundational work describes prostheses as functioning in-between many “distinct orders”, including flesh / steel, theory / fiction, translation / quotation, literal / figurative, familiar / academic, rhetoric / medicine, nature / artifice, public / private and more.15 notary’s prostheses facilitate his animal drag but also reiterate its artificiality; conflating margins between nature and culture, and species. to this extent, we might also understand his arm extensions as “companions”. in the companion species manifesto, haraway famously writes about the specific, mutually dependent relationship between people and dogs. she articulates this as “an implosion of nature and culture” and that the “co-constitution” is “bonded in significant otherness.”16 this is evident in the prostheses used by notary (and oleg) in the way that they literally and metaphorically — in form and content — constitute the artist’s relationship with his nonhuman otherness. in when species meet, haraway specifically discusses crutches as “companion species”, and their utilization as part of a “mind-body inventiveness”, when attributing her father’s successful sporting career to his living “in regard to” these “partners”.17 the matter of the crutches serves to inform notary’s embodied animality, whereby 13 for more on this idea, see harlan weaver’s bad dog where he makes this argument regarding the pit bull. 14 see melkumova-reynolds, “fashioning disability”. 15 wills, prosthesis, 10. 16 haraway, companion species, 15 17 haraway, when species meet, 168–70 272 | mccartney , animal drag humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the artist-as-oleg is able to phenomenologically read and respond to the room through this extended and conceptualized multi-species bodily sense; enabling him to get into character with different physical perspectives. his techne facilitate the idea that body and mind are intertwined, not divorced, thus critiquing cartesian ideas of mind over matter, and the notion that perception is as dependent on bodily sensory clues as on the mind’s understanding of them.18 some prostheses also require complicity; they can represent the choice to resist, conform, and / or transform oneself. in this sense, prostheses are also modes of dress and adornment; their objecthood is mobilized, enacted, and weaponized, and contains agency as well as stigma. oleg’s crutches here, however, do not read as invitation of pity, a common ableist perception of those perceived or highlighted as different.19 instead it mobilizes his actions. wearing prostheses is thus also a tool for drag; not least because the techne used in traditional gendered drag — for tucking, shaping, or flattening, for instance — might be considered prostheses, but because drag plays with the material and social world, which prostheses act in-between. as birke, bryld, and lykke write, drawing on karen barad, matter is not a fixed substance, but a doing, and performativity should be understood as jointly emerging from language /representation and material discursive factors.20 in all layers of this scene, the artist is othered, thus he highlights and questions the usual roles of power ascribed to white, rich heteronormativity. the performance does, however, also contribute to stereotypes of animality, such as being explicitly sexual and volatile, but this plays into the paradoxes of drag; questioning the extent to which drag can both perpetuate and problematize dangerous dualisms. that the embodied nonhuman primate is ultimately dominated by the usual suspects demonstrates the sad fate of many nonhuman animals and minorities. i read this scene as a parodic attack on the particular classist and misogynist art world by “the artist”, via 18 as in merleau-ponty’s canonical work in phenomenology of perception. 19 see taylor, beasts of burden. 20 birke, bryld, and lykke, “animal performances”, 177. mccartney , animal drag | 273 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) an empathetic, self-dehumanizing performance. here, neither notary, oleg, nor the embodied nonhuman primate want to assimilate, thus protesting the tenets of what it means to live in a contemporary, late capitalist system of exploitation, or to be human. “the artist”, however, is fictional, and we might reflect on that fact that the performance also functions as a conduit for the political message of the director, ruben östlund, who did not fully convey the plan to the “guests”, or film extras, of this scene prior to filming.21 they were stockholm’s real art world elite who agreed to take part at östlund’s invitation. nor did notary know that these persons were “playing” themselves until toward the end of his role in the film. they also, probably, felt relatively comfortable in their formal costume, blurring the lines of dragging as themselves, amid a familiar “set” to many of them. so, we can read the tension and reaction of these persons as both real and improvised; they did, to some extent, genuinely dictate the fate of the fictional oleg and the embodied nonhuman primate he performs as and secure their own positions of power, literally and through enactment. as a viewer, one feels compelled and confused at whom to sympathize with: the woman who is abused; the artist who is patronized; the nonhuman animal who is dominated; and/or christian who is embarrassed? at no point, however, does the animal drag side with the white, rich, cisheteropatriarchy of the room. “becoming-animal” and affect in animal drag the artist and his animal drag in the scene from the square described above is drawn from the work of real-world performance artist oleg kulik. in his career, kulik has repeatedly performed as a dog, sometimes taking his role as far as biting gallery visitors, and several curators have closed his shows early. mila bredikhna, a collaborator of kulik’s, has praised him for “renounc[ing] the language (languages) of human culture.”22 his shows have historically bordered on drama: in performing as breeds associated with guard dogs and installing warning signs with barred cages for himself, kulik has stereotyped 21 carew, “social responsibility”, 55 22 bredikhina, “pavlov’s dog theses”, 52 (italics in original). 274 | mccartney , animal drag humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the predatory animal and “dr[awn] out a macho competitiveness in male viewers”.23 moreover, “by abdicating language and notions of decorum, the artist addresses his work to the mob, to the prenot post-human”.24 as others have written, “the trouble with kulik is that he tries to look and behave as much as possible like a real dog, and does not recognize that it is only human beings who can enjoy this game — that is why there are no dogs who come running to his shows”.25 this recalls the anthropocentric privilege to drag as a nonhuman animal and the responsibility of the artist to consider their critical agency in doing so. to simplify a performance into one aspect of animality — that of aggression — is to patronize the nonhuman animal, to reproduce perceptions of otherness. further, in appealing to a “pre-human”, “mob” mentality, kulik inadvertently romanticizes an animal kingdom no longer feasible in a neoliberal world where so many nonhuman animals are exploited as commodities and inextricably bound to humans. there is also a danger in the fantasy of humans returning to a pre-linguistic state. the satire of kulik, as portrayed by the fictional oleg in the square, might be another provocation of the mob, bringing out the “beast” of the otherwise cultured humans in their attempts to dominate the embodied nonhuman primate. the difference, however, is that the scene in the film is a deliberate parody. language and dress have been used to divorce man from other species. they are thus problematic emblems of human culture. however, given that it is currently almost impossible to disentangle oneself from them, it might be more productive to consider these as gateways to the politics of drag; a performance based on the semiotics of adornment. drag isn’t always attempting to “pass” or transform fully. drag has power in its processes to reveal and operate in liminal states. as sociologist deborah ferreday has warned, the “notion of either being ‘fully human’ or becoming / ‘returning to’ the animal” actually “perform[s] the anxiety and melancholia at stake in 23 drobnick, “oleg kulik”, 144. 24 drobnick, “oleg kulik”, 145. 25 salecl, “love me, love my dog”, 16. mccartney , animal drag | 275 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) anthropocentricism”.26 the more one attempts to distinguish oneself as human or nonhuman, the more anthropocentric and binaristic one becomes. similarly, as jackson argues, there is a naïveté to assuming an uncritical, universal humanity.27 simply put, ideology lacks critique. thus, as we see in the square, animal drag might be extremely transparent in its performance; it might employ colonial cultures of language and dress as part of its critique, to recognize that we are inextricably, socially bound by these structures and to highlight their own performativity and construction. the notion of “becoming-animal” stems from the writing of french thinkers deleuze and guattari. they posit that there is a politics to “becoming” for those oppressed, in revolt, or always on the fringe. thus, “becoming-animal” is a philosophical form of alliance with the nonhuman animal. “becoming” subjects have nomadic modes of existence, are less stable, and operate in more generative ways of being. “becoming” is an interminable process. specifically, deleuze and guattari argue that human-animal relationships ought to have an affinity with the other, not act in mimicry; they even discuss the significance of “emitting” dog, not just imitating dog.28 art theorist jim drobnick argues that kulik does this via the odour of his performances.29 this would be impossible to determine with notary’s performance because the square is a film, but it might be worth considering the discomfort generated — between the guests at the museum, the film’s viewers (myself included), and the embodied nonhuman primate performed by notary as oleg — as a shared, human-animal affinitive affect of fear. fear also smells. affect is defined here as emotions and movement that pass across bodies, materially and psychologically connected and reacting to each other. affect thus undoes any easy division between self and other, human and nonhuman. braidotti argues that “the recognition of shared ties of vulnerability can generate new forms of posthuman 26 ferreday, “becoming deer”, 219. 27 jackson, becoming human. 28 deleuze and guattari, thousand plateaus, 302. 29 drobnick, “oleg kulik”. 276 | mccartney , animal drag humanimalia 14.2 (2024) community and compassion”.30 the shared moments of vulnerability in the square are performed and real, given its semi-improvised nature. thus, for all those who become embroiled in the scene, experiencing fear (including the threat of losing one’s power) is a plausible means of “becoming animal”. that the guests of the museum relearn to use their bodies, to act on their instincts, and to communicate in a common language with the embodied nonhuman primate, denouncing culture, as ulik calls for, could also be read as an acceptance of the invitation to “become animal”. it is worth observing, however, that much of the fear and action here is not pre-cultural and, in fact, relies on colonial and patriarchal matrices of race and gender, like concepts of fragility and civility. thus, the scene’s cultural affect is another potential reproduction of stereotypes; notary’s affect of fear plays with and aids the disruption of problematic dualisms but also perpetuates them. his affective performance nonetheless decentres humanness. through explicit reproduction, he provokes questions of gender, race, and embodiment that include nonhuman animals, imagined and real. one last thought on affect here is that notary-as-oleg is giving corporeality back to the nonhuman primate not present. this is not to substitute nonhumans for humans, whose habitats and populations are rapidly declining and who deserve to be present in the world (if not in a museum). but it offers an answer to an argument posed by scholar emily mcavan, namely that “cute” species, like the koala, can be commodified while simultaneously having a “face” capable of addressing a call for care, that is distinct from other, less charismatic animals, like that of a snake.31 this might be better known as the “bambi effect”. mcavan argues that the “face”, according to the philosopher emmanuel levinas, should be read in more abstract terms, so that humans feel a sense of responsibility towards all nonhuman animals and their environments. human-animal scholar david redmalm makes a similar point, arguing that “the animal face is not bound to a certain discourse”, thus expanding levinas’s 30 braidotti, the posthuman, 69. 31 mcavan, “i just care”. mccartney , animal drag | 277 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) phenomenology of the “face” to help us meet across species borders.32 what animal drag offers, then, is a physical human face / body to a species otherwise out of sight / mind. it might also generate an affect capable of addressing animals, animality, and environments beyond the “cute”. the material and social body in his analysis of kulik’s work, drobnick references elizabeth grosz’s work on volatile bodies (1994), which challenges the problematic dualisms of the mind and body.33 through grosz, he argues that the body, itself, once acknowledged as a mutable subject, is capable of disrupting humanism’s binaries. the body is always shifting and unpredictable in ways akin to maccormack’s argument that the body is a plastic state of in-between,34 and also in the way that “becoming” is never complete. this is similar to the notion that we should dispense with ideologies of an “end game” for transitioning bodily states — of beauty, ability, or sex — which unhelpfully reproduce hierarchies that are themselves entangled with racism and classism. in their book trans* (2018), halberstam uses the lego movie (2014) to articulate how the body and its landscape is always under construction, and how this might be playful, suppressed, or even commodified.35 the point is that the body and the spaces it shapes and inhabits are malleable, and this is also its freedom, in not conforming or longing for a reductive ideology. as deleuze and guattari state, to become “produces nothing but itself”.36 the plastic and liminal being, while not to detract from how some bodies have been marginalized because of such liminality, is also a (sometimes involuntary) site of resistance. the body in-between, or as wills would call an always-already prosthetic being, is thus a flexible, extendable body, capable of more imagination and creativity in pushing the very definitions of human and form. 32 redmalm, “in-your-face-ethics”, 94. 33 drobnick, “oleg kulik”, 146. 34 maccormack, ‘multi-dimensional modifications’. 35 halberstam, trans*, 129-36. 36 deleuze and guattari, thousand plateaus, 238. 278 | mccartney , animal drag humanimalia 14.2 (2024) drag — the play and disruption with traditional semiotics of adornment and embodiment — facilitates this. drag, in practice and theory, highlights the body’s state of process between various classifications and thus ruptures traditional dynamics of race, gender, sex, class, ability, species, and more, by not wholly conforming to any of these or, in notary’s case of (un)dressing, making extremely transparent those classifications as performative, constructed and/or unravelled discourses of power. drobnick cites grosz’s proposition that: “volatility implies unfinished and an unfinishable project that is the body, subject to continuing forces that effect both its material and social dimensions.”37 the fashion theorist joanne entwistle argues that dress is a form of embodiment, which “orientates oneself to the situation, acting in particular ways upon the body”.38 notary’s performance, neither fully human nor nonhuman, plays with materiality, through his prostheses and semi-dress, in order to suspend (obvious) disbelief. he also plays with the social, in the way he interrupts the art world gathering’s usual etiquettes. his body literally swings in a volatile fashion between varying material and social states. these two forces — the material and social — propel the performing body of animal drag. while drag has traditionally used the body and materiality to disrupt social constructions of gender, notary’s performance demonstrates that animal drag can also unsettle social and material models of class, race, ability, and species. meta animal drag some final thoughts attend to this scene’s hyperreal and multi-layered experience of production and spectatorship. there is little distinction between östlund and the character of oleg because the director staged much of the artist’s critique; but there is also little difference between notary and oleg, or the embodied nonhuman animal, because notary so convincingly takes on the role of an artist performing a nonhuman primate, which is his own career in the 37 grosz in drobnick, “oleg kulik”, 146. 38 entwistle, the fashioned body, 29. mccartney , animal drag | 279 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) world beyond the film. where oleg begins, and the embodied nonhuman primate ends, is also slippery. this is as much to do with the material adornments that are cast on and off, and the way that the scene abruptly ends, as it has to do with the fact that the artist of the film does not respond to his human name. that the scene and the name of oleg is a satire of another animal-activist artist adds a further dimension, in addition to the fact it was also received by a second group of paralleled black-tie guests, on the other side of the screen at its première in cannes. these people mirror those guests in the film dragging as themselves. perhaps they perform these roles in private, public, and now for mass media consumption too. östlund has spoken out about how he wanted to mock contemporary art jargon and the artist that he likens to the allegory of the naked emperor.39 his oleg then, might be a parody of kulik’s career, a jibe at the artist and the elite art world, as much as it is at the guests of the square’s première who are also performing cultural gatekeeping. either way, the anti-normative politics that i read into the scene hold. it acts as a microcosm for all the late capitalism (artworld) issues that the square otherwise raises. it also highlights that we cannot get away from the market economy infrastructures where human/nonhuman animal relationships might be acted out — real and performed. through this essay, i have shown how animal drag might be utilized to challenge human exceptionalism. braidotti has argued that a more realistic and knotted response — between cultures, capitals, and species — “requires more effort of our imagination to ground our representations in real life conditions and in an affirmative manner”.40 the scene from the square is a representation, but it is also an actual, embodied nonhuman primate performance. its layers of hyperreality — from the “real” audience to parodies of kulik and notary’s “instinctive” animal drag — show how real contemporary colonialist and gendered capitalist infrastructures can be acknowledged and critiqued from within. there is no benefit to setting “a nostalgic invention 39 östlund in carew, “social responsibility”, 3. 40 braidotti, the posthuman, 46. 280 | mccartney , animal drag humanimalia 14.2 (2024) of an all-inclusive holistic ideal”,41 nor to imagining unrealistic and romantic environments for the (preor) post-anthropocentric arts. i have shown that animal drag does not require the performer to fully become the nonhuman animal. instead, it extends and flexes conceptions of what such a becoming is or, as in the case with notary as-oleg-as-embodied-ape, it dehumanizes itself as part of a rupturing of anthropocentric thinking. animal drag lays bare the fact that species can also be performed; human beings are in fact often “doing” the human. animal drag is more than the pervasive philosophy of “becoming”: it demonstrates action, it takes theory into practice, and shows us how significant, ironically, cultured forms of adornment are in the critique and parody of culturally determined definitions of humanness and its ongoing alliance with white, ableist, cisheteropatriarchy. conclusion to open and historicize the drag in animal drag, i need to pay homage to drag and queer culture and theory as significant axes of animal drag. i have my own struggles as a disabled woman, but i want to be transparent about the fact i am also white and straight; i do not wish to contribute to the colonialist intellectualizing i have inherited, nor continue the legacy of those who have appropriated queer culture and experiences for abstract theory without actively supporting the lives and deaths of those it discusses. as such, i want to make clear that animal drag, as an idea, implicitly benefits from heteronormative white supremacy, but i also write this to argue that it can also practice activism. when jennie livingston’s paris is burning (1990) brought drag into the popular culture limelight, it also highlighted that drag is racialized, and is a cultural phenomenon that cannot be separated from socioeconomics. for example, those that partook in the late 1980s new york ball culture were also less likely to have access to health care and had higher mortality rates, especially in the wake of the hiv/aids crisis at the time. marlon m. bailey reiterates this, describing the additional dangers working-class, black, and latinx queer 41 braidotti, “animals, anomalies”, 529. mccartney , animal drag | 281 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) persons face, often living in poorer, urban neighbourhoods that operate more rigid heteronormativities and thus with increased crimes of homophobia and transphobia.42 it would be naïve to assume that any form of drag is without its issues. butler questions “whether parodying the dominant norms is enough to displace them: indeed, whether the denaturalization of gender cannot be the very vehicle for a reconsolidation of hegemonic norms”.43 bell hooks specifically critiques paris is burning for its portrayal of black people emulating (and aspiring to) fashion editorials, a portrayal which “privileges the ‘femininity’ of the ruling class white woman, adored and kept, shrouded in luxury, [which] does not imply a critique of patriarchy.”44 animal drag thus needs to be careful in how it too might perpetuate species binaries, in addition to other aspects of identity. in the square, for example, we saw reproductions of white masculinity upheld by the sartorial markers of menswear and its paradoxical “savour” and “mob” mentality. the use of material adornment to support an identity that one best aligns with at a given time might, at one end of the spectrum, be seen as trickery, and survival at the other. the seemingly dangerous artifice of gendered drag, like femininity or the figure of the femme fatale, is argued to be a projection of masculine insecurities,45 “synonymous with disguise, artifice, inauthenticity, and duplicity”,46 and has been used to legitimize “trans panic”.47 drag can also be a private performance, in rehearsal, and a more subtle, fluid spectrum of practice than traditionally conceived. it is utilized by 42 bailey, “gender/racial realness”, 336. 43 butler, bodies that matter, 125. 44 hooks, “is paris burning?”, 217. 45 see doane, femmes fatales. 46 tseelon, the masque of femininity, 32. 47 this pertains more to femme drag. see halberstam and del lagrace’s the drag king book for another perspective. it is worth noting that drag and trans* lives are very different. they can be considered independent modes of being / doing but which participate in intersectional spaces. many of the trans* community lean on gender performance — often less explicitly than one might associate with public drag acts — to experiment with gender identity. there is also, as with critical race theory and feminist theory, a rich relationship between animal studies and transgender theory; see hayward and weinstein, “tranimalities”. 282 | mccartney , animal drag humanimalia 14.2 (2024) those experimenting with or confirming their felt genders and / or sex, those in transition and who identify as non-binary too. for, if we were to agree with butler, then all gender is performed,48 including that of the cisgendered community. because drag is a mechanism for communities to practice skills of identity construction, both on and off the street, and is one cultural mechanism of survival whereby adornment is key, drag acts and their materiality are always political. the animal in animal drag is much more than a symbol, metaphor, or intermediary articulated through costume and artifice, and deserves its own attention. for example, we should consider what being an animal constitutes and who or what decides this, much like the power struggle witnessed between christian and oleg in the square. lourdes orozco and jen parker-starbuck critique human-animal performances for their anthropocentric privilege.49 in drag, “womanliness”, for example, can be taken off,50 just like “animality”. this doesn’t just render such states as constructed, but exposes networks of power and privilege in gatekeeping what constitutes being or acting a nonhuman animal and to potentially fetishize it. for a human animal to take a nonhuman animal perspective is also impossible and risks speaking on behalf of the other and so further silencing it.51 animal drag that attempts to consider an other perspective, then, might at least be leaning toward decentralizing the human status quo.52 another way of doing this is to perform the human or dehumanize (or ahumanize) oneself,53 as notary does in the square. animal drag that parodies the normative able body or humanism might be called cis-species drag, just like we saw with the unwitting guests of the square, who do the human by acting as themselves. 48 butler, gender trouble. 49 orozco and parker-starbuck, “goats, badgers”, 63-8. 50 as in the famous 1929 case study presented by joan riviere, “womanliness as a masquerade”. 51 this echoes the work of spivak in “can the subaltern speak?” there are some humans who want to permanently transition into other species. it is hard, however, to imagine many nonhuman animals longing to become human. while such a discussion is beyond the scope of this paper, one could draw parallels with complex debates on directions of privilege in transracial and transgender cases. for more on this, see brubaker, trans. 52 as suggested in orozco and parker-starbuck, “goats, badgers”. 53 maccormack uses “asignified” and “ahuman” in gardner and maccormack, deleuze, 6. mccartney , animal drag | 283 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) animal drag is indebted to posthumanism and takes its cue from the ethics of those seeking to create a more sustainable necropolitics for all. future case studies should though continue to ask what might be in it for the animal.54 the square uses the nonhuman primate for provocation; it reminds us of the exoticization and exploitation many minorities and nonhumans face as well as various intersecting human-animal identity politics. it cleverly uses a medium beyond traditional animal activism to reach a wider unsuspecting audience to reflect on its own makeup. if we understand queerness to be a form of dissidence and challenge to the status quo, then animal drag, beyond sexuality, is inherently queer. as haraway states, “queering has the job of undoing ‘normal’ categories, and none is more critical than the human/ nonhuman sorting operation”.55 at the very least, if to queer something is to subvert and overturn outdated and oppressive social constructions, then animal drag is indebted to the nonhuman animal for helping to queer notions of humanness and animality. it is key that animal drag takes place somewhere in the cartographies of late capitalism else it would risk failing to question the hegemonic and colonial mapping of disciplines, labour, and spaces that continue to impact all animals. because these are human-created problems, they need to be questioned as part of thinking critically about species. notary’s meta scene in the square recognizes the pitfalls of contemporary society but demonstrates that there is space to create and consider what braidotti calls a “system of representation that matches the complexity of contemporary nonhuman animals and their proximity to humans”.56 while some of the characterizations and nonhuman representations in the square might appear reductive, its performance, adornment, complex production, and reception, posits a conceptual and visual reflection that critiques how otherness is constructed and reinforced across and through the cultural industries of dress, art, and film. 54 see birke, “naming names”. 55 haraway, “foreword”, xxiv. 56 braidotti, the posthuman, 43. 284 | mccartney , animal drag humanimalia 14.2 (2024) animal drag is not, however, a perfect political weapon. the human animal is still very present in the performance, representation, and theory here. at times it might be too romantic, too imitative, or risk privileging the human animal. however, it is positive in its attempt to critique the contemporary world around it and offer of agency from within these power structures, pushing us to question them even more. through this essay i have identified a gap in practice and theory where animal drag might traverse more than one protest at a time, raising multiple issues of identity politics and social justice through a singular performance with serious considerations of adornment. notary’s “companion” prostheses help us understand adornment as othering and supportive, as transitioning techne, acting in-between the human and nonhuman. like deleuze and guattari’s philosophical “becoming-animal”, animal drag doesn’t strive to conform fully, or else it would only prop up dangerous ideologies of classification. but it is also more than a philosophy: it is contemporary, action-based, and works at destabilizing more than one social construct at a time, especially the human animal. i acknowledge that animal drag might perpetuate stereotypes, but i have demonstrated how its cultural form, as a work of drag, socially and materially renders its act as a doing and allows it to expose stereotypical constructions. this essay has built upon butler’s ideas to argue that we are all complicit in our performance of the human and has used ideas of affect to consider how animal drag acts might answer braidotti’s call for shared vulnerabilities across human and nonhuman relationships. i have suggested that, as an embodied performance, animal drag might offer a corporeality to other nonhuman animals often marginalized or overlooked within popular culture, fundraising, or research. a brief look at the works cited here demonstrates that there is an already rich and plentiful scholarship on animality and independent subordinated groups, but animal drag acts as a space where these conversations can come together through a single critical and conscious act. operating on sliding scales and slippery slopes mccartney , animal drag | 285 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) somewhere in between, outside, and in the liminal spaces of cultures and academic fields, often because their modus operandi is not yet fully understood, popularized, or given much attention, animal drag advocates for the beings that are often minoritized or less heard and seen. i hope this piece forms the beginnings of a rogue, nomadic pack of animal drag-ers. acknowledgements i am grateful to my animal drag research group. supervising the ma work of megan bang and conversations with donatella barbieri reminded me that performances also happen in private, in rehearsals, and of the power of materials to shape very different relationships between animals, human and nonhuman. the life, art, and design work of joe boon (and his work as showcased via the instagram handle @boony342) showed me how porous the space is between drag and life, while in working with lydia kaye on her phd i have learned more about monstrous drag and “trans-species” identities. our animal drag research group is a wonderful and international exchange of ideas. thanks to nicole seymour for looking at a very early version, and to david redmalm for looking at the latter stage. you both made supporting, astute, and improving suggestions. sincere and immense thanks are also due to the peer-reviewers and editors of humanimalia, especially kári driscoll and marianna szczygielska, who consistently encouraged me and brought more focus and criticality to animal drag. works cited bailey, marlon m. “gender / racial realness: theorizing the gender system in the ballroom culture.” feminist studies 37, no. 2 (2011): 365–86. https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2011.0016. bang, megan. “becoming-puppy: a posthuman exploration of puppy play.” ma thesis. central saint martin’s, university of the arts, 2021. barbieri, donatella. costume in performance: materiality, culture and the body. london: bloomsbury, 2017. birke, lynda. “naming names — or, what’s in it for the animals?” humanimalia, 1, no. 1 (2009): 1–9. https://doi. org/10.52537/humanimalia.10113. birke, lynda, mette bryld, and nina lykke. “animal performances: an exploration of intersections between feminist science studies and studies of human/ animal relationships.” feminist theory 5, no. 2 (2004): 167–83. https://doi. org/10.1177/1464700104045406. braidotti, rosi. “animals, anomalies, and https://www.instagram.com/boony342/ https://doi.org/10.1353/fem.2011.0016 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10113 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10113 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700104045406 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700104045406 286 | mccartney , animal drag humanimalia 14.2 (2024) inorganic others.” pmla 124, no. 2 (2009): 526–32. https://doi.org/10.1632/ pmla.2009.124.2.526. braidotti, rosi. the posthuman. cambridge: polity, 2013. bredikhina, mila. “pavlov’s dog theses.” in watkins and kermode, oleg kulik, 51–58. brubaker, rogers. trans: gender and race in an age of unsettled identities. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2016. butler, judith. bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex. london: routledge, 1993. butler, judith. gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. london: routledge, 1999. carew, anthony. “social responsibility and discomfort in the square.” screen education 91 (2018): 50–57. chen, mel y. “animals without genitals: race and transsubstantiation.” women & performance: a journal of feminist theory 20, no. 3 (2010): 285–97. https:// doi.org/10.1080/0740770x.2010.529253. davis, angela. “rape, racism and the myth of the black rapist.” in women race and class, by davis, 172–201. london: the women’s press, 1982. deleuze, giiles and félix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. translated by brian massumi. london: continuum, 2004. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. edited by marie-louise mallet. translated by david wills. new york: fordham university press, 2008. doane, mary ann. femmes fatales: feminism, film theory, psychoanalysis. london: routledge, 1991. drobnick, jim. the senses and society 1, no. 1 (2006): 141–48. https://doi. org/10.2752/174589206778055574. entwistle, joanne. the fashioned body: fashion, dress and modern social theory. cambridge: polity, 2000. ferreday, debra. “becoming deer: nonhuman drag and online utopias.” feminist theory 12, no. 2 (2011): 219–25. https://doi. org/10.1177/1464700111404288. gardner, colin, and patricia maccormack. deleuze and the animal. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2017. giannini, anna. “animal drag: sex, race, and the theatrical animal.” phd diss, university of wisconsin-madison, 2012. giffney, noreen, and myra j. hird. queering the non/human. aldershot: ashgate, 2008. halberstam, jack and del lagrace volcano. the drag king book. london: serpent’s tale, 1999. halberstam, jack. trans*: a quick and quirky account of gender variability. berkeley: university of california press, 2018. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. haraway, donna. “foreword: companion species, mis-recognition, and queer worlding.” in giffney and hird, queering the non/human, xxiii–xxvi. haraway, donna. when species meet, minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008. hayward, eva and jami weinstein. “introduction: tranimalities in the age of trans* life.” transgender studies quarterly 2, no. 2 (2015): 195–208. https://doi.org/10.1215/232892522867446. hooks, bell. “is paris burning?” in reel to real: race, sex, and class at the movies, by hooks, 214–27. new york: routledge, 1996. jackson, zakiyyah iman. becoming human: matter and meaning in an antiblack world. new york: new york university press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2009.124.2.526 https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2009.124.2.526 https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770x.2010.529253 https://doi.org/10.1080/0740770x.2010.529253 https://doi.org/10.2752/174589206778055574 https://doi.org/10.2752/174589206778055574 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700111404288 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700111404288 https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2867446 https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2867446 mccartney , animal drag | 287 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) kaye, lydia. “bodies in the post: critical posthuman practice in queer performance, fashion and digital art.” phd diss. saint martin’s, university of the arts london, forthcoming. maccormack, patricia. “multi-dimensional modifications.” in deleuze and the body, edited by laura guillaume and joe hughes, 192–202. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2011. mcavan, emily. “‘i just care so much about the koalas’: on grief, value and ethical response to non-human others in the anthropocene.” angelaki 28, no. 4 (2023): 21–38. https://doi.org/10.1080/09 69725x.2023.2243156. mccartney, nicola. death of the artist: artworld dissidents and their alternative identities. london: i.b. tauris, 2018. mccartney, nicola, “in light of #metoo: reconsidering the art/artist relationship for better futures.” visual studies 38, no. 3–4 (2022): 557–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/147258 6x.2021.2012248. melkumova-reynolds, jana. “‘let me be your stimy toy’: fashioning disability, cripping fashion.” in dangerous bodies, edited by royce mahawatte and jacki willson, 35–56. cham: palgrave macmillan, 2023. orozco, lourdes and jen parker-starbuck. “goats, badgers and other beasts: turning animal and performing the limits of the human.” performance research 21, no. 6 (2017): 63–67. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2017.1315972. östlund, ruben. the square. magnolia pictures, 2017. 151 mins. phipps, alison 2021. “white tears, white rage: victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism.” european journal of cultural studies 24, no. 1 (2021): 81–93. https://doi. org/10.1177/1367549420985852. redmalm, david. (2011) “in-your-faceethics: phenomenology of the face and social psychological animal studies.” in undisciplined animals: invitations to animal studies, edited by pär segerdahl, 73–104. newcastle-upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2011. riviere, joan. “womanliness as a masquerade.” international journal of psycho-analysis no. 10 (1929): 303–13. salecl, renata. “love me, love my dog”. in watkins and kermode, oleg kulik, 11–30. sandilands, catriona. “lavender’s green? some thoughts on queer(y)ing environmental politics.” undercurrents: journal of critical environmental studies 6 (1994): 20–25. https://doi. org/10.25071/2292-4736/37697. seymour, nicole. “alligator earrings and the fishhook in the face: tragicomedy, transcorporeality, and animal drag.” transgender studies quarterly, 2, no. 2 (2015): 261–79. https://doi. org/10.1215/23289252-2867561. spivak, gayatri. “can the subaltern speak?” in marxism and the interpretation of culture, edited by cary nelson and lawrence grossberg, 271–314. urbana: university of illinois press, 1988. taylor, sunaura. beasts of burden: animal and disability liberation. new york: the new press, 2017. tseëlon, efrat. the masque of femininity: the presentation of woman in everyday life. london: sage, 1995. watkins, johnathan and deborah kermode, eds. oleg kulik: art animal. birmingham: ikon gallery, 2001. weaver, harlan. bad dog: pit bull politics and multispecies justice. seattle: washington university press, 2021. wills, david. prosthesis. stanford: university of stanford press, 1995. https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725x.2023.2243156 https://doi.org/10.1080/0969725x.2023.2243156 https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586x.2021.2012248 https://doi.org/10.1080/1472586x.2021.2012248 https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2017.1315972 https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2017.1315972 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420985852 https://doi.org/10.1177/1367549420985852 https://doi.org/10.25071/2292-4736/37697 https://doi.org/10.25071/2292-4736/37697 https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2867561 https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2867561 reggio “happy goats” “happy” goats or, taking embarrassment seriously marco reggio translated by suleiman mcshane and erin clancy humanimalia 15.2 (summer 2025) abstract: this text was originally published in italian as the first chapter (dérive #1) of marco reggio’s book cospirazione animale. tra azione diretta e intersezionalità [animal conspiracy: between direct action and intersectionality]. additional footnotes have been provided by the author for this english translation, with some information on the italian context. the chapter deals with issues of species, gender, and coloniality that emerged in the praxis of the italian anti-speciesist movement over the past fifteen years. in particular, reggio gives an account of his experience as an activist and researcher facing the death of an ethiopian woman, agitu ideo gudeta, who fled her country under political persecution to open a goat farm in italy, where she was assaulted and killed by a co-worker. reggio interrogates the conflict between the privilege that entails being able to criticize and take distance from animal farming (which was hardly achievable from gudeta’s standpoint), and the impossibility of endorsing and celebrating the “happy meat” paradox from an animal liberation perspective (like all farmers, gudeta sent baby goats to the slaughter in order to be able to milk their mothers). reggio articulates his reflection along the lines of frantz fanon’s notion of the “zone of non-being” and judith butler’s aporetic “embarassment” in the face of the inexhaustible plurality of identities that cloak the subject (potentially opening the doors to the more-than-human). keywords: animal ethics, intersectionality, animal liberation, anti-speciesism, goats bio: marco reggio is an animal liberation activist, a member of the resistenza animale collective, and an independent researcher based in italy. his work focuses on political and intersectional antispeciesism, with particular attention to its relationships with transfeminism, queer theory, anarchism and disability studies. email: marco.reggio@unimi.it copyright © 2025 marco reggio this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 2 (2025): 85–110. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.23246 mailto:marco.reggio@unimi.it http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.23246 reggio , “happy” goats | 87 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) in memory of sarat colling (1984–2025) a gitu ideo gudeta was a refugee from ethiopia who had fled to italy after being subjected to political persecution in her home country. she became quite well known in the trentino region after founding a goat farm that produced cheese — a farm which grew over the years and obtained a certain level of entrepreneurial success. after earning a degree in sociology from the university of trento, agitu returned to ethiopia to lead projects in sustainable agriculture. in 2010, faced with the ethiopian government’s ongoing expropriation of land from farmers, she began participating in protest demonstrations, openly opposing the government’s disregard for the environmental consequences of handing land over to multinational corporations. persecuted for her activism, she returned to trentino in search of abandoned lands to reclaim. despite having very limited resources, she succeeded in bringing her entrepreneurial vision to life, building a network of support and solidarity, while also facing frequent racist and sexist attacks. hers was a story of emancipation — although, in many progressive narratives, she was reduced to a symbol of a paternalistic model of integration: the successfully “integrated” immigrant. on 29 december 2020, agitu was found dead in her home in the valle dei mocheni in trentino. yet another femicide. but the case also had some peculiarities that sparked heated debate and conflicting emotions. her killer was quickly arrested; it emerged that she had also been raped. the patriarchal nature of the crime became even more evident: the usual message of extreme violence against an autonomous, independent woman who was managing to make a life worth living for herself, despite years of sexist and racist threats. the perpetrator was of african origin — a fact that inevitably triggered racializing narratives about “savage” rapists and “illegal” immigrants who, in contrast to the victim, represent the archetype of non-integration. in any case, agitu’s story was both complex and “naturally” intersectional, articulated along the lines of gender, racialization, and ecological activism. 88 | reggio , “happy” goats humanimalia 15.2 (2025) goats and bears the name of this livestock farm was “la capra felice” (the happy goat). a name that was emblematic of the happy meat rhetoric that certain currents of antispeciesist1 thought had, for some years, come to regard with deep suspicion. at the time, i was active in a group called assemblea antispecista, a nationwide network that had emerged only a few months earlier and had mostly dedicated itself to another campaign rooted in trentino. between september and october 2020, we launched a campaign for the liberation of the bears held captive at the casteller facility2 and against the 1 the term antispeciesism, less commonly used in the anglophone world, is more prevalent in italy, comparable to terms such as “animal rights”, “animal liberation”, and “animalismo” (animal advocacy). it derives from “speciesism”, a term coined by richard ryder and popularized by peter singer in his 1975 classic, animal liberation. speciesism is analogous to racism and sexism, and refers to discrimination on the basis of species. antispeciesism, then, is the theoretical and political movement opposing such discrimination and, by extension, human supremacy. it seeks to establish equality among members of all species. in the italian context, this term is preferred to, or contrasted with, the more generic and widespread animalismo, to denote a more theoretically rigorous and politically conscious form of animal rights activism — one that is more intersectional and recognizes the importance of struggles against human oppression, highlighting their connections with the fight for animal liberation. 2 the stopcasteller campaign was created to oppose the policies of the northern italian province of trento concerning the local bears population. in italy, bears are found in only two regions: in abruzzo (central italy), where coexistence with humans has not posed significant problems thanks to the judicious administration of the regional park; and in trentino, where bears were reintroduced in the late 1990s under the eu-funded life ursus repopulation project. according to this project, bears were meant to spread across the alps in the years that followed, but poor management by both national and local authorities prevented this from happening. as one might expect, the bear population grew within trento. this led to some minor conflicts between the bears and the human population — nothing serious — as well as some limited economic damage to local farmers, which prompted the local government to capture or kill bears, in violation of established bear management protocol. the most high-profile case was that of daniza, a mother bear introduced from slovenia through life ursus. daniza had an encounter with a mushroom forager in pinzolo, which resulted in the man sustaining multiple injuries, though the details of the event were never fully clarified. daniza evaded a capture order for a long time, but when she was finally caught, she died of excessive sedation. in recent years, the right-wing provincial administration has used the casteller wildlife centre, near trento, to detain “problematic” individuals. the enclosure reserved for bears is so small that it can be reasonably described as a prison. casteller was originally meant to house these individuals temporarily, pending reintroduction into the wild — but this never occurred. in the past two years, the campaign has faced increasingly repressive policies towards bears, especially following the death of andrea papi. papi, a resident of val di sole (trentino), was killed on 5 april 2023 when he encountered reggio , “happy” goats | 89 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) persecution of other bears living freely in the mountains of trentino and who were under attack by the right-wing provincial administration led by the lega nord.3 after years of stagnation,4 stopcasteller was an energizing project, built in collaboration with local groups such as fridays for future trento and, in particular, with the centro sociale bruno and other centri sociali.5 a campaign with tangible, in many ways quite practical, objectives, but also with broader ambitions, at least potentially. bears were reintroduced into trentino jj4, a bear, while out jogging — the only fatal incident of its kind in the area. a cull order was issued for jj4; she was tracked and captured, but thanks to widespread mobilization the cull was prevented, and she remains confined at the casteller facility. in the months that followed, the autonomous province of trento intensified its crackdown on bears deemed ungovernable. for an introduction to the campaign and its context, see: “stopcasteller”, assemblea antispecista, https://assembleantispecista.noblogs. org/stopcasteller/stopcasteller-eng/. 3 lega nord (the “northern league”) is a major right-wing political party in italy, founded between 1989 and 1991 from a confederation of regional independence movements in the north. it initially gained attention for its racist propaganda — first directed at southern italians, and later at migrants from outside europe. the party has enjoyed strong electoral support and participated in several centre-right governments, beginning with silvio berlusconi’s first term in 1994. since 2013, its leader has been matteo salvini, who served as deputy prime minister and interior minister from 2018 to 2019, and became known for his anti-immigration propaganda and migrant push-back policies in the mediterranean. internationally, salvini is affiliated with xenophobic and neo-fascist groups such as marine le pen’s national front in france. lega nord continues to wield considerable power at the regional and municipal levels, especially in the north (as in the case of trento), and, at times, in central italy. 4 the movement for animal liberation in italy experienced a particularly active period in the 2000s, when several radical campaigns emerged along the lines of shac (stop huntingdon animal cruelty). these included “chiudere morini” (shut down morini), a campaign against a large dog-breeding facility for vivisection; the “aip” campaign (attack the fur industry); in the early 2010s, “fermare green hill” (stop green hill), aimed at shutting down a beagle-breeding facility for vivisection owned by a multinational corporation. both morini and green hill were permanently shut down as a result of these campaigns. fur farming was banned in italy in 2022 during the covid-19 pandemic for public-health reasons  —  thanks in part to the longstanding efforts of organizations such as essere animali (many of whose members originally contributed to aip, before funding a more institutional group) and lega anti vivisezione, as well as years of anonymous direct action. in the first decade of the twenty-first century, pressure campaigns like aip enjoyed strong support significantly from the anarchist movement, while the animal liberation front became highly active. their activities declined sharply in the years that followed. by the mid-to-late 2010s, grassroots animal liberation activism had diminished considerably. 5 in italy, centri sociali [social centres] refers to spaces run by the extra-parliamentary left, intended for the organization of political, social, and cultural activities. they are typically squatted. https://assembleantispecista.noblogs.org/stopcasteller/stopcasteller-eng/ https://assembleantispecista.noblogs.org/stopcasteller/stopcasteller-eng/ 90 | reggio , “happy” goats humanimalia 15.2 (2025) between 1999 and 2002 in order to secure eu funding. later, they became a “problem”, were considered overly habituated to humans, too dangerous, too uncontrollable, or simply too numerous (bears, of course, reproduce). eventually, they were persecuted and hunted; they rebelled. they were killed and imprisoned; they escaped —  like m49 whose two extraordinary breakouts from casteller had inspired us to act.6 they were recaptured and triumphantly returned to their cages, where they were doped up on psychotropic drugs. that alone would have been enough to mobilize us, but such institutional management called for a broader critique, intersecting as it did with a specific mode of viewing the territory as a resource to be exploited, parcelled out, like one giant ski resort, and it also again raised the question of non-conforming bodies — bodies that do not recognize borders and cross them — be they animal bodies who inhabit the alpine forests, oblivious to national frontiers, human migrants seeking a better life, or indecorous, unsettling presences who dare to bring into public spaces some form of gender dissidence. for this reason, it was a valuable experience to encounter other radical groups that were antagonistic7 to the local authorities. we all cherished this experience, as if this encounter, with all its contradictions, were something to be preserved and protected — protected, for instance, from identitarianism, since what was unfolding was a dialogue, and at times a mutual fascination, between very differ6 m49 (also known as papillon) is a trentino bear who, following the protests of farmers to whom he had caused much economic damage, was captured in july 2019. within hours of being placed in the casteller facility, he escaped. he remained at large until april 2020, when he was recaptured and placed under heightened surveillance with cameras and high electric fencing. he was chemically castrated and fitted with a radio collar. nevertheless, he escaped a third time in late july 2020, generating widespread media attention and public solidarity throughout italy. he was captured again in september 2020 and has not been released since. his escape brought public scrutiny to the conditions at casteller, especially after a report by cites (a government agency for wildlife conservation) with testimonies from veterinarians responsible for m49’s care: inadequate space, sensory deprivation, isolation, and the constant administration of psychotropic drugs. for more information on m49’s story, see: reggio, “stopcasteller e gli orsi”. in english, see d’amico, “italian governor steps up”; and, more recently, giuffrida, “animal rights groups”. 7 the term antagonista has a specific political history in italy, referring to groups on the extra-parliamentary left, often associated with centri sociali. reggio , “happy” goats | 91 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) ent histories. now, the centri sociali (that rather phantasmatic label encompassing many indefinable things, including the absence of a clearly defined antispeciest consciousness) were beginning to take an interest in antispeciesm tout court. at the same time, those of us with a background in animal liberation were finally adopting an intersectional perspective capable of grappling with the complexity of positionalities beyond the tragedy of nonhuman exploitation. members of assemblea antispecista, some very young, were coming to activism with considerable political awareness and attentiveness to issues traditionally seen as external to animal advocacy. they formed a group overtly opposed to sexist, homo-transphobic, colonial, and ableist politics. this came with many contradictions but also with the determination to challenge them. nonetheless, there was always the risk that clinging to reassuring identities would hinder bridge-building. and yet we quickly found common ground with our comrades from the centri sociali, in both a slogan and an action: “smontiamo la gabbia” [“break the cage”]. this was the rallying cry of the national demonstration that launched the campaign, but it was above all a literal practice, as during the first protest several groups managed to dismantle a large section of the casteller centre’s outer fence. we found each other in animal resistance, in the immediate solidarity with the rebellious bears, with m49 — a solidarity that seemed almost more real for “them” than for “us”, we who were by now all too accustomed to treating animal revolt as a topic of discussion, an area study with a rich bibliography. news of agitu’s murder reached us amid this heady but exhausting context, and it was immediately clear how hard it would be to speak about it. agitu was not only a person but had, against her own will, become a symbol, especially in some activist circles: a symbol of liberation, of female autonomy, of antiracism, of resilience and “care”. a symbol of care because her small farm embodied the ideal of the “happy” farm: she loved her goats, took care of them, gave them ample space to graze. at the same time, her work had ecological significance, tied to the conservation of the land and the preservation of the rare and endangered mòchena goat breed. for this reason, the outrage over her murder was also the outrage of a community who 92 | reggio , “happy” goats humanimalia 15.2 (2025) had known her, supported her, and forged ties with her — a community that included many farmers (both male and female) and transcended the local sphere, as shown by the appeal from the valsusa filmfest (see page 102 below). my first reaction, i remember, was rage. the same, i believe, that many other people (always too few) felt in the face of this femicide that had brought this journey of emancipation from colonialism to a sudden, violent end. but i already knew that something problematic would surface, because i knew that the path she had chosen, within a limited range of possibilities, clashed with my own sensibility — with “our” sensibility — in at least two respects. first, there was the very fact of animal exploitation, which, even if carried out with less violence, nevertheless meant the perpetuation of a mechanism that cannot escape some material realities. for example, no matter how attentive a farmer may be to the suffering and desires of the animals she farms, even if no goats are sent to slaughter, if you want a goat to produce milk, she must produce kids, and those kids will not live happily ever after. the second aspect was precisely the notion of “loving exploitation”. when the news arrived, it had a destabilizing effect on me, in a certain sense. alongside my rage, i felt a sense of closeness to agitu’s community, which also includes people who farm animals — and this in itself disturbed me. at the same time, my awareness of the fictions behind “happy meat” resurfaced along with this sense of solidarity. we knew that the celebration of agitu’s life — its spectacularization in some cases — would play out along the axes of not only gender and race, but also of species. the oppressed was, in this case, in a position of privilege, if only because she had control over the lives of others. i found myself “unable to speak”. not only out of respect for mourning — a mourning which was already political in its expression and extended beyond her family and friends: it was the fruit of her connection with a community that was also symbolic — but also because of the sense of being unable to take a stance without betraying one’s own convictions, one’s own sensibility, was nothing new, especially for someone involved in antispeciesist politics. this paralysis reggio , “happy” goats | 93 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) stemmed from a contradiction between the push to decolonialize8 antispeciesism and the feeling that our critique of “happy meat” was important — perhaps even essential — but at the same time tainted by as-yet undefined elements of coloniality. i remember how, during those long discussions within the group, some were adamant about the rejecting the idea of “ethical” farming and insisting that agitu was not antispeciesist. but one comrade said, more or less: “i don’t think that agitu, in ethiopia, had anything even close to the privilege of thinking about animal liberation, of incorporating it into her feminist and ecological struggle — certainly not as we conceive of it — and nor did she have the privilege of putting it into practice here in italy.” her words were very important in giving shape to our unease. judging love from the “zone of being” in a 2012 essay entitled “the concept of ‘racism’ in michel foucault and frantz fanon”, ramón grosfoguel elaborates on the distinction fanon draws in black skin, white masks between the “zone of being” and the “zone of non-being”: “those subjects located above the line marking the human live in what [fanon] calls the ‘zone of being’, while those who live below this line live in the zone of ‘nonbeing.’”9 around that time, i happened to be reading this essay, and i was struck by the fact that the racial apparatus was framed in terms of the category of the human: who counts as human and who does not. in the zone of being, subjects experience a particular form of racism, namely racial privilege; in the zone of non-being, they experience racial oppression. all forms of oppression — class, gender, sexuality — are experienced very differently in these two worlds. in the zone of being, there are relative conflicts between the “self” and the “other”, but they are not racialized, because the other is still acknowledged as fundamentally human. hence these conflicts depend on mechanisms of emancipation, inclusion, and negotiation. since i am writing from this zone and from a position of relative priv8 in her book, decolonialità e privilegio, rachele borghi introduces into the italian context the latin american feminist distinction between “decolonizzare” [decolonize], meaning liberation from military and political occupation, and “decolonializzare” [decolonialize], meaning liberation from the cultural and ideological legacies of colonialism. 9 grosfoguel, “el concepto de ‘racismo’”, 94. 94 | reggio , “happy” goats humanimalia 15.2 (2025) ilege, i am familiar with these dynamics — for example, as a worker able to negotiate certain aspects of my exploitation. i also know that recourse to direct violence by those in power is always a latent possibility — it is what grosfoguel calls a “perpetual peace with exceptional moments of war”. in the zone of non-being, by contrast, negotiation is rare: “perpetual violence” and “open and blatant appropriation” are the norm — a state of “perpetual war with exceptional moments of peace”.10 these two zones, evidently, cannot be delineated in a strictly geographic sense, because the global distinction between zones of being and non-being is accompanied by the distinction between zones of internal colonialism. thus, skin colour, facial features, and religious beliefs are indicators of conditions that vary greatly based on the context. while reading the essay, i couldn’t help thinking of nonhuman animals, not only because, as i noticed, everything hinged on man, measure of all things, but more concretely because i wondered what place animals occupied in this framework. they were always situated, in every circumstance, within the zone of non-being, regardless of latitude or geopolitical context, whether in colonies, post-colonies, protectorates, or the major western metropoles. always and everywhere, they were imprisoned, violated, slaughtered — and it makes no difference how sterile, sanitized, or “humane” the slaughterhouse is. “they always come from someplace worse.”11 but perhaps this too was a form of white prejudice. after all, many non-western cultures have never made such a clearcut distinction between humans and animals. was it this prejudice, which i likely shared with many western antispeciesists, that legitimized our judgment of the ambiguity of the word “care” in agitu’s case? as if, faced with the animal tragedy, one could even question the good intentions of a refugee trying to rebuild her life? indeed, grosfoguel goes on to argue that the issue is not so much racism as a line of separation between bodies, but “epistemological 10 grosfoguel, “el concepto de ‘racismo’”, 96. 11 them, season 1, episode 1, “day 1”, written by little marvin, directed by nelson cragg, aired 9 april 2021 on amazon prime video. reggio , “happy” goats | 95 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) racism”. i discovered that “what we know today as critical theory or critical thought is the social theory produced by the historical and social experience of the ‘other’ in the zone of being.”12 he is referring to the very tools i use in my work. it’s not that they are not useful, of course. the concept of “epistemic violence” developed by gayatri chakravorty spivak, for instance — a closely related idea but one that emerges from the academic, complex, and often inaccessible tradition of postcolonial thought — first made an impression on me when i saw it used in a clear and accessible way by a critical animal studies scholar, dinesh wadiwel, to talk about fish. waldiwel describes epistemic justice “as a way to understand the capacity of systems of truth to silence particular subjects, and render visible and invisible particular forms of truth and possibility.”13 while spivak deployed this concept to deconstruct the narratives of sati (the hindu ritual of widows burning) produced by colonizers and indian fundamentalists, and how both narratives silenced the voices of colonized women, wadiwel applies it to the debate around the suffering of fish and welfare-based actions to alleviate it. exploited animals, he argues, are caught in a double bind produced by the dominant epistemic framework: on the one hand, the narrative claiming that animals do not suffer and indeed “want” to die (like indian women did according to the patriarchal, fundamentalist version of sati); on the other hand, the saviour narrative of animal advocates who cannot imagine any alternative but to save animals from suffering or, at least, fight to reduce it. just as spivak might suggest there is an epistemic violence in imagining that the solution — the only solution — that indian women wanted to the ritual practice of sati was to be saved by british colonisers, we might similarly ask if the only solution available to the problem of large-scale human utilisation of animals is to reduce or avoid suffering (to ‘save’ animals who suffer).14 12 grosfoguel, “el concepto de ‘racismo’”, 97. 13 wadiwel, “do fish resist?”, 205. 14 wadiwel, “do fish resist?”, 206. 96 | reggio , “happy” goats humanimalia 15.2 (2025) there is, then, a possible approach from outside this suffocating framework: fish resist violence, and it is therefore evident that they do not “want to die”, and that their salvation does not come by way of the well-meaning, paternalistic animal advocate who argues for improving the conditions of their exploitation. going back to grosfoguel and decolonial though: leftist critical theory is an insufficient framework for “understanding either the problems experienced, or the way in which processes of violence and appropriation are articulated in the domination and exploitation of those subjects who belong to the zone of non-being.”15 might it be the case, then, that antispeciesist activists were judging from within the zone of being a person who was trying to survive in the zone of non-being? and — to complicate matters further — might they have felt authorized to do so because they were defending someone who, like the goats, had always inhabited a zone even more invisible and obscure than non-being itself? a zone of “absolute non-being”? vandana shiva and the pig and yet, we did not lack the necessary tools to deconstruct the rhetoric of “happy meat”, even within the leftist movement, where such rhetoric thrived and constituted a powerful barrier to the awareness of human privilege, thanks to genuino clandestino and similar organizations.16 for years, various activists, collectives, and groups had cautioned against his rhetoric. i was part of a working group, bioviolenza, whose name synthesized a particular discursive turn that had taken place in italy, which led to the promotion of animal products as bio or biologico [organic]. bioviolenza began to mobilize precisely against those entities that promoted such products. we studied the issue, wrote and disseminated texts analysing the various facets of “happy meat” rhetoric. there were of course those 15 grosfoguel, “el concepto de ‘racismo’”, 98. 16 genuino clandestino is a territorial network of “farmers, artisans, students, and rural workers” founded in italy in 2010. they organize grassroots markets for local products with a focus on food sovereignty. there were public debates between antispeciesist activists and members of genuino clandestino, who support traditional practices of extensive farming. see https://genuinoclandestino.it/. https://genuinoclandestino.it/ reggio , “happy” goats | 97 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) who didn’t understand why “radical” animal advocates would target small farmers, while industrial producers like cremonini17 and mcdonald’s were still out there running rampant. and indeed, our first protest was directed against slow food, at the salone del gusto in turin.18 at the time, slow food was beginning to become a formidable force, and its founder, carlo petrini, had become a key figure for a certain strand of “left-wing” culture (though he was also courted “from the right”). in essence, their operation involved constructing an imaginary built on a mixture of appeals to traditional values, the land, community, consumer identity, and, above all, food: good, very good, populist — yet somehow also aristocratic — healthy, ecological, and fair. in all of this, one of the elements was the ideal of traditional, “sustainable” livestock farming, along with the usual corollaries of locavorism, resource conservation, and animal welfare. with the idea of disrupting this narrative, in 2010 we staged a sit-in outside the festival venue. our goal was to make visible the “silent guests” at this immense banquet attended by thousands, not least because the event was cosponsored by another initiative called 17 cremonini is the largest private producer of beef and processed meat in europe, comparable to tyson in the us. it “supplies hamburger meat to mcdonald’s and burger king in italy and other countries”. see “luigi cremonini & family”, forbes, https://www.forbes. com/profile/luigi-cremonini/. 18 bioviolenza describes itself as follows: “the bioviolenza project was created by activists to expose an emerging strategy within the vast world of animal exploitation for food production (farming, fishing, and hunting): that of promoting supposedly ‘sustainable’, ‘ethical’, or ‘organic’ [in italian, bio, from biologico] methods of farming and slaughter. these are marketed as respectful of the environment, workers’ rights, local communities, and even of ‘animal welfare’. we argue that this approach is anything but ethical, as it does not advance the abolition of animal slavery or radically question human–nonhuman relations. we believe this rhetoric must be challenged and its contradictions exposed: the façade of ‘sustainability’ of these farms, ostensibly opposed to factory farming, allows consumers to silence their consciences while continuing to support, commercially and politically, an unjustifiable and irredeemable massacre.” see https://bioviolenza.blogspot.com/p/chi-siamo.html. the bioviolenza project is conceived both as a critique of the ideology of “happy meat” and as an organizing tool for protests against public expressions of this ideology. one such case was the salone del gusto, a major food fair in italy featuring producers from around the world, organized by slow food italy. the latter is part of the international slow food association, which promotes “the right to pleasure and to good, clean, and fair food for all, as part of the quest for prosperity and happiness for current and future humanity and for the entire network of living beings”. slow food supports networks of local producers offering ecologically sustainable, high-quality gastronomic products. see https://www.slowfood.it/. https://www.forbes.com/profile/luigi-cremonini/ https://www.forbes.com/profile/luigi-cremonini/ https://bioviolenza.blogspot.com/p/chi-siamo.html https://www.slowfood.it/ 98 | reggio , “happy” goats humanimalia 15.2 (2025) terra madre (mother earth), which had a vaguely more political, third worldist flavour to it. terra madre brought together farmers and indigenous activists from around the world in a shared struggle for food sovereignty, culminating in a sort of final gathering at the palaisozaki arena, where thousands of delegates were to witness a debate featuring various high-profile speakers, including carlo petrini, serge latouche, and vandana shiva. despite being paired with what was essentially a food expo masquerading as a political-cultural — with huge crowds of gourmands sampling delicacies at commercial stands, the festival gave the slow food the credentials to engage in institutional politics while also gaining support among the nonprofit sector. it opened up a series of discussions on the use of “resources”, food waste, agricultural models, and the practices of marginalized non-western communities displaced by agribusiness giants — but it was also clear that it offered fertile ground for expanding the rhetoric of “sustainable” farming. so we showed up at the arena with the intent of forcing the public to listen to the issues we had been screaming into a megaphone about in the street earlier that day. we opted for a surprise action.19 one activist in a pig costume covered in fake blood stormed onto the stage and collapsed, physically and symbolically, at the feet of the speakers. amidst the general embarrassment, a second comrade took the stage, leveraging slow food’s performative commitment to democracy and open dialogue. (it worked: petrini prevented security from intervening before she finished speaking). meanwhile, other activists in the crowd handed out flyers denouncing the rhetoric of “happy meat”. the speech was improvised, passionate, tough — but also confident in the possibility of mutual understanding, of finding a common language, at least in part — not so much with the “big names”, but with the general public. i was particularly struck by the alternating booing and applause: the audience wasn’t split into two opposing sides. instead, there were overlapping emotions and conflicting reactions that overlapped. in any case, intense feelings that couldn’t 19 see francia, “blitz animalista”. reggio , “happy” goats | 99 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) be contained. by applauding, they were expressing solidarity with a message opposing slavery and exploitation, in defence of the most vulnerable. the boos, perhaps, were triggered by what felt like an attack on identities forged with great effort and acknowledged only rarely, on a few precious occasions like this one. that, at least, is how i interpreted crowd’s reactions as i lay at the speakers’ feet. because i was the pig, and because i was rendered immobile, i was asking myself these questions for the duration of the whole speech, until the police took us away. i remember wondering what vandana shiva was thinking, a few inches away from me. (i may have splashed her shoes with fake blood.) in a situation where we were both protesters, she was more of a potential ally than a political enemy. could she understand our protest? or might she have misunderstood it completely? perhaps she experienced the intrusion of the animal issue as a nuisance in this occasion — an annoying “deviation” from an environmentalist path of liberation, emancipation, of speaking out? (is this also how agitu’s community instinctively reacts to those who raise the problem of the goats? the issues are the same: liberation, emancipation, speaking out, ecology). predictably, in the debate that followed, the panellists avoided the topic altogether, aided by petrini’s deft framing, which cast the activists’ message as mere sentimentality, to be met with paternalistic benevolence — a framing conveniently embodied in the figure of the activist who had spoken: young, very young, and female; the idealistic “little girl”, full of good intentions, emotional, a little impulsive. (it would be worth discussing, at some point, how political movements internalize this form of sexism and adultism, silencing “little girls” even before their opponents do. at the time, we chose not to give a fuck about whether she would be taken seriously for her age and gender.) later, i thought again about how vandana shiva might have experienced those moments, and whether there truly was a short circuit between colonialism and antispeciesism. perhaps she simply saw us as white vegans who want to teach indigenous people about nonviolence, respect for other forms of life, even empathy. would she have been wrong? but i also wondered if it wasn’t more important to underline that slow food itself represented the 100 | reggio , “happy” goats humanimalia 15.2 (2025) true expression of colonialism, appropriating the language of marginalized global communities to gain legitimacy in the industrialized centre. and so we return, ten years later, to agitu’s goats. the ambiguity between care and exploitation was clearly at the heart of the matter. but even on this point, we did not lack critical tools. agnese pignataro, feminist and antispeciesist, activist and scholar, had written a detailed article deconstructing the discourse of “care” in animal farming.20 this discourse had been gaining traction in france thanks to the work of jocelyne porcher, a farmer who adopted a feminist lens to frame her relationship with nonhuman animals as non-hierarchical. drawing on standpoint theory and the ethics of care as elaborated by joan tronto,21 pignataro dismantled several of porcher’s arguments to show how livestock farming could not be considered as a practice of care. she specifically questioned the idea of reciprocity between farmer and animal. in the same period, antispeciesist scholar marco maurizi had written a short essay following a series of discussions on veganism held in various centri sociali.22 in it, he clearly identified the key points of tension that made the debate between vegans and supporters of “grassroots” farming so fraught. i especially remember one evening at a centro sociale in milan where one of the antispeciesist activists in attendance insisted on framing the issue in a moralizing way, focusing blame on individual consumers of animal products and hindering any real political debate. and on the opposing side, i remember the resistance of the advocates of self-production, who, in practice, did little more than defend the good old traditional practices. unsurprisingly, marxist thinkers like pignataro and maurizi were highly critical of appeals to tradition as a value in itself — but there was also no shortage of contributions by the anarchists. in the years that followed, a self-published book by the troglodita tribe collective began to circulate, entitled la fattoria (in)felice: animali e contadini [the (un) 20 pignataro, “allevamento di animali”. 21 tronto, moral boundaries. 22 maurizi, “antispecismo”. reggio , “happy” goats | 101 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) happy farm: animals and peasants], which directly addressed this nostalgic rural imaginary.23 meanwhile, the north american scholar matthew cole had gone so far as to invoke “saint foucault” and his notion of pastoral power to frame the discourse around animal welfare.24 following the slow food protest, the trajectory of the bioviolenza collective intersected with the protests against expo 2015 in milan, where the hypocrisy of “good, clean, and fair” food was on full display. in the meantime, a wealth of critical material and activist experience had accumulated.25 a decade on, the topic was well-established. still, thanks to the intersectional currents within antispeciesism, new critical frameworks continued to emerge. thus, in her book beasts of burden, the artist and animal and disability rights activist sunaura taylor framed the reality of “happy meat” from a situated perspective: in many ways the thinking behind the humane meat movement is a philosophy built on the idea of interdependence. domesticated animals and human beings have evolved together to be interdependent — animals help human beings, and we in turns help the animals — or so the argument goes. the interdependence theories of the new meat movement nonetheless still reward the independent at the expense of the dependent and the stronger at the expense of the more vulnerable. in contrast, disability communities have long recognized that interdependence is not a mutual-advantage calculation. instead a disability perspective on interdependence recognizes that we are all vulnerable beings who will go in and out of dependency and who will give and receive care (more often than not doing both at once) over the course of our lives. what disability can bring to the humane meat conversation is a much-needed analysis of what it means to be accountable to being who are vulnerable.26 23 troglodita tribe, la fattoria (in)felice. 24 cole, “‘animal machines’”. 25 see the recommended readings listed on the bioviolenza website: http://bioviolenza. blogspot.com/p/materiali-e-letture-consigliate.html. see also collettivo bioviolenza, “la ‘carne felice’”; gelli, “alimenta il conflitto”; and bertuzzi and reggio, “no expo”. 26 taylor, beasts of burden, 171. http://bioviolenza.blogspot.com/p/materiali-e-letture-consigliate.html http://bioviolenza.blogspot.com/p/materiali-e-letture-consigliate.html 102 | reggio , “happy” goats humanimalia 15.2 (2025) herd immunity these tools were important. we wrote a statement about agitu’s death, which generated some hostility, but it was, i believe, the most honest and constructive exercise of practical thinking we could offer in that moment.27 however, we had to deal with a more concrete problem: the fate of the goats. agitu left behind some eighty goats, some of them pregnant. the most obvious solution was for local farmers to take them in. this possibility was also framed as a way of respecting agitu’s legacy and the spirit of care that had guided her work. what interested us, however, was how the goats could find a way out of exploitation. but how can one develop an action against exploitation if one cannot even name it? up until this point, the critique of the “happy meat” rhetoric within the movement could perhaps have been seen as a kind of peevishness — a matter of concern for antispeciesist purists only. but now the issue was becoming decidedly concrete, because it was this very rhetoric that was pushing for the goats to be placed with local farmers. in material terms, this would have meant the immediate slaughter of the newborns (many of the goats were pregnant). the symbolic investment was evident. the valsusa filmfest had amplified an appeal by marzia verona (writer, shepherd, and farmer) and marta fossati (goat farmer): “let’s post something on our social media […] something that speaks to who we are. i am calling on women breeders, farmers, veterinarians, salaried shepherds, women involved in the agricultural/livestock world in any capacity.”28 this was not just a call to reclaim mountain traditions. the authors of the appeal were leveraging the figure of the woman farmer — a strong, independent woman, connected with nature — who could bring to this traditionally male domain a particular aptitude for care, which could find expression in these photos on social media.29 this struck me. 27 assemblea antispecista, “agitu ideo gudeta e le ‘sue’ capre: tra patriarcato, razzismo e specismo”, 20 january 2021, https://assembleantispecista.noblogs.org/post/2021/01/20/ agitu-ideo-gudeta-e-le-sue-capre-tra-patriarcato-razzismo-e-specismo/. 28 marzia verona, “la voce delle donne”, pascoli e stalle, 31 dec. 2020, https://pascoliestalleblog. wordpress.com/2020/12/31/la-voce-delle-donne/.. 29 marzia verona, “sensazioni agrodolci”, pascoli e stalle, 8 jan. 2021. https://pascoliestalleblog. https://assembleantispecista.noblogs.org/post/2021/01/20/agitu-ideo-gudeta-e-le-sue-capre-tra-patriarcato-razzismo-e-specismo/ https://assembleantispecista.noblogs.org/post/2021/01/20/agitu-ideo-gudeta-e-le-sue-capre-tra-patriarcato-razzismo-e-specismo/ https://pascoliestalleblog.wordpress.com/2020/12/31/la-voce-delle-donne/ https://pascoliestalleblog.wordpress.com/2020/12/31/la-voce-delle-donne/ https://pascoliestalleblog.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/sensazioni-agrodolci-2/ reggio , “happy” goats | 103 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) verona collected many of the photos under the hashtag #donneforti (#strongwomen): they mostly featured women farmers tenderly holding baby lambs, sheep, and shepherd dogs. they seemed to express genuine care. some images even recalled the images you see of antispeciesist sanctuaries for animals removed from the circuit of exploitation. perhaps for this reason, they revealed the most profound — and the most subtle — contradiction at the heart of the “happy meat” paradigm. some photos came from non-western contexts, reinforcing an image of resistance to eurocentrism. the messages of solidarity also spoke of abuse, intimidation, and the killing of animals carried out because they were women — but also referred to sexist comments, insults, and sexual innuendoes relating to the photos of women in close-up with nonhuman animals. mixed feelings, again. the aspects of resistance to the patriarchy and colonialism resonated with me precisely because of the resemblance to agitu’s story. but it was precisely the symbolic power of these aspects that rendered the animals’ perspective invisible. a form of epistemic counter-violence, entirely legitimate in and of itself, which nevertheless turns against other oppressed subjects by reproducing, uncritically and knowingly, the epistemic violence of anthropocentrism. the fate of the goats hinged on a battle over the wishes of a dead person: “this is what agitu would have wanted”, people said, usually in order to argue for the keeping the herd together, preserving the rare breed, and continuing “sustainable” cheese production. but another idea that was circulating was that agitu’s empathetic approach might be better honoured by allowing the goats she had loved to live in peace. a network of animal sanctuaries, prompted by our collective, proposed that the goats be rehomed in places where they could live their lives without being expected to produce.30 the principal argument against this proposal was the supposed need to keep the herd intact, either because it is what agitu would have wanted, or because it was necessary for the preservation of the breed. this discourse on “the conservation of the race” [conservazione della razza], while never openly racist, clearly wordpress.com/2021/01/08/sensazioni-agrodolci-2/.. 30 bardi, “portiamo le capre”. https://pascoliestalleblog.wordpress.com/2021/01/08/sensazioni-agrodolci-2/ 104 | reggio , “happy” goats humanimalia 15.2 (2025) reflected a logic of racial purity, whereby certain individuals must be sacrificed for the sake of the “bloodline”. except that in this case, ironically, the victims are not members of some “inferior” race, but rather precisely of the one to be preserved. in the first weeks, the goats remained with a young shepherd who volunteered to care for them during this transitional period. in the meantime, the words of the activist feminoska, who defined antispeciesism as “an emotionally exhausting experience”,31 seemed to describe the situation perfectly. whereas francesca manzini, a comrade from the centro sociale bruno di trento,32 described it as disturbing: like transfeminism, antispeciesism is not a badge we can pin to our chests without fully embracing its radicality. it equips us with tools that permit us to view the episodes that infect us daily through entirely new and very powerful lenses: where others see neutrality, we see the many constraints and potentials that come with being oppressed — or an oppressor.33 a parrhesiastic position34 in which we are constantly forced, not to speak truth to power, but to “speak through” subjects who themselves hold hardly any power and who risk appearing as the object of indignation, as the enemy. agitu herself seems to have been disturbed, if not by antispecism, then by the relationship she had built with “her” animals, since on at least one occasion she had said that she struggled with the prospect of having to separate herself from the kids and tried, whenever possible, to give some of them up for adoption to avoid slaughter. in the conclusion to gender trouble, judith butler observes, almost in passing, that: the theories of feminist identity that elaborate predicates of color, sexuality, ethnicity, class, and able-bodiedness invar31 feminoska, “perché essere antispecista”. 32 francesca went on to cofound the intersectional antispeciesist collective scobi. 33 manzini, “un punto di vista antispecista”. 34 see foucault, parrēsia. reggio , “happy” goats | 105 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) iably close with an embarrassed “etc.” at the end of the list. through this horizontal trajectory of adjectives, these positions strive to encompass a situated subject, but invariably fail to be complete. this failure, however, is instructive: what political impetus is to be derived from the exasperated “etc.” that so often occurs at the end of such lines?35 regardless of the answer that an antispeciesist might give to this question, i believe that the disturbance caused by this “etc.” must be taken very seriously. the politics of animal liberation has often seemed to me like an attempt, an almost obligatory one, to take fully upon oneself the consequences that such embarrassment can generate, one of those consequences being an “instructive” failure. the nonhuman “etc.” of the species axis, or, more concretely, of the gaze that includes other animals, provokes a gestalt reorientation: you see everything under a different, rather unsettling, light. one of the first things you find is that animal exploitation is everywhere — in every object, every commodity; that human history is founded on it, literally on animal blood — and, perhaps even more disconcertingly, that domination over other animals is present in our ideas, in the ways we are taught to think from childhood. going back to agitu’s story, this is perhaps the discomfort, or the embarrassment of the “etc.”, a placeholder that, by definition, has no fixed content, and which may therefore allow unexpected elements to erupt into the space of political legibility. if i say “etc.” — a little word in which most people “see neutrality” — there is always the chance that someone will see nonhuman animals in it. conclusions the story has an unhappy ending. in a certain sense, the worst possible ending. the herd was neither kept together nor did it escape the cycle of exploitation. after about twenty days, and due in part to freezing temperatures, the goats were distributed among various local farmers.36 to indulge in the post-mortem overdetermination that 35 butler, gender trouble, 182. 36 “fa troppo freddo in valle dei mocheni”, l’adige.it, 20 january 2021, https://www.ladige.it/ cronaca/2021/01/20/fa-troppo-freddo-in-valle-dei-mocheni-trasferite-e-smistate-le-caprehttps://www.ladige.it/cronaca/2021/01/20/fa-troppo-freddo-in-valle-dei-mocheni-trasferite-e-smistate-le-capre-di-agitu-la-tristezza-di-beatrice-vi-auguro-il-meglio-1.2831893 https://www.ladige.it/cronaca/2021/01/20/fa-troppo-freddo-in-valle-dei-mocheni-trasferite-e-smistate-le-capre-di-agitu-la-tristezza-di-beatrice-vi-auguro-il-meglio-1.2831893 106 | reggio , “happy” goats humanimalia 15.2 (2025) was common at the time: agitu would not have wanted it to end this way. but this outcome tells us little. it was, after all, the outcome of a series of contingencies, bureaucratic hurdles, and our limited ability to influence the situation — despite the debates, the appeals, or the political approaches to the status of non-humans. it does tell us something about the frame of reference. the institutions in trentino seem to have distinguished themselves in their inability — or unwillingness — to resolve the situation: municipalities, provinces, and regions are often happy to delegate responsibility and management of animals to groups and businesses, like the shelters, which offer to help without asking anything in return. it does not escape our attention that these are the same institutions responsible for the mismanagement of the coexistence of humans and bears, a coexistence that in other regions (e.g. in abruzzo) appears to be less problematic. but, above all, one must wonder what conception underlies the culde-sac in which agitu’s goats found themselves, where the only conceivable condition seems to be that of bodies in production. the conflict between the need to keep the herd together to protect the breed and the demand to save the individuals by separating them (and sterilizing them), could have been resolved through simple, lowcost solution: let the herd live freely and autonomously in the valle dei mocheni. could have been — but clearly this solution lies beyond the discursive regime, not only that of the farmers and the institutions, but even some animal advocates. to the farmers, free goats are unproductive. to the politicians, they are unmanageable (like the bears, even if not as dangerous). and to the animal advocates, they are in constant need of protection. to some extent, all parties involved share the same anthropocentric assumption: that the land is “ours” to exploit and to manage (more or less benevolently). the dominant narrative is one of infantilization:37 the goats are “happy” so long as a human cares for them. without humans, they are assumed to be incapable of finding food, shelter, caring for their young, or escaping predators — and guess who the predators are in di-agitu-la-tristezza-di-beatrice-vi-auguro-il-meglio-1.2831893. 37 manzini, “un punto di vista antispecista”. https://www.ladige.it/cronaca/2021/01/20/fa-troppo-freddo-in-valle-dei-mocheni-trasferite-e-smistate-le-capre-di-agitu-la-tristezza-di-beatrice-vi-auguro-il-meglio-1.2831893 reggio , “happy” goats | 107 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) this area: the bears.38 the relation with the breeder becomes a reciprocal exchange: food and refuge in return for milk and meat. this narrative, which dictates what is “best” for the subject without ever consulting them, obscures its own violence. the kids separated from their mothers and sent to slaughter represent an exercise of power that is inseparable from production. the moral burden for this was placed squarely on agitu by the more vulgar animal advocates, as if she, not the broader system of production, were the killer. broader not only because it determines the economic rules (i cannot think of an economic context in which it is possible to run a profitable livestock business while sparing newborns and “unproductive” animals), but because of its suffocating entanglement of colonialism and speciesism: the only “salvation” available to a migrant anti-land grabbing activist was to participate in the oppression of someone even more vulnerable. the irony is that land grabbing is deadly not only for colonized peoples, but also for the nonhuman animals who inhabit the forests. in such contexts, animals and animalized humans are natural allies with a common enemy. the racial and anthropocentric apparatuses of the “first world” aim to destroy this alliance by suggesting total compatibility between the resistance of people like agitu and the “gentle” exploitation of other animals. there is no simple recipe for escaping this cul-de-sac. not for me, at least. perhaps, however, one useful ingredient is to make anti-speciesism even more disturbing. certainly, it should be more situated, more attentive to exploitation and to the intersectional logics of power — but also, perhaps for that very reason, also more uncomfortable. a continued resistance to the sensation of aphonia, of being unable to speak, unable to risk speaking. (are we disturbing you? don’t ask why we allow ourselves to speak — ask why you feel disturbed). but naturally, we must understand what precedes us. the terrible reputation of the “animal rights activists”, or of the “vegans”, for starters. the accusations levelled at agitu remind us: murderer, farmer, exploiter. and then the allure of “happy meat” within the movements themselves. 38 la capra felice was also committed to protecting the mòchena goat breed from bears — a further element that complicates any antispeciesist reading of this story. 108 | reggio , “happy” goats humanimalia 15.2 (2025) and, again, the conflict between ecology and antispeciesism, between species and individuals, becomes a new essentialism: sending kids to slaughter to save the mòchena goat breed. then there are the complex hierarchies of value between wildness and domestication. while the province of trento was under fire for killing bears, hunters and breeders rallied to its defence, complaining about how aggressive these specimens were, citing bear attacks and claiming damage to their livelihoods; someone pointed out that bear attacks are actually extremely rare, while those by cattle are infinitely more frequent, but the latter never become a public “issue”, presumably because it is accepted that livestock play an important economic role, which is worth a little collateral damage. domesticated animals enjoy greater protection than wild ones — until the moment they are slaughtered, of course. conversely, environmentalism, as ecofeminist marti kheel argued over thirty years ago, tends to give primacy to the wild. this inversion of perspectives is equally problematic, having as much to do with the prioritization of the species over sentient individuals as with a patriarchal worldview. until recently, in radical animal advocacy, the “wild” was the domain of untamed, active, ferocious animals, while factory farms were the realm of passive, helpless, feminized creatures; and “pets” (“companion” animals) were seen as an abomination, an institution to be abolished. wild animals follow their “nature”; the others are perverse, unnatural. this explains why it remains easier to rally around bears than goats. the real reason, of course, is obvious: we exploit goats. they are on our dinner plates. their milk and cheese are in our supermarkets. we eat them. not so with the bears. for their part, many animal advocates/anti-speciesists struggle to imagine a herd that is simply left to roam free. during this time, a story was making the rounds on social media — a bizarre story, but certainly reason for hope and for solidarity for those who fight for the liberation of animals (and not only). in spain, three parrots were reportedly opening the cages of captive birds to help them escape.39 they had learned how to open the locks and had formed a group 39 “i pappagalli che aprono le gabbie”, resistenza animale, 21 january 2021, https:// resistenzanimale.noblogs.org/post/2021/01/27/i-pappagalli-che-aprono-le-gabbie/. https://resistenzanimale.noblogs.org/post/2021/01/27/i-pappagalli-che-aprono-le-gabbie/ https://resistenzanimale.noblogs.org/post/2021/01/27/i-pappagalli-che-aprono-le-gabbie/ reggio , “happy” goats | 109 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) of liberators. this news was thrilling — not only from an ethological or cognitive standpoint, but politically: animals resist, we’ve always known that, but they resist collectively, non-violently, and altruistically. still, the first response to this news story on the average animal advocacy group’s page was concern that the freed birds, having lived in captivity, are not adapted to a life in freedom. a grotesque echo of the mainstream media’s reaction the animal liberation front raids: “hundreds of mink freed — many will die,” they say, or “these terrorists are crazy; they are harming the very animals they want to help” (read: “they were better off in those tiny cages, awaiting electrocution”). therefore: dwell in contradiction, avoid moralism, be the killjoy. “killjoy” in sara ahmed’s sense of disturbing the harmony of communities built on the exclusion of some other, even if, at times, it means ruining a moment of mourning, like wearing the wrong thing to a funeral. at the same time know that if you accept this game, the killjoys are many, and you might even realize that their own position is not outside of coloniality or other forms of privilege. it will be embarrassing, but it will allow us to really talk to each other. works cited bardi, silvia. “portiamo le capre di agitu nei santuari per animali.” la nazione, 1 november 2021. https://www.lanazione. it/cronaca/portiamo-le-capre-di-agitunei-santuari-per-animali-la-richiesta-alsindaco-1.5902516. bertuzzi, niccolò, and marco reggio. “no expo e antispecismo: un incontro mancato.” liberazioni, no. 22 (2015): 51–68. http://www.liberazioni.eu/ liberazioni-n-22/. borghi, rachele. decolonialità e privilegio: pratiche femministe e critica al sistemamondo. milano: meltemi, 2020. butler, judith. gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity. london: routledge, 1990. cole, matthew. “from ‘animal machines’ to ‘happy meat’? foucault’s ideas of disciplinary and pastoral power applied to ‘animal-centred’ welfare discourse.” animals 1, no. 1 (2011): 83–101. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani1010083. collettivo bioviolenza. “la ‘carne felice’.” in smontare la gabbia. anticapitalismo e movimento di liberazione animale, edited by niccolò bertuzzi and marco reggio, 67–81. milano: mimesis, 2019. d’amico, margherita. “italian governor steps up his battle against bears in trentino region.” the guardian, 23 may 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2023/may/23/italian-governorsteps-up-war-bears-trentino-region https://www.lanazione.it/cronaca/portiamo-le-capre-di-agitu-nei-santuari-per-animali-la-richiesta-al-sindaco-1.5902516 https://www.lanazione.it/cronaca/portiamo-le-capre-di-agitu-nei-santuari-per-animali-la-richiesta-al-sindaco-1.5902516 https://www.lanazione.it/cronaca/portiamo-le-capre-di-agitu-nei-santuari-per-animali-la-richiesta-al-sindaco-1.5902516 https://www.lanazione.it/cronaca/portiamo-le-capre-di-agitu-nei-santuari-per-animali-la-richiesta-al-sindaco-1.5902516 http://www.liberazioni.eu/liberazioni-n-22/ http://www.liberazioni.eu/liberazioni-n-22/ https://doi.org/10.3390/ani1010083 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/23/italian-governor-steps-up-war-bears-trentino-region https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/23/italian-governor-steps-up-war-bears-trentino-region https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/23/italian-governor-steps-up-war-bears-trentino-region 110 | reggio , “happy” goats humanimalia 15.2 (2025) feminoska. “perché essere antispecista è così emozionalmente estenuante.” animaliena, september 27, 2018. https:// animaliena.wordpress.com/2018/09/27/ perche-essere-antispecista-e-cosiemozionalmente-estenuante/. foucault, michel. discourse and truth and parrēsia. edited by henri-paul fruchaud and daniele lorenzini. english ed. established by nancy luxon. chicago: university of chicago press, 2019. francia, silvia. “blitz animalista: terra madre chiude col rosso.” la stampa, 25 october 2010. https://www.lastampa. it/torino/2010/10/25/news/blitzanimalista-br-terra-madre-chiude-colrosso-br-1.36998650/ gelli, francesca. “alimenta il conflitto: riflessioni sperimentali su antispecismo e anticapitalismo.” in smontare la gabbia, edited by niccolò bertuzzi and marco reggio, 121–131. milano: mimesis, 2019. giuffrida, angela. “animal rights groups decry ‘brutal’ killing of bear by italian forestry police.” the guardian, 7 february 2024. https://www. theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/07/ animal-rights-groups-decry-brutalkilling-of-bear-by-italian-forestrypolice. grosfoguel, ramón. “el concepto de ‘racismo’ en michel foucault y frantz fanon: ¿teorizar desde la zona del ser o desde la zona del no-ser?” tabula rasa 16 (2012): 79–102. https://doi. org/10.25058/20112742.112 manzini, francesca. “un punto di vista antispecista sulle capre appartenute ad agitu ideo gudeta.” global project. january 20, 2021. https://www. globalproject.info/it/in_movimento/ un-punto-di-vista-antispecista-sullecapre-appartenute-ad-agitu-ideogudeta/23214. maurizi, marco. “antispecismo, allevamento tradizionale e autoproduzione. note per un dibattito che non manchi l’essenziale.” bioviolenza. march 29, 2011. http://bioviolenza. blogspot.com/2011/03/antispecismoallevamento-tradizionale-e.html. pignataro, agnese. “allevamento di animali domestici ed etica del care: armonia o conflitto?” dep – deportate, esuli e profughe no. 23 (2013): 84–99. https://www.unive.it/pag/31439/. reggio, marco. cospirazione animale. tra azione diretta e intersezionalità. milan: meltemi 2022. reggio, marco. “stopcasteller e gli orsi prigionieri: una lotta intersezionale.” assemblea antispecista, 12 march 2021. https://assembleantispecista.noblogs. org/post/2021/03/12/stopcastellere-gli-orsi-prigionieri-una-lottaintersezionale/. singer, peter. animal liberation. new york: harper, 2009. taylor, sunaura. beasts of burden: animal and disability liberation. new york: the new press, 2017. troglodita tribe. la fattoria (in)felice. animali e contadini. aprilia: ortica, 2023. tronto, joan. moral boundaries: a political argument for the ethic of care. london: routledge, 1994. wadiwel, dinesh joseph. “do fish resist?” cultural studies review 22, no. 1 (2016): 196–242. https://doi.org/10.5130/csr. v22i1.4363. https://www.lastampa.it/torino/2010/10/25/news/blitz-animalista-br-terra-madre-chiude-col-rosso-br-1.36998650/ https://www.lastampa.it/torino/2010/10/25/news/blitz-animalista-br-terra-madre-chiude-col-rosso-br-1.36998650/ https://www.lastampa.it/torino/2010/10/25/news/blitz-animalista-br-terra-madre-chiude-col-rosso-br-1.36998650/ https://www.lastampa.it/torino/2010/10/25/news/blitz-animalista-br-terra-madre-chiude-col-rosso-br-1.36998650/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/07/animal-rights-groups-decry-brutal-killing-of-bear-by-italian-forestry-police https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/07/animal-rights-groups-decry-brutal-killing-of-bear-by-italian-forestry-police https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/07/animal-rights-groups-decry-brutal-killing-of-bear-by-italian-forestry-police https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/07/animal-rights-groups-decry-brutal-killing-of-bear-by-italian-forestry-police https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/07/animal-rights-groups-decry-brutal-killing-of-bear-by-italian-forestry-police https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.112 https://doi.org/10.25058/20112742.112 https://www.globalproject.info/it/in_movimento/un-punto-di-vista-antispecista-sulle-capre-appartenute-ad-agitu-ideo-gudeta/23214 https://www.globalproject.info/it/in_movimento/un-punto-di-vista-antispecista-sulle-capre-appartenute-ad-agitu-ideo-gudeta/23214 https://www.globalproject.info/it/in_movimento/un-punto-di-vista-antispecista-sulle-capre-appartenute-ad-agitu-ideo-gudeta/23214 https://www.globalproject.info/it/in_movimento/un-punto-di-vista-antispecista-sulle-capre-appartenute-ad-agitu-ideo-gudeta/23214 https://www.globalproject.info/it/in_movimento/un-punto-di-vista-antispecista-sulle-capre-appartenute-ad-agitu-ideo-gudeta/23214 https://www.unive.it/pag/31439/ https://assembleantispecista.noblogs.org/post/2021/03/12/stopcasteller-e-gli-orsi-prigionieri-una-lotta-intersezionale/ https://assembleantispecista.noblogs.org/post/2021/03/12/stopcasteller-e-gli-orsi-prigionieri-una-lotta-intersezionale/ https://assembleantispecista.noblogs.org/post/2021/03/12/stopcasteller-e-gli-orsi-prigionieri-una-lotta-intersezionale/ https://assembleantispecista.noblogs.org/post/2021/03/12/stopcasteller-e-gli-orsi-prigionieri-una-lotta-intersezionale/ https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v22i1.4363 https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v22i1.4363 _heading=h.gjdgxs howell, review of pearson a caring and coping in the city of dogs philip howell review of: chris pearson, dogopolis: how dogs and humans made modern new york, london, and paris. animal lives. chicago: chicago university press, 2021. 259 pp.; 21 illus. $24.00 (pb), $95.00 (hb). philip howell is professor of historical geography and fellow of emmanuel college, cambridge, uk. email: pmh1000@cam.ac.uk book review chris pearson’s dogopolis is both an excellent introduction to the history of dogs in the modern western city and a substantial contribution to that history in its own right. dog opolis covers some topics that are relatively well known to historians of animal–human relations in modern times, such as the controversy over vivisection in britain and the battle against rabies in britain, france, and the us, but he also introduces much less familiar themes, such as the abortive introduction of police dogs and the beginning of the war against dog mess. there is no better guide than pearson to the ways in which dogs were caught up in the civic dialogue of modern western societies. most notably, pearson offers a transnational urban history of dogs rather than sticking to the national frames that are still far more common in animal history. paris, london, and new york stand in for the modern west — a period ranging from the early nineteenth century to the beginning of the second world war — and pearson makes a compelling case for a municipal confrontation with common canine problems. he argues that the result of these scientific, administrative, and popular deliberations was “dogopolis”, an entirely new model of human–canine relations that includes dogs in urban life, under specific conditions and at a certain cost. the great utility of pearson’s history is to show how things that we think of as familiar and largely uncontentious, such as the presence of dogs in our cities, are the result of a long history of debates and practices. some of these interventions are obvious, such as sanitation and public health, but others are more obscure, taking in philosophical, cultural, and eminently political questions about the place of the dog in competing visions of urban and social improvement. there is nothing natural or inevitable about this; this was the product of “choice, contingency, and conflict” (2). pearson brings to the task a talent for clear and entertaining exposition, honed from his long-running blog on canine history (https:// sniffingthepast.wordpress.com/). familiar theoretical touchstones such as animal agency are glossed over as a result — dogs are prominent actors in “dogopolis”, but the focus is largely on how they are copyright © 2022 philip howell this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 321–327. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.11452 https://sniffingthepast.wordpress.com/ https://sniffingthepast.wordpress.com/ http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.11452 howell, review of pearson | 323 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) imagined and represented in popular and political debates, particularly in the print media that pearson relies upon. where pearson does venture into conceptual and theoretical discussion, it is via the history of emotion. in the substantive chapters, pearson looks at the proliferation of emotions in societal reactions to the street dog and the dangerous and potentially rabid dog, these fears and anxieties being complemented by pity for the suffering animal, an appreciation of the dog’s intelligence and how it might be harnessed in the pursuit of urban order, and the disgust at dog faeces in the city streets. i will consider these more carefully below, but it is worth stressing at the start that pearson is reserved on how much further animal historians might go with the business of emotion. in an appendix (it is significant that pearson chooses not to burden the main text with these methodological questions), pearson notes that “i treat canine emotional experiences as elusive and beyond my grasp. instead, i have examined how human actors understood canine emotions, how dogs affect humans emotionally, and how human emotions have transformed the lives of urban dogs in the west” (189). his argument, aligned with the mainstream history of emotions, is for the historical contingency of such emotions. that said, it is odd for pearson to claim that animal historians “have tended to overlook this history of emotions” (190), and it is easy enough to point to the work on rabies (for instance) as at least a partial reproof. but the overall argument is clear enough: we will not understand the emergence of “dog opolis” without placing front and centre the importance of conflicted emotional reactions to the urban dog. it has become too familiar a refrain that animals are good to think with, but pearson shows that feelings have played a more prominent role than ideas or theories in deciding the fate of dogs in our societies. chapter one, “straying”, considers the street dog. it is well appreciated that pet dogs were increasingly welcomed in the nineteenth-century west. they were sincerely mourned, as pearson shows in his discussion of the pet cemeteries of paris, new york, and london. but if pet keeping was “the acceptable furry face of human–canine relations” (42), the “mobile, diseased and disruptive” (17) stray became a problem on a par with streetwalkers, beggars, humanimalia 13.1 (2022) 324 | howell, review of pearson and vagrants of all kinds. pearson argues that street dogs were policed accordingly. true to its authoritarian reputation, paris had the longest history of impounding (and subsequently slaughtering) stray dogs. new york was not far behind, with an auxiliary cadre of dogcatchers that lengthened the arm of the law. pearson is excellent on the ways in which emotions were amplified by the efforts to take dogs off the streets in these three cities. practices of impounding created their own problems, particularly in the unsatisfactory public spectacle of cruelty and suffering, making the pound a crucial site of conflict between lovers and loathers of dogs. pearson accepts that london is somewhat different, given the central role of the temporary home for lost and starving dogs (subsequently the battersea dogs’ and cats’ home). here, there was at least the promise of a gentler solution to the problem of the stray, with dogs taking the more “innocent” role of homeless children. but as pearson notes, the dogs’ home also killed strays, salving the consciences of the tender-minded but ultimately serving the purposes of those who simply wanted dogs cleared off the streets. in this chapter, pearson clearly emphasizes the seemingly paradoxical combination of love for lost dogs and antipathy towards street dogs. chapter two, “biting”, moves to society’s greatest fear when it came to the presence of animals in the metropolis. pearson notes that the lack of scientific consensus on rabies allowed some to attribute rabies’ horrors to the supposed unstable temperament of dogs, their unsuitable treatment, including their sexual privation as pets, while dog lovers rallied to defend their favourites, playing down the dangers and exploring alternatives to the muzzle or, worse, summary destruction. there was also plenty of room for ambiguity over the identification of rabid dogs, and the proper treatment of those that were vulnerable. all the same, muzzling was a common policy in these three cities, if less harsh in new york and london than in paris, and supplemented by quarantine policies. but pearson argues that by the end of the nineteenth century more hostile and aggressive policies were in the offing everywhere, with more decisive support from the medical and veterinary and scientific establishment. in pearson’s account, pasteur’s treatment for rabies howell, review of pearson | 325 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) offered hope, but the promise of “transnational pasteurism” (66) was quickly met by dissent from those who opposed his methods or his science, falling back sometimes on the notion that emotional disturbance was at the root of the problem — this time in the unfortunate humans who contracted hydrophobia. but if pasteurism whipped up the emotions in a potentially self-defeating manner, pearson shows that it was an essential part of the civic inclusion of dogs: “pasteur’s vaccine, greater surveillance of dogs, and muzzling had sufficiently blunted the effect of canine biting to allow dogs to be integrated into dog opolis” (82). canine suffering remained a divisive issue and, after a brief discussion of the post-darwinian assessment of dogs’ emotional states, pearson’s third chapter on “suffering” explores the general theme of animal welfare and its politics. violence against animals became increasingly unacceptable, or at least not acceptable in a public and unregulated sense. where dogs were concerned, this sentiment was prominent in the heated debates over vivisection, and the possibilities for “humane” slaughter of street dogs and their like. the most obvious issue here, identified by many historians, is the unsavoury and demoralizing spectacle of animal killing. in the early days of “dog opolis”, pearson tells us, dogs were administered their quietus as privately as possible: in the pounds in paris (initially by hanging) and new york (drowning). but in london the dogs’ home eventually settled on euthanasia by poison gas, and asphyxiation became the favoured method transnationally. pearson does not linger on the irony, but he demonstrates that by the turn of the century animal protection societies in all three cities had moved from protesting cruelty against dogs and their owners to effectively sanctioning large-scale “humane” killing. debates about euthanasia continued into the twentieth century, but we could say that lethal chambers became the accepted price of “dog opolis”. the title of the fourth chapter, “thinking”, feels further off from the theme of emotion. moreover, the focus is not on animals’ actual abilities or capacities, but on the representation of canine intelligence. pearson’s arguments lead to a consideration of the history humanimalia 13.1 (2022) 326 | howell, review of pearson of police dogs. this is, however, one of pearson’s most novel arguments: here, the longstanding antipathy between street dog and policeman transformed into a partnership, at least for a time. pearson shows that police dogs were first introduced in paris, while the bloodhound was given a long leash in london, closely followed by new york. pearson’s argument about transnational influence and urban emulation is particularly effective in this section, bolstered by the growing contemporary emphasis on dogs’ innate intelligence and capacity to learn. that dogs were intelligent was accepted: but what kind of intelligence did dogs possess, and how reliable was this intelligence when dogs were made agents of the law? pearson’s history draws out the ambiguity of dogs’ performance as animal adjuncts to policemen. on the one hand, dogs could be set to track and take down the worst urban criminals, the atavistic criminals whose animality and brutishness found an effective contrast to the now authorized dogs. on the other hand, police dogs’ mistakes and unreliability were seized on by news media, and scepticism towards their abilities and intelligence led to paris discontinuing their use after the first world war. pearson concludes that it was only after the second world war that police dogs became enduring features of dog opolis. it is salutary to learn that the all-purpose police dog of our own day had such a shaky start. finally, in the chapter on “defecating”, we turn to the business of dog mess. this chapter shifts to the twentieth century, which saw inaction in interwar paris and more effective responses in new york and london, with private and municipal campaigns against the “dog nuisance”. disgust, of course, is central, but this is not just the immediate revulsion towards dog faeces. rather, dog poo became noticeable, and thus more disgusting, as cities became more sanitary. for pearson, earlier laissez-faire attitudes to canine defecation gave way to a pronounced concern for urban hygiene, and as horses disappeared and automobiles took their place, the problem of dog mess only became more visible and sensible generally. dog mess was discovered, and “for a growing band of concerned observers, [it] was too disgusting for dog opolis” (165). the issue is of course still with us, and the emphasis on the responsibility of dog owners lies outside howell, review of pearson | 327 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) the scope of pearson’s study, but he shows how acceptance of dogs was matched by disgust as well as fear. what is most striking and valuable in dogopolis is pearson’s focus on the connections and exchanges between london, paris, and new york: a “canine transnationalism” or “canine cosmopolitanism” (8) that united middle-class dog lovers and urban reformers. similarities between new york, london, and paris outweighed the differences, and while more attention to these differences in policy and culture would have been welcome, this is a persuasive argument. pearson is careful to specify that “dog opolis” is peculiar to the west, “a provincial rather than a universal manifestation of human–canine relatedness” (5). there are hints at the world beyond the west, nevertheless: the influence of the treatment of dogs in constantinople on french spa officials, for instance, which suggested that canine liberty was not as dangerous or unhygienic as others supposed, and that pet dogs were by contrast distinctly unhealthy. importantly, pearson also rightly recognizes that the provincial nature of “dogopolis” is bound up with racial histories, apparent in the notions of “breed”, for instance, but also more heavily underscored by the use of dogs against people of colour. pearson notes that bloodhounds were used to track enslaved men and women in the west indies, and this colonial violence was transposed to american cities, police dogs being instruments of racialized brutality. pearson’s history thus stresses “the creation of dog opolis within eurocentric notions of white superiority and progress” (37). these are striking and salutary sidelights in pearson’s instructive history of how caring for and coping with dogs transformed the modern city. microsoft word salmon h u m a n i m a l i a 1:2 jacob bull salmon tales peter coates. salmon. london: reaktion books ltd, 2006. 216 pp. £12.95 $19.95 (pb) fishes so often escape our (human) concern. practically, they are rarely encountered except possibly in aquaria, on the plate or the fishmonger’s bed of crushed ice. moreover, fishes occupy spaces which are so fundamentally alien to human ways of knowing that the use of the large-scale, industrial trawlers that are so ethically and environmentally contentious can almost be understood. indeed, their continued existence is evidence of our failure to place fishes within the schema of intellectual and social moral concern (see jones 2000). it is therefore superb to find such a work on salmon in the animal series, and the concern coates shows for the subject is careful and stimulating. the range of topics included in the text is wide reaching, covering the biological understandings of salmon, cultural significance, tins of salmon, a salmonskin-bikini, and the conflicts which arise between different social groups and individuals as well as between humans and salmon. the first substantive chapter is concerned with the biological salmon. it offers a brief introduction to all of the eight species of salmon that exist in the atlantic and pacific oceans. it also offers an introduction to the lifecycle of these salmon, describing the various stages of its freshwater life from egg, through alevin to fry, par and then smolt. it is in this smolt stage that the salmon begins its physiological change to adapt to saline conditions in preparation for its time feeding at sea. through this chapter the reader is given a wonderful insight into the scientific, historical and “lay” knowledges that led to the current understandings of the salmon as a biological entity and subject for scientific enquiry. the experiments conducted to ascertain how a fish may travel thousands of miles at sea only to return to the river of its birth highlight the different corporeal ontologies of aquatic habitats. this great journey, the almost unbelievable ability to end where one began, is emphasized through the chapter, and clearly identifies why salmon can be considered as charismatic species despite their alien habitat.1 the beginning of the second chapter further underlines the heroic narrative of the returning salmon as it is faced by various human and non-human predators. what follows in the rest of the chapter is an interesting account of the social and cultural value of salmon as a food through history and across the globe. the main focus of the 119 jacob bull — salmon tales chapter is a history of the tinned salmon industry which grew up on the east coast of the united states, and the historical significance of tinned salmon in british culture. contrasting with this “edible salmon” are accounts of human consumption of other parts of the animal, mainly in the form of “salmon leather” clothing. from this use of salmon coates moves in the third chapter to the “misuse” of salmon and their habitats. this chapter focuses on the wild salmon and laments the pressures exerted on salmon populations by human activities. these concerns are not merely recent events. coates offers a neat summary of the historical precedents to contemporary environmental issues affecting salmon populations. the latter stages of the chapter discuss the implications of fish farming, both as an option for maintaining fish stocks and the production of commodified salmon. the story of the commodified salmon echoes the plight of the broiler chicken. however, despite some concern for the implications on the bodily wellbeing of farmed salmon, the argument tends to center on the implications of farmed fish on wild stocks and human health. these controversies set up an interesting discussion in chapter four, which focuses on issues around who owns the salmon’s body. it highlights the manner in which tensions between different social groups have been played out through access to salmon fishing. in addition it discusses different issues in salmon fishing from commercial, compared to subsistence, compared to recreational. it is this recreational interest that is the topic for chapter five. in this fifth chapter coates’s traces the various written historical accounts of angling, that is recreational fishing (for salmon). he refers to many medieval and victorian texts. these texts have become integral to the angling experience. as the chapter progresses, coates focuses on fly-fishing over other forms of fishing, and describes how this “ostensible foolishness” (132) was exported across the globe, carrying with it the quarry anglers value so highly as “eggs on charcoal and living moss in perforated wooden boxes under ice” (133). the sixth chapter extends the significance of salmon beyond the culture of angling to discuss how salmon have gained significance, indeed mythical status in various cultures, from the heraldic motto of a scottish-borders town to the ceremonies of the kwakiutl people of vancouver island. it is here in the analysis of the wider cultural significance of salmon that i think that salmon begins to provoke some fundamental questions about what it is to be fish, and what it is to be human, a meeting of watery and airy inhabitants. overall, the book offers a wonderful introduction to some of the meetings between salmon and people. my concern perhaps with this text is that amid the clamor of science, the clash of tins, the arguments of ownership and even in the quiet moments of 120 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) recreational angling, the stories of the animals which are salmon are not as prominent as one might hope. i wanted more of the accounts that go beyond the use-value of salmon. this book is, nonetheless, a wonderful discussion of the social cultural and historical importance of salmon. coates does a fantastic job of elevating salmon to the position of charismatic-mega-fauna. he has in many ways achieved his intention to write “a veritable compleat2 salmon” (p.12). i would suggest, however, that it is not quite a complete salmon; i would like to hear the stories of the salmon that lie outside of, or at least closer to the edge of, our human understandings of fishes. this is possibly an unfair criticism, as part of the charisma of salmon species is their anadromous life cycle; that they appear in our rivers and lakes, momentarily becoming a significant feature, only to disappear to live lives elsewhere. however, i maintain that it would be interesting to hear more about the fish. coates does begin to discuss these stories in chapter 3, the unfortunate salmon, as he identifies the ecological crises of riparian environments and development of aquaculture. but humans stand as much more than just another predator waiting to snatch the salmon as it struggles to overcome the obstacles in its quest to do “this natural duty.”3 it would be good to consider what these fishes might be able to tell us about being fish and being human; what they may be able to communicate other than ecological disaster. i feel it is only in the passionate, insightful, at times slightly polemical, conclusion that coates begins to deal with these questions but maybe these stories are for another book. despite my desire to hear more of these alternative perspectives, salmon remains an interesting, accessible, thought provoking, and enjoyable read. it does much to counteract the social and intellectual blindness to considering fish as animals, and i thoroughly recommend it given the fact that fish so often escape our (human) concern. notes 1. see lorimer 2006/07 for a greater discussion of the charisma of animals as scientific subjects. 2. this spelling is a reference to isaak walton’s compendium on angling the compleat angler, considered by many to be the defining text on angling. 3. isaak walton (2003:78) as referred to by coates (2006: 7). 121 jacob bull — salmon tales works cited coates, peter. salmon. london: reaktion, 2006. jones, owain. “(un)ethical geographies of human–non-human relations: encounters, collectives and spaces.” animal beastly places. ed. chris philo and chris wilbert. oxford: routledge, 2000. 268-91. lorimer, jamie. “nonhuman charisma: which species trigger our emotions and why?” ecos 27:1 (2006). 20–27. lorimer jamie. “nonhuman charisma.” environment and planning d: society and space, 24:5 (2007). 911–32. walton, isaak. the compleat angler mineola: dover, 2003. microsoft word lulka pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 2:1 david lulka to turn: california’s proposition 2 and the ethics of animal mobility in agriculture on november 4, 2008, residents of california were asked to make a decision on a fundamental issue. proposition 2, officially entitled “standards for confining farm animals,” had qualified for the november election via the state’s referendum process, a process which allows members of the public to bypass the state legislature and submit a proposal directly to the will of the general population. as written on the election ballot, proposition 2 “[r]equires that calves raised for veal, egg-laying hens and pregnant pigs be confined only in ways that allow these animals to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely” (state of california, 2008). in comparison to most other ballot initiatives, the text of the proposition was sparsely worded. in essence, the proposition’s supporters sought to redress animal welfare concerns created by different types of animal enclosure ― namely, the use of veal crates, sow gestation crates, and battery cages. in many respects, the sparse wording of the proposition paralleled the substantive nature of the initiative, which sought to address issues so basic in character that they are difficult to designate even when more specific wording is employed. indeed, the nature of movement, let alone its ethical import, has been a subject that has perplexed thinkers for more than two millennia.1 proposition 2 was not the first initiative of its kind. in the united states, similar initiatives had been passed in florida, arizona, oregon, and colorado since 2002. those particular initiatives, however, only involved pregnant pigs or veal calves. the california initiative, by including pigs, calves, and hens, was more comprehensive than any of these prior enactments. as it turned out, since the veal and hog industry in california are virtually non-existent, the bulk of the debate and conflict regarding proposition 2 centered around egg-laying hens. the egg industry in california is one of the largest in the united states. according to the united states department of agriculture’s 2009 chickens and eggs summary, there were 20,272,000 egg-laying hens in california in 2008, ranking the state as the fifth largest. on average, each hen layed 260 eggs, resulting in the production of 5,272,000,000 eggs (fifth largest state). although california ranked high among all states, california egg production still only accounted for approximately 6% of the national total. according to david lulka — to turn: california’s proposition 2 and the ethics of animal mobility in agriculture 33 the usda’s latest agricultural census (2008), there were 5,098 farms with egg-producing hens in california. most of these farms, however, were quite small (4,553 had fewer than 50 hens). thus, as sumner et al. stated with regard to the statistics found in the 2002 agricultural census, “… most of these farms are small operations with no significant statewide commercial presence” (20). among the larger facilities, 15 farms had between 20,000-49,999 hens, 8 farms had between 50,000-99,999 hens, and 37 farms had 100,000 or more hens (usda chicken and eggs summary (2009). the lowest figure among the largest class, however, is not particularly indicative, for as sumner et al. observe, several of the largest facilities contain millions of hens. altogether, sumner et al. estimated the value of california egg production to be $337 million in 2007. central to these economic developments is the widespread use of battery cages to house egg-laying hens. according to united egg producers (uep), the primary trade organization for egg producers in the united states, 95% of commercial egg production is generated via cage systems. though hewson notes that the first battery cages in britain were for single birds, modern cages hold multiple birds, typically 5 to 10 birds (shields and duncan, n.d.). cage configurations vary, some measuring 12” x 18”, while others are 16” x 20” or 24” x 20” (bell). (the latter measurement refers to cage depth, and thus remains fairly constant among cage types. these cage depths accommodate the elongated body of hens, but not movement per se, as any lateral or circular movement is inhibited by the presence of other birds within the same cage.) while there has been growing concern about farm animal welfare in the eu (horgan and gavinelli), some of which has been codified in eu directives and awaits enactment at a later date (efsa), there are no legal standards for cage systems in the united states. more generally, mench has illustrated the disjointed character of farm animal welfare in the united states (variously involving government entities, producers, and retailers) and the potential complications that may emerge during the establishment of welfare guidelines. nonetheless, in response to emerging public concerns, the uep has developed guidelines to address welfare concerns. uep now advises producers to provide each bird with 67-86 square inches of space (uep). the larger value in this range covers an area slightly smaller than a standard sheet of copy paper. that said, the minimum number in this range (which converts to 432.3 cm2) is the more critical value, since it designates a threshold of acceptability. these industry guidelines are clearly meant to alleviate public concerns, but it is not clear that they will do (or have done) so. in their study of the space needs of laying hens, dawkins and hardie found that the mean area covered by a standing hen was 475.3 cm2. other behaviors, such as ground humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 34 scratching, turning, wing stretching, feather ruffling, and preening, required more space. wing flapping, the most extensive activity, required a mean area of 1876.3 cm2. if accurate, these numbers suggest the uep guidelines are not sufficient to meet the behavioral requirements of hens. in a document commissioned by the eu’s european food safety authority, it was noted that, “the evidence suggests that space allowances of 750cm² per bird have resulted in significant improvements in hen welfare, compared with the previous situation when birds were housed at 450cm2 per bird. however, even at these allowances, space is at a premium and some behaviors are prevented due to insufficient space” (70). although studies have examined the character of modern agriculture at the macro-level (e.g. bonanno et al.; goodman and watts), proposition 2 presents an ideal opportunity for exploring the impact of small-scale phenomena on agricultural industries. in contrast to the focus on the concentration or globalization of agriculture, proposition 2 offered a setting in which to investigate and better understand the significance of bodily movement. in recent decades, the body has become a topic of increasing interest in social theory. this research is difficult to summarize, for there are many strands to this research trend. shilling, however, has identified several primary sources, including examinations of consumer culture, the emergence of social movements/theories concerned with bodily experience or ecological harmonization, feminist research stemming from prevailing ideas on gender, research on governments’ incorporation of bodily processes into policy, growing interest in the impact of diverse technologies, and a desire to settle academic disciplinary debates. within geography, a more explicitly spatial discipline, this interest in the body is exemplified by harvey’s examination of the body within commodity chains, thrift’s exploration of techniques designed to slow the body, longhurst’s consideration of the pregnant body in public space, and davies’ study of organ transplantation. research on animal geographies, which was kicked off in a substantial way by wolch and emel, has tied into body politics in several ways. in some cases, there is an attempt to illustrate how animals fit within a given culture, for example in tuan’s elucidation of human domination in pet-keeping, yarwood and evan’s account of rare livestock breeds in the uk, or, more relevantly, hovorka’s description of the changing position of chickens in africa as a result of their commodification and ability to fit more easily into urban spaces. in part, such portrayals throw animals into the mix of social constituents. at a more fundamental level, there is fervent interest in animal agency, something that philo and wilbert describe in part by reference to “the beastly places made by animals themselves, whether wholly independent of humans or when transgressing, even david lulka — to turn: california’s proposition 2 and the ethics of animal mobility in agriculture 35 resisting, human spatial orderings” (24). spatial features are at the forefront of this definition, and this contention is supported by work that illustrates animal agency in different geographic realms ― rural (lulka, 2004), urban/suburban (wolch) and domestic (power). that these illustrations of animal agency are transgressions speaks to a certain outwardness of animality, one that is indicative of the long-held interest in movement, and one that is particularly relevant to the constraints imposed on animals in modern agriculture. though the power of nonhumans is by no means unlimited, these animal infiltrations disabuse us of the notion that animals are mere automatons or cultural creations. johnston, utilizing a phenomenological approach, has advocated the use of “dwelling” to further understanding of animals (641). while the term can suggest a sense of rootedness, in her depiction it indicates otherwise, for it describes “a complex and swirling movement” that is typical of any milieu. borrowing from tim ingold’s work, she contends this notion of dwelling is not simply intended to convey beings’ connections with their surroundings, but also that “the very generation of life forms, and the forms of life, are made possible through this milieu” (ibid.). this is particularly significant when we consider the vacuous environment of egg-laying hens and the inability of hens to move away from it and engage elsewhere. others, often following the work of latour (1993, 2005), characterize animal agency in non-cognitive terms; that is, one without intentionality. in these theorizations, the materiality of nonhuman animals has been accentuated. in some cases, animal materiality has an agential impact on systems of production and consumption (mansfield; stassart and whatmore), but does not necessarily benefit the animals in themselves. they are grist for the mill, one might say, as the substance and metabolism of the nonhuman body is enrolled into economic systems. the impact of this agential materiality has also been flipped the other way, where potential detriments to humans are made evident. in the local (or national) contexts of agricultural production, hinchliffe’s study of prions, cattle, and the production of “mad cow” disease and donaldson and wood’s study of foot and mouth disease are indicative. braun’s consideration of avian influenza’s global reach is particularly relevant, for this epidemiological threat posed by the winged agency of migratory birds was alluded to by opponents of proposition 2, who suggested that non-caged production might lead to new channels of disease transmission. it is important to recognize, however, that animal humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 36 agency is not inherently directed against humanity, but rather is reflective of pervasive opportunism in animal life (lulka, 2009). the extent of autonomy that nonhuman animals possess, though never absolute, varies considerably in these studies, bringing to the fore the importance of spatial contexts. the agency of nonhuman animals is modulated (and in some cases ended) in different ways by their surroundings, with humans having a greater or lesser role in determining their distribution and opportunities. whatmore’s work on hybrid geographies is a guiding work for this train of thought. perhaps the best example of how hybrid relations play out spatially in an agricultural context was put forth by holloway in his examination of milking technology. holloway examines dairy cows’ usage of selfmilking technology and the impact that particular material relationship has on the spatial life of those animals. in that instance, technology seemed to alter the temporal flow of the cows’ daily life and expand the spatial options available to them.2 these various issues are highly relevant to the case of proposition 2. the materiality of bodies (particularly chicken bodies), their commodification within economic systems, their potential ability to acquire and transmit diseases, and their relations to a specific technological system all come into play. though all of these relations apply, proposition 2 foregrounds the technological aspects that were explicitly developed to control the movements of agricultural animals. in this coming together of machines and bodies, ethical concerns rose to prominence. the present study seeks to illustrate the importance of these small-scale dynamics, but also to extend them to show their wider significance. with this goal in mind, this paper examines the opposing perspectives on proposition 2 in order to gain better understanding of the impact of animal movement in modern agriculture. the primary data used for this exploration was gathered from interviews with representatives of organizations that had stated their support or opposition to proposition 2. organization names were gathered from the yes on 2 and no on 2 websites, each of which listed groups that supported their respective position with regard to proposition 2. each side included a wide array of organizations, forming broad coalitions that spoke to the potentially large ramifications of the proposition. in selecting which organizations to contact from each coalition, an effort was made to speak with diverse organizations that were somewhat representative of the respective coalitions as a whole. some of the organizations contacted were widely-recognized organizations, whereas others were fairly unknown to the general public. organizations contacted included animal welfare/rights groups, scientific organizations, david lulka — to turn: california’s proposition 2 and the ethics of animal mobility in agriculture 37 environmental organizations, agricultural organizations (representing either industry interests or small farmers), veterinary organizations, consumer organizations, religious organizations, and labor organizations. this diversity is indicative of the contemporary political process and modern society in general, wherein functions are fragmented along a number of lines and individuals fill vastly different roles. it is also consequential, since it means that each individual’s knowledge, and indeed their social and ethical responsibilities, tends to be quite limited in scope. these facts are critical when considering interviewee comments. for one, some interviewees were less familiar with agriculture and/or animals, and thus the validity of their stance may be questioned. nonetheless, their comments (some of which are included below) are important because they affected the political context. secondly, a few interviewees explicitly noted that some concerns were outside the scope of their organization’s charge. this meant that their stance on proposition 2 did not negate the fact that there might be other valid issues to consider. indeed, even among groups who shared the same stance on the proposition, it was not uncommon for representatives to state how their position was based on criteria that other groups in their coalition did not utilize. in addition, a small number of interviews were conducted with individuals/ representatives who did not take an official stance on the proposition. these persons were contacted because they possessed some expertise that was relevant to the initiative. altogether, 38 interviews were conducted. twenty interviews were conducted with representatives whose organization supported proposition 2. fifteen interviews were conducted with representatives whose organization opposed proposition 2.3 three interviews were conducted with individuals/representatives who did not take an official stance on the ballot initiative. all interviews were conducted prior to the november election. in the next section, the opposing attitudes toward proposition 2 are put forth with an eye toward highlighting perceptions of the essential nature of farm animals, the perceived importance of space and movement, and the ethical character of human relations with farm animals. with regard to the initiative’s supporters, this section illustrates the motivations for proposing this initiative. with regard to the initiative’s opponents, counterarguments are noted that contest the pervasive perceptions of modern agriculture, farmers, and the proposition’s notion of welfare itself. in the following section, the different conceptions of animal welfare put forth by the opposing factions are examined. what becomes clear is that both factions’ conceptions of welfare humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 38 must address unpleasant realities. ultimately, in deciding between conceptions of welfare, ideas regarding the fundamental character of life ― the “acceptable” risks involved and the qualities that constitute a good life – come to the fore. animal turning. emblematic of the centrality of movement in this debate is an animated internet video produced in support of the proposition, wherein caged farm animals are juxtaposed with a dancing pig that encourages viewers to vote for proposition 2.4 the pig dances (and sings) joyously to the funky beat of stevie wonder’s “superstitious,” the lyrics having been reworded to convey messages about the living conditions of farm animals and the nature of modern agribusiness (figure 1). the choice of song seems hardly coincidental, for the lively tempo is highly energized and starkly contrasts with the monotonous image of industrial farms. figure 1 the importance of animal movement, and the role that agricultural industries played in the restriction of that movement, was expressed in a number of ways by proponents of the initiative. one supporter of the proposition stated it most simply in saying, “it’s part of our basic instinct. animals were born just like we were to move.” another supporter stated in more philosophical terms that, “the animals evolved their physiology, their chemistry, their brain patterns, their everything, you know … it’s kind of geared toward a certain way of being in the world.” yet another supporter tied the connection between an animal’s constitution and its being into a tighter nexus by saying that, “chickens like human beings have muscles, and muscles are made to move. muscles that don’t move atrophy, whether it’s a human being, a chicken, a cow, a pig, it doesn’t matter. chickens david lulka — to turn: california’s proposition 2 and the ethics of animal mobility in agriculture 39 evolved in nature with muscles, and they evolved with muscles specific to the kind of being they are, which is a chicken.” in this view, it is not simply that animals, for example chickens, have muscles (which are a signifier of movement in their own right, for their essence is isomorphic with the process of contraction and relaxation), but that the muscles are also indicative of the specific nature of an animal. there is, in this description at least, a monistic quality to the character of being. indeed, systems that restrain the movement of hens percolate into the structure of the animals. one of the acknowledged drawbacks of conventional egg production is an increase in occurrences of osteoporosis and bone breakage. while the weakening of bones is partially related to the high rate of egg laying (which places more stress on the nutritive resources of the hens), it also emerges from a lack of movement. movement is not simply an epiphenomenal dalliance, but rather one of the means by which bones are strengthened. cage structures thus play a pivotal role in creating brittle beings. this is particularly notable, since bones form the scaffolding for the rest of the animal’s mass. for some supporters, their stance on the issue was rooted in traditional, mainstream religious principles. for example, one interviewee stated that, “in general that has been our position … that the welfare of the animal that we’ll eventually slaughter for our food needs still requires a life of some type of comfort, and the confined cage that industrial agriculture uses currently just to stack as many animals together as possible, we just don’t think that’s proper care of animals or creation.” of note here as well is the explicit acknowledgment that such animals will be killed and consumed by humans. although some groups in this coalition would like to see society transition toward a vegetarian diet, many of the organizations did not have that objective. this is noteworthy, since some of the proposition’s opponents saw the initiative as an initial step in undermining animal agriculture as a whole. in actuality, the coalition in support of the proposition was broad and did not conform to this blanket claim. more commonly, supporters of the proposition relied upon evolutionary or humanistic grounds to base their opinions. for example, one interviewee stated that, “we’ve known since darwin that other animals have the same behavioral needs that human beings have. they have a need to socialize. they have a need to engage in their natural behaviors…,” and continued on to note that, “of course they can’t when they’re crammed into crates or crammed six or seven into a cage, a hundred thousand hens in a shed.” another supporter indicated a similar reference point when noting these humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 40 animals’ transition into modern life, stating “[a]nd even though they were domesticated, […] they were out most of their lives the last 20,000 years, they were not in factory farms. so they’ve sort of evolved and all geared up for movement, grazing, reproduction, raising young, and sort of just being out there as animals, not in a captive state.” furthermore, there is an apparent sense that the evolved capacities of agricultural animals are at least somewhat resistant to the confining practices of modern agricultural systems. as one supporter noted: […] we’ve had hundreds of […] former battery cage hens here at our sanctuary, no matter what kinds of abusive conditions these birds come from, if they survive the ordeal, they begin to recover their natural inborn impulses ― to dust bathe, to sun bathe, to perch, to spend a great deal of their day running from one place to another, and of course spreading their wings. but again, these birds are foragers. the interviewee further noted chickens’ evolved penchant for scratching the ground for food, a behavior unavailable to battery hens. thus, there is a conception that agricultural animals formerly lived a broad diverse life, one that was not limited to sustenance, but in many cases involved aspects of socialization. this is so even of birds, who are frequently attributed a lower cognitive standing. indeed, as one opponent of the proposition (who was not directly involved in agriculture) noted, “they’re chickens. they’re not too bright.” lingis, for one, has suggested otherwise in his examination of avian intelligence, but nevertheless this is a prevailing attitude among the public that supporters of proposition 2 had to counter. from a humanistic perspective, several supporters compared the animals’ situation to human experiences that commonly evoke notions of constraint and crowding. for instance, one proponent contended that, “on some level, it’s like […] going to prison. being in a cell that is supposed to house one or two people and […] instead […] maybe having about 50.” other comparisons included the effects of a long plane or car ride, during which the body is relatively immobilized. in relation to muscles and atrophy, another related it to the example of astronauts in space. such comments would undoubtedly be considered as anthropomorphic by some, but these particular comparisons largely related to the physicality of the animals ― for which there is more scientific basis for comparison ― rather than the cognitive aspects of nonhuman animals. more to the point, these humanistic perspectives were generally grounded in an evolutionary perspective (rather than a humanitarian perspective), whereby continuities between species were paramount. david lulka — to turn: california’s proposition 2 and the ethics of animal mobility in agriculture 41 the consequences of production for animals were perceived to be many, but essentially unified by their source in spatial constraint. again, in relation to the prison metaphor, one supporter noted that, “each one of them is pushing and fighting for its own space. and this is what happens when […] in our prisons […] there’s overcrowding, it creates animosity, some anger, some frustration and fights and so forth.” another supporter from a religious organization emphasized the physical, in stating that “i think the idea of having an animal confined beyond an ability to exercise, it deforms their limbs, […] they become lethargic, they’re in pain, at least serious discomfort, and it isn’t just the too small cage for one animal, it is the too many animals in one cage. that means they have to be debeaked so they won’t kill each other. and that’s just gross. i mean that’s just really vile.” another supporter conceptualized the effect of spatial constraints in almost the exact opposite fashion: “and just think of waking up every morning and there you are, there you are, you’re just there. you can’t move. you can’t do anything. the seconds are just ticking by. think of it. nothing. nothing.” and again, this notion of poverty was compounded by the same speaker in comparing the animals’ former lives to their new world: “they spend a huge amount of their time scratching the earth, scratching the soil. they explore, they have an active life embedded in them. and here these birds are being forced to live in a dark, putrid… not just living in a cage, but in a universe of cages.” despite these strong assertions that an animal’s ability to move should be a necessary component of agricultural systems, there was ambivalence among the yes on 2 coalition about the initiative. for some, there was concern that the proposition, initially entitled the “prevention of farm animal cruelty act,” would lead to a misconception among the public, whereby, if enacted, the public might be led to believe that farm practices would henceforth be humane in all facets. as such, one representative noted, “reduce cruelty, yes. prevention of cruelty, no. cruelty is not going to be prevented at all by the passage of this law. not at all. even if it’s fully enacted.” or as another interviewee stated in relation to cage-free production, “not that cage-free is necessarily humane. and that’s something we are very cautious about. we don’t say that letting them out [is] humane [….] it just means less cruel. and that’s an important distinction.” it should be noted here (and this will be reiterated below) that the sparsely-written proposition does not mandate cage-free production. most obviously, among the harms that would still persist, debeaking of birds or the forced molting of birds is problematic to many.5 another interviewee also noted that the proposition did not deal at all with the means of transporting animals or the methods of slaughter. in response to these perceived humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 42 shortcomings, one representative commented that, “the idea that somebody would say ‘well, i’m going to allow animals to be crammed into cages and crates now in order to have a stronger talking point, i think is really […] as wrong-headed as one could possibly be,” and another contended that “it would be hard to imagine [legislation] more modest. and we agree. it’s very modest. giving animals enough room to stand up, to lie down, turn around and extend their limbs is hardly radical.” in short, these comments suggest some level of realism among this coalition and that there wasn’t complete unanimity among animal welfare/rights organizations. the no on 2 coalition, of course, differed in its estimation of the proposition. although the coalition objected to the initiative on economic grounds, it also rejected the proposition on welfare grounds. these assertions came in both general form and highly specific articulations. in their respective ways, these contestations spoke to different spatialities that embodied certain assurances in response to various risks. here, three lines of argumentation are mentioned, the last of which appears to possess the most validity. according to one line of reasoning, the living conditions of animals are already satisfactory. as one opponent put it, “animals are already able to freely turn around and extend their wings and move about […]. they may touch another animal, but the way that the legislation is written, it has to be […] most of the time, which i assume of going to be over 50% of the time.” along the same line, the density of cage-systems was seen to conform to natural inclinations, for as the same interviewee noted, “most of the time, if you watch their behavior, they actually like to spend time together, and close to each other and touching each other. so, that’s why i believe the legislation is poorly written, cause it doesn’t take into any consideration the animal’s or bird’s natural herding or flocking instincts.” the practice of debeaking hens, nonetheless, seems to contradict this harmonious depiction of a managed flock. the point here, however, is not to dispute these contentions (though they seem more relevant to broiler facilities wherein birds are raised in open barns). rather, it is simply to note that such comments seem spurious by virtue of the fact that if caged hens already had enough room to move around, the initiative would present no alteration to existing conditions of production (and thus no harm to the producers). the second argument sought to substantiate the shared purpose of humans and animals within a farm setting. for instance, one proposition opponent asserted in direct opposition to the claims above that, “farmers are truly the original animal welfarists, because if they didn’t keep their animals as healthy as possible, then those farmers were david lulka — to turn: california’s proposition 2 and the ethics of animal mobility in agriculture 43 out of business, because somebody else out there was better than them.” in this telling, since the animal is a product which sustains a farmer’s livelihood, it is commonsensical that farmers will take good care of their animals. this perspective taps into a tradition, one almost akin to a mythology due to its deep roots. research has shown that many farmers do indeed form bonds with their animals. bock et al. illustrate that this bonding is a complicated process affected by several factors, including the frequency of contact with animals, an animal’s position on a farm (breeding animal vs. fattening animal), and species type. notably, with regard to the latter variable, they observed that relations with poultry (layers and broilers) were the most detached due in large part to the number of birds in a typical “flock” and the housing technology used to manage them, both of which tended to de-individualize the birds in comparison to other livestock. an alternative view on this matter was noted by one proposition 2 opponent in saying that “it all comes down to the actual management, the animal husbandry. and so it doesn’t really matter what kind of system you have, if you have good animal husbandry, and the care of the pigs is top priority, then everything will be fine. you’ll be able to produce pigs.” in this estimation, the external trappings of agricultural systems are deemed largely irrelevant, while the intent and knowledge of the producer assures a desired outcome. the impacts and limitations imposed by technology on both the producer and farm animal are downplayed in relation to human agency and foresight. these contentions face their own difficulties. not surprisingly, the prevalence of debeaking and forced molting in the egg industry were not mentioned by advocates for the perpetuation of the current system of production. such highly artificial practices are difficult to square with conceptions of welfare. putting these specific matters aside, whatever the legitimacy of management practices may be, the industries under attack by proposition 2 had to contend with a wider climate of distrust and disaffection with modern agriculture among the public. as many interviewees (and previous researchers) have noted, the majority of the public in developed countries have become disconnected from the process of food production, and thus from living farm animals. on the one hand, this has permitted many people to ignore systemic abuses in the food production system. on the other hand, this “ignorance” seems to foster the emergence of moral outrage, episodic as it may be, when abuses are made public. this outrage has cast doubt upon modern agriculture and is clearly a point of dismay among many working within agriculture. for example, a couple of proposition opponents objected to the yes on 2 coalition’s use of film footage relating to the well-publicized abuse of cattle humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 44 at a slaughter facility in chino, ca. as they rightly noted, those abuses had nothing to do with the practices addressed by proposition 2. as yet other proposition opponents admitted, agricultural industries have been slow to respond to the challenges posed by activists, and thus they are partly to blame for their own precarious situation. public “ignorance” of agriculture is pertinent to proposition 2 in yet another way, however, namely when it comes to the public’s understanding of the rationale embedded in everyday agricultural production techniques. as one proposition proponent stated, “i actually think it’s been a problem for the other side when [the public] say ‘well [proposition supporters] want them to be able to turn around’ and, you know, people can’t really understand why wouldn’t [egg producers] let them.” the third line of reasoning against proposition 2 pointed specifically to the science of animal husbandry. science, in this context, is not referring to a tradition as much as a series of novel developments. indeed, the modern egg industry is a relatively recent creation, initially emerging during the 1930s and 1940s, with california eventually serving as a model for other regions by the 1950s (bell, 1993). since that point in time, numerous technologies relating to the feeding and nutrition of hens, antibiotics, the air quality in production facilities, and the cleanliness of eggs (not to mention production rates) have been developed and refined. although some of these advancements have been developed in response to problems generated by the production system itself, these innovations form an intricate system of production that stands in stark contrast to the modest language of proposition 2 and some alternate means of production. thus, one opponent of the initiative stated that, “the cage system of developing, or producing eggs, has been developed over years as a safe and healthful means for producing eggs in california,” and another stated that the proposition “makes absolutely no animal husbandry sense the way it’s written right now.” coinciding with these notions of a scientifically-based industry was the contention that farm animals are multifaceted entities who have many needs. although such contentions might seem to bolster the position of the yes on 2 coalition, as multiple facets suggest a broader view of animals, this fact was taken to reject proposition 2 based on its current articulation. as the representative for an animal welfare organization that came out in opposition to proposition 2 stated: these organisms are just that. they’re organisms. there’s an array of different functions and activities and environmental considerations. and the thing that [...] i think is so very poor about this situation is that they’re focusing exclusively on just the confinement element and they need to be david lulka — to turn: california’s proposition 2 and the ethics of animal mobility in agriculture 45 able to do these two or three things and that somehow that is going to be the best thing for them. and i just don’t think that they have any science to prove that those two things alone will get them where they claim they want to go. this vision, though alluding to the diverse needs of hens, hints at a more mechanized view of the animal held by the industry. another interviewee, whose organization took no official position on proposition 2, put this concern in more precise terms by listing different measures of animal welfare: one way is to measure behavior, and try to mimic natural behaviors of animals, such as in the wild. another way of measuring it is through physiological measurements, such as stress hormones and blood levels. and a third way of measuring it is the effects on animal health, such as disease and injury… traditionally, veterinarians […], because of our training and background, have been used to looking at health as being the most important factor. i think now we are also […] becoming acquainted with the behavioral aspects as well. so, [it] ends up being a balancing act, because [there are] tradeoffs. if you improve behavior, you may negatively affect health and vice versa. improve health, you may negatively affect the behavior factor. so different people weigh those different measurements differently and consequently come to a different conclusion. these general concerns were a slight jab at the proposition’s proponents, who were seen as emphasizing behavioral concerns to the exclusion of other variables. this weighing of factors is clearly displayed in the divergent perspectives regarding proposition 2. several negative outcomes were seen to emerge from the proposition. a looser form of management was equated with greater risk to farm animals; for instance, “the ability to monitor all of that in freer environments and to protect animals from heat and cold and changes in the weather and water dish contamination and their own feces and all of that, it is much more difficult. so there are real tradeoffs.” or another, “it’s been shown over time that there’s less cannibalism with caged birds as opposed to free-roaming birds. and with caged birds, the eggs aren’t laid into feces or on the ground. they’re laid into a clean environment.” in line with these contentions, a recent study commissioned by uep and conducted by experts in animal sciences found that there humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 46 were more advantages (and fewer disadvantages) associated with cage systems as compared to non-cage systems (armstrong et al.). the study has a tenuous relation with proposition 2, since it was not conducted in response to the initiative, nor does the initiative mandate a cage-free or free-range style of egg production. interestingly, however, several of the interviewees that were in opposition to the sparsely-written initiative spoke as if the proposition would require free-range production. these perspectives manifested themselves in depictions of farm life that would be somewhat chaotic if proposition 2 passed. for example, one opponent stated: it’s not only that the birds could be exposed to more diseases by having open access to other birds, […] wild birds, that you know, you as a consumer would be more at risk to obtain [….] [t]hese bacteria are everywhere. we can’t control them. you know, you would be more exposed. but the methods that we use now help to reduce the bacterial numbers that could be present. or, as another representative stated in relation to the natural behavior of hens: these are the animals that, you know, invented the pecking order. they […] can be aggressive. so, putting them in uncontrolled or less-controlled environments […] that exposes them […] may be natural behavior, but it’s not particularly attractive natural behavior. not particularly productive natural behavior. that just takes away from animal welfare. these assertions about the drawbacks of proposition 2 are riddled with misconceptions about undesired biological movements perceived by the initiative’s opponents. such attitudes stood in direct opposition to the perceived anthropomorphic and unscientific perspectives of the initiative’s supporters. indeed, as one opponent stated, “i think there’s a bit of a pollyanna view being pushed by the other side that […] we need to just have a bunch of chickens running around on a grassy field after throwing some grain for them, as opposed to what really needs to be done to keep birds safe and produce eggs economically for the public.” again, the distance between most citizens and farm animals was used as means to alter the tenor of the political debate. given the numerous risks and uncertainties identified by opponents of proposition 2, it is not surprising that the egg industry has sought to instantiate a different dynamic. the machinery of modern agriculture is brought to bear upon different facets of animal life, david lulka — to turn: california’s proposition 2 and the ethics of animal mobility in agriculture 47 breaking linkages with other entities, in order to ward off potential dangers. as one representative characterized this dynamic: the proposition calls for basically banning an animal husbandry style that has been scientifically proven to improve bird health, and done correctly it is very safe for the birds. we use cage systems. they’re lighting controlled. their feed is controlled. their water’s controlled. and basically what the proposition is requesting is an elimination of that, that method. and basically […] open type of housing that would potentially expose the birds to diseases that can be carried by wild birds, such as avian influenza, newcastle disease, and it could be devastating for the industry. what is clear in this depiction is that the temporality and spatiality of egg production stand in marked contrast to the wider earthly context of production and the risks it presents. inputs – light, feed, water ― are implemented to judiciously perpetuate the existence of the animal, if not entirely for the animal’s sake, then for production’s sake, which for some is essentially seen as the same thing. that conflation is evident in the interviewee’s final sentence, where the emphasis shifts from avian health to the health of the egg industry. all in all, this depiction differs substantially from the descriptions of animal agriculture put forth by proponents of the proposition. realism and welfare. this manifestation of divergent perspectives on actual conditions has a direct bearing on conceptions of farm animal welfare. as is clear, both factions have stated that their position is in greater conformity to concerns about animal welfare. this might be expected if we were to fall into either one of two traps. first, we may suppose that proponents of proposition 2 have grounded their opinions in fantasy, wherein they know not what they speak of. second, we may suppose that the opponents of proposition 2 are simply lying in order to deflect public disapproval and secure greater economic profits. although there are strong grounds for believing that economic imperatives are paramount (and that representations will be shaded to minimize this brutal reality in the public eye), this mode of critique misses some important fundamental issues. (interestingly, some opponents of proposition 2 conveyed the opinion that organizations in support of the initiative were primarily interested in generating revenue via donations by creating conflict.) for this reason, it is preferable to take opponents’ words at face value to see where they lead. for the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 48 remainder of this paper, the connection between realism and welfare is explored to better understand the fundamental problematic. because the assumptions of realism address fundamental issues, realism’s impact is potentially broad. the result has been a partitioning of the term to make it relevant to more specific domains of thought and action. here, to limit the scope, i point briefly to three aspects. first, with scientific realism, there is the belief that science indicates the real true nature of things, perception being essentially unmediated by language or other distortions (giere). though no one has a monopoly on knowledge in this scientific perspective, differential access to scientific resources can create asymmetries (and thus differential credibility). secondly, and clearly clouding this matter, humphries notes that the objectives of realism are idealist in their own way. i will not say that that means realism is incorrect, but i will suggest that it does mean that scientific realism contains a normative aspect that aligns uneasily with its narrow empirical aspect. thirdly, in a more political environment, realism may designate a degree of resignation, a deference to one’s limitations, and a necessary hindrance to idealism, since idealism may lead one into catastrophic endeavors (see richardson; wolfowitz). i point to each of these aspects below. from various comments, it is evident that opponents of proposition 2 believed that the initiative’s supporters did not have an accurate view of the matter at hand. one interviewee, for instance, was highly skeptical of several welfare organizations’ credentials in view of the fact that they did not actually care for any real animals. in contrast, the one animal welfare organization contacted that was in opposition to the proposition defined itself as a more hands-on organization than other animal welfare organizations. as noted above, pollyanna imaginings were deemed an essential aspect of proposition proponents. some acknowledged that the supporters were wellintentioned, but they also contended that they were nonetheless misinformed. these assertions reflected the perspective of scientific realism. despite reasonable suspicions about their motivations, there is reason to suspect that people working daily within agricultural industries have an intricate knowledge of farm animals and are aware of minute proclivities that are unknown even to animal advocates. indeed, it might be unreasonable to expect otherwise. yet, this privileging of proximity oversimplifies the issue. to magnify minutiae into a monopoly does seem to be a distortion of reality. by and large, the proponents contacted were not prone to generalizations or grand visions. rather, more than a few were explicitly skeptical about the changes proposition 2 might bring about, being aware that the initiative might simply cause a geographic shift in egg production or that harmful practices would persist even if spatial constraints were david lulka — to turn: california’s proposition 2 and the ethics of animal mobility in agriculture 49 relaxed. additionally, many referenced scientific findings on confined animal feeding operations (cafos) and aspects of evolutionary theory. thus, a simple, dichotomous breakdown of realism is unhelpful here, for the realities of life can be illuminated from, and assessed from, a number of different angles. how can it be that these two factions came to diametrically opposed conclusions on the very same point? indeed, as it turns out, it appears as though each side is speaking past each other. to best understand this, it is helpful to look at tom regan’s conception of “harm.” regan would more than likely side with the proponents of proposition 2, but his depiction of harm is neutral enough that it actually sheds light on both sides of the debate. for regan, harm is not a unified thing, but rather something which has two faces. on the one hand, harm involves suffering that emanates from the infliction of pain. it may be fairly said that throughout its history the animal rights movement has primarily focused on this aspect of harm. among others, singer’s animal liberation predominantly emphasizes the intensity and diversity of pain inflicted within laboratories and on farms. the aforementioned criticisms of debeaking and forced moulting are indicative. on the other hand, regan also characterizes harm as deprivation. deprivation can take many forms, and is dependent upon the type of organism involved. such harm does not necessarily include any infliction of pain or any visible manifestations of suffering. what is evident in the debate surrounding proposition 2 is that each faction has emphasized different aspects of regan’s harm. it must also be noted that each faction is potentially challenged by the entirety of regan’s concept. along with regan’s work, it is helpful to recall the so-called brambell report of 1965, which identified five basic freedoms. these freedoms were the 1) freedom from thirst, and hunger, and malnutrition, 2) freedom from discomfort due to inadequate environments, 3) freedom from pain, injury, and disease, 4) freedom from fear and distress, and 5) freedom to express one’s natural behavior. in their representation of proposition 2, opponents actually emphasized the suffering (as a form of harm) that animals would endure if the initiative were passed. these included hardship inflicted by diseases (for example, by wild migratory birds) and parasites, potential exposure to predators (in a free-range setting), general decline in welfare due to farmers’ diminished capacity to inspect animals and less precise management of dietary intake, and increased pecking and cannibalism among farm humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 50 animals. some of these risks might require an extraordinary event (such as the transmission of avian influenza into california), while others involve mundane risks that are ubiquitous. in cataloging potentially dire consequences of proposition 2, these worries reflected the political aspect of realism, which calls for caution and warns against hubris (even though proposition 2 implies a diminished role for technology). such political realism portrayed ethical ideals, not technology, as unleashing crises. the harms that they emphasized align with the negative rights identified in the brambell report, but did not include the last right of freedom of expression. indeed, the technology used to raise hens (and other animals) is infused by a logic of negation manifested simultaneously in forms of separation which nonetheless permitted limited, yet essential contacts. this emphasis led some proposition opponents into an interesting posture, whereby they needed to buffer animals from their surroundings. this spate of concerns has direct ramifications upon the movement of animals, a property which can bring them into direct contact with these material risks. protection and welfare thus becomes a matter of locking animals in place for their own security. essentially, this was indicated in the opponent’s statement about cages and hens, in that, “they’re lighting controlled. their feed is controlled. their water’s controlled.” in its own way, this is a utopian vision, one that parallels, yet runs counter to, the “pollyanna” imaginings of the initiative’s supporters. it is utopian not simply because the animals are buffered from many potential harms (a real yet idealistic socio-natural formation), but also because the evacuation of risk amounts to the instantiation of nothingness. in substantially reducing certain types of risk, producers are creating places that are reminiscent of nowhere. here is evident the idealistic aspect of realism. thus arises the criticism that the egg industry has created a “universe of cages.” it is thus that proponents of the proposition compared cafos to prisons. this managerial stance potentially produces effects on humans as well. as bock et al. note, “in some housing systems the animals remain more visible as (individual) animals than in others because the farmers can see them moving, playing and interacting with other animals” (119). thus, the technology that houses animals may lead to further abstraction of the animal, which in turn may foster more exacting management techniques. although the concerns of proposition opponents should not be disregarded, the response of producers (and industry generally) has generated problems of its own. clearly, the diminishment of risk not only alleviates some potential hardships, it also generates a condition of deprivation. such deprivation is not a concern for some, but it is for others. as the language of proposition 2 indicates, it is not debeaking and forced david lulka — to turn: california’s proposition 2 and the ethics of animal mobility in agriculture 51 moulting (i.e., forms of induced suffering) that are addressed in this initiative, but rather the diminishment of capacities – specifically movement – that is confronted. thus, for proponents, the emphasis is upon the other side of regan’s definition of harm (and the positive right to expression in the brambell report). certainly, forms of suffering were noted by proponents, and indeed mention of disease (namely, salmonella) was mentioned. nonetheless, it may be argued that these were secondary, not simply by virtue of their absence in the initiative, but also because of their perceived origination in relation to space and movement. in other words, the necessity of debeaking and the prevalence of salmonella are perceived to be a direct consequence of the animals’ inability to move about. movement not only has value in its own right, but is also the means by which other problems can be diminished or avoided. one might say (ironically given the circumstances) that, by enabling movement, proponents hoped to kill two birds with one stone. that said, proponents of the proposition must face some fundamental questions as well. although the ascription of a pollyanna attitude to proponents seems unjustified, it may be accurate to claim that all of the ramifications of the proposition have not been thought through. indeed, some negative outcomes are likely to develop as a result of the structural changes mandated by the initiative. a less controlled environment is likely to generate some hardship, whether it stems from bacteria, competition among the livestock themselves, or from predators (though, again, proposition 2 does not require free-range production or access to the outdoors). although these are domesticated animals, that does not mean they are docile or tame, and thus it is unclear as to how red in tooth and claw supporters are willing to allow intraspecies’ and interspecies’ relations on the farm to become. in this vein, alrøe et al. note that organic farming may present a distinctive set of welfare issues. these uncertainties get to basic ideas about nature and the character of life. clearly, this does present some problem for proposition supporters. as lassen et al. note, tail docking of pigs is objectionable to some, as it speaks to violent human intervention in nonhuman lives, but the retention of tails may lead to tail biting among pigs and consequent infections. with regard to poultry, elson has contended that free-range production may produce net negative outcomes in terms of mortality. to be clear, efsa equivocally notes, “it is difficult to make general conclusions concerning the studies undertaken to assess the influence of keeping systems on laying hen mortality. thus, as no study compares all the cages and nc systems under the same conditions, it is very hard to give a hierarchy, in terms of mortality, among all the existing systems” (43). nonetheless, the fact there is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 52 uncertainty warrants caution. such realizations about the potentially untoward nature of nature are reflected in bracke and hopster’s definition of animal welfare. while forcefully stating that natural behavior should be included in conceptions of animal welfare, they also stated that natural behaviors that produce harm should not be included in evaluations of animal welfare. in short, policies and practices should account for nature, but should not be beholden to nature. although it may be fair to say that the full repercussions of proposition 2 have not been thought out (as many opponents contend), it is also evident that proponents did not necessarily feel that this was their responsibility. faced with a perceived injustice, proponents felt compelled to banish a set of practices, largely irrespective of the consequences. short of catastrophe, in the political process a solution falls largely upon the practitioners and is not the responsibility of the initiative’s supporters. this approach also reflects the philosophical hierarchy noted above, wherein the propensity for movement is seen as one of the fundamental attributes of life, one that supersedes and indeed encompasses other bodily concerns. perhaps this even includes the paradoxical notion that an untimely death may be part of a good life. in this sense, the two coalitions were perhaps unknowingly drawing a distinction between quality and quantity. further, it may be argued that the opponents of proposition 2 are more exacting, expecting a solution to be harm-free in all respects. again, to expect that any structural arrangement will institute perfect conformity with welfare would be utopian. during interviews, proponents did not suggest that life on a farm would become bucolic, but rather simply that a structural inequality would be struck down. this emphasis was inverted by proposition opponents, who accentuated the dire consequences of the legislation. faced with the possible enactment of proposition 2, opponents highlighted what would go wrong instead of emphasizing the justness of current agricultural practices. frequent recourse to the risks and problems associated with free-range production are indicative of this emphasis. recourse to free-range production established an either/or dichotomy, in which the secure world of modern food production was contrasted with the disordered world of extensive production. in effect, from this perspective proposition 2 would leave agricultural industries helpless in the face of numerous uncertainties. a certain rigidity or impotence would overtake those individuals and companies involved in the task of animal management and food production. in brief, proposition 2 would leave farmers with no option but to let the chips fall where they may. david lulka — to turn: california’s proposition 2 and the ethics of animal mobility in agriculture 53 ultimately, however, this is the achilles’ heel of the argument against proposition 2. as noted above, the language of the initiative is very sparse. it provides few details, few proscriptions, and few requirements. reference to free-range production, or some similar arrangement, is to deny the possibility that other options are available; options that eliminate the constraints imposed by conventional production yet also avoid some of the potential hardships generated by a more extensive form of production. the proposition itself does not construct such a dichotomy, and in this sense is more realistic than the stark option put forth by proposition opponents. the general avoidance of other options is less an indication of a lack of alternatives than a general adherence to, and perhaps preference for, the status quo. to be more convincing, opponents need to delve more deeply into several alternative management regimes rather than articulating polar opposites. conclusion. as it turned out, the voters of california supported proposition 2 by a wide margin, as 63.5% of the voters voted in support of the ballot initiative. a majority of voters in 47 counties supported the proposition, while voters in 11 counties rejected the proposition. counties in opposition to the proposition had small, rural populations. these included 6 counties located in the san joaquin valley region, 3 counties located north of sacramento, and 2 counties situated in the northeast corner of the state. this voting pattern likely represents long-standing cultural and economic divisions within the state. it may be tempting to surmise that voters were convinced by the arguments put forth by advocates of the state measure. political advertisements in support of proposition 2, however, were very general in nature, never really addressing the specifics of production. this may have been due to financial constraints, or the limited window of 30-second television spots, but it may also have been because it was deemed unnecessary. the pervasiveness of the yes vote didn’t emerge out of a series of analytical decisions, but rather from a more fundamental sense that formed connections with farm animals and current ideas about what constitutes a good life. indeed, though scientific arguments were promulgated by many supporters, the legislation itself was not scientific. a metaphysic ultimately stood at the foreground in this election process. this is only reaffirmed by the fact that the opposition’s emphasis on disease and food safety issues never gained traction. nor did it matter that the two major metropolitan newspapers came out in opposition to the proposition (los angeles times; san francisco chronicle). this is not to denigrate the public’s decision as unscientific or irrational, but humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 54 rather to note that the clearly pervasive mindset drew from other means of assessment; namely, a sense of their own bodies and the importance of movement. the opponents of proposition 2 lost because they failed to carve out an argument within this wider mode of thought. instead, their restricted conception of welfare was diametrically opposed to this perspective, thus leading the public to view their perspective as impoverished in itself. a simple proposition, with simple wording, was thus able to combat the minutiae of a selective science and find its way into california law. acknowledgment i am grateful to free range studios for permission to use an image from their video production notes 1. cf. gill and lennox. 2. one reviewer for this paper made the astute comment that self-milking technology does not eliminate all elements of human control from the production process. 3. an effort was made to contact an equal number of representatives from each side of the debate. although many individuals on both sides were very receptive to discussion, it proved difficult to make contact with some organization representatives. as the respective number of interviewees suggests, this was more often the case with opponents of proposition 2. the time constraints of the impending election added further complication to this process. 4. the video may be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kku6ry0kj1y&feature=related. 5. forced molting is a process wherein birds are not fed for a significant period of time so as to generate physiological changes that will subsequently increase their level of egg production. david lulka — to turn: california’s proposition 2 and the ethics of animal mobility in agriculture 55 works cited alrøe, hugo fjelsted, mette vaarst, and erik steen kristensen. “does organic farming face distinctive livestock welfare issues? ― a conceptual analysis.” journal of agricultural and environmental ethics 14: 3 (2001): 275-299. armstrong, jeffrey d., and donald bell, bill chase, gail golab, patricia hester, joy mench, ruth newberry, janice swanson, and paul b. thompson. united egg producers scientific committee on animal welfare. unpublished document. united egg producers. 2008. bell, d. “the egg industry of california and the usa in the 1990s: a survey of systems.” world’s poultry science journal 49 (1993): 58-64. bell, donald d. “cage management for layers.” commercial chicken meat and egg production, ed. donald d. bell and william d. weaver, jr. (eds.) norwell, ma: kluwer, 2002. 1007-1040. bock, b.b., and m.m van huik, m.prutzer, eveillard kling , and a. dockes. “farmers’ relationship with different animals: the importance of getting close to the animals. case studies of french, swedish and dutch cattle, pig and poultry farmers.” international journal of sociology of food and agriculture 15: 3 (2007): 108-125. bonanno, allesandro, and lawrence busch, william h. friedland, lourdes gouveia, and enzo mingione. from columbus to conagra: the globalization of agriculture and food. lawrence, ks: up of kansas, 1994. bracke, m.b.m., and h. hopster. “assessing the importance of natural behavior for animal welfare.” journal of agricultural and environmental ethics 19:1 (2006): 77-89. braun, bruce. “biopolitics and the molecularization of life.” cultural geographies 14:1 (2007): 6-28. davies, gail. “patterning the geographies of organ transplantation: corporeality, generosity and justice.” transaction of the institute of british geographers 31:3 (2006): 257271. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 56 dawkins, marian stamp, and sylvia hardie. “space needs of laying hens.” british poultry science 30:2 (1989): 413-416. donaldson, andrew, and david wood. “surveilling strange materialities: categorization in the evolving geographies of fmd biosecurity.” environment and planning d: society and space 22:3 (2004): 373-391. elson, arnold. “do extensive poultry systems really offer superior welfare?” poultry international 47:3 (2008): 10-13. european food safety authority (efsa). the welfare aspects of various systems of keeping laying hens. efsa-q-2003-92. 2005. 10 november, 2009. online. http://www.efsa.europa.eu/cs/blobserver/scientific_opinion/lh_scirep_final1.pdf?ssbin ary=true. giere, ronald n. “scientific realism: old and new problems.” erkenntnis 63:2 (2005): 149165. gill, mary louise, and james g. lennox. self-motion: from aristotle to newton. princeton: princeton up, 1994. goodman, david, and michael watts, eds. globalising food: agrarian questions and global restructuring. london: routledge, 1997. harvey, david. “the body as an accumulation strategy.” environment and planning: d society and space 16:4 (1998): 401-421. hewson, p. “origin and development of the british poultry industry: the first hundred years.” british poultry science 27:4 (1986): 525-539. hinchliffe, steve. “indeterminacy in-decisions ― science, policy and politics in the bse (bovine spongiform encephalopathy) crisis.” transactions of the institute of british geographers 26:2 (2001): 182-204. holloway, lewis. “subjecting cows to robots: farming technologies and the making of animal subjects.” environment and planning d: society and space 25:6 (2007): 1041-1060. horgan, r., and a. gavinelli. “the expanding role of animal welfare within eu legislation and beyond.” livestock science 103:3 (2006): 303-307. david lulka — to turn: california’s proposition 2 and the ethics of animal mobility in agriculture 57 hovorka, alice. “transspecies urban theory: chickens in an african city.” cultural geographies 15:1 (2008): 95-117. humphries, ralph. “the ideal realism.” philosophy today 45:2 (2001): 193-207. johnston, catherine. “beyond the clearing: towards a dwelt animal geography.” progress in human geography 32:5 (2008): 633-649. lassen, j., p. sandøe, and b.forkman. “happy pigs are dirty! ― conflicting perspectives on animal welfare.” livestock science 103:3 (2006): 221-230. latour, bruno. we have never been modern. cambridge. ma: harvard up, 1993 ―――. reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory. oxford: oxford up, 2005. lingis, alphonso. “avian intelligence.” knowing animals. ed. laurence simmons and philip armstrong leiden: brill, 2007. 43-56. longhurst, robyn. “breaking corporeal boundaries: pregnant bodies in public places.” contested bodies. ed. ruth holliday and john hassard. london: routledge, 2001. 81-94. los angeles times. “not chicken feed: proposition 2’s ban on tight cages for hens could drive the egg business out of state.” section a, page 20. september 25, 2008. lulka, david. “stabilizing the herd: fixing the identity of nonhumans.” environment and planning d: society and space 22:3 (2004): 439-463. ―――. “consuming timothy treadwell: redefining nonhuman agency in light of herzog’s grizzly man.” animals and agency. ed. sarah e. mcfarland and ryan hediger. leiden: brill, 200. 967-87. mansfield, becky. “fish, factory trawlers, and imitation crab: the nature of quality in the seafood industry.” journal of rural studies 19:1 (2003): 9-21. mench, j.a. “assessing animal welfare at the farm and group level: a united states perspective.” animal welfare 12:4 (2003): 493-503. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 58 philo, chris, and chris wilbert. animal spaces, beastly places: new geographies of humananimal relations. london: routledge, 2000. power, emma. “border processes and homemaking: encounters with possums in suburban australian homes.” cultural geographies 16:1 (2009): 29-54. regan, tom. the case for animal rights. berkeley: u california p, 2004. richardson, bill. “a new realism.” harvard international review 29:2 (2007): 26-30. san francisco chronicle. “why proposition 2 is a bad idea.” section b, page 10. september 24, 2008. shields, sara, and duncan, ian h.j. an hsus report: a comparison of the welfare of hens in battery cages and alternative systems. n.d. http://www.hsus.org/webfiles/pdf/farm/hsus-a-comparison-of-the-welfare-of-hens-in-battery-cages-andalternative-systems.pdf. downloaded september 8, 2009. shilling, chris. “sociology and the body: classical traditions and new agendas.” embodying sociology: retrospect, progress and prospects. ed. chris shilling. malden, ma: blackwell publishing, 2007. 1-18. singer, peter. animal liberation. new york: harper, 2009. stassart, pierre, and sarah j. whatmore. “metabolising risk: food scares and the un/remaking of belgian beef.” environment and planning a 35:3 (2003): 449-462. state of california. proposition 2. standards for confining farm animals. 2008. 10 november 2009. online. http://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/past/2008/general/title-sum/prop2title-sum.htm. sumner, daniel, a., j. thomas rosen-molina, william a. matthews, joy a. mench, and kurt r. richter. economic effects of proposed restrictions on egg-laying hen housing in california. davis, ca: university of california agricultural issues center, 2008. thrift, nigel. “still life in nearly present time: the object of nature.” body & society 6:3-4 (2000): 34-57. tuan, yi-fu. dominance and affection: the making of pets. new haven: yale up, 1984. david lulka — to turn: california’s proposition 2 and the ethics of animal mobility in agriculture 59 united states department of agriculture (usda). 2007 census of agriculture. 10 november 2009. online. http://www.agcensus.usda.gov/publications/2007/full_report/volume_1,_chapter_2_u s_state_level/st99_2_013_013.pdf. united egg producers (uep). united egg producers animal husbandry guidelines for u.s. egg laying flocks. 2008. 10 november, 2009. online. http://www.uepcertified.com/media/pdf/uep-animal-welfare-guidelines.pdf. united states department of agriculture (usda). chicken and eggs summary. 2009. 10 november, 2009. online. http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/usda/current/chickegg/chickegg-02-26-2009.pdf. whatmore, s. hybrid geographies: natures, cultures, spaces. london: sage, 2002. wolch, jennifer, and jody emel. animal geographies: place, politics, and identity in the nature-culture borderlands. london: verso, 1998. wolch, jennifer r., kathleen west, and thomas e. gaines. “transspecies urban theory.” environment and planning d: society and space 13:6 (1995): 735-760. wolfowitz, paul. 2009. “think again: realism.” foreign policy 174 (september/october 2009): 66-72. yarwood, r., and n. evans. “the geography of uk agriculture: mapping rare breeds.” geography review 14:2 (1999): 18-22. van heijgen becoming pheasant becoming pheasant the making, unmaking, and remaking of a hunted bird eugenie van heijgen wageningen university humanimalia 15.2 (summer 2025) abstract: pheasants have long been considered the most hunted bird species in the world. no other “hunting animal” has been bred, released, and shot for as long and as intensively as the pheasant. in the netherlands, after centuries of actively shaping these birds and the landscapes in which they were hunted, the rearing and release of pheasants is now prohibited. yet this hunting legacy still shapes how pheasants are regarded — or disregarded — in contemporary nature conservation and management. by analysing historical hunting documents, interviews, and current policies, i trace how the ecologies, relations, and biological selves that make up pheasants have been shaped by hunting practices. i argue that, because of their ambiguous status derived from this hunting past and the changing nature of contemporary landscapes, pheasants are “unmade” and rendered elusive to conservation efforts. at the same time, pheasants have found ways to re-make themselves and make a living in modern landscapes — paradoxically, still in dialogue with hunters — which might be understood as a form of multi-species stewardship. in this way, pheasants defy labels such as wild, domestic, feral, or native, and shed light on how historically formed interdependencies continue to shape contemporary efforts at biodiversity and nature conservation in anthropocene landscapes. keywords: conservation; stewardship; wildlife management; game animal; animal history; hunting; landscape bio: eugenie van heijgen is a lecturer at the forest and nature conservation policy group at wageningen university, where she also earned her phd in 2025 in the cultural geography group. this article is part of her doctoral research, in which she examines hunting landscapes in the netherlands as co-shaped multi-species assemblages through time and space. in her work, she explores how hunting has historically shaped human–animal–landscape relations, as well as our understanding of species, the wild, and conservation itself. email: eugenie.vanheijgen@wur.nl orcid: 0000-0001-5438-7026 copyright © 2025 eugenie van heijgen this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 2 (2025): 147–183. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.19718 mailto:eugenie.vanheijgen@wur.nl https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5438-7026 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.19718 van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 149 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) with all due respect, in the world of nature management he is seen as an inferior species; he does not matter. it’s the same for the real bird fanatics: for them the pheasant doesn’t count. he isn’t real. he has been walking around the netherlands for two thousand years, but he isn’t real. interview with biodiversity monitoring expert, 29 september 2023 introduction i am used to having encounters with pheasants. especially where i grew up, close to the river floodplains, i would see them every day while walking our family dog. sometimes i would spot one, usually a male, seemingly strolling casually through a field. on other occasions i was startled by a figure flying up from behind a blackberry bush, flapping noisily, accompanied by a shrill metallic crow. female pheasants are camouflaged in shades of brown, contrasting with the spectacularly coloured cocks. sunlight reveals their chestnut, golden-brown, dark green and red colouring, making them appear exotic and out of place. at the same time, these beautiful birds are bound to the landscapes of my childhood. but the presence of pheasants and their appreciation in the dutch landscape are far from self-evident. pheasants are probably the most hunted bird species in the world.1 active breeding, rearing, and releasing have been practiced for many “hunting animals”, but for none as long and as intensively as for the pheasant.2 thanks to these practices, the pheasant is currently one of the most widely introduced birds worldwide.3 pheasants have been bred, reared, and released for their meat and later for sport shooting/hunting. it is generally assumed that the pheasant was introduced to western europe by the romans. yet the first historical records of pheasants 1 see hill and robertson, the pheasant, 123–36. 2 de rijk, vogels en mensen, 79. 3 fuller and garson, pheasants, 2. see also errington and gewertz, “pheasant capitalism”. 150 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) in the netherlands appear in the fourteenth century in connection with medieval banquets. at the wedding feast of duchess katherine and duke edward in the hague in 1369, six pheasants were served alongside 273 rabbits. from the sixteenth century onwards, the breeding, rearing, and releasing of pheasants intensified.4 hunting policies aimed to protect the species, such as bans on collecting eggs, destroying nests, or hunting for a few years after release. for example, in the province of utrecht, protecting nests included a seven-metre radius restriction on mowing heather. after the french revolution and subsequent changes in land ownership, when the role of the aristocracy in the netherlands had somewhat diminished, pheasant hunting became more popular. from the second half of the eighteenth century, the pheasant became an important “hunting object” throughout europe.5 where pheasant hunting had once been an elite privilege, landowners now obtained the right to hunt them themselves.6 with more hunters, the systematic introduction of pheasants took off in the netherlands. as a result, by the end of the nineteenth century, the birds were living independently throughout the country: “originally introduced, but now living in a completely wild state in all provinces except groningen and drenthe”.7 in contrast to many other countries — such as the uk, where in 2016 up to forty-seven million birds were released and fifteen million shot8 — in the netherlands it has been forbidden to rear and release pheasants since 1998. for the first time in a long co-evolving history, pheasants are seemingly left to become feral/wild. however, the centuries-long interdependency of pheasants and hunters still leaves its traces. 4 see de rijk, vogels en mensen, 79. 5 ten den, achtergronden en oorzaken, 13. 6 this transition from connecting the hunting right to ownership of the land did not go smoothly. see bruneel and wessels, “verenigd maar verdeeld”. 7 “oorspronkelijk geplant, maar thans in volkomen wilden staat levende in alle provincies, behalve groningen en drente”. albarda, aves neerlandicae, 61. unless otherwise specified, all translations are by the author. 8 aebischer, “fifty-year trends”, 6. van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 151 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) scholars in the environmental humanities, animal geographies and related fields have paid close attention to the complex, entangled relations between human and nonhuman lives in shared landscapes.9 whether using concepts of (actor-)networks, assemblages,10 topologies,11 meshworks,12 or hybridity,13 they all make the ontological claim that understanding the world involves dynamic relations between organisms and environments. by drawing attention to the complex entangled lives of humans, nonhumans, and landscapes, animal geographers (and others) have challenged binary assumptions, such as thinking in terms of strict human–animal14 and nature–culture15 divides. recognizing these entanglements inevitably raises the question of what it means to be human in relation to animals — and highlights how animals actively figure in shaping their own lives and relations. despite this recognition, the dominant epistemologies through which we understand, treat, and envision the conservation of animals remain based on distinctions that reinforce purist views of organisms as species, breeds, and/or gene pools, tied to fixed and delineated places of belonging. meanwhile, the historical geographies of human–animal relations are still often understood as a trajectory towards ever greater power and control.16 this perspective reaches its epitome in the era increasingly referred to as the anthropocene, when animal lives have generally become more tightly controlled for human purposes; instrumentalized as commodities or intensively managed in the name of conservation. the story of the pheasant illustrates this development. throughout history, pheasants have been relocated, bred, and reared for hunting. yet to see these practices merely as expressions of human power, domination, and control risks upholding human exceptionalism as the sole driving force 9 philo and wilbert, animal spaces, beastly places. 10 gibbs et al., “camel country”; gorman, “therapeutic landscapes”. 11 whatmore and thorne, “wild(er)ness”. 12 ingold, being alive, 63. 13 whatmore, hybrid geographies. 14 plumwood, “politics of reason”. 15 descola, beyond nature and culture. 16 tuan, dominance and affection, 7. 152 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) shaping landscape ecologies and nonhuman lives. thus, it reaffirms what many argue is a major pitfall of using the term anthropocene: the idea of humans as an all-powerful species that, as a single homogeneous unit, completely dominates “our” environment and all other beings that live there. by addressing pheasant becomings and exploring their genealogies in dutch landscapes, this paper aims to tell a broader story. i take up erica fudge’s call to find ways to tell animal histories that help to “reconnect with our planet, and recognize ourselves as inseparable rather than special; reliant upon rather than dominating”.17 instead of seeing hunting as only the act of killing to exert dominance over animal lives, what happens if we take seriously the ways in which hunters and pheasants historically influenced each other’s modes of existence? in what ways has — and perhaps still is — the relationship between pheasants and hunters a “becoming with”?18 in this article, i explore the shared histories of pheasants and hunters in the netherlands, focusing on how pheasant becoming involves the agency of both pheasants and hunters. i ask how pheasants, hunters, and landscapes are “agential and active in the co-production of spatial relations”,19 by tracing the making, unmaking, and remaking of pheasants. this is important because pheasants bring into perspective more affirmative ways of envisioning anthropocene landscapes for wildlife — that is how pheasants transition from being intensively bred to finding their own ways of becoming “wild”, and how they do so in relation to hunters. through their historical interdependency with hunters, pheasants challenge neat labels like wild, domestic, feral, and native, and complicate our ideas of care and stewardship. they also show how formal efforts to conserve nature and biodiversity today are impacted by historically formed interdependencies. in the next section, i explore the theoretical and methodological implications of understanding animal histories and futures as processes of agential co-becoming. i then describe “making pheasant” as the historical process of rearing and releasing, how 17 fudge, “history of animals”, 262. 18 haraway, when species meet, 150. 19 miele and bear, “more-than-human research methodologies”, 229. van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 153 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) pheasants and knowledges about them are “unmade”, and how pheasants “remake” themselves in relation to hunters. i conclude by arguing that we might understand the relationship between pheasants, hunters, and the landscape as a form of multi-species stewardship. narrating agential animal histories, presents, and futures in the age of the anthropocene, human–animal relations are often understood on a spectrum between full human control and wild animal self-making. characterizing animals as domestic, wild, feral, native, or exotic not only sets up a simple wild–domestic dichotomy, it also inscribes an ideology of human mastery. within this spectrum, the “domestic” animal is defined by its dependence on humans, while the “wild” animal is defined by its independence from them. yet, as anna tsing writes: “through such fantasies, domestics are condemned to life imprisonment and genetic standardisation, while wild species are ‘preserved’ in gene banks while their multi-species landscapes are destroyed”.20 indeed, the wild–domestic interface creates powerful wildlife management strategies by assigning a legal status to animals depending on the spaces they occupy. for example, in rewilding schemes where large herbivores “de-domesticate” themselves and “rewild” the landscape,21 legal tensions arise around animal welfare and biosecurity, since their protection depends upon their being under human control.22 similarly, conservation that aims to harness and promote free-living wildlife as ecological vectors in rewilding often involves intensive human management. designating animals as “wild” does not necessarily serve them well, since it means that they become subject to wildlife management, which often involves large-scale killing.23 arguably, legally labelling animals as wild, domestic, or feral can constrain certain becomings in ways that are harmful for the 20 tsing, “unruly edges,” 144. 21 lorimer and driessen, “bovine biopolitics”. 22 lorimer, wildlife in the anthropocene, 97–117. 23 kaufman and mallory, the last extinction. 154 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) animals themselves. for example, paul keil traces how pigs in australia have at various times been categorized as domestic, wild, and feral. he argues that such labelling has “un-made” their relational possibilities.24 at the same time, animal agencies may move outside legal human control by forging affective connections. as maan barua shows, calling parakeets “feral” inscribes them into regimes of biopolitical population control rooted in nativist ideas about who belongs where — even as the animals themselves create openings for alternative and more just shared worlds.25 but not all animals have an unambiguous legal status. for example, when animals receive protection as a threatened species “certain species’ lives are elevated to a political status, while the rest (initially at least, the unlisted) remain biological, or mere, life”.26 so while some animals enter biopolitical regimes when granted legal status as domestic, wild, or threatened, others remain “just” life — liminal and, perhaps to some extent, able to navigate in and out of the biopolitical realm. how animals and the ways they are perceived are made and unmade happens alongside constantly evolving, reshaping, and adapting nonhuman agencies. we are all secret agents, depending on the circumstances, waiting for another being who will give us new agencies, new ways of becoming agents, actively acted upon, undoing and redoing precarious selves (through) one another. this is, since the beginning of our time as living creatures, our history: a history that needs new stories, for these can be given a sequel.27 to move beyond the story of domestication as a unilateral mode of human control over “nature”,28 or the “wild” as untouched by human interference,29 we need alternative stories. building on efforts to understand relationality through the new materialist (re)turn in 24 keil, “unmaking the feral”. 25 barua, “feral ecologies”. 26 braverman, “the regulatory life”, 20. 27 despret, “secret agents”, 44. 28 lien, becoming salmon; swanson et al. domestication gone wild. 29 cronon, “trouble with wilderness”. van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 155 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) geography, i consider the pasts, presents, and futures of human–animal assemblages to consist of ongoing collaborations, interdependencies, and co-becomings of humans and animals. so “instead of being some thing, life forms are constantly evolving, constantly becoming, shifting in their composition”.30 this means that if “human nature is an interspecies relationship”,31 the same can be said for more-than-human natures. the notion of “species” therefore should not be taken to refer to fixed animal beings defined in terms of genotypes, static physical forms, or regular behavioural patterns, but rather to “ecologies of becomings”.32 when a species goes extinct, it is not the pure unit itself that we should mourn, but rather the loss of “vast intergenerational lineages, interwoven in rich patterns of co-becoming”.33 becoming animal, however, entails more than interspecies interactions. the environment co-produces as well: “[o]n the one hand, the milieu ‘is taking’ the animal: it affects it, it captures it, it effectuates its power to be affected; on the other hand, the milieu does not exist outside the ‘grasping’ to which it is submitted: it exists through the way that a given animal confers on this milieu the power to affect it.”34 this means that the affordances the landscape provides for animals to thrive and survive35 are multilateral; what matters to animals within “sensory bubbles” or umwelten is based not only on a species’ or subject’s perceptual lifeworld but also shared and co-produced by atmospheres.36 as such, landscapes are “overlapping projects of world-making”.37 hunting forms a distinct genre in human–animal–landscape entanglements and becomings. the practice has been described as a cultural performance involving a close, personal engagement between 30 greenhough, “vitalist geographies”, 38; original emphasis. 31 tsing, quoted in haraway, when species meet, 19. 32 lorimer, wildlife in the anthropocene, 7. 33 van dooren, flight ways, 12. 34 despret, “secret agents”, 38. 35 gibson, “theory of affordances”. 36 uexküll, umwelt und innenwelt; van heijgen et al. “landscape is a trap”. 37 tsing, “dream of the stag”, 14. 156 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) hunter and animal.38 hunters often speak of experiencing a certain state of being, a sense of becoming part of nature by actively attuning themselves to the animal. but hunters do not form a relationship with just any animal: “it must be a special sort of animal that is killed in a specific way for a particular reason”.39 what makes these animals “special” seems to be related to what jamie lorimer calls the “affective charisma” of conservation species, such as behaviour and physical appearance.40 additionally, their cultural identity or status, as well as the moral justifiability of their death in terms of ecological balance or food provision, play a role in making an animal huntable. historically, the preservation and reservation of special animals for hunters can be understood as an early form of conservation.41 from their inception, western conservation and management efforts, both at home and abroad, have been closely tied to hunting. the spatial relationships between hunter, animals, and the environment they inhabit — whether in europe, north america, or elsewhere — are often framed as a form of care, identified as stewardship.42 this understanding has crystalized into management practices directed towards particular species.43 aldo leopold, a key figure in inspiring environmental stewardship with his land ethic, originally proposed that stewardship as wildlife management entails: (1) predator control (though he later opposed wolf hunting); (2) reserving game spaces; (3) artificially replenishing game species; and (4) habitat controls.44 however, leopold’s initial ideas about wildlife management were not entirely new. elite hunting traditions in western europe already involved appointing caretakers for such tasks. in germany, this type of care is known as hege, referring to caretakers’ practices such as feeding animals in enclosed spaces. the term encompasses both a type of space (wildgehege) and an ethos of managing that space 38 marvin, “a passionate pursuit”, 46–60. 39 cartmill, view to a death, 29. 40 lorimer, “nonhuman charisma”. 41 taylor, american conservation. 42 von essen and allen, “killing with kindness”, 183. 43 holsman, “goodwill hunting?”. 44 gigliotti et al. “changing culture of wildlife”, 79. van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 157 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) and the wildlife within it. when leopold published his sand county almanac in 1949, he extended his notion of stewardship for particular game species to an ethic of care for nature as a whole, building on work in the emerging field of ecology.45 this understanding of nature as a system or complex process has had consequences for how the role of hunters in “nature” is viewed today: hunting for wildlife management and ecological stewardship are often assumed to go hand in hand.46 for example, in some cases, population control by hunters is seen as necessary to protect ecosystems from excessive pressure by certain wildlife populations.47 yet, as robert holsman argues, seeing hunters as ecosystem stewards should not be considered self-evident: in relation to broader ecological objectives, hunters’ primary focus remains with the animals they hunt. at the same time, the appropriation of space, related practices of care and particular hunting traditions are bond up with an elitist vision of exclusive land use, one that distinguishes hunting as desirable and legitimate from poaching, which is cast as unregulated and assumed to be unsustainable forest use by local communities. as such, stewardship has been critiqued for reaffirming human control and dominance over both human and animal lives. stewardship, as it emerged from christian theology, bestows upon humans both the privilege and the moral responsibility to take care of god’s creation.48 in this way, stewardship perpetuates an anthropocentric and christian-humanist worldview in which huntable animals are objectified as natural resources. especially in a north american context, it has also been seen to reflect a colonial, patriarchal ideology that is at odds with indigenous perspectives.49 despite these critiques, scholars have begun to embrace the multiple and often ambiguous meanings of stewardship, pointing to other ways it can be understood. thus, johan peçanha enqvist et 45 mathevet et. al., “concept of stewardship”. 46 holsman, “goodwill hunting?”. 47 van heijgen et al. “haunted by hunting”. 48 callicott, thinking like a planet, 167. 49 eichler and baumeister, “hunting for justice”; luke, “violent love”. 158 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) al. identify care, knowledge, and agency as three dimensions that connect the discourse on stewardship in the academic literature: as an ethic, a motivation, an action, and an outcome. they argue that care is an underrepresented aspect in stewardship research, even though it can help us “identify and understand how more sustainable human–nature relationships can emerge and persist over time”.50 this also means that if we understand stewardship as an embodied and practiced expression of care, we should pay attention to the extent to which naturecultures51 foster interdependence, creativity, and other-than-human agencies and becomings — all while critically engaging with colonial and religious legacies. the identities of hunters as stewards or caretakers can therefore be seen as co-produced by the animals they hunt, and vice-versa — perhaps modelled on the way flowers gain agency “through becoming enabled to make their companion pollinators be moved by them, and this is how the latter could themselves be agents, through becoming enabled to make the flowers able to attract them, and in turn to be moved by them”.52 we cannot draw one-to-one parallels between the bee–flower relation and that of hunter and pheasant, but it does appear relevant to consider the at least potentially processual, relational, and mutual — if not symmetrical — character of these practices of care. to understand the shared histories of pheasants and hunters — and the ways in which, over centuries, pheasants have been “made” pheasant — i have conducted a review of dutch hunting literature dating from 1895 until 1995. this includes a full review of all articles on pheasants published in de jager (“the hunter”, formerly de nederlandse jager), the official magazine of the royal dutch hunters’ association (formerly the knjv), using the keywords “fazant” (pheasant), “haan/hen” (cock/hen), and “kweken” (rearing). i have also reviewed most dutch hunting handbooks published in this period, focusing on how, historically, pheasant bodies and behaviours have been moved 50 enqvist et al., “stewardship as a boundary object”, 26. 51 latimer and miele, “naturecultures?”. 52 despret, “secret agents”, 40. van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 159 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) and shaped by hunters. to understand the contemporary situation of pheasants, i have also gathered data from more recent newspaper articles, policy documents, and websites of the hunters’ association and sovon (stichting ornithologisch veldonderzoek nederland, the dutch centre for field ornithology). i have conducted several semi-structured interviews with hunters and exchanged emails and phone calls with sovon, the fbe (fauna beheereenheid, or fauna management unit) gelderland, and the hunters’ association. even though these methods focus on written and spoken texts, the pheasant has always been present in this landscape — both in my daily bicycle rides to wageningen and in countless field trips to estates and other hunting landscapes over the years. making pheasants there is no game species over which the hunter can exert as much influence as the pheasant. mainly through artificial propagation, but also through feeding and protection. this “human connection” does not mean that pheasant hunting is in any way inferior to hunting other game. if that were so, generations of excellent hunters and game wardens here and elsewhere would never have concerned themselves with pheasants, for their interest was never in “chickens”.53 what a pheasant is and how they are envisioned has historically been shaped by this “human connection”. according to the above, what makes a pheasant a good game bird is their ability to respond to a variety of manipulations, including rearing and releasing. even though these processes are very similar to the keeping of chickens, what sets pheasants apart is their ability to turn “wild” again. thus, while for chickens, connections with humans are comparatively onesided, in the case of pheasants, the “human connection” results not 53 “er is geen wildsoort waarop de jager zo’n invloed kan uitoefenen als de fazant voornamelijk door de kunstmatige vermeerdering, maar ook wel door het voeren en de bescherming in het algemeen deze ‘mensverbondenheid’ betekent niet dat de jacht op fazanten onder hoeft te doen voor die op enig ander wild ware het anders dan zouden generaties van voortreffelijke jagers en jachtopzichters zich hier en elders niet met fazanten hebben opgehouden, want naar ‘kippen’ ging hun belangstelling niet uit.” cartouche, “fazanten”, 813. quoted in dahles, mannen in het groen, 209. 160 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) only from human manipulations but also from the ability of these animals to shape this connection themselves. until the ban on releasing pheasants in 1998, pheasants in the netherlands — as is still the case elsewhere — were highly manipulated into becoming huntable animals. in what follows, i will outline how the pheasant came to be a “perfect” huntable bird and how this has historically been enacted in relations with hunters as part of shared lifeworlds from the late nineteenth century through to the late twentieth century. rearing at the end of the nineteenth century, the pheasant became a desirable game bird. with the decline of many other hunted birds (such as partridge) due to intensified agricultural land use, the ability of pheasants to adapt quickly to changing landscapes made them a blessing for hunters. rearing pheasants was seen as the most effective way to secure a large huntable population within a relatively short time (one to two years). because the entire process from rearing to release is time-consuming and costly, it was initially done mostly by elite landowners whose estates were large enough to hire a dedicated game keeper appointed with the task of breeding pheasants. the aim of rearing was to introduce and “civilize” (inburgeren) the pheasants within these private domains.54 over time, however, this changed: in 1957, one hunter noted that he “no longer [considered the pheasant] the ‘elite bird’ it once was; one finds breeding flocks and sees attempts at rearing and release by owners of both large and small fields, in both guarded and unguarded hunts”.55 pheasant chicks could be purchased at various ages (from one year old and older), or bred in enclosed pens, in so-called breeding groups (see figure 1). in these settings, the practice of captive rearing was legitimized by characterizing pheasant hens as poor mothers, incapable of raising many chicks on their own. in captivity, pheasant hens were considered “unreliable broody hens” (onvertrouwbare 54 fürst, “het inburgeren van den fazant”, 1. 55 “het is niet meer de ‘élite-vogel’ van vroeger; men treft foktomen aan en ziet broeden uitzetpogingen bij bezitters van grote en kleine velden, in bewaakteen onbewaakte jachten.” cartouche, “itbon”, 104. fig. 1 watercolour and pencil illustration of a pheasant breeding pen or “foktoom”, by the author. inspired by a drawing by rien poortvliet in a. h. m. jurgens, kennis en praktijk van de jacht op waterwild, klein wild en schadelijk wild (1968), 101. 162 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) broedsters) because of their shyness towards humans.56 wild pheasants were similarly considered “bad mothers”: “she lays her eggs carelessly in highly primitive nests, often in places that are plainly visible to all. her way of brooding and caring for the young is likewise so careless and inadequate that, out of fifteen to eighteen eggs, she raises only four to seven young.”57 the writer concludes that “[a]ll these circumstances make it necessary to raise pheasants as young domestic poultry and in many cases the hen must be kept confined and her eggs hatched under a foster mother.”58 so, as soon as the pheasant hen had laid her eggs, they were removed to be hatched by someone else. which bird would make the best foster mother for pheasant eggs was the subject of lively debate and experimentation. various chicken breeds were suggested as surrogates. bantam hens could hatch eleven to thirteen eggs, while larger black chickens might hatch up to twenty-one.59 especially hunters who would rear a small number of pheasants made use of chickens. “artificial mothers” (incubators) were also introduced, but not all hunters were in favour of this. keeping pheasant chicks warm by a lamp, without social interaction from a living mother, was by some believed to produce inferior birds: “chicks raised under a lamp are neither wild nor tame, i would almost call them ‘ordinary’. “they respond differently, less personally”, while chicken-hatched chicks would exhibit similar behaviour to their surrogate mother: “with a calm hen, i get calm chicks”.60 56 ericus, “jachtsport”, 438. 57 “de wilde fazantenhen is een slechte moeder. zij legt haar eieren op zorgelooze wijze in hoogst primitieve nesten, op plaatsen, die ieder gemakkelijk in ’t oog vallen. haar manier van broeden en de jongen verzorgen is eveneens zoo zorgeloos en onvolkomen, dat zij, van 15 tot 18 eieren, slechts 4 tot 7 jongen groot brengt.” g., “engelsche fazanterieën”, 1. 58 “al deze omstandigheden zijn oorzaak van de noodzakelijkheid, om de fazanten als jong tam plumvee op te kweeken en in tal van gevallen moet men de hen op-gesloten houden en de eieren, die zij legt, door een pleegmoeder laten uitbroeden.” g., “engelsche fazanterieën”, 1. 59 jurgens, kennis en praktijk , 103. 60 “ze reageren anders, minder persoonlijk. […] [b]ij een rustige kloek heb ik rustige kuikens. de kuikens onder de lamp zijn noch wild, noch rustig; ik zou haast zeggen, ‘gewoon’.” zandhaas, “betekent het uitzetten”, 236. van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 163 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) release there are differing views on the best way to release pheasant chicks. some authors suggest keeping the chicks in a large coop until they are eight weeks old before releasing them in the forest. others advise releasing them younger, at around four weeks, under the care of a turkey hen. turkeys are considered too heavy and “careless” to hatch pheasant eggs, but they are praised as excellent nannies. according to an article in the revue der sporten from 1909, four-weekold chicks could be brought into a remote forested area with their turkey foster mother, who would fiercely defend “her” chicks from predators if a dog or a cat slipped past the gun of a forester or game keeper. she would also teach the chicks to forage for food and roost with them high up in the trees. once the chicks could take care of themselves, the turkey hen would leave them and “return home” (komt naar huis terug).61 others recommended releasing the chicks at ten to twelve weeks, once they could “stand on their own feet” (op eigen benen kunnen staan).62 ultimately, the aim of releasing was to “rewild”63 or make wild (verwilderen) the pheasant chicks, which means that the pheasants have to learn how to navigate the landscape and behave as true game birds during the hunt. several factors are considered important. pheasants are described as having a “natural tendency to roam” (aangeboren trekdrang),64 meaning that they move away in search of better living conditions if their place of dwelling is lacking. landowners therefore tried to motivate pheasants to stay within their hunting grounds, given the effort and expense invested in raising them. a. h. m. jurgens recommends gradually releasing small groups of pheasants from a coop in a forested area, feeding them in the same place every day. so long as some pheasants are still inside the coop, the rest are unlikely to stray far. once all of them have been released, 61 ericus, “jachtsport”, 439. 62 jurgens, kennis en praktijk, 109. 63 not to be confused with the discourse of “rewilding” landscapes through (re)introduction of keystone species to promote ecological processes. here it refers to the process by which individual animals such as pheasants are “made” wild again. 64 jurgens, kennis en praktijk, 93. 164 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) the daily feeding routine would teach the birds to view the forest as a safe haven — ideal for roosting in trees and feeding at specific times. in this way, pheasants “know the way, as it were, and easily return to the place of release in autumn” (kennen zij als het ware de weg en keren in het najaar gemakkelijker naar de plaats waar zij zijn uitgezet terug). thus, releasing pheasants in the forest helps to manipulate and predict their behaviour, ensuring that they are “where the hunter wants them” (waar de jager hen wil hebben) when hunting season comes around.65 this might explain why, even though — as i will explain later — pheasants do not necessarily exclusively inhabit forests, hunting literature often refers to them as “forest pheasants”. hunting in pheasant hunting, the place where the hunter wants the pheasant to be is related to the flight behaviour of the bird and the method of hunting. this is peculiar, as pheasants are taxonomically classified as a ground bird (ratites): “they are good on their feet and can, if they wish, outpace almost any other fowl; but they fly poorly and do so only when absolutely necessary”.66 nevertheless, hunters prize pheasants for their flight: they can reach speeds of up to 95 km/h (59 mph) and “their method of flying requires powerful wingbeats, producing a flapping sound, especially when taking flight; but once the pheasant has reached a certain height, it flutters little and shoots forward rapidly in a downward glide with outstretched wings and tail, as if on an inclined plane”.67 pheasants were traditionally trapped or hunted with falcons, but with the advent of firearms, they became popular quarry for shooting. in the uk, this type of hunting even developed into its own 65 jurgens, kennis en praktijk, 109. 66 “zij zijn goed ter been en kunnen, als zij willen, in het hardloopen bijna met ieder ander hoen wedijveren; zij vliegen echter slecht en doen dit daarom slechts in den uitersten nood.” kalsbeek, fazant, pauw, kalkoen en parelhoen, 2. 67 “hun wijze van vliegen vereischt krachtige vleugelslagen en gaat daarom vooral bij het opvliegen met een klappered geluid gepaard; wanneer echter de fazant eens een zekere hoogte bereikt heeft, fladdert hij weinig, maar schiet met uitgespreide vleugels en staart als van een hellend vlak in benedenwaartsche richting snel vooruit.” kalsbeek, fazant, pauw, kalkoen, 2. van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 165 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) practice known simply as “shooting”. this practice is all about manipulating and predicting the flight behaviour of the bird. as such, the “poor” flying skills of the pheasant make it an excellent game bird for shooting. antonius hermans described the essence of shooting as “the art of bringing them up, over, and down”.68 “bringing them up” means flushing the pheasants into the air. in every hunting method, pheasants are startled into flight. this can be done by a dog flushing birds from cover, while a single or a small group of hunters follow behind. in driven shoots, so-called “beaters” walk through the landscape, systematically driving birds toward waiting hunters. ideally, throughout the drive (drift), individual pheasants should be continuously made to fly up. “bringing them over” means manipulating the birds so that they “present themselves” in the appropriate way. in general, high flying pheasants are desired. according to j. antonisse, the best conditions for high flying pheasants are created in driven shoots: “this really gives the game the opportunity to show its worth”, and, he adds, “the same goes for the guns”.69 to achieve this, a pheasant must: (a) be in prime condition; (b) be flushed at the right moment; (c) have clear space to gain height easily; (d) have a target cover to aim for; and (e) be able to spot the guns in time once airborne, and attempt to soar over them.70 evidently, the landscape plays an important role in producing high flying birds. ideally, pheasants fly over open ground between coverts, making them accessible targets. pheasants tend to look for cover in places they are familiar with, and this knowledge allows hunters to predict flight paths. as such, the landscape is much more than a backdrop to the hunting scene; it plays an active role in the process of becoming a huntable pheasant — and in the knowledge and skills required to be a good hunter. finally, “bringing them down” is about the skill of the shot. hunters who shoot pheasants while they are still flying low are frowned upon 68 hermans, jagerswoordenboek, 104. 69 “hierbij krijgt dit wild pas echt goed de kans te laten zien wat het waard is. overigens geldt dit evenzeer voor de geweren.” antonisse, de jacht in nederland, 133. 70 antonisse, de jacht in nederland, 133. 166 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) and considered to go against the hunter’s ethos. instead, pheasants should be allowed time to climb and pick up speed. meanwhile, birds that refuse or fail to climb are dismissed as “flutterers” (flodderaars). during the hunt, hunters are referred to as “the guns”. they are expected to be able to distinguish cocks from hens, as the latter must often be spared. naturalizing pheasants the sparing of hens suggests that hunters were keen to encourage natural breeding, rather than having to rely on rearing and release. indeed, at various times pheasants have lived all across the netherlands in a fully wild state. in many cases, rearing and release were intended as a starting point from which pheasants would (re-establish) wild populations: “these semi-wild pheasants sometimes voluntarily leave the forests in which they were hatched and raised, to settle independently, live entirely wild all year round, breed, multiply, and form colonies that can survive without human help”.71 the process was literally referred to as inburgeren — “naturalization”, in the sense of granting citizenship to the hunting field. this naturalization was, however, actively encouraged by hunters. various measures were taken to ensure annual repopulation of wild pheasants within the hunting grounds. first, the environmental conditions had to be right. to this end, extensive knowledge exchange took place in the hunting literature about the pheasants’ preferred habitat. this literature sees the pheasant as “a cross between forest-fowl [woudhoen] and field-fowl [veldhoen], needing both woods and open country to thrive. it needs the flat field, which in summer offers a desirable place to stay with good cover and more abundant food, and the forest, which provides shelter in the winter and the roosting places overnight”.72 this suggests that pheasants are not 71 “intusschen verlaten deze halfwilde fazanten somstijds vrijwillig de bosschen, waarin zij uitgebroed en opgegroeid zijn, gaan zich zelfstandig vestigen, leven het geheele jaar door volkomen in den wilden staat, telen voort, vermenigvuldigenn zich en vormen koloniën, die zonder hulp van den mensch kunnen bestaan.” kalsbeek, fazant, pauw, kalkoen, 6. 72 “de fazant nu staat tusschen deze twee groepen in: hij houdt het midden tusschen wouden veldhoenders en heeft voor zijn gedijen behoefte zoowel aan bosch als aan vlak. hij heeft het vlakke veld noodig, dat hem in den zomer een gewenscht verblijf met van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 167 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) “tied to any particular type of landscape but feel equally at home in polders, forests, or dunes”.73 second, when the environmental conditions were favourable, hunters took further measures to support existing populations of wild pheasants. one such was the creation of so-called “wild pheasantries”. these were areas planted with trees and scrubs, where tame males were introduced to attract hens and where the birds would be fed and protected from predators, both by the physical layout and the active culling of predators in an around these preserves. another common practice, likely centuries old, was to protect pheasants from harsh winters by catching and keeping them in an attic or coop until spring, when they were released to breed.74 this was especially popular on estates.75 not everyone approved, however: at the turn of the twentieth century, one hunter argued against providing winter shelter: “he [the pheasant] gladly makes use of it, which softens him up, to his own detriment and that of the landowner. by nature, the pheasant is a hardy bird”.76 the pheasant’s “nature” and genetic disposition were actively experimented upon. despite pheasants’ adaptability to a variety of landscape types, some hunters believed not all pheasants were equally suited to every biotope. jurgens distinguishes three kinds of pheasant in 1968: (1) “forest pheasants” (boschfazanten), smaller birds whose cocks lack the white neck ring and who “do” best in low-lying terrain; (2) “mongolian” or “formosa” pheasants, also known as “ringnecks”, which are larger and do have a white neck ring. these were introduced to europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and are better suited to higher ground;77 and (3) “tenebrosus” pheasants, which are dark birds, thought to be a spontagoede dekking en rijkelijker voedsel biedt, en bosch, dat hem beschut in den winter en hem gelegenheid schenkt, ’s avonds te boomen en er den nacht door te brengen.” fürst, “het inburgeren van den fazant”, 1. 73 dam, jagen, 56. 74 kalsbeek, fazant, pauw, kalkoen, 6. 75 de rijk, vogels en mensen, 79. 76 “hij maakt er evenwel gaarne gebruik van, hetgeen hem tot zijn eigen schade, en die van den jachteigenaar, verweekelijkt. van nature is de fazant een harde vogel.” g., “engelsche fazanterieën”, 1. 77 jurgens, kennis en praktijk , 95. 168 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) neous mutation of the “forest pheasants” originating in england in 1888. these are the author’s favourite. he believes they fly better, taste better, are “definitely better mothers” (beslist betere moeders), and they do well in his hunting grounds which are marshy with reeds and willows.78 with the introduction of these different breeds and their supposed variety of characteristics in terms of behaviour, appearance, and biotope choice, ensuring breed purity became of interest. especially outside the netherlands, pheasants were carefully bred to maintain a pure stock. the dutch literature shows a slight preference for “pure” strains, but no real effort seem to have been taken to keep them so — all varieties could interbreed and produce fertile offspring, meaning that wild pheasants would all inevitably become “bastards”. yet this “impurity” was not necessarily always considered a downside: crossbreeds were usually considered “strong, fertile, and well adapted to their environment”.79 accordingly, becoming a naturalized pheasant in the netherlands also meant becoming a genetic hybrid, adapted and attuned to landscapes informed by its ancestral lineage as a hunting animal. the ability to naturalize and to turn “wild” also gave pheasants a liminal legal status between domestic and wild. arguably, a handreared pheasant could be classed as livestock, but once released they would become wild game animals. if recaptured alive, for example to be kept in an attic during a cold winter, they would revert to livestock again. in the uk, where rearing and releasing still occur, this legal grey area works in favour of the hunting elite, since only animals classified as wild may legitimately be hunted. the ambivalent nature of the pheasant highlights a political and legal tension between the wild and the domestic, as george monbiot wryly remarks: “the pheasant’s properties of metamorphosis should be a rich field of study for biologists: even the greek myths mentioned no animal that mutated so often”.80 78 jurgens, kennis en praktijk, 97. 79 antonisse, de jacht in nederland, 133. 80 monbiot, “the shooting party”. van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 169 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) as this section has shown, the “human connection” between pheasants and hunters has historically been characterized by elaborate manipulations to create perfect huntable birds and by shaping landscapes in which they can be brought “up, over and down”. and it is this historical connection that entangles pheasants in processes of unmaking, as the next section will show. unmaking pheasants thanks to the use of arguments that are not always entirely fair — yet eagerly listened to in our anti-hunting society — we now live in an era in which the release of pheasants is banned. there are even many activists who openly state that they would not regret it at all if the pheasant were to disappear completely from the netherlands, as this would be a neat way to get rid of a troublesome exotic species.81 the ban on rearing and releasing pheasants, introduced in 1998, exposed conflicting values. naturalists regarded the bird as exotic, while hunters worried that pheasants were being driven to extinction for precisely that reason. although pheasants are classed as naturally occurring wild bird species under the dutch birds directive, to this day “many bird watchers don’t really take the pheasant seriously. they see the bird as an exotic descendant of captive-bred birds that were released en masse for hunting well into the last century, and as a hybrid — a mix of various subspecies and variants from their original range, from the balkans eastward deep into asia”.82 understanding pheasants as exotic frames them as out of place in the netherlands, and their presumed hybridity renders them unnatural. 81 “dankzij het gebruik van lang niet altijd zuivere argumenten — waarnaar in onze antijachtmaatschappij zo gretig wordt geluisterd — leven wij thans in het tijdperk van het verbod op het uitzetten van fazanten. er zijn zelfs legio aktievoerders die er rond vooruitkomen dat zij het geenszins zouden betreuren wanneer de fazant geheel uit nederland verdween, omdat dat het een mooie opruiming van de storende exoot zou vormen.” huygen, “de overbodige fazant,” 539. 82 “veel vogelaars nemen de fazant niet echt serieus. ze beschouwen de vogel als een exoot, nazaat van gefokte vogels die tot ver in de vorige eeuw massaal werden uitgezet als jachtwild. een bastaard, bovendien, een mix van diverse ondersoorten en varianten uit hun oorspronkelijke woongebied, van de balkan oostwaarts tot ver in azië.” urlings, “mens en natuur”. 170 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) as exotic and hybrid birds, their state of being and place of belonging are denaturalized. this delegitimization can be understood as the legacy of a biotic nativism that is deeply embedded in nature management.83 while it may appear to be just the view of a handful of birding enthusiasts, this perspective deprives pheasants of value and interest, which, in turn, can influence policymaking. information about the conservation status of pheasants in the netherlands is based on counts by volunteer bird watchers, coordinated and assessed by sovon, the dutch centre for field ornithology. this organization has the aim to track the numbers and distribution of birds in the country. the results of sovon’s counts inform nature policy and management. this means that policy effectively depends on information gathered by people who may have little interest in pheasants: for some counters, the pheasant quite literally does not count. since the affective relationships produced through counting practices are “a crucial element of knowing as well as managing wild animals”,84 pheasants, as underappreciated birds in the world of birding, seem to occupy a blind spot. sovon do still report on the conservation status of pheasants in the netherlands. according to sovon, pheasant populations are not doing well. whether an animal population has a sustainable future in the netherlands is determined in a so-called staat van instandhouding (conservation status). this assessment considers the animal’s distribution, population size, habitat (quality and extent), and future prospects. in 2022, sovon assessed the conservation status of pheasants as “moderately unfavourable” (matig ongunstig).85 according to their 2023 report, “the species is generally unable to sustain itself independently”. that the pheasant population might eventually settle into small regional groups is considered “plausible, but not certain” (aannemelijk, maar niet zeker).86 seemingly, the hunter-pheasant connection makes it difficult to define whether they live in a natural state: “due to the strong human influence on the popu83 barua, “feral ecologies”. 84 boonman-berson, rethinking wildlife management, 3. 85 sovon, “staat van instandhouding”, 2. 86 sovon, “factsheet fazant”, 5. van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 171 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) lation in the past, but also now in the border regions and probably also locally, there is probably no question of a natural situation”.87 the report also notes that some illegal releasing still occurs. paradoxically, current understandings of how pheasants are faring reproduce a “politics of purity”88 in which their naturalness and wildness are defined by their distance from humans — a wildness untainted by hunters. meanwhile, to minimize pressure on the remaining population, the national bird protection organization vogelbescherming advocates a total ban on pheasant hunting. unmaking is a “process that disregards how being exists through interactions with others”.89 arguably, interactions between hunters and pheasants — from their historical introduction to the more recent introduction of sub-species by hunters — have rendered them exotic and hybrid. because of their association with hunters, pheasants are “unmade” into unnatural beings. as a result, they are not seen as charismatic or even relevant conservation species in the netherlands. this low status is probably best understood in relation to the species they are emphatically not: partridges. partridges share a very similar history. they too have been kept, bred, and released for hunting, supposedly even since roman times. unlike pheasants, however, partridges are regarded as native. due to rapidly declining numbers from intensive farming, hunting partridges was banned in 1998. today, specialists count and register partridges and in some areas also ring them for monitoring. subsidies are provided to nature organizations to create landscapes specifically for partridges. pheasants benefit indirectly from these landscape changes, but there are no subsidies specifically for enhancing pheasant habitats, nor are they monitored in the same way. in the netherlands, pheasants now largely slip through the net of formal conservation efforts. while the historical and ongoing interactions with hunters make pheasants uninteresting as conservation subjects, hunters themselves are arguably caught up in this process of unmaking as well. 87 sovon, “factsheet fazant”, 5. 88 rutherford, “the anthropocene’s animal?”, 216. 89 keil, “unmaking the feral”, 20. 172 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) for example, they are excluded from formal knowledge production based on population counts. even though hunters have been counting pheasants for years, their methods have so far been deemed invalid. as jamie lorimer and steve hinchliffe have shown in the case of corncrakes, counting and surveillance methods shape which lives become visible that allow for political representation.90 this may explain why the hunters’ association (jagersvereniging) is now lobbying for an official, standardized counting protocol for both hunters and bird watchers, to be recognized by the central bureau of statistics (cbs). this can be seen as a strategy to prevent a total ban on pheasant hunting and to legitimize hunting by providing accountable data. such efforts illustrate how hunters, too, are delegitimized as advocates for pheasants. their extensive historical and ongoing relations with pheasants render them unsuited to “speak for” pheasants. in this sense, hunters’ knowledge and motivations are “unmade” too. pheasants’ liminal status between wild and domestic, as well as their association with hunters, keep them from being fully integrated into formal conservation efforts. whereas, historically, rearing and release can be considered a form of intense bio-control — including procedures of classification, monitoring, ordering, spatial confinement, and restraint — pheasants are now less politicized and scientized than other targets of conservation. compared to other “alien species”, pheasants seem to occupy a unique position. they were not introduced as an “ecological tool” for managing biosecurity,91 nor are they viewed as a biosecurity threat. they are not seen as rewilders of novel ecosystems or as indicator species for one, unlike, for example, partridges. as such, the ways in which pheasant lives have become culturally and spatially entangled with the rural biology of the dutch landscape remains largely unexamined. remaking pheasants in what has widely come to be referred to as the anthropocene, hunting appears as one of the many forms of violence against the 90 lorimer, “counting corncrakes”; hinchliffe, “reconstituting nature conservation”. 91 buller, “introducing aliens”, 184. van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 173 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) nonhuman world, especially when it is not deemed necessary for subsistence in a western context. at the same time, scholars have turned their attention to non-western communities for insights into alternative, more sustainable and less destructive ontologies, in which hunting plays an important role in understanding human– nonhuman relationality.92 the process of unmaking described above can be understood as a process in which “lively entanglements are unwound”.93 the entanglements of pheasants with hunters render pheasants “not real” (as quoted in the epigraph to this article) and disqualify them from serious consideration as a conservation species. while hunting in western contexts might be considered a onesided act of domination — especially when elite hunters combine taking animal lives with claiming control over land — at the same time this risks rendering animals as mere passive subjects of total control and also obscures human–pheasant relationality. therefore, to understand and evaluate the character of the pheasants and the type of interaction with the hunters, we can also consider how lively entanglements are “re-wound” or re-made, as part of an ongoing, ever-changing and situated relationship between hunters and pheasants. since the ban on rearing, releasing, and supplementary feeding of pheasants of 1998, their numbers have declined sharply. whereas pheasants were once widespread across the country, they have now vanished from many areas. for example, pheasantries in sandy, forested areas kept populations stable, but as soon as these were abandoned, ironically enough, the ‘forest-pheasant’ disappeared from these landscapes as well as from hunters’ language. pheasants began to move away from their assigned spaces towards “beastly places”94 of their choosing, where they could come into their own and breed on their own terms. at the same time, the dynamics shaping pheasant populations, distribution, and behaviour have also changed due to major landscape transformations. pheasants depend on a wide variety of foods, including berries, 92 see ingold, hunting and gathering; nadasdy, “gift in the animal”. 93 frederiksen, “haunting”, 533; cf. rose, “angel of history”, 77. 94 see philo and wilbert, animal spaces, beastly places. 174 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) grasses, buds, insects, and crop residue, but with the intensification of agriculture, lowering water tables and growing urbanization, food availability has decreased. these landscape changes have also increased predation pressure, especially from foxes, due to reduced cover. this means that not only have the conditions for pheasants’ survival in the dutch landscape changed over time, but so too have hunters’ tactics for killing and/or caring for them. pheasants and hunters are now entering into a new relationship in which hunters are far more reliant on pheasant agency and less focused on controlling them. we can assume that the pheasant has been naturalized in western europe for more than two thousand years. due to its cleverness and physical strength, it has been able to maintain itself effortlessly, has not introduced any foreign diseases, has not driven away or exterminated other bird species, and is always a feast for the eyes (including the quietly brown-yellow hens), while the cock’s metallic call adds a fascinating element to the landscape.95 hunters have long celebrated the pheasant’s resilience and beauty, and have adapted landscapes for them for centuries — a practice that continues to this day. many scholars now suggest we should appreciate the adaptive abilities of animals as “anthropocene heroes” in novel ecosystems, by highlighting how spaces are shaped by multispecies encounters and proliferation rather than fixed sets of species.96 at the same time, this also means recognizing that humans are not only destroyers of landscapes, but also, at times “increase rather than decrease biodiversity, or at the very least allow for different kinds of biodiversity to emerge and thrive”.97 in these landscapes, pheasant agencies, to quote despret, emerge not only 95 “wij mogen er van uitgaan dat de fazant dus in west-europa al meer dan 2000 jaar is ingeburgerd. hij heeft zich door zijn slimheid en lichamelijke sterkte moeiteloos kunnen handhaven, heeft geen vreemde ziektes binnengebracht, geen andere vogelsoorten verdreven of uitgeroeid en is steeds een lust voor het oog (ook de stemmig bruingeel gekleurde hennen), terwijl de metalige roep van de haan een boeiend element aan het landschap toevoegt.” huygen, “de overbodige fazant”, 539. 96 see palmer et al. “hybrid apes”. 97 rutherford, “the anthropocene’s animal?”, 218. van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 175 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) as the ability to “make others do things” but also to “incite, inspire, or ask them to do things” in various ways.98 first, pheasants appear to have changed the way they are hunted and appreciated. the grand driven shoots of the past required large populations, but with fewer birds now spread across various landscapes, dedicated pheasant shoots no longer take place. today, pheasants are part of a varied tableau of small game taken during small-scale flushing hunts — but only in places where pheasants remain relatively abundant. in many other hunting grounds, pheasants have become animals not to hunt: “in the past, pheasants were shot, but if you see one here now, don’t shoot — they’re rare.”99 whether pheasants are considered huntable thus depends on their presence or absence in particular landscapes. arguably, pheasants now partly determine their own huntability through their spatial dispersal and declining numbers. second, pheasants turn hunters into landscape managers. “the pheasant […] requires careful management to ensure the conservation of the species”.100 while in a conservation context the spatial relations between hunters and the animals they hunt are often understood in terms of regulating populations through hunting, in the case of pheasants “hunters bring attention to preventing mowing losses [by protecting nests], they create game crops, and manage corvids and foxes”.101 hunters intervene in intensively farmed landscapes by providing small strips of cover or food for wildlife — but only with the landowner’s permission. in this way, hunters act as caretakers of pheasant habitats and spatial advocates for pheasant lives. even though robert holsman argues that hunters could be better ecosystem stewards,102 the care hunters give to pheasants 98 despret, “secret agents”, 40. 99 interview with hunter, 18 august 2023. 100 “de fazant […] vraagt een zorgvuldig beheer om de instandhouding van de soort te waarborgen.” koninklijke nederlandse jagersvereniging, “fazant”. 101 “hierbij geven jagers aandacht aan het voorkomen van maaiverliezen, leggen ze wildakkers aan, beheren ze kraaiachtigen en vossen.” koninklijke nederlandse jagersvereniging, “fazant”. 102 holsman, “goodwill hunting?”, 814. 176 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) can be seen as precisely the kind of interdependency and co-becoming that matters when it comes to affording forms of pheasant agency. for pheasants seem to “incite, inspire or ask”103 hunters to change landscapes and take protective measures. these affective practices create opportunities to accommodate pheasants while at the same time pheasants themselves choose where they want to live — with or without the help of hunters. in this sense, hunter– pheasant interdependencies turn hunters, at least partly, into (landscape) managers, living alongside pheasants in “a mutual composition of worlds”.104 if we take seriously the ways in which pheasants make hunters do things, then stewardship cannot be understood as a solely human endeavour, one that in this case would rest exclusively in the hands of the hunter. building on — but also moving beyond — their history as charismatic flyers to be shot, pheasants have become stewards of their own lives and landscapes, where they negotiate management with hunters. rather than simply casting hunters as ecological stewards, perhaps we might see the wider range of practices that maintain pheasant ecologies and landscapes as a form of multi-species stewardship. multi-species stewardship, as a mode of caring for animal lives and landscapes, is co-shaped by pheasant presences and absences, behaviours and shared histories that create — or remake — possibilities for pheasants to thrive and live unfettered lives. these historically evolved ways of being are embedded in a wider landscape that shapes which possibilities emerge: a reared pheasant or a wild pheasant, a pheasant living in the dunes or the floodplains — each might enact its pheasantness differently.105 conclusion this article has shown that through processes of making, unmaking, and remaking, becoming pheasant is a multispecies affair. this is especially clear in view of their history as hunted animals. bred and raised by chickens and turkeys, cared for and released to be shot by 103 despret, “secret agents”, 40. 104 barua, “feral ecologies”, 911. 105 tsing, “the dream of the stag”. van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 177 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) humans, pheasants are now choosing their own habitats, which are subsequently cared for by hunters to cater to their needs. clearly, the bird’s hunting history still plays a role in its absence from policy making, expert interest, and management today. meanwhile, pheasants are carving out a place for themselves as open-field dwellers and as attentive mothers, adapting to the dutch landscape through a multispecies negotiation with hunters. as such, the ongoing adaptations of pheasants to changing landscapes have inevitably reshaped both their behaviour and geographies, as well as hunter–pheasant interdependencies over time. from a broader spatio-temporal perspective, becoming pheasant is not a linear passage from wild to domestic to feral, but rather a complex and dynamic trajectory in which pheasant knowledge, adaptive fitness, and “naturalness” are renegotiated over time and in specific places together with hunters. thus, pheasants disrupt simple categories such as wild, domestic, feral and native — which arguably makes them elusive as conservation targets. at the same time, pheasants complicate our understanding of human–animal relations in the anthropocene. for example, while the domestication of chickens — and their fossilized bones as a geological marker — is considered the ultimate symbol of the anthropocene,106 pheasants have coexisted with humans since long before chickens were domesticated. research shows that eight thousand years ago in china, pheasants were drawn to human settlements by food, eventually forming interdependent relationships.107 yet because this human connection never altered their genetic makeup, pheasants are not formally considered domesticated. unlike chickens, then, pheasants have developed an interdependency with hunters while remaining “wild”. thus, pheasants complicate not only the categorization of human–animal interdependencies themselves, but also our understanding of how these relationships are formed. the ways in which pheasants become with hunters is not simply a story of one-sided domination: pheasants have long been caught 106 bennett et al., “how chickens became”. 107 barton et al., “the earliest farmers”. 178 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) up in performances108 as hunting animals, co-producers of a multispecies management, and resilient birds able to secure a state of wildness, determined by the opportunities for autonomy and self-determination.109 pheasants show that stewardship need not be understood as a solely human-driven affair; in a relational world, care practices emerge through complex interand intra-actions between hunters, pheasants, and landscapes based on shared histories. i argue that we might understand these relationships as a form of multispecies stewardship which brings a more-than-human perspective to conservation efforts and debates. in this sense, the dutch pheasant complicates our understanding of what it means to be wildlife in the contemporary landscapes of the anthropocene — and challenges us to ask when which animals are conserved, how, and by whom. 108 whatmore and thorne, “wild(ern)ness,” 438. 109 collard et al., “manifesto for abundant futures”. acknowledgements i would like to express my sincere gratitude to the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback and insightful comments. i am also grateful to the editor and copyeditor of humanimalia for their thorough edits, which have enhanced the clarity and readability of this article. this article was written as part of the phd project “hunting landscapes”, funded by the wageningen school of social sciences (wass), whose support is gratefully acknowledged. works cited aebischer, n. j. “fifty-year trends in uk hunting bags of birds and mammals, and calibrated estimation of national bag size, using gwct’s national gamebag census.” european journal of wildlife research 65, no. 4 (2019). https:// doi.org/10.1007/s10344-019-1299-x. albarda, johan herman. aves neerlandicae: naamlijst van nederlandsche vogels. leeuwarden: meijer & schaafsma, 1897. antonisse, j. de jacht in nederland. amsterdam: becht, 1970. barton, loukas, brittany bingham, krithivasan sankaranarayanan, cara monroe, ariane thomas, and brian m. kemp. “the earliest farmers of northwest china exploited grain-fed pheasants not chickens.” scientific reports 10 (2020): 2556. https://doi. org/10.1038/s41598-020-59316-5. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10344-019-1299-x https://doi.org/10.1007/s10344-019-1299-x https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-59316-5 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-59316-5 van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 179 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) barua, maan. “feral ecologies: the making of postcolonial nature in london.” journal of the royal anthropological institute 28, no. 3 (2022): 896–919. https://doi. org/10.1111/1467-9655.13653. bennett, carys, jan zalasiewicz, mark williams, and richard thomas. “how chickens became the ultimate symbol of the anthropocene.” the conversation, 12 december 2018. https://theconversation.com/howchickens-became-the-ultimatesymbol-of-the-anthropocene-108559. benson, etienne. “animal writes: historiography, disciplinarity, and the animal trace.” in making animal meaning, edited by linda kalof and georgina m. montgomery, 3–16. east lansing: michigan state university press, 2011. boonman-berson, susan. “rethinking wildlife management: living with wild animals.” phd diss., wageningen university, 2018. https://doi. org/10.18174/455279. braverman, irus. “the regulatory life of threatened species lists.” in animals, biopolitics, law: lively legalities, edited by irus braverman, 19–37. london: routledge, 2015. bruneel, dieter, and leon wessels. “verenigd maar verdeeld: constitutionele debatten over jacht en eigendom in het verenigd koninkrijk der nederlanden.” bmgn: low countries historical review 134, no. 4 (2019): 4–32. https://doi. org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10760. buller, henry. “introducing aliens, reintroducing natives: a conflict of interest for biosecurity?” in biosecurity: the socio-politics of invasive species and infectious diseases, edited by andrew dobson, kezia barker, and sarah l. taylor, 183–98. london: routledge, 2013. callicott, j. baird. thinking like a planet: the land ethic and the earth ethic. new york: oxford university press, 2013. cartmill, matt. a view to a death in the morning: hunting and nature through history. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2009. cartouche. “itbon-wildonderzoek: fazanten.” de nederlandse jager 62, no. 7 (1957): 104. cartouche. “fazanten.” de nederlandse jager 84, no. 23 (1979): 813. collard, rosemary-claire, jessica dempsey, and juanita sundberg. “a manifesto for abundant futures.” annals of the association of american geographers 105, no. 2 (2015): 322–30. https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014. 973007. cronon, william. “the trouble with wilderness: or, getting back to the wrong nature.” environmental history 1, no. 1 (1996): 7–28. https:// doi.org/10.2307/3985059. dahles, heidi. mannen in het groen. de wereld van de jacht in nederland. nijmegen: sun, 1990. dam, j. h. jagen. bussum: c. a. j. van dishoeck, 1962. ten den, p. g. a. achtergronden en oorzaken van de recente aantalsontwikkeling van de fazant in nederland. arnhem: rijksinstituut voor natuurbeheer, 1989. descola, philippe. beyond nature and culture. translated by janet lloyd. chicago: the university of chicago press, 2013. despret, vinciane. “from secret agents to interagency.” history and theory 52, no. 4 (2013): 29–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/ hith.10686. eichler, lauren, and david baumeister. “hunting for justice: an indigenous critique of the north american model of wildlife conservation.” environment and society 9, no.1 (2018): 75–90. https://doi. org/10.3167/ares.2018.090106. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13653 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.13653 https://theconversation.com/how-chickens-became-the-ultimate-symbol-of-the-anthropocene-108559 https://theconversation.com/how-chickens-became-the-ultimate-symbol-of-the-anthropocene-108559 https://theconversation.com/how-chickens-became-the-ultimate-symbol-of-the-anthropocene-108559 https://doi.org/10.18174/455279 https://doi.org/10.18174/455279 https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10760 https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10760 https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.973007 https://doi.org/10.1080/00045608.2014.973007 https://doi.org/10.2307/3985059 https://doi.org/10.2307/3985059 https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10686 https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10686 https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2018.090106 https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2018.090106 180 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) enqvist, johan peçanha, simon west, vanessa a. masterson, l. jamila haider, uno svedin, and maria tengö. “stewardship as a boundary object for sustainability research: linking care, knowledge and agency.” landscape and urban planning 179 (2018): 17–37. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. landurbplan.2018.07.005. ericus. “jachtsport: fazanten (hoe men ze in den zomer ‘poot’).” de revue der sporten 3, no. 28 (1909): 436–39.https://resolver.kb.nl/ resolve?urn=dts:1664028:mpeg21. errington, frederick, and deborah gewertz. “pheasant capitalism: auditing south dakota’s state bird.” american ethnologist 42, no. 3 (2015): 399–414. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12137. frederiksen, aurora. “haunting, ruination and encounter in the ordinary anthropocene: storying the return of florida’s wild flamingos.” cultural geographies 28, no. 3 (2021): 531–45. https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740211003650. fry, tom, agnese marino, and sahil nijhawan. “‘killing with care’: locating ethical congruence in multispecies political ecology.” acme: an international journal for critical geographies 21, no. 2 (2022): 226–46. https://doi.org/10.14288/ acme.v21i2.2054. fudge, erica. “the history of animals in the present moment: rumination 2.0.” humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 253–64. https://doi.org/10.52537/ humanimalia.11282. fuller, richard. a., and peter. j. garson, eds. pheasants: status survey and conservation action plan 2000–2004. gland: iucn, 2000. https://iucn.org/ resources/publication/pheasantsstatus-survey-and-conservationaction-plan-2000-2004. fürst. “het inburgeren van den fazant in de vrije wildbaan.” de nederlandse jager 1, no 28 (1896): 1. g., “engelsche fazanterieën.” de nederlandse jager 4, no. 44 (1899): 1–2. gibbs, leah, jennifer atchison, and ingereth macfarlane. “camel country: assemblage, belonging and scale in invasive species geographies.” geoforum 58 (2015): 56–67. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.10.013. gibson, james j. “the theory of affordances (1979).” in the people, place, and space reader, edited by jen jack gieseking, william mangold, cindi katz, setha low, and susan saegert, 56–60. new york: routledge, 2014. gigliotti, larry m., duane l. shroufe, and scott gurtin. “the changing culture of wildlife management.” in wildlife and society: the science of human dimensions, edited by michael j. manfredo, jerry j. vaske, perry j. brown, daniel j. decker, and esther a. duke, 75–89. washington, dc: island press, 2009. gorman, richard. “therapeutic landscapes and non-human animals: the roles and contested positions of animals within care farming assemblages.” social & cultural geography 18, no. 3 (2017): 315–35. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016. 1180424. greenhough, beth. “vitalist geographies: life and the more-than-human.” in taking-place: non-representational theories and geography. edited by ben anderson and paul harrison, 37–54. london: routledge, 2016. haraway, donna. when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008. van heijgen, eugenie, clemens driessen, and esther turnhout. “the landscape is a trap: duck decoys as multispecies atmospheres of deception and betrayal.” transactions of the institute of british geographers 49, no. 3 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12629. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2018.07.005 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2018.07.005 https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=dts:1664028:mpeg21 https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=dts:1664028:mpeg21 https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12137 https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740211003650 https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v21i2.2054 https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v21i2.2054 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.11282 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.11282 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.10.013 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2014.10.013 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1180424 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1180424 https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12629 van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 181 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) van heijgen, eugenie, esther turnhout, and clemens driessen. “haunted by hunting: a landscape genealogy of the biopolitics, necropolitics, and sovereign power of red deer and wild boar management at the veluwe.” environment and planning e: nature and space 8, no.1 (2025): 431–53. https://doi. org/10.1177/25148486241301251. hermans, a. g. j. jagerswoordenboek schiedam: roelants, 1947. hill, david and peter a. robertson. the pheasant: ecology, management and conservation. oxford: bsp professional, 1988. hinchliffe, steve. “reconstituting nature conservation: towards a careful political ecology.” geoforum 39, no. 1 (2008): 88–97. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. geoforum.2006.09.007. holsman, robert h. “goodwill hunting? exploring the role of hunters as ecosystem stewards.” wildlife society bulletin 28, no. 4 (2000): 808–16. huygen, will. “de overbodige fazant.” de nederlandse jager 98, no, 15 (1993): 539. ingold, tim. being alive: essays on movement, knowledge and description. london: routledge, 2011. ingold, tim. “hunting and gathering as ways of perceiving the environment.” in redefining nature: ecology, culture, and domestication, edited by roy ellen and katsuyoshi fukui, 117–55. london: routledge, 2020. jurgens, a.h.m. kennis en praktijk van de jacht op waterwild, klein wild en schadelijk wild. amersfoort: roelofs van goor, 1968. kalsbeek, g. fazant, pauw, kalkoen en parelhoen: geïllustreerd handboekje voor de verzorging en verpleging van deze siervogels. zutphen: schillemans & van belkum, 1902. kaufman, les, and kenneth mallory, eds. the last extinction. cambridge, ma: mit press, 1993. keil, paul g. “unmaking the feral: the shifting relationship between domestic-wild pigs and settler australians.” environmental humanities 15, no. 2 (2023): 19–38. https://doi. org/10.1215/22011919-10422267. koninklijke nederlandse jagersvereniging. “fazant.” de jagersvereniging, accessed 25 april 2024. https://www. jagersvereniging.nl/jagen/diersoorten/ fazant/. latimer, joanna, and mara miele. “naturecultures? science, affect and the non-human.” theory, culture & society 30, nos. 7–8 (2013): 5–31. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276413502088. leopold, aldo. “the conservation ethic.” journal of forestry 31, no. 6 (1933): 634– 43. https://doi.org/10.1093/jof/31.6.634. lien, marianne e. becoming salmon: aquaculture and the domestication of a fish. oakland, california: university of california press, 2015. lorimer, jamie. “nonhuman charisma.” environment and planning d: society and space 25, no. 5 (2007): 911–32. https://doi.org/10.1068/d71j. lorimer, jamie. “counting corncrakes: the affective science of the uk corncrake census.” social studies of science 38, no. 3 (2008): 377–405. https://doi. org/10.1177/0306312707084396. lorimer, jamie. wildlife in the anthropocene: conservation after nature. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2015. lorimer, jamie, and clemens driessen. “bovine biopolitics and the promise of monsters in the rewilding of heck cattle.” geoforum 48 (2013): 249–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. geoforum.2011.09.002. luke, brian. ““violent love: hunting, heterosexuality, and the erotics of men’s predation.” feminist studies 24, no. 3 (1998): 627–55. https://doi. org/10.2307/3178583. https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241301251 https://doi.org/10.1177/25148486241301251 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2006.09.007 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2006.09.007 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10422267 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10422267 https://www.jagersvereniging.nl/jagen/diersoorten/fazant/ https://www.jagersvereniging.nl/jagen/diersoorten/fazant/ https://www.jagersvereniging.nl/jagen/diersoorten/fazant/ https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413502088 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413502088 https://doi.org/10.1093/jof/31.6.634 https://doi.org/10.1068/d71j https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312707084396 https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312707084396 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.09.002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.09.002 https://doi.org/10.2307/3178583 https://doi.org/10.2307/3178583 182 | van heijgen , becoming pheasant humanimalia 15.2 (2025) mathevet, raphaël, françois bousquet, and christopher m. raymond. “the concept of stewardship in sustainability science and conservation biology.” biological conservation 217 (2018): 363–70. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2017.10.015. marvin, garry. “a passionate pursuit: foxhunting as performance.” the sociological review 51 (2003): 46–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467954x.2004.00450.x. miele, mara, and christopher bear. “morethan-human research methodologies.” in key methods in geography, 4th ed, edited by nicholas clifford, megan cope, and thomas gillespie, 229–44. london: sage publications, 2023. monbiot, george. “the shooting party,” monbiot, 28 april 2014. https://www. monbiot.com/2014/04/28/theshooting-party/ nadasdy, paul. “the gift in the animal: the ontology of hunting and humananimal sociality.” american ethnologist 34, no. 1 (2007): 25–43. https://doi. org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.25. palmer, alexandra, volker sommer, and josephine nadezda msindai. “hybrid apes in the anthropocene: burden or asset for conservation?” people and nature 3, no. 3 (2021): 573–86. https:// doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10214. philo, chris, and chris wilbert, eds. animal spaces, beastly places: new geographies of human–animal relations. london: routledge, 2004. plumwood, val. “the politics of reason: towards a feminist logic.” australasian journal of philosophy 71, no. 4 (1993): 436–62. redmalm, david. “holy bonsai wolves: chihuahuas and the paris hilton syndrome.” international journal of cultural studies 17, no. 1 (2014): 93–109. de rijk, jan hendrik. “vogels en mensen in nederland 1500–1920.” phd diss. vrije universiteit amsterdam, 2015. rose, deborah bird. “what if the angel of history were a dog?” cultural studies review 12, no. 1 (2006): 67–78. https:// doi.org/10.5130/csr.v12i1.3414. rutherford, stephanie. “the anthropocene’s animal? coywolves as feral cotravelers.” environment and planning e: nature and space 1 nos. 1–2 (2018): 206–23. https://doi. org/10.1177/2514848618763250. sovon. “staat van instandhouding van de vogelsoorten op de wildlijst. sovon-rapport 2022/22.” nijmegen: sovon vogelonderzoek nederland, 2022. https://pub.sovon.nl/pub/ publicatie/20510. sovon. “provinciale factsheets fazant.” nijmegen: sovon vogelonderzoek nederland, 2023. https://pub.sovon.nl/ pub/publicatie/21368. swanson, heather anne, marianne elisabeth lien, and gro b. ween, eds. domestication gone wild: politics and practices of multispecies relations. durham, nc: duke university press, 2018. taylor, dorceta e. the rise of the american conservation movement: power, privilege, and environmental protection. durham, nc: duke university press, 2016. tsing, anna. “unruly edges: mushrooms as companion species.” environmental humanities 1, no. 1 (2012): 141–54. https:// doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3610012. tsing, anna. “the buck, the bull, and the dream of the stag: some unexpected weeds of the anthropocene.” suomen antropologi: journal of the finnish anthropological society 42, no. 1 (2017): 3–21. https://journal. fi/suomenantropologi/article/ view/65084. tuan, yi-fu. dominance and affection: the making of pets. new haven, ct: yale university press, 1984. uexküll, jakob von. umwelt und innenwelt der tiere. berlin: springer, 1909. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2017.10.015 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2017.10.015 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.2004.00450.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.2004.00450.x https://www.monbiot.com/2014/04/28/the-shooting-party/ https://www.monbiot.com/2014/04/28/the-shooting-party/ https://www.monbiot.com/2014/04/28/the-shooting-party/ https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.25 https://doi.org/10.1525/ae.2007.34.1.25 https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10214 https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10214 https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v12i1.3414 https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v12i1.3414 https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848618763250 https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848618763250 https://pub.sovon.nl/pub/publicatie/20510 https://pub.sovon.nl/pub/publicatie/20510 https://pub.sovon.nl/pub/publicatie/21368 https://pub.sovon.nl/pub/publicatie/21368 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3610012 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3610012 https://journal.fi/suomenantropologi/article/view/65084 https://journal.fi/suomenantropologi/article/view/65084 https://journal.fi/suomenantropologi/article/view/65084 van heijgen , becoming pheasant | 183 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) urlings, guus. “mens en natuur: hoe lang moet je de fazant als exoot blijven zien?” de limburger 14 december 2021. https://www.limburger.nl/ lifestyle/mens-en-natuur-hoelang-moet-je-de-fazant-als-exootblijven-zien/22189418.html van dooren, thom. flight ways: life and loss at the edge of extinction. new york: columbia university press, 2014. von essen, erica, and michael allen. “killing with kindness: when hunters want to let you know they care.” human dimensions of wildlife 26, no. 2 (2021): 179–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/1 0871209.2020.1800145. whatmore, sarah. “hybrid geographies: rethinking the ‘human’ in human geography.” in environment: critical essays in human geography, edited by bruce braun and kay anderson, 411–48. london: routledge, 2017. whatmore, sarah, and lorraine thorne. “wild(er)ness: reconfiguring the geographies of wildlife.” transactions of the institute of british geographers 23, no. 4 (1998): 435–54. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.0020-2754.1998.00435.x. zandhaas. “betekent het uitzetten van machinaal gebroede fazanten het einde van een natuurlijke stand?” de nederlandse jager 82, no. 7 (1977): 236. https://www.limburger.nl/lifestyle/mens-en-natuur-hoe-lang-moet-je-de-fazant-als-exoot-blijven-zien/22189418.html https://www.limburger.nl/lifestyle/mens-en-natuur-hoe-lang-moet-je-de-fazant-als-exoot-blijven-zien/22189418.html https://www.limburger.nl/lifestyle/mens-en-natuur-hoe-lang-moet-je-de-fazant-als-exoot-blijven-zien/22189418.html https://www.limburger.nl/lifestyle/mens-en-natuur-hoe-lang-moet-je-de-fazant-als-exoot-blijven-zien/22189418.html https://doi.org/10.1080/10871209.2020.1800145 https://doi.org/10.1080/10871209.2020.1800145 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0020-2754.1998.00435.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0020-2754.1998.00435.x meijer, stray philosophy iii learning to see mice (stray philosophy iii) eva meijer faculty of humanities university of amsterdam, netherlands humanimalia 13.1 (fall 2022) abstract: this essay describes the author’s experiences in living with exlaboratory mice, and investigates how these can function as a starting point for getting to know these mice beyond the confines of the current scientific paradigm and for building new relations with them. laboratory mice are generally seen as replaceable exemplars of a certain species. this essay focuses on their social lives and draws attention to their ways of being, their individuality, sense of community, language, and practices of care, showing their many forms of creating meaning. the first part of the text focuses on their daily lives, personalities, and relations. the second part of the text uses these auto-ethnographic investigations to critically evaluate academic literature about laboratory mice, drawing on insights from political animal philosophy, critical animal studies, and ecofeminism. these sections examine knowing mice, learning to see them differently, and building new political relations with them. keywords: mouse philosophy; animal sanctuary; laboratory mice; animal politics; multispecies conversations; interspecies democracy bio: eva meijer is a philosopher and writer. she works as a postdoctoral researcher at the university of amsterdam, on the four-year research project the politics of (not) eating animals, supported by a veni grant from the dutch research council, and at wageningen university in the project anthropocene ethics: taking animal agency seriously. she is the chair of the dutch study group for animal philosophy. meijer has written fourteen books of fiction and non-fiction, and her work has been translated into over twenty languages. visit her website at www.evameijer.nl. email: e.r.meijer@uva.nl orcid: 0000-0002-9597-5833 copyright © 2022 eva meijer this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 203–251. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.11520 http://www.evameijer.nl mailto:e.r.meijer@uva.nl http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9597-5833 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.11520 meijer, learning to see mice | 205 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) when vachtje1 (furry) could not run in the running wheel anymore, she decided to sit next to it and run with her hands. the ex-laboratory mice who live in my house do this if they want to join someone else in the wheel, in order to judge the speed with which the other is running, to get a feeling for it before they jump in. vachtje had a tumour in front of her left hind leg, making it impossible for her to run in the wheel, though she could still walk. by running with her hands she could still take part in the activity. vachtje’s hand running shows that the mice like to run in the wheels, but there is more to it. running in the wheels is also a habit, and something that gives meaning to their life. the ten brown female mice who live in the mouse house at my house were born in a laboratory at the university of utrecht, netherlands. they were bred to be used in experiments, but never took part in any. usually, such mice are killed. in the netherlands 159,614 mice were used in experiments and killed in 2019, and in the same year at least 262,238 mice were killed who had been used for breeding or who had been bred but not used in experiments.2 together with around a hundred other rats and mice, these mice were rescued by a group of dutch animal rights and animal welfare organizations, in a pilot project in which laboratory mice and rats could be adopted by the general public.3 the project is aimed not only at helping individuals, but also at changing public opinion about laboratory animals by drawing attention to their subjectivity. the mice were born in february 2020 and came to live with me in august of that year. in the time that followed, i watched them often, and interacted with them on their terms. in the beginning, they 1 for portraits of the individual mice, see the gallery at the end of this article. 2 see nvwa, zo doende 2019. on the empirical, moral, and political problems with animal testing, as well as alternatives, see herrmann and jayne, animal experimentation. 3 the organizations involved were de dierenbescherming [dutch society for the protection of animals], animal rights nederland, the rodent shelter knaagdierenopvang “het knagertje”, stichting hulp en herplaatsing huisdieren [pet aid and rehoming foundation], and the instantie voor dierenwelzijn utrecht [animal welfare body utrecht]. see also: https://www.animalrights.nl/een-tweede-leven-voor-kleine-proefdieren. https://www.animalrights.nl/een-tweede-leven-voor-kleine-proefdieren 206 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) did not like me much. they thought my hands smelled bad, but they did like my voice and came out of their sleeping houses when i called them.4 because they liked my voice, i began playing songs for them on the guitar, ukulele, and piano. i do not always play for them; sometimes i just sit and watch them. at the time of writing, january 2022, three of the ten mice are still alive: kleinoor (small ear), witoog (white eye) and bullie (little bull). they walk around freely in the room, sometimes using my body as an object to climb on. witoog also likes to sit by my side. the “i” in this story is a political philosopher who writes about animal languages and political voice, interspecies politics, and forming new multispecies communities.5 this essay is part of an ongoing investigation into how the perspectives of other animals can be foregrounded in political philosophy,6 how the animals can co-shape research questions, and how humans writing about other animals can cultivate attentiveness to their ways of life.7 cultivating attention and thinking with, instead of about, other animals includes recognizing and supporting their agency.8 there are to my knowledge no long-term studies about the social lives of laboratory mice. mice are generally studied in order to learn more about questions that concern humans, and are seen and treated as replaceable.9 in this essay i want to challenge this view of laboratory mice and bring the actual animals, their personalities and social relationships, into view. this requires a gestalt switch, another way of looking at them. in particular, i focus 4 i sometimes call when it is time to eat, but also just to say hello in the morning and good night in the evening — during the day most of them are asleep, though kleine muis and kraaloog like to do a bit of running in the afternoons, and others are up during the day sporadically too. 5 for reasons of space, i cannot defend my views on language and politics in detail in this paper. i do this in when animals speak (2019), and animal languages (2020), and touch upon them in different sections below. 6 see meijer, “stray philosophy” and “stray philosophy ii”. 7 see crary and gruen, animal crisis. 8 for example, in animal sanctuaries. see section iv below. 9 one important exception is the work of joanna makowska. see for example makowska and weary, “a good life”. meijer, learning to see mice | 207 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) on their individuality,10 sense of community, practices of care, and ways of creating meaning. i do so by alternating narrative — telling stories about the mice — and philosophical reflection. this mirrors my attitude towards the mice: i look at them and what they tell me, then reflect, then look again. in the first part of the text, i mainly tell stories about the mice, to give an impression of what kind of beings they are. i then contrast this with existing views of mice, in the laboratory and in culture more generally. in the final sections, i propose to view the interactions i have with the mice as dialogues that can play a role in changing the political circumstances that determine the lives of mice. my aim in this essay is quite modest, however: i want to give an impression of the mice that i was fortunate enough to get to know and explore new ways of thinking about mice-human relations, not to provide a full account of what it means to be a mouse, or to live with mice justly. for that, society would need to change. this text can only offer the first steps in thinking and living differently. i. life in the mouse house the mice live in a house with two floors that contains several running wheels, one or two large cardboard boxes for sleeping, and other smaller boxes for hanging out, hiding, eating, or climbing on. they have different stairs for getting to the top floor, and sometimes i give them a so-called “snack labyrinth”, which takes up most of the space on the ground floor. there are always many toilet rolls to walk through or hide in. i also make objects our of clay for them and give them willow branches to climb and chew on. the mice are awake around dusk and dawn. most of them sleep during the day and during the early hours after midnight, but at times someone wakes up in daytime and runs in a wheel or eats something. when only one or two mice are awake, that is all they do; when most of them are awake they have social encounters, play, and are more eager to explore and try out new activities. besides 10 i do so not just in the text, but also through the photographs that accompany this essay. see also the portraits at the end of this essay. 208 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) meijer, learning to see mice | 209 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 1: bullie, kleinoor and my slipper. figure 2: the mouse house. all images are by the author. 210 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) eating and sleeping, their main activities are running in the wheels, working on their nests by collecting scraps of paper, nest materials and hay, exploring or inspecting the house (spaces often need to be inspected again), and social events like grooming. i scatter their food twice a day on the floor and in the different boxes, and after that they spend time looking for the foods they like and eating. individual mice have specific preferences. for example, some like zucchini, others not; about half of them like chickpeas; most are fond of dandelion leaves; all like breadcrumbs, rice, pasta, oatmeal, and nuts; most like bananas; none of them likes apples, but i know other mice who do; they do not really like carrots but will eat them. some mice like many foods, like bullie and vachtje, while others are really picky, like mooitje (little beauty) and kraaloog (beady eye). they also have different habits concerning how much they eat and how much time they spend on it. kraaloog and kleine muis (little mouse) prefer running to eating. they eat a bit when i give them the food but soon continue their activities and will eat a little something later. other spend hours looking for the exact right nut or grain. bullie eats a lot. the same applies to running. the first time i put a running wheel in the house they immediately liked it, and i understood i had to get more because they all wanted to run at the same time. they prefer the wooden wheels to plastic ones. i had to throw the wooden wheels away because of a blood louse infestation, and bought plastic ones instead. but in the weeks that followed they did not run much and gained weight. i bought wooden wheels again and the mice ran the whole day; this was clearly a joyful event. as mentioned above, when mice want to join someone else in the wheel they first run with their hands, and then just climb in, which often disrupts the other’s running. they might try to climb up in opposite directions for a while until one of them leaves. after a year, they learned to run side by side in the bigger green wheel. when running together does not work out, sometimes the mice involved will start grooming one another. when a mouse falls out of the wheel because someone else is heavier or runs faster, they will wash their faces for a couple of seconds to recuperate. meijer, learning to see mice | 211 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) the mice are very particular about their boxes, using nesting material, cardboard, paper, and hay to build nests in them. some materials need to be in some of the boxes, and other materials need to be removed. it is not always clear to me why some bits of paper should be in the nest and others not, but the mice are in no doubt about this, and never have a difference of opinion about it. they keep their sleeping spaces clean, and use or or two corners of the house as toilets.11 i offer the mice many small cardboard boxes to hide in and climb onto. after a day or two i understood that they want not one but many doors in their boxes, but it took me months to understand that they also really like holes in the ceiling. because they are inquisitive, i add or remove objects daily. in addition to more serious activities like eating, nest-building, and running in the wheels, the mice like to play. sometimes one of the mice just runs all around the house. this also happens when i play certain songs on the ukulele. they enjoy running over the roofs of houses and boxes and create different routes through different boxes. i clean their house once a week and usually do not take them out because they don’t like it when i touch their bodies, so i first clean one floor and then the other. afterwards the mice are really happy. all of them are awake, everything is in a new spot, and they explore the whole new set-up together. some run in the wheels, others climb over the houses, everyone goes up and down the stairs multiple times. this is a social event; the joy is shared. the ritual used to be quite exuberant when they were younger, now they are more thoughtful and slower. they still make jumps of joy, like foals or rabbits do. the mice usually sleep together, sometimes with the whole group in one cardboard box and sometimes in smaller groups, though usually not more than two groups. when it is really warm, one or two mice might find a place alone on the top floor, but most will still join the others. they sometimes sleep on top of each other. 11 the two other groups of mice i have now both use plastic running wheels as toilets. cf. makowska et al., “standard laboratory housing”. 212 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) meijer, learning to see mice | 213 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 3: grote muis in the mice’s favourite wheel figure 4: the mice usually sleep together 214 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) some mice are more solitary than others. they will still join the others for sleeping or grooming, but also like to spend time alone. witoog for example likes to be apart from the others sometimes, spending time upstairs when the rest of them are downstairs. now that she is old, she sleeps a lot and does not avoid the others anymore, but she still keeps to herself. mice who are ill may also become more solitary. for example, when vachtje’s tumour was big she was awake more and spent more time looking for food while the others slept. kleine muis and kraaloog often run in the wheel when others sleep, but this has to do more with their temperament — they like to do a lot of running — than with the fact that they like to be alone, because they are often with the others and seem to enjoy the collective activities. the mice do not desire much contact with me. when i went to het knagertje to pick them up, i only had experience with liminal mice who lived in the wall of our former house. these mice had had some experience with humans before they came to live with me, and were not afraid of me, nor violent towards me. but they were also not eager to establish a relationship. early on, i sometimes put my hand inside their home, but they regarded it as a foreign object to be buried with nesting material. they will still smell my finger when i hold it near them, but then they move away. there are individual preferences. vachtje liked being touched from time to time. witoog liked me most in the beginning and still likes me best, although kleinoor nowadays also does not mind when i touch her. witoog also likes to sit next to me when bullie and kleinoor are exploring the room. bullie still prefers not to be touched by me. mouse language games the mice communicate using touch, taste, sounds (they squeak, but only very rarely and softly in my hearing range, and make a sort of chewing sound, “chuck, chuck”), sight, and scent.12 they also make use of tail and ear movements, facial expressions, gestures, and other movements, such as mimicking the movement of others. 12 flankie went blind in one eye when she was one year old and used her hands and body more in exploring than the others, showing that the others rely on sight more; she was also brave and was usually the first to climb onto everything. meijer, learning to see mice | 215 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) a few examples: holding one’s tail up straight into the air indicates excitement. the “chuck chuck” sound is used when exploring. the mice often kiss each other on the mouth when they run into each other, perhaps to identify each other, or as a greeting. i will get back to facial expressions in more detail below, but the reason i knew they did not like my hands was the look of disgust on their faces. they like to sit beside someone else when eating, sometimes very closely, with their sides touching. they also like to sit next to others and do nothing. the mice do not like to step over each other’s tails, they will move a tail they come across with their hands so they can walk around it. their movements are generally elegant. language is often seen as a strictly human capacity. but the question of who speaks is a political one, even in the case of humans, and ideas about language are not neutral or objective but informed by power relations in society.13 other animals express themselves in a variety of ways, using sight, scent, touch, sound, gestures, colour, movement. they use language to create meaning, build social relations, have arguments, and so on. wittgenstein’s later work, specifically his notions of language-games and family resemblances as put forward in philosophical investigations, offers a good framework for further thinking about animal languages, because it draws attention to the embodied and situated character of language.14 to understand and conceptualize language-games of different species and communities of animals further, we need to study them in the practices in which they take place. mouse language encompasses (ultrasonic) sounds and scents, but also gestures, movement, and grooming. the mice who live in my house have their own language-games, but also developed new ones in relation to me. an example of a language-game is an argument. the mice argue occasionally. their arguments usually last for one or two seconds and are very rare; in fact, i have witnessed only a few. because their lives are short, everything happens fast: learning, mourning, arguing. the 13 see derrida, the animal that therefore i am, e.g. the discussion of logos and the as such in chapter 4; cf. meijer when animals speak, chapter 1. 14 for a longer version of this argument, see meijer, when animals speak, chapters 1–3. 216 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) arguments were about food, though they usually do not mind when someone else steals their food and will just look for something else. arguments include loud noises, gestures, and bodily movements, and are easy to understand for a human witness. another example of a language-game is greeting. the mice have different ways of greeting one another — such as kissing the other on the mouth, or aligning their movements with those of the other. when a mouse meets another mouse, they might give up their own activity, and follow the other, mimicking her movement or posture. they also have ways of greeting me, acknowledging my presence by making eye contact or coming up to my hand. practices of care the mice have many ways of caring for one another. the most obvious practice of care is grooming. they spend a lot of time grooming others, in pairs or threes. when they were younger, they groomed one another in the cardboard boxes and sleeping houses or in the wheels, later on they also did it in plain sight, and when they are roaming freely in the room, they use the space underneath my legs. grooming can take a long time (up to ten minutes) and is often reciprocated, around sixty per cent of the time. grooming ends when one of the two mice leaves because they want to do something else, or when a third mouse joins them and the one who was doing the grooming now turns to the new person. grooming involves licking the other, often using the front paws to hold onto the other’s skin. this can be for balance, or because the work requires it, for instance when washing someone’s ear. ears can take very long to clean. grooming can be very gentle, or more like a massage. some mice really relax when they are being groomed and may put their face flat to the floor (looking like humans receiving a massage). the mice are very clean and never smell bad. but the grooming habits are also a social practice. when the mice had just arrived, they did not groom much, perhaps because they had had no houses, hiding spaces, or wheels in the laboratory and they did not feel safe enough for grooming or did not have enough room for it. meijer, learning to see mice | 217 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) mice also care for others who are ill. when vachtje was ill, she once ran into kleine muis in the snack labyrinth. kleine muis put her front paws around vachtje’s neck, and gave her some kisses. this was a hug. she then climbed up the wall to make space for vachtje, who could not climb anymore because of her tumour. i also saw witoog give breedsnuit (broadsnout) a hug when the latter had a big tumour. she put her arms around her, gave her some kisses on the neck, and moved on. when mooitje suddenly lost a lot of weight for reasons unknown to me, vachtje often sat very close to her. mooitje recovered within a day because i fed her some foods she really likes, mostly rice. after bullie had a stroke, kleinoor went up to her often to give her kisses on her snout and on her neck. witoog sat with her and crawled over her. this happened when only bullie, kleinoor and witoog were still alive. i have also twice seen four or five mice surround a mouse who was ill. they briefly formed a circle around her, a circle of support, and then went on with their business. bullie always sits with mice who are ill and does not leave their side when they are dying. i usually take her with me when someone needs to go to the vet. when a mouse is very ill and i know she does not have long to live, i keep an eye on bullie to judge the situation. care also takes place after death. vachtje, breedsnuit and kleine muis all died in a single week, in july 2021. the others did not seem to respond much. when mooitje and grote muis (big mouse) died on 1 september of that year, the others were scared and shy for a week. they did not eat well and hid in their boxes. flankie was the sixth to die, and after her death the other mice tended to the body. her friend kraaloog often went up to her to greet her after she died, and finally pulled her into a corner by a leg. kleinoor and witoog groomed her and then buried her with the nesting material. ecofeminist scholars often draw attention to care as a fundamental axis for reconfiguring relations with other human and nonhuman animals and the natural world.15 a focus on care foregrounds 15 see adams and donovan, feminist care tradition. 218 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) meijer, learning to see mice | 219 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 5: flankie grooming bullie. figure 6: witoog and bullie eating side by side. 220 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) meijer, learning to see mice | 221 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 7: kleinoor grooming witoog under my leg. figure 8: bullie likes to climb inside the leg of my jeans, but i don’t let her do that anymore because she also likes to chew on my leg hair. 222 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) relationality and interconnectedness. this provides an alternative to liberal modes of being that view human subjects as atomistic and autonomous agents, and systems in which humans are positioned hierarchically above other animals. care can be both a theoretical lens and a praxis. an ethics of care encompasses situated and embodied attentiveness towards individuals, as well as attention for exploitative economic and political structures and a commitment to change these structures. i will return to these exploitative structures below. on the personal level, the mice and i are connected through daily relations of care, because i feed them and make sure their house is clean, and we communicate. as josephine donovan writes, relations of care with other animals should be dialogical and include their perspectives.16 when the mice are older or ill, the daily care intensifies: i pay more attention to the physical wellbeing of the mice, and they are more prone to illness, so they need more support from me. flankie needed antibiotics and painkillers for a while, and mice with tumours may need more or different stairs in the house, and wider openings in the sleeping boxes. by keeping me company, the mice care for me too. this is not a symmetrical relation, but they are responsive towards me and acknowledge my presence. i also share some of the care with other humans, by telling them about the mice, and discussing the highs and lows with them, whereby they care for me too. caring for the mice is not only nice or friendly. it involves holding them captive, giving them medication against their will, and in general controlling many of their life choices. they did not ask for my interference and at times show that they do not want it, for example by resisting when i try to give them their medication, or by trying to escape. similar to how this works with dog companions however, my agency here is also limited. i cannot end the use of laboratory animals singlehandedly, and we all live in a world hostile to mice and most other animals. my job is to remain attentive and support the mice’s agency and wellbeing where i can. 16 donovan, “feminism and the treatment of animals”. meijer, learning to see mice | 223 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) for the mice, community is central, and care is an expression of community. socially and emotionally, they care well for one another, and therefore do not need me.17 how this plays out differs from mouse to mouse. bullie takes grooming extremely seriously. she used this to comfort other mice in their final moments, and by accompanying them to the vet and staying very close to them. others, like kraaloog, have a more casual way of being with others. but she often went to greet her best friend flankie when flankie was ill. she died not long after flankie died. the others did not stay with kraaloog when she died; she chose a space apart from them. ii. what is a mouse? mice are communicative beings who actively form meaningful relations with creatures from their own and other species. through watching them, i learned about their social relations and individuality. what they show me stands in stark contrast to cultural views about mice. both cultural ideas and scientific knowledge about mice are in large part shaped by prejudice and human domination. according to google, for example, a mouse is someone to be killed. when i search for “mice”, the first page gives twelve links to pest control companies, and two wikipedia pages. (“mouse” gives me a page full of links to computer mice.) only on the third page is there a link to the dutch organization for responsible pet ownership. how humans see different groups of mice is generally based on their use for humans. laboratory animals or companions are seen as useful, wild mice are generally respected or even admired, liminal18 mice, such as the ones that take up residence in human houses or gardens, are considered to be pests. this is not unique to mice. knowledge about other animals often reflects their use for humans. humans in most parts of the world currently live in societies that are anthropocentric in nature. in this 17 in contrast to my dog companions doris and olli, who desire and have much closer relations with me, which include more mutual care. 18 donaldson and kymlicka, zoopolis, chapter 7. 224 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) worldview, humans are not only the most important animals, they are also the standard by which other animals are measured. in certain areas — such as law or politics — this goes hand in hand with a strict distinction between humans on the one hand and all other animals on the other. this hierarchy is inherently violent: dinesh wadiwel calls it “epistemic violence”.19 epistemic violence serves to legitimate other forms of violence, because it makes them invisible. the fact that our institutions do not recognize other animals as subjects or individuals worthy of rights and protection follows from an anthropocentric worldview. in the case of mice, epistemic violence legitimates institutional violence, such as experimenting on mice as if they were objects, but also direct violence — maiming and killing liminal mice is seen as completely acceptable by most citizens and institutions. current scientific research usually reinforces epistemic violence. processes of knowledge production are not neutral, but intertwined with political, social, and economic structures. neoliberal capitalism for example has an effect on the objects and methods of study, because it favours knowledge that is deemed economically useful. anthropocentrism also affects knowledge production.20 scientists have long used other animals to gain knowledge about humans, or other topics relevant to humans, instead of trying to find out their perspective on the world or relations. earthworms for example are often used to study soil and ecosystems, but not to find out anything 19 wadiwel, war against animals, 36. 20 i should note that this mode of animal research is increasingly coming under criticism. ideas about how humans can get to know other animals are changing rapidly in different fields of study. in fields such as biology and ethology, there is more and more attention for the animal perspective. in the study of animal languages, for example, human language is no longer automatically taken as the blueprint for what language is, but instead species-specific languages and modes of expression are studied. furthermore, researchers are becoming increasingly aware of their own position and of how the material, social, psychological, and other conditions under which the animals in question are studied may influence the outcome of studies. in the humanities, a similar development can be detected. instead of simply looking at the information we have about other animals — for example concerning their cultures, emotional lives, forms of cognition — in different branches of critical animal studies the political and social frameworks in which this information is generated are also taken into account, including power relations between humans and other animals. still, a majority of the studies in which mice and other animals are used are for human purposes, which is reflected in how they are set up. meijer, learning to see mice | 225 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) about earthworms.21 similarly, mice are used to study human diseases, the origins of human emotions, and many other topics, but not to find out more about mice perspectives on a shared world. when their behaviours, emotions or cognition are studied, the outcomes are influenced by the material conditions under which knowledge is generated, such as isolation and captivity, electroshocks, and genetic manipulation. the scientific apparatus affects not only mouse welfare and knowledge production about mice, but also the agency of human researchers.22 klaus amann traces how mice and other living beings are transformed into technofacts in the laboratory.23 in dna research, for example, the structure of the scientific machine translates real animals into a certain kind of information. this translation follows larger scientific-political structures. tracing how specific forms of knowledge production form different images of mice, or produce different kinds of facts, can help to make visible power relations and show how agencies are intertwined. but getting a clearer view of, and responding to, the actual mice involved also requires attentiveness to larger political structures, as the study of mice’s facial expressions and donna haraway’s discussion of the oncomouse shows. responding to mice: facial expressions and the oncomouse mice are the most commonly used animals in experimentation in the netherlands. even though mice are used in studies aimed to benefit humans, this has also led to knowledge about their bodies and minds. empathy and care for others have been studied extensively in mice, for example, which shows that they feel each other’s pain and fear, and will console others when they are in pain.24 these studies often involve hurting mice and making them watch others being hurt, but the more benevolent studies usually also result in death — there 21 meijer, when animals speak, chapter 6. 22 birke et al., the sacrifice. 23 amann, “menschen, mäuse und fliegen”. 24 pierce, “mice in the sink”. 226 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) are no large-scale rehoming programs for mice.25 kristin andrews and susana monsó write about a similar moral problematic in the case of rats. rats are used in experiments that “prove” their moral worth, but they are still killed afterwards.26 the problems with these studies are not just moral, but epistemological too. vinciane despret shows how researchers’ views about animals often determine the outcome of studies.27 research questions often reflect prejudices related to identity categories, such as species and gender. because research questions set the frame in which animals can answer, production of knowledge that is uncritical about power hierarches produces knowledge that tends to reaffirm the social status of the beings in question. an example of how the way in which research is set up affirms stereotypical views of mice is the study of mice facial expressions. researchers at the max planck institute of neurobiology in munich, germany, studied facial expressions in mice and were able to connect five emotional states to these expressions: pleasure, disgust, nausea, pain, and fear. using computer algorithms, they could also measure the relative strength of the emotions. the goal of the study was not to understand mouse emotions better, but to investigate the basic mechanisms of how emotions are generated and processed in the brain. mouse emotions and expressions are described as if the mice were machines. for example: “mouse facial expressions evoked by diverse stimuli could be classified into emotionlike categories”, or “[t]o study facial expressions, we exposed mice to a diverse set of sensory stimuli that can be assumed to trigger changes in emotion state.”28 describing mice in this way influences the outcome of the study. if you study mice as machine-like beings, this will have an effect on what you see, or what the computer sees. it is also interesting to note that the researchers themselves were not able to see these mice’s expressions and did not take the time 25 this would make an interesting meta-study: what do studies about mice empathy show us about the empathy human researchers feel for others? 26 andrews and monsó, “rats are us”. 27 despret. what would animals say. 28 dolensek et al., “facial expressions”, 89. meijer, learning to see mice | 227 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) to learn them, so they used computer algorithms. the descriptions of the mice used in the experiment are based on prejudice, but also reinforce views of mice as acting more strongly on instinct than humans, being replaceable, and other common views of mice. there are many problems with this study, such as the violence inflicted on the mice, the focus on human benefit, the mechanistic, cartesian conception of animals. but it also does not begin to do justice to mice facial expressions. as i will discuss in the next section, it took time to get to know the mice. but some of their facial expressions were clear from the beginning — such as the look of disgust they gave me when they smelled my hand. now that i know them better, there are many things i can read in their faces. i can see if they are curious, excited, hesitant, satisfied, uninterested, concentrated on food or nesting material, excited with big eyes after running, greeting others. their sleepy faces, when they come out of the sleeping house after they have just woken up, are worth a special mention. describing facial expressions in the way that the study does by no means begins to do justice to what they can tell with their faces, even to this human observer who misses much. the cartesian perspective on mice is challenged by donna haraway in her discussion of the oncomouse, a type of laboratory mouse that has been genetically modified to be a breast cancer model for human women. haraway criticizes viewing these mice as a sacrifice for human reason, as well as perspectives that condemn breeding and killing oncomice as a form of domination. instead, she proposes to view laboratory practices, such as the ones in which oncomice are created, used, and killed, as a historical and contingent inequality in which the multiplicity of the world is reflected. humans and mice are entangled in different ways and in different webs, and haraway regards the oncomouse as a being in which nature and culture come together, as her sister and sibling.29 recognizing that agencies are interconnected, that similar cultural patterns play out in beings of different species, and that there are 29 see haraway, when species meet, chapter 3; cf. haraway, modest witness, 79. 228 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) different kinds of interdependencies, is valuable. but when haraway writes that the oncomouse is her “sibling” and “sister”, this is not simply an ontological statement: it is also a normative claim. she endorses animal experimentation by emphasizing the interconnectedness, but this conceals political human dominance. as zipporah weisberg writes, by comparing herself to the oncomouse, haraway sets up: “a false identity between herself — a relatively free and inviolable human subject — with a totally unfree and utterly violated subject-turned-object.”30 furthermore, there is no curiosity or invitation towards the actual oncomice, they are not asked if they would consider that specific human kin too. i cannot speak for the oncomouse, but it is difficult to see why they would consider haraway as sister or sibling. taking the oncomice’s perspective seriously demands a fundamental change in economic practices, political structures, personal habits. words matter here too. haraway uses a very different kind of vocabulary than dolensek and his colleagues at the max planck institute. to those who are familiar with and sympathetic towards feminist, posthumanist, and new materialist theory, and acknowledge the need to rethink the figure of the human, many of her claims may sound convincing. but they are also deceiving, and a political lens shows they are inconsistent. take “sharing suffering”, the title of the chapter of when species meet in which the oncomice feature. suffering is part of life for everyone, and we cannot keep others safe. sharing suffering refers to empathy, recognition, and caring for others. when my dog or human companions suffer, i suffer too. but using this phrase in the context of the oncomouse, glosses over of largescale human exploitation of mice. perhaps individual workers can share suffering, but as societies humans should rather focus on not inflicting suffering. for haraway, this framework of exploitation is legitimated by a “greater good calculation”.31 but the calculation of this greater good clearly depends on whom you ask. 30 weisberg, “broken promises”, 48. 31 haraway, when species meet, 87. meijer, learning to see mice | 229 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) as discussed above, political and scientific structures are interconnected and mutually reinforce each other. in the production of knowledge, different agencies intermesh and affect outcomes. this insight challenges human supremacy and opens the way for acknowledging other agencies, ontologically and politically, which can be a basis for reforming relations. however, recognizing limits on individual human agency does not legitimate large scale institutional human violence. a political lens allows us to see the large-scale injustice that most people would not find acceptable in the case of humans. finding it acceptable in the case of other animals is conceptually and morally problematic. recognizing this does not lead to abolishing relations — as the new field of animal labour shows, for example, it can also mean reformulating them.32 what is a mouse? and who decides? after describing in great detail the lives of the songbirds she lived with, len howard concludes she cannot make general claims about bird species like great tits.33 like humans, individual birds have very different personalities. while we can describe characteristics of species, and critically review how this relates to the roles that they play in human societies and imaginations, this is an important point to keep in mind, especially for animals who are made invisible and replaceable in laboratories, and in different kinds of texts. iii. learning to see mice differently learning to see other animals as their own beings takes time. alice crary and lori gruen describe how ideologies distort how humans view other animals.34 portrayals of animals in documentaries and art can affirm or contest existing relations; seeing is not neutral but interconnected with animals’ status in society. when a human sees a mouse, what they see is inevitably shaped by received cultural opinions that follow from how they were socialized. crary and gruen emphasize that humans are capable of moving beyond this immediate response, as they are in relation to other humans. this requires 32 see blattner et al., animal labour. 33 howard, birds as individuals. 34 crary and gruen, animal crisis, 107–19 230 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) meijer, learning to see mice | 231 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 9: kraaloog and flankie on the futsal field. figure 10: witoog’s tail. 232 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) moving away from the self and focusing on the actual other; certain forms of art and critical theory can help to open the way. looking at the mice changed how i saw them. it took me several months to learn to tell them apart. the only one i recognized from the first day onwards was vachtje, because her fur was a bit tousled. after a few months i began to perceive differences in size and body shape among the others. i began to notice that two of the mice were larger than average  — grote muis and kleinoor — while two were smaller — kleine muis and kraaloog. bullie was a bit bigger than all the others. once i was able to describe everyone’s posture, i could begin to recognize them as individuals. this took practice, and for a long time there were uncertainties, for example when someone was in the wheel and i could not tell if it was grote muis or kleinoor, who look very similar except that kleinoor’s left ear is slightly smaller than the right one. but with time it became clearer, and i began to recognize their faces as well. barbara smuts describes how learning to see other animals works in relation to a troop of baboons and a companion dog. the processes she describes are very different — in the case of the baboons she needed to learn to “speak baboon” in order to be accepted as a friendly stranger, but always kept her distance. in the case of the companion dog, safi, the relationship includes close proximity and sharing a house, as well as developing daily habits. but in both cases learning to see the animals correctly required an attentive awareness, not just with her mind, but also with her body and spirit, that was fostered and learned in dialogue with the animals in question.35 another example is the work of biologist deborah gordon, who describes how watching ants for a long time allowed her to see them.36 howard also emphasizes that learning to see other animals takes time.37 observing animals in only one setting for a limited amount of time often leads to errors in the interpretation of behaviours, because one does not know the individual personalities of the animals 35 smuts, “encounters”. 36 see gordon, “wittgenstein”. 37 see howard, birds as individuals and living with birds. meijer, learning to see mice | 233 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) involved, their habits, histories, and interpersonal relations. this mode of individualised observation stands in stark contrast to the mechanistic laboratory setting in which individuals are only seen as representatives of their species, and allows researchers to ask very different kinds of questions. some of the behaviours of the mice were immediately clear to me, for example, when they were shy or curious. other behaviours and activities took longer to understand, and the same applies to understanding their friendships, and the ways in which they create meaning more generally in terms of relations, play, spatial arrangements. learning to see mice is not just something that is interesting theoretically. it is also an important component of learning to care for them. because compared to ours their lives are short, there is not a lot of time to make mistakes. through offering the mice different options concerning the houses, wheels, foods, spatial arrangements in their house, and contact with me, i investigated their preferences. as i wrote above, one of the things i discovered is that they like holes in the ceilings of the boxes. this may seem like a minor issue, but it matters to them. another example is their clear preference for the wooden wheels. what matters to them most is that i often change the setup, preferably daily. trying out new things is fun for the mice, they enjoy being busy, but it is also important, because they are curious and investigating the new matters to them. seeing mice also matters in relation to knowing how to care for them when they are ill. vachtje was the first mouse to fall ill, and the first to die because of her tumour. breedsnuit and mooitje also died from a tumour. kleine muis and grote muis both died rather suddenly, after being ill for only a day. flankie and kraaloog died of old age, though flankie also had an ear infection and symptoms of paralysis in her hind legs. mouse health care is not very advanced, which is ironic in light of the fact that we know so much about their bodies. sunaura taylor has written about interconnections between disability and animality, drawing attention to human practices that make other animals disabled, as well as the animalization of humans with 234 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) disabilities.38 we find many of these practices in relation to laboratory mice. the bodies of lab mice are altered by humans for human purposes — sometimes genetically, sometimes they are made ill individually or collectively. when they live longer, many of these mice develop tumours, which is connected to breeding processes in historical cancer research. because mice are seen as commodities and because they do not live long, their lives are not valued by human societies. there is usually little that can be done when they are ill — the vet’s repertoire mainly consists of eye or ear ointment, painkillers, antibiotics, and euthanasia. i have been learning how best to assist them though, and i have got better at judging situations. while it was easy to see that the mice were ill from the start, it took time to learn to understand how diseases progress, mostly with regard to the timing. everything is faster with the mice than with cats, dogs, or humans. while my vet and the internet helped me judge the severity of situations, there is a certain knowledge that only comes with experience. this was not only true for me. the mice also learned about what it means when one of the others is ill, and have learned what death entails, as the description of their behaviours in relation to death above shows. an important aspect of learning to see others is allowing oneself to be transformed.39 matthew calarco argues that ethology should be seen as a transformative practice.40 he discusses the ethological work of joe hutto, who studied a pack of wild mule deer. hutto was adopted by them and formed new social relations, that made him see the reality of the deer differently, as well as making him more aware of the demise of the deer’s lifeworld due to ecological collapse. calarco draws attention to the social, environmental, and mental dimensions of ethology, which he describes as a pro-animal practice aiming to reform and re-envision relations between humans and other animals. practicing ethology in this sense enriches one’s world, but also makes one more sensitive to the suffering of other animals and the broader environmental catastrophe. this is true for living with lab 38 see taylor, beasts of burden. 39 cf. smuts, “encounters”. 40 calarco, “three ethologies”. meijer, learning to see mice | 235 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) mice as well. learning to understand the depth of their feelings and relations, caring for them, and being studied by them is joyful and a way of becoming more worldly. but it also makes reality more unbearable, because i now better understand the suffering of other mice, inside and outside the laboratory. experiencing the full cycle of life with these mice, who only live to be around two years old, and witnessing their deaths, was also transformative. it made me view life itself differently, because it gave me a better understanding of its fleeting nature, and of how different the shape of one’s life can be. some mice suffered before they died, especially the ones who died when they were older. i looked after them and felt for them. i suffered, but did i share in their suffering? i am not sure. i do know that all of us are here only very briefly, and i learned that for the mice death matters exactly as much as for humans. iv. political mouse–human dialogues working towards a better world for mice should be aimed at largescale structural change. current political, social, and economic practices and institutions can play a role in moving towards just interspecies societies. a first step towards more just relations with laboratory mice could for example be protection by labour rights, including the right to a pension. but change is also necessarily interconnected with small-scale experiments in which mice and other animals are consulted about their thoughts on the matter. otherwise, humans still have the last word in determining what is good for others. there seems to be a large gap between the daily interactions that i have with the mice and larger political, economic, cultural, and social structures in which animals are exploited. however, there are different ways to bridge this gap. in this last section i will briefly explore two: viewing mouse-human conversations as components of larger systems of deliberation, and writing about mice. recent work in animal philosophy posits communicative interactions between humans and other animals as deliberative practices. theorists emphasize the embodied and habitual nature of human political conversations, as well as the need to analyse the role of power in constructing who has political voice, and argue that from 236 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) this perspective certain conversations between humans and other animals can also be seen as deliberation. multispecies conversations already take place, but they can be improved.41 multispecies deliberation requires taking seriously animal languages and multispecies language-games, as well the material surroundings in which conversations that place. clemens driessen points to the importance of material interventions for human-nonhuman animal deliberation, such as the cat flap and the milking machine.42 sue donaldson directs the focus to the space in which humans and other animals deliberate.43 she argues that embodied interactions between animals of different species that take place in a shared commons can lead to more just relations between humans and other animals and new ways of co-existing. through embodied interactions in which animal agency is foregrounded, new forms of government can also come into being. an example is vine sanctuary, an lgtbq-led farmed animal sanctuary in vermont. the human animals who reside there view the sanctuary as a multispecies community in which the other residents are not seen as beings with pre-determined interests, but as subjects who can co-create the conditions under which they live.44 within this framework, the interactions i have with the mice can be understood as ongoing conversations. our dialogues are embodied, not dependent on human language, often revolve around objects, require curiosity from both sides, take time, will include misunderstandings and understandings, begin with a basic sense of connectedness as vulnerable beings, do not have a fixed outcome, and when there seems to be an outcome this does not mean one should stop being curious. i say something — perhaps by putting a willow ball in their house — and they tell me if they like it by using it or ignoring it or trying to get rid of it. or i offer them small pieces of vegan cheese and they will either eat it or not. some of these conversations take place once or 41 for a longer discussion of multispecies deliberation, see meijer, when animals speak, chapter 9. 42 driessen, “animal deliberation”, 138. 43 see donaldson, “animal agora”. 44 see blattner et al., “animal agency”; gillespie, “cow”; jones, “oxen”; jones, “captivity”; meijer “sanctuary politics”. meijer, learning to see mice | 237 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) twice, others are ongoing. for example, i sometimes ask them if they already like my hand by putting my hand in their house, and they say no. another example of an ongoing conversation is our music ritual. i know they like some songs for running so i play these, or invent new ones like them, and they respond by running in the wheel or through their house. in these conversations embodied forms of language play a role, as well as habits and objects. recent proposals to consider the whole system of deliberation, instead of only considering the deliberative quality of separate spheres, offer a framework for translating the conversations that take place on the microlevel to larger structures.45 in this way, conversations between the mice and me could influence legislation and decision-making concerning mice, and this could function as a first step in the transition towards a just multispecies democracy. our conversations can also affect cultural understandings of what it means to be a mouse. i give talks about the mice and write about their lives in newspapers and on my weblog, which may contribute to social and political conversations that take place on other levels of society, and more generally may invite other humans see them differently. v. meaning-making in the mouse house the mice have different ways of creating meaning, in their relationships with one another, in relation to me, through using objects, and forming habits and rituals, like the party when their house is clean. understanding their ways of creating meaning as a human requires paying attention, taking the time, and experimenting. it also requires thinking about language, in two senses. better understanding the perspective of mice on our common world requires learning about their languages, and how these can and do co-shape our common world. but language also matters on the level of the words and stories i as a human use to think and write about them. it is important to be precise about actual interactions, but also to not use the type of clinical, generic language that is reserved for objects, and that scientists often use when writing about mice, because in that specific 45 see meijer, when animals speak, chapter 9. 238 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) language-game there is too much that cannot be articulated, and it does not do justice to their ways of being. on the day that the mice came to live with me, i gave them a large brown envelope. they were so happy with this envelope, moving in and out of it, and using it to sleep in. their first running wheel was also a source of great joy. after spending the first six months of their lives in a small laboratory box, their world suddenly became much bigger and things began to happen. with more space and new objects their relationships with each other could also change, and they continue to change now that they are old. in a society that respects mice their lives would probably have been better. but even under these circumstances, they created beauty and meaning, individually and as a community. acknowledgements this essay is dedicated to breedsnuit, bullie, flankie, grote muis, kleine muis, kleinoor, kraaloog, mooitje, vachtje and witoog. i want to thank the anonymous reviewers and the editors for their thorough reading of the text and thoughtful comments. meijer, learning to see mice | 239 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) works cited adams, carol j. and josephine donovan, eds. the feminist care tradition in animal ethics: a reader. new york: columbia university press, 2007. amann, klaus. “menschen, mäuse und fliegen. eine wissenssoziologische analyse der transformation von organismen in epistemische objekte.” zeitschrift für soziologie 23, no. 1 (1994): 22–40. https://doi.org/10.1515/ zfsoz-1994-0102. andrews, kristin, and susana monsó. “rats are us.” aeon 2 march 2020. https:// aeon.co/essays/why-dont-rats-get-thesame-ethical-protections-as-primates birke, lynda, arnold arluke, and mike michael. 2007. the sacrifice: how scientific experiments transform animals and people. west lafayette, in: purdue university press, 2007. blattner, charlotte e., kendra coulter, and will kymlicka, eds. animal labour: a new frontier of interspecies justice? oxford: oxford university press, 2019. blattner, charlotte e., sue donaldson, and ryan wilcox. “animal agency in community: a political multispecies ethnography of vine sanctuary.” politics and animals no. 6 (2020): 1–22. calarco, matthew. “the three ethologies.” in exploring animal encounters: philosophical, cultural, and historical perspectives, edited by dominik ohrem and matthew calarco, 45–62. cham: palgrave macmillan, 2018. crary, alice, and lori gruen. animal crisis: a new critical theory. cambridge: polity, 2022. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. edited by marie-louise mallet. translated by david wills. new york: fordham university press, 2008. despret, vinciane. what would animals say if we asked the right questions? translated by brett buchanan. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2016. dolensek, nate, daniel a. gehrlach, alexandra s. klein, and nadine gogolla. “facial expressions of emotion states and their neuronal correlates in mice.” science 368, no. 6486 (2020): 89–94. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaz9468. donaldson, sue. “animal agora: animal citizens and the democratic challenge.” social theory and practice 46, no. 4 (2020): 709–35. https://doi.org/10.5840/ soctheorpract202061296. donovan, josephine. “feminism and the treatment of animals: from care to dialogue.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 31, no. 2 (2006): 305–29. https://doi.org/10.1086/491750. driessen, clemens. “animal deliberation: the co-evolution of technology and ethics on the farm.” phd diss. wageningen university, 2014. gillespie, kathryn. the cow with ear tag #1389. chicago: university of chicago press, 2018. gordon, deborah m. “wittgenstein and ant-watching.” biology and philosophy 7, no. 1 (1992): 13–25. https://doi. org/10.1007/bf00130161 haraway, donna j. modest_witness@ second_millennium.femaleman©_ meets_oncomouse™: feminism and technoscience. 2nd ed. new york: routledge, 2018. haraway, donna j. when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008. herrmann, kathrin, and kimberley jayne, eds. animal experimentation: working towards a paradigm change. leiden: brill, 2019. howard, len. birds as individuals. london: collins, 1953. howard, len. living with birds. london: collins, 1956. https://doi.org/10.1515/zfsoz-1994-0102 https://doi.org/10.1515/zfsoz-1994-0102 https://aeon.co/essays/why-dont-rats-get-the-same-ethical-protections-as-primates https://aeon.co/essays/why-dont-rats-get-the-same-ethical-protections-as-primates https://aeon.co/essays/why-dont-rats-get-the-same-ethical-protections-as-primates https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaz9468 https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract202061296 https://doi.org/10.5840/soctheorpract202061296 https://doi.org/10.1086/491750 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00130161 https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00130161 240 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) jones, miriam. “captivity in the context of a sanctuary for formerly farmed animals.” in the ethics of captivity, edited by lori gruen, 90–101. oxford: oxford university press, 2014. jones, pattrice. 2014. the oxen at the intersection: a collision. brooklyn, ny: lantern books, 2014. nvwa. zo doende 2019. jaaroverzicht proefdieren en dierproeven. utrecht: nederlandse voedselen warenautoriteit, 2020. makowska, i. joanna, and daniel m. weary. “a good life for laboratory rodents?” ilar journal 60, no.3 (2019): 373–88. https://doi.org/10.1093/ilar/ilaa001. makowska, i. joanna, becca franks, cathy el-hinn, tina jorgensen, & daniel m. weary. “standard laboratory housing for mice restricts their ability to segregate space into clean and dirty areas.” scientific reports 9, art. no. 6179 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598019-42512-3. meijer, eva. animal languages. translated by laura watkinson. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2020. meijer, eva. “sanctuary politics and the borders of the demos: a comparison of human and nonhuman animal sanctuaries.” krisis: journal for contemporary philosophy 41, no. 2 (2021): 35–48. https://doi.org/10.21827/ krisis.41.2.37174 meijer, eva. “stray philosophy: human-dog observations on language, freedom and politics.” journal for critical animal studies 12, no. 4 (2015): 105–35. meijer, eva. “stray philosophy ii: dog/ human reflections on education, boundaries, care, and forming interspecies communities.” journal for critical animal studies 17, no. 3 (2020): 3–30. meijer, eva. when animals speak: towards an interspecies democracy. new york: new york university press, 2019. pierce, jessica. “mice in the sink: on the expression of empathy in animals.” environmental philosophy 5, no.1 (2008): 75–96. https://doi.org/10.5840/ envirophil20085129. smuts, barbara. “encounters with animal minds.” journal of consciousness studies 8, nos. 5–6 (2001): 293–309. taylor, sunaura. beasts of burden: animal and disability liberation. new york: the new press, 2017. wadiwel, dinesh. the war against animals. leiden: brill, 2015. weisberg, zipporah. “the broken promises of monsters: haraway, animals and the humanist legacy.” journal for critical animal studies 7, no. 2 (2009): 21–61. https://doi.org/10.1093/ilar/ilaa001 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-42512-3 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-42512-3 https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.41.2.37174 https://doi.org/10.21827/krisis.41.2.37174 https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil20085129 https://doi.org/10.5840/envirophil20085129 meijer, learning to see mice | 241 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) portrait gallery 242 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) meijer, learning to see mice | 243 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) breedsnuit (broadsnout) breedsnuit is full of power, open to the world, funny, and very gentle. bullie (little bull) bullie is enthusiastic about food and running. she is strong and strongwilled, the only mouse to survive a stroke. if another mouse is ill she will keep her company. she also comforts the other mice when they are at the end of their lives, by grooming them and sitting with them. 244 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) meijer, learning to see mice | 245 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) flankie (flankie) flankie went blind in one eye when she was about six months old. she is curious, likes surprises, and touches everything with her hands because of her poor eyesight. she is eager to participate in activities and to explore new objects in the house. she is brave (the best climber of the group) but modest. kraaloog is her best friend. grote muis (big mouse) grote muis is calm and has a steady personality. she is not easily impressed. she sometimes steals food from the others and follows her own compass. 246 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) meijer, learning to see mice | 247 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) kleine muis (little mouse) kleine muis is cheerful, curious, open, and open-hearted. she is active, social, fast, and loves to run in the wheel and explore new things. kleinoor (little ear) kleinoor is calm yet curious and always happy to hear my voice. she is solid, outgoing; she is one of my special friends. 248 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) meijer, learning to see mice | 249 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) kraaloog (beady eye) kraaloog is cheerful and curious. she is even a bit more energetic than kleine muis. she is also smart and sweet and friends with flankie. mooitje (little beauty) mooitje enjoys group activities. she is modest yet curious, not someone who likes to be in the spotlight. she likes running in the wheel and climbing on the wooden house. the vet called her an “ultra-runner” because she kept going for so long even when she was ill. 250 | meijer, learning to see mice humanimalia 13.1 (2022) meijer, learning to see mice | 251 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) vachtje (furry) when she was young, vachtje was fierce, towards me but also towards the other mice. when she grew older she became more generous and quiet, and for a while she was the one who liked it most when i touched her. then she fell ill, and grew even more shy and cautious. witoog (white eye) witoog is very steady. she likes me more than the others and is my friend like kleinoor. she is calm, has a strong personality but is also modest. she makes her own decisions, and she is quite autonomous and wise. mchugh, review of olszok, the libyan novel the rise of regional creatures in literary animal studies susan mchugh review of: charis olszok, the libyan novel: humans, animals and the poetics of vulnerability. edinburgh studies in modern arabic literature. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2020. xi + 308 pp. £24.99 (pb); £75.00 (hb) susan mchugh is professor of english at the university of new england, biddeford, me, usa. email: smchugh@une.edu book review mailto:smchugh@une.edu at the crossroads of literary and animal studies, interest has been growing exponentially and shows no signs of slowing down. while preliminary groundwork has been done to identify some significant complications of concepts like “the animal” and “animality”, and more recently “the creature” and “creaturely”, much of the follow-through work remains to be done in clarifying how, when, and why particular peoples adapt them to literary representations of humans and other animals. charis olszok’s the libyan novel: humans, animals, and the politics of vulnerability advances these efforts significantly, not only by explaining what makes libyan perspectives on literary representations of creatureliness distinctive, but also by modelling how to engage important global discussions from a regional perspective. as the first monograph in english devoted to the libyan novel, the book additionally stands out as a major contribution to arabic literary studies. olszok’s primary task is to explain the rise of the libyan novel as coinciding with that of the despot muʿammar al-qadhafi, whose ruthless surveillance state underpinned his consolidation of power in the 1970s until his death in 2011, and terrorized the nation with a sense of “the impossibility of speaking openly of anything” (2). throughout the twentieth century, the history of the modern libyan state — which was ruled by genocidal italian colonizers, then petro-extractivist british military administrators, who in turn installed the puppet senusi monarchy, all together leading libya to be declared the world’s poorest nation in the 1960s — is a tragedy that clearly haunts its writers. but their inability to represent the experience of living under al-qadhafi’s jamahiriya realistically, or even directly, without fear of imprisonment, torture, and execution had a more lasting effect on their storytelling practices. olszok thus characterizes libyan literature as wrestling with the “difficulty of story”: in a literary tradition where every story is problematic, both through the horror of telling it, and the danger that telling it brings, narrative becomes necessarily allusive. stories conceal other stories, striving to express human experience in a country that has moved, within a few decades, from nomadic to copyright © 2022 susan mchugh this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 267–273. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.10929 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10929 mchugh, review of olszok | 269 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) urban, and from colonization to dictatorship, in a nation both rentier and “rogue”, stateless and authoritarian, and, since 2014, caught in the throes of civil war. (2–3) many salient aspects of life for modern libyans are spelled out for the benefit of readers who are unfamiliar with these profound and highly localized cultural changes. moreover, developing these contexts proves crucial for demonstrating the originality and relevance of the author’s primary argument about the importance of creatureliness as a vehicle for libyan writers to navigate the paradoxes of witnessing vulnerability while staying safe from censorship. rather than attempting an exhaustive study of the nation’s novelists, olszok has instead chosen to focus on the development of a stylistic tendency toward the “non-realist, structurally fragmented and hybrid” forms that make the libyan novel so distinctly compelling (30). what emerges is an organic explanation of the prominent, multifaceted roles of nonhuman animals in these stories: animals at once appeal to writers as politically expedient signs or symbols for articulating felt helplessness among otherwise silenced humans, while also anchoring strong material and cultural links to saharan and mediterranean ecologies along with ancient nomadic lifeways. more precisely, in these novels creatures with longstanding local significances like camels, jerboas, and gazelles serve as signposts, even at times direct reference points, to the many literary and cultural traditions that historically are tied to libyan homelands. olszok is careful to draw connections to the various influences of arabic, islamic, sufi, and other regional folklore traditions in creating sympathetic animal fictions. attributing cultural and class bias to animal studies scholarship, one of the book’s main claims is that the story of the libyan novel defies the presumption “that concern for ‘animal victims’ is limited to the rich west” (6). the focus on regional influences on the formal aspects peculiar to libyan fiction works well as a corrective for bias within literary studies too. while the animal-centred fictions of ibrahim al-kuni — the most widely translated arabic author today — understandably loom large throughout several chapters, olszok deliberately counters a misperception of alkuni as an isolated genius, largely perpetrated in english-language 270 | mchugh, review of olszok humanimalia 13.1 (2022) scholarship, through citations of his own extensive writing about his mutually influential, long-term relationships with other libyan authors who share his affinity for creaturely writing. taking an open-ended approach to the discourse of the creaturely, the book follows a loose historical structure starting roughly in the 1950s and concluding in the 2010s. a wide array of novels are discussed comparatively, and the introduction explains that they are grouped in chapters according to recurrent themes that are flagged by the book’s three major sections. part i, “survival,” contains a chapter each on the role of animal fables and primordial human-animality stories in advancing socio-ecological critique, which often link the existential alienation of being human to the experience of the intellectual in exile. in part ii, “signs and cityscapes”, olszok delves deeper into the self-reflexivity of libyan fiction through chapters on how animal and sculptural representations operate at once as signs, symbols, and secrets. such is the strangeness of libyan fiction that its depictions of neolithic rock art and modern monuments — both victims of defacement by militants during and beyond al-qadhafi’s regime — share a sense of precarity with their animal referents along with sympathetic humans, a condition that bears more immediate political implications for authorship that in turn are necessarily buried within the texts. part iii, “children of the land”, traces a peculiarly libyan adaptation of the bildungsroman or coming-of-age novel through representations of childhood as a paradigm for a stalled rather than surpassed sense of creaturely vulnerability, first through one chapter that shows how conventions of oral and folk storytelling influence this development in libyan arabic fiction. the next chapter explores how the arrested-development theme now shapes the stories of contemporary libyan novelists who elect to publish first in french and english rather than arabic, and along the way it spotlights the wider relevance of olszok’s argument about regional creaturely fictions for enriching comparative literature, world literature, and translation studies. the afterword brings this literary history to bear on libya’s “rapidly disintegrating present” (227), primarily by focusing on two fictional representations of the actual defacement and abrupt disappearance of tripoli’s famous girl and gazelle sculpture. a city landmark and central feature of a fountain in a busy urban roundabout, the large, mchugh, review of olszok | 271 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) bronze statue disappeared in november 2014 following a series of threats and assaults inspired by the italian-colonial provenance of the piece, and still more directly registering offense at the girl figure’s nudity. reading common elements across these stories and libyan fiction more generally, olszok aligns the incident and what happens in fictional retellings of it with the real-life death threats issued to libya’s millennial generation of authors. the plight of fiction writers harassed for depicting formerly taboo themes, issues, and historical perspectives — notably graphic depictions of sex — that are integral to the human experience today illustrate “how, amid the various powers vying for control of the country, oppression has become unpredictable and multifaceted, and the rules of censorship and self-censorship ill-defined” (229). thus creatureliness persists as a “defining characteristic of libya’s literary brilliance” (231), and one that appears poised to shape literary production there for decades to come, even as its writers come to terms with concerns that cross national boundaries. olszok’s attentiveness to the needs of audiences outside the community of libyan writers is one of the book’s strengths. especially for non-arabic speakers, the original translations and glosses of key passages and terms are exceptionally helpful, chief of which centres on the complexity of the term “creaturely” in this context. whereas in english the creature connotes strangeness or monstrosity (think: frankenstein), “[i]n arabic, contrastingly, the present participle makhlūq conveys an abidingly powerful notion of ‘createdness’” (18), emphasizing a property shared across all of creation. scholars in literary animal studies should take note here that olszok thereby identifies a bridge between positions predominantly characterized as oppositional in euro-american contexts: on the one hand, that which emphasizes the vulnerability of the human as a creaturely state, which is typified by eric santner’s on creaturely life: rilke, benjamin, sebald (2006) and relies heavily on giorgio agamben’s reading of michel foucault’s biopolitics; and on the other hand anat pick’s exemplary framing of the creaturely in terms of the precarity shared by humans and other animals in creaturely poetics: animality and vulnerability in literature and film (2011), drawn primarily through the mystical philosophy of simone weil. given the intertextual, 272 | mchugh, review of olszok humanimalia 13.1 (2022) palimpsestic tendencies that olszok abundantly identifies in libyan fictional creatures, it seems logical to conclude that neither position has become predominant, for their “depictions of vulnerability move beyond vehicles of fixed political meaning into nuanced explorations of oppression on multiple symbolic and spiritual layers” (20). but there is a drawback to the emphasis on parity in these different ideas about whose creatureliness matters. at times, it appears to forestall pointed discussion of how the politics of nonhuman animal rights and welfare operates in the libyan context. noting many disturbing depictions of people torturing and slaughtering animals — including a pattern in which a youngster responds with a lifelong aversion to meat eating, at times directly in response to witnessing traditional killings of animals at eid — olszok favours traditional literary methods to read such scenes strictly metaphorically, as coded critiques of state-sponsored murder. as an outsider to the culture, and one who is averse to reading animals metaphorically, i cannot help but wonder: when read literally, do the scenes that stage repulsion when faced with ritual slaughter loft critiques of all human pretenses of authority, or do they affirm that the very intention of the practice in islam is to instill a sense of aversion to all manner of bloodshed? in this respect, olszok’s attention to the human-historical significance in detailed close readings of scenes featuring humans, animals, and human–animal relationships comes arguably at the expense of developing the theoretical scaffolding that would demonstrate the significance of them for literary animal studies. as many have noted, what makes pick’s concept of the creaturely distinctive is the acknowledgement that nonhuman animals so often inspire people to care about shared vulnerability beyond the human fold; it is this very property that constitutes animals’ distinctive contributions to storyworlds, according to david herman’s narratology beyond the human: storytelling and animal life (2018). while olszok’s book as a whole makes a compelling case for libyan writers having made creaturely discourse a central facet of especially arabic fiction, the work remains of reconciling the human conditions of creatureliness with complementary arguments about what more-than-human effects the creaturely produces in literature and culture. so, for instance, mchugh, review of olszok | 273 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) tobias menely’s argument in the animal claim: sensibility and the creaturely voice (2015) that eighteenth-century british poetic representations of nonhuman animals inspire legal turns towards protecting the vulnerable across species lines begs comparison. this last point is not so much a weakness of the libyan novel as an indicator of how the book comes to identify many opportunities that await future scholarship. the ecological, agricultural, and other impacts of settler colonialist histories on human-animal relations are increasingly of special concern to new generations of scholars and students, who are aware as their predecessors never were before of the need for traditionally marginalized perspectives to be foregrounded in working out solutions to major social and biological crises today, whether the sudden outbreaks of zoonotic disease pandemics or the long march of anthropogenic extinction. it is intriguing to note how much of this work has begun in african literary animal studies: olszok’s the libyan novel adds to the momentum initiated by wendy woodward’s the animal gaze: animal subjectivities in southern african narratives (2008), and more recently advanced by jason price’s animals and desire in south african fiction: biopolitics and the resistance to colonization (2017), as well as evan mwangi’s the postcolonial animal: african literature and posthuman ethics (2019). by following their lead in looking beyond euro-american and anglophone canons to develop more appropriately nuanced models through comparable attention to so many more linguistic and regional traditions, literary animal studies will reach its true potentials for revolutionizing scholarship for the benefit of all. breeze, review of hamlett and strange a pet revolution? daniel breeze review of: jane hamlett and julie-marie strange, pet revolution: animals and the making of modern british life. london: reaktion books, 2023. 256 pp., 42 illus. £20 (hb, ebook). daniel breeze is a doctoral researcher in history at loughborough university, uk. email: d.breeze@lboro.ac.uk book review mailto:d.breeze@lboro.ac.uk jane hamlett’s and julie-marie strange’s pet revolution is an impressive introduction to the past two centuries of pet-keeping in britain. hamlett and strange will be recognisable names to victorianists for their pioneering research in victorian studies of the home (hamlett) and death and grief (strange). readers of this journal might recognize strange as a co-author of the invention of the modern dog: breed and blood in victorian britain (2018). this new book is the result of an ahrc-funded project that explored the roles of pets in british family life between 1837 and 1937. an exemplary history of the subject, the book bursts at the seams with primary sources that illustrate how all social classes came to welcome animals into their homes. in their introduction hamlett and strange boldly contend that a pet revolution should be put alongside other revolutions: “modernity in the western world was forged through a series of revolutions, from the industrial and agricultural to the political and commercial. we contend that, in britain at least, there was another revolution — the pet revolution — whereby households across the social spectrum welcomed animals into their domestic lives on an unprecedented scale” (8). their argument, then, is that revolutions of the nineteenth century, alongside trade facilitated by empire, made possible the widespread adoptions of pets within the british home. this focus is made clear in the introduction: “it is, we argue, impossible to understand the history of home and family without bringing animals into our stories” (16). in chapter one, “capture and taming”, hamlett and strange discuss the shifting attitudes towards the boundaries of what could be considered a pet. hamlett and strange contend that this was influenced by notions of imperialism, gender, and class. for example, while literature for boys was replete with instructions on how to capture and tame wild birds, girls were generally told to be content with the domesticated budgie (30–31). the so-called civilizing mission of empire was brought home in the attempts to civilize wild animals and bring them into the home as pets; this included dormice and squirrels. pointing towards the recent work by diana donald, copyright © 2023 daniel breeze this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 391–397. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.15995 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.15995 breeze, review of hamlett and strange | 393 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) women against cruelty (2019), which presents a women’s history of animal protection in victorian britain, hamlett and strange show the “taming” and “bagging” of animals to be a peculiarly masculine and imperial venture. successive laws, lobbied for by nascent campaign groups such as the rspca, shifted the social acceptability of these practices, which gradually institutionalized the pet-industry. this opening chapter, then, chronicles a reordering of how britons became acquainted with the animals that would become their companions. what started out as a free-for-all — eccentric gentlemen kept lions in their apartments off piccadilly (actor edmund kean) and wombats in their backyard menagerie (poet and artist dante gabriel rosetti) — became a legislated and institutionalized landscape of pet-keeping. from curiosity to commodity. chapter two, “building trust and buying love”, explores the changing landscape of animals as pet commodities in terms of their sale and purchase. hamlett and strange bring out aspects of class in their analysis of the social history of pet-dealers. there was a clear distinction, they argue, between those walking the street and those traders who had set up shop. however, that boundary was perhaps distorted by the presence of animal traders on the stalls at markets alongside “livestock” traders. moreover, there is a compelling discussion in this chapter about dog-nappers who, in their quest for ransoms, targeted the newly popular pedigree breeds and their wealthy humans (58–61). hamlett and strange argue that the increasing sentimentality of victorians towards dog companions contributed to the inflation of dog ransoms. importantly, the early victorian epidemic of dog-napping led to legislation which reclassified dogs as property in 1845. this encapsulates how the development of emotional attachment between humans and animals in this period developed side-by-side with the commodification and propertied understanding of pets both in law and wider society. chapter three, “rules made and broken”, takes us back into the domestic sphere, looking at “pets at home”. the discussion about how pets bred disorder into the highly structured victorian home recalled questions of agency. hamlett’s and strange’s primary sources often humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 394 | breeze, review of hamlett and strange infer a certain victorian state of mind that quietly enjoyed the upheaval brought by their non-human companions — whether it be beatrix potter taking delight in the volatile temperament of her rabbit, benjamin bouncer, or louis wain’s illustrated london news cartoon “other people’s pets”, which features finger-biting parrots, marauding monkeys, and badly-behaved dogs in a comedic and knowing manner (95–96). however, others found less enjoyment from the behaviour of their pets. the reverend john wood admonished his skye terrier, roughie, for his lack of class-consciousness: “he seemed as glad to see the most repulsive tramp as myself” (98). i was left wondering whether ideas about animal resistance developed by scholars like susan nance and jason hribal could be applied to pets during this period. finally, hamlett and strange argue that shifting home designs both helped and hindered pet-keepers with suburbia leading to a boon in cats and dogs, and increased flat-living and renting complicating the pet-owner dynamic. chapter four, “we’ve taken to you”, focuses on how pets were present within memoirs, diaries, and letters concerned with family life. perhaps the most arresting account in this chapter is that of ruth rose, whose wartime diaries show how paddy, her dog, provided comfort and companionship throughout her difficult marriage to a controlling and abusive husband (137–38). this chapter is illustrated with paintings and photographs, like other chapters, and there is a particularly intriguing portrait photograph here of a young edwardian black man holding two dogs “reassuringly”. hamlett and strange note the photograph as “one of the rare visual depictions of human-animal relationships in pre-first world war britain that include someone from a minority ethnic background” (118). this is noteworthy both for what it infers and what it neglects to show. by emphasizing the rarity of visual depictions involving minority ethnic individuals before 1914, hamlett and strange hint at the marginalization of groups from our historical records about human-nonhuman interactions in britain during the earlier periods of their study. chapter five, “in sickness and in health”, chronicles the changing medical landscape for pets: from home remedies to the sale of breeze, review of hamlett and strange | 395 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) curing concoctions and manufactured pet food toward the end of the nineteenth century; from vets as professionals focused mainly on horses to the expansion of their vocation to include dogs, cats, and small animals. albeit brief, there is an interesting discussion about the slow process of women being accepted as vets and not simply being side-lined into assistant caring roles due to essentialist ideas of gender (169). this is interesting because the veterinary profession is now majority female, compared to the medical doctor profession, which remains majority male. perhaps the shift in veterinary care from mainly agricultural to companion animals over time has shifted the social stereotypes about what a vet looks like — a shift incomparable to any in the medical profession? their section on cat owners feeling conflicted about having their pets neutered and / or spayed is an interesting study of how those owners understood the relationship between cat sexuality, gender, and behaviour (173–6). while hamlett and strange relate the improving affordability of veterinary care for working people, first through charities and then through its proliferation, they also recognize the sad reality that still exists for some people and their animal companions: “the deep pockets of love do not always stretch to the financial costs of health” (178). in the sixth and final chapter, “in loving memory”, hamlett and strange discuss the aftermaths of pet-keeping: grief. gender once again is an important dimension of analysis. particularly moving is a story from the memoirs of the famous yorkshire vet james herriot who euthanized bob, a fourteen-year-old labrador cross who had developed incurable cancer, the companion of an elderly and widowed labourer. the bewilderment and trembling lips of the elderly man meant herriot dispensed with the clichés and took no payment. “herriot’s recollection of his awkwardness demonstrates”, we are told, “men’s self-consciousness regarding sentiment” (198). another story recalls an edwardian family in limehouse who, in hard times, couldn’t afford to feed their pet rabbits and themselves. the rabbits were summarily eaten, and the father of the family did all he could to hold back his tears (201). similarly, i know two of my own great grandfathers kept rabbits especially for food, but both eventually humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 396 | breeze, review of hamlett and strange found they couldn’t continue the practice after a certain point because of unspoken emotional attachments. these stories illustrate how the incorporation of nonhumans into british homes — interestingly all working-class ones in these examples — destabilized the gender norms of the victorian patriarchy. as i have made clear, the excellence of this study lies in hamlett’s and strange’s wide breadth of sources and their clear analysis. this is a first-class cultural history of pet-keeping in britain from the victorian period to the mid-twentieth century. the book succeeds in analysing how dimensions of class and gender effected this practice and points to how imperialism not only opened trade routes for exotic animals, but also became an avenue for a certain discourse to seep into home-life within the metropole. the acceptance of nonhuman animals within the victorian homes of all classes was tied up with the civilizing mission of empire, but it also subverted their sense of order through the misbehaviours of those animals that many learned to love. it is, for the most part, a history of sentiment rather than respect; it’s unlikely that many of the pet-keepers whose words fill this book felt moral duties towards the animals they owned in the same way that animal advocates today understand their relationships with companion animals. in fact, this is another theme present: the drift towards a thoroughly commodified and propertied understanding of pets. however, i am unsure whether hamlett and strange fully justify the claim in their introduction that the “book is interested in the shifting parameters of power, intimacy and conceptions of personhood in human–animal relationships” (10). their pet revolution names a rearrangement of british perceptions of the home, the family, and the emotional status of nonhumans who became part of these institutions. it is this domestic revolution in which a pet revolution came to be, one made possible by its industrial and agricultural antecedents, but perhaps subordinate to them. unfortunately, though, it is hard to grasp how the revolution which they describe shifted power dynamics in human–animal relationships. as a work firmly grounded in cultural history, discussions of power could have perhaps been breeze, review of hamlett and strange | 397 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) developed further with added references to the rich vein of theoretical work underway in the field of historical animal studies — an engagement with ideas about animal agency, for example. ultimately, as hamlett and strange acknowledge, pets were not a product of the nineteenth century, or of britain in particular, but during this period their place, both symbolic and literal, was certainly reformed. the lingering question such a work raises for animal advocates is thus: how do we imagine the sequel? humanimalia vol. 15, no. 1 (fall 2024) humanimalia is a biannual journal devoted to the study of human–animal relations. it is interdisciplinary, open-access, and peer-reviewed, publishing original articles from a wide range of cultural, historical, philosophical, political, and aesthetic perspectives. humanimalia has three aims: to explore and advance the vast range of scholarship on human–animal relations, to encourage exchange among scholars working from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and those working closely with animals in non-academic fields. we invite innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches. ideally, we seek papers that combine approaches, or at the very least draw upon research in other disciplines to contextualize their arguments. as much as possible, we seek papers that acknowledge and seek to advance a more-than-human conception of aesthetics, culture, and society. https://humanimalia.org cover: slug, nagasawa rosetsu. ink on paper, edo period editorial board editor-in-chief kári driscoll utrecht university associate editors clemens driessen wageningen univeristy monica mattfeld university of northern british columbia emelia quinn university of ottawa marianna szczygielska czech academy of sciences kerstin weich independent scholar book reviews editor dominic o’key university of cambridge production assistant imogen grigorovich intern lotte suardi layout and typesetting kári driscoll editorial | iii humanimalia 15.1 (2024) as we near the end of what has in many respects been a difficult, dispiriting, and exhausting year, i find myself thinking of a famous haiku by kobayashi issa (1763–1828), one of the great masters of the form. the poem is addressed to a snail making its way up the side of mount fuji: 蝸牛 / そろそろ登れ / 富士の山 katatsumuri / sorosoro nobore / fuji no yama [snail / slowly slowly climb / mt. fuji] r. h. blyth, whose influential four-volume collection of haiku, published in the immediate aftermath of world war ii, was largely responsible for introducing western readers to japanese poetry, categorizes this poem as an example of “dry humour”.1 certainly, the contrast between the snail’s tiny progress and the sheer immensity of the iconic mountain gives rise to a sense of incommensurability which can be interpreted as irony or even satire. particularly, perhaps, if this slow ascent is read as a mock-heroic send-up of human striving — though this would no doubt be to impose a moral framework on the text that is peculiarly western, not to mention anthropocentric; a reading which, needless to say, a journal such as humanimalia would hesitate to endorse. this is not, however, to deny that the poem establishes a connection between the snail and the human observer, and, in turn, the reader, who through the initial apostrophe may also feel addressed and invited to ponder their relation to the snail and the mountain. to the contrary, the poem is arguably all about establishing connections between the seemingly disparate and incommensurable. the question, rather, is how to interpret these relations, and how to understand our position in relation to the situation described in the poem. according to the definition proposed in 1973 by the haiku society of america, haiku is “an unrhymed japanese poem recording the essence of a moment keenly perceived, in which nature is linked to human nature.” the definition has since been updated to say that it is the “essence of an experience of nature” that is “intuitively linked 1 r. h. blyth, haiku, 4 vols. (tokyo: hokuseido press, 1949–1952), 1:221. iv | editorial humanimalia 15.1 (2024) to the human condition.”2 haiku, and issa’s poem is no exception, is rooted in the precise observation of nature and careful attention to nonhuman life, which even in its minutest form is taken to be significant and meaningful in itself and for understanding human existence. as such, one might regard this as an instance of what anna tsing, in her multispecies ethnography of matsutake, calls the “arts of noticing”, predicated on slowing down and paying attention to alternative temporalities and modes of inhabiting the world that have been rendered illegible and irrelevant within the progress-oriented logic of capitalist modernity.3 if issa’s poem seems to invite us to empathize with the snail, or to hear the imperative to climb — but slowly, slowly — as directed at ourselves, this has less to do with the dreaded reductio ad figuram that inscribes animals within a purely anthropomorphic schema of signification, and more to do with a fundamental sense that “human nature” is itself “an interspecies relation”,4 and that this is in fact the reason why the experience of nature can be “intuitively linked” to the human condition in the first place, as the hsa’s updated definition has it. as a poetic form, haiku is characterized by its economy of expression: seventeen morae or, technically, on [音], arranged in three phrases of five, seven, and five, respectively. on, meaning “sound”, denotes a minimal phonetic unit, a specific duration.5 the prescribed length of a haiku is thus a measure of the time it takes to recite it out loud. the two central figures of the poem, the snail and mt. fuji, each occupy a single five-on line. in other words, while the two may be radically 2 haiku society of america, “definitions of haiku & related terms”, 18 september 2004, https://www.hsa-haiku.org/hsa-definitions.html. 3 anna tsing, the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2015), 17–38 passim; cf. thom van dooren, eben kirksey, and ursula münster, “multispecies studies: cultivating arts of attentiveness”, environmental humanities 8, no. 1 (2016): 1–23. https://doi. org/10.1215/22011919-3527695. 4 anna tsing, “unruly edges: mushrooms as companion species”, environmental humanities 1, no. 1 (2012): 144. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3610012. 5 in english it is common to refer to the number of syllables, but a single syllable may consist of several on, depending on the length of the vowel sounds: “some translators of japanese poetry have noted that about twelve syllables in english approximates the duration of seventeen japanese on.” haiku society of america, “definitions”. https://www.hsa-haiku.org/hsa-definitions.html https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527695 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527695 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3610012 editorial | v humanimalia 15.1 (2024) incommensurate in size in the physical world, within the poem’s sonic landscape, “katatsumuri” and “fuji no yama” are of equal magnitude. the relation between the two is marked by the longer middle phrase, “sorosoro nobore”, which takes slightly longer to say and thus introduces a delay, an intervening caesura that mediates between snail and summit. the reduplicant phrase “sorosoro” そろそろ, meaning gradually, slowly, also carries the implication that it is getting late, that it is time to go. as such, it serves as both a description of the snail’s pace and an exhortation to get going, to hurry up — but at the same time also to take it slow. the implication is not necessarily that the snail — or, by extension, we ourselves — will have achieved something by reaching the summit; rather, the climb itself, the prolonged physical relation to the mountain, is the goal. the haiku, this most diminutive and self-contained of poetic forms, thus encompasses multiple, divergent scales, both temporal and spatial, projecting beyond itself into unimaginable heights and distant futures, while remaining grounded in the slow, careful attention to the small and apparently insignificant, and, perhaps, in a nonlinear and nonteleological conception of progress. snails and slugs hold a special significance for humanimalia. the image that adorns the cover of this issue, an ink painting by nagasawa rosetsu (1754–1799), a contemporary of issa’s, depicts a slug’s meandering journey across the page, the lingering slime trail forming a nonhuman calligraphy of its own, an inscrutable signature that ironically echoes and encircles that of the artist. the image recalls our journal’s logo, which is the choreographic record of an interspecies collaboration between two snails and a digital haptic interface designed by mari bastashevski as part of her interspecies art practice. in both cases, the gastropods’ unpredictable, nonlinear trajectories and nonhuman temporalities invite contemplation and deceleration, a shift in perspective and an alternative conception of time and action. such contemplation takes time, and may result in unforeseen delays and detours, which may in turn mean that the “fall” issue doesn’t come out till december. so it goes. vi | editorial humanimalia 15.1 (2024) the poetics of relation and the cultivation of arts of noticing are a central concern in the five research articles contained in this issue of humanimalia. we begin in the eastern himalayas, or what historian willem van schendel refers to as “mithun country”: mithun (bos frontalis) are a species of semi-domestic cattle endemic to the region, whose cultural significance for the peoples of the region attests to a long history of interspecies interaction that transcends national geographic boundaries and challenges “the human-derived spatial and temporal constructs that underpin most historical narratives”. focusing on the mithun, van schendel argues for an “interspecies periodization” that takes “human-nonhuman temporalities seriously”. next we have a pair of articles investigating interspecies collaboration and joint meaning-making between humans and cats, and humans and dogs, respectively. in her article, anthrozoologist kristine hill explores how domestic cats and their human guardians communicate and form multispecies communities and families. meanwhile, criminologist bettina paul reports on fieldwork and interviews she conducted with airport security sniffer-dog teams in germany, and how the handlers interpret and understand their dogs’ sense perception and the forms of knowledge that arise from their collaboration. in his article, literary scholar and novelist sergio gutierrez negrón explores the political implications of a seemingly inconsequential vignette in a novel by the mexican author daniel sada, in which one of the characters is absorbed in contemplating the inscrutable activities of a colony of ants, while a political protest rages in the background. gutierrez negrón reads this scene as a political fable inserted into the flow of the narrative, a critical “refabulation” that simultaneously acknowledges the ants’ radical alterity while also deploying them as “the axis for the articulation of a utopian desire for the potential of a collective life organized beyond scarcity, labour, and capitalism”. finally, continuing the investigation into the possibilities of interspecies solidarity in anti-capitalist resistance, photographer and media scholar deborah hardt explores the recent spate of orca attacks on yachts and other vessels in the strait of gibraltar. on social media, editorial | vii humanimalia 15.1 (2024) and in the popular imagination, these orcas have been conscripted as heroes and nonhuman allies in a political struggle against the one-percent, whereas marine biologists have argued that the orcas’ aberrant behaviour is neither political nor intentionally destructive but rather a form of play. in contrast, hardt argues that these iberian orcas are indeed practicing intentional and creative resistance. specifically, she argues, their actions can be interpreted as an example of mêtis, an ancient greek term that denotes a form of “crafty resourcefulness” or “cunning intelligence” employed by underdogs to outwit stronger opponents. such a conceptual framework, as hardt shows, may have far-reaching implications for theorizing the politics of nonhuman resistance. the issue concludes with no fewer than seven reviews of recent books that run the gamut of the field of human–animal studies: nathaniel otjen on the promise of multispecies justice, edited by sophie chao, karin bolender, and eben kirksey (2022); laura gelfland on myth and menagerie: seeing lions in the nineteenth century by katie hornstein (2024); maura beste on cat people: human–cat interrelatedness in the cat fancy by emily stone (2023); angie pepper on what we owe to nonhuman animals by gary steiner (2024); marissa crannell-ash on the medieval pig by dolly jørgensen (2024); kristen guest on the tame and the wild: people and animals after 1492 by marcy norton (2024); and jishnu guha-majumdar on animals and capital by dinesh joseph wadiwel (2023). as always, i would like to thank the authors and peer reviewers, as well as my co-editors, copyeditors, interns, and production assistants for their hard work in making this issue a reality. together, we got there in the end, but slowly, slowly. on behalf of the editorial team, kári driscoll selby robot dogs and the paw patrol robot dogs and the paw patrol police dogs and racial biocapitalism in the americas and palestine ishaan selby concordia university humanimalia 15.2 (summer 2025) abstract: this paper explores the cultural politics of the police dog by tracing the role of dogs in the fabrication and reproduction of an anthropocentric social order in line with the imperatives of racial capitalism. these imperatives are based on sorting forms of life in accordance with their proximity to a normative white humanity as part of a project of meeting capitalism’s shifting valorization requirements. i argue that such sorting manifests as both labourers compelled to work by the violence of policing and as populations rendered surplus and made to die through killing, confinement, or organized abandonment. the paper reads the historical use of police dogs against black protesters from the civil rights era to the present, the children’s television show paw patrol, and israel’s use of robot dogs in its ethnic cleansing of the gaza strip as examples of policing as an operation of life sorting and as a manifestation of racial (bio)capitalism that makes use of the lively capacities and properties of dogs. the paper draws on work at the intersections of animal studies, black studies, labour studies, and critical theories of settler colonialism (especially those focused on occupied palestine) to argue for thinking together black liberation, police abolition, palestinian liberation, and animal liberation toward a project of mutual freedom for all life on a shared and finite world. keywords: paw patrol, racial capitalism, abolition, palestine, police dogs, copaganda bio: ishaan selby is a social sciences and humanities research council (sshrc) postdoctoral fellow at concordia university in the department of english. he holds a phd in english and cultural studies from mcmaster university. his research explores the intersections of capitalism, social difference, and animal life and has been published in english studies in canada, ecocene, and an edited collection entitled lost kingdom: animal death in the anthropocene (vernon press, 2024). his first book project tentatively titled “tooth and claw: animal oppression, racial capitalism, and the abolition of policing” argues that policing is fundamental to the human– animal distinction in social formations where the dominant relationship to animal life is one of ownership and that humanization and animalization are central to the life-sorting operations of racial capitalism. he divides his time between montréal and his home city of toronto. email: i_selby@live.concordia.ca orcid: 0009-0004-6242-8456 copyright © 2025 ishaan selby this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 2 (2025): 113–145. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.21426 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.21426 selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 115 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) introduction: police dogs and the politics of mutual freedom on 30 may 2020, then-us president donald trump threatened black lives matter protesters with “vicious dogs” among other “ominous weapons”.1 the threat, which recalled a history of dogs being used against black civil rights protesters, came on the heels of militant protest and revolt against the killing of george floyd five days prior, an event that caused a global reckoning with policing. what do we make of dogs as technologies of power and their historical role in reinforcing racial hierarchy? what makes trump’s invocation of “vicious dogs” as a threat against racial justice protesters so salient as a project of racial backlash? these dogs were, explicitly or implicitly, police dogs; dogs used to enforce the racialized social order of trump’s imaginary of white supremacy. we can see trump’s threat as “symptomatic of a much longer history of white organized violence against the black community” and as a mode of racial terror within a settler colonial mode of production.2 i argue that the use of police dogs works as a biopolitical and biocapitalist mode of sorting life that is worthy of protection from life that needs to be killed or maimed.3 under racial capitalism, such life sorting operations reflect and reproduce racial hierarchies and the differentiation of labour and political rights according to dysgenic processes of selection, valuation, and relation. this paper presents this theoretical framework and then uses it to read two seemingly disparate case studies: first, the children’s television show paw patrol and its reproduction of a police imaginary and second, the use of robot dogs by israel in its current ethnic cleansing of the gaza strip and long colonial war on palestine. my project here will suggest that drawing out the connections between these two apparently disparate phenomena on the grounds of their approaches to policing, racialization, and animality will allow us to 1 alexander panetta, “‘vicious dogs’ and ‘ominous weapons’: the politics behind trump’s latest protest threats”, cbc news, 30 may 2020, https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/ trump-politics-protests-1.5591527. 2 wall, “‘for the very existence of civilization’”, 861. 3 see puar, the right to maim. https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-politics-protests-1.5591527 https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-politics-protests-1.5591527 116 | selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol humanimalia 15.2 (2025) better understand the links between global racial capitalism, police, and the management of animal life. what unites these case studies, i argue, is the way the police as agents of capital work to classify life as either worthy of protection or as life that must be put to death or disciplined, ultimately in the service of capital accumulation. what also unites them is the use of dogs (cartoon or mechanical) as agents of enforcement of a colonial and racial order. while black and indigenous scholars have turned to the question of the animal, challenging the erasure of race in animal studies, and while the use of dogs in war has been studied by animal studies scholars, this paper offers an analytic for thinking these strands of social and political thought together through a shared focus on policing and the accumulation of capital. the positions of black people in the us and palestinians in israeli-occupied palestine differ in important ways but they are both are shaped by racial capitalism and settler colonialism through attendant logics of humanization and animalization. i also want to keep in view the differences between using dogs to police the citizens of a country (however conditional that citizenship) as in the case of black people in the us, and using dogs to police the subjects of an occupation as in the case of palestinians in gaza, which remains under effective occupation even after the formal withdrawal of israel. such a distinction is necessary if only to grasp the historical particularities that interweave dogs and dog representations with a racialized population in bonds of violence and subjugation. for black people in the afterlives of enslavement and the enduring structures of racial capitalism, dogs are used for the management of a population toward being productive wage labourers and away from challenges to the status quo of racial capitalism. in the case of gaza, capitalism requires the land to be cleared of the indigenous population, and so dogs are used in a project of genocidal elimination. my goal then is to read these two conditions together in the recruitment of the dog into an anthropocentric hierarchy of policing. the use of dogs in surveilling black life and crushing racial justice projects draws on a specific history of associations between selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 117 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) blackness and animality which has typified the racial formations of societies dependent upon racialized differentiation for capital accumulation and statecraft. these social formations have produced a system of white supremacy and anti-black racial hierarchy as well as racial regimes of ownership.4 the association between blackness and animality is fraught, to say the least, since black people are often animalized as a mode of dehumanization. my approach to the black-animal comparison follows bénédicte boisseron’s afro-dog in not instrumentalizing the black cause and the animal cause as measures for the other’s oppression.5 the recent works by bénédicte boisseron (2018), zakiyyah iman jackson (2020) and joshua bennett (2020) “engage with ‘animality’ as a relation of embodied existence and representation that configures ideas about both social difference and the human relationship to the natural world.”6 the critical thrust of these interventions has been to think against dehumanization as the paradigm for understanding racism, since within this paradigm, “advocating [...] inclusion within the human, reif[ies] the conceit of liberal humanism’s transcendence of race.”7 these works are a response to books like marjorie spiegel’s the dreaded comparison, a touchstone for contemporary animal activism. spiegel stages several textual and visual comparisons between animality and enslavement. her argument is that comparing the “suffering of animals to that of blacks [...] is offensive only to the speciesist: one who has embraced the false notion of what animals are like.”8 for boisseron and other scholars working at the intersection of black studies and animal studies, this text represents the instrumentalization of blackness and the specific historical experience of enslavement for the cause of the animal. such an instrumentalization has led black studies scholar alexander g. weheliye to complain about “the (not so) dreaded comparison between human and animal slavery” in animal studies and “how carelessly 4 see bhandar, colonial lives of property. 5 boisseron, afro-dog, xx. 6 ahuja, “the analogy of race and species”, 250. 7 ahuja, “the analogy of race and species”, 251. 8 spiegel, the dreaded comparison, 30. 118 | selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol humanimalia 15.2 (2025) […] this comparative analogy was brandished about in this area of inquiry.”9 in black studies work that is also attentive to animal oppression, the goal is to think through the imbrication of blackness and animal life and how black liberation and animal liberation are set against one another in racialized public culture. animal studies and palestine studies have had less convergence than animal studies and black studies. however, a critical attention to greenwashing and other practices of sanitizing colonial violence against palestinians has provided an opening for political and theoretical interventions at the intersection of animal studies and critical scholarship on palestine. in the case of palestine, recent work has criticized the use of veganism and animal welfare by the israeli state and propaganda apparatus to marginalize the question of palestinian self-determination by portraying itself as the vanguard of animal protection. i am interested in a repoliticization of the animal question through an interrogation of human-animal relationships in societies shaped by the policing of racialized populations and where the dominant relationship to animal life is one of ownership. the goal, then, is to think beyond comparison, to rethink contemporary metaphors of intersection toward something bumpier and messier. what forms of relation come into view if messiness and rupture are privileged over easy intersection? my claim is that an abolitionist politics and way of being comes into view; one motivated by a fundamental challenge to property, capital, and the carceral state. this abolitionist politics challenges the zero-sum logic that equates black and palestinian oppression with animal oppression and argues for concern for one over the other: instead, an abolitionist politic is informed by mutual freedom. such mutual freedom is dependent on the abolition of property; the abolition of property enables mutual freedom to be realized. che gossett emphasizes how thinkers in black studies challenge the instrumentalization of black suffering to the cause of animal liberation, where “blackness remains the absent presence of much animal studies and animal liberation discourse — which speaks to how blackness functions as ‘the raw 9 weheliye, habeas viscus, 10. selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 119 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) material’ of theory and knowledge production.”10 for gossett, this argument is not a call to abandon animal justice, instead, gossett drawing from du bois, it is a call for “freedom for all life.” such freedom for all life is the goal of an abolitionist analytic and political practice in so far as it challenges the naturalization of systems of confinement and the normalization of mass death. esther alloun similarly mobilizes a practice of intersectionality to argue for animal justice projects attentive to settler colonialism in palestine against the “simplicity” of a single-issue focus on animal rights that marginalizes or erases palestinians.11 thus, my argument aims to draw out the shared foci of the political project of animal liberation with black and palestinian liberation, showcasing their shared visions for challenging the hegemony of colonial capitalism and anthropocentric hierarchy. i also emphasize the central role of property regimes and racial capitalism to both white supremacist racial formations and animal exploitation. the production of animal capital is dependent on the broad forces of racial capitalism. both systems depend on the differential valuation of labour according to interlocking hierarchies of race, gender, and species which are dialectically produced by capital’s shifting valorization requirements, that is the way capital renders surplus some populations while valuing others according to different productive relations over different historical periods. as nicole shukin argues, “animal life gets culturally and carnally rendered as capital at specific historical junctures”. 12 by reading those historical junctures, scholars and activists can resist idealizing treatments of animal life. my project aims to do this by reading animal representations through the history of policing, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism in north america and palestine, projects that harm marginalized humans and animals alike. the paper also thinks about the way animals are rendered as weapons that come to police a social order of racial hierarchy. i am thus interested in the violence done by and to police dogs in the process of the conversion of life into weapons and the use of those weapons on racialized populations. 10 gossett, “blackness, animality”. 11 alloun, “‘that’s the beauty of it’”, 561. 12 shukin, animal capital, 7. 120 | selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol humanimalia 15.2 (2025) the figure of the police dog as seen in contemporary media representations appears disconnected from the history of policing it is based on. this disconnection is especially vivid through various kinds of propaganda that make use of dogs to conceal the harm done by police as an institution relying on certain mythologies around dogs imagined essential love and loyalty and the flattening of historical struggles against racial justice. according to sociologist tyler wall, while the us had experimented with using police dogs in the early twentieth century, they first became widespread during the civil rights era.13 reflecting on the black rebellions in the 2010s, especially the uprising in ferguson, boisseron writes that the “post-ferguson era has brought back to consciousness a racial prism that many wished had died in ‘post-racial america’ after obama’s first inauguration in 2009.” viewed through this prism, “race and dogs insidiously intersect in tales of violence,” with such intersections being visited upon the criminalized and black body.14 placing the empty, ahistorical representation of the police dog into historically specific racial formations helps us understand the role of the police dog as part of the history of policing and the history of capitalism writ large, especially as it concerns accumulation and the production and management of surplus populations. while the police dog is valorized, other dogs are subject to breed-based forms of discrimination sometimes resulting in waves of mass killing. boisseron notes that pit bulls have been subject to these kinds of moral panics since, due to their associations with black men, the dogs themselves come to be racialized as physical and sexual threats.15 this system of classification harms both the dog and the racialized human who is denied human status through police operations and a socially stigmatizing white gaze. in an argument for the use of police dogs, police scientist charles sloane relies on the use of dogs in war. he writes, “there is but little difference between fighting an enemy in a declared war and fighting an enemy, the criminal, at home on the crime front. both are 13 wall, “‘for the very existence of civilization’”, 864. 14 boisseron, afro-dog, 38. 15 boisseron, afro-dog, 43–49. see also claire jean kim, dangerous crossings, 271-275. selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 121 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) comparable battles for the very existence of civilization, for without the thin wall of police protecting the people […] the world would soon revert to savagery and bestiality.”16 while sloane’s erasure of the differences between war and policing serves to protect the existing social order, it also shows how such a mode of protection is cast in racialized and species terms through his linking together of savagery and bestiality. the imbrication of race and species, particularly the joint portrayal of the racialized and the animal as threats to an established order, reveals the way policing enforces the racialized and capitalist terms of that order through the tacit or explicit threat of violence. sloane’s rhetoric is especially striking given that his essay was published the same year he joined the us army in the imperial war in vietnam.17 ultimately, sloane’s conflation of warfare and policing practices in his discussion of the police dog suggests that “there are uncivilized elements within the united states striking at the heart of domestic order, and thus the snarling police dog is a potent weapon in the war to secure ‘civilization.’”18 sloane’s act of thinking together war and police is far from unique. such a connection has also been made by black radical organizations such as the black panther party, who connected the repression they faced from us police to imperial wars. modern work on the history of policing and empire has confirmed the extensive links between the repression of black liberation movements and the counter-insurgency operations against various decolonization movements across africa, asia, and latin america. as sociologist stuart schrader argues, “professional policing did not possess two repertoires […] it possessed a single repertoire, which experts vigorously attempted to institute wherever they could.”19 i will show later how the synonymous operations of war and policing come together with lethal force in gaza and palestine more broadly. 16 sloane, “dogs in war,” 388. 17 wall, “‘for the very existence of civilization’”, 868. 18 wall, “‘for the very existence of civilization’”, 869. 19 schrader, badges without borders, 6. 122 | selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol humanimalia 15.2 (2025) war, police, and capital the act of rooting out domestic enemies through police violence is ultimately performed in service of capital accumulation, as disciplining these rogue elements means their transformation into either docile wage labourers or surplus to be warehoused, killed and/ or profited from through mechanisms of confinement.20 the submission to labour discipline and the compulsion of the market is underwritten by policing and the whole carceral apparatus. a critical engagement with police power as both law enforcement and forms of social control places it at the centre of capitalism and “exposes the ubiquitous use of force in capitalist societies, which ranges from visible interventions to preserve order to minute acts supporting capital accumulation and the routine reproduction of social relations.”21 thus, not only do the police underwrite market relations of putative freedom, “this very power is central to the constitution of wage labor.”22 a critical account of police power thinks through its structural imbrications with the state, capital, and racialization. policing “is first and foremost a weapon of the state in the constitution of a capitalist order.”23 the constitution of such an order rests on a dialectic of direct coercion and legitimation, ultimately reinforced with violence.24 furthermore, it relies on the ability of power to draw and fabricate distinction and difference in accordance with historically determined markers of racialization and class status. the sovereign violence of the police can most easily be seen during situations of political protest and revolt as the discretionary power allotted to policing institutions allows them to decide when to make an arrest and who to target even if the same law is being broken in different moments. police power, then, is “inherent in sovereignty and is itself the most comprehensive branch of sovereignty,” with the role of the police extending beyond mere law enforcement and towards the policies of civil society such as public health and welfare as forms 20 see gilmore, golden gulag; adler-bolton and vierkant, health communism. 21 seri, “‘the dream of state power’,” 36. 22 neocleous, “‘original, absolute, indefeasible’,” 14. 23 neocleous, “‘original, absolute, indefeasible’,” 13. 24 harring, policing a class society, 254–55. selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 123 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) of social control.25 the forms of social control used by police historically involved not just the management of human populations but also non-human animals and the interaction between humans and non-humans. mark neocleous and brendan mcquade point out, policing created and enforced modes of interaction with animals including “measures concerning the proper handling of dogs, the sale of livestock, the keeping of pigs and the removal of manure.”26 the interweaving of the management of life by police power was thus always an interspecies affair. the contribution of critical theories of police power is to place such power at the centre of capitalism even under conditions of ostensibly freely contracted wage labour. they thus challenge foundational assumptions in marxist scholarship that “under capitalist social relations, direct political force is not necessary for the maintenance of economic exploitation.”27 neocleous and other critical theorists of police provide a welcome intervention in challenging the idea of capitalism as operating without direct violence. however, missing from their accounts is a history of the americas: “its history of settler racial genocide, racial slavery, racial segregation, racial liberalism, and racial revanchism” and how these historical phenomena have shaped policing and the intermingling of race and class.28 the police dog serves as a potent symbol of the intertwining of class and race as central to policing. the police dog is deployed to create and reproduce the established order of things at the intersection of the protection of property and the disciplining of racialized populations. these racialized populations challenge the police power of the state within different historical racial formations and the formation and reproduction of anthropocentric hierarchies. the use of dogs for policing draws its history from the use of dogs for slave catching, as sloane himself explains, referencing the portrayal of bloodhounds used to capture runaway slaves in uncle tom’s 25 neocleous, “original, absolute, indefeasible,” 20. 26 mcquade & neocleous, “beware: medical police,” 4. 27 heinrich, an introduction, 205. 28 schrader, “review of sidney l. harring”. 124 | selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol humanimalia 15.2 (2025) cabin.29 the scholar sara e. johnson maps out how dogs were used as instruments of racial terror against african and indigenous subjects. as she writes, “european colonizers wielded dogs as lethal weapons, and it was abundantly clear to contemporary observers that the animals were likely to maim and/or kill their prey, not simply to capture them in the course of pursuit.”30 johnson draws out the similarities in the use of dogs by european colonizers in the nineteenth century americas and the use of dogs as instruments of torture and terror in abu ghraib by the us.31 one of the key features of the trump presidency was the mobilization of the language of the war on terror against political rivals, namely the racial justice and anti-fascist groups that militantly organized against his brand of white nationalist authoritarian politics.32 the police dog, then, represented the mobilization of the state repressive apparatus outside the bounds of formal legal procedure. in theorizing the police hunt, a hunt for a supposed “criminal”, grégoire chamayou elucidates a contradiction between law and police violence, “if police action finds its main justification in respect for the law, what drives it in practice is something quite different: the desire and the pleasure of the pursuit, in relation to which the law appears as an obstacle to its full development.”33 the law, then, appears to both enable and limit policing, however such a dialectic of permission and limit is illusory since it is policing as such that produces the force of the law. as neocleous has long argued, law enforcement was a “meaning imposed on the term ‘police’ by an increasingly hegemonic liberalism in the late-eighteenth century.”34 this recent imposition conceals a more expansive understanding of policing as constituting the state as such. policing understood as a broad operation of management over life is geared toward the creation, reproduction, and disciplining of labouring populations, both human and non-human, as well as 29 sloane, “dogs in war,” 388. 30 johnson, “‘you should give them blacks to eat’,” 73. 31 johnson, “‘you should give them blacks to eat’,” 67, 86–89. 32 see ackerman, reign of terror, 316–26. 33 chamayou, manhunts, 91. 34 neocleous, war power, 10. selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 125 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) management of surplus populations, both human and non-human. the management of movement, life, and the conditions of death as a capitalist imperative means that capitalism is concerned with life and liveliness as fundamental categories of value differentiation. wall suggests a similar argument about state violence and policing when he argues that “the police dog amplifies the predatory animus of civilization — police as beast.”35 if the police act as beast in service of the established order of capitalist reproduction, then such action takes place in the domain of life itself and so involves control over and valuation of life. in his seminar the beast and the sovereign, jacques derrida argues that the beast and sovereign intertwine “at a distance from the law”, since both exist outside its formal structures, with the beast being ignorant of the law and the sovereign being above it as a law-maker.36 derrida argues that the beast, the sovereign, and the criminal “seem to be heterogeneous among themselves” but are united in being outside the law and so “call on each other” in a common relationship to law.37 while derrida here is not discussing capitalism per se, the enforcement of the capitalist forms of life and relations of production through the bodily capacities of the police dog is an example of the intertwined relationship of the power of the sovereign and the beast as a particular relation to law and hierarchies of liveliness which, in racialized social formations, are shaped by enslavement and colonization. ultimately, i argue that the dog’s body is subject to sovereign power in the service of capital accumulation and the reproduction of racial hierarchy. theorizing biocapitalism the police dog is a biopolitical and biocapitalist phenomenon. the police dog, like all instruments of policing, maintains the boundaries between life and death by reproducing a liveable life for certain subjects while, at the same time, condemning others to death through killing or organized abandonment. in my use of biocapitalism, i draw on two different theoretical genealogies. in the first 35 wall, “‘for the very existence of civilization’”, 868. 36 derrida, the beast and the sovereign, 32. 37 derrida, the beast and the sovereign, 17. 126 | selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol humanimalia 15.2 (2025) instance, it draws on the work of historians of enslavement, who note that a central feature of the atlantic trade was that slaves could only ever give birth to slaves, ultimately harnessing the reproductive capacities of women toward the process of commodification. summarizing this literature, nikhil singh writes, “[t]his biocapitalist innovation was in turn married to the slaveholder’s power over life and death,” mapping this power on to foucault’s biopolitical coordinates of killing, making live, letting die, and letting live.38 in the second instance, it draws on the work of animal life theorists such as donna haraway, who argues in when species meet that marxists should take into account liveliness as a form of value alongside use and exchange value.39 these two uses of biocapital set up an interesting homology between the racialized production of lively commodities and a broader control over life itself that defines capitalism. frederick douglass was, seemingly, aware of this homology when he wrote about “slave breeding states” where slaves were “reared” like livestock and where slave breeding was “looked upon as a legitimate trade”, sanctioned by law and upheld by public opinion.40 the framing of reproduction of enslaved people as “rearing” suggests a profound dehumanization, to be sure, but it also implicates the market and broader relations of production in the control over life and the use of lively capacities for profit. the production of commodities was central to the transatlantic slave trade, which saw death and terror as “incidental” to the “workings of the trade”.41 policing, in the expansive sense i have been working with here, was and is central to the hierarchies of life and the production of commodities under the labour regime of enslavement and its afterlives. returning to the police dog, we can see the police dog as exemplifying the processes of biocapital across both senses, its use by the state in the enforcing of racial regimes of ownership and the 38 singh, race and america’s long war, 78. 39 haraway, when species meet, 46, 66–67. 40 douglass, “reception speech at finsbury chapel, moorfields, england, may 12, 1846” 412, qtd in singh, race and america’s long war, 216n10. douglass also notes the bloodhound as a central technology of keeping the enslaved as enslaved. 41 hartman, lose your mother, 31. selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 127 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) conversion of the dog into property. the police dog is harnessed by agents of the state responsible for capitalist accumulation, accumulation which articulates itself through the production of racial difference. i offer the term “racial biocapitalism” to think about the centrality of racializing assemblages in marking out certain bodies as violable based on their distance from a normative white humanity. racialization shapes conceptions of life and liveliness across dynamics of labour and capital. racial biocapitalism, then, is an historical expression of the afterlives of the atlantic slave trade, and so the broader history and structure of policing. the other relevant biocapitalist modality at work is in the training of the police dogs themselves. the training is “contingent on the dog’s body being taken over by human agents and institutional forces so as to transform the canine into an obedient, disciplined ‘working dog’, a coercive metamorphosis grasped by the discursive conversion from canine to ‘k-9’.”42 such a process installs an anthropocentric hierarchy with the dog being obedient to a human master. while wall is largely focused on the disjuncture between the scientific management of dogs and their use as instruments of terror, scholars of animal studies might also note the anthropocentrism baked into such forms of recruitment to this enterprise of racial terror. the harm done to dogs is both central and incidental to these biocapitalist modalities: central in so far as it is the regimen of training that weaponizes the dog’s capacities and incidental in so far as the police dog is one part of a broader system of the management over life under racial and species hierarchies. the dog here becomes something of an abstraction for this control over life. at the same time, actual living dogs are harmed as dogs are placed in dangerous situations where they are subject to physical dangers. in my reading of paw patrol, i will elaborate on the yoking together of policing and dogs but for now i simply note that breaking this connection is important to both projects of police abolition and animal abolition, since to abolish police (dogs) would be one form of abolishing the use of animals for anthropocentric purposes. the politics of mutual 42 wall, “‘for the very existence of civilization’”, 867. 128 | selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol humanimalia 15.2 (2025) freedom i develop is thus attentive to the way marginalized humans and dogs are interwoven as subjects through their relation to being property and violence under capitalism. the shaping of modes of life and liveliness within racialized difference has historically expressed itself in zoological terms. chamayou writes that “the task of explaining the historical disaster that was taking place in the contact between the european capitalist mode of production and african societies was thus entrusted, starting at the end of the eighteenth century, to zoologists and specialists in natural history.”43 it is within this discourse that human–animal relations “became the privileged model for conceiving the relations among peoples.”44 within this zoological paradigm, race and species intersect to reproduce the biopolitics of confinement, enforced by the repressive state and institutionalized modes of anthropocentrism through the killing and confinement of animals as well as a broader dialectic of humanization and animalization. these biopolitics of classification were deeply shaped by the logics of abstraction that underwrite private property as a social construction and institution.45 i now turn to the first case study, a critical examination of how the police dog and policing more broadly is represented in the children’s television show paw patrol. what political pedagogies are reproduced or made invisible through such representations? and how do animals function within a dialectic of humanization and animalization regarding the police? i follow colleen boggs’s argument that animal representations “form the nexus where biopolitical relationships get worked out.”46 such a working out, i suggest, is also a question of the determination of value according to the logics of racial capitalism. i understand representations in an expansive sense, including both cultural texts and machines that summon the sign of animality, specifically “dog-ness”, as crucial to their expressive content. i start with paw patrol as it encapsulates a certain fantasy of the 43 chamayou, manhunts, 48. 44 chamayou, manhunts, 48. 45 bhandar, colonial lives of property, 3. 46 boggs, animalia americana, 12. selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 129 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) police as protectors of the social order, tacitly drawing on a longer history of using animals as subjects of the moral and political instruction of children. this text symptomatically reveals the police as invested in capital accumulation, not in the least as paw patrol is, in the last instance, selling the police as commodity. animal capital and carceral logic, or acab includes paw patrol paw patrol is a cultural juggernaut of children’s television. to those of us without children, however, it likely came to our attention through a right-wing panic which claimed that people on the left were “cancelling” paw patrol as part of a broader “war on police”.47 indeed, even the trump white house, in a response to the moral panic, lied about the status of paw patrol being taken off the air. what does this strange episode reveal about the links between the police dog, racializing assemblages, capitalism and popular culture? the show revolves around the exploits of a team of talking dogs led by a child who serve as a privatized security force in the fictional city of adventure bay. the most prominent character on the show is a police dog named, perhaps symptomatically, chase: recalling the use of police dogs in “manhunts”. due to the confluence of the covid-19 pandemic, the resurgence of a global struggle against police in 2020, and the massive success of the paw patrol franchise, the show became the subject of cultural discourse around “copaganda” — media representations of the police that naturalize their role in society as either positive or necessary for the preservation of order and peace. as tv critic kathryn vanarendonk writes, “tv has long held a police’s-eye perspective” and as viewers we are “locked inside a police perspective, harnessed to their needs, desires, and daily rhythms.”48 the panic over the left’s supposed “cancelling” of paw patrol is then a panic over a break with the hegemony of this perspective as it is reproduced in mass culture. 47 tara subramaniam, “fact check: despite white house claims, paw patrol and police lego have not been canceled”, cnn, 24 july 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/24/ politics/paw-patrol-lego-cancel-fact-check/index.html 48 kathryn vanarendonk, “cops are always the main characters”, vulture 1 june 2020, https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/tv-cops-are-always-the-main-characters.html. https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/24/politics/paw-patrol-lego-cancel-fact-check/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/24/politics/paw-patrol-lego-cancel-fact-check/index.html https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/tv-cops-are-always-the-main-characters.html 130 | selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol humanimalia 15.2 (2025) animals have long been used to instruct children in proper modes of relation and empathy. in her work, boggs explores how john locke’s some thoughts concerning education was a central point of reference for teaching children in the anglo-american enlightenment. she argues that locke’s argument relies on “the substitution of animals for human beings”, as the “ability to identify affectively with other human beings and to enter into social and legal relations with them depends on an ability to exercise proper compassion to animals.”49 the speaking animal character has often been a voice of moral instruction in popular culture. for instance, karah m. mitchell has explored how cat autobiographies present animals as sites of biopolitical control that reside in the hands of white women. written in service of a larger “humane” education movement largely directed at children, these texts worked to naturalize — through the figures of speaking animals — specific understandings of race and reproduction for young readers: they tied race to species and, through the “humane” euthanization of racialized animals, conflated nonhuman and human population control.50 in a video essay on paw patrol and/as copaganda, youtuber jackson maher, under his nom de guerre skip intro, notes that dogs have been used to soften the image of the police during periods of broader public scepticism. for example, following the killing of eric garner in new york city in 2014, the nypd fed stories about rescuing kittens to the media, including the new york times which ran a story about the nypd’s strategic response group rescuing a kitten.51 the strategic response group is a unit of the nypd that has been routinely criticized for its use of violence against protesters in the george floyd rebellions and, more recently, against pro-palestinian protests on university campuses.52 such images work to “humanize” the police through its “proper” care for animals, with the animals 49 boggs, animalia americana, 140. 50 mitchell, “a more ‘human(e)’ society,” 414. 51 “paw patrol’s dark secret, explained”, skip intro, 10 sept. 2022, youtube, 1 hr., 18 min., https://youtu.be/rwhupu9mfz0 52 bolger and speri, “nypd ‘goon squad’ manual”. https://youtu.be/rwhupu9mfz0 selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 131 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) becoming tools for the sanitization of police violence within a matrix of associations that work as a kind of counterinsurgency countering popular anger against the police. the animal is conscripted into the apparatus of policing in so far as it is summoned to normalize the role of police in preserving certain kinds of life, for instance, the life of an innocent kitten. animal representations are employed in an effort to normalize policing as both a fact of life and a desirable institution, necessary to preserve the social fabric and respond to emergencies. all the while, the real-life animals are conscripted into a hierarchical relation dependent upon a devaluation of animal life. in paw patrol, policing is presented as the only possible response to emergencies in the absence of a robust or even present polis.53 indeed, as maher points out, people only become present in the narrative as subjects which the paw patrol must swoop in and save.54 policing creates and disciplines the subjects that populate a social order seemingly free of the contingencies of history. in her reading of rancière, kristin ross argues that the police are an expansive political architecture of normalization. policing, for rancière, is ultimately concerned with “determining what can or cannot be seen, dividing what can be heard from what cannot.”55 the phrase “move along, there’s nothing to see here” then becomes the prototype of policing as such. if this is a general function of copaganda, it is especially present here, since there is literally nothing to see beyond the operations of the paw patrol represented by the police (dog). while there are other dogs on the show that perform other emergency services and duties, chase is definitively the main character and appears more frequently than the other dogs.56 if the raison d’être of policing is the fabrication of a social order of accumulation, paw patrol represents the ultimate fantasy of permanent emergency 53 for an exploration of how the show participates in the logic of neoliberal privatization through showing elected officials as either incompetent or criminal see kennedy, “‘whenever there’s trouble’,”: 256, 261, 264. 54 “paw patrol’s dark secret”, 10:36–11:12. 55 ross, may ’68, 23. 56 “paw patrol’s dark secret,” 8:44–9:10. maher is drawing on christopher ingraham’s work looking at how frequently each dog is deployed, with chase by far the most frequent. see ingraham, “inequality rising”. 132 | selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol humanimalia 15.2 (2025) and accumulation without resistance. unlike the superhero story which, as david graeber argues, stages the defence of the social order through the defeat of villains with their own plans, purposes, and projects, paw patrol poses no such ethico-political dilemmas since the only villain from the neighbouring town foggy bottom, mayor humdinger, has no aspirations beyond envy and no qualities that might make one sympathize or even be compelled by him.57 structurally, the show presents a problem or emergency for the dogs in the paw patrol to solve. maher suggests the ubiquitous presence of chase as the protagonist naturalizes the police as a response to any kind of emergency and in the “same class as other first responders.”58 in the episode “pups save ryder’s robot” (s1e19b), ryder builds a robot dog that goes haywire after the fire safety dog marshall accidentally breaks it, the paw patrol works to stop the robot so ryder can fix it. the result is a return to the status quo ante of the show with no lesson being learned and the paw patrol having fun with the robot dog. while the episode seems to raise some ideas leading toward a moral lesson, no such lesson is put forward instead the paw patrol pups play with the robo-dog. indeed, no explicit contrast is set up between the robo-dog and the paw patrol pups and ryder makes no gesture toward replacing them thereby setting the stage for the real pups to prove their superiority. the lack of narrative conflict speaks to fabrication of a particular order wherein the police are thoroughly naturalized as part of any kind of response. there is no alternative to the paw patrol. ultimately, this means there is no alternative to capitalism as such. the specific interaction between commerce and the police, the police as commodity, suggests an isometric connection between selling the idea of policing and police funding. the spectre of “defunding the police’”, despite never manifesting, prompted the liberals and the far-right to ally over fears of ‘“disorder” and “crime”. in most cases, such invocations often referred to the simple presence of surplus populations, defined either through formal racial and national ascriptions by the far right and in “class” terms through homelessness by the liberals. ultimately, the 57 graeber, “super position”. 58 “paw patrol’s dark secret”, 41:33. selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 133 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) dogs of paw patrol serve to naturalize the police and so to police political responses to policing as such. the police force as commodity takes a particular salience under neoliberal capitalism where “while budgets evaporate for public schooling […] there is no such shortfall for police, prisons, and the military.”59 such a mode of resource allocation unites the bourgeois political spectrum in defence of capital. the anti-crime and pro-police alliance between liberals and the far-right is hardly a novel phenomenon. such an alliance ultimately arises in service of protecting capital, with the differences between these political positions amounting to disagreements in how the ruling class should be represented in terms of demographic diversity. the erasure of palestine is another cause that, as darryl li argues, “happens to most powerfully unite liberals and the right in open expressions of racist warmongering.”60 the police repression of the pro-palestinian protests at college campuses last year has affirmed this position. i argue that the ideological consensus on the fundamental necessity of the police and the expansionist project in west asia known as zionism come together in their valuation and management of populations in service of capital. robot dogs, war, and police in palestine in the spring of 2024, a campaign was launched as part of the broader palestine solidarity movement to shut down ghost robotics, a company based at the university of pennsylvania and founded by two alumni. like many other targets of anti-zionist divestment campaigns, ghost robotics is a company producing weapons used by the idf sustained by elite institutions tasked with reproducing a diverse but pliable ruling class, in this case an ivy league university. the imbrication between settler colonialism in palestine and racial capitalism in the us is vividly demonstrated by ghost robotics. in their argument for and reflections on black–palestinian solidarity, organizers chenjerai kumanyika and demetrius noble note that upenn’s centre for innovation 59 schneider, the apocalypse, 27. 60 li, “rise and fall”. 134 | selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol humanimalia 15.2 (2025) received significant tax breaks as part of a keystone innovation zone, touted as a program to foster business development in underserved areas. but the tax credits that benefit ghost robotics […] would otherwise have gone into the city’s budget and could have helped to fund […] other resource-starved public infrastructure and social programs.61 ghost robotics as the manufacturer of robot dogs both profits from settler colonialism and genocide by selling these “dogs” to israel it is also materially enabled by a partitioning of space and an allocation of resources structured by racial capitalism. these “dogs” can scout terrain, float in water, and generally navigate territory deemed too risky for human soldiers. the use of these dogs fits the existing rationale for the use of the police dog, which was said by police scientists in the 60s to be a weapon that could perform tasks unsafe for human officers.62 importantly, they work to keep israeli soldiers safe from a guerilla resistance which has needed to favour tactics like the ambush over full-frontal, “traditional,” warfare. as policing works as a life sorting operation, so do the robot dogs work to preserve the life of the israeli settler-soldier and kill palestinians and other subjects resisting israeli colonialism. thinkers in the black radical tradition and black americans at large have long drawn connections between american imperialist wars abroad and its war against black people “at home”.63 the use of terror as justification for colonialism sits in dialectical relation with the us’s (and canada’s) own colonial history, with the “indian wars” serving to justify american wars abroad and exercise of its military might; the “indian wars” being a set of wars of colonial conquest against indigenous nations from the early modern period to the nineteenth century.64 in an essay written during israel’s 1982 war on lebanon, which was conducted with the goal of destroying the 61 kumanyika & noble, “lessons”. 62 wall, “‘for the very existence of civilization,’” 865. 63 singh, race and america’s long war, 22. 64 see singh, race and america’s long war, 24. see also dunbar-ortiz, indigenous people’s history. selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 135 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) palestine liberation organization, edward said asks the question: “who are the palestinians if not the functional equivalent of israel’s blacks, or red indians?”65 israel’s “blacks” or “red indians,” much like indigenous people and black people in the americas, are policed by “dogs” — in this case, weaponized robot dogs manufactured and sold in the us, israel’s imperial sponsor. we can see this as a kind of cyber-dystopian update of the networks of colonial racial terror in the use of dogs throughout the americas. the use of dogs, and here i deliberately blur the lines between real and mechanical police dogs, spreads from the suppression of indigenous and enslaved african revolts to the present as manifested in contemporary regimes of border control. indeed, the us department of homeland security has deployed these mechanical “dogs” to work as surveillance agents at the border, as part of the management of surplus populations in the climate crisis. such a management of surplus populations is less an anachronistic callback to nineteenth or early twentieth century colonialism but rather a vision of the future of capitalism. legal theorist dylan saba notes that the ethnic cleansing of in gaza and the turn toward border militarization are not relics of a colonial past but rather portend a nationalist future contingent on advanced technology and surveillance.66 primitive accumulation and animal capital in marx, the concept of primitive accumulation is used to critique a political economy that “cannot account for the origins of the capital relation” instead relying on the very values that came to define the capital relation, e.g. free wage labour, to explain the origins of such a relation.67 as marx puts it, “primitive accumulation […] is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing producers from the means of production.”68 the world-historical upshot of this separation was a break from older modes of life toward capitalist expansion. this account, while taken up in general terms, has also been 65 bawab, “the idea of palestine”. 66 dylan saba, “democrats are helping make the us border look more and more like gaza”, the nation, 15 feb. 2024. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democrats-border-gaza/. 67 nichols, theft is property!, 57. 68 marx, capital, 1:875. https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democrats-border-gaza/ 136 | selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol humanimalia 15.2 (2025) subject to critique for its characterization of accumulation as confined to a specific historical moment, and its suggestion that capitalism operates primarily by silent compulsion. however, as glen coulthard notes in his synthesis of indigenous critique and marxist political economy, “the escalating onslaught of violent, state-orchestrated enclosures following neoliberalism’s ascent to hegemony has unmistakably demonstrated the persistent role that […] violent dispossession continues to play in the reproduction of colonial and capitalist social relations in both the domestic and global contexts.”69 despite noting the presence of colonial plunder and enslavement in capitalist accumulation, marx remains inattentive to the analytical problem of “how racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies are retained as a mechanism of labour discipline and surplus appropriation” including the political process of alleging to render such distinctions “anachronistic in the long run” through narratives of universal equality and freedom.70 the accumulation of animals as commodities and the clearing of land for animal use have been a feature of capital accumulation in different colonial frontiers.71 historically, in the colonization of the americas, livestock played a crucial role, as both the driver of material changes to the landscape and in ideological terms.72 the israeli state has used practices of “reintroducing” wildlife as a broader practice of “making the land jewish again.”73 the ability to reintroduce wildlife as part of a settler project is contingent on the broader dispossession of palestinians that makes up the israeli settler project’s raison d’être. ideologically, these animals work to legitimate israeli settlers’ claims of “indigeneity” by linking them to religious texts in which the animals are mentioned or can be read into.74 the preservation of certain forms 69 coulthard, red skin, white masks, 9. 70 singh, race and america’s long war, 84. 71 see morin, “bovine lives”, 261–75. reading an account of the “trail of tears” the forceable transfer of the eastern cherokee population, patrick wolfe writes: “the cattle and other stock were not only being driven off cherokee land; they were being driven into private ownership.” see wolfe, “elimination of the native”, 392. 72 see anderson, creatures of empire. 73 braverman, “wild legalities,” 15. 74 braverman, “wild legalities,” 7–27. selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 137 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) of animal life is done through the negation of palestinian humanity, where palestinians are seen as less than animals by the israeli state and the global world system in so far as they are available to be confined and killed as per the imperatives of israeli capital and statecraft. importantly for our purposes, individual animals as well as palestinians have been killed and displaced as part and parcel israeli settler colonialism since the animal as an abstraction of settler power is more valuable than actual animals.75 animals are used by colonial racial capitalism as ciphers or abstractions for other ideological projects that are not concerned with preserving the life of singular, individual animals. this mode of abstraction is common across the archive i assemble here, as dogs become abstractions for police power and the management over life. the use of robot dogs is part of a larger project of using animals to enforce hierarchies of life that enable the accumulation of capital through policing. the project legitimated by zionism and the discourse of fighting terror in order to “re-occupy” gaza is ultimately a project to “develop” the land and make it profitable for israeli and global capital. the post-war fantasy is one of valuable waterfront properties and other strategies of accumulation (including repair) that ultimately feed back into israel’s economy, as jasbir puar has argued.76 the robot dogs also generate value in that they can be marketed as “battle tested” to other states for repression, as per the general orientation toward gaza as a laboratory for both military infrastructure and strategies for biopolitical regulation. the use of gaza and the west bank as “labs” is also a mode of profit extraction, as palestinians become animalized through being used as test subjects, a role that is usually filled by non-human animals in social formations dominantly structured by animal ownership. as amy kaplan explains, “israelis have little incentive to negotiate a real peace with the palestinians, because the lucrative security market has too much potential. what the israelis are selling to the rest of the world is not weaponry to defeat an enemy once and for all, but systems for pacification and management, which match the approach that many 75 braverman, “wild legalities,” 13. 76 puar, the right to maim, 145. 138 | selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol humanimalia 15.2 (2025) governments have come to take toward their increasingly urbanized and heterogenous populations.”77 israel profits from palestinian dispossession and the genocide in gaza by selling weapons and marketing strategies for urban warfare. the political rhetoric of both a total victory over hamas and the peaceful settlement of gaza elides the fundamental reality of profit through selling weapons of pacification. robot dogs are, in a curious way, the realization of the fundamental raison d’être of police dogs — being precision machines that can do the dangerous work of pacification and not risk the lives of personnel. the use of robot dogs as machines of genocide is their ultimate realization as tools of capital accumulation. the fantasy of genocide, of the clearing of the land, is the fantasy of the settler racial state par excellence, though as patrick wolfe has notably argued it is not always required for settler consolidation.78 the claims of settler colonial states to inhabitation and indigeneity are established through the “reorganization” of life that retroactively affirms settler claims to rightful inhabitation. this takes on a particular cast with zionism, which bakes in such claims based on a selective reading of history but is generally the case in all settler states. the taking of territory and the elimination of resistance to the taking of territory subtends such claims and operations of elimination. the fantasy of the nonhuman, of an idealized robot, takes on the characteristics of liveliness without life as such. the robot dog acts as a vicious beast outside the bounds of the law without having to worry about actual life. the fantasy of elimination of the native is also the fantasy of eliminating the fleshy material animals that exist outside the bounds of capital. here, i follow esther alloun in thinking about animal politics as a site through which settler colonialism is produced and articulated, with mainstream animal activist groups in israel and the us failing to critique settler colonial investments. such a separation of animal politics from settler colonial politics is yet another manifestation of the preservation of certain kinds of life while making die life along racialized lines of difference. 77 kaplan, our american israel, 269. 78 wolfe, “elimination of the native,” 387. selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 139 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) since 2012, the idf has promoted itself as welcoming of vegans “with the military advertising that it offered vegan alternatives to animal products used in equipment, such as leather-free vegan boots and later, synthetic wool-free berets, and food.”79 i see this instrumentalization of veganism as propaganda and as the cultivation of a discourse of progress against the “backward” palestinian. it also operates within a biopolitical dialectic preserving the life of animals alongside the killing and letting die of palestinians. the animal is thus humanized as the palestinian is animalized vis-à-vis hierarchies of values under racial capitalism. i want to conclude here by mapping potential solidarities between black, palestinian, and animal liberation movements and thinking through a non-carceral, abolitionist politics of animal justice. palestinian liberation, police abolition, and animal justice palestinian legal theorist noura erakat maps instances of black-palestinian solidarity through activist intimacies, forged through struggle against the police in ferguson and an increase in awareness of the palestinian political reality by black activists, what erakat terms the ferguson–gaza moment. this renewal of black–palestinian solidarity in the 2010s featured “joint protest targeting the exchange of military and carceral technologies between the united states and israel.”80 one of the galvanizing moments of this solidarity movement was palestinians using social media to teach black protestors how to deal with tear gas. the ferguson–gaza moment taught activists in the us that “white supremacy, and zionist occupation are not isolated threats faced by distinct groups. they are inseparable components of a broader imperial structure — one that profits from violence across the world, whether it’s selling weapons to the israeli military or to the us police departments that dominate poor and black neighborhoods.”81 drawing on this knowledge, the stop cop city movement, a multiracial coalition to stop the construction of a 79 alloun, “veganwashing”, 31–32. 80 erakat, “geographies of intimacy”, 473. 81 kumanyika and noble, “lessons”. 140 | selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol humanimalia 15.2 (2025) police training facility in georgia, has traced links between the atlanta police department and the israeli occupation force.82 the genocide is also an ecocide. the destruction of olive groves, the contamination of groundwater, and the pollution of the air all compound the beyond unliveable condition of palestinians in gaza. the stop cop city movement is similarly fighting against an ecocide: the police training facility will require the destruction of forests and result in profound biodiversity loss. the fact that both the genocide in gaza and cop city are environmentally destructive is part and parcel of the environmental destruction historically integral to settler colonialism. the struggles-to-come embodied in the movement for a free palestine (and palestinian resistance) and stop cop city are also struggles against climate change. as such, animal abolitionists should take up these struggles as part of a broad coalition that challenges the hegemony of western capitalism which also enshrines anthropocentric domination. as andreas malm maps out, “the destruction of palestine is playing out against the backdrop of a different, but related process of destruction: namely, that of the climate system of this planet.”83 using the language of palestinian political critique and existence, malm names the possible future destruction of the amazon rainforest as “a different kind of nakba” most immediately impacting the indigenous and afro-descendant people of the region. malm offers the term “fossil empire” to think about the long history of the kind of resource extraction that typifies settler modes of appropriation seeking to create and reproduce energy regimes based on fossil fuels.84 reflecting on a future “after the war” ahmad safi, co-founder of palestinian animal league, writes about the care shown by palestinians in gaza and the west bank toward animals that were also injured during the indiscriminate bombing and invasion by the occupation 82 see palestinian youth movement, “free palestine. stop cop city”. i use the term israeli occupation force as opposed to israeli defence force in line with the palestine liberation movement to rhetorically denaturalize the occupation of palestine by israel. 83 malm, “the destruction of palestine”. 84 malm, “the destruction of palestine”. selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 141 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) forces. safi calls for the “people of palestine”, including “humans and animals, trees and mountains”, to be the “fuel for the world’s revolutions and a torch for the civilizations that were annihilated, so that they may rise again.”85 safi presents a conception of personhood and political action that is not reducible to the human, but rather includes palestinian humans and nonhumans as co-strugglers toward revolution and a future beyond israeli and global colonialism. it is this vision that animates my concern with a broad understanding of abolition that is informed by the black freedom struggle and that moves beyond the species line. by and large, the animal justice movement has not taken carceral systems seriously, and has had little to nothing to say about palestine. as the legal scholar justin marceau explains “abuse an animal — go to jail” is representative of the broad trends within animal justice.86 more recently, scholars have challenged the reliance on these carceral systems as being able to protect animals since they can only focus on individual animals. such a focus on individual harm and lack of attention to broader structures carves out exceptions for the many animals that are disassembled in slaughterhouses and experimented on in labs since these take place under the aegis of legality. the preventing animal cruelty and torture act (pact) passed in the us is a central example of this kind of legislation which “represents a western trend of prioritizing the strength of criminal cases at the expense of saving the vast majority of animals from violent abuse.”87 as struthers montford and kasprzycka note, pact marks out exceptions for animals who threaten property and does not apply to people who slaughter animals or use animals in scientific experimentation, itself a central site of the production of animal capital. while animal advocates may respond with a single-issue focus on preventing harm to animals, i would counter that such a focus on criminalization ultimately reproduces systemic harm to animals by not effectively engaging with the larger systems of animal commodification and weaponization enshrined in capitalist society. 85 safi, “after the war”. 86 marceau, beyond cages, 2. 87 struthers montford and kasprzycka, “carceral enjoyments”, 229. 142 | selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol humanimalia 15.2 (2025) conclusion in thinking about the constellation of cultural and legal associations that bind together black people and dogs, boisseron argues that what “brings the dog, the slave, and the civil rights protestor together under the same ‘ferocious’ stigma is their common claim to freedom, perceived ultimately as a feral claim.”88 i see this “common claim to freedom” reflected in said naming the palestinian as a “threat to the stabilities — whether of states, parties, governments, or sects — that exist alongside him.”89 in thinking about the palestinian as threat to stabilities of a sociopolitical world that normalizes occupation, apartheid, and genocide, said draws his metaphor from the long history of human–dog interaction. in his preface to the 1992 edition of the question of palestine, reflecting on the major world-historical changes that had taken place since the book was first published in 1979, said writes that the question of palestine remains “undomesticated”.90 i want to argue for this ferality and “undomestication” as a counter-alliance against the police dog as a figure of repression and the harnessing of lively capital by the repressive state. throughout the paper i have traced how racial capitalism and animal capital commonly oppress black people, palestinians, and animals through the figure of the police dog (broadly conceived). in dialectical opposition to such a structure, i see the struggles of the past and future against white supremacy, colonialism, anthropocentrism, and the carceral state. the undomesticated nature of the question of palestine is homologous with the undomestication of black freedom struggles against the carceral state and the animal question. to “resolve” these questions would be to abolish capitalism as such. as a matter of animal justice and coalitional politics, animal justice organizations should work to ban the use of animals in policing, not just because of its cruelty to dogs and other animals but also as a project of mutual freedom for all forms of life on this shared planet. 88 boisseron, afro-dog, 51. 89 said, the question of palestine, 154. 90 said, the question of palestine, vii, xviii. selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 143 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) works cited ackerman, spencer. reign of terror: how the 9/11 era destabilized america and produced trump. new york: viking, 2021. adler-bolton, beatrice and artie vierkant. health communism. london: verso, 2022. alloun, esther. “‘that’s the beauty of it, it’s very simple!’: animal rights and settler colonialism in palestine–israel.” settler colonial studies 8, no. 4 (2018): 559–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/220147 3x.2017.1414138. alloun, esther. “veganwashing israel’s dirty laundry? animal politics and nationalism in palestine–israel.” journal of intercultural studies 41, no. 1 (2020): 24–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/07 256868.2019.1617254. ahuja, neel. “the analogy of race and species in animal studies.” prism: theory and modern chinese literature 18, no. 1 (2021): 244–55. https://doi. org/10.1215/25783491-8922265. bawab, nashwa. “edward said: the idea of palestine hounds zionists.” in these times, 18 september 2023. https:// inthesetimes.com/article/edward-saidpalestine-zionists-israel-invasion-1982. boggs, colleen glenney. animalia americana: animal representations and biopolitical subjectivity. new york: columbia university press, 2013. boisseron, bénédicte. afro-dog: blackness and the animal question. new york: columbia university press, 2018. bhandar, brenna. colonial lives of property: law, land, and racial regimes of ownership. durham, nc: duke university press, 2018. braverman, irus. “wild legalities: animals and settler colonialism in palestine/ israel.” polar: political and legal anthropology review 44, no. 1 (2021): 7–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12419. bolger, john and alice speri. “nypd ‘goon squad’ manual teaches officers to violate protesters’ rights.” the intercept, 7 april 2021. https://theintercept. com/2021/04/07/nypd-strategicresponse-unit-george-floyd-protests/. chamayou, grégoire. manhunts: a philosophical history. translated by steven rendall. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2012. coulthard, glen sean. red skin, white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2014. derrida, jacques. the beast and the sovereign, volume 1. edited by michel lisse, marie-louise mallet, and ginette michaud. translated by geoffrey bennington. chicago: university of chicago press, 2009. douglass, frederick. “reception speech at finsbury chapel, moorfield, england, may 12, 1846.” in my bondage and my freedom, 407–21. new york: miller, orton & mulligan, 1855. gosset, che. “blackness, animality, and the unsovereign.” verso books blog, 8 september 2015. https://www. versobooks.com/blogs/news/2228che-gossett-blackness-animality-andthe-unsovereign. gilmore, ruth wilson. golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing california. berkeley: university of california press, 2007. graeber, david. “super position.” the new inquiry, 8 october 2012. https:// thenewinquiry.com/super-position/. erakat, noura. “geographies of intimacy: contemporary renewals of black– palestinian solidarity.” american quarterly 72, no. 2 (2020): 471–96. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2020.0027. johnson, sara e. “‘you should give them blacks to eat’: waging inter-american https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473x.2017.1414138 https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473x.2017.1414138 https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2019.1617254 https://doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2019.1617254 https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922265 https://doi.org/10.1215/25783491-8922265 https://inthesetimes.com/article/edward-said-palestine-zionists-israel-invasion-1982 https://inthesetimes.com/article/edward-said-palestine-zionists-israel-invasion-1982 https://inthesetimes.com/article/edward-said-palestine-zionists-israel-invasion-1982 https://doi.org/10.1111/plar.12419 https://theintercept.com/2021/04/07/nypd-strategic-response-unit-george-floyd-protests/ https://theintercept.com/2021/04/07/nypd-strategic-response-unit-george-floyd-protests/ https://theintercept.com/2021/04/07/nypd-strategic-response-unit-george-floyd-protests/ https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/2228-che-gossett-blackness-animality-and-the-unsovereign https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/2228-che-gossett-blackness-animality-and-the-unsovereign https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/2228-che-gossett-blackness-animality-and-the-unsovereign https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/2228-che-gossett-blackness-animality-and-the-unsovereign https://thenewinquiry.com/super-position/ https://thenewinquiry.com/super-position/ https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2020.0027 144 | selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol humanimalia 15.2 (2025) wars of torture and terror.” american quarterly 61, no. 1 (2009): 65–92. https:// doi.org/10.1353/aq.0.0068. haraway, donna jeanne. when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008. hartman, saidiya v. lose your mother: a journey along the atlantic slave route. new york: farrar, straus & giroux, 2008. harring, sidney l. policing a class society: the experience of american cities, 1865–1915. new brunswick: rutgers university press, 1983. heinrich, michael. an introduction to the three volumes of karl marx’s capital. translated by alexander locascio. new york: monthly review press, 2012. ingraham, christopher. “inequality rising in the paw patrol universe.” the why axis, 25 august 2021. https://thewhyaxis. substack.com/p/inequality-rising-inthe-paw-patrol. kaplan, amy. our american israel: the story of an entangled alliance. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2018. kennedy, liam. “‘whenever there’s trouble, just yelp for help’: crime, conservation, and corporatization in paw patrol.” crime, media, culture 17, no. 2 (2021): 255–70. https://doi. org/10.1177/1741659020903700. kim, claire jean. dangerous crossings: race, species, and nature in a multicultural age. new york: cambridge university press, 2015. kumanyika, chenjerai, and demetrius noble. “lessons from decades of black and palestinian organizing.” hammer & hope: a magazine of black politics and culture no. 5 (fall 2024). https:// hammerandhope.org/article/blackpalestine-solidarity. li, darryl. “the rise and fall of baby boomer zionism.” hammer & hope: a magazine of black politics and culture no. 3 (spring 2024). https://hammerandhope. org/article/boomer-zionism. malm, andreas. “the destruction of palestine is the destruction of the earth.” verso books blog, 8 april 2024. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/ news/the-destruction-of-palestine-isthe-destruction-of-the-earth. marceau, justin. beyond cages: animal law and criminal punishment. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. marx, karl. capital: a critique of political economy, volume one. translated by ben fowkes. london: penguin books, 1981. mcquade, brendan, and mark neocleous. “beware: medical police.” radical philosophy, no. 208 (2020): 3–9. mitchell, karah m. “a more human(e) society? animal autobiography and the shaping of race, species, and gender.” american literature 96, no. 3 (2024): 411–41. https://doi.org/10.1215/0002983111398671 morin, karen m. “bovine lives and the making of a nineteenth century carceral archipelago.” in carceral logics: human incarceration and animal captivity, edited by lori gruen and justin marceau. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2022. neocleous, mark. “‘original, absolute, indefeasible’: or, what we talk about when we talk about police power.” social justice 47, nos. 3–4 (2021): 9–33. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27094591. neocleous, mark. war power, police power. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2014. nichols, robert. theft is property! dispossession and critical theory. durham, nc: duke university press, 2020. palestinian youth movement. “free palestine. stop cop city.” the new inquiry, 11 february 2024. https:// thenewinquiry.com/free-palestinestop-cop-city/. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.0.0068 https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.0.0068 https://thewhyaxis.substack.com/p/inequality-rising-in-the-paw-patrol https://thewhyaxis.substack.com/p/inequality-rising-in-the-paw-patrol https://thewhyaxis.substack.com/p/inequality-rising-in-the-paw-patrol https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659020903700 https://doi.org/10.1177/1741659020903700 https://hammerandhope.org/article/black-palestine-solidarity https://hammerandhope.org/article/black-palestine-solidarity https://hammerandhope.org/article/black-palestine-solidarity https://hammerandhope.org/article/boomer-zionism https://hammerandhope.org/article/boomer-zionism https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/the-destruction-of-palestine-is-the-destruction-of-the-earth https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/the-destruction-of-palestine-is-the-destruction-of-the-earth https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/the-destruction-of-palestine-is-the-destruction-of-the-earth https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11398671 https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-11398671 https://www.jstor.org/stable/27094591 https://thenewinquiry.com/free-palestine-stop-cop-city/ https://thenewinquiry.com/free-palestine-stop-cop-city/ https://thenewinquiry.com/free-palestine-stop-cop-city/ selby , robot dogs and the paw patrol | 145 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) puar, jasbir k. the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability. durham, nc: duke university press, 2017. ross, kristin. may ’68 and its afterlives. chicago: university of chicago press, 2002. safi, ahmad. “after the war, we will devote ourselves to reformulating concepts and freedoms again.” palestinian animal league, 25 november 2023. https://pal. ps/2023/11/25/after-the-war-we-willdevote-ourselves-to-reformulatingconcepts-and-freedoms-again/ said, edward w. the question of palestine. new york: vintage, 1992. schneider, suzanne. the apocalypse and the end of history: modern jihad and the crisis and liberalism. london: verso, 2021. schrader, stuart. badges without borders: how global counterinsurgency transformed american policing. berkeley: university of california press, 2019. schrader, stuart. “review of sidney l. harring, policing a class society: the experience of american cities, 1865–1915, second edition (chicago: haymarket, 2017) (part three).” legal form: a forum for marxist analysis and critique, 21 january 2018, https://legalform.blog/2018/01/21/ review-of-sidney-l-harring-policinga-class-society-the-experience-ofamerican-cities-1865-1915-secondedition-chicago-haymarket-2017-partthree-stuart-schrader/ seri, guillermina. “‘the dream of state power’: accumulation, coercion, police.” social justice 47, nos. 3–4 (2021): 33–55. https://www.jstor.org/stable/27094592 sloane, charles f. “dogs in war, police work and on patrol.” journal of criminal law and criminology 46, no. 3 (1955): 385–95. shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2009. singh, nikhil pal. race and america’s long war. oakland: university of california press, 2017. spiegel, marjorie. the dreaded comparison: human and animal slavery. rev. ed. new york: mirror books, 1996. struthers montford, kelly, and eva kasprzycka. “the ‘carceral enjoyments’ of animal protection.” in building abolition: decarceration and social justice, edited by kelly struthers montford and chloë taylor. london: routledge, 2021. wall, tyler. “‘for the very existence of civilization’: the police dog and racial terror.” american quarterly 68, no. 4 (2016): 861–82. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/26360959. weheliye, alexander g. habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. durham, nc: duke university press, 2014. wolfe, patrick. “settler colonialism and the elimination of the native.” journal of genocide research 8, no. 4 (2006): 387–409. https://doi. org/10.1080/14623520601056240. https://pal.ps/2023/11/25/after-the-war-we-will-devote-ourselves-to-reformulating-concepts-and-freedoms-again/ https://pal.ps/2023/11/25/after-the-war-we-will-devote-ourselves-to-reformulating-concepts-and-freedoms-again/ https://pal.ps/2023/11/25/after-the-war-we-will-devote-ourselves-to-reformulating-concepts-and-freedoms-again/ https://pal.ps/2023/11/25/after-the-war-we-will-devote-ourselves-to-reformulating-concepts-and-freedoms-again/ https://legalform.blog/2018/01/21/review-of-sidney-l-harring-policing-a-class-society-the-experience-of-american-cities-1865-1915-second-edition-chicago-haymarket-2017-part-three-stuart-schrader/ https://legalform.blog/2018/01/21/review-of-sidney-l-harring-policing-a-class-society-the-experience-of-american-cities-1865-1915-second-edition-chicago-haymarket-2017-part-three-stuart-schrader/ https://legalform.blog/2018/01/21/review-of-sidney-l-harring-policing-a-class-society-the-experience-of-american-cities-1865-1915-second-edition-chicago-haymarket-2017-part-three-stuart-schrader/ https://legalform.blog/2018/01/21/review-of-sidney-l-harring-policing-a-class-society-the-experience-of-american-cities-1865-1915-second-edition-chicago-haymarket-2017-part-three-stuart-schrader/ https://legalform.blog/2018/01/21/review-of-sidney-l-harring-policing-a-class-society-the-experience-of-american-cities-1865-1915-second-edition-chicago-haymarket-2017-part-three-stuart-schrader/ https://legalform.blog/2018/01/21/review-of-sidney-l-harring-policing-a-class-society-the-experience-of-american-cities-1865-1915-second-edition-chicago-haymarket-2017-part-three-stuart-schrader/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/27094592 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26360959 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26360959 https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240 https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520601056240 guest, review of norton copyright © 2025 talitha may this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2025): 270–274. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 new york city’s beloved owl talitha may review of: jacqueline emery and david lei, finding flaco: our year with new york city’s beloved owl. new york: owls of new york, 2024. 224 pp. $50.00 (hb). talitha may is an adjunct assistant professor at portland state university. email: talithadmay@gmail.com book review http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 mailto:talithadmay@gmail.com in their large, stunning photography book finding flaco: our year with new york city’s beloved owl, authors and photographers jacqueline emery and david lei chronicle their first-hand, yearlong account of following flaco, a 4.1-pound (1.8 kg) eurasian eagle-owl with a wingspan of over six feet (1.80 m) who escaped from his small enclosure at the central park zoo. they explain that, after finishing a day’s work, emery and lei would head to central park on their electric bikes equipped with binoculars, cameras, phones, tips, and a thermal monocular to find flaco. soon they would drive what they called the “hoot route”, finding flaco at many of his favourite upper west side perches. their narrative and photography touches upon the themes of perception, transformation, agency, beauty, community, and hope. the profusion of these themes is made fitting by one photograph in particular, in which flaco rests near a statue of pomona, the greek goddess of abundance. this image suggests that flaco awakened in emery and lei a much-needed cultural myth of meaningful abundance — he became a “symbol of freedom, hope, resilience”, an “outsider or underdog”, and even “a magical and mythical being” (203). flaco’s journey in the city began on 2 february 2023, when someone entered the central park zoo at night and cut open the metal mesh of flaco’s small enclosure. to date, this person has not been identified. flaco’s only view outside was through the enclosure’s skylight, metal mesh and a clear plexiglass barrier that separated him from visitors. the opening allowed him to escape a lifetime of captivity. flaco hatched at a bird park in north carolina in 2010 and was the only fledgling transferred to the central park zoo. emery and lei explain that, after the wire of his cage was cut, “innocent” flaco had been “thrust into the wild” (26). they hoped that flaco would be rescued — after all, he was born in captivity and lived that way for thirteen years. had his wings atrophied? would he starve? could he survive new york’s traffic? yet as flaco adapted to the city’s particular wildness, emery and lei began to shift their views regarding his perceived vulnerability. neither “a helpless zoo animal” (25), nor a “victim” (49), flaco was a “wild owl” (186) who quickly engaged in predation, recovered a nocturnal sleep pattern, developed his flying skills copyright © 2025 talitha may this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 2 (2025): 269–274. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.21773 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.21773 may, review of emery and lei | 271 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) and more. “before our eyes,” they explain, “flaco had discovered his wildness” (12) and “had reinvented himself” (36). flaco demonstrated unexpected agency. resisting capture, he established various roosting locations, living “the life he chose for himself on his own terms” (183). emery and lei confess to have underestimated flaco’s adaptability, resilience, and intelligence. they describe his curiosity, hunting efficiency, and favourite spots in the city, and even how he once listened to a couple break up. above all else, emery and lei also admire flaco’s beauty: “as night began to fall, fireflies would light up around him, adding to the magical feeling of being in his presence on those summer nights and making us almost forget that we were standing in the middle of manhattan” (102). it is “almost”, though, that is the operative word here, for as much as the hoot route estranges emery and lei from the city, it also unlocks for them a new way of seeing and being in it. finding flaco thus evokes a strong sense of place; its vivid photographs and maps reveal a city recast through an owl’s eye view. emery and lei cheered flaco’s freedom, joining a “shared experience of curiosity and concern” (25) with other new yorkers. for a time, flaco became an animal celebrity who inspired admirers and followers. finding flaco pays tribute to this community by including photographs, poetry, and art from other new yorkers who were inspired by flaco. among these are the poem “flaco the owl” by poet joseph fasano and a spray paint mural of flaco by graffiti artist nite owl. flaco’s “presence was a gift to every person who saw him”, emery and lei write (148). they explain that “holding those deep orange eyes in a mutual gaze, we saw something about ourselves too” (148). the book’s title thus has many resonances. more than just a plain description of emery and lei’s attempts to locate and photograph flaco, it names a journey toward animal appreciation, a labour of attentiveness, and a community-making adventure. listening for his distinct hoots, looking for his white throat patches, emery and lei worked to find flaco. once found, the reward was getting “to stay with [flaco] until sunset” (191), to witness a “sliver of golden light shining on him” (133), or to find a feather shed from flaco’s plumage. an humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 272 | may, review of emery image of his feather, on the last page of the book, brought a tear to this reviewer’s eye. not everyone was patient though. the authors recount a moment when they warned a fellow photographer that flaco did not appreciate people coming too close; when the photographer pushed beyond the owl’s level of comfort, he not only flew away but never returned to the courtyard. emery and lei assert that the “selfish” photographer “cheated herself and the rest of us out of something truly special” (171). emery and lei’s attentiveness to flaco raised their consciousness about the urban dangers he faced, from rodenticides to collisions with “canyons of glass” (200). in the end, both were responsible for his death. after a year and three months of freedom, flaco “either flew into or fell from a building as a result of lethal levels of rodenticides and a pigeon-borne virus in his system” (12). flaco was found dead, face down in an upper west side courtyard with traumatic injuries. a necropsy report conducted by the bronx zoo revealed that flaco had suffered from collision trauma, “severe pigeon herpes virus”, and “exposure to four different anticoagulant rodenticides” that new york city regularly uses (193). from this, the authors conclude that flaco’s short life leaves a legacy of action and hope. they touch upon how new york state senator brad hoylman-sigal renamed a sponsored act (feathered lives also count) in honour of flaco, which would require bird-friendly design and “lights out” legislation to mitigate bird deaths by building collision (205). the new york city council also passed flaco’s law no. 1, which would study the use of rat contraception in place of rodenticides. council members have also proposed flaco’s law nos. 2 and 3 regarding the reduction of light pollution and use of reflective glass for buildings. flaco thus stands, for emery and lei, as both a model and a warning. his story, lovingly re-presented in this beautiful book, calls upon readers to share the world with nature. flaco’s story also raises questions about what it takes to care for captive animals. emery and lei touch upon the small size of flaco’s enclosure; they question if flaco had enrichment activities; and they quote an ecologist who reports that “i have often observed may, review of emery and lei | 273 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) that when the power of choice is returned to them, animals prefer to take their chances in a free-living existence” (60). however, during flaco’s memorial service, held at his favourite oak tree in central park in 2024, lei gave a speech in which he asserted that flaco’s death mattered more because he was not simply a zoo animal, but an animal who “had discovered his wildness” (12). it’s a salient comment about implied public indifference regarding zoo animals. but it also forces us to ask why flaco didn’t garner attention when he was confined at the central park zoo. film director penny lane suggests that flaco activated an already latent public animosity towards zoos: “if we all think that zoos are fine, then why do we all root for any animal that gets loose from a zoo never to go back?” (182). but this might underestimate the role of sentimentality in the narrative of freedom that became the prevailing story of flaco’s escape. “flaco was never simply an owl”, emery and lei assert, but rather “a symbol of freedom, of hope, and of resilience” (203). flaco became, in other words, a metaphor for “outlaw”, “underdog”, and “folk hero” (8, 49) that seems to have obscured his agency and importance when he was simply perceived as a zoo animal. more than this, emery and lei’s account suggests that people loved flaco because he had become a charismatic individual: de-anonymized from the moment he left his cage, he became character, personality, celebrity. animal individuals who resist social trappings can become inspirational figures, as sarat colling argues.1 flaco’s story therefore implies a tension between the affordances of concern between free individuals and the encaged others still in the city’s zoo. yet flaco’s story nevertheless stands as a cut in the mesh of captivity. an opening, albeit small, may prompt readers to recognize the collective imprisonment of nonhuman animals rather than simply perpetuate the cult of individual celebrity with its paparazzi. it may also push beyond emery and lei’s own politics. they use their author’s note to announce that they are “not opposed to animals being held in captivity by zoos and other organizations for scientific research, public education, and conservation so long as they are 1 sarat colling, animal resistance in the global capitalist era (east lansing: michigan university press, 2021), 84. humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 274 | may, review of emery housed in good conditions and allowed to behave naturally” (9). yet readers will find more than enough evidence in emery and lei’s telling of flaco’s story to doubt this framing. finding flaco documents one owl’s journey from zoo animal to local celebrity, and in doing so, points to the agency and importance of those animals that remain anonymous, at least for now. microsoft word beachly pdf dummy h u m a n i m a l i a 4:1 william m. beachly eiseley’s stygian oracle i feel it is my duty to do what i can to make people realize that the wild creature has just as much right to live as you or i. they must learn that the wild offers a more thrilling sport than killing—that of letting live. killing for the excitement of killing is murder. as in human life, there are tragedy, and humor, and pathos in the life of the wild. there are facts of tremendous interest, real lives, and real happenings, to be written about, and there is little necessity for drawing on the imagination. — loren eiseley, the lost notebooks (14). how does a child in the eighth grade, in a dusty prairie town, from a dysfunctional, outcast home, who found little interest in schooling, produce such elegant pronouncements on morality exceeding the human sphere? where do the insights arise, and what propels one to follow an intellectual mission to correct millennia of misplaced hubris? in 1921, when loren wrote this for a school assignment, he had been an avid, self-taught reader: daniel defoe, jack london, ernest thompson seaton, and charles g. d. roberts were the teachers. from these writers it is not unexpected that one would develop empathy for the animal perspective, but eiseley went further to understand something more of the human condition. in this essay i seek a more humic, unspoken and experiential source of inspiration. my search for a cryptic, archaic species in an otherwise familiar landscape leads to questions about the making and mission of a searcher. why does one penetrate beneath the known surface to experience the “other,” who — as it may turn out — is more native to place than we are? looking down into a well, some may be startled by their own distant reflection. but to some like eratosthenes, the insight might arise to take measure of the immeasurable. compelled to look deeply, loren eiseley saw the assuring tether to time and place, our ariadne’s thread, begin to fray. i found a clue that what he glimpsed early in life challenged him to look for the stygian forms and forces that float beneath and beyond our self-made and sense-limited world, our umwelt. thus begins a tale of descent… the tunnel seems impossibly deep, yet i proceed at a snail’s pace, letting the cable out slowly. the dim light illuminates only what is immediately ahead. more like an aorta than a tunnel it is almost perfectly circular, just some wispy strands of silk along the smooth walls. but no sign yet of its maker, who must have been grimly determined. my descent continues, straight down. i may have seen a motion ahead, but cannot be sure humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 46 in the surrounding blackness. i stop to breathe, to clear my eyes and steady my gaze through a tiny, multi-faceted lens not unlike an insect’s eye. for how many, i wonder, was such a view their last of this world? perhaps back toward the retreating entrance, a shrinking point of light, as something like consciousness slips into oblivion. but i must focus forward, proceed on, the end must be near. then she strikes! i feel the tug of hardened fangs. i see momentarily a clawed leg, black as ebony. then it’s true. they are here. i withdraw the ureteroscope with which i violated the sanctity of her burrow. it must be 35 centimeters deep and nearly vertical in hard-packed clayey earth. my transgression was slow, millimeters at a time. my view through a fiber-optic cable of this length is restricted to a tiny disk in a dark void, like peering through a telescope backwards. it is one of several prototype ureteroscopes designed by my uncle hal, the urologist. of course i had to modify it to use in the field. a halogen flashlight focused on the light cable was all i really needed. it’s an especially long cable, like he uses when the tigers at omaha’s zoo develop kidney stones. my quarry is comparatively tame but just as reclusive as tigers. that summer of 1988 i had travelled to the highlands biological station in the appalachians to study spiders. fred coyle was one of my instructors and he had earned his doctorate revising the genus antrodiaetus, which in latin means “to pass through a cave.” these are not true spiders, but remnants of a paleozoic world. he taught me how to look for burrows of the more common species there in the damp, flocculent humus of those primeval forests. i was surprised to learn that a species collected in (and named after) my home town — antrodiaetus lincolnianus — was genuine. the species was described by two university of nebraska scientists in 1928. that same year a young university student submitted his first poem to prairie schooner, titled “the spider.” in it loren wrote: foundations buried underfoot are forfeit to the mole and worm but spiders know it and will put their trust in airy dreams more firm (the star thrower, 119) i wonder if eiseley knew then of the spiders that retained their stygian habits, their ancient foundations, underfoot in his own town. like phantoms these burrowing spiders reappeared only sporadically, roughly at 30 year intervals, since the type specimens (all males) were described. a female was william m. beachly — eiseley’s stygian oracle 47 collected near lincoln in the early 1950’s. on leap day, february 29th, 1984, one crossed the sidewalk in front of arachnologist hank guarisco in lawrence, kansas. most anyone else would have either stepped on it, or recoiled in horror. while they are members of the tarantula clan (mygal-omorpha), these spiders are not huge. not all tarantulas are; one found only on the bald tops of the great smokey mountains is no bigger than a flea. these antrodiaetids can have an inch-long body like a good-sized wolf spider but with stockier builds. their comparatively short legs are good for burrowing. unlike a wolf spider, all eight eyes are tiny. the stout bases of the fangs project forward, rather than down, a mygalomorph trait. their shiny exoskeleton is the color of chestnuts, except the abdomen which looks like a tiny, fuzzy kiwi fruit. on the soft abdomen, just behind the narrow pedicel are two shields of black, hardened chitin. see this archaic characteristic, and you know it is antrodiaetus. charcoal by william r. beachly when i returned to lincoln after the spider class, i was determined to find antrodiaetus lincolnianus. i recalled years before reading about a mygalomorph in worley and pickwells’ spiders of nebraska and thinking it improbable that one of these archaic spiders would be here. they might be expected in ancient places, like the appalachians. they are also found around the pacific rim: not so ancient, but mostly damp places. but back in lincoln the soil was dry, even in riparian woodlands it was like pavement, with humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 48 sparse leaf litter. i searched the most likely collection localities along salt creek, many of which had been preserved as park land because they were prone to spring flooding or isolated by railroads. but all that summer i could find neither spider nor burrow. the type specimens, the basis of a species taxonomic identity, had been collected under logs in the spring of 1928. by summer’s end, i was resigned to the prospect of waiting all winter for another chance. but chance does not wait for us. my chance came that fall. it was serendipity in a most unexpected place. my rationale for searching riparian woodlands (after appalachia, i no longer call these forests) was that they were among the few unplowed places left in eastern nebraska. burrowing spiders tend not to thrive with regular cultivation. whatever the pre-settlement range of this species had been, it must now be severely fragmented. i could not think of any good reason why this area, part of a vast ecocline or continuum, should have any endemic species. “nebraska, where the west begins” was then the official tourism mantra; soon afterward came the bumper sticker rejoinder: “nebraska, where the east peeters out.” both were true biogeographically. but really: an endemic species? one found only here? that these spiders had been collected in lincoln and lawrence said more about the distribution of arachnologists than that of the species. i had only conjectures, no real evidence. not yet. one warm autumn day i was in my back yard, an unkempt, infrequently mowed kind of place, and happened to kick over a large section of bark. something like a piece of toilet tissue caught my eye. lifting the bark had ripped open a six-inch long silken tube, pure white on the inside, disguised by bits of debris on the outside. it began at the edge of the bark and then disappeared down a white hole, about the diameter of a dime. that hole went straight down, and only one thing could have made it. at that time i hadn’t yet obtained the ureteroscope, but i did have a shovel. so i carefully trenched in the hard, clayey soil alongside the burrow to follow it down. except for curving around a root, it was strictly vertical and smooth-walled. the loess (finely pulverized dust the consistency of confectionary sugar) that mantles this part of the state maintains vertical banks, so little reinforcement by silk was needed for the burrow. at the bottom was a small chamber, and there waited a female a. lincolnianus, “in the exoskeleton” so to speak, and to me she was beautiful. so they weren’t just phantoms. the mystery only deepened. why here? another species that dr. coyle collected lived in the ozarks. he named it stygius after the river styx of greek mythology. based on morphological comparisons with the few museum specimens of lincolnianus he thought these could be close relatives. i have found william m. beachly — eiseley’s stygian oracle 49 burrows of stygius in missouri and they were very different, angling diagonally down in banks along spring-fed streams. but all members of the genus antrodiaetus have a burrow entrance that extends like a turtleneck collar beyond the surface. the spider pulls this in to form a slit covering the opening and then it waits patiently beneath for passers-by. it’s not like a trap-door, rather a folding door. the exterior is always disguised by moss, or dirt, or dead vegetation such that only the pure white interior can reveal the entrance. i found that by scraping the soil carefully, one can reveal these entrances. knowing how, i found more burrows in my yard, then in the riparian woodland, and then in a piece of native prairie. i did some research on my back yard. it was once part of a dairy farm, hence left as unplowed pasture, until lincoln sprawled over it. here was a native, i thought. and i? i was like eiseley; a creature molded of plains dust and the seed of those who came west with the wagons…that ancient contingent, with a lost memory and a gene or two from the indian, is underscored by the final german of my own name. (all the strange hours 23-24) change is an inevitable truth of life on earth; and urban sprawl is only one of many things impacting the reclusive lifestyle of antrodiaetus. since most mygalomorph spiderlings do not balloon like the true spiders, their capability of colonizing new habitats when conditions warrant are limited. the homestead act of 150 years ago was the first bugle call of an assault west of the missouri river that continues today, but most farmers retained some pasturage for work animals until the fuller mechanization of farming after world war ii. earl butz’s “fencerow to fencerow” farm policies probably left only relict populations in cemeteries and isolated bottomlands. who knows to what degree the synthetic pesticides accumulated in these relatively sedentary and probably long-lived soil residents? and now corn and soybeans convert ever more marginal lands into biofuels. even if we could measure these impacts, could we stop any of this? would anyone care about a spider? a flimsy folding door of silk hardly seems an adequate defense against climate change. if the world loses one more piece of its archaic self, one more frayed end of the vast evolutionary bush, at least one person noticed and wanted to know something of their lives. in his notebooks, eiseley made note of many small passings: last evening the largest house centipede i have ever seen died peacefully on our bathroom rug…toward the end this centipede was very tired, and like two aging animals who have come into a belated understanding with humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 50 each other, we achieved a mutual tolerance, if not respect. he had ceased to run with that flowing, lightning-like menace which is part of the horror of centipedes to man; and i, in my turn, ceased to drive him away from the woolly bathroom rug on which his final desires had centered. (the lost notebooks 86) but eiseley also wrote on the role of extinctions in evolutionary change; an inconvenient truth for intelligent design proponents and other teleological attempts to impart purpose to evolution. he knew the successions had more to do with chance than destiny. in an eroded gully he called “the slit” in the immense journey he contemplated a fossil skull he likened to a paleocene ur-mammal, looking up at him: the skull lay tilted in such a manner that it stared, sightless, up at me as though i, too, were already caught a few feet above him in the strata and, in my turn, were staring upward at that strip of sky which the ages were carrying farther and farther away from me beneath the tumbling debris of falling mountains. that creature had never lived to see a man, and i, what was i never going to see? (the immense journey 5) deep within the slit i had made, i felt as if i had found a paleozoic ur-spider. i built an “ant farm” like frame for that first female, and she readily made a new burrow in it where i could watch her activities. she seemed to prefer small ants, a resource for which she would have little competition — some toads or perhaps the occasional flicker. i knew of some spiders that mimic ants for protection, but not many that ate them with regularity. with the ureteroscope i was able to view other burrows without destroying them, to verify occupancy and describe their form. i found that during the drier summer months they entomb themselves by packing soil in the upper burrow, whence no trace of the entrance remains. but i had never seen one of these spiders wandering outside a burrow. those who do must be males in search of females. now, winters in nebraska can be hard, but not unrelenting. oftentimes we experience a thaw in late january or early february when the temperature can reach the 70’s. i found that on the evening of those rare, balmy days, the burrows of the antrodiaetus in my back yard were open, and the females were waiting near the entrances. yet i never collected a wandering male there. perhaps there were no suitors left. i did collect a wasp hovering by one burrow entrance, an ominous sign for it belonged to a group known to be parasitoids of spiders. could this mid-winter mating be a way to avoid the risks of exposure to these tiny terrors? one can hardly imagine a fate more horrible than william m. beachly — eiseley’s stygian oracle 51 being paralyzed by one of these wasps, who then lays tiny eggs under your skin that will hatch into maggots that will eat you alive, but slowly and selectively to keep vital functions intact until they mature. then your role as incubator is finished. i wouldn’t say i had been obsessed with things stygian, but i impulsively scrape likely locations. if i see a wolf spider burrow (these are always open at the top), i stop to insert a thin stem of a grass inflorescence, just to see a tell-tale motion if an occupant attempts to remove it. i’ve always been drawn to caves and crevasses. my childhood birthday ritual was to give out flashlights as party favors, pile into station wagons, and our parents dropped us off at robber’s cave. here one approached a plain-looking white house and knocked on the screen door. you gave the elderly lady a dime, she’d switch on the lights, and in back you entered what looked like an outhouse. but it had stairs leading steeply down — carved into soft sandstone — that then turned back and went down some more. it was always 55 degrees and damp down there, whatever the weather was topside. a single wire with the occasional operational light bulb ran along the ceilings of corridors that split and rejoined on several levels. in some places you felt your way. the floor was soft sand. every inch of that cool sandstone wall had initials carved into it, several times over. every sound you made was odd and muffled with just a little distance. we gathered in larger rooms to set rules and decide who would be the cyclops, whose gaze (light beam), if it caught you, would freeze you for later consumption (not unlike the sting of the parasitoid wasp). only one of the others, the no-man, could unfreeze you. if he was frozen, the rest were doomed, and the firstfrozen became the new cyclops. fleeing, we squeezed through fat man’s misery, or hid in the damp darkness of the well. if you needed a restroom, you held your nose and entered the question mark. the most intriguing place was a large corridor that ended in a bricked-up wall. when we asked the old woman where that led, she told us it went under the penitentiary, six blocks away, dug by escaping prisoners. we’d play down there for hours and emerge with that orange dakota sandstone ground into every bit of our old clothes. reading eiseley later in life, i realized my childhood experiences in lincoln intersected with many of his own, though i had a much happier time of it. he, too, explored storm sewers, spun fantasy worlds in people’s back yards, and gazed into dark pools in sandstone basins. he may never have been in robber’s cave (or been invited to many birthday parties) but the tragic tale of a true escape from the nearby penitentiary in a blinding blizzard haunted his childhood memory. but why seek the darkness, the hidden, the unknown? what did eiseley hope to find among the stygians? he watched humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 52 the darkness habitually in stygian havens of all sorts: forlorn places in bustling cities, edges of dark woods, trackless swamps, and in his professional duties, caves. perhaps he was listening for the whisper of some oracle. often he admitted being drawn to some places for no good reason. one remote farmhouse he visited more than once had a “monster” in the cellar, an entrance to a cave leading to a sanctuary called the blue room where a cobalt-blue pool half-filled the large chamber. like the storm sewers he explored as a child with his friend “the rat,” its waters could rise suddenly and trap the interloper. often such places visited him unexpectedly for the stygians were all around. what is it about caves? cut off from circadian cues, one’s anchor to reality drifts. the third eye of ancestral vertebrates has been closed in our kind for millions of years, now encased deep in the calvarium, yet it continues to monitor day length by some errant optic fibers. to descartes, this pineal gland was the seat of creativity and passions. gazing into orbital fissures of skulls, eiseley saw figurative caves, windows to the past. artifacts left in dry caves can last for millennia, be they burial shrouds, sacred scrolls, or ice age sloth dung. while erosion effaces features of the surface world, it is creating new spaces below. cave formations grow at a glacial pace. consider the colorful natural cave paintings, patinas, and sculptures destined to be seen by no one, save the monochromatic echo-vision of bats. caves are by nature isolated and isolating. like prophetic wilderness, men may enter but emerge as another. in the guadalupe mountains, eiseley felt he had desecrated a burial site in a cave, just to mollify some pointless collector. he wasn’t seeking the bundled body of a child he found, but older, ice age people and their clovis tools. in another cave a passage was revealed by dynamiting a boulder. he squeezed in and followed it down, dropping to a crawl space. only after sifting a bit through the curious sediment on the floor, did he notice in the fringe of his flashlight beam an ethereal motion on the ceiling, which seemed to be alive. it was an undulating gray mass of opiliones (otherwise known as daddy long legs). i’ve entered such chambers in the ancient buried mountains of oklahoma, and know exactly the feeling he had as they began to drop upon him. in a panic he squeezed back out, shaken but stirred. what kind of consciousness had he found? what purpose in their gathering and swaying together there in the blackness? even more unnerving was an episode in another guadalupe cave. after a rope descent into an unexplored cavern he and his companion became lost until they realized, crawling on their bellies, they had broken tiny stalagmites that belied their route of trespass, likely the first in our epoch, perhaps ever. when he emerged he felt himself a trespasser in his own time: william m. beachly — eiseley’s stygian oracle 53 by the time i stood at the cave entrance i was looking at life, at my companions, at the traffic below on the road, as though i had just arisen, a frozen man, from a torrent of melting ice. i wiped a muddy hand across my brow. the hand was ten thousand years away. so were my eyes, so would they ever be…”we are dwarfed,” i muttered to myself alone, “the tiny projection of a lantern show.” (all the strange hours 104) plato’s cave of illusion or dante’s vivid depiction of the underworld do not belie the value of caves to our own struggles through the pleistocene and even before. recently, south african anthropologists found evidence of our ancestors surviving a severe drought episode by living in seaside caves and harvesting shellfish for protein. while a small population persisted during this hard time (195-123 thousand years ago) most others died out. independent genetic evidence suggests this lineage alone may have survived to repopulate africa, and eventually the world.1 it was a bottleneck both for human genes and consciousness. how much of the former life was forgotten—how much carried on through the stories of elders? yet death seems a companion to nearly all moderns who venture into caves. native americans seemed to have avoided going further than natural light penetrated. in a pawnee legend an innocent youth was sacrificed by his father and cast into the platte. after drifting downstream his body was lifted to a sacred bluff by vultures, whence a kingfisher dove down into the river and emerged through a cave into a nahu’rac, or council of the animals, to whom the bird related the boy’s misfortune. what did the animals do? they discussed, debated, and explored possibilities. eventually through their ministrations he was revived like lazarus.2 i recall exploring the elephant caves in that very same sacred bluff, emerging with a pox of spider bites and poison ivy, but touched in some other way as well. young jim white, who explored the vastness of carlsbad caverns, brought only makeshift oil lamps and candles to light and mark the way with darkened spots. what a tenuous tether to the surface in a place that howls on occasion with unexplained winds. those who trust to their internal bearings are most apt to be among the lost in caves. despite these trepidations and the many legends about the underworld, some seek caves to find their past, rather than oracular premonitions or the counsel of animals. when we go beyond the familiar, fear often accompanies us. this may be part of what allows us to see ourselves and our world differently. but seeing involves an interior landscape as well. james papez (in 1937) began tracing the neural relays and circuits humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 54 that link emotion with sensation. in the 1950s, neurobiologist paul d. maclean, describing the limbic system as a paleo-mammalian brain, associated the experience of fear with the amygdalae — a pair of almond shaped structures beneath the temporal lobes. recent research into the many connections to and from the amygdala points to a broader importance. all five senses have inputs here, odor being the most direct of these, and the conception of danger begins here. the amygdala is part of our limbic system, at the root of emotional states. researchers in montreal recently reported the amygdalae of children of depressed or withdrawn mothers (like eiseley), also of orphans, were significantly larger. the amygdala sits at the tail end of a sea-horse shaped structure, the hippocampus, known to be the crucial gateway to memory formation. while aversive conditioning is one of the powerful results of this pathway and of clear evolutionary significance, it is also activated when we experience unexpected rewards. it may play a role in evaluating novelties (desirable or not) and shaping those tenuous boundaries between familiar and foreign, self and other. perhaps, linked to the nearby nerve clusters of the deep anterior insula, even our aesthetic sense of rarity and wonder may be activated. if so, this would be a surprising link between the poles of aversion and aesthetic attraction. the papez circuit is a labyrinth to rival lechuguilla. in a cave where sensory deprivation, disorientation, and heightened peripheral experience are combined with fear, we are allowed, via the amygdalae, to create new neural constructs of both who we are and what we are part of — being and belonging. death is often a visitor in eiseley’s essays, though not obtrusively so, at least not the personal death most authors treat with dread and loathing. as a child, eiseley found dead animals, observed them carefully (one woodpecker eventually revived from a deathly shock), and buried them in an empty lot behind his yard. he made tiny wooden crosses, gilded them with precious gold paint, and marked his little graveyard. one day a mower collected these crosses, a reaper whose purpose he puzzled over. his memorials were effaced, seemingly as ephemeral as his theological inclinations. the reaper was time, always time. time catches up to all species, and eiseley knew modern man would be no exception. eiseley’s stygian outlook became a reckoning of sorts with time the effacer. he knew what men fear more than death is irrelevance. eiseley saw the irrelevance in many human endeavors, including science. he was unique among science writers of his time in not conveying a sense of hubris to the public, a public wary of nuclear weapons in the hands of ideologues. for all that science had accomplished eiseley was a reluctant, humble pitch-man. no amount of scientific knowledge could clear the fog in which he william m. beachly — eiseley’s stygian oracle 55 probed, ever doubting surface appearances. no, we were not to be the masters of nature, but drifters within it. we would be transients, orphans of the pleistocene, and always cursed with questions of our relevance, but ever willing to concoct grand fantasies to embellish it. eiseley’s first book of essays, the immense journey, tells the journeys of one and all. i am every man and no man, and will be so to the end. (all the strange hours 23 ) we have entered a cave bound for regions unknown, only certain we cannot return by the route we came. along the way, thinkers like francis bacon, thoreau, and darwin lit luminaries like that young cowboy did in carlsbad. yet these seem to show ever more passages. for me, eiseley offers probing and intense insight into our human condition— like pitons in a cliff lacking handholds—but no easy answers. still, it is a world of wonders, not just darkness, to which our amygdala and insula are tuned. the perceptive mind should never feel complacent here, nor bored. but i wonder still what set his course, began his journey. in his own words: some say a child’s basic character is formed by the time he is five. i can believe it. i who begged for peace at four but was never blessed for long by its presence. (all the strange hours 25) many have focused on the dark beginnings in eiseley’s life; the shuttered, darkened home, the arguing parents, the sense of isolation from town, and his struggle to relate with his mother’s afflictions. but he continues: there are other things that define a child…sand piles for example…i used to spend hours turning over the gravel. why, i wouldn’t know…i prospected for hours alone. (all the strange hours 26) eiseley would remain a prospector all his life. growing up where he did — even half a lifetime later — i can relate with many of his childhood experiences and never will doubt the perceptive acumen of children. at this stage, specifics trump generalities. the now is telescoped out, the immediate more relevant than past or future. the fortunate among us can recall those summers that were unplanned and utterly unscheduled. each day was an open slate; just exploring was agenda enough and what better place to seize humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 56 the day than a sand box? though we were being conditioned to become mindless consumers, with the corny jingles and gimmicky new toys like silly putty, sand remained the most malleable of diversions. in a sand box one’s imagination races over vast scales of time and space, and all forms are protean. it is mind-work and handwork. each grain upon inspection is unique, its journey unfathomable, through the orogeny and pulverization of faraway mountains. combined with a running hose, one could make and wear away such mountains in an hour. digging brought forth earthy smells and deep connections to our limbic system and hunter-gatherer heritage. somehow the early agriculturalists knew that digging could bring a promise of future abundance. for the paleontologist, it unlocks great mysteries, and we, too, might unearth relicts of summers past. it is, above all, an experience that teaches. in the unexpected universe eiseley describes the hidden teacher in several manifestations, including one in the form of an orb-weaver spider. he observed it from the edges of her universe, intruded briefly and insignificantly with a pencil, but knew from there in the hub, his universe was unknowable. what have i learned from antrodiaetus? here is one who is truly native to this place. living patiently and quietly, are they oblivious to our hectic lives? have they become accustomed to the deep rumbling of traffic that they surely must feel? like many of eiseley’s encounters, i feel ambivalently that we are at once both tenuous and terrible intrusions in their lives. perhaps in the end, as our tendrils reach into every last resource, we will do what asteroids and ice ages could not, but to their umwelt we are seemingly as insignificant as the teeming bacteria and mycelia on a fallen fruit are to us. and yet we are touched by such encounters with antiquity and enormity. touched by going where others have not: touched in that insensible way that the oracle’s message might be heard in the breathing of a cave. when many were transfixed by the cyclop’s glare, the stultifying satisfaction of our ego, eiseley was no-man, the one who touched and awakened. and how was eiseley touched early in life? i scoured his autobiography, remembering vaguely a hint i had read. then i found it. it is this passage, one of his earliest memories, where i see both the precedent for his outlook and the most surprising oracle: it is true there had been my early delving into sand piles. and so strong is childhood memory, that i can still recollect the precise circumstances under which i first discovered a trap door spider’s nest. my amazing, unpredictable mother was the person who explained it to me. (all the strange hours 165) william m. beachly — eiseley’s stygian oracle 57 so, eiseley had met the stygians. no doubt it was antrodiaetus lincolnianus for true trap door spiders don’t occur in nebraska. surprisingly, his mother knew of such things. no future was told, but a bearing was set. he wondered. he probed. he found some answers from the hidden teacher, but more often only deeper mystery. a passage was chosen, but to what end? the stage was vast and made for greater things than myself. it was an enormous cavern with only the small yellow glow of a light on the podium. what was wrong? i was beginning to tread as on a rope over an infinity of time. (all the strange hours 5) eiseley begins his autobiography with this scene of disorientation late in his public speaking career, doubting his significance, and a vacancy reserved for “greater things.” when he wrote this in 1975, science had detected the whisper of the big bang, confirmed the existence of black holes, and was rapidly expanding the limits of the known universe. two years hence, eiseley would be gone. but “an infinity of time” could mean many things, as likely telescoping inwards as outwards, and as eiseley often peered, backwards. looking forward, he needn’t have feared irrelevance in that cavernous auditorium, for he had shown, and continues to show, countless seekers the hidden teacher. he did in his unique way fall into infinity. but in a scene impressed on my childhood memory, like the stone professor lindenbrook dropped into a phosphorescent pool3, he sent out endless ripples of light in the darkness: the reality we know in our lifetimes is dwarfed by the unseen potential of the abyss where science stops. in a similar way the smaller universe of the individual human brain has its lonely cometary passages or flares suddenly like a supernova, only to subside in death while the waves of energy it has released roll on through unnumbered generations. (the night country 215) notes 1. see marean, curtis. “when the sea saved humanity”. scientific american. 303: 5461. june 21, 2010. www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-the-seasaved-humanity 2. this story “the boy who was sacrificed” is retold in grinnel. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-the-sea-saved-humanity http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-the-sea-saved-humanity humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 58 3. lupien, sonia j, parent, sophie, evans, alan c., tremblay, richard e., zelazo, philip david, corbo, vincent, pruessner, jens c., séguin, jean r. 2011. “larger amygdala but no change in hippocampal volume in 10-year-old children exposed to maternal depressive symptomatology since birth.” proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america; 8/23/2011, vol. 108 issue 34, p14324-14329, 6p 10.1073/pnas.1105371108. see also http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-08/uom-cod081511.php 4. in the 1959 film adaptation of jules verne’s journey to the center of the earth. works cited eiseley, loren. all the strange hours: the excavation of a life. new york: charles scribner’s sons, 1975. ______. the immense journey: an imaginative naturalist explores the mysteries of man and nature. new york: vintage, 1959. ______. the lost notebooks of loren eiseley. ed.kenneth heuer. lincoln: u of nebraska p, 1987. ______. the night country. new york: charles scribner’s sons, 1971. ______. the star thrower. new york: times books, 1978. ______. the unexpected universe. boston: mariner, 1972. grinnel, george bird. pawnee hero stories and folk-tales. lincoln: u nebraska p, 1961. journey to the center of the earth. dir. henry levin. twentieth century fox. 1959. worley, leonard and gayle pickwell. the spiders of nebraska. lincoln: u of nebraska studies, vol. 26-31, 1927. humanimalia vol. 14, no. 2 (spring 2024) special issue: life with and without animals guest edited by angela bartram, johanna hällsten, and christine parker humanimalia is a biannual journal devoted to the study of human–animal relations. it is interdisciplinary, open-access, and peer-reviewed, publishing original articles from a wide range of cultural, historical, philosophical, political, and aesthetic perspectives. humanimalia has three aims: to explore and advance the vast range of scholarship on human–animal relations, to encourage exchange among scholars working from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and those working closely with animals in non-academic fields. we invite innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches. ideally, we seek papers that combine approaches, or at the very least draw upon research in other disciplines to contextualize their arguments. as much as possible, we seek papers that acknowledge and seek to advance a more-than-human conception of aesthetics, culture, and society. https://humanimalia.org cover: lee deigaard, quarantine drawing 04.02 no. 3 (2020) editorial board editor-in-chief kári driscoll utrecht university associate editors mari bastashevski amsterdam school for cultural analysis clemens driessen wageningen univeristy monica mattfeld university of northern british columbia emelia quinn university of amsterdam marianna szczygielska czech academy of sciences kerstin weich independent scholar book reviews editor dominic o’key university of sheffield intern imogen grigorovich layout and typesetting kári driscoll guest editors’ introduction | iii humanimalia 14.2 (2024) when the term “animal studies” was coined in the early 1990s it was initially envisaged rather narrowly as a subfield of the social sciences, but by the time of two large and ground-breaking international conferences in 2000 — representing animals in milwaukee and millennial animals in sheffield — it was clear that the arts and humanities were at least as important to this nascent field as the social sciences. the cross-disciplinary emphasis in turn has led to new lines of enquiry regarding what exactly the arts and humanities contribute separately and together to life with and without animals. since then, the creative arts specifically have analysed the subject of the animal, and what marks it, thus, with rigorous criticality, probing enquiry, and poignant and provocative analysis. some of the concerns of those early debates remain as important as ever: the avoidance of anthropocentrism, an attention to the lives and experience of nonhuman animals that does not reduce them to symbolic representations of human values, and a recognition of the contested, but necessary role of animal advocacy within the field of animal studies. other priorities have shifted, perhaps most importantly in recognition of the impact of climate change, environmental degradation and species extinctions, and the changes these have brought about to our understanding of, and engagement with the more-than-human world. issues of negotiation, agency, communication and language beyond (human) words inform the interspecies critical debate, a terrain that is now firmly embedded in the arts and culture. this special issue pays attention to and gives detail to these contemporary considerations and their renewed potential for guiding human animal relations toward rising to these contemporary considerations of sustainable futures. our aim with this special issue is to convey a sense of what the interdisciplinary field of animal studies looks like now from a culturally significant and visual perspective, to give contemporary critical appraisal through a discussion of varying related concerns. this gives attention to the significance the arts and culture bring to the field of animal studies and the pasts, presents, and futures of shared iv | guest editors’ introduction humanimalia 14.2 (2024) human–animal lives. the articles focus on different aspects of life with and without animals, the domestic, the wild, the tame and the trained, the climate-reduced and adapted, and the lost. the issue contains a mixture of traditional academic articles and more creative or artistic contributions that combine visual and textual elements and artistic research. this special issue grew out of a conference organized by the animal research group within the digital and material artistic research centre at the university of derby. the second in a series of three conferences on the theme of “(un)common worlds”, life with and without animals took place in november 2020.1 the conference and its companion exhibition, antonym, were initiated, curated, and led by steve baker and angela bartram. life with and without animals was originally scheduled as an in-person event to be held at the university of derby over three days in july of 2020. due to covid-19 lockdowns, this was not possible; participants were unable to travel by air or overland to attend, and we were advised to consider altering the format and dates, or even to cancel the event all together. after strenuous attempts to make this happen in its intended format, delivery was finally modified to ensure it could go ahead. in the end, the conference took place online over the course of one day in november 2020, with keynotes by susan mchugh and the artist duo bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir and mark wilson. the companion exhibition, antonym, which had originally been planned to be installed at artcore gallery in derby to coincide with the conference, also had to be converted to an online format. the aim of the conference, and the companion exhibition, was to convey a sense of what the interdisciplinary field of animal studies looked like in 2020. we welcomed contributions in support of this proposal, across many formats and disciplines, offering readings and insight into various subjects. different approaches and types of voice were important to offer a multi-disciplinary insight from the 1 the first (un)common worlds conference, entitled “contesting the limits of human–animal communities”, was held in turku, finland in 2018. the third, “navigating and inhabiting biodiverse anthropocenes”, was held at oulu university, finland and in partnership with the university of derby, in october 2023. guest editors’ introduction | v humanimalia 14.2 (2024) cultural to the scientific. particularly, contributions responded to the spotlight themes, which we felt were of interest at that time: “encounters and interventions”; “spaces of empathy and loss”; “in and out of sight”; and “shared environments”. these themes were deliberately open-ended and were intended primarily as prompts for thought. we received more than eighty proposals covering a range of disciplines and subjects concerning the theme and selected a third of these for our conference. some presentations chose to address priorities that have shifted over the past twenty years, while others sought to drill into the subject specifically. eight of the presenters of artistic research were also selected for the online exhibition representing sweden, ireland, the usa, iceland, and the uk. the antonym artists were bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir and mark wilson (who, with susan mchugh, were also keynotes for the conference), andrea roe and cath keay, angela bartram, johanna hällsten, julia schlosser, lee deigaard, paula mccloskey and sam vardy, and steve baker and cath clover. the contributions to this special issue of humanimalia follow an open call to participants of the second conference of the trilogy, life with and without animals, by guest editors angela bartram, christine parker, and johanna hällsten. the contributions respond to the theme and offer a range of approaches from the historical to the artistic to reflect the conference’s remit. a few years have passed since the conference in 2020, and the authors contributing to this special issue were asked to consider this within their articles, and to develop their contributions accordingly. the seven contributions therefore offer a collective insight into the nuances within the field now. the online conference opened with a keynote by bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir and mark wilson. their imaginative contribution to this issue, “passing — captive — still”, intersperses contextual commentary with images of chickens and humans at a bird auction. the text and the images within their article explore the prioritizing of the physical and imagined privileged perspective of the chickens. the second keynote by susan mchugh closed the online conference, and her poetic contribution to this issue, “apace: dogwalking, vi | guest editors’ introduction humanimalia 14.2 (2024) kinaesthetic empathy, and posthuman ethos in the great north woods”, seeks to inspire extensions of empathy towards the ineffable relations that structure nature–culture borderlands. this is done by writing about close range encounters with wildlife experienced on her daily dog walks across the seasons. meanwhile, darren o’brien’s article, “embracing the radical cartographies of the doggy-dérive: a walk in three acts”, situated at the intersection of “fine art walking practice”, psychogeography, and critical animal studies, propses the term deep canine topography, which seeks to reframe the humble act of “walkies” as a multi-species co-authored act of making and performing together. lee deigaard’s emotive article “horse/horizon: on photography and multispecies bonding” explores multi-species empathy and loss. in the images within the article the body of the horse is discussed as becoming landscape imagined and embodied. importantly, the text derives from writings made in the horse’s presence. who bodies are, where and how they occupy the landscape — itself a body — defines the relationships discussed. their histories and memories, yearnings, inform the through-lines of synchronous connection within this contribution. jane flynn’s touching historical analysis, “goodbye old man? the evolution of the soldier–horse relationship in myth and memory, 1880–1939”, explores the discourse surrounding soldier–horse relationships and their impact on public perceptions of warfare. flynn discusses how popular images, such as fortunino matania’s “good-bye old man!”, allowed those at home to imagine soldiers’ compassion for their horses’ plight, and how they proved to be valuable when the process of national mourning and reconciliation began. in andrew craig’s granular text, “bigfoot swims in the garden of eden: hellbenders and identity formation in american history”, hidden animals, unsettling and unexplainable things experienced by american white men in the wilderness are considered from an historical perspective, and in relation to aspects of male identity formation. finally, angela bartram’s article “older humans and their dogs: interspecies companionship and anticipating loss”, uses the guest editors’ introduction | vii humanimalia 14.2 (2024) concept of performative identity as an exploration of becoming of that which we do in her artistic research project, “dogs and the elderly”. the article discusses the sensitive and sympathetic methodologies used within the initial stages of the project to capture personal stories on the significance and benefit of interspecies human–canine companionship. the guest editors would like to thank the editorial team at humanimalia for their guidance and assistance throughout the process of bringing this special issue to fruition, as well as extending our very grateful thanks to our wonderful contributors. special thanks also to lee deigaard for providing the image that adorns the cover of this issue. angela bartram university of derby christine parker university of derby johanna hällsten london metropolitan university kuen, review of paxson who are the eaters? laura kuen review of: heather paxson, ed. eating beside ourselves: thresholds of foods and bodies. durham, nc: duke university press, 2023. xii + 233 pp. $25.95 (pb); $99.95 (hb); oa (ebook) laura kuen is a phd candidate at the institute of ethnology, czech academy of sciences, prague. email: kuen@eu.cas.cz book review mailto:kuen@eu.cas.cz who do we think of when we think about eating? who are the eaters, who the eaten? and how do these assumptions emerge? unlike annemarie mol’s recent book eating in theory (2021) which tries to find fresh answers to the question of what it means to be human by taking eating as a philosophical starting point, the objective of eating beside ourselves aims to decentre the human from conceptualizations of eating and feeding. edited by heather paxson, the volume discusses eating as a transformative, relational, world-making process and multispecies sociality. too often, the authors say, eating has been understood “as thoughtfully deliberate, a fundamentally cultural matter of intention and meaning” (3) while other-than-human ingestions remained unnoticed. to counteract such imbalance, the volume introduces approaches from multispecies and science and technology studies into food studies not only to broaden the field’s object of discussion but also to make it relevant beyond its boundaries. based on in-depth, ethnographic, and historical research, the authors foreground the “threshold” as the volume’s key analytical focus, a concept of processual character and transformative power. for the threshold, as “a baseline or upper limit beyond which a particular phenomenon will occur” (5), is where generative change can be observed. the theme of the threshold is also reflected in the structure of the volume, in that the seven research chapters are separated by interludes — named intercalary exchanges — written jointly by the respective authors. “serving alternately as portal and as barrier” (6) the terms processing, (in)edibility, giving, transgression, and nourishment find short contemplation. the chapters are formally different and do not pursue a developing argument. in fact, not all contributions address the decentring of the human but, instead, generally outline the world-making and relational implications that eating holds. this review will focus primarily on the chapters that actively address nonhuman eating and thus become productive starting points for those interested in multispecies or more-thanhuman endeavours. copyright © 2023 laura kuen this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 437–443. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.17834 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.17834 kuen, review of paxson | 439 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the first research chapter is presented by amy moran-thomas, whose book traveling with sugar (2019) inspired the volume’s turn towards thresholds. moran-thomas sets her ethnography within a history of colonial sugar plantations. connecting almost-abandoned sugar refining plants in london to her field site in belize, she argues that sugar, as a substance and disease, creates and reveals new scales. through the lens of interrelated thresholds of eating and being eaten, moran-thomas parallels thresholds of pollution in belize’s terrestrial and aquatic landscapes with the exorbitant blood sugar levels of many belizeans. by showing how in london only a few traces of the sugar industry have stayed in place while its aftermaths still critically shape bodies and relations in belize, moran-thomas demonstrates the uneven lingering of commodities’ afterlives. a deeper conceptualization of the threshold as an analytical tool, however, remains diffusely interspersed in the ethnography. as such the chapter reads predominantly as an empirical contribution and not as the theoretical grounding or the volume’s secondary introduction as which it is framed. in the second chapter, historian and sociologist hannah landecker examines quite literally eating beside humans by tracing the history of medicated feed and the industrialization of metabolism in the united states. following historian tiago saraiva1 who argues that technoscientific organisms such as industrially bred wheat, potatoes or pigs are not merely objects of human modernist experimentation but themselves actively contributing to world-making processes, landecker asks: “what worlds are made in and through the industrialization of metabolism?” (59) or: “[h]ow exactly is cheap food made possible, and with what specific effects on the material conditions of contemporary life?” (ibid.). letting these questions guide her historical analysis, she effectively breaks with anthropocentric narratives of the making of modernity. landecker structures her account of the us-american industrialization of metabolism into the three successive phases: conversion, scale, and acceleration. while between 1880 and 1920, with the advent of “scientific feeding”, 1 tiago saraiva, fascist pigs: technoscientific organisms and the history of fascism (cambridge, ma: mit press, 2016). humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 440 | kuen, review of paxson animals were primarily conceptualized as machine converters of matter and energy, between 1920 and 1960 microbial metabolism, chemical synthesis, and animal metabolism were joined into new chains of consumption and conversion. in this period, the use especially of vitamins and amino acids enabled the production of key nutrients at lower costs and unseen scales. eventually, acceleration became the goal. the introduction and use of growth-promoters drastically quickened livestock animal metabolisms and changed the ratio of food that was needed to reach a slaughter-ready weight. the chapter impressively demonstrates how the radical remaking of feeding practices created a modernity based on biochemical experimentation, and in which matter is moved at new scales and speeds which radically alters an array of metabolic relations until this day. landecker skilfully manoeuvres between empirical description and macro-level argumentation, offering a genuine enrichment to our thinking about the mass-scale eating that happens beside but also because of humans. landecker and alex blanchette dedicate their intercalary exchange to processing as both their works focus on webs and chains of eating rather than on isolated species. the authors conceptualize processing not as an inherent feature of some foods, but as a process of modularization that, in the wake of industrialism, includes and connects ever more eaters as well as those who are being eaten. as their empirical contributions show, metabolic and sensory processes create and influence new relations under conditions of industrial commodity production. simultaneously, the authors describe how metabolism and the senses themselves have become the targets and means of commerce and innovation (88) which entails the steady expansion of industrial influence into interspecies relating. blanchette gives us another captivating example for the creation of such new webs of relations through industrial reformatting in his chapter on the politics of palatability in the united states. examining how cats and pigs have been industrially conjoined through the factory farm, he argues that “pork corporations must develop new specialized sites of labour and value within each hog body part to sustain kuen, review of paxson | 441 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the broader project of industrialized animal life and death” (90). blanchette’s research site, an undisclosed company located somewhere in the great plains, processes industrial hog lungs as part of a continually finer-grained process of by-production into palatants — powdered or liquid flavourings for pet animal feed. it is one of just a few global sites that amass a unique concentration of pigs, “mining” porcine body parts which only become profitable “processing material” when available in vast quantities (96–97). following sarah besky,2 blanchette points to the global longevity of monocultures — despite the justified hopes for them to be doomed — and their ongoing accumulation of new practices, values, aesthetics, and participants. yet he also hints at monoculture’s fragility, unpredictability, and its unintentional features, exemplified for him by the rapid rise of animal palatant production as a by-product of the pork industry, and the fact that “human eaters alone cannot sustain the economic model of the factory farm” (92). moreover, blanchette’s case of industrial feed production posits palatants as transcorporeal technologies that target the interspecies relationship of humans and their pet animals. by making cats purr, stretch, or eat fast when served flavoured feed, palatants are designed to induce visible responses of pleasure in the companion species of human customers. this example shows the extent of the feed industry’s deep involvement in various interspecies relationships, be they “based on sentimental affection (for cats) or efficient exploitation (for pigs)” (95). blanchette and landecker both demonstrate the massive scale and global relevance of animal eating that invites further research. beyond these, though, rather than promoting a decentring of humans from the conceptualization of eating, the volume’s remaining chapters seem to follow annemarie mol’s interest in what we can learn about the human when we take eating as an analytical focus. still, they hold insightful observations that are summarized in the following. the intercalary exchange between blanchette and marianne 2 sarah besky, “exhaustion and endurance in sick landscapes: cheap tea and the work of monoculture in the dooars, india”, in how nature works: rethinking labor on a troubled planet, ed. sarah besky and alex blanchette (albuquerque: university of new mexico press, 2019), 23–40. humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 442 | kuen, review of paxson elisabeth lien, for example, traces the co-emergence of the states of edible and inedible. problematizing human edibility as “an insufficient baseline feature of the material world” (111), they discuss the emergence of (in)edibility as a situated, more-than-human sociality but also classificatory, social, cultural, physiological, and digestive thresholding project. lien’s chapter further exemplifies the situational character of (in)edibility by examining how the acts of eating and becoming edible make food an ontological entity. having a background in interpretative ethnography and material semiotics, lien starts from the premise that “food” only emerges in the practices that make it so (115). based on three decades of ethnographic engagement in arctic norway, she describes six thresholding moments in which fish, cloudberries, and reindeer flesh either become or cease to be food for her human interlocutors. she invites us to linger on these generative moments because it is precisely “when things are not yet edible or edible no longer, that significant transformations occur” (114). lien’s chapter takes a slower pace and offers a stimulating ethnographic closeness and is a methodologically inspiring example of how paying attention to eating as a threshold can be interpretatively fruitful. turning away from the question of edibility, lien and harris solomon discuss the deeply intertwined relationship of eating and dying in their joint interlude. the authors reflect on the temporality and performativity of death, taking dying not as a single moment but rather as a sequence of unfolding events (139). a further contemplation of life as threshold provides the subsequent chapter by solomon on life support in an emergency trauma ward in mumbai, india. he extends the notion of eating and nourishing to the act of breathing in a setting where the death of one patient on a ventilator means the possibility of life support for another. solomon aims to show how breath as a critical substance and feature of embodiment makes the process of ventilation a topic of interest also to food studies. while this is certainly the case, it is uncertain whether the conceptual expansion of the notion of eating to breathing adds or takes from its analytical applicability. it raises the question of whether metabolism, rather than eating, is the volume’s real leitmotif. kuen, review of paxson | 443 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) emily yates-doerr thematically stays with the human body by considering the relationality and conceptual dissolution of the individual in embodied feeding relationships. developing her thoughts around her own pregnancy, an experience when her “singularity was becoming duplicity” (163), she examines the placenta as a threshold of transgression that necessitates both connection and separation which makes it a compelling object for thinking about relationality. yates-doerr and deborah heath discuss nourishment as thresholding work, a practice of care that refuses absolute distinctions between harm and benefit and can shift between perils and possibilities. heath then ends the volume with a description of the world-making role of grapevines on biodynamic vineyards in aotearoa new zealand. despite being a welcome shift of attention towards plant and microbial eating, the main interest of the chapter lies in the anthroposophical cultivation practices of the winegrowers. at this point, some more reflection on rudolf steiner and the historical context of his anthroposophical teachings would have increased the critical value of the chapter. overall, eating beside ourselves is empirically diverse and insightful and articulates eating as a fundamental form of relating. however, given the variety of approaches, methods, and levels of detail, the book does not develop a coherent theoretical intervention. each chapter illustrates, in its own way, how a critical attention to eating, food and feeding can open questions about social and interspecies relationships. while many of the chapters engage with decidedly human perspectives, it is landecker’s and blanchette’s contributions that stand out and meet the volume’s proclaimed intention of putting more-than-human eating to the table. nevertheless, the volume’s promise lies in its diverse disciplinary backgrounds, ranging from medical anthropology, history, science and technology studies, feminist and postcolonial studies to multispecies ethnography. taken together, they can push the question “who are the eaters?” beyond the field of food studies. salzani and weisberg, food for thought copyright © 2025 carlo salzani and zipporah weisberg this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2025): 242–256. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 food for thought carlo salzani and zipporah weisberg review of: josh milburn, just fodder: the ethics of feeding animals. montreal & kingston: mcgillqueen’s university press, 2022. viii + 232 pp. ca$37.95 (pb). and josh milburn, food, justice, and animals: feeding the world respectfully. oxford: oxford university press, 2023. vi + 216 pp. £70.00 (hb). carlo salzani is guest research fellow at the messerli research institute of vienna, austria. email: carlosalzani@gmail.com zipporah weisberg is an adjunct professor at the university of ottawa, canada. email: zipporah.weisberg@ gmail.com review article http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 mailto:carlosalzani@gmail.com mailto:zipporah.weisberg@gmail.com mailto:zipporah.weisberg@gmail.com that food is a (or even the) central theme for any ethico-political project aiming to overcome animal exploitation does not need much explanation: from pythagoras to peter singer, from the ancient greeks to contemporary moral philosophy, it is first and foremost the fact that humans eat nonhuman animals that constitutes the core of critical inquiry. indeed, it is food animals who are killed in the greatest (in fact, more and more appalling) numbers and, in terms of injustice, it is they who face the most systematized harms at human hands. in a word, creating a more respectful world for animals requires changing our food practices. yet if this is the baseline for most traditional and contemporary animal ethics, there exist blind spots and a certain fuzziness in outlining the details of “just” relationships with nonhuman animals and with food. that is why political philosopher josh milburn has devoted no fewer than two books to the nexus of food and animals. bringing together animals ethics and food ethics, milburn proposes a novel look at old relationships and overlooked questions. just fodder: the ethics of feeding animals (2022) tackles the difficult question of how to feed obligate carnivores in human care (especially in homes and wild animal sanctuaries) without violating animal rights, while food, justice, and animals: feeding the world respectfully (2023) explores how we might develop an animal rights-respecting global food system for humans. milburn situates his analyses squarely within the recent political turn in animal ethics. thus, he is concerned less with individual ethical choices and more with larger questions of justice — specifically food justice. these books examine the deeper philosophical questions underlying food production and consumption and offer practical solutions to long-standing problems. milburn’s writing style is clear, accessible, and engaging, presenting complex philosophical debates in a straightforward manner, which allows the reader to follow along easily. even if we do not agree with many of his proposals, especially in the second book, we applaud milburn for the sophistication and honesty with which he approaches his analyses. both books make important contributions to the scholarship on animal rights and should be read by anyone interested in how issues of food and food justice are central to the whole debate about justice for animals. copyright © 2025 carlo salzani and zipporah weisberg this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 2 (2025): 241–256. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.22631 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.22631 salzani and weisberg, review of milburn | 243 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) new answers to old (and new) questions just fodder focuses on a number of philosophical and practical questions concerning the feeding of other animals, especially obligate carnivores, while upholding animal rights. milburn asks us to consider not only what and how we feed to the animals closest to us (companion animals) but also what kinds of animals we should be permitted to feed or not to feed, whether and when we should feed them, and how our obligations change with respect to different categories of animals. that the question of justice is the fulcrum of the book is emphasized by the wordplay of the title. food for animals has traditionally been considered “just” (i.e. merely) fodder, not worthy of philosophical investigation, which, as milburn argues, is entirely misguided. food production and consumption cannot be disentangled from issues of justice, and by extension from political institutions like the state. the question, then, is what just fodder might look like: how do we feed nonhuman animals justly? excluding those animals who are farmed for human consumption, milburn presents a variety of categories in which nonhuman animals might be placed with respect to their relation to us. he begins with those “closest” to us, i.e. companion animals (or what he calls the “animal family”), and progressively expands the circle of consideration to “liminal animals” (called “animal neighbours”), animals attracted to and affected by agricultural practices (“animal thieves”), animal in sanctuaries or rehabilitation centres (“animal refugees”), and, finally, the most distant, wild animals (“animal strangers”). in milburn’s relational view, the obligations we have towards animals are a function of the relationships we have with them and of how much we impact their lives. the obligations therefore decrease as the animals’ distance from us increases. we find his divisions helpful, if only for the purposes of the analysis: we are not sure, for example, that “animal thieves” is the fairest characterization of animals who scavenge in agricultural areas, as it betrays an anthropocentric bias by labelling these animals as “scroungers” of human “possessions”. moreover, although it is important to acknowledge our relationships with other animals, it is equally if not more important to acknowledge that humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 244 | salzani and weisberg, review of milburn animals are not reducible to these relationships. while convenient for the argumentative line, this reduction is a potential downside of this method, and the reader should keep this in mind. before exploring the animal family, milburn devotes a chapter to the question of animal carnivorism, which outlines the rationale and the logic of his overall approach. milburn is confident that the obligatory carnivorism of certain species is neither a justified objection nor an insurmountable problem, since nutritional science has emphasized that what animals (including humans) need is specific nutrients, rather than specific ingredients. this is an important distinction, and one that is often overlooked. ultimately, milburn notes, due to advances in science and technology, it is possible to feed nonhuman animals justly without violating the rights of other animals, a welcome and encouraging assertion on the face of it. since killing some animals to feed others would harm rights-bearing subjects, milburn proposes a series of alternatives that are made available by the development of nutritional science and new food technologies. milburn rightly insists that plant-based solutions should always take precedence whenever possible. there is ample evidence to suggest that dogs, classed roughly as omnivores, can thrive on entirely plant-based diets. the same is very likely possible for cats, classed as obligate carnivores. milburn points out that omnivore and carnivore are themselves loose categories that do not establish hard and fast rules about the specific foods an animal, human or nonhuman, might need to eat. certainly, neither dogs nor cats need to eat raw animal flesh or even consume animal protein for their nutritional needs to be met. as long as the food they are being provided contains appropriate ingredients, they can justly be fed plant-based food. milburn also provides a strong and compelling case for vertical agriculture as a solution to the ecological harms and animal rights’ violations caused by arable agriculture. far from being a techno-fix, he argues, vertical agriculture is relatively easy to set up and could feed millions without any small field animals being killed and without huge swaths of land (and ecosystems) being destroyed for crops. salzani and weisberg, review of milburn | 245 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) however, as milburn points out, plant-based diets may not be possible for all animals in all situations, particularly carnivorous wild animals housed in rescue and rehabilitation facilities. it is therefore necessary to explore other options, like collecting (unfertilized) eggs from “backyard” (and companion) chickens. milburn discusses how one might source “animal protein” from animals killed by vehicles or who have died of natural causes, yet he ultimately dismisses this because of the obvious difficulty of systematizing it. it is one thing for an individual rescue centre to rely on the occasional animal corpse on the side of the road, and another to rely on them as a consistent food source. nevertheless, milburn is convinced that eggs and cultivated meat can be produced without violating the rights of animals. we explore his proposals for these food products in greater detail below, but for now suffice it to say that we are not convinced that either are compatible with justice in the long term. egg production, no matter how ostensibly “humane”, always risks exploitation and harm, and the production of cultivated meat, for humans or other animals, inevitably involves regarding animals as commodities. to be sure, wild animals must be fed something while plant-based alternatives are developed, but any recourse to cultivated meat should be temporary, not final. another concern we have is with the stark division that just fodder makes between sentient and non-sentient animals, something that also comes up in food, justice, and animals. in both texts, milburn argues that non-sentient animals can be “sacrificed” and used as food without a second thought. this, he maintains, is “neither morally problematic nor unjust” (jf, 45). he acknowledges that in some cases the attribution of sentience is problematic and that in the future new studies and new discoveries can and will change our current views, but he does not hesitate to dismiss, in a language that we find crude and insensitive, as “fair game” those not “qualifying” for just treatment. in his words: “i am comfortable saying that any animals who (or that) are non-sentient are ‘fair game’; we can feed them to carnivores” (jf, 46). milburn, it seems to us, is far too comfortable both in his conviction that human knowledge and ingenuity can (or will) confidently allow us to draw lines between beings, and that this line-drawing sentientist position is just. humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 246 | salzani and weisberg, review of milburn we are also troubled by milburn’s claim that to avoid rehabilitated carnivores harming other rights-bearing animals upon release from sanctuaries, they should be kept in captivity indefinitely (and fed rights-less invertebrates and cultivated meat). given that captivity is itself a fundamental injustice, it is difficult to understand how it is just to keep animals captive when they could be released. once recuperated and healthy, wild animals ought to be able to live independently of human interference and to acquire food as they normally would. while maintaining animals’ habitats is certainly a question of justice, what other animals do in that habitat is not. it is disingenuous to suggest that we have “blood on our hands” if released animals kill other animals for food. they are not “ours”, so what they do outside a sanctuary is not, in principle, our responsibility (unless we have trained them to do harm). as sovereign beings, they should be entitled to proceed with their lives as they wish and as they need. we might have a responsibility to prevent our cat and dog companions from injuring other animals, but that is because we have an entirely different kind of relationship with them, as milburn himself points out. despite these reservations, we are on board with most of just fodder’s claims and certainly support its efforts to find concrete solutions to problems often ignored or downplayed by animal scholars and activists. let us now turn to milburn’s second book, where we engage in a more sustained critique of some of the issues already raised and new issues that emerge with respect to feeding humans justly. you can’t have your cow and eat it too after having explored in just fodder how to feed other animals justly, in food, justice, and animals milburn turns his attention to how to feed human animals justly. he makes it clear from the outset that in the future “zoopolis” he envisions, animal agriculture as it is currently practiced would have no place. milburn asserts that sentient animals have a prima facie right not to suffer or to be killed. the violence to which farmed animals are subjected should be absolutely impermissible in any society that deems itself just. however, rather than advocating for a shift to an exclusively plant-based food system, salzani and weisberg, review of milburn | 247 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) milburn argues that it would be not only possible but even preferable to implement a non-vegan food system in the zoopolis. the non-vegan food system would avoid violating animals’ rights by relying on cellular agriculture to produce animal products, including cultivated meat. meanwhile, eggs could be sourced from happy hens, who, along with their mammalian counterparts, would be protected by robust workers’ rights. animals deemed not (sufficiently) sentient to warrant rights at all, such as jellyfish and oysters, would be considered “fair game” for farming, sale, and consumption. milburn presents two main reasons for reinventing animal agriculture rather than abandoning it. the first is that countless field animals are killed in plant-based agriculture, and it may not be as sustainable as some animal-based alternatives. the other is that eliminating animal products from the food system would undermine too many people’s conception of “the good life” and deprive them of “good work” to be justifiable or just. for some, he writes, “christmas without turkey just might not be christmas anymore” (fja, 24), and for others missing out on foie gras or octopus may be too disturbing a prospect to consider (fja, 9). while we are highly sceptical of the viability of his proposals and disagree with many of the assumptions upon which they are based, we do appreciate milburn’s attempt to work through problems that many proponents of veganism have not adequately addressed, and provide concrete solutions to a seemingly insurmountable problem: the fact that the majority of the human population shows a total unwillingness to give up meat and other animal products, no matter how much cruelty is involved in their production. within the animal rights community, numerous initiatives are underway to inspire a shift to sustainable plant-based agriculture, but movement in this direction is frustratingly slow. nevertheless, we find it difficult to sympathize with many of milburn’s proposals. from the outset, he is far too quick to give up on plant-based agriculture as the food production system of the future zoopolis. to be sure, sustainability and the problem of killing field animals in plant-based agriculture is serious and must be addressed. humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 248 | salzani and weisberg, review of milburn however, given the technologies and ingenuity at our disposal, this problem could be solved or at least seriously mitigated, especially if adequate funding and resources were provided. indeed, as we saw above, just fodder proposes vertical agriculture as one solution to this problem. but it is curiously absent from the discussion in the second book. we are also not convinced that maintaining a “good life” defined in part by the consumption of animal products is a valid reason for developing new forms of animal agriculture. it is true that many people associate turkey with christmas and other foods with other traditions, but surely this does not mean that the foods should therefore stay in production. some traditions must be abandoned for the cruelty or injustice they involve, period. as a committed liberal, milburn does not want to propose constraining solutions and allows the state only a small, controlling role: neither the state nor other entities should tell people what the good life is. fair enough. yet, just as he insists that there are multiple conceptions, as many as there are people, he seems to privilege a very specific, very “british” pastoral conception of the good life. on occasion milburn does openly acknowledge his partiality, yet he does not otherwise historically situate the kinds of images and values that he not only evokes but implicitly universalizes. moreover, as milburn himself explains, foods with no cultural associations in a given place can become popular seemingly overnight. in other words, cultures and conceptions of the good life are constantly shifting. he points to sushi’s almost instantaneous popularity in britain as an example (fja, 69). why could plant-based foods not become just as popular? why cling to turkey or foie gras or octopus when, even if they could be sourced without the cruelty involved now, it would still require a degree of exploitation to produce them? there are logistical problems as well: one wonders how it will ever be possible to produce an entire turkey via cultivated meat processes that can be roasted whole and carved up on the christmas dinner table. it is not just turkey flesh itself, but the ritual that is apparently meaningful to so many people. salzani and weisberg, review of milburn | 249 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) milburn devotes an entire chapter to outlining the virtues of “plantbased meat” and does an excellent job of responding to its critics, both vegan and non-vegan. but he does not push this further to imagine how plant-based agriculture could be systematized. instead, he conveys his certainty that depriving people of meat and animal products means depriving them of the good life, and therefore a solution must be found. elsewhere, milburn claims that “the practice of meat-eating is not itself rights-violating — even if (almost) all the ways that we currently acquire meat are rights-violating” (fja, 3). we are uncomfortable with this assertion. there are many reasons to assume that as long as animal flesh is being consumed, nonhuman animals will be regarded as sources of flesh rather than subjects or individuals in their own right. it is reasonable to assume that “plant-based meats” that do not contain any animal flesh but are entirely of vegetable origin do not objectify and commodify animals in any way, as milburn maintains. but a burger made of pea protein is quite a different thing and has very different connotations than a burger made of cow flesh, no matter how the flesh was procured. milburn does not adequately distinguish between, or critically examine, the implications of these two very different kinds of “meat” but assumes they are on a par, somehow. we also find it odd that milburn presents his analysis as a work of “ideal theory”, that is, an exploration of a desirable future. ideal theory is not to be confused with utopianism, which milburn dismisses as “head-in-the-cloud theorizing” (fja, 15), but is to be distinguished from non-ideal theory, which is concerned with immediate reforms and policy changes. it is one thing to admit that veganism might be difficult to systematize, let alone universalize, but it is quite another to establish a non-vegan food system and the consumption of animal products as the goal — indeed as the ideal — itself. certainly, as we try to replace the rapaciously destructive animal-based food system in place with a sustainable plant-based one, it might be necessary to make concessions along the way (in the form of reformist or welfarist changes, for example), but to aspire to a new form of animal agriculture strikes us as misguided, especially from an animal rights perspective. humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 250 | salzani and weisberg, review of milburn indeed, milburn is very clear that he is making principled rather than practical arguments for non-vegan food systems. if he were advocating for cellular agriculture and cultivated meat, both of which he claims will enable the continuation of the non-rights-violating production of meat and other animal products, as potentially viable transitional technologies to enable a universal shift to plant-based agriculture, we might be somewhat more sympathetic to his project (although we are extremely wary of these technologies, even as “stop-gaps”, for many reasons). but, as a form of ideal theory, that is as a proposal for what could and, he frequently insists, should be, we find his suggested food system to be wanting. overall, what milburn is offering is more in line with a non-ideal theory that works within the existing structures as a means of inching its way towards justice, rather than a theory of what a properly just society should look like. another concern is that milburn relies heavily on a false binary between “old” animal rights represented principally by tom regan and gary francione, and “new” animal rights in which “veganism ceases to be a moral baseline” (fja, 13). there certainly are important differences between what we prefer to call traditional and contemporary animal rights, especially in light of the political turn. not all contemporary political theorists of animal rights will necessarily advocate a vegan future, but this does not mean that others do not or will not. in our view, the distinguishing feature between moral and political approaches to animal rights is not whether veganism is a necessary foundation for a peaceable future with other animals, but whether veganism (or animal rights more generally) is a moral and/ or a political issue. perhaps the most troubling issue with the book’s framing is that its underlying motivation is to find a way for humans to “have our cow and eat her too” (fja, 2; 29; 193). milburn repeatedly invokes this phrase to demonstrate that his proposed non-vegan food system could satisfy everyone, from animal rights theorists and activists to ardent meat-eaters. a true “win-win” scenario! but relying on this phrase and what it represents (including the very neoliberal “win-win” logic) is a major misstep and signals a lack of awareness about the salzani and weisberg, review of milburn | 251 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) intricacies of the system of domination milburn is trying to challenge. the original adage, “you can’t have your cake and eat it too”, suggest that one should not seek to have more than what is reasonable: we should curtail our hubris, or the consequences will be dire — a meaning that milburn does not unpack. asserting that we can have our cake (or cow) and eat it (or her) too, as milburn does, reinforces the very hubris the phrase is meant to warn against. indeed, it reinscribes the rapacious attitude born of the marriage of human supremacism and capitalism that removes all limitations, or moderations, on human behaviour and seeks boundless satisfaction of all human desires regardless of how superficial or destructive. ultimately, the fulfilment of human needs is paramount: this, he argues, “is a book about how we can have the best of both worlds; how we can have respect for animals, and access to the positive things that animal agriculture gives us: good food, good jobs, and more” (fja, 20). the phrase is also very troubling from a feminist perspective. “having our cow and eating her too” recalls what carol j. adams refers to as the “cycle of objectification, fragmentation, and consumption, which links butchering and sexual violence”.1 surely, a book devoted to presenting an “ideal” vision of a just future for humans and other animals should condemn, not celebrate, the ownership and consumption of female animals (or any animals at all). given how frequently the phrase comes up in the book, it seems that milburn did not think through its implications or, if he did, was not bothered by them. for milburn, having our cow and eating her too means we can have her flesh without causing her harm. as noted, he claims that in the kinds of farms he imagines, animals would not be at risk of harm, let alone cruelty, because they would be considered “workers” rather than property. as rights-bearing members of the political and social community, their labour would have to be properly remunerated. they would be ensured healthcare, retirement benefits, and ideally be members of strong animal labour unions. as for the practicalities, the animals would live their lives in peace apart from the 1 carol j. adams, the sexual politics of meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory, 25th anniversary edition (london: bloomsbury academic, 2025), 29. humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 252 | salzani and weisberg, review of milburn necessary gathering of cells, which would be as non-invasive as possible. for chickens and other poultry, biopsies would not be necessary because “the sourcing of the eggs […] would, in principle, be acceptable. similar is true of feathers” (fja, 125). mammal cells could be extracted by way of “needle biopsies” and “incision biopsies” with “the use pain relief” if necessary. ideally, stem cells could be sourced “without interfering with animals’ bodies” using umbilical cords (fja, 126). the animals would otherwise go about their lives as normal with minimal interference. farmers, he says, could “take biopsies as part of routine human–animal contact. or farmers could encourage animals to participate in their own time, at their own speed, perhaps in exchange for a favoured food (or similar)” (fja, 126). even if this were possible, there are a host of problems that arise when considering using nonhuman animals in this way. populations would have to be controlled in order to meet production needs. reproductive interventions would take place, which are the source of so many injustices. certainly, animals would continue to be bred to provide the cells for certain kinds of flesh. they would possibly be segregated by species or sex for monitoring purposes, ruining the possibility of multispecies community-building, which is surely the defining feature of a zoopolis. these are but some of the practical ethical issues that milburn’s proposal raises. others concern the dynamics at play. the farmer would still be in a relationship of domination with the animals, who would exist primarily as sources of profit. and the possibility of slippage into more egregious forms of exploitation would always remain in place. calling the animals “workers” may alleviate some of the concerns, but not necessarily all of them. the animals could very easily be recategorized as products again and be subject to familiar forms of exploitation. this all amounts to what for us is the main problem of this approach: it doesn’t make conceptual sense to see animals as both workers and products at the same time, which is what they would be in milburn’s system. these two categories seem to be mutually exclusive, and the attempt to reconcile them a quite traditional form of “washing” to cover the persistence of exploitation. salzani and weisberg, review of milburn | 253 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) finally, one must ask: is a forced biopsy labour or abuse? even if one doesn’t care about the animals, would the farmers themselves consider taking biopsies “good work” as milburn claims? why would planting carrots or lettuce not be equally “good” if not better work? what makes animal agriculture a form of good work for farmers, actually? milburn never explains. most farm labour is very difficult, gruelling even. for those who enjoy this kind of work, they could find plenty of opportunities for it on sanctuaries, where they would have opportunities to form meaningful relationships with animals as individuals and not, let’s face it, as commodities. the same problems arise with milburn’s proposal for raising hens in order to sell their eggs. milburn paints a bucolic image of an imaginary farm, faireggs, where hens comfortably and peacefully engage in their “natural” activities but still produce eggs for humans (fja, 146). the image he presents sounds lovely, but what’s missing? other animals, for a start. why segregate animals by species, except for purposes of exploitation, when so many enthusiastically otherwise seek out friendships with animals? the name of the farm also belies its benevolence. this is a place where eggs are produced, first and foremost, not a place where hens live. this says a lot in itself. this is a farm, not a community. the hens would have workers’ rights, but they would still be like captive workers, valued primarily for their output. the problems do not end with how milburn views the role of farmed animals (to remain farmed animals). he is also very quick to determine which animals are “fair game” for farming, harvesting, and consumption. as noted, the term “fair game” is, in our view, callous, deriving from discourses of hunting that go unquestioned. that aside, the species whom milburn considers “fair game” include, most notably, jellyfish, oysters, and some insects. these creatures may fall under the taxon animal, milburn says, but they do not have the degree of sentience required to be deserving of rights. without delving into the debate around degrees of sentience, or likelihood of sentience, corresponding rights, and our related obligations, suffice it to say that we are troubled by milburn’s assumption that certain humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 254 | salzani and weisberg, review of milburn animals do not warrant the same protections as others, and that he actively advocates for their exploitation and consumption. should an “ideal theory” not aim to reduce and ultimately eliminate our use and exploitation of other animals for food and other products, as opposed to finding new ways to justify the exploitation of this and not that species? shouldn’t it simply draw the line at “animals” and call it a day? milburn is concerned that plant-based agriculture would not meet the protein needs of the food insecure around the world. “indeed,” he writes, “meat can be an important source of nutrition for food insecure people, or people with certain health conditions” (fja, 78). this is a surprising claim given that so much food insecurity is caused by animal agriculture, and that there are multiple non-animal-derived sources of protein that could be much more easily produced and distributed than by relying on cellular agriculture and egg production. milburn frequently raises the issue of finding an appropriate “place” for animals to reside if animal agriculture is eliminated. he seems to echo nonvegans’ anxiety about “where all the animals would go” if farms were shut down. we are surprised at this preoccupation with “place”. as milburn himself admits, most animal rights advocates suggest turning farms into sanctuaries. this appears to be a feasible and desirable option, both materially and symbolically. any remaining anxiety about “place” is unwarranted. as soon as animals are no longer bred in the billions for agricultural purposes, their numbers would drop dramatically and much less “place” would be needed. if society withdraws from and rewilds natural spaces, curbing urbanization and industrialization, there would be even more “place” for other animals to reside. yet, milburn remains preoccupied with and uses the question of place as a justification for creating (more?) farms rather than transforming existing ones into sanctuaries. apparently, milburn’s main concern is how the disappearance of farms will negatively impact people who enjoy watching animals grazing in the countryside. who is to say that they wouldn’t enjoy watching the same animals grazing but in a space that is now a salzani and weisberg, review of milburn | 255 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) sanctuary and not a farm? and more importantly, who is to say that so many people would miss that pastoral image he describes, and even if they did, that it really matters? some people might be disappointed by the loss of farms and their replacement with sanctuaries or transformation into other ecological projects. but their disappointment ought not to be the foundation for major ethical and political choices that impact the lives (and deaths) of other animals. milburn therefore misses an opportunity to explore the possibilities that sanctuaries offer for transforming both the landscape and, crucially, the nature of human–animal relations. the fact that animals on sanctuaries are not required to produce anything, intentionally or not, is itself incredibly meaningful. the total elimination of instrumentality or exploitation is a radical intervention in the historical relationship between humans and other animals. it could be something that the wider public accepted and embraced. finally, milburn’s books suffer from a major lacuna: an examination of the role of capitalism in perpetuating massive injustice in food systems around the world. it is bizarre that an author exploring food justice would not even acknowledge, let alone address in any meaningful way, the injustices for which capitalism is responsible when it comes to food production and consumption (never mind in other areas). capitalism is by far the primary cause of injustice to humans and nonhumans in the existing food system. to ignore its role in perpetuating the food insecurity and denial of food sovereignty, the unequal distribution of protein and nutritional foods, and other ills is to do an injustice to the question of food justice. milburn proceeds throughout his analysis as though capitalism didn’t exist or as though it didn’t matter to questions of food justice. the failure to engage with this central issue unfortunately undermines milburn’s analysis from the beginning. indeed, milburn’s zoopolis is — implicitly but very clearly — a capitalist polis, and it is the uncritical acceptance of capitalism as the de facto system that frames the whole philosophical project, infusing it with the illusion of a “win-win” outcome — a capitalist dream if ever there was one. it is this acceptance that produces the logic of “having humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 256 | salzani and weisberg, review of milburn one’s cow and eating her too”, that is, the illusion that humans don’t have to renounce their exploitative relationships with nature and the other animals and, while radically changing the workings of the system, everything — that is, its underlying economic logic — can remain the same. despite his many courageous and inventive analyses and proposals, we feel that this logic ultimately prevents milburn from envisioning a truly, systemically, just zoopolis. in the end, although we disagree on many points, both books have given us much food for thought. we admire milburn’s courage in taking on difficult issues and applaud his rigorous reasoning and imaginative vision of (food) justice for humans and other animals. milburn has certainly started an important conversation — or taken an existing conversation to a much more advanced stage — and opened up the floor for a lively and constructive debate. theunissen sheepdog trialling “my kingdom for a barking dog!” a critical history of sheepdog trialling with border collies, and why it matters to sheep bert theunissen utrecht university humanimalia 15.2 (summer 2025) abstract: according to raymond and lorna coppinger, experts in canine behaviour, sheepdog trialling with border collies is mostly for fun. the british international sheep dog society (isds), however, contends that trialling has the practical aim of improving the collie as a working dog. so who is right? i take a historical approach to answer this question, using the wealth of data contained in the field, a magazine established in 1853, to investigate the sport’s history and relation to practical shepherding. trialling in britain started in 1873, and in the following decades, the dogs and shepherds’ trialling behaviour underwent a stylization that has clear overtones of genteel notions of manliness. soon after the first trials, however, critics pointed out that the collies’ specific working style made them less, rather than more suitable for practical shepherding. other critics objected that the course design did not reflect daily farm work and that training for the trials placed an unacceptable burden on the sheep. in response, the isds, established in 1906, restructured the trials to make them more “workmanlike”. this did not end the discussion of their usefulness, however, which continued unabated. today, in britain and other sheep farming countries, many shepherds are critical of the trial collie and prefer a different type of dog. the trial collie, i conclude, is to be seen as a sporting dog, bred specifically for trialling. their use is indeed mostly for fun. in the final section, i raise questions with respect to trialling and sheep welfare. i will discuss an alternative approach to shepherding in which the sheep are not driven but led by the shepherd. this alternative has practical merits and benefits sheep welfare. keywords: sheepdog trials; herding dogs; border collies; shepherding; sheep welfare bio: bert theunissen is emeritus professor of history of science and former director of the descartes centre for the history and philosophy of the sciences and the humanities at utrecht university. his research field is the history of the life sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with special interest in the history of breeding and farm animal breeding cultures. his latest book is beauty or statistics: practice and science in dutch livestock breeding 1900–2000 (toronto: university of toronto press, 2020). email: l.t.g.theunissen@uu.nl orcid: 0000-0002-4011-7620 copyright © 2025 bert theunissen this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 2 (2025): 183–230. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.20155 mailto:l.t.g.theunissen@uu.nl https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4011-7620 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.20155 theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 185 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) in dogs, their seminal book on canine behaviour and evolution, raymond and lorna coppinger professed that the “use of sheepdogs […] is mostly for fun”.1 this claim will doubtless strike many british sheep farmers as preposterous. to their mind, sheepdogs are working dogs without whom, as shepherd-poet james hogg put it, “the pastoral life would be a mere blank”.2 as appears from the context, the type of sheepdog the coppingers had in mind was the border collie, and the “fun” they referred to was sheepdog trialling, which over the last century has grown into a worldwide sport. seen in this way, their claim is perhaps less unreasonable, yet the point still stands that the indispensability of herding dogs for sheep farmers seems hard to deny. moreover, according to the british international sheep dog society, the purpose of competitive trialling has always been, and still is, of a practical nature: the improvement of the collie as a working dog.3 thus the question presents itself to what extent, if at all, the coppingers’ assessment holds water. in this paper i take a historical perspective to shed light on the issue. my analysis raises questions about the british style of shepherding with herding dogs, which i also aim to elucidate from a historical angle. through their performance in the trials as well as their appearance in tv shows, films, and books, border collies have achieved the status of the proverbial sheepdog, at least in the eyes of the general public. promoters of the breed have touted the collie as the best herding sheepdog in the world and one of the “great success stories of british agriculture”.4 yet agricultural and cultural historians have paid remarkably little attention to the breed’s history and the backgrounds of sheepdog trialling. mike worboys, julie-marie strange, and neil pemberton have described the emergence of the collie as a show dog in the late victorian period, and margaret derry has analysed the collie’s transatlantic rise as a show dog in 1 coppinger and coppinger, dogs, 189. 2 hogg, the shepherd’s calendar, 308–9. 3 see “what we do”, international sheepdog society, accessed 16 july 2025, https://www. isds.org.uk/the-isds/what-we-do/. 4 halsall, sheepdog trials, 36. https://www.isds.org.uk/the-isds/what-we-do/ https://www.isds.org.uk/the-isds/what-we-do/ 186 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) the context of the commercialization of pedigree breeding in the early twentieth century.5 the british sheepdog trials, initiated by genteel landowners in 1873, are central only to albion urdank’s investigation of what he called the “rationalization” of the trials in the twentieth century. urdank argued that the competitions became less sensationalist and more “workmanlike” after 1906, when the british international sheepdog society began to organize trials.6 few details about the earlier history of the trials have been published, however, and the first part of my paper aims to fill this gap by an analysis of the rich and largely unexplored data contained within the now partially digitized the field, or country gentleman’s newspaper, a weekly magazine established in 1853. its pages contain well over a hundred reports and comments on the sheepdog trials during the first four decades of their existence, and they shed new light on the early history of the sport and its relation to practical shepherding.7 a short explication of the meaning of “sheepdog” in victorian britain is helpful to begin with; the first section thus introduces the main varieties. only dogs with a particular set of behavioural characteristics proved to do well in the competitions, and over the years sheepdogs of the collie type turned out to best fit the requirements of trialling. selective breeding further enhanced their herding style, resulting in the distinctive modus operandi of the trial collie. not only the dogs’, 5 worboys, strange, and pemberton, the invention, 213–18; derry, bred for perfection, 67–102. 6 urdank, “rationalisation”, 78. details on some early trials are provided at the websites “shepherds with beardies” (now defunct, but archived at https://web.archive.org/ web/20160423005146/http:/shepherdswithbeardies.com/index.html) and the border collie museum (www.bordercolliemuseum.org), and in wentworth-day, the wisest dogs. there is a plethora of books on the border collie, and many contain some (and mostly the same) historical information, usually without references. 7 the field (henceforth cited as field) is still in print as a monthly magazine. its publications from 1853 until 1911 are digitally retrievable from the british newspaper archive of the british library. i have used this digital repository as my primary source, using “sheepdog”, “sheep dog” and “trials” as keywords to retrieve the journal’s reports on the trials and other potentially relevant articles. the field reported on the major trials; there were many local ones that, if mentioned, were merely announced. some other periodicals, such as the british fancier and the ramsbottom observer, also reported on the trials, but more incidentally; the field had the widest coverage. https://web.archive.org/web/20160423005146/http:/shepherdswithbeardies.com/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160423005146/http:/shepherdswithbeardies.com/index.html http://www.bordercolliemuseum.org theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 187 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) but also the shepherds’ conduct on the course underwent a stylization. a specific choreography of trialling emerged, and there were clear overtones of genteel notions of manliness in the pas de deux performed by shepherd and dog. this development was not welcomed from all sides, and critical comments soon began to appear in the field. recurring elements in these critiques were that the course design did not reflect the daily routines at the farm, that the style of shepherding preferred by the judges made the dogs less suitable for their work, and that the training required in preparation for the trials placed an unacceptable burden on the sheep. the international sheepdog society’s efforts to rationalize the trials appear to be a response to this criticism. as we will see, however, the restructuring of the trials did not end the discussion on their practical usefulness, which has continued to this day. many british shepherds did not consider the trial collie to be the type of dogs they needed. outside britain, shepherds in the major sheep-farming countries either had no need for a herding sheepdog or preferred a different kind of dog. the trial collie, i conclude, is to be seen as a sporting dog, bred especially for the purpose of trialling. in the final section i argue that the trials should raise questions, especially when we switch perspectives to the involuntary participants in the sport: the sheep. is it acceptable to coerce them to partake in the competitions for the mere purpose of entertainment? the question is the more germane because, as i will argue, the border collie’s herding style is an example of british exceptionalism gone global as a consequence of the trials’ success, while there is an alternative, more sheep-friendly approach that has for ages been the worldwide default in shepherding. british sheepdogs and their behaviour nineteenth-century british sheepdogs came in two general forms: a larger one, for driving sheep or cattle to the market or the slaughterhouse, and a smaller one, for herding flocks in the field. until the second half of the century, there were no standardized breeds, and 188 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) working dogs were mostly defined on the basis of their function.8 thus, a dog keeping the flock together on its route to town was a drover dog, and a dog assisting shepherds with their daily routines was a shepherd dog. if there was anything else that characterized the two types, it was their variability. descriptions of sheepdogs in contemporary literature on british dogs reflect this: authors distinguished the functional categories of droving and herding dogs, but accounts of what they looked like seem largely based on the local varieties the authors happened to know from their own experience. drovers, also called curs, were depicted as dogs with shaggy or smooth grey-and-white coats, although different coats and colours were not excluded.9 some drovers were naturally stump-tailed; most had their tails docked. their frequent barking and dexterity in nipping the hocks of cattle without getting kicked were said to be essential to get and keep a flock or herd moving. the smaller shepherd dogs might be rough or smooth-coated, and their colours were usually combinations of black and white, sometimes with tan markings. they were less noisy, but able to bark on command. the dividing line between the two types was anything but sharp, and some illustrations are confusing rather than illuminating. controlled mating in working dogs must have been difficult to achieve, particularly in the case of drover dogs, who travelled through villages and towns, where it was part of their job to protect their charges against the local dogs.10 thus, there will have been many dogs of mixed ancestry — some authors considered the drover to be a composite type (“cur”) anyway. furthermore, on small holdings, versatile dogs would have been preferred over specialized ones. several authors indeed noted that many dogs were expected to perform multiple 8 derry, bred for perfection, 48–102; ritvo, the animal estate, 82–115, and the platypus, 104–120; worboys, strange, and pemberton, the invention. for farm animals more generally, see for instance trow-smith, a history. 9 the descriptions of drover and shepherd dogs in this paragraph are based on beilby and bewick, a general history; edwards, cynographia; taplin, the sportsman’s cabinet; bingley and howett, memoirs; brown, biographical sketches; smith, the natural history; youatt, the dog; martin, the history; meyrick, house dogs; stonehenge, the dogs; dalziel, british dogs; shaw, the illustrated book; lee, a history; leighton, the new book. 10 coppinger and coppinger, dogs, 119–130. fig. 1 (top) “cur dog” or drover. in beilby and bewick, a general history of quadrupeds, 1790, 286. fig. 2 (bottom) “drover’s dog”. in allen, domestic animals, 1848, 212. 190 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) tasks besides herding livestock, such as guarding the yard, vermin control, and small game hunting (or poaching). all this is not to say that the british sheepdog population was an inextricable jumble of mongrels. as indicated, drovers were bigger, and they needed power and stamina to drive large flocks — if necessary, for days on end — while the smaller shepherd dogs had to be agile and biddable to the shepherd’s commands. moreover, different dogs were required in different geographical regions. depending on the specifics of their task, recognizable types of sheepdogs were used in, for instance, the downs, the border counties of england and scotland, and the scottish highlands. they were known for their specific capabilities and had local names, such as the smithfield drover, the welsh grey, and the highland collie.11 even though discussions of most breeds’ exact origins are bound to dissolve in speculation, it is plausible that shaggy-coated drovers contributed to what would come to be called the old english sheepdog or bobtail in the late nineteenth century. similarly, early illustrations of gathering and herding dogs used in the border counties and the scottish highlands (where they were called “coallys” or “colleys”) often show a convincing resemblance to the collies that were later to perform in sheepdog trials. it was probably this type of dog, particularly the foxy-headed scottish variety, that was mainly used in breeding the rough and smooth collie, the show varieties of the herding sheepdog, in the final decades of the nineteenth century. furthermore, in scotland and several english regions, a shaggy-coated type of dog of intermediate size was used, whose behaviour was somewhere between that of drover and shepherd dogs. descriptions and photographs of these “beardies”, as they were called, suggest a mixed drover-collie origin.12 11 hancock, dogs of the shepherds, 10–14, 90. 12 leighton (the new book, 102) described the type as the “scottish bearded” in 1907. see also hancock, dogs of the shepherds, 90–92, and the now-defunct website “shepherds with beardies”, archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20160423005146/http:/ shepherdswithbeardies.com/index.html. the bearded collie as a recognized show breed did not emerge until the 1950s. https://web.archive.org/web/20160423005146/http:/shepherdswithbeardies.com/index.html https://web.archive.org/web/20160423005146/http:/shepherdswithbeardies.com/index.html fig. 3 (top) “the shepherd’s dog”. in beilby and bewick, a general history of quadrupeds (1790), 284; “coally” in the fifth edition (1807), 329. fig. 4 (bottom) “scotch sheep dog” or “highland colley”. in youatt, the dog (1845), 63. 192 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) to a certain extent, the typical trialling behaviour of the modern border collie — the name that gained currency after the first world war to distinguish the working collie from the show varieties — is a product of selection for the sheepdog trials. the collie’s herding conduct is based on a number of distinct ‘motor patterns’, as the coppingers defined them, which were enhanced and fine-tuned by selective breeding.13 however, as appears from sources dating from long before the trials were instituted, the collie’s characteristic conduct was not created by late nineteenth-century shepherds. for instance, the earliest book on british dogs, john caius’s of englishe dogges from 1576, contains a clear description of a sheepdog gathering and driving sheep on the shepherd’s command: this dogge either at the hearing of his masters voyce, or at the wagging and whisteling in his fist, or at his shrill and horse hissing bringeth the wandring weathers and straying sheepe, into the selfe same place where his masters will and wishe is to have [them], wherby the shepherd reapeth this benefite, namely, that with litle labour and no toyle or moving of his feete he may rule and guide his flocke, according to his owne desire, either to have them go forward, or to stand still, or to drawe backward, or to turne this way, or to take that way.14 farmer and agricultural writer william ellis, in the shepherd’s sure guide (1749), noted that a sheepdog should obey every whistled command, bark when asked, collect the sheep for folding at night, and make sure they stayed clear of arable fields. if the shepherd wished to inspect a single ewe, the dog should seize her by the ear and hold her till the shepherd arrived. the principal adage of good flock management was to leave the sheep in peace as much as possible, so they could graze and grow. therefore, ellis wrote, a “lame shepherd, and a lazy dog, are accounted the best attendants on a flock of sheep, 13 coppinger and coppinger, dogs, 189–224. for a history of herding behaviour, and descriptions of the communication between shepherd and dog, see westling, “zoosemiotics”, and savalois, “teaching the dog”. 14 caius, of englishe dogges, 24. another early source is mascall (the first book, 231), who wrote that a sheepdog should bark on command, never chase the sheep, and stop running when told. theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 193 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) because they necessarily drive them leisurely [and] give the sheep their due time of feeding”. admittedly, he added, there was a difference between, on the one hand, enclosed pastures, where less shepherding was needed and hedges and fences made driving the sheep easy, and, on the other hand, the open fields in common land, where the flocks of different shepherds grazed together. in the open commons, a “nimble shepherd” and a “nimble dog” were required to keep the flocks apart and prevent them from ravaging the arable plots. still, it was essential for a sheepdog never to go after the sheep without good reason. a dog with too much “courage” might ruin the flock.15 ralph beilby and thomas bewick, in their general history of quadrupeds (1790), and sydenham edwards, in his cynographia britannica (1800), both described in detail how sheepdogs managed to fetch sheep even when they were far away and out of sight. in driving them, edwards wrote, the dog should keep perfect balance: “sheep on mountainous regions are swift as roes. if well taught he never approaches too nigh, but hovering round presents himself wherever his presence is necessary”. if the sheep bolted, the dog “flies before for fear of separating them, makes half circles and meets them in front”. a good dog, he added, “never offers injury, attacks but to restrain, and pursues but to guide. the best kinds run perfectly silent”.16 the importance of calm and measured shepherding was reiterated by later authors. in a treatise on the management of mountain sheep from 1815, john little noted that a “hasty passionate man, with a rash dog” made for bad shepherding. it took a “calm [and] good tempered man, with a sagacious close mouthed dog” for the flock to thrive.17 in the same vein, william youatt stated in 1845: “in open, unenclosed districts, [sheepdogs] are indispensable; but in others i wish them, i confess, either managed, or encouraged less”. a drover dog might occasionally need to nip a sheep, but this “will admit of no apology in the shepherd’s dog”.18 in 1846, 15 ellis, a compleat system, 1–34. 16 beilby and bewick, a general history, 284–285; edwards, cynographia, 64–65. 17 little, practical observations, 80. 18 youatt, the dog, 61. 194 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) charles st. john added that a sagacious dog, in his first approach of the sheep, did not dash right at them but made a wide arc, ending up behind them to drive them in the required direction. st. john also recorded the sheepdog’s ability to separate a sheep from the flock and catch them.19 shepherd james scott of ancrum, an early competitor in the sheepdog trials, suggested that the famous ‘eye’, the mesmerizing gaze collies deploy to impose their will on sheep, was a recent phenomenon. the first time he ever saw a dog use it was in 1875, two years after the first recorded trials.20 however, james hogg’s shepherd’s calendar of 1829 had already recorded the sheepdog’s characteristic glaring at the sheep. or, rather, at any animal, as hogg’s dog hector would not only eye-stalk sheep, but also the farm cat: “whenever he was within doors, his whole occupation was watching and pointing the cat from morning to night”.21 so, it is clear that the sheepdog trials that began in 1873 were not responsible for the creation of the modern collie’s typical herding behaviour. the most notable elements were displayed much earlier by at least some dogs from the regions where, as thomas brown wrote in 1829, “his services are invaluable”, that is “in the north of england, and in the highlands of scotland”.22 still, the trials stimulated selective breeding for this type of herding conduct, resulting in its enhancement and stylization. as we will see, the shepherds’ behaviour would also undergo stylization during the early decades of the trials. this process included the suppression of aspects of everyday herding routines that shepherds and sheepdogs were emphatically not supposed to display on the trial course. the first trials at bala the first officially recorded british sheepdog trials were held on october 9, 1873, on the slopes of garth goch near bala, a welsh 19 st. john, short sketches, 110. 20 mcculloch, sheep dogs, 17–18. for a similar opinion, see holmes, the farmer’s dog, 17–18. 21 hogg, the shepherd’s calendar, 311–312. 22 brown, biographical sketches, 131. theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 195 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) market town.23 the event took place under the patronage of the upper classes: the organizing committee included, among others, viscount combermere, the marquis of exeter, and viscount downe. the social significance of events of this kind, as meeting places for the classes that consolidated the social hierarchy, was perceptively pointed out by rawdon lee, in his a history and description of the collie (1890): in these times of peculiar changes no stone should be left unturned that is likely to sustain the good feeling not always prevailing between landowner and tenant […] without going quite so far as to suggest such competitive trials as a panacea for political unpleasantness and agricultural depression, there is no doubt [such meetings] bring the land occupier and the land owner into touch with each other, provocative of friendliness that can scarcely be secured by any other means.24 urdank rightly noted that the trials initially showed a clear resemblance to the kennel club’s dog shows, the first of which was held in 1859.25 one of the initiators of the bala event was sewallis shirley, the founder of the kennel club, and it may have been on his suggestion that the trials did not only test the dogs’ working abilities, but also included a competition for the best-looking sheepdog. from a practical perspective, however, the sheepdog trials rather shared their motivation with the gun dog field trials organized by the gentry since 1866.26 the aims the bala committee set itself were not explicitly stated but a few years later the organizers of sheepdog trials 23 unrecorded trials were claimed to have been organized in kirkby stephen in cumbria since the late 1850s: “kirkby stephen dog show and sheepdog trials”, field, 4 september 1880, 369–370. trialling in australia started in the 1860s; see wayne mcmillan, “historical australian sheepdog trials”, australian working stock dog magazine no. 16 (august 2021), 36–41, https://issuu.com/awsdm/docs/awsdm_june_2021/s/13169208. 24 lee, a history, 102. 25 urdank, “the rationalisation”. 26 worboys, strange and pemberton, the invention, 79–83. an announcement of the bala trials mentioned that this “novelty” was to be organized by the same committee that was engaged in setting up a gun dog trial in the area. the main organizer, richard john lloyd price esq., was a well-known figure in both the dog fancy and gun dog trialling. see r.j. lloyd price, “sheepdogs at the rwilas field trials”, field, july 6, 1873, 17; halsall, sheepdog trials, 25–26. https://issuu.com/awsdm/docs/awsdm_june_2021/s/13169208 196 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) at ulverston put the goal in these words: “to induce greater attention to the breeding and training of these useful dogs”.27 thus, the trials’ purpose shared a key element with that of the gun dog trials. the latter were organized in reaction to complaints about the show ring, in which working ability played no role. for gun dogs, it was felt, this would not do: the aim of breed improvement through competition could only be reached if the dogs’ performance in the field was also tested.28 for sheepdogs the situation was no different: they also appeared in the show ring and the detrimental effect this might have on their working ability was a broadly shared concern.29 “dog shows have added to the beauty of the collie; trials must add to his intelligence”, rawdon lee stated succinctly.30 the report of the first trials at bala in the field conveys that the reality of shepherding had not yet reached the level of sophistication desired by the authors discussed above.31 of the ten competing dogs, who showed as much variability in their size and looks as in their approach to the task at hand, only a few succeeded in fulfilling it. as with the gundog trials, the competition was held in two rounds: the first intended to eliminate weaker contenders, the second to appoint a winner. in the first heat, three sheep had to be driven into a small pen made of hurdles. the sheep — of a flighty welsh mountain type — were released at a distance of five hundred yards from the pen. the dog had to collect them, drive them to the pen and, with the assistance of the shepherd, make them enter it. in the second round, three sheep were released at a distance of eight hundred yards, and the dog had to fetch them, drive them through a gate, and bring them to the shepherd. no time limit was mentioned, 27 “sheepdog trials at ulverston”, field, 9 october 1880, 558. 28 worboys, strange and pemberton, the invention, 79–83. 29 a bone of contention, for instance, was the cross of the collie with the gordon setter, which fancy breeders used to add brilliance to the coat but was said to impair working ability. see stonehenge, “the colley and other sheepdogs”, field, 11 august 1877, 161– 162; shaw, the illustrated book, 73–82; worboys, strange and pemberton, the invention, 213–218. 30 lee, a history, iv. 31 “sheep dog field trials at bala. thursday, oct 9”, field, october 19, 1873, 390; all quotations in my description of the event derive from this source. theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 197 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) but the judges could decide to end a run at their own discretion if it took too long. only two dogs succeeded in penning their sheep: tweed, a small black and tan highland collie, and sam, a black dog with a white collar from north east england. the other dogs lost one or more of their charges, either right at the start or at the pen, the sheep bolting in all directions or disappearing among the spectators. quite a few triplets refused to be driven away from the corner of the field where the other sheep were penned. some dogs seemed not up to the task of driving a small lot of three at all. one dog, instead of circling the sheep, merely ran after them, and another could not even keep up with the agile mountain sheep. the field’s reporter deemed one of the competing dogs “to yelp too much”. another dog bit a particularly “nasty” sheep, and a ewe that had jumped into a stream bordering the trial course was hauled out by the dog by the scruff of her neck. the shepherds made no bones about improvising either: one of them lifted his dog over a wall to get to his targets, and another penned a sheep by chucking them in himself. a particularly tiny canine was lifted high into the air by the shepherd to enable him to sight his sheep. during the runs, if shouted or whistled commands proved ineffective, some shepherds resorted to a different register: a local contestant entertained the crowd with what the reporter qualified as “excellent witticisms in welsh”. the judges also saw fit to intervene on one occasion, when an uncharacteristically cooperative triplet was felt to make things too easy for the dog; they ordered the shepherd to disperse them, so as to enable the dog to show his cunning. the four dogs selected to compete in the second round demonstrated, to varying degrees, “what ought to be done and the way to do it”, according to the reporting journalist. tweed displayed “wonderful obedience” and kept his distance in circling the sheep, “coming leisurely and without frightening [them]”. sam impressed the spectators by dropping instantly to command and by his “crouching like a panther” at the pen. he may even have controlled the sheep with his “eye”: the chronicler noted how he seemed to be “fettering 198 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) them with his eye”. the crowd cheered loudly at sam’s performance, but he only won third prize, because it was one of his sheep who had jumped into the water, and his rescue efforts had taken too much time. tweed was awarded first prize, and he also won the beauty contest. sam’s qualities did not go unnoticed, however, because a year later he was sold to an australian farmer.32 he would not be the last prize winner to change hands after a trial. the field’s account of the bala trials shows that the rules of the game had not yet been set in stone. neither the shepherds and their dogs, nor the organizers and judges seemed to have had a clear idea of what to expect and what was expected of them.33 there were no penalties for undesirable behaviour on the dog’s or handler’s part, and the jury mainly intervened if a run took up too much time. on the other hand, both the judges and the viewers — most of them farmers and shepherds — knew how to recognize a good performance. the best dogs’ working method matched fairly well with the recommendations for good shepherding made in the literature discussed above. the gentrification of trialling the bala initiative was widely followed. within a few years, associations were established that organized herding competitions in wales and the border counties of england and scotland, and by the end of the century many british regions had their own trials. most events were initiated by gentry landowners, while some others were part of a dog or agricultural show. the bigger trials became yearly events, with spectator numbers in the hundreds or even thousands. the number of viewers at the first bala trials was estimated at three hundred, some two thirds of them farmers and shepherds. the third edition had more than two thousand people watching, with police present to keep good order.34 the 1883 trials of the north-western counties sheepdog trials association 32 “national sheep dog trials”, field, 17 october 1874, 404. 33 the same applied to the field’s reporter. his somewhat sensationalist account differs from later reports, which were written more matter-of-factly. 34 “national sheepdog trials at bala. another account”, field, 23 october 1875, 441. fig. 5 “the winner of the sheep dog trials at bala, 1873.” in the rural almanac & sportsman’s illustrated calendar for 1875 (london: field office), 17. 200 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) boasted more than four thousand visitors, the 1904 longshaw trials seven thousand, and the 1910 llangollen trials even eight thousand.35 only the trials on the grounds of alexandra palace in london attracted disappointing numbers of visitors. apparently, a reporter surmised, londoners could not imagine the attractiveness of such an event.36 the customary number of sheep in a trial run was three. swift mountain sheep continued to be preferred, also in lowland regions — a welsh flock was transported to london especially for the alexandra palace trials. in the border counties, other hill sheep such as cheviots and scottish blackfaces were deployed. the criterion was that trial sheep should be agile and fast, in order to pose a real challenge to the dog. lowland sheep did not fit the bill, as they were heavier and slower. the second edition of the bala trials set an example by having the dogs work three sheep picked from three separate flocks, which made it even more difficult to keep them together.37 on the other hand, the dogs’ work was made easier at most trials by releasing the triplets from a separate pen on the course, with the flocks from which they were drafted out of view. the number of competing dogs was typically between twenty and forty, but some had more than sixty. the beauty contest remained a regular part of the proceedings. the bigger trials soon became two-day events, with work starting early and continuing till dusk. a time limit for each run was introduced at the garth trials of 1875 and this would become normal procedure at most trials hereafter.38 besides the most important stake, open to all dogs, there might be separate stakes for local dogs, and sometimes for young dogs and young handlers.39 remarkably, the north-western counties trials association initially had separate classes for bitches and dogs in all stakes. no reasons were given, but the division disappeared after a few years, arguably because there 35 “north-western counties sheepdog trials”, field, 1 september 1883, 312–13; “longshaw sheepdog trials”, field, 24 september 1904, 545; “vale of llangollen sheepdog trials”, field, 13 august 1910, 322. 36 “collie trials at the alexandra palace”, the daily news, 30 june 1876, 5. 37 “national sheepdog trials”, field, 17 october 1874, 404. 38 “the garth colley trials”, field, 14 august 1875, 197. 39 see for instance, “grand trial of sheep dogs”, field, 16 september 1876, n.p. theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 201 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) were indeed no reasons for it, other than the convention of gender segregation in sports.40 the course set-up showed considerable variation from event to event, but there was a common core to the trials’ format. they all ended with the penning exercise and began with the dog having to fetch the sheep, after their release at distances of about four hundred to eight hundred yards from the shepherd. between start and finish the dogs had to drive the sheep to the shepherd, negotiating various obstacles along the way, such as flagpoles which the sheep had to be driven around, and gaps in hedges or fences they had to be driven through. penning was often made more difficult by narrowing the openings between the hurdles. a novelty introduced in the 1890s was the maltese cross, a contraption made of hurdles with two passages at a ninety-degree angle, which the sheep had to be driven through in either one or both directions.41 the 1880 llangollen trials introduced a new task, the shed. with the shepherd’s assistance the dog had to separate three marked sheep from a flock of nine and pen them.42 in the 1900s, scottish trials required the dogs to shed and control a single sheep.43 a special stake was added to the llangollen trials of 1892, in which a team of two dogs had to bring two separately released lots of sheep together, shed three marked sheep, and then pen them all.44 the public much appreciated this brace competition and it was included in many trials. it was not only the design of the trial course that evolved. under the scrutiny of the judges, the dogs and shepherds’ behaviour also changed, developing into a pas de deux with a distinct choreography that became the hallmark of sophisticated herding. this fine adjustment of trialling conduct was by and large complete by the 1900s. the judges, mostly local farmers “who thoroughly understand shepherding”, soon began to deploy point systems and penalties to 40 “north-western counties sheepdog trials”, field, 6 september 1879, 319, and 1 september 1883, 312–13. 41 see, for instance, “sheepdog trials at tring”, field, 7 august 1897, 211. 42 “the llangollen sheepdog trials”, field, 16 october 1880, 584. 43 see, for instance, “sheepdog trials at gullane”, field, 8 september 1906, 434. 44 “a sheep dog trial in wales”, field, 13 august 1892, 254. 202 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) assess the quality of the performance of both shepherd and dog.45 there was little uniformity, however, with judges at different trials giving various points for the initial fetch of the sheep, the drive, and the pen, as well as for the shepherd’s command of the dog and the latter’s style of working.46 at many trials, speed was a guiding criterion for placing the winners, but the fastest worker did not automatically win: “superior style” might trump speed.47 the shepherd was permitted to assist the dog at the pen and the maltese cross, yet after the first bala trials pushing or even touching the sheep was no longer allowed. the ulverston trials of 1880 introduced the rule that a shepherd would be disqualified if he touched a sheep.48 the shepherd’s latitude was restricted by assigning him a fixed space, which he was only allowed to leave to provide assistance at the cross and the pen.49 while the judges at the first bala trials had tolerated biting, at the third edition they disqualified a dog for mauling a sheep.50 the north-western counties sheepdog trials association, initiated in 1877, stated as one of its chief objectives “that of humanity, inducing gentle treatment of the sheep by the dog”, implying that biting was to be penalized by disqualification.51 all trial committees would adopt this rule, which may explain why the skill of catching and holding a sheep to enable the shepherd to inspect them was never demonstrated at the trials. while earlier and contemporary writers, as we saw above, considered catching to be part and parcel of the sheepdog’s work, the committees apparently did not deem it appropriate, at least not for public display. an aspect of herding conduct that was more and more rebuked over the years was barking. it was already frowned upon at the first bala 45 “north-western counties sheepdog trials”, field, 22 september 1888, 423. 46 for examples, see the 1892 trials in wirral, cheshire, discussed in urdank, “the rationalisation”, 71, and “sheepdog trials in scotland”, field, 29 september 1906, 550. see also jones, sheep-dog trials. 47 see for instance “the sheepdog trials at the alexandra palace”, field, 8 july 1876, 45. 48 “sheepdog trials at ulverston”, field, 9 october 1880, 558. 49 “the llangollen sheepdog trials”, field, 6 august 1881, 196. 50 “national sheepdog trials at bala. another account”, field, 23 october 1875, 441. 51 “sheepdog trials at ulverston”, field, 9 october 1880, 558. the shepherd had to pay for any damage to the sheep. theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 203 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) trials, and three years later a bitch was said to display “veritable stupidity” because she “ran in, barked, and scattered the sheep”.52 at trials near carlisle in 1885 the field journalist noted that “by yelping and barking in a most furious manner”, a dog’s “chance of victory was extinguished”.53 the reporter of the 1895 west riding trials regarded barking as “most unprofessional”, and by that time it had indeed become an anomaly; witness the comment that a “yelping dog” was a “somewhat rare competitor at trials of this kind”.54 the undesirability of a noisy performance had as a consequence that, besides catching a sheep, yet another aspect of practical shepherding deemed useful by agricultural writers was not demonstrated at the trials: the ability of a dog to bark on command. the creeping and crouching movements that only some dogs had demonstrated in the early years of the trials soon became a standard part of good penning style.55 john henry walsh, editor of the field and a leading authority on dogs, considered it a characteristic of the collie’s herding method to face the sheep, lie down, then take a few steps forward, lie down again, and so on, thus preventing his charges from breaking away while at the same time pushing them in the desired direction.56 by the 1890s, most dogs had mastered this technique: “toss worked beautifully, crawling and creeping as required”, the chronicler of a welsh trial noted in 1892.57 in 1897, jack was even said to have “marred an excellent performance by refusing to crouch at the pen”.58 furthermore, it was not mandatory for the dogs to exercise control with their ‘eye’, but it was certainly regarded as an asset. at a competition in 1908, the judge blamed the failure of many dogs to keep their sheep under control on their lack of “strong eye”.59 52 “sheepdog trials at bala”, field, october 14 1876, 447–48. 53 “north-western countries sheep dog trials”, field, 3 october 1885, 479. 54 “west riding sheepdog trials”, field, 7 september 1895, 420; “the lake district sheepdog trials”, field, 4 september 1897, 397. 55 see, for instance, “sheepdog trials at machynlleth”, field, 4 november 1876, 533–34. 56 stonehenge, “the colley and other sheepdogs”, field, 11 august 1877, 161–62. 57 “a sheep dog trial in wales”, field, 13 august 1892, 254. 58 “the lake district sheepdog trials”, field, 4 september 1897, 397. 59 “north of scotland sheepdog trials”, field, 12 september 1908, 481. 204 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) in the early years of the trials, quite a few dogs, in their first approach of the sheep, made a beeline towards them, often scattering them as a result: “laddie was a complete failure, running into his sheep as if he meant having a chop”.60 soon, however, the better dogs were praised for going around the sheep in a wide arc, ending up behind them.61 this wide approach was initially identified as the ‘run out’, and eventually as the ‘outrun’, as it is today.62 not only the dogs were expected to avoid unnecessary noise, however. in the early years, the public chuckled at the shepherds’ hollering to direct and correct their dogs, but over the years loud shouting was increasingly disapproved of. of the shepherds’ three means of communication, the whistle, arm gestures, and voice commands, the latter came to be considered the least stylish. in its report on a demonstration trial especially arranged for queen victoria in 1889, the field noted: “the style in which mr. rowlands worked his colley demands special notice, and is worthy the emulation by every shepherd, especially as he gave instructions to his dog by signs and by whistle, without any shouting whatsoever”.63 rowlands was not the first shepherd to cultivate this silent working style. william wallace, a northumberland shepherd, directed his dogs almost entirely by arm movements and whistling at the hawick trials of 1883, and at the kington trials of 1878 mr. powell drew the spectators’ attention by working “solely by the different notes sounded on the whistle”.64 many shepherds would continue to use voice commands, probably because they simply could not do without them, but the best competitors avoided them, because a dog who “required too much shouting at” was not appreciated by the judges.65 in 1892, at a sheep-penning competition near aberdeen — another novelty, in that the shepherd was not allowed to assist the dog — a special prize was awarded to 60 “the sheepdog trials at alexandra palace”, field, 15 july 1876, 21. 61 see, for instance, “kirkby stephen dog show and sheep dog trials”, field, 4 september 1880, 369–70; “llangollen sheepdog trials”, field, 30 july 1898, 204. 62 “north of scotland sheepdog trials”, field, 12 september 1908, 481. 63 “royal sheepdog trials”, field, 31 august 1889, 313. 64 mcculloch, sheep dogs, 20–21; “sheep dog trials”, field, 6 july 1878, 20. 65 “colley trials at endmoor”, field, 22 august 1885, 303. theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 205 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) the shepherd working most quietly.66 a scottish trial in 1906 had a prize for the “dog working best to the call of the whistle alone”.67 working quietly also meant that both shepherd and dog were expected to suppress all outward signs of excitement or impatience. in 1884, the “main excellence” of thomas telfer’s dog speed was said to “lay in his gentleness and absence of all appearances of excitement while in view of the sheep, which he worked without fuss and noise”.68 at the 1893 kilmarnock trials, a duo was praised because “neither dog nor man lost head or temper, and both seemed to understand each other. a good example of what a sheepdog, properly trained, can do”. in contrast, at the llangollen trials of 1898, a dog was said to be “rather harshly worked, his handler becoming very excited”.69 by the 1890s, the shepherds who made a name for themselves all demonstrated this restrained and silent working style. among them were trialling luminaries such as william wallace, father and son jonathan and george barcroft, and james scott. these handlers were veritable circuit-goers, demonstrating their skills throughout the country. they also played a prominent role in spreading the fame of the collie abroad. an english team including jonathan barcroft was invited to (and won) a sheepdog trial in germany in 1897, with the emperor, wilhelm ii, among the spectators. wallace, jonathan barcroft and others competed in ireland in 1898, and in 1910 james scott was one of three shepherds who, with six of their dogs, toured the usa to give demonstrations.70 as a result of the collie’s growing fame, hundreds of dogs found their way to buyers in the usa, canada, south africa, australia, new zealand, and many other countries over the course of the twentieth century. in britain, prize-winning 66 “sheep-penning competition in aberdeen”, field, 16 january 1892, 76. 67 “sheepdog trials in scotland”, field, 29 september 1906, 550. 68 “colleys in america”, field, 25 october 1884, 582. 69 “llangollen sheepdog trials”, field, 30 july 1898, 204. 70 “sheepdog trials in germany”, field, 5 june 1897, 881; “sheep dog trials in ireland”, field, 8 october 1898, 590; “colleys in america”, field, 25 october 1884, 582. for america, see also “the working border collie in america”, the border collie museum, last modified 19 february, 2014, https://www.bordercolliemuseum.org/bchistoryamerica/bc_ historyamerica.html. https://www.bordercolliemuseum.org/bchistoryamerica/bc_historyamerica.html https://www.bordercolliemuseum.org/bchistoryamerica/bc_historyamerica.html 206 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) dogs became the foundational animals of the modern border collie population, their names figuring prominently in the pedigrees of today’s dogs.71 for the top handlers, trialling was a lucrative business. george barcroft’s frequent trial winner don, to give an example, was sold for eighty pounds in 1902 — some eight thousand pounds today.72 trial winners customarily took home between five and fifteen pounds.73 in addition, gentry landowners regularly provided silver cups worth up to fifteen pounds.74 the barcrofts’ star dog white bob earned his owners more than seventy pounds in a single season, and george barcroft’s total income from prizes and trophies was reported to have amounted to some 2,500 pounds.75 by the 1900s, trial dogs were still diverse in outward appearance, but less so than in the early years, when some dogs were of the bigger drover type, others of the smaller collie type, and still others something beardie-like in between. shepherds with english drover dogs soon found out, however, that this type of competition was not for them. the drovers who competed at the alexandra palace trials in 1876 nearly all lost their sheep “over the hills and far away”, and at the 1880 edition a shepherd with a similar type of dog withdrew from the competition when he saw the course to be completed.76 at trials near clapham in 1884, a drover described as a “bobtailed cur” was said to bark so much and drive so badly that he was called up “before he had an opportunity of further misbehaving himself”.77 as it 71 mcculloch, border collie studies; carpenter, the blue riband; grew, key dogs. 72 “the kennel”, field, 16 august 1902, 315. 73 the alexandra palace trials in 1900 even had a first prize of 25 pounds; “alexandra palace sheepdog trials”, field, 8 september 1900, 413. 74 see for instance “sheepdog trials at the alexandra palace”, field, 8 july 1876, 45. 75 see “white bob”, shepherds with beardies, archived on 16 july 2011 at https://web. archive.org/web/20110716054614/http://www.shepherdswithbeardies.com/history/ barcrofts/white%20bob/white_bob.htm; “obituary”, shepherds with beardies, archived on 16 july 2011 at https://web.archive.org/web/20110716054744/http:/www. shepherdswithbeardies.com/history/barcrofts/obituary/obituary.htm. 76 “collie trials at alexandra palace”, field, 30 june 1876, 5; “alexandra palace sheepdog trials”, field, 24 june 1882, 852. 77 “north-western counties sheepdog trials”, field, 13 september 1884, 373–74. https://web.archive.org/web/20110716054614/http://www.shepherdswithbeardies.com/history/barcrofts/white%20bob/white_bob.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20110716054614/http://www.shepherdswithbeardies.com/history/barcrofts/white%20bob/white_bob.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20110716054614/http://www.shepherdswithbeardies.com/history/barcrofts/white%20bob/white_bob.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20110716054744/http:/www.shepherdswithbeardies.com/history/barcrofts/obituary/obituary.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20110716054744/http:/www.shepherdswithbeardies.com/history/barcrofts/obituary/obituary.htm theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 207 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) turned out, the dogs whose behaviour did meet the competition requirements were mostly of the herding type youatt had described as the highland collie, and by the 1900s they had come to predominate at the trials. a few beardies or beardie crosses were still competitive in those years, but the type would gradually disappear.78 whatever their looks, the dogs’ preferred herding behaviour was clearly defined by 1900, and so were the shepherd’s demeanour and interaction with his dog. in its first decades, i would suggest, trialling — a male-only sport in the nineteenth century — underwent a stylization that had clear overtones of victorian middle class and genteel ideals of manliness.79 appropriate manly behaviour was based on restraint and self-control and did not allow for outward displays of excitement, nor for raising one’s voice or wild gesticulation. dominance should be embodied in and flow naturally from posture and gaze: the judges rewarded natural authority and quiet command, of the shepherd over the dog, and of the dog over the sheep. thus, the improvement of shepherding, the stated objective of the genteel organizers of the trials, amounted to the shepherds and their dogs emulating the norms of conduct of their patrons. the remarkably formal attire of the shepherds at the trials, illustrated in the photo (fig. 6) below, supports this interpretation. early criticism given that the trials fine-tuned the performance of both shepherds and dogs, did sheep farmers and their patrons appreciate the changes as benefiting sheep management at the farm? one might think they did, considering the involvement of some of them in the trials as organizers and judges. as it turns out, however, the field’s reports elicited negative readers’ reactions from the beginning. these would grow into a sustained undercurrent of critical comments, which, despite the trials’ success as sporting events, cast doubt on the supposition that they achieved their intended practical goal. 78 the field sometimes described the barcrofts’ white bob as an old english sheepdog, yet he crept and crouched like a collie and was probably a beardie. 79 see, for instance, tosh, manliness and masculinities. fig. 6 george barcroft (left) at the wirral trials of 6 june 1892. the blackeared dog on the right is white bob. in the british fancier, 10 june 1892 courtesy of shirley duckworth and judi max. theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 209 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) in 1875, two years after the competitions began, a sheep farmer from the english midlands wrote a letter to the field expressing his concern about the working style of the trial dogs. which kind of dog was best suited for farm work depended entirely on the region, he contended. agile collies might be useful on the open hills of scotland and wales, but he himself had no need for them. shepherding in the midlands was much easier, as pastures were enclosed and fairly small. therefore, his shepherd worked with a big bitch who was “ancient, fat, and lazy”. it was “quite a treat”, he noted, “to see the mild and easy way she performs her work”. she was equally suitable for driving sheep from the market to the farm, as she made them “reach home quietly and safely, without being overdriven”. one of his other dogs, he added, was a collie, but he did not like the way she worked at all. she was “very active and quick, and when she starts to her work is gone like a bullet from a rifle, and at times makes me tremble, fearing she may drive the sheep over the fences or hurdles”. generally speaking, he concluded, it was not the collie, but the “heavy, old-fashioned, bob-tailed english sheepdog”, who best suited midland farmers.80 this comment echoes william ellis’ opinion, expressed a century earlier, that in enclosed fields a lame shepherd and a lazy dog were the best flock attendants. in 1881, a commentator likewise remarked that in counties where “sheep are continually penned, there is little opportunity for the high training of the colley […] shepherds in the close-folding districts train their dogs to the performance of a few simple duties, and that is all”.81 rawdon lee agreed: “the big, heavy sheep of the sussex downs, the lincolnshire wolds, and the shropshire pastures require little driving or looking after. kept in inclosed land, they have not the opportunities afforded [to mountain sheep] of straying”.82 for these reasons, shepherds from the south downs saw no point in participating in sheepdog trials. they deployed beardie-like dogs 80 “colleys dogs and their usefulness”, field, 24 july 1875, 108. 81 wing, “the colley of cumberland”, field, 8 october 1881, 531. see also “dog tax in ireland”, field, 25 may 1878, 626. 82 lee, a history, 104. 210 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) who, because of their unhurried style of working, were no match for the collies on the trial course. neither a trial judge who travelled to the south downs especially to instruct them how to work collies, nor demonstration trials by northern shepherds could convince them otherwise; the southern shepherds were perfectly happy with their dogs and remained uninterested in trialling. attempts to organize trials in kent failed for the same reason.83 other critics contended that the trials insufficiently reflected the sheepdog’s work at the farm, even in the hill counties.84 after visiting the 1867 alexandra palace trials, lord arthur cecil of orchardmains, an acclaimed breeder of dogs, horses and cattle, expressed his dissatisfaction with the set-up of the trials course in the field. working three sheep, he commented, did not reflect a sheepdog’s daily routines. such a small lot, terrified by the unfamiliar situation they were brought into, could only be expected to scatter in all directions, giving the dogs little chance to show their prowess. furthermore, it was pointless to judge dogs on the basis of speed of working, as fast dogs merely ran the fat off the sheep.85 other critics expressed similar concerns in these years, emphasizing that the dogs’ day-to-day tasks should be central to the competitions.86 the effectiveness of the competing dogs’ conduct was also questioned. for instance, in the 1890s several commentators remarked that the collies’ increasing tendency to drop when driving sheep was superfluous. it was more efficient if they stayed on their feet and just stopped when necessary.87 83 h. e., “southdown breeding farm”, field, 10 september 1892, 429–30; “sheepdog trials in westmorland”, field, 24 august 1889, 285; “sheepdog trials in the south of england”, field, 21 july 1906, 104; “the kennel”, field, 21 september 1907, 529–30; “the kennel”, field, 5 october 1907, 624. 84 north-west england still had vast unenclosed areas; see white, transforming fell. for a contemporary description of sheep farming in different geographical regions, see malden, british sheep. see also the agricultural history of england and wales, volumes 6 and 7. 85 arthur cecil, “the sheepdog trials at alexandra palace”, field, 15 july 1876, 82. 86 “sheep dog trials at alexandra palace”, 1 july 1876, 21; “llanberis sheepdog trials”, field, 28 october 1882, 618. 87 “a sheepdog trial in wales”, field, 13 august 1892, 254; “lake district sheepdog trials”, field, 29 august 1896, 370–71. theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 211 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) a fundamental critique was published in the field’s section “the farm” in 1896. spectacular as the dogs’ performance might look, the comment went, “it is questionable whether these trials should not be abolished altogether”. they encouraged highland shepherds to devise intensive training programmes for their dogs, and their “proficiency in the art of drilling the sheepdog” irritated the flocks and ran counter to the flockmaster’s prime interest: a well-dispersed flock of quietly grazing sheep.88 a decade later, in the same section of the field, another attack on the utility of the trials began by noting that there was “considerable discussion” about the pros and cons of field trials among northern flock-owners, the majority of whom “condemn them not only as valueless, but as being actually objectionable”. the author listed three major complaints. to begin with, the trials tested only few aspects of the dogs’ multifaceted work on the hills, and their training was focussed on these aspects to the extent that their general working ability was impaired. for instance, the crucially important task of gathering widely dispersed sheep was not included in the trials. on the hills, trial-trained dogs might even be inclined to bring the sheep to the shepherd in small lots instead of searching far and wide to collect them all. furthermore, trial dogs were directed for an important part by gestures, a method that was useless in the misty weather common in the mountains. finally, the intensive training for the trials might cause injuries to the sheep. thus “the welfare of any portion of the flock is subordinated to mere fancy, and absolutely needless, and, as many suggest, valueless, methods of training”. utility was all that mattered, and “we have it on the authority of experienced hill farmers and shepherds that the two are by no means synonymous”.89 the 1908 edition of the book of the farm, the standard manual of victorian agriculture, commented on the trials in much the same way: these trials are objected to by many sheep-farmers, on the grounds that the operations performed at the trials are not such as are met with in ordinary sheep-farming practices, and 88 “the farm. rural notes”, field, 29 august 1896, 381. 89 “sheepdog trials”, field, 9 november 1907, 849–50. 212 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) that a good deal of harm is inflicted upon considerable numbers of sheep by excessive driving in the process of training the dogs for the competitions.90 an insider’s commentary on the trials was included in a contribution to the field from 1911, authored by charles brewster macpherson, a scottish landowner, sheep farmer, trial judge, and successful trialler. he described an experience with his prize-winning collies when they were gathering sheep on the hills. intent on evading the dogs, the sheep deployed the tactic of hiding in dense juniper bushes on the hill slopes, lying on their stomachs, their heads down. unable to see the sheep, the dogs were at a loss to how to get them out. the reason for their failure was clear, according to macpherson: true to their trial-winning status, his dogs worked as quiet as a mouse, which in the situation at hand was utterly ineffective: what use now the lightening drop, the artful creep, the stealthy approach, the once loudly applauded style? as, pouring with perspiration, i thrash the bushes with my stick, and waving my coat aloft, even imitate the barking of a dog myself, i utter aloud the wish, “my kingdom for a barking dog!”91 macpherson’s frustrating experience was not unique. the difficulty of dealing with sheep hiding in the undergrowth was regularly encountered during trials in the hill counties, and it were particularly the top handlers’ silent dogs who were baffled by the sheep’s ploy.92 the organizing committee of the llangollen trials therefore resorted to cutting the undergrowth on the course terrain.93 this led john dickson, the scottish poet and hill shepherd, to sneer that trial collies only performed well on a golf course.94 90 macdonald, stephen’s book, 268. 91 charles brewster macpherson, “my dogs — some reminiscences”, field, 30 september 1911, 781. 92 “lake district sheepdog trials”, field, 29 august 1908, 396. 93 “lake district sheep dog trials”, field, 27 august 1904, 379. 94 quoted in mundell, country diary, 29. theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 213 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) the international sheepdog society’s reforms the popularity of the trials did not suffer from these negative assessments of their practical usefulness. on the contrary, in the twentieth century they would grow into a worldwide phenomenon, with an increasing number of triallers without a farming background, and with more and more women contenders after the second world war.95 training sheepdogs and competing in trials provided “pretty amusement” to any dog lover, the editor of the kennel wrote in 1903, and a special stake for “amateurs” was organized as early as 1891 as part of the denbigh trials.96 the first training club for sheepdogs was founded in haddington near edinburgh in 1906 — the same year the international sheepdog society (isds) was established.97 outside britain, trials associations were established even in countries where sheep farming was a marginal economic activity, and over the course of the twentieth century several national associations joined the isds as associate members. while nineteenth-century londoners had never warmed up to the trials, in the years around the second world war thousands of people — some twenty thousand in 1949 — watched the sheepdog trials sponsored by the daily express in london hyde park. the public success of the competitions reached new heights with the bbc show one man and his dog, which has been on air since 1976. in britain, the number of viewers peaked at eight million in 1981.98 today, handlers from all over the world compete in the isds’s world sheepdog trials. the first edition, held in bala in 2002, attracted eighteen thousand visitors.99 so it was not without reason that eric halsall, longtime isds director, trial judge and commentator of the bbc show, declared the border 95 combe, shepherds, 71–73. 96 “the kennel”, field, 29 august 1903, 400; “denbigh sheepdog trials”, field, 7 november 1891, 714. 97 the field, 18 august 1906, 323. 98 see “1949 hyde park sheepdog trials with j. m. wilson”, posted by isds sheepdog archive on 29 june 2018, youtube, 3:08, https://youtu.be/isp7rtlxgwk. for the bbc series, see wikipedia, “one man and his dog”, last modified 17 june 2024, https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/one_man_and_his_dog; clips can be watched on youtube. 99 “2002 isds bala world sheepdog trials”, rural route videos, 2003; posted to youtube by omer alkubaisy on 9 march 2019, https://youtu.be/1yjiesj2l4o. https://youtu.be/isp7rtlxgwk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/one_man_and_his_dog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/one_man_and_his_dog https://youtu.be/1yjiesj2l4o 214 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) collie to be one of the “great success stories of british agriculture”, and it was doubtlessly the public appeal of the trials that contributed largely to this success.100 what halsall also meant, was that the trials had shown to the world that the border collie was the proverbial sheepdog: it was the collie who made sheep farming possible even under the most difficult conditions, and there was no herding breed anywhere in the world that surpassed the collie in sagacity and efficiency. in halsall’s words, the collie was “the best dog in the world for that purpose”.101 in the same vein, the isds boasted that britain “is very much the ‘kennel of the world’ as far as the working sheepdog is concerned”.102 all this is not to say that the landowners and farmers’ criticism of the trials left them unaffected. it may safely be assumed that the changes in the trials’ design and judging discussed by urdank were a response to the critiques. within the isds, farmers and shepherds took the lead in organizing trials and the role of the landed gentry gradually waned. a more “workmanlike” approach came to prevail, urdank argued.103 the quality of the work became central, and it was judged on the basis of an elaborate point system. speed of working was considered less important, and the dogs’ ability to work effectively and independently gained prominence over ‘style’ and ‘command’. the maltese cross disappeared, the entrance of the pen was made wider, and in the championship final round dogs were required to work two lots of ten sheep. the beauty contest was replaced by competitions for “type” and “condition”, but eventually these elements were abolished altogether. 100 halsall, sheepdog trials, 36. 101 halsall, british sheepdogs, 7. 102 “the shepherd’s dog”, international sheep dog society. the site is under reconstruction and this page was recently removed, but it was archived on 11 april 2024 at https://web. archive.org/web/20240411130538/https://www.isds.org.uk/the-isds/the-shepherds-dog/. 103 urdank, “the rationalisation,” 72–80. for a description of the isds course designs, see also reid, “sheepdog trials”. the landed gentry’s interest in sheep farming had already begun to wane in the 1880s, when imported wool and mutton pushed prices down; see hunter, “sheep and deer”. the aims of the isds were to financially support shepherd families in case of need, improve the sheepdog, and stimulate public interest in the shepherd and shepherding. after world war i, separate classes were created for farmers and shepherds in order not to disadvantage the latter, who had less time and money to invest in their dogs. https://web.archive.org/web/20240411130538/https://www.isds.org.uk/the-isds/the-shepherds-dog/ https://web.archive.org/web/20240411130538/https://www.isds.org.uk/the-isds/the-shepherds-dog/ theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 215 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) in line with this, it can be added, the shepherds’ use of voice commands returned. the trend towards exercising extreme restraint in this regard was at its peak in the decades around 1900 but was ultimately reversed. with genteel influence declining, voice commands once again became a normal part of the shepherds’ communication with their dogs, and they still are today. concomitantly, the use of arm signals waned, and judges no longer put a premium on silent communication.104 it should be noted, however, that urdank’s analysis only pertains to the isds trials and that, initially, the society was ‘international’ merely in that it brought triallers from scotland and england together. wales joined in the society in 1922, ireland in 1961, but other nations can only become associate members. moreover, the society was never a governing body that set rules to the british trialling circuit as a whole. different course designs are still in use at the hundreds of smaller trials held every year at regional and local level. many of these competitions continue to work with small lots of sheep, and dogs may still have to negotiate the maltese cross.105 outside britain, different models are also used. at the australian national championship competition, for instance, dogs have to work three sheep. even more importantly, even though the isds put more emphasis on efficiency and independence, the collies’ typical herding behaviour — the principal attraction of the trials for the spectators — has not changed fundamentally. if anything, selective breeding has fixed the dogs’ typical motor patterns, such as “eye-stalk” and “clapping” — the technical term for crouching — ever more firmly in their hard-wired behavioural repertoire.106 for trial dogs, working silently is still mandatory, and biting continues to be a capital offense. later criticism what did not change either, was the criticism of the trials’ purported practical usefulness. it continued unabated, despite the isds’s 104 hart (the hill shepherd, 45) noted that gesturing is now actually frowned upon at trials. 105 for an impression of local welsh trialling, see mccaig, mr. and mrs. dog. 106 the display of a motor pattern can become hypertrophied to the extent that a dog may virtually freeze while executing it (“sticky dog syndrome”); see coppinger and coppinger, dogs, 203; cropper, the dog man, 46. 216 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) reforms, and it can still be heard today. in 1929 top handler james scott deplored the fact that “it is rare one meets a farmer who will give his hearty support to sheepdog trials”, one of the complaints being that their training caused unnecessary worrying of the flock.107 similarly, in 1982 eric halsall, commentator of the bbc shows, wrote that farmers were still unconvinced of the border collie’s superior herding qualities and did not think the extra time involved in giving a working collie the extra polish needed for the trials was worth the effort.108 in herdwicks (2009), a history of one of the lake district’s principal sheep breeds, geoff brown, longtime secretary of the herdwick sheep breeders association, pointed out that lake district sheepdogs, called “cumberland curs”, differ from border collies in several respects. they are “generally much less biddable than the collie”, who is selected for “obedience rather than for an instinctive and intelligent ability to seek and gather sheep which is the hallmark of the good fell dog”. echoing macpherson’s observations in the field, he noted that work on the fells requires a dog who barks when the sheep go into hiding, for instance, on slopes with extensive bracken growth.109 in his counting sheep (2014) philip walling, a former northumberland sheep farmer and writer, observed that the trial collie is not up to strenuous fell work.110 the trials require short bursts of energy, and selective breeding has turned trial collies into sprinters lacking the stamina for long hours of gathering widely dispersed fell sheep. especially on hot days, they may run out of steam and get overheated. additionally, they do not bark, which is an indispensable quality to retrieve sheep from their hiding places and keep them moving. experienced hill shepherds, walling noted, use powerful barking dogs who can work on their own, and they look down upon trial collies as prime donne who let you down when you need them most.111 iris combe, a breeder and writer on collies, likewise acknowledged that 107 quoted in halsall, sheepdog trials, 35–36. 108 halsall, sheepdog trials, 36. 109 brown, herdwicks, 65–66. see also hancock, dogs of the shepherds, 84. 110 walling, counting sheep, 204–217. 111 walling, counting sheep, 206; 214. theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 217 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) a strong, loose-eyed — i.e., without strong eye — and barking dog is better suited for hill work.112 some hill shepherds even use dogs of the hunter type, who, rather than herding them, chase the sheep to get them moving.113 in interviews on the website shepherds with beardies, which promotes the modern version of the beardie as a better alternative for herding sheep, shepherds criticize the high-strung disposition of the collie: they never ‘turn-off’ when near the sheep. beardies are loose-eyed, drive in drover-like fashion, bark and bite when necessary, and can catch a sheep. some shepherds consider the collie’s dropping and crouching unnecessary antics and a waste of time. beardies always work on their feet.114 the welsh sheepdog society also promotes the reconstruction of a barking, loose-eyed dog working on his feet, as used by welsh hill shepherds before the introduction of the collie.115 despite the ban on biting at the trials, hill shepherds in the twentieth century have continued to use collies that may bite sheep and can catch them on command.116 even some contemporary triallers acknowledge that work at the hill farm places different demands on the dogs than what is expected on the course, and that biting — often euphemistically referred to as “gripping” — may be condoned in practical shepherding. for instance, viv billingham, a sheep farmer and an accomplished trialler, wrote: “i fear that the greater the popularity of trialling, the more attributes the dog will lose. the hill man’s requirements in a dog, namely power and practical ability, will always be the same”. therefore, according to billingham, if a sheep turns on the dog, biting is excusable, and if a ewe needs treatment, 112 combe, border collies, 72. see also rebanks, the shepherd’s life, chapter 2. 113 mundell, country diary, 36–38, 164–65. 114 “shepherds/farmers”, shepherds with beardies, archived 12 april 2016 at https://web. archive.org/web/20160412140256/http:/www.shepherdswithbeardies.com/shepherdsfarmers/shepherds_farmers.htm. see also hart, the hill shepherd, 40; mundell, country diary, 36–38, 162–66. 115 “welsh sheepdog society film”, posted by tim jones on 29 july 2016, youtube, 2:00, https://youtu.be/9f7mgkjhkmo. see also hancock, dogs of the shepherds, 85–86. 116 see for instance mcculloch, sheepdogs, 66. see also the bfi national archive film “blackfaced sheep” (1946), posted by bfi on 12 december 2017, youtube, 30:42, https://youtu. be/4orhypxeeus. https://web.archive.org/web/20160412140256/http:/www.shepherdswithbeardies.com/shepherds-farmers/shepherds_farmers.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20160412140256/http:/www.shepherdswithbeardies.com/shepherds-farmers/shepherds_farmers.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20160412140256/http:/www.shepherdswithbeardies.com/shepherds-farmers/shepherds_farmers.htm https://youtu.be/9f7mgkjhkmo https://youtu.be/4orhypxeeus https://youtu.be/4orhypxeeus 218 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) it is helpful to have a dog who knows how to catch her.117 reversely, both billingham and trialler donald mccaig noted that, when competing in sheepdog trials with a powerful and self-willed dog, it is hard to avoid disqualification if the sheep do not readily cooperate.118 according to the isds, improving the sheepdog is still the society’s objective today, because “without a good working dog the work of the shepherd, both on the hills and the lowlands would be impossible”.119 the irony is, however, that trial collies, precisely because of their specialization for the trials, have become less, not more suitable for hill shepherding. nor can it be said that such collies are indispensable in the lowlands. today, with almost universal enclosure of pasture areas, lowland sheep farmers, like the farmers from the midlands and the south we encountered above, do not need a highly trained trial collie. many sheep farmers are even better off without a sheepdog, the coppingers noted, because the costs of training and maintaining a herding dog rarely outweigh the benefits.120 on the european continent, for instance, various types of sheepdogs were used until the end of the nineteenth century, but most of the working varieties have disappeared since then.121 continental sheep farmers now routinely manage their enclosed flocks without dogs. even when 117 billingham, one woman, 52, 69, 94; quotation on p. 69. similarly, an online instruction video by collie trainer and trialler emma gray, who frequently appears on the bbc show this farming life, features a collie assisting her in catching a ewe: “how to catch a sheep...with sheepdog school”, posted by our farming life with sheepdog school on 26 november 2023, youtube, 7:33, https://youtu.be/em9ywm1y8nc. see also “paul and carol”, shepherds with beardies, archived on 15 june 2016 at https://web.archive.org/ web/20160615052856/http:/www.shepherdswithbeardies.com/shepherds-farmers/ scotland/paul%20and%20carol/paul_carol.htm. 118 billingham, one woman, 69; mccaig, mr. and mrs. dog, 163. 119 “what we do”, the international sheepdog society, accessed 16 july 2025, https://www. isds.org.uk/the-isds/what-we-do/. 120 coppinger and coppinger, dogs, 189. the price of an excellent sheepdog can easily go up to five thousand pounds. it can also go even higher: the record price (from 2021) is £27,100, see https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-55935911. 121 for an overview of the pastoral breeds, see hancock, dogs of the shepherds. see also “index to border collie cousins”, the border collie museum, last modified 23 february 2014, https://www.bordercolliemuseum.org/bccousins/bc_cousins.html. most of the european sheepdog types that still exist have been developed into show breeds. https://youtu.be/em9ywm1y8nc https://web.archive.org/web/20160615052856/http:/www.shepherdswithbeardies.com/shepherds-farmers/scotland/paul%20and%20carol/paul_carol.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20160615052856/http:/www.shepherdswithbeardies.com/shepherds-farmers/scotland/paul%20and%20carol/paul_carol.htm https://web.archive.org/web/20160615052856/http:/www.shepherdswithbeardies.com/shepherds-farmers/scotland/paul%20and%20carol/paul_carol.htm https://www.isds.org.uk/the-isds/what-we-do/ https://www.isds.org.uk/the-isds/what-we-do/ https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-55935911 https://www.bordercolliemuseum.org/bccousins/bc_cousins.html theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 219 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) sheep have to be relocated over long distances, herding dogs are not self-evidently indispensable. for thousands of years, and since long before specialized herding dogs were developed, shepherds in the southern mountain ranges of europe and asia have been moving huge numbers of sheep over hundreds of miles during the yearly transhumance. they did (and still do) use dogs, but these were of the livestock guardian type, meant to protect the sheep from predators.122 to be sure, the trials have given the collie worldwide renown, and shepherds who feel they need a sheepdog often consider the border collie an obvious choice, but whether they really need such a dog is a different matter. australian and new zealand sheep farmers certainly regard herding dogs as indispensable. their dogs descend from ancestors imported from the uk in the nineteenth century to drive the imperial herds of british cattle and sheep “shot round the world”, as rebecca woods put it.123 their herding conduct differs from that of their forebears, though. selective breeding and crossing with other breeds have turned them into strong and independent dogs, such as the kelpie, the australian cattle dog, and the huntaway, who use their bodies and teeth to control sheep.124 the huntaway barks loudly and incessantly while working, and, like the kelpie, jumps on the sheep’s backs, for instance to push them through handling equipment. the australian cattle dog is a ‘heeler’ who bites his charges at the hocks. british sheepdogs exported to south and north america in the nineteenth century underwent similar changes in their behavioural repertoire.125 122 coppinger and coppinger, dogs, 101–30, 189; welker et al. (“a wolf in sheep’s clothing”) date the development of specialized herding dogs to the early middle ages. see also various contributions in fiore and lugli, dogs, past and present. 123 woods, the herds. 124 for the australian cattle dog, see clark, a dog. for the kelpie’s working style, see for instance “casterton dog auction 2022 — lot no. 21 — sally, 2yr 3m”, posted by emma leonard on 4 april 2022, youtube, https://youtu.be/tyms2rxdofq. 125 for instance, australian shepherds (a breed developed in the american west) are looseeyed, work on their feet and may bite and bark; see “working description”, the australian shepherd club of america, accessed 17 july 2025, https://asca.org/aussies/ about-aussies/working-description/. see also haraway, when species meet, 97–107. the herding style of the patagonian sheepdog of chile and argentine resembles the beardie’s; see barrios, “the patagonian sheepdog”. https://youtu.be/tyms2rxdofq https://asca.org/aussies/about-aussies/working-description/ https://asca.org/aussies/about-aussies/working-description/ 220 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) in sum, the claim that herding sheepdogs are indispensable for sheep farming is an exaggeration, and this is all the more true for the view that the isds trial collie is the best dog in the world for the purpose. for practical farm work, many shepherds all over the world prefer a different kind of dog. the typical trial collie is first and foremost a dog for sports and entertainment. the sheep in the equation: lead or drive? historical research is not meant to tell us what to do, but it can raise relevant questions about the present. if sheepdog trialling is intended for sports and entertainment, a pertinent question is whether it is acceptable, from an animal welfare perspective, to continue the tradition. herding is based on the dog’s predatory instinct, with the sheep as prey. for a sheepdog, executing this behaviour is intrinsically rewarding; for sheep it is anything but.126 even under the best of circumstances, with a well-trained dog and a thoughtfully designed course, there is no fun in trialling for sheep. at the very least, their involuntary participation annoys them, but things do not always go well and running in a trial can be agonizing.127 furthermore, trials only show the tip of the iceberg. collies need to be trained, and sheep serving as ‘training material’ are worse off than sheep in actual competitions. while their behaviour is partly hard-wired, dogs must learn to obey commands and interact with the shepherd. there is also a lot they have to unlearn, such as harassing and biting the sheep,128 and a dog may even turn out to be unsuitable for competitive trialling. the sheep bear the burden of everything inexperienced and unfit dogs do but ought not to during the training process. today, moreover, many people aspiring to participate in trials have no farming background and may initially know little about shepherding, meaning that sheep also have to endure the training process of such novices. it is not the purpose of this paper to make an ethical assessment of whether or not all this should 126 coppinger and coppinger, dogs, 206–211. 127 a trialler who acknowledges this is donald mccaig; see for instance his mr. and mrs. dog. 128 see, for instance, “top tips for sheepdog training (part 1): remember the dog’s hunting”, posted by andy nickless on 14 april 2020, youtube, 4:35, https://youtu.be/kzqka_apcxk. https://youtu.be/kzqka_apcxk theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 221 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) be condoned for mere entertainment purposes, yet the question is justified. it might be countered that the real problem is with the trials in their present form. in order to really contribute to their stated purpose — the improvement of practical shepherding — they should be brought more into line with the daily routines at the farm. however, a closer alignment of the trials with actual shepherding practices, in britain and beyond, would also call for a different type of dog. further, sheep welfare will not improve by replacing the trial collies with dogs who, like some of the border collie’s foreign cousins, bark a lot, bite the sheep, and jump on their backs. however this may be, the history of shepherding suggests an alternative solution. the worldwide reputation of the collie as a herding dog is an example of british exceptionalism that has gone global. for millennia, the world’s domestic sheep were not driven by dogs, but led by the shepherd. if sheepdogs were used at all, they were of the livestock guardian type.129 british shepherds deviated from this model, probably in the late middle ages, when they switched to a system of shepherding in which sheep were gathered and moved by driving dogs, with the shepherd walking behind the flock instead of in front. the explanation, already to be found in caius’s description of the sheepdog from 1576, is well-known: the early extermination of the wolf in britain enabled shepherds to pasture their sheep in open fields, where they could disperse widely without risk of predation, even if left unattended.130 one can see the rationale, in such a situation, of having a gathering dog to collect the sheep and to drive them in any desired direction. outside britain, the older model of leading the sheep was maintained, and some of the british agricultural writers discussed above were remarkably positive about it. in his plea against too much ‘dogging’ of the sheep, ellis approvingly quoted a french author saying that shepherds should be the sheep’s “leaders and guides” rather than their “lords”.131 youatt contrasted the peaceful way continental 129 see footnote 122. 130 caius, of englishe dogges, 23. 131 ellis, a compleat system, 2. 222 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) shepherds moved their flocks with the sometimes-brutal approach of english shepherds. citing a work on spanish merinos, he wrote: “there is no driving of the flock; that is a practice entirely unknown; but the shepherd, when he wishes to remove his sheep, calls to him a tame wether accustomed to feed from his hands. the favourite, however distant, obeys his call, and the rest follow”.132 according to henry stephens, ewes with young lambs should not be driven at all. the shepherd should carry one of the lambs in his arms and have the ewes follow him.133 in her shepherds of britain (1911) adelaide gosset noted that, as an exception to the rule, shepherds of the downs preferred to lead their flocks. this neatly explains why, as noted above, they were unimpressed by the collie’s working style and found no interest in the trials.134 leading the sheep would remain an anomaly in britain, but its advantages were occasionally reiterated — for instance by that maverick of british agriculture, allen fraser, in his animal breeding heresies (1960). in the middle east, he wrote, shepherding was “so much more delicate, more gentle and i am certain of it, biologically more sound. the sheep were never driven. they were led”.135 this different role of the shepherd had a different attitude towards the sheep as a corollary. fraser continued by referring to the biblical metaphor of the lord as the good shepherd: “the sheep hear his voice; and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out […] he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him, for they know his voice” (john 10: 3–5). it is precisely because of their trustfulness and compliance that sheep epitomize the faithful believer in judeo-christianity. the field’s reports on the sheepdog trials present a starkly contrasting metaphorical image of sheep: that of icons of stupidity. they are called stupid, countless times, for not cooperating or actively resisting: “he had stupid sheep, and failed to pen”; “a trio of horned imbeciles”; “the pig easily holds the record of crass stupidity [yet sheepdog trials] reveal 132 youatt, the dog, 61–62. 133 stephens, the book, 161. 134 gosset, shepherds of britain, 105. 135 fraser, animal husbandry heresies, 151. fig. 7 a dutch shepherd leading his flock. elias stark, “schaapskudde op de heide”, 1889, rijksmuseum amsterdam. 224 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) the sheep as it really is, the embodiment of unadulterated, maddening perversity in a concentrated form that is unapproachable by any other animal”.136 not surprisingly, the commentators’ qualifications of the dogs’ behaviour were exactly opposite: intelligent, sagacious, patient, tactful, and obedient. on the trial course, the sheep could never win: if they cooperated, the dog won; if they didn’t, they were stupid.137 this stereotype of stupidity reflects a vision of shepherding based on dominance and control rather than trust and cooperation, reducing sheep to subaltern creatures whose lack of rationality justifies their subjugation. as recent studies confirm, however, sheep are not stupid. they are social animals that form long-lasting bonds with their offspring and with each other.138 sheep recognize flock members and humans individually, even from photographs, and can read facial expressions.139 their safety and well-being are in the group, and their flocking behaviour is a manifestation of their social intelligence and collective memory, not of lack of individuality.140 calling sheep stupid, sarah franklin observed, may derive from the western inclination to see intelligence and individualism as inextricably linked. in china, where “conformity is a competitive social skill”, sheep are considered highly intelligent animals.141 by virtue of their flocking instinct, sheep are trainable as a group. a poignant example: at the slaughterhouse a flock can be induced to calmly follow a trained sheep, which prevents them from panicking when having to enter the facility.142 in shepherding, it is not only the shepherd and the dog who communicate: it is not uncommon 136 quotations from field, 13 october 1883, 518; 2 september 1905, 433; 2 september 1911, 535. 137 it is not uncommon today for triallers to blame a bad run on bad sheep. see, for instance, “omahd 21st series wildboarclough 1996 singles”, days gone bye – sheepdog trial reruns, youtube, 1 june 2022, https://youtu.be/tt95l5scjfi, where the sheep are called a “miserable bunch” and “rotten”. 138 rowell, “till death”; rowell and rowell, “the social organization”; despret, “sheep do have opinions”. 139 kendrick, “sheep don’t forget”; knolle, “sheep recognize”. 140 despret and meuret, “cosmoecological sheep”, 30–33. 141 franklin, dolly mixtures, 200–201. 142 bremner, braggins, and kilgour, “training sheep”. on such “judas sheep”, see also see coulthard, follow the flock, 120–21. https://youtu.be/tt95l5scjfi theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 225 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) for sheep to respond to a command given to the dog.143 scandinavian farmers have an age-old tradition of calling their cows home for milking (“kulning”), and sheep can likewise be called to come to the shepherd.144 establishing trust is crucial for sheep to come when called, and if they are willing to come, they can also be led. i can adduce my own experience in shepherding without a dog as an illustration. for more than twenty-five years, my partner and i have had a flock of some twenty clun forest sheep, a shropshire breed with a reputation for skittishness. in the first weeks after we bought them, their sole intent seemed to be to stay as far away from us as possible. this changed when we started feeding them, and after some time, they were willing to come when we called them to the feeding trough. the next step was that they would follow us to the trough in an adjacent pasture. eventually, they were also prepared to follow us to the shed and to a new pasture further down the road. it took more time (and patience on our part) for them to decide that the trailer means good news — a fresh field. they now enter it of their own accord. they are still easily spooked, for instance by strangers or tractors, and, once in a while, a ewe jumps the fence and dashes off. to retrieve her, we walk the flock towards her, and she will gladly join it to return home. we have never needed to repeat the training process with newcomers or lambs. older ewes who know the routines teach them by example how things work. admittedly, all this is more difficult to achieve on highland farms, where sheep are often left to their own devices for most of the year, yet even hill sheep come to the shepherd for winter feeding, and they can also be called.145 on the european continent, after a steep 143 savalois, “teaching the dog”; westling, “zoosemiotics”. 144 see, for example, jennie tiderman-österberg, “kulning: the swedish herding calls of the north”, folklife magazine 2 september 2020, https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/ kulning-swedish-herding-calls. 145 for examples of calling sheep, see “the good shepherd and his sheep”, posted on 10 july 2012 by lbotnx2, youtube, https://youtu.be/coq_grsflns; “this woman is living her best life with a family of sheep”, posted on 25 september 2023 by the dodo, youtube, https://youtu.be/qmamgbtmiqs; “calling in the sheep”, posted on 20 may 2012 by suzannacramptonireland, youtube, https://youtu.be/m7btqqdrdow; and “calling sheep”, posted on 24 october 2012 by meridianjacobs, youtube, https://youtu.be/holr54ef4ly. https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/kulning-swedish-herding-calls https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/kulning-swedish-herding-calls https://youtu.be/coq_grsflns https://youtu.be/qmamgbtmiqs https://youtu.be/m7btqqdrdow https://youtu.be/holr54ef4ly 226 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) decline in the twentieth century, shepherding is being reintroduced on a modest scale, mainly for conservation, cultural heritage, and education purposes. newfangled shepherds often know no better than to drive their sheep with border collies, but others have restored the traditional practice of leading them. still, they often need dogs that flank the moving flock or act as a living fence to keep the grazing sheep out of crop fields and other no-go areas. trials and demonstrations are being organized to enhance their working abilities.146 from a sheep welfare perspective, shepherding with these loose-eyed dogs is not always an improvement, as some types can be harsh on straying sheep. in my opinion, their barking (except perhaps on command) and biting should best be penalized by trial judges, as in the case of the border collie trials. it seems likely the time is near when using animals against their will and at the expense of their welfare will no longer be considered acceptable for entertainment purposes. if there is to be a future for sheepdog trials, it seems to lie in a model that serves to improve practical sheep management and at the same time meets sheep welfare requirements. this means that sheep should be led rather than driven, with trust and cooperation as guiding principles rather than dominance and coercion. the days of the trial collie would then be over. for practical shepherding, in cases where the help of dogs is deemed indispensable, sheepdogs who function as the eyes in the shepherd’s back and do not worry the sheep hold out the best promise of sheep-friendly shepherding. the collies surely won’t mind being replaced. there is no lack of other sportive opportunities for them to have fun. 146 examples are the french beauceron and the german altdeutscher schäferhund. for demonstration videos, see “working beauceron, herding 1000 sheep with 1 dog”, posted by beauceron von den hütern asgards on 5 december 2022, youtube, 2:15, https://youtu.be/ah3z_mvmrcy; “altdeutscher hütehund bei der arbeit”, posted by paul m. on 20 april 2019, youtube, 9:06, https://youtu.be/6d0r-kfvlsu; “niedersächsische meisterschaft der schäfer 2015”, posted by agrarblick on 23 august 2015, youtube, 9:52, https://youtu.be/tkioyt29y08. https://youtu.be/ah3z_mvmrcy https://youtu.be/6d0r-kfvlsu https://youtu.be/tkioyt29y08 theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 227 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) acknowledgements thanks to the many shepherds who shared their thoughts about styles of shepherding with me. thanks also to margaret derry, gareth enticott (who is writing a book on the history of the new zealand huntaway), and elian hattinga for their encouragement and suggestions. two anonymous reviewers provided perceptive criticism that helped me to improve the paper. sheep do have opinions (despret), and my own sheep’s eagerness to share them, across the species barrier, provided the incentive for writing this paper. works cited the agrarian history of england and wales. 8 vols. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1967–2011. barrios, natasha, alvaro fuenzalida, marcelo gómez, consuelo heuser, rodrigo muñoz, elaine a. ostrander, heidi g. parker, and césar gonzálezlagos. “the patagonian sheepdog: historical perspective on a herding dog in chile.” diversity 11, no. 12 (2019): 245. https://doi.org/10.3390/d11120245. beilby, ralph, and thomas bewick. a general history of quadrupeds. newcastle upon tyne: s. hodgson, r. beilby, and t. bewick, 1790. billingham, viv. one woman and her dog. moffat: lochar publishing, 1988. bingley, william, and samuel howett. memoirs of british quadrupeds, illustrative principally of their habits of life, instincts, sagacity, and uses to mankind. london: darton and harvey, 1809. bremner, k. j., j. b. braggins, and r. kilgour. “training sheep as ‘leaders’ in abattoirs and farm sheep yards.” proceedings of the new zealand society of animal production 40 (1980): 111–16. brown, geoff. herdwicks: herdwick sheep and the english lake district. south stanmore (cumbria): hayloft, 2009. brown, thomas. biographical sketches and authentic anecdotes of dogs. edinburgh: oliver and boyd, 1829. caius, johannes. of englishe dogges: the diuersities, the names, the natures, and the properties. translated by abraham fleming. london, 1576. carpenter, e. b. the blue riband of the heather: the supreme champions 1906–88. ipswich: farming press, 1989. clark, noreen r. a dog for the job: australia’s cattle dogs. calwell: inspiring publishers, 2022. combe, iris. border collies. london: faber & faber, 1978. combe, iris. shepherds, sheep and sheepdogs: a feminine view of shepherding life and customs. clapham: dalesman books, 1983. coppinger, raymond and lorna coppinger. dogs: a new understanding of canine origin, behavior and evolution. chicago: the university of chicago press, 2002. coulthard, sally. follow the flock: how sheep shaped human civilization. new york: pegasus, 2021. cropper, jim. the dog man. as told to edward hart. york: wsn, 2005. https://doi.org/10.3390/d11120245 228 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) dalziel, hugh. british dogs: their varieties, history, characteristics, breeding, management and exhibition. london: the bazaar office, [1879]. derry, margaret e. bred for perfection: shorthorn cattle, collies, and arabian horses since 1800. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press, 2003. despret, vinciane. “sheep do have opinions.” in making things public. atmospheres of democracy, edited by bruno latour and peter weibel, 360–70. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2006. despret, vinciane and michel meuret. “cosmoecological sheep and the arts of living on a damaged planet.” environmental humanities 8, no. 1 (2016): 24–36. https://doi. org/10.1215/22011919-3527704. edwards, sydenham t. cynographia britannica [...]. london, 1800. ellis, william. a compleat system of experienced improvements, made on sheep, grass-lambs, and houselambs, or, the country gentleman’s, the grasier’s, the sheep-dealer’s, and the shepherd’s sure guide in the profitable management of those most serviceable creatures […]. london, 1749. the field: the county gentleman’s newspaper. london: field office, 1853–1911. fiore, ivana and francesca lugli, eds. dogs, past and present: an interdisciplinary perspective. oxford: archaeopress, 2023. franklin, sara. dolly mixtures: the remaking of genealogy. durham, nc: duke university press, 2007. fraser, allen. animal husbandry heresies. london: crosby lockwood & son, 1960. gosset, adelaide l. j. shepherds of britain: scenes from shepherd life past and present from the best authorities. london: constable and company, 1911. grew, sheila. key dogs from the border collie family. hernando, ms: heritage farms pub, 1993. halsall, eric. british sheepdogs, being the history of the international sheep dog society. burnley: turner and earnshaw, 1992. halsall, eric. sheepdog trials. cambridge: patrick stevens, 1982. hancock, david. dogs of the shepherds: a review of the pastoral breeds. ramsbury: crowood press, 2014. haraway, donna j. when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008. hart, edward. the hill shepherd. newton abbot: david and charles, 1977. hogg, james. the shepherd’s calendar. edinburgh: william blackwood, 1829. holmes, john. the farmer’s dog. london: popular dogs publishing co., 1975. hunter, james. “sheep and deer: highland sheep farming, 1850–1900,” northern scotland 1, no. 1 (1972): 199–222. https:// doi.org/10.3366/nor.1972.0015. jones, edward w. h. sheep-dog trials and the sheep-dog [...]. brecon: edwin poole, 1892. kendrick, keith m., ana p. da costa, andrea e. leigh, michael r. hinton, and jon w. peirce . “sheep don’t forget a face.” nature 414, no. 6860 (2001): 165–66. https://doi.org/10.1038/35102669. knolle, franziska, rita p. goncalves, and a. jennifer morton. “sheep recognize familiar and unfamiliar human faces from two-dimensional images.” royal society open science 4, no. 11 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171228. lee, rawdon briggs. a history and description of the collie or sheep dog in his british varieties. london: h. cox, 1890. leighton, robert. the new book of the dog: a comprehensive natural history of british dogs and their foreign relatives, with chapters on law, breeding, kennel management, and veterinary treatment. london: cassell and company, 1907. https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527704 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527704 https://doi.org/10.3366/nor.1972.0015 https://doi.org/10.3366/nor.1972.0015 https://doi.org/10.1038/35102669 https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.171228 theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” | 229 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) little, john. practical observations on the improvement and management of mountain sheep, and sheep farms. edinburgh: john moir, 1815. macdonald, james. stephen’s book of the farm. 5th ed. edinburgh and london: william blackwood and sons, 1908. malden, walter james. british sheep and shepherding. london: macdonald & martin, 1915. martin, w. c. l. the history of the dog: its origin, physical and moral characteristics, and its principal varieties. london: charles knight & co., 1845. mascall, leonard. the first booke of cattell: wherein is shewed the gouernment of oxen, kine, calues, and howe to vse bulles and other cattell to the yoake, and fell […]. london, 1587. mccaig, donald. mr. and mrs. dog: our travels, trials, adventures, and epiphanies. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2013. mcculloch, john herries. border collie studies. edinburgh: the pentland press, 1952. mcculloch, john herries. sheep dogs and their masters: being a history of the border collie, together with some notes about the men who have developed the breed. dumfries: robert dinwiddie, 1938. meyrick, john. house dogs and sporting dogs. london: taylor and francis, 1861. mundell, matt. country diary. edinburgh: gordon wright publishing, 1981. rebanks, james. the shepherd’s life: a tale of the lake district. london: allen lane, 2015. reid, james a. “sheepdog trials.” in the book of the dog, edited by brian veseyfitzgerald, 736–51. london: nicholson & watson, 1948. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate: the english and other creatures in victorian england. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1987. ritvo, harriet. the platypus and the mermaid, and other figments of the classifying imagination. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1997. rowell, t. e. “till death do us part: longlasting bonds between ewes and their daughters.” animal behaviour 42, no. 4 (1991): 681–82. https://doi.org/10.1016/ s0003-3472(05)80249-0. rowell, t. e., and c. a. rowell, “the social organization of feral ovis aries ram groups in the pre-rut period.” ethology 95, no. 3 (1993): 213–32. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1439-0310.1993.tb00472.x. savalois, nathalie, nicolas lescureux, and florence brunois. “teaching the dog and learning from the dog: interactivity in herding dog training and use.” anthrozoös 26, no. 1 (2013): 77–91. https://doi.org/10.2752/17530371 3x13534238631515. shaw, vero. the illustrated book of the dog. london: cassell, fetter, galpin & co., 1881. smith, charles hamilton. the natural history of dogs. vol. 1. edinburgh: lizars, 1839. st. john, charles. short sketches of the wild sports and natural history of the highlands. london: john murray, 1849. stephens, henry. the book of the farm: detailing the labors of the farmer, steward, plowman, hedger, cattle-man, shepherd, field-worker, and dairymaid. new york: c. m. saxton, 1851. stonehenge [john henry walsh], ed. the dogs of the british islands. 2nd ed. london: horace cox, 1872. taplin, william. the sportsman’s cabinet: or, a correct delineation of the various dogs used in the sports of the field. london: j. cundee, 1804. tosh, john. manliness and masculinities in nineteenth-century britain: essays on gender, family and empire. harlow: pearson longman, 2005. trow-smith, robert. a history of british livestock husbandry, 1700–1900. london: routledge and kegan paul, 1959. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0003-3472(05)80249-0 https://doi.org/10.1016/s0003-3472(05)80249-0 230 | theunissen , “my kingdom for a barking dog!” humanimalia 15.2 (2025) urdank, albion. “the rationalisation of rural sport: british sheepdog trials, 1873–1946.” rural history 17, no. 1 (2006): 65–82. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s0956793305001603. walling, philip. counting sheep: a celebration of the pastoral heritage of britain. london: profile books, 2014. welker, martin h., et al. “a wolf in sheep’s clothing: the development of livestock guarding dogs in the adriatic region of croatia.” journal of archaeological science: reports 42 (2022). https://doi. org/10.1016/j.jasrep.2022.103380. westling, louise. “the zoosemiotics of sheep herding with dogs,” in the semiotics of animal representations, edited by kadri tüür and morten tønnessen, 31–52. leiden: brill, 2014. white, ian. transforming fell and valley: landscape and parliamentary enclosure in north west england. lancaster: centre for northwest regional studies, 2003. woods, rebecca. the herds shot round the world. native breeds and the british empire, 1800–1900. chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 2017. worboys, michael, julie-marie strange, and neil pemberton. the invention of the modern dog: breed and blood in victorian britain. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2018. youatt, william. the dog. london: charles knight and co, 1845. _hlk154699687 _hlk164026754 _hlk162860679 _hlk163131968 _hlk161741356 _hlk189597605 _hlk163810057 _hlk154825269 _hlk156479068 _hlk154737456 _hlk154776303 _hlk155378150 _hlk154996005 _hlk162526673 _hlk162701595 _hlk157612939 _hlk161753350 _hlk160109647 _hlk160528451 _hlk160523782 _hlk160601716 _hlk164421011 _hlk189687865 humanimalia vol. 14, no. 1 (fall 2023) humanimalia is a biannual journal devoted to the study of human–animal relations. it is interdisciplinary, open-access, and peer-reviewed, publishing original articles from a wide range of cultural, historical, philosophical, political, and aesthetic perspectives. humanimalia has three aims: to explore and advance the vast range of scholarship on human–animal relations, to encourage exchange among scholars working from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and those working closely with animals in non-academic fields. we invite innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches. ideally, we seek papers that combine approaches, or at the very least draw upon research in other disciplines to contextualize their arguments. as much as possible, we seek papers that acknowledge and seek to advance a more-than-human conception of aesthetics, culture, and society. https://humanimalia.org cover: bart van der leck, de kat, 1914 casein on cement board (asbestos), kröller-müller museum, netherlands editorial board editor-in-chief kári driscoll utrecht university associate editors mari bastashevski amsterdam school for cultural analysis clemens driessen wageningen univeristy marianna szczygielska czech academy of sciences kerstin weich independent scholar book reviews editor dominic o’key university of sheffield intern imogen grigorovich copyeditors kári driscoll pauw vos deborah schijvers layout and typesetting kári driscoll https://humanimalia.org editorial | iii humanimalia 14.1 (2023) we are pleased to share with you the latest issue of humanimalia. it’s a bumper issue, weighing in at 450+ pages and featuring no fewer than ten research articles and eight book reviews on a broad range of topics relating to the complex cultural, historical, political, and technological dimensions of the human–animal relationship. this is not a special issue, and the articles are all very different in approach and subject matter, but there are nevertheless some overarching themes running through the contributions. one of these is the question of gender and its intersections with the discourse on species. jesse arseneault and rosemary-claire collard, for instance, revisit the history of animal and witch trials in mediaeval and early modern europe, arguing that, far from being a historical aberration, these trials testify to the emergence of a new reproductive order that still holds sway under global capitalism. as such, the historical prosecution of these “crimes against reproduction” highlights to the role of animality in the construction of gendered reproductive norms, and may, perhaps, in turn point towards alternative modes of relating to animal life. the intersections of gender and the biopolitical governance of human and nonhuman bodies is central to another contribution to this issue, namely “wild horse roundups and removals” by jennifer l. britton, abigail del grosso, cassidy ellis, and christian hunold. the authors examine the contentious and often violent altercations (physical and online) between wild horse advocates and the bureau of land management in the western united states, tracing how the disparate discourses and “ways of knowing and relating to wild horses” lead to exclusion and violence in these situations, but sometimes also to empathy and care across species lines. the issue of interspecies care and conservation is another recurring theme in the issue. architect and anthropologist ariane d’hoop explores the impact of urban renewal on swifts (apus apus) and the people who care for them in brussels. the belgian capital has long been host to a large population of these migratory birds, thanks in part to the distinctive putlog holes in the city’s historic buildings, iv | editorial humanimalia 14.1 (2023) which are ideal nesting sites, but these are gradually disappearing as a result of renovation and redevelopment. in her essay, d’hoop details the ethics of care and practices of attentiveness that unfold in the more-than-human city. interspecies care is also central to charlotte kroløkke and mervi honkatukia’s ethnographic study of a prison farm in central finland, which, until recently, served as a “living gene bank” for an endangered breed of lapland cows. the authors investigate how the precarious, parallel lives of the human inmates and the nonhuman animals in their care are folded together in and through the complex entanglements of biopolitics, gender, conservation, incarceration, and national identity that permeate this “space of exception”. another space of exception featured in this issue is the porton down defence science and technology laboratory in the uk, which, at the beggining of the cold war was the site of top-secret biological weapons testing involving experiments on countless animals, ranging from guinea pigs and mice to rabbits, cats, and monkeys. in her investigation into this site, catherine duxbury focuses on the role of wilful ignorance and what she calls the “strategic effacement” of nonhuman animals in the production of scientific objectivity. laura gelfand’s contribution, “a wolf in sheep’s clothing”, also deals with the theme of (in)visibility and agency and how these are produced and withheld within scientific institutions and discourses, although the institution in question is apparently quite different: nineteenth-century european art and the discipline of art history. in her essay, she revisits j.m. whistler’s white girl (1862). the painting and the central figure have been scrutinized by generations of critics and art historians, but, as gelfand notes, the striking animal presence hiding in plain sight at the bottom of the image — a wolf’s head mounted on a sheepskin rug — has gone largely unnoticed: another example of the paradoxical invisibility of animals in traditional humanities scholarship. moving through a series of interpretations of this chimerical figure, gelfand shows how critical attention to the material and semiotic presence of nonhumans in cultural artefacts can shed new light on their and our history. editorial | v humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the history of art plays an important role in hanneke ronnes and harry reddick’s sociocultural history of the dutch cat. as the authors show, based on their forays through the rich digital archive of literary texts, letters, pamphlets, and newspaper articles, the reputation and social position of the humble housecat has changed fundamentally over the past several centuries — from a dirty mouser and witches’ familiar, to the pampered puss of the bourgeoisie, but also the emblem of avantgarde aloofness, and the apotheosis of “pettability” — a trajectory that dovetails with the political, cultural, and economic transformations of dutch society. this analysis sheds light on the current international debate on the negative ecological impact of free-roaming cats on urban bird populations, and the specific, historically determined contours of that debate in the netherlands. moving from europe to southeast asia, agathe lemaitre’s essay presents an ethnographic investigation a different type of cat, the formosan clouded leopard and its spectral and material afterlives among the indigenous paiwan people of taiwan. the species has been officially extinct in taiwan for the past half-century but continues to occupy a privileged position within traditional paiwan society, both as a near-mythical creature and in the form of material objects, ritual garments, and other artefacts made from clouded leopard skin. drawing on the concept of survivance as theorized by georges didi-huberman and others, lemaitre examines how the ambiguous afterlife of the clouded leopard relates to the resilience of traditional paiwan culture in the face of globalization and environmental change. the material afterlives and ambiguous presences of taxidermied animals also play an important role in another institution that comes under scrutiny in this issue: the natural history museum. in “pachyderm matriarchy”, mark alvey revisits donna haraway’s seminal essay “teddy bear patriarchy”, and specifically her discussion of the role of taxidermist carl akeley’s wife delia in the creation of the african hall at the american museum of natural history. drawing on a wealth of historical and archival materials, alvey sets out “to deepen, and correct” the story of delia akeley’s involvement and thus to recuperate her authorship and agency. in the process, he also sheds light on the material and discursive practices that go into creating the literal vi | editorial humanimalia 14.1 (2023) elephants in the room. the natural history museum is also the site of anastassiya andrianova’s intervention, entitled “a dino fix”, in which she investigates the subversive potential of a vegan picturebook about a vegetarian t. rex named linus for teaching young children about evolution, extinction, and the anthropocene, all while challenging the hegemony of carno-phallogocentrism in a cutesy anthropomorphic way. along the way, the question of gender, care, and the production of knowledge come into renewed focus. the issue concludes with reviews of eight recent books, ranging from literary studies (maren tova linett’s literary bioethics; sundhya walther’s multispecies modernity; and saskia mccracken and alexy goody’s edited collection beastly modernisms), to history (jane hamlett and julie-marie strange’s pet revolution and éric baratay’s animal biographies), to multispecies ethnography and science and technology studies (irus braverman’s settling nature; lisa jean moore’s our transgenic future; and heather paxson’s edited volume, eating beside ourselves). it has been a busy year at humanimalia since the journal was relaunched in october of last year. thanks to the tireless support of the good people at openjournals.nl, we are now officially listed and indexed in the directory of open access journals (doaj). humanimalia has been firmly committed to open access scholarship and publishing since before it was cool, and this is an important acknowledgement of that fact. thanks as always go to my co-editors, to the peer reviewers, copyeditors, and to the authors. special thanks also to our intern, imogen grigorovich, for helping to prepare the full-text (html) versions of the articles in this issue. imogen has been busy retrofitting the entire humanimalia back catalogue, and we will be gradually rolling out the full text versions of all published articles in the coming months. watch this space. on behalf of the editorial team, kári driscoll utrecht, october 2023 microsoft word gouabault et al pdf.doc h u m a n i m a l i a 3:1 emmanuel gouabault, annik dubied, claudine burtonjeangros genuine zoocentrism or dogged anthropocentrism? on the personification of animal figures in the news introduction. over the past few decades, animal figures seem to have been increasingly personified in euro-american information media. references to domestic or wild animals described as human characters have become more frequent; an identity and a genealogy (first name, surname, filiation, etc.) are attributed, for example, to knut, the polar bear cub of the berlin zoo; to jj3, a bear killed in switzerland; as well as to tinkerbell, paris hilton’s chihuahua. the feelings and actions of these animals are often described at length. at the same time, however, an opposite trend can be observed in news reports highlighting aggressive or threatening animals; dangerous dogs, mad cows, birds or pigs spreading the flu seem more common than before, and these incidences, contrary to the trend of personification, reinforce human-animal alterity. this ambivalence in the media raises questions regarding public attitudes about the borderline between humans and animals. on the one hand, a vanishing borderline supports the idea of an increasing zoocentrism proposed by adrian franklin in animals and modern culture (1999); on the other, reactions to new animal threats not only highlight the felt need to maintain a clear distance, but also suggest the permanence of anthropocentrism in human-animal relationships. this article attempts to analyze the extent of contemporary european zoocentrism, as measured through recent media coverage of certain animal figures. are zoocentrism and personification dominant trends today? the study of personified animals reveals certain current trends related to animals, both in the media and society at large. nowadays, animal representations in european media portray ambivalent figures. while animals may be shown as being very close to humans (i.e., personified animals) in some cases, in others we see that they are depicted as a source of danger. this reflects an evolutionary trend in human-animal relationships, and consequently raises many questions. franklin associates ambivalent animal representations with a shift from anthropocentrism towards zoocentrism. he observes a “decline in anthropocentrism (the assumption of the moral ascendancy and centrality of humans in the world) [and] the emergence of zoocentrism (the recognition of animals as full or partial moral subjects)” in interactions with animals, as in the development of animalassisted therapies (franklin and white 5). in another article discussing animal rights humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 78 supporters, franklin specifies this evolution as “neither the zoocentrism of strict animal rights nor an anthropocentric privileging of the human, but hybrids of the two” (franklin, tranter and white 6), which means that these two attitudes are not in strict opposition. the sensibility of a growing zoocentrism described by franklin is reinforced by the emergence of the pet phenomenon, which from the middle of the nineteenth century has offered a widespread model for human-animal relationships in general based on the difference between wild and not-wild.1 this has occurred in a context of urbanization and industrialization that has contributed to the reinforcement of the distinction, firmly established in the age of enlightenment, between nature and culture. this clear distinction has been challenged, however, by the emergence of ecological awareness in the 1960s and 70s, and, at the same time, by the epistemological revolution of ethology, which may also be taken as evidence of growing zoocentrism. nowadays, animal cultures are acknowledged, and wild animals are considered to be “strong” subjects, even persons (lestel, origines 135-139).2 another trend worth mentioning is the polarization of animal friends in relation to certain flagship species, such as the wild and threatened ones, also called the mediagenic megafauna (freeman, 49; campionvincent, 23). these animals, whether large felines, elephants, cetaceans, or polar bears, clearly fascinate many people who, living mostly in urban environments, idealize those distant creatures. this fascination, combined with other factors such as a polemical ecological discourse, makes it possible for animals previously considered pests to be today’s heroes, and indeed “symbols of those spaces that have been reconquered from polluting humanity, of this protected nature that is once again in balance” (campionvincent, 34). wolves and dolphins are good examples of this process. representations of human-animal relationships are clearly embedded in this re-negotiation of the human relationship with nature, in association with a growing concern for the environment, for sustainable development, and for the management of risks induced by nature. our analysis of zoocentrism through personified animals in the media aims at providing complementary insights into these tendencies from the perspective of the social sciences. over the last few years, the european media have increasingly favored individualized, personified, and even “starified” treatment of information. a multitude of articles focus on stars or on figures symbolizing a cause, a process characterized as starification, media treatment centered on the private lives of figures (dubied, “l’informationpeople” 11-18). the placement of individual figures at the center of media representations increases the potential for emotional connection and proximity, and makes the treatment of general interest subjects more concrete, more available, but also more problematic. we claim that the personification of animals through the promotion e. gouabault, a. dubied, c. burton-jeangros — genuine zoocentrism or dogged anthropocentrism? 79 of information provided in terms of individual figures not only depicts a shift in human-animal relationships, but also challenges the definition of identity that humans from western societies attribute to themselves (along with or against other groups of existing entities3) and the values surrounding this definition, such as individualism, respect for nature, ethnocentrism, etc. the human tendency to personify animal figures has been discussed in terms of spheres other than the media, in a number of situations related to the history of human-animal relationships. cultures based on animist or totemist ontologies, as well as ancient and medieval societies, feature a number of personified and famous animals.4 however, the transition through modernization to a naturalist ontology — the “great divide” of latour, based on a rupture between human and animal nature — excludes neither animist thinking nor the persistent personification of certain animals. méchin substantiates this through the attribution of names to domestic animals during the nineteenth century. these names were in general very descriptive, taking into account, in the case of bovines, for example, their color and/or behavior. animals intended to be eaten, on the other hand, were either not named, in order to avoid an inopportune attachment, or were given standardized names that transformed them into objects that could then be morally slaughtered; this is known as the “comedy of innocence” (dalla bernardina, personne 36). in any case, attachment could not really be avoided, due to the animal husbandry context that favored identification with the living, which rousseau considered to be an essential faculty of humans, even before the consciousness of oppositions. therefore, the personification of animals is not specific to the present time. the process nonetheless acquires new significance and forms during the 20th century, notably in the media, and can be seen as an illustration of a growing zoocentric sensibility (franklin, 54-55). before proceeding to our empirical analysis of the personification process, we must examine the notion of the “person” in anthropological discourse. according to mauss, the notion is relative and varies with states or social situations that individuals encounter (331-362). leenhardt insists on the necessity to conceive it in a relational, i.e. social and symbolic, dimension (cited by rabain-jamin, 571-573). the attribution of the status of person is therefore variable, depending on a specific interactive context. sanders defines four criteria for the personification process in the interactions between humans and dogs: the attribution of (1) a thought process (remembering, deducing, understanding, believing, etc.); (2) a personality (biography, preferences, desires, etc.); (3) a potential reciprocity in order to co-construct the relationship between human and animal; and (4) a role in the human group (210-221). in the context of ethology, lestel5 questions the identity of some animals that are in close relations with humans, referring instead to “human-animal hybrid communities,” such as friendship relationships, and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 80 insists on the concept of shared identity (which he refers to as “co-identity”). moreover, the attribution of complex cognitive capacities to animals allows us to consider them not as autonomous weak subjects, but rather as heteronomous strong subjects, or even persons. in their interactions with humans, as in the exemplary relationship between primates and primatologists, animals develop a more accurate awareness of their identity, as well as a richer memory and increased capacity for anticipation, while at the same time reinforcing their self-representations through diverse strategies (lestel, l’animal 57-58). the construction of the status of “person” — human or not — depends in the end on a tripartite concept of history: phylogenetic (history of the species), cultural (history of the group), and individual (biographic history) (op. cit. 135). these elements show how sensitivities toward animals are evolving through diverse forms of zoocentrism. anthrozoological relationships nonetheless seem to remain ambivalent. it is our intention to examine these tensions through the analysis of a large corpus of swiss media extracts.6 methods. the analyzed media corpus consists of 4,244 articles extracted from fifteen swiss newspapers over the period 1978-2007, and 236 tv news extracts. we examined the personification process in three analytical stages. in the first global analysis conducted with the caqdas atlas.ti database, each extract was coded according to the role assigned to the animal in the media discourses. among the five main figures of animals that emerged from this coding the figure of the “shown animal” (i.e., animal figures specifically used by journalists to be shown to the reader) was the one most directly linked with the personification process. in the second analytical stage, a subcorpus of 225 items was used to identify eight “attributes of personification” among cases related to the “shown animal” figure. finally, we focused our attention on a specific case of a “shown animal,” namely that of knut, and compared this, through the use of the “contrasted portrait” approach, to the undesirable animal figure of the pitbull. these two figures allowed us to delineate the ambivalence of contemporary animal representations. the swiss paradigm presents a number of interesting characteristics. firstly, this is because switzerland offers a multilingual media context (french, german, and italian) situated at the crossroads of european cultures. moreover, switzerland typically boasts a high density of media usage in relation to per capita press (ranked fourth worldwide in 2007) and of tv-set possession (95% of households in 2007). analysis of animal representations in this setting appears therefore to be a promising endeavor in terms of richness and diversity of results, allowing for fascinating comparisons with related research in other national contexts. e. gouabault, a. dubied, c. burton-jeangros — genuine zoocentrism or dogged anthropocentrism? 81 let us finally emphasize that we do not intend to place weight on the diversity of the media coverage, but rather to focus on personified animal representations in the media in general.7 a content analysis of the media extracts allows us to establish a list of “personification attributes” that can then be compared to those described in other studies, like sanders’s, addressing the process of animal personification outside the media. by combining these attributes, three levels of personification were deduced: 1. the singular animal, presented as a specific subject, different from its own group or species; 2. the individualized animal, described in an anthropomorphic way, as a genuine individual; 3. the superindividual, referring to the most developed stage of personification, in which a process of “starification” is applied to the animal. the superindividual dimension will be more thoroughly analyzed in the case study of the polar bear knut, the abandoned cub of the berlin zoo. the “knut story” turned into an international narrative, and the little bear's figure became emblematic, to be used as a trademark and a symbol for environmental campaigns. the case of knut will then be compared to an opposite animal figure placed in the media forefront at the same time, that of the three pitbulls who killed a child on his way to school in eastern switzerland. levels of animal personification. in the content analysis of the selected corpus of animal representations in the swiss information media, we identified five main animal figures (figure 1) representing contrasting roles that humans tend to attribute to animals portrayed in the media. main animal figures shown 32% companion 5% undesirable 36% utilitarian 8% victim 19% figure 1 : main animal figures (n=4480 articles and tv news extracts) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 82 these contrasted figures confirm the ambivalence of animal representations in today’s media, as well as highlighting the importance of the personification of animals, in particular through the figure of the “shown animal,” which represents 32% of the corpus (second most important after the “undesirable animal”). the “shown animal” is on the whole a fairly stable figure throughout the three studied decades, but it is divided among a series of sub-figures that evolve differently. among these sub-figures, the animal “on stage,” which is of particular interest for the analysis presented here, has become more frequent over time.8 the figure of the “companion animal” also refers to the personified animal to an extent, in particular through the sub-figure of the “companion’s personality,” within which the animal is described in an anthropomorphic way. in total, we identified 225 items directly related to the personification process transversally in the corpus. in extending sanders’s work, we established eight “attributes of personification,” most of which can be identified as “human attributes,” since the animal is never really considered in and of itself: • the context in which the animal is described characterizes its specificity, without taking into account any indication of its personality, personal history, or even name. • the speaking, which consists of “speaking for” the animal, more than “speaking with,” as observed by arluke and sanders regarding dogs (61-81). these authors considered this attribute mostly in the context of an animal-person dyad, something which is rarely the case in our corpus. • the attribution of an individual name to the animal (humanlike or not). méchin underlines that to be named an animal has first to be individualized. describing the evolution of animal naming in france, she insists on its fundamental role in animal personification. in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th, the rule was to give descriptive, even if individualized, names to domesticated animals; nowadays the rule has shifted towards giving human names to companion animals. • an individual history is sometimes formulated, including references to family, parents, age, date of birth, etc. • the attribution of a national or territorial identity can contribute to the success of certain animal media figures, as in the case of knut. the mediagenic megafauna that we evoked earlier involve the fascination, widespread in europe, for what have been called the “big herbivores, indigenous, primitive, archaic, or e. gouabault, a. dubied, c. burton-jeangros — genuine zoocentrism or dogged anthropocentrism? 83 prehistoric” (lizet and daszkiewicz 63). this passion targets, for example, bisons, some equidae species (franche-montagne in the swiss jura) and certain capridae species (the nera verzaschese in the swiss ticino). as with the megafauna, this process illustrates a quest for origins, observable in the reconstitution of the animal’s native origin. in such cases, the discourse on identity is central, in particular when the preservation of some “indigenous” species prevails over that of other species considered as invasive or exotic. referring to “wild naturalized living,” micoud highlights the artificiality of the process (208-209). • the interiority of the animal refers to its emotional reactions and/or thought processes, an attribute highlighting anthropomorphization. baker writes of “disnification” regarding the depiction of animals in visual media, which “incline towards the stereotypical and the stupid, float free from the requirements of consistency or of the greater rigor that might apply in other nonvisual contexts” (175). this notion fits with the kind of anthropomorphism appearing in our analysis of the press corpus, as will be detailed below. • the mediatization turns an animal into a media figure. this attribute contributes widely — as a cause or as a consequence — to the massive interest generated about animals in the western world. it refers to the media coverage of a specific animal, such as dolly, the cloned sheep, included in our corpus. • the “starification,” in reference to the work of the sociologist edgar morin (122126), refers to an animal as a “superindividual” or a “star.” in the media discourse, such an animal is attributed two qualities: on the one hand, it is like everybody (having a daily life with emotions, difficulties, etc.), while on the other hand it is a hero, inaccessible and fascinating. the superindividual is like a model, embodying specific values. nowadays, a lot of sportsmen, movie actors, or politicians are analyzed from that sociological perspective. here we suggest that some animals undergo a similar process. our analysis suggests that sanders’s criteria appear to be relevant also for media animal figures. this means that personification might be similar in the media and in a typical interactional context. while the motivations are different in these two contexts, the means are similar. we underlined this through the distinction between “speaking for” the animal and “speaking with” it. does the personification of animals in the media support the claim of a growing zoocentrism? indeed, apart from the context — and some obvious elements of the individual history (such as parents, age) — singularized animals seem to be assigned typical human qualities, such as the use of verbal humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 84 language, a baptismal name, a coherent humanlike biography, emotions, etc. to sum up, these animals encompass all the characteristics of a modern individual able to tell its story and to formulate an identity through it. according to these attributes, animal figures can be classified into three contrasting levels, emphasizing an increasing complexity and shift towards human qualities. through the description of examples from the corpus, we propose a distinction among singular animals, individualized animals, and superindividuals. with each level of personification, more human attributes are associated with the animal, and the borderline between human and animal is further blurred. at the first level, the singular animal refers to a single animal presented as a specific subject, separated from its own group or species. illustration 1 provides a first example: words are put in the mouth of a swan (see caption below) “asking” a man, who is smoking, for hashish.9 in this case, only the attributes of context and speaking are present in the article. illustration 1: the swan and the man in a second article, entitled “aspiring actors,”10 dogs are waiting for a tryout with their owners (illustration 2). here only the attribute of context is present. e. gouabault, a. dubied, c. burton-jeangros — genuine zoocentrism or dogged anthropocentrism? 85 illustration 2: aspiring actors the second level — referring to the individualized animal — is more complex. it includes at least two attributes, and potentially all of them, with the exception of the last one (i.e., “starification”). the animal is described in an anthropomorphic way, as a genuine individual. three examples will help us to describe such animals. illustration 3 presents “sammy,” the “friendly” elephant seal that is shaking hands with a man in the berlin zoo.11 in the context of the show, the journalist suggests that sammy should have something to say about the appropriateness of what he is asked to do. three attributes are present here: the context, a human name, and interiority. the animal’s name is a nickname, emphasizing the comic character the elephant seal, who often acts like a clown in the shows. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 86 illustration 3: sammy, the “friendly” elephant seal in the article entitled “‘fungi’ lives it up” (illustration 4), which also includes a picture of fungi the “happy” solitary (but social with humans) dolphin of dingle in ireland,12 five attributes are present: context, human name, individual history, territorial identity, and interiority. the stereotype of the friendly dolphin is clearly applied to fungi. this figure, widespread in social representations,13 is an accurate illustration of baker’s disnification. llustration 4: fungi lives it up e. gouabault, a. dubied, c. burton-jeangros — genuine zoocentrism or dogged anthropocentrism? 87 the most complex example relating to the individualized animal is that of the scottish sheep dolly. she was the first adult animal cloned, in 1997. the case provoked a great deal of bioethical concern, highlighting negotiations between moral and instrumental tendencies, as observed by macnaghten in his analysis of the public attitudes towards genetically modified animals (animals 538-539). in the case of dolly the swiss media made use of six of the attributes we previously distinguished: the context, a human name, individual history, national identity, interiority, and of course mediatization. the sheep was called dolly by the scientists as a reference to the singer dolly parton,14 malamud pointing out that “the cloned cell was a mammary cell and dolly parton has famously large breasts” (10). this example again illustrates the interest of study animal naming. illustration 5: dolly parton / dolly the sheep the third level — referring to the superindividual — is the most complex, and includes all the attributes without exception. the personification process is amplified and can be qualified in terms of “starification.” the best example in our corpus is knut. currently, the personification of animals is carried out mostly by the media, and is accentuated by their own dynamic, emphasizing the individualization of news. the star animal represents the most elaborated example of this process. we will now show that this third level of personification illustrates the existing ambivalence between zoocentric and anthropocentric sensitivities. knut, jj3, max and their friends. the animal celebrity as a superindividual. the global corpus we analyzed includes several starified animals, among others max, a ringed stork equipped with an argos satellite transmitter since 1999 (and who turned humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 88 out to be a female), and knut, the little polar bear of the berlin zoo. the latter generated considerable media coverage and is at the top of the hierarchy we described above. as a celebrity animal he incarnated both the tendency of the media to personify animals, as well as the crisis of the human-animal frontier. therefore his case deserves a detailed analysis. knut was born in december 2006 in captivity, in the berlin zoo. like all offspring of threatened species, his birth provoked public curiosity. the case of knut, however, would not stop there: rejected by his mother, as sometimes happens in a captive environment and after spending some time in an incubator, knut then chose to “adopt” a substitute mother and found one in one of the zoo keepers, thomas dörflein. round, white, and silky, knut then attracted with his somersaults the attention of an eager international public, live and through the media (illustration 6). the berlin zoo quickly calculated the profit it could generate out of this animal, and produced an impressive number of derivative products associated with knut, ranging from soft toys to children songs. illustration 6: knut superstar through this process, knut became the center of a mass-media phenomenon that became known as knutmania (illustration 6).15 like any celebrity of the modern star system, he became a trademark well beyond his “domain of competency” (benhamou, 22). he maintained this status until he reached adolescence, when he lost his freshness e. gouabault, a. dubied, c. burton-jeangros — genuine zoocentrism or dogged anthropocentrism? 89 and chubby charm. as a greyish and plantigrade young adult, he was no longer capable of attracting the attention of the public, nor of enjoying the protection of his substitute mother, who died soon after teaching him to be autonomous, in september of 2008. the adult bear knut fell into a melancholy that some media compared to that developed by britney spears at the time of her un-success story.16 a tragic story, then, which the media told through the figure of the innocent orphan — an orphan polar bear cub with clearly human characteristics: abandonment, adoption, childish games and pranks, learning, and even video productions! indeed, the media coverage did not establish any boundaries between children and knut.17 in our study of the swiss media, we gathered 31 items (articles and tv news extracts) about knut. the majority of articles were collected from the german-speaking media, probably due to a greater cultural proximity between the german and swiss-german media. the content of these items can be distributed into four categories highlighting the contradictory ways in which journalists decided to deal with the matter. the idealization of knut in the media discourse is the most frequently chosen angle, representing two thirds of the articles devoted to him (figure 2). in the 22 articles and tv news items categorized as idealizations, knut was presented as a legendary and almost human hero-to-come, and more specifically as a mythic promising child. several features were associated with him, the main one of which (nine items) referred to his “admirers.” for example, a caricature18 represented the german chancellor angela merckel delivering a speech for the fiftieth anniversary of the roma treaty signature (25th march 2007), in the presence of the little bear (by her left side), thus mocking the fact that after the main celebration everyone was invited to go to the zoo to see knut. it is evident then that despite the knutmania generated by the media, the animal in question is not being considered in and of itself, as would have been the case in the context of a genuine zoocentric sensibility. here the animal appears to be more than a person. it becomes a superindividual, a super-human figure reminding people of their faults, and embodying also the protection of the environment. consequently, we suggest that an anthropocentric sensibility prevails. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 90 knut (2007) ethics 1 zoology 3 proximity 5 idealisation 22 figure 2. knut (2007; n=31 articles and tv news extracts) the idealization category contains further subcategories. in the “realizations” subcategory (three items), knut’s development is depicted as a great accomplishment. an article goes so far as to describe the different stages of his first months in the form of a career.19 in the “savior” subcategory (three items), knut becomes a symbol for an environmental campaign in favor of biodiversity and against global warming. a front page, referring to the context of environmental protection, is titled: “will knut save the world?”20 in other idealized figures — such as power (one item); superstar (three items); model (two items) — knut embodies some important values, such as youthfulness or perfect “berlinership.” referring to knut as a “king” (one item), one journalist jokes about the celebrity of the little bear. the figure is used as a symbol of reconciliation with the animal kingdom, knut being a mediator between nature, as an animal, and culture, as human-raised: he is an inverse wild child. a link can be made here with brydon’s analysis of the return to nature of the orca keiko, the star of the movie free willy. the killer whale had also been raised by humans and was made symbolically responsible for “re-establishing” a connection with nature. more recently, the birth of a female cub “flocke,” on 11th december 2007, provided a potential follow-up to the knut serial. the nüremberg zoo tried to generate a media/economic phenomenon around flocke similar to, or indeed even more intense than, that of knut.21 some journalists pushed the tale, imagining the future wedding of knut and flocke, and the birth of their offspring (cf. ganz-blaettler). knut’s case suggests that one of the functions of the animal celebrity figure is to incarnate the hierarchy of values promoted in a specific sociocultural context. arluke e. gouabault, a. dubied, c. burton-jeangros — genuine zoocentrism or dogged anthropocentrism? 91 and sanders have demonstrated this hierarchy by means of the notion of a “sociozoological scale,” a scale of values embedded in western social imaginaries since aristotle (167-186). other scholars, like detienne and boia, have shown that vertical thinking is ancient, and creates a hierarchical classification of alterity, attributing infrahuman categories to animals or any human reduced to bestiality.22 humans occupy the middle position in the scale, while the upper position is attributed to gods and superhuman creatures. the work of renard on the human savage, and of gouabault (la résurgence 434-472) on the opposition of values between sharks and dolphins illustrates this structure, as a continuation of the structural analysis of lévi-strauss. studies on the values conveyed in star information also confirm this line of thought through the star figures.23 knut is no exception, and like his human brothers he is an innocent child, a victim of an abandonment that “society” compensates for. any attack on his “person” is unbearable, so long as he remains a child, children being at the heart of many social issues in western modern societies. in this respect, its figure is ambivalent: excessively anthropomorphized, but at the same time presented as over-human in his ability to encompass nature and the value thereof. the knut phenomenon emphasizes the permanent negotiation surrounding human-animal relationships. knut versus the pitbulls. knut is not the only animal to have appeared on the front page of the media corpus we analyzed. positive figures like his may have, of course, a limited shelf-life, for they are regularly overshadowed by other less amiable or even threatening animal figures. when the story of knut appeared very early in 2007, the swiss information media had been discussing for over a year news of a “crime” associated with the figure of the dangerous dog.24 this ambivalent coexistence sets up a contrasted portrait (legros et al., 128-133) that illustrates how the media figures of knut and the pitbulls were constructed upon their very opposition. this portrait offers a dualistic and hierarchical representation of animals, aptly summarizing their current ambivalence. the contrasted aspects of these two figures are summarized in table 1. knut’s figure leans towards humans, whereas pitbulls lean towards the beast. this opposition evokes another one, described by the extremes of the “sociozoological scale” (arlucke and sanders, 167-186), between angel and demon. this duality is underlined in the media pictures by knut’s whiteness and the pitbulls’ darkish colours, the latter calling to mind demons “reversing the master-servant relationship” (arlucke and sanders, 181). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 92 characteristic knut, the little polar bear the pitbulls ontological reference inclines towards human (culture) inclines towards beast (nature) western symbolic reference angel demon degree of individuality knut is presented as an individual the pitbulls are considered as a species attitude he is friendly they are aggressive name he has a name they are anonymous origin his parents are mentioned they have been illegally imported living context he lived in a favorable environment after a difficult birth they lived in an unfavorable environment table 1: knut and the pitbulls, a “contrasted portrait” newspaper coverage clearly underlines differences: knut is the “world savior” (“retter des erde”) and a “superstar of climate protectors” (“superstar der klimaschützer”),25 while the pitbulls are treated as “battle machine[s]” (“kampfmaschine”) and “killer[s](…).”26 bad animals are mostly considered as a species; furthermore, their foreign origin — as is often the case in the crises associated with animals — encourages the description of danger as coming from outside. in our case, it underlines two aspects of the opposition knut/pitbulls: first, western societies favor individuality, a positive value attributed to knut; second, multiplicity refers to an out-of-control animality, which is one of the deepest western fears.27 even though history has provided some examples of famous personified “bad” animals like gustave, the monstrous crocodile from burundi (monestier, 261-272), we do not know of any study describing a superindividual “bad” animal. does the opposition between knut and the pitbulls suggest a contemporary “comedy of innocence,” which would consist in offering great honors to one animal, while others are treated in ways about which humans feel guilty, such as chickens in the industrial poultry farms or the chinese dolphins being exterminated by human activity? this idea of redemption is developed by dalla bernardina (l’éloquence 145-181). however, knut did not stay long at the heart of public attention; after one year he was dropped as e. gouabault, a. dubied, c. burton-jeangros — genuine zoocentrism or dogged anthropocentrism? 93 radically as he had been chosen in the first place. the temporary success story of knut, and the ambivalence of its figure, might be interpreted in terms of the symbolic domestication of savage animals: the polar bear, known for its savagery, its ferocity, and its scarcity, is here totally assimilated to humans, to the point that it adopts their attitudes and weaknesses. let us remind ourselves that the adolescent knut is presented as succumbing to neurasthenia because he cannot bear being rejected by humans. clearly, the personification process questions the human/animal borderline: to be a star, knut had to become humanlike (cf. malamud). saved from euthanasia, he later lost a great deal of his supposed “animal nature” by being brought up by humans.28 furthermore, the personification process confirms the ambivalence of contemporary animal representations in western societies: the idealization of knut, in parallel to the demonization of the pitbulls, certainly highlights it. conclusion. the personification of animals in media discourse is associated with the renegotiation of certain social values, such as individualism, respect for nature, etc. we have empirically described different levels of such a personification process, with knut, the polar bear cub brought up at the berlin zoo illustrating the most elaborate level of personification within the superindividual category. our analysis questions the extent of zoocentrism. indeed, in the media context, the process by which the animal is singled out and made “as human as possible” is more supportive of an anthropocentric sensibility than a zoocentric one. the personification process follows a “pet relationship model,” in the sense of a relationship in which the animal is anthropomorphized and considered dependent on humans. social representations of wild animals like dolphins, for example, can sometimes follow this model, which can lead to ignorance of their own world (rules, specific signals of communication, etc.) and consequently may generate danger for humans. a “companionship model” — in which the animal is rather considered in and for itself — was observed by franklin, especially through the relationship between animals at home and their owners, but it did not appear in our corpus. in fact, the analyzed articles have a lot to do, in terms of the animal self or interiority, with the “disnification” underlined by baker. in conclusion, the personification process evident in the swiss media illustrates the current ambivalence between zoocentric and anthropocentric sensitivities. naturally, personification provides a positive image of animals, but it does so at the cost of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 94 jettisoning most of the animals’ characteristics in the process. this suggests that rather than supporting a growing zoocentrism, the media portray representations based on diverse motivations regarding animals and nature. knut’s story seems to reflect particularly well this complexity, through the variety of reactions it has provoked. moreover, despite an apparent zoocentrism, the media discourse insists on maintaining an appropriate distance from animals. the human-animal borderline is indeed always present and reappears again and again, sometimes in unexpected ways. the contrasted portrait of knut and the pitbulls symbolizes the modern “great divide” between nature and culture, between civilization and savagery. the analysis of this structural opposition shows how much the animals we studied in the press are not considered in and for themselves, but as figures in a media bestiary. prolonging and adapting the religious and moralist tradition of medieval bestiaries, this portrayal of animals as objects, i.e. not in and for themselves, showcases some social values (individualism, innocence, etc.) through edifying stories. in this sense we may conclude, based on parallels with the celebrity press, that the animal starification process becomes increasingly similar to the human one, demonstrating complex interactions between zoocentric and anthropocentric sensitivities. notes 1. cf. digard, whose study includes sociological, anthropological and historical analysis concerning pet relationships, primarily in france. 2. cf. also despret. 3. descola and latour suggest that we should consider adopting hybrid categories, notably with regard to the notion of identity, integrating both humans and nonhumans; such an assumption is becoming more and more widely accepted (cf. macnaghten, “nature”). 4. cf. descola for the renewal of the anthropological definitions of animism and totemism, and pastoureau for his historical perspective on famous animals. 5. cf. particularly on these subjects: les origines animales de la culture and l’animal singulier. 6. this paper forms part of a larger research project that aims to document the social representations associated with animals portrayed by the media in e. gouabault, a. dubied, c. burton-jeangros — genuine zoocentrism or dogged anthropocentrism? 95 switzerland over the last 30 years: claudine burton-jeangros and annik dubied (dirs), the representations of animals in the swiss information media, 1978-2008. from the 'nice pet' to the 'threatening other,' funded by the swiss veterinary office, 2007-2009. 7. for specific results regarding the diversity of media coverage, see burtonjeangros et al., les representations des animaux dans les medias suisses d'information, 1978-2008. de la 'brave bête' à l''altérité menaçante,' genève, 2009. the research points out that no major difference between linguistic regions or between types of media (weekly versus daily, reference press versus popular press) could be observed in relation to the undesirable animal figure (pp.46-48). 8. for details see burton-jeangros et al. 9. article published in l’illustré (05.07.1980). 10. article published in corriere del ticino (12.30.1995), entitled “aspiranti attori.” 11. article published in le matin (08.26.1988), entitled: “bien le bonjour…”. 12. article published in le matin (10.10.1991), entitled ”’fungi’ fait la fête.” 13. cf. gouabault entitled: “le dauphin. stéréotype, contre-stéréotype, symbole.“ 14. this picture of dolly parton and the sheep dolly is extracted from an article published in blick (27.02.1997). 15. a german webpage is dedicated to knut, with pictures and videos, and offers a global view on this phenomenon: http://www.rbb-online.de/knut/index.html (visited on 4th august 2009). the picture referring to knutmania is extracted from an article published in schweizer illustrierte (02.04.2007). 16. cf. gorin et dubied, “desirable people: identifying social values through news of celebrities.“ 17. knut died on march 19th 2011. his death produced significant media coverage that confirmed the analyses we propose in this article. the attention given to the disposal of his body — some media wrote about building a mausoleum, others humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 96 discussed the possibility of stuffing knut – and the widely expressed emotions further illustrated the personification process. in this context, references to the cause against global warming also highlighted the continuity between humans and animals, and challenged one again the frontier between us and them. finally, the death of knut does not mean the end of his story. 18. published in blick, 03.26.2007. 19. published in schweizer illustrierte, 04.02.2007. 20. blick, 24.03.2007. 21. flocke also has her own webpage: http://tiergarten.nuernberg.de/v04/flockespersonal.129.0.html?&no_cache=1&sword_list[]=flocke (04.08.2009). 22. see bancel et al. on human zoos. 23. cf. gorin et dubied, “desirable people: identifying social values through news of celebrities.“ 24. the mediatization of the death of the young suleyman, attacked by three pitbulls on his way to school and later succumbing to his injuries, began in december 2005. the media coverage of this incident was at its high point at the end of 2006, at which time the trial of the dogs’ owner took place (burton-jeangros et al.), and continued until the beginning of 2008. 25. see blick, 24.03.2007. 26. see blick, 06.12.2005. 27. cf. terrasson, who worked on the fear of nature through psychosocial experimentation by night in forests ; cf. durand for a study considering mythologies, archetypes, and the collective unconscious; cf. kellert for a study by questionnaire; and cf. thomas for a study of science-fiction literature. 28. see blick, 24.03.2007. e. gouabault, a. dubied, c. burton-jeangros — genuine zoocentrism or dogged anthropocentrism? 97 works cited arluke, arnold, and clinton r. sanders. regarding animals. philadelphia: temple up, 1996. baker, steve. picturing the beast: animals, identity and representation. manchester: manchester up, 1993. bancel, nicolas, pascal blanchard, gilles boëtsch, éric deroo, and sandrine lemaire, eds. zoos humains: au temps des exhibitions humaines. paris: la découverte, 2004. benhamou, françoise. l’économie du star system. paris: odile jacob, 2002. boia, lucian. entre l’ange et la bête: le mythe de l’homme différent de l’antiquité à nos jours. paris: plon, 1995. burton-jeangros, claudine, annik dubied, emmanuel gouabault, david gerber, karine darbellay, and valérie gorin. les représentations des animaux dans les médias suisses d’information, 1978-2007. de la ‘brave bête’ à ‘l’altérité menaçante.’ rapport final. genève: département de sociologie, 2009. 28 june 2009. <www.news.admin.ch/message/?lang=fr&msg-id=27095> brydon, anne. “the predicament of nature: keiko the whale and the cultural politics of whaling in iceland. “ anthropological quarterly 79.2 (2006): 225-260. campion-vincent, véronique. “les réactions au retour du loup en france. une tentative d’analyse prenant ‘les rumeurs’ au sérieux.“ le monde alpin et rhodanien 30.1-3 (2002): 1152. dalla bernardina, sergio. “une personne pas tout à fait comme les autres. l'animal et son statut.“ l'homme 120, xxxi.4 (1991): 33-50. —————. l'éloquence des bêtes: quand l'homme parle des animaux. paris: métailié, 2006. descola, philippe. par-delà nature et culture. paris: gallimard, 2005. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 98 despret, vinciane. quand le loup habitera avec l'agneau. paris: les empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2002. détienne, marcel. “entre bêtes et dieux.“ nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 6 (1972): 231246. digard, jean-pierre. les français et leurs animaux: ethnologie d'un phénomène de société. paris: fayard, 1999. dubied, annik. les dits et les scènes du fait divers. genève-paris: droz, 2004. —————. “l’information-people. la célébrité racontée par la presse.“ communication 27.1 (2009): 11-17. http://communication.revues.org/index1209.html. durand, gilbert. les structures anthropologiques de l’imaginaire: introduction à l’archétypologie générale. paris: dunod, 1992. franklin, adrian. animals and modern cultures: a sociology of human-animal in modernity. london: sage, 1999. —————, and robert white. “animals and modernity: changing human–animal relations, 1949–98.“ journal of sociology 37.3 (2001): 219–238. franklin, adrian, bruce tranter, and robert white. “explaining support for animal rights: a comparison of two recent approaches to humans, nonhuman animals, and postmodernity.“ society & animals 9.2 (2001): 127-144. freeman, milton. elephants and whales: resources for whom? oxford: taylor & francis, 1995. ganz-blaettler, ursula. “la mise en scène et la mise en série du personnage people, ou la poursuite d'une alliance fructueuse entre marketing et divertissement.“ communication 27.1 (2009). http://communication.revues.org/index1284.html gorin, valérie, and annik dubied. “desirable people: identifying social values through news of celebrities.“ media, culture and society (forthcoming). e. gouabault, a. dubied, c. burton-jeangros — genuine zoocentrism or dogged anthropocentrism? 99 gouabault, emmanuel. la résurgence contemporaine du symbole du dauphin: approche socioanthropologique. lille: anrt, 2006. —————. “le dauphin. stéréotype, contre-stéréotype, symbole.“ stéréotypage, stéréotypes. fonctionnements ordinaires et mises en scène. ed. henri boyer. paris: l'harmattan, 2007. 109-118. kellert, stephen. “values and perceptions of invertebrates.“ conservation biology 7.4 (1993): 845-855. latour, bruno. nous n’avons jamais été modernes: essai d’anthropologie symétrique. paris: la découverte, 1997. legros, patrick, frédéric monneyron, jean-bruno renard, and patrick tacussel. sociologie de l'imaginaire. paris: armand colin, 2006. lerner, jennifer, and linda kalof. “the animal text: message and meaning in television advertisements.“ the sociological quarterly 40.4 (1999): 565-586. lestel, dominique. les origines animales de la culture. paris: flammarion, 2001. —————. l’animal singulier. paris: éd. du seuil, 2004. lévi-strauss, claude. anthropologie structurale deux. paris: plon, 1996 (1973). —————. la pensée sauvage. paris: plon, 1962. lizet, bernadette, and piotr daszkiewicz. “tarpan ou konik polski? mythe contemporain et outil de gestion écologique.“ anthropozoologica 21 (1995): 63-71. macnaghten, phil. “animals in their nature. a case study on public attitudes to animals, genetic modification and ‘nature.’“ sociology 38.3 (2004): 533-551. —————. “nature.“ theory, culture & society 23.2-3 (2006): 347-349. malamud, randy. “famous animals in modern culture.“ a cultural history of animals in the modern age. ed randy malamud. oxford: berg, 2007. 1-26. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 3, number 1 (fall 2011) 100 mauss, marcel. sociologie et anthropologie. paris: puf, 1995 (1950). méchin, colette. “les enjeux de la nomination animale dans la société française contemporaine.“ anthropozoologica 39.1 (2004): 133-141. available at http://www.mnhn.fr/museum/front/medias/publication/15110_mechin.pdf . micoud, andré. “vers un nouvel animal sauvage : le sauvage naturalisé vivant?“ nature, sciences et sociétés 1.3 (1993): 202-210. monestier, martin. les animaux célèbres: histoire encyclopédique, insolite et bizarre, des origines à nos jours. paris: le cherche midi, 2008. morin, edgar. l'esprit du temps. paris: grasset, 1962. pastoureau, michel. les animaux célèbres. paris: arléa, 2008. rabain-jamin, jacqueline. “personne.“ dictionnaire de l'ethnologie et de l'anthropologie. ed. p. bonte et m. izard. paris: presses universitaires de france, 2004. renard, jean-bruno. “l’homme sauvage et l’extraterrestre : deux figures de l’imaginaire évolutionniste. “ diogène 127 (1984): 70-88. sanders, clinton r., “understanding dogs: caretakers’ attributions of mindedness in canine-human relationship.“ journal of contemporary ethnography 22.2 (1993): 205-226. gundermann, review of weil copyright © 2024 nathaniel otjen this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 164–170. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 who benefits from multispecies justice? nathaniel otjen review of: sophie chao, karin bolender, and eben kirksey, eds. the promise of multispecies justice. durham, nc: duke university press, 2022. xii + 284 pp. 23 illus. $99.95 (hb), $26.95 (pb) nathaniel otjen is a postdoctoral fellow in the high meadows environmental institute at princeton university. email: notjen@princeton.edu book review http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 when i first thumbed through the promise of multispecies justice, i was most struck not by the edited collection’s beautiful illustrations or thoughtful layout, but rather by its list of contributors. half of the volume’s fourteen authors are early-career scholars, ranging from doctoral candidates to postdoctoral researchers and assistant professors. such a distribution reflects the commitments of editors sophie chao, karin bolender, and eben kirksey. it also, however, indicates where energies in the emerging field of multispecies justice studies lie and which voices are leading this work. the early-career scholars featured in the collection share an interest in how human groups relate to nonhuman beings and they conceive of justice as an activity that extends beyond, and often productively challenges, western modes of being human. as an early-career researcher myself who works on multispecies justice from interand transdisciplinary positions, i felt a spirit of collaboration while reading the book. the promise of multispecies justice emerged out of a series of online conversations and virtual talks held in 2020 and 2021 when a community of scholars came together to refuse the social isolation imposed by the covid-19 pandemic. drawing inspiration from sara ahmed’s the promise of happiness, the edited volume examines the cultural articulations of multispecies justice and asks what kinds of worlds are possible in its “promise”. it features nine single-authored scholarly essays; three genre-bending poems; and an introduction, afterword, and glossary written by the editors. each of the contributors — with the exception of philosopher michael marder, poet and literary scholar craig santos perez, and science fiction author m. l. clark — use ethnography to study specific facets of multispecies (in)justice. each brings additional scholarly approaches to bear on their analysis, including environmental justice studies, critical animal studies, black geography, indigenous studies, and legal studies. moreover, each chapter takes up a different location, ranging from india to colombia, guam, tanzania, azerbaijan, the western united states, and the philippines. the collection will be of interest to scholars working in these places copyright © 2024 nathaniel otjen this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 1 (2024): 163–170. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.19274 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.19274 otjen, review of chao et al. | 165 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) and fields, along with advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying the intersections of capitalist-colonialist violence and multispecies relations. the promise of multispecies justice joins a growing body of work that engages the area of study and collection of cultural practices increasingly known as “multispecies justice”. recent special issues on the topic include the march 2023 edition of cultural politics (edited by chao and danielle celermajer) and the fall 2024 issue of the minnesota review (edited by myself and celermajer) on “multispecies justice and narrative”. several recent books in legal studies and animal ethics have also taken up the topic, including martha nussbaum’s justice for animals (2023), maneesha deckha’s animals as legal beings (2021), irus braverman’s settling nature (2023), and lori gruen and alice crary’s animal crisis (2022). finally, the editors themselves have recently published books that address questions of multispecies ethics and justice — from in the shadow of the palms (2022) to the unnaming of aliass (2020) and the mutant project (2020). the rise of multispecies justice studies can be attributed to the widespread and growing critique of western juridical systems raised by multiple disciplines. as the top courts rule against human rights and crisis becomes experienced as a daily condition, it is increasingly apparent that modern juridical systems are not up for the task of repairing our damaged worlds and that they are partly responsible for creating injustice. at the same time, a growing body of work coming out of critical animal studies, black feminist studies, postcolonial studies, and indigenous studies, among other fields, has considered how power and inequality not only manifest, but also operate, across species lines. there is a growing consensus that what were once thought of as strictly “human” problems are multispecies problems — that addressing social injustice requires resolving injustices with more-than-human communities. much of this work moves away from animal liberation models which overemphasize suffering as the prerequisite for action and separate the needs of animals (most often farmed and companion animals) from humans. it also departs from rights frameworks which have extended the humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 166 | otjen, review of chao et al. communities protected under the law without reorganizing the larger structures and operations of justice. instead of “add-speciesand-stir” approaches to justice where other beings are simply inserted into existing frameworks, scholarship on multispecies justice challenges ineffective juridical systems and considers what justice means and whom it supports. as the promise of multispecies justice and other publications contend, multispecies justice is a situated, pluralistic practice that arises from, and in response to, the lived experiences of humans and nonhumans. curiously, given the proliferation of work in this area, the promise of multispecies justice does not make an explicit intervention into theories of multispecies justice. instead, readers are left to determine the collection’s primary contributions. from my vantage point as an environmental humanist who frequently turns to ethnography, i see at least three contributions to existing literature, which i discuss in greater detail below. first, the collection proposes that multiple kinds of justice exist, particularly when it comes to nonhuman beings. formulating a singular “multispecies justice”, the editors and contributors suggest, risks reproducing the universalism present in current theories of justice, along with the inequalities that such an approach creates. they propose thinking instead about “species of justice” (4). second, they argue that feminist philosopher susan leigh star’s question “cui bono?”, or “who benefits?”, is a guiding framework for multispecies justice. struggles for justice are always built around particular individuals and groups, often at the exclusion of others. asking “who benefits?” not only reveals who is being included and excluded, but it also encourages critical reflection on how justice movements and juridical structures can be built in ways that benefit wider communities. finally, the authors argue that theories of multispecies justice must move away from hermeneutics of peace to instead take on the more uncomfortable work of dwelling with violence and building better worlds amid the trouble of our times. in calling for multiple modes of justice, the contributors emphasize how particular cultures view and theorize different kinds of justice otjen, review of chao et al. | 167 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) as multispecies projects. cultural anthropologist radhika govindrajan, for example, considers how state policies in uttarakhand, india, have disrupted livestock economies and placed new “burdens of care” on rural women (36). govindrajan follows one woman as she pursues “spectral justice” (39) for a bull named gattu who began haunting her dreams in the summer of 2019 after he was wrongfully killed. much like chao’s work with the marind peoples in west papua, govindrajan uses ethnography to show how multispecies justice is envisioned and practiced by communities in response to global disruptions. the attention to granularity found in this volume and elsewhere reflects a growing insistence that challenging ineffective western modes of justice requires looking to models that emerge from living communities, or from what marder calls the “just is” (134). modes of multispecies justice, these authors show, arise from “the surfaces, materialities, and actualities of existence” (135) and must, therefore, be studied from their sites of expression. moreover, as govindrajan’s analysis of shifting social conditions in uttarakhand indicates, this work requires attending to the ways that historical projects have unevenly shaped relations with more-thanhuman beings and produced differing — and sometimes competing — understandings of what justice is, how it can be pursued, and who gets to participate. the promise of multispecies justice derives its critical energies from that question of who gets to take part in projects of justice. as celermajer and i discuss elsewhere, the faculties of language and speech have long been viewed as prerequisites of legal subjecthood. this has positioned humans with disabilities and nonhuman beings marginal to juridical procedures and it has tied language and speech to political subjectivity. while the promise of multispecies justice does not directly address the speech-endowed subject, it does dwell a good deal on the problem of language — namely on the limitations of language to convey multispecies worlds. at times, however, some of the contributors make assertations that risk collapsing linguistic differences and reinstalling binaries. m. l. clark, for instance, asks: “if we struggle even to find a common language for transformational justices among fellow humans, what hope have we of finding the words humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 168 | otjen, review of chao et al. to speak of restoration and rehabilitation as it relates to multispecies trespass, too?” (182). the editors return to this assertion in the afterword, noting that “words can do justice, for humans, in some ways” (229), but that “we rattle against the limit of our languages” (230) when “seeking to describe how to do justice for frayed forests, overburdened oceans and waterways” (229). why is it that words are seen as capable of representing human lives and securing justice for some groups of humans but as failing to adequately convey the experiences of nonhuman beings? noriko ishiyama and kim tallbear argue that the english language is responsible for the problems of representation and knowing that clark and the editors identify. they observe that english has functioned as an apparatus of “settler-colonial thought” (189), especially in the context of settler law and indigenous genocide, one that has strategically disrupted kin relations. taking a similar approach, perez asks not how language represents another, but instead how language is shaped by other beings. his poem “th s xth m ss ext nct n” suggests that species loss is felt at the level of language and that it leaves its mark on speech. addressing extinction, perez successfully argues, requires transforming language and its capacities to account for loss. rather than celebrate multispecies existence (through language or other means) as a mechanism for achieving justice, the collection’s contributors centre the conflict inherent in struggles over juridical standing. kristina lyons, for example, calls for “bettering conflict”, or “creating opportunities to confront and live out disagreements” (72) in the colombian amazon. she proposes a “dialogic approach to justice” (69) based not on consensus and non-confrontation, but rather on robust political debate where different groups work out better futures amid disagreement. this focus marks a broader shift occurring in multispecies thought where there is a growing acknowledgement that living with others requires embracing trouble. multispecies justice does not seek to create harmony amid or out of chaos. rather, it seeks to negotiate the always-conflicted world “we” co-produce and co-habit. alyssa paredes makes this point in her chapter on resistance to aerial spraying. communities in the philippines and other postcolonial nations, she observes, often practice otjen, review of chao et al. | 169 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) an “ethics of exclusion” (80) that involves prioritizing certain modes of being human. in such plantationscapes, juridical arguments for human wellbeing and “molecular sovereignty” (89) require insisting on a sharp demarcation between human and nonhuman, and on the community’s humanity over the nonhuman beings upon whom they depend. as parades demonstrates, the lens of multispecies existence is drastically insufficient in this context. this is not to say that the elimination of interspecies violence should not be a central goal of multispecies justice, but rather that the exclusive focus on praising interconnection ultimately misses the material conditions that multispecies justice approaches seek to address. as i suggested above, the promise of multispecies justice could have gone further in directly positioning its ideas in relation to existing scholarship. the introduction, for instance, uses the term “interspecies intersectionality” without crediting harlan weaver or acknowledging the concept’s roots in queer and trans theory. similar moves occur in the glossary with terms like “ecological justice” and “procedural justice” which have well-established critical lineages that go unremarked upon. greater engagement with existing work could have brought the collection into dialogue with the wide array of scholarship happening in multispecies justice studies and made its contributions to this area more targeted. it could also have served as a counterweight to the collection’s tendency to flatten the more-than-human ecologies that are central to multispecies justice studies. while the contributors carefully attend to the histories and dynamics of specific human communities, chapters by elizabeth lara, lyons, marder, clark, and ishiyama and tallbear discuss animal and plant communities only in broad strokes. in each of these chapters i was left wondering about the particular lifeways and experiences of the beings they mentioned. which species and groups are at stake in projects of multispecies justice? how are their lives constrained by historical and contemporary events? and how do these beings relate to groups of humans? the inclination to generalize and omit details about more-than-human communities while emphasizing the need to study human groups in all their complexity may reflect a larger problem in multispecies justice humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 170 | otjen, review of chao et al. studies. as the field develops, there will be a growing need to tell more lively stories about and with the human and nonhuman beings who are supposed to be at the centre of analysis. all told, the edited collection provides a compelling example of how to do multispecies research that attends to particular cultures and ideas of justice, and how to analyse the conflicts that so often structure multispecies relations. the promise of multispecies justice offers a striking example of how multispecies justice studies can envision alternatives to ineffective political paradigms during this moment of profound loss and opportunity. schuurman, imagining home imagining home: performing adoptability in transnational canine rescue and rehoming nora schuurman school of history, culture and arts studies university of turku, finland humanimalia 13.1 (fall 2022) copyright © 2022 nora schuurman this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 79–110. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.11074 abstract: this article explores online performances of adoptability of homeless dogs in transnational animal rescue and rehoming practices in finland, based on an analysis of the websites of finnish animal rescue charities, as well as interviews with volunteers at these charities. drawing on recent work on concepts such as home, care, encounter value, and nonhuman charisma, i explore how homeless dogs in other countries are portrayed online for the purpose of transnational rehoming as pets and, more generally, how animal adoptability and ideals of a pet and a multispecies home are constructed. the dogs’ life histories, present situation, and subsequent adoptability are validated in stories based on interpretations of their past and present experiences, subjectivity, and agency. the encounter value of homeless dogs is based not only on the positive affects their portrayals are supposed to evoke, but also on interpretations of their experiences of suffering and the compassion they may elicit in the potential adopter. the adoptability of these dogs, i argue, is constructed on an encounter value based on compassion-evoking charisma rather than promises of sharing a life with an “ideal” pet and their rehoming is presented as an opportunity to create a home with an animal who may never have had one before. keywords: homeless animals, rehoming, dogs, home, care, encounter value, nonhuman charisma author bio: dr nora schuurman is academy research fellow at the university of turku, finland. she is a geographer specializing in human–animal relationality, especially spaces and practices of interspecies co-living and care, animal agency, the human–animal boundary, knowledge, expertise, and animal death. she is currently studying care practices in her project “landscapes of interspecies care: working the human–animal boundary in care practices” (academy of finland). email: nora.schuurman@utu.fi orcid: 0000-0002-0835-5223 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.11074 mailto:nora.schuurman@utu.fi https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0835-5223 schuurman, imagining home | 81 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) “the dark beauty tuuma is an open, cheerful, and sociable puppy. her little tail wags vigorously when tuuma gets to meet new people!”1 this description of the young dog tuuma is an excerpt of one of the several online presentations of homeless dogs offered for adoption by finnish animal rescue charities. these dogs, residing in shelters in different countries around europe, have become the target of transnational animal rescue and rehoming practices. through these practices, an increasing number of animals have been rehomed from southern and eastern europe to more affluent countries in the north and west of europe in the past two decades. the developments contributing to the increased popularity of transnational animal rescue and rehoming practices include concern for the fate of abandoned animals in foreign countries, increased international mobility, as well as current problems associated with dog breeding. in the resulting practices, care for the distant other, animal advocacy, and personal human–animal relations intertwine in a way that is gradually transforming pet culture in the west. in finland, there are currently around twenty animal rescue charities importing homeless animals from abroad for the purpose of rehoming, with the largest number of animals arriving from romania, russia, and spain. the overwhelming majority of the animals rehomed are dogs, while a small minority are cats. the charities almost exclusively operate on a voluntary basis and collaborate with local volunteers, groups, and charity organizations in the countries of origin, supporting them in the daily care of the animals in shelters and in the preparation of their rehoming. these practices have emerged in a landscape where most of the canine population are purebred, produced by hobby breeders, but with an increasing presence of puppy mills. there are clear structural similarities between transnational animal rehoming and child adoption.2 despite the species difference, both practices provide a means of adopting a new family member from 1 “tuuma”, viipurin koirat, last updated 19 december 2019, https://viipurinkoirat.fi/tuuma. 2 for the latter, see for example yngvesson, belonging in an adopted world; leinaweaver, “the quiet migration redux”. https://viipurinkoirat.fi/tuuma 82 | schuurman, imagining home humanimalia 13.1 (2022) faraway places that are sometimes labelled as unable to safeguard the wellbeing of the adoptees. further, in both types of practices, there are specific criteria involved in the selection of the adoptive families. the differences stem from the significance given to the species boundary: animals are not officially considered family members and, thus, the rehoming programmes are not formal in the way that child adoption programmes are. the former are also public in a way that child adoption programmes are not, since dogs looking for a home are individually presented on the webpages of the charities. in transnational animal rehoming practices, the online presentation plays an important part in the adoption process. because of the geographical distance involved, potential adopters cannot see the dogs in the shelter environment and hence to bring them closer to the public the animals are introduced online. the purpose of these portrayals is to define and describe the dogs’ adoptability, in other words, to market their potential for rehoming as companions, and to create a good match between dog and adopter.3 these online presentations include pictures and videos as well as written descriptions of, for example, the dogs’ background, personality, special needs, and their interaction with humans and other dogs at the shelter. this article draws on an analysis of the presentations of homeless dogs on the web pages of finnish animal rescue charities, as well as interviews with volunteers at these charities. i am interested in how homeless dogs are portrayed online for the purpose of transnational rehoming as pets and, more generally, how animal adoptability and specific ideals of a pet and a multispecies home are constructed. to answer these questions, i approach the online presentations of dogs as stories that include performances of the animals’ individual subjectivity and agency. theoretically, the article draws on recent discussions within studies of pet–human relationships,4 with a special focus on the concepts of home,5 encounter value,6 and nonhuman charisma.7 3 balcom and arluke, “animal adoption as negotiated order”. 4 fox, “animal behaviours”; charles and aull davies, “my family”; power, “furry families”. 5 douglas, “the idea of a home.” 6 haraway, when species meet. 7 lorimer, wildlife in the anthropocene. schuurman, imagining home | 83 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) there have been several earlier studies on animal rescue and rehoming practices and their implications for human–animal relations.8 the object of study in this paper, however, differs from the previous work because of the international dimension of the practices studied — the distance and the unknown quality of the dogs’ backgrounds. i begin with a discussion on the theoretical aspects of what i see as constituting the adoptability of an animal. i then introduce the methodology before presenting the empirical analysis of how the adoptability of homeless animals is constructed in the finnish practices of rescuing and rehoming homeless dogs from abroad. pet–human relationships and home exploring how animals become perceived as adoptable sheds light on the ambiguous place of pets in the contemporary west, that is, as nonhuman animals living in the human home, as part of the family, but also faced with expectations of companionability and love.9 pets are generally understood as animals that share their lives with humans in close companionship.10 pets are, by definition, not eaten, therefore they are placed in a different category from animals that are destined for consumption by humans or pets. such categorizing practices serve to maintain “the strongly dualistic boundaries of the ‘pet’ and ‘meat’ animal.”11 however, despite their privileged position and due to their legal status as property, pets are still subjected to human power and domination.12 the very category of “the pet” itself comprises subcategories that place pets of different species or origins in different positions. for example, rats kept as pets are often not valued in the same way as 8 e.g. balcom and arluke, “animal adoption”; irvine, if you tame me; nyman, “adopting animals”; policarpo, “daphne the cat”; weaver, “‘becoming in kind’”. 9 see redmalm, “discipline and puppies”. i have used the term “nonhuman” where it clarifies the difference between humans and other animals. otherwise, i use “animal” generally for nonhuman animals and “pet” specifically for animals that live in human homes, perceived by humans as companions or family members. 10 power, “furry families”; thomas, man and the natural world. 11 plumwood, eye of the crocodile. 12 donovan and adams, “introduction”. 84 | schuurman, imagining home humanimalia 13.1 (2022) cats or especially dogs.13 dogs, who share a history with humans longer than that of any other domesticated species, have become humans’ “helpers” in hunting, farming, and shepherding “meat” animals.14 for dogs themselves this does not guarantee protection from human domination, abuse, or abandonment, rendering their position essentially liminal and illustrating “a conundrum of dog–human natureculture, the inability definitely to articulate the boundary between nature and culture (and animal and human) in the history and agency of this companion species relation.”15 according to david redmalm, contemporary western pet culture can be understood as “a set of practices and discourses that simultaneously creates inhibitions and enables certain ways of being for both humans and other animals.”16 apart from being produced and maintained by humans, these discourses and practices are influenced by the agency displayed by pets themselves. in this article, i take the agency of animals to include their subjective experiences as well as the actions by which they convey to others (humans and animals) their feelings, emotions, and perceptions and, in turn, shape the actions of others.17 a pet–human relationship is not created by humans alone; instead, animals with their actions and communication with humans contribute to the interaction on which an interspecies relationship is based. this is consistent with studies on how pet owners who actively share everyday life with their pets perceive them as conscious, sentient, and intentional agents.18 in such relationships, agency can be traced to the (mostly) nonverbal interaction where both human and animal respond to each other in “the intimate choreography of human/animal interrelationships.”19 following vinciane despret, such close interaction leads to a mutual transformation and domestication, a process that can also be 13 schuurman and dirke, “from pest to pet”. 14 plumwood, eye of the crocodile. 15 freccero, “carnivorous virility”. 16 redmalm, “discipline and puppies,” 441. 17 mcfarland and hediger, “approaching the agency of other animals”. 18 charles and aull davies, “my family”. 19 birke, bryld, and lykke. “animal performances”, 170. schuurman, imagining home | 85 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) considered the aim of a successful pet–human relationship.20 it is notable that despret’s idea of mutual domestication focuses on the home, the place where pets share their life with humans and, with their own agency, are able to “become with” a human in a sustainable way. pets are understood to belong to the home, the place where the human–pet relationship is co-constructed by both humans and animals.21 it has been suggested that relationships with animals in the home have the ability to blur the hierarchical boundary between humans and animals, resulting in “posthuman families”.22 it may be, however, that the boundary is maintained contextually in everyday practices and enforced if, for instance, the owner wants to give up the pet.23 in a sense different from any other category of animals, the idea of a pet can nevertheless be defined in relation to the space of the home. to explore what rehoming homeless animals as pets is about, therefore, i now turn to the concept of home. home, as mary douglas defines it, is “a localizable idea” or “a kind of space”.24 home is not, however, reducible to physical space alone — rather, it is an imaginary space that also includes expectations, perceptions, experiences and memories.25 this imaginary space is occupied not only by humans but also by different domesticated animals, including those understood as pets. it is through “the historic centrality of home — as a place, practice and idea — to domestication” that the connection between pet and home becomes apparent.26 the word “domestic” refers to the house or household and, thus, the home can be understood as the space of domestication.27 consequently, an animal such as a dog or a cat without a home with humans is perceived as homeless, but with the potential to become a pet once rehomed. the verb “to rehome” itself includes the prefix “re-”, meaning that something is done anew, or 20 despret, “the body we care for”. 21 fox, “animal behaviours”; holmberg, urban animals. 22 tipper, “everyday relationships”. 23 charles, “post-human families?”; redmalm, “pet grief”; shir-vertesh, “flexible personhood”. 24 douglas, “the idea of home”, 288–289. 25 kelley, “emergent urban imaginaries”. 26 power, “domestication and the dog”. 27 bulliet, hunters, herders, and hamburgers. 86 | schuurman, imagining home humanimalia 13.1 (2022) somewhere is returned to.28 to rehome an animal can therefore be understood as taking the animal back home again, where they belong — as a pet. in this way pets are closely linked to the idea of domestic stability.29 “domestication” for dogs that are rescued and rehomed from other countries into more affluent western homes may, however, become embedded in different discourses concerning, for example, race or nation.30 in placing homeless animals in human — or multispecies — homes, the term rehoming is used almost interchangeably with that of adoption. the term “to adopt” refers to taking a child (or, as in this case, an animal) into the family by choice, as opposed to by biological necessity.31 in general, the term “adoption” is used for placing human children outside the family of their biological parents, whereas for animals, both terms are used.32 further, the emphasis on rehoming is on the home, whereas with adoption the focus is on the family; i have used both terms accordingly in this article. whether the adoptee is a human or a nonhuman, adoption implies choosing a new member to the family, to live in the home and to form a kinship with the other family members.33 creating a relationship with an animal through adoption is essentially an act of care. following puig de la bellacasa, “although not all relations can be defined as caring, none would subsist without care.”34 this is especially true for companionships between humans and animals, in which care is what enables them to live together. even in the private space of the home, however, care relationships have social, political, and cultural dimensions, manifested as widely accepted conceptions and practices.35 the ways in which animals, typically at the receiving end of care, have been perceived and treated in the practices of care have been the focus of discussions 28 oxford english dictionary, s.vv. “rehome, v.”, “re-, prefix”, https://www.oed.com/. 29 fudge, pets. 30 kim, “michael vick”; schuurman, “encounters”. 31 oxford english dictionary, s.vv. “adopt”, “adoption”, https://www.oed.com/. 32 “adoption” is sometimes used synonymously to “sponsoring” an animal, that is, supporting an animal who permanently resides in the shelter with a small fee. 33 jerng, claiming others. 34 puig de la bellacasa, “nothing comes without its world”, 198. 35 tronto, moral boundaries. https://www.oed.com/ https://www.oed.com/ schuurman, imagining home | 87 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) of the feminist care ethic. these discussions emphasize the need for a dialogue that recognizes the subjectivity and agency of the animal, supported by joan tronto’s conception of care relationships as co-produced.36 as jopi nyman points out, the affective and emotional relationships between humans and adopted pets are not neutral but, rather, shaped by cultural discourse about family and identity, suggesting that “the process of rehoming is a way of reconstructing the identities of both human and non-human participants as well as producing hybrid families.”37 similarly, discourses about pet keeping include culturally constructed ideals of what a pet and a pet–human relationship should be, and these ideals do not always allow for the recognition of the pets’ agency. the significance of the expected emotional bond between the human and the pet is considerable, carrying a promise of long-term companionship and cross-species kinship with shared positive emotions and mutual understanding.38 in the case of dogs, leena koski and pia bäcklund discuss the underlying expectations regarding “good canine citizens” — sociable, flexible, co-operative, tolerant of stress as well as able to control emotions — and how these reflect the ideal human being in modern society.39 this ideal does not only imply docility. as redmalm notes, pets are also expected to be agents of their own life and “not afraid to speak up” on issues concerning their own life.40 it is worth asking, however, whether these expectations enable or, in fact, restrict the expression of agency. do they allow for the acknowledgement of the animal’s subjective agency, in the sense of “listening to animals, paying emotional attention, taking seriously — caring about — what they are telling us”?41 verónica policarpo aptly remarks that especially for homeless animals, subjectivity — and thereby agency — may only be granted under specific conditions, that is “adaptation to human 36 donovan, “feminism and the treatment of animals”; tronto, caring democracy. 37 nyman, “adopting animals”, 182. 38 desai and smith, “kinship across species”; schuurman, “encounters”. 39 koski and bäcklund, “on the fringe”; see also weaver, “‘becoming in kind’”. 40 redmalm, “discipline and puppies”, 445. 41 donovan, “feminism and the treatment of animals”, 305. 88 | schuurman, imagining home humanimalia 13.1 (2022) lifestyles, not being aggressive, being friendly, and adjusting to the home and its inhabitants.”42 these conditions can be understood as minimum standards for the adoptability of a homeless dog. to develop an understanding of the construction of the adoptability of animals, i apply the relational concept of encounter value coined by donna haraway for the purpose of bringing companion species into the analysis of lively capital. haraway describes encounter value as the “axis of lively capital and its ‘biotechnologies in circulation’ — in the form of commodities, consumers, models, technologies, workers, kin, and knowledges.”43 in subsequent work on human–animal relationships by several authors, encounter value has been used to analyse the potential value of an animal in creating partnerships with humans, or “making companions”. catherine nash describes it as “the value of mutually shaping, affective, intimate, yet ethically complex human–animal relations that are neither isolated from nor completely determined by commodification.”44 moreover, michelle gilbert and james gillett, for example, discuss encounter value in the context of the breeding, marketing, and sale of sports ponies, to describe the equine’s capacity to form a relationship with a human: “when the child or adult makes a successful bond with the animal, the value of that animal substantially increases.”45 in his study of the sale of american mustangs in germany, robert pütz links encounter value to the concept of nonhuman charisma, developed by jamie lorimer.46 as defined by lorimer, the purpose of the concept is “to describe the features of a particular organism or ecological process that configure its perception and subsequent evaluation.”47 in his work, lorimer focuses on wild animals, but the concept has later been successfully used for studying individual companion animals and their relationships with humans. 42 policarpo, “daphne the cat,” 1292. 43 haraway, when species meet, 65. 44 nash, “breed wealth”, 851. 45 gilbert and gillett, “equine athletes”, 640. 46 pütz, “making companions,” 589. 47 lorimer, wildlife in the anthropocene, 39. schuurman, imagining home | 89 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) foregrounding the “relationally acquired” agency of animals, will mckeithen defines charisma as “the affective and agentive capacity of (specifically organic) nonhumans to esthetically and corporeally capture, captivate, and animate humans to action.”48 in addition to affect and agency, aesthetics is one of the key aspects of nonhuman charisma, referring to the appearance of animals in, for example, visual media representations.49 the ways in which the charisma of homeless animals is performed online contribute to their encounter value and thereby their eventual adoptability, as i will show in my analysis. methodology the materials i have used for the analysis presented in this paper consist of online descriptions of rescue dogs and interviews with finnish rescue volunteers. i have collected and analysed textual presentations of dogs on the web pages of three finnish animal rescue charities in 2019: rescueyhdistys kulkurit [rescue association hobo dogs], viipurin koirat [vyborg dog association], and auringonkoirat [sun dogs association]. each of these charities imports dogs from one specific country, namely romania, russia, and spain, respectively. rescueyhdistys kulkurit and viipurin koirat are the largest operators in the field, whereas auringonkoirat is considerably smaller. all of them have imported dogs for several years. because these descriptions often take a narrative form, i have approached them as small stories of the dogs’ everyday lives and their personal histories.50 following policarpo, i take these narratives to reveal “the ways nonhuman animals and human–animal boundaries are done, and undone, in the context of social media and digital media practices.”51 the stories told about individual animals provide access to how people interpret their agency, including the animals’ subjective experiences and the purpose of their actions.52 48 mckeithen, “queer ecologies,” 130. 49 lorimer, wildlife in the anthropocene, 39. 50 georgakopoulou, “small stories research”; tovares, “all in the family”. 51 policarpo, “daphne the cat,” 1291. 52 mcfarland and hediger, “approaching the agency”. 90 | schuurman, imagining home humanimalia 13.1 (2022) the agency of homeless animals has been situationally shaped by their life histories, including past encounters with humans. in the case of homeless dogs, attempts at understanding their agency against the backdrop of their known life history sheds light on how they might experience living in a home with humans. in discussing the agency of animals, however, there is always the methodological challenge of animal otherness, since all research materials are ultimately produced by humans. in stories about animals, the animals themselves are represented by the humans who write the narrative and interpret and reflect on the actions and subjective experiences of the animals.53 in the stories analysed in this article, therefore, the dogs’ actions are interpreted according to the charities’ understandings and consequent performances of these actions as part of the dogs’ individual agency and subjectivity. i have chosen to analyse the adoptability of homeless dogs in the online material as performances, that is, as material-discursive processes in which human–animal relationality comes into being.54 as the processes of producing conceptions of animals, including their adoptability, are both material (embodied interaction) and discursive (contextual ideas about animals), they can be understood as performative. as lynda birke, mette bryld, and nina lykke explain, focusing on performativity in human–animal relationality turns the attention to “non-human otherness as a doing or becoming, produced and reproduced in specific contexts of human/non-human interaction.”55 the performative approach is useful for analysing how embodied interactions between humans and animals produce understandings of animals and their agency in situated practices such as rehoming. in addition to the online material, i interviewed nine volunteers on the practices of rehoming homeless dogs from abroad at five transnational animal rescue charities in southern finland in march 2020. the interviews were recorded verbatim, transcribed, and 53 nance, “introduction”; schuurman, “animal work”. 54 barad, “posthumanist performativity”. 55 birke, bryld, and lykke, “animal performances”, 169. schuurman, imagining home | 91 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) anonymized, and for the purposes of this paper i gave the interviewees pseudonyms. the interviews support the analysis of the online material and help to illustrate the context in which the adoptability of the dogs is performed. both the online material and the interviews were analysed thematically. the themes that emerged from this analysis include adoptability, interpretations of animal subjectivity and agency, the “ideal” pet, expectations regarding the home, and home as a space for care. to understand how the adoptability of homeless dogs is performed and a possible home imagined for them, i now turn to the analysis of the materials.56 performing adoptability i begin by analysing the ways in which the adoptability and agency of homeless dogs are performed online. i focus on the construction of the dogs’ charisma, which is based on two qualities: their attractiveness as a companion, both in terms of character and aesthetics, and the challenges and compromises created by their temperament, past traumas, and possible health issues. as noted by nyman, such issues are often also faced in the adoption of human children with an unknown past.57 the portrayals of homeless dogs online contain descriptions of their physical appearance, such as “pretty as a picture”, “handsome”, “lovely”, and “cute”. there are also references to their individual character, for example, timidity or courage, calmness or wildness as well as friendliness to humans or other dogs. these are coupled with an abundance of photographs and videos of the dogs, usually taken at the shelter, showing the dogs alone or in a group, and sometimes a close-up of the head. to find a suitable home for each dog, online applications from potential adopters are assessed by the rescue charities, and the charities’ volunteers consequently confirm that the visual aesthetics in the dogs’ portrayals contribute to their adoptability. one of the interviewees, maria, explains how this may already be evident in the first photos of new arrivals, sent from the shelter 56 all research material was translated from finnish to english by the author. 57 nyman, “adopting animals”. 92 | schuurman, imagining home humanimalia 13.1 (2022) to the charity in finland: “i often see from the picture already, i know that this one will be rehomed in a week.”58 the dogs that attract the most interest are the small ones and those with fluffy fur. among the unpopular ones are black dogs and dogs that look too “ordinary” and are thereby not likely to evoke a response from the viewer: the huge number of average dogs. that is, those middle-aged, middle-height ordinary dogs that are just so common that it is hard for them to stand out in the group. even if there is nothing wrong with the dog, if they have a really nice temperament and they are perfect, there is such a huge abundance of dogs. and then there are of course the shy dogs, a category for whom it is difficult to find a home.59 the dogs with the least appeal and encounter value are big, youngish males that resemble breeds perceived as aggressive. all charities, however, point out that aggressive dogs are not included in their adoption scheme. puppies are especially popular, due to the promise of a life-long relationship. age can also reduce the adoptability of older dogs because of the inevitable shortness of a potential relationship: “for many, although they would like to give a home to an older dog, having to part with them is so distressing.”60 it is often the combination of aesthetics and agency that creates an interest in a particular animal. in the videos it is possible to get some idea of how the dog interacts with humans, dogs, and other animals; whether, for example, they are hesitant, or actively approach the human delivering treats to the dogs. when posted online, such interactions may result in increased interest in rehoming, sometimes to a surprising extent, as is confirmed by one interviewee, liisa: we got an awful lot of replies on [a puppy]. i asked the people what it was that had made them fall in love with her. and then everyone said that she had such a cute video where the cat slapped her across the face.61 58 maria (interview). 59 kati (interview). 60 anna (interview). 61 liisa (interview). schuurman, imagining home | 93 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) in many of the online accounts of individual dogs, their actions are depicted in such a way as to evoke an emotional response in the viewer or reader: “a dark nose can be seen to peek from the doghouse door again and again, and the cutest pair of eyes follow the goings-on curiously, but there is just not enough courage for making friends.”62 such small stories complement the visual material and offer an interpretation of the dogs’ agency, linking it to the aesthetic and affective dimensions of charisma.63 as understanding animal agency is always subject to human interpretation, the ways in which the animals’ actions are interpreted have a significant impact on how they are imagined as animals. whether, for example, they are understood to have subjective feelings, emotions and intentions and what the content of these are perceived to be in any given situation. in the excerpt above, for instance, the ways in which the dog looks out of the doghouse but does not come closer, are understood as signs of curiosity and timidity. the contextual interpretations of the subjective experiences of the homeless dogs are based on the practice of reading their gestures, expressions and actions, for example their attempts at making contact with humans. these are interpreted in relation to the specific context of interaction, such as when the dogs communicate with the volunteers at the shelter. the contexts of interaction include situations where human action shapes animal action: “alaska gets excited when people talk nicely to her and has sweet bursts of joy around her cage.”64 likewise, canine action is depicted as shaping human action: “rolle finds people really interesting, and he tries eagerly to get them to pay attention to himself, offering one trick after another to get a reaction.”65 depictions of agency are also found in 62 “fei”, viipurin koirat, last updated 6 december 2019, https://viipurinkoirat.fi/fei. after rehoming, the webpages where the individual dogs are presented are still visible, but they have been removed from the list of adoptable dogs and placed in the category of “rehomed dogs” [kodin saanut koira]. 63 lorimer, wildlife in the anthropocene, 35–55. 64 “kodin saanut koira: alaska (nyk. aura)” [rehomed dog: alaska (now aura)], rescueyhdistys kulkurit, last updated 19 october 2019, https://kulkurit.fi/alaska/. 65 “kodin sannut koria: rolle (suomessa)” [rehomed dog: rolle (in finland)], rescueyhdistys kulkurit, last updated 10 march 2020, https://kulkurit.fi/rolle/. https://viipurinkoirat.fi/fei https://kulkurit.fi/alaska/ https://kulkurit.fi/rolle/ 94 | schuurman, imagining home humanimalia 13.1 (2022) narratives where the dogs express intense emotions such as excess devotion to humans, as in the story of cida: cida is the wild one in the group, absolutely the liveliest of the puppies. cida was said to be brave and greedy, and she does not seem to have any limits even with strangers. the girl is happy, she just falls in the lap of our volunteers and enjoys the attention. cida simply loves humans.66 these interactions typically take place in the space of the shelter, which emphasizes the homelessness of the dogs, deprived of human companionship and a home. interpreted in this way, and performed in their stories online, the aim of becoming a pet and the need for a home become central in the way the dogs’ agency, subjective experiences and expectations are understood. at the same time, however, the stories document the lives of animals with compromised welfare, some of them struggling with severe health issues. in order to contextualize their present condition, there is often some attempt at constructing the dogs’ past experiences before they were found and taken to the shelter in their country of origin. the backgrounds of the dogs looking for a home vary: for some of them, it is not known, but many have been found on the street, in the woods or in an abandoned building. in many cases, the dog’s emotions and actions are interpreted in relation to their known or assumed past, including their life at the shelter and beyond. some of these experiences can only be guessed at: “eliisa may have had some bad experiences of men in her previous life, as she is a bit fearful of men.”67 here, the dog’s specific fear has been given a context and a possible reason. according to the interviewed volunteers, it is not uncommon for homeless dogs to be afraid of men, but the exact reasons in each case, such as potential abuse in past life, are not known for certain and are therefore not explicitly stated. sometimes the dog is interpreted as generally “nervous”, but the feeling 66 “kodin saanut koira: cida (peltotytöt)” [rehomed dog: cida (field girls)], rescueyhdistys kulkurit, last updated 18 november 2019, https://kulkurit.fi/cida-peltotytot/. 67 “kodin saanut koira: eliisa” [rehomed dog: eliisa], rescueyhdistys kulkurit, last updated 14 march 2020, https://kulkurit.fi/eliisa/. https://kulkurit.fi/cida-peltotytot/ https://kulkurit.fi/eliisa/ schuurman, imagining home | 95 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) is then contextualized in a situation described in the narrative, as in the story of ambra who seems to be wary of other dogs: when treats are delivered, ambra would also very much like to join in. but what can the little girl do about her nervousness, and then she just has to content herself with following the party from the sidelines.68 what seems to make ambra nervous is the social act of “joining in” with other dogs and possibly also approaching the human giving the treats. the feelings and emotions expressed by the dog are thus interpreted and performed as part of their character, as in another example: “underneath, rolle is not a very strong dog, rather he is the one who steps aside […] if the other one is a very strong character.”69 in both cases, the dogs’ emotional states are described as fundamental characteristics instead of spatially and temporally contextual emotions or feelings, possibly transient in their journey of becoming with humans and learning to adapt to life as a pet. consequently, the representations of the dogs become performances of animality where momentary encounters have the potential of defining the animal. these examples illustrate the contextuality of the concept of encounter value in creating potential for rehoming, with a possibility of resulting in successful pet–human relations. the adoptability of the dogs is performed through these narrative expressions of encounter value, based on portrayals of the dogs’ charisma and agency, and contextualized with interpretations of their background and subjective experiences. imagining home expectations of a future home are woven into the narratives of the homeless dogs. home for them is described as a future space based on close relationships and family. home, for someone without one, can be understood as an imaginary space, and their family 68 “ambra”, viipurin koirat, last updated 10 april 2017, https://viipurinkoirat.fi/ambra. 69 “rolle”, https://kulkurit.fi/rolle/. https://viipurinkoirat.fi/ambra https://kulkurit.fi/rolle/ 96 | schuurman, imagining home humanimalia 13.1 (2022) an imaginary family.70 in this section, i analyse the performances of the imagined space of home as part of the adoptability of the dogs, and the ways in which risks and challenges in the rehoming of individual dogs are addressed in the online data. often, the home is performed as a place of longing, as is the case for unto who “already dreams about saying goodbye to the shelter soon.”71 such an interpretation of the dog’s agency not only contributes to their nonhuman charisma, but also reflects the common meaning of the home as the site of human–pet relationships and, thus, the place for a dog to become a pet through human companionship and domestication.72 this also implies that the dogs’ wellbeing and happiness are contingent on their rehoming: the future family will be expected to have a sense of humour, as cida is always where things are going on, and even if nothing has happened, something soon will when cida arrives. cida is a dog who enjoys life with every fibre of her being, although at the shelter it is not very special at the moment. imagine how she will brighten up the day […] when she gets home. during our volunteers’ visit, cida tried very much to eat one of their coats and almost chewed the gloves off her hands.73 the imaginary home is set against the spaces that, for homeless animals, can be defined as “nonhomes”74 — the street, the forest, and the field where the dogs have been found and, ultimately, the shelter, where they meet the volunteers of the rehoming charities. seen from the viewpoint of rehoming, these spaces are performed as “other”, rendering the dogs themselves other in two distinct ways: as another species,75 but also as a stranger from a strange land.76 70 nyman, “adopting animals”. 71 “unto”, viipurin koirat, last updated 22 october 2020, https://viipurinkoirat.fi/unto-1. 72 power, “domestication”; schuurman, “encounters”. 73 “cida (peltotytöt)”, https://kulkurit.fi/cida-peltotytot/. 74 douglas, “the idea of home,” 289. 75 haraway, companion species manifesto, 50. 76 schuurman, “encounters”. https://viipurinkoirat.fi/unto-1 https://kulkurit.fi/cida-peltotytot/ schuurman, imagining home | 97 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) there is, however, also a space between these other spaces and the ultimate home: the foster home, a transitory space between the shelter and the home. the selection of the adoptive family ideally happens before the dogs arrive in finland, but some dogs are imported and placed in foster care before their actual rehoming. this may happen if the charities consider the shelter environment especially harmful for the dog. this is often the case for puppies, who need more human contact than can be provided at the shelter, or if a particular dog does not seem to attract interest in the rehoming programme. because of its quality of in-betweenness, the foster home can be understood as a liminal space: it is a temporary site of dwelling, a “nonhome” that nevertheless resembles a “real” home in its social environment, routines, and potential for creating relationships.77 in a foster home, potential adopters can visit and see how the dog copes in a domestic environment. it is, further, possible to describe the dogs’ daily life in the foster home online; their adaptation to family routines and their interest in creating a relationship with humans and other pets. this is the case with butch, “an individual little dog who is a bit shy with strangers but very attached to his foster carer. […] the foster carer describes butch as an affectionate and friendly boy.”78 the dog’s adoptability can thus be performed in much more detail in the foster home than would be possible at the shelter. this is seen in the story of eros: eros travelled bravely in the car, explored the place, and made himself at home. he is not afraid of the bigger male dogs but jumps next to them on the sofa. at least for now, he wants to guard his resources against the other dogs, that is, things that he finds important. according to the home carer, eros will do anything for praise, scratches, and treats, and is a clever dog who learns new things fast. eros seeks contact with humans all the time and would be easy to train as a hobby as well. eros goes on walks very well, he mostly follows alongside the hu77 franklin and schuurman, “aging animal bodies”. 78 “butch,” viipurin koirat, last updated 16 april 2020, https://viipurinkoirat.fi/butch. https://viipurinkoirat.fi/butch 98 | schuurman, imagining home humanimalia 13.1 (2022) man with a slack leash, at least now in the beginning when everything is new.79 the practice of placing dogs in foster homes before rehoming gives volunteers an opportunity to observe the dogs closer and thus interpret their agency and present it in the stories. this practice, therefore, increases the dogs’ perceived charisma and encounter value in a way that might not have happened had they stayed at the shelter. this “domestication” of a dog from a shelter environment abroad also enables a further performance of the dog’s adoptability in a manner that is accessible to the reader. in the narratives, the accounts of their actions portray the agency of the dogs as it is visible in their active pursuit of encounters with humans, thereby fulfilling the expectations regarding the adoptable pet. in the quote above, for example, being able to adapt to the home and cope with “the bigger male dogs”, “learn things fast” and “seek contact with humans all the time” can be interpreted as codes that place the dog in the domain of petness — the culture of pet–human interaction and co-living.80 for the dogs placed in foster homes, however, their adoptability is not limited to the specific skills necessary for being a pet — the dog may be performed as adoptable in narratives of spontaneous action in which they display charismatic agency. this can be seen in the story of mei: “as we pass by the day-care centre, the leash tightens, though not towards the other way but, instead, mei would so much like to go to the fence to kiss all the children at the day-care centre.”81 here, the charisma of the dog is situated in an environment — the vicinity of the day-care centre — that is familiar to potential adopters and thus enhances the imagining of a shared home with the dog. individual human–animal relationships are co-constructed in close encounters and shared everyday life in which “how to get on 79 “eros”, auringonkoirat, last updated 23 january 2020, https://auringonkoirat.com/ kodinsaaneet/erosb.html. 80 schuurman and syrjämaa, “shared spaces”. 81 “mei”, viipurin koirat, last updated 7 july 2015, https://viipurinkoirat.fi/mei. https://auringonkoirat.com/kodinsaaneet/erosb.html https://auringonkoirat.com/kodinsaaneet/erosb.html https://viipurinkoirat.fi/mei schuurman, imagining home | 99 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) together is at stake.”82 rehoming a homeless dog, as any prospective relationship between humans and animals, is not devoid of risks and expected difficulties in adapting to the new home. some of these troubles are mild and are typically described in the data as positive challenges that can be overcome with training, often in a charismatic way that evokes affect in the form of cross-species compassion. this is seen later in mei’s story: life in the foster home with children is going well, although the smallest children may be run over by lively mei […] she has not come to grips with all the basic skills of a pet dog yet and is still learning, but who wouldn’t enjoy training lovely mei? mei does walk on a leash, but she is still learning the actual walking. in the beginning, the speed and pulling force are considerable when she is taken by the smells. when she has let off some steam, mei walks nicely without pulling.83 in the narrative descriptions of the dogs, any potential challenges that might affect their encounter value are interwoven with the performance of their adoptability. problems are often depicted in a way to make them appear manageable but, at the same time, not undermining their gravity. some dogs, however, do have serious difficulties that may complicate their rehoming, and this is made clear in the online material by way of specific warnings. the purpose of the warnings is to avoid problems for the dogs in the rehoming process and, especially, to avoid returns. when writing the descriptions of the dogs on the web pages, according to the interviews, the charities aim to be honest and describe any challenges and problems in detail. despite these efforts, things do not always work out according to plan. in the next section, i analyse such cases and the role of compassion in the struggle to find the ideal home — or any home at all — for the homeless dogs who may not, despite best efforts, fulfil the expectations that surround the ideal pet. 82 haraway, when species meet, 35. 83 “mei”, viipurin koirat, https://viipurinkoirat.fi/mei. https://viipurinkoirat.fi/mei 100 | schuurman, imagining home humanimalia 13.1 (2022) rehoming as care sometimes the dog has already been rehomed, but something has gone wrong, and the adopter cannot care for the dog anymore. in such cases, the dog is returned to the charity and is placed in a foster home, once more in need of a permanent home. this happened to rolle: “rolle was booked for a home of his own the first time on 6 may 2015, and he arrived in finland on 17 may 2015. just before winter 2018, rolle came back to look for a home for the second time.”84 his whole story is presented online, including detailed descriptions of his behavioural problems and how these are managed: at the moment, walks with rolle are carried out with an appropriate, light, and fitting muzzle. the reason we decided to use the muzzle was that while walking on a leash, rolle has developed a way of getting very nervous when, for instance, he sees another dog, and in these situations, he may take it out on the dog or the human close by. with the muzzle, we can make sure that rolle cannot vent his frustration in an undesirable way and thereby reinforce a behaviour that would be undesirable for him in such situations. as haraway warns us, embodied communication with animals is not always easy or harmonious and, although the ultimate goal is something special, the everyday effort of working towards shared happiness can sometimes be stressful and intimidating. in rolle’s case, we do not know his whole history, but his nervousness about meeting other dogs can be interpreted as stemming from negative experiences in the past. for him, these emotional — and certainly embodied — memories can evoke unpleasant feelings. these memories play a part in the development that, for rolle, leads to the application of a muzzle when going for walks. equipment to control the dogs is seen in some of the photos in the online material. a typical example is a dog wearing both a collar and a harness, as well as a leash attached to each for extra security, since running free may be risky for a dog that is in transition from 84 “rolle”, https://kulkurit.fi/rolle/. https://kulkurit.fi/rolle/ schuurman, imagining home | 101 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) homelessness to domesticity.85 the use of controlling devices such as collars, harnesses, muzzles and double leashes may be attributed to human domination over animals, but according to rebekah fox, the situation may be much more complex. she reminds us that a human–animal relationship “inevitably involves some forms of restriction, power and control”, but that there is often at the same time “a certain degree of guilt, worry or uncertainty about what the animal is thinking or feeling, particularly where the relationship is seen to be unsuccessful.”86 in rolle’s case, the decision to apply the muzzle to prevent any incidents resulting from the dog’s nervousness is presented as a solution that might be temporary. in this way, explaining the situation would not drastically threaten rolle’s adoptability but rather increase it by offering a way for constructing a relationship in which the dog’s special needs are addressed. as nyman suggests, a successful adoption involves “an acceptance of insecurity and relationality.”87 building a new future for a rescue dog, taking into account their life history with past experiences that we can only guess at, certainly challenges any suggestions that sharing life with animals might be simple. returning to haraway’s warning, then, nyman’s remark about insecurity brings a complexity to the process of mutual becoming, in which the at times romantic expectations are compromised by the presence of past traumas. this does not undermine the possibility of creating enduring relationships. in many of the presentations of the dogs, their subjective experiences almost appear as weaknesses. lorimer points out that, in terms of affect, nonhuman charisma is not necessarily only positive but can also be negative, for example, when it elicits feelings of disgust or panic in humans.88 in the case of the homeless dogs portrayed online, however, negative emotions in the dog do not necessarily evoke negative responses in humans but can, on the contrary, find compassion in the reader. according to erica fudge, “thinking about other lives (both human and non-human) and exploring the 85 schuurman, “encounters”. 86 fox, “animal behaviours,” 529. 87 nyman, “adopting animals,”195. 88 lorimer, wildlife in the anthropocene, 48. 102 | schuurman, imagining home humanimalia 13.1 (2022) possibility of other modes of perception […] is central to compassion and care for others, both human and animal, in that it is by imagining ‘that could be me’ that fellow-feeling emerges.”89 compassion contributes to canine charisma in the online narratives, and such affective charisma increases the encounter value of the dog and, ultimately, their adoptability. thus, in the portrayals of homeless dogs online, their encounter value contributes to their adoptability in diverse ways, depending on their individual life history and present situation. the act of giving a homeless dog a “good home” is the central act of care that is expected to fulfil an important need for them. when looking for a home for a specific dog, however, their individual needs will have to be taken into account. a dog may need a home in a particular type of area or with a certain kind of family, in terms of house size, outdoor access, area population density as well as other human or nonhuman family members and their experiences of (other) dogs. i call this a designer home, as illustrated by the following narrative: other dogs seem to create a lot of safety and support for fei and so, careful fei is looking for a home with a brave canine friend waiting for her. […] fei does hope, though, that somewhere in the world there is a human for her too. the kind of a lovely person who would give fei time and understanding and would not lose their temper even if things did not go the way you would wish them to. a person who would take fei in their life as she is and would want to offer her something that every dog living in a shelter is missing — a happy life.90 such examples reveal the effort the charities make to listen to the dogs and acknowledge their agency, including their subjective experiences and needs for individual care, following a care ethic that favours “situational, contextual ethics, allowing for a narrative understanding of the particulars of a situation or an issue.”91 in the same 89 fudge, pets, 2. 90 viipurin koirat, “fei”. 91 donovan and adams, “introduction,” 2. schuurman, imagining home | 103 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) vein, the practice of “special adoption”, that is, rehoming homeless dogs with special needs, portrays the idea of home as a space for care. one of these cases is poppy flower, a dog who was hit by a car in romania. she was found lying on the street and subsequently taken to a shelter. after recovering from an operation on her broken bones, she became available for adoption as a dog with special needs: despite her experiences, poppy flower is a balanced and seemingly easy little pup. poppy flower is energetic and perky and enjoys the company of humans. poppy flower currently shares a cage with another female and gets on well with her. poppy flower would thus benefit from a brave canine companion in her new home.92 later in the text, the injuries of the dog are described in detail, and instructions are given for her future care: “with poppy flower it is necessary to be prepared to follow up on the old fracture, also when in finland, and it may require further care or intervention as well.” here, rehoming the injured dog is presented as an act of care that requires a different kind of commitment from the adopter, including the possibility of potentially expensive veterinary treatment, when compared to a life with a healthy dog. despite her injuries and need for extra care, however, the dog is portrayed in a charismatic way that emphasizes her “cheerful” nature and love of humans. further, by suggesting that poppy flower would “benefit from a brave canine companion” it is proposed that her care should be organized as an interspecies task, shared between human and canine carers. the adoptability of such a dog is constructed on an encounter value that is based on compassion-evoking charisma rather than promises of sharing a life with an “ideal” pet. in the online material, homeless dogs are not performed as animals with the potential to become an “ideal” pet.93 instead, for them the 92 “kodin saanut koira: poppy flower” [rehomed dog: poppy flower], rescueyhdistys kulkurit, last updated 16 august 2020, https://kulkurit.fi/poppy-flower/. 93 koski and bäcklund, “on the fringe”; policarpo, “daphne the cat”; redmalm, “discipline and puppies”. https://kulkurit.fi/poppy-flower/ 104 | schuurman, imagining home humanimalia 13.1 (2022) aim of the rehoming practices is just to cope. this does not mean, however, that they will be faced with a life as “lesser” beings. instead of fulfilling specific expectations as “ideal” companions, they are encountered as agents with their own life histories and a possibility to communicate their subjective experiences to those who are prepared to listen. from this viewpoint, rescue dogs belong to an altogether different category than purebred dogs, outside the commercialization, control, and biopolitical production of pets. the dogs that are rehomed via transnational animal rescue and rehoming charities come from a world of otherness, vulnerability, interspecies care, and resilience. inevitably, these animals remind us of disabled people whose agency is often dismissed,94 or of human migrants for whom achieving a secure life in another society offers the possibility of a better life, despite the challenges faced in achieving this position. such comparisons call for a contextual scrutiny of the workings of the categorical boundaries surrounding and dividing animals; as despret suggests, in some situations the most important boundaries are drawn within the categories of human and animal, not between them.95 in the case of homeless dogs, the boundaries between “pet”, “feral”, and “wild” easily dissolve. conclusions in this article, i have explored the ways in which the adoptability of homeless dogs is performed online in the practices of transnational animal rescue and rehoming. according to the analysis, the dogs looking for a home are presented by the rescue charities as individuals who have experienced hardship and are in need of care but are nevertheless attractive as companions. the dogs’ life histories, present situation and subsequent adoptability are validated in stories based on interpretations of their past and present experiences, subjectivity, and agency. these interpretations become part of how the adoptability of the dogs, that is, their potential as desirable companions, is performed online in the form of nonhuman charisma, including aesthetics, affect, and agency, and subsequently the 94 cf. taylor, beasts of burden. 95 despret, “becomings of subjectivity”. schuurman, imagining home | 105 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) encounter value of the dogs.96 their stories are spatially situated, in relation to the meanings attached to the home, the spatial core of the idea of adoption. for a homeless dog, home is an imaginary space of belonging — in contrast to the “nonhomes” of the shelter and the places where the dogs are found, such as the street or the woods. another nonhome is the foster home, a liminal space that serves as a gateway to the “real” home. these spaces and the dogs’ experiences of them, as interpreted by humans, perform the (permanent) home as the space for a dog to be. in western pet culture, this imaginary space is full of expectations of companionability and love. moreover, the promise of companionship with an adopted rescue dog, including positive emotions and mutual understanding and trust, reflects that of international child adoption. due to the international context, the background of the adoptee often remains unknown, bringing a dimension of otherness to both human and animal adoption. in the latter, however, the sense of otherness is further reinforced by the species boundary. in the stories of the dogs, the animals are portrayed against the background of their multiple otherness, as non-domesticated nonhumans from another country and multispecies cultural environment. consequently, the home becomes a space of domestication, with the specific aim of transforming the homeless animal into a family pet with a new home, home country, and way of living with humans. in the metanarrative of becoming a pet, the dog is placed in a home, to be rescued and to be happy, thereby fulfilling the expectations of pet culture. the background of homeless animals, however, sometimes presents challenges to their rehoming. while they might seem like easily adoptable pets and companions, their temperaments, traumas and health issues render them living, individual beings in need of personalized care and living environment. the adoptability of homeless dogs is thus not only based on the positive affects they may evoke, but also on interpretations of their past experiences and the compassion they may elicit in the potential adopter. in such 96 lorimer, wildlife in the anthropocene. 106 | schuurman, imagining home humanimalia 13.1 (2022) cases, sharing life with them may seem to be filled with not only happiness and positive experiences, but also worry, stress, and an inevitable acceptance of uncertainty. while it is clear that any interspecies care relationship can be demanding, the difference lies in how the possible challenges of homeless dogs are included in the performances of their adoptability. in so doing, they balance the expectations of happiness inherent in the commercial pet culture. offering homeless animals for rehoming commodifies them, but many of them are openly described as vulnerable and in special need of care, which frames the act of rehoming as a good deed.97 considering their background, homeless dogs do not represent the cultural ideal of what a pet should be. their rehoming is, consequently, not presented as an ideal process of mutual becoming.98 instead, it is presented as an opportunity for the human to create a home with an animal who may never have had a home before. imagined in this way, the home becomes a space for interspecies care where the animal is encountered as a whole living being, a subject and an agent with a life history and individual interests, habits, preferences, and needs. by presenting homeless dogs in such a way, the practices of transnational animal rescue and rehoming may well contribute to the development of a healthier, more ethical pet culture. 97 nash, “breed wealth”. 98 despret, “the body we care for”. schuurman, imagining home | 107 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) works cited balcom, sarah, and arnold arluke. “animal adoption as negotiated order: a comparison of open versus traditional shelter approaches.” anthrozoös 14, no. 3 (2001): 135–150. https://doi. org/10.2752/089279301786999445. barad, karen. “posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 28, no. 3 (2003): 801–831. https://doi.org/10.1086/345321. birke, lynda, mette bryld, and nina lykke. “animal performances: an exploration of intersections between feminist science studies and studies of human/ animal relationships.” feminist theory 5, no. 2 (2004): 167–183. https://doi. org/10.1177/1464700104045406. bulliet, richard w. hunters, herders, and hamburgers: the past and future of human–animal relationships. new york: columbia university press, 2005. charles, nickie. “post-human families? dog–human relations in the domestic sphere.” sociological research online 21, no. 3 (2016): 83–94. https://doi. org/10.5153%2fsro.3975. charles, nickie and charlotte aull davies. “my family and other animals: pets as kin.” sociological research online 13, no. 5 (2008): 13–26. https://doi. org/10.5153%2fsro.1798. desai, shruti and harriet smith. “kinship across species: learning to care for nonhuman others.” feminist review, no. 118 (2018): 41–60. https://doi.org/10.1 057%2fs41305-018-0104-0. despret, vinciane. “the becomings of subjectivity in animal worlds.” subjectivity 23, no. 1 (2008): 123–139. https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.15. despret, vinciane. “the body we care for: figures of anthropo-zoogenesis.” body and society 10, nos. 2–3 (2004): 111–134. https://doi. org/10.1177/1357034x04042938. donovan, josephine. “feminism and the treatment of animals: from care to dialogue.” signs: journal of women in culture and society 31, no. 2 (2006): 305–329. https://doi.org/10.1086/491750. donovan, josephine, and carol j. adams. “introduction.” in the feminist care tradition in animal ethics, edited by josephine donovan and carol j. adams, 1–20. new york: columbia university press, 2007. douglas, mary. “the idea of a home: a kind of space.” social research 58, no. 1 (1991): 287–307. fox, rebekah. “animal behaviours, posthuman lives: everyday negotiations of the animal–human divide in petkeeping.” social & cultural geography 7, no. 4 (2006): 525–537. https://doi. org/10.1080/14649360600825679. franklin, alex and nora schuurman. “aging animal bodies: horse retirement yards as relational spaces of liminality, dwelling and negotiation.” social & cultural geography 20, no. 7 (2019): 918–937. https://doi.org/10.1080/146493 65.2017.1392592. freccero, carla. “carnivorous virility; or, becoming-dog.” social text 29, no. 1 (2011): 177–195. https://doi. org/10.1215/01642472-1210311. fudge, erica. pets. new york: acumen, 2008. georgakopoulou, alexandra. “small stories research: methods—analysis— outreach.” in the handbook of narrative analysis, edited by anna de fina and alexandra georgakopoulou, 255–271. hoboken, nj: wiley, 2015. https://doi. org/10.1002/9781118458204.ch13. gilbert, michelle and james gillett. “equine athletes and interspecies sport.” international review for the sociology of sport 47, no. https://doi.org/10.2752/089279301786999445 https://doi.org/10.2752/089279301786999445 https://doi.org/10.1086/345321 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700104045406 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700104045406 https://doi.org/10.5153%2fsro.3975 https://doi.org/10.5153%2fsro.3975 https://doi.org/10.5153%2fsro.1798 https://doi.org/10.5153%2fsro.1798 https://doi.org/10.1057%2fs41305-018-0104-0 https://doi.org/10.1057%2fs41305-018-0104-0 https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2008.15 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x04042938 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x04042938 https://doi.org/10.1086/491750 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360600825679 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360600825679 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1392592 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2017.1392592 https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-1210311 https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-1210311 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118458204.ch13 https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118458204.ch13 108 | schuurman, imagining home humanimalia 13.1 (2022) 5 (2012): 632–643. https://doi. org/10.1177/1012690211416726. haraway, donna j. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. haraway, donna j. when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008. holmberg, tora. urban animals: crowding in zoocities. london: routledge, 2015. irvine, leslie. if you tame me: understanding our connection with animals. philadelphia, pa: temple university press, 2004. jerng, mark c. claiming others: transnational adoption and national belonging. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2010. kelley, matthew james. “the emergent urban imaginaries of geosocial media.” geojournal 78, no. 1 (2013): 181–203. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-011-9439-1. kim, claire jean. “the wonderful, horrible life of michael vick.” in ecofeminism: feminist intersections with other animals and the earth, edited by carol j. adams and lori gruen, 175–190. london: bloomsbury, 2014. koski, leena and pia bäcklund. “on the fringe: the positions of dogs in finnish dog training culture.” society and animals 23, no. 1 (2015): 24–44. https:// doi.org/10.1163/15685306-12341342. leinaweaver, j. b. “the quiet migration redux: international adoption, race, and difference.” human organization 73, no. 1 (2014): 62–71. https://doi.org/10.17730/ humo.73.1.f1x606xr745wnw4k. lorimer, jamie. wildlife in the anthropocene: conservation after nature. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2015. mcfarland, sarah e. and ryan hediger. “approaching the agency of other animals: an introduction.” in animals and agency: an interdisciplinary exploration, edited by sarah e. mcfarland and ryan hediger, 1–20. leiden: brill, 2009. mckeithen, will. “queer ecologies of home: heteronormativity, speciesism, and the strange intimacies of crazy cat ladies.” gender, place & culture 24, no. 1 (2017): 122–134. https://doi.org/10.1080/0 966369x.2016.1276888. nance, susan. introduction to the historical animal, 1–16. syracuse, ny: syracuse university press, 2015. nash, catherine. “breed wealth: origins, encounter value and the international love of a breed.” transactions of the institute of british geographers 45, no. 4 (2020): 849–861. https://doi.org/10.1111/ tran.12383. nyman, jopi. “adopting animals: home and family in us rehoming narratives.” in thinking with the familiar in contemporary literature and culture ‘out of the ordinary’, edited by joel kuortti, kaisa ilmonen, elina valovirta, and janne korkka, 181–196. leiden: brill, 2019. plumwood, val. the eye of the crocodile. edited by lorraine shannon. canberra: anu press, 2012. policarpo, verónica. “daphne the cat: reimagining human–animal boundaries on facebook.” sociological review 68, no. 6 (2020): 1290–1306. https://doi. org/10.1177/0038026120918167. power, emma. “domestication and the dog: embodying home.” area 44, no. 3 (2012): 371–378. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1475-4762.2012.01098.x. power, emma. “furry families: making human–dog family through home.” social and cultural geography 9, no. 5 (2008): 535–555. https://doi. org/10.1080/14649360802217790. puig de la bellacasa, maría. “‘nothing comes without its world’: thinking with care.” the sociological review 60, no. 2 https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690211416726 https://doi.org/10.1177/1012690211416726 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10708-011-9439-1 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-12341342 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-12341342 https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.73.1.f1x606xr745wnw4k https://doi.org/10.17730/humo.73.1.f1x606xr745wnw4k https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2016.1276888 https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369x.2016.1276888 https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12383 https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12383 https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026120918167 https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026120918167 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2012.01098.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2012.01098.x https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360802217790 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649360802217790 schuurman, imagining home | 109 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) (2012): 197–216. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1467-954x.2012.02070.x. pütz, robert. “making companions: companionability and encounter value in the marketization of the american mustang.” epe: nature and space 4, no. 2 (2020): 585–602. https://doi. org/10.1177/2514848620924931. redmalm, david. “discipline and puppies: the powers of pet keeping.” international journal of sociology and social policy 41, no. 3/4 (2020): 440–454. https://doi.org/10.1108/ ijssp-08-2019-0162. redmalm, david. “pet grief: when is nonhuman life grievable?” the sociological review 63, no. 1 (2015): 19–35. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467954x.12226. schuurman, nora. “animal work, memory, and interspecies care: police horses in multispecies urban imaginaries.” cultural geographies 28, no. 3 (2021), 547–561. https://doi. org/10.1177/14744740211003651. schuurman, nora. “encounters with a canine other: performing domestication in transnational animal rescue and rehoming.” social & cultural geography 22, no. 5 (2019): 686–703. https://doi.org/10.1080/146493 65.2019.1619820. schuurman, nora and karin dirke. “from pest to pet: liminality, domestication and animal agency in the killing of rats and cats.” trace: journal for human– animal studies 6, no. 1 (2020): 2–25. https://doi.org/10.23984/fjhas.86934. schuurman, nora and taina syrjämaa. “shared spaces, practices and mobilities: pet–human life in modern finnish homes.” home cultures 18, no. 2 (2021): 173–194. https://doi.org/10.1080/1 7406315.2021.1963611. shir-vertesh, dafna. “‘flexible personhood’: loving animals as family members in israel.” american anthropologist 144, no. 3 (2012): 420–432. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15481433.2012.01443.x. taylor, sunaura. beasts of burden: animal and disability liberation. new york: new press, 2017. thomas, keith. man and the natural world: changing attitudes in england 1500–1800. london: allen lane, 1983. tipper, becky. “‘a dog who i know quite well’: everyday relationships between children and animals.” children’s geographies 9, no. 2 (2011): 145–165. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2011. 562378. tovares, alla v. “all in the family: small stories and narrative construction of a shared family identity that includes pets.” narrative inquiry 20, no. 1 (2010), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1075/ ni.20.1.01tov. tronto, joan c. caring democracy: markets, equality, and justice. new york: new york university press, 2013. tronto, joan c. moral boundaries: a political argument for an ethic of care. london: routledge, 1993. weaver, harlan. “‘becoming in kind’: race, class, gender, and nation in cultures of dog rescue and dogfighting.” american quarterly 65, no. 3 (2013): 689–709. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2013.0034. yngvesson, barbara. belonging in an adopted world: race, identity, and transnational adoption. chicago: university of chicago press, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.2012.02070.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-954x.2012.02070.x https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620924931 https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848620924931 https://doi.org/10.1108/ijssp-08-2019-0162 https://doi.org/10.1108/ijssp-08-2019-0162 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954x.12226 https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-954x.12226 https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740211003651 https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740211003651 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2019.1619820 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2019.1619820 https://doi.org/10.23984/fjhas.86934 https://doi.org/10.1080/17406315.2021.1963611 https://doi.org/10.1080/17406315.2021.1963611 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01443.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01443.x https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2011.562378 https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2011.562378 https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.20.1.01tov https://doi.org/10.1075/ni.20.1.01tov https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2013.0034 110 | schuurman, imagining home humanimalia 13.1 (2022) online research materials auringonkoirat. “eros.” last updated 23 january 2020. accessed 23 june 2022. https://auringonkoirat.com/ kodinsaaneet/erosb.html. rescueyhdistys kulkurit. “kodin saanut koira: alaska (nyk. aura)” [rehomed dog: alaska (now aura)]. last updated 29 october 2019. accessed 23 june 2022. https://kulkurit.fi/alaska/. rescueyhdistys kulkurit. “kodin saanut koira: cida (peltotytöt)” [rehomed dog: cida (field girls)]. last updated 18 november 2019. accessed 23 june 2022. https://kulkurit.fi/cida-peltotytot/. rescueyhdistys kulkurit. “kodin saanut koira: eliisa” [rehomed dog: eliisa]. last updated 14 march 2020. accessed 23 june 2022. https://kulkurit.fi/eliisa/. rescueyhdistys kulkurit. “kodin saanut koira: poppy flower” [rehomed dog: poppy flower]. last updated 16 august 2020. accessed 23 june 2022. https:// kulkurit.fi/poppy-flower/. rescueyhdistys kulkurit. “kodin saanut koira: rolle (suomessa)” [rehomed dog: rolle (in finland). last updated 10 march 2020. accessed 23 june 2022. https://kulkurit.fi/rolle/. viipurin koirat. “ambra.” last updated 10 april 2017. accessed 23 june 2022. https://viipurinkoirat.fi/ambra. viipurin koirat. “butch.” last updated 16 april 2020. accessed 23 june 2022. https://viipurinkoirat.fi/butch. viipurin koirat. “fei.” last updated 6 december 2019. accessed 23 june 2022. https://viipurinkoirat.fi/fei. viipurin koirat. “mei.” last updated 7 july 205. accessed 23 june 2022. https:// viipurinkoirat.fi/mei. viipurin koirat. “tuuma.” last updated 19 december 2019. accessed 23 june 2022. https://viipurinkoirat.fi/tuuma. viipurin koirat. “unto.” last updated 22 october 2020. accessed 23 june 2022. https://viipurinkoirat.fi/unto-1. https://auringonkoirat.com/kodinsaaneet/erosb.html https://auringonkoirat.com/kodinsaaneet/erosb.html https://kulkurit.fi/alaska/ https://kulkurit.fi/cida-peltotytot/ https://kulkurit.fi/eliisa/ https://kulkurit.fi/poppy-flower/ https://kulkurit.fi/poppy-flower/ https://kulkurit.fi/rolle/ https://viipurinkoirat.fi/ambra https://viipurinkoirat.fi/butch https://viipurinkoirat.fi/fei https://viipurinkoirat.fi/mei https://viipurinkoirat.fi/mei https://viipurinkoirat.fi/tuuma https://viipurinkoirat.fi/unto-1 _hlk83217059 _hlk106367360 humanimalia vol. 13, no. 2 (spring 2023) special issue: horses and humans guest edited by kristen guest and monica mattfeld humanimalia is a biannual journal devoted to the study of human–animal relations. it is interdisciplinary, open-access, and peer-reviewed, publishing original articles from a wide range of cultural, historical, philosophical, political, and aesthetic perspectives. humanimalia has three aims: to explore and advance the vast range of scholarship on human–animal relations, to encourage exchange among scholars working from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and those working closely with animals in non-academic fields. we invite innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches. ideally, we seek papers that combine approaches, or at the very least draw upon research in other disciplines to contextualize their arguments. as much as possible, we seek papers that acknowledge and seek to advance a more-than-human conception of aesthetics, culture, and society. https:humanimalia.org cover: george stubbs, anatomy of the horse, 1766 editorial board managing editor kári driscoll utrecht university associate editors mari bastashevski amsterdam school for cultural analysis clemens driessen wageningen univeristy marianna szczygielska czech academy of sciences kerstin weich independent scholar book reviews editor dominic o’key university of sheffield copyeditors kári driscoll dominic o’key pauw vos layout and design mari bastashevski kári driscoll typsetting kári driscoll guest editors’ introduction | iii humanimalia 13.2 (2023) while visiting the international museum of the horse in lexington, kentucky, in 2017, we toured the spectacular arabian horse pavilion. as we wandered through the chronologically ordered exhibits that trace the origins of the modern arabian, we were struck by the unexpectedly diverse aesthetics that predate the consolidation of the arabian as a breed in the twentieth century. early photographs from homer davenport’s trips to syria and lady anne blunt’s stud offered diverse images of “arabian” horses from across the middle east, some of whom displayed stocky builds, straight or roman noses, and rather nondescript conformation. alongside these were early romantic, orientalized paintings of horses with dished faces, impossibly refined bodies, and flagged tails — the conformation that defines the arabian breed today. the divergence between these examples of photographic and painterly representation, and the ways human imagination clearly played a role in shaping the modern aesthetic of the arabian into the now recognizable “show” type horse, prompted us to think more broadly about how — and to what ends — we shape and reshape horses. our initial question was what came first: the horse or the representation of the horse — fiction or reality? we also questioned how human relationships with equines, and their relationships with us, alter how we think about, interact with, and shape them (and they us). how does this influence change over history and across geographic location? how are we as scholars to approach these complex issues? the cluster of five essays and roundtable collected here engage with these questions about horse–human relationships from distinct disciplinary perspectives. in doing so, this special issue hopes to add to the many excellent studies that have appeared over the past several years examining issues of horse– human relationships. current scholarship engages with questions about horse–human relationships and agency from multiple disciplinary and theoretical approaches. lynda birke and kirrilly thompson’s (un)stable relations: horses, humans and social agency (2017), for example, examines iv | guest editors’ introduction humanimalia 13.2 (2023) equine agency, culture, and perspectives within horse–human affective relationships, as does katherine dashper’s study of interspecies communication and collaboration in human–animal relationships in equestrian sport and leisure (2017). dona lee davis and anita maurstad’s edited collection, the meaning of horses: biosocial encounters (2016), utilizes a broad ethnographic approach to think about individual development and break down the nature–culture binary at the heart of horse–human relationships past and present. also thinking about equestrian cultures, jonna bornemark, petra andersson, and ulla ekström von essen’s equine cultures in transition: ethical questions (2019), raises important questions about interspecies interactions by exploring shifts in our understanding of horses as subjective beings with their own language systems and ways of being. finally, gala argent and jeannette vaught’s recent the relational horse: how frameworks of communication, care, politics, and power reveal and conceal equine selves (2022) places equine ways of being at the centre of contemporary questions about horse–human relationships. the interdisciplinary character of this recent scholarship makes clear the benefits of placing diverse subjects, and in some cases methodologies, side by side in order to explore the complexity and ethics of horse–human relationships. the contributors to this special issue of humanimalia similarly draw on diverse disciplinary methodologies and experiences when confronting such questions. taken together, the historians, literary scholars, social scientists, anthropologists, and sociologists whose work is collected here employ modes of inquiry that draw on the personal, the anecdotal, and the experiential alongside traditional disciplinary modes of analysis. such intimate fusions destabilize accepted definitions of kind by asking what it means to see, hear, touch, and even know a horse (as well as what it means for the horse to know you). in her contribution to this issue, angela hofstetter’s deeply personal exploration of horse–human relationship foregrounds questions about the space in which interspecies intimacies are formed. exploring the interrelationship between childhood trauma, grounding guest editors’ introduction | v humanimalia 13.2 (2023) in the present, and the resulting intimacy (or its destruction) with her lipizzan mare eroika, hofstetter foregrounds the importance of being present to the horse as part of the training relationship. taking broader historical approaches, christian gundermann and margaret derry examine the stakes of horse–human relationships in light of human fashions for equine body type. focusing on spanish breeds from the baroque era to the present and concerns with purity, gundermann pinpoints the role spanish horses have played in iterating and “queering” modernity’s aesthetic in ways that challenge modern norms of competition and breeding. similarly, derry’s historical exploration of key strands of history that underpin modern purebred arabian breeding examines “human interactions with animals, the culture that results from that interaction from a global point of view, and the difficulties that arise when trying to define quality in a living thing.” jeannette vaught’s contribution to this discussion draws on history and personal experience to query established norms of nonsexuality and gendered policing produced by equine reproductive technology. by thinking about our relationships to animal sexuality differently, vaught argues, we may imagine alternative, and more ethical, ways for horses and humans to live together. the final essay, by jocelyne porcher and sophie barreau, explores the use of the human voice in training young horses to offer a new understanding both of animal labour and of the ways voice creates (or disrupts) equine happiness and contentment within horse–human training relationships. together, these articles question established discourses, processes, and ways of being with nonhuman others by questioning the ingrained systems that have traditionally shaped horse–human interaction. sitting alongside these five articles is a roundtable focused on “shaping the equine body” that likewise unpacks, questions, and mulls over established (and problematic) ways of being with horses. the roundtable’s participants — susanna forrest, richard nash, karen raber, and jeannette vaught — are diverse in their interests and disciplinary approaches: forrest’s recent work focuses (among other things) on encounters that frame the long history of the “wild” tarpan and takhi; nash is an influential scholar of the vi | guest editors’ introduction humanimalia 13.2 (2023) eighteenth-century thoroughbred who is also active in the modern world of thoroughbred breeding and racing; raber, whose research focuses on animals in renaissance england, is a grand prix dressage rider; and vaught, a former veterinary technician specializing in equine reproduction, now engages in research focused on the historical ethology of horse–human relationships. a particularly exciting aspect of this roundtable discussion is the way participants’ relationships (of various types) with equines shape the methodologies and questions they bring to the subject. together in conversation, these scholars offer an interdisciplinary and experiential exploration of the ways humans shape equestrian bodies and worlds, offering insights into the mythologies and stories surrounding equines within modernity, and suggesting new ways of being together that could improve the lives of both species. kristen guest and monica mattfeld prince george, bc works cited argent, gala and jeannette vaught, eds. the relational horse: how frameworks of communication, care, politics, and power reveal and conceal equine selves. human–animal studies 24. leiden: brill, 2022. birke, lynda and kirrilly thompson. (un)stable relations: horses, humans and social agency. human–animal studies. london: routledge, 2018. bornemark, jonna, petra andersson, and ulla ekström von essen, eds. equine cultures in transition: ethical questions. routledge advances in sociology. london: routledge, 2019. dashper, katherine. human–animal relationships in equestrian sport and leisure. routledge research in sport, culture and society. london: routledge, 2017. davis, dona lee and anita maurstad eds. the meaning of horses: biosocial encounters. london: routledge, 2016. microsoft word porth pdf dummy h u m a n i m a l i a 4:1 emily f. porth when women birthed mooncalves and moles: the display of fetal remains and the invisibility of females in museums an introduction to the hunterian museum. i passed through the regal roman columns that grace the front entrance of the royal college of surgeons in london, england and collected my dark yellow “museum visitor” badge from a security guard at the front desk. upon walking up the stairs to the second floor and then entering the museum, i was greeted by a volunteer working at the desk to the right, who directed me toward the large laminated museum guides located under a bust of the museum’s namesake, john hunter. bust of john hunter (photo by emily f. porth) the light is kept quite dim, owing to the fragility of the many wet-preserved specimens in the main part of the museum: row upon row of bits, sections, and entire human and animal specimens. they were delicately dissected and suspended in an alcoholic solution in the interest of their long-term preservation, most having been prepared by http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 2 hunter himself in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and the quality of the specimens is immaculate. the museum collection also includes surgical instruments, skeletal remains, wax and plastic models, as well as a few odd specimens that have been preserved from the ravages of time through the old technique of rapid dehydration, followed by the application of a thick coat of lacquer. it is the spirit collections however, in their seemingly endless rows of glass jars of innumerable size and content, that dominate this space on the translucent shelves and give it its name: “the crystal gallery.” entrance to the “crystal gallery” (photo by emily f. porth) the most imposing sight on entering the main gallery is the skeleton of “the irish giant,” a man named charles byrne who exhibited himself in life as the world’s tallest http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 3 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles man, and who ended up — against his explicit wishes — as part of john hunter’s expansive collection. now, as an iconic figure associated with the museum, it is incredibly unlikely that his remains will be removed from display, even though the museum and the public are well aware that he did not wish to be displayed in death as he was in life. “the irish giant” (photo by emily f. porth) the hunterian museum is a medical museum and, in the tradition of such museums — and of science itself — its specimens come from people and animals who frequently remain unknown and anonymous in the collection catalogue, and who are almost always displayed in the same fashion: without names, and without individual histories. the skeleton of mr. byrne is one of few specimens that has a documented story, and whose story is told within the exhibitions. passing through the galleries, i was struck by one thing after another; the museum is an almost overwhelming visual cornucopia of beings, and pieces of beings, that represent the diversity of life on this planet, as well as the incredible progress made in the eighteenth century in understanding anatomy and the workings of biology. it is also a strong indicator of the ambition and curiosity that drove hunter’s medical research and http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 4 collecting. some specimens, such as a piece of honeycomb, or various insects, seem more innocuous than others that, frankly, left me unsettled. the more shocking beings seem to appear more sharply in the glass shelves: a small pregnant water vole (specimen 3462) is suspended upside-down in clear fluid, the skin over her bulging belly removed entirely to reveal numerous uteri that are connected together and curve like a large intestine outside of her body. on the other side of the shelves, part of a child’s face (specimen p 334) is preserved, riddled with smallpox sores that have burst and ulcerated. the face, unidentified as either male or female, is sawed across at the rim of the eyes with lower eyelashes left intact, and then also cut vertically midway down the side of the face, leaving the teeth in the mouth, but with an empty void behind it. the dye injected into the skin to color the sores left the flesh looking blanched but remarkably lifelike. by the time i had made it through most of the collection, i felt thoroughly desensitized to what i was seeing — and it seems likely that is part of the logic for locating the mammalian embryological and fetal specimens in the final corridor of the museum. particular biological similarities make humans feel emotionally closer to some other species. erica fudge asserts that the characteristics of big eyes and long eyelashes, for instance, compel consumers to feel more strongly about the plight of veal calves than chickens in factory farming. this is because we see the calves, in a way, as a mirrored version of ourselves, which promotes a very specific type of recognizability between human and animal (fudge 40). in contrast, animals like fishes look so completely different from humans, that empathy is often more challenging in practice. at the hunterian, there are fetal bodies representing the varying stages of development of multiple species — insects, reptiles, almost any type of animal you can think of — but it is those species that are most closely related to human, as well as humans themselves, that are grouped together grouped near the end of the path visitors take through the museum. *** she sits in a glass jar labelled “3773”. her skin is a waxy beige, lightened by the formaldehyde and alcohol that preserve her body, and she is completely hairless. it seems apparent that her eyes were not developed enough to have ever seen, had she been outside of her mother at that stage of development — it just would have been too early for survival. her mouth is slightly open and teeth and tongue are apparent just inside of her prised lips. a large scar marks the length of her trunk, stretching from the groin, all the way up to what remains a large, gaping hole in the centre of her chest. http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 5 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles affixed in anatomical position, her arms rest in front, palms facing downward, and she hangs suspended, appearing almost to sit within the glass jar that has been her final resting place from sometime between 1760 to 1793. it is a protective glass womb to replace the pulsing, fleshy one she left behind. this one does not nourish the way her mother’s did, but with the correct proportion of chemicals within, it does sustain its own type of “life” for the body within it: an eternal one. where did she come from? under what circumstances was she removed from the female who nurtured her biological development? and if this was her fate, what happened to her mother? fetal remains in the museum. the catalogue entry from 1970 for the wet-preserved fetus described above is brief: “a female mammary fetus of a kangaroo (macropus sp.), at a slightly more advanced stage of development. in the centre of the abdomen is the mouth of the marsupial pouch. the lateral fusion of the lips is still maintained although it is in process of breaking down” (dobson).1 one of the volunteers at the museum told me that she and the other specimens on this shelf were the first kangaroos that had ever been seen in london (personal communication, june 8/10), although this information doesn’t appear in any of the catalogue information about the kangaroo specimens. did you initially assume the fetus i describe is human? if so, did you experience an emotional reaction to her? if you had known she was a kangaroo fetus, do you think your reaction would have been different? would you have thought about where she came from and wondered about the details of her individual family history? in this paper i argue that narrating the embryological origin story through traditional scientific display techniques has the potential to reinforce the systemic marginalization and devaluation of females of all species. when fetal bodies are exhibited without reference to the context of their acquisition, females become the “absent referent” and can essentially be morally abandoned as “incubators.” the purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the displays of bodies in scientific institutions that are presented, and perceived by most of people who visit them, as “objective” and “value-neutral.” fetal remains occupy a sensitive space for some people because of their visual association with contemporary debates about whether or not a woman should be able to choose to terminate a pregnancy and, regardless of politics, the fetal remains at the hunterian museum are visually arresting bodies that attract a lot of attention from visitors. during the summer of 2010, i carried out fifteen interviews with visitors to the hunterian museum.2 nine of these interviewees voiced their interest or concern about the circumstances surrounding the acquisition of the human fetal bodies because no http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 6 context was provided in the display about how they came to be in john hunter’s collection.3 a woman i interviewed, who had recently had a baby herself, said, “the fetuses seem more brutal — it’s the idea that they were ripped out of somebody” (penny, 16/06/10). her frank words made an impression on me, and left me to wonder about the women who were the biological mothers of these fetal remains and essentially rendered invisible through the process of museum collection and display. it is also intriguing that interviewees so seldom used the word “mother,” or even “woman,” to describe the source of the human fetal bodies. of equal interest is my interviewees’ general lack of curiosity about the source of the fetal remains of nonhuman animals. they, too, are the offspring of mothers who have become invisible, and the presence of these fetuses in the museum is likewise generally unexplained in the catalogue and displays. my interviews reinforced the importance of drawing attention to the display of fetal remains because they are symbolic of the females, both human and nonhuman animal, who are not commonly given adequate representation in places of informal education, and who are in fact sometimes dramatically misrepresented, as i discuss later. i could have examined how other types of discrimination, including racism, classism, ableism, and heterosexism are apparent in the ways fetal bodies are displayed, but given the length of this paper, i have chosen to focus my analysis on females and the sexism that continues to exist within museum displays. the “embryological origin story” is a concept developed by lynn m. morgan, an anthropologist whose book icons of life: a cultural history of human embryos (2009) emerged as central to my work. she defines origin stories very basically as narratives that “are patterned, predictable accounts of how ‘we’ (the people) came to be” (8). origin stories come from many different sources and are traditionally associated with religious beliefs, but embryology is the origin story of modern science — itself a system of belief — in which the embryo/fetus4 plays the key role, and it is the one that many humans take for granted as the “truth” for all people, regardless of religious or cultural beliefs, about the origins of all animals. morgan poignantly remarks that, “the cultural ideology that portrays embryos and fetuses as natural, anonymous, free-floating creatures carries serious consequences” (138), and although her work deals solely with humans, my research at the hunterian draws attention to how some of these concerns affect females of all species. it is only possible to understand the embryological worldview by understanding what ideas about female bodies, pregnancy, and the unborn existed in the past, before this http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 7 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles perspective became widely understood as “fact.” after situating my research within the historical context of the hunterian museum, i discuss changing perceptions in the west of what we today call “fetuses,” from the eighteenth century and through to the present, in conjunction with a discussion about the shifting ideas around how humans were connected to other animals. duden in particular sheds significant light on ideas about human reproduction in the 1700s as a feminist historian of science. her work on the case books of an eighteenth century german physician who wrote about the medical histories of nearly two thousand women has been instrumental in demonstrating that the ways we describe and understand the body are inherently cultural. interwoven in this “herstory” are threads about religion and science, and how these shifting ideas about the origin story of humanity resulted in the changing relationships amongst humans, as well as with other beings. these relationships continued to shift once ideas about evolution and natural selection became widely accepted, and embryology became an established field of study. even today, museum exhibitions about evolution will include models of several animals, including humans, in their embryological state. these models are displayed together in a line to demonstrate how developmentally similar all species are, and how we share a common ancestor. i outline the defining features of the present-day embryological origin story, as morgan has established them, and then discuss in more depth how culture is embedded within the scientific paradigm, of which the embryological worldview is a product. next, by bringing together the voices of interviewees with an analysis of the fetal displays in the hunterian museum, i explore how the gradual and largely uncritical acceptance of the embryological origin story has contributed to the exclusion and marginalization of both human and nonhuman animal females in the west. i go beyond discussing how fetal remains are displayed to analyzing how they are narrated, and i specifically question whether or not these bodies should be situated within a context. locating each individual specimen in its own “origin story” would render its mother visible and make females once again part of the story of reproduction, rather than abandoning them as the “absent referent.” it would also re-situate reproduction firmly within the social contexts with which it is inextricably entwined. i am not advocating that fetal displays be removed from museums.5 however, in order to promote the increased inclusivity of females in the visual narrative of museum displays, i conclude by exploring some alternative display and interpretation http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 8 techniques. this is possible even within museums like the hunterian which present their collections within a historical context and need to remain mindful of the issue of authenticity. bodies on display and the hunterian museum. how does the display of particular specimens, and the ways they are exhibited, reflect what humans think about themselves and each other? how does it mirror how humans see themselves in connection with other beings? in a museum, the assemblage of objects and specimens into an exhibition produces a “visual narrative”; as such, “collections as a whole, and also individual exhibitions, [can be considered] the result of purposeful activities which are informed by ideas about what is significant and what is not” (hooper-greenhill 3). museum displays reflect not only unquestioned beliefs about relationships between humans and the rest of the world, but they also reinforce them. as such, it is essential to question the stories they tell visitors, and whether this narrative has the potential to be harmful and exclusionary. answering these questions necessitates understanding the stories humans in the west learn and take for granted about their biological origins. from the nineteenth century and into the present, human remains, as well as objects made and modified by humans, have usually been sequestered in “cultural history” museums,6 whereas animal remains have been displayed exclusively in “natural history” museums — two spheres that are, by their fundamentally artificial separation, represented as having little influence on each other and established in apparent opposition. it is thus a rare thing to see human and non-human animals displayed together in the same galleries as they are at the hunterian museum. it is done this way because specimens are displayed within what attempts to be an authentic historical context, and the present museum aims to display hunter’s collection as he would have. according to dr. simon chaplin, who was senior curator at the hunterian museum when it underwent the renovation that transformed it into the crystal gallery, “that was hunter’s collection, with humans and animals displayed together; he was trying to show comparisons between different types of living bodies… hunter wasn’t reducing humans, but putting them together as living things in the sense that it is not possible to understand one without the other” (chaplin, 10/08/10). chaplin remarked that the big idea in the museum’s renovation was to demonstrate that medicine in the eighteenth century did not have the same shape that it does now, and to highlight the importance of dissection in that period and in hunter’s work. when john hunter passed away in 1793, he left an astounding collection of 13,687 prepared biological specimens (asma 55). for chaplin, however, the collection is http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 9 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles fundamentally not just about dissection, but about presenting specimens for learning, and that was also hunter’s intent when he began collecting, preparing, and displaying these specimens. while the crystal gallery is oriented “to create the visual spectacle of seeing thousands of specimens all together – to convey the same sense of awe and wonder that visitors would have experienced in the eighteenth century” (chaplin, 10/08/10), the hunterian museum has been used for the education of surgeons and other scientists from its inception, and it now also educates a much wider audience since it was opened to the general public in 1995 (asma 57). the crystal gallery (photo by emily f. porth) http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 10 fetal bodies have been preserved and displayed since people began collecting anatomical specimens. however, many science museums that previously had fetal collections on display have gradually phased them out, making the hunterian and other anatomical museums unique spaces where they are still visible to the public. given that the hunterian museum is focused on education, this makes it especially important to analyse the visual narrative that is told through the ways these bodies are displayed, and to question how it influences what visitors are learning. of moles and mooncalves: human origin stories in 18th to 19th century europe. the fetus, as western society identifies it today, did not exist for the women from whom john hunter collected the fetal specimens that visitors can still see at the museum. in the eighteenth century, a woman was not acknowledged to be pregnant until she felt the “quickening” — when the developing child begins to move, at about eighteen to twenty weeks’ gestation (duden 16). even when a woman perceived herself as being “with child,” she did not envision a “fetus” or the stages of “fetal growth,” nor was there any guarantee that her state would result in a baby (duden 13). for women in the eighteenth century, pregnancies could be “true” or “false,” and when a woman was “truly” pregnant, she would eventually give birth to a living child. however, as the german physician wilhelm gottfried von ploucquet wrote in 1788, “not everything that comes from the birth parts of a woman is a human being” (quoted in duden 13). in the case of “false” pregnancies, “her swelling belly does not cover a yet unborn child, but a ‘something’ she conceived and will bring forth that is not recognised as a ‘child’, because it does not have a ‘human form’”(duden 13). before the quickening, a woman whose menses had ceased was in a liminal state of being: maybe she was ‘with child’, maybe not. perhaps the cessation of her ‘monthly’ was due to some blockage, some ‘retention of menses’. what we today perceive as an abortion, a ‘miscarriage’, or the premature birth of a fetus, then, in the eighteenth century, could be perceived as emitting bad blood, the birth of a mole, a mooncalf, a ‘cleansing’ of the womb, or as healthy flux against unhealthy stoppage. (duden 16) what is a mole or a moon-calf/moon-child? from the time of aristotle, it was thought that “in the first weeks after conception, nature likes to shelter all kinds of beings, including little children, moles, monsters” (duden 17). in the words of a physician named johann storch, who practiced medicine in eisenach, germany in 1725: http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 11 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles ‘a mole is a growth which, after carnal mingling, has been conceived in the womb, nourished through the generative power, and kept as a misshapen thing for a while, until nature expels it as something useless, with the same movements she uses for real birth’... [they are] useless beings, stagnations, which ‘nature seeks to expel from the body’. (qtd. in duden 17-18.) essentially, until the middle of the eighteenth century, what we now understand to be a fetus was interpreted by anatomists as “a big-headed monster, a mooncalf, a misshapen thing” (duden 20). what significance does this have for our understanding of humananimal relationships, if human females could birth other particular types of animals, albeit “useless” ones? as evidenced from duden’s case study, a belief in moles and moon-calves as part of human reproduction was not just part of a vibrant folk religion or local beliefs, but was part of official medical discourse across most of europe. the fetus, as we know and understand it today, was simply not a part of this discourse: until the middle of the eighteenth century, illustrations of a human baby in utero usually resembled a fully formed small man who was often depicted sleeping, or doing some rather acrobatic activities. over time, however, visualisations of the unborn began to look more like an infant, and details about the womb with the umbilical cord, etc. were added (newman 28-35). however, knowledge about obstetrics and human development changed dramatically over the course of the next one hundred years as the embryological origin story developed, and with it ideas about the relationship between humans and other animals were altered as well. there were many shifts in thought across western europe during the 1700s and into the 1800s about what was then called (and is still labelled as such in the hunterian museum) “products of generation.” it was not until 1782 that there is any record of change in term from “generation” to “reproduction”; this term seems to have been introduced by the natural historian and scientist georges-louis leclerc, comte de buffon (1707-1788). “reproduction” had previously only been used in reference to natural history, anatomy, or scientific contexts (jordanova 372). this shift in terminology was met with some hostility, as jordanova notes that the term “reproduction” had the implication of bringing humans to the same level as other living beings, including plants: “the fear of levelling was widespread in the period, prompted http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 12 as much by political radicalism as by ideas that denied the specialness of ‘man’ or the presence of the immortal soul” (jordanova 372). during the medieval period (roughly 400 – 1500 ad in britain), science was undertaken for the sake of religion — from the christian church’s perspective, nature contained patterns, but it was ruled from above by god, and so had no spirit or will of its own. at this time, a sharper line of division developed between humans and nonhuman animals, and because only men had been made in god’s image, humans (and males, in particular) were perceived to have been given dominion over all others (noske 45). by the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, dramatic change was underway in western europe. this included: colonial expansion; the weakening of christian unity under papacy; the discovery and use of the scientific method; the proliferation of industrialism; and the rise of nationalism, individualism, and mercantilism across the continent (kinsley 111). the bible and christianity were used to justify and reinforce many of these changes, particularly scientific pursuits and colonial domination, which were directly tied to the emergence of museums and the “cabinets of curiosity” that functioned as status symbols for the state and the wealthy. most of the prolific philosophers during this time were “working for god as well as science” (coates 79). nature could only become unimportant and subjected to the rigours of scientific scrutiny when humanity saw itself as separate and distinct from the natural world. noske identifies the shift in this perspective as resulting primarily from the mechanical worldview solicited by francis bacon (1561-1626), rené descartes (15961650), and sir isaac newton (1623-1747). these men embarked on a quest to discover nature’s “laws,” a process that created the scientific worldview and the idea that its findings represent truth (noske 53-54). descartes, in particular, defined consciousness and thought as the final proof that humans were inherently separate from all other creatures on earth (coates 17); “because consciousness could not originate in matter, only humans had a soul, which was given by god” (preece 136). in this worldview, non-human animals are machines because they “lack mind” and, therefore, have no soul: an animal “lives in the world, responds to the world, but it cannot know the world. any sign of knowledge that might be shown is mere instinct” (fudge 99). once scientists became more interested in proving how different humans were from other animals, and more anatomical work was carried out on human cadavers from the early eighteenth century, the idea of a woman birthing moon-calves and moles became increasingly outdated amongst surgeons like hunter who were actively collecting human and animal “products of generation.” hunter and his older brother william, http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 13 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles who was a prominent obstetrician and gynecologist, were likely at the head of this movement because of the research they generated through each of their extensive collections of human and animal specimens.7 the work of these scientists also led to different ways of viewing human female bodies, which have long been closely associated with animals and nature through their capacity to bear offspring. it was assumed that the “bodily demands” of women interfered with their ability to act independently and “rationally,” and thus put into question their capacity to be agents in their own right (campbell et al. 5-6). in fact, part of the legacy of descartes’ distinction between mind and body is “the equating of women, children, animals, and ‘the natural’ with one another and with the despised body,” a perspective that elizabeth spelman describes as “somatophobia” (adams and donovan 1995, 2). by the end of the eighteenth century, the idea of “woman” was universally disenfranchised, regardless of age, ancestry, or class, and natural historians proposed a “universal reproductive woman” (schiebinger, nature’s body 6). schiebinger attributes this significant interest in reproduction to a perceived need by colonial governments to increase populations in both the colonies and in europe itself. through the nineteenth century, “objective” scientific research was actively used to demonstrate the “natural” intellectual inferiority of the universal woman, as well as lower class europeans, all non-european humans, and non-human animals. “scientists, with their privileged knowledge of nature, became consecrated priests in a new secular order, intermediaries between the laws of nature and states” (9), and females of all species became valued primarily through their capacity to bear offspring. whether wild or domestic, female nonhuman animals were prized for their ability to produce food for humans, and for their role in producing more animals that could be collected as new specimens in museums and zoological parks. for human females, their value lay in producing additional child or slave labor, or as the means to further populate europe and the colonies with “desirable” people. although hunter, his brother, and select other scientists collected and displayed fetal bodies as teaching tools for other medical professionals from the middle of the eighteenth century, it was not until 1799 that anatomist and physician samuel thomas soemmering displayed a series of images of male and female fetuses lined up by age and size in a small booklet he published under the title of icones embryonum humanorum, which translates simply as “images of human embryos” (duden 18). this strategy deviated from the historical norm of always depicting the developing child as male, but it has also served to reinforce the gender binary, which is still problematic. http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 14 soemmering notes that although he captured each fetus as an individual, it is still meant to act as a type that represents all fetuses at that point in gestation (duden 22). this visualization technique echoes how scientists and curators will choose a single non-human animal in a museum collection to represent its entire species: this is called a holotype. it is the anonymity of specimens in museums that allows spectators to see them as a “type,” rather than as individuals, and it also gives visitors the right to look. the latter is particularly so when gazing at fetuses, which are marginalized in society outside of the pictures available through ultrasound technology. this opportunity is made possible only through the authenticity of the bodies, as well as the viewing permission that is granted through an exhibition (desmond 371). through soemmering’s booklet, the display of fetal bodies in their successive stages of development became standardized. it is an important indicator of the role science continues to play in demonstrating what appears to be the inevitable progress of humanity through the evolution of the individual human. non-human animal fetuses were widely collected too (those from exotic species having the most prestige), but continue to be referred to as “comparative specimens.” by designating humans as the standard by which other animals are judged, humanity is represented as the pinnacle of evolution. stages of fetal development (photo by emily f. porth) http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 15 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles the collection of human and non-human animal fetal bodies — catalogued and displayed without any reference to their mothers, families, or the context of their procurement — slowly began to change religious and folk origin stories, and human offspring that had previously been interpreted as moon-calves and moles were redefined as human. through this, the magical reproductive link to other species in the west was severed. although it certainly cannot be claimed that animals were treated with more respect prior to this time, in general people had an undeniably closer relationship with the natural world and other animals because so many were based in rural areas and still profoundly dependent on the land for survival. further, the new visualization of fetal bodies dramatically changed what it meant to be pregnant for women; both they and european society began to re-interpret women’s bodies and their “products of generation.” this marks the point at which fetuses came to be seen as individual entities separate from their mothers; as they were collected from females whose identities and circumstances were not only anonymized, but designated as completely unimportant by the emerging scientific community. animal kinship: darwin’s theory of evolution and reproduction. charles darwin (1809-1882) spent quite a bit of time at the hunterian museum in the late 1830s to early 1840s as he and the curator, richard owen (1804-1892),8 inspected the fossils that darwin had brought back from south america. asma surmises that hunter’s large collection of teratology specimens9 “served as the backdrop for darwin’s and owen’s early discussions of extinction. individual bodies and organs, preserved in the act of fluctuation from the norm, were suggestive of flux at the species level,” and this is a preoccupation that asma claims surfaces repeatedly in darwin’s diaries from the period (66). when darwin finally published on the origin of species in 1859, it was groundbreaking in part because it provided a scientifically feasible mechanism to explain the idea that species were not created separately, nor did they exist in fixed biological forms. rather, they were each subject to processes of natural and sexual selection that, given variation, heredity, and long spans of time in which to act, could account for the vast diversity seen in the natural world (noske 63). perhaps most controversially, as noske articulates, “the random character of natural selection turned living nature into an accidental object, brought about by mechanical forces and made to exist in a cold, meaningless universe” (66). within this universe, god seemed to have no place in the new scientific narrative of earthly creation.10 http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 16 while largely focusing on the evolutionary forces acting upon plants and animals, it was clear that darwin included human beings within his theory, even though it was a point at which he only hinted near the end of on the origin of species: “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” (darwin 488). evolutionary theories strongly implied a connection between human and animal life in a way that previous christian accounts had not, and this was often emphasized through a comparison between human and animal embryonic development. however, because human embryos were very difficult to obtain, these developmental similarities were often applied last to humans, and so they remained ideologically distinct from other species (morgan 49; 47). the view that phylogeny recapitulated ontogeny, or that the embryological development of “higher” animals went through stages roughly corresponding to those of the lower animals from which they developed, was articulated and popularized by the german biologist ernst haeckel (1834-1919) in the middle of the nineteenth century (morgan 49). around this time it was discovered human embryos have a “tail” from the forty-first day after conception for a total of about two weeks, and although some of the public found this news blasphemous, others saw it as proof of recapitulation (164). regardless, the embryonic tail became an important line of demarcation between humans and other animals. further, the embryonic tail demonstrates how anatomical traits became imbued with symbolic meaning, which effectively helped to create what it meant to be an embryo (168). haeckel’s leading opponent, the anatomist wilhelm his, sr. (1831-1904), instead insisted that embryology needed to focus exclusively on human development, and he helped to shape the ensuing mania for collecting human embryos. during the latter half of the nineteenth century, scientists went to drastic lengths to obtain human embryos at the earliest possible stages of development (see morgan). these specimens were then shipped to scientists seeking them through elaborate “supply networks” (buklijas and hopwood), which morgan appropriately labels a “patriarchal project, as men circulated the most intimate contents of women’s bodies among an old boy’s network” (89). this is not unlike the collection practices of explorers and naturalists who feverishly “collected” (i.e., killed) almost every animal who crossed their path in the name of acquiring a “perfect” specimen. as there was a demand for comparative fetal specimens by scientists and curators as well, pregnant animals in the wild were also seen as valuable prey for colonial explorers. http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 17 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles one continues to see parallels in the treatment of female human and nonhuman animals during the early twentieth century, when embryo-harvesting techniques used on laboratory-raised rhesus macaques were employed as a model for finding human embryos in tissues from hysterectomies (morgan 127). this collection process involved re-branding fetal remains from waste tissue to active tissue, and re-positioning all females as mechanistic “incubators,” rather than as mothers. this effect was achieved with human fetuses through popular literature that likened human and bird development: after all, if embryos were like eggs, they could be sorted, collected, and studied on their own merits as mass-produced specimens, without regard for the lives of the women involved (56-57). historically, and into the early twentieth century, women who miscarried or aborted pregnancies handled fetal remains privately, and if scientists asked for them, families seemed to have no ethical issues or personal attachment to the remains. that does not mean, however, they did not grieve for the emotional loss of a pregnancy — the tissue was simply valued differently. for instance, the remains of quintuplets are on display at the hunterian museum (specimen 3681): born premature at five months’ gestation, three babies were alive at birth and died shortly afterwards, and the other two were stillborn. in a rare case (probably due to their remarkability as specimens), the information about the quints’ origins is found in both the museum catalogue and on the display label: they were born to a mother in blackburn, lancashire in 1786. a local surgeon called john hull attended the birth… in his report hull describes how he was allowed to take the bodies of the fetuses, but was not permitted to take the placenta which was burnt in accordance with local custom. he sent the preserved bodies to london and they were placed in john hunter's museum. (rcseng 2011)11 eventually, the collecting activities of embryologists modified women’s behavior, and women learned not to discard dead embryos and fetuses in their own way (i.e., burial on one’s property, or disposal down the privy). they also learned that the most acceptable course of action was to surrender dead embryos and fetuses to doctors (morgan 82). this shift accompanied the more widespread medicalization and institutionalization of reproduction and birth, of humans as well as of other animals in the factory farm industry, zoological parks, and purebred companion species. by the early 1900s, images of embryonic development were commonplace across the west, http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 18 “yet court cases and interviews reveal that for a long time working-class women seeking abortions still tended to speak, not of eggs, fertilization and embryos, but about needing to restore an interrupted flow and rid themselves of a waste material” (buklijas and hopwood). clearly, this shift in viewing pregnancy, women’s bodies, and products of generation did not occur ubiquitously across all sectors within society, or simultaneously within all societies in the western world. however, evolution and, by extension, embryology, did change how women saw their own bodies, pregnancy, and the process of reproduction. by the 1930s, the embryological origin story was widely accepted in the western world by most sectors of society. different religious and secular worldviews took knowledge of the fetus and made it their own (for instance, the question of when “life” begins and its influence on law and public policy regarding a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy), but it was still considered to be a taken-forgranted biological reality, regardless of interpretation. although evolutionary theory made tangible the biological kinship that humans share with other animals, in practice it rarely changed the attitudes of humans toward other animals. and, as women and female animals have been further exploited through their reproductive capacities within the embryological worldview, primarily as incubators for new life, the fetus emerged as an independent agent and, potentially, as an individual capable of being ascribed personhood. the embryological origin story: the contemporary scientific perspective. morgan identifies embryos as the central actors in western society’s modern origin story (4). as noted above, not all peoples believe or believed that the being developing in a female’s uterus is, in fact, an embryo or fetus. however, fetal development has become a takenfor-granted “reality” for most of us through the increasing visualization of the biological development of the fetus, particularly through ultrasound technology. that fetal bodies have the “capacity to become a sacred image of life itself is demonstrated by its ability to represent the human, the nation, the species, and the future” (franklin 64). morgan identified several assumptions within the embryological origin story. first, this view of development assumes that the path from embryo, to fetus, to baby is the only way to become a full human being, and it supposes that all humans begin as embryos, and we were all fetuses at one point. next, the embryological view assumes that the production of all human pregnancies is human embryos — they cannot come to bear another species, or hybrid of another species, or an inanimate object (11). third, this view assumes that embryos are “amoral biological entities, defined and classified solely by their genetic and anatomical features,” which is harmful because it is a type of http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 19 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles biological reductionism that does not take into consideration “the spiritual, moral, or social circumstances that generate embryos” (12). the final assumption in the embryological origin story is that it is the only story, that it is a story free of subjective belief, and that is true above all other stories. over the past two generations, humans in the west have come to know this story as not as a cultural artifact, but rather as “the facts of life” (morgan 12). the culture in science. why is it critical to see our understandings of biological processes as cultural artifacts? in her book the woman in the body, martin builds on the metaphor of baking a cake to illustrate the importance of critically analyzing popular discourses about female bodies: i assume that women would not menstruate or give birth if they did not have physical bodies and if those bodies did not contain genes, hormones, or many other things. questions about how genes or hormones function in human lives are legitimate, but even complete understanding of them could never settle any human matter. if we focused only on completely understanding the physical components of the cake, we would lose the person who baked it, the occasion it was baked for, and the people who were there to eat it ... my concern is not what is true or false about those processes, nor am i competent to say. instead i try to get at what else ordinary people or medical specialists are talking about when they describe hormones, the uterus, or menstrual flow. what cultural assumptions are they making about the nature of women, of men, of the purpose of existence? often these assumptions are deeply buried, not hidden exactly, but so much a part of our usual experience of the world that they are nearly impossible for a member of our same cultural universe to ferret out. (13) for instance, martin explores how scientists narrate the process of fertilization in human reproduction by relying on western cultural stereotypes of what it means to be male or female. she describes how, in the biology texts she analysed, the egg behaves “femininely” and is characterised as being “large and passive”; it does not “move” or “journey”, but instead it is “swept” or “drifts” down the fallopian tubes. in contrast, sperm are given active characteristics that are associated with men and masculinity in the west by “delivering” their genes to the egg on a “mission” they are capable of only through their “streamlined” shape and “strong” tails (490). she concludes that through this stereotyped language, women and their reproductive processes are portrayed as being less worthy than men or male biology (485-486). in examples like this, it is clear http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 20 that science is too embedded in society to claim that it is possible to interpret the “natural” world beyond its cultural context. the display of bodies — even within a medical museum, where the body is displayed in an unassuming glass jar — narrates a story that is as subjective and partial as the story about the egg and the sperm. as schiebinger remarks, “the body is cultural and political as well as biological” (“introduction” 1), so its display as a scientific and cultural specimen should be interpreted as far more than simple “objective” physical representations. machin, for instance, did an in-depth study of the natural history galleries at the manchester museum to examine how cultural constructions of gender are embedded within the displays of taxidermy mounts. in looking at bird specimens in particular, she notes that 74% of male specimens were mounted at a greater height than the female specimens, and 82% of the male specimens also had a more erect posture (59). both types of positioning implied that male dominance and dominion over females is normal, whereas in reality it does not accurately reflect the animals’ behavior in the wild, and it misleadingly implies that this type of relationship is “natural” within all societies, including human. the projection of societal norms onto scientific study has occurred widely in zoology, especially in regard to gender and sexuality (see levin; bagemih; schiebinger, “feminist history”; haraway), so it is perhaps unsurprising that it has surfaced in displays about our understanding of animal behavior.12 regardless, given that researchers are now cognizant of these discrepancies, museums have an obligation as purveyors of knowledge to make changes accordingly to their exhibitions. displaying fetal remains. it appears as if it is a quote-unquote baby. because it has certain recognizable features from the morphology on the outside. and it’s, it’s tricky. it’s very tricky. but you know, you look at a jar, it contains the specimen. it looks like a baby. is it a baby? no. it’s not a baby. it’s a neverbeen-born, un-dead specimen. so, it’s very in-between. it’s the border zone between these ideas about where life begins, where it ends, and these are not scientific questions” (bio-artist sarah franklin, quoted in anker and franklin 2011, 116). http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 21 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles mid-term fetal remains (photo by emily f. porth) the fetal bodies, like the other wet-preserved specimens at the hunterian museum, are displayed in a very particular way: simply, in clear, fluid-filled glass jars in row upon row of ordered shelves that can easily be described as elegant. they seem to embody scientific objectivity and neutrality — it is initially difficult to imagine how a specimen displayed so plainly could portray anything except the bare “facts.” and, indeed, this is how many of the visitors i spoke with interpreted displays at the hunterian museum. barbara (11/06/10) is a british woman over sixty years of age who identified herself as christian, and she is also a hobby geologist. it was her first time at the hunterian museum, and she described the human fetal displays as “very well put together, very distinct… the lighting there in particular made the detail clear, there were no shadows…. it couldn’t have been done any other way —you don’t want to dress up a woman’s uterus in a flowery pink box!” (11/06/10). although she revealed that she terminated what would have been her third child in the late 1970s, barbara was clear that she had no emotional reaction to seeing the fetal displays; they simply prompted her to reflect on how the fetus would have looked at the time she aborted the pregnancy. barbara felt that the displays were done “respectfully and sensitively,” and that she thought they fulfilled their purpose as educational tools. her reaction to the human fetal specimens, in light of her personal history, suggests that she took on the role of detached scientific observer in response to their presentation, and in this regard the displays could be regarded as successful. http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 22 john (18/06/10), a mature student who was at the hunterian as part of a university class to learn to measure skulls, had a similar reaction. a british man who described himself as having no religious beliefs, john had recently experienced the birth of his own child and said he was initially “a bit horrified” when presented with the opportunity to view human fetal remains. however, when he did go to look at them, john noted that he was, in fact, “not disgusted or horrified because they didn’t look like real babies because of their discolouration and puffiness — i just felt interested… they weren’t intended to shock, they were just presented factually” (18/06/10). dawn (23/06/10), a british woman who also identified as having no religious beliefs and who was doing a postgraduate degree in osteopathy, reaffirmed this reaction by saying, “being in jars, all the same blanched shade, allowed for curiosity and detachment.” penny (16/06/10), a british woman in her thirties, visited the hunterian for the first time with a friend and their young babies. as a self-identified baptist and as a woman who works behind the scenes at another prominent museum in london, penny said that she felt strongly in response to the fetal remains not being contextualized, and she felt confused about who the museum’s audience was because “there was nothing about how they were collected, why they were there, how they were preserved, and how gestation happens” (16/06/10). she cited the question of “how they got them” to be the one that concerned her the most, especially as a new mother herself; she asked the provocative question, “were there two deaths?,” coming to her own conclusion that “we will never know… [but] there was a life behind it, and acknowledging and respecting that life seems important”(16/06/10). a young british university student named amir (21/06/10) who identified as muslim also reacted strongly to seeing the fetal remains. he described their display as “questionable”; he wondered if they should be on display “because it’s one of those things that’s not supposed to be seen” (21/06/10). he said he felt he had a relationship to the bodies on display because, very simply, “i was once a fetus. i don’t feel a direct connection just looking at the display, but the realisation is there” (21/06/10). despite dissenting opinions, the consensus amongst my interviewees was that the fetal remains were displayed with respect. dawn said that she found the bodily displays to be “accessible and well-displayed,” yet she felt that the preservation and presentation in jars “almost dehumanised them,” which created distance and made the specimens easier to look at (23/06/10). if the human specimens were effectively turned into objects rather than recognized as individuals through the way they were displayed, this raises the question of how the jar affected perceptions of the non-human animal fetal http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 23 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles specimens. while it is not unusual to see dead animal bodies on display in museums, wet-preserved mammals are a much less common sight than taxidermy. even though penny reacted strongly to the human fetal bodies, she said that the bodies of animals were less concerning “because you’re not so worried about who the animal was” (16/06/10). she clarified that she is a vegetarian and would not want an animal to be harmed during the making of a display, but she asserted that an animal’s “sense of dignity” is not as important, and that the protocols around exhibiting human bodies should be different from those of animals (penny, 16/06/10). amir’s response was similar, as he asserted that animal remains are a different matter entirely, because we are different from animals: “we eat animals, we have to kill them, there is not much difference between eating and looking at or studying them” (amir, 21/06/10). james (18/06/10), a non-religious american visitor about to begin his phd in the humanities,13 also mentioned that “it’s the humanness that affects the most, rather than the animal bodies — it’s looking at the skull, and knowing a person’s brain was in there and that their soul was there too” (18/06/10). brigid (21/06/10), a young university student who also identified as non-religious, surmised that animal remains are just more acceptable in our society, but on a personal level, she did not see a difference between them and the human remains. as a student who is used to looking at specimens from a clinical standpoint, dawn noted that the fetal specimen which she remembers most vividly is the armadillo (specimen 3479), rather than any of the human specimens: “it was so perfect!” (23/06/10). dawn did think that the bodies of animals should have different protocols around their display than humans, though, because animal remains are commonplace in our society — “we see them every day in the supermarket, after all” (23/06/10). a canadian visitor, alexa (25/06/10), who is working on her phd in the humanities, indicated that she did not have any response to seeing animal fetuses, but was most impressed that the human and animal specimens were displayed “with real equality… there is no human privilege, and some people might find that disturbing that they’re not accorded a special human status” (25/06/10). alexa also believes that the protocols around displaying animal bodies should not be any different than those of humans because “they are a sobering reminder that we are part of the animal kingdom. it is a good activity to de-privilege how important we think we are, and understand how much the medical community has learned from animals. if we had been separated from animals in the display, it would have really detracted from the meaning of the collection” (25/06/10). http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 24 aniaml fetuses (photo by emily f. porth) fruit bat fetuses (photo by emily f. porth) http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 25 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles the display of humans and animals together was done to reflect hunter’s original interest in comparative anatomy. however, aaron (02/07/10), a canadian family doctor who was in the uk working towards a postgraduate degree in the history of medicine, had a further observation. he noted that the human fetal bodies were “classically displayed in a chronological order that leads toward life,” and that this technique is actually a political display in itself because the fetuses “literally march toward the human” (02/07/10). this is obviously true of human fetuses, which look progressively more human as they age, and are ordered as such. what is especially interesting about the animal fetal specimens, though, is that they do not generally march towards anything: beyond the developmental series of fetal kangaroos, fruit bats, and walruses at the hunterian museum, fetal non-human mammals are, more often than not, displayed as solitary specimens. although this may reflect hunter's interests as a collector or his accessibility to certain animals, the story it implies to contemporary audiences is that humans evolve, but other species are static and unchanging. furthermore, the sex of fetal humans is identified in the museum catalogue and display labels, whereas the sex of non-human animal bodies is frequently left unreported.14 female humans and animals are marginalized or made invisible in both natural history and evolutionary exhibits, as they are frequently displayed only in the context of their capacity to bear and rear offspring (i.e., machin; linke). this is evident, for example, in the way museums and other popular media illustrate hominid evolution by showing only males evolving from humanity’s pre-hominid ancestors into modern homo sapiens. females may be included as part of fetal development displays, but adult women are generally absent from the evolutionary displays that grace natural history museum galleries, except when they are depicted as “barefoot and pregnant” in the cave diorama, seated next to the fire that symbolically separates early humans from other animals. the plastinated bodies on display in the phenomenally popular body worlds exhibitions are similarly problematic in their depictions of females. these exhibitions contain fetuses as well, although, unlike the hunterian museum, they are kept in a separate curtained area that is optional for visitors to walk through. walter has observed that the majority of full-body female specimens (two of three in the specific body worlds exhibition studied) focus on the pregnant body, “implicitly defining the female as a reproductive machine” (283). linke also documented that, while several sets of male genitalia (often elongated and erect) were displayed in body worlds in separate showcases, women’s reproductive organs were on exhibit with “malignancies, tumours, http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 26 deformities and cysts” (17). the hunterian also contains a large collection of penises, most of those on display from men afflicted with syphilis, but there is little to illustrate their internal reproductive organs. in contrast, at both the hunterian museum and in body worlds, the internal reproductive organs of females are displayed, rather than external genitalia. perhaps one can infer from this that women’s reproductive organs are solely for the “business” of producing offspring, whereas male organs are for pleasure (although, by showing diseased penises at the hunterian, there is clearly a cautionary message as well). once again, this type of anatomical display works to confine being female to the sole purpose of bearing offspring, and it also confirms destructive gender stereotypes in western society. these types of attitudes towards females did exist socially in the past, before the embryological worldview became dominant – women who chose not to marry, or women who could not bear children, were often marginalised or treated as less valuable and inferior. while women today are still judged by whether or not they choose to bear or raise children, they are also valued for the many other skills and talents they bring to society. these other contributions outside of reproduction are not, however, represented in scientific displays, and females of all species continue to be exhibited – and sometimes treated in life — almost exclusively as reproductive beings. narrating fetal remains. although display labels providing a narrative about the specimens are few and far between in the hunterian, when a story is conveyed in the museum gallery it is critical to consider whether the narrative has been misrepresented by being re-interpreted through the embryological origin story. in one example from the hunterian museum, a display label describes a tissue specimen (3590) consisting of: the left ovary, fallopian tube, and half of a uterus from a woman in the first month of pregnancy… these specimens come from a woman aged 25. she was a domestic servant who committed suicide by taking poison. according to john hunter, who carried out the post-mortem examination, she was pregnant, although her family suggested that her last period had been less than one month before. at the time it was suggested that the lateness of her period and the realisation that she was pregnant may have prompted her to take her own life. (rcseng 2011) http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 27 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles specimen 3590 (courtesy of royal college of surgeons) the name of the woman was mary hunt, and she died on april 20, 1792. given the previously discussed late eighteenth century views on pregnancy, it seems likely that the speculative story presented about her condition, and her reaction to it, may actually be quite fictitious. in this account by the museum, the voices of the woman and her family are silenced to privilege the perspective of the male surgeon. if she had not yet even missed her period, one wonders about the circumstances surrounding her impregnation, which are not at all investigated or considered; being in a subservient position in a wealthy household, within a society that was remarkably stratified along the lines of class and gender, it is possible that she experienced some sort of sexual violence which led to her pregnancy. it is doubtful that the attending doctor would have questioned such circumstances, particularly if it reflected poorly on her employer, who was likely an acquaintance or friend of his. no one has questioned whether she committed suicide because of the situation which led to her pregnancy, rather than the pregnancy itself, which she was likely not yet aware of — if hunter was correct, and she was, indeed, pregnant. it can be said that this alternative narrative is just as unlikely or problematic as the one the museum tells, but that is exactly the point. what is further concerning is the way that an artist, karen ingham, chose to give mary a voice through an exhibition she created at the hunterian in 2009 called “narrative remains.” ingham chose six specimens from the hunterian collection and, using the information from the museum database, she constructed first person narratives about each of these specimens – voices that spoke from beyond the grave. she imagines mary would now say to an audience: http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 28 i didn’t want to do it but once my employer knew i was pregnant i’d be out on the street and as good as dead anyway. there was nothing for it, not for the likes of a poor girl like me. the poison did its job and i thought that was the end of it but the surgeon john hunter thought different. he opened me up and poked here and there exclaiming this way and that with fancy names in latin i couldn’t make head nor tail of. but he seemed to find me of interest, which was gratifying, for gentlemen of his class never found me of interest when i was alive. they’d look right through me, which is funny really, as that’s what you’re doing now, looking through the bits of me, here in this glass jar. looking where the baby was, too small to really see or even feel, but he knew just what had come to pass. and now here i am, in a place with other bits of mothers and babies, so it’s almost like i’m part of a family after all. (ingham) in this narrative, mary appears gratified and honored that she has been dissected and put into a jar by hunter, suggesting that women through history have wanted nothing more in life than to have the attention of a man, particularly if he is wealthy – even if they have to die for it. ingham also seems to equate being from a lower class with being unaided and emotionally destitute, as she implies mary has no family (aside from preserved bits of mothers and babies) and thus no options for survival if she were to lose her job. however, based on the account in the museum catalogue of her family’s testimony, which indicates they shared a close enough relationship to know her menstrual cycle, it seems highly unlikely that she was uncared for and alone in her life. finally, the narrative exalts hunter’s knowledge and expertise in knowing “just what had come to pass,” when he clearly did not know any more about the situation beyond that it was likely she had conceived. the question of context. my position is that museums should provide a context about their specimens in order to honor the former lives of those beings, as well as to aid visitors in connecting to and learning from them. yet, as the story told about mary hunt demonstrates, narratives become dangerous when they translate the past through a contemporary worldview that is contextually insensitive. this is especially true when such stories contain ideas that actually serve to reinforce harmful stereotypes about women in contemporary society. as with human specimens, i believe it is also possible to enable a meaningful connection between visitors and nonhuman animal specimens by situating the latter within a context. some of the display labels that accompany animal specimens in the http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 29 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles museum illustrate the context of their procurement, but most do not. in the case of some specimens, labels clearly indicate that the animal was killed specifically for research purposes, or to obtain its offspring. for example, the label on a jar containing a secretion from the uterus of a sheep (specimen 3487) notes that the animal was killed three days after copulation specifically “to show changes in the reproductive organs of ewes in the days following impregnation” (rcseng 2011). the detailed labelling seems to be most common among the domesticated animals that hunter raised himself, whereas the more exotic animal specimens tend to have labels even more ambiguous than the human specimens: for example, “a fetal infant armadillo near the end of its gestation”(specimen 3479). one exception is a rhesus monkey fetal specimen (specimen 3585), which is described in the catalogue as having “come from a female monkey owned by a 'mr endersbay' (probably william endersby of bedfordshire, d.1802)… the monkey gave birth on 15 december 1782, and the specimen would have been prepared shortly afterwards” (rcseng 2011). there is no indication of whether the monkey was stillborn or killed at birth for hunter’s collection, and the sex remains unmentioned, even though it is clearly male from the photograph in the catalogue. further, there is no reference to the wellbeing or circumstances of mr. endersby’s rhesus monkey after she mothered the specimen. the lack of details makes it difficult to feel any sort of empathy or connection to the monkey on display or to his mother, which could assist visitors in learning about the role that animals played in relation to the history of surgery, and about colonialism and the trade in exotic animals. it could also prompt museum audiences to reflect on how the contemporary exotic pet industry remains problematic. http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 30 specimen 3585 (courtesy of royal college of surgeons) the visitors i interviewed were divided about whether they wanted more descriptive labels in the museum in order to situate the remains within a context. john commented that he was more bothered by looking at the surgical instruments than at the fetal specimens, “because it’s easy to imagine what they did with them after reading the stories!” (18/06/10). penny also reinforced this by saying she had a “sympathetic pain reaction” after learning about surgery in the eighteenth century and seeing the size of gallstones and the tools used to remove them; she felt pity for the people represented in the museum because they were “the worst cases” (16/06/10). interestingly, these stories help visitors connect with and understand what the experience of surgery would have been like in a historic context, yet in general they do not seem to help visitors to understand the lives of individuals whose anatomical contributions generated new understandings of the body and disease, and who were a part of how the field progressed to make surgery safer for others. alexa thought it was better not to have the histories of the human fetal specimens included because “people might have a strong emotional reaction to the fetuses if their stories were known — but it doesn’t have to be a bad reaction, either!” (25/06/10). anne (24/06/10), a “slightly spiritual” british woman working on her psychology undergraduate degree, was concerned that, by putting more emphasis on who the specimen was in life, the museum also “muddies the ethical waters about their responsibility to their visitors” in terms of their mental health. to situate her response within a context, anne told me she had been one of three triplets, but her “other sisters didn’t make it… it was not hard to see [the fetal bodies], i was just curious, but my http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 31 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles mum wouldn’t have been able to see them” (24/06/10). it seems as though her concerns about the museum’s responsibilities to the mental health of its visitors may be valid in this case, although all of the people i spoke with seemed quite prepared for the type of specimens they might encounter because of the nature of the museum. females as the “absent referent.” by removing females completely from the embryological origin story and highlighting the value of the fetus, but not the value of females who bore them, the latter are effectively rendered symbolically worthless. this has serious repercussions for the lives of females, especially when the well-being of the unborn is privileged over the well-being of the living. females have become the “absent referent,” in the way that carol adams uses the term to refer to the psycho-social detachment experienced by people who eat meat. it explains how there is a total disconnect between living animals and the end product that ends up at the dinner table: one does not eat meat without the death of an animal. live animals are thus the absent referents in the concept of meat. the absent referent permits us to forget about the animal as an independent entity; it also enables us to resist efforts to make animals present. the absent referent functions to cloak the violence inherent to meat eating, to protect the conscience of the meat eater and render the idea of individual animals as immaterial to anyone’s selfish desires. the function of the absent referent is to allow for the moral abandonment of a being. (adams 2009) when gazing at the fetus as it has traditionally been displayed, females are the absent referent. “most of the fetuses do not even have an umbilical cord, a memory to a maternal relationship. they appear out of context to a woman, to flesh, to a placenta, to origin… their author is the anatomist” (duden 23). fetuses are presented almost as though they were immaculately conceived – but without the virgin mary. most of my interviewees said they were more affected by seeing wet-preserved fetal bodies than by seeing the fetal skeletons, and amir phrased the difference in these terms: “because it was in fluid, it was striking because it looked so much like it would in the womb, but with a man-made jar around it, the analogy is quite disturbing… the effect of the glass and water magnifies it too, enhancing the impact because of the detail” (21/06/10). the jar is a glass womb, a male uterus. it is a very literal metaphor in that it appears innocuous, but the jar is actually the absent referent for the male surgeon-anatomist who wanted to “give birth” to the fetus that he collected and then re-animated. it is the referent which obscures the absent referent through its transparency. in a way, it justifies fetal displays because it allows them to occur; its message is that a female is not http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 32 needed, and it posits the male womb as an objective space that the female womb can never hope to be. through its transparency, it claims that context is not required. fetus in amnion (photo by emily f. porth) as the absent referent in fetal display, females are effectively morally abandoned as “incubators.” that this has become a lived reality for some beings is especially true of domesticated female animals in factory farm industries, who are valuable only as long as they can reproduce, regardless of how desperate the condition of their overall health, or how much emotional stress they experience. they are discarded as waste after becoming “spent” and losing their ability to reproduce. the industrial farming of animals came into being with chickens in the early twentieth century (boyd), and although this was well after the embryological worldview had been established, it can be said that this system of practice only became possible because females had already been morally abandoned. given the autonomy of chicken embryogenesis and the increased availability of reliable energy in the form of electricity, thermostatically regulated incubators substituted for the brooding hen, allowing large numbers of newly hatched chicks to be produced on demand… by 1934, roughly half of all chickens raised in the united states were hatched in artificial incubators, with state of-the-art hatcheries operating as "veritable chick factories" capable of producing more than one million chicks per year. (boyd 639-640) http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 33 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles it is important to note that this type of agriculture is destructive for males too, whether they are male calves deemed useless by the dairy industry and then confined to a dark crates for the rest of their short lives (fudge 38), or the innumerable male chicks who are destroyed almost immediately after hatching in the egg production industry (cassuto 64). the agricultural industrial complex is an institution that completely precludes females from rearing their young (and, in the case of the egg industry, even from the opportunity to bring them into the world), and only values them as incubators of a “product.” this system has, however, only been able to come into existence because the embryological worldview has symbolically rendered females as marginal to the production of her offspring. reimagining an inclusive fetal display. the issue of whether fetal remains should be on display at all is contentious, particularly when images of the dead fetus have been used in a way that can be described as violent by anti-choice groups in relation to the abortion debate. yet, this is precisely why morgan advocates for continued exhibition of fetal displays: “as long as fetal remains appear only to symbolize abortion, this link will remain unchallenged… the less that fetal remains are visible in public, and the more limited the contexts in which they appear, the more shocking and sordid their appearance comes to seem” (31). morgan, however, does little to further a new vision of how fetal remains could be displayed differently to challenge the assumptions of the embryological origin story. i ask two questions in my quest to reimagine fetal display: first, how can museums better represent the lives of females in scientific displays, honoring them as mothers and yet also for the many other things they do? and second, how can museums incorporate other worldviews about human relationships with animals that encourage attitudes of respect and kinship? one of my interview questions challenged visitors by explaining that some museums have been critiqued for showing females solely in regard to their reproductive capacity, while using male bodies as the standard frame of reference; i then asked whether they thought the hunterian museum specimen displays followed the same trajectory. while most interviewees first responded to the question with “i’d never thought of that before!,” upon reflection many of them did conclude that the hunterian replicates this division in its displays. however, it was interesting that the visitors i spoke with thought this was allowable because of the museum’s historic context — they assumed http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 34 that, for hunter, the male body would have been the biological norm, and females would have been valued primarily in terms of their reproduction, and if that is how he did it, that is how the specimens should be displayed. this is interesting, and it could potentially complicate attempts by the museum to make its displays more inclusive, lest they be judged as “inauthentic.” as such, it is special exhibitions and other supplementary materials that may be the best way for the hunterian and other medical museums to challenge the embryological origin story and incorporate other ways of knowing. at the hunterian museum, females associated with the collections can regain their visibility through changes to both the museum guide and the audio guide. although little has been recorded about the origins of the fetal remains in hunter’s collection, a historical context could be provided that discusses how women at the time would have understood pregnancy and the child growing within them. ultimately, if museums are going to display fetal remains, especially those that were collected historically, they need to be transparent about changing perceptions of the fetus because contemporary audiences will interpret them so differently. females could also be given a more audible and contemporary voice by incorporating narratives from individual women about experiencing the loss of a pregnancy, or by using stories from zoologists and other animal professionals (from zoos, farms, game parks, etc.) who have an understanding of non-human animal behavior in response to pregnancy and to the death of a child. these voice recordings could then be featured as part of the museum audio tour, and help audiences to have an empathetic reaction and emotional connection to the specimens they are viewing. additionally, females are frequently focused on as “mothers” in museums, yet exhibitions seem largely to disregard the role that males play as fathers (machin 60). as such, it would be complementary and interesting to provide information about the changing role of men within the domestic sphere during this period, and whether their understandings of reproduction changed in the same ways and at the same times as did women’s. the hunterian museum also offers daily volunteer-led tours that center on different themes, and a tour focusing on the daily life of women in the 18th century, situated within the contexts of class and ancestry, from motherhood and beyond the domestic sphere, would be an excellent way to contextualize the fetal bodies and other remains of women in the galleries. the museum could also feature a tour specifically about the lives of animals in the 18th century and their various relationships with humans, as it would situate the non-human animal remains (and particularly the circumstances of their acquisition) within the context of colonialism and changing scientific and religious http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 35 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles worldviews. it would also help to make the lives of animals more significant to visitors. additional information, where known, could be provided in the hunterian museum’s online catalogue; although i was told there is no further data available about the context of the human fetal remains in hunter’s collection, basic details such as the sex of animal fetal bodies could easily be added. this is a very simple way to acknowledge the animals as individuals and recognize females in the collection. special exhibitions at the museum have an even greater potential to provide insight into other origin stories and ways of knowing, and the hunterian museum has a strong history of these which can both supplement and challenge the permanent displays.15 one of the main assumptions that a special exhibition could defy is the idea that humans experience both physical and social evolution, but non-human animals do not: animal and human fetuses could be displayed side by side at equivalent stages of development, accompanied by an explicit discussion about human-animal evolutionary kinship. this could be supplemented by information about the changing relationships between humans and other animals from the eighteenth century. also, numerous specimens of the same animal species could be shown together at different stages of development, mirroring the way that human fetal specimens are traditionally displayed. these display techniques would reflect a worldview in which animals and humans are kin and humans are not perceived to be special or superior to other animals. to take this exhibition one step further and challenge the embryological origin story, the museum could include origin stories that do not consider a fetus to be a biological reality – this could be within a historical context, or narrate the contemporary beliefs of certain religious or cultural groups who hold a different idea of what a fetus is. morgan documents, for instance, how some women in ecuador today do not think of a fetus or young baby as a person — it is “more like a puppy, a little animal.” even though they practice catholicism, it is not quite a person until it is baptized (xii-xiii). a special exhibition would also be the ideal place to draw links between historical bodies and contemporary issues. for example, an exhibition could focus on the way female animals were, and continue to be, exploited for their reproductive capacity by reflexively discussing the way female bodies are displayed in the museum, and how that reflects the way western society uses and values female animals. narratives could describe first-person accounts of respectful human-animal interactions and relationships in different contexts, from various cultures or faith traditions and through different periods of time. for example, this could include narratives from christians who describe their beliefs about the role humans play in acting as god’s stewards of the http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 36 natural world. through these sorts of alternative interpretations, even anatomical museums can pose challenging questions to visitors that have the potential to result in positive social change. finally, the museum could also take steps to temporarily alter its permanent galleries. for instance, machin documents how the manchester museum drew attention to the invisibility of female animals in its natural history galleries by enacting an “intervention.” staged during international women’s week (march 4th to 11th), the intervention involved placing a single female specimen prominently in the central aisle of the mammal gallery as an introduction to the initiative (57), and then concealing male taxidermy specimens with white sheets to draw attention to the insignificant number of specimens representing females (59).16 a small display label accompanied the concealed specimens, explaining the intervention and describing the female specimens that were still in storage in order to highlight the inadequacy of female representation (59). this example is important because of the tendency within science to describe females as different from males, “implying that the male state represents the standard from which females deviate” (machin 57). in a museum like the hunterian that is full of anatomical specimens – just bits and pieces of bodies – it is usually impossible to determine the sex of the individual who contributed the specimen unless it is explicitly noted on the display label, and often it is not. hence, visitors assume the specimens are from male bodies, unless the biological bits deal specifically with the reproductive system and are thus easily identifiable. as machin eloquently states, if museum visitors are to see animal diversity properly represented, one might expect to find that female and male animals are proportionately shown in museums… there is a curatorial obligation or responsibility to explain the collections on display and to encourage visitors to reflect on the extent to which displays properly represent difference and diversity with respect to life on earth. (55) it is this “curatorial obligation” to “represent difference and diversity” that all museums, even those purporting to “objectively” display their scientific specimens, need to consider. concluding thoughts. museums, particularly those exhibiting scientific collections, may be hesitant to make their displays more socially inclusive by deconstructing their exhibitions and incorporating other perspectives. however, as i have demonstrated http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 37 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles through an examination of the way fetal specimens are displayed at the hunterian museum, such scientific exhibitions are loaded with cultural assumptions that prove to be harmful to females of all species. this is characterized by the way females have become the “absent referent” in regard to fetal remains, and the lack of contextualization regarding the changing understanding female bodies and of pregnancy from the eighteenth century. this multifaceted “hidden curriculum” embedded within the fetal displays at the hunterian museum and in other similar exhibitions ultimately reinforces the marginalization and exploitation of females in western society. museums can promote inclusivity at three levels — individual, community, and society (dodd and sandell 25) — and it is on a societal level, on which museums can “contribute towards the creation of more equitable societies” that i suggest the hunterian museum can make changes to help visitors move beyond the sexist and speciesist notions that are embedded within scientific displays of human and animal bodies. museums need to go beyond deconstructing exhibitions and instead commit to re-imagining and enacting inclusive exhibitory techniques for these same displays. by providing the suggestions outlined above, it is my hope that museums will incorporate other ways of knowing that challenge the embryological origin story, and also reposition females of all species in ways that enable visitors to identify with them, thereby encouraging respect and learning. it is not only necessary to provide females with adequate physical representation in museum displays, but also to allow specimens to speak with voices that are situated within the correct historical context. the authoritative voice of the white male surgeon needs to be de-centered in order to allow for this to happen. as smith eloquently states: how aristotle departed from plato, what stalin said to churchill, and how emerson engaged with thoreau these and like topics consumed my class time. scholarly fields ranging from history to philosophy to science, literature, and law have developed through the medium of male conversation. if i have benefited from this listening, might not men... learn from listening to a conversation among women? (67) finally, it is important to emphasize that it is not enough to deconstruct and reimagine museum displays from a feminist perspective, if that perspective remains anthropocentric. as i have demonstrated, there are innumerable parallels between the ways that females of every species can be exploited for their reproductive capacity, and http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 38 all are impacted through the widespread acceptance of the embryological origin story and the problematic ways it is popularly depicted. it is only through recognising these similarities, and in accepting that various forms of oppression are interlocking (plumwood), that real change can be made. notes 1. it should be noted that the present day catalogue entry describes this kangaroo as an “infant” or “newborn,” rather than as a fetus. marsupials are born before they have fully developed to survive outside of their mother, and instead complete their development inside their mother’s pouch. the described kangaroo specimen is still too young to have survived outside of the pouch and, as such, can be similarly described and compared to other fetal animals. 2. all interviews were semi-structured and open-ended, and coded manually for analysis. all names used are pseudonyms, unless individuals requested otherwise. 3. one of my interviewees referred to the fetal specimens as “stillborns,” as he assumed that this was the natural circumstance which would have brought them to the hunterian museum (luke 24/06/10). this is interesting, especially because the museum is somewhat transparent in the exhibition text about the strong likelihood hunter acquired bodies from grave diggers. however, most of the people i interviewed made no such assumptions, and he seems to be an exception. 4. in relation to the biological development of a human being, the term “embryo” refers to the being from fertilization to the seventh week of gestation. from week eight until birth, the being is referred to as a “fetus,” the idea being that it can be described as such when it begins to look like the species to which it belongs (morgan 91). i use the term fetus because i am dealing with museum specimens that are generally further along in their development and easily recognizable as belonging to a particular species. 5. this paper is not about the abortion debate, but it is important to acknowledge that the anti-choice movement has done an excellent job, particularly in north america, of associating fetal bodies with terminated pregnancies. i think it is important for the public and average layperson to see fetal bodies in a context like a museum that is without stigma in order to dissociate them from the abortion debate. 6. it is important to note that not all human bodies have been displayed solely in cultural history institutions. there is a tragic history of indigenous peoples being http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 39 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles displayed, both living and dead, at natural history museums and zoological parks. ota benga, for instance, was a living congolese man brought to the united states who was first exhibited at the st. louis world’s fair in 1904, and then as a living exhibit at the american museum of natural history in new york. benga “failed to be sufficiently docile in the museum,” and so he was contracted out to the new york zoological gardens where he was put on display in the primate house; his exhibition was “a huge success,” although he was eventually released into the care of clergy after advocacy groups intervened to protest his display as inhumane (ota benga alliance). 7. there is another hunterian museum, featuring the collection of william hunter, at the university of glasgow in scotland. 8. owen, while probably best known for coining the term “dinosauria,” went on to found the natural history museum in london (fortey 37). 9. teratology literally means “the study of monsters” (asma 66) and refers to biological organisms with developmental anomalies. as anker and franklin note, “much of the ‘stilled’ life packed into ‘wet’ tissue collections was ‘failed’ in the sense of displaying pathological disease, deformity, and death, illustrating, among other things, that life was both radically plastic and capable of veering ‘off plan’” (105). the fetal specimens i focus on in this paper that are on display to the public at the hunterian museum are not, however, obviously deformed or otherwise “monstrous.” 10. i, and many others, do not agree that evolution is necessarily devoid of divine energy or intent. evolution and religion have, however, been popularly portrayed as being polarized, particularly in a north american context, and i do not wish to represent them as such in my research. 11. the label, however, does not say that the mother of the babies was named margaret waddington, born in 1765. she was twenty-one when she gave birth to the quintuplets, and already had one older child as well (rcseng 2011). the museum label focuses on the activities of the male doctor, rather than on the woman who bore them. it would have been easy to incorporate the interesting narrative about the value of the placenta compared to that of the remains, thereby creating a version of the story where the mother is a central actor in the existence of her own children. http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 40 12. the assumption that nonhuman animals will only enact heterosexual couplings, and that only two genders exist in all other species (bagemihl), is still commonly depicted in natural history museums (levin). 13. readers may have noticed by this point that the majority of my interviewees were all highly educated. given that interviewees were approached completely randomly in the museum, it seems apparent that it attracts a certain type of visitor because of the nature of its collections and its affiliation with the royal college of surgeons. 14. there were a few exceptions to this in the hunterian museum, including the kangaroo fetal specimens. 15. ingham’s narrative remains (2009) was one of these special exhibitions. although the fictionalized stories it puts forth are highly problematic, the premise of the exhibition is quite excellent and it was well-presented in a way that was very engaging. 16. in the manchester museum natural history galleries, only 11% of specimens were represented by females alone, and 14% of species were represented by both male and females specimens (machin 58). works cited adams, carol j. “a vegan-feminist lament.”[2009] carol j. adams (blog), online. accessed july 31, 2011. adams, carol j. and josephine donovan. “introduction.” animals and women: feminist theoretical explorations. carol j. adams and josephine donovan, ed. durham, nc: duke up, 1995. 1-8. anker, suzanne and sarah franklin. “specimens as spectacles: reframing fetal remains.” social text 106, 29.1 (spring, 2011): 103-125. asma, stephen t. stuffed animals and pickled heads: the culture and evolution of natural history museums. oxford: oxford up, 2003. bagemihl, bruce. biological exuberance: animal homosexuality and natural diversity. new york: st. martin’s, 1999. http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 41 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles boyd, william. “making meat: science, technology, and american poultry production.” technology and culture 42.4 (2001): 631-644. buklijas, tatjana and nick hopwood. 2010. making visible embryos. online. accessed july 19, 2011. campbell, sue, letitia maynell, and susan sherwin. “introduction: minding bodies.” embodiment and agency. sue campbell, letitia maynell, and susan sherwin, ed. college station: pennsylvania state up, 2009. 1-21. cassuto, david n. “bred meat: the cultural foundation of the factory farm.” law and contemporary problems 70.59 (winter, 2007). 59-87. christian, william a. visionaries: the spanish republic and the reign of christ. princeton, nj: princeton up, 1996. coates, peter. nature: western attitudes since ancient times. los angeles: u california p, 1998. darwin, charles. on the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. london: john murray, albemarlestreet, 1859. http://darwin-online.org.uk/pdf/1859_origin_f373.pdf, accessed may 9, 2012. desmond, jane. 2008. “postmortem exhibitions: taxidermied animals and plastinated corpses in the theaters of the dead.” configurations 16.3. (fall 2008): 347-377. dobson, jessie. 2011 (1970). “rcshc/3773 – macropus.” royal college of surgeons of england online database of museum and archive collections. online. accessed may 20, 2011. dodd, j. and richard sandell. including museums: perspectives on museums, galleries and social inclusion. leicester: research centre for museums and galleries, university of leicester, 2001. duden, barbara. “the fetus on the ‘farther shore’: toward a history of the unborn”, fetal subjects, feminist positions. lynn m. morgan and meredith w. michaels, ed. philadelphia: u pennsylvania p, 1999. 13-25. http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 42 foltyn, j.l. “the corpse in contemporary culture: identifying, transacting, and recording the dead body in the twenty-first century.” mortality 13.2 (may 2008): 99-104. fortey, richard. the secret life of the natural history museum: dry store room no. 1. london: harper perennial, 2008. franklin, sarah. “dead embryos: feminism in suspension.” fetal subjects, feminist positions. lynn m. morgan and meredith w. michaels, ed. philadelphia: u pennsylvania p, 1999. 61-82. fudge, erica. animal. london: reaktion, 2002. haraway, donna j. primate visions: gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. new york: routledge, 1989. hooper-greenhill, eilean. museums and the interpretation of visual culture. london: routledge, 2000. ingham, karen. narrative remains. wellcome trust and the hunterian museum, 2009. jordanova, ludmilla. “interrogating the concept of reproduction in the eighteenth century.” conceiving the new world order: the global politics of reproduction, faye d. ginsburg and rayna rapp, ed. berkeley: u california p, 1995. 369-386. kinsley, david. “christianity as ecologically harmful” and “christianity as ecologically responsible.” ecology and religion: ecological spirituality in cross-cultural perspective. englewood cliffs: prentice-hall, 1995. 103-24. levin, amy. “introduction.” gender, sexuality, and museums: a routledge reader. amy k. levin, ed. new york: routledge, 2010. 1-11. linke, uli. “touching the corpse: the unmaking of memory in the body museum.” anthropology today 21.5 (october 2005): 13-19. machin, rebecca. “gender representation in the natural history museum galleries at the manchester museum.” museum and society 6.1 (2008): 54-67. http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 43 emily porth — when women birthed mooncalves and moles martin, emily. “the egg and the sperm: how science has constructed a romance based on stereotypical male-female roles.” signs 16.3 (spring 1991): 485-501. martin, emily. the woman in the body. boston: beacon press, 1987. morgan, lynn m. icons of life: a cultural history of human embryos. berkeley: u california p, 2009. morgan, lynn m. and meredith w. michaels. “introduction.” fetal subjects, feminist positions. lynn m. morgan and meredith w. michaels, ed. philadelphia: u pennsylvania p, 1999. 1-9. newman, karen. fetal positions: individualism, science, visuality. stanford: stanford up, 1996. noske, barbara. humans and other animals: beyond the boundaries of anthropology. london: pluto press, 1989. ota benga alliance. “who is ota benga?” 2010. online. plumwood, val. feminism and the mastery of nature. london: routledge, 1993. preece, rod. animals and nature: cultural myths, cultural realities. vancouver: ubc press, 1999. preece, rod. “darwinism, christianity, and the great vivisection debate.” journal of the history of ideas 64.3 (2003): 399-419. rcseng. surgicat: the online catalogue of the museum and archive collections at the royal college of surgeons of england. electronic document, http://surgicat.rcseng.ac.uk/, accessed 19 july 2011. sandell, richard (ed.) museums, society, inequality. routledge: london, 2002. schiebinger, londa. nature’s body: gender in the making of modern science. [1993] 2nd edition. new brunswick nj: rutgers up, 2004. _____. “feminist history of colonial science.” hypatia 19.1 (winter 2004): 233-254. http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 http://surgicat.rcseng.ac.uk/ humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 4, number 1 (fall 2012) 44 _____. “introduction.” feminism and the body. londa schiebinger, ed. new york: oxford up, 2000. 1-24. smith, barbara clark. “a woman’s audience: a case of applied feminist theories.” gender, sexuality, and museums: a routledge reader, amy k. levin, ed. new york: routledge, 2010. 65-70. walter, tony. “body worlds: clinical detachment and anatomical awe.” sociology of health and illness 26.4 (may 2004): 464-488. http://www.pdfcomplete.com/cms/hppl/tabid/108/default.aspx?r=q8b3uige22 humanimalia vol. 13, no. 1 (fall 2022) humanimalia is a biannual journal devoted to the study of human–animal relations. it is interdisciplinary, open-access, and peer-reviewed, publishing original articles from a wide range of cultural, historical, philosophical, political, and aesthetic perspectives. humanimalia has three aims: to explore and advance the vast range of scholarship on human–animal relations, to encourage exchange among scholars working from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and to promote dialogue between the academic community and those working closely with animals in non-academic fields. we invite innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches. ideally, we seek papers that combine approaches, or at the very least draw upon research in other disciplines to contextualize their arguments. as much as possible, we seek papers that acknowledge and seek to advance a more-than-human conception of aesthetics, culture, and society. https:humanimalia.org cover: ciao maschio, 1978 editorial board managing editor kári driscoll utrecht university associate editors mari bastashevski norwegian university of science and technology, trondheim clemens driessen wageningen univeristy marianna szczygielska czech academy of sciences, prague kerstin weich messerli research institute, unversity of veterinary medicine, vienna book reviews editor dominic o’key university of sheffield copyeditors kári driscoll dominic o’key pauw vos layout and design mari bastashevski kári driscoll typsetting kári driscoll editor’s introduction | iii humanimalia 13.1 (2022) it gives us great pleasure to present to you this new issue of humanimalia, the first in its new incarnation, and after a short hiatus during which the journal moved from its original home at depauw university in greencastle, indiana to utrecht university in the netherlands. we have a new look, a new logo, and a new editorial team, but we remain committed to promoting a more-thanhuman conception of aesthetics, politics, culture, and society as we continue the work of the journal in this next phase of its existence. humanimalia was founded in 2006 by istvan csicsery-ronay and sherryl vint, both long-time editors of science fiction studies, in consultation with donna haraway and china miéville. at the time, humanimalia was the only animal studies journal to be fully online and open-access, and part of its core mission is to promote interand transdisciplinary work from across the humanities, natural and social sciences and beyond — the original cfp also invited legal scholars, veterinarians, zookeepers, and amateur naturalists to submit their work. this commitment to accessibility and transdisciplinary dialogue remains a key aim of the journal. the first issue was published in 2009, and a further twenty-two issues followed over the next twelve years, comprising almost three hundred articles and reviews. in late 2020, istvan announced his retirement, and for a time it seemed that the journal would cease operations altogether. luckily, i was able to convince istvan to hand over the reins to me and i set about arranging for humanimalia to move to the netherlands. fortuitously, this transfer coincided with the launch of openjournals.nl, a newly established open-access publishing platform, which would become humanimalia’s new home. meanwhile, i assembled a new team of editors: marianna szczygielska (feminist history of science), clemens driessen (more-than-human geography), kerstin weich (philosophy and veterinary medicine), and mari bastashevski (art and design). my fellow literary animal studies scholar dominic o’key agreed to come onboard as book reviews editor. together, we have spent the better part of the past two years getting the journal back up and running in its new guise. iv | editor’s introduction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) when it first launched, humanimalia bore the subtitle “a journal of human/animal interface studies”. in redesigning the journal, we opted to drop the subtitle, feeling that it was no longer necessary given that human–animal studies is now firmly established as a field of inquiry. nevertheless, it bears emphasizing that the journal retains a particular interest in the question of the various interfaces between humans and nonhumans, which, in this digitally mediated age of extinctions, are increasingly not just cultural but also technological. the field of animal studies has long been preoccupied with the “disappearance” of animals from everyday modern life and, concomitantly, with the (im)possibility of authentic, unmediated encounters with nonhuman others. this discourse has often been marked by an underlying suspicion of media and technology, which tends to assume that culturally or technologically mediated encounters with animals are not just qualitatively different but inherently less “real” than encounters with actual animals in the wild — a view that implicitly buys into the fantasy of unmediated access to animals. a fundamental assumption of humanimalia’s approach is that the relationship between humans and nonhumans is always historically, culturally, and technologically mediated, and, conversely, that history, culture, and technology are and always have been constitutively more-than-human. this principle of universal mediation and humanimal interaction in and through technological interfaces is represented in the journal’s new logo, which was designed by mari bastashevski in collaboration with a rout of snails using a customized haptic interface. each dot constitutes a single touch; a line between the dots connects two touches occurring simultaneously. snails can generate up to six lingering touches simultaneously: three with their bodies, two with their antennae which they use to test where to go next, and one for the trail, which the touchpad registers as a lingering touch. mari prepared the ground by introducing two baseline 2d geometries that constitute the foundation of human design—a circle and a line — and then allowed the snails to build on that. the logo is the choreographic record of two snails dancing across this interactive digital plane; a visual representation of the “dance of relating”. editor’s introduction | v humanimalia 13.1 (2022) humanimalia is devoted to the study of human–animal relations from a wide range of cultural, historical, philosophical, political, and aesthetic perspectives and disciplinary approaches. this broad range is reflected in the current issue, which features six research articles on subjects ranging from taxidermy and display practices of nonhuman primates in natural history museums (verity burke) and the construction of nonhuman personalities at several animal shelters in finland (nora schuurman), to human–tiger cohabitation in india (kath weston) and human–mouse cohabitation in amsterdam (eva meijer), to the phenomenal presence of dogs in classic hollywood cinema (borbála lászlo), and the hermeneutic and pedagogical challenge and necessity of reading literary animals as animals (john drew). in order to mark the transition to this new phase in the journal’s history, we wanted to invite some of the founding figures in the field to look back on the past two decades and to look forward to how they see the field developing. we took as inspiration the pioneering series of position papers published by h-animal under the title “ruminations” in the mid-2000s. for this issue, we are delighted that erica fudge agreed to revisit her rumination on “the history of animals” from 2006. we hope to make this a recurring series of interventions featuring established and emerging scholars in the field. for future issues, we are also actively looking to include a variety of different forms, from proposals (modest or indecent), provocations, roundtables, and special sections to artistic or multi-media contributions, and we invite you, our readers, to get in touch with ideas and suggestions. the issue concludes with eight book reviews on a range of recent titles that showcase the transnational scope and growth of the field. for this issue we are bringing back a format that was a hallmark of humanimalia in the early days, namely the double book review, where two scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds each review the same book, in this case charis olszok’s recent monograph the libyan novel: humans, animals and the poetics of vulnerability (2020), which is reviewed by susan mchugh and nadine a. sinno. vi | editor’s introduction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) the theme of what mchugh calls “regional creatures” (i.e. non-anglophone perspectives on animals and animality) continues with deborah amberson’s review of animality in contemporary italian philosophy, edited by felice cimatti and carlo salzani (2020), and in salzani’s own review of animals and humans in german literature, 1800–2000, edited by lorella bosco and micaela latini (2020). in his review of outside the anthropological machine, edited by chiara mengozzi (2021), andré krebber wonders “whatever happened to giorgio agamben in human–animal studies” — a question that finds another potential answer in adam kotsko’s review of agamben and the animal (2022) by none other than the ubiquitous carlo salzani. rounding out the issue are dominic o’key’s review of juno salazar parreñas’s decolonizing extinction (2018) and finally philip howell’s review of chris pearson’s dogopolis: how dogs and humans made modern new york, london, and paris (2021). many thanks to the authors and peer reviewers, without whose hard work and generosity we wouldn’t have an issue at all; to everyone at openjournals for making the transition as smooth as possible; to our companions and partners, human and nonhuman; and of course to istvan for giving us the opportunity to continue the work he started. we hope you enjoy reading this issue and we look forward to receiving your feedback and submissions for future issues. on behalf of the editorial team, kári driscoll, managing editor utrecht, october 2022 gelfand, review of hornstein copyright © 2024 laura d. gelfand this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 172–178. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 leonine visibility and the production of nature laura d. gelfand review of: katie hornstein, myth and menagerie: seeing lions in the nineteenth century. new haven, ct: yale university press, 2024. 272 pp. 108 colour + 50 b&w illus. $75.00 (hardcover). laura gelfand is professor of art history at utah state university email: laura.gelfand@usu.edu book review http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 mailto:laura.gelfand@usu.edu i wept as i finished reading katie hornstein’s magnificent new book, myth and menagerie: seeing lions in the nineteenth century. admittedly, i do cry easily, but the way that hornstein engaged me in this fascinating and deeply tragic story of human– lion relations is truly devastating. most readers will know all too well that research in animal studies often involves studying awful things that societies have done, and continue to do, to animals. but hornstein’s book is particularly affecting because she makes central the stories of individual lions who were brutally captured and killed by the french during their algerian campaign. the lived experiences of these lions, from their seizure and traumatic voyages to paris, to the miserable situations in which they were exhibited for artists and curious onlookers, as well as their sadly premature deaths, forms the core of the book. hornstein’s meticulously researched exploration of the fates of numerous lions — hunted to extinction in north africa, looted as war trophies, hailed as proof of colonial masculine power, exploited as abused objects of public entertainment for private profit — carries a deep emotional charge, the power of which is further underscored by her transparency about the role that personal loss and grief played in the writing of the book. hornstein lays out the fundamentals of her argument with admirable clarity in the book’s introduction. organizing the contents in roughly chronological order, she begins with the establishment of the muséum d’histoire naturelle in paris in 1793 and ends in the decades after 1900 with the extinction of the barbary lion in north africa. as she writes, this timeframe “implies a depressing paradox about the production of ‘nature’ in the nineteenth century that haunts every chapter of this book” (11). namely that “the practice of looking at captive animals in urban, cosmopolitan contexts, as well as the proliferation of visual images of lions […] cannot be disentangled from the fact of their disappearance in the wild” (11). what differentiates hornstein’s approach from previous studies of nineteenth-century representations of animals is her exploration of the role lions played as artists’ models, figures of public dissection, and as taxidermic specimens. building on john berger’s comparison copyright © 2024 laura d. gelfand this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 1 (2024): 171–178. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.19395 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.19395 gelfand, review of hornstein | 173 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) of the viewer’s experience in art galleries and in zoos, and his provocative observation that the way we see caged animals in the zoo is “always wrong”,1 hornstein argues for a “shared set of viewing practices between the cage and the frame by locating works of art as a dynamic point of convergence between these two spaces” (10). hornstein supports this method of viewership by considering diverse visual media, providing readers with insights into both the formally structured milieu of nineteenth-century french artistic production and more popular forms of cultural production including mass-produced prints and the newly invented medium of photography. the book is richly illustrated with exceptionally high-quality colour reproductions so that hornstein’s incisive discussions of specific paintings, drawings, and sculptures are amply supported. further, many of these images are not well known, and thus hornstein is to be thanked for drawing the viewer’s attention to these works, many of which are startlingly beautiful. the first chapter explores how french artists broke with long-established hierarchies in french academic painting, using well-known lions as models for paintings that were formative in the construction of identity in postrevolutionary france. the chapter begins by focusing on a remarkably fecund and famous family of lions that lived in the state menagerie from 1798 through the first decade of the nineteenth century. the lions, mark and constantine, had several litters of cubs, some of whom survived. hornstein reveals how artistic representations of the female lion, constantine, fashioned her into an exemplary model of the postrevolutionary mother. this leonine family were depicted in numerous “scientific” studies in oil on vellum by nicolas maréchal, whose paintings were then bound in leather and used primarily by contemporary scientists to advance their understanding of big cats. the fact that these renderings of the skin and fur of lions were painted on another animal’s skin, then collected and bound in the skin of yet another animal seems worthy of some consideration, however brief, and i found myself wishing that hornstein had delved into this intriguing mash-up of animal bodies. 1 john berger, about looking (new york: pantheon, 1980), 23. humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 174 | gelfand, review of hornstein the chapter continues with a discussion of jean-baptiste huet’s unusually large painting of mark and constantine, entitled a family of lions in their cage (shown in the salon of 1802). hornstein interprets the painting as a political statement based on huet’s emphasis on the animals’ caged setting. such commentary was traditionally reserved for artists committed to the lofty practice of history painting, a category that included classical, biblical, mythological, and historical subjects with an emphasis on the composition of human figures in space. hornstein’s intriguing proposal is that huet was attempting to fuse the lower ranked art of animal painting with history painting to make a “properly historical animal painting” (52). thus, according to hornstein, huet’s incarcerated lions could be seen to refer to the revival of slavery under the postrevolutionary french government, or to invoke the “specter of the revolutionary prison as a site of exemplary trauma” (41). hornstein’s rich analysis of this painting, along with other representations of mark and constantine, illuminates how two famous lions were rendered and shaped to constitute political ideas and ideals at a moment when the french republic was struggling to forge a new identity. as the author makes clear, the role of lions in france’s political self-formation was critical. the second chapter begins with a detailed description of the various lions that were already in paris as the nineteenth century began, and those that were sent or donated to the official menagerie in the following decades. included among these was a lion given to the republic by a jewish-algerian merchant named michel busnach to whom the french government owed seven million francs. busnach’s gift of a lion, according to hornstein, “must be regarded as both boldly suggestive and fabulously ambiguous” (56). busnach was not french or christian, and his identity as other became so inextricably connected with the lioness he donated that administrators of the muséum d’histoire naturelle did all they could to reject his gift. despite these efforts, the lioness entered the collection where she served as a model for such important romantic artists as eugène delacroix, antoine-louis bayre, and théodore géricault. it is well known that lions were a common subject for romantic artists, but hornstein’s extensive research reveals how deeply engaged gelfand, review of hornstein | 175 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) these artists were in studying lions, both living and dead, describing the complex avenues they used to gain access to their animal subjects. the strongest section of this chapter is the author’s discussion of géricault’s astonishingly beautiful painting, head of a lioness (c. 1819–20). hornstein suggests that the likely model for this under-discussed masterpiece was busnach’s unwanted lioness and she connects the lioness’s problematic status and identity with géricault’s “larger preoccupation with the instability of power” (63). in addition, she situates the production of the head of a lioness within the artist’s biography, noting that it was probably completed during the period of his convalescence from a mental health crisis triggered by the mixed reception of his 1819 entry to the salon, the raft of the medusa. the second half of the chapter focuses primarily on delacroix’s numerous paintings and drawings of lions and lionesses and the diverse kinds of animal models he used. in addition to direct study of living lions in the muséum d’histoire naturelle, delacroix eagerly attended dissections of lions that died at the menagerie, and he studied taxidermized lions as well. hornstein’s fascinating discussion finds that delacroix’s representations of lions were not only the result of direct observation, but that their extraordinary ferocity was the result of the artist’s creative reanimation, because the lions he had access to were either in various states of torpor, dead, or skinned, mounted and preserved. the third chapter offers a masterclass in how to combine art historical and animal studies methods to create a rich and nuanced context for a single work of art. focusing on antoine-louis barye’s lifesize sculpture, lion attacking a snake (first shown in plaster in 1832, then in bronze in 1835), hornstein situates the sculpture within contemporary discussions of relational viewership. in nineteenth-century paris one could see lions wasting away in the public menagerie and compare the living lions with painted and sculpted renderings of them exhibited in the official salon. in some instances, the paintings were viewed as inferior to the actual animals, but the reception of barye’s sculpture was so enthusiastic that the menagerie’s lions were seen as a pitiful disappointment in comparison. an art critic writing in le charivari called the living, captive lions “slaves, without humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 176 | gelfand, review of hornstein animation, without rage, without force.”2 hornstein writes that “just as the lions at the menagerie were subject to being viewed through the lens of artworks, so too were works of lion-centered art susceptible to being evaluated through the actual living, breathing animals to whom they referred” (109). for barye, studying actual lions, especially when they were feeding, gave him some understanding of their behaviour in the wild, but his sculpture of a lion viciously attacking a snake was primarily a product of his imagination given the pathetic condition of the living and dead lions he could observe. hornstein explores how barye’s imaginary drama challenged an academic tradition that dictated that only human figures could convey powerful emotions and meaning. barye’s sculpture aggressively asserted that animal bodies could be of equal importance and that they should share the same status as representations of the human form. in chapter four, hornstein examines lion hunts and explores how the visual theme and cultural practice of hunting lions became emblematic of french colonial expansion in north africa. i was stunned to read about just how many big cats were exported to france from algeria in the years immediately after the conquest. “in 1838 and 1839,” hornstein writes, “the french government reported that a staggering 5,448 lions, hyenas, and panthers were exported […]. for the year 1840, this number rose to 7,970 […] living and killed animals” (133). in addition to sending animals to paris, the french offered bounties for lions, panthers, and hyenas in algeria. much like efforts to eradicate wolves during the settlement of the western united states, the french argued that a large-scale destruction of animals would help indigenous peoples whose livestock were endangered by predators. in reality, the eradication of indigenous animals functioned as a proxy for the pacification and eradication of indigenous people. french colonialists enthusiastically embraced the opportunity to hunt and kill big cats (and plenty of other animals), driving barbary lions to extinction in less than one hundred years. profit and status were conferred on the most successful practitioners of this culture of 2 “ils sont là, dans leur cages, esclaves, sans animation, sans colère, sans force.” jacques arago, “beaux-arts: salon de 1836”, gazette des théatres: journal des comédiens, april 17, 1836, 459. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k63365344/f3. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k63365344/f3 gelfand, review of hornstein | 177 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) violence, and hornstein traces the stories of two famous lion hunters and the objects of material and visual culture that helped amplify their status as celebrities, including reproductive engravings, photographs, and an extraordinarily odd late painting by édouard manet. hornstein’s focus here is on differentiating the meaning conveyed by actual lion hunts from representations of them. she finds that for nineteenth-century french viewers these signified two very different things. iconographically, the hunt continued to serve as a traditional image of masculine heroism, but actual lion hunts did something very different: they helped create clear divisions between humans and animals and reinforced the concept of human exceptionalism at a moment when questions about man’s place in nature was being problematized. in the final chapter, myth and menagerie moves away from the respectability of the natural history museum to the seedier world of the circus, where artists, including rosa bonheur and edwin landseer, became acquainted with lion tamers and studied the lions they used in their performances. bonheur, the most successful and famous animal painter of her time in france, was even presented with two lion cubs by a lion tamer, and she kept the surviving female named fatma in her private menagerie outside paris. hornstein contrasts bonheur’s lioness with another fatma — a boulevard entertainer purportedly from tunisia — whose “orientalizing” erotic desirability and unattainability resembles the powerful human compulsion to touch and interact with lions. hornstein explores how late nineteenth century photos and paintings of women with lions exploited the fantasy of a relationship “characterized by possession and domination over another living creature” (173). the author follows a trail that leads from the wish to interact with lions to its capitalist fulfilment in private circuses run by celebrity lion tamers. here, the author takes readers to coarser sites and more brutal sights, and in doing so investigates “an entire network of relationships among circuses and their related spectacles, the possession and domination of lions, and the production of works of art” (178). hornstein explores the newly invented medium of photography and efforts by early practitioners to capture images of humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 178 | gelfand, review of hornstein humans interacting with lions. in some photos lion tamers were posed with taxidermic lion bodies producing inadvertently comedic results, while plans for carefully composed photographs of human performers with live leonine stage props were usually derailed by cats acting like cats. invariably these modern images cannot and do not measure up to long-established romantic vision of lions found in painting and sculpture. finally, in her afterword, hornstein pulls her wide-ranging and thoughtfully researched study together to consider the fate of these lions, whose “availability as figures of representation simultaneously marks an impending absence” (214). interest in animal studies is growing rapidly among art historians, and hornstein’s book should be required reading for anyone considering such a move. the text is beautifully written, incorporating all the relevant methodological and theoretical references without becoming bogged down with jargon. further, as with all good art history, hornstein’s insightful formal analyses open up the images, while her thorough research contextualizes them, so that the reader is left with a fuller understanding of the meaning of these images for those who made them and the audiences for whom they were initially produced. but, most importantly, the lives of actual lions — both the captives brought to a foreign land, and those who remained behind and were massacred — remains central to the text. among its many strengths, i believe the author’s greatest achievement is to maintain her vigilant focus on the tragic lives of these animals, and it is this focus that brought this reader to tears. vol. 15, no. 2 (summer 2025) humanimalia humanimalia is a biannual journal devoted to the study of human– animal relations. it is interdisciplinary, open-access, and peer-reviewed, publishing original articles from a wide range of cultural, historical, philosophical, political, and aesthetic perspectives. humanimalia has three aims: (1) to explore and advance the vast range of scholarship on human–animal relations; (2) to encourage exchange among scholars working from a variety of disciplinary perspectives; and (3) to promote dialogue between the academic community and those working closely with animals in non-academic fields. we invite innovative works that situate these topics within contemporary culture via a variety of critical approaches. ideally, we seek papers that combine approaches, or at the very least draw upon research in other disciplines to contextualize their arguments. we are particularly interested in papers that acknowledge and seek to advance a more-than-human conception of aesthetics, culture, society, and politics. https://humanimalia.org cover: crow, talitha may (2025) editorial board editor-in-chief kári driscoll utrecht university associate editors clemens driessen wageningen univeristy monica mattfeld university of northern british columbia emelia quinn university of ottawa benjamín schultz-figueroa seattle university marianna szczygielska czech academy of sciences kerstin weich independent scholar book reviews editor dominic o’key university of cambridge production assistsant imogen grigorovich intern lotte suardi layout and typesetting kári driscoll editorial | iii humanimalia 15.2 (2025) we are pleased to present the latest issue of humanimalia — a “summer” rather than a “spring” issue, in recognition of the fact that our publishing rhythm has been gradually drifting away from the equinox and toward the solstice. this issue features five original research articles, plus a translation and accompanying introduction, as well as five book reviews. monica mattfeld’s essay, “the spanish horse and the thunder drum”, opens the issue with a meditation on memorialization and nonhuman agency. mattfeld reconstructs the life, death, and curious afterlife of the “spanish horse”, a star performer at astley’s amphitheatre whose tanned hide was transformed into a thunder drum after his death circa 1824. challenging conventional understandings of taxidermy and objecthood, mattfeld argues that the drum constitutes an “animal-made-object” which retains traces of the spanish horse’s subjectivity and agency even beyond death. through a synthesis of new materialism, ecofeminism, and taxidermy theory, she critiques models that either erase animal individuality or treat animal remains as ethically indistinct from other matter. proposing an expanded definition of taxidermy, mattfeld shows how the horse’s disarticulated form continued to speak — literally and symbolically — within the theatre’s affective soundscape, as both a memento mori and a sublime, politically charged memorial. if mattfeld’s spanish horse finds a strange kind of afterlife, paul g. keil’s “the feral at home” brings us back to the compromised vitality of the living. in his ethnographic account of a wild-caught pig named pig-pig, raised by an australian pig hunter, keil destabilizes the dominant narrative of the feral as irredeemably invasive and unlivable. pig-pig’s presence within — and resistance to — this narrative illuminates an “unauthorized multispecies home”, where feral agency flickers, if briefly, outside frameworks of control. the article explores the unexpected attachments and ethical entanglements that arise when a being defined by its killability is, temporarily, allowed to become someone. but as keil’s conclusion reminds us, these alternate trajectories remain precarious, forever shadowed by the lethal scripts of biosecurity and belonging. iv | editorial humanimalia 15.2 (2025) shifting from individual animals to collective movements, marco reggio’s “‘happy goats, or, taking embarrassment seriously”, appearing here in english for the first time, takes as its point of departure the life and death of agitu ideo gudeta — an ethiopian refugee, feminist entrepreneur, and goat farmer, whose 2020 murder became a cause célèbre in the italian media. originally published in italian as the first chapter in his book cospirazione animale, reggio’s essay resists both celebration and simple condemnation, instead confronting the ethical and political contradictions that emerge where questions of species, gender, race, and coloniality intersect. drawing on frantz fanon’s “zone of non-being” and judith butler’s remarks on the “embarrassed ‘etc.’” that invariably comes at the end of lists of intersectional identity markers, reggio proposes a politics grounded not in certainty but in discomfort — a willingness to sit with paradox, to resist both moral purity and political disavowal. what emerges is a vision of an anti-speciesism that is intersectional, historically situated, and radically open to complexities of the more-than-human. in the accompanying introduction, suleiman mcshane and erin clancy offer a critical entry point into reggio’s thought, situating his work within the broader landscape of italian animal rights activism and anti-speciesist critique. in his trenchant analysis of police dogs as instruments of racial biocapitalism — spanning civil rights-era attacks on black protestors, the affective copaganda of paw patrol, and the israeli military’s deployment of robot dogs in gaza — ishaan selby exposes how animal life is made complicit in processes of domination, expropriation, and organized abandonment. in tracing how the figure of the dog mediates between the human and nonhuman, selby challenges us to confront the biopolitical entanglement of species and race in the carceral logics of the modern state. his call to think black, palestinian, and animal liberation together does not suggest equivalence, but insists on relationality — on the need to recognize the shared infrastructures of violence, and thus the possibilities for shared resistance. as with the other contributions to this issue, selby’s essay demands that we take seriously the more-than-human dimensions of justice and the more-than-human consequences of injustice. editorial | v humanimalia 15.2 (2025) eugenie van heijgen’s “becoming pheasant” offers a fitting counterpoint to these overtly political interventions by shifting the focus to the long, entangled history of hunting, landscape-making, and species formation in the dutch countryside. van heijgen traces how the pheasant — bred, released, and shot for centuries — has been materially and discursively produced by human desire, rendered legible and illegible by shifting regimes of conservation and control. today, even in the absence of sanctioned pheasant release, these birds persist: elusive, unclaimed, and actively remaking their own multispecies lifeworlds. in resisting fixed designations — wild or domestic, native or invasive — van heijgen’s pheasants exemplify what it means to inhabit anthropocene landscapes as both more-than-human archives and speculative futures. like the goats, dogs, pigs, and horses that traverse this issue, pheasants prompt us to reconsider the categories that govern life, death, and possibility across species lines. finally, bert theunissen’s critical history of sheepdog trialling casts a long view over the development of shepherding as both practice and performance. drawing on extensive archival sources, theunissen traces how border collies were shaped not just by the demands of farm work but by the stylized masculinity and aesthetic ideals of nineteenth-century trialling culture. far from improving practical herding, trialling produced a type of “sporting dog” optimized for spectacle, often at the expense of both sheep welfare and farm utility. today, as many working shepherds reject the trial collie in favour of more cooperative herding styles — some even experimenting with forms of leading rather than driving — theunissen calls on us to reconsider entrenched ideas of control, obedience, and animal labour. taken together, the essays in this issue traverse a range of geographies, genres, and disciplinary formations to ask how species come to matter — and to whom. they explore the fragile, fraught, and sometimes hopeful terrain of interspecies relation under conditions of ongoing ecological, colonial, and epistemic violence. whether attending to the figure of the goat as a site of ethical contradiction, the police dog as an instrument of racial biocapitalism, or the pheasant as a product of forgotten stewardship, these essays insist on the vi | editorial humanimalia 15.2 (2025) necessity of sustained, situated, and intersectional critique. what emerges is a portrait of a world in which the categories of species, labour, value, and resistance are contested and reconfigured across shifting ecological, colonial, and political terrains. as usual, the issue also features a range of critical reviews of recent books in human–animal studies and related fields. ben de bruyn discusses the late karen bakker’s the sounds of life and gaia’s web, two popular science books that explore the intersection of digital technology, environmental science, and interspecies communication. de bruyn appreciates bakker’s cautious optimism and her insistence on exploring digital technology’s potential to aid rather than hinder human connection with the natural world. at the same time, he also raises concerns about the limits of digital environmentalism and the risk of techno-solutionism. while bakker urges us to imagine a future of “kinship acoustics” and planetary listening, de bruyn reminds us of the extractive logics that often underlie even the most well-intentioned ecological projects. in their joint review of josh milburn’s just fodder (2022) and food, justice, and animals (2023), carlo salzani and zipporah weisberg take issue with milburn’s liberal framework, particularly its implicit endorsement of capitalism as a viable context for multispecies justice. while they welcome milburn’s detailed analyses of relational obligations across species and his commitment to finding workable solutions in a world reluctant to abandon animal products, his zoopolis, they argue, remains entangled in a logic of exploitation, presenting reformist solutions that fail to challenge systemic structures of oppression. this view stands in implicit critical dialogue pablo castelló’s review of matthew calarco’s the three ethologies (2024), in which castelló mounts a defence of liberal political theories of animal rights — especially donaldson and kymlicka’s zoopolis — which, in his view, has been unfairly dismissed by critical animal studies scholars as being purely individualist, when in fact such accounts retain crucial tools for articulating collective territorial rights and animal subjecthood. calarco’s central claim is that forging more just and meaningful human–animal relationships requires a transformation of self and editorial | vii humanimalia 15.2 (2025) society along three interrelated lines of “ethological” practice — mental, social, and environmental — rooted in the greek notion of askesis, or disciplined ethical formation. drawing on narrative ethnography, indigenous thought, and everyday multispecies encounters, calarco explores how humans might resubjectify themselves in response to animals’ lives and worlds, emphasizing relationality, attentiveness, and dwelling. castelló highlights the three ethologies not only as a philosophical intervention, but also as a call to action — one that asks readers to risk vulnerability, embrace co-becoming, and see with, rather than simply look at, the more-than-human world. talitha may, whose striking image of a crow building a nest of twigs graces the cover of this issue, reviews jacqueline emery and david lei’s finding flaco: our year with new york city’s beloved owl (2024), a nonfiction account of a eurasian eagle owl who escaped the central park zoo, becoming a viral sensation. as may shows, the book is more than a lavish photo-documentary; it is a reflection on perception, urban ecology, and the contested politics of freedom. may invites us to consider what it means for a non-native, “escaped” animal to capture the human imagination, and what kinds of lives become thinkable or lovable in the urban wild. the review raises difficult questions about the sentimental logics of animal celebrity and the limits of anthropocentric empathy. and yet, flaco’s story also functions as a rupture — “a cut in the mesh of captivity” — that points toward a broader reckoning with the institutionalized confinement of nonhuman lives. finally, returning to the uncanny material afterlives of animal bodies with which the issue began, poulomi choudhury reviews elizabeth effinger’s taxidermy and the gothic: the horror of still life (2024), a provocative exploration of taxidermy as a material and affective site of gothic horror. tracing how preserved animal bodies evoke stasis, dread, and ontological unease, effinger argues that taxidermy functions as a “dark mirror” reflecting systemic violence, perverse desires, and the blurred boundary between life and death. choudhury praises the book’s ambition and interdisciplinary scope but notes its limited engagement with the material conditions of animal death. while the book provocatively critiques “critical taxidermy studies” for viii | editorial humanimalia 15.2 (2025) sanitizing or aestheticizing taxidermy, it risks reproducing the same move by reducing animal death to metaphor and human projection. as choudhury argues, the horror of taxidermy is not only that we might become mounts — but that the animal already has. in addition to her book review, talitha may also provided the image that graces the cover of this issue. it was inspired by two crows who began building a nest on a ledge of her apartment building this past spring. “throughout the day,” she writes, “the crows build their nest with malleable twigs they snip from trees. […] often, they would discard the materials they had brought to their nest, but then days after, re-visit their drop piles and methodically sift through material. the mandala-like design represents the regularity of crow time, egalitarian turn-taking, methodical choices, and graceful lines of flight. rather than fly directly to their nest, for instance, they often circled the courtyard until a final lift to the eave. in contrast to the disruption and unpredictability of human induced global climate change, crow time and methodology characterizes a rhythmic orderliness. the starkness of the design also references how in late winter when gathering en masse at dusk, their bodies appear like crisp silhouettes.” we hope other readers will feel inspired to submit their art for consideration for future issues of humanimalia. as always, i would like to thank the authors and peer reviewers, as well as all section editors, copyeditors, our intern lotte, and our production assistant imogen, for their hard work, egalitarian turn-taking, methodical choices, and graceful lines of flight, all of which contributed to bringing this issue to fruition — if not in time for spring, then at least before summer gives way to the stark silhouettes of winter. on behalf of the editorial team, kári driscoll july 2025 cranell-ash, review of jørgensen copyright © 2024 marissa crannell-ash this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 198–203. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 porcine paradox marissa crannell-ash review of: dolly jørgensen, the medieval pig. nature and environment in the middle ages 9. woodbridge: boydell press, 2024. xii + 117 pp. 26 b/w illus. £19.99 (pb). marissa crannell-ash is a phd candidate in history at the university of rochester, ny. email: mcrannel@ur.rochester.edu book review http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 dolly jørgensen is no stranger to medieval pigs. over the last two decades she has written several pieces about them in relation to agriculture and forestry as well as sanitation and husbandry practices. in the medieval pig, jørgensen uses this knowledge to present a short and accessible monograph that explores the lives of pigs in the middle ages. placing pigs front and centre, jørgensen draws on historical records and material culture, including toponymy, archeological data, art, and literature in order to consider closely how pigs and humans shaped one another’s lives in western europe between ad 500 and 1500. she argues that, in the middle ages, pigs were materially ubiquitous and ideologically paradoxical: emblems of saints but sinful in nature, a source of life-sustaining flesh but capable of murderous behaviour; an animal consumed by christians and yet so closely associated with jews. in the first chapter jørgensen makes clear that while the wild boar does make an appearance as a point of comparison, the domestic pig is the star of the show. the chapter also sets the tone for the book to come — clear and straightforward, with an approach that “involves looking at both [pigs] and ourselves” (1). jørgensen stresses that the reader should not think of the role of the pig in the middle ages as unchanging despite the tremendous breadth of the geographic and temporal range covered. human entanglement with pigs is the primary focus, and this chapter makes clear a fundamental fact upon which the rest of the book is built: pigs were ubiquitous, and most people had regular interactions with them. additionally, jørgensen introduces a recurring argument of the book, that pigs “embodie[d] paradoxes” (1). the pig turned garbage into food, creating precious calories to carry people through the winter, but was simultaneously a source of danger due to that same propensity for eating everything. pigs were fattened up for human consumption, but that also meant that they could cause significant destruction. pigs were both creatures created by god and suspected of doing the bidding of the devil. essentially, then, “most positive attributes of pigs could also be flipped over as a negative in a different situation” (10). copyright © 2024 marissa crannell-ash this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 1 (2024): 197–203. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.19636 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.19636 crannell-ash, review of jørgensen | 199 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) the medieval pig explores the pig across four areas: in the countryside, in the city, on the plate, and in the mind. chapter two concerns the first of these, as jørgensen focuses on how woodlands were shaped, literally and figuratively, by the presence of pigs. in england, for instance, the domesday book calculated woodland size according to the needs of hypothetical foraging pigs. forests were measured as “wood for x swine” (17), although jørgensen reminds us that “just because a woodland could feed 90 pigs in a good year does not mean that there were 90 pigs feeding in it every year” (17). and those pigs that did frequent the forests were closely monitored. professional swineherds made their living by keeping pigs out of harm’s way and from causing harm themselves, driving herds from pasture to pasture and from feeding sites to market — although of course, all of this care was in service of delivering the hogs to the ultimate harm — slaughter. she notes that archaeologists have discovered physical remnants of the droveways taken by pigs and their human minders. the overall image conjured throughout the chapter is of pigs well-integrated into the lifeways and landscapes of the medieval countryside. the third chapter turns to the place that swineherds and their pigs would often end up: the urbanizing cities of medieval europe. jørgensen explores the logistical problems inherent in keeping medium-sized omnivores in small spaces filled with many people. people built inconveniently-located sties and stalls, butchered pigs in unsanitary places, piled up their body parts in the corners of towns, and let their pigs wander freely, all in contravention of laws prohibiting or limiting such behaviour. the urban pig was everywhere — even if one could not actively see a pig at any particular moment, there was a good chance that one might smell them. and they were notorious, jørgensen states, for their destructive behaviour, as they would root up bodies from cemeteries, maim fish and fowl, and even kill children. jørgensen contends that there was “a standing concern in medieval urban areas about pigs grazing in the wrong areas” (35), but that it was the place of pigs on the plate that justified their continued presence in urban environments. humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 200 | crannell-ash, review of jørgensen that role of pig as food animal is explored further in the following chapter, where jørgensen presents patterns of pork consumption in the form of both fresh and preserved meat. using archaeological data and medieval recipe collections to trace patterns of slaughter, storage, and consumption, jørgensen notes that “pork was not the major part of the medieval diet, but most people ate it” (44). they consumed the blood of pigs, too, and boiled their bones, which may explain why “so few pig bones are typically found” (53) in places like trash heaps during archaeological excavations. pigs, jørgensen concludes, were thus extremely versatile as objects of consumption — but they were not eaten by jews or muslims, who are briefly mentioned in acknowledgement of the fact that pork was not a universal food. chapter five ventures into the symbolic place of the pig in medieval minds. it is here, in this final — and indeed the longest — chapter of the book, that jørgensen develops her claim that the pig is a paradoxical figure, both a blessing that offered meat for the winter and a representation of sin and debauchery. pigs, she argues, were physically useful but symbolically difficult. biblical stories involving pigs, like that of the gadarene swine, formed the basis of christian thought about these animals and their relation to humans, solidifying the role of pig as resource: “[t]hey become the home of demons and they are herded for potential meat” (59). these tales shaped much of the medieval narrative about the nature of pigs, and while wild boars signified virtues such as nobility and valour, the figure of the poor domestic pig instead embodied lust and gluttony (despite her positive connection to saint anthony). in folklore, pigs appeared as demonic or at least as servants of the devil, the “portent of bad things to come”. in stories like the middle irish saga cath maige mucrime, “magic pigs” “ascend from hell” (60) and wreak havoc on fields for seven years. later in the chapter, jørgensen connects the negative traits assigned to pigs to racialized prejudice beliefs about the nature of jewish people. apocryphal tales, some of jewish origin, explained why jews did not eat pork but were also used to demonize them. muslims once again make a brief appearance, including in a charming anecdote from a muslim scholar regarding the crannell-ash, review of jørgensen | 201 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) origin of pigs on noah’s ark. at the end of the chapter jørgensen demonstrates how the pigs of the mind could impact the pigs of the flesh with a section on the role of pigs as legal persons who were punished for the murders of humans. jørgensen argues that these criminal pigs were thought to have rationality and thus could take responsibility for the crimes they committed. however, the vast scale of the book, while impressive for such a slim volume, does cause complications from time to time. although jørgensen warns the reader to beware the trap of considering the medieval pig as a single, static figure, the geographical and temporal scale of the book at times has a flattening effect. when the medieval pig presents information spanning multiple centuries and locations, such as the data about the age of pig slaughter, it risks conflating the disparate experiences of pigs in albania, norway, and england, thus establishing the very model of “the medieval pig” that it otherwise warns against. additionally, despite the book’s breadth, jørgensen devotes little space to human–pig relations inherent in places with higher mixed-faith populations. future research could build upon this and provide more points of view on the pig to deepen our understanding of how people of varying faiths perceived pigs. another avenue for future research is the topic of unpaid labour involving pigs, such as the role of children in managing the pigs of individual households. jørgensen spends time examining the roles of swineherds who were paid to mind pigs for large estates or cities, but spends relatively little time on those looking after smaller groups of pigs, including children whose families owned one or two pigs. the many examples of children killed or maimed by pigs mentioned in the book, especially at the end of chapter five, make clear that children and pigs encountered one another with some regularity — the contexts in which that occurred would add an interesting dimension. my primary quibble with jørgensen’s argument, though, arises from her claim that pigs were better controlled than previous scholars have assumed. without citations to the previous arguments jørgensen is refuting, it is difficult to know if her account contradicts itself, as the book is full of examples of uncontrolled pig behaviour. humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 202 | crannell-ash, review of jørgensen she rightfully points out that potential swineherd sizes should not be mistaken for actual herd sizes, but just as herd sizes did not necessarily reach legal capacity, so too should we assume that adherence to pig vagrancy laws was imperfect. between 1370 and 1374 the english town of lynn litigated a whopping 675 cases of pig vagrancy (37)! one of the examples jørgensen provides involves the pigs of nottingham, who destroyed the walls of a garden while under the care of a swineherd. while a court found that the swineherd was not liable for the damages caused by the pigs, the destruction of the wall suggests that the pigs’ activity was not entirely controlled by the human ostensibly in charge (35). while control over pigs was desired and sought, it was not always achieved. throughout the book, jørgensen brings up many problems caused by uncontrolled pigs such as the eating of corpses, destruction of property, and physical harm to humans and other animals. the deaths of numerous children (and the consumption of one communion wafer) do not paint a picture of pigs under perpetual human control. she notes that issues caused by free-roaming pigs — like those of the order of saint anthony — and nuisance pigs were “systemic” (39). all of this demonstrates that while medieval pigs were certainly not entirely unmanaged, they were running amok with enough regularity to cause headaches and heartache for medieval communities. overall, though, the medieval pig convincingly argues for the central and paradoxical role of the pig in the middle ages. jørgensen’s primary argument — that the paradoxical pig had a central place in the world of the medieval west — is not a particularly flashy or groundbreaking one, but she does a remarkable job synthesizing the various aspects of the medieval pig into a coherent narrative. as such, the book will be an indispensable resource for students, chock full of fascinating facts and careful research, augmented by the extensive and thorough bibliography, while opening up a host of avenues for future research regarding the relationships between not just pigs and humans, but also pigs and their environments. although we cannot know what medieval pigs thought about themselves, humans, or their place in the world, what jørgensen’s account shows above all is that they took up a lot of space. they were crannell-ash, review of jørgensen | 203 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) central to the lives of the people around them because of their roles as consumers of garbage, cheap sources of food, domesticates who needed minding, and a host of other functions. it is also clear that pigs were good to think with — theologians like st. augustine and philosophers like albertus magnus considered the pig as not just an animal, but as a symbol. medieval thinkers linked porcine behaviours — wallowing in the mud, eating (ostensibly) indiscriminately — to human conceptions of morality, with one writer defining the pig as “a foul and gluttonous beast which runs in the muck as aristotle says” (66). the medieval pig is a vivid and accessible introduction to the world of medieval pigs. i find myself wishing that similar books existed for other medieval creatures — perhaps future scholarship can follow this well-made blueprint. flynn goodbye old man goodbye old man? the evolution of the soldier– horse relationship in myth and memory, 1880–1939 jane flynn independent scholar humanimalia 14.2 (spring 2024) abstract: on the battlefield, it was the soldier–horse relationship that formed soldier and horse into an effective weapon against the enemy. at home, portrayals of this relationship enabled the british people to imagine the realities of war. reality and representation co-existed in a blending of past and present that combined traditional notions of warfare with the modern battlefield. increasingly, this imagery represented the many soldiers and horses of the ranks who, although humble, were striving every day to win the war. images, such as fortunino matania’s good-bye, old man, allowed those at home to imagine their own loved ones in the soldier’s compassion for his horse’s plight. these messages of humanity and compassion would prove equally valuable when the process of national mourning and reconciliation began. keywords: the great war; soldier–horse relationship; memory; mythologization; war illustration; portrayal; world war one bio: dr jane flynn is a teacher, historian, and writer with research interests in myth, memory, national identity, and the visual representation of work and war. she is the author of soldiers and their horses: sense, sentimentality and the soldier–horse relationship in the great war (routledge: 2020). jane blogs on www.soldiersandtheirhorses.com and hosts the facebook group “horses and history”. she brings a lifelong passion for horses to her work. email: j.flynn.1916@gmail.com orcid: 0000-0003-1126-1006 copyright © 2024 jane flynn this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 185–224. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.15136 http://www.soldiersandtheirhorses.com mailto:j.flynn.1916@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1126-1006 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.15136 flynn , goodbye old man? | 187 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) “according to regulations, it was for a veterinary officer alone to decide whether a horse should be killed straightaway or whether it should be kept alive for hospital treatment. but such was the concern of the british soldiers for their horses that in many cases […] a soldier himself performed this merciful office with his rifle. […] men who in times of shortage or danger had shared rations with their horses, or even risked their lives to save them from danger — as had many british soldiers — could not come to this tragic parting without real sorrow. one of the most human pictures of the war represented a british soldier on the battlefield holding up the head of his wounded horse and saying “good-bye, old pal!” it was no mere flight of imagination on the part of the artist, for that scene occurred over and over again in actual fact.”1 on 15 july 1916, the war illustrated led its one hundredth edition with a front-page illustration entitled “‘good-bye old man!’ — the soldier’s farewell to his steed. a touching incident on the road to a battery position in southern flanders” (fig. 1). published when british forces on the western front were fighting in the succession of battles that would later be remembered collectively as the somme, it told the story of a young artilleryman whose horse had been mortally wounded. although torn by the urgency of the situation, and the shouts of his comrades, the soldier knelt with the dying horse’s head cradled in his arms. with the horse’s harness removed and hitched over his shoulder, he wept as he said a hurried last goodbye to his faithful friend. drama, and a sense of danger and urgency, was created by the image’s composition: the road drawing the eye backwards and forwards between the dying horse and back into the picture where we see what remains of the team struggling together to push the gun limber up the hill and away from the danger of the falling shells. the force of the shell and the true horror of the incident are only suggested. it is the destruction of the nearby building, the smoke and 1 clarke, “british war horse”, 467. fig. 1 fortunino matania, “‘good-bye, old man!’ — the soldier’s farewell to his steed. a touching incident on the road to a battery position in southern flanders.” the war illustrated, 15 july 1916. copyright © rebellion publishing ltd. all rights reserved. used with permission. flynn , goodbye old man? | 189 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) flying debris, the crater made in the road near to the horse, and the torn bark on the trees bordering the road that indicate the full force of the blast which has wounded the dying horse. in the foreground, debris is scattered around man and horse. pieces of broken and hurriedly cut harness, and a forgotten mess tin, not only suggest the shell’s destructive power, but also their hurried departure. this was a “language” of war reporting with which the great war’s audience would have been familiar; the bodies of dead horses were used to imply war’s consumption of “useful life”.2 that this visual metaphor was so well understood suggests how, as paul fussell has observed, the war was “relying on inherited myth” as “it was generating new myth, and that myth is the fiber of our own lives”.3 the soldier and his horse in good-bye, old man were figures in a story that, although it had evolved to encompass the evils of modern warfare, had been told many times before. this is not to say that portrayals of the military horse were mere tropes, but rather that as long as horses were necessary in warfare, those stories would “occur over and over again in actual fact”.4 the horse was a living, breathing equine agent in a history formed amidst other human and nonhuman agents, but it did not participate by choice. indeed, as soldiers of the great war complained that they were mere “slaves” to the british army, it is not surprising to find that they often expressed sympathy for the horses who, having even less agency than they had themselves, struggled and suffered on their behalf.5 soldiers who had gone to great lengths to care for their horses as best they could were well aware that the horses relied on them to “voice” what they endured. perhaps this was sometimes rather too anthropomorphic for modern tastes, but it was a language that enabled soldiers to express the attention to their horses’ well-being that lay at the very heart of the soldier–horse relationship. thus, it has been 2 wilkinson, depictions and images of war, 127. 3 fussell, the great war, ix. 4 clarke, “british war horse”, 467. 5 r.g. flowerdew, sergeant, 175 machine gun corps, transferred from suffolk yeomanry, “personal diary, western front 1916–1917”. liddle collection, leeds university special collections, gs0562. 190 | flynn , goodbye old man? humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the duty of the human half of the “centaurian pact” to express their guilt at the suffering horses have endured in war.6 as anna sewell’s old war horse, captain, so patiently explained when asked by beauty whether war was the “fine thing” people seemed to suppose: “‘ah!’ said he, i should think they never saw it. no doubt it is very fine when there is no enemy, when it is just exercise and parade, and sham-fight. yes, it is very fine then; but when thousands of good brave men and horses are killed, or crippled for life, it has a very different look.”7 just as sewell’s novel addressed the “downward spiral” that was the inevitable fate of britain’s civilian and military horse population, war illustrations (and most notably matania’s good-bye, old man) reveal not only how the military horse was portrayed, but something of the very real soldier–horse relationship that inspired them.8 interestingly, moreover, portrayals that changed attitudes to the treatment of horses in civilian life had an influence not only upon how the military horse was portrayed, but on military animal management and supply practices, and upon the soldier–horse relationship itself. indeed, there was a palpable tension between the necessary use of horses in war and the moral responsibility incumbent upon those who did so. during the great war, we might argue that the soldier–horse relationship became as powerful an agent in its representational form as it was on the battlefield. this interplay of the real and the representational, or the real and the imaginary, was nowhere more fraught than in the body of the military horse. as garry marvin has explained, horse and human enter into a cyclical relationship whereupon representations and constructions create the context for relationships with animals; the relationships themselves then generating representations, and representations out of relationships. he notes that these systems are not mechanical, and nor are they fixed in time. thus, it is necessary to consider how and why social, economic, political, and cultural changes within human societies change the place of humans and horses within them, and thus 6 raulff, farewell to the horse, 9–10. 7 sewell, black beauty, 180. 8 edwards, thy servant the horse, 39. flynn , goodbye old man? | 191 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the relationships and representations that come out of this change.9 it is this fluid interplay between the real and the representational that, once the influence of memory and myth are brought into the process, i refer to as “remembering and forgetting”. of course, it would be simplistic to argue that the soldier–horse relationship was one day remembered and the next forgotten. rather, this article traces the real and representational soldier–horse relationship’s changing place in british society before, during, and after the great war. to this end, this article takes its earliest representations of the soldier–horse relationship from the victorian period, exploring examples from the crimean, mahdist, and boer wars in the process. its later examples tentatively reflect the complexities of social change in the interwar period, and the soldier–horse relationship’s real and representational place in a nation unalterably changed by the great war. indeed, even dorothy brooke, who, sixteen years after the war’s culmination, would become the saviour of the old war horses in cairo, admitted that she too had “hated to remember but could not forget”.10 indeed, the soldier–horse relationship’s evolution is a microcosm of the wider process events undergo in order to become history, and which, once myth and memory combine in their telling, ensure that some stories survive when others fall by the wayside.11 this, then, is a process of telling and re-telling, and of remembering and forgetting, that relies upon a story’s (or concept’s) continued relevance, and therefore also upon its ability to capture the imagination.12 images like good-bye, old man appealed to the british public because they created a sense of continuity within a shared national history, a strong feature of which was a (largely imaginary) connection to the heroic and chivalric.13 during the great war, these associations were re-worked to suit the demands of modern warfare, with the soldier 9 garry marvin, “wolves”, qtd. in landry, noble brutes, 13. 10 dorothy e. brooke, “british war horses’ sad plight”, morning post 16 april 1931. available on the website of the brooke hospital for animals: https://www.thebrooke.org/ about-brooke/history-brooke/dorothy-brookes-letter-morning-post 11 barthes, mythologies 12 flynn, soldiers and their horses, 6–7. 13 girouard, return to camelot, 260. https://www.thebrooke.org/about-brooke/history-brooke/dorothy-brookes-letter-morning-post https://www.thebrooke.org/about-brooke/history-brooke/dorothy-brookes-letter-morning-post 192 | flynn , goodbye old man? humanimalia 14.2 (2024) and his horse playing a crucial role in this re-imagining. in the postwar period, however, social change, increased mechanization, and a move towards modernity that eschewed these traditional associations combined to place both the real and representational soldier– horse relationship under increasing strain.14 good-bye, old man enables us to explore the soldier–horse relationship’s evolution in myth and memory, an approach that allows this important portrayal of the soldier–horse relationship to do more than simply illustrate a point.15 rather, considering the period in which the image was produced, and the people it was produced for, enables us to trace changing attitudes to the soldier and his horse. in a sense, good-bye, old man becomes an example of how myths come into being and how they endure. in fact, the soldier– horse relationship has undergone a mythologization in parallel with that experienced by the great war itself. this being to a large extent a process of simplification: as roland barthes put it, myth’s function is “to distort not to make disappear”.16 thus, when the soldier–horse relationship’s mythologization is referred to in the context of this article, it is as two extremes. these are, first, that every british soldier loved his horse to the extent that he would have put his own life in danger to save him or her from harm, and second, that all the british army’s horses were routinely treated with culpable carelessness. as with most myths of the great war, the reality of the situation — i.e. the war as it was experienced first-hand —  is rather less easily compartmentalized. as jay winter puts it: “to array the past in such a way is to invite distortion by losing a sense of its messiness, its non-linearity, its vigorous and stubbornly visible incompatibilities.”17 14 rae, “double sorrow”, 260. 15 goodbye old man appears in numerous popular and academic texts, and websites, on the subject of war animals. in 2006, the painting (originally commissioned by our dumb friends’ league to head their wartime blue cross campaign) appeared at an exhibition entitled “the animals’ war” at the imperial war museum in london. see, for example, gardiner, the animals’ war, 36. 16 barthes, mythologies, 31. 17 winter, sites of memory, 4–5. flynn , goodbye old man? | 193 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) portraying the soldier–horse relationship: the victorian and edwardian legacy the horse had long been an important figure in the “imagined community” that was british national identity.18 at the time of the great war, just as today, where and how the horse fitted into this “imagined” nation depended considerably upon the context in which the horse and the human encountered each other.19 there was a significant difference in the relationship between horse and human when the horse was kept as a working animal, and when this was extended to include military uses and equestrian pursuits.20 there was, and is, a difference in attitudes towards a thoroughbred produced for horse racing and a top-level show horse, as there is a hunter, a leisure horse, a heavy draft horse, or a horse that is produced solely for meat.21 we need to think only of the different spaces inhabited by, and discourses concerning, companion animals and livestock animals to get a sense of the vast incongruities in the ways that particular human and nonhuman animal bodies are constructed within these different contexts, or “apparatuses”.22 just as attitudes to the well-being of living horses evolved throughout the victorian and edwardian period, so too did concerns about what happened to horses at the end of their lives. as kendra coulter has noted, “across space and time, horses have been valorized, loved, worked, exploited, and slaughtered.” however, the “dirty work” was usually the responsibility of working-class people.23 at the very centre of this debate were the soldiers and horses who, as sandra swart has identified, experienced at first-hand “an uneasy friction between the growing view of horses as comrades and their official designation as military property.”24 18 anderson, imagined communities, 6–7. 19 fudge, “a left-handed blow,” 16. 20 dashper, “tools of the trade”, 360–61. 21 endenburg, “perceptions and attitudes”, 40. 22 thierman, “apparatuses of animality”, 93. 23 coulter, “herds and hierarchies”, 135. 24 swart, riding high, 128. 194 | flynn , goodbye old man? humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the victorian and edwardian period saw mechanization, humanitarian and legal reform, and social change combine to challenge any conviction that god’s purpose in creating the horse had been solely that the species might serve mankind. for a growing number of the british people, it was becoming difficult to accept horses’ abuse in a society where, we must not forget, the horse was still a prime means of transport and of providing power for manufacturing.25 increasingly, the british populace was encouraged to treat their animals as they themselves would wish to be treated. by the turn of the century, animal cruelty was becoming socially unacceptable. reflecting this social change, by the time the fifth edition of lieutenant-general frederick fitzwygram’s “bible” of horse management, horses and stables, was published in 1901, it had evolved since its original publication in 1869 to more strongly emphasize the moral duty incumbent upon the human in the human–horse relationship. whereas in previous editions it had been implicit that there was a duty of care (expressed through the act of managing horses appropriately and with consideration), now the moral and humane reasons for this good practice were spelled out very clearly. fitzwygram’s text had always imparted sage advice on practical matters of horse management, but new sections of the book focused on the humane horseperson’s moral responsibility to prevent and alleviate suffering: [s]urely no creature stands more in needs of this aid than the horse. his life is often one of continual slavery and in many instances of perpetual discomfort. he alone, or almost alone, of all creatures is doomed to never-ceasing labour. […] [t]he horse 25 for example, f. m. l. thompson suggested that because there was such demand for local transport to and from the railway stations, the “railway age” was “the greatest age of the horse”. richard moore-colyer agrees, arguing that “[f]or all the triumphant articles in the contemporary agricultural and engineering press applauding the achievements of steam and mechanization, the horse remained the fundamental unit of power in victorian britain and was to retain its pre-eminence into the first decade of the twentieth century. agriculture, the extractive and manufacturing industries, urban and rural transport systems, and the civil and military authorities all relied, to a greater or lesser extent, on the draught power or carrying capacity of the horse.” see thompson, “horses in european economic history”, 13–14; moore-colyer, “aspects of horse breeding”, 47. flynn , goodbye old man? | 195 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) seems to be haunted by the demon of labour and fatigue almost from his earliest years, and generally increasing to the hour of his death — to be haunted by a demon whose power to torment seems to increase as the horse becomes older and more worn.26 indeed, and if as emotionology suggests society does indeed influence and shape what is considered acceptable and unacceptable behaviour, and thus too the emotional life of the individual, then it would appear that fitzwygram’s wishes were beginning to be borne out.27 the growing influence and respectability of humane organizations such as the royal society for the prevention of cruelty to animals (rspca),28 and especially once allied with the christian message that “the merciful man shows mercy to his beast”,29 tells us that ill-treatment of animals was becoming more than the “pseudo sentimentality”30 of a minority. however, neither would it have required a great flight of the imagination to visualize the horrors of war when britain still harboured every conceivable abuse of the horse, “the most precious of gifts which god bestowed upon man”.31 part of living in a horse-drawn age was that its realities were often all too visible. as such, while the visible role of horses (and their abuse) helped the british public to reconcile themselves with the necessary use of horses in war, it also ensured that they were never entirely innocent of its horrors. when the disposal of britain’s unwanted horses and the abuses inflicted upon them were there to be seen with one’s own eyes, it is difficult to maintain the modern fiction that the british before 1914 were entirely naïve to the horrors of 26 fitzwygram, horses and stables, 520. 27 rosenwein, “worrying about emotions”, 836–37. 28 “the final aid to progress was the receipt of a letter, dated 4 july 1835, from kensington palace, saying: ‘i have laid before the duchess of kent your letter of the 2nd inst. and its enclosure, relating to the society for the prevention of cruelty to animals and her royal highness very readily acceded to your request that her name and that of the princess victoria be placed on the list of lady patronesses.’ the princess was to become queen victoria, whose encouragement of the society’s activities, and royal patronage from 1840, did so much to help its progress during the next half century.” moss, valiant crusade, 29. 29 brontë, agnes grey, 45. 30 ainsworth, review of a lashing for the lashers, 550. 31 macmillan, “god’s beautiful creatures”, 974. 196 | flynn , goodbye old man? humanimalia 14.2 (2024) war. perhaps they did not fully anticipate modern warfare’s capacity for destruction, but they by no means ignorant of what war entailed. the british people were evidently aware that horses suffered and died in battles, but war was no longer thought of as an excuse to treat animals in any manner one wished. for example, in an article published by the humanitarian league in 1912, ernest bell and harold baillie weaver argued that although the british were considered to be more “actively enlisted on the side of humaneness to animals than [...] any other country of the world”, this humanity still fell short once a horse became a war horse and was thus exposed to the particular hardships of a military campaign. the fact that this question was raised at all, however, shows how far attitudes to animals had in fact come.32 it also goes a long way to explaining the british army’s much improved approach to horse supply and management during the great war. bell and weaver wrote: whether we have the right to force these docile and confiding animals to take part in our unholy quarrels against their natures and their wills may be for some people a debatable question, but everyone must admit that if we do so, the very least that should be expected of us is to see that they shall be subjected to no more suffering than is absolutely necessary. it certainly cannot be said that this is the case now. on the contrary, it must be admitted by anyone who will take the trouble to enquire into the facts, that horses and the other animals employed in war, are treated with culpable carelessness and indifference, resulting in severe suffering, a great part of which is avoidable.33 although the boer war in south africa (1899–1902) was an important milestone in the practical utilization of horses in warfare, and certainly for how the public thought about the use of horses in war, the imagery used to portray them would have been familiar. for example, when in 1904 the committee represented in england by mr albert holt of messrs holt and holt, south african merchants, chose to commemorate “the 32 see ritvo, the animal estate, 125. 33 bell and weaver, horses in warfare, 3–4. flynn , goodbye old man? | 197 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) services rendered to our gallant soldiers in the late war in south africa by that most faithful of all servants the horse”.34 the port elizabeth memorial took the form of “a rough-hewn pedestal with a cattle trough at the foot” (fig. 2). the bronze sculpture depicted a soldier kneeling before his horse to offer him a much-needed drink of water. the inscription carved into the stone base reads: “the greatness of a nation consists not so much in the number of its people or the extent of its territory as in the extent and justice of its compassion.”35 this image of a soldier offering water to his horse, but for some timely alterations to uniform and equipment, bore more than a passing resemblance to a stanley berkley illustration of english cavalrymen watering their horses during the mahdist war in sudan in the 1880s. during the great war, the motif would appear again; because of the simple fact that man and horse likewise felt thirst, the soldier and his horse were drawn together in the public imagination. moreover, these inherited images appeared again and again. as long as horses were used in war, and as long as soldiers had to ensure their horses were watered, they would always have a basis in actual experience. images which portrayed the horse’s suffering and the soldier’s endeavours to relieve it, while emphasizing the british soldier’s capacity for compassion, spoke also of the humanity imagined to be inherent in all those born of the nation he served. it may merely have been an illusion, but such images helped to reinforce a belief that the british were a people of “justice” and “compassion”. the port elizabeth memorial reflected how attitudes to the soldier’s horse were changing. it was no longer thought that humanity could be entirely dispensed with “in the heat of great battles”, and it was no longer only “raving anti-cruelty people” who thought so.36 rather, the memorial sought to recognize the horse’s necessary role in the army’s service. while the memorial’s primary purpose was to remember the 400,000 horses killed during the boer war, many also 34 “war memorials.” the times monday 28 march 1904 (issue 37353): 6. 35 brereton, the horse in war, 133. 36 julian ralph, correspondent at the front for the daily mail, in pike, “the cruel case of the wounded war-horses,” 916. fig. 2 “the horse memorial, port elizabeth” reproduced under licence, chronicle / alamy stock photo. flynn , goodbye old man? | 199 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) hoped that it would “inculcate acts of kindness to animals” and remind “the rising generation [...] of the part taken in that historical struggle by man’s best friend”. its epitaph, while the sceptical might accuse it of hypocrisy, was certainly not lacking in integrity.37 portrayals of the soldier–horse relationship were not confined only to the civilian world, to poets, or to the imaginations of artists and war illustrators. the national army museum’s collection contains sufficient examples to suggest the british army was itself keen to recognize the horse’s contribution to its history. neither did paintings commissioned by the regiments themselves shy away from sentimentality. there may have been little place for emotional indulgence on the battlefield, but when expressed after the event such images provided an opportunity for remembrance, and thus recovery and reconciliation. in this way, the stories these images told, and their portrayal of the soldier–horse relationship, would become immortalized, preparing the ground for their evolution through memory and myth. for example, richard caton-woodville’s 1882 painting, cruel to be kind, portrayed “a moment full of pathos” as an officer reluctantly raised his pistol ready to shoot his wounded horse. it was as if caton-woodville had captured a memory: in the harsh conditions on the north west frontier of india, there was no means of treating a sick or wounded horse. to save it from a lingering and painful death, the officer has to resort to shooting his own mount. it is a moment full of pathos. as he prepares to fire, the injured animal raises its head to look at its master. it seems to know what he is going to do. […] the subject was meant to be seen as heroic as well as tragic, to show that fulfilling duty can sometimes be difficult.38 37 “this was a war of almost unprecedented brutality, in which the british beat the boers by burning down their homes and herding them into the world’s first large-scale concentration camps, where over 40,000 people died. […] this is a worthy index, on which britain would have been placed close to the bottom; unless we were judged by compassion — or sentiment — for animals. these monuments, perhaps, permit us to see ourselves as kind people, even as unspeakable acts are committed on our behalf.” monbiot, “cult of the heroic animal”. 38 richard caton-woodville, “cruel to be kind, north west frontier, 1878–1882,” london: national army museum, nam 1960-05-50-1. 200 | flynn , goodbye old man? humanimalia 14.2 (2024) set on a snowy road, overshadowed by rugged mountains, this small act of kindness brought the experience of war down to a single moment; its intimacy perhaps foreshadowing what would make matania’s good-bye, old man so successful some thirty years later. in the painting’s background an artillery team struggle with the difficult terrain, the gunners on foot pushing the gun limber, as the drivers, whips raised, urge their horses to even greater effort. this is a detail intended to remind us that the prosecution of war must always take precedence over the soldier’s personal feelings. in the drawing’s centre, the officer’s iron-grey horse raises his head and seems almost to thank him for what he is about to do. the officer’s body language suggests the emotions he feels at that moment. he does not weep, or show obvious distress, but he slightly turns his body away. it is as if he is torn between the necessity that he shoots accurately, and his reluctance to see the horse die. caton-woodville’s message was that sometimes it took bravery to be compassionate. portrayals of the soldier–horse relationship that conveyed the soldier’s capacity for compassion would prove ever more valuable during the great war. “stirring visions of reckless cavalry”: the war illustrated the war illustrated emerged in 1914 as an illustrated newspaper dedicated solely to coverage of the war’s events. photographs and illustrations enabled the magazine’s readers to see war. war photography still had limitations, but while it was difficult to capture the action as it happened, the technology made it possible to imagine what life behind the lines was like. similarly, photographs taken after a battle conveyed the ferocity of the fighting that had gone before. what was and was not shown was important for morale, but this was not simply a matter of propaganda. indeed, stephen badsey reminds us that propaganda had not been widely used before the great war and had not yet acquired its largely negative connotations. nevertheless, there was a strong desire to avoid bad news, and there was a limit to what could be shown. as badsey explains it, “no news was better for the military than the good news desired by flynn , goodbye old man? | 201 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the politicians, and bad news was what all wanted to avoid”.39 however, this “absence of news” does not suggest that the period’s newspapers simply delivered pro-war propaganda. what was and was not said was decided as much by the people who bought the newspapers as it was by those who produced them. publications like the war illustrated reflected the tastes and views of their readership, and this in turn encouraged the publication’s coverage.40 there was an acknowledged subtext to the military horse’s portrayal which would not have been lost on those who read the war illustrated. indeed, the riderless horse, the horse alone in no man’s land, or the horse standing patiently over the recumbent figure of his sleeping (or deceased) master, were inherited images of battle which carried with them the assumption that horses were part of this landscape. new drama was created, however, when modern warfare impinged on these old imaginings. in october 1917, for example, the illustrated london news carried on its front cover a fullpage illustration by wallace coop entitled fidelity. in the image, a horse stood over the body of his dead master. his ears were pricked and his eyes wide with fear as shells exploded behind him and a tank rumbled towards the brow of a hill in the distance. the text read: nothing could be more pathetic than the sight of a terrified horse left alone on the battlefield. during one of the recent battles before ypres, a machine-gun officer acting in a forward capacity, who had been reconnoitring, informed an artillery officer that there was a riderless horse standing beside its dead rider, to whom it was evidently still faithful. the artillery officer went to the place indicated, and found the horse, which was apparently one of a gun-team. it was evidently in an exhausted state and had become entangled in wire near its dead master.41 in her work on the british army in art prior to the great war, j. w. m. hichberger points out that the very success of an image often relied to a large extent upon “the imagery and clichés of newspaper war 39 badsey, the british army in battle and its image, 164. 40 wilkinson, depictions and images of war, xi. 41 coop, “fidelity”. 202 | flynn , goodbye old man? humanimalia 14.2 (2024) journalism,” and that because of this it was also assumed viewers would imagine the events that had led to that point.42 thus, when the war illustrated used photographs and images of horses, their readers would have looked far beyond what was printed on the page. they would have imagined the ferocity of the fighting, and also the experience of the other horses and humans who had been with them.43 john singleton has rightly indicated that study of the soldier’s horse gives “scope for considering the relationship between human beings and animals and their suffering in early twentieth century warfare.” he also argues that when the horse was pictured in the early months of the great war it was as a “dashingly romantic” cavalry mount ridden “in pursuit of an ever-fleeing foe”. in the war’s later years, however, the horse came to be revealed in “less glamorous, but equally gallant, roles”. according to singleton, this was an evolution that concluded once the war was won and the illustrated press were able to return to a more “traditional imagery of the war-horse”.44 singleton is correct when he identifies an evolution in the portrayal of horses that mirrored wider social feeling. but this process was in no way linear, and was often contradictory and convoluted in nature. even though early portrayals of the soldier’s horse did exploit the excitement and glamour of the cavalry charge, these never disappeared entirely. rather, their persistence suggests a powerful desire to present war as it had always been imagined, whilst reluctantly acknowledging what it had become. in 1915 colonel mark lockwood, presumably frustrated by public ignorance regarding the importance of horses to the ongoing war effort, challenged these misconceptions in order to emphasize the horse’s vital place in modern warfare: since the beginning of the age of chivalry, when first knights spurred into battle, the horse has been always associated with the romantic pageantry of warfare. until the last few months, to think of war was to conjure up stirring visions of reckless cavalry charges, of foam-flecked chargers, imagine the thudding 42 hichberger, images of the army, 91. 43 wilkinson, depictions and images of war, 127. 44 singleton, “britain’s military use of horses,”: 179. flynn , goodbye old man? | 203 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) of hoofs, and the fierce shouts of maddened men on no less maddened steeds. of late the opinion seems to be held among civilians that horses are no longer a very important factor in the success of a campaign; this is a fallacy.45 coverage in the war illustrated both supported and disputed mark lockwood’s argument. that horses were absolutely essential in modern warfare was made abundantly clear by their sheer proliferation. horses were everywhere in almost every edition, whether as the subject of a photograph, illustration, article, or just because they were part of the war’s landscape. however, the drama and romance of “the reckless cavalry charge” was almost as persistent. indeed, so popular was this collective imagining that the leading war illustrators were kept very busy nourishing it. cavalry charges and heroic (preferably mounted) acts of great heroism and daring appeared on a regular basis throughout the war. even though long-range weapons had made war a far less personal affair, in terms of applying the “moral to the material” individual bravery remained just as important as it had before the great war. as david englander explains: industrialized mass warfare had, if anything, rendered traditional conceptions of the human-oriented battlefield more rather than less useful. intelligence, initiative and élan were never more relevant and the scope for personal valour was wider than ever.46 wartime images of the soldier and his horse focused on their bravery, undiminished stoicism, kindness, and good humour in the face of danger and adversity. thus, tales of modern chivalry bore more than a passing resemblance to their traditional forbears.47 in the october of 1914, for example, the war illustrated published an advertisement for the first in a series of “thrilling and fascinating” 45 lockwood, “how the horse is cared for at the front.” 46 englander, “discipline and morale in the british army,” 125. 47 the attributes of the english gentleman were alleged to have descended from medieval chivalry. there were various key traits this modern-day chivalry encompassed, such as: generosity of spirit, being a good sport, amateurism over professionalism, a rejection of ruthlessness and cruelty, self-control and restraint, and modesty mixed with self-assurance. see collins, “the fall of the english gentleman”, 93–95. 204 | flynn , goodbye old man? humanimalia 14.2 (2024) romances. in this instance, guy standish had rescued a nurse during the british expeditionary force’s retreat from mons, an act of chivalric heroism worthy even of king arthur’s knights. an excerpt from the forthcoming publication read: “we’ll never get through lucy — but we can die together!” hoarsely shouted guy standish as his horse, scorning its double burden, charged gloriously into the band of astonished uhlans. those supreme and thrilling seconds seemed like an eternity to guy, and to the brave but trembling girl whom he was attempting to rescue from a fate far worse than death. only a miracle could carry the lovers unscathed through that insensate, hate-filled group of prussian fiends — and the miracle happened! for weeks afterwards the story of how guy standish won the victoria cross was proudly told wherever british and french soldiers were gathered together.48 in the illustration accompanying this extract (fig. 3), the brave guy standish is pictured mounted upon his equally heroic steed. in his right hand he holds aloft a cavalry sabre, while in the left he aims his revolver at a “prussian fiend”. somehow, he has managed to ride his white horse through the mass of german cavalrymen without a hand on the reins, or any other obvious means of control. this is a detail which reminds us perhaps of donna landry’s “silken thread” connecting human and horse: his horsemanship and the bond he has with his horse being so innate that any more obvious form of control is unnecessary. 49 meanwhile “the brave but trembling girl” clings to standish as he carries her to safety. the overall impression is more akin to the pre-raphaelite’s revival of the romantic and chivalric, or to the work of writers like sir walter scott and alfred lord tennyson, than to the modern battlefield, or indeed to any real experience of taking animals into war (fig. 4). what had changed, however, was who was portrayed. the glamour of the cavalryman had now extended to encompass the humble transport driver, artilleryman, and trooper, and the draught horses 48 edgar, “how guy standish won his v.c.” 49 landry, noble brutes, 69. fig. 3 “how guy standish won his v. c.” answers, a supplement to the war illustrated, 1, no. 7 (3 oct 1914), 151. copyright © rebellion publishing ltd. all rights reserved. used with permission. fig. 4 “a cavalry engagement” postcard published by reinthal & newman, new york; c. h. ltd., london. undated. author’s private collection. flynn , goodbye old man? | 207 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) and pack mules who worked alongside him. thus, existing associations of englishness with equestrian heroism became further entwined, not only with romantic notions of the chivalric virtues, but with the stoicism of the working man and the industry of the working horse.50 moreover, the various attributes of the officer class were increasingly applied to the soldier of the ranks, and significantly also to his horse. ulrich raulff describes the transformation of the civilian horse into a war horse as the “centaurian pact”, an action that transformed the “terrified prey animal” into a military asset.51 similarly, the human element of the “pact” was also altered. this was a process that transformed human and equine “innocents” into warriors. while the horse truly was an innocent in the process, soldiers tended to be rather more conscious of the improved status their association with horses provided; one article described “how quickly the feeling of superiority gains ground in thomas atkins’s mind directly he is put on horseback”.52 in reality, soldiers reported how the horses regularly put these newly trained horsemen firmly back in their “place”. for example, a. whiteley remembered how he, having started learning to ride only very recently in the royal field artillery, was publicly humiliated after just one moment’s misplaced overconfidence: i was billeted with a plumber and his family. so i am proud as punch going through great baddow and the plumber’s family were looking through the window and the greengrocer had stopped and there were some cabbage leaves on the floor and i had the reins that tight that he bends down to pick up the cabbage and i slide down his neck and sit on my behind in front of the window. the next thing was when i got up the horse had gone. it went on the parade ground and got in position before i did.53 50 on englishness see landry, noble brutes, 2–3, and on english gentleman and chivalry see collins, “the fall of the english gentleman,” 93. 51 raulff, farewell to the horse, 9–10. 52 denman, “the future of mounted infantry,” 389. 53 a. whiteley, royal field artillery, transcript of taped interview, liddle collection, leeds university special collections, tr/08/59. 208 | flynn , goodbye old man? humanimalia 14.2 (2024) representations of the soldier–horse relationship still relied heavily on traditional, inherited notions of warfare. the cavalryman may no longer have been quite the military force he had once been, but this did not stop the nation’s people from invoking him, and all that he represented. what changed was that the artilleryman, the mounted infantryman, and the horse transport driver were increasingly imbued, like the cavalryman before them, with the positive chivalric virtues of the mounted knight. likewise, the heavy and light draught horses, who along with mules bore the brunt of the work in modern warfare, were now also recognized for the “spirit with which they take up guns and shells”. an article, published in the times in december 1917, described the horses in glowing terms: i am sure you would like the army horses in flanders. they are the most beautiful things in the country, especially the light and heavy draught horses, for they have to recommend them the fact that they do a job of work. saddle horses are lovely to look at, of course, but they, like the cavalry, are simply not in it in this war, and this fact robs them of their charm just now, when every one and everything is judged by his job of work. unspoilt by blinkers, they are not robbed of the beauty of eye; and their winter coats — innocent often of clippers — only add to their looks.54 no longer was it necessary to be a gentleman (or a thoroughbred) to be possessed of all the most positive attributes of the british race, and nowhere were these qualities better illustrated than in the soldier’s kind and sympathetic treatment of his horse: not for honors alone will the british soldier risk danger, but with that fine chivalry which is ever at the services of the weak and oppressed, he will, whether a simple private or a commissioned officer, extend his aid to creatures of lesser usefulness.55 david sobey tamblyn describes the feeling of the british soldier for his horse as having been akin to an act of chivalry bestowed upon a “creature of lesser usefulness”. an odd choice of wording, given that 54 “army horses: animal sufferers from shell shock”, the times, friday 28 december 1917 (issue no. 41672), 9. 55 tamblyn, horse in war, 63. flynn , goodbye old man? | 209 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) soldiers were more inclined to describe their horses as friends, or comrades, than as something “lesser” than themselves. in fact, in reality, the british army’s approach to the management of its human and equine resources differed very little, to the point that many soldiers felt the horses had been better cared for than they had themselves. far from being “lesser creatures”, the horses represented a valuable “asset” to the army, and woe betide any soldier who failed in his responsibility for their well-being. as w. e. theakston recalled one of his sergeants as saying: “we can get plenty of you for a shilling a day, but the horses cost £40 each.”56 this is not to say that the soldiers only cared for the well-being of their horses for fear of reprisal. when a soldier was assigned a horse he liked and trusted (and who hopefully liked and trusted him in return) he would do everything he could to protect him or her from unnecessary harm. this, however, was “the tragedy when casualties occurred”.57 goodbye, old man: the great war the reality of working with horses on the front line was that it was often dangerous and difficult. this, however, did not prevent many soldiers from forming a bond with their horses akin to the comradeship which existed between men. the british army was keenly aware that the horse’s physical condition deteriorated more slowly when it was treated with sympathetic consideration and that the relationship this same sympathy engendered made the soldier and his horse a far more useful tool in warfare. this mindset was simply an extension of the attitude the army had to the welfare of its human resources. indeed, the old adage, “no foot no horse”, was as easily applied to an infantryman who could not march as it was to a horse. nevertheless, soldiers assigned the task of working with horses day in day out, and expected always to put the horse’s welfare before their own, found circumstances dictated what relationship was created between horse and man. whether this was always one of love 56 w. e. theakston, non-commissioned officer, royal field artillery, transcribed interview, iwm16710. 57 james t. capron, 2nd lieutenant, royal field artillery, transcribed interview, western front 1914–1918, liddle collection, leeds university special collections, gs028. 210 | flynn , goodbye old man? humanimalia 14.2 (2024) is debatable, but there is sufficient evidence to suggest that when basil clarke described some soldiers’ reactions to the death of their horses as a “tragic parting” he was not entering the world of myth. similarly, lieutenant colonel a. w. walmsley, who had served as an officer in the army service corps during the great war, recalled the terrible conditions at passchendaele. he described how a team of mules had struggled in mud so deep their drivers were unable to save them, how he had been unable to get near enough to shoot them and how, because of this, they had eventually drowned. indeed, even when interviewed in 1978, his regret was still palpable. soldiers did not always say what had happened to their horses, but there were many who remembered vividly: six mules were trying to pull an ammunition wagon up. had gone on struggling until they definitely sank in the mud and had been suffocated. […] their drivers were trying to the very last moment most desperately at the risk of their own lives to get them out. i went to try and help and was completely useless because i found the mud was so deep i couldn’t even get near.58 soldiers may have been restricted as to what they could or could not write about in their letters, but they certainly knew when what was being reported at home did not tally with the realities of their own experience. in his diary, sergeant r. g. flowerdew often referred to newspaper articles sent to him by his wife and to topics raised in them. on one occasion, he described how a transport officer had been reported as saying, “i shan’t want my horse tonight i will walk”. in the article, this had been used to imply that the officer was either selflessly going without his horse, or so brave that he did not feel he needed one. flowerdew clearly had been entertained by this misrepresentation of what was for him his wartime reality. in his diary he wrote: “when i saw that i said i take it they have the wind up and are afraid to ride”.59 what we are reminded of here is that news travelled in both directions. 58 a. w. walmsley, lieutenant-colonel, royal army transport corps, transcribed interview, liddle collection, leeds university special collections, tape 513. 59 r. g. flowerdew, sergeant, leeds university special collections, gs0562. flynn , goodbye old man? | 211 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) interestingly, good-bye, old man appears to have appealed to the soldiers themselves, suggesting that it had not in fact strayed too far from their lived experience. indeed, while serving in the hussars at arras, corporal jack may chose to commemorate the day his horse was killed by meticulously copying down henry chappell’s homage to good-bye, old man: a poem entitled “a soldier’s kiss”. that he did so tells us not only that soldiers also saw these portrayals of war, but that they were at times sufficiently in tune with their lived experience to be able to offer some comfort. indeed, soldiers’ recollections sometimes hinted at the reality behind the image. for example, an ex-troop sergeant of the nineteenth hussars described a trooper’s reaction to the death of his horse during a withdrawal under fire in 1918: i was riding with the squadron rearguard when one of the troop horses was badly hit by mg fire. horse and rider crashed down in front of me. the horse lay on its side and the trooper, unhurt, had rolled clear. kicking one foot out of the stirrup, i ordered the trooper to mount behind me. instead, he crawled towards his horse which had raised its head and was looking at him. he reached the horse, gently lifted its head onto his knees, and stayed put. i again ordered him to mount, and drew my pistol, saying i would shoot the animal. he said nothing; just looked up at me, then down to the horse, and continued to stroke its head. i think he knew it was the end, and i also think it understood its master was trying to give it what comfort he could. i didn’t shoot. the squadron was almost out of sight. i said something to the effect “well, it’s your funeral” and trotted on to rejoin my place. the trooper caught up with the squadron later: he had stayed with his horse till it died. by all the law of averages, he should have stopped one too.60 the reason goodbye old man proved so popular was perhaps because it contained more than a grain of truth. it may be a seemingly obvious point, but the great war looked very different when viewed from the inside out and without the gift of 60 brereton, the horse in war, 129–30. 212 | flynn , goodbye old man? humanimalia 14.2 (2024) hindsight. wartime portrayals may seem naïve, or downright sentimental, but they were produced when those who created these images, and those for whom they were created, did not know how events would unfold. it is certainly no accident that already familiar imaginings of the soldier–horse relationship were reworked during the great war. there was, after all, more comfort to be found in the sense of continuation these images created than in dwelling too much on the present. this was not because the british public wanted to hide from war’s reality, but rather because they needed to be able to root their imaginings in something familiar: in this case, the familiar was the horse. that the soldier and horse in good-bye, old man were really very “ordinary” was another feature of the image which surely lay behind its lasting appeal. that both could at once be any horse and any soldier allowed its audience to identify with their story, and perhaps see in them the bravery and undiminished compassion of their own loved ones. it meant they were also able to see in the soldier and his horse the human and equine lives that had been sacrificed to the war effort. the most popular of these portrayals would become central to the soldier–horse relationship’s evolution in myth and memory. central to this evolution is the cycle of relationship and representation that changes over time. hence what a wartime audience saw when they looked at good-bye, old man in 1916, what a postwar audience saw, and what we might see today, are all slightly different. in effect, the horse changes little, but the contexts in which we encounter one another change far more. remembering and forgetting: after the war the familiar images of the soldier and his horse that had allowed the british people to imagine war from a safe distance were equally valuable once the process of national mourning and reconciliation began. although horses rarely featured in official memorials to the war’s dead, the british people nevertheless found ways to remember them. there may have been little overt remembrance of their contribution, but the horses and mules were remembered by the men with whom they had shared the hardships of life on campaign. flynn , goodbye old man? | 213 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) as a relatively “safe” topic, veterans talked about their horses and told stories of their shared adventures and exploits. veterans wrote about their horses in their memoirs and shared these memories with their families. local communities celebrated their veteran war horses and took great pride in each individual’s exploits and longevity well into the 1930s. however, these positive associations with the soldier’s horse were to come under increasing strain during the interwar period. increased mechanization meant that the horse was starting to disappear as a prominent participant in military endeavour. when the army mechanized its cavalry, artillery, and logistics regiments, the soldier and horse were severed from one another for the first time in british military history. britain’s contribution to the allied victory was still widely attributed to the excellence of its horse supply and management. nevertheless, horses were becoming a “less serious subject” than they had once been. it was not that the horse had disappeared, but rather that it was becoming increasingly disassociated from work and war. r. h. smythe, for example, recalled how attitudes to the horse had changed during his career as a veterinary surgeon: after the advent of peace in 1918 […] [p]eople who hitherto had lived with horses, talked of horses and dreamed horses, suddenly lost all interest in them as living creatures and regarded this as a suitable moment to be rid of them. […] within a few years the only horses remaining with us in any number were those which played an essential part in various sports, more especially those which provided an incentive to gambling.61 it must have seemed that the military horse was slipping from sight and mind. that the soldier–horse relationship was remembered just as it was starting to become forgotten is testament, not only to the british people’s desire for reconciliation, but to the complexity of their relationship with the horse. it was as much a matter of what was remembered as what was not. as major r. archer-houblon observed when he looked back on his experience of the soldier–horse 61 smythe, the mind of the horse, 12–13. 214 | flynn , goodbye old man? humanimalia 14.2 (2024) relationship: “how prehistoric all these reflections will seem, only a few years hence! yet to us such subjects were as bread and meat, and the horses and their wants occupied as large a share of our thoughts as ever did the movements of the enemy!”62 after the war, the british people concentrated on the horses who had been fortunate enough to find their way home.63 these few became the representatives of the many thousands who had not returned, and they were duly accorded veteran status. in 1919, the times reported on a class at aldershot command show for military horses that had seen active service. among these was a brown gelding called b30, whose army service had begun in 1912 when issued to the fifth dragoon guards as a troop horse. b30 had seen service throughout the war: he was at mons, and took part in the great retreat: was in every action in which the cavalry was engaged including the battle of the marne, aisne, ypres, loos, the somme, cambrai, and arras. he was the first horse to jump the hindenberg line, in full marching order, after the infantry had broken through. although wounded on several occasions, he never went into the sick lines, and was never “excused duty”. he was ridden throughout the war by lieutenant-colonel w. q. winwood, c. m. g., d. s. o., commanding the 5th dragoon guards, in whose name he is entered at the aldershot show. the horse was looked after throughout the war by the same groom, private glare.64 horses retained by their regiments, and especially those who had been ridden by a person of significance, often became war heroes in their own right.65 indeed, the evident affection with which certain individuals were remembered and revered by their regiments suggests this acted as a form of displacement or distraction when that soldier’s own horse had not returned. the leicestershire yeomanry 62 r. archer-houblon, major, liddle collection, leeds university special collections, gs0040. 63 seago, “a memory of the veteran war horses at olympia.” 64 “a veteran war horse”, the times, thurs 31 july 1909 (issue no. 42166): 18. 65 see for example, tamblyn, horse in war, and seely, my horse warrior. flynn , goodbye old man? | 215 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) had a horse called songster, who not only became the object of his regiment’s affection, but also something of a local celebrity. he was photographed, painted,66 and appeared in the leicester and loughborough press on numerous occasions (figure 5). today he is remembered in the regimental museum as loughborough’s very own war horse. when he finally died in january 1940 (at the ripe old age of thirty nine), his final resting place was marked with a cross and his numerous medals were buried with him. squadron sergeant major harry poole recalled the “luck” attached to songster, the horse’s cheeky character, and his, “proverbial ability to avoid wounds or worse”, all of which had won him a special place in the yeomanry’s hearts.67 he was purchased at an army dispersal sale soon after the war, after which poole provided him with a home for life and the well-deserved retirement of a veteran war horse. as poole recalled: when the authorities dismounted us there was not an officer or man who failed to bid songster “goodbye” for he was the pet of the regiment. he went to the 3rd hussars, and when we were given our horses back […]. songster was speedily reclaimed. […] he was always as artful as a barrow-load of monkeys, and tales of songster are told wherever leicestershire yeomanry gather. the majority are true.68 debate raged throughout the interwar period as to whether mechanical alternatives to the horse really were viable, or whether the horse was still the more reliable and versatile option.69 mechanization of 66 “songster. painted from memory by sergeant fred schepens”, loughborough carillon museum archive. 67 “mr poole once said of songster ‘he had an uncanny knack of sensing danger, and his luck in escaping wounds or worse was proverbial. our horse lines were heavily shelled on one occasion. we lost a number of horses killed and wounded, and songster was found to be missing. soon afterwards he came trotting up as if nothing had occurred. there is no doubt he had freed himself and galloped out of the danger zone.’” “famous war horse dead”, the loughborough echo, 17 january 17, 1940, loughborough carillon museum archive. 68 “leicestershire claims the oldest war-horse. rejected in 1914 on account of age: but went to france — now pulls a milk float,” newspaper cutting, date etc. unknown, loughborough carillon museum archive. 69 “the horses were used to haul cannons, ammunition and so on and a horse does not get stuck the same way as a truck does in the mud.” leonard sebastian, interview with grif williams. greg krenzelok, u.s. army veterinary corps historical preservation group, youtube 11 august 2014, https://youtu.be/iyfvprq5vqk?si=94x-5m493ubgw2_7. https://youtu.be/iyfvprq5vqk?si=94x-5m493ubgw2_7 fig. 5 photograph of mr harry poole and songster. (songster is on mr poole’s right.) courtesy of the loughborough carillon museum. flynn , goodbye old man? | 217 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the army promised to free the horse and mule from the suffering they had hitherto endured, but many people feared they would be pressed into service when the country again found itself at war. general jack seely believed it was the horse above all animals who had the greatest cause to wish for peace. he wrote: “truly the horse might cry out more loudly than any other creature, ‘give peace in our time, o lord’”.70 fortunately for horses, the great war was to be the last conflict where they would be utilized on such a scale. mechanization of the army’s cavalry, artillery, and transport regiments proceeded throughout the 1920s and 1930s, severing the soldier from the horse for the first time in british military history. mechanization severely challenged the horse and horseman’s ancient place in the country’s military landscape. the result was to prove as much a dislocation of military horses and horsemanship from the national psyche as it was a physical detachment from work and war. furthermore, mechanization of the army threatened to sever the horse from military life, and with it the horse’s ancient relationship with the soldier. inevitably, such dramatic change was met with resistance, not because the horsed regiments were technophobic or reactionary, but because the horse was at the very core of their individual histories and identities. as david french explains, this was a threat not only to their status as horsed soldiers, but to the continued corporate existence of the regiments that were their “professional home”.71 such profound change threatened every aspect of a horsed regiment’s organization, and was certainly not a matter of simply replacing a horse with a machine. it affected each regiment’s daily routines, its rank structure and the specialist roles within it, its training and tactics, its history and customs, and even its social and recreational life. james t. capron described how, during the great war, each battery had its farrier sergeant (“shoey”) who was accompanied by an assistant responsible solely for the horse’s feet. each also had a saddler sergeant (“waxey”) and a quarter master sergeant 70 seely, my horse warrior, 108. 71 french, “mechanization”, 301–302. 218 | flynn , goodbye old man? humanimalia 14.2 (2024) (“stores”) responsible for horse-related equipment, feed, and supplies.72 with mechanization, these were all trades that would become as redundant as the horses themselves. colonel t. b. a. evans-lombe, who was commissioned into the 8th king’s royal irish hussars during the great war, believed that the officers and men of his regiment were genuinely attached to their horses and to horse sports.73 the “genuine love of horses” lombe described was cultivated because horsemanship mattered. horse shows, competitions, and horse-based games and activities were an essential part of training the soldier and his horse for war. shows and equestrian events encouraged soldiers to take pride in their horses, assisted in forging soldier–horse bonds, bolstered morale, and encouraged a healthy spirit of competition.74 officers may have hunted and played polo, but they were still vastly outnumbered by the horsemen in the “other ranks” of a horsed regiment.75 it was essential that all horsed soldiers were able to manage their horses in any situation. far from being a safe job away from the fighting, the life of the horsed soldier had always been difficult and often dangerous. it was the horseman’s unity with his horse in the face of danger that had lent the soldier–horse relationship its glamorous appeal. there was certainly still interest in the military horse amongst the amateur and professional horse community. however, as clay mcshane and joel a. tarr note in the horse in the city, horses were becoming “a relic of pre-industrial times” unhelpfully associated with “amateur nostalgia”.76 moreover, horses came to be associated (albeit inaccurately) with the officer class.77 once the soldier of the 72 james t. capron, liddle collection, leeds university special collections, gs028. 73 t.b.a. evans-lombe, colonel, iwm sound archive, 000985/0. in french, “mechanization”, 305. 74 blenkinsop and rainey, history of the great war, 60. 75 “army riding school,” british pathé, id 2328.22, canister on192k, 1915, https://www. britishpathe.com/asset/70933/ 76 mcshane and tarr, the horse in the city, 14. 77 it is notable that mason and riedi’s sport and the military, 78–79, removes the soldier of the ranks entirely from this sphere of military life and leaves a strong, but inaccurate, impression that it was only officers who rode. https://www.britishpathe.com/asset/70933/ https://www.britishpathe.com/asset/70933/ flynn , goodbye old man? | 219 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) ranks (who hitherto had represented by far the greatest part of the british army’s equestrian population) became disassociated from the horse, so the soldier–horse relationship’s ability to capture the wider public imagination became diminished. this is not to say that everyone remembered the soldier–horse relationship and then suddenly forgot about it entirely. such a simplification would indeed enter the realms of myth. rather, the memories veterans recalled, or were willing to recall, the elements of the same memories that were altered, or left by the wayside as the years went by, the telling and the re-telling, all played their part in ensuring that some recollections survived in memory and into post-memory when others did not. 78 similarly, personal experience and historical memory became mixed up.79 as alessandro portelli explains, this is a process through which “personal ‘truth’ may coincide with collective imagination”.80 many veterans remembered the horses amongst themselves and their families, and many went on to record these recollections more formally in later life.81 sadly, however, few of their stories ever entered the public arena. instead, it was a handful of images, poems and stories, and those with the loudest voices (the animal charities, the influential, the writers, artists, and commentators of the period), who would propagate the mythologization of the soldier–horse relationship. indeed, to fully appreciate the influence those few images had over the british imagination during and after the great war, it is necessary only to consider good-bye, old man (and the plethora of reproductions and other written and visual homages it inspired). for example, henry chappell’s poem “a soldier’s kiss” and fortunino matania’s drawing became synonymous: 78 johnston, riding into war, 54. 79 portelli, “the peculiarities of oral history,”: 99. 80 portelli, “peculiarities of oral history,” 99. 81 in britain, it became evident by the 1970s that the experiences of the great war’s veterans were in danger of being lost. the imperial war museum, british broadcasting corporation (bbc), and private individuals, such as the military historian doctor peter liddle, set about interviewing veterans, as well as obtaining donations of diaries, letters and other material from family members. the liddle collection is now housed at the university of leeds, https://library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections/collection/723. https://library.leeds.ac.uk/special-collections/collection/723 220 | flynn , goodbye old man? humanimalia 14.2 (2024) only a dying horse — pull off the gear, and slip the needless bit from frothing jaws. drag it aside there — leave the roadway clear — the squadron gallops on without a pause.82 so it was that the soldier–horse relationship entered a new era. by the 1930s, the war horse was increasingly becoming not a fact of military life but a relic of its past. the war’s culmination had already proved to be a turning point in how the british public saw itself in relation to the soldier’s horse. just as a few named equine veterans would become living representatives of the many, the imaginings that had thus far been countered by reality now also started to gain a life of their own. increasingly, the “real” became the imagined and the imagined became evidence that these events had been “real”. it was not that the events recounted in images made popular during the war had never happened, but rather that what remained was becoming increasingly detached from the war as it had actually been fought. in effect, the most appealing stories and images gained increasing power in the absence of any evidence that may otherwise have contradicted them. it was not that stories such as that told in good-bye, old man were untrue, but rather that their influence began to distort, and be distorted by, a fading memory (real and imagined) of what the war had really been like.83 during the great war, the horse’s innocence and selfless service of humankind had been used for patriotic gain that emphasized the soldier and horse’s combined stoicism, hard work, unstinting bravery, and spirit in the face of war’s untold horrors. the soldier–horse relationship had provided consolation, hope, and even opportunities for humour. by the 1930s, however, and even though the soldier and horse veterans of the soldier–horse relationship had long since returned to the daily business of ordinary life, it seemed they both still had work to do. just as the soldier–horse relationship’s portrayal had evolved during the great war, now its mythologization would come to embody the pitiable waste of war: 82 chappell, “a soldier’s kiss”. 83 flynn, soldiers and their horses, 133. flynn , goodbye old man? | 221 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the cries continued. it is not men, they could not cry so terribly. […] it’s unendurable. it is the moaning of the world, it is the martyred creation, wild with anguish, filled with terror, and groaning. […] one can no longer distinguish whence in this now quiet silvery landscape it comes; ghostly, invisible, it is everywhere, between heaven and earth it rolls on immeasurably. […] we can bear almost anything. but now the sweat breaks out on us. we must get up and run no matter where, but where these cries can no longer be heard. and it is not men, only horses.84 84 remarque, all quiet on the western front, 46–47. acknowledgements this article is a re-working, and re-appraisal, of research originally published in soldiers and their horses (routledge 2020). i would like to thank routledge for their permission to include material from that book in this altered form. thank you to monica mattfeld and kári driscoll for their advice and expertise in bringing this paper to fruition. thank you also to mel gould at the loughborough carillon museum for his help during my hunt for songster, and rebellion publishing for their permission to re-produce images from the war illustrated. works cited ainsworth, william harrison. review of a lashing for the lashers, by henry curling. ainsworth’s magazine 20 (1851): 550–53. anderson, benedict. imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. london: verso, 2016. badsey, stephen. the british army in battle and its image 1914–18. london: continuum, 2009. barthes, roland. mythologies. translated by annette lavers. london: vintage, 1996. bell, ernest and harold baillie weaver. horses in warfare. london: humanitarian league, 1912. bishop, alan and mark bostridge, eds. letters from a lost generation, first world war letters of vera brittain and four friends: roland leighton, edward brittain, victor richardson, geoffrey thurlow. london: virago, 1998. 222 | flynn , goodbye old man? humanimalia 14.2 (2024) blenkinsop, l. j. and j. w. rainey, eds. veterinary services. london: h.m.s.o., 1925. https://wellcomecollection.org/ works/txemf8zp. brereton, john maurice. the horse in war. london: david & charles, 1976. brontë, anne. agnes grey. london: thomas nelson and sons, 1950. chappell, henry. “a soldier’s kiss.” our dumb animals 49, no. 5 (october 1916): 76. clarke, basil. “the story of the british war horse from prairie to battlefield.” in the great war: the standard history of the all-europe conflict, edited by h.w. wilson and j.a. hammerton, vol. 9, 453–70. london: the amalgamated press, 1917. https://archive.org/details/ greatwar-standardhist-v9/. collins, marcus. “the fall of the english gentleman: the national character in decline, 1918–1970.” historical research 75, no. 187 (2002): 90–111. https://doi. org/10.1111/1468-2281.00142. coop, wallace. “fidelity.” the illustrated london news cli, no. 4097 (october 27, 1917). national archives at kew, zper 34/151. https://discovery. nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/ c1849027. coulter, kendra. “herds and hierarchies: class, nature, and the social construction of horses in equestrian culture.” society and animals 22, no. 2 (2014): 135–52. https://doi. org/10.1163/15685306-12341253. dashper, katherine. “tools of the trade or part of the family? horses in competitive equestrian sport.” society and animals 22, no. 4 (2014): 352–71. https://doi. org/10.1163/15685306-12341343. denman, thomas. “the future of mounted infantry.” the nineteenth century: a monthly review 47, no. 277 (march 1900): 382–91. edwards, lionel. thy servant the horse. london: country life, 1952. endenburg, nienke. “perceptions and attitudes towards horses in european societies.” equine veterinary journal 31, no. s28 (1999): 38–41. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.2042-3306.1999.tb05154.x. englander, david. “discipline and morale in the british army, 1917–1918. in horne, state, society and mobilization in europe during the first world war, 125–45. fitzwygram, frederick. horses and stables. 5th ed. london: longmans, green, 1901. https://archive.org/details/ horsesstables00fitzuoft/ flynn, jane. soldiers and their horses, sense, sentimentality and the soldierhorse relationship in the great war. new york: routledge, 2020. french, david. “the mechanization of the british cavalry between the world wars.” war in history 10, no. 3 (2003): 296–320. fudge, erica. “a left-handed blow: writing the history of animals.” in rothfels, representing animals, 3-18. fussell, paul. the great war and modern memory. oxford: oxford university press, 1977. gardiner, juliet. the animals’ war: animals in wartime from the first world war to the present day. london: portrait, 2006. girouard, mark. the return to camelot: chivalry and the english gentleman. new haven, ct: yale university press, 1981. hichberger, j. w. m. images of the army: the military in british art, 1815–1914. manchester: manchester university press, 1988. horne, john, ed. state, society and mobilization in europe during the first world war. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1997. edgar, george. “how guy standish won his v.c..” answers, supplement to the war illustrated 1, no. 7 (3 october 1914): n.p. https://archive.org/details/twi1914/ page/n185/mode/2up. https://wellcomecollection.org/works/txemf8zp https://wellcomecollection.org/works/txemf8zp https://archive.org/details/greatwar-standardhist-v9/page/453/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/greatwar-standardhist-v9/page/453/mode/2up https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2281.00142 https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2281.00142 https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/c1849027 https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/c1849027 https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/c1849027 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-12341253 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-12341253 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-12341343 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-12341343 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2042-3306.1999.tb05154.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2042-3306.1999.tb05154.x https://archive.org/details/horsesstables00fitzuoft/ https://archive.org/details/horsesstables00fitzuoft/ https://archive.org/details/twi1914/page/n185/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/twi1914/page/n185/mode/2up flynn , goodbye old man? | 223 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) johnston, james robert. riding into war: the memoir of a horse transport driver, 1916–1919. frederickton, new brunswick: goose lane editions and the new brunswick military heritage project, 2004. landry, donna. noble brutes, how eastern horses transformed english culture. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press, 2009. lockwood, mark. “how the horse is cared for at the front: the magnificent work accomplished at the front for britain’s war-horses.” in the war illustrated album de deluxe: the story of the great european war told by camera, pen and pencil, edited by j. a. hammerton, vol. 4, 1134. london: amalgamated press, 1916. https://archive.org/details/ warillustratedal0004hamm/. macmillan, hugh. “god’s beautiful creatures.” in the quiver: annual volume, 1903, 974–80. london: cassell, 1903. https://archive.org/details/sim_ quiver_1903_38/page/974/mode/2up. marvin, gary. “wolves in sheep’s (and others’) clothing.” in beastly natures: animals, humans, and the study of history, edited by dorothee brantz, 59–78. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2010. mason, tony and erica riedi. sport and the military: the british armed forces 1880–1960. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2010. mcshane, clay and joel a. tarr. the horse in the city: living machines in the nineteenth century. baltimore, md: the johns hopkins university press, 2007. monbiot, george. “the cult of the heroic animal.” the guardian, 24 october 24, 2006. https://www.monbiot. com/2006/10/24/the-cult-of-the-heroicanimal/. moore-colyer, richard. “aspects of horse breeding and the supply of horses in victorian britain.” agricultural history review 43, no. 1 (1995): 47–60. moss, arthur w. valiant crusade: the history of the r. s. p. c. a. london: cassell, 1961. pike, lawrence w. “the cruel case of the wounded war-horses.” nineteenth century: a monthly review 47, no. 280 (june, 1900): 916–22. portelli, alessandro. “the peculiarities of oral history.” history workshop journal 12, no. 1 (1981): 96–107. https://doi. org/10.1093/hwj/12.1.96. rae, patricia. “double sorrow: proleptic elegy and the end of arcadianism in 1930s britain.” twentieth-century literature 49, no. 2 (2003): 246–75. https://doi. org/10.1215/0041462x-2003-3006. raulff, ulrich. farewell to the horse: the final century of our relationship. translated by ruth ahmedzai kemp. london: allen lane, 2017. remarque, erich maria. all quiet on the western front. translated by a.w. wheen. london: mayflower-dell, 1965. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate: the english and other creatures in the victorian age. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1987. rosenwein, barbara h. “worrying about emotions in history.” the american historical review 107, no. 3 (2002): 821–45. https://doi.org/10.1086/ ahr/107.3.821. rothfels, nigel, ed. representing animals. bloomington: indiana university press, 2002. seago, edward. “a memory of the veteran war horses at olympia.” the tatler, 23 june 1937. seely, jack. my horse warrior. london: hodder & stoughton, 1938. sewell, anna. black beauty. london: penguin classics, 2008. sheffield, gary. forgotten victory: the first world war, myths and realities. london: headline, 2001. https://archive.org/details/warillustratedal0004hamm/page/1134/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/warillustratedal0004hamm/page/1134/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/sim_quiver_1903_38/page/974/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/sim_quiver_1903_38/page/974/mode/2up https://www.monbiot.com/2006/10/24/the-cult-of-the-heroic-animal/ https://www.monbiot.com/2006/10/24/the-cult-of-the-heroic-animal/ https://www.monbiot.com/2006/10/24/the-cult-of-the-heroic-animal/ https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/12.1.96 https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/12.1.96 https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-2003-3006 https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462x-2003-3006 https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/107.3.821 https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/107.3.821 224 | flynn , goodbye old man? humanimalia 14.2 (2024) singleton, john. “britain’s military use of horses 1914–1918.” past and present 139, no. 1 (1993): 178–203. https://doi. org/10.1093/past/139.1.178. smythe, r.h. the mind of the horse. london: j.a. allen, 1974. swart, sandra. riding high: horses, humans and history in south africa. johannesburg: wits university press, 2010. tamblyn, david sobey. the horse in war and famous canadian war horses. kingston, on: jackson press, 1920. https://archive.org/details/ horseinwarfamous00tamb/. thierman, stephen. “apparatuses of animality: foucault goes to a slaughterhouse.” foucault studies no. 9 (september 2010): 89–110. https://doi. org/10.22439/fs.v0i9.3061. thompson, f.m.l. horses in european economic history: a preliminary canter. reading: british agricultural history society, 1983. wilkinson, glenn r. depictions and images of war in edwardian newspapers, 1899–1914. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2003. winter, jay. sites of memory, sites of mourning: the great war in european cultural history. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2007. https://doi.org/10.1093/past/139.1.178 https://doi.org/10.1093/past/139.1.178 https://archive.org/details/horseinwarfamous00tamb/ https://archive.org/details/horseinwarfamous00tamb/ https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i9.3061 https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i9.3061 _hlk164925102 _hlk165858138 d’hoop, caring for swifts in brussels crossing worlds in buildings caring for swifts in brussels ariane d’hoop université saint-louis – bruxelles, cesir université de liège, seed humanimalia 14.1 (fall 2023) abstract: holes in the houses of brussels, as in other buildings across europe, have long been the preferred nesting sites of the common swift (apus apus), a bird famous for its fast flight and for spending most of its life on the wing. for several decades, however, urban construction and renovation has led to the destruction of swifts’ breeding sites, contributing significantly to their disappearance, and have prompted amateur naturalists to spatial interventions in ways that they hope the birds will accept. this essay explores this form of care that is forging a new path through the more-than-human city. it starts with an account of how swifts “story” the cavities they inhabit, and then describes the engagement of a devoted swift caretaker with the birds’ astute knowledge of buildings and their meaningful worlds. moving across sites in brussels, the essay articulates how an attentiveness takes shape between swifts, their storied-places, and the human caretakers who learn about them, as well as the tensions and contradictions that arise. such a care practice involves noticing and experiential learning, it requires conveying importance to unfamiliar interlocutors, and leads both to the reactivation of architectural heritages and pleasure at aesthetic encounters with the birds. in some cases, the employment of nest boxes and other technologies may also risk greenwashing ecologically harmful operations. caring for swifts, the essay concludes, involves a reciprocal co-becoming at specific architectural interfaces, through attentive and imaginative practices. these modes of attention and of imagination enable material interventions in buildings with a fuller appreciation of swifts’ storied worlds. keywords: multispecies studies, urban ecology, care, storied-places, attentiveness, common swift bio: ariane d’hoop studied spatial arrangements in performing arts and then completed a joint phd in architecture (université libre de bruxelles) and anthropology (university of amsterdam). she has developed a microethnographic attention to the materiality of places, most of them in brussels, to explore how it matters in situated social practices. in her first monograph, the slightest attachment (transcript, 2023), she examines the role of spatial arrangements in a community psychiatric care practice. her current work focuses on spatial interventions, mostly by amateur naturalists, in response to animal presences and vulnerabilities in cities. email: ariane.dhoop@gmail.com orcid: 0000-0002-5093-3867 copyright © 2023 ariane d’hoop this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 43–82. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13265 mailto:ariane.dhoop@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5093-3867 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13265 d’hoop, crossing worlds | 45 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) amusive birds! say where your hid retreat  —  gilbert white, the natural history of selborne  in a short amateur video, filmed in a brussels street in the bright, early hours of one of the first days of may, the camera points towards the gable of a house, a corner that would not usually catch one’s eye. we suddenly hear and glimpse ten or so small, black birds sweeping over the house in quick flight. the filmmaker comments: “7:53 am. after feeding for an hour, first attempts to find the holes.”1 some of the birds suddenly plunge into the gable, just under the edge of the roof, and charge the spot, violently hitting their bodies against it before bouncing back. a few seconds later, they strike against the freshly rendered wall. during the five videos filmed there that day, we see the birds coming back, again and again, persisting in trying to enter holes that are no longer there. each spring, they used to return from their nine-month-long migration in sub-saharan africa to that same cavity. now they find it cemented over. these “amusive” birds, called common swifts (apus apus, hereafter swifts), are admired for flying “with an astonishing lightness and with the speed of the wind”, and for the way they appear to “swim slowly in the air”.2 they spend most of their life in flight through the immensity of the sky (fig. 1). however, less famous than their flight is their vital need to cram themselves into small dark holes during the breeding season. their extreme speed makes it hard to catch sight of them as they enter their nesting hole, that is, if there is still a hole for them to enter. whether through negligence or deliberate efforts, in recent decades their nesting sites have been increasingly destroyed by changes in the construction and renovation of buildings. 1 martine wauters (@swiftlady8019), “martinets sans abri (4): recherches vaines et... faucon pèlerin!” youtube, 6 may 2020, 4:55. https://youtu.be/inioufmrvca. my translation. 2 dubois, planches coloriées, 30. https://youtu.be/inioufmrvca figure 1: a swift flying in the sky above brussels, june 2020. photograph by luca de carli. used with permission. d’hoop, crossing worlds | 47 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) when buildings prove fatal records of swifts continually crisscrossing the clouds in brussels date back to 1921, but their relationship with the city is much older than that.3 swift experts estimate that these birds have specialized in nesting in the holes and cracks of human-made houses for 10,000 years, as long as these structures were built over four metres tall. in europe, their population expanded together with the edification of monuments during antiquity and their construction techniques.4 in the nineteenth century, they were called “wall swifts” (“martinets de muraille”), since they inhabited old edifices in the crevices of church towers or ancient castles (fig. 2).5 in belgium, swifts mostly live in cities, of which brussels is one of the most significant. in contrast with many other birds, they still inhabit the city centre and other historic districts densely populated by humans. in the early 2000s, between 1,200 and 2,400 breeding pairs were estimated to live in the city. cavities are hardly visible from the ground, and this makes the inventory of breeding sites difficult and the numbers imprecise.6 recent monitoring has indicated that between 1992 and 2020 the number of swifts in brussels dropped by 42 per cent, and a similar decline has been observed across europe.7 scientists attribute this decline to several phenomena. first, their migration towards south-east africa is perilous and may be even more so depending on the climate conditions. moreover, the fact that swifts are away nine months of the year plays to their disadvantage. their places are too easily neglected and destroyed during their long absence. if a pair’s traditional site is no longer available, adopting another breeding place is extremely difficult for them. second, as 3 coopman, “les oiseaux bruxellois”. 4 genton and jacquat, martinet noir, 129, 132–33. 5 dubois, planches coloriées, 30. 6 weiserbs and jacob, oiseaux nicheurs. 7 paquet, monitoring; schaub, meffert and kerth “nest-boxes”. the decline in swift populations has recently been reported in twelve european countries (weiserbs et al., “population et habitat”, 88). it is estimated at 21 per cent between 2007 and 2016, but because the loss has not reached an average of 20 per cent since 1980, the swifts’ status for the iucn red list remains of “least concern”. see birdlife international, “apus apus”, the iucn red list of threatened species (2016). https://doi.org/kbn5. figure 2: “martinet de muraille”. plate 31 from charles fréderic dubois, planches coloriées des oiseaux de la belgique et de leurs œufs, vol. 1 (brussels: c. muquardt, 1854). d’hoop, crossing worlds | 49 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) numerous studies suggest, insectivorous bird species such as swifts also depend on abundant insect populations to feed themselves and their young, and so to ensure successful breeding.8 starvation may thus be another cause of death, as flying insects have significantly declined due to intensive industrial farming and the use of insecticides, or in cities where insect populations are made vulnerable due to the lack of adequate vegetation, or light pollution.9 when undernourished, swifts become much more vulnerable to predators, such as falcons, sparrowhawks, owls, martens, weasels, or cats. third, swifts’ vital dependence on human buildings is seen, in many places, as a major reason for their decline.10 the evidence for this lies in the observation that all urban bird species that depend on manmade structures have seen their numbers plummet, as the evolution of current construction techniques and materials offer fewer nesting opportunities in comparison to older buildings. the most recent reports indicate that the number of birds breeding in cavities in brussels has dropped by an average of 74 per cent between 1992 and 2018.11 indeed, when the swift’s decline was first detected in brussels, it was particularly districts where lots of renovations had been carried out that were affected.12 these renovations entail the replacement of old buildings with edifices whose flat surfaces are made of concrete, manufactured panels or glass, without recesses or protrusions.13 these buildings’ minimalist style leaves no room for other cavity-nesting birds or nonhuman animals that have been making their homes in the crevices of our buildings for centuries.14 plus, next to public urban renewal programmes that have been implemented 8 tallamy and shriver, “declines in insects”. 9 paquet, “campagne de recencement”; tallamy and shriver, “declines in insects”. 10 weiserbs et al., “population et habitat”; wauters, “mesures pratiques”; schaub, meffert, and kerth “nest–boxes”, 165. 11 paquet and weiserbs, inventaire et surveillance, 17. 12 weiserbs and jacob, oiseaux nicheurs; weiserbs et al., “population et habitat”. 13 “brusselization” is a term dating from the 1960s and 1970s, which refers to a major trauma among the inhabitants of brussels: the megalomaniacal tabula rasa of entire neighbourhoods in the name of modernizing the city, led by developers who also profited handsomely from it. 14 mourmans-leinders, le martinet noir. 50 | d’hoop, crossing worlds humanimalia 14.1 (2023) since the late 1970s, the thermal insulation of the walls and roofs of existing houses has become a focus of public authorities. in brussels, the regulation dealing with the reduction of energy consumption in the construction sector became more apparent in the first decades of the twenty-first century,15 and the recent energy crisis prompts a massive insulation of most residential buildings.16 although the need for renovation and to reduce carbon emissions through insulation techniques and regulations is important, its current form of implementation undermines other forms of life than human ones, regardless of their crucial dependency on the materiality of buildings. in short, whereas swifts’ vulnerability certainly stems from their migratory and insectivorous character, urban observations foreground the destruction of their nesting site as a major threat to their disappearance. swifts’ vital dependence on the human-built environment, together with their discontinuous but loyal and barely noticeable presence in its holes, have rendered them highly vulnerable to the loss of their homes. caring for storied places in a previous issue of this journal, philosopher thom van dooren and anthropologist deborah bird rose proposed the notion of “storied-places”. with that notion, the authors call for an attentiveness to the nonhuman storying of a place; that is, how animals “understand 15 neuwels, “politique de performance”. 16 in brussels, 45 per cent of residential buildings belong to the least energy-efficient categories, and the region wants to improve this situation by 2030 through financial incentives (devillers, “la disparition”). today, the european union requires that all residential buildings be fully insulated by 2050. for private homeowners, the offer of insulation premiums is justified by the prospect of a reduction of their heating bill. but the lack of means remains an obstacle: most of the houses that are poorly insulated belong to low-income owners who can’t afford the investment. swifts thus trouble the notion that “urban nature” belongs to the most privileged neighbourhoods, since their dwellings in buildings precisely depend on the unequal distribution of housing insulation. it would be too hasty, however, to qualify this connection between endangered animals and underprivileged human residents as a kind of interspecies alliance for a more convivial city, because the latter don’t actively seek to keep their house permeable to heat loss or to cavity-nesting birds. d’hoop, crossing worlds | 51 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) and render meaningful the places they inhabit.”17 as they frame it, a story is not necessarily a verbal or written account, nor must it involve chronological descriptions. a story can also be developed by weaving connections between events while experiencing a world meaningfully. these connections emerge, for instance, on sydney’s shorelines, when penguins faithfully return to their breeding sites, which have become lost places; when they adapt their burrows to local rock crevices; or transmit their practices of place-making to subsequent generations. from this perspective, urban places are more-than-human worlds: they’re multispecies achievements, being “co-constituted in processes of overlapping and entangled ‘storying’, in which different participants may have different ideas about where we have come from and where we are going.”18 to speak of “storied-places” is a plea against human exceptionalism, since it contends that the ability to inhabit a meaningful world is not exclusive to humans. the notion also requires deeper consideration than that of “habitat”, which limits the focus to the biophysical attributes of the sites that birds occupy.19 in this way, van dooren and rose’s proposition claims a greater “conviviality” with nonhuman animals in cities: an ethics that would acknowledge alternative ways of inhabiting and making a place meaningful, in a more equitable city, perhaps especially for those whose lives are endangered. this proposition has fuelled my concern for the swifts, their nesting sites in brussels and their destruction. the notion of “storied-places” calls for taking more seriously the swifts’ meaningful engagements with, or worlds within, the particular places they inhabit. but the case of swifts leads me to expand the proposition by adopting a slightly different focus, which raises some different questions. swifts have intimately embedded their storying of places in human-made 17 van dooren and rose, “storied-places”, 1. this plea is part of the broader effort of these authors to reflect on species extinction as an ongoing phenomenon that is happening around us, including in our cities, as part of “a quieter systemic process of loss” (rose, van dooren, and chrulew, extinction studies, 1). they delve into the specificities of case studies, narrate how situated processes of extinction matter and to whom, and elaborate on ethical responses to the issues at stake in multispecies situations. 18 van dooren and rose, “storied-places”, 2. 19 van dooren and rose, 10. 52 | d’hoop, crossing worlds humanimalia 14.1 (2023) buildings. for generations, they have entangled their sense of place with ours. in brussels and elsewhere in europe, the destruction of their breeding places has engendered a commitment to maintaining or remaking these places in ways that the birds would best accept them. in other words, the situations i have found in brussels involve the specific relationships that the birds have formed with particular places, but also the persistent efforts by devoted people to provide nesting sites that swifts will hopefully adopt. those efforts are the focus of this paper. i articulate swifts’ storying of their places along with the practices of people who are learning to care for them. if swifts have different ideas about the human-made buildings they inhabit, then there’s a lot to learn from the people who are discovering these ideas and dwellings, and the responses they call for. i therefore explore the actual situations in which a more careful attention takes shape between the birds, the buildings, and the people who encounter them there. my relational thinking comes from a body of work that focus on care practices, informed by science and technology studies. these ethnographic studies focus on the relationships that develop between different beings — people, technical things, animals, and others — and examines what these relationships produce in ongoing attempts to improve fragile situations.20 in these studies, care is not all about warm, nice, and infinitely supportive relationships. caretakers rather try out specific ways of operating within those situations, notably by (re)arranging the spaces.21 here, by focusing on the forms of care for other species involved in practices of place-making, i bring out how attentive practices emerge between swifts, their storied-places and the human caretakers who learn about them. how can animal spatial practices and meanings, in this case involving swifts, be supported in the (re)making of a place? how might an attentiveness develop along with these care practices? and which tensions or contradictions do they carry? in brussels, conservation efforts for swifts and their nesting sites rely heavily on volunteers. martine wauters, who filmed the video i 20 mol, moser, and pols, care in practice. 21 d’hoop, the slightest attachment. d’hoop, crossing worlds | 53 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) mentioned earlier, is a leading figure among them. since 2010 she has been increasingly committed to the fate of these birds, to such an extent that it has become the central activity of her life, albeit unpaid. after having read the many observations she posts on her blog, “martine(t) news”,22 i conducted a series of interviews with her and i then observed her interventions on-site. while these direct observations were fruitful, in order to get a deeper sense of the situations at stake i completed them with archival research and recent grey literature about the swifts in brussels (monitoring reports, maps or local observations), documentary research into brussels’ building types, ornithological studies about swifts spanning other european regions (natural history, descriptive biology, ethology), and technical manuals about buildings or nest boxes. in other words, this method is less predefined and more guided by the situation under scrutiny: by what this situation requires me to learn to better understand and reflect on the worlds that take shape in those places and multispecies encounters. this method leads me to refer to the natural sciences, as well as other, non-scientific ways of knowing, while remaining critical about certain knowledge practices, in order to weave a tale proper to the social sciences.23 this tale articulates how urban sites in brussels matter for swifts and people, where their respective values and practices of place-making may entwine, clash or be reinvented. in what follows, i describe how swifts’ storied places involve the social creation of distinct cavities. next, my attention centres on people’s engagements with specific sites, where they develop certain ways to notice, to recuperate historical artefacts, and to use technologies such as nest boxes and audio recordings. more than merely providing suitable habitats, those engagements are forms of care through 22 “martine(t) news, le blog de martine wauters (belgique)”, http://martinew.canalblog. com. (“martinet” is the french word for “swift”.) 23 cf. swanson, “methods for multispecies anthropology”. while researching these efforts for liveable places for swifts, i found high stakes in learning from unofficial and minor forms of knowledge, where experimental engagement through lay expertise has worthy of relevance compared to the “true facts” to be unveiled by scientists. this observation aligns with steven hinchliffe and sarah whatmore’s argument for a “politics of conviviality” in “living cities”, that is, where experts in urban design and conservation are liable to be contested by city inhabitants who have acquired day-to-day, vernacular ecological knowledge. see hinchliffe and whatmore, “living cities”. http://martinew.canalblog.com/ http://martinew.canalblog.com/ 54 | d’hoop, crossing worlds humanimalia 14.1 (2023) which people learn about the birds’ storying of places and propose plots, in the materiality of buildings, in the hope that they continue or reshape these storying practices. in the final section, i discuss how “paying attention” occurs as the birds and caregivers draw each other into their worlds, through tangible interventions as much as imaginative work. in my view, these emerging modes of attention and of imagination, and worlds that materialize in buildings, map some of the more liveable paths through the more-than-human city.24 swifts’ stories: the social creation of distinct cavities each summer, swifts animate the sky over several neighbourhoods in brussels with tireless sarabandes. swifts are very much at home in the air, eating, drinking, and even sleeping, grooming, and mating in flight. but one thing they can hardly do on the wing is lay eggs. for that, they need a grounded place, and so they seek out particular streets, houses, holes, and the darkness therein. this is where they will settle down for the summer months. once a hole is adopted, the nest built, and two or three eggs have been laid, the parents take turns brooding them and will then feed the nestlings with numerous airborne insects hunted beyond the colony’s territory (fig. 3). approaching the end of july, nestlings strengthen their wings and hesitantly scrutinize the outside world before entering their aerial lives. as for the parents, they take their leave for africa soon after the last juvenile has left the nest. if they are lucky, the pair will return to the same cavity throughout their entire lifetime, which might be many years or even decades. the oldest known resident has been returning to the same nesting site for twenty-one years.25 while swifts’ nesting places are without a doubt indispensable to their reproduction, the significance of the holes goes beyond their being useful for breeding. how do the birds inhabit them? through which experiences and connections do they render these holes meaningful? in other words, what do we know of the way that they “story” these places? 24 amidst a great deal of literature on this subject, the concept of zoöpolis, emerging in berkeley in the 1990s, offers an agenda for a full appreciation of animal conditions in our cities; see wolch, “zoöpolis”. 25 weitnauer, mein vogel. figure 3: two parents visiting nestlings in their nest box, installed by inhabitants in their house in the city centre. screenshot by the author from http://ruysbroecktower.viewcam. me:8000/ on 17 june, 2020. courtesy of elizabeth thornburn and mark pearse. http://ruysbroecktower.viewcam.me:8000/ http://ruysbroecktower.viewcam.me:8000/ 56 | d’hoop, crossing worlds humanimalia 14.1 (2023) “the discovery of a suitable nesting site,” writes ulrich tigges, “undoubtedly is the most important event in the life of a swift.”26 as he observes in berlin, the borders of a colony’s territory align with the streets’ spatial layouts, such as the rows of houses that frame a few blocks. the sociality of a colony is thus first and foremost aligned with the built environment of a neighbourhood. in turn, the city block, while becoming a territory, contributes to the social invention of swifts as neighbours. indeed, they transmit its frontiers across generations. over the summer, swifts’ flying parties involve highpitched, piercing screams that indicate the locality to the youngest members of the colony. while analysing these “screaming parties”, rosanne van oudheusden found that variation in calls occurs between individuals, but also between different geographical locations. although this observation invites further research, it suggests that a territory may well be distinctive in its vocalization.27 once drawn to that location, at dusk the youngest swifts engage in an aerial display for which ornithologist david lack coined the term “banging”: a bird alone, or sometimes followed by several others, will loop and brush against the holes in a building.28 as soon as the banging activity starts, older members of the colony come back to their cavities, sit at the entrance and scream at the potential intruder in order to signal their occupation. while passing and passing again in front of the holes and nests of the colony, the youngest in fact map which ones are occupied and who is living where within the colony’s territory.29 they engage in these jubilant rituals with great energy and screaming, but will not nest in their own cavity before coming back the next year. thus, they sharpen their sense of place through these banging movements and screams, among the swifts of a colony and the blocks that they inhabit. this emplaced sociability 26 tigges, “spatial behaviour”, 3–4. 27 van oudheusden, a call for help. 28 lack, swifts in a tower, 34–35; genton and jacquat, martinet noir, 38. 29 although lack (swifts in a tower) interprets this behaviour as a search for unoccupied nesting cavities, there may be other reasons that remain little understood. olos (“is ‘banging’”) observes that the more banging occurs, the less birds of prey such as kestrels attempt and succeed in hunting swifts at the hole entrances, which leads him to interpret this behaviour as an anti-predator strategy. for genton and jacquat (martinet noir, 39), play seems to prevail over the discernment of cavity occupation. d’hoop, crossing worlds | 57 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) appears even more valuable when one knows that, during their migration, the birds make very little contact with each other.30 the relations between older and young members of the community take shape together with the transmission and recreation of their territory, bounded by the spatiality of a neighbourhood.31 and while adult swifts remain loyal to their cavity summer after summer, the youngest birds prospecting for new sites are more inclined to adopt new kinds of holes. they therefore appear as more hopeful settlers to the people who try to attract them to other crevices or nest boxes. then, within such a territory, swifts’ storying involves cavities and their interior. while back from migration adult swifts meet their partner in the same cavity as the previous year, which thus becomes a rendezvous point. when first adopting a new nest, a swift learns to enter it with ease and quickness, and then trains its partner by demonstrating the appropriate movements.32 it takes several days of training for flight movements to be successfully attuned to a particular entrance. partners then arrange their nest with a degree of “architectural dexterity”33 in the darkest side of the hole. they collect light materials carried up by the wind over the colony site or near it, like bits of straw, feathers, small leaves, pieces of plastic, grass, scraps of paper, sometimes petals, and damselflies or butterflies whose vivid colours sparkle.34 more than a collection of materials, the nest of a pair of swifts consists, too, of secretions from their own bodies. they stick these materials with their saliva and shape their nest by turning around it, moulding it to fit the interior contours of the cavity.35 they keep building the nest when the eggs are laid and stop when they hatch, and non-breeding pairs continue the nest-making process throughout the 30 genton and jacquat, martinet noir, 74. 31 as vinciane despret (habiter en oiseau, 163–4) notes, the creation of a neighbourhood is one of the many ways in which the territory of birds matters. and here i add: the block as a spatial configuration contributes, by its material arrangement, to the birds’ social invention. such a neighbourhood allows them vigilance, too: swifts have a special scream for warning each other, as well as house martins, when a predator is approaching. 32 genton and jacquat, martinet noir, 93, 95. 33 goodfellow, avian architecture, 22. 34 gory, “recherche et utilisation”. 35 gory “recherche et utilisation”; wauters “mesures pratiques”; lack, swifts in a tower, 51. 58 | d’hoop, crossing worlds humanimalia 14.1 (2023) whole summer, preparing for the years to come. thus, each nest is unlike any other: swifts create a distinct relationship with them through the attunement of their flight to the entrance and interior arrangement with their own collection of materials and secretions. but swifts’ cavities are not only singular within the territory of a colony or in its interior design. the birds also demonstrate the importance of their home through their stubbornness in defending it. not only do they scream out when a potential intruder passes by, but when resident swifts find a stranger in their hole (conspecifics or otherwise, such as starlings or sparrows), a fight ensues that can last more than five hours.36 serious injuries, and in some rare cases death, may result from these vigorous fights, although playacting is not excluded from these encounters.37 these battles are another manifestation of how much swifts’ distinctive homes matter to them. and these conflicts are contingent upon “our” buildings as well: the scarcer the holes, the greater the chance of fights. from this glimpse into swifts’ connections with their dwelling places, it is notable how much their storying is imbued with sociability, and results in the creation of a distinctive place: while becoming a neighbour within the territory of a colony, transmitting its boundaries across generations, discovering which cavities are available or inhabited, and by whom, attuning their vocalizations to a location, being reunited with one’s partner after an incredibly long journey, building a nest together, defending the place with sheer stubbornness and, last but not least, sustaining a lifelong fidelity to the only site where they ever dwell. swifts’ involvement with their nesting places also occurs through a familiarization with the space of a singular cavity, through their bodily training to enter it quickly, or when shaping the 36 i have found a few witnesses of swifts and sparrows occupying the same cavity in harmony. such interspecies cohabitation seems rare but deserves more acknowledgement. 37 indeed, lack attests that he once found a beaten swift looking dead, so he frightened its opponent away in an attempt to save the almost-beaten bird. yet when the other bird flew away, “the apparent corpse rose up and also left the box, evidently uninjured” (swifts in a tower, 31). in most cases, however, these fights are a risky practice. it may happen, for instance, that house sparrows come to inhabit the hole during the absence of swifts. once expropriated, the sparrows may take revenge by wrecking swifts’ nests, and piercing and throwing out their eggs (genton and jacquat, martinet noir, 102–3). d’hoop, crossing worlds | 59 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) nest according to the layout of a hole. what to a human might seem like nothing more than dark, dusty little cavities into which the birds crawl to raise their young, in fact carry social importance and distinct familiarizations. in a text entitled “more-than-human sociality”, anna tsing calls for critical descriptions that extend our curiosity into the social worlds of nonhuman others, which are not understood through human social standards.38 with these socialities belonging to other species, tsing evokes the way landscapes can carry multiple contingent histories, in which humans and their plans remain important but are far from being the only agent. i will come back to the conjoint histories of a site. for now, i would simply like to point out how swift sociality, as they put it in motion within a colony, a pair, or interspecies interactions, is intimately entangled with, and created by, the singular built environment in which they learn to dwell, from the configuration of a city block to the shape of a cavity. cracks and colonnades: noticing, learning, conveying the collection of swift photographs and anecdotes that martine shares on her blog draws readers in with an attentive curiosity for these unexpected sites. the documentation of her observations and interventions is a practice through which a form of noticing emerges.39 she sometimes says that she now looks at the city “with swift eyes”. as we will see, in practice this expression can mean shifts in focus and different ways of noticing. the older posts on her blog show pictures of houses, often poorly maintained, which are zoomed in on the holes and cracks around which she first heard screams and, looking up, spotted swifts’ cavities. non-breeding swifts brushing the tops of houses when banging often provide the first clues to the presence of a colony. but swifts’ nesting sites are hard to see because their entrances are impossibly small — a crack between two bricks, the slight gap in the eaves — and because the swift’s flight in and out is so quick that one must watch with undisturbed patience to perceive it. 38 tsing, “more-than-human sociality”. 39 tsing identifies different practices for developing the skill of noticing mushrooms, while learning to love them, such as painting or collecting. see tsing, “arts of inclusion”. 60 | d’hoop, crossing worlds humanimalia 14.1 (2023) soon after she started to collect observations, martine engaged in technical arrangements in order to protect nesting sites or to install new ones. whether tending to emergencies or not, she is constantly alert and ready to go to sites of concern. on the map she shared with me in 2020, i counted 130 interventions she made in brussels, under or inside eaves, in holes or walls. she also established the volunteer working group, whose members monitor colonies or help to carry out awareness-raising actions. her knowledge, then, comes from the accumulation of these situated experiences. importantly, it is also supported by a network of swift enthusiasts from countries across europe. the network consolidates learning and support, allowing members to give advice, share new scientific knowledge, and to meet up regularly and invite each other to visit sites abroad.40 such a community of knowledge allows learning that is both based in locality and travels across territories, where the dwellings of birds often reveal new details about the suitability of particular places. in this way, swift lovers have learnt to pay attention to the birds while becoming affected by what matters to them. i became aware of the potential of such attentiveness when reading vinciane despret’s study about birds’ territories and the ornithologists who multiply the many ways in which they are experienced, felt, and made significant. learning to pay attention, she writes, is a process of “attunement” (“accorder de l’attention”): it is both “giving one’s attention” and acknowledging how other beings are attentive; “it is another way of acknowledging importance”.41 in other words, when birds make territories, they create modes of attention to which ornithologists may in turn become attuned. this makes the birds more interesting and opens up significant differences, not only between perspectives or hypotheses, but between territories, ways of living, and ways of world-making. returning to martine, i recognize this attunement of attention to that of the birds in the way she learned to notice swifts’ places through an accumulation of observations of local colonies, enlarged by those of connoisseurs from 40 the respective websites of members of that network are each more enthralling than the next. a list is available here http://www.commonswift.org/others_english.html. accessed on april 24, 2020. 41 despret, habiter en oiseau, 15. http://www.commonswift.org/others_english.html d’hoop, crossing worlds | 61 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) abroad. she also used to watch over her interventions, checking to see if the birds would come back and that nothing bothers them. yet in recent years, the volume of requests has become so overwhelming that little time remains to see if all goes well in those places. moreover, the process of noticing and learning is sometimes not enough. the work of preserving or providing homes for swifts requires conveying this field knowledge and its importance to unfamiliar interlocutors. this occurred as we were sitting in the construction site cabin, behind a monumental art and history museum (musée du cinquantenaire), together with the site managers of the governmental organization managing the state’s properties (régie des bâtiments). this museum is a persistent mark left by belgium’s colonial power and displays a collection of archaeological artefacts and artworks from non-european cultures. in 2015, ornithologists discovered a colony of swifts living in the cracks in the curved colonnade on either side of the museum (fig. 4a & b). there, swifts offer an impressive spectacle, with their acrobatic flights around the mosaics and their cries that reverberate among the stones of the colonnade. since their presence has been documented, it was also mentioned in the planning permission, which subsequently requires a meeting in order to see if the upcoming restoration of the colonnade will affect the birds. the roof is prone to leaking, but before the necessary repairs can be undertaken, it is necessary to ascertain that they will not disturb the nesting sites. for martine, the stakes of this meeting are even higher than protecting the nests. not only does she care about this astonishing colony, but, knowing the numerous, huge buildings that the régie manages, she also envisions the possibilities that may arise if her interlocutors were to be receptive to the matter of urban wildlife. she thus attempts to magnify the meeting’s importance. from the outset, she has placed on the table two wooden artefacts — a swift and a square with a hole in it — along with her laptop featuring blog posts about previous interventions, and annotated pictures of the building and its colonnades (fig. 5). with these objects she concretely explains the situation: she talks about the birds, their needs, the specific holes figure 4 (opposite): a) the curved colonnade of the musée du cinquantenaire, brussels. b) holes above the mosaic. figure 5 (above): martine’s props for making swifts’ presence concrete and technical. all photographs by the author. 64 | d’hoop, crossing worlds humanimalia 14.1 (2023) where their presence has been documented. her arm dives down and then swoops back up and turns around. she is showing swifts’ movements as they would leave and enter the holes, and the space they require to do so. the meeting goes well: all agree to make sure that no works will occur during the breeding season, and that no remaining infrastructure will prevent access to the cracks. i am surprised to discover how these site managers listen at length about swifts, look at leaflets about the birds’ ethology, and become interested in different forms of nesting boxes. i am moved by the feeling that something comes to truly matter, which did not an hour ago. we then go up under the colonnade to take a closer look in situ, which manifested even more care. martine indicates the nesting sites, and where and how the swifts fly. in doing so, she stirs her interlocutors’ imaginations: she creates a “fictional presence” of the birds while they are away. from there we can also notice the actual sizes of the cracks and how spotlights aimed at the mosaics may be disruptive for the birds. the meeting concludes with further commitments. they envisage the installation of nest boxes on the museum’s vast roof for black redstarts or grey wagtails, these birds having been documented on the site. they also extend their concerns to other buildings managed by the régie. the organization includes a service devoted to sustainability, yet the reduction of energy consumption is, again, a leading priority. but that meeting may induce earlier changes. i observed how the site managers’ interest took shape, along with martine’s budding joy when sensing her interlocutors’ responsiveness. she managed to make this happen, when she mimicked the birds’ movement, talked about their ways of life, used objects that gave a concrete idea, showed existing solutions, or the birds’ behaviour when on site and, when necessary, shifted from these stirs of imagination to a technical and architectural language. it was through these concrete ways of doing that a sense of importance was passed on to the others. of course, such a sense of importance is not always so readily manifested and conveyed. and perhaps my presence as an observer also amplified it. but when it does, these ways of doing d’hoop, crossing worlds | 65 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) foster significance. conveying, here, is not simply communicating information, but, as its popular latin root conviare reminds us, it offers an invitation “to accompany on the way”. these approaches foster commitment in people; they spread and amplify concerns, first embedded in that building and situation, then opening on to others. putlog holes and towers: reactivating heritages certain historical artefacts belong to the architectural specificities that martine and other swift lovers have learned to notice. in the nineteenth century, brussels saw tremendous development with the erection of the characteristic terraced townhouses that swifts, among other birds, came to particularly enjoy. most of these maisons bruxelloises were built between the 1850s and the 1930s, at a time of great industrial prosperity. these houses are hospitable to swifts, mostly because they offer more spaces and cracks, but also due to a detail of their architecture. below the eaves of the maisons bruxelloises, a series of holes have been inserted at regular intervals, called “putlog holes” (“trous de boulins”, fig. 6a). these holes have existed at least since the middle ages, and were particularly common in nineteenth century constructions in belgium and northern france. until the inter-war period, they were mandatory in most municipalities in brussels. putlog holes were first and foremost used to insert the ends of beams, to support scaffolding for finishing touches or repairing façades, and occasionally to insert pulleys for raising furniture (fig. 6b). “putlog covers” (“cache-boulin”) were often placed over the holes, to be removed when the holes were needed. at first, putlog covers were made of cork, but from the 1870s they were attached by a hinge at the top, as large-scale and inexpensive production developed models either in cast iron or in stamped or molten zinc (fig.6c).42 putlog covers are shaped as ornaments featuring stars, rosettes, and often mascarons such as frightening human or animal faces (here mostly lions or dogs), originally intended to frighten away evil spirits. if the covers were not stolen to be sold for scrap metal, they were often slightly ajar or 42 hennaut and demanet, bois et métal, 166–67. fig. 6: a) (opposite, top) putlog holes in the façades of typical brussels townhouses. photograph by the author. b) (opposite, bottom) midnineteenth-century putlog hole used to hold an i-beam in charleroi, belgium (2015). photo credit: jmh2o, cc by-sa 4.0, via wikimedia commons. c) (this page) putlog holes with covers in brussels. photograph by the author. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:charleroi_-_trou_de_boulin_-_utilisation_actuelle.jpg 68 | d’hoop, crossing worlds humanimalia 14.1 (2023) corroded by rust, leaving open a small passage to the hole. from the turn of the twentieth century, architects’ tastes led them to leave the holes fully open and to play with polychromed materials for embellishing the borders. nowadays, putlog holes and their covers are little known. they are hardly appreciated as cultural heritage, and literature about them is scarce. yet, once brought to your attention, they are noticeable everywhere in the suburbs of brussels. to begin noticing putlog holes is to begin looking at brussels’ houses with swifts’ eyes. almost always more than five metres above street level — a swift’s minimum requirement — putlog holes are very popular among the birds. while swifts are sensitive to light at the nest, they find obscure cavities in putlog holes, as they are about thirty centimetres deep. owing to the covers, their entrances may be quite narrow, making the hole a safe refuge by keeping bigger birds out. smaller models (five to eight centimetres in diameter) are also interesting to swifts as corridors to reach spaces under roofs. in all cases, an opening of three centimetres makes the hole perfectly suitable for swifts to enter with their straight flight, or when swooping out (fig. 7). other cavities in brussels’ buildings are good candidates for becoming swifts’ dark quarters. watching the city “with swifts’ eyes” means noticing entrances that look tiny to humans. mostly, eaves provide large boxes that the birds first explore from their side edges. yet swifts may also find shelter in ventilation holes whose grates have fallen off, in cracks under or above lintels or windowsills, and under fascia boards, where narrow spaces are left between the end of the wall and the side of the roof. more rarely, swifts have dwelled in roller shutter boxes, although such spaces are difficult to access for them. martine notes that there are some “cultural” differences between brussels’ swifts and those belonging to other landscapes, as well as between colonies, since some of them favour one sort of cavity over another.43 putlog holes in particular are architectural technologies that are culturally, historically, and geographically specific. today they are not well known, but swifts have long found them suitable. their storying of places has emerged with these specific artefacts 43 wauters, “mesures pratiques”; weiserbs et al., “population et habitat”. fig. 7: swift diving from a putlog hole, molenbeek municipality square, 2010. photograph by brigitte de boeck and jean-claude hardy. used with their permission and that of martine wauters. 70 | d’hoop, crossing worlds humanimalia 14.1 (2023) that are culturally situated. this is the case for different kinds of cavities, such as eaves, but putlog holes show even more forcefully how swifts converted a highly specific historical technology into a dwelling place. as dominique lestel argues, if technical skills and the use of tools are cultural attributes among human societies, then the making of private spaces by animals (such as nests or burrows) are part of their cultures too.44 in this way, putlog holes lie at the interface between local human and swift cultures. swifts’ conversions of these holes, like other specific human-made artefacts that have come to suit their preferences, form a historical and cultural entanglement between their world and ours. thus, swifts and their defenders do not engage with “human constructions” in general, but with these discrete, specific heritages that have become meaningful in the swift’s world, and now gain new attention and meaning for people in their encounters with them.45 another form of architectural heritage to which swifts draw our attention are towers. not modern skyscrapers, as we have seen, but lower and older towers such as those of churches or castles. these towers are more than suitable technologies. when a colony lives in the top walls or roof of a tower, the group circles round the column, seemingly chasing each other. as discussed above, these collective “screaming parties”, together with the looping play of young birds, are central to swifts’ social, territorial, and intergenerational lives. swifts also engage in these flying screaming parties along streets, with the houses of their cavities at the centre of their flight trajectories. when this house is a tower, they circle around it. it seems that a tower perfectly suits swifts’ circling patterns, possibly even enhancing the pleasure these parties provide.46 the noisy, circling flights around the rising part of the building appear to be a dazzling 44 lestel, origines animales. 45 it is noteworthy that in other regions the common swifts have storied their places with different cultural heritages, such as in leiden in the netherlands, where they nest in “the gaps under the zinc gutters in 1970s housing estates, the openings beneath the roof tiles of the seventeenth-century church and between the bricks of the old windmill” (schilthuizen, darwin comes to town, 75). 46 ornithologists presume that play may be a factor in these flights (genton and jacquat, martinet noir, 89) and i can also easily imagine the pleasure of speed afforded by these circles. d’hoop, crossing worlds | 71 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) performance for those partaking and for those observing. the swifts’ acrobatic flight is a recurrent fascination among scientists and enthusiasts. their social choreographies awaken a sense of grace with their aerial slides, the agility of their dives and bounces, and the thrill of excitement while pursuing each other. as philosopher etienne souriau contends, these aesthetic movements are not simply instinctive and mechanical repetitions. when animals play with their driving forces and try to find the right rhythm, their sensitivity is at stake.47 hence, such aesthetic experiences do not happen just for the appreciative observer, but for the aerobatic birds as well. i would add that the possibility of an aesthetic encounter also involves the towers that mediate the birds’ circling movements and their captivating expression. such spectacles have been a common sight in northern italy for centuries. the use of “swift towers” (“torri rondonare” in italian) most probably spread among medieval fortified buildings from the fifteenth century, possibly even the thirteenth century, onwards. as mauro ferri describes, artificial nests were installed in tower houses (“casa torre”), and then in belfries, farmhouses, palaces, bell towers, and so on. up until the twentieth century, turrets were also added on existing roofs. they were made of rows of cells embedded in walls, which the birds could reach through little corridors. the rows of holes added regular touches to the sober architecture (fig. 8). at the back of each cell, a wooden plug could be removed in order to capture nestlings before their first flight, once they were fattened and would taste like “small butter pancakes”.48 young swifts were cooked, canned, and stored for gastronomic occasions or offered as highly valued gifts. the delicacy was rare, since the selection of nestlings had to be carefully carried out, on the condition that the captures would not harm the colonies. ferri found regional variations for coping with that condition: either the first brood was completely spared, or only one bird was taken; or else, for each brood, “one chick had to be spared so that the parents were not upset”.49 the 47 souriau, le sens artistique, 27–58. 48 ferri, “ancient artificial nests”, 231. 49 ferri, 235. fig. 8: the swift tower of castellaro, italy. photograph by martine wauters. used with permission. d’hoop, crossing worlds | 73 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) birds’ breeding places were thus a means for exploiting their chicks as food and involved moral obligations within a strongly asymmetrical relationship. whereas swifts were offered shelter at the expense of (a part of) their progeny, humans got a delicious dish with little inconvenience. nowadays, hundreds of these towers are still standing but left in ruins since the practice faded in the early twentieth century, as little birds were not considered food anymore. ferri has been fighting to preserve this heritage, which he thinks may be rediscovered to support the species, along with the novel “swift towers” that have recently mushroomed across europe.50 back to brussels, and for those like martine who have witnessed swifts’ screaming parties around italian towers, watching the city “with swifts’ eyes” also means that towers spark the imagination. she now notices certain towers in the city that emerge as good candidates for future transformation. she has integrated nest boxes in some of them located in schools, churches, or in industrial buildings such as a former brewery, in an effort to match the architectural style of the towers. the success of these operations depends on swifts adopting the next box, circling around it, and amplifying its aesthetic. however, this is not always easy, as with the tomberg tower in eastern brussels. this tower was part of a municipality building listed for its 1930s art deco style. at a time when its restoration was planned, martine had already spotted that tower and got ideas from the italian swift spectacles. she joined meetings to propose swift boxes for the design project. first approved by the municipality, the historic monuments and sites department, the architect and the contractor, the boxes were later excluded from the project due to overwhelming concerns about finding the right aesthetic style in harmony with local heritage. here the concern about the exclusive conservation of an architectural heritage dispelled the possibility of an aesthetic multispecies encounter. 50 “swift towers” are installations erected in the past few years, sometimes standing as artworks. although swifts devote a lifelong (and generation-long) faithfulness to their nesting territory, these installations appear far less permanent than towers belonging to buildings. 74 | d’hoop, crossing worlds humanimalia 14.1 (2023) yet, a change is underway: today putlog holes and (certain kinds of) towers compel attention because they are at the crossroads of swifts’ and human cultural heritage. while the former called to swifts’ ingenious agency in converting an architectural artefact into a home, the latter started as a technology for food exploitation and persists as an architectural artefact that intensifies the encounter through the pleasures of joyful circles around rising brickwork. ultimately, engaging with swifts’ meaningful connections with putlog holes and towers involves the possible reactivation of these technical and aesthetic heritages. risky nest boxes lastly, a great deal of martine’s interventions to install nest boxes consists of going up to rooftops via scaffolding or a lift, sometimes with the support of the municipality. the placement of artificial nest boxes, and their possible adoption by swifts, is a widespread practice across europe. for the human novices who discover them, the nest boxes appear as devices through which forms of proximity with birds are invented. the making of artificial nests for swifts includes the deployment of many technical details that adapt the boxes to their needs, for instance, by using thermos-regulator materials, designing a slanting roof that prevents predators from landing, an entrance that discourages other dwellers, or by inserting a cup in the nesting area that spares them time in building a whole nest (fig. 9 a & b). yet, for swifts to adopt new nesting sites, installing boxes is only the first step. once the boxes have been correctly installed (e.g. at a sufficient height, avoiding the threat of overheating due to a south-westerly orientation, at irregular intervals to prevent swifts from mistaking “their” entrance and the ensuing fights, etc.), further effort is required to lure the birds to them. it typically takes years before swifts select a box and make it their home, so recordings of their vocalizations are used to attract them.51 as such, nest boxes cannot be 51 monitoring studies that report adoptions of nest boxes placed as compensatory measures in the context of building transformations remain scarce and ambiguous. two german investigations show contrasting results: the first one accounts an occupation of ten per cent of the boxes by swifts, and the second more optimistically reports that twenty fig. 9: a) four nest boxes installed by an inhabitant in brussels. b) close-up of a nest box. note the three lines carved under the hole to enable swifts to grip the box before entering. photographs by the author, with thanks to nick winship. 76 | d’hoop, crossing worlds humanimalia 14.1 (2023) reduced to the mere solution of installing and improving a technology in itself. the boxes require ongoing attention and care, therefore more volunteers, and more of their patience and stamina. artificial nest boxes offer the promise of rejoicing when catching a glimpse of a swift flying towards the hole, but this is not guaranteed. the success of these nest boxes is a risky affair: it requires the refinement of these technologies to make them more inviting to the birds, the creation of a “fictional presence” of swifts using sound, and the boxes must be watched over while letting swifts choose whether to respond to those tricks. but installing nest boxes runs greater risks than being seen as solutions in themselves and forgotten about after being placed. martine told me a story with some unease, in which she evoked the construction of a huge package distribution centre on a vast wasteland of twelve hectares along the brussels canal. from 1930 to 1993, the site was host to a gas plant that produced and delivered town gas, coke, and derived products for the carbon-chemical industry. as a result, it was estimated to be the most polluted site in the brussels region.52 like many former industrial sites, in the decades since the plant closed down, the area had become a marsh where many animals and plants had come to dwell. the wasteland was quite famous among brussels’ naturalists. for birds alone, they reported about sixty different species living on the site, both endemic and migratory. in order to compensate for the loss of habitat, the company proposed to install eight nest boxes for swifts, but without much care about how it would be done. in short, placing the boxes provided an alibi for a cynical greenwashing operation. following a public inquiry, environmental organizations lodged objections during the authorization procedures, but without going to court. an ambivalence pervades martine’s account: like other environmentalists, she sorely regrets the loss of the wasteland, but since the mega-depot was going ahead with its eight nest boxes anyway, she four per cent of boxes placed during renovation were occupied thereafter (schaub, meffert and kerth, “nest-boxes for common swifts”). 52 ibge, rapport sur l’état de l’environnement. d’hoop, crossing worlds | 77 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) provided advice on how to better integrate them so that swifts could actually adopt them. again, what was at stake for her was the conveying of importance. the negotiation opened a big door for her to become an advisor for citydev, a public organization that plays a central role in the development of real estate housing projects and businesses across the city. there is a success for martine and the swifts here: the increasing importance of integrated nest boxes throughout the city. however, i cannot help but see a contradiction in the use of the nest boxes for the construction on the wasteland. placing the boxes requires few engagements: they are not expensive, do not bother the human residents, and may give the construction project an unearned positive image. in other words, since swifts are unobtrusive dwellers in human buildings, interventions to install nesting sites may help to justify construction projects and draw attention away from the way these projects destroy other living beings’ places. with cautious use, the boxes are technologies that create proximity and meaningful possibilities for the birds, but these objects are also dangerous since they can be easily mobilized as instruments for greenwashing. watching the city “with swifts’ eyes” once “we” have met, we can never be “the same” again. propelled by the tasty but risky obligation of curiosity among companion species, once we know, we cannot not know. if we know well, searching with fingery eyes, we care. that is how responsibility grows. — donna haraway, when species meet in their storying of places, swifts have an astute knowledge of our buildings that illuminates a world made of generational transmissions, scream dialects and looping parties, flight attunements to particular entrances, hole arrangements, and fierce fights. these dwelling practices involve the social creation of distinctive places. what is it, then, to engage with storied places, with swifts’ meaningful 78 | d’hoop, crossing worlds humanimalia 14.1 (2023) neighbourhoods, buildings, and holes? what does it mean to care in this case? i conclude by coming back to the expression “watching [the city] with swifts’ eyes”. of course, it is impossible for us to fully grasp the experiential world of other animal subjects. the expression “with swifts’ eyes” does not imply putting or imagining oneself in the birds’ place. it rather signals a practice of attentiveness and imagination that experiments with a proximity to the bird, by paying attention to what matters or could matter to them in the shared environment. how does this attentiveness take shape along with the transformation of buildings? which tensions or contradictions emerge in their wake? perhaps the most striking occurrences that call attention are swifts’ “screaming parties”, during which they pursue each other over their territory. while first hearing these screams and then recognizing them, these parties draw swift lovers to notice the birds’ particular neighbourhoods and nesting places. without such opportunities, it is rare to notice one of them entering a hole. swifts’ sounds are thus crucial to further scrutinize small crevices in walls and eaves, both for the members of a colony and for their human enthusiasts. from there, martine’s attention enlarges through an accumulation of local observations. not only swifts’ stubborn fidelity to their nesting sites leads her to return each spring to these same places, anticipating the joy of finding migrators again, but she also learns from other connoisseurs what the architectural preferences of these birds may be, and becomes more aware of them. in this way, specific historical artefacts, like putlog holes or historic towers, compel attention and hold aesthetic appeal. they call to reactivate these otherwise forgotten inheritances with which the birds have woven their world for centuries, despite the prevalence of human-centred aesthetics in architecture. swift caretakers are also drawn into their world when refining nest-box technologies to craft better scenarios for them. these boxes demand a surplus of attentiveness, like when using playbacks of swifts’ calls in the hope of attracting them. yet, they can easily be turned into compensation instruments that justify destruction. d’hoop, crossing worlds | 79 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) in addition, the practice of engaging with swifts’ storying of places implies the sparking and stretching of imagination. the expression “watching [the city] with swifts’ eyes” signals how that practice of attention involves imagination, like when spotting old towers and starting to see the promise of circling parades and their aesthetic pleasures. i pinpoint this imaginative work, too, when martine suggests their “fictional presence”. this consists of conveying importance to interlocutors previously ignorant of swifts, by mimicking the birds’ movement during a meeting, showing objects, or through oral descriptions in situ; when martine mimics the swifts’ calls in a way that plays into their quest for sociability; or when sharing anecdotes or videos on her blog. the attentiveness in the care for swifts is intimately bound up with these acts of imagination. these ways of paying attention and of stretching the imagination belong to a form of care through which swifts and humans come to be with each other, in meaningful ways, through material interfaces of buildings such as holes, eaves, nest boxes, house blocks, putlog holes, or certain kinds of towers. rather than a co-becoming through bodily co-presence and touch, the relating through which these species constitute each other is mediated by those specific architectural interfaces. as these buildings and their material invitations have long attracted swifts in human-made cities, today they appeal to human caregivers and their abilities to respond to swifts’ storied places through their ears, eyes, mimicry, imagination, and reshaping of the built environment. in this way, these buildings lure both swifts and humans to cross each other’s worlds. it is through such attentive and imaginative practices that material interventions with a fuller appreciation of swifts’ meaningful worlds emerge, and will most likely spread. 80 | d’hoop, crossing worlds humanimalia 14.1 (2023) acknowledgements i am deeply grateful to martine wauters; this article could not have been researched if she had not generously welcomed me into her impressive practice dedicated to swifts’ fate. thank you as well to mélanie tamm for sharing with me her knowledge about putlog holes, and to alain boeckx and steyn van assche for sharing theirs about the cokerie du marly wasteland. for allowing me to publish their pictures, thank you to luca de carli, elizabeth thornburn, mark pearse, brigitte de boeck, jean-claude hardy, nick winship, and again to martine wauters. for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript, i thank the two anonymous reviewers, as well as wakana suzuki, filippo bertoni, jeannette pols, thibault de meyer, and the members of the seed lab (socio-économie, environnement et développement) at the université de liège. thank you to stephen creek who assisted with editing. the research for this article would not have been possible without unemployment benefits in belgium. works cited coopman, laurent. “les oiseaux bruxellois.” les naturalistes belges 2, no. 7 (1921): 103–5. despret, vinciane. habiter en oiseau. arles: actes sud, 2019. devillers, sophie. “la disparition des maisons passoires coûtera des milliards d’euros.” la libre belgique, 15 september, 2022. d’hoop, ariane. the slightest attachment: when psychiatric buildings enact affinities. bielefeld: transcript, 2023. dubois, charles fréderic. planches coloriées des oiseaux de la belgique et de leurs œufs. 3 vols. brussels: c. muquardt, 1854. https://www. biodiversitylibrary.org/item/188590. ferri, mauro. “ancient artificial nests to attract swifts, sparrows and starlings to exploit them as food.” in birds as food: anthropological and crossdisciplinary perspectives, edited by frédéric duhart and helen macbeth, 217–39. enfield: icaf, 2018. genton, bernard, and marcel jacquat. martinet noir: entre ciel et pierre. cahiers du mhnc 15. la chaux-de-fonds: éditions de la girafe, 2016. goodfellow, peter. avian architecture. how birds design, engineer & build. edited by mike hansell. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2011. gory, gérard. “recherche et utilisation des matériaux nécessaires à la construction du nid du martinet noir apus apus.” alauda 62, no. 2 (1994): 117–22. https://www.biodiversitylibrary. org/page/61562348. haraway, donna j. when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/188590 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/188590 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/61562348 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/61562348 d’hoop, crossing worlds | 81 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) hennaut, eric, and marie demanet. bois et métal dans les façades de bruxelles. brussels: archives d’architecture moderne, 1997. hinchliffe, steve, and sarah whatmore. “living cities: towards a politics of conviviality.” science as culture 15, no. 2 (2006): 123–38. https://doi. org/10.1080/09505430600707988. ibge. bruxelles environnement. rapport sur l’état de l’environnement bruxellois 2003– 2006. brussels: bruxelles environnement / leefmilieu brussel, 2007. lack, david. swifts in a tower. london: unicorn, 2018. lestel, dominique. les origines animales de la culture. paris: flammarion, 2001. neuwels, julie. “politique de performance énergétique des logements à bruxelles: une logique industrielle structurellement inégalitaire.” espaces et sociétés 170, no. 3 (2017): 73–90. https://doi.org/10.3917/esp.170.0073. mol, annemarie, ingunn moser, and jeannette pols, eds. care in practice: on tinkering in clinics, homes and farms. bielefeld: transcript, 2010. mourmans-leinders, marjos. le martinet noir (apus apus). 2nd ed. translated by walter steinrüch. linkebeek, 1999. olos, grzegorz. “is ‘banging’ an antipredator behaviour in common swift (apus apus)?” ornis fennica 94, no 1 (2017): 45–52. https://www. ornisfennica.org/pdf/latest/171olos.pdf. paquet, alain. “campagne de recencement des oiseaux à bruxelles: adieu merle et moineau, hello buse et grand duc.” by sophie devillers. la libre belgique, march 20, 2022. paquet, alain. monitoring des populations d’oiseaux en région de bruxelles-capitale: rapport 2020. namur: natagora, 2021. paquet, alain, and anne weiserbs. inventaire et surveillance de l’avifaune à bruxelles: rapport final 2017. namur: natagora, 2018. rose, deborah bird, thom van dooren, and matthew chrulew, eds. extinction studies: stories of time, death, and generations. new york: columbia university press, 2017. schaub, tonio, peter j. meffert and gerald kerth. “nest-boxes for common swifts apus apus as compensatory measures in the context of building renovation: efficacy and predictors of occupancy.” bird conservation international 26, no.2 (june 2016): 164–176. https://doi:10.1017/ s0959270914000525. schilthuizen, menno. darwin comes to town: how the urban jungle drives evolution. london: quercus, 2018. souriau, etienne. le sens artistique des animaux. paris: hachette, 1965. swanson, heather anne. “methods for multispecies anthropology: thinking with salmon otoliths and scales.” social analysis 61, no. 2 (2017): 81–99. https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2017.610206. tallamy, douglas w., and w. gregory shriver. “are declines in insects and insectivorous birds related?” ornithological applications 123, no. 1 (1 february 2021). https://doi.org/10.1093/ ornithapp/duaa059. tigges, ulrich. “spatial behaviour of the common swift (apus apus)”. apuslife no. 61 (1999). http://www.commonswift. org/0061tiggesu.html. tsing, anna l. “arts of inclusion, or, how to love a mushroom.” australian humanities review no. 50 (2011): 5–21. http://doi.org/10.22459/ahr.50.2011.01. tsing, anna l. “more-than-human sociality: a call for critical description.” in anthropology and nature, edited by kirsten hastrup, 27–42. new york: routledge, 2014. van dooren, thom, and deborah bird rose. “storied-places in a multispecies city.” humanimalia 3, no. 2 (2012): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.52537/ humanimalia.10046. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505430600707988 https://doi.org/10.1080/09505430600707988 https://doi.org/10.3917/esp.170.0073 https://www.ornisfennica.org/pdf/latest/171olos.pdf https://www.ornisfennica.org/pdf/latest/171olos.pdf about:blank about:blank https://doi.org/10.3167/sa.2017.610206 https://doi.org/10.1093/ornithapp/duaa059 https://doi.org/10.1093/ornithapp/duaa059 http://www.commonswift.org/0061tiggesu.html http://www.commonswift.org/0061tiggesu.html http://doi.org/10.22459/ahr.50.2011.01 https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203795361 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10046 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10046 82 | d’hoop, crossing worlds humanimalia 14.1 (2023) van oudheusden, rosanne. a call for help: vocal behaviour of the common swift apus apus. haren: groningen university, 2006. wauters, martine. “mesures pratiques pour la préservation du martinet noir apus apus en wallonie et à bruxelles.” aves 55, no. 3 (2018): 101–23. https://revue.aves. be/revue/article/1532. weiserbs, anne, and jean-paul jacob. oiseaux nicheurs de bruxelles 2000– 2004: répartition, effectifs, évolution. liège: aves, 2007. weiserbs, anne, alain paquet, martine wauters, and damien sevrin. “population et habitat du martinet noir apus apus en région de bruxellescapitale.” aves 57, no. 2, (2020): 87–102. https://revue.aves.be/revue/ article/1572 weitnauer, emil. mein vogel. aus dem leben des mauerseglers apus apus. liestal: basellandschaftlicher natur und vogelschutzverband, 1980. white, gilbert. the natural history of selborne. 2nd ed. 2 vols. london, 1825. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/ bibliography/32868. wolch, jennifer. “zoöpolis.” in animal geographies: place, politics, and identity in the nature–culture borderlands, edited by jennifer wolch and jody emel, 119–38. london: verso, 1998. https://revue.aves.be/revue/article/1532 https://revue.aves.be/revue/article/1532 https://revue.aves.be/revue/article/1572 https://revue.aves.be/revue/article/1572 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/32868 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/bibliography/32868 move134974114 move13497411411111111111111111111111111 _heading=h.gjdgxs11111111111111111111111 _heading=h.30j0zll1111111111111111111111 roundtable: shaping the equine body roundtable shaping the equine body kristen guest monica mattfeld karen raber susanna forrest richard nash jeannette vaught humanimalia 13.2 (spring 2023) abstract: this roundtable discussion brings together four prominent scholars from equine studies (susanna forrest, richard nash, karen raber, and jeannette vaught) to discuss how we have historically shaped the equine body (and mind) when we breed and train horses, and how taking this history into account might allow us to imagine new ways of living with horses. three core concerns are addressed from multidisciplinary perspectives: how do human representations, desires, and fantasies inform our interactions with horses? how have equine bodies and minds been shaped by us over time? how do the stories we tell ourselves about equine bodies in turn shape how we relate to horses — and how might we do this differently? keywords: equine studies; equine history; ethology in animal studies; horse– human relationships; breed and breeding; training relationships contributors: kristen guest is professor of english at the university of northern british columbia, canada. email: kristen.guest@unbc.ca monica mattfeld is assistant professor of english at the university of northern british columbia, canada. email: monica.mattfeld@unbc.ca karen raber is professor of english at the university of mississippi. email: kraber@olemiss.edu susanna forrest is a freelance writer and researcher living in lund, sweden. email: susanna.forrest@gmail.com richard nash is professor emertus of english at indiana university, bloomington. email: nash@indiana.edu jeannette vaught is a lecturer in liberal studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at california state university, los angeles. email: jvaught@calstatela.edu copyright © 2023 the authors this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 1–29. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13277 mailto:kristen.guest@unbc.ca mailto:kraber@olemiss.edu mailto:susanna.forrest@gmail.com mailto:jvaught@calstatela.edu http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13277 roundtable | 3 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) t his roundtable brings together the substance of two separate discussions about the ways humans have shaped equine bodies, and continue to do so. the first conversation was a public presentation broadcast as part of the equine history collective’s speaker series and moderated by the guest editors, while the second was a discussion between the moderators and participants that delved deeper into issues raised in the first session. the text presented here brings together parts of both conversations in order to highlight core questions and themes. kristen guest and monica mattfeld: the idea for this roundtable was inspired by an experience we had a few years ago when we visited the arabian pavilion at the international museum of the horse. as we walked through the exhibits, we had an interesting conversation about whether the arabian horse that we know now was a product of human fantasy or not. looking at photographs of arabian horses from turn-of-the-century syria, most did not look anything like a modern show arabian with the dished face and high-set tail now associated with the breed. where we did see these types of horses, though, were in the romantic paintings that formed part of the exhibit. we wondered, then, if similar things happen when we imagine a wild horse or a racehorse? are human representations, desires, and fantasies informing the ways we shape equine bodies? karen raber: i do think fantasy is where it starts. my poor middle class jewish parents who only ever wanted me to go to college and be a nice doctor were horrified at the consequences of giving me the black stallion series when i came very close to becoming a horse trainer instead. humans imaginatively create the worlds that we inhabit, and we create those worlds for animals too. and we don’t know whether animals create their own versions of those worlds. i would also say, i always find it fascinating that when we do animal studies we always end up having discussions that we haven’t yet resolved in human studies. the two are continuous with one another, and we have still never figured out how to resist massive structures like capitalism, and the economic uses of the horse, and the fantasies that 4 | roundtable humanimalia 13.2 (2023) literature and other things bring into play as we imagine ourselves in relation to these systems. susanna forrest: i agree, karen. there is so much fantasy about wild horses. when i first started thinking about the wild horse fantasy, i intended it to be part of a book on girls and horses, and i was going to examine why girls want to be the ones who tame the wild horse. what i found was that despite this fantasy of having horses that are untouched by human hands, real wild horses are actually manipulated (literally and figuratively) to an extreme degree by humans and that they have distinct cultural and even utilitarian roles. currently there is a utilitarian argument for wild horses in which they’re positioned as guardians of the landscape and restorers of ecosystems, which is what’s happened in mongolia (along with other grazing and conservation projects in the west. but there’s also a whole other symbolic strand, which is the historical moment in which this fantasy about the wild horse emerges in the early nineteenth century — a time when western society is full of horses that are the opposite of wild. there’s always an intertwined relationship between how we perceive wild horses and how we treat domestic horses. richard nash: this takes me far afield, but two things struck me listening to you discuss fantasy and the concept of “wild”. one is a wonderful video that’s been circulating on the internet for a couple of years now about returning wolves to yellowstone park.1 the most amazing thing about the video is that it shows what happens to the ecology, the complete ecology, once you introduce wolves back into the picture. it’s the notion (which has always struck me as the question with breeding to rewild things) that often there seems to be a presumption (it’s good to hear that that’s changing) that one can rewild an animal independent of the ecological context in which the animal lives. the big thing we learned when we think ecologically is how who we are, what we are, determines and influences where we are, as well as the other way around. these things are all woven together. and in that sense, and this gets me back to what wild 1 “how wolves change rivers” (2014). https://youtu.be/ysa5obhxz-q. https://youtu.be/ysa5obhxz-q roundtable | 5 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) enlightenment was really all about, once you start thinking ecologically the thing that becomes particularly strange to imagine is how we define and create this distinction between wild and domestic, or what it means to be wild. this is clearly what’s now being argued about the przewalski’s horse. i’ve been thinking about that issue for a long time, and the question of the fantasy of the feral that i talked about in wild enlightenment is the idea that one can get back to that animal creature as vehicle, that one can get back to some imagined idea of what “natural” horses were before they became socialized and domesticated. the other thing i was thinking about is the connection to what i’m trying to do with this slippery topic of inventing the thoroughbred in the early modern period. there is a fantasy, and it’s encoded in the breed when people talk about foundation stallions, that there is a moment when things begin, and of course there is no moment when things begin. instead, there’s a sort of messy transition out of which things appeared and then institutionalized themselves and, usually as part of that institutionalization, there is a claim about the moment when these horses began. when you go back before that moment, you find this incredibly muddy trafficking of what “thoroughbreds” were that mucks about for a while and then turns around to announce itself as having been created. i think if you go back far enough, you’re going to find a space of confusion, which is where i spend most of my research life. jeannette vaught: one thing to bear in mind is that our fantasies don’t only shape bodies but also our relationships with horses. though we might imagine other ways of living with our equine companions, people are often unwilling to give up the things that they like to do with their horses in order to make changes that would improve their lives because those changes are impractical and not part of accepted ways of doing things — because our fantasies of having successful relationships with horses are shaped by what exists and what we’ve been told we should do. if we can begin to think more critically about the bargains that we’ve struck in this arrangement, however, i believe we can reconfigure human and equine relationships in ways 6 | roundtable humanimalia 13.2 (2023) that work towards more meaningful multispecies freedoms — echoing karen’s point about the linked nature of animal studies and human studies — and more complex and rewarding multispecies relationships. so we’ve got to find ways to nurture new fantasies! one way to think about how this limited capacity for fantasy shows up is in our current gendered relationships with our horses. one example that’s obsessed me for years is the pharmaceutical regulation of sexualized femininity in mares, using products like regumate not only to facilitate breeding, but also to curb displays of sexual maturity that people find embarrassing or difficult to manage safely within existing social structures. to some degree, this hormonal shaping of the horse reinforces the view of horse–human relationships as a version of the parent–child relationship, because female equine adulthood is just too much to handle. it conforms, of course, to long-standing restrictive cultural beliefs about women in domesticity, and the hormonal alteration of the bodies of female horses follows the same repeated pattern of enforcing dominant gendered and sexual norms for human and equine behaviour and kinship. it follows old and familiar narrative strategies that have long governed the literary and visual representations of girls, women, and horses as a means of warning us about the dangers of sexual freedom and independence. pharmacology in this example is simply a new tool to do the old job of constraining feminine sexuality in order to enforce compliance and domestic nonsexual feminine roles as a social norm. it also suggests how, and the extent to which, we’ve surrounded ourselves with de-sexed animal companions since we are really unprepared to relate to those who are not de-sexed. to get anywhere with this, i think, we must recognize and get past the idea that erasing sexuality from human relationships with companion animals — or shunting sexuality off solely to breeding purposes — should be a requirement for human attentions and affections. that’s a whole new fantasy of relating! and that’s no easy task, and it comes with significant hurdles, pitfalls, and ways to fail. sf: i was just thinking, jeannette, as you were talking about policing equine sexualities, about a conversation i had with a conservation roundtable | 7 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) manager for a rewilding project who wasn’t a traditionally horsey person. they had this hybrid expectation that the horses should be wild but at the same time, extensively managed. because they didn’t want any more foals they had decided to geld the stallion, but they wanted him to continue to behave like a wild stallion, moving the herd enough to graze correctly. so he was vasectomized. and then they also had an additional problem that he was too much like a stallion and got very aggressive with the youngsters when they got to be a certain age. so it was this strange combination of getting these horses because they were ostensibly “wild” and then policing how they behaved. that made me think a bit of your research and the restrictions we put on horses. jv: susanna, i was also thinking about connections between our work. what i’ve written about cloning on the commercial side is also happening on the extinction side — not just for horses, but mammoths and other animals that scientists are trying to bring back from the dead. it makes me think about the kinds of logics that we have to work through in order to make something seem like a good idea, like a possible idea, or like something that we might be able to handle. the results of that are so fascinating to parse in relation to our relationships with horses. kr: this discussion about fantasy and relationships has a lot to do with ideas of “wild” and “domestic”. indeed, in the nature of horses stephen budiansky asks why we never domesticated the zebra. and it turns out the answer is that many people believe zebras are more hostile and aggressive than other species and so the thinking is that the zebra cannot be collectively domesticated. (usually the explanation is that they evolved to fight lions, their main predator, so are more violent; but i’m very suspicious of that assertion!) in other words, our assumptions prevent us from trying to domesticate zebras — so we conclude it cannot be done. but my questions have always been: how much is produced by human expectations of those interactions, the human approach to the animal, and the assumptions that govern that relationship? and how much of it is actually intrinsic? 8 | roundtable humanimalia 13.2 (2023) for instance, when thinking about horses, those with a “kind eye” are often thought better, kinder, easier to train. i mean, i don’t know if you can make a biological argument that the size of the eye or the darkness of the eye has anything to do with anything, but it certainly works out in training, like a horse with a “kind” eye just gets treated better. so are you producing this docility because you imagine it is there? sf: this tension between our ideas about wildness and domesticity is something that also happens with the takhi. they are treated as wild horses — usually separated out and left to be “wild”, often in quite limited spaces. but there have been successful attempts to tame them. in the management of free roaming horses in general, moreover, there’s been an ongoing clash about which type of horse is best suited to conservation between people who support focusing on native indigenous breeds of horses like the exmoor, and those who want the designated “primitive horses” like koniks, which are a kind of reconstructed “fake” tarpan. i was told that koniks are actually quite easy to handle — much easier, in fact, than shetlands. there’s also a really great study by the anthropologist natasha fijn, which points out how the imagined distinction between wild and domestic in mongolia is really not as straightforward as we’d like to make it out to be.2 she notes that many domestic mongolian horses are kept in a quasi-wild state, in which they graze freely, choose to breed as they like, and often are not used for riding. and then you have some takhis who have been raised in zoos and are completely managed, so these domestic mongolian horses actually live in a comparatively “wild” state. complicating this further, there is a long history in mongolia of occasionally breeding domestic horses to takhis. so in mongolia at least, there is a literal lack of boundaries between wild and domestic horses. but the ideal, or fantasy, of “wild” remains really powerful in western culture. for instance, in eighteenthand nineteenth-century travellers’ reports, it’s clear that locals believed feral horses could be tamed, but a truly wild horse would die if you tried to break their spirit. 2 fijn, “the domestic and the wild.” roundtable | 9 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the question about human fantasies we’ve been thinking about is central to lucy rees’s work on equine behaviour.3 she deconstructs a lot of the things we’ve been talking about — the gendered relationships we project on wild horses and the notions we have of how they interact with us, and what they’re trying to say to us. for me, thinking about horses in the light of rees’s work really changed the way i interact with them and how i think about what we can do with them. my own experience of wild horses was that i couldn’t get near any of the takhis in the mongolian reserve i visited because they remove themselves as quickly as possible if you get anywhere near them. so there’s no fantasy relationship in real time! kg/mm: so to build on these ideas about the role fantasy plays in our understanding of and relationship to horses, how have equine bodies and minds been shaped by us over time? how are human ideas (and fantasies) of breed, purity, and value implicit in this process? rn: i thought i would talk about two ways of shaping the equine body in thoroughbreds and why they are historically important as they raise the issue of unanticipated consequences when we try to shape not just individuals but whole breeds. the first is human influence on the muscular-skeletal framework, the outward shape and appearance of the horse. the second is our influence on what we can’t see in this skeleton: things like respiratory bleeding. i want to talk a bit about the intersection between the shaping of bodies and the role of veterinary knowledge as it emerges in the eighteenth century and develops into the twenty-first. i begin with eclipse because he has an iconic and important status in the history of the thoroughbred. we think of him not necessarily as a foundation stallion, but as a conduit for the influence of the most important of the foundation stallions, the darley arabian. he is also the most famous horse of the latter half of the eighteenth century. one of the things that’s interesting about eclipse is how he stands in some minds as the first great racehorse but was also functionally one of the last of the old style of heat-racing thoroughbreds. 3 rees, horses in company. 10 | roundtable humanimalia 13.2 (2023) eclipse is legendary because he was undefeated, but he was racing at a time when plate racing required horses to win two of three fourmile heats in order to win the plate. by the time you get to the end of the eighteenth century, heat racing (and the type of horse bred for them) was already going out of fashion and being replaced by versions of the stake races that we have today: racing as a single event. what emerges, then, is a different racing practice than eclipse was training for, developed for, and in fact bred for. and yet, his mythological status remains. in his time, eclipse, had come to be seen as the epitome of what a racer should be and would at the time have been considered a large racehorse. however, what “large” was is open for debate: upon exploring eclipse’s and period horses’ size, i discovered immediately that even though we have his skeleton, and even though it was meticulously measured about a decade ago, the people who measured it never said exactly how many hands tall he was. they measured each individual bone, but they did not specify how tall eclipse was. as near as i can work out, you get estimates of eclipse running from just over fifteen hands to just over sixteen hands, which is a significant variation. today, we’re used to hearing that eighteenth-century horses were smaller than they are now; yet, sixteen hands would still be a good-sized horse today. how much has the shape of the animal really changed in terms of size? it’s also interesting to think about how we understand thoroughbreds in terms of their physical structure, while largely ignoring the internal organ structure that is every bit — or perhaps even more — important for racehorses. eclipse was directly related to a stallion called flying childers (eclipse is the great-grandson of this horse’s full brother), who had a kind of celebrity status in the early eighteenth century that was comparable to the celebrity that eclipse had later in the century. both eclipse and childers are famous not only for being unbeaten, but also for winning their races by tremendous amounts. again, you have to remember that at this point in history, races were typically run at or beyond four miles, often in multiple heats, unlike today, when horses run a single, shorter race. these different kinds of roundtable | 11 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) races require different capabilities from horses. with the shorter distance racing we have today, people look for horses who have tactical speed they can turn on whenever it’s needed, and who also have a high cruising speed that allows them to go relatively fast at a nonextreme gallop. in heat racing of the eighteenth century, however, that high cruising speed was dominant because it had to be sustained for a much longer distance. what this meant is that if you could run the first two miles faster than your opposition, by the time the real racing started the field were already struggling to keep up. that was how horses like eclipse and childers succeeded. i mentioned that childers is the brother of eclipse’s great-grandsire, and the reason i did so is that his brother, who was a more important and influential sire, was less well known (and never figured as a subject of portraiture) because he never made it to the races. the reason he never made it to the races was that in training he bled visibly from the nose — a condition now known as epistaxis. we only learned in the 1970s that visible bleeding from the nose is just the smallest tip of the iceberg when it comes to respiratory bleeding that takes place in all racehorses, and indeed likely in all horses that undergo extreme exercise. if you exercise race horses at anything like a high and sustained speed, they’re going to have some degree of haemorrhaging in the lungs. with the recognition of epistaxis and eiph (exercise induced pulmonary haemorrhage), you saw two innovations in racing in america in the 1970s: the introduction of legalized anti-inflammatories and lasix (furosemide) as a preventive therapeutic. recently, there has been an attempt to roll back the use of lasix in response to arguments about the proper role of veterinary care and equine welfare when in racing. to me, this inheritance of eighteenth-century breeding is related to what you can and can’t see when you look at eclipse’s breeding (for a specific type of race) and his skeleton. today there are two ways to address it: you can use anti-inflammatories as preventive measures to lessen the likelihood of catastrophic breakdown, and you can use lasix to reduce the chance of fatal bleeds. those interventions have produced incredibly heated debates revolving around medication. it 12 | roundtable humanimalia 13.2 (2023) seems to me, however, that we should be asking if veterinary intervention itself is harmful and how far it abets our choices in breeding. this question is at the heart of what’s been going on over the last fifty years, and underpins further questions — such as how to develop policies that are in the best interest of the horses that you choose to race? on the extreme end of this spectrum is the question of whether we should stop racing horses altogether — a question that has implications for the thoroughbred in particular, since it is a breed that is almost entirely valued as a racehorse. if you stop racing horses, do you stop breeding thoroughbreds? what is the value of a thoroughbred if it can’t race? there are major constraints in such discussion, since the expense of having horses, especially thoroughbreds, is so immense, and has become so commodified, that it’s virtually impossible for anyone to make decisions that are not based on dictates of the marketplace. for instance, if you’re going to breed a mare to a stallion, you not only have to think about what the cost of the breeding is going to be, but also about potential value of the resulting foal. most breeders today must think in terms of how they manage their mares in a competitive commercial marketplace. and what comes through more than anything else in these policy debates is how much the arguments that are fought over with such intensity today simply repeat dogma and doctrine that you can find in the eighteenth century about breeding and managing horses — even as we continue to reproduce genetic issues that go back to the very origins of the breed and that spring from our preoccupation with the look of the horse. kr: building on richard’s history of performance and the “look of the horse”, i want to push our discussion even further back in time to think about one of the more intriguing descriptions of horses found in early modern literature: the dauphin’s speech from shakespeare’s henry v, which is usually rendered as a kind of mockery of the dauphin’s excessive adoration of his horse in quasi-sexual representation of its beauties. but this is a heteronormative response to the speech, and in perpetuating it we’re just reproducing the anxieties and rejection of the characters surrounding him who try and redirect his discussion back roundtable | 13 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) to a more heterosexually appropriate desire for women. what i suggest instead when looking at this through a kind of socio-cultural frame, what we might want to do is think about what is it about horses that encourages this kind of sexualizing response of the animal. for me, it is all to do with shape. i’m going to read you a few of the quotes that are ubiquitous in early modern treatises and show how important that issue is in the period. in a seventeenth-century work, an hipponimie, or the vineyard of horsemanship, michael baret talks about the ideal “handsome” horse as one with ribs that “beare out in ro[t]undity like a barrell”, and wants it to have a “round backe”, meaning rounded haunches.4 thomas blundeville prefers the neapolitan to the spanish jennet, because the latter’s “buttockes bee somewhat slender”. he generally approves animals that are “full of apparaunt muscles or brawnes of fleshe” with short backs and “great round buttockes”.5 and in his advice to horse purchasers gervase markham refers again and again to the many swellings that comprise the perfect equine form. so, he says, see that “the breast […] be broad, out-swelling”, and that the animal have “fore-thighs” that are “fleshy” and again “out-swelling”. markham then goes on to say, “look upon his buttocks and see that they be round, plump, full and in an even levell with his body, or if long, that it be well raised behind and spread forth at the setting on of the tail, for these are comely and beautifull.”6 similarly, if you look, for example, at renaissance paintings and sculpture, you find the same kind of dwelling on fleshly curves, the roundness, the “out-swellings”, as markham puts it. kenneth clark talks about this feature as the “splendid curves of energy”: in these paintings of horses, “the neck and the rump, united by the passive curve of the belly, and capable of infinite variation, from calm to furious strength […] are without question the most satisfying piece of formal relationship in nature”.7 therefore, in the early modern record, and then in the art history critical record, you have a real appreciation for the shape of the animal as it is represented. this appreciation is especially visible 4 baret, an hipponimie, 1:110; 2:5. 5 blundeville, the fower chiefyst offices, 8, 14. 6 markham, the perfect horseman, 120, 124. 7 clark, animals and men, 36 14 | roundtable humanimalia 13.2 (2023) in the work of anthony van dyck’s equestrian portraits and albrecht dürer’s work. here you get this emphasis on roundness, essential at the time to the representation of the animal’s beauty and health. we could read this focus on the beauty of curvaceous posteriors in a kind of cultural, sociological, even a political sense. you can talk about it in terms of geometry and the order of nature, but i actually want to talk about it instead as something that is inherent in matter and in human responses to matter itself. in neuroscience, there is a study of the way in which curves are something that humans are predisposed neurologically to prefer. oshin vartanian, a psychologist, has conducted experiments that show how this preference is not accidental, that it is inherent in the way that human beings respond to the world.8 following this, i suggest that equine curves present the viewer or the writer with a range of affordances, a kind of an affective stimulation, in this case telegraphing potential pleasures of human life and human equine anatomical engagement. it’s those curves that make us engage with the horse that also are the practical affordances that allow humans to be part of a horse–human duality. thus, the fleshly roundness is the fatty and muscular swelling that baret, blundeville, and markham dwell on. the curvaceous horse mirrors and complements a rider’s own curving anatomical structures; it invites eyes, hands, and legs to linger, to touch, to assert pressure, or surrender space to another’s form. they seduce with their promise of amplified power driving forward through the rider’s legs and seat curves — and we might say our primordial visceral sources of relational and erotic gratification. sf: i think it’s interesting how aesthetics and bodily ideals inform the actual breeding of very different kinds of horses. with the thoroughbred they’re working towards something functionally fast and lean, while the baroque type you are talking about, karen, is about carrying power, with both types being bred to progress towards some kind of conformation ideal. with the tarpan and the takhi, people have also worked towards an ideal, but for them it is an ideal that they can’t see. most people in the west who attempt to breed 8 vartanian et al., “impact of contour on aesthetic judgments”. roundtable | 15 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) tarpan or takhi can’t know what they might have looked like in the wild before their extinction there: they’re improvising, and much of what they emphasize comes from nineteenth-century theories — of georges cuvier and charles darwin — and the fossil record of ancient horses. all of these elements together have resulted in an imagined “primitive” aesthetic: dun colouring, leg and dorsal striping, upright mane, and a “cruder” body shape than the refinement domestication would bring. as a result of this, western attempts at back-breeding from the nineteenth century onwards have been contradictory and, in many instances, destructive. for example, one of the earliest captures of horses from mongolia by western explorers led to the mass killing of the adults in the herd and the fostering out of the foals to domestic mares. when they did manage to get foals back to europe, they were split up between multiple zoos without any reliable genealogical documentation or standardized method of obtaining the correct “primitive” type. from here, the horses were bred without knowing whether they were already related to each other. over the decades, as there were ongoing debates about measurements, about proper colours, about skull shape, the number of vertebrae, etc. that were appropriate to the type, there were deliberate attempts to get rid of horses that were deemed to have “domestic” builds. ultimately, these haphazard and destructive back-breeding attempts produced a very narrow, inbred, genetic bottleneck of horses. by the period after world war two, only nine captive takhi actually produced foals, while the takhi in the wild went extinct. thus, despite efforts to preserve a type of takhi in zoos, the life that they were living and the way that they had been bred physically changed them away from the wild type — there were changes in bone, loss of colouring, reduced fertility, and shortened lifespans. there have now been several decades of efforts to reduce the inbreeding. but it’s interesting to think about the effects of breeders’ determination to try to produce a distinctly “primitive” type, a purity. 16 | roundtable humanimalia 13.2 (2023) rn: i have been thinking about how much the idea of what a thoroughbred is, and how the thoroughbred world functioned, was not standardized until very recently. the idea that you’re breeding to perfect a breed (based on how a breed ideally functioned) is something that’s very clear by the nineteenth century, even though what it means to perfect a breed is still not clearly stated. are you breeding for speed? in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, you get attempts to underwrite breeding ideas with scientific rhetoric in ways that at times seem ridiculous. one can encounter people speaking and writing about a “speed gene” in ways that seriously distort what we know about the process of genetic inheritance. what’s the notion of “gene” and what’s the notion of “speed” at work in these kinds of formulations? the further you go back, and i’m going back into the seventeenth century, the more you find people who are breeding the horses that become known as “thoroughbred”, and who are generally claiming that they’re looking to breed better horses for a stronger military — which would mean horses who can travel significant distance carrying meaningful weight at relative speed. but as peter edwards has asked, very directly and quite rightly, were they really breeding horses for that purpose or were they using that ostensible, public-spirited and military purpose to generate funding for racing?9 this is a question speaking directly to the point of separation or combination between recreation and utility (and that’s really so much of what in the seventeenth century you’re trying to get a handle on). as such, the very articulation of what it is we’re working with as an animal, and what the function of that animal should be as a managed resource, is shifting over time and often without the shift itself being acknowledged. even when you get into what seems to be well-established nineteenth-century breeding, however, you still have the same problem because you have the question of what is a classic distance for a race? what distance are we breeding horses to race for? what age are we trying to race for? what is a “thoroughbred”? all those things remain fluid and in flux, and the more firmly you grasp them, the more you lose purchase on their interconnections. 9 peter edwards, horse and man in early modern england. roundtable | 17 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) kr: can i follow on that? this is completely not my historical, scholarly self speaking right now. a lot of what’s going on in sport horse breeding at the moment involves a lot of unanticipated consequences because the industry is focused on producing stock that no longer has to make the journey to become a dressage horse. part of what’s happening is that people want to purchase young horses who, from the very beginning of their careers, have the arched neck, muscle development, and elevation that allows for the free shoulder. the problem is that in dressage, horses are supposed to be the product of six to ten years of progressive training and some kind of relationship with the rider that produces correct motion as a consequence of that development. but what you see when you look at events where they’re selling these horses are twoand three-yearolds who already look mature because people simply want to buy the finished product. that is creating genetic issues with hypermobility, but also a weird disconnect where these incredibly expensive horses are marketed as the ideal to amateur riders who struggle to sit their large gaits. so function kind of gets lost. i saw something similar in arabian breeding in the 1980s, when people were breeding the new, exaggerated style of show horse because the market was so hot at the time. horses that were discarded were actually often incredibly sturdy, useful, and talented animals, while the ones that were being bred for this fantasy version of the physicality of the arabian were often unrideable because their backs were literally not strong enough to hold the rider. i think we get these fixations about what it is we want without recognizing that breeding for fashion can never happen without a tremendous downside. jv: as richard suggested when he was discussing breeding in the eighteenth century, it can be hard to project what will or will not be beneficial in the future. so it’s never easy to say, “well, if we make these decisions and act this way, then horses’ lives will benefit.” i think it’s very messy territory. and so by thinking about these ways we define “wild” or “not wild”, and what human interventions have always been taking place, perhaps we can leave room to wonder if it is even possible to define “domestic”. i think that keeping that slipperiness 18 | roundtable humanimalia 13.2 (2023) in view when we’re talking about what we’re actually doing with our domesticated horses can help us attend to the complexity of our relationships, and the truths that are inherent in that complexity. to pick up on the veterinary focus and its relationship to unanticipated consequences that richard introduced earlier, i’d like to turn to questions not just about what we breed, but about how we’re doing it in many sectors of the horse industry. i’m deeply concerned right now with both the current norms of oestrus regulation and breeding practices that have become almost banal in the age of artificial insemination and related reproductive technologies. these are not easy territories to navigate in terms of ethics and what we should or should not be doing, because solving one problem can very easily aggravate another. but i do think that people should be thinking harder about the sexual choices they’re making for their animal companions, and in this case, about horses in particular. to draw an analogy with a different species, and to go on a kind of dog tangent for a moment, we might think about dogs and leash laws. leashes are fantastic. they protect dogs and humans from disease and injury. and of course legislating the control of free-roaming dogs often means that the dogs around us are fed and housed and vaccinated. these things are really great. but leashes and the human lifestyles that accompany them have also eliminated dogs’ abilities to have their own autonomous social and sexual lives, and to have autonomy over their home geographies. and really, that’s no small thing for a dog’s mental and physical health. and that’s part of what makes the leashed and unleashed dog encounter many of us have experienced so dangerous: because it is often the case that both the dogs and the humans involved lack the cross-species social skills to be together safely. added to this is the fact that humans are not required to make up for the loss of social training that comes with the leash. you know, you can choose to if you want to, but you’re not required to, and that leads to some pretty wild inconsistencies in how people and dogs interact, and some very unhappy and anxious dogs. so it’s not a “leashes are bad” or “leashes are good” situation; rather, the leash is a solution to some roundtable | 19 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) really important dangers and the indirect cause of others. but when things go wrong on either side of the equation, it’s the dog — not the human — who ends up suffering most significantly. for me, de-sexing dogs and cats is a similarly complicated area full of great gains and also regrettable losses. but those losses, again, are felt most often on the animal side. and to finally connect that analogy back to what i was talking about earlier in terms of our limited views of our relationships with horses, the unintended consequences of setting up the structures of our relationships are really, equally complex. sf: to pick up on your question about “domestic”, jeannette, another extraordinary development in the ongoing debates on “wild”, “domestic”, and “breeding” (in this case back-breeding) has been that with permafrost melting, all of these incredible ancient animals are coming out of the ground in siberia. one of them was a foal, estimated to be 42,000 years old. he is so complete he still has blood in his veins and urine in his kidneys. there is talk that scientists will try and clone this horse, so we will finally have a true “wild” horse, as it were, but it will come about by the most artificial means imaginable. if this happens, it may alter the understanding we have of these imagined taxonomies of “wild” horses but will certainly also spur debate about authenticity and ethics. kr: i just had a question and a thought for richard. am i right in thinking that eclipse’s heart was unusually large? rn: when they did the autopsy on him it was found his heart was unusually large, yes. kr: i think i’m fascinated by this phenomenon, and i actually hadn’t thought as much about this as i probably should. but the idea that when we respond in breeding to externalities, we often forget about internal aspects of what it is that we’re breeding for, in addition to the intangibles that we can’t quite express, like temperament. what’s reliable about trying to read temperament? is that even a scientific concept? what are we talking about when we say something like that? and how much do we know about internal structures? 20 | roundtable humanimalia 13.2 (2023) rn: it’s one of the things that has developed in recent years. there has been a significant amount of genetic research done on the transmissibility of the potential for large hearts. it’s possible to breed for that trait, but not every large heart is a good thing to have. you can have an enlarged heart, and it’s a problem. but that doesn’t seem to hinder attempts to re-create eclipse’s anatomical oddity, and it is certainly one thing that was traced through family lineage well before the era of genetics. in the past there was the more anecdotal version of people looking for horses with big hearts, with all of the temperamental and physiological connotations of that phrase. with your question of temperament, karen, the same rhetoric is out there about looking for a horse with a good eye. if you talk to someone in sales right now, that’s exactly what they’ll be looking for: a “good eye”. it is assumed, of course, that a “good eye” is not only definable and recognizable when present, but that it is tied to temperament (demonstrating amazing historical longevity for similar body-behaviour connections). this means, for instance, that if a horse shows too much white in his eye his promotional value is going to go down, even though, as far as i can tell, that has nothing to do with temperament. but it’s certainly a long-standing mythology. kg/mm: these are fantastic discussions, and they are taking us into the realm of our third question: how do shape, ideals, and the fictions we tell ourselves about creating equine bodies in turn shape how we relate to horses? jv: i’d like to build a bit on what richard is saying about the ways our organization and use of knowledge in the horse industry shapes our relationships to horses. we’ve been focusing on questions of animal identity within a breeding system so far, but another important aspect of human–horse relations that gets obscured once we’re focused on economic issues, is how much human relationships with animals are encoded by a rationalized worldview. this flows from an emphasis on markets and possessions that encourages us to think of ourselves as selves, and relationships as relationships between separate selves, rather than as beings in connection to each other. i think as horse people all of us have this moment where we roundtable | 21 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) feel like we have had the luck to forge a relationship with a horse that seemed to dissolve those boundaries between human self and horse self. this ideal can be a strong motivator for us to come into relationships with horses, but it gets complicated significantly by the kinds of overlays we’ve been discussing — the individualized, economically-driven markers of “success” that focus on the horse as a commodity. in part, this likely happens because our management practices — be they managerial, veterinary, scientific, or economic — eclipse the things we don’t really have language for. in our relationships with horses, however, whether they be personal, physical, or intimate in whatever way, there’s this relationality that betrays the logic of rationality. i recently had a conversation with a non-horsey friend who is an artist, and even as someone who had not experienced human–horse friendship, she could totally be on board with the idea that the relationships we have with horses are not just with their bodies, but rather with their whole beings — and that when this relationship really works, the boundaries between them and us seem to disappear. but when we zoom out beyond the one-on-one relationship, those boundaries are actually quite saturating. this doesn’t just have implications for us, moreover, because the ways a rationalized worldview manifests — in the emphasis on capital, or science, as a naturalized idea of competition between individuals — also shapes horses’ bodies and experiences in ways that individualism and agency can’t describe. what i worry about are the ways in which individualist and agency-based models of analysis preclude our ability to dismantle the harmful aspects of our relationships with horses by obscuring how our management of horses as a group determines the ways individual horses have to live. stallions often exist in these terribly isolated conditions by virtue of their sexuality, for example, and mares are subjected to technologies that regulate their hormones both for breeding and for human interactions. kr: can i ask a somewhat impertinent question? i have to admit that i’m very suspicious of the search for a relationship that bypasses all of the kinds of constructs and categories that you’ve talked about, 22 | roundtable humanimalia 13.2 (2023) because there’s a big difference between thinking about our relationships with horses and living with them on the ground. i was on a panel talking about horses at a conference a billion years ago, and somebody was discussing how she did not use any training methods whatsoever with her horse. gala argent said something like, “that’s fine until you go to get it on the trailer to go to the vet, then what do you do?” i agree with gala, but i also understand the desire to find a different set of terms for a relationship. so i’m just very curious, what are the benefits and the problems associated with the kind of future that you’re imagining? i mean, as susanna has suggested, we’ve made horses the creatures they are, and there are none of them out there that we didn’t make. so in what ways would we then be actually ducking a responsibility by evading all of these kinds of formalized relationships? jv: that’s a really wonderful question, and i completely agree with it. we can’t escape these constructions — and just as we’re not escaping them by choosing not to ride, it’s also not the case that opting out of training is synonymous with building a better relationship with, or life for, one’s horse. it’s not like we’re going to join a band of feral horses and live together in utopian harmony. but maybe if we could be curious about how to negotiate their relationships with us and themselves differently, that could change the terms of the relationship a lot. the possibility that we could stop committing ourselves to being stuck with what’s presented to us as “just how it is” might allow for different living arrangements that actually allow horses to be who they are — while, you know, still being able to get on a trailer and be treated by vets and do fun activities together, right? all of which require good communication and collaboration. and a focus on rational agency partially is what leads to the kind of argument that equates equine freedom with no training, right? as opposed to more realistic and relational ways of getting on together that can include loading in the trailer to go to the vet. i guess the question i’m getting at with this line of inquiry ties back to one we talked about earlier: who in the human–animal partnership pays the highest cost for the decisions that humans make about their roundtable | 23 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) lives, and what would it mean if humans payed a little more of that cost? how can we negotiate the terms a little more fairly — which isn’t to say that we’re not going to be lopsidedly directing how domestic horses live. we do have to be honest, i think, that it really is not possible for most people and horses to have an equal relationship. but we can think harder about it, and look at different alternatives and relational possibilities. kr: i think everything you just said is brilliant and absolutely right. the irony is that historically the idea of the rider as a centaur figure perhaps aspired to destabilize all of those ways of dividing up and knowing the world, but it never actually did it, and in a really disturbing and persistent way it makes you wonder whether that image is actually part of the problem — that the ideal of connection is already about assimilating in some way that we’re not recognizing. i often forget that hybrid form is monstrous in a lot of shakespeare’s texts. perhaps in our desire for connection, we really want to plumb the interiority of other creatures, so what starts as an ideal becomes monstrous. i’ve often thought that one of the saddest things about our species is that we are so freaking lonely. we need to know, we need to commune with other creatures, and we want so badly to know something about them — something more than surface — and so we look for it, but the only thing we get is the same thing that we get from each other in some ways: we have language, and we have all kinds of other ways of communicating, but they’re just not effective at really piercing to the depths, so we just get surface. to bring us back, though, to richard’s discussion about long-standing mythologies of body-behaviour ideals, one really old idea about connection with animals is, as richard already pointed out, through the eye — the “window to the soul”. in the horse world there’s this emphasis on the “soft” eyes of a horse, and maybe it’s a projection about the communication we long for — that we want to engage in because we’re alone and lonely in the world as human beings and want to relate to other animals. it suggests that we’re not very comfortable with our own limits, and that we are reaching constantly for something more because science and rational categories don’t satisfy. we struggle with 24 | roundtable humanimalia 13.2 (2023) that, because we know we’re supposed to be all those things, and we’re supposed to value all those things, but we’re looking for what jeanette pointed out — intimacy of any kind — and there are so many ways of thinking about the intimacy of human–animal relations. rn: i’m going to pick up on this discussion of eyes, because it triggered a memory. i was at a sale looking at horses; we had a list of half a dozen horses we were going to look at and were waiting for them to come out. there was a lull, and a horse was just standing there, waiting to be presented at the edge of the barn. i had been following my checklist looking at size, looking at shape, watching their walk — but for a moment i made eye contact with this animal about to be led out to be inspected. suddenly having broken the frame and made eye contact i realize this is kentucky, and i have this horrific thought that it’s like i’m at a slave auction. i think that is exactly what you’re talking about around the issue of the eye — that when there’s a gaze it changes the dynamic. for me, that was a really, deeply disorienting moment. jv: i also want to jump in just for a moment and talk about that feeling of the eye and that desire for connection with another being. in my own relationships with horses, i’ve definitely felt drawn to the idea that we can learn quite a lot from their eyes and from their expressions. as you point out, this fantastical impulse can be romanticized in ways that we need to be critically aware of, and it definitely relates to the ideas that we’ve been pursuing about aesthetics and shaping the body. i think that what ends in our attempts to shape horses’ bodies begins with our fantasies and desires about what our relationships with them should or could be. really, our fantasies about relationship not only condition the kinds of equine bodies we choose — whether that be focused on kind eyes or other physical qualities — but those bodies then become the basis for humans performing and experiencing those relationships as particular fantasies of horses-relating-to-us. i think it’s worth thinking about this notion that horses are not only a repository for human aesthetics, but also for our desires about relations that we have on a more individual human-to-horse level — your centaur, karen. roundtable | 25 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) as such, i’d like to address the process part, and the loss of process, and the kind of re-compensation of that process with the breeding, which i think is such a brilliant point that speaks to larger economic and labour shifts. becoming a dressage rider was historically supposed to be a bit like going to college where you would devote your life to studying it for a long period of time, and you and the horse together would be brought up in a progressive, systematic way either through military training or through a kind of traditional, rigorous and artistic classical training. this was always more ingrained in europe and has never really been available in the united states in any kind of meaningful way. as a result, as markets have globalized, in this country you have this disconnect between the labour itself of becoming a professional horseperson, the value that labour would have, and the organized way in which that labour would occur; not to mention, you have no real economic space for that labour to occur, and no model on which to pattern a desire to actually participate in such labour. so i think that breeding has kind of taken over that vacuum. i’d also like to highlight something richard said that crystallized something for me, which i haven’t before been able to put words around: that as a result of what was going on in the eighteenth century we created the conditions for a thoroughbred horse, and a horse to fit those conditions. now, hundreds of years later, we no longer have those conditions, but we still have that horse. that old lineage shapes horses in current racing practices even though the context in which such breeding made sense is long gone. so the question is: what do we do now? i think that’s such an important and wonderful question, and i’m really, really excited that you posed it within that contextual and historical frame. for me, it illuminates something i’ve been thinking about, about questions that the study of bodies and embodiment has posed for me. taking what i’ve learned from that work into a more relational territory is where i’d like to go next — not abandoning questions of embodiment so much as asking about the body, the mind, and cognition all together. all of these qualities shape both horses and the grounds for our relationships with them. i’m particularly interested 26 | roundtable humanimalia 13.2 (2023) in asking questions that get at who horses are apart from us. who would you be, horse, if we weren’t managing your sexuality? who would we be together if we could be our full selves, whatever that means? we can’t know the answers to these questions until we change the terms of the relationships we have now. i know these seem to be perhaps unanswerable questions, but over the past couple of years, research has appeared in scientific fields like ethology and social science that have given some empirical backing to the claim that horses have wonderfully developed cognitive and communicative abilities across species. with such grounded support for exploring the prospect of different ways of thinking about interspecies communication, what might it mean, to follow my current obsession, if taking responsibility for the care and safety of horses were not synonymous with managing or removing their sexuality? what would it mean to set aside the parental metaphor from definitions of responsibility and care for companion species? what would happen if we moved towards a commitment to accept the cyclical bodily-determined fluctuations and feelings, behaviours, and social abilities of nonhumans who share our homes, our time, and our attention? these are pretty big philosophical and practical questions, and they may be difficult to pursue, especially through empirical research, but i think in the horse world we could start by thinking differently and asking different questions about our treatment of mares’ bodies. what if we refused to equate sexual maturity with mandatory managed reproduction on the one hand and chastity on the other in relationships from the factory farm to petkeeping? would these be steps towards a larger refusal to allow heteropatriarchal, anthropocentric, and capitalist structures to govern the uterus of any of us? would it allow us to live together as adults? historical grounding, theoretical context, and scientific research are critically important, but for me it’s also not the end of the line. instead, it’s a path for developing theory, practice, and philosophy that aims to improve the present and future relationships between horses and humans. roundtable | 27 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) rn: to add to this philosophical questioning, and take a more economic stance on issues of gender and breeding, i’ll say we know there is gender bias in breeding practices past and present. breeders and consumers focus on stallions today, but historically it’s not always been stallion, stallion, stallion all the time. in fact, stallion vs. mare is a debate that is as old as the thoroughbred — but the most straightforward reason there has always been a greater focus on stallions is pure economics; that is, a mare can produce at most one viable foal a year, and will have to skip years at some point, while the stallion can be bred to multiple mares per year over a comparatively long breeding career. it’s also much harder to track important producing mares: with a much smaller sample you usually have to wait three or four generations before you realize how important specific dam lines are. so simply at the level of commercial appeal we focus on stallions, and it’s especially become the case since the 1970s. before secretariat, stallion books were kept at forty per year, but now horses like into mischief and tapit breed two hundred mares a year. in some cases, shuttle stallions will be breeding a hundred mares in one hemisphere and then going to the other hemisphere and breeding a hundred more. as a result, there’s simply an economics of scale which dictates that the stallion draws the investment: if you want to get rich in thoroughbred racing you want to own a horse who will be syndicated as a stallion because that’s where all the money winds up flowing. by the same token, there are people in the industry who will tell you that it’s the mare that matters, and certainly the people that i’ve worked with at the upper levels place a real emphasis on finding the right mare first. they argue that once you find the right mare then you can find the right stallion to get the cross you want. most serious breeding programmes now have one eye on the commercial market all the time with both parents, and that restricts choices a lot — because even if you think that crossing a particular stallion with a particular mare would make the ideal thoroughbred for all time, you still wouldn’t breed those horses if there was no commercial market for offspring of either parent. in the end, the main goal of most breeders is to sell the foal and have some back-end value. 28 | roundtable humanimalia 13.2 (2023) sf: for me, there’s so much room for the history of science to offer insight into the ethology of horses, and particularly in the way we talk about wild horses. in early travellers’ reports from the west about the takhi, they appeal to orientalist ideas about stallions and their harems. the discourse is highly gendered and assumes a very patriarchal and hierarchical system, with an emphasis on colts being thrown out of the band by the stallion. this changes a bit in the 1970s with a new focus on the lead mare’s importance in the herd. it’s a way of thinking that corresponds with the emergence of second wave feminism, and it suggests how much ideology determines how we see the natural world. using ethology to think about wild horse relationships allows us to imagine that perhaps horses don’t have hierarchies at all (as we understand them in human terms), that maybe they’re more like anarchists who band together, and whose actions are determined by whoever is hungry, or whoever notices a threat first. distancing ourselves from human assumptions in effect allows us to see them differently: as a fluid group, in which mares and colts may decide to leave or drift away rather than being driven away. kr: i think lurking in a lot of the discussion about animals and about training relationships is a concept of freedom, and the belief that there would be a different set of behaviours without the kinds of constructions that humans force horses into. and, as susanna’s work makes clear, the boundaries are very hazy and very ancient. we don’t know what we don’t know about what a horse is outside our historical relationship to the species. it is also difficult to calculate the costs of a human–horse relationship, because there is a huge cost to living feral. as nigel rothfels points out, there’s no way we can know that animals in zoos or barns or houses aren’t perfectly happy with the arrangement.10 kg/mm: is there anything anyone would like to add? kr: can i end by saying that one of the consequences of these conversations is that i have concluded that people are weird? people are just weird. 10 rothfels, “zoos, the academy, and captivity”, 484. roundtable | 29 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) works cited baret, michael. an hipponimie, or the vineyard of horsemanship. london, 1618. eebo-tcp. http://name.umdl.umich.edu/ a04062.0001.001. blundeville, thomas. the fower chiefyst offices belongyng to horsemanshippe. london, 1566. eebo-tcp. http://name. umdl.umich.edu/a16229.0001.001. budiansky, stephen. the nature of horses: exploring equine evolution, intelligence, and behavior. new york: the free press, 1997. clark, kenneth. animals and men: their relationship as reflected in western art from prehistory to the present day. new york: william morrow, 1977. edwards, peter. horse and man in early modern england. london: hambledon continuum, 2007. fijn, natasha. “the domestic and the wild in the mongolian horse and the takhi.” in taxonomic tapestries: the threads of evolutionary, behavioural and conservation research, edited by alison m. behie and marc f. oxenham, 279–98. canberra: anu press, 2015. markham, gervase. the perfect horseman, or, the experienced secrets of mr. markham’s fifty years practice. london, 1656. eebo-tcp. http://name.umdl. umich.edu/a51971.0001.001. nash, richard. wild enlightenment: the borders of human identity in the eighteenth century. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2003. rees, lucy. horses in company. ramsbury:ja allen, 2017. rothfels, nigel. “zoos, the academy, and captivity”, pmla 124, no. 2 (march 2009): 480–86. https://doi.org/10.1632/ pmla.2009.124.2.480. sustainable human, “how wolves change rivers,” narrated by george mobiot. youtube video, 13 february 2014. https://youtu.be/ysa5obhxz-q. vartanian, oshin, gorka navarrete, anjan chatterjee, et al. “impact of contour on aesthetic judgments and approachavoidance decisions in architecture.” pnas 110, suppl. 2 (10 june 2013): 10446–53. https://doi.org/10.1073/ pnas.1301227110. http://name.umdl.umich.edu/a04062.0001.001 http://name.umdl.umich.edu/a04062.0001.001 http://name.umdl.umich.edu/a16229.0001.001 http://name.umdl.umich.edu/a16229.0001.001 http://name.umdl.umich.edu/a51971.0001.001 http://name.umdl.umich.edu/a51971.0001.001 https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2009.124.2.480 https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2009.124.2.480 https://youtu.be/ysa5obhxz-q https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1301227110 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1301227110 microsoft word turner pdf h u m a n i m a l i a 2:1 lynn turner when species kiss: some recent correspondence between animots what is important to me is not the appearance, it is the passage. i like the word passage. pas sage (illbehaved, unwise). all the passwords all the passing and borderpass words, the words which cross the eyelid on the interior of their own body, are my magic animots, my animal-words. ―cixous, ‘writing blind’ [1996] in stigmata: escaping texts, 1998 (140) fig. 1. carolee schneemann, infinity kisses i, one from the series, image courtesy of the artist. this paper considers the figure of the interspecies kiss in works by donna haraway, hélène cixous, and carolee schneemann in light of the impact on animal studies by jacques derrida. i elaborate key elements of derrida’s increasingly glossed essay “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow)” to show both their commonality with deconstruction more broadly and their conceptual importance in rethinking relations between humans and other animals in particular. these elements are not simply applied to haraway, cixous, and schneemann but are interwoven with and developed by their works. i position the interspecies kiss, indeed the kiss in general, as performative. while “performativity” has become part of the lexicon of visual culture, often appearing simply in adjectival form, its more complex articulation in the work of derrida is often overlooked. there the term, as part of his subtle displacement of signification, already impacts on what we thought was human property: rather than meaning residing in our organic, present possession, it becomes conditioned by a lynn turner — when species kiss: some recent correspondence among animots 61 machinic, reactive repetition, the very quality that descartes attempted to section off as the impoverished domain of the animal. bringing organic and machinic into an enmeshed relation inevitably brings haraway’s figure of the cyborg to mind, while the “doing” over “being” quality of the performative resonates with her emphasis on the relating of our encounters.1 the cartesian question that derrida redirects ― “but as for me, who am i […]?” (“animal” 418) ― might seem to return us to the grounds of the performative speech act; however, derrida insinuates a not necessarily linguistic activity into this question that again makes clear that performativity is not species specific.2 throughout “the animal that therefore i am” derrida plays on the first person present tense of “to be” ― indistinguishable from “to follow” in french, thereby making descartes think again. a deceptively simple “je suis” performatively installs a non-priority and a non-presence in the would-be thinking subject. this transformation is intensified through the substitution of “the animal” for “i think”: no more the quarantine of “i think therefore i am.” temporal trouble results from knocking the present tense of my thought offkilter through the implication that i am after something else ― what? ― the animal: it dispenses with linearity, distributes deferral, and dislodges origin. “being” through the activity of following, the animal that therefore i am cannot be certain of its own terrain. following as a hunter? a follower, not leader? as one that is always following after the animal, without overtaking the animal, and without pause. while they encounter each others’ work unevenly ― a relationship divergently traced by curiosity, science and who reads whom ― there is a hospitality that emerges between the thinking of haraway and derrida independently of any deliberate mutual involvement. in contrast, the personal and the literary-philosophical friendship between cixous and derrida threads throughout their writing, explicitly and elliptically.3 surviving him in time, cixous is frequently read in light of derrida’s work even as ― as this paper finds ― a feline cixousian uncanny stalks “the animal that therefore i am,” leaving tracks as yet unremarked. moreover, however much derrida may have shifted relations between what we call philosophy and what we call literature, his work is perhaps more readily digested as “argument.” cixous’s thought turns on the poetic first, and this has long-involved animal figures ― without subsuming animals under the decoration of “mere” figures. observing “animals are becoming more and more important in my books […]” as early as 1996 (“menagerie” 40), cixous invokes the animot as early as 1976 (la 91).4 the temporal quandary of who i am following is humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 62 presaged in cixous when she touches the touch of “the cat whose cat i am” (“menagerie” 44).5 it is unlikely that schneemann is a reader of derrida. however, she may well have encountered “french philosophers” as compulsory reading at some juncture in angloamerican art cultures of the 1980’s, following on from the lessons in ideology that she parodies with droll delight in her most well known performance work, interior scroll (1975). in that work, schneemann famously pulled a scroll out of her vagina, unfurled it, and read aloud a script addressing the distaste with which a “structuralist filmmaker” regards her work, detailing its “personal clutter,” “persistence of feelings,” and “hand-touch sensibility.”6 the “structuralist film-maker” stands for that assimilation of the unconscious to ideology prevalent in much theory of the 1970s. that version of freud and marx promoted an obligatory critical distance in the arts ― along with a widespread ban on the body ― that was supposed to disarm the apparatus that would otherwise continue to dupe unwitting spectators into desiring against their own interests. it also militated parricidically against any trace of authorship ― or worse, autobiography ― as another effect of ideology. schneemann’s work does not enter this paper as a combatant on behalf of the real lives imagined to be ignored as they wander “outside-of-the-text,” nor as a sponsor of the conceit of authorship. rather, in light of derrida, cixous, and haraway, her work indicates a revised sense of the autobiographical, of the touch of the hand, even of what we call experience linking with performativity beyond the speech act and the ability to intend. these revised senses precisely impact on the powers assumed to be human. while a much lengthier endeavor might bring haraway, cixous, and schneemann together along additional lines, here the “autobiographical animals” at play in their work converge through the kiss. in the companion species manifesto, haraway writes of one of her dogs: we have had forbidden conversation; we have had oral intercourse; we are bound in telling story upon story with nothing but the facts. we are training each other in acts of communication we barely understand. we are, constitutively, companion species. (2, italics original) in an essay concerning the concept of the event, cixous writes, “with a firm tread the cat climbs onto the woman’s lap, looks the woman in the eye with a clear and decided gaze and abruptly a kiss on the alarmed mouth” (“the cat’s arrival” 22). schneemann, without consideration for finesse, frame, or focus made daily photographic portraits of lynn turner — when species kiss: some recent correspondence among animots 63 her morning kiss with her cats, first cluny and later vesper, culminating in two large sequences: infinity kisses i (1981-1988) and infinity kisses ii (1990-1998) ― later made into a short film infinity kisses ― the movie (2008). the kisses are not identical in all these instances, but they cannot be exhausted by a “beauty and the beast” allegory in which the kiss reveals the beast to have been a man all along. rather, the kiss solicits an undecidability into the divisions between subjects and species once thought to be decisive. kiss me honey honey kiss me.7 the image that drew my attention to the infinity kisses is the one shown out of sequence from what is a substantial body of images on schneemann’s website (pictured above). in contrast to the sexuality by-pass affected by critics of the companion species manifesto, schneemann’s image falls most easily, rapidly, and ecstatically into one of a grand passion. the woman’s head is thrown backwards and reaches to one side in a gesture readily associated with female sexual pleasure (this is not an air kiss; this is not a peck on the cheek). she is in frame from the shoulders upwards, and since her shoulders are uncovered her nakedness is metonymically implied. though the cat is smaller, of course, this frame is so organized that equal space is given to both beings. the cat at top right, the woman at bottom left. the cat, perched on a pile of boxes, reaches down to the woman. their kiss is central: the even expanse of the woman’s upper chest and the glide of her neck swoop straight up to it. breaking up the flow of the woman’s neck and the consistency of her skin, the black and white markings of the cat’s fur call a halt to the gaze. though the woman’s eyes are so turned toward the cat that they cannot be seen, we can see the face of the cat, and the cat’s eyes are shut. it would be recognizable as a portrait of a kiss even if the title did not name kisses as such. familiar romantic conventions are out in force; all but one. and this exception, this unfamiliar “familiar” is captivating. infinity kisses is not a single image, nor a single idea work since the kiss constellates so much. rather it is the name of at least two extended series, sometimes rearranged into other patterns, and a movie. infinity kisses i consists of a photogrid of 140 small 35 mm xerachrome photographs, each printed twice (right to left and left to right, exacerbating the mirror-image effect), taken from 1981 until 1987, massed together, and mounted on linen. infinity kisses ii comprises 24 self-shot 35 mm color photographs printed as laser images, each 96 x 120 inches, taken between 1990 and 1998. there are strong formal and formalizing elements in the presentation of the work, though the images arise out of the highly informal filming environment of keeping a camera ready at hand in anticipation humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 64 of the morning kiss that schneemann habitually received, first from cluny and later vesper. both sets ended arbitrarily, not through an aesthetic decision to render closure or because they work toward a known end, but due to the death of the cat (the artist saw vesper as the reincarnation of cluny) (imaging 264). significant art-historical attention has been directed to schneemann’s work and its engagements with space, body, process, and ritual ― albeit with the tendency to truncate more than 40 years of varied practice to a kind of “greatest hits” list consisting of the individual and group naked performance works, meat joy (1964), up to and including her limits (1973-76), interior scroll, and eye/body (1963), as well as the erotic film fuses (1965), for which the artist filmed herself having sex with her then partner james tenney, with her cat kitsch as observer, staging the gaze.8 this hit list’s conversation with feminist theory and art history converges around the question of the body, especially the female body, and agency, sexuality, power, and experience. the conversation turns into contestation around the same questions. feminist art-historical analysis of the 1970s and 1980s that was invested in lacanian psychoanalysis, as exemplified by the earlier work of griselda pollock, found it difficult to see any female body step free of the pernicious “male gaze,” to the extent that only signs for the feminine became legitimate. any female bodies, whether in performance, film, or twodimensional media, tended to be understood as the index of women who had given in to their own inevitable objectification, incapable of producing the requisite critical distance in the spectator. “body art” seemed particularly culpable. 1990s’ feminist art history, exemplified by amelia jones’s book titled body art (1998), both challenged the ideological analysis of the problem of the “gaze” and appropriate responses to it, and opened performance work by both male and female artists (schneemann included) to more nuanced analysis.9 much less has been written, however, about schneemann’s works that foreground the feline (photographs, mixed media installations, and films ― arguably including fuses), the relative silence around which (in term of critical writing and exhibition profile) the artist is only too aware.10 split decision, a large and intelligently curated retrospective of schneemann’s work in toronto and buffalo, has intervened in this absence by organizing her work not according to the deadweight of chronology, but according to three themes: war, erotics and felines.11 rebecca schneider is one of very few art historians to address the feline content of schneemann’s practice, naming the subjects of bestiality, criminality, and the everyday in relation to infinity kisses, the video installation vesper’s stampede to my holy mouth lynn turner — when species kiss: some recent correspondence among animots 65 (1992) and fuses. for schneider these works point to the limits, even irrelevance, of gender in light of bestiality, the expected transgression of which is held in check by the quotidian tone of the work. since vesper’s gender is “neither apparent nor important,” schneider sees sexuality fade gender from the frame, curiously allowing schneemann to remain unmarked (49). schneider links this “art-bestiality” to a multiplication of sexualities commensurate with derrida’s dream of future sexualities beyond negation and thus beyond opposition, (“choreographies” 50). while this link is not unwarranted, it does run rough-shod over the range of conflicting work that the rather odd term “artbestiality” might be taken to incorporate, as well as ― in composing a book about the “explicit female body” in performance ― effacing possible lines of enquiry opened by the question of the animal. in other words, it does not seriously consider the “questions of interspecies communication” that schneemann herself acknowledges (imaging 264). in his encyclopaedic book on the representation of animals in contemporary art, the postmodern animal, steve baker glosses infinity kisses. reliant on schneider, he frames the work as the collapse of art into documentary through the weight of the domestic mise-en-scène (170). baker’s work does imply, however, an interesting dilemma: realism, ostensibly for the sake of the animal, seems to descend into sentimentality, but unfeeling postmodernity only removes the animal by other means ― through the sign without allegiance that is allegory. schneemann’s work, i suggest, helps us understand that this division always breaches. now, does a kiss respond or react? “does my cat really kiss me?”12 can we decide? in his recent investigation of the literary kiss, j. hillis miller swiftly asserts the metaphoric capacity of a kiss to substitute for speech (act) (724). i suggest that its metonymic function is equally important. if the lips are proximate to speech, then they serve, or at least attempt to serve, as the anchor tying the speech to its actor. moreover it is metonymy that indicates the “touchiness” of the kiss.13 curiously, in light of derrida’s extensive writings on the incalculable quality of the performative, miller positions the kiss of which derrida writes as one that does take effect, even when sent by the virtual means of telephone call, letter, and email (by writing, in other words, by the dangerous supplements that expose the absence at the heart of any postal system), in contrast to kafka’s mourning for written kisses, since these are inevitably destined to feed only ghosts and thus never to reach their “destinée” (731). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 66 if a kiss kisses does it really do so because invisibly it airlessly seals in the singular affect as the intention of the kisser? does the mark, the “x” really stand only for the particular kiss it bodies forth, rather than standing for anything else? does the “x” instead cross something out? nay-saying the singularity of each kiss seems a little churlish. no one but a judas would tear a kiss into some other non-kissing context, and his kiss was pretended anyway. in a debate with colleagues concerning the vicissitudes of the performative, one provided the example of “i love you,” questioning who would ever say such a phrase and not mean it. yet there seems to be no better example of this splintered category. don’t we say “i love you” romantically and hope that we mean it, or that the saying of it will make it true? don’t we say “i love you” spontaneously and wonder, belatedly, if we really meant it? say it guiltily in response to the demand for reciprocity? say it habitually? automatically? use it accusingly: you said that you loved me! repetition, the sense of convention invading intention, is once again at work, here dogging the human purchase on response. this repetition invites not just a roominess of meaning, a polysemia of the kiss, but an infinity kiss. in this sense it is the kiss that is modified by infinity, by an infinity of contexts. beyond comprehension, since infinity cannot be presented, the kiss becomes sublime. kiss of infinity: kiss without end. miller also ventures the question of morality, hence the possible immorality of a kiss ― although, interestingly, this question only emerges indirectly through a citation used to demonstrate the sheer uncertainty of what this non-universal practice might concern. prior to asking what it means to kiss in general, joyce’s stephen dedalus asks whether it is right or wrong to kiss his mother (725). this morality, or even legality, is not first of all about consenting to kiss or be kissed, but rather its confining its proper usage to the inside edge of a law-bound social world. but since kissing is of the edges ― edges that lose track of themselves ― this confinement is going to be uneasy. kissing, miller further notes, “by no means differentiates human beings from animals, as philosophers used to believe […]. chimpanzees kiss, as do other animals” (728). unsupported by any references, miller assumes the empirical explanation that one can observe animals doing the same thing that humans do (kissing). he does not expand the sense of what might constitute this activity through recourse to the less empirically observable problem of the performativity of the kiss (his ostensible subject). neither does he pursue the question, if kissing is common to at least some rather than just one animal, what happens in the inter-species kiss? changing the grounds of the “animal question” is required if anything more or less than a reactive argument regarding the essential quality of the kiss is to be produced. taking on the near, though not totally, unified front of philosophy that denies language, lynn turner — when species kiss: some recent correspondence among animots 67 and hence the ability to respond, to the animal, with an opposing, defensive, and reactive claim that “of course they have their own languages!” like french or mandarin, gets us nowhere. derrida, cixous, haraway, and schneeemann turn the tables and question our certainty regarding our own clarity of communication; they transform the terms of the alleged privation of the animal with regard to language. art historical convention would concentrate upon marshalling adequate evidence for schneemann’s aesthetic process, influence, and development, culminating in the signature of the work. schneemann is signatory, she takes credit for the work as artwork and she names ―and defines― a body of photographs as infinity kisses. in this traditional view, every meaningful aspect of the work is decided in advance, and by the artist alone. but schneemann opens herself to the risk of another signatory, naming herself as a signed body, as recipient of the repeated actions of cluny and vesper: “he ritualistically, ardently kisses me on the mouth” (imaging 264). she has also referred to kitsch as a camera, since her “steady focus enabled me to consider her regard as an aperture in motion” (qtd. “what does” 73).14 an important reversal of subject-centered maintenance of the signatory comes with deconstruction’s insistence on countersignature, that it is the other that signs, the other that offsets the would-be decisiveness of my decision, my signature, my mark, my kiss. prior to returning to schneemann, haraway, and cixous, the following sections elaborate the grounds by which it can also be argued that the cat signs, refining the question of what it is to be an “autobiographical animal,” what it is to kiss ― and what it is to kithe. kithe me honey honey kithe me. familiar in the albeit antiquated expression “kith and kin” signifying “friends and family,” the oxford english dictionary also lists “kith” as meaning “information,” specifically regarding rules of etiquette, rules concerning what is proper. its strict separation from “kin” is unclear. kinship could also be seen as governing ― at least arempting to govern ― the proper. kith is also linked to the verb “to kithe.” as a verb ― a “doing” word ― to kithe is to proclaim, to show, or to confess. how performative is that! derrida’s cat does not kiss him, at least he does not tell us whether she does. he struggles to keep the story of his cat on the most mundane level, in the effort to curb her figural conscription and to keep the discussion relatively simply focused on showing up the philosophical expectation that the animal can only react, rather than, as he finds to his “shame,” respond. the burgeoning number of texts commenting on “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow),” as well as derrida’s other text from the cerisy proceedings, “and say the animal responded?,” largely fall into two categories. they either applaud the work of the philosopher, humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 68 relieved that his contribution clarifies both the extent and the stakes of anthropomorphism as well as its flipside of an absolute divide between the human and the animal, or they back-track these essays through the rest of derrida’s work to remind us of his consistent investigation of the “animal question.” haraway shares in the relief, but supplements derrida’s analyses both with alternative outcomes and a critical relation to what she takes to be the limits of his response to this cat, as well as its visual scenography (when species meet 19-27). on the other hand, since haraway’s priority is to write from the point “where species meet” as a place conflicted with naturalcultural, colonial, political narratives that incorporate the philosophical, rather than to start from a domain constitutively philosophical, she sometimes cuts short the range of derrida’s remarks. the ground may be muddied through following multiple tracks, but that range needs more detailed elaboration here, in order to develop the stakes for when species kiss. a cluster of inabilities surround what is called, in a supremely performative gesture of naming, “the animal” (derrida, “the animal” 392). these inabilities collude in the expulsion of “the animal” from the terrain that calls itself that of “man.” this name calling procedure also invokes the communicative relation of call and response, and from here the distinction, if there is one, between, response and reaction (382). rarely is an inability reserved as proper to “man,” yet when it is, this inability or privation engineers the condition of his dominance. in derrida’s hands this last and exceptional inability will turn out to work quite differently, and this difference will mark a general condition. the problem coalesces in particular, and in a particularly influential fashion, in the work of heidegger. for him “the animal” has no hand, cannot name, cannot speak, has no relation to death, no relation to the “as such” of the world ― in fact is “poor in world” ―, and hence has no relation to dasein ― crucially contrasting with “man’s” access to all of the above. in order to signal the animal’s substantial deprivation, the hand of “man” must be, or rather does, something special. it will become clear, however, that this doing, if it relates to the performative, does so in a far from empirical sense (underlining the misrecognition of performative for performance). firstly, the hand must be given a clean slate, cut off in kind from what heidegger refers to as the “grasping organs” of beasts, and divorced from the kinship named by evolution. it is not that man’s hand does not grasp ―the oddity, even monstrosity of its singular form is remarked by derrida― but that his grasp conveys a specialized range that is raised to the general status of techne. moreover, the work of the hand (handwerk) is joined with what heidegger calls “thinking.” the handiwork of thinking thus becomes a signature lynn turner — when species kiss: some recent correspondence among animots 69 of the human: in having no hand the animal does not think and cannot sign. thinking of this handiwork as a signature gives a suggestion of the difference performed by the human hand: this hand may grasp, as does the paw, but what it does significantly is give. this hand does not simply or empirically give, rather and above all it gives itself. giving itself, giving the same, the hand auto-graphs. in so doing this hand transcends biology, and accesses the “as such” of things (the essence untouched by the paw or any other “prehensile organ”). kithe me. rather than simply reacting to this division of labor by elevating the grasping paw, derrida switches attention to the assumed qualitative separation of giving and taking: this is one element of what cannot be vouchsafed ( “heidegger’s hand” 166-169). likewise, the difference between the sign-making capacities of the animal and the linguistic abilities of man ― especially the ability to name, rather than be named ― is raised to a higher plane through heidegger’s assumption that the animal has no access to phenomenality as such and thus “does not unveil the being of being” through naming (derrida qtd. lawlor 50). again, for derrida, rather than reacting and claiming equal footing with regard to being for the animal, what must be questioned is the alleged phenomenal presence in the name of that which is named through showing up its distance as a consequence of the gesture of pointing. kithe me. rather than performing a kind of direct capture, pointing is a spacing that disseminates, it is a gesture that cannot gather the “as such” of that which is pointed out. this privation holds true for the gesture when performed by the hand, even ― perhaps crucially ― in a relation of autoaffection. the culmination of the animal’s privation of hand, language, naming, and access to the “as such” of being is heidegger’s well-known determination that the “animal is poor in world.” this is in contrast both to the stone, which is “worldless,” and of course “man,” who is “world-forming” (heidegger qtd. lawlor 51). in spite of any apparent comparison, lawlor points out that this insistence on poverty of world should not be read as placing the animal and human on a sliding scale of relation to world. rather, this is a difference “not of degree but of essence” (51). the “world-forming” capacity of man again assumes access to the “as such” of beings. with such an access comes the capacity to question being as such. this ability to question one’s own being echoes the gesture of pointing involved in naming, here directed, autoaffectively, to oneself. never pointing at themselves, never referring to their own being, animals for heidegger do not die, they merely “perish” (53). but the implication, now that the difference between giving and taking, the ability of pointing to gather the world, and the presence of being as such in the name, is that man too does not have access to death as such. if the gesture misleads and man cannot access, cannot catch up humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 70 with what ― should he do so ― would vanquish all possibility (death), then man too suffers a privation similar to that of the animal. consequently that common privation muddies the grounds of their ostensible difference. following this, and since for heidegger “the possibility of death defines what most belongs to dasein,” derrida’s assertion that these questions shake the foundations of heidegger’s entire ontology does not seem so dramatic (55). these unsettling manoeuvres characteristic of deconstruction dismantle the anthropomorphic traps that both identity politics and the logic of “animal rights” fall into ― that is, into defending animals on the basis of the privileges (whether laws or rights or concepts of identity) formerly accorded solely to “man.” this is not dissimilar to the failures of a feminism of equality ― a feminism that assumes that our task is solely to extend the existing range of rights formerly co-opted by men to newly enfranchised women, rather than the ambitions of a feminism of difference that would also examine the conditions and stakes of these rights together with the concept of subjectivity that they assume. like the latter, deconstruction insists on changing the terms of the argument, such that the grounds of comparison themselves qualitatively change. neither conceding to the tendency to police an absolute divide of difference between animal and human, nor collapsing all distinctions, all signatures, into absolute continuity or identity, derrida rather refigures the relation between animals and humans as one of “staggered analogy” (77-79). with the stagger comes a spacing, ground not covered by the equivalence marshalled when this is corralled into being like that, loosening the assumed anchorage of one side of an analogy. lawlor presents the staggered analogy as the notion of faults, or differences, without a fall ― that is without a fall from grace, from an original, sinless, perfect, condition of presence. rather, the staggered analogy is destinerrant. when species kiss. noting that heidegger does not cite any source to shore up his doxa regarding the animal, derrida pinpoints the discursive pattern to the two major missed encounters in representations of animals: that of the philosopher or the scientific observer of animals who nevertheless does not see animals as beings who look back, and that of the poets or prophets “who admit taking upon themselves the address of an animal that addresses them,” but claim to have found “no statutory representative” who acknowledges the address of an animal in a theoretical, philosophical, juridical, or civic mode (other than himself, faced by his cat) (“animal” 383). yet, what if not all “western human workers with animals” have refused or ignored the respective gazes of animals, as haraway asks (when species meet 21). turning to (and therefore impacting on) a different archive than that of derrida’s, haraway calls on a range of less lynn turner — when species kiss: some recent correspondence among animots 71 discursively regimented work from the sciences that adapt or abandon the flawed concept of the neutral observer. bioanthropologist barbara smuts, for example, finds that her observation of a baboon colony can only proceed when she gives up the arempt to be invisible ― berer put as hostile, and learns to adjust her behaviors to those of the baboons who certainly are taking note of her (24). while haraway appreciates the mundane quality of derrida’s encounter with his cat, his vigorous efforts to maintain the daily particularity of this cat and to hold at bay the allegorical lure that would dissolve her catness, as well as his recognition that the cat was responding and not only reacting to him, she yet finds a failure of curiosity in “the animal that therefore i am.” for haraway, so much effort goes into addressing the pitfalls that philosophy has entrenched in the discourse of species that when it comes to this cat, if derrida is curious about what her response might entail, he can find no way to write about it, and she vanishes from his text as surely as if she were a cheshire cat. this is one reason i turn to the heightened terrain of the interspecies kiss. the site of curiosity and the way in which it affects the subject in its grip is pressing, not least because haraway has found herself, trained biologist and interdisciplinary critic of technoscience, in the thick of what might be popularly construed as fascism: the terrain of “pure-bred” dogs, and in particular playing a sport with ― rather than simply maintaining the breed history (herding livestock) of ― australian shepherds. loving cayenne as a companion animal and as an australian shepherd leads haraway not simply to the presumed closed book of an aestheticization of the type, but to another involvement with gene politics. the macro-level leads her to the amateur practices of activist dog-breeders to quash in-breeding (since not everyone follows popular “sires” for their looks alone, regardless of genetic proximity to their mate) and work towards eliminating genetic disorders through open registries recording pedigree details in full. the micro-level generates the interspecies kiss. alternating between poetically attuned diaristic extracts from what she names as “notes of a sportswriter’s daughter” and a comparatively more straightforward theoretical address, haraway’s companion species manifesto begins somewhat provocatively. the very first line tells us that “ms cayenne pepper continues to colonize all [haraway’s] cells ― a sure case of what the biologist lynn margulis calls symbiogenesis” (1). (symbiogenesis refers to new ways of thinking about genetic transfers that do not necessarily involve linear sexual reproduction but rather notice the various exchanges, mergers, and recombinations of genetic material perpetrated by bacteria). starting off on the other foot, it is donna haraway that is “colonized” by humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 72 cayenne pepper, by the saliva from her “darter-tongue kisses” (1). it is the tongue of the other that signs, delivering the saliva that troubles the species of all kisses. this figure is biological in the creative senses that new material feminisms, in stacy alaimo’s phrase, are now bringing to attention. it displaces earlier fears that biology would only ever cut destiny to the whim of those in power. indeed, the whole of haraway’s work may be understood as a demonstration that, while the biological may be a field riven by power, this field is not therefore forever anterior to culture or otherwise inaccessible. her still paradigmatic early essay “’gender’ for a marxist dictionary” historicizes the political urgency of the relatively recent term “gender” to compensate for the “deficiencies” blamed on the immutable “sex differences” of girls, while opening second-wave feminism’s foundational “sex/gender” divide to other differences masked by the genre of gender, as well as, crucially, refusing to give up theoretically on “sex” or “nature.” “ms cayenne pepper” presents a flash of the irony familiar from the first lines of “a cyborg manifesto.” that marital blank, “ms,” rather than the anachronistic “miss” or “mrs,” might initiate the scent of the spectral terror of monstrous lesbian reproducibility. and if there is terror, it may only be compounded by the line by line realization that cayenne is canine, and she is not transformed into a man by the humanizing virtue of the kiss. they have had “forbidden conversation”; they have had “oral intercourse” (2). the wet medium of cayenne’s rich saliva produces a figure of coconstitution and of reproduction exceeding both species as transfections pass ― or communicate ―through viral vectors. in so figuring unlicensed reproducibility and in so figuring co-constituting contact as random occurrence rather than appointed moment within the dialectical narrative foretold about the human subject, haraway bypasses the necessity to surmount any dead fathers in the telos of the law. this is not the de-humanization of a sadistic pornographic standard, but the de-humanism of life. such a de-humanism should have taken hold after the three wounds inflicted on the “fantasy of human exceptionalism” named as such by freud (when species meet 11) ― namely, the copernican wound that decentered the earth and fundamentally opened the door to “a universe of inhumane, nonteleological times and spaces,” the darwinian wound that earthed “man” as one amongst other animals rather than their anointed ruler or final outcome, and the freudian wound itself, wielding the concept of the unconscious to dislodge reason from within (11). to these haraway adds a fourth wound, the “cyborgian, which infolds organic and technological flesh and so melds that great divide as well” (11). these dissolves, however, do not amount to a new found pool of sameness, but a series of differences unanchored by origin or end in sets of shifting relations. these shifting relations need to be re-emphasized in light of lynn turner — when species kiss: some recent correspondence among animots 73 haraway’s cited 60 percent of americans currently doubting or outright rejecting that humans are descended from other animals. play, and all the incalculable risks it entails, surfaces theoretically when haraway changes the register of the question derrida uses to reset our relation to them, and to discontinue any further variation on the rhetorical theme of “can they do what we do?” ― the line that heidegger’s work entrenched. citing jeremy bentham derrida asks “can they suffer?” while haraway asks “can they play?” (22). yet “can they suffer?” does not simply replace something like “can they speak? (no? oh well, let’s kill them).” rather, it joins with derrida’s reversal of the philosophical refrain of a privation, or lack of an ability, contrasting the proper possession of that ability as mark of the human. it works the ground of transforming privation into ability troubling the sovereignty of power (ability) ― they can suffer. thus the grounds of derrida and haraway do not quite square, but they should be read together, staggering, supplementing each other’s work, especially since play too might also trouble the sovereignty of power. while haraway’s “play” arises in the contexts of her agility work with her dogs, in which species must find a means of communication, and of the non-reproductive sexual play observed between dogs closing the companion species manifesto, “play” in its more derridean sense joins the scene at the point where haraway’s interspecies contact zones are also figured as kin-making. pet subjects. haraway’s wider argument is at pains to extend “companion species” beyond the “companion animals” that we think we know under the name of “pets” (a name that arguably oedipalizes the animals in its grasp). yet the focus of this essay is limited to specific relations with domesticated animals, especially insofar as, with haraway, these are not apprehended as “furry children” (companion 11). inevitably the (frequently hostile) discourse on pets has informed this research. marc shell’s important essay on “the family pet” raises particular questions, because it is forcefully directed against the way in which animals become figured as kin to those not their kind. for shell, pet-lovers who name their love as one which encompasses all animals falls into a christian ideology of one family in which all are brothers under god. the totalitarianism that the one family produces runs thus: if we are all brothers and show kindness to our brothers, woe betide anyone or anything that is not cast as a brother. the structural conundrum this universalism also produces is a newfound equivalence between incest and bestiality. consequently the outcome is “either universal celibacy and starvation or bestiality/incest and cannibalism” (141). while judaic particularism humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 74 fares slightly better, in that it does not imagine “all men” as brothers, thus allowing for some non-brothers to nevertheless be human, and also renders differences between animals through the laws on keeping kosher, shell nevertheless finds it difficult to envision any new kin relation between those we call human and those we call animals. persuasive as he is, shell’s implicit habituation to the grid-locked relations of structuralist anthropology means that he does not pause to consider if there is any performative contingency involved in the functioning of “family.” synchronic slices of current sets of relations (structuralism’s remit) just cannot imagine what they (claim only to) describe unfolding in any other direction. for shell, the addition of animals makes no operative difference for existing kinship structures. no supplement, they merely compound existing problems. haraway’s post-structuralism of kinship assumes otherwise: if humans and other animals are drawn in to new kinds of kin relation, this does not necessarily revert to an oedipal plan. haraway refuses a kin relation that authorizes the pet as (like) a child, since she does not want to infantilize dogs and also because neither “children” nor brothers exhaust the term “kin” (11). echoing his earlier work on the non-admission of the “sisters” to “friendship,” philosophically conceived, derrida asks, “what happens to the fraternity of brothers when an animal enters the scene” (“the animal” 381). “[t]rying to live different tropes” in haraway’s book does not retreat into her own personal whims or freshly cleared ground to patrol, but it does assume that if there are kinship structures they do not exist in an everlasting present or repeat with the exactitude of a an idealized machine. rather, they risk a rewrite at every turn, and that means the possibility of new kin relations affecting all comers. shell ends “the family pet” by assigning that pet a structural function, a typically anthropomorphic one: “if there were no such beings as pets, we would breed them,” he says, since pets tell us who we are (141). yet there is an odd loophole: “sometimes we really cannot tell whether a being is essentially human or animal ― say when we were children or when we shall become extraterrestrial explorers” (141). perhaps the loophole is more than an exception: holding onto a difference between those who really cannot tell the difference and those who can tell perfectly well will not help shell with the performativity drawn to attention by derrida, haraway, cixous, and schneemann. catoptrics lynn turner — when species kiss: some recent correspondence among animots 75 fig.2 carolee schneemann, infinity kisses ii, one from the series, image courtesy of the artist along with the disappearance of derrida’s cat from “the animal that therefore i am” ― a disappearance hovering between a failure of curiosity and an ethical refusal ― haraway also finds the repetition of a philosophical trope trapping derrida in a scene dominated by its visuality, and punctuated by his naked body. he is naked before his cat. naked and ashamed. yet with haraway’s acknowledged catholicism and the emphasis on the sins of the flesh, following derrida’s visual emphasis she loses track of its equivocality. on the one hand, she’s right ― this is about jacques and not his cat, about whom we learn very lirle ― but the way it is about jacques makes a difference. derrida’s phrasing is odd. he writes: i often ask myself, just to see, who i am ― and who i am (following) at the moment when, caught naked, in silence, by the gaze of an animal, for example the eyes of a cat. (“the animal” 372, italics in original) prompted by the eyes of a cat, this gaze is like a kiss, if a kiss is as open as this paper suggests. this “just to see” may seek, but cannot seize. its curiosity is not calculative. just a few lines later derrida repeats the phrase, repeats it twice more and in those instances it turns back toward him, mirroring the first time, now identified with the cat looking at him “just to see” (373, italics original). later in the essay it is echoed in the scene of biblical naming. there god lets man (without woman) name “in order to see” what happens. this god has both an “infinite right of inspection,” and also the “finitude of a god who doesn’t know what is going to happen to him with language” humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 76 (418). derrida too does not know what is going to happen when he looks “just to see” into the eyes of this cat, and in so doing asks after himself. derrida’s being is troubled, not confirmed by this other. who am i? such an autobiographical question would point the self out, point for point “in the present […] and in his totally naked truth” (418). this indexical emphasis makes a metonymy for the hand, and the hand recalls its signature place in heidegger. yet for derrida the incapacity for the human to point to being as such speaks to the vicissitudes of writing. not only can we not decide between giving and taking, but all such gestures necessarily space, and that minimal distance opens onto the possibility of difference not identity. this condition repeats whether we send, sign, or seal by hand, by word, by lips, or by gaze. derrida does not look in order to cancel the other by seeing only his own re-confirmed reflection (“pointing” straight back to him). rather, the response of the other always surprises. for where autobiography habitually imports a mirror to figure its reflective function and to lead back automatically, autoaffectively, to the signing self, “the animal that therefore i am (following)” sees itself in the eyes of a cat. it is habitually through the reflected other that the subject is staged for itself as such, misrecognition of that subject’s capacities is part of the allure. what if the other is wholly other, and not a brother in advance? what if this other is a cat? jacques lacan once opened limited access to the mirror for the animal ― as a visual reflection, but without speculative insight. there the recognition of the animal’s own image did not forecast the ability to say “i” as it did for the human infant (“the mirror stage”). neither could animals take each other’s images for their own. but seeing himself in the eyes of a cat, signed by this other, jacques derrida becomes an autobiographical animal, and he is not alone. supplementing the gaze of the non-human other, it is the interruption in and of the kiss that is underlined in cixous. she does not see it coming, even though her eyes are open and the cat’s determination is flagged by its “clear and decided gaze” (“the cat’s arrival” 21). for that matter she does not see the cat coming, either: “in the meantime the cat arrived” (21). pure event, and as such astonishing. not “in the beginning,” though this is her first line, rather “in the meantime the cat arrived.” arriving without an article, as the chapter of her novel messie (1996), “arrivée du chat” stresses arrival even over the cat, in a sense that slightly dissipates in its more recent english translation as a discrete essay called “the cat’s arrival.” even so, published in a special issue of the journal parallax on “animal beings,” this essay has been interjected into a field rippling with the after-effects of derrida’s work on animals, but which has not (yet) kept pace lynn turner — when species kiss: some recent correspondence among animots 77 with that of cixous. perhaps this will change with the publication of the portable cixous, a collection of her writings that explicitly names “the animal” as a core theme in her work, and one not limited to cats or domesticated animals (segarra). but cixous’s ceaseless breaching of genre disorients the difference between autobiography (that should only ever lead back to the self) and magical realism (that should only escape the perceived realism of the self). thus the challenge of her prose and her preference for embedding “argument” within poetic phrasing and neologism may continue to fox those readers hoping to find a program or a method (of course, these are not easily found in derrida either!). cixous’s cat does not make an appearance only to subsequently fade from view, or atrophy in allegory. but the stress is on the surprise of the encounter: she writes “i’d also never have imagined […] that the event would be a cat” (16). her surprise at this unforeseen, and thus eventful, remarkable encounter foreshadows that of derrida: both of them rendered not at home in their own homes, both caught on the unhomely, uncanny, backfoot. in cixous, since arrival is a feminine noun in french, this force of arrival is stressed as feminine, while the cat of the title is in the generic that is masculine form until the first line of the essay, when “la chatte” is specified (had the french used “arriver” as a verb ― le chat est arrivé or la chatte est arrivée ― it would have both emphasized the cat and had agreement of the gender across noun and verb). a similar sense of arrival arriving prior to any assignation is used by derrida in his ambiguously wrought term l’arrivant ― forgering, he tells us in a footnote, that cixous had made use of “arrivant” in her novel la (1976) and the next year produced a play based on that book called l’arrivante (derrida aporias 86, n.14). on the one hand, this footnote frustratingly contributes to the play of precedence between derrida and cixous, whose works echo each other so much anyway, not least in the context of deconstruction’s troubling of precedence itself ― who am i following?15 the door and the shore (“la rive”) marking the arrival of the arrivant ― repeating throughout cixous’s text ― redouble this problem, as derrida remarks: “this border will always keep one from discriminating among the figures of the arrivant, the dead, and the revenant (the ghost, he, she, or that which returns)” (aporias 35). on the other hand, it is also fraught in the general context of work by women, so rarely cast as eventfully paradigmatic rather than machinically derivative ― and, in dating from the mid-1970’s, l’arrivante, like la jeune née, marks a time when it was most pressing to challenge alleged sexual neutrality.16 the one who arrives should be unmarked because unforeseen, a neutral if humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 78 not neuter arrival. elsewhere derrida himself reminds us how often the neutral masks the masculine: here he remains content with the arrivant. cixous writes through the literary liberty of free indirect style enabling rapid shifts between first and third person voices, dissolving easy identification or solidity of “character,” and frequently provoking the question “who speaks?” thus in her text, both “she” and “i” are surprised by the arrival of the cat. the question is intensified, given the shift in context, the grafting of “arrivée du chat” from an ambiguously fictional and ambiguously autobiographical book onto a journal context in which we expect the first person singular to be the vehicle for the author’s voice, to sign for the author. provoking “who speaks?” or “who signs?” usually skews the machinations required for rendering and retaining the human subject as central. here it enables cixous to pose and repose all the clichés of anthropomorphism without simply falling into enunciating them herself. she lets fly the distance of the literary while at the same time appropriating autobiographical authority, saying that she had never thought that a cat would show up, not “in one of my stories” (“the cat’s arrival” 21). remarked in this way, cixous’s “stories” become her autobiography, and events exceed her control. not simply a personal quandary, events exceed human control as they let both animals and machines rush in. in cixous the cat can speak ― but in order to demonstrate projection, to reveal the error of “exaggerating” love (32). in cixous the ruse that the cat is really an allegory of the displaced human partner is voiced to try and ward off the animal’s difference and the possibility that the cat is a rival (as anglophone readers will hear). when comings and goings have already circumvented his post, that displaced partner ― his improper name a literary quotation ― is reduced to arempting to reinstall proper boundaries. he grasps pointlessly at the functioning of doors, hence laws, and who should remain before them, as a limitless amount of women and fantastic beasts traverse this open house, a hippopotamus highlighting the hyperbole (32).17 meanwhile the woman comes to offer unconditional hospitality to the others to whom she is hostage, in spite of emmanuel levinas, for whom the animal has no face and hence no relation to the ethical.18 “you’re thanking me!!?” the woman asks, on the cat’s return (“the cat’s arrival” 22). startled by her affirmative kiss, given in disregard of the woman’s initial inhospitable shock at their proximity, the woman “asked herself who could have taught the animal this way of thinking” (22). so close together in the text, “thanking” can easily be misread as “thinking.” as cary wolfe notes, they are etymologically entwined lynn turner — when species kiss: some recent correspondence among animots 79 (“exposures” 8). no gratuitous slippage, the move implicates cixous in the same critical relation to heidegger’s “handwerk” that derrida more explicitly poses. the gift, for which one gives thanks, was supposed to sign for the human. in this kiss, it is truly hard to decide between giving and taking, and thus between species. a mirror crops up in “arrivée du chat,” again as the device that points back to the signing subject. pre-figuring derrida’s scene, it is an uncomfortable return: it is a technological supplement of shame. the mirror moreover is personified―or “animalified”: the mirror “squawks” like a parrot, it is “perched” on her shoulder, it will not shut up, it is repetitious: “naked naked naked see you see you see you,” exacerbated in the phonetically close french: “nus nus nus vus vus vus” (“the cat’s arrival” 33; messie 79). cixous is naked before a cartesian-lacanian animal-machine ― the mirror that parrots the christian history of technology inscribing nudity as a shame. this parroting mirror that shows will always show you up, land upon the fault. a moment later the mirror derides her in terms that redress her nakedness as a type of clothing, “a get-up”: “look at that get-up it isn’t pretty” (“the cat’s arrival” 33). “in her totally naked truth?” the mirror affronts her. the mirror installs modesty. its plural derision is also addressed to the cat (“vous êtes nus”), but sits on the shoulder of the woman recalling her to its specular economy that always sees the same thing. no insult from the woman’s exasperated human family quite manages this. “arrivée du chat” specifically links the shame effect with the technology of the mirror. the mirror is charged with splitting the pair of them into the self-conscious one that knows and must overcome her shameful nakedness ― or proximity to animality ― and the one that does not. the story of shame is thus linked to the original sin of speculative dialectics that spurs the human to produce both clothing and the veil of consciousness as a technology that sublates the animal. what if dialectics offers an incomplete history of technology? derrida argues as much while cixous rhetorically implies it. the cat’s pyjamas. for schneemann, every morning the camera was there “just to see,” without determination over the image. she had it there, ready to hand, by the bed, ready to turn towards her cats as well as toward herself. schneemann is in the photographs, she signs: quickly read, and without the insight of the theoretical work drawn upon in this essay, infinity kisses would be legible as autobiographical work as it is traditionally and simply identified ― as an index of “my own,” and legible within an artist’s work known for its investment in the personal, in experience, in a “hand-touch sensibility.” but does that hand point back to the signing subject, and point her out, point for point in her naked truth? ‘nudity perhaps remains untenable,’ remarks humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 80 derrida, his own desire for “naked words” voiced within an essay bracketed by quotations (“the animal” 418). it cannot be held in the hand, gathered in a moment of presence. schneemann’s nudity precedes her: “nudity” clothes the performance works more readily associated with her name as a form of signature. she is always partly concealed, as are her cats, and this is not a violence that could be avoided according to a more ethical representational strategy. despite derrida’s caution, he warns readers that we not be able to decide for certain whether his story was true or fictional, since the telling and the reading of that story will always redraw its contours. texts of whatever context cannot police their own borders. if the mirroring function within schneemann’s works was perhaps less clear in the first version of infinity kisses, where the smaller images were abutted against each other and mounted as one totemic grid, in the subsequent versions of much larger prints the effect is magnified. glazed, they reflect viewers as well as other prints. in schneemann, the trope of the mirror is no trap of the same: the eye of the camera is a frequent trope for the i of a directing subject, but here each blink of the shutter releases an other image ―image after image of ―what? as cixous writes: “woman with cat? or woman belonging to cat? or cats? or woman? or women? or the foreigner?” (“the cat’s arrival” 22). who mirrors whom? infinity kisses is not reducible to the too available and pitying cliché of older women clinging to the company of cats, here we must take account of a mirror of technical reproducibility, a mirror that iterates ― a point reiterated by the various articulations of these photographs, re-cited in different contexts when schneemann uses her own work as a found object. in so doing she emphasizes their range beyond realism. their eyes are shut in most images; even when they are open, the inability to predict frame or point of focus renders the visual field contingent. schneemann’s experiments in framing ― horizontally or vertically, and variations on printing the images in pairs as loose similarities or as precise doubles ― makes use of photography’s propensity towards infinite reversals between positives and negatives, and allows no gaze to resolve a hierarchy ordering who follows whom. infinity kisses names the work, emphasizing the performative kisses without consolidating their content or contracting their context. the kiss brings to attention the entanglement of response and reaction without dissolving those who kiss into a pool of sameness: kissing is of the edges, of continguity not continuity. performativity in general is neither a power of the human nor the proper of the human. the kiss, thought as performative, finds it difficult to specify who is following whom. lynn turner — when species kiss: some recent correspondence among animots 81 fig 3. carolee schneemann, infinity kisses ii, 1990-98, 2004 print edition as shown in remains to be seen, cepa gallery, buffalo, ny, 2007. image courtesy galerie lallouz. this paper benefited from the support of the ahrc (research leave scheme, 2007-8). various aspects have been presented as papers (in vaxjö university, sweden, york st john university, bristol university, and goldsmiths, uk). a short extract has been published in the issues in contemporary culture & aesthetics, 2-3, 2009, pp. 12-21. i thank the editors and the anonymous reviewers from humanimalia for their careful revision suggestions. notes 1. haraway’s contemporary and colleague at ucsc, karen barad, has explicitly named performativity as “posthuman’ see her “posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter” in signs, 28:3 (2003): 801-831. 2. derrida, “the animal” (418). this unattributed citation from descartes is the final sentence of derrida’s essay, modified only by the addition of “following.” 3. directly addressed in, for example, cixous’s portrait, and derrida’s h.c for life. 4. steve baker first mentioned cixous’s early use of the term “animot” to me. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 82 5. the english translation “menagerie” appears with an epigraph from derrida’s text che cos’è la poesia? (1988) in which poetry is likened to a hedgehog. cixous’s text also appears ― without that epigraph, as “de la ménagerie à la philosophie,” the chapter succeeding “arrivée du chat” in her novel messie. 6. interior scroll, first performed in 1975, subsequently performed on numerous occasions in various venues, sometimes incorporating group elements sometimes remaining the individual performance of schneemann herself. interior scroll is also widely exhibited as photographic documentation in vertical series that suggest both a strip of film and a scroll ― including the text that schneemann recited. 7. “kiss me honey honey kiss me” was a popular song written by albon timothy and michael julien, first recorded by shirley bassey in 1959. 8. eye/body, 1963; meat joy, 1964; interior scroll, 1975; up to and including her limits, 1976. first dates given: all performances performed on numerous occasions in various venues, sometimes incorporating group elements sometimes remaining the individual performance of the artist. fuses, 18 min, color, silent 16mm film, 1965. meat joy now warrants a whole other engagement with the use of animal meat as metaphor. 9. it should be noted that jones takes little account of the development of pollock’s extensive work beyond her 1987 book vision & difference. 10. conversation with the artist, march 2008. 11. split decision comprised two simultaneous shows: breaking borders, museum of contemporary canadian art, toronto, 2007 and remains to be seen, cepa gallery, buffalo, ny, 2007. 12. this question is asked, and answered in variously sentimental and sanctimoniously anti-anthropomorphic ways with regard to dogs on this website: http://ask.metafilter.com/28246/is-my-dog-kissing-me accessed 23/11/2007. 13. luce irigaray famously works metaphor and metonymy together to address both a positive symbolisation of the feminine through labial multiplicity (in excess of, rather than opposition to, phallic unicity and the logic of the same) and to link this lynn turner — when species kiss: some recent correspondence among animots 83 symbolisation to a new political, poetic and symbolic speech and “speech” by women most notably. see her “when our lips speak together.” 14. baker’s subsequent and more sympathetic account of schneemann doesn’t remark on the technological tropes that facilitate schneemann’s remark (in favour of a more art historical reportage of the artist’s account). i try to address this in the last section of this paper. 15. for a useful ― though highly modest ― discussion of these overlapping themes in their work, see cixous, “jacques derrida as a proteus unbound.” 16. la jeune née is usually translated as the newly born woman though only the feminine not the species is strictly specified. 17. the persistence of doors and their surprising traversal inevitably suggests ― and revises ― kafka’s well known formulation of the condition of the law. unlike the “man from the country” the cat passes the door and thus retouches the law. see kafka, the trial, sue golding first drew my attention to the air of kafka marked by cixous’s door. 18. numerous writers have commented on the glimmer of recognition offered by “bobby the dog” to the dehumanized prisoners in the camps only for lévinas to erase an ethical maxim from his barks since the animal is “too stupid, trop bête” to be able to universalize this relation. see, for example, john llewelyn qtd. wolfe, zoontologies 17. works cited alaimo, stacy & susan j. hekman, eds. material feminisms. bloomington: indiana up, 2008. baker, steve. the postmodern animal. london: reaktion, 2000. ―――. “what does becoming-animal look like?” representing animals. ed. nigel rothfels. bloomington: indiana up, 2002. cixous, hélène. “the cat’s arrival.” [1996] parallax 12:1 (2006): 21-42. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 84 ―――. “from my menagerie to philosophy” in resistance, flight, creation: feminist enactments of french philosophy. ed. dorothea olkowski. ithaca: cornell up, 2000. 40-48. ―――. “jacques derrida as a proteus unbound.” critical inquiry 33 (winter 2007): 389-423. cixous, hélène. la. paris: editions gallimard, 1976. ―――. messie. paris: des femmes, 1996. ―――. portrait of jacques derrida as a young jewish saint. new york: columbia up, 2004. ―――. “writing blind.” [1996] stigmata: escaping texts. new york & london: routledge, 1998. cixous, hélène, & catherine clément. la jeune née. paris: union générales d’editions, 1975. derrida, jacques. “and say the animal responded?” trans. david wills. zoontologies: the question of the animal. cary wolfe, ed. minneapolis: minnesota up, 2003. 121-146. ―――. “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” trans. david wills. critical inquiry 28:2 (2002): 369-418. ―――. aporias. trans. thomas dutoit. palo alto: stanford up, 1993. ―――. “choreographies.” interview with christie mcdonald. points. interviews, 19741994. palo alto: stanford up, 1994. ―――. “geschlecht ii: heidegger’s hand.” trans. john p. leavey, jr., deconstruction & philosophy: the texts of jacques derrida. john sallis, ed. chicago: chicago up, 1987. 161196. -----. h.c for life, that is to say… trans. laurent milesi, palo alto: stanford up, 2006. ―――. haraway, donna j. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people & significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. lynn turner — when species kiss: some recent correspondence among animots 85 ―――. “a cyborg manifesto: science, technology & socialist feminism in the late 20th century. [1985}., cyborgs & women: the reinvention of nature. london: free association books, 1991.149-182. ―――. “’gender’ for a marxist dictionary.” [1987] simians, cyborgs & women: the reinvention of nature. london: free association books, 1991. 127-148. ―――. when species meet. minneapolis: minnesota up, 2008. hillis miller, j. “what is a kiss? isabel’s moments of decision.” critical inquiry, 31:3 (2005): 722-746. irigaray, luce. “when our lips speak together.” this sex which is not one. trans. catherine porter, ithaca: cornell up, 1988. 205-218. jones, amelia. body art: performing the subject. minneapolis: minnesota up, 1998. kafka, franz. the trial. trans. willa & edwin muir, new york: modern library, 1956. lacan, jacques. “the mirror stage as formative of the function of the i.” [1949] ecrits. trans. jacques alain miller, new york: routledge, 2001. 1-8. lawlor, leonard. this is not sufficient: an essay on animality and human nature in derrida. new york: columbia up, 2007. pollock, griselda. vision & difference. new york: routledge, 1987. schneeman, carolee. imaging her erotics: essays, interviews, projects. cambridge, ma: mit, 2002. schneider, rebecca. the explicit body in performance. new york: routledge, 1997. segarra, marta. ed. the portable cixous. new york: columbia up, 2010. shell, marc. “the family pet.” representations 15 (summer 1986): 121-153. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 2, number 1 (fall 2010) 86 wolfe, cary. “exposures.”. philosophy & animal life. stanley cavell, cora diamond, john mcdowell, ian hacking, and cary wolfe, eds. new york: columbia up, 2008. 141. ―――. ed. zoontologies: the question of the animal, minneapolis: minnesota up, 2003. keil the feral at home the feral at home the rogue trajectory and unexpected relations of a “feral pig” paul g. keil institute of ethnology, czech academy of sciences humanimalia 15.2 (summer 2025) abstract: a feral pig in australia is an introduced pig who lives beyond the constraints of human husbandry or expresses wild physiological traits. these animals are typically characterized as alien, overwhelmingly destructive, and toxic. the only acceptable relation is to kill them. i met pig-pig during a series of interviews — she was a wild-caught pig living on the property of scott, a pig hunter. primarily drawn from conversations with scott, this paper is an account of pig-pig that explores a feral pig trajectory that partially existed outside of dominant discourses and practices. writing about pig-pig and scott helps expand our understanding of feral pigs (and hunters) — including who they are and who they can be with. it also requires being attuned to a morethan-human agency that exceeds apprehension and determination, to a degree. first, i analyse how this individual animal eludes common categories and ways of enacting feral pigs. next, i explore the unexpected and compelling relations she developed and consider how her place in an unauthorized multispecies home enabled her to become pig-pig. finally, i ask how pig-pig was still alive and what it reveals about the limits of scott’s power and the obligations he had towards other claims on pig-pig, by human and nonhuman alike. the paper concludes with pig-pig being killed, demonstrating the limits of alternate trajectories of pig becoming in a world geared towards their death. keywords: feral; pig; australia; ethics; hunting; more-than-human; multispecies home bio: paul g. keil is a human–animal ethnographer who engages in the fields of social anthropology and environmental humanities. keil’s regional expertise is based in assam, india and australia, where he conducts ethnographic research on human–wildlife relations, working animals, hunting, and biosecurity practices. his analytical interests emerge from questions regarding interspecies coexistence and teamwork, aesthetics and ethics, as well as uncertainty and vulnerability in more-than-human worlds. keil is co-editor of the volume composing worlds with elephants: interdisciplinary dialogues (ird, 2023) and the author of the ethnographic monograph the presence of elephants: sharing lives and landscapes in assam (routledge, 2024). email: keil@eu.cas.cz orcid: 0000-0001-6577-3045 copyright © 2025 paul g. keil this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 2 (2025): 43–71. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13814 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6577-3045 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13814 keil , the feral at home | 45 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) in 2019, “scott” was in his late fifties. he was (and still is) a big guy, heavily bearded, with a gravelly voice. there was a softness beneath his hard presentation that i was drawn to when i met him. one late afternoon, we sat in a patch of eucalypts on his half acre property. the leaves offered some protection from the oppressively dry wind and sun during this third and final year of a devastating drought. scott remained seated in his white ute — an open flatbed utility truck that was the vehicle of choice in rural australia, especially among pig hunters. i was perched below the driver’s side door, sitting on a broken and dusty red plastic milk crate, engaged in a conversation that meandered over the joys of hunting, the history of pig hunting in the area, and how to cure pork. suddenly, scott’s train of thought broke and he enthusiastically directed my attention to something happening behind me. i turned to see pig-pig, about twenty metres away, strolling through the trees and across the dusty ground, towards a pile of odd materials: discarded groundsheet, barrels, an old cage, a bathtub. pig-pig had dark, long hair and a lengthy pointed snout, morphological features not common among domestic-raised pigs, but traits akin to the wild boar of asia and europe. these are traits that also emerge when domesticated pigs have been living wild for a few generations.1 pig-pig looked like a feral pig, part of a free-living population of millions of individuals inhabiting large parts of eastern and northern australia, across diverse ecological niches.2 “you should... have a photo of what it’s going to do here” scott said encouragingly. “it’ll go and get in the bathtub.” i was impressed to watch pig-pig casually saunter her way among the trees. impressed not only because it was the first time i was going to see a pig take a bath but mostly because i did not expect an animal who looks like pig-pig to be here. domesticated british breeds of pig were introduced to australia with european settlers as livestock. whether by escaping or by being set 1 tisdell, wild pigs. 2 the most reliable assessment of feral pig population in australia was conducted by jim hone in 2020, putting the population at 2.5–4 million. however, the actual number is likely higher, particularly in successive years of high rainfall between 2020 and 2023: hone, “how many feral pigs in australia”. fig. 1 pig-pig’s free-living porcine kin are generally leaner and more muscular. these smartphone photographs are slightly blurry, the reason for which will be made clear later in the article. photographs by the author. keil , the feral at home | 47 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) free, generations of these pigs began living in colonies beyond the constraints of human husbandry.3 wild pigs have been visible in the landscape since the late nineteenth century, serving as a pest for farmers and as an economic opportunity for hunters. yet since the 1980s this population has been branded as “feral” and categorized as an out-of-place, invasive species that are overwhelmingly destructive, toxic,4 and so “killable”.5 feral pigs are troublesome animals: there is a wide range of empirical literature demonstrating how they damage species compositions of native ecosystems and negatively impact farming economies.6 scientific research and public discourse are deeply biased towards casting these animals as overwhelmingly negative and possessing no positive value.7 the demonization of so-called feral and invasive species is hegemonic and strategic to rallying public support for their culling. the animals’ death is justified as protecting farming economies and vulnerable native ecologies.8 in the state of new south wales (nsw) where i conducted fieldwork, there are strong regulations on how feral pigs are to be engaged: property owners are obliged to destroy them if found on their land and it is illegal to both transport and keep a live feral pig for private or commercial use. their vast numbers and abject status are also reasons why wild pigs are the most hunted game animal in australia. the only accepted form of relationship with a free-living pig in the country is to kill them. yet here was pig-pig, alive and well, taking baths on the property of a pig hunter and surviving in a nation invested in her death. free-living pigs in public and natural scientific discourse are dominantly represented at the level of population and species, thus enabling essentializations and sweeping negative generalizations. 3 cushing, “‘cunning, intractable, destructive animals’”. 4 gentle, wilson, and cuskelly, “feral pig management”; keil, “unmaking the feral”. 5 haraway, when species meet, especially ch. 3. 6 for an excellent summary of literature see: hone, applied population and community ecology. 7 keil, “unmaking the feral”. 8 understanding the feral animal as negative and out-of-place is also a deeply felt part of settler national identity performed through exclusionary biopolitics: franklin, animal nation. 48 | keil , the feral at home humanimalia 15.2 (2025) alternatively, research on invasive species in animal studies and environmental humanities has inquired into historically shifting and ambivalent attitudes towards such animals, thus complicating contemporary hegemonic positions.9 yet even in these studies, other-than-human organisms are figured at broad scales of time, space, population and kinds, with little focus on an animal’s lived particularities in a specific context.10 conversely, this paper is not about “feral pigs” or the culture of keeping pet pigs among pig hunters; rather, i give attention to one account of an individual making a place among a peculiar collective of humans and nonhumans. rendering these idiosyncratic interactions can also help foreground relations and ways-of-being that challenge accepted narratives and expose readers to what is possible.11 pig-pig was brought to scott’s property as a piglet by his son, jamie, after a hunt where her mother was killed. bringing this individual home facilitated a trajectory of “feral pig” becoming that is neither permitted nor desirable within the practices and discourses of invasive species management and biosecurity. in this domestic space, pig-pig has developed surprising habits and relations of value, surprising because they exist outside of the normative expectations and characterization of her kind. human–animal and multispecies scholars have been encouraging researchers to tell complex stories about organisms considered abject.12 further, there is a need to cultivate a sensitivity to possibilities excluded in certain human– animal practices, so “[adding] to the realities” of the beings studied.13 as a researcher of human and wild pig relations in australia, addressing these exclusions and exploring alternative ideas about who “feral pigs” can be and be with, i am “taking responsibility for how things congeal as they are” in scientific and public discourse.14 writing about pig-pig is not an ethical intervention into her life, but 9 franklin, animal nation; riley, “cats in australia”; o’gorman and van dooren, “the promises of pests”. 10 swart, “but where’s the bloody horse?” 11 govindrajan, animal intimacies. 12 tsing et al., arts of living; fleischmann, “more-than-human political geographies”. 13 lonkila, “care-full research ethics”; see also hollin et al., “(dis)entangling barad”. 14 lonkila, “care-full research ethics”, 489. keil , the feral at home | 49 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) it contributes to knowledges about the lives of her kind15 and helps balance dominant and narrow positions regarding their existence in australia. it is an attempt towards building fairer representation and performing a “small justice”16 that might mediate people’s perception of these remarkable if problematic beings. pig-pig was not a focused subject of my research and my reciprocating encounters with her were fleeting. she was a repeated topic throughout three long conversations i had with scott and his family about hunting. sometimes she physically inserted herself into the conversation by scavenging and rootling around where we spoke. a few times she interacted directly with me. scott was my interlocutor and mediator for the nonhuman in this context, and this paper’s story of pig-pig is also about understanding what she meant to him. scott identified as a “pig-dogger”, a member of a large hunting community in australia17 often unfairly stereotyped as being irresponsible and composed of people who “presumably do fit the description of ‘redneck, barbaric, and bogan’.”18 in the human–animal studies literature, there is ongoing debate about how to conceptualize hunters’ relationship to animals: whether as an ambivalent relation that objectifies and also respects animals,19 or one that is fundamentally an expression of domination and entitlement over the life and death of nonhumans.20 scott had killed thousands of wild pigs: pig hunting was a lifelong passion and practice in service of his appetites, economic needs, and recreational interests. admittedly, he was also not very fond of pig-pig as an individual, as he once exclaimed in an over-exaggerated fashion — “i hate it!” however, scott’s words cannot be taken at face value, and his position towards and power over pig-pig was ambiguous. her place on his 15 haraway, when species meet. 16 ihar, “multispecies mediations”. 17 demographic studies are non-existent, but it is a dominantly male community with possibly 100,00 practitioners across australia. 18 adams, “‘redneck, barbaric’”, 50; note: while a term that can be used in a self-deprecatory way, “bogan” can have a derogatory and classist meaning and often used to identify persons who supposedly express aesthetic tastes deemed unrefined or uncultured. 19 howell, “hunting and animal human history”. 20 kalof and fitzgerald, “reading the trophy”; kopnina, “beyond multispecies ethnography”. 50 | keil , the feral at home humanimalia 15.2 (2025) property questions assumptions about hunters’ singular perspective on the animals they hunt, and resists framing his relationship of power in absolute terms. sympathetically writing for free-living pigs and pig hunters simultaneously might seem contradictory. however, from ethnographic experience, i find that the hunting community can offer a more nuanced appreciation of the wild pigs they kill compared to other stakeholders. pig-pig’s and scott’s story is not meant as an example of an innocent and harmonious interspecies relation. rather, it represents a different example of how to live with and kill feral pigs in australia — one that is arguably more open to these animals compared to dominant discourse and practice. i avoid identifying pig-pig as a “feral” animal. first, feral invokes the divisive binary order of domestic/wild and so constructs free-living pigs in australia as aberrations; yet an appreciation of pig-pig requires respecting the talent of pigs to move fluidly between domestic and wild states.21 second, the normative use of the terms feral and “invasive” in australia can characterize a pig’s presence as wholly negative and destructive. this forecloses the other relational potentials of these animals as will be explored in this paper.22 and third, branding an animal as feral is often held to reinforce the human claim on nonhuman animal bodies and lives:23 ferals are posed as risky, out-of-place, “human-created mistakes”24 who must be rectified through killing. however, such a characterization does not fully align with my analysis of scott’s interaction with pig-pig, where within the imbalanced power dynamic of the multispecies home they both inhabit, there are some limits on his ability to lay claim to and dictate her life and death. in addition, scott’s property is also a set of relations where pig-pig was not necessarily out-of-place. conscious of how pig-pig exists in ways that escape how feral pigs are typically apprehended, this paper is attuned to pig-pig as a nonhuman agency that partially exceeds determination — a being who 21 govindrajan, animal intimacies; arregui, “reversible pigs”; keil, “unmaking the feral”. 22 ogden, “beaver diaspora”. 23 rowan and timmins, “politics of naming”; hill et al., “uncivilized behaviours”. 24 lu, “world’s feral pigs”. keil , the feral at home | 51 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) is always more-than-human. more-than-human, in this case, invokes a flipside notion of ferality where feral animals are not objects of anthropocentrism, but rather reveal its limits. a feral pig, for instance, thwarts or eludes imposed categories and orders, is frustratingly beyond control,25 and exposes the presumed power to manage a free-living population as deeply limited.26 it is this notion of ferality that has informed the concept’s revaluation by multispecies, feminist, and environmental humanities scholars in recent years. ferality can be positioned as: transgressive and liberating for the subject;27 possessing a liminal quality, living both within and without categorical orders;28 or an effect afforded by anthropogenic world-making, yet working in unexpected ways beyond humanity’s sphere of control.29 through these ideas, ferality can refer to the ways and degrees in which life eludes concept and comprehension and undoes those intentions, plans and efforts which seek to grasp or shape the world in a certain way.30 while i do not claim to represent pig-pig’s “voice,” her more-than-human agency and difference are present in this paper in the feral ways in which she is revealed as partially indeterminable. especially, in how through her relations she disrupts cultural expectations and concepts, compels others, and creates unintended obligations on scott. to begin, i will look at how pig-pig confounded my own ideas on how to make sense of a feral-looking pig. not feral game in australia, accounts of free-living pigs are primarily produced by either the recreational hunting community, or by farming and associated government agencies. as a researcher, i mostly encountered wild pigs through ethnographic research on pig-dogging, the kind of hunting practised by scott. this popular mode of hunting 25 wilson, wilson, and robin “ought ecology of ferals”. 26 pigs are too elusive and too rooted in place—targeted suppression is the compromise in australia, instead of total eradication: commonwealth of australia, “threat abatement plan”. 27 montford and taylor, “guest editorial: feral theory”. 28 rutherford, “anthropocene’s animal?” 29 tsing et al., feral atlas. 30 halberstam, wild things. 52 | keil , the feral at home humanimalia 15.2 (2025) choreographs a highly provocative encounter where pigs are located, chased, and caught by canines. such an interaction enforces a limited degree of freedom for the pig — in other words, pigs can only fight or take flight. killing the pig involves the hunter physically grappling with them in an intimate and risky encounter and then stabbing the pig in the heart, resulting in a quick death. through the hunt, pigs are largely experienced as cunning and elusive creatures, skilled at avoiding and escaping the hunters. if caught, they are found to be aggressively defensive and dangerous. both reactions are desired and central to the experience of the hunt.31 by nsw law, a feral pig in australia is any pig who is free-living or one that expresses “wild” physical traits.32 scientific and public discourse about free-living pigs often revolves around them being diseased, destructive to livelihoods, and ecologically invasive.33 through my fieldwork with farmers and government pest control officers, i have observed multiple examples of extensive feeding on crops, and listened to the frustrations of state biosecurity officers attempting to control pig populations. furthermore, this species is a generalist omnivore able to adapt to many environments, and in the agricultural landscapes of nsw pigs will maintain a high reproductive capacity, with large litter sizes more than once a year in good seasons.34 these qualities feed into a popular characterization of feral pigs as wildly proliferating pests who mindlessly eat anything. in extreme cases, particularly when mapping pigs through population numbers, pigs can be portrayed as bare life and a disease to remove from the national body.35 free-living pigs are enacted in certain ways. enactment is a performative logic, where who an animal is and what they can do is a reality 31 keil, “rank atmospheres”. 32 riley, “brighton v. will”. 33 hone, applied population and community ecology. 34 analysis of their presence in scientific articles and media is often abstracted to maps and population levels, and representative numbers are exaggerated either referencing their total possible population (with unreliably large margins of error) or breeding potential. such figures invoke an overwhelming potential. they are killed at a distance and en masse, through poison and helicopters in the hundreds and thousands. 35 hudson, “the political animal”; collins, “feral pigs”. keil , the feral at home | 53 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) done in relation to a particular set of discursive and material practices.36 the “feral pig” and the “hunted pig,” for example, are not solely semiotic constructions — they are realities also informed by the ways the nonhuman agent interacts with pest control and hunting techniques.37 importantly, the pig’s identities and capacities are not pregiven and can only be understood as effects emerging within the human relations in which they are embroiled. consequently, enactments are non-exhaustive of a species’ potential.38 this also means that the performance of a certain reality will inevitably exclude possible alternatives.39 animals have a “slippery” existence and inhabit worlds outside of the material-semiotic practices through which people attempt to apprehend them.40 in australia there are potentially other articulations of porcine existence that are not revealed through the dominant practices of culling and hunting. for example, invasive species discourse often enacts pigs as a population number and as purely destructive and so excludes consideration and analysis of their potential relations of value to humans or ecosystems, as well as failing to sympathize with their subjective, individual lives.41 and hunting is an interaction that does not create opportunities for other modes of relation beyond a predator-prey dynamic. neither form of engagement is particularly receptive to unexpected relational possibilities and events — “the space of what is not yet and may or may not ever be” or what donna haraway has referred to as the open.42 nonhumans in interspecies entanglements will always be more-than human’s ability to apprehend them materially and conceptually. while attending to what is excluded in realities is often framed as an ethical responsibility of the researcher,43 sometimes realities and 36 law and lien, “slippery”. 37 see also geiger and hovorka, “animal performativity”. 38 law and lien, “slippery”. 39 barad, meeting the universe halfway. 40 law and lien, “slippery”. 41 celermajer and wallach, “illegible animal”. 42 haraway, when species meet, ch. 8. 43 lonkila, “care-full research ethics”; hollin et al., “(dis)entangling barad”. 54 | keil , the feral at home humanimalia 15.2 (2025) questions are pressed upon the researcher outside of their control. when i saw pig-pig crossing the property to take a bath i was bewildered. not only was she alive, but she was unchallenged and neither anxious nor aggressive in my presence. being so habituated to encountering pigs as a destructive animal or elusive hunted game, i was unsure how to engage a feral-looking pig who freely and comfortably inhabited domestic space near people. over the course of my research, even after meeting several more feral-looking pigs living as pets with hunters, i am still compelled to ask about the individuals. they seemingly embody an out-of-placeness, both in their “unhomeliness” in context of the national body,44 and in how they make their home with people who regularly hunt their kind (although this sense of being out-of-place would likely have been less impressive prior to the 1980s, when keeping and moving wild-caught pigs was still legal in the state).45 encouraged by scott, and eager to get a photo of this unusual and unique habit of pig-pig taking a bath, i pulled out my budget smartphone from my pocket. the camera’s limited range demanded i get in close to take a shot. having noticed me, instead of proceeding into the water, she directed her attention and began walking in my direction. “she’s not going to do it!” i announced, laughing. as pig-pig approached i greeted her cordially, as if she were a dog, “hello there! hello!” however, i quickly learned that i was ignorant of her intentions towards me, notably as scott began to shout from his ute and with increasing urgency: “pig-pig, wake up to yourself! pig-pig!! piss off!!!” he was waving his cane wildly out the 4wd window. i laughed nervously, foolishly, taking faltering steps backward (hence the blurry photos), desperately trying to mask my anxiety as it dawned on me that she was not coming up to say hello. scott’s brother later informed me that pig-pig had a habit of biting people. i created enough distance between pig-pig and myself, and she halted her march forward. she eyed me cautiously, uttering low porcine grunts while i returned to the red crate somewhat embarrassed and defeated. five minutes later, when 44 gressier, “going feral”. 45 further, this unhomeliness would have been even less pronounced in northern territory where a blind eye is turned to catching and keeping free-living pigs as livestock. keil , the feral at home | 55 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) i went to my car to fetch a drink, pig-pig again approached me with similar intent, sizing me up, following and watching me from a few metres away. i had the presence of mind in that instant to address her directly this time, “i see you! don’t even think about it!” pig-pig left me alone after that and did not uncomfortably bother me for the rest of the afternoon and evening as i spoke with scott and his family. she paced back and forth under the eucalyptus trees while keeping in our proximity, perhaps seeking out scraps of food. at one point, she entered a tense standoff with a hunting dog a passing friend brought over, who supposedly just wanted a “little nibble on her ear,” as the dog’s owner said jokingly. human–animal studies researchers deliberate over the possibility of misrepresenting animals. such problems can be quickly corrected when meeting an animal in the flesh. pig-pig had the opportunity to express her own power by being able to assert herself physically and disrupt my representative account.46 that is, pig-pig’s agency was not made known through a positively apprehended presence — such as her precise meaning as expressed through her feelings or intentions — but manifested in the ways my own ideas and expectations were destabilized. as i bumbled my way out of her reach, i was subject to her rather than the other way round.47 critical analysis of human–animal relations through enactment or the related concept of agential cuts often emphasize how it is anthropocentric practice and agency that primarily determines what is included and what is excluded.48 yet in this case, it was pig-pig that worked against my expectations and demanded that i engage her differently. in fact, it was only during our second encounter, when i both recognized her distrustful and disgruntled response to my presence, that she seemed satisfied of the appropriate respect i offered and left me alone. her (potentially) violent response in our first encounter was appropriate to my own violent misrecognition of her irreducible individual self.49 46 see buller, “animal geographies i”. 47 on being subject to the other-than-human, see plumwood, “being prey”. 48 hollin et al., “(dis) entangling barad”; lonkila, “care-full research ethics”. 49 see derrida, animal, 9. 56 | keil , the feral at home humanimalia 15.2 (2025) pig-pig was reminding me that she was more than i supposed. she adopted a position in relation to me that i was initially unable to interpret. in fact, scrambling to make sense of pig-pig, i mistook her for something akin to a house dog, and assumed her quiet interest was one of curiosity if not friendliness. even now, upon reflection, her intention to bite me remains an ambiguous gesture — pigs will use their mouths to explore, feel, and test the world, not simply to defend or attack.50 my limited ability to respond to and communicate with her properly was connected to both a misplaced familiarity and the lack of ready-to-hand conceptual resources through which to interpret her actions and her place on the property.51 her presence disrupted the set of categories i haphazardly assigned to her. a home to become pig-pig scott and his brother grew up around free-living pigs. he spent at least forty years of his life hunting pigs for recreation, to sell to wild game processing companies, and to consume (wild pork formed a main part of his diet). scott learned pigging from his father, who used to trap, keep, and then sell the live pigs at stockyards — a practice made illegal in the 1980s. their grandparents were itinerant shearers and farmhands, who in their spare time caught wild pigs with their dogs for some “poor man’s pork”.52 scott inherits a history of entanglements with free-living pigs now banned by biosecurity legislation or discouraged by food and health authorities — consuming wild pig is rare, as it is popularly considered diseased or disgusting.53 while scott was incapacitated at the time of our meetings and unable to hunt, jamie hunted and brought home pigs to eat. unlike many recreational pig hunters in nsw, scott professed the value of not killing wastefully.54 additionally, he did not speak disparagingly of pigs as “villains” as often done in pest or invasive species discourse.55 scott 50 studnitz, pederson, and jensen, “why do pigs root?” 51 see also willerslev, “spirits”, on the temporary breakdown of expectations. 52 garvey, dinkum little aussies. 53 australians, including most hunters, rarely eat feral pigs. see gentle et al., “feral pig management”; gressier, “going feral”. 54 the bodies of most recreationally hunted pigs are left as carrion. 55 chua and schreer, “introduction”. keil , the feral at home | 57 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) and his brother often admiringly expressed that pigs are courageous and smart. to co-opt the famous quote by john berger about farmers and livestock, hunters can hold pigs both in high regard and love to hunt them: “[w]hat is significant, and is so difficult for the urban stranger to understand, is that the two statements are connected by an and not by a but.”56 outside the practice of hunting, hunters can hold themselves open to different ways of being with pigs beyond the chase. for scott, it was not unusual to have a wild-caught pig as a pet: he and his broader family have kept multiple pigs of this kind at their places over the years. hunters might bring home these animals to train the hunting dog, or as future food for the dinner table, or as pets for the family — although such relational categories can be uncertain and fluid, as pets might eventually become a meal, or training objects become much-loved pets. hunting interlocutors familiar with keeping wild caught pigs will claim they make great domestic companions, just as smart and lively as dogs. pig-pig was neither the feral animal of government discourse, nor the elusive and aggressive game of hunter (nor a dog!). scott’s concept of and position towards her was ambiguous. one evening, i accompanied scott’s brother on an unsuccessful pig hunt. it was early december, and there was some question about whether a pig might be caught in time for christmas. talking about the upcoming holiday, scott claimed that if there was no luck catching one, then he would serve up pig-pig if he had to. expressed with the masculine bravado characteristic of male australian pig hunters, and clarifying his practical position towards pig-pig, scott asserted, “i don’t give a fuck, and i will kill and eat that pig.” however, he immediately retracted this statement, adding that he would not do so because he did not want to upset his son. apparently, jamie was quite fond of pig-pig. “he can do anything with that [pig],” scott testified, offering evidence of how close their relationship is: “pig loves him. if he laid down [on the ground], the pig will lay down [with him].” despite scott’s lack of regard for pig-pig, he also recognized her to be a valued pet, a relation demonstrated through the resonant affection 56 berger, “why look at animals?”, 7. 58 | keil , the feral at home humanimalia 15.2 (2025) between the animal and his son. as much as scott asserted that pig-pig was nothing more than an irritation and a potential meal, she certainly was an individual that afforded him an entertaining topic of conversation with strangers like myself. at one point, scott invited me to observe where pig-pig slept. within the patch of eucalypts on his property was a chicken coop. one half of it was enclosed by corrugated iron and wood slats, the other half was constructed from fencing wire. under the shaded portion was pig-pig lying on her side, her large, black, hairy frame surrounded by four or five chickens sleeping beside, under, and on top of her. as she drew deep breaths in the heat, i pressed my face into the wire for a closer look. pig-pig offered no sign of acknowledgement apart from a single — and possibly irritated — grunt. scott proclaimed proudly how pig-pig was better than any guard dog. and that any fox or stranger who dared to enter the property to steal one of the chickens, would be in for the “surprise of their life.” when i asked why pig-pig slept with the chickens, scott replied: “oh, she’s been adopted as family, i suppose.” writing of her interlocutors in uttarakhand, india, and how they use genealogical terms to explain their relationship with nonhuman others, radhika govindrajan states that “kin making is a multispecies affair.”57 if pig-pig had run with her sounder, she would have lived in a matriarchal pig society of interrelated family groups of females and their offspring, ranging, foraging, procreating, parenting, loving, fleeing, and fighting together. yet, through hunting, she was unmade58 — violently disentangled by jamie from the rich biological, social and ecological worlds she had been born into. now, instead, she lived intimately with a brood of hens.59 yet this so-called “feral pig”, much maligned for being a habitat destroying animal who mindlessly feeds on all manner of things — from roots to bird eggs, live lambs to carcasses — had convivially joined with these feathered 57 govindrajan, animal intimacies, 6. 58 baynes-rock, crocodile undone. 59 i also wonder about her position on the pecking order, and whether she plays a role in incubating eggs. keil , the feral at home | 59 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) others: feeding together on insects and worms beneath the eucalypts in the afternoon, intimately sharing sleeping arrangements, and developing protective ties.60 living on scott’s property also required pig-pig to negotiate with the hunting dogs who sometimes also roamed freely about the place. despite their reputation as violent animals, i generally find “pig-dogs” to be calm individuals, a trait appreciated by those who keep them around young families. these canines are selected for their intense drive and enthusiasm to chase target animals, and their expertise at holding wild pigs with barks or their teeth. yet pig-pig and the pigdogs, were surprisingly nonplussed in each other’s company. they were so relaxed, scott assured me, that sometimes pig-pig would wander over to where the dogs liked to lay near the house and share their spot on the cool, shaded concrete. while i accept the chickens saw pig-pig like family, it is hard to say how the dogs saw her. listening to hunters who keep wild-caught pigs at home, one described the relationship as a mediated tolerance, where the dog respects the human’s command not to harass the pigs. another supposed that his dogs were smart enough to know the contextual difference between a pig to be hunted and a pig to share a home with. one individual i met was brought back as a piglet for the hunting puppies to practice on (the piglet likely to die at some point); but, within a few days, both puppy and piglet unexpectedly befriended each other: “porky” was now two years old, and a cherished subject doted on by her human family. in pig-pig’s case, her relationship with dogs seemed more one of caution and tolerance, as demonstrated when the dogs occasionally became grumpy with her getting too intimate and warned her off with a growl. if scott expressed little regard for pig-pig beyond being an object (and he always referred to her as an “it”), his stories about her inevitably drew admiring attention to her talent at soliciting kinship, friendship, and begrudging acceptance from others. pig-pig was not merely 60 in a private communication, laura kuen, an anthropologist conducting multispecies ethnography on smallholders in the carpathian mountains of ukraine, informed me how a pig kept by an interlocutor regularly killed the chickens also kept on the property. pig and chicken kinning is not a given! 60 | keil , the feral at home humanimalia 15.2 (2025) what jamie lorimer calls “corporeally charismatic”,61 a material and affective encounter framed at the interspecies level; rather at an interpersonal level she was related to as a curiously compelling individual, a nonhuman person with a vibrant and strong personality as expressed through her idiosyncratic arrangements with others. while interspecies charisma is often framed through human relations with nonhumans, it seemed to me that her charm also worked on other nonhumans in this shared space, such as chickens who accommodated for her sleeping in their pen. and, while scott might not have admitted it, he also was taken with and amused by her. scott is aware that keeping a feral-looking pig on his property was illegal. he expressed some disregard for the local land services, the authorities who police such matters and who would shoot pig-pig if they learned of her presence. defying nsw law, scott’s property held open a space for pig-pig to be engaged and enacted in ways beyond being an invasive species, a pest, or hunted game. further, the way in which scott’s small property was managed helped facilitate these unexpected interspecies relations. it was unorganized: there were no demarcating or enclosing fences or cages, and no clear distinctions between animal and human spaces apart from the house. the domestic space was a “contact zone”62 for creating new relational possibilities and interpretations, as well as forms of place-making.63 nora schuurman refers to such spaces as the co-production of a multispecies homescape — “an inseparable part” of who the animal is and “how they and their lives can be understood”.64 these homescapes are material arrangements and imaginaries where identities and capacities are co-constituted through the multifaceted set of interspecies perspectives and relations connected to this space.65 61 lorimer, wildlife in the anthropocene; boyd, “painting with horses”. 62 haraway, when species meet, passim. 63 see also russell, “domestication of anthropology”. 64 schuurman, “multispecies homescapes,” 660. 65 it is worth noting that i am unsure how scott might have spelt the name “pig-pig,” but i choose to write the name with a hyphen. hyphens are common ways by which linguistic reduplications generally are represented in english. the hyphen is also important to understanding pig-pig. as anthropologist garry marvin explained in a private communication: etymologically, the ancient greek term ὑφέν (huphén) means “together” and keil , the feral at home | 61 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) on scott’s property, pig-pig lived apart from the world of “feral pigs,” becoming part of this eclectic, domestic multispecies collective. a place proximally and dynamically organized by varying bodies, histories, and affects, with relationships defined through notions of tolerance, family, ambivalence, and friendship. within this space, not all inhabitants are recognized or given voice equally, and power is unevenly distributed. although scott was the owner of the property, as well as a key observer and interpreter of the homescape’s dynamics, that did not necessarily mean he was at the centre of this place. domestic properties by categorical definition are contrasted to wild spaces as closely governed by humans, where people play a significant role in cultivating and managing social and ecological relations.66 yet in multispecies homes, the world-shaping power of animals cannot be overlooked: they express agencies that are closely entwined with and constrained by, but not wholly dictated by people.67 pig-pig’s relations with chickens and dogs were negotiated and co-created between themselves. and, as per scott’s description, pig-pig had done significant work weaving together this world — an achievement complemented by the generosity of chickens and dogs. for example, pig-pig dared to lie alongside a kind of being who in another situation might be her potential attacker and, in turn, the dogs were open to novel possibilities with an animal they regularly chased. there are meaningful more-than-human worlds that overlap but do not fully coincide with scott, and that partially fell outside of his power both in their development and in the ethical demands they would make of him.68 the ties that kept her alive despite being fostered into a multispecies home on scott’s property, pig-pig was always at a high risk of being killed. scott certainly made so the hyphen reminds us that being is always compound. pig-pig’s identity was constituted by the human and nonhuman beings with whom she made her life and home. in many ways she was also a human-pig, a chicken-pig, and maybe even a dog-pig. 66 cassidy, “domestication reconsidered”. 67 haraway et al. “anthropologists are talking”. 68 see latimer, “being alongside”. 62 | keil , the feral at home humanimalia 15.2 (2025) this clear. this risk became most apparent to me after finally watching pig-pig take a bath — a small part of her daily routine and a necessity, given her species’ lack of sweat glands. scott and i sat quietly amused as this porcine lady approached the tub, stood on two hind legs using the rim to support herself, then hoisted herself into the water with barely a splash. pig-pig sat there for a while with all but her oversized head submerged in the tepid water, bathing in silent contentment under the eucalypts, momentarily absent to the searing heat. reading my notes after returning from the field, i juxtaposed this moment against the conversation i had with scott several days before taking this photo. we were also looking at the bathtub, and he was explaining how he used this tub to scald the bodies of hunted pigs before butchering them. he went into detail about the exact temperature to boil the water and amount of bicarbonate soda to add. after being submerged for some time, the coarse feral pig hair could be easily scraped from the body. given scott’s proclivity for hunting and taste for wild pigs i suspect many dead pigs had passed through that bathtub over the years. as scott bragged, on the two out of three occasions we spoke, “i’ve eaten more pigs than most blokes have killed.” sitting in that bathtub, where other dead pigs had been processed, pig-pig led a precarious existence that oscillated between the relational possibilities that could result in either her life or death. how was pig-pig still alive? thinking about it now, i still find it surprising and unlikely that she was alive, given who scott was and the trajectories of most of her kind that come into contact with humans in australia. at the time of my visit, we were also in the middle of one of the worst droughts in living memory. pigs are very resilient beings, but even their population numbers and condition in the area were noticeably dropping. one farmer in northwest nsw confessed to me that “even if i was still hunting, i wouldn’t be hunting them now… pigs, roos [kangaroos]… we’re all struggling.” the ecological relations that sustained human and nonhuman lives were stretching thinner and thinner, and, for some, inspiring a sense of solidarity with an animal typically seen as a pest. scott, however, did not seem to possess such a sympathetic sense of fellowship for pig-pig’s wild kin. chasing and killing these animals has been an important and vital part of his livelihood, diet, and fig. 2 pig-pig having her daily bath. photograph by the author. 64 | keil , the feral at home humanimalia 15.2 (2025) sense of self for decades. and as scott claimed, he has no qualms about eating pig-pig, just like any other pig he hunts. however, pig-pig was not like most other pigs scott encountered. his claim over pig-pig and his capacity to decide whether she lives or dies were overstated. scott was obliged to preserve the companionship she developed with jamie and would not kill her at the risk of upsetting his son. scott appreciated pig-pig’s adoption into a family of hens and how, like a guard dog, she now served to protect the brood — a role he both respected and saw as beneficial. even pig-pig’s personality — expressed through her unexpected and idiosyncratic relations with pig-dogs, chickens, jamie, and bathtubs — “captured” scott through a charismatic agency which seemingly compelled him to talk about pig-pig despite not “[giving] a fuck” about her. charisma is a vulnerability to being affected by others in ways that cannot be consciously controlled.69 pig-pig’s worth was beyond his ability to decide alone. becoming part of this multispecies home, she developed value for others to which he felt beholden. scott’s position stands in contrast to how governing authorities in australia regard pigs identified as feral. as danielle celermajer and arian wallach argue, invasive species programs seek to strip these nonhumans of any utilitarian, aesthetic, or identity-based value and deny the possibility of any legitimate, economic, or meaningfully positive relationships that might potentially support their existence in the country.70 by denying their value and by judging their presence as wholly negative, biosecurity discourse aims to invalidate all ecological and social relations and so starve pigs of those vital connections that makes life fundamentally possible.71 scott, in relation to pig-pig and others on his property, does not reproduce such a monological position towards pigs, a position that is unappreciative of the perspectives of others and reduces the world and its inhabitants to serve a singular purpose.72 while scott did not seem to contem69 keil, presence of elephants. 70 celermajer and wallach, “illegible animal”. 71 keil, “unmaking the feral”. 72 rose, reports from a wild country. keil , the feral at home | 65 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) plate what pig-pig might think or want, he did account for and was in dialogue with other desires about, claims on, and interpretations of her as part of the multispecies home. these other relations that constituted pig-pig bound her to the world, pulled her in other directions beyond scott’s intentions and appetites. who pig-pig was for scott was also about who she could be for others — this made it possible for her to be alive at my time of meeting her. the conclusion to the feral at home while i have not referred to her as feral, there is also a sense in which an aspect of pig-pig was always feral and more-than-human. pig-pig is unauthorized, evades expectations and easy conceptualization, and cannot be completely governed, even within skewed power relations. scott’s property was a transgressive space that allowed her to develop relations and unexpected ways of being-with that do not align with hegemonic perspectives on free-living pigs and fall outside the biopolitical orders that organize the country. the domestic relations pig-pig formed on scott’s property were affective arrangements that emerged beyond scott’s ability to fully dictate and mediate. this includes how her charisma partially captured scott despite his intentions. finally, as per the first section, pig-pig’s presence was beyond my expectations and conceptual resources at the time of our meeting. the feral in pig-pig can come to stand for an agency that was inapprehensible and unpredictable,73 and highlights the ways in which life always exceeds determination. nonhuman being will always partially exist beyond our bodily and conceptual apparatus and become through other relations beyond our own perspectives and intentions.74 ferality, then, constitutes an aspect of all our relations and can occur not just “in the wild” but domestic domains too.75 ferality suggests that pig-pig will always be morethan a “feral animal” in australia. pig-pig complicates my understanding of free-living pigs and hunters. scott’s account and my limited interactions with her have 73 ramírez and ravetz, “feral futures”. 74 latimer, “being alongside”. 75 halberstam, wild things. 66 | keil , the feral at home humanimalia 15.2 (2025) helped me understand that pigs are animals whose potentialities are not limited to rigid categorization or a limited range of affects. this multispecies home facilitated other ways of speaking about and relating to free-living pigs beyond their enactment as invasive species to be eradicated, or even game to be hunted and eaten. pigpig’s connections with humans and nonhumans on scott’s property articulate not only her uniqueness but also the relational knots that helped keep her alive during that time. to write about hunters and feral-looking pigs in a more nuanced and, potentially, positive manner is not to overlook the objectifying expressions of human dominance over animals by hunters and the destructive effect of a troubling, introduced species in australia. rather, this essay attempts to write from a depolarized position,76 and push back against absolute or all-encompassing perspectives on these subjects by rendering them more fairly and keeping their potentialities uncertain. i’d like to end this paper with another story about pig-pig. after i initially drafted this paper in 2022, i was able to return to scott’s town following an extended hiatus. the drought that peaked in 2019 had transformed into three back-to-back years of rain. much of the area was flooding and free-living pigs were thriving. i learned this speaking with scott’s brother, with whom i had the opportunity to share a quiet, brief beer at his home one afternoon. scott was not around town, so i asked after him. i then asked after pig-pig. scott and jamie were open to pig-pig wandering in and beyond the property boundaries, feeding elsewhere and returning home later — something like the free-ranging pannage pigs of nineteenth-century settler australia.77 overtime, she began visiting one neighbour who reciprocated her attention by giving her food. she then began to repeatedly return, pestering for more. for a vaguely offered reason that remains unclear to me, pig-pig had become a nuisance. perhaps pig-pig’s gregarious yet blunt personality did not translate well beyond scott’s property. wild or domesticated, pigs are well known for their intractability, and at 70kg (which they easily 76 palmer et al., “holding discomfort”. 77 cushing, “‘cunning, intractable, destructive animals.’” keil , the feral at home | 67 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) grow into in their first year) they can be felt as powerful and potentially dangerous to owners. pig-pig had become such a pest to the neighbours that one day, scott received a phone call complaining that he needed to solve the problem. so, scott instructed his son to take the rifle up to the property to shoot the pig and bring her back. the neighbours protested but scott apparently saw no other way of handling the issue. while scott and jamie took responsibility for pigpig, they were unwilling to pen the animal which came along with additional domestic responsibilities of keeping, caring for, and feeding her.78 keeping a feral-looking pig was also illegal, so any persistent troublemaking might have exposed scott to unwanted attention from authorities. competing obligations to his neighbours led to scott demanding that pig-pig be killed, over and above any value she had for jamie, the chickens, or for her own life. the relational space open to alternate life trajectories for pig-pig — to becoming more-than a killable “problem animal” — was always tenuous and imperfect. and, as it turned out, it had definite limits. when i met pig-pig, it seemed as if her fate was undecided; yet it is also unsurprising that she was ultimately killed, given that pig-pig lived within a country and set of relations so heavily geared towards the control and death of her kind. scott’s brother expressed his own annoyance, arguing that the neighbours invited this eventual outcome by feeding her and that killing pig-pig was not something scott or jamie wanted to do. “anyway,” scott’s brother continued, “we did her right.” it turns out, they scalded pig-pig in the bath she used to bathe in and then ate her. again, appropriating john berger, a hunter is “fond of his pig and is glad to salt away its pork.”79 i believe in this instance, saying that “we did her right” was also to imply that they treated her respectfully. while scott and his family enjoyed eating wild pork generally, pigpig was not just any pig. in this case, consuming pig-pig was affectively appropriate: an act that was a necessary display of good manners towards their feral-looking companion. 78 such a decisive solution is also not uncommon in rural australia to practically deal with a working animal or livestock who has developed bad habits or committed a transgression. 79 berger, “why look at animals?”, 7. 68 | keil , the feral at home humanimalia 15.2 (2025) acknowledgements i would like to thank: the editors of humanimalia for their patience; the two reviewers for pushing this article to be better; and for the time, insight, and added nuance contributed by my colleagues from the department of ecological anthropology on prior iterations of this paper — especially kieran o’mahony, laura kuen, and andré thiemann with their supportive reading and comments on a final draft. always appreciated. this output emerged as part of the erc boar project, which has received funding from the european research council (erc) under the european union’s horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 866350). works cited adams, michael. “‘redneck, barbaric, cashed up bogan? i don’t think so’: hunting and nature in australia.” environmental humanities 2, no. 1 (2013): 43–56. https://doi.org/10.1215/220119193610342. arregui, aníbal g. “reversible pigs: an infraspecies ethnography of wild boars in barcelona.” american ethnologist 50, no. 1 (2023): 115–28. https://doi. org/10.1111/amet.13114. barad, karen. meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke university press, 2007. baynes-rock, marcus. crocodile undone. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2020. berger, john. “why look at animals?” in about looking, 3–38. new york: vintage, 1980. boyd, madeleine. “painting with horses towards interspecies response-ability: non-human charisma as material affect.” animal studies journal 6, no. 1 (2017): 129–154. buller, henry. “animal geographies i.” progress in human geography 38, no. 2 (2014): 308–18. https://doi. org/10.1177/0309132513479295. cassidy, rebecca. “introduction: domestication reconsidered.” in where the wild things are now, edited by rebecca cassidy and molly mullins, 1–25. oxford: berg, 2007. celermajer, danielle, and arian wallach. “the fate of the illegible animal: the case of the australian wild donkey.” animal studies journal 8, no. 2 (2019): 229–58. https://doi.org/10.14453/asj. v8i2.14. chua, liana, and viola schreer. “introduction: heroes and villains in the anthropocene.” environmental humanities 16, no. 3 (2024): 697–708. https://doi.org/10.1215/2201191911327284. collins, g.h. “feral pigs — the time bomb.” australian veterinary journal 80, no. 5 (2002): 305–305. commonwealth of australia. “threat abatement plan for predation, habitat degradation, competition and disease https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3610342 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3610342 https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13114 https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.13114 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513479295 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132513479295 https://doi.org/10.14453/asj.v8i2.14 https://doi.org/10.14453/asj.v8i2.14 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-11327284 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-11327284 keil , the feral at home | 69 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) transmission by feral pigs (sus scrofa) (2017).” australian government, department of the environment and energy, 2017. cushing, nancy. “‘cunning, intractable, destructive animals’: pigs as cocolonisers in the hunter valley of new south wales, 1840–1860.” in animals count: how population size matters in animal–human relations, edited by nancy cushing and jodi frawley, 113–25. london: routledge, 2018. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. translated by david wills. edited by marie-louise mallet. new york: fordham university press, 2008. fair, hannah, viola schreer, paul g. keil, laur kiik, and niki rust. “dodo dilemmas: conflicting ethical loyalties in conservation social science research.” area 45, no. 2 (2022): 245–53. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12839. fleischmann, larissa. “more-than-human political geographies: abjection and sovereign power.” political geography 107 (2023): 102949. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102949. franklin, adrian. “the adored and the abhorrent: nationalism and feral cats in england and australia.” in the routledge handbook of human–animal studies, edited by garry marvin and susan mchugh, 139–53. london: routledge, 2014. franklin, adrian. animal nation: the true story of animals and australia. sydney: unsw press, 2006. garvey, keith. dinkum little aussies. dubbo: macquarie publications, 1980. geiger, martha, and alice j. hovorka. “animal performativity: exploring the lives of donkeys in botswana.” environment and planning d: society and space 33, no. 6 (2015): 1098–117. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0263775815604922. gentle, m., cameron wilson, and john cuskelly. “feral pig management in australia: implications for disease control.” australian veterinary journal 100, no. 10 (2022): 492–95. https://doi. org/10.1111/avj.13198. govindrajan, radhika. animal intimacies. chicago: university of chicago press, 2018. gressier, catie. “going feral: wild meat consumption and the uncanny in melbourne, australia.” australian journal of anthropology 27, no. 1 (2016): 49–65. https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.12141. halberstam, jack. wild things: the disorder of desire. durham, nc: duke university press, 2020. haraway, donna j. when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008. haraway, donna, noboru ishikawa, scott f. gilbert, kenneth olwig, anna l. tsing, and nils bubandt. “anthropologists are talking — about the anthropocene.” ethnos 81, no. 3 (2016): 535–64. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 00141844.2015.1105838. hartigan, john, jr. shaving the beasts: wild horses and ritual in spain. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2020. hill, kristine, michelle szydlowski, sarah oxley heaney, and debbie busby. “uncivilized behaviors: how humans wield ‘feral’ to assert power (and control) over other species.” society & animals 31, no. 7 (2022): 907–25. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306bja10088. hollin, gregory, isla forsyth, eva giraud, and tracey potts. “(dis) entangling barad: materialisms and ethics.” social studies of science 47, no. 6 (2017): 918–41. https://doi. org/10.1177/0306312717728344. hone, jim. “how many feral pigs in australia? an update.” australian journal of zoology 67, no. 4 (2020): 215–20. https://doi.org/10.1071/zo20077. https://doi.org/10.1111/area.12839 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102949 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2023.102949 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815604922 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775815604922 https://doi.org/10.1111/avj.13198 https://doi.org/10.1111/avj.13198 https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.12141 https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2015.1105838 https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2015.1105838 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-bja10088 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-bja10088 https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312717728344 https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312717728344 https://doi.org/10.1071/zo20077 70 | keil , the feral at home humanimalia 15.2 (2025) hone, jim. applied population and community ecology: the case of feral pigs in australia. hoboken, nj: wileyblackwell, 2012. howell, philip. “hunting and animal– human history.” in the routledge companion to animal–human history, edited by hilda kean and philip howell, 446–73. london: routledge, 2018. hudson, laura. “the political animal: species-being and bare life.” mediations 23, no. 2 (2008): 88–117. ihar, zsuzanna. “multispecies mediations in a post-extractive zone.” in the promise of multispecies justice, edited by sophie chao, karen bolender, and eben kirksey, 205–26. durham, nc: duke university press, 2022. keil, paul g. the presence of elephants: sharing lives and landscapes in assam. london: routledge, 2024. keil, paul g. “rank atmospheres: the more-than-human scentspace and aesthetic of a pigdogging hunt.” the australian journal of anthropology 32 (2021): 96–113. https://doi.org/10.1111/ taja.12382. keil, paul g. “unmaking the feral: the shifting relationship between domestic–wild pigs and settler australians.” environmental humanities 15, no. 2 (2023): 19–38. https://doi. org/10.1215/22011919-10422267. kopnina, helen. “beyond multispecies ethnography: engaging with violence and animal rights in anthropology.” critique of anthropology 37, no. 3 (2017): 333–57. https://doi. org/10.1177/0308275x17723973. kalof, linda, and amy fitzgerald. “reading the trophy: exploring the display of dead animals in hunting magazines.” visual studies 18, no. 2 (2003): 112–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/147258603100 01631985. latimer, joanna. “being alongside: rethinking relations amongst different kinds.” theory, culture & society 30, nos. 7–8 (2013): 77–104. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276413500078. law, john, and marianne elisabeth lien. “slippery: field notes in empirical ontology.” social studies of science 43, no. 3 (2013): 363–78. https://doi. org/10.1177/0306312712456947. locke, piers. “elephants as persons, affective apprenticeship, and fieldwork with nonhuman informants in nepal.” hau: journal of ethnographic theory 7, no. 1 (2017): 353–76. https://doi. org/10.14318/hau7.1.024. lonkila, annika. “care-full research ethics in multispecies relations on dairy farms.” cultural geographies 28, no. 3 (2021): 479–93. https://doi. org/10.1177/1474474020987248. lorimer, jamie. wildlife in the anthropocene: conservation after nature. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2015. lu, donna. “world’s feral pigs produce as much co2 as 1.1m cars each year, study finds.” the guardian, 19 july 2021. https://www.theguardian.com/ environment/2021/jul/19/worlds-feralpigs-produce-as-much-co2-as-11mcars-each-year-study-finds struthers montford, kelly, and chloë taylor. “feral theory: editors’ introduction.” feral feminisms no. 6 (2016): 5–17. https://feralfeminisms. com/feralintroduction/ ogden, laura a. “the beaver diaspora: a thought experiment.” environmental humanities 10, no. 1 (2018): 63–85. https://doi.org/10.1215/220119194385471. palmer, alexandra, lauren willing, and laura mclaughlan. “holding discomfort: reducing polarisation around killing for conservation.” australian humanities review no. 73 (2025): 42–70. https://doi. org/10.56449/14685502. https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.12382 https://doi.org/10.1111/taja.12382 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10422267 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10422267 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x17723973 https://doi.org/10.1177/0308275x17723973 https://doi.org/10.1080/14725860310001631985 https://doi.org/10.1080/14725860310001631985 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413500078 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413500078 https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312712456947 https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312712456947 https://doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.024 https://doi.org/10.14318/hau7.1.024 https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474020987248 https://doi.org/10.1177/1474474020987248 https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/19/worlds-feral-pigs-produce-as-much-co2-as-11m-cars-each-year-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/19/worlds-feral-pigs-produce-as-much-co2-as-11m-cars-each-year-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/19/worlds-feral-pigs-produce-as-much-co2-as-11m-cars-each-year-study-finds https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/19/worlds-feral-pigs-produce-as-much-co2-as-11m-cars-each-year-study-finds https://feralfeminisms.com/feralintroduction/ https://feralfeminisms.com/feralintroduction/ https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-4385471 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-4385471 https://doi.org/10.56449/14685502 https://doi.org/10.56449/14685502 keil , the feral at home | 71 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) plumwood, val. “human vulnerability and the experience of being prey.” quadrant 39, no. 3 (1995): 29–34. ramírez, rafael, and jerome ravetz. “feral futures: zen and aesthetics.” futures 43, no. 4 (2011): 478–87. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2010.12.005. riley, sophie. “brighton v. will: the legal chasm between animal welfare and animal suffering.” animals 10, no. 9 (2020): 1497. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ani10091497. rose, deborah bird. reports from a wild country: ethics for decolonisation. sydney: unsw press, 2004. rose, deborah bird. “slowly: writing into the anthropocene.” text 17, spec. issue 20 (2013): 1–14. https://doi. org/10.52086/001c.28826. rowan, n.t., and tracy l. timmins. “the politics of naming feral: anthropocentric control and feral pigs in north america.” feral feminisms no. 6 (2016): 46–67. https://feralfeminisms. com/the-politics-of-naming-feral/. russell, nerida. “the domestication of anthropology.” in where the wild things are now: domestication reconsidered, edited by rebecca cassidy and molly mullin, 27–48. oxford: berg, 2007. rutherford, stephanie. “the anthropocene’s animal? coywolves as feral cotravelers.” environment and planning e: nature and space 1, nos. 1–2 (2018): 206–23. https://doi. org/10.1177/2514848618763250. schuurman, nora. “multispecies homescapes.” progress in human geography 48, no. 5 (2024): 655–68. https://doi. org/10.1177/03091325241240563. studnitz, merete, margit bak jensen, and lene juul pedersen. “why do pigs root and in what will they root?: a review on the exploratory behaviour of pigs in relation to environmental enrichment.” applied animal behaviour science 107, nos. 3–4 (2007): 183–97. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.applanim.2006.11.013. swart, sandra. “‘but where’s the bloody horse?’: textuality and corporeality in the ‘animal turn’.” journal of literary studies 23, no. 3 (2007): 271–92. https:// doi.org/10.1080/02564710701568121. tisdell, clement allan. wild pigs: environmental pest or economic resource? burlington: elsevier science, 1982. tsing, anna l., nils bubandt, elaine gan, and heather anne swanson, eds. arts of living on a damaged planet: ghosts and monsters of the anthropocene. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2017. tsing, anna l., jennifer deger, alder keleman saxena, and feifei zhou. feral atlas: the more-than-human anthropocene. stanford: stanford university press, 2021. wehr, nathaniel h., steven c. hess, and creighton m. litton. “biology and impacts of pacific islands invasive species. 14. sus scrofa, the feral pig (artiodactyla: suidae).” pacific science 72, no. 2 (2018): 177–98. https://doi. org/10.2984/72.2.1. willerslev, rane. “spirits as ‘ready to hand’: a phenomenological analysis of yukaghir spiritual knowledge and dreaming.” anthropological theory 4, no. 4 (2004): 395–418. https://doi. org/10.1177/1463499604047918. wilson, anna, david wilson, and libby robin. “the ought-ecology of ferals: an emerging dialogue in invasion biology and animal studies.” australian zoologist 39, no.1 (2017): 85–102. https:// doi.org/10.7882/az.2016.027. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2010.12.005 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.futures.2010.12.005 https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10091497 https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10091497 https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.28826 https://doi.org/10.52086/001c.28826 https://feralfeminisms.com/the-politics-of-naming-feral/ https://feralfeminisms.com/the-politics-of-naming-feral/ https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848618763250 https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848618763250 https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325241240563 https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325241240563 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2006.11.013 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2006.11.013 https://doi.org/10.1080/02564710701568121 https://doi.org/10.1080/02564710701568121 https://doi.org/10.2984/72.2.1 https://doi.org/10.2984/72.2.1 https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499604047918 https://doi.org/10.1177/1463499604047918 https://doi.org/10.7882/az.2016.027 https://doi.org/10.7882/az.2016.027 _hlk194320226 _hlk194051742 ray, review of o’key from anthroponormativity to creaturely ethics: rethinking animals as comparative literary subjects sreyashi ray review of: dominic o’key, creaturely forms in contemporary literature: narrating the war against animals. new horizons in contemporary writing. london: bloomsbury, 2022. viii + 202 pp., 4 b/w illus. £85.00 (hb), £28.99 (pb). sreyashi ray is a phd candidate in the department of asian and middle eastern studies at the university of minnesota, usa. email: rayxx356@umn.edu book review mailto:rayxx356@umn.edu what are the ways in which literary comparatists might reconceive animals as veritable subjects of transcultural comparison? how are cross-linguistic literary speculations about the spectral appearance of a prehistoric pterodactyl in postcolonial india, the killing of dogs in post-apartheid south africa, herring over-fishing in industrialized english seaside towns, and animal captivity in european zoological gardens interconnected? in creaturely forms in contemporary literature: narrating the war against animals, dominic o’key initiates a dialogue between two fields that are all too seldom brought together — comparative literature and animal studies — to determine the theoretical/ methodological frameworks that might interpret animal figures, produced across literary traditions and geopolitical concerns, through a shared set of critical coordinates. creaturely forms examines the formal and thematic innovations that prose fiction written across national, cultural, and linguistic differences use to articulate modernity’s “war against animals” (3). focusing on how literature grapples with the large-scale commoditization of animal lives and anthropogenic species extinction in contemporary contexts of global climate emergency, the book interrogates the mechanisms through which anthropocentric impulses of literature can be strategically manipulated to critique human exceptionalism. even though the idea of humanity’s “war against animals” might appear “hyperbolic” and “imprecise” (9) to some readers, as the author observes, the book’s central argument insists that the adoption of this phrase compels one to reconsider the multiscalar nature of the capitalist appropriation of interspecies relationships. o’key introduces the analytic “creaturely forms” to refer to literary narratives that “push up against the very limits of a form that prioritizes and produces human subjectivity, repurposing and remaking forms in order to re-form human-animal relations” (5). instead of invalidating the literary significance of human subjectivities or overturning anthropocentrism in favour of alternative forms of interspecies hierarchies, creaturely forms delineate the narrative strategies that represent the interconnectedness of human and animal lives. o’key focuses on animal figures in the works of w. g. sebald, j. m. coetzee, and mahasweta devi to show that they “dramatize copyright © 2023 sreyashi ray this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 253–262. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13895 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13895 ray, review of o’key | 255 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) encounters with and tensions between different figurations of animality” (6). even though all three authors accomplish this through their unique attentiveness to the questions of literary form, the common concerns resonating across their work make it possible to interrogate their writings within a comparative framework that challenges any uncritical consolidation and / or erasure of interspecies difference. in doing so, these authors not only communicate the intricacies of interspecies relationships and transspecies precarities, but also reveal “how constructed oppositions between the human and the animal are necessarily conjoined with other modalities of human marginalization” (4). o’key’s use of “creaturely” as a multivalent analytic to refer to the “aesthetic mediations of animals rather than the animal itself” (7) is attentive to the narratological construction of animal characters, the perceptions of human characters about these literary animals, the formal and thematic modifications implemented to accommodate the interactions of human and animal characters, and the manner in which these multispecies textual co-presences destabilize the anthroponormativity of literature. chapter 1, “the war against animals: reading for creaturely life”, expands on a contextually informed understanding of creatureliness that elaborates the theoretical arguments and methodological concerns that inform the rest of the book. it critiques the conjoined operations of the mass production and mass extinction of animals through processes like factory farming, capture fisheries, and industrial developmentalism to highlight how they collectively produce a reductive understanding of humanity. o’key maintains that a shift of focus from anthropocentrism to anthroponormativity is necessary because it shows that the widespread, multidirectional operations of human domination take place irrespective of whether humans are centrally positioned or decentred. anthroponormativity, as an analytical optic, not only investigates the circumstances in which human centring / de-centring unfolds, but also makes evident that the sustained production of the sovereign human subject is dependent on the production of subordinated animality. in this context, paying attention to the formal developments of literary genres is crucial for understanding how they might be implicated in upholding hierarchical humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 256 | ray, review of o’key differences between humans and animals. instead of arguing that writers like sebald, coetzee, and mahasweta “divest literature of its anthroponormativities” (29), o’key contends that their articulations of creaturely forms envision a “reconciliatory horizon” (37) where the dignified restoration of agentive animality is complemented by the critique of modernity’s appropriation of creaturely lives. chapter 2, “w. g. sebald’s creaturely melancholia”, focuses on sebald’s the rings of saturn and austerlitz to show that they foreground an ethics of creaturely awareness through interspecies encounters, exchanges of gaze, and shared suffering. o’key argues that sebald’s writings express a “creaturely poetics of connection” (42) through the remembrance of erstwhile interspecies intimacies fractured by industrial modernity. does the interpretation of fiction as “an ethico-aesthetic form of restitution” that develops a “creaturely melancholia” (43) accomplish anything beyond the nostalgic commemoration of threatened and exterminated animal lives? o’key shows that sebald’s use of formal strategies like first-person narration, dialectical natural-historical prose style, slow temporality, intertextuality, use of animals as metonymic signifiers, incorporation of black-and-white photographs and taxonomic illustrations, and use of lists, hypotaxis, and parataxis collectively disclose a more-thanhuman ethics. concomitantly, sebald’s attention to the themes of shared bodily vulnerabilities between humans and animals critiques cartesian dualism’s repudiation of animal vitalities. o’key focuses on a particular scene in the rings of saturn in which sebald’s narrator arrives at the dining-room of a hotel in an industrially declining english seaside town and orders a plate of fish and chips. sebald provides a trenchant description of the unappealing appearance and tastelessness of the cooked fish. according to o’key, the representations of the cooked fish as a “metonymic signifier of the disinvestment, deindustrialization and deprivation of english seaside towns” and as the “catalyst for a natural-historical narration of the north sea fishing industries” (58) become significant narrative acts that explicate the war against animals. in the novel, sebald supplements the natural history of herring fish with the zoological ray, review of o’key | 257 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) illustration of a cod fish, which deliberately misleads readers into assuming that the latter is a herring. o’key argues that “it is within this ambiguity of meaning, this momentary formal elision of the differences between herring and cod, that sebald crafts a more-than-human ethics” (64). he locates possibilities for the emergence of a morethan-human ethics in the failure to recognize the difference between a herring and a cod, where the failure symptomatizes the widespread dissociation between humanity and nature. he insists that this inability to differentiate is not “an individual failing on the part of the reader but a symptom of modernity’s wider instrumentalization and disregard for animal others” (64). however, o’key’s understanding of morethan-human ethics would have received greater clarity if the visual entanglement of the herring and the cod could have been explored more elaborately in terms of their entangled histories of exploitation. in austerlitz, on the other hand, creaturely ethics emerges through the gaze and other forms of embodied responses from animals. sebald explores the significance of the zoo as a site that animates the deteriorating relationship between modernity and nature through a focus on the embodied presence of captive animal figures. whether it is the psychopathological twitch of a racoon responding to their claustrophobic environment or the cautious stares of a fallow deer, o’key shows that in sebald’s novels, zoo animals become mirror reflections of the melancholia, alienation, loneliness, and disillusionments of the human characters. chapter 3, “j. m. coetzee’s creaturely trouble”, negotiates with the complexities of fictionalizing animal suffering through close readings of coetzee’s “textual experiment” in disgrace and elizabeth costello — “a multi-text investigation that attends simultaneously to the problem of writing fiction about animals and the problem of writing pro-animal thought into fiction” (89). in the case of disgrace, o’key pays attention to coetzee’s use of counterfocalization as a narrative strategy that recuperates the personhood of seemingly minor nonhuman characters like katy, the bulldog, and driepoot, the three-legged dog. building on gayatri spivak’s argument that coetzee deliberately focalizes the narrative from the perspective of humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 258 | ray, review of o’key its purported protagonist, david lurie, to lure the readers into imagining the possibilities of counterfocalization, o’key draws attention to the countervoice of lucy, david’s daughter. lucy performs a form of “personal postcolonial creatureliness” (98) by arguing in favour of an ethically reconstituted humanity which, instead of repudiating animals or relegating them to a subordinate position, redistributes privileges equitably across interspecies boundaries. lucy’s rejection of anthroponormativity, o’key argues, is communicated through her embrace of the similarities between her predicament and that of dogs. instead of repudiating humanity, lucy’s creatureliness reconceptualizes it through a rejection of colonial and liberal notions of personhood. in fact, o’key argues that her creatureliness destabilizes the anthroponormativity of the novel form through narrative speculations about human moral responsibilities associated with the euthanasia of dogs. this notion of creatureliness is significant because it shows that alongside the embodied presence of animals, whether as illustrated figures or literary characters — as was evident from the previous chapter’s analysis of sebald’s writings — the presence of human characters like lucy who negotiate with the imposed boundaries between characterization and depersonalization is also crucial for the explication of creaturely ethics. o’key observes that even though coetzee undertakes an empathetic characterization of a canine figure like driepoot, he also grapples with the fact that driepoot is one of many unwanted dogs whose deaths are inevitable. driepoot’s death is a necessary thematic improvisation for the narrative closure of disgrace: “the novel, as an anthropological machine, sacrifices the dog for its disgraced protagonist’s redemption” (103). however, instead of endorsing this “plotted story of [david’s] rehabilitation” (103), coeztee questions the sacrificial structure of the novel form which sanctions the killing of animal characters for the ethical recuperation of its human characters. in elizabeth costello, by contrast, coetzee transforms animal characters into ideas by foregrounding the animality of the novel’s eponymous human protagonist. o’key argues that costello’s awareness of her own embodied presence, coupled with her ruminations on ray, review of o’key | 259 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the precarity of animal lives (the dulgannon frogs, the sacrificial ram, penguins), reconciles her with her own animality. costello critiques the abstract and instrumentalist representation of animals as “mere figures” (110), because it forecloses ethical responsibility, but insists on engaging with the embodied presence of animals. and yet, as o’key notes, “the novel itself appears to rarely provide a ‘record of an engagement’ with nonhuman animals’’ (111). however, instead of diminishing animal presence through their transformation from characters to ideas, costello’s reflections on animal deaths through musings on the animality of her own body subvert the sacrificial logic of the novel form. alongside the emergence of creaturely ethics in this subversion, o’key also locates coetzee’s critique of anthroponormativity in his articulation of costello’s “singular, idiosyncratic and tactless” vegetarianism, characterized by “a minimal ethics, a compromised and complicit position” (117, 118). even though costello’s “troublesome vegetarianism” (114) risks reinstating the sacrificial logic by replacing the animality of the other-than-human animal with her own animality, it simultaneously “uncovers the deep structures of symbolic sacrifice that obtain within literary fiction itself” (119). thus, instead of completely repudiating the sacrificial economy of the novel form in elizabeth costello, o’key’s reading shows that coetzee’s politics of substitution limits the novel’s recourse to a creaturely ethics. chapter 4, “mahasweta devi’s creaturely love”, analyses how animal figures become conjoined with the political dehumanization of indigenous adivasi communities in postcolonial india through close readings of mahasweta devi’s short stories “fundamental rights and bhikari dusad”, “douloti, the bountiful”, “salt”, and “the hunt”, as well as the novella “pterodactyl, puran sahay and pirtha”. o’key addresses the contentious existence of humanity and animality as two discrete but interconnected discourses in these texts in terms of “creaturely love” (130). as a literary-aesthetic mode that mahasweta adopts in her writing to repudiate the environmental consequences of postcolonial developmentalism, creaturely love is “a barbed feeling, an affect which rips and scratches away, a love whose cultivation verges on the edge of catastrophe, preserving the differences between characters and social experiences while still building humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 260 | ray, review of o’key solidarity” (130). additionally, o’key invokes the figure of the inhuman to refer to the bare humanity of disenfranchised adivasis who are deprived of human rights and constitutional protection. in “fundamental rights and bhikari dusad”, for instance, a poor goatherd named bhikari realizes that he must forsake his political personhood and become an inhuman figure — “a creature of the forest” (133) — to survive. o’key differentiates between dehumanization and inhumanity, between those suffering from a loss of political humanity and those who are not even in a position to claim political humanity, to argue that the gap between political humanity and subjugated subjectivity also produces animality. according to o’key, inhumanity is “a perceived or enforced state of creaturely life” (134) and bhikari accesses his freedom by becoming “a creature of the forest” who enters “the non-political space of the nonhuman” (134). however, it becomes difficult to determine whether bhikari’s creaturely becoming is a consequence of his inhumanity or that of his dehumanization. o’key’s reading of bhikari not only reveals the ambiguity surrounding the differentiation of dehumanization and inhumanity, but also suggests an erasure of the differences between inhumanity and animality. this risks producing the inhuman and the (nonhuman) animal as interchangeable categories in a way that obscures the political lives of animals who are often prioritized over the subaltern communities who cohabit with them. even though o’key writes that he is aware of “the danger of portraying these characters as being somehow essentially or naturally interlinked with nature, thereby tacitly countersigning their own subjugation as creatures” (137), he does not explore this conundrum any further in his reading of “fundamental rights of bhikari dusad”. one way of reading the story is to pay attention to the fact that bhikari’s recourse to animality doesn’t address or provide a narrative resolution to the broader discourse on the complicated entanglements of care, kinship and violence involving goats as sacrificial animals implicated in both commercial and ritualistic killing in india. mahasweta deliberately stages this conundrum to show that the connotations of animality change depending on the caste, class, and religious dynamics of human-animal co-constitution in postcolonial india. ray, review of o’key | 261 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) o’key then explores “the contradictory valences of animality” (138) in mahasweta devi’s story “douloti, the bountiful”. in it, mahasweta focuses on how the bonded labourers, who are oppressed by feudal economic structures in postcolonial india, internalize their inhumanity. if some of them identify with the degradations of animal life when their feudal lords render them as less valuable than labouring animals, others feel apprehensive about being counted like domestic farm animals for the government census. o’key’s recognition of these “conflicting notions of animality” is accurate, but it stops short of elaborating how postcolonial interspecies hierarchies are bolstered through colonial legacies of racial and / or caste-based disenfranchisement in both instances. the notion of creaturely love that o’key articulates at the beginning of this chapter is represented most emphatically in the novella “pterodactyl, puran sahay and pirtha”. puran sahay is a journalist who arrives in the tribal village of pirtha in the state of madhya pradesh in india to report on the struggles of its resourceless inhabitants who are suffering from starvation. puran wants to draw public attention to the ecological degradation and lack of government or state initiatives for pirtha’s indigenous population. he meets bikhia, a boy from the village, the story of whose sightings and engravings of a prehistoric winged creature had drawn him to pirtha in the first place. they develop an unexpected bond through their individual and collective witnessing of the pterodactyl-like creature, the living and breathing reincarnation of pirtha’s tribal ancestor. according to o’key, mahasweta crafts an alternative form of bildungsroman in which puran’s character development is accomplished through his giving up of himself to the alterity of the pterodactyl. puran and bikhia’s collaborative care for the dying pterodactyl exemplifies a multispecies love which preserves the differences of the contradictory worlds of puran and bikhia, but also transcends “the entrenched ontological divisions between human, inhuman, and nonhuman” (155). through the process of witnessing the corporeal vulnerability of the dying creature, puran realizes that he must “relinquish the pterodactyl” (152). o’key argues that by rendering the pterodactyl as “small humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 262 | ray, review of o’key and minor” and by letting it die, mahasweta “ensures that the pterodactyl remains unincorporated into the orbit of understanding” (152). o’key’s reading of the pterodactyl as a “passive and ambiguous” character who “simply crumples and deteriorates” (149) suggests that the animal must die to affirm their incomprehensible alterity. o’key argues that unlike in disgrace, where the sacrifice of the animal character is pivotal for narrative resolution, the sacrifice of the pterodactyl signifies the continuity of puran’s ethical responsibility. however, the sacrificial logic that o’key provides doesn’t necessarily elevate the pterodactyl any more than driepoot in disgrace. if we read the pterodactyl’s radical alterity as something that surpasses his corporeal vulnerability, then it is possible to read how he challenges anthroponormativity of the literary form. in o’key’s reading, however, the pterodactyl’s alterity is circumscribed by his corporeal vulnerability, which arguably restores the sacrificial logic of the literary form. creaturely forms concludes by offering brief but precise analyses of more contemporary literary articulations of creatureliness in the hungry tide by amitav ghosh, animal’s people by indra sinha, animalia by jean-baptiste del amo, the wolf border by sarah hall, happiness by aminatta forna, the ministry of utmost happiness by arundhati roy, nineveh by henrietta rose-innes, and the overstory by richard powers. from foxes in the context of immigration enforcements in contemporary london to vultures in neoliberal india, from insects in post-apartheid south africa to trees in the contexts of environmental activism in north america, o’key shows that critical attention to the politics of literary form reveals the diversity of multispecies relations. focusing on wide-ranging forms and consequences of interspecies co-constitution across cultural contexts, creaturely forms delineates the continuities of capitalist appropriation across all these relations. by bringing the fields of comparative literature and animal studies into a productive dialogue with each other, creaturely forms argues convincingly in favour of acknowledging the importance of textual animals as serious, interventionist subjects of literary inquiry in the contexts of global environmental degradation. pepper, review of steiner copyright © 2024 angie pepper this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 188–196. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 letting beings be angie pepper review of: gary steiner, what we owe to nonhuman animals: the historical pretensions of reason and the ideal of felt kinship. routledge human–animal studies series. london: routledge, 2024. x + 269 pp. £36.99 (pb), £135.00 (hb). angie pepper is a senior lecturer in philosophy at the university of roehampton, london. email: angie.pepper@ roehampton.ac.uk book review http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 mailto:angie.pepper@roehampton.ac.uk mailto:angie.pepper@roehampton.ac.uk in what we owe to nonhuman animals, gary steiner presents an ambitious and challenging analysis of the history of western philosophy and contemporary animal ethics as a successor to that history. not content with charting the origins and ascendency of human exceptionalism in western thought, steiner lays the foundations for an alternative path, one in which we “open ourselves to the essential continuity that we share with the experience of nonhuman animals” (234). this alternative path, the ideal of felt kinship, takes emotion as essential to moral life and seeks to expand the horizons of the moral community to encompass all sentient creatures as genuine equals. for steiner, the western philosophical tradition is underpinned by a foundational anthropocentrism “according to which human beings are both unique and superior to all other sublunary beings” (4– 5). importantly, this foundation permeates all aspects of our lives and thinking and constitutes what steiner calls the anthropocentric background ideal of living (chapter 1). this ideal, steiner suggests, is both the product and the cause of a pathos of fear: a deep-rooted fear of vulnerability, uncertainty, and, ultimately, death. while all sentient animals are embodied, vulnerable, and mortal, these facts have driven humans, as a species, to find ways to distinguish ourselves from all other creatures. we have come to see nonhuman animal life as, to borrow from thomas hobbes, “nasty, brutish, and short” and we have sought, through the exercise of our capacity for reason to liberate ourselves (or so we believe) from the challenges that face mere beasts. this attempt to separate ourselves from the other animals, steiner reasons, is motivated by fear of our own fragility and has led to humans having an “inflated sense of our own nature and worth” (3). moreover, our fear of change and the unknown serves to reinforce and stabilize the anthropocentric ideal, making it not just difficult for us to want to do things differently but to even conceive of a non-anthropocentric orientation (14). according to steiner’s analysis, the elevation of reason and the denigration of emotion have been central to the establishment and maintenance of the anthropocentric ideal (chapter 2). from seneca copyright © 2024 angie pepper this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 1 (2024): 187–196. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.19619 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.19619 pepper, review of steiner | 189 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) to kant to descartes, our emotions have been viewed with deep suspicion for their tendency to breed irrationality and compromise the integrity of moral judgement. as a consequence, successive thinkers in the western tradition have sought to cleave reason from emotion. this has produced a commitment to what steiner calls the “eleatic conception” of reason, which requires detached abstraction from our lived experience as embodied, vulnerable creatures and “[purports] to take the human mind beyond its own purview and disclose something essential about the reality with which we find ourselves in contention” (109). crucially, by elevating reason in this way, we humans have drawn a hard line between ourselves and the other animals who, we have judged, are forever trapped in a world of immediacy, passion, and instinct. this ideological picture installs humans at the top of the moral hierarchy and reinforces the belief that we are the legitimate masters of all other animals and the natural world. with the historical analysis of the anthropocentric ideal complete, steiner offers an alternative driven by a pathos of humility. humility, he says, proceeds from a stance of openness, generosity, and modesty about what we do not and cannot know about other animals. more specifically, it demands that we embrace “letting beings be” (48) and resist the temptation to assume that we know what is in their best interests when in fact “the lives and capacities of nonhuman animals are a bit of a mystery” (46). importantly, this shift to a stance of openness and epistemic humility ushers in the rejection of the eleatic conception of reason. in its place, steiner offers us historical reason (chapter 3). inspired by josé ortega y gasset and john william miller, he posits that for historical reason “truth is not timeless but instead is inherently timebound” (207). though he thinks we should prefer historical reason to the eleatic conception, steiner suggests that previous advocates of historical reason have overlooked the importance of emotion. consequently, he argues (chapter 4) that “embodied, affective constitution is essential for providing reason with the orientation needed to ground and guide moral judgment” (105). to my mind, one of the virtues of steiner’s account is that while he is keen to stress “the extensive commonalities between human and humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 190 | pepper, review of steiner nonhuman animals, rather than their apparent differences” (217), he does not pretend (as some do) that there are no cognitive differences between some humans and other animals or that those differences don’t matter in normatively significant ways. for steiner, this recognition of sameness and difference comes together in the form of a well-tempered humanism (chapter 5); a kind of humanism that recognizes that we are perhaps the only creatures capable of evaluating our actions in terms of moral permissibility (223). crucially, well-tempered humanism differs from ill-tempered humanism in that it does not take the capacity for moral agency to be grounds for moral superiority and is guided by the pathos of humility over that of fear. even so, i found the tenor of the book decidedly gloomy. the careful and persuasive tracing of how and why anthropocentrism has dominated for “several millennia” (4), and the suggestion that “[a]lmost without exception” (206) contemporary animal advocates continue to be in its grip, leaves one with the depressing sense that shifting from the pathos of fear to a pathos of humility is a herculean task not suited to mere mortals. for if “very few people writing about the moral status of nonhuman animals today have taken any really effective measures to challenge [the anthropocentric] prejudice” (9), what hope is there? indeed, it is hard not to conclude that the desire to dominate is a permanent feature of human nature; a blemish that cannot be righted by the efforts of the exceptionally rare well-tempered humanist. maybe this is right — i’ll confess to sometimes succumbing to this bleak outlook. but this hopelessness should be resisted since it will only breed despair and apathy, neither of which will help the billions of animals who continue to be used and killed by us each year. contra steiner, i believe there are grounds for a quiet optimism, and i am not persuaded that contemporary animal ethics, and animal studies more broadly, are fundamentally in the grips of the anthropocentric ideal (though, of course, no one would doubt that a great many thinkers continue to be). these are relatively young disciplines, but they are emerging as urgent areas of philosophical enquiry and the work being done is robust, novel, and sophisticated. pepper, review of steiner | 191 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) animal ethics has traditionally been concerned with what duties individuals have to prevent nonhuman animal suffering, but the last twenty years have seen the emergence of the “political turn”1 and more recently the “agency turn”.2 while the political turn saw a shift in focus to considerations of justice and the structural and institutional dimensions of nonhuman animal exploitation, the agency turn demands that the capacity for self-willed action is recognized as normatively significant both in terms of what animals can do and what they are owed. with their sensitivity to the formal and informal ways that power conditions our relations to nonhuman animals, their emphasis on nonhuman self-determination, and the importance of including nonhuman voices, these disciplinary developments represent important departures from the anthropocentric ideal that steiner carefully elaborates. regrettably, steiner’s representation of contemporary animal ethics does not admit the full richness and variety of work being done. his limited discussion of the current literature is devoted chiefly to martha nussbaum and christine korsgaard. to be sure, nussbaum and korsgaard are both brilliant and esteemed philosophers who provide interesting frameworks for thinking about what we owe to nonhuman animals; frameworks that should not be dismissed out of hand. and their forays into animal ethics have made a significant contribution to legitimating the subfield as an area of serious philosophical enquiry. moreover, both authors are deeply inspired by aristotle and kant, and thus their positive views are intimately bound up with the intellectual traditions that steiner is rightly critical of. 1 for works discussing the political turn in animal ethics, see tony milligan, “the political turn in animal rights”, politics and animals 1 (2015): 6–15; robert garner and siobhan o’sullivan, eds., the political turn in animal ethics (lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2016); and alasdair cochrane, robert garner, and siobhan o’sullivan, “animal ethics and the political”, critical review of international social and political philosophy 21, no. 2 (2018): 261–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2016.1194583. 2 the agency turn in animal ethics is a recent development. for some key works in this area see natalie thomas, animal ethics and the autonomous animal self (london: palgrave macmillan, 2016); marc g. wilcox, “animals and the agency account of moral status”, philosophical studies: an international journal for philosophy in the analytic tradition 177, no. 7 (2020): 1879–99; charlotte e. blattner, sue donaldson, and ryan wilcox. “animal agency in community”, politics and animals 6 (2020): 1–22; and richard healey and angie pepper, “interspecies justice: agency, self-determination, and assent”, philosophical studies: an international journal for philosophy in the analytic tradition 178 (2020): 1223–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2016.1194583 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 192 | pepper, review of steiner however, steiner’s decision to focus on nussbaum and korsgaard is likely to raise a few eyebrows among those working in animal ethics. both authors are notorious for citing very few works in animal ethics, or animal studies more broadly, which problematizes their inclusion as representative of the field. it is quite unfair to judge the entirety of the work being done in animal ethics based on the missteps of two philosophers who are seemingly operating outside of that literature. worse still, for steiner’s analysis of contemporary animal ethics, nussbaum and korsgaard will seem to many like low-hanging fruit because the inconsistencies and anthropocentric flaws in their views are well-documented. this means that steiner’s critique holds no surprises for the reader already immersed in the current literature. what does come as a surprise, however, is that steiner repeatedly asserts that sue donaldson and will kymlicka’s influential work zoopolis: a political theory of animal rights (2011) is also anthropocentric. unlike nussbaum and korsgaard, donaldson and kymlicka are very much representative of the discipline and few others have influenced the scholarship being done in this area as they have. indeed, their work has been at the forefront of both the political and agency turns and their meticulous engagement with advocates and critics of their work has shaped a whole generation of thinkers. given this, steiner’s rejection of their work is striking and, if his analysis is correct, it would have significant implications for the current state of the discipline. to understand steiner’s accusation of anthropocentric bias in donaldson and kymlicka’s work, we need to take a few steps back. early on in the book, he proposes that a philosopher’s view on pet-keeping offers us a “very simple litmus test” (13) of whether they are committed to an anthropocentric background ideal of living, and he suggests that philosophers who claim that “pet ownership is (or can in principle be) to the advantage of nonhuman animals [are], if only unwittingly, succumbing to an anthropocentric prejudice” (13). for steiner, the practice of pet keeping is inherently unjust because it denies animals their freedom and entails a commitment to a moral hierarchy in which humans are assumed to have superiority over other animals. pepper, review of steiner | 193 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) accordingly, steiner accuses donaldson and kymlicka of “proceeding from a place of fear” (49) since their work calls for the inclusion of domesticated animals as full members of the political community as opposed to “letting beings be” (49). he further suggests that their fear of a future without domesticated animals leads them to “operate within an essentially anthropocentric worldview” (252). the basic thought seems to be that donaldson and kymlicka’s model of interspecies justice, which regards domesticated animals as already members of the political community and advocates for the formal recognition of that fact, is nonetheless underpinned by a moral hierarchy that privileges humans over other animals. to my mind, this challenge is ill-founded and underdefended. unlike most of the other authors he entertains, steiner does not offer a detailed summary of donaldson and kymlicka’s position — a position they have developed and defended in numerous works beyond zoopolis — and there is no close engagement with their theoretical commitments or motivations. this is problematic because donaldson and kymlicka are quite clear that they are not concerned about keeping domesticated animals with us for our sake but rather in recognition that those animals have, like human citizens, a right to remain in and shape their political communities. moreover, the zoopolitical vision developed by donaldson and kymlicka is clearly guided by the kind of humility expounded by steiner. recall that the pathos of humility is characterized by openness, generosity, and modesty with regard to what we know of other animals, and to what we can know about them given our own limited epistemic capacities. now consider the following: [t]o know what justice requires in our relations with [domesticated animals], we need to know whether and how they want to relate to us. but we do not yet know this, and we cannot know it without the direct participation of animals themselves. […] our knowledge of [domesticated animals] — their needs, interests, or potential ways of flourishing — is deeply impoverished by bias, self-interest and failure to recognize how their ways of being are profoundly shaped by the ways we stunt their humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 194 | pepper, review of steiner opportunities. […] they are the experts on many dimensions of their individual subjective good, and we can only access this knowledge if they are able to engage in processes of exploration, contestation, and self-representation.3 in this passage, donaldson makes it clear that her and kymlicka’s zoopolitical vision starts with humility about what we know of the animals with whom we share our homes and societies. we have very little idea about what domesticated animals want or what they would opt for were they given a genuine choice. importantly, for donaldson and kymlicka’s project, we have to accept that we cannot know the answer to the question of how we should live with domesticated animals in advance. that question can only be answered by the other animals themselves and we must find ways of enabling their agency so that those animals may choose for themselves. this brings us to something of an impasse: on the one hand, we have steiner telling us that since we cannot know the minds of other animals and what is good for them, we should let them be. this entails discontinuing all uses of animals and thereby ending the practices and processes of domestication, including the practice of keeping animals as companions (49). on the other hand, we have donaldson and kymlicka telling us that since we do not yet know the minds of domesticated animals, we must enable their political agency. this means that we cannot simply assume that domesticated animals have no interest in or preference to live with humans. rather, we must educate and socialize domesticated animals so they can make an informed choice about their future with us. as it happens, i agree with steiner’s conclusion that animals are owed more than being “subsumed under human administration” (252). however, the assertion that it is unjust because animals might have chosen otherwise is insufficient to show what is wrong with donaldson and kymlicka’s view. this is because, as we have seen, they will respond that animals might choose to live with us under our administration (and indeed the forebears of many domesticated 3 sue donaldson, “animal agora: animal citizens and the democratic challenge”, social theory and practice 46, no. 4 (2020), 717–18. pepper, review of steiner | 195 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) species did!). to claim we know otherwise is to arrogantly assume the authority to speak on behalf of animals, thereby disregarding the very ethos of humility that steiner is advocating. so, a more compelling critique will require a careful elaboration and evaluation of their argument. specifically, we must take the zoopolitical account on its own terms and show how multispecies citizenship cannot transform human tyranny into legitimate political authority as they suggest. to help us with that task, steiner does offer some provocative remarks that might be developed to motivate an alternative abolitionist path to the zoopolitical vision set out by donaldson and kymlicka. for one, he is keen to emphasize that social justice, which has been the preoccupation of contemporary political philosophy, must be distinguished from cosmic justice (47). in animals and the moral community (2008), where he develops this distinction more fully, steiner argues that the liberal paradigm of social justice involves rational agents entering a social contract and is fundamentally anthropocentric.4 thus, social justice is the justice of human affairs and pertains only to inter-human relations. cosmic justice, by contrast, is wider in scope and independent of human artifice. “to affirm cosmic justice”, he argues, “is to abandon our fantasy of being ‘the masters and possessors of nature.’ it is to let animals be in such a way that we no longer project upon them a diminished reflection of our own image but instead value their mortality as we value our own.”5 what matters for cosmic justice is that humans take their place as equal to other species in the cosmic community and orient themselves accordingly. while social justice — the justice of human affairs — is important, it must ultimately be incorporated within the wider cosmos of being. though he doesn’t say so explicitly, i take steiner’s commitment to cosmic justice to suggest that, for him, the paradigm of social justice cannot be revised through a non-anthropocentric lens (which implies that much of the writing in the political turn has gone awry). this is because our institutional arrangements, the ones that we impose upon other animals, are inherently hierarchical. in these 4 gary steiner, animals and the moral community: mental life, moral status, and kinship (new york: columbia university press, 2008), 120–21. 5 steiner, animals and the moral community, 163. humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 196 | pepper, review of steiner institutions, animals are systematically subordinate to humans in terms of their social status, their power, and their vulnerability. one important implication of this is that what we owe to other animals is cosmic, not social, justice. though this suggestion seems at odds with much of the work that has come out of the political turn in animal ethics, i think steiner is on to something. if we couple steiner’s suggestion that animals are not owed social justice, with his admission that robust moral agency seems peculiar to some human beings, we have good reason to be suspicious about attempts to legitimate our existing institutional arrangements involving nonhuman animals — no matter how many reforms we make to those institutions. if only some humans have access to, and understanding of, a level of social organization that most, if not all, other animals do not, this makes our institutional relationships with other animals inherently asymmetrical. it is we who evaluate the institutional structures that organize our collective life, we who have the power to determine how those structures will be in the future, and we who are responsible for bringing about institutional change. with this last point in mind, steiner’s concerns about our “self-serving prejudice” (239) take on a special weight. even if we find ways to enable domesticated animal agency, create mechanisms that allow their voice to shape law and policy, and foster meaningful opportunities for them to exit their relations with us, none of these steps fully mitigate the fundamental asymmetry that exists between us and the other animals who are subject to institutionalized relations of power. all of this gives us a reason to prefer steiner’s commitment “to letting beings be” over seeking justice for them within human– nonhuman animal polities. in closing, steiner presents us with a compelling account of how the anthropocentric ideal came to dominate thinking in the western philosophical tradition. while his critical remarks about the state of contemporary animal ethics don’t always hit their mark, the book is nonetheless an important contribution that must be reckoned with by all those thinking about what we owe to nonhuman animals. vaught, adults together adults together mares, women, and the enduring constraints on mature multispecies relations jeannette vaught california state university, los angeles humanimalia 13.2 (spring 2023) abstract: americans who spend time with common mammalian companion animals do not typically spend much time around reproductively mature animals, as laws and cultures support the widespread spaying and neutering of pets (with some significant exceptions). however, one important population of humans and animals does not entirely match this trend: horse people. while male companion horses are very commonly castrated, or “gelded”, female horses are almost universally allowed to mature into fully reproductive individuals. for many animal enthusiasts, mares are the only reproductively mature mammals other than humans that they ever spend time with. this lack of experience with full animal maturity, in its physical and behavioural senses, has shaped human paradigms for relating to mares. the female body of the companion horse, then, because it is at once fully chaste and also fully sexualized unlike any other nonhuman body most humans are exposed to, is both a body to be managed and a uniquely effective screen on which to project complex cultural values and gendered anxieties. starting with an interdisciplinary examination of the veterinary practice of pharmaceutically regulating mares’ hormones, followed by an analysis of public discourses in art, literature, and social media that interpellate relationships between mares and women, this essay argues that contemporary techniques of disciplining the sexual maturity of mares have deep historical and cultural roots. this essay also expands a growing body of work that includes material multispecies relationships within sexuality studies. by attending to the strategies through which full adulthood and maturity are not afforded to companion animals, we can see how stubborn patriarchal patterns become persistently embedded in familial multispecies relationships. keywords: mare, horse, twitter, edwin landseer, regu-mate, annie gilbert, john solomon rarey, sexuality, maturity, multispecies, horse training, veterinarian, pharmaceutical bio: jeannette vaught is a lifelong horsewoman and a former equine veterinary technician. she holds a phd in american studies and teaches at california state university, los angeles. she writes about a wide range of topics that can be found at the intersection of animals, agriculture, and technology. email: jvaught@calstatela.edu orcid: 0000-0002-2767-0042 copyright © 2023 jeannette vaught this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 121–160. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13276 mailto:jvaught@calstatela.edu https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2767-0042 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13276 vaught, adults together | 123 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) i used to spend a lot of time with a wonderful horse who would frequently ask his closest humans to hold his tongue. he would look right at you, stick out his tongue, and gently place it right on your torso between your chin and your sternum. not licking, mind, but just there. if you didn’t respond by grasping it, he’d start to nudge your chest with increasing force. he didn’t want to rest his tongue on you, he wanted you to hold it. horse tongues are large, thick, and muscular, fitting their size and eating habits. it is an uncanny and disorienting part of the body to touch (who touches a tongue? even your own tongue? with your hands?). this request was always funny, and always incredibly strange, but it was clear he derived great comfort from it. he would rest his eyes, stand stock still, and just breathe his big slow horse breaths. the gesture never failed to result in absolute stillness between human and horse, just breathing, for a few minutes. i would often find myself closing my own eyes, allowing myself to forget the strangeness of this odd intimacy, not trying to put words around it, and surrendering to the connection it fostered. i was a teenager then, and it felt both wrong and right, but many adolescent experiences felt both wrong and right, and i wonder now if i would have responded differently to this intimacy at other times in life. but interpretation aside, it felt good for horse and human in ways that neither of us — for different species-specific reasons — could speak about, and in that sense, it united us in those moments simply as two barn-bound beings with bodies and desires that extended into but also well beyond the realm of sex. in the horse’s case, sex was no stranger; he was a breeding stallion. his life was entirely shaped by the preservation of his body so he could safely produce and ejaculate semen. his living space and daily schedule prioritized his sexual labour in order to suit the desires of humans who wanted to create more horses. i was there as part of this professional management. i was paid to work at the barn, keeping his stall clean and giving him exercise, and taking care of the other horses who lived there. several other humans were also intimately involved in the bodily functions of this commercial sex enterprise.1 in this context, 1 for a more detailed account of the multispecies sexual labour of the breeding shed, see vaught, “how to make a horse have an orgasm”. 124 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) human contact with the stallion’s sexual organs and human orchestration of his sexual behaviour were not seen as unseemly — it was work. but in this limited, circumscribed, highly controlled and sexualized life, his asking of a teenage girl to hold his tongue while she cleaned his living quarters seemed to be the more uncomfortably transgressive action. it was sensitive and personal. it could not be contained by the bounds of his commercial utility to humans. it had literally nothing to do with the sex that saturated his existence. having his tongue held was a way for him to break from those constraints and be known, even if just for a little while before we had to go back to work. this essay is not about that horse, or even about stallions, but about mares and women. it has been pointed out to me that it is perhaps counterproductive to the aims of this essay to begin an essay about mares with a story about a stallion — a critique to which i concede. but i nevertheless begin with this anecdote because it is a key origin point for the kinds of questions this essay pursues about what affinities are possible between sexually mature humans and horses, and how human attention to the constraints we erect around gender, and around human and animal sexuality, can help excavate and expand better possibilities to build horse–human relationships in ways that are not often thought to be possible given these constraints. the kind of relating i describe above was made possible in part by the fact that the horse in question was a stallion, whose gentle transgressions could be accepted in a way that a mare’s might not have been. this essay explores how forging and maintaining human–horse affinities often replicates and imposes harmful limits on what kinds of relationships are possible, particularly with mares. and for many women and other humans who might otherwise define themselves somewhere along the feminist spectrum, these relationships expose how quickly one reaches the limits of feminist praxis when it comes to relationships with animals, particularly ones who are mature.2 2 i would argue this is an issue of particular relevance to white feminism, which tracks both with the whiteness of mainstream european / euro-american horse cultures, and with the much longer traditions among feminists of colour to pursue expansive, relational, more-than-human feminisms. vaught, adults together | 125 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) in prior essays on the equine breeding shed, i have foregrounded the shared experiences of humans and breeding stallions, in part because this is where my own lived experience in these spaces came from. i learned a lot about stallions because of the proximity of our workspaces and the centring and protection of their semen as the literal well from which breeding businesses spring. thinking memories, practices, and experiences through the interdisciplinary lenses of multispecies ethnography, animal history, and gender and sexuality studies has opened up space to grapple openly with contemporary social, narrative, and technical structures that police the intermingling of human and equine bodies. writing about equine cloning, however, showed me how even the management of a nonsexual process can be heavily influenced by human sexual anxieties, and the material realities of that practice can be shaped by — even created by —its narrative interpretation.3 in turn, this led me to think about the management of equine sexual lives beyond the breeding shed, where sexual behaviours and activities are excised out of human–horse and horse–horse relationships. it struck me that human–animal relationships in which sex is present are quite rare compared to those where it is not. but sexuality is of course present in all. so, in terms of sexuality, what are humans doing with the horses who are not having sex? human–horse affinities, along with those between humans and other nonhuman companions, must invariably define and enforce parameters around sex and sexual maturity. however, for the last half-century or so, as susan mchugh has shown, contending with sexual maturity in companion animals in the united states has been largely a one-way street leading towards near-total human control of animal sexuality. this has been accomplished through the human removal of nonhuman sexual organs and behaviours from shared spaces and public view.4 sexual maturity in companion animals generally exists at one of these human-controlled extremes: it is either surgically removed, or it is the defining feature of a commodity-producing human / nonhuman labour structure. desexing surgeries are a key technology for creating permissible conditions for humans and 3 vaught, “a question of sex”, 98–132. 4 mchugh, animal stories, 115–26. 126 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) companion animals to live together, effectively excising sexuality as a dimension to their relationships. for breeding animals, whether those on factory farms or stallions like my tongue-wielding friend, their sexuality remains intact only to be commercially appropriated for human use. in both cases, their bodies, behaviours, and sex acts are kept segregated from most public human and nonhuman shared spaces, and sexual choices and expressions are directed by humans. as animal reproduction has consistently been outsourced to professional and commercial domains hidden from public view, “humane” relationships between humans and nonhumans have come to be distinguished by a strong deterrence of sex and sexual behaviours. welfare activism on behalf of farmed animals, for example, has a powerful focus on the reproductive abuses of animal bodies and the intersectional abuses of vulnerable humans and animals who, in the name of food production, get roped together into exploitative forms of sexual labour.5 over time, an oppositional binary has come to describe profit-driven reproduction on one side and caredriven companionship on the other. yet companionship, which appears to be the “humane” side of this binary, is no less constructed and enforced through human control of reproductive potential. such “humane” companion relationships are in large part predicated on managing sexual maturity by erasing the sexual lives of animals and withholding human affection from animals whose sexual behaviours distract from human pursuits. mchugh reminds us that the management of affection is a key feature of the de-sexing rhetoric that functions alongside rhetorics of human responsibility for an animal’s safety and comfort. in the logic of desexing, which precludes a companion animal having sex with a member of its own species, “affection,” mchugh writes, “is conceived of as not prevented (among animals) so much as aided (between pets and people) by veterinary surgery.”6 humans tend to care much less about the first part of this logic — the subjective consequences of 5 see, for example, blanchette, “herding species”, and artist lynn mowson’s “speaking meat” and “boobscape” projects at lynnmowson.com. 6 mchugh, animal stories, 128. http://lynnmowson.com vaught, adults together | 127 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the removal of sex and sexuality from an animal’s life — than they do about the second: the attention which they jealously guard. it is this connection between desexing and affinity which pointed me towards mares for this essay. for horses as much as home-bound pets, sexual maturity appears to be a chief threat to the contemporary arrangements of multispecies sociality. as it happens, policing sexuality in non-breeding male horses has proven to be very effective and largely noncontroversial. most male horses are castrated at a young age, and such horses, called geldings, generally integrate easily into the european and north american companion horse cultures that prize the absence of sexual features and behaviours. despite the strong cultural preference for equine asexuality, however, mares are very rarely prevented from reaching reproductive maturity. unlike most domestic animals of both sexes, especially cats and dogs, who routinely undergo surgical removal of reproductive organs in order to enter into human families, it is not routine to surgically alter female horses regardless of whether humans intend to breed the mare or not. in the twenty-first century, for many humans who are involved with animals for companionship, pleasure, and competition, mares are the only reproductively mature female mammals besides women that they spend time with. here we have a situation where the sexual behaviour of mares — primarily their oestrus cycles and the behaviours that accompany them — become seen as a disruption to a “norm” of nonsexuality. when the behaviour of sexually mature mares gets in the way of their relationships with humans, it is regularly maligned as a detriment of character and positioned as a problem to be solved. and for a large number of women whose companion horses are mares, the fact that they share ovulatory cycles and their accompanying discomforts has unfortunately not led to multispecies solidarity or a liberating interpretation of sexuality and its biological and social expressions. women and people with ovaries and uteruses are generally just as likely to participate in the sexual degradation of mares as are men.7 7 johnson, “maritude”, 119–34. 128 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) such a situation leaves little room to learn about or explore the actual sexuality of reproductively mature animals. the paucity of interpretive options means that the hierarchies of power that govern the relationships of sexually mature humans and nonhumans often go unmarked, unspoken, and therefore unchallenged and unchanged. this is where gender studies, queer studies, and animal studies together can help expose how current and historical rhetorics, representations, and practices reveal how often current norms replicate power relations that we might not think we believe in or support in other contexts. in this light, the severe restrictions imposed on the ability of many companion animals, including horses, to live full adult lives might seem antiquated, outdated, or even unjust. hopefully shedding light on constrained sexuality as a complex site of multispecies relational analysis can expand the possibilities for ethical ways of living together for the benefit of both humans and horses.8 this essay explores how the bodies of non-breeding companion mares, who ostensibly live lives of utmost sexual chastity, are nevertheless subject to human sexual control, and furthermore how female sexual maturity writ large is interpreted through representation with horses. because it is at once fully chaste and fully sexual, unlike any other nonhuman body most humans are exposed to, the female body of the companion horse is both a body to be managed and a uniquely effective screen onto which to project complex cultural values and gendered anxieties. this essay will trace historical and contemporary interventions that humans have constructed in order to blunt, disparage, or twist the bodies of mares into markers of unruly femininity and feminine sexuality. it will further show how both the literal and representational affections and affinities between humans and mares are built upon the prude blunting of their sexualities. such interventions — whether they be pharmaceutical, representational, or digitally mediated, as each of the following sections of this essay takes on — expose the existence of unexplored subjective dimensions to our equine companions that have 8 several authors are making brilliant inroads into queer and animal studies with an eye towards more ethical multispecies futures. see, for example, chen, animacies; rosenberg, “how meat changed sex”; parreñas, decolonizing extinction. vaught, adults together | 129 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) been hidden by such constraints. the central project of this essay is to facilitate conditions under which we can ask, what other possibilities are there for relating to mares that have been foreclosed by our current norms? can we envision a world in which these foreclosures are not seen as necessary? and what might it look like to create more space for animal sexuality in our shared lives outside of the unilaterally segregated boundaries that currently exist? i do not have concrete answers. here, i draw from multispecies, feminist, and queer possibilities of co-existing in order to interrogate norms of human prudishness about companion animal sexuality (with full respect to the fact that these norms differ from region to region, and are particularly potent in the united states), and to show, where they exist, how these norms are tied to the demand that companion animals relate most closely to the humans who claim them. the unique role of mares offers and opportunity to understand the overall limits of existing norms for mares, women, and feminine people. to be clear, in this and other essays i’ve written that explore the sexual dimensions of animal and human lives, i am not suggesting or advocating for a world in which humans and horses have sexual relations with each other. but the very fact that this has been suggested to me as a “logical conclusion” to my paths of inquiry reveals the extreme narrowness of knowledge and imagination that most people have about the myriad roles of sexuality in their own lives, not to mention its centrality to the experiences and subjectivities of nonhuman beings and the idea that nonhuman beings might pursue relations with other nonhumans.9 if the only response that some people can come up with to my question, “what does it look like if we do not unilaterally segregate and / or preclude animal sexuality as a category in human lives with animals?” is, “does that mean you are saying that people and animals should have sex?” this just proves to me that human and animal sexualities need to be all the more thoroughly 9 the essays contained in indigenous anthropologist kim tallbear’s critical polyamorist blog offer many lessons in understanding why “western” and scientific binaries erected between human / animal, male / female, and monogamy / non-monogamy contribute to this narrow worldview. 130 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) and unflinchingly examined.10 i am not asking us all to have sex. i am asking: what would it take, and what might it look like, for us all to live together, as adults? regu-mate and the mythology of the “moody” mare in contemporary north american horse cultures, the human expectations for how to spend time with non-breeding horses are largely circumscribed by externally determined schedules. regardless of their sex, horses in these structures are expected to behave the same way every day in order to conform to the schedules of humans: lesson horses need to be willing to be ridden at lesson time; horses owned by working amateurs need to be ready to ride when that human can make room in their schedule; humans who like to attend horse shows expect their horses to be ready to load on the trailer and be ridden when the show happens. as noted above, many of the horses in these roles are geldings. the surgical alterations they have undergone, provided they were gelded at a young age, arrest their sexual development. while their bodies are fully adult, their hormonal development is stunted so that they do not develop and exhibit the sexual behaviours of stallions. individual exceptions abound, but on the whole desexing makes most geldings sexually immature, and thus generally compliant and human-schedule-friendly. horses born with female sex organs, however, do not typically undergo surgical alteration. while removing testicles is often an uncomplicated, inexpensive outpatient surgery, removing ovaries is an expensive invasive surgery that comes with more risk to large equine bodies (in comparison to dogs and cats), and thus fewer veterinarians have the necessary surgical training or facilities. mixed-sex companion horse barns are therefore often populated by sexually immature males and sexually mature mares, both living in utmost chastity. in this context, the mares’ sexuality is often interpreted as a disruption. like in women and any person with a uterus, oestrus cycles in 10 however, if you are interested in exploring ideas about shared sexualized intimacies with domestic companion animals, perhaps a good first stop is carolee schneemann’s video installation, “infinity kisses” (2008). additionally, kari weil discusses the patriarchal dimensions of bestial taboos in “miss mazeppa and the horse with no name.” vaught, adults together | 131 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) horses can cause abdominal tenderness, internal pain, and changes in mood, including a strong desire for privacy. pain and discomfort during oestrus causes mares to react negatively — understandably so — to grooming and riding, which requires abdominal exertion of painful muscles and also much human touching of sensitive equine flanks. accompanying hormonal fluctuations can send mares into expansive desirous vocalizations, which can be extremely loud and frequent, and can be directed at every horse within range. mares in oestrus will also frequently lift their tails towards other horses and urinate frequently to signal their sexual interest. oestrus can also increase head tossing and leg striking behaviours, and some mares may aggressively lunge or kick at other horses who approach them. all of these behaviours, while perfectly explainable, leave many human handlers embarrassed and inconvenienced, if not outright angry, or even physically injured. these conditions tend to foster conflicts between humans and mares, which are couched in terms of the human’s responsibility to control, even to punish, a mare’s lusty expressions of sexuality in order to protect the safety of themselves and others. in much of the horse world, if a mare displays the hallmarks of sexual behaviour in public, it is commonly interpreted as a poor reflection on the human handler. the equation of responsible companion human-animal stewardship with the control of nonhuman reproductive behaviours is quite familiar from the last half-century or so of spay / neuter campaigns directed toward domestic pets. removing sex and sexual behaviours from the lives of animal companions has become a normative feature of human–animal relations that occur at close quarters. spay and neuter surgeries had been available to companion pet owners since the early twentieth century, but campaigns to promote them in the us ramped up significantly in the 1970s, around the same time that some women gained the ability to control their own pregnancies through hormonal birth control. it was during this time period that the protection from sex and pregnancy which these surgeries offered became directly attached to larger discourses of animal welfare and 132 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) safety, and to definitions of responsible human care of animals.11 the spectacular success of these campaigns has made spay and neuter surgeries nearly synonymous, for many, with responsible companion animal care. indeed, it is almost a prerequisite for the acquisition of animal “personhood” that accompanies a move into a multispecies home, and whether or not they receive human affection is to a large degree dependent on the companion animal’s ability to behave “appropriately” — in that they seek nonsexual attention from other animals and nonsexual attention from us humans and the homes we provide (and, of course, our own human sexual sovereignty is uncontested in this formulation). in this framework, it is a very easy logical step to define companion horses’ sexual behaviours as unsafe, and not just in the sense of the bodily danger posed by the exuberant and energetic physicality of sexually mature mares. it is also unsafe for the relationship between human and horse — an affinity that is revealed, in these instances, to be held together by equine compliance with human expectations of “appropriate” behaviour. astute observers may note that the reproductive control of cats and dogs rests on a different issue than the control of horse reproduction. cats and dogs can produce many offspring at a time, for one, and those living on the margins of domestic human lives have more opportunities to find sexual partners in ways that most companion horses do not. by contrast, horse people have never been able to lean on population-control reasoning to justify reproductive alterations. while the horse world has its share of equine population issues, widespread uncontrolled or “accidental” pregnancies are not among them in domestic settings.12 yet desexing surgeries in any historical context limit not only pregnancies but also the social relations between animals that would have included homospeciative sex. not only nonhuman populations but also behaviours are shaped to conform to human-defined domestic and social standards through desexing, and even the earliest pet desexing campaigns were tied directly to social control as much as biological 11 mchugh, animal stories, 116. 12 feral horse populations in the western states, along with overbreeding of thoroughbreds and quarter horses, are serious but separate issues. vaught, adults together | 133 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) control. “gonadectomies”, mchugh reminds us, sprang from human eugenic policies, and “initially were implemented in order to control populations in ways that primarily served human self-interests.”13 humans making these decisions for the animals they care for are thus cast as responsible for the health and safety of their pets, and also for the consequences of their pets’ “bad” sexual actions. the easiest resolution to this problem of responsibility, in mchugh’s analysis, has come to be “sexually altering the animals with whom we choose to share our lives.”14 this “responsible” human act of intervention into the shape and scope of their animals’ love lives and sexualities contributes to conceiving of pets as part of one’s “suburban furniture”, in mchugh’s evocative phrase — as a vital but also eminently controllable and inoffensive part of one’s domestic space.15 with the prospect of sex out of the picture, and animal desires physically blunted, humans and their companion animals can pursue heterospeciative forms of love and affinity between and around each other that do not threaten a surgically enforced sexual innocence. such are the expected norms for human–animal companionship. the recent vogue for referring to domestic pets as “fur children” reveals the extent to which domestic companions are expected to remain forever immature and permanently under human control in order to receive parental, not adult, love.16 the parent / child analogy of the term also deflects any potential for animal sexuality to poke through in this companion relationship: it facilitates and reinforces the necessity of non-sexual heterospeciative relations by situating sexuality alongside incest, effectively making it taboo. population control is, under such conditions, at best a side effect of the social control that gonadectomies provide to pets and their companion humans. in this regard, companion horses find themselves roped into much the same logic as domestic pets. despite the fact that companion horses, unlike most pet animals, live outside the human home and do not have 13 mchugh, animal stories, 116. 14 mchugh, animal stories, 115. 15 mchugh, animal stories, 17. 16 for a fascinating ethnography documents the precarity of companion animals as members of multispecies families, see shir-vertesh, “flexible personhood”. 134 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the same potential to “overpopulate” as pets do, they are equally subject to the easiest available tools of reproductive control. mares — lusty and intact, not succeeding in normative orientation to humans as either child or furniture — find themselves on the outs. for mares, the enforced control and erasure of sex and sexuality is all too often a clear prerequisite for human affection. a 2017 article in the chronicle of the horse, one of the most widely read publications across the diverse professional and amateur equine industries, described the conflict in these terms: “everybody knows a moody mare, the one who comes into heat at every show and can’t focus on her job because she’s whinnying and flirting with the boys.”17 such is the language that passes for contemporary horse-world common sense about what sexually mature mares are doing and how it affects their human relationships. putting aside the overtly anthropocentric and capitalist concept that companion horses have a human-determined “job”, in this formulation, sexually mature mares who are “moody” or “can’t focus” because they’re “whinnying and flirting with the boys” are violating the terms of contemporary human–animal companionships that equate heterospeciative companion relationships with the total absence of sexual identity and undivided attention only for human companions. the terms used in this article are terms of sexual degradation — ones historically directed at women in workplace contexts, moreover — and mate guarding that serve to malign the sexualized feminine body and enforce chastity as the only appropriate behaviour. the language surrounding sexually mature behaviours in mares can easily range into misogynist territory, such as calling mares “slutty”, or by warning people that a particular mare who has a history of displaying signs of oestrus is “mare-ish”. stallions are also sometimes spoken of with this kind of warning when people call them “studdish” — and very often when mares or stallions display sexual behaviour in public, they will both be publicly reprimanded or restrained. julia johnson, in her exploration of misogynist characterization of mares in american stable culture highlights the term “maritude”.18 this particular portmanteau 17 lieser, “usef to examine rules”. 18 johnson, “maritude”. vaught, adults together | 135 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) further reinforces a heterospeciative parent / child orientation by incorporating the common parental term for obstreperous behaviour in human toddlers and teenagers: “attitude.” in each of these examples, there is a lack of conceptual ability to account for a mare’s sexual maturity as anything but a threat to human companionship. unable to turn to spay surgeries as a tool to arrest the development of sexual maturity in mares, many humans have taken to hormonal methods. for the past thirty-odd years, there has been one fda-approved drug on the market for repressing oestrus and its associated behaviours in mares. sold through veterinary prescription under the brand name regu-mate®, this oral solution’s active drug is a steroidal progestin called altrenogest, and it is often marketed to and spoken of in barns as a necessary intervention in mares’ reproductive cycles. regu-mate was approved by the fda in 1983 and was originally intended for use by commercial breeders to help chemically coordinate and control the timing of mares’ oestrus cycles for more efficient conception. regu-mate works by suppressing ovulation, much like a human birth control pill. this capability made regumate appealing to people outside of the breeding world who wanted to avoid mare oestrus altogether. owners of broodmares who were primarily interested in smoothing out their mares’ breeding schedules — regu-mate’s intended users — were thus quickly joined, and perhaps even eclipsed, by owners of companion mares who never intended to breed their mare, but wanted to alter their mares’ “moods” and eliminate their “flirting” to smooth out their riding schedules and public behaviours. the chronicle of the horse article cited above described it as follows: “for many competitors altrenogest, aka regumate, is a lifesaver when it comes to showing this type of mare.”19 despite the fact that this drug is easily absorbed into human skin and can significantly affect women’s hormonal and reproductive cycles through such exposure, regu-mate remains an easy prescription to obtain for behavioural control of mares in settings where they are not intended for breeding. dr paul mcclellan, a prominent performance horse veterinarian, noted that the vast majority of regu-mate 19 leiser, “usef to examine rules”. 136 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) doses are given to companion mares year-round for their behavioural effects. speaking as a prescriber, mcclellan suggested that “many show mares are on it year-round and at a higher dose than the recommended amount”, a result of the long-term normalization of this drug off-label in barns across horse cultures.20 the common practice of permanently over-administering altrenogest ultimately produces a similar effect on mares as a spay surgery would. regu-mate made the suppression of sexual maturity in mares seem as easy and as normal as desexing other companion animals, but it is no longer the only pharmaceutical option. more recently, another hormone product has entered the companion and competitive equine market. depo-provera, known in human medicine as a birth-control drug for women and a form of chemical “castration” for male sex offenders, is injectable medroxyprogesterone acetate, also known as mpa. these are the only uses for which this drug is fda approved and licensed. it made its way into the horse market through compounding pharmacies, who sell their own compounded form of this drug to veterinarians. as with regu-mate, the adoption of this drug for horses has been less than careful, and because regumate’s ubiquitous use makes hormone regulation seem easy and safe, off-label overuse of mpa was nearly instantaneous.21 its injectability has helped mpa gain quick acceptance due to the (often ignored but ever-present) health concerns over women handling the liquid feed additive regu-mate, and many horse owners and barn managers regularly give intramuscular injections of common equine medications without much veterinary supervision. additionally, mpa has become popular in no small part because its desired behavioural effects are reported to be more pronounced than those of regu-mate, even though, in horses, it does not reliably prevent ovulation. recent studies are suggesting that such results are due to the powerful effect mpa has on the brain. like valium or xanax, mpa works on the gaba receptors in the brain to create a profound sense of calm. dr kent allen, a long-time equine competition veterinarian, 20 leiser, “usef to examine rules”. 21 leiser, “usef to examine rules”. vaught, adults together | 137 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) testified to the usef drugs and medications committee that “when it seems to be working better than altrenogest for mares, it’s likely because it’s working on the gaba receptors in their brains rather than preventing them from suffering the discomfort of ovulating.” another veterinarian put the matter plainly: “we’re not giving it [mpa] for therapeutic reasons. we’re not giving it necessarily to keep mares out of heat. we are specifically giving it to affect their behavior.”22 what these drugs do is blunt both the visible and behavioural manifestations of sexuality in sexually mature horses. the fact that residues of mpa have begun turning up in stallions and geldings — horses who decidedly do not ovulate — also points to its wider use as a tool to govern horses’ sexual behaviours, and really any strong emotional behaviour, to suit human desires. the pharmaceutical alteration of companion mares thus performs a similar duty as desexing surgery for domestic pets. by suppressing sexual maturity and desire, it helps remove behaviours that humans interpret as oversexualized, embarrassing, and disruptive to a friendly relationship. but in this formulation, neither the human nor the horse is getting the fullest version of the other; each is bound tightly by heterosexual and patriarchal standards of behaviour. here, as in domestic spaces, the underlying standards of heterospeciative companion relationships can most easily be enforced if homospeciative sexuality is taken out of the picture. the hormonal blunting of mare sexuality essentially positions equine companions as children in relation to the young and adult humans with whom they spend their time. while the “problem” of sexually mature mares can be “solved” in this way, doing so merely enforces gendered standards of control while leaving the roots of those standards unquestioned, and indeed not leaving any room to ask if mares (or, for that matter, women and femmes) are at all served by these standards. such action forecloses the possibilities for exploring fuller, more expansive relationships between sexually mature beings that might exist beyond the confinements of scientific, social, and species authority over their bodies and behaviours. 22 leiser, “usef to examine rules”. 138 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) no room for noncompliance: genealogies of representations of women and horses the pharmaceutical enforcement of desexualized femininity and a parent–child human–horse relationship structure conforms to longstanding cultural beliefs about women and domesticity. hormonal alteration enlists the bodies of female horses in the enforcement of dominant gendered and sexual norms for human and equine behaviour and kinship. in this regard, recent pharmacology follows old and familiar narrative strategies that have long governed the literary and visual representations of girls, women, and horses. pharmacology is simply a new tool to do an old job: constraining feminine sexuality in order to enforce compliant desexed feminine roles as a “responsible” social norm. in both new pharmacology and old narration, a prudishness where desire is concerned edges out queer possibilities for reimagining and reframing adult human–horse companionship. but historical representations also abound with stories of women and girls exploring the boundaries of their respective constraints, even if the end result of those stories is to resoundingly enforce such boundaries. these stories might help inform and encourage more current projects of exploration, perhaps envision different narratives, and ideally help us effect different real-life endings by refusing to repeat the process of uncritically falling back on corrupted logics of control, as we have done with hormonal management. in literary representations, bonds between women and horses do not often have much to do with the sex of the horse in question, because it is the woman whose sexuality will be policed, not the horse’s. sally mitchell’s classic analysis of women in nineteenth century english fiction points to the emergence of “sensation” novels in the 1860s as a literary space where writers and readers worked out the “enlarged possibilities for a woman of less than immaculate purity” that accompanied rapid changes in middleand upper-class women’s education, mobility, and social expectations.23 in such novels, associations with horses wave a red flag over young women characters who will throw the story for a sexual loop. while 23 mitchell, fallen angel, 73. vaught, adults together | 139 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) such representations are often thrilling, depicting the liberated and unchaperoned movement away from confined domestic spaces that a horse could provide to a woman, such depictions as a rule do not narratively glorify riding women. “aside from the new plots she creates,” mitchell argues, referring to the numerous ways in which a woman and a horse can get into tricky social situations together, “the figure of the woman riding gives clear evidence of conservative reaction to a new social phenomenon. when a woman is introduced in a riding habit — or even more dangerously, on the foxhunting field — we can be virtually certain that trouble and impropriety will follow.”24 in mitchell’s analysis, women riders in sensation novels were often pursuing societal freedoms that were afforded to men only. the women escaped domestic confinement; they used “men’s language”; they pursued sexual aims with men inside and outside of their class; and they had ambitions to participate in public life, even just by riding in public without chaperones. horses, by providing a fast and independent mode of transportation, were key facilitators of women’s challenges to the male prerogative to masculine social privileges (or, their “mannishness”, in less accepting terms). in assigning riding women masculine traits, sensation novelists could then punish these figures in order to re-inscribe the feminized values of class, chastity, and domesticity back onto their bodies. riding women could find themselves far from safety, encountering dangerous weather, dangerous men, or even danger from their horse in the form of a bolt or a fall. in each of these scenarios, her return to the domestic sphere is paramount, and rescue by a man is a common feature. “before a riding heroine can reach a happy ending,” mitchell makes clear, “she must suffer enough weakness, illness, and humiliation to melt her down into chastened femininity.”25 while mitchell does not explicitly say so, the conservative reconstitution of riding women as women in these novels is entirely predicated on giving up horses for “chastened” domestic heterosexuality — there is no other alternative if the women want to live. across the numerous sensation novels that mitchell points to, riding women 24 mitchell, fallen angel, 75. 25 mitchell, fallen angel, 75. 140 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) who refuse this humiliation and choose to keep their horses and their shared freedoms are killed. domesticity or death, it seems. this formula positions the horse, regardless of his or her own sex, as a navigational tool for exploring the boundaries of women’s sexuality. with the mobility a horse provides, riding women can access the dangers that accompany sexual maturity, both social and physical (ostracism; rape; injury; death). but before those consequences are delivered, the horse can help women characters and readers envision a different world: they link her to her mobility, her agency, and her ability to escape the physical and social confinements that make it difficult to challenge gendered expectations of chastity and domesticity. in the novels in which riding women are punished, the horse is thus positioned as a betrayer — in its promise of impossible freedom, the horse is ultimately responsible for the fate that befalls her. such a formula precludes any cross-species kinship unless a woman is willing to give up her social value.26 women, in these examples, are being subjected to the same physical domestication that mares are subject to pharmaceutically now. the historical purpose of this move was to protect geographic, economic, and reproductive freedom as masculine domains. despite the obvious contextual differences, in both examples femininity and mature sexuality together are coded as “wrong”. real-life late-nineteenth-century women did carve out spaces to ride, and many formed relationships and even livelihoods with horses — though they could not fully escape being narrativized within this impossible death-or-domesticity framework. if a “safe” place could be described as a place where women were not liable to lose their class status, their femininity, or their lives, then a safe place for upper-class women to ride was rotten row. by the 1860s, for men and women, riding one’s most beautiful horse in one’s most beautiful clothing along rotten row was a well-established part of the “london 26 the recent hbo miniseries gentleman jack, a fictionalized narrative about anne lister, a real pre-victorian woman who loved both women and horses, still uses this trope in its narrative and visual depictions of how lister must navigate physical and social worlds. while her relationships with horses figure prominently in her plotlines, interestingly, lister is depicted as a woman who more often chooses to walk or drive a carriage to her destinations — not to ride. vaught, adults together | 141 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) season”, wherein social status and potential marital alliances between members of upper-class families were performed and negotiated. the rules of this performance allowed women to ride without challenging social boundaries: the road was lined with iron rails to enforce class separations, fashion had to be of the highest rank, no one was permitted to ride at high speeds, and it was expected that courtly manners should prevail. such rules made it safe for women to ride without risking being labelled as mannish. the stated end goal of this public riding was in-class heterosexual marriage, and there was literally nowhere to go. unlike characters in sensation novels riding headlong across the countryside, women riders on rotten row could “safely” ride because all other structures that upheld their gender roles — literally: iron fences! — remained in place.27 but the horses ridden on rotten row did not simply appear from the tony stables of the victorian well-to-do: they were bred, trained, bought, and sold, and some of the people who did this work were women. the trappings of rotten row were not designed to uphold the femininity of these professional riding women, but rather served to highlight their class and gender nonconformity by associating their position on the working side of the iron rails with sex unleashed from the ties of marriage and social class that were ostensibly preserved inside. women horse trainers were given the moniker “pretty horsebreakers”, a sharp-edged term that pointed to their assumed sexual availability to men of the upper classes. the real live horse, like the fictional horses of sensation novels, was the means by which such transgression could occur. the most famous example is that of catherine walters, an accomplished working-class horse trainer hired by an ambitious london horse seller to ride his best sale horses along rotten row, in the hope that they would catch the eye of wealthy buyers. walters was one among a seemingly small cadre of women horse trainers in london during those years who were not members of the highest echelons of victorian society but who crossed the iron rails with horses. walters famously cemented these ties with sexual relationships, eventually becoming a long-time supported courtesan.28 27 kane, “rotten row was rotten”. 28 forrest, if wishes were horses. 142 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) horses, for walters, provided access to a lifetime of social and economic wealth outside marriage — but only because horses and socially dangerous feminine sexuality worked in tandem. at the risk of stating the obvious: while horse training and sex were co-interpreted through a dominant framework of trangressive feminine sexuality, women horse trainers were not all prostitutes. the professionally successful victorian “pretty horsebreakers” who were paid for horse training but not for sex provided a much more difficult subject to interpret at the time. one noted equestrian professional, a woman named annie gilbert, provides an example of this vexed interpretation. she and her horse training methods were the subject of a much-discussed painting by the famed victorian animal artist edwin landseer. his 1861 painting, the shrew tamed, depicts her and a horse reclining together in a stall piled high with dishevelled straw. the calm repose of the horse and the woman are belied by the signs of motion and struggle that surround them, as well as a leather strap that lies close by. while records of gilbert’s young life or of her death remain difficult to find, equine historian susanna forrest found several records of gilbert’s participation in the london social world and of her professional life as a horsewoman in upper-class victorian circles, including riding with the queen’s hounds. in a blog post exploring the history of the painting and the identity of the woman it depicts, forrest notes that the woman in landseer’s painting has for many years been mistakenly identified as walters by serious art historians, despite contemporary evidence clearly identifying the woman in the painting as gilbert — a misidentification that speaks to the staying power of the horse-sex connection.29 forrest points to reactions to the painting at its 1861 unveiling at the royal academy, which managed to both admire and disparage gilbert. the london daily news wrote, “this picture has been painted, we hear, in compliment to miss gilbert, the accomplished horsewoman who has so thoroughly mastered mr rarey’s system of horse-taming as to have practiced it herself with perfect success.”30 29 forrest, “who is the woman”. 30 quoted in forrest, “who is the woman”. vaught, adults together | 143 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) meanwhile, forrest notes, blackwood’s edinburgh magazine, disparaged landseer “and his friends”, gilbert among them, finding that “the intrusion of ‘pretty horsebreakers’ on the wall of the academy is not less to be regretted than their presence in rotten row”.31 these reactions interpret gilbert within the same narrow frameworks utilized by sensation novelists: her independent professional accomplishments, threatening as they were to the prerogatives of class and masculinity, are both undeniable and “regrettable”. thankfully, as a real woman and not as a character in such a novel, gilbert, as far as we know, did not face imminent threats to her life for choosing to live it in the company of horses (or artists!) while enjoying the economic and geographic freedoms they provided. forrest’s choice of excerpt from the london daily times review provides a key insight for reading landseer’s painting and understanding more of women’s roles in the victorian horse world. the “mr rarey” mentioned above is john solomon rarey, an american horse trainer who enjoyed brief but fervent fame across north america, europe, and the united kingdom for his innovative methods of horse training that emphasized kindness and communication rather than fear and violence as the central pillars of human–horse relationships. landseer depicted gilbert using one of rarey’s key techniques. the reviewer interprets this technique through the familiar gendered tropes: a vicious thoroughbred mare has had, as we see from the strap now thrown aside, its leg bound up, and after a struggle to which the condition of the straw bears witness, lies thrown. the “shrew” is at length so entirely subdued that she now permits her mistress to recline at full length on her shoulder, and even advances her muzzle at the patting of the small fair hand, as if begging for a caress to seal a better understanding for the future.32 this reviewer identifies the horse as a mare, and moreover has chosen to identify the horse, rather than the woman, as the titular “shrew” who has, to follow the shakespearean reference, been 31 quoted in forrest, “who is the woman”. 32 quoted in forrest, “who is the woman”. 144 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) lately demonstrably unwilling to be in relationship with gilbert, but whom gilbert has nevertheless “subdued”. of course, the painting itself leaves it to the viewer to decide which of the two is the “tamed” shrew.33 this reviewer, in casting the mare in this role, nevertheless plays with that ambiguity to subtly argue that neither the mare, if it is indeed a mare, nor the woman are conforming to the feminine ideals of compliance and domesticity. the mare’s late unwillingness is characterized as viciousness; likewise, gilbert has done the work of a man but with the promise of a “caress” from a “small fair hand”. those invested in preserving classed, raced, and gendered hierarchies used the language of sex to narrate their boundaries in service of their protection. yet this language does not accurately reflect rarey’s training methods and the philosophies that undergirded them — philosophies that included making space for women to work, and making that work less violent for both horses and humans. by focusing less on gilbert’s sociopolitical position as a professional horsewoman and the social narratives that were used to interpret her, and more on her work as a professional horsewoman, we can get a clearer sense of how such work offered both women and horses a measure of shared liberation from the stringent actual and narrative constraints that limited who they had to spend time with and how. the moment depicted in landseer’s painting is one of the first steps that must be reached, according to rarey’s method, before training can fully begin — it is a breakthrough moment where a horse’s resistance to the presence of a human first fully yields, and where, if done very carefully, the horse can first begin to work with a human partner. annie gilbert may have learned rarey’s methods from him personally. following the publication of his book, the modern art of taming wild horses, in 1855, rarey became an equine training celebrity and gave popular 33 many thanks to a reviewer of this essay who also pointed out the slipperiness of species in the ambiguity of this title, as well. given the shakespearean reference, many viewers would be drawn to identify the woman as the “shrew”, not the horse; it is also quite rare for a nonhuman animal to be referred to metaphorically as a different species. to read the mare as the “shrew” requires that the mare be first anthropomorphized as a woman resisting the expectations of domesticity and then zoomorphized, as such a woman would be, as a shrew. vaught, adults together | 145 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) performances across the united states. he was invited to england in 1857 to improve the military training of horses there. he gave four performances for queen victoria during the winter of 1857 and 1858 and quickly amassed around two thousand students who paid to receive hands-on training in his methods. as historian sharon cregier notes, fully half or more of his students in england were women.34 the leather strap cast aside in the painting was then known as the rarey strap, and it was used to tie one of the horse’s forelegs up so that the horse had to balance on three legs. most horses can balance on three legs without falling, but it does challenge their mobility, and it makes them have to think twice before moving if they want to avoid a fall — and, to be fair, horses do fall with this method, which is why at the time it was common to do this on large heaps of straw, as landseer’s painting shows. it is a tool of force, no doubt, but in careful human hands, it is a tool to force the horse to pay attention and to think. in other words, to confront a human handler through cognition rather than through bodily motions such as running, kicking, or striking. a panicked horse, or a horse with a history of violence at the hands of humans, uses his or her body as a means of avoidance and is wholly focused on defence and escape. in the painting, white hairs along the horse’s withers speak to a long embodied history of ill-fitting saddles or harnesses, aligning this horse with prior violence. with a foreleg hobbled, these bodily options are less available, and the horse has to engage his or her mind. in rarey’s formulation of equine intelligence, the horse’s mind could best be accessed through the senses, which would be immediately switched on when the horse came to terms with his or her inability to move. to re-evaluate their situation, a panicked horse with a leg tied who could not just move away from or threaten a human handler would have to start gathering new information: smells, sights, and sounds. this key moment makes it possible for the horse to finally begin to take in specific information about the handler, and to begin to respond to that person in a calculated, specific way — in short, to pay close attention, the very opposite of panic or avoidance.35 fear, panic, 34 cregier, “john solomon rarey”, 172–73. 35 cregier, “john solomon rarey”, 172. 146 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) and paying attention are all immensely exhausting, and so rarey’s method taught handlers, once they had reached this critical moment where the horse was focused completely on them and would try to figure out a new strategy, to use the leverage of the strap in a series of calm, careful motions to encourage the horse to lie down, or, if the horse had fallen but was calm, gently to encourage him or her to stay down, until the strap could be slowly and safely removed. if this action could be accomplished, then the horse would associate rest and relief with their attention to the calm handler, and make the first step towards curiosity and mutual communication, rather than avoidance and fear. the immediate aftermath of this breakthrough is depicted in landseer’s the shrew tamed. true to the best-case result of using rarey’s method, the horse, free of all constraints, is now calm enough to be curious about this human, and starts to use her senses — the ears pricked, the muzzle reaching for a “small fair hand” — to learn about gilbert, rather than flee from her.36 gilbert, true to the method, stays still and calm, available for the horse’s curiosity. they are bonded in shared exhaustion and are finally able to relate to each other on shared terms. this moment, for anyone who has reached this kind of mutuality with a member of any species — the moment where you are finally, fully paying attention to one another, and feeling similar feelings — is imbued with a particularly potent intimacy. in 1860s london society, this intimacy was at the core of gendered transgressions made by professional horsewomen who were sexualized in order to be controlled. to return to the ambiguous question of who exactly was the “shrew” in the painting in the language of the london daily times review, it is implied that both the mare and the woman depicted are deserving of judgment. the mare is “begging for a caress” from gilbert; the woman, meanwhile, has stepped into male roles, an action which must be simultaneously recognized, sexualized, and belittled, as revealed by the cutting humour of the reviewer in ridiculing her success: “the lady’s self-possession and saucily assumed air of conqueror are highly amusing.” ha, ha. 36 forrest, “who is the woman”. vaught, adults together | 147 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) such mistrust for women horse trainers gives landseer’s title a hard edge: who, in this image of two prone, exhausted, but intimately connected ostensible females, is the shrew — the “vicious” mare, or the “pretty horsebreaker”? yet such initial muddlements and the subsequent distinctions matter only to those trying to make both horse and woman fit into gendered social roles. for gilbert and the horse, however, and perhaps many other horses such as those depicted in the painting? they don’t care. during their work, gilbert and the horses in real life stepped outside of this conversation altogether, relating just to each other. the work of horsemanship, for building relationships based on attention and bodily knowledge, allowed a number of victorian women and horses to carve out space to simply be who they were and to be known by one another. this ambiguity is mirrored in the title: the unresolved question of whether the horse or the woman is the “shrew” links their bodies inextricably together while also upending gendered assumptions about them both. where “shrew” connotes unruly feminine behaviour which the title suggests could be applied to either human or horse, the image itself neutralizes the insult to the point where it matters not whether the horse is a mare or not, or gilbert a woman or not, or who has “tamed” whom. stark divides between human masculinity and femininity, as well as stark divides between human and equine subjectivities, recede behind the word and the image, which instead offers an intercorporeal coupling that defuses the offending sexualities that brought them together (the supposed “viciousness” of the mare, and the gendered trespass of gilbert) by virtue of the repose of both human and equine subjects. indeed, as art historian kate aspinall pointed out to me, the presence of a small domestic dog in the painting is an important detail. the dog, with the looks of a king charles spaniel, is perched at the top of the straw pile observing the reclined horse and woman. formally, the dog completes the “holy triangle” of normative formalism as the third subject in the frame. but symbolically — as well landseer knew, given that dogs were among his portrait specialties — the dog, as a toy breed, exemplifies the nurturance of perpetual domestication. in contrast, the horse has recently been “wild”, but through 148 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) gilbert’s actions has just now begun her return to domestic behaviour. and gilbert as a woman may have been born domesticated according to the constraints of the time, but through her professional work, she has, in a sense, “re-wilded” herself.37 to me, the moment depicted in the shrew tamed is a kind of opposite to de-sexing: as whole adult beings, these two are indeed free from the death-or-domesticity double bind; they are free to be adults and not lovers of each other, or men, or women; they are free to be simply horse and human. they are free to set the terms of their relationship; free from the centrality of sex and the definitional associations of sexuality and propriety; free from the metaphorical gymnastics of species signifiers (who is the shrew?) that have supported the derogatorily gendered interpretations of their actions. equitable self-possession is most frightening in a society that believes women should be possessed by men, not themselves. in victorian sensation literature, in the trope of the “pretty horsebreaker”, and in critical responses to landseer’s painting, the body of the horse carried cultural anxieties about undomesticated women and public femininity. the anxiety in victorian england was the anxiety that women would gain the social and economic privileges of self-possession that were guarded by the gates of masculinity. a sexually mature woman such as gilbert, who chose a life where her sexuality was not confined to heterosexual marriage or homospeciative intimacy — where, in fact, sex and her sexuality were perhaps not the most important part of her own identity as a woman — was thus subject to a gamut of interpretive and social constraints that instead directed attention always back to sex, with men. in our current horse culture, the words that denigrate feminine sexual maturity — slutty, flirtatious, unfocused — are directed at mares, and they preclude equitable adult co-relations. these words contribute directly to the parent / child pattern of the relationship between women and companion mares, and disrupt pathways towards building solidarities between women and horses as adults who should both possess more freedoms to relate to each other as they choose. 37 kate aspinall, email message to author, 23 august, 2021. vaught, adults together | 149 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the pharmacological blunting of mares’ sexuality in order to control these behaviours ultimately replicates the victorian social structures that similarly controlled and narrated the movements and actions of women. during the twentieth century, opportunities for women to ride as professionals and amateurs expanded dramatically, but this expansion did not result in a shared liberation of feminine sexualities. rather, in the words of historian sandra swart, “gender norms have jumped the species boundary”, and the relative freedoms gained by women did not translate into better terms to interpret relationships between women and mares, who began to take on a larger share of the burden of conforming to strict constraints of sexual propriety.38 one wonders what happened to the openings into a different world that training methods like rarey’s offered — of a world where a woman and a horse could simply pay attention to each other, and nothing else mattered. visual media and the persistent narrative of equine innocence susan mchugh’s animal stories vividly dispels such wondering by chronicling what actually did happen to women in the english-speaking world who entered into professional equestrian careers during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. she highlights technical advancements which opened horse work up to more and more women — innovations in underwear and saddles were so important! — and links these developments to reactionary backlashes in narrative and media representations which continued the sensation novels’ tradition of bringing violent ends to women’s equine relationships.39 this tandem analysis paints a stunningly depressing picture. while methods of training such as rarey’s enjoyed popularity at the end of the nineteenth century and opened professional opportunities for women in the horse world, such methods were still very much left of centre. “rarey’s insistence on the existence of equine intelligence”, historian cregier notes, “predated behavioural theories by almost 100 years”, making him very much an 38 swart, “the equine experiment”. 39 mchugh, animal stories, 73–4. 150 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) outlier in both his training methods and his philosophies.40 women publicly entered the horse world, but horse training methods that emphasized partnership and intelligent communication across species lines did not necessarily come with them. nor did a transformation in what it meant, culturally, for women to be horsewomen. sensation novels responded to social change by re-inscribing violent punishments for pursuing masculine freedoms. mchugh identifies a continuity of this pattern during a later period of change, where media representations of both real and fictional girls and women and horses foregrounded injury and suffering, thus associating horsewomen with bodily and gender violence. in these twentieth century depictions, even the less gruesome representations have tended, in mchugh’s analysis, to position time with horses as a “phase” that is normal for (white) girls, but is odd for an adult, feminine woman to pursue. both narrative tracks block the representation of women and horses from sharing healthy adult relationships outside of the tropes of either transpeciative violence, or gender and sexuality transgressions. from national velvet to modern media coverage of equestrian sports, sexual maturity is seen as a problem to be resolved by breaking the affective ties between women and horses. one of the key twentieth-century twists that mchugh identifies in this pattern is the emergence of a narrative insistence that horses should be part of the lives of girls, but not women. in her inimitable phrasing, mchugh notes that before the twentieth century, stories about women and horses were common enough (as we have seen), but stories about girls and horses were as “rare as hen’s teeth”.41 over the course of the century, this rarity dissolved under a flood of girl / horse stories, as well as the actual demographic rise of young white girls as riders of horses. in the context of women gaining entry into professional competitive horse sports, “fictional horsewomen [were] cast increasingly on the defensive, victimized by a particular linkage of girlish love for horses with sexualized violence.”42 mchugh 40 cregier, “john solomon rarey”, 173. 41 mchugh, animal stories, 65. 42 mchugh, animal stories, 66. vaught, adults together | 151 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) observes that many of these narratives fit heteronormative interpretations that position horses as a substitute and training ground for eventual heterosexual love between women and men. girls, in this reading, will eventually transfer their affection for horses to men.43 elspeth probyn makes similar recollections about the overwhelming prepubescent girl-ness of late-twentieth century horse worlds, reminisces that “from the pony-club stories and experiences of my youth, i can only remember girls and girls together with horses, and not a boy to be seen.”44 in narrative and in real-life experience, probyn observes, the normative path that is modelled through puberty is that girls “get over horses”, and trade in their best girl (and horse) friends for a boyfriend. horses, in this interpretation, are a kind of substitute boy, a training-wheels phallus that, through literal spread legs and body-to-body connection, train girls to stop wanting the companionship of other girls and to start desiring men. a girl’s “horse phase” will eventually pull her girl–girl relationships apart as they reach sexual maturity, and the multitudes of gender expressions and affinities that are possible in girlhood become systematically reduced to cisgendered, heterosexual womanhood norms.45 probyn and mchugh both roundly reject this interpretation as scandalously impoverished — mchugh notes that such psychoanalytic rhetorics sell girls out “at the expense of other stories about their own bodies, along with those of animals”46 — and both authors offer careful re-readings of girl-and-horse stories that attend to a multitude of queer and transpeciative desires, as well as illuminate the always-present, if oft-ignored, narratives of bodily empowerments and independence that exist through girl–horse relationships.47 43 mchugh, animal stories, 92–3. 44 probyn, “girls and girls”, 23. 45 probyn, “girls and girls”, 25–26. brett mizelle describes a similar phenomenon in the plot of the book and film charlotte’s web, where the main human character, fern, is instructed to leave her girlish love of animals and nature behind to focus on heterosexual human pursuits. see mizelle, pig, 143–46. 46 mchugh, animal stories, 67–8. 47 see also elspeth probyn, outside belongings and ann game, “riding: embodying the centaur,” 1–12 for psychological and phenomenological explorations of desire, identity, and riding women. 152 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) yet, as mchugh makes clear, professional horsewomen who have chosen not to grow out of relationships with horses find themselves filtered through a punishing cultural lens that can overtake their own self-interpretation. twentiethand twenty-first century media representations of women’s work and relationships with horses reinforce the same kinds of stories told by sensation novels and reviews of the shrew tamed that served to warn, rather than empower, people who wish to remain socially accepted as women and as competent equestrians. one of mchugh’s more striking examples is the parallel experience between the fictional story of national velvet and contemporary real-life women jockeys. mchugh writes of the novel, “whether for riders, horses, stewards, or audience members, the experiences of the national becomes filtered through communications technologies, enveloping and reconfiguring the race as it is run.”48 in this example, mediated representation infiltrates each character’s experience to create and reinforce a dominant meaning of the race. outside of fiction, media representation has similar effects: contemporary women jockeys find themselves having to navigate not just their work as jockeys, but media representation of their work as jockeys. their representation is experienced by many women jockeys as the most dangerous and unpleasant aspect of their careers — not the fact that they careen around crowded tracks at high speeds.49 if we read these examples alongside decades of televised coverage of women equestrian olympians that have consistently emphasized “struggling female riders”, the dominant representation of real women pursuing competitive equestrian careers is that of a woman suffering.50 while companionate time with horses, and even careers with horses, are open to more girls and women 48 mchugh, animal stories, 97. 49 mchugh, animal stories, 98. 50 mchugh, animal stories, 101–3. this pattern repeated at the 2020 olympic games, when the modern pentathlon competitor annika schleu of germany ran into trouble with her mount, saint boy, during competition. images and a video of her weeping in distress as the horse refused to continue a show jumping round circulated internationally. their coach, kim raisner, was caught on camera urging schleu to hit the horse with her crop, and raisner even struck the horse herself. this understandably created a media sensation and outcry on behalf of the horse and resulted in censure for the coach. images of women succeeding at this event, or any other olympic event, by contrast, were scarcely covered in mainstream news or sports coverage. vaught, adults together | 153 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) than in earlier periods of history, the victorian equestrian dichotomy of death or domesticity for sexually mature women has barely been blunted in the public sphere in the intervening years. if, as i argued at the outset of this essay, horses rhetorically serve, in each of the situations i’ve described, as a living screen onto which to project larger human cultural anxieties, it would seem that both sexually mature women and mares are united by the fact that modern english-speaking horse cultures refuse to grant either of them the freedom to co-exist without depicting them as outlandishly, boundary-crushingly, dangerously, inconveniently mature. neither woman nor mare in this context is permitted a fully adult existence. in her exploration of humans masquerading as animals and old european myths about animals masquerading as humans, wendy doniger reminds us that “the animals want to do all the things that we want to do, but they lack the language and self-reflection to tell stories about them. they share our sexuality but not our stories of sexuality.”51 stories of sexuality, in the case of both women and mares, and companion animals more broadly, hold sway over the expression of bodily sexualities. predominant narratives about what sexuality means, what its consequences are, and who is responsible for whose sexuality shape actual relationships with companion animals and companion horses. by defining nonhuman homospeciative sexuality as inappropriate, and by demanding that companion animals focus all of their affection, chastely, on their human companions, the maintenance of an absent sexuality becomes a dominant form of relating. this is of course what makes it possible for many men and women to uncritically accept the hormonal regulation of mares as de rigueur — in a manner quite similar to the multitudes of humans who readily accept de-sexing surgery for their in-home pets as a prerequisite for multispecies domestic arrangements. literary, artistic, and media representations of women’s sexuality have thus exerted a significant amount of power in leashing, blunting, or removing the sexual lives from the animals whose attention and affection humans crave, but will not return in equal measure. 51 doniger, “mythology of masquerading animals”, 726. 154 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) this essay has focused mainly on how a genealogy of attitudes towards and representations of women with horses has shaped the contemporary lives of horsewomen and companion mares, and i wish to close this section with an example of a mare in front of the camera to illustrate further the troubled paradoxes of sexuality in which women and horses are bound up. an american political media event at the end of 2017 placed a little mare named sassy in the midst of a maelstrom of sexuality stories. coverage of sassy, as well as public interpretation of her body and what was happening to it, drew heavily from cultural tropes that enforce the impossibility of being concurrently female, feminine, adult, and sympathetic. following alabama senator jeff sessions’s resignation from the u.s. senate to serve as united states attorney general in 2017, a special election was held on 12 december to fill the vacancy. democrat doug jones edged out the republican nominee roy moore in the election, but not before moore made national headlines for two main things: allegedly engaging in inappropriate sexual behaviour, and riding a horse to the polls on election day. as videos and images of moore’s ride to the polls hit cable news outlets and the internet, the horse was soon identified as sassy. moore had ridden sassy on a similar errand just months before, when he won a run-off election against sen. luther strange (r-alabama) to enter the december contest. sassy’s presence became a kind of election-day superstition for moore. in the days leading up to the special election, he announced that he would be riding to the polls, saying, “i think it’s a good thing to do, i won the last time i rode a horse.”52 for some, sassy soon became the main focus of election day coverage. “horse twitter”, a subset of the social media platform’s users with interest and / or expertise in horse world goings-on, exploded in judgment of his riding style. moore’s style mystified many: he held his reins long and moved his hands from high to low in jerky, awkward motions while sassy skittered uncertainly with quick steps.53 52 gore, “roy moore will ride”. 53 these users, along with many others, did not recognize this style of riding as style, but as ignorance. in a series of explanatory tweets, katrin boniface, an equine historian and multidisciplinary horse trainer, carefully explained that the style moore displayed was vaught, adults together | 155 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) one user commented, “the way he’s holding the reins is legitimately bizarre and that horse is confused as fuck.”54 another weighed in with emphasis, “i know this isn’t the point but roy moore is an awful rider, put your fucking heel down and get your leg under you and stop hauling on your horse’s mouth you goddamn pedophile idiot.”55 in this latter example, moore’s alleged behaviours towards teenage girls were a tool within quick reach of this user to critique his treatment of his mare, sassy. sassy’s body-in-distress was nearly instantly made into a palimpsest of the bodily distress allegedly suffered by moore’s human accusers as twitter spun out a stream of instantaneous co-interpretations. viewers’ readings of sassy’s body coincided with the rushing tide of public #metoo testimonies that had rushed forth following the harvey weinstein allegations in that autumn. the month after the weinstein story broke, during moore’s campaign for the run-off election, a total of nine women reported that moore had either assaulted them or made unwanted romantic or sexual advances to them in the past. public records assert that two of the accusers were minors at the time they alleged these events to have taken place, the youngest being fourteen. tweets ostensibly meant to critique his riding seamlessly connected judgment of moore’s riding style to the predatory sexual behaviour of which he was accused. sassy was represented as a victim of both. a screen capture from one of the videos taken earlier in the day soon began to circulate on twitter. the image froze sassy in a moment of visible discomfort: a taut rein connected her gaping mouth to moore’s jerked-back hand, exposing the metal bit between her teeth. though most of her body is in profile to the viewer, the rein has pulled her purposeful, and part of southern gaited horse culture — but that his ride to the polls on sassy was not a good example of what it was supposed to look like. “he rides like most folks do who pay trainers to work their gaited horses,” she noted, adding that she “still wouldn’t send an animal to a trainer whose horses looked like that.” katrin boniface (@katboniface), twitter, 12 december 2017, https://twitter.com/katboniface/ status/940692901440262144. 54 anna merlan (@annamerlan), twitter, 12 december 2017, https://twitter.com/ annamerlan/status/940647814413078529. 55 kaye toal (@ohkayewhatever), twitter, 12 december 2017. tweet no longer public. https://twitter.com/katboniface https://twitter.com/katboniface/status/940692901440262144 https://twitter.com/katboniface/status/940692901440262144 https://twitter.com/annamerlan https://twitter.com/ohkayewhatever 156 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) face around so that it points towards viewers almost directly. sassy’s eyes are white-walled, her ears are pinned back, her nostrils are flaring. her haunches and hind legs are tucked underneath of her, bent as if to either cower or leap. moore, for his part, remains fully in profile, smiling calmly to an audience of white men who are smiling back at him, which makes it appear that sassy has turned to face us, her imagined audience, and is pleading for us to witness this moment, while moore carries on believing that everything is fine, either oblivious to her suffering at his hands or utterly unconcerned by it and his power over her. superimposed onto her brown haunch, the user has emblazoned in white the words “#metoo”. here we have a representation of a struggling female horse, not a struggling female rider, but in this case, sassy is thoroughly interpreted as a stand-in for girls and women. part of this phenomenon, of course, is because of how social media works: far more humans could view and respond to sassy’s appearance through the lens of women’s struggles with aggressive men than through the lens of human–horse relationships. but in the process, sassy herself, as a horse, became nearly completely invisible. and this is exactly why i find this example so fascinating: the rhetoric simmering around sassy in the digital realm reinforced the same set of values that are, in our time, used to define “responsible” versus “irresponsible” relationships between humans and companion animals. in order to connect with sassy, horse people and non-horse people alike aligned her with the identity of a child (in this specific case, as a palimpsest of moore’s alleged underage victims) in order to emphasize her innocence, and therefore her need for human care. they seemingly could not speak of her own suffering outside of this association. this overdetermined interpretation of sassy’s body and behaviour harmonizes with the logics of de-sexing; it brings her under our collective care, but only on our human terms, only as a representative of childlike innocence. god forbid she go into heat. would our hearts go out to her, then? within hours of sassy’s ride hitting cable news, sassy had her own twitter account. “she” appeared on twitter as @roymooreshorse vaught, adults together | 157 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) (the account was later publicly claimed by human comedian dave colan), and she announced her arrival with all-caps excitement: “look i am on tv!” but the second line above a link to the video of her directly engages the dynamic of coercion that permeated the discussions of her body that day, positioning her both as a being with a voice of her “own” but also as one whose life was distinctly constrained (witness the handle @roymooreshorse). directly above the video footage, it reads, “i did not choose this life.”56 she certainly did not choose the story of sexuality that was imposed on her so quickly and easily in the context of moore’s allegations and the early days of #metoo. sassy was given a story of violated sexuality, innocence, and personhood that in every way overlooked her actual needs. and while meeting her needs was never the point of interpreting her mediated body in this case, it nevertheless serves as a stark reminder of how easily we twenty-first century humans turn to centuries-old narratives of innocence in order to feel affinity with female and feminine beings. conclusions for sassy and the other subjects of this essay, the “story about sexuality” that is told about companion mares is that their mature sexuality should not exist. desires that extend beyond the human risk breaching the boundaries of multispecies love. the current stories that surround mares limit their sexuality entirely, and these limits are policed and enforced both socially and technologically, through the casual deployment of hormones. these stories, as this essay has endeavoured to show, grow from old stories and techniques used to limit, police, and enforce the boundaries of feminine sexuality for women, as well; they are stories that are very useful to anthropocentric patriarchal power. these stories are very rarely about sex. they are about who has what freedoms. disentangling the knots that bind horses and women together is to attempt telling different multispecies narrations that invite queerer, more expansive possibilities for relating to each other. to do so, we must recognize and get past the 56 dave colan (@roymooreshorse), twitter, 12 december 2017, https://twitter.com/ roymooreshorse/status/940678609378742272. http://twitter.com/roymooreshorse https://twitter.com/roymooreshorse/status/940678609378742272 https://twitter.com/roymooreshorse/status/940678609378742272 158 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) erasure of sexuality from human relationships with companion animals as a prerequisite of our human attentions and affections, and we must not let prudishness edge out possibilities for remaking companion relationships. by outlining these enduring constraints, i aim to raise questions that can hopefully break open more expansive discussions about relating on more equitable terms. this essay has identified roadblocks that foreclose possibilities for living more expansive adult lives with companion animals, and has paid particular attention to how in our current moment, old methods of social control of female sexuality, which were once commonly ascribed to human women, are now uncritically and widely applied to mares. but what would be possible if “taking responsibility for” the sex lives of animals were not synonymous with removing it entirely? what would be possible if we humans worked at divorcing our definitions of multispecies responsibility from the paradigm of parenthood of a “fur child” who must conform to human-defined times and modes of heterospeciative affinity? in the horse world, would making an ethical commitment to allow mares to be adults be one way of helping women and people with uteruses to recognize the external social structures that confine the visibility — and thus effective knowledge and treatment — of their own bodies? what if we refused to equate “acceptable” sexual maturity with mandatory reproduction, and chastity with “responsible” heterospeciative love? would these be steps towards a larger refusal to allow heteropatriarchal, anthropocentric, and capitalist structures of work to govern the uterus of horse or human, or any of us? would we then be able to live together, as adults? vaught, adults together | 159 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) works cited blanchette, alex. “herding species: biosecurity, posthuman labor, and the american industrial pig.” cultural anthropology 30, no. 4 (2015): 640–69. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.4.09. chen, mel y. animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. durham, nc: duke university press, 2012. cregier, sharon e. “john solomon rarey (‘the great horsetamer’), 1827–1866.” in american national biography, edited by john a. garraty and mark c. carnes, 172–73. oxford: oxford university press, 1999. https://doi.org/10.1093/ anb/9780198606697.article.2000838. doniger, wendy. “the mythology of masquerading animals, or, bestiality.” social research 71, no. 3 (2004): 711–32. https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2004.0057. forrest, susanna. if wishes were horses: a memoir of equine obsession. london: atlantic books, 2012. forrest, susanna. “who is the woman in sir edwin landseer’s the shrew tamed?” susanna forrest: horses, history and news (blog), 10 july 2017. https://susannaforrest.wordpress. com/2017/07/10/who-is-the-woman-insir-edwin-landseers-the-shrew-tamed/. game, ann. “riding: embodying the centaur.” body & society 7, no. 4 (2001): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/135703 4x01007004001. gore, leda. “roy moore will ride his horse sassy to vote on tuesday.” alnews.com, december 8, 2017. https://www.al.com/ news/2017/12/roy_moore_will_ride_ his_horse.html. johnson, julia. “maritude: misogyny in the horse world.” in the relational horse: how frameworks of communication, care, politics, and power reveal and conceal equine selves, edited by gala argent and jeannette vaught, 119–34. leiden: brill, 2022. kane, kathryn. “rotten row was rotten — kinda.” the regency redingote (blog), 7 august 2009. https://regencyredingote. wordpress.com/2009/08/07/rottenrow-was-rotten-kinda/. lieser, sara. “usef to examine rules on depo-provera and regu-mate.” the chronicle of the horse 80, no. 5 (28 february 2017). https://www. chronofhorse.com/article/usef-toexamine-rules-on-depo-provera-andregu-mate. mchugh, susan. animal stories: narrating across species lines. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2011. mitchell, sally. the fallen angel: chastity, class, and women’s reading, 1835–1880. bowling green, oh: bowling green university popular press, 1981. mizelle, brett. pig. animal series. london: reaktion books, 2011. parreñas, juno salazar. decolonizing extinction: the work of care in orangutan rehabilitation. durham, nc: duke university press, 2018. probyn, elspeth. “girls and girls and girls and horses: queer images of singularity and desire.” tessera 15 (1993): 22–29. https://doi.org/10.25071/19239408.24995. probyn, elspeth. outside belongings. london: routledge, 1996. rosenberg, gabriel n. “how meat changed sex: the law of interspecies intimacy after industrial reproduction.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies 23, no. 4 (2017): 473–507. https://doi. org/10.1215/10642684-4157487. shir-vertesh, dafna. “‘flexible personhood’: loving animals as family members in israel.” american anthropologist 114, no. 3 (2012): 420–32. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.15481433.2012.01443.x. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca30.4.09 https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.2000838 https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.2000838 https://doi.org/10.1353/sor.2004.0057 https://susannaforrest.wordpress.com/2017/07/10/who-is-the-woman-in-sir-edwin-landseers-the-shrew-tamed/ https://susannaforrest.wordpress.com/2017/07/10/who-is-the-woman-in-sir-edwin-landseers-the-shrew-tamed/ https://susannaforrest.wordpress.com/2017/07/10/who-is-the-woman-in-sir-edwin-landseers-the-shrew-tamed/ https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x01007004001 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x01007004001 https://www.al.com/news/2017/12/roy_moore_will_ride_his_horse.html https://www.al.com/news/2017/12/roy_moore_will_ride_his_horse.html https://www.al.com/news/2017/12/roy_moore_will_ride_his_horse.html https://regencyredingote.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/rotten-row-was-rotten-kinda/ https://regencyredingote.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/rotten-row-was-rotten-kinda/ https://regencyredingote.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/rotten-row-was-rotten-kinda/ https://www.chronofhorse.com/article/usef-to-examine-rules-on-depo-provera-and-regu-mate https://www.chronofhorse.com/article/usef-to-examine-rules-on-depo-provera-and-regu-mate https://www.chronofhorse.com/article/usef-to-examine-rules-on-depo-provera-and-regu-mate https://www.chronofhorse.com/article/usef-to-examine-rules-on-depo-provera-and-regu-mate https://doi.org/10.25071/1923-9408.24995 https://doi.org/10.25071/1923-9408.24995 https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-4157487 https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-4157487 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01443.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01443.x 160 | vaught, adults together humanimalia 13.2 (2023) swart, sandra. “the equine experiment.” keynote address given at the annual equine history collective conference, w. k. kellogg arabian horse library, california state polytechnic university, pomona, 13 november, 2019. tallbear, kim. “the polyamorist that wants to destroy sex: interview by montserrat madariaga-caro.” the critical polyamorist (blog) 1 february 2021. http://www.criticalpolyamorist.com/. vaught, jeannette. “how to make a horse have an orgasm.” in living with animals: bonds across species, edited by natalie porter and ilana gershon, 157–67. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 2018. vaught, jeannette. “a question of sex: cloning, culture, and legitimacy among american quarter horses.” humanimalia 10, no.1 (2018): 98–132. https://doi.org/10.52537/ humanimalia.9526. weil, kari. “miss mazeppa and the horse with no name.” in performing animals: history, agency, theater, edited by karen raber and monica mattfeld, 141–53. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2017. https://doi. org/10.1515/9780271080789-011. http://www.criticalpolyamorist.com/ https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9526 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9526 https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271080789-011 https://doi.org/10.1515/9780271080789-011 guest, review of norton copyright © 2024 kristen guest this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 206–210. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 unsettling the columbian exchange kristen guest review of: marcy norton, the tame and the wild: people and animals after 1492. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2024. 448 pp. $37.50 (hb). kristen guest is professor of english at the university of northern british columbia. email: kguest@unbc.ca book review http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 in the tame and the wild, marcy norton explores how culturally distinct ways of conceptualizing and interacting with animals “help explain the ontological divide between european and indigenous cultures” after 1492 (3). taking creation myths as her starting point, norton illustrates how spiritual beliefs shape divergent worldviews: in the book of genesis, she argues, there is a clear, hierarchical distinction between humans and animals, whereas indigenous cultures emphasize “the permeability and interconnectedness of all beings” (2). such differences informed institutional and symbolic structures in european and indigenous cultures of meso america and greater amazonia as well as the ways individuals interacted with nonhuman animals in their daily lives. when these cultures encountered each other following columbian contact, norton suggests, what resulted was an intermingling of ideas and practices that profoundly transformed both groups in ways that continue to impact us on a global scale today — from the modern meat industry and climate change to the practices of zoological science and petkeeping. across eleven thematically focused chapters, norton ranges across times, places, and cultures — taking in sources from the caribbean, lowland south america, mexico, central america, and europe that were produced and dispersed over the five-hundred-year history of colonization in the americas. her interdisciplinary approach brings together methods and concepts from history and anthropology, and the range of materials she draws on include textual and visual artefacts that anchor the broad focus of the book’s claims in specific, detailed engagements that knit together the otherwise diverse peoples that comprise “europe”, “greater amazonia”, and “mesoamerica”. by placing animals at the centre of colonial history, norton proposes an alternative to the influential concept of columbian exchange as flows of “things” (conquest by guns, germs, and steel). instead, she interrogates the entanglement of human and nonhuman subjects within the colonial contact zone. rejecting the deeply entrenched idea that livestock husbandry is “a necessary and inevitable part of human progress” (9), she positions animal husbandry as a form of extractivism used to dispossess land, displace indigenous peoples, copyright © 2024 kristen guest this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 1 (2024): 205–210. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.19641 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.19641 guest, review of norton | 207 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) and objectify animals in contexts where they had traditionally been understood as subjects (77). norton’s approach works both to meticulously recover the ways in which pre-contact indigenous people interacted with animals, and to shed light on the ways european and indigenous engagements with animals profoundly reshaped the lifeways of both sides. the tame and the wild is organized into three sections: the first, “subject and object”, examines european modes of human–animal relation grounded in hunting, objectifying, and conquering; the second, “tame and wild”, focuses on indigenous ways of conceptualizing and interacting with animals through the intersubjective modes of absorbing, taming, hunting, and nourishing. though these first two sections outline how culturally distinct modes of categorizing animals emerge from different forms of relational activity, hunting — an activity central to both cultures — is particularly noteworthy as a point of overlap that encapsulates divergent understandings of animal subjectivity. among europeans, norton demonstrates, the practice of hunting among elites underpinned the symbolic expression of hierarchy and species difference. by contrast, among the indigenous peoples hunting took place within a fluid “ecology” of interdependence that expressed the “universality of subjectivity and personhood” (152). the broader implications of this overlap are the focus of the final section, “entanglements”, which tracks how european and indigenous practices and ways of knowing intermingled and were mutually transformed as a result of colonization. in charting the shifting worldviews and modes of interaction produced by contact after 1492, “entanglements” shows how our current, deeply contradictory relationships with nonhuman animals emerged from this long history. the book’s central argument unfolds within this framework as norton unpacks the ways designations of subjectivity were formulated differentially around questions about what, why, and how we eat. for europeans, she argues, “vassal” animals such as dogs and horses existed as privileged, often individuated, subjects and were invested with symbolic value. these animals — who were not eaten — worked humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 208 | guest, review of norton alongside their human owners in ritualized hunts that played a central role in organizing and reproducing a human hierarchy in which man’s claim to dominion was naturalized. while these privileged animal subjects helped define a vertical axis of difference, those others who were domesticated and produced as food through practices of husbandry were largely objectified, and so solidified the horizontal, binary distinction between human subject and animal object. by contrast, the indigenous societies norton examines classify all animals (including human animals) in explicitly relational, subjective terms. thus prey — the “wild” animals that one eats — were regarded as part of a web of interrelated lifeforms in which all beings both eat and are eaten. prey were not merely stalked, killed, and consumed but also “absorbed” via practices of material culture — their pelts, bones and feathers worn and memorialized (109). the “familiar” by contrast, were wild beings found or captured in the wild and nurtured in ways quite distinct from conventional modes of domestication. throughout the book, norton marks this difference by using the kilinago term “iegue” (an “animal one feeds”) to suggest the nurturing relationship between tamer and tamed (131). this relationship was much more than an individual bond between human and familiarized animal: in the words of a contemporary observer, “animals that come tame before them, they believe to belong to their gods, and that they dare not kill” (131). unlike domestic animals produced by european husbandry practices (fed in order to become food), those familiarized to become “tame” were not eaten, because — like one’s human family — they were considered to be kin (132). while both societies ate animals, she argues, european husbandry alienated “animal bodies from their personhood” while indigenous familiarization “actualized the reality of interspecies kinship” (149). norton’s focus on culturally distinct ways of conceptualizing animal subjectivity is one of the strengths of the tame and the wild, and by bringing european and indigenous worldviews into conversation she unsettles the binary assumptions that undergird claims to human exceptionalism. animals were never an uncomplicated “other” guest, review of norton | 209 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) to a human self in the west, and norton’s cross-cultural approach recaptures one thread in a history that has been obscured by enlightenment modes of categorizing and classifying. this is perhaps most effectively presented in norton’s discussion of the ways europeans conceived of elite hunting animals and prey in terms that strained the animal/human distinction. unlike animals produced by husbandry, “vassal” animals were individualized, conceived as unique personalities, and their comforts meticulously tended (32– 34). similarly, charismatic prey were “observed, respected, and admired”: “conceived as ‘enemies’, as in war — destined for death but respected for their clever stratagems” (32). such animal exceptionalism suggests not only how metaphoric connections aligned some animals with humans, but also the extent to which the eating / eaten dichotomy is rooted in cultural practices that confer subjective status through training relationships. in the case of indigenous societies, such dynamics played out in similar ways via human affinity for “special” animals — as when single species were captured in order to eat some and familiarize others. yet, the implications of such moments are sometimes overshadowed by norton’s emphasis on indigenous care and kinship. we learn, for example, that parrots were baited into live traps in order to exploit their impulse to “rescue” fellow species members, and that mother monkeys were killed with poison arrows so their young could be harvested for familiarization, but the impact of such practices on the animals involved is not addressed (138, 140). similarly, in charting the ways that familiarized animals were commodified as the market for exotic species expanded, we learn of animal treatment in europe, “far removed from the nurturing care given by those engaged in the taming work of familiarizing iegue” (282), and the ill-effects of “europeans’ involvement in increasingly colonized trade networks” (293). such moments in the book’s argument step back from delving into potentially fascinating — albeit messy — moments of human contradiction by placing them within a binary understanding of their cultural paradigms. one result of this reflex is that sharp, interesting, and useful critiques of european practices emerge alongside a much more romanticized and diffuse picture of indigenous cultures. humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 210 | guest, review of norton where they are teased out, the contradictions evident on both sides are, in fact, the most intriguing aspects of the deeper dives norton takes in her readings of diverse, unexpected subject matter, including the ways animals figured in european witch hunts and discourse about cannibalism, the status of the human as animal in ritual sacrifice, and the origins of the modern abattoir in fifteenth-century spain. norton also excels at unpacking aspects of indigenous representation in ways that make difficult, culturally specific forms such as the cosmogram legible to non-specialists. for some readers this extreme reach of time, place, and subject matter in the tame and the wild may frustrate the desire for a specific focus that unfolds within a tighter timeline and more specific location. others may find that the method of using very specific examples to draw conclusions about very broad trends unduly flattens important differences — particularly in attempts to recapture the histories of diverse indigenous peoples (including those whose practices do not square neatly with the tame / wild model norton frames), but also in distilling a singular “european” culture. the trade-off for such losses of specificity is that the tame and the wild is a tour de force: noteworthy for both its rich scope and bold insights. indeed, the leakages and contradictions norton is able to examine on a broad scale are ultimately the book’s most exciting contribution to the fields of colonial history, the history of science, anthropology, and animal studies. species interactions are by their very nature messy, and norton’s willingness to embrace this messiness in a capacious spirit allows her to ask and answer important questions in ways that are both compelling and paradigm-shifting. while making an important contribution to the scholarship of colonial history, norton also sheds light on the ways in which our deeply paradoxical relationships with animals are an ongoing legacy of this history. for scholars and students of animal studies, the tame and the wild is particularly relevant and useful, offering deep historical context for some of the most pressing issues currently confronting humans and animals on a planetary scale. gutiérrez negrón literary labour of ants the literary labour of ants refabulation, digression, and utopian form in daniel sada’s porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe (1999) sergio gutiérrez negrón oberlin college humanimalia 15.1 (fall 2024) abstract: this essay considers the literary labour carried out by ants in daniel sada’s porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe (1999), considered one of the most significant works of mexican literature in the last decade of the twentieth century. this essay takes a digressive scene within the novel, in which an ant fable is imagined, as a model of “refabulation”, a rewriting of western formic, or ant-centred, narratives that attempts to escape the total enclosure of allegory. sada’s refabulation both registers the fact of ants’ radical alterity and deploys them as the axis for the articulation of a utopian desire for the potential of a collective life organized beyond scarcity, labour, and capitalism. at the same time, the essay suggests that meaningful representations of interspecies interactions might not be found in novelistic narratives per se, but in the digressions often found and contained in its pages. keywords: ants, zoopoiesis, novelistic digression, animal fables, utopian form bio: sergio gutiérrez negrón is irvin e. houck associate professor of hispanic studies at oberlin college in oberlin, ohio, where he teaches courses in literature and latin american cultural studies. he publishes on contemporary latin american literature and nineteenth-century mexican cultural studies. he is also a novelist. email: sgutierr@oberlin.edu orcid: 0000-0001-7418-6889 copyright © 2024 sergio gutiérrez negrón this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 1 (2024): 105–133. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.19122 mailto:sgutierr@oberlin.edu https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7418-6889 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.19122 gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants | 107 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) amid the overwhelming narrative of violence and corruption told in daniel sada’s novel porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe (“because it seems like a lie the truth is never known”, 1999), considered one of the most significant works of the last decade of the twentieth century in mexico, there is a digression, a scene that momentarily suspends the plot. it goes like this: a group of protesters gather to demand information from the local government about the recent disappearance of a group of young activists. among them is cecilia, a mother of two of the missing young men. she is preoccupied and anxious, but after four hours of meandering political speeches, she has still not learned anything about her sons’ fate. suddenly, a stranger catches her eye. the man has been there for as long as she has. but only in that moment does she notice he has not been engaged in the events unfolding around them. instead, he sits on a bench, cracking his fingers, observing an anthill. the novel’s omniscient narrator tells it as follows: [el hombre] contemplaba — desde que llegó lo hizo — una ringlera de hormigas cuyo ignoto derrotero podía ser mentira artística. se trataba de un decurso temporal e itinerante: ordenamiento instintivo a más flexibilizado en un trazo curvilíneo apto para ideas y vueltas provechosas e inviolables. no se había perdido el tiempo. en un lapso de cuatro horas las hormigas de seguro habían traído a su reino las reservas suficientes para que su sociedad tuviera quehacer de sobra y descanso posterior ampliado a muchas más horas. su concepto favorito sería “despreocupación”, pero también “actitud” para hacer la sincronía entre trabajo y holganza, o mejor: los trabajos de la holganza: contrapeso y bienestar. the man was contemplating — since he arrived, he had been doing so — a column of ants whose unknown path might have been an artistic lie. it was a temporal and itinerant course: an instinctive organization twisted into a sinuous line well suited to fruitful and inviolable ideas and turns. they wasted no time. in the space of four hours, the ants had surely brought back enough supplies to their kingdom so that their society would 108 | gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants humanimalia 15.1 (2024) have plenty to do and, afterwards, enjoy an extended period of rest for many hours more. their favourite concept would be “nonchalance” [despreocupación], but also “attitude” [actitud] to bring about the synchrony of work and holganza [leisure, idleness], or rather: the labours of holganza  — counterbalance and well-being.1 a moment later, as if cecilia’s gaze has triggered some “internal mechanism”, the man, named conrado lúa, stands up, and from that moment on becomes instrumental to the novel’s narrative development.2 yet before the peculiar formic parenthesis is broken, cecilia will join conrado in his observation of the “event on the ground”.3 this “event on the ground” [suceso del suelo], a paragraph-long scene in a dizzyingly neo-baroque narrative about the dissolution of a community that spans six hundred pages, is the only moment in this novel that could be characterized as utopian. it is, indeed, an idiosyncratic interruption. its sudden fabulation, with its ambiguous point of view, has no significant repercussions in what follows. ants make a brief second appearance, not long after this scene, but they do so reduced to superficial facticity in that they bite a distracted conrado lúa, and are then dismissed.4 nevertheless, in this essay i will delve into this digression, reading it closely and considering it both on its own and within the context of the larger narrative. in a novel, by virtue of “not being determined by a teleological imperative, digression is free to carve out its own narrative space, to occupy the text as irreducible difference, no longer impelled to serve the larger whole”.5 digressions free narratives from their eventual destiny as plot and, in doing so, generate spaces for other narratives that are not necessarily supplemental or equivalent.6 the small 1 sada, porque parece mentira, 67. all translations are my own. except for this fragment, i provide the english translation in text and include the original quote in footnotes. 2 sada, porque parece mentira, 67. 3 sada, porque parece mentira, 67. “ligero entretenimiento para los reojos de ella entre gato y garabato, por decir más, el suceso del suelo, el cual no era interrumpido por el tránsito gigante.” 4 sada, porque parece mentira, 70. 5 frederick, “re-reading digression”, 18. 6 frederick, “re-reading digression”, 24. gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants | 109 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) literary form of the digressive narrative, like sada’s ant scene, frees itself from the threat of narrative subsumption or emplotment, and allows for speculative interpolations within a novel. taking digression itself as a small literary form, it is possible to explore the literary labour carried out by the ants in sada’s novel and consider their generative potential within the narrative. ants have long played a central role in the stories that humans tell about themselves. in the nahuatl tradition, the hero quetzacoatl transforms himself into a black ant after seeing one carrying along grains of corn, a plant that is locked away in a hidden mountain. he breaks into the hiding place, steals some of the corn, and brings it to the gods, who, in turn, declare that the grain will be humanity’s main sustenance.7 in the west, by contrast, insect stories were historically plotted around the relationship between intelligence and instinct, labour and idleness, or of collective living. fables, in particular, have been crawling with ants since the very beginning. because of the influence of the proverbs and aesop, the insects and their alternative societies have been a constant in christian meditation and didacticism since very early in its history.8 provident and industrious, sada’s ants hark back to these biblical and classical predecessors. in proverbs 6:6–8, king solomon exhorts man to “go to the ant thou sluggard; consider her ways and be wise: which, having no guide, overseer, or ruler, provideth her meat in summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.” like sada’s ants, solomonic ants are guided in their collective provisioning of the community by a common imperative that seems to transcend the political. so too are aesop’s ants, but this classical fable expands on solomon’s maxim by infusing it with plot, or at least by furthering its combative morality. aesop’s fable goes as follows: an ant toils through the summer to store up food for the coming winter while a cicada (or a grasshopper, solomon’s sluggard) spends the warm months dedicated to song and dance. each insect is aware of the other and their disparate approaches. the cicada (or grasshopper) tempts the ant in some versions. “why not come and chat 7 florescano, “el mito de quetzacoatl”, 37. 8 sleigh, six legs better, 9. 110 | gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants humanimalia 15.1 (2024) with me,” it asks, “instead of toiling and moiling in that way?”9 the ant, always industrious and focused, ignores the interloper. time passes, the cold arrives, and the ant and its ilk thrive. the cicada/ grasshopper does not. in some iterations, it dies of hunger while watching the ants enjoy the fruits of their labour. in others, it approaches the provident insects and pleads with them. in these cases, the ant turns to reprimand: “why didn’t you too store up some provisions during the summer?”, it asks and, after a quick back and forth, hands its death sentence with gusto: “since you sang in summer you can dance in winter”.10 here too, like in the novel, there is the unrepentant industriousness, the foresight and expedience of the ant. throughout his career, daniel sada (1953–2011) was known as a writer’s writer, a consummate stylist with an eccentric oeuvre. his fiction told absurd, humorous, and yet brutally mundane stories about the lives of awkward characters living in peripheral small towns of northern mexico. for mark anderson, sada’s “meticulous linguistic landscapes” have always been more important than the plots themselves, overrun as they are by a multiplicity of conflicting points of view which converge into “a single cultural geography that is nevertheless always open and purposefully incomplete, since no story is ever self-sufficient”.11 porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe is widely considered to be both his stylistic magnum opus and his most political novel. narratively, porque parece mentira revolves around the consequences of a theft of electoral ballots sometime between 1969 and 1972 in a provincial town called remadrín, located in the northern state of capila (not real-life coahuila), in “mágico” (not mexico). local political youths protest and plan to take their complaints to the state capital, brinquillo (not saltillo). they are intercepted and massacred in a clumsy but effective conspiracy put together by the corrupt regional government. the premise is made explicit in its first lines: “the corpses arrived at three in the afternoon. they were brought in a van — en masse, uncovered — and all riddled 9 aesop, fables of aesop, 54. 10 aesop, the complete fables, 246. 11 anderson, “daniel sada”, 199. gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants | 111 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) with bullets as expected”.12 but the text aborts linearity soon after, and goes on to assemble itself progressively through a rambling circumlocution that accumulates an often-discontinuous constellation of anecdotes, characters, landscapes, and language games which narrate, condemn, mock, and dismantle the legitimacy of a corrupt regime. all the while, it examines the collapse of the national-popular ideological state apparatus and the social consequences that follow.13 cecilia, the woman who observes the ant man, and her husband, trinidad, open and close the story, serving as one of the central narrative anchors. they are, however, just two in a cast of around ninety characters. in a sense, their story, as well as the dozens of others the novel tells, is relevant to the extent that their individual narratives relate to a story of communal dissolution that marks a stark contrast to the harmonious sight of the column of ants. in the novel, the scene with the ants is one of hundreds of meandering digressions. certainly, it is the only one centred on a nonhuman animal of any kind. still, a reader could easily miss it in the narrator’s winding discourse. most scholars would agree, in fact, that, however interesting the scene in question, or even the story and characters, the most compelling element in porque parece mentira is its omniscient narrator. as in his other works, “sada’s narrators exploit the eloquence of partial meanings, provisional associations, and incomplete metaphors and syntactic structures”.14 searching for a term to describe this heterodiegetic voice, scholar marco kunz settles on “parodic omniscience”. these narrators, kunz argues, parody the omniscience of traditional narrators who claim “the authority of their enunciative monopoly” to speak the “truth of their fictions”.15 sada’s narrators position themselves in proximity with their characters and 12 sada, porque parece mentira, 13. “llegaron los cadáveres a las tres de la tarde. en una camioneta los trajeron — en masa, al descubierto — y todos balaceados como era de esperarse.” 13 long, “tlatelolco’s persistent legacy”, 518. 14 anderson, “daniel sada”, 213. 15 kunz, “la omnisciencia paródica”, 300. all translations my own. “[e]l narrador se comporta como una parodia de esas voces omnipoderosas que en la inmensa mayoría de los relatos heterodiegéticos nos aseguran, con la autoridad de su monopolio enunciativo, la verdad de sus ficciones.” 112 | gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants humanimalia 15.1 (2024) are as contradictory and evasive as they are; yet, at the same time, the narrators “do not renounce the privilege of omniscience”, even if they do reject “the pretensions of pseudo-divine sovereignty”.16 the slippery nature of the narration allows for a digressive impulse which, as samuel frederick has written of another author, “dialectically interacts with plot, negating its centrality, but not usurping its place” in an “unresolved and irresolvable dialectic”.17 in fact, for héctor rodríguez de la o, sada’s narratives are often overwhelmed by an “excess of detail” that metastasizes and pushes the main threads of a particular novel to the sidelines, temporarily becoming “autonomous”.18 the scene with the ants is one such instance. despite its brevity, this digression stands out: it resonates and vibrates in the occlusive gloom of sada’s magnum opus. in its brevity, the scene brings to the fore the palpitating question of the possibility of a collective horizon, the dream of a life beyond labour, of a life of “holganza”, left untranslated to preserve the vague sense it conveys, in spanish, of leisure, idleness, but also of the suspension or absence of work — the infinitive at its centre, “holgar”, is also the word that yields “huelga”, as in “huelga de trabajadores” or workers’ strike.19 more importantly, this brief scene is also a markedly zoopoetic one, not necessarily because, paraphrasing kári driscoll and eva hoffmann, it is “about [ants], but because the [ants] that inhabit [it] serve as a necessary and unsubstitutable means to particular, as yet inscrutable, poetic ends. without them, it can’t be done”.20 in fact, in a maximalist novel where the horizon of hegemonic politics is revealed as uninhabitable, where there is no future in the community of people, where life is reduced to exploitation and poverty, and politics is presented as degrees of corruption and abuse, the only possi16 kunz, “la omnisciencia paródica”, 328. “[e]l narrador sadiano no renuncia al privilegio de la omnisciencia; incluso hace uso de su autoridad para denunciar mentiras, vicios y abusos, pero rechaza las ínfulas de la soberanía pseudo-divina y se coloca en un nivel más próximo a los humanos.” 17 frederick, “re-reading digression”, 24. 18 rodríguez de la o, porque parece barroco, 76–77. 19 diccionario de autoridades (1734), “holganza”. real academia española. https://www.rae. es/obras-academicas/diccionarios/nuevo-tesoro-lexicografico-0 20 driscoll and hoffmann, “what is zoopoetics?”, 3. https://www.rae.es/obras-academicas/diccionarios/nuevo-tesoro-lexicografico-0 https://www.rae.es/obras-academicas/diccionarios/nuevo-tesoro-lexicografico-0 gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants | 113 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) bility of escape offered by its narrator comes in the form of a minor digressive scene. this scene, in turn, engages in what will be called “refabulation”, a retelling and rewriting of western formic fables that attempts to escape the total enclosure of allegory, catalysed by the zoopoetic encounter with the small life form of the ant. fabular ants, instinct, and the zoopoetic instance notwithstanding their continued popularity, the fable as a genre has fallen into disrepute among scholars in the past few decades, particularly in the field of animal studies, which has tended to regard anthropomorphism with suspicion, and hence to align the fable with the very same ideologies that harm or devalue real, living nonhuman animals. as josé manuel marrero henríquez has put it, “[t]he loquacity with which fables give voice to foxes, ants, wolves, cicadas, and lambs does not acknowledge animals in their animality but transforms them into symbols of the vices and virtues of human morality”.21 “nowhere in literature,” writes margot norris “[have] animals [been] allowed to be themselves, to refer to nature and to their own animality without being pressed into symbolic service as metaphors, or as figures in fable or allegory (invariably of some aspect of the human)”.22 that being said, a reappraisal of the fable is afoot among scholars in animal studies. for chris danta, for example, the fable “unsettles the orientational metaphor that […] is fundamental to western thought: ‘human is up; animal is down’”.23 the fable thus enables a form of reorientation that invites readers to confront the existential fact of their animality, while also allowing them to imagine the sociality of other species.24 similarly, jeremy b. lefkowitz has noted how fables shift the attention towards the animal in that “animals have been only partially analogized to human beings, behaving in some ways like humans but retaining the outward appearance and eating habits of animals.”25 erica fudge summarizes these positions by stating simply that “[t]he animal story is a human 21 marrero henríquez, “affection, literature”, 3–4 22 norris, beasts of the modern imagination, 17. 23 danta, animal fables, 10. 24 danta, animal fables, 19; cf. hartigan, aesop’s anthropology, 23–24. 25 lefkowitz, “aesop and animal fable,” 11. 114 | gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants humanimalia 15.1 (2024) story, but it is also an animal story. and the apparently human story is also animal”.26 in this context, and focusing particularly on ant fables, catherine parry asks whether “descriptions such as ‘harmonious’, ‘hard-working’, ‘altruism’, and ‘civilisation’ [are] anthropocentric terms that obscure what ants are really doing,” or whether they are […] “anthropomorphic terms which make the apparently unfathomable other intelligible when scientific researchers find themselves at a loss for an objective description”.27 marrero henríquez and norris would insist on the former. parry and other scholars such as danta, lefkowitz, and fudge, however, would consider the possibility of the latter. parry herself wonders if the terms and concepts used to speak of the insects’ qualities are not necessarily human inventions, but rather “generated from our contemplation of creatures such as ants […] in an effort to make sense of ourselves”.28 “literature,” writes parry, “uses [ants and anthill figures] to analogise questions about how humans live as social creatures, for the fabular ant is not just good to think, and not just a trope, but a method for constituting and defining what it means to be human.”29 yet, parry suggests, the ant-as-method operates well beyond the humanistic realms where metaphor is often assumed to reside. even when interested in ants for ants’ sake, entomologists, naturalists, psychiatrists, sociologists, biologists, and taxonomists have all slouched towards the symbolic, incapable of escaping the cultural imaginaries which constitute their respective fields. this is not surprising. as charlotte sleigh says, a scientist “reaches for a metaphor in order to describe a process in nature (indeed, that metaphor may even condition how he or she sees it)”. the metaphor, in turn, comes with baggage, with “cultural resonances that reach beyond its immediate application to the natural world and suggest all kinds of unintended connections, images, and analogies to readers (in the broadest sense) of the scientist’s work”.30 in this way, a scientist’s explicatory language 26 fudge, “what can beast fables do”, 113. 27 parry, other animals, 67. 28 parry, other animals, 67. 29 parry, other animals, 65. 30 sleigh, six legs better, 14. gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants | 115 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) generates further echoes, conditioning “new exploration, experimentation, and representation”.31 sleigh insists, though, that the relationship between science and culture is multidirectional, “with the culture shaping the questions posed by scientists and the scientific answers in turn directing cultural views, reinforcing or slowly altering conceptions of the natural and its significance for the human condition”.32 for sleigh, in the period from the late-nineteenth to the late twentieth century, the ant-as-method was “used successively to model the human mind, society, and communication”.33 the theme of instinct, rooted in thomist philosophy, was a constant in these accounts, structured as they were on the binary supposition that “where man has intelligence to guide his actions, animals are endowed with instinct”.34 the human and the ant were imagined to be the “heads of their respective phyla, exercising respectively intelligence and instinct”.35 the raw fact of ants’ complex social behaviour cemented them, along with bees and wasps, as the “acme of instinct”.36 for karl marx, in the mid-nineteenth century, the distinction between the instinctive action of nonhuman animals and insects — spiders and bees, in his case — “and the imaginative, creative, and intentional quality of human practice [was] crucial to the theory of alienation”.37 alienated, “man (the worker) no longer feels himself to be freely active in any but his animal function […], and in his human functions he no longer feels himself to be anything but an animal”.38 marx’s dismissive position was but one of many, however. others believed that the study of insects’ instinctive life had the potential to reveal “something about evolution” and the “progress towards eusociality”.39 to31 sleigh, six legs better, 15. 32 sleigh, six legs better, 11. 33 sleigh, six legs better, 11. 34 sleigh, six legs better, 16. 35 sleigh, six legs better, 49. 36 sleigh, six legs better, 16. 37 peterson, “zoological marx”, 20. 38 peterson, “zoological marx”, 20 39 sleigh, six legs better, 40. that is, that the complex social organization of certain insects, which seemed to imply cooperation, distribution of tasks, and generational cohabitation, all of which are taken as hallmarks of eusociality, could be used to explain human collective life. 116 | gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants humanimalia 15.1 (2024) wards the end of the nineteenth century, this interest in the instinctive life existed within a cultural horizon in which an appreciation of primitive forms of life flourished, and had the potential not only to illuminate the evolutionary history of life on earth, but also buttress and complement the search for modes of perceptions “surpassing that of the human”.40 ultimately, as jussi parikka writes, “[s]eeing insect life as an instinctual folding with its environment hints at interesting subject–object couplings in which the inventive modulation of the living environment on the insects’ part proceeds via an immanent engagement”.41 in sada’s novel, the ants’ “instinctive organization”, their impulsive yet focused collective activity, is what catches the eye of their accidental audience and, in danta’s phrase, “reorients” the perspective. for the narrator, the peculiar way in which the insect collective traverses its “unknown path” instinctively is so remarkable and surprising, that it “might have been an artistic lie”.42 the ants’ instinctive collective forces the narrator to default to the language of falsehood, artifice, and artistic practice. the language of creative artistry seems to be the only linguistic arsenal he has at hand to refer to an activity that is formally complex, aesthetically remarkable, but not fully reasonable. only by framing it thus can he conceive the alterity of these small lives. once framed in such a manner, as by association, the insects capture the narrator’s imagination and catalyse the diegetic instance of zoopoiesis, a “creation by means of the animal”.43 to be sure, the narrator’s zoopoetic instance takes place only on the realm of the hypothetical, of the subjunctive (“the ants had surely brought back enough supplies to their kingdom so that their society would have [tuviera] plenty to do”).44 that is, the narration distances itself from the truth and becomes lodged in a subjunctive mode that does not seek to fix and determine the ants. in this way, it avoids what john drew calls an “anthropo-allegorical erasure”, 40 parikka, insect media, 24. 41 parikka, insect media, 44. 42 sada, porque parece mentira, 67. 43 driscoll, “sticky temptation”, 223. 44 sada, porque parece mentira, 67. original quote? gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants | 117 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) which obfuscates the nonhuman animals in animal representations and recasts them “as mere resources for (literal and symbolic) human consumption”.45 beyond the basic indicative description of the column of ants moving across the ground, everything else the narrator proclaims is explicitly conditional, understood as a suggestion, as unambiguous fantasy. as carolyn fornoff has recently written, the subjunctive foregoes “commitment to a singular or fixed truth”, and “encodes the speaker’s uncertainty or opinionating about the state of things”. fornoff argues that “subjunctive aesthetics are less invested in accuracy and reportage, and more in the desires and fears that the real provokes, as well as the as-of-yet unrealized possibilities that percolate around the given”. she continues: “[t]hinking in the subjunctive explodes the fixity of the way things are, suggesting, even against all odds, that the status quo can be transformed”.46 in this same spirit, sada’s zoopoetic vignette, written in the subjunctive mode, recasts the ants’ instinctive order as the slight crack through which, as leonard cohen had it, the light gets in. sada’s formic digression echoes the classic anthill metaphor, which “proposes a society of diminished autonomy, individual identity, boundaries, and motivations, and emphasises socially beneficial altruistic behaviour”.47 yet, in sada, this fantasy registers as ironic because of its subtle implication of an inversion of the intelligence– instinct binary. that is, the fabulation emphasizes the apparent wisdom and harmony of ants, which stands in contrast to the messy and meandering political gathering that surrounds it, and which seems to be driven by unthinking instinct. this contextual irony, in turn, pushes the digression into the realm of the exemplary, the allegorical, and, thus, of the fable. sada’s fabular ants, however, differ from their solomonic and aesopian lineage in one key respect: solomon and aesop’s ants reside in an agonistic world defined by scarcity; sada’s do not. if anything, the labours of solomonic and aesopian insects are given meaning by the prospect of an imminent, wintry death. by contrast, in the immediate frame of the novelistic 45 drew, “re-animalizing animal farm”, 167. 46 fornoff, subjunctive aesthetics, 3. 47 parry, other animals, 72–73. 118 | gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants humanimalia 15.1 (2024) narrator’s idle fabulation, which filters the idle vagrant’s fantasy and cecilia’s boredom, there is no threat, no external drive. the ants in remadrín are motivated — or are imagined to be motivated — by their collective prioritization of what sada calls “the labours of holganza”. here, solomon’s fable would be phrased differently: “look to the ants thou sluggard [conrado, cecilia] — consider their ways and be wise: which, having no guide, overseer, or ruler, gather the harvest for four hours, so they can rest for longer”. thus, it is holganza, as opposed to the threat of scarcity and death, that is the fabular insects’ driving principle. labour not for labour’s sake, but for the social reproduction of the collective and its right to holganza. in other words, sada’s narrator short-circuits the west’s formic fable through a description that reboots the traditional interpretation of the insect’s continuous activity. in doing so, it clears the way for the potential of a new subjunctive refabulation that, at the same time, does not erase the ant itself as another life form. collective life, remadrín’s impossible community, and the “column of ants” on the one hand, the contemporary scientist explains the social and collective life of the ant as as random, instinctive behaviour resulting from evolutionary adaptation. “to lay observers [like sada and his narrator] and natural historians across the centuries”, on the other hand, writes parry, there has “always seemed to be the potential for more exciting or mysterious explanations for ants’ innovation, organised cooperative behaviour, and sheer achievement in tasks such as nest building and garnering of food supplies”.48 sleigh holds that the “particular identification of instinct with social insects, gives the trope an additional characteristic: it is essentially constituted by the mass”.49 the question of the ant as a social insect could be deployed in various ways. for example, at the end of the nineteenth century, ants were regarded as models of collective social responsibility. before and between the two world wars, however, the ant collective pessimistically came to suggest unthinking crowds, 48 parry, other animals, 68. 49 sleigh, six legs better, 16–17. gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants | 119 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) mass manipulability, and the devaluation of the individual life. later, towards the mid-1950s, the ant collective was rehabilitated into a positive model of group intelligence and complex task-solving machines.50 instinct played a role in all of these images; as expression of a prelapsarian, communitarian impetus; as proof of inherent herd impulses; or as teleological, purpose-driven action. sada’s narrator subscribes to the affirmative school of ant fabulation. as we have seen, in the novel, the ant collective’s instinctive organization and coordinated action are positively imagined to be guided by the common, collective horizon. the brevity of the fragment belies its dramatic weight precisely because the ants are spotted right amid a messy, noisy, and disorganized political gathering.51 in the midst of this confusion and boredom, cecilia spots conrado looking at the ants. he seems so calm and preoccupied that she cannot but focus on him and the object of his attention, “as if she were casually observing an augury”.52 she goes on to look back and forth, from man to insects. but then conrado, the stranger, jumps to his feet, and the reverie is broken, the insects fading into the novel’s noise. the augury is, of course, the stranger himself, who will provide the information that can lead to the discovery of the fate of the young protesters. yet, even if we accept this reading, the ants’ collective cannot be denied a portentousness of its own. porque parece mentira is, all things considered, very much a novel about the formation and dissolution of collectivity within a socially fragmented and isolated community. the novel’s plot, in fact, is structured around three instances in which attempts are made to create a collective horizon, such as that of the ants. chronologically, the first of these collective moments is the surprising resonance the three opposition parties’ platforms find among the people of remadrín, which spurs an unprecedented interest in the coming elections, and politicizes the town’s youth. as the narrator tells it, “[n]ever before in the history of electoral campaigns has what is happening now occurred. the 50 sleigh, six legs better, 17. 51 sada, porque parece mentira, 67. 52 sada, porque parece mentira, 67. “[p]or no encontrar más que hastío en los devaneos de allá, prefirió observar al hombre como si viera a sus anchas un augurio.” 120 | gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants humanimalia 15.1 (2024) propaganda of the three most influential [opposition] political parties managed to penetrate the most unexpected of places, as did their candidates”.53 the collective horizons promised by these parties are vague, and their details obscure. when cecilia’s soon-to-be vanished sons argue with their father and defend their political beliefs, which are those of the opposition parties, they find themselves at a loss for words and can only mutter: “poverty, tremendous and irremediable. alms-wages, a mere pittance, for now and forever. for such purposes, democracy in suspense is beneficial”.54 the narrator summarizes the mobilization thus: “seen in another way: poverty binds people together. the filthy philosophy of necessity. herds are formed. there is no lack of opportunity. any reason will do”.55 here, the political platform of the opposition itself does not matter. in the impoverished present of remadrín, it is heroic enough simply to oppose the status quo. the political reawakening is so noteworthy that the regional ruling party concocts a series of cascading tactics to suppress the vote. despite these obstacles, the citizens of remadrín and its environs show up on voting day in unprecedented numbers. the line barely moves, though, because the officer in charge of the polling station, corruptlike the others, employs a “sinister but expedient strategy: delay”.56 eventually, there is movement, and more and more people cast their votes. alas, it is all for naught: “suddenly, some masked men got out of the three peculiar vans. a flourish of machine guns, such that the police did nothing but shrink back and then it was: ‘hands up, everyone!’”57 the masked men fire their guns into the air to scare the “now ex-voters”, 53 sada, porque parece mentira, 113. “a lo largo de la historia de las campañas electorales jamás ha sucedido lo que ahora. la propaganda de los tres partidos políticos de mayor arrastre logró penetrar en los sitios más impensados, al igual que sus candidatos”. 54 sada, porque parece mentira, 20. “la pobreza tremenda y sin remedio. los salarios-limosna y por todos los siglos de los siglos. para tal fin ayuda la democracia en vilo”. 55 sada, porque parece mentira, 28. “vista de otra manera: la pobreza aglutina. mugre filosofía de la necesidad. se forman manadas. no falta la ocasión. cualquier motivo sirve”. 56 sada, porque parece mentira, 103. “figura inamovible, sin embargo, porque el jefe de casilla demoraba el proceder. una siniestra estrategia, lúcida para los suyos: ¡la demora […]!” 57 sada, porque parece mentira, 165. “de pronto, de las tres raras camionetas se bajaron unos tipos que andaban enmascarados. gala de ametralladoras para que los policías no hicieran más que encogerse y: ¡arriba las manos, todos!” gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants | 121 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) and “with great speed and efficiency, another three masked individuals grabbed five ballot boxes and loaded them into the idling vans, ready to make a quick getaway”.58 thus, corruption and the threat of violence dissolves this common and unprecedented attempt at inaugurating a new, collective horizon through the electoral process. nevertheless, the most ardent citizens of remadrín persist. they organize themselves once again, led by members of one of the parties, and resolve to march in protest, first, to the state capital and, later, the country’s. this second collective instance, moved by the belief in the possibility of political change, is, again, interrupted. early in the novel, the narrator proleptically reveals the eventual fate of the protesters, on which the text will later expand extensively: “the army repressed that protest with an abundance of violence”.59 sada never makes clear how many of the mobilized citizens were murdered. a witness, who appears only briefly in the text, speculates that “eighty percent of the protesters must be safe and sound [...]. most of them hightailed it into the desert”.60 but regardless of how many participants survived — and, at the end of the novel, it is revealed, in passing, that cecilia’s sons are, in fact, alive, although she will never know — they can never return to remadrín, caught as it is in an inescapable web of corruption. the final bid for a collective horizon — which begins with the protest in which cecilia sees the stranger and the ants — is driven by a shared sense of mourning and indignation: the widespread movement of margins moving towards the centre: people: since the early hours: the clamour rushing towards the cruel vortex of the main square, where the movement of hundreds halted and the whirlpool of common indignation gathered new momentum. the elections had to be denounced, 58 sada, porque parece mentira, 165–166. “[a]hora ex votantes”; “con gran rapidez técnica otros tres enmascarados cargaron con cinco urnas y se treparon con ellas a los muebles encendidos, ya listos para arrancar”. 59 sada, porque parece mentira, 16. “[e]l ejército reprimió aquella marcha con lujo de violencia” 60 sada, porque parece mentira, 17. “[e]l ochenta por ciento de los manifestantes ha de estar sano y salvo […]. ¡a todo lo que daba huyó la mayoría al desierto[!]” 122 | gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants humanimalia 15.1 (2024) and hence: the killing, the violent and repulsive despotism. they needed to organize for it once again, with more people, and to see if this time it would really be worth it.61 newly energized, the people of remadrín organize a committee and send it out through the region to find out more information about the fate of the protesters. when they fail, the citizens become disheartened but persist in their demands. if they cannot get answers outside of the town, they will do so right there. so they organize a permanent sit-in in front of the corrupt mayor’s office. they are certain that, with time, he will crack. the sit-in begets a community, a constant festival of sorts, despite the serious demands that drive it. a game keeps the citizenry engaged: every day, there is a contest for the best new slogan and banner. the system works, and remadrín’s cohesion outlasts the early enthusiasm. “but the game did not last more than four months because the object, in truth, was something else, namely the original demand: that the government answer for the disappeared honestly, goddamn it, and of that there was no chance, really”.62 the sit-in disbands and, eventually, the regional government — the very same government that ordered the massacre — sends its men to arrest remadrín’s mayor, accuses him of masterminding the whole thing, and replaces him with a new, young, and naïve interim mayor pulled from the official party’s ranks.63 this new administrator goes on to undo the former mayor’s complicated infrastructure of clientelism and corruption, and, without the protections of yore, remadrín’s wealthy citizens leave, condemning the town: “the fat cats up front, followed by the middle-class, and trailing behind them, the poor masses with no jobs, hungry, tearful, because 61 sada, porque parece mentira, 52–53. “el movimiento generalizado de orillas que se mueven hacia el centro: gente: desde temprano: el barullo apurón hacia el vórtice cruento de la plaza de armas adonde se frenaban las correrías de cientos y adonde el remolino de indignación común cobraba un nuevo impulso. había que repudiar las elecciones, en consecuencia: lo de la matazón, el despotismo airado y asqueroso. había que organizarse para ello, de nuevo, con más gente, y a ver si ahora sí valía la pena.” 62 sada, porque parece mentira, 433. “pero el juego no duró más allá de cuatro meses porque el objeto, en verdad, era otro, por decir: la demanda original: que el gobierno respondiera por los desaparecidos sinceramente, caray, y eso no, ni para cuándo.” 63 sada, porque parece mentira, 513. gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants | 123 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) without money the people are ruined”.64 to whoever is left in town, the new interim mayor promises a round of honest and fair elections. on the day, though, nobody shows up to vote because there is barely anybody left. as marco codebò has argued, all of the key characters in sada’s novel are “forced to leave the locality where their existence is situated”, condemned to a permanent displacement.65 against this bleak landscape, sada offers us the alterity of the ants: free from individual identity and characterized only by the collective and instinctive. cecilia and conrado lúa’s encounter with the ants occurs not between the internal consciousness of individuals and external entities or environments, but rather through their interaction with a network of bodies. as parry has written, it is an encounter that is of “a nature entirely alien to the metonymy of the face that identifies the human individual”.66 it is in the subjunctive zoopoetic instance of refabulation catalysed by the encounter with the plurality of the ants that the novel’s narrator posits the only community capable of sustaining any common project. everything everywhere in the town of remadrín, in the state of capila, in the country of mágico is a communal dead-end. everything except this projected alien ant formation, where all individualism has melted into the plural mass, where scarcity and poverty do not register simply because all action, always already collective, is predicated not on permanent accumulation, but on the provisioning of “enough reserves to their kingdom that their society would have plenty to do, and afterwards an extended period of rest for many hours more.”67 it is the smallest of utopias, undoubtably, and it could be argued that this formic dreamland is put into question the very moment it appears in porque parece mentira. its singular appearance is brief, almost parenthetical. its very articulation in the subjunctive mode as a speculative digression by the narrator and the fatalistic cascade 64 sada, porque parece mentira , 515. “los ricachos por delante seguidos por los medianos y hasta atrás, como en arrastre, la pobre bola de gente sin jale, hambrienta, llorosa, porque sin dinero el pueblo está tirado a la ruina.” 65 codebò, novels of displacement, 128. 66 parry, other animals, 94. 67 sada, porque parece mentira, 67. 124 | gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants humanimalia 15.1 (2024) of events that follow it, in the novel, renders it sardonic; the people’s future is so dim that utopia can only be projected by a vagrant and an exasperated mourning mother, onto the smallest of life forms. yet, it is also for all these reasons that sada’s ants are so noteworthy, as i have been arguing up to this point. it is precisely because it is subordinated against all these odds that the digression in question begets utopian form. kathi weeks writes that [a]s a source of provocation as well as estrangement, the utopian form can potentially animate the desire for the possible, as opposed to simply the vindication or restoration of what has been lost; stimulate the imagination of what might become rather than nostalgia for what once was; and also mobilize on the basis of hope for a different future, rather than only on outrage and resentment over past and present injustices.68 sada’s fable of the ants registers the existence, however fleeting, of a desire for another reality, which haunts the novel as a provocation, and almost as a red herring. it is the only such case of utopian demand in all of daniel sada’s oeuvre, and it is achieved only through zoopoiesis. utopian ants and “the labours of holganza” porque parece mentira paints remadrín’s labour panorama in just a few strokes. what little promising work exists locally is in public employment and, insofar it is distributed and appointed by the town’s mayor, comes at the price of wholly submitting to and abetting his corrupt ways. outside this, all other waged work pays so little that cecilia’s sons consider it no better than charity, and it is this lack of economic prospects that mobilizes them politically.69 conrado lúa, the ant man, is himself a disgruntled ex-employee of a local political leader. he comes to remadrín to shed light on the nature of the massacre at the heart of the novel out of vengeance and resentment at being pushed out into this dire landscape. beyond political employment and exploitative wages, the only stated promise of work 68 weeks, the problem with work, 207–8. 69 sada, porque parece mentira, 20. gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants | 125 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) exists at the other side of the border, in the united states. but even this is not readily available. one of the novel’s many characters, dora ríos, crossed the border once, but, after struggling to get there, it all came to naught: “they couldn’t find work. they begged and otherwise — with anguish — they slept out in the open wherever they felt tired. besides: illegal immigrants dodging border patrol, with no english, what could they really expect?”70 as codebò has noted, in the novel, “[p]owerless characters who plan to emigrate to the united states experience all the difficulties of crossing the border illegally, while [characters with political and economic power] seem to encounter no problem whatsoever”.71 despite this lack of opportunities, in remadrín, like everywhere else, work continues to be the primary means by which individuals are integrated into economic, social, political, and familial systems.72 even the novel’s main sluggard, cecilia’s husband trinidad, who has avoided work his whole life and inherited all that he has, hypocritically preaches the importance of industriousness to his sons at one point, falsely claiming that it had cost the family “a lot of work” to overcome poverty, build their house, and open their corner store (“tienda de abarrotes”).73 everybody in the room, including trinidad himself, is aware of the fiction, and yet he cannot avoid reproducing the moralism of industriousness.74 sada’s ants, guided by their labours of holganza, interrupt this dogma of work. their presence captures the joint imagination of idle characters — the distracted narrator, conrado, recently fired from his job, and cecilia, a bored, distraught citizen — and offers a brief and minuscule utopia. in its brevity, the ants’ labour of holganza hints at a particular strain of the expansive and variegated archive of what weeks calls the tradition of the refusal of work. paul lafargue 70 sada, porque parece mentira, 93. “no conseguían trabajo. pordioseaban y aparte — con angustia — dormían al aire libre donde les daba sueño. además: ilegales huyendo de la migra, sin mascar el inglés, ¿qué podían esperar?” 71 codebò, novels of displacement, 120. 72 weeks, the problem with work, 8. 73 sada, porque parece mentira, 113. 74 sada, porque parece mentira, 32. 126 | gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants humanimalia 15.1 (2024) (1842–1911), karl marx’s son-in-law and co-founder of the first french socialist party, was an early precursor. in his most famous pamphlet, the right to be lazy (1898), he condemned all work performed in capitalist society, which was but “the cause of all intellectual degeneracy, of all organic deformity”.75 against the imperatives of industriousness and productivism, he offered the practice of the “virtues of laziness”, and posited laziness as the “mother of the arts and noble virtues”.76 lafargue’s pamphlet insisted, however briefly, on the need to “return” man to his primitive animality, conceptualizing the human as, essentially inoperative and without purpose, or, in the words of giorgio agamben, “the sabbatical animal par excellence”.77 whereas marx saw animals “as instinct-driven, uncreative, and unselfconscious — the mirror image of unalienated humans”,78 lafargue’s pamphlet did the opposite, casting the animal as the outside of capitalist consciousness. lafargue argued that the moral obfuscation with labour “atrophied” “the primitive animal”, and short-circuited its capacity to understand that laziness was the natural state of man.79 it was up to proletariat, he insisted, to “make of the human animal a free being”.80 for this reason, he yearned for the day when the working class would free itself from the vices of work and rise up, “not to demand the rights of man, which are but the rights of capitalist exploitation, not to demand the right to work which is but the right to misery, but, to forge a brazen law forbidding any man to work more than three hours a day”. if that day were to come, he writes, “the earth, the old earth, trembling with joy would feel a new universe leaping within her.81 the world of laziness envisioned by lafargue is pleasurably purposeless, teeming with entertainment, with the killing of time, “which kills us second by second;” a world with “shows and theatrical 75 lafargue, right to be lazy, 11. 76 lafargue, the right to be lazy, 58. 77 agamben, the kingdom and the glory, 246. 78 peterson, “the zoological marx”, 20. 79 lafargue, the right to be lazy, 12. 80 lafargue, the right to be lazy, 13. 81 lafargue, the right to be lazy, 56. gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants | 127 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) performances always and always”.82 for kathi weeks, lafargue’s refusal of work is not a call for the abolition of productive activity per se, but a refusal to make work “the necessary center of social life and means of access to the rights and claims of citizenship, and a refusal of the necessity of capitalist control of production”.83 such refusal, in lafargue and others, entailed “a reduction of work, in terms of both hours and social importance, and a replacement of capitalist forms of organization by new forms of cooperation”.84 sada’s ants, in their stated nonchalance (“[t]heir favourite concept would be ‘nonchalance’, but also ‘attitude’”, the narrator tells us), are very much creatures that are imagined to exist within a context similar to this refusal of work. far from the “atrophies” of capitalist imperatives, they are committed to the notion of holganza in its most active sense, as a suspension of work, as a condition closer to idleness than to leisure. yet, before moving to the question of holganza, it is important to note that sada’s emphasis on the how or the means, on the “nonchalance” or “attitude” of formic activity is not tangential or secondary to the what, or content, of the labours of holganza. in his subjunctive formulation, sada could be said to approach agamben’s modal ontology, according to which a life “cannot be separated from its form”, a life in “which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself”.85 for agamben, understanding human life necessitates, on the one hand, acknowledging its essential inoperativity, its purposelessness, the “radical being-without-work of human communities”. 86 on the other, it requires appreciating that “the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all, power”. 87 the ants’ labours of holganza are not articulated through a combative or oppositional stance, but through their nonchalant attitude, the casual and calm acknowledgment of the facticity of the how and what of these labours. 82 lafargue, the right to be lazy, 53. 83 weeks, the problem with work, 99. 84 weeks, the problem with work, 99. 85 agamben, means without end, 4. 86 agamben, means without end, 141. 87 agamben, means without end, 4. 128 | gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants humanimalia 15.1 (2024) for agamben, inoperativity also has a use. in fact, what is in question in “inoperativity” is the “capacity to deactivate something and render it inoperative — a power, function, a human operation — without simply destroying it but by liberating the potentials that have remained inactive in it in order to allow a different use of them”. 88 sada’s formic parenthesis suspends, for a subjunctive moment, the functional logic of the productivism of capitalist imperative; it renders it inoperative, and offers the labours of holganza as a new logic. the ants’ nonchalance could, perhaps, offer a position from which to articulate what agamben has called “a form-of-life”, “the revocation of all tactical vocations, which deposes them and brings them into an internal tension in the same gesture in which it maintains itself and dwells in them”. 89 agamben writes that if idleness “return[s] ceaselessly in the dreams and political utopias of the occident”, it is because it functions as an enigmatic relic that gestures towards the inoperative essence of humankind. 90 sada’s “labours of holganza” are an articulation of this tenacious idleness — as opposed to productive or contemplative leisure — which western philosophical traditions have consistently interpreted as moral disintegration, non-productivity, self-alienation, and so forth. to speak of idleness freed from these restraints, while preserving its currency as a functional concept and a phenomenological experience, philosopher brian o’connor suggests a threefold approach focusing on its phenomenological features, its effective dimension, and its structure. described phenomenologically, idleness can be understood as a state “experienced as unfocused and only vaguely, if at all, as purposeful”; as “restful and pleasurable”; and as a “sense of freedom throughout the duration of idle behaviour: a feeling of noncompulsion and drift”.91 approached with an eye to its effective dimensions, o’connor holds that the activities which happen during an idle period are, by definition, non-productive. “should an interesting thought, of value to ongoing or future projects, arise 88 agamben, the use of bodies, 273. 89 agamben, the use of bodies, 277. 90 agamben, the kingdom and the glory, 246. 91 o’connor, idleness, 5. gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants | 129 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) during idleness it is a serendipitous outcome”, he writes.92 in this sense, it is not a moment of irrationality or mindlessness. idle drift allows for conceptual components, judgements, as well as an awareness of action even if accompanied with a disregard for overall ends and purposes. the emphasis on the effective dimension of idleness makes it possible to address the ways in which it is ultimately inoperative in that it is not bound to the imperative to “make something of oneself, even in bad faith”.93 for o’connor, idleness jettisons any structure of choice, any reflexivity, and is experienced not as autonomy, with its social injunctions, but as “freedom in a context, a knowing indifference — and an implicit resistance — to specific recommendations about how one ought to live”.94 beyond individual choice, beyond the laborious work of self-determination, the zoopoetic encounter between conrado / cecilia and the ants offers the novel the possibility to conceive, “by means of the animal”, an estranged, collective reality in which the seemingly contradictory concept of “the labours of holganza” serves as a sort of instinctive and inoperative organizational norm, as a potential form-of-life. the ants’ existential activity, in this sense, is neither irrational, mindless, or alienated, as marx would have it. but neither is it essentially productive, inspirational, or reproductive. it just is, even if it seems like a lie. in other words, “the labours of holganza” become, then, a kneejerk and desperate attempt at fleetingly and subjunctively conceptualizing freedom as an activity, a freedom that is beyond the political freedoms peddled by the novel’s politicians, beyond liberalism’s individualistic conceptions of freedom, and beyond “philosophers’ freedom” understood as rational self-determination.95 the subjunctive refabulation catalysed by the zoopoetic encounter with the ant indexes the utopian possibility of the potential fact of a collective life organized beyond scarcity, labour and capitalism, beyond what so far has constituted human sociality. 92 o’connor, idleness, 6. 93 o’connor, idleness, 6. 94 o’connor, idleness, 180. 95 o’connor, idleness, 172. 130 | gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants humanimalia 15.1 (2024) a conclusion for catherine parry, it might be the case that the “form and narrative strategies of the modern novel” are inextricable from a “particular conception of the modern human” and, thus, “anthropocentric by nature”, incapable of reaching “non-anthropocentric animal protagonists”.96 but she also believes in and considers the possibility of novelistic narratives that forego the attempt to render authentically “non-human sensory worlds”, and instead articulate a “critical [form] of anthropomorphism” to engage with the multispecies cohabitation of the world and undo exceptionalist anthropocentrism.97 sada’s scene with the ants belongs to the critical strain of this tradition. it articulates its critical anthropomorphism by embracing a subjunctive mode that both records the indicative existence of the ants, its process of zoopoiesis, and, only then, launches into an anthropomorphic fabulation lodged and contained within the limits of its subordinate clauses. in so doing, it suggests that, perhaps, the literary indexing of interspecies interaction, the “event on the ground” of zoopoiesis, is not necessarily found in the novel per se, i.e. in its plot, but rather in the brief, autonomous digressions often found and contained in its pages. plot, in the words of frederick, is the “regulatory system that assures any digressive deviation is accounted for”.98 the (plotted) novel is inevitably “dominated by the superego of continuity, a superego of evolution, history [and] filiation”, which semantically and psychologically impoverishes all incident to the pull of the story, the imposition of character, and the coherence of the whole.99 it might indeed be the case that plotted narrative is anthropocentric by nature, as parry says of the novel form, in that the gravitational forces of intention, identity, and teleology cannot help but anthropomorphize all life. as such, digression offers a tool to suspend and pry open the anthropomorphic force exerted by emplotment. taken as a small literary 96 parry, other animals, 66. 97 parry, other animals, 66. 98 frederick, samuel. “re-reading digression”, 16. 99 barthes, grain of the voice, 132. gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants | 131 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) form, it allows for an encounter, however brief, with non-human sensory worlds. as a result, it has the potential to beget utopian form, as it does in sada’s novel. in porque parece mentira , once this brief zoopoetic instance ends, the narrator once more reduces ants to their alterity and facticity and forgets them, but not before making them bite conrado. that bite, a humorous resolution typical of the novel’s narrator, registers the insects’ existence beyond fabulation precisely at the point when they are left behind by a narrative that once more gives in to the gravitational pull of plot. in porque parece mentira, the slippery nature of the digression, the fact that it is not immediately clear to whom the brief daydream can be ascribed — to conrado who observes the ants, to cecilia who observes conrado observing the ants, or to the loquacious narrator, who permits and indulges in the distraction — generates the sense that, for however long, the “event on the ground” happens to all of them. the sudden, strange sight of semiotically unencumbered miniature life seizes all three in an instance of zoopoiesis that forgets story, suspends the pull of plot, and brackets the corruption and murder and ennui which portend a life without respite or future. this moment becomes utopian simply because it cuts through all of the contextual darkness and noise, and acknowledges the existence of other lifeforms and, with it, the existence of other inoperative forms of living. works cited aesop. the complete fables. translated by olivia temple and robert temple. london: penguin, 1998. aesop. the fables of aesop. text based upon la fontaine and croxall. illustrated by joseph eugene dash. chicago: albert whitman & co, 1925. agamben, giorgio. the kingdom and the glory: for a theological genealogy of economy and government. translated by lorenzo chiesa and matteo mandarini. stanford, ca: stanford university press, 2011. agamben, giorgio. means without ends: notes on politics. translated by vincenzo binetti and cesare casarino. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2000. agamben, giorgio. the use of bodies. translated by adam kotsko. stanford: stanford university press, 2014. anderson, mark. “daniel sada and the everyday baroque.” in contemporary latin american fiction: critical insights, edited by ignacio lópez calvo, 199–216. ipswich, ma: salem, 2017. 132 | gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants humanimalia 15.1 (2024) barthes, roland. the grain of the voice: interviews, 1962–1980. translated by linda coverdale. new york: hill and wang, 1985. codebò, marco. novels of displacement: fiction in the age of global capital. columbus: ohio state university press, 2020. danta, chris. animal fables after darwin: literature, speciesism, and metaphor. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2018. drew, john. “re-animalizing animal farm: challenging the ‘anthropoallegorical’ in literary and pedagogical discourse and practice.” humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 163–201. https://doi. org/10.52537/humanimalia.11190. driscoll, kári. “the sticky temptation of poetry.” journal of literary theory 9, no. 2 (2015): 212–29. https://doi.org/10.1515/ jlt-2015-0011. driscoll, kári, and eva hoffmann. “introduction: what is zoopoetics?”. in what is zoopoetics?: texts, bodies, entanglement, edited by kári driscoll and eva hoffmann, 1–13. cham: palgrave macmillan, 2018. florescano, enrique. “el mito de quetzacoatl.” allpanchis, no. 40 (1992): 11–93. fornoff, carolyn. subjunctive aesthetics: mexican cultural production in the era of climate change. nashville: vanderbilt university press, 2024. frederick, samuel. “re-reading digression: towards a theory of plotless narrativity.” in textual wanderings: the theory and practice of narrative digression, edited by rhian atkin, 15–26. london: routledge, 2011. fudge, erica. “what can beast fables do in literary animal studies? ben jonson’s volpone and the prehumanist human.” in animal satire, edited by robert mckay and susan mchugh, 101–116. cham: palgrave macmillan, 2023. hartigan, john, jr. aesop’s anthropology: a multispecies approach. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2014. kunz, marco. “la omnisciencia paródica en porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe de daniel sada.” in nuevas narrativas mexicanas 3: escrituras en transformación, edited by marco kunz and cristina mondragón, 297–333. barcelona: linkgua-digital, 2019. lafargue, paul. the right to be lazy and other studies. translated by charles h. kerr. chicago: charles h. kerr & company, 1907. lefkowitz, jeremy b.. “aesop and animal fable.” in the oxford handbook of animals in classical thought and life, edited by gordon lindsay campbell, 1–23. oxford: oxford university press, 2014. long, ryan. “tlatelolco’s persistent legacy: a comparative analysis of three mexican novels.” bulletin of latin american research 24, no. 4 (2005): 513–26. http://www.jstor.org/ stable/27733804. marrero henríquez, josé manuel. “affection, literature, and animal ideation.” in spanish thinking about animals, edited by margarita carreterogonzález, 3–20. east lansing: michigan state university press, 2020. norris, margot. beasts of the modern imagination: darwin, nietzsche, kafka, ernst, and lawrence. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2019. o’connor, brian. idleness: a philosophical essay. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2018. parikka, jussi. insect media: an archaeology of animals and technology. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2010. parry, catherine. other animals in twentyfirst century fiction. cham: palgrave macmillan, 2017. https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.11190 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.11190 https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2015-0011 https://doi.org/10.1515/jlt-2015-0011 http://www.jstor.org/stable/27733804 http://www.jstor.org/stable/27733804 gutiérrez negrón , the literary labour of ants | 133 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) peterson, anna l. “the zoological marx.” capitalism nature socialism 33, no. 3 (2022): 18–36. http:/doi.org/10.1080/1045 5752.2021.1966485. rodríguez de la o, héctor. porque parece barroco lo real: un estudio comparativo entre daniel sada y carlo emilio gadda. mérida: universidad nacional autónoma de méxico, 2018. sada, daniel. porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe. mexico city: tusquets, 2010. sleigh, charlotte. six legs better: a cultural history of myrmecology. baltimore, md: john hopkins university press, 2007. weeks, kathi. the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries. durham, nc: duke university press, 2011. http:/doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2021.1966485 http:/doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2021.1966485 ole_link2 microsoft word grebowicz h u m a n i m a l i a 1:2 margret grebowicz when species meat: confronting bestiality pornography in the pornography of meat, carol adams makes the argument that feminism in general, and the critique of pornography in particular, ought to address the condition of animals.1 she points out that animals have been historically excluded from feminist inquiry because of the feminist rejection of denigrating comparisons between women and animals. the feminist message has been “we are not animals!”, an investment in rightful belonging to humanity right down to the bumper sticker that reads, “feminism is the radical notion that women are people too.” i follow adams in her demand to reinscribe the animal into feminist inquiry, but critiques like hers lack a robust interrogation of the ontology of animal being in general. contemporary discourses of posthumanism explore “the animal” as a contingent, historical, and contested concept in dynamic and co-constitutive relation to “the human,” and raise possibilities for new ontologies of animality (see not only haraway, but also derrida, latour, and agamben). in what follows, i argue that, in this posthumanist context, the feminist task is to construct theoretical structures in which to begin to think not just animality in general, but animal sexualities in particular, from the vantage point of a critical rethinking of “the human.” my particular subject of inquiry will be bestiality pornography, a discourse which thus far has been dealt with only in the margins (if at all) of both animal studies and feminist critiques of porn. though the ethics of sexual relations between humans and animals warrant serious research and discussion, i am less concerned with them in this particular project, focusing instead on the interspecies imaginary that bestiality porn produces. i firstly examine the role of this imaginary in the ongoing construction of two related fields: that of femininity on one hand and of feminism on the other, and secondly attempt to organize theoretical resources for thinking about—and living alongside—animals as active co-agents in the production of meanings, rather than passive screens for our anthropomorphic projections. i. gendering animals. not surprisingly, catherine mackinnon’s recent contribution to animal studies literature focuses in part on the use of animals in pornography (2007, 320-22). she describes the relation of the law to animals as gendered, which in her analysis means that animals are feminized and women are figured in terms of “animal nature.” both groups are subordinated to the law of humans, the most powerful of humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 2 which are biological men. this is most obvious, she writes, in the use of animals in commercial pornography, where animals and women occupy the same subordinate position. both groups are victims of an unequal power relation, which is subsequently eroticized. the actors are men, the objects acted upon are women and animals. however, a quick survey of internet bestiality porn shows imagery and narratives which do not align neatly with mackinnon’s schema. in fact, there is quite a variety of imagery available, making up an internally inconsistent kaleidoscope of constructs and norms, and indicating that bestiality pornography tells us little about the practice of bestiality. an analysis of the semiotics of gender particular to both cultural practices yields important information about how we view women and how we view animals. in mythology and throughout the history of art and literature, images of women with animals (and masculine beast-men) are much more frequent than images of men with animals. but if we take commercial pornography to be a qualitatively unique, historically and materially situated phenomenon of culture, rather than, say, just another genre of literature, the proliferation of zoo porn cannot be read as just a natural extension of the story of leda and the swan or the rape of europa. how do narratives of interspecies desire change when mediated by this particular technology and logic of democratization of information? the most widely available bestiality (also called “zoo”) pornography depicts women having sex with male horses and dogs, two species which have evolved in close proximity to humans, and which appear as figures of masculinity throughout our culture. indeed, horses and dogs almost always appear as the male actors in the pornography itself, situated in narratives in which animals are substitutes for men where men are missing (“horny farm girl needs horse cock,” “teen’s first time with dog,” etc.). what is eroticized in this imagery is not the power difference between the male viewer and the animal, which may be trained or forced into doing (almost) anything, but something very different: the size and virility of the horse, the eagerness of the dog, etc. intense anthropomorphism fuels these narratives, rather than the eroticization of the power of humans over animals on which mackinnon focuses. there is also extensive “gay” zoo porn involving animals, with men performing the same acts as the women in the “straight” zoo porn—giving fellatio and receiving (in this case) anal intercourse. in fact, the very designations “straight” and “gay” in this context signify properly only if we assume that the horses and dogs substitute quite directly and unproblematically for men. this type of imagery makes up the majority of bestiality porn on the internet. margret grebowicz– when species meat 3 how do i know? i looked. in fact, the account i offer here is a result of a deliberate decision to look at/for porn sites in the way a casual consumer of internet porn would: searching for free imagery, taking “tours” of paysites, registering as a user of file sharing sites, and just clicking around, getting a general impression of what is available and under what conditions. i kept a log of the search terms: animal sex, bestiality porn, zoo porn, zoo sex, animal porn, and once i was more familiar with the terminology: farm sex, free beast toons, animal sex galleries, bestiality porn share, monster hentai, and so on. rather than statistics about the production and consumption of this subgenre, i was interested in the intersection of this particular technological mediation with graphic narratives of inter-species desire on an experiential level. as postfoucauldian philosophers of subject formation, we should attend in particular to the subjective and intersubjective effects of the circulation of this discourse. who are the consumers of this imagery? is a very different question than what is it like to be a consumer of this imagery?, and a philosophical inquiry into the production of patriarchal and naively humanist subjectivity conceives of the empirical in terms of the latter. the more one clicks, the more nuanced a story emerges. there is another kind of narrative widely available, one in which the women are so insatiable that “they’ll fuck anything!” sites like www.fuckthemall.com and others invite viewers to watch women with “all” animals, as many different kinds as possible, penetrating themselves with snakes, eels, and other fish. the story here seems to be a bit different: the women are even more insatiable and out of control sexually, while the masculine element is not quite as present here as in the bodies of the dogs and horses, often for the simple reason that we are no longer watching penises, but entire animals being inserted into orifices, animals like fish, onto whom it is more difficult to project anthropomorphic fantasies. in this kind of material, the animality of the animals is emphasized. the insatiable women will do anything to satisfy their needs, including fellating “filthy” dog penises, for instance (see www.bestialityfacial.com). the recurrence of the word “filthy” is important to note, because it serves to remind the viewer that this is precisely an animal penis, not a human one, marking a departure from the narratives which rely on the power of anthropomorphic projection. for instance, www.beasttoons.com shows a cartoon woman dressed up in a maid’s outfit and with a gorilla looking up her skirt. she wonders to herself, “a gorilla is so similar to a human. i wonder if he can get me pregnant?” a few web pages later, the same site shows the same cartoon woman straddling a bucket which houses a chicken, whose head is up her vagina. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 4 finally, there are occasional, rare images of human penises in animal vaginas (usually those of dogs or sheep, though there are also photos of penises inside chickens). on www.zoohan.net there are multiple images of men having intercourse with animals, but they are tagged with the words “extreme” and “shocking.” following these photos to further links, one can also find the occasional photograph of either an entire forearm inside a cow’s vagina, or even just photographs of animal genitalia alone, but with a very different appearance from today’s glossy porn. they tend to be single images, rather than entire galleries or films, and the same image gets circulated among multiple sites. the fact that many are yellowed indicates that they are scanned prints, not digital photographs. they are shot in the dark with flash, usually very close up and never showing a person’s face. in fact, all of the imagery of this sort that i encountered had the appearance of home-grown, amateur porn, or possibly even images made in veterinary contexts and not intended for pornographic use, but in any case, not commercial porn produced under conditions of some degree of regulation and budget. in this pornography, the animal is always on the receiving end of the sex, its vagina or anus clearly substituting for that of a woman. thus, in contrast to mackinnon’s claim that bestiality pornography invariably feminizes animals just as it feminizes women, it appears that there are at least three different classes of bestiality porn, in which the semiotics of gender function in different ways. to speak in broad terms, in the first class, the animals become “men.” in the second, the animals become “animals” and it is the species difference which is eroticized. i would like to suggest that in this, the least anthropomorphic of the constructs, the animal is almost genderless, or at least that the erotics of the narratives and images arise not from gender difference, but from species difference. in the third, the animals are “women.” thus, we can see more than one distinct way of anthropomorphically gendering animals, and, in the case of the animalizing of animals, we encounter a degendering. how does this, a more nuanced reading of the gender semiotics of bestiality porn, affect feminist critiques of porn, and how does it speak in particular to a critique of this imagery as a site where the oppression of women and that of animals intersect? mackinnon’s critique of the pornographic feminization of animals seems more like an engagement with bestiality rather than with bestiality porn. the cultural practices are quite different. the most significant difference for the purposes of my analysis is that the majority of zoo porn shows women having sex with animals, while real-life, prosecuted cases of bestiality involve men almost exclusively. the legal literature as well as bestiality (also called “zoophilia”) blogs indicate that the people having sex with animals off-camera are in fact men. our cartoon maid has a chicken’s head in her margret grebowicz– when species meat 5 vagina, but, as the blogs indicate, when humans have sex with chickens it is a man inserting his penis into the hen’s cloaca, an encounter which is usually fatal for the hen. the kinds of rare images tagged as “extreme” are thus anything but—they show the banal truth of the sex with animals that humans actually practice. in contrast, the women having vaginal or oral sex with horse penises, at the forefront of every “zoo” or “farm” paysite, make rare appearances in the legal literature (one recent exception, the 2008 case of diane whalen and donald siegfried, in which the oklahoma couple was charged with bestiality, was a matter of porn production: whalen’s son discovered numerous films which siegfried had shot of the family dogs having sex with whalen2 ). this is significant, since gender does not officially signify in the legal prosecution of bestiality cases, in the case of either the humans or the animals involved. moral debates about bestiality also obscure this fact, with blanket references to “humans” and “animals”, as if neither were gendered, and as if gender-as-power-difference were not at work in sex acts between humans and animals. this is certainly not the only instance in which porn does not depict the realities of sex. lesbian porn for straight male viewers and incest porn are just two subgenres about which it is common knowledge that the actors are in fact acting, faking pleasure in the interests of a narrative, acting as “real” lesbians or members of the same family in order to produce a fantasy, in contrast to amateur straight porn, whose appeal lies in the fact (is it?) that non-actors are experiencing real pleasure. however, one must be careful about the use of the word “real” in the context of the pornography debates. mackinnon has warned at length about the tendency to figure porn as fantasy, when the sex taking place in order to produce the “fantastic” images is in fact very real. thus, my own distinction here between bestiality porn and “real” bestiality is quite tenuous. it may be more helpful to distinguish between sex with animals for money and sex with animals for personal pleasure, focusing on distinctions between intentions, motives, pleasures, and privileges, rather than any ontological difference between more or less “real” events. however mediated and “fake” zoo porn may or not may be, zoo sites have a particular way of linking onto websites about off-camera bestiality practices. they often piggyback on “information” sites about zoophilia, defined as “love” relationships with animals, usually to the exclusion of humans and including sex. although zoophilia websites actively disassociate themselves from porn sites and make strong distinctions between bestiality practices and the production of bestiality porn, openly condemning the use of animals in porn as “cruelty” and “exploitation,” the porn sites’ invariable humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 6 insistence that what they show is real (“100% real animal sex!!!”) works to reinforce the connection. bestiality is presented as something which must be kept secret, like the use of internet porn itself. websites open in a sea of warnings and the experience is that of entering ever deeper levels of something forbidden, when in fact there is nothing illegal under us law about the viewing of most pornography, including bestiality porn and virtual child porn (most of which remains decriminalized in the us since the supreme court decision of 2002). at the same time, however, because this imaginary is one of repression and the failure of society to understand the viewer’s “needs,” it is also of community, file sharing, and underground trafficking of information among users who form a network. it is presented as an instance of the democratization of knowledge, with the internet making access to knowledge easier, faster, and less expensive than ever.3 www.beastwiki.com, a site devoted to reviews of all of the bestiality paysites available, looks exactly like wikipedia.com, except that the links are red and not blue. sites like www.zooshare.com are not only for file sharing, but for posting blogs, commenting on posts, reviewing and rating the pornography, while users often describe themselves as keeping a secret, hiding their true selves, and being deeply misunderstood. www. beastforum.com invites users to “share you opinions, creations, and experiences with others,” and on www.beasttoons.com, in the very same frame in which the aforementioned french maid cartoon protagonist encounters the gorilla, she promises us an educational experience: “with your membership you’ll also get full access to our extensive zoophilia database that covers everything you want to know about animal sex.” blogs often include expressions of gratitude for the forum, a place where users can finally show their true selves. while some blog posts discuss the considerable challenges of sharing one’s desire for zoo porn with a sex partner, typically a new girlfriend who might be scared off, others post about something very different, namely the difficulties of a life in which animals themselves are the sex partners. thus, the connection between bestiality porn and bestiality is further reinforced by this imaginary of persecuted subculture, shared understanding, and access to important-but-forbidden information. ii. meaningful consent in the case of animals. in the us most states have laws against sex with animals, and of those, a majority deems the act a felony, not a misdemeanor. most states classify bestiality under their animal cruelty statutes.4 if significant money is involved, the criminality extends to property damage, as in the case in which an illinois man confessed to having had intercourse with the mares in the stables in which he was employed over the course of 20 years.5 mackinnon (2007) asks the important question why laws against sex with animals exist at all. her answer takes margret grebowicz– when species meat 7 us out of the problematic in which both the law and so much of animal studies are explicitly located, that of suffering, and places us squarely in the problematic more proper to feminist jurisprudence surrounding rape and bodily integrity, namely that of consent.6 since “people cannot be sure” that animals consent to the sex, the law exists to protect the animals. more specifically, she writes, “we cannot know if their consent is meaningful” (321). and yet, there are clearly cases when we know that the animals do not give their consent to the sex: in the illinois mare case, for instance, the man was caught after 20 years of intercourse with the horses only because one of the mares died in the act. he had bound her in such a way as to constrict her neck, presumably in hopes of successfully immobilizing her, and the mare had fought the intercourse so hard that she had strangled herself. or, to take a less dramatic example, in much dog porn the animal is lying down, being fellated or mounted by a woman, often with the help of at least one other person, so that the whole scene is obviously highly mediated and reads as forced. when animals fight back or show their indifference, it seems easy to make the claim that they do not consent. mackinnon writes, “do animals dissent from human hegemony? i think they often do. they vote with their feet by running away. they bite back, scream in alarm, withhold affection, approach warily, and swim off” (324). so when exactly is it that “we cannot be sure” about their consent? it is when animals appear as willing participants in these acts that the question of consent becomes complicated. we know that they say no, but it is much less thinkable that they might say yes. indeed, in zoo porn, only those animals that are figured as intelligent enough to be agents to some degree are the ones that may be believably presented as consenting to the sex. this is most prevalent in the imagery which genders the animals male. a dog mounts a kneeling woman from behind, or sniffs between her legs, or the horse ejaculates in her mouth—this is where the issue of consent takes on considerable ambiguity. the presentation of the animal as an agent in the sex becomes believable, and the animals are continuously described as “lucky,” “hungry,” and “horny.” numerous sites advertise photo galleries accompanied by narratives of dogs “raping” innocent girls or other “first timers.” in all of the sites classified as “animal rape,” the animal, usually a dog, is present as the perpetrator, not the victim, of a rape. this rape narrative sometimes depends on claims about the animal’s intelligence, as in www.zooshock.com, which shows photos of a woman having intercourse with a pig. the accompanying narrative states that she was raped by the pig in a shed, a claim which is then supported by the following sentence, which explains that pigs are among the most intelligent animals on the planet, comparable to dogs. the trajectory from humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 8 intelligence to sexuality is clear: the more intelligent the animal, the more credible the narrative in which the animal is a sexual agent. however, when we compare this pornographic valuing of the intelligence and complexity of “higher order animals” with the ways in which this densely gendered inter-species imaginary manifest itself legally, we encounter some contradictions. mackinnon points out that “commercial pornography alone shows far more sex with animals than is ever prosecuted for the acts required to make it” (321). indeed, though i will not offer a review of the legal literature concerning bestiality cases, it is striking that the sheer amount of bestiality porn on the internet is disproportionately large in comparison to the number of bestiality cases which make the daily or weekly news. it is also significant that the cases which do make the news rarely describe the kind of sex that makes up the majority of the porn. women receiving cunnilingus from dogs (and occasionally cats), women penetrated by dogs and horses, and occasionally pigs and goats, women performing fellatio on dogs, horses, goats, even camels—these acts are almost never prosecuted. why might this be? i imagine that mackinnon would answer: because the law, with its first amendment absolutism, turns a blind eye to whatever is required to make pornography, which it is committed to protecting. this is why legislators do not go after the people engaged in the various acts of “sodomy” required to make porn. in other words, mackinnon’s answer to the question does not depend on the contents of the imagery at all, or on its semiotics of gender, but on her reading of the supreme court’s investment in the first amendment. mackinnon would argue that, just as the very real unwanted sex that must take place for porn to exist at all is virtually unprosecutable, the sex with animals remains invisible to the law. her equation would be simple: we don’t prosecute bestiality just like we don’t prosecute rape, because we hate animals just like we hate women. once again, an analysis of the semiotics of gender at work in the discourses yields a different answer. the legal landscape is ostensibly void of gender distinctions when dealing with bestiality, but this is not the case de facto. if mackinnon is right that us anti-bestiality law exists to protect animals from sex to which they do not consent, then it follows that the law is harsher on sex acts with animals in which the anthropocentric projection onto the animal is that of feminine vulnerability and passive receptivity. when the projection is of masculinity, on the other hand, as in the case of the acts required to make most animal pornography, acts which go unprosecuted, the law appears much softer. the message seems to be that if the animals are doing things that any red-blooded heterosexual man would enjoy doing, then we are no longer margret grebowicz– when species meat 9 dealing with cruelty. to put it bluntly, the law is more able to recognize sex with animals as cruelty when the animals are figured as women, rather than men, and is thus more likely to prosecute “real” bestiality (in which men have intercourse with predominantly female animals) than the acts required to make porn (in which women have intercourse with predominantly male animals). for this reason, it could be argued, the majority of the real sex in bestiality porn goes unprosecuted. this is consistent with mackinnon’s reading of the legal treatment of rape in general: the easier it is to establish a lack of consent, the easier the rape conviction. and as mackinnon points out, we know when animals say no. the harder it is to prove that no consent took place, the harder the rape conviction. it is here that mackinnon’s claim that the relation of the law to animals is gendered must be turned on its head. it is gendered, but not in the sense that the animals are necessarily feminized. on the contrary, in the making of the majority of bestiality internet porn, they are twice masculinized: once in the pornographic imagery, where they substitute for men and are (more or less believably) figured as taking pleasure in the activities, and again when the laws against sex with animals are not enforced specifically in the context of the acts required to make the pornography. the animals are made into men on two levels: once, in the pornographic narratives and a second time, in the law’s blindness to the criminal acts required to produce the narratives. the resulting equation is a bit different than mackinnon’s: when we do prosecute bestiality, it is when the animals are figured as women and not when they are figured as men. even as the law does not gender animals (bestiality is defined as sex between humans and animals, regardless of gender), a very predictable semiotics of gender is at work in its enforcement. before the law, the animals’ “desire” is naturalized, just as men’s sexual response is naturalized. in contrast to the pornographic narrative, where desire is linked to intelligence and complexity, and so results in the anthropomorphic projection of agency, the legal functions according to a logic in which the willing animal, as virile masculinity, is exhaustively programmed by nature and thus incapable of agency. iii. denaturalizing animal sex. mackinnon is perhaps best known for her analysis of meaningful consent in the case of women. she claims that in conditions of social inequality in which power differences are eroticized and women’s subjugation is coextensive with their positive value as sex objects, there is no possibility of women’s meaningful consent to sex (“privacy vs. equality: beyond roe vs. wade” in mackinnon 1987). this is often caricatured as her “all sex is rape” thesis. this does not mean that women cannot consent to sex. clearly, they do so all the time. but mackinnon asks us humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 10 to consider how “meaningful” this consent is, how seriously we ought to take it given the cultural production of femininity as sexually available and servile. though she has famously been criticized for denying women any possibility of sexual agency, what interests me more immediately is the paradox to which this argument leads, one which is useful for thinking through consent and thus sexual agency in the case of animals. note that the law does not protect entities that cannot consent, like sex dolls, vibrators, doorknobs, or watermelons, with which it is not illegal to engage in sexual activity. the only kind of creature with whom sex might be prohibited is the kind of creature that is capable of some degree of consent or dissent, an agent whose agency and consent cannot be established conclusively because of external mitigating factors, but an agent nonetheless. in other words, only a being that is capable of consent is capable of denying its consent and thus being raped. thus, there is something logically problematic about the very idea of the being that always consents (as in mackinnon’s description of the construction the feminine in the legal imaginary, which, as she demonstrates, makes it so difficult to prosecute rape in the case of adult, sexually active women), as well as the being that never consents (the child, the animal, the mentally disabled adult). in order to escape this paradox and develop a more nuanced account of sexual agency across the board, we must pool feminist and posthumanist theoretical resources. this, i propose, points to the future of feminist animal studies: the possibility of thinking the agency (erotic, ethical, semiotic) of animals in sexual practices, in an effort to counteract the received claim that they are exhaustively programmed by “nature.” feminism has barely begun to denaturalize or queer animal sexualities. for instance, carol adams persuasively argues that the sexual objectification and consumption of animals and of women follow the same models. she proposes that feminism should approach the animalizing of women and the feminization of animals in patriarchal culture as a unique opportunity, namely the chance to study the oppression of animals as a particular symptom of androcentric social organization. however, adams’s work on the visual culture aspect of meat consumption is devoted to exposing the logic and structure of a pattern of oppression and exploitation, a position which depends on one important assumption: that humans are the only actors in this practice. the structure of her argument follows an identifiable second wave feminist formula in which power and privilege are pretty unambiguously distinguishable from subjugation. in that sense, it offers rather limited resources for a postor neo-foucauldian feminist analysis of power, desire, and norms, of the production of truths and practices, and the complexities of the care of the self.7 margret grebowicz– when species meat 11 what happens if, in contrast, we begin from the assumption that animals are actors, too, insofar as they are the kinds of beings that can not only deny consent, but give it? the position appears dangerous at first, as if one were on the side of the contemporary zoophilia communities i describe here, which also rely heavily on a particular rhetoric of animal consent and even “pleasure.” how might we begin to distinguish between the sexual agency we anthropomorphically project onto animals (in the production of porn, for instance) and their real sexual agency, the very thing which renders them rapeable (at least in human legal terms) in the first place? how to think critically about the law which purports to protect animals without in the course of our critique leaving them wide open to exploitation? and furthermore, what kind of account of agency is available in a post-enlightenment world in which we have abandoned human exceptionalism, in which we take evolutionary biology seriously, but also in which we no longer conflate “nature” with “programming”? what is the relationship between consent, agency, and responsibility in this posthumanist landscape? and finally, does this starting point commit us to the progressive potential of bestiality? haraway’s latest book, when species meet, offers an ontology of the political subject which includes non-human animals, or to put it differently, demonstrates that the inclusion of non-human animals in the body politic will call for the radical transformation of that body. she, too, reminds us of the reasons animals were actively excluded from much early feminist inquiry, in this case marxist feminism :8 “they tended to be all too happy with categories of society, culture, and humanity and all too suspicious of nature, biology, and co-constitutive human relationships with other critters.” feminism never questioned the reserving of the categories of desire and sexuality for human beings (73-4). but surely, it cannot be by accident that the comparisons between animals and women are made in pornographic contexts in particular. neither is it accidental that animals are gendered in pornography. the patriarchal logic which depends on an assumption of woman’s animal nature makes this assumption specifically in the context of sexuality, insofar as we imagine that sex is where humans are at their most animal. and we do imagine this: in his controversial piece “heavy petting,” peter singer actually defends bestiality on the grounds that “there are many ways in which we cannot help behaving just as animals do — or mammals, anyway — and sex is one of the most obvious ones. we copulate, as they do. they have penises and vaginas, as we do, and the fact that the vagina of a calf can be sexually satisfying to a man shows how similar these organs are” (2001). according to singer’s logic, the zoophile’s desire for the animal is always already proof of our humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 12 animality. zoophilia itself becomes a symbol of the breakdown of human exceptionalism and perhaps even proof of evolution. but clearly, this collapsing of desire into “nature” is not where feminism will wish to end up. if the received wisdom is that woman=sex and sex=animality, and if feminism today must reinscribe the animal it has exiled from its literature, then it must put at the forefront of this reinscription the complex naturecultural problematic of animal sexualit(ies) in particular. just as feminism has interrogated, historicized, and unhinged the connections between femininity and sexuality in an effort to denaturalize exploitative sexual practices, it must do so in the case of animality. the idea of denaturalizing animal sexuality is obviously problematic, at the very least because it complicates our relationship to the discourse which offers the most detailed information about nonreproductive sex among animals, namely animal behavior studies. feminist theory will need to do much more than cite studies by empirical scientists which describe, for instance, same-sex sexual behaviors among some primates, manatees, certain whale species, and those famous big horn sheep that recently made the news.9 it will have to also examine the political and ontological commitments which underpin projects seeking to naturalize non-reproductive sex among animals. one important task is to thematize and explore the difference between the anthropocentric projection of consent (as in the pornographic narratives, for instance), and the real agency of non-human animals, the agency which renders them active partners in interspecies sex and thus in the production of the posthuman sexual imaginary. what, if any, epistemological resources do we have for making this distinction? in derrida’s the animal that therefore i am, sexuality is precisely the site of the human-animal difference and the site where both humans and animals are denaturalized. rather than challenging the modern anthropomorphic opposition between human and animal by pointing out how very animal we are in our sexualities, as singer does above, derrida performs a contrasting gesture. he exposes the human as a highly mediated philosophical construct by exploring the degree to which animality poses the ultimate limit to the human. the animal is “more other than any other,” and it is so precisely “on the threshold of sexual difference. more precisely, of sexual differences” (36). animals thus become not just another “other” for feminism to include in its everexpanding list of oppressed identities, but quite possibly the question mark itself, the philosophical problem of sexuality par excellence. engaging philosophically with animality means engaging with the idea of sexual differences in the plural, a bottomless heterogeneity of sexual possibilities. this undermines the modern fantasy that humans margret grebowicz– when species meat 13 are on one side of the divide and a homogeneous group called “animals” is on the other. derrida writes, philosophers have always judged and all philosophers have judged that limit to be single and indivisible, considering that on the one side of that limit there is an immense group, a single and fundamentally homogeneous set that one has the right… to mark as opposite, namely the set of the animal in general…. it applies to the whole animal kingdom with the exception of the human (40-1). animality, understood as the site of limitless sexual differences, overturns this received order and allows a feminist engagement with animals that does not fall prey to fantasies of a nature from which politics is absent. haraway’s companion species manifesto, an account of the complexity of dog-human interdependence and co-evolution which argues for the necessity of a posthuman or animal political ontology, ends with a rather racy sex scene. she makes the case that dogs are not “natural,” using the example of complex, unique sexual play between two dogs, one of which is spayed: none of their sexual play has anything to do with remotely functioning heterosexual mating behavior—no efforts of willem to mount, no presenting of an attractive female backside, not much genital sniffing, no whining and pacing, none of that reproductive stuff. no, here we have pure polymorphous perversity that is so dear to the hearts of all of us who came of age in the 1960s reading norman o. brown. the 110 pound willem lies down with a bright look in his eye. cayenne, weighing in at 35 pounds, looks positively crazed as she straddles her genital area on top of his head, her nose pointed towards his tail, presses down and wags her backside vigorously. i mean hard and fast. he tries for all he’s worth to get his tongue on her genitals, which inevitably dislodges her from the top of his head. it looks a bit like the rodeo, with her riding a bronco and staying on as long as possible. they have slightly different goals in this game, but both are committed to the activity. sure looks like eros to me. definitely not agape (99). humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 14 haraway’s political philosophy depends on the claim that humans and dogs (and many other animals) are semiotic agents10 in the production of naturecultures. the central role played by non-reproductive sex play is crucial to her position, which seeks to undermine the notion that animals are programmed by nature while humans are not (and insofar as they are, they are animals). haraway denaturalizes animal sex at the same moment that she endows the dogs with not just desire, but sexual agency: “they invented this game” (100). note the importance of the claim that this is eros and not agape, perversity and not necessity—in short, a certain sense of indeterminacy, possibility, rather than bondage to a stable and knowable script of practices and significations. invention—in the form of non-reproductive sexual practice—appears here as an alternative to a view of nature as programming, as ordered, predictable and thus controllable. it plays the same role in haraway’s text as the limitless plurality of sexualities does in derrida’s. in the work of these theorists the animal understood as a sexual agent becomes the figure of radical possibility and openness. if bestiality is defensible, it is so not on the grounds that as animals we are all programmed by nature (and so both the bitch in heat and the man who enjoys penetrating her can’t help themselves), but that posthuman sexuality means precisely the possibility of agency, resistant practices, queer bodies, and culturally unintelligible pleasures, and that within this landscape no practice may be prohibited preemptively. as philosophers know, however, agency does not erase power structures or protect the agent from exploitation. we also know that with agency comes responsibility, which means that no practice among agents is immune to ethical examination. it is precisely when we take animals to be agents that interspecies sex becomes irreducible to questions of pleasure for the parties involved (pace the zoophile’s insistence on the pleasure of the animal partner). thus, while a denaturalizing of animal sexualities makes it impossible to prohibit bestiality preemptively, it remains possible (and perhaps becomes even more urgent) to make post-emptive prohibitions, upon ethical examination of cultural constructs, beliefs, and practices in the presence of existing power structures. in contrast to the view that would have us believe that animality=sexuality=nature= woman, posthuman animality explodes the universalizing category of nature as homogeneous and predictable. it is this figure of the animal with which feminist critique should engage today precisely because it unmistakably announces that we don’t know what we thought we knew about any of the players in the above equation-about sex, women, and least of all about “nature.” the task, then, may be more accurately described not as re-inscription of the animal in feminism, but as the margret grebowicz– when species meat 15 inscription of a wholly new imaginary of animality, the condition for the possibility of new imaginaries of gender. notes i’d like to thank cara o’connor for her insightful commentary on this piece and for anne o’byrne for organizing the “feminists and other animals” symposium at suny stony brook, february 2009. 1. see also the account of zoos as an instance of pornography in acampora (2005). 2. <http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?subjectid=11&articleid=20080708_11_a vete78514&allcom=1> 3. for more on this subject, see my article “democracy and pornography: on speech, right, privacies, and pleasures in conflict,” forthcoming in hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy 26:1. 4. <http://www.animallaw.info/articles/ovuszoophilia.htm> 5. < http://lists.envirolink.org/pipermail/ar-news/week-of-mon-20030804/004730.html> 6. my point is not that consent is a more important category, or that consent and agency are the most significant concerns to raise in the problematic of animal sexuality. my point is more modest: that sexual agency is an important problem to raise about animals from a feminist perspective. 7. take the ubiquitous “rabbit vibrator” (made famous by the television show “sex and the city”), which has a soft little vibrating animal attachment, working to stimulate the clitoris while the penis-shaped shaft does the work of penetration. the animals depicted are almost exclusively rabbits (hence the name) and dolphins, with occasional appearances by mice and seahorses. these products are marketed (apparently with great success) exclusively to women, arguably to sexually self-aware, adventurous, perhaps even queer or “fluid” women. the animals in play are sexy (rabbits and dolphins) or diminutive (mice and seahorses), and note the absence of any figures of masculine virility, like dogs or horses. what exactly is happening here? this is one example of a cultural phenomenon which adams’s particular way of reading the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 16 intersection of women and animals in pop culture does not help us to analyze robustly (though, to be fair, her own analysis is concerned exclusively with the welfare of material animals, not semiotic puzzles like this one). 8. a self-described marxist feminist, mackinnon nevertheless offers an important resource for this conversation by opening the space for the question of meaningful consent of animals. how might an analysis of commercial bestiality pornography benefit from haraway’s writing about labor, inequality, relations of use, and freedom in the context of the work animals do in experimental labs (2007, 73-77)? 9. <http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1582336,00.html> 10. in future projects, i hope to work out exactly what is meant by “agency” in a harawayan schema. this remains a difficult and ambiguous term in her work. works cited acampora, ralph. “zoos and eyes: contesting captivity and seeking successor practices.” society & animals, 13:1 (2005): 70-88. adams, carolyn. the pornography of meat. london: continuum, 2003. agamben, giorgio. the open: man and animal. trans. kevin attell. stanford: stanford up, 2004. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. trans. david willis. new york: fordham up, 2008. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. prickly paradigm press, 2003. ―――. when species meet. minneapolis: up, 2007. latour, bruno. the politics of nature. trans. catherine porter. cambridge: harvard up, 2004. mackinnon, catherine. feminism unmodified. cambridge: harvard up, 1987. margret grebowicz– when species meat 17 ―――. “of mice and men: a fragment on animal rights.” the feminist care tradition and animal ethics. ed. josephine donovan and carol j. adams. new york: columbia up, 2007. 316-332. singer, peter. “heavy petting.” nerve, 2001. <http://www.nerve.com/opinions/singer/ heavypetting/.> microsoft word uddin-shukin h u m a n i m a l i a 1:1 lisa uddin biocapital, vol. i nicole shukin, animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. posthumanities series vol. 6. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2009. 288 pp. $67.50 hb, 22.50 pb. recently, in the midst of the h1n1 swine flu pandemic that continues as of this writing, an ap photograph of three caged pigs circulated through the digital mediascape and floored me with its ugliness. shot from the exterior of a concrete cell, peering inwards, the image showed three cowering animals with distended bellies, glowering eyes, and hair-covered skin matching the gray-brown hues and filth of the surrounding walls and floor; a repugnant picture of zoonotic disease and its porcine culprits. the extended caption read: “pigs huddle inside a cage after being caught as a preventative measure to check swine flu, by the greater hyderabad municipal corporation (ghmc) in hyderabad india, wednesday, april 29, 2009. according to the official estimates there are 50,000 pigs in hyderabad city, mostly stray.”1 bad news, it seems, for human populations worldwide. bad news also for the pigs of urban india, whose corporeal proximity to urban indians calculates as a health risk, punishable by imprisonment and an unforgiving photographic eye. locked away and made to look hideous, these swine are criminalized twice over, allowing a developing high tech city to go about its business – indeed, constituting the hostile physical and symbolic conditions of modernization itself. 76 lisa uddin – biocapital, vol. i my reading of what makes the ap photograph so ugly riffs off of nicole shukin’s animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times, the sixth book in the university of minnesota press’ posthumanities series. animal capital is a catalytic piece of scholarship that brings animal studies into in-depth conversation with transnational cultural studies and intensifies the marxist politics of both. in a supple set of case studies of animals in industrial and post-industrial contexts, the book offers a versatile critical framework through which to consider how animal life is enmeshed in and integral to market cultures. historians may bristle at the “unorthodox genealogies” and philosophers may grow impatient with some unwieldy conceptualizations, but shukin’s breakthroughs overshadow these discomforts (7). the central argument that capital routinely takes the form of animals – in both fetishized figure and usable flesh – confronts animal studies’ tendency to bracket off one for the sake of the other. against her own disciplinary training as a literary scholar, shukin insists on thinking these two dimensions of animal life together, on simultaneously foregrounding the “semiotic currency of animal signs and the carnal traffic in animal substances” across various sites of capitalist production and the social world more broadly; in effect, laying out a history and theory of animalas-capital (7). in this sense, animal capital rephrases the pivotal “question of the animal,” posed by cary wolfe and pursued by other poststructuralist critics, in a firmly materialist register, but one that also takes seriously the seductive immateriality effects of animal imagery.2 what emerges is an inspired installment of what donna haraway has provisionally titled “biocapital, volume i.”3 shukin is particularly attuned to the “bio” of her capitalist critique. the book draws strength from previous accounts of biopower, extending the work of, most notably, michel foucault, michael hardt, antonio negri and georgio agamben. while each of these writers variously theorize capital’s comprehensive penetration into social and biological lives, they limit their inquiry to human subjects and populations, treating animals (when they do) as metaphors for “man’s” objectification and/or expressions of racial, sexual and class difference. without abandoning the critical insight that life itself has become an object of power, and that species boundaries are historically protean, shukin’s study focuses attention on a fuller range and complexity of biopolitical relations. she approaches animals as something more (and less) than symbolic placeholders for human others; they are also the bones, hides, proteins, genes, and laboring bodies that make speciesism possible and probable. the trope of “rendering” is central to shukin’s analysis. introduced early in the text, rendering “signifies both the mimetic act of making a copy, that is, reproducing or interpreting an object in linguistic, painterly, musical, filmic, or other media . . . and the industrial boiling down and recycling of animal remains” (20). recognizing that the faculty of mimesis and the practice of animal recycling make for an “odd couple,” the 77 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) author works hard to explain the term’s theoretical viability by tracing its compatibilities with capitalism’s logic (45). in chapter one, she develops rendering as a mode of aesthetic animal representation in contradistinction to michael taussig’s mystical ideas of mimetic reenchantment, and frankfurt school critics who conceptualized an intrinsic animality in mimesis (despite their otherwise careful attentions to historical contingency). a second line of development considers rendering as the history of processing and reprocessing animal parts, focusing on an industry that has similarly constructed animals as a universal and renewable resource, while also grappling with the stomach-turning logistics. under the rubric of “automobility,” chapter two imports this two-fold vision of animal-as-capital into a fascinating account of fordism’s debt to nonhumans. triangulating the relationship between animal slaughter, cars and cinema, shukin’s analysis is far-reaching, but never far-fetched. she examines, for example, how automotive factories and other sites of mass production found a spatial model in meat production plants, and – with more detail – how the early-twentieth-century movement of animals down disassembly lines prefigured the sense of motion, the material substance, and the affective power of “moving pictures.” the chapter’s discussion of slaughterhouse tourism through a reading of its promotional literature is one of several skillful visual and textual analyses that sustain the book, and a superb illustration of the visceral and symbolic species confusions underpinning cultural spectacles that are paradoxically designed to secure the human-ness of a given audience. chapter three’s focus on “telemobility” writes a genealogy of telecommunication in the west. its sweep is likewise broad and convincing, connecting the electrical experiments performed on frogs in eighteenth-century italy, to thomas edison’s 1903 filmed display of electrocuting topsy the elephant, and advertisements for a canadian wireless communication company that features different animate and inanimate animal figures. taking issue with akira mizuta lippit’s “profoundly idealizing” theory of the electric animal, animal capital adds some carnage to representations of animals as telecommunication’s primary fetish (13). for shukin, the historical practice of using animals to convey communication’s magical quality – the sense that communication “just happens,” much like animals seem to perpetually exist irrespective of their biological life and death – perpetuates the fiction of painless transmission and disavows a certain economic, physical and representational violence upon which it depends (132139). the point crystallizes nicely in a discussion of telus mobility’s commercial 78 lisa uddin – biocapital, vol. i menagerie of cute, clean and mimetically-inclined animals (monkeys and chameleons, for instance) in light of the colton mineral ore used in the manufacture of electronic devices. mined most cheaply in eastern congo, colton also helps fund militant groups in the region and has activated orientialist campaigns in the west to protect lowland gorillas at risk of becoming bushmeat for rebel forces. a final chapter on “biomobility” tackles, with dazzling success, the biopolitical quagmire of cross-species pandemics. shukin’s treatment foregrounds “the potential of infectious disease to rapidly travel through the social flesh of a globally connected life world,” and builds on existing studies of those biological impacts and imaginaries that irritate neoliberal fantasies of capitalism’s transcendence over nature (182). animal capital specifically deciphers the overlapping racism and speciesism present in speculative discourses of border-crossing disease. these overlaps articulate some of the deepest western fears about economic globalization and its underbelly of “ethnicanimal alterity,” while concurrently enabling capital accumulation to accelerate as usual (187). shukin preludes these insights with some sharp analysis of globalization’s opposite obsession with posthuman kinship. gregory colbert’s popular ashes and snow becomes a generative target of material and rhetorical critique; a traveling exhibition of photographs promoted as a positive antidote to late capitalism via colonial-style images of pre-modern and vaguely eastern human-animal intimacy. from there, the chapter journeys on to a discussion of the scientific and media conjectures over the non-western origins of mad cow disease, aids, sars and the avian flu, concluding with an analysis of various manifestations of “global health security” that seek to segregate animals from humans, even while constructing the former as an emergent stakeholder in the transnational marketplace. as shukin demonstrates, there is ample room for such contradictions in the symbolic and corporeal renderings that produce animal capital. given its remarkable elasticity, which the author astutely underscores in her own object choices and writing style, the joint capitalization of animals and animalization of capital keeps questions of resistance that are familiar to cultural studies alive, if not well. on what grounds or trajectories can alternative species relations be conceived, shared and sustained? to what extent do the near infinite biopolitical entanglements that are signaled in this book keep all forms of life within the jurisdiction of the market? in light of shukin’s persuasive and intricate claims, the prospect of other lives (figurative and/or fleshy) seems strained. by the end of animal capital, the author’s worst-case scenario is bleak indeed: “those living in the globe-mobile of market culture have to contend with the possibility that capitalism may not necessarily bump up against the limit of finite resources or unravel from its own immanent contradictions. on the contrary, it appears all to capable of infernally surviving” – namely, through the stuff and semiotic power of nonhuman beings (231). but buried in the middle of the book, shukin whispers a 79 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) counter-scenario, a tentative best case: “signs of animal protest awaiting counterhegemonic production are strewn all over the social texts of modernity, as yet unactivated links to repressed histories of animal capital” (130). the means by which scholars might activate those histories, however, are obscured by the author’s extensive analysis of an animal’s more certain existence as the reusable parts of capitalism. all pigs, shukin suggests, go to market. under these conditions, it is worth pondering how research in animal studies might amplify the ones that squeal differently en route. notes 1. ap photo caption, wednesday april 29, 2009. accessed via abc news international. the photo can be viewed on google images by typing the caption as keywords. 2. cary wolfe, animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. chicago: the university of chicago press, 2003. 3. donna haraway, when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008: 66-67. barreau/porcher, voice voice: a primordial tool in the training of young horses sophie barreau école blondeau, saumur, france jocelyne porcher inrae / umr innovation, montpellier, france humanimalia 13.2 (spring 2023) abstract: the role of the voice in work relations with horses has been little studied. the results of the research we conducted into the professional training of young horses, however, show that equestrians’ use of their voice dominates training. our results demonstrate a specific tessitura in the voices of the equestrians (from medium to medium-low), as well as a ternary rhythm in the voices of the most experienced among them. the results of our exploratory study confirm the interest of studying the role of the voice in the construction of an interspecies bond between humans and horses, and the place of affectivity at work. keywords: work, horse, voice, skills training, affectivity sophie barreau oversees research at the école blondeau, a renowned training school for young horses and riders. she was a rider and a riding teacher before training in ethology and joining the animal’s lab research group, directed by jocelyne porcher. her work focuses on the working relationship between humans and horses, including their professional training. she worked with professor matsuzawa at the inuyama primate research institute (kyoto university) to observe the work of horses in a cognitive laboratory. specifically, she taught ponies to use touch screens. for several years, she has been conducting research with the animal’s lab team to understand the subjective relationships of horses at work. email: sophie.barreau@ecoleblondeau.com jocelyne porcher is a sociologist, research director, and leader of the animal’s lab team at the umr innovation (inrae, national research institute for agriculture, food and environment). her research focuses on the working relationship between humans and animals. she is the author of a dozen books on the subject, including animal labor: a collaborative utopia (2017) and animal labor: a new perspective on human–animal relations (co-edited with jean estebanez, 2019). she takes a critical view of the industrialization of animal husbandry and constructs a theory of animal husbandry based on the sciences of work, in particular on the psychodynamics of work. with her team, she is interested in animal labour, i.e. the subjective investment of animals in work, and has published numerous articles on the subject. for the past ten years, she has also been developing critical work on the process of exclusion of domestic animals in industrial societies. email: jocelyne.porcher@inrae.fr copyright © 2023 sophie barreau and jocelyne porcher this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 161–186. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13273 mailto:sophie.barreau@ecoleblondeau.com mailto:jocelyne.porcher@inrae.fr http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13273 barreau and porcher, voice | 163 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the voice, as aristotle emphasized, is complex. it is a human attribute that brings humans closer to animality and, at the same time, distances them from it. according to aristotle, the voice was a manifestation of one’s soul, and while not all humans or animals could articulate their voices clearly, any being that possessed one had a soul and could manifest their thoughts with it. aristotle’s views on voice have been heavily debated throughout history, and the concept and workings of voice continue to be key sources of fascination for philosophers, behaviourists, and scientists from diverse fields of inquiry. the voice’s role in interspecies relations primarily has been studied in relations with dogs and, more recently, with horses, as part of ongoing efforts by animal studies scholars. some studies highlight the cognitive and social abilities of animals to understand human modes of communication mobilized during interspecific interactions.1 other studies emphasize the important place language and voice hold in interspecies communication in general, with particular attention given to emotion and affect. in doing so, though, much of the scholarship focuses on the linguistic elements of voice, aligning the language and tone used to talk to animals with those used to talk to infants.2 while essential to understanding the relationship between the complex concept of “voice” and equally complex human–animal interactions, the majority of these studies are mostly experimental and do not allow for alternative animal affects. many studies are underpinned by the idea, for instance, that animal involvement in work is predicated on the necessity of exploitation and domination instead of intent, enjoyment, or other agential reasons. furthermore, they are rarely conducted in what christophe dejours, in his theory of the psychodynamics of work, consider “real work” situations.3 many studies fail to take into consideration the consequences of the work context when contemplating the operations and impact of voice on human–animal working relationships. indeed, animal labour, that is, the 1 briefer, “vocal contagion of emotions”; trösch et al., “horses categorize human emotions”. 2 stern, les formes de vitalité; mondémé, “comment parle-t-on aux animaux?”; karpf, the human voice; jeannin et al., “pet-directed speech”, 201. 3 dejours et al., the return of work. 164 | barreau and porcher, voice humanimalia 13.2 (2023) subjective engagement of animals in work, is a very little-explored field of research. therefore, to address the implications of “real work” on human voice, and its mediating role in human–horse relationships, this paper will share the findings of our research undertaken at the école blondeau in saumur, france. we observed young horse and trainer interactions during the horse’s first training sessions (and the real work scenarios taking place) to understand the place of voice, its links with affectivity, and the articulation between voice and technical gestures used as part of the training process. what is work? the field of labour studies, and more particularly the psychodynamics of work, interrogates the disconnect between workplace procedure (including instructions and technology) and actual working experience, or “real work” (when technology fails, procedure does not function as intended, and instructions are unclear, workers must step outside of the rules to do what needs to be done in order to achieve an objective beyond the prescribed process). as dejours and gernet argue, “the exercise of work is inevitably accompanied by a confrontation with reality, that is, with what is made known to the worker through his or her resistance to control and pushes the subject to think and act differently than the work organization has planned.” 4 it is within this gap between “prescribed work” and “real work” that a worker’s encounters can result in numerous affective experiences. work is connected to physical and psychological affects that impact not only a subject’s work experiences, but also their lived realities beyond the work schedule. as such, work can manifest as dreams, illness, stress, creativity, cooperation, and other, sometimes contradictory, experiences. indeed, “work does not only generate suffering and pathology. it can also bring out the best, provide pleasure and become part of the psychic economy as an irreplaceable mediator in the construction of one’s sense of health and self-fulfillment.”5 4 gernet and dejours, “evaluation du travail”, 28. unless otherwise indicated, all translations are our own. 5 dejours and deranty, “centrality of work”, 170. barreau and porcher, voice | 165 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) work, then, is multifaceted, influencing the private and public, the intimate and the productive, and, if done well, it also leads to “recognition”. recognition is a “symbolic reward to the encounter with the real” provided by those who are familiar with the “real work” and the challenges that go into overcoming it. it is community belonging and acceptance that in turn results in “a form of pleasure and subjective enhancement” associated with the creation of personal and group identity.6 thus, it is through the dynamics of recognition that work can be a factor of fulfilment and positive transformation for the subject. this definition of work is particularly relevant for observing working animals. our relationships with them are often contextualized by and mediated through work, but, like human work, animal work (in all its forms) is much more than pure productivity; it also involves multifaceted approaches and reactions to “real work”, recognition of that work, and affective responses to working relationships and contexts.7 the question of work is thus central to understanding our relationships with animals, and observing animals at work allows us to see precisely what they do autonomously and outside of procedures. what do they invent in order to meet their objectives? what is work for an animal? the framework of the psychodynamics of work has allowed us to understand the work relations between humans and animals in a way that other theoretical frameworks have never allowed.8 we have shown that work with animals is made possible because there is an intersubjectivity between species based on affects and communication, which implies that the animals are subjects of the work and therefore endowed with a power to act. within this intersubjective context, animals are invited (or forced) to go beyond their “natural” behaviours to carry out tasks or actions determined by human ideals and societies. for example, animal “work” might include providing food for human consumption,9 a military dog jumping out of an air6 dejours and deranty, “centrality of work”, 172. 7 dejours and deranty, “centrality of work”; porcher and estebanez, animal labor. 8 porcher, éleveurs et animaux; salmona, les paysans français. 9 porcher, éleveurs et animaux. 166 | barreau and porcher, voice humanimalia 13.2 (2023) plane with a parachute, or a guide dog focused on the task of safely walking his handler across the street while suppressing his instinctive behaviours, e.g. sniffing.10 often including opportunities for pleasure and suffering,11 animal work is just complex as human work while also affording opportunities for subjective growth.12 as such, we define animal work as the physical and mental effort that an animal must make, over and above what is prescribed, to achieve set objectives.13 the work of equines within equestrian sport provides new opportunities to understand not only human–horse relationships, but also to move one step closer towards answering the question: why would an animal engage in work? human–horse relationships are intersubjective relationships built upon shared language systems thatcontain a mix of subjective agency, coercion, and force at their core.14 this is also the case for animal labour in general, as charlotte blattner, kendra coulter, and will kymlicka argue: “‘labour’ is partly descriptive but also partly normative. descriptively, we can recognize that there are awful forms of harmful, exploitative, degrading, and/ or forced labour, but normatively, we can say that ‘labour’ contains within it ideas (or ideals) of cooperation, consent, recognition, and dignity.”15 as such, much like human work, animal work has the inherent potential for suffering (or death). but it also has the potential for pleasure. horses and other animals are able to enter into emotional communication with humans,16 and our results show positive animal affect is absolutely central to animal agency and subjective experience within work. it is the voice, we argue, that conveys the emotional state of humans to the horses and through which horses 10 mouret, porcher, and mainix, “military and police dogs”. 11 porcher, “well-being and suffering”. 12 see porcher and schmitt, “dairy cows”; porcher, “animal work”; porcher and lécrivain, “the wolf”; porcher and lécrivain, “bergers, chiens, brebis”; porcher and barreau, “le débourrage”; mouret, “apprendre à prendre soin”; mouret, “chiens de patrouille”; lainé, living and working; haraway, companion species manifesto; estebanez, porcher, and douine, “travailler à faire semblant”; deneux, “les chevaux ”; dray, “du cheval exécutant”; dray, “technozoosemiotics”; mulier and porcher “service hippomobile”. 13 porcher, “the work of animals”, 1-9. 14 brandt, “language of their own”; game, “riding”. 15 blattner, coulter, and kymlicka, animal labour, 11. 16 trösch et al., “horses categorize human emotions”. barreau and porcher, voice | 167 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) are given encouragement, recognition, and praise for their work involvement. as such, it is through emotion that animals, in this case horses, appear to become invested in the human–horse relationship and the work undertaken together, much like humans. however, our study indicates horses need this emotional support to invest themselves in work, to flourish within its artificial parameters, and perhaps to even find pleasure and recognition therein. what is a voice? from a physiological point of view, “voice” refers to a complex system. for antoine-joseph giovanni, the voice is “the whole of the mechanisms which allow the appearance of a vibration on the free edge of the vocal cords. it is the initial sound mechanism which is then subjected to the filtering of the pharynx and the oral cavity to be transformed into vowels and voiced consonants. the larynx, and in particular the vocal cords, are at the centre of the voice production device.”17 from an anthropological point of view, as proposed by leroi-gourhan, the voice is part of the first musical performances created by the human species.18 for psychologist régine prat, “to think about the voice is to place oneself at the crossroads of many paths, music, rhythm, the voice of the speaker and the voice as it is received, that is, the world of communication and interrelationships.”19 child psychology presents the voice through an important body of work on “baby talk” as a primordial affective envelope allowing the child to become a linguistic being feeling loved and protected. the psychoanalyst d. w. winnicott considers the voice to be an essential element in the construction of the affective envelope that links the mother and her baby.20 for psychoanalysis, the voice is of interest because it carries in it the expression of our interiority.21 within the world of equestrian work, voice and its musicality are central to training methodologies at the école blondeau. trainers, 17 giovanni, lagier, and bernardoni, “physiologie de la phonation”. 18 leroi-gourhan, la civilisation du renne. 19 prat, “prendre une voix”, 29. 20 winnicott, babies and their mothers. 21 castarède, “métapsychologie de la voix”. 168 | barreau and porcher, voice humanimalia 13.2 (2023) however, are not provided with any specific protocols or procedures. the only prescription provided is that the voice must “invade” the horse, without specifying the type of voice or tone to be used. for nicolas blondeau, the head trainer at the école blondeau, the horse must learn to listen to the human, the human voice, and the emotional and affective message it carries. therefore, the voice must be omnipresent to keep the horse’s attention. the voice, then, appears to be produced by the trainers spontaneously within the framework of working with their horses. it also appears to be a major vector of the horse’s responses to human communication. as such, the voice is connected to both prescribed work (it must influence the horse) and to the world of “real work” (emerging spontaneously in relation to the horse’s actions or behaviour). methodology of the voice study to study the effects of voice we looked beyond the language specific words used (“c’est bien mon pinpin”; “tu es mon champion”; “viens ma grenouille enchantée” [“that’s good my little bunny”, “you are my champion”, “come my frog prince”]) to think further about the affect carried by the music, timbre, and tone of the voice. the dynamic elements of the voice, that allows us to describe it and to discriminate between voices, are the tessitura (high, medium, low), the timbre, the intensity, the flow, and the rhythm. in song, the voice goes from soprano for the acute tones, and to baritone and bass for the low tones. voice is musical, elemental, and affective. as such, to study the effects of a musical voice on horses within work contexts we engaged an original method that approaches the trainers’ voice as a musical production. as part of this methodology, we talked with experts in the field of music who could explain why the music of the voice was congruent with the words and had an effect on the horses. patrice peyriéras, a musician and conductor who specializes in voice casting for opera and musicals, was especially important for this study. he was able to perform technical analysis of the qualities of the human voice, its range and rhythm, but also to understand its emotional content. barreau and porcher, voice | 169 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) our fieldwork took place at the école blondeau, which is a breaking-in stable for young horses and a rider training school. this school caters to multiple equestrian disciplines, with ninety percent of the school’s clientele consisting of equestrian professionals from the olympic disciplines and racing. in addition, for the past fifteen years, the republican guard have sent their young horses there for starting. we chose this school for two main reasons. first, the method of training horses is very standardized, which allowed us to produce quantitative and comparative analyses. all horses entering the école blondeau follow a training programme derived from the master horsemen of the french tradition, particularly following françois baucher (1793–1873).22 in this programme, all the horses follow an identical training schedule using the same method (eighteen steps in the same order, over a matching period of time). all learning is thus rigidly systematic and broken down task by task. second, the école blondeau receives a large number of horses per year (between one hundred and one hundred and fifty), which allowed us to have a large sample and to work with experienced equestrians. the first step of blondeau’s eighteen-step method is known as “traction, voix, baguette” [“traction, voice, stick”], or tvb. during this step the horses learn their first mode of communication, which aims to respond to the trainers’ requests to walk forward. in the second stage, which consists of getting the horse into a horsebox or “van”, the trainer deliberately constructs a stressful situation, containing the potential for disagreement, with the aim, after negotiations, of bringing the horse to accept and obey the trainer’s directions with confidence. once this communication and hierarchical framework has been established, all the other stages are tailored towards the professional experiences that the horse will encounter throughout his or her equestrian career. this initial training is a prerequisite for all apprenticeships and all horse careers (racehorses, sports horses, leisure horses, etc.). the method of training horses on the ground at the école blondeau revolves around the idea of releasing pressure. this differs from other 22 baucher, méthode d’équitation. 170 | barreau and porcher, voice humanimalia 13.2 (2023) methods that teach horses to give in to pressure, not seek to release it. in more traditional methods of ground work, for example, horse and trainer are at a distance from each other in a circle with a radius of about four metres. the horse is worked on the lunge in order to trigger a forward movement. the trainer encourages the horse to move forward by pushing with a whip that is positioned towards the hindquarters. in this scenario, the forward movement is triggered by the propulsion of the hind legs. in the blondeau method, in contrast, horse and trainer are in close proximity: either face to face or side by side, or less than 50 cm apart (often even in direct contact). the forward movement is triggered by the pull on the lunge line, which is held a few centimetres from the horse’s bitted mouth. in this case, it is the pressure on the mouth, and therefore on the forehand (head, neck, shoulders, and forelegs) of the horse, that will trigger the forward movement. the horse is thus worked from the ground at walk and the trot, but always in close proximity to the body of the trainer. this bodily connection between horse and trainer results in a close relationship, and the methodology aims to train a ridden horse to accept very close contact with humans. this close contact goes hand in hand, in the blondeau method, with talking to the horses. among all the horses who arrived at the école blondeau in november 2019, we chose eight horses (four females and four males, non-castrated) to be trained in the first stages of tvb. we decided to observe this stage because it takes place in a stall or box, which allowed us to set up the voice recording tools in the best conditions. in this first stage, the horse is taught to advance towards the rider. the horse is equipped with a bridle, a bit, and a lunge line in the colbert position (where the lanyard is passed through the inner ring of the bit, then over the neck, with the end of the lanyard finally attached to the outer ring of the bit). the trainer will consequently teach the horse to accept the traction on the bit and will then accustom him or her to the presence of a stick on the shoulder. once this occurs, the trainer will add a vocal command, aller (“go”), to supplement their commands. the prescription for the rider is to start the pull on the bit while pronouncing the a of aller and then to touch the shoulder with the stick while pronouncing barreau and porcher, voice | 171 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the second syllable, -ler. thus, there is the coordination of sound with gesture. this breakdown of information is intended to make learning easier for the horse. when the horse has understood that these actions mean they must advance on the rider, the trainer congratulates them by saying oui, c’est bien. recording and processing of the voices we recorded the voices of eight trainers as they worked with the horses. all trainers worked with two horses, one male and one female. the trainers were four women (coline, elsa, aurélie, and zineb) and four men (manu, nicolas, philippe, and steven); all trainers at the école blondeau were either professional riders or in training. the age of the trainers is not related to their professional experience, and they each come from diverse backgrounds. coline is from a family of riders. she came to train to be able to work in the family equestrian centre. elsa is a rider and riding instructor and wanted to learn how to train young horses to perfect her equestrian knowledge. zineb comes from morocco, where she practices show jumping, and she came to france to discover french traditional horse riding. these three riders were, at the time of the study, trainees in continuing education at the school. aurélie, temporarily engaged as a trainer, is a professional rider. steven has made his entire career in racing as a training rider and was finishing his retraining at the school. philippe, a driving instructor, comes back regularly to the school to maintain his skills. nicolas and manu are regular riders and instructors at the school. the trainers’ voices were processed using pro tools software and analysed by patrice peyriéras, who came to the school’s stables and spent three days with the team (25–28 november 2019). the recordings were made during the tvb stage, while peyriéras was located in a monitoring room above the box where the horses and trainers were working. he then studied each of the voices. the recording of the trainers’ voices was therefore done in the same place, with the same equipment, and in the same working situation. moreover, at the same time as we recorded the voices on a computer, we filmed the work sequence. we filmed with a stationary camera. it 172 | barreau and porcher, voice humanimalia 13.2 (2023) barreau and porcher, voice | 173 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) figure 1: nicolas blondeau demonstrates the first element of the “traction, voice, stick” (tvb) phase. figure 2a–2d: coline practicing tvb. credit: inrae / école blondeau 174 | barreau and porcher, voice humanimalia 13.2 (2023) is a medium shot where you can always see the trainer and the horse. we processed the videos with behavioural coding software the observer xt and recorded the contact gestures. we thus have an audio recording and a video recording (approximately ten minutes) of all sessions. voice and speech in the first training of the young horse at work tessitura is the set of sounds that can be emitted by a voice or by an instrument. in humans, the tonal range is gendered. the common vocal tessitura for men, we find, is on the low end: bass, bass baritone, baritone, tenor, and countertenor. for women, it is higher, with the tessitura often falling in the range of contralto, mezzo-soprano, and soprano. however, within a working context with horses, all trainers sought out the typically masculine range. the results of our study show that both male and female trainers seek to place their voices in the low-medium and medium range, even the highest voices like zineb’s. as peyriéras explains, if we refer, for example, to the keyboard of a piano, we find the high notes at one end and low notes at the other. by analogy, one can say that the trainers’ voices are situated more or less in the middle of the keyboard and, as peyriéras explains, they “always seek downward, towards a sound lower than [their] spoken voice.” there is, he notes, in this search for a lower tessitura, a desire to envelop and cradle. the syllables are lengthened and repeated. there are many pauses of a few seconds, before the voice resumes soft, warm, and low. the tone rises or falls according to the intensity of the action. musical phrases and ternary rhythms while we observed the presence of this low tessitura, we were also interested in the rhythm that the trainers applied to their voices when talking to the horses. rhythm in music is what determines the duration of the notes in relation to each other and serves as a basis for melodic placement. the best known are the binary rhythms (each beat is divided in two: ta-ka, ta-ka, ta-ka) and ternary rhythms barreau and porcher, voice | 175 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) (each beat is divided in three: oom-pa-pa, oom-pa-pa, oom-pa-pa). by listening to the voices, peyriéras noticed that there was a homogeneous rhythm and tessitura for each sequence of each trainer. we also observed that nicolas blondeau, and manu to a lesser extent, built musical phrases on a ternary rhythm. this rhythm remains regular regardless of the context and the attitude of the horse. indeed, peyriéras illustrates the presence of a ternary (dactylic) rhythm in the sentences of nicolas blondeau and manu by the fact that he can beat the measure on their words as if he had his musicians play a waltz: “a-ller-bien, a-ller-bien, a-ller-bien…” or “oui-oui-bien, oui-ouibien, oui-oui-bien…” and so on. thus, whether the horse is resisting the rider’s request or being cooperative and positive, the rhythm tends towards the same three-beat structure. we find this ternary rhythm throughout the training stage studied. impact of voice on horse behaviour a 2016 study conducted by the mammal vocal communication and cognition research group at the university of sussex investigated horses’ ability to discriminate between human voices based on their “positive” (laughter) or “negative” (growl) valences. their results show alert postures when it comes to “negative” voices and calm postures when it comes to “positive” voices.23 we can see that horses are sensitive to voice modulations and change their behaviour accordingly by altering their contact gestures. in our study, during the video observation of horses in a real work situation, we noticed that the horse regularly made contact with the human by touching them with the tip of their nose. this “contact gesture” is called “touch” in experimental studies on social cognition. it is interpreted as a gesture that expresses the horse’s attention towards the human.24 in the behavioural repertoire of the horse, the moments when horses are in contact are related to social acts, such as grooming behaviours. these behaviours in horses 23 smith et al., “domestic horses”. 24 lansade et al., “horses are sensitive”; trösch et al., “horses categorize human emotions”; ringhofer and yamamoto, “domestic horses send signals”. 176 | barreau and porcher, voice humanimalia 13.2 (2023) are considered positive gestures marking the affinity between two individuals.25 however, contact gestures are also closely linked to trainers’ voices. in an 1828 treatise on the art of shoeing intractable horses, the austro-hungarian cavalry captain constantin balassa describes this same contact gesture and links it to the voice: “if i raise my voice to a horse, he will either recoil or advance, for the harsh sound of the human voice has almost the same effect on the horse as cracking a whip; if, on the other hand, i speak to the horse in a gentle voice, he will rest his head on my shoulder in a friendly manner and obey me willingly in all things, especially if he is already accustomed to being treated in this way.”26 this nineteenth-century text provided further inspiration for our study, and we therefore thought we would link this contact gesture with the trainers’ voices and investigate whether there was any correlation between the voice (tessitura and rhythm) and the horses’ behaviour at the école blondeau. as such, we watched the eight videos synchronized with the recorded voices and noted the number of contact gestures initiated by the horses. meanwhile, we also observed the links between the trainer’s voice and co-verbal gestures (for example, voice and pointing gestures). in so doing, we noticed that affectionate contact initiated by the horse triggered tender words in a positive, calm, or low tone from the trainers during these initial training stages. in these moments, a chain of reciprocal recognition behaviours was initiated. the results of these observations are clear. the tessitura of the voices is directly linked to the number of contact gestures received, and the voices that elicit the most contact gestures are the lowest pitched, i.e. those that remain in the same tessitura whatever the context. in contrast, those trainers with no contact gestures tended to express themselves in voices that were out of tune with their gestures. with 25 shimada and suzuki, “contribution of mutual grooming”. 26 “wenn ich ein pferd scharf anrufe, so wird es zurück oder vorwärts prallen; so daß der scharfe ton der menschlichen stimme auf das pferd beynahe die wirkung eines peitschenhiebes äußert; spreche ich hingegen zu dem pferde mit sanfter stimme, so legt es mir freundlich den kopf auf die schultern, und gehorcht mir willig in allem; besonders es einmal an diese behandlungsart gewöhnt ist.” balassa, der hufbeschlag, 18. barreau and porcher, voice | 177 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) his deep voice and structured rhythm, nicolas blondeau clearly had more contact gestures than any other trainer. on average, nicolas had sixteen contact gestures from the two horses he worked with over the period of ten minutes of video recording. emmanuel had thirteen, philippe eight, aurélie five, steven three, and elsa and zineb none. the female trainer with the most contact gestures, aurélie, also has the deepest of the female voices and one of the most ordered. talking to babies, talking to horses? infant-directed speech (ids) has been extensively studied. it has a high frequency, rising intonation, and syntactic parameters (short sentences with many repetitions); it is marked by what anne karpf calls “a melody of intimacy”. as she explains: “‘baby talk’ envelops toddlers in warmth while helping them understand language and the rules of conversation. it is hard to imagine any other human faculty capable, with so little effort, of such developmental feats.”27 prat points out that this “baby talk” is universal among humans: “it consists, from the baby’s first year until he or she is three years old, of accented speech, peaks of intonation, marked endings of sentences, greater frequency of labials (m, b, f, v), higher pitch.” she states that rhythm, i.e., temporal organization, is the essential factor in emotional tuning.28 to stimulate the baby, mothers will tend to use higher notes, whereas when they want to soothe the baby, they will usually lower the pitch of their voices.29 the way we typically talk to animals shares many similarities with ids. for example, in bernard martino’s influential documentary film, le bébe est une personne (“baby is a person”, 1984), the american paediatrician t. berry brazelton speaks to the infants as the trainers speak to their horses, with a beautiful deep voice repeating the name of an infant girl named shannon. just as the trainers say “voilà, voilà, voilà”, brazelton intones “come on, come on, come on,” 27 karpf, the human voice, xx, 149. 28 prat, “prendre une voix”, 31. 29 fernald, “perceptual and affective salience”; bouteloup, “berceuses pour petits”; karpf, the human voice; golse and simas, “la question du rythme”. 178 | barreau and porcher, voice humanimalia 13.2 (2023) “shannon, shannon, shannon” and so on.30 in both cases, it is a soft and caressing yet serious voice meant to communicate the importance of the moment. scholars have also pointed to some key differences between ids and talking to animals, however.31 in the literature, pet-directed speech (pds) is often described as rising in pitch.32 with regard to dogs, however, sarah jeannin points out that deep tones are effective in making the animal sit and wait, while high frequencies encourage the animal to come.33 analysis of the voices of the école blondeau trainers shows commonalities with both ids and pds, including rudimentary syntax and stressed syllables. however, we observed that both male and female trainers tend to use medium or low tessituras rather than high ones. these shifts in tessituras differentiate our results from other works already produced on horses.34 our hypothesis is that these differences come from the experimental protocol adopted. in other experiments, the observation of the horses’ sensitivity to pds was conducted only in connection to the studies on the pointing gesture, which was intended to stimulate the animal. in those cases, the high tessitura also is mobilized, as in ids, to stimulate the animal. however, in our field, we are in a real work situation with a young horse that is entering work. therefore, the aim of the trainers, by going in the low tessitura, is to calm the animal down, put it at ease, and generate confidence, while it is in a formative and stressful transition away from the world of fellow equines to the world of training and humans. furthermore, it is also known that the horse’s hearing is more comfortable perceiving sounds in the conversational zone, i.e. in the medium range.35 a human voice at mid-range and low mid-range can thus quite effectively heard by horses. furthermore, as our results confirm, horses are able to differentiate between high and low voice modulations. 30 martino, le bébe est une personne, 1:31:50–1:43:30. 31 jeannin, “la relation homme–animal”; mondémé, “how do we talk to animals?” 32 lansade et al., “horses are sensitive”; see also mondémé “how do we talk to animals?” 33 jeannin, “la relation homme–animal”, 36. 34 see, for instance, lansade et al., “horses are sensitive”; mondémé, “une linguistique”. 35 see leblanc, l’esprit du cheval. barreau and porcher, voice | 179 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) voice and body techniques: joining gesture and speech but does the tessitura of the voice alone explain this difference in the attention shown by the horses to the trainers? the discovery of the ternary rhythm in the trainers’ work suggests the horses’ responses are not necessarily linked to the pitch of the voice or to a particular rhythm alone. instead, we argue, the coherence between the ternary rhythm of the voice and the precision of the gesture is key. a deep voice and a ternary rhythm are not enough in themselves; they are part of body techniques, of “technical gestures”. as the psychologist and anthropologist blandine bril clarifies, a technical gesture is “a fluid, embodied gesture, requiring an engagement with the task” and the embodiment of knowledge.36 the precision of the gesture comes from learned and practiced proficiency; a proficiency that brings the appropriate energy to our arms, our fingers, to the tool we may be holding, and to the articulation between all these elements. working with horses is predominately physical, requiring few tools other than the trainer’s own body. arms, hands, posture, voice, tone, energy, and modulation of everything together constitute what marcel mauss calls “techniques of the body”, and they create linguistic ties to the horses, to which the horses in turn respond.37 as we have seen, the observation of horses in real work situations brings new data on the relationship between the voice and the technical gesture of the trainer. if horses are more likely to touch trainers whose utterances follow a ternary rhythm, it is also because they are the ones who have the most technical precision. their voice is precisely tuned to their gestures, and their bodily language. for instance, when they say “a”, they pull on the horse’s mouth. when they say “-ller”, they touch the stick to the horse’s shoulder. when they say “bien”, they release the traction and the horse moves towards the rider. the voice and the gesture are perfectly synchronized, and they can repeat this synchronization several times in a row until the horse has fully understood the mode of communication that the 36 bril, “comment aborder la question”, 71, 79. 37 mauss, “techniques of the body”. 180 | barreau and porcher, voice humanimalia 13.2 (2023) barreau and porcher, voice | 181 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) figure 3a and 3b: first and second contact gesture. figure 4: analysis of contact gesture in the observer tx software credit: inrae / école blondeau 182 | barreau and porcher, voice humanimalia 13.2 (2023) trainer is teaching them. on the other hand, if the gesture is clumsy, if the trainer has not integrated the technique, the instructions given to the horse will be confused and the trainer will be partly detached from their relationship with the horse. because trainers have incorporated the technical gestures, they can invest in the relationship with the horses and be attentive to them, while anticipating their behaviour to a certain extent. in return, the coherence between the voice and the gesture makes the rider’s requests coherent in the eyes of the horse, allowing the horse to likewise anticipate what will be asked of them. when gesture and body are coherent, the horse cannot be surprised, and can foresee what will happen, which predictability creates calmness and an environment conducive to better learning. we were able to observe this synchronization and its effects on the relationship with the horse because we conducted our observations in a real work situation (with its needs, changing relationships, and ongoing mediation of desires). whereas in an experimental situation, the context must artificial in order to ensure control of all of the experiment’s parameters. this prevents observers from seeing the unexpected and watching human and animal negotiate together the real work scenarios central to the horse–human relationship. it is because we are in the field of social sciences, and more specifically in the field of labour studies, that we approach our questions in connection with reality,38 and this allows us to be open to what is actually happening in the day-to-day work and life with horses. conclusion in work, humans and horses build intersubjective relationships. “breaking-in” is the beginning of the development of this intersubjectivity. step by step, day by day, the rider and the young horse develop a partnership based on affectivity. they connect their bodies in concert, and this agreement is heard because the voice is the echo of it. when young horses begin to be “broken in” they enter training; they discover the world of work in which they will participate for 38 porcher and schmitt, “dairy cows”. barreau and porcher, voice | 183 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) many years. this discovery is made through the body, and it is the body that is the vector of the relationship with the material, with the tool, and with the other. in the learning stage that we observed, it is a question of the horse’s understanding the mode of communication that the human will always use in training and riding to give information. the coherence of the message sent is thus essential to working well together, and if the initial message from the trainer to the young horse is completely coherent, the horse will have an easier transition into the strange and new world of work. for the psychodynamics of work, this means work holds the promise of fulfilment or the fate of submission. if we recognize the worker’s capacity for intelligence and initiative, she will be able to complete her work well. on the contrary, if what counts is blind obedience and submission, the personality of the worker will be suppressed and destroyed by the work. seeing things this way leads us to take a new look at our relationships with animals, one that is much more complex than the one we have had until now. with this complexity, we can ask new questions and provide new answers to change our working relationships. as christophe dejours expresses it: “the field of work shows aspects of animals that cannot be seen outside the field of work.”39 indeed, talking about animals as workers raises new ethical questions that shift the question of animal welfare and allow us to move away from a simple zootechnical approach. this leads to more subtle questions, such as the possibility of a right to fulfilling and positive animal labour. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank anne karpf, patrice peyriéras, and the trainers at the école blondeau. warmest thanks to monica mattfeld and kári driscoll for their writing and editorial support. 39 christophe dejours, concluding remarks at the first animal’s lab rencontres symposium, agroparistech, paris, france, 8–9 april 2016. 184 | barreau and porcher, voice humanimalia 13.2 (2023) works cited balassa, constantin. der hufbeschlag ohne zwang. vienna, 1828. https://books. google.com/books?id=f8xtaaaacaaj. baucher, françois. méthode d’équitation basée sur de nouveaux principes. 10th ed. paris: librairie militaire, 1854. http:// ark.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb30066263h. blattner, charlotte e., kendra coulter, and will kymlicka, eds. animal labour: a new frontier of interspecies justice? oxford: oxford university press, 2020. bouteloup, philippe. “berceuses pour petits et grands.” spirales 34, no. 2 (2005): 51–60. https://doi.org/10.3917/ spi.034.0051. brandt, keri. “a language of their own: an interactionist approach to human– horse communication.” society & animals 12, no. 4 (2004): 299–316. https:// doi.org/10.1163/1568530043068010. briefer, elodie f. “vocal contagion of emotions in non-human animals.” proc. r. soc. b. 285, no. 1873 (feb. 2018): 20172783. http://doi.org/10.1098/ rspb.2017.2783. bril, blandine. “comment aborder la question du geste technique pour en comprendre l’expertise et l’apprentissage?” techniques & culture 1, no. 71 (2019): 78–91. https://doi. org/10.4000/tc.11373. castarède, marie france. “métapsychologie de la voix.” champ psychosomatique 48, no. 4 (2007): 7–21. https://doi. org/10.3917/cpsy.048.0007. coulter, kendra. animals, work, and the promise of interspecies solidarity. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2016. dejours, christophe, and jean-philippe deranty. “the centrality of work.” critical horizons, 11, no. 2 (2010): 167–180. https://doi.org/10.1558/crit.v11i2.167. dejours, christophe, jean-philippe deranty, emmanuel renault, and nicolas h. smith. the return of work in critical theory: self, society, politics. new york: columbia university press, 2018. deneux-le barh, vanina. “les chevaux de sécurité publique: des professionnels?” économie rurale no. 374 (oct.–dec. 2020): 91–106. https://doi.org/10.4000/ economierurale.8367. dray, charlène. “du cheval exécutant au cheval actant. réinventer les relations inter-espèces au travers d’une pratique artistique expérimentale.” circus sciences: revue scientifique en ligne sur les arts du cirque no. 1 (2020): 45–52. https://mediatheque.ifce.fr/index. php?lvl=notice_display&id=69122. dray, charlène. “technozoosemiotics: think and practices of scenography with the horse for a modern aesthetic drama.” in animal performance studies, edited by laura budriesi, 322–37. turin: accademia university press, 2022. https://doi.org/ 10.4000/books. aaccademia.12480. estebanez, jean, jocelyne porcher, and julie douine. “travailler à faire semblant: les animaux au cinéma.” écologie & politique 54, no. 1 (2017): 103–21. https://doi.org/10.3917/ ecopo1.054.0103. fernald, anne. “the perceptual and affective salience of mothers’ speech to infants.” in the origins and growth of communication, edited by lynne feagans, catherine garvey, and roberta golinkoff, 5–29. norwood, nj: ablex, 1984. game, ann. “riding: embodying the centaur.” body & society 7, no. 4 (2001): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1177/135703 4x01007004001. gernet, isabelle, and christophe dejours. “évaluation du travail et reconnaissance.” nouvelle revue de psychosociologie 8, no. 2 (2009): 27–36. https://doi. org/10.3917/nrp.008.0027. https://books.google.com/books?id=f8xtaaaacaaj https://books.google.com/books?id=f8xtaaaacaaj http://ark.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb30066263h http://ark.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb30066263h https://doi.org/10.3917/spi.034.0051 https://doi.org/10.3917/spi.034.0051 https://doi.org/10.1163/1568530043068010 https://doi.org/10.1163/1568530043068010 http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.2783 http://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2017.2783 https://doi.org/10.4000/tc.11373 https://doi.org/10.4000/tc.11373 https://doi.org/10.3917/cpsy.048.0007 https://doi.org/10.3917/cpsy.048.0007 https://doi.org/10.1558/crit.v11i2.167 https://doi.org/10.4000/economierurale.8367 https://doi.org/10.4000/economierurale.8367 https://mediatheque.ifce.fr/index.php?lvl=notice_display&id=69122 https://mediatheque.ifce.fr/index.php?lvl=notice_display&id=69122 https://doi.org/ 10.4000/books.aaccademia.12480 https://doi.org/ 10.4000/books.aaccademia.12480 https://doi.org/10.3917/ecopo1.054.0103 https://doi.org/10.3917/ecopo1.054.0103 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x01007004001 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x01007004001 https://doi.org/10.3917/nrp.008.0027 https://doi.org/10.3917/nrp.008.0027 barreau and porcher, voice | 185 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) giovanni, antoine, aude lagier, and nathalie heinrich bernardoni. “physiologie de la phonation.” emc oto rhino laryngologie 9, no. 2 (2014): 1–15. https://hal.science/hal-01427064. golse, bernard and roberta simas. “la question du rythme entre empathie(s) et intersubjectivité(s).” spirales 44, no. 4 (2007): 59–64. https://doi.org/10.3917/ spi.044.0059. haraway, donna. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. jeannin, sarah. “la relation homme– animal: étude de la communication vocale adressée au chien (canis familiaris).” phd diss., université paris nanterre, 2016. https://www.theses. fr/2016pa100172. jeannin, sarah, caroline gilbert, amy mathieu, and gérard leboucher. “petdirected speech draw adult dogs’ attention more efficiently than adultdirected speech.” scientific reports 7 (2017): 4980. https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41598-017-04671-z. karpf, anne. the human voice: how this extraordinary instrument reveals essential clues about who we are. new york: bloomsbury, 2006. lainé, nicolas. living and working with giants: a multispecies ethnography of the khamti and elephants in northeast india. paris: muséum national d’histoire naturelle, 2020. lansade, léa, miléna trösch, céline parias, alice blanchard, elodie gorosurreta, and ludovic calandreau. “horses are sensitive to baby talk: pet-directed speech facilitates communication with humans in a pointing task and during frooming.” animal cognition 24, no. 5 (2021): 999–1006. https://doi. org/10.1007/s10071-021-01487-3. leblanc, michel-antoine. l’esprit du cheval. introduction à l’éthologie cognitive du cheval. intelligence, cerveau, perception. paris: belin, 2010. leroi-gourhan, andré. la civilisation du renne. paris: gallimard, 1936. martino, bernard, dir. le bébe est une personne. tf1 1984. 183 minutes. available on youtube: https://youtu. be/3yzv-ywmvw0. mauss, marcel. “techniques of the body.” 1934. translated by ben brewster. economy and society 2, no. 1 (1973): 70–88. https://doi. org/10.1080/03085147300000003. mondémé, chloé. “comment parle-ton aux animaux? formes et effets pragmatiques de l’adresse aux animaux de compagnie.” langage et société 163, no. 1 (2018): 77–99. https://doi. org/10.3917/ls.163.0077. mondémé, chloé. “une linguistique au-delà de l’humain? les vertus heuristiques de la semiosis interespèce.” itinéraires. littérature, textes, cultures, no. 2020-2 (2020). https://doi. org/10.4000/itineraires.8453. mouret, sébastien. “apprendre à prendre soin: la centralité du travail dans l’éducation des chiens guides d’aveugles.” écologie & politique 54, no. 1 (2017): 87–102. https://doi.org/10.3917/ ecopo1.054.0087. mouret, sébastien. “les chiens de patrouille de la police nationale: les gueules armées de la république.” sociologie du travail 60, no. 2 (april– june 2018). https://doi.org/10.4000/ sdt.2040. mouret, sébastien, jocelyne porcher, and gaelle mainix. “military and police dogs: weapons or colleagues?” in porcher and estebanez, animal labor, 129–45. mulier, chloé and jocelyne porcher. “le service hippomobile de vendargues: un collectif interspécifique de travail.” natures sciences sociétés 30, no. 1 (2022): 31–45. https://doi.org/10.1051/ nss/2022020. https://hal.science/hal-01427064 https://doi.org/10.3917/spi.044.0059 https://doi.org/10.3917/spi.044.0059 https://www.theses.fr/2016pa100172 https://www.theses.fr/2016pa100172 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-04671-z https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-04671-z https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-021-01487-3 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-021-01487-3 https://youtu.be/3yzv-ywmvw0 https://youtu.be/3yzv-ywmvw0 https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147300000003 https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147300000003 https://doi.org/10.3917/ls.163.0077 https://doi.org/10.3917/ls.163.0077 https://doi.org/10.4000/itineraires.8453 https://doi.org/10.4000/itineraires.8453 https://doi.org/10.3917/ecopo1.054.0087 https://doi.org/10.3917/ecopo1.054.0087 https://doi.org/10.4000/sdt.2040 https://doi.org/10.4000/sdt.2040 https://doi.org/10.1051/nss/2022020 https://doi.org/10.1051/nss/2022020 186 | barreau and porcher, voice humanimalia 13.2 (2023) porcher, jocelyne. “animal work.” in the oxford handbook of animal studies, edited by linda kalof, 302–18. oxford: oxford university press, 2017. porcher, jocelyne. éleveurs et animaux, réinventer le lien. paris: presses universitaires de france, 2002. porcher, jocelyne. “the work of animals: a challenge for social sciences.” humanimalia 6, no. 1 (2014): 1–9. https:// doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9925. porcher, jocelyne. “well-being and suffering in livestock farming: living conditions at work for people and animals.” sociologie du travail 48, supplement 1 (august 2006): e56–e70. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. soctra.2006.02.001. porcher, jocelyne and sophie barreau. “le débourrage des jeunes chevaux, un terrain inattendu pour la psychodynamique du travail?” travailler 41, no. 1 (2019): 153–169. https://doi. org/10.3917/trav.041.0153. porcher, jocelyne and jean estebanez, eds. animal labor: a new perspective on human–animal relations. bielefeld: transcript, 2019. porcher, jocelyne and élisabeth lécrivain. “bergers, chiens, brebis: un collectif de travail naturel?” études rurales no. 189 (2012): 121–37. https://doi.org/10.4000/ etudesrurales.9615. porcher, jocelyne and élisabeth lécrivain. “the wolf and the patou dog: freedom and work.” in porcher and estebanez, animal labor, 113–27. porcher, jocelyne and tiphaine schmitt. “dairy cows: workers in the shadows?” society & animals 20, no. 1 (2012): 39–60. https://doi. org/10.1163/156853012x614350. prat, régine. “prendre une voix dans ses bras.” enfances & psy 58, no. 1 (2013): 29–39. https://doi.org/10.3917/ ep.058.0029. ringhofer, monamie and shinya yamamoto. “domestic horses send signals to humans when they are faced with an unsolvable task.” animal cognition 20, no. 3 (2017): 397–405. https://doi. org/10.1007/s10071-016-1056-4. salmona, michèle. les paysans français. le travail, les métiers, la transmission des savoirs. paris: l’harmattan, 1994. shimada, masaki and nae suzuki. “the contribution of mutual grooming to affiliative relationships in a feral misaki horse herd.” animals 10, no. 9 (2020): 1564. https://doi.org/10.3390/ ani10091564. smith, amy victoria, leanne proops, kate grounds, jennifer wathan, sophie k. scott, and karen mccomb. “domestic horses (equus caballus) discriminate between negative and positive human nonverbal vocalisations.” scientific reports no. 8 (2018): 13052. https://doi. org/10.1038/s41598-018-30777-z. stern, daniel. les formes de vitalité. psychologie, art, psychothérapie et développement de l’enfant. paris: odile jacob, 2010. trösch, miléna, florent cuzol, céline parias, ludovic calandreau, raymond nowak, and léa lansade. “horses categorize human emotions cross-modally based on facial expression and non-verbal vocalizations.” animals 9, no. 11 (2019): 862. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani9110862. winnicott, d. w. babies and their mothers. edited by clare winnicott, ray shepherd, and madeline davis. introduction by benjamin spock. reading, ma: addison-wesley, 1987. https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9925 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9925 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soctra.2006.02.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.soctra.2006.02.001 https://doi.org/10.3917/trav.041.0153 https://doi.org/10.3917/trav.041.0153 https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesrurales.9615 https://doi.org/10.4000/etudesrurales.9615 https://doi.org/10.1163/156853012x614350 https://doi.org/10.1163/156853012x614350 https://doi.org/10.3917/ep.058.0029 https://doi.org/10.3917/ep.058.0029 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-016-1056-4 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-016-1056-4 https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10091564 https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10091564 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-30777-z https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-30777-z https://doi.org/10.3390/ani9110862 _hlk104974073 _hlk103090740 _hlk108180574 _hlk108187477 _hlk104970561 _hlk108187404 _hlk108187724 _hlk108187311 _hlk104971389 _hlk108179591 _hlk106702833 _hlk104970315 _hlk108188036 _hlk104971329 _hlk108178720 _hlk108180053 _hlk108179028 _hlk108188261 _hlk104971127 _hlk104974452 _hlk108187357 _hlk108181510 microsoft word griffiths h u m a n i m a l i a 1:2 michael r. griffiths “the tame from the wild”: handling political economies of life at the emergence of capital [i]f socrates makes the women common, and retains private property, the men will see to the fields, but who will see to the house? . . . it is absurd to argue, from the analogy of animals, that men and women should follow the same pursuits, for animals have not to manage a household. — aristotle, politics, bk. ii. (1152) it presently occurr’d to me, that i must keep the tame from the wild . . . and the only way for this was to have enclosed some piece of ground . . . this was a great undertaking for one pair of hands. — defoe, robinson crusoe (106) at least since aristotle, representations of animality in fictions of the economy have skirted the bounds of allegorical and mimetic modes or (to employ a distinction consonant with the old terms of the great chain of being) those of analogy and emulation.1 for defoe’s robinson crusoe, animals as living beings must be consigned to the status of “tame” chattel property. they are also relied upon as the bases for economic arguments from the “analogy of animals.” inscriptions of species difference in such arguments often conceal material origins within genres that appear entirely analogical or allegorical. at times, ironically, scholarly efforts to address human representations of animals consistently risk reducing the animal to a figment of the human imaginary even as the gesture that performs this reduction is itself the product of an ethical imperative. as we all know, the tension between ethics and anthropocentrism has been the subject of much debate in the burgeoning study of nonhuman animals. the question has been, to a degree vexed and difficult partly because the very study of animality automatically questions the foundations of what people think of as ethics. ethics then appears as monstrous, but so, too, does the attempt to rethink it beyond the humanist paradigm. for example, during a roundtable discussion held at the 2008 annual convention of the modern language association, entitled “the future of animal(ity) studies,” the conveners provided panelists with a guiding distinction between animality studies— critique of animal representation in human discourse—and animal studies, more directly concerned with the materiality of animal life.2 although both approaches were taken seriously scholars who identify with the animal studies side of this distinction have at times been dismissive of the anthropocentrism of animality studies, as if the risk michael griffiths– “the tame from the wild” 19 implied by the analysis of human discourse necessitated a downfall into anthropocentrism. donna haraway, for instance, has questioned jacques derrida’s deconstruction of “the autobiographē of the human species,” arguing that it gives no attention to the material question of actual animals.3 while it may be the case that critical followers of derrida’s deconstruction of the question of the animal risk a reflexive emphasis on humanism, it does not necessarily follow that address to the animal “outside representation” constitutes the study of a ding an sich beyond the grasp of anthropocentric discourse.4 i do not point this out in order to suggest that the opening of recent theoretical analysis onto empirical study of real animals is not valuable. taking the material and ethical question of the animal seriously is clearly invaluable. i want to suggest, however, that the relation between the figural and the material by which living things are made subjects or objects is more complex than has hitherto been suggested by those who seek, implicitly or explicitly, to deauthorize the animality studies wing of human-animal studies. in cross-mapping fiction, material events, and philosophical discourse, it becomes clear that allegories of animality are not simply mimetic, though neither are they entirely floating and dereferential. for richard nash, animal discourse forms rather “a pre-existing mythological terminology actually shaped by preconceptions and hence perceptions by which real beings were observed and recognized by europeans” (wild enlightenment 3). one could say, for instance, that “real beings” do not pre-exist enlightenment humanist representational economies with their “mythological terminology.” the task of disentangling this relation between real and imagined, allegorical and ethically immediate already opens onto a further double bind, since such a task immediately faces both the specific historic context of an allegory’s inscription and apparently distinct philosophical and ethical stakes that inevitably refer to the immediacy of the present. one sees in my opening epigraphs a distinction between tame and wild animals in defoe that is highly reminiscent of aristotle’s distinction between forms of property in the fields and in the house—in other words a distinction that crosses the human and the non-human, as well as the gender, race, and citizen status of the inhabitants of a territory. such figuration also organizes and is reorganized by the shifting categorizations of real beings that traverse the overlapping discourses of taxonomy and political economy. considering the economic and religious changes that lead to the rearticulation of these categories, one finds that classical forms of subjection and humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 20 economic categorization are both retained and rearticulated within enlightenment humanist discourse. in aristotle’s politics the taxonomy of living beings schematizes the management of non-living things in the household and those in the fields—at the farthest reaches of dominion. this “absurd” analogical praxis continues through the modern era. one key distinction that will be retained in britain as late as daniel defoe’s 1720s operatively divides chattel property from the family property system of the landed. the designation of chattel property is never limited to actual “cattle,” nor is the mysterious space of the house made up only of the family—those inhabiting the dominion of a pater familius. such ambivalences in the categorization of life demand multiple genealogies. here, my explication of these ambivalences and transformations will be anchored around a reading of robinson crusoe since this text can be read not only as an event in the history of english literature—for instance, in what ian watt has famously called the rise of the novel—but also in that of political economy.5 mining crusoe’s futurity, one easily uncovers numerous examples of this curious travelogue’s influence on the rhetoric of political economy. robinson’s isolation on his island will come to hold a paradigmatic importance for jean-jacques rousseau.6 marx also famously observed that “robinson crusoe’s experiences are a favorite theme with political economists” (capital 47). and this is to name but two well known examples. the advent of robinson crusoe in enlightenment intellectual history connects the emergence of property with that of biopolitics. by referring to the concept of biopolitics in a discussion that began with aristotle i mean to invoke michel foucault’s famous contention that while “[f]or millennia, man remained what he was for aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question” (history 144). while such critics as nash and phillip armstrong have addressed the importance of robinson crusoe to the study of non-human animals in enlightenment discourse, it is life’s transforming place in the discourses of value that i examine in this essay. while i deploy my argument with reference to contemporary contexts, i aim to implicate such eighteenth-century animal representation in an emergent biopolitical economy with a series of ethical and political consequences for the history of the present that concern humans and non-humans alike. the elusive taxonomy of species and value one finds in crusoe will remain all the way to the present, making one aware of the unwieldy basis of the economy of the living and the non-living, human and non-human, person and thing. economic allegories of tameness and wildness cross the species divide and they do so through a concept of property that is always, on some level, metaphoric. as gilles michael griffiths– “the tame from the wild” 21 deleuze has argued, for david hume at least, “nature is the principle of resemblance and uniformity” produced within the empirical human subject that emerges at the twilight of the renaissance (empiricism 47). for hume it is “property” that “engenders and develops inequality” and the rules produced by this regime of property “will be the object of political economy” (op. cit., 51). following nineteen years on the heels of robinson crusoe’s first appearance, hume’s sense that humans are the product of a social constructionism rooted in property reveals an instance of what robert marzec has called the “syndrome” of robinson crusoe as it is carried into the nineteenthand twentieth-century intensification of the private. nonetheless, since the present essay aims to further far-reaching assertions about the economic form of life’s subjugation, any risk of anachronism must be explained and defended. i began with aristotle because of the strange similarity between his early division of the things of the fields from those of the house and a division that i will identify in defoe’s text. nonetheless classical economy is not modern capitalism. animality and slavery are not transcendent platonic universals but are produced and reproduced within the discursive structure of a given system of power—what foucault called a social apparatus, or dispositif.7 this is to say, that shared schematism does not apply a historically transcendent biopolitics, but one whose vicissitudes rely (at least in part) on modern forms of economics, which is to say: the rise of imperialism and capitalism. so, while invoking a historical comparison, i want to emphasize that i am wary of transplanting the aristotelian economy of man, woman, slave, and animal across geographically or temporally distinct contexts. i prefer to stress the way continuities (as well as breaks) have continually recurred in economizations of life. whereas followers of the earlier foucault have been wary of the risk of economism, giorgio agamben has recently observed that “[t]he latin term dispositio, from which [foucault’s] french term dispositif, or apparatus, derives” also etymologically connects to the “semantic sphere of the theological oikonomia” (apparatus 11). the study of biopolitics can benefit a lot from examining the economics of the dispositif of enlightenment humanism, its antecedents, and legacy.8 defoe had manifestly espoused his assent to the connection between economic dominion and the divine ordering of species difference when he wrote in the review that without “the subjection . . . to the useful part of man” of “the useful part of creatures . . . tame, docile, tractable, and submissive,” humans would be overrun by “the less needful part . . . left wild and at war with us” (qtd. in armstrong 44), were this the case, he asserts, “what would it give to trade, what a universal stop to all humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 22 manner of commerce!” (ibid.). as an influential early eighteenth-century figuration of animal property, robinson crusoe reflects and portends shifts in the dispositif by which forms of life would come to be assigned value in the enlightenment. handling animality and biopolitics. in making these claims about the intersection of animal allegory, political economy, and biopolitics through a reading of defoe’s text, it is necessary to recall certain recent critiques of humanism that center around the biopolitics of the figural hand and situate them next to the hand’s place in early eighteenth-century thought. the use of animals as metaphors for kinds of property has lurked in the margins of a number of recent and influential critiques of humanism. derrida famously linked the metaphor of the hand with the epistemology of the sacrificial structure of enlightenment humanism, or, carnophallogocentrism. in deconstructive terms, this epistemology of distinction focuses on heidegger’s retention of the hand as a mark of humanist thought, particularly à propos the exclusionary potential it retains within his destruktion of humanist metaphysics.9 cary wolfe has argued that the hand in this philosophical genealogy is but one in a series of signs of species difference.10 ann van sant has argued that defoe’s subversion of the “hierarchy of head and hand” in crusoe reflects the georgic revolutionary reintroduction of “a long tradition supported by authority from both greek and latin antiquity” (121). van sant notes the coincidence in crusoe’s figural hands of usages which place lockean labor alongside exaltations of power and sovereignty. in van sant’s account, the discursive unwieldiness of human social hierarchy exceeds both the terminology of earlier intraaristocratic emphasis on status and emergent hierarchies of socioeconomic class distinction. van sant concludes by insisting that the oscillation of the hand between categories of difference and hierarchy shows “the persistence of the concept of a statusbased society well after social and economic relations had ceased being governed by status” (132). however van sant’s account does not triangulate these claims about discursive shifts between class and status with the formation of the human. this is surprising since derrida, haraway, wolfe, armstrong, and nash, in varying ways show animality to be a central enlightenment hinge. for derrida, this transformation forms in the late eighteenth century and will root itself in the phenomenology that follows. “there is,” derrida remarks, “a kantian hand, and there will be a husserlian hand and a heideggerian hand . . . which will have traits in common but do not overlap” (on touching 149). bringing derrida’s contention into dialogue with van sant’s, we could assert that there is also an early-eighteenth century hand that manifests through locke’s and defoe’s texts and connects economics and the body. in light of the derridean michael griffiths– “the tame from the wild” 23 critique of humanualism, the hand’s privileging of certain labor forms in early eighteenth century economic thinking entails not only distinctions among human socioeconomic categories (class, status), but, i will argue, traces an emergent nexus of species and race-based differentiations, for which economic distinctions cannot be disentangled from perceived biological and ontological forms of life (185). recent discussions of biopolitics have emphasized the relation between the body and its foundational character for modern notions of property. stressing the corporeal dimensions of lockean property, roberto esposito points out that the extraction of individualism from a monotheistic commonwealth hinges on the foundational coincidence of the body and property.11 lockean individualism founded in the “property in [one’s] own person,” is corporealized through its prosthetic mode of extraction—“the labour of [the] body and the work of the hands” (locke 287). esposito connects the hand to property through a discussion of kant’s introduction of liquidity to political economy via the continued persistence of the figural hand as its support. in kant’s conception, property need not be literally held in hand in order to be individualized—that is, justified as an individual possession. for kant, the hand’s absenting from direct connection to property becomes the underpinning of moveable goods and of the pecuniary by extension (esposito 69). since, as van sant has argued, defoe’s text subverts the primacy of mental over manual labor, defoe’s text must also reposition the conditions under which beings are made the subjects of power. however, as revealing as it is, the biopolitical character of political economy, and the status of animal bodies is not apparent within the textual trajectory that esposito traces from locke to kant. through a semiotics of animality’s relation to the hand and body of the sovereign, defoe’s text repositions lockean notions of sovereignty, property, and liberty. it behooves one to note that the relative tameness of animals, as well as the relatively economic practices of non-europeans was initially subject to the relative ability or inability of europeans to show sympathy to other forms of life. as deleuze notes, sympathy is not a phenomenological given but, as was recognized by defoe’s eighteenth-century contemporary, hume, takes form according to the social apparatus that produces it, which is to say at that time, political economy (empiricism 37-54). as hume further emphasized, “society is in the beginning a collection of families” (op. cit., 39). production: pecuniary chattels and the figure of the goat. as armstrong has suggested, the preponderant influence of cartesian thought meant that european travelers normatively assumed that non-humans and non-europeans alike could not humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 24 easily be grasped conceptually. however they could certainly be grasped and commodified via the hand of homo oeconomicus (17-22). the incarceration of life by the “hand” is always already an act of detention, as at the moment when, “in a great undertaking for one pair of hands,” crusoe breeds up a “he-goat . . . tame as one of the kids . . . to supply myself with goat-flesh . . . [so] perhaps i might have them about my house like a flock of sheep”(rc 106). kant’s detentio is property without the necessity of possession, whereby “i possess it, although i have laid it out of my hand, and wherever it may lie” (armstrong 13). crusoe’s detention of his goats anticipates kant’s humanualist assertion, showing the reliance of early colonial adventures on this humanist political economy of the confinement of non-humans. shortly after enclosing his goats in this way, crusoe steps back to survey the order of his kingdom of non-human subjects, remarking on his status as his “majesty the prince and lord of the whole island” (rc 108). he then begins to enumerate the roles of the various subjects around his table: poll, [crusoe’s parrot] as if he had been my favourite, was the only one permitted to talk to me. my dog who was now grown very old and crazy, and had found no species to multiply his kind upon, sat always at my right hand, and two cats, one on one side the table and one on the other, expecting now and then a bit from my hand, as a mark of special favour. (rc 108) where are the goats once crusoe and his “little family sit down to dinner” (rc108)? where are the goats whom crusoe has painstakingly bred and housed—beginning with the first kid whom he “sav’d” alive from his “dog” (rc 81, 105-107)? what is the meaning of the absence of cattle—and therefore, chattel—animals from this scene of a family made up entirely of non-humans? as armstrong notes, only the first goat finds itself in the family circle (41). crusoe takes pity only on the first exceptional goat which “became so loving, so gentle, so fond, that is became . . . one of my domesticks also” (rc 82). one can identify the liminal statuses of the animals in crusoe’s dominion by noting historical and biographical resonances, for instance, the connection between crusoe and his “real-life avatar, alexander selkirk,” a castaway who was rescued from juan fernàndez island several years prior to the publication of defoe’s book (armstrong 13). yet the mimetic sources for crusoe are an explanatory means and not an exhaustive end. selkirk, who according to the first published account of him “tam’d some wild michael griffiths– “the tame from the wild” 25 goats and cats”(rc 230)—was doubtless a source for defoe. but, as nash puts it, “beyond the already well-travelled ground of the selkirk-crusoe affinity,” the implications of the interspecies castaway narrative can be deciphered through reading practices beyond the biographical and mimetic. since “both islands and their animal populations (particularly goats) carry special significance” for enlightenment models of economy and taxonomy (nash 67). as nash reminds us, “[t]he goats that populated selkirk’s island refuge, and which crusoe domesticates, represented in eighteenthcentury natural history a liminal creature between wild and tame, savage and domestic” (87). the solitary human at table, crusoe excitedly observes, “how like a king i din’d” (rc 116). this performance of sovereignty over his little family follows the goat’s domestication and the banishment of its offspring to the compound. the narrative trail left by goats in defoe’s text leads back to the earliest classical division of dominion— between the things of the family and those of the fields.13 as ian a. bell observes, lockean thought of dominion conditions defoe’s figuration of crusoe’s sovereignty. the etymology of dominion finds its root in domus, the home. in the leviathan, hobbes reinvigorated the connection between dominion and property, insisting that: “[t]hat which in speaking of goods and possessions is called an owner, and in latin dominus . . . the right of possession, is called dominion” (218). if one foregrounds the slippage between the microscopic family dominion of crusoe’s experiment, and the impersonal connection with territory over which the sovereign casts his gaze, we arrive at an aporia that fails to manageably separate crusoe’s paternal power over property and his sovereign power—the wider sense of dominion. as was the case for aristotle, in defoe’s allegory dominion, sovereignty, and paternal power are not discrete but are rather connected by a metonymic displacement. as michel foucault rightly notes, the metaphoric relation between family and state will come to recede into a custodial power over subjects, which, in defoe’s allegory, are nonhuman.14 bell argues that while friday is called a slave, his relation to crusoe also borders on the status of an autonomous subject. in robinson crusoe, the goat functions as the prototype for the chattel slave whose value is coincident with its conditions of life.15 this is why the first captured kid must be nursed: made to live by the sovereign rather than let die in order to be rendered manageable (rc 105).16 not only is the goat taxonomically liminal, it is immediately connected to europe’s outside, “the proliferating goats . . . [call] out for the civilizing touch of european cultivation” (nash 83). as alfred crosby notes, spanish, portugese, and english maritime travelers used humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 26 atlantic islands as stations for replenishment in the long voyages to the new world and around the cape of good hope. for this reason, these explorers made a practice of seeding these islands with familiar species, for instance in the canaries, as they conquered each isle “[t]hey ‘europeanized’ their island, importing species of old world plants and animals” (crosby 94). as nash argues by reference to william dampier’s journal, “in the various accounts that inform defoe’s narrative, european species (rats, cats, and goats in particular) explode on juan fernàndez” (nash 79), to figure the global replication “of versions of europe” (crosby 89). the carnophallogocentric structure in derrida’s sense emerges in the logic of slave and chattel subjectivity—a metaphorics of consumption troubled by this gordian knot of parallel subjugations. before he has fully tamed and nursed his kid in the realm of res familius, crusoe asks god’s blessing for this meat he has placed his labor upon through hunting—recalling the primal scene of non-european (“indian”) labor in locke’s second treatise (rc 91).17 crusoe rhetorically invokes the tension between individualism and commonwealth, asking “[c]an god spread a table in the wilderness?” (rc 94). such ritual expenditure begins to take on an increasingly outmoded role in the novel, as crusoe better encloses his land and fixes the property forms designating the subjects in his compound. prior to friday’s emergence as “slave,” the “savage people who sometimes haunted this island” produce for crusoe the specter of humanualist economy’s primitive other through “print of a man’s foot” (rc 126). in response to the foot, crusoe immediately accelerates his handy work of enclosing his compound, “that i might not fall into the hands of the barbarians” (rc 125). the attempt at global selfreplication that crosby identifies with early modern european expansion can also be read in derrida’s terms as the “globalatinization” of religious and economic thought of property (cosmopolitanism 32). this cross-cultural christianization of economy recalls the degree to which, as agamben noted, foucault’s narrative of the emergence of apparatuses of subjection is closely connected to the “theological oikonomia” in monotheistic logics of economy. in more recently translated writings on biopolitics, foucault connects such apparatuses of control over life as the science of population with the rise of capitalism. for the later foucaultian genealogy, the sovereign’s direct connection to the wealth of the state recedes, yet his power over his subjects functions increasingly through the management of subjects via population modeling—a form of power consonant with the emergent imperative to avoid the direct governance of markets.18 as property becomes private, it refuses the common logic that referred to the divinely guaranteed sovereign. yet michael griffiths– “the tame from the wild” 27 sovereignty’s multiplication of biopolitical projects nonetheless refers to its subjects as forms of life with economic potential. in the politics, aristotle distinguishes such instruments of production as the sowing shuttle—which facilitates a limited number of tasks—from instruments of action. aristotle designates the “slave” a living possession, capable of instrumentality but possessed of potential to act only qua instrument (bw 1135-37). what aristotle withholds from the slave is not potential [potenza], but the dynamic form of potential [dynameia]. for this reason, aristotle says the slave has no autonomy: no capacity for reflective action. the distribution of kinds of property relies at once on their spatial orientation—whether through detentio or in proximity to the hand—and the related division of forms of life by their varying potentials. defoe’s text stands at the hinge of the two key breaks in foucault’s genealogy. crusoe is at once sovereign of a kingdom—guarantor of the wellbeing of his subjects—and father in dominion of these same subjects, their direct owner. crusoe’s goats display neither dynamic potential, nor the related autonomy ascribed to companions like the parrot. crusoe’s cats, as i have said, receive the expenditure of “special favours” from his hand, while nonetheless remaining simultaneously subjects and property. yet these little things of the family are not property in the sense aristotle ascribed to a sowing-shuttle, nor are they mere instruments of use and exchange. the absent goats are more particularly chattel property than the difficulty to classify cats, who receive special favor, or the parrot who speaks.19 defoe’s sacrificial economy renders the goat a “living magazine of flesh, milk, butter and cheese” (rc 111). following derrida, we might say that the carnophallogocentric structure of consumption and sacrifice is allegorized through the goat’s reduction to a “living magazine.” the liminal taxonomic status with which the goats are shackled foregrounds not only the limits nash saw in eighteenth-century natural history, but also limits in the related rethinking of property’s mobility. as it is figured in crusoe, such globalatinization of the sacrificial economy is a reiteration of the aristotelian distinction between domestic and agrarian property, which forms a basic tenet in roman law through the distinction between res familia and res pecunia. for marcel mauss the roman economics of “things” was subject to a binary based on a primary spatial distinction that founds roman law (nomos).20 the material resonance of the distribution of animality in space is clear for the nature of the distinction wherein “things were of two kinds. a distinction was made between familia and pecunia, between the things of the household . . . and the cattle subsisting in the humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 28 fields, far from the stables” (mauss 49). for locke, the hand facilitated property grounded in the body’s immediate labor—“the work of the hands.” but crusoe’s initial work of enclosure, he has established the detentio of the goats, which renders them movable property no longer reliant on the hand. through the manual, crusoe facilitates the feeding of the bit to cats, the “mark of special favor.” in approaching animals, manual labor is something from which the master of dominion is increasingly removed. we can find the same logic in the roman legal system from which it is derived: a distinction was also made between the res mancipi and the res nec mancipi, according to the forms of sale. as regards the former, which are made up of precious things, including immovable goods and even children, no disposal of them could take place save according to the precepts of the mancipatio, the ‘taking (capere) in hand . . . the things that did not fall under the mancipatio are precisely the small livestock in the fields and the pecunia, money, the idea, word and form of which derived from cattle and sheep. (49-50) the res familia creatures most properly inhabit the proprietary sphere of the house, where the goats enclosed in the compound are pecunia creatures: a “living magazine” capable of producing further fungible goods. within crusoe’s dominion, but banished from his family dinner, the goats can be owned without being in proximity of the hand and can be exchanged readily and fungibly. crusoe’s goats are both res pecunia and res nec mancipatio. within this order, the goat is not born, but made pecuniary by “the work of hands.” afterward, the hand becomes an increasingly symbolic mechanism of labor. if we continue to take robinson crusoe as at once an allegorical musing on forms of animal property and an event in the history of political economy, then the vicissitudes of the goat foreground the text’s exemplification of this initial proprietary distinction in the state of nature (where, as marx points out, exchange is always potential) (marx 47-50). crusoe’s domination of goats allegorizes the transformation of forms of life—be they goats, or slaves—into forms of property. as such, goats must be made immobile and incapable of escape, ironically in order for them to become the most dispensable (and therefore mobile) instantiation of living property. towards the end of crusoe’s diary, he notes: dec. 27. kill’d a young goat, and lam’d another so as that i catch’d it, and led it home in a string; when i had it home, i bound and splinter’d up its michael griffiths– “the tame from the wild” 29 leg which was broke, n. b. i took such care of it, that it liv’d, and the leg grew well, and as strong as ever; but by my nursing it so long it grew tame, and fed upon the little green at my door, and would not go away: this was the first time that i entertain’d a thought of breeding up some tame creatures, that i might have food when my powder and shot was all spent. (rc 56) within the structure of narration the first goat on the island is rendered chattel and pecunia through the nursing function of crusoe’s hands, even as this function also carries out the laming of the animal to prevent its escape. res pecunia is a structural position within which potential for instrumentality is attained through the sovereign’s custodial adaptation of the health and wellbeing of the body. by the time of the dinner of crusoe’s “little family,” this process has progressed to facilitate the absence of the goats from his grasp. reproduction is crucial to this process of rendering life subject to exchange. crusoe’s final act “of conjuring” in relation to his island is to send wives back from england to his pagan subjects.21 some animals can be bred, others cannot. crusoe’s dog, for instance, the not-quite-companion, is to die without progeny. the goats, on the other hand, are capable of producing useful exchangeable offspring. the production of such pecuniary items by the husbandry of goats is also necessary to the luxurious feast at the house—its enabling condition. shortly after crusoe has, for the “first time . . . entertain’d a thought of breeding up some tame creatures,” he writes in his diary, “jan. 3. i began my fence or wall; which being still jealous of my being attack’d by some body, i resolved to make very thick and strong” (rc 76). despite the apparent absence of other humans, crusoe’s act of breeding goats necessarily entails the effective origination of enclosed land but not all of crusoe’s experiments with the breeding of living subjects proceed as efficiently. consumption and the family: domesticating the cat. describing his little family’s history, the castaway introduces the strange pedigree of the cats: the two cats which i brought on shore at first . . . were both of them dead, and had been interr’d near my habitation by my own hand; but one of them . . . multiply’d by i know not what kind of creature . . . [t]wo which i had preserv’d tame, whereas the rest run wild in the woods, and became indeed troublesome to me at last. (rc 108) humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 30 where the goats refer to a pecuniary system of exchange, the cats refer to a confused religious economy. each animal codes a different aspect of the globalatinization, in derrida’s terms, of economic forms. as mauss notes, the etymology of the notion of res familia implies a privileged category of life where ownership is linked to gift-giving and religious sacrifice. mauss observes that the survival of the sacral principle of the gift is coded in the etymology of the latin word res (thing).22 the same roman legal form is preserved in the european feudal property system of domination and sovereignty: the nexum, the most ancient form of contract in roman law, is already separated from the substance of collective contracts and also from the ancient system of gifts that commit one…things [according to this conception of nexum] are not the inert objects that the law of justinian and our own legal systems conceive them to be. first they form part of the family: the roman familia includes the res, and not only people . . . the best etymology of the word familia is without a doubt that which compares it to the sanskrit dhaman, “house.” (mauss 49) thus, the family and its things were afforded a privileged place in the domestic space of the roman nexum. similarly, crusoe’s domestic creatures possess, if not subjective autonomy, a privileged symbolic relation to the master through their very poverty of instrumentality: the parrot who speaks, the dog who sits at one’s right hand, the luxuriating cats who receive the “special favor” of the sovereign’s “hand” a ‘bit’ now and then. in locke’s terms, the body’s relationship with property is a human universal. the “indian” is as capable of extracting property from commonwealth as the christian european, since “the law of reason makes the deer, that indian’s who killed it” (locke 306). the marker of cultural difference between “the indian” and the european parallels that already established between the subjects of res familia—figured by the domesticated allegorical cats, dogs, and parrots—and the absented pecuniary goats. this marker is waste, where “as much as any one can make use of to any advantage of life before it spoils” is thereby that person’s property (op. cit., 308). although “nothing was made by god for man to spoil or destroy,” any waste is simultaneously a sacrilege and a violation of the principles of emergent capitalism—whose economics computes only use and exchange. what mauss shows in this rethinking is that the secular nexum divides forms of life into familial and “inert” pecuniary objects and that this process also facilitates modernity’s separation of religion and economy. michael griffiths– “the tame from the wild” 31 in the history of privacy’s emergence in england and for english imperialism abroad, one can say that what marzec calls the syndrome of robinson crusoe changes with the changing status of the tithe. tithing, the christian remnant of sacral waste, was in diminution through the seventeenth century emplotted by crusoe’s fictive memoir. as laura brace has argued, in the latter half of the seventeenth-century: debates between the advocates of enclosure and the defenders of commons centered on conflicting notions of property. [d]isentangling the fusion of economic, cultural and religious concerns, [the] opposition [to enclosure] focused on the improvers’ ideal of using the land to its utmost worth. they felt that this reflected a dangerous abuse of the common treasury and ran counter to god’s purposes … god was in control of the land itself rather than interested in its fruits and productivity. (brace 78) nonetheless, it was the improver’s logic that became the norm for the economic individualism that would be espoused by the globalizing english church. the narrative by which defoe renders his goats a signifier of res pecunia also allegorizes the transformation and enclosure of land in late seventeenth century england. the dynamic of crusoe’s family at dinner permits useless expenditure only as a sign of sovereignty. this contradictory and covert retention of sacral expenditure will not be articulated until the twentieth century postulation of a gift exchange by mauss or that of a general economy by georges bataille. where, for marx, enclosure signals only the emergence of private property, crusoe’s “living magazine of flesh” produces an individualizing function of privacy; this function operates through the sacrifice of life.23 the christian logic of sacrifice was replaced through the late seventeenth and early eighteen centuries by new forms of non-productive circulation: the european commodity trade in luxuries and the credit economy. crusoe’s cats refer to this transformation and by metonymic association complicate the figure of the “hand” in enlightenment economies of human exceptionalism.24 “god gave the world to men in common,” locke recounts, “but since he gave it them for their benefit, and the greatest conveniences of life they were capable to draw from it, it cannot be supposed he meant it should always remain common and uncultivated” (locke 309). yet the indian’s very mode of life is rendered intrinsically wasteful by a process of comparison within the logic of use and exchange which locke has gradually been adopting. since “an acre of land that bears here twenty bushels of wheat, and another in america, which, with the same husbandry, would do the like, are without a humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 32 doubt, of the same natural intrinsick value,” then locke deduces that the appropriation of land from savages should logically follow (op. cit., 316). “[i]f,” locke rejoins, “all the profit an indian received from it were to be valued and sold here . . . it would scarcely be worth any thing.” in this way, the secularization of european economics parallels the “civilization” of the colonized. crusoe’s goats figure enclosure in europe and abroad. as such they figure the extraction of surplus value from the forms of life that populated enclosing commons of the imperial center which, as crosby observes, were being transplanted to its new colonial domain. equally they figure the insistence upon secular economy to which such figures of the sacral as friday’s people—like locke’s indian— finds themselves subject. taking a bit from crusoe’s “hand” as a mark of “special favour,” the animals of crusoe’s little family stand for the economic unwieldiness, which remains at the heart of the enclosing metropole.24 with the diminution of tithing in england, the sacral connotations of economics that still subsist within res familius undergo an alternate purge that sees them transformed into alternate economic forms. as carolyn merchant argues, “enclosure represented for the english the most prevalent method of entering the market economy” (qtd. in nash 80). crusoe’s first encounter with animals is the discovery of a wild cat seated atop a chest recovered from the doomed vessel. “i found,” he says, no sign of any visitor, only there sat a creature like a wild cat upon one of the chests . . . i toss’d her a bit of bisket, tho’ by the way i was not very free of it, for my store was not great: however, i spar’d her a bit, i say, and she went to it, smell’d of it, and ate it, and look’d (as pleas’d) for more, but i thanked her, and could spare no more; so she march’d off. (rc 41) the “wild cat” is fed a “bit of bisket” that should not be spared by the frugal protestant colonialist. as i have argued, the feeding of the wild cat can be read as a sacrifice unjustifiable either in the emergent discourse of political economy or in any extant practice of the english church. where this exuberant expenditure could be thought in bataille’s terms, it could contemporaneously have allegorized only the threat of either savage religion or popery. the store not being “very free of it” marks a curious exception in an allegory that plays out through the thrifty enclosure of this wild island.25 in certain colonial english dialects, from at least 1607, the word bit could connote a number of kinds of coin, by michael griffiths– “the tame from the wild” 33 the eighteenth century the bit was generally the old mexican real [equivalent] of a dollar or about 6d. sterling; later values assigned are a half pistareen or of a dollar, and (in some colonies) the value of 1d. sterling.26 the signifier bit, then, while denoting a scrap of food in the both the early wild cat scene and the scene at dinner can also be read to connote coin in this way: at the horizon of what, for the dictionary’s compilers, is a parenthesized emergent colonialism.27 in concert with the bit, crusoe's familial feline subjects gradually transform themselves into figures of luxury exchange. the figural pack of cats can be endlessly unpacked, so to speak. theodore f.m. newton first reconstructed defoe’s abortive attempt to avoid debtor’s prison in 1692 by entering business as a civet farmer. a reference to defoe in a bankrupts bill of 1706, reads: “he has run through the degrees of comparison, pos. as a hosier; compar. as a civet-cat merchant; and super. as a pantile merchant” (ctd. in newton 10). civets were a luxury item whose glands excreted a “buttery oil” from which could be produced “the base of a well-known perfume” (op. cit., 12-13). this was then “packed in bullock horns and shipped to the perfumers of europe and america,” and, as newton asserts, “there was a ready market for such an elixir” (op. cit., 10). defoe’s apparent history with civet cats provides another way to read the connection of the figural cats to luxury trade, a fascinating context in light of the contemporary credit-driven economy that produced the south seas bubble of 1720. it also proffers an alternate way to read the furious breeding of the mad pack of cats on the island that crusoe cannot explain. the biographical resonance of defoe’s own failed scheme to farm civet cats foregrounds luxury economics as the hinge between familiar european markets and the emergent global trade. as armstrong argues “interbreeding between the ship’s cats and wild animals suggests their common origins [from] european ships” (35). the cats that crusoe pays “special favor” to at table through a “bit” from his sovereign “hand” are the hybrid offspring of european cats run wild in the colonial dominion of crusoe’s making. in this way, the globalization of useless expenditure is both an export of european mercantilism that this project represses and an invention specific to the colonial project. feeding the cats figures the necessity of investing liquid capital in luxury goods that—like civet cats—are themselves immutably fungible. crusoe’s transformation of the island may suggest the need for frugal husbandry and enclosure as a prerequisite to the sovereign enjoyment of domination. it also functions to humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 34 compensate for the violence done to the goats, who become themselves an export of the european self.28 as brace argues, the diminution of the practice of tithing is a sign of the reduction of religious sacrifice as it inversely corresponds to the increasing enclosure of common lands. the cats emerge as a hybrid excess of the erasure of the christian sacral. in relegating this excess to europe’s outside, crusoe’s cats mark the simultaneous outside to the emergent protestant ethic via their connotation of the economics of excess and ritual and this, in turn, is figured through european and non-european others. in this light, we can begin to see the economic rationale (however irrational) of othered practices of excessive consumption that loom large in defoe’s account, like cannibalism—one of defoe’s key motivations for enclosing his compound (to avoid the “hands” of savages and barbarians). while the tithe was consistently associated with the despised practices of the papacy, defoe appears more concerned with the regulation of non-christian forms than with fear of popery.29 like the figural wildness of the cats, this feared religious alterity is to be managed through the hand—a manual metaphorics. in the further adventurers of robinson crusoe crusoe happily joins with a papist against the greater evil of the island’s new population of “spaniards” who “were the main body of the [island’s] family” but have neglected to baptize their “savage” wives (1). in the further adventures the papist’s solution for ensuring the civilization of the island and of its place in christendom is to “take the work out of the hands” of crusoe’s hybrid populace of savages, spaniards, and wayward englishmen (23). before savages and “idolaters” can corrupt them, the papist insists crusoe should, “teach them the knowledge of the true god.” here the “hand” connects labor and proselytism at the foundation of commonwealth—indeed of pastoral care more generally. the metaphorics of the hand frames this categorization of people into forms of life wherein the pastoral actor in the wilds of foreign possessions is rewarded for his proselytizing efforts by the guarantee of future dominion. pleased with his good works, crusoe later notes, “it is a valuable thing indeed, to be an instrument in god’s hand to convert seven and thirty heathens to the knowledge of christ” (26; emphasis added). in celebration for the sovereign’s return, crusoe’s subjects roast five goat kids (9). in the crusoe fictions, the hand itself is refused manumission by its ongoing role in the economics of pastoral care from goat to slave to subject. defoe’s reconciliation of labor and providence through metaphors of species property. between the cat, the goat, and the hand that divides and binds them, figurations of animality and difference reveal the michael griffiths– “the tame from the wild” 35 complementary emergences of economic subjection, religious transformation, and the taxonomy of life. cat-astrophe. since i opened through aristotle, it would do to temporarily return to the classical politics in order to ground the discussion. in the poetics “the king” must be “the natural superior of his subjects” even as the subjects of his sovereign protection must also be “of the same kin and kind” as he (bw 1143). in order to be exchangeable, chattel beings like crusoe’s goats are arbitrarily removed from the family, that is, from the status of kin. yet in defoe’s fiction the goats are the offspring of the first tame goat, which, we saw, became one of crusoe’s “domesticks.” in narrativizing this paradox, defoe’s “analogy of animals” succeeds in narrating the modern form of political subordination with precision. the goat kid, like friday are the first and most familiar creatures in a process of defamiliarization that estrange their offspring (which are clearly “of the same kin and kind”) to the status of inert possessions. in crusoe, as i have argued, secular modern narratives of sovereignty and economy retain a metaphorics of descent and familiarity which thoroughly retains the residues of christian individualism, even as they are converted into new symbolic forms. the taxonomy of exchangeable creatures that inhabits defoe’s allegory portends the interdependence of biopolitical technologies in the modern global economy. in this newly reconstituted global nexum the form under which life is rendered property is politically central. these indeterminacies are foreshadowed by defoe’s fiction, which has proven both influential and prophetic. animality and race mutually constitute the property form of the emergent global order dominated by first world capital. here i want to signal some of the implications of the preceding examination of the figural animal economies in crusoe, as they imply the emergence of this biopolitical property form of under modernity. not until twentieth century engagements with non-european economies did the contradictions of lockean and other english moral and political thought become clear. bataille, for instance, famously argued that individualism—which he called sovereignty—is grounded in the transcendence of the human soul even as this soul is contradictorily grounded in an irreducibly animal body.30 more recently, esposito asserts that a kind of quasi-religious transcendence continues covertly as the enabling of that least politically questioned category of person-hood. for esposito, the “dispositif of the person” describes the inextricable religious and economic structure of individuation that operates in concert with the humanist paradigm. in the aporia between the human humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 36 body and the horizon of transcendence lies the “person” whose dispositif “superimposes and juxtaposes humans as men and animals as men; or that distinguishes a part of man that is truly human from another that is bestial, that is enslaved to the first.”31 esposito argues, “to be able to legitimately assert what we call subjective rights (at least in the modern juridical conception of rights), one needs beforehand to have penetrated the enclosed space of the person” (1), the economic connotations of which should by now be immediately apparent. in bestowing and retracting familial status on the various beings in his dominion, crusoe’s narrative acts out this tension between the possession of an “enclosed” personhood and the capacity to assert the protection and obligation of fellow beings. as an economic category that evades even the old legal reliance on embodiment the dispositif of the “person” remains in political operation even after humanist discourse claims to have extricated itself from its problematic race and gender biases. within this dispositif, animals are hardly people too, to be sure. they are beings who rely on protections that citizens of the first world, as enclosed and enclosing persons, are immunized from affording them. i say first world citizens because it is not only non-human life (though this is categorically the case), but humans themselves who are affected by the contradictory production of personhood. it does not suffice to be a human in order to be treated as a person: a living being subject to sympathy and obligation. the modern form of pecuniary capital and the secular taxonomy of living property developed in the eighteenth-century can be seen as the beginning of the dispositif of the person for the imperialist project of england and, to some degree, the models that it is produced in its wake. the hand remains a central figure in this relation. for esposito, “figures of manumissio and mancipatio [are] unequalled in their capacity for coercison and creative flights.”32 the hand of the sovereign individual permits a continuity between the granting of the status of protection and partial freedom to others [manumissio] and the correlative form of possession and release with its connotation of economic proprietary [mancipatio]. esposito draws out this partiality through its classical prehistory in roman citizenship.33 but, as i have argued, the partiality of political subjectivity and its relation to the economization of sympathy is reorganized in the early eighteenth-century through allegorizations like that of the european traveller’s encounter with the non-human and the non-european. as i noted earlier (via deleuze) it was hume who first openly observed this emergent contradiction—as early as 1739.34 the initial model of the moral framework of obligation for hume is the affective dimension of the family (deleuze 39). as a conceptual tool for thinking society, deleuze notes, families “exclude one another; they are partial (partiales) rather than made up of parts (partielles). the parents of one family are always the strangers of other families . . . the problem of society, in this michael griffiths– “the tame from the wild” 37 sense, is not a problem of limitation, but a problem of integration.” the problem is that this enlightenment social logic of moral philosophy, like the roman law from which it descends, does not contain a mechanism for inclusion. like crusoe’s compound, the english enlightenment’s model for sympathetic engagement with alterity in the sphere of politics and economy is mired in contradictory familiatories and favoritisms. this dynamic of differentiation emphasizes corporeal care over sovereignty as the general condition of a familiar or recognizable personhood: whose hidden condition is the appearance of civilization. this is apparent insofar as it invades so many even well intentioned models of ethics and politics.35 in the neocolonial order which crusoe’s island nation-building portends the citizens find themselves consistently at risk of animalization.36 it is this risk of reduction to the status of virtual chattel, the relegation to the pecuniary position within the global dominion that traverses the category of human and animal in the dispositif of the person. being a person within the secular public sphere of today’s global order still requires that one perform an enclosed, frugal individualism that, insofar as what derrida calls globalatinization defines this order, remains abrahamic. as jean joseph goux notes, limning bataille’s failure to penetrate capitalist society, “[p]roductive expenditure now entirely dominates social life. in a desacralized world, where human labor is guided in the short or long term by the imperative of utility, the surplus has lost its meaning” (208). the emergence of this person, immunized of all that is objectionable to the abrahamic legacy coincides with the emergence of a politics for which the rational participation of reflective subjects as its basis. as partha chatterjee has recently argued, politics today “emphasizes the welfare and protection of populations . . . using similar technologies all over the world but largely independent of considerations of active participation by citizens in the sovereignty of the state” (47). the problem with the political economic legacy of the robinsonade is not only that the rational public sphere has not lived up to its egalitarian project but it is also that the neocolonialist architects of this global island continue to believe that it has. the tense relation between the familial and the pecuniary, between the kin and the essentially other, between the potential person and a “living magazine of flesh”—each of these early modern binaries pre-empts what judith butler identifies in the twenty-first century as “indefinite detention,” to which we all remain potentially subject. 37 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 38 notes revision of this essay was precipitated with support from the shirley bard rapoport graduate essay prize many thanks are due to betty joseph, in whose graduate seminar many elements of the present essay were conceived, and of course to cary wolfe, who continues to lend a generous ear to developments in my thinking. josh kitching also deserves warm acknowledgement for his always timely and thoughtful editorial remarks. 1. cf. foucault, the order of things, 21-29. 2. colleen glenney boggs, una chaudhuri, susan mary griffin, ursula k. heise, michael s. lundblad, laurie shannon, cary wolfe, the future of animal(ity) studies, panel 681, mla annual convention, monday 29 december, 2008. 3. cf. haraway, 21; derrida, “this animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” trans. david wills. critical inquiry. 28 (2001), 369-418. 4. i take seriously cary wolfe’s more thoroughgoing recent annotation of the complexities of dealing with non-human animals in a posthumanist manner. as well as complicating the terms of reference, this also implies a thoroughgoing skepticism of the temporality reified in historicist and even new historicist literary critical methodology. cf. wolfe, “’human, all too human’: animal studies and the humanities,’” pmla 124:2 (2009), 564. i discuss this at greater length in my “caveats for the posthuman past: questions of methodology in eighteenth century animal studies,” in ecti 49 (2008), supplement. 5. watt’s study makes the influential claim that privacy’s temporal and subjective conditions are brought into literary form. see watt, the rise of the novel: studies in defoe, richardson, and fielding, u california p, 1977. maximilian novak had already established the centrality of economics to defoe’s fiction in his economics and the fiction of daniel defoe. james thompson’s more recent account seeks to use the novel’s relation with economics for conjectures on the “modeling” of economics in anticipation of such postmodern eschewals of economic reference as one finds in the thought of jean baudrillard. thompson, “defoe and the narrative of exchange,” in models of value: eighteenth century political economy and the novel. durham nc: duke up, 1996, 87-131. michael griffiths– “the tame from the wild” 39 6. rousseau notes famously that the ideal first book in a proper education should not be “aristotle, pliny, or buffon . . . [but] robinson crusoe” (rc 262). 7. i mean to invoke foucault’s notion of social apparatus, which he called a “dispositif.” for foucault taxonomies of difference are produced from within historically contingent apparatuses of knowledge and material domination. for exploration of the complex idea of a dispositif see foucault, archeology 50-6, 79-134; gilles deleuze, “what is a dispositif?” in michel foucault: philosopher. trans. timothy j. armstrong. new york: harvester wheatsheaf, 1992, 159-168. for a recent discussion of this concept in animal rights discourse and roman law, see esposito, “the dispositif of the person,” trans. tim campbell. forthcoming in law, culture, and the humanities. (2010): ms 1–21. 8. on the connection between post-marxist thought, biopolitics, and caveats for the conjugation of gramscian terminologies with an adaptation of agamben, see laclau, “bare life or social indeterminacy,” in giorgio agamben: sovereignty and life. ed. matthew calarco and stephen de caroli. stanford: stanford univ. press, 2007, 11-22. 9. cf. heidegger, being and time, 63-4. cary wolfe has argued that the hand is one in a series of signs of species difference. arguing that the dividing function of the hand extends beyond philosophical discourse into scientific discourse with the “romance of the opposable thumb,” wolfe’s account destabilizes the distinction between animality and the human in derrida through a systems-theoretical register. cary wolfe, “in the shadow of wittgenstein’s lion: language, ethics, and the question of the animal,” in animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. chicago: u chicago p, 2003, 44-96. 10. wolfe’s account destabilizes the distinction between animality and the human in derrida through a luhmannian register of second-order observation in wolfe, animal rites, 44-96. 11. cf. esposito, 44-76. 12. i employ this rhetoric of following in a narrative form and also in a diegetic space in order to background that most derridean tension between suivre and pister. the “am (more to follow)” that figures in the idiomatic titling of david wills’s excellent translation of derrida’s l’animal que donc je suis excellently restores this tension between suis [am], suivre [to follow], and pister [to trail] that inhabits the deconstruction of humanualism in derrida’s text. derrida, l’animal que donc je suis. paris: galilée, 2006. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 40 13. l. type *domini n-em, deriv. of domini-um property, ownership. oxford english dictionary 2d. 1989. 14. in this formulation, analogies of domination—paternal power over subjects adjacent to paternal power over children—are gradually replaced in practice by the modeling of population and the analysis of the family as an object of political power. “prior to the emergence,” foucault notes, “of population, it was impossible to conceive that art of government except on the model of the family, in terms of economy conceived as the management of the family.” “governmentality” in essential works of foucault 1954 – 1984, volume 3: power. ed. james d. faubion. london: penguin, 2000, 201–222, 216. 15. marx theorized the coincidence of the basic conditions of the life and subsistence in the process of labor in his essay “estranged labor,” even as he reinscribes the species barrier via man’s self conscious apprehension of his own conditions. marx, economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844, 111-3. 16. cf. foucault, society must be defended, 239-264. 17. “the law of reason makes the indian his who hath killed it.” locke, two treatises, 307. 18. cf. foucault, the birth of biopolitics, 51-74. 19. for the mimetic function of animals in regard to the recurrence of the fable in eighteenth century england in a number of recent essays, see frank palmeri, “the autocritique of fables,” and richard nash, “animal nomenclature: facing other animals.” 20. it was carl schmitt who attempted to establish the continuity between space and law in modern as well as ancient jurisprudence. schmitt, the nomos of the earth in the international law of jus publicum europaeum. trans. g. l. ulmen. new york: telos press, 2006. 21. as joseph notes, roxana’s “narrative strategy” of individualism through sexuality “resembles [crusoe’s] conjuring with robinson crusoe on the island.” betty joseph, reading the east india company, 37. michael griffiths– “the tame from the wild” 41 22. as mauss observes, the latin word most denotatively translated as “thing” [res], is best traced etymologically to a sanskrit word for gift: latinres, sanskrit rah/rahti. see mauss, the gift, 50. 23. marx makes this argument in the section on primitive accumulation that closes the first volume of capital. clearly i do not intend to take umbrage with the notion that enclosure reform results in the simultaneous emergence of privacy and alienation. rather, as i have been arguing, this contention must analyzed in relation to the subjection of life. marx, capital, 369. 24. cf. haraway. when species meet, 165. 24. nash has discussed eighteenth-century animal nomenclature and poll’s status as mimetic being at length in his “animal nomenclature,” 107-8. armstrong discusses poll’s speech in terms of lockean and cartesian models of consciousness in what animals mean, 18-21. 25. this is no doubt a consequence of the influence of max novak’s admittedly brilliant analysis of the correspondence between locke and robinson crusoe and the effects the latter was to produce subsequently. novak rightly argues that crusoe narrativizes the emergence of utility in such an isolated situation as a distant island. novak also discusses marx’s argument that exchange is presupposed even in such conditions, as i have earlier remarked, in novak, economics and the fiction of daniel defoe, 54-59. 26. bit. n. 1608 {emem} belm. lond. iii. 122 coiners..vulgus, bit-makers. in the eighteenth century the bit was generally the old mexican real value of a dollar or about 6d. sterling; later values assigned are a half pistareen or of a dollar, of a dollar, and (in some colonies) the value of 1d. sterling. (gomes cassidy and brock le page 44) 27. what i here call “parenthetical colonialism” conjugates an important dialogue that animal studies might pursue with such a postcolonialist as joseph, who points out that “[f]eminist critique of mainstream historiography has revealed that when the subject of history is normatively male, sexual difference appears as an agent of historical causation.” one might add to joseph’s fine point the observation that when the subject of history is carnally male, sexual difference appears as the erasure of gift exchange, for instance at the moment when “defoe’s roxana (1724) stages the self-constitution of its female protagonist against the background of british commercial expansion.” reading the east india company, 4, 32. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 42 28. the wild cat’s gendering as a “she” can also be read as a resonance of contemporary figurations of non-productive economies as feminine, for instance in the satirical image of “dame credit.” kimberly s. latta, “the mistress of the marriage market: gender and economic ideology in defoe’s review,” in elh 69:2 (2002): 359-83. 29. cf. brace, idea of property, 76-80. 30. cf. bataille, theory of religion. new york: zone books, 1989. 31. roberto esposito, “for a philosophy of the impersonal,” trans. timothy campbell, forthcoming in centennial review, (2010): ms 1–15, 9. citations are from the manuscript pagination. the translator has given permission for these citations. 32. esposito, “the dispositif of the person,” trans. tim campbell. forthcoming in law, culture, and the humanities (2010): ms 1–21, 11.citations are from the manuscript pagination. the translator has given permission for these citations. 33. esposito notes that “no one in rome was a full-fledged person from the beginning of life nor did one remain a person forever,” limning not only ancient forms of slavery, but also the transition from fili to patres, and other transformations in age, class, condition, property ownership that variously transformed the relation between life and citizenship in the classical scene. esposito, “the dispositif of the person,” 11. 34. cf. david hume, treatise of human nature. oxford: clarendon, 2007. 35. esposito has in mind here, for instance, the way the utilitarian philosophy of life espoused most famously by as peter singer, “unambiguously accept[s] the roman doctrine of the initial distinction between person and non-person, through the intermediate stages of the quasi-person, the semi-person and the temporary person.” esposito, “for a philosophy of the impersonal,” 9. 36. cf. achille mbembe, on the postcolony. berkeley: univ. of california press, 2001, 27-8, 235-8. 37. cf. judith butler, precarious life: powers of mourning and violence. new york: verson, 2006, 50-100. michael griffiths– “the tame from the wild” 43 works cited agamben, giorgio what is an apparatus? and other essays. trans. david kishi and stefan pedatella. stanford: stanford up, 2009. aristotle, basic works (bw) trans. richard p. mckeon. london: random house, 1941. armstrong, phillip. what animals mean in the fiction of modernity. london: routledge, 2008. bataille, georges. the accursed share: consumption. trans. robert hurley. new york: zone books, 1991. bell, ian a. “king crusoe: locke’s political theory in robinson crusoe,” essays and studies 69 (1988): 27-36. brace, laura. idea of property in seventeenth century england, manchester: manchester up, 1998. chatterjee, partha. the politics of the governed: reflections on popular politics in most of the world. new york: columbia up, 2006. crosby, alfred. ecological imperialism: the biological expansion of the new world, 900-1900. cambridge: cambridge up, 1986. defoe, daniel. the further adventures of robinson crusoe; the novels and selected writings of daniel defoe. 3 vols. london: shakespeare head press, 1927 ―――. the life and surprising adventures of robinson crusoe of york &c. (rc) (1719) ed. michael shinagel. w. w. norton & company, 1994. deleuze, gilles. empiricism and subjectivity: an essay on hume’s theory of human nature. trans constantine v. boundas. new york: columbia up, 1991. derrida, jacques. on cosmopolitanism and forgiveness. trans. mark dooley and michael hughes. london: routledge, 2001. ―――. on touching—jean luc nancy, trans christine irizarry. stanford ca: stanford up, 2005. humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 44 esposito, roberto. bios: biopolitics and philosophy, trans. tim campbell. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. foucault, michel. the archeology of knowledge,trans. a. m. sheridan smith london: tavistock, 1998. ―――. the birth of biopolitics: lectures at the college de france, 1978-79. london: palgrave macmillan, 2008. ―――. the history of sexuality volume 1: an introduction. trans. robert hurley. new york: vintage, 1978. ―――. the order of things. london: routledge, 2002. ―――. society must be defended: lectures at the college de france, 1975-6. trans. david macey. london: palgrave macmillan, 2003. gomes cassidy, fredric and robert brock le page. ed. dictionary of jamaican english. cambridge: cambridge u p, 1967 goux, jean-joseph. “general economics and postmodern capitalism,” trans. kathryn ascheim and rhonda garelick, yale french studies 78 (1990): 206-24. haraway, donna. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2007. heidegger, martin. being and time. trans. john macquarrie and edward robinson. new york: harper and row, 1962. hobbes, thomas. leviathan. ed. c. b. macpherson. new york: penguin, 1968 joseph, betty. reading the east india company, 1720-1840: colonial currencies of gender. chicago: u chicago p, 2004. locke, john. two treatises of government. ed. peter laslett. cambridge: cambridge up, 1987, marx, karl. capital: an abridged edition. trans. david mclellan. oxford: oxford up, 1999. michael griffiths– “the tame from the wild” 45 ―――. economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844. ed. dirk jan struik, trans. martin mulligan. london: international publishers, 1969. marzec, robert p. “enclosures, colonization, and the robinson crusoe sydnrome: a genealogy of land in a global context.” boundary 2 29:2 (2002), 129-156. mauss, marcel. the gift: the form and reason for exchange in archaic societies. trans w. d. halls. new york: norton, 2000. nash, richard. “animal nomenclature: facing other animals,” in humans and other animals in eighteenth-century british culture: representation, hybridity, ethics. ed. frank palmeri london: ashgate publishing, 2006. 101-118. ―――. wild enlightenment: the borders of human identity in the eighteenth century. charlottesville: u virginia p, 2003. newton, theodore f.m. “the civet cats of newington green: new light on defoe.” the review of english studies, 13:49 (jan., 1937): 10-19. novak, maximilian. economics and the fiction of daniel defoe. new york: russell and russell, 1962. palmeri, frank. “the autocritique of fables.” humans and other animals in eighteenthcentury british culture: representation, hybridity, ethics. ed. frank palmeri. london: ashgate publishing, 2006. 83-100. van sant, ann. “crusoe’s hands.” eighteenth century life. 32:2 (2008): 120-137. microsoft word calarco-derrida h u m a n i m a l i a 1:1 matthew calarco tracking the animal in derrida jacques derrida. the animal that therefore i am. ed. marie-louise mallet. trans. david wills. new york: fordham university press, 2008. 176 pp. $60.00 hb, $20 pb. derrida first delivered the written text of the animal that therefore i am (cited hereafter as aia) at a conference in cerisy, france in 1997. thirty years prior, in 1967, he published his first three major works: writing and difference, speech and phenomena, and of grammatology. during the three decades between the publication of these works — a period of time in which derrida gained first national and eventually international prominence — he insisted repeatedly on the seriousness and importance of the “the question of the animal.” and yet, despite this insistence, he never devoted an entire book or article to the issue of animals in those years. he did not, however, remain entirely silent on the issue. in the mid-to-late 1980s, he began working through the question of the animal in some depth in relation to martin heidegger’s thought, most notably in his essay “heidegger’s ear: (geschlecht ii)” and in the sixth chapter of of spirit: heidegger and the question. this more sustained engagement with the question of the animal continued in his 1989 interview with jean-luc nancy, “‘eating well,’ or the calculation of the subject,” and in his 1993 book aporias: dying—awaiting (one another at) the limits of truth. for readers who were interested in the kinds of questions that animate animal studies, it was clear from these and other scattered texts published at the time that derrida had remarkably important and provocative things to say about animals. but readers would have to wait until aia to get a fuller sense of how the question of the animal fit into his overall work. although derrida presented a complete version of aia at cerisy, he avoided publishing that text in its entirety while he was alive. it is clear from reading the original manuscript in his archives that derrida was not entirely pleased with the cerisy version of the text, as there are numerous marginal notes and crossed out passages and pages that indicate the need for thoroughgoing revisions before publication. indeed, derrida himself published only two portions of the full text before he died: “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow)” (which appeared in 1999 and constitutes chapter 1 of aia) and “and say the animal responded?” (which appeared in 2003 in english and 2004 in french and constitutes chapter 3 of aia). when i spoke to derrida in 2002 about the possible publication of the entire text of aia he underscored to me how unhappy he was with the initial draft and how much, by contrast, he admired elisabeth 81 matthew calarco – tracking the animal in derrida de fontenay’s massive work on the question of the animal, le silence des bêtes. consequently, readers should bear in mind that the book they have before them in aia does not represent a polished draft, but a work in progress that derrida would no doubt have wished to expand and rework in several ways. it is perhaps best to read the book as a preliminary and ongoing set of reflections on the question of the animal that can be fruitfully placed alongside derrida’s earlier writings on animals mentioned above, as well as one of the final seminars he taught that also focused on animals, the beast and the sovereign (which will appear in english translation in 2009). with this publishing history in mind, allow me to turn directly to the content of the book. the opening chapter, “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow),” is no doubt already well known to many readers of this journal. the chapter first appeared in english translation in critical inquiry in 2001 and has been the object of careful analysis by many authors working in animal studies. it is here that we find the much-discussed nude encounter that derrida has with a cat, an encounter that calls into question both his humanity-animality and subjectivity. also in these initial pages, derrida offers his two hypotheses (in contrast to heidegger’s “theses” on the world formation of human, animal, and stone) concerning animals. the first hypothesis concerns the rising tension over the past two centuries between, on the one hand, violence toward animals and, on the other hand, ethico-political efforts to limit animal suffering. here, derrida links the latter struggle against violence toward animals with jeremy bentham’s remarks on animal suffering, and also attempts to bring his own thinking on radical passivity into dialogue with this utilitarian approach. the second hypothesis revolves around what we might call “ontological” issues, namely, the questions of how the human-animal distinction is drawn, whether it can be maintained, and in what form. following these two hypotheses, derrida takes the reader on a brief tour through his older writings in support of his claim made early on in the book that questions concerning life, living beings, and animals have always been for him the most pressing questions. the chapter closes with an analysis of the term “animot,” a term that derrida hopes his reader will substitute for the metaphysically-laden concept “animal.” by replacing “animal” with “animot,” derrida hopes to remind the reader of the multiplicity of animal beings, their complicated relationship to human beings, as well as the ways in which animal multiplicity radically complicates traditional human-animal distinctions. with this general theoretical framework and set of concepts in place, derrida turns in chapter 2 to a reading of various figures in the history of philosophy with an eye toward challenging their portrayal of animals and the human-animal distinction. among the major figures discussed are rené descartes (with his contentious but 82 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 1 (september 2009) influential discussion in the discourse on method of the distinction between humans on one side, and animals and machines on the other), immanuel kant (who develops an account of human subjectivity over and against animals in the anthropology and elsewhere), and emmanuel levinas (who sought to develop a notion of ethics built on a conception of a uniquely human ethical subjectivity and ethical alterity). derrida offers useful, although not particularly original or insightful, readings of each of these figures. perhaps the most disappointing portion of this chapter is his reading of levinas, a reading that is based heavily on john llewelyn’s more insightful and original analysis in the middle voice of ecological conscience. one cannot help but get the impression that it is this second chapter, and the reading of levinas in particular, that derrida would have most needed to rework and supplement, should he have decided to bring the full text to publication. by contrast, the third chapter, “and say the animal responded?” constitutes a genuinely insightful and groundbreaking reading of jacques lacan’s remarks on the human-animal distinction, and lacan’s insistence (which follows in lockstep with dominant trends in the writings of descartes, kant, heidegger, and levinas) that animals are unable to “respond” to others of various sorts, and can only “react” to external stimuli. given the widespread influence of lacanian-influenced theorists such as alain badiou and slavoj žižek in contemporary critical theory, it would be fruitful to bring derrida’s critical analysis of lacan into dialogue with žižek’s and badiou’s respective recoveries of lacan’s concept of the subject. this kind of auseinandersetzung would be extremely helpful for highlighting the lingering and often dogmatic anthropocentrism typically found in these and other neo-lacanian theorists. the final chapter was not part of the original written manuscript, but is rather than transcript of a recording of largely improvised oral remarks that focus on heidegger’s 1929-30 seminar fundamental concepts of metaphysics. while this discussion will be of interest to readers new to derrida, it does not offer much that goes beyond the earlier published work on heidegger mentioned above. although he breaks no new ground in this final chapter, it should be noted that derrida’s overall critical reading of heidegger on the question of the animal is without question some of the most interesting work he has ever done, and these closing pages would serve as a fine introduction to the larger questions concerning animals derrida seeks to pose with regard to heidegger’s thought. there is, of course, no question of engaging in a full critical response to derrida’s aia in the space of a book review. his work is far too rich and the questions he raises are far 83 matthew calarco – tracking the animal in derrida too complicated to attempt such a response here. elsewhere i have attempted an initial critical response, and i refer the reader to that text should she be interested in this kind of analysis.1 in closing, i wish to add that despite the book’s somewhat unfinished form, and despite certain reservations i have with derrida’s ontology, ethics, and politics, i recommend this book strongly to all readers interested in animal studies. the ideas one finds in these pages are certain to become central and unavoidable reference points for animal studies theorists and activists who are interested in rethinking the humananimal distinction, the ethical an ontological status of animals in the history of philosophy, and the relationship between critical thought and political practice. note 1. matthew calarco, zoographies: the question of the animal from heidegger to derrida (new york: columbia university press, 2008), especially chapter 4. drew, re-animalizing animal farm re-animalizing animal farm: challenging the “anthropoallegorical” in literary and pedagogical discourse and practice john drew king’s university college at western university london, on humanimalia 13.1 (fall 2022) abstract: interpretations of george orwell’s animal farm have been almost exclusively focused on anthropocentric allegory in the text and what i call the anthropo-allegorical interpretive frame. given animal farm’s iconic and enduring status in english classrooms, i unpack this process, particularly how it is informed and perpetuated by the persistence of human exceptionalism rooted in the humanist literary tradition, and hegemonic approaches to education. i employ derridean deconstruction to critique the humanist and educational legacies that inform the largely homogenized and deanimalized interpretation and pedagogical applications of animal farm. then i argue for a new, hybridized reading — and teaching — that moves beyond the anthropocentric and toward a more-than-human interpretive and pedagogical orientation that speaks to the oppressions and challenges confronting multiple species, including, but not confined, to our own. keywords: animals in literature; animals in education; animal farm; allegory; anthropo-allegorical, george orwell, animal farm bio: john drew is an assistant professor in the department of english, french, and writing at king’s university college at western university on the traditional and treaty lands of the anishnaabek, haudenosaunee, chonnonton, and lūnaapéewak peoples. he is an award-winning researcher whose work focuses on animals and nature in literature and film, multispecies empathy and justice, environmental education, and writing and social change within the climate emergency. email: jwdrew@uwo.ca orcid: 0000-0003-1277-3580 copyright © 2022 john drew this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 163–201. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.11190 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.11190 drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 165 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) animal farm is widely taught in english classrooms. an allegorical representation of the russian revolution, animal farm famously tells the story of a courageous group of farmed animals who come together to overthrow their brutal human masters only to find themselves subjugated and exploited by a self-appointed elite class of animals: the vanguardist pigs. the book depicts the tragi-ironic consequences arising from the animal characters’ blind devotion to leadership, as well as their credulous susceptibility to propagandistic manipulation. accordingly, as a teaching text, animal farm presents valuable critical teaching opportunities, especially in the perilous political and cultural aftermath of the “post-truth” trump era.1 prior to this period, animal farm’s sceptical representation of revolutionary change offered an ideologically useful elixir during the geopolitical tensions of the cold war, as well as during the political and cultural tumult emerging from the anti-oppression and counter-cultural movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. as frances stoner saunders has shown, the cia saw great propagandistic potential in bringing orwell’s vision of revolutionary futility to the masses and secretly purchased the film rights to produce the 1954 disney-esque film adaptation.2 in the ensuing years, animal farm would be canonized as an educational text, and, like many great teachable texts, it can be used to both reaffirm and challenge the status quo.3 crucially, this cultural and pedagogical appropriation of orwell’s classic causes the animals themselves to be sacrificed; more specifically, the oppression and suffering they endure as animals is obfuscated. referencing angus fletcher’s analysis of allegory, onno oerlemans reminds us that allegory is shrouded in a competitive duality between the vehicle (the surface story) and the tenor (the allegorized abstraction). he argues that “(a)n allegorical representation asserts a hierarchy, since the vehicle of the allegory is inferior to its tenor, and at the same time belies this hierarchy because our 1 searcy et al. “reinterpreting revolutions”, 155. 2 shaw, “some writers”, 153. 3 bibby, “content and context”. 166 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) attention is drawn to what is immediately presented.”4 the standard political allegorical interpretation of animal farm not only subordinates the allegorical vehicle (the animal story), but it also largely negates it, thereby adhering to john simons’s argument that animal fables use animal representations “merely as vehicles for the human”.5 the vast majority of the scholarly analysis of the text adheres to such negation of animals, emphasizing almost exclusively orwell’s use of historical and political allegory.6 through this reductive allegorical hermeneutic, animals are discursively diminished in ways that reflect, as well as reproduce, their wider material debasement. in the canadian educational context, animal farm is often positioned pedagogically as a transitional text for early adolescents, preparing them for the more serious themes of the adult literature they encounter during high school and beyond. animal farm summons the tradition of childhood animal stories like anna sewell’s black beauty and margaret marshall saunders’s beautiful joe, which typically combine human and animal interests.7 indeed, animal farm’s subtitle, “a fairy story”, signals its affiliation with a broader tradition of children’s talking animal stories, even if only ironically. consequently, the implied subversion of “the fairy story” tradition is one that would seem to undermine and devalue the status of animal stories as well. certainly, the enduring educational application of animal farm is one that overtly disregards the book’s animal figures by teaching it almost exclusively through a symbolic / allegorical interpretive orientation.8 under this interpretive and pedagogical rubric, the reading of animal farm requires children to discipline their attention to the realm of exclusively human concerns. in this light, orwell’s classic becomes a valuable disciplinary resource for an educational system deeply beholden to the entrenched values of human exceptionalism that 4 oerlemans, poetry and animals, 31. 5 simons, animal rights, 119. 6 see, for example, meyers, george orwell, 101–113; letemendia, “revolution”; kirschner, “dual purpose”; white, “socialism and utopia”; rodden, “big rock”; hamilton, “allegory”. 7 fernandes, animal fable; hoult-saros, mythology of the animal farm. 8 fudge, “heart of the home”; mchugh, “animal farm’s lessons”. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 167 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) undergird our socio-economic relations and structures. the allegorical erasure of animals from animal farm helps to affirm a culture of “carnism” that reduces the animal characters to mere avatars that serve human purposes.9 this process (re)confines the anthropocentric boundaries of subjectivity and re-casts animals as mere resources for (literal and symbolic) human consumption. this hegemonic reading of animal farm illustrates what i call the anthropo-allegorical framing: an active analytical, educational, and sociocultural process that effectively reads animals out of stories ostensibly devoted to them through the imposition of an anthropocentric interpretive orientation. it is particularly ironic that this process of animal erasure should be carried out in a text that, on the surface, is about domesticated animals being oppressed by the systems that support human exceptionalism. indeed, this de-subjectivizing anthropo-allegorical frame both obfuscates and reframes animals’ suffering. in culture and society, raymond williams observed this interpretive blind spot, writing that the “existence of a long tradition of human analogies in animal terms allow[s] us to overlook the point that the revolution that is described is one of animals against men.”10 williams’s emphasis on the primacy of animals to orwell’s story was not only an interpretive response to the text but also a matter of taking orwell’s preface at face value. in the preface to the ukrainian translation, orwell explained that animal farm was inspired by witnessing a boy savagely beating a carthorse, which prompted him to “analyse marx’s theory from the animals’ point of view. to them it is clear that the concept of a class struggle between humans was pure illusion, since whenever it is necessary to exploit animals, all humans are united against them, the true struggle is between animals and humans.”11 curiously, orwell’s explicit reference to the human oppression of animals as the foundation of all human oppression was widely ignored by subsequent generations of scholars until the 2000s when animal 9 joy, why we love dogs. 10 williams, culture and society, 293. 11 orwell, “preface”, 406. 168 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) studies and posthumanist scholars returned to the passage.12 literary interpretation is not limited to authorial intent, but the fact that so many scholars who do privilege authorial intent so conspicuously ignored or even rejected orwell’s statement reveals the degree to which anthropocentrism, and indeed human exceptionalism, are embedded in the tradition of literary analysis. it is perhaps for these reasons that the spectre of animal suffering and slaughter hangs over this iconic text, unrecognized, yet in plain sight, like poe’s purloined letter. therefore, in this paper, i will examine the limits of the anthropo-allegorical reading of animal farm, paying specific attention to the pedagogical and cultural implications of the anthropo-allegorical erasure. after synthesizing key literary analyses of the text, i employ a derridean deconstructionist analysis to examine how linguistic frames consolidate cultural hierarchies that are consequential within and beyond the species divide. i then consider the historical humanist lineage of language, literacy, and literature as logocentric criteria and linguistic / discursive mechanisms which are used to define human subjectivity and are aided by the cultivation of the literary educational project to uphold the ontological premise of human exceptionalism. the dynamics have entangled material-semiotic consequences for animals and marginalized humans alike. finally, i propose a hybridized reconceptualization of animal farm that acknowledges and confronts intersecting human and animal oppression. animal obfuscation in formal educational spaces the dynamics of anthropo-allegorical readings intersect with larger questions about the place of animals in education. helena pedersen argues that human exceptionalism pervades the western educational system in ways that effectively institutionalize animal erasure. referencing the ideas of steve baker and john berger, pedersen suggests that education follows the humanist cultural edict to “render […] animals, which are fully exposed to our view, effectively 12 tiffin, “pigs, people and pigoons”; harel, “animal voice”; mchugh, “animal farm’s lessons”; dwan, “orwell’s paradox”; eisenman, cry of nature; cole, “true struggle”. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 169 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) invisible — that is, either seen as mere vehicles for the transmission of symbolic meaning or drained of any significance whatsoever.”13 pedersen argues that the ideology of animal capital and human exceptionalism is operative in educational settings codifying boundaries between human and animal interests. accordingly, schools are implicitly invested in legitimizing the “animal-industrial complex”.14 indeed, bradley rowe and samuel rocha illustrate how this ideological messaging is embedded in the “hidden curriculum” through the continued proliferation of meatand dairy-based lunches offered in school cafeterias.15 this messaging, furthermore, takes place in school settings often saturated with “disneyfied” animal images and stories. this context helps situate the educational deployment of animal farm. animal farm helps initiate middle and high schoolers into the governing ethos of instrumental rationality that upholds human exceptionalism. matthew cole and kate stewart argue that animal avatars and texts have been operationalized pedagogically in both official and hidden curricula to redirect children’s empathetic attachments away from animals. accordingly, children are taught to draw clear distinctions between themselves as subjects and animals as objects, “manipulable matter” to meet human ends.16 for cole and stewart, the conventional pedagogical approach to animal farm would embody the ongoing western rationalist project to “socially construct animals in ways that legitimize human uses of them”.17 through animal farm and similar texts, students learn to discipline their animal empathy and redirect their focus toward instrumentalism: the animals serve the transcendent humanist allegory. recent educational studies of how the text is being taught reveal that it is used to meet various teaching objectives including language / vocabulary development, critical pedagogy, and the social 13 pedersen, animals in schools, 59. 14 noske, humans and other animals, 23; twine “animal-industrial complex’”, 14. 15 rowe and rocha, “school lunch”, 483; giroux, theory and resistance. 16 cole and stewart, our children, 34. 17 cole and stewart, 7. 170 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) construction of meaning.18 in my own experiences teaching animal farm at both secondary and post-secondary levels, there are usually students who read it through an animal lens, some sympathetically and others reactively, often resulting in heated classroom discussions. still, educational scholarship on animal farm neglects the animal question entirely. even a recent critical analysis dedicated to re-interpreting and reconceptualizing the teaching of the book remains exclusively committed to an anthropo-allegorical reading.19 similarly, online animal farm unit plans and curricular guides reflect a widespread dismissal of the animal.20 the preponderance of these teaching resources and corresponding educational scholarship reinforces the message that “to read animal farm as a text that might have something to say about animals is to misread it.”21 are animals represented in animal farm? as noted, most literary scholarship on animal farm is thoroughly anthropocentric. some exceptions are noteworthy, however, but they, too, contain surprising contradictions and omissions. in his lengthy analysis of animal farm, for instance, richard smyer identifies a link between “carnivoracity and colonial exploitation” in orwell’s essay “marrakech”.22 yet he does not engage with the dynamics of carnivorism and oppression in animal farm itself, the book to which his entire study is devoted. similarly, douglas kerr references orwell’s personal declaration in the essay “why i write”, that “most 18 brent and millgate-smith, “challenging texts”, 158; cramer et al., “using experiential exercises”; yandell, “the social construction of meaning”; bibby, “content and context”; miró juan, “the use of literature”. 19 searcy, et al. “reinterpreting revolutions”. 20 erica fudge points to mitzi brunsdale’s student companion to george orwell which presents a taxonomy explaining the allegorical meaning of each animal character (such taxonomies are commonly placed in online teaching resources). a 2017 article from the popular british online educational blog, teachwire, which offers educational news stories, resources, and teaching ideas presented “8 great teaching tools for reading george orwell’s animal farm in ks4 english”, all of which revolved around the conventional anthropo-allegorical reading by emphasizing the value of the animal characters to ease the students into symbolic and allegorical reading. the ubiquity of the exclusively anthropocentric interpretations and the related pedagogical applications are clear across all contexts. 21 fudge, “at the heart of the home”, 13. 22 smyer, animal farm, 40. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 171 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) of the good memories from my childhood up to the age of twenty are connected with animals”.23 kerr cites orwell’s self-expressed animal sentiment as an essential context for understanding his searing depictions of human-animal violence in burmese days, “marrakech”, and “shooting an elephant”, as well as to illustrate the link between colonial and animal exploitation. like smyer, however, kerr curiously does not extend his analysis to the analogous concerns in animal farm. more recently, richard pordzik extended kerr’s analysis of “marrakech”, “shooting an elephant”, and burmese days by arguing that orwell’s representation of animal agency constituted a challenge to the tenets of human exceptionalism undergirding literary humanism.24 and like kerr, podznik opts not to discuss animal farm directly even though he references the ukrainian preface as evidence that orwell’s work had been animated by animal concerns.25 importantly, the rise of animal studies and posthumanism has brought much-needed critical attention to the inherent anthropocentrism that guides most literary analysis. such non-anthropocentric analyses of animal farm, however, came relatively late. one of the first literary scholars to analyse the depiction of animal suffering in the book directly was helen tiffin, who rightly questions how the plight of the text’s eponymous animals could be ignored for so long.26 tiffin refers to this neglect as a “disappearing act” whereby animal literary representations are read reflexively by humanist scholars through the anthropocentric allegory. tiffin posits that it may have been for this reason that the intervention of a non-literary scholar, psychoanalyst jeffrey masson, was required to announce the seemingly obvious and quite subversive kernel belying the humanist allegory: the systemic immiseration and slaughter of domesticated animals for economic benefit.27 susan mchugh echoes these concerns and argues that the western literary approach to reading animal representations exclusively as symbolic avatars for anthropocentric 23 kerr, “orwell, animals, and the east”, 234–35. 24 podznik, “george orwell’s imperial bestiary”, 440. 25 podznik, 440. 26 tiffin, “pigs, people and pigoons”, 251. 27 masson, pig who sang to the moon, 239n4. 172 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) purposes demonstrates the pervasive degree to which we are academically conditioned to read animals “in and around (culturally inscribed) disciplinary structures”.28 similarly, david dwan acknowledges that the preface opens the door to an animal reading beyond the humanist allegory, acknowledging that orwell’s allegory “raises questions about traditional distinctions between animals and humans”.29 however, he ultimately closes the door on an animal reading because it would undermine the book’s allegorical conceit an implicit acknowledgement it seems that the visceral affective force of the literal story threatens to overpower the abstract humanist allegory. accordingly, we must disregard, or sacrifice, the animal to preserve the more significant humanist interpretation. an alternative reading might emphasize the entangled oppression of humans and animals (as orwell’s preface suggests). dwan’s insistence on a zero-sum reading, one that must privilege the human over the animal, reflects a fundamental precondition of humanism, namely that animals must be subservient to humans, even in the representational domain. stewart cole offers a more extensive and somewhat more sympathetic analysis of the animal question in animal farm, but ultimately arrives at much the same conclusion. he argues that “[w]hile it is true that animal farm denaturalizes our exploitation of nonhuman animals by making it the key grievance from which a revolution is launched […], orwell makes abundantly clear his view that nothing need be done to end that exploitation.”30 the conclusion reached in his study is guided less by a textual analysis of orwell’s book than it is from biographical observations, albeit parsed from the author’s vast oeuvre of essays. specifically, cole refers to orwell’s critique of gandhi and his religious commitment to vegetarianism, along with his more famous excoriation of the proverbial vegetarian who remains, “out of touch with common humanity” and “willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years onto 28 mchugh, “animal farm’s lessons”, 28. 29 dwan, “orwell’s paradox”, 666. 30 cole, “true struggle”, 349. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 173 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) the life of his carcase”.31 for the sake of precision, it must be stated here that orwell’s ire clearly targets self-motivated, health-conscious vegetarians and not what we might today call ethical vegetarians or vegans (i.e. the commitment aimed at alleviating animal suffering). nevertheless, for cole, orwell’s rancorous statement reflects his commitment to the “continued ratification of (human) superiority”, thereby embodying what “derrida calls ‘carnophallogocentrism’ — that is, a vision of authority as residing at the nexus of meat-eating, masculinity, and language-driven rationality, a position that nothing in orwell’s writings contradicts.”32 cole’s pronouncement is as bold as it is sweeping. invoking derrida for the purpose of containing textual interpretation, indeed intimating that there is one final interpretation, is ironic to say the least. carnophallogocentrism is correctly and pithily defined by cole. operationalizing this term to confine and singularize the possible readings and interpretations of the book is highly problematic as there is no way to decontextualize carnophallogocentrism from the derridean method of deconstruction. moreover, discerning an author’s personal values (drawn from exterior works) assumes the romantic-humanist position that a text coheres to the author’s intention — a decidedly anti-derridean position. indeed, the standard by which cole determines orwell’s values vis-à-vis animals would also cast derrida himself as carnophallogocentric given his ambivalent stance toward vegetarianism — a claim derrida would, furthermore, be unlikely to reject given his critique was aimed at western culture (of which he was a self-aware product) and not at individuals.33 unquestionably, then, orwell was implicated in carnophallogocentrism, but this does not prevent significant kernels of animal resistance and critique from emanating from his texts. if anything, orwell’s essays suggest a man of complex, and often conflicting, views surrounding animals and they therefore offer inconclusive, and certainly insufficient, criteria to guide an interpretation. 31 orwell, the road to wigan pier, quoted in cole, “true struggle”, 348. 32 cole, “true struggle”, 349. 33 calarco, “deconstruction is not vegetarianism”. 174 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) indeed, much of orwell’s work has defied ethical and political consistency. as cole acknowledges, orwell’s politics are often a jumble of contradictions on a variety of levels including gender, race, and class, referencing examples where orwell “inferiorizes”34 and even animalizes members of marginalized communities. what distinguishes these abuses from the ire he reserves for vegetarians, cole asserts, is that these groups still manage to “retain their humanity” in orwell’s estimation. according to this formulation, vegetarians would disavow the “ontological superiority on which our humanity is founded”, thereby forfeiting their essential humanness.35 the degree of argumentative hair-splitting deployed here to distinguish the moral intent of orwell’s insults suggests an abiding commitment to containing the author’s often shifting allegiances, if only at the species level. it is on these terms that cole concludes that “orwell’s writing uniquely illuminates the incompatibility of speciesism and social justice.”36 whatever his exterior writing reveals about the author himself, it does little to illuminate how animal farm contributes to the impasse to which cole refers. when cole commits to animal farm itself, he argues that orwell is torn between a commitment to acknowledging our essential animality and a refusal to abandon the tropes of humanism. the ending where the humans and pigs become indistinguishable from each other would seem to enact this very tension. and yet, cole suggests that this fraught tension disqualifies an animal reading largely because it remains unresolved. this is a high bar indeed, a standard that again is not applied to the many humanist contradictions percolating through orwell’s works. at the end of his analysis, cole questions whether our own “institutionalized speciesism […] signals an ongoing violent attempt to consolidate our superior humanity in the face of forces and events that daily call it into question.”37 i agree and if we are committed to challenging such institutionalized speciesism then we must thoroughly interrogate the standards that uphold it. 34 cole, “true struggle”, 350. 35 cole, 330. 36 cole, 338. 37 cole, 350. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 175 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) dismissing such an explicit engagement with the horrors and ruthlessness of animal capitalization because the author may not have approved of such a reading upholds institutionalized speciesism. rigorous, deconstructive engagement with the text itself, not the author, is needed. i return to derrida’s neologism to argue that even if it is established that orwell embodied carnophallogocentric qualities, animal farm presents a challenge to the human supremacy that feeds carnophallogocentrism. the novella begins with a group of farmed animals convening to reflect on their shared immiseration at the hands of their human oppressors. a senior pig, old major, leads the meeting and proceeds to outline an explicitly detailed litany of the horrors awaiting the farm’s animal inhabitants. before the reader has the opportunity to commit to a narrow anthropo-allegorical reading of the book, they are presented with a compelling critique of the systematized violence inflicted on farmed animals, albeit in an anachronistic pastoral setting. indeed, this seemingly innocent setting deepens the critique as it recasts the enduring, anodyne notions of “old macdonald’s farm” into a dystopian space. animals who have experienced cruelty have been presented sympathetically in a range of popular texts, including anna sewell’s black beauty, margaret marshall saunders’ beautiful joe, felix salten’s bambi, and richard adams’s plague dogs. such depictions of abuse, however, are typically isolated to the careless or sadistic actions inflicted on specific animals by individual people. old major identifies the larger source of animal subjugation and slaughter, and it is not limited to the individual evil of mr. jones, the proprietor of the farm. consistent with orwell’s preface, old major indicts humanity along species lines, declaring “the evils of this life of ours springs from the tyranny of human beings.”38 it becomes increasingly clear that old major’s critique is also systemic in scope; he identifies the economic processes supporting the practice of carnism or carnivorism as the oppressive human system that must be overthrown. his references to animal domination, exploitation, and slaughter are explicit, for 38 orwell, animal farm, 5. 176 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) instance, when he states that “the very instant our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty.”39 they can, furthermore, not be decontextualized from institutionalized carnivorism — at least not without a deliberate effort. undoubtedly, this scene is crafted to support its allegorical marxian tenor, but the affect generated through the viscerally detailed animal vehicle threatens to overwhelm that tenor. such affective engagement recalls the tradition of promoting animal welfare through children’s literature, and it becomes impossible to ignore or seamlessly transpose onto its anthropo-allegorical tenor (i.e., the cruel exploitation of the proletariat). if the animal cruelty described by old major drives the allegorical affect, it raises an obvious though roundly neglected question: why should we not also be concerned with the animals’ oppression? is it not more powerful to recognize the animals’ suffering along with the entangled human-animal oppression that belies the humanist allegory? the fact that such hermeneutic pains have been taken to repress this human-animal entanglement is quite telling and require critical unpacking. in derridean terms, i would argue that animal farm has simply not been sufficiently deconstructed. scholars and educators have quite successfully encoded a highly restrictive and enduring humanist interpretation that has persisted largely unchallenged for decades. deconstructing the humanist legacy as outlined so far, scholarly interpretations and analyses on animal farm have largely settled on the anthropo-allegorical reading. the more recent attempts to re-animalize the text have been more aspirational than analytical, while attempts to analyse animality have largely concluded that an animal reading is either at odds with the allegorical tenor or authorial intention. animal farm’s interpretive boundaries would therefore seem largely settled. is it animal farm itself that resists new readings? or is our potential to (re)read the text uniquely restricted by a pervasive carnophallogocentrism that obfuscates its more troubling animal implications? as derrida 39 orwell, animal farm, 3. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 177 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) has argued, there is no final book and no final interpretation of the book — the book changes with us. animal farm, therefore, demands a re-reading, re-interpreting, and re-teaching reflective of our cultural moment, a culture increasingly sensitive to issues of animal suffering and slaughter. emphasis on a constructed consensus of orwell’s authorial intention is perpetuated while his stated inspiration (human oppression of animals) is ignored. it is a very selective form of authorization, indeed. for derrida, the idea that a textual form can be reduced to a singular authoritative reading is rooted in the four-thousand-year-old tradition of writing, one that attempts to reduce writing to a mere extension of speech. accordingly, the text becomes a mere substitutive instrument manipulated by the author to extend his (it is almost exclusively a “he”) speech to geographical and temporal spaces (i.e., the future beyond the author’s death) in order to safeguard the integrity of the speaker’s (i.e., the author’s) intention. as such, the text becomes analogous to the paternalistic desire to ensure the integral continuity of a father’s offspring. for this reason, derrida devised the neologism phallogocentrism to link patriarchy and rational-textual authority. for derrida, the persistent, singular interpretive orientation of animal farm would be rooted in this desire for textual fidelity, so it coheres to a singular, paternalistic intention — that is to reflect the authority (typically the imagined authority) of the speaker / author and one that is more likely to reflect the dominant values of the context in which the text is interpreted. authoritative interpretation aims to tame writing through a hierarchically imposed linearity (i.e., religious and later humanist-rationalist authority) to contain meaning and limit contestation. derrida argues, however, that such linearized projects were doomed to fail because the very structure of writing is founded on an inherent representational infidelity between signifier and signified or between sign and referent. with allegory, we could say that the vehicle corresponds with the signifier and the tenor corresponds to the signified. in the traditional anthropo-allegorical reading of animal farm, the animal narrative serves as the signifier from which the humanist political allegory is signified. as with other signifier–signified relations, an inevitable slippage between the 178 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) two occurs over time as new interpretative possibilities emerge. if the perceived authorial intention begins to be breached, a conservative response corrects such infringements by deferring phallogocentrically to the word of the authorial father. to revisit the denial of orwell’s preface through this lens then, the fidelity of the established anthropo-allegorical reading is disrupted by the author’s own words. yet the humanist interpretation continues to subsume consideration of the surface-level animal themes. in of grammatology, derrida argues that post-war western culture found itself positioned at a fulcrum linking “two ages of writing. because we are beginning to write, [and] to write differently, we must reread differently.”40 this looming transition marked the endpoint of a century-long revolution (beginning with the assault on the linear consensus of discourse led by marx, nietzsche, and freud) that laid siege to the linear model of reading and writing upholding western logocentrism. linearity and singularity gave way to delinearized and “pluridimensional” modes of writing and reading. what was at stake here, derrida understood, was the question of subjectivity and who defines it. for derrida, this could not be reduced to a “simple regression toward the mythogram” as many of his contemporary critics had argued, but “on the contrary, it makes all the rationality subjected to the linear model appear as another form and another age of mythography.”41 in other words, the activation of new orientations, interpretations, and subjectivities ultimately cast scrutiny on who precisely determined the dominant, linearized mode of authoritative logos — the supposedly transcendental subjectivity — repositioning it as a “white mythology”. central to derrida’s project then is the requirement that we deconstruct the sources of textual authority and interpretation until they are rendered transparent. in animal farm we must consider why the authoritative linearized (i.e., anthropo-allegorical) reading has dominated the cultural, critical, and pedagogical imaginary until well after the eruption of “pluridimensionality”. could it be that these 40 derrida, of grammatology, 87. 41 derrida, 87. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 179 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) carnivoristic tensions, so overtly present in the book, point uncomfortably to an internal cultural contradiction (not to mention cultural trauma) that required repression? if so, why even elevate such a potentially volatile text to the educational status it has long occupied? one reason may be that the animal consumption economy was naturalized for so long that it was left largely unexamined in the broader culture and therefore logically ignored in a text in which it was so frankly depicted. a more compelling possibility, however, may be rooted in what helena pedersen has identified as a pervasive “institutional anxiety regarding the question of the animal,”42 an anxiety motivated by a desire to uphold rather than disrupt the human exceptionalism operative in both education and humanities-based academic research. animal farm’s literal story of animal liberation being so adamantly disregarded suggests a strong commitment to upholding human exceptionalism. of course, with a text as enduring and as widely translated as animal farm there is a range of cultural and historical influences informing its reception and interpretation, but the seemingly ubiquitous commitment to the anthropo-allegorical suggests a near-hegemonic exclusion of (even partial) animal-centric engagement. the commitment to the soviet revolutionary allegory, for example, remains as entrenched in the post-cold war period as it was during the cold war. perhaps more so given that, with very few exceptions, scholarship surrounding animal farm presupposes this historical allegory even if much of it examines propaganda and the manipulation of language.43 through this process of erasure and anthropo-allegorical replacement, questions of animal subjugation and liberation are more effectively invalidated. as michael hardt and antonio negri argue, the abstraction of a resource is designed to conceal its extraction, and as nicole shukin has shown, this same principle is operative in the economy of “animal capital”.44 in this economy, symbolic 42 pedersen, “education, anthropocentrism”, 172. 43 elbarbary, “language as theme”; fowler, language of george orwell; sewlall, “orwell’s animal farm”; white, “socialism and utopia”; bibby, “content and context”; ferrari, “a boot stamping”. 44 hardt and negri, assembly, 164; shukin, animal capital, 7–8. 180 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) avatars populate popular culture as an alibi for the mass slaughter of animals locked in the dystopian machinery of the animal-industrial complex. accordingly, systematic animal suffering and destruction are symbolically affirmed through their interpretive omission. to understand why literary scholars have ignored the animal in animal farm for so long we must explore the embedded legacy of human exceptionalism in literary education and scholarship. in “rules for the human zoo: a response to the letter on humanism,” peter sloterdijk posits that literacy has historically instilled cultural divisions that perpetuated a “yawning gulf between the literate and the illiterate,” one whose “insuperability amounted almost to a species differentiation”.45 in sloterdijk’s estimation, literacy offers the subject access to a humanism whose express purpose is to “tame” our animal nature. along these lines, he wryly observes how the very “label of humanism reminds us (with apparent innocuousness) of the constant battle for humanity that reveals itself as a contest between bestializing and taming tendencies.”46 here sloterdijk points to humanism’s original mission: to elevate humans above animals. accordingly, he unveils the teleology of the humanist literary and pedagogical project — to define humanity in contrast to animality. as cary wolfe contends, human subjectivity is discursively constructed: language (and by extension literacy) become the determinants of subjectivity, a condition that excludes animality. hence, he writes, the “formation of western subjectivity […] relies on tacit agreement that the full transcendence of the ‘human’ requires the sacrifice of the ‘animal’ and the animalistic.”47 drawing on the work of german sociologist niklas luhmann, wolfe argues that the only way to distinguish language from non-language is through language. in such a fashion, language constitutes a framing mechanism that separates inclusion (i.e. inside the frame) from exclusion (outside the frame). wolfe connects luhmann’s notion of exclusion to derrida’s concept of “sacrificial structure” underlying 45 sloterdijk, “rules for the human zoo”, 23. 46 sloterdijk, 15. 47 wolfe, animal rites, 6. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 181 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) symbolic economies.48 for derrida, the outside is “always ‘to come’” since it comprises the excluded voices that constitute the inside’s eventual source of “pluridimensionality”, as when the barriers governing eurocentric notions of subjectivity are challenged. for wolfe, the most crucial and enduring barrier is the one that upholds the species divide between human and animal. sloterdijk’s analysis reminds us why this boundary remains so resilient in the context of the humanist literary and pedagogical project — it is the foundation upon which the edifice stands. this is what is so revealing about animal farm’s pervasive and enduring anthropo-allegorical interpretive schema. the surface-level animal themes constitute a challenge to the “transcendence of the human” and are consequently “sacrificed” or excluded from the interpretive schema altogether. such exclusions, following wolfe’s analysis, may simply constitute onto-epistemological “blind spots” to that which exists outside the humanist interpretive schema — they are rendered unrepresentable within the symbolic economy of the humanist allegory. an emphasis on the systematized immiseration and subjugation of animals raises irreconcilable ethical and ontological tensions with the transcendent humanist allegory, despite orwell’s avowal that it was the coterminous oppression of humans by humans and animals by humans that inspired the novel. such conspicuous neglect of the animal in the overwhelming majority of scholarly interpretations of animal farm would seem to uphold what sloterdijk and wolfe separately argue, namely, that the human cannot easily co-exist alongside the animal within the onto-discursive schema of literary humanism. along similar lines, literary scholar robert mckay argues that the persistent dismissal of the animal in western letters reflects the “compulsory humanity” that undergirds the humanities.49 extending judith butler’s concept (by way of adrianne rich) of “compulsory heterosexuality,” mckay analyses margaret atwood’s symbolic application of animals in her 1972 novel surfacing, along with her explicitly stated literary theory (as outlined in survival from the same year) that animals should only be written and read symbolically in service 48 wolfe, animal rites, 205. 49 mckay, “identifying with the animals”, 209. 182 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) of the human (master) narrative. accordingly, when an animal figuratively suffers or dies in a literary text, she or he is excluded from what judith butler has termed “grievable” status and can, therefore, at most be interpreted as a symbolic manifestation of deeper human trauma.50 in animal farm, the gruesome death of the perseverant workhorse, boxer, pushes this conceit to its limits. after the pigs betray the revolutionary principles of animalism and commit themselves to the same ruthless, instrumentalist rationality that guided their human oppressors, they come to similarly dominate their fellow animals. boxer’s inexhaustibility is a crucial exploitable resource to the pigs, as well as an inspiration to the other animals. when his body finally breaks down and he ceases to be of exploitable value, at least as a living animal, the pig leaders surreptitiously resort to a capitalistic scheme — to sell boxer to the knackers where he will be slaughtered. under the pretence of being taken to the veterinarian, he is loaded into a truck marked “alfred simmonds, horse slaughterer and glue boiler, willingdon. dealer in hides and bone meal. kennels supplied.”51 boxer’s slow realization that he is going to be destroyed and sold for consumable parts presents readers with a scene of indelible and horrifying pathos. in terrified desperation, boxer attempts with all his remaining strength to free himself from the knacker’s truck, “but alas! his strength had left him; and in a few moments the sound of drumming hoofs grew fainter and died away.”52 according to atwood’s prescribed linearized reading, boxer’s death, in and of itself, is “ungrievable” because his animality is radically excluded from our own interpretive orientation — even in the presence of such visceral, animal-specific horror. the scene presents the reader with a rare depiction of an animal’s terrified realization and anguished resistance in the face of imminent slaughter. yet readers have been trained to re-direct their empathy to an anthropocentric abstraction. 50 butler, precarious life, xiv. 51 orwell, animal farm, 82. 52 orwell, 82. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 183 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) anyone who has read this scene with students, however, will understand that boxer’s death is eminently grievable, on its own terms. he is, first and foremost, a terrified horse before he is rendered metaphoric grist for the anthropo-allegorical mill. this affective first response to the scene tends to be disregarded and callously redirected into anthropo-allegorical oblivion. it is one thing to frame this scene with allegorical meaning, but to interpret (not to mention teach) it as a uniformly human tragedy is quite another — a dissonant framing device that is not only wilfully blind but one that forces children and young adults to masochistically deny any personal traumatic response brought on by their empathetic engagement with animal suffering. to read boxer’s impending slaughter strictly metaphorically requires an ironic detachment that succeeds in amplifying the anthropo-allegorical impact while suppressing the affect that would otherwise be evoked. indeed, this would seem to engender a coarsening and erosion of affective engagement with the suffering animal, illustrating horkheimer and adorno’s claim that “to show concern for animals is considered no longer merely sentimental but a betrayal of progress.”53 in pursuit of children’s developmental progress, the compulsory humanist imperative renders the animal casualties of carnivorism unreadable unless they are refracted through the anthropo-allegorical interpretive frame. undoubtedly, boxer’s gruesome demise embodies the ultimate tragedy of capitalism, namely that those who produce value for the system are consumed by it, quite literally for the animals, as they actually are devoured by an economic system fuelled by the blood of animals.54 read in this fashion, boxer’s death embodies the entangled, but asymmetrical, oppression of humans and animals trapped in the cold, dystopian machinery of instrumental capitalism that figuratively (in the case of humans) and literally (in the case of animals) eats those who serve it.55 53 horkheimer and adorno, dialectic of enlightenment, 211. 54 shukin, animal capital; drew, “rendering visible”, 207. 55 coulter, animals, work; donovan and adams, feminist care tradition. 184 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) talking animals: the anthropomorphic dilemma if we want to re-subjectivize animals, both attention and care are needed. anthropomorphized animal representations, such as those in animal farm, have long been critiqued by critical animal studies scholars for appropriating animals in service of anthropocentric objectives.56 indeed, derrida himself has argued that animal symbolic representation erases the animals’ essential alterity. this erasure, however, is in actuality informed by the essentially carnophallogocentric reception and interpretation of the text — consistent with “compulsory humanity” — rather than being inherent to the text itself.57 onno oerlemans, for instance, argues that a carefully guided engagement with anthropomorphism can promote greater engagement with animal subjectivity.58 similarly, sam cadman states that a progressive form of anthropomorphism offers a possible avenue for countering anthropocentrism from the inside out.59 by contrast, jane desmond denounces the “magical fantasy of anthropomorphism” as “an extended instance of domination through incorporation”.60 helena pederson subsequently applies desmond’s insights to the school setting and sees parallels to homi k. bhabha’s notions of indeterminacy and colonial mimicry. for bhabha, the colonial other is “a subject of difference that is almost the same, but not quite […] continually producing its slippage, its excess, its difference.”61 pedersen sees a similar “double articulation” at work in the anthropomorphizing of animals, rendering them “almost human, but not quite”. she argues that students’ repeated exposure to entertainment and educational anthropomorphic iterations work ironically, in bhabha’s term, to “re-inscribe the same boundaries that they are challenging”.62 this ironic reproduction of species difference works to contain animals in a subordinate, instrumentalized cultural position. 56 crist, images of animals; beer, “animal presences”. 57 derrida, the animal that therefore i am, 91. 58 oerlemans, “defense of anthropomorphism”. 59 cadman, “reflections on anthropocentrism”. 60 desmond, staging tourism, 210. 61 bhabha, location of culture, 86. 62 pedersen, animals in schools, 30–31. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 185 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) there remains, however, a crucial dimension of bhabha’s argument that requires further unpacking and that is his notion of the “enunciative split”. bhabha derives this concept from frantz fanon who observes that cultural enunciation is a double-edged sword for both the colonizer and colonized, which is a key dimension of bhabha’s “double articulation” theory. fanon’s vision for revolutionary change resides in what bhabha calls “the intervention of the third space of enunciation” which opens an unstable, ambivalent space between colonizer and colonized or the dominant and dominated.63 this ambivalent space is often massaged away by the dominant group but, following fanon, bhabha sees the emancipatory potential of the third space to displace ideological orthodoxies supporting dominant interests. for bhabha, the enunciative split establishes an “in between space” characterized by hybridity in a way that obliterates notions of a stable unifying culture or identity. bhabha argues that this hybridic, ambivalent space is forged in negotiation, while the hegemonic narratives of the dominant interests remain products of negation — a negation of the other’s experience and value. by negotiating the hybridic potential of the “third space,” we may, bhabha argues, “elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves”.64 cary wolfe applies bhabha’s enunciative cultural theories to his own analysis of mimetic power across species lines in michael crichton’s congo, before ultimately concluding that bhabha’s “work remains captivated […] by the figure of the human”.65 wolfe argues that because bhabha’s notion of the subject is “located” in the very same enlightenment liberal humanism that he seeks to critique, his analysis necessarily “constitutes its own repression”.66 however, even if bhabha’s subjective positionality may foreclose a broader cultural analysis of the emancipatory potential of more non-human subjectivities, it still generates critical space for the deconstruction of humanist discursive tropes (i.e. anthropomorphic devices). if we are to 63 bhabha, location of culture, 54. 64 bhabha, 56. 65 wolfe, animal rites, 188. 66 wolfe, 5. 186 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) interrogate anthropocentric narratives through bhabha’s theoretical frame, then we must leave room for both sides of the double articulation in modes of cultural enunciation. humanist anthropomorphic narratives (or more specifically their hegemonic interpretations) do re-inscribe species boundaries between human and other, but not through negotiation, rather through negation. the orthodox anthropo-allegorical reading and teaching of animal farm typically persists in negating the animal anthropomorphically, but it does not necessarily follow that those anthropomorphic narratives must always erase the otherness of animal experience, especially when read through bhabha’s double articulation frame. by giving anthropomorphic voice to farmed animals, animal farm offers readers the rare opportunity to engage empathetically with the plight of exploited and oppressed animals. in this way, we achieve donna haraway’s feminist epistemological goal to realize “splitting” perspectives. for haraway, a commitment to “splitting” perspectives recognizes that the “topography of subjectivity is multidimensional, and so, therefore is vision”.67 accordingly, we may allow ourselves to see in new ways and from different perspectives. in this light, old major’s disquieting summation of the systematic, almost absurd, cruelty pervading farm animal existence rings perhaps truer today in the era of advanced industrial “farming” techniques: [w]hat is the nature of this life of ours? let us face it, our lives are miserable, laborious and short. we are born, we are given so much food as will keep the breath in our bodies, and those of us who are capable of it are forced to work to the last atom of our strength; and the very instant our usefulness has come to an end we are slaughtered with hideous cruelty. no animal in england knows the meaning of happiness or leisure after he is a year old. the life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.68 while this passage may suggest a marxist analogue of human exploitation, does it not evoke the literal reference to animal suffering 67 haraway, simians, cyborgs, and women, 193 68 orwell, animal farm, 3. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 187 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) first? why does the human subtext so thoroughly “nullify” the animal text at the surface when the two can exist, and indeed inform, one another?69 students are tasked with reading through and beyond the animal suffering depicted in the book, treating the animals in these passages as mere instrumental mirages serving a higher, human-centric purpose. negation, however, is something we learn through cultural inscription. the negation of the animal that occurs when teaching animal farm can only be achieved through an active process of silencing the literal story of the book. students should be given the opportunity to negotiate the convergences and divergences between the animal and human concerns of the book. reading in such a fashion allows students to register the “others of our selves,” as bhabha would have it. this allows them to see the oppressive and predatory human customs as observed from the defamiliarized position of the non-human animal other. old major’s declarations attest to this: man is the only creature that consumes without producing. he does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. yet he is lord of all the animals. he sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.70 this passage is similarly inscribed with much of the same allegorical connotations as the previous passage. but when readers are encouraged to focus actively on the double articulation on which the allegory depends, both human and animal dimensions are foregrounded. the reader may see themselves reflected as other through the eyes of a subjugated animal. in many instances throughout the book there remains a conspicuous slippage that cannot be neatly enclosed into the conceit of allegory. this movement rather reverberates in ways that problematize the conventional anthropo-analogical reading, as, for instance, when old major’s lament continues: 69 see harel, “animal voice”, 15. 70 orwell, animal farm, 4. 188 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) [n]o animal escapes the cruel knife in the end […] every one of you will scream your lives out at the block within a year. to that we all must come — cows, pigs, hens, sheep, everyone. even the horses and the dogs have not better fate. you, boxer, the very day that those great muscles of yours lose their power, jones will sell you to the knacker, who will cut your throat and boil you down for the foxhounds. as for the dogs, when they grow old and toothless jones ties a brick round their necks and drowns them in the nearest pond.71 it is difficult to read this passage as subordinate to the humanistic allegory. as dwan suggests, the analogical abstraction collapses under the weight of the all too real evocation of animal slaughter, one that does not extend neatly to the analogue of proletarian oppression.72 the visceral emphasis on animal death overpowers the relatively remote analogy to proletarian disposability, viscerally compelling one’s attention to the terror and anguish of the doomed animals. at the very least, the book offers an unequivocal “consensus that animals ought to be treated humanely”.73 the broader literary negation of the animal experience and their suffering only reveals the empathetic limitations of “our speciesist interpretive bias”.74 this is not to reject the anthropo-allegorical subtextual conceit, but rather that the animal and human dimensions of animal farm need not be mutually exclusive. indeed, through a bhabhasian lens it becomes clear that an anthropo-allegorical narrative cannot have the one without the other. as readers, scholars, and educators, we can privilege negotiated reading over one of negation. as such, a negotiated approach to reading embraces language’s inherent shiftiness and unreliability which corresponds to derridean “pluridimensionality”. under these terms, language becomes less invested in policing the boundaries of subjectivity, in a way that exemplifies mel y. chen’s project of “feraliz[ing]” discourse.75 for chen, 71 orwell, animal farm, 5. 72 dwan, “orwell’s paradox”, 667. 73 ortiz-robles, literature and animal studies, 175. 74 harel, “the animal voice”, 17. 75 chen, animacies, 18. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 189 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) language has been domesticated to serve the exclusionary framework of the dominant white supremacist, ableist, hetero-patriarchal, and speciesist mode of subjectivity. they argue that a “feral” discourse is required to confront the hierarchically imposed shackles of linearity. the stakes for challenging language’s linearization, or what chen calls “domestication,” are high indeed, and such challenges have profound implications for the human and more-than-human alike. building on linguist michael silvertein’s work on “animacy hierarchies,” chen argues that entrenched linguistic hierarchies frame cultural perceptions of possibility. animacy hierarchies help assign agential status to humans, while denying agency to marginalized human and non-human others through a careful, but largely invisible, project of linguistic and discursive codification. this project is mainly dependent on an uncontested and sedimented legacy of metaphorization. pluralizing the cultural and literary discourse: beyond metaphorization as derrida asserts, metaphorization is a crucial component of logos’s affirmation of “white mythology” and is instrumental in calcifying cultural tropes that sustain dominant ideologies. metaphor in this sense works as a linearizing linguistic mechanism that frames our thoughts and perceptions through a constructed lens of analogized similarity, which promotes commensurability and familiarity. metaphor and its linguistic siblings, simile, symbolism, personification, and allegory, all serve the same reductive, linearizing function. in such a fashion, animal farm has been read, analysed, and taught almost exclusively in an anthropo-allegorical manner, reducing the animal representations to mere traces on which an anthropocentric symbolic interpretation could be realized. here, the “animacy hierarchy” subordinates the animal thereby reproducing the onto-epistemological imperatives of western logocentrism and human exceptionalism. as derrida, wolfe, chen, and others have demonstrated, this has profound consequences for humans and animals alike. carey wolfe’s discursive theorization of the species divide hinges on the derridean “structural sacrifice” that excludes animals from 190 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) subjective status. for wolfe, like horkheimer and adorno before him, the category of the human depends upon the sacrifice of the animal “and the animalistic, which in turn makes possible a symbolic economy in which in which we can engage in what derrida will call a ‘noncriminal putting to death’ of other humans as well by marking them as animal.”76 the reductionist anthropo-allegorical frame through which animal farm is read, theorized, and taught is therefore not only limiting but also deeply implicated in the linguistic-discursive reification of exclusionist and oppressive cultural hierarchies. according to timothy snyder, stalin’s farmland collectivization program during the early 1930s inspired a propagandistic project to associate farmers with pigs — the crude analogical implication being that farmers now shared the expendable status of the slaughter animal.77 the confiscation of land that followed led to the great soviet famine and the holodomor in ukraine. in animal farm, orwell re-imagines the land confiscation with the chickens representing the farmers. napoleon, the post-revolutionary stalinist pig autocrat, enforces an egg collectivization program that the chickens refuse. napoleon selects three of the hens and numerous other animal “traitors” and publicly slaughters them one by one, “leaving the air heavy with the smell of blood, which had been unknown since the expulsion of farmer jones.”78 understanding this weaponization of metaphor to link farmers to their own farm animals presents an additional, and essential, allegorical tension, which may also shed light on orwell’s selection of pigs as the post-revolutionary oppressors. as slaughter animals, pigs are “made killable”.79 the distinction between farmer and pig (slaughterer and slaughtered) is dissolved in the metaphorical alignment of farmer and pig consigning as snyder argues, the resistant soviet farmers to the “killable” status of their slaughter animals. in animal farm, this power dynamic is inverted but the metaphoric alignment is preserved — the farmers are no longer pigs, but the pigs have become farmers. here, we 76 wolfe, animal rites, 6. 77 snyder, on tyranny, 33 78 orwell, animal farm, 57. 79 haraway, when species meet, 80. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 191 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) see the volatility of metaphoric associations and their oppressive power. orwell’s allegorical representation of this historical tragedy reveals the intersecting depths at which animal and human oppression, and indeed slaughter, are connected and even mutually reinforce one another aligning with wolfe’s derridean formulation of the “‘non-criminal putting to death’ of other humans […] by marking them as animal”.80 erasing the animal dimension from animal farm thus upholds the mythology of human exceptionalism, while negating what should be two essential and intersecting lessons from the book: that human and animal oppression are semio-materially entangled and that domesticated animals suffer terribly at the hands of their human oppressors. thus, the dominant anthropo-allegorical reading of orwell’s classic reinscribes species-based hierarchies within the symbolic economy of literature and literary education, and instrumentalizes the representations of animal suffering for humanist ends. there is an extractive dimension to this engrained anthropo-allegorical formulation that aligns comfortably with colonial and settler-colonial ideologies. anishinaabeg scholar and activist leanne betasamosake simpson argues that extractionist capitalism pervades all facets of settler-colonial culture, including education.81 she argues for a “nishnaabeg anticapitalism” based on what she calls “grounded normativity” recognizing that “we live embedded in networks of humans and non-humans”.82 similarly, robin kimmerer invokes the sky woman falling creation story shared by the indigenous peoples of the great lakes of what is now canada and the united states as an illustration of the “chain of reciprocity” guiding indigenous multispecies ethics.83 in the story, a woman falls from the sky but her life is saved thanks to a multispecies intervention to break her fall. she then embraces a life of mutual reciprocity with the animals and plant life on turtle island. in this spirit, kimmerer points to the haudenosaunee thanksgiving address that describes “our mutual allegiance 80 wolfe, animal rites, 6. 81 simpson, as we have always done, 76. 82 simpson, 80. 83 kimmerer, braiding sweetgrass, 20. 192 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) to the democracy of species”.84 she argues that schools would better serve indigenous and settler communities alike by “pledging reciprocity to the living world”.85 along these lines, nathan snaza calls for new syllabus projects that responds to the protest movements of black lives matter, idle no more, and standing rock by “generating lists of texts that don’t respect disciplinary traditions, regimes, and canons. they [instead] gear education not in the service of a humanization oriented toward man [sic], but toward ways of seeing the (colonialist, settler) state as violent, extractive, and unnecessary.”86 in my situated space of south-western ontario, canada there is an emerging effort at the board level to decolonize and indigenize education by integrating indigenous texts into the syllabus. in addition to representation, indigenous scholars like simpson and kimmerer argue that education requires ethical and epistemological transformation which challenges the hubris of embedded western humanism. furthermore, billy ray belcourt argues that the systematized subjugation and slaughter of animals is deeply entangled with the colonial oppression of indigenous peoples. to this end, he contends that “animal domestication, speciesism, and other modern human-animal interactions are only possible because of and through the historic and ongoing erasure of indigenous bodies and the emptying of indigenous lands for settler-colonial expansion.”87 for belcourt, speciesism is a settler-colonial concept and hence efforts to promote speciesism, or to leave it unchallenged, also serve to promote colonialism. thus, the unchallenged anthropo-allegorical reading of animal farm not only validates species-based hierarchies but also implicitly affirms notions of western cultural supremacy in its repression of the animal and its refusal to consider how violence against animals is discursively entangled with systemic violence directed at indigenous (and other marginalized) peoples. 84 kimmerer, braiding sweetgrass, 116. 85 kimmerer, 116. 86 snaza, animate literacies, 159. 87 belcourt, “animal bodies”, 3. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 193 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) language and discourse determine power in animal farm, and those who have a monopoly on discursive power (first the humans, then the pigs) determine the value systems (in this case, cold instrumentalism) that will ultimately govern the others not in power. but how the empowered class justifies their privilege is a pressing concern for orwell. animal farm’s iconic axiom “all animals are equal… but some are more equal than others” represents the most famous of many aphorisms operationalized by the pigs to constrain the subordinated animals.88 it is important to remember that this cynically ambiguous aphorism devolves from a simple revolutionary edict — “all animals are equal” — but is later affixed with the second clause to validate the pigs’ privilege and dominance over the other animals. there are six other revolutionary commandments that are programmatically qualified until they are divested of their original emancipatory intention and potential. the other animals become confined in this linguistic web and are unable to resist the pigs’ gaslit project of discursive manipulation that gradually narrows their material conditions until they are returned to pre-revolutionary levels of immiseration. although the original edict pronouncing animal equality signified animal liberation and presented a clear species divide between non-human and human animals, the qualified edict begins to blur that very distinction. towards the end of the book, the pigs begin to walk upright on two legs rather than four, violating the second commandment, which proclaimed, “whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy”.89 the pigs’ chant of “four legs good — two legs better!” further dissolves the human-animal divide.90 in this light, the qualified edict “some animals are more equal than others” assumes a different character now that the pigs are emulating human qualities. in the book’s final passage, when the pigs confer with the human farmers, the species line is fully dissolved when several of the subordinated animals gather to spy on the congregants and they shift their attention, “from pig to man and from man to pig 88 orwell, animal farm, 90 89 orwell, 15. 90 orwell, 89. 194 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) […] but already it was impossible to say which was which.”91 through the political anthropo-allegorical reading this seemingly phantasmagorical transformation symbolizes the ultimate indistinguishability between soviet socialism and western capitalism. through this conventional reading we seem to reach a nihilistic impasse, one that grants this book such value to the apparatuses of capture. it passively validates the capitalist status quo by invalidating a revolutionary alternative and this appropriation becomes all the more potent when the literal animal representations are obfuscated leaving the species-based hierarchy informing the analogy (and conveniently, the animal capital foundation supporting western capitalism) unexamined. interestingly, to return to cole’s analysis, he further disqualifies an animal reading because he believes orwell leverages the animals’ “inhumanity to help delineate a humanism that, while ostensibly undergirding an egalitarian political ideology, actually proves exclusionary not just across species lines but within them.”92 this is a crucial insight, but one applicable for the opposite of what cole intended. the ending problematizes the humanist delineation in a way that resonates with cary wolfe’s contention that species boundaries are discursively constructed while simultaneously referring to the “arbitrariness behind the concept of equality, and to reflect on our most fundamental attitudes and practices involving animals.”93 importantly, orwell’s description of the metamorphosis privileges the pig’s transformation into the human with no explicit elaboration on humans becoming pigs (i.e., “[n]o question now what happened to the faces of the pigs”94). the pigs become indistinguishable from the humans, and vice versa, because the pigs’ aspirational trajectory toward human status is complete. the ending thus confirms that the most exceptional, or “more equal” animal here is indisputably the “two legged” human animal but, as orwell’s preface intimates, human supremacy precedes intra-human hierarchies. 91 orwell, animal farm, 95. 92 cole, “true struggle”, 337. 93 boremyr, “reading orwell’s animals”, 5. 94 orwell, animal farm, 95. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 195 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) crucially, before the ultimate humanization of the pigs, mr. pilkington, the once hostile owner of foxwood farm now praises the ruthless efficiencies of animal farm, informing the pigs that he intends to apply their methods on his own farm before drawing the analogy, “if you have your lower animals to contend with […] we have our lower classes!”95 here, the entangled exclusions across and between species lines become apparent. pilkington’s statement suggests that the lessons learned from the oppressive subjugation of farmed animals could be applied to the exploitation of disempowered humans, again consistent with the oft-neglected human-animal thesis of orwell’s ukrainian preface. such a reading challenges the hegemony, indeed the very legitimacy, of humanism. the ending of animal farm therefore reveals a concept of the human founded on the very inter and intra-species exclusions to which cole refers, one devoted only to the tenets of instrumentalism and exploitation. accordingly, humanism becomes the alibi that papers over the abhorrent legacies and ongoing injustices inflicted on the abject human and animal world through the “necropolitics” of colonial capitalism.96 indeed, the pigs’ final humanization is dependent on them subjugating their fellow animals — the pathway to human membership is therefore paved on the sacrifice of animal bodies much as the anthropo-allegorical reading is forged on the disavowal of an animal reading. contrary to upholding humanism, reading the animal in animal farm destabilizes the humanist alibi and in so doing presents a rare opportunity to confront the entangled human-animal legacies of instrumentalism, exploitation and immiseration on which western human(ist) exceptionalism rests. conclusion animal farm presents a world in which animals are granted access to subjectivizing language and, as a result, their collective subjectivity is slowly and paradoxically undermined and all but erased by the very language and discourse that shapes their world. similarly, the hegemonic anthropo-allegorical interpretation, guided by literature’s 95 orwell, animal farm, 92. 96 mbembe, “necropolitics”, 11. 196 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) “compulsory humanity”, consigns the animal characters to a humanist avatar status that erases not only their essential animality but crucially disregards the representation of human-imposed systemic animal immiseration. the “talking animals” of animal farm unequivocally disclose the legacies of animal blood that have fueled carnophallogentrism, and the literary and educational dismissal of their perspectives reflects the miasmic embeddedness of these values in our culture and institutions. if scholars and educators lack the ethical commitment and capacity to confront animal exploitation and slaughter, both discursively and materially, for the sake of the animals themselves, then we might consider it for the sake of the students we are tasked with educating. leanne betasamosake simpson laments how western education’s emphasis on anthropocentric, instrumentalist values fails indigenous people. robin kimmerer’s suggests western education adopt the haudenosaunee pledge of “mutual allegiance to the democracy of species”97 to prepare students for the reciprocal and sustainable values that will be required to confront the climate emergency. western humanism and its penchant for reading animals anthropo-allegorically obstructs such alternatives while supporting the colonial semio-material violence towards nature, humans, and other animals. along these lines, helena pedersen points to greta thunberg’s disavowal of an education for a future denied by ecological catastrophe.98 implicit in thunberg’s challenge to education is an awareness that education is not only neglecting the challenges of the future but is in fact complicit in accelerating our demise through its commitment to recalcitrant values and ideologies that are radically opposed to our long-term survival. she is pointing to a new educational possibility, disassociated from the kind of human exceptionalism that turns a blind eye to the cruelty of agricultural animal containment and slaughter, and towards one that also understands, especially in these pandemic times, how both human and 97 kimmerer, braiding sweetgrass, 116. 98 pedersen, “education, anthropocentrism,” 174. drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 197 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) animal fates are fatally and eternally entwined. such a pedagogical orientation requires an ethical commitment beyond the parochial species-specific narcissism of western humanism; to a devotion that recognizes the shared, but asymmetrically distributed, frailties that confront all animals, human and otherwise. when such an educational vision is enacted to confront the ethical and existential limits of human exceptionalism, animal farm’s long-repressed animal story may finally be heard. 198 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) works cited atwood, margaret. surfacing. toronto: emblem editions, 2010. atwood, margaret. survival: a thematic guide to canadian literature. toronto: house of anansi, 2012 baker, steve. picturing the beast: animals, identity, and representation. urbana: university of illinois press, 2001. beer, gillian. “animal presences: tussles with anthropomorphism.” comparative critical studies 2, no. 3 (2005): 311–22. https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2005.2.3.311. belcourt, billy-ray. “animal bodies, colonial subjects: (re)locating animality in decolonial thought.” societies 5, no. 1 (2014): 1–11. https://doi. org/10.3390/soc5010001. berger, john. why look at animals? london: penguin, 2009. bhabha, homi k. the location of culture. london: routledge, 2012. boremyr, hannah. “reading orwell’s animals: an animal-oriented study of george orwell’s political satire animal farm.” ba thesis, dalarna university, 2016. bibby, simon. “content and context: a university l2 course using george orwell’s animal farm.” the journal of literature in language teaching 3, no. 2 (2014): 21–33. brent, mandy, and chris millgate-smith. working together: linking skills and curriculum for adolescents with a language learning disability. victoria, aus.: acer, 2008. burgess, lloyd. “8 great teaching tools for reading george orwell’s animal farm in ks4 english.” teachwire 11 nov. 2017. https://www.teachwire. net/news/8-great-teaching-tools-forreading-george-orwells-animal-farmks4-english. butler, judith. precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. london: verso, 2004. cadman, sam. “reflections on anthropocentrism, anthropomorphism and impossible fiction: towards a typological spectrum of fictional animals.” animal studies journal 5, no. 2 (2016): 161–182. https://ro.uow.edu.au/ asj/vol5/iss2/8/. calarco, matthew. “deconstruction is not vegetarianism: humanism, subjectivity, and animal ethics.” continental philosophy review 37, no. 2 (2004): 175–201. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007005-3925-4. chen, mel y. animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. durham, nc: duke university press, 2012. cole, stewart. “‘the true struggle’: orwell and the specter of the animal.” lit: literature interpretation theory 28, no. 4 (2017): 335–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/1 0436928.2017.1388736. cole, matthew, and kate stewart. our children and other animals: the cultural construction of human-animal relations in childhood. farnham: ashgate, 2014. cosslett, tess. talking animals in british children’s fiction, 1786–1914. london: routledge, 2017. coulter, kendra. animals, work, and the promise of interspecies solidarity. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2016. cramer, elizabeth p., natsuko ryosho, and peter v. nguyen. “using experiential exercises to teach about diversity, oppression, and social justice.” journal of teaching in social work 32, no. 1 (2012): 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/08 841233.2012.637463. crist, eileen. images of animals. philadelphia, pa: temple university press, 1999. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. edited by marie-louise mallet. translated by david wills. new york: fordham university press, 2008. https://doi.org/10.3366/ccs.2005.2.3.311 https://doi.org/10.3390/soc5010001 https://doi.org/10.3390/soc5010001 https://www.teachwire.net/news/8-great-teaching-tools-for-reading-george-orwells-animal-farm-ks4-english https://www.teachwire.net/news/8-great-teaching-tools-for-reading-george-orwells-animal-farm-ks4-english https://www.teachwire.net/news/8-great-teaching-tools-for-reading-george-orwells-animal-farm-ks4-english https://www.teachwire.net/news/8-great-teaching-tools-for-reading-george-orwells-animal-farm-ks4-english https://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol5/iss2/8/ https://ro.uow.edu.au/asj/vol5/iss2/8/ https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-005-3925-4 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-005-3925-4 https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2017.1388736 https://doi.org/10.1080/10436928.2017.1388736 https://doi.org/10.1080/08841233.2012.637463 https://doi.org/10.1080/08841233.2012.637463 drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 199 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) derrida, jacques. of grammatology. translated by gayatri chakravorty spivak. corrected ed. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press, 1997. derrida, jacques. margins of philosophy. translated by alan bass. chicago, il: university of chicago press, 1982. derrida, jacques. writing and difference. translated by alan bass. chicago, il: university of chicago press, 1978. desmond, jane. staging tourism: bodies on display from waikiki to sea world. chicago, il: university of chicago press, 1999. donovan, josephine and carol j. adams, eds. the feminist care tradition in animal ethics: a reader. new york: columbia university press, 2007. drew, john. “rendering visible: animals, empathy, and visual truths in the ghosts in our machine and beyond.” animal studies journal 5, no. 2 (2016): 202–16. dwan, david. “orwell’s paradox: equality in animal farm.” elh 79, no. 3 (2012): 655–83. https://doi.org/10.1353/ elh.2012.0025 eisenman, stephen f. the cry of nature: art and the making of animal rights. london: reaktion books, 2013. fernandes, marie. the animal fable in modern literature. new delhi: b.r. publishing corporation, 1996. ferrari, roberta. “‘a boot stamping on a human face—for ever’: george orwell, language, literature, and politics.” caietele echinox no. 39 (2020): 172–88. https://doi.org/10.24193/ cechinox.2020.39.13. fowler, roger. the language of george orwell. london: red globe, 1995. fudge, erica. “at the heart of the home: an animal reading of mikhail bulgakov’s the heart of a dog.” humanimalia, 1, no. 1 (2009): 10–23. https://doi.org/10.52537/ humanimalia.10114. giroux, henry a. theory and resistance in education: a pedagogy for the opposition. south hadley, ma: bergin & garvey, 1983. hamilton, craig. “allegory, blending, and censorship in modern literature.” journal of literary semantics 40, no. 1 (2011): 23–42. https://doi.org/10.1515/ jlse.2011.002. haraway, donna. “the promises of monsters: a regenerative politics for inappropriate/d others.” in cultural studies, edited by lawrence grossberg, cary nelson, and paula a. treichler, 295–337. new york: routledge, 1992. haraway, donna. simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of nature. new york: routledge, 1991. haraway, donna. when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008. hardt, michael, and antonio negri. assembly. new york: oxford university press, 2017. harel, naama. “the animal voice behind the animal fable.” journal for critical animal studies 7, no. 2 (2009): 9–21. horkheimer, max, and theodor w. adorno. dialectic of enlightenment: philosophical fragments. edited by gunzelin schmidt noerr. translated by edmund jephcott. stanford, ca: stanford university press, 2002. hoult-saros, stacy. the mythology of the animal farm in children’s literature: over the fence. lanham, md: lexington books, 2016. joy, melanie. why we love dogs, eat pigs, and wear cows: an introduction to carnism. 10th anniversary ed. newburyport, ma: red wheel, 2020. miró juan, eva. “the use of literature in the english as a foreign language classroom in secondary education: animal farm.” ma thesis, universitat jaume i, spain, 2020. http://hdl.handle. net/10234/190373. https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2012.0025 https://doi.org/10.1353/elh.2012.0025 https://doi.org/10.24193/cechinox.2020.39.13 https://doi.org/10.24193/cechinox.2020.39.13 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10114 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10114 https://doi.org/10.1515/jlse.2011.002 https://doi.org/10.1515/jlse.2011.002 http://hdl.handle.net/10234/190373 http://hdl.handle.net/10234/190373 200 | drew, re-animalizing animal farm humanimalia 13.1 (2022) kerr, douglas. “orwell, animals, and the east.” essays in criticism 49, no. 3 (1999): 234–55. https://doi.org/10.1093/eic/ xlix.3.234. kimmerer, robin. braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants. minneapolis, mn: milkweed editions, 2013. kirschner, paul. “the dual purpose of animal farm.” the review of english studies 55, no. 222 (2004): 759–86. https://doi.org/10.1093/res/55.222.759. letemendia, veronica claire. “revolution on animal farm: orwell’s neglected commentary.” journal of modern literature 18, no. 1 (1992): 127–37. masson, jeffrey moussaieff. the pig who sang to the moon: the emotional world of farm animals. new york: ballantine books, 2003. mbembe, achille. “necropolitics.” translated by libby meintjes. public culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40. https://doi. org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11. mchugh, susan. “animal farm’s lessons for literary (and) animal studies.” humanimalia 1, no. 1 (2009): 24–39. https://doi.org/10.52537/ humanimalia.10115. mckay, robert. “‘identifying with the animals’: language, subjectivity, and the animal politics of margaret atwood’s surfacing.” in figuring animals: essays on animal images in art, literature, philosophy and popular culture, edited by mary sanders pollock and catherine rainwater, 207–27. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2005. meyers, valerie. george orwell. basingstoke: macmillan, 1991. noske, barbara. humans and other animals: beyond the boundaries of anthropology. london: pluto, 1989. nyman, jopi. “re-reading sentimentalism in anna sewell’s black beauty: affect, performativity, and hybrid spaces.” in affect, space and animals, edited by jopi nyman and nora schuurman, 65–79. london: routledge, 2015. oerlemans, onno. “a defense of anthropomorphism: comparing coetzee and gowdy.” mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature 40, no. 1 (2007): 181–96. oerlemans, onno. poetry and animals: blurring boundaries with the human. new york: columbia university press, 2018. ortiz-robles, mario. literature and animal studies. london: routledge, 2016. orwell, george. animal farm. harmondsworth: penguin, 1989. orwell, george. “preface to the ukrainian edition of animal farm.” in the collected essays, journalism and letters. vol. 3, as i please 1943–1945, edited by sonia orwell and ian angus, 402–6. new york: harcourt brace jovanovich, 1968. pedersen, helena. animals in schools: processes and strategies in humananimal education. west lafayette, in: purdue university press, 2010. pedersen, helena. “education, anthropocentrism, and interspecies sustainability: confronting institutional anxieties in omnicidal times.” ethics and education 16, no. 2 (2021): 164–77. https:// doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2021.1896639. pordzik, ralph. “george orwell’s imperial bestiary: totemism, animal agency and cross-species interaction in ‘shooting an elephant’, burmese days and ‘marrakech’.” anglia 135, no. 3 (2017): 440–66. https:// doi.org/10.1515/ang-2017-0045. rodden, john. “big rock (sugar)candy mountain? how george orwell tramped toward animal farm.” papers on language and literature 46, no. 3 (2010): 315–41. rowe, bradley, and samuel rocha. “school lunch is not a meal: posthuman eating as folk phenomenology.” educational studies 51, no. 6 (2015): 482–96. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013194 6.2015.1098643. https://doi.org/10.1093/eic/xlix.3.234 https://doi.org/10.1093/eic/xlix.3.234 https://doi.org/10.1093/res/55.222.759 https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11 https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10115 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10115 https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2021.1896639 https://doi.org/10.1080/17449642.2021.1896639 https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2017-0045 https://doi.org/10.1515/ang-2017-0045 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2015.1098643 https://doi.org/10.1080/00131946.2015.1098643 drew, re-animalizing animal farm | 201 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) scholtmeijer, marian. animal victims in modern fiction. toronto: university of toronto press, 2019. searcy, lara, jonathan b. allred, seth d. french, and christian z. goering. “reinterpreting revolutions: an ‘encoding/decoding’ analysis of animal farm.” in critical approaches to teaching the high school novel: reinterpreting canonical literature, edited by craig hill and victor malo-juvera, 145–60. new york: routledge, 2019. sewlall, harry. “george orwell’s animal farm: a metonym for a dictatorship.” literator: journal of literary criticism, comparative linguistics and literary studies, 23, no. 3 (2002): 81–96. https:// doi.org/10.4102/lit.v23i3.344. shaw, tony. “‘some writers are more equal than others’: george orwell, the state and cold war privilege.” cold war history, 4, no. 1 (2003): 143–70. https:// doi.org/10.1080/14682740312331391774. shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2009. simons, john. animal rights and the politics of literary representation. basingstoke: palgrave, 2002. simpson, leanne betasamosake. as we have always done: indigenous freedom through radical resistance. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2017. sloterdijk, peter. “rules for the human zoo: a response to the letter on humanism.” translated by mary varney rorty. environment and planning d: society and space 27, no. 1 (2009): 12–28. https://doi.org/10.1068/dst3. smyer, richard i. animal farm: pastoralism and politics. boston: twayne, 1988. snaza, nathan. animate literacies: literature, affect, and the politics of humanism. durham, nc: duke university press, 2019. snyder, timothy. on tyranny: twenty lessons from the twentieth century. new york: tim duggan books, 2017. tiffin, helen. “pigs, people and pigoons.” in knowing animals, edited by laurence simmons and philip armstrong, 244–65. leiden: brill, 2007. twine, richard. “revealing the ‘animalindustrial complex—a concept and method for critical animal studies.” journal for critical animal studies 10.1 (2012): 12–39. white, richard. “george orwell: socialism and utopia.” utopian studies 19, no. 1 (2008): 73–95. williams, raymond. culture and society, 1780–1950. new york: columbia university press, 1983. wolfe, cary. animal rites: american culture, the discourse of species, and posthumanist theory. chicago, il: university of chicago press, 2003. https://doi.org/10.4102/lit.v23i3.344 https://doi.org/10.4102/lit.v23i3.344 https://doi.org/10.1080/14682740312331391774 https://doi.org/10.1080/14682740312331391774 https://doi.org/10.1068/dst3 _hlk62151663 an introduction to marco reggio’s activism and research an introduction to marco reggio’s activism and research suleiman mcshane erin clancy humanimalia 15.2 (spring 2025) abstract: this introduction situates marco reggio as a significant critical voice in the italian animal liberation movement and provides context for our english translation of the first chapter of his 2022 book cospirazione animale. it outlines reggio’s intersecting commitments to anti-speciesism, queer and trans-feminist theory, disability studies, and anti-colonial activism. through a discussion of reggio’s work on the contradictions within animal advocacy — exemplified by the case of agitu ideo gudeta and the politics of “happy meat” — the introduction highlights his emphasis on embracing discomfort, provisionality, and intersectionality as necessary elements of multispecies justice. it also reviews reggio’s broader contributions: his theoretical and editorial collaborations, his focus on vegephobia, the right-wing appropriation of animal advocacy, the practice of archiving animal resistance, and the role of sanctuaries as sites of care and coalition. concluding with a reflection on the challenges of building truly intersectional and transformative movements, the introduction positions reggio’s work as an invitation to navigate the tensions between solidarity, critique, and collective struggle. keywords: marco reggio, anti-speciesism, intersectionality, animal resistance, vegan activism suleiman mcshane (not their real name) is an activist and researcher based in italy who prefers to remain anonymous. their identity is known to the editors of humanimalia. erin clancy is a phd candidate in geography at the university of wisconsinmadison. their work focuses on the intersection of disability politics, feminist care ethics, and the psy-sciences in italian and transnational contexts. email: eclancy2@wisc.edu copyright © 2025 the authors this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 2 (2025): 73–84. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.23239 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.23239 mcshane and clancy, introduction to marco reggio | 75 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) marco reggio is a leading critical voice in the grassroots animal liberation movement in italy. this introduction offers english-speaking readers an overview of his activism and research in the fields of animal resistance, animal advocacy, and vegan studies, with a particular focus on the intersections of anti-speciesism, queer and trans-feminist theory, and disability studies. this introduction accompanies our translation of the first chapter of reggio’s 2022 book cospirazione animale (animal conspiracy), published in this issue of humanimalia. the chapter, entitled “‘happy’ goats, or: taking embarrassment seriously”, centres on the femicide of agitu ideo gudeta, an anti-colonial environmentalist who fled ethiopia in 2010 after facing prosecution for her political activism against land grabbing by foreign corporations. in italy, gudeta became a successful conservationist and goat herder, but in 2020 she was raped and murdered by a coworker, who was also a migrant. at the time, reggio was in the same region, trentino, working with the intersectional collective assemblea antispecista (anti-speciesist assembly) to oppose the politics of the local administration affiliated with the xenophobic, right-wing lega nord (northern league). trentino’s president at the time, maurizio fugatti, was ordering the killing and imprisonment of wild bears accused of causing economic damage to the surrounding farmland — a brutal, simplistic solution meant to appease affected farmers and reassure citizens worried about the large, wild animals on the increasingly urbanized mountain landscapes.1 in the first chapter of his book, as elsewhere in his work, reggio invites us to take a situated position in these struggles, remaining attentive to the complexities and contradictions of uneven postcolonial geographies. he expresses deep solidarity with gudeta, an activist who struggled against colonial, racist, and sexist violence. at the same time, drawing on judith butler’s call to explore the political uses of embarrassment, reggio reflects on his own discomfort in voicing opposition to animal farming in the context of such tragic circumstances: in life, gudeta refused to send adult goats to 1 see valenti and reggio, “animali in gabbia”; and reggio, “gli orsi trentini”. 76 | mcshane and clancy, introduction to marco reggio humanimalia 15.2 (2025) slaughter, yet in order to produce milk, the goats had to be made to bear kids — newborns who were then killed. in 2011, reggio co-founded bioviolenza, a collective that critiques and opposes the rhetoric of “happy meat” and so-called ethical animal farming.2 the group exposed the contradictions inherent in farming practices like gudeta’s and those of many other smallscale, organic farmers who, while recognizing the agency and value of nonhuman animals, still condone their killing and the exploitation of their reproductive lives.3 against this backdrop, reggio asks, how can one express solidarity with gudeta’s anti-colonial and feminist struggle without abandoning the political principles of multispecies justice and liberation — and without endorsing animal husbandry? in the following chapters of cospirazione animale, reggio explores other issues that emerged at the crossroads of his activism and theoretical reflection. chapter 2 deals with the connections between mental illness and animality, covering the historical pathologization of animal advocates — labelled insane since the early days of the anti-vivisection movement — and the role the disabled community has played in the disputes over animal testing. chapter 3 investigates the paradox of “naturality” as it shapes perceptions of race, species, ability, gender, and sexuality. reggio emphasizes the role of performativity in identity formation, taking as his guide the protagonist of indra sinha’s 2007 novel animal’s people — a young man who became disabled during the ecocidal bhopal disaster, who, because of his folded body and marginalized status, identifies as nonhuman.4 chapter 4 engages with the problem of speaking for (nonhuman) others. drawing from stories of animal resistance — animals exercising their agency and directly opposing their enslavement — and from the insights of activists like bell hooks, reggio rejects the notion that animal advocates speak “for the voiceless”. instead, he argues that animals have voices that are systematically silenced by 2 matthew cole, “from ‘animal machines’ to ‘happy meat’? foucault’s ideas of disciplinary and pastoral power applied to ‘animal-centred’ welfare discourse”, animals 1, no. 1 (2011): 83–111. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani1010083. 3 reggio, “allevatori ‘etici’”. 4 indra sinha, animal’s people (london: simon & schuster, 2007); reggio, “a quattro zampe”. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani1010083 mcshane and clancy, introduction to marco reggio | 77 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) the ideological and infrastructural machinery of speciesism. the final chapter confronts the conflict between environmentalism and antispeciesism, namely that the former tends to view humans as individuals while reduces other beings to mere “species”. reggio proposes that resolving this conflict — made ever more urgent by the climate crisis — begins with recognizing that the anthropocene is not the product of a species (anthropos, or homo sapiens), but of a ruling class within that species.5 in all five chapters — which reggio calls dérives in reference to the situationist method — he does not seek to formulate a new, exhaustive theory of anti-speciesism, nor to offer definitive answers to the problems he raises. instead, he offers a lucid and profound reflection on moments when the human, colonial, patriarchal, and other privileges collide, in order to refine our understanding of these entanglements. to move forward (or to move at all), he suggests, we must learn how to live with the discomfort, or embarrassment, that arises when different liberation struggles intersect — an intersection that is empowering and, at the same time, full of contradictions and obstructions. in the absence of simple solutions, resisting speciesism implies embracing an attitude of queerness and provisionality. the present introduction is accompanied by a near-exhaustive bibliography of reggio’s writings, which played a key role in bringing the critical insights of gender and disability studies into the italian debate on animality. in 2015, with massimo filippi, perhaps italy’s leading critical animal studies theorist, reggio co-edited corpi che non contano (bodies that don’t matter), a collection that explored judith butler’s theory of performativity in relation to animal studies and included an interview with butler. for many years, until 2018, reggio served on the editorial board of liberazioni: rivista di critica antispecista (liberations: journal of anti-speciesist critique), focusing on the intersection between gender and animal studies.6 in his role at liberazioni, reggio advanced discussions on the necessity of solidarity 5 as murray bookchin argues in remaking society: pathways to a green future (boston: south end press, 1989). 6 of particular interest is his essay on birdy, the novel and the film, first written for liberazioni and later republished in whatever. see reggio, “passare”, and “animal drag”. 78 | mcshane and clancy, introduction to marco reggio humanimalia 15.2 (2025) between disability, queer, and multispecies liberation struggles. his writings on these intersections probe the intertwined and oppressive processes of experimentation and spectacularization that render these groups “monstrous” — and thus available for exploitation and violence.7 together with feminoska, militant animal liberation thinker and translator, reggio curated the italian editions of sunaura taylor’s beasts of burden (2017) and dawn prince-hughes’s songs of the gorilla nation (2004), two foundational works on the intersections of animality and disability. these texts, like cospirazione animale, challenge ableist and speciesist devaluations of life, making way for the possibilities of care and coalition by shedding light on these entanglements. working at the intersection of feminism, anti-racism, anti-speciesism, and the deconstruction of binarism, reggio wrote a preface to the italian edition of laura fernández aguilera’s hacia mundos más animales (towards more animal worlds, 2018), translated by feminoska as mondi animali. corpi non umani e binarismo ontologico (2024). another focus of reggio’s research and activism are the cultural and political aspects of veganism, in particular avenues of resistance to its commercialization as a movement. reggio has examined the ridicule and discrimination directed at vegans and vegetarians — “vegephobia”8 —  arguing that vegephobia helps sustain animal oppression by discouraging alternatives to meat consumption. between 2008 and 2011, he contributed to the italian editions of veggie pride, an initiative that originated in france as part of the mouvement pour l’abolition de la viande, an international movement for meat abolition which adopts the tactics of gay pride. coming out as vegan, reggio argues, can threaten one’s gender identity and heteronormativity, given the strong link between meat-eating and masculinity. this “coming-out” can provoke conflict within traditional families, in ways comparable to lgbtq+ coming out. this 7 see reggio, “club degli umani”. 8 see matthew cole and karen morgan, “vegaphobia: derogatory discourses of veganism and the reproduction of speciesism in uk national newspapers,” the british journal of sociology 62, no. 1 (2011): 134–63; see also the italian blog vegefobia, https://it.vegephobia.info/ and reggio, “l’attivismo antispecista.” https://it.vegephobia.info/ mcshane and clancy, introduction to marco reggio | 79 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) parallel is the subject of rasmus rahbek simonsen’s a queer vegan manifesto, which filippi and reggio translated, edited, and published in 2014.9 within essentialist paradigms, the naturalization of killing animals goes hand in hand with the naturalization of the inferiority of women and the privileging of the heterosexual nuclear family and other oppressive hierarchies which are all mutually reinforcing. likewise, species, gender, and racial identities are treated as immutable biological facts. reggio suggests that, like queerness, anti-speciesism — as the negation of “species” as a social construct — subverts these fixed, oppressive roles imposed on human and nonhuman animals alike.10 in his most recent book, vegan antispecista, reggio reflects on public perceptions of veganism, which is often framed either as dangerously unhealthy, bordering on orthorexia, or as an obsession for health and fitness fanatics that borders on fatphobia. he argues that mainstream white veganism uses fatphobia to promote vegan diets, subsuming veganism into the diet industry and reducing it to moralizing consumerism that privileges thin, non-disabled bodies. in 2019, with sociologist niccolò bertuzzi, reggio co-edited smontare la gabbia (dismantling the cage), a volume focused on the animal advocacy movement in italy. their co-authored essay in the volume revisits a topic that reggio has long been interested in: the far-right, xenophobic appropriation of animal advocacy, and the exploitation of pet culture to promote nationalist, bourgeois narratives that cast non-western and formerly colonized cultures as backward and abusive to animals.11 fascist groups have infiltrated vegan and animal advocacy spaces, framing their activism around the need to preserve natural resources for the “autochthonous” (white) europeans. this reproduction of racist, colonial hierarchies reinforces reggio’s call for an anti-imperialist grounding in animal 9 more recently, reggio has returned to the subject of veganism and masculinity in “masculinidades veganas” and “virilità, eterocentrismo e veganismo”. 10 see carmen dell’aversano, “the love whose name cannot be spoken: queering the human–animal bond”, journal for critical animal studies 8, no. 1 (2010): 73–125; reggio, “antispecismo”; feminoska and reggio, “la natura è contronatura”. 11 see bertuzzi and reggio, “il movimento”. on this subject, see also reggio’s essay “essere vegani”, and the chapter “decolonizzare la dieta” in vegan antispecista, 40–48. 80 | mcshane and clancy, introduction to marco reggio humanimalia 15.2 (2025) advocacy and for constant self-reflexivity regarding one’s own position in the global north. reggio himself comes from the tradition of italian anarchism, playing an active role in several animal liberation collectives. in 2010, he participated in campaigns against vivisection and the fur industry. like many members of liberazioni at that time, he was active in oltre la specie (beyond the species), a group that sought to politicize the animal issue, build bridges with other liberatory struggles, and to enrich the abolitionist discourse with insights from continental philosophy. rejecting peter singer’s (ableist) definition of speciesism as merely a flawed moral principle, these groups grounded their theory in the material realities of animal exploitation — the practical conditions that give rise to the ideology of speciesism as a justification for confinement and killing. perhaps the most significant facet in reggio’s work is his role in resistenza animale (animal resistance), a collective dedicated to archiving instances of nonhuman rebellion: animal subjects evading captivity, resisting oppression, or dismantling hostile architecture designed to exclude them from spaces appropriated by the human. reggio was one of the first and most influential promoters of the concept of animal resistance in italy.12 in 2017, together with feminoska, he published a translation of sarat colling’s master’s thesis, “animals without borders”.13 colling — who tragically passed away earlier this year — later revised and expanded her thesis into a monograph, published under the title animal resistance in the global capitalist era.14 in dialogue with colling, reggio’s work highlights the multiscalar geographies and spatial relations that sustain antispeciesist struggle and animal resistance. in italy, the discourse of animal resistance is closely tied to sanctuaries — spaces where individuals rescued from exploitative industries receive care and hospitality. in 2023, police stormed cuori liberi (free hearts), an 12 see hribal, “animali, agency e classe”; cappellini and reggio, “quando i maiali fanno la rivoluzione”; reggio, “do non-human animals resist?”. 13 colling, animali in rivolta. 14 sarat colling, animal resistance in the global capitalist era (east lansing: michigan state university press, 2020) mcshane and clancy, introduction to marco reggio | 81 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) animal sanctuary near milan, to cull the sheltered animals as part of efforts to contain the swine flu epidemic that has swept through northern italy and led to the killing of hundreds of thousands of pigs. under police protection, state veterinarians killed the last pigs at the refuge, pigs who had survived the epidemic. reggio joined the national mobilization that followed, writing that animal sanctuaries are not only spaces of asylum but also as sites for cultivating anti-speciesist consciousness.15 at a time of intensifying political and ecological crises, the potential for animal liberation collectives to contribute to broader movements for systemic change depends on their capacity to regroup and form new alliances — particularly around spaces like animal sanctuaries, where refugees can find safety and alternative economies of relation can be built. a recent shift toward a politicized approaches is prompting new organizers to see themselves not simply as single-issue animal advocates but as participants in a wider emancipatory movement. yet bridging the gaps between different struggles is not without its challenges. embracing a mindset of honesty and openness, along with a theoretical culture rooted in intersectionality — as reggio suggests — could foster more genuine connections and coalitions between movements that often regard themselves as separate — and help them to confront the tensions that inevitably arise when they try to unite and integrate their perspectives. 15 see panini and reggio, “i rifugi antispecisti”. 82 | mcshane and clancy, introduction to marco reggio humanimalia 15.2 (2025) marco reggio bibliography monographs reggio, marco. cospirazione animale. tra azione diretta e intersezionalità. milano: meltemi, 2022. reggio, marco. vegan antispecista. per la liberazione animale e umana. torino: eris, 2024. edited volumes simonsen, rasmus rahbek. manifesto queer vegan. edited and translated by massimo filippi and marco reggio. aprilia: ortica, 2014. translation of “a queer vegan manifesto.” journal for critical animal studies 10, no. 3 (2012): 51–80. filippi, massimo and marco reggio, eds. corpi che non contano. judith butler e gli animali. milano: mimesis, 2015. colling, sarat. animali in rivolta. confini, resistenza e solidarietà umana. edited by feminoska and marco reggio. translated by les bitches. milano: mimesis, 2017. translation of “animals without borders: farmed animal resistance in new york”, ma thesis, brock university, 2013. bertuzzi, niccolò and marco reggio, eds. smontare la gabbia. anticapitalismo e movimento di liberazione animale. afterword by massimo filippi. milano: mimesis, 2019. taylor, sunaura. bestie da soma. disabilità e liberazione animale. edited by feminoska and marco reggio. translated by feminoska. milan: edizioni degli animali, 2021. translation of beasts of burden: animal and disability liberation. new york: the new press, 2017. prince-hughes, dawn. canti della nazione gorilla. il mio viaggio attraverso l’autismo. edited by feminoska and marco reggio. translated by feminoska. milano: edizioni degli animali, 2024. translation of songs of the gorilla nation: my journey through autism. new york: harmony, 2004. chapters in edited volumes filippi, massimo and marco reggio. “il movimento del veganismo: da stile di vita a forma-di-vita.” foreword to manifesto queer vegan, by rasmus rahbek simonsen, 7–20. filippi, massimo and marco reggio. “il veganismo è intrinsecamente politico: conversazione con rasmus rahbek simonsen.” in simonsen, manifesto queer vegan, 69–86. filippi, massimo and marco reggio. “una molteplicità di animali sensuali.” interview with judith butler. in filippi and reggio, corpi che non contano, 23–26. reggio, marco. “l’attivismo antispecista tra invisibilizzazione e resistenza.” in filippi and reggio, corpi che non contano, 47–52. reggio, marco. “per un antispecismo decoloniale.” foreword to animali in rivolta by sarat colling, 9–36. bertuzzi, niccolò and marco reggio. “il movimento per la liberazione animale in italia.” foreword to smontare la gabbia, 7–15. bertuzzi, niccolò and marco reggio. “destre e liberazione animale. fra qualunquismo e strumentalizzazione.” in smontare la gabbia, 43–63. reggio, marco. “virilità, eterocentrismo e veganismo nel discorso pubblico fra privilegio di genere e privilegio di specie.” in i tormenti del potere. ripensare le identità sessuali tra antispecismo e ambientalismo, edited by mirco costacurta, 127–43. bologna: diodati, 2020. mcshane and clancy, introduction to marco reggio | 83 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) feminoska and marco reggio. “far finta di essere san*.” foreword to bestie da soma, by sunaura taylor, 7–30. reggio, marco. “do nonhuman animals resist? critical geographies, decolonial theories, and the case for veganism as multispecies solidarity.” in vegan geographies: spaces beyond violence, ethics beyond speciesism, edited by paul hodge, andrew mcgregor, simon springer, ophelie véron, and richard white, 239–55. brooklyn, ny: lantern, 2022. feminoska and reggio, marco. “tipi animali particolarmente strani: rivendicare la biodiversità.” foreword to canti della nazione gorilla, by dawn prince-hughes, 9–18. feminoska and marco reggio. interview with dawn prince-hughes. in canti della nazione gorilla, 253–60. feminoska and marco reggio. “attraverso lo specchio: dal sistema-mondo ai pluriversi animali.” in laura fernández aguilera, mondi animali. corpi non umani e binarismo ontologico, 7–17. verona: ombre corte, 2024. reggio, marco. “la spedizione.” in zanne, edited by francesco cortonesi and susanna panini, 135–47. perugia: cronache ribelli, 2024. feminoska and marco reggio. “la natura è contronatura. intersezioni tra queer e antispecismo.” in queer in italia, vol. 2, edited by marco pustianaz, 73–76. pisa: ets, 2025. journal articles (selection) reggio, marco. “antispecismo: stare dalla parte degli animali è ‘contronatura’?” in liberazione generale. tavola rotonda sulle correlazioni tra antispecismo, antisessismo, intersessualità e omotransfobia, edited by michela angelini, michela balocchi, egon botteghi, and davide tolu, 1–2. 2013. cappellini, stefania and marco reggio. “quando i maiali fanno la rivoluzione. proposte per un movimento antispecista non paternalista.” liberazioni no. 16 (2014): 43–62. reggio, marco. “‘hitler era vegetariano…’. l’ecologia sociale alle prese con l’antispecismo.” liberazioni no. 17 (2014): 40–61. reggio, marco. “dracula: una lettura non antropocentrica. intervista a david del principe.” liberazioni no. 19 (2014): 85–93. bertuzzi, niccolò and marco reggio. “no expo e antispecismo: un incontro mancato.” liberazioni no. 22 (2015): 51–68. reggio, marco. “‘essere vegani significa stare vicini alla gente del proprio paese’.” liberazioni no. 23 (2015): 29–49. reggio, marco. “allevatori ‘etici’: animali(sti) felici.” liberazioni no. 27 (2016): 58–76. reggio, marco. “passare per un canarino. birdy fra animal drag e transizione di specie.” liberazioni no. 29 (2017): 15–32. feminoska and marco reggio. “hugh hefner e la porno(zoo)topia di playboy.” liberazioni no. 31 (2017): 24–36. reggio, marco. “performare la specie. animal drag, eternormatività, riconoscimento.” whatever: a transdisciplinary journal of queer theories and studies 1 (2018): 233–64. https://doi.org/10.13131/2611657x.whatever.v1i1.11. reggio, marco. “masculinidades veganas entre virilismo, heterocentricidad y homofobia: estigmatización y estrategias de respuesta en el discurso público y privado.” revista latinoamericana de estudios críticos animales 1, no. 5 (2018): 234–52. reggio, marco. “a quattro zampe. note su animalizzazione, disabilità e colonialismo.” aut aut no. 380 (2018): 140–155. https://doi.org/10.13131/2611-657x.whatever.v1i1.11 https://doi.org/10.13131/2611-657x.whatever.v1i1.11 84 | mcshane and clancy, introduction to marco reggio humanimalia 15.2 (2025) reggio, marco. “‘they were like me’. una persona autistica fra i gorilla.” animal studies: rivista italiana di zooantropologia 37 (2022): 38–42. valenti, elisa and marco reggio. “animali in gabbia.” ibridamenti/due, 11 october 2023. https://www.ibridamenti. com/2023/10/11/animali-in-gabbia/. reggio, marco. “gli orsi trentini. selvatici, ferali o domestici?” animal studies: rivista italiana di zooantropologia no. 41 (2023): 48–61. reggio, marco. “il club degli umani. animalizzazione/disabilizzazione nel pensiero di sunaura taylor.” minority reports: cultural disability studies no. 16 (2023): 203–24. panini, susanna and marco reggio. “i rifugi antispecisti e la peste suina africana.” quaderni della decrescita 1, no. 1 (2024): 293–95. web articles (selection) reggio, marco. “refugees welcome. la liberazione animale nell’antropocene.” effimera, january 29, 2016. https:// effimera.org/refugees-welcome-laliberazione-animale-nellantropocenedi-marco-reggio/. reggio, marco. “contro lo sterminio per moltiplicazione.” la falla, 17 january 2019. https://lafalla.cassero.it/controlo-sterminio-per-moltiplicazione/. reggio, marco. “non basta rinunciare al privilegio di specie.” pressenza, 16 march 2021. https://assembleantispecista. noblogs.org/post/2021/03/16/nonbasta-rinunciare-al-privilegio-di-specie/. reggio, marco. “la guerra agli animali selvatici.” comune-info, 19 january 2023. https://comune-info.net/la-guerra-aglianimali-selvatici/. translations (selection) adams, carol j. “la costruzione sociale dei corpi come commestibili e degli umani come predatori.” translated by marco reggio. diogene. filosofare oggi, no. 22 (2011): 44–46. translation of section four of “ecofeminism and the eating of animals,” hypatia: a journal of feminist philosophy 6, no. 1 (1991): 125–45 (134–37). https://www.jstor.org/ stable/3810037. hribal, jason. “animali, agency e classe. la storia degli animali scritta dal basso.” translated by marco reggio. liberazioni no. 18 (2014): 32–58. translation of “animals, agency, and class: writing the history of animals from below.” human ecology review 14, no. 1 (2007): 101–112. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24707647. links cospirazione animale, website and personal blog: http://www. cospirazioneanimale.it/ personal blog on the web magazine rewriters: https://rewriters.it/author/ marco-reggio/ the blog vegefobia, co-edited by marco reggio: it.vegephobia.info the blog resistenza animale, co-edited by marco reggio: https://resistenzanimale. noblogs.org/ the blog bioviolenza, co-edited by marco reggio: https://bioviolenza.blogspot. com/ liberazioni. rivista di critica antispecista: http://www.liberazioni.edu/. https://www.ibridamenti.com/2023/10/11/animali-in-gabbia/ https://www.ibridamenti.com/2023/10/11/animali-in-gabbia/ https://effimera.org/refugees-welcome-la-liberazione-animale-nellantropocene-di-marco-reggio/ https://effimera.org/refugees-welcome-la-liberazione-animale-nellantropocene-di-marco-reggio/ https://effimera.org/refugees-welcome-la-liberazione-animale-nellantropocene-di-marco-reggio/ https://effimera.org/refugees-welcome-la-liberazione-animale-nellantropocene-di-marco-reggio/ https://lafalla.cassero.it/contro-lo-sterminio-per-moltiplicazione/ https://lafalla.cassero.it/contro-lo-sterminio-per-moltiplicazione/ https://assembleantispecista.noblogs.org/post/2021/03/16/non-basta-rinunciare-al-privilegio-di-specie/ https://assembleantispecista.noblogs.org/post/2021/03/16/non-basta-rinunciare-al-privilegio-di-specie/ https://assembleantispecista.noblogs.org/post/2021/03/16/non-basta-rinunciare-al-privilegio-di-specie/ https://comune-info.net/la-guerra-agli-animali-selvatici/ https://comune-info.net/la-guerra-agli-animali-selvatici/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/3810037 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3810037 https://www.jstor.org/stable/24707647 http://www.cospirazioneanimale.it/ http://www.cospirazioneanimale.it/ https://rewriters.it/author/marco-reggio/ https://rewriters.it/author/marco-reggio/ http://it.vegephobia.info https://resistenzanimale.noblogs.org/ https://resistenzanimale.noblogs.org/ https://bioviolenza.blogspot.com/ https://bioviolenza.blogspot.com/ http://www.liberazioni.edu/ deigaard horizon/horse horizon / horse on photography and multispecies bonding lee deigaard independent artist humanimalia 14.2 (spring 2024) abstract: photographs and text explore multi-species empathy and loss through a long-term companionate relationship with a significant horse as teacher, collaborator, muse, and beacon. the images were made without request or instruction during acts of reciprocal caretaking and exploration. they record the pauses and accommodations of two bodies within a landscape seemingly unchanging except with the light, seasons, time, perspective, and the infinite amplitude within the daily and familiar, between human and nonhuman. the body of the horse becomes actual landscape, imagined landscape, embodied landscape. the text derives from writings made in the horse’s presence. to approach, to touch another carries a charge — whether of transgression or congruence. the feeling of close connection in any intimate relationship also carries a sense of deep strangeness and far places. who bodies are, where and how they occupy the landscape — itself a body — defines relationships. this project considers how human and nonhuman animals experience space and proximity, distance and absence, and how we bond to one another. our histories and memories, yearnings, inform the through-lines of synchronous connection. keywords: multispecies empathy; horse photography; proprioception with animal bio: lee deigaard explores the topographies where one consciousness encounters another, describing a landscape given shape and substance by its animal protagonists, their sensory and imaginative worlds and their autonomy. with language, photography/video, installation, event, and drawing, her work approaches the animal from positions of equality, collaboration, and mutual curiosity and looks at multi-species empathy, animal cognition and personality, sensory processes of memory and grief, and the nature of intimacy. as an independent artist and researcher based in urban louisiana and rural georgia, she has exhibited and presented her work internationally. email: lee.deigaard@gmail.com copyright © 2024 lee deigaard this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 55–112. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.15525 mailto:lee.deigaard@gmail.com http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.15525 fig. 1 astrophel selection from near and far, 2016. unless otherwise noted, all images are by the author. 58 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) this might as well be a love letter to a horse, two beings sunk into the pine shavings among the cobwebs, dozing and communing, attuning respiration and heart rate, as time passes and knowledge deepens. to work with animal collaborator-teachers while producing artwork and papers for human audiences makes us translators, paraphrasers, thieves, memorialists, archivists, witnesses… mourners. to mix roles of apprentice (woman to horse) with caregiver and medical proxy (woman for horse) somewhat conveys the push and pull, showing and being shown, leading and following, ministering and receiving implicit in any close relationship that is based in mutual convictions of equality. if apprenticeship is training and tutelage, mentoring is believing in someone and supporting them. creative research is the search; the art-making derives from inspiration and exists in part as tribute. one to the other. i was his person. he was my horse. the privilege of proximity unlocks knowing. he mediated access to shared meditative states, creative spaces of insights and ideas; he shared what he knew and encouraged in dialogue, in the journey. i was never an equestrian but a hippophile1 who sought to serve and adore and learn. we met as young adults. i was untrained which meant he had much less to undo. perhaps i began knowing little (all relationships begin thus), but in pursuing service over mastery or control, i learned. he taught me. mourning involves forensic examination of shattered pieces. this essay therefore shares its form with cento poems created from fragments and phrases drawn from disparate sources. akin to how memory works, which is not in linear sequence, this essay collects and recombines excerpts, poems, lists, and notes i wrote in his presence as he slept or grazed along with essays, exhibition statements, and presentations drawn from these documents, shared experiences, and the imagery i made with him. to love is to fear loss. an artist 1 a hippophile, in my usage here, not only loves the horse (its greek roots: ἵππος [horse] and -φιλος [one who loves]), she loves him for who he is. theirs is a pair bond apart from bits, reins, and saddles, apart from riding. the hippophile cherishes proximity, seeks to serve the horse, and through both, seeks to better know him and be known by him. meeting eye-to-eye becomes a mutualism, a knowing more deeply (from which true love arises). fig. 2 photograph: “blanket triage” 2017. 60 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) fearing this loss lays crumbs for the questions that will come after and without him; she builds a database towards a forensic anatomy of love, for learning in the afterward; to remember and not forget, to hold in heart and mind the being with in the being without. the body of work ended when he did. i write the retrospection, then, of the introspective encounters. this small essay calls out to memory and to blue. let him live, reader, in your imagination. i will write like winter blanket triage when i sat bundled in the pasture mending torn straps with needle and dental floss as blue horse stood over me marking my actions, his warm breath and whiskers upon my face so that i felt his blessing and curiosity as i worked. i am his witness; here is my testimony. fragments: what we did, how we imagined excerpt from artist statement for moons revolve, moons adore, dec 2018 to know another, whether horse or person, is to mix empathy and nearness, vertigo and vast horizons. psyches and souls contain multitudes. one is held to another with gravitational pull. in deep space, we revolve, we adore. to perceive another involves limits closer to hand. gates and fences keep out, they keep in. we peer through narrow openings and perceive in fragments. notes on phone, aug 16, 2019 the memories of walking the pasture in the pitch dark, what i drew in the dust on his skin notes on phone, nov 3, 2015 his longing sustained gaze at the two skeletal horses [next door] (the care taking impulses of horses — the mirrored body language, the crossed / met glances) text to [barn owner] about donkey companion and blue, oct 2016 they’re doing the magic alignment like compasses even tho can’t see each other through solid door. fig. 3 detail: blue yonder [slant light], 2018–19. fig. 4 detail: moons revolve, moons adore, 10′ × 10′ wall vinyl, photograph with dye-sublimation print on aluminium (moon, 30″ diameter), 2018. deigaard , horizon / horse | 63 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) yearning / dreaming: steady star / midnight sun no woman or horse is replete and apart. rather, each is a part of, and their abiding together communes within, a vastness — a universality — which cannot be itself without them, nor they without it. every [woman and horse] resonates within the vibratory, respirating world. the landscape is a body; two bodies within a landscape are a relationship. duration and proximity are markers of both terrain and connection. to deeply know another, horse or human, is a wide-open frontier. the horizon, the convergence of earth and the sensory with the aspirational and ethereal sky, draws us and eludes us in equal measure. this is the meeting of species, of two, in a congruence of the granular and celestial. between horses, between humans, between humans and horses is presumption (a form of cognitive empathy) and empathy (a form of trespass, an act of hope, a move for connection). the flight response in prey animals, their keen anticipation in being both exquisitely alive to touch while prone to startle or flee, mirrors processes of intimacy. grazing in parallel, reclining to rest in tandem reveal the deeply tactful reinforcement of horses’ companionate mirroring. the aligning of self with another (within species, across species) both reflects and deepens bonding. a horse reads a person. a person dreams of being with a horse, of being a horse. in our dreams, signifying freedom, but more so in life, the horse shows us how to wordlessly know and convey which is also how to feel and express love. a horse is an apparition in the night, a watcher of moonrise and sunrise. once i sat with blue intending to write a poem. about him or buttressed by him as he breathed into my hair. he lowered his head, snuffled the paper in my lap, took it into his mouth gazing steadily at me and masticated it. i laughed and tugged, the paper tore. nothing lost, everything gained. parts and fragments become wholes; horses (and poems) reveal themselves. fig. 5 photograph: “eating the poem”, sept 1, 2016. fig. 6 steady star, digital video animation, installation with plastic toy horse and pine shavings, recorded audio of blue horse sleeping, 2012, installation view: new orleans museum of art, pride of place, curated by katie pfohl, 2017. 66 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) artist statement for in your dreams [horses], installation, videos, and photographs, 2012 growing up, old family portraits instilled in me a conviction that horses, too, were my kin. in the old photographs, the humans and horses seemed inseparable. in one, my great-grandmother cleo stands with cleo the horse… …a toy horse runs and never grows tired. a real horse breathes and snores, deep in sleep. longing becomes a dream; dreams persist. they must be tended. steady star explores the chimerical power of longing, the stamina of dreams and fixations. can longing prefigure a great love? can longing after losing that love preserve it? like the toy horse in the animation, when the beloved dies, he is not running free; he remains within the frame, which is to say, within your heart and mind. between you and your yearning is a tether. but he runs unencumbered above the clouds. before the horse, there was the vision and dream of him. in a way, this pre-visioning prepares for the future meeting and the opportunity, the yearning presaging the heightened emotional awareness upon meeting the other and that convergence, what can happen in that convergence, the being with. notes on phone in the stall with blue, aug 6, 2015 the horse looks at himself in the mirror… presses his face to the reflection and rubs up and down, his ear tips crimped against the wall he looks at [me] in the mirror, turns his head, [we] touch noses, turns back, [our] gazes meet again [in reflection] notes on phone, aug 27, 2016 making landscapes in colours horses [perceive]…of places they might never see like coral reefs making them big enough — ten times size of what i take in at arm’s length? deigaard , horizon / horse | 67 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) lifting and lowering of head to focus 20 / 60 vision studio list, 500 miles from blue, sept 19, 2017 …blue looking out an airplane window … landscapes for a horse —views he likes —where he used to live [and never returned] —scale relative to him —wide angle and monocular —sunsets —a way to embed scents into surfaces? make small framed portraits of what he eats [a gallery of the gustatory] number o’clock horse grass subject matter his, style mine … projecting into corners… with / intimacy / music/ and other missing yearning risks hagiography and nostalgia. and yet longing helps us hold the beloved in our mind’s eye. love does not end with absence. each whisker on a horse’s chin corresponds to a discrete site in the horse’s brain. through pallesthesia, the horse feels the firmament, its subtle signatures and unique vibrations, through his vascularized hooves and through his sinuses. touch is integral to all intimacy including companionate relationships with nonhumans. of course his horse-ness, my human-ness informed how and where we knew each other and through which languages. as i think of him now, four years since touching his warmth or feeling his whiskers on my cheek, we enter a body-less zone of the psyche and soul, a liminal place defined by threshold. a place in life i often found him waiting for me, hot summer days under the barn fan where, marking his breathing and relaxing into the stupefying heat, i fig. 7 photograph: “phone screen saver [hand to mouth]”, 2015. deigaard , horizon / horse | 69 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) emptied my mind. or rather, i opened it to discover him there, waiting for me to arrive. both of us suffered orthopedic injuries in our prior lives. our ensuing physical adaptations formed the basis, from the beginning, for our meeting each other eye-to-eye, one-to-one. upright as we were, we were grounded, neither carrying nor being carried. but bearing and being borne. sometimes i wonder, if we met again in some inchoate space (where longings gather), would i know him without his horse body? being human i doubt myself. i believe he would know me. in an instant. what does this look like from the outside? as impenetrable as any relationship until you watch for a bit. a list in an unsent email to myself, after a nature walk with blue, aug 28, 2017 blue eats: the scales of a pine cone gingko leaves off a tree dandelions dried oak leaves blueberry bush leaves dirt from a pile used to set masonry stones deigaard’s who is my horse? audio interview with lee (of blue), march 18, 2014 …it is a companionate relationship and one of deep intimacy, but that is tinged with gender a little bit because i find him courtly, i find him handsome. but not… with sexuality at all. it’s… intimacy. if you can describe intimacy as feeling your best self around another individual. […] there were some times i jerked awake in the middle of the night. as if he’d said my name. and that generally seemed to coincide with him needing me and having, like, unmediated pain [i could help him with]. but i did have a dream about him where — i guess we were going on a date [transcription is unfinished] fig. 8 outback selection from near and far, 2016. deigaard , horizon / horse | 71 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) excerpt from 21 (50 days × 1000 words), written on phone from the bathtub, nov 2023 …flirting with beloveds is not a shallow gloss, an entrapment. but an art of teasing and intense focus, of playfulness. how does one flirt with a horse? you might as well ask how does one fall in love with a horse? the heightening when the other is near. the brightening upon first sight. the oxytocin and the dopamine. the pleasure from presence. the reciprocal flow between two who feel similarly. i gush and laugh, tell him he is handsome. he pricks his ears. he turns his head to see me closely. he rests his chin upon my head and sighs. animals, horses approach obliquely. they ask and express with reserve. they watch us when we do not watch them. their freedom, in large part, is when they move without being [perceived]. against cosmic insignificance, we want to matter, to be held, to be acknowledged. we want, too, to want without covenant. to not be needed, if perhaps wanted. sometimes we want to be needed… …the brush of blue’s whiskers upon my cheek, the sweet smell of hay in his exhales, the crusts in the corners of his eyes from winter dust that i removed with the lightest of fingernails. memorizing his body with my hands. his body was an infinite horizon. it was my hearth. and haven. when i speak of his body, i speak of touch and rhythms (of breath and heartbeat). of odours and fragrances. of inchoate glow. of proximity and the comfort within it. of privilege in this proximity and the gratitude lacing through. in the last years of blue’s life, i acquired a portable piano and set to learning music i hoped he would like. i could only play beethoven, slowly, at what turned out to be more or less the speed of blue’s heart at rest. resonance. between trying and being, hoping to give and porously receiving. 72 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) i lugged the keyboard to the edge of the barn and field where he was free to walk far away if he chose. blue watched me set up then stood close to me and listened. i made many mistakes! sometimes he tickled my neck with his lips, and i laughed. i felt his encouragement. once when i stepped away, i heard him press a single key — a clarion tenor note — as if he were confirming a hypothesis. his lips left grass stains i refuse to wipe away. notes written from afar while thinking of him and his donkey friend, april 8, 2019 (23 days before hospitalization) do they like lower tones, more sonorous, less treble? do they prefer my slower playing, close to their heart rates? do they have an expectation of the “right” note, in key? do they prefer major keys to minor? rolling arpeggios? beethoven vs mozart? the aspect of social support — they come and listen because they see i’m doing it for them. then, do they enjoy it?… the “invasion” of sound: to mask environmental sounds they need / want to hear can cause them stress / when does the music encourage something else? ear actions show “expectations” within the melody, what happens when i hit wrong notes [ears are expressive as well as receptive] … from a motel next to the interstate typed into a google doc on phone, may 26, 2019 i played for blue [while he was at the hospital] phone recordings of the piano pieces i learned for him. because of the din of the fans, i held it up to his ear, and he listened. and he seemed to find it peaceful. he didn’t move away. deigaard , horizon / horse | 73 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) he rests his chin on my head. sometimes he looks at me very specifically. he lets me know he’s glad i’m there. and that he sees how i try to help him. and he indulges my anxious flitting about him… i cried in the stall today just as i did yesterday. from fear of his… re-injury and… fatigue. he stood with me, tactful gentleman. phone notes typed with blue in medical “stall rest”, june 17, 2019 is time more full-bodied to a horse? their short, shorter lives. they spend proportionately fewer hours asleep. they are wholly present and alive to the slightest motion, aroma, change in the air. do horses take the long view…? when you cannot wholly choose where you wish to go [or be], from this does patience (abiding) arise? does time stretch out as in prison? excerpts from studio notes on phone, 500 miles from blue, oct 17, 2017 make blue a wall hanging. quilt, company of other horses w texture knit him a cowl knit him an embrace … make him a mural of mares… a scene he can see himself in. … fig. 9 photograph: “a scene he can see himself in”, april 2016. deigaard , horizon / horse | 75 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) scenes to see him in: within / without, moons revolve, moons adore wall text for installation moons revolve, moons adore in the group show love and loss across species lines: the neuroscience of attachment curated by linda brant, orlando science center, winter / spring 2021 horses enter rem sleep, therefore they dream. the horse appears at rest in a gossamer hammock. the artist’s hair mingles with the horse’s. two moons revolve in the night sky and earthbound below. a horse’s true teaching, however direct or explicit, may arrive obliquely and embedded within life’s activities. the images of near and far were made incidentally during acts of care-taking and companionship without request or instruction. they are improvisatory, recording the proprioceptive pauses and accommodations of two bodies within a landscape seemingly unchanging except with the light and the seasons, time and perspective, and the infinite variety within the daily and familiar. the body of the horse becomes actual landscape, imagined landscape, embodied landscape. we gaze upon landscapes. we live within them. landscapes are also interior places of imagination and contemplation. what we think we see is not always what is. what we see, our perspective, is often determined by where we stand. this is analogous to common political and social processes; what feels real must exist. let the artist watch what the horse watches, stand with him and look beyond. to be close takes respect of difference as much as the draw of affinity, affection. written at the kitchen counter in pencil on index card, march 2022 the traumatic2 loss of blue was embedded in both the rural landscape where i could only visit — but not stay — and in a shared 2 in the being parted, as both of us wanted to continue, but also in the manner of death and an ending in runaway pain nothing could reach fast enough. 76 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) topography of the imagination that recedes towards the distant horizon with absence. in a perspective drawing, the horizon is where all lines converge. its etymology refers to “dividing, separating”, to being a boundary understood to be between earth and sky. the horizon — where land meets sky — is a place of possibility — where the sun rises and sets — it always recedes from us no matter the distance we travel toward it. for horses, it can be where predators first appear. or, too, the absent beloved upon her return. to approach, to touch another carries a charge — whether of transgression or congruence. the feeling of close connection in any intimate relationship also carries a sense of deep strangeness and far places. since his death, i study the moon as i studied the white blaze (the moon) on his shoulder (the night sky). if the imagination too is a landscape, intimacy is a journey towards an ever-receding horizon, cognizant of the soil beneath your feet, the vibrations and scents, the ephemeral yet utterly signifying. the horizon is the possibility; the journey is the caretaking, the quotidian, the time in proximity. the sun does not drop in the sky; rather the horizon rises to meet the setting sun. horizons, and we, move relative to the sun. we revolve. to watch the sunset or the night sky standing next to and at shared eye level with a loved one, with a horse, is to abide in the landscape together — and simultaneously to sense how little we know. binoculars and magnifying lenses amplify what the naked eye cannot otherwise see. they flatten space, not just in bringing the far distance into sharper relief but in compressing the distance between near and far. in photography, this distance is known as depth of field. images with shallow depths of field can be largely blurry; where they appear sharp is within a narrow range of distance. as with the pupil, a camera’s aperture and how much light it admits is a central control. inherent to greater depth of field is a bringing forward of the background in union with the foreground. fig. 10 midnight sun (iii) selection from near and far, 2016. 78 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) alternatively, a microscope enlarges what is invisible yet very near — what is, in fact, inside us or living on our skin. the microscopic — cells and synapses — can look and feel nearly astronomical. the horse’s binocular and monocular vision echoes these compressions and amplitudes. a camera on a tripod intrudes, disrupts the common frequency. the camera on the phone is quiet and does not cover my face in use. it uses no tripod and slips into my pocket. its depth of field is deep and therefore ambiguous. the telescopic compresses (which is intimacy). we are who we are, animated through the eye of the beholder. who are we without the animal witness, the animal philosopher who must study us for their very lives. in being with us, what do animals give up? what might they gain? blue’s body is the landscape. his body activates the landscape as he explores it. circular breathing: reciprocal / orbital / holding close in an argument for equality among species, of the longitudinal and steadfast, and the personal lyric across millennia, the poetic form most interior and embodied yet connective, let us hearken to a single horse. why? because one [horse] matters, all [horses] do. if one [horse] does not matter, then no [horses] do. humans often make rules about categories: proscriptions and banishments. individuals are not categories; they claim their space and live their lives in story, history, and in imagination (which is the future). to be with an animal, to know them, to be reciprocally responsive, is to commit to the details of their world: to consider the direction and force of the breeze, the movements of insects, the cresting sugars of grass, rates of respiration, of whiskers like fingertips. the personal lyric in poetry celebrates, amplifies deeply singular, often idiosyncratic experiences of love and loss, and yet it can traverse the ages recognized to its core from even the far future. deigaard , horizon / horse | 79 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) in times of pandemic, mounting extinctions, and distress at impending loss, in individual lives, the dramatic arc (inexorably personal) curves to the domestic, to partnering or clustering, and to acts of connection against annihilation. (without) excerpts from poem written after he died, conjugation (september poem), 2020 … if her yearning through dirty panes and curtains can spook a doe, who is to say a thought doesn’t carry consequence we don’t know the architecture of it is all only that the metaphors are filaments and thoughts… …sharpening, sharpening… that hindsight tool for photographs and grievers. she has seen it happen… because you cannot see, you must imagine, you must feel to the last, breath his upon her cheek and hers on his… the brush of whiskers, of lashes her flank pressed to his flank counting breaths, willing them to slow and ease, to mingled be only stay because you cannot see, you hope beset by memory and longing she walked into a web took its central strand into her mouth like a bit felt its light curb and mouth open, 80 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) backed away from its tug it sprang taut to release, to refrain then but write another verse… (in 21 years, blue never again felt a bit in his mouth.) written with him, in fear of being without him compilation, notes typed into phone next to sleeping horse, aug 6, 2015 horse sleep. sleep tadpoles in the trough dive deep when the horse sloshes the surface with his lips. they avoid overhead shadows. smaller than cherry pits. through the gate, he stops to eat the grass out of reach from inside the fence. she drapes the lead rope over his neck and goes to wait in the shade. things he touches: the rusted upended water trough, the plastic electric aerator, the sprayer tank with straps and wand, a bucket, three mouthfuls of crepe myrtle, a withered leaf. at the barn, the mower, the sprayer, the bucket, the grooming tools, the brush, the sink, he licks the sink, the brush again, the hat brim. down the hall to the rope, the manure wheelbarrow, the white horse has come inside his hindquarters turned to us his ears swiveled. the tiller, the rope, the bucket. when he pauses on his own on the hill and for a moment looks uncertain, his horseness, his horselessness, his central anxiety, the narrow amplitude of his daily experience and the repetition of routine. deigaard , horizon / horse | 81 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) as he dozes his lower lip relaxes and flaps, his nostrils flare his ears swivel his lips work as if he were speaking incantating … animal understanding and sympathy is nonverbal and feels sacred and private. blue horse held connection and the intimate space as sacred. but he was also personable, curious and sociable. other species recognized in him a gentle expansiveness and approached. birds alit upon his rump as he grazed. cats rolled on their backs and stretched beneath him. a child toddled between his legs. he and i took naps together, lying down in the shavings on our sides, facing the other. when i opened my eyes, i might find him looking at me. and when he opened his, he often saw me looking, too. i held myself utterly still. horses sleep lightly knowing they must be able to get up quickly enough to flee. they relax best when someone is their sentinel and keeping watch. i resisted (not always) the urge to touch his face. he had a sense of occasion, humour, and a benevolent cognizance of his charisma and beauty. to know and be known, to be seen, reinforces self-identity and sense of belonging in human and horse. not on parallel tracks within respective species (though this is also true) but in belonging to each other. the horse shifts his weight, his ears swivel. watching what catches his attention, what we see arising incidentally due to proprioceptive or sympathetic movements, this is meditative. it is being present. how do you hold onto this animal-mediated knowledge and awareness in their absence after they have died (or gone extinct)? without them, what do you know anymore? can you still see? horse sense(s) the horse sees very nearly in the round. he is alert to the long view (binocular vision) which uses two eyes. he studies you closely from the side through one eye (monocular vision). depending which eye is studying you, you can tell if he feels relaxed or nervous. he will 82 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) turn his head to use the eye (and brain hemisphere) which suits the apprehension (or the recognition). each eye can see around 150 degrees (combined he can see 300) from nearly the edge of his nose sweeping along his flank to just off his rump. intra-ocular transfer — when the same object can initially seem novel to a horse when encountered from opposite sides — means he is continually negotiating different points of view. our hands are often within our visual fields. we look at what we touch. the horse’s hand — his muzzle, whiskers, lips, nostrils — is in his blind spot. lips are fingers, enhanced by whiskers as fingertips. prehensile lips sort through grains and even powders, unlatch gates and doors and open lids. they work zippers and buckles. horses use their teeth to massage (reciprocal grooming) and to poke or nip. horses use their mouths to investigate. most equestrian training shoves the horse’s nose away lest he bite, thereby suppressing his curiosity and understanding of his environment as well as his communication. a horse’s mouth, like a human hand, is exquisitely sensitive. the horse’s “hand” can also taste and smell via the flehmen between his lip and gum. touch mingles with taste and smell more than sight. happiness, as with humans, shows in the mouth, in the zygomatic smile. the horse considers, chews and licks. his cognitive processing — the literal manifestation of rumination — shows in his mouth. the human hand and the horse’s mouth as fulcrums of communication both investigate and attach to touch. touch is reciprocal in that two surfaces necessarily meet. touch both receives and returns sensation. it requires invitation, permission, initiation, and reception. touch establishes boundaries between bodies while also connecting them. this kind of deep awareness is foundational for empathy leading to understanding, to companionable comfort in one another’s company. the horse leads the way. anticipation of and pleasure in the other’s presence is a privilege. recognition of presence through touch doesn’t judge or categorize. deigaard , horizon / horse | 83 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the horse naturally attunes himself — to heartbeat, rates of breathing, he is sensitive to pheromones. a horse can teach you how to be in the moment and all its fullness — which is where both empathy and art reside. horses weigh a thousand pounds or more and yet they perceive the minute dilations and contractions of our pupils, feel every insect. horses know the subtle language of the body; their proprioception, their awareness of their body (and of yours), its orientation within itself and relative to another, is acute. this kind of physical awareness defines intimacy. it is difficult to hide your true self from a horse. the horse receives information from all his senses. to categorize, he seeks confirmation from multiple sources. as he is alert to the landscape, he is alert to the lens of a camera or any shift in focus of a companion. some horses seek novelty and are curious about where we go when we shut the door. many horses prefer to be left alone. horses are kept in horse places, which often means confinement. humans, sadly, have our human places. i am interested in where we invite horses to enter (literally and imaginatively). and where horses are curious to enter. i am most interested in where a horse invites me to enter. blue was uncommonly open to humanity, to me. i first saw him in a backyard, his head held high, ears tipped forward, chest nearly against the fence, curious about the visitor. he looked as if he wanted to meet and be met, to know and be known. how he claimed space with his intelligence and personality, his charisma. i know that blue drew me in immediately. i remember the feelings and the magnetism, his keenness and vividness; i had eyes only for him. how can i describe a feeling so explicit, so bodily legible, that i never looked for the words. animals walk through the world without carrying anything, their bodies as vehicles of motion and expression; in the anthropocene each of them, predator or prey, feels and is utterly vulnerable. while animals have their own languages and even learn our spoken languages, they are extremely gifted at reading motives and hidden 84 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) intentions within humans, more than we are of ourselves. our efforts in return have been blinkered. horses are avatars of climate change (heat stroke and anhidrosis — formerly afflictions of the tropics — are moving ever northward) and harbingers of the economy (rates of euthanasia and abandonment of horses increase ahead of market changes). horses are seen as markers of privilege, but horses’ lived experience, in too many cases, closely parallels domestic violence and processes of gaslighting and being silenced while being required to perform complete compliance at all times. the language of conquest has long been applied to relationships between the sexes; it also applies to how many of us treat horses. horses are powerful animals who nonetheless hold this power in reserve, employing their keen emotional intelligence (and demonstrated memory of, for example, whether a human smiled or frowned the last time they saw them). their acute proprioception and delicate vivid sensory world, the privilege of proximity to them heighten and intensify feelings of connection and mutual understanding. unto horses are projected fantasies of freedom yet their lives are largely circumscribed. horses are expected to become passive purveyors and channels of human freedom and entitlement, without protest or reciprocal communication. we know from studies of trauma and domestic violence that the brain is changed with verbal and physical abuse or neglect, excessive control, and unpredictability. being in the presence of a horse outside of performance objectives holds one in the moment,heightens the physical sensations art seeks to engage — of sight, touch, breath, dilations, subtle vibrations, sound, and shifts in light. horses have dichromatic vision, humans trichromatic, but there are colours, particularly in the yellow, blue spectrum that we see the same. as prey animals, horses’ binocular vision — which is their depth perception (what recedes, what obtrudes) and distance vision — and neurosensory orientation is to the horizon: what or who may broach it and what will it mean to their safety. their pupils — in a kind of formal and functional sympathy — are rectangular and horizontal. deigaard , horizon / horse | 85 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) notes on an airplane flying over the appalachian mountains, may 26, 2022 places i have summoned his memory: — in an mri machine — waiting for an ultrasound technician to show films to the radiologist — in a la-z-boy recliner before emdr therapy — in an operating room, the anaesthesiologist adjusting dials (how hard blue fought sedation) says: “think of a peaceful place” the word, his name only, the colour before image. i am out, blackness, before i see his face. in reality, i think of him countlessly and seamlessly. this unrepresentative list occurs to me on an airplane looking down on the quilt of landscape, rivers branching like trees, the suggestion of omniscience, of the insurmountable (distance, scale) relegated below the clouds. the occasions listed here are (human) medical — and derive from imaging or pre-imaging, or trying to imagine while moving your eyes to cross hemispheres of the brain (like horses’ side to side monocular vision modulating with the frontal and binocular) — or preparing for peering beneath the skin, the entering of interior places and canals with ultrasonic waves or probes with cameras. in order to enable the easier breach and penetration of the corporeal, for processes performed on and within the body, i conjure not a place as a state of mind but one who is no longer here, not even at a distance (has travelled past the horizon), who is wholly incorporeal. i make a cave of absence and flood the crater of his loss with sunlight and memories. go beneath the surface. make pictures ahead of pain. stabilize the body and mind by imagining a star. a horse body as the night sky among the constellations. studio / process statement, aug 2019, four weeks after his death i’ve worked closely for many years with animal family members including a dearly loved horse who was a long-time artistic collaborator and inspiration. 86 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) i have never been interested in posing or compelling or even structuring animal participation. rather i’m drawn to what draws them, to their personalities, to considering our shared voluntary experiences and cross-species communication. so much of my work occurs in the in-between moments of caretaking and support (mutual), between grazing and seeking shelter (which are themselves analogous to common studio processes). being wholly present and spending time in proximity with an animal who has sought me as i reciprocally sought him without directing and determining unfolding events leads to better ideas. my animal collaborators are beacons, pointing the way. moving with an animal, seeing what he sees, encourages a reflexive photography, the camera as an extension of the body in movement with another body. the time outdoors and among animals sharpens my other senses and heightens my receptivity to the unexpected, to responsive improvisation. while drawing or image sorting, the companionate presence of animal family members, the deeply tactful wordless reinforcement through their bodily alignment with mine emboldens me. artists often work in the interstices… i am interested in spatial and bodily boundaries and where experiences and points of view collide and merge and separate. working in volume of imagery means that sorting and associatively batching are constant ongoing processes. animal senses are swift and instantaneous. my understanding comes more slowly and often through retroactive review where, frame by frame, i gain insight into my animal partner, his reactions and processing. it can feel like two separate processes, exterior and interior, the during and the after, the with and the without: the impressionistic, immersive experience outdoors, and the searching, sequencing, writing, and editing within indoor spaces and digital desktops. but of course they pervade one another. memory and history, insight, emotional and physical connection and disconnection weave through. to be with animals, to make art is to communicate primarily nonverbally, to heighten awareness of senses and feelings of immediacy. deigaard , horizon / horse | 87 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) on a blue post-it note pasted to studio wall, artist residency, joan mitchell center, sept 2017 franz marc, how does a horse see the world? (in his paintings, they are up to their own business.) i study equine colour vision and make this list: cadmium yellow medium indian yellow yellow ochre raw umber cerulean blue italian raw sienna i search online for vistas which blue and i might see similarly, in the “same” colours. like on the prow of a boat in antarctica, its grey and blues and tinges of gold sun on white. or through the space station window peering down at the marble earth of swirling blues and yellows and browns. places we will never go and where no distances seem too vast. i pin 4″ × 6″ glossy prints of these impossible places to the studio wall and feel the thread between us, 500 miles, taut and robust. biography: his-story blue, from his certificate of registration, was foaled august 1, 1988 as wonder’s blue. black roan, markings: four stockings, under jaws, under chin, bald. blaze and moon, flower and shadow, the names of kittens and milkmaids, the title of a knight pervade his family tree. pride and wonder. shadow and midnight. and go boy [go gently]. he was sold by other people at least three times before he came to me. he lived variously in fields bounded by barbed wire or oak boards painted white, in a residential backyard with a dog house and a german-speaking shepherd. one barn was weathered grey, another 88 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) painted yellow like goldenrod. another was red with white trim. one was masonry with heavy sliding doors and metal bars. he was born in a verdant valley of farms and pasture, 150 miles long and only a few miles wide with high-walled escarpments to each side. he lived all his life on cherokee land in the humid sub-tropical climate of the cumberland plateau and the valley and ridge portion of the appalachian mountains. for a few years, he lived near the forced river embarkment of the trail of tears where sandhill cranes still fly overhead to hiwassee. perhaps one or two of these ancient tall birds alit in his pasture and met his gaze. other species could recognize a gentleness and mercy in him. tornadoes came close, one an e4 ⅓ of a mile wide with 175 mph winds. he lived among shale, sandstone, and carbonate (limestone and dolomite) rocks and soils. for twenty years, he lived in valleys running northeast and southwest on opposite sides of the same long mountain. for ten years he watched the mountain sunrise, the next ten, the mountain sunset. why are mountains blue? why is a black horse blue? (blue roan refers to a horse who has white hairs mingled among his black ones) the mountain is a range of pale to midnight blues; it can glow russet, lavender, and pink across seasons and times of day. the mountain blushes and deepens, predicting weather. when his longtime former companion died atop this mountain, i did not know the news to tell him. and yet that very day, i wrote down how he aimed his body to the mountain like the needle of a compass and stood motionless for a while without grazing, his head lowered, his neck straight, his body like a table. for one month towards the end he lived between mountains named house and clinch. he knew hail, high winds, rain, snow, and floods, freezing cold and blazing heat. flies, mosquitoes, ticks, enormous horse flies. his eyes would widen and he would, without flicking his deigaard , horizon / horse | 89 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) skin, hold still for my help, the only insects i killed, those who would leave golfball-sized welts upon his flank. he watched at least three of his companions die. one was felled on the road next to him by a speeding car, two others by the needle who, legs buckling, folded into their pre-dug graves adjacent to his pasture. common animals visiting pastures where he grazed white-tailed deer, foxes, coyotes, raccoons, opossums, wild turkeys, rabbits, bluebirds, rat snakes, groundhogs, field mice, eastern meadowlarks, mourning doves. where he moved and lived for thirty-one years, relative to his place of birth as the crow flies (from a google doc blue’s life iii) he first moved 45 miles east, then 32 miles sw (35 miles from place of birth), then 43 miles further sw (70 miles from place of birth). from there, he moved 20 miles se (72 miles from birthplace)) and then 19 miles east (47 miles south from where he was born). thence 110 miles ne, 11 miles due south and then back, 22 miles northeast and then back. except for three hospital stays those last months, each of these moves were total and complete, without return or visit. written on an index card at the kitchen counter ++++“the rareness of blue in nature:” why does a horse have a moustache? so he can find grass in low light and identify which are most nutrient-rich. names of pasture grasses: (hay) timothy and alfalfa fescue, orchard grass, winter rye bermuda grass, zoysia, bluegrass queen anne’s lace, passion flowers clover and dandelions… fig. 11 blue ridge selection from near and far, 2018 deigaard , horizon / horse | 91 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) dx the journey / guild of pain from transcript of proprioceptiveness and being creatively with the animal (bartram + deigaard], living with animals conference, eku, richmond, ky, march 9, 2023 …it is this…cohabitating question, the question of by and for whom and whose home it is. and there are times when animals invite you into their space, they tell other animals that you are okay. there’s whole networks that develop when you are trusted not to invade or to, you know, coerce… there is a whole deep way of knowing which becomes play, which becomes: we could call it research, but it becomes resonance and knowing another which is in essence what we are working to do. looking at empathy, intimacy and this resonance of knowledge and recognition of another. i met blue when he was 8½ years old and already in discomfort. i took him to the vet school hospital who diagnosed navicular disease. until the age of five, it is likely he was shod in weighted platform wedge shoes in the cruel big lick style of the region which led to his extremely early onset and frequently painful orthopedic issues. tennessee walking horses then (and even to present day) were still too frequently “sored” on the soles of their hooves so that, in pain, they would pick their feet up higher and faster in show rings. blue was uncommonly stoic. i was told that he had been bred and then gelded by age five as explanation for his demi-stallion ways. horses’ skeletons are still fusing until they’re eight years old. link texted to self while writing this paper the sad cruelty behind the tennessee walking horse, ofhorse.com 92 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) email letter to a close friend, july 29, 2019 july 14 … yesterday, i lay down in the shavings with blue while he napped. he’s back in a navicular pain crater… the searingly hot barn time with blue is real peace, despite the worry if we will make it through this. july 22 … i think i hold a guild membership in the school of pain… tending dearly beloved blue for 23 years of always lurking ghastly navicular disease pain (he’s the real pain sensei) is its own form of non-medical expertise that demands his human companion demonstrate many unnatural-to-her traits of advocacy, faith, hyper-conscientiousness, slow observation, collation of details of varying sizes along varying scales, psychological strategy, holding people to account [the generosity and expertise of so many], and managing a portfolio of systems, some solvable, others less so… […] i know that blue may die, sooner rather than later, or [by what the senior vets say] we may enjoy years. i know nothing much is foreseeable, and i take this (slightly quixotic but not unreasonable) journey of ours at its face. each day of togetherness matters. neither of us wastes these days in that blue’s gifts of seemingly telepathic connection or at least extraordinary emotional wisdom is good at holding us both in the moment. in this way, being with him is like meditation… …monday morning, blue went into surgery performed in the last week before his retirement by a slight man, deeply introverted and yet world renowned, to receive bilateral front leg neurectomies. [emily dickinson poem texted to self while sitting cross-legged in the shavings: “if your nerve deny you—/ go above your nerve…”] i am terrified of this. and yet it releases him nearly immediately from this breakaway, this meteoric pain that grew and grew… a pain that has sequestered itself, allowed its muzzling secondary to a peaceful life these last ten years in particular. it raged and towered like a deigaard , horizon / horse | 93 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) tsunami. and then it blasted through all of our lovingly built structures and coping methods… the solution to pain, to cut and extract the nerves to create the absence of pain. there is a price. which is that someday, he may catastrophically fail, his deep flexor tendons sawed through by the serrated navicular bone. and he will lose the mechanical ability to stand. and this would be the clear irrevocable end. today i watched blue walk normally down the hall [looking about interestedly], and i dared to hope a little bit. what i saw as a last ditch intervention is not these days a rare surgery… all horses deserve freedom of movement, to stand or walk away at will. the management of chronic navicular pain demands this. the horse vascularizes through his hooves and legs as he walks and moves. when a horse shreds his tendon in an accident as blue did, the medical treatment is prolonged confinement to a stall as the tendon heals. in opposition to the relief, to the release of pain in a horse is the necessity for buffering his gi tract against the risk of ulcers. blue and i with him were determined to thread between. could his tendon heal against the worsening of navicular discomfort in confinement? could the buffering against potential ulcers hold off against the duration required of pain medications towards healing? each barn at which we found ourselves in and out of the hospital and rehab, blue horse reached out to his stall mates. he was gentle and interested, concerned with the distress of others. in his own pain, next to another horse with tendon injuries, he stood with his nose near the bars, and he modeled steadiness for the other horse. he breathed deeply and stood with them. how does he convey this? how do you describe charisma and wisdom? except that you see the other horse stop pacing and kicking the boards. you see the other horse stand in his stall close to blue and begin to lower his head, to breathe deeper and more slowly. phantom pain refers to pain experienced regardless of a limb’s amputation. the pain sites itself externally-in the space of absence, but of course it arises and is piercingly internal. deaths of loved ones can 94 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) resemble amputations in that they are total losses of familiar physical bodies once connected by touch and proximity and proprioception. a neurological treatment for phantom pain creates a visage of the missing limb in order to reconnect mind and body towards alleviating phantom pain. photographs, artwork do not resurrect. but they communicate and buttress memory, reinforce longing and the inchoate yet haptic state of being with. being with heightens primary senses. being without resides in painful memory. somatic memory can invoke sensations, felt bodily and in the present, of being near him. somatic memory can be how the body stores trauma but also intimacies felt deeply. being with / attempt to predict, prepare for being without collected from email drafts typed into phone next to sleeping horse, aug 28, 2014 …separation anxiety is not the same as grief. duration however short is not the salient point but the severing of the thread. to protest the separation preserves the thread. proximity is a covenant… afterwards you dream of him. of the fear in his eyes, the fear in yours you tried to hide. then later — there are dreams like this: he strains through the murky darkness to meet you in the portico — a place halfway between inside and out, between the light and the cold darkness, a place of trespass for both of you. a big horse calls to him, stomps, and he turns, pricks his ears, and runs, gallivants, unimpeded by arthritis, by bone spurs, by stiffened joints, a foal again, all legs and eagerness and boundless hope / possibility. …every time it starts from scratch. the curious horse who licks your arm. the wary one who stops at your touch, stills his reflexes, and waits to see what will happen next… he has written himself in you. fig. 12 fata morgana selection from near and far, 2018 96 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) from google doc notes for lost touch shared breath, march 29, 2022 when limbs overlap, the edge between them wanders. whose edge depends on lifting and resting, yielding and pressing. to draw this line upon a page is not always possible. the viewer, like the artist, must recall touch, the sensation of heat, covalence and photosensitivity, as if the drawing could be a photograph, transparent and burned into memory as sunlight through lashes, heavy, ephemeral… and yet one limb presses another, who presses back; their cambria merge. and the edge no longer wanders. becomes a crease, a folding, an enfolding, a commitment of parts, one to the other. this is inosculation, proximity become whole. a certain loss of liberty ensues. final necropsy, july 29, 2019 …until pain no longer controllable… …owner requests heart fixed separately. heart weight: 4.1 kg heart percentage of body weight: 0.9% heart weight high or low: high (adult normal is .7%) lungs float: yes notes typed into phone, jan 31, 2015 … he might like italian opera … fig. 13 high desert night selection from near and far, 2018 98 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) death / during / after (without) / fragments from a letter written to a friend (3 days after), aug 1, 2019 …the intern said afterwards… the barn owner, on one of the field service visits, had said to her… “that horse really really loves that woman. it’s [written] all over his face when he sees her.”… blue liked in these final months to… put one eye close to mine… we were eye to eye as he died. one of blue’s many gifts in life, as it was in his death, was how he coaxed a shared meditative state… showed how to maintain presence in the moment, awareness and focus. of being tuned into a shared frequency. i shave the white moon on his right shoulder and place the short hairs in a baggie. i take the hair on his cheek and over his heart. i clip his chin whiskers. they get their own baggie. i borrow the vet’s sharpie marker and draw on the shaved skin near blue’s heart (to write myself into him, upon him). i hallucinate the rising and falling of his chest. july 28, 2019 … i breathed in his last exhales. septicemia … letter, aug 2019 dear friend, the college of veterinary medicine would like to extend our condolences during this time of loss… it is normal and natural to experience a broken heart because your beloved animal is gone… deigaard , horizon / horse | 99 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) excerpt, transcript from a zoom meeting, june 2023 earlier… i talked about reading an interview with a neuroscientist and the question being asked, “can you love from an empty room?” does love only exist transmissorily in two directions to have life or to mean something? and the answer is “no”. because, you can love from an empty room… you can love from afar; you can love without incursion. you can love without claiming. you can love animals without expecting to be loved back. what do you do with this love from a remove? it is a very real thing; it is not a figment. it is not something only grown from nostalgia or from imagination. the imagination is absolutely essential to the creative space, which is action. it is essential to empathy, because the processes of cognitive empathy are going to involve imagination and the imaginative leap. these are the processes in play… which of them will last or matter… it’s a kind of speaking into the unspeakable void — the words and art that we send out. it’s a form of speaking as justice that comes from principles, but is an inherently communicative act. it’s a telegraphic thing. i think about it a lot with the communications of animals and the ways i try to live my life: my awareness of them and looking for their presence always and considering where i am and my role in it. that kind of quietness and way of being is part of deep listening… or helping with the levers of empathy, or helping accessibility [towards knowing animalness] without exposure [of the animal] — the things that poetry does, which is leaping time and space where something that is immediate and personal two thousand years ago has the same force. we are talking about those things and not about answers. fig. 14 photograph: “close quarters”, july 17, 2019. deigaard , horizon / horse | 101 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) in memoriam the horse in the dark pasture sees the same moon. he tastes the change in seasons, the cresting waning sugars in the grass. what came together from fragments is torn again. let us pick up the pieces. once i was loved truly madly deeply by a horse named blue whom i loved truly madly deeply. he taught me in love and with love what i most needed to know. through him i see the horses on the plains, the river they make, and i am parched for the sight of them. i see them and i love them and the flow of history and horizon (which is the future) suspends there in the cooling desert air as the sun drops behind the mountain. no. as the plains rise and cover the sun. near and far depicts inner topographies of shared consciousness where blue and i met and were together and free to explore. to feel as another, to feel with another, to feel without the other: empathy can become love; and grief (through which love lives on) maps itself from the individual to the collective and back again. i’m speaking here about animal mediated, freely offered, access to insight, to ideas, to creativity, to making the work in the presence of and with the other in reciprocal companionship, in collaboration, in mutual expressions of artistry. art-making and laying down memories ahead of my feared loss of him shared contours, as much as we both sought understanding, in the actions of love and the preservation of this singular beacon’s transmissions. his generous participation, his curious inclinations, humour and affection, his conviction always (mine too) that he mattered, that human discourse was his to join in, if he chose it (nay, he led it.) fig. 15 sunset selection from near and far, 2018 deigaard , horizon / horse | 103 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) excerpt from 27 (50 days × 1000 words), nov 2023 what did blue memorize of me and i of him? he and i met telescoping the time between. his gift for abiding now and being fully: how does this not make interminable the waiting for the beloved? because he was himself and knew himself, he and i, we, were the grace notes without which the daily mechanics, the daily subsistence and caretaking of self must continue. to love so totally and not be subsumed? to love so telescopically and not forget or diminish? the patience inherent to great love is astonishing. in constancy is the duration. in duration the memory. in memory the recall. the return and the promise of return is the future. to be known, to know, to know further: this is the ranging, the travelling, the learning, the keening and hearkening. this is the heartening: the oxygenating, the circulating. until the cessation of life. announcement of death to those who knew him from afar, instagram, aug 1, 2019 in memory of blue horse who showed the way with infinite patience, tenderness, wisdom, and wit… sunrise, moonrise, horizon-rise we watched together. he was the night sky and the morning glow. partner, art collaborator, muse, teacher, poetry editor, explorer, most significant of others, benevolent and charismatic to all species, eternally beloved, blue (1988–2019). the photograph of blue sky is his. fig. 16 photograph by blue, oct 2016 (taken with his lips) fig. 17 daybreak selection from near and far, 2018 fig. 18 blue’s moons an installation of photographs of the moon since his death, 2019–22 fig. 19 photograph: blue’s right eye, 2019 fig. 20 (opposite) top: blue yonder, detail [vapor trail], 2019. bottom: blue yonder, detail [crater’s edge / cloud sacrum], 2018–9. [note: crater’s edge depicts two figures on the rim of a volcano] fig. 21 (above) black dunes selection from near and far, 018 fig. 22 detail, moons revolve, moons adore, two room installation, detail wall sculpture (conduit pipe and lycra), 10′ × 10′, 2018. deigaard , horizon / horse | 111 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) endnote …i have been looking at intimacy as a different kind of knowledge than a rider’s request of a horse or a horse’s indication of tension or muscular response to his rider though there is overlap in proprioceptive awarenesses and sensory processing with any such proximity. riding is still based in equine service to the human — and it is the very unique rider who does not employ the (even if merely suggestive or lightly wielded) essentially negative curbs of bridle and bit. most discussions and research into horse-humanness privileges the relationship of rider to horse. i find i prefer not to cite sensory examples or research results that derive primarily from or are directed towards riding and harness activities. i am hoping to foreground intimacy as an abiding with another without expectation of outcome or performance directive. and related to the photographic series, a thinking about horizons not only as destinations to be ridden towards but of perceiving and conceiving of the other, their unknowability, their utter specificity, the telescoping of the near and far. and the role of memory and imagination in empathetic connection and deepening understanding, in retroactive as well as anticipatory insight. i am interested in meeting the horse on the ground, eye-to-eye, and in the best conditions of relative equality we can create for ourselves, horse and human, towards what enables and upholds emotional connection and the freedom to choose it or reject it, the porosity and mutual curiosities of two individuals, what the horse initiates and communicates to be followed by the human. working knowledge of many of the things research has been exploring in the last decade came to me as direct and generous teaching from the horse over the last thirty years. any of us who have lived closely and compassionately with animals have been glad to see the accumulation of experimental results proving what animals have taught pretty explicitly in our domestic and companionate settings for a very long time. i think my essay begins and dwells within the intimate bond, porousness between two who 112 | deigaard , horizon / horse humanimalia 14.2 (2024) want to learn about and know the other, who seek companionship and deep understanding, above all else, who are not invested in the horse-rider dynamic but in the support of who the other is. and what artwork can be made of and about such an intimacy, in forms of research and of being with the other, and not permitting the pursuit of results or of formal considerations to dictate interactions. is there a way to conduct the relationship in full presence while learning, incorporating, and understanding better through the artmaking (that is collaboratively achieved via the abiding together in curiosity and receptivity). fish, review of moore living capital and the quantum ethnography of spider goats kenneth fish review of: lisa jean moore. our transgenic future: spider goats, genetic modification, and the will to change nature. new york: new york university press, 2022. xviii + 214 pp. 23 b/w illus. $89.00 (hb), $30.00 (pb). kenneth fish is associate professor of sociology at the university of winnipeg. email: k.fish@uwinnipeg.ca book review mailto:k.fish@uwinnipeg.ca transgenic organisms destabilize boundaries. insulin-producing bacteria, pesticide-resistant soybeans and cancerous mice are among the products of genetic engineering techniques that blur the lines between microbial, plant and animal species that have taken millennia to evolve. at once living organisms and products of human ingenuity, transgenic beings trouble the sacred boundary between the natural and the artificial, confusing the science of molecular biology with its technological application. political boundaries are also destabilized as radical environmentalists and religious conservatives find common ground in their resistance to the genetic engineer’s violation of the purity of nature. genetic engineering creates new assemblages of humans and nonhumans and, in the process, puts under the microscope our social theoretical frameworks. no wonder that these living products of technoscience have received so much attention from scholars in animal studies, science and technology studies, and cultural studies, those fields that aim to cross the conceptual boundaries dividing the disciplines. in our transgenic future, lisa jean moore explores the destabilizing effects of goats genetically engineered to produce spider silk in their milk. lighter and stronger than steel, the silk has potential applications in everything from medical sutures to bulletproof vests. following in the science studies tradition of bruno latour and donna haraway, moore uses ethnography and thick description to explore the complex and contradictory ways that technoscience works within the context of neoliberalization, rationalization, and the disenchantment of nature. she travels to a florida forest to collect spiders, to an idaho farm to meet and milk the transgenic goats, and to the labs where the r & d and purification of the spider silk takes place. the primary data source is a series of interviews with various scientist-entrepreneurs involved in the creation and use of the goats. these are supplemented with her own photographs of the field sites, cartoons, and personal conversations with family members and friends. eschewing positivist objectivity, moore places herself at the centre of her analysis, and her biography and immediate impressions in the field are interwoven throughout. “my observations are an epistemological and methodological move toward an even more micro, copyright © 2023 kenneth fish this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 445–451. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.17913 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.17913 fish, review of moore | 447 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) almost quantum, level,” she writes, “where my interpretation included feelings, discussions, relationships, affects, and sensations” (14). she makes her methodological choices clear in the beginning and never shies away from the difficult theoretical, political, and personal questions she faces along the way. the first chapter introduces the orb-weaving spiders whose silk ultimately links the complex set of human and nonhuman actors encountered throughout the book. for context, moore provides a description of the spiders and identifies the various actors who have long recognized the military, medical, and other commercial applications of their silk. but it’s really during the spider-collecting expedition and her interview with an entomologist that the analysis comes alive. moore’s description is vivid as she comes to appreciate the beauty of the spiders and realize the “selective speciesism” (33) that shapes both animal studies scholarship and animal welfare policy in prioritizing the cute and cuddly. she finds kinship with the spiders as a woman, mother, and feminist scholar and her encounter with them raises questions concerning patriarchal oppression, as well as her own experience with artificial insemination. yet, it also raises difficult ethical questions as she is “left to consider how humans’ domination of spiders, at least in this collection expedition, dislocated and deprived female spiders of their typical lived experience” (47). while critical animal studies often displays this tension between feelings of kinship and concerns with domination, moore’s encounter with the creepy and crawly allows her to explore it in refreshing and often surprising ways. the spider goats make their appearance in the book’s second chapter. after a brief history of the development of the goats, we are transported to the farm. moore’s interviews are particularly effective here in revealing the tension between the “emotional engagement” and “cognitive detachment” of those who must care for creatures whose lives are subordinated to human interests, and who are ultimately killed and disposed of when they become obsolete. but moore struggles with her own feelings and ethical judgements as well. despite the empathy she feels for goats whose lives are so humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 448 | fish, review of moore limited, and whose offspring are taken from them, she realizes her vision of goat liberation is informed by patriarchal assumptions around what is “natural” for (human) mothers. and despite a “critical sociological” reflex to regard science and technology as domination, her attitude toward her human subjects turns out to be no less complicated. “they were not cavalier or unethical people,” she writes. “they were open and honest in front of me, patiently explaining every detail of their work. and still i couldn’t shake how the clinical measurement of a goat’s worth was the spider silk protein in her milk. how could i represent these people without my own judgements seeping out?” (94–95). these kinds of questions abound in the book and moore faces them squarely and offers no easy answers. this commitment to asking difficult questions continues in chapter three when moore locates the spider goats within their political economic context. she begins with a brief overview of the science of transgenics, using a conversation with her daughter to covey the technical details in a user-friendly way. she comments on corporate science and neoliberal capitalism — as well as on weberian notions of rationalization and disenchantment of nature — and it’s in relation to these larger-scale social processes that she begins to account for what is unique about the spider goats. “while previous human–goat interactions involved a co-constituted history of entanglements, goats have become useful to humans not as goats. the goats are now a system of production, making something entirely not of the goat but the spider silk protein desired by scientists (and the market)” (102). yet, despite her attention to broader political economic structures, moore avoids regarding them as monolithic. there are underlying tensions and contradictions at every turn that are revealed most clearly in her interviews with those who must reconcile a concern with the goats as “sentient creatures and a professional need to think of them as machines” (114). this machine metaphor proves in the end to be a central theme of the chapter as moore effectively locates the spider goats within a hyper-rationalized form of capitalism where life itself becomes harnessed as a means of production. the disciplinary boundary between animal studies and political economy is destabilized in a particularly stark way here as she confronts the spider goats as living capital. fish, review of moore | 449 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) in chapter four the spider silk reappears, only now as a product of technoscience intended for the market. moore’s central concern here is uncovering the human motivations underlying the creation and use of the spider goats. while aware of the drive to accumulate profit and the market pressures of capitalism, she wants to avoid reducing human desire to an effect of these. she assesses the value of psychoanalytic theory in this regard, which she considers a “modality of thinking through human motivations beyond commercial opportunism” (137) and a way of uncovering “underlying primitive agonies that motivate innovation” (139). ultimately, moore is ambivalent, convinced of the power of a marxist critique in highlighting the role of capitalism in motivating innovation, but unwilling to reduce technoscience to such motivations simply because her interviews reveal a more complex narrative. “i am not trying to skirt a marxist critique,” she concludes, “and despite the obligatory ‘everything is driven by profit’ moral to the story, i do see how human workers (lab techs, herdsmen, scientists, me) make their work meaningful, even if it is driven by the pursuit of capital” (151). while there is something of a false dichotomy here in the notion that a focus on capital is necessarily contrary to the notion that workers “make their work meaningful”, there is no question that such meaning has often been neglected by political economists and moore makes a valuable contribution to labour process analysis in this regard. our transgenic future demonstrates the value of ethnography to science and technology studies, and to a critical social science more generally. there is a feeling of discovery and wonder throughout the book as questions are raised on the fly. in place of discreet and stable things, moore highlights processes and relations. “i take all these different pieces — spider legs tickling my forearm, math equations handwritten by my daughter, plastic tubes shooting out modified milk, baby goats’ incessant cries — and put them in contact” (149). processes of capitalism and rationalization are ever present, but these are messy, lived experiences that are always contradictory. but it’s perhaps the contradictory experience of moore herself that is revealed most effectively in this quantum ethnography of spider goats as she faces the many destabilizations she humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 450 | fish, review of moore encounters in a self-reflexive way, questioning her assumptions as sociologist, feminist and mother. there are insights both highly philosophical and deeply personal on every page, all conveyed in an engaging style. of course, ethnography conducted at this quantum level must always sacrifice a detailed examination of large-scale social transformations. to moore’s credit, these transformations are present in the form of the anthropocene, late capitalism, danger capitalism, the risk society, neoliberalism, fordism / taylorism, and rationalization, to name a few; indeed, the title of the book itself conveys a desire to derive big conclusions about “our future” from an ethnography of spider goats. but there is little sustained attempt to explain these processes or draw out the role that the spider goats play in them. moore suggests in the introduction that the spider goats provide “new opportunities for me to comment on emerging science, technology, capitalism, feminism, maternalism, reproduction, ethics, queerness, and animal studies” (26), and there is indeed commentary on all of these and more. but the book is not a rigorous account of the significance of the spider goats for the broader social transformations she identifies. similarly, moore spends little time drawing out the theoretical significance of her work for the scholarly traditions mentioned throughout the book. she draws on science studies, animal studies, feminism, and others, but we don’t ever really find how her quantum ethnography of spider goats contributes to or challenges them. she often alludes to the limitations of “critical sociology”, but this tradition remains undertheorized. “it is easy for me,” she suggests, “to slip into an automatic critical sociological drive to expose this evil apparatus that flattens the human spirit and alienates us from our species being” (107). is this a caricature of the frankfurt school? we can’t be sure. but given the fact that moore appears to consider herself part of this tradition, we might expect a more nuanced account of its limitations and how her ethnographic work might contribute to building a more resilient critical theory of science and technology. fish, review of moore | 451 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) then again, moore does ultimately acknowledge the theoretical motivations driving her ethnographic pursuits. while there are hints throughout the book, the casual reader may be surprised to find in the conclusion her admission that “throughout this project i’ve grappled with moving beyond a purely marxist analysis, though it is very apt” (159). personally, this confirmed what i’ve suspected since donna haraway declared herself “something of an unreconstructed and dogged marxist”; namely, that an ethnography of technoscience is most effective when cast within the broad conceptual framework of a marxian political economy.1 not that moore is simply after empirical evidence that marx was right all along, but her ethnographic work reveals the human (and nonhuman) practices at the heart of capitalism in a way that encourages a critical appraisal of certain of marx’s central concepts. “humans,” she writes, “have expanded spider goats’ capital potential through the very real microinteractions i observed in the field and the metastructures that sustain it” (126). moore’s attention to these microinteractions generates novel reflections on the marxian concepts of false consciousness, alienation, species being, and capital, among others. in this sense, the book is an important marxian ethnography of living capital alongside the work of kaushik sunder rajan.2 our transgenic future will appeal to interdisciplinary scholars in science studies and animal studies, as well as to those interested in broader theoretical debates within feminism, marxism and the critical social sciences more generally. as moore acknowledges, the book “evolved from my desire to learn, create, experience, and share, rather than my attempts to intervene or advance” (3). her purpose is thus less to advance an argument than to explore the life world of the spider goats and experience the destabilizing effects of this world as they arise. as such, her work raises many more questions than it answers. but they are important questions and it was a pleasure to accompany moore on her journey to reach them. 1 donna haraway, modest_witness@second_millennium.femaleman©_meets_oncomouse™: feminism and technoscience (new york: routledge, 1997), 8. 2 kaushik sunder rajan, biocapital: the constitution of postgenomic life (durham, nc: duke university press, 2006). craig bigfoot swims in the garden of eden bigfoot swims in the garden of eden hellbenders and identity formation in american history andrew craig university of georgia humanimalia 14.2 (spring 2024) abstract: this essay examines the ways hellbenders, a species of aquatic salamander native to north american, has appeared in the archival of american history. it analyses the historical accounts american men during the late-eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries about their interactions with hellbenders as they worked to define themselves as a distinct portion a species possessing the ability to scientifically understand and tame the wilderness to their own advantage. it argues that unlike wolves, pigs, or cows, that have been historically domesticated because of their physical characteristics and bioadaptive behaviours, hellbenders’ unique physical characteristics, elusive behaviours, and geographic isolation have made them a particularly resonant signifier of that which was wild or primitive. encounters with an otherworldly, archaic species of salamander served a cultural function akin to wildman legends or stories of bigfoot encounters by giving men access to an imagined landscape in which they could reconceptualize their relationship to nature and society during periods of rapid change. keywords: masculinity; hellbenders; salamanders; conservation; natural history; fantasy echo; environmental history bio: andrew craig is a phd student in the history department at the university of georgia. originally from asheville, north carolina he received his ba in history from unc chapel hill and his ma from unc wilmington. he wrote his master’s thesis on the development of vertically integrated hog farms and the environmental crisis they created during the twentieth century in eastern north carolina. his dissertation project focuses on agriculture and environmental justice movements in the us south during the twentieth century. email: andrew.craig@uga.edu copyright © 2024 andrew craig this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 147–184. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.14037 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.14037 craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 149 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the glacial recession that characterized the late pleistocene epoch vastly reshaped the earth’s surface and produced levels of biodiversity many scholars have compared to the biblical garden of eden.1 as flora and fauna adapted to a new set of ecological circumstances, an abundance of species emerged and spread throughout the new landscapes that emerged across the northern hemisphere.2 species like cryptobranchus alleganiensis — or hellbenders, as the large, aquatic salamanders later became popularly known — evolved, and as they started to thrive, they spread throughout the new riparian regions that emerged throughout the appalachian mountains.3 simultaneously, homo sapiens started migrating across the bering strait to take advantage of the new ecological opportunities that continued to emerge throughout north america.4 biologists have shown that over the course of next ten thousand years, hellbenders spent their time making nests under river rocks left behind by receding pleistocene glaciers. there, they would curl up, or bend, as their name suggests, and lay perfectly camouflaged in their algae-covered, rocky environment. they lay waiting inconspicuously, almost lazily, for another aquatic life form to swim by, such as a crawfish or minnow, before sucking the unsuspecting food source into unhinged jaws.5 occasionally, hellbenders would unbend themselves from their favourite resting place to swim about in the rapids using their tail like a rudder. the swift-moving water would flow over their lasagna-like, capillary filled flaps, filling their bodies with oxygen. outside of mating season, this was the hellbender’s daily routine.6 1 on historical perceptions of the “abundance” of the north american “wilderness”, see worster, shrinking the earth. 2 on the pleistocene as a benchmark for ecological restoration and conservation, see donlan et al. “pleistocene rewilding”. 3 see bredehoeft, “pleistocene hellbender”; burgmeier et. al, “spatial ecology”; and pugh et al., “eastern hellbenders”. 4 see hoffecker, modern humans, 305; and ray, great ice age. 5 david herasimtschuk (conservation photographer), interview with author, 6 march 2020; lori williams (wildlife diversity biologist, north carolina wildlife resources commission), interview with author, 18 february 2020. 6 johnson and briggler, the hellbender; humphries and pauley, “life history”. 150 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) during mating season, hellbender males protected the spaces they dug out for females to lay eggs by fighting other males. once the eggs were laid, the hellbender male would fertilize them and spend four to six weeks guarding the entrance to the rock covered nest until the larvae hatched. the hatchling larvae that survived the threat of being eaten by predators such as trout and other hellbenders spent two years growing limbs and shedding their gills. between the ages of five and eight, they started searching for potential mates by sending out pheromones to communicate with others their intention to breed. hellbenders that reached adulthood spent twelve to fifteen years, sometimes even thirty, hunting, reproducing, and fighting off predators and other hellbenders from their territory by secreting irritants from their pores.7 it remains unclear when exactly hellbenders first encountered the species biologists now consider to be one of the biggest threats to their territory and their biggest predator: humans. the specific ways human-hellbender relations changed over time also largely remains a mystery.8 though they have often noted the historic importance of nonhuman entities like bison in shaping the “opportunities for certain kinds of subsistence” and “strategic endeavors” for indigenous americans, historians have yet to explore the potential ways these encounters might have changed both species over time, or the role these encounters might have played in shaping thousands of years of human history in north america. 9 convincing arguments made by numerous recent animal historians and animal studies scholars force historians to wrestle with the role of nonhuman species in shaping human history.10 as such work 7 harding, amphibians and reptiles; petranka, salamanders. 8 on hellbenders’ physiological changes over time, see unger, et. al., “population genetics”. since the 1970s, biologists have noted a decrease in population as a result of stream pollution and siltation: see keitzer, et. al., “stream characteristics”; nickerson et. al., “habitat differences”; and quinn et. al., “multiscale factors”. 9 morrissey, people of the ecotone, 18–22. 10 for a survey of recent works, see nance and marks, bellwether histories. for more on the approaches to animal histories that have informed this essay see benson, “historiography”; cowie, “exhibiting animals”; despret, “secret agents”; fudge, perceiving animals; nance, the historical animal; and walker “animals and the intimacy of history”. craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 151 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) shows, nonhuman animals have often played a significant role in shaping the way humans construct their identity and understand their relationship to the environment.11 according to nicole seymour, nonhuman animals have historically played a valuable role in the narratives humans mobilize as part of their political strategies.12 and as hannah boast argues, studying these narratives proves to be “instructive for interrupting the past, present and future” of political anxieties, “their routes into the mainstream”, and reminds modern environmentalists to “exercise care in the stories we tell about pollution.”13 despite these recent developments in the historical study of human and nonhuman animal relations, many questions linger regarding the range of roles species like the hellbender — a species that historian drew swanson calls “all-but-hidden” — have played in human history.14 animal historians have frequently noted the difficulties of locating nonhuman animal subjects in the archival record.15 locating hellbenders presents its own set of challenges: like their living counterparts who are rarely encountered by humans because of evolutionary adaptations like their camouflaging physical attributes and elusive bioadaptive behaviours, archival hellbenders prove scarce. rarely mentioned in the bulk of available source materials, when hellbenders do appear, they do so in a remarkably consistent way. in the scattered and fragmented documents left behind by white american men who were in some way entangled in a british colonial system of knowledge production, hellbenders are almost universally mentioned because of their inherently exotic or loathsome qualities. the picture of the historic hellbender that emerges from this archival record bares a closer resemblance to a mythic beast, or cryptid, like bigfoot than it does to 11 for examples of these works, see: boisseron, afro-dog; emel, “are you man enough”; nance, rodeo; spencer, “the buffalo”; and rosenberg, “race suicide” and “no scrubs”. 12 seymour, bad environmentalism. 13 boast, “gay frog”. 14 swanson, “mountain meeting ground”, 242. 15 animal historians frequently note the difficulties of grappling with problems like these in their sources. for an excellent description of the ways in which historians have approached these problems, see: nance, entertaining elephants, 277–288; zulueta, “nonhuman animal testimonies”; and tortorici, sins against nature. 152 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) a swimming, breathing salamander.16 over a period spanning more than two centuries, american men, have most often described these encounters in terms of disgust and superstition. despite encountering hellbenders in vastly different historical contexts, white settler men prove to be consistent in their focus on hellbenders’ “negative aesthetic charisma”. in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, the anglo-american men who encountered hellbenders during scientific voyages of discovery and/or masculinity-reaffirming adventures, and who recorded such encounters in a way that has survived archivally, often reported that hellbenders’ appearance and behaviours triggered “strong feelings of disgust and even panic among those humans they encountered.”17 across multiple generations, there is a continuity in the way american men emphasized hellbenders’ physical features in wild or exotic terms and recorded their observations about its seemingly devilish or mischievous behaviour. in her analysis of feminist identity construction, historian joan wallach scott has identified historical continuities like these as a “designation of a set of psychic operations by which certain categories of identity are made.”18 constitutive of these patterns are what scott terms “fantasy scenarios” in “which the real relations of identity between past and present are discovered and/or forged.”19 in particular historical moments, fantasy scenarios have enabled political movements to establish commonality amongst individuals based on unconscious associations, to solidify identity, and build “constituencies across the boundaries of difference.”20 over time, these fantasies recur as “fantasy echoes”: familiar fantasies that are adjusted and adapted to “elide historical differences”, “create apparent continuities”, and “condense the process of identification” in response to the specific circumstances of the moment.21 16 on the cultural history of cryptids, see: buhs, “tracking bigfoot”; degh, legend and belief; loxton and prothero, abominable science!; milligan, “‘truth’”; morris, “imagining bigfoot”; and wallace, klamath knot. 17 lorimer, “nonhuman charisma”, 919–920. 18 scott, fantasy of feminist history, 66–67. 19 scott, 50–51. 20 scott, 60–61; 66. 21 scott, 65–66. craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 153 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) this essay uses scott’s fantasy echo framework to analyse the continuities of archival encounters with hellbenders across three distinct periods of the history of the united states. scott’s framework is mobilized throughout because of its ability to destabilize the apparent continuities of the archival record and to help scholars understand why american men wrote and circulated specific narratives about hellbenders that emphasized their “feral charisma” in a seemingly universal way under vastly different sets of historical circumstances.22 untangling the reasons why the men who recorded hellbender encounters constructed fantasy scenarios from these experiences provides evidence that shows how unseen animals, like hellbenders, who have limited interactions with human populations because of their distinctive physical features and elusive behaviours, have shaped the ways successive generations of american men have understood themselves and their relationship to nature. during periods throughout the history of the united states when their patriarchal power has been challenged, american men crafted specific narratives about hellbenders — hellbender fantasies– that enabled them to articulate masculine identities that have been foundational to the political coalitions they have historically built. at times, they crafted hellbender fantasies to specifically define themselves as scientists or “civilized” modern men in sharp contrast to the nation’s wild “primitive” landscapes and the species that inhabited it. at other times, they used hellbender fantasy scenarios to articulate a distinct nationalist mode of masculinity, which, as the case studies presented in this essay show, helped them consolidate their power, justify their authority over the north american landscape, and legitimize their claims to land ownership as well as their attempts to manage populations in north america through eradication or conservation. tracing how these hellbender fantasies echo over time reveals the roots of these narratives in indigenous epistemologies and illustrates 22 scholars have often relied heavily on theoretical constructs of relational frameworks in their studies of the environment and human/nonhuman animal relations in isolated historical moments. this fails to fully grapple with the archival continuities and changes in human– nonhuman animal relations and identity formation over time, see: hatley, “blood intimacies”; rose, “flying fox”; van dooren, “vultures”; and morgensen, “theorising gender”. 154 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) how white anglo-american settler men in the eighteenth century started to exploit indigenous encounters with hellbenders and indigenous communities’ knowledge about the species to craft their hellbender fantasies. working to define themselves as american citizens who could govern a modern nation after the american revolution, american men again echoed both indigenous narratives of hellbender encounters as well as colonial observers’ hellbender fantasies in the descriptions they produced about hellbenders as they worked to classify and name this “peculiar” species as a particularly american animal. as i argue in later portions of the essay, white american men in the nineteenth century again echoed these hellbender fantasies as they laid claim to a particular scientific knowledge of the north american landscape and the populations that inhabited it. in doing so, they contributed to the historical development of what historian claudio saunt argues was a system of state-administered indigenous “expulsion” and “eradication” that emerged in the 1830s and subsequently became a model for colonial empires around the world.23 echoes of colonial hellbender encounters continued to help certain american men affirm and stabilize their identities during periods like the gilded age and cold war when racialized, class-based urban conflicts forced many americans to re-evaluate their identity as american citizens and their relationship to the environment. as the rather miscellaneous series of anecdotes about human–hellbender interactions that appear in the archival record of american history suggests, hellbenders, who can breathe underwater and emit a milky-slime as a defence against predators through their skin, have historically been a more powerful signifier of non-humanness than mammals like wolves, pigs, or cows who have been historically domesticated because of their physical characteristics and bioadaptive behaviours, which make them readily anthropomorphizable within the contexts of human cultural systems.24 hellbender encoun23 saunt, unworthy republic, xiv–xv; 26. 24 see churlew, “love and death”; haraway, trouble; and lorimer, wildlife. for specific species examples mentioned in the text see: essig, lesser beasts; mizelle, pig; haraway, companion species; anderson, creatures of empire; allen, otter; and colby, orca. craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 155 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) ters, even if just in imagined liminal spaces, helped a particular set of american men to define “wilderness” and understand their relation to it.25 encounters with an otherworldly, archaic species of salamander served a cultural function akin to wildman legends or stories of bigfoot encounters by giving them access to an imagined landscape in which they could reconceptualize their relationship to nature and society during periods of rapid change. these fantasies helped the american men who wrote about hellbenders — many of whom have influenced how other americans understood the environment through their work as imperial agents, natural historians, writers, politicians, and conservationists — affirm their masculinity and legitimize their position atop a social hierarchy they naturalized via comparisons to othered species like the hellbender. through their accounts of their interactions with hellbenders, these men worked to define themselves as a distinct portion of a species possessing the ability to scientifically understand and tame the wilderness to their own advantage. the unique physical characteristics, elusive behaviours, and geographic isolation of hellbenders made them a particular resonant signifier of that which was wild or primitive. embryonic encounters hellbender encounters begin to appear in the archival record during the 1760s. in many early hellbender descriptions, colonial men echoed indigenous stories of hellbender encounters to name the species. likewise, these men recounted indigenous encounters with hellbenders to describe the species’ behaviour and help newspaper, pamphlet, and travelogue readers in england imagine one of the many natural wonders of the north american wilderness. one of the earliest examples of how indigenous americans helped english colonizers understand their interactions with hellbenders comes from famed natural historian john bartram. while working as a specimen collector for early botanist peter collison in the 1760s, 25 on “wilderness” and the ways americans have defined it in the past, see cronon, “the trouble with wilderness”, 7–28; and smalley, wild by nature. 156 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) bartram recorded in his journal a description of what the indigenous peoples in the alleghany mountains, near fort pitt, called a “small kind of ‘alligator’.”26 a british soldier named jonathan carver recorded a similar encounter in the diary he kept of his travels between 1766 and 1769 while stationed in the ohio region during the seven years’ war. carver recounted in his memoir that members of the winnebago nation told him about the population of alligators they had eradicated from one of the northern branches of the illinois river. later naturalists would argue that indigenous descriptions of the “alligators” carver wrote of indicate that this was in fact a population of hellbenders. by recording these descriptions of the species in the published account of his expedition, carver played a key role in the british imperial process of mapping and commodifying the north american landscape in the mid-eighteenth century as a colonial specimen collector. carver crafted his own hellbender fantasy to define a navigable landmark english settlers could use to locate north america’s natural resources. he echoed his unnamed winnebago guides and their narratives about hellbender encounters to identify the location of the river that served as a navigable channel to winnebago lake. carver reported that by following the path of the river where winnebago communities told him they had once worked to exterminate a peculiar aquatic species, he found land that was “very fertile, abounding with grapes, plums, and other fruits, which grow spontaneously” as well as winnebago farms, game lands, and trading posts.27 though he downplayed the role of winnebago peoples through “omission and anonymization”,28 carver relied heavily on indigenous manual and intellectual labour to craft his hellbender fantasy. echoing indigenous hellbender encounters, he emphasized his own labour in the production of natural history as a resident colonial collector whose observations assisted metropolitan scientists in the “philosophical development of ideas about geographical 26 as reported by barton, a memoir, 21. 27 carver, travels through the interior, 37. 28 kuster, “global commodity chains”. craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 157 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) distribution” and facilitated the production and exchange of natural history specimens as commodities on the global imperial market.29 as european colonists increasingly commodified the north american landscape during the late eighteenth century, they continued to encounter this “alligator”.30 traveling through frontier regions of the blue ridge mountains along the french broad river in north carolina, virginia, and the allegheny mountains, french explorers andré michaux and his son françois encountered hellbenders on several occasions.31 andré caught a “mountain alligator” while fishing on the north toe river in north carolina in the 1770s.32 his description of this “mountain alligator” became popular in the scientific communities of early nineteenth-century paris where it was later classified as the “la salamandre des monts alléganis” or salamandra alleganiensis.33 françois would again encounter the mountain alligator on his travels through the holston valley region of north carolina and virginia in 1802 where he observed enslaved african american men referring to this species of two-foot-long salamander as the “hellbender”.34 throughout the eighteenth century, colonial naturalists continued to echo indigenous knowledge as they produced scientific descriptions of north american flora and fauna that provided european colonizers with the “practical means to dominate their physical surroundings” and gave them “an ideological framework within which to comprehend the experience of doing so.”35 according to susan scott parrish, colonial naturalists played a key role in the production of natural historical knowledge that allowed the british empire to expand. colonial naturalists delivered descriptions and specimens to the metropole which fuelled english curiosity about america as an edenic land of wild wonders. as tensions heightened between 29 on colonial collectors see kuster, “global commodity chains”. 30 on colonial competition between these groups, see roberts, colonial ecology, 69–72. 31 inscoe, “michaux, andré”. 32 thwaites, travels west, 289; cf. andré michaux in north america, 496n99. 33 daudin, histoire naturelle, 8:231–32. 34 barton, a memoir, 5; thwaites, travels west, 289. 35 zeller, inventing canada, 6. 158 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) england and its colonies in the decades prior to the american revolution, colonial naturalists started working to define a specific american scientific epistemology, and along with it, a particular identity as american observers of the natural world. during the mid-eighteenth century, they started to argue that their “unadorned” descriptions of the american environment, and their encounters with its species provided a unique kind of knowledge: a taxonomy that privileged scientific accuracy in contrast to the inventive and romanticized science produced by european cities such as london and paris. colonial naturalists’ role in the production of empirical knowledge gave them access to transatlantic instructional connections in ways that gave them the ability to assert their authority and challenge british imperial power.36 bartram’s, carver’s, and michaux’s hellbender encounters shaped the way some american natural historians, like benjamin smith barton, sought to define themselves specifically as american after the united states formally severed ties to england after the american revolution. during the early nineteenth century, politicians like thomas jefferson worked with natural historians like barton to account for and scientifically describe the unique aspects of the american wilderness as part of the larger project of forging a uniquely american identity. barton, along with other american naturalists during this period, started rejecting european conventions for scientific naming and categorization, which used french or purely latin phrases. instead, american naturalists started using a mix of native american and latin words to denote a new species.37 for barton, who had first described the species as salamandra horrida in 1808 when trying to identify a separate species of salamander, echoed colonial hellbender encounters to define himself, in scientific terms of the enlightenment, as an american who possessed a particular scientific authority because of his careful observations of this particular species found throughout the burgeoning 36 parrish, american curiosity, 21–22. 37 on the importance on naming conventions for defining national identity and american science epistemologically, see parrish, american curiosity, 134–35 and robichaud, animal city, 204. craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 159 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) nation.38 in 1812, barton wrote a small volume describing hellbenders. having never encountered them himself, he drew almost exclusively on the accounts of colonial naturalists’ encounters with hellbenders to name and describe a uniquely american animal.39 the majority of barton’s hellbender pamphlet is spent analysing these earlier descriptions to define the species in particularly american terms. while carefully describing the species’ physical attributes and behaviour, he devotes substantially more attention to dissecting the variety of names used historically for the aquatic salamander to identify a particularly american scientific name for it.40 after rejecting names, like salamandra alleganiensis, given to the species by european observers, he also rejects the name the aquatic salamander had been given by enslaved african men. barton reports that “by the negroes in the western parts of virginia, […] the reptile is often called hell-bender, by reason of its slow twisted motions, when moving in the waters, which the slaves compare to the tortuous pangs of the damned in hell.”41 in the same way that carver submerged indigenous labour in his hellbender fantasy, barton submerged african american manual and intellectual labour by echoing enslaved black men’s descriptions of hellbenders and their encounters with the species. finding it “beneath the dignity of natural history to notice” the “vulgar names” used by people of african descent who were themselves commodified and forced by slave-owners’ violent coercive tactics to produce staple crops, he instead defined the species as the “tweeg”, which he described as the algonquian word used by the delaware to describe the salamander.42 by choosing an indigenous word for the species, barton took part in a tradition historian phillip deloria calls “playing indian”.43 according to deloria, adopting elements of 38 barton, some account, 6. 39 barton, a memoir, 5. 40 barton, a memoir, 21–25. 41 barton, a memoir, 6. for more on enslaved african american encounters with animals during the antebellum period, see silkenat, scars on the land, 32–55. 42 barton, a memoir, 6–7. 43 deloria, playing indian, 182–86. 160 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) indigenous culture, like algonquian or mohawk words, was a persistent tradition in american culture during “paradigmatic moments” in history, like the period following the american revolution. the use of indigenous words like “tweeg” allowed white american men like barton to perform american “indianness” which provided them with “a powerful foundation for subsequent pursuits of national identity.”44 by defining the particularities of encounters with species unique to the american environment like the hellbender, naturalists like barton in part attempted to help other nations and other americans make sense of what it meant to be american. barton attempted to demonstrate the superior ability of american men to describe american animals using a particularly american scientific method in his hellbender pamphlet in the same way natural historians during the colonial period used their role in the production of scientific knowledge to gain access to and assert authority in the british imperial system. echoing indigenous hellbender encounters enabled barton to lay claim to a particular knowledge of american species. like colonial naturalists before him, barton worked to define americans in relation to the environment they inhabited and the variety of species they encountered. in demonstrating his ability to describe curious american critters and determine specifically american names for the nation’s species, he defined americans as having a specific scientific authority that helped them tame the nation’s wilderness, transform it using principles of the enlightenment, and govern populations scientifically. hatchlings emerge in the second half of the nineteenth century, social reformers echoed early american naturalists as they wrote about hellbender interactions and hellbender habitats in new ways to legitimize their attempts to manage human and nonhuman populations in north america. in the wake of the civil war, many americans worked to redefine themselves within a divided nation and forge an identity 44 it is worth noting that this effort to perform indigeneity is not unique to american history but common to settler cultures. see deloria, playing indian, 7. craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 161 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) as free labourers in a burgeoning industrial economy. across the nation, african americans, women, and immigrants all vied for the right to participate in the american political process, and in doing so, attempted to define themselves as american citizens.45 at the same time, the vast expansion of the nation’s industrial economy radically changed americans’ relationship with animals and the environment as urban populations grew.46 increasingly removed from rural or “wild” spaces, class conscious social reformers, like george grinnell and henry bergh, located the root of the era’s social tensions in americans’ changing proximity to livestock and wildlife. as women, immigrants, and other marginalized groups continued to demand their rights as citizens and workers in a rapidly changing urban landscape, many american men turned to the wilderness to affirm their patriarchal identities.47 to reconceptualize their identity and relationship to the environment in an increasingly industrialized and urban world, progressive era social reforming men articulated their identities and worked to affirm their masculinity, amidst the era’s social and ecological tensions, through their interactions with animals like hellbenders in numerous ways.48 many elite social reformers, like george grinnell, argued that american men needed wilderness and encounters with wild animals to define themselves and affirm their masculinity. this idea inspired americans to establish numerous clubs and organizations devoted to protecting american animals and wild spaces throughout the late nineteenth century. some clubs were also devoted to giving americans new ways to encounter and consume them too, as a growing class of consumers demanded material objects through which they could display the wealth they had amassed in an industrial economy. 45 on americans working to define themselves and redefine citizenship after the american civil war, see: richardson, west from appomattox, 4–7; steven hahn, a nation; and edwards, gendered strife. 46 on changes between americans and the environment after the american civil war, see cronon, nature’s metropolis; mauldin, unredeemed land; robichaud, animal city, 7; anderson, capitalist pigs; and rome, “nature wars”. 47 montgomery, the fall. 48 for more on the various ways americans articulated and affirmed their masculinity during the progressive era, see: bederman, manliness and civilization. 162 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) social clubs like the ichthyophagous — or fish-eating — club or, were perfectly suited to this task, allowing elite urbanites to encounter wild species and helping them to define their class status by participating in the consumption of exotic aquatic animals. founded in the 1880s by several prominent new york society men who were heavily entrenched in the growing marine fishing industry, members of the ichthyophagous club gathered annually for lavish dinner parties to feast on “many kinds of fish […] rarely eaten” because of their “unknown” excellence.49 the club’s membership included the editor of the new york times, robert barnwell roosevelt, uncle and mentor to future president theodore roosevelt, and another one of teddy roosevelt’s close friends, george bird grinnell, who founded the audubon society and owned the periodical forest and stream.50 as grinnell announced on the pages of his newspaper, the club’s founding principle was to test “the edible qualities or possibilities of uncanny water creatures not commonly reckoned as food but looked upon with disgust and loathing.”51 on 27 may 1881, club members gathered to dine on the “deviled” hellbender.52 for a brief period, the club seemed to have successfully convinced americans that the hellbender counted amongst the country’s many delicious exotic delicacies. grinnell reported on the pages of forest and stream the next month that the hellbender “was most excellent, its only fault being the small pieces consequent upon a limited supply.”53 according to one period cookbook that featured hellbender as an ingredient amongst its recipes, the club was partially successful in convincing some members of elite society during the decade that hellbenders were a delicacy ranking with the “best 49 humes, michele humes, “the way we ate: the ichthyophagous club”, the new york times, 6 january 2010. 50 murphy, “afs roots”, 90–100; taliaferro, grinnell; adler, “dining”. 51 “when the ichthyophagous dines.” forest and stream, 17 march 1906, 426. https://www. biodiversitylibrary.org/page/60909914 52 adler, “dining with the ichthyophagous club”; cf. “the ichthyophagous club”, new york times, 27 may 1881, 5. https://www.nytimes.com/1881/05/27/archives/the-ichthyophagous-club.html. 53 grinnell, “hellbender’s appeal”. https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/60909914 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/60909914 https://www.nytimes.com/1881/05/27/archives/the-ichthyophagous-club.html craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 163 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) salmon” despite its mud-coloured flabby skin.54 even the american angler noted in 1886 that the hellbender “can be ‘fed up’ so that it will become a palatable makeshift.”55 redefining hellbenders as a delicacy for americans served a dual purpose for ichthyophagous club members like grinnell. it gave some opportunistic club members new ways to commercialize america’s natural resources and meet the demands of a growing class of urban consumers. at the same time, it gave men like grinnell a new way of addressing the nation’s social tensions and affirming their masculinity through encounters with rare, exotic species. for grinnell, encountering and conquering “uncanny water creatures not commonly reckoned as food but looked upon with disgust and loathing” affirmed “civilized” american men’s identity in the same way big game hunting did.56 encountering savage or loathsome creatures in the wilderness provided a profound method for elite american men to confront wilderness and reconceptualize american manhood.57 throughout the late nineteenth century, grinnell worked to protect white american men’s access to the “wilderness” and ability to encounter wildlife. in 1887, he founded the boone and crockett club with theodore roosevelt to promote the conservation of wildlife and wildlife habitats so men could continue to hunt and fish. in the decades that followed, the club’s founders built a political constituency around their conservation ethic, which called for the expulsion and eradication of indigenous peoples like the blackfeet nation from their land as a means of creating and managing a system of national parks that ensured white americans’ access to supposedly primitive spaces.58 like many other social reformers, grinnell believed that the only way to resolve the racialized, class-based urban conflicts threatening the 54 whitehead, steward’s handbook. 55 “the flavor of carp”, the american angler, 30 october 1886, 284. 56 “when the ichthyophagous dines”, 426. 57 on hunting and fishing’s role in defining certain american identities, see: haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy” and hahn, “hunting, fishing, and foraging”. 58 spence, “crown of the continent”. 164 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) stability of the nation and its growing industrial economy was to return to its garden of eden: the wilderness. for conservation-minded reformers like the grinnell and roosevelt, hunting instilled qualities such as “energy, resolution, manliness, self-reliance, and capacity for hardy self-help”, which were critical for the american nation to “do its life-work well”.59 as they explained in boone and crockett club publications, the individualistic act of tracking and killing animals was a way to encounter nature and revive the qualities which they believed had enabled their colonial ancestors to build american civilization and that contemporary urban men failed to display because they no longer regularly encountered nature and wild things. much like the act of killing wild and exotic animals and stuffing them to display as natural history specimens, men like grinnell framed experiences like eating “grotesque” animals such as the hellbender as acts that could “induce” the “highest forms” of “healthy manhood” in white men, which was required in a democracy to keep the wheels of society moving.60 by conserving men’s ability to encounter wild things and conquer them, conservation-minded reformers sought to preserve natural resources for “the achievement of manhood”.61 other members of new york’s elite, such as henry bergh, founder of the american society for the prevention of cruelty to animals (aspca), were not so convinced that the practice of killing animals was the “prophylaxis” for the “specific historical malaise” of the gilded age’s urban crisis.62 bergh was, in fact, convinced that killing animals for sport was just the thing that was ruining american civilization.63 killing animals for leisure or pleasure was an “immoral”, unchristian, even “unmanly” act that caused deviant brutish behaviour to permeate throughout society.64 after founding the aspca in 1866, bergh became a vigilante, gaining legal authority through new york’s 59 roosevelt and grinnell, american big-game hunting, 14–15. on us national parks and conservation movement see: hays, conservation; miller, modern environmentalism; and tyrrell, “america’s national parks”. 60 haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy”, 38–39. 61 see haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy”, 57; and robichaud, animal city, 285. 62 on the ascpa, see: robichaud, animal city, 225; and haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy”, 38. 63 henry bergh, “pigeon shooting”, new york times, 31 dec. 1871, https://nyti.ms/3ucigs1. 64 gilfoyle, “the moral origins”, 638; bergh, “pigeon shooting”. https://nyti.ms/3ucigs1 craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 165 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) anticruelty laws, who worked to define and enforce what he believed to be civilized american behaviour, articulated through a language of christian morality.65 in his quest to end the uncivilized treatment of animals, bergh took aim at the pigeon shooting competitions held by elite new yorkers to hone and display their marksmanship.66 in june 1881, just weeks after the ichthyophagous club dined on hellbender, bergh published an illustrated circular which called for the end of pigeon shooting and worked to define a different relationship to wildlife for american men. grinnell quickly published a scathingly sarcastic response to bergh’s circular later that month in forest and stream. denouncing bergh’s “ultra-humanitarian plea” as “weak”, grinnell argued that bergh had not gone “far enough”. mocking his belief in the cruelty of pigeon shooting, he asked why bergh “put in a plea for the pigeon and remain[ed] silent upon the late unholy holocaust of hellbenders by the greedy ichthyophagi?”67 to convince readers of the illogical nature of bergh’s claims about pigeon shooting, grinnell constructed his own hellbender fantasy. substituting hellbenders for pigeons, and the ichthyophygists for shooters, he rewrote bergh’s pigeon plea as “the little hellbender’s appeal” to imagine how a hellbender, “suddenly endowed with speech”, might defend itself by appealing to the conscience of those who killed and consumed its species. speaking to a member of the club who had consumed it, grinnell’s imagined little hellbender first explained how it had “betrayed into captivity while seeking to provide nourishment” for its family of hellbenders, “now dead of starvation.” it then asked the ichthyophage what he would gain “by [the] crunching of my delicate limbs and ruptured arteries that a senseless turnip would not afford you?” by unnecessarily killing and consuming “this little body, so cunningly and so mysteriously contrived by the creator”, the little hellbender suggested to the ichthyophage that he had both offended god and insulted the “cultivated spirit of your generation by a deed your own conscience, on 65 gilfoyle, “the moral origins”, 639. 66 john f. kullberg, “father of clay pigeon”, new york times, 5 feb. 1990, https://nyti.ms/3w5q7ih. 67 grinnell, “hellbender’s appeal.” https://nyti.ms/3w5q7ih 166 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) reflection, will characterize, but which i refrain from doing.”68 encountering the little hellbender as a member of the ichthyophygous club himself, grinnell found its claims ridiculous. he suggested that bergh might have an easier time achieving his “hoped-for effect upon the cruel ichthyophagus” if he worked to intervene on behalf of pigeons and other nonhuman animals by convincing the city’s district attorney that the club’s annual dinners were “in direct violation of the gambling laws, or divorce laws for that matter.” like bergh’s encounter with the pigeon, grinnell’s hellbender encounter and the fantasy he constructed around it worked to affirm and define his own masculine identity. echoing colonial naturalists, who used encounters with hellbenders to assert their authority as scientific americans, grinnell used his interactions with hellbenders as a way to affirm his authority as a “civilized” american man in relation to “weak” men like bergh, who seemed incapable of encountering wild spaces and loathsome animals in the same way. in the first decades of the twentieth century, hellbender encounters would continue to play a role in a larger debate about the relationship between american men and animals that drove the creation of modern american environmental conservation. during the early 1900s, conservationists like horace kephart echoed grinnell’s hellbender fantasy and crafted fantasies of their own as they continued to search for ways to affirm their identity as civilized american men through their encounters with wilderness and the species found in it. during the 1890s, kephart — one the founders of the american national parks and conservation movement — became disenchanted with his experience of urban life while serving as the director of the saint louis mercantile library. for several years, camping trips offered him a respite, but in early 1904 he suffered a nervous breakdown as a result of his urban anxieties.69 later that summer he travelled to the great smoky mountains of north carolina on a journey to find himself 68 grinnell, “hellbender’s appeal”. 69 on the modern wilderness movement in the early twentieth century, see sutter, driven wild. on kephart biographically, see: ellison and mccue, back of beyond. craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 167 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) again. in his books camping and woodcraft and our southern highlanders, kephart explained how he had been able to reconceptualize his identity through his confrontations with the appalachian wilderness. hellbender encounters played a role in kephart’s quest to revitalize his sense of self and helped him explain to an urban audience how they too could be saved by returning to america’s eden. after encountering them on his trip, kephart crafted his own hellbender fantasies to signify what he defined as uncivilized or primitive. while this reference is brief, he directly references hellbenders when discussing chinese immigrants, whom he believed embodied urban life. according to kephart, chinese immigrants and hellbenders were alike in that they were able to make a home anywhere, “whether immersed in air, water, or mud.”70 he classified the chinese american population and hellbenders as “exotic […] peculiar creatures who were shaped by their uncivilized environments.”71 kephart also characterized white appalachian families who lived alongside the hellbender-inhabited rivers he visited in the blue ridge mountains as creatures of their environments. however, he extended a differently racialized description to his white appalachian subjects. unlike negative characterization of chinese immigrants, kephart valorized their supposed primitive nature. the mountaineers he encountered there lived by what he identified as a traditional set of colonial values that had been preserved because the appalachians had been “ghettoed in the midst of a civilization that is as aloof from them as if it existed on another planet.”72 later explaining that he had chosen the mountains of north carolina for his mission to live the “self-dependent life of the wilderness nomad” because he was unable to find a guide to the region in any of his library research, kephart believed the appalachian mountains to be a primitive, wild space that remained untouched by industrial modernity.73 70 kephart, camping and woodcraft, 18. 71 kephart, our southern highlanders, 356. 72 kephart, our southern highlanders, 18. 73 kephart, our southern highlanders, 14–15. 168 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) kephart’s hellbender fantasies, fuelled in part by his racial and classbased characterizations about chinese immigrants and mountaineers, helped him imagine the appalachians as the primitive wilderness he so fervently desired to find. for years after travelling to western north carolina, kephart worked to protect of this region of appalachia in large part because he envisioned it as a garden of eden that allowed him to affirm his sense of self and reconnect with his white colonial heritage. kephart echoed grinnell, whose own work continued the project of colonial naturalists. grinnell — who had actively worked to “civilize” blackfeet people after he “discovered” the area that became glacier national park — in the way he defined the spaces he wished to protect and the reasons for preserving them. like grinnell, kephart understood that the presence of populations perceived to be uncivilized was critical for categorizing a place as part of his imagined american wilderness. hellbender encounters helped early american conservationists imagine certain spaces as wilderness and define the people that inhabited the regions they deemed wild as uncivilized and primitive. for kephart, hellbender fantasies helped define the area that became the great smoky mountain national park as a wild space in need of protection and careful management. comparing the behaviour of the communities that lived in these wild spaces to that of hellbenders, men like grinnell and kephart justified social reform programs and land seizures that were necessary to create national parks in this region.74 throughout the first decade of the twentieth century, hellbender encounters continued to help scientifically-minded american men identify primitive or wild things. in the 1900s, james mooney ventured into the mountains of north carolina as an agent of the united states bureau of american ethnology to “trace the development of human thought under varying conditions of race and environment.”75 guided by the work of contemporary scientists and 74 on other progressive-era environment management programs in the south, see giesen, boll weevil blues and strom, making catfish. 75 mooney, myths of the cherokee, 12. craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 169 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) anthropologists, mooney worked to compare the cultural development of the eastern band of the cherokee nation to that of the western band by collecting myths. during this period, many influential american men, including theodore roosevelt, believed that the primitive lifestyles of america’s indigenous peoples were dying as a result of the settling of the west. in the period of progressive politics, scholars like frederick jackson turner solidified the idea that the american character was defined by the clash of european cultures with indigenous cultures on the frontier of the american wilderness. for a nation that had defined its character through confrontations with indigenous peoples in the wilderness, the disappearance of primitive american peoples threatened the national character and its mythic origins. collecting the culture and myths of indigenous peoples offered a unique way to maintain a connection to the american garden of eden for ethnologists like mooney. one of the myths mooney collected involved the hellbender. 76 according to cherokee tradition, if a man eats a hellbender and then goes directly into a field, the crop planted there will be ruined. mooney found this myth to be “unexplainable” which led him to conclude that “primitive man is essentially the same in every part of the world.”77 mooney’s conclusion helped to bolster lewis henry morgan’s theory of social evolution which posited that human advancement came in evolutionary stages — savagery, barbarism, and civilization.78 it confirmed for federal bureaucrats of the era that the cherokee, like other indigenous american peoples, were less civilized, or savage, and therefore in need of management. studies like mooney’s myth of the cherokee were critical in crafting the social management programs of the progressive era that relied on “expert knowledge” in its policy making. these social management programs were guided by the same progressive era belief in 76 on the role of animal myths in work of ethnographers defining native american cultures during this period see spencer, “the buffaloe.” 77 mooney, myths of the cherokee, 307. 78 morgan, ancient society; woodbury et. al., “american ethnology”. 170 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) a universal social good that inspired the creation of the national parks. in order to maintain that good, the lives of citizens and the land had to be managed for the long-term benefit of the whole population. expert ethnological records like mooney’s provided something that these men would understand as empirically based evidence of the cherokee and other native american’s savagery on morgan’s advancement scale and helped them to manage indigenous peoples.79 as they appear on the pages of myths of the cherokee, hellbender fantasies helped justify progressives’ belief in a universal social good. hellbender fantasies again served to categorize certain populations of america as uncivilized and in need of careful management. the echoes of cherokee encounters with hellbenders recorded by mooney allowed him to preserve and reconnect with america’s mythic frontier origins. echoing the hellbender encounters of both contemporary men like grinnell and kephart as well as colonial naturalists, mooney’s hellbender fantasies helped him legitimize his authority as a civilized american man with a specific claim to scientific expertise during a period of rapid social change. shedding the gills in the second half of the twentieth century, human–hellbender interactions also shaped how certain american men made sense of themselves and dramatic ecological changes as the united states asserted it technological and scientific power during the cold war. the growth of the us consumer economy, the expansion of new deal programs, industrial food production, and fears of nuclear annihilation all worked to intensify the anxieties many american harboured about the loss of wilderness and environmental degradation.80 echoing the hellbender fantasies of previous generations, certain american men crafted narratives about their interactions 79 on the use of ethnography for crafting federal native american management programs, see elliot, “ethnography” and purdy, after nature, 38. 80 for historical analysis of american anxieties regarding environmental degradation in the twentieth century, see: buhs, fire ant wars; ferguson, this is our land; harvey, a symbol of wilderness; maher, nature’s new deal; and sellers, crabgrass crucible. craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 171 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) with hellbenders as they simultaneously sought to of reconceptualize the nation’s relationship to the environment and protect it. in the late 1960s,at the same time that scientific and technological advancement was escalating ideological cold war battles and racial tensions were boiling over at home, americans were becoming increasingly concerned over the harm they were causing the environment and the damage they were causing other species.81 encounters with hellbenders helped some americans define themselves in relation to their environment and species. starting to realize the full scale of the nation’s impact on the environment, conservationists responded to echoes of hellbender fantasy in new ways. as biologists noticed significant declines in species like hellbenders during the 1970s, they started working to better define the species as a means of measuring the degradation of america’s wilderness and health of the nation’s streams. their work defining hellbenders informed how they defined themselves as conservationists moving forward. echoes of colonial hellbenders continued to resonate for some of the american men who started encountering hellbenders in new ways in the early 1970s. tucked between stories about foraging for food in the wild and encounters with appalachian folk traditions, national geographic published an article in its july 1972 edition titled “the shadowy world of salamanders”. the cover photo featured an extraterrestrial looking, translucent aquatic salamander standing on a rocky grey surface, set against a pitch-black backdrop. the article told the story of a hellbender hunt. before going into the “prehistoric swamp” late one night, the author paul zahl put on high-waisted rubber boots, grabbed a flashlight, bucket, and net, and stepped into the unknown world of the river. twenty minutes later, his fellow hunters had captured a dozen hellbenders. zahl mentions the animal’s “cold beady eyes” and describes the hellbender as a hybrid between “a fish, a lizard, and some weird crawler” or something from “a horror movie.”82 zahl 81 see carson, silent spring; drake, loving nature; and lear, rachael carson. 82 zahl, “the shadowy world”. 172 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) describes hellbenders as an evolutionary remnant that illustrate how animals evolved from water to land. he also takes pains to describe salamander’s strange ability to breathe underwater, making this a focal point of his discussion. just a few of years after americans, aided by new technologies, had explored new frontiers in outer space, zahl’s hellbender fantasy helped him define his species on an evolutionary scale and redefine american wilderness. echoing colonial american naturalists, zahl affirmed a particular definition of the terrestrial american wilderness by carefully observing and describing its curious particular species during the space age. reflecting on his hellbender encounter, zahl wrote that being “reacquainted with these wonderful, beautiful animals […] i had caught some glimpses of the untold millions of salamanders living […] across this land.” he echoed colonial naturalists in a specific way while describing the salamander biologist who led his hellbender hunt. like the frontier explorers who had first worked to describe the species empirically, zahl described the scientist departing for the hunt draped in “gear, bags, jars, camping equipment, maps, and other paraphernalia of his calling.” zahl’s hellbender encounter enabled him to reacquaint himself with the abundance of curious encounters that could take place terrestrially in america’s wild spaces while simultaneously giving others a path to finding it.83 responding to the intensifying social anxieties of space age environmental degradation, zahl wrote about his encounter with hellbenders in the same way other american men wrote about bigfoot fantasies to make sense of their changing relationship to the planet. echoes seem to particularly resonate between zahl’s reflection on his hellbender encounter and the bigfoot fantasy david rains wallace’s crafted a few years later in the klamath knot. while trying to make sense of a curious figure he imagined seeing along a hike and define himself in relation it, wallace keenly observed that encounters with bigfoot remind us that “we don’t live in a world 83 zahl, “the shadowy world”. craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 173 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) that’s completely nailed down.”84 for both zahl and rains, experiences with mysterious, rarely encountered animals, both real and imagined, allowed americans to enter a liminal space in which they could confront and reconnect with the wilderness that had given birth to particular american identity and individualism from a safe, yet accessible distance. during the 1970s and 1980s, hellbenders, like bigfoot, became an “invigorating emblem of the wild”, an object through which humans were able to redefine their relationship with what was perceived to be lost as they became increasingly aware of anthropogenic environmental degradation.85 in the 1970s, biologists started noticing a significant decline in the populations of salamanders and other animals like hellbenders. hellbender encounters helped biologists, who were becoming increasingly concerned about the scale of the nation’s impact on the environment, define both environmental degradation and themselves as conservationists in the second half of the twentieth century. working to understand populations of animals like the hellbender better, conservationists like john groves responded to the echoes of past hellbender encounters and crafted hellbender fantasies of their own. long before he became a leading figure in the hellbender conservation movement, interactions with reptilian and amphibious species played a large role in groves’s life. growing up in the 1950s, he often took reptile hunting trips with his father, frank, a long-time reptile curator at the baltimore zoo.86 as a child, he learned how to handle snakes and other reptiles safely in the time he spent with his father. occasionally, john convinced his father to let him skip school and go on reptile hunting in distant states  often to places like florida– with ecologies radically different than those he encountered in maryland. in john’s memory, it was on one of those awe-inspiring trips, 84 wallace, the klamath knot, 111. 85 like hellbender encounters, echoes of bigfoot encounters are particularly loud during periods of radical social change, such as the late nineteenth century when americans dealt with industrialization, the post-world war ii period, or the 1970s and early 1980s, see: morris, “imagining bigfoot”, 289. also see, buhs, “tracking bigfoot”. 86 “frank groves, 84, reptile curator for zoo”, baltimore sun, 7 april 2004. https://www. baltimoresun.com/2004/04/07/frank-groves-84-reptile-curator-for-zoo/ https://www.baltimoresun.com/2004/04/07/frank-groves-84-reptile-curator-for-zoo/ https://www.baltimoresun.com/2004/04/07/frank-groves-84-reptile-curator-for-zoo/ 174 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) while lipping over rocks with his father, that he first encountered north america’s largest salamander, cryptobranchus alleganiensis, a.k.a. the hellbender.87 over the next fifty years, john continued to encounter hellbenders as he built a career in herpetology for himself. though he followed in his father’s footsteps and devoted most of his primary research to snakes, he occasionally helped young scientists organize hellbender surveys as curator of reptiles at the philadelphia zoo. then in the early 2000s, john found himself in a new position as reptile curator at the north carolina zoological park and in need of a new project. as he surveyed the reptiles and amphibians being studied in the state, it occurred to him that no one had seriously studied hellbender populations in north carolina.88 groves knew from his work with other herpetologists that the once common but always elusive hellbender populations of appalachia had been steadily declining throughout the region since the 1970s. around the time john groves moved to north carolina, a concerted conservation effort was starting to coalesce as appalachian herpetologists worked to figure out why hellbenders were disappearing. in 2004, ron goellner, at the saint louis zoo, founded the center for hellbender conservation in missouri to promote research, bring awareness to the strange critters’ plight, and educate the public about this often-misunderstood creature. as he planned a study of north carolina hellbenders, groves drew extensively on goellner’s work and the conservation model he had developed in st. louis. in 2007, groves partnered with the north carolina wildlife resources commission and wildlife diversity biologist lori williams to launch a broad initiative to study of the state’s hellbender populations and educate the public about them. in doing so, groves and williams became north carolina’s premier “hellbender hunters.”89 87 groves. interview with author; groves and williams, “in search of the hellbender in north carolina”. 88 groves, interview with author. a bibliography of groves’s published herpetology research readily available online through multiple sources. 89 see mark wanner, “hunting hellbenders”, greensboro news & record, 29 august 2009. https://greensboro.com/news/columnists/hunting-hellbenders/article_d06d794d9a40-5923-9209-59fbc70ae601.html. https://greensboro.com/news/columnists/hunting-hellbenders/article_d06d794d-9a40-5923-9209-59fbc70ae601.html https://greensboro.com/news/columnists/hunting-hellbenders/article_d06d794d-9a40-5923-9209-59fbc70ae601.html craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 175 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) over the next seven years, groves and williams collaborated with a growing number of zoologists and ecologists to locate and observe the state’s “bigfoot”-esque hellbender populations. in many ways, the work of conducting these surveys resembled the labour of resident specimen collectors during the colonial period. like the biologists that appeared in zahl’s narrative of his hellbender encounter, groves, williams, and their assistants donned wet suits and snorkels and spent countless hours crawling along stream bottoms in search of the “elusive” hellbender, hoping they found a hellbender instead of creek mud. when they were lucky enough to grab a hellbender, they pulled it from its rocky hiding place and placed it on a dissected piece of pvc pipe to observe it, by measuring the specimen they collected, describing its physical characteristics, observing its behaviours, and recording the location of its habitat. they often interviewed local working-class residents and anglers who they encountered during survey trips to locate other specimens and better understand the hellbender populations through the accounts of people who reported encountering the aquatic salamanders in their daily lives. conservationists often report that the mountain residents they encountered while conducting their surveys hoped that their goal was not to save hellbenders but rid the rivers of them.90 because of stories told by appalachian anglers about encounters with hellbenders echoing for successive generations, many mountain residents described hellbenders as a loathsome, vicious pest that exude a poisonous slime that can infect waterways and kill prized fish populations.91 other appalachians define hellbenders as an omen of bad luck, asserting that if a hellbender bites a fishing rod, it will never catch another fish.92 many of the misconceptions appalachian residents held about hellbenders could be attributed to their own encounters with the species and echoes of past encounters. reports abound of hellbenders 90 this is something that every conservationist interviewed by the author highlighted about their educational programming. 91 alissa widman neese, “zoos, other officials work to keep hellbender salamander happy and healthy in ohio”, canton repository, 16 august 2016; snyder, “new streams of religion”, 911. 92 williams, interview with author. 176 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) eating the fish anglers have caught and left hanging on stringers in the river or causing rashes and skin irritations when handled. over time, as anglers spun tales from their encounters with hellbenders to share their knowledge of the river with other fishermen and new generations — they constructed hellbender fantasies which solidified the salamander’s regional reputation as a fish-killing monster.93 responding to the echoes of appalachians’ past hellbender encounters themselves, groves and williams submerged working-class appalachian knowledge about the species as they publicly emphasized their own modern scientific descriptions of the species as a way of challenging cultural myths about the species and providing americans with a new way of conceptualizing their relationship to the environment through encounters with animals like the hellbender.94 after years of conducting these surveys, groves and williams launched a population management plan in 2010 that was aimed at protecting hellbenders by increasing public awareness about the species. in doing so, they crafted their own hellbender fantasies from their encounters with the species by designing a campaign to make the salamanders more palatable and publicly accessible by rebranding the seemingly menacing hellbender as the “snot otter”, a core figure of their conservation efforts.95 at schools, fairs, and outdoor educational events, groves, williams, or some lucky assistant, transformed into “snotty the snot otter”.96 they donned a brown cloth suit that featured a wavy flowing cape-like back, a long tail, shoes, and gloves with orb tips on its fingers and toes, and a large foam mascot head with beady, yellowish eyes and a short open snout. dressed as snotty, conservationists educated the 93 williams mentioned in her interview that this frequently happened with anglers she talked to in the communities she visited during hellbender surveys. likewise, online fishing forums frequently recount stories of interacting with hellbenders while fishing. see, for example: ryan griswell, “toccoa river hellbender”, freshwater fishing, gon forum, 13 july 2012, https://forum.gon.com/threads/toccoa-river-hellbender.699016/; hoch999, “waterdogs/hellbenders in the yough river?” fishusa forums, 14 february 2009, https:// forums.fishusa.com/message/165633-waterdogshellbenders-in-the-yough-river/. 94 krometis, et. al, “water scavenging’. 95 groves and williams, “in search of the hellbender”. 96 leslie eaton, “green movement’s new mascot: the slimy snot otter”, wall street journal, 5 march 2011. https://forum.gon.com/threads/toccoa-river-hellbender.699016/ https://forums.fishusa.com/message/165633-waterdogshellbenders-in-the-yough-river/ https://forums.fishusa.com/message/165633-waterdogshellbenders-in-the-yough-river/ craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 177 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) public as part of their attempt to demystify hellbenders and make the species a tangible way for north carolinians to connect with nature. appearing as snotty, they hoped that by rebranding hellbenders as snot otters they could challenge the cultural misconceptions held by appalachians about the species and manage the way human populations responded to future hellbender encounters.97 as american anxieties about climate change intensified throughout the twenty-first century, snotty the snot-otter — as a particular hellbender fantasy — helped americans redefine their relationship to the species and the american wilderness. during the 2010s, hellbender fantasies like snotty provided the foundations for numerous political coalitions that formed around conservation issues like clean water. as they worked to address the misconceptions and echoes of appalachians’ hellbender encounters, groves and williams used snotty to define hellbenders as a “bioindicator” which can help scientists measure levels of environmental degradation. encountering hellbenders, whether as snotty or as a bioindicator, helped conservationists determine the health of the north american wilderness and spot “degrading environmental conditions when conditions first start changing.”98 in the decade after snotty’s introduction, numerous conservationists and politicians started touting cryptobranchus alleganiensis as a mascot for the environmental conservation movement in north carolina and other states throughout appalachian mountain range — like pennsylvania– where the species makes its home.99 as many wrestle with questions regarding their role in the twenty-first century’s climate crisis, hellbenders continue to shape the ways some american men understand themselves and their relationship to the environment through their specific ecological role and the particular adaptive behaviours the species has developed 97 see burgmeier et. al., how our zoos. 98 jodie owen, “see a hellbender? the wildlife commission wants to know”, north carolina wildlife resources commission, 27 march 2018. https://www.ncwildlife.org/blog/ see-a-hellbender-the-wildlife-commission-wants-to-know. 99 in 2019 pennsylvania legislators passed a law making the hellbender its official state amphibian, see: lauren hard and jennifer harlan. “pennsylvania honors the snot otter. it’s not even the strangest state animal”, new york times, 23 april 2019. https://www.ncwildlife.org/blog/see-a-hellbender-the-wildlife-commission-wants-to-know https://www.ncwildlife.org/blog/see-a-hellbender-the-wildlife-commission-wants-to-know 178 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) which has enabled them to thrive in north america for millennia. even as conservationists have worked to redefine the ferally charismatic species as a cuddly bioindicator, the echoes of prior interactions with elusive or “all-but-seen” species like hellbenders continue also give shape to the way some americans make sense of rapidly changing social and environmental circumstances. works cited adler, anthony. “dining with the ichthyophagous club.” history of oceanography, 15 january 2015. https:// oceansciencehistory.com/2015/01/15/ dining-with-the-ichthyophagous-club/. allen, daniel. otter. london: reaktion books, 2010. anderson, j. l. capitalist pigs: pigs, pork, and power in america. morgantown: west virginia university press, 2019. anderson, virginia dejohn. creatures of empire: how domestic animals transformed early america. new york: oxford university press, 2004. barton, benjamin smith. a memoir concerning an animal of the class reptilia, or amphibia, which is known, in the united-states, by the names of alligator and hell-bender. philadelphia, 1812. barton, benjamin smith. some account of the siren lacertina, and other species of the same genus of amphibious animals. philadelphia, 1821. bederman, gail. manliness and civilization: a cultural history of gender and race in the united states, 1880–1917. chicago: university of chicago press, 1995. benson, etienne. “animal writes: historiography, disciplinarity, and the animal trace.” in making animal meaning edited by linda kalof and georgina m. montgomery, 3–16. east lansing: michigan state university press, 2011. boast, hannah. “theorizing the gay frog.” environmental humanities 14, no. 3 (2022): 662–79. https://doi. org/10.1215/22011919-9962959 boisseron, bénédicte. afro-dog: blackness and the animal question. new york: columbia university press, 2018. bredehoeft, keila e. “a re-evaluation of the pleistocene hellbender, cryptobranchus guildayi, and an overview of cryptobranchus remains from caves in the potomac river region.” ms thesis, east tennessee state university, 2010. buhs, joshua blu. the fire ant wars: nature, science, and public policy in twentieth-century america. chicago: university of chicago press, 2004. buhs, joshua blu. “tracking bigfoot through 1970s north american children’s culture: how mass media, consumerism, and the culture of preadolescene shaped wildman lore.” western folklore 70, no. 2 (spring 2011): 195–218. burgmeier, nicholas g., trent m. sutton, and rod n. williams. “spatial ecology of the eastern hellbender (cryptobranchus alleganiensis alleganiensis) in indiana.” herpetologica 67, no. 2 (2011): 135–45. burgmeier, nicholas g., john d. groves, noah shields, bryan plis, dale mcginnity, cheryl piropato, and rod n. williams. how our zoos help the hellbenders. west lafayette, in: purdue https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9962959 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9962959 craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 179 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) university cooperative extension service, march 2020. https://www. extension.purdue.edu/extmedia/fnr/ fnr-544-w.pdf carson, rachael. silent spring. new york: first mariner books, 2002. carver, jonathan. travels through the interior parts of north america in the years 1766, 1767, and 1768. london, 1778. https://archive.org/details/ travelsthroughin00incarv/ churlew, matthew. “managing love and death at the zoo: the biopolitics of endangered species preservation.” australian humanities review no. 50 (2011): 137–58. http://doi.org/10.22459/ ahr.50.2011.08 colby, jason m. orca: how we came to know and love the ocean’s greatest predator. new york: oxford university press, 2018. cowie, helen. “exhibiting animals.” in the routledge companion to animal-human history, edited by hilda kean and phillip howell, 298–321. london: routledge, 2019. cronon, william. nature’s metropolis: chicago and the great west. new york: w. w. norton, 1991. cronon, william. “the trouble with wilderness: or, getting back to the wrong nature.” environmental history 1, no. 1 (january 1996), 7–28. https://doi. org/10.2307/3985059 daudin, françois maire. histoire naturelle, générale et particulière, des reptiles. 8 volumes. paris, 1802. dégh, linda. legend and belief: dialectics of a folklore genre. bloomington: indiana university press, 2001. deloria, phillip j. playing indian. new haven, ct: yale university press, 1998. despret, vinciane. “from secret agents to interagency.” history and theory 52, no 4 (2013): 29–44. https://doi.org/10.1111/ hith.10686 donlan, c. josh, joel berger, carl e. bock, jane h. bock, david a. burney, james a. estes, dave foreman, et al. “pleistocene rewilding: an optimistic agenda for twenty-first century conservation.” the american naturalist 168, no. 5 (2006): 660–81. https://doi.org/10.1086/508027 drake, brian allen. loving nature, fearing the state: environmentalism and antigovernment politics before reagan. seattle: university of washington press, 2013. edwards, laura f. gendered strife and confusion: the political culture of reconstruction. urbana: university of illinois press, 1997. elliot, michael a. “ethnography, reform, and the problem of the real: james mooney’s ghost-dance religion.” american quarterly 50, no. 2 (1998): 201– 33. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.1998.0020 ellison george and janet mccue. back of beyond: a horace kephart biography. gatlinburg, tn: great smoky mountains association, 2019. ellison, george. “kephart, horace sowers.” in dictionary of north carolina biography, edited by william powell, 3:352–53. chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 1991. emel, jody. “are you man enough, big and bad enough? wolf eradication in the us.” in animal geographies: place, politics and identity in the nature-culture borderlands, edited by jennifer wolch and jody emel, 91–116. london: verso, 1998. essig, mark. lesser beasts: a snout-to-tail history of the humble pig. new york: basic books, 2015. ferguson, cody. this is our land: grassroots environmentalism in the latetwentieth century. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, 2015. fudge, erica. perceiving animals: humans and beasts in early modern english culture. london: palgrave macmillan, 2000. https://www.extension.purdue.edu/extmedia/fnr/fnr-544-w.pdf https://www.extension.purdue.edu/extmedia/fnr/fnr-544-w.pdf https://www.extension.purdue.edu/extmedia/fnr/fnr-544-w.pdf https://archive.org/details/travelsthroughin00incarv/ https://archive.org/details/travelsthroughin00incarv/ http://doi.org/10.22459/ahr.50.2011.08 http://doi.org/10.22459/ahr.50.2011.08 https://doi.org/10.2307/3985059 https://doi.org/10.2307/3985059 https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10686 https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10686 https://doi.org/10.1086/508027 https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.1998.0020 180 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) giesen, james c. boll weevil blues: cotton, myth, and power in the american south. chicago: university of chicago press, 2011. gilfoyle, timothy j. “the moral origins of political surveillance: the preventive society in new york city, 1867–1918.” american quarterly 38, no. 4 (autumn 1986): 637–52. https://doi. org/10.2307/2712698 grinnell, george bird. “the little hellbender’s appeal.” forest and stream 16, no. 21 (1881): 404. groves, john d. and lori a. williams, “in search of the hellbender in north carolina.” connect magazine, march 2011, 12–15. https://ag.purdue.edu/ department/extension/hellbender/_ docs/groves-searchhellbender.pdf hahn, steven. “hunting, fishing, and foraging: common rights and class relations in the postbellum south.” radical history no. 26 (october 1982): 37–64. https://doi.org/10.1215/016365451982-26-37 hahn, steven. a nation under our feet: black political struggles in the rural south from slavery to the great migration. cambridge, ma: belknap press of harvard university press, 2003. haraway, donna j. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. haraway, donna j. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham, nc: duke university press, 2016. haraway, donna j. “teddy bear patriarchy: taxidermy in the garden of eden, new york city, 1908–1936.” social text no. 11 (1984): 20–64. https://doi. org/10.2307/466593 harding, james h. amphibians and reptiles of the great lakes region. ann arbor: university of michigan press, 1997. harvey, mark w. t. a symbol of wilderness: echo park and the american conservation movement. albuquerque: university of new mexico press, 1994. hatley, james. “blood intimacies and biodicy: keeping faith with ticks.” australian humanities review 50 (2011): 63–76. http://doi.org/10.22459/ ahr.50.2011.04 hays, samuel p. conservation and the gospel of efficiency: the progressive conservation movement, 1890–1920. pittsburgh, pa: university of pittsburgh press, 1999. hoffecker, john f. modern humans: their african origins and global dispersal. new york: columbia university press, 2017. humphries, w. jeffrey, and thomas k. pauley. “life history of the hellbender, cryptobranchus alleganiensis, in a west virginia stream.” the american midland naturalist, 154, no.1 (2005): 135–42. inscoe, john c. “michaux, andré.” in powell, dictionary of north carolina biography, 4:262. johnson, tom r. and jeff briggler. the hellbender. saint louis: conservation commission of the state of missouri, 2004. https://ag.purdue.edu/ department/extension/hellbender/_ docs/johnson-thehellbender.pdf keitzer, s. connor, thomas k. pauley, and chris l. burcher. “stream characteristics associated with site occupancy by the eastern hellbender, cryptobranchus alleganiensis alleganiensis, in southern west virginia.” northeastern naturalist 20, no. 4 (2013): 666–77. https://doi. org/10.1656/045.020.0418 kephart, horace. camping and woodcraft: a handbook for vacation campers and for travelers in the wilderness. knoxville: university of tennessee press, 1988. kephart, horace. our southern highlanders. new york: outing publishing company, 1913. https://doi.org/10.2307/2712698 https://doi.org/10.2307/2712698 https://ag.purdue.edu/department/extension/hellbender/_docs/groves-searchhellbender.pdf https://ag.purdue.edu/department/extension/hellbender/_docs/groves-searchhellbender.pdf https://ag.purdue.edu/department/extension/hellbender/_docs/groves-searchhellbender.pdf https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1982-26-37 https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-1982-26-37 https://doi.org/10.2307/466593 https://doi.org/10.2307/466593 http://doi.org/10.22459/ahr.50.2011.04 http://doi.org/10.22459/ahr.50.2011.04 https://ag.purdue.edu/department/extension/hellbender/_docs/johnson-thehellbender.pdf https://ag.purdue.edu/department/extension/hellbender/_docs/johnson-thehellbender.pdf https://ag.purdue.edu/department/extension/hellbender/_docs/johnson-thehellbender.pdf https://doi.org/10.1656/045.020.0418 https://doi.org/10.1656/045.020.0418 craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 181 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) krometis, leigh-anne, hannah patton, austin wozniak, and emily sarver, “water scavenging from roadside springs in appalachia.” journal of contemporary water research & education 166, no. 1 (april 2019): 46–56. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1936704x.2019.03301.x kuster, megan. “global commodity chains and local use-value: william colenso, natural history collecting and indigenous labour.” journal of colonialism and colonial history 22, no. 2 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1353/ cch.2021.0021 lear, linda. rachael carson: witness for nature. new york: mariner books, 1997. lorimer, jamie. “nonhuman charisma.” environment and planning d: society and space 25, no. 5 (2007): 911–32. https://doi.org/10.1068/d71j lorimer, jamie. wildlife in the anthropocene: conservation after nature. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2015. loxton, daniel and donald r. prothero. abominable science! origins of the yeti, nessie, and other famous cryptids. new york: columbia university press, 2013. maher, neil m. nature’s new deal: the civilian conservation corps and the roots of the american environmental movement. new york: oxford university press, 2008. mauldin, erin stewart. unredeemed land: an environmental history of civil war and emancipation in the cotton south. new york: oxford university press, 2018. mclean, elizabeth p. “john and william bartram: their importance to botany and horticulture.” bartonia no. 57 (1992): 10–27. michaux, andré. andré michaux in north america: journals & letters, 1785–1797. translated, edited, and annotated by charlie williams, eliane m. norman, and walter kingsley taylor. tucaloosa: university of alabama press, 2020. miller, char. gifford pinchot and the making of modern environmentalism. washington, dc: island press, 2001. milligan, linda. “the ‘truth’ about the bigfoot legend.” western folklore 49, no. 1 (january 1990): 83–98. https://doi. org/10.2307/1499483 mizelle, brett. pig. london: reaktion books, 2012. montgomery, david. the fall of the house of labor: the workplace, the state, and american labor activism, 1865–1925. cambridge: cambridge university press, 1987. mooney, james. myths of the cherokee. washington dc: bureau of american ethnology, 1902. morgan, lewis h. ancient society, or: researches in the lines of human progress from savagery through barbarism to civilization. new york: holt, 1877. morgensen, scott lauria. “theorising gender, sexuality and settler colonialism: an introduction.” settler colonial studies 2, no. 2 (2012): 2–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/220147 3x.2012.10648839 morris, gregory l. “imagining bigfoot.” western american literature 42, no. 3 (fall 2007): 277–92. https://doi. org/10.1353/wal.2007.0002 morrissey, robert michael. people of the ecotone: environment and indigenous power at the center of early america. seattle: university of washington press, 2022. murphy, brian. “afs roots: the father of all the fishes.” fisheries 45, no. 2 (february 2020): 90–100. https://doi. org/10.1002/fsh.10413 nance, susan. entertaining elephants: animal agency and the business of the american circus. baltimore, md: john hopkins university press, 2013. nance, susan, ed. the historical animal. syracuse: syracuse university press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1936-704x.2019.03301.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1936-704x.2019.03301.x https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2021.0021 https://doi.org/10.1353/cch.2021.0021 https://doi.org/10.1068/d71j https://doi.org/10.2307/1499483 https://doi.org/10.2307/1499483 https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473x.2012.10648839 https://doi.org/10.1080/2201473x.2012.10648839 https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2007.0002 https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2007.0002 https://doi.org/10.1002/fsh.10413 https://doi.org/10.1002/fsh.10413 182 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) nance, susan. rodeo: an animal history. norman: university of oklahoma press, 2020. nance, susan and jennifer marks, eds. bellwether histories: animals, humans, and us environments in crisis. seattle: university of washington press, 2023. nickerson, m. k. krysko, r. owen, “habitat differences affecting age class distributions of the hellbender salamander, cryptobranchus alleganiensis.” southeastern naturalist, 2, no. 4 (2003): 619–29. parrish, susan scott. american curiosity: cultures of natural history in the colonial british atlantic world. chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 2006. petranka, james w. salamanders of the united states and canada. washington, dc: smithsonian institution press, 1998. powell, william s., ed. dictionary of north carolina biography. 6 volumes. chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 1979–1996. pugh, m. worth, john d. groves, lori a. williams, and michael m. gangloff. “a previously undocumented locality of eastern hellbenders (cryptobranchus alleganiensis alleganiensis) in the elk river, carter county, tn.” southeastern naturalist 12, no. 1 (2013): 137–42. https:// doi.org/10.1656/058.012.0111 purdy, jedediah. after nature: a politics for the anthropocene. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2015. quinn, samuel a., james p. gibbs, myrna h. hall, and peter j. petokas. “multiscale factors influencing distribution of the eastern hellbender salamander (cryptobranchus alleganiensis alleganiensis) in the northern segment of its range.” journal of herpetology, 47, no. 1 (2013): 78–84. https://doi. org/10.1670/11-127 ray, louis l. the great ice age. washington, dc: us department of the interior, 1992. richardson, heather cox. west from appomattox: the reconstruction of america after the civil war. new haven, ct: yale university press, 2007. roberts, strother e. colonial ecology, atlantic economy: transforming nature in early new england. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, 2019. robichaud, andrew a. animal city: the domestication of america. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2019. rome, adam. “nature wars, culture wars: immigration and environmental reform in the progressive era.” environmental history 13, no. 3 (2008): 432–53. https:// doi.org/10.1093/envhis/13.3.432 roosevelt, theodore, and george bird grinnell, eds. american big-game hunting: the book of the boone and crockett club. new york: forest and stream publishing, 1893. https://www. biodiversitylibrary.org/item/52303 rose, deborah bird. “flying fox: kin, keystone, kontaminant.” australian humanities review no. 50 (2011): 119–36. http://doi.org/10.22459/ahr.50.2011.07 rosenberg, gabriel n. “no scrubs: livestock breeding, eugenics, and the state in the early twentieth-century united states.” journal of american history 107, no. 2 (september 2020): 362–87. https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/ jaaa179 rosenberg, gabriel n. “a race suicide among the hogs: the biopolitics of pork in the united states, 1865–1930.” american quarterly 68, no. 1 (march 2016): 49–73. https://doi.org/10.1353/ aq.2016.0007 saunt, claudio. unworthy republic: the dispossession of native americans and the road to indian territory. new york: w. w. norton, 2020. scott, joan wallach. the fantasy of feminist history. durham, nc: duke university press, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1656/058.012.0111 https://doi.org/10.1656/058.012.0111 https://doi.org/10.1670/11-127 https://doi.org/10.1670/11-127 https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/13.3.432 https://doi.org/10.1093/envhis/13.3.432 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/52303 https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/52303 http://doi.org/10.22459/ahr.50.2011.07 https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaaa179 https://doi.org/10.1093/jahist/jaaa179 https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2016.0007 https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2016.0007 craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden | 183 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) sellers, christopher c. crabgrass crucible: suburban nature and the rise of environmentalism in twentieth-century america. chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 2012. seymour, nicole. bad environmentalism: irony and irreverence in the ecological age. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2018. silkenat, david. scars on the land: an environmental history of slavery in the american south. new york: oxford university press, 2022. smalley, andrea l. wild by nature: north american animals confront colonization. baltimore, md: john hopkins university press, 2017. snyder, samuel. “new streams of religion: fly fishing as a lived religion of nature.” journal of the academy of religion 75, no. 4 (december 2007): 896–922. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfm063 spence, mark david. “crown of the continent, backbone of the world: the american wilderness ideal and blackfeet exclusion from glacier national park.” environmental history 1, no. 3 (1996): 29–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/3985155. spencer, jasmine. “the buffalo, the chickadee, and the eagle: a multispecies textual history of plenty coups’s multivocal autobiography.” american indian quarterly 43, no. 2 (spring 2019): 168–203. https://doi. org/10.5250/amerindiquar.43.2.0168 strom, claire. making catfish bait out of government boys: the fight against cattle ticks and the transformation of the yeoman south. athens: university of georgia press, 2009. sutter, paul s. driven wild: how the fight against automobiles launched the modern wilderness movement. seattle: university of washington press, 2002. swanson, drew a. “mountain meeting ground: history at an intersection of species.” in nance, the historical animal, 240–58. taliaferro, john. grinnell: america’s environmental pioneer and his restless drive to save the west. new york: liveright, 2019. thwaites, ruben gold, ed. travels west of the alleghanies made in 1793–96 by andré michaux, in 1802 by f. a. michaux; and in 1803 by thaddeus mason harris, m. a. cleveland: arthur h. clark, 1904. tortorici, zeb. sins against nature: sex and archives in colonial new spain. durham, nc: duke university press, 2018. tyrrell, ian. “america’s national parks: the transnational creation of national space in the progressive era.” journal of american studies 46, no. 1 (2012): 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s0021875811001320 unger, shem d., olin e. rhodes, jr., trent m. sutton, and rod n. williams, “population genetics of the eastern hellbender (cryptobranchus alleganiensis alleganienses) across multiple spatial scales.” plos one 8, no. 10 (october 2013): e74180. https://doi. org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074180 van dooren, thom. “vultures and their people in india: equity and entanglement in a time of extinctions.” australian humanities review 50 (2011): 45–62. http:// doi.org/10.22459/ahr.50.2011.03 walker, brett. “animals and the intimacy of history.” history and theory 52, no. 4 (december 2013): 45–67. https://doi. org/10.1111/hith.10687 wallace, david rains. the klamath knot: explorations of myth and evolution. san francisco, ca: sierra club books, 1983. whitehead, jessup. the steward’s handbook and guide to party catering. chicago, 1889. woodbury, richard b. and nathalie f. s. woodbury. “the rise and fall of the bureau of american ethnology.” journal of the southwest 41, no. 3 (autumn 1999): 283–96. https://doi.org/10.1093/jaarel/lfm063 https://doi.org/10.2307/3985155 https://doi.org/10.5250/amerindiquar.43.2.0168 https://doi.org/10.5250/amerindiquar.43.2.0168 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021875811001320 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0021875811001320 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074180 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0074180 http://doi.org/10.22459/ahr.50.2011.03 http://doi.org/10.22459/ahr.50.2011.03 https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10687 https://doi.org/10.1111/hith.10687 184 | craig , bigfoot swims in the garden of eden humanimalia 14.2 (2024) worster, donald. shrinking the earth: the rise and decline of natural abundance. new york: oxford university press, 2016. zahl, paul a. “the shadowy world of salamanders.” national geographic 142, no. 1 (july 1972). zeller, suzanne. inventing canada: early victorian science and the idea of a transcontinental nation. montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press, 2009. zulueta, concepción cortés. “nonhuman animal testimonies: a natural history in the first person?” in nance, the historical animal, 118–33. lászló, cynematographic doubling cynematographic doubling: dogs’ phenomenal presence in hollywood feature films borbála lászló doctoral school of literary and cultural studies university of debrecen, hungary humanimalia 13.1 (fall 2022) abstract: the present article contends that cinematic canines do not rupture representation even when they seem to slip out of character; rather, they reveal an immanent phenomenological dimension of fiction films. the main premise is that even such a crystallized representational form as classical narrative cinema, which treats the domestic dog as a sentimental icon, offers at least three layers to account for: 1) a visual layer that constructs the dog as a cute image; 2) an epistemological layer that carries the meanings we attach to it; and 3) a phenomenological, or “creaturely” layer that the cinematic medium will never be able to represent but will continue to present as long as it employs real-life dogs. dogs thus create moments of what i call “cynematographic doubling”, when their phenomenal presence completes the diegesis with a documentary dimension, and moves the audience to emotions which are difficult to define. while focusing on the first two layers alone would reinforce an anthropocentric approach, according to which dogs in the fiction film project human notions, sentiments and intentions, the phenomenological, or “creaturely” layer calls for a relational approach according to which the cinematic portrayal of dogs is co-created by flesh-andblood canines. through an interpretations of selected hollywood films, the article highlights moments that reveal the extent to which the film is indebted to the star dogs’ creaturely agency and affect. keywords: dog representations, cinema, cuteness, creatureliness, creaturely affect, phenomenology, relationality bio: borbála lászló is a phd candidate at the university of debrecen, hungary, engaged in reading cinematic texts from a more-than-human perspective. she is particularly interested in filmic representations of dogs as well as their phenomenological, biopolitical, and bioethical implications. in her research she attempts to map the cinematic traces and transformations of human– canine relationships in documentary and fiction films. email: brbala.laszlo@gmail.com orcid: 0000-0002-7718-6419 copyright © 2022 borbála lászló this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 111–162. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.10936 mailto:brbala.laszlo@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7718-6419 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10936 lászló, cynematographic doubling | 113 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) “as much as you think that you’re a master of your pet, it’s usually the other way around.”  — ericson core, director of togo, 2019 “hello, dad,” say the eyes of strongheart to boston blackie, a jewel thief who has just been released from prison. “hello, old boy,” the man would reply, if the return of boston blackie (1927) were not a silent film, but one shall want for nothing: the intertitle helps viewers read the opening sequence as an emotional reunion of man and his beloved companion, the “pal who had never failed him.”1 this scene, a dog running towards his master after a long absence, jumping into his arms, and covering him with slobbering kisses and adoring glances (fig. 1), has been replayed countless times in subsequent hollywood films. although affective experiences like this do not easily lend themselves to analysis, the simplest way to make sense of them would be to say that the spectator is expected to be moved by the reunion of master and pet, the dog’s enduring love and such concomitant gestures as the “puppy eyes” look — an evolved feature of domestic canines to emotionally manipulate humans, which hollywood has been using for its own purposes of prompting an emotional response in the audience. but is this all that is happening? put differently, the initial question of this article is “what do we feel as spectators when we see a cute-looking dog character in a hollywood feature film?” yet to make sense of the affective force of the cinematic canine, one first needs to see clearly the creature that affects the viewer. the introductory question thus gives way to the main set of queries underlying this paper, namely, “what evokes the almost inexplicable, poignant emotion that many of us experience when encountering — through the screen — the adorable glances of a dog?”, “what is this creature?”, and ultimately, “what do we see 1 the return of boston blackie is a valuable source for studying dog representations because it is the only one of the strongheart films that has survived to be restored for viewing today. as alexandra horowitz explains, this has to do with the fact that films featuring animal actors, especially those that starred dogs “were so popular that the film stock was destroyed from frequent playing”. horowitz, “dog at the side”, 222. 114 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) when we are watching a dog in a hollywood movie?” in an attempt to understand its strong emotional effect better, the present article thus examines the nature and visual manifestation of the being that constitutes the cinematic canine in hollywood feature films. it adopts a non-anthropocentric, relational approach that entertains the idea of the (f)actual dog playing a part in creating his or her own representation. in other words, the paper builds on the premise that the quality of the canine character of moving viewers to emotions is as complex as the individual who evokes it and that this character is not just a product of cinematic technologies. three-fold four-legged furry friends as the opening sequence of the return of boston blackie illustrates, the fictional canine comprises at least three layers, as it were, three dogs with three different names. first, hugging his master like a child clinging to their parent, there is strongheart, the cute-looking, quasi-human character. then there is strong heart, the allegory of loyalty and love. and finally, hiding in plain sight, there is strongheart, the real-life dog whose not-fully-convincing performance as a dog of the same name makes it relatively easy to notice his presence. it is odd, for instance, that he seems to be looking and barking in the wrong direction (fig. 2), most probably at his handler off-screen, thus revealing his non-fictional “being-there”, to borrow the term heidegger reserved for human beings to describe, in this case, a nonhuman animal. yet this is not to say that the real-life dimension of strongheart will disappear once he is looking “the right way” and resumes his position in the diegesis. as adrienne mclean argues, dogs, like all animals, provoke a “crisis of representation” in commercial cinema because their depiction can never be considered as proper representation.2 that is, a fiction film featuring a dog is always, to a certain extent, documentary, not in the generic sense of providing a factual report on a particular subject, but in the most literal sense of documenting reality, although, as i will argue, this documentary referentiality does not transcend the fiction but rather doubles it, becoming part of the diegesis. 2 mclean, “introduction”, 20. lászló, cynematographic doubling | 115 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) jonathan burt asserts that “the line between the fictitious and the real animal is most difficult to draw”, but it becomes noticeable especially in the case of slippages, such as when strongheart looks at his handler off-screen. at such moments, burt argues, the on-screen animal precipitates an ostensible “rupture in the field of representation”.3 in the return of boston blackie, such a rupture appears to occur when, while blackie and strongheart are out walking, a cat leaps into the frame and, catching sight of the dog, arches its back with its fur standing on end, seeming to double its size in a second. triggered by this excitement, strongheart duly slips into dog-mode: his eyes are fixated on the cat, his ears prick forward, his tongue is thrust out and withdrawn repeatedly; his whole being is strung with attention and curiosity. the film stylistically accentuates this focused state with a close-up. then, as the cat decides to flee, canine prey drive cuts in and strongheart moves to begin the pursuit only to be held back by blackie (bob custer). what makes this sequence interesting is that seeing the dog actor momentarily distracted by the cat reveals an immanent documentary or phenomenological dimension within the fiction, which we do not usually pay attention to. consequently, this scene has the potential to change our perception of feature films as being pure fiction, with characters who are separate from who they are in “the real world”, to a kind of impure or hybrid fiction which, evoking the main points of bazinian realism, always already contains reality and where acting means not “simply the simulations of feelings and identities” but the “presentation of states of being”.4 since it is the dog acting on his instincts that, in the highlighted scene, causes the realization about fiction’s impurity or hybridity, one could assume that the present view on cinematic canines relies on an implicitly cartesian distinction between humans, who are capable of acting by tapping into their inner selves, and animals, who are incapable of acting as humans do because they lack psychological depth and only behave according to their instincts. however, by blurring the line between representation and reality as well as 3 burt, animals in film, 11–12. 4 kouvaros, “realism and cinema”, 385. 116 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) lászló, cynematographic doubling | 117 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 1 (left): strongheart, the cute-looking character and strong heart, the allegory of loyalty and love. still from o. hoyt, the return of boston blackie [01:57] figure 2 (right): strongheart, the real-life dog barking at his handler off-screen. still from o. hoyt, the return of boston blackie [02:08] 118 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) lászló, cynematographic doubling | 119 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 3: strongheart helping us glimpse the film’s phenomenological dimension. stills from o. hoyt, the return of boston blackie [11:12–12:15] 120 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) acting and non-acting, this view in fact reminds us that all characters, whether they are human or nonhuman (in the present scene human, canine or feline, to be precise) inevitably present their real or phenomenal “states of being”. strongheart’s fictional status as an anthropomorphized character is reinstated when blackie says, “listen, old boy, i said a quiet and peaceful evening. remember?” to which the dog responds with an affirmative bark. but this intertitle can also be read metafictionally, as if the human actor were reminding the dog to play his role. which he does, though not entirely: the attempt to restore representation as we have previously known it cannot be fully successful because we have glimpsed the irreducible phenomenological dimension of strongheart, with his susceptibility to chase a cat or look at his trainer at any moment, of blackie, since the actor, bob custer can be also distracted by, for instance, some strong smell, and of the cat, who is also simultaneously playing part in the fiction and is being him or herself. thus, even though master and pet continue their walk, implying that the “proper” — pure — fiction has resumed its course, the flickering eyes of the cat, now sitting safely in the nook of a tree, remind us that fiction films always involve and are affected by the real-life animal, whose continuous presence greatly contributes to evoking a poignant feeling in the viewer (fig. 3). all animals, human and nonhuman, can reveal their own as well as the other characters’ phenomenological state. however, since dogs are considered to be one of the most trainable species, possessing the intelligence, the emotional depth, and the agility to play a character in a manner similar to humans, while at the same time, as nonhuman animals, being denied the status and significance of a character in their own right, when they apparently rupture the fabric of the diegesis, they break the illusion of pure fiction more effectively than another, less trainable animal, such as a cat — who is assumed to be always present simply as herself — would, or, conversely, than a human being, who is assumed to be acting even when she is being herself. therefore, i will address the effects particularly dogs have on our perception of fiction, by focusing on similarly representative scenes from a number of hollywood films. to stress my point, the present paper partly breaks with mclean’s and burt’s arguments lászló, cynematographic doubling | 121 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) and contends that cinematic canines in fact cannot rupture representation. even when they seem to do so, the dogs reveal only their phenomenological dimension, the (f)actual dog who is also present while convincingly playing his or her part; it is, in fact, the same creature who plays the character. while this is true for all movies in which dogs appear, i am here concerned with hollywood productions because i wish to make the point that even such a crystallized or polished representational form as the one perpetuated by classical hollywood cinema, with its seemingly one-dimensional canine images, offers at least three layers, namely: 1) a visual layer that constructs the dog as a cute image; 2) an epistemological layer that carries the meanings we attach to it; and 3) a creaturely/phenomenological layer that the feature film absorbs and presents in the manner of a documentary as long as it employs real-life dogs. classical hollywood cinema tends to construct the dog as an image of cuteness,5 drawing heavily on the animal’s mimetic-neotenic morphology, the evolved feature of the puppy eyes which makes the canine gaze resemble that of human babies, hence potentially activating a sense of protectiveness in the viewer.6 even in the silent film 5 one must add that, although dog representations in hollywood films are mostly based on the aesthetics of cuteness, we also often encounter dogs foaming at the mouth, bloodhounds chasing escaped criminals and other monstrous canine characters, which rather recall the aesthetics as well as the meaningand affect-making mechanisms of horror. as katarina gregersdotter et al. argue, the animal in animal horror cinema is often represented as a monstrous, ferocious, evil other, who embodies our fears and confirms our sense of normality, civility and moral superiority (“introduction”, 5–14). of course, individual dog figures are much more complex than the simple binary of cute or terrifying allows, as i argue throughout this article. 6 according to a 2019 ethological study, there is a pair of muscles, levator angulioculi medialis (laom), and retractor anguli oculi lateralis (raol) present in dogs but not in wolves, their closest genetic ancestors, which proved to be responsible for the special affective communication with humans (see kaminski et al., “evolution”, 14678). when these muscles raise the eyebrows, making the dog’s eyes look bigger and objectively cuter, humans respond with a jolt of oxytocin in their blood, the same hormone that activates our nurturing instincts when we see human babies. the findings of this study thus show that domestic dogs have developed these muscles during their coevolution with us, that is, they have voluntarily mimicked our young offspring in order to appear cute and stimulate in us an urge to care for them. the perception of cuteness is, of course, highly subjective, but, as the quoted study shows, it has a well-grounded biological underpinning first introduced in the 1940s by ethologist konrad lorenz. his theory of baby schema (kinderschema) suggests that creatures with juvenile aesthetic features ‒large eyes, bulging 122 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) era, filmmakers realized that a flash of puppy eyes can trigger (parental) feelings in the audience, especially given that with no dialogue, the pantomimic gestures of the actors gained a huge narrative significance and similar importance was imputed to the facial expressions, most importantly the eyes, of dog heroes.7 for instance, the chicago tribune’s review of strongheart in the silent call (1922) remarked that the dog was “an extraordinarily intelligent creature with a pair of eyes that go to your heart.”8 owing to its ability to cause such an overwhelming experience, filmmakers have never ceased to capitalize on the “puppy eyes” look, instructing the dog actor to turn towards the human actor or the camera with pleading eyes, usually emphasizing the animal’s expressions with a close-up. according to burt, it is the animal’s affective impact upon the human observer that constitutes its agency, but it is questionable to what extent the affective response is evoked by the real-life dog or by the strategies of representing dogs in feature films. acknowledging the ambiguity of such and similar affective forces, burt writes: on the one hand, it can be argued that an emotional response to animals is an empathetic and hence a straightforward natural expression of sentiment toward fellow creatures. on the other hand, it can as easily be said that it is film itself that, since its arrival in the mid-1890s, has increasingly influenced the constructions of the animal in the public domain and that the force of the viewer’s response to the animal is imbued with the techniques by which film provokes feelings in its audience.9 from an anthropocentric perspective, and knowing that they are trained and instructed to “act” in feature films, it can be stated that dogs serve to trigger our emotions and are thus deprived of their craniums, retreating chins‒ are likely to trigger our nurturing instincts. in this sense, dogs have not only learnt to mimic the expression of human babies, but in order to do so have retained their juvenile facial features into adulthood, hence their mimetic-neotenic morphology, more precisely, their puppy eyes. 7 see fuller-seeley and groskopf, “the dogs”, 65. 8 “introducing a canine hero who can act”, chicago tribune, 12 april (1922), 24; quoted in fuller-seeley and groskopf, 59. 9 burt, animals in film, 30–31, 10. lászló, cynematographic doubling | 123 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) agency. their filmic representation is under human control. nevertheless, one should not forget that films draw on a trait that domestic dogs have developed in order to generate in humans the impulse to care for them,10 even if this quality is manipulated by the film industry and its practices of aestheticizing cuteness.11 furthermore, the individual dog actor also needs to establish an emotional bond with the human co-star in order to move the viewer with its glances through the camera. these details suggest, then, that it is not only the representational strategies that make dogs appear cute on the screen: it is also their own ability which they decide to use when bonding with humans. taking into account the possibility of the dog actor himor herself looking wilfully adorable already challenges the notion that the cute dog character is a mere visual construct completely controlled by cinematic technologies. in terms of projected meaning, the dog often appears as a “threshold creature” in the sense that it moves with ease between the realms of tameness and wildness, nature and culture.12 and, i would add, childhood and adulthood, since in the narratives of hollywood films, there is a recurring pattern of a dog befriending a child, in most cases a boy. as i will show in the analyses that follow, the dog’s role in this type of narrative is not so much to teach the child discipline 10 according to joshua paul dale, the dog’s cute appearance suggests the possibility of self-domestication which might have taken place in concert with human selection. he argues that the domestication of dogs from wolves might have had two stages: that of self-domestication, during which a few less fearful or aggressive wolves began to draw closer to human settlements, behaving in an increasingly prosocial way as humans got used to their presence; and that of a subsequent selection process when humans started breeding dogs intentionally, based on traits that proved to be useful in human activities such as hunting. these assumptions allow one to speculate that it was the dog’s intrinsic appeal for sociality that brought canines and humans together in the first place. see dale, “appeal of the cute object”, 48. 11 in this regard, cinema follows the principles and mechanisms of consumer culture, which, as daniel harris, lori merish, and sianne ngai have articulated, aestheticizes and commodifies weakness to trigger a maternal response in the consumer, thereby increasing the appealing value and profitability of cute objects. see harris, cute, 4; merish, “cuteness”, 186; and ngai, our aesthetic categories, 1. yet, as ngai points out, consumer culture also capitalizes on the cute entity’s own inclination to manipulate the perceiver, which betrays the etymology of the english word “cute”, a shortened form of “acute”, as in “clever”, “sharp witted”, or “cunning”. 12 see mchugh, dog, 42. 124 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) and catalyse his maturation into a responsible adult as it is to retain or reintroduce into the adult world some of the wildness, emotional freedom, and social flexibility that — according to the adult perception — characterizes childhood. therefore, interestingly, while dogs’ evolved neotenic appearance (potentially) evokes our nurturing instincts, their behaviour encourages us to identify with dogs’ constructed childishness. canine figures, moreover, are often associated with the tropes of love and loyalty. although it should be noted that such allegorical constructions find support in real-life dogs’ proclivity for interspecies engagement, they are nevertheless constructions, abstract meanings that we attach to the creature. focusing only on the visual and the epistemological layer of cinematic canines would thus repeat the reductive, dominantly anthropocentric interpretation according to which animals in fiction are mere constructs (symbols, metaphors, allegories, and the like) created to project ideas about ourselves — a reading strategy that prevailed both in literary and film criticism before the animal turn, but was recently challenged by animal studies scholars such as mclean and burt.13 cinematic canines are much more than a cute image and an intricate allegory of love, loyalty, and emotional freedom. yet, while burt and mclean account for the actual creature as an entity who resists and ruptures representation, this paper, taking strongheart’s example as a springboard, proposes that the real-life dog in fact completes representation with its own phenomenological reality. as derrida once said, “in its closure, representation continues”, absorbing the real.14 although one usually only glimpses the creaturely layer when the fictitious skin peels back, revealing some sensuous (olfactory or tactile) canine experience, that is, when the lifeworld of the fleshand-blood dog most conspicuously protrudes from the film’s surface, it is never separated from the fictional world. this means that 13 while my approach aims to highlight that the third, creaturely layer of cinematic canines has the potential to resist the control of cinematic technologies, i also realize that the animals’ creaturely beings are recruited by hollywood’s storytelling apparatus. this also implies that hollywood functions as a cultural institution of the most powerful settler-colonial, capitalist country in the world, and reflects the ethical, political, and ideological implications for the way animals relate to and are treated by the state. 14 derrida, writing and difference, 316. lászló, cynematographic doubling | 125 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) the dog’s movements, gestures, and actions are simultaneously part of the narrative and of the world of sensory impulses, the here-andnow, the place and moment of shooting with the cameras, the handler, other human and nonhuman animals on set, the whole filmic apparatus: in short, reality. i thus argue that dogs occupy a threshold position in hollywood feature films, and, by being simultaneously in and out of fiction, they help us glimpse the hybridity of the representational universe as it inherently contains a phenomenological dimension: an aspect which most of the time we do not notice but which nevertheless affects the perception of the film and the emotional states it creates in the audience. while my argument resonates with that of burt, he approaches the question of filmic animals from the opposite direction, stating that creatures in fiction can always be seen as real, nonfictional, and factual. i claim that even when they appear as themselves, animals in cinema are also always fictional and constructed. or, to put it slightly differently, as opposed to burt and mclean who suggest that the actual, real animals are, in a sense, unrepresentable, i perceive them as completing, and hence actively contributing to the creation of their own representation. as suggested earlier, all animals — human and nonhuman — are capable of doubling representation with their phenomenal presence. yet due to their perceived trainability, intelligence, psychological depth and agility, which makes them similar to human actors, while at the same time remaining essentially canine, different and nonhuman, dogs are more prone to call our attention to the diegetic world containing a documentary dimension than a less trainable animal, such as a cat, or, conversely, a highly trainable and trained animal, such as a human. a cat is assumed to be always present simply as herself, treated as a prop by both filmmakers and viewers, while a human is believed to be simulating feelings and identities even in moments when she is simply being herself. thus, although bringing their phenomenal realities into the fiction, these two species are less likely to reveal the immanent impurity or hybridity of feature films than cinematic canines. when a dog’s phenomenal presence or “state of being” is presented, he or she effectively breaks the spell of pure fiction and confronts us with the immanent impurity 126 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) or doubling of fiction with reality. i propose that one could describe such moments as “cynematographic doubling”, a term that combines the etymologically similar roots of dogs (the greek κύων [kuōn], dog, and κυνικός [kunikos], doglike, canine, cynic) and cinema (from κίνημα [kinēma], meaning movement, hence the phrase moving image, which is simultaneously construed here as an emotionally moving medium). the notion of cynematographic doubling thus brings together, or rather reflects, the connection between dogs, cinema, and that emotionally moving quality when the former two are joined together. more precisely, cynematographic doubling refers to moments when a dog’s phenomenal presence doubles the diegesis with a real or documentary dimension, which is always there but we usually do not see it, and, as a consequence, also complicates the affective spectatorial experience. the films selected for analysis will thus be read as works of cynematography in which the phenomenological or creaturely double of the canine character actively contributes to completing the fiction with his or her phenomenal reality and, consequently, to creating a moving image not only in terms of the medium’s dependence on movement, but also in the sense of being emotionally moving for the viewer. the creaturely double of the canine character this paper furthermore proposes that the aforementioned doubling can be construed in terms of the derridean logic of spectrality insofar as it “exceeds all the oppositions between visible and invisible, sensible and insensible.”15 derrida’s spectre, however, “is visible only insofar as it is not visible in flesh and blood.”16 since the dog character’s sensory lifeworld is present in and through the canine actor’s body, and therefore intrinsically linked to carnality, it should be termed a creaturely/phenomenological rather than a spectral or ghostly doubling of the fictional dog. relying on derrida’s notion of the spectre, yet grounded in the animal actor’s corporeality, the present article refuses to treat the filmic dog representation as a mere construct, and, joining other animal studies scholars’ 15 derrida and stiegler, “spectrographies”, 39. 16 derrida and stiegler, 38. lászló, cynematographic doubling | 127 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) work, aims to call attention to the real creature beyond the image and the projected meanings. as pao-chen tang insightfully argues in his essay “of dogs and hot dogs: distractions on early cinema”, “[u]ndoubtedly cinema signifies, but the dogs’ agency complicates [the] claim that animals are naturally turned into languages or signs when they become filmic element.”17 as part of the argument that the (f)actual dog actively completes its own representation, it is important to note that the creaturely double of the canine character is not conceived here as a cartesian beast-machine that takes over the “well-behaved” dog actor when a reactive mechanism is triggered by a disruptive element such as a cat or an offscreen handler. although it becomes visible in such impulsive instances, the creaturely double, as i implied above, denotes the real-life animal that is always present alongside — in fact is inseparable from — the character even when it remains invisible; it is the same creature that convincingly plays its role. in other words, although the selected scenes may give the impression that the third layer of the cinematic canine emerges as an instinctual being that cannot think, pretend, or transcend itself — which would reinforce the old anthropocentric notion of animals that derrida deconstructs in his essay “and say the animal responded?”18 — the segments in fact refer to the dog actor who can be indeed distracted (just as human actors), but who also convincingly pretends to be a character for a large part of the narrative. perceiving the third layer of the cinematic canine as a real-life creature that can act both convincingly and unconvincingly also makes the question of whether the dog actor can “pretend to pretend”, as human actors supposedly can, or merely pretend, as in following commands, irrelevant. regarding this matter, derrida admits that “it is indeed difficult, even impossible, to discern between pretense 17 tang, “of dogs and hot dogs,” 50. 18 the essay is a critique of lacan’s argument that the animal is incapable of “pretense in the second degree”, whereas the “subject of the signifier” belonging to the human order possesses such a power and, as such, can “emerge as subject, instituting itself and coming to itself as subject by virtue of this power, a second-degree reflexive power, a power that is conscious of being able to deceive by pretending to pretend.” derrida, “and say”, 130. 128 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) and a pretense of pretense, between an aptitude for pretense and an aptitude for the pretense of pretense.”19 he concludes that “every pretense of pretense remains a simple pretense (animal or imaginary, in lacan’s terms), or else, on the contrary, and just as likely, that every pretense, however simple it may be, gets repeated and reposited undecidably, in its possibility, as pretense of pretense (human or symbolic in lacan’s terms).”20 informed by derrida’s conclusion, this article takes the dog’s ability to act for granted, making no difference between “simple pretense” and “pretense of pretense”, and instead differentiates between moments when the dog actor acts convincingly, and thus absorbs the viewer into the fiction, and moments when, because it is itself distracted, distracts the spectator. the consequence of such instances, as tang brilliantly argues, is that the onscreen animals can act as distractions, inviting us to see them “as real dogs — dogs as such — in relation to cinematic mediation.”21 drawing on tang’s argument, this paper adds that in hollywood, the dog that acts and the dog that distracts, thus the character and its creaturely double, are one and the same, which refutes rather than reinforces the cartesian notion of the animal as beast-machine. a relational perspective on dog representations in hollywood taking the above into consideration, while the first two layers of the cinematic canine reinforce an anthropocentric approach according to which dogs in the fiction film always “signify as ‘projections’ and ‘realizations of an intention’ — of trainers, writers, directors, and studios, as well as of audiences and critics,”22 the creaturely/phenomenological layer, most salient when the dog seemingly acts “out of character”, calls for a relational approach that acknowledges the extent to which the film and the feelings it evokes are indebted to the canine subject. this approach does not imply an expansion of human subjectivity and agency to the nonhuman, but rather what anat 19 derrida, “and say”, 135. 20 derrida, 134–36. 21 tang, “of dogs and hot dogs”, 55. 22 mclean, “introduction”, 13. lászló, cynematographic doubling | 129 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) pick calls a “gesture […] of contraction”, in the sense that it seeks to make our cultural representations including cinema and our modes of inquiry, such as film criticism, “less human” while “seeking to grant animals a share in our world of subjectivity”.23 the relational interpretations of the selected hollywood films that follow aim to account for the presence and the affective power of the dog figures’ creaturely dimension. although the three layers overlap, i shall focus on moments that, in the words of roman bartosch, “take effect as a transgressive rupture of stable, dichotomous taxonomies for the sake of a sustained sense of relationality.”24 before moving on to the analysis let me stress that the animals in the selected scenes do not rupture the fiction, but rather reveal their immanent phenomenological dimension, that is, the dog actor playing the character — an aspect which would remain unnoticed were it not for a momentary distraction. what the scenes under consideration do rupture is therefore the long-taken-for-granted link between representation and human agency, which they replace with a relational notion that even hollywood films are co-created by the nonhuman creatures’ actions. this approach heavily draws on tang’s “cinema of distractions” which “concerns an alternative mode of viewing that invites the viewer to spend more time looking at and thinking about cinematic animals.”25 partly breaking with burt’s and mclean’s, and rather siding with pick’s, bartosch’s and tang’s positions, i argue that even hollywood movies that use the dog as a sentimental icon  — a cute image, an allegory of love and loyalty — contain the phenomenological layer and thus move the spectator with the affective power of the creaturely, and that recognizing this can result in an ethical viewing practice. uncovering the creaturely in three “classic” hollywood hounds in the following analyses, i will first demonstrate the traditional, anthropocentric reading of cinematic canines, which construe them 23 pick, creaturely poetics, 6. 24 bartosch, “reading seeing”, 226. 25 tang, “of dogs and hot dogs”, 55. 130 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) as cute images and sentimental allegories, and then offer a reinterpretation of the films and the selected scenes, with the third, phenomenological or “creaturely” layer in mind. continuing the legacy of such legendary dog actors as strongheart and rin tin tin, who could allegedly pull the heartstrings of the audience with a simple raising of their brow, lassie come home (1943) consistently applies the technique of the “puppy eyes” look. on the visual level, the dog thus appears as an image of cuteness, the moving effect of which is emphasized through close-ups of the dog actor pal’s face. for instance, in a scene where lassie is taken back to the duke’s (nigel bruce) kennels after running away for a third time, she looks at joe (roddy mcdowall) with pleading eyes, begging him not to leave her there again (fig. 4). the canine character is infantilized, appearing as a little child, and as such, serves as an example of how hollywood exploits the dog actor’s evolved skills for emotional manipulation through the aestheticization of weakness. the film, furthermore, also seeks to move the audience on the level of the narrative where the dog is given a twofold allegorical role. on the one hand, lassie serves as a “threshold creature” in mchugh’s terms and is supposed to lead both human character and viewer alike back into a blissful, albeit imaginary, state of childhood. in order to fulfil this function, she is endowed with more empathy than most human characters and is able to transform them into compassionate beings. this is particularly true for joe’s parents and the duke of rudling, who abandon their intention to sell and buy lassie, respectively, after witnessing the dog’s loyalty to her young master. evoking nostalgic sentiments for childhood, imagined as a time when one was allowed to give in to one’s emotions, lassie serves as an allegory of childhood and loving with unreserved devotion.26 26 as henry jenkins points out, the “linkage of those two sentimental icons — the boy and the dog — was no accident”, since a newly-found emotional value was ascribed to both children and dogs between 1870 and 1930. jenkins, “her suffering aristocratic majesty”, 222. the perception of childhood was gradually changing, rendering children emblematic of a lost idyll in literature sometimes to the point of sacralization, while dogs were coincidentally revaluated as companions, becoming the means through which the rising middle-class communicated ideas about themselves in popular media or in children’s literature like erik knight’s novel on which the film lassie was based. see wolf, “promoting lassie”, 107. lászló, cynematographic doubling | 131 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) on the other hand, the adults make an ethical decision not to stand in the way of the dog’s love and loyalty, which is a sign of maturity rather than pre-social emotional freedom and unruliness. the film, nevertheless, allegorizes canine love for a purpose that is similar to its reasons for aestheticizing canine appearance: to manipulate the audience emotionally by projecting human notions and sentiments through the dog. the 1957 disney film old yeller, set in rural post-civil war texas, continues the narrative tradition of following a dog-boy friendship where the eponymous dog has a single allegorical role: to reintroduce the wildness, emotional freedom, and social flexibility that — in the adult imagination — characterizes childhood. left in charge of his little brother, his mother, and the farm in their father’s absence, the teenage travis (tommy kirk) longs to cross into manhood, but his self-enforced maturation process is offset by the dog’s neotenic behaviour. although yeller (spike), a stray appearing one day on the family’s farm, is initially claimed by the younger son arliss (kevin corcoran), he eventually establishes a bond with travis, who, from a would-be man, becomes a boy again thanks to his developing friendship with the maverick dog. travis is easily distracted, for instance, when, enthralled by two squirrels playing chase, he almost misses the opportunity of shooting a deer, and his emotions increasingly prevail over his reason. this ultimately leads to him withholding the knowledge that yeller is infected with rabies, keeping the dog alive until it is too late, as a consequence of which travis has to shoot the dog himself. soon after yeller’s death, travis’s father returns, and the boy refuses to accept the horse he had asked for as a present, the symbol of manhood in his eyes, because the memory of yeller, and his childhood, is still very much alive in his heart. this film is therefore another example of the link between the sentimental icons of the boy and the dog, the latter represented as a guide who transports character and viewer alike back into a childlike state of emotional freedom. old yeller is also abundant in close-ups of the dog’s puppy eyes — mostly appearing in scenes when yeller needs shelter, care, protection or food — thereby constructing the dog as a cute image which is intended to evoke the viewers’ nurturing instincts (fig. 5). 132 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) lászló, cynematographic doubling | 133 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 4: lassie as an image of cuteness with her “puppy eyes” directed at joe and the audience. still from wilcox, lassie come home [27:12] figure 5: yeller shown in a vulnerable state to evoke the viewers’ parental feelings. still from stevenson, old yeller [52:40] 134 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) lászló, cynematographic doubling | 135 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 6: the image of the cute-looking benji (top) juxtaposed with that of the child characters in danger (bottom). stills from camp, benji [50:42; 50:46] 136 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) more often, however, we are invited to go down the rabbit hole of childhood, for instance, when the titular character is catching fish in the river, and stir the water of our repressed emotions. the film’s canine character thus primarily functions as an allegorical “threshold creature” who is able to take us back to our childhood with his unbounded emotions. hence the film ultimately projects human notions and sentiments onto the dog, just as in lassie. in the 1974 family film benji, the frequent use of close-ups of the eponymous dog’s affectionate glances renders the dog a cute image with the intention of evoking parental feelings in the viewers. alternating the “puppy eyes” look with images of the child characters in danger further serves to enhance this effect (fig. 6). on the narrative level, however, benji (higgins) yet again functions as an allegory of childishness and pre-social emotional freedom, destined to transport the audience back into an imaginary childlike state. in contrast to this, adulthood is represented by the respectable dr chapman (peter breck), who, despite his children’s fondness for benji, forbids them to keep him as a pet, arguing that, as a stray, he is likely to carry diseases. whereas the father’s intersubjective relationships are characterized by domination and separation — his insistence on the dog’s distance, for instance, focalizes the lack of an intimate relationship with his kids — benji’s repeated visits to the chapman house, despite the risk of being harmed, stress the importance of contact and connection, which children are known to place above caution. the film’s narrative thus associates its canine protagonist not only with childlike naïveté, urging viewers to imitate such behaviour, but also with the tropes of love and loyalty, which are values and skills one acquires through socialization. considering the film’s visual and narrative layers, benji is therefore similar to lassie and old yeller in treating the canine character as a sentimental icon — a heart-warming image and a carrier of projected human meanings — and thus ostensibly offers an anthropocentric reading. yet all the three canine characters discussed so far hide another layer in plain sight: their experiential, phenomenological, creaturely side which doubles the fiction, challenges the one-sided, anthropocentric lászló, cynematographic doubling | 137 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) interpretation, and complicates the affective spectatorial experience of the viewer. a significant moment, when lassie’s creaturely layer becomes discernible, is when she and toots, the canine companion of rowlie (edmund gwenn), the itinerant tinsmith, whom lassie joins on her way home, are engaged in a tug of war. “you’ve been good dogs. go and play. you did a good show today,” says rowlie to the dogs after one of his end-of-sale performances in which both toots and lassie participate. rowlie’s command is ambiguously metafictional, similar to when blackie reminds strongheart to behave in the return of boston blackie: rowlie seems to be speaking both as a character and as a real-life dog trainer, the “show” referring to the diegetic act performed by the fictional dogs as well as to the canine actors’ performance in the film itself. and the dogs do indeed go and play, not only as characters but also as real dogs enjoying an actual game of tug of war (fig. 7). rowlie’s command thus introduces a scene into lassie where fiction and documentary markedly overlap but which reminds the viewer that the real-life dog is ever-present, constantly completing representation. in this light, even though one catches a glimpse of the (f)actual dog when lassie runs out of the frame with the rag in her mouth, she is always in the process of quitting fiction, at the threshold between representation and reality. considering lassie’s character only from a visual and an epistemological perspective would fail to account for the role played by the dog’s creaturely presence in interweaving the fabric of the film and evoking a subtle, but all the more profound and partly ineffable feeling in the spectator. although old yeller strongly projects the allegory of childhood, the viewer does not have to wait for long to catch a glimpse of the dog actor’s phenomenological/creaturely layer as the film effectively begins with yeller racing through the family’s cornfield in pursuit of a hare (fig. 8). since the sequence is part of the narrative but can also be seen through an ethological lens, the fictional dog yet again appears as a threshold creature, not only as an allegory, running between worlds and thereby connecting wilderness to civilization and childhood to adulthood, but also in terms of the division between representation and reality which yeller’s double status effectively 138 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) lászló, cynematographic doubling | 139 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 7: lassie and toots simultaneously playing as characters and real-life dogs. still from wilcox, lassie come home [1:09:00–1:09:13] 140 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) lászló, cynematographic doubling | 141 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 8: yeller’s phenomenal presence revealed as he is chasing a hare. still from stevenson, old yeller [07:04] 142 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) lászló, cynematographic doubling | 143 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 9: benji doubling the fiction with reality as he is chasing a cat. stills from camp, benji [08:46– 09:00] 144 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) undermines. it seems that fiction and fact most saliently converge in chasing and playing sequences, which most emphatically present the dog as a dog. one must mention that these scenes are also selected and edited, carefully eliding moments that might disturb the human audience (for instance, dogs fighting, killing other animals, or coupling), which shows how representation absorbs and at the same time censors reality. yet integrating such sequences as that of yeller chasing a hare still signal that the filmic text opens up to (at least some aspects of) creatureliness and in so doing doubles itself with a phenomenological dimension. just like lassie and yeller, benji is more than just a sentimental icon conveying human notions and triggering well-calculated sentiments in the audience; this cinematic canine also contains a layer of the creatural and thus moves the viewer with his specific, largely inexplicable affective power. as with the previous films, the presence of the (f)actual dog becomes most salient when benji’s behaviour coincides with that of the canine actor. this occurs, for instance, when we see, first from an external, then from a subjective point of view, him chasing a cat up a tree as part of his morning routine (fig. 9). just like blackie’s disciplining remark to strongheart or rowlie’s prompting lassie to play, the cat’s owner’s outburst of “you primitive, uncultured cur” comes across as ambiguously metafictional, causing uncertainty as to whether she is reprimanding benji the character or higgins the dog actor. the woman’s words yet again underpin the fictional dog’s perpetual threshold position, his being constantly in and out of character, and with this comes the ability to double the fictional universe with a phenomenological dimension that contributes to forming the audience’s affective reactions. emotionally moved by two less “traditional” and more creaturely cinematic canines in the final two analyses, i will focus on two less “traditional” hollywood hounds that do not fit into the category of overly cutesified canine images, therefore they resist an anthropocentric reading, while their capacity to evoke the creaturely affect is the most powerful, and thus they best demonstrate the significance of a relational reading. lászló, cynematographic doubling | 145 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) among the fictional dogs in hollywood movies, hooch (beasly), the eponymous dog in the buddy cop comedy turner & hooch (1989), is most liable to reveal the character’s creaturely/phenomenological dimension. this is partly because as an unruly, stocky, and powerfully built french mastiff, with a drooling muzzle and a jaw powerful enough to tear one’s throat out, he most emphatically occupies the position of the threshold creature who easily slips out of the “cute doggy” image into the realm of the wild, or the unfamiliar and the uncanny within and, more importantly, across the diegetic world. as elizabeth young argues, [a]cross and within breeds, dogs oscillate between emblems of domestic order and perceived threats to it — an oscillation also embodied within the individual animal. for in the specter of the friendly pet […] is the possibility that the dog may expose the permeable boundaries of domestication, turning from faithful to violent and reverting from cute to wild.27 the character of hooch epitomizes dogs that wildly oscillate between the domestic or civilized sphere. for instance, in the scene where the titular characters are first seen together, it is difficult to discern whether hooch is rushing towards turner (tom hanks) to greet a friend or to attack a trespasser and whether, after their collision, he is licking the policeman’s face out of love or if he is getting ready to bite it off (fig. 10). more importantly, one might be concerned about tom hanks, since the clash of the human and the canine body, preceded by a slow-motion shot of this massive dog running towards the camera, creates an overwhelmingly haptic experience and requires viewers to see the dog as a dog. casting such a fierce-looking breed thus not only ascribes the role of a threshold creature to the dog within the narrative but also in relation to the ostensible fiction/reality divide, which hooch/beasly is ready to tear down at any moment, constantly doubling fiction and causing a slightly unnerving feeling in the spectator. 27 young, “canine uncanny zone”, 132. 146 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) lászló, cynematographic doubling | 147 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 10: hooch tearing down the divide between fiction and reality. stills from spottiswoode, turner & hooch [08:50; 09:23] 148 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) lászló, cynematographic doubling | 149 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 11: shots of hooch’s puppy eyes look used for emotional manipulation (upper images), and images causing uncertainty about the dog’s thoughts and emotions (lower images). stills from spottiswoode, turner & hooch [42:56; 44:32; 1:02:13; 1:02:45]. 150 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) lászló, cynematographic doubling | 151 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 12: hooch’s gaze reflecting his inner depth. still from spottiswoode, turner & hooch (32:37) still from spottiswoode, turner & hooch [32:37]. 152 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) interestingly, due to the dog’s “perceived threats” to rip up the fabric of representation, the allegory of friendship and love presented by turner & hooch is all the more powerful. the narrative follows the formation of an unlikely bond between the canine and the human character, the latter being characterized as organized, disciplined, and clean to the point of obsessiveness. parallel to the taming and grooming of hooch into a domestic pooch, turner is transformed into a much more flexible person who is open to abandoning his former ways to learn from, and love, others: after all, it is thanks to hooch that turner accepts the romantic overtures of the veterinarian emily. one could even argue that dog and human go through a mutual assimilation as a result of which hooch becomes a police dog identifying and tracking criminals while turner transforms into a zoomorphic creature who enjoys nibbling dog biscuits. similar to the transformation of joe’s parents, the duke of rudling, travis, and dr chapman, turner is thus turned into a compassionate being due to his growing friendship with the dog. on an epistemological level, then, this film is not exempt from attaching a heart-warming allegorical meaning to the canine character. yet the affective power of the portrayed interspecies friendship largely depends on the actual dog’s similarity to wild animals, and his unfamiliarity and ontological distance from human beings, which makes hooch’s crossing over even more moving. it seems that the greater the distance between human and canine, the more powerful the force is that unites them, something that goes for both the characters as well as the fictional dog and the viewer. the creaturely presence of the canine figure permeates the epistemological layer and evokes an inexplicable emotion in the audience, similar to what one feels when encountering a wild animal. the constructed image of hooch as a cute-looking pet, furthermore, is occasionally saturated by a creaturely tint since some of the closeups of hooch’s “puppy eyes” highlight the character’s subjective experiences and thus remind viewers of the presence of the (f)actual dog. although the film is full of close-ups where the power of the dog’s puppy eyes is used for manipulation, like the infamous “i didn’t do anything” or “please let me in” look (fig. 11, upper images), the lászló, cynematographic doubling | 153 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) film also contains images of the dog’s apparently genuine, non-mimetic vulnerability, for example when hooch seems to be thinking of his former owner (fig. 11, lower images). but apart from this emotional assumption, which one obtains through turner’s perspective, the viewer is left uncertain about the dog character’s, let alone dog actor’s, emotions and thoughts. another close-up shows hooch from the side in semi-darkness, slightly lit from above so that the rims of his eyes and his iris have a golden glow (fig. 12). this aesthetic presentation highlights the affective connotations of hooch’s gaze toward turner, who is finally ready to cooperate with the creature he initially finds repulsive. considering that hooch had been fond of turner already before his former owner was murdered and the policeman took him in, this shot indicates that the bonding between the human and the dog is initiated by the latter, thereby highlighting canine agency. the dog character’s motivations for befriending a “neat freak” policeman, however, remain elusive. neither can we be sure that beasly’s apparently affectionate glances are indeed addressed to the human actor playing turner or to his handler offscreen, or whether they are maybe a reaction elicited by a piece of ham dangling above his nose. although the shot focalizes the dog’s puppy eyes look, its affective power derives as much from the constructed image as from the pupil’s bottomless blackness against the iris’s golden glow. in turner and hooch, unfathomable creaturely subjectivity thus cuts through both the visual and the epistemological layer. all the cinematic canines analysed above have been read as threefold entities wherein the creaturely/phenomenological dimension completes the perception of the dog as a cute image and as an allegory of childhood, love and loyalty, thereby challenging the usual anthropocentric readings of the films they are featured in. in the closing analysis, i continue to pursue a relational approach by showing that even if either the aesthetically or epistemologically constructed layer is missing, commercial cinema can effectively move the audience as long as it employs real-life dogs that bring their own, inscrutable lifeworld into the fictional universe. for instance, given the siberian 154 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) husky’s lack of neotenous morphology,28 that is, the breed’s genetic inability to use the power of the puppy eyes for emotional manipulation, the 2019 disney film togo can only rely on allegorizing canine love and on the affective impact of the dog actors.29 it is, nevertheless, one of the most touching representations of the human-canine bond among the movies discussed here because the creaturely presence of the real-life dogs interpenetrates the whole fabric of the film as well as the allegory of love that we attach to it. much of togo’s emotional quality derives from the narrative which recounts the initially tentative, yet increasingly intimate relationship between leonhard seppala (willem defoe) and his sled dog. when togo is still a pup, seppala wants to get rid of him because he looks weak and is unmanageable, but the musher eventually yields to the dog’s insistence to become part of his sledging dog pack. during the training process, the underdog proves to be an energetic, resilient, and natural leader, and his outstanding qualities are relied upon even in togo’s old age when seppala and his pack complete the legendary 1925 serum run to nome, alaska, across 1,085 km in severe weather conditions to collect a vaccine during a diphtheria outbreak. despite his principle of keeping an emotional distance from his dogs, seppala’s shell of solid stoicism eventually cracks as he becomes intimately attached to togo: moved by his vulnerability due to the dog’s old age and injuries, he takes him into his house, nurses him by the fireplace, and lets him lie in his bed. even more moving than these gestures is the episode in which, refusing to stay housebound, togo runs after seppala, who welcomes him with open arms (fig. 13). this is not the cliché reunion of master and pet first used and perpetuated by silent films, since an integral part of that overused image, the ‘puppy eyes’, is missing. but it is not only allegorical either, or at least not exclusively. although at this point in the 28 the authors of the study on the evolution of facial muscle anatomy in dogs tell us that raol, the muscle responsible for pulling the lateral corner of the eyelids towards the ears, is not present in the siberian husky, which is “more closely related to wolves than many other breed” (kaminski et al., “evolution”, 14678). 29 although it was one dog named diesel, a direct descendant of the real-life togo, going back fourteen generations, who played the adult togo throughout the film, the filmmakers used several huskies as stunt doubles. see core, “crafting a tearjerker”. lászló, cynematographic doubling | 155 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) film one might attach the abstract meanings of loyalty and love to togo, the allegory is based on the portrayed dog’s subjectivity. since the unknowability of the fictional togo, furthermore, reflects the inscrutable motivations of the dog actor, the creaturely layer permeates the epistemological layer, thereby evoking an inexplicable, almost visceral experience in the audience. the fact that the filmmakers chose to employ real-life huskies in spite of the difficulties of working with them largely contributes to the particularly strong creaturely affect, the almost musky aroma, seeping from this film. as michael lawrence points out, the increasingly popular practice of supplementing real dogs with digital animation and visual effects has many advantages: for instance, the digitally enhanced dogs are more cost-effective, as “they are less time-consuming and therefore less expensive because no longer determined by the unpredictable or intractable volition of real animals, however ‘well-trained.’”30 this aspect, however, already implies that digital enhancement deprives canine characters of their creaturely dimension which is responsible for evoking the aesthetic experience of unpredictability. the latter is a crucial aspect in my reading as it allows the real dog to counterbalance the control of the human filmic apparatus that produces images, signs and symbolical constructions out of the (f)actual animals. furthermore, while lawrence suggests that digital enhancement is also “effective dramatically” as it can make dog characters “more anthropomorphically expressive”,31 it also cuts back on the dogs’ agency in this respect. for instance, the digital manipulation of the dogs’ faces makes them more suitable to express and evoke human emotions, while manipulating their movements so that they can present stunts that real dogs would be unable to do (such as head-spins and somersaults) entails moulding the canine body for dramatic purposes. as lawrence admits, both of these enhancement methods evoke the ethically and politically questionable practices of breeding that have treated the body of domestic canines as malleable material to produce more and more “perfect” 30 lawrence, “practically infinite”, 116. 31 lawrence, 116. 156 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) lászló, cynematographic doubling | 157 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 13: the dog actor playing togo completing the fiction and the affective spectatorial experience. still from core, togo [1:40:17]. figure 14: the real husky puppy contributing to creating his own representation. still from core, togo [1:40:06]. 158 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) dogs for various purposes.32 just as the canine body is “plastic in the hands of the breeder”,33 so too is the dog character in the hands of visual effects personnel. consequently, while lawrence argues that digitally enhanced dog characters can “reveal for us the repressed histories of such subjection”,34 i would add that they also reinforce the representational regimes that transform dogs into anthropomorphic spectacles and signs. in other words, while digital manipulation makes dog characters more effective economically and dramatically, this also means that they eliminate the characters’ creaturely dimension, the layer which, as i have argued throughout this paper, contributes to evoking a profound emotional experience in the viewer. togo is an effective film exactly because ericson core, the director, realized that involving real dogs instead of using cgi technologies is key to providing an authentic affective experience for the audience. as core put it in an interview, “[t]hey’re not always looking at you, they’re not always in exactly the right place, but their heart is there.”35 to another magazine, core remarked that during shooting, the animals “teach you more than you probably teach them” and so “as much as you think that you’re a master of your pet, it’s usually the other way around.”36 such a directorial attitude entails letting the dogs be themselves in front of the camera, recording uninstructed movements and gestures, and finally editing and incorporating these takes into the final product. this explains why, for example, when a young togo escapes from the kennel and disrupts seppala’s training routine within the diegesis, togo’s behaviour also seemingly disrupts the fiction. the little husky’s genuine gestures of impatience, his autonomous desire to break free from wherever he is locked up, and his ebullient movements once finally loose (fig. 14), force us to see the dog as a dog and therefore touch us with the affective force of the creaturely. despite the absence of the puppy eyes feature, this film can thus move the viewer because, ultimately, it adapts to and incorporates the real animals’ actions. 32 lawrence, “practically infinite”, 118–120. 33 watson, “toy dogs”, 878; quoted in lawrence, 119. 34 lawrence, 120. 35 core, “true story of ‘togo’”. 36 core, “‘crafting a tearjerker”. lászló, cynematographic doubling | 159 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) conclusion while togo explicitly supports the assumption that cinematic dog representations are co-constituted by flesh and blood canines — as much responsible for emotionally engaging the audience as the filmmakers’ strategies — all the films analysed in this article absorb and are, in turn, affected by canine agency. in other words, all of the enlisted illustrations can be construed as “cynematographic” films, because besides the filmic techniques, namely the aesthetic cutesification and narrative sentimentalisation of the canine characters, the real-life dogs also play a crucial part in emotionally moving the viewers, and thus also in shaping the representation of their species. to demonstrate this argument, i focused on moments of cynematographic doubling, namely scenes and sequences in which the dog’s phenomenal presence is at once revealed and helps reveals the immanent doubling or hybridity of the feature film itself that, in the bazinian sense, always absorbs reality. furthermore, while calling our attention to the impurity of fiction, the dog’s phenomenal presence also causes an almost inexplicable, poignant emotion in the audience, which mostly derives from having just glimpsed the (f)actual animal on the screen. this means that it is not only the cinematic apparatus that renders the canine character emotionally moving, but also the dog actor him or herself. in moments of cynematographic doubling, we thus see how much cinema is indebted to the dogs’ participation in creating their own representation as well as in generating an emotional response from the viewers. in short, the analysed scenes help us perceive films featuring dogs as cynematographic images with an emotionally moving quality largely dependent on the dog character revealing his or her phenomenal “states of being”. taking account of the creature not as an entity who ruptures but who completes the character can help us better understand what we feel when we are watching a cute-looking dog on the screen. it, furthermore, also sheds new light on the nature of cinematic canine representations in hollywood, which seem to be as much indebted to the agency of the dog actor as they are controlled by the 160 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) human filmic apparatus. this is not to deny the power relations unevenly distributed along species lines within the film industry, or, at the other extreme, to say that dog actors themselves write, direct, or shoot films. it is to illuminate that without their presence, the hollywood movie could not evoke such overwhelming emotions in the audience, that is, it would not work as an affective cultural representation. to conclude, viewing hollywood productions featuring dogs from the relational perspective proposed by this paper can help us realize that the films are not only the products of human, but also of nonhuman agency. in so doing, it might also open up viewers to a more relational perspective through which they could see how much of “our” representations, “our” cultures and “our” worlds are co-created by nonhuman animals. to quote tang’s idea, which resonates with this research in many respects, such an alternative mode of reading films can serve as a basis for an ethical viewing that “changes not only how we relate to cinema but also how we relate to animals”37 and the world(s) that we together inhabit. acknowledgements first, i would like to express my thanks to the reviewers for providing me with valuable insights on the issues of animal representation in general, and the filmic representation of dogs in particular. in the latter respect, i am indebted to kári driscoll, the managing editor of humanimalia, who suggested using the term “cynematographic” in order to better articulate my argument about the dog actors’ role in completing fiction and complicating the affective viewing experience. last but not least, i am grateful to my supervisor, tamás bényei, whose vast knowledge, continuous support, patience, and humility is an endless source of inspiration and encourages me to go on even in what sometimes feels to be quicksand. thank you all for helping me see better the complexity of cinematic canines. and thank you, dogs, for making cinema more complex than it would be without you. 37 tang, “of dogs and hot dogs”, 55. lászló, cynematographic doubling | 161 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) works cited bartosch, roman. “reading seeing: literary form, affect, and the creaturely potential of focalization.” in beyond the human-animal divide: creaturely lives in literature and culture, edited by dominik ohrem and roman bartosch, 215–238. cham: palgrave macmillan, 2017. burt, jonathan. animals in film. london: reaktion books, 2002. camp, joe, dir. benji. 1974; mckinney, tx: mulberry square productions. core, ericson, dir. togo. 2019; alberta, canada: walt disney pictures. core, ericson. “‘togo’: ericson core on willem dafoe, sled dogs & crafting a tearjerker.” by gregory ellwood. the playlist, 20 december, 2019, https:// theplaylist.net/togo-ericson-coreinterview-20191220/. core, ericson. “the true story of ‘togo’: inside disney+’s sled dog drama starring willem dafoe.” by john boone. et online, 16 december, 2019, https:// www.etonline.com/the-true-story-oftogo-inside-disneys-sled-dog-dramastarring-willem-dafoe-exclusive-138083. dale, joshua paul. “the appeal of the cute object.” in the aesthetics and affects of cuteness, edited by joshua paul dale, joyce goggin, julia leyda, anthony p. mcintyre, and diane negra, 35–55. new york: routledge, 2017. derrida, jacques. writing and difference. translated by alan bass. chicago: university of chicago press, 1978. derrida, jacques. “and say the animal responded?” translated by david wills. in zoontologies: the question of the animal, edited by cary wolfe, 121–146. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2003. derrida, jacques, and bernard stiegler. “spectrographies.” translated by jennifer bajorek. in the spectralities reader: ghosts and haunting in contemporary cultural theory, edited by maría del pilar blanco and esther peeren, 37–51. new york: bloomsbury, 2013. fuller-seeley, kathryn and jeremy groskopf. “the dogs who saved hollywood: strongheart and rin tin tin.” in mclean, cinematic canines, 54–78. gregersdotter, katarina, nicklas hållén, and johan höglund. introduction to animal horror cinema: genre, history and criticism, 1–19. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2015. harris, daniel. cute, quaint, hungry and romantic: the aesthetics of consumerism. boston: da capo press, 2001. herman, david, ed. creatural fictions: human-animal relationships in twentiethand twenty-first-century literature. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2016. horowitz, alexandra. “the dog at the side of the shot: incongruous dog (canis familiaris) behavior in film.” in mclean, cinematic canines, 219–234. jenkins, henry. “her suffering aristocratic majesty: the sentimental value of lassie.” in the wow climax: tracing the emotional impact of popular culture, 215–245. new york: new york university press, 2007. kaminski, juliane, et al. “evolution of facial muscle anatomy in dogs.” pnas 16, no. 29 (2019): 14677–14681. https:// doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820653116. kouvaros, george. “‘we do not die twice’: realism and cinema.” in the sage handbook of film studies, edited by james donald and michael renov, 376–390. london: sage, 2008. lawrence, michael. “‘practically infinite manipulability’: domestic dogs, canine performance and digital cinema.” screen 56, no. 1 (2015): 115–120, https:// doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjv009. https://theplaylist.net/togo-ericson-core-interview-20191220/ https://theplaylist.net/togo-ericson-core-interview-20191220/ https://theplaylist.net/togo-ericson-core-interview-20191220/ https://www.etonline.com/the-true-story-of-togo-inside-disneys-sled-dog-drama-starring-willem-dafoe-exclusive-138083 https://www.etonline.com/the-true-story-of-togo-inside-disneys-sled-dog-drama-starring-willem-dafoe-exclusive-138083 https://www.etonline.com/the-true-story-of-togo-inside-disneys-sled-dog-drama-starring-willem-dafoe-exclusive-138083 https://www.etonline.com/the-true-story-of-togo-inside-disneys-sled-dog-drama-starring-willem-dafoe-exclusive-138083 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820653116 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1820653116 https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjv009 https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/hjv009 162 | lászló, cynematographic doubling humanimalia 13.1 (2022) lorenz, konrad. studies in animal and human behavior. translated by robert martin. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1971. mchugh, susan. dog. london: reaktion books, 2004. mclean, adrienne l., ed. cinematic canines: dogs and their work in the fiction film. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, 2014. mclean, adrienne l. “introduction: wonder dogs.” in cinematic canines, 1–33. merish, lori. “cuteness and commodity aesthetics: tom thumb and shirley temple.” in freakery: cultural spectacles of the extraordinary body, edited by rosemarie garlandthomson, 185–203. new york: new york university press, 1996. ngai, sianne. our aesthetic categories: zany, cute, interesting. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2012. o. hoyt, harry, dir. the return of boston blackie. 1927; chadwick studios, hollywood, los angeles, ca: chadwick pictures. accessed at youtube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=in1vyuhndyi&t=732s pick, anat. creaturely poetics: animality and vulnerability in literature and film. new york: columbia university press, 2011. spottiswoode, roger, dir. turner & hooch. 1989; monterey, pacific grove, and moss landing, ca: touchstone pictures. stevenson, robert, dir. old yeller. 1957; westlake village, thousand oaks, and chatsworth, ca: walt disney pictures. tang, pao-chen. “of dogs and hot dogs: distractions in early cinema.” early popular visual culture 15, no. 1 (2017): 44-58, https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654 .2016.1232203 watson, james. “‘toy dogs’.” century magazine 31, no. 6 (1886): 878. wilcox, fred m., dir. lassie come home. 1943; monterey, ca: metro-goldwyn-mayer. wolf, kelly. “promoting lassie: the animal star and constructions of ‘ideal’ american heroism.” in mclean, cinematic canines, 104–120. young, elizabeth. “canine uncanny zone,” review of cinematic canines: dogs and their work in the fiction film, edited by adrienne l. mclean; picturing dogs, seeing ourselves: vintage american photographs, by ann-janine morey; at home and astray: the domestic dog in victorian, by philip howell. humanimalia 7, no. 2 (2016): 131–140. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in1vyuhndyi&t=732s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=in1vyuhndyi&t=732s https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2016.1232203 https://doi.org/10.1080/17460654.2016.1232203 microsoft word iveson h u m a n i m a l i a 1:2 richard iveson animals in looking-glass world: fables of überhumanism and posthumanism in heidegger and nietzsche “—then you don’t like all insects?” the gnat went on, as quietly as if nothing had happened. “i like them when they can talk,” alice said. “none of them ever talk, where i come from.” “what sort of insects do you rejoice in, where you come from?” the gnat inquired. — lewis carroll, through the looking-glass introduction. the question of the nonhuman animal is central, both strategically and in itself, to contemporary philosophy and politics; a matter of (right to) life and (putting to) death that always already exceeds the lives and deaths of “mere” animals. indeed, the ever-increasing number of academic texts, artworks, manifestos, political treatises, and the like which constitute the field that has come to be known as “animal studies”— all of which, and in their various ways, refuse to remain deaf to the call and the demand of an animal appeal—clearly demonstrate that thinking nonhuman animals can no longer be penned within traditional domains of biology and ethology.1 as is well known, it is the delineation of difference from—and thus exclusion of—“the animal” which, as jacques derrida asserts, thus “institutes what is proper to man, the relation to itself of a humanity that is above all anxious about, and jealous of, what is proper to it” (animal 14). any such claim to human(ist) exceptionalism thus presupposes a structural logic of dependence-exclusion, an exclusive inscription that, as a function of power, falls back upon every (other) animal—whether that animal other be a nonhuman animal or, in being excluded from itself through a murderous theatrics of displacement, an animalized human—and renders them speechless, reduced to subjugated bodies which may be killed but never murdered.2 such a symptomatic and systematic disavowal necessarily depends upon a homogeneous and privative determination of “animality,” one which, variously and fabulously clothed, returns throughout western philosophy to open the space(s) for a “noncriminal” putting to death. essential to the exclusive functioning of this anthropo-logic is the paradoxical reproduction of “the animal” as undying—that is, both as lacking the possibility of death and as sharing a transparent pathic communication, with each made reciprocally to ground the other—by which the murder of a nonhuman animal becomes ontologically impossible even as corpses are being produced in exponentially increasing numbers. whether as untouched by the fall into self-awareness, or as soulless automatons under the technical mastery of man and 47 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world definable only by lack, the figure of the undying animal remains central both to human exceptionalism and to figuring it a (human) right to do whatever we like to (other) animals. this logic must thus be understood as the entanglement of both material and symbolic economies, and in this the contemporary question of being-with other animals is not only a question of and to capital, a question of the literal rendering of animals’ bodies that underpins so many diverse industries, but is at once a demand which infinitely exceeds the economico-juridico-democratic ordering founded upon, and conserved by, the semantics of an agent-centered conception of subjectivity and of the sovereign (human) subject of rights and duties. such thinking (of) animals is thus at once a thinking (of) posthumanism that has nothing to do with the generally liberalist conception of the “post-human” summarized by cary wolfe as an historical succession in which “the human is transformed and finally eclipsed by various technological, informatic, and bioengineering developments rooted in the early twentieth century” (“bring the noise” xi), but is rather that which marks the necessity of a thinking both beyond and before the “metaphysical anthropocentrism” which constitutes, as matthew calarco asserts, “[o]ne of the chief limitations for thought at present” (zoographies 74). in this, the attempt by martin heidegger to move beyond the closure of metaphysics remains invaluable to a rigorous posthumanist thought, and as such there has been much recent critical attention paid to the heideggerian animal (most notably perhaps by jacques derrida, giorgio agamben, and andrew benjamin). as is by now well known, in the second part of the 1929-1930 seminar entitled the fundamental concepts of metaphysics: world, finitude, solitude, heidegger sets out on the way of a comparative analysis of three guiding theses: the stone is worldless, the animal is poor-in-world, the man is world-forming [der stein ist weltlos, das tier ist weltarm, der mensch ist weltbildend]. while it is indeed plausible, and perhaps even unavoidable, to read in heidegger’s tripartite schema the operation of an anthropocentric teleological dialectic, i aim to demonstrate that there is available another—nondialectical or para-dialectical— reading.3 this reading, in exploring the differences and similarities between the existential analytic and traditional metaphysics, discloses how the hermeneutic circle functions within heidegger’s commitment to a “humanism beyond humanism” as outlined in his 1947 paper, “letter on humanism.” in this, i argue that heidegger’s thinking does indeed break with the traditional metaphysical configurations of the human-animal relation, but, in that nonhuman animals are unthinkingly reinscribed as essentially undying, his philosophy remains ultimately enclosed within a metaphysical anthropocentrism and, as such, takes its place alongside traditional metaphysics in 48 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) underwriting the industrialized holocaust of nonhuman animals under the sign of gestell. nevertheless, it is by way of heidegger’s going along with animals that, in (re-)turning to nietzsche’s thinking (together) animals and the “as such,” i aim to demonstrate the necessity of (re)inscribing the having of a death, that is, the having of this death of this nonhuman animal and, in so doing, to interrupt such murderous metaphysical hubris. to give death to other animals: it is a phrase that aims to retain all of its ambivalence within capitalism—to give death as gift, a giving that ever again demands a response, rather than to calculate death whilst effacing the material fact of the day-to-day massacre of other animals, both nonhuman and human, on a scale that defies comprehension. fables of origin: animals in the mirror. in being and time (1927), heidegger’s animal barely raises her head before finding herself (non)placed in negativity: not present-athand [vorhandensein], not ready-at-hand [zuhandensein], and, most definitely, not the dasein who, as something other than a living-being, is irretrievably distanced from the nonhuman animal which (rather than “who”) “merely has life” [des nur-lebenden] and thus can only “perish” [verenden]. located entirely negatively, the spectral figure of the animal nevertheless remains to haunt both the dasein and heidegger in its beingsomehow-other-in-the-world. returning to the question two years later in the fundamental concepts, heidegger is called to devote almost one-hundred-and-forty pages to a questioning of the “essence of animality” (a questioning which, it should be noted, presupposes an ignominious reduction of the vast multiplicity of “living beings” to a single homogeneous “essence”). along the way, he reiterates the unbridgeable distance between the dasein and “the animal” in much the same terms as before, asserting that, despite the corporeal proximity, “being-with [mitsein] [animals] is not an eexxiissttiinngg--wwiitthh [mitexistieren], because a dog does not exist but merely lives” (fcm 210). such a way as heidegger goes along is most certainly not, as he makes explicit, “an animal kind of way.” in this way, the proximity of the nonhuman animal paradoxically functions to reinscribe human (or at least dasein) exceptionalism. given the importance of the “way” for heidegger’s thinking, such a way of (not) going (with) calls for a detailed analysis of its own, but for the moment it is enough to wonder about this uncanny crossing of proximity and distance that makes of every animal irreducibly other. an-other crossing that is perhaps a haunting or (and) a possession in that the dasein would seem to share without sharing its “there” or its clearing with a living being-in-the-world that does not exist, and which the dasein, in a (non)relation of absolute otherness, might perhaps pet but is essentially prevented from touching. 49 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world in the fourth chapter of part two of the fundamental concepts, and via the work of biologists hans driesch and jakob johann von uexküll, heidegger argues that the nonhuman animal is excluded from the worlding of world as a necessary result of its ccaappttiivvaattiioonn [benommenheit], that is to say, “[c]aptivation is the condition of possibility for the fact that, in accordance with its essence, the animal behaves within an environment but never within a world” (fcm, 239). this is because, as far as heidegger’s animal is concerned, there can be neither anything beyond, nor any differentiation within, the disinhibiting ring which marks the absolute limit of her environmental capture. as a result of this essential undifferentiated absorption [eingenommenheit], “the animal” can therefore never apprehend (“have”) “its” own captivation—that is, can never apprehend “its” own capture within a set—and hence “it” is poor-in-world [weltarm].4 moreover, claims heidegger, it is in following this conclusion concerning the way of animals that the essence of the human can be thenceforth disclosed: “in the end our … analysis of captivation as the essence of animality provides as it were a suitable background against which the essence of humanity can now be set off” (282). it would seem then, that the analysis of the animal’s way of being is undertaken solely in order that the proper essence of the human can be subsequently disclosed through the negation of its negation, that is, through the dialectical disclosing of the essence of world. such a methodology thus presupposes a categorical and teleological human/animal distinction. the condition of possibility of world, withheld as we have seen from the animal, “is” precisely the “having” of captivation as such, that is, the apprehension of the undisconcealedness of being as undisconcealedness (i.e. of the withdrawal of being). in other words, the human “is” only in this having of the “as”-structure [die ‘als’-struktur], which is the condition of possibility for the logos, as it is only in having the “as” that the human is given to apprehend being as beings—the wonder that beings are which is the worlding of world—and thus, beyond the captivation of the disinhibiting ring, to perceive itself as an (individuated) being. this apprehension of ontological difference is nothing less than the apprehension of finitude, of the possibility of impossibility, and thus at once the condition of possibility for the dasein’s existential projection of its ownmost being-toward-death. we can thus see how, in negating the ringed animal as without re(ve)lation and thus poor-in-world, heidegger is thus free to posit the properly dasein as that which “is” nearest to being, and thus reserve for it alone the possibility of authentic existence. it is here then, with the capacity to apprehend something as something, that heidegger draws the abyssal line between the humandasein and the animal, one which permits neither the possibility of a human animal nor 50 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) that of a nonhuman dasein. for as long as such a line remains unquestioned, heidegger’s discourse (re)turns safely within the metaphysical humanist enclosure. the nonhuman animal remains, however, and remains a problem. given the essential withholding of apprehension from the animal, it is clear that the “poverty” [armut] attributed to it by heidegger can only ever be a “deprivation” [entbehrung] when viewed from the perspective of the human, and thus, in truth, is neither poverty nor privation. this then, and as heidegger himself points out, appears to disallow the positing of the tripartite thesis from the first, in that such an essential characterization is in fact conceived only in comparison with man and “not drawn from animality itself and maintained within the limits of animality” (270). curiously, heidegger does not object to this charge: to imagine otherwise, he says, is perhaps the privilege only of poets (271). is it that heidegger is thus staking a claim to philosophical poetry in opposition to the dialectic? not objecting to the objection, heidegger rather sets out to “wweeaakkeenn” [abschwächen] it, to set about “[r]emoving its force” [seine entkräfting] (270). he does this, in fact, by affirming it: while the (perhaps unassailable) charge remains, he says, it nevertheless “surely suffices that … [it] has led us to our destination in a practical fashion” (272; emphasis added). let us defer our objection, he suggests, because “[i]n spite of everything it has brought us closer …” (ibid., emphasis added). we have found our way, that is, because the essence of animality as being-captivated and thus poor-inworld—a thesis “which follows only if the animal is regarded in comparison with humanity” (271)—serves us as the “negative” by which our own “positive … proper essence has constantly emerged in contrast” (272). there is, however, no talk of sublation, no labor of the negative in what is only—as heidegger repeatedly makes explicit—a comparative examination. it is rather the case, i would suggest, that the animal in heidegger’s discourse is less a negative to be negated than a mirror which reflects only the essence of being-human that being-human itself renders invisible—a mirror in which “we humans” always already find ourselves, but without ever disclosing (if indeed such a disclosure were possible) the essence of animality. heidegger, as is well known, explicitly seeks to position his own discourse on the far side of the (en)closure of metaphysics, and thus, as he makes clear in the “letter on humanism,” outside of any traditional humanist expropriation: are we really on the right track toward the essence of man as long as we set him off as one living creature among others in contrast to plants, beasts, and god? … [w]hen we do this we abandon man to the essential realm of animalitas even if we do not equate him with beasts but attribute a specific 51 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world difference to him. … such positing is the manner of metaphysics. but then the essence of man is too little heeded and not thought in its origin, the essential provenance that is always the essential future for historical mankind. metaphysics thinks of man on the basis of animalitas and does not think in the direction of his humanitas (227, my emphasis). in the open: man and animal (2002), giorgio agamben, citing the final sentence above (73), claims that heidegger has indeed ignored his own prescription—this prescription which for heidegger is “above and beyond all else” (“letter” 227). at first glance, and given what i have argued above, this appears undeniable—heidegger has indeed set off man in contrast to “beasts.” but this is not, however, to say that heidegger has therefore “abandoned” man to the essential realm of animalitas, that is, the realm of (merely) living creatures. the opposite is in fact the case—heidegger rather essentially abandons animalitas in order to think the essence of man. “[w]e ourselves,” says heidegger, “have also been in view all the time” (fcm, 272). at this point it is helpful to return to heidegger’s comment which serves as a coda to his analysis of the animal: “in the end,” he states, “our earlier analysis of captivation as the essence of animality provides as it were a suitable background against which the essence of humanity can now be set off” (282) [am ende ist die bisher aufgezeigte benommenheit als wesen der tierheit gleichsam der geeignete hintergrund, auf dem sich jetzt das wesen der menschheit abheben kann’ (die grundbegriffe, 408)]. any reading of the heideggerian animal must return to, and negotiate around, these words, occurring as they do just prior to the first formal interpretation of the “as”-structure. again, there is, and “in the end,” no sublation, no laboring negative, but only the apparent, hesitant aestheticism of the suitability or fittingness (geeignete) of the background which is—and with the so to speak “innocent” qualification “as it were” (gleichsam)—provided by the animal. against the background of the animal, the setting off of the human is thus doubled: in the first place, the human “stands out,” set off (abheben) from a background animality that serves to focus attention whilst harmonizing with its object, like the setting which displays a jewel to best effect. in the second, the animal provides the point of departure from which the dasein might set off along the way that is proper to the human; that is, to take off (abheben) from the animal and, in so doing, to withdraw her value (abheben) in constituting the proper economy of man. this is to draw a very different kind of line, that of an organizational frame which, like that enclosing a painting, negotiates with both sides in order to establish and delimit its focus. hence we can begin to understand heidegger’s insistence that the correctness or otherwise of his 52 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) claim for an essential poverty on the part of the animal must nevertheless await the disclosure of the essence of (human) world, as it is only then that one might “understand the animal’s not-having of world as a deprivation after all” (272). heidegger is thus booking a return passage, a reaching back to the animal such as is available only from within the human world, and he does so in order to legitimate the posited essence of animality which “founded” that world. it is a turn, that is to say, of and within the hermeneutic circle. we humans have thus been in view all the time “whether we wanted to be or not, although not in the form of some arbitrary and contingent self-observation or in the form of some traditional definition of man” (ibid.). here then, in a gesture familiar from being and time, heidegger sites his discourse outside of both the human sciences (specifically the biology of driesch and von uexküll) and traditional metaphysics. outside, that is, such discourses in which thinking the human is “abandoned” to animal physiology on the one hand, and outside of a humanist metaphysics in which the reproduction of man endlessly and fallaciously depends upon the exclusion of the nonhuman animal on the other. heidegger is thus claiming, despite the familiar, all-too-human attribution of ontological privation common to both the existential and the metaphysical, to have set off along a different way, one neither straight nor (self-)certain. whether this brings us any closer to a thinking encounter with animals, however, remains to be thought. this other way of thinking is, of course, the turning of the hermeneutic circle that is the existential analytic itself. as heidegger makes clear in being and time, the circle of understanding “is the expression of the existential fore-structure of dasein itself” (195), a positioning safely within the circle which ensures that, of all beings-in-the-world, it is only the dasein which has the “possibility of existence, [and thus] has ontological priority over every other entity” (62). it is this privilege which gives to the dasein alone “a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing” (195). while a scientific discourse such as biology may indeed comport to entities not itself, when it comes to the dasein however—as the sole being for whom being-in-the-world belongs essentially—, an understanding of being “pertains with equal primordiality both to an understanding of something like a ‘world’, and to the understanding of the being of those entities which become accessible within the world” (33). we can thus see why, in his subsequent lecture course, heidegger passes through “the essence of animality” in order to disclose “something like a ‘world,’” and why contemporary biology might provide just that point of departure. thus, “[w]henever an ontology takes for its theme entities whose character of being is other than that of dasein, it has its own foundation and motivation in dasein’s own ontical structure, in which a pre-ontological 53 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world understanding of being is comprised as a definite characteristic” (ibid.). that is, as that which “is” nearest to being, it is the privileged position of the dasein which justifies its understanding of animality on the basis of an understanding of the dasein. the animal as constituted in biological discourse is in this sense an “empty form” from which its primordial sources have become detached, leaving only “a free-floating thesis” for which the hermeneutic method secures the access to the phenomenon that is its object so as to provide “our [human] ppaassssaaggee [durchgang] through whatever is prevalently covering it up” (61). such a hermeneutic turn is, as heidegger reiterates, a turning solely within the human-dasein: “philosophy … takes its departure from the hermeneutic of dasein, which, as an analytic of existence, has made fast the guiding-line for all philosophical inquiry at the point where it arises and to which it returns” (62). the biological discourse of animality is thus, reiterated by heidegger, simply the point of departure, where it arises in comparison to the dasein and to which it always already returns. in other words, the essence of animality in the fundamental concepts is the radicalization of what the dasein already possesses in, and is concealed by, the “everyday” existentiell discourse of driesch and uexküll’s biology, the necessarily ontical point of departure which provides the passage to an existential understanding of the human-dasein. a passage or a way which, in going along with animals, never encounters—never touches—animals at all. that animals are without the “as”-structure and thus without possibility is assumed by heidegger at the very beginning of being and time, and necessarily so given his way of thinking the indissociability of language and being with the privilege of the dasein— and thus of the latter’s identity with the human—during this period. hence, and despite the distance claimed from both empiricism and traditional metaphysics, heidegger must thus in the fundamental concepts similarly refuse animals entry into the reserve of language that is the preserve of the human, with the result that, while passing through the everyday discourse of biology, he thus grounds his reiteration of exceptionalism on the most traditional and “common sense” metaphysical definition of all: that animals are essentially condemned to captive instinct because of a lack of language. moreover, in that language thus understood is—before and beyond the exclusively verbal—the condition of possibility of the open, heidegger in fact extends the traditional definition in order to deny nonhuman animals the world. indeed, that heidegger chooses to illustrate this not with a poet, but with saint paul, should certainly give pause to all poor creatures deprived of voice along the way. 54 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) in order to better understand the consequences of this humanist turn and, moreover, to think how a turn of that circle may itself provide a way beyond the humanist enclosure, agamben’s reading of the heideggerian animal in the open—referred to briefly above—provides both counterpoint and point of departure. seeking to problematize heidegger’s claim (in the “letter”) to have moved beyond “the manner of metaphysics,” agamben’s reading comes to rest upon the claim that heidegger posits profound boredom “as the metaphysical operator in which the passage from poverty in world to world, from animal environment to human world, is realized” (the open 68). this has important consequences for agamben’s reading: given that profound boredom marks the (evolutional and teleological) passage from the animal to the dasein, it can only be that the “jewel set at the center of the human world and its lichtung [clearing] is nothing but animal captivation; the wonder ‘that beings are’ is nothing but the grasping of the ‘essential disruption’ that occurs in the living being from its being exposed in a nonrevelation” (ibid.). as a result, the “irresolvable struggle between unconcealedness and concealedness, between disconcealment and concealment, which defines the human world, is the internal struggle between man and animal” (69). if humanity, agamben thus asks, “has been obtained only through a suspension of animality, and must thus keep itself open to the closedness of animality, in what sense does heidegger’s attempt to grasp the ‘existing essence of man’ escape the metaphysical primacy of animalitas?” (73). in reaching this conclusion, however, there occurs in agamben’s reading a necessary shifting or drifting of terms, a passage-over that is a passing-on-to (the nonhuman animal) which occurs precisely at the moment when agamben introduces the notion of passage. immediately following the description of profound boredom as “the metaphysical operator” in which is realized the passage from animal environment to human world, agamben asserts that “at issue here is nothing less than anthropogenesis, the becoming da-sein of living man” (68). in that it is only in and through profound boredom that the human-dasein can apprehend the wonder “that beings are,” it is indeed the case that the “having” of captivation as such is “nothing less than anthropogenesis, the becoming da-sein,” but this is not—and nor can it ever be—the becoming “of living man” in the sense of the passage from the “merely living” to the properly human-dasein, a passage which marks and thus passes over the nonlocalisable moment between the still-animal and the already-dasein and between the no-longer animal and the not-yet human. in order to better understand the stakes of agamben’s reading, it is necessary to recall the two “original and importantly different determinations” which, as andrew benjamin demonstrates, “configure two of the 55 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world dominant forms taken by the relationship between the human and the nonhuman animal” (“particularity and exceptions” 76). in the first, the production of the human is predicated on the death or nonexistence of the animal; whereas in the second, the human remains in a constant struggle with his or her own animality, an animality which must be repeatedly overcome in being-human. these two configurations endlessly reiterate the logic of dependence-exclusion, both erroneously defining the nonhuman animal by what he or she lacks within a teleological dialectic, and thus marking every nonhuman animal as incomplete, subhuman. here, as i aim to demonstrate, heidegger’s attempt to think humanitas outside of any such traditional metaphysical definition is taken by agamben and unknowingly re-placed within the second configuration—an economy common to what agamben terms the modern anthropological machine and, moreover, one which agamben’s own notion of a sacred community prior to the positing of identity is, ultimately, unable to escape.5 becoming-dasein—that is, the dasein “thought in its origin”—remains, as i have argued, for heidegger a thinking solely in the direction of humanitas, in that the background which “sets off” is not that which is preserved and annihilated in the animal’s being raised up to the human, nor is it that which grounds the dasein like its shadow (and thus up close to, touching). rather it is the case that such a setting-off marks out heidegger’s discourse of anthropo-genesis as a speculative thesis, one that offers a fantastic hypo-thesis or, “as [if] it were,” a fable—a fable that, true to (the) form, has always already sacrificed the animal to its very taking-place. being-captivated [benommen], “the possibility of apprehending something as something is wwiitthhhheelldd [genommen] from the animal. and it is withheld from it not merely here and now, but withheld in the sense that such a possibility is ‘not given at all’’’ (heidegger fcm, 247). given this a priori withholding of the “as”-structure, what is most proper to the animal is its not-being-able to disclose the undisconcealed as undisconcealed and, at once therefore, neither can the animal ever apprehend concealedness, which, in that it presupposes its opposite, remains essentially unavailable. as a result, the animal can never become the dasein—the passage between animal and human is always already impossible. hence, whereas for agamben animality abruptly comes to signify concealedness, and which makes of the struggle between unconcealedness and concealedness the struggle between man and animal, in fact the animal can be positioned at neither pole. without relation, there can be no dialectical teleology, no possible negation of the negation of the animal, but only an abyssal rupture that marks out the animal at the limit of thinking, of thinking the dasein, and of thinking finitude. 56 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) thus, while agamben’s reading of becoming-dasein as the bridge from animal to human makes of heidegger’s discourse a reiteration of the aporetic site of the fault-line between the animal and the human—one which, as agamben himself makes clear, “cannot be mended from either side” (the open 36)—in fact there can be no crossing, no passage, and therefore no irresolvable conflict. there is, in short, no between of the animal and the human. without relation, animals remain for heidegger absolutely other, beyond what gives itself as food for (anthropocentric) thought and, as such, just as essentially excluded from concealment as they are from propriety and authenticity. it is rather that, in thinking the “having” of captivation, thinking humanitas is obtained in thought by the human in order to think the human-dasein or, more precisely, to think the becoming of the human-dasein. the irresolvable—in being ever reiterated— struggle between concealment and disconcealment, one necessarily ever denied to “the animal,” is thus the ontological struggle between improper “being-dasein” and proper “becoming-dasein.” that is to say, it is the struggle between “being-dasein” understood in the sense of the specifically human undisconcealed absorption that is being-there as facticity [faktizität] and falling [verfallen], and becoming-dasein in the taking-place of the possibility of the human-dasein’s resolute openness in being-toward-death. this is because it is the taking-place of the “having” of the “as” in profound boredom which is the condition for—and which always already escapes in—the uncanny experience of anxiety in which the dasein is brought “back from its absorption in the ‘world’’’ (being and time 233) to find itself “face to face with the ‘nothing’ of the possible impossibility of its existence,” coming-to-be ownmost dasein in being “disclose[d] the uttermost possibility” (310-11). on the one hand, then, there is the turbulent sham of “untruth” (unwahrheit) “which brings tranquillized self-assurance—‘being-at-home,’ with all its obviousness—into the average everydayness of dasein” (223, 264, 233) and, on the other, the “truth” of existential projection in and as which, “[i]n the happening of uncanniness, beings as a whole open themselves up” (introduction to metaphysics 178). nonhuman animals, it is clear, essentially have no place in this struggle. rather than a conflict between humanitas and animalitas, heidegger puts forward a thesis which for him can only ever concern an entirely human(ist) struggle. while agamben accurately describes the becoming-dasein in the having of captivation, what he thenceforth shifts or passes on or over to the animal is the blindness of the everyday, the undisclosed in facticity and falling. the “absorption in itself” [eingenommenheit in sich] of animal captivation can never be the “being absorbed in the world” [sinne des aufgehens in der welt] of the dasein, in that such captive everydayness of the latter “being alongside” always already presupposes that structure of significance [bedeutsamkeit] essentially 57 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world denied to nonhuman animals. what then, is left for “the animal?” it can only be an (all too familiar) dissolution within the undifferentiation of thoughtless, instinctive reaction. whereas agamben wishes to “restore to the closed, to the earth, and to lēthē their proper name of ‘animal’ and ‘simply living being’” (the open 73), in fact the apprehension of the closed or the earth is rather the sense of that which exceeds sense: that which gives the dasein to apprehend that beings are is their appearing as closed in the blunt materiality of their withdrawal. in other words, what have being named closed, earth, and lēthē constitute in their blunt materiality the taking-place of beings as such, and which can be apprehended only as meaning without sense (content) and as sense (sensibility) without meaning. in this affective manifestness [offenbarkeit] as without sense, therefore, the dasein comes to be(ing) always already in language. becoming-dasein thus remarks the taking-place of the ‘as’ which has always already escaped: when beings are apprehended as beings, the sense of that which withdraws has necessarily already taken-place—that is, the withdrawal of meaning has already become meaningful in its being apprehended—and in the (subsequent) wonder of the fact that beings are we are thus always already anxiously constituted within infinitely entangled structures of meaning. such a withdrawal of meaning, therefore, is neither meaningless nor transcendental, but is rather that which exceeds every structure of meaning upon which nevertheless depends its affective manifestness—the uncanny disposition that is its apprehension, in other words, is necessarily a singular, historically situated event. we get some sense of this in heidegger’s notion of “mood” [die stimmung] or, more precisely, “attunement” [die gestimmtheit] which, in the decade between being and time and the nietzsche lectures, acquires a robust materiality beyond any reduction to the organismic: “[e]very feeling is an embodiment attuned in this or that way, a mood that embodies in this or that way” (nietzsche i:100) and which— always just as essentially has a feeling for beings as a whole, every bodily state involves some way in which the things around us and the people with us lay a claim on us or do not do so. … mood is precisely the basic way in which we are outside ourselves. but that is the way we are essentially and constantly. (99) 6 in the third of the nietzsche lectures two years later, heidegger further clarifies this notion with the move from eemmbbooddiimmeenntt [das leiben] to that of bbooddyyiinngg [das leibende], a shift which serves to highlight that “the body” [der leib] never refers to its apparent “encapsulation” in the “physical mass” [körper], but rather to “a stream of life” which 58 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) “is transmission and passage at the same time” (nietzsche iii:79). a bodying, in other words, is never that of a substantial body that is thence contingently situated, but rather “is” the laying claim of sense in infinite singularity, that is to say, being-attuned in and as an essential and constant bodying is relation: being-exposed rather than a being that exposes itself. what the dasein, in resolute being-towards-death, must ever again keep itself open to is not, as for agamben, the closedness of animality, but to a letting lie before such as being as such comes to withdraw from sense. it is this which alone always remains to interrupt the capture of the closedness of the everyday, which remains to disrupt the disinhibiting ring of “the they” [das man]. in the fundamental concepts as in being and time, heidegger does not in fact (and as a result) think animals at all. rather, and “in the end,” heidegger offers only an extended animal fable, a fabulous sacrificial myth that, as (if) it were and in the background, sets off what is (arguably) most proper to man—that is, his own very origin. in our questioning, writes heidegger, we always and inevitably “end up talking as if that which the animal relates to and the manner in which it does so were some being” (fcm 255)—but it is not, in fact, some being, but rather, and only, human being: none other than the dasein “we” always already are. we end up interpreting “the animal” as if she were human: anthropomorphically, in other words—in the form of a fable (in this seminar, it should be remembered, heidegger is putting forward a thesis, that is, putting something forward for the sake of argument, and which heidegger very rarely does). traditionally dealing with origins, the generic fable is, after all and by definition, an anthropomorphic mirror in which, reflected in the exemplary figure of “the animal,” “we” humans are expected to re-cognize our ownmost proper mode of being. here then, and for the sake of argument, heidegger is proffering a fabulous drama, one in which is staged, as if in a mirror, the rigorously anthropocentric struggle between being that dasein which has its demise [ableben] and becoming that dasein which has dying for its way of being (being and time 291). in another sense, however, it is also and at once an anti-fable, in that, given the imperative of an always already becoming again that is the gift of finitude, there can be no site nor sight of the dasein’s phylogenetic origin—as heidegger is no doubt aware, a telling anthropogenesis can never be a tale of the origin of the species, which would inevitably reiterate its auto-destruktion precisely along the fault-line. thus, an obvious question remains: “who” or “what” comes-to-be human? it cannot be a nonhuman animal, nor any other-being-in-the-world, essentially denied as they are access to the “as.” there “is,” therefore, no origin. rather, only the human always already comes-to-be after what maurice blanchot calls the “deluge” of language, of being as such: the human comes-to-be, and is called to being, by being always already in language. 59 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world “we” humans are thus always already following the unsitable originary site of the fall into the “as”-structure, and it is the nonhuman animal who necessarily finds herself, without even the possibility of impossibility, nonplaced uncannily both before and after the world. and yet, it remains to ask, how can it be that, given the undifferentiated absorption that is instinctive reaction, “[t]he animal’s way of being, which we call ‘life’, is not without access to what is around it and about it” (fcm 198)? in that for heidegger such a “not without access” [nicht zugangslos] can never be access to being as such, it soon becomes clear that “not without access” can only be a “seeming to have access” understood as a “not-having-in-the-mode-of-having.” it remains essentially the case, heidegger insists, that the animal only “appears as a living being [als seiendes lebewesen vorkommt]” (ibid.), and it is this mere “seeming like” or “appearing as” which gives rise to the claim of the animal’s “having” the “as.” and indeed, this reference to the animal appearing aass [als] a living being is at once to explicate that very appearing: for heidegger, both the appearing and the subsequent claim are pure anthropomorphisms, a necessarily human “talking as if” in which each and every animal is transformed into yet one more anthropo-magical mirror. unable to differentiate beings as beings, animals thus only appear as living beings as a result of one exceptional animal’s “having” the “as”—an exclusive property which subsequently reduces every other-being-(not)-inthe-world to a dependence upon the ek-sistence of the human. hence, one can now better understand heidegger’s deferral of the disclosure of the essence of animality as something available only from within the human world. other than as a ghosted outline, therefore, a phantom individuation through the looking glass that is the human-dasein, all other beings remain essentially absorbed in the anonymous impersonal night of the es gibt. it is here that the relation between heidegger’s “decentred exceptionalism” and traditional humanist metaphysics is most clearly disclosed and, perhaps unsurprisingly, heidegger’s “letter on humanism” provides the key. on one side, the radical antihumanism of the decentered subject is indeed, and contrary to agamben’s argument, other to the traditional metaphysical definitions of the human. at the same time, however, its decentering of the exclusively human subject serves only to introduce the higher, überhumanism which heidegger in the “letter” claims is to be found within the existential analytic, the “sole implication” of which— is that the highest determinations of the essence of man in humanism still do not realize the proper dignity of man. to that extent the thinking in being and time is against humanism. … [but] humanism is opposed 60 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) because it does not set the humanitas of man high enough (233-4, my emphasis). according to this überhumanism there can be no possibility of an essential humananimal mitsein, in that it is the human that always already constitutes (“subsequent” to its appearing) nonhuman beings as beings, and in this sense the nonhuman animal must thus always already come after the human: before the human there is (mere) “living,” but not “living be-ing” as such. here then, heidegger does indeed displace nonhuman animals outside of the humanist teleology of traditional metaphysics which, in that “the human” comes to be in and as the exclusion of the “animalistic ground” upon which it depends, marks (down) every nonhuman animal as incomplete, as subhuman. at the same time, however, he reinscribes an überhumanist exceptionalism insofar as being comes to be as such only in and as the human and thus, in its always already exclusion of an animal ground, the constitution of the “nonhuman animal” therefore depends upon the human. hence, while it is a radical reversal of the dependence-exclusion of the metaphysical humanist tradition, it is one which nevertheless remains within its economy—as if in a mirror. so it is that, in the telling of such a fabulous tale, nonhuman animals thus come to be(ing) only as spectral beings-for-man7—invoked from the deepest of depths, raised up to a ghostly appearance and allotted, so to speak, a brief graceless period before, for the most part, “disappearing” once again into the undifferentiation of the mass term “meat.” such an überhumanist a priori refusal of thinking animals—in every sense—has then, in going along with the traditional (metaphysical) denial of death to nonhuman beings, far-reaching and murderous consequences. most important here is that, in the mirror of heidegger’s resolution, and in common with christian and enlightenment tradition, animals have no death, no possibility, and no meaning—exscribed therein, written out in an all too human, all too familiar fashion, as soulless mechanisms working only until they run (or are ran) down. reiterating the undying figure central to the two dominant configurations of metaphysics, heidegger thus reiterates too the hubris of a human exceptionalism that, given the surety of absolute superiority, sanctions our doing whatever we like to (other) animals. such putatively posthumanist thinking therefore, in its restaging of the eternal animal predicated upon the lack of language, reproduces a symbolic economy serving a capitalist dependent logic, one which ensures that the biological death of nonhuman animals—and thus of this death of this (farm, laboratory, or feral) animal—is considered at best epiphenomenal (rendered both symbolically and literally as “a fortuitous by-product”) and, at worst, a simple impossibility; that is, meaningless and thus unthinkable. in this sense, heidegger thus unwittingly 61 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world underwrites the material global practice of systematic violence and mass slaughter on a truly unthinkable scale in that, figured as undying, his discourse mimetically reproduces as ‘natural’ the material reduction of nonhuman animals to a state of ‘interminable survival’ that is at once a daily zootechnical genocide.8 it serves, that is to say, to naturalize capital’s waging of a (massively unequal) war on animals. that, however, is not necessarily the end of heidegger’s “just so” story. in that the animal, corralled within the dasein’s reflection, remains unthought, the animal inevitably remains; and remains too for heidegger, whose rigour will not allow his reservation to remain unspoken: the difficulty of the problem lies in the fact that in our questioning we always and inevitably interpret the poverty in world and the peculiar encirclement proper to the animal in such a way that we end up talking as if that which the animal relates to and the manner in which it does so were some being, and as if the relation involved were an ontological relation that is manifest to the animal. the fact that this is not the case compels us to the thesis [nötigt zu der these] that the eesssseennccee ooff lliiffee iiss aacccceessssiibbllee oonnllyy tthhrroouugghh aa ddeessttrruuccttiivvee oobbsseerrvvaattiioonn [wesen des lebens nur im sinne einer abbauenden betrachtung zugänglich ist], which does not mean that life is something inferior or that it is at a lower level in comparison with human dasein. on the contrary, life is a domain which possesses a wealth of being-open [offenseins], of which the human world may know nothing at all (fcm 255; translation modified). it remains the case then, beyond what is yet one more anthropocentric mirror—beyond, that is, this “fact” which compels heidegger to speculate—, that this necessarily destructive observing with and to which the animal is sacrificed nonetheless reserves and preserves for animals, on the far side of the abyssal rupture, the possibility of an unknown and unknowing being-open which remains to be (differently) thought. fables without origin: animals in the world. while it is indeed the case, as derrida remarks, that heidegger never seriously envisages the possibility of a “mitsein with” the nonhuman animal, it is by turning to nietzsche—retaining here the senses of both circle and dialogue—that we are able to gain a glimpse of what it might mean to think the multiple ways of being-animal and the destructive observation together, rather than as mutually exclusive conditions. a thinking together that is, in other words, thinking 62 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) encounters shared between animals necessarily thrown in the world in and of language. this is not to suggest, however, a (slightly or greatly) more inclusive, yet nevertheless homogeneous, category of beings. any such delimitation would necessarily remain dependent upon that which it excludes, and would, as a result, be always already undone by the nonlocalizable moment of its fault-line. in fact, the opposite is the case. just as it is not possible to efface the threshold of nonhuman-human difference by “simply” placing (and thus excluding) animals as “before” the taking-place of (human) language according to some kind of genetic, evolutionary timescale, neither is it possible—any more than it is advisable—to evade or to efface differences between animals, be they human and/or nonhuman, in the sharing of that very taking-place in and of language.9 a “body,” as heidegger argues, is never that which subsequently encounters the world but rather, in its attunedness that is the essential and constant laying claim of sense, “is” a being-outside that singularly bodies. in this, i will argue, every so-called body, whether it is “one” we commonly call “animal” or “human” (or rather neither and both), is abysmally situated in-relation—i.e. in relation without relation—and, in being exposed across sense, meaning and world, it is only by way of the essential indecipherability of the other that an “i” might ever again come to be. moving through nietzsche’s well-known but vertiginously productive 1873 essay, “on truth and lie in the extra-moral sense” [über wahrheit und lüge im aussermoralischen sinne] (henceforth cited as tl), it quickly becomes apparent that what nietzsche calls “image” is in fact the originary forgetting which marks the having taken-place of language. this “image,” however, is explicitly nonanthropocentric, in that “language,” as we will see, must be understood here as incorporating all production of sense, that is to say, as extending to the tropological functioning of perception and affection. the movement of sensation is, in other words, a transference or translation [übertragung] within a nonnecessary (that is, creative or aesthetic) relationship. “to begin with,” writes nietzsche, “a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image [ein nervenreiz, zuerst übertragen in ein bild]” (82). in this, and right at the beginning, nietzsche is thus making clear that “image” refers neither solely to human perception nor solely to visual perception, but rather to any and all perception and affection—that is to say, any filtering of information—each instance of which is always a translation: the image that “is” the touch of the sun’s warmth, that “is” the smell of honey, or that “is” the sound of thunder, and so on. given that any such moment or movement of translation necessitates an over-leaping [überspringen] from one sphere into a second, absolutely heterogeneous sphere—i.e., an overleaping that marks out the image as vehicle to the stimuli’s tenor—every image is therefore a “perceptual metaphor” [die anschaulichen metaphern]. moreover, the inescapability of this discontinuity makes every perceptual 63 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world metaphor necessarily inadequate—“a stammering translation into a completely foreign tongue” (86)—, one which cannot help but truncate, mutilate, and make monstrous. nothing less than a material laying-claim in and as which a body comes-to-be, the sense-image is thus a vehicle ever lost to an errant transmission, to dissemination. at once then, living beings possess only discontinuous metaphors of physical responses, responses which themselves mark the taking-place of material encounters. hence, in coming to be only in and as a metaphorical vehicle always radically divided from the originary being-with of an encounter which can be neither perceived nor known nor represented, it thus follows that the kantian “thing in itself”—which is “what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would be” (82; my emphasis)—is necessarily an illusion. every image then, every sense by which be-ing is outside itself, is thus not only a metaphor, but also always already an abuse of metaphor in that its analogy remains necessarily incomplete, and thus for nietzsche, language in its broadest sense is the operation of catachresis.10 never in a relation to or of truth, the sense-image is therefore—and “at most”—“an aesthetic relation or disposition [ein ästhetisches verhalten]” (86). as well as deconstructing the traditional platonic distinction between the sensible [aisthēton] and the intelligible [noēton], such aesthetic relating that is the production of sense is never, given the impossibility of independently existing entities, that of a subject-object relation. furthermore, given that this being-disposed-outside that is to be attuned to a condition is the aesthetic production of sense, it follows that that which appears to us simply as “our bodies”—that is to say, the sense of a body—, as well as the sense of the self, of self-awareness, is necessarily founded upon an a priori infolding of the outside which always already interrupts any such delimitation. every passion, being a moment and movement of translation, is thus at once an act of interpretation, just as every action is at once dependent upon a passive infolding of externality. the ek-static production of sense is thus irreducible to the modern cartesian notion of egological “consciousness” and at once divested of both anthropocentric and organismic restriction; every nonhuman animal too is first of all be-ing outside itself, and thus it necessarily follows—and as nietzsche insists—that they too come to their senses only in and as metaphoric perceptions. moreover, in focussing on the tropology of sense and hence of a technics at and as the origin of life, the self-proclaimed “last of the stoics” irredemiably fractures any secure distinction between the “natural” and the “artificial,” disclosing the dark machinations of power that blind us to even the most transparent perception. when, in describing the 64 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) translative mo(ve)ment in the birth of tragedy (1872), nietzsche writes of a kind of inverse blinding in which “the bright image projections … [are,] as it were, luminous spots to cure eyes damaged by the gruesome night” (67), he thus gives us to think ourselves, avant la lettre, in the sightlessness of heidegger’s captivated animal, essentially blind when faced with beings we can never apprehend as such. moreover, in following the traces of nietzsche’s text it soon becomes clear that any attempt at continuing to draw such a bold (aristotelian, cartesian and heideggerian) dividing line between an “animal” reaction and a “human” response is ultimately untenable.11 this blinding, deafening, benumbing production (or rather, as we will see, reproduction) of perceptual metaphors necessarily places “us”—i.e. “us” beings that translate stimuli into images—always already “in” language: we are, in and as the transfer—and thus in and as existence itself—already in and as trope, inhabiting and beinginhabited by machines for generating meaning. obviously, such practices of senseproduction are not, or not only, language in the narrow sense of the written and spoken word. nor is it the case, as we will see, that the image is a necessarily intermediate stage between nerve stimulus and intelligible word-concept (it is not the case, that is to say, that the image is not yet “language proper,” lacking only its teleological fulfillment). as a result, nietzsche neither places “the animal” in a median position between non-life (entities which do not translate stimuli into imagery) and being-human (or beingdasein), nor does he—and without denying the abyssal rupture remarked by the marker of proximal distance—mark out animals for an exclusion predicated upon their death or overcoming which would be to therefore prohibit the possibility of an animalhuman mitsein. despite heidegger’s refusal of any such language to nonhuman animals, it is nevertheless here in terms of the metaphorical “image” that his writings and, after him, those of jacques derrida, enable us to better understand what is at stake in its disposition. for nietzsche, as we have seen, the image is a truncated translation of a response marking a material encounter. the image that remarks every perception is thus always an inadequate interpretation of a relation. given this, and as will become increasingly clear, it can only be that the experience which nietzsche calls the “first” image—a “unique and entirely individual original experience” that is “without equals” and thus “able to elude all classification” (tl, 83, 84-5)—is the perception of a singularity.12 never a sense of the impossible thing-in-itself, the experience that is the “first” image is the perception of being as such—the “entirely individual original experience” that is the immediate perception of this uniquely situated relation of be-ing. the “as” of “as such” here remarks the excessive and discontinuous transport of 65 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world metaphor, the discontinuous aesthetic (non)relation that remarks our exposure such that it is only as it is. in other words, the as such “is” the mo(ve)ment of language “itself”: the posit(ion)ing being and being posit(ion)ed of and in language. in the coming community (1990), giorgio agamben describes the event of singularity as follows: i am never this or that [substance], but always such, thus. eccum sic: absolutely. not possession but limit, not presupposition but exposure. … whereas real predicates express relationships within language, exposure is pure relationship with language itself, with its taking-place. it is what happens to something (or more precisely, to the taking-place of something) by the very fact of being in relation to language, the fact of being-called. … existence as exposure is the being-as of a such. … the such does not presuppose the as; it exposes it, it is its taking-place. … the as does not suppose the such; it is its exposure, its being pure exteriority’ (978). in order to better understand this notion of the “first” image as the possibility of immediate perception as such, it is thus necessary to read in nietzsche’s text a grammar marked not by the will but by a primordial passivity which contaminates all activity. in this, the unique, individual and original relation that is the singularity of the as such “is” the taking-place of language—the taking-place which is, as we saw with the apprehension of the closed or the earth in heidegger, the singular laying claim of blunt materiality which withdraws in the relation that “is” being as such. this “original” relation, however, can never be perceived as such—that is, can never be the translative production of an image—in that it is precisely this immediate relation which must escape in the transference into the discontinuous domain that is its interpretation, its sense. the x of the original individual “acquaintance” always already remains, as nietzsche writes, “inaccesible and undefinable for us” (83). in short, the image that is to perceive can only ever mark the escape of the originary individual relation as such in its being-sensed, the translation having always already taken-place of and in language.13 the word or concept “language” presents a problem here, however. inevitably carrying its burdensome anthropocentric history before it, it tends unwittingly to limit its recall to the verbal, and thus to an exceptionalism which language here precisely puts out of the question. the petrified anthropo-logic that inheres in the term “language,” in other words, elides the sense of nonhuman animals. for this reason, i suggest that the originary relation of being as such is better understood simply as that in which the 66 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) transfer of sense can take place. in this, the open that “is” being as such is precisely the taking place of the encounter of sense which escapes in its necessary translation, a mo(ve)ment which, in and as perception, has always already taken place. here “sense” is chosen in that it retains, across the discrete domains of translation marked by sens and sinn, its irreducibility to either the sensible or the intelligible, but it is rather that each always invests the other: entangled sense (common and uncommon) and sensibility, meanings without sense and sense without meaning. sense [le sens] is thus, as jean-luc nancy writes, the element in which there can be significations, interpretations, representations … it is the regime of their presentation, and it is the limit of their sense [sens] … our world is a world presented as a world of sense [monde de sens] before and beyond any constituted meaning [sens constitué] (l’oubli de la philosophie 90-1). sense thus carries an imbrication of the material and the semiotic that always exceeds any reduction to the words spoken by human animals alone. the taking place of sense is at once the opening of and as language, and to a necessary mo(ve)ment which, in the proximal distancing of the “as,” installs a technics as and at the origin of sense. it is this, as we shall see, which renders untenable any recourse to the myth of a “natural” (tele)pathic animal communication and, ultimately, to the ideology of the undying animal. translation having always already taken place, this necessary falling away into the metaphoricity of sense—a fall which is also a surfacing, a coming to one’s senses and thence to one’s “self”—thus gives us to understand a “having” of the “as”-structure common to all perception (metaphor, by definition, being the taking of something as something else), rather than being the exclusive property of the dasein. the “first” image to which nietzsche draws our attention, the sense of this singular being as such, must thus be read as the coming-to-be that is the remarking of the taking-place of the “as” which has always already escaped. here it is necessary to understand that such numerical markings as employed by nietzsche are grammatical, and not genetic.14 the “original, unique and individual experience” is, in other words, that alien, uncanny transport that gives a being to apprehend that beings are in the blunt materiality of their withdrawal, a zoo-genesis in which the attunement of heidegger’s “profound boredom”—a sense only of the reserve of being as such in the withdrawal of sense—is one shared potentially by every being (in be-ing disposed outside itself). moreover, as the condition of possibility for the abyssal generalization of the image, this sense of that 67 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world which escapes is necessarily a pure performative, referring only to itself and thus to its fantastic masking of the abyss. this follows necessarily from the fact that, for any translation-perception to “make sense”—that is, for an image to be apprehended, or rather recognized as an image—it must, upon its “first” appearance, always already be repeated (and so come to differently divide its indivisible essence). in this, the necessary iterability of a recognized sense—“an idealization that permits one identify it as the same throughout possible repetitions” (derrida specters 200)—at once remarks a sense of the temporal, with “sense of time” understood as the multiplicity of local economies that constitute the “time of sense.”15 thus, what for nietzsche is the metaphoricity of sense is perhaps better understood as the re-cognition of sense: “cognition”—the process of knowing in the broadest sense—here serving to recall the tropological movement by which sense is produced, a production which the recursive prefix remarks as always already a re-production. in summary then, the singular encounter as such is such that always already escapes in the necessary re-cognition of the perceptual metaphor as image, that is, in the sense of sensation as sensation—the sense that is tropologically produced as perception and affection. following from this, re-cognition in and as image therefore presupposes its siting within a co-originary structure of differential relation—that is, recognition presupposes a multiplicity of countersignatures—in that an image necessarily “means” only in and as its difference (to recognize the image of redness, for example, is always already to recognize not-redness). this re-cognition is, in other words, always already a repetition that is a falling into temporality and at once what heidegger calls a “destructive observation.” this is because, being reiterated, any image is always already “becomingsedimented” in that perception must necessarily ignore differences between singularities in order to recognize an image as an image, to recognize sense as sense. a recognition which, as nietzsche tells us, in equating by forgetting or “omitting the aspects in which they are unequal” (tl 83), already marks the mo(ve)ment with the sedimentation of an habitual and conventional perceptual response. thus, recognition dissimulates what it shows and that it shows—is, in a word, writing. all of which leads to the conclusion that there can be no recognition as such: the giving (of the) as such to recognition is thus always already a calculation, and thus there can be no recognition of recognition as such, no sense of the reproduction of sense, and thus no absolute distinction between the sensible and the intelligible. that it gives [es gibt] is given up in the recognition of its been given, which is at once the giving of finitude, of death. in every sense then, that which is encountered is defaced as it at once defaces that which encounters, its destructive observation reproduced behind our backs, so to speak—a 68 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) machinic rumbling both before and beyond. hence, always already differentially sited and cited, perception is always already apperception that is nonetheless irreducible to cogitating activity. here then, we have two distinct but indissociable sites of non-sense: on the one hand, the necessary withdrawal of being as such that is the condition of possibility for the production of sense (the taking place of language) and, on the other, the singular differences of a particular perception which are necessarily and violently effaced in its recognition (language always already having taken place). we can see, in other words, only because we are blind, can hear and feel only because we are deaf and unfeeling. this distinction is extremely important, in that it is the former which potentially interrupts the latter. for the moment, however, it is necessary only to note that it is the iterability of the image which, in its having taken-place (again), always already places being(s) in and as language, that it is iterability which “lets the traces continue to function in the absence of the general context or some elements of the context” (derrida “strange institution” 64). and finally, it is only in and as the habitual effacement of difference—that is, through the idealization of iterability by which historicity is constituted—that be-ings are able to be, as it is only, as nietzsche insists, “the petrification and coagulation of a mass of images” that produce the relatively stable contextual elements which allow beings—whether “human” or “animal”—to “live with any repose, security, and consistency” (tl 86). this is because, in that the recognition of an image presupposes its positing within a differential relation of images (that is, within contingent machines for generating meaning), the becoming-sedimented that is the image is at once the becoming-sedimented of reiterated combinations of component images (or component combinations thereof).16 the image then, the tropological making sense of sense, is always already the situated contraction of reiterated habitual sensecomponents within a relational structure. such metonymies consist of a utilitarian and conventional selection or cutting out—that is, an habitual interpretation of meaning— according to its use within dominant social relations, and in this always already presuppose relations of power. deleuze and guattari make this clear in their gloss on the notion of opinion—a notion which, understood in the context of this text, can never belong exclusively to the human, and which will be further developed when i turn to nietzsche’s definition of truth: we pick out a quality supposedly common to several objects that we perceive, and an affection supposedly common to several subjects who experience it and who, along with us, grasp that quality. opinion is the rule of the correspondance of one to the other. … it extracts an abstract 69 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world quality from perception and a general power from affection: in this sense all opinion is already political (what is philosophy, 144-5). how (a) being makes sense, in every sense, can be thus considered sociopolitical, and in this, the non-sensing of singular differences as much as the habitually recognized sense of an encounter is an active-passive reproduction of power and of power’s limits (of the production and reproduction of norms). the recognized image—the necessarily reiterated metaphorico-metonymic perception—is therefore always already what we might (catachrestically) call an “image-concept” in that, in nietzsche’s words, after it “has been generated millions of times and has been handed down for many generations … it acquires at last the same meaning … it would have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship … were a strictly causal one” (tl, 87). it is just such an habitual regulation of “making sense” which, as nietzsche is at pains to point out, orders human and nonhuman animals alike. for all such be-ings then, tropes are necessarily machines of calculation and repetition that, beyond and before any “i,” habitually order the sense of the world. it is, in heideggerian terms, that of always already being-thrown and falling into the everyday, into doxa. thus it is that, in being always already outside ourselves (and to be otherwise would constitute an eternal present), every active-passive recognition that is “to sense” presupposes bounded and bonded structures of meaning, presupposes archives and relays, backloads and rhizomatic connections; presupposes the machinic operation of power. always already an interand intra-action, “making sense” is thus, in short, an interpretative act of passion, at once both singular and habitual and inhabited by power that informs and conforms all knowing. the “having” (in the sense of its having always already taken-place) of the (ap)perceptual metaphor—and thus of being-in-language—is thus to be always already excluded from the “unique and entirely individual original experience” that is the being as such of the singular encounter, of the such that it is (only) as it is. constituted from outside of ourselves, this bodying which we ever again “are” is thus irretrievably extimate, always already requiring the crossing-through of being as such. hence, the tropology of sense is not substitution, but rather constitution, of be-ing—an aesthetic relation without relation as a result of an exclusion from which nonhuman animals cannot therefore be excluded. on the one side (of a line that can no longer be drawn), it is undeniable that nonhuman animals are able to live socially with “repose, security, and consistency”—and yet such repose can only be granted by iterability. hence, if one accepts that nonhuman animals are, as a result, gifted with response—that is, ek-sist in 70 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) relation without relation—and thus respond-able and responsive, then being-exposed in an encounter presupposes asymmetrical relatings that cannot be determined in advance. on the other, if human hubris insists upon downgrading nonhuman responseability to a “merely” “instinctive” reaction to (sedimented) perceptions—reactions whose gestures or signs are (somehow) passed down from generation to generation— must one not also read in the much-vaunted human response rather the captivation within the disinhibiting ring of the destructive conventional reaction? as derrida writes, “what would ever distinguish the response, in its total purity, the so-called free and responsible response, from a reaction to a complex system of stimuli? and what, after all, is a citation?” (animal 53-4). this response/reaction dichotomy has a long and illustrious philosophical history, but for the moment it is sufficient to gesture towards just one consequence of its ongoing deconstruction, one requiring a vast and painstaking analysis to unpack: to no longer be able to posit nonhuman animals as reactive mechanisms is necessarily to refuse the “premeditation” that determines a responsible (i.e. guilty) subject and which founds humanist-juridical discourse—if animals respond, or humans react, then the “responsible” intentional subject before the law becomes indeterminable. one can thus understand the considerable significance invested in its maintenance. it remains to ask nietzsche, however, as to the difference, if any, between the (human and nonhuman) metaphoricity of sense and the (predominantly human) sense of verbal language. for nietzsche there is indeed a difference between “man” and “animals,” which is precisely the mark of marking out, of excluding and externalizing “the animal” upon which man depends in the production of the proper—albeit empty—concept of “man” itself. however, as we have seen, nonhuman animals cannot be excluded from the iterated image and its metaphorical displacement from the as such and, as a result, from the coagulated mass of images and their metonymic combinations that permit not only repose and security, but also and at once the having of sociopolitical castes and degrees, of subordinations and clearly marked boundaries. nonetheless, this would seem to be exactly how nietzsche describes that which does indeed mark out the nonhuman from the human animal: “[e]verything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept”; schemata which then allow “the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries … the regulative and imperative world” (tl 84). reading this section more closely, however, and in the hope of chasing down the difference which sites man’s mode of being-tropological as other to that of the animal, one discovers this difference does not in fact consist of man’s having 71 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world the word (and thus the concept) but, quite simply, in man’s having of truth; a division which, at first sight, appears to unambiguously reiterate the long familiar metaphysical gesture which allocates—and in doing so defines—man and man alone as the site of teleological reason. this is, however, impossible according to nietzsche’s logic for several reasons. to begin with, in that the word “is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin” (83), the word is therefore always already a word-concept and thus excluded from the singular “truth” of being as such. as with the image, the word is rather the site of an habitual re-cognition that ignores difference in order to let “the traces continue to function in the absence of the general context.” moreover, within the bounded and bonded structures of meaning, within the machines of habitual recognition inhabited by power, word-concepts are inseparably entangled with image-concepts which compose the overwhelming majority of a human animal’s tropological functioning of perception and affection—for example (but not reducible to) kinesic and paralinguistic communications such as expression, tone of voice, movement and stillness, respiration, muscle tensity, even peristalsis—all of which, in that they are iterable and/or are read as such, function at the nonverbal “animal” level of the nietzschean image; the vast majority of which, as noted above, are irreducible to the conscious cartesian “i.” this strongly argues against the claim that human language in the narrow verbal sense evolved to replace crude so-called “animal” language in that, if indeed this were the case, then the evolving of this new, more efficient method would have resulted in the decay and disuse of “animal” language among humans.17 given this, the “second stage” which for nietzsche marks out the human—and again, it should be clear that the ordinal is solely a grammatical marker, and at once a mark of grammar’s “unconscious domination” (beyond good and evil 217)—does not therefore bear the mark of a teleological progression, but must rather be thought of as another way or another mode of inhabiting and being-inhabited by generative structures of meaning. that is to say, being-human is simply being a way of inhabiting the abyssal technicity of language that remains always discontinuous with the multiplicity of other ways of being-animal but which is nonetheless shared across overlapping zones of indecipherability (the recognised “meaning” that is this encounter of an aspirated breath, for example, or of a stillness) in being-with others. thus, and to use an exemplary nonhuman from amongst nietzsche’s extensive bestiary, while beinggnat-in-the-world remains discontinuous to the plural ways of being-tiger, being-bird, or being-plant (or rather, being this “tiger,” this “bird,” or this “plant”), there is nevertheless no ontological difference dividing living-beings-in-the-world, no difference 72 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) in essence between “the human” and “the animal” as there is for heidegger (and all such quasi-individuated bodyings too, are always already relations of relations without relation). “[i]f we could communicate with the gnat,” writes nietzsche, “we would learn that he likewise … feels the flying center of the universe within himself” (tl 79). being (dis)placed in metaphor, there can “be” only correspondence without correspondence, relating without relation, a co-responding that always already interrupts every essence, disrupts every sovereign self. there can “be” no taking-place, only and ever (and which is neither “only” nor forever) an already taken-place and an always not-yet taken-place—no presence but only and ever difference and deferral. living beings thus ek-sist in a relation without relation that can never be “natural” and thus, following nietzsche’s logic and at once moving beyond it, “natural”—whether considered as a concept or a word, as a signifier or a signified or a referent—finds itself transformed into its opposite, into something fantastical, some fantastic thing which is not a thing, which is, and is nothing.18 for this reason, and contrary to the thought of heidegger, it necessarily follows that nonhuman animals—both similarly and differently to man—apprehend a world. moreover, not only can there be no human exceptionalism on the basis of language and world, nor is it possible, as nietzsche’s philosopher-gnat would tell us, to justify even an anthropological privilege: the insect or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion which is not available (86). the word-concept then, is another way of being in language, and thus of being in difference, but it is neither prior nor subsequent, neither before nor above, only an other—but not further (spatial or temporal), as we will see—translative dis-placement. and here too the question, and the nonhuman animal, remains: in reiterated giving voice—in the call calling for a response, in declaration and in warning, but also in the gesture of a paw or claw—do not certain animals “name” or “sign” an image recognised—and thus shared—by an other? it is clear that we have not yet located the “truth” that marks the human out from other animals, both the word and the image are necessarily dissimulations, habitual formations which, in permitting repose and security to both human and nonhuman animals, allow us to live and work together 73 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world (and figured, in nietzsche’s text, by man as he who “must exist socially and with the herd,” and then again, as he who must “lie with the herd”). nevertheless, it is exactly here that the difference is found (without being founded), in that it is only man who invents— a uniformly valid and binding designation … for things, and this legislation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth. for the contrast between truth and lie arises here for the first time. the liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real. … he misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even reversals of names. if he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him (81, emphasis added). “truths” are thus habitual duties “which society imposes in order to exist,” to wit “to be truthful means to employ the usual metaphors” (84). it is thus only from these necessary habits that there “arises a moral impulse in regard to truth” (ibid.), and it is this which marks the difference: only with the appearance of a moral impulse to truth, and thus of the moral exclusion of the lie, does “man” appear, and as different from the nonhuman animal. whereas a nonhuman animal may “make something which is unreal appear to be real,” may misuse fixed conventions and perhaps be socially ostracised as a result, he or she cannot, however, lie in an immoral (or indeed, moral) sense, but only in an extra-moral sense. the truths of men are, in short, “illusions which we have forgotten are illusions” (84), in that dissimulation is the condition of possibility for reason itself. upon the abyss, “rational man” thus legislates, he universalises and, in so doing, constructs “values”— values which exclude, demonise; values which serve only to mark out. for nietzsche then, the difference between human and nonhuman animals is the difference between the law and making sense, between the reactive legislation of (illusory) moral truth and the aesthetic constitution of meaning. being-animal is thus to be always already exposed with-in bounded structures generative of meaning, and yet without (or before) (the) law in the double sense of the sovereign who is not subject to the law but who, precisely because she is not a recognised subject of law, finds herself nevertheless utterly subjected.19 before the law that is to say, not like franz kafka’s man from the country, but rather as a prisoner of his penal colony who must learn man’s law by her wounds, by its being written over and into her body. (for kafka, it should be recalled, 74 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) the law—inscribing innumerable yet indistinguishable deaths—remains indecipherable to the end, and whose monument is a death-machine that can no longer be maintained.20) thus, given that “man” is nothing but the appearance of the lie within the concept of truth, it is not simply truths that are illusions, but also the phallogocentric superiority of “man” himself. lacking any foundation, man necessarily builds his edifice of concepts only “from himself,” constructs a world “more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world” (tl 84) whose truths are “thoroughly anthropomorphic” and which can never be “really and universally valid apart from man” (85). it remains to be seen, however, as to what this might mean for nietzsche’s philosophy. given that nonhuman animals similarly require an “inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force” (86), they are necessarily no closer to the immediate perception of this uniquely situated relation of be-ing, no more “originary” than the rational man in and as his moral schema. as a result, nietzsche is by no means advocating a “return” to some kind of preverbal, quasi-“natural” state, which would be to advocate an impossible (and not only in that the “human” takes place only in and as the legislation of “truth”) and at once nonsensical movement from a cooler lie to a fiery lie, both of which relate only to one another and which are always “equally” displaced from the unique, individual and original relation (although no calculation can ever measure this incommensurable proximity and distance of equality). in that one absolutely discontinuous vehicle can be no more truthful than a second (and thus there can be no judgments of absolute truth and value), there remains, in short, difference (or différance) without privilege. in this, it is clear that what nietzsche seeks is not a simple inversion of exceptionalism which valorises the animal over the human (and thus reinscribes the human/animal division). rather, what nietzsche’s text gives us to think is a way of being (human) with others who do not share our language, who are not heideggerian reflections of ourselves, but are rather those others with whom or with which neither consensus nor essential disclosure is possible. every interpretation of and as sense is, as we have seen, always a mis-re-cognition, that is to say, the necessary non-recognition— i.e., effacement—of the singular as such. nevertheless, while the tropological movement can never be identical without ceasing to be interpretation, neither can it ever leave that which it interprets without ceasing to be its vehicle. the reproduced sense must remain, so to speak, always touching (on) the sensing-sensed encounter, must always—at some immeasurably proximal distance—be with, and in this the effaced materiality as such always remains to interrupt its habitual recognition. however, when necessary habit petrifies into dogma, into legislation, then, rather than an encounter of bodies constituted in and as relation, a mis-re-cognition comes to predetermine the sense of an 75 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world encounter. that is to say, the attunement that is being-exposed is misrecognized in the strong sense, in that one holds to a recognized (sedimented) sense of the encounter prior to the encounter, and as such the encounter is essentially prevented from taking place: i see without having being seen, i touch without having been touched. detached from that which gives itself to be interpreted, interpretation ceases to be interpretation and thus becomes law. it is this latter misrecognition which, according to nietzsche, is the mark of the human: the falling always already into the transcendental. the comparison with hegel is instructive here: like nietzsche, hegel too argues that the concept “exists in the animal” but that only the human concept can exist “in its fixed, independent freedom,” that is, as a transcendental ideal.21 the difference lies in the fact that, for hegel, it is precisely the animal which is necessarily “sick” and “anxious” as a result. (following the argument explored here, however, it should be noted that “misrecognition”—the predetermining and thus prevention of the encounter—is necessarily confined neither to egological consciousness (human or nonhuman) nor to human verbal language (the latter which would reinscribe the familiar human/animal distinction posited on the basis of a properly human belief in god). the specific difference outlined by nietzsche here is that of the moral legislation of truth common to human way(s) of being, rather than misrecognition per se, although even here it is by no means possible to rule out a priori an other way of being thus “morally impulsive” amongst nonhuman ways of being. as derrida points out, “where there is transgenerational transmission, there is law, and therefore crime and peccability [il y a de la loi, et donc du crime et de la peccabilité]” (la bête et le souverain 152).) it is in the face of this fall of language that nietzsche—whose famous remark that “to believe in grammar is still to believe in god” is one to which we must not cease to respond—posits his notion of recursive artistic conduct. such conduct is the vigilance of an affirmative response to the inartistic, reactive violence of misrecognition, a being-with which thus ever again preserves the possibility—the chance and the necessity preserved in the singular situated encounter—of that uncanny zoogenetic transport which gives (a) be-ing to apprehend that beings are in the blunt materiality of their withdrawal. in the face of blind universals, responsible conduct affirms that responsive touch which, always already exceeding the transcendental, remains always to come: a sense only of the taking-place of sense prior to its recognition, which (re)marks the opening of an unheard-of relation. the singularity—the individual—does not live, does not exist, but rather “is” that which exceeds every determinable form, “is,” in short, that which oouutt-lliivveess [überleben].22 hence, as werner hamacher asserts, rather than “being a social or psychic form of human existence, the individual—exceeding type and genus—is the 76 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) announcement of the über-mensch” (‘“disgregation of the will”’ 159). nietzsche’s over or über-human is thus a call and a demand which, remaining always already to come, thus withdraws from all re-cognition and, as such, exceeds all specular delimitation: interrupting, that is to say, the stage of heidegger’s fabulous anthropo-magical mirror in and as a silent announcing which necessarily out-lives or sur-vives any enclosure of the properly “human.”23 artistic conduct is thus a way of being-with-in-the-world, a conducting towards that response which, in its having always already taken place, constitutes a creative forgetting of being in encountering the way in which something comes to be that which it is as such: “invention,” as nietzsche writes, “beyond the limits of experience” (“the philosopher” 53). being “clever beasts,” humans invented knowing and thus invented the division between humans and animals. here then, we are returned to the inescapable destructiveness of any observation concerning nonhuman animal existence, of a “talking as if” in which the other of nonhuman being is, in a stammering catachresis, written over by way of alltoo-human (pre)conceptions.24 nothing, as derrida says of this or that animal, “can ever rob me of the certainty that what we have here is an existence which refuses to be conceptualized [rebelle à tout concept]” (animal 9). here, i take derrida’s ironic statement to mean that ways of being are in themselves the rebellious refuting of conceptualization, an indecipherable space in the putatively secure edifice of the certain world. such ways of being in language are such that can never be securely delimited, but are rather ways of being-disposed-outside that presuppose as their condition the overlapping zones and jagged edges that reserve the space of ethical response. that is, of violent infolded encounters which, in constituting newly-opened spaces and asymmetrically inhabited by power, are by definition so de-formed as to be unrecognisable. while simple “communication” remains always already impossible, there remains, however, differential ways of being-with, of being-together as always already related in difference. to come to be in an artistic encounter is to be open to the incalculable, to that which exceeds sensible recognition—to say yes to the chance and necessity of life’s ever again. it is not only to be exposed to the creative withdrawal of being as such, it is, moreover, to rejoice in the encounter, as indeed lewis carroll’s gnat—the untimely cousin of nietzsche’s gnat-metaphysician—expects of alice, and of whom he awaits a response. conclusion. in a different direction then, upon a different path, it becomes imperative to disclose an other way to give death to—and to the giving of dying of—(human and nonhuman) animals. to give death to other animals: to give death as gift, the gift of and the giving that is the shared finitude of all living beings (a gift-giving heidegger rejects 77 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world out of hand in excising the “merely living” from living be-ing as such), a gift which renders impossible the monstrous hubris of an unthinking utilisation and consumption of fetishised (and thus doubly disembodied) flesh and corpses. finitude is the condition of possibility for a thinking encounter, and it is finitude which is elided—rendered imperceptible, made nonsense—by an a priori unthought “truth” that over-writes other bodies, and which paradoxically calculates nonhuman animals as undying and, thus, killable. to give this death is to bear witness, to attest, being (always inadequately) response-able to this death of this other animal. heidegger’s exclusive corral must be interrupted: despite the secular salvation dreams of the enlightenment’s instrumental experimental thinking, no animal (in the broadest possible sense) can die in the place of the other, and in this sense it is indeed the case that dying can be neither given nor taken away. nevertheless, as derrida says, it is a “fact that it is only on the basis of death, and in its name, that giving and taking become possible” (gift of death, 44). it is a death that necessarily must pass through, in being exposed across, an indissociably doubled abyss, that is, an abyssal structure of language which necessarily exceeds any reduction to the verbal on the one hand, and an abyssal bodying which exceeds any organismic delimitation on the other—a redoubled abyss that confounds any and every interiorexterior and/or organic-technological dichotomy.25 in refusing to efface the dying of animals, being-with nonhuman animals becomes possible. it is to recognize that language is not the reserve and the preserve of the human and, infinitely more than this, is never solely a “human” experience. rather, being as such is always already shared, constituted by encounters across languages which (re)produce bodies “systematically mad” (in jean-françois lyotard’s phrase) one to an other. unlike heidegger’s specular fable, the fable (with) which nietzsche sets off is at once a nonfable and a counterfable: excluded from the myth of original plentitude in being always already thrown outside of ourselves, the shared finitude of be-ings in and as metaphors that mark our originary being-with necessarily calls for a response. such thinking would necessarily move beyond both traditional humanist and heideggerian überhumanist metaphysics, moving towards an always again rethinking (of) the destructive observation which is, of course, that very interpreting of something as such that heidegger a priori denies to his fabulous “animal.” it is imperative, if we are to be (albeit inadequately) responsible within the midst of a largely unremarked global slaughter, for posthumanist philosophy to think both the finitude and the nonsubstitutable deaths of nonhuman animals. to think, that is to say, in sharing the proximal distance to the as such that is being-with, and thus to think the sharing of each other and of the world, always already separated by the greatest possible proximity. 78 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) notes thanks to jennifer bajorek for reading the various drafts of this paper, and for her invaluable comments and suggestions. 1. notable examples within (and across) various disciplines include: cary wolfe, what is posthumanism? (minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2010) and, ed., zoontologies: the question of the animal (minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2003); matthew calarco & peter atterton, eds., animal philosophy: essential readings of continental thought (ny: continuum, 2004); matthew calarco, zoographies: the question of the animal from heidegger to derrida; cora diamond et al., philosophy and animal life (ny: columbia up, 2008); h. p. streeves, ed. animal others: ethics, ontology, and animal life (albany: suny p, 1999); andrew benjamin, “what if the other were an animal? hegel on jews, animals and disease” (critical horizons: a journal of philosophy and social theory 8:1 (august 2007). 61-77.); nicole shukin animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times (minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2009); carol j. adams, neither man nor beast: feminism and the defense of animals (edinburgh: ak press, 1994); ralph acampora, corporeal compassion: animal ethics and philosophy of body (pittsburgh: u pittsburgh p, 2006); donna j. haraway, when species meet (minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008); david nibert, animal rights/human rights: entanglements of oppression and liberation (lanham, md: rowman and littlefield, 2002); and, in a related field, daniel heller-roazen, the inner touch: archaeology of a sensation (cambridge, ma: mit press, 2007). 2. the genocidal economy of animalization is exemplified both by the nazi demonization of jews as saujuden (“jewish pigs” or “swine”), and by the image of private lynndie england leading a prisoner around on a dog leash in the abu ghraib prison in iraq. 3. it is on the basis of a teleologico-dialectical reading that derrida acutely contends that the “median character” of heidegger’s animal threatens the order, implementation, and conceptual apparatus of the entire existential analytic (of spirit 57). 4. while the plurality of living beings can never be reduced to the single general term “the animal,” i have retained the term as heidegger’s term—along with the attendant so-called “neutral” pronoun—where necessary so as not to distort heidegger’s idiom any more that is inevitable in every translative interpretation (the same is true of 79 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world nietzsche later in the text). nevertheless, it is hoped that such reductive grammar henceforth sounds and resounds its unacceptability. 5. the modern anthropological machine which produces “bare life” by “excluding as not (yet) human an already human being from itself, that is, by animalizing the human, by isolating the nonhuman within the human … the animal separated within the human body itself” (the open 37), clearly depends upon the second configuration. agamben’s utopian community prior to identity, meanwhile, in inverting the dystopian machinic production of bare life, necessarily remains caught within its economy. as andrew benjamin demonstrates, agamben’s undifferentiated ontology effaces the specific functioning of power by refusing what benjamin calls “a relation of porosity and negotiation,” a refusal which in fact mirrors the machine’s refusal of precisely that problematized relation in the production of an ineliminable difference—a difference which, by the fact of its being produced, presupposes a primordial relatedness. see “particularity and exceptions: on jews and animals.” 6. thanks to andrew benjamin for drawing my attention to this passage. 7. it is not insignificant that it is from the condition that nonhuman animals are solely “beings-for-man” that aristotle in the politics infers the new western concept of “just war.” 8. as derrida writes, contemporary agribusiness condemns nonhuman animals to “an artificial, infernal, virtually interminable survival, in conditions that previous generations would have judged monstrous” (animal 26). 9. the huge variety of nonhuman animals that populate nietzsche’s texts—all those gnats, spiders and worms, the entire bestiary that attends zarathustra’s under-going, the birds that soar above and the blond beast that stalks throughout—has inspired an equally huge variety of interpretations ranging from a reduction, on the one hand, to either rhetorical flourishes or simple anthropomorphisms and, on the other, to evidence of nietzsche being “a visionary philosopher of what it means to live as an animal being” (acampora & acampora 2). notable examples include heidegger’s “zarathustra’s animals” in nietzsche vol. 2; margot norris, beasts of the modern imagination: darwin, nietzsche, kafka, ernst, and lawrence (baltimore: jhu press, 1985); vanessa lemm nietzsche’s animal philosophy (bronx: fordham up, 2009); and acampora 80 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) & acampora, which, in addition to the essays collected therein, contains brian crowley’s invaluable “index to animals in nietzsche’s corpus.” 10. on nietzsche’s thinking (of) metaphor, and thus of the “truth” of “truth,” important texts include sarah kofman’s now canonical nietzsche and metaphor (paolo alto: stanford up, 1972); philippe lacoue-labarthe, the subject of philosophy (minneapolis: u minnesota p, 1979); andrzej warminski’s reading of visibility and blindness in “prefatory postscript: interpretation and reading” in readings in interpretation: hölderlin, hegel, heidegger (minneapolis: u minnesota p, 1987); and gary shapiro alcyone: nietzsche on gift, noise and women (albany: suny p, 1991). texts which take “on truth and lie” as their specific focus, and in addition to kofman above, include paul de man’s “rhetoric of tropes (nietzsche)” in allegories of reading: figural language in rousseau, nietzsche, rilke, and proust (new haven: yale up, 1979) and “anthropomorphism and trope in the lyric” in the rhetoric of romanticism (ny: columbia up, 1984); warminski, “towards a fabulous reading: nietzsche’s ‘on truth and lie in the extra-moral sense’” (new school graduate faculty philosophy journal 15 [1991]: 93-120); and jean-luc nancy, “’our probity’ on truth in the moral sense in nietzsche” in looking after nietzsche, ed. laurence a. rickels. (albany: state university of new york press, 1990. 6789). finally, it is necessary to include here jacques derrida’s “white mythology” in margins of philosophy (chicago: u chicago p, 1972) which, while reading “on truth and lie” only “indirectly,” as warminski points out, it nevertheless remains one of its most far-reaching readings. 11. derrida, as is well known, seeks throughout his writings to deconstruct this traditional distinction which, from aristotle onwards, has been employed to reduce “animality” to a meaningless mechanical instinct in opposition to which the would-be autonomous human response can thence be constituted. 12. on the singularity of nietzsche’s “individual,” see werner hamacher, ‘“disgregation of the will’: nietzsche on the individual and individuality” in premises: essays on philosophy and literature from kant to celan (palo alto: stanford up, 1996). 13. in a related context, see andrzej warminski’s reading of the unsublatable excess of the always already (no) more “example of example” that disarticulates hegel’s reading of “sense-certainty” in “reading for example: ‘sense-certainty’ in hegel’s phenomenology of spirit” (diacritics 11:2 [summer, 1981]. 83-95). 81 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world 14. by contrast, vanessa lemm in nietzsche’s animal philosophy reads nietzsche’s ordinals as genetic, rather than grammatical. such a reading, however, necessitates the reduction of nietzsche’s notion of memory to that of human memory alone (and thus “inseparable” from the “transposition (übertragung) of an intuited metaphor into a word” [135, emphasis added]), and this despite the fact that, on the previous page, lemm cites nietzsche’s assertion that memory is “the quantity of all experiences of all organic life, alive, self-ordering, mutually forming each other, competing with each other, simplifying, condensing and transforming into many different unities. there must exist an inner process, which proceeds like the formation of concepts [begriffsbildung] out of many singular cases [einzelfällen]” (kritische studienausgabe 11:26, qtd. in lemm, 134). 15. see derrida’s limited inc. (evanston: northwestern up, 1988) for an extended treatment of what he terms the “quasi-concept” of iterability. 16. see nietzsche on memory, note 14, above. 17. it can be argued that verbal language also serves to distract from, or mask, kinesic and paralinguistic dissemination, and can do so only because it is considerably less efficient. emil menzel has shown, for example, that not only are chimpanzees “masters of gestural subtlety,” but also that the most dramatically humanoid of their gestures are made only “by the most infantile and inexperienced animals”—the use of which decreases as the young chimps gain experience, and thus subtlety (noske 148). this is not, however, to suggest that verbal distraction is a uniquely human trait. 18. at times, however, nietzsche suggests that anthropogenesis “takes place” only when man (who is not yet “man”) banishes “the most flagrant bellum omni contra omnes [war of each against all]” in order to live socially (tl, 81). in this, nietzsche in fact falls foul of the nature/culture dichotomy which his own text is in the process of rendering inoperative. as donna haraway acutely remarks, “[t]he naturalistic fallacy is the mirror-image misstep to transcendental humanism” (when species meet 79). 19. on this double sense of “outlaw,” see jacques derrida, la bête et le souverain (2008). 20. cf. franz kafka “in the penal colony” (1919) in the complete stories, ed. nahum n. glatzer, new york: schocken, 1995. 140-167. 82 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) 21. in fact, it is possible to read nietzsche’s entire essay as a revalued rewriting of this sentence from the encyclopedia of the philosophical sciences in outline and critical writings (qtd. in benjamin ‘what if the other were an animal?’ 67). 22. on nietzsche’s notion of “out-living,” see beyond good and evil, sections 210-212. 23. in addition to hamacher on outliving as “sur-vival,” see jacques derrida, “living on” in harold bloom et al. deconstruction and criticism (new york: continuum publishing, 1979. 75-176). 24. the emphasized of is here being made to do double (subjective and objective) genitive duty: the other of nonhuman be-ing as that which both “belongs” to a nonhuman animal (in relation to a human animal), and that which be-ing (whether nonhuman or human) always already (re)produces. 25. on this indissociably doubled abyss of language and body, see cary wolfe’s “flesh and finitude,” in which he considers “the fact that there are two kinds of finitude … [and that] the first type (physical vulnerability, embodiment, and eventually mortality) is paradoxically made unavailable—inappropriable—to us by the very thing that makes it available: … the finitude we experience in our subjection to a radically ahuman technicity or mechanicity of language” (27-8). works cited acampora, christa d. & ralph acampora, eds. a nietzschean bestiary: becoming animal beyond docile and brutal. lanham & new york: rowman & littlefield, 2004. agamben, giorgio. the coming community. trans. michael hardt. minneapolis & london: u minnesota p, 1993. ―――.the open: man and animal. trans. kevin attell. stanford: stanford up, 2004. benjamin, andrew. “what if the other were an animal? hegel on jews, animals and disease.” critical horizons: a journal of philosophy and social theory 8:1 (august 2007). 6177. 83 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world ―――. “particularity and exceptions: on jews and animals.” south atlantic quarterly 107:1 (winter 2008). 71-87. calarco, matthew. zoographies: the question of the animal from heidegger to derrida. new york: columbia up, 2008. deleuze, gilles & félix guattari. what is philosophy? trans. graham birchill & hugh tomlinson. london: verso, 1994. derrida, jacques. the animal that therefore i am. trans. david wills. new york: fordham up, 2008. ―――. la bête et le souverain, volume one (2001-2002). paris: galilée, 2008. ―――. the gift of death. trans. david wills. chicago & london: u chicago p, 1995. ―――.of spirit: heidegger and the question. trans. geoffrey bennington & rachel bowlby. chicago & london: u chicago p, 1989. ―――. specters of marx: the state of the debt, the work of mourning and the new international. trans. peggy kamuf. new york: routledge, 2006. ―――. “’this strange institution called literature.’ an interview with jacques derrida.” trans. geoffrey bennington & rachel bowlby. acts of literature. ed. derek attridge. new york & london: routledge, 1992. 33-75. hamacher, werner. “’disgregation of the will’: nietzsche on the individual and individuality” in premises: essays on philosophy and literature from kant to celan. trans. peter fenves. palo alto: stanford up, 1999. haraway, donna. when species meet. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2008. heidegger, martin. being and time. 1927. trans. john macquarrie & edward robinson. malden, ma & oxford: blackwell publishing, 1962. ―――. the fundamental concepts of metaphysics. trans. w. mcneil & n. walker. bloomington, in: indiana up, 1995. 84 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) ―――. die grundbegriffe der metaphysik: welt—endlichkeit—einsamkeit in gesamtausgabe, ln, bd. 29/30. frankfurt am main: vittorio klostermann, 1992. ―――. introduction to metaphysics. trans. gregory fried & richard polt. new haven & london: yale up, 2000. ―――. nietzsche, volumes one and two. trans. david farrell krell. new york: harpercollins, 1991. ―――. nietzsche, volumes three and four. trans. joan stambaugh, david farrell krell, & frank a. capuzzi. new york: harpercollins, 1991. ―――. “letter on humanism” in basic writings. 1978. ed. david farrell krell. rev. ed. london: routledge, 1993. 217-265. lemm, vanessa. nietzsche’s animal philosophy: culture, politics, and the animality of the human being. new york: fordham up, 2009. nancy, jean-luc. l’oubli de la philosophie. paris: galilée, 1986. nietzsche, friedrich. beyond good and evil in basic writings of nietzsche. trans. w. kaufmann. new york: the modern library, 2000. 179-435. ―――. the birth of tragedy in basic writings of nietzsche. trans. w. kaufmann. new york: the modern library, 2000. 1-144. ―――. “on truth and lies in a nonmoral sense.” philosophy and truth: selections from nietzsche’s notebooks of the early 1870’s. trans. & ed. daniel breazeale. new jersey: humanities press international inc., 1993. 79-97. ―――. “the philosopher: reflections on the struggle between art and knowledge.” philosophy and truth: selections from nietzsche’s notebooks of the early 1870’s. trans. & ed. daniel breazeale. new jersey: humanities press international inc., 1993. 3-58. noske, barbara. beyond boundaries: humans and animals. montreal: black rose books, 1997. 85 richard iveson – animals in looking-glass world wolfe, cary. “bring the noise: the parasite and the multiple genealogies of posthumanism.” intro. to michel serres the parasite. trans. lawrence r. schehr. minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2007. xi-xxviii. ―――. “flesh and finitude: thinking animals in (post)humanist philosophy.” substance 37:3, 2008. 8-36. guest, review of cooley uneven evolutions kristen guest review of: mackenzie cooley. the perfection of nature: animals, breeding, and race in the renaissance. chicago: university of chicago press, 2022. xvi + 353 pp., 30 halftones. $37.50 (pb), $112.50 (hb), $36.99 (pdf). kristen guest is professor of english at the university of northern british columbia, canada. email: kguest@unbc.ca book review mailto:kguest%40unbc.ca?subject= mackenzie cooley’s the perfection of nature offers an important contribution to our understanding of the ways philosophies of selective breeding emerged, converged, and changed over the course of the long sixteenth century. taking in the networks of empire that connected renaissance spain to both the courts of italy and the new world, this study explores the diverse ways in which people “lived in an animal world, and how their understanding of animals shaped their vision of human and nonhuman natural diversity” (227). in taking up this focus, cooley not only deepens our understanding of the diverse philosophies that informed breeding practice, but also highlights continuities with the present that take in, among other things, the idea of eugenics, a breeding philosophy “seized upon cyclically across the ages as a means of shaping the future to meet the interests of the present” (5). elucidating the complex forces that shaped breeding philosophy and practice in early modern spanish cultures of the old and new worlds, cooley thus prompts us to reflect on the ways our current understanding of breed and race as categories of identity sit within a long history of human attempts to shape the nonhuman world. knitting together this impressive, wide-ranging, and nuanced study is the core theme of razza—a concept of lineage that takes in heredity and environment as shaping influences. a complex and much-debated concept in medieval and early modern scholarship, razza links early notions of race and breed across human and nonhuman species. this conceptual fluidity allows cooley both to engage across subjectivities — from plant to animal to human life forms — and to demonstrate the very different ways in which principles of selective breeding were applied and understood in local contexts. razza is not merely an expression of the interrelationship of blood, kind, and conditions, then, but rather — as cooley makes clear — a category that complicates notions of a straightforward equivalence between race and breed. grounding these ideas related to categories of identity is cooley’s truly impressive trans-atlantic archival research. through meticulous close readings of rich, often unlikely written and visual sources cooley outlines the ways in which breed copyright © 2023 kristen guest this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 189–194. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13832 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13832 guest, review of cooley | 191 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) and breeding were deeply implicated in textual practices of writing, record-keeping, and branding that cumulatively consolidated the idea of razza “as a nameable, visible, and legible reality” (3). the perfection of nature is divided into four sections: “knowing and controlling animal generation”, “a divergence in breeding”, “a brave new natural world”, and “difference in european thought”. adopting what she characterizes as a “contrapuntal” method, cooley deliberately juxtaposes human and nonhuman animal or plant case studies that contrast european and new world contexts and perspectives. these case studies of selective breeding draw together a fascinating range of subjects: from the selective breeding of horses and dogs in the old and new worlds to the application of razza to the breeding of humans in renaissance court culture, the interconnection of livestock branding and human branding of slaves, the selective breeding of maize in mexico and categorization of camelids in peru. the two chapters in section one establish the conceptual foundation for what follows. chapter one explores the diverse range of belief systems that had already informed selective breeding by the sixteenth century. cooley employs a deliberately expansive view of both “breeders” and “philosophy” to take in the range of formal and informal practices and ideologies that shaped breeding practice. this approach allows her to position more widely known and circulated ideas about breeding alongside the more ephemeral, “artisanal”, approaches to breeding that were transmitted informally via localized knowledge networks. by tracing the history of ideas related to breeding, cooley complicates our understanding of the influence of galenian and geohumoral theories of generation focused, respectively, on a balance of humours within the body and the effect of climate/environment on the body in the early modern period — placing these alongside alternative approaches focusing on natural magic and animal imagination in renaissance breeding practice. the privileging of razza in the court cultures of spain and italy informed an interest in producing the most “noble” or “perfect” versions of animals through careful selection and control of the breeding environment. in turn, cooley tells us in the second chapter, humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 192 | guest, review of cooley breeding for discrete forms of razze generated anxieties about decline associated with the movement of animals away from their place of origin. thus the brand, a method for indicating quality associated with breeder identity, emerged as a way to address the problem of declining razze as animals circulated across europe and the new world. “through brands and the bureaucracy surrounding such marks”, cooley argues, breeders made “difference legible even as the effects of breeding alone waned generationally” (15). the expanded practice of branding evolved alongside other forms of textual record-keeping in european courts as noble families commissioned illustrated manuscript books of brands and catalogues of their prized animals. the quintessential modernity and impact of this shift is highlighted at the end of the chapter, which touches on the parallel practice of branding slaves in the new world. this extension of branding as a practice from animals to humans not only pinpoints a pivotal moment in the co-evolution of categories such as breed and race, but also offers insight into our current concept of commercial brand as a way of identifying recognizable, reproducible product. by historicizing branding as a way of indicating the origin and ownership of commodities, in effect, cooley opens a path for further examination of the way that breed informed the operations of economic modernity as a global force. the perfection of nature then turns to case studies about the practices of court breeding and differing views of hybridity. the chapters included in section two examine animal and human collections in the italian court of the gonzaga family. the gonzagas were renowned horse breeders who rose to a position of power in renaissance europe. alongside their equine breeding programs, however, their razze also included cats, dogs, and collections of human curiosities — such as dwarves — created by selective breeding. horses of the gonzaga razze were circulated as gifts to courts across europe, including the stables of charles v, but also (and more shockingly), were carefully crafted “human curiosities”. cooley unpacks one example involving a two-year-old girl bred from what isabella d’este described as “my race of little dwarves” (82). the exercise of power implicit in the case of this child extended upward, cooley suggests, guest, review of cooley | 193 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) since everyone in the court (including the duke) “would have their partners chosen for them with an eye to the resulting offspring” (86). this insight from the archives significantly complicates our understanding of the operations of power, for while practices of selective reproduction are exercised from above, the mutual implication of plant, animal, and human lifeforms in court culture draws attention to the ideological, immersive power of breeding to shape life that would be extended to the new world. cooley then looks at moteuczoma’s zoo and human menagerie, in doing so showing how superficial similarities belied deeper issues of cultural difference between european and mexican courts. moteuczoma’s exercise of royal power to shape nature coincided with the practice of european courts such as that of the gonzaga and was immediately recognizable to cortés. similarly, the metaphor of seeding was used to describe both european and nahuatl practices of selective breeding. following the murder of monteuczoma and the consolidation of spanish power, however, nahuatl metaphors were reworked within the changing power structure of colonization. to trace this shift, cooley draws on successive nahuatl/spanish dictionaries to map the ways spanish vocabulary and agricultural concepts reconceived of existing nahua notions of selective breeding. their shift to the alternative metaphor of grafting worked, cooley suggests, to supplant indigenous concepts of heritability with european agricultural traditions. in section three cooley turns from the shaping of nature to instances of hybridity in new world encounters. chapters five and six address the ways both the categorization of species and the unanticipated consequences of breeding between old and new world populations crystallized spanish anxieties related to blood and purity. chapter five focuses on the unintended outcome of merging two highly developed but different traditions of dog breeding following the conquest of mexico. unlike many forms of new and old world species, dogs interbred easily and reproduced quickly, transforming distinct domestic breeds from both sides into in a recognizably mestizo (mixed) dog that mirrored the parallel rise of a mestizo class of people. in chapter six, humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 194 | guest, review of cooley cooley examines how the spanish misrecognized peruvian camelids such as alpacas and llamas as “safe, christian sheep” rather than as camels associated with the-still troubling islamic / moorish “other” (17). such moments in this study alert readers to the ways spanish anxieties underpinned and informed how engagements with new world populations played out in broader contexts. the two chapters that comprise the final section of the book explore the ways that animals provided models for understanding issues related to heredity in human beings. here, cooley contrasts the scholarship of jesuit naturalist josé de acosta with italian giovanni battista della porta’s study of physiognomy. both scholars’ engagements with ideas about shaping animals raise questions that troubled core concerns of the spanish empire — acosta by relating questions about species to those about the religious conversion of new world peoples, and porta by suggesting that physiognomy not only explained patterns of behaviour in animals and humans but also raised questions about free will. these capstone chapters thus underline a theme that recurs throughout the book as a whole: that the idea of free will became increasingly difficult to navigate as new ideas emerged during the sixteenth century which extended breeding practices and theories across nonhuman and human species. taken together, cooley’s wide-ranging case studies offer a new and valuable demonstration of the ways that a desire to “improve” nature figured in belief systems and interspecies encounters over the long sixteenth century. her exploration of how specific instances of selective breeding were represented, thought, and practiced sheds light on the complex, uneven evolution of breed and race as categories of identity, and suggestively connects renaissance thought to concepts such as eugenics or branding that are typically associated with the post-enlightenment era. beyond its clear relevance for transatlantic scholarship on renaissance spain, then, this book will also be an invaluable resource for animal studies scholars interested in questions about the entangled histories of breed and race that we continue to grapple with today. bartram older humans and their dogs older humans and their dogs interspecies companionship and anticipating loss angela bartram university of derby humanimalia 14.2 (spring 2024) abstract: loneliness and a lack of socialization can have a deteriorating effect on life experience and health. unfortunately, loneliness is an experience often felt by older people, and interspecies companionship can provide valuable and daily interaction that is positive for well-being. in the place of another human, a dog may inhabit a role as a provider of emotional support. in judith butler’s sense of performative identity, there is a becoming of that which we do. using an approach of working with (rather than on) people, this informs sensitive and sympathetic methodologies for an analysis of the significance and benefit of interspecies companionship for older people in the initial stages of my artistic research project, dogs and the elderly. made with participants of the alzheimer’s society’s “memory cafés” in nottingham and lincolnshire (uk), the project demonstrates how interspecies companionship can be valuable for supporting the emotional health and well-being of older people. this illustrated photo and text article discusses how the project’s older humans and their dogs inhabit a togetherness within supportive interspecies relationships in various ways, and how this contributes to their lived experience. it explores the stories of a group of people, living with or supporting others with early-stage alzheimer’s, who speak to companionship with their dogs to articulate the significance of the relationship from their perspective. keywords: human; dog; companionship; interspecies; ageing; loneliness bio: angela bartram is an artist and artistic researcher working with thresholds of the human body, gallery or museum, definitions of the human and animal as companion species and strategies for documenting the ephemeral. bartram is professor of contemporary art and co-lead for the creative and cultural industries academic theme and research centre at the university of derby. amongst other board affiliations, she is vice president of the society for artistic research and trustee of the board of directors of the live art development agency. her phd in fine art is from middlesex university. email: a.bartram@derby.ac.uk orcid: 0000-0001-9001-4630 copyright © 2024 angela bartram this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 225–257. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.15998 mailto:a.bartram@derby.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9001-4630 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.15998 bartram , older humans and their dogs | 227 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) during the spring of 2014 i met oscar, a large black labrador. the meeting was arranged through the uk’s “borrow my doggy” scheme, an initiative that pairs up humans with other people’s dogs when they cannot permanently accommodate one of their own. my german shepherd dog, woofer, had recently died and i felt a sense of loss and emptiness where a canine friend should have been. oscar was the first dog i met on the scheme and, as we got on so well, he was also the last. he was gentle and likeable, displaying a kind and approachable manner, and we quickly established a friendship spanning nearly ten years. his amiable nature to all humans allowed our friendship to develop creatively into a research project involving older people. specifically, oscar became an invaluable collaborator in my artistic research project, dogs and the elderly. with the increased vulnerability that often accompanies advancing age, social isolation and loneliness can present a very real threat to health and longevity.1 loneliness, for anne forbes, “may be described as an unwelcome feeling of lack or loss of companionship.”2 kimberley smith regards it as “a phenomenon that has social roots, but a psychological presentation.”3 loneliness can come to represent the “psychological embodiment of social isolation”.4 cheryl a. krause-parello describes loneliness as a “painful and unpleasant 1 social isolation and loneliness are distinct but often linked experiences. one may be socially isolated, which possibly manifests as a feeling of alienation. this may lead to loneliness, a feeling which is more persistent. 2 forbes, “loneliness”, 352. 3 smith, “charting loneliness”, 38. 4 steptoe et al., “social isolation”, 5797. 228 | bartram , older humans and their dogs humanimalia 14.2 (2024) stressor”.5 older people, for a variety of reasons (including mobility, health, lack of family or close friends nearby, financial and other kinds of insecurity, and personal fears for safety) are “particularly susceptible to a blitz of relational losses”, putting them at increased risk of loneliness.6 contributing factors include “major life events and transitions, such as developing a health issue, retirement or bereavement”, which may increase the risk of experiencing loneliness.7 prevention can be found in positive social relationships as they are among “the most important things we need in life; they are crucial to our wellbeing and our physical and mental health.”8 but how do the people experiencing this actually feel, and can living with a dog help to ameliorate this condition? dogs and the elderly is an artistic research project that proposes to discover what the effects of living with a dog can be in this respect. through extending invitations to a small group of older humans, it aims to capture first-hand stories that speak to the personal and often complex feelings about individual lives lived with dogs. concerning the significance of interspecies interactions for an older person’s wellbeing, the project seeks to practically discover how life with a dog can give added value and purpose in life. the project offers an opportunity for its participants to speak and to have priority given to the sharing of their stories, through a methodological framework built on listening and inclusivity.9 in foregrounding personal attestations on individual reliance and need in this way, the project is itself significant. methodologically, dogs and the elderly engages artistic research, as an un-prescriptive, sensitive, and interpretative approach to knowledge production, which, i suggest, enables sensitive interactions and 5 krause-parello, “pet attachment”, 5. 6 krause-parello, “pet attachment”, 3. 7 smith, “charting loneliness”, 41. 8 smith, “charting loneliness”, 38. 9 the individuals involved were asked throughout if they were comfortable, with a reminder to only share what they wished. the situation for the sharing of stories was constructed to allow them to feel valued. this included strategies whereby they were allowed to talk freely, openly, and without restraint; attention was always on the person(s) and their dog, with listening being person-centred, active, present, and receptive. bartram , older humans and their dogs | 229 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) encounters.10 offering an opportunity for people to speak of their intimacies and connections with dogs through this method enables others to listen through creative translation. this situates the creative act as “a process of correspondence”.11 responding sympathetically to the person directly respects the individual and their right to contribute through responsive engagement.12 as an example, the project was named together with its volunteers from the alzheimer’s society’s memory cafés, based in nottinghamshire and lincolnshire.13 through this act of naming of the project it attempts, informally and with sensitivity, to explore the material and affective conditions that help an older person managing a degenerative cognitive disease engage in a binding and intimate relationship with a companion dog.14 contributions came from attendees of the memory cafés, including those who were experiencing the condition themselves, or were performing a caring role for a partner with early-stage alzheimer’s.15 as my research companion, oscar was active in the initial phases of the project, demonstrating the pleasure and positive effect of being in the company of a dog through direct engagement. his presence at the memory cafés gave a welcome experience of human-canine togetherness for those who wished to indulge in his company. harold herzog states there is evidence to show those who enjoy being 10 as the project uses artistic research to engage with others, it does not use the social science methods of interview analysis. rather, it allows the stories to evolve and exist through creative methodology and interpretation to keep the sentiment with the person and dog to which they speak. 11 ingold, making, 31. 12 the project is in receipt of the necessary ethical approvals. additionally, to ensure strict adherence to the organization’s ethical standards, checks with the leads of the alzheimer’s society’s memory cafés were made throughout. 13 the appropriateness of the term elderly was part of a discussion and agreement regarding the correct name of the project. this happened at the initiation of the project in collaboration with people engaged through the memory cafés in late 2017. the reference to the human in the project’s title was their suggestion, and we decided upon it together through exploring other options and connotations. 14 the research acknowledges that younger people can also experience alzheimer’s, but this research specifically is aimed at the older demographic. this is due to the additional complexities of social isolation that advancing age can bring. 15 after an initial call for participation via age uk, the east midlands alzheimer’s society made contact to ask that users of their memory cafés be involved. this resulted in the work being done with this organization. 230 | bartram , older humans and their dogs humanimalia 14.2 (2024) with nonhuman animals experience “more positive moods, more ambition, greater life satisfaction, and lower levels of loneliness.”16 oscar’s value was evident through the positive responses expressed towards him, demonstrating the mood enhancing effects of being with a dog. his difference and familiarity within the cafés suggest why this is possible — dogs provide interactions and companionship in ways that other humans cannot. through donna haraway, we understand companionship as the connection established between mutually reflexive co-living bodies.17 companionship is enabled through co-existence, and the practicalities and familiarities of daily interspecies living. it suggests an equitable relationship that transcends the binary of nonhuman animal pet and human owner.18 companionship, for haraway, is a form of becoming-with enabled through an intuitive acceptance, and responsiveness to the other. in the images interspersed throughout this essay, the words that appear as quotes act as a critical companion to the photographic images, as a representation of the shared lives of human and canine bodies charted across the project.19 the quotes, placed as images throughout the text, are taken directly from the individual storytelling encounters.20 they provide snippets of the dialogue given freely in the people’s homes with their dogs by their side. because of the types of stories gathered, and through the intimate nature of their details, the initial story’s themselves are where the project establishes the greatest personal connection and impact. the stories offer 16 herzog, “impact of pets”, 237. 17 see haraway, companion species manifesto. 18 henceforth, any reference to the term “pet” is as it occurs within citations and in response to literature. the mutuality implied within the term companionship is favoured for the research project. 19 all images by the author. 20 the stories inform a sound artwork and video that are shown as companions in gallery exhibitions. the video artwork features only written quotes from the stories, which are edited in sequence (video stills of the quotes are included in this text). the sound artwork includes short, unaltered, excerpts from the spoken recordings. on exhibition, there is a speaker per individual voice, and they are all placed close together as a group. the gallery, as a space that spotlights the artwork, is useful for dissemination. as this text relates to the stories gathered at the start of the process, however, where the unfolding is at its most heightened, there is no image of the sound artwork to offer. the project is still active as new practical components are in development at the time of writing. bartram , older humans and their dogs | 231 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) reflections on individual, but generally considered anticipations of loss, where all participants spoke of their fear of losing what they presumed would be their last dog. with the passing of time since the stories were shared a few years ago, this is a loss which has presumably now occurred. the benefits to live with a dog is to be open to the experience of another habitually and with regularity. for many, relationships with dogs are “a central element of human life.”21 primarily, this is due to their capacity to exist side-by-side with humans, which is possible because they “exhibit many of the same cognitive flexibilities and biases that characterize our own species.”22 a product of this cognitive similarity is their ability for synchronicity and emotional contagion that leads to acts of empathy and attachment with others. “emotional contagion, a basic building block of empathy, occurs when a subject shares the same affective state of another”, which is an outcome of 21 amiot, bastian, and martens “companion animals”, 552. 22 maclean and hare, “human bonding”, 281. oscar 232 | bartram , older humans and their dogs humanimalia 14.2 (2024) cohabitation.23 beyond acts of labour for humans, and as its oldest domesticated companion animal, dogs can become effective providers of support and associative reassurance. kendra coulter refers to such support and reassurance as “voluntary” work, suggesting that it concerns the provision of “joy, kindness, and comfort”.24 dogs’ capacity to provide companionship is of value to humans who, as inherently social beings, often seek comfort from others, and this is “especially important for seniors, vulnerable or marginalized people.”25 as part of a working scenario and companionable dynamic, dogs have historically proven to be good company for humans, which, for caroline knapp, “strike[s] deep chords in us […] bolstered by […] individual experiences.”26 margret grebowicz suggests that a “dog’s willingness to work is a product of [their] interaction with humans.”27 additionally, dogs have the capacity to respond to their human companion’s needs, and this serves as a reminder of how they “provide primary connections across animal and human worlds.”28 in the case of service dogs, a dog can “literally [be] experienced as an extension of the blind owner’s self, a complex and unique perception that also hinges on an understanding of shared human and canine identity.”29 these attachments allow dogs to adapt to the individual person with whom they live. the animal behaviourists charlotte duranton and florence gaunet also describe this adaptive capacity of dogs in relation to their “sensitivity to others’ behaviours and the ability to adjust their own behaviour accordingly.”30 dogs’ capacity for synchronicity enables their responsiveness towards others. through the synchronicity within companionship, they benefit humans by providing “life-sustaining emotional support and motivation”, that is life-affirming and 23 palagi, velia, and cordoni, “rapid mimicry”, 2. 24 coulter, “beyond human”, 204. 25 coulter, “beyond human”, 204. 26 knapp, pack of two, 25. 27 grebowicz, rescue me, 41. 28 mchugh, dog, 19. 29 mchugh, dog, 124. 30 duranton and gaunet, “canis sensitivus”, 514. bartram , older humans and their dogs | 233 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) transformative.31 health-based research by krause-parello suggests that “companion animals may have a significant effect on the reduction of loneliness and the promotion of health.”32 as the “attachment between humans and their pets, provide(s) a unique and accessible source of support”, this is a good outcome for the human.33 the domestic human-animal relationship, therefore, can positively impact mental health, as it supports the individual in deflecting any of the potentially negative and debilitating effects of loneliness. companion animals bring increased value not only for older people but also those living alone, experiencing homelessness, and those isolated from regular contact with others, as the relationship provides a sense of regularity, routine, and co-living. indeed, “most pet owners believe that their companion animals are good for them.”34 essentially, this is due to their providing and maintaining a supportive framework of contact that is beneficial. for the project’s demographic of older people with early-stage alzheimer’s and partners who care for those in this position, this contact can be particularly useful. in relation to the expansion of the application of corresponding care, such contact allows additional measures to be occupied by other species. the human–animal attachment becomes a supportive mechanism in this respect, that enables the human to live positively through the experience of being with their domestic companion. as noted above, a companion, for haraway, is an extension of the relationship between human and nonhuman animals, but one where equality is necessary — a situation where there have “to be at least two to make one.”35 the history of human and dog companionship speaks to the reflexivity of giving between the species and says as much about the needs of both within their relational duality. in return for companionship in a positive relationship, dogs receive benefits, such as protection, warmth, food, and shelter.36 a dog in this 31 coulter, “beyond human”, 204. 32 krause-parello, “pet attachment”, 1. 33 krause-parello, “pet attachment”, 3. 34 herzog, “the impact of pets”, 236. 35 haraway, companion species manifesto, 12. 36 not all domestic human and dog relationships are positive for each species, but for this 234 | bartram , older humans and their dogs humanimalia 14.2 (2024) context is more than merely a pet for older people who may rely on their daily canine interactions as life enhancing and fulfilling. companionship is more than a human–nonhuman animal relationship; more equal, and responsive to need and circumstance. this greater sense of equality is possible due to the levelling of hierarchies and positions within the binary of them and us, to forge a mutually beneficial relationship. at its most equal, this is structurally flexible and mutable in response to individual input and need. caring daily for another creature provides intellectual and cognitive stimulus through the provision of a sense of purpose and use. the care the human gives to their canine, such as feeding, exercising, and managing health issues, can make a difference in how useful the individual feels. feeling useful and of use to another can mean the difference between falling into declining health or not. the dogs and the elderly project acknowledges and asserts, in line with a suggestion by coulter, that embodied human–canine interactions facilitate reciprocal sympathetic care and care-giving. through this, coulter argues, we should, “recognize that the ‘social’ is multispecies”, and that dogs can care as much for humans as humans can for dogs.37 physically or psychologically, through a “being with” as companions, embodiment, as affirmation of the experience with the relationship, creates interspecies cooperation and care. using the right method in judith butler’s sense of performative identity, there is a becoming of that which we do.38 taking butler’s position as the affirmative article mutually productive relationships are the focus. 37 coulter, “beyond human”, 201. 38 see butler, bodies that matter. bartram , older humans and their dogs | 235 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) and positive, dogs and the elderly worked with, rather than on people and their dogs. knowledge is a practice that constitutes a learning through doing, and a thinking through process, and this research demonstrates how this operates in application.39 the notion of thinking through doing with others together is paramount. due to their receptiveness to humans and engaged levels of synchronicity to others, there is much to learn from dogs. thus, the methodology of the project looked to the dog’s capacity for responsiveness and synchronicity with others to establish sensitive interaction and to allow their immersion in the process. practically, this informs how the research enacts fair, respectful, and responsive attention to human accessibility to contribution. structurally, and in practice, the project was engaged most actively with this methodology at the time of its making through the story-gathering exercises. experiencing the early demands of alzheimer’s, or supporting a partner who is, can mean that the presence of a dog in the home becomes increasingly important. sympathetically and sensitively gathering stories from such a group requires an informal application of performativity, where the activity enables a feeling of relaxation and a sense of interactive and participatory ease. henk borgdorff states that artistic research concerns “performative [art] practices, in the sense that artworks and creative processes do something to us, set us in motion, alter our understanding and view of the world.”40 although not wholly relating to speech acts in j. l. austin’s sense, in this instance performativity relates to the multiplicities within the exchange and its method of artistic research. performitivity positions (canine) cause and (positive, companionable) effect in this context, and how it informs the sensitively constructed framework for gathering the stories first-hand. additionally, this approach relates to peggy phelan’s and judith butler’s use of performativity that extends to the and an other body engaged in repetition and ritual acts of embodiment. the bodies in this context are animal and dog, as that which is different, but companion to the human. additionally, the 39 see dewey, democracy and education. 40 borgdorff, “production of knowledge”, 50. 236 | bartram , older humans and their dogs humanimalia 14.2 (2024) performative structure includes the wilful construction of an environment to promote, and not restrain the sharing of stories. this is managed through careful attention to the space and pace, as well as the comfortable and sensitive manner of the exchange.41 opportunities for human–canine companionship become even more important when opportunities for socializing with humans become less frequent, which the story-sharing sessions explore and document. not only were the sessions centred around the individual bonded relationships of human and dog, but they also provided a situation for performative interaction whereby the human volunteer had priority in the engagement. the term “bonded” can be loaded within the context of interspecies companionship. the project acknowledges that any physical bonding device, such as the companion’s walking leash, connects, but with one in control and the other the controlled. the leash is also, however, a visualization of the invisible bond between human and canine in their mutual pursuit of an urban or rural walk, an act that seeks harmony through an equitable pursuit, even though it is usually set around an imbalanced dynamic.42 for one speaker in this project, the leash and the daily walk with their dog is a priority within their story, and it is therefore of note. 41 see austin, things with words; butler, bodies that matter; phelan, unmarked. the performative, for austin, relates to speech-acts and their truth value. butler argues that performativity enacts through a gendered and other body, through a constrained series of regularized and repetitive norms. phelan locates performativity with the political, gendered, and visual body. 42 the daily walk features largely in one of the stories, as it is a means to be outside of the home, and so has relevance. bartram , older humans and their dogs | 237 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) an invitation to share the relationship between oscar and me transcends traditional domestic cohabitation arrangements. this operates without the foundations and measures of who provides the other with what, in a practical caring and homely sense, and beyond the confines of fundamentally privileging domesticity. even in respect of the equality noted in haraway’s conception of companionship, there is often an imbalance in the domestic (however slight); the human, essentially and normally, tends to make the decisions about the daily routine. in my relationship with oscar, companionship seems truly possible because we do not cohabitate. our companionship simply does not operate within the same co-living structures that define interspecies domesticity. grebowicz states that “within life with dogs […] the distinction between self and world pretty much disappears”, and this is typical of the reciprocity in our friendship, which sees enjoyment in the experience of togetherness with mutual engagement and equal reward.43 the self, for grebowicz, relates to both the human and dog, each of us alike in this context, and this extends into our introduction to the meetings and the people in attendance. on attending the meetings of the alzheimer’s society’s memory cafés, oscar and i encountered a variety of people with different levels of concentration and interest as to why we were there. we went to three meetings a week in various suburban locations in nottingham, and one in an economically oppressed and rundown seaside town on the east coast of england called skegness. one meeting in nottingham had over fifty members present and appeared somewhat riotous and uncontrolled; another had eight people seeking entertainment and stimulation; the other slotted us into a packed schedule of quizzes about historic british transport vehicles and different types of world food to a membership of twenty. we met with fifteen people in skegness in the context of a discussion of the local seafront and promenade. the opportunities to meet new people presented exciting days out for oscar. he displayed the same familiar signs of eagerness and 43 grebowicz, rescue me, 35. 238 | bartram , older humans and their dogs humanimalia 14.2 (2024) happiness as when we would go on our regular woodland unleashed walks, but with increased alertness as he came to understand that we were going somewhere new in the car. not least the act of putting on his special and best collar signalled we were doing something different before we embarked on the journey. on arrival at the meetings oscar was, by agreement with all present, let off his lead to wander the room. indeed, many encouraged this before the question was asked. there was an active migration of attention to his presence upon his unleashing, due to the unfamiliarity of his species in these (human) meetings. interest grew in this unusual visitor once he could gently greet and meet the people at the cafés. he had his ears tickled, his belly rubbed, and his head massaged, in return. his positive reception demonstrates how important interspecies contact is to so many; this unusual interaction differentiates the café meetings from others. during his adventures and discovery of new people, i spoke to the groups to explain why we were there and what my request involved. some listened, some did not — some were more engaged with the friendly canine wandering amongst them than the human standing nearby. as oscar provided a different experience at the meetings, this is understandable. eyes looked down as hands gently caressed his head. he travelled from person to person. as individual café users fussed, scratched, and stroked oscar, a few initiated conversations with me. through this i responded to additional questions to explain why we were there and gently asked: do you have, or have had a dog you would like to talk about? would you like to share your story? during these encounters, many questions of oscar can be heard: “what a lovely dog, is he coming again?” “does he need a bowl of water? maggie, can you look after the dog please?” “does he like his tummy rubbed?” during each of the memory cafés and through these discussions people express that they want to talk and share their stories. as a result of bartram , older humans and their dogs | 239 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) our attendance, we meet jean, john and barbara, frank and laura, reg, and mandy*, who offer to share their stories.44 we set a date and we meet, often a month or more later, but this time in their home or a site of their choosing. the meeting place is highly significant, as the canine and human will be at their most relaxed within the familiarity of the home or preferred place. their domestic habitats specifically allow the humans to be at ease through the familiarity and normality it brings to the situation. a significant contact zone where their stories environmentally locate and flourish, it is important to hear their words within their homes wherever possible. as a shared space, the home is also an environment that facilitates the interspecies companionships on which they rely. specifically for the project, the familiarity of the habitat enhances the capacity for the sharing of stories and their ownership of the activity. enabling free and unhindered speech, the home environment allows the researcher to be less of an instigator and more of a witness. listening we schedule the dates to meet loosely over a changeable timetable. occasionally, we reschedule due to an unexpected hospital or doctor’s appointment, because the human or dog is not well, or there is a family issue. sometimes the volunteers are simply too tired or there is too much happening on that day. when we meet the discussions are informal and conversational allowing life stories and thoughts to emerge. beyond the general sense of concern and thinking for their current position and their dogs’ futures, there are other relevancies that become apparent. the storytellers speak to intricate and intimate elements of their own lives, framed around 44 mandy is a pseudonym. left to right: frank, laura, and lucy; jean and dandy; john, barbara, and max; reg and harvey 240 | bartram , older humans and their dogs humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the discussions of their dogs’ habits, welfare, and needs. increasingly, there is a shift from thoughts regarding companionship to the self and their experience of complexities within negotiations of the everyday. through the progressive ease in the unfolding of reflection and sentiment there is an awareness of the humans warming to the attention they are receiving from someone who is listening with intent and interest. visibly, and through knowledge, experience, and understanding, i see them become increasingly confident in their manners, gestures, and speech. initially conscious of the microphone placed nearby, the increasing ease eventually renders the apparatus inconspicuous. after a while they simply stop looking at it on the table in front of them. overall, there is a sense of them wanting to talk. the recorded stories offer varying insights into the lives of five human–canine households experiencing and navigating early-stage alzheimer’s. they speak of their dogs as integral to the family, and how they manage and behave together daily, demonstrating the ritual and performative within the home environment. jean is a helper in one of the memory cafés in nottingham, and lives alone with her three-legged poodle, dandy. with dandy sitting by her side on the sofa, and with her hand gently stroking the length of his back, jean talks of her emotional dependence on him for routine, purpose, contact, and comfort. she says that he senses her change in emotions and feelings and is there for her in an hour of need. there is physical dependency and attachment that often sees dandy come toward her to be close, so that she feels the calming weight and heat of his body against hers. when her husband died, dandy became her reason for living. she explains that “i felt alone, and needed something with me, and he was.” dandy became her something to rely on, and she holds him affectionately as she talks fondly of their relationship, saying with a smile that he is her abiding and “real comfort.” occasionally, jean looks into his eyes and he meets hers in return. whilst gesturally demonstrating their attachment as she administers gentle strokes to dandy, she discusses their bond which is, “very much about him and me.” krause-parello states, “as loneliness increased for the older woman, there was a significant increase in pet bartram , older humans and their dogs | 241 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) attachment”, which is evident in the situation of jean and dandy.45 for his part, dandy appears content and safe. in fact, so much so that he begins to fall asleep. although this relies on observational judgement, his manners and behaviour portray a relaxed attachment to jean. he feels safe to not be on guard and wary of danger in her company within their home. max, a small fluffy white dog, plays with a ball as barbara talks of how she feels safe to leave john, who has early-stage alzheimer’s, in the house alone if max is there. barbara states that her daily cleaning job provides her with respite from their home situation and full-time care for john. this would be impossible without max, as she would worry about what is happening whilst she is not at home. max, therefore, is an enabler of relief, for barbara, from the burden of caring for someone who is ill. he is a trusted chaperone and companion for john when she is absent, and he makes it possible for barbara to have other experiences beyond the demands of their domestic situation. occasionally, john gets up from the sofa and goes over to max to touch his head, as if checking in, before returning to his seat. he is ever watchful of max, and offers that “he is my reason for living and to keep going on happily.” in subtle contrast to john’s attentiveness to max, barbara predominantly meets my eyes as she talks. for her, the attachment differs from john’s as max provides a means for her to be beyond the house and away from the caring that she needs to administer. as her enabler, their bond is different, less attached, but nevertheless still as significant. without max, she acknowledges, her life, its structure, and possibilities would be different. 45 krause-parello, “pet attachment”, 10. jean and dandy 242 | bartram , older humans and their dogs humanimalia 14.2 (2024) similarly, lucy, a small white rescue dog from greece, is chaperone and companion to frank, enabling him to leave the house safely without his wife. frank can go to the shops alone if lucy is with him, and this provides a sense of daily normality. laura, frank’s wife, offers that she trusts lucy to bring frank home should he lose his way, saying, “she knows what to do.” she states this has happened on several occasions, but thankfully frank has learnt to ask lucy for assistance. he says, “sometimes i forget where i am, and i say, ‘lucy, take me home,’ and she does.” she responds by taking charge in leading them home and to the safety of their known environment. lucy provides frank and laura with a safety net: for frank, this means the freedom to leave the house unaccompanied by his wife and to experience a form of regularity and normality; laura finds assurance in the knowledge that lucy will return frank safely and she states this allows her to be at ease. lucy enables the independence of each. they sit with her between them on the sofa as they talk, stating that lucy adopted them, and they believe that “she needed them.” “she kept showing up at our holiday apartment,” john says, “so we decided to bring her home, and now we could not be without her. it has changed — we thought she needed us, and it turns out it is the other way around.” they clearly adore her, they say as much, but the affection they feel is also visible and palpable. they stroke her head affectionately and gently, and she looks at them adoringly before falling to sleep. in observing the contentment of the three companions in this situation, this looks to be a scene that is regular and usual. frank, laura, and lucy john, barbara, and max bartram , older humans and their dogs | 243 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) reg, an ex-military man in his eighties, talks of his life with dogs. he demonstrates pride in the telling of his story, which involves walking weekends away for him and his dog of the time. of his current dog, harvey, he says, “we couldn’t be without him.” reg has had many relationships with dogs, but the “love of his life”, he says, was ralphie, a jack russell terrier. trips with ralphie included long cross-country hikes, sharing sandwiches and biscuits, and sitting by the campfire together at the end of the day. reg asks if he can read a lament written for ralphie after his death. as he does this, harvey is by my feet playing with a toy; his wife stares out of the window seeking distraction from the increasingly emotional lament as it unfolds. reg reads of ralphie’s handsomeness, his gazes as if he were wishing to speak, how swimming was a favourite activity, and of their japes and laughter together. when he begins to speak of ralphie’s death towards the end, reg’s voice begins audibly to break, and the room becomes tense with the emotional longing and upset he is revisiting. writing about being with a companion animal has “the same psychological benefits [and effects] compared to thinking about one’s best friend, suggesting companion animals provide a direct source of social support.”46 the emotional reading of his own text shows how significant its writing was, and still is, for reg, in relation to the memory of their companionship. his devotion to ralphie is evident in text and speech; reg clearly still mourns his passing. all are silent as he concludes reading, not wanting to intrude into this moment of reflection and sadness. as i leave, reg thanks me for taking the time with them, and quietly hands me a paper copy of the lament. still bearing pencil notes of ralphie’s adoption written in his hand, this is a highly personal artefact. the fact that he gives it to me as a gift suggests reg has found our interaction to be positive, as i do not think he would offer the item if he had experienced it as negative, awkward, or uncomfortable. presumably, he wanted to make a gift of the poignant artefact within his story to a person who wanted to listen. 46 amiot, bastian, and martens, “companion animals”, 555. 244 | bartram , older humans and their dogs humanimalia 14.2 (2024) in skegness i meet mandy, who asks to speak with a request that her recently diagnosed husband not be present. her husband is a local councillor, and his condition is not common knowledge. she states that she really wants the project to include her story, to share with others what is happening to her, but her husband cannot be involved. mandy is struggling with the emotional, practical, and social demands of serving as his primary carer. she is the only person who does not want to have her photograph taken, stating a fear of others knowing of her husband’s illness and the change it has brought to their lives. to further retain privacy, she requests that we meet at the skegness memory café centre. because of these factors, and as she wants the focus to be on her story alone, her dog is also not present. as the project gives ownership to its storytellers, mandy sets the conditions she needs to feel secure, safe, and at ease. these are accommodated responsively and completely. the break in daily “ralphie’s lament”, written by reg in 2012 reg and harvey bartram , older humans and their dogs | 245 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) regularity, she explains, would raise her husband’s suspicions if she were to leave the house with the dog at the time when she would normally go shopping for food. regularity and routine for her is binding and performative within the home and the structural day-to-day. privacy in this matter is vital for mandy as she is acutely conscious of how her social life will change once others become aware of her husband’s illness. she aims to keep this a secret for as long as possible, saying, “i do not want people to know.”47 when we talk, i ask her if she is comfortable and sure about taking part; she affirms that she wants to speak, and that she needs to “talk to someone outside of skegness.” women, particularly, can develop “a dependence on attachment support (with their pet) when stressed”, which is relevant to her act of sharing.48 mandy’s story demonstrates how interspecies attachment can provide support. she states at the outset that in taking her dog for walks, she has a reason to leave the house unaccompanied. here, she finds respite in the organized solitude with her walking companion, finding the space to recharge, refresh, and gather herself before returning home. providing refuge from her reality at home, she states that her dog is a means to escape a situation with which she is struggling to cope. this includes the social context, as she explains that she can interact freely and with normality with those she meets when walking her dog without fear of the exposure of her husband’s illness and their domestic reality. even though they walk together as a pair, it is difficult to determine how connected they are in the pursuit. mandy talks of being within herself during the walks although she is conscious of being in the company of her dog. alone in her thoughts, but not alone on the walk. she feels and wants her dog’s bodily presence, which she is aware of as he walks leashed beside her. mandy acknowledges the alignment of the rhythm of their bodies, stating that she senses how they fall into the same gait as they travel paths and canal sidings. 47 additionally, her name is changed within the project to further protect her position (this was not at her request but felt necessary for the research). 48 krause-parello, “pet attachment”, 11. 246 | bartram , older humans and their dogs humanimalia 14.2 (2024) however, the physical togetherness within the daily act appears somewhat emotionally fractured, as the dog is primarily her vehicle for escape. despite her acknowledgement of his presence, she is semi-absent and disconnected, which hinders their relationship’s companionable fulfilment. the daily walking, she concludes, is necessary as a support through the increasingly demanding management and care of her husband’s diagnosis. in this way, her dog provides her with a service of rescue; he provides a means to an end, and a “reason to go out”. as she leaves, i watch her straighten her back as if to steel herself for the return to her normality. her story is, perhaps, the most complex of them all. the connection in its many forms, contact with a companion animal is valuable to human wellbeing, as the above stories show.49 the interspecies 49 to the dogs too, but as this is not articulated or explained through the mechanisms of an animal behavioural study, it is not measurable beyond gesture and observation within this research. bartram , older humans and their dogs | 247 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) companions in the project enact togethering through daily contact and the sharing of pursuits, which enhances wellbeing and a feeling of effective domestic support. there is a need for contact with the other in various ways within the experience of domestic socialization. this locates with a need to “be” with another, however slight and in whatever construct is necessary. catherine amiot, brock bastian, and pim martens write that “research has demonstrated that relationships with animals are good for human health, because they can reduce stress and medical complaints while also increasing self-confidence.”50 additionally, companion animals “play a soothing and calming role in the wellbeing of those who suffer from dementia and the families who care for them”, as is evident in this research.51 mandy, barbara, and laura all recognize the care and respite opportunities their dogs provide, and reg and jean acknowledge the value in their dogs’ emotional and physical support and companionship. within the stories this companionship is attentive, relational, and varied, and impacts significantly on the positive human experience. coulter suggests this impact is possible because “companion animals continuously assess the people with whom they live, physically and emotionally, and […] provide care of various kinds, especially emotional support, through their presence, behaviours, interactions, and touch.”52 in this way, they become regular enablers of their human’s improved wellbeing in whatever way seems necessary.53 although the individual stories are their own, they feel representative of many. a dog can facilitate escapism, be a companion, provide purpose, and create safety, amongst other things, as spoken to within these exchanges. the stories represent, to draw on haraway’s work, how “making kin” becomes possible.54 the companionable nuances within speak to a variety of physical, emotional, and psychological human-canine interactions, entanglements, and 50 amiot, bastian, and martens, “companion animals,” 552. 51 amiot, bastian, and martens, “companion animals,” 555. 52 coulter, “beyond human”, 204. 53 of course, not all touch brings pleasure and comfort, particularly if delivered with malice or aggression, and irrespective of being verbal, psychological, or physical. however, for this text the focus is on positive and productive touch between species and bodies. 54 see haraway, staying with the trouble. 248 | bartram , older humans and their dogs humanimalia 14.2 (2024) dependencies. contact, as relational and interconnected in this context, sees “kinning” made demonstrably visible and understandable during the enactment of storytelling, but also through the details shared. the rhizomatic potentials disallow binaries and refute their conditions, encouraging multiplicities and mutualities through affectionate portrayals of kinship. in our discussions, the storytellers frame their dogs, to quote grebowicz, as “both agents and subjects of rescue.”55 all animals (including humans) need touch for affirmation of the self, as an individual and within groups. interspecies companions communicate through multi-sensorial acts of touching, which is essential to level unstable hierarchies and create mutual acts of relational comfort and balance. jacques derrida suggests that “without touch animals would be unable to exist.”56 walter benjamin suggests the physical gap between individuals closes, even if only for a moment, through acts of positive touch, and this allows emotional and psychological connections to build.57 the chemical calming effects of touching a dog informs how the relationship develops towards relational and mutual acts of embodiment. studies show that human-animal contact produces oxytocin in both species, a chemical that cognitively informs positive social bonding. connectivity develops as people “with high oxytocin levels and lower cortisol [stress hormone] when interacting with their dogs tended to have closer bonds” with them.58 the relationship, in effect, feels good, and therefore investment is given to its development and maintenance. “tactile interaction [specifically] between humans and dogs increases peripheral oxytocin concentrations in both”, which further explains mutually beneficial interspecies attachment formation.59 positive chemical reactions influence how interspecies bonding is producible through various methods of contact, 55 grebowicz, rescue me, 17. 56 derrida, on touching, 47. 57 benjamin, one-way street, 50–51. 58 yuhas, “pets”, 31. 59 nagasawa et al, “oxytocin”, 334. bartram , older humans and their dogs | 249 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) which is relevant to the relationships and stories within this project. stroking a dog is an example of a tactile interaction, which is a binding and familiar act of positive intention and connectivity; another is the verbal and spoken, where informality creates an openness and engagement within the parameter of shared communication; it can be as simple as looking into each other’s eyes, as an act that “not only facilitates the understanding of another’s intentions but also the establishment of affiliative relationships with others.”60 reciprocally, the dogs in the stories receive much in return, which creates harmony and mutuality within the domestic environment. indeed, “the action of stroking an animal has been found to reduce the animal’s heart rate”, and the calm manner displayed by the dogs seems to confirm this.61 as the stories describe, they forge relationships around the need and wants of each other, to be mutually life affirming and co-supportive in their management and construction of productive togetherness. contact is therefore significant within the context of interspecies companionship, as it enables and supports its structure to develop to mutual benefit. contact creates connection, which helps forge companionship that is not only physical, but also emotional and intellectual, and relates to methods of stimulation and connection with another. 60 nagasawa et al, “oxytocin-gaze positive loop”, 334. 61 amiot, bastian, and martens, “companion animals”, 556. 250 | bartram , older humans and their dogs humanimalia 14.2 (2024) on being with and without there are moments where details within the stories of jean, john and barbara, frank and laura, reg, and mandy, particularly prick at sentiment regarding their interspecies futures. this concerns, for a variety of considerations, how they may come to be without the companionship of a dog. within the stories they refer with fondness to dogs loved and lived with in the past, their joys and sadness at their passing, the “what will happen ifs” and the “what has already happened”. experiences of there-ness and the not there-ness are spoken, together with the lessening presences and increasing absences they imagine they will experience as their dogs die. they talk of the impending void of suddenly not being with their companion, should quality of life decline to the extent that they move to the care sector, a place that cannot accommodate their dog, or if their companion dies before them. there are “repercussions of ignoring the voices of […] marginalized humans”, as marti kheel states, and this is pertinent with respect to the personal hopes and needs of reg, barbara, john, mandy, jean, laura, and frank.62 each of them refers to the “burden” associated with being forced to leave their dog to a different fate, to a life in shelter or with different people who might not care for his or her welfare and happiness to their standards and to the canine’s usual experience. the thought evokes their contemplative sadness. that they all talk about a burden — for the dog primarily, but also their families and shelters — draws attention to potential deficits in the uk care sector (or its general representation, at least). there seems to be a common belief held by the individuals in the group that the system as its stands lacks the support for interspecies companions to remain together. it is little wonder, then, that they are concerned. the hope that their dog will precede them in death, universally and individually portrayed within this group, is the optimum outcome. even though this may bring sadness, grief, and loneliness, leaving a dog behind is not a preferable option. as reg said of harvey, he and his wife would “hate to think we would die and leave him to fend for 62 kheel, “communicating care”, 45. bartram , older humans and their dogs | 251 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) himself.” all the individuals within the project say they would rather accept being alone once their current canine companion has passed than it be the reverse. this represents an understandable concern, as most people would not want to leave their canine companion to an unknown fate.63 altruistically, and with great consideration reg, barbara, john, mandy, jean, laura, and frank recognize their dogs’ demise before their own as the best outcome — for the dog at least. they think against their own needs, hoping to provide their canine “kin”, in haraway’s sense of the term, a life safe and fully within their domesticity. put simply, they do not want their dog to experience the absence, displacement, and grief of losing their companion. kheel suggests that “care underscores the role of empathy”, which is significant to consider in this respect.64 yet, at the time of writing, in the uk there is an unfortunate lack of attention to the extended needs of older people staying with their dogs. 65 of the 11,300 care homes listed in the uk in 2016, 7,700 are advertised as being “pet friendly”.66 however, the level of friendliness, and what this means, in practice, is misleading. a professed “friendliness” to pets (or companions) does not necessarily mean that a person’s dog or cat can become their co-resident within a care home.67 unfortunately, little has changed since the market report by laingbuisson, a business intelligence provider, which produced these findings. blue cross, a uk-based charity providing affordable veterinary care and advocat for animal welfare, see this as such an issue that they are constantly pressuring regulatory organizations for all care homes to have a clear companion animal policy.68 they criticize current legislation and 63 within the parametres of this study it is impossible to say if this would be the same for dogs. due to the nature of dogs’ capacity for synchronicity, companionship, and attachment, however, one may presume sentiment to be the same. 64 kheel, “communicating care”, 45. 65 a simple solution, could, perhaps, see existing interspecies companions remain together within residential facilities, but there is much to consider to make this achievable. 66 laingbuisson, “care of older people: uk market report” 2016. 67 it is acknowledged some do allow this, but at extra and often unaffordable cost to most. 68 “all care homes should have a pet policy says blue cross”, blue cross 23 april 2021, https:// www.bluecross.org.uk/news/all-care-homes-should-have-a-pet-policy-says-blue-cross. this research-informed directive is ongoing and regularly updated with most recent details and developments on the website. https://www.bluecross.org.uk/news/all-care-homes-should-have-a-pet-policy-says-blue-cross https://www.bluecross.org.uk/news/all-care-homes-should-have-a-pet-policy-says-blue-cross 252 | bartram , older humans and their dogs humanimalia 14.2 (2024) advertising as confusing and misleading, and are pursuing ways to work with organizations to ensure this becomes simpler to understand. the ongoing research of blue cross in this area notes that forty percent of care homes claim to be “pet friendly”, and that two thirds of older people surveyed said they would be “devastated” if they were separated from their companion animal as a condition of entering residential care. the burden that the storytellers spoke of correlates with this expression of devastation, as one connects to, and informs the other. the research by blue cross explains that “pet friendly” can mean anything from the occasional visit by nonhuman animals, care staff bringing their own companion animals into the home, or the presence of a fish tank in a communal area, such as the television room. considering these findings, it is little surprise that the people from the memory cafés feel anxious about their interspecies futures. additionally, it is understandable that the burden they discuss relates to the fate of the animal themselves. realistically, they would enter a residential facility and, if an agreeable alternative is not available, their dog would enter an animal rescue. this is a terrifying predicament for some, and one that would presumably create anxiety and grief, not only because of the separation, but because of the unknown fate of their companion. however, for many reasons and influential factors this is currently not a priority. the day-to-day within care homes is under significant pressure, which leaves little scope for proactivity. understandably, the pressure is located around stress areas such as finance, and time and human and physical resource restraints, which influence and inform what is achievable and how. there are also recognisable practical difficulties to consider, like who will care for the animal if their person cannot, how many can live together, and are there allergies within the home. unfortunately, yet understandably, the combination of these complex issues is not seeing a solution for change become a priority for implementation. bartram , older humans and their dogs | 253 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) in summary the stories recounted above demonstrate how the “human-dog relationship is exceptional.”69 they speak to how the dog becomes their human’s companion of choice and significance. this concerns how the interspecies pairings negotiate and engage in synchrony in the everyday to forge a togetherness that is mutually beneficial. similarly, in pack of two: the intricate bond between people and dogs, caroline knapp describes how a dog can become a force for life via the multiplicities present within the relationship. knapp tells the story of a woman who suddenly found herself living alone after experiencing domestic cruelty: miranda’s abusive partner leaves her, and knapp describes how she “felt utterly alone walking into [the now] empty apartment, and she realized at that moment that in fact she wasn’t. she held the dog, and she felt, perhaps for the first time in her life, that she was truly needed, truly responsible for another being, truly in a relationship with another.”70 there are echoes in miranda’s story of all the stories recounted above, but perhaps especially of jean’s, who describes dandy as providing comfort, purpose, and affirmation through her attendance to his daily routine and needs. in return she is in receipt of his reciprocity of care. grebowicz notes that “we go on about unconditional love and losing our best friend, but maybe the reason that these tropes fail to describe the experience, that language itself fails and lands us in platitudes, has to do with how profoundly alive dogs are in life.”71 this explains an aspect of why the dogs in the stories have such a great impact on their human companions. an enactment through 69 nagasawa et al, “oxytocin-gaze positive loop”, 334. 70 knapp, pack of two, 203. 71 grebowicz, rescue me, 34. 254 | bartram , older humans and their dogs humanimalia 14.2 (2024) closeness, proximity, and contact; an attachment that is supportive and purposeful; a representation of looking at the other with the intent to see. much like in knapp’s account, through their routine and familiar acts of becoming-with and becoming-kin, dog and human come to rely on each other. this presents a particular “becoming” — a becoming-together — which is significant and present. for rosie mcgoldrick, following rosalind krauss’s idea of expansion in the posthuman, this more-than-human approach to understanding “permits and develops” our social and responsive engagement with another species.72 connectedness is key, and openness to sensing and experiencing connections across species sees relationships develop productively for both. looking back and revisiting the archive of the stories several years later, the provocations and narratives of concern for their dogs and their own lives still resonate. the stories act as an anchor to their happening, and the encounter with these people and their dogs who were so open, attentive, and involved. time has passed and inevitably the relationships have changed, through loss or displacement into care. a sad but inevitable end. a positive future would ideally explore and create possible solutions to entering residential care with one’s companion animal with relative ease. if the system could learn to accommodate existing human–nonhuman-animal companions, in whatever way, this could make the transition less stressful. an aspiration, where the difficulties of accommodating both the practicalities of the organization and the needs of the individual are overcome. this is not a proposal, as there is absolute acknowledgement of the many complexities and considerations in influence, but rather a desire and optimism for the future. it hopes to make the situation better — but it will take time and resources.73 the dogs and the elderly project serves as a reminder of how important it is to hear and give time to the experiences of others. the 72 mcgoldrick, “artist ethics”, 3. 73 organizational and sector difficulties are acknowledged, and this is in no way meant to apportion blame. bartram , older humans and their dogs | 255 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) many facets of this project draw me back continually, as if captive in a loop of experience of listening and hearing, to the stories and their subjects. the project’s formative storytelling sessions are the most significant aspect, as it is here that the experiences and legacies of each interspecies bond are at their most heightened in representation. the beginning of the research, where the telling of the stories took place, is still the most poignant and significant. the stories leave a residual question as to why it is so difficult for these people to share their experiences and feelings in day-to-day life. as a society, are we deaf to the experiences of others, and specifically older people, and those with complex illness? it can be extremely beneficial to listen, so it is useful to find ways like this project to make that happen. the focus on engaged listening is why this project is so important and necessary. these interspecies relationships are the story, they are the research. several years on from our time meeting people for the project, my research companion, oscar, reached the end of his life. when i began writing this article, i was conscious that his time would soon end, and i felt the same impending sense of loss as those who shared their stories. oscar died aged just over fourteen years on 20 december 2023. in a text indebted to looking back at significant encounters and considering the alive-ness of dogs, of meetings and connected exchanges, i end with fond memories and thoughts of him. a somewhat poignant opportunity to look back on our time of knowing each other, in our relationship and for this project, that heralds the end of our friendship. another anticipated loss of interspecies togetherness which, sadly, has now become an actuality. 256 | bartram , older humans and their dogs humanimalia 14.2 (2024) works cited amiot, catherine, brock bastian, and pim martens. “people and companion animals: it takes two to tango.” bioscience 66, no. 7 (2016): 552–60. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biw051. austin, j. l. how to do things with words: the william james lectures delivered at harvard university in 1955. oxford: clarendon press, 2011. benjamin, walter. one-way street and other writings. translated by edmund jephcott and kingsley shorter. london: verso, 1997. borgdorff, henk. “the production of knowledge in artistic research.” in the routledge companion to research in the arts, edited by michael biggs and henrik karlsson, 44–63. london: routledge, 2011. butler, judith. bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex. new york: routledge, 1993. coulter, kendra. “beyond human to humane: a multispecies analysis of care work, its repression, and its potential.” studies in social justice, 10, no. 2, (2016): 199–219. https://doi. org/10.26522/ssj.v10i2.1350. deleuze, gilles. difference and repetition. translated by paul patton. london: bloomsbury, 1994. deleuze, gilles and félix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. translated by brian massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1987. derrida, jacques. “the animal that therefore i am (more to follow).” translated by david wills. critical inquiry 28, no. 2 (2002): 369–418. https://doi. org/10.1086/449046. derrida, jacques. on touching — jean-luc nancy. translated by christine irizarry. stanford: stanford university press, 2005. dewey, john. democracy and education: an introduction to the philosophy of education. new york: macmillan, 1916. duranton, charlotte and florence gaunet. “canis sensitivus: affiliation and dogs’ sensitivity to others’ behavior as the basis for synchronization with humans?” journal of veterinary behavior 10, no. 6 (2015): 513–24. https:// doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2015.08.008. forbes, anne. “caring for older people: loneliness,” bmj: british medical journal 313, no. 7053, (1996): 352–54. https://doi.org/10.1136/ bmj.313.7053.352. grebowicz, margret. rescue me: on dogs and their humans. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2021. haraway, donna j. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. haraway, donna. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham, nc: duke university press, 2016. herzog, harold. “the impact of pets on human health and psychological wellbeing: fact, fiction, or hypothesis?” current directions in psychological science 20, no. 4 (2011): 236–39. https:// doi.org/10.1177/0963721411415220 ingold, tim. making: anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture. london: routledge, 2013. kheel, marti. “communicating care: an ecofeminist perspective.” media development (2009): 45–50. https:// waccglobal.org/communicating-carean-ecofeminist-perspective/. knapp, caroline. pack of two: the intricate bond between people and dogs. new york: random house, 1998. krause-parello, cheryl a. “the mediating effect of pet attachment support between loneliness and https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biw051 https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v10i2.1350 https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v10i2.1350 https://doi.org/10.1086/449046 https://doi.org/10.1086/449046 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2015.08.008 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jveb.2015.08.008 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.313.7053.352 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.313.7053.352 https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721411415220 https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721411415220 https://waccglobal.org/communicating-care-an-ecofeminist-perspective/ https://waccglobal.org/communicating-care-an-ecofeminist-perspective/ https://waccglobal.org/communicating-care-an-ecofeminist-perspective/ bartram , older humans and their dogs | 257 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) general health in older females living in the community.” journal of community health nursing, 25, no. 1 (2008): 1–14. https://doi. org/10.1080/07370010701836286. mchugh, susan. dog, london: reaktion books, 2004. mcgoldrick, rosemarie. “artist ethics and art’s audience: mus musculus and a dryroasted peanut.” arts 12, no. 4 (2023): 174 https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12040174 maclean, evan l. and brian hare. “dogs hijack the human bonding pathway: oxytocin facilitates social connections between humans and dogs.” science 348, no. 6232 (2015): 280–81. https://doi. org/10.1126/science.aab1200. nagasawa, miho, shouhei mitsui, shiori en, nobuyo ohtani, mitsuaki ohta, yasuo sakuma, tatsushi onaka, kazutaka mogi, and tkefumi kikusui. ”oxytocingaze positive loop and the coevolution of human–dog bonds.” science 348, no. 6232 (2015): 333–36. https://doi. org/10.1126/science.1261022. palagi, elisabetta, velia nicotra, and giada cordoni. “rapid mimicry and emotional contagion in domestic dogs.” royal society open science, 2 (2015): 2150505. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150505. phelan, peggy. unmarked: the politics of performance. london: routledge, 1993. smith, kimberley. “charting loneliness,” rsa journal 165, no. 1 (5577) (2019): 38–41. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/26798454. steptoe, andrew, aparna shankar, panayotes demakakos, and jane wardle. “social isolation, loneliness, and all-cause mortality in older men and women.” pnas 110, no. 15 (2013): 5797–801. https://www.pnas.org/doi/ full/10.1073/pnas.1219686110. yuhas, daisy. “pets: why do we have them?” scientific american mind, 26, no. 3 (2015): 28–33. https://doi.org/10.1038/ scientificamericanmind0515-28. https://doi.org/10.1080/07370010701836286 https://doi.org/10.1080/07370010701836286 https://doi.org/10.3390/arts12040174 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aab1200 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aab1200 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1261022 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1261022 https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150505 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26798454 https://www.jstor.org/stable/26798454 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1219686110 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1219686110 https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamericanmind0515-28 https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamericanmind0515-28 ronnes+reddick dutch cat history untamed nature a sociocultural history of the modern dutch cat hanneke ronnes university of amsterdam, netherlands harry reddick reinwardt academy, amsterdam, the netherlands humanimalia 14.1 (fall 2023) abstract: the cat is now one of the most popular pets in the netherlands, but it was once much maligned. the development of the european cat as a pet in general followed a trajectory from outcast with wealthy ladies as its sole ally, via idiosyncratic nobles and romantics, to the beloved and subversive muse of artists and creatives. the history of the french, english, and american cats has received attention in the past, but that of the dutch cat has not. this latter history took a somewhat different turn, as is shown in this article. in the netherlands the cat was adopted in the last quarter of the nineteenth century by the bourgeois and urban elite as well as by socialists, feminists, and avantgarde artists. the class-adjacent cultural tug of war that ensued about the cat was eventually won by the latter groups. these counter-cultural movements saw the cat as emblematic of their cultural position as creatives and people at the edge of society, linking the recalcitrant and enigmatic character of cats to their own idiosyncrasies. this association was to persist in the netherlands and is mirrored today in the mainly left-wing political orientation of the dutch cat-owner. keywords: cats; human–animal relations; the netherlands; avant garde artists; class relations; pet-keeping bio: hanneke ronnes studied history, anthropology, and archaeology in amsterdam and dublin. she now works as an associate professor at the cultural studies department of the university of amsterdam and is also an endowed professor lecturing at groningen university on art history and landscape history. her research has included the political and cultural history of the country house, the present-day demolition of historical architecture, and the history of cats. accordingly, she owns two veteran cats, who prefer being fed to hearing about their feline ancestry. email: h.ronnes@uva.nl bio: harry reddick is a researcher based between the university of amsterdam, where he earned a master’s degree in heritage and memory studies, and the amsterdam university of the arts. he is currently researching the heritage of industrial spaces as part of the horizon-funded centrinno project. he also produces sound art as part of radio-archivist/abstract storytelling duo self and other on nts radio, and works as a programmer for echobox radio in amsterdam. he has a cute cat named fiona. email: harry.reddick@ahk.nl copyright © 2023 hanneke ronnes and harry reddick this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 315–346. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13534 mailto:h.ronnes@uva.nl mailto:harry.reddick@ahk.nl http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13534 ronnes and reddick, untamed nature | 317 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) while the cultural status of cats has been on the up and up for the past century and a half, their ecological reputation has recently taken a hit.1 despite their overwhelming popularity as media icons, cats have not — in stark contrast to almost every other living animal — benefited from the growing public interest in nature and nature conservation. indeed, the opposite is true: this recent upsurge in (media) attention for ecology and sustainability has been quite detrimental to the domestic cat’s reputation, as evidenced by the ongoing debate on the harm caused by domestic cats to nature and biodiversity. both academic scholarship and bestselling books, such as cat wars: the devastating consequences of a cuddly killer and the lion in the living room: how house cats tamed us and took over the world (both published in 2016), not to mention the media, have recently begun to frame the domestic cat as a threat to wildlife.2 in the netherlands, this discussion is fuelled by the “huiskat thuiskat” [house cat, indoor cat] foundation, which, backed by various members of the dutch scientific community, seeks jurisdiction that will prohibit cats from roaming freely outdoors. these accusations against cats are not new: the main reason for the cats’ late adoption as pets in the late nineteenth century, was their penchant for killing birds. despite this bad press, legislation protecting cats from abuse or murder was introduced in most western european countries, including the netherlands, in the second half of the nineteenth century. this was an important milestone in the cat’s long and winding journey from maligned scapegoat to beloved companion animal. the history of this journey — and of the shifting human–animal relationship it signifies — has been explored in various western contexts, but so far there has been little sustained investigation into the history of the dutch cat. this is surprising given the socio-political context of 1 the arguments in this article are based on research previously undertaken by one of the authors and published in dutch: ronnes and van de ven, “van dakaas tot schootpoes”; ronnes, “de subversieve huiskat”; and ronnes “de anti-hond”. 2 see e.g. loss et al., “free-ranging domestic cats”; loss et al., “review and synthesis”; trouwborst and somsen, “domestic cats”; marra and santella, cat wars; tucker, lion in the living room. 318 | ronnes and reddick, untamed nature humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the netherlands, through which an idiosyncratic type of cat began to emerge. its changing position in nineteenth-century society is to an extent congruent with that of french, british, and american cats, as discussed by kathleen kete, harriet ritvo, and katherine grier, in that it is intertwined with issues of class and cultural production.3 however, the agents of change in the netherlands — artists, both traditional and avantgarde, members of the elite, and prominent socialists and feminists — gave rise to a qualitatively different and peculiarly dutch idea of the cat, which has proven to be exceptionally robust and enduring. this cultural construction notwithstanding, however, there are also aspects of cats’ behaviour which, as we will show, would allow them to be characterized as agents of change in their own right. after all, cats are endowed with a certain autonomy that makes them unpredictable and perhaps less subject to the whims of the systems organizing human social and cultural life than, for example, the dog (the cat’s principal rival for human affection), might be. thus, it would be a mistake to understand the question of agency in the human–animal relations presented hereafter as a one-way street: it is precisely the specific behavioural character of cats that underpins their adoption by the avantgarde and socialist pillar of dutch society. based on big data analyses of historical newspapers and the study of contemporary literature and art, this article analyses human–feline relationships and traces the birth of a quintessentially dutch cat some 150 years ago. the next section will start with a history of the cat in the pre-nineteenth-century dutch republic. pawing the line: early-modern dutch cats several behavioural and affective qualities of cats as a species have ensured that there has always been a small but dedicated core of followers in the low countries.4 their glossy fur drew admiring looks; their ears and big eyes were considered charming. especially the fact that they were useful in the household and in the barn as hunters 3 see kete, the beast in the boudoir, 115, 123–24, 131–33; ritvo, the animal estate; grier, pets in america, 167–68. 4 ronnes, “de subversieve huiskat”. ronnes and reddick, untamed nature | 319 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) of mice and rats was appreciated. supporters further maintained that cats have a social (if enigmatic) side. they love being petted by people, which they show by pressing up against passers-by. given the cat’s reputation for cleanliness, this may be a temptation for the passer-by, but one which does carry the potential risk of transferred zoonotic disease. others simply felt that the cat was as close as one could get to a lion or a tiger without leaving dutch shores: a cuter, miniature version of such exotic foreign fauna. but these positive evaluations should be regarded as exceptions to the rule that cats faced fierce opposition. their already vulnerable position was made even more precarious in the late twelfth century, when the church turned its back on cats, stigmatising them as a symbol of evil.5 this led to a centuries-long cultural association of the cat with the diabolical, carnal, and feminine. erik aerts, author of two recent studies on the history of the dutch cat, argues that cats’ reputation did begin to change somewhat in the seventeenth century. while the uneasy connotations of the cat with devilry and witchcraft — with the latter also being understood as a byword for a pernicious sexuality and promiscuity — persisted well into the nineteenth century, this did not prevent burghers in the dutch republic, who had just gained their independence from spain and great wealth through trade and colonialism, from welcoming cats into their lavish townhouses. this is evident from paintings of children playing with cats alongside domestic scenes with a cat by the fireplace. it is quite possible that, within the many prosperous towns of the dutch republic, the tentative rise in the cats’ status within the household context indeed started somewhat earlier than elsewhere.6 apart from this early form of domesticity evident in the genre paintings, the relative religious freedom and the radical enlightenment generally associated with the dutch republic — though historians have begun to nuance this image7 — may also have contributed to a somewhat more cat-friendly climate.8 free 5 aerts, “felix als huisdier of ondier?”, 491–92, 6 molle, “inleiding”, 469; prak, dutch republic, 250–61. 7 see for instance jacob, “walking the terrain of history”. 8 see israel, the dutch republic, 1019–66. 320 | ronnes and reddick, untamed nature humanimalia 14.1 (2023) thinkers such as constantijn huygens and balthasar bekker fiercely criticized superstition in their works and both referred to cat fables when doing so.9 the advance of the cat as a pet nevertheless took an erratic course, one tied into societal processes of change — and who was afforded the agency to effect it — within dutch history. cat-haters remained in the majority in the low countries, with their vitriol not only directed at their feline foes, but at their owners — people who, in the eyes of their critics, were excessively and obsessively attached to their cats. these perceptions persisted into the eighteenth century. in literature, gysbert tysens’ publication of the popular poem “op de dood van een poesje” [“on the death of a pussycat”] — a rhythmic and witty piece in which a woman’s love for a cat is ridiculed at length — is fairly typical.10 betje wolff and aagje deken’s 1787 epistolary novel letters from abraham blankaart provides another example of a cat — a pussycat walking on mama’s piano — being outcast with wealthy ladies as their sole ally. incidentally, and indicative of the way in which cat maltreatment was still downplayed, in the novel the drowning of a cat is dismissed as unimportant.11 in the encyclopaedias of the time, entries relating to cats are rife with anthropomorphic references to their many negative qualities, which are typically coded as feminine: falseness and disloyalty are mentioned remarkably often. johannes le francq van berkhey begins the entry on the cat in his natural history for children (1781) as follows: “the cat is a very treacherous, unfaithful and thieving animal, which cannot be tamed sufficiently, either by caresses or treats, nor by beatings or locking up, that she will leave off scratching and stealing.”12 van berkhey followed the example of georges-louis leclerc de buffon in france, who in his famous histoire naturelle (1749– 1782) was similarly scathing when it came to cats.13 however, buffon’s 9 see huygens, trijntje cornelis, act 3, scene 1; bekker, de betoverde weereld; ronnes and van de ven, “van dakhaas tot schootpoes”, 121. 10 tysens, apollo’s marsdrager, 3:135. 11 wolff and deken, abraham blankaart, 10, 198. 12 francq van berkhey, natuurlyke historie, 3:80. 13 buffon, histoire naturelle, 6:3–55. ronnes and reddick, untamed nature | 321 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) and van berkhey’s by-then somewhat old-fashioned, clichéd representations of the cat as devilish and licentious, evoked a counter-reaction. especially purebred cats were increasingly defended and adopted by the (intellectual) elite and nobility. françois-rené chateaubriand, horace walpole, and jean-jacques rousseau, for instance, were all famous cat-lovers.14 as was isabelle de charrière (aka “belle van zuylen”), the eighteenth-century dutch (and later swissbased) author, known for her novels and letters which cast a critical eye on contemporary society, including pre-revolution france. charrière might have been influenced by rousseau in her love of cats. (indeed, her entire oeuvre of novels, plays, and letters may arguably be read as an ambiguous response to rousseau, whose confessions she helped publish.) charrière’s love for dogs is well known, as shown in a recent publication,15 but in her letters she also regularly mentions the presence of a cat in her house.16 this partiality on the part of nobles such as charrière went further than a typical “aristocratic affectation”.17 cats appealed to noble outsiders because they were aloof and elegant misfits just like them. for de charrière, the cat was also a symbol with which she rebelled against the nobility as a social group and the class restrictions that mainly affected women. this is apparent, for example, from her novel lettres de mistriss henley, whose eponymous protagonist, feeling trapped in her husband’s ancestral country house, takes in a cat. while she removes the portraits of her husband’s family, the cat scratches the furniture. for the human protagonist, fleeing is impossible, but the cat, unrestricted by human obligations of marriage and class, seizes the first opportunity to run away and leave the suffocating place, never to return.18 compared to dogs, cats were much more rarely portrayed in the eighteenth century, whereby william hogarth’s the graham children serves as a relatively famous european exception. katherine rogers 14 simpson, book of the cat, 3, 12–13; freund and yonan, “cats”. 15 see trompert-van bavel, belle van zuylen en haar honden. 16 see, for instance, isabelle de charrière, letter to her brother ditie van tuyll, 7 dec. 1769, correspondence, https://charriere.huygens.knaw.nl/edition/entry/2070. 17 rogers, the cat and the human imagination, 86–88. 18 charrière, lettres de mistriss henley, 13–16. https://charriere.huygens.knaw.nl/edition/entry/2070 322 | ronnes and reddick, untamed nature humanimalia 14.1 (2023) believes that this is because a cat could not contribute to the status of the owner, again placing the idea of cats and their ownership into a tangled perception of class dynamics. the cat, she writes, “was neither an expensive, highly bred animal, nor one that could plausibly be shown gazing adoringly up at its human patron.”19 various dutch artists produced further exceptions, e.g. the early dutch cat portrait “two children with a cat” (1630) by judith leyster (fig. 1); karel du jardin’s etching “sleeping dog and cat" (1652–59) (fig. 2); or aert schouman’s portrait of maria catharina van der burch and hendrik baron van slingelandt’s cat who lived at their zuydwind estate south of the hague. the latter portrait indicates the slow rise of a less discursive love for cats on account of the dutch elite. the watercolour portrait shows an apparently very ordinary cat sporting a pink bow. the affectionate caption reads: “our cat, born at zuydwind anno 1744, died 1761”.20 although, as we have seen, there is plenty of evidence that in the eighteenth century it was still predominantly “outsiders”, including women and certain members of the noble elite, who are associated with cats, this portrait hints at a broader, familial adoption of cats by people of means or education. a self-portrait of the engraver and painter hendrik spilman with his wife sanneke van bommel, their two children and a cat (fig. 3), similarly speaks of this broader appreciation of cats. cat welfare: rules and rights the integration of cats into families in the upper echelons of society continued into the nineteenth century. in b. a. alewijn’s 1837 poem “de roode kat van den heer abbing vertelt haar wedervaren aan eenige andere katten” [mr abbing’s ginger cat recounts her adventures to some other cats] the protagonist, a cat named rozette, tells her cat friends of the love she received having been accepted into the abbing family after running away from her previous master, whose cheeses in the attic she had defended from mice.21 rozette tells her 19 rogers, the cat and the human imagination, 33. 20 see carolien naaktgeboren-bos, “aert schouman”, guusje & gio (blog) 2 august 2017, https://caroliennaaktgeborenbos.nl/?p=1582. 21 alewijn, “de roode kat van den heer abbing vertelt haar wedervaren aan eenige andere katten”, amsterdam city archives, crommelin family archives, inv. no. 489. https://caroliennaaktgeborenbos.nl/?p=1582 figure 1: judith leyster, two children with a cat, ca. 1630. oil on canvas, 61 × 52 cm. private collection. wikimedia commons. figure 2: karel du jardin, sleeping dog and cat, 1652–1659. etching, 300 × 311 mm. rijksmuseum, amsterdam. object no. rp-p-h-s-49. public domain. figure 3: hendrik spilman, self-portrait with his wife sanneke van bommel, their two children [and a cat], 1761–1784. oil on canvas, 37 × 30 cm. rijksmuseum, amsterdam.object no. sk-a-1583. public domain. 326 | ronnes and reddick, untamed nature humanimalia 14.1 (2023) story on the bleachfield, where she and her audience are safe from the maids and the neighbour, whose dislike makes it clear that, rozette’s recent positive experiences notwithstanding, cats were certainly still not to everyone’s liking. nevertheless, cats were now often framed as a victim rather than as an aggressor, which led to greater enfranchisement. the legal emancipation of cats through animal rights legislation — which proved important for the gradual improvement in the position of the cat — was much slower in the netherlands and more ponderous than in france and the uk. in order to avoid being perceived by its european neighbours as a barbaric, “uncivilised society”, the dutch state eventually bowed to public pressure.22 this pressure predominantly came from those who cared most about the overall push towards the education and refinement of dutch society: the elite. from the eighteenth-century eccentric noble’s flirt, to a more bourgeois, familial patronage in the early nineteenth century, the engagement of the social elite with cats in the latter half of the nineteenth century was fuelled by a “civilizing offensive”. ambitions regarding animal welfare and a civilizing of the people dovetailed in efforts to abolish popular games such as “katknuppelen” (“clubbing cats”), which consisted of a cat having to get escape from a barrel which was being smashed by boys with clubs. animal welfare was initially instigated by private initiatives (as was the case in the uk and france) such as the ’s-gravenhaagsche vereeniging tot bescherming van dieren [the hague association for the protection of animals], founded in 1864, with king willem iii as one of its patrons. the king was also entreated to help establish the sophia society (named after queen sophia), which pursued similar animal protectionist goals. the first animal shelter or toevluchtsoord voor noodlijdende dieren [refuge for distressed animals] was established in 1878 by six wealthy ladies from the hague, having again taken their cue from a similar british organization. initially catering only to stray dogs, cats became part of the organization’s remit in 1893. annual figures from 1893–94 indicate that care of cats was not the primary task of the shelter. rather, quite the opposite appeared 22 davids, “aristocraten en juristen”, 193–94; kluveld, reis door de hel, 41. ronnes and reddick, untamed nature | 327 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) to be the case. of the 117 animals brought in by the police and private individuals, 114 were euthanized. this was done by means of gas: infinitely more humane, it was said, than drowning in a well, which was common.23 in 1896, a “painless suffocation room” was opened in haarlem for stray and sick animals, a service that was free for the poor, while the well-to-do were asked to pay a small fee.24 intertwined with the shift in the relationship with animals such as cats, then, was the public response to the problem of strays and the nuisance they caused, regarded at the time as a serious matter of public health. as early as 1885, an amsterdam resident was concerned about the large number of dead stray animals in the capital and wrote to the newspaper to ask whether this should not be a matter for the government, especially with a view to the deterioration of the water quality in the canals. the start-up subsidy provided by municipalities for dealing with the problem seems to suggest it was indeed considered a governmental concern, in keeping with the ongoing civilization agenda pushed by the elite.25 apart from a preoccupation with animal maltreatment by the lower classes, a significant part of the discussion on animal welfare at the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century focused on animal testing. cats were still commonly used in the laboratory for excruciating tests involving the administration of arsenic, cocaine or “a few drops of sulphur sodium solution”. in neighbouring countries, the legitimacy of animal testing had been a matter of public dispute from as early as the eighteenth century.26 dutch support for foreign critics such as jeremy bentham and arthur schopenhauer came from the anarchist philosopher felix orrt.27 orrt’s philosophy fit within a broader movement of socially-engaged protestant 23 “het haagsche hondenen katten-asyl”, nieuwe tilburgsche courant, 27 october 1895. http://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010154860:mpeg21:a0005. 24 “verstikking van dieren”, algemeen handelsblad, 10 april 1896. https://resolver.kb.nl/ resolve?urn=ddd:010126527:mpeg21:p004. 25 ronnes and van de ven, “van dakhaas tot schootpoes”, 126; “wenken en vragen”, algemeen handelsblad 4 sept. 1885, https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010143464: mpeg21:p002. 26 hillenius, “mens, dier en ethiek”, 133–34; everse, “het dier als proefdier”, 91–92. 27 cliteur, darwin, dier en recht, 40–46, 60–72; verdonk, het dierloze gerecht, 68–77. http://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010154860:mpeg21:a0005 https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010126527:mpeg21:p004 https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010126527:mpeg21:p004 https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010143464:mpeg21:p002 https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010143464:mpeg21:p002 328 | ronnes and reddick, untamed nature humanimalia 14.1 (2023) thought, principal proponents of which included the highly influential protestant theologian and prime minister abraham kuyper, as well as one of the best known dutch socialists, ferdinand domela nieuwenhuis. kuyper’s impact on dutch society cannot be overstated. singlehandedly responsible for the main schism within the dutch protestant church, the founder of the vrije universiteit amsterdam, the newspaper de standaard, and the anti-revolutionaire partij, the first political party in the netherlands, kuyper is regarded as the prime mover in the “pillarization” [verzuiling] of dutch society.28 he was also a member of the society for the protection of animals (dierenbescherming) and openly opposed vivisection. nieuwenhuis, who represented the opposing, socialist “pillar” of dutch society, was also active in the animal welfare movement. his perspective that animals could be worthwhile subjects of solidarity (extending his politics beyond just human concerns) was influenced further by the particular love he had for his own cats. in a letter to his daughter johanna written in 1895 he voiced his belief that cats’ solidarity with each other was an example for humanity.29 his electorate, however, did not always share his opinion on this point. the improvement of the situation of the dutch cat met with protest from people — not seldom socialists — who feared that more money would be spent on the welfare of animals than of humans. with some regularity indignation was expressed in the media at what seemed like excessive care for animals at a time when many poor still lived in appalling conditions and worked longer hours than the pampered animals.30 when the first dutch animal shelter opened, the algemeen handelsblad noted that while public opinion had shifted noticeably in favour of animal welfare, it was still not uncommon to encounter incredulity and indignation at the fact that dogs and cats now had their own refuge in the hague while “many a member of that much higher species, man, suffer misery and deprivation.”31 proponents of 28 koch, abraham kuyper; wintle, economic and social history, 312–23. 29 domela nieuwenhuis, familicorrespondentie, 439–40. 30 “dierenbescherming en menschenmishandeling,” recht voor allen, 26 april 1884, https:// resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=mmiisg05:000089917:mpeg21:p006. 31 “een toevluchtsoord voor onbeheerde dieren,” algemeen handelsblad, 23 may 1878, https://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/view?coll=ddd&identifier=ddd:010102443:mpeg21:p005. https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=mmiisg05:000089917:mpeg21:p006 https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=mmiisg05:000089917:mpeg21:p006 https://www.delpher.nl/nl/kranten/view?coll=ddd&identifier=ddd:010102443:mpeg21:p005 ronnes and reddick, untamed nature | 329 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) animal testing saw the anti-vivisection movement as decadent and accused its members of making a mockery of the scientific process. they portrayed the activists as weak and effeminate, as soft-hearted housewives with overfed, indolent, and overindulged “favourite kitties”.32 the activists they had in mind were not the ones engaged in parliamentary debates, but formed part of two groups at the edges of society that became involved in the anti-vivisection movement: feminists and members of the so-called petites religions.33 with the progressive secularization of society there was room for the rise of these “small religions” (vegetarianism, esoterism, etc.), whose members interpreted evil differently than most of the dominant christian doctrines, and thus had a different agenda — including the fight against animal abuse. feminists, seeing a link between their own liberation and that of animals, were also actively involved in the anti-vivisection movement. they raised their voice in public lectures and through fiction. marie daal (a pseudonym for caroline van der hucht-kerkhoven) introduced female heroines into her anti-vivisection novels who are confronted with the reality of vivisection and the abuse of cats, and, as a result, take up a more active social role in trying to prevent this maltreatment than was common for women at the time.34 this indicates again the subtle influence cats had upon sociocultural power relations, rather than simply being the beneficiary of charitable human actors. the combination of animal welfare institutions and philosophical objections to testing culminated in demands for tougher legislative precautions to the issue of animal protection. such legislation duly — if gradually — surfaced against this backdrop. the amendment for the “provision against rabies” was an important first step. passed in 1875, the amendment determined that the chaining up of cats was antithetical to their nature (although this did not put a complete stop to the widespread practice). the “laws of nature” thereby demanded 32 kluveld, reis door de hel, 29. 33 romein, op het breukvlak van twee eeuwen; kluveld, reis door de hel, 17; de rooy, “een hevig gewarrel”; koolmees, “het doden van dieren in nederland”; huisman and te velde. “op zoek naar nieuwe vormen”. 34 kluveld, reis door de hel, 44–45, 48–49. 330 | ronnes and reddick, untamed nature humanimalia 14.1 (2023) a law of society that guaranteed that cats could roam around freely. the same year saw the first “animals act” criminalizing the deliberate maltreatment of cats, which resulted in numerous fines reportedly being given to less “civilized” members of society who were guilty of killing or abusing cats. in march, de tijd reported that a man and a boy had been sentenced to a month and two weeks in prison, respectively, for stealing two cats.35 four years later, in july 1879, the same newspaper printed a letter from a reader in amsterdam complaining about poor adherence to the terms of the act, suggesting that animal protection was not yet a high priority. according to the author, even city officials and police officers were guilty of mistreating cats.36 a solution was drawn up in order to further encourage compliance with the new laws. local animal protection departments negotiated a bonus scheme for its staff, who would receive a cash bonus for every report that led to a conviction. concurrently, unofficial state constables were appointed to monitor compliance with the law, while financial incentives for police officers proved effective.37 artists’ cats artistic manifestations of cat-orientated sentiment also provide a barometer of the changing opinions of cats towards the end of the nineteenth century. one of the most notable depicters of cats, who not only cherished but also painted them incessantly was the amsterdam-based painter henriëtte ronner-knip (see fig. 4). amid the trend of organizing cat shows from around 1890 (following the example, again, of the english, and the likes of the crystal palace shows), her romantic paintings focused on the purebred cats of her wealthy patrons — siamese and long-haired cats such as angoras and persians — in a bourgeois salon (sometimes accompanied by their bourgeois mistresses).38 ronner’s work was popular all over europe, but especially among the british nobility and wealthy merchants. she 35 “binnenland”, de tijd, 4 march 1875. https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010263904: mpeg21:p002. 36 “honden en politie”, de tijd, 4 july 1879, https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010265356: mpeg21:p003. 37 davids, dieren en nederlanders, 139. 38 kraaij, henriette ronner-knip, 84. https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010263904:mpeg21:p002 https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010263904:mpeg21:p002 https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010265356:mpeg21:p003 https://resolver.kb.nl/resolve?urn=ddd:010265356:mpeg21:p003 figure 4: henriëtte ronner, cat with kittens, 1844. oil on panel, 52.5 × 39 cm. rijksmuseum, amsterdam. object no. sk-c-163. public domain. 332 | ronnes and reddick, untamed nature humanimalia 14.1 (2023) was said to compete only with the greatest painter of the nineteenth century, rosa bonheur, who, like ronner, devoted herself to animal portraits.39 she demonstrated a canny entrepreneurial instinct by orientating her genre painting towards the changing art market, as wealthy buyers (who apparently wanted their own luxurious lives reflected back at them) commissioned and paid for many cat paintings. ronner’s cats and their stately salons thus became cemented as the interior par excellence of a social group who now enthusiastically embraced the cat as pet.40 compared to current house cats, ronner’s specimens look a lot more dignified. a then-new category of “lost and found” newspapers advertisements gives the impression that the missing cats of members of society rich enough to pay for such an advertisement were all decked out with bells and bows.41 to further gloss over their rougher sides, these cats were kept indoors as much as possible and spent part of the day and night in a basket. street cats on the other hand were much scruffier than twenty-first-century cats: they were likely to be malnourished, thin, less vibrant in terms of colour and markings, often disabled, with open wounds or infested with fleas, and socially cautious or lacking in agency. it is said that ronner once placed an advertisement for new models, but that when she was offered “normal” cats, she firmly declined the offer.42 clearly, ronner felt her large audience of amsterdam notables would have turned down the cats of the streets and back-alleys of the dutch capital.43 in declining, ronner fits uneasily among the bracket of artists working in cat-focused or at least cat-featuring paintings, who considered other cats — and specifically not the purebreds — as suitable for representation. the street cat was the mascot for avantgarde artists, the painters and writers of the day, coalescing most strongly from the 1880s onwards. a straight line can be drawn from the eccentric eighteenth-century misfit noblemen to the avant-garde painters and 39 greer, obstacle race, 86. 40 kraaij, henriette ronner-knip, 106–26. 41 ronnes and van de ven, “van dakhaas tot schootpoes”, 127. 42 horst, spinnende poezen, 10. 43 kraaij, henriette ronner-knip, 78–84, 106–126. ronnes and reddick, untamed nature | 333 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) writers who were active a century later. the fact that ronner, as well as her clientele, and the upper echelons of society were active in promoting animal welfare also had its roots in the eighteenth century, though these belonged to a completely different lineage of cat-lovers than the avantgarde artists, namely the (noble) elite with an interest in cats. this highlights the double identity of the modern(ist) cat: on the one hand wild, misunderstood, and ostracized, on the other domestic, aestheticized, and hygienic. this is reflected in the specific type of cats — scruffy street cats versus pampered purebreds — adopted by the two groups. dutch avantgarde artists looked towards france for inspiration for cat-art, where modernist painters such as monet, renoir, gauguin, and toulouse-lautrec all painted cats in significant roles, either as protagonists or at least as sidekicks.44 although initially shocking and much parodied, especially manet’s once-controversial olympia, a parody of titian’s venus of urbino, had a profound effect, and the black cat depicted in the painting became a beloved model, embodying a threefold sexual meaning: through the cat’s proximity to the naked courtesan, as a visual pun (a literal pussy in the boudoir); and through its erect tail. it wasn’t only french painting that dutch avantgarde artists drew inspiration from; they also turned to literary cats. following from ludwig tieck’s 1779 adaptation of puss in boots, numerous romantics across the literary world had followed in his footsteps: wordsworth, pushkin, chekhov, and poe are some of the giants of nineteenth-century world literature who gave the cat a place in their oeuvre. champfleury’s les chats not only discussed the sexual connotation of the cat, but also proclaimed that it is mainly women, poets, and artists — in other words: sensitive people — who understand cats. that manet’s black cat became a mascot of the parisian bohemian, however, had as much to do with the rodolphe salis’s illustrious theatre café and cabaret in montmartre, le chat noir. the famous poster by theophile steinlen, in which the haughty and independent cat was prominent, established an even stronger association between cats and 44 morris, cats in art, 81–102; rubin, impressionist cats and dogs. 334 | ronnes and reddick, untamed nature humanimalia 14.1 (2023) art within the broader french social context.45 meanwhile, charles baudelaire, another prominent cat-loving poet, cultivated maladjustment and impassive and elegant dandyism, which suited the autonomous and aesthetic feline perfectly.46 in the netherlands, in part through the influence of these european artists and writers, the association between avantgarde artists and cats was similarly pronounced, but it grew to take on a distinct character. the influential group of avant-garde literati, poets, and artists who comprised the counter-cultural scene of late-1880s amsterdam, known collectively as the “tachtigers” (the “eightiers” or the “movement of eighty”), also adopted the cat as their figure, albeit without the strong sexual connotation of the cat in contemporary french art. for the tachtigers, the cat served mainly as a de facto animal representative, with its idiosyncratic nature seemingly the perfect embodiment of their own isolated, misunderstood genius. cats at the vanguard the tachtigers’ love of cats is documented from their earliest gatherings. the minutes of the first editorial board meeting of de nieuwe gids [the new guide], the journal founded by the collective to parody the established literary journal de gids, which had refused to publish their work, mention the presence of a cat. the entire editorial board — with one possible exception — owned or co-habited with a cat. others associated with the movement, such as the well-known members jac van looy (1855–1930), lucie broedelet (1875–1969), willem witsen (1860–1923), and more besides, made references to cats in letters, stories, diary fragments or featured them in their paintings or photos. witsen, for example, kept a cat in london in the 1890s.47 and in 1903 witsen writes to his son pam thanking him for a “beautiful little story” about a cat.48 45 fields, le chat noir, 6–37; rubin, 13–22. 46 black, “baudelaire as dandy”, 190. 47 tholen, letter to witsen, 24 june 1890, volledige briefwisseling, https://www.dbnl.org/ tekst/wits009brie01_01//wits009brie01_01_0304.php. 48 witsen, letter to willem “pam” witsen jr., 10 february 1903, volledige briefwisseling, https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/wits009brie01_01/wits009brie01_01_1184.php. https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/wits009brie01_01//wits009brie01_01_0304.php https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/wits009brie01_01//wits009brie01_01_0304.php https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/wits009brie01_01/wits009brie01_01_1184.php ronnes and reddick, untamed nature | 335 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) witsen’s love for cats would spill over into etchings and drawings (see fig. 5), and he also photographed the poet lucie broedelet with a cat. tholen’s 1889 painting slachthuis [slaughterhouse] featured a curious cat stepping beyond the threshold of the titular scene. george hendrik breitner’s lady with a cat (1883) is probably the best-known cat work amongst the tachtigers’ output, but it is certainly not the only one in his oeuvre (see fig. 6). he produced countless photographs and drawings of cats. as a kind of signature, a drawing of a cat is prominently displayed in the background of breitner’s self-portrait. breitner may also have taken the first dutch post-mortem photo of a cat.49 attitudes towards cats had now shifted significantly, and this is evident in the story “the death of my cat” by jac van looy, published in de nieuwe gids. although the title is almost identical to the aforementioned poem written a century earlier by tysens ridiculing a feminine (or effeminate) love of cats, van looy’s autobiographical piece demonstrates a completely different attitude towards the cat. his story describes a personal and tender relationship with a beloved pet, whose death has left the writer bereft. the fact that the cat murderer was a young, brash and insensitive lower-class boy adds further complexities of class positioning to both the tale and cat historiography.50 cats began to appear in other tachtigers’ literary works too. frederik van eeden’s now-canonical “little johannes” featured a house cat simon deeply admired by eponymous protagonist.51 this was not the last of van eeden’s dalliances with cats: his amsterdam diaries are filled with “fat cats”; cats joined a family outing on the banham country estate; a waitress at a café-restaurant is accosted by playful cats; his children find a litter of kittens in frankfurt.52 on a further occasion, cats even penetrate his subconscious: in his private “dream book” he describes an erotic dream in which a man’s 49 dekker, katten, 11–14. 50 looy, “de dood van mijn poes.” 51 eeden, dagboek, 3. 52 eeden, dagboek, 104, 225, 1186, 1329. figure 5: willem witsen, poes lola [lola the cat] ca. 1887–88. etching, 249 × 179 mm. rijksmuseum, amsterdam. object no. rp-p-1941-269. public domain. figure 6: george hendrik breitner, marie jordan breitner with a cat in her lap, c. 1885–c. 1905. gelatin silver print, 300 × 311 mm. rijksmuseum, amsterdam. object no. rp-f-00-588. public domain. 338 | ronnes and reddick, untamed nature humanimalia 14.1 (2023) genitals take on the form of a cat that scratches and bites him. such sexual symbolism is reminiscent of the french cat, but, importantly, it does not feature in his published works.53 perhaps most notably, the tachtigers’ cat-obsession becomes clear in the malleability of language itself when put to the services of feline metaphors, in which the tachtigers were adept.54 in addition to well-known cat-related idioms such as “de kat uit de boom kijken” (lit., “to stare the cat out of the tree”, equivalent to the english “wait and see which way the cat jumps”), all kinds of self-invented expressions and metaphors abounded. in the tachtigers’ hands, cheeks can be as “soft as cat fur” (according to herman gorter); people may be “as pretty as a kitty” [poes-mooi] (willem kloos); according to albert verwey, lodewijk van deyssel’s arguments are all mixed up as if “the cat had been playing with them”.55 jacob israël de haan describes his own “little letter” to van deyssel as “just like the squeak of a pussycat”.56 ill-advised critics, according to kloos and verwey, seemed like a “collection of trapped mice” who will soon “be for the cat”.57 finally, cats represent both the world of critical reception — willem kloos sketches an idyllic mise-en-scène of a critic at an open window in the evening watching two cats, spellbound — and a playful way to evoke frustrated sexual arousal, again expressed only privately in a diary.58 cats, then, represent the cerebral and playful counter-cultural scene that the tachtigers helped define at the turn of the twentieth century. the tachtigers eschewed the domestic-bourgeois cat that ronner built a career on and which was especially popular in the uk, as well as the association with femininity and sexuality that remained commonplace in french cultural settings. 53 eeden, dromenboek, 385. 54 endt, het festijn van tachtig, 29; halsema, vrienden & visioenen, 43–44. 55 gorter, mei, een gedicht, 50; kloos, nieuwere literatuur-geschiedenis, 82; deyssel and verwey, briefwisseling, 45. 56 haan, brieven. 57 kloos and verwey, de onbevoegdheid, 6. 58 kloos, nieuwere literatuur-geschiedenis, 182; van deyssel, “tegen de hitte”, 22. ronnes and reddick, untamed nature | 339 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) legacies the association of cats with the avantgarde which the tachtigers had help to foster would persist in the netherlands, and cats and their mysterious nature remained a recurring theme in literature, art, and aesthetic debates in counter-cultural circles in the twentieth century. meanwhile, the nobility and the social elite in general lost their interest in cats and turned their attention to dogs instead. this also meant that the common cat won out over the purebred cat: the bows that had adorned the chic nineteenth-century specimens disappeared in the twentieth century, even as paintings of stately cats against the background of tasteful interiors gave way to modernist representations, the most famous being bart van der leck’s the cat (1914). this does not mean, however, that the ordinary cat was not regarded as an elegant creature: she was chic by nature. the short story “imperia” by louis couperus (regarded as a tachtiger by some, as the dutch proust by others), published in 1910, perfectly encapsulates this development. set against the sunny backdrop of nice with its beautiful city palaces and gardens, “imperia” tells the tale of the author’s eponymous street cat. a french friend of his, a femme de lettres, is amazed: “how can you,” she asks, “have such an ordinary chat-de-gouttière! you, for whom everything must be so refined!” the narrator replies that imperia is not at all ordinary but “witty, graceful, and feline”.59 he must have understood very well what his friend meant: to her surprise, couperus has taken a liking to a mundane alley cat instead of a beautiful long-haired angora. couperus rejects the distinction between these two types of cat and pretends that it was not imperia’s breed but her individual characteristics that were the subject of conversation. while ferdinand domela nieuwenhuis’s ideas on animal welfare were, as we have seen, not always supported by his colleagues and the electorate, a few decades later this was significantly different. in the 1920s and 30s animal welfare ranked high on the socialist agenda; the most prominent socialist advocate for animal welfare 59 couperus, "imperia", 162–63. 340 | ronnes and reddick, untamed nature humanimalia 14.1 (2023) was the influential politician henri polak (1868–1943).60 while they were actively involved in nature conservation, within which animal protection was a key issue, other parties largely remained silent on the subject. politically and otherwise, the members of the elite had turned their back on the cat. the nobility’s favourite pet was now the dog (in many ways the anti-cat); the bourgeois urban elite had also lost their interest in the purebreds and no longer adorned their homes with cats or cat art. fast-forward to the 1950s and 70s, and an endless line of renowned dutch authors, including the most canonical — willem frederik hermans, gerard reve, and jan wolkers — picked up the thread of the tachtigers and devoted themselves to the cat. almost every wellknown dutch author wrote a cat story or autobiographical non-fiction about or prominently featuring cats. the ultimate ode to the cat, indeed the “standard work” on the species, and a literary masterpiece, rudy kousbroek’s de aaibaarheidsfactor (the pettability factor, 1969), contained a ranking system of some of the big hitters in the animal kingdom based on how willing they are to be petted, which featured in every new edition, including the audiobook.61 the pettability factor, published (complete with a soft, “pettable” cover) to immediate acclaim, described a “classification system” distinguishing animals that are untouchable because of their nature (piranhas), their substance (jellyfish), their poor understanding of the phenomenon (rodents) or poor appreciation of it (horses and dogs). there is only one animal that adores being petted and that is the cat, “the apotheosis in the evolution of pettability”.62 this classification, unsurprisingly, also reflects the fact that the cat was by far the most popular animal amongst the intellectual elite including the authors of the day. this counter-cultural preference resonated with a wider audience and found a fertile ground in a society in which the 1960s student movement had left a particularly great mark.63 60 saris and van der windt, “de opkomst”; deen, “tegen het palingtrekken”. 61 kousbroek, aaibaarheidsfactor; jacobs, “poezelogie”, 81; van eeuwen, “hekel aan een huis vol herrie”; van den boogaard, “de man en zijn poes”. 62 kousbroek, aaibaarheidsfactor, 18–24. 63 kennedy, building new babylon. ronnes and reddick, untamed nature | 341 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) de poezenkrant [the cat newspaper], an example of alternative media that has been published at irregular intervals since the 1970s, also fits within this trend. initially stemming from an experiment by graphic artist piet schreuders, in which a “newspaper” was launched that was designed as if cats had been in charge of the layout. de poezenkrant, this newspaper produced by cats for cats (the address label features both the names of the cat and its owner), quickly became into a cult hit. the paper, which still exists, has no editorial policy or indeed no editorial team at all, has a partially user-created format, and shows ugly cats on the cover so as to actively discourage people from buying the newspaper.64 the impact of this continuous appropriation of the cat by alternative writers and authors is reflected in the political orientation of the cat owner, who generally lean towards the political left.65 recent large-scale research into pet ownership in combination with voting behaviour shows that more left-wing voters own cats and that those identifying as politically right-wing are more likely to keep dogs.66 other studies confirm this.67 cats — contrary, stubborn, and unconforming — are almost universally associated with a tendency to disrupt, confound, and even revolt, and in the dutch cultural imagination even more so.68 conclusion one hundred and fifty years after laws prohibited the chaining up of cats on the grounds that it was antithetical to their nature, that nature has once again become the focus of an international debate on the damage free-roaming cats do to their natural surroundings and 64 schreuders, het grote boek van de poezenkrant, 15. 65 ronnes and van de ven, “van dakhaas tot schootpoes”, 136. 66 figures from intomart. thanks to tom van dijk and pieter van eeden. the same has been argued for the united states (ivanski et al., “pets and politics”), although other research contradicts this: coren, “dog ownership”. 67 according to one study, cat owners in the netherlands mainly live in the city and dog owners in rural areas, which is congruent with predominantly left and right voting behaviour. the north of the country, traditionally a socialist stronghold, has the highest cat density (feiten & cijfers, 10). 68 in the uk no correlation has been found between cat ownership and electoral geography. the purebred cat persevered, yet it is the dog that is the most popular pet. see murray et al., “number and ownership” and “most popular pets in the uk”, petplan 2018, https://www.petplan.co.uk/pet-information/blog/most-popular-pets/. https://www.petplan.co.uk/pet-information/blog/most-popular-pets/ 342 | ronnes and reddick, untamed nature humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the necessity of keeping them indoors. then as now, the language used to describe the problem is anthropomorphic and accusatorial: cats used to be evil, wicked, and feminine; now they are vicious and intent on “taking over the world”. evidently, we continue to struggle with the identity of the cat and our relationship with one of our favourite companion species. calls for legal action to prohibit cats from roaming freely, indiscriminately killing and eating birds and other wildlife, can also be heard in the netherlands, particularly from the huiskat thuiskat foundation. dutch opponents of the free-roaming cat face enormous opposition, however, since cats have been firmly embedded within dutch society since the late nineteenth century, and the government has so far declined requests for a bill mandating that cats be kept indoors. if anywhere, the cat seems to have found a safe haven in the netherlands where their eccentricities and rougher edges have consistently been cultivated and are at the very heart of the cat’s, and often also their owner’s, identity. the ubiquitous dutch pet cat is the ordinary house cat — not a pedigree cat — with a hint of the avantgarde and leftist politics. the key moment in the identity formation of the dutch cat was the nineteenth century, an era characterized by the emergence of a profound affinity towards cats. from an outcast with a few wealthy ladies as its sole ally, via idiosyncratic nobles, romantics, and bourgeois families, the cat became the beloved and subversive muse of artists, writers, and other creatives. it was the cat of the countercultural movements — mainly the movement of the tachtigers, and other free-thinkers — as well as people involved in political emancipatory movements, that persisted. although the twentieth century witnessed a more conventional embrace of feline representation and involvement, the avantgarde–socialist cat never went away, which is evident in literature, such as in the acclaimed and influential publications of de poezenkrant and de aaibaarheidsfactor, and in the voting behaviour of cat owners, which is predominantly (to a statistically significant degree) left-wing. while in the united kingdom, the aesthetic appearance of cats garners ronnes and reddick, untamed nature | 343 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) greater attention, and in the french context the historically-rooted sexual connotations still take precedence, the dutch perspective highlights the cat’s intrinsic autonomy. this autonomy, epitomized by the cat’s ability or agency to accept nourishment and affection from humans while at the same time retaining independence, is the fundamental attribute that resonates within the dutch cultural context. precisely this fundamental attribute of the cat would be impacted by rules imposing restrictions on their ability to roam free, making the implementation of such regulations unlikely in the foreseeable future. works cited aerts, erik. “felix als huisdier of ondier? de relatie tussen mens en kat in middeleeuwen en nieuwe tijd.” tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 125, no. 4 (2012): 488–503. https://doi.org/10.5117/ tvgesch2012.4.aert. bekker, balthasar. de betoverde weereld. amsterdam: daniel van den dalen, 1691. black, lynette c. “baudelaire as dandy: artifice and the search for beauty.” nineteenth-century french studies 17, no. 1/2 (1988): 186–95. boogaard, raymond van den. “de man en zijn poes.” nrc 3 october 2015. https:// www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2015/10/03/deman-en-zijn-poes-1539193-a1032162 buffon, georges-louis leclerc, comte de. histoire naturelle, générale et particuliére. avec la description du cabinet du roi. vol. 6. paris: impr. royal, 1766. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/ bpt6k10672421. charrière, isabelle de. la correspondence d’isabelle de charrière / de briefwisseling van belle van zuylen. edited by suzan van dijk and madeleine van strien-chardonneau. amsterdam: huygens instituut, 2012–. https://charriere.huygens.knaw.nl/. charrière, isabelle de. lettres de mistriss henley, publiées par son amie. edited by joan hinde stewart and philip stewart. new york: modern language association of america, 1993. cliteur, paul. darwin, dier en recht. amsterdam: boom, 2001. coren, stanley. “dog ownership predicts voting behavior — cats do not.” psychology today, 27 august 2019. https:// www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/ canine-corner/201908/dog-ownershippredicts-voting-behavior-cats-do-not. couperus, louis. “imperia.” in korte arabesken, edited by h. t. m. van vliet, oege dijkstra, marijke stapert-eggen, and karel reijnders, 162–71. utrecht: l. j. veen, 1990 [1911]. https://www. dbnl.org/tekst/coup002kort02_01/ coup002kort02_01_0017.php. davids, karel. “aristocraten en juristen, financiers en feministen. het beschavingsoffensief van de dierenbeschermers in nederland voor de eerste wereldoorlog.” volkskundig bulletin 13, no. 2 (1987): 193–94. davids, karel. dieren en nederlanders: zeven eeuwen lief en leed. utrecht: matrijs, 1989. https://doi.org/10.5117/tvgesch2012.4.aert https://doi.org/10.5117/tvgesch2012.4.aert https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2015/10/03/de-man-en-zijn-poes-1539193-a1032162 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2015/10/03/de-man-en-zijn-poes-1539193-a1032162 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2015/10/03/de-man-en-zijn-poes-1539193-a1032162 https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k10672421 https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k10672421 https://charriere.huygens.knaw.nl/ https://eur04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.psychologytoday.com%2fintl%2fblog%2fcanine-corner%2f201908%2fdog-ownership-predicts-voting-behavior-cats-do-not&data=05%7c01%7ch.ronnes%40uva.nl%7c65752ff4ba754d1a8d1c08dbc3978e55%7ca0f1cacd618c4403b94576fb3d6874e5%7c0%7c0%7c638318827935609703%7cunknown%7ctwfpbgzsb3d8eyjwijoimc4wljawmdailcjqijoiv2lumziilcjbtii6ik1hawwilcjxvci6mn0%3d%7c3000%7c%7c%7c&sdata=vzvzuekzj1y%2f0%2f9vyyajzlc9md4eq4p5p5d%2bbwp%2f8ii%3d&reserved=0 https://eur04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.psychologytoday.com%2fintl%2fblog%2fcanine-corner%2f201908%2fdog-ownership-predicts-voting-behavior-cats-do-not&data=05%7c01%7ch.ronnes%40uva.nl%7c65752ff4ba754d1a8d1c08dbc3978e55%7ca0f1cacd618c4403b94576fb3d6874e5%7c0%7c0%7c638318827935609703%7cunknown%7ctwfpbgzsb3d8eyjwijoimc4wljawmdailcjqijoiv2lumziilcjbtii6ik1hawwilcjxvci6mn0%3d%7c3000%7c%7c%7c&sdata=vzvzuekzj1y%2f0%2f9vyyajzlc9md4eq4p5p5d%2bbwp%2f8ii%3d&reserved=0 https://eur04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.psychologytoday.com%2fintl%2fblog%2fcanine-corner%2f201908%2fdog-ownership-predicts-voting-behavior-cats-do-not&data=05%7c01%7ch.ronnes%40uva.nl%7c65752ff4ba754d1a8d1c08dbc3978e55%7ca0f1cacd618c4403b94576fb3d6874e5%7c0%7c0%7c638318827935609703%7cunknown%7ctwfpbgzsb3d8eyjwijoimc4wljawmdailcjqijoiv2lumziilcjbtii6ik1hawwilcjxvci6mn0%3d%7c3000%7c%7c%7c&sdata=vzvzuekzj1y%2f0%2f9vyyajzlc9md4eq4p5p5d%2bbwp%2f8ii%3d&reserved=0 https://eur04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.psychologytoday.com%2fintl%2fblog%2fcanine-corner%2f201908%2fdog-ownership-predicts-voting-behavior-cats-do-not&data=05%7c01%7ch.ronnes%40uva.nl%7c65752ff4ba754d1a8d1c08dbc3978e55%7ca0f1cacd618c4403b94576fb3d6874e5%7c0%7c0%7c638318827935609703%7cunknown%7ctwfpbgzsb3d8eyjwijoimc4wljawmdailcjqijoiv2lumziilcjbtii6ik1hawwilcjxvci6mn0%3d%7c3000%7c%7c%7c&sdata=vzvzuekzj1y%2f0%2f9vyyajzlc9md4eq4p5p5d%2bbwp%2f8ii%3d&reserved=0 https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/coup002kort02_01/coup002kort02_01_0017.php https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/coup002kort02_01/coup002kort02_01_0017.php https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/coup002kort02_01/coup002kort02_01_0017.php 344 | ronnes and reddick, untamed nature humanimalia 14.1 (2023) dekker, tessel. katten: schetsen en foto’s van george hendrik breitner. amsterdam: panchaud, 2017. deen, femke. “tegen het palingtrekken en katknuppelen.” het historisch nieuwsblad, 3 july 2012. https://www. historischnieuwsblad.nl/tegen-hetpalingtrekken-en-katknuppelen/. deyssel, lodewijk van. “tegen de hitte en den schrijfkramp in. papieren van levensbeheer uit de zomer van 1891.” edited by harry g.m. prick. maatstaf 28, no. 8/9 (1980): 1–26. deyssel, lodewijk van, and albert verwey. de briefwisseling tussen lodewijk van deyssel en albert verwey. edited by harry g.m. prick. 3 vols. the hague: nederlands letterkundig museum en documentatiecentrum, 1981–1986. domela nieuwenhuis, ferdinand. “en al beschouwen alle broeders mij als den verloren broeder”: de familiecorrespondentie van en over ferdinand domela nieuwenhuis, edited by bert altena and rudolf de jong. amsterdam: stichting beheer iisg, 1997. eeden, frederik van. dagboek, 1878–1923. edited by h.w. van tricht. culemborg: tjeenk willink-noorduyn, 1971. eeden, frederik van. dromenboek. edited by dick schlüter. amsterdam: bert bakker, 1979. endt, enno. het festijn van tachtig: de vervulling van heel groote dingen scheen nabij. amsterdam: nijgh & van ditmar, 1990. eeuwen, marion van. “hekel aan een huis vol herrie.” nrc, 20 january 2000. https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2000/01/20/ hekel-aan-een-huis-vol-herrie7478983-a79242. everse, j. w. r. “het dier als proefdier.” in relaties tussen mens, dier en maatschappij, edited by a. verweij, 91–104. wageningen: centrum voor landbouwpublikaties en landbouwdocumentatie, 1973. feiten & cijfers gezelschapsdierensector 2015. ’s-hertogenbosch: has hogeschool; utrecht: universiteit utrecht, 2015. https://edepot.wur.nl/ 361828. fields, armond. le chat noir: a montmartre cabaret and its artists in the turn-of-the-century in paris. santa barbara, ca: santa barbara museum of art, 1993. francq van berkhey, johannes le. natuurlyke historie voor kinderen. 3 vols. leiden: frans de does, 1781. https://books.google.com/ books?id=wxwoaaaaqaaj. freund, amy, and michael yonan. “cats: the soft underbelly of the enlightenment.” journal18 no. 7 (2019). https://www.journal18.org/3778. gorter, herman. mei, een gedicht. amsterdam: w. versluys, 1889. greer, germaine. the obstacle race: the fortunes of women painters and their work. new york: tauris parke, 2001. grier, katherine c. pets in america: a history. chapel hill: university of north carolina press, 2006. haan, jacob israël de. brieven van en aan jacob israël de haan 1899–1908. edited by rob delvigne and leo ross. dnbl: digitale bibliotheek voor de nederlandse letteren, 2018. https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/ haan008brie02_01/index.php. halsema, dick f. van. vrienden & visioenen. een biografie van tachtig. groningen: historische uitgeverij, 2010. hillenius, d. “mens, dier en ethiek.” in relaties tussen mens, dier en maatschappij, edited by a. verweij, 124–137. wageningen: centrum voor landbouwpublikaties en landbouwdocumentatie, 1973. horst, han van der. spinnende poezen en speelse katjes: het werk van henriëtte ronner-knip (1821–1909). schiedam: scriptum, 2015. https://www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/tegen-het-palingtrekken-en-katknuppelen/ https://www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/tegen-het-palingtrekken-en-katknuppelen/ https://www.historischnieuwsblad.nl/tegen-het-palingtrekken-en-katknuppelen/ https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2000/01/20/hekel-aan-een-huis-vol-herrie-7478983-a79242 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2000/01/20/hekel-aan-een-huis-vol-herrie-7478983-a79242 https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2000/01/20/hekel-aan-een-huis-vol-herrie-7478983-a79242 https://edepot.wur.nl/361828 https://edepot.wur.nl/361828 https://books.google.com/books?id=wxwoaaaaqaaj https://books.google.com/books?id=wxwoaaaaqaaj https://eur04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3a%2f%2fwww.journal18.org%2f3778&data=05%7c01%7ch.ronnes%40uva.nl%7c65752ff4ba754d1a8d1c08dbc3978e55%7ca0f1cacd618c4403b94576fb3d6874e5%7c0%7c0%7c638318827935609703%7cunknown%7ctwfpbgzsb3d8eyjwijoimc4wljawmdailcjqijoiv2lumziilcjbtii6ik1hawwilcjxvci6mn0%3d%7c3000%7c%7c%7c&sdata=2j3mauf4q0050uai%2bimpibdcfnafka1r%2busgk8lkgmo%3d&reserved=0 https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/haan008brie02_01/index.php https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/haan008brie02_01/index.php ronnes and reddick, untamed nature | 345 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) huisman, frank, and henk te velde “op zoek naar nieuwe vormen in wetenschap en politiek. de ‘medische’ kleine geloven.” de negentiende eeuw 25, no. 3 (2001): 129–36. https:// demodernetijd.nl/wp-content/uploads/ dne-2001-3a-huisman-velde.pdf huygens, constantijn. trijntje cornelis. een volkse komedie uit de gouden eeuw. edited by harrie m. hermkens and paul verhuyck. amsterdam: prometheus / bert bakker, 1997. https://www.dbnl. org/tekst/huyg001trij01_01/index.php. ivanski, chantelle, ronda f. lo, and raymond a. mar. “pets and politics: do liberals and conservatives differ in their preferences for cats versus dogs?” collabra: psychology 4, january 2021. https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.28391. israel, jonathan. the dutch republic: its rise, greatness, and fall 1477–1806. oxford: clarendon press, 1995. jacob, margaret. c. “walking the terrain of history with a faulty map.” bmgn — low countries historical review 130, no. 3 (2015): 72–78. https://doi.org/10.18352/ bmgn-lchr.10104. jacobs, herman. “poezelogie: rudy kousbroek.” knack magazine, 18 march 2009. kennedy, james carleton. “building new babylon: cultural change in the netherlands during the 1960s.” phd diss., university of iowa, 1995. kete, kathleen. the beast in the boudoir: pet keeping in nineteenth-century paris. berkeley: university of california press, 1994. kloos, willem. nieuwere literatuurgeschiedenis. veertien jaar literatuurgeschiedenis, 1880–1893. amsterdam: s.l. van looy, 1925. kloos, willem, and albert verwey. de onbevoegdheid der hollandsche literaire kritiek. amsterdam: w. versluys, 1980. kluveld, amanda. reis door de hel der onschuldigen. de expressieve politiek van de nederlandse anti-vivisectionisten, 1890–1940. amsterdam: amsterdam university press, 2000. koch, jeroen. abraham kuyper: een biografie. amsterdam: boom, 2011. koolmees, peter. “het doden van dieren in nederland, 1860–1940: een onbehaaglijk onderdeel van de mens– dierrelatie.” de moderne tijd 2, no. 3–4 (2018): 326–47. https://doi.org/10.5117/ dmt2018.3-4.008.kool. kousbroek, rudy. de aaibaarheidsfactor. amsterdam: de harmonie, 1969. kraaij, harry j. henriette ronner-knip, 1821–1909. een virtuoos dierschilderes. schiedam: scriptum art, 1998. looy, jac van. “de dood van mijn poes.” de nieuwe gids 4, no. 2 (1889): 49–74. loss, scott r., tom will, and peter p. marra. “the impact of free-ranging domestic cats on wildlife of the united states.” nature communications 4 (2013): 1396. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2380. loss, scott r., brooke boughton, samantha m. cady, david w. londe, caleb mckinney, timothy j. o’connell, georgia j. riggs, and ellen p. robertson. “review and synthesis of the global literature on domestic cat impacts on wildlife.” journal of animal ecology 91, no. 7 (2022): 1361–72. https://doi. org/10.1111/1365-2656.13745. marra, peter p., and chris santella. cat wars: the devastating consequences of a cuddly killer. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2016. molle, leen van. “inleiding. een geschiedenis van mensen en (andere) dieren.” tijdschrift voor geschiedenis 125, no. 4 (2012): 464–75. https://doi. org/10.5117/tvgesch2012.4.moll. moore, arden. the cat behavior answer book: practical insights & proven solutions for your feline questions. north adams, ma: storey publishing, 2007. morris, desmond. cats in art. london: reaktion books, 2017. https://demodernetijd.nl/wp-content/uploads/dne-2001-3a-huisman-velde.pdf https://demodernetijd.nl/wp-content/uploads/dne-2001-3a-huisman-velde.pdf https://demodernetijd.nl/wp-content/uploads/dne-2001-3a-huisman-velde.pdf https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/huyg001trij01_01/index.php https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/huyg001trij01_01/index.php https://doi.org/10.1525/collabra.28391 https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10104 https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10104 https://doi.org/10.5117/dmt2018.3-4.008.kool https://doi.org/10.5117/dmt2018.3-4.008.kool https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms2380 https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13745 https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2656.13745 https://doi.org/10.5117/tvgesch2012.4.moll https://doi.org/10.5117/tvgesch2012.4.moll 346 | ronnes and reddick, untamed nature humanimalia 14.1 (2023) murray, jane k., william j. browne, maggie a. roberts, alex whitmarsh, and timothy j. gruffydd-jones. “number and ownership profiles of cats and dogs in the uk.” the veterinary record 166, no. 6 (2010): 163–68. https://doi. org/10.1136/vr.b4712. prak, maarten. the dutch republic in the seventeenth century: the golden age. translated by diane webb. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2005. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate. the english and other creatures in the victorian age. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1987. rogers, katharine m. the cat and the human imagination: feline images from bast to garfield. ann arbor: university of michigan press, 2001. romein, jan. op het breukvlak van twee eeuwen. leiden: querido, 1967. ronnes, hanneke. “de anti-hond. poezen en edellieden.” virtus: journal of nobility studies no. 29 (2022): 84–96. https://doi. org/10.21827/virtus.29.84-96. ronnes, hanneke. “de subversieve huiskat. kunstenaars en poezen in nederland, 1885–1910.” de moderne tijd 2, nos. 3–4 (2018): 248–66. https://demodernetijd. nl/wp-content/uploads/dmt-2018-34dronnes.pdf. ronnes, hanneke, and victor van de ven. “van dakhaas tot schootpoes. de opkomst van de kat als huisdier in nederland in de negentiende eeuw.” de negentiende eeuw 37, no. 2 (2013): 116–36. https://demodernetijd.nl/wp-content/ uploads/dne-2013-2b-ronnes-ven.pdf. rooy, piet de. “een hevig gewarrel. humanitair idealisme en socialisme in nederland rond de eeuwwisseling.” bmgn — low countries historical review 106, no. 4 (1991): 625–40. https://doi. org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.3440. rubin, james henry. impressionist cats and dogs: pets in paintings of modern life. new haven: yale university press, 2003. saris, frank, and henny van der windt. “de opkomst van de natuurbeschermingsbeweging tussen particulier en politiek (1880–1940).” jaarboek parlementaire geschiedenis (2019): 21–31. schreuders, piet. het grote boek van de poezenkrant. amsterdam: uitgeverij rubinstein, 2004. simpson, frances. the book of the cat. london: cassell, 1903. trompert-van bavel, trix. belle van zuylen en haar honden. groenlo: self-pub., 2014. trouwborst, arie, and han somsen, “domestic cats (felis catus) and european nature conservation law — applying the eu birds and habitats directives to a significant but neglected threat to wildlife.” journal of environmental law 32, no. 3 (2020): 391–415. https://doi. org/10.1093/jel/eqz035. tucker, abigail. the lion in the living room: how house cats tamed us and took over the world. new york: simon & schuster, 2016. tysens, gysbert. apollo’s marsdrager, veilende allerhande scherpzinnige en vermakelyke snel, punt, schimp, en mengel-digten. met aardige printjes verçiert. vol 3. amsterdam: henderik bosch, 1728. verdonk, dirk-jan. het dierloze gerecht: een vegetarische geschiedenis van nederland. amsterdam: boom, 2009. wintle, michael. an economic and social history of the netherlands, 1800–1920: demographic, economic and social transition. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2000. witsen, willem. volledige briefwisseling, 1877–1923. edited by leo jansen, odilia vermeulen, irene de groot, and ester wouthuysen. groningen: noordhoff, 1971. https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/ wits009brie01_01/index.php. wolff, betje, and aagje deken. brieven van abraham blankaart. vol. 1. the hague: isaac van cleef, 1787. https://doi.org/10.1136/vr.b4712 https://doi.org/10.1136/vr.b4712 https://doi.org/10.21827/virtus.29.84-96 https://doi.org/10.21827/virtus.29.84-96 https://demodernetijd.nl/wp-content/uploads/dmt-2018-34d-ronnes.pdf https://demodernetijd.nl/wp-content/uploads/dmt-2018-34d-ronnes.pdf https://demodernetijd.nl/wp-content/uploads/dmt-2018-34d-ronnes.pdf https://demodernetijd.nl/wp-content/uploads/dne-2013-2b-ronnes-ven.pdf https://demodernetijd.nl/wp-content/uploads/dne-2013-2b-ronnes-ven.pdf https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.3440 https://doi.org/10.18352/bmgn-lchr.3440 https://doi.org/10.1093/jel/eqz035 https://doi.org/10.1093/jel/eqz035 https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/wits009brie01_01/index.php https://www.dbnl.org/tekst/wits009brie01_01/index.php beste, review of stone copyright © 2024 maura beste this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 180–186. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 into the cat show ring maura beste review of: emily stone, cat people: human–cat interrelatedness in the cat fancy. multispecies encounters. london: routledge, 2023. vi + 200 pp. £39.99 (pb), £125.00 (hb). maura beste is a ph.d. candidate in the departments of gender and women’s studies and animal and comparative biomedical sciences, university of arizona. email: beste@arizona.edu book review http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 emily stone’s cat people: human-cat interrelatedness in the cat fancy turns to the world of pedigree cats to consider concepts of agency, work, and the ethics of care across species. the newest instalment of routledge’s multispecies encounters series, cat people adopts online and in-person multispecies ethnographic methods to explore how cats’ expressiveness and agential choices are variously heard, obscured, and ignored in “cat fancies”. fancies are events of pedigree cat showing and breeding in the united kingdom. stone, a self-proclaimed cat person who has long lived with cats and volunteered in shelters, draws on what she calls “a species-specific knowledge of cat behaviour” (7) to examine both human and feline sensibilities in the cat show ring. from the outset, stone distinguishes between animal welfare, which she defines as “making improvements to the lives of animals ‘within the status quo’”, and wellbeing, the central focus of her study, which “questions the system within which the cats sit” (7). she urges animal studies scholars to shift their focus from merely addressing the conditions of human-animal interactions — where incremental changes often serve to justify the continuation of these activities — towards a deeper examination of the ethical and relational aspects of the interactions themselves. the form of the book is linear and historically organized, beginning with feline domestication and ending with uncertainties about the social sustainability of current pedigree maintenance practices, including cat showing and confirmation. the intermediary chapters connect socioculturally to multispecies aesthetics, eugenics and biopower, work and leisure, and responsible care. in chapter one, stone traces how cats came to be companion animals, following the cat’s domestication journey “from mouser to catwalk”. following the lead of many evolutionary biologists, stone questions the accuracy of centring human dominion in domestication. instead, she maintains that domestication is not a single event or time, but rather a process of mutual adaptation that continues in contemporary human–animal relationships. stone points out how cats retain behavioural and morphological traits that make them excellent hunters, exemplary evolutionary self-selectors, and perfect copyright © 2024 maura beste this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 1 (2024): 179–186. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.19497 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.19497 beste, review of stone | 181 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) liminal species that are dependent on and independent of human care. even so, stone argues that cat’s apparent “autonomy” (21), the very thing that is considered to distinguish them from other companion species, becomes lost in selective breeding, opening felines up to a variety of behavioural and health issues. moreover, she suggests that the prevailing idea of the “selfish” cat is likely due to “a level of misunderstanding and lack of knowledge regarding cat personalities, behaviour, and communication” (15). increasing knowledge about feline sociality, stone says, disproves perceptions of their aloof indifference. chapter two provides a vivid and detailed description of the cat show itself, of the loud and busy halls in which judges and their assistant handlers (called stewards) examine cats one-by-one according to the established breed standard. paying particular attention to the feline umwelt, the cat’s specific sensorium and perception of the world, stone explores how the olfactory and auditory qualities of the show ring can be particularly stressful during weekend-long shows. many instances of feline stress, such as learned helplessness or freezing, are misinterpreted at the cat show as relaxation or passivity. speaking with a veterinarian, she is told “i think there’s probably thousands of cat breeders and showers who have got cats who are bloody terrified, and they think they are just sitting there chilled” (55). owners tell stone that they participate in shows for their cats’ enjoyment, but what the book argues is that the cat fancy, as a place of heightened cat visibility and spectacle, is also a zone in which cats are neglected and made invisible (51). when stone argues that many owners may misread their cats’ body language, it raises questions about the construction and politics of what is a legitimate human interpretation of feline feeling. stone navigates this by emphasizing the importance of recognizing cats as individuals. she rarely affords them the same level of attention and contextualization as her human participants, however. stone advocates for “guardians to attend to their cats individually on their own terms, not just human terms” (165) and acknowledges the unique personalities, needs, and preferences of cats. yet she tends to treat humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 182 | beste, review of stone behavioural science as a universal approach to understanding all her feline participants. cats are often assessed here through broad behavioural generalizations, such as when stone notes that vocalizations are merely “a sign of frustration” (55). spending more time observing and documenting the emotional expressions, preferences, and quirks of specific cats, as stone does with her human participants, could offer a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between behavioural science, breeders’ interpretations of feline behaviour, and the lived experiences of cats. this deeper exploration of the interplay between generalizable science and individual feline experiences could enrich discussions on interspecies harm, as explored in the subsequent chapters (particularly chapters five and six), and help bridge some of the epistemological tensions between breeders, veterinarians, and the cats themselves. in short, given the diverse certifications, moral dimensions, and schools of thought in companion animal behaviour, social scientists and multispecies ethnographers must consider how individual animals might deviate in their expressiveness from established behavioural norms couched in frameworks of legitimacy. chapters three and four offer valuable insights into the interplay of aesthetics, selective breeding, and biopower. stone highlights the role of nonhumans in categorizing and regulating various forms of life, positioning the pedigree cat within a complex web of power that gwendolyn blue and melanie rock describe as trans-biopolitics — a theoretical framework that identifies nonhuman actors within technologically-mediated networks of life and death.1 this framework serves as a foundation for exploring how layers of speciesism, anthropocentrism, and biopolitical control manifest on nonhuman bodies. by examining these intersections of power, stone presents three thought-provoking arguments in these chapters that offer rich avenues for further exploration. the first point concerns how cats serve as a vehicle for breeders’ agency: rather than being seen as individual beings, pedigree cats often embody the labels and accomplishments of their breeders. in this sense, pedigree cats 1 see gwendolyn blue and melanie rock, “trans-biopolitics: complexity in interspecies relations,” health 15.4 (2011): 353–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363459310376299 https://doi.org/10.1177/1363459310376299 beste, review of stone | 183 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) are transformed into art objects that reflect the breeder’s aesthetic vision: “the cat as an aesthetic ‘object’ becomes a marker of the breeder’s skill in a similar way to a piece of art acting as an ‘index’ of the artist’s skill” (71). although cat people lacks a thorough analysis of how the aesthetic values of specific breeds are intertwined with broader social frameworks, future research might investigate how literal and embodied aspects of feline physiology ground breeders’ artistic sensibilities as expressed through selective breeding. second, stone gestures toward notions of purity and the mythologies surrounding breeds that often slip into racialized discourses of eugenics. she briefly explores how the concept of purity transcends both ethnicity and animal breeds, revealing a colonial fixation with the exotic through the romanticized origin stories of cats like the birman and the egyptian mau. this concern with invented histories emerged in stone’s fieldwork, as cat fanciers decorated their feline’s cages according to these perceived origins: “the australian mist breed was covered with australian paraphernalia such as flags, toy koalas, and kangaroos, the turkish van cats were sitting on cushions decorated with turkish flags, and a maine coon had multiple american flags draped across her pen” (93). the book therefore makes a striking connection between fabricated histories of breeds and the imperialist aesthetics of exoticism. third, the conflicting points regarding breeding practices in chapter four are particularly intriguing: on one hand, female cats (referred to as queens) can refuse mounting from potential mates; on the other hand, breeders often undermine this sexual agency by keeping the queen and stud in close proximity so as to produce desirable offspring traits. under what conditions can the queen’s refusal be recognized? or perhaps, under what circumstances is her refusal legible to human interpretation? while stone acknowledges the uncertainty in understanding how cats select their mates, she argues that “breeding practices represent a true human intervention and lack of consideration for the feline umwelt” (100). by presenting these moments, stone opens up important avenues for future exploration, particularly in locating nonhuman bodies, especially humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 184 | beste, review of stone companion animals, within our biopolitical framework, where scientific research renders certain animal agencies and choices visible, while others remain obscured by interspecies power dynamics and reproductive control. stone’s strongest argument lies in chapter five, in which she details the difficulties in establishing absolute boundaries between work and leisure for both cats and cat people. resisting such binaries, stone aptly points out human–nonhuman working relationships can be based on love and respect as well as domination. with this in mind, she approaches cat and human work and leisure with a refreshing curiosity, finding the cat fancy to be a form of work for cats and a form of commodified leisure for humans: although pedigree showing is considered a hobby mainly motivated by social connection with fellow cat people, research participants also exert physical labour in caring and transporting cats and invest significant financial resources which lead stone to conclude work and leisure exist on a continuum that with categories that can be experienced simultaneously. compared to scholars such as donna haraway, who find instances of co-creation and collaboration in human–animal working relationships,2 stone concludes pedigree cat breeding and showing is “focused on human–human interactions, with the cats acting principally as conduits for this interaction” (141). lastly, transitioning from the show ring to the home, cat people delves into the complexities of pedigree cat-keeping and husbandry. stone thoughtfully engages with anecdotes that might otherwise be dismissed as inconsequential, such as participants describing cats knocking chicken off a bedside table (148) or meeting kittens over facetime (153), to emphasize the individuality and relational subjectivity of humans and their cats. despite her focus on the everyday interactions between cats and their people, stone maintains a critical eye on how feline behavioural science either reinforces or challenges the qualitative data she gathers. stone applies this understanding to various aspects of husbandry, including the intricate dynamics of managing multi-cat households, decisions related to litter delivery 2 donna haraway, when species meet (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008). beste, review of stone | 185 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) and sterilization, and considerations surrounding outdoor access. by examining how harm can occur both at the population and individual levels through breeding practices that protect cats from external threats yet restrict their mobility and freedom, stone aligns with other scholars on the ethics of care, ultimately concluding that “care can do good yet simultaneously oppress” (160). she grounds this argument within the specific context of companion animal husbandry and breeding, where universal standards are challenging to establish and implement, as “particular aspects of the cats and particular ways of relating to them are brought to the fore at different moments in different contexts” (165). these evolving moral considerations shaped by veterinary and behavioural science contribute to what participants in the united kingdom perceive as a decline in cat fancy culture — a focus of the final chapter. as the number of judges and new participants dwindles and the costs and regulatory measures rise, the future of cat fancy appears increasingly uncertain. reflecting on the five freedoms of animal welfare, established in 1965 to guide legislative changes for animal rights and adopted by major animal interest groups worldwide, stone challenges readers to consider which aspects of cat fancy culture should be preserved, even if doing so might come at the expense of the cat’s well-being. she points out that instead of questioning the fundamental principles of these activities, we often make minor adjustments to justify their continuation — shifting the focus of inquiry from animal welfare to animal wellbeing. nevertheless, she presents the intertwined components of the discourse on the decline of cat fancy with relative even-handedness, recognizing that while breeders and exhibitors understand the ethical concerns, they view themselves as essential to preserving the integrity and future of specific breeds. i eagerly anticipate the future theoretical insights that may emerge from stone’s ethnographic research, particularly in the areas of interspecies harm, biopower, and the gendered interpretations of sexuality and agency in relation to care and reproduction. the qualitative data presented throughout the book opens up potential for humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 186 | beste, review of stone future more thorough explorations of specific themes, such as the representation of cats as artistic objects, the role of cats in expressing breeders’ agency, and the establishment and enactment of interspecies harm within the contexts of behavioral science, colonialism, and biopower. a deeper examination of these issues may not only enhance the reader’s understanding of the complexities within cat fancy culture, but situate this niche community to broader discussions in human–animal interaction and critical animal studies. nonetheless, the book delivers a compelling account of human–cat relationships in pedigree breeding, offering valuable insights into these dynamics while paving the way for future research on selective breeding, aesthetics, and class-based analyses of pet ownership. it is particularly well-suited for graduate students preparing to engage in both in-person and digital multispecies ethnographic research involving companion animals for its relatively straightforward structure and presentation of data. o’brien embraicing the radical cartographies of the doggy dérive embracing the radical cartographies of the doggy dérive a walk in three acts darren o’brien nottingham trent university humanimalia 14.2 (spring 2024) abstract: operating at the intersection of fine art walking practice, psychogeography, and critical animal studies, the practice of deep canine topography seeks to reframe the humble act of the walkies as a co-authored, multi-species act of making and performing together. this essay offers a snapshot of my current research, drawing on erin manning’s concept of relational movement, andrew goodman’s gathering ecologies, tim ingold’s meshwork, deleuze and guattari’s twin concepts of becoming-animal and nomadic subjectivity, as developed by rosi braidotti, alongside roberto marchesini’s theories on animal creativity. in the process i consider the potential of the ubiquitous dog walk as the site of creative co-becoming. this essay comprises three elements: 1) a photo-essay, mapping a typical daily walk from the canine point of view; 2) creative writing, in the form of short passages of prose as imagined from the canine perspective; and 3) the main body of the text, which explores the practice of deep canine topography, or the doggy dérive, in relation to theoretical discourse. in addition, short descriptions of our human-canine artistic experiments are offered, along with hyperlinks to the research catalogue, where the reader can encounter the works described in the text. keywords: deep canine topography; walking-art; psychogeography; animal geographies; nomadic subjectivity; becoming-animal bio: dr darren o’brien (he/him — ki/kin) is a uk-based artist researcher, working in video, sound, text, and photography. his current practice-led research explores extended concepts of landscape art, through generative multi-species co-production and human-more-than-human contact zones. email: darren.obrien.art@gmail.com orcid: 0000-0002-0629-6469 copyright © 2024 darren o’brien this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 23–54. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.14844 mailto:darren.obrien.art@gmail.com https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0629-6469 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.14844 o’brien , radical cartographies | 25 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) we are part of the same shadow in the stone, appended in motion and space by more than the leash that allegedly holds us together. we are dog-human. —alexandra horowitz, our dogs, ourselves in their 2018 study “(just) a walk with the dog?”, thomas fletcher and louise platt describe the humble dog walk as “a significant arena where relations of power between animal and human are consciously mediated.”1 they go on to propose that the dog walk should be fully considered as an important zone of shared human–canine ontology. scholar of canine cognition alexandra horowitz suggests that human–canine relational ontologies are built on a complex interplay between history, science, law, and culture, hinting at the potential of the walk as a site for exploring new ways of being and becoming human–canine.2 andrew goodman writes that “with a child in tow, or towing us, our walk can never be simply a blinkered move from a to b. instead, […] it splits to become multiple: consisting of many foci, intensities, and heterogeneous singularities.”3 the same can certainly be said of walking with a dog “in tow, or towing us”. it is clear, therefore, that the humble dog walk forms a central pillar of everyday human–canine relations. but what happens when we frame the walkies as an act of multi-species artistic collaboration? how might this reframing redefine human–canine relational ontologies towards new radical cartographies? this question formed the basis of an extended period of artistic research undertaken as part of my phd. this essay represents a snapshot of our research and invites you to join us on a walk through deep canine topography and the doggy dérive. it is presented in three acts. act i explores the origins of the dérive as a playful creative strategy and applies this to the walkies as a multi-species artistic process. act ii examines the fluidity of bodies in motion and the potential of co-becoming offered by framing the walkies as a collaborative act. finally, act iii explores the 1 fletcher and platt, “(just) a walk”, 213. 2 horowitz, our dogs, ourselves, 6. 3 goodman, gathering ecologies, 111. 26 | o’brien , radical cartographies humanimalia 14.2 (2024) complex contested cartographies of both landscapes and identities which shape our human-canine co-becoming. our walk is guided by my canine companion, messmate, or kin, whose navigational desires shift human subjectivity and offer a deeper connection with the more-than-human landscapes we walk through and with. we will also be joined by others, whose creativity, thoughts, and concepts help us to speculate on the mechanisms at play in the doggy dérive. critical theorist ron broglio highlights artists’ unique ability to redefine the surfaces that separate human and animal as sites of creative exchange. he proposes that, as animals challenge linguistic representations, artists employ non-linguistic strategies to think alongside animals.4 i propose the terms “deep canine topography” and the “doggy dérive” as an invitation to employ the strategies and techniques of psychogeography and walking-art to form a multi-species alliance that tentatively tests the limits of language and philosophy. i have no authority to speak on behalf of my canine companion, although i attempt to do so in the prose which opens each section of this essay. i do this partly to expose the futility of translating his world into words but also to explore what happens when i enter a hinterland of humanimal hybridity. the best i can offer is to report back from the zones of contact between human-canine and the environments we walk, whilst acknowledging the deep and complex histories in which both human and canine bodies are entangled. throughout this paper i deliberately position my canine companion as artist, collaborator, and co-author. as such, i will often refer to “our” practice or “our research”, and use “we” instead of “i” to reflect our mutual collaboration. i have always felt uneasy about imposing a human name on my canine companion within the text, but conventions in the uk require that his name appear on his rspca adoption certificate and official veterinary and insurance records as: dexter o’brien. therefore, in line with both academic and artworld conventions, all artistic-walking outputs, photographs, video, sonic, and gps drawing works, composed by both human and canine bodies, are credited to o’brien and o’brien. this is also designed to challenge 4 broglio, surface encounters., xxxi, 107. fig. 1 adventures in deep canine topography, o’brien and o’brien, 2019–2023 28 | o’brien , radical cartographies humanimalia 14.2 (2024) such conventions and to begin to tease at the idea that subjectivity, creativity, and the generation of knowledge are exclusive to the human condition. each section also ends with a brief, selected account of our creative experiments. these examples are hosted by the research catalogue and can be encountered via the hyperlinks provided.5 act i: defining the doggy dérive humans are drawn to semiotic patterns, written in lines and sharp geometric points, plotted with laser eye accuracy, drawn out in blueprints, forming hard edges, erected by soft tissue and grey matter, that constitutes this urban space. i am drawn to lines of another kind, scent lines, tracks and traces, invisible clouds of vibrant particles, overlapping and engulfing the sharper forms of this constructed landscape as they hit my olfactory bulb, evoking a desire, a drive, a pull towards their origin, a chicken bone, a cupcake wrapper, a urine trail, forming a map of those who have walked this path before and those yet to come. ***** our walking adventure began when my canine companion discovered a body in a local suburban park. squeezing my way through a thicket of bramble and hawthorn, into which my companion had disappeared, i was suddenly struck by a powerful shift in atmosphere as he slowly circled the remains of a dead fox in an advanced state of decomposition. it was in that moment that i became aware of a deep connection to place, and the liminal quality of domesticated and wild canid essences combined in a single moment. it was as if my canine companion had crossed an invisible line separating his domestic and feral character and in doing so invited me to test the limits of my own animality. what i witnessed that day was a quiet mourning for a distant wild canid kin. a rare moment of care and 5 research catalogue, international database for artistic research, https://www. researchcatalogue.net/ https://www.researchcatalogue.net/ https://www.researchcatalogue.net/ o’brien , radical cartographies | 29 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) stillness in an otherwise playfully animated body. what followed was a number of walks stretched across three years of research, in which my canine companion’s navigational agency was privileged. our walks ranged from 15-minute block walks to 16km explorations of the semi-wild spaces on the edge of the city, always following his lead as he set the time, pace, direction, duration, and distance. our artistic research project is, to some extent, informed by psychogeography and its methods. psychogeography emerged in the mid1950s, developed by the marxist revolutionary group of artists and activists, the situationists, and their previous incarnation, the letterist international. spokesperson for the letterist and situationist groups, guy debord, defined psychogeography as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, whether unconsciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals.”6 based in paris, france, the situationists became specifically concerned with the critique of post-war consumerist structures and flows of urban geographies, which sought to tame and civilize space, time, and the individual. to this end, the situationists developed and employed the technique of the dérive, or drift, as a walking strategy that exposed unseen power structures of urban space. debord defined the dérive as a mode of experimental behaviour linked to the conditions of urban society: “a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances.”7 the dérive utilized strategies of chance and playful improvisation, in order to resist the order imposed upon the body in urban space and disrupt assumed ideas of the journey.8 alongside late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century romanticist explorations into walking as a creative act of union with nature, psychogeography has informed a wide range of contemporary artistic-walking practices. walking artist and researcher blake morris argues that artistic walking represents its own distinct artistic medium which offers “opportunities […] to creatively imagine the world through slow, detailed engagement with the contours of the 6 trier, guy debord, 17. 7 trier, guy debord., 17. 8 richardson, “schizocartography”, 182. 30 | o’brien , radical cartographies humanimalia 14.2 (2024) landscape”.9 stephanie springgay and sarah truman, of the walking lab research centre, extend contemporary walking-art’s potential to engage with the more-than-human world in ways which reach beyond the human as the central subject, suggesting that sensing bodies in motion become nodes in a rhizomatic network, connected to a multiplicity of human and more-than-human geographies. here, springgay and truman signal a significant departure from walking art’s romantic philosophical humanist origins towards more relational and affective posthuman walking strategies.10 furthermore, in a direct critique of psychogeography, springgay and truman suggest that “liberal humanism presumes that psychogeography is an activity of paying attention to the corporeality of walking in space, casting off usual relations, to become more ‘enlivened’ by walking and place.”11 their critique acknowledges psychogeography’s historical relationship to the flâneur, as a nineteenth-century urban explorer and observer of modern life. first appearing in charles baudelaire’s 1863 essay, the painter of modern life, the flâneur conjures up an image of an often white, male, in this case parisian figure, free to observe from a safe distance and of seemingly independent financial means. the playful act of walking exploration embodied in the figure of the flâneur, and by extension early psychogeography, places certain assumptions on the freedom of the body of the walker. first, it assumes a free-walking spirit, capable of transcending normative flows, breaking the spell of urban space, and opening new lines of flight. second, it assumes a freedom of movement which remains problematic for many people and as such represents a privilege often associated with whiteness, masculinity, able-bodiedness, and higher social class. in a much-needed feminist critique of psychogeography, deirdre heddon and cathy turner argue that “the reiteration of a particular genealogy—or fraternity—which includes jean-jacques rousseau, henry david thoreau, andré breton and guy debord generates an orthodoxy of walking, tending towards an implicitly masculinist ideology.”12 whilst heddon and myers also 9 morris, walking networks, 169. 10 springgay and truman, walking methodologies, 95. 11 springgay and truman, “methods beyond proceduralism,” 210. 12 heddon and turner, “walking women”, 224. o’brien , radical cartographies | 31 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) argue that such conceptions of walking-art are framed by two enduring historical discourses: “the romantics, tramping through rural locations, and the avant-gardists, drifting through the spectacular urban streets of capitalism.”13 in highlighting a lack of attention to gender, predominant in the historical discourse of walking-art and psychogeography, heddon, turner, myers, springgay, and truman, alongside other contemporary radical walking-art practitioners, continue to challenge and critique historic conceptions of psychogeography. my intention, therefore, is to examine how the disruptive nature of my canine companion troubles preconceived ideas of walking-art and psychogeography, towards a more-than-human walking methodology. one which is neither steeped in the ideals of romanticism, nor overburdened with the baggage of psychogeography’s masculinist origins, but is more attuned to contemporary posthuman discourse. the term “deep topography” first appears in scarp, a 2012 book by writer, historian, and contemporary psychogeographer nick papadimitriou. in this book he combines memoir, social history, and a meditation on walking as a sensory practice, to describe a journey through the outer fringes of northwest london. papadimitriou’s deep topography requires a communion both with and of the landscape, its contours, geographies, and histories, beyond the scientific and the romantic gaze. luke bennett likens papadimitriou’s deep topographical methods to jane bennett’s (no relation) concept of vibrant materialism, suggesting that both attend to the material vibrancy and agency contained within the multiplicities which make up any given landscape.14 both papadimitriou and bennett (jane) ask us to abandon our human-centric worldview in favour of approaching objects, including the objects of landscape, as vibrant, dynamic, and always in formation. in its canine form, deep topography rejects the static representations of landscapes and seeks to explore the immediate sensory entanglement between human, canine, and the environments we walk together. 13 heddon and myers, “walking library”, 114. 14 bennett, incongruous steps, 61. 32 | o’brien , radical cartographies humanimalia 14.2 (2024) in exploring affective qualities of such a union, it is worth briefly switching our attention to the field of human and animal geography. jamie lorimer, timothy hodgetts, and maan barua suggest that dogs and wolves have a unique way of tuning into the domestic and the wild worlds we co-occupy, shaping the atmospheres of our shared spaces. they go on to posit that “for a dog (or wolf), the atmosphere of tranquil woodland is probably more lively than for a human given the lingering scent-lines and pheromone traces that permeate the atmosphere, in addition to the visual signs of wildlife presence.”15 such atmospheric connections infect not only the practice of deep canine topography, in the act of the walk, but extend to the wider, day-to-day experience of human–canine cohabitation. in her 2013 book, on looking: eleven walks with expert eyes, inspired by numerous dog walks, alexandra horowitz turns her attention to an exploration of a familiar walk around a new york city block through the senses of eleven expert travellers, such as artists, ethnographers, and the visually impaired. in the process she asks us to consider what we miss on an everyday basis, from the insect eggs on the leaves of a tree to the fossilized remains of prehistoric shellfish captured within the surfaces of sandstone buildings. similarly, anthropologist tim ingold likens walking to the process of weaving, drawing, writing, and storytelling, seeking a commonality within such modes of expression which employ gestures that draw and direct our attention.16 he reminds us that lines are in constant formation crossing and interweaving with each other to form an entangled interconnected web or meshwork. while discussing the act of travelling through space, or wayfaring, ingold proposes that “the organism (animal or human) should be understood not as a bounded entity surrounded by an environment but as an unbounded entanglement of lines in fluid space.”17 we have, in effect, become experts at filtering out sensory stimuli, paying attention to the job at hand and zoning into the minimum information required to go about the business of being human in the modern city. as an antidote to this condition of blinkered 15 lorimer et al, “animals’ atmospheres”, 34. 16 ingold, being alive, 178. 17 ingold, being alive, 64. o’brien , radical cartographies | 33 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) zoning, both horowitz and ingold ask that we draw our attention to the things that we habitually pass by. for the doggy dérive, the walk is interrupted by the presence of my canine companion, thus shifting my attention between his navigational desires and my own entrenched modes of moving through space. the doggy dérive requires an unlearning of such blinkered modes of moving through towards a moving within a meshwork of interconnected lines. employing the deep topographical methods described by papadimitriou and the more-than-human turn in walking-art practice proposed by springgay and truman, we can begin to reframe “walkies”, or the doggy dérive, as something more than a set of negotiated power relations. instead, it becomes a playful improvised dance between bodies and affects in motion. furthermore, employing ingold’s concept of the meshwork helps us to deconstruct the boundaries of skin and fur, of surface, of interiority and exteriority. here, bounded bodies are deconstructed through the event of the walk and become reconstructed within a meshwork of fellow creatures, rocks, grass, dogs, birds, rivers, wind, soundwaves, and so on. building on such concepts, deep canine topography proposes a collaborative human-canine walking-art practice built around affect, immanence, and playful improvisation. experiments in embodied gps drawing to explore the relational movement of human and canine bodies we now invite you to encounter an experiment in embodied drawing. in this experiment we employed global positioning technology, not as a navigational tool, but as a drawing tool, to track the relative and relational movements between human and canine bodies. gpx files were extracted from two devices, a human carried mobile phone with a gps app, and a canine carried gopro camera, with built in telemetry. both tracklogs were then animated using gpx animator open-source software. the resulting animated drawings express the vitality of canine navigation, drawn through landscape by sensory stimuli, rather than forging a direct route from a to b. the canine drawn line darts back and forth in a playful dance, following contours, edges, smells, and sounds, always keeping an eye on my fig. 2 two bodies drawing o’brien and o’brien, 2023 https://www.researchcatalogue. net/shared/bd990de62ed9423c625 12acc528e8b83 https://www.researchcatalogue.net/shared/bd990de62ed9423c62512acc528e8b83 https://www.researchcatalogue.net/shared/bd990de62ed9423c62512acc528e8b83 https://www.researchcatalogue.net/shared/bd990de62ed9423c62512acc528e8b83 o’brien , radical cartographies | 35 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) position, checking in every so often, before darting off again in the direction of a new sound or smell. the human body, although following the canine’s general trajectory, takes a more direct route between points, whereas the canine body draws an altogether more spontaneous trajectory. such lines offer a visualization of ingold’s definition of the meshwork as a series of interlocking lines in motion and hints at moving bodies as unbounded, fluid, and permeable. act ii: becoming-animal — becoming nomadic hard edges give way to softer cultivated contours of the park, constructed by a gentler hand, the smells-scape shifts to a sweeter, more earthy tone, and i am engulfed in clouds of tree pollen, fox, squirrel, and rat trails, guiding me this way and that, time, and space dissolve. ***** having established the background to our doggy dérive, it is now time to explore how human and canine bodies become entangled through the action / event of the deep canine topographical walk. exploring ways in which walking-art taps into affective forces and connections, springgay and truman propose that “walking also provides a way to open up the non-visual senses, finding ways of knowing and communicating through movement, and helps to de-familiarize everyday actions.”18 similarly, rosi braidotti describes the process of de-familiarization as a “transspecies flow of becoming by interaction with multiple others.”19 she goes on to propose that the concept of nomadism renders the subject as constituted in such a way that it “explodes the boundaries of humanism at skin level.”20 it is here, in braidotti’s development of the twin deleuzoguattarian concepts of the nomadic subject and becoming-animal, that we might begin to gently tease at the boundaries between human and canine bodies in motion. 18 truman and springgay, “propositions for walking research”, 261. 19 braidotti, nomadic theory, 221. 20 braidotti, nomadic theory., 221. fig. 3 adventures in deep canine topography o’brien and o’brien 2019–2023. o’brien , radical cartographies | 37 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) to explore this further, we turn our attention to erin manning’s concept of relational movement and andrew goodman’s writing on walking as a performative practice. manning explores how bodies in motion are in a constant state of co-becoming. she suggests that “the body becomes through forces of recombination that compose its potential directionalities.”21 such forces, she argues, are relational and therefore we are always more than one, never moving in isolation but in relation to the forces of those around us.22 goodman expands on manning’s concept of relational movement echoing nineteenth-century naturalist, essayist, poet, and philosopher henry david thoreau’s invitation to treat every walk as an adventure, suggesting that “every walk we set out on, even the most mundane and functional, is inherently an adventure into the unknown, into improvisation and discovery.”23 for goodman, walking becomes a site of creative rupture which “complicates and disrupts established spatial relations, multiplying and creating new immanent connections to extend the potential of the body in space.”24 he goes on to propose that the act of walking might also allow for a becoming minor of a body. here, goodman draws on the deleuzoguattarian concept of the major and the minor. deleuze and guattari define the major as representing constant and homogeneous systems and the minor as encapsulating the creative possibilities of becoming minor(itarian).25 therefore, in revisiting the provocation of the situationist dérive, the minor might represent a radical resistance to the normative structures of constructed and mediated spaces of advanced capitalism and the anthropocene. in the case of deep canine topography, becoming minor or “minoritarian” is synonymous with becoming animal as a move towards remapping human–canine–landscape cartographies. this move requires the redefining of human and canine bodies as co-authors in the composition of the walkies. furthermore, following manning, goodman proposes that the walking body can disrupt and reconfigure relations and extend towards new explorations and 21 manning, relationscapes, 6. 22 manning, relationscapes., 13. 23 goodman, gathering ecologies, 111. 24 goodman, gathering ecologies, 111. 25 deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus, 104–5. 38 | o’brien , radical cartographies humanimalia 14.2 (2024) potential connections.26 human and canine affects radically reshape how we move through and become entangled in the effective forces that surround us. thus, bodies and objects have the potential to become radically re-mapped through the action of the doggy dérive. conceptualizing the body in motion as unstable and fluid allows for new ways of thinking and moving through the world in relation to other bodies and objects. moving bodies create space and time, they are not simply moving through a pre-structured space but responding to and constantly dancing with other bodies and objects. springgay and truman suggest that “objects do not exist as discrete entities that come together through interactions but are produced through entanglement.”27 for example, goodman describes a walk through the city as a bodily composition through chaos, out of which improvisation, in a negotiated response to the bodies of others, helps us to creatively navigate space.28 similarly, urban walks with my canine collaborator are constructed through an improvised choreography. head down, intent on following the scent of fellow canine travellers. always, it seems, in search of something outside of my own limited sensory schema, he will happily pull me in one direction or another, refusing my attempts to lead him otherwise by becoming a stubbornly immovable object. in the spaces designated as either edgelands or parklands, however, such restricting forces are momentarily lifted, and the canine body becomes electrified by a newfound energy. this lifting of restrictive forces is extended to encompass the human body as human and canine senses become attuned to the world. we are no longer connected by the lead but by an unspoken and invisible thread of trust and reciprocity, free to become lost in moments of pure becoming. as a human-canine unit, we are never walking in isolation but as part of a multiplicity of connected bodies and affects. it is important, however, to acknowledge the very personal autoethnographic nature of our research and not to take our own freedoms for granted. as someone who has experienced moments of acute anxiety and agoraphobia, i can attest that the 26 goodman, gathering ecologies, 116. 27 springgay and truman, walking methodologies, 6. 28 goodman, gathering ecologies, 119. o’brien , radical cartographies | 39 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) freedom to walk is never a foregone conclusion. it is, therefore, hard to separate our walking adventures from the complex and nuanced power relations that affect all bodies in motion. braidotti describes the predominant western european relationship with animals as based on the “dominant human masculine habit of taking for granted free access to and consumption of the bodies of others.”29 she also offers a clear discussion of deleuze and guattari’s concept of becoming-animal as an ethical basis for a non-hierarchical bond between human and nonhuman. in so doing she posits the concept of becoming-animal as an important move towards a profound and vital interconnection, which challenges speciesism and offers an ethical appreciation of what bodies (human, animal, other) can do.30 gerald bruns describes the concept of becoming animal as “a deterritorialization in which a subject no longer occupies a realm of stability and identity but is instead folded imperceptibly into a movement or into an amorphous legion whose mode of existence is nomadic”.31 in such terms, a de-identifying and de-familiarization of the self becomes a necessary step towards becoming-animal. this goes some way towards helping us to understand how embracing the doggy dérive as a strategy might strengthen the human–canine bond and trouble human exceptionalism. stephanie merchant also offers an account of becoming animal through the sport of canicross running. she explores moments of becoming which have a lasting impact on human–canine relationships: i do not claim that we have “become one”, morphed in focus and ability, to reach a singular common goal (although on a good day it may temporarily feel like that for me). however, what i do claim, is that we are no longer what we were before, and that we have become canicross runners together in a powerful cat’s cradle of success and failure, anecdote and routine, frustration and joy.32 29 braidotti, nomadic theory, 223. 30 braidotti, nomadic theory, 85. 31 bruns, “becoming-animal (some simple ways)”, 703. italics in original. 32 merchant, “running with an ‘other’”, 21. 40 | o’brien , radical cartographies humanimalia 14.2 (2024) although stopping short of defining their athletic partnership as a human-canine metamorphosis, merchant seems to describe the same ephemeral moments of becoming that we experience in our own deep topographical walks. such moments reveal both human and canine as nomadic and capable of becoming entangled through a shared activity. this sense of entanglement seems to operate outside of negotiated power relations and is more reliant on the dissolving of the human ego to enter into a bio-egalitarian union which is dog-human. this might also be defined as playful improvisation. as a musician i experience similar moments of becoming when improvising with others. in such moments the boundaries between bodies, instruments, and soundwaves dissolve through a creative union. alongside the concept of becoming-animal, deleuze and guattari also introduce us to the concepts of the rhizome, the molar, and the molecular. the rhizome is offered as an alternative to arborescent systems and structures. arborescent systems are hierarchical, with a central trunk, branches, a beginning, a middle, and an end, whereas rhizomatic structures are anti-hierarchical with no centre or periphery, no beginning, middle, or end point and, more importantly, no central privileged viewpoint.33 becoming-animal is offered therefore as a rhizomatic move in which the subject gives up their privileged viewpoint and becomes part of the multiplicity or pack. in moments of becoming, deleuze and guattari propose that “each individual is an infinite multiplicity, and the whole of nature is a multiplicity of perfectly individuated multiplicities.”34 the concepts of molar and molecular are a little harder to grasp. in simple terms, the molar is associated with the conscious, perceptible, rigid, and organized; the molecular with the unconscious, subtle, and fluid. here, becoming-animal is offered as a molecular move in which bodies operate as fluid and deterritorialized. deleuze and guattari describe this as becoming-imperceptible, that is an entry into a zone of imperceptibility, as a de-territorialization, an uncoupling of the self towards an act of communion with the world. or, as they rather poetically suggest, “to 33 deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus, 3. 34 deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus, 244–45. o’brien , radical cartographies | 41 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) be present at the dawn of the world”.35 one could interpret this proposition as akin to papadimitriou’s deep topographical communion with the landscape. it also helps define the very deep connection between human and canine engaged in the collaborative act of the walkies. furthermore, one could read this as the very essence of how the canine body explores and communes with the world through instinct and intuition, responding to each sensory stimulus as a poetic and creative entanglement with and of the landscape. the term instinct, however, is problematic, suggesting an automatic response akin to the cartesian notion of the animal as automaton. therefore, i prefer to use the terms affect, immanence and improvisation when describing how the canine body becomes in relation to the world. the term affect relates to the affective forces acting on and between bodies in motion; immanence relates to the multiplicity of affects and forces surrounding our bodies as we walk; and improvisation relates to our call and response actions and reactions as expressed in the moment of the walk. interestingly, deleuze and guattari go on to suggest that movement is central to becoming-imperceptible, stating that “pure relations of speed and slowness, pure affects, are below and above the threshold of perception.”36 thus, in the doggy dérive, both human and canine bodies enter the realm of imperceptibility, mingling with the multiplicity of more-than-human affects toward moments of pure hybridity. this neatly circles back to manning’s concept of relational movement through which she proposes that “movement courses through the me that is in formation: experience, perception, feeling—all of these are movements, and each of them contributes, in an infinity of ways, to what ‘i’ will become in any given occasion.”37 what i am trying to explore here is the description of the unspoken, the unconscious, the imperceptible connections between human, canine, and landscape which unfolds through the act of walking. it is important, however, to state that we do not seek out or try to create the conditions for such transitions and becomings, where the boundaries 35 deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus, 280. 36 deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus, 281. 37 manning, “wondering the world”, 166. 42 | o’brien , radical cartographies humanimalia 14.2 (2024) separating human-canine and landscape become fluid and slippery, but the awareness of the concept of becoming-animal helps to recognize when it happens, however fleeting and ephemeral. to put it more simply: there is a point in the walk, where the human (myself) and the canine (my companion) seem to align in the moment of walking through, or perhaps more accurately walking with the landscape. in such moments, human and canine bodies assume the position of interlacing lines within a multiplicity of lines and trajectories. our walks unfold through a number of improvised twists and turns, subtle non-verbal communications where lines are no longer defined by the forging of the quickest point from a to b, but as connective tissue between human-canine and a multiplicity of sensory stimulus. rather than observing the landscape from an ocular-centric, bipedal position, all senses seem to align as an unspoken connection is formed and the walk becomes an assemblage of skin, fur, and mud. however, despite offering the concept of becoming-animal as an intriguing proposition to navigate the structural boundaries between human and animal, deleuze and guattari express some disdain for the pet dog, or canis familiaris. they state that pets, in general, represent, “oedipal animals each with its own petty history, ‘my’ cat, ‘my’ dog. these animals invite us to regress, draw us into narcissistic contemplation”.38 here, deleuze and guattari, perhaps deliberately, wrench us from our cosy idea of companion animal relations to reveal a darker underbelly of the structurally reductionist realities of animal domestication and symbolism. in response, donna haraway exposes the limitations of deleuze and guattari’s concept, describing it as a “fantasy wolf-pack version of ‘becoming animal’”.39 she argues that, despite working so hard to move beyond the human-animal divide, deleuze and guattari’s joint project has a distinct and “profound absence of curiosity about or respect for and with actual animals”.40 she goes on to contest that deleuze and guattari present 38 deleuze and guattari, a thousand plateaus, 240. 39 haraway, when species meet, 27. 40 haraway, when species meet, 27. o’brien , radical cartographies | 43 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) us with a “philosophy of the sublime, not the earthly, not the mud”.41 more importantly she accuses their philosophy of feeding off an opposition between the wild and the domestic, the dog and the wolf, signalling a “symptomatic morass for how not to take earthly animals, wild or domestic, seriously”.42 despite the very glaring problems raised by haraway, the underlying concept of becoming-animal offers a radical philosophical move which goes some way to undoing the human–animal, nature–culture divide. it might also help us to understand the dynamics of the walkies as the site of human–canine artistic collaboration. this is especially true in braidotti’s positioning of the concept as an ethical basis on which to redefine human–animal relations. embodying the canine soundscape an early experiment in deep canine topography considered the canine soundscape, specifically how experiencing my canine companion’s spatial position, might unsettle my body as a bounded object and bring us into closer sensory union. using a pair of in-ear binaural microphones, i adapted my companion’s walking harness by positioning microphones just behind each of his ears. i also made a cradle for an on-board digital recorder. we undertook a number of urban walks from our home, usually under a kilometre, recording sound from the canine point of view as we walked. the resulting immersive canine soundscape invites the listener to imagine themselves as canine. the first of the walks was recorded in january 2020, the second in march of the same year, during the first covid-19 lockdown, with a noticeable difference in soundscape between the two. i presented the first of the soundscape walks at a practice-based research seminar, by installing it in the listen in sound-cinema booth at the bonington building (nottingham trent university), just before the first uk lockdown. the listen in booth is a small, one-person box, where participants sit in near darkness with sound emanating from stereo speakers just above the head. seminar participants reported feelings of embodying the canine position, 41 haraway, when species meet, 28. 42 haraway, when species meet., 28–29. fig. 4 further adventures in deep canine topography: experiments in canine soundscapes. attending to rhythm and repetition o’brien and o’brien, 2020–2023 https://www.researchcatalogue. net/shared/b13c5fa83b84022ce165a 3d94ca7ae27 https://www.researchcatalogue.net/shared/b13c5fa83b84022ce165a3d94ca7ae27 https://www.researchcatalogue.net/shared/b13c5fa83b84022ce165a3d94ca7ae27 https://www.researchcatalogue.net/shared/b13c5fa83b84022ce165a3d94ca7ae27 o’brien , radical cartographies | 45 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) creating a powerful minds-eye image of the world at ground level. i became interested in how encountering canine soundscapes might offer a powerful zone of contact, a bridge between embodied experience which enables a kind of human-canine hybridity. more recent sonic experiments include the use of wireless microphones enabling a live blending of human and canine soundscapes creating moments of deep sensory entanglement between human and canine walkers. act iii: navigating contested spaces and complex relations this is an act of vandalism, an attempt to tame the feral in a futile act of mass domestication, its forces act upon my body, restricted by the lead, unable to follow my nose amongst the busy traffic, all sense of place replaced by stone, all sense of freedom curtailed as my senses become overwhelmed by noxious gasses. i long for the edgelands, the parklands, the wild spaces, to run free and mingle with the multiplicity, as a body without organs, as an abstract machine. ***** every dog, as i do, has the urge to question. and i, like all dogs, have the compulsion to be silent. franz kafka, investigations of a dog navigating the hard edges of the urban streets, our pace is quick and rhythmic, as paw and foot fall into step, interrupted only by the crossing of busy roads which become torrents of fast-flowing rapids restricting our path toward the local park. in the park, our pace slows giving way to an exploitative weaving of lines along scent trails. zigzagging from lamppost to tree trunk to bin, stopping to investigate the local canine communication network, before leaving a chemically rich response. snuffling through the longer grasses, head weaving playfully from side to side, my canine companion drops and rolls, wriggling on his back, as if to absorb the essence of the landscape. fig. 5 adventures in deep canine topography, o’brien and o’brien 2019–2023. o’brien , radical cartographies | 47 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) a squirrel takes its regular position beside a sheltered park bench from which it shares hand-fed peanuts in an act of human-squirrel co-becoming. leaving the park, my companion leads me through the graveyard, dipping into the university herb garden to wallow in its fragrant perfume, before venturing up to the higher ground of the castle mound to sniff the air and plot the route home. this familiar walk through our neighbourhood has become a habitual daily routine. like kafka’s canine protagonist, i can only speculate on my companion’s desire to understand the world around him. this final section draws our attention to the inherent power relations present in the spaces we walk together as dog-human. throughout our research we have regularly encountered highly mediated and constructed city spaces, suburban streets, public parks, and what might be defined as edgeland spaces. all routes present their own set of complex rules and structures which act upon bodies in motion. some walks lead us into situations where my own anxieties take over. my companion has no concept of, or respect for, human constructed boundaries and borders. likewise, he may refuse to take a particular route due to his perception of some kind of danger ahead, exposing the powerful unseen forces which act upon the canine body. this particular walk takes us through an urban landscape, a city park, to a medieval castle mound and a modern university campus. it is rich with historic significance which is difficult to ignore. in describing traversing urban spaces, goodman suggests that “in walking, the experience of the city is always an intimate and shifting engagement, as feet selectively prehend the qualities rather than the essential properties of the street.”43 likewise, our attention in the park is focused on the illusion of wilderness, however cultivated, rather than its victorian design and problematic histories of social and political control. whilst the edgeland spaces we walk, on days when time is more abundant, seem to oscillate between moments of wildness and domesticity. here, the signs and signifiers of colonial expansion are written in the landscape. from the linearization of the river soar into the leicester arm of the great union canal to 43 goodman, gathering ecologies, 115. original emphasis. 48 | o’brien , radical cartographies humanimalia 14.2 (2024) aid transportation of coal, and cotton, from the far reaches of the colonies to feed the hosiery factories of the city; to the disused railway built by my irish grandpa, brought to england as migrant labour, when ireland was still under british rule; to the undulating pasture of medieval strip farming; to the remnants of a roman road which once connected exeter (isca dumnoniorum) in the southwest to lincoln (lindum colonia) in the north midlands. all lines and histories converge here. however, my canine companion has little concern for social and political history. he reads history in the scent trails of those who have walked these lines before us and perhaps those yet to come. jack halberstam offers the concept of bewilderment to rescue the term wild from its complex colonial origin. for halberstam, bewilderment holds within it a trace of the colonial project but also, “refers to an immersive sense of being lost or of standing outside of a system of knowing or of merging with other systems of space and time that linger in the background to those we have selected as meaningful in the contemporary world”.44 through this definition of bewilderment, we are placed within a space of unknowing or enchantment, bafflement, or confusion towards a “becoming that moves in an opposite direction to colonial knowing”.45 halberstam posits that artists and theorists who seek bewilderment as an aesthetic strategy do so against and beyond the cartographic origin of the term to become untethered and adrift. this sense of losing one’s way is another form of nomadic estrangement. bewilderment folds us back into the concept of defamiliarization, offered by the essence of the dérive and braidotti’s nomadism, where the “self” seeks to become adrift and nomadic as a precursor to entering into moments of human-canine hybridity. this sense of abandon and lostness lies at the heart of our deep canine topographical experiments. however, as with any such aesthetic strategies, we can never fully escape the gravity of the histories that bind us in altogether more problematic alliances. such tensions oscillate between moments of harmony and the constant weight of human canine relational ontologies. 44 halberstam, wild things, 66. 45 halberstam, wild things, 66. o’brien , radical cartographies | 49 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) harlan weaver explores the complexity of shared human–canine histories and identities through a transformative relationship with an american pitbull terrier. weaver states that “in moments when my appearance has been at its most liminal, when i have felt vulnerable as a visibly transgender person, she (haley) ensured my safety. concurrently, my whiteness, queer identity, and middle-class status encourage other humans to read haley as less threatening; in my presence, she is perceived as less dangerous.”46 weaver expresses a human-canine relationship which is predicated on care and negotiated togetherness and defined as a becoming in kind. what strikes me about weaver’s concept of becoming in kind, is that it gets to the heart of how our identity, sense of self, and subjectivity are constantly shaped and reshaped through our relationship with our canine kin. by approaching my canine companion as fellow artist, engaged in moments of creative collaboration, the walk acts as a momentary suspension of normative assumptions through which our dog-human identities become defined. having said this, tensions and asymmetry, although momentarily dissolved in moments of creative hybridity, remain intact and are difficult to ignore. in addressing such tensions, halberstam delivers a harsh but pragmatic account of the very concept of the companion animal. in a direct response to donna haraway’s definition of human, companion animal co-becoming as an ontological choreography, halberstam suggests that such a dance “is still created, enacted, and performed by humans with animals, pets, and other things as props rather than coplayers.”47 whereas braidotti, following haraway, positions the dog as a radical and significant product of technoscience, calling for a symbolic system of kinship which matches the complexity of our shared ontological histories.48 my hope is that deep canine topography, as much as it ever can do, moves beyond the canine as a prop towards a true creative alliance. to this end, i deliberately position my canine companion not as the subject of observation, an inspiration, or muse, but as artist, collaborator, and co-author. 46 weaver, “becoming in kind”, 689. 47 halberstam, wild things, 119. 48 braidotti, nomadism, 94. 50 | o’brien , radical cartographies humanimalia 14.2 (2024) our research has been shaped by our creative partnership, but one question it has raised is perhaps destined to remain unanswered. that is, what does my canine co-researcher make of it all? to contemplate this quandary, it is worth considering roberto marchesini’s recent writing on animal creativity. marchesini explores the question of animal consciousness through a number of key unifying observations. firstly, he describes the sensory as that which differentiates between sensibility and agency or what is present in the world and the changes the animal produces in the world. he describes this as constituting the animal’s sense ofself. secondly, he considers the animal’s affective, inherent interests in the world as the for-self. here, the animal’s cognitive ability to adapt to any given situation is based on experience and knowledge, rather than automatic responses as assumed in the cartesian model of the animal. his final observation proposes an awareness of such actions which he describes as the in-self, or interiority of self-awareness.49 the essence of marchesini’s proposition is that animals respond creatively to the world in much the same way that humans do. they are capable of problem solving, play, and ingenuity. by focusing on creativity as a shared characteristic of all animals, including but not explicitly humans, he problematizes the already shaky ground of the human–animal, nature–culture divide. in applying such concepts to the process of deep canine topography, our shared creativity becomes the great leveller, the common ground on which human exceptionalism and therefore human-canine relational ontologies might be troubled. framing the walkies as the site of creative alliance renders the traditional concept of the animal as automata redundant. instead, it proposes a relational collaborative act of world-making which by extension embraces, or gathers, the environments we encounter as part of a multiplicity of bodies in motion. for our final experimental encounter, we head to the coast to experience the elemental forces of a landscape in constant flux, through the eyes and ears of the dog-human. 49 marchesini, the creative animal, 347. fig. 6 the beach beneath our feet three channel video and binaural sound, 9m14s o’brien and o’brien, 2021 https://www.researchcatalogue. net/shared/52256fb154c049df81ee8 b7140dcbd21 https://www.researchcatalogue.net/shared/52256fb154c049df81ee8b7140dcbd21 https://www.researchcatalogue.net/shared/52256fb154c049df81ee8b7140dcbd21 https://www.researchcatalogue.net/shared/52256fb154c049df81ee8b7140dcbd21 52 | o’brien , radical cartographies humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the beach beneath our feet using a combination of canine chest mounted gopro camera and human hand-held points of view, this video work was constructed from several walks along the north norfolk coast (uk), conducted in october 2020. the resulting ten-minute video merges sound from the canine point of view with binaural sound recorded from the human perspective. the video is quite deliberately edited and the use of three channels reflects experiments with the tryptic as a way of blending rhythms and further hybridizing human and canine perspectives. the beach beneath our feet borrows its title from mckenzie wark’s 2011 book the beach beneath the street: the everyday life and glorious times of the situationist international, which explores the history of the situationist’s revolutionary art practices, including the dérive. the video combines the concept of the dérive with papadimitriou’s ideas of deep time through the choice of location, happisburgh beach, in north norfolk (uk), and its association with the oldest human footprints discovered in europe. this particular landscape is slowly being lost to the sea through erosion, further adding to a sense of wildness and elemental forces as the land clings onto its material form, continually shaped by the elements. coda our pace begins to slow as our mini adventure into deep canine topography and the doggy dérive is nearly at an end. we began our walk by exploring how psychogeography and walking-art might enable a re-framing of the walkies as an artistic practice. we speculated on how embracing the concepts of relational movement, nomadic subjectivity, and becoming animal might help us to reframe the humble walkies as a shared more-than-human act of co-becoming. we have explored the contested nature and histories of the places and spaces we walk. we have also briefly faced up to our deep and complex human-canine shared histories and the possibility of rewriting such histories and identities through a creative alliance. finally, we have considered how creativity might unlock new ways of being and becoming dog-human. now we approach the comfort of home, the key turns, the door creaks, a drink and a o’brien , radical cartographies | 53 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) post-walk snack gives way to a light snooze. my canine companion slips into a deep slumber, legs twitching as he dreams of walking, recalling, and reliving our encounters with the world. our improvised dance has many loose ends and new landscapes to explore as we take our first stumbling steps towards embracing the walkies as something other than an arena of continuously mediated relations of power, towards a more harmonious alliance built on affect, immanence, and playful improvisation. works cited baudelaire, charles. the painter of modern life. translated by p.e. charvet. london: penguin, 2010. bennett, jane. vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham, nc: duke university press, 2010. bennett, luke. “incongruous steps toward a legal psychogeography.” in richardson, walking inside out, 59–72. braidotti, rosi. nomadic theory: the portable rosi braidotti. new york: columbia university press, 2011. broglio, ron. surface encounters: thinking with animals and art. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2011. bruns, gerald l. “becoming-animal (some simple ways).” new literary history 38, no. 4 (2007): 703–20. https://www.jstor. org/stable/20058035 deleuze, gilles, and félix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. translated by brian massumi. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1988. fletcher, thomas, and louise platt. “(just) a walk with the dog? animal geographies and negotiating walking spaces.” social & cultural geography 19, no. 2 (2018): 211–29. https://doi.org/10.10 80/14649365.2016.1274047 goodman, andrew. gathering ecologies: thinking beyond interactivity. london: open humanities press, 2018. halberstam, jack. wild things: the disorder of desire. durham, nc: duke university press, 2020. haraway, donna j. staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham, nc: duke university press, 2016. haraway, donna j. when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2013. heddon, deirdre, and misha myers. “the walking library for women walking.” in walking, landscape and environment, edited by david borthwick, pippa marland, and anna stenning, 114–26. london: routledge, 2019. heddon, deirdre and cathy turner. “walking women: shifting the tales and scales of mobility.” contemporary theatre review 22, no. 2 (2012): 224–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2012 .666741 horowitz, alexandra. on looking: eleven walks with expert eyes. new york: scribner, 2013. horowitz, alexandra. our dogs, ourselves: the story of a singular bond. new york: scribner, 2019. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20058035 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20058035 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1274047 https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2016.1274047 https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2012.666741 https://doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2012.666741 54 | o’brien , radical cartographies humanimalia 14.2 (2024) ingold, tim. being alive: essays on movement, knowledge, and description. london: routledge, 2021. kafka, franz. investigations of a dog. translated by michael hofmann. london: penguin, 2018. lorimer, jamie, timothy hodgetts, and maan barua. “animals’ atmospheres.” progress in human geography 43, no. 1 (2019): 26–45. https://doi. org/10.1177/0309132517731254 manning, erin. relationscapes: movement, art, philosophy. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2009. manning, erin. “wondering the world directly—or, how movement outruns the subject.” body & society 20, nos. 3–4 (2014): 162–88. https://doi. org/10.1177/1357034x14546357 marchesini, roberto. the creative animal: how every animal builds its own existence. cham: palgrave macmillan, 2022. merchant, stephanie, “running with an ‘other’: landscape negotiation and inter-relationality in canicross.” sport in society 23, no. 1 (2020): 11–23. https:// doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2018.1555212 morris, blake. walking networks: the development of an artistic medium. london: rowman & littlefield international, 2019. papadimitriou, nick. scarp: in search of london’s outer limits. london: sceptre, 2012. richardson, tina. “developing schizocartography: formulating a theoretical methodology for a walking practice.” in richardson, walking inside out, 181–93. richardson, tina, ed. walking inside out: contemporary british psychogeography. london: rowman & littlefield international, 2015 springgay, stephanie and sarah e. truman. “on the need for methods beyond proceduralism: speculative middles, (in)tensions, and responseability in research.” qualitative inquiry 24, no. 3 (2018): 203–14. https://doi. org/10.1177/1077800417704464 springgay, stephanie, and sarah e. truman. walking methodologies in a more-than-human world: walkinglab. london: routledge, 2017. trier, james. guy debord, the situationist international, and the revolutionary spirit. leiden: brill, 2019. truman, sarah e., and stephanie springgay. “propositions for walking research.” in the routledge international handbook of intercultural arts research, edited by pamela burnard, elizabeth mackinlay and kimberly powell, 259–67. london: routledge, 2016. wark, mckenzie. the beach beneath the street: the everyday life and glorious times of the situationist international. london: verso, 2015. weaver, harlan. “‘becoming in kind’: race, class, gender, and nation in cultures of dog rescue and dogfighting.” american quarterly, 65, no. 3 (2013): 689–709. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43822925 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517731254 https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132517731254 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x14546357 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x14546357 https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2018.1555212 https://doi.org/10.1080/17430437.2018.1555212 https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417704464 https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417704464 https://www.jstor.org/stable/43822925 derry, westernizing arabian horses westernizing arabian horses: examples of purity breeding in relation to authenticity and improvement, 1880–2020 margaret e. derry university of guelph, canada humanimalia 13.2 (spring 2023) abstract: this article reviews western approaches to the regulation of arabian horse breeding as it shifted west and globalized, focusing on the period between 1880 and 2020. the move to “preserve” the arabian horse within a western framework is central to this history, but different approaches have been adopted over time. i consider examples from nineteenth century poland, england, and russia as contexts for understanding how debates about and approaches to producing “purity” unfolded in the arabian horse industry in the twentieth-century united states and continue today in the global context of arabian breeding framed by the word arabian horse organization (waho). keywords: arabian horse; breeding; purity; pedigree; poland; england; russia; united states; waho bio: margaret e. derry is an adjunct professor in history at the university of guelph; associated faculty, campbell centre for animal welfare, department of animal and poultry science, university of guelph; and former associated scholar, institute for the history and philosophy of science and technology, university of toronto. she has published extensively, including six books and many articles on the historical breeding of farm and companion animals. her most recent book, made to order: the designing of animals, was published by the university of toronto press in 2022. “purity: its role in livestock breeding and eugenics, 1880–1920,” is forthcoming in agricultural history (nov. 2023). email: mderry@poplarlane.net copyright © 2023 margaret e. derry this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 85–119. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13792 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13792 derry, westernizing arabian horses | 87 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the sound of pounding hoofs in sand could be heard easily. [… the] steeds moved effortlessly across the sand […]. blacks, bays, chestnuts galloped swiftly with heads held high and hot coats shining in the sun. — walter farley, the black stallion returns since its first publication in 1945, american novelist walter farley’s the black stallion returns has captivated readers with the fantasy of desert arabia and its horses.1 among many of farley’s admirers in north america the book has stimulated a lifelong interest in the arabian horse and accompanying feelings about its assumed uniqueness and perceived exotic heritage. farley’s books appeal especially to young readers, and by the 1980s his earliest fans were in a position to realize the childhood dreams these stories had stirred. some have become breeders as a result of farley’s influence, while others have tried to recapture childhood memories by investing in arabians. indeed, one breeder claims that farley contributed more to the development of the arabian over the twentieth century than any other single person.2 many readers also developed the conviction that antiquity and purity were embedded in this desert horse in a way not true of other equine breeds originating in the west. a dichotomy exists, however, between what farley wrote about the black stallion and what many arabian horse breeders in western society have come to believe about arabian-specific notions of purity. farley’s imaginary breeder of the black stallion, the arab sheik abu jaʿ kub ben ishak from the el kharj district in saudi arabia, actively introduces foreign blood into his breeding programmes to produce greater speed. such improvement is achieved, his daughter explains, by abandoning ideas about strict genetic purity where necessary: “my father and his father before him have spent their 1 farley, the black stallion returns, 100. in what follows i refer to “arabia” both when discussing the imagined, orientalized east and in historical discussion of eras when the territory was identified as “arabia” by western travellers. where geographical specifics are available they are identified and when referring to more present history i refer to the “middle east”. 2 forbis, “ansata arabian stud”, 178; forbis, “ansata: the breeding program”, 213. 88 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) lives interbreeding the original nejdi purebred strain […] with others which they have sought for improvement purposes.”3 the sheik enlarges on this point, noting that his horses’ “blood is pure and free of admixture, except in instances when we think that our line will be improved by careful interbreeding with other strains.”4 he concludes by noting that because such breeding practices are commonly followed in arab countries very few “pure” arabians exist there, and “certainly none in any foreign country.”5 abu jaʿ kub ben ishak’s implication that purity and authenticity as ideologies have not been sacrificed through this breeding strategy is central to farley’s fictional representation of the arabian horse. by the 1980s, however, breeders of arabians in the west saw the situation differently when assessing real animals. though they continued to revere farley’s fictional horse, the perceived need to adhere to ideals of purity and authenticity to historic type raised critical questions about improvement. was improvement, for example, the antithesis of authenticity because improvement implied change from the original? could authenticity exist without genetic purity? in what follows, i take up questions of this nature by reviewing western approaches to the regulation of arabian horse breeding as it shifted west and globalized, focusing on the period between 1880 and 2020. the arabian was popular and influential in the west well before farley’s time. indeed, the importation of such animals to europe through agents from constantinople and towns in syria had been underway from at least the late sixteenth century, and oriental bloodstock were central to the creation of many breeds including, most notably, the english thoroughbred. by the nineteenth century, however, a growing focus on the arabian as a pure breed in itself had taken hold as a result of the expanding preoccupation of western travellers, explorers, and businessmen with the near and middle east. prior to the napoleonic campaigns of 1798–99, western interest in ottoman lands had centred on the desire to establish trade routes and political contacts in north africa. by the early 3 farley, the black stallion returns, 112. 4 farley, the black stallion returns, 115. 5 farley, the black stallion returns, 116. derry, westernizing arabian horses | 89 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) nineteenth century, however, the focus was beginning to shift. concern with the topography of the land and its minerals, with its human history (especially that of egypt), as well as the drive for scientific exploration (the river nile being a prime example) began to focus increased attention on the middle east. in the mid-nineteenth century, britain and france developed political and commercial aspirations for greater control of this territory, particularly egypt (and the building of the suez canal, for example). mapping and exploration became critical for western penetration of this territory, in turn encouraging further exploration and ultimately tourism. railway building amplified the sense of european presence, and turkey itself (the centre of the ottoman empire), syria, and iran (persia) all attracted significant european attention. ottoman and arabic cultures and customs offered what western newcomers increasingly defined as a sense of exoticism: painters and writers, for example, took the exotic east as their subject in greater numbers over the late nineteenth century.6 europeans often felt a sense of decay pervaded countries under ottoman control, moreover, making many western visitors come to believe it was their duty to rescue and preserve its treasures. the move to “preserve” the arabian horse within a western framework, keeping it pure rather than using it to upgrade european horses, was part of this orientalist trend in western thought. after the mid-nineteenth century, european travellers began to penetrate the interiors of syria in greater numbers in search of bedouin-bred arabian horses. by the late nineteenth century more adventurous visitors began extensive trips into central (now saudi) arabia with the same thought in mind. in europe, importers developed two different strategies to breeding these horses, both designed to maintain the arabian in its new environment. establishing arabians as a breed in the west: importing stallions to breed local mares in poland. the most important examples of the earliest method of breeding arabians outside the middle east rested on breeding up to intensified 6 for example, see stevens, the orientalists, 15–18. 90 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) arabian blood by mating imported arabian stallions with local mares. the system developed primarily in poland where, for centuries, princely stud owners had coveted and collected arabian horses. historically, many of these studs could be found on what was known as the “black road”, the main route taken by tartar and turk invasions up to 1750.7 around 1570, polish princes began the practice of capturing cavalry stallions during invasions and mating them to local mares. the breeding of “arabians” as such was not central and selection strategies beyond this simple formula were random and haphazard. over time, however, the poles came to believe that crossing eastern males into the national herd led to an improvement in polish horses. as prince roman sanguszko wrote in 1876, describing the state of his family’s stud at the end of the previous century: the herds of great landowners of the times were often mixed and led without any thought. the only saving grace was that from the older times, as a consequence of the turkish and tartar attacks, the hero families of our countries defending it [sic], […] they had the opportunity to acquire original eastern and arab horses through the wars, and from them, the better blood and the higher oriental race spread throughout the country.8 as relations with turkey stabilized and the wars ended in the early nineteenth century, the acquisition of eastern stallions became more difficult. landowners in poland interested in intensifying the “arabian” qualities of their animals, started to send agents to constantinople and centres in syria, like aleppo, to purchase stallions. as the century advanced, polish breeders relied less on their own agents and more on horse dealers from constantinople or aleppo to supply breeding stock. the poles usually made no effort to understand where the horses they imported originated or who their breeders were, and reliance on the judgement of agents/dealers for selection was the common practice — though an important exception 7 w. s. blunt, my diaries, 219 (13 september 1895). 8 sanguszko, sr. “prince sanguszko’s stud farm”. for this and all subsequent documents downloaded from skowronek.io: this website was constructed by lyman doyle and was also attached to the blog daughters of the wind until shortly before december 2022. the site is currently down but can be accessed via the internet archive’s wayback machine. http://skowronek.io derry, westernizing arabian horses | 91 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) was count wacław rzewuski, who had come to know and admire bedouins as a result of his travels through syria and imported more than one hundred animals when he returned to poland.9 as polish breeders began to focus on improving the horses in their studs, they adopted more structured breeding programmes utilizing newly purchased stallions. after generations of constant breeding with arabian stallions, the resulting horses carried a greater concentration of arabian blood.10 in effect, they became “arabians”. the history of the sanguszko family stud in sławuta (established in 1791 to work in concert with another family stud founded in the sixteenth century) illustrates many of the patterns described above. prior to 1800, the sanguszko herd had been a nondescript group of horses which resulted from random breeding involving some arabian blood.11 when the end of several wars resulted in a shortage of raided stallions, between 1800 and 1803 the sanguszko family began to follow the standard practice of purchasing stallions in the ottoman empire and despatched the nobleman kajetan burski to constantinople in search of horses. finding nothing of interest there, burski proceeded to aleppo and thence into the interior of syria (a practice virtually unheard of at that time) on various buying expeditions. by the late nineteenth century, though, the sanguszko family had come to rely on horse dealers in ottoman lands and followed the common custom of purchasing stallions rather than mares. the historic propensity of polish breeders to have little knowledge of where horses originated or how the arab people bred continued as well. in 1900, prince roman sanguszko jr., nephew of the elder prince roman and the sanguszko family member then in charge of the arabian horse operation at sławuta, admitted that he knew next to nothing about how breeding proceeded in arab countries: “i cannot judge about strains, the species, divisions and branches of the desert arabian horse […] i have never travelled to arabia,” he suggests, adding that “whether the nomadic bedouins will disappear in the less or more distant future, under the influence of european 9 archer et al., crabbet arabian stud, 18. 10 ott, “skowronek type”, 103; taverna, “comet”, 84. 11 sanguszko, “prince sanguszko’s stud farm”. 92 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) culture, […] it is difficult for me to judge.” sanguszko did, however, believe in the value of the arabian horse and saw “saving” the breed as his mission: “the arabian horse deserves to be preserved, there is no doubt about that.” he further argued that his horses had attained a degree of excellence while maintaining authenticity and so “completely preserved the type of the desert arabian horse.”12 the sanguszko interaction with arabians became more complicated when the sławuta operation split into two sections, a division initiated by the marriage of maria sanguszko to a member of the potocki family. many of the sławuta animals became part of potocki holdings as a result of this split, and in 1881 they would form the foundation of a new stud, antoniny, established by józef potocki (maria’s son).13 the affairs of the family studs — sławuta and antoniny — remained closely linked and private breeding records existed for these interconnected family operations. the basis of both studs, then, rested on bred-up animals with records linking them to the breeding practices of the late eighteenth century. it should be noted that it was not always clear whether the stallions acquired by the poles, either in raids against the ottomans or via agents sent to constantinople and aleppo, were in fact arabians. sanguszko, for example, spoke of “eastern” or “oriental” horses as opposed to “arabians” being obtained by the princely studs. many equine types passed through the general area and had commonly been traded in towns like aleppo. in other words, it is likely that some animals brought to arabian studs in central europe belonged to other breeds. this situation appears to be the case in the breeding and importing work of the branicki family whose stud, uzin, was founded around 1780. in 1895, wilfrid s. blunt, an english visitor and important commentator on arabian affairs in the west, noted that: the history of the stud, of which i have looked over the books, seems to begin authentically in 1813, though [it is said to have] forty years or more of antiquity. it can hardly be called a pure 12 sanguszko, jr., “letter”. the letter was published in shcherbatov and stroganov’s book of the arabian horse [книга объ арабской лошади], pp. 158–64. 13 parkinson, “skowronek”, 119. derry, westernizing arabian horses | 93 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) arab stud, as the stallions then imported stand entered as turk, turkoman, anatolian, persian, arab, and even in 1828 english, while the mares are equally mixed. it is clear that they have run too much after size; and at uzin the type nearly lost. […] the mares are far inferior in looks to the sanguscko mares, having coarse heads, long backs, and long legs. they carry their tails, however, generally well. one cannot avoid the conviction about them that they are of mixed origin. i only saw one mare […] one would have supposed to be an arab. they are breeding now largely from an english thoroughbred, which gives more saleable stock.14 establishing arabians as a breed in the west: importing mares and stallions for breeding in england the second approach to “preserving” arabians en route to creating what would become the modern arabian breed, involved having considerable knowledge of arab culture and breeding methodology: knowing exactly where the best horses were bred, undergoing difficult travels to reach them, and subsequently importing mares and stallions with little reliance on town agents. the intent was to produce arabians with no admixture of local european stock and to do so on the basis of personal research. the approach was initiated in 1877 by wilfrid and lady anne blunt when they founded the crabbet arabian stud in england. the blunts learned to write and speak arabic, and after communicating with arab breeders soon understood certain principles that were commonly held by desert bedouins throughout arab countries. namely, that young foals should be deprived of water for their first few days of life to test foal stamina in the environment; that seasons dictated when to breed and which animals should be bred more than any outward appreciation of quality in an individual. bedouins believed in telegony—the idea that if a mare carried a foal by an undesirable stallion (usually simply meaning one owned by a foreign tribe), all her future foals sired by different stallions would be tainted. because only mares that had never been covered by the wrong horse were considered to be of the 14 w. s. blunt, my diaries, 223–24 (20 september 1895). 94 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) highest quality, the family of such mares would easily become associated with quality; by inference, if a mare was clean she was also pure. conversely, foals born from the wrong crossing, as with their dams, became valueless for breeding purposes and therefore were viewed as being of low quality.15 (clearly at least some tenets of environmental breeding, which had dominated european approaches up until the late eighteenth century, also played a role in arab strategies.) the bedouin breeders also kept track of their mares by categorizing them within “strains”, thereby defining the family line to which any individual horse belonged via the strain relation of mares, not stallions. after reviewing reports made by western travellers, the blunts decided that the major bedouin breeding area was bordered by nejd in the south and the syrian desert in the north.16 nejd itself, they felt, was the most significant centre of quality horse breeding. taken in their entirety, the 1879 diaries of lady anne suggest that while the blunts recognized that bedouins produced good stock in parts of syria, iran and iraq, the couple believed that the greatest historical horse-breeding tribes of nejd were in present-day saudi arabia. it was here, then, that they concentrated the search for mares and stallions, although they did travel through syria and other countries in search of potential stock. the blunts also established an operation in egypt, sheykh obeyd, to breed stock and to house horses that later would be sent to their crabbet stud in england.17 authentic documentation from breeders’ private records remained as important to the blunts as good quality. they went to great lengths to ensure that documentation was as correct as possible and quickly learned to avoid horse-trading agents. from the beginning, moreover, the blunts were interested in maintaining the authenticity of the original arabian horse rather than breeding for improvement. the couple bred to perpetuate horses defined as “pure”, or asil, meaning they traced authentically on all sides to bedouin breeding. if aims of improvement did not guide crabbet breeding 15 edwards, “to progress… or regress”, 13–14. 16 archer et al., crabbet arabian stud, 16; blunt-lytton, authentic arabian horse, 160. 17 see upton, desert heritage, 20, 36, 68, 80, 88. derry, westernizing arabian horses | 95 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) plans, however, the blunts diligently watched for any degeneration in quality. culling was important to ensure the continuation of authentic quality, as wilfrid noted in 1904: “to maintain the stud its highest perfection, all individuals should be weeded out of it every year which fail to come up to a certain standard of physical form.”18 knowledgeable as they were about the traditional culture surrounding the arabian, the blunts chose not to strain breed their arabians. instead, they devised a way to keep track of the lines from which they were breeding based on tail female descent. thus, for example, any horse, mare or stallion, with a name starting with r descended on its dam’s side from the desert-bred mare rodania,19 while any horse that descended from the desert-bred mare dajania on the dam’s side had a name that started with n, for nefisa, dajania’s daughter. despite this method of record-keeping, western attitudes to the relative importance of mares to stallions continued to underpin their breeding program. the production of good stallions was the object of the stud, and mares were evaluated according to their ability to produce them. “it is better [that good mare lines] should be lost when after three generations they have failed to produce a sire of the first class”, wilfrid opined, since only certain mare lines produce “colts worthy of being used as sires.”20 lady anne planned to write a book about the background and history of arabian breeding based on her extensive first-hand knowledge. she died in 1917 before completing the project, however, leaving an incomplete manuscript, which was published in 1944 by her daughter, lady wentworth, in her book the authentic arabian. lady anne was particularly interested in how the myths and stories surrounding the antiquity of the breed developed. she outlined the way the culture concerning the beginnings of the arabian had evolved over the years, particularly in nejd. the original outlook about origin derived from word-of-mouth attitudes that developed in what she called the “inner circle”, the area in central saudi arabia known 18 w. s. blunt, quoted in archer et al., crabbet arabian stud, 225. 19 edwards, “remember the mare”, 27. 20 w. s. blunt, quoted in archer et al., crabbet arabian stud, 225–6. 96 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) as the plateau of nejd. according to nejd tradition, wild horses had been caught and tamed “in the primitive days of old”. the wild ones subsequently died out, but the tamed horses received no special treatment to ensure that animals “kept [their] pure wild type unchanged”. lady anne believed that islamic religion introduced new ideas about where the arabian came from — ideas based, as far as she was concerned, on fable. these ideas were particularly strong in the towns or oases, places traditionally looked down on by the desert bedouins who thought their compatriots had been corrupted. “thus,” lady anne suggested, “a new body of tradition was got together of a mixed if not altogether spurious kind,” but one which more accurately should be called “mohammedan” rather than arabic. the moslem version, she argued, “has been repeated by every subsequent writer on arabian matters until it has become almost impossible to distinguish what is of value in it and what worthless.”21 as far as lady anne was concerned, the moslem version not only coloured, but also formed the basis of, western travellers’ views (or what she described as a third vision of the arabian’s past) because these people rarely ventured into remote parts of the desert.22 lady anne believed, then, there were three separate cultures regarding the arabian; the original nejd one (the most authentic), the broader town interpretation highly coloured by moslem culture and common in arab countries, and the western view which was largely based on and similar to the generalized arabic town attitude. the blunts were aware of and interested in the princely studs existing in poland, and over the years between the 1880s and roughly 1910 often visited them. the couple appreciated the work of the polish princes and the relative antiquity of the establishments (compared to their own) devoted to breeding arabians. lady anne admired the animals that conformed to authentic type at antoniny, for example, but concerns about their lack of purity held the blunts back from purchasing any stock. for lady anne, quality and even authenticity to type could not overcome their lack of purity. after visiting the stud in 1884, she wrote: 21 a. blunt, quoted in blunt-lytton, authentic arabian horse, 86, 87, 89–92. 22 a. blunt, quoted in blunt-lytton, authentic arabian horse, 134, 135, 140–3, 148. derry, westernizing arabian horses | 97 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) i should very much like to have something from this stud if we could find a pure one for sale. […] i wished i could have made a picture of the herd of mares grazing on the edge of the oak forest. it was a lovely sight — for looking at them in that way one could not see the flaws of descent […] in looking over the stud book, i found that hardly any one of the mares but has a cross in her pedigree — it would therefore be absurd to us to buy anything now; perhaps later on if one of the finest were for sale one might buy her as a specimen, but a colt from any of these would not be valid for breeding.23 westernizing the desert arabian: the establishment of pedigree registry the establishment of a stud in england quickly triggered the desire to standardize the arabian along the english system of purebred breeding — a move that, in the end, would “westernize” the arabian as an established breed. evaluation and monetary worth, first in britain and subsequently in international circles, rested on an animal being defined as “purebred” (having a pedigree generated by a public registry rather than an owner-breeder pedigree). for their model, the blunts turned to the only public registry for horses at the time, the general stud book (gsb), which was run and operated by the weatherby family since the late eighteenth century. the gsb generated pedigrees for the english thoroughbred and held the power both to qualify animals for entry in the racing industry and to include or exclude new entries. the gsb provided the model for the registry of papered racehorses in other countries as well and had become the standard used by jockey clubs in france, the united states, and australia. the weatherby family sympathized with the blunts’ cause because of the historically close relationship of the arabian to the thoroughbred and james weatherby agreed to open a special section of the gsb for arabians in 1877, thereby identifying the arabian as a breed.24 pedigrees involving standard genealogy would carry no strain 23 a. blunt, “personal journals”. 24 archer et al., crabbet arabian stud, 170. 98 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) information other than a reference to foundation animals as “desert bred”. any registered horse could, if bred to a registered horse, have future progeny entered in the book. root documentation gave evidence of purity in foundation animals, making correct information important for acceptance by the registry. however, the correctness of what had been used to identify “purity” became both unimportant and superfluous once entry into the stud book had been achieved. authenticity to purity was thus guaranteed by the prestige associated with gsb pedigrees. as had been the case with the thoroughbred, weatherby planned to generate a pool of animals from which all future stock would be bred so that at some point the book would be closed to outside entries. the gsb model almost immediately created difficulties for breeders dispersed across diverse geographies and traditions. arabians in continental europe held only pedigrees generated by the breeder and no central public way of collecting pedigrees existed. many of the significant horses bred as arabians in europe originated in poland, and these animals carried pedigrees emanating from the stud books of various princely breeders which clearly indicated the bred-up status of the animals. the situation, it seemed to some, should be addressed: in 1900, several russian breeders began to consider how to address the difference between the importing systems of the polish princes and that of the blunts. documenting “purity” via public records (not just through breeder records), they argued, could distinguish animals that might look like arabians but were not pure, from those that were in fact pure from a desert background. increasingly aware of the crabbet stud but relying heavily on polish arabians (which tended to be produced in what was russian poland), the russians similarly began to believe that a public registry system ought to be developed in russia. arabian horse breeding was not new to russia in 1900. the russian imperial family and aristocracy had been using both arabians and turkomans for horse breeding for centuries. in 1778, count alexei orlov founded a stud based on gifts from the sultan of turkey; from these stallions, he would develop the orlov trotter by crossing them derry, westernizing arabian horses | 99 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) on local mares.25 stud records for all russian operations were privately kept at this time, as was the case in poland. more studs developed over the nineteenth century. prompted by interest in the near and middle east and its culture, prince alexander grigorievich shcherbatov and his brother-in-law count sergei alexandrovich stroganov established an arabian stud and in 1889 travelled to syria in search of pure mares and stallions. in 1900, they published the book of the arabian horse (книга объ арабской лошади, translated into english as the arabian horse: a survey in 1989) in which they discussed purity and bedouin strains. shcherbatov used his imports for crossbreeding or upgrading local animals, but from the beginning stroganov wanted to preserve the arabian in its pure state and by 1899 there were sixty-six horses of one hundred per cent arabian background in his operation. the following year, he bought an imported arabian mare from wilfrid blunt at a horse show in france for 10,000 francs.26 shcherbatov and stroganov devised a strategy for organizing a russian public stud book based on two separate sections, one for pure arabians and one for bred-up arabians. they then presented their proposal to the imperial government. before authorizing it, the main managing department of state horse breeding of russia decided to investigate the matter and sent a questionnaire to prince roman sanguszko jr., then the primary breeder in poland. sanguszko responded that he thought it undesirable to separate “non-pure” animals from a list comprised of horses that were one hundred per cent arabian in a stud book. while his animals did not descend on all lines from desert-bred imports, he noted that they were as good or better in quality than those that did. improvement as much as authenticity had always been important to polish breeders, and sanguszko indicated his belief that purity was not an issue of authenticity or improvement: the [newly proposed russian] stud book, in my opinion, should comprise only one section of arabian horses, without differentiating between pureblood [one hundred per cent arabian] 25 greely, arabian exodus, 170. 26 w. s. blunt, my diaries, 458 (7 september 1900). 100 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) and purebred [with less than one hundred but more than fifty per cent]. horses that originated exclusively from pure arabian ancestors, i.e. not having even one drop of any other blood, besides the arabian, and horses of the famous arabian horse breeding farms in russia [most polish studs were in polish russia] which have at least ⅔ or 66% of pure arabian blood, should be included in this book, and their pedigree must be proven.27 in its final deliberations, the imperial government also addressed the blunt method, characterizing it as follows: in general, it should be admitted that before mr. w. blunt, who founded his farm at crabbet park (england) in 1878, pureblood arabian horse breeding in europe did not exist. this is because the arab bedouins’ horse breeding was not studied enough at the time, and under the name of arabian horses the european farms were accepting all kinds of horses purchased in the east, as soon as they had a distinctive type.28 commenting on the arabian situation in europe, the russian government set out how the purity/authenticity ethos appeared to be opposed to the improvement ethos under western standards, using the crabbet stud as an example. the blunts’ intention, the report noted, was to “exclude all horses that don’t fit into arabian type, whatever the other individual qualities are, since the goal of the stud is not to improve the composition, according to european concepts, but to preserve the arabian horse in a state it existed in since ancient times in its homeland.”29 despite sanguszko’s reservations, the russian stud book was established in 1903 with separate pure and bred-up sections. with the russian revolution, however, the stud book collapsed as did the breeding operations of the two russians who had proposed it. shcherbatov died in 1915, and stroganov (who died in 1923) fled to paris. none of the horses belonging to either of these breeders 27 sanguszko, jr., “letter”. 28 “stud book of arabian horses”. for the original russian, see https://vivaldi.nlr.ru/ bv000070233/view/?#page=22. 29 “stud book of arabian horses”. https://vivaldi.nlr.ru/bv000070233/view/?#page=22 https://vivaldi.nlr.ru/bv000070233/view/?#page=22 derry, westernizing arabian horses | 101 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) survived and when the russian government re-established a horse breeding centre, tersk, at stroganov’s estate in 1921 it was with entirely new breeding stock. initially, tersk focused on local crossbred types but shifted in 1926 to being a purebred arabian breeding operation. none of stroganov’s lines were part of the new stud. instead, horses acquired by tersk often came from polish animals of sanguszko background or english animals based on the same lines. a newly established russian registry book that pedigreed these animals had only a purebred section. before the collapse of the 1903 russian stud book, the prototype of a public registry which would endure across europe (russia included) and ultimately globally, was founded in 1908 in the united states. the new american stud book separated the arabian horse from the parallel thoroughbred registry associated with the gsb by establishing a national registry devoted specifically to the arabian. this stud book entrenched the pattern of maintaining only a purebred section: there was no section for bred-up animals and no pathway for admission to purebred status based on breeding up to an accepted percentage. the american registry evolved from events that began in 1906, the year in which homer davenport brought back a group of arabians from syria along with a bedouin groom. davenport did not have what was deemed to be accurate documentation of their “desert” breeding and had failed to take the horses through england to acquire pedigrees from the gsb. these omissions meant that in the united states no registry would accept them because the jockey club did not register foreign animals without gsb papers. the situation was made worse by new american legislation. in 1906, the bureau of animal industry, the arbiter of what qualified as a purebred animal because of the united states department of agriculture’s role in tariff regulations set out by the treasury department, demanded registration in american books was necessary to obtain purebred status. to provide his horses with pedigrees, davenport decided to establish a new registry for arabian horses in 1908.30 30 “breeders of the northeast”, 143–4; craver, “davenport arabian horses”, 1–5. 102 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the resulting organization, the arabian horse club of america, inc. (renamed several times, before finally settling on the arabian horse registry of america, inc., or ahra, in 1969) set up rules to define the eligibility status for entry into the registry. centrally, it established both that no breeding-up would be recognized in horses accorded purebred status, and that all horses entered had to have documentation establishing descent entirely from horses bred in the desert. davenport’s arabians were grandfathered in, but future imports would be accepted as purebred only if their purity could be authenticated with proper documentation. entry requirements to the ahra fell into two separate sections, both guided by the mission statement to preserve desert purity. the first was the “non-discretionary” group, which required no documentation and automatically accepted applicants as pure. in 1908 this group included arabian horses from the jockey club stud books of britain, france, australia, and the united states. in the future, horses emanating from other sources would be admitted on a “discretionary” basis and would require supporting documentation to establish their purity. ahra directors were given the power to accept or reject such documentation, effectively making them gatekeepers of purebred status. the problem of bred-up arabians (those never defined as entirely descended from the desert) becoming part of the american system and later the world system was not solved by this new strategy for assessing “purity” and therefore authenticity. furthermore, the new way of assessing purity brought with it the capacity for individuals to serve their own interests because of their power to regulate, especially when it came to importing. the heyday of the western trade in arabians under the gsb and ahra, 1920–1960. the centre of the arabian horse world in the west between 1920 and 1960 was the crabbet stud in england, whose trade with breeders in the united states shaped ideologies of purebred breeding to a considerable extent. in the early part of the twentieth century, the crabbet operation passed into the hands of wilfrid and anne blunt’s daughter, judith blunt lytton (later lady wentworth). following her derry, westernizing arabian horses | 103 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) parents’ practice, wentworth did not breed by strain; however, she did work to improve the original type. when some accused her of diverging from authentic style, she responded that “if being ‘off-type’ means having higher withers, longer rein and curve of neck, stronger and broader quarters and better hocks, together with freer hock action, then i am proud to say that i have deliberately bred for these points and shall continue to do so.”31 wentworth’s breeding philosophy of improving from foundation stock dovetailed both with the dominant approaches to arabian horse breeding in europe and north america at the time, and with views about the role authenticity should play in breeding decisions. until mid-century it was generally accepted that animals could be both true to authentic style and improved, an outlook not unlike that articulated by farley in the black stallion returns (1945). registry systems played a significant, but perhaps more importantly, hidden role in the establishment of this position, which in the end equated authenticity with purity. (farley paid little attention to the impact of registries, perhaps because their influence was not publicly apparent at the time he wrote his books.) the fact that wentworth worked within the accepted registry systems — the gsb and the ahra — meant that neither the purity nor authenticity of her stock would be questioned. wentworth utilized the desert blunt lines at crabbet and to some degree relied on the research carried out by her mother, lady anne blunt, but her most important innovation would be the introduction and widespread use of the polish stallion skowronek, who had been imported to england in 1913 by an american.32 skowronek was bred by count potocki at the antoniny stud in poland and foaled in 1908. to pedigree the horse in the general stud book, wentworth obtained papers verifying the horse’s background from the breeder’s son, józef potocki, jr. this horse would be the last foundation animal to be pedigreed by the gsb as the book was subsequently closed to new unregistered stock. potocki reported from his family records that skowronek’s sire, ibrahim, had been brought to poland in 1907 by count 31 reese, the kellogg arabians, 43. 32 the authentic arabian horse provides a detailed description of wentworth’s views on breeding, strains, and authenticity in the true arabian. 104 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) józef potocki sr., having been purchased in odessa through an agent who had acquired the horse in the “orient”. the animal was documented as sired by heifer, out of lafitte.33 skowronek’s dam, jaskolka, had been bred in poland from polish stock. while virtually nothing more could be discovered about skowronek’s sire’s background, his dam was another matter. in this, potocki had been less than complete in providing information about jaskolka to the gsb in 1919. to begin with, it is clear from the 1903 russian stud book that the mare came from a bred-up background. part one of the book covered all horses that had descended entirely from animals imported from the best breeding tribes in arab countries, and part two set out all horses of largely arabian blood whose pedigrees contained some non-arabian ancestors. no horse owned by the potocki family gained entry to part one and jaskolka was listed in part two.34 real evidence also exists to show that she did not qualify for part one: a history of the sanguszko family stud written in 1876 and published in the united states in the 1960s notes that all potocki imports of arabians before 1818–19 had been stallions. purebred mares did not come into the arabian breeding herd until later and thus horses that traced to the pre-1819 sanguszko stud records (like jaskolka) could not be described as purebred.35 despite this issue, the registration of skowronek in the gsb ensured that any lack of purity in his background would not impact the marketing of his progeny internationally. wentworth’s “authentic” arabians bred after 1920 resulted predominantly from the cross of skowronek on the old blunt imported lines, and by 1960 skowronek had created by far the greatest sire line of arabians in the united states.36 changes in poland after 1920 raised another issue that would be ongoing: the relationship of a foreign government-regulated public stud other than the gsb with the ahra. the situation that evolved in poland challenged the non-discretionary views of the ahra and 33 edwards, “great strain robbery, pt. 2”, 22. 34 see evidence in the “stud book of arabian horses”. 35 waho, “is purity the issue?” see also “prince sanguszko’s stud farm”. 36 edwards, “skowronek… three to one”, 26–28. derry, westernizing arabian horses | 105 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) in doing so exposed the difficulty of maintaining “purity” on the evidence of foreign registries. built on the remnants of the princely studs shattered by the first world war, a new public registry under the polish government’s minister of agriculture was established in 1926 on the model of and complying with the procedures of the purebred system.37 breeding centres subsequently emerged with surviving horses from the old private studs serving as foundation stock for these new operations.38 it would be argued that the poles deliberately concentrated on the continued use of old polish lines which had emanated from quality breeders.39 since the poles had always bred for what they deemed improvement as much as for authenticity to type, no re-start based on one hundred per cent purity was planned. impressed by the athletic ability of polish-bred horses (as well as noting that skowronek had been bred in poland), american directors of the ahra became interested in importing polish horses. to avoid the difficulties of these horses being on the discretionary list, in 1937 they placed the polish book in the non-discretionary section, thereby allowing the registration of polish horses in the us without questions about their background. admittance through the non-discretionary section meant that historically bred-up animals would be defined as one hundred per cent pure, thus serving the personal interest of the directors responsible for the decision. purity/authenticity concerns under registry definitions, 1950–1970. despite the ubiquity of skowronek genetics in american arabians and a rising interest in imported polish horses, many breeders in the us after 1960 began to question whether western registry systems had actually preserved the purity of the desert horse. underpinning 37 wilfrid blunt described the situation for the sanguzsko family in his diary: “slavuta and its stud have acquired a tragic notoriety […], having been the scene of one of those hideous outrages which distinguished the bolshevik revolution of 1917. prince sanguscko, the owner of the stud, was in his country house at slavuta, when a number of disbanded soldiers recently returned from the russian army broke into his house and took him out of it and brutally ill-treated him, killing him at last with their bayonets and then pillaging the château and destroying the whole of his arabian stud.” my diaries, 221 (14 september 1895). 38 lindsay, “arabian breeding”, 26. 39 marston, “blue influence”, 131. 106 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) this shift were carl raswan’s ideas concerning the loss of bedouin breeding techniques articulated in his books and horse index. raswan, whose original name was carl reinhardt schmidt, travelled extensively in syria during the years around the first world war. born in germany in 1893, he became an american citizen in 1927 and changed his name to that of his favourite arabian stallion (ironically not a product of pure bedouin stock but rather a son of skowronek, bred by lady wentworth). passionate about arabian horses, raswan believed that arabian horse breeding in the west had moved away from arabic roots and culture, thereby resulting in a breed that was not authentic. purity to what he believed were arab ways became raswan’s obsession. acting as an agent, he returned to syria a number of times in the 1920s and early thirties and became acquainted with both town and bedouin arabs. long after his travels, he wrote about breeding techniques of the arab people while living in the united states (and later mexico). raswan died in 1966 but his ideas about breeding, more than any animal he either bred or imported, endured. in attempting to reintroduce authenticity to western breeding, raswan focused on the strain system. for him, strains and culture were at the heart of bedouin breeding and therefore required for authenticity. breeding by strain had never taken hold in the west and the dominance of breeding that openly avoided purity — such as that found in skowronek’s background, for example — represented the ultimate in degradation of the arabian horse to raswan. indeed, “western” concerns with quality, improvement, and even beauty played no part in raswan’s theories. despite this, and intriguingly, raswan’s correspondence with w. k. kellogg in 1926 expressed overpowering appreciation for skowronek: skowronek is [a] pure white arab stallion. he has never had a rival, won all championship and is undefeatable and not in all history is known to have another arab existed of his type outside arabia. he is the most beautiful which i ever saw and has a spiritual to his physical which is beyond description […]. he seems to be of an unearthly creation.40 40 raswan to w. k. kellogg, 4 february, 1926, quoted in parkinson, romance, 52. derry, westernizing arabian horses | 107 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the horse also seemed to evoke nostalgia for raswan’s days of freedom in the desert away from the problems of the west, and this way of life as much as the arabian animal itself seemed to inform his passionate belief in the need for breeding reform. according to raswan, the arabian horse had been created within three overarching strains (all with numerous sub-strains) associated with three distinct physical types: the saklawi (refined, elegant, and feminine), the kuhaylan (powerful, bold, and masculine), and the muniqi (with a racier build and usually with the forequarters more developed than the hindquarters).41 raswan believed both that the arabs had practised strain breeding and also inbreeding and that western breeders should do their best to return the modern arabian to the authentic trueness of type found in the three strains. for raswan, this could be accomplished by undertaking a number of steps. first, by breeding away from the muniqi strain, which he claimed was impure because of one bedouin cross with a turkoman stallion in the seventeenth century (a pure or asil arabian had no muniqi blood). raswan stated that europeans had in the past favoured muniqis because of their racing ability, and that this preference had stimulated their production for the european market. among bedouins, however, muniqi strains were avoided.42 second, by placing primary emphasis on female lines, as had been the case in arab countries. raswan thus advised dropping the western obsession with stallions. third, by expecting intensification of the basic family strain characteristics when horses are bred to produce concentration within a strain, especially where both parents follow the same strain pattern in tail female. and finally, by inbreeding whenever possible.43 one follower of the raswan system stated that “the challenge of […] breeding has not been in the production of good horses because this has resulted from the automatic biological processes.”44 41 forbis, the classic arabian horse, 254, 275. these names can all be spelled in a variety of ways: e.g. seglawi, saqlawi; keheilan, kehilan; mannakey, maneghi. 42 “raswan”, arabiana, 148; ott, “arabian types and strains”, 142, 145, 152; craver, “davenport arabians at craver farms”, 10–11; edwards, “letter”, 15. 43 craver, “davenport arabians at craver farms”, 10. 44 craver, “davenport arabians at craver farms”, 11. 108 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) throughout the 1960s, americans kathleen ott and her daughter jane actively took up raswan’s fight to return to “authentic” breeding practices. kathleen ott wrote extensively about the need to return to strain breeding and jane ott organized a plan for preserving true arabians on a percentage basis. known as the blue star system, jane ott’s “blue star” designation applied to horses that descended on all sides to roots with no muniqi blood. “blue list” animals traced to these roots as well, but with one to fifty per cent breeding of muniqi. all other arabians were assigned to a “general list”.45 studs operating under the blue star system began to practice inbreeding within strains to preserve true (non muniqi) type. breeders claimed that perpetuating type defined the highest quality and that any attempts at improvement—including for beauty—meant degradation. jane ott also addressed the issue of muniqi and/or turkoman influence. to begin with, she believed turkoman blood was common in horses bought by agents in syria despite claims that these animals were pure arabians.46 she explained the advent of muniqi in arabians as follows: the muniqiyat strains represent the only known case in which a bedouin tribe permitted an alien stallion to serve an arabian mare. the 17th century salqa bedouins allowed a cross of turcoman (already a grade-arabian stock) into their muniqi strain. this produced an increase in size and sprint-speed, with a loss of compactness and refinement. the new muniqi eventually spread through most if not all the old muniqi, and, in the course of three centuries, has infiltrated seven of the other nineteen strains. […] the bedouins valued the muniqiyat strains, […] but never accepted them as “asil” […]. foreigners, on the other hand, usually fell head over heels for the muniqi at first sight and preferred it to every other strain, possibly because of its resemblance to the english thoroughbred, a breed which the muniqiyat arabians played a principal part in founding.47 there was a strong reaction by establishment breeders against the raswan and ott theories. these breeders not only relied heavily 45 ott, “arabian types and strains”, 142, 145, 152; “blue star arabians”, 133–35. 46 ott, “the sub-list basilisks”, 95. 47 ott, “grant and huntington importations”, 139, 141. derry, westernizing arabian horses | 109 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) on skowronek genetics, but also believed in striving for superior type — particularly better structured legs — while maintaining the head and neck characteristics so desirable in arabians. gladys brown edwards, a renowned expert on the history and breeding of arabians who worked for the w. k. kellogg arabian breeding centre in california during the 1930s and early forties, became a major spokesperson for the status quo, which included recognition for the breeding quality of skowronek. edwards rejected theories that disfavoured improvement breeding, abandoned ideals of beauty, and excluded skowronek lines. she labelled the new style of authenticity-driven breeders the “anties” because they were opposed to any arabian not derived from or duplicating (as they defined it) methods of pure bedouin breeding. an “anti” bomb had been “dropped on poland”, edwards suggested, “resulting in a blackout of all polish bloodlines as far as the anties’ conception of ‘purity’ was concerned. the target, of course, was skowronek.”48 she also noted the implication that in the american registry pedigreed half-breeds were regarded as pure. in her response to “anti-ism” edwards agreed with the polish stud book’s founder edward skorkowski that “one would be crazy to deny the purity of skowronek’s blood, the horse of the century.”49 through the early 1960s, edwards led the crusade against what she saw as the raswan anti-improvement movement. in “to progress...or regress that is the question”, edwards asked readers of the arab horse journal to consider whether “your horse descended from certain celebrated individuals or has it ascended from them?” edwards further argued that “to scrap such benefit and regress into yesteryear does not seem in accord with american initiative and progress.”50 improvement breeding and the systems designed to bring about improvement had, as far as she was concerned, clearly replaced the antiquated thinking and methods that dominated in europe until the late eighteenth century. the refinement found in skowronek’s offspring was central to her objection to raswan’s theory concerning the muniqi strain: 48 edwards, “great strain robbery, pt. 1”, 23. 49 edwards, “great strain robbery, pt. 1”, 29. 50 edwards, “to progress... or regress”, 12–16. 110 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the [muniqi] is no more “angular” than is any other strain. […] at any rate, the [muniqi] was no more “impure” than any other, and rawsan’s vague story about one obscure tribe crossing with “turcoman stallions” (he first said one, then kept adding to them — himself — not the tribe — though on paper of course [)] — and pow!  — automatically all [muniqi] horses in arabia became contaminated!51 the continued entrenchment of the western registry system. breeding under the western pedigree system with its unclear attitude to “purity” remained in place despite the undercurrents of a desire to re-instate an emphasis on the horse as a product of arabic culture. the arabian horse industry in the west exploded after 1970 following the american acceptance of many new european national registries.52 the influence of raswan and strain theory, however, continued to influence the breed via the rise of what might be called artificial western “strains” over the late 1970s and early 1980s, including so-called straight russian arabians (basically horses of egyptian, polish and crabbet breeding). polish horses continued to command attention and their breeding mushroomed after the stallion bask was imported to america in 1963. american demand for polish horses expanded to include animals bred in holland, britain, and germany and the hot market was stoked by the structure of the american tax system, which offered tax advantages to investors in the horse industry. the tax reform act of 1986 changed the situation by introducing the idea of passive and active investment. subsequently, tax advantages would be significantly reduced for those who owned horses as a passive investor or through passive activity (an investment partnership).53 as tax shelters for people investing in arabians in the united states disappeared, the arabian 51 edwards, “letter”, 15. 52 for more detail on the western arabian horse industry, see derry, bred for perfection; horses in society; and made to order. 53 email to the author from pricewaterhousecoopers, about american taxes, 18 january, 2000. for a detailed review of how the tax act affected horse owners, see geske, “tax tips”, 132, 129. derry, westernizing arabian horses | 111 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) horse industry was dramatically reshaped. with this reduction in american demand, a collapse of the hot global market for arabian horses followed. when the dust from this downturn settled in the 1990s, the arabian horse industry revived but its character was changed significantly. it now reflected a more fully globalized market involving many countries in the middle east as well as traditional centres like europe and north america. in part, this resulted from the unifying power of the world arabian horse organization (waho), founded in 1967. waho would come to act as an umbrella organization for world trade, but it did so under western registry conditions. as christoph lange explains: with waho came a new definition of the arabian horse, which did for the arabian breed in the twentieth century what the british general stud book did for the thoroughbred in the eighteenth century: it consolidated the arabian’s status as a global breed, established a blueprint for closed stud books, and placed control of its registry in the hands of a small but powerful group of euro-american private breeders. perhaps most influentially, waho introduced a new breeding definition embedded in a transnational bureaucratic infrastructure. the political consequences of this shift produced a regulative regime of inclusion and exclusion focusing on pedigree and questions of breed purity.54 from the beginning, waho defined purity through the mechanics of the western purebred system by imposing regulations for public recording. most crucially, registries of countries joining waho were required to conform to waho’s rules for pedigree standards. as early as 1972, however, it became apparent that streamlining the world’s registries would not be a straightforward process. this was immediately evident in spain, where the spanish civil war had disrupted famous studs — most importantly that of the duke of veragua — resulting not in the loss of the horses, but rather in the loss of pedigrees. everyone knew the surviving horses were purebred arabians (many were descendants of crabbet horses with skowronek bloodlines), 54 lange, “making and remaking”, 239. 112 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) but no one could be sure of the correct sires and dams.55 the problem of validating spanish pedigrees was solved when waho members agreed to recognize the spanish horses descending from the duke of veragua’s stud simply as “veragua”. the veragua issue demonstrated that if concerns over purity were not resolved the international market would not function smoothly. it was therefore important to reach a transnational agreement about how to define a pure arabian. waho set up a committee that spent considerable time working on the problem of defining purity. at the 1974 waho meeting in malmö, sweden, members ratified the proposed definition put forward by the committee, which stated that “a purebred arabian horse is one which appeared in any purebred arabian stud book or registry listed by waho as acceptable.”56 despite the malmö agreement, however, disputes about the purity of contentious horses, and therefore the pedigrees of animals emanating from them, continued to fracture the international market. in the 1990s, for example, a dispute over the stallion kurdo iii brought the purity (and hence the marketability) of many south american horses into question. waho itself became divided over the issue, a situation that threatened the stability of various national registries. despite these setbacks, the power of waho continued to grow and it effectively became the titular head and governing body of the global arabian horse world. today, the only recognized “pure arabians” in the world are those accepted by waho since horses with pedigrees from national stud books rejected by waho are excluded from the global arabian community. the national registries consolidated under waho thus form a closed circle that has been defined by anthropologists as “kula”: an idea used to describe not only the exclusive closed nature of a breeding circle, but also the complex dynamics of ritualization and commodification common to the group.57 in effect, waho exists as a marketing cartel with cultural overtones. membership comprises an elite and closed body of breeders who function in a sealed-off world that isolates non-members from the 55 “spanish arabian stud book”, 237, 240, 241. 56 “1974 waho conference”, 18. 57 lange, “global arabian horse kula”. see also ziegler, “kula ring”, 39–60. derry, westernizing arabian horses | 113 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) economics, culture, and breeding operations within its specialized society. within the waho, the western system of defining purity has prevailed.58 however, the desire for closer allegiance to bedouin traditions involving strain breeding and assessment of purity on that basis has not necessarily been incompatible with the overarching western system, and therefore has not vanished among arabian breeders in various parts of the world. it is particularly noteworthy that raswan’s passionate and even romantic vision has continued to inspire breeders even if few now implement his theories. in a conversation on an internet forum in 2010, for example, lebanese breeder edouard al-dahdah noted that he admires raswan’s passionate vision, despite his belief that “raswan’s monumental body of work (his index) is cryptic, garbled, ambiguous, incoherent, confusing and downright contradictory. it generally complicates rather than clarifies.”59 replies to this comment suggested general agreement but most posters also expressed deep admiration for the man and his ideals. one noted that “raswan raised awareness for preservation of the authentic arabian horse, at a time when people just bred one arabian to another […]. whether you agree or disagree with rawsan’s theories, whether you think he was a charlatan or a hero is not as important as his overall general message calling for the preservation of the asil.” it could thus be argued that the main significance of rawsan’s influence rests on his reintroduction of the importance of arab thinking and culture to debate about the authenticity of the arabian. five different groups devoted to preserving both purity and bedouin theory in the breeding of arabians still exist today: the blue catalog, the pyramid society, al khamsa, and the asil club. a group of international breeders who support the dream of preserving bedouin standards within the western registry system issued a manifesto in 2022 outlining what made an arabian pure to its past.60 58 for more on the waho and its effects on middle eastern countries, see lange, “decolonizing the arabian horse”. 59 on carl raswan as a reliable source of scholarly information on arabian horses see edouard al-dahdah’s blog daughters of the wind: https://daughterofthewind.org/. 60 see: https://arabianhorsemanifesto.org/. https://daughterofthewind.org/ https://arabianhorsemanifesto.org/ 114 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) modern genetics and the purity / authenticity myth. by now it should be apparent that the “turkoman”, an oriental horse found in many ottoman lands often in conjunction with arabians, lurks behind much of this story — and particularly the period covering the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. the exact location where the two breeds might have simultaneously existed in the middle east remains unclear, but both types could be found in europe as early as the sixteenth century. whether an imported horse was an arabian or a turkoman has historically been difficult to determine. the founding stallions of the thoroughbred breed, for example, were often referred to as “turks” but at the same time were said to be arabians. it even appears that sometimes “turk” was a synonym for arabian. the records of polish princes who presided over early arabian studs show evidence of imported “turkomans”, and in the 1890s, wilfrid blunt wondered if these “turkomans” were in reality arabians. raswan spoke of turkoman crosses on particular arabians, and jane ott believed many of the horses sold by agents in syrian towns were in fact turkomans. this breed of oriental horse was developed in the desert north of arabia in the steppes of central asia. long bodied, slender, tough, and fast, the type was favoured both in the ottoman empire and europe.61 in 1813, for example, john m. kinneir reported that in persia it was common to cross turkomans on arabians.62 european wars with the ottomans often resulted in the importation of turkoman horses for the cavalry. the turkoman is believed to be extinct today but with a close living relative, the akhal-teke. recent genomic work confirms the validity of arguments that turkoman genetics are central to breeds such as the thoroughbred. as donna landry points out, “the resemblance, even today, between the english horse [thoroughbred] and the turkoman — in the form of the modern akhal-teke — is so striking, and so in contrast to the relative lack of resemblance between the english horse and the purebred arabian […] that it appears the turkic contribution has been hidden in plain sight.”63 among the more 61 see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/turkoman_horse. 62 landry, “disappearance of the turk”, 41. 63 landry, “disappearance of the turk”, 38. about:blank derry, westernizing arabian horses | 115 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) important findings related to dna studies of turkoman genetics is that our understanding of the lineage of the three founding stallions of the thoroughbred breed — the darley arabian (the most significant), the godolphin barb, and the byerly turk — were all turkomans by male descent.64 turkoman stallions were thus clearly being used extensively to improve horses in europe, making it attractive for breeders in the middle east to cross turkomans on arabians to produce stock for export to europe. jane ott suggests as much, and lady anne blunt infers the same. how frequently the turkoman was interbred with the arabian is not known, but the potentiality raises interesting questions related to the antiquity of arabian purity. modern genomics has also done much to illuminate the arabian’s past revealing, for example, information about genetic diversity and the modern pursuit of purity in arabians. it seems evident that the broad diversity evident in the dna of polish arabians, especially in relation to low diversity levels in other north american and european arabians, resulted from the long history of upgrading local stock with stallions among early polish breeders. the greatest genetic diversity in arabians, however, can be found in middle eastern countries, indicating that the movement of horses to the west initiated a trend towards diversity loss. generations of inbreeding in the animals originally imported to the west and strict emphasis on the centrality of imported genetics to ideologies of purity have therefore come at a cost for breeders outside the middle east. if further dna studies link the turkoman more closely to the past of the arabian, such information could undermine the focus on purity that has led to decreased genetic diversity in the modern arabian breed. given the tenacity of myths surrounding purity and strain differentiation, it will be interesting to see how new dna studies will impact engrained cultural ideas. 64 the overview of dna and genomics in relation to the arabian presented here is based on the following: khanshour et al., “microsatellite analysis”; almarzook et al., “diversity of mitochondrial dna”; almarzook et al., “genetic diversity”; wallner et al., “y chromosome uncovers”; hudson, “whole-loop mitochondrial dna-d loop”; sadeghi et al., “genetic diversity”; cosgrove et al., “genome diversity”; machmoun et al., “genetic diversity”; sargious et al., “genetic diversity”; sargious at al., “genetic diversity”; remer et al., “y-chromosome insights”; felkel et al., “the horse y chromosome”; michaelis, “analysis of arabian stallion”. 116 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) a few concluding remarks the confusion arising from trying to fuse notions of western “purity” with reconstructed historical views of arabic “purity” has made the history of the arabian tumultuous, and in the end has given rise to an east–west hybrid in the regulation of the arabian horse industry on a global stage — though nationally there continues to be a deviation towards one form or the other. the difference between global and national trends, and between waho-identified breeders and those whose stock is excluded from waho’s closed books, might in the end reduce the power of waho to control definitions of purity or authenticity in the name of marketability. genomic information could also play a role in undermining the foundations of organizations like waho. there are currently deep feelings of bitterness about pedigree issues, believed lack of purity, and the excessive power of certain breeders within the framework of waho-enforced culture.65 the economic basis of contemporary breeding culture rooted in western privileging of certain forms of pedigree keeping stands to erode if its perceived value undergoes a transformation. under these conditions, walter farley’s fictional rendering of attitudes to purity, authenticity, and improvement in the middle east seems surprisingly prophetic. the actual history of what has happened to the arabian horse over the past three hundred years, however, tells us much about human interactions with animals, the culture that results from that interaction from a global point of view, and the difficulties that arise when trying to define quality in a living thing. 65 this issue has been extensively discussed on the blog “daughters of the wind” over the years. see especially https://daughterofthewind.org/note-on-amer-saudi-race-stallion/. about:blank derry, westernizing arabian horses | 117 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) works cited almarzook, saria, monika reissmann, and gudrun a. brockmann. “diversity of mitochondrial dna in three arabian horse strains.” journal of applied genetics 58, no. 2 (2017): 273–76. https:// doi.org/10.1007/s13353-016-0384-z. almarzook, saria, monika reissmann, danny arends, and gudrun a. brockmann. “genetic diversity of syrian arabian horses.” animal genetics 48, no. 4 (2017): 486–89. https://doi.org/10.1111/ age.12568. archer, rosemary, cecil covey, and colin pearson. the crabbet arabian stud: its history and influence. northleach: alexander heriot, 1978. “breeders of the northeast: a look back”, arabian horse world, november 1988, 143. blunt, anne. “lady anne blunt’s personal journals (1882–1911).” edited by lyman doyle. skowronek: a partbred arabian horse, 12 march, 2020. https://web. archive.org/web/20220127044939/ http://skowronek.io/sources/ lady-anne-blunts-personaljournals-1882-1911/. blunt, wilfrid scawen. my diaries, being a personal narrative of events, 1888–1914. part one: 1888 to 1900. london: martin secker, 1919. https://archive.org/details/ mydiariesbeingpe01blunuoft. blunt-lytton, judith (lady wentworth). the authentic arabian horse. london: george allen & urwin, 1944. cosgrove, elissa j., raheleh sadeghi, florencia schlamp, heather m. holl, mohammad moradi-shahrbabak, seyed reza miraei-ashtiani, salma abdalla, et al. “genome diversity and the origin of the arabian horse.” scientific reports 10 (2020): 9702. https://doi.org/10.1038/ s41598-020-66232-1. craver, charles. “davenport arabian horses.” in simpson, arabiana, 1–5. craver, charles. “davenport arabians at craver farms.” in simpson, arabiana, 6–11. derry, margaret e. bred for perfection: shorthorn cattle, collies, and arabian horses since 1800. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2003. derry, margaret e. horses in society: a story of animal breeding and marketing culture, 1800–1920. toronto: university of toronto press, 2006. derry, margaret e. made to order: the designing of animals. toronto: university of toronto press, 2022. edwards, gladys brown. “‘the great strain robbery’ or ‘the pursuit of the pashas’, part 1.” the arab horse journal, august 1960, 22. edwards, gladys brown. “‘the great strain robbery’ or ‘the pursuit of the pashas’, part 2.” the arab horse journal, september 1960, 22. edwards, gladys brown. “letter.” in simpson, arabiana, 15. edwards, gladys brown. “to progress… or regress that is the question.” the arab horse journal, march 1960, 12. edwards, gladys brown. “remember the mare.” arabian horse journal, april 1961, 26. edwards, gladys brown. “skowronek… three to one.” the arab horse journal, february 1960, 26. farley, walter. the black stallion returns. new york: random house, 1945. felkel, sabine, claus vogl, doris rigler, viktoria dobretsberger, bhanu p. chowdhary, ottmar distl, ruedi fries, et al. “the horse y chromosome as an informative marker for tracing sire lines.” scientific reports 9, no. 1 (2019): 6095. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598019-42640-w. forbis, judith. the classic arabian horse. new york: liveright, 1976. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13353-016-0384-z https://doi.org/10.1007/s13353-016-0384-z https://doi.org/10.1111/age.12568 https://doi.org/10.1111/age.12568 https://web.archive.org/web/20220127044939/http://skowronek.io/sources/lady-anne-blunts-personal-journals-1882-1911/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220127044939/http://skowronek.io/sources/lady-anne-blunts-personal-journals-1882-1911/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220127044939/http://skowronek.io/sources/lady-anne-blunts-personal-journals-1882-1911/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220127044939/http://skowronek.io/sources/lady-anne-blunts-personal-journals-1882-1911/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220127044939/http://skowronek.io/sources/lady-anne-blunts-personal-journals-1882-1911/ https://archive.org/details/mydiariesbeingpe01blunuoft https://archive.org/details/mydiariesbeingpe01blunuoft https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-66232-1 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-66232-1 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-42640-w https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-42640-w 118 | derry, westernizing arabian horses humanimalia 13.2 (2023) forbis, judith. “ansata arabian stud: the history.” arabian horse world, august 1982, 178. forbis, judith. “ansata: the breeding program.” arabian horse world, august 1982, 196. geske, alvin j. “tax tips for horse owners.” arabian horse world, january 1988, 132. greely, margaret. arabian exodus. london: j.  a. allen, 1975. hudson, william. “whole-loop mitochondrial dna d-loop sequence variability in egyptian arabian equine matrilines.” plos one 12, no. 8 (2017): e0184309. https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0184309. khanshour, anas, eleanore conant, rytis juras, and ernest gus cothran. “microsatellite analysis of genetic diversity and population structure of arabian horse populations.” journal of heredity 104, no. 3 (2013): 386–98. https://doi.org/10.1093/jhered/est003. landry, donna. “the disappearance of the turk: the cultural politics of thoroughbred horses in the ottoman and british empires.” diyâr 3, no. 1 (2022): 28–48. https://doi. org/10.5771/2625-9842-2022-1. lange, christoph. “decolonizing the arabian horse: the breeding, circulation and certification of the straight egyptian arabian in the 21st century.” phd diss., university of cologne, 2020. lange, christoph. “a global arabian horse kula, or ‘the fundamental interconnectedness of all things’.” zfe | jsca 147 (2022): 189–202. lange, christoph. “the making and remaking of the arabian horse – from the arab bedouin horse to the modern straight egyptian horse.” in horse breeds and human society: purity, identity and the making of the modern horse, edited by kristen guest and monica mattfeld, 234–50. london: routledge, 2020. lindsay, patricia. “arabian breeding in postwar poland.” the arab horse journal, february 1961, 26. machmoum, mohamed, ismaïl boujenane, rabiaa azelhak, bouabid badaoui, daniel petit, and mohammed piro. “genetic diversity and population structure of arabian horse populations using microsatellite markers.” journal of equine veterinary science 93, (2020): 103200. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. jevs.2020.103200. marston, diana. “blue influence on general list.” in simpson, arabiana, 129–32. michaelis, eva. “analysis of arabian stallion lines with y chromosome markers.” diploma thesis, university of veterinary medicine vienna, 2019. https://permalink.obvsg.at/ac15615171. “the 1974 waho conference.” the arabian 1, no. 1 (1974): 17–19. ott, jane lewellyn. “the sub-list basilisks.” in simpson, arabiana, 95–98. ott, jane lewellyn. “skowronek type and the ‘raffles’ variation.” in simpson, arabiana, 102–6. ott, jane lewellyn. “arabian types and strains.” in simpson, arabiana, 99–101, 136–49, 149–55. ott, jane lewellyn. “blue star arabians, blue list arabians and arabians.” in simpson, arabiana, 133–5. ott, jane lewellyn. “the grant and huntington importations.” in simpson, arabiana, 139–41. parkinson, mary jane. the romance of the kellogg ranch: a celebration of the kellogg/cal poly pomona arabian horses, 1925–2000. pomona, ca: w. k. kellogg arabian horse center, 2001. parkinson, mary jane. “skowronek.” arabian horse world, july 1982, 119. “raswan.” in simpson, arabiana, 148, 155, 51, 53. reese, herbert harshman. the kellogg arabians: their background and influence. alhambra, ca: bordon, 1958. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0184309 https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0184309 https://doi.org/10.1093/jhered/est003 https://doi.org/10.5771/2625-9842-2022-1 https://doi.org/10.5771/2625-9842-2022-1 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jevs.2020.103200 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jevs.2020.103200 https://permalink.obvsg.at/ac15615171 derry, westernizing arabian horses | 119 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) remer, viktoria, elif bozlak, sabine felkel, et al. “y-chromosomal insights into breeding history and sire line genealogies of arabian horses.” genes 13, no. 2 (2022): 229. https://doi. org/10.3390/genes13020229. raheleh, sadeghi, mohammad moradishahrbabak, et al. “genetic diversity of persian arabian horses and their relationship to other native iranian breeds,” journal of heredity 110, no. 2 (2019): 173–82. https://doi.org/10.1093/ jhered/esy061. sanguszko, prince roman, jr. “letter by prince r. v. sanguszko (1900).” translated by ekaterina vsemirnova. skowronek: a partbred arabian horse, 9 march, 2020. https://web.archive. org/web/20201019160433/https:// skowronek.io/sources/letter-by-princer-v-sanguszko-1900/. sanguszko, prince roman, sr. “prince sanguszko’s stud farm (1876).” translated by david rygielski. skowronek: a partbred arabian horse, 9 march, 2020. https:// web.archive.org/web/20220127045212/ http://skowronek.io/sources/princesanguszkos-stud-farm-1876/. sargious, mary, ragab m. el-shawarby, mohamed e. abo-salem, et al. “genetic diversity of egyptian arabian horses from el-zahraa stud based on 14 tky microsatellite markers.” slovenian veterinary research 58, no. 2 (2021): 55–62. https://doi.org/10.26873/svr-1041-2020. sargious, mary a., hanaa a. ahmed, ragab m. el-shawarby, et al. “genetic diversity and population assignment of arabian horses.” pakistan journal of zoology 54, no. 2 (2022): 825–33. https://dx.doi.org/10.17582/journal. pjz/20201013221026. shcherbatov, prince a. g. and count s. a. stroganov. книга объ арабской лошади. st. petersburg, 1900. translated by g. i. vassiltchikov as the arabian horse: a survey. london: j. a. allen, 1989. simpson, bill, ed. arabiana: an anthology of articles about arabian horses and their owners. privately published. stevens, mary anne, ed. the orientalists: delacroix to matisse. european painters in north africa and the near east. london: royal academy of arts, 1984. “stud book of arabian horses with their pedigrees present in russia (1903).” translated by ekaterina vsemireonva. skowronek: a partbred arabian horse, 28 march 2020. https://web.archive.org/ web/20201128113735/https://skowronek. io/sources/stud-book-of-arabianhorses-with-their-pedigrees-present-inrussia-1903/. taverna, barbara levi. “comet.” in simpson, arabiana, 83–98. upton, peter. desert heritage: an artist’s collection of blunt’s original arab horses. london: skilton and shaw, 1980. valdés colón de carvajal, cristina. “the spanish arabian stud book.” arabian horse world, april 1986, 236. wallner, barbara, nicola palmieri, claus vogl, doris rigler, elif bozlak, thomas druml, vidhya jagannathan. “y chromosome uncovers the recent oriental origin of modern stallions,” current biology 27, no. 13 (2017): 2029–35. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. cub.2017.05.086. world arabian horse association. “is purity the issue?” waho publication 21 (january 1998). https://web.archive. org/web/20080705105054/http://www. waho.org/purityissue.html. ziegler, rolf. “the kula ring of bronislaw malinowski: simulating the coevolution of an economic and ceremonial exchange system.” in social dilemmas, institutions, and the evolution of cooperation, edited by ben jann and wojtek przepiorka, 39–60. berlin: de gruyter oldenbourg, 2017. https://doi.org/10.3390/genes13020229 https://doi.org/10.3390/genes13020229 https://doi.org/10.1093/jhered/esy061 https://doi.org/10.1093/jhered/esy061 https://web.archive.org/web/20201019160433/https://skowronek.io/sources/letter-by-prince-r-v-sanguszko-1900/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201019160433/https://skowronek.io/sources/letter-by-prince-r-v-sanguszko-1900/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201019160433/https://skowronek.io/sources/letter-by-prince-r-v-sanguszko-1900/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201019160433/https://skowronek.io/sources/letter-by-prince-r-v-sanguszko-1900/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220127045212/http://skowronek.io/sources/prince-sanguszkos-stud-farm-1876/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220127045212/http://skowronek.io/sources/prince-sanguszkos-stud-farm-1876/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220127045212/http://skowronek.io/sources/prince-sanguszkos-stud-farm-1876/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220127045212/http://skowronek.io/sources/prince-sanguszkos-stud-farm-1876/ https://doi.org/10.26873/svr-1041-2020 https://dx.doi.org/10.17582/journal.pjz/20201013221026 https://dx.doi.org/10.17582/journal.pjz/20201013221026 https://web.archive.org/web/20201128113735/https://skowronek.io/sources/stud-book-of-arabian-horses-with-their-pedigrees-present-in-russia-1903/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201128113735/https://skowronek.io/sources/stud-book-of-arabian-horses-with-their-pedigrees-present-in-russia-1903/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201128113735/https://skowronek.io/sources/stud-book-of-arabian-horses-with-their-pedigrees-present-in-russia-1903/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201128113735/https://skowronek.io/sources/stud-book-of-arabian-horses-with-their-pedigrees-present-in-russia-1903/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201128113735/https://skowronek.io/sources/stud-book-of-arabian-horses-with-their-pedigrees-present-in-russia-1903/ https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.05.086 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.05.086 https://web.archive.org/web/20080705105054/http://www.waho.org/purityissue.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080705105054/http://www.waho.org/purityissue.html https://web.archive.org/web/20080705105054/http://www.waho.org/purityissue.html wadiwel, review of amir animals, capitalism, resistance dinesh joseph wadiwel review of: fahim amir. being and swine: the end of nature (as we knew it). translated by geoffrey c. howes and corvin russell toronto: between the lines, 2020. 228 pp. $24.95 (pb). dinesh joseph wadiwel is associate professor in the school of social and political sciences at the university of sydney, australia. email: dinesh.wadiwel@ sydney.edu.au book review mailto:dinesh.wadiwel@sydney.edu.au mailto:dinesh.wadiwel@sydney.edu.au fahim amir’s being and swine collects together an array of probing and brilliant quick-fire provocations on human–animal relations, capitalism, and resistance. amir’s style as a writer is distinct. the text, while theoretically rich and reflective of current academic debates, is unencumbered by excessive intext referencing, an approach amir suggests was aimed at ensuring “readability” (177n2). and certainly the text is eminently readable and engaging: being and swine is written in a sharp, ironic, and sometimes darkly humorous style.1 every chapter is composed of snappy subsections; each subsection offers a curious or original reflection, often by juxtaposing ideas in unexpected ways. a criticism could be advanced that being and swine lacks sustained philosophical arguments; however, this misses the point of the text, which is not to labour over argumentation but to provide a succession of prompts which provoke the reader and inspire thought in new direction. perhaps confirming the intent of this stylistic approach, amir provides the following “reading advice” in the preface: “the chapters build on each other, but that doesn’t mean that they have to be read in this order. every chapter stands on its own and can be chosen according to the reader’s own interests as a point of access to the book” (xv). the introduction sets the concerns and orientation of the book, and includes some personal reflections which articulate amir’s standpoint. importantly, the introduction situates the questions raised by amir in relation to marxism and the left project. this includes pointed criticisms that highlight the apparent indifference of the left to the violence and exploitation experienced by nonhuman animals. john sanbonmatsu has previously remarked that “leftists and rightists converge on the question of animal rights.”2 amir produces a similarly pithy diagnosis: “when it comes to animals, the left turns right” (5). this highlights one important contribution of being and swine: namely to intervene into left and marxist theory, a trajectory of the text i shall return to below. 1 on humour, amir advises the reader: “this cannot be done without humour, for the more politically charged a problem is, like today’s ‘ecological crisis’, the more crucial it is not to tense up when dealing with it. if you grab hold too hard, you might damage the object of interest, and what’s more, not be able to let go” (xv). 2 john sanbonmatsu, introduction to critical theory and animal liberation (lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2011), 1–32, here p. 13. copyright © 2023 dinesh joseph wadiwel this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 237–246. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13564 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13564 wadiwel, review of amir | 239 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) in chapter two amir explores the inter-relation between pigeons and urban space, the attempts by city authorities to stigmatize and control these birds, and examples of human and nonhuman resistance. this chapter highlights amir’s distinct style of analysis, which draws together humans, nonhumans, economies, machines, and built environments in a constant and dynamic interaction, shaped by power, pleasure, vitality and resistance. it is on the latter dimension — resistance — that amir provides an important contribution to the field: i shall discuss this further below. being and swine’s third chapter continues the theme of the interaction between life and urban spaces through a focus on pigs. here amir highlights both the physical interactions between working class people and pigs within urban landscapes, but also the metaphoric interaction between the “radicalized masses” and semi-feral hogs, captured in the phrase the “swinish multitude” (52). then, in chapter four, amir examines the rise of industrialized intensive animal agriculture. while the factory farm is a common focus within animal studies, amir’s approach is unique due to the theoretical gaze applied, drawing from critical theorists max horkheimer and theodor adorno, as well as offering a deep dive into the fascinating perspective of the historian of architecture, sigfried giedion. in this context, amir advances a fresh narrative on the relation between developments in industrial animal agriculture, fordist production and capitalism. in chapter five amir continues to focus on urban animals, exploring the less apparent connections and co-habitations between human societies and “nature”. scholars like donna haraway are known for their work challenging dualisms between nature and culture.3 amir has a distinct voice within this context; he highlights the way in which animals, in resistant and non-intuitive ways, flourish in environments that feel far from natural, like wild animals that thrive in militarized areas such as the rocky mountain arsenal national wildlife refuge. amir’s distinct sense of humour is on display here too 3 see for example donna j. haraway, simians, cyborgs and women: the reinvention of nature (london: free association books, 1991) and the companion species manifesto: dogs, people, and significant otherness (chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003). humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 240 | wadiwel, review of amir when he makes these observations. for example, commenting on the sewers under berlin’s famous berghain nightclub, amir notes: sooner or later all the drugs that get consumed up above have to get out, too — they flow down the through the sewer system, where the animals that live there take a bath in veritable showers of hormones and other potent molecules. there is no research on this particular habitat of urban ecology, but why shouldn’t there be rats here, hopped up on amphetamines and raving to themselves, or cockroaches copulating at high frequencies, or snuggledrunk toads on mdma sliding against each other, or psychoactively dissociated mice, with ketamine coursing through their bloodstreams? (97) this humour works to disrupt the reader’s associations of what compromises a “natural environment”, bringing to the fore the unseen forms of community and agency that animals might develop in response to human urban ecologies. a similar analytic gaze informs the book’s sixth chapter, which focuses on the interconnections between bees, mosquitos and termites on the one side and colonialism, military technologies, racial segregation, nation and city building on the other. the final chapter provides a number of concluding provocations, in part shaped by more politically tactical questions about how to move forward. this final chapter is notable for its particular critique of consumerist veganism and urges readers towards a deeper, more enduring political project which, crossing ethics and epistemology, involves the reorientation of our senses and knowledge systems “to make reality stutter” (173). being and swine is a translation of a 2018 text published in german by edition nautilus.4 it is notable that the english text contains a number of revisions and adjustments.5 the original text carries the title schwein und zeit (literally “pigs and time”) a play on martin heidegger’s classic philosophical text sein und zeit (being and time); this 4 fahim amir, schwein und zeit. tiere, politik, revolte (hamburg: edition nautlius, 2018). 5 in personal correspondence, amir confirmed that the english translation has a number of alterations, including a revised introduction and chapter order to aid readability and better reflect the transition of ideas, as well as minor changes to address an anglo-american audience. the english edition will likely be the preferred source for future translations. wadiwel, review of amir | 241 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) allusion is repeated in the english title. the german edition also utilizes an alternate subtitle, tiere, politik, revolte (“animals, politics, revolt”), which suggests a different — perhaps more politically-focused — orientation of the text for this audience. this is mirrored by some of the differences between the chapter and section titles chosen: for example, chapter six, which is focused on insect relations, is given the enigmatic title “cloudy swords” in the english edition, while the original german text carries the title “neoliberale bienen, solimosquitos und anarcho-termiten” (“neoliberal bees, soli-mosquitoes and anarcho-termites”).6 there are also a number of other changes to the text itself: there are sections in the german edition which are not reproduced in the english edition; the english edition, however, includes a very informative preface, and a revised introduction, both of which orient the reader to amir’s approach, method and distinct theoretical outlook, which as discussed above both situate the book within animal studies and marxist theory, but also adopts a particular style of analysis which combines cutting observations, a radical political standpoint and a significant helping of whimsy. further, as amir notes in the preface, the english edition appeared after covid-19 had swept the planet, and this allowed the author to reflect on the pandemic and its relation to the themes in the book. in my view being and swine makes at least two important critical contributions to animal studies. the first relates to amir’s original account of animal resistance. animal resistance has been theorized by a select group of scholars within animal studies.7 amir’s work on resistance advances a distinctive view;8 and it is one that has proved highly influential for my own theoretical work describing animal insubordination to power.9 my interest in amir’s work is in the use of 6 “soli” here is a shortened form for “solidaristic” or “solidarity”. 7 see for example jason hribal, fear of the animal planet: the hidden history of animal resistance (oakland: akpress, 2010); sarat colling, animal resistance in the global capitalist era (east lansing: michigan state university press, 2020). 8 in addition to being and swine, amir had previously published short essays detailing this approach to resistance. see, for example, fahim amir, “1000 tauben. vom folgen und fliehen, aneignen, stören und besetzen”, eurozine, 7 may 2013. https://www. eurozine.com/1000-tauben/. 9 see dinesh j. wadiwel, the war against animals (leiden: brill, 2015), 10–16; and dinesh j. wadiwel, “do fish resist?”, cultural studies review 22, no. 1 (2016): 196–242. https://www.eurozine.com/1000-tauben/ https://www.eurozine.com/1000-tauben/ humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 242 | wadiwel, review of amir an “operaist” or “workerist” model of resistance that is informed by autonomist marxist theory, which emphasizes the way in which productive systems always work in a tussle with the lives they seek to subsume;10 this process of interaction can be understood as the interplay of domination and resistance. for autonomist marxism, this meant that the forms capitalist production takes are a direct response to the resistance of its labour force to the work that is imposed upon it. for example, according to this theoretical perspective, it could be argued that the contemporary deployment of employee surveillance software by some workplaces — such as the use of keystroke tracking or facial recognition — which has accompanied the move to work from home arrangements during the covid-19 pandemic, is a direct response by capitalist production to creative acts of non-compliance and absenteeism by workers (taking naps, long lunches and attending to care labour). resistance here is central to developments in the technologies of work; workers continually seek opportunities for non-compliance, while workplaces continually seek new ways to enforce work to ensure profitability. amir cleverly reworks this theoretical framing to understand animal resistance: for example, the practices and formations of the city itself — attempts to purify and cleanse streetscapes, the deployment of cut glass on building ledges to deter birds — are responses to pigeon agency and resistance. as such the material landscape of cities are not only the result of human planning but are instead a co-production that represents the outcome of power, resistance and conflict between humans and animals: “where there are cities, there are also pigeons. and where there are pigeons, there is resistance” (37).11 while i am convinced of amir’s important articulation of this workerist model of animal resistance, being and swine could also have 10 there are a small number of other scholars i am aware of who utilises this framing derived from autonomist marxism including nicole shukin, animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2009) and agnieszka kowalczyk, “mapping non-human resistance in the age of biocapital” in the rise of critical animal studies: from margins to centre, eds. nik taylor and richard twine (london: routledge: 2014), 183–200. 11 to an extent, this agrees with contemporary theorists in posthuman urban studies, such as maan barua, “infrastructure and non-human life: a wider ontology”, progress in human geography 45, no. 6 (2021): 1467–1489. wadiwel, review of amir | 243 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) clarified how this resistance operates. for example, amir discusses the difficulties faced by animal agriculture in trying to mechanize the “processing” of pig carcasses into food. because many of these processes in animal agriculture cannot be automated, a significant number of tasks involve manual human labour. in this context, amir suggests that “the pigs resisted even beyond death” (81). however, i would argue that this use of “resistance” to describe interactions with non-living materials is potentially distracting for the analysis amir provides. perhaps it is true that all materials in production processes need to be grappled with and as such evade total attempts at control. however, i think “resistance” must be more carefully differentiated between animated living beings and “inert” commodities. at least in my opinion, there is a qualitative difference between the resistance of living animals within production systems and the difficulties posed to industries who process the bodies of these animals after death. amir’s text powerfully tracks the way animated life continually poses a challenge to its subordination by processes of domination. death, however, marks a rupture in this particular domain of political relations: it is a victory over life by the powers that have dominated it. certainly, the bodies of dead animals processed into meat create difficulties for the human workers and machines who transform them into consumption commodities. but from an analytic standpoint, this latter “resistance” is qualitatively different from the political resistance of the animal who was once alive.12 the second contribution offered by being and swine relates to its intervention into marxist approaches to understanding human interactions with animals. following in the footsteps of some of the 12 nevertheless, i would stress that what happens to animals after they die within animal agriculture has importance for the politics of domination and resistance which shape interactions with animals while they are alive. an example is the relationship between pre-death stress experienced by animals and its impact on meat “quality”; this interaction has compelled producers to deploy methods to reduce the distress experienced by animals prior to slaughter. in effect this has meant that producers have attempted to mitigate and smooth the resistance of animals to their own deaths in order to produce a more palatable consumption commodity and maximise profits. see for example nikolal čobanović, et al., “the influence of pre-mortem conditions on pale, soft and exudative (pse) and dark, firm and dry (dfd) pork meat”, acta veterinaria 66, no. 2 (2016): 172–86. humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 244 | wadiwel, review of amir early innovators in the field such as benton, noske, and hribal,13 there have been a growing number of animal studies texts over the last decade which have responded to and built on the foundations of marxist theory.14 amir provides a distinctive voice in this field. as above, amir deploys a specific understanding of resistance that draws from the tradition of marxist thought. additionally, the work is systematically aimed at not merely contributing to animal studies but, most importantly, intervening into leftist thought. as i have indicated above, from the opening pages of being and swine amir makes clear that the animal question interconnects with capitalism and broader forms of oppression; further, that the left has by and large been uninterested in the treatment of animals. dominant strands of marxist theory, to its detriment, have not seen any particular relationship between animal liberation and other struggles against oppression. many of the reflections in being and swine provide historical, material, and conceptual resources which make ground towards developing a fuller account of the relationship between nonhumans and capitalism. within this context of an engagement with the left being and swine offers directions for a reformed marxism that is capable of taking into account the concerns of animals. on occasion amir appears to express a solidaristic hope for a shared struggle between traditional left movements and animal liberationists. we see this to an extent in chapter three, which highlights the interconnection and shared constituency of the “swinish multitudes”: “the political power and the resistance of aggregates that included animals” (58). the book here draws upon michael hardt and antonio negri’s concept of the “multitude”, which as amir describes has the capacity to bring together diverse 13 see ted benton, natural relations: ecology, animal rights and social justice (london: verso, 1993); barbara noske, beyond boundaries: humans and animals (montreal: black rose books, 1997); and jason hribal, “‘animals are part of the working class’: a challenge to labor history”, labor history 44, no. 4 (2003): 435–53. 14 see for example, ryan gunderson, “marx’s comments on animal welfare”, rethinking marxism 23, no. 4 (2011): 543–548; corinne painter, “non-human animals within contemporary capitalism: a marxist account of non-human animal liberation”, capital & class 40, no. 2 (2016): 1–19; katherine perlo, “marxism and the underdog”, society & animals. 10 (2002): 303–318; christian stache, “conceptualizing animal exploitation in capitalism: getting terminology straight”, capital and class 44, no. 3 (2019): 1–21; and marco maurizi, beyond nature: animal liberation, marxism, and critical theory (leiden: brill, 2021). wadiwel, review of amir | 245 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) movements, conglomerates which differ from both the state and the nation: “a storm of passions, relations and understandings that cannot be reduced to the number one” (57).15 at the close of being and swine, this hope for unity between diverse struggles is repeated: “what marx wrote about the relationship between english and irish workers also holds for the relationship between humans and animals […] there can be no freedom as long as there is unfreedom” (173). despite this optimism, however, it is here that i would like to express caution. the nature of structurally antagonistic relationships is that, of course, the freedom enjoyed by some may very well conditionally require the unfreedom of others. in these circumstances, possibilities for solidarity and alliances are fraught. this structural reality was central to marx’s description of the relation between workers and the bourgeoisie in capital vol.1: the same bourgeois consciousness which celebrates the division of labour in the workshop, the lifelong annexation of the worker to a partial operation, and his complete subjection to capital, as an organization of labour that increases its productive power, denounces with equal vigour every conscious attempt to control and regulate the process of production socially, as an inroad upon such sacred things as the rights of property, freedom and the self-determining “genius” of the individual capitalist.16 we find a similar structural relation described in other forms of oppression: for example, theorizations of racial inequality which highlight that the freedom which attaches to whiteness is interconnected with unfreedom for others, including through anti-black violence.17 this understanding of freedom and its relation to unfreedom is relevant to human relations with animals. structural antagonisms overtly shape human animal relations, including in the 15 michael hardt and antonio negri, multitude: war and democracy in the age of empire (new york: the penguin press, 2004). 16 karl marx, capital, trans. ben fowkes (london: penguin, 1990), 477. see also 280. 17 see charles w. mills, the racial contract (cornell university press, 1999); saidiya v. hartman, scenes of subjection: terror, slavery and self-making in nineteenth century america (new york: oxford university press, 1997); and frank b wilderson iii, red, white and black: cinema and the structure of u.s. antagonisms (durham: duke university press, 2010). humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 246 | wadiwel, review of amir context of food systems and research industries which overtly position the freedom and survival of humans against the unfreedom of billions of animals. being and swine frequently draws attention to these contradictions, highlighted in the institutions and systems of production described in detail which systematically attempt to quell and counter the resistance of animals to their own subjugation. for thinking in the marxist tradition this poses a challenge: can it overcome its own persistent, and perhaps foundational, anthropocentricism in order to imagine social transformation that also includes non-human life? or alternatively, is it possible for the left to imagine socialism beyond its traditional bounds as a liberation project for the “working class”? how is the socialist project instead potentially about liberation of all life from the grips of domination; a project which might seek to establish social relations which enable flourishing for life in the broadest sense, including humans, animals and the planet? to this extent, being and swine is an important stepping stone towards a wider multispecies conception of a socialism to come. in this context it is no accident that, referring expressly to both human and animal liberation, amir remarks that “it should be expected that communism, as an unredeemed promise of humanity, will let the apes out of the zoos — physically and metaphorically” (173). _hlk121238141 _hlk121308630 mattfeld spanish horse the spanish horse and the thunder drum taxidermied subjects and animal-made-objects in the early nineteenth century monica mattfeld university of northern british columbia humanimalia 15.2 (summer 2025) abstract: life for many horses at the turn of the nineteenth century was short and subject to objectification before and after death. however, the life and afterlife of one horse at astley’s amphitheatre, the spanish horse, resisted the usual loss of identity animal death often brings. in this article i first provide a biography of the spanish horse and then question his afterlife as a theatrical thunder drum. in doing so, i think about the nature of taxidermy, memorial, and the usual binary of subject/object inherent within fragmented animal bodies. as part of this process, i explore the thunder drum/spanish horse with the aid of ecofeminism, philosophies of taxidermy, and material feminist thought, and i argue that the afterlife of the spanish horse as a thunder drum was one of loving remembrance that did not erase the animal self within the material object. instead, i suggest, the preservation of the spanish horse’s skin after death enabled his ongoing participation and agential voice within the amphitheatre, while elevating him above other animals therein. keywords: taxidermy; gibraltar charger; the spanish horse, astley’s amphitheatre; horses; agency; matter; ecofeminism; animal memorial; sound; subjectivity. bio: monica mattfeld is an assistant professor of english at the university of northern british columbia, where she specializes in animal studies and the literature and history of eighteenth-century england. she has published on the interplay between animal and human disability, early modern horsemanship practices, theatrical animals, the early circus, and performances of human and animal gender. she is the author of becoming centaur: eighteenth-century masculinity and english horsemanship (2017), and co-editor of multiple animalstudies publications. her forthcoming second monograph is entitled equines in eighteenth-century thought: intersectional discriminations and the imperfect horse (palgrave macmillan). it focuses on discourses of equine disability, animal activism, and systems of discrimination and exploitation over the long eighteenth century. email: monica.mattfeld@unbc.ca copyright © 2025 monica mattfeld this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 2 (2025): 1–41. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.15999 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.15999 mattfeld , the spanish horse | 3 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) in 1824 the clown jacob decastro published his memoirs, which offered a glimpse into the lives and performances of animals at astley’s amphitheatre — the pre-eminent illegitimate theatre and the first circus venue in england. he records the back-stage adventures of the amphitheatre, telling stories of individual actors, the plays and songs performed, the ongoing battles between the amphitheatre and the office of the lord chamberlain, and of the many animal performers who graced the amphitheatre stage.1 during this process, however, decastro’s memoirs raise many more questions than they answer about period conceptions of performing equines, the tensions between animal value and personal emotional attachment during a time of rapid economic change, and the corresponding commodification of nonhuman animal bodies. some of the most complex questions appear from a short account of the theatrical life, death, and afterlife of one of the amphitheatre’s most valuable horses. the “spanish horse” seemingly held a special place in the hearts of the amphitheatre’s human performers, but after his death his body was fragmented, seemingly de-individualized, and objectified. he was skinned, his hide tanned and then crafted into a thunder drum.2 in his memoirs, decastro discusses the end of life and afterlife of the spanish horse in a footnote, which is worth quoting in full: mr. w. davis, the present proprietor and manager of the royal amphitheatre, was so fond of this same horse from its wonderful tractability and extreme docility, that when, from his loss of teeth by age, he was unable to eat his corn; and from a lively remembrance of his former services, he very humanely (and such feelings do honour to the heart of humanized society), allowed the decrepit, aged, and nearly worn-out animal, out of his own private purse two quartern loaves per day. n.b. — this beast was accustomed, at a public performance, to ungirt his own saddle, wash his feet in a pail of water, fetch and carry a complete tea equipage, with many other strange things. 1 decastro, memoirs. for information on london’s theatre and circus environment see: o’quinn, entertaining crisis; moody, illegitimate theatre; and worrall, theatric revolution. 2 decastro, memoirs, 30. 4 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) he would take a kettle of boiling water off a flaming fire, and acted in fact after the manner of a waiter at a tavern or tea gardens. at last, nature being exhausted, he died in the common course of it, and mr. davis, with an idea to perpetuate the animal’s memory, caused the hide to be tanned and made into a thunder-drum, which now stands on the prompt side of the theatre, and when its rumbling sounds die on the ear of those who know the circumstance, it serves to their recollection as his “parting knell”.3 this was not the usual method of either memorializing or preserving the body of a celebrity animal. the spanish horse was not stuffed and placed in a museum, as was the case with alfred the gorilla; he was not the subject of satirical memorialization in newspapers, as was the learned pig; nor was he buried with an extensive elegiac inscription, as was king nobby.4 this article explores the strangeness of this apparently loving memorial, the continued objectification and use of the spanish horse’s fragmented body, and the mixed private and public nature of his afterlife. in doing so, i question why this afterlife? why a thunder drum? and: what does the life and death of the spanish horse tell us about the nature of objects, animal bodies after life, and connections to the subjective? this article is divided into two sections. the first definitively establishes the identity of the spanish horse and provides biographical details of his life before and after entering service at the amphitheatre. the second builds on this biography by exploring the connections between the life of this particular horse and the peculiarities of his specific afterlife as a thunder drum. as part of this process, i suggest that objects like the thunder drum, those composed of animal bodies (or parts of them) from beings like the spanish horse, can resist the typically faceless and subjectless nature of objects. thinking with ecofeminist approaches to animals, especially those by josephine donovan, and the material feminist 3 decastro, memoirs, 30. 4 paddon, “life and times of alfred”; gazetteer and new daily advertiser (london), 21 june 1786, issue 17949; mattfeld, “genus”; boyle, “monumental inscriptions”. mattfeld , the spanish horse | 5 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) thought of jane bennett towards objects, i suggest that the spanish horse remained known, remained subject, even in his fragmented state. as a drum, the spanish horse gained a voice, and his afterlife within the amphitheatre tied agency and memory to his live being and lived history. in other words, contrary to what previous scholarship on animals as faceless objects suggests, the live animal was not effaced by the act of rendering or shaping after death. in making this argument, i look to the history of taxidermy as memory keeper, while also suggesting an expanded definition of the practice that encompasses the faceless after death — the fragment, the unrecognizable but still known, animal being. part 1: “the spanish horse” the spanish horse was truly old when he passed away sometime around 1824. according to decastro, he lived to the age of forty-two, outliving his original owner, philip astley, and was still alive at the amphitheatre when william davis became owner and manager in 1822.5 most horses during the early nineteenth century experienced premature ageing, disability, and death as a result of intersecting exploitative systems endemic to a growing capitalist economy. indeed, most horses did not live beyond the ages of ten or twelve, thus making those who experienced true old age anomalies.6 as such, the spanish horse was one of the few equines to survive the typical life trajectory of most equines living in the period’s increasingly capitalist, speciesist, and ableist society, and the care he received in his declining years suggests an important ethical responsibility of care, perhaps even sympathetic affection, between horse and human that resists systems that define animal value as useful or monetarily beneficial.7 according to decastro, davis spent his own money to care for the spanish horse in his elderly years, ensuring that he was able to eat by purchasing bread for his consumption. most likely horse bread 5 decastro, memoirs, 30. 6 edwards, “image and reality”; mattfeld, equines. 7 mattfeld, equines. 6 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) softened with water or wine, as was customary, this food, decastro implies, was nourishing, medicinal, and special (or elite and expensive).8 thus, for davis to incur this extra expense for a horse who could no longer fulfil his duty as a performing horse due to his old age and impaired state was an act of “humane” benevolence during a time when such actions towards an animal were especially indicative of a civilized and properly british heart.9 they were also actions that fulfilled many calls by animal welfare, anticruelty, and animal rights campaigners who argued horses should be rewarded for their lifetime of hard work in support of human society at all levels with a happy retirement and veterinary care therein.10 however, many authors likewise lamented that such duty to a horse was often forgotten when faced with equine old age or disability. indeed, care for a decrepit animal was highly unusual for the time.11 thus, davis’s actions suggest there was something unique, even special, about this particular horse that made him deserving of such attention. while at the amphitheatre, as decastro recalled, the spanish horse was an acting equine famous for his sagacious abilities, which ranged from making and serving tea to untacking himself.12 decastro does not provide any indication of how a quadruped accomplished such feats, but the inclusion of their description in his memoirs evidences the central position of the spanish horse within the amphitheatre’s programme. indeed, the performance of these and similarly “impossible” feats were standard elements of the amphitheatre’s programme for most of its history. horses who could “count”, tell time, or sit at a table and enjoy tea (fig. 1) were top-billed actors, even if their individual names were often omitted from the amphitheatre playbills. indeed, these horses were often simply advertised as “learned” in 8 rubel, “english horse-bread”, 40–47. 9 see for instance boddice, history and attitudes; donald, picturing animals; eisenman, cry of nature; and perkins, romanticism and animal rights. 10 see for instance, primatt, dissertation, 214–15. 11 mattfeld, equines. 12 decastro, memoirs, 30. such acts of animal sagacity were typical for the amphitheatre, and for other period illegitimate theatres in london. see the british library’s (bl’s) “astley’s cuttings from newspapers”, 1768–1833, scrapbook. 3 vol. th.cts.35–37.; and lysons, collectanea, for some of the many examples of acting equines working in london. fig. 1 anonymous, horse sitting down to tea with a clown, n.d. from the british library collection. daniel lysons, collectanea: or, a collection of advertisements and paragraphs from the newspapers relating to various subjects (thcts 50), f. 85. image # f60105-88. 8 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) some way.13 they were also the ones who, it seems, could play dead, act furious or wild when needed, and who later took on some of the hippodramatic roles written for them at the turn of the nineteenth century. these horses, then, were the partners with whom the amphitheatre succeeded. however, very few warranted a mention in decastro’s memoirs. what was so unique about the spanish horse? why was he the one who experienced such care and textual record? these questions are difficult to answer. even though worthy of care in infirm old age and famed during his life and after his death, the spanish horse’s identity remains confused and contradictory — and establishing it is key to understanding this particular afterlife. in the minimal scholarship that mentions the spanish horse (and decastro’s memoirs), he is conflated with two other leading horses of astley’s amphitheatre: billy and the gibraltar charger. philip h. highfill, jr., kalman a. burnim, and edward a. langhans record that philip astley had acquired two horses from smithfield market, and one of them “was ‘billy’, later known to fame as the ‘little learned military horse’, or ‘spanish horse’”.14 in contrast, hannah velten states astley would perform on “a dark bay stallion known as ‘the spanish horse’ or ‘the gibraltar charger’, who had been gifted to him by general elliott” after his discharge from “fighting in the german war”.15 susanna forrest also conflates a spanish horse gifted in 1766 with the gibraltar charger, but for her he was “white” not “dark bay” in colour.16 who was the spanish horse of decastro’s memoirs? was he also known as billy, and did he come from a market infamous for old and broken-down equines? when was he active at the amphitheatre? was he instead known as gibraltar and came to astley in 1766 as a lavish gift from elliott? or, did he arrive at the amphitheatre even later than that?17 as my following discussion suggests, decastro’s spanish horse, the uniquely deserving equine from a world of 13 for examples of learned horses see bl, “astley’s cuttings”. 14 highfill, burnim, and langhans, biographical dictionary, 147. 15 velten, beastly london, 133. 16 forrest, age of the horse, 121–22. 17 smithfield market was notorious for selling horses of dubious quality during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. see heyrick, cursory remarks. mattfeld , the spanish horse | 9 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) unique horses, was also known as the gibraltar charger, arriving at the amphitheatre in 1788. however, it is a twisted path of misnaming, confusion, and misremembering we need to follow to arrive at this conclusion — and it is a path that begins with decastro himself. decastro provides the foundational account of the spanish horse, and his version of the horse’s life was re-published throughout the nineteenth century. decastro’s account was also expanded upon by charles dickens in his biography of philip astley, published in all the year round (1872).18 however, while there are problems with decastro’s original account, as i will discuss in a moment, it is with dickens’s work that the story of decastro’s spanish horse really begins to become muddled. dickens provides a detailed history of a horse called “spanish horse”, while connecting him to a longer genealogy of acting equines, including the first famous amphitheatre horse, billy. as dickens writes, philip astley obtained billy from smithfield market sometime around 1766 and trained him for the stage.19 billy proved an apt pupil and quickly became “a great popular favourite, playful as a kitten with those he knew, and deeply versed in all the learning of the circus”. he could fire pistols, serve tea, and “invite the clown down to tea”, which recalls decastro’s account of the spanish horse. billy, after a few misadventures (including being seized and then sold by the london authorities only to be reunited with astley by chance after three years’ absence from the theatre) had a long life and died “at last of sheer old age, universally respected and regretted”.20 dickens does not specify the year of billy’s death. while astley relied on billy to help begin his career as equestrian performer and later as circus owner and manager, he also owed much of his success to an equine also named the spanish horse, who he 18 dickens, “philip astley”, 210. 19 astley took great pride in advertising that billy was a poor-quality horse from smithfield, and he became a living advertisement for astley’s equestrian abilities. astley said “he cared little for shape, make or colour; temper was the only consideration. five pounds was the highest price he paid for a horse, and he patronised smithfield for his buying.” k.b., the magazine programme. the stage of the past being episodes in the lives of actors and actresses of other days. no. 34.—philip astley, 1742–1814, in astley’s biography file — v&a archives — unfoliated. 20 dickens, “philip astley”, 210. 10 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) owned at the same time as billy (the two horses highfill, burnim, and langhans incorrectly conflate into the spanish horse of decastro’s memoirs). evidently “even more famous than billy”, this spanish horse, probably of ideal barb or other spanish breeding (as his name indicates), was, according to decastro and dickens, gifted to astley by general george elliott “after the german war”, i.e. the seven years’ war (1756–1763). astley was a sergeant major in elliott’s fifteenth light dragoons and had distinguished himself at the battles of emsdorf and friedburg. to celebrate his military achievements, in june 1766, when astley petitioned for his discharge at the war’s conclusion, elliott presented him with a certificate of service and “with a fine charger, which, as the spanish horse, afterwards made the acquaintance and secured the applause of a very large public”.21 this was because the spanish horse “could perform all billy’s tricks and more”, such as ungirthing his own saddle, currycombing himself, and of course sitting down with a clown for a meal.22 according to decastro, this was the “fine charger” who died and was turned into a thunder drum sometime around 1824.23 unfortunately, however, decastro’s recollection (and later dickens’) of when astley acquired the spanish horse does not stand up to scrutiny; when the timeline is examined, the numbers just don’t add up. indeed, the first spanish horse’s acquisition date of 1766 and death date of circa 1824 are nonsensical when considered alongside possible equine lifespans. when we compare the gifting and death dates of this spanish horse, it is doubtful that the first spanish horse was the same spanish horse decastro described as the recipient of davis’s charity. if in the unlikely event the first spanish horse was gifted to astley in 1766 as a foal, at his death he would be fifty-eight years of age. however, if he was gifted as an older, trained 21 dickens, “philip astley,” 205. astley’s certificate of service and discharge letter are held at the bl, “astley’s cuttings,” item 1028, n.d. highfill, burnim, and langhans, in addition to mixing up billy and the spanish horse, also mistakenly argue the first horse given to astley by elliot, the spanish horse, was actually the second horse gifted to him, the gibraltar charger. see kwint, “astley’s amphitheatre” and “legitimization”, 72–115, for further information on astley and his military career. 22 dickens, “famous circus horses”. 23 decastro, memoirs, 29. mattfeld , the spanish horse | 11 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) horse, as was the more likely scenario in keeping with period views towards the prime age of working equines,24 he would be between five and eight years older, or more. in this case, he would have an approximate death age of sixty-three to sixty-six years of age. horses in captivity during the early modern period could have a lifespan of forty years (with the majority living to less than twenty).25 these are lifespans many scientists today likewise uphold for horses kept in domestic environments.26 indeed, horses living beyond forty are and were unusual, but not unheard of: the oldest horse on record lived to the age of sixty-two.27 therefore, the first spanish horse’s possible lifespan range of sixty-three to sixty-six years was technically possible but highly improbable during a period of uneven and sometimes questionable veterinary knowledge and often exploitative work environments.28 the idea of the first spanish horse being the animal davis turned into a drum is further destabilized by his recorded age of death; decastro records he died at the age of forty-two, not in his late fifties or sixties. as a result of these discrepancies between acquisition date and death age, we must question the accuracy of the information contained in decastro’s memoirs. we need to take a closer look at our final horse, the gibraltar charger, also called “the spanish charger”,29 to make sense of who is who in decastro’s record. general george elliott gifted the gibraltar charger to philip astley in 1788, after the siege of gibraltar (fig. 2).30 a “white” horse (i.e. a grey horse who appeared white),31 not a “dark bay stallion” as velton contends, gibraltar was also known as the “spanish charger”.32 he did not, initially, perform any of the feats or tricks that made billy and the first spanish horse famous; instead, with astley gibraltar 24 mattfeld, equines. 25 bacon, “history of life and death,” 234. 26 cozzi, “aging and veterinary care.” 27 spector, “handbook of biological data.” 28 see curth, care of brute beasts, for a history of farrier and veterinary medicine. 29 the morning post (london), december 2, 1806, issue 11183. 30 bl, “astley’s cuttings,” vol. 3, f.1077, n.p, “1788.” 31 the north-eastern daily gazette (middlesborough, england), july 11, 1890. see also william hinck’s portrait in mattfeld, “‘undaunted all he views’.” 32 the morning post (london), december 22, 1806; issue 11183. fig. 2 john singleton copley, defeat of the floating batteries at gibraltar, september 1782 (the siege of gibraltar), 1783–1791. oil on canvas, 544 × 754 cm. the guildhall art gallery, london. image credit: city of london corporation, cc by-nc. mattfeld , the spanish horse | 13 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) became famous for appearing on stage (or on a barge in the middle of the thames) surrounded by patriotic fireworks. gibraltar also performed with philip astley’s son, john, in 1788 as an embodiment of grand military achievement and ideal british loyalty to the crown. with the astleys, gibraltar became the headlining act of the 1788 theatre season and quickly achieved celebrity status. critical infatuation with him was short-lived, however; after the end of the 1788 theatre season, gibraltar’s name disappears from the amphitheatre’s performance programme and from the national press.33 while the reasons for his decline are unknown, it is probable that his popularity with the audience simply waned. the astleys prided themselves on staging the strange and wondrous, and on the continual performance of everything new. philip astley was known for revamping the entire amphitheatre programme, as often as once or twice a week in some cases, in order to remain unique within the ever-increasing popularity for displays of equestrian extravaganzas from the other illegitimate theatres around london.34 in order to stay competitive, then, astley may have quietly removed gibraltar from the position of headlining performer while assigning him to another role within the amphitheatre, such as the “flying equestrian stage”, “the wonderful learned horse”, or the “beautiful white and spirited horse”, possibly renamed “tallyho”, who plays the burlesque role of the taylor’s horse in the pantomime “the hunted taylor”.35 now, assuming gibraltar, the spanish charger, was between eight or ten years of age when he came to astley after his military service, this would put his age between forty-one and forty-three. this, of course, fits with decastro’s account of the “spanish horse’s” death at the age of forty-two in 1824 and suggests a tentative birth date sometime between 1780 and 1782 — if he died between 1822 and 1824, as decastro implies. with these numbers in mind, then, i suggest that gibraltar was decastro’s equine who became a thunder drum. 33 for a more complete account of the gibraltar charger and his role in astley’s amphitheatre with john and philip astley see mattfeld, ‘“undaunted all he views”. 34 bl, “astley cuttings,” vol. 2, unfoliated, n.d. 35 bl, “astley’s cuttings,” vol. 1. f. 123a, n.p. (march 1795); vol. 3, f.170 (may 16, 1808); vol. 3, f. 185 (june 1808). 14 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) life and death gibraltar reached the end of his life in the early nineteenth century during a period of immense change—but also remarkable continuity—when it came to views towards nonhuman animals. over the period, as keith thomas argues, older, and often minority, views on animal care and cruelty became of interest to more and more people; and it was also a period where animal life was important enough to preserve with legislation and protection societies.36 while the discourses themselves had not changed in great measure from their earlier iterations, by the end of the eighteenth century they were “much more widely dispersed, and they were much more explicitly backed up by the religious and philosophical teachings of the time”.37 as part of this tradition, while it had long been argued that unnecessary pain and suffering was cruel, ideas about which animals should now fall under humanity’s sphere of moral concern had also shifted. instead of only the rational animals (broadly defined) being deserving of care, by the beginning of the nineteenth century many authors argued that all nonhuman animals were deserving of happiness and even unalienable rights. they became subject to the “law of universal benevolence” in a way where their suffering as animals, as individuals, was considered of increased importance. of course, animal cruelty was still widespread and condemned mostly for what it taught a person to do to his fellow humans (i.e. cruelty to animals was the gateway to cruelty to humans), but nonhuman animals were increasingly coming to be seen as fellow creatures, even as brothers, equally deserving of attention and care as their fellow humans.38 and care and sympathy for animals became an essential component of a new british ideal of humanity — as davis evidently embodied, at least for decastro.39 36 kean, animal rights; perkins, romanticism; spencer, writing about animals. see also meneley, animal claim; donald, picturing animals. 37 thomas, man and the natural world, 174–75. see also edwards, horse and man; boddice, history of attitudes. 38 thomas, man and the natural world, 174–80; preece, brute souls, 37–38. 39 sympathy and sentiment towards animals had limits, however, as morillo (rise of animals, xv), and wolloch (“limits”) argue. mattfeld , the spanish horse | 15 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) once an animal was dead or dying, however, common husbandry practice often invited the end of such sympathetic care and introduced treatment of animal bodies that led to objectification, commodification, loss of individual identity. while sympathetic care of aged horses was a central component of animal welfare and anti-cruelty literature in this period, actual enactment of the advice presented in such texts was remarkably rare — making davis’s actions that much more unique.40 indeed, it seems the majority of equines who were aged, lamed, disabled, ill, or simply unwanted for any reason, were sold for parts to the knacker’s. as clay mcshane and joel a. tarr explain, once a horse arrived at the knacker’s yard, workers would remove the hair, which would be made into cushions, added to plaster to help it stiffen, or be woven into blankets. the bones could be carved into knife handles or combs; the hooves would be boiled to extract oil necessary for the production of gelatine and glue; the head would also be boiled to separate the oil and then burned for bootblack. the vapours from the boiling process contained carbonate of ammonia, used as an insecticide. the bones also produced phosphate of lime, which was processed further into phosphorus used in matches, while the fats skimmed off the top of the boiling vats would be used in candle or soap making. the meat would be processed as dog food, and finally, the hide would be removed and sent to the tanners to be made into valuable cordovan (shoe) leather.41 a dead horse, then, was regarded as a source of financial profit, just as many owners thought of them during their lifetimes. indeed, as george skeavington argued in 1850, “[m]oney is of more consequence than animal feeling”, and money was the pre-eminent driving force behind all treatment of horses— alive or dead.42 while we do not know how gibraltar died, after his death davis’s common course of action would have been to exploit the horse’s body for profit. indeed, it is likely that gibraltar’s body was disarticulated and sold for its component parts — even though decastro 40 mattfeld, equines, chapter 8. 41 mcshane and tarr, horse in the city, 27–30. 42 skeavington, modern system of farriery, 295. 16 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) certainly does not provide details of this process, as to do so would undermine the anticruelty and humanizing messages of his memoirs. but, surprisingly, he does provide an account of what happened to the most recognizably individualized and familiar signifier of the gibraltar charger: his skin. “at last, nature being exhausted, he died in the common course of it,” decastro writes, “and mr. davis, with an idea to perpetuate the animal’s memory, caused the hide to be tanned and made into a thunder-drum, which now stands on the prompt side of the theatre.”43 this horse-as-drum itself does not survive, probably destroyed in one of the many fires to strike the amphitheatre over its history, but the transformation of gibraltar’s body into a drum positions him both inside and outside of the category of animal as commodity, useful only for financial gain.44 certainly his presence as a drum aided the revenue of the theatre, but there is more to his presence than pure economics would allow. instead, gibraltar’s life, death, and afterlife positioned him as at once a cherished member of the amphitheatre troupe on par with the human actors, and someone who should be honoured for his service, but also as both an objectified employee and mourned servant for whom simple burial or the erection of a monument would not suffice. indeed, i suggest, turning gibraltar into a thunder drum was an oddly fitting memorial for a horse famous for his courage under fire. as a large drum, he continued to be associated with the sounds of battle, and with the drums carried therein. as a drum, his use value continued to be associated with military service to humans — a service the amphitheatre (and most authors who touched on the subject at the time) considered natural to the equine species.45 gibraltar as a thunder drum, then, using anthropocentric and anthropomorphic rationale, would be able to continue his service to the amphitheatre, perhaps even to the wider nation. 43 decastro, memoirs, 30. 44 dickens, “philip astley”, 210. 45 astley, astley’s projects and astley’s system. see also cavendish, a general system; and to a certain extent, herbert, a method. mattfeld , the spanish horse | 17 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) part 2: subjective objects as a drum, however, the gibraltar charger became a thing, a piece of hide stretched over a frame.  for many, gibraltar’s thingness would relegate him to the position of the inert, immobile, and silent, like the bodies of so many other horses rendered down to fertilizer or worn on the feet of fashionable londoners. however, as decastro suggests, in the state of thunder drum gibraltar was not necessarily understood or thought of as simply inert, as an inanimate object unable to influence those around him. instead, i argue, gibraltar in his afterlife retained a level of subjectivity and agency not afforded to many other animals alive or dead. gibraltar’s agency, in turn, invites us to question the usual binaries of live/dead, recognizable/ faceless, subject/object, and culture/nature which, as i will argue, some recent scholarship on animal lives and deaths, memory, and attitudes towards the nonhuman other (animal, thing, matter) continues to perpetuate. furthermore, gibraltar’s ongoing agency as object likewise invites a thinking beyond existing philosophies on matter, animals as material objects, and the power and agency within such things. as such, to unpack the ontological complexities within gibraltar-as-drum, as an object, and davis’s implied rationale for making him into one, i bring together into conversation new materialism, ecofeminism, and taxidermy. these three approaches to objects/matter and agency, i suggest, are incomplete in singularity when complex beings/objects like gibraltar-as-drum are in question. therefore, by bringing them together in a more interwoven approach to gibraltar i problematize the usual interpretation of material objects made from animal remains as subjectless, inactive, and no different than objects composed of any other material. doing so offers a more nuanced interpretation of the amphitheatre’s thunder drum, the special horse who was made into it, and the affective relationships many people had to gibraltar as material thing. i begin with new materialism, and specifically with the work of jane bennett as one of the leading scholars thinking about the typically 18 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) unnoticed power of all matter. as part of her groundbreaking exploration of how seemingly inert matter or material items are imbued with meaning, emotional response, and thus agency of their own, bennett uses anecdote and scenes of refuse as a generative thought experiment. the most influential of these experiments for ecofeminist scholars engaging with her work is a scene of “debris” on the street. while out walking one day, bennett came across the following: one large men’s black plastic work glove one dense mat of oak pollen one unblemished dead rat one white plastic bottle cap one smooth stick of wood.46 for bennett, this scene was affective and indicative of the power of things to be both objects and items that have agency in themselves to produce their own forms and formulations beyond human intervention. as bennett states, in witnessing this “tableau” of immaterial and nonhuman matter she was struck by “a nameless awareness of the impossible singularity of that rat, that configuration of pollen, that otherwise utterly banal, mass-produced plastic water-bottle cap.”47 for bennett, the objects on the street all together were indicative of the live and unalive nature of things and matter in general. in making this philosophical argument and her wider point about the agential nature of matter, however, bennett does not differentiate between types of matter, or man-made objects, things, and dead animals. for her, the dead rat was no different, and ethically should be approached no differently, than the plastic work glove or the wooden stick. instead, she argues, “[o]rganic and inorganic bodies, natural and cultural objects (these distinctions are not particularly salient here) all are affective.”48 bennett, and many theories that form the groundwork for her investigation into vital materialism, is not particularly interested in animals (worms and their 46 bennett, vibrant matter, 4. 47 bennett, vibrant matter, 4, original emphasis. 48 bennett, vibrant matter, xii. mattfeld , the spanish horse | 19 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) political agency being an exception49) or the ethical questions their material presence invites as different from that of inorganic objects. instead, bennett works to create an ethics of recognition, an acknowledgement of all matter as more than inert, lifeless, and therefore unimportant object commodity. for bennett, matter (regardless of what it is made from) is an actant that when taken as a ‘vital’ element within the world, especially a human world, offers a newly ethical politics for the betterment of all. however, by presenting these more general approaches to matter, bennett has sidestepped the issue of animal matter as fundamentally different in its once-alive and now-dead state from other material forms. for josephine donovan, as an ecofeminist interested in the connections between objects, the aestheticization of animal representation, and animal life, bennett’s oversight is ethically problematic enough to undermine the entire enterprise of new materialism. indeed, donovan rejects bennett’s new materialism, arguing that due to the ongoing newtonian-cartesian aesthetic value ascribed to matter (man-made and once alive), and the lack of “loving attention” that would see that one of those objects (the rat) was once alive and hence deserving of loving respect as an individual, new materialism has lost even a glimmer of ethical credibility. as donovan writes: “ironically, we find here rescripted the aesthetics of modernity in which the ‘unblemished’ (aesthetic description) rat’s body has significance only as part of an interesting, if vibrant, aesthetic composition.” indeed, “surely there is a difference to be made (something the new materialists often fail to do) between a living or formerly living being and a manufactured commodity.”50 bennett’s rat was once a live being and as such deserving of attention, love, and ethical care that honours her life. therefore, to engage with bennett’s rat appropriately and with true recognition and care for her as a once-live being (instead of aestheticizing and de-individualizing or demonizing her as a source of disgust), donovan suggests “[o]ne might indeed be moved, under an ethic of care, to bury the rat, offering her a measure of final dignity, in honor of her past existence 49 bennett, vibrant matter, 94–109. 50 donovan, aesthetics of care, 35. 20 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) as a presence with whom a caring, dialogical relationship had been possible.” such attention, and an ethics of care towards nonhuman beings (alive or dead), is essential for donovan’s aim of generating “a significantly new understanding of living matter” and thus a truly ethical concern for the beings on this planet.51 while i applaud donovan’s emphasis upon live animal beings and the aesthetic representations that have great impacts on their lives, as with bennett, donovan does not readily extend this ethics of care to once-live nonhuman animals. what this limited focus on the oncelive animal does, however, is prohibit thinking about an animal as object and as agential within that state. it likewise rejects any possibility that animal matter, especially once fragmented, might agentially invite alternative human responses to live animal bodies — of inviting its own matter-driven ethics of care or of inviting influential legacies of the once-live animal within the dead flesh. indeed, bennett’s dead rat was certainly vibrant (provoking an affective response in the form of disgust), an actant within a wider assemblage of matter, as donovan also points out, but she was also a rat with her own life, culture, and relationships with both human and nonhuman beings. i suggest it was a life that remains part of the dead body, of the decomposing matter of the self. in making this argument, though, i embrace the nature of bennett’s vital materialism, where matter remains agential, intentional, in ways not fully understood by modern science. i also stretch it further to question what it means when that matter is from a once-live animal. what would it mean to question bennett’s dead rat? what happens to the subjective self, epistemologies and ontologies of knowing the animal other, at the point of death? the introduction of erica fudge’s concept of “animal-made-objects” may help remind us of and account for the power of animals as objects, as matter. looking to bruno latour’s actor network theory and bill brown’s thing theory, fudge proposes a new phrase, the “animal-made-object”, as a way to help recall the agential power within human culture 51 donovan, aesthetics of care, 35–36. mattfeld , the spanish horse | 21 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) of animals alive or dead. according to fudge, “this term carries two simultaneous meanings: (1) the animal-made object — the object constructed from an animal; and (2) the animal made-object — the objectified animal.” for fudge, this term should “not only remind us of the concurrent status of animals as both agents and matter but also of the nature of the relationship we have with them.” therefore, the “animal-made-object” is ethical in intent, illuminating animal– human relationships and often the destabilizing aspects, or “recalcitrant” nature, of animal matter.52 however, while fudge’s concept of the “animal-made-object” is indeed a useful reminder of animal material power, nuancing bennett’s non-animal-focused arguments, fudge’s objects, while agential and acknowledged for their unique actant status as animal objects, also remain deindividualized. donovan argues something similar. indeed, during the rendering from live animal to butchered food, donovan argues “animals become absent referents. animals in name and body are made absent as animals for meat to exist.” as part of this process, “the living animal is eclipsed, deadened, exploited, and discarded” as modernity and its reliance upon cartesian and kantian mechanism demands.53 thus, for both fudge and donovan the “animal-made object” and the “animal made-object” remain subjectless. indeed, while “animal-made objects” are especially interesting and forceful actants to “effect change upon so-called human culture” when they come into contact with human bodies, often in the form of clothing or perfume, they remain objectified things, like donovan’s slaughterhouse victims, where the live animal’s individual “sentient presence has been removed”.54 therefore, in order to see the nonhuman animals of the world, especially those who are dead or have been killed, like gibraltar, we need to move beyond a care ethic that stops short of recognizing all animals made matter. certainly, recognizing the objectification and removal of the animal self that occurs in modern abattoirs and 52 fudge, “renaissance animal things,” 42–43, 44. 53 donovan, aesthetics of care, 50. 54 fudge, “renaissance animal things,” 45. 22 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) rendering facilities is essential, but for us to understand the transition of the gibraltar charger into a thunder drum, and then the individual particulars of this specific afterlife, we need to think about the who within all matter — not just the matter with still-recognizable animal shapes, or bodies. as such, we cannot simply reject bennett’s new materialism, as donovan has done. nor can we simply view dead animal matter as the result of mechanical and anti-sentimental modernism. instead, we need a theory of cared-for matter that continues to recognize matter’s vital agency as objectified thing and which recognizes the subject within the dead-animal matter itself. indeed, to bring the animal self back, to recognize the ongoing if often unquantifiable or mysterious nature of animal subjectivity in seemingly inert matter, we need to exercise a recognition of animals as sentient, feeling, desiring beings before death and acknowledge that at least a modicum of that self remains in the matter that the animal becomes when transformed into an objectified now-dead, if agential, object. while the self that remains is subject to continuing anthropocentric and anthropomorphic constructions, and as we will see is predicated on the knowability or “celebrity” status of the animal before death, i suggest the nonhuman animal self, in some instances, is never fully effaced by objectification and mechanical rendering after death. thus, to come to understand gibraltar-as-drum scholars need to recognize and hear the “who” within the animal-made objects.55 as part of her ethical approach to animal representation and aestheticization, donovan suggests that scholars need to recognize and think with the self within that representation. according to donovan, “art and literature”, and, as i suggest, animal-made-objects, “created under an aesthetics of care are conceived through a participatory epistemology — an ‘i–thou’ relationship, in which the natural world and its multivarious creatures are recognized as subjects who have stories of their own.” for donovan, “[s]uch subjects are qualitatively particularized, embedded in specific locales — their unique physical bodies and historically and geographically specific environments.” knowing 55 donovan, aesthetics of care, 50. mattfeld , the spanish horse | 23 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) “these subjects’ ways of being requires experiential attentiveness to their unique shapes, expressions, and patterns, as well as to their contextual habits. it requires listening to their diverse voices.”56 i want to listen to gibraltar’s voice as a drum. i want to take his after-death body, his disarticulated and unrecognizable shape, seriously. in doing so, i want to think about gibraltar as the thunder drum in a way that not only takes seriously his status as animal matter, as a sound-making machine, but also decastro’s recollection of why gibraltar was made into a drum and what influence he had on those around him. however, the interweaving of vital materialism and donovan’s ethics of care still leaves us with the thorny issue of moving beyond the moment of rendering subjectless that death and disarticulation brings. to take the “who” within the drum as central, and as a presence and a self attached to a physical animal-made-object, i add to these theoretical approaches the practice of taxidermy — while offering a slightly alternative interpretation of its defining features. the practice of taxidermy traditionally is about preserving the individual within the recognizably and aesthetically shaped object for a variety of reasons. for example, taxidermy has been, and is, done to make a political statement and for self-aggrandizement, as with jeremy bentham’s auto-icon; to capture the likeness and anthropomorphized notion of a wider species, as with museum specimens; freezing in time a thrilling (for the human) moment of human vs. “beast”, as with game hunting; making an ethical or artistic statement, common to artistic taxidermy; or the preservation of a loved companion, as with pet taxidermy.57 regardless of rationale, though, taxidermy is about capturing within the preserved hide / skin / feathers / scales of a dead animal some semblance or notion of that animal when they were alive (or a semblance of human–animal relationships indexed in the animal body58) — this intent makes taxidermy, and the philo56 donovan, aesthetics of care, 73. 57 see collings, “bentham’s auto-icon”; staughan, “entangled corporeality”; aloi, speculative taxidermy; baker postmodern animal; haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy”. 58 aloi, speculative taxidermy, 23. 24 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) sophical underpinnings of it as a practice, potentially quite useful for coming to understand why gibraltar was made into the amphitheatre’s thunder drum and the role he had once there. however, there is a problem: the definition of taxidermy is often limited to beings whose body remains recognizable in some form and akin to the animals’ live body (in its entirety or in part) in its dead, taxidermied state.59 for example, sarah amato, looking to katherine grier, defines taxidermy as follows: taxidermy posits a particular kind of connection between animals and objects, whereby the animal is transformed into an artefact but remains recognizably embodied as its animal self […]. to create taxidermy, the skin of the animal was removed, stuffed, and mounted in a lifelike position — though early techniques varied and sometimes skeletons were wrapped in material to provide the structure of the mount. taxidermy transformed animals into manufactured objects.60 taxidermied animals (and some humans, like bentham) retain recognizable physical elements, such as hands / paws, coats, and faces that recall their live selves through their preserved shape. as donna haraway suggests, taxidermy is “the art most suited to the epistemological and aesthetic stance of realism.”61 it is when an animal body becomes so fragmented or altered through human processing, and the animal’s original shape becomes lost, that problems arise. indeed, for amato, and other scholars interested in the history of taxidermy, animal-made objects that do not retain recognizable features of the now-dead-animal do not qualify as taxidermied beings. as amato argues, items such as “a leather coat” cannot be classified as taxidermy because the object’s animal “origins are disembodied, abstracted, and recalled through the mental effort of associating the coat to the cow”.62 even within some modern art circles where “speculative taxidermy” celebrates non-traditional and 59 see baker, postmodern animal, for ‘botched taxidermy’ or taxidermy of the fragment. 60 amato, beastly possessions, 190. 61 haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy,” 34. 62 amato, beastly possessions, 190. mattfeld , the spanish horse | 25 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) often nonreferential forms of animal taxidermy, the individual animal self is subsumed under the ‘relationship’ between human and animal within the anthropocene — the who within remains unknown within the object.63 the association between object (such as a modern-art installation, shoe, glove, perfume, or stuffing in furniture) and the animal from which they are made simply is not clear enough, and the animal self is lost to the nonreferential matter. as a result, such objects, amato implies, cannot allow the dead animal to act as memory, as emotive being, or as instructional item as “proper” taxidermied animals should. such objects, according to traditional definitions of taxidermy, do not allow for “attentive love” or the recognition of the animal within all “animal-made-objects”. in order to understand the afterlife of gibraltar as a thunder drum, then, we need a new definition of taxidermy, one that includes any alteration of an animal’s body, especially alterations that are designed for remembrance or memorial in perpetuity. we need to strip “taxidermy” as a practice and art back to its original meaning: etymologically, taxidermy is derived from greek, and is composed of taxis [τάξις], “order / arrangement”, and derma [δέρμα], “skin”. thus, literally, “taxidermy” is simply “skin arrangement”.64 within this open definition, skin of any shape or size can be stretched over just about anything — a life-like mould or a geometric frame would make no difference. the skin could be manipulated and arranged as the creator/ worker wished — even if they were creating a coat, gloves, or drum. while broadening this definition runs the risk of subsuming the taxidermist’s art, that of stretching and shaping a hide over an internal skeleton to preserve the image of the dead animal after life, into a wider morass of animal-body renderings, a new definition that includes the fragmented and shaped dead body as always carrier of the live individual allows for visibility of the animal subject within the material object; we can recognize the animal individual inherent within the manipulation of skin (or other body part) into an animal-made-object even if the object is utilitarian and its final shape does not recall the animal’s original form. 63 aloi, speculative taxidermy, 24. 64 kalshoven, “gestures of taxidermy,” 35. 26 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) if we interpret the thunder drum as a piece of taxidermy, an agential animal-made object composed of once-live animal matter, and thus worthy of ethical consideration, provocative interpretations of decastro’s short and enigmatic footnote start to emerge. gibraltar was rendered into a thunder drum specifically as a useful object of theatre life, but this rendering, i suggest, illustrates his actant status as matter, as animal-made-object, where his objectified and fragmented skin becomes the matter and means of remembrance, emotional connection, and moralizing instruction that in turn consistently recalls aspects of his life as military hero and celebrity actor. indeed, with this expanded definition of taxidermy in mind, i suggest as an animal-made utilitarian object, as taxidermied animal matter, the thunder drum retained the who, the presence of gibraltar. therefore, by coupling bennett’s generally vibrant matter, donovan’s ethical attention towards animals as important and separate from other material objects, fudge’s animal-made objects as agential in their own right, and who gibraltar was before death (and how he was interpreted as a subjective being after death), the thunder drum is made intelligible. as i explore next, and in contrast to kantian philosophy, which, as bennett points out, argues that the “essential character of matter is lifeless, inertia”,65 the animal-made-object retained gibraltar’s voice, the who behind the object. to be sure, that voice (the recognition of it and the recollection of gibraltar it enabled) was predicated upon an epistemological status that mandated a hearer possessed some form of connection to gibraltar as a living—and celebrity—being. as decastro writes, his rumbling voice, or “parting knell”, was recognizable to those who knew “the circumstances” of his life and death. thus, gibraltar-as-drum, an object reduced to bare matter and artificially constructed object, remains horse — he remains, at least in some form and for some people, the gibraltar charger. thunder drum as a taxidermied and agential animal-made object, i argue, gibraltar’s body had a voice. thunder drums had the capacity to 65 kant, critique of judgement, 1790, as qtd. in bennett, vibrant matter, 65. mattfeld , the spanish horse | 27 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) exercise an immense influence upon all those who interacted with them — through sight, touch, and, of course primarily, sound. thunder drums, as the name implies, were used to recall the sounds of thunder, storms, and battle (especially of cannon and other ordinance fire). they helped to create mood, tension, and fear, and were essential pieces of the amphitheatre’s soundscape. as john jennings recalled, they were a modern invention during the early nineteenth century and usually consisted “of a calf-skin tightly drawn over the top of a box frame. with this instrument the low rumbling of distant thunder or the long roll of the elemental disturbance may be attained.” this elemental disturbance rarely existed in singularity. instead, the thunder drum worked in tandem with other theatre machines to create weather and atmospheric effects designed to shock, and in some cases frighten, the audience that experienced them.66 when we look closely at them, however, and attentively invite the animal self within to emerge, thunder drums can also act as powerful reminders of the animal within. in the case of the gibraltar charger (the animal within and the who in the object) the thunder drum functions both as a human memorial to his life and as a strongly emotive voice through which he, as material actant, could influence those around him. indeed, as a taxidermied animal-made-object, gibraltar as thunder drum became the embodiment of mournful memory for those who knew him, a creator of the amphitheatre soundscape and shaper of the audience into a community of the sublime, and a commanding instructor of ideal behaviour who was positioned close to the divine. primarily, however, for the select few who knew of his death and life, the drum’s theatre soundscape became, night after night, gibraltar’s memorial — as davis probably intended and as taxidermy invites. as rachel poliquin argues, regardless of stated intent, taxidermy is also about remembrance, about “human longing” for one who is lost; it is about “the desires and daydreams surrounding human relationships with and within the natural world.”67 typically, and especially for the early nineteenth century, such relationships were those of pet and 66 jennings, theatrical and circus life, 171. 67 poliquin, breathless zoo, 6. 28 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) owner (the taxidermy of pets was popular at the time), where the pet remained useful after death.68 for the gibraltar charger, these dreams and desires invite recollections of equine service that paint him as the absolute equine military hero. with the thunder drum, it mattered that the hide used came from the gibraltar charger and not another animal. it mattered also that gibraltar was a war hero. indeed, the association of thunder drums with performances of a military nature was especially useful for a theatre that in the early nineteenth century turned much of its attention to the staging of grand military equestrian extravaganzas known as hippodramas. over the nineteenth century, these spectacles became the most popular theatre productions of the age, with many produced around the approximate date of gibraltar’s death and first performances as a drum.69 while there is no extant record of which productions gibraltar as the thunder drum may have been a part of, all these plays in some form contain military or nationalistic subject matter.70 while the gibraltar charger experienced a long and, it seems, caredfor history at the amphitheatre, he was above all a military horse. even though decastro does not accurately record his connection to the siege of gibraltar, it seems gibraltar’s connection to general elliot and military action in general remained firmly entrenched within amphitheatre lore. gibraltar’s overall militaristic history is in keeping with the acts he performed in 1788, and the ones which gained him celebrity status as a result. for instance, gibraltar’s first public appearance on 4 june 1788 was timed to celebrate the birthday 68 young, pet projects. 69 these hippodramas include: james robinson planche’s cortez; or, the conquest of mexico (1823); charles dibdin the younger’s bonduca; or, the british queen (1823); j.h. amherst’s battle of waterloo (1824) and bonaparte’s invasion of russia; or, the conflagration of moscow (1825); thomas dibdin’s kenilworth; or, the days of good queen bess (1824); george croly’s the enchanted courser; or, the sultan of curdistan (1824); and andrew ducrow’s the burmese war; or, our victories in the east (1826). 70 see harvard university, houghton library’s lamont microfiche (w 2653) for copies of these plays. for information on hippodrama in england, france, and america, see saxon, life and art; mattfeld, “‘i see them galloping!’”; and poppiti, a history of equestrian drama. mattfeld , the spanish horse | 29 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) of george iii and overtly connected military courage with support for the crown. part of the celebrations consisted of a fireworks display lit on a barge in the centre of the thames river. the gibraltar charger was also on this barge, “courageous[ly]” and unconcernedly “entirely covered with fire, which seemed to be his favourite element.”71 the morning chronicle and london advertiser even jokingly asked “whether the gibraltar charger has not been used to eat fire, as he seems to be so very fond of it.”72 indeed, he “stood as firm as the rock of gibraltar itself” through the entire ordeal.73 from here, gibraltar frequently performed his military training in conjunction with (indoor) fireworks and the firing of weaponry (including a small cannon) from his back, proving beyond doubt his ability to “withstand fire” as ideal military chargers (and according to philip astley, all horses) naturally should. indeed, as the morning post and daily advertiser pointed out, gibraltar could “stand […] fire so well” due to being ridden by elliot “during the whole siege of gibraltar”.74 and, “[e]very body seems desirous of seeing the horse which carried the gallant veteran through the glorious toils of war” as a result.75 even though gibraltar would go on to perform with john astley in his equestrian ballet, and more than likely in comedic or “learned horse” parts, it seems he would always be remembered for his nationalistic military service (and the performance of it on the thames and the amphitheatre stage in 1788). his military experience, and consequential ability to calmly interact with fireworks and cannon, became synonymous with “him”, with the anthropomorphized construction of his equine self. gibraltar would always be the horse associated with general elliot, with battle, the protection of british imperialism, and with his prowess as a charger — regardless of which name he was subsequently known by or which history he was given. gibraltar, as the “ode” about him enthused, 71 world (1787) (london), june 21, 1788; issue 462; world (1787) (london), june 5, 1788; issue 448. 72 morning chronicle and london advertiser (london), june 21, 1788; issue 5965. 73 morning herald (london), june 5, 1788; issue 2377. 74 morning post and daily advertiser (london), june 5, 1788; issue 4748. 75 world (1787) (london), july 5, 1788; issue 474. 30 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) bore our warlike hero round gibraltar’s rocks, while cannons sound,— fly red hot balls in air: thousands has he to conquest led; his course has been o’er slaughtered dead. he was “fearless as noble in his soul”, while “his element is war alone; / on glory’s heights for this he’s known”. and known he was throughout his life, if decastro’s short note about him is to be believed.76 he was elliot’s charger, an honoured veteran of war, and i suspect he remained so for the rest of his life (although no evidence that i could find, other than decastro’s incorrect history, discusses gibraltar directly after 1788) (fig. 3). furthermore, i suggest gibraltar was also known for his military might after death, and his reputation for the ultimate of military chargers directly informed the decision to taxidermy him into a thunder drum. while we can never be sure of the exact rationale behind davis’s decision, gibraltar’s militarized reputation, coupled with the typical valuation of animals alive or dead through use value, suggests the drum as animal-made-object was considered a fitting, even perfect, memorial for an old warhorse. it was a memorial that at once allowed for the remembrance of his past service, but which also emphasizes human constructions of ideal horses — and by extension, ideal human/animal relationships. the “ode on the gibraltar charger” again offers clues to these constructs. it emphasizes discourses that constructed equines as servants (or slaves, depending on the author) and ever eager to serve his human masters.77 according to the “ode”, “the soldier he will ne’er forsake” as “the army’s friend and guide” in peace and war. gibraltar was “created for our use, his pride / is man to glory e’er to guide” — indeed, he “welcomes death mankind to love, / and no reward but love he’ll crave”.78 such imagery and constructions of gibraltar, and by extension all ideal equines whom he represents, follow the usual view of horses as created to serve mankind — and 76 “ode”, morning post and daily advertiser (london, england), june 16, 1788; issue 4757. 77 on animal slavery see tague “companions, servants, or slaves”; mattfeld, equines. 78 anonymous, “ode”, morning post and daily advertiser. fig. 3 john singleton copley, general george augustus eliot on a grey charger: a study for the “siege of gibraltar”, ca. 1787. oil on canvas, 50.2 × 31.8 cm. the huntington library, art museum, and botanical gardens. object no. 2001.6. courtesy of the huntington art museum, san marino, california. 32 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) hence, as only valuable when they can continue to do so.79 therefore, as a celebrated servant of the nation’s military heroes (elliot and astley), literary representative of ideal equines throughout britain, and as cherished actor who could perform apparently impossible feats, gibraltar must be correctly honoured after death. to remain valuable and valued, he must remain of use. the thunder drum is particularly poignant, as it is a way for him to continue serving as animal-made-object. it is a loving homage to his life (his wished-for reward according to the “ode”) while honouring his service to both the military and to the (militarized) amphitheatre. such recollections, and the ongoing use of gibraltar-as-drum within the nationalistic, imperialist, and often violent world of hippodrama, i suggest, was an especially fitting aspect of his memorial and one that also allowed for further improving instruction. in his afterlife of service, gibraltar functioned as a taxidermied animal-made object that channelled his “self” as both military hero and performing horse to shape the world around him as a material actant. as an animal-made object embodied with the military history and idealized nature of gibraltar, the thunder drum’s ability to produce loud sounds reminiscent of battle that consequently, according to jennings, rendered an audience awestruck, was essential to the amphitheatre soundscape. such sounds were required for drawing the audience into the amphitheatre’s world of artifice and reenactment, and for eliciting desired emotive responses from those who heard him. as jennings writes: a thunder drum was struck, “and, following the sharp rattling of the shaken sheet of iron and the flash of ignited magnesium an effect is produced that completely awes the simple citizen who knows nothing of the mechanism of the stage.”80 for edmund burke, the sound of thunder and drums was simply sublime. according to burke, the sound of “vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder, or artillery, awakes a great and awful sensation in the mind.”81 indeed, “[f]ew things are more awful,” other than the “striking of a clock” on a silent night, than the “single stroke on a 79 mattfeld, equines. 80 jennings, theatrical and circus life, 171. 81 burke, philosophical inquiry, 151. mattfeld , the spanish horse | 33 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) drum, repeated with pauses; and of the successive firing of cannon at a distance.”82 as gibraltar was likely used to accompany hippodramatic spectacles, his voice was that of the sublime, and the most effective machine for its production. the sublime, as theorized by burke, could have a strong influence on those who experienced it. this was especially the case when it came to sound. as burke argued, loud or sudden noise, such as that created by thunder or the striking of a drum, “is sufficient to over-power the soul, to suspend its action, and to fill it with terror.”83 this terror of an imagined threat robbed the people who experienced it of all their rational abilities. they were struck dumb. such fear, in turn, also resulted in one of the key emotions necessary to the success of the theatre: “delight.” fearful delight, that thrill one experiences when witnessing the sublime, was bread and butter to the amphitheatre, which relied on sensation to sell tickets (as many critics scornfully pointed out).84 when an audience heard gibraltar’s voice, then, they could become awestruck, speechless, and affected by what they experienced at the theatre in a multi-sensory experience that helped bring the theatrical world to life.85 furthermore, the sublime sound of the thunder drum could enwrap an audience in waves of the sublime because the sound of a drum like the thunder drum provides “a means of us ‘touching’ at a distance — a form of personal contact […] a kind of social glue.”86 it offered a shared experience that sympathetically drew listeners together into a world of mutual feeling. of course, all drums could do this, but the equine material of this particular thunder drum was especially important within the amphitheatre world. as i illustrate elsewhere, for burke, horses were typically not associated with the sublime owing to their obedience to human direction. there were, however, also instances where a horse could become the embodiment of the sublime par excellence.87 82 burke, philosophical inquiry, 153. 83 burke, philosophical inquiry, 150–53. 84 moody, illegitimate theatre in london, 10–14. 85 moody, illegitimate theatre in london, 10–14. 86 hendy, noise, 14–15. 87 mattfeld, “‘i see them galloping’,” 74–75. 34 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) specifically, burke refers to a horse in the book of job as the prime instance of the equine sublime: hast thou given the horse strength? hast thou clothed his neck with thunder? canst thou make him afraid as a grasshopper? the glory of his nostrils is terrible. he paweth in the valley, and rejoiceth in his strength: he goeth on to meet the armed men. he mocketh at fear, and is not affrighted; neither turneth he back from the sword. the quiver rattleth against him, the glittering spear and the shield. he swalloweth the ground with fierceness and rage: neither believeth he that it is the sound of the trumpet. he saith among the trumpets, ha, ha; and he smelleth the battle afar off, the thunder of the captains, and the shouting.88 this was a horse whose neck was “clothed […] with thunder” and who was the ultimate in human helpmate as god directed. as a military charger, then, gibraltar was (at least advertised and staged as such) the embodiment of a truly divine animal. he was the ultimate in the sublime horse — alive and dead. indeed, through sound gibraltar could fulfil the fantasy of equine servitude, live the anthropocentric story of equine love, and embody an ideal military might of biblical proportions. the audience shared the phenomena of the sublime, as listening to gibraltar after death created a shared, terror-filled, experience, one that worked to equate the often-patriotic and militaristic messages and images performed on stage with an overwhelming voice. his voice was rumbling, awe inspiring, and total — a voice, decastro implies through the phrase “parting knell”, that was for some also remarkably similar to the thundering voice of god.89 88 job 39:19–25 (kjv). 89 hendy, noise, 165. mattfeld , the spanish horse | 35 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) “parting knell” parting knells were complex elements of nineteenth-century death practices. parting knells (also known as passing knells, death knells, or death bells), in addition to signifying the death of a person, had the potential effect of providing divine protection and a call to salvation for those who heard them. as david hendy notes, parting knells were rung on bells — either handheld or situated in church towers. these bells, especially in the middle ages, were often inscribed with lines of scripture or “spells” designed to drive away evil spirits waiting to seize the newly departed soul.90 while an integral component of earlier practices of death and mourning, parting knells and the ringing of bells continued into the nineteenth century, and their devotional elements endured within the popular imagination.91 in the nineteenth century, however, ringing the bells was “not for the souls of the dead but for the ears of the living.”92 people were not interested in driving away any evil spirits, or necessarily in praying for the soul of the deceased, but in the reminder of their own mortality that the bells afforded.93 many mourners found such reminders deeply disturbing. for example, laura lorrimer described the parting knell as “a leaden weight” on the hearts of all who heard it, a “mournful utterance”, and an unutterably sad reminder of death.94 similarly, for walter scott the parting bell was a “mighty knell” that disturbed the human and natural world with its sound, “so dull and stern”.95 by invoking the language of the parting knell, decastro linked the sound of gibraltar-as-drum to that of the bells. as such, like the ringing of the church bell, the horse-as-drum’s parting knell, while celebratory for his past deeds in the amphitheatre, was also the voice of man’s divine protector and partner in times of strife; he was also, in this instance, the voice of death, the newly departed, and as a result, a voice to be mourned and ultimately feared. i suggest that hearing a 90 price, bells and man, 111–12. 91 laqueur, work of the dead, 147. 92 as qtd. in north, church bells of rutland, 91. 93 sigourney, “passing bell,” 217–18. 94 lorrimer, “captain jasper j. jones,” 246–47. 95 scott, “marmion”, canto second, ll. 628–34. 36 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) parting knell like gibraltar’s could make listeners acutely and tantalizingly aware of how close death walked beside them.96 as the bell at rutland’s church of st. andrew’s, whissendine, made clear: “my roaring sounde doth warning geve / that men cannot heare always lyve.” similarly, a bell at warmington church, northamptonshire, warned “i measure life: i bewail death.”97 to hear a parting knell was thrillingly to hear death speak, and fearfully to mourn its presence. but to hear it was also to hear the potential for eternal salvation. as the third bell at the church of st. helen’s in brant brougham beseeched its listeners: “beg ye of god your soul to save / before we call you to the grave.”98 regardless of how nineteenth-century authors strove to distance themselves from historical funerary practices, the association of parting knells with religion remained firmly in place. the church bells continued to toll around the nation, and the sounds of passing continued to invite spiritual devotion from the community of listeners. within this communal soundscape of the death knell, the act of listening was potentially an act of religious expression and reaffirmed faith, and as a result, an act of receiving a promise for divine protection in the afterlife.99 to hear the parting knell of the church bells or of gibraltar-as-drum recalled the presence of death to the living, and in turn, awakened the listeners to the fragility of their own immortal souls. for gibraltar, then, his parting knell not only connected the audience within a community of terror-filled delight, and the amphitheatre workers in a community of celebrating mourners, but it also, in effect, spread his message of spiritual guidance, or his “wholesome warning”, throughout the theatre on waves of sound.100 like a church bell, the gibraltar-as-drum worked to: 96 lomax, bells and bellringers, 68. 97 lomax, bells and bellringers, 90–91. 98 laqueur, work of the dead, 147. 99 hendy, noise, 112; lomax, bells and bellringers, 67. 100 monsell, passing bell, ix. as don ihde argues, early acoustics began discussing the movement of sound through waves in the early to mid nineteenth century. ihde, acoustic techniques, 11. for an overall look at sound in the nineteenth century see picker, victorian soundscapes. mattfeld , the spanish horse | 37 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) prompt us his will to do, bid us his favour sue, warn us his wrath to rue, unto whose eye, unto whose bar of dread, judge of the quick and dead, every hour’s silent tread bringeth us nigh.101 what his mournful voice meant, precisely, and what constituted his message of warning in order to receive divine protection remains unclear. but what is certain is that as a drum he was a momento mori that “touched” everyone in the amphitheatre in some way. as a being fragmented, stripped of his skin — the external markers of identity — in the process of becoming an animal-made-object, he became, as all taxidermy must, a figure of “remembrance” for those who “knew the circumstances” of his life and death.102 he likewise became a being whose voice activated the experience of the sublime through his agency as a horse-as-drum. as such, he embodied the possibility of “[o]rganic materials [to] have the potential to be far more haunting souvenirs than manufactured objects. and haunting is the right word. by staving off the finality of material dissolution, preservation endows bodily souvenirs with an impoverished yet resolute immortality.”103 as a drum, the gibraltar charger was elevated above a celebrity animal famed for performing the impossibly human; as a seemingly inert material object he was transformed into a producer of emotive sound that altered all aspects and people of the theatre. he became at once material, animal, thing, companion, but he also became elevated, better, heard, and divine as a taxidermied animal-made-object that celebrated the “who” within. 101 sigourney, “passing bell,” 219. 102 poliquin, breathless zoo, 7. 103 poliquin, breathless zoo, 203. 38 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) acknowledgements i would like to thank kevin hutchins, humanimalia’s editor kári driscoll, and the two anonymous reviewers for their excellent comments and suggestions. your time, generosity, and expertise are greatly appreciated. works cited aloi, giovanni. speculative taxidermy: natural history, animal surfaces, and art in the anthropocene. new york: columbia university press, 2018. amato, sarah. beastly possessions: animals in victorian consumer culture. toronto: university of toronto press, 2015. astley, philip. astley’s projects, in his management of the horse […]. london, 1804. astley, philip. astley’s system of equestrian education, exhibiting the beauties and defects of the horse […]. london, 1801. bacon, francis. “history of life and death.” in the works of francis bacon. volume 5: translations of the philosophical works 2, edited by james spedding, robert leslie ellis, and douglas denon heath, 213–336. london, 1858. reprint, cambridge university press, 2011. baker, steve. the postmodern animal. london: reaktion books, 2000. bennett, jane. vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. durham, nc: duke university press, 2010. boddice, rob. a history of attitudes and behaviours toward animals in eighteenthand nineteenth-century britain: anthropocentrism and the emergence of animals. lewiston, ny: edwin mellen press, 2008. boyle, john. “monumental inscriptions on an urn in the gardens at marston.” gentleman’s magazine 50 (1780): 242. burke, edmund. a philosophical inquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful. london, 1767. cavendish, william, duke of newcastle. a general system of horsemanship in all it’s branches […]. volume i. london, 1743. facsimile reproduction. introduced by william c. steinkraus and technical commentary by e. schmit-jensen. north pomfret, vermont: j.a. allen, 2000. collings, david. “bentham’s auto-icon: utilitarianism and the evisceration of the common body.” prose studies 23, no. 3 (2000): 95–127. https://doi. org/10.1080/01440350008586718. cozzi, bruno, cristina ballarin, roberto mantovani, and ada rota. “aging and veterinary care of cats, dogs, and horses through the records of three university veterinary hospitals.” frontiers in veterinary science 4, no. 14 (2017). https://doi.org/10.3389/ fvets.2017.00014. curth, louise hill. the care of brute beasts: a social and cultural study of veterinary medicine in early modern england. leiden: brill, 2010. decastro, jacob. the memoirs of j. decastro, comedian […]. london, 1824. dickens, charles. “famous circus horses.” era, march 26, 1892. dickens, charles. “philip astley.” all the year round 7 (dec. 2, 1871–may 11, 1872), 205–11. https://doi.org/10.1080/01440350008586718 https://doi.org/10.1080/01440350008586718 https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2017.00014 https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2017.00014 mattfeld , the spanish horse | 39 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) donald, diana. picturing animals in britain, 1750–1850. new haven: yale university press for the paul mellon centre for studies in british art, 2007. donovan, josephine. the aesthetics of care: on the literary treatment of animals. new york: bloomsbury academic, 2016. edwards, peter. horse and man in early modern england. london: bloomsbury academic, 2007. edwards, peter. “image and reality: upper class perceptions of the horse in early modern england.” in the horse as cultural icon: the real and the symbolic horse in the early modern world, edited by peter edwards, karl a. e. enenkel, and elspeth graham, 281–306. leiden: brill, 2012. eisenman, stephen f. the cry of nature: art and the making of animal rights. london: reaktion books, 2013. forrest, susanna. the age of the horse: an equine journey through human history. new york: atlantic monthly press, 2016. fudge, erica. “renaissance animal things.” in gorgeous beasts: animal bodies in historical perspective, edited by joan b. landes, paula young, and paul youngquist, 41–56. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2012. haraway, donna j. “teddy bear patriarchy: taxidermy in the garden of eden, new york city, 1908–1936.” social text no. 11 (1984): 20–64. hendy, david. noise: a human history of sound and listening. london: profile books, 2013. herbert, henry, earl of pembroke. a method of breaking horses and teaching soldiers to ride, designed for the use of the army […]. london, 1762. heyrick, elizabeth. cursory remarks on the evil tendency of unrestrained cruelty: particularly on that practised in smithfield market. london, 1823. highfill, jr. philip h., kalman a. burnim, and edward a. langhans. a biographical dictionary of actors, actresses, musicians, dancers, managers, and other stage personnel in london, 1660–1800. vol. 1: abaco to belfille. carbondale: southern illinois university press, 1973. ihde, don. acoustic techniques. lanham, maryland: lexington books, 2016. jennings, john joseph. theatrical and circus life: or, secrets of the stage, green-room and sawdust arena. st. louis: sun publishing, 1882. kalshoven, petra tjitske. “gestures of taxidermy: morphological approximation as interspecies affinity.” american ethnologist 45, no. 1 (2018): 34– 47. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12597. kean, hilda. animal rights: political and social change in britain since 1800. london: reaktion books, 1998. kwint, marius. “astley’s amphitheatre and the early circus in england, 1768–1830.” phd dissertation, magdalen college, oxford, 1994. kwint, marius. “the legitimization of the circus in late georgian england.” past and present, no. 174 (2002): 72–115. laqueur, thomas w. the work of the dead: a cultural history of mortal remains. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2015. lomax, benjamin. bells and bellringers. london, 1879. lorrimer, laura. “captain jasper j. jones.” in a voice from the south, 246–247. nashville, tn: southern methodist publishing house, 1883. mattfeld, monica. ‘“genus porcus sophisticus’: the learned pig and the theatrics of national identity in late eighteenth-century london.” in performing animality: animals in performance practices, edited by lourdes orozco and jennifer parkerstarbuck, 57–76. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12597 40 | mattfeld , the spanish horse humanimalia 15.2 (2025) mattfeld, monica. ‘“i see them galloping!’: war and performing horses in matthew lewis’s timour the tartar.” in performing animals: history, agency, theater, edited by karen raber and monica mattfeld, 66–80. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2017. mattfeld, monica. equines in eighteenthcentury thought: intersectional discriminations and the imperfect horse. new york: palgrave macmillan, forthcoming. mattfeld, monica. “‘undaunted all he views’: the gibraltar charger, astley’s amphitheatre and masculine performance.” journal of eighteenthcentury studies 37, no. 1 (2014): 19–36. https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12036. mcshane, clay and joel a. tarr. the horse in the city: living machines in the nineteenth century. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press, 2007. menely, tobias. the animal claim: sensibility and the creaturely voice. chicago: university of chicago press, 2015. monsell, john samuel bewley. the passing bell, and other poems. london, 1866. moody, jane. illegitimate theatre in london, 1770–1840. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2000. morillo, john. the rise of animals and descent of man, 1660–1800: toward posthumanism in british literature between descartes and darwin. newark: university of delaware press, 2018. north, thomas. the church bells of rutland: their inscriptions, traditions, and peculiar uses; with chapters on bells and bell founders. leicester, 1880. o’quinn, daniel. entertaining crisis in the atlantic imperium, 1770–1790. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press, 2011. paddon, hannah, “biological objects and ‘mascotism:’ the life and times of alfred the gorilla.” in the afterlives of animals: a museum menagerie, edited by samuel j. m. m. alberti, 134–50. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2011. perkins, david. romanticism and animal rights, 1790–1830. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2003. picker, john. victorian soundscapes. oxford: oxford university press, 2003. poliquin, rachel. the breathless zoo: taxidermy and the cultures of longing. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2012. poppiti, kimberly. a history of equestrian drama in the united states: hippodrama’s pure air and fire. new york: routledge, 2018. preece, rod. brute souls, happy beasts, and evolution: the historical status of animals. vancouver: ubc press, 2005. price, percival. bells and man. oxford: oxford university press, 1983. primatt, humphrey. a dissertation on the duty of mercy and sin of cruelty to brute animals. london, 1776. rubel, william. “english horse-bread, 1590–1800.” gastronomica 6, no. 3 (2006): 40–51. https://doi.org/10.1525/ gfc.2006.6.3.40. saxon, arthur h. the life and art of andrew ducrow & the romantic age of the english circus. hamden, ct: archon books, 1978. scott, walter. “marmion.” in the poetical works of sir walter scott, 76–171. edinburgh, 1850. sigourney, lydia howard huntley. “the passing bell.” in illustrated poems, 217–218. philadelphia, 1849. skeavington, george. the modern system of farriery, as practiced at the present time at the royal veterinary college. london, 1850. spector, william s. handbook of biological data. philadelphia: saunders, 1956. spencer, jane. writing about animals in the age of revolution. oxford: oxford university press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1111/1754-0208.12036 https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2006.6.3.40 https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2006.6.3.40 mattfeld , the spanish horse | 41 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) straughan, elizabeth r. “entangled corporeality: taxidermy practice and the vibrancy of dead matter.” geohumanities 1, no. 2 (2015): 363–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/237356 6x.2015.1109468. tague, ingrid h. “companions, servants, or slaves?: considering animals in eighteenth-century britain.” studies in eighteenth-century culture 39 (2010): 111–30. https://doi.org/10.1353/ sec.0.0067. thomas, keith. man and the natural world: changing attitudes in england, 1500–1800. london: allen lane, 1983. trimmer, sarah. the two farmers, an exemplary tale: designed to recommend the practice of benevolence towards mankind, and all other living creatures; and the religious observance of the sabbath-day. london, 1787. velten, hannah. beastly london: a history of animals in the city. london: reaktion books, 2013. wolloch, nathaniel. “the limits of enlightenment sensitivity to the suffering of animals.” in knowledge and pain, edited by esther cohen leona toker, manuela consonni and otniel e. dror, 123–144. leiden: brill, 2012. worrall, david. theatric revolution: drama, censorship, and romantic period subcultures, 1773–1832. oxford: oxford university press, 2006. young, elizabeth. pet projects: animal fiction and taxidermy in the nineteenthcentury archive. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566x.2015.1109468 https://doi.org/10.1080/2373566x.2015.1109468 https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.0.0067 https://doi.org/10.1353/sec.0.0067 _hlk161041181 _hlk140132597 _hlk161041194 _hlk161118751 _hlk161139015 _hlk161118898 _hlk140132098 _hlk161140134 _hlk161043591 _hlk143854788 _hlk165781072 _hlk161041644 _hlk178073107 _hlk140068815 _hlk165182304 _hlk161140645 _hlk165368484 _hlk162670924 _hlk161138603 _hlk165183180 _hlk172119951 _hlk140545318 paul (in)tangible teamwork (in)tangible teamwork human perceptions of nonhuman sensing in the case of sniffer dogs bettina paul university of hamburg humanimalia 15.1 (fall 2024) abstract: sniffer dog teams are a vital, and at the same time highly contested, part of airport security practices. while human dog handlers are confronted with scepticism concerning the teams’ reliability and capacity in detection work, they also have to cope with their nonknowledge when considering what their canine partners smell when searching for explosives. based on the insights from field observations, as well as interviews on more-thanhuman sensing practices in predominantly german security contexts, this essay explores the way sniffer dog teams work and asks how they deal with the nonknowledge issue. in conceptualizing their human–animal interaction as a performative dance of agency, nonknowledge can be characterized as the enactment of a productive force through reciprocal responsiveness and sensual knowledge. in exploring the nexus of human perception and animal sensitivity, this essay engages with the question of how the epistemology of knowing shapes interspecies communication in security-related contexts. keywords: sniffer dog teams; nonhuman sensing; nonknowledge; animal agency; animal labour; human–animal relationality; interspecies communication bio: bettina paul is senior researcher and lecturer in criminology in the department of social sciences at the university of hamburg, germany. her current research is inspired by the intersection of science and technology, cultural animal studies and animal–computer interaction. it centres around interspecies knowledge production, sociotechnical imaginations, and the polychronicity of technologies. her work on human–animal sniffer dog teams is conducted in the context of a dfg-funded project on anticipatory truth verification systems in the field of airport security. email: bettina.paul@uni-hamburg.de orcid: 0000-0003-3786-2707 copyright © 2024 bettina paul this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 1 (2024): 75–104. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18530 mailto:bettina.paul@uni-hamburg.de https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3786-2707 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18530 paul , (in)tangible teamwork | 77 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) resulting from a combination of specific ideas about the world and an interaction with that very world, the outcome of “thinking with animals” is a knowledge object that contains elements of both the world and of a particular way of knowing it. ideally, then, studying these products may shed a light both on the world and on the perception of it. — andreas roepstorff, “thinking with animals” “w hat does the dog smell?” is a rhetorical, self-directed question that i encountered repeatedly in different forms when talking to sniffer dog handlers in their work environment.1 these conversations were conducted as part of a study that considered the area of explosives detection and how humans conceptualize their nonhuman partners’ senses. even though the question of what is on the mind of an animal relates to various species with which humans interact, in the case of the sniffer dog it seems to be both a highly consequential and closely scrutinized one. the question is raised within the context of a larger critique of sniffer dogs, especially when they are working in the service of the state. as such, they are characterized as an extension of sovereign power and criticized for their “ability to enact a politics of smell”.2 this critical discourse of instrumentalizing sniffer dogs as a tool for state power comes from outside the security field, however. for the actual working reality of sniffer dogs within state services, other lines of critique are more dominant. in the case of germany, explosives detection dog teams are employed by the military, the police, and by private security firms.3 within the field of airport security, in the focus of my fieldwork, explosives detection dogs are often compared 1 i agree with donna haraway that “handler” is a terrible term for one entity in a partnership. but since it is an established term within the field, i will use it to stay true to the field’s terminology. see haraway, when species meet, 225. 2 neocleous, “smell of power,” 200. 3 sniffer dog teams also exist in other services and detection fields, e.g., search and rescue, drugs or conservation. 78 | paul , (in)tangible teamwork humanimalia 15.1 (2024) with technological devices.4 yet none of the currently available technologies are seen as a match for sniffer dog teams when engaging in relevant tasks. sniffer dogs can cover a wide area at high speed, are physically flexible in reaching all parts of cargo, and can differentiate between odours,5 which is something that cannot currently be achieved by an electronic device.6 nevertheless, these abilities are all still challenged on the grounds that they only come in pairs with their handlers, or that they lack objective standards owing to the difficulty of establishing with any certainty precisely what it is that the dog smells.7 “what does the dog smell?” is also a question in everyday scent work. here, however, it is generally perceived as an unsolvable mystery that must be accepted. it is indeed a difficult question to answer with definitive certainty, but one that deserves more attention from scholarship, particularly within the domain of everyday animal labour. there is, to be sure, a growing body of work within animal studies that engages with this issue, focusing not only on the negative working conditions of animals, but also on the positive value that work might have for animals.8 kendra coulter, for example, approaches this question from an interspecies solidarity standpoint.9 she elucidates the idea of providing humane jobs for animals, meaning that the animals are “suitable for and interested in the job”, and have the “right to choose whether to work or not”.10 on a similar note, charlotte blattner argues 4 in germany, with regard to aviation security, explosives detection dogs are deployed only by security companies that are accredited to control air freight. in the case of more general airport security they are also employed by the police. 5 the term odour is the appropriate terminology since the often used equivalent “scent” refers only to the smell of living beings (human or animal). odour is a broader term encompassing the vapour of explosives, drugs, and other substances. see furton and winialski, “olfactory capabilities”, 23, 24. for the purposes of this paper i will also frequently use the term “scent work”. 6 see furton and winialski, “olfactory capabilities”, 22 for this evaluation. 7 these arguments have been raised in various informal discussions in the airport security field. as the field is very security-sensitive, there is no formal criticism from within. 8 see porcher and estebanez, “animal labor”, 17. 9 coulter, animals, work; “humane jobs and work-lives”; but see also blattner, “animals have a right” for an overview of the current scholarship, see blattner, coulter, and kymlicka, “introduction: animal labour”, 2. 10 coulter, “humane jobs and work-lives”, 36; emphasis in original. paul , (in)tangible teamwork | 79 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) from an interspecies justice position that animals should not only be protected from exploitative work conditions, but should also have the right to work, pointing to the idea of self-determination for nonhuman species, and conceptualizing different ways to recognize and ensure their free will.11 maintaining humane jobs for animals, then, means at a minimum, entitling them “to retirement, dignity, and a great deal of autonomy”, as coulter emphasizes.12 of course, the degree of autonomy available to animals depends greatly on the specific kind of work. unlike animals working in the livestock industry, for instance, the labour performed by sniffer dogs has the potential to be “good work”, as it is based on reciprocity.13 “good work” in this context should have an emancipating impact on the animal. as well as the opportunity to exercise agency and experience interspecies sociability,14 one should also ensure that animals can be “esteemed as valuable workers” as alasdair cochrane writes, and allow for pleasure, which, in cochrane’s definition, includes the use and development of skills.15 one important skill within scent work is that of “emotional labour”, a concept developed by tiamat warda, which encompasses emotional displays in the course of a formal job to “align with social and organisational guidelines”.16 emotional labour is steered by socalled “feeling rules”, which are taught in the training. warda differentiates these emotional displays from those in emotion work, which are not formally required, but rather entail a social use, for instance, to keep interspecies communication going.17 the special human–animal encounter that lies at the heart of scent work might be described as a form of dance: a “dance of agency” as andrew pickering phrases it. a characteristic of this notion is the shifting agency between humans and animals in an “extended backand-forth dance of human and non-human agency in which activity 11 blattner, “animal labour”, 95, 96, 99. 12 coulter, “humane jobs and work-lives”, 35. 13 cochrane, “good work for animals”; cf. porcher and estebanez, “animal labor”, 11. 14 blattner, “animals have a right”, 34. 15 cochrane, “good work for animals”, 49. 16 warda, “interspecies emotion management”, 86. 17 warda, “interspecies emotion management”, 87, 89, 90. 80 | paul , (in)tangible teamwork humanimalia 15.1 (2024) and passivity on both sides are reciprocally intertwined”.18 this means that both entities are relevant in their recursive effects. nevertheless, agency seems to be a challenging concept within the human–animal ensemble: not because of the question of whether the dog has any, but rather concerning how agency is distributed within the ensemble and who is leading in the interaction. even within the seemingly homogeneous field of sniffer dog handlers, there are radically different conceptions, or even “cosmologies”, when it comes to thinking about the dogs’ agency.19 the classic anthropological term “cosmology”, as defined by nils bubandt and andreas roepstorff, means an “encompassing conception of the world”. this proves to be a fruitful framework with which to explore the differences i encountered in the field in how handlers made sense of their communication with their canine partner.20 based on his ethnography of fishery in greenland, roepstorff speaks of the different cosmologies of fishers and biologists, with a particular focus on where they clash in their perspectives and understanding of fish. he refers to these different cosmologies as “thinking about” versus “thinking with” animals. “thinking about” is framed by a cartesian dualism, where the difference between human and animals is crucial and taken as self-evident. the contrast in cosmology is shown in roepstorff’s example of the way the inuit fishers ascribe personhood to animals.21 “thinking with”, in the way roepstorff describes it, entails an “a priori ascription of semiotic competence”.22 animals from this perspective are seen as being capable of interpreting their environment and actively engaging in communication with other species, including humans. as i will show, both cosmologies are at work in how human handlers approach the agency of their canine partners, and they also affect the communication and sociality of the teamwork as it unfolds in the encounter. 18 pickering, “material culture”, 195; emphasis in original. 19 koski and bäcklund, for instance, observe that the way canines are humanized, animalized or instrumentalized in training depends on humans’ “modes of thought connected to dogs” (“position of dogs,” 27). 20 roepstorff and bubandt, “introduction”, 21; see also roepstorff, “thinking with animals.” 21 roepstorff, “thinking with animals”, 213. 22 roepstorff, “thinking with animals”, 203; emphasis in original. paul , (in)tangible teamwork | 81 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) both versions of the question of “what a dog smells”, be it the sceptical position of comparison with technologies or the everyday mystery from inside the field, entails a scrutiny of knowledge claims about the human–animal communication. what we do and do not (or cannot) know about animal sensing seems to be of crucial concern to everyone who is confronted with or engages in this practice. i use the term nonknowledge to characterize the human perception of this mystery. nonknowledge is often perceived as a lack of knowledge or as the opposite of knowledge. however, to analyse human–animal work interaction it would be useful to understand nonknowledge as performative, as something that emerges in action and is always intertwined with other forms of certainty. donna haraway’s notion of knowledge in the encounter is helpful to grasp nonknowledge in sniffer dog teamwork. she distinguishes between positive and negative ways of knowing between the partners. the possibility of a positive way of knowing derives from mutuality in the encounter and curiosity as to what the partner is thinking about.23 in describing negative ways of knowing, by contrast, haraway draws on negative theology. generally speaking, there is no way to know for certain who or what god — or, in this case, the nonhuman other — is, and yet at the same time there exists a certainty about the other, a certainty that haraway compares to love.24 haraway’s differentiation thus points to an affirmative notion of nonknowledge, conceived not as a lack of knowledge, but rather as a different way of knowing, one that is not based on certainty. nonknowledge in the human–animal encounter then must be seen as being productive. it is socially situated and enacted in its mutuality in light of the tacit, intangible knowledge at play. this handling of nonknowledge within human–animal interaction will be explored further, focusing on the ways humans conceptualize their access to their canine partners’ modes of sensing. these explorations are based on insights from a research project exploring the work of sniffer dogs as an example of lively resistance within a field where security is increasingly automated. the material for the case study is based on thirteen field visits with a mix of non-participant 23 as haraway argues throughout when species meet, especially 95–132. 24 haraway, companion species manifesto, 50. 82 | paul , (in)tangible teamwork humanimalia 15.1 (2024) and participant observations, as well as twenty qualitative interviews with a total of thirty-five dog handlers, trainers, and authorities within the police, private security, and customs.25 these were conducted primarily in germany, but also in the netherlands and switzerland, between august 2021 and march 2024. the time spent in each field ranged from a few hours up to a day, and the interviews were mainly conducted during these visits. the field visits included direct observations of daily practices, predominantly airport security, as well as visits to sniffer dog training facilities also for general explosives detection dogs. visits to the customs sniffer dogs teams complemented the observations, even though they focused on other topics rather than explosives. all participants (humans and animals) mentioned have been anonymized. the analysis of the interviews and fieldnotes was based on the principles of abductive analysis.26 this means that the successive coding process filtered out key analytical themes of different forms of sensing, knowing and not knowing as it was voiced by the dog handlers or shown in their interactions. in what follows, i will address the modes of knowledge and nonknowledge that can be differentiated in this field and sketch out how they prove to be important for the real-world performance of sniffer dog teams. i begin by outlining knowledge claims from the field, and then proceed with an account of knowledge that is produced within the actual intra-action of the ensemble. considering the teamwork as a “dance of agency”, i will demonstrate the role of sensation in the oscillation of agency within the team. highlighting the quality of mutual encounters in the dance, the focus will be on the sensual tacit dimension that can be conceptualized as nonknowledge. the concluding thoughts will explore how human cosmology, and perceptions of their partner’s agency, relate to the negative way of knowing, thereby emphasizing how humans evaluate the nonhumans’ olfactory capacity and performance, despite their sensory inability to perceive the odours themselves. 25 even though the customs sniffer dogs were employed to detect an odour (wildlife) distinct from the explosives detection dogs in the police and private security field, the conversations and observations yielded insights in their comparisons. 26 see tavory and timmermans, abductive analysis. paul , (in)tangible teamwork | 83 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) entering the ontology of dog handlers: from the genetic fit to “they are all individuals”.27 when talking to dog handlers, whether within the police, customs or in the private security sector, one quickly discovers that they share a common knowledge concerning the nature of dogs, both as a species and with regard to specific breeds. opinions about which breeds inherit which character traits were consistent throughout the field: german and belgian shepherds were seen as best fitted to become detection dogs.28 reportedly, they inherit the necessary traits for the work: playfulness and a “tenacious desire to track” [belastbaren finderwillen], “which goes beyond the play instinct” (security, interview 32). furthermore, they have to be steady, meaning they are not afraid of loud noises, traffic, or a specific terrain. they have to be able to focus and not be easily distracted, show a “willingness to work”, even when it means going beyond their limits. all of these traits are seen as something that cannot be trained but has to be innate. within the recruitment phase, the handlers look for pre-existing qualities in the dog that match their own framework, such as genetic predisposition (security, interview 32).29 there are differences insofar as some adhere to a fantasy of “purity”,30 while others merely associate the negative outcome of an overemphasis in breeding. since the state services have no breeding programs on their own, they rely on trusted sellers. the dogs are taken in on trial for about six months, during which they are thoroughly checked for health and character traits to see if they fit the job description, and to evaluate the development of the human–animal bond during this time. the sniffer dog teams rely on a special bond with one specific human handler, so that they can depend on each other and develop 27 police, interview 3. all translations of german quotations into english, both from the interviews and fieldnotes and from published sources are by the author. 28 this is identical to the insights of ahto-hakonen and hakonen from the finnish police dog field, see ahto-hakonen and hakonen. “all fun and games”, 730, 731. 29 see also d’souza, hovorka, and niel, “conservation canines”, 67, regarding the “play drive” requirement for canine scent work. interestingly, their study shows that detection dogs can be chosen from shelters, and do not have to be purebred dogs where everything is supposedly known about the dog. 30 see guest et al., “roundtable”, 13. 84 | paul , (in)tangible teamwork humanimalia 15.1 (2024) a unique responsiveness. it is this uniqueness that is criticized by those in the security field for the lack of interchangeable partners in the work schedule, but also for the monopoly of interpretation that one person carries. in the field, this feeds scepticism about the accuracy of interpretation in detection. in the literature, the embodied consent in the interpretation is criticized for being one person’s responsibility.31 it is difficult to know how to ensure consent within the recruitment process and to find out if the canine is interested in the job. while blattner considers whether consent is in fact “made” by the human handler, the common perception in my field was that sniffer dogs have to want to work and cannot be forced into it.32 all dog handlers within the airport security field are obliged to undertake (recurrent) training, which entails basic theory on canine behaviour, obedience, odour characteristics and behavioural conditioning. another key influence on the handler’s style of thinking is the training instructor, whom many think of as a mentor. dog handlers also seek out factual knowledge on their own (e.g. from other trainers or specialist literature). but above all, their practical knowledge is acquired collaboratively through living and working with their canine partner in a daily basis. one issue in which distinct cosmologies in the field come into view is the working assignment of the dog. so-called “single purpose dogs”, as in the case of aviation security certified explosives sniffer dogs, are trained solely for these specific tasks. so-called “dual purpose dogs”, assigned for protection and detection for example, are expected to switch between aggressive and playful modes, depending on the job. however, one handler from a private security company commented that “the dual-use dog is a myth” (security, interview 32). his perception was an example of a “new perspective” in the field, one that contradicts and challenges a great deal of conventional training and perceptions, by focusing on positive reward-oriented methods.33 the parallel training styles in the 31 blattner, “animal labour”, 108. 32 blattner, “animal labour”, 107. 33 for the sniffer dog training example, see fjellanger, “learning principles”, 11–15. paul , (in)tangible teamwork | 85 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) field epitomized a paradoxical co-existence of paradigms.34 the paradigm shift “from strict to soft methods” that jenni ahto-hakonen and aki hakonen describe in the context of finnish police dogs was also evident in my field participants.35 this varied, however, according to the types of tasks the dogs were required to perform. in the case of a dog who was supposed to protect and detect, classic training methods were still present. in contrast, “single purpose” explosives sniffer dog teams were increasingly using positive reinforcement methods. this shift in the “dog training culture” 36 marks a radical renunciation of earlier practices. justyna włodarczyk identifies a shift that goes even further beyond positive reinforcement, and which can be seen especially clearly in the culture of agility training.37 she describes it as “becoming more dog”. approaches such as this make it clear that human agents within sniffer dog work are not just subject to influences from within their disciplinary bubble, but that the general human–animal relationship is influenced by other cultural changes. this new way of thinking is also connected to more general changes, specifically in the domestic living conditions of handlers and their canine partners. whereas in the past, handlers mostly lived in houses and kept their dogs in cages in the backyard, today, new handlers tend to live in apartments and share their living space with their canine partner. this shift in living conditions has fundamentally changed the way humans and dogs relate to each other. keeping dogs outside the household served to emphasize an emotionally distanced and hierarchical power-relation, whereas once they moved into the same living space, animal partners became an integral part of the family. even though, formally, the employer has ownership of the canine worker, the interspecies partnership extends into their private lives and even into the one or the other’s retirement, 34 this is similar to how włodarczyk describes it (“be more dog”, 40). 35 ahto-hakonen and hakonen, “all fun and games”, 735. more generally, see also koski and bäcklund, “position of dogs” and włodarczyk “be more dog”. 36 charles et al., “fulfilling your dog’s potential”. 37 włodarczyk “be more dog”. coulter also talks about a departure from “antiquated training practices”, in her case with the example of horse training. coulter, “humane jobs and work-lives”, 37, 41. 86 | paul , (in)tangible teamwork humanimalia 15.1 (2024) a phenomenon that kendra coulter refers to as “work-life”.38 animal labour within state service corresponds to this notion of “work-life”, since the sniffer dogs are cared for by their handlers after work and are entitled to a pension. one dog handler from customs explained that her canine partners are allowed to come to work even after retirement, but that they are off duty. this is so they can keep their familiar daily environment and companionship (custom, interview 20). furthermore, the handlers try to distinguish between the work and private sphere since both parts of their lives are deeply influential to the other. some help their canine partner by putting on a different collar for work than the one for at home, for example, so that the distinction is symbolically marked. while on the job, the search task requires the emotional labour of both entities — the human handler must withhold their emotions so as not to interfere in the sniffing process, and direct appropriate emotions towards their canine partner at the end of the search. the sniffer dog in turn must engage in appropriate emotional displays, as these are a crucial feature of how to indicate a search result. what is seen as appropriate is something that both the handler and canine partner learn in the training, and is guided by “feeling rules” regarding the exact exercise (such as the gesture to indicate a scent or the duration of this gesture).39 in another police dog training setting, an instructor described the changes in the field as a result of the increasing open-mindedness of trainers. instructors are developing new methods with as little negative reinforcement as possible. while training through positive reinforcement turns out to be quite time-consuming, handlers and instructors observe and reflect on the way the animal teammate now conducts their work in a joyful manner. the classic methods, in which pressure is put on the dog, are now perceived as harming 38 coulter, “humane jobs and work-lives”. as the comparative study on the work of conservation canines by d’souza, hovorka and niel shows, humans who control the worklives must meet the demands of humane jobs so that canines can fully embrace them (“conservation canine”). 39 warda, “interspecies emotion management”, 83, 87. paul , (in)tangible teamwork | 87 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) them, which leads to avoidance behaviour (police, interview 1).40 different thinking styles also reveal themselves in the way that human handlers perceive the dog ontologically as an animal. here, common knowledge suggests that the dog, in general, is a pack animal. even though many handlers agree on this, it has different consequences when it comes to the distinct ways of thinking. one senior police dog handler, whom i accompanied throughout a day in the field, characterized dogs as “stupid”. since they are pack animals, he said, they just follow others, looking for an alpha. to him it was clear that this had to do with the fact that dogs are still predators. he would always ask himself: “how would nature react? what would the wolf do?” (police, interview 3). when “thinking about” dogs, the handler talks about the way the specific configuration of dogs’ brains is responsible for their talent, which makes their sniffing capabilities unique (police, interview 3). for this handler, a dog’s personality is genetically determined. this emphasis on biological features extends into seeing the dog as a latent predator constantly observing the human handler to find his or her weak spot. with this view the handler emphasizes the species-separating characteristics in an extreme form. in a different case, a dog handler from a security company connects the idea that dogs are pack animals to their longing for affection and need for the social company of others (security, interview 32). this handler argues strongly against the “old school” practice of “breaking” the dog, which for him meant achieving absolute obedience and instilling fear. for the handler, this is an outdated attitude, but one which is still prevalent in the field. disputing the old view that a dog will always challenge the next one above them in the pack hierarchy, he argues that there are different types of dogs in a pack. only a few dogs want to be leaders, and in his view, typical “alpha animals” do not exist anymore, as they have been bred away. instead, there are somewhat stronger (more dominant) or weaker (more submissive) characters (security, interview 32). 40 of course, recent changes in german animal welfare legislation prohibiting training equipment designed to cause pain (such as prong collars) have made it necessary to invent new methods as well. all of this is easier to establish for sniffer dogs than for protection dogs, where the control of aggression is part of the job. 88 | paul , (in)tangible teamwork humanimalia 15.1 (2024) seeing knowledge as something that is fluid and preliminary, we can see the figure of the “alpha wolf” reflected in the perspectives of the two handlers in different ways. nonetheless, both of these perspectives lead to the conclusion that human domination over the dog is required. this is despite the fact that in wolf-related science, the idea of the single “alpha” that is a leader of the pack has long been refuted.41 the idea still lives on, however, in part due to its strong narrative. in thinking of the dog as a wild animal allows handlers to explain unfamiliar behaviour in the dog to themselves. the explanation that this is “just nature” helps them relate to their own reactions to it. working with sniffer dogs coming from the “thinking about” cosmology makes the handler want to domesticate the dog. the “thinking with” cosmology, on the contrary, results in concessions when working with the sniffer dogs. but there are commonalities as well, since in both ways of thinking the human handler speaks of dogs as if “they are all individuals” (police, interview 33). thus, even when they talk about the specific character traits of a certain breed, there is a common understanding that each dog has their own personality which may differ from the imagined breed-specific traits.42 accessing nonhuman sensation in “dances of agency”: on reciprocal sensing looking at the way sniffer dog teams interact will allow insights into the enactment of nonknowledge, since the specific ways of knowing — positive and negative — are on display in this practical human– animal encounter. as karen barad emphasizes, “[k]nowing is a direct material engagement, a practice of intra-acting with the world as part of the world in its dynamic material configuring, its ongoing articulation.”43 in scent work, this kind of reciprocal sensing and the expectations towards the other are clearly demonstrated as a dance of agency, as the following scene from a sniffer dog training shows: 41 see peterson et al., “leadership behavior”, 1410. 42 warda, “interspecies emotion management”, 88. 43 barad, meeting the universe halfway, 379. paul , (in)tangible teamwork | 89 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) we watch as a dog handler team under the supervision and guidance of an instructor runs through a detection test. the dog is left on a long leash and is not allowed to move until his handler says so. the handler shows the dog where to start searching — moving with two fingers along some objects that form the start of the search. (they call this “vorspuren”.) suddenly the dog stands very stiffly in front of the object — he freezes up to the tip of his tail. this is interpreted by the handler as the dog’s having detected the odour that was the target of the search. the handler makes a sound with his clicker, signalling the dog to stop freezing. then the dog receives a treat and, most importantly, gets effusive praise from his human partner. the handler rejoices loudly with the dog, moves with him, pats him, affirms him joyfully, and starts playing with him. it is this affection that the dog strives for, the handler tells me later. (police, fieldnotes 1) this description indicates the abandonment of a “preset taxonomic calculation”44 within the situational encounter of the two entities. the thinking of genetic predispositions is deferred and replaced by sensation which shows that “thinking is the conceptual counterpart of the ability to enter modes of relation, to affect and be affected.”45 thinking — with and about — becomes part of sensation. no matter how the human handlers think with or about the dog, the issue of whether they have a “cognizing mind” or not is secondary: “‘minds’ are themselves material phenomena that emerge through specific intra-actions”, as barad writes.46 the handler and the dog communicate through multiple senses, through a form of immersion. immersion can be understood as a “state of mind”, a “trope of engagement”, and sensation must then be understood as the bodily capacity “to resonate, to become more”.47 regarding “sensory attunement” as it appears in the fieldnote: blattner as well as fox et al. emphasize the role of embodied knowledge 44 haraway, when species meet, 71. 45 braidotti, posthuman knowledge, 124. 46 barad, meeting the universe halfway, 361. 47 hayward, “sensational jellyfish”, 173, 183. 90 | paul , (in)tangible teamwork humanimalia 15.1 (2024) as a joint experience within human–animal communication.48 this is most noticeable in the exuberant reward parts in the above scene. in another instance, i observed a training situation where a handler was rather shy and quiet when interacting with the dog and was subsequently severely criticized by his instructor for not “giving him [the dog] enough” (police, fieldnotes 1). the instructor called on the handler to behave more like a dog, a perfect example of the imperative to “be more dog”, as włodarczyk describes it. the performance of the required “boundless enthusiasm”49 signifies a reward for the dog just as the act of playing does. here the human anticipates what the dog likes, which leads to a strategic use of the playfulness as a reward within the training and then, later, on the job. here also a crucial notion of the work-life regarding the work’s influence on the private sphere becomes relevant. the handlers try not to play with their dogs at home, since playing is reserved for their tasks at work. for fox et al., this points to the continuing power dynamics in teamwork: “[e]ven if non-coercive and playful, [they] are never entirely innocent and often work with canine sensibilities to shape their behaviour to human desires.”50 in their interaction, the handler needs his or her body to meet semiotically with the animal partner during the detection procedure. but this communication does not always work. one handler i observed in a scent work test did not act on the physical hesitation of his canine partner and moved further in outlining the search trail (a technique knows as “vorspuren”, or track modelling, see fig. 1). the human signalled the dog to keep on going, even though this was against the dog’s initial will. this turned out to be a mistake and the handler did not pass the test. attentiveness, trust, and a reliance on the other lie at the very heart of the teamwork. this observation reveals two aspects: first, it illustrates the relevance of feeling rules, which guide the dog to show specific signs to indicate that they smelled the target scent but also instruct the human 48 blattner, “animal labour”, 107; fox et al., “you are a dog”, 430–33. 49 włodarczyk, “be more dog”, 40. 50 fox et al., “you are a dog”, 448. cf. warda, “interspecies emotion management”, 89. paul , (in)tangible teamwork | 91 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) partner to hold back with any emotional display so as not distract their partner. instead, the human handler is guided into observing every bodily movement from their partner to interpret it closely. once they miss even a tiny hesitation as in the example above, they run the risk of misinterpretation. second, it points to an ostensible paradox: “desired disobedience”. when the dog was in the lead, the handler had to be attentive, and when this was not the case, the dog was supposed to resist the handler’s inattentive behaviour to bring the human back on track. dog handlers working for the german customs described to me how they had to deliberately train the dog to assert themselves against the will of the handler (customs, fieldnotes 17). haraway refers to the oxymoron of a “disciplined spontaneity” within agility training, which seems a similar training goal to the desired disobedience that i noticed in the field of sniffer dogs. moreover, she also describes the interaction as a dance, when “[b]oth dog and handler have to be able to take the initiative and to respond obediently to the other. the task is to become coherent enough in an incoherent world to engage in a joint dance of being that breeds respect and response in the flesh”.51 within the context of the dance, disobedience can be understood as the embodiment of confidence. only when they feel confident with the handler will they resist their diverging signals. explanations from the field included the importance that the dog keep their own will and follow it. the dog should stand up to the handler’s commands if they go against his or her own instincts (police, interview 33; see fig. 3). others emphasize that what seems to be an act of “deliberate disobedience” is just work-related behaviour in which dogs decide when they can take the lead and when not: in reality the dog is not being disobedient, but rather does what he or she is supposed to do. the dog is asked to freeze in front of the odour of explosives, which he or she does. […] dogs don’t have a complex personality. they smell it — they show it. (security, interview 32) 51 haraway, companion species manifesto, 62. 92 | paul , (in)tangible teamwork humanimalia 15.1 (2024) even more in-depth was the exploration of a dog trainer at the customs (customs, fieldnote 20). he pointed out that on the one hand, there is obedience, with the characteristic that the dog knows what is required of them. this obedience entails commands and making sure that the dog does what the human signals them to do. on the other hand, there is the interrelation when the team is engaged in the search. it is then that the dog knows that they can take the lead. therefore, they are not disobedient, but rather equipped with the power to take the lead and the knowledge about this empowerment. the term used for this is “führigkeit” [biddability], which describes a specific eagerness to work with the handler, a voluntary docility, in which the canine partner offers their service in an unprompted and unrequested manner. similar to how włodarczyk describes it, many of the handlers considered their dogs to be the experts,52 which legitimized them to take the lead (see fig. 2). in the case of the immersion, interpreting the nonhuman animal through the sensorial encounter is “making sense through senses”.53 the different cosmologies lead to different interpretations, and this difference can be seen in the way the encounter is conceptualized. the immersion described at the beginning of this section is relevant in either way of thinking, but with a distinct contour. proponents of the old-fashioned school of thought say that they have to get into “the head of the dog”. it is the description of becoming a hybrid being, where the human is the brain, and the nonhuman the “eyes and nose”. but instead of semiotically meeting like in a conflation as described before, here it is seen as a strategy to be on top of the dog’s will, to be the alpha, and to ensure obedience. but it is also voiced as a desire to understand what the dog is thinking and to be able to spot early when the dog starts refusing to work. this refusal is something blattner would consider an important way for the animal to express dissent.54 some handlers emphasized the importance of the leash as a means of communication: “the leash is like a telephone line that signals what i want” (police, interview 3). 52 włodarczyk “be more dog”, 41. 53 hayward, “sensational jellyfish”, 183. 54 blattner “animal labour”, 99. figures 1–3 fig 1. i show him where to sniff. fig 2. the expert takes the lead. fig 3. he stops while i keep moving these images are part of my participant observation within the sniffer dog training. the dog performed professionally with me being a stranger to him. 94 | paul , (in)tangible teamwork humanimalia 15.1 (2024) these kinds of reflections are supported by the sniffer dog handler literature, which emphasizes the interspecies perspectives, namely, that of thinking of oneself in line with the animal partner. “in detection, it is important to view the search environment from the individual canine’s perspective.”55 the immersion then also takes place on the part of those who prefer to “think with”. here they reflected on their encounter more closely in line with the way that eva hayward describes it, in which they “do not conflate but meet, ‘intra-act’, in the sharing of the world”.56 the situational emerging and reciprocal responsiveness in intra-action requires an openness to the sensation of the animal partner on the part of the human. it then seems that both entities attempt to assume the perspective of the other in this joint action. they are in the intra-action of detection, they are in a mode of mutual sensing which forces them to open up, regardless of their style of thinking. braidotti’s term of “knowledge collaborators”57 appears to be a fitting description for this. the dance metaphor, once again, aptly describes the role-shifting that takes place in the human–dog interaction when they switch leadership. this is true for very different sniffer dogs’ engagements. “in tracks, the handler gives up the lead and the dog takes over. the dog decides” (police, interview 3). this kind of autonomy, letting the nonhuman make their own decisions, is part of what blattner calls for to ensure that work is a “meaningful activity”.58 furthermore, in the explosives detection action, the dogs have to take the lead in indicating where they have smelled the target odour. thereby the dogs use their professional emotional display in freezing from the tip of the nose to the tip the tail and await the reaction of their human partner. the handler must recognize the indication and release it with a sound of their clicker, followed by a reaffirming 55 waterbury and schultz, “handler perception”, 442. 56 hayward, “sensational jellyfish”, 175. 57 braidotti, posthuman knowledge, 112. 58 blattner, “animal labour”, 95. paul , (in)tangible teamwork | 95 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) appraisal. here, visual bodily signals meet with acoustic ones.59 the shifting of agency — the dogs taking the lead, then awaiting the human’s reaction — is imprinted by a reciprocal expectation, which is expressed in a learning guide for detection dog trainers as follows: [t]he trainer waits for the dog to offer a desired action. the dog is the initiator of actions, and the trainer is a passive participant who provides rewards when the action is offered. the dog is in control of the learning process.60 learning in this new interactive, collaborative process is no longer guided (solely) by getting the dog to do what they would not do otherwise. the process is not just about learning with, but also from the dog.61 confidence in the dogs and their will to work for the human partner (“the dog’s inner motivation to do something for us”, police, interview 3) is the basis of the interaction, which is often referred to as the necessary “social bond” (police, fieldnotes 1). work here can be interpreted as a liberating proposition,62 or at least as benefiting the animal, since it is part of the sociability within the team relation. “‘trusting’ one’s dog entailed knowing how the dog responded in specific situations, knowing how to ‘read’ the animal, and sharing a bond of mutual confidence”.63 for this interpretation to become possible, the human handler has to consider all the obstacles and distractions affecting the dog’s work task (the presence of different odours, and other distracting aspects). therefore, human handlers have to consider how the canine partner interprets the environment. the “reading” of each other takes place in the “zones of intersection where the non-human world enters constitutively into 59 in her autoethnography of guide dogs, warda highlights the relevance of acoustic emotional displays “beyond speech and intonation” within emotional labour. see warda, “emotions at work”, 5. 60 fjellanger, “learning principles”, 14; emphasis in original. 61 włodarczyk, “be more dog”, 45, 46. 62 see porcher and estebanez, “animal labor”, 24. 63 sanders, “ambivalence”, 166. see also haraway (when species meet, 242) who views trust as inseparable from responsibility “for and to one another”. 96 | paul , (in)tangible teamwork humanimalia 15.1 (2024) the becoming of the human world and vice versa.”64 this is the zone of reciprocal access that roepstorff describes as a form of “semiotic competence”, which can be seen as the “use of the competence and interpretation of a species to get knowledge about something that is invisible to humans”.65 in the zone of intersection during the detection process, it seems that after the dog indicates a target, they become the passive part of the team, waiting for the human to act. when taking the idea of the dance seriously, one must understand that the waiting part is also active. for the dance to develop, both partners must alternate in activity, wherein “passages of human passivity are precisely passages of material activity”,66 which, here, can also be applied to the nonhuman animal. this form of active passivity, such as waiting for a dance partner’s action, might be described as “a roundabout or deferred way of acting oneself”.67 in this case, the role of the active partner is to expose oneself to the activity of the other, and to allow the other to affect oneself. the dance of agency in the sniffer dog teamwork becomes a routine interaction, which manifests in interactionist spaces of mutual understanding. in these encounters, intra-active knowledge, positive and negative, is mutually disclosed. (in)tangible knowledge the disclosure of unknowns that takes place in the manifestation of the dance, in the sensation and immersion, can be understood as ontological nonknowledge that is enacted in a number of different ways. at first, nonknowledge entails the central question of what it is that the dog can smell. how this kind of nonknowledge is perceived on a scientific basis depends a great deal on the epistemological background chosen. it could be seen as a knowledge gap that can possibly be filled; or as knowledge that can be made explicit by science in principle, as would occur when smell analytics develops to the point of being able to capture the olfactory capacity of dogs. in this case, 64 pickering, “material culture”, 196. 65 roepstorff, “thinking with animals”, 206. 66 pickering, “material culture”, 195. 67 sloterdijk, you must change, 374; translation modified. paul , (in)tangible teamwork | 97 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) smelling would be understood as a purely biochemical and biophysical procedure. as an example, there have been many attempts to recreate the way a dog smells using bio-mimicry approaches. one unique capacity of dogs is their ability to detect more particles than any artificial device, due to their specific way of circulating the air through their noses while sniffing. at the same time, dogs can distinguish the distinct components of odours, something that constitutes one of the biggest mysteries for those working and researching in the field. the question remains, how does the dog separate the pieces and reassemble them to recognize a certain target substance? individual senses are never engaged alone — rather, they are accompanied by other senses. even when considering the biophysical and neurobiological side of things, when it comes to smell there are diverse influences at play. smelling is not just an act of sniffing, but rather an act of “practical intelligence”.68 cognitive ability is just one part of smelling, while the effect of outside influences is the other; as a zoological researcher explained to me: “you don’t always smell in the same way. no, sensory perception is significantly affected by external factors and internal factors” (researcher, interview 36). the question of how the dog can differentiate distinct parts of the odour can also be understood as negative knowledge with the reflection on the preliminary limits of scientific endeavours or, in other words, as a knowledge that is yet to come. it is important not to see this form of nonknowledge as a gap, but rather as productive in its own way. the difficulty that arises from this is that nobody can say for sure what the stimulus for the dog’s reaction is. is it the odour of the sample carrier, adulterants, the targeted scent? or is the dog reacting to something that they recognized in the handler? but then, it is here that within the steady human-animal encounter a certainty develops that the knowledge about the scent differentiation is there or will be there. the actual training of the dog towards identifying a substance only takes a couple of days, since the dog is capable of memorizing 68 mouret, porcher and mainex, “police dogs”, 133. 98 | paul , (in)tangible teamwork humanimalia 15.1 (2024) different odours very quickly. it is the learning to read one another within the team and to grow together that lies at the core of the training. one such course takes around seven weeks. the interviewees reflected that especially the human needs time to learn how to read their animal partner. accordingly, the responsibility for any kind of error was said to lie “100 percent with the human” (police, interview 3). nonknowledge is also deliberately and productively enacted as a method. to ensure that the dog does not get any cues in the form of nonverbal signals from the handler (no cheating through influences by the handler), nonknowledge is installed as a principle in the training and tests through including only non-involved, non-informed persons in the procedure (so-called “double blind”) (police, interview 1). but nonknowledge also lies within the encounter of the dance. those who work in the field ask themselves, “what is my partner smelling?” this was a repeated question of a leading dog handler from a security company with more than forty years of experience (security, interview 34). what is registered by the dog’s multiple senses cannot be grasped by the human, since the mind of the animal partner is inaccessible to them: “we can never be sure what we are conditioning for” (police, interview 3). this is also highlighted in the scent work literature which emphasizes that the human handler needs to be “cognizant about how environmental stimuli may be perceived differently” by their nonhuman partner.69 the dog handlers’ lack of explicable, cognitive knowledge enmeshes with a sensual understanding of what the canine partner knows. a tacit knowledge is already there but it is intangible. the tacit, negative knowing of the nonhuman partner’s views is enacted through the routinized experiences of observing the dog, and trying to learn how the canines behave in different situations. this enacted tacit knowledge is shown in the handler’s confidence in the dog’s capability of smelling what is at stake. it is part of the “negotiations”, as coulter calls them, in which the animals “make their views known”.70 69 waterbury and schultz, “handler perception”, 442. 70 coulter, “humane jobs and work-lives”, 37. paul , (in)tangible teamwork | 99 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) tacit knowledge is also acquired in experiments. it is here that the handlers learn new capacities of the dog, without really knowing how the dog can do this. the confidence or trust, not just in the capacity of the dog, but also in the actual team-performance, is based on the individual tacit somatic knowledge of each handler towards the individual dog. the capacity for social interaction, for reading one another, and for becoming immersed is something peculiar to sniffer dogs when compared to other species with the same high olfactory capacity, but without the social bond to the human (e.g. bees). this ability to socialize, as well as the manifold relations that a canine has with a human, is how benjamin meiches explains the “dog’s capacity to produce more joyful work.”71 clinton sanders emphasizes the ambivalence of the work regarding his case of k9 and patrol dogs, where the handler had to see the dog partially as an object (a supporting tool) because of the formal requirements of the field, but simultaneously saw them as a companion and developed a social relationship.72 sanders observes that the canines are only an instrument for their teammate by purpose, not by nature. in my field visits, the handlers self-consciously confronted this ambiguity: they were responding to their partners’ individuality.73 even when they were reflecting on the nonhuman partner as a companion, the use of technological vocabulary to describe the canine was common. handlers referred to the dog as needing to be “calibrated” (security, interview 34), to be “switched on” and “off”, and to get information on their “motherboard” (police, fieldnotes 1). this might be an expression of the ambivalence that the human–animal work relationship embodies. in particular, police and customs officers who have to differentiate between a strongly regulated working environment and private work life with the dog have to find a way to cope with the ambivalence this causes. the metaphorical74 reflection on their partner 71 see meiches, “non-human humanitarians”, 7, 17. 72 sanders, “ambivalence”, 168. 73 as in włodarczyk “be more dog”, 44. see also the balancing of the dog’s personality in ahto-hakonen and hakonen, “all fun and games”, 734. 74 for the “metaphorical dog” see ahto-hakonen and hakonen, (“all fun and games”, 733), who focus on the professional demands of the team as medium and tool. 100 | paul , (in)tangible teamwork humanimalia 15.1 (2024) can thus be seen as a result of the instrumental language of being embedded in the work environment. equally, it seems to be a way to cope with the intangible knowledge of their teamwork, as technologies seem to offer a transparency that another living entity does not. concluding thoughts “what happens if the working animals are significant others with whom we are in consequential relationship in an irreducible world of embodied and lived partial differences, rather than the other across the gulf from the one?”75 this question posed by donna haraway marks a crucial point, since the dog handler team in the airport security field is characterized by the ambiguity of building a bond that must be effective during work hours but also transferable into the private sphere. this necessary bond and reciprocal reading of the two entities means they are both indispensable for detection work. this foundation of positive and negative knowing within this interactive work, through crucial mutual understanding, makes them targets for debate within the larger discussions on the canines’ value as biotechnology76 within state services. roepstorff emphasizes that the question of how animals are perceived ultimately becomes a question of “from within” versus “from without”. the key points in these cosmologies are represented in discussions concerning differences or similarities in the “other”, questions rooted in how we conceive nature and culture. when we hold on to a classic biology-dominated, as opposed to a bio-semiotic, perspective, it helps us to “reconfigure the border between humans and nonhumans”.77 on the contrary, encompassing the world as “natureculture”, in which we emphasize the similarities with other beings, allows one to think with animals. the dichotomy of “thinking with” and “about” animals, as the sniffer dog teams example shows, is rooted in tacit knowledge, drawing on experience and observations. as such, it is enacted in the entangled dance of the human– animal ensemble. 75 haraway, when species meet, 72. 76 porcher and estebanez, “animal labor”, 17. 77 roepstorff, “thinking with animals”, 214–15. paul , (in)tangible teamwork | 101 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) but the scent work field is still characterized by parallel cosmologies. the shift in the dog training field towards a more empathetic perception of the nonhuman animal has an impact on scent work within state service. its specific, yet still messy reality embodies this “shift from instrumental to affective dog–human relations”.78 when following the logic of seeing the animal partner as an instrument, this is accompanied by a deep scepticism toward embodied knowledge per se. but even so, human handlers must open up to their partner when entangled in the encounter, to engage in the bio-semiotic dance. this dance requires confidence in each other’s performance, by mutual attentiveness to, and engagement with, every little movement, and a “performative finding out about and accommodation to the other”.79 following a “thinking with” thought style builds trust in the unknown capacity of the other and leads to a “becoming-with”, which grants a degree of sensitivity for new forms of knowledge. therefore, differing worldviews become the background which contributes to the acknowledgement of the working other. it becomes evident that the nonhuman animal partner is not just dependent on instincts, but rather also on “social competences”.80 increased attention and openness towards the otherness of the canine partner becomes vivid when the most recent scent work literature argues for the necessity of the handler to understand (“tune in” to) the animals’ perception of their surrounding world, which is seen as being “defined by their senses, experiences, and needs”.81 besides an openness to more “dogness”, there is also a requirement to acknowledge the canine’s professional skills as shown in their emotional labour. to recognize their professionalism in differentiating it from other notions of emotion work means to acknowledge them as professional workers indeed. consequently, this allows for a step towards more humane jobs and work-lives for animals. 78 charles et al., “fulfilling your dog’s potential”, 192. 79 pickering, “material culture”, 202. 80 porcher and estebanez, “animal labor”, 26. 81 waterbury and schultz, “handler perception”, 442. 102 | paul , (in)tangible teamwork humanimalia 15.1 (2024) by admitting to this enaction of nonknowledge, and comprehending what is relevant for the dog, one approaches thomas nagel’s classic question of “what it is like for a bat to be a bat” — or, in this case, “what it is like for a dog to be a dog?” with this ongoing challenge, the human handlers will assure an “openness to emergence and what the world has to offer”,82 knowing that the answer will remain cognitively intangible, yet can still constitute a way of knowing. 82 pickering, “material culture”, 202. acknowledgements this article was written in the context of the research project “socio-technical systems of anticipatory truth verification in the field of airport security”, based at the university of hamburg and rwth aachen university. it was funded by the deutsche forschungsgemeinschaft (dfg, german research foundation) — project number 442224904. i am very grateful to the editors and the anonymous reviewers for their inspiring comments on previous versions of the paper, as well as to larissa fischer, wendy fitzgibbon, and sylvia kühne for their support. a special thank you goes to all those in the scent work field who kindly agreed to let me accompany them in their work. works cited ahto-hakonen, jenni and hakonen, aki. “all fun and games? relationships between finnish police dogs and their handlers.” society & animals 31, no. 5–6, (2021): 726–43. https://doi. org/10.1163/15685306-bja10068 barad, karen. meeting the universe halfway: quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham, nc: duke university press, 2007. blattner, charlotte e. “animal labour: toward a prohibition of forced labour and a right in freely choose one’s work.” in blattner et al., animal labour, 91–115. blattner, charlotte e. “should animals have a right to work? promises and pitfalls.” animal studies journal, 9, no 1 (2020): 32–92. http://dx.doi. org/10.14453/asj.v9i1.3 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-bja10068 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-bja10068 http://dx.doi.org/10.14453/asj.v9i1.3 http://dx.doi.org/10.14453/asj.v9i1.3 paul , (in)tangible teamwork | 103 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) blattner, charlotte, e., kendra coulter, and will kymlicka, eds. animal labour: a new frontier of interspecies justice? oxford: oxford university press, 2020. blattner, charlotte e., kendra coulter, and will kymlicka. “introduction: animal labour and the quest for interspecies justice,” in blattner et al., animal labour, 1–25. braidotti, rosi. posthuman knowledge. cambridge: polity, 2019. charles, nickie, rebekah fox, harriet smith, and mara miele. “‘fulfilling your dog’s potential’: changing dimensions of power in dog training cultures in the uk.” animal studies journal 10, no. 2 (2021): 169–200. http://dx.doi. org/10.14453/asj.v10i2.8 cochrane, alasdair. “good work for animals.” in blattner et al., animal labour, 48–64. coulter, kendra. animals, work, and the promise of interspecies solidarity. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2016. coulter, kendra. “toward humane jobs and work-lives for animals.” in blattner et al., animal labour, 29–47. degreeff, lauryn e., and craig a. schultz, eds. canines: the original biosensors. singapore: jenny stanford, 2022. d’souza, renée, alice hovorka, and lee niel. “conservation canines: exploring dog roles, circumstances, and welfare status.” in blattner et al., animal labour, 65–88. fjellanger, rune. “general learning principles for training rest dogs.” in mine detection dogs: training, operations and odour detection, edited by ian g. mclean, 11–22. geneva: gichd, 2003. fox, rebekah, nickie charles, harriet smith, and mara miele. “‘imagine you are a dog’: embodied learning in multi-species research.” cultural geographies 30, no. 3 (2023): 429–52. https://doi. org/10.1177/14744740221102907 furton, kenneth g., and david winialski. “comparing the olfactory capabilities of dogs with machines designed to detect odors.” in degreeff and schultz, canines, 21–62. guest, kristen, monica mattfeld, margaret derry, donna haraway, donna landry, harriet ritvo, and sandra swart. “humanimalia roundtable on breed”. humanimalia 10, no. 1 (2021): 5–26. https://doi.org/10.52537/ humanimalia.9591 haraway, donna j. the companion species manifesto: dogs, people and significant otherness. chicago: prickly paradigm press, 2003. haraway, donna j. when species meet, minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008. hayward, eva. “sensational jellyfish: aquarium affects and the matter of immersion.” differences 23, no. 3 (2012): 161–96. https://doi.org/10.1215/104073911892925 koski, leena and pia bäcklund. “on the fringe: the positions of dogs in finnish dog training culture.” society & animals 23, no. 1 (2015): 24–44. https:// doi:10.1163/15685306-12341342 meiches, benjamin. “non-human humanitarians.” review of international studies 1, no. 45 (2019): 1–19. https://doi. org/10.1017/s0260210518000281 mouret, sébastien, jocelyne porcher, and gaelle mainix. “military and police dogs.” in animal labor: a new perspective on human–animal relations, edited by jocelyne porcher and jean estebanez, 129–45. bielefeld: transcript, 2019. neocleous, mark. “the smell of power: a contribution to the critique of the sniffer dog.” in body/state, edited by angus cameron, jen dickinson, and nicola smith, 199–208. farnham: ashgate, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.14453/asj.v10i2.8 http://dx.doi.org/10.14453/asj.v10i2.8 https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740221102907 https://doi.org/10.1177/14744740221102907 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9591 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9591 file:///users/drisc001/desktop/%20https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-1892925 file:///users/drisc001/desktop/%20https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-1892925 https://doi:10.1163/15685306-12341342 https://doi:10.1163/15685306-12341342 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210518000281 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0260210518000281 104 | paul , (in)tangible teamwork humanimalia 15.1 (2024) peterson, rolf o., amy k. jacobs, thomas d. drummer, l. david mech, and douglas w. smith. “leadership behavior in relation to dominance and reproductive status in gray wolves, canis lupus.” canadian journal of zoology 80, no. 8 (2002): 1405–12. https://doi.org/10.1139/z02-124 pickering, andrew. “material culture and the dance of agency.” in the oxford handbook of material culture studies, edited by dan hicks and mary c. beaudry, 191–208. oxford: oxford university press, 2012. porcher, jocelyne, and jean estebanez. “animal labor: at the forefront of innovative research.” in animal labor: a new perspective on human–animal relations, 11–33. bielefeld: transcript, 2019. roepstorff, andreas. “thinking with animals.” sign system studies 29, no. 1 (2001): 203–18. roepstorff, andreas, and nils bubandt. “general introduction: the critique of culture and the plurality of nature.” in imagining nature: practices of cosmology and identity, edited by andreas roepstorff, nils bubandt, and kalevi kull, 9–30, aarhus: aarhus university press, 2003. sanders, clinton r. “mind, self, and human-animal joint action.” sociological focus 40, no. 3, (2007): 320–36. https://doi.org/10.1080/003802 37.2007.10571313 sanders, clinton r. “‘the dog you deserve’: ambivalence in the k-9 officer/patrol dog relationship.” journal of contemporary ethnography 35, no. 2 (2006): 148–72. sloterdijk, peter. you must change your life: on anthropotechnics. translated by wieland hoban. cambridge: polity, 2013. tavory, iddo, and stefan timmermans. abductive analysis: theorizing qualitative research. chicago: university of chicago press, 2014. warda, tiamat. “emotions at work: acknowledging interspecies emotional labour of guide dog mobility instructors.” society & animals (2023): 1–19. warda, tiamat. “interspecies emotion management: the importance of distinguishing between emotion work and emotional labour.” trace: journal for human–animal studies 8 (2022): 82–101. https://doi.org/10.23984/ fjhas.111345 waterbury, ann, and craig a. schultz. “when does handler perception become canine detection? how applied behavior analysis and ethology can improve handler interpretation of canine behavior?” in degreeff and schultz, canines, 440–78. włodarczyk, justyna. “be more dog: the human–canine relationship in contemporary dog-training methodologies.” performance research 22, no. 2 (2017): 40–47. https://doi.org/10.1139/z02-124 https://doi.org/10.1080/00380237.2007.10571313 https://doi.org/10.1080/00380237.2007.10571313 https://doi.org/10.23984/fjhas.111345%20 https://doi.org/10.23984/fjhas.111345%20 ole_link4 ole_link3 hofstetter, pursuit of virtù the pursuit of virtù angela hofstetter butler university, indiana humanimalia 13.2 (spring 2023) abstract: “the pursuit of virtù” is a personal narrative revisiting a pivotal riding lesson that unlocked the uglier side of the adage that the horse is a mirror to your soul. the beating heart of the essay reflects on how a rider’s trauma can manifest in the body of the horse as well as how classical dressage — the pursuit of courage and collection — can provide a map to return to a harmonious state of balance that is as much mental as physical. mostly, it is a prayer asking forgiveness from all horses who have had to carry the unbearable burden of human hearts and minds heavier than their bodies could ever be. keywords: horse stories; classical dressage; sexual abuse; personal narrative; trauma; psychology; domestic violence bio: angela hofstetter shares her rural home in story, indiana with giant dogs, plump horses, and assorted flora and fauna from the hoosier national forest. she received her phd in comparative literature from indiana university where she fostered a passion for novels of the long nineteenth century. a senior lecturer at butler university, angela’s courses reflect her commitment to a robust intersectionality that interrogates the moral complexity of all animals — human and other. her first-year seminar, “the call of the wild”, is her absolute favourite course to teach because she gets to spend an entire year with students exploring complex questions about nature, nurture, and justice. email: ahofstet@butler.edu copyright © 2023 angela hofstetter this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 31–45. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13275 mailto:ahofstet@butler.edu http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13275 hofstetter, the pursuit of virtù | 33 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the horse is a mirror to your soul. sometimes you might not like what you see. — buck brannaman traumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: the past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and, in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. they learn to hide from their selves. — bessel van der kolk there was a time our bodies moved together in balance. a simple inhale coupled with an imperceptible lift of the pelvis would shift eroika and me into a ground-covering trot. a crisp tightening of the abdominals and a closing of the pinky on the outside rein shifted the mare’s balance towards her haunches, the beginning of a medium trot evident in our very first lesson. a rise of the inner seatbone would be met by eroika’s generous back, lifting me into a canter that was soft, round, and ground-covering. although we were just learning movements like shoulder-in and turn on the haunches, the foundation of collection—mental and physical—allowed us to move harmoniously. until it didn’t. this is eroika’s story; it is mine, too. it is a tale of madness and despair, but also of love, passion, and hope: a desperate clinging to the ethos of classical dressage as a means to heal body and soul when alcohol and psychotherapy failed (the latter far more damaging than the former). mostly, it is a prayer asking forgiveness from a mare i loved before she was born — indeed to all horses who have had to carry the unbearable burden of human hearts and minds heavier than their bodies ever could be. 34 | hofstetter, the pursuit of virtù humanimalia 13.2 (2023) eroika is a proud lipizzaner mare of noble lineage with a lovely, liquid eye that expresses the subtlety of her rich interior. her father, maestoso platana 21, was a performer in the illustrious spanish riding school in vienna—the partner of third generation bereiter christian bachinger. her mother tacoma bestowed the blood of maestoso canada, a remarkable stallion who closed the quality gap between austrian and american broodmares. eroika’s early promise impressed dr jaromir oulehla, retired director of the spanish riding school and the piber stud. at the tender age of six months, she was the first horse in america — including mature stallions — to be awarded a “10” for her head and neck. her elastic trot also received a perfect score. eroika’s temperament received good, though not perfect marks. submission was never high on her list of priorities. even as a filly, she did not suffer fools. my heritage is not so illustrious. i am quite literally a bastard born in charleston, south carolina whose adoptive parents robbed me of a naturally optimistic temperament that longed for beauty. alma faye and jack ansel, stock characters from the southern gothic, raised me — groomed me — for the husband who ultimately broke me. i know this seems melodramatic; in happier times i laugh at the excess of emotions which rock my world when their mad bolt heeds no curb. too often it is only fatigue that brings some level of calm, exhaustion as a momentary forgetting that never sticks. in spite of valiant efforts to move past the violently amorous attentions of a humbertishly bigoted father, my body remembers. of course, tales of crazy women (or crazy horses, for that matter) don’t always begin with abuse. there are other accounts of misfiring synapses and inherited traits interpreted according to the fashion of the day which create other stories, yet beneath these narratives are the distorted bodies whose reality is too often denied by the profession charged with their healing. freud reinterpreted the confessions he had taken as truth in his younger days as an internal diseased desire of the daughter rather than a traumatic reaction to an external act of violence by the father (or uncle or neighbour or shopkeeper, etc.) after krafft-ebing et al. dismissed his “aetiology of hysteria” as hofstetter, the pursuit of virtù | 35 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) nothing but “a scientific fairy tale.”1 vincent felitti’s ground-breaking work linking obesity and sexual trauma grew into the kaiser permanente study of adverse childhood experiences (aces), yet he received institutional pushback for believing these fat malingerers.2 in fact, the only thing stronger than the incest taboo and its pedophilic cousin is the desire to relegate these stories to the margins. although dorothy allison, maya angelou, mary karr, oprah winfrey, vanessa springora, erika schickel and others are high-profile voices decrying the devastation inflicted on tender little bodies, we just don’t want to know. it’s too unseemly. it’s too scary. charming men, honourable men, and handsome men wreak far more havoc than the lonely pervert with a lollipop, a trench coat, and an aged van with tinted windows (or the equivalent across centuries): respectable fathers — not just the drunk, poor, dark, and other — take unspeakable liberties that only a sadist could describe as fantasy or seduction. popular textbooks of psychiatry still maintained that occurrences of incest were as rare as one in a million as late as 1975: “the legacy,” writes judith lewis herman, “of freud’s inquiry into the subject of incest was a tenacious prejudice, still shared by professionals and laymen alike, that children lie about sexual abuse. this belief is by now so deeply ingrained in the culture that children who dare to report sexual assaults are more than likely to have their complaints dismissed as fantasy.” herman’s reflections 1 masson, the assault on truth, 10. masson quotes at length from freud’s disappointed response to his paper in a letter to his close friend, the ear, nose, and throat specialist wilhelm fließ: “a lecture on the aetiology of hysteria at the psychiatric society met with an icy reception from the asses, and from krafft-ebing the strange comment: it sounds like a scientific fairy tale [es klingt wie ein wissenschaftliches märchen.] and this after one has demonstrated to them a solution to a more than thousand-year-old problem, a ‘source of the nile’!” a compelling focus of masson’s controversial treatment of freud’s seduction theory is to wonder what might have happened if he had never abandoned his trust in the truth of the tales of his hysterical patients. what would the world be like if freud had maintained his belief in them? it is a question worthy of careful consideration in our #metoo era. 2 felitti, “relation”, 44–47. 36 | hofstetter, the pursuit of virtù humanimalia 13.2 (2023) on freud resonate with the response to felitti and others who try to expose this open secret: “within the medical profession, denial persists even in the presence of incontrovertible evidence, such as venereal disease in children. rather than acknowledge the possibility of sexual abuse, physicians have been known to assert that children can contract venereal disease from clothing, towels, or toilet seats, an idea that transcends the limits of biological possibility and which would be considered laughable if applied to adults.”3 even mainstream french newspapers like le monde featured letters in support of paedophilia signed by luminaries such as jean-paul sartre, simone de beauvoir, and roland barthes because “it is forbidden to forbid”.4 any analyst trained in this milieu, “no matter how benevolent otherwise, does violence to the inner life of his patient and is in covert collusion with what made her ill in the first place.”5 such collusion was exacerbated in my case: like many of the molested,6 i unwittingly sought to replay the family drama by marrying a brilliant, well-educated yankee with a gloriously irreverent sense of humour. he was also a malignant narcissist (every woman adores a fascist/the boot in the face…) with two previous marriages and two broken engagements that landed all four women in mental institutions. i was no. 5, locked up on the same fifth floor of bloomington hospital where no. 4 had been hauled against her will some twenty years before. although our courtship began in fairytale style, daily taunts soon took me back to the “home” i thought i had married above, unleashing an unwelcome onslaught of memory. the repressed terror buried in my marrow poisonously leaked out, and i became dangerously unhinged. courage and joy fled as pathetic self-loathing altered my conformation: rounded shoulders, lowered head, and tight hips replaced the open heart and soft eyes of good equitation, mental health, and rigorous pilates. my hands 3 herman, father–daughter incest, 11. herman quotes this shocking statistic from d. james henderson’s entry “incest” in the widely used comprehensive textbook of psychiatry. 4 onishi, “a victim’s account”. 5 masson, the assault on truth, 191. 6 i cannot bear the words “victim” or “survivor”. neither and both describe me; i only want to be a rider. perhaps a writer as well. hofstetter, the pursuit of virtù | 37 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) shook at the slightest sound or fast movement. the irony was not lost on me that the worst of my mental collapse took place in a victorian bedroom with century-old yellow wallpaper. worst of all, i welcomed an old childhood friend: dissociation. the rift between eroika and me under saddle did not always hinder our friendship outside of the arena where my heart could mitigate the harm of my body. grooming and groundwork — soft caresses and awkward dancing — kept up our intimacy. i particularly loved standing next to her left shoulder, the lead rope swinging lax, picking up my left foot to cross over my right… eroika picking up her left hoof to cross over her right. it was tentative at first as she figured out what i was asking — not unlike the talented dancer in high heels relying on a less agile partner who, in one of life’s inexplicable asymmetries, is the one who leads. she would be so pleased with herself after we crossed the arena in tandem, her baritone nickers, demanding a peppermint, increasing in delighted anticipation as the plastic crinkled during the unwrapping. but even the suggestion of a canter, particularly on the left lead, was a whole other story. under the weight of my misery, eroika’s easy lope erupted into a violent bolt; her dropped back, raised head, and pinned ears signified the removal of the consent her soft body once offered. she flailed; she flung herself at the sides of the arena when inside or, more perilously, took no care for her feet when out in a vast, open field. before long, the mare whose noble carriage once reflected her imperial lineage mirrored the seismic shift in my mental and physical state. diagnosing the unwanted behaviour of a horse is not unlike diagnosing the unwanted behaviour of a human. you seek physical causes first. mostly able to mask the internal tumult from nine to five, only my closest friends — or those unlucky enough to catch me in the later hours — knew the full truth. or a full truth: the onslaught of repressed memories erupted in my dreams and haunted even sunny days. that didn’t mean i couldn’t hide it from most: la belle indifférence of our mask. you can lie to your therapist, your spouse, your friends, and 38 | hofstetter, the pursuit of virtù humanimalia 13.2 (2023) your co-workers. perhaps they will be grateful to be spared the truth. you cannot, however, lie to your mount. “there is no secret so close,” writes r. s. surtees, “as that between a rider and his horse.”7 wisely, i sought the advice of equestrian friends, trainers, and veterinarians, following the appropriate diagnostic protocol to find the root of the decline in my mare. eroika’s mouth was carefully checked for any dental discomfort. so was her body — especially the right shoulder that braced, refusing to turn when she was stressed. her flash noseband was removed, and her preference for a jointed snaffle versus a french link was immediately indulged. the soft sheepskin of a mattes pad cushioned the saddle custom fitted to eroika and me by a master sellier. sometimes things continued to go well, following our well-established routines. other times, it was terrifying for both of us. while eroika could tolerate my riding her into the ground, putting her audacious pride literally onto her forehand as my equitation became increasingly fetal, she could not tolerate it when i mentally left her, leaving only my misshapen body behind. tellingly, it was a riding lesson that first granted me profound insight into our misfortunes — though it would take time to sink in. during the dissolution of my marriage, i abandoned the expense of a dressage trainer due to the high cost of a divorce attorney. i rode less and less while i fretted more and more. a good friend coaxed me to fill in a spot at a clinic with a grand prix rider at her barn. i was reluctant for two reasons: the money and, of course, my mental state. fragility can understandably frustrate trainers devoted to helping horses and humans find as much beauty and balance as their forms allow. 7 surtees, mr. sponge’s sporting tour, 199. the quote has leapt out of this mid-victorian homage to foxhunting and the grifting life onto the larger stage of equestrian internet memes. although its twenty-first century life invokes mystical interspecies intimacy, its nineteenth-century usage was a blissfully satirical commentary on the many mounts of soapey sponge: “when a man and his horse differ seriously in public, and the man feels the horse has the best of it, it is wise for the man to appear to accommodate his views to those of the horse, rather than risk a defeat. it is best to let the horse go his way, and pretend it is yours. there is no secret so close as that between a rider and his horse.” i couldn’t let my millennial usage totally betray the cynical spirit of surtees! hofstetter, the pursuit of virtù | 39 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) they spend their lives on the backs of these beasts, unknotting the kinks caused by unbridled fear as much as wanton cruelty. if they are not careful, the bodies of the trainers can become a repository of both human and equine misery. as i warmed up, i watched this previously unknown trainer give a lesson to a lovely blonde middle schooler on her very first pony, who, like most ponies, had definite but mercurial opinions. the little mare sped up and slowed down, she wouldn’t turn — everything according to her own volition. it would have been tempting to smack the pony and rip her face, to scream “stop it” — and i’m certain many generally kind riders have experienced a moment where they could not trust their better selves. this trainer, however, trusted in shapes to bring them into harmony, telling this sweetly talented little rider to rely on equitation rather than rough hands and crude aids to communicate with her willful mount. it is difficult to dominate a pony. it is difficult to dominate a mare. it is nearly impossible to dominate a pony mare. if you succeed in doing so, it will never be beautiful, and such ugliness degrades horse and human alike. this is not a new truth — it’s at least as old as xenophon. in the art of horsemanship, he maintains that nothing “that is forced or misunderstood can ever be beautiful”. “for what the horse does under compulsion,” xenophon warns, “is done without understanding; and there is no beauty in it either, any more than if one should whip and spur a dancer.”8 such riding never results in real connection that preserves joyful vitality in the pair. only tense imitation of spirit results from horses “fretted by their riders into ugly and ungraceful action”.9 this middle schooler would not be satisfied with ugly, throwing her brave little heart into the pursuit of a grace she will be chasing her entire life as she grows into an exceptional horsewoman. with each lap around the arena, the child focused on disciplining her body into alignment rather than pulling the mare onto the bit. with each 8 xenophon, the art of horsemanship, 62. 9 xenophon, the art of horsemanship, 56. 40 | hofstetter, the pursuit of virtù humanimalia 13.2 (2023) stride, they became more and more beautiful. the girl’s bright eyes sparkled and the wrinkled crease of the pony’s cow eyes softened. the little blonde’s irrepressible grin descended all the way down to the mare’s feet, which were no longer shuffling to some internal cacophony. they were now in rhythm. it was a perfect twenty-metre circle that was an absolute joy to behold. observing the changing expressions of the horse and rider, i mentally checked my own position from crown to toe. i straightened my back and opened my collarbone, softened my thighs and relaxed my heels. i rolled my shoulders back and down, setting my elbows and wrists to move in concert with eroika’s sensitive mouth. lastly, i felt the imaginary string talked about by every horse trainer and pilates instructor, the one at the top of my head that was pulling me higher and higher, creating space between each vertebra — new places for eroika and me to breathe into as we picked up a tentative trot. our lesson began. as i had not been riding much of late, maintaining a proper position without tension for a long time was tough but surprisingly doable. at the instructor’s request, we picked up an easy working trot. instinctively the trainer knew not to push us into more expressive gaits. i marvelled at our rhythmic relaxation; eroika was in a good mood. so was i. the lesson emphasized correct basics, and trusting in the geometric wisdom of podhajsky, klimke, and loch. my outside hip turned with her easily to describe the circumference of a lovely, round twenty-metre circle. we repeated these patterns on the left, mixing in a little leg yield to supple her massive shoulders and ample haunches. it was splendid; my joy kept my heart open and my legs softly breathing around her receiving body. the relentless misery of the past few years temporarily melted away, and i glimpsed a brighter future for us. i don’t know what shifted. it happened in the kind of time only physicists, great musicians, and greater equestrians can measure. i had not yet registered the alteration, nor had the spectators in the hofstetter, the pursuit of virtù | 41 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) arena. in fact, at that very moment, a friend who shared some of the normal fear that accompanies middle age shouted in encouraging solidarity: “that’s good ang!” did i tense because it was the moment in a lesson where we would normally shift into canter, and i just didn’t feel ready? did fat old tom, spooker of even the quietest horse in pursuit of a wayward mouse and a dead stopper — meaning he would decide to use the arena as a litter box right in front of any horse, regardless of its size, speed, or temperament if fancy struck him — decide to have a little fun with us? did the next pair warming up for their lesson cross our path a little too closely, reminding me that i could not always stop this mare and a collision might ensue? i frankly don’t recall. but the trainer, unconcerned about any of these “threats”, perceived only my hypervigilance and quietly asked me to bring her to a walk on the long rein. eroika exhaled into the slower tempo, her neck stretching out like an accordion. “she doesn’t like it when you go away,” the trainer said to me. “what?” i asked, confused. this was not typical clinic talk of inside reins, outside legs, and uneven hands that accompany the proverbial command to “get that horse on the bit”. “she doesn’t like it when you go away,” the trainer repeated. “she got a worried look on her face, so i asked you to walk.” while i’m certain that my friend who organized the lessons informed the clinician that i was struggling with fear issues because the mare could bolt — and bolt she would — that even she, also a trainer and former eventer, had experienced some fear when eroika ran madly across an enormous hay field, refusing to stop or turn until exhausted, i’m also certain my trainer friend didn’t give her a detailed list of my traumatic life, of the childhood dissociations when an unwelcome visitor crossed the threshold of my bedroom, of the recent violations that dragged that past into a present i all too frequently couldn’t remain in. 42 | hofstetter, the pursuit of virtù humanimalia 13.2 (2023) yet this clinician saw in less than a blink of an eye that the mare became terrified when i dissociated.10 i don’t know what gave her an insight that my marriage counsellor, my friends, my attorney, or even my soon-to-be ex did not see; one that i couldn’t fully comprehend until later, but i knew she was on to something. i also knew that i could trust the rhythm and shapes of manège riding to restore a beautiful balance to our decimated lives. in the ethics and passions of dressage, charles de kunffy paints a truth eroika learned from me (a source of my everlasting sorrow): “no living creature can be gymnasticized when ill, in pain, uncomfortable, weak, anxious, intimidated, or even unhappy.” de kunffy therefore places great importance on the “rider’s attitudes, inner emotional climate and character development”, maintaining that when done in “the right spirit, riding should improve the personality of the rider, causing new virtues to emerge while strengthening the old ones.” for this hungarian master, the benefit of gymnastic exercise for horse and rider is indisputable: “classical horsemanship is therapeutic riding.” these insights correlate with the wisdom of trauma studies, providing a reliable truth that seems to elude psychoanalysts and yet anchors my soul. “riding,” he continues, “that does not remain at all times attentive to therapeutic needs of the horse will fail in the attainment of athletic ones.”11 indeed, shapes matter for horses and humans alike. in this spirit de kunffy links aesthetics with emotional welfare because beauty “ultimately looks like the manifestation of happiness”.12 similarly, alois podhajsky, who safeguarded the spanish riding school from none less than hitler, reminds us of the empathy inspired by the horse who “teaches us self-control, constancy, and the ability to understand what goes on in the mind and the feelings 10 it should be mentioned here that this unnamed clinician is betsy van dyke. in spite of her profound impact on the lives of me and my mare, i only rode with her this one time. she read the essay and graciously responded that it had moved her. her compassionate intuition marks her as a true friend of horses and riders. 11 de kunffy, ethics and passions of dressage, 16–7. 12 de kunffy, ethics and passions of dressage, 47. hofstetter, the pursuit of virtù | 43 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) of another creature” when in pursuit of collection.13 it is important to recognize that collection as a form of self-government applies to both horse and rider. to be calm, cool, and collected has dual meanings. the mental element reflects relaxation and emotional stability while the physical is expressed in the increased power and equilibrium in all movements at all gaits. real self-carriage relies on the accountability of each individual — human and equine — to act as responsible moral agents according to their capacities. lady sylvia loch, another passionate adherent to the old ways, also situates discussions of “dressing” a horse within the larger field of aesthetics, which reflects “the beauty and order of nature”.14 this ethos of the classical rider rejects foucauldian vocabulary like “normalizing judgment” and “docile bodies” as well as the freudian fixation on repression and hysteria in favour of more empowered incarnations: self-government and collection that result from a world where good equestrianism is a part of virtù, or what vicki hearne describes as “that noble old conception of intelligence, courage and power collapsed in one trait”.15 this quality manifests itself as a kind of somatic harmony. like drummer girl, the thoroughbred mare featured in hearne’s chapter “crazy horses”, eroika craved “balance, symmetry, and coherence […]. hence the depth of her enraged despair when the world failed to provide the forms she inchoately yearned for. she desired balance the way any creature desires its own nature, and this meant more to her than what we usually call 13 podhajsky, complete training, 20. 14 loch, dressage, 18–9. loch argues that in “the days when art could never in the public’s wildest imagination comprise of a canvas daubed with bold brush strokes of a raw colour accompanied by an apparently random use of squiggles and blobs, blurs, and bobs, definitions were undoubtedly easier […]. to our forefathers, art represented the definite and classical. this meant that it pertained to reality, reflected the beauty and order of nature and was determined always by the laws of balance and light. logic and symmetry prevailed at all times. the opposite of classicism was chaos, disorder, darkness — a breaking of the rules — something quite unacceptable.” her call-to-arms clearly echoes goethe’s characterization of the classic as healthy and the romantic as sickly. before you dismiss this as misplaced nostalgia, think about the bizarre world of postmillennial dressage where phrases like “flash and trash” describe disjointed extravagant movement that win blue ribbons and perhaps even olympic medals from horses who don’t enjoy the longevity of the mounts of the spanish riding school. 15 hearne, adam’s task, 121. 44 | hofstetter, the pursuit of virtù humanimalia 13.2 (2023) love.”16 eroika instinctively knew the lesson i had to learn from the pit of heartbreak, from the tumultuous, disorderly chaos improperly named, and her soft eye begged me — not this melodramatic wastrel who inhabited my form — to come back to her. it is this return of virtù i doggedly seek for both of us. if only an epiphany could immediately erase the traumatic memory in my body and its impact on hers. most tales of equestrian courage recall the heroics exploits of alexander on bucephalus, the doomed british calvary in the crimea, lara prior-palmer retracing the steps of genghis khan on the untamed steppes of mongolia, even velvet riding the pi to a fictional victory in the grand national. we don’t count a fifty-year old seeking to canter her mare in an elegant circle while being fully present as brave. in spite of current lip service, most don’t count little girls — regardless of their chronological age — who finally speak up about unwelcome attentions as brave. tant pis. when i reflect upon the riding lesson that finally offered eroika and me a path to wellness, i cannot help but smile when i think of the brave little blonde with bright blue eyes on her pony. her courage and tact allowed her to place at usdf regionals on a beloved “throwaway” against older girls riding european imports that cost more than a sports car. brava! being brave will be different for me and eroika, whose lot in life is limited by my being her guardian as my lot in life was limited by jack ansel and alma faye being my guardians. the courage embedded in her very name, however, gives me hope. i apologize to her profusely at times; she signals her forgiveness by coming over of her own accord to the old mulberry tree where we tack up for a ride in the field, graciously taking a sugar cube like a princess accepting tribute. i ride only as long as i can keep my heart open, my chin up, and my soul present. that is my solemn promise to her. there are no championships in our future. that is absolutely fine. we still can share a life of glorious intimacy. she and her buddy tyco live right outside my bedroom window. they let me know their desires 16 hearne, adam’s task, 129. hofstetter, the pursuit of virtù | 45 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) by long nickers and loud stares. we are getting older together, doing the best we can. there is a heroism in that. before rides, i take tennyson, sugar cubes, and peppermints out to the field. i read aloud the last stanza of “ulysses” to remind us of the beauty that remains. i tack her up, tighten the girth in slow increments, gently swing a leg over, settle into the saddle, and reach down to give her a sugar cube, sometimes on her left, more frequently on her right, all the while reciting the words we both now know by heart: tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’ we are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; one equal temper of heroic hearts, made weak by time and fate, but strong in will to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. works cited felitti, vincent j. “the relation between childhood adverse experiences and adult health: turning gold into lead.” the permanente journal 6, no. 1 (winter 2002): 44–47. https://doi.org/10.7812/ tpp/02.994. henderson, d. james. “incest.” in comprehensive textbook of psychiatry, 2nd ed., edited by alfred m. freedman, harold i. kaplan, and benjamin j. sadock, 1530–39. baltimore, md: williams and wilkins, 1975. herman, judith lewis. father–daughter incest. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1991. hearne, vicki. adam’s task: calling animals by name. new york: knopf, 1986. kolk, bessel a. van der. the body keeps the score: brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. new york: viking penguin, 2014. kunffy, charles de. the ethics and passions of dressage. middleton, md: half halt press, 1993. loch, sylvia. dressage: the art of classical riding. north pomfret, vt: trafalgar square publishing, 2001. masson, jeffrey moussaieff. the assault on truth: freud’s suppression of the seduction theory. new york: simon & schuster, 1998. onishi, norimitsu. “a victim’s account fuels a reckoning over abuse of children in france.” new york times, march 16, 2021. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/01/07/world/europe/francepedophilia-gabriel-matzneff.html. podhajsky, alois. the complete training of horse and rider in the principles of classical horsemanship. hollywood, ca: wilshire book company, 1967. surtees, robert s. mr. sponge’s sporting tour. london: bradbury, agnew & co., 1853. xenophon. the art of horsemanship. edited and translated by morris h. morgan. boston: little, brown, and company, 1893. https://doi.org/10.7812/tpp/02.994 https://doi.org/10.7812/tpp/02.994 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/world/europe/france-pedophilia-gabriel-matzneff.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/world/europe/france-pedophilia-gabriel-matzneff.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/07/world/europe/france-pedophilia-gabriel-matzneff.html _hlk126348747 _hlk126348732 bhattacharjee, review of mathur beastly tales for the anthropocene paloma bhattacharjee review of: nayanika mathur, crooked cats: beastly encounters in the anthropocene. animal lives. chicago: university of chicago press, 2021. xiv + 208 pp., 16 halftones. $27.50 (pb). paloma bhattacharjee is a graduate student in the department of sociology and anthropology at simon fraser university, burnaby, bc, canada. email: pba41@sfu.ca book review mailto:pba41@sfu.ca contemporary anthropological scholarship on more-thanhuman relationships has brought to our attention the complex social relations and communicative possibilities shared across life forms that inhabit degrading landscapes. recent works such as radhika govindarajan’s animal intimacies (2018), michael. r. dove’s bitter shade (2021) and eduardo kohn’s how forests think (2013) have offered crucial insights into how different human communities interpret nonhuman agencies, be it through focusing on their points of view, practical skills, political presence, or on the influence that their worldmaking activities have on social relations. nayanika mathur’s crooked cats is an important addition to this rich corpus of literature. over fifteen years in the making, crooked cats is an ethnographic inquiry into the connections between the rise in unusual encounters between humans and big cats in india and the unprecedented ecological changes that mark the anthropocene. by no means an account of mechanical correlation or cause-and-effect, crooked cats argues instead that indeterminacy is central to the relationship between interspecies relations and ecological crises. by listening to the explanations provided by those people who live in close proximity with big cats, mathur argues that indeterminacies unfold within complex socio-political contexts. she suggests that her interlocutors’ explanations or theorizations are ultimately premised on a recognition that humans are not the only actors—that big cats can become “crooked” (3). “crookedness” here refers to the uncharacteristic or aberrant behaviour of big cats, like the leopards who are perceived to be intentionally preying on humans. the recurring question among mathur’s interlocutors—“what makes a big cat crooked?” (3)—situates the actions and temperament of the big cats within their politico-ecological context. crooked cats is based on fieldwork conducted in the indian states of uttarakhand, himachal pradesh, and maharashtra. but mathur’s arguments also transcend these particular locations. crucial to the book is a movement across the scales of the intimate and the planetary. intimate, because the work is centred on the stories, or “beastly copyright © 2023 paloma bhattacharjee this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 231–235. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.12647 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.12647 bhattacharjee, review of mathur | 233 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) tales”, told among people who live in close quarters with big cats. planetary, because mathur contends that these stories offer an opportunity for us to grasp some of the complexities of the anthropocene; these beastly tales articulate how lived experience unfolds within the context of specific histories, power relationships, local politics, and cosmological understandings. as a form of knowledge, mathur says, such stories respond to the uncertainty of the present times. and “uncertainty” is a conceptual tool with which mathur urges the reader to question the promise of certitude that distinguishes scientific ways of knowing in modernity. the present ecological crises repeatedly trouble the limits of certainty, she says. indeed, the book’s opening chapters show how scientific and bureaucratic claims about why big cats become crooked actually derive from numerous provisional, tacit, and intuitive knowledges. in the first chapter, for example, mathur argues that the official or scientific explanations for crookedness have generally sat in opposition to what gets construed as local, indigenous or native explanations. mathur dismantles this opposition between local and official by pointing out their co-production. the argument is developed further in the second chapter. there, she discusses the events following the unwelcome presence of maneater cats in human-populated areas. what becomes most pressing in these circumstances is the identification of the maneater cats. the author explores the conflict between the bureaucratic insistence on identifying guilty cats (before taking action) and the difficulty of such identifications. she demonstrates that people who are tasked with executing the official protocol of id-ing maneater cats tend to rely on affective registers to determine whether the cats are maneaters or innocents. these forms of recognition embrace inexplicability as their premise and are shared among people who, through their histories of living close to big cats, have developed skills of interpreting the cats through registers such as their gaze and gait. mathur develops her argument further through her discussion of celebrity big cats. the third chapter presents an account of the public conversations generated by a white tiger from delhi zoo, named humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 234 | bhattacharjee, review of mathur vijay, who mauled to death a zoo visitor who entered his enclosure. through the example of this popular tiger who turned from cute to maneater, mathur traces the commodification of animal personalities and the sentimentality they invoke, pointing to the fact that market-driven emotional responses tend to get invested in the dichotomy of cuteness and animality. the fourth chapter examines the issue of governance by exploring petitions against dangerous cats which are sent to both government offices as well as holy shrines and temples. here mathur analyses these petitions as an important genre of narrative in themselves, revealing in her close readings how these documents couple the sacred with the profane, the bureaucratic with the affective. moreover, mathur contends that big cats often appear in these petition-narratives as having more agentic capacities than the humans who wrote them, who present themselves as “subjugated” (92) or vulnerable to the prowess of predators. the sixth chapter explores how humans and nonhumans share space and “live beside” (124) one another within densely populated urban areas across cities in india. scholars such as thom van dooren and deborah bird rose have argued against the idea of a sequestered nature that exists separately from civilization, and have instead foregrounded the extent to which nonhuman beings actively engage in place-making activities in spaces that are misconceived as only human habitats. mathur adds to these critical conversations on the multispecies city by explaining how people’s interpretations of the presence and movement of big cats is mediated by the spatial histories and hierarchies of these places — be it ghettoization based on class, caste, political turmoil between the hills and plains, or the conflict between indigenous communities and migrant settlers. towards the end of the book mathur addresses the range of intense emotions and forms of communication and intimacy that are produced through encounters with nonhuman animals. she examines in particular how new kinds of visual technologies — cctv, smartphones, and camera traps — allow for new ways of visualizing nonhuman lives that are distinct from the earlier images of hunting or bhattacharjee, review of mathur | 235 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) professional wildlife photography. mathur argues that these visual technologies mark a new mode of knowing animals, “entrapping” them in a visual regime of surveillance in which “unusual” behaviours are starkly marked out (31). crooked cats is a timely contribution that speaks to the growing need for more situated accounts of climate change, which it offers by attending to the “logics and poetics” (4) of beastly tales in their bureaucratic and narrative forms. mathur makes a strong case that beastly tales dissolve many dichotomies — religious–political, cosmological–historical, science–myth — which separate the clear interconnections that constitute living in the anthropocene. her work makes a refreshing addition to the burgeoning body of scholarship on interspecies relationships. the work is a fascinating read for those concerned about the anthropocene, governance, nonhuman lives, extinction and knowledge formation. krauss, review of coates copyright © 2024 judith krauss this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 302–307. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 armchair sciurologist? judith krauss review of: peter coates, squirrel nation: reds, greys and the meaning of home. london: reaktion books, 2023. 336 pp. 36 illus., 10 in colour. £16.99 (hb). judith krauss is a lecturer in the department of politics and international relations at the university of york, uk. email: judith.krauss@york.ac.uk book review http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 mailto:judith.krauss@york.ac.uk peter coates’s squirrel nation is a well-written, extremely rich and detailed reflection on the fluctuating relationship between the humans of the united kingdom and the squirrel populations with whom they share space. red squirrels, generally deemed an emblem of native british fauna, are now limited to scotland and a few strongholds in mostly more coniferous habitats in wales and northern england. grey squirrels, often styled as destructive invaders imported from north america by the victorians, now outnumber the reds — in part because of a vicious squirrelpox virus, carried by greys and lethal only to reds, but also because of human-shaped landscapes that favour the larger greys. across seven chapters plus a preface, peter coates draws on newspaper, (social) media and literary sources, academic work from different disciplines, legislative and policy debates, as well as royal and celebrity advocacy to trace how over time both reds and greys have been subject to love and hate, to cages, disease, and anthropomorphism. in sum, despite the contemporary discourse in the uk distinguishing vehemently between the loved red squirrel and the unloved grey squirrel, coates highlights that the two species share more similarities than meets the eye. he asks not just whether we should learn to live with the greys, but whether we ought to love them too. hailing from formby, one of the last remaining red squirrel sanctuaries in england, coates describes himself as “an armchair sciurologist” (11). but squirrel nation attests to an extensive knowledge on human–squirrel relations that belies coates’s rhetorical self-deprecation. his work focuses predominantly on the uk while also engaging with the north american context from which the grey squirrels originated. he shares extensive knowledge on the two squirrel species and humans’ responses to them, but also on individual squirrels and how their actions polarize personal and public opinions. his examples range from fabricated text messages between imagined grey and red squirrels in the daily star newspaper to passionate appeals in the houses of parliament for red squirrel support. the book meticulously traces the ever-shifting love-hate triangle between reds, greys, and the humans of the uk. the wealth of everyday encounters documented between the british — foresters, conservationists, copyright © 2024 judith krauss this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 301–307. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18823 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18823 krauss, review of coates | 303 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) researchers, authors, celebrities, politicians, members of the public — and red or grey squirrels illustrates just how ingrained squirrels are in national and natural consciousness. squirrel nation reveals many ways in which greys and reds have traded places on the loved–unloved spectrum. in the first chapter, coates foreshadows how much of a journey human perceptions of squirrels have been on in the uk. across the nineteenth century and into the twentieth it was, in fact, the native red squirrels who were seen as destructive pests, while the introduced greys were available to buy as cuddly toys for a time. lately, though, things have flipped the other way. coates observes that it is now an instance of rare bipartisan agreement that greys must be controlled and killed (25). in chapter one and beyond, coates explores how many of the undesirable qualities now ascribed to greys, such as damaging young trees or a seasonal carnivorous nature, were the bane of foresters’ and bird lovers’ existence even when the reds were the only squirrels on these isles — same complaints, slightly different genes. usefully nuancing the monolithic perception of the good, native, british red squirrels, coates emphasizes in the second chapter that, historically, red populations were routinely killed by trigger-happy humans and threatened by habitat loss or disease. indeed, more than once the reds required reintroduction mostly from northern europe, long before the greys entered stage left. then, in chapters three and four, coates details grey squirrels’ origins in the us and their subsequent — mixed and partly lethal — reception in the uk. he highlights that the forms of squirrel nationalism that paint reds as good natives and the greys as invaders partly manifested as anti-americanism: characteristics like greed were ascribed by some to both humans and squirrels hailing from north america. squirrel nation’s attention to shifting human–squirrel relations illustrates some unintended consequences of the loved–unloved distinction, but also tentative signs that this distinction may be abating. for example, coates highlights that during the second world war, grilled squirrel and squirrel-tail soup were proposed as potential answers to britain’s widespread food shortages (154). yet humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 304 | krauss, review of coates whatever culinary appeal squirrels had was complicated by their concomitant characterization as tree rats. so began the intensifying “war on the grey peril”, as coates entitles his fifth chapter. in chapter six, coates shares important reflections on the reds’ valorization and commodification vis-à-vis the greys’ criminalization and vilification. on the one hand, the reds: supported and protected by then-prince charles, and the subject of £2.46m in funding from scotland’s heritage lottery fund. on the other, the greys: instrumentalized for a smear campaign against a brexit-opposing politician, and the subject of abiding verbal toxicity, even though warfarin, an anti-coagulant poison bait intended to control the greys’ numbers, was banned in 2015. even so, coates proposes in chapter seven that the uk is now “learning to live with (and to love) the grey” (224). he emphasizes that, while public perception of greys may have shifted from initially adored to generally abhorred over time, there have always been those asking fellow britons not to be beastly to the greys (234). and the number of those with a soft spot for the greys may be growing, as suggested by radio station callers advocating for the greys’ right to live, greys’ featuring in advertising, or some researchers and conservationists speaking out for the greys. chapter seven also shares recent genetic research demonstrating that certain aristocrats played an outsized role in facilitating greys’ original expansion, as genetic stocks suggest that grey squirrels would not have been able to populate the uk in the same way without humans releasing them to estates in other parts of the country (244).1 this underscores that vilifying the greys, rather than problematizing the humans who have facilitated their translocation and expansion, is problematic. the last few pages (252 onwards) highlight vital biological information about similarities between greys and reds, questioning the red–grey binary. 1 see a. l. signorile et al., “using dna profiling to investigate human-mediated translocations of an invasive species”, biological conservation no. 195 (2016): 97–105, https://doi. org/10.1016/j.biocon.2015.12.026; and a. l. signorile et al., “mixture or mosaic? genetic patterns in uk grey squirrels support a human-mediated ‘long-jump’ invasion mechanism”, diversity and distribution 22, no. 5 (2016): 566–77, https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.12424. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2015.12.026 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2015.12.026 https://doi.org/10.1111/ddi.12424 krauss, review of coates | 305 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) i wonder, though, how this book might have read if these important insights had been shared earlier on. much of the book focuses on the red–grey distinction, with obvious justification. nevertheless, it might have been interesting to read those earlier pages with the knowledge of key similarities between greys and reds, to problematize and nuance the species dichotomy. similarly, the genetic research that demonstrates just how much of a role humans have played, and arguably continue to play, in shaping both squirrel species’ separate but intertwined fates, could have shone a somewhat different light on the greys’ vilification. incidentally, some maps or charts documenting reds’ and greys’ shifting habitats, habits, and numbers in time and space would have been useful to provide complementary types of visual information than the book’s existing portfolio. the book contains beautiful archival and more recent photos of squirrels as well as various products utilizing squirrel imagery; there are prints of artworks such as murals or lithographs, but no maps or charts. there are further examples of where some tweaks might have created an even more readable and important book. i am led to believe that creative writing students are advised to kill their darlings, that is, to eliminate points that they love but don’t serve the story. in this book, anecdotes from newspapers, popular culture and parliament can seem overwhelming in their abundance. at times, the reader has to work hard to connect the dots from these insights to the key messages of the wider story. moreover, there are some instances where more critical engagement would have been desirable. coates’s stated focus is on foregrounding “the connection between nature, in the form of animals, and the notion of the nation” (10). however, as the sentence “a synonym for nation is country” (26) suggests, he does not differentiate very much between english, northern irish, scottish, and welsh relations with greys and reds. furthermore, would that focus on nature and nation not have required more critical engagement with social and political science texts which problematize struggles around national identity, land and borders in the diverse contemporary uk context, and humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 306 | krauss, review of coates problematic ideological links between nation and nature?2 there are passing nods to sara ahmed (30) and the comaroffs (31), but it is not spelt out in any great depth what their thinking might lend to critical analysis of the above-mentioned dynamics. moreover, coates’s understanding of the home, which takes the presence of a garden for granted, does not problematize the racial, class, gender, generational, and economic dimensions of this presumption. the presence of “the garden” (26) will be predicated on a particular type of home and a particular vision of spare time for gardening, all of which is proving increasingly unattainable for significant (especially younger) parts of the current uk population. similarly, coates writes: “for many who live in the country(side), rural britain is britain” (27). while this may be the case, does that not risk neglecting the uk’s growing, diverse, urban population, who incidentally will be much more likely to encounter squirrels in parks than in a private garden? on all these counts, some robust editing to reduce the wealth of observations and foreground links to the main story, but also invite critical reflection on one’s inherent positionality and presumptions — useful to any author, including this reviewer — might have created an even more readable and worthwhile book. squirrel nation also leaves largely untouched highly pertinent debates in (global) conservation and environmental policy. the book’s final idea, namely that attitudes to the greys may (and should?) be shifting, could have been even more fascinating had it been tied more explicitly to the repercussions of dominant conservation thinking, which generally prioritizes loved species while often disregarding or sometimes targeting the unloved.3 coates might also have 2 see jevgeniy bluwstein, connor cavanagh, and robert fletcher, “securing conservation lebensraum? the geo-, bio-, and ontopolitics of global conservation futures”, geoforum (2023) https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103752; and gargi bhattacharyya, adam elliott-cooper, sita balani, et al., empire’s endgame: racism and the british state (london: pluto press, 2021). 3 see sarah l. crowley, steve hinchliffe, and robbie a. mcdonald, “killing squirrels: exploring motivations and practices of lethal wildlife management”, environment and planning e: nature and space, 1, nos. 1–2 (2018), 120–43, https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848617747831; deborah bird rose and thom van dooren, introduction to “unloved others: death of the disregarded in the time of extinctions”, special issue of australian humanities review no. 50 (2011): 1–4; thom van dooren, “a day with crows — rarity, nativity and the violent-care of conservation”, animal studies journal 4, no. 2 (2015): 1–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103752 https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848617747831 krauss, review of coates | 307 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) had more to say on the current fierce disagreements about how to manage conservation and space in a time of rampant anthropogenic degradation of and changes to biodiversity. he might also have had insights on whether we, and especially those of us with historically high ecological footprints, should curtail our resource consumption to protect these furry beings. finally, if, as coates articulates in a gem of a sentence — “grey squirrels excel at making our world theirs” (49) — would it not have been worth engaging more with the rise of more-than-human perspectives, and how humans’ and squirrels’ world-making intersects?4 in sum, these criticisms aside, for anyone with a deep interest in squirrels and their ever-fluctuating relationships with humans in the united kingdom, this rich book is a must-read. it comes with all the strengths of a labour of love, namely great breadth and depth of knowledge and longstanding immersion in a topic that the author cares about deeply. however, it also harbours some of the weaknesses of a labour of love, such as a lack of critical distance, a mountain of material, and a risk of key messages becoming buried. maybe that is quite fitting for a self-confessed armchair sciurologist. after all, squirrels famously save up a lot of different foodstuffs, and they bury their acorns too. 4 see donna haraway, when species meet (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008), and especially anna lowenhaupt tsing, the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins (princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2015), for more details on how human and nonhuman world-making interrelate. burke, facing extinction facing extinction: animal death masks in the post-mortem museum representation of gorillas verity burke department of history of art and architecture trinity college dublin humanimalia 13.1 (fall 2022) abstract: when we consider the preservation of the animal body in natural history displays, we primarily think of techniques such as taxidermy or the mounting of a skeletal anatomy. animal death masks are, by contrast, almost completely unstudied. although casting has been predominantly understood as a technique for preserving the human face, nonhumans have also had their faces captured by the casting of a death mask, and the resultant plaster used for a variety of purposes, from the creation of an accurate taxidermy mount, to featuring as a display object in its own right. “animal death masks” examines three case studies in which death masks play an integral role, all of which feature male gorillas kept in city zoos who grew to be local celebrities and were preserved for display in their regional museum, and each of whom had a cast taken of their face after death. this article argues that animal death masks materialize the distorted boundaries present in museum primate narratives: between indexical representations and artistic portraits, endangered animals and celebrity, conservation and preservation. keywords: museums, death masks, gorilla, conservation, preservation, heritage, taxidermy bio: verity burke is an interdisciplinary scholar working at the intersections of literary analysis, the environmental humanities, and museum studies. the irish research council funds her current project, still lives: organic and digital animals in the natural history museum, which examines the dialogue between analogue and digital technologies of animal mediation in their museum context. her wider work examines the narratives and displays of human and nonhuman bodies; museum representations beyond organic remains; and storytelling in the natural history museum. email: burkeve@tcd.ie orcid: 0000-0002-1678-2815 copyright © 2022 verity burke this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 1–43. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.10933 mailto:burkeve@tcd.ie https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1678-2815 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.10933 burke, facing extinction | 3 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) one frosty morning in new york, shortly after christmas, i had a striking encounter with a male silverback gorilla. this meeting did not take place on the city’s streets, of course, but in a darkened room of the akeley hall of african mammals, in one of the western world’s most iconic museums: the american museum of natural history (amnh). although hundreds of thousands of visitors have encountered the “giant of karisimbi” since his installation in 1936, one encounter — the first — remains the best known. the story goes like this. the institution’s taxidermist, carl akeley, ventured out on an expedition to what was then the belgian congo to collect specimens for mounting in the museum’s galleries. encountering “a magnificent creature with the face of an amiable giant,” akeley shot and killed the animal.1 the good-natured simian face was “molded forever from the death mask cast from his corpse,” while the body was carefully taxidermied for exhibition.2 the experience left such an impression on akeley that he began to process the conflict between the kind of preservation undertaken in the museum diorama and the conservation of animal populations in their own habitats, eventually becoming “motivated to convince the belgian government to make [the kivu mountains] the first african national park to ensure sanctuary for the gorilla.”3 much has been written about akeley’s transformative experience with the “giant of karisimbi”,4 and yet little attention has been paid to a specific aspect of the transformation from living gorilla into taxidermy mount: the creation of an animal death mask. this article hopes to redress this balance, bringing new attention to the roles that gorilla death masks play in the post-mortem representation of primates in contemporary museum narratives. human death masks — a wax or plaster cast posthumously taken of a person’s face — were created for a number of reasons, including as reference material for a portrait, as a memorial imbued with relic-like power through contact with the absent body, and out of 1 akeley, in brightest africa, 230. 2 haraway, primate visions, 31. 3 haraway, 31. 4 haraway, 26–58; kohlstedt, “nature by design”; rothfels, “preserving history”. 4 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) the desire to preserve a supposedly objective likeness of an important person. yet as the above incident illustrates, humans are not the only animals from which funerary plasters have been produced. nonhumans have also had their faces preserved by the casting process, and the resultant masks have been used for a variety of purposes, from the basis for an accurate taxidermy mount to functioning as display objects in their own right. as with humans, the best-known nonhuman plaster casts are usually of famous individuals, endangered megafauna who become anthropomorphized ambassadors for their species. when “representing animals” becomes crucial to “ways of thinking about, and ultimately interacting with, animals themselves,”5 the menageries on display in museums become a vital source of analysis for the mediation of the other-than-human. although the taxidermy and skeletal anatomies on display in natural history museums have been extensively studied, literature on the role of death masks is considerably less extensive and little research about animal death masks has been undertaken.6 the material difference of death masks from these post-mortem representations reveals additional depth to stories about nonhuman animals. this article argues that animal death masks materialize the distorted boundaries present in the post-mortem representation of primates in natural history museum narratives: between indexical representations and artistic portraits, endangered animals and celebrity, conservation and preservation. from here, i will explore three case studies in which death masks play an integral role in an animal’s institutional afterlife. all three involve death masks taken of male gorillas kept in city zoos who 5 dodd, rader, and thorsen, “introduction”, 1. for more on how animals circulate meanings about and beyond the natural world, see alberti, the afterlives of animals. 6 alberti, “introduction”; morris, mr potter’s museum; poliquin, the breathless zoo; pointon, “artifacts”; clymer, “cromwell’s head”; barry and burke, “behind the mask”. research into animal death masks has largely been limited to exhibition catalogues, such as near life: the gipsformerei — 200 years of casting plaster (2019), which accompanied an exhibition that ran from august 2019 to march 2020 at the staatliche museen zu berlin, and included the death masks of a boar, a wolf, a goat and a crocodile, as well as that of knut, the famous polar bear of the berlin zoo. burke, facing extinction | 5 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) grew to be local celebrities and were preserved for display in their regional museum. while these cases highlight the diversity of preservation techniques and narratives used to represent gorillas in western cultural institutions, my focus is rather on how their death masks function in a contemporary display context. first, a behindthe-scenes visit to berlin’s museum für naturkunde takes us to the institution’s renowned taxidermy workshop, where berlin zoo’s first gorilla, bobby, was taxidermied. this case study questions the indexical nature of the funerary plaster and the role of the death mask as a post-mortem portrait. next, we consider the institutional afterlives of bristol zoo’s famous gorilla, alfred. after his death, both the zoo and alfred’s fans were keen to memorialize the locally famous western lowland gorilla. a death mask was taken and his body was mounted, capturing alfred’s well-known features, while both letters and zoo ephemera in bristol museum’s archives and the institution’s exhibition emphasized his personality. this perspective shift from animal to celebrity is most evident in the display of his death mask, which obscures the other-than-human nature of the gorilla. finally, we encounter the story of milwaukee captive samson, whose unusual post-mortem preservation figures a twenty-first century evolution of akeley’s anxieties about the conflict between wildlife conservation and museum forms of preservation, and whose death mask’s relic-like connection to the original animal serves the purpose of authenticating other post-mortem representations. while these gorillas’ institutional afterlives share commonalities, examining the role their death masks play reveals significant variation in the construction of museum narratives about endangered primates. before we engage with the role of the cast in the display narratives of these three case studies, however, we must consider the death mask in the cultural context of primate exhibition. death masks in the context of primate exhibition cultural historian ole marius hylland’s suggestion that the act of making a death mask can be interpreted as “a stubborn, existential act of defiance, an attempt to freeze a certain point in time” envisions the face casts as a rear-guard action against loss, an effort to 6 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) materialize some element of the individual for posterity.7 plasters serve historically as “relics, general memento mori objects, practical tools for sculptors, objects of remembrance for dignitaries, study objects for medical sciences and objects of entertainment and exhibition.”8 the nonhuman death masks in this study often serve similar display purposes as the human ones, even if their historical contexts and subjects are radically different. taking a death mask was a complicated process, with formatori (the artisans who took the mould and made the cast) each having their own preferred techniques. georg kolbe, a renowned early-twentieth-century german sculptor, was also a master of the art of funerary plaster casting, using the masks as reference points for the busts he crafted. his description of creating the mould provides a sense of the processes involved: the parts where hair is growing are painted over with a thin solution of modelling clay or with oil, so that the plaster may not adhere when it is poured over [the face.] the outline of the mask, the parts on the neck, behind the ears, and so on, are surrounded with the thinnest of damp paper […] a large bowl of plaster of the consistency of soup is ladled over the face a few millimetres in thickness; then a thread is drawn over the middle of the forehead, the bridge of the nose, the mouth and chin. a second bowl of more solid plaster is spread over the first layer like pulp (this is to provide a firm outer shell), and before it sets the thread is drawn away, dividing the whole into two halves. as soon as the outer layer has set hard, the halved mould is broken apart and carefully detached from the head; this is the most difficult step, for the mould enclosing the body was airtight. the halves thus detached are immediately fitted together again and clamped, the negative is cleaned and refilled with plaster. roughness on the covering outer shell [is] carefully chipped away with mallet and chisel, and there we have the positive, the finished mask.9 7 hylland, “faces of death”, 173. 8 pointon, “artifacts”, 172. 9 benkard, undying faces, 44–45. burke, facing extinction | 7 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) this process is complicated by nonhuman bodies, which present different challenges to those of humans: the hair needs to be covered in oil to prevent the plaster from sticking on fur-covered mammals and feathered birds, while the positions of ears, beaks and snouts can make removing the mould without damage especially difficult. animal death masks are usually taken of specimens as reference for an accurate taxidermy mount, but the funerary plasters taken of celebrity animals also intend to capture a known individual as much as a specimen. the formal similarities with human death masks often lead institutions to display them in contexts which anthropomorphize them and imbue the casts with anthropocentric meanings. for example, the death mask of dolly the cloned sheep has been displayed in the national portrait gallery in edinburgh, which also displays artworks featuring such notables as mary, queen of scots and philosopher david hume, rather than with the taxidermy mounts in the natural history collection of the national museum of scotland.10 the science of cloning has commodified the original animal and transformed the copy — the clone — into an animal celebrity, while the copy of that copy — the death mask — is consequently exhibited amongst art, as a celebrity artefact. in the case of animal death masks, gorilla plasters particularly highlight a number of intersections between specimen and celebrity, conservation and preservation, indexical representation and art. apes, and gorillas specifically, were long considered to have been a demonstration of the ‘missing link’ between human and animal creation.11 molecular biologists have proven our kinship with apes at a genetic level: we share 99 per cent of our dna with apes.12 as donna haraway has noted, “monkeys and apes have a privileged relation to nature and culture for western people: simians occupy the border zones between those potent mythic poles.”13 andrew flack additionally links the popularity of simians to the physical 10 “death mask”, national museums scotland. https://www.nms.ac.uk/ explore-our-collections/collection-search-results/death-mask/673589. 11 scott, “the ‘missing link’”. 12 berger, why look at animals?, 47. 13 haraway, primate visions, 1. https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/collection-search-results/death-mask/673589 https://www.nms.ac.uk/explore-our-collections/collection-search-results/death-mask/673589 8 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) characteristics they share with humans (“rounded outlines, hair, an often-vertical posture, flat faces with familiar expressions, and the ability to manipulate small objects”), but in particular connects the recognition of animal individuality to the way humans are trained to seek personhood by looking at the face.14 the power of forming an emotional connection through facial recognition has frequently been used in conservation purposes for the endangered gorilla.15 this simian similarity is further emphasized when it comes to celebrity zoo animals, which have often been anthropomorphized by media reportage, display narrative and zoo ephemera. writing about bristol zoo, the institution in which alfred the gorilla lived in captivity between the years of 1930 and 1948, flack argues that “the power of these animals to mobilize emotions at the heart of the human-animal, object-subject binaries remains today. its practicality, however, has transformed in line with conservationist agendas.”16 as noah cincinnati has noted, this conservationist agenda was far from simple. in the early twentieth century, conservationists “framed the collection of threatened species as critical to preventing extinction,” yet vast numbers of gorillas were killed when resisting capture.17 others were explicitly shot for post-mortem display, in line with the beliefs of naturalists such as william hornaday of the new york zoological park (today the bronx zoo), who argued that the “highest function that any wild animal can serve, living and dead, is to go on exhibition, as a representative of its species, to be seen and studied by millions of serious-minded people.”18 the animal trade, zoos, and museums were all interconnected during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. western institutions benefited from their colonial connections and gorillas were traded 14 flack, the wild within, 120. 15 one telling example is the website findagrave.com, which allows users to upload photographs of individuals and their final resting place. the user “gorilla passion project” has created 252 memorials with added photographs so that “people can see a face to match the loss of so many of these beautiful animals and just how human they are.” see https:// www.findagrave.com/user/profile/48238259 16 flack, the wild within, 185. 17 cincinnati, “too sullen for survival”, 169. 18 hornaday, “the zoological park”, 543. burke, facing extinction | 9 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) as commodities across cultural institutions in order to be exhibited dead or alive.19 colonial expansion “fuelled intense museological traffic in the late nineteenth century”,20 and overlapped with a drive to appeal to a mass audience that extended into the early twentieth century. the gorilla was uniquely suited to serve as both an icon of the west’s colonial power and as a crowd-pleaser. early gorilla displays frequently fed into colonial narratives. mounts were, for example, exhibited in an intimidating attack position so that “european museum-goers, thrilled or terrified, could soothe themselves with the thought that white hunters had overcome the fearsome monster, and with the knowledge that solid glass stood between themselves and it.”21 other series showcased the primate’s physical similarity to humans as evidence of darwinian evolution — for example, walking upright like man, or in ethnographic displays with other, supposedly less “evolved”, races.22 zoo media in the early twentieth century, when the three gorillas chosen for case studies were held in captivity, further capitalized on these similarities by constructing anthropomorphized personalities to amplify an animal’s fame. animal celebrity is “now a basic mode of animal presentation for zoos, which employ so-called charismatic megafauna, or ‘flagship species’, to represent whole ecosystems and continents as ‘fundraising ambassadors.’”23 as susan nance has argued, “animal celebrities always need human mediators with the press and public, and who apply to a given animal’s behaviour a story about the animal’s awareness of his or her surroundings and motivations.”24 an unintended side effect of this celebrity status can be that when we celebrate a single individual, “we relegate the rest to a heightened obscurity.”25 in mid-twentieth century studies of wild populations by primatologists such as dian fossey and george schaller, gorilla sub19 scott, “missing link”, 2. 20 scott, 9. 21 nyhart, “life after death”, 237. 22 scott, “missing link,” 6–8. 23 nance, animal modernity, 83–84. 24 nance, 24. 25 malamud, animals and visual culture, 36. 10 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) jects were endowed with gendered pronouns, “rendering an animal no longer as an ‘it’ but rather as ‘she’ or ‘he’”.26 the act of naming, moreover, “offered the possibility of understanding individuals as not simply placeholders of animal behaviour but as subjective beings,” thereby effecting significant change in conservation policies.27 human–simian similarities have nonetheless frequently concealed the historical commodification and endangerment of the species in their museum context, where displays foreground accuracy of representation, authenticity, and celebrity. the correlation between representations of the face, memorialization and animal personhood could be powerfully evoked by the death mask in museum narratives. exhibiting the individual’s face can, for instance, figure as a memorial, a form of portraiture, a mirror to celebrity culture, but also as a specimen, or as a complex combination of all four. yet in echoing the uses of human death masks, the narrative meanings present in contemporary displays of animal death masks, especially those who lived in captivity, can figure material evidence of the tensions present in representing gorillas in museum display. “the mona lisa smile of bobby the gorilla” the introduction to my first case study comes by way of ton hermans, a general practitioner from the netherlands who wrote a short article detailing his visit to the masterpieces of taxidermy gallery in the museum für naturkunde (mfn), berlin. hermans was particularly taken with “one of their masterpieces”: bobby, an enormous specimen of a gorilla, 1.72 meters high, and 266 kilos in body weight when he died. his position was very natural and the expression on his face touching. a sort of mona lisa smile caused me to wonder what was so special about this animal. bobby was introduced in the zoo of berlin in 1928, as a young male, bought in central africa. in a short time, he became one of the most popular animals in the zoo, the darling of the public and his keepers. he was intelligent 26 shah, “animal life stories”, 121. 27 mitman, “pachyderm personalities”, 178. burke, facing extinction | 11 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) and friendly, and never showed the unexpected episodes of bad temper, well-known and feared from gorillas. he developed into a real personality in both the zoo and berlin.28 on “a bad day in 1935,” bobby took ill, and despite the best care of veterinarians, he passed away from what was later discovered to be appendicitis. once he died, the mfn offered to “prolong his existence” by preparing his skin as a taxidermy mount. after a death mask was taken and casts were made of both hands and feet, the taxidermy mount of bobby has been exhibited in the capital’s natural history museum ever since.29 although herman’s exhibition review offers us a concise introduction to bobby and the kind of biographizing that frames “celebrity” zoo animals, it also relates a particular visual language: that bobby looked “very natural”; that herman had an emotional response to the “expression on his face” and a subtle paralleling of taxidermy with art in the reference to the portrait of the mona lisa.30 the dialogue between sculpture and specimen preservation can be traced back to the nineteenth-century trend for taxidermists to produce realistic, “lifelike” representations. the genre of realism — which intended to show nature as close to “reality” as possible — dominated taxidermy during the era in which berlin’s gorilla was preserved.31 28 hermans, “mona lisa smile”, 81. a full account of the exploitation of bobby’s life has been reconstructed through clippings from contemporary literature in christian welzbacher’s bobby: requiem für einen gorilla. 29 hermans, “mona lisa smile”, 81. an additional historical context for the taking of both human death and life masks was as reference material to advance racist arguments about human “types”. such casts were often displayed in natural history museums in the second half of the nineteenth century; the same period also saw “human zoos”, such as those displaying people from cameroon and togo at the german colonial exhibition in 1896, whose body parts would be accessioned into various collections on their deaths. while this longer history is not presented in the contemporary display contexts of the death masks of bobby, berlin’s institutions are still grappling with the original purposes of many such plaster collections. 30 hermans, “mona lisa smile”, 81. 31 the history of taxidermy is fruitfully discussed in poliquin, the breathless zoo. for an understanding of how this history overlapped with a shift in scientific representation, see daston and galison, objectivity. 12 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) death masks have been understood as highly accurate representations of the “real,” as they supposedly create an exact copy of the subject’s face. but analysing bobby’s mask disrupts this sense of indexicality. the process of making the specimen look “real” was considered an art and had a particularly close relation to portraiture and sculpture, for which human and animal death masks alike were most frequently taken. according to late-nineteenth-century biologist vernon l. kellogg, taxidermy should simultaneously reveal “the peculiar characteristics of the animal species represented,” while possessing “the power of displaying the emotions and passions” and thus “appeal to the human senses just as a figure in marble or bronze may,” a sentiment which finds echoes in herman’s response to the finished “masterpiece” of bobby.32 dermoplasty, a technique developed by german taxidermist philipp leopold martin (1850–1885), replaced earlier “stuffed animal” approaches, with the taxidermist instead sculpting a model onto which the skin was carefully positioned. martin’s approach to facial dermoplasty advanced taxidermic realism using the techniques of sculpture: clay is injected towards the ears, then at the corners of the mouth towards the animal’s cheeks and face parts, whereupon, using one’s fingers or modelling tools, the intended physiognomy can easily be produced. for noses and lips, however, one must use firmer clay, which of course must be put in place with one’s fingers […]. the lips are sealed with temporary thread and this part is modelled from the outside, whereby, as the clay often stays soft for days, there is no need to hurry, and one can make improvements and adjustments as needed. — it will be clear that only in this way is it possible to achieve an animal’s correct physiognomy.33 an appearance of correct and natural physiognomy is aped through artistic intervention, which is consequently obscured through the act of 32 kellogg, “latter-day taxidermy”, 142. equally telling is the fact that gerhard schröder, one of the taxidermists who worked on the mount of bobby, was appointed a member of the sculptor trade association for his dermoplasty work. see welzbacher, bobby, 207–8. 33 martin, praxis der naturgeschichte, 1:129. burke, facing extinction | 13 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) naturalistic taxidermy. it is, however, exactly these texts and techniques that highlight the extent to which taxidermy and sculpture overlap. the dermoplasty of bobby is overtly represented as a sculpture-specimen hybrid in press coverage of the unveiling of his taxidermied body: a large, light room behind the scenes of the natural history museum, half sculptor’s studio, half silent zoo. centre stage is a something, draped in white dust sheets. the cover falls. bobby the gorilla, just recently completed, sits lifelike before us. so true to nature, that one takes an involuntary step backwards because strong railings no longer separate us from this unearthly creature of the primeval forest, which was gazed upon for years in our zoo. for the first time in the history of animal preservation they have succeeded in preparing a gorilla perfectly. even the dermoplasty sculptor, karl kaestner, chief taxidermist at the natural history museum, and gerhard schröder, are satisfied with their work. bobby sits upright supported by his right hand, and his gaze appears, as in his lifetime, to glide past the masses of people around his cage.34 the “lifelike” sculpture, installed in a museum of natural history, is suggestive of the elevation of taxidermy to art and of a shift from representing bobby solely as a specimen to serving as a portrait of an individual and as emblematic of the art of taxidermy. a visit to the mfn’s world-renowned taxidermy workshop, down corridors lined with medals from preservation championships, provides valuable insight into the historic and contemporary production of animal death masks, as well as revealing their particular role for gorilla taxidermy. robert stein, one of the institution’s senior taxidermists, explained that animal death masks are usually taken as reference for the eventual taxidermy mount, with casts not uncommonly discarded after use. the berlin workshop prefers the method of mixing clay and water and lightly coating the fur before plaster is applied, isolating the fibres from the casting solution and washing off easily to minimize fur loss on a soon-to-be taxidermied skin. 34 quoted in welzbacher, bobby, 203. 14 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) occasionally the face is subtly sculpted before a death mask is taken, with salt water solution used to plump up tissues and hold the eyes open, an intervention to make the animal look more ‘natural’.35 in the case of some species, such as gazelles, there is considered to be no need to cast a death mask from the individual body; instead, the taxidermist simply takes measurements and uses a reference mask already annexed within the museum’s vast stores. in contrast, the face and personality of a gorilla is considered highly individual; so much so that even when the deceased gorilla is not widely known to the public, the taxidermists of the berlin workshop prefer to take a cast of both head and hands to enable a precise fit to the individual body.36 although it is unusual for animal casts to be displayed as museum objects in their own right (with an exception made for displays about the taxidermic process, such as the mfn’s masterpieces of taxidermy gallery), plaster masks hang on the wall of the workshop, including a refined cast of bobby’s face. compared to other gorilla death masks which inevitably capture the unedited face of the animal as it was in death (such as that of alfred discussed below), the plaster of bobby is an incredibly detailed and recognisable portrait of the living animal. the connections with portraiture are reinforced by its display on the workshop wall, where it no longer functions as 35 this is the case with bodily casts too, such as that of knut, berlin zoo’s famous polar bear. stein explains that a cast of a body also cannot be exact for the purposes of dermoplasty. in the case of knut, he was lifted by two winches and placed into the desired position, but in death, the muscles are lax; the taxidermist cannot simply position the skin on top of the initial cast, as the fat layer has to be removed for preservation purposes, and the original skin would be too big for the cast. instead, the muscles and fat have to be sculpted with clay, using the cast model as the base for this structure. in contrast, the body casts of amphibians and reptiles are deemed ‘better than the mount’ because the cast preserves the animal precisely as it was after death, whereas preserved organic matter is subject to degradation over time. these insights reveal value judgments about proximity to the original creature and to “nature”, at the same time as revealing the vast amount of artistic and interpretative work that goes into making this happen. 36 such a practice is one indicator of the anthropocentrism present in natural history collections, preservation and display praxis. the human connection to the face allows us to identify the gorilla as more “individual”. simian faces have similarities to our own, emote in an apparently legible fashion, and hold differences more readily recognizable as unique characteristics. in contrast, the gazelle face is more easily considered “other” and each individual less readily considered unique from an anthropocentric perspective. burke, facing extinction | 15 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) reference material but as an example of the workshop’s level of artistry. stein reveals an unusual reason for the uncannily lifelike face: this is not the post-mortem plaster referenced by hermans but is instead a cast taken from the animal’s face at the end of the dermoplasty process. the gorilla’s body had been soaking in a tank of paraffin preparation, which mfn taxidermist ralf bonke credits with the exceptional preservation of bobby’s skin. the sculpted face was subsequently cast and gifted to multiple institutions as an example not just of gorilla anatomy but of successful preservation. a side-by-side comparison of the two masks raises startling differences. the original cast was thought not to look “right”: the mouth was particularly pointed out as “wrong”, a value judgment which balanced the incorrect representation of the gorilla’s anatomy with the plaster’s poor aesthetic. the naturalistic expression, with closed eyes, sloped mouth and hair visibly trapped within the plaster may accurately represent the animal as he was in death and provide a sense of authentic physical proximity, but such an image could not function as a public portrait since it would disrupt the constructed character of the celebrity zoo animal. it is then the mask of the stately dermoplastic gorilla which ultimately functions as compelling evidence of how the artistry of taxidermy can make the dead look convincingly “lifelike”. the photographic series previously displayed on the mfn’s webpage for the masters of taxidermy gallery reveals the fault lines between the artistic goal of realism and the extreme level of intervention this requires, underscoring how the post-mortem artefacts of bobby relate to the tradition of art as much as to the tradition of the specimen.37 the “eye contact” of the first image reinforces how natural the mount looks, evoking a sense that this is a living animal gazing gravely into the viewer’s eyes, while the faces of the taxidermists are tellingly averted. only after tearing our own eyes away from those of the gorilla does the wider picture come into focus, providing an 37 “der gorilla bobby”, museum für naturkunde, berlin, last updated 14 january 2014. accessed via the internet archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20140201234424/ http://www.naturkundemuseum-berlin.de/ausstellungen/praeparationstechniken/ gorilla-bobby/ https://web.archive.org/web/20140201234424/http https://web.archive.org/web/20140201234424/http http://www.naturkundemuseum-berlin.de/ausstellungen/praeparationstechniken/gorilla-bobby/ http://www.naturkundemuseum-berlin.de/ausstellungen/praeparationstechniken/gorilla-bobby/ 16 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) burke, facing extinction | 17 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 1: a comparison of the original death mask of bobby the gorilla, with the mask taken of his taxidermy, in the stores of museum für naturkunde. photograph by the author. included by kind permission of museum für naturkunde staff. 18 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) burke, facing extinction | 19 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 2: photograph of the präparatoren karl kaestner and gerhard schröder working on the dermoplasty of bobby in 1936. reproduced with thanks from museum für naturkunde berlin, historische bildu. schriftgutsammlungen (mfn, hbsb) zm b iii 1404. figure 3 (bottom left): photograph of kaestner carefully moulding bobby’s face to the sculpted mount. mfn, hbsb, zm b iii 1317. figure 4 (bottom right): photograph of a new death mask being cast from the mounted dermoplasty of bobby the gorilla in 1936. mfn, hbsb, zm b iii 1319. 20 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) uncanny realization that this face is being fixed back onto a sculpted body, fracturing the impression that the living animal is sitting for his portrait. the image in which the cast is taken from the taxidermy highlights how, despite being based on the biological body, the second death mask idealizes both the animal and the taxidermic art which can create a ‘lifelike’ face. the photos contradict the understanding that a nonhuman facial cast should serve as reference material for making taxidermy, representing instead how the plaster is taken from the taxidermy. this simultaneously imagines the animal as an idealized version — a hyper-nature which is more in accordance with expectations of what nature should ‘really’ look like — and as the apex of the taxidermic art through which this was achieved. returning to the masterpieces of taxidermy gallery at the mfn, visitors are introduced to the uncanny dissonance between the hyper-reality of the taxidermy mount, and the revelation of the human intervention behind it. unusually for a natural history museum, the focus of the exhibition is on the art behind animal preparation rather than on an exploration of the natural world. visitors gather around bobby’s mount, displayed as the product of such artistic mediation, while the surrounding exhibition underscores how this effect was created. an image from the photographic series is displayed on an exhibition board, showing the preparation of bobby at a crucial moment of reconstruction. it is only when looking closer, however, that it becomes possible to discern that this is the moment that bobby’s face is being reattached (see figure 2). close attention to bobby’s preparation reveals that the post-mortem animal has a function beyond that of a specimen, literalizing the connection between dermoplasty and sculpture. the transformation of bobby’s mask from reference material into art object can be fully realized not by visiting the mount’s final resting place, but rather by visiting the place where the gorilla spent most of his life. artistic representations of bobby abound at the berlin zoo, from an illustration of a stern-looking chiaroscuro gorilla with bobby’s recognisable silhouette on the entrance sign, to more generalized gorilla imagery throughout the park. the best-known article of burke, facing extinction | 21 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) bobby ephemera at the berlin zoo is german sculptor fritz behn’s stylized statue — sitting in the hunched position originally intended for the dermoplasty, and for which the mfn workshop still stores the plaster model used to plan the work in miniature. the statue guards the primate house and continues to emphasize the transition from biological gorilla to art object. within the monkey house itself, bronze sculptures of several species of primate hang spotlit on otherwise plain walls. a closer look provides an unexpected moment of recognition: the face of the gorilla is not just bobby, but specifically the death mask cast from bobby’s dermoplasty, while the other bronzes are cast from the corresponding death masks hanging in mfn’s taxidermy workshop. in this context, the death mask’s role as artwork becomes apparent, serving not as reference for a taxidermic portrait, but transformed into the “bronze” idealized by kellogg. the imagery of the “mona lisa smile” identified by hermans finds even stronger resonance here, for without contextualization, the death mask, which represents the apex of the art of taxidermy, passes as an art object, exhibited only feet away from actual sculptures. just as bobby’s unveiling allows the mfn to become “half sculptor’s studio, half silent zoo”, a critical analysis of the functions of the death mask reveals the object as a hybrid: an icon of the art of heritage preservation as well as a carefully crafted portrait of the individual face as it was brought ‘back to life’ by the taxidermy mount. the afterlives of alfred samuel alberti’s edited collection, the afterlives of animals (2011) lays out one of the founding principles of scholarship which examines museum animals. he explains that by examining an animal’s movement and meaning in life and death, and their presence in our institutional collections, we are “able to trace the shifting meanings (scientific, cultural, emotional) of singular animals and their remains.” these stories take us “from fields and rivers through zoos and menageries to museums”.38 as he points out, however, what we 38 alberti, “introduction”, 1. dodd, rader and thorsen also take up this thread, stating in the introduction to their collection animals on display that “ways of representing animals are crucial to ways of thinking about, and ultimately interacting with, animals themselves.” 22 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) often discover is not the meaning of the animal, but the human-animal entanglement that the animal representations in such institutions iterate. for, even though these creatures are “nonhuman”, they are “instilled with many of our characteristics” and continue to be anthropomorphized post-mortem.39 in his landmark study of the bristol zoo (the erstwhile home of alfred the gorilla), andrew flack has pointed out that the duality of the object-subject perception of captive creatures is a fundamental principle of many human relationships with animals, and one which caused anxiety when humans recognized their own animal nature in the animals they observed — none more so than in the resemblance between humans and other primates.40 flack goes so far as to single out visitor relationships with alfred specifically as epitomizing “this intensifying sense of intimacy across the human-animal borderlands,” paralleling an “increasing concern for captive lives and a mounting anxiety about animal freedom and happiness.”41 it is the post-mortem element of this thread which i wish to take up, as alfred’s death mask is a valuable case study through which to investigate the intersections between human and nonhuman, specimen and celebrity, and the use of these aspects after his death in institutional narratives about this famous gorilla. encounters with the object afterlives of alfred — specifically, the taxidermy mount in bristol museum and art gallery, the bronze bust of alfred’s head which is displayed in bristol zoo’s gorilla island, and finally the death mask exhibited in the m shed, a history museum focused on bristol life — reveal how the tensions about which element of alfred to focus on remain. one of the enduring elements of alfred’s life and material afterlife has been his individual celebrity rather than his use as a zoological specimen.42 alfred’s death mask adds vital framing to this interpretation for, according to art historian jane schuyler, in their human context, death masks were taken because of “the craving for 39 alberti, “introduction”, 9. for more on the historic links between post-mortem commodification and animal celebrity, see the chapter on “jumbo” in nance, animal modernity. 40 flack, the wild within, 181. 41 flack, 182–183. 42 flack; paddon, “biological objects”, 132–50. burke, facing extinction | 23 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) fame.”43 while the taxidermy mount and bronze bust are partially contextualized with interpretation detailing the conservation of gorilla species, alfred’s death mask is displayed similarly to the death masks of human dignitaries, and risks obscuring the sense of alfred as an endangered animal. alfred’s anthropomorphized personality, bolstered through his proximity to humans, is the lens through which his life story is focused. the birth of the ‘alfred’ identity is given as the date of his arrival at the zoo in 1930, rather than when he was actually born in the belgian congo, signifying how the gorilla’s wild identity has been replaced by his zoo “character”. archival material indicates a continued entanglement of anthropomorphism and zoological milestones, with zoo literature and visitor testimony balancing delight at his stylish outfits — ranging from winter jumpers, hessian sacks and a handkerchief perched jauntily on his head — with his record as the oldest gorilla to survive in captivity.44 alfred’s post-mortem life continued to centre his personality as much as zoological fact: although his bones and organs were sent to the anatomy department at bristol university, these were never displayed. perhaps (as with samson, below) they were considered not representative of, or even detrimental to, the ‘character’ of alfred constructed by zoo media. as flack argues, “personalities for zoo creatures were not only recognized but also intensively cultivated”, including a transformation “into honorary people”, which extends into representations of alfred in the museum space.45 the taxidermy mount of alfred is in the world wildlife gallery of bristol museum and art gallery, a darkened room displaying a historic collection of nineteenth and twentieth-century taxidermy. the mount’s face is markedly similar to the death mask, including the slightly lopsided nostrils, which suggests taxidermy company rowland ward made good use of the plaster. the placid expression, furthermore, sits well with the ambling gait requested by the museum’s curator, as this was how zoo visitors were accustomed to 43 schuyler, “death masks”, 2. 44 barnett, “the dictator of bristol”, 39. 45 flack, the wild within, 120, 134. 24 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) burke, facing extinction | 25 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 5: an example of the cartoon signage pointing the way to alfred’s taxidermy mount in bristol museum and art gallery. photograph by the author. figure 6: the taxidermy mount of alfred the gorilla in the world wildlife gallery in bristol museum and art gallery. © bristol culture. 26 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) burke, facing extinction | 27 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) figure 7: the bronze bust of alfred the gorilla as displayed in bristol zoo’s gorilla island. photograph by the author. figure 8: the death mask of alfred displayed in the bristol people gallery of m shed, bristol. photograph by the author. 28 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) seeing him, disrupting the popular image of the animals as “terrifying apes”.46 alfred is one of the only animals to stand alone — most are in clusters according to region or in dioramas, such as the galapagos giant tortoise and a tiger hunted by king george v — and displayed without contextual habitat. the gallery interpretation indicates alfred’s presence long before a glimpse of the mount is sighted. numerous signs featuring cartoon renderings of the famous gorilla alert guests to his location, announcing “here i am” and situating the individual subject over the specimen object, providing an anthropomorphized and mediated sense of “who” that animal is. some vestiges from a recent intervention in the form of temporary exhibition extinction voices,47 which drew attention to endangered and extinct species within the gallery by obscuring specimens under funereal veils, remain and frame alfred within a narrative of conservation concerns. this exhibition narrative, in which individual stories are appended to otherwise anonymous specimens, reaches its apex in the interpretation surrounding alfred. alfred has the most extensive signage of any animal in the gallery, but it is of a personal nature: he is overtly identified as an “icon for the city in life and death”, acknowledging his position as an important historical figure and as “more” than a wild animal. despite the interpretation explicitly relating alfred’s “place in bristol’s cultural history”, the sign also argues that “alfred’s legacy” is not just as a taxidermy object but also “a better understanding of gorillas” which has “contributed to attempts at preserving them in the wild”. however, the interpretation explicitly ac46 letter from gerald a. best to f.s. wallis, 8 april 1948. gorilla “alfred” collection, “rowland ward file”, feb 1948. file 3023, accession number 29/1948. 47 the official page for the exhibition purports that to “highlight the seriousness of the wildlife extinction crisis, we have veiled alfred the gorilla and 31 other animals in our world wildlife gallery,” with the simian narratively both the star attraction and separate from the unnamed “other animals,” almost as a human celebrity supporting the cause. thirty-two animals in the permanent exhibition — among them some of the gallery’s most charismatic megafauna, including the rhino, tiger, giraffe and chimpanzee — were obscured from view under funereal veils. as with the displaying of death masks, the museum’s use of visual culture commonly associated with human mourning alerted visitors to the dangers of permanent loss. the exhibition received a positive response from critics and audiences alike; the only complaint was that alfred was hidden from view. see “extinction voices”, bristol museum & art gallery, https://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/ bristol-museum-and-art-gallery/whats-on/extinction-voices/ https://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/bristol-museum-and-art-gallery/whats-on/extinction-voices/ https://www.bristolmuseums.org.uk/bristol-museum-and-art-gallery/whats-on/extinction-voices/ burke, facing extinction | 29 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) knowledges that “alfred represents many things to many people” and “can be viewed as an example of a species of an endangered mammal, an example of the taxidermist’s art or as an iconic bristol legend,” a trifecta of endangered animal, specimen and celebrity which appears to inform display praxis surrounding the gorilla’s representation.48 the interconnected narrative between the endangered status of gorillas, the individuality of alfred and an anthropomorphic focus on the face continues in another site strongly associated with the city’s famous western lowland gorilla. alfred lived in captivity in bristol zoo for the majority of his life, and a bust of his head remains on display there to this day. the zoo’s living gorillas are connected with conservation concerns even before entering the zoo. an adult gorilla features, for instance, on signage and primate adoption schemes. the institution’s conservation programme is likewise illustrated with images of gorillas and they are advertised on the digital display screens used to entertain guests as they queue for tickets. the interpretation for gorilla island similarly creates a narrative that reinforces a conservationist message; while the interpretation contributes to the anthropomorphism of zoo captives by characterizing the animals as an ‘extended family’, correlating the gorillas’ dynamic with a nuclear human household, the signage also flags conservation issues and discusses nonhuman behaviours. the institution’s development of the link between human visitors and the island’s other-than-human residents contextualizes the bust of alfred, positioned unobtrusively by one of two main doors to the enclosure. the serious expression of the bronze face, gazing out from within a small enclave within the wall at adult eye height, is reminiscent of the memorial busts of well-known public figures. this impression is reinforced by the sober inscription on the base: “alfred: bristol zoo’s famous lowland gorilla. he arrived here on 5th september 1930 & died on 9th march 1948.” the final line continues 48 the issues raised by remembrance day for lost species co-founder persephone pearl about the extinction voices intervention have resulted in further decolonizing and environmental interrogation by the museum’s staff. the team are interrogating how the collection’s colonial legacies are at work in the world wildlife gallery’s permanent displays, and looking to new possibilities at exhibiting extinction futures. see gladstone and pearl, “exhibition voices”. 30 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) to configure the object as memorial art, acknowledging its creation “by roy smith r.w.a. 1949”, an artist from bristol’s royal west of england academy who completed it not long after alfred’s demise. although little information about the bust’s commissioning or its artist remains, the parallels between the bust and the death mask are strong. the object’s visual symmetry with the busts of human dignitaries silently anthropomorphizes alfred; however, the bust is contextually connected with the conservation narratives developed in gorilla island’s interpretation. the death mask itself is displayed in bristol’s m shed, an institution which opened in 2011 and focuses on the city’s history and identity. interestingly, information about alfred is not included in the exhibition which deals with the zoo’s past. unlike bristol zoo and bristol museum and art gallery, which feature alfred-specific or gorilla-inspired branding and associated conservation narratives, the visitor’s first encounter with alfred does not occur until the “bristol life” gallery on the second floor. here the visitor is told about the theft (and eventual return) of alfred’s body from the bristol museum in 1956.49 alfred’s death mask is located in the “bristol people” gallery in a prominent spot: the first object a visitor encounters if they turn to the right on entry, and part of a series of statues, busts and portraits which line the perimeter of the exhibition. the mask’s implicit connection to the traditions of portraiture, celebrity personhood and memorialization, and alfred’s inclusion in the ‘bristol people’ gallery, emphasizes alfred’s closeness to humanity, while only minimal information about his species is provided.50 49 morris, “revealed”. 50 this is emphasized again by the reaction of younger visitors witnessed during this individual encounter, none of whom paid attention to other portraits or busts within the gallery. the mask of alfred, by contrast, drew a significant amount of attention, in part perhaps because it is compellingly at eye height for children; yet, as with the artwork in bristol zoo, the children compared the mask (perhaps rather unflatteringly) to other humans they knew, a moment which signals a recognition of alfred’s ability to trouble the human/nonhuman border. such a reaction to the death mask emphasizes paddon’s assertion that “anthropomorphic constructions connect audiences with animals” and especially that “in the societal psyche, animal celebrities such as alfred can be placed near the center of a linear continuum between human and animal.” paddon, “biological objects”, 144. burke, facing extinction | 31 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) a close look at the mask reveals this to be the original copy (perhaps the sole one, as archival letters suggest the mould did not survive making the first “positive”).51 biological material is embedded in the plaster, with the hairs that were trapped in the mould due to inefficient lubrication pulled free in the plaster of the first casting. in retaining these links to the organic body, the mask, like the taxidermy, functions as a hybrid object — simultaneously artistic impression and indexical copy, individual representative and gorilla gorilla gorilla specimen. in doing so, his status as a member of an endangered species is obscured, extracted from his own environment in central africa and exhibited instead as a local celebrity in a western cultural institution. this obstruction is furthered by the object’s interpretation, which comes in the form of a tiny worn label, its cardboard starting to peel from the mount after years of repeated touch. although the interpretation notes that “famous taxidermy company rowland ward preserved alfred’s body which is still on display at bristol museum and art gallery,” the connection between the taxidermy and the cast’s use as reference material is left implicit. the label additionally signposts the city’s other iconic representation of alfred, “a bronze bust […] still displayed at the entrance to the gorilla house at bristol zoo,” rather than any discussion of alfred as an endangered animal. only the object name, which classifies this item as a death mask, and half a sentence — “this plaster bust was made from his death mask” — discuss the item on display. it is relatively unusual for even human plasters to be exhibited as sole representations of their subjects; they were rarely taken with the intent to display, and tacit acknowledgement is made of this in the accompanying signage, which points to the location of preferable “portraits.” although the letters from rowland ward state the urgent delivery of the death mask as soon as possible so that accurate work on the taxidermy mount could commence, the object’s own contextualization within the gallery suggests that the mask alone displays only one facet of the animal, signalling the necessity of visiting the other objects related to alfred. 51 letter from best to wallis, 8 april 1948. 32 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) the gallery narrative serves to position the mask further along the spectrum to celebrity portrait than that of the museum or, due to its inclusion in the wider conservation narrative of gorilla island, than the bronze bust. in the extreme transition to “human,” signalled through the display of alfred’s mask in the longer tradition of preserving human celebrity through funerary plasters, and its exhibition alongside other such objects, alfred’s identity as a gorilla, rather than as an anthropomorphized celebrity, is ultimately obscured. remaining samson death masks are imprints, material signs which, like a “dog’s footprints in the sand”, signal a body that is no longer there. as marcia pointon has argued, they “evoke absences and, in their fragmentary character, imply disembodiment”. but imprints are also literally negatives. from them a positive can be made. we thus have a binary structure that permits, as we have remarked, not only one duplication but also multiplication.52 while pointon is talking about the art of taking funerary plasters, her words could also be metaphorically applied to the attempt to increase species numbers in wildlife conservation. our naive belief that if we can hold on to even a single member of a species, perhaps it will remain possible to multiply, to not succumb to the final loss of extinction is a hope which resonates throughout the current case study. as with alfred and bobby, the death mask is not the object most commonly associated with the memory of samson, the silverback gorilla brought to milwaukee, wisconsin usa, in 1950. yet, as with the two former primates, placing the death mask in context with other post-mortem representations of the animal throws light upon how these representations operate. an analysis of samson’s material afterlife raises questions about the locus of an animal’s “essence”, highlights tensions between the conservation of animals in the wild versus museal forms of preservation and investigates which elements body-objects require to function as an emotive memorial. 52 pointon, “artifacts,” 178. burke, facing extinction | 33 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) samson’s life story bears an uncanny resemblance to that of bobby and alfred: hailing from west africa, samson attracted significant crowds while in captivity, and he became a local celebrity.53 it was decided that his official birthday would be the date that he arrived at the zoo, where his anthropomorphized persona was born, and his birthday was frequently celebrated in a way similar to that of a human child’s, with soda and a cake.54 samson was given a human name which recalled the biblical strongman and was referred to by his pronoun, and his admirers wished to see him memorialized after he passed away from myocardial fibrosis in 1981.55 as with the other case studies, samson had a death mask taken to carefully record his features. this was used both as reference material for a taxidermy which was installed in the milwaukee public museum in an exhibition titled “samson remembered” (overtly signalling the mount’s function as a memorial), and for a bronze statue of his head, which is positioned near the gorilla area in the milwaukee county zoo where he spent his days. but samson’s taxidermy differs from the average gorilla specimen in one crucial respect; it contains not one atom of the gorilla’s original biological body: samson the gorilla was another story. a 652-pound, overfed lowland gorilla from cameroon, samson was famous for slamming his fists against his plexiglas window at milwaukee county zoo, delighting terrified visitors. one day in 1981, in front of his fans, samson fell over and grabbed at his chest. zoo vets could not resuscitate him; an autopsy revealed he’d had five previous heart attacks. samson’s corpse was in the zoo’s freezer for years. when the milwaukee public museum finally took possession, officials found the gorilla’s skin too damaged to mount. the museum tried putting samson’s skeleton on display, but his bones were a weak evocation of the colourful 53 “milwaukee’s menagerie: samson the gorilla”, milwaukee public library, https://www. mpl.org/blog/now/milwaukee-s-menagerie-samson-the-gorilla 54 boyd, “gorillas samson and sambo”. 55 “samson #0021 gorilla”, find a grave, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/141628052/ samson-_0021-gorilla. https://www.mpl.org/blog/now/milwaukee-s-menagerie-samson-the-gorilla https://www.mpl.org/blog/now/milwaukee-s-menagerie-samson-the-gorilla https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/141628052/samson-_0021-gorilla https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/141628052/samson-_0021-gorilla 34 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) ape. samson wasn’t just dead, he was silenced. that troubled museum staff member wendy christensen […]. christensen proposed resurrecting samson through the taxidermy variant called a recreation — an artificial rendering of an animal that does not use the original animal or even its species. in 2006, 25 years after samson’s death, she began fashioning the ape’s synthetic doppelgänger from scratch.56 the language of the journal article above presents samson’s biography within a broader narrative of captive gorilla exhibition and locates samson somewhere between living animal and embodied “story”, with a blend of zoological detail (“652-pound, overfed lowland gorilla from cameroon,” an empiricism which carries echoes of the commodification of the nonhuman body) and storytelling whimsy (“one day in 1981”). the disintegration of samson’s physical form is paralleled with silence, requiring a more recognizable vector than the one which the articulation of his bones can provide. the language of multiple narratives about the recreation emphasizes the transformation of the material samson into something less tangible, namely his story. yet visitors still require a vector for this narrative, an object which can function as a material link to the original biological animal. the taxidermist’s use of the death mask functions as a supposedly indexical connection to the organic samson, through the need for a recognizable element of the animal: the face. the installation of an entirely artificial samson fits into longer traditions of museum representations of natural history; a desire to depict an animal not exactly as in life but as an idealized interpretation.57 it is an attempt to narrow the distance between human and nonhuman animals, “not necessarily to the animal itself but to the animal as imagined within a historico-cultural space”.58 while it is not unusual for a preserved animal to be composed of “only a fraction of the living specimen […] skin only or bones only,”59 nor for such taxidermy or anatomies to be composed of multiple materials, 56 christy, “still life”. 57 see daston and galison, objectivity, 98. 58 dodd, rader and thorsen, “introduction”, 3. 59 alberti, “introduction”, 6. burke, facing extinction | 35 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) functioning as a kind of mixed media sculpture,60 (re)creating samson with only synthetic materials and the impressions captured by plaster and film resonates with the apprehension of a final loss. the creation of a man-made body obscures both the anxieties raised by the cast of a deceased individual’s face and by the threat of extinction: “the connection between a body that is no longer there and a material thing that remains […] evok[ing] absences and, in their fragmentary character, imply[ing] disembodiment,”61 a push and pull between an intervention which prevents the final loss of samson and the revelation that samson is indeed gone. the museum presentation subtly assuages these fears, for when christensen took her masterpiece to the world taxidermy championships in 2009, a plaque was placed in his case to reassure visitors that this was not a permanent absence: if you notice samson conspicuously mia from his usual haunts on the first floor, it’s because he is getting primped and papered [sic] for a competition! museum taxidermist/artist wendy christensen-senk will be taking samson “on the road” to the world taxidermy championships in st. charles, mo in may. she will compete with him in a category especially for re-creations. the world taxidermy championships are held every 2 years and there are around 1200 taxidermists in attendance (last time 29 different countries were represented) and over 800 mounted animals exhibited. this is the finest collection of taxidermy art ever displayed anywhere. the wtc is may 6–10. samson will be away from the museum from the middle of march until the middle of may. please keep your fingers crossed and wish wendy good luck! the competition is fierce and she and samson will need it!62 the sign follows the trope of anthropomorphizing exhibits common to contemporary natural history museums, its language suggesting 60 for more on museum mounts as mixed media sculptures, in particular of fossil life, see rieppel, assembling the dinosaur. 61 pointon, “artifacts”, 178. 62 imig, “samson the gorilla”. 36 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) a still living individual who is being “primped and pa[m]pered” for a “road trip”. christensen is depicted attaching synthetic hairs to the recreation, the juxtaposition of the living human face of the taxidermist and the face derived from the death mask, itself taken from the body of the original samson, creating a sense of wonder over the artificiality of the gorilla’s body — even as the text proclaims its authentic identity as samson. indeed, it is from a narrative analysis of an account of the recreation’s construction as an object which successfully represents samson that the death mask’s vital role in mediating historic tensions between wildlife conservation and museal forms of preservation can be discerned. investigative journalist bryan christy’s national geographic article “still life” — covering samson’s time at the world taxidermy championships (wtc) — indicates this interplay, its tagline stating that “in the taxidermist’s hands, even extinct animals can look alive. but preservation is one thing, and conservation’s another.” the article opens with an incident which emphasizes the shift in emotional reactions prompted by the artificiality of the body-object: the incensed visitor is pointing at a mounted lowland gorilla as taxidermist christensen teases a few hairs around the huge primate’s fingers. “i was in rwanda,” the woman shouts, “and i know gorillas are protected!” […] facing her accuser, she calmly explains that for three decades, samson the gorilla was the star attraction at the milwaukee county zoo. the visitor apologizes, then gapes at what christensen says next: this animal, a vessel for samson’s story, contains no speck of real gorilla.63 the visitor’s outburst is one against which many natural history galleries attempt to undertake rear-guard action (the interpretation in the world wildlife gallery in which alfred sits, for example, is at great pains to explain how collections praxis has changed and to highlight the historic nature of their collection, stating that the institution no longer accepts animals purposefully killed for taxidermy mounts). christensen’s taxidermy occupies a liminal position, not physically composed of samson, and yet with claims to being “more samson” 63 christy, “still life”. burke, facing extinction | 37 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) than the skeletal mount. christy’s description of the object as an animal, a “vessel for samson’s story” yet not a “real” gorilla figures a transubstantiation which preoccupies this article’s discussions around endangerment, preservation and conservation. christy situates this shift from preservation to conservation, from “real” primate to “story”, in the historical context of natural history specimen collection and construction, embedding the account of a hunting trip by the american museum of natural history taxidermist carl akeley with which this article began. although this excursion resulted in one of akeley’s most important works, “a mountain gorilla diorama whose figures were killed by his team in the belgian congo in 1921,” the trip “changed akeley’s life,” for looking down on the silverback he had killed, akeley declared that it required “all one’s scientific ardour to keep from feeling like a murderer.”64 this experience led to the taxidermist constructing not just a taxidermy mount, but albert national park sanctuary for mountain gorillas, for which he is recognized as “a forefather of gorilla conservation”.65 akeley’s interventions are not limited to the development of a conservationist perspective. he is credited with inventing “a narrative framework for us to consider dead animals, one that continued to this day” originating in his creation of the first animal diorama at milwaukee public museum in 1889, which now displays the recreation of samson.66 although interviewed participants at the wtc explain that “the key to taxidermy is telling the whole story,” christy argues that “samson the gorilla was another story,” perhaps because the recreation’s power as a relic had to be substantiated without the animal’s skin.67 all taxidermy occupies the uncanny territory of an inert object which appears almost alive, suggesting a not-quite-deadness through its physical proximity to the living animal. in the case of samson, this physical connection is instead proffered through christensen’s use 64 christy, “still life”. 65 christy, “still life”. 66 “the man who made habitat dioramas”, amnh, 19 may 2016, https://www.amnh.org/ explore/news-blogs/news-posts/carl-akeley-dioramas 67 christy, “still life”. https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/news-posts/carl-akeley-dioramas https://www.amnh.org/explore/news-blogs/news-posts/carl-akeley-dioramas 38 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) of his death mask, troubling the authenticity of the biological animal through the supposed empirical powers of the copy: christensen molded a silicone face using samson’s plaster death mask and thousands of photographs. she ordered a replica gorilla skeleton from a vendor called bone clones and a mix of yak and artificial hair from national fiber technology, the company that supplied fur for chewbacca, of the star wars movies. for samson’s hands she took molds of gorilla hands from the philadelphia zoo and reproduced them in silicone, right down to the fingerprints. next, she rimmed his synthetic eyes with false eyelashes bought at walmart.68 an immense attention is given to samson’s face in an attempt to make it as accurate as possible, yet the skeleton is simply a ‘replica,’ with no indication as to whether this was modelled on the existing articulation of samson’s bones. although the primate’s fingerprints — another unique, individual and identifying aspect — have been replicated in incredible detail, they are not derived from samson’s own fingers. as with bobby, the use of samson’s death mask reveals a fractured relationship to authenticity both through “the connection between the face of the dead person and the mold the mask represents to which an individual’s name is attached” and the implications, in the case of an object designed to create copies, of where originality might lie.69 nonetheless, the plaster’s “authentic” preservation of the face and its central role in the creation of a reconstruction which holds more authenticity than the original bone mount demonstrates how akeley’s anxiety about the tension between wildlife conservation and museum preservation remain relevant in the twenty-first century. the use of the facial plaster to authenticate the recreation also indicates our anthropomorphic attachment to a humanly recognisable element of samson. the recreation of samson follows the trajectory of the death mask, an imprint which “connotes the absence” in which the original has 68 christy, “still life”. 69 pointon, “artifacts”, 177. burke, facing extinction | 39 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) not been cast from but “cast away”.70 “it is the corpse that has been excluded, leaving the death mask as its trace.”71 samson’s artificial body, deemed more authentic than his skeletal mount through the death mask’s connection to the living animal’s recognisable face, signifies an individual whose story is supposed to synecdochically stand in for that of his entire species. it is important, then, that, as christy’s tale concludes, christensen not only triumphed over “world masters who’d brought their finest — and real — wildlife effigies,” but that “she did it without harming a single gorilla hair.”72 beyond the mask as the three case studies examined in this article suggest, unlike other representations of animals, funerary plasters rarely stand by themselves as exhibit objects. as the case study of bobby articulates, perhaps this is because, unlike taxidermy, which uses skilled artistic intervention to recall an animal to some semblance of life, casts more often inescapably capture an animal’s deadness; the popular image of bobby has been crafted through artistry, and this is what the better-known death mask consequently conveys. this plaster functions as a representation of the level of artistry required to create a lifelike taxidermy mount, and, like the dermoplasty from which it is cast, functions as a portrait of the living animal. the original cast’s evident representation of mortality — of the post-mortem — must be contextualized by representations which conjure the life-essence of the individual in a way that a genuine death mask does not. none of the three case studies make use of the deathliness of the gorilla casts in their exhibition narratives, instead focusing on lifelike representations, despite the possibilities of such emotive objects to emotively depict loss or make visible the continued commodification of nonhuman animals. maybe this is because, as in the case of alfred, the death mask has its own history connected with the preservation of human faces, a cultural heritage which draws on the traditions of portraiture, celebrity, 70 pointon, “artifacts”, 178; my italics. 71 pointon, 178. 72 christy, “still life”. 40 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) and memorialization. although these traditions can speak meaningfully to how we conceptualize charismatic megafauna and species ambassadors (especially when these are species visually similar to our own), the display of alfred’s death mask reveals that such an object can be too troubling to function in an ambassadorial role. alfred’s plaster simultaneously reveals that the formal similarities between human and nonhuman death masks play into the intense focus on the cultivated personality of the zoo celebrity and can drown out the plight of gorillas as endangered animals, moving too far over the troubled boundaries between human and nonhuman to complete a transition to celebrity artefact. finally, the authenticity bestowed upon the recreation taxidermy of samson is conjured through the indexicality of the death mask on which the mount’s face is based. the story of samson reveals that we struggle to recognize the constructed character of an animal known in life through, for example, a skeletal anatomy, requiring a face in order to read (or project) their anthropomorphized personality. in this instance, although the tradition of portraiture remains, the use of the death mask serves to retain a sense of capturing the original, authentic animal. taxidermic preservation remains the apparent gold standard for natural history museum displays, and yet as christy’s piece notes, akeley’s anxieties about gorilla death, preservation and conservation still resonate with a modern-day audience: christensen’s use of a death mask helps to authenticate the recreation by providing a connection to the biological body. examining animal death masks provides valuable insight into the techniques at play in natural history narratives, which use material remains to mediate stories about the other-than-human. while taxidermy, art installations and even skeletal mounts have received critical attention, death masks have remained less visible, both critically and within cultural and scientific institutions. as this analysis indicates, however, these objects can reveal vital and complex narratives about animal celebrity, the artistry of preservation, and the tensions between preservation and conservation. death masks do not function like other imprints or animal remains; their representation of burke, facing extinction | 41 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) death is more overt than that of taxidermy, and in their rendering of the face, death masks are more recognisable as “characterful” to the human eye than a skeletal mount, while their display is often bound up with the cultural histories of human funerary plasters. animal death masks could be used more frequently and more overtly to foreground historical commodification, tell conservation stories, forge an emotive connection to the individual, and confront viewers with the death of species: such objects can help us recognize the mortality of nonhuman animals, and to look them in the face. acknowledgements research for this article was funded by the research council of norway under project #283523 “beyond dodos and dinosaurs: displaying extinction and recovery in museums” at the university of stavanger, norway. sincere thanks are due to the hard work of julia burke for her translation of sources and discussions about works originally published in german. her comprehension and understanding of vital materials enhanced my research. the author would like to extend heartfelt thanks to the mfn staff who generously spent the entire day sharing their knowledge about the artefacts, processes and animals created in the taxidermy workshop. this article would not have been the same without the insights of robert stein, jürgen fiebig, jan panniger, ralf bonke, moritz maier and giulia bianconi. these same thanks are also due to curatorial staff at bristol museum and art gallery. isla gladstone’s insights and awareness of all things alfred improved this article immeasurably. 42 | burke, facing extinction humanimalia 13.1 (2022) works cited akeley, carl. in brightest africa. garden city, ny: doubleday, page, 1923. alberti, samuel j.m.m. “introduction: the dead ark.” in the afterlives of animals, edited by samuel alberti, 1–16. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2011. barnett, ray. “the dictator of bristol.” nonesuch: the university of bristol magazine (spring 1999): 38–40. barry, anna maria and verity burke. “behind the mask: death masks, celebrity and the laurence hutton collection.” victoriographies 12, no.1 (2022): 10–30. https://doi.org/10.3366/ vic.2022.0445. benkard, ernst. undying faces: a collection of death masks. translated by margaret m. green. london: hogarth press, 1929. berger, john. why look at animals? london: penguin, 2009. boyd, robert j. “gorillas samson and sambo adoptive birthday party.” 5 october 1955. wisconsin historical society. https://www.wisconsinhistory. org/records/image/im49009. christy, bryan. “still life,” national geographic, august 2015. https://www. nationalgeographic.com/magazine/ article/taxidermy-animal-preservationmuseums. cincinnati, noah. “too sullen for survival: historicizing gorilla extinction, 1900– 1930.” in the historical animal, edited by susan nance, 166–83. syracuse, ny: syracuse university press, 2015. clymer, lorna. “cromwell’s head and milton’s hair: corpse theory in spectacular bodies of the interregnum.” the eighteenth century 40, no. 2 (1999): 91–112. daston, lorraine and peter galison. objectivity. new york: zone books, 2007. daston, lorraine and gregg mitman, eds. thinking with animals: new perspectives on anthropomorphism. new york: columbia university press, 2005. dodd, adam, karen a. rader, and liv emma thorsen. “introduction: making animals visible.” in animals on display: the creaturely in museums, zoos, and natural history, edited by liv emma thorsen, karen a. rader, and adam dodd, 1–11. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2013. flack, andrew. the wild within: histories of a landmark british zoo. charlottesville: university of virginia press, 2018. gladstone, isla and persephone pearl. “exhibition voices, extinction silences: reflecting on a decolonial role for natural history exhibits in promoting thinking about global ecological crisis, using a case study from bristol museums”, museum & society 20, no. 1 (2022): 50–70. https://doi.org/10.29311/ mas.v20i1.3806. haak, christina, miguel helfrich, and veronika tocha, eds. near life: the gipsformerei — 200 years of casting plaster. munich: prestel, 2019. ex. cat. haraway, donna j. primate visions: gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. new york: routledge, 1989. heise, ursula k. imagining extinction: the cultural meanings of endangered species. chicago: university of chicago press, 2016. hermans, ton. “the mona lisa smile of bobby the gorilla.” european journal of general practice 1, no. 2 (june 1995): 81. https://doi. org/10.3109/13814789509160769. hornaday, william t. “the zoological park of our day.” zoological society bulletin no. 35 (september 1909): 543–48. hylland, ole marius. “faces of death: death masks in the museum.” in museums as cultures of copies, edited by brita brenna, hans dam christensen, and olav hamran, 172–86. new york: routledge, 2018. https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2022.0445 https://doi.org/10.3366/vic.2022.0445 https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/records/image/im49009 https://www.wisconsinhistory.org/records/image/im49009 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/taxidermy-animal-preservation-museums https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/taxidermy-animal-preservation-museums https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/taxidermy-animal-preservation-museums https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/article/taxidermy-animal-preservation-museums https://doi.org/10.29311/mas.v20i1.3806 https://doi.org/10.29311/mas.v20i1.3806 https://doi.org/10.3109/13814789509160769 https://doi.org/10.3109/13814789509160769 burke, facing extinction | 43 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) imig, nate. “how samson the gorilla made milwaukee proud years after death.” radio milwaukee. 7 march 2017. https:// radiomilwaukee.org/story/communitystories/samson-mpm/. kellogg, vernon l. “latter-day taxidermy,” science 22, no. 554 (1893): 141–2. https:// doi.org/10.1126/science.ns-22.554.141.b. kohlstedt, sally gregory. “nature by design: masculinity and animal display in nineteenth-century america.” in figuring it out: science, gender, and visual culture, edited by ann b. shteir and bernard lightman, 110–40. hanover, nh: dartmouth college press, 2006. malamud, randy. an introduction to animals and visual culture. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2012. martin, philipp leopold. die praxis der naturgeschichte. vol. 1, taxidermie. 2nd ed. weimar: bernhard friedrich voigt, 1876. https://archive.org/details/ diepraxisdernatu11mart/ mitman, gregg. “pachyderm personalities: the media of science, politics, and conservation.” in daston and mitman, thinking with animals, 175–95. morris, pat. mr potter’s museum of curiosities. trinity: five star management, 1995. morris, steven. “revealed: 1950s rag week students who stole bristol museum’s stuffed gorilla.” the guardian, 4 march 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/ education/2010/mar/04/bristol-alfredgorilla-theft-mystery. nance, susan. animal modernity: jumbo the elephant and the human dilemma. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan 2015. nyhart, lynn k. “life after death: the gorilla family of the senckenberg museum (frankfurt/main).” endeavour 37, no. 4 (december 2013): 235–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. endeavour.2013.08.001. paddon, hannah. “biological objects and ‘mascotism’: the life and times of alfred the gorilla.” in alberti, the afterlives of animals, 132–50. poliquin, rachel. the breathless zoo: taxidermy and the cultures of longing. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2012. pointon, marcia. “casts, imprints, and the deathliness of things: artifacts at the edge.” the art bulletin 96, no. 2 (2014): 170–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/0004307 9.2014.899146. rieppel, lukas. assembling the dinosaur: fossil hunters, tycoons, and the making of a spectacle. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2019. rothfels, nigel. “preserving history: collecting and displaying in carl akeley’s in brightest africa.” in animals on display: the creaturely in museums, zoos, and natural history, edited by liv emma thorsen, karen a. rader, and adam dodd, 58–73. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2013. schuyler, jane. “death masks in quattrocento florence.” source: notes in the history of art 5, no. 4 (summer 1986): 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1086/ sou.5.4.23202222. scott, alexander. “the ‘missing link’ between science and show business: exhibiting gorillas and chimpanzees in victorian liverpool.” journal of victorian culture 25, no. 1 (2020): 1–20. https://doi. org/10.1093/jvcult/vcz015. shah, mira. “animal life stories; or, the making of the animal subjects in primatological narratives of fieldwork.” in animal biography: re-framing animal lives, edited by andré krebber and mieke roscher, 119–37. cham: palgrave macmillan, 2018. welzbacher, christian. bobby: requiem für einen gorilla. berlin: matthes & seitz, 2019. https://radiomilwaukee.org/story/community-stories/samson-mpm/ https://radiomilwaukee.org/story/community-stories/samson-mpm/ https://radiomilwaukee.org/story/community-stories/samson-mpm/ https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ns-22.554.141.b https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ns-22.554.141.b https://archive.org/details/diepraxisdernatu11mart/ https://archive.org/details/diepraxisdernatu11mart/ https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/mar/04/bristol-alfred-gorilla-theft-mystery https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/mar/04/bristol-alfred-gorilla-theft-mystery https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/mar/04/bristol-alfred-gorilla-theft-mystery https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2013.08.001 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.endeavour.2013.08.001 https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2014.899146 https://doi.org/10.1080/00043079.2014.899146 https://doi.org/10.1086/sou.5.4.23202222 https://doi.org/10.1086/sou.5.4.23202222 https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcz015 https://doi.org/10.1093/jvcult/vcz015 microsoft word csiro-species h u m a n i m a l i a 1:2 istvan csicsery‑ronay, jr. after species meet donna haraway, when species meet. posthumanities series. u of minnesota p, 2008. 360 pp. $24.95 the publication of donna haraway’s the companion species manifesto [csm] in 2003 was a powerful signal that critical science studies and science and technology studies were moving toward embracing ecofeminism and “the question of animality” in a big way. haraway’s intellectual authority guaranteed that the shift in emphasis from cyborgs to companion species would immediately affect the mainstream of critical thought, and help to redefine posthumanism in a manner more friendly to living beings than the technocentric trends that haraway’s earlier manifesto had, rather contrary to her intentions, helped to support. it was also a puzzling document — for some because of its apparent abandonment of the cyborg, for others because it seemed to offer rather little in the cause of animal liberation. haraway’s focus on working dogs as models for companion species, and companion species as models for a new paradigm of ontological and ethical relationships, seemed in some ways to sentimentalize the relationships among human‑ and non‑human animals by privileging one of the most unusually tight human‑animal bonds in cultural evolution; in other ways it seemed to downplay the most urgent political problems posed by the human domination of animals by escaping into metaphysical vision and playful anecdote. with when species meet (wsm), haraway has elaborated on csm, not so much through detailed engagements with her critics or defenses of her positions, but by enfolding them in an enormous sweeping embrace, defending the open‑endedness of her new model by demonstrating the complex interconnections of experience, science, and philosophical speculation that demand such a quasi‑metaphysical scale. wsm displays not so much an argument, as a distinctive design. for few north american thinkers is the unity of manner and matter as significant as it is for haraway. and in this sense, haraway’s project is as aesthetic as it is cognitive and political. from the outset, she makes clear that she argues through figures — since only figuration captures the double reality of things as simultaneously actually physically existing beings and also signs. her animal figures in particular appear as “creatures of imagined possibility and creatures of fierce and ordinary reality,” in whom “the dimensions tangle and require response” (3). 144 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) the privileged trope of haraway’s work until now has been the network, figured in a myriad knots, nodes, skeins, cat’s cradles, entanglements, and connections. the cyborg gave the net‑trope a certain avant‑garde authority. in the age of the world wide web, neural nets, cyberspace, the matrix, dna strands, and the expanding array of countercultural affinity groups connected by burgeoning electronic communications systems, haraway’s version of the cyborg caught the attention of every group surfing the wave of communications technology. her “ironic myth” immediately struck a chord — outraging the naturalists, flummoxing the patriarchal architects, but inspiring tech‑ savvy youth hoping to subvert the brave new tech world for liberatory purposes. haraway made clear in that founding manifesto that the network was a medium constructed of beings that could no longer be considered any one thing; she emphasized particularly that the long‑held foundational distinctions between machines and humans, and animals and humans, were obsolete ideological fictions of patriarchal domination. but there was actually rather little about the animal/human connection in that extraordinary document. to some extent, haraway’s cyborg/network trope gained its in‑your‑face energy precisely because it no longer privileged life. animal/human relationships came into the foreground in primate visions, but not in the radical form of the cyber‑tropes of the manifesto. in modest witness, the complexities of the oncomouse, the actually existing figure that knots laboratory technoscience and living beings, still seemed to be a special case among animal/human interfaces: an animal generated not only within, but by and for the web of technoscience. mixotrichia universalis. the promise of wsm, and the claim made for the companion species paradigm, is that now the human‑/non‑human animal interfaces will not only occupy the space previously occupied by the machine/human, but will embrace and subsume it. life and living beings will finally inhabit center stage. the cyborg, which had been embraced as the figure of the posthuman par excellence, has itself been dissolved, beginning with the concept of the posthuman. ironically for a book appearing in a series called posthumanities, haraway opens with the overarching claim (troping latour): “we have never been human.” so we cannot then be posthuman. in this disavowal of all the posthumanist uses to which her ideas have been put, haraway signals at the outset that wsm will also disavow every fashionable discursive niche that keeps the notion of human exceptionalism alive by negation — every post‑, anti‑, in‑, non‑ and ahumanism still fighting with big daddy god, in whose image the human is made, and against which the (choose your privative prefix) ~human postures. 145 csicsery-ronay – after species meet instead, the erstwhile human becomes in wsm a dynamic, tumbling network of living relationships: symbiotic microbes, parasite/hosts, composite organism, hybrids, prosthetic compounds, animal‑human partnerships, and a near‑utopian web of scholars and fellow‑teachers constantly supplying new energies to each other. in wsm, haraway’s global model (discreetly hidden at the end of the book) is the composite protozoan named mixotricha paradoxa. actually existing, yet endowed with a name that could serve a comic biopunk‑science fiction novel as an ur‑agent, the mixotricha embodies the material‑semiotic in exuberantly utopian form. made up of a nucleated cell and four sorts of bacterial microbes (whose different kinds number from about 200 to 250,000 cells), with its five entangled genomes, mixotricha paradoxa is an extreme example of how all plants and animals — including ourselves — have evolved to contain multitudes. (286) the proper object of attention and reflection then is the space, simultaneously real/material and imaginative (“material‑semiotic”), where diverse vectors meet: contact zones. the model of the contact zone allows fractal analogies from mary louise pratt’s model of human civilizational/cultural confluences, to crittercams (cameras attached to marine animals to record their pov), to that embodied contact zone the mixotricha — and, centrally, the human/dog partnership exemplified by haraway’s own relationship with her australian shepherd partner, ms. cayenne pepper. in a dynamic, discentered world like this no one discursive mode can occupy a central position. haraway’s typical technique — aesthetic and cognitive — is to move from one kind of message to another without privilege. e‑mail correspondence with fellow agility‑training enthusiasts, reflective memoirs of her disabled feisty sportswriter father, citations of fellow scholars’ research, meditations on whitehead, stengers, and gregory bateson, are all equal nodes in the net. nonetheless, most readers will be left with the impression, as they were with csm, that haraway’s own experience training with cayenne is the center, the raison d’etre of this book. and for good reason. although in principle any of haraway’s many material‑semiotic figures can be used to organize all the material in the book, the chapters describing haraway’s personal experiences of training and being trained for canine agility trials lend themselves to be read as the central analogy for the book as whole. 146 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) the tenor of haraway’s use of her agility‑work with cayenne is different from csm’s, even though it reprises many of the earlier book’s anecdotes. indeed, it is easier to read the agility sport as a poetic‑polemical argument, and consequently wsm as a genuine manifesto, because, i believe, haraway has found and engaged a worthy adversary, which she lacked in csm. that adversary is derrida. derrida’s cat, haraway’s dogs. in an unusual (for haraway) family reminiscence about her sportswriter father, who, disabled at a young age, nonetheless thrived by treating it as a joyful sport in competition with his infirmity, haraway makes clear that she is her father’s daughter. although she describes in detail the material training and trials of canine agility sports with cayenne, the figurative message is that co‑operation mixotricked with competition is good for thinking too. like a highly competitive athlete, haraway raises her game by treating derrida’s now well known lecture “and you say the animal responded” as a challenge. in derrida’s oft‑discussed piece, the philosopher traces the genealogy of the chasm between the human and the animal as hypostatic beings, a chasm that derrida argues is the source of the very notion of the human being. derrida finds the epitome of this boundary drawing in descartes’s view that animals are incapable of the supposedly distinctively human capacity to respond, being able only to react. this boundary, more than any of the other culture‑constituting exclusions of history (not merely western, it should be noted), derrida considers the origin of every value and ideology that relies on the concept of the human as an ethically and ontologically privileged subject. the boundary simultaneously disavows human beings’ manifest continuity with other animals, while concealing the enormous diversity of beings that are swept into the category of the animal. it is in the name of this trick that most human atrocities have been committed, to the lasting shame of philosophy. to make this shame concrete, derrida tells a shaggy‑dog anecdote of encountering his “little cat” one morning in the bathroom of his paris apartment. standing stark naked before the wee beast, derrida confesses to feeling that he (and specifically his “sex”) is being watched, and judged. the story is an aesthetic moment in derrida’s argument, an attempt to concretize the shame of philosophy in a lived experience turned parable. in an essay specifically studying derrida’s lecture, erica fudge has traced the genealogy of western philosophers’ use of cats and dogs as emblematic animals. the dog has traditionally accompanied the philosopher, in part to symbolize the hunt for the truth, and in part to embody the essential difference between animal and man. the cat, by contrast, has stood in for the wild, self‑willed, and feminine resistance to philosophical discipline. a 147 csicsery-ronay – after species meet cat may look at a king. fudge implies that whatever derrida’s relationship with his actual pet was, the cat’s role echoes the tradition of a natural animal challenging philosophical rationalization: the philosopher caught being unaware of his animal companion in the very act of recognizing its existence, its claim to a response. whether haraway is consciously drawing on this literary typology or not, her central chapters, “training in the contact zone,” are a rich addition to the heritage, now with a special self‑reflexiveness, since the emblematic animals are no longer primarily “semiotic,” but emphatically and necessarily tangible, historical, and companions in the world. in most propositional respects, haraway and derrida are in full agreement. for both, the point of acknowledging animals is to demolish anthropocentrism by first establishing that the ontological category distinction between human and animal is bogus, in the interest of an ethic of respectful and responsive relationship that would make the civilization‑constituting atrocities against both human and non‑human animals impossible. they both keep animal rights discourse at arms’ length, since neither can accede to the liberal individualism underlying most western legal discourse. the difference between them lies less in reflection, than in how they imagine agency. in his lecture, derrida accepts the generative premise of animal rights discourse that animals suffer, and thus make implicit claims on human beings guided by an ethics of care. this does not require that the abyss between language‑trapped human beings and inscrutably languaged non‑human animals be bridged. the shared mortality of living, sentient beings makes its own demands. for haraway, the emphasis on suffering leads, in reality as in etymology, to imagining the question of the animal in passive terms. derrida in the paris bathroom, writes haraway, did not become curious about what the cat might actually be doing, feeling, thinking, or perhaps making available to him in looking back at him that morning. (20) thus, even though derrida has challenged the very category of the animal, for haraway his encounter with his cat did not draw him out of his reflection, or spur him to ask the questions that haraway believes must be added to the one asked about animals’ suffering: 148 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) can animals play? or work? or even, can i learn to play with this cat? can i, the philosopher, respond to an invitation or recognize one when it is offered? what if work and play, and not just pity, open up when the possibility of response, without names, is taken seriously as an everyday practice available to philosophy and to science? what if a usable word for this is joy? (22) over against derrida’s discreet and urbane animal parable, haraway asserts one that condenses an active, rambunctious relation, based ultimately on play and joy, that is consciously shared and in evolving companionship, in a sporting partnership with actual dogs. i will confess that haraway’s detailed accounts of training with cayenne for agility competitions and the trials themselves, and the exchanges with human companions who share the love of the sport, do not do much for me. i love dogs (as i love cats, and raccoons, and skunks, and octopi), but the extended reports on agility competitions strike me somewhat like the christmas letters of the parents of a little leaguer to family and friends about their special child. and yet... the uninhibited enthusiasm of a world‑class philosopher takes on parabolic dimensions. for haraway’s dynamic dog‑anecdotes are in fact indirect critiques of derrida’s embarrassed emphasis on animal passivity — and his own. extended to the book as a whole, wsm’s reveling in activity indicates a rich counter‑ philosophy, if not outright resistance, to the “philosophy of the animal” presented by continental european theory. in company with thinkers like karen barad, isabelle stengers, and marc bekoff, haraway approaches human/non‑human interfaces in ways directly contrary to the post‑heidegerrian philosophical obsession with shame. where shame represents the ground of conscious human existence in much contemporary continental theory, from what agamben quoting primo levi calls “the silent shame of being human” (131 ) echoed in writers as various as levinas and deleuze, to derrida’s shame of philosophy, haraway’s approach stresses the opposite. throughout wsm, figures of joyful, participatory, and indeed physical interactions abound — with nonhuman animals, with their lovers, with constantly emerging new ideas and collaborations, and above all, with the outside. against heidegger’s notorious notion that animals are “poor in the world,” haraway seems intent on demonstrating they are as rich as humans are. where derrida confesses to a mortal sexual embarrassment at being seen by his cat, haraway treats the reader to randy puppy porn: willem lies down with a bright look in his eye. cayenne looks positively crazed as she straddles her genital area on top of his head, her nose 149 csicsery-ronay – after species meet pointed towards his tail, presses down and wags her backside vigorously. i mean hard and fast. he is trying for all he’s worth to get his tongue on her genitals, which inevitably dislodges her from the top of his head. looks a bit like the rodeo, with her riding a bronco and staying on as long as possible. they have slightly different goals in this game, but both are committed to the activity. sure looks like eros to me. definitely not agape (193). this move serves not only to illustrate the unfettered agency of dogs to create their own queered terms of joy; it shows the human witness liberated by the erotic discourse of nonhuman animals. “the open” is articulated by concrete, renewable, events shared by dogs and humans, recreated again and again through sport, play, and work, and ultimately co‑evolutionary companionship. to counter the numbing challenge of “bare life” to which millions of animals are condemned, haraway offers the biopolitics of “flourishing.” chris cuomo suggests that the core ecological feminist ethical starting point is a “commitment to the flourishing or well‑being, of individuals, species, and communities.” flourishing, not merely the relief of suffering, is the core value, one i would like to extend to emergent entities, human and animal, in technocultural dog worlds. (134) one can, however, question whether this powerful affirmation of the positive in haraway’s thought is sustainable for very long. christine cuomo’s feminist‑ecological notion of “flourishing” (not to be confused with the “positive psychology” of flourishing associated with martin seligman and mihály csíkszentmihályi) serves haraway as the ultimate ethical collection‑point for this responsible/responsive and joyful distribution of agency. but this version of flourishing, extending the ethic of care to the entire biosphere and perhaps beyond, is so profoundly abstract and under‑ theorized that it blocks from sight the difficulty of imagining how human beings can reconcile their own inexorably intrusive actions on the infinitely complex animal world with the utopian wish to assist — if not indeed to manage — its universal well being. haraway discusses at length the need for eco‑ and animal activists to accept the necessity of killing in mortal, animal life (human and non‑human), and the imperative of “killing well.” until “flourishing” is brought face to face with this moral necessity, it has little practical value. from this perspective, when species meet is something of a pastoral in the literature of contemporary animal/human interface theory. haraway 150 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) fully acknowledges the mass destruction of nonhuman animal lives at the heart of our world, but her response here is to figure out a world of corrective affinity networks and good will in the human/animal web. she mentions that she might have written biocapital vol. 1 or the birth of the kennel. wsm is neither of those books; it resembles mutual aid far more. three questions appear to me to be most pressing behind this screen: what about the octopus? haraway entertains many kinds of animals in wsm: sheep, whales, donkeys, mosquitoes, microscopic organisms, feral pigs, wolves, and baboons, but the canine‑human relationship dominates the imaginary of the book. it is captured in the clever cover image: the silhouette of a dog shaking hands/paws with a shadowy, 3‑dimensional human hand. i confess that i would have been more comfortable had the hand been grasping an octopus tentacle. while i am sure too much can be made of haraway’s choice of dogs to be what harriet ritvo calls her “touchstone species” (443), it is fair to ask whether haraway’s example of species companionship based on the dog can be fruitfully carried to other kinds of animals. dogs, more perhaps than any other nonhuman species, are cyborgs before the letter, being shaped by their mutual evolution with human beings in the civilizing process. they are, as haraway controversially argues, creatures that enjoy discipline, purposive action, problem solving, innovation, polymorphous perversity (with humans as well as other species), and collaboration. they can be demonstrably smarter than human beings in the very tasks that human beings set for them, especially the working breeds that haraway favors.1 also, since europeans and diasporic anglos don’t eat dogs, they are protected by the culture from the fatal commodification suffered by most other literal companion species. while dogs may eat with us, most other animals at our tables are eaten by us, often through the help of our canine kapos. in the naturecultural economy that determines who shall kill and who shall eat, dogs tend to be privy to power. one must, of course, start somewhere. the vast majority of texts addressing human/non‑human animal interfaces have emphasized the overlaps of higher mammalian consciousness in those beasts who might in some alternative zoötaxonomy be classed together as “mind beasts,” on the basis of their supposedly shared “intelligence” (defined, of course, in terms of problem‑solving that humans appreciate). it is more difficult to imagine granting personality and playful co‑operative impulses to mosquitoes and molluscs, and so it may be inevitable that even critical animal studies will separate animals into different categories of affinity, with different powers of attraction for scientific research projects, funding, and public affection — now perhaps 151 csicsery-ronay – after species meet with more sophisticated ontological justification. indeed, the notion of joy in play may mark just such a dividing line.2 human relationships with dogs, like other working animals and pets, require minimal accommodation from humans. this goes doubly for “sporting” relationships, like agility training or other suburban skill sports that serve no utilitarian goals. even wild mind beasts are curious about, and participate in, rapport with human interlocutors. but what are we to do with the beasts that have no desire to accommodate us? what are the models of civilizational transformation that will accommodate the nonhuman animal world that we have no chance to “uplift” into our own techno‑evolutionary projects? what about the cyborg? in wsm haraway intimates that each new relationship of becoming between human and nonhuman animals should essentially evolve freely, without predetermination. though wsm notes several kinds of machine‑animal assemblages — canine genetic databases, e‑mail support networks, crittercams, cloning regimes, laboratories — haraway’s emphasis has noticeably shifted away from the material command‑control‑communications networks, if not specifically to organic creatures, then to a more encompassing metaphysics of becoming. in a now famous phrase, haraway has said that she has moved on from the cyborg, which is a “junior sibling” of the more comprehensive concept of companion species (csm 11). in a critique of this shift, n. katherine hayles has argued that, while the cyborg as a network node may indeed be too narrow a focus compared to human/animal co‑ becomings, the underlying cybernetic matrix of posthumanist technoscientific society has expanded far beyond the grid that generated the notion of the cyborg in the first place. the web of interlinked “cognizing machines” expands at an accelerating pace, so that conscious human decisions about our own environment and political possibilities — our biopolitics — will soon be just the tip of the iceberg over a massive unconscious domain of proliferating mechanical operations occurring more rapidly and complexly than human agents can follow. this process is being aided from both ends of the cultural spectrum, by both techno‑capitalism and the posthumanist dismantling of the liberal subject, a decentering that bestows greater and greater decision‑making power onto interlocking bio‑mechanical systems. many of the most important decisions about our relationships with animals will be made by machines having far less in common with animals than human beings do. 152 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) as haraway has tirelessly emphasized, non‑human animals are historical beings. they are historical not only like human animals, but with them. from extinctions to sanctuaries, non‑human animal histories are now inextricably bound up with human activity. given human technoscientific capacities to demolish habitats (and indeed the entire biosphere), wilderness exists on human sufferance. can the responsibility grounded in responsiveness that haraway calls for be assumed without recognizing the power that the “regime of computation,” as hayles calls it, has acquired in all human relationships? the specific powers that human beings have already manifested in natural and social history — through their language, hands, or the folds of the anterior mpfc and acc regions of the human cortex — cannot be wished away by decrying anthropocentrism. as technocultural posthumanists tirelessly emphasize in their turn, these powers are being ramped up to a new level with the creation of a “cognisphere.” the conditions of existence of every living thing on earth are now subject to human political decisions that increasingly place power over life in nonliving systems. what about life? haraway’s cyborg was particularly memorable because it was the first major left‑critical theory to use a cybernetic model for mapping possibilities of praxis. the model was often resisted, in part because of cybernetics’ foundational refusal to treat organic life as an inherently superior system of organization. the cyborg and its cognospheric evolutes not only break down the animal/human/ machine distinctions, they do so (in theory) by not privileging one over the other. there is no requirement to privilege life over any other kind of organization of information. the cognisphere no longer recognizes a compelling distinction between organic life as given and other kinds of self‑organizing self‑enhancement — the many potential forms of artificial life and even artificial culture. implicit is the victory over “biocentrism.” it is reasonable to expect, given hundreds of generations of human beings’ sense of the sacredness of life, that there will be serious and principled reactions against this anti‑ vitalism. the centrality of the ethic of flourishing in wsm, and haraway’s affirmation of erotic and cognitive joy in partnering living beings, seem to come down on the side of organic life. i believe it remains to be defended explicitly within the supposedly cybernetic‑materialist framework in which she is working, or we may have to somehow accommodate the meaning of sacredness once again, and readmit the expelled shadow of spiritual awareness into our critical discourse about animals and life. do people owe allegiance to “life?” can one be committed to animal being without also identifying with non‑human animals, sharing their ultimate interests? is the view that organic life on earth is merely a contingent vehicle, rather than a source and mode of 153 csicsery-ronay – after species meet being that has inherent worth, and to which we owe much, compatible with love of the biosphere? in the collapse of the machine/animal wall, it is not hard to imagine that many in the animal party will resist, including, and perhaps mainly, nonhuman animals. technoscience cannot provide answers for these things. the metaphysical turn by many posthumanists shows that the subject is beginning to come to the surface even in materialist discourse. practices that put this allegiance to life – from individual animals and plants to the living planet – to work will probably have to resemble respect for sacredness, if not actually affirming it. joy and love, haraway’s two most powerful sources of knowledge, are not only emotions; they are for most religions spiritual forces. despite her frequently stated disdain for religion, haraway’s work increasingly engages spiritual thought and we should not be surprised if the repressed sacred makes a comeback after species meet. notes 1. cf. the remarkable, original problem solving by a sheepdog in cox and asford, 430. 2. a leading scholar of animal play, gordon m. burghardt, hypothesizes that play behavior develops only in animals that are nurtured under certain favorable physiological conditions, such as a “high‑energy lifestyle,” extended parental protection, surplus energy following satiation. this conception favors mammals and some birds, and excludes most reptiles. cf. burghardt, the genesis of animal play. testing the limits. cambridge, ma: mit, 2005. works cited cox, graham, and tony ashford. “riddle me this: the craft and concept of animal mind.” science, technology, & human values, 23:4 (autumn, 1998). 425‑438. cuomo, christine j., feminism and ecological communities: an ethic of flourishing. new york: routledge, 1998. 154 humanimalia: a journal of human/animal interface studies volume 1, number 2 (winter 2010) derrida, jacques. “and say the animal responded?” (trans. david wills). zoontologies: the question of the animal. ed. cary wolfe (ed.). minneapolis: u minnesota p, 2003. 121– 146. fudge, erica. “the dog, the home and human, and the ancestry of derrida’s cat.” oxford literary review. 29 (2008). 37‑54. hayles, n. katherine. “unfinished work: from cyborg to cognisphere.” theory, culture & society, 23:7‑8 (2006). 159‑166 ritvo, harriet. “making animals real.” biosocieties 3 (2008). 443‑446. arathoon, review of eason animal assistance in chronic illness jamie arathoon review of: fenella eason. human–canine collaboration in care: doing diabetes. multispecies encounters. london: routledge, 2020. xiv + 194 pp. £130.00 (hb), £36.99 (pb). jamie arathoon is an esrc research fellow at the university of edinburgh. email: jamie.arathoon@ed.ac.uk book review mailto:jamie.arathoon@ed.ac.uk dogs guide humans, hear for humans and assist humans with physical disabilities by pulling, pushing, or picking up items; they sniff out bombs and mines, money, drugs, and missing people; they participate in sports, leisure, and tv; they help humans during times of anxiety, depression, trauma, and ptsd, and keep them safe during seizure and epileptic events. the roles dogs play in human lives are becoming ever more wide-ranging, as fenella eason shows in her new book human–canine collaboration in care: doing diabetes. combining anthrozoology and disability literature with wider human–animal knowledge from sociology, anthropology, geography, philosophy, biology, and psychology, eason examines “care practices performed by human-canine partnerships to improve ‘personal’ health, welfare, domestic, and social life within the limitations of type 1 diabetes” (18). in doing so eason asks “how do chronically ill people engage with medical alert assistance dogs in their selfand other-care behaviours and in their lives?” (3). to answer this question eason adopts a multispecies ethnographic approach, telling stories by eloquently combining conceptual debates with first-hand observational entry points into the lives of the humans and diabetes alert dogs. eason draws on relevant posthuman and more-than-human scholars throughout her book to critically discuss key ethical issues involved in the human use of animals since the entwined strands of human–dog symbiotic coexistence are also subject to issues of morality. eason makes three key contributions to animal and disability studies. the first is to the concept of care. through an analysis of human and assistance dog practices eason expands what care means from its human-centred conceptualization to appreciate how animals play an active role in care practices. this contribution builds towards eason’s main aim: to explore how chronically ill people and medical alert assistance dogs engage in care behaviours in their lives. to reconceptualize care, eason draws on what i call a cautious anthropomorphism of assistance dogs, one that leans on a dogs’ ability to “be like us”. this cautious anthropomorphism relies on a spatial retelling of anthropomorphism, one that sees anthropomorphism copyright © 2023 jamie arathoon this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 217–222. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.12719 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.12719 arathoon, review of eason | 219 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) expanding the potentiality of human–animal relations outwards. the cautiousness here is about how often anthropomorphism is used and relies on the human partner’s anthropomorphic understanding of their assistance dog. using cautious anthropomorphism to extend the capacity to care for another, to be a canine characteristic, eason argues that: no matter the pleasurable reward gained for correct alerting, no dog will exert him or herself to serve “those in need” unless they care or at least have some concern about others[.] unless they feel the mutual attraction of a bond and are conscious of their companions’ altered states of being when blood sugar levels drop dangerously low — and that something needs to be done (135). this relies on the prior relationship between human and assistance dog and the humans’ view of their dogs as caring for and about them. to further extend the notions of care into the realm of doggy ness, eason draws on a variety of theoretical concepts, such as interspecies solidarity, and more-than-human readings of empathy and compassion. it is eason’s understanding and building of vinciane despret’s conceptualization of empathy that is important to extending the ability to care beyond human boundedness. eason argues that sympathy is “intended to offer kindness and perhaps elements of sorrow that someone else has received injury, bereavement, loss of employment, or similar. but this perspective seems to come from above, looking down; it carries faint condescension, separateness, and perhaps a concealed sense of relief that the other is suffering and not oneself” (141–42). whereas “empathy is an essential quality in the development or improvement of human–human relationships, enabling greater understanding of one another’s hopes, desires and despairs and the ability to reflect this comprehension appropriately and meaningfully by each attempting to ‘walk in the shoes of the other’” (142). for eason, empathy is more inclusive as an act of mutual recognition, a looking-with, rather than down at. eason’s negotiations of empathetic engagement and the human–animal relationship as one of mutualism lead to better management of the intricacies and complexities of chronic illness and form the basis for humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 220 | arathoon, review of eason ethical human–animal relations. conceptually, i think this reframing of care is valuable because it recognizes animals as minded individuals, able not just to care for, but also to care about others. furthermore, viewing care in this way, through cautious anthropomorphism instead of damaging anthropocentrism, opens the potentialities of sharing worlds with animals. here, i think broader questions of anthropomorphism versus anthropocentrism, ableism, and speciesism arise. how can understanding animals as caring for and about others challenge ableist and speciesist hierarchies? eason’s second key contribution, which draws on the above, is a discussion about the various “doings” of diabetes. highlighting how the “doing” of diabetes — that is the detection of changing blood sugar levels and injection of insulin — is a surveillant practice requiring constant bodily monitoring,1 eason skillfully guides us through type 1 diabetes as an illness and the effects of its diagnosis on the human. it is where the diabetes alert dogs come into concern, through the human loss of hypo-awareness, that animal studies scholars might find most useful. this is useful because eason spotlights a key human–animal relationship and the attendant embodied actions that shape this relationship through the “doing” of diabetes. as eason notes, human participants “are compelled to rely on guesswork and repetitive success or failure of the optional test. in this situation [loss of hypo-awareness], the scenting ability of a hypo-alert assistance dog is influential” (75). the diabetes alert dog provides an accurate sensing ability when the human body becomes normalized to — and unable to detect — the territorialization of hypoglycaemic episodes. the sentient sensing ability of a diabetes alert dog (dad) is valued as “the dad will continue to perform an alert regardless of the individual’s mood or language; will provide good practices of care despite argument and tension; and being animate, warm, and friendly, is likely to gain acceptance of the alert and the need to follow it with a blood test, reducing friction and the need to nag” (75). thus, the diabetes alert dog can make decisions for the care of the human and help facilitate — and reduce the stress in — other human–human relationships. 1 for more on this, see mark lucherini, “performing diabetes: surveillance and self-management”, surveillance & society 14, no. 2 (2016): 259–276. doi: 10.24908/ss.v14i2.5996. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v14i2.5996 arathoon, review of eason | 221 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) what permeates through this first contribution is the all-consuming nature of living with diabetes: as participant janet explains, “you just find your mind is always thinking about diabetes” (84). here i think eason provides a timely and much-needed critical discussion of human– animal practices, showing the “life-saving” role of diabetes alert dogs. furthermore, i believe eason follows kendra coulter and neil pemberton in recognizing the importance of agency of animals with jobs, moving beyond the idea that animals are merely aids for human wellbeing.2 in my own research i have shown that for assistance dogs who help people with physical disabilities and chronic illness, the agency of assistance dogs is vital in their training and in the care practices for their human partners.3 for eason (and myself) it is the dogs’ liveliness, their sentience and ability to make decisions that form a crucial part of their role. eason illustrates examples of canine sentience such as their “urgent nudging to encourage swift testing or the […] physical ‘blocking’ of the stairs to prevent fall and injury” (134). it is thus the diabetes alert dog’s “warm practices of care” (127) that help them become an empowering part of human self-care practices, something that a blood sugar monitor, or in the case of my work with assistance dogs for physical disability, a reacher-grabber, cannot provide. eason provides a valuable dialogue that can be expanded outwards to question how agency and sentience is understood in relation to all working animals. eason’s final key contribution, as i see it, is a challenge to the human– animal relationship through a critical examination of how power, status, and care are all concomitantly developed through human–canine relationships. the unequal status of dogs, as tool, companion, pet, and assistant provide a useful starting point for considering larger ethical discussions about “using” animals as commodities for bettering human lives. in the official terminology, diabetes alert dogs are 2 kendra coulter, animals, work, and the promise of interspecies solidarity (basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2016); and neil pemberton, “cocreating guide dog partnerships: dog training and interdependence in 1930s america”, medical humanities 45, no. 1 (2019): 92–101. doi: 10.1136/medhum-2018-011626. 3 jamie arathoon, “the geographies of care and training in the development of assistance dog partnerships”. phd thesis, university of glasgow (2022). https://theses.gla. ac.uk/82798/. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medhum-2018-011626 https://theses.gla.ac.uk/82798/ https://theses.gla.ac.uk/82798/ humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 222 | arathoon, review of eason described as the “equipment” of their human companions. eason shows how this instrumental logic is both confirmed and troubled by disabled humans, who value the “warm” nature of assistance dogs. eason notes, “being a device or property belonging to another for health benefit can, as in this case, ensure a high standard of care and affection” (47). in this sense, eason outlines that the ascribed identity given to assistance dogs as a “tool” or “aid” can lead to better welfare practices for the assistance dog. however, eason makes an interesting challenge to the conceptualization of assistance dogs put forward by her participants and wider literature, as she states, “the likelihood that a proportion of canine and human research participants currently consume products manufactured from other animals, who did not choose martyrdom based on a utilitarian maxim, may seem to undermine a non-speciesist ethic supporting the kindly, nonexploitative use of assistance animals” (107). the consideration here is: how can you live ethically with one animal but exploit others? this is a question that needs greater exploration and is a point for future research. human–canine collaboration in care did leave me wanting more empirical detail, but this is not a criticism. rather, it is because i found the empirical detail fascinating. furthermore, pictures of the technologies described alongside photographs of the embodied alerts of the dogs, could have added an affective visual dimension to the “doing” of diabetes that was central to the book. that being said, however, the book is essential reading for those interested in animal studies and disability studies. the book makes a vital contribution by bringing disability and animality into conversation, which too often goes amiss in conversations around animality and intersectionality. the book, as i read it, is a challenge to our ableist and speciesist society. it shows how empathetic engagement and care flows both ways in a crucial human– animal relationship. eason is successful in completing the aims of her book in presenting the “doing” of diabetes, the role of a diabetes alert dog, and in creating greater knowledge and understanding around such partnerships. in summary, human–canine collaboration in care, is a thoughtful, provocative book, which helps enlighten the world of human–diabetes–dog partnerships. a world where human and animal “doings” of care is a life-saving and life-giving practice. britton et al., wild horse roundups wild horse roundups and removals affect, gender, interspecies politics jennifer l. britton abigail del grosso cassidy ellis christian hunold drexel university, philadelphia, usa humanimalia 14.1 (fall 2023) abstract: the us bureau of land management (blm) has been aggressively reducing the size of wild horse herds in the american west. the agency’s wild horse roundup and removals, we argue, constitute instructive sites of political contestation about what — and whose — knowledge counts. we trace how the gendered affective interspecies relations that arise in these spaces shape claims-making about the presence of wild horses on public lands, and how these competing claims struggle for public recognition and political credibility. our contribution to the study of the political function of emotion is focused on the interplay between its avowal and disavowal. a reflexive thematic analysis of qualitative data collected from 28 roundups and removals reveals that the blm’s disavowal of emotion serves to place both wild horses and wild horse advocates in the same subaltern category of being destructive, disruptive, and out of place — in short, “feral”. wild horse advocates’ engagement with affect is both more complex and more ambivalent. at times, advocates exercise emotional restraint in an effort to defuse attempts by anti-horse interests to disparage wild horse advocacy as mere sentimentality. however, we argue, advocates’ ecofeminist practice of politically engaged “witnessing” of roundups and removals doubles down on more-than-human affective attachments precisely to resist the “double-feralization” of wild horses and the humans who care for them. improved understanding of the dynamics of gender and affect in the struggle about the future of wild horses on us public lands helps clarify pathways toward a more compassionate coexistence with wild horse herds. keywords: wild horses, interspecies politics, politics of emotion, affect, witnessing, entangled empathy, compassionate conservation, wild horse advocacy bios: jennifer l. britton is a wild horse photographer and advocate who documents wild and free-roaming horses across the united states (@jenbrittonphotography). she is the executive director for sustainable development strategy at drexel university, and holds an m.s. in science, technology, and society. email: jlb42@drexel.edu. abigail del grosso is pursuing a dual bs / ms degree in environmental science at drexel university. their master’s thesis examines the parasites of prairie grouse. cassidy ellis is pursuing a ba degree in environmental studies and sustainability at drexel university. christian hunold is a professor in the department of politics and in the center for science, technology and society, drexel university, philadelphia. his research on multispecies politics engages the spatial dimensions of human-wildlife governance in the united states. email: hunoldc@drexel.edu. copyright © 2023 jennifer l. britton, abigail del grosso, cassidy ellis, and christian hunold this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 207–248. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.14311 https://www.instagram.com/jenbrittonphotography/ mailto:jlb42@drexel.edu mailto:hunoldc@drexel.edu http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.14311 britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 209 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) t his paper originates in an unsettling roadside encounter. jennifer britton was photographing wild horses in the salt wells creek wild horse herd management area near rock springs, wyoming in 2018. she was observing the wellknown stallion called “bubba” and his band. bubba, a massive black horse with the signature curly mane and tail that many horses in this herd are known for, has been in many ways the face of the salt wells creek herd. he is immediately recognizable in photographs shared in wild-horse-focused social media spaces (fig. 1). britton’s observation of the horses was suddenly interrupted, however. as she recorded in her field notes of that day: “a rancher stopped his truck next to me along dirt road 27 and screamed at me for a time about how much he hates the horses. his face turned bright pink. he concluded his tirade by shouting about how he would shoot them all if he could, and then drove off.”1 this one-sided interaction, a vivid demonstration of anti-wild-horse sentiment in the american west, stayed with her. to be sure, the significance of affect in the politics of us wild horse management had suggested itself to her before.2 but there is nothing quite like an elderly man’s blind rage interrupting your peaceful day of watching horses graze in a sagebrush-covered valley to remind you that you may have been understating its importance. the wild free-roaming horses and burros act of 1971 prohibits the killing of unbranded and unclaimed horses and burros on bureau of land management (blm) and united states forest service (usfs) land. the prohibition against killing does not cover all free-roaming equids in the united states, however. protections and population management levels derived from the act apply only to herds who inhabit blm and usfs land; governance of herds present on other federal lands or indigenous territories is subject to various different rules.3 on land managed by the blm and usfs, the focus of our research, the agencies’ preferred means of regulating population size is the periodic removal of “excess” horses and burros to government-operated holding facilities and privately contracted 1 jennifer britton, field notes. 2 see hunold and britton, “‘wild and free’”. 3 see wallace et al., “an abundance estimate”. figure 1: the well-known salt wells creek stallion bubba, recognizable by his curly coat, big right knee, and distinctive head shape, is an offspring of the equally beloved stallion goliath. © jennifer britton britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 211 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) ranches where tens of thousands of the animals live out the rest of their lives — though each year several thousand are adopted by private citizens. removals are justified in terms of various threats wild horses pose to semi-arid rangelands, such as damage to vegetation, soils, and riparian areas.4 these threats are identified by a rangeland ecology and management science enterprise housed at public universities and federal research stations in the western us. prevalent in rangeland ecology and management literature is frustration that legislation and public opinion prevent lethal culling to control horse populations. a recurring theme in this literature is the unique difficulty of negotiating with wild horse advocates who are passionately immersed in wild horse preservation.5 for example, kirk davies and chad boyd note that “science-based ecosystem conservation is confounded by human psychology and the politics and sociology of horse advocacy groups.”6 this statement is emblematic of the way public lands management research frames emotion and science as being at odds with each other. specifically, well-intentioned men of science (and they are usually men, for rangeland science and management are male-dominated professions) are hamstrung by the public’s valuing of charismatic but destructive animals getting in the way of efficient removals. not only do these professions defend killing wild horses in the name of science, they also dismiss resistance to such proposals as irrational. however, lest there be any confusion about whose capacity for reason is being questioned here, the vast majority of wild horse advocates happen to be women. as it happens, davies and boyd are based at the us department of agriculture (usda)’s eastern oregon agricultural research center located near burns, oregon, just 25 miles away from the malheur national wildlife refuge. in january 2016, the refuge was the site of an occupation by armed public lands ranchers and right-wing militants led by members of the notorious bundy family, public lands ranchers known for their prior armed standoffs with federal law enforcement 4 see danvir, “multiple-use management”; davies and boyd, “ecological effects”. 5 see beever et al., “conservation challenges”; danvir, “multiple-use management”; davies and boyd, “ecological effects”; norris, “review”. 6 davies and boyd, “ecological effects”, 563. 212 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) officers over disputes about public lands grazing lease violations. the occupation had been inspired by the prosecution of dwight and steven hammond, two public lands ranchers with grazing leases adjacent to the refuge. the hammonds had been convicted of arson following a string of lease violations, and they had frequently issued death threats and other threats of violence against refuge employees.7 lost on the occupiers, one presumes, was the bitter irony of white ranchers questioning the legitimacy of federal ownership of land that, in the late nineteenth century, had been stolen from the wadatika band of the northern paiute in a decades-long campaign of dispossession that concluded when the us congress dissolved the malheur reservation in 1883.8 in any event, the occupation held the nation’s attention for its more than month-long duration. in the end, the refuge facilities were seriously damaged, several of the occupation leaders arrested, and arizona rancher lavoy finicum was killed. far from an anomaly, the malheur occupation was of a piece with the legacy of twentieth-century range wars fuelled by “tensions over land and resources, identity and belonging, autonomy and authority”9 in the western us. rangeland scientists blaming ecological mismanagement on the emotionality of wild horse advocates while ignoring the violent history of right-wing militias with close ties to the ranching community — as displayed, for example, in the sagebrush rebellion10 of the 1970s and 80s and in subsequent rage-fuelled populist land use uprisings — struck us as a troubling though revealing blind spot in this literature. writing as interpretive human–animal studies scholars whose research combines multispecies ethnography with theoretical reflection, we investigate contemporary public contestation about what — and whose — knowledge counts in the spatiotemporal events which the blm calls “wild horse gathers” and which advocates, less euphemistically and more accurately, call wild horse roundups and removals. wild horse roundups and removals, following rafi youatt, 7 see wiles and thompson, “who’s who”. 8 see hampton, “range wars and white privilege”. 9 martin et al., “political ecology”, 227. 10 see cawley, federal land, western anger. britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 213 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) operate as sites of interspecies politics that feature “the intermingling […] both of actual creatures and of ideas about these creatures.”11 we trace how this intermingling of facts and values in these spaces generates claims-making about wild horses and their governance, and how these claims struggle for public recognition and political credibility. our empirical material stems primarily from more than two dozen roundups and removals carried out between 2020 and 2022. in practical terms, the blm’s ramping up of removals in the very recent past has re-energized public debate about the future of wild horses on public lands; a debate that is documented online and accessible to researchers. in political terms, the blm’s unapologetic enthusiasm for drastically reducing wild horse herds during the biden presidency highlights the public lands management system’s relative insulation from electoral control and from partisan influence. on the one hand, engaging the contemporary debate reminds us (discouragingly enough) of the persistence in public lands management of settler-colonial ideologies that have for many decades structured who belongs and who does not belong on western rangelands. on the other hand, the contemporary debate holds clues about ways to challenge the ongoing exclusion of historically marginalized human and nonhuman animal communities from having a say in us public lands management and nature conservation. as interpretive social scientists, we study political meaning-making by actors whose public narratives reflect not just some rationalist conception of political interests but also if not primarily their fundamental values. facts matter, but they are deeply, inextricably embedded in affective relations. as human–animal studies scholars, we take an expansive, more-than-human view of who is capable of acting politically. thus, we do not approach sites of interspecies politics as neutral observers but, rather, as scholar-advocates with an eye to gauging the capacity of political contestation to better incorporate the voices of nonhuman animals. crucially, as noted above, gendered affective relations take centre stage in the instances of interspecies political meaning-making we investigate in this study. as 11 youatt, “interspecies politics”, 241. 214 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) we shall see, the starkly gendered experiences of wild horse roundups and removals are consistent with the affective logic of nature conservation more generally: “mainstream conservation discourses position care for animals as feminine and emotional, while privileging a very different human–animal relationship based in masculine, rational concern for species.”12 what our analysis adds to human– animal studies scholars’ understanding of the political function of emotion is a nuanced account of the avowal and disavowal of affect in wild horse roundups and removals, and a compelling story of how affective responses to wild horses in these traumatizing spaces strive to uphold as well as to subvert existing human-to-human and human–animal political hierarchies. wild horse roundups and removals, for all their heavy-handed law enforcement swagger, generate not only violence and exclusion but also, thanks to the tireless interventions of advocates, empathy and care across species lines. a reflexive thematic analysis of qualitative data collected from twenty-eight contemporary roundups and removals reveals that the blm’s disavowal of emotion serves to place both wild horses and wild horse advocates in the same subaltern category of being destructive, disruptive, and out of place — in short, “feral”. in mainstream conservation science and policy, a formerly domesticated feral species reproducing outside human control is typically valued less than other, usually “native” species.13 politically, labelling a species as feral is a delegitimizing move that often marks the species as expendable in the name of conservation interests.14 indeed, the entire field of “invasion biology” revolves around attempts, often with scant evidence,15 to pin negative economic and ecological impacts on introduced species. wild horse activists’ engagement with affective relations is both more complex and more ambivalent than the blm’s. at times, advocates exercise emotional restraint in an effort to defuse attempts by anti-horse interests to disparage wild horse advocacy as mere sentimentality. however, activists’ ecofeminist 12 mccubbin and van patter, “trophy hunters & crazy cat ladies,” 1327. 13 see hill et al., “uncivilized behaviors”. 14 see celermajer, “illegible animal”; clancy, “more-than-human territoriality”. 15 see sagoff, “fact and value in invasion biology”. britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 215 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) practice of politically engaged “witnessing”16 of roundups and removals from a position of “entangled empathy”17 doubles down on more-than-human affective attachments precisely to resist the blm’s double-feralization of wild horses and the humans who care for them, by establishing that wild horses are grievable as individuals who maintain bonds of family and friendship, have ecological value, and participate in interspecies kinship relations. section i explicates our theoretical framework for decoding the nexus of affect and gender in the politics of wild horse management. in section ii, we describe the research setting and explain our methods of data collection and analysis. a reflexive thematic analysis of affect and gender in wild horse politics, presented in section iii, examines the struggle for public recognition and political credibility in terms of four major themes in our data: protecting ecological integrity, regulating horses’ numbers, listening to nonhuman others, and debating advocacy strategies. we close by discussing how improved understanding of the dynamics of gender and affect in wild horse politics helps clarify pathways toward a more compassionate coexistence with wild horse herds. i. theoretical framework: affect / gender nexus in interspecies politics we approach wild horse roundups and removals as sites of interspecies politics18 at which actual wild horses and ideas about them interact with human actors motivated by diametrically opposed logics and rationales concerning the presence of wild horses on us public lands: government workers and contractors who perform and supervise the work of catching and removing the horses as well as wild horse advocate-observers who document the process as best they can under conditions set by blm personnel. participants’ affective responses to wild horses fundamentally shape “the logics and rationales that are used to either support or denounce their presence on 16 see gillespie, “witnessing animal others”. 17 see gruen, entangled empathy. 18 youatt, “interspecies politics”, 241. 216 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the land.”19 by tracing how distinctive ways of knowing and relating to wild horses produce, more often than not, exclusion and violence but also, at times, empathy and care across species lines we hope to develop a deeper understanding of the role of affect and gender in upholding as well as in subverting established power relations and political hierarchies in disputes about who controls western us rangelands. the role of affect both in the construction of knowledge about nonhuman animals and in the spaces where species meet has been a fruitful area of social science inquiry.20 ecofeminists call for incorporating the voices of nonhuman animals into political discourse and public policy by “listening to animals, paying emotional attention” to what they are telling us.21 and pioneering conservation scientists highlight the importance of emotions for knowing nonhuman animals more fully.22 this research has delivered two significant insights about why affect matters in the study of interspecies politics. first, rationality and objectivity are themselves feelings.23 this implies, among other things, that reason is always already informed by affect, and that placing reason and emotion in different boxes to protect some notion of unbiased objectivity is to set up a false choice.24 second, many nonhuman animals experience inner lives and social relationships rich in emotions.25 just as no plausible ac19 clancy et al., “free-roaming donkeys”, 1200. 20 see candea, “carlos the meerkat”; blue, “public attunement”; bruckner et al., “naturecultures”; greenhough and roe, “attuning to laboratory animals”; lorimer, “nonhuman charisma”; mccubbin and van patter, “trophy hunters”; whitney, “tangled up in knots”. 21 donovan, “feminism and the treatment of animals”, 305–07. see also birke, “intimate familiarities?”; blattner et al., “animal agency in community”; hamilton and taylor, ethnography after humanism; meijer, when animals speak. 22 see ramp and bekoff, “compassion”; wallach et al., “when all life counts”. 23 see milton, loving nature. 24 see hooper et al., “‘anti-cull activists’”. 25 see bekoff and pierce, wild justice; coulter, “challenging subjects”; kret et al., “my fear is not”; williams, “secret lives of horses”. peer-reviewed studies of wild horse ethology are rare, primarily due to lack of interest in and funding for non-applied research on introduced species. studies of wild horse social dynamics must invariably justify their existence in terms of population management objectives; for example, mendoça et al., “population characteristics of feral horses”. given that wild horse populations survive without human intervention in many parts of the world, domestication does not appear to have fundamentally altered horse behaviour, however. britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 217 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) count of human reason can ignore the role of emotion in constructing and contesting knowledge claims,26 denying the affective capacities of nonhuman animals obscures the complexity of their lived experiences.27 it is not merely insight and understanding, however, that are diminished when emotions are disavowed. disavowal is also closely intertwined with the production of injustice. bureaucratically rational ways of apprehending the world have a way of silencing the voices of marginalized human and nonhuman communities and of cementing the unjust relations of power responsible for their oppression and exploitation.28 in roundups and removals, these experiences of injustice are often gendered. for example, in the blm’s conception the problem of wild horses figures primarily as one of “overabundance”, an ostensibly scientific diagnosis that implies the need for drastic herd reductions. however, rangeland scientists and public lands managers are not content with vilifying the animals’ presence on public lands. they also claim for themselves the moral high ground of professional responsibility — as signalled by their (rationally determined) willingness to kill horses — while infantilizing advocates’ interspecies empathy as nostalgic sentimentality, as evidenced by the double-feralization of wild horses and of wild horse advocates permeating our data. the political function of this double-feralization, we contend, is not only to set up wild horses for removal but also to silence unruly wild horse advocates. the advocates, for their part, respond to this masculinist double-feralization by tying the normative political potential of emotionally engaged storytelling, such as publicly grieving wild horses’ loss of freedom, to the practice of witnessing as a political act. witnessing, kathryn gillespie explains, differs from more detached modes of documentation in its justice-oriented political motivation and response to the suffering of others: witnessing “requires a political 26 see lakoff, “why it matters”. 27 see fraser-celin and hovorka, “compassionate conservation”; rizzolo and bradshaw, “nonhuman animal nations”. 28 see taylor and fraser, “the cow project”. 218 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) engagement with the subject’s embodied experience.”29 witnessing, in this context, does not necessarily restrict itself to the individual: documenting the suffering in often unhealthy conditions of thousands of captured horses corralled in cramped holding pens is as much part of advocates’ action repertoire as reporting individual experiences. emotionally engaged witnessing cuts through anonymizing concepts of “population” and “overabundance” by storying wild horses as members of distinctive social groups and as individuals inhabiting a particular home place.30 in so doing, witnessing helps make caring and grieving for nonhuman others socially intelligible, thereby exposing and critiquing unjust power relations and hierarchies. empathetically attending to another’s experience of suffering and wellbeing — the blend of emotion and cognition the feminist animal ethicist lori gruen calls “entangled empathy” — does more than that, however. advocates’ attunement to the lived experience of wild horses, we contend, also prefigures more compassionate forms of coexistence with wild horse herds. ii. methodology the research setting: roundups and removals as sites of interspecies politics the wild horses who inhabit us public lands are largely confined to blm-managed herd management areas (hma) scattered across ten states in the intermountain west.31 some wild horses are also found on other federal lands, such as tracts of land managed by the national forest service and the national park service, as well as on native lands where federal protections and population management targets do not apply. in 2013, horse slaughter became illegal in the united states, and horses from non-blm and non-usfs herds still sent to slaughter are exported to mexico and canada. navajo nation, for example, is home to some 40,000 wild horses, and their management is a divisive topic, even though all sides acknowledge the 29 gillespie, “witnessing animal others”, 573. 30 see wallach et al., “recognizing animal personhood”. 31 bureau of land management, “herd management areas”, https://www.blm.gov/programs/ wild-horse-and-burro/herd-management/herd-management-areas. https://www.blm.gov/programs/wild-horse-and-burro/herd-management/herd-management-areas https://www.blm.gov/programs/wild-horse-and-burro/herd-management/herd-management-areas britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 219 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) sacredness of the horse in diné culture.32 as kelsey john explains, diné “‘traditionalists’ claim that the horse’s sacred position in navajo epistemology and philosophy means the tribe should not round up and sell horses for slaughter, and on the other side, ‘nontraditionalists’ [...] advocate for the round up in order to alleviate the effects of feral horses on rangeland, homesites, and water.”33 though lethal control is not a management option on blm-managed land, the agency is implementing an aggressive agenda of removing wild horses from many of its 177 hmas. between 2020 and 2022, approximately 20,000 wild horses were moved to long term warehousing in helicopter roundups and removals, reducing the number of horses remaining to about 80,000. these operations, which have been conducted for decades, follow a standard template. the public is alerted to impending roundups by publication of notice-and-comment periods for area management plans in which regional blm offices make their case for reducing herd sizes to an “appropriate management level” (aml) determined by the agency. this thirty-day comment period is waived in the case of so-called “emergency” herd reductions (undertaken under the pretext of extreme drought) that require only a public announcement of the planned roundup. the blm is required, however, to make the events themselves accessible to the public, and wild horse advocates often attend as observers. public observation points are generally set up in a place up to a mile away from the trap site, and advocates frequently report situations of poor visibility of the trap that they contend is intentional. private contractors provide the necessary personnel and logistics: managers, wranglers along with their horses, and helicopter pilots as well as helicopters, trucks, stock trailers, and the equipment needed to set up temporary corrals, pens, and chutes that funnel 32 outside native territories, indigenous perspectives have had little influence on management of introduced species or on north american conservation more generally. see bhattacharyya and larson, “the need for indigenous voices”. decolonizing conservation is a complex undertaking that requires not just rethinking existing approaches but cultivating networks for collaborating with indigenous scholars and practitioners, without harming indigenous-led conservation initiatives. see hessami at al., “indigenizing the north american model”; morales et al., “redefining american conservation”. 33 john, “animal colonialism”, 58. 220 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) galloping horses into the traps. the trap site is the focal point of a roundup: a fenced pen that is open at one end to a wide funnel made of lengths of jute. depending on the number of horses to be removed from an hma, a roundup may last up to a week or longer, with adjustments based on weather conditions. roundups begin early in the morning, as the helicopter pilot sets off to locate bands of horses. once located, the pilot flies low to the ground behind the horses, guiding them towards the trap site as they retreat from the perceived threat, a distance that may range from a mile or so to ten miles, depending on where the horses were found. advocates only get to witness the final stretch that the horses travel into the jute funnels and into the traps, at which time they are generally seen galloping, arriving sweating and breathing heavily. as the helicopter chases the horses into the trap, wranglers are on site to take over. some on horseback may ride out to retrieve those horses who have been unable to keep up with a running pace whether because they are injured or are very young or older, and may rope or otherwise herd these individuals towards the trap. as the gate slams shut, horses are packed tightly and some may panic, trying to jump out over the fencing. small foals are at risk of being trampled or injured. wranglers on the ground at the trap quickly begin to sort the horses, separating mares and foals from stallions. horses are routed through a series of corrals and chutes and moved into large stock trailers. the trailers can hold up to a dozen or more horses at a time, and once full they drive loads of horses to blm-owned holding facilities. once at the holding facility, horses are unloaded together into pens where they await further processing. over the next few days to weeks they will be catalogued, branded, and vaccinated. horses determined to suffer from physical ailments (e.g., “club foot”) the blm deems a barrier to transport are shot at the trap site; others (e.g., “blindness in one eye”) may be killed upon arrival at the holding facility. the survivors will settle into life in this holding facility, sharing a small unsheltered enclosure space with dozens of other horses, many of whom they already know. blm personnel provide feed and water. upon completion of some (but not all) roundups, a limited number britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 221 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) of horses are released back to the range. however, since supply far outstrips demand for adoption of blm-managed horses, tens of thousands of animals live out their lives in holding facilities or on government contracted ranches. data collection: 28 roundups and removals in order to analyse how affect, gender, and species interact in these spaces, we gathered publicly available text data on 28 roundups and removals conducted between 2020 and 2022, in 7 states (california, colorado, idaho, nevada, oregon, utah, and wyoming.) for each event we collected four sets of data: blm publications (n 34), reports compiled by wild horse advocacy organizations (n 122), news coverage (n 116), and social media threads (n 43) in wild-horse-related facebook groups and youtube channels (see table 1). data analysis we conducted a reflexive thematic analysis to explore patterns of participant meanings in our data.34 thematic analysis is an interpretive methodology wherein researchers immerse themselves in the data to familiarize themselves with their depth and breadth while actively searching for patterns and meanings. this process is reflexive in that it involves moving from reviewing unstructured data to developing ideas about what is going on in the data. unlike the frequency word counts of content analysis, thematic analysis aims to uncover participants’ lived experiences, perspectives, and practices, the social processes that influence and shape particular phenomena, the explicit and implicit norms governing particular practices, as well as the social construction of meaning and the representation of social objects in particular texts and contexts.35 we proceeded from inductively coding our text data to building themes from these codes in a four-step process. given our interest in understanding participant meanings, we selected code labels that stayed close to the wording of the texts we examined. 34 see braun and clarke, “using thematic analysis”; guest et al., applied thematic analysis. 35 see braun and clarke, thematic analysis. table 1: roundups and removals 2020-2022 hma blm advocates news media social media barren valley complex, or 4 6 3 4 beaty butte, or 1 3 1 1 centennial, ca 2 4 1 1 challis, id 1 3 6 2 conger, ut 1 4 1 2 desatoya, nv 1 4 2 1 diamond hills complex, nv 1 5 4 1 eagle, nv 1 5 2 1 four mile, id 1 5 3 n/a fox-lake range, nv 1 4 2 n/a jackson mountains, nv 1 6 8 1 maverick-medicine, nv 1 3 1 1 nevada wild horse range, nv 2 2 n/a n/a onaqui mountain, ut 2 10 6 1 owyhee complex, nv 1 4 4 1 paisley desert, or 1 2 n/a 1 palomino butte, or 1 6 4 2 pancake complex, nv 1 5 5 3 red desert complex, wy 1 5 4 4 rock springs, wy 1 3 6 5 sand wash basin, co 1 8 32 4 saylor creek, id 1 2 2 n/a shawave mountains, nv 1 4 4 n/a silver king, nv 1 5 5 2 stinkingwater, or 1 4 1 2 sulphur, ut 1 5 4 n/a surprise complex, ca 1 3 2 2 west douglas, co 1 2 3 1 total 34 122 116 43 britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 223 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) first, the four-person research team jointly coded text data pertaining to a sample of four randomly selected roundups, generating some 50 codes. second, using these codes, cassidy ellis then coded the entire archive (n 315) using nvivo, a software package for organizing and analysing qualitative data. abigail del grosso independently performed a second round of coding. the team then resolved any divergent coding choices, merged poorly differentiated codes, and revised misleading code labels. thus, coding was a reflexive process that involved moving back and forth between the texts and the codes, separately and jointly, until coding was judged to be complete. third, each team member independently compiled the coded statements in our dataset into broader themes36 that captured participants’ experiences, perspectives, and practices in the context of wild horse roundups and removals. this process of organizing codes into analytic themes was informed by the ways nvivo helped us visualize the centrality of certain codes and the relationships among them. in a final step, we determined that our codes converged on four major themes. pro-horse and anti-horse discourses imbue each of these themes with different, often diametrically opposed meanings. likewise, human actors in wild horse politics accept or repudiate affect in complex ways, primarily across the pro- / anti-horse divide but also, at times, within each system of meaning. moving from reviewing unstructured data to generating broader themes in such an elaborate process yielded four motifs around which the political struggle between the gendered avowal and disavowal of affect in wild horse roundups and removals revolves: protecting ecological integrity, regulating horses’ numbers, listening to nonhuman others, and debating advocacy strategies. in what follows, we discuss how the federal public lands management system’s double-feralization of wild horses and wild horse advocates, as well as the insurgent affective relations of care that resist and subvert this framing, play out across these four major themes. 36 see creswell, research design, chapter 9: qualitative methods 224 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) iii. interspecies affective relations at wild horse roundups and removals protecting ecological integrity the wild and free-roaming horses and burros act of 1971 directs the blm to maintain hmas as multi-use. the multiple-use doctrine compels the agency to balance wildlife species diversity and livestock grazing with wild horse and burro habitat. it also mandates that horse and burro populations be managed to “maintain a thriving natural ecological balance”, but at the “minimum feasible level”. the precise meaning of these terms is ambiguous and politically contested.37 competing storylines of nativeness and belonging position wild horses either as a vital component of the rangeland ecosystem, as wild horse advocates contend, or as a threat to rangeland ecological integrity, as the agency asserts. in framing wild horses as ecosystem destroyers, the blm relies on data generated by an academic rangeland science and management enterprise that sees the presence of horses on public land as a threat to ecological integrity. echoing malthusian anxieties familiar from campaigns targeting unwanted species such as suburban white-tailed deer38 and canada geese,39 “feral” horses are portrayed as reproducing at unsustainable rates and, thus, as ecologically destructive and worth less than species such as native wildlife and agricultural livestock that are regarded as more legitimate. advocacy organizations such as the american wild horse campaign (awhc) counter that the blm’s insistence that “wild horses must be reduced to unscientifically low population levels in order to manage for a thriving natural ecological balance” turns wild horses into ecological scapegoats.40 if rangeland health were a prime concern for the blm, advocates contend, surely the agency would moderate its support for public lands livestock grazing and stop diverting forage and water to sheep and cattle after removing horses, ostensibly due to lack of forage and 37 see danvir, “multiple-use management”; boyce et al., “causes and consequences,” 157. 38 see connors and gianotti, “becoming killable”. 39 see clancy, “more-than-human territoriality”. 40 see awhc, “emergency roundups”. britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 225 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) water. advocates note that the economics of roundups and removals run counter to blm claims about having to remove horses in order to protect rangeland health. not only are private contractors paid large sums of money to capture, ship, and warehouse the horses off-range, but the areas from which the horses have been removed are typically opened to greater numbers of grazing sheep and cattle than before. the blm seeks to deflect criticism of skewing multiple-use management in favour of livestock interests by suggesting that “[c]attle or livestock grazing has actually declined on public rangelands 34 percent since the ’70s.”41 advocates counter that some hmas appear to be managed principally for livestock. in south-eastern oregon’s barren valley complex hma, for example, advocates discovered that wild horses were allocated “12% of the authorized forage, with 88% going to privately owned cattle and sheep.”42 here, “the forage diverted to livestock could support an additional 2,250 horses across the three [barren valley complex] hmas. the combined aml [appropriate management level] could increase from 892 to 3,142. the problem is public-lands ranching, not overpopulation.”43 advocates report that “more and more cattle and sheep, especially sheep, [have] started showing up” following roundups.44 the blm also frames roundups as being pro-horse, such that by removing wild horses now they are preventing wild horses from going hungry and thirsty in the future. a blm district manager explains that they “conduct gathers like this to ensure that the health of the rangelands and the wild horses are not at risk due to herd overpopulation and severe drought conditions.”45 herd reductions, the agency claims, help “maintain a thriving ecological balance that supports healthy horses on healthy rangelands that provide adequate habitat, forage and water for horses, wildlife, including greater sage-grouse, and livestock.”46 advocates dispute the blm’s claims that horses are rounded 41 see hottle, “wild horse gather concludes”. 42 duffy, “sheepshead wild horses”. 43 duffy, “barren valley gather”. 44 naumann, “born to be wild”. 45 “pancake complex wild horse gather underway”, lincoln county record, 25 january 2022, https://lccentral.com/2022/01/25/pancake-complex-wild-horse-gather-underway/ 46 chast, “blm rounds up”. https://lccentral.com/2022/01/25/pancake-complex-wild-horse-gather-underway/ 226 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) up for their own good. the agency argues that “life out on the range can be pretty tough, and they don’t live as long as they do in domestic life” because “a large percentage of the horses are emaciated and dehydrated.”47 advocates, however, keep documenting the routine removal of horses in good physical condition. unlike the blm, advocates regard wild horses as a vital part of the rangeland ecosystem. they cast doubt on blm claims that fewer than 100,000 wild horses confined to, at most, ten percent of federal public land are capable of degrading entire ecosystems. in questioning claims of ecological harmfulness, advocates point to the ancient evolutionary history of wild horse species in north america48 and marshal evidence that free-roaming horses sometimes have positive impacts on rangeland ecology.49 they also articulate a non-instrumental, cultural conception of equine belonging that sidesteps the native / non-native question entirely.50 that is, advocates do not pathologize wild horses’ history of de-domestication, instead imbuing the sheer grit of multigenerational survival in sparse grasslands with a kind of naturalized immigrant status.51 where anti-horse discourse invokes wild horses’ descent from livestock as leverage to weaken their status as protected wildlife, advocates flip this narrative to establish wild horses’ right to remain on the land: “rounding up is not the answer…! these animals are on their given lands.”52 the blm’s and advocates’ positions on the ecological impact of wild horses are each entangled with incommensurable conceptions of the animals’ right to inhabit these landscapes. one might think that divergent interpretations of horses’ health should be simple to settle empirically: a given animal is either found to be in poor physical condition or not. however, matters of fact tell only a small part of 47 chast, “blm rounds up”. 48 see haile et al., “ancient dna”. 49 see lundgren et al., “equids engineer”. 50 see wallach et al. “when all life counts”. 51 see bhattacharyya et al., “the ‘wild’ or ‘feral’ distraction”. 52 joan webb, “all wrong……”, 7 august 2021, comment on return to freedom, wild horse conservation, “the bureau of land management plans to begin an ‘emergency’ helicopter roundup of 296 wild horses”, facebook, 5 august 2021. https://www.facebook. com/returntofreedom/posts/10159651378233054?comment_id=10159654129008054. https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/10159651378233054?comment_id=10159654129008054 https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/10159651378233054?comment_id=10159654129008054 britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 227 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the story. while the claim that today’s wild herds descend from domestic livestock is uncontested, for example, each side’s conclusions about the meaning of de-domestication for the animals’ belonging on the range could not be more different. regulating horses’ numbers the construct of “excess” horses drives the blm’s overpopulation narrative. the agency claims that the 80,000 horses estimated to inhabit blm-managed public lands in 2022 are still “more than three times what is sustainable and healthy for the land and the animals”53 and that unmanaged herds double in size every four years, posing an “existential threat” to america’s public lands.54 advocates counter that the agency’s amls are unscientifically low, referencing a national academy of sciences study which concluded that blm’s research on population size is “not transparent to stakeholders, supported by scientific information or amenable to adaptation with new information and environmental and social change.”55 some advocates believe that the blm has betrayed the public interest by engineering a de facto takeover of western public lands by agricultural and mining interests. the blm, for its part, affirms that roundups are here to stay. according to one wild horse and burro program supervisor, gathers are “kind of, i guess you’d say, the purpose of our program.”56 that horses are no longer present in several hmas reinforces advocates’ impression that the blm is not motivated by ecology, but by a political mission to “depopulat[e] the west of its wild horses and burros herd by herd.”57 despite their scepticism about the blm’s inflated population growth projections and aggressive herd reductions, advocates acknowledge that few natural predators live alongside wild horses, thanks to a combination of permissive predator sport hunting regulations and extirpation of cougars, wolves, and grizzly bears in the name of 53 draplin, “federal land managers”. 54 philipps, “a mustang crisis looms”. 55 naumann, “born to be wild”. 56 chast, “blm rounds up”. 57 sonner, “us plans more wild horse roundups”. 228 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) government-sanctioned “predator control”.58 as such, and in light of horses’ confinement in the finite spaces of hmas, many advocacy organizations reluctantly accept some practices that limit horses’ population growth. support for fertility control in wild horse management is a small area of overlap between blm and advocate beliefs, but these stakeholders diverge dramatically in how they think regulating horses’ numbers should be carried out. the most widely used equine fertility control method involves injecting mares with pzp, short for porcine zona pellucida, an injectable immunocontraceptive that is effective in a range of ungulate species, including horses.59 many advocates argue that pzp is a safe, proven, and effective method in addition to being humane, non-invasive, and non-traumatic. for these advocates, the use of pzp is an ethical choice for population regulation because of its minimal impact on horses’ social behaviour. in fact, there are several examples of collaboration between advocacy organizations and regional blm offices to deploy pzp, and advocates emphasize that these kinds of collaborations are less costly to taxpayers than expensive roundups and the subsequent long-term warehousing of captured horses. a number of advocate organizations, including higher-profile groups like awhc, have called on the blm to collaborate more extensively through public–private partnerships to expand the use of pzp in herd management across the system. advocates further say that building this infrastructure is needed because existing volunteer-run pzp programs are not really widely replicable or sustainable: “what needs to change is, instead of relying on a bunch of old ladies to go out and dart like me, they need to hire people to do it.”60 pzp administration, if adopted more widely, would be an example of more compassionate wild horse management because roundups and removals could then be largely avoided. however, such proposals have been rebuffed by the blm. echoing the biopolitical “massification”61 of animal bodies in mainstream conservation science discourse, 58 see bergstrom et al., “license to kill”. 59 see gruenberg, wild horse dilemma. 60 stella trueblood, quoted in anderson, “branded”. 61 sutton and taylor, “managing the borders”. britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 229 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the agency claims it is impractical to dart large herds, among other things “due to the fact that many horses look the same”, a statement that betrays a belief that horses are interchangeable and indistinguishable from one another.62 the blm also points to the likely need for labour-intensive, costly bait-trapping in order to dart mares unaccustomed to human presence after their first experience of being shot with a dart gun. the existence of volunteer-run pzp programs does not prevent roundups from happening when the agency deems them necessary, as the sand wash basin hma experience shows.63 says one wild horse photographer: “i will probably never be able to emotionally come back here. i mean, this place is going to be like a graveyard to me.”64 by cooperating with blm on a few birth control programs, but entirely on blm’s terms, advocates have traded their volunteer labour for a largely symbolic form of “access without influence” that has left existing management practices intact, a classic case of co-optation of oppositional social movements by state institutions.65 even more so than the irreconcilable perspectives on ecological integrity discussed above, limited cooperation on fertility control — requiring, at a minimum, a shared belief in its efficacy — leaves intact the underlying affective relations wherein herds figure either as an aggregate to be manipulated or as a community whose wellbeing requires attending to the social dynamics among its members. the depth of these incommensurabilities is revealed more fully in the next section. listening to nonhuman others the two affective regimes we have identified — treating wild horses as an undifferentiated mass versus attending to their “fleshy bodily and emotional susceptibilities, potentialities and vulnerabilities”66 — constitute starkly contrasting human–animal relationalities. for the blm, wild horses figure as objects of managerial govern62 steve leonard, the blm’s wild horse and burro manager for colorado, quoted in laconte, “largest wild horse roundup”. 63 see hunold and britton, “‘wild and free’”. 64 meg frederick, quoted in garcia, “helicopters”. 65 see dryzek et al., green states and social movements. 66 greenhough and roe, “attuning to laboratory animals”, 371. 230 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) ance, as indicated by this detached estimate of risks associated with a proposed roundup at sand wash basin hma: “the helicopter roundup would be stressful to the herd and possibly fatal to 1.1%, or in this case about eight horses.”67 at times, the blm tries to temper the brutality of helicopter roundups: “the pilots, i like to refer to the pilots as the border collie in the sky where they’re simply herding the horses towards the trap.”68 despite such transparent attempts to dissociate its practices of capturing wild horses from the violence involved,69 the blm’s technocratic calculus of acceptable losses fundamentally collides with advocates’ grieving for horses who will “spend their lives in captivity”70, often “under terrible conditions”71. advocates express outrage at the rough handling of horses at trap sites: “heartbreaking! these are wildlife not livestock! and they are our defenseless beautiful horses and burros…”72 foals being “chased, roped, and brought into the trap by the riders” are sometimes separated from their mothers.73 advocates point “to the dangers inherent in running newborn foals and heavily pregnant mares, who could slip their foals because of the stress”74 and denounce roundups being undertaken in extreme weather conditions. the blm claims roundups and removals are as safe as possible, yet advocates believe helicopter roundups that cause horses to “break limbs, crash into fences, and die of exhaustion” are “devastating and 67 goodland, “wild horse advocates”. 68 hottle, “wild horse gather concludes”. 69 mazhary, “distancing animal death”, 3. 70 maffly, “onaqui wild horses”. 71 lynette radel, “all these roundups going on”, 31 august 2021, comment on return to freedom, wild horse conservation, “the bureau of land management plans to capture and remove 1,900 wild horses from the barren valley complex”, facebook, 31 august 2021. https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/10159700833388054/ ?comment_id=10159701008133054. 72 helen norvell, “heartbreaking!”, 23 august 2021, comment on return to freedom, wild horse conservation, “conger hma (utah) roundup ends with 231 horses captured, 1 dead”. https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/pfbid0lc4j43wuxxykeb5kg kmjhto5xzdamrlqbkkrtiffpzbe8tjsk2evelqcd1cyt9qyl?comment_id=10159686656313054. 73 awhc, “roundup report: barren valley complex”. 74 “judge restricts helicopter use in jackson roundup”, horsetalk.co.nz, 22 june 2012, https:// www.horsetalk.co.nz/2012/06/22/judge-restricts-helicopter-use-jackson-mountain-roundup/. https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/10159700833388054/?comment_id=10159701008133054 https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/10159700833388054/?comment_id=10159701008133054 https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/pfbid0lc4j43wuxxykeb5kgkmjhto5xzdamrlqbkkrtiffpzbe8tjsk2evelqcd1cyt9qyl?comment_id=10159686656313054 https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/pfbid0lc4j43wuxxykeb5kgkmjhto5xzdamrlqbkkrtiffpzbe8tjsk2evelqcd1cyt9qyl?comment_id=10159686656313054 https://www.horsetalk.co.nz/2012/06/22/judge-restricts-helicopter-use-jackson-mountain-roundup/ https://www.horsetalk.co.nz/2012/06/22/judge-restricts-helicopter-use-jackson-mountain-roundup/ britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 231 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) cruel”.75 in the october 2021 barren valley complex, or roundup a 6-year old mare died of a broken neck after bashing into a trap corral panel.76 in addition to suffering fatal injuries, some captured horses are shot on site for what the blm terms pre-existing conditions. advocates counter that it is unnecessary to kill horses who have evidently survived for years despite conditions like club foot or blindness in one eye. such killings provoke anger, grief, and, at times, sarcasm. a social media comment on the killing of captured horses at the barren valley complex notes: “[w]ell, there’s 27 horses that blm won’t have to feed for life. so win-win in blm’s eyes.”77 another comments: “more bs from blm as to ‘pre-existing’ conditions. they run them until one or more has a broken leg or worse then ‘put them down!’ they’re inhumane dirt bags!!!!!!! all were doing fine until being chased for miles!!!”78 what the blm defends as humane treatment advocates denounce as animal abuse. advocates also detail mistreatment and declining health following roundups, including “heavy reliance on the electric [cattle] prods” and overcrowded holding pens that cause horses to become stressed and jump on top of each other.79 a sand wash basin hma observer reports: “they’re in a cage now, stressed out, scared to death and packed like sardines…the accidents and deaths and things like that, it doesn’t happen when they’re running. it happens right now.”80 confinement in poorly managed holding facilities, moreover, facilitates the spread of infectious disease. for example, 145 horses captured 75 “feds to round up america’s most iconic wild horse herd: say no!” everyaction, [march 2019], https://secure.everyaction.com/bcqrx780we6w9cx2idyt_a2. 76 awhc, “roundup report: barren valley complex”. 77 jan morse, “[w]ell, there’s 27 horses”, 8 november, 2021, comment on return to freedom, wild horse conservation, “the bureau of land management on friday ended an ‘emergency’ helicopter roundup continued on the barren valley complex”. https://www. facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/pfbid02xttthjapizd1kyk5haefykfg82tyqo6us 7suhusutesbsdwut6tcztrdly5zez97l?comment_id=10159831111128054. 78 donna canada, “more bs from blm”, 9 november 2021, comment on return to freedom, wild horse conservation, “the bureau of land management on friday ended an ‘emergency’ helicopter roundup”. https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/ pfbid02xttthjapizd1kyk5haefykfg82tyqo6us7suhusutesbsdwut6tcztrdly5zez97l ?comment_id=10159832595033054. 79 awhc, “roundup report: barren valley complex”. 80 garcia, “helicopters”. https://secure.everyaction.com/bcqrx780we6w9cx2idyt_a2 https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/pfbid02xttthjapizd1kyk5haefykfg82tyqo6us7suhusutesbsdwut6tcztrdly5zez97l?comment_id=10159831111128054 https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/pfbid02xttthjapizd1kyk5haefykfg82tyqo6us7suhusutesbsdwut6tcztrdly5zez97l?comment_id=10159831111128054 https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/pfbid02xttthjapizd1kyk5haefykfg82tyqo6us7suhusutesbsdwut6tcztrdly5zez97l?comment_id=10159831111128054 https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/pfbid02xttthjapizd1kyk5haefykfg82tyqo6us7suhusutesbsdwut6tcztrdly5zez97l?comment_id=10159832595033054 https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/pfbid02xttthjapizd1kyk5haefykfg82tyqo6us7suhusutesbsdwut6tcztrdly5zez97l?comment_id=10159832595033054 https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/pfbid02xttthjapizd1kyk5haefykfg82tyqo6us7suhusutesbsdwut6tcztrdly5zez97l?comment_id=10159832595033054 232 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) in the west douglas hma roundup died of equine flu at the cañon city, co holding facility in 2022 when blm staff failed to vaccinate the herd in a timely manner.81 that same year, the blm’s wheatland offrange corral in wyoming experienced an outbreak of strangles, affecting more than half of the 2,750 horses held there and killing 0.8% of them.82 in advocates’ telling, it is not life on the range but, rather, captivity that endangers horses’ wellbeing. in addition to documenting physical suffering, advocates articulate horses’ experiences of emotional distress based on visual and auditory cues. the trauma of family separations is a recurring theme. at barren valley complex hma, “a stallion [who] was able to evade capture and headed up the hill overlooking the trap. he looked down into the valley at his family and whinnied for them.”83 this same observer describes a group of horses who “were all huddled close together, confused, scared.” separated mothers and foals show obvious signs of distress: “as soon as the foal was separated it started calling for its mother, even as the trailer she was on pulled away and out of sight.” some stallions witnessing their mares and foals being loaded onto trailers at an oregon trap site reacted as follows: “the stallions were especially attentive in this group, coming to the sides of the chute to say goodbye to their mares one last time. it was a truly heartbreaking way to start the day.” in the context of bearing witness to such traumatic upheaval, advocates are buoyed by occasional expressions of defiance: “the proud stallion was separated from the rest of the herd purposefully by the helicopter in an attempt to capture his family and deter them from following him. moments later the black stallion and his band ran towards each other and reunited before escaping up the mountain. a true freedom fighter. we love to see it!”84 for roundup operators, however, horses are little more than physical bodies to be processed as efficiently as possible; troublesome advocates who empathize with the horses, moreover, figure as emotionally 81 brown, “cañon city facility”. 82 fike, “more horses die”. 83 awhc, “roundup report: barren valley complex”. 84 awhc, “roundup report: red desert complex”. britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 233 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) disturbed interlopers. stripping horses of their individuality and advocates of their capacity for reason delegitimizes the presence of horses on the land while infantilizing advocates’ concerns. a blm field office manager responsible for the sand wash basin roundup states that he appreciates “that people are emotional about these […] beautiful animals” but insists, in the next sentence, that “they also need to understand that it’s not ok to allow the population to get up to a certain level, right on the edge, before they start to crash.”85 the unsubtle implication is that sentimentality equals femininity equals naiveté, ergo refusal to take responsibility for doing what must be done, as identified by “objective” rangeland ecological science. at roundups and removals, misogyny and the denigration by feralization of wild horses and their human advocates are deeply intertwined. intimidation of advocates by blm personnel, including threats of physical violence, is not unheard of, as when a male blm state director threatened a prominent female advocate during an encounter on an hma: “if this were the 70’s or 80’s you would be dragged out of your truck, brutalized, tied to a bumper and dragged around the desert until your body disintegrated. or perhaps next year?”86 the ecofeminist political act of witnessing roundups and removals makes wild horses grievable and reveals that wild horses are themselves capable of grieving. by giving voice to the horses’ distress alongside their own, advocates strive to make empathizing with nonhuman others socially intelligible to wider publics and, in doing so, to expose hierarchies of domination that obscure animals’ suffering and justify their expendability.87 publicizing horses’ traumatizing experiences brings to light a routine violence that is absent from “the facts” showcased in the blm’s public communications. advocates refocus public attention from “excess” horses onto the physical sensations and emotional experiences of suffering nonhuman others. this mobilization of more-than-human grief resonates with an ecofeminist conception of entangled empathy88 that asks humans 85 garcia, “helicopters”. 86 leigh, “letter to blm director neil kornze”. 87 see blue “public attunement”; gillespie, “witnessing animal others”. 88 see gruen, entangled empathy. 234 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) to listen to the voices of nonhuman animals and to reflect on what might be learned from such communication.89 modelling that rationality and emotionality are not mutually exclusive in more-than-human relationships of kinship prefigures a more holistic epistemology; an epistemology shared by compassionate conservation scientists.90 many wild horse advocates, especially those who attend roundups, have logged countless hours watching wild horses in their habitats, and in the course of this naturalistic observation have come to a nuanced and detailed understanding of their lives. these advocates, who are often also wild horse photographers with detailed knowledge of specific herds, know individual horses by sight and can picture a map of each horse’s social relationships, and of herds’ daily and seasonal habits, practices, and movements. in their recurring encounters with bands of horses they have come to know well, these photographer-advocates embrace an interspecies ethic of care and kinship, readily expressing both their affection for individual horses as well as their anger and grief when roundups are implemented. like many wild horse photographers, jennifer britton became an advocate as a result of time spent getting to know individual horses as unique characters acting out lively relationships with other horses, whether as family, friends, or rivals, as shown in her image of a sand wash basin hma mare and stallion sharing an affectionate moment (fig 2.). when horses feel like kin rather than like undifferentiated organisms, the spectre of roundups and their associated violence is a compelling call to action. after roundups have concluded and some portion of captured horses are released back into their hmas, advocates return to observe whether and how the social dynamics of herds have changed with the loss of most of their population and a freshly skewed male-female ratio. to be sure, to affirm affective ways of knowing and relating to wild horses does not in the short term change public policy. however, sharing stories about the lives and deaths of wild horses gives meaning to marginalized lives, a precondition for challenging their continued subjugation.91 that said, lean89 see donovan, “feminism and the treatment of animals”; meijer, when animals speak. 90 see wallach et al., “when all life counts”; wallach et al., “recognizing animal personhood”. 91 gillespie, “witnessing animal others”, 577. figure 2: in sand wash basin, a mare and stallion, part of the same family band, share an affectionate greeting. © jennifer britton 236 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) ing into more-than-human affective attachments often invites dismissive responses from public lands managers. next, we discuss how advocates, in an effort to develop political strategies that might yet help secure a future for wild horses, navigate the contradictions of defusing malicious attributions of sentimentality while upholding affective ways of knowing and relating to wild horses. debating advocacy strategies the strategies advocates use most frequently to challenge blm policies are offering public input, engaging in litigation, and documenting roundups. however, advocacy campaigns have had little impact on federal management practices, even in limited areas of shared concern, such as fertility control and water provisioning. where does this unimpressive record leave wild horse advocacy, according to advocates? for some, the failure to change policy has reinforced a deep mistrust of the blm as hopelessly corrupt. a small minority hope to sidestep the question of federal authority altogether by articulating a libertarian vision of equine autonomy as freedom from government interference: “there’s something wrong here — these horses and this land belong to us, the people, not the bureau of land (mis)management”92 on this view, wild horses are simply to be left alone. however, non-interference does not resonate with most advocates, who are calling on one another to continue to fight for policy change. on social media, wild horse supporters urge that “writing letters, signing petitions, donating, and making calls” can improve the treatment of horses.93 the blm must solicit public input on proposed non-emergency roundups. however, many advocates who as citizens expect to have a say on public policy are frustrated by the 92 marnie barrett, “there’s something wrong here”, 16 october 2014, comment on american wild horse campaign, “blm has announced an emergency roundup of wild horses within the palomino buttes hma in oregon”. https://www.facebook.com/freewildhorses/ photos/a.119795654746757/790049484388034?comment_id=790139601045689. 93 mona malone, “but take the time and do something constructive”, 7 october 2021, comment on return to freedom, wild horse conservation, “the bureau of land management on thursday”. https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/pfbid02gah aqkhrgwtu2uumtxz7npp6rzwbkuviw3nszfktnjfs4kmlvza7w22bj4lsdwvcl?comm ent_id=10159767639123054&reply_comment_id=10159768252633054. https://www.facebook.com/freewildhorses/photos/a.119795654746757/790049484388034?comment_id=790139601045689 https://www.facebook.com/freewildhorses/photos/a.119795654746757/790049484388034?comment_id=790139601045689 https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/pfbid02gahaqkhrgwtu2uumtxz7npp6rzwbkuviw3nszfktnjfs4kmlvza7w22bj4lsdwvcl?comment_id=10159767639123054&reply_comment_id=10159768252633054 https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/pfbid02gahaqkhrgwtu2uumtxz7npp6rzwbkuviw3nszfktnjfs4kmlvza7w22bj4lsdwvcl?comment_id=10159767639123054&reply_comment_id=10159768252633054 https://www.facebook.com/returntofreedom/posts/pfbid02gahaqkhrgwtu2uumtxz7npp6rzwbkuviw3nszfktnjfs4kmlvza7w22bj4lsdwvcl?comment_id=10159767639123054&reply_comment_id=10159768252633054 britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 237 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) agency’s persistent disregard for their ideas. though federal agencies must seek public input and document this process, agencies have long enjoyed a fair amount of judicial deference to interpret their own rules and regulations. even so, some advocacy organizations regularly take the blm to court, challenging it on humane treatment and other grounds and occasionally chalking up wins that hold the agency and roundup operators accountable to animal welfare regulations.94 overall, though, litigation has not altered the core of roundup practices. however, even unsuccessful litigation forces the blm to publicly justify disputed practices, such as the use of helicopters. litigation also ties up agency resources. laments one official regarding legal challenges of helicopter use: “blm has got to increase the tools in our toolbox to manage this. when we do try to do that, oftentimes litigation comes into play.”95 outside regulatory and legal arenas, campaigners work primarily to increase public awareness. wild horse photography, for example, relies on horses’ nonhuman charisma96 to publicize their plight. among wild horse advocates are skilled photographers who use their images to reveal two distinctive manifestations of society’s collective “learned invisibility”97 regarding multispecies interdependencies. images showing horses going about their lives on the range convey that they are unique individuals with distinctive personalities, interests, and interpersonal attachments to friends and family. empathetically showcasing horses inhabiting their homes allows wild horse fans and advocates who are unable to travel to see them to “put faces to the horses ‘whose freedom will be lost forever’”.98 photography and videography are also employed to monitor and document conditions during roundups and at holding facilities. given their intimate familiarity with individuals and family bands, photographers recount which horses were captured, or escaped, or were injured 94 see “owyhee complex wild horses”, wild horse education https://wildhorseeducation.org/ owyhee-complex-wild-horses/. 95 hottle, “wild horse gather concludes”. 96 we borrow this concept from lorimer, “nonhuman charisma”. 97 schlosberg, “environmental management”. 98 maffly, “onaqui wild horses”. https://wildhorseeducation.org/owyhee-complex-wild-horses/ https://wildhorseeducation.org/owyhee-complex-wild-horses/ 238 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) during helicopter runs into trap pens. they report on the conditions of individual horses as well as their collective health status when there is access to blm-contracted holding facilities. observer images and video footage from roundups also expose the violence of roundups and removals, showing the speed at which horses are chased into traps, acts of violence such as when foals are roped or injured, or times of panic as horses attempt to jump out of the trap corrals. moreover, the often poor technical quality of images produced at these events — grainy and blurry as a result of being shot from long distances — unwittingly reveals that public observers are kept too far from trap sites to observe the process clearly. organizationally more demanding forms of political mobilization such as direct action have been used only sparingly. prior to the 2021 sand wash basin roundup, advocates held a peaceful protest in denver where participants expressed hopes of “finally getting politicians to step forward and acknowledge that there’s something really wrong going on” with roundups.99 the onaqui herd roundup in 2021 likewise inspired organized protests, including a rally in salt lake city.100 unlike the well documented history of unlawful and frequently violent action by public lands ranchers against the blm and other federal offices and officials to protest federal land management policy, direct action to subvert or sabotage roundups by wild horse advocates has not been documented. as we have shown, anti-horse discourse disavows affect in its conception of the wild horse “overpopulation” problem, ignores contemporary acts of violence committed by public lands ranchers, and frequently denigrates advocates’ affective ways of knowing and relating to wild horses. in their struggle to balance attachment and detachment in formulating their own positions, advocates are understandably wary that their empathetic entanglement with wild horses will be weaponized against them. specifically, advocates fear that the 99 “colorado governor asks feds to hold off on planned wild horse roundup in sand wash basin”, cbs news colorado, 31 august 2021, https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/ jared-polis-wild-horse-roundup-sand-wash-basin-department-interior-bureau-of-landmanagement-deb-haaland-colorado/. 100 naumann, “born to be wild”. https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/jared-polis-wild-horse-roundup-sand-wash-basin-department-interior-bureau-of-land-management-deb-haaland-colorado/ https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/jared-polis-wild-horse-roundup-sand-wash-basin-department-interior-bureau-of-land-management-deb-haaland-colorado/ https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/jared-polis-wild-horse-roundup-sand-wash-basin-department-interior-bureau-of-land-management-deb-haaland-colorado/ britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 239 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) “emotional ecology”101 generated by grieving for horses they have known and cared for on the range is illegible to wildlife conservation and management bureaucracies. responses to this concern range from doubling down on affective attachments as a means to signal compassion for wild horses to foregoing, on tactical grounds, any outward display of emotion in public statements. some contend that only the detached bureaucratic style of relating “the facts”, as it were, has any hope of swaying policy makers. they urge others that when speaking to reporters “you have to act like a press secretary, not an advocate. no emotion. no crying. no naming the foals you love. you need to offer straightforward facts.”102 however, adopting the detached style of bureaucratic policymaking presupposes that public lands management governance is actually receptive to evidence rather than determined by the political influence of extractivism. there are scant indications to suggest this is the case. however, our data also reveal a more nuanced understanding of the nexus of the political function of emotion that does not ask advocates to surrender their affective commitments. wild horse tourism, for example, is understood by advocates to involve relating affectively to wild horses as representations of “pure americana, unbridled freedom, power, [and] determination”.103 these values serve as powerful symbols in american political rhetoric. they also undeniably have a dark provenance, intertwined as they are with the history of genocidal violence against indigenous human communities (and extermination campaigns directed against various nonhuman species). public lands wild horse activists, it should be acknowledged, are predominantly of euro-american descent. there is legitimate concern that white americans’ unreflected appeals to “old west” tropes, however well-intentioned, turn a blind eye to historical and contemporary patterns of colonial ecological violence against indigenous communities and cultures.104 yet, while they originate in america’s violent settler-colonial history, these values nonetheless 101 whitney, “tangled up in knots”. 102 eckhoff, “how to advocate effectively”. 103 andrea maki, “wild love preserve”, https://www.wildlovepreserve.org/. 104 bacon, “settler colonialism as eco-social structure”. https://www.wildlovepreserve.org/ 240 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) conjure a resonant sense of more-than-human belonging that wild horse advocates can use on the behalf of the horses. for example, advocates note that geographically accessible hmas like sand wash basin and onaqui mountain function as popular ecotourism destinations that entice people “from all over the country to visit, observe, and photograph” wild horses.105 such encounters hold enormous normative potential. notably, many visitors experience the horses, not as interchangeable members of an undifferentiated population, but as distinct individuals. repeat visitors in particular are attached to individual horses and their families, including named individuals whom they look forward to meeting again during future visits.106 rather than anonymous wild horses, they are nonhuman kin who inhabit a specific home range, like the salt wells creek stallion bubba and his band (fig. 1). bubba experienced roundups during his long life on the range. he was captured in 2021 and then released with select other stallions. he died of a catastrophic injury in august 2023, and the news travelled quickly around wild horse advocacy spaces, accompanied by expressions of grief from around the world; many advocates and fans noted with gratitude that he died in his home rather than in an off-range holding pen. iv. conclusion wild horse roundups and removals are sites of exclusion and violence as well as care and compassion. our analysis of the interplay between avowal and disavowal of emotion in these spaces reveals how distinctly gendered, mutually incompatible ways of knowing and managing wild horses strive to uphold as well as to subvert established power relations and hierarchies. the malthusian anxieties that mark wild horses as creatures endowed with, at best, a precarious claim to belonging on western us rangelands logically lead to their biopolitical treatment as expendable; if not, thanks to legal restrictions, as killable, then as detainable.107 thoughts and talk of killing, though, are never entirely absent from these fundamentally ex105 walker, “blm announces plans”. 106 naumann, “born to be wild”. 107 hunold and britton, “‘wild and free’”. britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 241 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) terminative contexts, fuelling as they do the imagination of some rangeland scientists and blm officials. however, the public lands management system’s massification of wild horses as marauding ecosystem destroyers has to contend with alternative affective logics and rationales that, via emotionally engaged storytelling about the lives and deaths of beloved nonhuman others, cultivate morethan-human empathy and care in the face of persistent systems of oppression. faced with logics and rationales of massification and feralization that undermine the legitimacy of the political figure of the wild horse and of the political figure of the wild horse advocate, citizen-observers of roundups and removals nevertheless persist in affirming relations of interspecies kinship between actual humans and horses. wild horse advocates are the first to concede the modesty of their accomplishments. thus, we must ask ourselves whether and in what ways empathetic entanglement with the lived experience of wild horses might actually reshape the future of wild horses on us public lands. in the short to medium term, focusing on movement building is likely a more promising strategy than hoping for immediate policy change. though affected publics often turn into advocates for nonviolent human-animal coexistence,108 human-animal studies literature suggests that affective enchantment alone does not suffice to secure abundant futures for all species.109 the present trajectory of public lands management, moreover, appears stacked against wild horse advocates. after all, rather than zeroing out marginally profitable public lands grazing leases, the blm is zeroing out wild horse herds in numerous hmas. advocates might take a small measure of comfort from knowing that the cultural impact of rendering visible otherwise unseen violence routinely inflicted on wild horses does not depend entirely on its ability to change policy. anti-horse discourse can disavow emotion in its understanding of the “overpopulation” problem, discount the violence of public lands ranching, and denigrate the affective relations of wild horse advocacy. what it cannot accomplish, however, is to squash the capacity of wild horses and 108 see sinha et al., “affective ethnographies of animals lives”. 109 see lien, “what’s love got to do with it?” 242 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) their human advocates to mount more-than-human campaigns of political resistance. for the foreseeable future, wild horse advocates, in their curious emotionality that so confounds rangeland scientists, will continue to be repulsed by so-called “win-win” proposals such as shooting wild horses and feeding their bodies to endangered california condors.110 none of this is to say that advocates are not justified in being concerned about the legibility of emotionally engaged storytelling to mainstream conservation science and policy audiences, particularly in bureaucratic settings. however, we caution that trading affective attachment and entangled empathy for bureaucratic rationality may be a short-sighted strategy, particularly in terms of attracting more supporters to wild horse preservation. when advocates attempt to translate their compassion for nonhuman others into “forms socially acceptable in the context of rational bureaucracy”, they risk obfuscating the values underpinning their commitments.111 as we have shown, massifying wild horses renders individual horses’ experiences invisible and the horses themselves ungrievable. emotional detachment of this sort serves to further claims that wild horses are threats to ecology and conservation interests by framing wild horses as less valuable inhabitants than other animals on the rangelands, which in turn makes them removable. what is more, purposeful emotional detachment from the experiences of wild horses, for the sake of appearing unbiased in policy arenas, exemplifies the irony of conservation: namely, that massification engenders precisely the disposability of nonhuman animals that makes conservation efforts necessary in the first place.112 in contrast, emotionally engaged storytelling about wild horses as individuals with subjective experiences worthy of empathy enriches not only conservation science and practice; it also exposes and re-politicizes the construction of nonhuman expendability and precarity by ostensibly rational, but routinely violent management practices. 110 danvir, “multiple-use management”. 111 whitney, “tangled up in knots”. 112 fraser-celin and hovorka, “compassionate conservation”. britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 243 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) acknowledgements the authors would like to thank ali kenner, jason lambacher, and the participants of drexel university’s center for science, technology and society works-in-progress seminar for their feedback on this project. we also thank heather hellyer for sharing hma data, and bubba for inspiration. works cited american wild horse campaign. “emergency roundups: necessary or just appeasing ranchers?” 1 september, 2020. https:// americanwildhorsecampaign.org/ media/emergency-roundupsnecessary-or-just-appeasing-ranchers. american wild horse campaign. “roundup report: barren valley complex ends with 1,672 mustangs captured, 27 dead.” november 2021. https://www. americanwildhorsecampaign.org/ media/roundup-report-barrenvalley-complex-ends-1672-mustangscaptured-27-dead. american wild horse campaign. “roundup report: red desert complex, wy.” november 2020. https:// americanwildhorsecampaign.org/ media/roundup-report-red-desertcomplex-wy-2020. anderson, dylan. “branded: first 72 horses from last year’s record sand wash basin roundup get new homes.” post independent, 15 march 2022. https://www.postindependent.com/ news/branded-first-72-horses-fromlast-years-record-sand-wash-basinroundup-get-new-homes/. bacon, j. m. “settler colonialism as ecosocial structure and the production of colonial ecological violence.” environmental sociology 5, no. 1 (2019): 59–69. https://doi.org/gh8jn6. beever, erik a., lynn huntsinger, and steven l. petersen. “conservation challenges emerging from freeroaming horse management: a vexing social-ecological mismatch.” biological conservation 226 (2018): 321–328. https://doi.org/gfd6j8. bekoff, marc and jessica pierce. wild justice: the moral lives of animals. chicago: the university of chicago press, 2009. bergstrom, bradley j., lily c. arias, ana d. davidson, adam w. ferguson, lynda a. randa, and steven r. sheffield. “license to kill: reforming federal wildlife control to restore biodiversity and ecosystem function.” conservation letters 7, no. 2 (2014): 131–42. https://doi.org/gfkktq. bhattacharyya, jonaki, d. scott slocombe, and stephen d. murphy. “the ‘wild’ or ‘feral’ distraction: effects of cultural understandings on management controversy over free-ranging horses (equus ferus caballus).” human ecology 39, no. 5 (2011): 613–25. https://doi.org/bn2sck. bhattacharyya, jonaki and brendon m. h. larson. “the need for indigenous voices in discourse about introduced species: insights from a controversy over wild horses.” environmental values 23, no. 6 (2014): 663–84. https://doi.org/gnkd59. birke, lynda. “intimate familiarities? feminism and human-animal studies.” society & animals 10, no. 4 (2002): 429–36. https://doi.org/fvpfcn. https://americanwildhorsecampaign.org/media/emergency-roundups-necessary-or-just-appeasing-ranchers https://americanwildhorsecampaign.org/media/emergency-roundups-necessary-or-just-appeasing-ranchers https://americanwildhorsecampaign.org/media/emergency-roundups-necessary-or-just-appeasing-ranchers https://americanwildhorsecampaign.org/media/emergency-roundups-necessary-or-just-appeasing-ranchers https://www.americanwildhorsecampaign.org/media/roundup-report-barren-valley-complex-ends-1672-mustangs-captured-27-dead https://www.americanwildhorsecampaign.org/media/roundup-report-barren-valley-complex-ends-1672-mustangs-captured-27-dead https://www.americanwildhorsecampaign.org/media/roundup-report-barren-valley-complex-ends-1672-mustangs-captured-27-dead https://www.americanwildhorsecampaign.org/media/roundup-report-barren-valley-complex-ends-1672-mustangs-captured-27-dead https://www.americanwildhorsecampaign.org/media/roundup-report-barren-valley-complex-ends-1672-mustangs-captured-27-dead https://americanwildhorsecampaign.org/media/roundup-report-red-desert-complex-wy-2020 https://americanwildhorsecampaign.org/media/roundup-report-red-desert-complex-wy-2020 https://americanwildhorsecampaign.org/media/roundup-report-red-desert-complex-wy-2020 https://americanwildhorsecampaign.org/media/roundup-report-red-desert-complex-wy-2020 https://www.postindependent.com/news/branded-first-72-horses-from-last-years-record-sand-wash-basin-roundup-get-new-homes/ https://www.postindependent.com/news/branded-first-72-horses-from-last-years-record-sand-wash-basin-roundup-get-new-homes/ https://www.postindependent.com/news/branded-first-72-horses-from-last-years-record-sand-wash-basin-roundup-get-new-homes/ https://www.postindependent.com/news/branded-first-72-horses-from-last-years-record-sand-wash-basin-roundup-get-new-homes/ https://doi.org/gh8jn6 https://doi.org/gfd6j8 https://doi.org/gfkktq https://doi.org/bn2sck https://doi.org/gnkd59 https://doi.org/fvpfcn 244 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) blattner, charlotte e., sue donaldon, and ryan wilcox. “animal agency in community: a multispecies ethnography of vine sanctuary.” politics and animals 6 (2020): 1–22. https://journals.lub.lu.se/ pa/article/view/19024. blue, gwendolyn. “public attunement with more-than-human others: witnessing the life and death of bear 71.” geohumanities 2, no. 1 (2016): 42–57. https://doi.org/gmmg47. boyce, paul n., jacob d. hennig, ryan k. brook, and philip d. mcloughlin. “causes and consequences of lags in basic and applied research into feral wildlife ecology: the case for feral horses.” basic and applied ecology 53 (2021):154–63. https://doi.org/kqfq. braun, virginia and victoria clarke. “using thematic analysis in psychology.” qualitative research in psychology 3, no. 2 (2006): 77–101. https://doi. org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa. braun, virginia and victoria clarke. thematic analysis: a practical guide. thousand oaks, ca: sage, 2021. brown, jennifer. “cañon city facility where 145 wild horses died is shorttaffed, in violation of federal policies, report finds.” the colorado sun, 27 may 2022. https://coloradosun. com/2022/05/27/wild-horses-equineflu-outbreak/. bruckner, heide k., annalisa colombino, and ulrich ermann. “naturecultures and the affective (dis)entanglements of happy meat.” agriculture and human values 36 (2019): 35–47. https://doi.org/kpwf. candea, matei. “‘i fell in love with carlos the meerkat’: engagement and detachment in human–animal relations.” american ethnologist 37, no. 2 (2010): 241–58. https://doi.org/btjfrj. cawley, r. mcgreggor. federal land, western anger: the sagebrush rebellion and environmental politics. lawrence, ks: university press of kansas, 1993. celermajer, danielle. “the fate of the illegible animal: the case of the australian wild donkey.” animal studies journal 8, no. 2 (2019): 229–58. http:// doi.org/10.14453/asj.v8i2.14. chast, noah. “blm rounds up, removes hundreds of wild horses in eastern oregon, to be put up for adoption.” ktvz 21, 31 august 2021. https://ktvz. com/news/wildlife/2021/08/31/blmrounds-up-removes-hundreds-of-wildhorses-in-eastern-oregon-to-be-putup-for-adoption/. clancy, cara l. “more-than-human territoriality: the contested spaces and beastly places of canada geese in europe’s largest urban wetland.” urban geography (2021). https://doi.org /10.1080/02723638.2021.1907972. clancy, cara l., laura m. kubasiewicz, zoe raw, and fiona cooke. “science and knowledge of free-roaming donkeys — a critical review.” journal of wildlife management 85, no. 6 (2021): 1200–13. https://doi.org/10.1002/ jwmg.22090. connors, john patrick and anne short gianotti. “becoming killable: whitetailed deer management and the production of overabundance in the blue hills.” urban geography (2021). https://doi.org/gqjjsn. coulter, kendra. “challenging subjects: towards ethnographic analyses of animals.” journal for the anthropology of north america 21, no. 2 (2018): 58–71. https://doi.org/10.1002/nad.12075. creswell, john w. research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches, 4th ed. thousand oaks, ca: sage, 2015. danvir, rick e. “multiple-use management of western u.s. rangelands: wild horses, wildlife, and livestock.” human–wildlife interactions 12, no. 1 (2018): article 4. https://doi. org/10.26077/cz0b-6261. https://journals.lub.lu.se/pa/article/view/19024 https://journals.lub.lu.se/pa/article/view/19024 https://doi.org/gmmg47 https://doi.org/kqfq https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa https://doi.org/10.1191/1478088706qp063oa https://coloradosun.com/2022/05/27/wild-horses-equine-flu-outbreak/ https://coloradosun.com/2022/05/27/wild-horses-equine-flu-outbreak/ https://coloradosun.com/2022/05/27/wild-horses-equine-flu-outbreak/ https://doi.org/kpwf https://doi.org/btjfrj http://doi.org/10.14453/asj.v8i2.14 http://doi.org/10.14453/asj.v8i2.14 https://ktvz.com/news/wildlife/2021/08/31/blm-rounds-up-removes-hundreds-of-wild-horses-in-eastern-oregon-to-be-put-up-for-adoption/ https://ktvz.com/news/wildlife/2021/08/31/blm-rounds-up-removes-hundreds-of-wild-horses-in-eastern-oregon-to-be-put-up-for-adoption/ https://ktvz.com/news/wildlife/2021/08/31/blm-rounds-up-removes-hundreds-of-wild-horses-in-eastern-oregon-to-be-put-up-for-adoption/ https://ktvz.com/news/wildlife/2021/08/31/blm-rounds-up-removes-hundreds-of-wild-horses-in-eastern-oregon-to-be-put-up-for-adoption/ https://ktvz.com/news/wildlife/2021/08/31/blm-rounds-up-removes-hundreds-of-wild-horses-in-eastern-oregon-to-be-put-up-for-adoption/ https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2021.1907972 https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2021.1907972 https://doi.org/10.1002/jwmg.22090 https://doi.org/10.1002/jwmg.22090 https://doi.org/gqjjsn https://doi.org/10.1002/nad.12075 https://doi.org/10.26077/cz0b-6261 https://doi.org/10.26077/cz0b-6261 britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 245 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) davies, kirk w. and chad s. boyd. “ecological effects of free-roaming horses in north american rangelands.” bioscience 69, no. 7 (2019): 558–65. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biz060. donovan, josephine. “feminism and the treatment of animals: from care to dialogue.” signs 31, no. 2 (2006): 305–29. https://doi.org/10.1086/491750. draplin, derek. “federal land managers plan to round up 6,000 wild horses due to drought, wildfires.” the center square, 4 august 2021. https://www. thecentersquare.com/colorado/ article_20a63214-f565-11eb-8f2cf3499f6aba70.html. dryzek, john s., david downes, christian hunold, and david schlosberg, with hans-kristian hernes. green states and social movements: environmentalism in the united states, united kingdom, norway, and germany. oxford: oxford university press, 2003. duffy, brendan. “barren valley gather ea comes and goes, no news release.” western horse watchers association, 30 june 2020. https://westernhorsewatchers. com/2020/06/30/barren-valley-gatherea-comes-and-goes-no-news-release/. duffy, brendan. “sheepshead wild horses get short end of stick.” western horse watchers association, 13 july 2020. https://westernhorsewatchers. com/2020/07/13/sheepshead-wildhorses-get-short-end-of-stick/. eckhoff, vickery. “how to advocate effectively for wild horses with the media.” the cloud foundation, 10 september 2021. https://www.thecloudfoundation. org/current-events/2021/9/10/how-toadvocate-effectively-for-wild-horseswith-the-media. fike, ellen. “more horses die of strangles at wheatland facility, more than half of population ‘impacted’.” cowboy state daily, 12 may 2022. https:// cowboystatedaily.com/2022/05/12/ more-horses-die-of-strangles-atwheatland-facility-more-than-half-ofall-population-impacted/. fraser-celin, valli-laurente, and alice j. hovorka. “compassionate conservation: exploring the lives of african wild dogs (lycaon pictus) in botswana.” animals 9, no. 1 (2019): article 16. https://doi. org/10.3390/ani9010016. garcia, nelson. “helicopters drive wild horses into traps in northwest colorado.” 9news, 5 september 2021. https://www.9news.com/article/news/ local/colorado-news/73-dda83c3b09d9-430c-943d-e44f4ae59c11. gillespie, kathryn. “witnessing animal others: bearing witness, grief, and the political function of emotion.” hypatia 31, no. 3 (2016): 572–88. https://doi. org/10.1111/hypa.12261. goodland, marianne. “wild horse advocates call for help from bennet, hickenlooper and polis to stop ‘inhumane’ roundup.” colorado politics, 26 august 2021. https:// www.coloradopolitics.com/news/ article_a6529758-069b-11ec-9929db95e3d9dc44.html greenhough, beth and emma roe. “attuning to laboratory animals and telling stories: learning animal geography skills from animal technologists.” environment and planning d: society and space 37, no. 2 (2019): 367–84. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263775818807720. gruen, lori. entangled empathy: an alternative ethic for our relationship with animals. new york: lantern books, 2015. gruenberg, bonnie u. the wild horse dilemma: conflicts and controversies of the atlantic coast herds. new providence, pa: quagga press, 2015. guest, greg, kathleen m. macqueen, and emily e. namey. applied thematic analysis. thousand oaks, ca: sage, 2012. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biz060 https://doi.org/10.1086/491750 https://www.thecentersquare.com/colorado/article_20a63214-f565-11eb-8f2c-f3499f6aba70.html https://www.thecentersquare.com/colorado/article_20a63214-f565-11eb-8f2c-f3499f6aba70.html https://www.thecentersquare.com/colorado/article_20a63214-f565-11eb-8f2c-f3499f6aba70.html https://www.thecentersquare.com/colorado/article_20a63214-f565-11eb-8f2c-f3499f6aba70.html https://westernhorsewatchers.com/2020/06/30/barren-valley-gather-ea-comes-and-goes-no-news-release/ https://westernhorsewatchers.com/2020/06/30/barren-valley-gather-ea-comes-and-goes-no-news-release/ https://westernhorsewatchers.com/2020/06/30/barren-valley-gather-ea-comes-and-goes-no-news-release/ https://westernhorsewatchers.com/2020/07/13/sheepshead-wild-horses-get-short-end-of-stick/ https://westernhorsewatchers.com/2020/07/13/sheepshead-wild-horses-get-short-end-of-stick/ https://westernhorsewatchers.com/2020/07/13/sheepshead-wild-horses-get-short-end-of-stick/ https://www.thecloudfoundation.org/current-events/2021/9/10/how-to-advocate-effectively-for-wild-horses-with-the-media https://www.thecloudfoundation.org/current-events/2021/9/10/how-to-advocate-effectively-for-wild-horses-with-the-media https://www.thecloudfoundation.org/current-events/2021/9/10/how-to-advocate-effectively-for-wild-horses-with-the-media https://www.thecloudfoundation.org/current-events/2021/9/10/how-to-advocate-effectively-for-wild-horses-with-the-media https://cowboystatedaily.com/2022/05/12/more-horses-die-of-strangles-at-wheatland-facility-more-than-half-of-all-population-impacted/ https://cowboystatedaily.com/2022/05/12/more-horses-die-of-strangles-at-wheatland-facility-more-than-half-of-all-population-impacted/ https://cowboystatedaily.com/2022/05/12/more-horses-die-of-strangles-at-wheatland-facility-more-than-half-of-all-population-impacted/ https://cowboystatedaily.com/2022/05/12/more-horses-die-of-strangles-at-wheatland-facility-more-than-half-of-all-population-impacted/ https://cowboystatedaily.com/2022/05/12/more-horses-die-of-strangles-at-wheatland-facility-more-than-half-of-all-population-impacted/ https://doi.org/10.3390/ani9010016 https://doi.org/10.3390/ani9010016 https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/colorado-news/73-dda83c3b-09d9-430c-943d-e44f4ae59c11 https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/colorado-news/73-dda83c3b-09d9-430c-943d-e44f4ae59c11 https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/colorado-news/73-dda83c3b-09d9-430c-943d-e44f4ae59c11 https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12261 https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12261 https://www.coloradopolitics.com/news/article_a6529758-069b-11ec-9929-db95e3d9dc44.html https://www.coloradopolitics.com/news/article_a6529758-069b-11ec-9929-db95e3d9dc44.html https://www.coloradopolitics.com/news/article_a6529758-069b-11ec-9929-db95e3d9dc44.html https://www.coloradopolitics.com/news/article_a6529758-069b-11ec-9929-db95e3d9dc44.html https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818807720 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775818807720 246 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) haile, james, duane g. froese, ross d. e. macphee, richard g. roberts, lee j. arnold, alberto v. reyes, morten rasmussen, rasmus nielsen, barry w. brook, simon robinson, martina demuro, m. thomas p. gilbert, kasper munch, jeremy j. austin, alan cooper, ian barnes, per möller, and eske willerslev. “ancient dna reveals late survival of mammoth and horse in interior alaska.” pnas, 106, no. 52 (2009): 22352–57. https://doi. org/10.1073/pnas.0912510106. hamilton, lindsay and nik taylor. ethnography after humanism: power, politics, and method in multispecies research. london: palgrave macmillan, 2017. hampton, stephen carr. “more range wars and white privilege.” memories of the people, 13 january 2016. https:// memoriesofthepeople.wordpress. com/2016/01/04/more-range-wars-andwhite-privilege/. hessami, mateen a., ella bowles, jesse n. popp, and adam t. ford. “indigenizing the north american model of wildlife conservation.” facets 6, no. 1 (2021): 1285–1306. https://doi.org/gmgvbx. high country news. sagebrush rebellion: evolution of a movement. edited by marshall swearingen. paonia, ca: high country news, 2016. hill, kristine, michelle szydlowski, sarah oxley heaney, and debbie busby. “uncivilized behaviors: how humans wield ‘feral’ to assert power (and control) over other species.” society & animals (2022). https://doi. org/10.1163/15685306-bja10088. hooper, jes, thomas aiello, kristine hill, michelle szydlowski, and sarah oxley heaney. “nothing more than ‘anti-cull activists’: accusations of bias and the politics of research that advocates for non-human animals.” animal studies journal 12, no. 1 (2023): 70–95. http://doi. org/10.14453/asj/v12i1.6. hottle, garrett. “wild horse gather concludes in challis.” kmvt 11, 11 november 2019. https://www.kmvt. com/content/news/wild-horse-gatherconcludes-in-challis--564781112.html. hunold, christian and jennifer l. britton. “‘wild and free’ in climate-challenged landscapes: negotiating the mobilities of free-roaming horses in the american west.” borderlands 21, no. 1 (2022): 67–89. https://doi.org/10.21307/ borderlands-2022-004. john, kelsey dayle. “animal colonialism: illustrating intersections between animal studies and settler colonial studies through diné horsemanship.” humanimalia 10, no. 2 (2019): 42–68. https://doi.org/10.52537/ humanimalia.9501. kret, mariska e., jorg j. m. massen, and frans b. m. de waal. “my fear is not, and never will be, your fear: on emotions and feelings in animals.” affective science 3 (2022): 182–89. https://doi. org/gqkjfq. laconte, john. “largest wild horse roundup in colorado history underway.” summit daily, 7 august 2021. https://www.summitdaily.com/ news/largest-wild-horse-roundup-incolorado-history-underway/. lakoff, george. “why it matters how we frame the environment.” environmental communication 4, no. 1 (2010): 70–81. https://doi. org/10.1080/17524030903529749. leigh, laura. “letter to blm director neil kornze.” wild horse education, 19 august 2015. https://wildhorseeducation. files.wordpress.com/2015/08/ imminentdanger.pdf. lien, marianne e. “what’s love got to do with it? care, curiosity, and commitment in ethnography beyond the human.” environmental humanities 14, no. 2 (2022): 457–74. https://doi. org/10.1215/22011919-9712511. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0912510106 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0912510106 https://memoriesofthepeople.wordpress.com/2016/01/04/more-range-wars-and-white-privilege/ https://memoriesofthepeople.wordpress.com/2016/01/04/more-range-wars-and-white-privilege/ https://memoriesofthepeople.wordpress.com/2016/01/04/more-range-wars-and-white-privilege/ https://memoriesofthepeople.wordpress.com/2016/01/04/more-range-wars-and-white-privilege/ https://doi.org/gmgvbx https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-bja10088 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-bja10088 http://doi.org/10.14453/asj/v12i1.6 http://doi.org/10.14453/asj/v12i1.6 https://www.kmvt.com/content/news/wild-horse-gather-concludes-in-challis--564781112.html https://www.kmvt.com/content/news/wild-horse-gather-concludes-in-challis--564781112.html https://www.kmvt.com/content/news/wild-horse-gather-concludes-in-challis--564781112.html https://doi.org/10.21307/borderlands-2022-004 https://doi.org/10.21307/borderlands-2022-004 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9501 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9501 https://doi.org/gqkjfq https://doi.org/gqkjfq https://www.summitdaily.com/news/largest-wild-horse-roundup-in-colorado-history-underway/ https://www.summitdaily.com/news/largest-wild-horse-roundup-in-colorado-history-underway/ https://www.summitdaily.com/news/largest-wild-horse-roundup-in-colorado-history-underway/ https://doi.org/10.1080/17524030903529749 https://doi.org/10.1080/17524030903529749 https://wildhorseeducation.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/imminentdanger.pdf https://wildhorseeducation.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/imminentdanger.pdf https://wildhorseeducation.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/imminentdanger.pdf https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9712511 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9712511 britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals | 247 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) lorimer, jamie. “nonhuman charisma.” environment and planning d: society and space 25, no. 5 (2007): 911–32. https://doi.org/10.1068/d71j. lundgren, erik j., daniel ramp, juliet c. stromberg, jianguo wu, nathan c. nieto, martin sluk, karla t. moeller, and arian d. wallach. “equids engineer desert water availability.” science 372, no. 6541 (2021): 491–95. https://doi.org/f9hj. maffly, brian. “onaqui wild horses pulled from the range.” the salt lake tribune, 17 july 2021. https://www.sltrib.com/ news/environment/2021/07/17/onaquiwild-horses-pulled/. martin, jeff vance, kathleen epstein, nicolas bergmann, adrianne c. kroepsch, hannah gosnell, and paul robbins. “revisiting and revitalizing political ecology in the american west.” geoforum 107 (2019): 227–30. https://doi. org/gnmv9m. mazhary, hibba. “distancing animal death: geographies of killing and making killable.” geography compass 15, no. 7 (2021): e12582. https://doi.org/grvvsf. mccubbin, sandra g. and lauren e. van patter. “trophy hunters & crazy cat ladies: exploring cats and conservation in north america and southern africa through intersectionality.” gender, place & culture 28, no. 9 (2021): 1327–50. https://doi.org/kpwt. mendonça, renata s., pandora pinto, tamao maeda, sota inoue, monamia ringhofer, shinya yamamoto, and satoshi hirata. “population characteristics of feral horses impacted by anthropogenic factors and their management implications.” frontiers in ecology and evolution 10 (2022). https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2022.848741. meijer, eva. when animals speak: toward an interspecies democracy. new york: nyu press, 2019. milton, kay. loving nature: towards an ecology of emotion. london: routledge, 2002. morales, nia, jordan lee, milton newberry, and karen bailey. “redefining american conservation for equitable and inclusive social-environmental management.” ecological applications 33, no. 1 (2023): e2749. https://doi. org/10.1002/eap.2749. naumann, alan. “born to be wild: animal advocates are pushing back against the roundup of utah’s onaqui wild horse herd.” salt lake city weekly, 25 august 2021. https://www.cityweekly.net/utah/ born-to-be-wild/content?oid=17211146. norris, keith a. “a review of contemporary u.s. wild horse and burro management policies relative to desired management outcomes.” human–wildlife interactions 12, no. 1 (2018): article 5. https://doi. org/10.26077/p9b6-6375. philipps, dave. “a mustang crisis looms in the west.” the new york times, 22 march 2020. https://www.nytimes. com/2020/03/22/us/mustang-crisiswest.html. ramp, daniel and marc bekoff. “compassion as a practical and evolved ethic for conservation.” bioscience 65, no. 3 (2015): 323–27. https://doi. org/10.1093/biosci/biu223. rizzolo, jessica bell and gay bradshaw. “nonhuman animal nations: transforming conservation into wildlife self-determination.” society & animals 29, no. 4 (2019): 393–413. https://doi. org/10.1163/15685306-00001679. sagoff, mark. “fact and value in invasion biology.” conservation biology 34, no. 3 (2020): 581–88. https://doi.org/10.1111/ cobi.13440. scasta, j. derek., jacob d. hennig, and jeffrey l. beck. “framing contemporary u.s. wild horse and burro management processes in a dynamic ecological, sociological, and political environment.” human–wildlife interactions 12, no. 1 (2018): article 6. https://doi. org/10.26077/2fhw-fz24. https://doi.org/10.1068/d71j https://doi.org/f9hj https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2021/07/17/onaqui-wild-horses-pulled/ https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2021/07/17/onaqui-wild-horses-pulled/ https://www.sltrib.com/news/environment/2021/07/17/onaqui-wild-horses-pulled/ https://doi.org/gnmv9m https://doi.org/gnmv9m https://doi.org/grvvsf https://doi.org/kpwt https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2022.848741 https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2749 https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.2749 https://www.cityweekly.net/utah/born-to-be-wild/content?oid=17211146 https://www.cityweekly.net/utah/born-to-be-wild/content?oid=17211146 https://doi.org/10.26077/p9b6-6375 https://doi.org/10.26077/p9b6-6375 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/us/mustang-crisis-west.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/us/mustang-crisis-west.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/22/us/mustang-crisis-west.html https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biu223 https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biu223 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-00001679 https://doi.org/10.1163/15685306-00001679 https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13440 https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13440 https://doi.org/10.26077/2fhw-fz24 https://doi.org/10.26077/2fhw-fz24 248 | britton et al., wild horse roundups and removals humanimalia 14.1 (2023) schlosberg, david. “environmental management in the anthropocene.” in the oxford handbook of environmental political theory, edited by teena gabrielson, cheryl hall, john meyer, and david schlosberg, 193–208. oxford: oxford university press, 2016. sinha, anindya, anmol chowdhury, nitesh s. anchan, and maan barua. “affective ethnographies of animal lives.” in a research agenda for animal geography, edited by alice hovorka, sandra mccubbin, and lauren van patter, 129–46. cheltenham, uk: edward elgar, 2021. https://doi.org/kpx5. sonner, scott. “us plans more wild horse roundups this year than ever before.” the associated press, 26 january 2022. https://apnews.com/article/e47f7353e4 ee89c41a0400d31360c47b. sutton, zoei and nik taylor. “managing the borders: static/dynamic nature and the ‘management’ of ‘problem’ species.” parallax 25, no. 4 (2019): 379–94. https:// doi.org/kpxd. taylor, nik and heather fraser. “the cow project: analytical and representational dilemmas of dairy farmers’ conceptions of cruelty and kindness.” animal studies journal 8, no. 2 (2019): 133–52. http://doi.org/10.14453/ asj.v8i2.10. walker, carol j. “blm announces plans to destroy the onaqui mountain wild horse herd in 2019.” wild hoofbeats, 15 december 2018. https:// www.wildhoofbeats.com/blog/blmannounces-plans-to-destroy-the-onaquimountain-wild-horse-herd-in-2019. wallace, zach p., ryan m. nielson, dale w. stahlecker, guy t. didonato, megan b. ruehmann, and jeffrey cole. “an abundance estimate of free-roaming horses on the navajo nation.” rangeland ecology & management 74 (2021): 100–109. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. rama.2020.10.003. wallach, arian d., marc bekoff, chelsea batavia, michael paul nelson, and daniel ramp. “summoning compassion to address the challenges of conservation.” conservation biology, 32, no. 6 (2018): 1255–65. https://doi. org/10.1111/cobi.13126. wallach, arian d., erick lundgren, chelsea batavia, michael paul nelson, esty yanco, wayne l. linklater, scott p. carroll, danielle celermajer, kate j. brandis, jamie steer, and daniel ramp. “when all life counts in conservation.” conservation biology, 34, no. 4 (2020): 997–1007. https://doi.org/10.1111/ cobi.13447. wallach, arian d., chelsea batavia, marc bekoff, shelley alexander, liv baker, dror ben-ami, louise boronyak, et al. “recognizing animal personhood in compassionate conservation.” conservation biology, 34, no. 5 (2020): 1097–1106. https://doi.org/10.1111/ cobi.13494. whitney, kristoffer. “tangled up in knots: an emotional ecology of field science.” emotion, space and society 6 (2013): 100–107. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. emospa.2011.10.003. wiles, tay and jonathan thompson, “who’s who inside and on the outskirts of the malheur occupation.” high country news, 11 january 2016. https:// www.hcn.org/articles/whos-who-atthe-oregon-standoff-malhuer-bundy. williams, wendy. “the secret lives of horses.” scientific american 313, no. 4 (2015): 76–79. https://doi.org/10.1038/ scientificamerican1015-76. youatt, rafi. “interspecies politics and the global rat: ecology, extermination, experiment.” review of international studies 49, no. 2 (2023): 241–57. https:// doi.org/gsjs9r. https://doi.org/kpx5 https://apnews.com/article/e47f7353e4ee89c41a0400d31360c47b https://apnews.com/article/e47f7353e4ee89c41a0400d31360c47b https://doi.org/kpxd https://doi.org/kpxd http://doi.org/10.14453/asj.v8i2.10 http://doi.org/10.14453/asj.v8i2.10 https://www.wildhoofbeats.com/blog/blm-announces-plans-to-destroy-the-onaqui-mountain-wild-horse-herd-in-2019 https://www.wildhoofbeats.com/blog/blm-announces-plans-to-destroy-the-onaqui-mountain-wild-horse-herd-in-2019 https://www.wildhoofbeats.com/blog/blm-announces-plans-to-destroy-the-onaqui-mountain-wild-horse-herd-in-2019 https://www.wildhoofbeats.com/blog/blm-announces-plans-to-destroy-the-onaqui-mountain-wild-horse-herd-in-2019 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rama.2020.10.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rama.2020.10.003 https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13126 https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13126 https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13447 https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13447 https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13494 https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13494 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2011.10.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2011.10.003 https://www.hcn.org/articles/whos-who-at-the-oregon-standoff-malhuer-bundy https://www.hcn.org/articles/whos-who-at-the-oregon-standoff-malhuer-bundy https://www.hcn.org/articles/whos-who-at-the-oregon-standoff-malhuer-bundy https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1015-76 https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1015-76 https://doi.org/gsjs9r https://doi.org/gsjs9r _heading=h.2et92p0 _heading=h.za4hrp746d9 _heading=h.1fob9te _heading=h.3znysh7 elliott, review of quinn when vegans are monstrous alba elliott review of: emelia quinn, reading veganism: the monstrous vegan, 1818 to present. oxford english monographs. oxford: oxford university press, 2021. ix, 188 pp. £65.00 (hb). alba elliott is a phd candidate in the department of romance languages and literatures at harvard university. email: albaelliott@g.harvard.edu book review mailto:albaelliott@g.harvard.edu to many audiences the figure of the vegan stands as a moralizing, absolute, and ethically narrow-minded individual seeking to impose a doctrine on society writ large. in reading veganism: the monstrous vegan, 1818 to present, emelia quinn delves into this abhorrence for veganism, analysing representations of what she terms the “monstrous vegan” in literature. quinn’s task is to recuperate these monsters. taking frankenstein’s monster as the prototype, she theorizes monstrous veganism as imperfect, campy, and generative. working with a corpus of anglophone texts from 1818 to the present, quinn explores four key characteristics embodied by monstrous vegan characters. the monstrous vegans she identifies do not eat animals, “an abstinence that generates a seemingly inexplicable anxiety in those who encounter them” (3). they are hybrid creatures made of both human and nonhuman parts, “destabilizing species boundaries” (3). they come into existence outside of heterosexual reproduction, “the product of male acts of creation” (3). finally, they are “intimately connected to acts of writing and literary connection” (3). despite this schematization this is not an exhaustive study. quinn’s goal is rather to trace the many connections between literature’s monstrous vegan characters, and she does so with a flexibility that enacts her own self-conscious refusal of vegan ethical rigidity. against a vision of veganism as a logically and morally sound personal commitment, quinn conceptualizes it as “a state of strategic insufficiency that aspires towards a pragmatic model of utopian thought” (8). she embraces monstrosity and failure in order to create space for the imperfection of vegan identities. indeed, quinn avoids exclusively focusing on vegans and vegetarian characters that are favourably written. refusing to oversimplify, quinn engages in close readings that deconstruct the myth of the perfect, abstinent vegan. although reading veganism is positioned primarily within the field of vegan theory, quinn connects this emergent field with animal studies, food studies, queer theory, ecocriticism, and postcolonialism, an engagement that she mirrors by deftly manoeuvring between diverse theoretical thinkers. these range from carol j. adams’s work copyright © 2023 alba elliott this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 223–229. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.12319 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.12319 elliott, review of quinn | 225 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) on the feminist-vegan in her field-defining the sexual politics of meat to jacques derrida’s posthumous the animal that therefore i am (2008), from which quinn derives the idea that vegetarianism is imperfect, “failing to escape […] sacrificial structures” (15). yet quinn also challenges derrida’s argument that vegetarianism (and by extension veganism as a utopian vision of vegetarianism) creates an “illusory sense of freedom from complicity” that masks ongoing participation in the oppression of women and non-human animals (15). she argues instead that “veganism is messier and further reaching than that; an entanglement of identity, practice, and ethics that refuses to sanction the carnivorous human subject” (5). quinn argues that neither vegan nor carnist identities can be understood as stable or secure. to do so, she builds on judith butler’s work on terms such as “queer” that refuse substantive and rigid definition, as well as adapting susan sontag’s theory of camp to introduce the re-invigorating potential of vegan camp. quinn’s reference to “entanglement” above also recalls philosopher lori gruen’s entangled empathy: an alternative ethic for our relationships with animals (2015). according to gruen, we need to recognize our existing entanglements with the nonhuman world and respond with empathy in order to reach more ethical decisions and practices. as quinn argues, the construction of vegan identities that are purportedly ethically superior conceals the implicit failures in veganism and provokes anxiety at points where these failures are exposed. it is important to note, though, that quinn’s recognition of veganism’s imperfections — its entanglement with and inextricable relation to multiple forms of animal exploitation — does not ultimately capitulate to a quietist futility. quinn wishes to emphasize that veganism does not escape or transcend ethical dilemmas, that ethics is always encountered in the enactment and performance of vegan choices. reading veganism is structured in two parts. the first part identifies the prototype of the monstrous vegan and its implications, and the second part offers ways of engaging with monstrous vegan figures in a reparative manner. the first chapter of the book takes mary shelley’s frankenstein (1818) as the origin of the monstrous humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 226 | elliott, review of quinn vegan, arguing that the creature “reflects the ambivalence, contradictions and anxieties that cluster around vegan modes of being” (40). the creature displays an inconsistent morality that oscillates from a self-reported diet of nuts, roots, and berries that avoids animal exploitation, to the murders that he commits and his “inability to see the cow as a fellow sentient being” (41–42). the creature’s rejection of meat is therefore ambivalent at best, characterized by “murderous actions and pacifist words” (59) that fail to live up to any ideal of moral purity — a failure that is crucial to quinn’s theorizing of vegan identity. in chapter two, quinn explores the relationship between sexual and alimentary desire in relation to monstrous futurity in h. g. wells’s the island of doctor moreau (1896) and the time machine (1895), in which veganism is an “ethical abstraction” that “is seen to result in a failure to acknowledge the reality of human desires” (61). indeed, the monstrosity of wells’s vegetarian characters is “engendered by the failures and inconsistencies of their meat-free diets” (63). in the island of doctor moreau, these characters evoke both “anxiety and utopian aspiration” (63). wells’s monstrous vegan figures are “situated between the present and the future, as a looming spectre of evolutionary transformation” (88). the inconsistencies and repression associated with wells’s vegan and vegetarian characters contribute to their monstrosity, as he posits the failure of both a discursively imposed and a genetically bred veganism that constitute a “degeneration” (81). in the third chapter, quinn argues that margaret atwood’s maddadam trilogy (2003–2013) aligns with derrida’s “critique of vegetarianism as promoting only an illusion of ‘good conscience’” (170). quinn argues that vegan monsters in atwood’s work are “overdetermined literary constructions [that] signal the impossibility of connecting to a ‘pure’ or inherent vegan identity” (89), rendering veganism “a monstrous pretence of innocence that seeks to absent itself from late-capitalist structures” (115). it is precisely this purported distance from late capitalist exploitative structures of gender, race, and species that quinn reframes, noting that entanglement and complicity are inescapable in spite of vegans’ best efforts. elliott, review of quinn | 227 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) in the second part of her book, quinn responds to the impossibility of a “pure” vegan identity. arguing that veganism must be “fragmentary and hybrid” (90), she frames it as a performative practice in much the same manner as meat-eating is. she argues: “vegan performativity [is] a mode of species trouble that challenges the supposed naturalness of omnivorous appetite” (119). quinn follows this line of argument in chapter four, where she turns her focus towards j. m. coetzee’s elizabeth costello (2003). much has been written about coetzee’s animal ethics and elizabeth costello’s vegetarian thematics; quinn’s reading centres the titular character as a performative enactment of the monstrous vegan trope. she reads the novel as parodying attempts to assert a stable ethical identity. for quinn, costello addresses the difficulty of rendering animal suffering visible while also avoiding fetishizing violence as spectacle. costello’s monstrous veganism thus becomes something of a model for quinn’s own approach: by focusing on literary scenes not of violence against animals but in which monstrous vegans speak about violence against animals, quinn practices a form of literary criticism that refuses the spectacle of industrialized farming. in chapter five, quinn enters the realm of pleasure, reading alan hollinghurst’s the swimming-pool library (1988) and the sparsholt affair (2017) through the lens of vegan camp. vegan camp, she says, is an “aesthetic lens and mode of reading that seeks pleasure from the spectacle of human exceptionalism” (26). this pleasure is derived from extravagant performances of vegan otherness and vegan failure. hollinghurst’s monstrous vegans are ostentatiously morally-wavering, anxiety-producing, repellent, or naïve. he uses humour to highlight the artificiality of veganism by representing his monstrous vegans as quasi-parodic extremists. to do so, hollinghurst associates carnivory with homosexuality, puns frequently with the double-entendre of “meat”, depicts vegetarianism as frustrated sexual desire, and writes undesirable — even repulsive — vegan characters. vegetarian disgust at meat is seen, for instance, as a performance that has little to do with flesh itself, and rather is provoked by what meat signifies. this performative disgust “emphasizes the insecurity and unfixed nature of desire and abjection” (160). however, quinn humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 228 | elliott, review of quinn argues that the artificiality of veganism “turns the gaze back on omnivores, forcing a confrontation with the limits and instabilities of the carnivorous appetites undergirding human desires” (165). in this way, vegan camp is employed as a humorous means of exposing the artificiality of both veganism and carnism. embracing monstrous vegans through vegan camp highlights “the difficulties [for vegans] of living and desiring in a non-vegan world” and refocuses critical attention onto carnists (165). camp thereby offers an alternative to the “sincerity and despair” that characterize much vegan discourse, reconciling the failure of veganism’s practice with its pleasures and utopian aspirations (166). readers reluctant to engage with a “preachy” vegan text may rest assured: quinn casts aside moralizing in favour of nuance and the recognition of the imperfections within veganism. by refusing the myth of a stable ethical identity, quinn offers a more flexible veganism. in the absence of the expectation of perfection, vegans are afforded a degree of forgiveness: although they aspire to a minimization of harm, they are invariably imperfect, and the monstrous vegan trope becomes a tool for refiguring vegan identity. alongside this, reading veganism suggests alternative ways of engaging with veganism outside of graphic and disturbing visual representations of animal suffering. quinn foregrounds the pleasure, humour, and subversion accessed through vegan performativity and vegan camp. where vegan theory conventionally dwells on the despair produced by mass nonhuman suffering, quinn’s analysis in reading veganism suggests ways to exist in spite of, and within, a world of carnist violence. in this way her book could be read alongside jack halberstam’s the queer art of failure, which sees moral perfection as a fantasy that can be productively queered. moreover she argues that the fear and anxiety invoked by the monstrous vegan reflects gendered, sexual, imperial, and racial anxieties by their implied threat to white european patriarchy. indeed, the monstrosity of these vegan figures is in many ways a reflection of human anxieties about certain appetites and behaviours, because they expose “unsettling questions about human needs and wants” (114). elliott, review of quinn | 229 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) quinn’s depiction of veganism is complex: veganism “represents a composite of modes of relation to nonhuman animals; functions as a queer positioning that destabilizes previously fixed ideas of gender, race, class, and sexuality; and raises questions about what it means to be a ‘speciesed’ subject” (62). she posits vegan camp as a productive alternative to the more conventional approach in vegan theory that seeks to restore the animals that have been disappeared into absent referents (148). although such an approach might be accused of excessive detachment from interventionist discussions of animal exploitation, quinn is not suggesting that an anthropocentric vegan camp is the only way to read veganism. instead, she offers vegan camp as a new lens through which to engage with literary texts that are not ostensibly vegan, adding to the repertoire of vegan theory and expanding critical possibilities. one way that i would be interested in seeing quinn’s theory applied would be in vegan camp readings of texts that engage with existing entanglements with nonhuman animals. the impact of reading veganism goes far beyond the works that quinn studies, inviting further reparative vegan readings, and raising questions about the purported stability of human subjectivities. quinn asks her readers to reckon with how they construct and enact identities of consumption; reading veganism offers new ways of recognizing and acknowledging the power dynamics in our entanglements with nonhuman animals. de bruyn, the webs of life copyright © 2025 ben de bruyn this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2025): 232–239. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 the webs of life ben de bruyn review of: karen bakker, the sounds of life: how digital technology is bringing us closer to the worlds of animals and plants. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2022. 368 pp. $33.00 (hb). and karen bakker, gaia’s web: how digital environmentalism can combat climate change, restore biodiversity, cultivate empathy, and regenerate the earth. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2024. vii + 288 pp. $29.95 (hb) ben de bruyn is professor of english literature at the université catholique de louvain, belgium. email: ben.debruyn@uclouvain.be review article http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 mailto:ben.debruyn@uclouvain.be before her untimely death in 2023, the canadian researcher karen bakker completed two insightful and accessible books that articulate valuable lessons for readers interested in multispecies studies and digital technology: the sounds of life (2022) and gaia’s web (2024). focusing mainly on the first book, this review contextualizes bakker’s cautiously optimistic overview of recent developments in biology, technology, and conservation. it subsequently zooms in on some of its complications and scrutinizes its treatment of indigenous practices, eco-surveillance, and environmental hope. as bakker mentions at the start, the sounds of life reviews a wide range of recent scientific findings that support three claims: “many more nonhumans can make and sense sound than scientists had previously realized; many species have richer, more complex communication and social behaviors than previously understood; and these findings create new possibilities for both environmental conservation and interspecies communication” (6). by sharing observations from the fields of bioand eco-acoustics with a wider audience, the book joins forces with publications such as bernie krause’s the great animal orchestra (2012) and david george haskell’s sounds wild and broken (2022). bakker’s reflections further hint at the history of scientific playback experiments and related debates about animal music and language, as mapped in studies such as gregory radick’s the simian tongue (2007) and rachel mundy’s animal musicalities (2018). as a result, some of bakker’s observations may be familiar to readers with an established interest in these debates, who are likely to have encountered earlier accounts of the research of karl von frisch, the impactful reception of songs of the humpback whale, or the discovery that insect vocalizations reveal temperature variations. yet bakker smartly foregrounds “species previously thought to be mute or species that vocalize beyond human hearing range” (sounds of life, 216) and provides useful updates related to familiar cases by describing honeybee robots, acoustic deterrents aimed at elephants, and the overlooked whispers of whale mother–calf pairs. what is copyright © 2025 ben de bruyn this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 2 (2025): 231–239. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.21807 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.21807 de bruyn, review of bakker | 233 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) more, the sounds of life introduces lesser-known facts about the overlooked sonic skills of turtles, the intricate vocabulary of bats, and the recognizable sound signatures of healthy reefs — not to mention remarks about the acoustic capabilities of plants and animals without ears, like tiny coral larvae. across the nonhuman realm, the appearance of silence turns out to be misleading, and so humans should become better listeners on this “resonant earth” (4), with the help of cutting-edge technology as well as the “deep listening” skills perfected by indigenous communities (7). while a sceptical reader might argue that the book’s sonic focus implies a bias towards creatures who vocalize, recent research on marine plant life makes a compelling case for the claim that “noise pollution is not a species-specific issue but rather an ecosystem issue” (195). in the early twenty-first century, environmentalists should hence foster a planetary form of eco-acoustic justice. the sounds of life will not just appeal to scholars interested in sound, however. bakker’s argument also aligns with ongoing research on biodiversity anxiety and the importance of multispecies interactions, as articulated in books such as robin wall kimmerer’s braiding sweetgrass (2013) and ursula heise’s imagining extinction (2016). bakker underlines the value of a multispecies perspective by drawing attention to the fact that certain “plants that are pollinated by bats have developed flowers and leaves that act as echo reflectors, serving as beacons […] to attract bats” (112), or that certain humans and birds have learned to cooperate and communicate when searching for honey and beeswax (151–3). while she mainly sounds a hopeful note, moreover, bakker does not shy away from the brutal realities of climate change, habitat fragmentation, and environmental noise — all of which negatively impact biodiversity. seeing that the exponential growth of industrial noise has a proven devastating impact on humans and nonhumans alike, even on marine creatures without ears and marine plants such as seagrass, she stresses that we must take action now. the advantage is that noise “is one of the few types of pollution we can easily mitigate” (197), as commentators such as ed yong have also noted. humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 234 | de bruyn, review of bakker yet the most distinct feature of the sounds of life is not its interest in sound, biodiversity, and multispecies knots, but its refreshingly upbeat embrace of digital recording technologies and ai algorithms that are able to harvest and analyse vast quantities of acoustic data rapidly. these technologies can help us to monitor sensitive sites and endangered species in real time and also to develop forms of acoustic deterrence and acoustic enrichment that promise to defuse conflicts between human farmers and wild elephants or lure aquatic creatures back to degraded coral reefs, for example. this form of “computational sustainability” (52) is discussed more fully in gaia’s web, where bakker contends “that carefully regulated digital technologies can and should be used to advance environmentalism” (105) — enlisting a nascent “digital environmentalism” to combat the “digital anthropocene” (104) or “biodigital anthropocene” (212). as the planet is rapidly changing, and creatures are forced to adapt, bakker believes that “bioacoustics-powered conservation […] offers one of the best means available to protect biodiversity” (sounds of life, 189) by helping us notice and reduce human noise, prevent poaching and unsustainable fishing, and make sure animals and humans avoid fatal encounters. the sounds of life does not only show that sound is present and meaningful in multispecies worlds, in other words, but that sound can be turned into a crucial tool for convivial coexistence with the aid of new digital tools and related devices like drones, robots, and satellites. many environmental thinkers are critical of technology, but bakker’s work encourages us to recognize its conservation potential, not unlike adam fish’s similarly hopeful account of drone conservation in oceaning (2024). while her plea for acoustic conviviality and digital environmentalism is helpful, certain aspects of the sounds of life raise questions. first, bakker cites bernie krause’s “acoustic niche hypothesis,” which states that “in any given ecosystem, different species evolve to occupy unique acoustic niches” (sounds of life, 111). however, while there is some evidence for this hypothesis, the use of different frequencies by neighbouring animals might simply be the result of their divergent body sizes, as david george haskell has observed in sounds wild and broken. what is more, because of the need de bruyn, review of bakker | 235 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) for mutually shared communication channels among competitors, some animal soundscapes actually exhibit “sonic grouping” instead.1 while i agree that sound deserves closer attention, and might be particularly productive in reimagining human–animal coexistence with the help of large-scale monitoring projects, ed yong is surely right in underlining the importance of a multisensorial perspective in an immense world (2022). as humans, we need to become better listeners, but we should also learn to recognize the other needs of highly sensitive creatures impacted by assorted forms of sensory pollution. bakker briefly hints at such complications, admittedly, most explicitly when referring to the field of “biotremology,” which studies vibrations communicated via the ground or plant surfaces rather than airborne sound waves (sounds of life, 217). as such phenomena reveal, we should bear in mind various sensory stimuli when thinking about multispecies cohabitation. an additional complication is that the sounds of life articulates both a speculative and a down-to-earth account of interspecies communication. on several occasions, the text raises the possibility that a true dialogue between humans and other creatures looms on the horizon: “humanity may be on the brink of inventing a zoological version of google translate” (6); “bioacoustics devices thus function like a digital translation device” (41); “although humans may never be able to think like a bat, our artificial intelligence algorithms may be able to do so” (136); “our digital devices have brought us to the brink of a new era in digitally mediated interspecies communication” (201); “if whale sounds have meanings that can be decoded, perhaps they have a form of language that can be translated; perhaps, more speculatively, their songs express oral histories that we could eventually learn from” (162). yet as bakker herself admits in passages that nuance maximalist claims about cross-species dictionaries eagerly promoted by tech enthusiasts, this precise form of interspecies translation is unlikely to become a reality soon, if ever. this bait-andswitch technique is unfortunate, also because she herself indicates that such fantasies are neither realistic nor particularly urgent. “it is 1 david george haskell, sounds wild and broken: sonic marvels, evolution’s creativity, and the crisis of sensory extinction (new york: viking, 2022), 108. humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 236 | de bruyn, review of bakker important,” she writes, “not to overstate the potential of digital listening” (75); we do not know “whether bats [and other creatures] even recognize us as entities to communicate with” (132). further, “skeptics […] argue that we have more immediate concerns given current catastrophic rates of biodiversity loss: by the time we figure out whether we can communicate with nonhuman species, many of them may have vanished from the earth” (179). as the fate of the elephant listening project illustrates, the real task for bioacoustics research right now might be less to construct an “elephant dictionary” and more to harness the power of sound for practical conservation purposes (51). while these parts of her argument are thought-provoking, i am likewise sceptical about bakker’s frequent turn to indigenous insights and hopeful embrace of ai and digital technology. we can surely agree that the time-honoured practices of indigenous communities hold crucial lessons for scientists and citizens who have become disconnected from their physical environments. in addition, bakker rightly notes that both scientists and conservationists have treated disadvantaged groups poorly in the past and cautions us that we “should avoid recolonizing and appropriating indigenous knowledge” (201). she further stresses that scientific projects should collaborate with traditional ecological communities, which help us grasp that sonic data is inextricably linked to particular places, that other creatures might also have a right to data privacy, and that we should try to establish a form of reciprocity between human auditors and their nonhuman relatives — fleshing out a form of “kinship acoustics” (174). yet the sounds of life does not say much about how we can avoid instrumentalizing other knowledge traditions, nor does it systematically ponder the obvious “tension” (9) between the “deep listening” of local groups and the “distant listening” of expert outsiders, or the growing threats to these groups by forces that eagerly embrace the extractivist possibilities offered by large-scale monitoring projects. bearing in mind the work of commentators including kate crawford and peter dauvergne, readers might additionally be more doubtful de bruyn, review of bakker | 237 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) than the sounds of life about the regenerative, pro-planet potential of energy-hungry digital technologies that are tied to dubious ideologies and relentlessly map every part of the planet. while recounting invigorating stories of quirky scientists combatting anthropocentric prejudices, bakker depicts acoustic interventions as benign and quasi-medical procedures: “ecoacousticians listen to landscapes like a radiologist might look at an mri scan, discerning the subtlest signs of health and disease” (5). this is not untrue, but we should not lose sight of the violence associated with human activities, or the fact that “digital technologies can be misused and abused” (203) — as the book suggests in brief and scattered passages. sound and science may nurture multispecies flourishing, but let us not forget that close attention to whale songs culminated in a massive haul of baleen by whalers in the past (13); that acoustic deterrents may enable “peaceful human-elephant coexistence” but probably also facilitate the spread of human farming (57); that the study of bee decision-making is being monetized by the cloud computer industry and internet hosting centres (147); that the military is eagerly experimenting with the conversion of bees “into disposable, militarized sensing devices” (157) and with a “bionic morse code” based on whale vocalization patterns (161); and that interactive digital devices for nonhuman animals are not just used to advance “interspecies understanding” but to grease the gears of “industrial meat production facilities” (174). while bakker chooses optimism and states that indigenous traditions model useful “guideposts” for ecodigital projects (7, 174), it remains an open question whether recent scientific and technological developments strengthen convivial forms of entanglement or permit an even more brutal and fine-grained entrapment of other earthlings. this precarious balancing act between optimism and pessimism is even more conspicuous in gaia’s web and so i conclude with a brief look at bakker’s final publication. reorienting her focus from bioacoustic science to biodigital technology more broadly, this second recent book asserts that the earth is becoming “simultaneously natural and technological, ecological and digital, human and nonhuman: a merging of the web of life and the world wide web” (gaia’s humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 238 | de bruyn, review of bakker web, 230–1). as she explains in her two-part argument, digital monitoring projects are presently helping to combat challenges such as global heating alongside biodiversity loss, and the introduction of actors like organic robots and biological batteries is ushering in a form of “biodigital convergence” (106). in navigating these developments, bakker maintains, we are faced with the choice between an ominous “green panopticon” (14) on the one hand and a promising “digital biocentrism” (16, 212) on the other, in which technological innovation does not lead to eco-surveillance capitalism but to multispecies flourishing. as in the sounds of life, bakker comes down on the side of “cautious optimism,” though she admits that “safeguards” are necessary — yet often missing at the moment — and that hope may well constitute a dangerous “trap” (232). bakker’s summary of the possibilities and pitfalls appears evenhanded, though it favours optimism and occasionally approaches bothsidesism. at one moment she enthusiastically explains that eco-surveillance operations can stop illegal fishing; at another she notes more critically that it can be abused “to track illegal migrants” (27). she observes that “precision farming” might reduce “herbicide and pesticide use” (94), but also that it is currently “being used primarily to further intensify industrial agriculture” (95). ambivalent claims crop up elsewhere too: “digital technologies might create a virtuous cycle […] but they might also create a vicious cycle” (105). additionally, “it is not yet clear whether blockchain offers a progressive or a regressive pathway for nonhuman agency” (146), or if biobots are “[a] useful form of green technology or a form of [nonhuman] torture” (205). readers are excitedly told that “virtual reality experiences that cultivate a sense of ‘self as other’ result in changes in environmental attitudes” (159) but later hear that “increased empathy as a result of immersive technology experiences is often at best a transient phenomenon, and at worst a mirage” (177). digital whale protection systems establish “whale lanes” and thereby illustrate “how digital technologies could enable whales (and other nonhumans) to collaborate with humans in managing the environment” (116). however, we should “not overstate the degree of cooperation […] in a world in which [whales] have so little control” (116–7). de bruyn, review of bakker | 239 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) i agree with bakker that these developments are inherently ambiguous and offer tantalizing glimpses of a utopian planetary future. yet we should be clear-eyed about the obvious downsides as well as wary of perverse side effects. will whale lanes and precision farms mainly result in saving cetacean lives and reducing pesticides, one might ask, or will they just squeeze even more value out of the land and sea? does the right path forward really involve turning forests and other nonhumans into digital “economic actor[s]” (144)? should we not be developing more radical strategies, which challenge the status quo via digital monitoring systems for abattoirs, for example, that immediately detect animal welfare abuses and automatically fine the owners or notify the relevant authorities? as humans and other creatures currently find themselves in digital and ecological webs simultaneously, we should surely not forget, as bakker notes in passing, that a “spider and a fly both encounter the spider’s web, but the outcome is very different for the latter” (153). gundermann, iberians are different “iberians are different” on breed, power, and queer subversion christian gundermann mount holyoke college, massachusetts humanimalia 13.2 (spring 2023) abstract: historically, iberian horse breeds were considered the height of perfection, but with the development of the thoroughbred (the embodiment of enlightened modernity), they increasingly were aligned with spanish obsolescence. however, this dichotomy is too simple and often incorrect. as this paper illustrates, the spanish pure breed itself is the outcome of a major modernization effort in the sixteenth century, linked to the spanish colonial empire’s own early modernity. furthermore, “modernizing” attempts continue to shape the breed as breeders and breed organizations attempt to meet the demands of the sport horse market, emulating the success of the modern sport horse breeds. thus, as this paper argues, within complex temporal interactions between older and newer forms of modernity, the resurgence of older, presumably superseded, projects presents a kind of queer subversion of the temporal narratives of progress, modernity, and modernization. this subversion is instantiated in the present moment by the traditional iberian horse (as the product and icon of an older form of modernity). as a natureculture, this older modernity reverberates not only as a cultural investment but also as a “natural” resurgence of genetic diversity and multiplicity. this article theorizes the marginalized early modernities of spain and portugal in their baroque colonial multiplicities, and thereby rewrites the way european modernity has been understood. keywords: iberian horse, modernity, modernization, baroque, breed, purity, progress, power bio: having been raised by horses, christian gundermann became a scholar and teacher of cultural studies, languages, and theories to other humans. he now teaches gender studies at mount holyoke college, and specializes in critical animal studies, feminist science studies, and the study of health. his horses have helped him conceptualize and articulate a number of biomedical issues at the boundaries of human and equine existence, such as metabolic, autoimmune, infectious, and allergic conditions which resulted in two sibling pieces titled “reading bloodwork is an art form” (catalyst 3.2, 2017) and “equine/human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings” (humanimalia 10.2, 2019). both articles question scientific reductionism through the stories of two of his equine companions and their illnesses. he is currently working on writing projects about the role of genetic testing in shaping human–equine relationships, and the entanglements of genetics, seropositivity, autoimmunity, and state power in the covid crisis. he is owned by a handful of iberian horses, his current, future, and past training and riding partners. for and with them, he studies the literature of classical, particularly french, dressage. email: cgunderm@mtholyoke.edu copyright © 2023 christian gundermann this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 47–84. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13274 mailto:cgunderm@mtholyoke.edu http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13274 gundermann, “iberians are different” | 49 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) they usually have incredibly fat short necks. their under­ developed hind ends do not match their huge front ends. and they have a tendency to be lazy, so it’s hard to push them forward. that makes it very difficult to get these hors­ es looking pretty under saddle.  — personal conversation with a stranger discussing the quality of well-known olympian lusitano stallion, rubi ar in 2022 the italians of the renaissance [under spanish rule] discov­ ered the horses from the iberian peninsula. not having been able to obtain from their mounts what they had seen done with the greatest facility by the spaniards, they were driven to invent training rules permitting them to bring their horses to the degree of collection observed in the peninsular hors­ es […]. therefore it was the horses of iberian breeding that served as models for the italians […]. thus was born the science of horsemanship.  — dom diogo de bragança, dressage in the french tradition, 10–11 preliminaries obviously, iberian horses (pres and psls1) are different from other breeds, as all breeds are different from each other. yet, the contemporary sport dressage industry that is dominated by modern warmblood breeds seems to reserve a special place of difference for iberian horses. perhaps because they were once the paradigmatic dressage horse, the horse of the old european masters who laid the foundation for what we now know as “dressage”, they have come to represent a kind of quintessential über-difference. they are not then 1 pre stands for “pura raza española” (“pure spanish breed”) and psl for “puro sangue lusitano” (“pure lusitano/portuguese blood”). 50 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the “non-dressage horse” — like many other breeds we see rarely in upper-level competition — but have instead become modern sport dressage’s (antiquated) other, something like its foreclosed past.2 in this essay, i examine the current situation of iberians as a naturecultural phenomenon, arguing specifically that their historical, aesthetic, and epistemological link to the spanish baroque era functions today as an expression of queerness — that is, as a performative resistance to, and subversion of, the norms of modern sport dressage. the recent appearances of pre and psl horses at the highest levels of international dressage competition during olympic and world equestrian games (including tokyo 2021) also raise the spectre of modernization within iberian breeds.3 since roughly the beginning of the millennium, many iberian breeders have made a concerted effort to break into the national and international markets for dressage horses. despite their closed studbooks, they have aimed to reshape their breeds to look, move, and function more like the northern european sport horses (primarily german, dutch, danish, and swedish warmblood breeds) that dominate modern competition. along the lines of what foucault refers to as a “progress narrative”, the term “modernization” in horse breeding will, therefore, be examined not only as a way of mapping the contrast between iberian horses and their modern rivals, but also as an internal dynamic within the pre and psl breeds that has manifested as a paradoxical 2 other sport equitation (and olympic) disciplines such as show jumping and three-day eventing have rarely considered iberians as suitable mounts, defined as these disciplines are by modern breed standards and riding style influenced by the thoroughbred type. a notable exception to this rule is the manuel veiga-bred lusitano stallion novilheiro mv, who, under john whitaker, became british show jumping champion in the early 1980s and after 1987 went on to make an impressive impact in the breeding shed. 3 the issue of the modernization trend in lusitano breeding is made clear in an article published on the fei (fédération équestre international) webpage about the four portuguese dressage competitors in the 2021 olympics, all of whom competed on psls: “in fact, it’s only in the last 15–20 years that lusitano breeders have turned their expertise to producing horses for dressage competition. previously they were bred for bullfighting, classical dressage and working equitation.” see burton, “portugal’s dressage stars prepare for tokyo”. i should note that the explicit differentiation here between “classical dressage” and modern competition dressage is odd to the extent that modern competition dressage, at least in principle if not in fact, still follows the rules written by the classical master general a. e. e. decarpentry. gundermann, “iberians are different” | 51 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) focus on simultaneously improving and preserving breed identity. in the case of ancce,4 the spanish national association, annual prizes are used to promote an explicitly “modern” pre even as they continue to employ a traditionalist rhetoric of purity (“una sangre limpia sin cruces” [clean blood without outcrossing]) to set the pre apart as presumably “purer” than modern warmbloods with their open studbooks.5 in what follows, i examine how the pre is enmeshed in a series of “modernizing” moments that both consolidate and challenge different formations of modernity. the centrality of equine breeds, especially the english thoroughbred, to the project of western modernity and national identity has been demonstrated amply in recent publications.6 for richard nash the thoroughbred as a “pure breed” paradoxically produced from the crossing of native english mares with imported “oriental” stallions in the eighteenth century, epitomizes the naturecultural contradictions of modern horse breeding.7 the thoroughbred has become the chief modernizer of many horse breeds, including the warmblood sport horses that dominate competition today and have been produced over the past five decades by outcrossing older northern european warmblood horses with thoroughbreds to create new “super athletes.” the thoroughbred represents one thread in the story of breed identity as a product and producer of modernity; however, it is not the only one. rather, i will suggest here, the seemingly archaic 4 ancce stands for asociación nacional de criadores de caballos de pura raza española (national association of breeders of purebred spanish horses). it was established in 2007, taking over the management of the breed from the spanish government, which had run the pre studbook since 1912. 5 this quotation is taken from the promotional video “el pura raza española (pre)” featured on the landing page of ancce’s website [01:02]. 6 donna landry’s ground-breaking book noble brutes, particularly the chapter “the making of the english hunting seat”, scrutinizes the connections between the invention of the english thoroughbred, the emergence of a novel english riding style, and modern english identity formation. richard nash’s work, particularly “‘honest english breed’: the thoroughbred as cultural metaphor”, analyses the nexus between breed purity and the emergence of modern nationhood. in “a perfect nicking pattern”, nash engages with the contradictions between anxieties about degeneration and hopes for perfectibility in “nicking” as “the perfectly paradoxical theory of modern breeding” that crosses the “nature/culture hybrid of racialized identities, both human and non-human” (40). 7 nash, “perfect nicking pattern”. 52 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) iberian horses now being “modernized” are, themselves, naturecultural products of an alternative strand of modernity that emerged in baroque spain. this essay thus seeks, first, to complicate the understanding of western modernity as unitary or singular, while positing that across its different manifestations modernity manifests a paradoxical commitment to “progress narratives” (change for the “better”) and, simultaneously, to “preservation”; second, to suggest that, for as much as they have been understood to be the product of canonical figures such as galileo, columbus, newton, descartes, voltaire, napoleon, and pasteur, western modernities are always linked to broad global colonial projects and to the hybridization that occurs in the contact zones with subjugated cultures; and, third, that within the complex temporal interactions between older and newer forms of modernity, the resurgence of earlier, presumably superseded, projects presents a kind of queer subversion of the temporal narratives of modernity and modernization. in the context of my argument, this subversion is instantiated in the present moment by the traditional iberian horse (as the product and icon of an older, presumably superseded form of modernity). as a natureculture, this older modernity resurges, or reverberates, not only as a cultural investment but also as a “natural” resurgence of genetic diversity and multiplicity. “resurgence”, “reverberation”, and “natureculture” are terms that will sustain this argument by relying both on theorizations of the spanish baroque by cuban poet and intellectual severo sarduy, and on naturecultural conceptualizations of queerness as the performative subversion of ostensibly stable ontologies formulated by feminists karen barad and donna haraway. sarduy, moreover, supplies a proto-deconstructive understanding of modernity as always necessarily accompanied by its own subversion, and does so within the specific context of the spanish siglo de oro.8 if the spanish horse has its mythological point of origin in an (early) spanish modernity 8 siglo de oro commonly translates into english as “golden age”, but the literal translation would be “century of gold”, which, in its awkwardness in english, reveals the colonial connection between spanish modernity and new world plunder. gundermann, “iberians are different” | 53 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) (“renaissance”), this modernity is accompanied closely by its own subversion (“baroque”), and eventually situated within the context of a subsequent european high modernity in which both spain and portugal come to be associated with the decadent baroque paradigm of decline, excess, and corruption rather than the hopeful modern progress narrative. sarduy’s contribution explains that the one is impossible without the other, and i intend to tease out the implications of this insight for current modernization projects within iberian horse breeding. modernity, multiplicity, and the baroque (horse) the time is now. i am talking about iberian horses now, the ones in my backyard, the ones owned by friends, by teachers, by breeders of our horses and of their parents, breeders in various countries. i am also talking about horses that appear in competition against warmblood sport horses, even those that are sent to the olympics to represent their countries. what are their specificities, their differences from the current norm, and how did they come to be the way they are? how does this history inflect the present moment? the problems associated with the current modernizing paradigm emerge with striking clarity in a short video clip making the rounds on social media as i write this. the clip compares the extended trots of a warmblood and a pre from the 2021 dressage world breeding championship for young horses in verden, germany. both horses are five years of age. the pre was bred by the prestigious breeding farm centurión, one of the chief drivers behind reshaping the breed for a sport horse market, and the young stallion’s pedigree is packed with horses that have received high breeding status from ancce.9 clearly, this young stallion is the crème de la crème within the modernizing paradigm. yet, he and his rider have received 2.5 percentage points lower on the extended trot than the warmblood. those posting comments on the clip mostly agree that the pre deserves this lower grade: there is no doubt that he has lost balance, is uneven in 9 most prominently, his dam’s sire, kabileño viii, is one of the handful of stallions who received all the highest grades, including the status of “élite”, held only by five pre stallions in the history of the grading system. 54 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the length of strides that both hind legs take, steps wide behind, and is tilting the poll, among other signs of struggle with the movement.10 much of the debate prompted by this clip focuses on the inherent unsuitability of pres for this signature movement in modern competition dressage, as well as on recent improvement in pre breeding to overcome this weakness. these “improvements” are precisely what is behind ancce’s grading system for breeding stock, and a very similar grading system is in place with the portuguese breed association apsl, where movement is now receiving a coefficient of 1.5 to place greater weight on this key element of sport horse dressage. what is at stake for both registries is a kind of “updating” — or bringing the breeds to conform — to the standards and norms of what is expected of a modern sport horse under current market conditions. this particular pre is clearly trained and ridden to conform to modern standards, but fails to meet them insofar as purity of the gait and balance are lost, and is then rightfully penalized with a significantly lower grade. i say rightfully because, according to international dressage rules written in the 1950s and still in effect today, loss of balance and purity of gait must result in a lower score. while one could argue (and some social media commentators do) that the problem is simply rider error, the problems evident in this example occur so frequently with pres that this case cannot be reduced either to simple rider error or to overt breed bias on the part of the judges. instead, breed bias occurs at a much deeper level: that is, at the level of more broadly disrespecting (ignoring or “unknowing”) breed difference and thus treating the iberians like “any other breed” (which in dressage at this historical juncture means “like a warmblood”) when it comes to training, riding, presenting, and judging them. at the level of the young horse breeding championships, this bias manifests even through categorical assumptions about age and pace of maturation, as well as training progression. according to inherited precepts of classical dressage where a horse begins to do 10 see the extended discussion in response to the video posted on facebook by marina verdejo sánchez on 26 august 2021: https://www.facebook.com/100010039385939/ videos/431108301572180. https://www.facebook.com/100010039385939/videos/431108301572180 https://www.facebook.com/100010039385939/videos/431108301572180 gundermann, “iberians are different” | 55 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) gentle work under saddle as a four-year-old, an extended trot should not be expected from any five-year-old horse. as a result of modern breeding practices, however, many young warmbloods are able to produce this movement without much training and strength building, while young pres are not able to do so. as a result, at this moment in time, centurión’s keenest efforts to produce a big-moving pre who can outcompete a german warmblood on his own turf cannot override residual aspects of the breed — older norms of conformation and movement — that become apparent during the extended trot. so what is this difference? where does it come from and what does it suggest? why can an iberian, even a modernized one, not “extend” the trot like a warmblood as a required token of “dressage suitability” in the young horse evaluations? why does he lose balance and rhythm when he is ridden in this way at this age? why was his balance never — that is to say, until now — meant to be that of a horse pushing powerfully forward with a straight lengthened frame such as that manifested in the extended trot? finally, what would he be if his breeders achieved their goal by “improving” away core aspects of his iberian-ness to produce a new, homogenized and globalized, variety of luxury competition horse? origins there are two basic types of origin stories about the pure spanish horse.11 one is a romantic story based on mythologies that date back thousands of years and involve as agents the specific landscape, climate, and soil of the iberian peninsula, particularly andalucía; the entanglement of its horses with fighting bulls; a combination of isolation from europe, and an influx of african and arabic peoples and 11 the origin stories of lusitanos, about which i cannot go into detail here, are more splintered and complex, both because portugal was, at various points of its history, either part of spain, or closely connected to spain (for example, king philip ii, who figures prominently in the one type of origin story of the spanish horse, was simultaneously king of portugal when he established the spanish breed). lusitanos also drew genetically on the spanish breed at various points of their history. for example, after the alter real line (one of the four major bloodlines in the lusitano) had gone extinct in the early twentieth century, it was recreated based on pre imports. a similar history defines another one of the four major lusitano lines, the andrade bloodline. many important lusitano ancestors in modern pedigrees are therefore of spanish breeding. 56 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) their horses; and often, in a certain locus of prominence, the role of the carthusian monks of jerez de la frontera as preservers of ancient purity from the onslaught of political invasion and corruption.12 these stories do not have one singular temporal point of origin, and intentional, rational, human agency figures only alongside other agential factors.13 the other type of origin myth is the story told by rationalist academic historians who both refute the various existing mythologies (and their necessary mutual contradictions) and set a definitive origin date based on archival evidence. most saliently, the work of juan carlos altamirano both documents and re-enacts what i will call the “gesture of modernity”.14 as kristen guest and monica mattfeld point out, quoting anthony giddens, “modernity rests on the belief that the world is open to transformation by human intervention”.15 altamirano’s is precisely the narrative of such a belief, and it furthermore enacts the gesture of “purification”, to invoke bruno latour’s theory that the separation of culture from nature is the most fundamental definition of what constitutes the modern.16 the “purified” (purely “manmade” cultural) spanish breed receives its origin story in altamirano’s account to the extent that it becomes the product of a precisely dated instance of human intervention, via a strict separation of the singular human subject and nonhuman object. instead of researching, documenting, and conceptually exploring the multiplicity and diversity of various breed projects of multiple actors which converged into what we now know as the pre without any specific and singular 12 sylvia loch, whose 1986 volume the royal horse of europe continues to play an ambassadorial role for the iberian breeds in the english-speaking world, reproduces the myth that the carthusian monks of jerez had large herds of horses already in 1476 when the order was founded, and that they played a crucial role in preserving a particularly pure variety of andalusian, the cartujano (loch, 28). in the history of the carthusian horses, juan carlos altamirano draws on historical documents to dispel this “carthusian myth”, which was so influential that it even informed government-controlled breeding policies. altamirano uses this refutation to cement his thesis that king philip ii is to be seen as the creator of the pre. 13 the prominent historian of the spanish horse juan llamas perdigó summarizes many of these myths in his book this is the spanish horse (1989). 14 the main point of reference here is altamirano, historia y origen. 15 guest and mattfeld, “introduction”, 3. 16 quoted in nash, “perfect nicking pattern”, 27. gundermann, “iberians are different” | 57 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) point of origin, altamirano documents and describes a singular and universal project centred in the royal spanish figure, philip ii.17 one defining feature of modern breeding is the practice of written and centralized record keeping, culminating in the creation of stud books.18 this technology aims to systematize and standardize the existing breeding culture in which several, typically noble, families own and develop their own “breed”.19 according to altamirano, the modern pre is the product primarily of philip ii’s project initiated between 1567 and 1625 at the córdoba stud, a large-scale architectural complex which was built specifically for this purpose and that brought together hitherto novel numbers of breeding stock (up to 1,200 broodmares with over 500 annual foals).20 this way of defining the creation of a “breed” is inherently modern, and euroand logocentric in that it either excludes, or relegates to a primitive, pre-historic, or unsystematic status, all oral breeding traditions and links it instead to the project of the nation.21 more specifically, altamirano’s story centres the 17 besides the work of carlos altamirano, other historians who have examined the role of king philip ii’s breeding project as a foundational moment of the spanish breed are eduardo agüera carmona, librado carrazco, juan m. lópez rodríguez, and josé martínez millán. the promotional publications featured on the ancce website, as well, have endorsed this narrative of philip ii as the founder of the breed. kathryn renton’s “breeding techniques and court influence” offers a revisionist historical analysis that aims to dispel the singularity of the origin myth constructed by altamirano and others. 18 many scholars of the history of the english thoroughbred have pointed to the centrality of the technology of the stud book for the creation of the breed, and modern breeding in general. see donna landry’s comment that “in the 19th century following the establishment of the general stud book in 1791, the question of purity becomes an issue and the notion of breed becomes something much more associated with nation” (guest et al., “roundtable”, 15). and as margaret derry pointedly suggests, the notion of pure breed, upheld by the technology of the stud book “democratized the idea of breed” since it standardizes and institutionalizes it, wresting it from the strict personal and private control of the aristocracy (guest et al., “roundtable”, 13). my argument, however, suggests that these developments did not begin in england in 1791, but rather, in different ways, with philip ii’s nation building project in spain in 1560. 19 see nash, “perfect nicking pattern”, 34–35. 20 for this number of broodmares see, for example, carrasco and lópez rodríguez, “las caballerizas reales”, 14. 21 martínez millán presents the most detailed discussion of the specifics of philip ii’s use of the novel pure spanish raza for his nation building project, a new political organization that martínez millán calls monarquía hispana (hispanic monarchy) under castilian leadership, a transformation of his dynastic inheritance that resulted in the construction of the new court in madrid. see martínez millán, “la real casa”, 53–55. 58 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) origins of the breed in the efforts of three members of the spanish aristocracy: the royal “stud master” diego lópez de haro, his grandson diego lópez de haro y sotomayor, and, most centrally, philip ii, the inheritor of one half of the habsburg empire and consolidator of modern spanish identity under the castilian language. while 1492, the year in which the “reconquista” comes to completion, constitutes one of the major symbolic birth dates of the modern spanish nation, philip ii fleshes this project out in new and concrete ways. as a native speaker of castilian, philip transformed his dynastic inheritance by rejecting the polyglot tendencies of his father, the previous king of spain and emperor of the roman empire, charles v. as a gesture of centring castilian power within the construct of “spain”, he built the royal palace el escorial in madrid, established a distinctly spanish absolutist court, and, despite the fact that he was also king of portugal, of naples, of milan, and of the low countries, in addition to spain under castilian dominance, he transferred his principal residency to madrid. for this novel political project, the new spanish horse breed would become the most powerful emblem. in addition to the breed’s symbolic value at the centre of empire and nation, this new royal court drew significantly on the equine production of the royal stud in córdoba for its ceremonial horses, as well as for diplomatic gifts to other european courts: a practice which symbolically anchored spanish preeminence in the larger european context.22 as carrasco and lópez rodríguez suggest, the breed was created both as a “horse for the nobility” and as “self-image and standard bearer of spain”.23 in spanish historiography, philip ii is most firmly associated with the spanish siglo de oro, which, in broad strokes, signified a time of relative peace, wealth derived from the pillage and plunder of new american colonies, a flourishing of the arts, and the centring of court culture. within this context, philip ii cemented the crucial role of the horse for the absolutist court and its rituals, transforming its role from chivalric to courtly. by centring the history of the 22 see, for example, renton, “breeding techniques”, 229–231. 23 carrasco and lópez rodríguez, “las caballerizas reales”, 14–15. gundermann, “iberians are different” | 59 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) pre in that of philip ii, altamirano anchors the origin and identity of the breed in the most glorious moment of spanish modernity, a modernity that was propped up materially by the influx of american “precious metals” (most paradigmatically, it was under philip’s rule that spain completed the conquest of the inca empire, its most important source of gold).24 the spanish empire was, at this historical moment, the spearhead of europe’s colonial war machine, which enabled its rapacious accumulation of wealth and the concomitant creation of an early capitalist european economy. in turn, as a horse enthusiast, philip was able to invest some of this colonial capital in the creation of a breed that “reuniera todas las virtudes que, desde la antigüedad, se consideraban ideales para un équido” [brought together all the strengths which, since antiquity, were considered ideal for an equine].25 as renton points out, the production of the spanish horse as a raza was far from regional or homogeneous (as some of the popular myths would suggest) and incorporated many different strands and types by importation to spain from regions as geographically removed as flanders, italy, and tunisia.26 the work of 24 the use of horses in the conquest and colonization of the americas put a further strain on the sheer quantity of horses the central royal stud in córdoba and its subsidiary networks of breeding operations had to provide. the military horse recruitments often entered into conflict with the breed standards of the spanish horse as “horse of kings” because its requirements were of a different nature. as carrasco and lópez rodríguez state: “en esos momentos la caballería demandaba caballos con más velocidad y resistencia, contrarias al caballo de picadero que se estaba fabricando en caballerizas reales, en el que primaria la facilidad para los aires reunidos, levadas, cabriolas, trabajo pie a tierra, etc.” [at this moment, the cavalry required faster and hardier horses, in opposition to the manège horses that the royal stables produced where the main value was placed on ease of collected movements, such as levades, caprioles, and inhand work]. see carrasco and lópez rodríguez, “las caballerizas reales”, 18. 25 altamirano, historia y origen, 32. 26 “the king’s stables in cordoba mated select stallions and mares of different regional origins and functional types from his own territories in naples, flanders and north africa, as well as from further east” (renton, “breeding techniques”, 229). renton’s articles “breeding techniques” and “defining ‘race’ in the spanish horse” demonstrate the heterogeneity or “impurity” at the heart of philip ii’s project. in my view, this argument doesn’t actually contradict, at a conceptual level, the implementation of a purity project, which is by definition always a regulatory ideal, not a reality. as derrida pointed out, origin stories are always about difference (“différance”) at the core, yet ideologically attempt to erase this difference (see derrida, “des tours de babel”). in this sense, renton’s argument can be reconciled with a deconstructive commitment to demystifying logocentrism’s projection of purity in the origin. 60 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the royal stud in córdoba thus exemplifies what nash, talking about the english thoroughbred roughly two hundred years later, identifies as the paradoxes of modern breeding: the simultaneous and contradictory impulses of preservation and change (improvement), and the construction of purity through hybridity.27 the newly minted spanish raza thus reflected the political and economic dynamics of an era that brought forth a major first wave of empire and globalization. many of the features of the invention of the english thoroughbred and the establishment of the general studbook in england in 1791, as nash and landry, among others, analyse, and which for them accompany the construction of an english modernity through and alongside the emblematic english pure breed, had already been established in spain at the height of the spanish empire’s modernity.28 the breeding stud as biopower, mestizaje, and purity social institutions and their power structures constitute an important mechanism through which western modernity/ies implement the “transformation [of the world] by human intervention”.29 these institutions (re)produce the progress narrative, in this case the breeding of “better” horses: better, that is, at matching a given time period’s ideals and demands on the horses’ function. once again, spain’s (early) modernity seems to foreshadow many of the social developments associated with the high modernity of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when the centre of imperial/ colonial power shifted to the north (primarily to france and england). the creation of institutions such as the córdoba stud could be understood along the lines of the shift foucault describes toward 27 nash, “perfect nicking pattern”, 40. 28 in “beware a bastard breed”, in the context of analysing the role of the earliest of the mythical three foundation stallions of the english thoroughbred, byerley turk, nash argues that during the lifetime of byerley turk in the last decades of the seventeenth century, “the very notion of distinct breed identities — much less, the idea of carefully policing the boundaries of such breed identities —  remained an idea not yet imagined” (193). all the findings of the pre historians quoted in this article, foremost altamirano, contradict this argument for the spanish context. 29 guest and mattfeld, “introduction”, 3. gundermann, “iberians are different” | 61 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) modern biopower instantiated in social institutions like the prison, the clinic, the madhouse, the school, the workplace/factory, or the military. in the birth of the clinic, for example, foucault analyses the invention of the “medical gaze” as a central organizing principle for biopower within the emergent field of modern medicine.30 arguably, the modern breeding stud (and the stud book as one of its central technologies with its focus on bloodlines and purity) develops a specific, systematic, and meticulously defined “gaze upon the horse” (similar to the “medical gaze upon the patient” in foucault), alongside bureaucratic registers of fixing or objectifying this gaze in order to regulate, normalize, and standardize (equine) reproductive life. just as in foucault’s work, where the “patient” and the “doctor” are the products of this institutionally fixed gaze, “broodmare/breeding stallion,” yegüero (“mare master”), and caballerizo (“stud master”), are institutionalized positions within a hierarchy that produces this new modern and disciplinary gaze upon horses. it is thus an institutionalized gaze which, in altamirano’s view, produced the spanish horse (not a more variegated and complex interaction of human selection, landscape, climate, and interaction between various species). academic literature in equine studies of the last twenty years or so has generally located this nexus between modernity, purity, and equine breeds in the late eighteenth century in england with a specific focus on the invention of the english thoroughbred. the distinction here between the older (pre-and early modern) concept of “type” (often linked to geographical regions and defined through certain physical and mental characteristics) and “breed” (as a formalization or institutional and/or genetic “fixing” of type under the concept of purity) is seen as the symbolic moment where breed becomes a reflection of, and vehicle for, the modern nation.31 30 see foucault, birth of the clinic. 31 the symbolic significance of the pre is tied to the spanish nation repeatedly throughout history, most notably with napoleon’s invasion of spain in 1807, which constituted a threat to the continuance of the spanish breed, or the demise of the franco regime in the 1970s, during which time several us-based iberian studbooks were established. the main studbook (ialha, the “international andalusian and lusitano horse association”) continues to constitute a challenge to spain’s sovereignty over the breed to 62 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) donna landry concisely summarizes this argument: there is type, but it is taken from character as well as visible type. so there’s a long early-modern period between 1550 and 1850 when these terms [type and breed] are coexisting. but increasingly after 1750, and certainly […] in the 19th century following the establishment of the general stud book in 1791, the question of purity becomes an issue and the notion of breed becomes something much more associated with nation.32 altamirano and other spanish pre historians, however, allow us to see in philip ii’s production of the pure spanish horse (which subsequently becomes the hegemonic horse of absolutist power throughout europe and beyond), a phenomenon not only very similarly dedicated to purity beyond the characteristics of “type,” but equally implicated in the construction of the nation, and in the horse breed as a nation.33 the spanish term raza (as in “pura raza española”) is of particular relevance in this context as it is this day, which spain has actively sought to marginalize since the establishment of the spanish breed association ancce in 2007. the contentions, differences, and disagreements between the “mother studbook” in spain and the american offshoots are worth an investigation in their own right and exceed the scope of this article. however, i wish to signal that the work of christoph lange on the arabian horse, specifically the colonial dynamic of the creation of arabian studbooks outside of the middle east, and the eventual postcolonial reappropriation of control over the breed in egypt and saudi arabia, is of great relevance for this discussion and would allow for an assessment of the quasi-colonial status of spain and portugal at certain points in modern history visà-vis anglo-saxon and french world hegemony. see lange, “making and re-making”. 32 guest et al., “roundtable”, 15. 33 arguing with renton’s demonstration of the heterogeneity at the heart of the córdoba project, my contention is that purity here does not mean the opposite of crossbreeding (similarly to the invention of the english thoroughbred where “oriental” stallions and “native” mares were crossed), but the controlling and documenting of “linaje” from here on out, a bureaucratic fixing and administering of a population (of equines, in this case). altamirano points out that philip ii called his chief stud administrator “gobernador de la raza” (“governor of the breed”) and implemented an entire bureaucracy from “yegüero mayor” (“mare master”) to “caballerizo” (“stud master”) to “contador” (“accountant”) (altamirano, historia, 139). eduardo agüera carmona insists that diego lópez de haro was this chief and principal “gobernador de la raza”, and that he managed to meld and fix, over a period of roughly six equine generations between 1565 and 1598, the various and diverse influences that renton rightly points out, into a homogeneous racial prototype that, from then on to the present, constitutes a stable, pure, and recognizable breed. see agüero carmona, “el caballo”, 69. gundermann, “iberians are different” | 63 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) frequently invoked as an indicator of purity over other breeds that are not razas.34 as sandra swart notes in the south african context where, in afrikaans, the term for breed is also “race” (ras), raza/race/breed in animal breeding “is the final place where ideas about purity of breed and openly eugenic discourse can be freely embraced”.35 in sixteenth-century spain, the construction of breed purity under the term raza (not as the opposite of cross-breeding at the origin, but as fixing and administering of linajes) may arguably have already served as a counterweight to the increasing cultural, political, and legal threat of hybridity and miscegenation that defined the colonial empire philip ii was building, and for which the new spanish horse served as the central emblem. spain’s “early modern” coloniality may seem, from the perspective of anglo-saxon horror of miscegenation, to be strangely tolerant of racial mingling, as when the military men at the colonial frontier (fetishistically known as “conquistadors” in english) were not only allowed but encouraged, to take american indigenous women as concubines and have children with them in order to create a bilingual mestiza class that would serve as intermediaries between their cultures. in this sense, spanish coloniality did not explicitly uphold a strict separation of european conquerors and american colonized subjects, but instead understood emerging cultures in america as complex systems of mingling or “contact zones”.36 the mestizo reality, however, created contradictory scenarios of racism, discrimination, and legal-cultural deadlock, as demonstrated by the famous case of inca garcilaso de la vega, son of a spanish conquistador and an inca noblewoman. to mention garcilaso, one of spanish america’s most famous early mestizo authors, in the context of a discussion of horse breed and purity is not entirely fanciful. not 34 often in blog-based breeder discussions, raza (spanish) is contrasted with the older/ laxer notion of “blood” (as in the “puro sangue lusitano”, i.e. pure portuguese blood) of the portuguese breed, which in nationalist banter against the portuguese means that the portuguese breed presumably lacks this foundational anchor present in the purity of the spanish race/breed). 35 guest et al., “roundtable”, 16. 36 for a theorization of the term “contact zone”, see pratt, imperial eyes. 64 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) only do we know, as mario vargas llosa affirms, that he was “fond of horses” and equitation and eventually settled down in the small village of montilla near philip ii’s equine capital of córdoba37 — where, in 1579, garcilaso’s stallion was chosen as breeding stud for the king’s services38 — but more specifically because garcilaso became acquainted with them as a young man through his spanish uncle’s horse breeding operations in his native cuzco where horses were an entirely “new” animal. here, he learned to become a proficient rider, and eventually rode a spanish horse in the celebration of and pledge to the new king, philip ii, in 1557. in this festivity, he participated in the juego de cañas [game of sticks], a contest of arabic origin where two riders “duelled” each other with sticks, and which, in spain, had come to symbolize the history of the confrontation between islamic and christian forces, terminating in the “reconquista” of islamic territories between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries. the game quickly gained traction in the colonies, no doubt because the colonized populations recognized themselves in the “moors”, or as victor sanchis amat puts it: “el moro ahora era el indígena” [the moor was now the native american].39 garcilaso’s specific identification with horses, evinced both in his writings and his interest and participation in philip ii’s breeding project in córdoba, highlights the horse as a complex tie between the three cultures (islamic, castilian, and inca). indeed, the horse’s role in the juego de cañas — which showcased the specific dexterities of the spanish, barb-related horse for close combat — also suggested the hybridity and violent confrontations central to a castilian imperial project deeply obsessed with purity. just how complex the miscegenation and purity themes played out at the social and legal levels during phillip ii’s rule is evinced by “the inca’s” arrival in spain in 1560 to reclaim his paternal heritage, title and name, and to litigate an inheritance claim over his father’s fortunes during the 1560s. in other words, his half-inca lineage as son of a spanish soldier and his inca concubine (of royal blood herself), 37 see vargas llosa, “el inca garcilaso”. 38 sanchis amat, “el inca garcilaso”, 110. 39 sanchis amat, “el inca garcilaso”, 112. gundermann, “iberians are different” | 65 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) a father who was then married to a spanish noblewoman, did not prevent him from levelling a legal claim as his father’s legitimate heir.40 while his legal battle was ultimately unsuccessful, he settled in spain to pursue a military and literary career as one of the world’s first and most prominent mestizos, supported by his father’s family, at precisely the moment when philip ii was embarking on the córdoba project to create a pure equine raza that would be, in altamirano’s words, an “emblema de un imperio” [emblem of an empire].41 “the inca” garcilaso took great interest in the creation of this breed,42 which appeared at a moment when the empire was grounded both in the kind of hybridity embodied in persons like garcilaso and in cultural practices such as the juego de cañas. it also came at a historical juncture when, as renton shows, the “breeding” of the nobility itself was becoming suspect.43 in this context, philip’s obsession with combining multiple types of horses to produce a “pure spanish race”,44 might be regarded as an attempt to harness notions of purity as a way of fashioning the empire he had inherited into an (early) modern nation state. the year 1492 was not only connected with the conquest of the americas which initiated a vast colonial encounter with human difference but was also the date of castilla’s definitive victory over the last islamic stronghold (granada) on the iberian peninsula. it also brought the definitive expulsion from the territory of all jewish residents who would not convert to christianity.45 while the focus of the banishment of the jews initially, and at face value, appears to be religious in nature, it also signalled the moment at which the presence 40 this legal claim was, to top it off, centred in a horse: garcilaso’s father had been disgraced for lending his horse to the rebellious francisco pizarro (see sanchis amat, “el inca garcilaso”, and vargas llosa, “el inca garcilaso”). 41 altamirano, historia, 77. 42 sanchis amat, “el inca garcilaso”, 110. 43 renton explains that “carillo lasso himself observed that that the project of conserving the race, or conversely the need to remedy its decline, was a phenomenon that one could also identify in the state of human nobility […] it is hardly surprising that contemporary discourses linked the lineage of horses to the lineage of nobles.” see renton, “breeding techniques”, 234. 44 altamirano, historia, 76–77. 45 see pérez, the spanish inquisition. 66 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) of converts in sixteenth century spanish society became a different sort of cultural problem: with the perception that conversion could no longer completely wash away the bad linaje, “new” christians with jewish linaje were suspect and subjected to more stringent investigation (by means of the inquisition) into their conjectured “crypto-jewish” practices. the need to prove pure christian linaje within spain thus signalled a crisis of racial purity that unsettled the newly established national identity. in this context, the thoroughly disciplined, “pure”, and controlled linajes of a spanish raza of horse, created by philip ii as the symbolic unifier and consolidator of spanish imperial national identity, worked to ideologically offset the nation’s heterogeneity symbolized by the jewish convert (who had come to represent an “imperfectly purified” citizen). beyond combining desirable phenotypes, then, the modern foundation of the disciplinary breed project was shaped by the purposeful control and deployment of bloodlines, including the fixing of those phenotypes through repeated linebreeding during the period between 1665 and 1698 into a pure, recognizable, and “repeatable” breed type that has lasted for four centuries.46 the term linaje (literally “lineage,” but in breeding contexts best translated as “bloodline”) thus suggests how animal breeding during this time was able to perform the kind of symbolic work necessary to resolve conflicts within spanish society. since we know that philip’s raza was created both to supply the newly consolidated absolutist nobility with mounts for their novel horsemanship pursuits47 and to represent spanish influence across the continent at practically all of the courts, the traits vaguely named as “good” or “strong” in communications to and from the king’s “governors” of the breed refer to their aptitude for high collection and 46 for agüera carmona, this fixing of the racial prototype into a recognizable breed for the four centuries to come, is attributable to the sole visionary genius of diego lópez de haro, whom philip ii had put in charge of the córdoba stud during the period in question. thus, for agüera carmona, lópez de haro is the “hacedor [del] caballo andaluz” (“the creator of the andalusian horse”). see agüera carmona, “el caballo”, 60. 47 for an analysis of the role of horses and their training in the new courtly culture in france, and more specifically, of the performance and exhibition of the airs above the ground as conduits of noble male identity during this period of profound social transformation, see tucker, “early modern french noble”. gundermann, “iberians are different” | 67 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) alta escuela airs above the ground.48 the associated mode of high school riding was taught prominently in spanish-ruled naples by frederico grisone, to whose school aristocratic riders from across europe flocked and whose influential dressage manual, considered to be the first in modern times, was translated into spanish in 1568.49 the new spanish horse widely adopted for the manège was not only characterized by a signature subconvex profile, but also by a short, wide back, sloped croup and low-set tail, strongly developed, highset neck, and generally strong muscling50 — all characteristics that continue to inform today’s breed standards for the traditional pre.51 carrasco, lópez rodríguez, and agüera carmona refer to several well-known paintings from the time period, most notably by van dyk, rubens, and velázquez as evidence of the preferred conformation indicated only sparsely in historical documents. while one could object that paintings were likely influenced by ideals as much as physical realities, idealizations do express the aspirations that inform breeding choices and ultimately coalesce as breed. the conformational requirements for a horse to perform airs above the ground probably give us another explanation as to why, even today, these breeds do not readily lend themselves to the extended trot so prized in current dressage competitions. the compact build of a horse that can easily find the balance to sit on its hind legs (piaffer to levade) and then propel itself up into the air into the dramatic school jumps (courbette and capriole) without building momentum through speed, contrasts sharply with the longer frame that allows for effortless extensions in modern warmblood sport horses. needless to say, the baroque painters to whom pre scholars 48 carrasco and lópez rodríguez, “las caballerizas reales”, 18. 49 see tobey, “legacy of federico grisone”, 149. while grisone’s 1550 work gli ordini di cav­ alcare is usually considered the first “known treatise on dressage after that of xenophon” (bragança, dressage, 73), in fact, alta escuela equitation was present on the iberian peninsula at least since the portuguese king dom duarte published his work livro da en­ sinança de bem cavalgar toda sela (the book on teaching good riding in any saddle) in 1434. it is unclear whether king duarte’s equitation was directly transmitted to the court of philip ii, but the connections to grisone are obvious. 50 carrasco and lópez rodríguez, “las caballerizas reales”, 14–15. 51 for a detailed definition of breed type (“prototipo racial”) of the pre, see ancce, “el caballo español”. 68 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) have recourse for visualizing the conformation of the seventeenth century horse do not depict them performing in forward extension, but rather celebrate the highly collected equilibrium. however, the alta escuela was not the only functional requirement that can be assumed to have produced the classical, short-coupled iberian horse as we know it in the twenty-first century. of bulls and horses alongside the narrative of philip ii’s raza, another important origin story of the iberian horse emphasizes the roots of these breeds in interaction with iberian cattle, and most importantly, with fighting bulls. as pre historian juan llamas perdigó affirms, spanish horses are born of the encounter with the aggressive bull of andalucía, and this encounter has shaped their morphology, balance, and movement.52 one might argue that the bullfighting lineages of the iberian horses constitute an inherent counterpoint to the modernizing, homogenizing, and nationalist narrative of the córdoba project, even while morphologically there is a fair bit of overlap between the bull-oriented iberians and the alta escuela pres. as such and through its queer relation to power, the origin of the bullfighting horse is always multiple and undisciplined, closer to type than raza. indeed, one finds many cross-breds among the actual bullfighters: hispano-arabs, tres san­ gres (pre×thoroughbred×arab), cruzados (luso-arab), etc. while llamas’s romantic-poetic formulations participate in myth-making, they also introduce naturecultural considerations that position the history of the pre much differently than narratives focused exclusively on political and social contexts. for llamas, the spanish horse is not simply a product of human rationality and agency associated with modern disciplinary and institutional power as it is in altamirano’s account, but is instead endowed with an agency of its own and in affinity with the landscape in which it evolved. horse, bull, human, and marisma (brackish river) inextricably tangle into each other in his writing. in encounters with a fighting bull, especially when this is a close encounter, the horse needs 52 llamas perdigó, this is the spanish horse, 17. gundermann, “iberians are different” | 69 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) to possess both a particular type of athletic ability and an extremely flexible body that can spin or turn on a dime, gallop, stop, and move sideways or backward within a split second.53 modern sport horses have been bred for ample ground covering gaits, not for manoeuvrability in tight quarters. as a result of their more forward balance, less flexible backs, and less closed stifle angles, neither the thoroughbred nor the modern warmblood could ever move like an iberian horse around a bull. portuguese academic rider and dressage historian, diogo de bragança, explains the interconnections between the iberian horse, classical portuguese equitation from the fifteenth century to the present,54 and iberian bullfighting traditions. for bragança, “tauromachic horsemanship is […] the only equestrian activity proving that the horses [that academic dressage] uses are truly ‘finished’ as school horses.”55 both the balance of the bullfighting horse and the old-school rassembler (collection according to pre-nineteenth-century principles) require the type of equine conformation found in the iberian, a horse that has “gaits that are not very ample by nature”.56 traditional iberian riding, whether bullfighting, cattle work, or the alta escuela, “puts its horses on the haunches, and i think that it is good since it is in this position that the handling of peninsular horses is at its best.”57 accordingly, bragança recommends that “the aptitude [for balance on the haunches] should be emphasized” with iberian-type horses in their training.58 bragança’s reflections thus 53 llamas calls this the “essence of the spanish horse”, an “essence” upheld by the anatomy of neck and stifle angles (this is the spanish horse, 18). 54 according to bragança, portuguese classical equitation was, from the eighteenth century onward, closely linked to french dressage as consolidated by louis xiv’s écuyer françois robichon de la guérinière. this is partly reflected today in the performance costumes used at the escola portuguesa de arte equestre (the portuguese school of equestrian art, the portuguese equivalent of the spanish riding school of vienna), which are in the style of louis xiv’s versailles school. bragança mentions as well that today’s internationally known “traditional” portuguese saddle is a direct reproduction of french eighteenth-century saddles (dressage, 77). 55 bragança, dressage, 159. 56 bragança, dressage, 173. 57 bragança, dressage, 174. 58 bragança, dressage, 173. 70 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) remind us that “it is only after having worked our peninsular horses at collected gaits that we can make them take up extended gaits without too much difficulty.”59 since developing the “old-school ras­ sembler” takes several years of training and extended trot could only be expected at the end of this development, it would be impossible for an iberian to demonstrate an extended trot at an early age. bragança’s argument serves as a perfect explanation for where the prevailing modern training and testing system in place today fails young iberian horses. in addition to the morphological characteristics of a horse that can “turn on a dime”, the bullfighting horse also needs to possess a form of bravery that disposes him to flirt with disaster. within the pre, there are several brands/bloodlines that are most directly associated with bullfighting and cattle work.60 in the case of the psl, the breed as a whole is more uniformly associated with this type of functionality, although there is one main psl bloodline that is strongly associated with bullfighting.61 in the pre, these lines are rarely found in pure form today as their breeders no longer exist, but they have been incorporated into many contemporary breeding programs at the forefront of the modernizing movement. arguably, the degree to which the pre has been modernized over the past decades to meet the demands of the modern dressage arena signifies a watering down of its heritage as a bullfighting and alta escuela horse, while certain portuguese breeders have retained those traditional qualities in the lusitano up until now. the encounter between an aggressive bull and a horse provides a snapshot of the traditional iberian horse’s natureculture, which has sedimented into its specific morphology: “a neck that seems to reach 59 bragança, dressage, 173–74. 60 the four breeders/bloodlines most directly associated with bullfighting are miura, paco lazo díaz, guardiola, and domecq. with the exception of guardiola (which also still exists as a stud) all of them also maintained close connections to the portuguese, and lazo díaz explicitly opposed the closing of the spanish stud book to lusitano influence in the late 1960s. guardiola’s brand is not directly associated with the bullfight, but with another torine sport called acoso y derribo, a discipline similar to american cattle sorting, but with more fast and violent action. 61 this is the brand of manuel veiga, which still exists to this day. gundermann, “iberians are different” | 71 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) up towards the sun and the stars […] combined with an exceptionally sharply angled stifle joint, gives a natural ability to feint and dodge unmatched by any other breed.”62 this morphology has shaped these horses’ biomechanics, but equally characteristic is how they watch out for things around them, how their skin reacts to touch, how their ribcage moulds around the rider’s inside leg, how their energy is explosive, but always upward and retracting, never bursting forward into pressure. to burst directly into a bull in the manner of a thoroughbred who bursts forward out of the starting gate and onto the flat racetrack, would be suicide for a bullfighting horse.63 the iberians play with power, but do not confront it directly. they dance and bend around an attack, provoking and dodging their adversary. beyond the onto-epistemological claim about the iberian horse’s queer historical positioning, to be developed further below, i would argue that this relationship to power is itself a queer manoeuvre that works against the grain of the focus on purity and disciplinary/institutional control associated with the historical creation of the pre. not only does the etymology of queer link back to the notion of “oblique” (related to the german word “quer”), it also suggests an indirect form of confronting power that has recently been reclaimed in queer studies as a form of minority discourse. coining the term “disidentification” as his main theoretical vehicle, josé esteban muñoz argues that the ambivalent and indirect relation to power constitutes nothing less than “the blueprint for minoritarian counterpublic spheres”.64 to disidentify, ultimately, is to neither identify with (or assimilate to) the demands of hegemonic (white, straight, male) power, nor to counter-identify against (or refuse outright) all hold that it has over minority subjects through direct, violent confrontation; rather, it stitches together an encounter that is neither (yes)/nor (no), but a “perhaps” or “for the time being” or “somewhat” or “not completely,” or “not quite yet”. 62 llamas perdigó, this is the spanish horse, 18. 63 bragança argues that “blood horses with great scope, selected by tests of speed […] lack strength in the slow gaits, a serious obstacle to obtaining the training necessary for facing a bull with precision at a deliberate pace” (dressage, 162). 64 esteban muñoz, disidentifications, 5. 72 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) there is a way of reading the negotiations of the bullfighting horse with the brute force of the bull as similarly ambivalent, as not quite confronting, but neither as evading or capitulating (fleeing). within the putative prey animal “nature” of the horse, to not flee from danger but instead to flirt with it suggests a strange or queer natureculture rather than a “straight nature”. ethology-based animal rights advocates might consider the behaviour of a bullfighting horse to be a form of learned helplessness produced merely by harsh or terrifying training. however, anyone who knows iberian horses from bloodlines that excel in this ritual understand that you cannot intimidate a horse into this kind of bravery. in the bullfighting ring, the rider’s life often depends on the horse’s ability to take care of the rider. the horse must not only take the initiative, then, the rider must also trust in the horse’s “intuition”, to borrow kirrilly thompson’s words.65 such expressions of agency underscore the fact that this ability has become the iberian horse’s natureculture and is not merely a conditioned response or a pre-given nature.66 a natureculture represents 65 when i speak of the “bullfighting horse”, i am referring to the caballo de rejones, not to the caballo de picar, an important distinction theorized by kirrilly thompson with regards to the spanish bullfighting tradition. thompson also points out that the former is ridden in the jineta/gineta style, whereas the latter a la brida like the heavy northern european jousting horses of the middle ages. in the portuguese mounted bullfight, the figure of the picador and his armoured, restrained, and muzzled horse who has little to no agency in the fight and only serves as a wall into which the bull is provoked to crash, and against which the rider braces when attacking the bull, does not exist. by contrast, the caballo de rejones is an active participant whose interaction with his rider produces the compenetración (rapport/understanding, literally “deep mutual penetration”) that thompson theorizes as “becoming centaur”. thompson is right in stressing the importance of the “intuition” of the caballo de rejones for the dynamic and safety of the rider-horse couple. see thompson, “theorising”, 243. in the portuguese version of the ritual, this dynamic is much more central than in the spanish mounted bullfight, and furthermore, the bull does not die, and his horns are wrapped in leather sheaths to prevent injury or death of the bullfighting horse. 66 i applaud thompson’s emphasis on performativity and actor-network theory in her theorizing of the dynamics of the mounted bullfight. in this vein, she deftly proposes that “the application of performativity to animals frees them from essentialist scientific discourses” (“theorising”, 325). in other words, it frees them from their subjection to “straight nature”; yet, there is an incongruity at a key moment in her argument where she distinguishes in binary fashion between the horse’s (natural) “instinct” to flee, which in her argument is suppressed in the encounter with the bull, and his “intuition” (243) for flamboyant and provocative movement, and even aggression toward the bull, which are highly valued in iberian culture, and which, in my argument, constitute the iberian horse’s natureculture. gundermann, “iberians are different” | 73 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) a potential, in this case for movement or behaviour. realizing this potential, stallions in many bullfights provoke attacks from the bull but then dodge them. they approach, then retreat, but not fully in order to continue the fight. the biomechanical balance of the bullfighting horse on the haunches and his elastic ability to roll back onto his hocks, allows him to fully develop this ambivalence, which is neither forward nor backward, but often both and neither as he dances around the bull in lateral manoeuvres. baroque subversions altamirano points out that the spanish raza came into its own during the baroque period (roughly 1550–1750), and that the stallions chosen for breeding during that period reflected the baroque aesthetic predilection for curved lines. they were, therefore, physiologically “curvy”, including the convex frontonasal profile of the head.67 the nasal profile of the baroque horse blends into the overall convex shape seen from the side that includes a rounded, arched neck and a sloped croup with low set tail, an overall conformational dynamic further emphasized by a short back and loin. altamirano explains the nasal profile as a cultural preference for curved convex shapes and rejection of straight lines, without, however, going into any exploration of the significance of these aesthetics or problematizing the notion of a strictly sequential nature of so-called artistic periods. in this manner, aesthetic difference is assumed simply to be the result of a succession of tastes and there is no sustained discussion of the biomechanical significance of this “roundness” in the way that bragança discusses its relevance for the bullfight and alta escuela equitation. one might therefore ask: what is the wider cultural significance of the baroque curve that altamirano invokes but does not theorize? the theoretical essay barroco (1974) by severo sarduy — a cuban exile who lived much of his life in paris and whose career intersected with some of the most prominent parisian poststructuralists interested in the baroque (barthes, lacan, foucault, deleuze) — offers a basis for developing a more capacious exploration of the “curvy lines” of the iberian horse. 67 altamirano, historia, 160. 74 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) considering that it is largely devoid of any functional value and therefore a purely aesthetic marker, the frequent focus on the “frontonasal profile” of the iberian horses has become a signal of how iberians, particularly psls, have failed to modernize. an anglo-saxon equestrian tourist quoted by altamirano notes that “spanish judges like everything that we look down upon: they don’t like a straight and dry head,” and “the curved head [is] essential for the pure breed”.68 altamirano also notes that the convex profile is no longer favoured in the pre.69 this is perhaps a reflection of the modernization project of the yeguada militar in the 1930s and 40s, a kind of modernization that did not occur in the lusitano until much later, and with less consistency.70 the pressure to modernize on that part of the military — to serve the need for fast, ground-covering mounts rather than the alta escuela horses associated with philip ii’s raza — can be seen as a continuous strain or tension on iberian breeds since the rise in popularity of the thoroughbred in the nineteenth century.71 the modern aesthetic idealization of the concave, or dished, head associated with the arabian horse has since come to be a powerful marker of a horse’s attractiveness, even among some iberian lovers. but why, to an audience that has not been specifically educated to appreciate it as a sign of iberian “nobility”, is a curved head outdated, “unmodern”, old-fashioned, inelegant, and even ugly (anecdotally many people have surprisingly strong reactions against this nasal profile)? what does its continued linking 68 “los jueces españoles gustan [de] todo lo que nosotros despreciamos en un caballo: no gustan de una cabeza recta y seca…” and “era esencial en la raza pura la cabeza acarnerada.” altamirano, historia, 167. 69 altamirano, historia, 160. 70 it should be noted that the yeguada militar (ym), founded in the 1890s by the spanish government with the goal of improving the breed by providing access to quality stallions for pre breeders, is considered to be a continuation and revival of philip ii’s project in córdoba in the sixteenth century. see carrazco and lópez rodríguez, “las caballerizas reales”, 22. the ym also owns and breeds the most significant number of arabians on the iberian peninsula, as well as a smaller number of english thoroughbreds. the speculation that the ym might secretly have experimented with outcrossing pres to arabians or thoroughbreds in its modernization project in the first decades of the twentieth century — a practice already in place under the various labels and registrations for hispanoárabe or cruzado (crossbred) or tres sangres (three bloods) —  without officially declaring it, might have been stimulated by the presence of these other breeds on the premises of the military stud farm. 71 carrasco and lópez rodríguez, “las caballerizas reales”, 18. gundermann, “iberians are different” | 75 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) to the baroque signify? as will be shown, what is at stake is the relationship of modernity to its own internal critique. indeed, the shape of the baroque iberian horse is not in itself the subject of this critique, in the sense of essence or ontology; rather, it performs this critique in the context of, and in relation to, the modern horse. for sarduy, the oblique and elliptical curve (not the roundness of the circle) is one of the central elements that define baroque aesthetics and cosmology. it is, in this context, a subversion of the rationalist renaissance focus on the circle as the expression of the perfection of symmetry. in this sense, sarduy sets up the baroque from the very beginning of his essay not so much as an other, or alternative to, or even supersession of, the renaissance, but rather as a deconstructive re-reading of the rationalist discourse of modernity itself as a process of undoing and unravelling. sarduy describes galileo’s obsession with the symmetry of the circle and its singular centre,72 arguing that the baroque transforms these aesthetics not so much through a complete rejection of the paradigm, but rather by distorting the circle into an elongated and decentred imitation of a circle. the ellipsis in effect distorts the symmetry of the circle, as there are now two or multiple centres.73 of paramount importance is that, for galileo, the symmetry of the circle was not only perfect and divine, but also “natural”, and its distortion is therefore contra naturam. this turn against nature is precisely the nexus that subtends sarduy’s view of baroque aesthetics as ultimately queer in an obliquely sexual sense as well. one effect of this production of nature and power as centred and singular (so the rejection of multiple truths), is perhaps the phobic obsession with the forces of decentring and multiplicity that the baroque paradigm kindles. retombée (as a french word used throughout the spanish text) is one of sarduy’s key terms, making its appearance in the first 72 “galileo se aferra al círculo como a la noción de naturalidad que en la tradición aristotélica le es consubstancial; la fetichización de esta figura participa también del espejismo que deriva de las últimas lecturas, mecánicas, de esa tradición.” [galileo is fixated on the circle as well as the concept of naturalness, which in the aristotelian tradition are coextensive; the fetishization of this figure is also part of the mirage that appears in the last readings on mecanics of this tradition.] sarduy, barroco, 46–47. 73 sarduy, barroco, 19. 76 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) sentence of the book. it could be translated into english as “fallout” — literally that which “falls” (“tombe”) back (“re-“) — or “repercussion” (with its sonic references), or “consequences” in a broader causal sense. sarduy thus defines the baroque against the dominant periodizing habit, as a much broader phenomenon which keeps producing its retombée, and therefore intervening in the (modern) present, with its continuous oscillations, reverberations, and echoes (re-percussions). the baroque, in this sense, is not over. rather, it has always been ghostly and continues to produce its subversive effect on the modern, both in the sense of present/contemporary and in its more technical meaning as the ongoing dynamics of modernity and modernization realized as the compulsion to “update”. my interest is to understand the iberian (baroque) horse as an instance of retombée within the context of modern horse breeding and its “updating” urge. to some extent, this return happens in naturecultural ways within the complex web of genetics and cultural practices as a point of failure to conform. within the context of modern sport horse dressage, i would suggest, the traditional iberian horse functions as a continual question mark. closely related to the ellipsis as a distortion of the divine/natural circle and a multiplication of its centres in baroque aesthetics is the importance of anamorphosis.74 for sarduy, anamorphosis is a perversion of renaissance perspective,75 which centres the viewer and has him look “head on” or “straight at” the object of his gaze.76 anamorphosis makes such a “straight” positioning preposterous, because the truth of a subject can only be seen by looking obliquely, or queerly. to look straight on is to miss the point altogether. anamorphosis thus offers a visual analogy of the aesthetic and athletic strategy of the 74 lacan’s famous reading of holbein’s painting the ambassadors highlights poststructuralism’s interest in displacing rationalist notions of power. see lacan, les quatre con­ cepts, 101–2. 75 renaissance perspective can be said to be the precursor not only of modern visuality, but also of the scientific method. for an argument along these lines, see jackson, strat­ egies of deviance, 126. 76 “la anamorfosis aparece pues como la perversión de la perspectiva y de su código — presentar de frente, ver de frente” [anamorphosis appears therefore as a perversion of the perspective and its code — to present up front, to look straight on]. sarduy, barroco, 49. gundermann, “iberians are different” | 77 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) bullfighting horse who both confronts and subverts the power of the bull by distorting straight-on attacks via elliptical movement. since the predominant tradition of horse training in the iberian peninsula is ultimately based on this aesthetic (and its connection to alta escuela as bragança demonstrates), and since the iberian horse’s natureculture has developed around this ritualized form of moving, it seems important to expand the discussion of the iberian horse’s “baroqueness” beyond the “curvy” shape of his or her frontonasal profile (or even back and croup) toward a more capacious consideration of the traditions that have shaped this horse as an oblique curve, and that underpin its elliptical subversion of modern power. one might concede that the modernization of iberian breeds is a recurring theme throughout their history, from philip ii’s foundational modernization in the latter half of the sixteenth century, to the yeguada militar project between the 1890s and the 1940s, and to present attempts within the pre and the psl to breed for the sport horse market. modernization is perhaps an inevitable historical force, yet, sarduy’s argument that this process of modernization is always haunted by the retombée of baroque subversion raises questions about the coherence of such enterprises. does the old-style of iberian horse command a difference, an allure, a difficulty, and a delight that cannot be laid to rest, even natureculturally, as it continues to re-emerge as genetic difference? does the persistence of this difference present itself in the difficulties of riders and breeders today who ignore the traditions? sarduy allows us to proceed along this conceptual path, and while the word “queer” was not in his vocabulary (in spanish at the historical moment of sarduy’s articulation), it seems appropriate when understood in its etymological relation to the “oblique” or “wayward”. it is with these theoretical markers in mind that i have concluded that the iberian horse is queer. the term represents an imperfect translation of sarduy’s link between baroque aesthetics and sexual minority discourse (which, in his text, is hinted at obliquely more than made explicit), but for the time being, there seems to be no better word available in the english language. 78 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the production of nature another way of exploring the connection between sarduy’s theory of the baroque as strategic, subversive retombée and my claim that the baroque iberian horse is a queer ironic commentary on the modern sport horse, is by taking a final swerve through queer feminism’s onto-epistemology. what i identify throughout this essay as a core component of “modernization” is a progress narrative that relies on the logocentric operations opposing nature to culture, matter to meaning/agency/intention, and animals to humans. as an extension of modernity, modernization is always a process in which human agency acts upon a presumably passive nature/matter in order to “improve” it. when derrida reminds us that “there is no nature, only […] denaturalization and naturalization”,77 he posits that nature itself does not exist outside of its cultural production. in similar fashion, donna haraway pointedly asks “what gets to count as nature, for whom and when, and how much [does] it cost […] to produce nature at a particular moment in history for a particular group of people”.78 in the case of the iberian horse, one might ask about the cost of philip ii’s raza, the twentieth-century yeguada militar project, or the current focus on producing sport-bred iberians? who bears it and to what effect? there is no space here to pursue this question fully, but to offer just one concrete example, one might consider whether increasing the average size of the pre from 15–16 hh to 16–17 hh over the last two decades — an increase felt to be desirable for dressage competition where increased size also implies rangier, larger movement — could account for the growing prevalence of ocd lesions in the joints of young iberians in recent years.79 this deconstructionist critique of humanist thinking, however, requires a next step to become fully useful to my argument. donna 77 derrida, given time, 170; quoted in butler, bodies that matter, 1. 78 paper tiger tv, “donna haraway reads” [2:06–2:16]. 79 ocd, or osteochondritis dissecans, is a disabling disease of equine joints, which could be the product of, among other factors, extreme and rapid growth spurts during development. several iberian breeders with whom i spoke about this subject blame the recent obsession with size for the apparent increase of ocd cases in iberians. this claim is not based on statistical analysis. gundermann, “iberians are different” | 79 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) haraway addresses this need with her neologism “naturecultural”, where nature and culture are understood to be so tightly woven into and through each other that matter and meaning, nature and culture, cannot be separated. one of the central issues at stake in her use of this term is agency within a logocentric cultural system that has, for millennia, cast matter as passive, even when etymologically the term (derived from mater, mother) is also linked to matrix (womb), which is inherently generative. for haraway, all “critters” (organisms, technologies, molecules, or ideas) are “material-semiotic actors”, not ei­ ther matter or meaning makers.80 all meaning-makers are also material (and hence constrained by concrete situatedness and limited sight), and all matter has inherent meaning-making capacity. equally relevant is quantum physicist karen barad’s theorization that matter is endowed with agency as an active meaning maker. barad largely agrees with the performative or linguistic turn in twentieth century philosophy in that she refutes essentialist ontologies and hence understands that the material manifestations of reality are brought about performatively and relationally. with foucault, she also refutes representationalism, the idea that reality and meaning/language are separate from each other, or that one can describe something neutrally without simultaneously constituting it. in this manner, we might understand a horse breed, as altamirano does with regard to the pre, as culturally produced by social institutions including spanish imperialism, colonialism, and the cultural need to modernize spanish nobility from its medieval role into emergent absolutism. barad’s ideas become particularly weighty and novel for my argument when she posits matter itself as performative, and as an actor.81 in other words, spanish noblemen did not simply take pre-existing passive forms of nature (the existing native jennet horse, neapolitan imports, the barb, fertile pasture lands around córdoba, etc.) and shape them into the 80 haraway, “situated knowledges”, 595. 81 alluding to an array of recent publications in cultural studies, barad ironically observes: “language matters. discourse matters. culture matters. there is an important sense in which the only thing that does not seem to matter anymore is matter.” barad, “posthumanist performativity”, 120. 80 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) (early) modern spanish raza through their sole intentional action, but rather (early) spanish modernity was co-created by various material-semiotic actors (including horses, landscapes, soil composition, inca gold, spanish nobility, caribbean sugar, etc.), congealing into a dense web of correspondences that we now call the pre. in altamirano’s discussion (as in most discussions that do not take an explicitly naturecultural approach), equine morphology (“matter/ nature”) is left out as an actor, stripped of agency, as it were, as if a shift from a la j/gineta (the predominant riding style of the military pre-reconquista in the peninsula) to airs above the ground ridden with a longer stirrup (not exactly a la brida) in the modes of aristocratic self-representation was not a necessary consequence of a different type of horse, and thus dictated by naturecultural entanglements with horses rather than simply human cultural volition.82 barad further suggests that the term queer has a particular affinity with her project of troubling the seemingly stable binary oppositions between nature and culture, matter and meaning.83 barad’s projection of the usefulness of the term queer within a quantum-physics-informed frame offers a radical reconfiguration of the foundational categories of space, time, and causality, as well as matter. in “nature’s queer performativity”, she develops the notion of a “queer critter”: someone whose “very ‘species being’ […] makes explicit the queering of ‘identity’ and relationality”. she insists, moreover, that it is “not enough to simply assert that identity is a relation, if the relation in question is between or among entities that are understood to precede their relations”.84 for barad, in effect, “beings” or “entities” are constituted entirely through relations among agential actors. in the case of sixteenthand seventeenth-century european nobility who represent themselves through alta escuela movements 82 thompson’s concept of “centaur” as a performative, and always technologically mediated, act of continuous becoming together is very similar to the human/equine naturecultural entanglement out of which, in my argument, the modern pre has emerged. see thompson, “theorising”, 232. 83 “queer is a radical questioning of identity and binaries, including the nature/culture binary […] including […] causality, matter, space, and time” barad, “nature’s queer performativity”, 29. 84 barad, “nature’s queer performativity”, 33. gundermann, “iberians are different” | 81 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) with their mounts, most specifically through airs above the ground, as treva j. tucker demonstrates, their identity as nobility is as much constituted through the interaction with these “new” horses as the horses themselves are through their interaction with the noblemen, each other, or the architecture of the manège, and perhaps most specifically the pillars. equine morphology, movement, balance, and indeed breed altogether must be understood as active meaning-makers, not simply as a human product. it was, then, the possibility opened up by the movement in bullfighting and alta es­ cuela airs of a specific equine conformation and morphology that allowed for the development of renaissance/baroque horsemanship and breeding, as much as the other way around. moreover, equine conformation and movement was not simply produced by humans ex nihilo through breeding and training, but rather developed over time, in history, in what barad calls “intra-action”, between actors who did not exist prior to that intra-action. my suggestion, then, would be to understand the critter “breed” itself as a material-semiotic actor that does not precede its entangled relationalities. it is not simply a passive product of human agency, a “thing” that “is” or “is made”; rather breed actively contributes to and encodes the fields of multi-species power becoming manifest in the various riding academies of europe, beginning with dom duarte’s earliest (fifteenth century) example, and culminating in robichon de la guérinière’s service to louis xiv as écuyer du roi and codification of classical dressage in the 1730 treatise école de cavalerie, which today counts as the basis of all classical dressage theory. from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the spanish raza was the hegemonic horse, and congealed the norm for equine–human power structures in that moment. it was also the “modern” horse, even as this very modernity was also already undercut by the retombée of its baroqueness. in calling the contemporary iberian horse queer in a baradian sense, however, i am referring to its historical positioning as a critical critter in the present moment, not in an essentialist, transhistorical sense. in so doing, i suggest that the iberian horse today offers a critical, destabilizing, de-naturalizing angle 82 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) from which to understand the normative institutional forces of modernization manifest through breed, first via the thoroughbred as the modernizer of nearly all modern horse breeds, and now in international competition via the modern warmblood sport horse. in recent history, in effect, “breed” sits alongside other northern european critters such as liberal democracy or advanced capitalist efficiency, all of which eclipsed spanish world hegemony and relegated it to an unmodern and baroque ghostliness. i have not had space to develop a full argument about some of the specific positions of the psl in this constellation. it is a breed that lacks the institutional grounding in a full-fledged (early) modernity of its own and was on several occasions reconstructed based on the pre. it thus represents a minor chord within the minority discourse, even as it has simultaneously eclipsed the pre in its recent rise to prominence in international dressage competition and associated markets. the classical iberian horse, however, the one that persists despite intense modernizing pressure both onto and from within existing breed structure, provides us with an aesthetic delight that is at odds with the present congealments of beauty, power, and progress — of what constitutes a good, or better, horse for sport — and signals that there are alternatives to the status quo. this is a delight that is capable of queering the modern power of the sport horse. works cited agüera carmona, eduardo. “el caballo de don diego lópez de haro: origen del caballo andaluz.” anales de la real academia de ciencias veterinarias de andalucía oriental 28, no. 1 (2015): 59–71. http://hdl.handle.net/10396/15102. altamirano, juan carlos. historia y origen del caballo español. las caballerizas reales de córdoba. málaga: a. m. c. ediciones, 1998. altamirano, juan carlos. history of the carthusian horses. translated by catherine germann. málaga: ediciones ecuestres, 2003. ancce. “el caballo español. morfología de la raza.” asociación nacional de criadores de caballos de pura raza española. n.d. https://www.ancce.es/ contenido/morfologia-del-pre. ancce. “el pura raza española (pre).” asociación nacional de criadores de caballos de pura raza española. 28 may 2020. https://www.ancce.es/videos/50/ el-pura-raza-espanola-pre/. http://hdl.handle.net/10396/15102 https://www.ancce.es/contenido/morfologia-del-pre https://www.ancce.es/contenido/morfologia-del-pre https://www.ancce.es/videos/50/el-pura-raza-espanola-pre/ https://www.ancce.es/videos/50/el-pura-raza-espanola-pre/ gundermann, “iberians are different” | 83 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) barad, karen. “posthumanist performativity: toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter.” in material feminisms, edited by stacy alaimo and susan hekman, 120–54. bloomington: indiana university press, 2008. barad, karen. “nature’s queer performativity.” kvinder, køn & forskning 15, nos. 1–2 (2012): 25–53. https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1-2.28067. bragança, dom diogo de. dressage in the french tradition. translated from portuguese by rené bacharach, translated from french by michael l.m. fletcher. franktown, va: xenophon press, 2011. burton, teresa. “portugal’s dressage stars prepare for tokyo.” fei: fédération équestre internationale. 21 november 2021. https://www.fei.org/stories/sport/ dressage/portugal-equestrian-dressagemaria-caetano-rodrigo-moura-torres. butler, judith. bodies that matter. london: routledge, 1993. carrasco, librado and juan m. lópez rodríguez. “las caballerizas reales de córdoba: su papel en la evolución del caballo y de su utilización por la sociedad española.” in las caballerizas reales y el mundo del caballo, edited by juan aranda doncel and josé martínez millán, 11–30. córdoba: litopress, 2016. derrida, jacques. given time: i. counterfeit money. translated by peggy kamuf. chicago: university of chicago press, 1992. derrida, jacques. “des tours de babel.” translated by joseph f. graham. in difference in translation, edited by joseph f. graham, 165–207. ithaca, ny: cornell university press, 1985. edwards, peter, karl a. e. enenkel, and elpeth graham, eds. the horse as cultural icon: the real and the symbolic horse in the early modern world. leiden: brill, 2011. foucault, michel. the birth of the clinic: an archaeology of medical perception. translated by a. m. sheridan. london: routledge, 1973. guest, kristen and monica mattfeld. introduction to equestrian cultures: horses, human society, and the discourse of modernity, 1–7. chicago: university of chicago press, 2019. guest, kristen and monica mattfeld, eds. horse breeds and human society: purity, identity and the making of the modern horse. london: routledge, 2020. guest, kristen, monica mattfeld, margaret derry, donna haraway, donna landry, harriet ritvo, and sandra swart. “humanimalia roundtable on breed.” humanimalia 10, no 1 (2018): 5–26. https://doi.org/10.52537/ humanimalia.9591. haraway, donna. “situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective.” feminist studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066. jackson, earl, jr. strategies of deviance: studies in gay male representation. bloomington: indiana university press, 1995. lacan, jacques. les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse. vol. 11 of le séminaire de jacques lacan, edited by jacques-alain miller. paris: éditions du seuil, 1973. lange, christoph. “the making and remaking of the arabian horse — from the arab bedouin horse to the modern straight egyptian.” in guest and mattfeld, horse breeds and human society, 234–50. llamas perdigó, juan. this is the spanish horse. translated by jane rabagliati. london: j.a. allen, 1997. landry, donna. noble brutes: how eastern bloodstock transformed english culture. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press, 2009. loch, sylvia. the royal horse of europe. the story of the andalusian and lusitano. london: j. a. allen, 1986. https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v0i1-2.28067 https://www.fei.org/stories/sport/dressage/portugal-equestrian-dressage-maria-caetano-rodrigo-moura-torres https://www.fei.org/stories/sport/dressage/portugal-equestrian-dressage-maria-caetano-rodrigo-moura-torres https://www.fei.org/stories/sport/dressage/portugal-equestrian-dressage-maria-caetano-rodrigo-moura-torres https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9591 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9591 https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066 84 | gundermann, “iberians are different” humanimalia 13.2 (2023) martínez millán, josé. “la real casa de caballeros pajes, un centro de educación cortesana perteneciente a la caballeriza real.” in movilidad cortesana y distinción: coches, tiros y caballos, edited by juan aranda doncel and josé martínez millán, 45–134. córdoba: litopress, 2019. muñoz, josé esteban. disidentifications: queers of color and the performance of politics. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 1999. nash, richard. “beware a bastard breed: notes toward a revisionist history of the thoroughbred racehorse.” in edwards et al., the horse as cultural icon, 191–216. nash, richard. “‘honest english breed’: the thoroughbred as cultural metaphor.” in raber and tucker, the culture of the horse, 245–72. nash, richard. “a perfect nicking pattern.” humanimalia 10, no.1 (2018): 27–43. https://doi.org/10.52537/ humanimalia.9523. paper tiger tv. “donna haraway reads ‘the national geographic’ on primates.” trt, episode 126, 1987. 28 minutes. https:// papertiger.org/donna-haraway-readsthe-national-geographic-on-primates/. pérez, joseph. the spanish inquisition: a history. translated by janet lloyd. new haven, ct: yale university press, 2005. pratt, mary louise. imperial eyes: travel writing and transculturation. london: routledge, 1992. raber, karen and treva j. tucker, eds. the culture of the horse: status, discipline, and identity in the early modern world. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2005. renton, kathryn. “breeding techniques and court influence: charting a ‘decline’ of the spanish horse in the early modern period.” the court historian 24, no. 3 (2019): 221–34. renton, kathryn. “defining ‘race’ in the spanish horse: the breeding program of king philip ii.” in guest and mattfeld, horse breeds and human society, 13–26. sanchis amat, victor manuel. “el inca garcilaso y la jura de felipe ii en el cuzco.” revista de crítica literaria latinoamericana no. 85 (2017): 101–13. sarduy, severo. barroco. buenos aires: editorial sudamericana, 1974. thompson, kirrilly. “theorising riderhorse relations: an ethnographic illustration of the centaur metaphor in the spanish bullfight.” in theorizing animals: rethinking humanimal relations, edited by nik taylor and tania signal, 221–53. leiden: brill, 2011. tobey, elizabeth m. “the legacy of federico grisone.” in edwards et al., the horse as cultural icon, 143–71. tucker, treva l. “early modern french noble identity and the equestrian ‘airs above the ground.’” in raber and tucker, the culture of the horse, 273–309. vargas llosa, mario. “el inca garcilaso y la lengua de todos.” biblioteca virtual miguel de cervantes, 2009. https:// www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ ark:/59851/bmc4f282. https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9523 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9523 https://papertiger.org/donna-haraway-reads-the-national-geographic-on-primates/ https://papertiger.org/donna-haraway-reads-the-national-geographic-on-primates/ https://papertiger.org/donna-haraway-reads-the-national-geographic-on-primates/ https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmc4f282 https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmc4f282 https://www.cervantesvirtual.com/nd/ark:/59851/bmc4f282 van schendel mithun country interspecies mapping and timing a view from mithun country willem van schendel university of amsterdam humanimalia 15.1 (fall 2024) abstract: this article argues for an interspecies methodology to challenge the human-derived spatial and temporal constructs that underpin most historical narratives. it also seeks to qualify the entrenched dichotomy between wildness and domestication. to this end, we focus on the interaction between humans and “mithuns” (bos frontalis), bulky bovines endemic in the mountain forests of the eastern himalayas. in this large region — covering parts of india, myanmar, bangladesh, bhutan, and china — numerous societies attuned their cultural sensibilities and cosmological assumptions to the same animal. this remarkable feat of cultural convergence attests to the unwitting power that a semi-wild bovine exerted over generations of humans — a fact that environmental historians can incorporate into their analyses of interspecies agency. the significance of mithuns to humans had nothing to do with their livestock potential. they were sacred animals that humans needed to communicate with supernatural forces. the form that this communication took was ceremonial sacrifice. during the twentieth century, however, mithun–human relationships morphed into a new sacrality of place, ethnic identity, regional belonging, and political resistance. this transformation suggests the need for an “interspecies periodization” that takes human-nonhuman temporalities seriously. as most of these societies historically did not use script, written evidence is not plentiful. therefore, indigenous forms of knowledge production about the environmental past — embedded in songs, stories, dances, rituals, material remains, dress, and sculptural art — are of paramount importance. these shaped human behaviour towards mithuns in the past, and they continue to do so today. keywords: interspecies history; bos frontalis; mithun; himalayas; animal sacrifice; area studies. bio: willem van schendel (university of amsterdam & international institute of social history) works in the fields of history, anthropology, and sociology of asia. in recent years he has been concentrating on environmental issues. some recent publications are “non-human labour history? three short questions”, 2023; entangled lives: human-animal-plant histories of the eastern himalayan triangle (cambridge university press, 2022; with joy l. k. pachuau); flows and frictions in trans-himalayan spaces: histories of networking and border crossing (amsterdam university press, 2022, ed. with gunnel cederlöf); a history of bangladesh (cambridge university press, new edition, 2020); and embedding agricultural commodities: using historical evidence, 1840s–1940s (routledge, 2017, ed.). email: h.w.vanschendel@uva.nl orcid: 0000-0001-7641-4056 copyright © 2024 willem van schendel this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 1 (2024): 1–44. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18820 mailto:h.w.vanschendel@uva.nl https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7641-4056 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18820 van schendel , mithun country | 3 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) look! as evening falls, a hefty animal emerges from the dense mountain forest. it saunters towards a nearby village where a man offers it some salt. then it returns to the forest. you have just witnessed a mithun–human encounter. as historians move away from unreasonably anthropocentric history, they are exploring interspecies pasts more forcefully than ever before.1 an important focus is on how relationships between humans and other animals have shifted over time. this article is intended as a small contribution to this discussion. it considers an animal habitat — “mithun country” — that straddles the boundaries of three world regions that scholars have long treated as distinct civilizational entities. the historiographies of these regions — “south asia”, “southeast asia”, and “east asia” — are separated by the academic conventions of “area studies”, which are hard to overcome. taking mithun country as our starting point, we can develop a historiography that takes human–nonhuman relationships seriously and questions the human-derived spatial and temporal constructs that underpin most conventional historical narratives. in addition, we can re-examine an entrenched dichotomy in the study of human–nonhuman relationships: the contrast between wildness and domestication. i focus on the interaction between humans and the mithun, a bulky but little-known bovine endemic in the eastern himalayas. the aim is to show how mithuns have long decisively shaped numerous human cultures, how intense mithun–human relationships metamorphosed over the course of the twentieth century, and how interspecies spaces and times cut across purely human ones. 1 for example, kean and howell, the routledge companion; bonnell and kheraj, traces of the animal past; roscher et al., handbook of historical animal studies. 4 | van schendel , mithun country humanimalia 15.1 (2024) mithun country what is a mithun? it is a large bovine that is usually described as semi-wild (or semi-domesticated). first portrayed by europeans in 1804, it is known to scientists as bos frontalis (figure 1).2 its origins have long been disputed, with many authors believing that the mithun was a domesticated form of the gaur (another wild bovine, bos gaurus).3 however, new genetic research has confirmed that mithun and gaur are completely distinct species.4 the most recent study even rejects an earlier assumption that the two species “might have originated from the same wild bovine, which is now extinct.”5 2 contemporary scholarly literature tends to refer to the animal as mithun. the word probably derives from an austroasiatic language that preceded the arrival of indo-european and trans-himalayan speakers in the area where this animal lives. in surviving austroasiatic languages (khasi, pnar) it is known as mynthna (simoons and simoons, a ceremonial ox, 226–27; singh, khasi-english dictionary, 136; passah, pnar-english dictionary, 57). in many trans-himalayan (tibeto-burman) languages of the region, the animal is known by variations of sha, sia, sial, etc. (blench, “contribution of linguistics”; aisher, “through ‘spirits’”, 423; sharma, learners’ manipuri–english dictionary, 190; faruque et al., “present status of gayal”, 77; malsawmliana, “socio-economic importance”, 41–42; post, “on reconstructing”, 330). more easterly languages know the animal as kungbam (lapolla and sangdong, rawang-english-burmese, 511) and ngepu (or ngvpuq; perlin, grammar of trung, 29, 363). in chinese it is dúlóngniú (独⻰牛), often translated as drung ox. in indo-european languages the term is gayal (except for assamese, which uses mithun, mithan, or methon; alternative spellings are mythan or maithan; rainey, “notes on the chinboks”). 3 another related bovine, the banteng (bos javanicus), used to be present in the mithun’s habitat (barbe, “some account”, 386) but is now thought to be regionally extinct. 4 there is mounting evidence that the mithun is a separate species, but it is capable of interbreeding with both gaur and domestic cattle (wang et al., “draft genome of the gayal”; devi et al, “revisit of the taxonomic status”; tenzin et al., “assessment of genetic diversity”; bareigts, les lautu, 88; li et al., “molecular phylogeny”; evans, big-game shooting, 64–66; kauffmann, “landwirtschaft”, 72; simoons and simoons, a ceremonial ox, 14–30). 5 mukherjee et al., “genetic characterization”, 16; devi et al., “revisit of the taxonomic status”; see also baig et al., “mitochondrial dna”. from the eighteenth century to the present, two hypotheses about the origin of the mithun have been put forward: that the mithun might be a domesticated form of the gaur, or that it might be a hybrid of gaur and domestic cattle. these suggestions do not sufficiently explain: a) why the area of mithun distribution is so much more restricted than that of both gaur and domestic cattle; b) why the mithun is genetically adapted to withstand hypoxia at high altitudes up to 4,000 m and cannot thrive at altitudes below 200 m — unlike the gaur, which roams from sea level to 2,500 m; and fig. 1 earliest depiction of a mithun (bos frontalis), 1804. source: lambert (“description of bos frontalis”, 57; see also his “further account”). this animal was captured in the foothills east of chittagong. the first description in english dates from 1790. early references speak of “gobbah”, “village gayal”, “jungly-gau”, etc. cuvier, supplément, 92–99; pearson, “memorandum on the gaur”. see also macrae, “account of the kookies”, 186, 191–92; wilcox, “memoir of a survey”, 371–72. 6 | van schendel , mithun country humanimalia 15.1 (2024) the mithun is not a domesticate; it is a wild species that has sought limited intimacy with humans, on its own terms. the mithun is quite distinct from the better-known gaur in its appearance, distribution, genetic make-up, and behaviour — and its habitat is far more restricted.6 mithuns are mountain dwellers (at altitudes from 300 to 4,000 m) in the eastern himalayas (figure 2).7 they prefer deep forests in steep foothills and higher slopes, shielded from the sun, and near rivers and salt licks.8 their primary food consists of tree leaves, shrubs, bamboo shoots, and herbs — not grass.9 they are found only in mithun country, which snakes through bhutan, northeast india, bangladesh, myanmar, and china (figure 3), thereby connecting the academically distinct areas of “south asia”, “southeast asia”, and “east asia”.10 mithun country is a spatial entity that we can use as a building block in environmental history because it is not only ecologically but also culturally significant.11 the humans inhabiting the mithun habitat are culturally and linguistically extremely diverse, but these cultures share a remarkable regard for mithuns.12 linguistic evidence points c) why the physical appearance of the mithun (e.g., the shape of the horns, body size) is both very distinctive and very stable over generations. domestication implies the physical alteration of animals by selective breeding for specific characteristics, creating organisms that differ from their “wild” forebears and usually cannot survive well without human help. mithuns reproduce independently of humans, in the forest, so their domestication is questionable. such animals are “wild” rather than “feral” (escaped from domestication and become wild). ma et al., “comparative transcriptome analyses”; chen et al., “draft genome”; ahrestani “bos frontalis”, 4, 8: li et al., “large-scale chromosomal changes”. 6 castelló, bovids, 628–629. mithuns may have a dark brown or piebald coat, often with white lower legs. their horns do not curve upwards like a gaur’s. 7 on the genetic adaptations that allow mithuns to live in high-mountain environments, see ma et al., “comparative transcriptome analyses”. 8 in butler’s words (“rough notes”, 332), “the forest-clad shades of the lower hills”. 9 geng et al., “prioritizing fodder species”. 10 the term mithun country is taken from simoons and simoons (a ceremonial ox), who spell it “mithan country”. this pathbreaking book is still the single-most informative overview on the mithun. 11 i follow fisher’s (environmental history, 1) working definition of environmental history as “vital patterns of interactions among humans, other living beings, and the material world.” 12 mithuns share their habitat with humans speaking well over a hundred different languages and holding many distinct ethnic and religious beliefs. several are mentioned fig. 2 a mithun in arunachal pradesh (india). photo by willem van schendel. fig. 3 mithun country pachuau and van schendel, entangled lives, 49–50, 117–19, 173–83. van schendel , mithun country | 9 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) to “the deep-rooted importance of mithun culture in the region” and to the mithun being seen as a “prototypical” animal. in some of the region’s languages, the names of all other animal species are even derived from its name.13 mithun cultures the mithun is a rare occurrence in conventional archival records because most societies in this region did not use writing — nor were they part of larger states — in some cases up to the eve of the second world war.14 as mithuns themselves left few traces, studying human–mithun relationships is methodologically challenging. written sources began to appear in the nineteenth century, but they tended to represent outsiders’ (mostly travellers’ and british imperial officials’) views of the human–mithun relationship. emic perspectives can be gleaned from other sources, however. megaliths, woodcarvings, and textiles are sources of evidence that can be understood as expressing human–mithun mutuality. many local art practices featured the animal, especially its head, which was considered its sacred core (see figures 4 to 6 for examples). in this dispersed archive, mithuns are anything but marginal or incidental. other rich sources of information are stories, songs, dances, rituals, and place names in the many languages of mithun country.15 in these sources, mithuns often play a crucial ontological role, connecting the in dorji et al. “mithun”. it is common in indian social-science literature to refer unselfconsciously to these ethnic groups as “tribes” — a term anchored in the indian constitution. this is not the case in bhutan, china, bangladesh, and myanmar for an introductory map, see http://www.muturzikin.com/cartesasiesudest/sud.htm. 13 blench, “contribution of linguistics”, 80–82, 106. 14 several parts of the mithun habitat were claimed by british india and china but remained what the british called “unadministered”. these regions were ruled by numerous small polities that continued precolonial styles of governance and had no use for literacy. some were buffers between assam, tibet and bhutan (the north-east frontier tracts) and between northern and eastern burma and china (the hukawng valley, “the triangle”, parts of the naga country, and the wa region of the shan hills). others were surrounded by british indian territory but were, up to the 1940s, too dangerous for british troops to conquer (for example, an area between arakan, bengal, the lushai hills and the chin hills). see, for example, hutton, diaries. 15 sarma and zoliana, changing affinities, 146–47. http://www.muturzikin.com/cartesasiesudest/sud.htm fig. 4 megalith in champhai (mizoram, india) showing humans and mithun skulls. many memorial stones across mithun country depict full-bodied mithuns or, more frequently, mithun skulls. these stones are very hard to date but they are generally thought to be several centuries old. pachuau and van schendel, entangled lives, 176–77. photo by willem van schendel. fig. 5 wooden representation of a mithun skull in the chittagong hill tracts (bangladesh), 1961. van schendel et al, chittagong hill tracts, 156. photo by david sopher, 1961. fig. 6 mithun heads on a village gate in tuophema tourist village, nagaland (india). for explanations of this angami naga design, see mills, ao nagas, 78; hutton, diaries, 23; kauffmann, “bedeutung”. photo by willem van schendel. van schendel , mithun country | 13 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) deep past with living memories. this significance was unfamiliar to the outside world until anthropologists began to publish written versions of stories, revealing them to be rich and varied. for as long back as we know, mithuns have been key to the lifeworlds of many humans across mithun country. they became the prime sacred animals in the region’s various and distinct religious traditions, which are often lumped together as “animism”.16 the ontological value of these bovines derived from the fact that they figured prominently in origin stories, played a pivotal role in mediating between humans and supernatural forces, and could act as guides to the afterlife.17 the cosmological significance of mithuns was underpinned by stories of their crucial role in the creation and maintenance of the world. several stories spoke of the world originally being covered with water, until “a great mithun dug a pit into which the waters poured and allowed the dry earth to appear”.18 another story held that “the only creatures in the early world were two spirits, one of whom had the form of a mithun and the other the form of an elephant. they fought and killed each other and from their flesh and bones the world was formed.”19 a third explained that the first mithun tossed the sky up with its horns, creating a living space underneath for humans to 16 one way of defining animism is as a worldview that assumes that not only humans, but also nonhuman animals, plants, and other parts of the environment are sentient and therefore share obligations. in mithun country, there were considerable differences in mithun lore and sacrificial practices among ethnic and religious groups. sarma and zoliana, changing affinities, 75–80. in bangladesh, mithun sacrifices have also been reported among muslims. faruque et al., “present status of gayal”, 81; kabir, “report on case study”. 17 hutton, diaries, 13; sarma and zoliana, changing affinities, 79–80. mithun sacrifices were essential markers of both human lifecycle events and the agricultural cycle. for example, in what is now arunachal pradesh (india), a bridegroom would have to work for the bride’s parents during a planting season, after which a wedding was arranged in which the village religious specialist sacrificed a mithun and a “portion of the blood and a small part of each limb is taken into the jungle and left as an offer to the spirits.” “affairs on the north-east frontier”, 49. 18 elwin, myths, 4, 18, 89. the primeval importance of mithuns was also attested to by the story of the sun, in a quarrel with the moon, throwing mithun dung at it, causing the dark spots that are still visible from earth. elwin, myths, 52. 19 elwin, myths, 5, 8–9. 14 | van schendel , mithun country humanimalia 15.1 (2024) inhabit.20 and there was another belief that a great mithun supports the earth on its body. its regular movements produce the seasons. when it twitches its ears, it causes a small earthquake, and when it suddenly moves its whole body, a large earthquake occurs.21 the closeness of humans to mithuns was also expressed in numerous stories that portrayed mithuns as kin.22 a salt partnership mithuns are free-roaming forest animals that do not depend on humans for food or procreation. humans did not hunt them. mithuns were not fed, kept in pens, worked, or milked. placid and shy, they may over centuries have tolerated human company for a single reason: a mutual love of salt. in stories about human settlement in mithun country, a recurring theme is that mithuns pointed humans to saltwater springs in the forest, after which people moved and settled in the area.23 humans did not domesticate mithuns. these bovines remained forest animals with a friendly attitude to humans. they tended to wander and disappear into the mountains, so humans regularly searched the forest to entice them with salt.24 mithuns could also come near a human settlement once every few weeks to get access to some salt (figures 7 and 8).25 either way, humans used salt to create and maintain a bond with mithuns. they fed baby mithuns salt to encourage loyalty to the person providing it. humans could identify 20 elwin, myths, 24–25. 21 elwin, myths, 86–88. 22 in northern mithun country humans considered the mithun as close kin because it originated in strife between siblings, resulting in one becoming human and the other a mithun (e.g. elwin, myths, 397–400). among the many stories about the origins of the mithun, one is associated with brother–sister incest. elwin, myths, 98, 352, 394; blackburn, himalayan tribal tales, 119–22, 265; pachuau and van schendel, entangled lives, 96–97. mithuns were treated as equal to humans in many other stories as well (sarma and zoliana, changing affinities, 75–80). for reflections on interspecies kinship and personhood regarding another bovine, the yak, see wouters, “relatedness, trans-species knots”. 23 aisher, “through ‘spirits’”, 191. 24 humans sometimes interpreted such a disappearance as a mithun having been abducted by spirits. aisher, “through ‘spirits’”, 236–37. 25 faruque et al., “present status of gayal”, 79–80; bareigts, les lautu, 88. fig. 7 mithuns in a forest clearing approaching a man who has put salt on rocks. aiyadurai, “‘tigers are our brothers’”, 78. photo by ambika aiyadurai. fig. 8 a mithun in bangladesh receiving a handful of salt, “the only reason it comes into the village.” brauns and löffler, mru, 131. photo by lorenz g. löffler. van schendel , mithun country | 17 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) free-roaming individuals by bodily signs: the colouring of their coats, their body size, the shape of their horns, and the small slits that humans had made in mithuns’ ear lobes. based on these signs, humans claimed ownership.26 but mithuns defied this anthropocentric label. they remained semi-wild, challenging conventional categories of wildness and domestication.27 mithuns as intermediaries remarkably, the significance of mithuns to humans had nothing to do with their livestock potential. first and foremost, they were seen as sacred animals — the only living beings capable of moving between the parallel worlds of the forest and the village.28 they were thought to have a special relationship with the spirits of both forest and village, and humans needed them as intermediaries to communicate with these supernatural forces.29 the form that this communication took was ceremonial sacrifice.30 26 in many societies in the region, individual humans consider themselves to be associated with, or own, individual free-roaming mithuns. aiyadurai, “‘tigers are our brothers’”, 77–78, 110. 27 the richness of mithun lore makes the region excellently suited to gaining deeper insights into local perceptions of wildness. so far, linkages with comparative studies of the meaning of wildness and domestication in different cultures and historical circumstances have been rather tenuous. recent scholarly research in mithun country challenges the wildness/domestication dichotomy and could benefit from stronger comparative perspectives. for example, norton identifies a stage/practice that she calls “taming” and explains the caribbean concept of iegue, “an animal whom one feeds.” she rejects the teleological assumption that this practice necessarily leads to domestication. norton, the tame and the wild. see aisher, “through ‘spirits’”; aiyadurai, “‘tigers are our brothers’”; blackburn, himalayan tribal tales; sakhong, in search of chin identity; jackson, mizo discovery; wouters, “relatedness”. 28 indigenous understandings complicate the wild/domestic dichotomy. a detailed study of a group in northern mithun country argues that they distinguish human-reared animals (chickens, pigs, etc.; the animals of the village) and spirit-reared animals (the animals of the forest). the mithun’s power is based on it being the only intermediary: the only living being that habitually moves between these two parallel worlds of the forest and the village. aisher, through ‘spirits’”, 307–8. 29 sometimes these parallel worlds are conceived as “human” and “sky”. as one observer explained the complex entanglement: “the mithun of men is associated with the sky spirits, while the souls of men are conversely bound up with the mithun of the sky, so that when a mithun dies on earth a spirit dies in the sky, and when a man dies, it means that the sky spirits have sacrificed a mithun.” hutton, diaries, 13. 30 aisher (“through ‘spirits’”) contains detailed descriptions of the indispensable cosmological role that (souls of) mithuns play — and the notion of human and mithun souls 18 | van schendel , mithun country humanimalia 15.1 (2024) mithuns were not the only sacrificial animals in mithun country, but they were by far the most sacred, topping a list of lesser sacrificial animals.31 mithuns were enveloped in cosmological significance: spirits were known to dwell in and around their horns and around the rope with which they were led and tethered.32 as the highest-ranking nonhumans, mithuns even had chickens sacrificed to their souls: oh female mithun! may the villagers speak well of you. don’t get hurt, don’t sprain your legs, be well, may your prosperity be manifold and assured […] and wherever you go, may your journey be good. i call your soul with a chicken.33 mithun sacrifices were at the heart of an elaborate system of ceremonial feasting.34 the preparations and interactions surrounding this ritual varied between different human groups but all of them acknowledged the cosmological significance of the event. people would wear distinct dresses for the ceremony, and mithun remains could be wrapped in a specially embroidered blanket.35 afterwards, mithun meat was ceremoniously shared and consumed and each mithun skull was carefully preserved and displayed on a sacred skull living parallel existences — among the nyishi of northern mithun country. see sarma and zoliana, changing affinities, 78. 31 unlike mithuns, these lesser sacrificial animals were domestic animals: chickens, pig(let)s, goats, dogs, and so on. they were needed for minor occasions, for example to mollify forest spirits before clearing a field for slash-and-burn agriculture. bareigts, les lautu. 32 aisher, “through ‘spirits’”, 111, 120; 126. it is important to realize that the cultural significance of the mithun is based on completely different cosmological assumptions than that of a better known “sacred” bovine of south asia, the domesticated cow. in the cosmology of hinduism (a religion that was of no significance among mithun-oriented mountain societies), avoiding beef was a dominant doctrine. in mithun country, consuming sacrificial mithun meat formed the core of community feasts. for an introduction to the literature on human-domestic-cow relations in hindu communities in south asia, see adcock and govindrajan, “bovine politics”. 33 bareigts, les lautu, 158–59. my translation. 34 “mithun gravitate towards the dense, often dark, tropical, subtropical and temperate forests surrounding the village. here, away from the village, they feed, breed and bear offspring. this habitual migration between human and uyu [spirit] domains only serves to reinforce their powerful cosmological significance as sacrificial animals par excellence.” aisher, “voices of uncertainty”, 490. 35 fraser and fraser, mantles of merit, 69. see lehman, structure of chin society, 180; sakhong, in search of chin identity, 76. van schendel , mithun country | 19 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) rack (figures 9 and 10).36 the cosmological and social significance of these “feasts of merit” was underlined by lasting commemorative symbols: wooden sacrificial posts, carved ceremonial stones showing mithun horns, and decorative wooden “horns” on the roof of a feast-giver’s house (figures 4 and 5).37 through these sacrifices, mithuns became powerful symbols of status and (among some groups) fertility.38 ceremonial feasting was concurrently individual, in that it offered prestige and power to the organizer, and communal, in that it distributed spiritual benevolence and wealth among a community.39 mithun sacrifices were “religious, social and economic action” that accompanied trade deals, peace treaties, friendship pacts, marriages or deaths, and times of illness or misfortune.40 as many as forty mithuns could be lured from the forest to be sacrificed in a single ceremony but in most cases a single mithun sufficed.41 human well-being across mithun country critically depended on these sacrifices, which showed that humans needed mithuns far more than mithuns needed humans. 36 as far as i know, these carefully preserved skulls — which remain spiritually significant for generations — have not yet been used as sources of animal osteobiography (the study of life histories through skeletal remains), which could throw light on the hidden histories of mithun foraging and breeding behaviour, as well as on their geographical movements. 37 mayirnao and khayi, “decolonosing feasts”; yekha-ü and marak, “elicüra”. 38 woodward, “gifts”. 39 in the words of one woman’s song: “to kill a mith[u]n and erect a wall of decorative [design to celebrate it] is the highest honour in our land.” sakhong, in search of chin identity, 72. 40 woodward “gifts for the sky people”, 221. see malsawmliana, “socio-economic importance”; rawlins, “on the manners”; shakespear, “the lushais”; fraser and fraser, mantles of merit, 30–31; head, hand book. as lehman (structure of chin society, 40) put it: “it is an animal of great symbolic value, the beast of choice in major sacrifices, the common measure of value in exchange transactions including bride price, and an animal figuring prominently in metaphors concerned with beauty, strength, and so forth.” 41 fürer-haimendorf, konyak nagas, 60. alcohol was ceremoniously gulped from mithun horns, and “powder flasks of gayal (the mithun) horn are beautifully polished and inlaid with silver or ivory“ (shakespear, history of the assam rifles, 77). the tough mithun hide was used for shields. macrae, “account of the kookies”, 186. fig. 9 a mithun sacrifice, early twentieth century. mizo zirlai pawl (mzp) collection. photographer unidentified. fig. 10 skulls of sacrificed mithun and other animals proudly exhibited near the india–myanmar border, 2012. the souls of these animals were thought to guide departed human souls to the afterlife. lehman, structure of chin society, 179–82. photo by willem van schendel. 22 | van schendel , mithun country humanimalia 15.1 (2024) mithuns as badges of identity in the twentieth century, the societies of mithun country changed, christianized, and gradually became incorporated into contemporary nation states. the symbolic meaning of the mithun shifted.42 in many cases, the ancient religious significance of the animal faded away. but mithun-human intimacy persisted. this closeness was expressed in many ways — humans felt they could decipher non-verbal mithun signs such as twitching ears or swishing tails, and occasionally they channelled the mithun’s voice. in a nostalgic lament (written by recruits on their way to wartime france in 1917), the mithun spoke its mind: it “grunt[ed] not wanting to bid farewell”.43 the spread of christianity among the region’s mithun-oriented mountain societies occurred at different times, because their encapsulation into british india occurred at different times. for example, the british attacked and annexed the chin and lushai hills (today: mizoram in india and the chin state in myanmar) in the 1890s, after which missionaries began proselytizing. a generation later, many inhabitants had become christians.44 in the naga hills this process had started much earlier, and in the region south of the lushai hills christian conversion did not commence until the 1940s. the church did not allow animal sacrifices, and yet many christians continued to “show their reverence for this traditional sacrificial animal”.45 they slaughtered mithuns only for very special occasions — community celebrations such as christmas and weddings — during which the meat was shared and consumed largely in the traditional manner (figures 11 and 12).46 with the passing of colonial rule, mithun country was administratively dismembered. as new nation-states were forged, mithuns 42 tzüdir, “appropriating the ao past”, 284–85. 43 achumi, “‘tell them our story’”, 9. 44 pachuau and van schendel 2015, camera, 59–86. 45 brauns and löffler, mru, 130. see also pachuau and van schendel, camera, 177–81. 46 according to brauns and löffler (mru, 130), “[t]he christian bawm [of the chittagong hill tracts, bangladesh] […] pool their resources in order to purchase a gayal [mithun], and the animal is then consumed by the entire village at christmastime”. fig. 12 sharing mithun meat among christian graves, circa 1956. aizawl theological college collection. photographer unidentified, possibly gwen rees roberts (pi teii). fig. 11 two mithuns to be slaughtered for christmas in a mizoram (india) village, 1944. vanlalmawii collection. photographer unidentified. see also pachuau and van schendel, camera, 80. 24 | van schendel , mithun country humanimalia 15.1 (2024) became confirmed crossers of the new state borders. they also emerged as an eco-cultural resource that allowed the people of mithun country to emphasize their regional identity. ideas of regional belonging (sometimes across new state borders), self-determination, and indigeneity crystallized around the figure of the mithun. with the development of new ethnic categories all over mithun country, mithuns came to represent these categories and their boundaries.47 during the closing decades of the twentieth century, the mithun motif was expressed with increasing intensity and defiance. it marked cultural opposition to nation-building projects, especially in the states of northeast india. this could take the form of a nostalgic re-enactment, a festive dress, body art,48 a warning, or a festival (figures 13 to 15). the mithun has also appeared in modern literature.49 in addition to these eco-cultural appropriations, the mithun also became a powerful eco-political resource. it signalled the political distinctiveness of the region. two indian states — arunachal pradesh and nagaland (figure 16)50 — adopted the mithun as their “state animal”, which is interesting because state animals are always wild species.51 mithuns thus became overtly political animals. 47 for example, mithun intimacy provided a link between several groups with mutually unintelligible languages in northeast india as they sought to foreground the umbrella concept of “naga”. the mithun emerged as a badge of naga connectedness and distinctiveness. 48 a mithun-head tattoo, created by contemporary tattoo artist mo naga (moranngam khaling), appears on anthropologist lars krutak’s website: https://www.larskrutak. com/mo-naga-naga-tattoo-revival/. mo naga’s “neo-naga” design was inspired by a konyak naga woodcarving and a maram naga house painting. see also krutak, “neonaga”; hutton, diaries, 23. 49 for example, in the poem “let’s hope, anyway”, by yumlam tana, a poet who lives in arunachal pradesh (india): “some day / you will come back to me / as does the bos frontalis / piebald, white-stocked, white-horned and white-faced / returns to its salt licks / tucked away in the core of cool earth and green copses. / maybe / i will lead you / salt-licking / to my house / and it will be your second coming.” 50 before 1972 arunachal pradesh (contested between india and china) was known as the north east frontier area (nefa). the mithun was nefa’s logo, too. tellingly, the state emblem of nagaland shows the mithun as well as the state motto “unity”. longkumer, “representing the nagas”, 169–70. 51 by contrast, india’s “wild life (protection) act, 1972” still classifies the mithun as “the domesticated form” of the gaur. https://www.larskrutak.com/mo-naga-naga-tattoo-revival/ https://www.larskrutak.com/mo-naga-naga-tattoo-revival/ fig. 13 re-enacting a mithun sacrifice in mizoram (india) in 1995. mizo zirlai pawl (mzp) collection. photographer unidentified. for a similar ritual in china, performed for tourists in 2006, see “jiànzhèng dú lóngzú jìsì yíshì” [witness the dulong people’s sacrificial ceremony], sina news center (10 may 2006), https://news.sina.com.cn/c/ cul/p/2006-05-10/12209821244.shtml. by 2016, the sacrificial animal had been replaced by an enormous mithun effigy. see “yúnnán dú lóngzú qúnzhòng huāndù ‘kāi chāng wǎ’ jié” [people of the dulong ethnic group in yunnan celebrate the “kaichangwa” festival]. china in pictures (4 february 2016). http://photo.china.com. cn/news/2016-02/04/content_37733811_2.htm. https://news.sina.com.cn/c/cul/p/2006-05-10/12209821244.shtml https://news.sina.com.cn/c/cul/p/2006-05-10/12209821244.shtml http://photo.china.com.cn/news/2016-02/04/content_37733811_2.htm http://photo.china.com.cn/news/2016-02/04/content_37733811_2.htm fig. 14 a mithun head adorns a man’s jacket at a formal village meeting in nagaland (india). photo by willem van schendel. fig. 15 a billboard in arunachal pradesh (india). photo by willem van schendel. 28 | van schendel , mithun country humanimalia 15.1 (2024) various emerging counter-elites in mithun country embraced the mithun to express regional anger, (sub)national aspirations, and armed struggles against state forces and coercive extraction (figure 17). the title of a book about one of these regional aspirations articulates these feelings well: the raging mithun.52 the historical intimacy of mithuns and humans across mithun country continues today under vastly different circumstances. the sacrality of the animal as an indispensable go-between with supernatural beings has largely morphed into a new sacrality of place, ethnic identity, regional belonging, and resistance to state coercion. mithun sacrifices dwindled with the spread of christianity, but mithun imagery flourished.53 and this imagery emphatically highlighted the mithuns’ wild, untamed, and self-reliant characteristics.54 mithuns as livestock at the same time as locals re-imagined the mithun as a wild animal serving as a new emblem of regional distinctiveness, policy makers and scientists imagined the animal in a diametrically opposed manner: as a domesticated animal with commercial potential.55 to them, it was a potential economic resource. claiming national intellectual property and state control over mithun bodies, they made them a target of “scientific husbandry” and trade. in myanmar, government plans involved army-controlled wildlife smuggling: the military 52 lotha, the raging mithun. 53 in china, animal sacrifices were forbidden in 1950. although bovine sacrifices were wellknown in the mountains of northwestern yunnan (china), it is not clear if the mithuns living there were used. gros (“cultes”) mentions domestic cattle being used in feasts of merit very similar to the mithun sacrifices described for other parts of mithun country. 54 this notion of wildness is also reflected in the fact that several zoos around the world keep mithuns in their collections. https://zooinstitutes.com/animals/domesticgayal-211/ (accessed 16 february 2024). as early as the 1900s, an attempt was made to stock one or more european zoos with mithuns: a 1916 note, which sought to secure mithuns from the lushai hills for an american ranch in the philippines, mentioned a “german [who] brought down 30 or 40 gayal [mithun ...] about 10 or 12 years ago and shipped them from chittagong for the kaiser.” jackson, mizo discovery, 81. 55 definitions of domestication differ. the mere human use of plants and animals does not imply their domestication. domestication can be said to result from selective breeding and physical alteration for specific characteristics. pachuau and van schendel, entangled lives, 41–42. https://zooinstitutes.com/animals/domestic-gayal-211/ https://zooinstitutes.com/animals/domestic-gayal-211/ fig. 16 the government seal of nagaland (india) source: wikimedia commons fig. 17 emblem of the kuki national organisation, which fights for the establishment of zale’n-gam, an independent state to unite the kuki people now living under myanmar, indian, and bangladeshi rule. source: http://kukination.blogspot.com/2011/12/ kno-kuki-national-orginasation.html http://kukination.blogspot.com/2011/12/kno-kuki-national-orginasation.html http://kukination.blogspot.com/2011/12/kno-kuki-national-orginasation.html 30 | van schendel , mithun country humanimalia 15.1 (2024) rounded up mithuns and exported them (or their excellent meat) from chin state to india.56 in india a “national research centre on mithun” was set up in 1988, with a view to exploiting and “developing” mithuns for their meat, milk, and leather.57 similar but smaller initiatives were undertaken in bhutan (1970s), bangladesh (1990), myanmar (1990s), and china (2000).58 mithuns proved difficult to manage, however, partly because they are prone to fall victim to disease and die when taken to livestock farms, especially in the lowlands, as was the case in bangladesh.59 scientists considered free-roaming to be “suboptimal”, however, so they promoted “semi-intensive mithun rearing units”, in which mithuns would roam freely during the daytime but were brought back to pens at night.60 genomic sequencing, semen selection, and biomedical research sought to frame the mithun as domestic livestock to be “improved” and manipulated.61 this utilitarian approach marked a complete disregard for the mithun as a wild species, to be sustainably preserved and protected together with its ecosystem of broad-leaf (sub)tropical forests.62 meanwhile, the mithun population was declining because of habitat destruction, crossbreeding, and climate change.63 mithuns are sensitive to heat and sunshine, and they respond to rising temperatures by moving up the mountains into deeper, cooler forests close 56 project maje, “mithuns sacrificed”. 57 “mithun”; https://nrcmithun.icar.gov.in/. this could create conflicts between locals and livestock scientists. sarma and zoliana, changing affinities, 107–12. 58 dorji et al., “mithun”, 1735–36; uzzaman et al., “semi-domesticated and irreplaceable”; project maje, “mithuns sacrificed”. 59 half the mithuns brought to a “research farm” in yunnan (china) died within months (he et al., “superovulatory”). there is a history of mithuns perishing after being brought to the chittagong lowlands in bangladesh. for an “artificial reproduction center”, set up in naikhangchhari (elevation 19 m.), see uzzaman et al., “semi-domesticated and irreplaceable”, 1370. 60 khan et al. “semi-intensive”. 61 icar-national research centre on mithun, “semi-intensive”; management practices. 62 dorji et al., “mithun”, 1733–34. see cram et al.; van der wal et al. 63 in china, the number of mithuns has recently been growing to over 20,000 in reforested areas. dulong niu; “yúnnán gòngshān xiàn dúlóngjiāng xiāng shēngtài fúpín de shēngdòng shíjiàn” [the vivid practice of ecological poverty alleviation in dulongjiang township, gongshan county, yunnan]. ministry of ecology and the environment of the people’s republic of china, 11 september 2019. https://www.mee.gov.cn/xxgk2018/xxgk/ xxgk15/201909/t20190911_733388.html. https://nrcmithun.icar.gov.in/ https://www.mee.gov.cn/xxgk2018/xxgk/xxgk15/201909/t20190911_733388.html https://www.mee.gov.cn/xxgk2018/xxgk/xxgk15/201909/t20190911_733388.html van schendel , mithun country | 31 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) to rivers and salt licks. there are indications that this affects the traditional intimacy between mithuns and humans because mithuns now live farther from human-inhabited spaces and no longer respond to salt-offering humans who call them.64 thus, climate change may have the effect of making mithuns more “wild.” interspecies space what does this brief example tell us about imagining space and time in environmentally sensitive ways? by taking an animal habitat to work towards how humans have made their living in it, we may open our minds to hitherto neglected interspecies geographies and suggest new entry points into the past. the space of mithun country is relevant because it emerged from animals. humans all over this area — and only this area — developed profoundly meaningful connections and affinities with mithuns.65 they integrated these nonhuman animals fully into their cultures.66 and mithuns similarly developed ways to open their lifeworld to intermittent contacts with humans. arguably, other animals were also significant for humans in mithun country. the tiger and the hornbill (a large forest bird) played important roles in regional cultures as well, but there were three important differences. first, only the mithun became an indispensable intermediary between humans and supernatural beings by means of communal sacrifices. second, the tiger and the hornbill are not restricted to mithun country; their habitats spread far beyond it, affecting other cultures differently. and third, only the mithun straddles the 64 another factor may be that more people leave villages for education or non-agricultural jobs, so they have less time to cultivate their links with mithuns. on the other hand, there may be technological innovations (such as mithun trackers fitted on collars) that could make it easier to maintain these links. sarma and zoliana, changing affinities, 107–8, 149–51. 65 sarma and zoliana, changing affinities. 66 scholars propose that wider regional perspectives can also be applied to these cultures. thus, blackburn (“oral stories”) suggests that the oral histories of mithun country were connected and that they formed a larger “culture area” stretching from northeast india to southwest china. another wider framing is “the new himalayas” — the anthropogenically impacted himalayas since the early modern era, characterized by “the transboundary, the indigenous and the animist”. smyer yü, “situating environmental humanities”, 4. 32 | van schendel , mithun country humanimalia 15.1 (2024) wildness–domestication divide, producing an interspecies partnership that differs fundamentally from human–tiger or human–hornbill relationships. uniquely, the mithun’s natural habitat became a well-defined human cultural space. practitioners of the environmental humanities ponder which spaces are relevant to which research questions. mithun country obviously does not follow human territorial boundaries (state borders, area studies, ethnic divides), but neither does it fit broad ecological spaces, such as watersheds, climate zones, ecoregions, or the “global biodiversity hotspots” that guide much current research. mithun country crosses the boundaries of nine internationally recognized terrestrial ecoregions.67 it also straddles three global biodiversity hotspots: “indo-burma”, “himalaya”, and “mountains of southwest china”.68 these boundary crossings show that broadly drawn ecozones must be disaggregated to study specific interspecies histories effectively. mithun country is an example of an environmental zone defined by mithun–human reciprocity. the mithun is endemic in this space, and over time this space has become the home of a group of mithun-oriented human cultures.69 a distinctive interspecies geography took shape, a vernacular corridor that defiantly wends its way through the eastern himalayan uplands.70 generations of scholars have repeated the unproven view that the mithun is a domesticated form of the wild gaur.71 it might be closer 67 mithun territory coincides with none of the “terrestrial ecoregions” delineated by the world wildlife fund. it covers parts of no less than nine of them: the northern triangle subtropical forests, the northern triangle temperate forests, the northeast india–myanmar pine forests, the eastern himalayan broadleaf forests, the eastern himalayan subalpine conifer forests, the mizoram–manipur–kachin rain forests, the himalayan subtropical broadleaf forests, the lower gangetic plains moist deciduous forests, and the myanmar coastal rain forests. dinerstein et al., “an ecoregion-based approach”. 68 mittermeier et al., “global biodiversity”. for a map, see https://www.e-education.psu. edu/geog30/book/export/html/393 (accessed 26 february 2024). 69 both kauffmann (“landwirtschaft”, 62–64, 110) and simoons and simoons (a ceremonial ox, 6–7) provide maps of mithun distribution by ethnic group in the 1930s. 70 smyer yü and dean, yunnan–burma–bengal corridor geographies. 71 devi et al. (“revisit of the taxonomic status”, 6) assert that “our generated sequence of https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog30/book/export/html/393 https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog30/book/export/html/393 van schendel , mithun country | 33 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) to the truth to say that, historically, wild mithuns have approached human newcomers who entered their domain thousands of years ago, and that these mithuns thereby domesticated humans to become salt-dispensing partners, while keeping their own freedom to roam at will.72 in turn, humans acknowledged the might of mithuns by imagining them to be creators of the world and formidable mediators with supernatural powers on behalf of humans. looked at in this way, the mithuns unintentionally led the way in creating a unique relationship between nonhuman and human animals that challenges the routine distinction between “wildness” and “domestication”, and between “nature” and “culture”. evidence from mithun country shows that local thinkers did not make that distinction in quite the same way.73 rather, they saw an all-inclusive universe in which spirits, nonhuman animals and humans formed dynamic partnerships of respectful reciprocity. in this encompassing environmental space, mithuns acted as guides to humans, and as crucial go-betweens between humans and spirits. interspecies time the example of mithun country also alerts us to ways in which the narratives of the environmental humanities might deal with temporality. in mithun country, the conventional periodization that professional historians use to organize their narratives is of limited value. anthropocentric, state-oriented periods (for example, “precolonial”, “colonial”, “postcolonial”, or “dynasty”) are inadequate. at best, they fit only parts of the mithun habitat, and they fit these at different b. frontalis [mithun] showed a distinct cluster and confirms that b. frontalis is not the domesticated form of b. gaurus [gaur], but rather a distinct species under the genus bos […]. many animal taxonomists mistook it as a domesticated type of indian gaurus due to their similarity in appearance.” 72 as humans, we are unable to fathom the intentions of nonhuman animals or see the world “through their eyes”. attempts to do so have been dismissed as pretentious ventriloquizing. but we can understand how the actions of nonhuman animals affect human–nonhuman relationships. see swart, “animals in african history”, 2. 73 humans were not imagined as being “outside” nature, although in some local cosmologies a clear distinction was made between the parallel worlds of the village and the forest; in others the overarching unity of the universe was foregrounded. woodward, “gifts”; aisher, “through ‘spirits’”. 34 | van schendel , mithun country humanimalia 15.1 (2024) moments in time.74 therefore, they fail to cover the historical development of human-mithun relations across the mithun habitat. and, crucially, they do not even correspond to how humans in mithun country have conceptualized time.75 human–mithun relations have their own timescales and these can be helpful in developing interspecies periodization. for example, after a long period of religious stability, in which mithun sacrifices were fundamental rituals that structured the annual cycle as well as human lifecycles, the cosmological landscape changed.76 from the late nineteenth century, people in mithun country began to embrace new religions, notably forms of christianity and buddhism that frowned upon mithun sacrifice. this gradually altered the relationship between mithuns and humans, as mithuns lost much of their spiritual significance. but mithun meat retained its exceptional and revered aura; it was only shared and consumed during momentous community celebrations. a further change occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, when humans native to mithun country began to use their historical connections to the animal to assert their sense of place, their ethnic and political identities, and their struggles against imposed state policies. as mithuns saw their forest habitat shrink, humans reinvented the mithun as an environmental badge of indigeneity, authenticity, anger, and defiance — a badge that underlined wildness and interspecies union. a third shift took place in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, when scientists in the five states whose territories cover 74 colonial rule commenced in some parts of mithun country (arakan/rakhine and assam) in the 1820s and lasted over 120 years. upper burma was incorporated in british india in the 1880s. but other parts of mithun country (in what are now arunachal pradesh, nagaland, kachin state, and an area near the bangladesh/india/myanmar trijunction) remained self-governing throughout — and sometimes well beyond the collapse of the colonial state (in 1947–48) and the emergence of its successor states. areas in yunnan were never part of a colonial state. their history is usually framed in terms of chinese dynasties (ming, qing), and their successor republics, but such framing makes no sense for other parts of mithun country. 75 pachuau and van schendel, entangled lives, 7–14, 64. 76 das, “from millet to rice”. van schendel , mithun country | 35 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) mithun country discovered the commercial potential of mithuns. they claimed mithuns as a national resource and attempted, with mixed success, to turn them into regular livestock whose meat and leather could be marketed. we may use such human-nonhuman turning points to structure narratives of interspecies temporality. historians are increasingly aware of the importance of more-than-human periodization to highlight our embeddedness in our ever-changing environment. in some historiographies, “catastrophic” interspecies periodization already trumps anthropocentric periodization — for example, in the study of pandemics, the columbian exchange, mass extinctions, and global warming. but less spectacular and smaller-scale shifts in human-nonhuman relations can also contribute to much-needed guidelines for interspecies periodization. for example, mithun country — just one example of a specific regional space/time combination — suggests the salience of distinguishing between “ecosystem-level” time (the temporality of the mithun habitat) and “single-interspecies-level” time (such as human–mithun temporality).77 conclusion this brief exploration of mithun country suggests five issues to contemplate. first, by focusing on nonhuman actors, we can contribute to overcoming the parochialism of overly anthropocentric history. whether we look at microbes, fungi, plants, nonhuman animals, or natural elements (rivers, swamps, forests, deserts, seas, storms, earthquakes, or mountain ranges), they all help us decentre humans and take nonhuman space and time seriously. the mithun case exemplifies how nonhumans co-produce human 77 in this region, environmental historians could explore how best to apply these levels of interspecies temporality by considering partly overlapping interspecies time periods based on, say, the “mautam” corridor (where bamboo flowering causes human famines); valuable medicinal fungi or plants (caterpillar fungus (cordyceps sinensis) and mishmi teeta (coptis teeta)); “rediscovered” species (the mishmi wren-barbler, spelaeornis badeigularis); or invasive species such as water hyacinth (pontederia crassipes) and shrub verbena (lantana camara). pachuau and van schendel, entangled lives, 28, 221, 239; weckerle et al., “people, money”; king and sonahue, “rediscovery”; iqbal, “fighting with a weed”; rai and singh, “lantana camara invasion”. 36 | van schendel , mithun country humanimalia 15.1 (2024) spaces and times, often without us realizing it. over a long period of time, distinct societies in a large geographical region attuned their cultural sensibilities and cosmological assumptions to the same animal. this remarkable feat of cultural convergence attests to the unwitting power that a semi-wild bovine exerted over generations of humans. this is a valuable finding that environmental historians can incorporate into their analyses of interspecies agency. animals that were once seen as silent bystanders, and as props, specimens, living machinery, and commodities in human histories, are better understood as historical partners.78 this insight challenges the conceptual border between humans and nonhumans that inspires anthropocentric history — but it resonates strongly with customary worldviews in mithun country. second, environmental histories hardly ever coincide with contemporary or historical state and world-area entities. they disregard human-designed boundaries. mithun country straddles the national territories of india, myanmar, bangladesh, bhutan, and china. in addition, it connects the academic templates of “south asia”, “southeast asia”, and “east asia.” it exemplifies how an environmental history approach can help us highlight complex connections between world areas. the concept of ecological “transregions” (which may overlap and change over time) has been suggested as a useful heuristic tool for crossing the notional borders of world areas.79 the borders of such transregions may be understood as co-produced; for example, mithun foraging patterns may have determined human border making.80 third, spaces are always time-bound, so “mapping” and “timing” go hand in hand. the standard periodization of, for example, south asian studies makes little sense in mithun country where diverse cultural traditions have constructed time differently, providing an opportunity to delve into the multiplicity of timing in 78 for example, van schendel, “non-human labour history?” 79 smyer yü, “environmental edging”; cederlöf and van schendel, flows and frictions. 80 as in the case of a naga group’s traditional boundary with the ahom state, in today’s assam. agrawal and kumar, numbers in india’s periphery, 113. van schendel , mithun country | 37 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) south asia and refine interspecies periodization.81 this is particularly relevant in the current era of rapid environmental change. as the landscapes of mithun country are degraded by human interference, and nonhuman habitats are shrinking, our mapping and timing must adapt accordingly. fourth, this tour of mithun country alerts us to a well-known, deepseated problem: a fundamental distinction between the domains of “nature” and “culture” in the production of academic knowledge. environmental history has long rejected this distinction — the environment is always a nature-culture amalgam. put differently, the human touch is planetary, and it is a fallacy to think of humanity as existentially alienated from nature. the fantasy of an untouched, pristine, unspoiled nature produces problematic terms like “wildness” and “conservation”. the deep mountain forests that the mithuns prefer as their habitat are not pure or primeval in any sense. like all other “natural” phenomena, they have long histories of human interference. as mithuns demonstrate by their behaviour, creatures can be “wild” and “domestic” at the same time. domestication is best seen as a spectrum on which mithuns have never moved far, even though their intimacy with humans has deep roots. and fifth, this case study nudges us towards studying unconventional sources of historical information (notably multilingual oral archives and material remains such as landscapes, forest habitats, megaliths, skull racks, bones, woodcarvings, and ceremonial posts) and reconsidering what constitutes relevant and reliable evidence about the past. to this end, academic historians should take locally-based, non-academic narrators of the environmental past more seriously than most of us have done. indigenous forms of knowledge production, conveyed in local languages, are key to deciphering the indigenous cosmologies of mithun country. these interpret the environment as an all-inclusive universe in which spirits, nonhuman animals and humans form dynamic partnerships of respectful reciprocity. this worldview — articulated in songs, stories, dances, rituals, material remains, dress, and sculptural 81 pachuau and van schendel, entangled lives, 11–12. 38 | van schendel , mithun country humanimalia 15.1 (2024) art — shaped past attitudes and behaviour. and this worldview is still perceptible in modified form today. so we, academic historians, need to distance ourselves more from that romantic figure of the lone heroic scholar ploughing endlessly through dusty records. record-ploughing certainly remains extremely important (although increasingly on-screen). but as environmental historians have been demonstrating for years, there are essential sources beyond the archetypal archive. these have been called proxy records: many of the questions asked by environmental historians cry out for reliable proxy records […] that may reflect, for example, deforestation, erosion, salinization, or changes in species compositions […]. while these disparate sources of data do not always combine as easily as we might like, the various material “proxy” records are an essential part of researching environmental history, even in very recent periods.82 this is a crucial point for mithun country because here written sources are uncommon and proxy records are the main carriers of environmental historical information. the field of environmental history is only beginning to be developed in this region, so we can put its nascent historiography on a thoroughly interdisciplinary footing, overcoming academic silos. theoretical insights and research methods from disciplines beyond the humanities and social sciences can assist in unlocking alternative interspecies ways of “mapping” and “timing” the region. in other words, we can take a cue from the mithuns’ wandering habits, by crossing disciplinary, national, and area-studies borders ourselves. 82 morrison, “conceiving ecology”, 42. van schendel , mithun country | 39 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) works cited achumi, ilito h. “‘tell them our story’: memories of the sumi naga labour corps in world war i.” south asia: journal of south asian studies 46, no. 1 (2023): 55–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/00 856401.2023.2143653 adcock, cassie, and radhika govindrajan. “bovine politics in south asia: rethinking religion, law and ethics.” south asia: journal of south asian studies 42, no. 6 (2019): 1095–1107. “affairs on the north-east frontier.” foreign and political department, secret e branch, government of india, proceedings (december 1914) 156–34. national archives of india, new delhi. agrawal, ankush, and vikas kumar. numbers in india’s periphery: the political economy of government. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2020. ahrestani, farshid s. “bos frontalis and bos gaurus (artiodactyla: bovidae).” mammalian species 50, no. 959 (2018): 34–50. https://doi.org/10.1093/ mspecies/sey004 aisher, alexander. “through ‘spirits’: cosmology and landscape ecology among the nyishi tribe of upland arunachal pradesh, northeast india”. phd thesis, university college london, 2006. aisher, alexander. “voices of uncertainty: spirits, humans and forests in upland arunachal pradesh, india. south asia: journal of south asian studies 30, no. 3 (2007), 479–98. https://doi. org/10.1080/00856400701714088 aiyadurai, ambika. “‘tigers are our brothers’: understanding humannature relations in the mishmi hills, northeast india.” phd thesis, university of singapore, 2016. baig, mumtaz, et al. 2013. “mitochondrial dna diversity and origin of bos frontalis.” current science 104, no. 1 (2013): 115–20. barbe, m. “some account of the hill tribes in the interior of chittagong, in a letter to the secretary of the asiatic society.” journal of the asiatic society of bengal 14, no. 1 (1845): 380–91. bareigts, andré. les lautu: contribution à l’étude de l’organisation sociale d’une ethnie chin de haute-birmanie. paris: selaf, 1981. bhattacharya, neeladri, and joy l. k. pachuau, eds. landscape, culture, and belonging: writing the history of northeast india. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2019. blackburn, stuart. himalayan tribal tales: oral tradition and culture in the apatani valley. leiden: brill, 2008. blackburn, stuart. “oral stories and culture areas: from northeast india to southwest china.” south asia: journal of south asian studies 30, no. 3 (2007): 419–37. https://doi. org/10.1080/00856400701714054 blench, roger. “the contribution of linguistics to understanding the foraging/farming transition in northeast india.” in 50 years after daojali-hading, edited by tiatoshi jamir and manjil hazarika, 99–109. new delhi: research india press, 2014. bonnell, jennifer, and sean kheraj, eds. traces of the animal past: methodological challenges in animal history. calgary: university of calgary press, 2022. boomgaard, peter. southeast asia: an environmental history. santa barbara, ca: abc-clio, 2007. brauns, claus-dieter, and lorenz g. löffler. mru: hill people on the border of bangladesh. translated by doris wagner-glenn. basel: springer basel. butler, john. “rough notes on the angámi nágás and their language.” journal of the asiatic society of bengal 44, no. 1 (1875): 308–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2143653 https://doi.org/10.1080/00856401.2023.2143653 https://doi.org/10.1093/mspecies/sey004 https://doi.org/10.1093/mspecies/sey004 https://doi.org/10.1080/00856400701714088 https://doi.org/10.1080/00856400701714088 https://doi.org/10.1080/00856400701714054 https://doi.org/10.1080/00856400701714054 40 | van schendel , mithun country humanimalia 15.1 (2024) castelló, josé r. bovids of the world: antelopes, gazelles, cattle, goats, sheep, and relatives. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 2016. cederlöf, gunnel, and willem van schendel, eds. flows and frictions in transhimalayan spaces: histories of networking and border crossing. amsterdam: amsterdam university press, 2022. chakrabarti, ranjan, ed. critical themes in environmental history of india. new delhi: sage, 2020. chen, yan, tianlu zhang, ming xian, et al. “a draft genome of drung cattle reveals clues to its chromosomal fusion and environmental adaptation.” communications biology 5 (2022): 353. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-02203298-9 cram, dominic l., jessica e. m. van der wal, natalie t. uomini, et al. “the ecology and evolution of human–wildlife cooperation.” people and nature 4, no. 4 (2022): 841–55. https://doi.org/10.1002/ pan3.10369 cuvier, frédéric. supplément à l’histoire naturelle générale et particulière de buffon. vol. 1: mammifères. paris: f. d. pillot, 1831. das, debojyoti. “from millet to rice: the politics of the new faith and time discipline among borderland communities in eastern nagaland.” asian ethnology 79, no. 2 (2020): 377–94. devi, ningthoujam neelima, bihsal dahar, prasanta kumar bera, yashmin choudhury, and sankar kumar ghosh. “revisit of the taxonomic status of bos genus with special reference to north eastern hilly region of india.” animal gene 27 (2023): 200143. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.angen.2022.200143 dinerstein, eric, david olson, anup joshi, et al. “an ecoregion-based approach to protecting half the terrestrial realm.” bioscience 67, no. 6 (2017): 534–45. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix014 dorji, tashi, jigme wangdi, yi shaoliang, nakul chettri, and kesang wangchuk. “mithun (bos frontalis): the neglected cattle species and their significance to ethnic communities in the eastern himalaya — a review.” animal bioscience 34, no. 11 (2021): 1727–38. https://doi.org/10.5713/ab.21.0020 dulong niu [mithun]. [lushui]: people’s government of nujiang lisu autonomous prefecture, yunnan, 2023. elwin, verrier. myths of the north-east frontier of india. new delhi: munshiram manoharlal, 1958. evans, g.p. big-game shooting in upper burma. london: longmans, green, 1911. faruque, m.o., et al. “present status of gayal (bos frontalis) in the home tract of bangladesh.” bangladesh journal of animal science 44, no. 1 (2015): 75–84. https://doi.org/10.3329/bjas. v44i1.23147 fisher, michael h. an environmental history of india: from earliest times to the twenty-first century. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2018. fraser, david w., and barbara g. fraser. mantles of merit: chin textiles from myanmar, india and bangladesh. bangkok: river books, 2005. fürer-haimendorf, christoph von. the konyak nagas: an indian frontier tribe. new york and london: holt, rinehart and winston, 1969. geng, yanfei, guoxiong hu, sailesh ranjitkar, et al. “prioritizing fodder species based on traditional knowledge: a case study of mithun (bos frontalis) in dulongjiang area, yunnan province, southwest china.” journal of ethnobiology and ethnomedicine 13 (2017): 24. https://doi.org/10.1186/ s13002-017-0153-z gros, stéphane. “cultes de fertilité chez les drung du yunnan (chine)”. moussons 19 (2012): 111–136. https://doi.org/10.4000/ moussons.1264 https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-03298-9 https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-03298-9 https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10369 https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10369 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.angen.2022.200143 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.angen.2022.200143 https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/bix014 https://doi.org/10.5713/ab.21.0020 https://doi.org/10.3329/bjas.v44i1.23147 https://doi.org/10.3329/bjas.v44i1.23147 https://doi.org/10.1186/s13002-017-0153-z https://doi.org/10.1186/s13002-017-0153-z https://doi.org/10.4000/moussons.1264 https://doi.org/10.4000/moussons.1264 van schendel , mithun country | 41 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) he, zhan xing, yoko sato, ji cai zhang, et al. “superovulatory response and pregnancy after interspecies transfer of embryos in semi-wild dulong (bos frontalis) — short communication.” veterinarski arhiv 84, no. 2 (2014), 183–88. https://hrcak.srce.hr/119052 head, w. r. hand book on the haka chin customs. rangoon: office of the superintendent, government printing, burma, 1917. hill, christopher v. south asia: an environmental history. santa barbara, ca: abc-clio, 2008. hutton, j. h. diaries of two tours in the unadministered area east of the naga hills. calcutta: baptist mission press, 1929. icar-national research centre on mithun. management practices for improved mithun (bos frontalis) husbandry. medziphema, nagaland: icar-nrc on mithun, 2020. https://nrcmithun.icar. gov.in/node/704 icar-national research centre on mithun. mithun (bos frontalis): the unique bio-resource of north east india. medziphema, nagaland: icar-nrc on mithun, 2020. https://nrcmithun.icar. gov.in/node/701 icar-national research centre on mithun. “semi-intensive mithun rearing units.” mithun digest 17, no. 1 (2021): 14. https:// nrcmithun.icar.gov.in/node/909 iqbal, iftekhar. “fighting with a weed: water hyacinth and the state in colonial bengal, c. 1910–1947.” environment and history 15, no. 1 (2009): 35–59. https://doi. org/10.3197/096734009x404653 jackson, kyle. the mizo discovery of the british raj: empire and religion in northeast india, 1890–1920. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2023. kabir, shariear. “a report on case study of a gayal farm located at padua, sukhbilash rangunia, chattogram.” chattogram: chattogram veterinary and animal sciences university, 2020. http://dspace.cvasu.ac.bd/jspui/ handle/123456789/451 kauffmann, hans-eberhard. “landwirtschaft bei den bergvölkern von assam und nord-burma.” zeitschrift für ethnologie 66, no. 1/3 (1934): 15–111. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25839470 kauffmann, hans-eberhard. “die bedeutung des dorftores bei den angami-naga.” geographica helvetica 10, no. 2 (1955): 84–95. https://doi. org/10.5194/gh-10-84-1955 kean, hilda, and philip howell, eds. the routledge companion to animal– human history. london: routledge, 2019. khan, meraj haider, et al. semi-intensive mithun farming: success stories under tribal sub plan (2016–2021). medziphema, nagaland: icar-national research centre on mithun, 2022. king, ben, and julian p. donahue. “the rediscovery and song of the rustythroated wren babbler spelaeornis badeigularis”. forktail no. 22 (2006): 113–15. krutak, lars. “neo-naga.” tätowiermagazin july 2015: 50–54. lambert, aylmer bourke. “description of bos frontalis, a new species, from india.” transactions of the linnean society 7, no. 1 (1804): 57–59. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1096-3642.1804.tb00280.x lambert, aylmer bourke. “further account of the bos frontalis.” transactions of the linnean society 7, no. 1 (1804): 302–5. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-3642.1804. tb00296.x lapolla, randy j., and david sangdong. rawang-english-burmese dictionary (a tibeto-burman language spoken in myanmar). singapore: privately published, 2015. https://www.rawang. org/files/rvwang-english-burmese%20 dictionary.pdf https://hrcak.srce.hr/119052 https://nrcmithun.icar.gov.in/node/704 https://nrcmithun.icar.gov.in/node/704 https://nrcmithun.icar.gov.in/node/701 https://nrcmithun.icar.gov.in/node/701 https://nrcmithun.icar.gov.in/node/909 https://nrcmithun.icar.gov.in/node/909 https://doi.org/10.3197/096734009x404653 https://doi.org/10.3197/096734009x404653 http://dspace.cvasu.ac.bd/jspui/handle/123456789/451 http://dspace.cvasu.ac.bd/jspui/handle/123456789/451 https://www.jstor.org/stable/25839470 https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-10-84-1955 https://doi.org/10.5194/gh-10-84-1955 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-3642.1804.tb00280.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-3642.1804.tb00280.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-3642.1804.tb00296.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1096-3642.1804.tb00296.x https://www.rawang.org/files/rvwang-english-burmese%20dictionary.pdf https://www.rawang.org/files/rvwang-english-burmese%20dictionary.pdf https://www.rawang.org/files/rvwang-english-burmese%20dictionary.pdf 42 | van schendel , mithun country humanimalia 15.1 (2024) lehman, f. k. the structure of chin society: a tribal people of burma adapted to a non-western civilization. urbana: university of illinois press, 1963. li, s. p., h. chang, g. l. ma, and h. y. cheng. “molecular phylogeny of the gayal in yunnan china inferred from the analysis of cytochrome b gene entire sequences.” asian-australasian journal of animal science 21, no. 6 (2008): 789–93. https://doi.org/10.5713/ ajas.2008.70637 li, yan, et al. “large-scale chromosomal changes lead to genome-level expression alterations, environmental adaptation, and speciation in the gayal (bos frontalis).” molecular biology and evolution 40, no. 1 (2023). https://doi. org/10.1093/molbev/msad006 longkumer, arkotong. “representing the nagas: negotiating national culture and consumption.” in bhattacharya and pachuau, landscape, culture, and belonging, 151–75. lotha, abraham. the raging mithun: challenges of naga nationalism. kohima: barkweaver, 2013. ma, jun, et al. “comparative transcriptome analyses of gayal (bos frontalis), yak (bos grunniens), and cattle (bos taurus) reveal the high-altitude adaptation.” frontiers in genetics 12 (2022): 778788. https://doi. org/10.3389/fgene.2021.778788 macrae, john. “account of the kookies or lunctas.” asiatic researches 7 (1803): 183–98. malsawmliana. “socio-economic importance of sial (mithun) in traditional mizo society.” historical journal mizoram 21 (2021): 41–53. mayirnao, shaokhai, and sinalei khayi. “decolonising feasts of merit: reasoning marān kasā from a tangkhul naga perspective”. asian ethnicity 24, no. 2 (2023): 258–77. https://doi.org/10.1080/1 4631369.2022.2089093 mills, j.  p. the ao nagas. london: macmillan, 1926. mittermeier, russell a., will r. turner, frank w. larsen, thomas m. brooks, and claude gascon. “global biodiversity conservation: the critical role of hotspots.” in biodiversity hotspots: distribution and protection of conservation priority areas, edited by frank e. zachos, and jan christian habel, 3–22. heidelberg: springer, 2011. miyamoto, mari, jan magnusson, and frank j. korom. “animal slaughter and religious nationalism in bhutan.” asian ethnology 80, no. 1 (2021): 121–45. morrison, kathleen d. “conceiving ecology and stopping the clock: narratives of balance, loss, and degradation.” in shifting ground: people, animals, and mobility in india’s environmental history, edited by mahesh rangarajan and k. sivaramakrishnan, 39–60. new delhi: oxford university press, 2014. mukherjee, sabyasachi, anupama mukherjee, sanjeev kumar, et al. “genetic characterization of endangered indian mithun (bos frontalis), indian bison/wild gaur (bos gaurus) and tho-tho cattle (bos indicus) populations using ssr markers reveals their diversity and unique phylogenetic status.” diversity 14, no. 7 (2022): 548. https://doi.org/10.3390/d14070548 norton, marcy. the tame and the wild: people and animals after 1492. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 2024. pachuau, joy l.k., and willem van schendel. the camera as witness: a social history of mizoram, northeast india. delhi: cambridge university press, 2015. pachuau, joy l.k., and willem van schendel. entangled lives: humananimal-plant histories of the eastern himalayan triangle. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2022. passah, sajeki. pnar–english dictionary. jowai: pnar printers and publishers, 2013. https://doi.org/10.5713/ajas.2008.70637 https://doi.org/10.5713/ajas.2008.70637 https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msad006 https://doi.org/10.1093/molbev/msad006 https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2021.778788 https://doi.org/10.3389/fgene.2021.778788 https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2022.2089093 https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2022.2089093 https://doi.org/10.3390/d14070548 van schendel , mithun country | 43 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) pearson, j. t. “memorandum on the gaur and gayal.” journal of the asiatic society of bengal 6, no. 1 (1837): 225–30. perlin, ross. “a grammar of trung.” himalayan linguistics (2020). https://doi. org/10.5070/h918244579 post, mark. w. “on reconstructing ethno-linguistic prehistory: the case of tani.” in crossing boundaries: tibetan studies unlimited, edited by diana lang, jarmila ptáčková, marion wettstein, and mareike wulff, 311–40. prague: academia, 2022. project maje. “mithuns sacrificed to greed: the forest ox of burma’s chins.” portland, or: project maje, 2004. https:// www.projectmaje.org/mithuns.htm rai, prabhat kumar, and m. muni singh. “lantana camara invasion in urban forests of an indo-burma hotspot region and its ecosustainable management implication through biomonitoring of particulate matter.” journal of asia-pacific biodiversity 8, no. 4 (2015): 375–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. japb.2015.09.003 rainey, r. m. “notes on the chinboks, chinbons, and yindus of the chin frontier of burma.” indian antiquary 21 (1892): 215–24. rangarajan, mahesh, and k. sivaramakrishnan, eds. india’s environmental history from ancient times to the colonial period: a reader. 2 vols. ranikhet: permanent black, 2012. rangarajan, mahesh, and k. sivaramakrishnan, eds. shifting ground: people, animals, and mobility in india’s environmental history. oxford: oxford university press, 2014. rawlins, john. “on the manners, religion, and laws of the cucis, or mountaineers of tipra.” asiatic researches 2 (1799): 187–93. roscher, mieke, andré krebber, and brett mizelle, eds. handbook of historical animal studies. berlin: de gruyter, 2021. sakhong, lian h. in search of chin identity: a study in religion, politics and ethnic identity in burma. copenhagen: nias press, 2003. sarma, abhishruti, and joseph zoliana. changing affinities: ecologies of human– mithun relationships in northeast india. guwahati: north eastern social research centre, 2023. shakespear, john. “the lushais and the land they live in.” journal of the society of arts 43, no. 2201 (january 1895): 167–185. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/41334168 shakespear, l. w. history of the assam rifles. london: macmillan, 1929. sharma, h. surmangol. learners’ manipuri– english dictionary. imphal: sangam book store, 2006. simoons, frederick j., and elizabeth s. simoons. a ceremonial ox of india: the mithan in nature, culture and history. madison: university of wisconsin press, 1968. singh, u nissor. khasi–english dictionary. shillong: eastern bengal and assam secretariat press, 1906. smyer yü, dan. “situating environmental humanities in the new himalayas: an introduction.” in smyer yü and de maaker, environmental humanities in the new himalayas, 1–24. smyer yü, dan. “environmental edging of empires, chiefdoms, and states: corridors as transregions.” in smyer yü and dean, yunnan–burma–bengal corridor geographies, 46–67. smyer yü, dan, and erik de maaker, eds. environmental humanities in the new himalayas: symbiotic indigeneity, commoning, sustainability. london: routledge, 2021. smyer yü, dan, and karin dean, eds. yunnan–burma–bengal corridor geographies: protean edging of habitats and empires. london: routledge, 2022. https://doi.org/10.5070/h918244579 https://doi.org/10.5070/h918244579 https://www.projectmaje.org/mithuns.htm https://www.projectmaje.org/mithuns.htm https://doi.org/10.1016/j.japb.2015.09.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.japb.2015.09.003 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41334168 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41334168 44 | van schendel , mithun country humanimalia 15.1 (2024) swart, sandra. “animals in african history.” in oxford research encyclopedia of african history, edited by thomas t. spear. oxford: oxford university press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1093/ acrefore/9780190277734.013.443 tenzin, sangay, jigme dorji, tashi dorji, and yoshi kawamoto. “assessment of genetic diversity of mithun (bos frontalis) population in bhutan using microsatellite dna markers.” animal genetic resources 59 (2016): 1–6. https:// doi.org/10.1017/s2078633616000072 tzüdir, lanusangla. “appropriating the ao past in a christian present.” in bhattacharya and pachuau, landscape, culture, and belonging, 265–93. uzzaman, rasel, shamsul alam bhuiyan, zewdu edea, and kwan-suk kim. “semi-domesticated and irreplaceable genetic resource gayal (bos frontalis) needs effective genetic conservation in bangladesh: a review.” asianaustralasian journal of animal science 27, no. 9 (2014): 1368–72. http://doi. org/10.5713/ajas.2014.14159 van der wal, jessica e. m., claire n. spottiswoode, natalie t. uomini, mauricio cantor, fábio g. daura-jorge, dominic l. cram, et al. “safeguarding human–wildlife cooperation.” conservation letters 15, no. 4 (2022): e12886. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12886 van schendel, willem. “non-human labour history? three short questions.” notebooks: the journal for studies on power 2, no. 2 (2023): 189–99. https:// doi.org/10.1163/26667185-bja10035 van schendel, willem, wolfgang mey, and aditya kumar dewan. the chittagong hill tracts: living in a borderland. bangkok: white lotus press, 2000. wang, ming-shan, yan zeng, xiao wang, et al. “draft genome of the gayal, bos frontalis.” gigascience 6, no 11 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/ gix094 weckerle, caroline s., yongping yang, franz k. huber, and qiaohong li. “people, money, and protected areas: the collection of the caterpillar mushroom ophiocordyceps sinensis in the baima xueshan nature reserve, southwest china”. biodiversity and conservation 19 (2010): 2685–98. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-010-9867-0 wilcox, r. “memoir of a survey of asam and the neighbouring countries, executed in 1825-6-7-8.” asiatic researches 17 (1832): 314–469. woodward, mark r. “gifts for the sky people: animal sacrifice, headhunting and power among the naga of burma and assam.” in indigenous religions: a companion, edited by graham harvey, 219–29. london: cassell, 2000. wouters, jelle j. p. 2021. “relatedness, trans-species knots and yak personhood in the bhutan highlands.” in smyer yü and de maaker, environmental humanities in the new himalayas, 27–42. yekha-ü and queenbala marak. “elicüra: the ‘feasts of merit’ shawl of the chakhesang naga of northeast india.” the oriental anthropologist 21, no. 1 (2021): 138–57. https://doi. org/10.1177/0972558x21990790 yumlam tana. “let’s hope anyway.” netlit review: the seven sisters post literary review, 3 june 2012. https://nelitreview. tumblr.com/post/24306633566/poemsby-yumlam-tana https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.443 https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.443 https://doi.org/10.1017/s2078633616000072 https://doi.org/10.1017/s2078633616000072 http://doi.org/10.5713/ajas.2014.14159 http://doi.org/10.5713/ajas.2014.14159 https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12886 https://doi.org/10.1163/26667185-bja10035 https://doi.org/10.1163/26667185-bja10035 https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/gix094 https://doi.org/10.1093/gigascience/gix094 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10531-010-9867-0 https://doi.org/10.1177/0972558x21990790 https://doi.org/10.1177/0972558x21990790 https://nelitreview.tumblr.com/post/24306633566/poems-by-yumlam-tana https://nelitreview.tumblr.com/post/24306633566/poems-by-yumlam-tana https://nelitreview.tumblr.com/post/24306633566/poems-by-yumlam-tana lemaitre, clouded leopard afterlives of the clouded leopard likulau heirlooms and paiwan culture agathe lemaitre national dong hwa university, taiwan humanimalia 14.1 (fall 2023) abstract: this paper analyses the afterlives of the likulau (clouded leopard), through its spiritual presence and material traces among the indigenous paiwan people of taiwan. despite having been locally extinct for over half a century, the clouded leopard still continues to inhabit the myths and imaginations of the local population. in traditional paiwan culture, the clouded leopard held a special status, and its skin and teeth were used to make ritual clothes and adornments for the village chiefs. in this paper, i explore the significance of these likulau artefacts in contemporary paiwan society. i also examine how the paiwan’s interactions with and the cultural significance of these objects have evolved in connection with environmental changes and social transformations of paiwan society. as embodied in these material traces, the clouded leopard is both absent and present, extinct and alive. i explore this spectral presence via the concept of survivance (didihuberman), examining how the ambiguous persistence of the clouded leopard relates to the resilience of traditional paiwan culture. keywords: paiwan, clouded leopard, afterlife, survivance, indigenous peoples bio: agathe lemaitre is a phd candidate in anthropology at the college of indigenous studies, department of ethnic relations and cultures, national dong hwa university, taiwan, where she is part of the research project “austronesian worlds: human–animal entanglements in the pacific anthropocene.” her phd research considers the relationship between the austronesian paiwan and two species of nonhuman animal, the locally extinct clouded leopard (neofelis nebulosa) and the endangered mountain hawk-eagle (nisaetus nipalensis), from a social, political, and environmental perspective. email: agathe.lemaitre@yahoo.fr orcid: 0000-0002-3284-8802 copyright © 2023 agathe lemaitre this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 175–205. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.12856 mailto:agathe.lemaitre@yahoo.fr https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3284-8802 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.12856 lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard | 177 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) in the humid taiwanese winter of 2019, i visited the paiwan village of laiyi in pingtung county (屏東縣，來義部落) in southern taiwan. it was my second visit to the village, and i was hoping to discover some clouded leopard items, fragments of the past still alive in the present. together with a colleague from the university, i sought out some potential owners of such items. after sitting in one family’s living room for an hour talking about clouded leopard artefacts, i was wondering if they would make an appearance this evening or not. i could only wait and see if the owners were inclined to show us them, which is not always the case. that evening, we were in luck. at a certain point, ina1 went upstairs and returned with a leopard skin and a headdress which she laid out in the middle of the room. the skin had been cut from head to tail on the underside of the belly in order to allow it to be laid flat. the room went silent. the animal seemed to fill the space and integrate into the social circle of the house. the owner displayed the clouded leopard hide very carefully, with slow movements, making sure not to damage the skin. in that moment, the clouded leopard hide was not just an item destined to be photographed. looking at the skin we could almost feel the presence of the clouded leopard; this material object brought the past back to life in the present, making visible what usually remains hidden. looking at these material traces that continue to haunt paiwan society, this paper explores the complex afterlives of the clouded leopard. despite having been declared locally extinct by scientists, the clouded leopard (neofelis nebulosa) maintains a ghostly presence for the indigenous paiwan people. i will begin by presenting the paiwan and their relationship with the clouded leopard, or likulau (in paiwan). then i will discuss the significance and agency of the remaining artefacts made from the bodies of clouded leopards. these artifacts, i argue, constitute a form of survivance for the species. finally, i will examine how a new kind of artefact, artificial replicas or imported skins, have come to compensate for the impossibility of producing new artefacts from the taiwanese clouded leopard. 1 ina is a paiwan term to designate a woman who is older than you, and can be translated as mother, aunt, grand-mother, etc. figure 1: two old clouded leopard skins: a vest and a full body skin. laiyi village, pingtung county, november 2018. photograph by the author. lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard | 179 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) paiwan clouded leopard culture the paiwan live in the southern and south-eastern parts of taiwan in pingtung and taitung counties, on either side of the central mountain range (zhongyang shanmai 中央山脈). they are often divided by government classification into four dialectal groups according to geographical area: the northern, southern, eastern, and central paiwan.2 they are also divided into the ravar group in the north of pingtung county, with geographical proximity to the rukai people, and the vutsul / butsul groups in the south and east.3 this research focuses on the vutsul paiwan, which is a hierarchical society divided between a highest community leader (vusam mamazangiljan), the nobility (mamazangiljan), the leader helpers (pualu), and the commoners (adidan). parallel to this inherited social hierarchy, other kinds of social status are acquired by merit and personal abilities, such as shaman (pulingau) who is sensible to the spirit world, and warrior (rakac) who is an expert at hunting and headhunting. paiwan social and individual life is organized around the community and the practice of sharing between members. sharing unifies the community by means of the circulation of goods and values through the social ranking system. traditionally, the paiwan were hunter societies, in which all the men were both hunters and warriors, known as fearsome head-hunters. in the past, hunting and gathering alongside small-scale agriculture was the basis of paiwan life. during my fieldwork, from 2018 to 2022, i made several short visits to paiwan villages to conduct interviews, and two longer stays of six months in taitung and in pingtung for participant observation.4 in the first part of my fieldwork, i mostly met with chiefs and noble families who are generally the ones in possession of clouded leopard 2 this administrative division into four groups is not so evident in reality, where differences are more related to migration path. two neighbouring villages may speak different dialects, for example. 3 the vutsul can be further divided between the vutsul in the north; the paumaumaq in the central part; the chaobolbol, sebdek, parilarilao and skaro in the south; and the paqaluqalu in the east (chiang bien, 1984). these groups share a similar social organization and rank system. 4 all interviews and discussions were conducted in confidentiality, and the names of interviewees are withheld by mutual agreement. 180 | lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard humanimalia 14.1 (2023) items. however, after 2020, i also met with hunters, shamans, and elders, in order to deepen my understanding of the leopard culture, and the past relationship of paiwan society to this animal. most of my informants were men over the age of forty, although i also talked with a few younger hunters in their thirties as well as some women. as a white woman and non-indigenous foreigner, it took me a long time to understand the social context of the paiwan community and notably the actual authority conflicts between traditional hierarchy and new elites. i decided to restrict my research to the central (pingtung county) and east paiwan (taitung county) groups, which are linked by migration pattern, and share the same sacred mountain, dawu (kavulungan).5 dawu mountain is considered as the land of the spirits and ancestors and the place where the leopard used to roam. the central paiwan have been the main owners of leopard artefacts for generations and stories of leopards are still told in taitung to this day. as said, it was not easy for me, as an outsider and a woman, to integrate into the masculine world of my fieldwork. at first, hunters rejected my requests to join them on a hunt or to go up to the mountains: they would often say it was too dangerous and therefore unsuitable for a woman. the paiwan nowadays usually hunt at night with powerful headlights which reflect the animal eyes and blind them, allowing hunters to shoot their prey with shotguns. they often hunt in small groups of two to four, but some also go alone. the main game species are muntjacs, serow, and flying squirrels, though some more adventurous hunters also trap boar or go deeper into the mountain to shoot deer. these days, the animals are mainly used for food, as most people do not want to spend so much time preparing the skins. as i spent more time living in the community, a man in taitung finally agreed to bring me on a hunt. his friend was sceptical, saying that i would bring bad luck and warned me not to touch their weapons. that evening i experienced my first hunt with the paiwan and we killed two muntjacs and a flying squirrel. i did not slow them down and without complaining i carried the body 5 despite some dialectal and minor customary differences, these two groups share a similar social organization and ranking system. lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard | 181 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) of the muntjac i was given. on our way back to the village, the man told me i was welcome to join the hunt again. it seems that contrary to his friend’s prediction my presence had brought them good luck. after that, i accompanied a number of different hunting parties and gradually came to be accepted. my skill at hiking was recognized and praised. while hunting in the mountains and hiking, i learned the most about the relationship between the paiwan and the local ecosystems. i tried to see the world as they do, and listened to whatever they wanted to share with me. from my mountain experiences, i learned that the paiwan have established different kinds of connections with animals. the paiwan distinguish between qudzipan, or domestic animals, which are taken care of and who live in close proximity with humans (such as pigs, dogs, or chickens), and wild animals, sacemel, which are usually subdivided into three main categories. the first category is the usual game (liewu 獵物) that my informants often jokingly described as the animals wearing high-heels (that is hooves): wild boar, muntjacs, serow, deer. the second category comprises animals perceived as sacred, because of their link to the spiritual world, and are therefore taboo to be hunted: for example, the hundred pacer pit viper [deinagkistrodon acutus 百步蛇]. the third category is situated in between the previous two: animals which are not sacred, but are also not usually hunted because of their specificity and rareness, such as the black bear [ursus thibetanus formosanus 黑熊], the mountain hawk-eagle [nisaetus nipalensis 熊鷹], and the clouded leopard [neofelis nebulosa 雲豹]. an addition, one might identify a fourth category: rodents and small clawed animals, which were not eaten in the past, but now, under the influence of other groups, have been integrated into the paiwan diet. an elder in taitung told me that these small animals were considered the prey of the clouded leopard and the hawk-eagle and as such were not eaten. in other words, this was a form of sharing the game between humans and leopards. hunting practices have been a major part of the paiwan way of life, providing food and supplies for making clothes and other objects. in the past, hunters used furs for blankets and clothes, but also used other parts of the animal to make ritual artefacts. the paiwan consider hunted 182 | lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard humanimalia 14.1 (2023) animals as gifts given by their ancestors.6 without the spirit’s agreement, hunters cannot be successful.7 before going on a hunt, the paiwan recite prayers and make small offerings of alcohol or betel nuts asking the spirits for their permission, support, and protection. after a successful hunt, they also perform offerings to thank the spirits. the restrictions of hunting rights imposed by the various colonial regimes (japanese; chinese kuomintang or kmt [國民黨]) on indigenous people has restrained their ability to interact with animals and limited the production of artefacts made from the bodies of those animals. for the paiwan, hunting remains an important means of maintaining a link with their local environment, and spirits. to give up hunting would be to give up their roots in their ancestral land. the clouded leopard was first “discovered” and introduced to the west by the english diplomat and naturalist robert swinhoe in 1862, who visited the dawu mountains and documented the species.8 during the japanese colonization of taiwan (1895–1945), the colonial administration kept records of indigenous hunting which established how many animals were killed by various ethnic groups each year. these records indicate that the paiwan killed the most leopards, but that other indigenous people were also hunting them, most notably the atayal in the north.9 other traces of the leopard’s presence during this period are the old japanese photographs of skins and artefacts made and owned by the paiwan. since the indigenous peoples of taiwan had no writing system, it is harder to account for the leopard’s presence before the japanese colonial period. nevertheless, my informants often described the leopard as the predator which lived in the high mountains and kept the wildlife population in check. 6 it is difficult to classify the paiwan as either an animist, totemist, or perspectivist society since their borrow elements from those various ontologies. indeed, social ranks are associated with special rights notably in link with some specific animals (totemism principle). though the paiwan social realm is comprising humans and nonhumans in a collective of beings overseen by the spirits and ancestors (animist principle). finally, in paiwan societies can be observed extra-human and intra-human perspectivism. some humans (warrior, shaman) in certain conditions transform into animals, while humans can also be inhabited by ancestors in dreams or through possession. 7 informal discussion with a hunter, tuban village, taitung county, 2020. 8 swinhoe, “mammals of the island of formosa”. 9 mabuchi, collected works, 76–77. figure 2: a vest made of clouded leopard skin. xinlaiyi village, pingtung county, march 2019. photograph by the author. 184 | lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard humanimalia 14.1 (2023) their slow extinction is one of the reasons for the abundance of wildlife in taiwan today, with a surplus of monkeys and muntjacs left without predators. the clouded leopard has an ambiguous status within paiwan culture(s): as the largest predator on the island10 it was highly valued, yet it was not considered sacred. it is only after many interviews and discussions that i began to grasp the paradoxical status of the clouded leopard: the feline was neither a sacred nor a game animal, but one that could be killed when encountered by chance or caught in a hunting trap. in such circumstances, they were seen as a gift from the ancestors that could not be refused. for example, an elder of qijia village (七佳部落) in pingtung county explained to me: in all my life i have never heard elders talk about how you can catch a clouded leopard. [...] it was not seen as a game animal. maybe it would be caught by mistake in a trap, and, because it was already dead, it would thus be brought in to make skins. so, the elders do not talk about how to catch a clouded leopard. is it taboo? or prohibited? some secret prohibition? if a leopard had been killed, a ceremony (palisi) had to be conducted in order to appease the spirit of the animal along with the other spirits. if the ceremony was not carefully performed by the village shaman (pulingau), it could bring bad luck and cause accidents, sickness, or even death to the hunter’s family (or even to all the villagers).11 hunting a clouded leopard in the past was not a trivial endeavour, because of their intelligence and their scarcity. it was rare for a clouded leopard to be killed, but when it did happen, the hunter who brought one back to the village would gain social status. indeed, some interlocutors told me that, in the past, in order to become a warrior, one had to have killed a clouded leopard, a mountain hawk-eagle, a black bear, or cut off the head of a (human) 10 taiwanese black bears are larger, but they are not considered predators since they feed primarily on leaves, shoots, roots, and fruit, although they have been known to eat insects and small mammals on occasion. 11 interview with an elder and hunter, wenle village, pingtung county, 15 march 2019; interview with an elder and hunter, tuban village, taitung county, 25 november 2020. lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard | 185 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) enemy.12 back in the village, the leopard’s body was first kept outside of the living area, where a ritual to thank and comfort the spirits was performed before allowing the carcass inside the village perimeter. the clouded leopard was then given to the highest chief (vusam mamazangiljan) who kept the skin, teeth, jaws, and tail. in paiwan culture, the chief is also the steward of the communal land, so they received part of whatever had been hunted or collected on their territory. the mamazangiljan then had the duty to redistribute meat to the families in need, the sick, or the elderly. they were at the centre of the community economy of giving and receiving. some informants told me that the meat was eaten collectively by the villagers, while others claimed that it could not be eaten, and that the body was buried instead. the parts kept by the mamazangiljan were used in the chief’s regalia as vests or headdresses. many indigenous peoples use animals to symbolize power or to recognize their authority.13 each animal may be associated with some special power or quality which are then correlated to the person using animal-made artefacts or emblems. in the paiwan case, reserving clouded leopard ornaments for the highest chief is also a recognition of their social status and position as the centre of the community. not all the chiefs wear these kinds of items but for those who do, these artefacts come to reinforce the visualization of the social order. in the process of being transformed from a wild animal into a cultural artefact the clouded leopard passed through the hands of various different members of the community (hunters, the shaman, the chief, commoners). this passage symbolized the unity and sharing principles of the paiwan. furthermore, through the ritual ceremony (palisi), the shaman also re-initiated a link with the spiritual world, to 12 interview with an elder and hunter, wenle village, pingtung county, 15 march 2019; discussion with a noble woman and four paiwan elders, jialan village, taitung county, 4 december 2020. headhunting was a common practice in the austronesian world, important means for the production and reproduction of the society. in headhunting practice, enemies are usually perceived as foreigners, or even not fully human. but when the enemy’s head was brought back to the village, it was transformed into a friend or family member. the paiwan associate in their narrative the hunting of three types of wild animals and the headhunting. the transition process is similar with the clouded leopards, that pass inside the cultural sphere after being killed, and are integrated into the family, coming even to represent them through the materiality of the artefact. 13 jerolmak and tavory, “molds and totems”, 65. 186 | lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard humanimalia 14.1 (2023) thank the ancestors for offering this gift. paiwan society was historically united horizontally (between all members) and vertically (with the spirits and ancestors) through the process of incorporating the leopard into the community. colonial impact on the human–animal relationship it is generally agreed that the local extinction of the clouded leopard began with the period of japanese colonial rule, which lasted from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the second world war. the disappearance of the clouded leopard coincided with the efforts of the japanese administration to “civilize” and “nipponize” taiwanese indigenous people. in practice, this meant forced resettlement of indigenous people in villages controlled and organized by the japanese, and the requirement to speak japanese and adopt the cultural manners of the occupiers.14 all those transformations impacted the paiwan relationship to the environment and wildlife. the education of indigenous people was notably focused on the introduction of writing system and insertion into market economy. the literacy effort impacted the indigenous people oral system and initiated the slow erosion of traditional oral history. it is plausible to assume that many of the stories relating to the clouded leopard have been lost or survive only as vague memories because it was not considered necessary or desirable to write them down. in this way, most informants do not know the origin of a given clouded leopard item, nor for how many generations it has been in their family. most of my interviewees told me that it has been too long, that i had come too late to collect these kinds of memories. at first, this absence of memories of the objects’ history appeared to me as a lack or a lacuna. gradually, however, i came to appreciate that it is equally important to reflect on the traces that remain within the object itself. indeed, part of their significance is still infused in these material items, handed down from generation to generation, and this also applies to the new replicas acquired in more recent times. the articulation between historical trauma, social change, 14 rubinstein, taiwan; matsuoka, “fandi” tongzhi. lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard | 187 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) and the transitional process of the material artefacts’ meanings is complex. the transformation of these artefacts, their loss of significance and disappearance from view, followed by their recovery and new significance—all of this is linked to the process of survivance. in this paper, i use the term survivance rather than survival, since the latter tends to refer to the biological fact of continued existence. survivance, on the other hand, conceptualizes the idea of a lasting presence, not only in a biological sense but also symbolically and spiritually. the anishinaabe writer georges vizenor uses the concept of survivance when discussing the first nations of north america. according to vizenor, survivance is an “active sense of presence” over historical absence, and the word encompasses both survival and the idea of active resistance.15 in my research, survivance refers to this holistic aspect of natural and cultural continuity in the face of disappearance. the transformation of the narratives surrounding the leopard and its material afterlives are not signs of its disappearance but rather, of the persistence of a presence that adapts to a changing social and natural world. paiwan societies have undergone many changes with their integration into dominant societies, first the japanese, then the chinese kuomintang (kmt), which remains a major political party in taiwan. the paiwan were forced to adopt new cultural systems, languages, and find their place in a market economy, with a significant exodus toward the cities starting in the 1960s. in the villages, the power of the mamazangiljan has diminished because of the loss of traditions among the younger generations but also because of competition among chiefs. the dislocation and relocation of villages under the japanese and the kmt have weakened local chiefs’ power and challenged their authority with the establishment of new chiefs not based on traditional ranking. while living within a community, i observed the manifold kinds of conflicts over authority that exist today: between various chiefs drawing their legitimacy from different times, bloodline relations to the traditional chief, designation by the japanese, but also presently new elites relying on wealth and education. 15 vizenor, survivance, 20. 188 | lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard humanimalia 14.1 (2023) while in the past a village could only have one vusam mamazangiljan recognized by all, today a village can have two, three, or even more chiefs fighting to establish their legitimacy. i realized that traditional regulations are less binding, as the elders’ and chief’s authority is less respected and new values become accepted. the logic of commodification more often comes into conflict with old rules of sharing or hunting taboos. for example, animals not hunted in the past are now seen as fair game and hunted game is sold outside the village rather than shared. clouded leopard items are representative of these social changes. during major festivals or weddings, it is now common to see people dancing while wearing synthetic leopard fur without consideration for their social position. new-found wealth allows people without traditional chief status to buy expensive leopard skins from other countries and wear them as status symbols. this, at times, can come in conflict with traditional mamazangiljan who may not have financial means to buy such goods. taboos become more flexible, slowly disappearing as people tend to rely on the power of wealth in competition with the past social order and norms. the significance and agency of clouded leopard artefacts in contemporary paiwan society today, only a few authentic clouded leopard artefacts remain in paiwan villages and i mostly found them among the central paiwan in pintung. those precious artefacts are usually kept in the family house and only displayed for important ceremonies or festivals (weddings, five-year covenant maljeveck). nowadays, synthetic or imported skins are often used as substitute of the original artefacts. the leopard items are usually vests made from the skin, or headdresses made with the tail and teeth. the vests are long tunics with no sleeves. the front part is often made from red fabric with black patterns sewn on it, often resembling animals killed by the person who owns the tunics, or else paiwan emblems such as the sun, the hundred pacer viper, and human heads. these patterns are closely correlated with social rank, but the insertion into the national society impacted the respect for those rules. the back part of the vest was made from leopard skin and is very rigid, although sometimes lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard | 189 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) both the front and the back of vests were made from leopard skins. the headdresses are made from the tails of leopards, crafted into a band to put around one’s head. on the front part of the headdress, a leopard’s jaws and/or teeth are sewn in a circle, often along with a round shell or colourful beads. on the side and the top of the headdress, hawk-eagle feathers, boar’s teeth or skins, or muntjac antlers are often added. it took me some time to find any authentic items. at first, in 2018, all the artefacts i encountered were replicas: synthetic or imported. gradually, however, it appeared that genuine items still existed in laiyi township pingtung county. sometimes, long discussions were necessary before i permitted to see the leopard artefacts. it was a process of testing, acceptance, and building trust before the paiwan families would show me their leopard artefacts and allow me into their intimate circle. as i spent more time living among the paiwan and learning the local language, i was more welcomed to see items and talk about them. i was asked many questions about myself too: why i was there? what was the point of my research? being a student at donghwa was helpful, since it is a university known for its indigenous studies department and many of my informants had relatives or friends studying there. i mainly spoke mandarin with the people, but over time i learnt more paiwan words. the fact that i had no religion was regarded with suspicion—many indigenous communities are converted to one of the various christian churches in taiwan16— but it ultimately allowed me to avoid taking sides. the slow integration process was important for my informants to be more confident about my presence and to show me their precious heirlooms. when they were brought into the room, the objects were generally set down on the table and offered to me to view. in those moments, they always became the centre of attention. these artefacts are imbued with a special kind of energy. when one focuses one’s attention on the leopard skins and other precious objects, they seem 16 in taiwan there are multiple religious groups, with an important concentration in the indigenous communities, eighty per cent of which are converts to christianity. however, many indigenous people go to church while also holding on to their traditional religion and beliefs in private. 190 | lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard humanimalia 14.1 (2023) to come alive and, in a sense, speak for themselves, transporting the viewer back to another time. indeed, they might look shabby, with the fur coming apart, but observing them, one can imagine and come to feel the presence of the clouded leopard which otherwise remains invisible. the time when leopards still roamed the mountains and their skins were still worn by chiefs is also a time when indigenous cultures were less diluted by outsider value systems. looking at these precious inherited objects allows people to feel a connection with that vanished past. after having seen a few original artefacts and encountering many replicas, i come to wonder about the present significance of leopard items: do they still provide a link to the past, or are they losing their meaning for younger generations? what is their importance when authentic skins can be substituted by replicas? but most importantly, how does the leopard live on in these material items after the death of the individual animal and the local extinction of the species? survivance precious goods made from leopards still elicit a powerful affective response and nostalgia. according to my informants, such artefacts contain the soul or breath (nasi) of the animal which still lives within the material. the artefacts represent the material trace of a culture and a history that no longer exists, and at the same time they constitute the ghostly presence of an animal which still inhabits the cultural memory of the paiwan. so, how to consider the persistence of the likulau’s presence? one way to approach the ghostly persistence of the clouded within paiwan culture is through what georges didi-huberman calls “survival” [survivance], a concept he derives from aby warburg’s discussion of the nachleben, or “afterlife”, of images.17 warburg introduced the concept of nachleben to describe the power of images, their ability to pass through time and maintain their efficiency to act on the imagination.18 the efficacy of the image lies in its meaning, but that 17 didi-huberman, surviving image, 16. 18 didi-huberman, 50. lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard | 191 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) meaning can change and evolve in response to the needs of the time. in anthropology, the related concept of survival refers to early debates based on an evolutionist vision of societies. notably, edward tylor, steeped in the ideology of that epoch, used the concept to explain that while societies progress within a linear timeframe, they still tend to hold onto old institutions, customs, or beliefs that are no longer adapted to their new stage of development.19 for tylor, those outdated practices and beliefs lasting within ostensibly “modern” societies should be eliminated because they lag behind society’s progress. as a discipline, anthropology has always been interested in the transformation of cultures over time: what is transmitted or not, what changes during the transmission, and what remains the same. all those questions touch on the idea of survival. in warburg’s usage, the idea of nachleben (afterlife) helps to account for the transition between various states of a single image, whose significance may change over time but still survives.20 it is not just a question of material or practices, but also of the “life” of the image—or in the case of the paiwan, the clouded leopard—and its affect. the iucn red list classifies the clouded leopard as locally extinct in taiwan, and when i began my research, this was how i thought of the animal, as already gone. this absence was echoed in the silence surrounding the likulau during the first two years of my fieldwork (2018– 2019). but after spending time with the men in the mountains and getting to know them personally, that silence was suddenly broken and people began to tell me stories, legends, and beliefs about the leopard. i also directly observed how my informants interacted with their ecosystem, trying to be more attentive to the interaction between human, natural, and material elements. by means of these observations, i came to understand my informants’ world better, and following that, their narrative. i realized that i had been wrong to focus on the question of whether the leopard was really extinct or not, as for them this question was irrelevant. what people were trying to tell me was that the leopard is still present in taiwan, albeit not as an animal of flesh and bone. once i realized that for the 19 zeebroek, “survivance ou intempérance?” 20 didi-huberman, surviving image, 50–51. 192 | lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard humanimalia 14.1 (2023) paiwan death and disappearance do not mean emptiness but another form of presence, an afterlife, i was finally able to further my research. the likulau inhabits a liminal position: absent but still present, both dead and alive. in this case, if the likulau remains as a presence, spiritual and mental, what part of the leopard aura is located within the material artefacts made from its body? the concept of survivance is complex and paradoxical because it combines the ideas of rebirth with that of perpetual death. this concept can help us to think of the relation of the paiwan to the leopard as a living being, as an object, as a memory, and as the presence of an absence. an informant in taitung told me that when a paiwan warrior dies, he becomes a clouded leopard and continues to roam his hunting territory to protect it. another informant expanded this account, saying that at his death, a warrior would first become a hawk-eagle flying in the sky and looking over its territory, and that when the eagle dies, it falls from the sky and is transformed into a clouded leopard and goes on protecting its land. and finally, when the leopard dies, it becomes water bamboo, providing water for men going into the mountains. when the water dries up, the soul of the warrior finally can go back to the ancestors’ land in the dawu mountain (tjagaraus). the leopard’s presence goes beyond the animal and is correlated in paiwan cosmology to the transitional processes between life and death, humans and spirits. listening to this legend, i understood why the potential extinction of clouded leopards does not seem to mean a total disappearance, but instead appears as a ghostly presence in the paiwan mountains. life and death are entangled and not clearly distinguishable from one another. ghosts, as a direct invocation of the past, induce a complex relationship with time, disrupting the structure and chronology of history, blocking the possibility of organizing the present and the past, which both become present and overlapping. to speak of ghosts is to speak of the entanglement of history with the present, and accepting the possibility of a presence-absence. in the humanities, there has been a growing interest in phenomena of haunting since the 1990s, notably with jacques derrida’s specters lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard | 193 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) of marx, to discuss collective and individual trauma or experience of historical violence that refuses to disappear. derrida argues that we should accept the presence of ghosts and not doubt their realities, since in haunting phenomena absence and presence cannot be separated. in their introduction to the spectralities reader, maría del pilar blanco and esther peeren write that the spectral specificity is to remain liminal and ungraspable, coming to question the past, present, and future: “the ghost also questions the formation of knowledge itself and specifically invokes what is placed outside it, excluded from perception and, consequently, from both the archive as the depository of the sanctioned, acknowledged past and politics as the (re)imagined present and future.”21 ghosts cannot be understood without looking at the past experiences they are related to, nor without looking at the present condition that brings them back. the clouded leopard in taiwan answers to a similar logic, a past that refuses to be erased from memory and continues to haunt the paiwan, a collective history, and the trauma of its disruption. extinction induces trauma with the severance of some bonds among living beings, and the impact of this loss on the local environment. the leopard’s disappearance occurred during the japanese occupation, when both the social system and the natural habitat were transformed by colonial activities. both social transformation and the loss of the likulau brought about a new form of relationship between humans and felines. tong chun-fa explains that for the paiwan, death is the symmetrical opposite of life, it is two complementary aspects of the human transition within a continuous cycle. the newborn comes from the spirit world and the dead return to it.22 the leopard as a spiritual presence can still guide this transitional process toward the spirit lands, though in the contemporary world, the warriors themselves are disappearing, forgetting their duties toward the community and the land, and how to fulfil them. elders complained to me that people are leaving the village for the cities, and so they forget about their culture and their ancestors. because of that when they die, they cannot find the path back to their ancestors’ 21 blanco and peeren, spectralities reader, 9. 22 tong, “funeral rituals”, 103. 194 | lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard humanimalia 14.1 (2023) land in the dawu mountain and their souls keep roaming indefinitely. speaking of a ghostly presence refers to those losses and those evolutions of the social world that occurred in close link with the natural world. but spirits do not have to be negative and fearful for the paiwan, on the contrary, they are part of the balance and cycle of life itself, and thus are an important part of the paiwan world. in this view, the likulau, guid of the dead souls, has become a spirit itself that can keep acting on the world. a world without spirits makes no sense for the paiwan, and that is also why the spiritual afterlife of the leopard remains so significant. in this context, does extinction mean a clear death and disappearance of the likulau? it seems that the answer is no because the animal is still alive under other manifestations, physical and mental. in this way, survivance is useful for thinking about this absence-presence of the extinct animal, because it encompasses the idea of transmission via tradition but also the process of transformation and hybridization that the leopard undergoes: first by being made into ritual objects, and then in the way these objects themselves are changed through use and acquire new meanings. through extinction, the relationship to the animal has been transformed and the maintaining of the human–animal bonds become a challenge. the meanings associated with the leopard and objects made from it can also change as there are no more possibility to interact with the living animal. yet in this process of estrangement, the traces of the clouded leopard seem to remain and perpetuate its presence. the memory or trace of the likulau in turn becomes a relational presence, acting at a performative level. haunting in february 2019, there were reported sightings of the clouded leopard in taiwan in taitung county, near anshuo village. so far, there is no hard, scientific evidence of the leopard’s reappearance, but the leopard nevertheless lives on, as a spectral trace of the past that manifests its presence. one year after the alleged sighting, i went into the community where the leopard had been seen and asked the locals about it. a hunter explained to me: lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard | 195 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the one who saw it the closest was driving a scooter and bumped into it. that person is now in shimendi and is my apprentice. when he told me about it, he thought it was a leopard cat [石虎 prionailurus bengalensis], but we don’t have those here. i asked him to describe it and the pattern on its body. after he had described it, i knew without a doubt that it was a likulau. but this was not a big one, it might have been a cub. the ghostly body of the clouded leopard, seen by a few witnesses, comes back to tell its story and make people remember it, keep talking, and wondering about it. this sighting gave people renewed hope. for the paiwan, the likulau has an affective power that is akin to haunting. haunting is often correlated with deeper emotional and historical entanglements, such as war trauma or personal experiences. when it comes to spectral apparition, as grégory delaplace notes, it is difficult to determine what exactly is perceived, because it remains outside of ordinary experience.23 when looking at the leopard artefacts with my informants, they would not usually be able to express their feelings in words, but there was nevertheless usually a palpable change in the mood, and a shared sense that there was some presence in the room there with us, emanating from those items. this haunting, ineffable presence is somehow related to a sense that the past, that history and memory, has become the present, and that a framework or boundary separating the past and the present has been suspended. such individual or collective experiences of the uncanny disrupt one’s sense of time and make it difficult to share with others what one has experienced and what one has seen. my informants did not talk easily about their beliefs concerning the clouded leopard. only in intimate settings, generally late at night, when most people were already asleep and just a few of us were still talking and drinking around the fire, might they tell stories of the likulau and the emotions they evoke. the survivance of the clouded leopard in paiwan societies is in part passed on by narratives and legends that come to re-enact the presence of an animal. after the sightings, my paiwan informants 23 delaplace, intelligences particulières, 119–20 196 | lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard humanimalia 14.1 (2023) discussed the possibility that the leopard might not be extinct and that it still was still able to appear to people. one of my informants told me that paiwan hunters still secretly believe in the clouded leopard’s presence, but that they do not want people to know about it.24 it is a living spiritual presence that helps people to keep a connection with the past. it allows them to escape the contemporary ontology, and (re)connect with the natural and spiritual worlds. in this way, the leopard, whether extinct or not, continues to act upon the present. in the paiwan language, stories of the past are divided between milimilingan, the distant past which lies beyond living memory and is akin to myth, and taucikel which refers to more recent historical events and can be seen as a form of oral history.25 today, the clouded leopard is further removed from the taucikel with fewer and fewer people having directly seen one or being able to remember it. it slowly recedes into milimilingan. as milimilingan, the leopard is neither lost nor fully absent, but persists as a reminiscence of the past that is still active in the present. in paiwan society, ancestors and spirits are a significant part of daily social life; they exist alongside the living and exert an influence on their lives. thus, while the presence of the likulau changes, how do material artefacts made from the leopard’s body evolve in their production and values? transformation of the artefacts’ production the first time i had the opportunity to visit the owner of a leopard item, i was very excited and full of expectation to hear about its history. i arrived at the village in pingtung one evening to meet with this informant, who was a member of an important noble family and in possession of clouded leopard artefacts. i first took some time to talk with him, explaining our research, its aims and why i wanted to see the items. to my surprise he was only too happy to show them to me. “i have a leopard headdress and vest and hawk-eagle feathers,” he said, “wait here while i go get them.” when he came back, i could immediately tell, even in the dim light, that the fur he was carrying was not from a real 24 interview with an elder, wangjin village, pingtung county, 1 december 2020. 25 ku, “‘mirimiringan’ and ‘taucikel’”; hu, paiwanzu de wenhua quanshi. lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard | 197 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) animal but rather synthetic furs whose pattern and colour had faded. i asked about these artificial skins, made into headdress and vest, and a mutual sense of surprise arose from this first interview. my informant was surprised by my disappointment: was i not looking for leopard items, was he not showing them to me? i myself was wondering why he had told me he had artefacts if they were so obviously replicas? it turned out that he had sold the authentic artefacts a while ago when he needed money. later he had bought these synthetic ones instead. i was shocked: how could he have sold such a precious heirloom? how could he happily show us the synthetic leopard skin without feeling any sense of remorse? what difference was he making between those two? at the time, it felt like i had failed, because i had not seen any authentic leopard items that evening. but later, thinking back on that event, it began to seem highly significant. during my research into old taiwanese leopard garments, i found that many people own fake skins made either from synthetic material or from skin imported from other countries. this observation first made me question the status of these kinds of artefacts compared with the old taiwanese furs. the imported skins are a symptom of the extinction of taiwan’s leopards and the resulting scarcity of leopard fur. after the period of japanese rule, the demand for clouded leopards increased and created an interest in importing skins and teeth from other countries, especially from china, malaysia, and indonesia. these skins are sometimes from other species of big cats, such as tigers. in the 1970s, the convention on international trade in endangered species of wild fauna and flora (cites) strictly forbade commerce of animal parts and put a stop to this influx of imported goods.26 in addition to the imported items, there are also replica skins and teeth made from plastic. synthetic skins are easily recognizable by the colour of their material and their smooth shining fur. the real fur is darker more rigid. there are several factors that drive the paiwan to acquire clouded leopard products from other sources. many of the original clothes or headdresses have been lost or sold by the families who owned 26 cooper and rosser, “international regulation”. figure 3: a hat made from leopard skin, imported from china. jiaxing village, pingtung county, april 2019. photograph by the author. lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard | 199 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) them. in many cases, the items were lost during the japanese occupation, when many were destroyed or seized by japanese forces. a few people spoke about items that had been buried in the ground in an attempt to keep them safe, but which, when the families went to retrieve them after many decades in the earth, had been all mouldy and decomposing.27 items have also been lost during forced resettlement.28 in more recent years, some owners have sold them when they needed money.29 finally, animal skins, generally speaking, are difficult to maintain in good condition, and so a significant number of artefacts have simply fallen apart with age. the extinction of the taiwanese clouded leopard, the scarcity of the goods, and the social changes in relation with domestic and international politics have created new needs and new ways to use leopard artefacts. these items have evolved along with the transformations in paiwan society. imitation and imported furs have become a commodity as opposed to a rare, treasured historical artefact. these new kinds of goods are referred to by some informants as “deceptive” or “fake”, but others consider them as a new way to hold on to the traditions at least through visual representation. as an elder in nanhe (pingtung) explained to me, clouded leopard replicas are used by people to make clothes for important social events (e.g. festivals and weddings), but everyone can tell the difference from the authentic skin. i asked this elder if these replicas or imported skins still hold a similar meaning to the authentic ones. he answered that: if you haven’t hunted and caught this clouded leopard yourself, it doesn’t have the same meaning. it is only if you caught it yourself that it would have a deeper meaning. if it is said to have been passed down by your ancestors, then it will be part of your family legacy, and so it will establish a connection to that legacy. you need to be able to talk about the historical lineage, you need to be able to tell the story of how this clouded leopard skin was been passed to you, and which of your ancestor hunted it.30 27 interview with a chief family, wangjia village, pingtung county 6 february 2018. 28 interview with a noble family, nanhe village, pingtung county, 6 february 2018. 29 interview with the chief family, nanhe village, pingtung county, 5 february 2018. 30 interview with an elder, wenle community, pingtung county, march 2019. 200 | lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard humanimalia 14.1 (2023) this elder expresses the conflict between the achievement of killing a leopard yourself, which connects you to the leopard, the land, and the ancestors, and the act of buying a synthetic skin, which only gives you the appearance but without any form of connection to the natural and spiritual world. the story of these artefacts is important because it creates a link, bringing the ghost of the leopard from the past to the present through narrative. the absence of the leopard has made it necessary to find new ways to maintain the bonds with these items and continue their transmission to future generations. replicas and imported leopard items are seen as a way to keep the leopard in circulation within paiwan society. however, imported skins are perceived as foreign and not directly anchored in paiwan culture. some families are in possession of both real and imitation vests and headdresses. they wear the imitation ones during ceremonies if the weather is bad to avoid damaging the authentic ones. in laiyi, i saw some old photographs from the early twentieth century showing paiwan people wearing taiwanese leopard skin vests and in other pictures imitation skins. even though some of my interlocutors say it is better to have real skins or teeth, they think that wearing the other kinds is still a representation of the past relationship to the leopard, in the only way currently possible. for some other paiwan, wearing fake or imported skins is a symbol of the way society is changing in relation to the market economy and the demands of tourism.31 outside of the villages, leopard items are also a way to promote paiwan culture, used in tourist activities and during festivals. for the past decades, the government has been supporting indigenous people’s cultural costumes, foods, and traditions, in order to attract domestic and international tourists. while leopard artefacts are transformed into commodities, they also take part to a larger display of the paiwan culture participating to commodification strategies within the national and international society. 31 interview with a chief family, wangjia village, pingtung county, 6 february 2018; interview with a chief family, xinlaiyi village, pingtung county, march 13th 2019. lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard | 201 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) clouded leopard artefacts have adapted to contemporary times and continue to act and provoke reactions. in the past those artefacts were emblems of the mamazangiljan’s social position, but now they are embedded in a more commercial logic and represent a new kind of authority based on wealth. in this way, rich families more often choose to display their wealth by wearing imported clouded leopard items or hawk-eagle feathers. in both cases, the act of buying expensive items is a direct challenge to the past social order and power.32 buying and wearing items outside of one’s traditional rights displays people’s willingness to acquire new forms of power and influence in a contemporary world where the past is no longer seen as the dominant source of values to respect. in marx’s conception, commodities are not deprived of value, but when materials become artefacts and enter a commodified logic, commodity fetishism masks the origin of their value, and the production forces behind them. the value of leopard heirlooms derives from the transition of the animal from one world (natural) to another (cultural) through the mediation of the ancestors. the process of commodification of the new artefacts severs those links and masks their initial value. while the animal has disappeared, artefacts remain one of the manifestations of the leopard’s afterlife, supporting its ghostly presence which do not want to totally fade away. it is an absence (extinct) that made people speak about it, but this demonstrated at the same time the survivance of the animal under various forms and with possibly varying meanings. authentic leopard artefacts are seen as more or less inhabited by spirits and souls depending on the way owners consider and interact with them, while the new items (replicas and imported) are symbols that can be transformed according to the needs of the time, influenced by a new elite’s challenge of the past social order, and haunted by memories that refuse to disappear. these items are also pieces of the past that keep haunting the present and continuously make people wonder whether the clouded leopard is in actuality completely absent from the mountains of taiwan. 32 ku, “names, value, and hierarchy”. figure 4 (top): a set of two vests made from imported leopard skins. wenle village, pingtung county, march 2019. figure 5 (bottom): on the chairs, two vests made from synthetic leopard furs. on the table, a headdress of boar fur and a helmet made from muntjac leather, and in the front two hawk-eagle feathers. pingtung county, 2019. photographs by the author. lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard | 203 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) conclusion looking at paiwan society, we can say that the clouded leopard maintains a haunting presence both in the southern mountains of taiwan but also within the paiwan communities: it is a memory of the past that still acts and reveals itself in the present. this cat has maintained a relationship with paiwan people: in the past as a living creature respected for its power and abilities, then as valuable goods cherished for their preciousness. at present, although the clouded leopard seems to have disappeared, remaining items make it possible for them to perpetuate their relationship to their own past and to the animal, leading to an ambiguous form of presence both visible (material, graspable) and invisible (spiritual, mnemonic). the leopard heirlooms represent a liminal presence inducing feelings of loss and continuation, or transformation and permanence. nevertheless, the meanings of these goods have evolved over time. they are today more and more encompassed in a commercial logic of buying and selling. in both cases, these items are still impacting the paiwans and playing an important role in their culture. they create reactions and they continue to change as society is changing. the leopard’s ghostly presence continues to configure human-environment relations for the paiwan, since the feline has become a sort of spiritual presence, roaming the traditional territory, and remains between the paiwan and the ancestors’ world. it remains an open question whether the clouded leopard extinct in taiwan or not. for the paiwan, who keep feeling its presence through artefacts and spirits, this issue has never been settled. my research led me to consider the possibility of an absence which would rather be an invisible but persistent presence: a ghostly presence. the time spend with my informants, made me realized that extinction is not a total ending but can be one more transformation, evolving the relationship between human and animals while efforts are made to perpetuate this bond. the likulau may no longer inhabit the mountains of taiwan as a flesh-and-blood animal, but from the 204 | lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard humanimalia 14.1 (2023) paiwan’s perspective, it has never been “just” an animal. it was and remains an always ambiguous creature, a mediator between realms, not totally integrated into the animal world nor totally part of the spiritual or sacred world. in indigenous society where traditional knowledge, social reproduction, and the relation to the local environment are slowly eroding, maintaining the presence of the likulau is also a matter of resilience. in this context survivance is an act of resistance and of persistence. it is a reaffirmation of the paiwan’s specific ontology in the face of its threatened dissolution within the modern national and global society. acknowledgements i would like to thank all my paiwan informants for their time and patience. i dedicate this work to my sister mathilde; may she keep running through the mountains. works cited berliner, david. “anthropologie et transmission.” terrain, no. 55 (2010): 4–19. https://doi.org/10.4000/ terrain.14035. blanco, maría del pilar, and esther peeren, eds. the spectralities reader: ghosts and haunting in contemporary cultural theory. new york: bloomsbury, 2013. chiang, bien daniel. “house and social hierarchy of the paiwan.” phd diss., university of pennsylvania, 1993. https://repository.upenn.edu/ dissertations/aai9321371. cooper, margaret e. and alison m. rosser. “international regulation on wildlife trade: relevant legislation and organization.” revue scientifique et technique 21, no. 1 (2002): 103–23. https://doi.org/10.20506/rst.21.1.1329. delaplace, grégory. les intelligences particulières. enquête dans les maisons hantées. preface by vinciane despret. brussels: vues de l’esprit, 2021. didi-huberman, georges. the surviving image: phantoms of time and time of phantoms. aby warburg’s history of art. translated by harvey l. mendelsohn. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2017. hu tai-li 胡台麗. paiwanzu de wenhua quanshi 排灣族的文化詮釋 [cultural interpretation of the paiwan]. taipei: linking books, 2011. jerolmak, colin and iddo tavory. “molds and totems: nonhumans and the constitution of the social self.” sociological theory 32, no. 1 (2014): 64–77. https://doi.org/knxd. https://doi.org/10.4000/terrain.14035 https://doi.org/10.4000/terrain.14035 https://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/aai9321371 https://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/aai9321371 https://doi.org/10.20506/rst.21.1.1329 https://doi.org/knxd lemaitre, afterlives of the clouded leopard | 205 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) ku kun-hui. “‘mirimiringan’ and ‘taucikel’ revisited: historical genres and political struggle among the austronesian-speaking paiwan in southern taiwan.” paper presented at the 18th international association of historians of asia (iaha), taipei, 2004. ku kun-hui. “naming relationship and constructing hierarchy: names, value, and hierarchy among the austronesian paiwan, taiwan.” pacific studies 39, nos. 1–2 (2016): 174–200. mabuchi tōichi 馬淵東一. zhuzuo ji di yi juan 著作集第一卷 [collected works, volume i]. edited by yang shu-yua 楊淑 媛, and translated from the japanese by lin xue-zhen 林雪貞 and huang shu-fen 黃淑芬. taipei: institute of ethnology, academia sinica, 2017. matsuoka tadasu 周俊宇. “fandi” tongzhi yu “shandi” xingzheng: taiwan yuanzhumin shehui de difanghua「番 地」統治與「山地」行政：臺灣原住民族社 會的地方化 [governing “savage lands” and administrating “mountain areas”: the localization of taiwan’s indigenous society]. translated from the japanese by zhou jun-yu 周俊宇. taipei: national taiwan university press, 2018. rubinstein, murray, ed. taiwan: a new history. armonk, ny: m. e. sharpe, 1999. swinhoe, robert. “on the mammals of the island of formosa (china).” proceedings of the zoological society of london 30, no. 1 (1862): 347–65. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1469-7998.1862.tb06539.x. tylor, edward b. primitive culture: researches into the development of mythology, philosophy, religion, art, and custom. 2 vols. london: john murray, 1871. tong chun-fa 童春發. “kua xinyang bijiao shiyexia de sangzang yishi: yi paiwanzu sangzang yishi weili” 跨信仰比較視野 下的喪葬儀式：以排灣族喪葬儀式為例 [funeral rituals from the perspective of cross-faith comparison: a case study of paiwan funeral rituals].” taiwan yuanzhumin yanjiu luncong 台灣原住 民研究論叢 [taiwan indigenous studies series] no. 15 (2014): 93–140. vizenor, gerald, ed. survivance: narratives of native presence. lincoln: university of nebraska press, 2008. zeebroek, renaud. “survivance ou intempérance? à propos du ‘lundi perdu’.” revue du nord 362, no. 4 (2005): 791–802. https://doi.org/10.3917/ rdn.362.0791. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7998.1862.tb06539.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7998.1862.tb06539.x https://doi.org/10.3917/rdn.362.0791 https://doi.org/10.3917/rdn.362.0791 _gjdgxs guha-majumdar, review of wadiwel copyright © 2024 jishnu guha-majumdar this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 212–221. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 what are animals worth? jishnu guha-majumdar review of: dinesh joseph wadiwel, animals and capital. animalities. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2023. xii + 316 pp. 3 b/w illus. £95.00 (hb). jishnu guha-majumdar is an assistant professor of political theory at butler university, indianapolis, in. email: jguhamajumdar@butler.edu book review http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 early on in animals and capital, dinesh wadiwel aptly notes that the text may be considered a sequel to the war against animals (2015). in that text, wadiwel had deconstructed human-centred theorizations of war, sovereignty, and biopolitics. he demonstrated that one could not just “add and stir” animals into these categories, but that a consideration of nonhuman animal lives and deaths deepens and transforms our understanding of those concepts. what the war against animals does for politics, animals and capital does for political economy. wadiwel’s main task here is to illuminate the unique structural position that food animals occupy within capitalism. doing so, he argues, has important ramifications for developing solidarity between food animals and marginalized humans that will strengthen both animal advocacy and anti-capitalist praxis. animals and capital joins a growing literature that theorizes the relationship between capitalism and what wadiwel calls hierarchal anthropocentrism. but animals and capital is unique in its pursuit of a comprehensive and systematic critique of (anthropocentric) political economy, as well as its theorization of food animals’ role in the production of capitalist value. by “systematic critique of political economy”, i mean that wadiwel’s primary purpose is not to do political economy per se — though he does to a substantive degree — but to transform anthropocentric understandings of the categories of political economic analysis. by focusing on “capitalist value”, i refer to how wadiwel interrogates the way capitalism uses nonhuman animals to meet its primary drive: the production of surplus value. food animals illuminate how the value-production under capitalism proceeds in new and crucial ways that marx and anthropocentric marxists have not adequately theorized. as he puts it in chapter 1, “[t]he question that has been missing is about value. exactly how are animals valuable to capitalism? why have they been sought after as objects of use value? and how does this value dictate and shape their relation to capital” (28)? another way of thinking about wadiwel’s approach is through a phrase that kept recurring to me as i read: animals and capital is copyright © 2024 jishnu guha-majumdar this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 1 (2024): 211–221. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.19680 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.19680 guha-majumdar, review of wadiwel | 213 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) something like a preliminary das kapital for food animal production. wadiwel takes up the critical tools bequeathed by marx’s later work in order to take the spirit of capital beyond itself. the result is a work that is extremely clarifying for understanding the path that anthropocentric domination has taken over the last century, and more importantly, opens up worthwhile further questions and avenues for analysis. in this review i want to explore animals and capital by dividing it into three parts: first, the preface and first two chapters, which set up the basic methodological presuppositions for the rest of the text; then the middle chapters, in which wadiwel performs his critique of political economy with respect to the titular concepts. these are the heart of the text, in my view. finally, i will focus on the shorter last chapter, where wadiwel speculates on the political trajectory that his analysis may lead animal advocates towards. i will summarize each part and then critically engage with wadiwel’s insights, focusing especially on his reconceptualization of labour and resistance and the political implications of his analysis. methodology and key concepts the preface frames wadiwel’s three intended interventions. first, that the problem animal advocates must address is not “speciesism” — an arbitrary prejudice — but the material and ideological conjunction of “hierarchical anthropocentrism” and capitalism (vii). second, advocates ought to focus as much attention on production as they do on consumption. not only do factory farms manufacture food animals at a scale never seen before in human history, but they also “produce” humanity biopolitically by literally providing sustenance for a growing mass of human labour. the book’s third intervention is to go beyond “commodification” and property status as the main frame for understanding anthropocentric domination. while important, this frame does not capture what is central to food animal oppression insofar as capitalism constantly commodifies various forms of life and sentience, human and nonhuman. more essential is their unique structural position as food animals, captured not only by the physical implements of captivity but the dragnet of capitalist valorization. humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 214 | guha-majumdar, review of wadiwel in chapter 1, “value”, wadiwel defines his understanding of capitalism, articulates the main value-forms food animals take on for capital, and situates animals and capital among other literature on marx and nonhuman beings. wadiwel defines capitalism as “an organism and mechanism that seeks to extract value and accumulate it in the form of capital: the latter comprising a social relation which is invested in its own continual accumulation” (8–9). this definition emphasizes that domination proceeds less from one group — capitalists in and of themselves — than an impersonal, inhuman system that ceaselessly seeks to reorganize every form of life it contacts for the purposes of value creation. under capital, food animals appear in three value-forms. first, as consumption commodities — food — that enable the reproduction of human labour forces. second, as raw materials to be worked upon by the agricultural production process. finally — and perhaps most importantly for wadiwel — as labour. nonhuman animals are active agents in the production process (a claim elaborated upon in chapter 4, “labour”). indeed, they are perhaps the most “significant labour force of capitalism” (14, original emphasis) given the sheer numbers of animals produced in factory farms. wadiwel argues that this third prong distinguishes his account from many contemporary approaches to theorizing capitalism and nonhumans — namely john bellamy foster’s defence of marx, jason moore’s ecological reformulation of capitalism, and ariel salleh’s ecofeminist account of capitalism. despite their resonances with his approach, he suggests they still tend to conceptualize nonhuman animals as resources for, rather than agents of, production. chapter 2, “materialism”, works through three methodological inspirations (besides marx): new materialisms, afropessimism, and deleuze and guattari’s theorization of capitalism. wadiwel appreciates how new materialist theories emphasize materiality beyond the borders of human sovereignty, but worries that its emphasis on a politics of affinity and pluralism is insufficient to theorize the food animals’ antagonistic relationship to capitalism. he thus draws on frank wilderson’s work to theorize this antagonism. the rest of guha-majumdar, review of wadiwel | 215 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) wadiwel’s work consistently weaves between these two tendencies, sometimes theorizing nonhuman animals as having important commonalities and opportunities for solidarity with other social justice movements, and other times worrying that certain articulations of human emancipation entail intensifying animal domination. wadiwel then uses deleuze and guattari to put a finer point on the relationship between hierarchical anthropocentrism and capital. capital works by “liberating” and intensifying certain flows and desires, which enables it to take on pre-existing relationships of domination and fundamentally transform them in an “intoxicated and frenzied way” (56). the critique of anthropocentric political economy in the middle section of the book, wadiwel practices the critique of anthropocentric political economy that his prior chapters theorize. chapter 3, “commodity”, takes up the first two of the aforementioned value-forms imposed on food animals: consumptive commodities and raw materials for production. through a rather complicated and brilliant reading of a footnote in capital, as well as key texts by luce irigaray, wilderson, and jacques derrida, wadiwel shows that the food animal functions both as a material and symbolic commodity. in the traditional process of commodification, the commodity’s use value becomes abstracted from its exchange value, which is determined in relation to an economy of other exchange-values. but in the case of the food animal commodity, this system of value exceeds the rigidly economic sphere as it also confirms human superiority in a discursive economy of meaning. as wadiwel puts it, “the exponential and frenzied circulation of animal-sourced foods for human satisfaction and pleasure establishes a continuing mirror that allows humans to see themselves — sovereign, victorious — in the corpses which are fabricated” (71). whereas this aspect of commodification concerns nonhuman animals’ role in production, wadiwel also considers the consumptive side of animal commodification. here, capitalism poses a unique problem for animal advocates, because it gives human labourers the false promise of freedom through spending their wages on consumer humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 216 | guha-majumdar, review of wadiwel goods, and especially animal products. late capitalism’s regime of cheap food metabolically intertwines human populations with nonhuman animal death. this creates problems for consumption-focused ethical veganism (though wadiwel does support certain forms of political veganism), because animal products “are saturated by the promise of freedom and its necessity, so that it would seem that giving up animal-sourced products becomes akin to a loss of world or death itself” (85). animal advocates, then, must contend with food animals’ dual role as elements of production and consumption. chapter 4, “labour”, might be the most central of these middle chapters, robustly developing the concept of food animals’ “metabolic labour”. drawing upon anthropologist les beldo and feminist theorizations of gestational labour, wadiwel posits that capital targets animals’ microbiological processes for ceaseless growth and value production. food animals are a unique type of labourer because they are both constant capital (that which transfers but does not add new value to the product, like machinery or raw material) and variable capital (that which adds new value to the commodity). wadiwel doesn’t quite use these words, but food animal labour appears as the endpoint of capital’s dream of totally unhindered labour exploitation — capital optimizes every part of the food animal’s body and life to enhance its microbiological processes. a second key intervention concerns the way marxists have conceptualized capital. understanding animals as labourers complicates the inverse relationship that marx posits between human labour time and fixed capital as technology advances. instead, with factory farming’s technical advances, human labour consistently fades away, while nonhuman animal labour increases and faces an increasing mass of fixed capital. chapter 5, “circulation”, describes the maritime transport of live animals to be slaughtered in increasingly globalized markets, highlighting an important but underexamined aspect of the industry. it is the most empirical chapter, and i found some of the “smaller” details about global animal markets to be quietly devastating: for example, that 5–10 percent of animals get pink eye from the dust produced by cheap animal feed (146), and that cows stand for the entire duration guha-majumdar, review of wadiwel | 217 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) of globe-spanning voyages because they do not feel comfortable sitting down (159). at a conceptual level, wadiwel shows that considering nonhuman animals as active agents in the production process explains why markets have tended to rely on animals imported from other parts of the world: food animals continue to labour on themselves, making their relative labour cost rather low. this insight provides an exception to marx’s general “law” that circulation disrupts the time of production; because the site of animal labour is within their own bodies, production continues even during circulation. chapter 6, “resistance”, uses fish production to examine a theme latent but unexplored in prior chapters: the role of food animal resistance in their own production as animal capital. wadiwel argues that the question “do fish resist?” offers political potential blocked by traditional questions of sentience and suffering. resistance, he suggests, depends less on proving intrinsic animal capabilities, which are already epistemically shaped by the violent systems conditioning animal behaviour. taking a page from the “operaist” tendency in italian marxism, he argues that capitalist technologies of production betray a belief in fish resistance. what else are the hook, the purse seine net, and aquaculture farms but efforts to master the resistance of fish? though a seeming total domination of food animals, this state of affairs reveals the way that nonhuman agency structures our world, and holds out faith that this resistance is prior to and exceeds the systems of domination that seek to capture it. labour and resistance one more chapter of the text remains, but i pause here to reflect on the important insights of this middle part of the text. among the many brilliant arguments from these chapters, wadiwel’s development of “metabolic labour” seems most central. i welcome consideration of this concept as a point of discussion for further analysis of anthropocentric capitalism, but it also raises a number of questions. what is “labour” such that it covers the typical image of human labour, the “macrobiological” labour of nonhuman animals (things animals do that interact with the external world), and, finally, internal, “microbiological” metabolic processes that contribute to animal humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 218 | guha-majumdar, review of wadiwel growth? what is necessary to classify something as labour, and what are the stakes of that decision? wadiwel does partly answer each of these issues, but these answers raise further questions. regarding what makes something labour, wadiwel suggests this is the wrong question. instead of asking “do animals labour?” he says that a better question “is something like: ‘what is the use value of animal labour power to capital?’” (98, emphasis added). i do think the latter question is helpful, but it still seems that determining the use value of labour power depends on some prior discussion of what makes something labour. concerning the second issue — the stakes of calling something labour — wadiwel makes clear in an earlier chapter that doing so emphasizes nonhuman animals as active, rather than passive, agents in production. while i am obviously sympathetic to this standpoint, it isn’t clear to me that emphasizing animals’ metabolic processes accomplishes this goal. that is, if food animals’ active, labouring contribution is the fact that their bodies try to survive and grow, that seems a far cry from the sorts of worldmaking agency that this agentic move usually celebrates. here, an application of the new materialist insights from chapter 2 might have proved helpful. however, this invocation would pose problems for the text’s goal to theorize the unique structural position of food animals; one might just as well point to the metabolic processes of plants as indications that they, too, are combinations of constant and variable capital. a related issue emerges with wadiwel’s discussion of resistance. i do think a focus on animal resistance is crucial, and i welcome wadiwel’s application of operaism. however, i don’t think that resistance fully avoids the difficulties of other capacities like suffering. wadiwel says that one of the advantages of the notion of resistance is that it avoids debates over whether nonhuman animals have this or that capacity or neurobiological substrate. but as he notes later on, it is just as possible to write off fish resistance as mere instinctive reaction. in this case, too, we are returned to debates about sentience and capacity, because these decide whether the resistance shown is actually resistance. guha-majumdar, review of wadiwel | 219 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) what unites these considerations is the slipperiness of questions about nonhuman animal agency. one value that suffering has — though not necessarily in its welfarist or utilitarian iteration — is that it focuses on a vulnerability that, as jacques derrida puts it in the animal that therefore i am (2008), is a form of impower rather than the types of power and capacity that, as wadiwel rightly notes, get mired in epistemologies shaped by violence. to be clear, the purpose of these questions is not to suggest that the concept of metabolic labour or focusing on resistance is unhelpful, or that suffering is a panacaea. to the contrary, there is interesting potential in the concept, but as presented i think there is room for further discussion and conceptual development. politics in the shorter last chapter, “dreams”, wadiwel turns to the political implications of his analysis. he does not aim to be too programmatic here, allowing space for readers to adapt his analysis for politics on the ground. he splits his interventions into three categories: framing, tactics, and goals. at the level of framing, wadiwel suggests that the key demand of pro-animal activists ought not be a mere reduction in food animal suffering, but for animals to have their lives back. additionally, he repeats his call for animal advocates to focus on production and not solely consumption. at the level of tactics, wadiwel argues that veganism does have an important political role, but many forms of consumerist, market-driven veganism are unlikely to alter capitalism’s structure of production. finally, at the level of goals, wadiwel considers how traditional communist figurations of a democratic ownership of the means of production may risk intensifying domination of nonhuman animals. instead, human and nonhuman solidarity might be sought through the lens of reclaiming time, which would lead advocates to calling to an end to work altogether, thus following the path of anti-capitalists like antonio negri and kathi weeks. i found myself mostly in agreement with what wadiwel says, but his emphasis on pursuing production-oriented strategies raised a number of questions. wadiwel does not deny the value of many humanimalia 15.1 (2024) 220 | guha-majumdar, review of wadiwel demand-side interventions, noting that production and consumption are intertwined, but he does not fully explain the character of this intertwinement at the level of political advocacy. i think the work would have benefitted from articulating the relationship between the production and consumption with more depth, as strategies concerning consumption will always be a part of the animal advocate’s repertoire. for all the limitations of consumption-oriented movements, they do appeal to a sphere where people have direct control (a point which wadiwel does recognize). more generally, although wadiwel does spend time outlining examples of production-focused advocacy, i still came away not fully certain of what this type of advocacy looks like in an everyday way. he does give two illuminating, current examples: one from the yuin nation’s resistance to kangaroo culling in australia, and another from the mexican anti-speciesist organization faunacción, both of which take seriously the conjunction of colonialism and capitalism. however, the text presents these examples mostly through their declarations of intent. these are no doubt important, but it would seem that a shift to jamming production makes especially pertinent the process by which declaration is collectively transformed into effective on-the-ground organizing. another question raised by this chapter is the extent to which wadiwel’s analysis supports two very prevalent — at least in the us — pro-animal strategies: rescue operations, like those from direct action everywhere, that break into factory farms and expose the conditions of production; and “lab-grown” meat. the latter, i suspect, would be more controversial, given the corporations and level of capital involved. pro-market lab-grown meat advocates endorse this strategy for the supply-side reasons as well, but they explicitly endorse the power of the market and large corporations to make this technology a commonplace reality.1 on the other side some anti-capitalists are more optimistic about lab-grown meat, arguing that it is an urgent priority for the left to socialize its 1 nathaniel popper, “this animal activist used to get in your face. now he’s going after your palate”, new york times 12 march 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/ technology/bruce-friedrich-animal-activist.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/technology/bruce-friedrich-animal-activist.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/technology/bruce-friedrich-animal-activist.html guha-majumdar, review of wadiwel | 221 humanimalia 15.1 (2024) production.2 if wadiwel is correct and the productive sphere is key, then this latter approach seems most consonant with his analysis, but he leaves this question open. i don’t think wadiwel is obliged to provide definite answers to all these questions within the scope of his already wide-ranging work, and it is a mark of its strength that animals and capital pushes these conversations forward. it helpfully enables animal advocates to better map out modern structures of animal domination and provides them with important conceptual toolkits for navigating them. as such, i highly recommend this text and consider it essential reading both for animal advocates and for any critic of capitalism. both animals and capital and the war against animals magisterially diagnose the distinct character of the modern anthropocentric domination of nonhuman animals. together, they make a strong case that all those interested in social justice struggles ought to be interested in the struggle for animal liberation as well (and vice versa). 2 jan dutkiewicz, “socialize lab meat”, jacobin 11 august 2019. https://jacobin.com/2019/08/ lab-meat-socialism-green-new-deal https://jacobin.com/2019/08/lab-meat-socialism-green-new-deal https://jacobin.com/2019/08/lab-meat-socialism-green-new-deal kroløkke and honkatukia parallel lives parallel lives human–cow entanglements at a finnish prison farm charlotte kroløkke university of southern denmark, odense, denmark mervi honkatukia nordic genetic resource center (nordgen), ås, norway humanimalia 14.1 (fall 2023) abstract: this article investigates cow care-taking practices in a finnish prison and living gene bank. building upon work in feminist science and technology studies, critical animal studies, and critical heritage studies, we seek to understand how human and nonhuman animal lives are partially folded together, while also discussing the worlds cultivated in a space of conservation and incarceration. empirically, the article draws upon multispecies ethnography undertaken during two separate visits to pelso prison in central finland. we conclude that cows emerge as not simply working animals. they are viewed as valuable genetic material vital to the finnish nation state as well as given names and granted personalities. meanwhile, in the company of an endangered cattle breed, inmates gain new value as care-workers and conservationists “saving” the breed. in this space of exception, precarious interspecies lives are interwoven. keywords: conservation; multispecies ethnography; critical animal studies; bovine biopolitics; feminist cultural studies; science and technology studies bio: charlotte kroløkke is an interdisciplinary feminist cultural science studies scholar. she has been head of the cultural heritage package in the 3mc traditional mountain cattle project as well as principal investigator of several interdisciplinary research projects on reproduction and reproductive technologies. she has been editor-in-chief of the nordic journal of feminist and gender research, and author or co-author of more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles as well as several books and book chapters. email: charlottekro@sdu.dk orcid: 0000-0002-9264-5265 bio: mervi honkatukia, phd, heads nordgen’s livestock department. her expertise covers the conservation and promotion of animal genetic resources and their cultural heritage as well as the genetic diversity of domestic animals. the adaptation of domestic animals to changing environmental conditions has been one of her research topics. at nordgen farm animals, she has led several pan-nordic networks with a goal of sustainable use of genetic resources and ensuring the preservation of native nordic breeds for future use. email: mervi.honkatukia@nordgen.org orcid: 0000-0003-4839-2931 copyright © 2023 charlotte kroløkke and mervi honkatukia this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 281–313. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.12919 mailto:charlottekro@sdu.dk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9264-5265 mailto:mervi.honkatukia@nordgen.org https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4839-2931 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.12919 kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives | 283 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the 2021 canadian documentary prison farm shows how caring for cows helps inmates process guilt and give back to the community. caring for young calves confronts the hardships associated with being away from their own human children. as one of the men puts it: “taking care of these animals is taking care of my guilt.” another man notes that “without this, i’d have nothing. i’d just be an inmate.”1 cow care-taking is vividly displayed as being about more than merely acquiring a new set of job skills; we are shown how it gives these men a sense of purpose. this article investigates cow conservation and care-taking practices as they unfold in the case of a finnish prison farm which, in addition, functioned as a living gene bank for endangered species of livestock. departing from our backgrounds in feminist cultural studies and animal genomic science scholarship, we study how inmates and cows work side by side and are potentially transformed in the company of one another. located in central finland, the pelso prison and living gene bank can be viewed as a space of exception. here, an endangered breed of cows known as northern finncattle or lapland cows have been kept. the breed is most often divided into three different varieties: northern finncattle (the variety referred to in this article, which tend to be white with black ears or spots), as well as western and eastern finncattle. smaller in size in comparison to other cattle types, finncattle are viewed as native to finland. as noted by sakari tamminen in his ethnography of finnish biogenetic resources, nonhuman animals have become vital in the making of the finnish nation state. labelling and conserving finnish cattle, sheep, and even apples becomes, then, interwoven with “the theoretical ideas of a natural finnishness, a nonhuman nationhood.”2 emerging from the claims that human and nonhuman animal encounters can be transformative, we theorize the pelso prison and living gene bank as a space of exception. this means recognizing the ways that the exception, in the case of the pelso prison, becomes a 1 “prison farm”, cbc television, https://www.cbc.ca/cbcdocspov/episodes/prison-farm. 2 tamminen, biogenetic paradoxes, 80 about:blank 284 | kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives humanimalia 14.1 (2023) regulatory and nation-making norm.3 this understanding is echoed in tamminen’s work, in which he uses a biopolitical framework to argue that the conservation of finncattle and finnsheep exceeds the conservation of nonhuman animals and extends itself to “finland and the current forms of power in use to maintain particular nonhuman populations as genetic resources.”4 against this backdrop, two research questions guide our work: how do inmates work alongside cows at the pelso prison? and secondly, in the contexts of conservation and incarceration, what kinds of worlds are cultivated? while endangered cows emerge as valuable genetic resources, they are also viewed as therapeutic nonhuman animal interventions. meanwhile, in being alongside endangered cows, inmates gain positions as nurturing conservationists and caretakers. in what follows, we begin with a presentation of the pelso prison to discuss how multispecies ethnography helps document the ways that human and nonhuman animal lives are partially folded together. we then turn to how nonhuman animals entangle with national, gendered, and racialized histories, while also presenting our theoretical approach drawing on work within the fields of science and technology studies (sts), critical animal studies, and critical heritage studies. in our analysis, we centre human–cow forms of relatedness, and we delineate how the pelso prison case helps us understand how different worlds are cultivated when inmates and endangered cows work alongside one another, as well as the broader biopolitical implications of this space. doing multispecies work located a mere 300 kilometres south of the arctic circle, pelso prison is an all-male prison consisting of closed as well as open wards. it currently houses eighty inmates. the living gene bank at pelso prison was established in 1984 and closed in august 2022 (fig. 1). the gene bank was separated into two areas: a finncattle barn and outside area and an area dedicated to finnsheep. the 3 see agamben, state of exception. 4 tamminen, biogenetic paradoxes, 42. figure 1: the pelso prison and living gene bank is located approximately 82 km from oulu, finland. photo taken by charlotte kroløkke, february 2022. 286 | kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives humanimalia 14.1 (2023) finncattle living gene bank had grown from its first initial thirty inhabitants to, at the time of its closing, some sixty-eight milking cows, two breeding bulls, and sixty-five calves and heifers. with the goal of breeding, and accordingly, preserving finncattle, the living gene bank was established at pelso prison following a series of events thought to have saved the northern finncattle breed. the former head of the finnish agricultural research centre, professor kalle maijala’s work on farm animal conservation is viewed as vital in the establishment of the bank.5 in the early 1980s, the numbers of finncattle dropped drastically and the breed teetered on the brink of extinction. the decision was made to establish a working living gene bank at pelso to conserve the breed while simultaneously giving inmates the opportunity to cultivate “relevant” working skills. in his ethnography of finnish biogenetic resource management, tamminen describes pelso prison as a form of disciplinary power, arguing that the prison “holds populations that have no place in the society but that the society is unable to let die since they might prove useful later and in other contexts than those from which they emerge”. 6 the decision to close the living gene bank and relocate all the animals to the lappia vocational college, located in loue in the northern part of finland, was based on several reasons. one significant factor in the decision was that the pelso prison is itself scheduled to move to a new facility in 2024. also, animal husbandry work is now considered less “relevant” and hence it was no longer felt that the prison farm was helping inmates to cultivate the “necessary job-related skills”.7 at the gene bank’s new location in northern finland, agricultural students will do the care-work while small lapland-based businesses are expected to derive benefits from what is described as the potential for luxury lapland products.8 for example, the arctic 5 mtt agrifood research finland, “eureca cryoconservation”. 6 tamminen, biogenetic paradoxes, 80. 7 interview with assistant director of pelso prison, february 2022. 8 for more information about the plans, see tiinamaija rantamartti, “tervolassa valmistaudutaan ainutlaatuisen geenipankkikarjan tuloon — lappian koulutustilalle suunnitteilla miljoonainvestointi,” yle.fi 6 october 2020, https://yle.fi/a/3-11578328. https://yle.fi/a/3-11578328 kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives | 287 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) ice cream factory, a local lapland business, will extend its range of products to include finncattle-derived dairy.9 the company markets its products as being “inspired by arctic nature and the best childhood memories”, produced from natural ingredients in madeto-appear exceptional northern flavours (cloudberry, bilberry, and northern finncattle milk).10 the transfer of the northern finncattle living gene bank to lappia vocational college has received considerable media attention, and has been naturalised as an epic “return to lapland” for the northern finncattle.11 to understand how inmates and cows were mutually transformed in the company of each other, we employed a multispecies approach.12 in our case, this meant spending time in the company of inmates and cows at the pelso prison. we made two visits to the facility: the first was in february 2022, and the second in august 2022. the latter visit was undertaken during a time of emotional upheaval due to the closing of the living gene bank. during both visits, we spent time inside and outside the barn (fig. 2). we were present at the milking station and engaged in the milking of the cows. we chatted with staff and inmates before, during, and after their work. we walked with cows to their summer pastures and hung out with them within small and large enclosed areas while observing, interacting with, touching, and brushing them. some of our conversations were conducted in english, while others were carried out in finnish. at the time of our visits, the cattle team consisted of two female supervisors who undertook all the work involved in managing care-work while also supervising a team of five to seven finnish inmates. they jointly managed the twice-daily work with finncattle undertaken early in the morning as well as late in the afternoon. while we were within the confines 9 for more information about this project, see suvi jylhänlehto, “lapinlehmän maito maistuu nyt artesaanijäätelöissä – tilamaito kannetaan tonkassa navetalta tuotantotiloihin.” maaseudun tulevaisuus 3 sept. 2022. https://www.maaseuduntulevaisuus.fi/ruoka/ fa1c83c6-df7b-4971-a322-3ee71bcc2067. 10 see rifat jahan, “arctic ice creams born out of local flavors”, daily finland, 7 july 2019, https://www.dailyfinland.fi/business/11451/arctic-ice-creams-born-out-of-local-flavors/. see also the arctic ice cream factory’s website, https://www.arcticicecream.fi/. 11 conversations with supervisors at the pelso prison and living gene bank. 12 van dooren et al., “multispecies studies”; ogden, hall, and tanita, “animals, plants, people, and things”; tsing, “unruly edges”. about:blank about:blank https://www.dailyfinland.fi/business/11451/arctic-ice-creams-born-out-of-local-flavors/ https://www.arcticicecream.fi/ figure 2: outdoor interactions with cows during the winter months. photo taken by charlotte kroløkke, february 2022. kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives | 289 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) of the pelso prison structure, we exclusively spent time in the living gene bank noting the presence of guards when arriving and leaving the bank. as anna tsing writes, multispecies ethnography requires a recognition of how humanity itself emerges in interspecies relationships. multispecies scholars thom van dooren, eben kirksey, and ursula münster refer to the cultivation of “arts of attentiveness”, asking “how human lives, lifeways, and accountabilities are folded” together.13 consequently, it extends our scholarly interest to the ways that human and nonhuman lives come together, paying attention to ethical concerns related to nonhuman animals14 and critically questioning the centrality of the human subject. in the field of anthropology, the multispecies turn has led to a renewed interest in the lives of animals, whether these unfold in labs, on farms, or in various ecosystems.15 following from the above work, as well as the ethical guidelines for multispecies work proposed by heather rosenfeld and lauren van patter,16 we obtained informed consent from all human participants including administrators at the pelso prison and carefully considered how our presence could negatively affect the lives of the human and nonhuman residents. having outlined our case and methodological approach, we now turn to our theoretical perspectives prior to discussing our analytical interventions. on cows and conservation: theoretical perspectives historically, nonhuman animals have been linked to the making of nations, and cows are no exception.17 breeds, to quote krithika srinivasan, can be viewed as a “construction of the human imagination”.18 furthermore, as mette svendsen argues, nonhuman animals become politicized in accordance with eugenic discourses when, for example, attempts are made to keep pigs bred outside 13 van dooren et al., “multispecies studies”, 2. 14 rosenfeld and van patter, “introduction”. 15 kirksey and helmreich, “emergence”. 16 rosenfeld and van patter, “introduction”. 17 kroløkke, “heritage”; tamminen, biogenetic paradoxes. 18 srinivasan, “biopolitics of animal being”, 113. 290 | kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives humanimalia 14.1 (2023) of denmark away from the national borders.19 nordic mountain cows become symbolic of an imagined exceptional scandinavia,20 while the emergence of finncattle (as a breed) is bound up with early twentieth-century finnish nationalist movements: “labor-intensive breeding techniques were used to purify the national animals of foreign blood and to produce purebred finnish animals in order to prove the theoretical ideas of a natural finnishness, a nonhuman nationhood.”21 moreover, the desires for pure-bred animals are reiterated at a time when scandinavian politicians and media reports express concern over immigration and the emergence of an increasingly racially and ethnically diverse scandinavia. accordingly, eike marten notes that “valued diversity and de-valued differences resonate highly with human diversity discourse.”22 in this manner, nonhuman animals become material as well as symbolic nationalized capital.23 nonhuman animals are also deeply embedded within colonial and racialized discourses.24 notably, radhika govindrajan shows how colonial powers intertwine with notions of the nonhuman. while the colonizer is afforded the status of humanity, govindrajan argues, animality becomes attributed to the colonized.25 similarly, and in her critique of gregory colbert’s photographic exhibit of exoticized animals (e.g., elephants and cheetahs), nicole shukin shows how the visual representations of humans and animals portray brownskinned non-westerners as “closer to animals than the white westerner, who, after all these twists and turns, remains in imperial position as the universal subject.”26 the racialized hierarchies implicating 19 svendsen, pigs, people, and politics. 20 kroløkke, “heritage”. 21 tamminen, biogenetic paradoxes, 79–80. 22 marten, “bio/diversity”, 56. 23 kroløkke, “heritage”; shukin, animal capital; swart, “other citizens”; tamminen, biogenetic paradoxes. 24 govindrajan, animal intimacies; taschereau mamers, “human–bison relations”; morin, carceral space; parreñas, decolonizing extinction; shukin, animal capital; wyckoff, “sexism and speciesism”. 25 govindrajan, animal intimacies, 11. 26 shukin, animal capital, 199. kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives | 291 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) human and nonhuman actors are also present in human spaces of confinement.27 karen morin points to the ways that animals (especially dogs) historically have played a role in the prison system while additionally showing how the figures of “laboring prisoners” and “laboring animals” fruitfully can be thought together: “labor exploitation inexorably transforms brown-skinned prisoners and animal bodies in carceral spaces.”28 to theorize and document human and nonhuman animal relations, we turn to burgeoning work within critical animal studies.29 in her ethnographic study of interspecies relatedness in the central himalayas, govindrajan troubles interspecies power relations and dismantles the idea of human exceptionalism. similarly, and based on a visual archive and photo-elicited interviews, in our own earlier work, we discuss the ways that human–mountain cattle relations are brought into being through recognizable kinship terms. nordic mountain cows emerge, we argue, as “mothers”, “daughters”, “friends”, “co-workers”, “family members”, and, importantly, as “pets”.30 in a similar vein, catherine nash discusses interspecies relatedness between icelandic horses and humans. interspecies relatedness, she argues, is embedded within categories of similarity and difference, shaped by how these animals are “valued as individuals, as representatives of the breed and embodiments of pedigree and lineage within the breed and evaluated in relation to other members of the breed”.31 meanwhile, in her analysis of the animal planet television show cell dogs, donna haraway shows how nonhuman animals emerge as companions, inmates, even therapists. in these programs, dogs and prisoners turn into “freedom-making technologies for each other”.32 characteristic of this work, then, is 27 brower, “lives of animals”. 28 morin, carceral space, 91–92. 29 birke and hockenhull, “investigating human–animal bonds”; govindrajan, animal intimacies; howell and kean, “writing in animals in history”; kuhl, “human–sled dog relations”; nash, “kinship”; linné, “cows on facebook”; webster and ebersole, “maasai relationships”. 30 cf. kroløkke et al., “a flock of one’s own”. 31 nash, “kinship”, 136. 32 haraway, when species meet, 64. 292 | kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the desire to discuss how human and nonhuman animal encounters trouble species hierarchies and — in the employment of recognizable kinship terms — become folded together. as we centre the conservation practices conducted in the pelso prison farm, we additionally draw upon work in sts and critical heritage studies that shows how conservation is “caught up in apparatuses of biopower”.33 in his study of the biopolitics of endangered species preservation, matthew chrulew analyses the networks of power that ensure that certain exoticized animals are bred and kept in captivity. eike marten also understands biodiversity conservation as “a biopolitical investment”,34 which works by turning made-to-appear native plants into species that, unlike their “alien” counterparts, are meant to “live and be harnessed”.35 in the case of conservation, then, biopower can be understood as the power to make live and not let die.36 the conservation of endangered species is thus predicated on “the promise of vitality to come”37 as well as the making of “latent futures”38 that privilege species-thinking, which chrulew defines as follows: “species over individuals, code over life, genes over bodies.”39 by preserving dna, blood, or reproductive cells, biobanks and living gene banks function as future-making institutions, “hopeful projects”40 engaged in conservation in the name of a better future to come. from the perspective of critical heritage scholars, concepts like “biodiversity” and “endangerment” are foundational in the institutionalization of biobanks. as rodney harrison notes, banking biodiversity can be conceptualized as hope as well as “a form of biopolitical power” involving an “anticipatory temporal disposition toward the future”.41 when nonhuman animals are classified as “endangered”, 33 chrulew, “managing love and death”, 140. 34 marten, “bio/diversity”, 51. 35 marten, 54. 36 kowal and radin, “indigenous biospecimen collections”, chrulew, “freezing the ark”. 37 van dooren, “banking the forest”, 263. 38 radin, “planned hindsight”. 39 chrulew, “managing love and death”, 148. 40 van dooren, “banking the forest”, 262. 41 harrison, “freezing seeds”, 81. kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives | 293 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) for example, it conjures up visions of “loss” and national “depletion”42 and serves as a biopolitical quest to save specific species of animals.43 it is against this backdrop that the conservation of certain species becomes understood as an attempt to secure the nation’s biodiversity and consequently, a form of bio-wealth. which species come to be viewed as native (and worthy of conservation) entails an active biopolitical intervention in the “production of more or less distant futures”44 as well as a re-naturalization of the borders of the nation state. in this paper, we seek to unsettle human and nonhuman animal binaries. nonhuman animals can be viewed as relational, even performative categories enabling human and nonhuman animal partial connections and divisions.45 in haraway’s influential work, “becoming-with” is viewed as a material as well as a discursive process.46 it entails understanding human and nonhuman animal interactions as collaborative. anita maurstad, dona davis, and sarah cowles employ this approach when showing that being-with horses is strongly performed in the stories that riders tell.47 human and nonhuman animals become-with one another as well as with a multitude of other environments.48 similarly borrowing from haraway’s work, andrea petitt and alice hovorka add a feminist intersectional approach to the study of how women in botswana become-with cows. to petitt and hovorka, becoming-with helps take “both humans and other animals seriously by engaging the relationships between them.”49 human and nonhuman animal worlds, these scholars argue, are materially as well as discursively knotted together. while we find inspiration in this work; in our analysis, we prefer joanna latimer’s concept of “being alongside” to “becoming-with”, as it emphasizes 42 breithoff and harrison, “from ark to bank”, 39. 43 chrulew, “managing love and death”. 44 breithoff and harrison, “from ark to bank”, 38. 45 birke, intimate familiarities; “rats (and mice)”; birke, bryld, and lykke, “animal performances”, latimer, “being alongside”. 46 haraway when species meet. 47 maurstad, davis, and cowles, “horse–human relationships”, 324. 48 such as viruses and bacteria, cf. gundermann, “equine/human lyme embodiments”. 49 petitt and hovorka, “women and cattle”, 146. 294 | kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives humanimalia 14.1 (2023) partial connections with nonhuman animals rather than hybridity: “each part remains partially connected but also partially divided.”50 in contrast to the more totalizing joining-together in the trope of “becoming-with”, being or working alongside one another encourages attention to, for example, the ways that human caretakers may benefit from their nonhuman animal interactions, yet still, in the structures of the penal system, remain inmates. in employing latimer’s concept, we can also show how human and nonhuman animals work and dwell together, and in this manner, embody a form of partial connectivity. being alongside cows “welcome to prison,” the supervisor says when our team of researchers first arrives on a cold february morning. in this white snowy landscape, where it is difficult to see where the road begins and ends, the supervisor’s big, warm smile stands out in contrast to the cold climate. “finnish native breeds” the sign on the outside door reads, featuring a photo of a cow with her calf. walking into the corridor, a cosy little dining area and office are located on the right-hand side. here, what appears as a never-ending supply of coffee and cake await (see fig. 3). across from this room, we find the changing area where the two supervisors and all guests get dressed. the walls are adorned with posters and drawings by the inmates: one poster shows the eight dam lines that have been housed at the prison farm, while a christmas card (drawn by one of the inmates) along with a range of cattle awards are featured as well (see fig. 3). in the changing room, we put on big rubber boots, overalls, gloves, and a hat — not only to protect us from the freezing cold, but also to help shield us from the smell, the cow dung, and the mud. the two supervisors are experienced at working with finncattle. the main supervisor has spent the past ten years working at the prison and knows each cow by her udder, she jokingly says. whereas inmates come and go throughout the year, the supervisors have remained the same. of the five inmates present during 50 latimer, “being alongside”, 96. figure 3: photo of the head office in which supervisors dine, enjoy coffee breaks, or teach. photo taken by charlotte kroløkke, august 2022. 296 | kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives humanimalia 14.1 (2023) our visit in august, only one was on the team in february. all the cows have been named either by the supervisors or by the team of inmates. during this first tour of the farm, we meet, for example, the award-winning amma — a northern finncattle cow who is fourteen years old and now retired. amma spends most of her time outdoors, but she also has an open shed for shelter and sleeping. at the living gene bank, all cows are marked with an ear tag number, but they have also been given names by the inmates, many of which refer to aspects of prison life, alcoholic drinks, or public figures. we meet several three-month old calves — for example, tuomio (which means “sentence” or “verdict” in finnish) and tyrmä (which means “dungeon” or “jail”). uuno is just one month old and a favourite of one of the inmates. meaning “number one”, uuno is also the name of the beloved finnish comedy character “uuno turhapuro”, created by spede pasanen, a caricature of a finnish man (ragged, lazy, and dirty yet married to the daughter of a rich industrialist). in the living gene bank, uuno seems to indeed enjoy several privileges: he walks freely around in the barn, follows us, and mirrors our curiosity when, like us, he peeks into the enclosed areas (fig. 4). in what the supervisor refers to as the “teenage” division, we meet “tuborg” (named after a brand of danish beer), whose mother is named “olvi” (a brand of finnish beer). during the second visit, the calves we met in february have already left for their new residences or, as in the case of uuno, joined a local farm as a companion animal. during this visit, we are greeted by several new three-month old calves. we meet “ulla” (a conventional scandinavian female name) and “ukk” (named after urho kaleva kekkonen, president of finland from 1956 to 1982), as well as a black-and-white calf named “upcider” (a finnish brand of alcoholic cider). given the fact that the living gene bank is soon to close along with the expressed affections that the supervisors and inmates share with us about the living gene bank, the last calf to be born at the facility is named “unohtumaton” meaning “unforgettable”. in this working environment, inmates and supervisors attend to various farm chores: cleaning the inside areas, attending to the cattle, feeding, and milking them, while also helping the young ones latch figure 4: uuno (the calf) follows us around and visits the other cows in the barn. photo taken by mervi honkatukia, february 2022. figure 5: cows line up to get into the milking station. photo taken by charlotte kroløkke, february 2022. kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives | 299 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) on to large artificial nipples that have come to constitute their source of nourishment. with the radio blasting (music and programming are chosen by the inmates), the atmosphere is decidedly laid-back, and everyone appears to be focused on their work. inmates move around the barn, cleaning, laughing, talking to each other — and, importantly, always also to the cows. as a team, we join the inmates and cattle, brushing the cows, milking, and walking with them. the cows appear content and often playful, especially the younger ones. cows move to and from the milking station (fig. 5). inmates make coffee, and everyone seems occupied with performing specific tasks. much in the same manner as the inmates, cows appear adjusted to the daily routines, including going into the milking station as well as, in the summertime, going on a twice-daily walk to a nearby green pasture. the inmates tell us that despite the smell and the risk of injury when in the company of large animals, working at the living gene bank is highly desirable work. while cleaning the stables, we chat with two of the inmates. they describe working with non-human animals as transformative. according to one of them, working with this type of cow breed has been a “healing” experience — a type of “recovery”. it is, he says, “good for guys like me.” being with cows makes him feel like “a good guy”. the one-month-old calf uuno is, he admits, his favourite, and he recounts how he took care of uuno from the moment he was born. as is common practice in dairy farming, calves are separated from their mothers upon birth. left with a new-born calf, the inmate explains that he felt nervous and concerned about having the responsibility of nurturing a new-born, but in the end they both “made it” he says, smiling. this mentality is echoed by another care-worker, who talks of the vulnerabilities associated with giving birth and one incident in which he helped “save” one of the new-born calves. the description of working with animals as healing and calming recurs in other conversations as well. one care-worker says that working with animals helps him control his temper. it calms him down. this speaks to the affective relationships that emerge in being alongside cows. moreover, it also reveals how relatedness frequently is 300 | kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives humanimalia 14.1 (2023) formed when in the company of specific cows. as we walk into the barn, for example, we immediately encounter the cow olea. dressed up with one of the care-worker’s hats (see fig. 6), the inmate explains that this signifies their friendship. not only has he taken care of her for a substantial part of her life, but he is also keen to express that he really likes her personality. displaying a similar level of reciprocity, olea runs towards him when he calls her name once the milking is done. meanwhile, olea also appears to have a mind of her own, “escaping” the milking station to visit other parts of the barn and skipping into the enclosed area, thereby avoiding having to spend the summer night outside in the pasture. while all the inmates note that simply working with cows makes it easy to think of something else, attending especially to “native” cattle makes the inmates feel that they are “making a difference”. here, time passes by quickly, they say. meanwhile, the vulnerability of being in the proximity of animals weighing 3–400 kg (660–880 lbs.) is a humbling experience and inmates go to great lengths to negotiate human–cow spaces. as one of the inmates put it: “you cannot fight with the cows, they will always win.” another states that he especially likes working with cattle (as opposed to sheep), because they are so “big”. thus, the inmates’ being-alongside the cows is informed by a peculiar mixture of interspecies humility and masculinized prowess. materially, this is displayed, for example, when the inmates move bulls to an outside area, and one of them recalls trying to ride one of the bulls like a cowboy at a rodeo. moreover, it unfolds when inmates interact with a range of three-month-old calves. here, inmates are united in expressing a playful joy, touching, and chatting with the animals. haraway’s observation that nonhuman animals serve as therapeutic interventions seems right on the mark.51 in being alongside these cows, inmates engage in a form of self-transformation by establishing interspecies intimacy with cows granting them distinct personalities such as being curious and easy-going. not only do all the inmates volunteer to work in the living gene bank, being paid a minimal amount for their labour (less than five euros a day), but they 51 haraway, when species meet, 63. figure 6: photo of the cow olea wearing a care-worker’s hat. photo taken by mervi honkatukia, february 2022. 302 | kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives humanimalia 14.1 (2023) also unilaterally express developing affective bonds, turning cows into “friends” and “pals” — in some cases, even nonhuman companions. in the case of olea, her care-worker wishes he could take her home with him, while another inmate, with a smile on his face, explains that the cows are probably the reason he keeps returning to prison. cows and people emerge “as subjects and objects to each other, mutually adapted partners in the naturecultures of lively capital.”52 in this living gene bank, finncattle are both individualized cows (with names and distinct personalities) and simultaneously also gendered symbolic forms of national bio-wealth. the latter is especially evident when inmates stress that they enjoy working with native finnish animals and when supervisors point to the bank’s success story of having “saved the breed”. while cows are anthropomorphized as “pals”, inmates gain new qualities and value — as “productive” citizens. in this human–cow co-shaping, the value of finncattle extends beyond their national bio-wealth as “native” animals. it is within this context that interspecies encounters further transform inmates into “good” citizens. as one of the inmates put it: “the cows would say — if they could speak — that he [in reference to himself] is a good guy.” another inmate echoes this sentiment when stating that the work at the bank is a form of escape for him: “the cows just love you. they don’t care what you have done.” in these forms of multispecies affective relatedness (“the cows just love you”), inmates and cows synchronize their movements with one another. finncattle engage in the choreography of “good dairy production” or made-to-appear docile working bodies, when they, for example, are disciplined to enter the milking station or when they walk in an orderly line to the summer pasture — like human children going on a kindergarten trip (see fig. 7). in the case of the pelso prison, cows are disciplined to move in particular ways (to and from the milking station, for example) revealing what chrulew calls the “intense anatomo-politics of the animal body”.53 52 haraway, when species meet, 62. 53 chrulew, “managing love and death”, 148. figure 7: late summer walk with northern finncattle from their pasture back to the living gene bank. photo taken by charlotte kroløkke, august 2022 304 | kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives humanimalia 14.1 (2023) yet the relationship between the inmates and the finncattle goes beyond farming practices such as milking, testing of the milk, the udder, and the use of assisted reproductive technologies, to more synchronized practices such as moving inside and outside of the barn area. accordingly, while cows are certainly disciplined to move in particular ways, in being alongside one another, inmates and cows also synchronize their movements to adapt to each other’s needs. cows appear to recognize specific inmates and, regardless of this, they interact with everyone using their heads and body weight to get attention (fig. 8). for this reason, inmates carefully manage the interactions with cows. this is also the case with calves. calves are less predictable, as one inmate found out when playfully kicking a football in an indoor areas for calves, this may result in human injuries. meanwhile, the inmate and cow interactions unfold indoors as well as (during the summer months) outdoors in the pastures. inmates walk with the cows (as well as selected calves who, much like companion animals, are put on a leash) to and from their pasture. encouraging and pushing cows to follow a particular path, inmates also playfully discipline the cows that have chosen paths of their own. in these examples of being alongside cows, humans and nonhuman animals playfully connect in the finnish agricultural landscape. at the pelso prison and living gene bank, human and nonhumans appear, in haraway’s terminology, as messmates or companion species to one another. not only are cows viewed as having a mind of their own, when, for example, invading the supervisors’ personal space or simply choosing their own path or direction (during the summer walk); inmates also enjoy spending time with the cows playing, as in the case of the football, and interacting with them. in this manner, at various points during day-to-day activities, the distinction between humans and cows seems to become blurred — though it is of course quickly reinstated as soon as the cows are being milked and their calves are taken away from them.54 54 see svendsen, near human. figure 8: interaction between supervisors and cows. photo taken by mervi honkatukia, february 2022. 306 | kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives humanimalia 14.1 (2023) conservation / incarceration: the governance of nonhuman animals pouring coffee, yet visibly annoyed during this august afternoon work shift, the inmate grabs his cup and turns his back on the male prison guard. guards are always present if one of the supervisors is absent. today, however, three supervisors are working, and the guard’s presence appears to elicit a negative reaction. a stern appearance, prison attire, and equipment (radio and a gun) disrupt the otherwise laid-back atmosphere characteristic of the milking station; materially reminding these cow care-workers of their position as troubled political bodies (their status as inmates). in this section, we discuss how worlds of human and nonhuman animal conservation and incarceration are cultivated and how the boundaries between them at times collapse but also, as indicated in the above example, are re-affirmed. this means privileging the ways that material and social worlds intertwine as well as paying attention to the governance of what kirksey and helmreich refer to as interspecies entangled biographies.55 each day, inmates are picked up by one or both supervisors. from our vantage point at the living gene bank, we observed inmates walking casually with one of the supervisors to and from the prison. once inside the structures of the living gene bank, wearing their characteristic orange overalls, inmates quickly move around the barn or the accompanying outside area, pausing only occasionally to have a brief chat or smoke a cigarette. the worlds of conservation and incarceration collapse into one, not only for the inmates but also for the cows, who invariably also move in and out of different spaces of confinement. the supervisors train the inmates informing not only them — but also us — of how to interact with each cow including her temperament (for example, willingness to be milked) and family history. this may shape how inmates know and care about the cows.56 55 kirksey and helmreich, “emergence”. 56 gillespie, cow with ear tag, 26. kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives | 307 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) although northern finncattle are viewed as valuable finnish genetic material, at pelso prison, cows must also be reproductively fit. stroking one of the cows and chatting with the supervisor, we learn that this one will not be going to the vocational college up north. due to a “poor uterus”, the supervisor says, she will be going to the slaughterhouse. technologies of biopower (the use of assisted insemination, for example) dictate which of these endangered animals may live.57 similarly, echoing this reality, kelly somers and karen soldatic argue: “biological diversity is narrowed by the killing of animals who are deemed ‘non-productive’ or ‘productively disabled.”58 regardless of their endangered status, milk is still at the core of these cows’ existence, and although finncattle apparently produce less milk than other breeds, their milk is supposedly (according to the prison staff) of a higher quality. in this manner, the decision of which animals get to live and which are slaughtered is bound up with a rationale of productivity. an exception to this rule is the 14-year-old amma, who received several milking awards yet is past her reproductive years. during the second trip, we learn that amma now lives on a farm as a companion animal along with a group of other cows and horses. accordingly, a few of the cows get to live lives in which their reproductive abilities play little or no role, the supervisor says. although the pelso prison participates in the industrialized logics of productivity, the treatment and management of the cows also differs from the intensive and industrialized agriculture in several ways. supervisors stress the cows’ physical and mental health and well-being along with that of the team of inmates. worrying about the level of care that the cows — once moved to the vocational school — will experience, supervisors interestingly position the inmates’ care-work as a more genuine and stable type of care compared to the prospective care offered by “random” vocational students. like the inmates, who possess different skills and manage different machines while taking care of the day-to-day assignments (seemingly at their own pace), each cow is considered an individual with a 57 see marten, “bio/diversity”. 58 somers and soldatic, “productive bodies”, 35. 308 | kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives humanimalia 14.1 (2023) distinct personality. throughout our visits, supervisors and inmates are united in entertaining us with stories of different cow personalities, while we — when in the proximity of the cows — certainly observe and recognize that the cows act differently. few cows appear hesitant in our company; most of them come close and are even assertive at times, while none of them can be considered docile. most frequently viewed as a desirable, even necessary, trait in the safe management of livestock, we are told northern finncattle display none of the docility of other breeds such as, for example, holstein cattle. thus, contrary to richie nimmo’s observation that “assemblages of disciplinary technologies” are “geared towards the production of ‘docile’ and ‘productive nonhuman bodies’”59 in this living gene bank, endangered cows partially unsettle otherwise well-established forms of nonhuman animal caretaking practices while simultaneously, despite their status as endangered, upholding the rationale of productivity in terms of their reproductive abilities. at the gene bank, human and nonhuman worlds are intertwined with worlds of conservation and incarceration. outlining different “bovine biopolitical” modes of operation, jamie lorimer and clemens driessen sketch the move from industrialized agriculture to conservation, welfare, biosecurity, and rewilding.60 each biopolitical mode is characterized, they argue, by a distinct set of logics as well as a distinct set of human and nonhuman monster figures. whereas the logic of profit and improvement characterizes industrial agriculture, preservation and companionship help define the biopolitics of conservation and welfare; including the ways that welfare also gets entangled with industry practices and standards, respectively. in the case of the pelso prison living gene bank, inmates acknowledge the individual cow, expressing care and responsibility towards them along with emphasizing their status as “endangered” and “native”. this is in opposition to industrialized agriculture epitomized by the image of the high-achieving “turbo-cow”.61 in contrast, in the world of the living gene bank, the image of an individual yet simultaneously 59 nimmo, “bio-politics of bees”, 5. 60 lorimer and driessen, “bovine biopolitics”, 4. 61 orland, “turbo-cows”. kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives | 309 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) made-to-appear “social” and “happy” cow prevails. meanwhile, the “turbo-cow” and the irresponsible breeder / farmer appear, in our observations, as undesirable — even monstrous — human and nonhuman animal figures.62 while cow wellbeing appears at the centre of working alongside cows, the living gene bank does operate according to industry practices as well. moreover, in conservation practices, the bank operates at the level of the species (rather than at the level of the individual cow). simultaneously, and in the protection of what becomes framed as nationalized genetic resources, the bank enacts a biopolitical intervention in the production of (non)human futures. we posit that finncattle’s position as “endangered” and “native” plays a key role in the ways that these interspecies biographies entangle. interestingly, whereas these made-to-appear native nonhuman animals turn into forms of finnish bio-wealth (yet simultaneously expendable and killable), it also appears that their symbolic value (at least temporarily) sticks to the human inmates as well. the cultural significance of these cows adds another layer of understanding to this. when working alongside native finncattle, inmates are seen as having an opportunity to become rehabilitated and accordingly, come to resemble “care-workers” and “conservationists” contributing to, as noted by one of the supervisors, “saving the breed”. thus, the endangerment / conservation label works doubly: it safeguards the northern finncattle breed, turning these cows into nationalized bio-wealth, while simultaneously attributing cultural value and symbolic significance to the inmates themselves. conclusions in conclusion, we want to reflect on what our analysis of the pelso prison can offer for theories of more-than-human worlds. only a few of the inmates have any previous experience with animal husbandry and even fewer expect to work with cattle in the future. nevertheless, the inmates describe being alongside cows as a vital and meaningful human and nonhuman animal interaction. working with cattle enables inmates to leave their prison living quarters, and it grants 62 lorimer and driessen, “bovine biopolitics”, 4. 310 | kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives humanimalia 14.1 (2023) them the opportunity to work and closely interact with other living beings. all inmates echo the therapeutic value that being in the company of cows has: it grants them a sense of worth and helps them engage in what they refer to as meaningful work. in the company of cows, these inmates take on new value, when they emerge materially as well as discursively as finnish care-workers and conservationists who “save” what is positioned as a “native” cattle breed. in the decision to move the living gene bank to its new location, northern finncattle prove useful in new and other ways. transformed into a late-modern capitalist site of education, entertainment, and food consumption; in this naturalized “return to the arctic”, northern finncattle genetic material becomes optimized and emerges now as a symbol of authentic — even “pure” — arctic experiences and ingredients. we began with a desire to understand how inmates work alongside finncattle as well as the worlds that are cultivated during conservation and incarceration. taking a multispecies methodological approach helped reveal the ways that this living gene bank materially — as well as discursively — operates within different biopolitical modes of nonhuman animal well-being, neoliberalism, and conservation. at the pelso prison, cows are not merely nonhuman animal labourers; they become partially individualized: they are given ear tag numbers but also individual names and granted personalities based on perceived traits, such as “curious”, “stubborn”, and “gentle”. they emerge as “trouble-making teenagers” as well as disciplined “workers” when at the milking station. supervisors and inmates express responsibility and care towards the individual cow as well as the breed as a whole, yet also remain bound to the neoliberal principle of productivity. in these human and nonhuman animal interactions, inmates gain a sense of worth as productive citizens and conservationists. in this manner, inmates and cows work alongside each other experiencing moments of connection as well as difference. kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives | 311 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) works cited agamben, giorgio. state of exception. translated by kevin attell. chicago: university of chicago press, 2005. birke, lynda. “intimate familiarities? feminism and human–animal studies.” society and animals 10, no. 4 (2002): 429–36. https://doi. org/10.1163/156853002320936917. birke lynda. “who — or what — are the rats (and mice) in the laboratory?” society and animals 11, no. 3 (2003): 207–24. https://doi.org/dtmddj. birke lynda, mette bryld, and nina lykke. “animal performances: an exploration of intersections between feminist science studies and studies of human / animal relationships.” feminist theory 5, no. 2 (2004): 167–83. https://doi. org/10.1177/1464700104045406. birke, lynda, and jo hockenhull. “on investigating human–animal bonds: realities, relatings, research.” in crossing boundaries: investigating human–animal relationships, edited by lynda birke and jo hockenhull, 15–36. leiden: brill, 2012. breithoff, esther, and rodney harrison. “from ark to bank: extinction, proxies and biocapitals in ex-situ biodiversity conservation practices.” international journal of heritage studies 26, no. 1 (2020): 37–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/13 527258.2018.1512146. brower, charles hendrickson, ii “the lives of animals, the lives of prisoners, and the revelations of abu ghraib.” vanderbilt journal of transnational law 37, no. 5 (2004): 1353–88. https:// digitalcommons.wayne.edu/lawfrp/404. chrulew, matthew. “managing love and death at the zoo: the biopolitics of endangered species preservation.” australian humanities review no. 50 (2011): 137–57. https://doi.org/10.22459/ ahr.50.2011.08. chrulew, matthew. “freezing the ark: the cryopolitics of endangered species preservation.” in radin and kowal, cryopolitics, 283–306. gaard, greta. “posthumanism, ecofeminism, and inter-species relations.” in the routledge handbook of gender and environment, edited by sherilyn macgregor, 115–29. london: routledge, 2017. gillespie, kathryn. the cow with ear tag #1389. chicago: university of chicago press, 2018. govindrajan, radhika. animal intimacies: interspecies relatedness in india’s central himalayas. chicago: university of chicago press, 2018. gundermann, christian. “equine / human lyme embodiments: towards a feminist ecology of entangled becomings.” humanimalia 10, no. 2 (2019): 150–79. https://doi.org/10.52537/ humanimalia.9505. haraway, donna j. when species meet. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2008. harrison, rodney. “freezing seeds and making futures: endangerment, hope, security, and time in agrobiodiversity conservation practices.” culture, agriculture, food and environment 39, no. 2 (2017): 80–89. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/cuag.12096. howell, philip, and hilda kean. “writing in animals in history.” in kean and howell, routledge companion, 3–26. isaacs, tatum. “farmers behind bars: a critical analysis of prison farm labor in kentucky and beyond.” kentucky journal of equine, agriculture, & natural resources law 9, no. 3 (2017): 507–32. https:// uknowledge.uky.edu/kjeanrl/vol9/iss3/6/. kean, hilda, and philip howell, eds. the routledge companion to animal–human history. london: routledge, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1163/156853002320936917 https://doi.org/10.1163/156853002320936917 https://doi.org/dtmddj https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700104045406 https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700104045406 https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2018.1512146 https://doi.org/10.1080/13527258.2018.1512146 https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/lawfrp/404 https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/lawfrp/404 https://doi.org/10.22459/ahr.50.2011.08 https://doi.org/10.22459/ahr.50.2011.08 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9505 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9505 https://doi.org/ 10.1111/cuag.12096 https://doi.org/ 10.1111/cuag.12096 https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kjeanrl/vol9/iss3/6/ https://uknowledge.uky.edu/kjeanrl/vol9/iss3/6/ 312 | kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives humanimalia 14.1 (2023) kirksey, eben, and stefan helmreich. “the emergence of multispecies ethnography” cultural anthropology 25, no. 4 (2010): 545–76. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01069.x. kowal, emma, and joanna radin. “indigenous bio specimen collections and the cryopolitics of frozen life.” journal of sociology 51, no. 1 (2015): 63–80. https://doi. org/10.1177/1440783314562316. kroløkke, charlotte. “heritage with cows. conserving nordic human and nonhuman animals.” international journal of heritage studies 28, no. 8 (2022): 955–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/1 3527258.2022.2099448. kroløkke, charlotte, anne nørkjær bang, ulla ovaska, and mervi honkatukia. “a flock of one’s own: nordic human–mountain cattle kinship-making practices.” society & animals. forthcoming. kuhl, gail. “human–sled dog relations: what can we learn from the stories and experiences of mushers?” society & animals 19, no. 1 (2011): 22–37. https:// doi.org/10.1163/156853011x545510. latimer, joanna. “being alongside: rethinking relations amongst different kinds.” theory, culture & society 30, nos. 7–8 (2013): 77–104. https://doi. org/10.1177/0263276413500078. linné, tobias. “cows on facebook and instagram: interspecies intimacy in the social media spaces of the swedish dairy industry.” television & new media 17, no. 8 (2016): 719–33. https://doi. org/10.1177/1527476416653811. lorimer, jamie, and clemens driessen. “bovine biopolitics and the promise of monsters in the rewilding of heck cattle.” geoforum no. 48 (2011): 249–59. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. geoforum.2011.09.002. marten, eike. “bio/diversity and its deadly underside: making killable in times of emergency.” journal of gender studies 29, no. 1 (2020): 49–62. https://doi.org/ 10.1080/09589236.2019.1692650. maurstad, anita, dona davis, and sarah cowles. “co-being and intra-action in horse–human relationships: a multispecies ethnography of be(com)ing human and be(com)ing horse.” social anthropology / anthropologie sociale 21, no. 3 (2013): 322–35. https://doi.org/ 10.1111/1469-8676.12029. mtt agrifood research finland. “eureca cryoconservation finland.” eureca: towards self-sustainable, european, regional cattle breeds. 2009. https:// www.regionalcattlebreeds.eu/publications/ documents/finland_cryo.pdf. morin, karen m. carceral space, prisoners and animals. london: routledge, 2018. nash, catherine. “kinship of different kinds: horses and people in iceland.” humanimalia 12, no. 1 (2020): 118–44. https://doi.org/10.52537/ humanimalia.9426. nimmo, richie. “the bio-politics of bees: industrial farming and colony collapse disorder.” humanimalia 6, no. 2 (2015): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.52537/ humanimalia.9909. novek, joel. “pigs and people: sociological perspectives on the discipline of nonhuman animals in intensive confinement.” society & animals 13, no. 3 (2005): 221–44. https://doi.org/ 10.1163/1568530054927771. ogden, laura a., billy hall, and kimiko tanita. “animals, plants, people, and things: a review of multispecies ethnography.” environment and society: advances in research 4, no. 1 (2013): 5–24. https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2013.040102. orland, barbara. “turbo-cows. producing a competitive animal in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.” in industrializing organisms: introducing evolutionary history, edited by susan r. schrepfer and philip scranton, 167–89. new york: routledge, 2004. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01069.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1548-1360.2010.01069.x https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783314562316 https://doi.org/10.1177/1440783314562316 about:blank about:blank about:blank about:blank https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413500078 https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276413500078 https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476416653811 https://doi.org/10.1177/1527476416653811 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.09.002 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2011.09.002 https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2019.1692650 https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2019.1692650 https://doi.org/ 10.1111/1469-8676.12029 https://doi.org/ 10.1111/1469-8676.12029 https://www.regionalcattlebreeds.eu/publications/documents/finland_cryo.pdf https://www.regionalcattlebreeds.eu/publications/documents/finland_cryo.pdf https://www.regionalcattlebreeds.eu/publications/documents/finland_cryo.pdf https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9426 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9426 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9909 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9909 https://doi.org/10.1163/1568530054927771 https://doi.org/10.1163/1568530054927771 https://doi.org/10.3167/ares.2013.040102 kroløkke and honkatukia, parallel lives | 313 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) parreñas, juno salazar. decolonizing extinction: the work of care in orangutan rehabilitation. durham, nc: duke university press, 2018. petitt, andrea, and alice j. hovorka. “women and cattle ‘becoming-with’ in botswana.” humanimalia 12, no. 1 (2020): 145–66. https://doi.org/10.52537/ humanimalia.9433. radin, joanna. “planned hindsight: vital valuations of frozen tissue at the zoo and the natural history museum.” journal of cultural economy 8, no. 3 (2015): 361–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17530350.2015.1039458. radin, joanna, and emma kowal, eds. cryopolitics: frozen life in a melting world. cambridge, ma: mit press, 2017. rosenfeld, heather, and lauren van patter. “introduction to special issue ethics in multispecies research: reflections from the field.” acme: an international journal for critical geographers 21, no. 2 (2022): 106–12. https://acme-journal. org/index.php/acme/article/view/2231. shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2009. somers, kelly, and karen soldatic. “productive bodies: how neoliberalism makes and unmakes disability in human and non-human animals.” in disability and animality: crip perspectives in critical animal studies, edited by stephanie jenkins, kelly struthers montford, and chloë taylor, 35–56. london: routledge, 2020. srinivasan, krithika. “the biopolitics of animal being and welfare: dog control and care in the uk and india.” transactions of the institute of british geographers 38, no. 1 (2013): 106–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14755661.2012.00501.x. svendsen, mette n. “pigs, people, and politics: the (re)drawing of denmark’s biological, politico-geographical, and genomic ‘borders’.” biosocieties (2021): https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-02100244-6. svendsen, mette n. near human: border zones of species, life, and belonging. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, 2022. swart, sandra. “the other citizens: nationalism and animals.” in kean and howell, routledge companion, 31–52. tamminen, sakari. biogenetic paradoxes of the nation: finncattle, apples, and other genetic-resource puzzles. durham, nc: duke university press, 2019. taschereau mamers, danielle. “human– bison relations as sites of settler colonial violence and decolonial resurgence.” humanimalia 10, no. 2 (2019): 10–41. https://doi.org/10.52537/ humanimalia.9500. tsing, anna. “unruly edges: mushrooms as companion species: for donna haraway.” environmental humanities 1, no. 1 (2012): 141–54. https://doi.org/ 10.1215/22011919-3610012. van dooren, thom. “banking the forest: loss, hope, and care in hawaiian conservation.” in radin and kowal, cryopolitics, 259–82. van dooren, thom, eben kirksey, and ursula münster. “multispecies studies cultivating arts of attentiveness. environmental humanities 8, no. 1 (2016): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1215/220119193527695. webster, lena k., and james j. ebersole. “maasai relationships with and perceptions of dogs in northern tanzania.” society & animals 28, no. 4 (2020): 357–76. https://doi.org/ 10.1163/15685306-12341574. wyckoff, jason. “linking sexism and speciesism.” hyaptia 29, no. 4 (2014): 721–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/ hypa.12098. https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9433 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9433 https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17530350.2015.1039458 https://doi.org/10.1080/ 17530350.2015.1039458 https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/2231 https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/2231 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00501.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2012.00501.x https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-021-00244-6 https://doi.org/10.1057/s41292-021-00244-6 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9500 https://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.9500 https://doi.org/ 10.1215/22011919-3610012 https://doi.org/ 10.1215/22011919-3610012 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527695 https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527695 https://doi.org/ 10.1163/15685306-12341574 https://doi.org/ 10.1163/15685306-12341574 https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12098 https://doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12098 gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing a wolf in sheep’s clothing james mcneill whistler, “the white girl”, and the animal(s) in question laura d. gelfand utah state university humanimalia 14.1 (fall 2023) abstract: james mcneill whistler’s painting, symphony in white, no. 1: the white girl, has been the focus of much art historical analysis, but the animal rug beneath the feet of his model has received little attention. in this essay i suggest that whistler represented a mounted wolf’s head sitting on top of a large sheepskin rug, i.e., a wolf in sheep’s clothing. exploring the diverse meanings of this symbol within the context of the painting complicates how we understand the work and reinforces its importance as a reflection of the artist’s life and ambitions at the time he created it. keywords: james mcneill whistler, painting, wolf, sheep, iconography, symbolism bio: laura d. gelfand is professor of art history at utah state university. her research centres on representations of dogs and wolves in the history of art. she was a fulbright fellow at the university of york in 2018–19, and in addition to editing our dogs, our selves: dogs in medieval and early modern art, literature, and society (brill, 2016), her recent publications include: “the wolf at the door and the dog at our feet”, home cultures 18, no. 2 (2021): 105–27, and “human animal interactions in western art”, in the handbook on humananimal interactions, interventions and anthrozoology, routledge (2023): 658–76. email: laura.gelfand@usu.edu orcid: 0000-0002-2937-4095 copyright © 2023 laura d. gelfand this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 137–174. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13562 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2937-4095 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13562 gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing | 139 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) in 1862, the first of james mcneill whistler’s many published retorts to art critics appeared in the athenaeum, when he wrote to protest the reviewer’s association of his painting, the white girl (fig. 1), with wilkie collins’s popular novel, the woman in white. whistler denied any connection, writing that: the proprietors of the berners street gallery have, without my sanction, called my picture “the woman in white”. i had no intention whatsoever of illustrating mr. wilkie collins’s novel; it so happens, indeed, that i have never read it. my painting simply represents a girl dressed in white standing in front of a white curtain.1 in the same journal, the director of the berners street gallery contradicted whistler, explaining that the artist was both aware of and “pleased with the name”.2 earlier that same year, george du maurier quoted whistler in a letter describing the work as featuring a female figure “standing against a window which filters the light through a transparent white muslin curtain — but the figure receives strong light from the right and therefore the picture barring the red hair is one gorgeous mass of brilliant white.”3 both of whistler’s descriptions fail to mention the striking objects included in the lower third of the painting where the model stands on a large yellow-grey animal skin that rests atop a blue and white floral carpet. the model appears to have dropped the colourful blooms from a nosegay onto the carpet, retaining only a single white flower in her left hand. 1 the reviewer also called the white girl “one of the most incomplete paintings we ever met with”. the author of the review is assumed to have been e. g. stephens, and the review was published in the athenæum on 28 june, 1862. whistler wasted no time in responding, and his letter to the editor was published in the same journal on 5 july, 1862. see young, macdonald, and spencer, the paintings, cat. no. 38, and macdonald and petri, catalogue raisonné, ymsm 038. https://whistlerpaintings.gla.ac.uk/catalogue/ display/index.php?mid=y038. the original letter is included in the online edition of whistler’s correspondence, edited by margaret f. macdonald, patricia de montfort and nigel thorp, cat. no. 13149: https://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/ recno/display/?cid=13149. further references to this edition will be abbreviated “guw” (glasgow university: whistler) followed by the catalogue number. 2 frederick buckstone to william hepworth dixon, 19 july 1862. guw 12979. 3 george du maurier to thomas armstrong, february 1862, in du maurier, letters, 105; cf. spencer, “painting, poetry and meaning”, 300n5. https://whistlerpaintings.gla.ac.uk/catalogue/display/index.php?mid=y038 https://whistlerpaintings.gla.ac.uk/catalogue/display/index.php?mid=y038 https://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/recno/display/?cid=13149 https://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/recno/display/?cid=13149 figure 1: james mcneill whistler, symphony in white, no. 1: the white girl, national gallery of art, washington d. c., 1861–2, 1872. harris whittemore collection. public domain. gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing | 141 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) surely the most surprising inclusion is the mounted animal head that confronts viewers with bared fangs. this striking detail is hard to miss, but few of whistler’s contemporaries remarked on it. ernest chesneau noted the inclusion of a wolf skin in his review of the salon des refusés, as did horace de viel-castel.4 however, the inclusion of this remarkable animal, whistler’s omission of it in his own descriptions, and the failure of most contemporary critics to make any note of it warrants further investigation. in fact, in the century and a half since it was first shown, this emphatically present animal has remained virtually invisible. an early biographer described whistler as an “inveterate mystifier”,5 and my focus in this essay is on demystifying this animal presence. i believe that in a characteristically audacious move, whistler painted a mounted wolf’s head sitting atop a large sheepskin rug. in other words, viewers of whistler’s painting stand nose to nose with a wolf in sheep’s clothing. these animal artifacts, and the symbolic meaning produced by their combination, are the physical, metaphorical, and literal foundation on which whistler’s white-clad model stands. as this essay shows, recognizing and understanding the symbolic meaning of the animal elements in the white girl produces a more nuanced interpretation of the artist, his relationship to his sitter, and the painting itself. whistler began painting the white girl in paris during the winter of 1861/2 and submitted it to the royal academy exhibition in london in 1862 where, as he had anticipated, it was rejected.6 he then showed the painting at the berners street gallery where the owners advertised it with the title the woman in white. despite his protestations, whistler knew the gallery had changed the title and that it was done to capitalize on the popularity of wilkie collins’s novel.7 whistler admitted as much in a letter to his friend george lucas which includes a humorous sketch of a man with a signboard 4 chesneau, artistes modernes, 191; viel-castel, “salon de 1863”; cf. fried, manet’s modernism, 540, n. 73. 5 eddy, recollections and impressions, 47. 6 joanna hiffernan to george a. lucas, 9 april 1862. guw 9186. 7 tsui, “the phantasm”, 460. 142 | gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing humanimalia 14.1 (2023) advertising the exhibition on which whistler’s name is misspelled: “whisller’s extraordinary picture the woman in white”8 (fig. 2). aileen tsui notes whistler’s “strategic manipulation of the title in order to accommodate the contradiction between his claims for his art’s purity — both its independence from literature and its aesthetic quality — and his dabbling in aspects of mass culture.”9 in the letter to lucas, whistler put a positive spin on the royal academy’s rejection, claiming that he was “waging an open war with the academy”.10 yet few of the academy’s members knew that whistler had cast them in the role of arch-enemies, nor would they have cared. however, acceptance by the english and french academies was a serious matter for whistler, who, unlike many of his avantgarde contemporaries, was not independently wealthy. in 1863, whistler asked lucas to help him submit the white girl to the french salon, writing, “i have set my heart on this succeeding, and it would be a crusher for the royal academy here, if what they refused were received at the salon in paris and thought well of.”11 whistler also noted that he was touching up the painting so “it will be fresh” for submission to the salon.12 henri fantin-latour then reported to whistler that although the judges for the 1863 french academy had found it difficult to reject the white girl, they had nevertheless done so, and the painting was subsequently shown at the salon des refusés where it was listed in the hastily organized catalogue as the dame blanche (cat. no. 596).13 in fantin’s letter to whistler he described the process that resulted in two exhibitions being held simultaneously at the palais de l’industrie, one with works accepted by the salon’s judges, and the 8 i have not seen this deliberate misspelling noted or discussed elsewhere. whistler to lucas, 26 june 1862, guw 11977. 9 tsui, “the phantasm”, 460. throughout this essay i use the title whistler originally gave the painting since my focus is on the period when whistler used it. he gave the painting its current title in 1867. 10 whistler to lucas, 26 june 1862, guw 11977. 11 whistler to lucas, 16 march 1863, guw 10693. 12 whistler to lucas, 16 march 1863, guw 10693. 13 fantin to whistler, 1 may 1863, guw 1079. figure 2: letter from james mcneill whistler to george a. lucas, june 26, 1862 (detail sketch of man wearing a sandwich board advertizing the “woman in white”), wadsworth atheneum of art, hartford, ct, gift of john f, kraushaar, 1925.539. 144 | gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing humanimalia 14.1 (2023) other with rejected works. he assured whistler that “the best things will be well placed and exhibited together, and certainly they are going to ensure that you are well placed.”14 indeed, whistler’s painting was installed near the entrance to the exhibition in “a sort of place of honour, before an opening through which all pass, so that nobody misses her.”15 whistler sent several letters to fantin asking about the reception of the painting by the public, the press, and their fellow artists.16 fantin reported that gustave courbet, edouard manet, alphonse legros, and charles baudelaire all admired the work.17 as a protective friend, fantin was less forthcoming about negative responses by critics and the french public who had been primed by reviewers to see the works in the salon des refusés as both badly painted and a bit naughty.18 whistler embraced good and bad reviews alike, seeing the white girl as a succès de scandale, and in 1878, when he was building his libel case against john ruskin, he was pleased to be able to refer to the painting as “most notorious”.19 fabritzius’s caricature of the salon des refusés mocked both the artworks in the exhibition and the crowds who flocked to see them (fig. 3). three of manet’s paintings, including the dejeuner sur l’herbe (originally titled le bain) appear in the centre of the cartoon, with the white girl to the right, high on the wall. fabritzius included the 14 fantin to whistler, 1 may 1863, guw 1079. 15 fantin to whistler, 15 may 1863, guw 1081. 16 whistler to fantin, 25 may/10 june 1863, guw 8044; whistler to fantin, 6–10 july 1863, guw 8043; whistler to fantin, 16 august 1863, guw 8032. 17 fantin to whistler, 15 may 1863, guw 1081. 18 this can be gathered from reports by artists, critics, and others that are collected in tabarant, histoire catalographique, 95, and tabarant, manet et ses œuvres, 67. for a discussion of the reception of the exhibition as well an extraordinarily helpful timeline, see wilson-bareau, “the salon des refusés”, 313–7. 19 whistler to james anderson rose, november 1878, guw 8784. for readers unfamiliar with the libel case, in 1878, whistler sued the famous and influential art critic john ruskin for a review of his painting, nocturne in black and gold: the falling rocket (1875, detroit institute of arts) in which ruskin accused whistler of “flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.” whistler sued ruskin for libel, but he was also eager to burnish his reputation as a firebrand and to defend the aesthetic art movement of which he was a part. the two-day trial was a public sensation, and thanks to his witty comebacks and convincing defence his artistic practice, whistler won the case, but he was awarded only a single farthing and was thus bankrupted by legal expenses and other debts. as a result, he had to sell his home and all its contents. gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing | 145 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) flower held in the model’s hand and the wolf’s head at her feet. the white girl also features in a caricature by gillot, published in la vie parisienne on 11 july 1863 (fig. 4). gillot arranged the exhibition’s most scandalous works to conceal any objectionable nudity. at the top of the cartoon, a maniacal academician wields a flaming sword in one hand and a pair of scales in the other as he sits astride a cloud in his artistic heaven. the caption explains that this crazed artist is struggling to separate light from dark (or good from bad art), and the figure’s dynamic pose copies raphael’s fresco in the vatican loggia showing god separating light from dark.20 the white girl features prominently in gillot’s caricature, but the lower portion of the painting is cut off and with it the wolf’s head, an omission that anticipates the painting’s historical reception. together, the caricatures confirm that whistler’s white girl and manet’s dejeuner sur l’herbe were sufficiently well known to serve as recognizable signifiers of the salon des refusés. significantly, fabritzius shows the paintings in the salon des refusés as consisting primarily of female nudes and domestic animals. in this context, hung high on the wall, surrounded by animals and women, it seems as though the wolf’s head in whistler’s painting would have been particularly obvious.21 instead, some critics commended whistler for his adherence to tradition, praising his reliance on english, italian, and french paintings. a few noted that it was common practice in art schools to paint a model draped in white against a white curtain and complimented whistler for his treatment of this familiar theme.22 others were so bothered by the lack of a clear narrative in the work that they came up with their own. for example, jules-antoine castagnary wrote that whistler had depicted “the bride’s morning after, that troubling moment when a young woman reflects on the absence of yesterday’s virginity.”23 sexual overtones also dominated interpretations by other critics who believed that whistler was representing a fallen 20 krell, “manet’s déjeuner sur l’herbe.” 319, fig. 1. 21 see note 4, above. 22 spencer, “whistler, manet, and tradition”, 60. 23 castagnary, “salon de 1863”, qtd. in macdonald and petri, catalogue raisonné, ymsm 038. figure 3 (above): caricature view of the salon des refusés, 1863. photograph by camille rensch, photographie de la madeleine, paris, of a drawing by fabritzius. albumen print. figure 4 (left): gillot, caricature view of the salon des refusés, la vie parisienne 11 july 1863. gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing | 147 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) woman, much like william holman hunt’s the awakening conscience (tate britain, 1853), and other pre-raphaelite paintings.24 in contrast to the attention the female figure garnered, however, the animals in whistler’s painting were almost entirely overlooked by his contemporaries, just as they have been by most later scholars of the work. the wolf’s head and sheepskin at hiffernan’s feet, like hiffernan herself, are absent referents. the objectification of the human and nonhuman elements in whistler’s painting obscures the identity of the living woman who modelled for the painting and the body parts of what may have been living animals. whistler repeatedly asserted that the painting’s central female figure was not a portrait of a specific individual, even though it was well known that his mistress was the model. the painting and its title(s) strip hiffernan of her identity and transform her into an object. hiffernan shares this objectified status with the dead animal skin on which she stands and the mounted wolf’s head that menaces viewers of the painting. stripped of their identities, the human and animal elements are transformed into vessels into which metaphorical meaning has been poured, and it is to this meaning that i now turn. the wolf in sheep’s clothing it is important to consider how it has been possible for so many viewers to overlook the animal elements in the white girl for so long, and why this is the first essay to focus primarily on the animals in this otherwise much-discussed painting. the bottom third of whistler’s lifesized painting features a blue and white floral carpet on top of which a large, taupe and grey-tipped sheepskin rug is spread. whistler’s model stands near the centre of the rug, which is bordered by sanguine-coloured paint, perhaps indicating that the rug was backed with red wool felt, as was common at the time.25 the red extends beyond the white edge of the fleece, and for some viewers the bloody hue may serve as a reminder of the violence required to transform a living animal into a decorative skin. near where the sheep’s neck would have 24 lochnan and jacobi, holman hunt, 96–110; bronkhurst, holman hunt, 165–68. 25 it is also possible that this red is meant to be understood as blood, an idea i discuss below in the context of whistler’s self-portrait. 148 | gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing humanimalia 14.1 (2023) been, a mounted wolf’s head has been placed on top of the fleece. whistler made no effort to make it appear as if the head and the skin are organically connected, and he carefully differentiated the colour and texture of both skins to underscore the difference between the two. the wolf’s head is modelled primarily in shades of grey, but whistler also added several blue highlights to create the illusion that the head is projecting into the viewer’s space. orange-red brushstrokes define the wolf’s nostrils, tongue, under the lower lip, and right eye. detailed modelling and the careful application of primary colours on the wolf’s head contrast sharply with the painterly facture and mostly taupe colouring of the sheepskin. the fur on the wolf’s head is painted to appear shorter, straighter, and smoother than the texture of the fleece beneath it. because the upper two-thirds of the painting are primarily white, the brilliant colour of the lower section draws the viewer’s eye to the objects painted there. in addition, to the right of the wolf’s head, the red paint seems to seep into the blue and white carpet. whistler deftly used colour to establish both visual and conceptual relationships. as our eyes travel left, along the edge of the sheepskin, we find brightly coloured flowers including white lilacs, and yellow and purple daisies with goldenrod centres. the red along the edge of the sheepskin changes into a browner hue near the wolf’s head, a colour that closely resembles dried blood. flowers resting on the blue and white carpet include red and white petunias, daisies, and some unidentifiable blooms. using a brush and a palette knife, whistler rendered the flowers vibrantly and energetically, and this is very much in contrast with the upper portion of the painting where hiffernan’s green eyes and red hair are the only areas of strong colour. compositionally, whistler created two primary areas of visual interest that vie with one another for the viewer’s attention. whistler thus establishes a visual connection between the woman and the wolf resulting, as we shall see, in one of at least three possible symbolic meanings for the wolf in sheep’s clothing. the animal head in the painting is undoubtedly that of a wolf, and comparisons with other wolf heads makes this clear (fig. 5). i have consulted with wildlife experts and zoologists, including several who figure 5: top: the wolf’s head in whistler’s the white girl bottom: mounted wolf’s head, stokes nature center, logan, ut. photograph by the author (2021). 150 | gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing humanimalia 14.1 (2023) specialize in wolves, and without any hesitation all of them agree that this is the head of a wolf.26 significantly, the wolf’s head is not resting on a wolf skin. the pelt is larger than that of a wolf and whistler gives the fur a fleecy quality that contrasts with the sleekness of the fur on the wolf’s head. the suggestion that this is the skin of a polar bear is untenable, it is too small to be the skin of one of these enormous animals. a 1901 photo of evelyn nesbit by rudolf eckemeyer, jr. shows the actress posing with her knee on the head of a polar bear whose skin is suspended behind her (fig. 6). not only is a polar bear’s head far larger than that of a wolf, but the shape of the head and body are also completely different. the fur on the bear’s head is the same colour as the rest of its pelt, and all of it is much whiter than the wolf head and what i identify as the sheepskin in whistler’s painting. the photo also shows the polar bear’s head still attached to the skin of the body. in the white girl, the wolf head rests atop the spot where the sheep’s scapula would have attached to its spine, and there is no way that the head could be organically connected to the skin. charles brock suggests that the animal(s) under hiffernan’s feet could be a hybrid bear/wolf.27 however, there is no precedent for, or meaning produced by the visual combination of a bear and a wolf, while a wolf in sheep’s clothing is a well known metaphor, and one replete with meanings that would have been familiar to whistler and viewers of the painting. the identification of the skin as that of a polar bear is relatively recent. while there was a great deal of popular interest in polar exploration when whistler was completing the painting, borrowing, or purchasing a polar bear pelt would have been prohibitively expensive, and had he attempted to obtain one, some record of his efforts might survive. whistler’s financial records show that he 26 i am deeply grateful to the wildlife and canid experts who were willing to discuss the identification of the animals in the painting, namely dan mcnulty (associate prof., wildland resources specializing in wolves, usu), carol von dohlen (professor of biology and zoology, usu), julie young (former director of the coyote research station, associate professor of ecology and wildlife preservation, usu), and chad page (professor of agriculture, sheep and goat specialist, usu extension). all agreed that the head is that of a wolf but were less certain about the identification of the pelt. 27 brock, “short history”, 179. figure 6: evelyn nesbit by rudolf eickemeyer, jr., photo, 1901. national museum of american history, smithsonian institution, washington, d. c., the rudolf eickemeyer, jr. collection 152 | gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing humanimalia 14.1 (2023) rented an easel to paint the white girl, a basic tool that was far more readily available than a polar bear pelt.28 brown bear skins were traded in significant numbers through the hudson’s bay trading company in late-nineteenth-century england, but at the time, polar bear skins were quite rare.29 sheepskins, by contrast, were inexpensive and easily obtained, and when combined with a wolf’s head, produced a rich variety of metaphoric meanings. a mounted wolf’s head would probably also have been relatively easy to obtain. at the start of the nineteenth century, france had one of the highest wolf populations in europe, but following an aggressive campaign to exterminate them which was incentivized with bounties, wolves were extirpated by the early twentieth century.30 thousands of wolfskins and heads were tanned and/or mounted, and it would have been a fairly simple matter for whistler to have borrowed one to use as a prop. contemporary references to wolves whistler wrote to fantin early in the summer of 1863 to describe the royal academy exhibition and noted that one of three paintings shown by john everett millais is “a real picture! well, something truly artistic.”31 whistler respected millais’s work and his judgement, and according to hiffernan, millais had praised the white girl as “splendid, more like titian and those old swells than anything he had seen.”32 although it’s not known which painting whistler was singling out for praise, it may have been the wolf’s den (fig. 7), the most modern of the three paintings millais exhibited that year. the painting depicts four of millais’s children playing at being wolves using fur carriage rugs. they are shown beneath the grand piano in their home on cromwell place, with the painter’s point of view on the floor alongside his children. the artist george price boyce saw the picture in millais’s studio on 22 march 1863, and wrote that “he 28 28 august 1862, guw 2026. 29 see o’regan, “menageries and bearskin caps”, 261. 30 moriceau estimates that there were up to 15,000 wolves in france at the start of the nineteenth century. see moriceau, “the wolf threat in france”, 2–3. 31 whistler to fantin, 25 may/10 june 1893, guw 1081. 32 hiffernan to lucas, 10 april 1862, guw 9186. figure 7: john everett millais, the wolf’s den, 1863, national museum of western art, tokyo. 154 | gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing humanimalia 14.1 (2023) has in hand an excellent picture of his children playing at wolf”.33 millais’s oldest daughter effie is lying on her back and contemplating a snowdrop, a traditional symbol of hope and innocence.34 to effie’s right we see everett, the artist’s oldest son, who looks out of the picture toward the viewer and glowers with as much menace as a young child can muster.35 his expression is far less sinister than that of the mounted wolf that meets the viewer’s eye in whistler’s painting. the red felt backing of both carriage rugs is reminiscent of, yet more carefully rendered, than the red that traces the edges of the fleece in the white girl. millais and whistler met in 1860, the year whistler showed at the piano at the royal academy, and he claimed that millais had said to him, “i never flatter but i will say that your picture is the finest piece of colour that has been on the walls of the royal academy for years.”36 the wolf’s den was exhibited in london the same year the white girl was shown in the salon des refusés, and although whistler’s earlier painting may not have been a direct influence on millais, the artists knew one another and admired each other’s work. we see in whistler’s broad artistic circles the kind of intertextual influence that elizabeth prettejohn has identified as critical to the aesthetic movement’s ability to make “art for art’s sake” an international artistic phenomenon.37 currency of the phrase “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” with his strict religious upbringing and deep familiarity with the bible,38 whistler would have known that the phrase, “a wolf in sheep’s 33 boyce, diaries, 37. 34 for additional examples of contemporary symbolic interpretations of flowers see ingram, flora symbolica, 156. 35 an interesting aside about painting is that the artist’s oldest son, everett millais went on to become an expert on dog breeding, with a particular focus on bassett hounds, which he was the first to import to england. his book, the theory and practice of rational canine breeding was published in 1889. for more on millais’s theoretical approach see worboys, strange, and pemberton, invention of the modern dog, 164–70. 36 as reported by george du maurier in a letter to his mother in may 1860. see du maurier, letters, 4. 37 prettejohn, “walter pater”, 36–58. 38 meacock, “whistler and scriptural persuasion” 24–30. gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing | 155 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) clothing,” originated in the biblical passage, “beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves” (matthew 7:15). the metaphorical phrase has never gone entirely out of favour, and even if whistler did not see the specific images i illustrate here, they nevertheless indicate that the phrase was in common use when the white girl was created. in 1860 punch published a cartoon showing napoleon as a wolf in sheep’s clothing (fig. 8). a second contemporary cartoon shows jefferson davis, president of the confederacy, dressed in women’s white crinolines and a fancy feathered hat being hauled off to jail by two union soldiers (fig. 9). davis tried to evade capture by dressing in his wife’s cloak, and the northern press seized on this to humiliate the defeated general by depicting him in women’s clothing. these and other examples confirm that the phrase “a wolf in sheep’s clothing” was in widespread use when whistler painted the white girl. additionally, they show that the phrase could convey a range of political, personal, and practical meanings. in the sections that follow, i focus on three ways that whistler may have intended the wolf in sheep’s clothing to be read by viewers of his painting. first, the animal presence is primarily correlated to whistler’s model and mistress, jo hiffernan; second, it acts as a metaphoric self-portrait; and, finally, it references the painting’s radicality when shown in a deeply conservative exhibition setting. the wolf’s head and sheepskin should also be recognized as fragments of animals that may once have been living beings, and even if whistler did not use a specific skin and a particular head as models, they are painted in a way that makes it appear that he did. i explore this at several points within this essay, but it is important to recognize that the metaphorical meanings of these animal fragments are not separable from their material reality, and that these two aspects work together to compliment my reading of them. there are, of course, many other ways for whistler’s wolf in sheep’s clothing to be read and understood, but in the sections that follow, i discuss what i believe are the three most significant associations for the artist and his audience. figure 8: “injured innocence and his billet-doo”, punch, august 1860, walker art library/ alamy stock photo, d01a2p figure 9: unidentified photographer, a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or jeff in crinoline, 1865. international center of photography, gift of charles schwartz, 2012. gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing | 157 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) joanna hiffernan as a wolf in sheep’s clothing the first and most obvious connection is between the wolf in sheep’s clothing and whistler’s muse, model, and mistress, jo hiffernan. with her striking coppery red hair and large green eyes, hiffernan was whistler’s primary model during the first half of the 1860s. although their romantic relationship ended around 1874, hiffernan remained close to whistler until her death in 1886, even raising the son whistler fathered with another woman.39 friends describe the couple’s relationship as stormy, and george du maurier wrote in 1864 that whistler was “in mortal fear” of hiffernan, and that she was “an awful tie”.40 in 1863/4 whistler’s brother-inlaw, with whom he was already quarrelling, refused to dine in whistler’s home, claiming it had been sullied by hiffernan’s presence.41 when whistler’s mother visited london, hiffernan moved out of the home she and whistler shared, staying elsewhere for the sake of propriety.42 friends described hiffernan as passionate, intelligent, fiery, and fiercely devoted to whistler. she was also financially dependent on him, and his mother urged him to “promote a return to virtue in her” by giving her the inheritance he had received from his aunt.43 in the victorian society in which whistler and hiffernan lived, some did not distinguish between those who lived with men outside of marriage, those who were paid for sex, and those who had sex for pleasure, seeing all unmarried, sexually active women as sinners.44 whistler’s family saw hiffernan as a fallen woman, and so did many viewers of the white girl. a double standard applied to men and women that led one of whistler’s contemporaries to write that a “woman falls but once, and society turns upon her as soon as the offence is known. a man 39 macdonald, woman in white, 30. 40 du maurier, letters, 227. 41 whistler to fantin, 4 january–3 feb 1864, guw 8036. 42 guw 8036; cf. meacock, “whistler and scriptural persuasion”. 43 a. m. whistler to j. whistler, 22 january 1866, guw 6527. sutherland and toutziari, whistler’s mother, 139. 44 nead, myths of sexuality, 170–75. 158 | gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing humanimalia 14.1 (2023) falls many times, habitually, confessed by; yet society changes her countenance on him but little, if at all.”45 hiffernan’s red hair, loose around her shoulders and in disarray, is the only element, besides her large, green eyes, that whistler described as breaking from the otherwise all-white palette. in exploring the long association of redheaded women with sexual availability, jacky colliss harvey writes that “there are very definite associations between long or loosened hair and sex,”46 and one of the earliest and best-known sources to connect witchcraft, sex, and “young, nubile, redheaded, green-eyed women” is the malleus maleficarum, heinrich kramer’s profoundly misogynistic fifteenth-century treatise on witchcraft, which describes women with red hair as evildoers driven by lust. artists influenced by the malleus produced countless images of witches and prostitutes with red hair, and in the process established enduring connections between red hair and sexual sordidness.47 manet’s redheaded model, victorine meurent, posed many times for the artist, including for the dejeuner sur l’herbe, and olympia (both 1863). nineteenth-century audiences were accustomed to seeing paintings of nude women, but meurent’s red hair in combination with the radicality of manet’s paintings provoked scandalized responses from critics and the public. hiffernan also modelled for courbet who, like whistler, revelled in his reputation for outrageous behaviour, and hiffernan’s tousled red hair is a dominant feature of the paintings he produced.48 there are countless more examples, but suffice it to say that the idea that redheaded women were sexually available was well established for nineteenth-century viewers. visitors to the salon des refusés are repeatedly described as dissolving into peals of laughter at the sight of the white girl. émile 45 miller, prostitution considered, 26. 46 harvey, red, 70. 47 harvey, red, 89. 48 courbet’s paintings of hiffernan include portrait of jo (1865, private collection), jo, the beautiful irish girl (c. 1866/1868, nationalmuseum, stockholm), jo, the irishwoman (c. 1866/1868, the nelson-atkins museum of art, kansas city, mo), and jo, la belle irlandaise (1865–66, the metropolitan museum of art, new york). gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing | 159 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) zola, who admired the painting, wrote that those who saw it in the exhibition “nudged each other and went almost into hysterics, there was always a grinning group in front of it.”49 in his review of the exhibition, philip gilbert hamerton described viewers as “struck with amazement. this for two or three seconds, then they always looked at each other and laughed.”50 it is difficult to imagine what these early viewers found so funny about the painting, but the responses of the public were altogether different from those of the french artists whistler hoped to impress. fantin told him that “baudelaire finds it charming, charming, exquisite, absolutely delicate, as he says. legros, manet, bracquemond, de balleroy and [fantin himself]; we all think it admirable.”51 whistler had produced a painting that was so radical that all but the most avant-garde viewers struggled to know how to respond. robert wilson torchia writes that: in the final analysis, the genre of the full-length portrait was adamantly resistant to whistler’s purpose of making a spontaneous formalist statement. […] the subject was too similar to contemporary femme fatale types, the woman’s sexually charged appearance was too highly suggestive, and attributes such as the wilted lily were too vulnerable to a traditional iconographic explication.52 michael fried situated the white girl among other contemporary nineteenth-century paintings in which the main figural subject is supposed to be unaware of the viewer’s presence. these works attempt to “negate or neutralize the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld.”53 however, like so many others, fried’s discussion of whistler’s painting fails to mention the wolf that gazes out at the viewer, not only acknowledging the viewer’s presence but aggressively initiating engagement. 49 zola, œuvres complètes, 5, 533–34, trans., and qtd. in the catalogue raisonné, ymsm 038. 50 hamerton, “the salon of 1863,” 259–60, qtd. in the catalogue raisonné, ymsm 038. 51 fantin to whistler, 15 may 1863, guw 1081. 52 torchia with chotner and miles, american paintings, 242–3. 53 fried, manet’s modernism, 192. 160 | gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing humanimalia 14.1 (2023) nineteenth-century critics provide some clues about what the public may have found so entertaining about whistler’s painting. in the absence of a clear narrative, viewers and critics devised their own stories, then evaluated the painting based on how well it illustrated the tales they concocted. as noted above, these narratives were almost always sexual, spiritual, or both. for example, the critic paul mantz asked: where does this white apparition come from? what does she want with her loose hair, her big eyes drowned in ecstasy, her languid attitude and that flower without petals on the fingers of her hanging hand? no one can say: the truth is that mr. whistler’s work has a strange charm: for us, the woman in white is the finest piece in the salon of heretics.54 figures that seem oblivious to our gaze invite us to project our own expectations and desires upon them. when constructing interpretations for whistler’s non-narrative painting, viewers resorted to familiar, sexualized tropes. it is therefore particularly interesting to consider why, with viewers champing at the bit for meaning, the presence of a wolf in sheep’s clothing beneath the model’s feet escaped notice. such blatant disregard for the animal presence in a picture with so little else in it attests to the deep-seated human tendency to privilege representations of humans over those of nonhumans. surely this is why so many of whistler’s contemporaries, as well as critics up to the present day, have failed to notice or mention this extraordinary and prominent part of the painting. the apparent invisibility of this highly visible element is a compelling argument for the benefits of integrating animal studies into art history.55 hiffernan’s distracted expression is in stark contrast with the fierce, pointed stare of the wolf at her feet. some critics believed that whistler represented hiffernan as a mystic or spiritual figure, and according to macdonald, “both whistler and hiffernan attended seances at dante gabriel rossetti’s house. (whistler thought hiffernan was ‘a bit of a medium’).”56 fernand desnoyers described the painting as 54 mantz, “salon de 1863”, 60–61; macdonald, online catalogue raisonné, ymsm 038. 55 for an important argument on this point, see aloi, “animal studies and art”. 56 macdonald, woman in white, 23. gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing | 161 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) “the portrait of a spirit, a medium,”57 while théophile thoré called the model a “vision”, and fantin reported that courbet was annoyed that hiffernan looked like “an apparition, with spiritual content”.58 by juxtaposing his model’s glazed expression — which was interpreted by some viewers as showing the sitter in an sexual or drug-induced state of ecstasy — with the sharply focused gaze of the wolf, whistler may have been warning viewers not to make assumptions about the innocence or sinfulness of his model. jo hiffernan looks toward the viewer but denies us any real connection. she is tightly buttoned up, arms covered to the wrists, not even the tip of a shoe showing. in casual morning dress with her hair down, viewers may gaze freely at her face and clothed body, but this offers nothing of the titillation to be found in the profusion of female nudes that crowded the walls of the salon. hiffernan’s emotionless gaze, her physical impassivity, and her loosened red hair render her simultaneously restrained and unrestrained. ann c. colley, who identifies the skin as that of a wolf, describes some of the white girl’s erotic charge as coming from the “possibility that his model is bare footed (she has after all let her hair down) and with her toes is caressing and feeling the wolf’s wild fur.”59 further, she writes, hiffernan “digs her toes into the wolf and faces the viewer, who stares nervously, yet pleasurably, at a representation of what those used to believing in the ultimate division between animal and human would rather not recognize.”60 while i identify this skin as that of a sheep rather than a wolf and thus believe that hiffernan is digging her concealed toes into a woolly fleece, i agree with colley’s suggestion that the hidden erotic engagement with an animal body may have been part of what inspired viewers at the salon des refusés to titter uncomfortably when observing the painting. whistler’s painting is unsettling thanks to the alignment of his living model’s dazed inertia and her unseen, erotic interaction with the uncannily alert, yet dead and inert, fragmented bodies of a sheep and a wolf. 57 desnoyers, salon des refusés, 27–28. 58 fantin to whistler, 15 may 1863, guw 1081. 59 colley, wild animal skins, 145. 60 colley, wild animal skins, 146. 162 | gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing humanimalia 14.1 (2023) whistler as the wolf in sheep’s clothing james mcneill whistler is among the most instantly recognizable nineteenth-century artists thanks in large part to his striking self-presentation and carefully cultivated public persona. his portrait was painted by several contemporaries, he was included in several group portraits, and he painted numerous self-portraits. further, he understood that zoomorphism could be used to produce powerful meaning. this is most clearly seen in his famous butterfly signature, a symbol he used to embody himself and to which he added a stinging tail when he deemed it appropriate. as a visual sign the butterfly helped establish whistler’s brand.61 and well before the publication of his book, the gentle art of making enemies (1890), whistler promoted himself as an outré bohemian wit and an artistic underdog; in addition to other interpretations, the wolf in sheep’s clothing in the white girl should be understood to function as a concealed self-portrait. although it has not previously been noted, the face of the wolf that meets the viewer’s gaze resembles whistler, and the inclusion of an image of the artist as animal/beast aligns both with whistler’s artistic practice and his position in the art world when the painting was made. the unknown taxidermist who prepared the wolf’s head in the white girl used a mount with an open mouth, pointed white teeth, and an animated expression that makes it appear as if the wolf is laughing at a joke (perhaps the joke is on us). the wolf seems to raise its left eyebrow sightly, giving it an ironic expression that bears a striking resemblance to whistler’s own self-portraits (fig. 10). as a concealed self-portrait the wolf exemplifies arthur jerome eddy’s description that “there was nothing [whistler] loved better than to surprise, mystify, confuse, and confound.”62 the bloody-looking edge that borders the sheepskin and is similar in colour to the tongue in the wolf’s head may also be an attempt by whistler to call attention to himself as the creator of the work. sarah cohen has explored how 61 several scholars have explored whistler’s deliberate cultivation of his public persona including burns, “old maverick to old master” and slifkin, “invisible man”. 62 eddy, recollections and impressions, 47. figure 10: james mcneill whistler, arrangement in gray: portrait of the painter, c.1872, detroit institute of arts. 164 | gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing humanimalia 14.1 (2023) artists, including rembrandt and chardin, recognized a correlation between actual blood and the red paint that they used to simulate it, thus producing a visual pun.63 artists who engaged the “paintblood pun” used red paint and the animal hairs in their brushes to signal their creative and material presence to viewers of the illusionistic imagery they painted. for whistler, placing this bloody smear near his own severed and snarling animal stand-in would have acted as a forceful assertion of his presence in a work that was especially significant for him.64 in addition to branding his work with a butterfly logo and including himself as a wolf in the white girl, whistler showed himself and others in the guise of animals in several other paintings and drawings. one of the best-known examples is in the famous peacock room, now in the freer gallery in washington dc. after he and his patron, frederick leyland, argued over payment for his work, whistler painted a mural on the wall facing his princess in the land of porcelain (1863–5), titled art and money: or the story of the room (fig. 11), the mural was the first of whistler’s artistic efforts to humiliate leyland. in the painting, whistler substituted two fighting peacocks for himself and his detested patron, but he made sure the human identities of both birds would be immediately apparent: whistler is the bedraggled bird on the left who is being abused by the frilly-shirted bully of a peacock on the right, a bird obviously meant to represent leyland. in 1879, whistler produced an even more vicious attack on leyland in the gold scab: eruption in frilthy lucre (the creditor) (fig. 12), painted after the ruskin trial and whistler’s resulting bankruptcy. whistler left the gold scab in his home to be found by those sent to inventory and liquidate his possessions. in the painting, leyland, who fancied himself a musician, and to whom whistler was deeply in 63 cohen, “chardin’s fur”, 41. 64 artworks that explore this blood-paint pun include caravaggio’s beheading of saint john the baptist (1608, st. john’s cathedral, valletta, italy), rembrandt’s slaughtered ox (1655, louvre, paris), and chardin’s hare with powder flask and game bag (1728-30, louvre, paris). in a gesture that is far more explicit than the blood near the severed head of the wolf in the white girl, caravaggio signed his name in the blood that shoots from john the baptist’s severed neck. many thanks to sarah cohen for discussing this fascinating concept and these works of art with me. figure 11: james mcneill whistler, art and money: or the story of the room, peacock room, freer gallery of art, smithsonian institution, washington d. c.: gift of charles lang freer, f1904.61, 1876–77. figure 12: james mcneill whistler, the gold scab: eruption in frilthy lucre (the creditor), 1879, de young museum, san francisco. gift of mrs. alma de bretteville spreckels through the patrons of art and music. gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing | 167 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) debt, appears as a monstrous peacock playing the piano with scaly, claw-like hands while using whistler’s house as a piano bench. as he had in the peacock room, whistler mocks leyland for wearing fancy frilled shirts, but he also ridicules his musical pretentions, and characterizes him as obsessed with chinese pots. the painting employs the same colour palette as the peacock room, and whistler’s butterfly signature in the top right-hand corner has a long, barbed tail poised to strike leyland’s back. this outrageously insulting picture beautifully illustrates whistler’s use of animals to characterize and caricature humans. as a wolf in sheep’s clothing in the white girl, whistler depicts himself as a hybrid; betwixt and between, neither fully a wolf, nor entirely a sheep, he is not truly accepted by high society nor entirely outcast. whistler embodies this fractured duality in the headless sheepskin beneath hiffernan’s feet and the lively mounted wolf’s head that engages viewers. in 1867, dante gabriel rossetti wrote a limerick mocking the pugilistic aspects of whistler’s personality: there’s a combative artist named whistler who is, like his own hog-hairs, a bristler: a tube of white lead and a punch on the head offer varied attractions to whistler.65 finally, the wolf in the white girl may also be read as an oblique reference to russia and the formative years whistler spent there as a child. whistler lived with his parents in st. petersburg from 1843 to 1848, and it was at this time that he discovered his passion for art. so crucial was the time and place to him that during the ruskin 65 rossetti’s limerick references an incident in which whistler either tossed or pushed his brother-in-law, francis seymour haden, through a plate glass window in paris. following haden’s complaints, whistler was expelled from the newly formed burlington fine arts club. rossetti and others appealed for clemency to the club’s officers but were unsuccessful, and rossetti and his brother eventually resigned in protest. whistler’s correspondence includes numerous letters about the episode, which clearly bothered him. whistler’s behaviour was outrageous throughout the 1860s and it is possible that it may have been caused by lead poisoning, also known as painter’s colic, which would have been a result of his extensive use of white lead in paintings from this period. see rossetti, dante gabriel rossetti, 274. 168 | gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing humanimalia 14.1 (2023) trial, whistler stated under oath that he had been born in st. petersburg, rather than in his actual birthplace of lowell, massachusetts.66 wolves are deeply enmeshed in russian national identity and they haunt the pages of many russian texts, from folktales to great literature, including tolstoy’s war and peace. as is so often the case with wolves, they can carry positive and negative meanings, but the power of the wolf’s gaze and its effect on viewers is noted with exceptional frequency in russian literature. further, accounts of wolf hunts in russia and elsewhere often emphasize the animal’s worthiness as a foe.67 whistler believed that his life as an artist started in russia, and wolves are intrinsic to russian cultural identity, this connection may be embedded in the white girl, a painting of great personal significance for the artist. as a concealed self-portrait, the wolf’s head represents multiple aspects of this multivalent artist, from his artistic origins to his bohemian radicality and his flashy public persona. channelling positive and negative meanings, whistler as the wolf in the white girl is underdog, predator, bristler, mystifier, and more.68 the painting itself as the wolf in sheep’s clothing in the 1860s it was virtually impossible for any artist who was not financially independent to be successful outside established and traditional academic systems. as macdonald notes, whistler “was determined to make his mark and this required the exhibition of a major painting at the salon in paris and/or the royal academy in london. there was simply no alternative if he wished to become famous, and, incidentally, rich.”69 whistler had to exhibit his work in conservative institutional settings, but his paintings were as profoundly radical as his public identity, and the two were inextricably connected. according to his own misleading descriptions, the white girl was simply a painting of a woman dressed in white in a 66 gregory, world of whistler, 18. 67 wolves were frequently the subject of polarized debates about animal cruelty and noblesse oblige in nineteenth-century hunting journals. numerous examples of wolf hunts in literature and hunting journals can be found in helfant, “contested portrayal of wolves”. 68 sutherland, life for art’s sake, 77. 69 macdonald, woman in white, 11. gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing | 169 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) white interior — a standard academic exercise — and the title he first gave it, the white girl, asserted that there was nothing more to the painting. but beneath the work’s seemingly innocuous white surface, whistler embedded the beating heart and razor-sharp teeth of a wolf. the painting’s covert yet radical modernity was intended to shake the foundations of the art world from within. yet, to accomplish this, whistler needed to show the work in deeply conservative english and french academic settings. whistler was well connected and he served as a pivot point and catalyst between the art capitals of paris and london. few of his contemporaries could boast of having an equally impressive group of artist friends on both sides of the channel. for example, in 1863, whistler travelled with algernon charles swinburne to paris where he introduced swinburne to manet and had his friend baudelaire introduce him to the photographer félix nadar.70 such close connections with élite members of the avant-garde art world were not easy to establish and whistler enjoyed the social cachet they provided. in the early 1860s, whistler’s artistic circle included numerous artists who were pushing both artistic and cultural boundaries.71 influenced by the writings of théophile gautier and baudelaire, these artists immersed themselves in aesthetic ideas that valued beauty in art above morality and science. swinburne’s 1868 essay on william blake, in which he introduced the phrase “art for art’s sake”, was dedicated to william michael rossetti, who wrote that, the greatest ideas for the artist’s purpose are not those which would be greatest for the theorist, the religionist, or the historian, but ideas of beauty, character, and expression; beauty of form, colour, and action, the material beauty which lies open to perception.72 from 1859 to 1864 most of d. g. rossetti’s painting were exhibited in private clubs and venues where viewers tended to look more favourably on his experiments, and thus, he could avoid public scandal. 70 spencer, “tradition of the avant-garde”, 49. 71 grieve, “rossetti and the scandal”. 72 rossetti, fine art, 18–19. 170 | gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing humanimalia 14.1 (2023) whistler was less financially secure, but he also gravitated toward controversy. he was indeed a bristler, and he embraced the opportunity to brawl with the academy. whistler was not the only one trying to change the academy. in 1860, the royal academy was engaged in a battle to maintain control over its annual exhibition, an event that broadcast its iron grip on the english artworld. starting in the 1840s, the royal academy’s stylistic monopoly was increasingly threatened by the rising middle class and politicians capitalizing on what they saw as a resulting decline in taste; predictably, a culture war ensued. noting the small number of history paintings at the royal academy’s 1862 exhibit and the corresponding increase in genre subjects, critic tom taylor wrote sorrowfully that contemporary british art was no longer “an organ of national feeling, a channel of national sentiment, or an expression of national greatness.”73 responding to widespread complaints about royal academy exhibitions, in 1863 a parliamentary commission was established to examine the organization’s inner workings and it recommended several ways for the annual exhibition to be more appealing to, and affordable for, middle class members of victorian society. these recommendations were summarily rejected by members of the academy who asserted that works of art would be damaged by riotous crowds if they offered days that were free of charge, and they were appalled by the idea that lay members might help with art selection and hanging. according to lynda nead, the 1863 commission exposes the struggles over the control of cultural production during this period; the middle classes began to assume cultural domination […] and participation in high culture worked to define “respectability” for the industrial middle classes and to carve a common class identity from the disparate sections which made up the victorian bourgeoise.74 when the white girl was shown in paris, according to grischka petri, whistler “pointed his finger reproachfully at the royal academy in london: ‘they are not a little disgusted […] to think that the white 73 quoted in nead, myths of sexuality, 166–7. 74 nead, myths of sexuality, 168. gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing | 171 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) girl should be well received in paris after having been mistreated here!’”75 whistler had described the painting as “waging an open war with the academy”, and this was a war he wanted and needed to win.76 according to aileen tsui, “whistler made the repudiation of ordinary viewers’ understanding a deliberate aim of his artistic programme.”77 and, for whistler, the insertion of a wolf in sheep’s clothing, an overt symbolic reference to his goals for the painting itself, must have been irresistible. whistler tried to cloak the white girl’s radicality with a traditional, white, innocent veneer, and it did penetrate the fortress of high art when it was shown in the salon des refusés. once there, the true, dangerous modernity of whistler’s painting was revealed, and like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the painting shed its innocent disguise, eager to savage the academy with its slavering jaws. conclusion recognizing the presence of the wolf in sheep’s clothing in the white girl, and investigating its meaning, underlines the importance of incorporating animal studies perspectives into the history of art. as john berger wrote, “the first subject matter for painting was animal. probably the first paint was animal blood. prior to that, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the first metaphor was animal.” and if this is so, he continues, and the first metaphor was indeed animal, “it was because the essential relation between man and animal was metaphoric.”78 although they have received remarkably little attention to date, animals play essential roles in whistler’s white girl. seeing and understanding the metaphoric presence of the wolf in sheep’s clothing in the painting enriches our understanding of the sitter, the artist, and the ideas that underpin one of whistler’s most important early works. because the white girl is a painting and not a photograph, we cannot assume that the objects that appear on the canvas are “real”, but if the animals in whistler’s painting were 75 whistler to fantin, 25 may 1863, guw 08044. cf. petri, arrangement in business, 71. 76 whistler to lucas, 26 june 1862, guw 11977. 77 tsui, “the phantasm,” 449. 78 berger, why look at animals, 16. 172 | gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing humanimalia 14.1 (2023) once living beings, he chose to show them as dead and preserved. artist’s choices have meaning, and in the case of whistler’s white girl, the dead animals literally support the entire painting, yet these animals have remained virtually invisible and rarely been discussed. in addition to depicting animal bodies, whistler used animal hairs in his brushes, insects were crushed and transformed into his paint, and his canvases were primed with animal skin glues.79 the explicit and implicit materiality of animals in the painting contributes to its extraordinarily nuanced conceptual framework. in whistler’s white girl, human and nonhuman subjectivity and materiality come together to produce both a powerful metaphor and new meanings that have been waiting all this time for us to see them, hiding in plain sight, just a bit like a wolf in sheep’s clothing. 79 hackney, “art for art’s sake”, 86–87. works cited aloi, giovanni. “animal studies and art: elephants in the room.” antennae: the journal of nature in visual culture (february 2015): 1–31. aloi, giovanni. “speculative taxidermy: inscribing vulnerability.” configurations 27, no. 2 (2019): 187–209. https://doi. org/10.1353/con.2019.0012. berger, john. why look at animals? london: penguin, 2009. boyce, george price. the diaries of george price boyce. edited by virginia surtees. norwich: real world, 1980. brock, charles. “a short history of the woman in white.” in macdonald, the woman in white, 171–91. bronkhurst, judith. william holman hunt: a catalogue raisonné. new haven, ct: yale university press, 2006. burns, sarah. “old maverick to old master: whistler in the public eye in turn-ofthe-century america.” american art journal 22, no. 1 (1990): 28–49. https:// doi.org/10.2307/1594555. castagnary, jules. “salon de 1863: les refusés.” le courier du dimanche, 14 june (1863): 4–5. chesneau, ernest. l’art et les artistes modernes en france et en angleterre. paris: didier, 1864. cohen, sarah r. “chardin’s fur: painting, materialism, and the question of animal soul.” eighteenth-century studies 38, no. 1 (2004): 39–61. https://www.jstor. org/stable/30053627. colley, ann c. wild animal skins in victorian britain: zoos, collections, portraits, and maps. london: ashgate, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2019.0012 https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2019.0012 https://doi.org/10.2307/1594555 https://doi.org/10.2307/1594555 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30053627 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30053627 gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing | 173 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) desnoyers, fernand. salon des refusés: la peinture en 1863. paris: azur dutil, 1863. du maurier, george. the young george du maurier. a selection of his letters, 1860–67. edited by daphne du maurier. london: peter davies, 1951. eddy, arthur jerome. recollections and impressions of james a. mcneill whistler. philadelphia: j.b. lippincott, 1903. fried, michael. manet’s modernism, or, the face of painting in the 1860s. chicago: university of chicago press: 1996. gregory, horace. the world of james mcneill whistler. new york: thomas nelson and sons, 1959. grieve, alastair. “rossetti and the scandal of art for art’s sake in the early 1860s.” in prettejohn, after the pre-raphaelites, 17–35. hackney, stephen. “art for art’s sake: the materials and techniques of james mcneill whistler (1834–1903).” in historical painting techniques, materials, and studio practices, edited by arie wallert, erma hermens, and marja peek, 186–90. los angeles, ca: getty trust, 1995. hamerton, philip gilbert. “the salon of 1863.” fine arts quarterly review 1 (1863): 259–60. harvey, jacky colliss. red: a history of the redhead. new york: blackdog and leventhal, 2015. helfant, ian m. “the contested portrayal of wolves in nineteenth-century russia.” in other animals: beyond the human in russian culture and history, edited by jane costlow and amy nelson, 63–76. pittsburgh, pa: university of pittsburgh press, 2010. ingram, john. flora symbolica, or the language and sentiment of flowers. london: fredrick warne and co., 1869. krell, alan. “manet’s déjeuner sur l’herbe in the salon des refusés: a re-appraisal.” the art bulletin, 65, no. 2 (1983): 316–20. https://doi.org/10.2307/3050326. lochnan, katharine and carol jacobi. holman hunt and the pre-raphaelite vision. new haven, ct: yale university press, 2008. macdonald, margaret f., ed. the woman in white: joanna hiffernan and james mcneill whistler. washington, dc: national gallery of art; london: royal academy of arts; new haven, ct: yale university press, 2020. macdonald, margaret f., patricia de montfort, and nigel thorp, eds. the correspondence of james mcneill whistler, 1855–1903. including the correspondence of anna mcneill whistler, 1855–1880, edited by georgia toutziari. on-line edition. the university of glasgow, 2003–2010. https://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/ correspondence/. macdonald, margaret f., and grischka petri. the paintings of james mcneill whistler: a catalogue raisonné. university of glasgow, 2020. http:// whistlerpaintings.gla.ac.uk. mantz, paul. “salon de 1863.” gazette des beaux-arts no. 15 (1863): 32–64. marvin, garry. “perpetuating polar bears: the cultural life of dead animals.” in nanoq: flatout and bluesome, edited by bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir and mark wilson, 156–65. spike island: blackdog publishing, 2006. meacock, joanna. “whistler and scriptural persuasion.” the british art journal 8, no. 3 (2007): 24–30. https://www.jstor. org/stable/41614771. miller, james. prostitution considered in relation to its cause and cure. edinburgh: sutherland and knox, 1858. moriceau, jean-marc. “the wolf threat in france from the middle ages to the twentieth century.” hal science (2014). https://hal.science/hal-01011915. nead, lynda. myths of sexuality: representations of women in victorian britain. oxford: blackwell, 1988. https://doi.org/10.2307/3050326 https://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/ https://www.whistler.arts.gla.ac.uk/correspondence/ http://whistlerpaintings.gla.ac.uk http://whistlerpaintings.gla.ac.uk https://www.jstor.org/stable/41614771 https://www.jstor.org/stable/41614771 https://hal.science/hal-01011915 174 | gelfand, a wolf in sheep’s clothing humanimalia 14.1 (2023) o’regan, hannah j. “menageries and bearskin caps: experiencing north american bears in postmedieval britain.” in bears: archeological and ethnohistorical perspectives in native eastern north america, edited by heather a. lapham and gregory a. waselkov, 256–70. gainesville: university of florida press, 2020. petri, grischka. arrangement in business: the art markets and the career of james mcneill whistler. hildesheim: olms, 2011. prettejohn, elizabeth, ed. after the preraphaelites: art and aestheticism in victorian england. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, 1999. prettejohn, elizabeth. “walter pater and aesthetic painting.” in prettejohn, after the pre-raphaelites, 36–58. robertson, walford graham. life was worth living: the reminiscences of w. graham robertson. new york: harper and brothers, 1931. rossetti, william michael. fine art, chiefly contemporary: notices re-printed with revisions. london: macmillan, 1867. rossetti, william michael, ed. the works of dante gabriel rossetti. london: ellis and scrutton, 1911. slifkin, robert. “james whistler as the invisible man: anti-aestheticism and artistic vision.” oxford art journal 29, no. 1 (2006): 53–75. https://doi. org/10.1093/oxartj/kci049. spencer, robin. “whistler’s ‘the white girl’: painting, poetry and meaning.” the burlington magazine 140, no. 1142 (may 1998): 300–11. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/887886. spencer, robin. “whistler, manet, and the tradition of the avant-garde.” studies in the history of art 19 (1987): 47–64. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42618020. sutherland, daniel e. whistler: a life for art’s sake. new haven, ct: yale university press, 2014. sutherland, daniel e., and georgia toutziari. whistler’s mother: portrait of an extraordinary life. new haven, ct: yale university press, 2018. tabarant, adolphe. manet et ses œuvres. paris: gallimard, 1947. tabarant, adolphe. manet. histoire catalographique. paris: éditions montaigne, 1931. torchia, robert wilson, with deborah chotner and ellen g. miles. american paintings of the nineteenth century, part ii. the collections of the national gallery of art: systematic catalogue. new york: oxford university press, 1998. tsui, aileen. “the phantasm of aesthetic autonomy in whistler’s work: titling the white girl.” art history 29, no. 3 (2006): 444–75. https://doi.org/10.1111/ j.1467-8365.2006.00509.x. viel-castel, horace de. “salon de 1863.” la france (21 may, 1863). whistler, james mcneill. the gentle art of making enemies. london: william heinemann, 1890. wilson-bareau, juliet. “the salon des refusés of 1863: a new view.” the burlington magazine, 149, no. 1250 (may 2007): 309–19. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/20074825. worboys, michael, julie-marie strange, and neil pemberton. the invention of the modern dog: breed and blood in victorian britain. baltimore, md: johns hopkins press, 2018. young, andrew mclaren, margaret macdonald, robin spencer, and hamish miles. the paintings of james mcneill whistler. 2 vols. new haven, ct: yale university press, 1980. zola, émile. œuvres complètes, vol. 5. edited by henri mitterand. paris: cercle du livre précieux, 1967. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kci049 https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/kci049 https://www.jstor.org/stable/887886 https://www.jstor.org/stable/887886 https://www.jstor.org/stable/42618020 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2006.00509.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8365.2006.00509.x https://www.jstor.org/stable/20074825 https://www.jstor.org/stable/20074825 willekes, review of bell et al. galloping through culture: horse racing and global history carolyn willekes review of: sinclair w. bell, christian jaser and christian mann, eds., the running centaur: horse-racing in global-historical perspective. sport in the global society: historical perspectives. london: routledge, 2022. 216 pp. £130 (hb). carolyn willekes is an assistant professor in the department of general education at mount royal university, calgary, alberta, canada. email: cwillekes@mtroyal.ca book review mailto:cwillekes@mtroyal.ca the horse is an animal that has influenced human society and history in myriad ways, and its social, cultural, and economic significance whether as wild, feral, or domestic species has long been recognized across academic disciplines. this is evidenced by the wide-ranging wealth of publications that explore different aspects of the horse–human relationship over a chronological span that stretches from prehistory to the present day. one of the primary roles that the domestic horse has fulfilled in the human sphere is that of an athlete. equestrian competition can take many different forms, but one of the most universal genres of horse sport is racing. the running centaur: horse-racing in global-historical perspective seeks to investigate the importance of the horse through the lens of horse racing in a global context as a way of highlighting cross cultural and chronological connections. the contributors do this by focusing on the historical significance of the racehorse, examining the many social, cultural, political, and economic elements connected to racing. this creates a common theme: the degree to which equestrian sport can be woven into the social fabric and cultural ethos of diverse societies. this volume succeeds admirably in this endeavour as its authors explore the concept and purpose of horse racing over a period of several millennia presenting readers with a scope that spans cultures and continents. this allows the authors to use the horse as a sort of touchstone within seemingly disparate cultures and periods. the volume begins in ancient greece and ends with indigenous north american tribes in the twenty-first century. with racing as a foundation, the authors successfully produce a cohesive thread by situating each chapter within a specific set of questions and topics outlined by the editors in the introduction. authors were asked to consider the spatial and architectural framework of racing spaces, race organization, prizes, symbolic representation, and social range and identities. thus, although the volume covers a wide range of cultural and historical contexts, as well as diverse forms of horse racing, the concept of the race horse and its importance to society serves to connect each chapter back to a common purpose. copyright © 2023 carolyn willekes this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 195–203. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13627 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13627 willekes, review of bell et al. | 197 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) in the first chapter, christian mann and sebastian scharff explore the significance of horse racing within the context of the greek agones (competitions), and the connection to aspects of ancient greek identity and social structures. the authors provide an overview of the different forms of athletic festivals and the horse racing events connected to them, as well as the role of the athletic festival in greek society, including its religious significance. we are reminded that participation in these events was a marker of status, and “victories in horse or chariot races were considered a sign of wealth and power and fostered the legitimation of monarchs, and they could also be used by politicians in democracies” (11). of note are the sections focusing of the social significance of equestrian victories in terms of establishing authority, legitimacy, and power for the wealthy owners of the victorious racehorses, and how this was celebrated and propagated through monuments, poems, and coinage in a manner which highlights the broader significance of horse racing in the power and political structures of the greek world, a theme we will see repeated throughout the following chapters. sinclair bell then presents a clear and succinct analysis of chariot racing in imperial rome. his chapter builds on several of the concepts explored by mann and scharff by showing how horse racing can shift from a means of obtaining personal glory and honour to a phenomenon that became central to the very heart of urban spectacle in the roman world. indeed, horse racing here becomes understood as a key component of “roman-ness”; chariot racing became a fundamental part of social identity and belonging in roman society — a factor further emphasized, as bell points out, by the collective identities held by fans of each racing faction. bell explains the ins and outs of the racing factions and the logistics of the races in a manner that makes it clear that these races were more than pure entertainment. race events contributed to the complex relationship between spectators, charioteers, race horses, and the emperor in a manner that placed the circus at the heart of roman society, for “they were events that could play a highly significant role in the way the romans at all levels of society structured their private experiences, both inside and outside the arena” (53). humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 198 | willekes, review of bell et al. david alan parnell’s chapter on chariot racing in byzantium does a wonderful job of showing the legacy of roman chariot racing as it transitioned onto the context of christian byzantium. central to its significance was its role in building and maintaining the relationship between the emperor and the crowd. parnell focuses on the spatial location of urban hippodromes and the expectation that the emperor himself be physically present during the races in constantinople. parnell suggests that “the emperors regarded chariot racing and the opportunity to be with the spectators at chariot races to be of considerable importance to the legitimacy and stability of their reigns” (81). in other words, the hippodrome was a venue where the people expected to have access to the emperor to make their requests and demands known. it served as a site of political and religious reform, as well as violent suppression as emperors sought to obtain or maintain authority via the social significance of horse racing as a long-established form of public entertainment. the running centaur’s fourth chapter remains situated in the environs of constantinople/istanbul as tülay artan looks at the role of horse racing within the context of the ottoman court. here we are reminded that horse racing can take many different forms, as we move from the hippodrome to the open countryside, where the ottoman elite engaged in long-distance races across country. this may reflect earlier nomadic traditions, and indeed, this is a topic that it would be useful to have further discussion around as it would situate this style of racing within the cultural context a bit more firmly. artan builds links with the previous two chapters by considering the changing role of the hippodrome itself. on the one hand it still served as a means of making the sultan visible and creating dynastic legitimacy, but this was no longer accomplished through the medium of racing; instead, the races moved to kâğıthane, outside the city. artan highlights the responses to the races by ottoman and european chroniclers, suggesting that they reflect differing cultural structures and perceptions. a shift to shorter-distance track racing occurs in the 1720s, moving horse racing into the public sphere, and “by the late nineteenth century horse racing had become a fully public entertainment in istanbul” (109). this shift is notable, and it would willekes, review of bell et al. | 199 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) be useful to have further discussion around why it happened — were there particular social, cultural, or political forces that caused the change in format? christian jaser’s chapter transports us back to an urban sphere through a comparative study of italian palio and german scharlach races. this fascinating study highlights the degree to which seemingly similar forms of racing could differ in nuanced ways due to geographical location and social hierarchies. jaser outlines some commonalities between these races in terms of logistics and audience. in both cases, the races drew large number of spectators from across the social spectrum and they came to serve as a meeting point between the elites and non-elites. although there were no restrictions regarding status in terms of participation competitive racehorses were expensive, a fact that is particularly evident in the sphere of the palio races. this is where jaser notes the primary difference between the two races: the less lucrative scharlach races resulted in a short-term commemoration of victory, rather than an enduring statement. jaser posits that this may be due to the range of participants who came from different economic classes whereas the palio races were the prerogative of a racing elite creating an environment dominated by princes and signori with horses bred specifically for this purpose. in this setting horses became an extension of their owners, and the commemoration of victory served as a form of powerful propaganda, echoing elements of ancient greek racing. there is a lot of fascinating comparative material in this chapter, but the details skew more towards the palio races, in part because of the available source material. to balance this out, it would have been helpful for the author to explain why these two racing traditions were being compared, given the conclusion that these two forms of races developed in “rather unconnected parallel worlds” (126) as there is perhaps something interesting in the parallel but unrelated development. in chapter six isabelle schürch examines equestrianism and equestrian contests in new spain. this chapter situates racing within the broader context of competitive equestrianism, with a particular humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 200 | willekes, review of bell et al. focus on the period of spanish transatlantic expansion from the 1490s–1600s. schürch provides an excellent overview of equestrian performance traditions in spain, detailing their influence on spanish identity both through connections to broader medieval practices. schürch also discusses autochthonous iberian events that were used “by local elites to display their skills, competence, and power, and to re-enact their social group’s meritorious service during the so-called reconquista” (136). schürch thus suggests that equestrians reimagined mounted combat within the confines of spectacle rather than the battlefield. one of these competitions, the juegos de cañas, was brought across the atlantic and appears in narratives of the early conquest. here this martial game was enacted within the sphere of conquest rather than urban spectacle, taking on a new meaning within the context of conquistador society and social identity. although these were not horse races in the traditional sense, speed, agility, and endurance were traits important to the game, and to mounted combat in general, as schürch explains. thus, although formalized racing was not a primary equestrian concern for spanish or new spanish identity during this period, we are nonetheless presented with themes that reflect earlier chapters, namely the role of equestrian competition in creating collective identities and transmitting cultural beliefs and practices. this chapter provides some thoughtful perspectives, but a more detailed discussion around the absence of formalized racing practices reflective of established and developing group identities would add a further link to the broader focus of this volume. the next chapter brings us to a country deeply connected to modern racing: england. richard nash argues that the racetrack, organizations, and particular racing meets came to play an important role in politics and kingmaking during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. moreover, nash suggests that the jockey club did more than manage and organize races, they also played an important role in the politics of church and state during the protestant–catholic conflict of the period and its connected issues of succession. during this period of unrest horse racing emerges “not merely as a witness to history, but as an integral feature of political performance” (150). willekes, review of bell et al. | 201 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) as we have seen in previous chapters, racing becomes a venue for legitimization, power, authority, and status within a particular cultural context. here, the establishment of race meets and racing organizations reflected political preferences and support of whig or tory platforms, as well as an opportunity for active political campaigning. this is a well-argued chapter that shows the importance of horse racing as a reflection of, and propaganda tool for, the religious, political, and cultural views of different segments of society. christiane eisenberg then looks at connections between the financial world and racing, focusing in particular on the relationship between spending, investments, and racing during the english financial revolution on the heels of the glorious revolution of 1688. eisenberg neatly outlines the key details that created significant financial changes during this period, which in turn created an influx of physical cash in the hands of britons who were looking for ways to spend it within the context of a market in which consumer goods were few and far between. as a result, there was a rise in gambling, betting, and different forms of investment, which in turn shaped ideas around social status and hierarchies. eisenburg points out several similarities between the betting/wagering culture that emerged in this period, particularly in relation to horse racing, and the ways in which this transferred to the evolving financial market, for “gambling on horse racing was highly suited to make actors on the financial markets more willing to take risks” (173). the actions and innovations of one market could have consequences on the other, which ultimately pushed parliament and the crown to introduce disciplinary measures to control their influence and reach, including the horse races act of 1739 which sought to control the number of racing venues and races held by passing requirements and restrictions around prize money and admission fees. eisenberg’s short but detailed chapter makes a valuable contribution to this volume by reminding readers that the connections between racing and socio-political structures were not limited to the racetrack itself. in the final chapter, peter mitchell explores the cultural context of horse racing amongst the indigenous tribes of north america. humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 202 | willekes, review of bell et al. mitchell focuses the study on the regions of the great plains and the southwest in what he calls an “initial step toward exploring indigenous horse racing practices not only in north america but also in other parts of the world to which horses were (re-)introduced as a consequence of the so-called ‘columbian exchange’” (182–183). mitchell looks at the significance of horse racing within the context of indigenous gaming practices and traditions, building a strong argument about the significance of racing within the parameters of “sacred play” and its connections to ritual and ceremony. mitchell provides a succinct summary of racing logistics before then moving on to discuss key features that differentiated north american indigenous racing practices from those of nineteenth-century euro-american racing; namely the use of magic, witchcraft, traditional medicine, and rituals to influence horses and the outcomes of races. here we see some fascinating connections to the use of defixiones (curse tablets) used in the roman circus as discussed by bell (45), and the use of plant and other formulas to improve the abilities of italian and german racehorses as discussed by jaser (124). mitchell makes a strong argument for horse racing as an integral part of cultural identity amongst the tribes of the great plains and southwest. he examines the ways by which attempts were made to suppress racing by colonial governments and powers, and further, he reveals how racing traditions nonetheless endured and persisted into the twenty-first century through indigenous rodeos and the indian relay. in sum, mitchell’s excellent chapter connects indigenous practices to the broader global tradition explored throughout this volume by articulating a clear and comprehensive analysis of horse racing as a central feature of social and political concerns through its function as an expression of values, beliefs, and structures. this volume is a valuable contribution to the fields of equine history and sporting history. the chapters are both informative and accessible to specialists and non-specialists. the cohesion between the chapters does a wonderful job of highlighting why studying human–animal interactions is so valuable to interdisciplinary and cross-cultural research; the figure and histories of the horse willekes, review of bell et al. | 203 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) provide an important link across a range of regions and traditions. the running centaur presents readers with a detailed and wide-ranging analysis of horse racing and its historical significance. it also provides a strong base for further scholarship in this field to pursue the study of horse races and race horses in other cultural contexts, such as the history of racing practices in horse-centric regions like central asia and mongolia. in sum, this volume is a valuable contribution to the field of animal studies as it encourages scholars to consider the significance of human–animal relationships within a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary scope as a means of developing far reaching and significant connections that allow us to consider the ways in which animal history can further our knowledge of cultural traditions and societal structures. snæbjörnsdóttir/wilson passing captive still passing – captive – still (rare breed birds) snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson humanimalia 14.2 (spring 2024) abstract: the images in passing captive still depict humans together with birds in cages, their respective presence conjoined at eye-level. in this series, both human actors and the birds themselves are, in every case, seen through the cage bars suggesting a subversive, equalizing narrative. the strategic, pictorial conflation produces an uncanniness, which is both quaint and unsettling. as far as the images themselves are to be believed, both species are apparently “imprisoned” in the pictorial space. in order further to upset what might be the expected power balance of the auction house and event, the various bird individuals, pairs or groupings, appear always in front of the human actors, thereby privileging them within that space. an objective, reflective and contextualizing commentary is interspersed alternately with a subjective view, apparently from the position of those held captive against their will. keywords: contemporary art; othering; captive birds; interspecies; interspecific gaze; anthropocentrism bio: bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir and mark wilson are a collaborative art partnership. their interdisciplinary art practice explores issues of history, culture and environment in human and more-than-human relations. working very often in close consultation with experts and amateurs in the field, their work tests cultural constructs and tropes, and human behaviour in respect of ecologies, site, extinction, conservation, and the environment. underpinning much of their practice are issues of psychological and physical displacement and realignment in respect of land and environment and the effect of these positions on cultural perspectives. their artworks have been exhibited throughout the uk and internationally and they are frequent speakers at international conferences on issues related to their practice. their works have been widely discussed in texts across many disciplinary fields and regularly cited as contributing to knowledge in the expanded field of research-based art practice. www.snaebjornsdottirwilson.com bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir (phd) is professor of fine art at the iceland university of the arts, reykjavík. mark wilson (phd) is professor in fine art at the institute of the arts, university of cumbria, uk. email: bryndis@btinternet.com – mark.wilson@cumbria.ac.uk copyright © 2024 bryndís snæbjörnsdóttir and mark wilson this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 1–22. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.16066 http://www.snaebjornsdottirwilson.com mailto:bryndis@btinternet.com mailto:mark.wilson@cumbria.ac.uk http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.16066 snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still | 3 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) but if i were a bird a series of photographs by the artists, taken in the early 2000s at an auction of “rare breed” domestic birds. in all, there are over forty images, from which this is a selection. 4 | snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still humanimalia 14.2 (2024) foreword between 2004 and 2011 the artists lived in the country, in a house surrounded by farmland. this being the case, they took an interest in the relationship between farmers and their farmed animals and one aspect of this exploration involved occasionally attending the local livestock mart where the photographs in the accompanying photo essay were taken. at this time, as keepers of a large tract of land including a river meadow, we looked after hens, ducks, and geese ourselves. the chickens were a mix of breeds, some of which we had “rescued”, and amongst them was a cockerel. before too long, inevitably, he found himself with rivals, which resulted in fights breaking out amongst them. a decision was taken to auction two of them, each with a couple of hens. one trio sold but the other didn’t. we attempted to take the unsold cockerel and his hens back a second time, but on being pushed into the cage he protested, broke free, and ran away as far as he could, down onto the meadow, only to return to join the others that same evening. it was clear to us that he had not wanted a repeat of the auction house experience. we understood this and chose to let him stay. before long, things reached an equilibrium of sorts, but at the time, we had wondered about his experience and indeed, what he might have been thinking. this photo essay in which we attempt to consider the position of the birds, is in memory of our feisty cockerel. snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still | 5 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) passing — captive — still depicts humans together with birds in cages, their respective presence conjoined at eye level. in this series, both human actors and the birds themselves are, in every case, seen through the cage bars suggesting a subversive, equalizing narrative. the strategic, pictorial conflation produces an uncanniness, which is both quaint and unsettling. as far as the images themselves are to be believed, both species are apparently “imprisoned” in the pictorial space. in order further to upset what might be the expected power balance of the auction house and event, the various bird individuals, pairs, or groupings, appear always in front of the human actors, thereby privileging them within that space. 6 | snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still humanimalia 14.2 (2024) but how is it i am here at all? there’s movement all around me, yet, for now, i am still — motionless. i watch — and i see. there are other eyes too — bright, alert eyes scanning me and others in the room. some are hiding. some are sleeping. some strut their floors and some pass by — some inside and some not — and yet, within this circus, all aresomehow inside. snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still | 7 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) in still photography, the absence of sound can be deafening, or suffocating — it may also, as we believe is the case in these images, serve to deepen the conflation of the respective agents within this environmental relationship — where considerable audible chaos may be imagined, the sonic peace which is a quality of a photograph, instead becomes the oxygen, or lack thereof, that feeds a newly-offered appraisal of the auction mart, its capitalist, agrarian assumptions and associated oppressive and suffering behaviours. 8 | snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still humanimalia 14.2 (2024) it is a cacophony. the sound surrounds me and seems to come both from nowhere and from everywhere at once. we are the prisoners of noise. and yet if i call out — perhaps i might escape. once summoned (once i find my voice), my call extends beyond the bars, flying freely in the air to join the babble of all other voices in the hall — the chattering, the shrieks, the grumbling and shrill — recalcitrant, defiant — the coos of admiration and contempt. we are all obliged to speak out sooner or later — if only in some way, to occupy and claim the space as ours. snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still | 9 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the photographs were necessarily candid, taken discreetly, so as not to affect the behaviour of the human attendees. this means that across this narrow depth of field, the focus moves appropriately between birds, bars, and humans and on occasion will indiscriminately snag all, or none in particular — in this, we can say that the camera too played its part in precisely shaping the narrative architecture and choreography of the space. 10 | snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still humanimalia 14.2 (2024) having been here for a while now — i have the sense, i sense strongly — that something else is afoot. we are the ones upon whom extra value is bestowed — as possessions, as decoration, whim, or fancy. bargaining chips or not, some things for us are soon to change. we are fewer now; the din diminishes, though distant voices seem to shout. still, we who remain will watch and wait — this is the antechamber. the main event’s not here. snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still | 11 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) that this is a theatre is beyond question. but more, it is a room (and a building) full of theatres. each little stage here invites the gaze of onlookers, detached, disinterested, the passers-by, whose attention may be caught. each plot is a sub-plot of the whole. and so we too are implicated, trapped in time with these subjugated players, within this apparent equilibrium. the photograph is a “putting intocontext”, a placing that makes perpetual drama from a fleeting, interspecific intersection. and what does that drama reveal — a tumultuous truth, or some dubious contrivance? are these snapshots of circumstance, the consequences of which would otherwise pass unnoticed? do these multiple, momentary plays provide a secret window on a long forgotten, buried world, where species came to know each other once, and in that moment, humans drafted rules of dominance and submission, subservience, and use, as their adopted behaviours for eternity? 12 | snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still humanimalia 14.2 (2024) time drags as we wait. the group next door was taken out just now — whisked away and disappeared, protesting. somewhere out of sight, the human clamour ebbs and flows. one voice above the rest — a drone, that threads its way back along these emptying rows, this mesh, these bars and metal walls — a hollow, empty monotone, rises from a growl, through mid-toned, tight, percussive beats to high crescendo — to stop and start again… snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still | 13 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) the perennial spectacle of animal display. in other contexts of cultural and purportedly educational presentations within museums and zoos, artists jaschinski, billingham, sugimoto, berger, and dion, observe and make their subversive pitches, but here, the questions languish at the intersection of animal life and human trade. we create a fulcrum, on which we balance two parallel species who eye each other’s moves, we presume, from radically different perspectives. 14 | snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still humanimalia 14.2 (2024) once, and elsewhere still, we birds, like dogs, were made to fight. a ring was drawn, around which all onlookers would gather, weighing odds and placing bets, and once the skirmishing began, would murmur, shout and scream — in their insistence that we should kill or else be killed. now this spectacle again — the circus of desire and danger, decadence and the witnessing of death — the bullfight, the gladiatorial contest, the stonings — the barrel and the fish. snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still | 15 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) in this framing, where according to pictorial rules at least, the power relationship is ambiguously suspended and a fantasy made possible, in which the birds seem to possess an unruffled composure, a calmness and clear-eyed vigilance which in wit, appears entirely to eclipse their disparate and clearly unwitting human inspectors. the birds, alert, take notice and unlike the humans, in many cases seem to look both ways, to their prospective claimants and to the camera — and in doing so, command the field. 16 | snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still humanimalia 14.2 (2024) somehow, suddenly, just now — there was a break. a rupture in the skin, where one world burst, gushing impolitely and noisily into the other. antibodies rushed to stem and neutralize the breach. it wasn’t pretty — more of a farce. i noticed how differently from each other we move, and how this difference gives our weaknesses away. both parties came to be unhinged — the chaos grew, the wall collapsed — the narrative went rogue. yet this interruption was significant — a giveaway and existentially at least, the tell-tale break. things crop up. events demand response — and order, once disturbed, provokes us all to act in ways which are exceptional, undignified, disorderly. in revolution though, all lies in settled dust. snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still | 17 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) from the 2021 berlin exhibition on belonging by the finnish, new york-based artist terike haapoja, the multi-screen video installation reveals a sequence of animal enclosures at the bronx zoo. each space is filmed through protective glass and the environments beyond, though predominately green, appear lifeless, grim and barren. glimpses of animals are caught as they intersect with the transient, ghost-like reflections of their human visitors. the melancholic soundtrack weaves electronic drones with classical, orchestral lyricism — significantly broken only once, around midway, by the sudden and protracted screams of two lemurs. 18 | snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still humanimalia 14.2 (2024) and what are you doing here? do you trap me once again? not only are we caught, entangled in a dance, where one believes is free and one ensnared — and neither knows the limit of their choice. but you perch on a margin, believing this to be, from simple means, a sign, corrosive in effect, and nonetheless, a rent, through which another world is glimpsed, where no single one of us is less than one. so hold me in this chink of light, examine me, imagine me — consider what i feel. am i bemused, or intrigued — do i seem deep in thought, my feathers ruffled, or at ease — am i locked in conversation, bound to act, this way or that — does my heart beat faster? am i perturbed — or still, at rest amidst the din? snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still | 19 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) in on belonging, haapoja too explores the nature and ethical implications of the spectacle of the other and along with the essay which supplements the exhibition, uses it to tease out ideas of social power and vulnerability, of inclusion and exclusion more generally. one of the three films in the three-channel installation concludes with a direct confrontation between free (albeit shepherded) human wonder and enforced nonhuman passivity. a young girl’s clear reflection in the glass, superimposes the corresponding figure of a gorilla in the space beyond, in seated, blank repose. the child functions as a surrogate for our relational questioning — not least, on matters of our perceptions of interspecific consciousness — before then being gently, but firmly steered from the frame by her guardian, leaving such questions, unsettlingly to reverberate. 20 | snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still humanimalia 14.2 (2024) i’m not here; i am most certainly gone. so many here departed now are trapped within these stolen tableaux. how many knew, how many others not? it is a glitch — an anomaly, an itch and scratch on the skin of an ancient cycle — bringing significance to the insignificant, where one significance speaks for all time and for all who live. it is nothing remarkable, but a trading place of choice and denial. it is remarkable in every way — my will — in unfair exchange for yours. snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still | 21 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) often, much more often than occasionally i think, we become aware of noise only at the very moment such noise ceases. deaf as we are to the screech-wall of roosting starlings who have gathered in trees beyond the window, over an indeterminate period, with our focus held elsewhere — was it twenty minutes, an hour perhaps, or more? — at the instant they cease as one to chatter, a flurry of a thousand free wings announces both their previous clamour and the sonic rupture of their sudden departure. 22 | snæbjörnsdóttir / wilson , passing – captive – still humanimalia 14.2 (2024) this anomaly tells us far more about how unconscious familiarity stealthily accrues and how our assimilation of structure, of our rhythmic surroundings, sonic or otherwise, is a constantly accreting process — shaping us, minute by minute, in ways beyond our conscious register. by this means, power and suffering are customarily imposed, inflicted and perpetuated, all too often far below the horizon of our questioning. if these birds are gone, what is this space, but a receptacle of memory — of colour, of motion, repose, and sound? this metal shed, where birds and others all come and go — placed temporarily in stalls and cages, haltered up or held and led to the adjoining mart, paraded, sold, and bought and trailed away... this space now holds itself accountable — a long, imaginary echo of repeated, unspeakable, imbalanced transaction — a ledger of intolerable acquisition and unthought, unregistered loss. rutledge-prior, review of mummery and rodan how to win multispecies friends and influence anthropocentric people serrin rutledge-prior review of: jane mummery and debbie rodan, imagining new human–animal futures in australia. australian studies: interdisciplinary perspectives 5. oxford: peter lang, 2022. xiv, 348pp., 14 colour illus., us$82.95 (hb) serrin rutledge-prior is a research fellow at the australian national university’s crawford school of public policy. email: serrin.rutledge-prior@ anu.edu.au book review in the not unlikely event that you, reading this review, are not australian, you may well be wondering how much relevance a book on narratives surrounding animals in australia has for you. at best, you’re thinking — and i know this is what you’re thinking, because upon learning that i am australian, this is always what non-australians ask me about — the book will offer thrilling accounts of the various sharp-toothed and venomous creatures down under that delight in preying upon hapless tourists. or perhaps the book will explore views on iconic marsupial species — a safe bet, given a statue of one, the kangaroo, features on the book’s cover. if this is the case, then the book may be an amusing read but perhaps one whose subject matter is somewhat removed from the experiences of non-australians. while i can confirm that the book does feature sharks and “salties” (saltwater crocodiles), kangaroos and koalas, and more besides, the uniqueness of australia’s animal population does not render the value of book’s analysis unique to australia. indeed, it is somewhat ironic, given the number of endemic species in australia and how these animals are used to promote the australian “brand”, that the country’s views on animals are not more distinctively progressive — if only to ensure the long-term viability of the eco-tourist dollar. instead, as imagining new human–animal futures in australia shows, mainstream narratives towards animals in australia are underpinned by an ideological framework that is shared all-too-commonly around the world: anthropocentrism. the book’s purpose, then, is to make explicit the anthropocentric narratives that surround animals in australia. throughout, mummery and rodan explore how these narratives are being challenged with alternatives that focus on the sentience of other animals, and provide examples of where the latter are already emerging in australian society: in the work of activists, in film and television, and even in local policy. the first chapter outlines the concept of the “imaginary”, which is used to frame the subsequent analysis. as the authors suggest, an imaginary is an amalgamation of the views, understandings, and norms, that a group has about the world around them. furthermore, in shaping the way that people see their place in, and interactions with, the world copyright © 2023 serrin rutledge-prior this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 2 (2023): 247–252. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13776 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13776 rutledge-prior, review of mummery and rodan | 249 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) around them, an imaginary “makes that world” (5). the importance of the social imaginary when thinking about human–animal relationships is that it “provides the background legitimacy for any given society’s daily routines and social repertoires” (4). understanding the nature of the imaginaries that influence our view of the world, then, is vital if we want to challenge the norms that shape our relationships with animals; it allows us to see that our use and abuse of animals is not inevitable. another important feature of the book’s analysis which is introduced in this chapter is its engagement with ideas from australian first nations peoples in relation to animals and “country”.1 over the course of the book, these ideas offer a compelling alternative to the anthropocentric, western narratives that underpin mainstream australian society, and are an indication of the increasing (and for all too long, denied) importance that is being accorded to indigenous perspectives. no doubt aware of a history of cultural exploitation of indigenous cultures, the authors are also careful to acknowledge that, as scholars without first nations heritage themselves, they are only and necessarily scratching at the surface of the indigenous ontologies that they describe (11). after setting the conceptual groundwork, the book considers five prominent spaces in australia where we can see contested animal narratives. chapters two and three, which look at the “livestock” industry and meat-eating respectively, introduce the concept of “sentience”, and how its recognition can serve as an antidote to anthropocentric narratives. the chapter highlights this point, for example, with reference to australia’s live export scandals of the 2010s, which were catalysed by the release of undercover footage that revealed cruel and systemic treatment of the sheep and cows in this industry. with australians around the country responding so viscerally to the sight of their pain, we were reminded of the essential similarities that we share with them. chapter four considers how human–animal relationships are presented on screen, with an analysis of australian films and television programs like skippy the bush kangaroo, red dog, and penguin bloom. this chapter, with its heart-warming insights on the nature 1 “welcome to country”, australian institute of aboriginal and torres strait islander studies (2022), https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/welcome-country https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/welcome-country humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 250 | rutledge-prior, review of mummery and rodan of friendship, is particularly valuable; it is a reminder that we can all make a difference in the lives of other animals (and vice versa) by cultivating truly respectful, “other-regarding” relationships with them. the fifth chapter, which looks at those animals who are “neither food nor friend”, is also particularly insightful. its focus on the stories we tell about “pest” and “feral” animals reveals how framing certain animals (including certain native animals, whose ancestors were living in australia tens of thousands of years before european colonization!) serves a useful purpose in blame-shifting. rather than addressing our own exploitation of the land, we can point to them when ecological “imbalances” occur. having lived in the australian capital, canberra, for several years, where local nature reserves are closed off annually for kangaroo “culls”, i find this blame-shifting all too familiar; the problem is not that we have taken their lands and fragmented what’s left, it is that they are “overpopulated” and need to be “managed”. chapter six moves further into considerations of ecological stewardship by addressing australia’s management of the great barrier reef, an immense “multitude of interlinked ecological communities” (212) that has immense cultural and economic value for australians. given the threat that climate change poses to the reef — a threat that is rendered visible by mass coral bleaching events — it offers us a sobering example of how changing our relationships with animals cannot happen in isolation. we must also change our relationship to the environments which sustain us all. mummery and rodan draw together the threads of the preceding five chapters in the book’s final chapter, which provides an account of how anthropocentric narratives can be challenged and, perhaps eventually, replaced. the directives that the book offers are ostensibly simple: we must share our spaces and facilities with other animals; we must care about other animals beyond their usefulness to us; we must develop interspecies solidarity as a commitment to making political change for animals; and we must cultivate understanding of the needs and preferences of other animals, and how they communicate these things to us. in this way, we might be able to reshape the social imaginaries that we live in, and therefore shift rutledge-prior, review of mummery and rodan | 251 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) the norms that guide our relationships with animals. simple directives yes, but they are by no means easy to implement. this is where the backdrop of multispecies community design that the authors also propose is crucial. while it may be difficult for many of us as individuals to maintain attitudes of sharing, caring, solidarity and understanding — especially those of us without particular commitments to animals — if we are encouraged as a community to change our attitudes in these way via policies that foreground animals’ interests, then this may, in turn, promote the desired attitudes. say we commit to a policy of actively sharing our spaces with, and making structural accommodations for, kangaroos and currawongs, blue heeler dogs and blue-tongued lizards, great white sharks and white-tailed spiders; with multispecies spaces the norm, it becomes easier for us to care about, understand, and feel solidarity with, other animals as we see and interact with them every day. it is a shame that more couldn’t have been said in this chapter, however, about the ways that this kind of proactive design work could be used to remind us of the lives of animals in the factory farming industry. while companion animals and wild animals of various kinds are discussed, industrially farmed animals are conspicuous here in their absence. the idea to include “ethical warning labels” on animal products could be one way to start to do this,2 though a range of other social “nudges” are needed. another, more general, limitation of the book is its treatment of the concept of anthropocentrism. while challenging anthropocentrism is surely an integral part of addressing our relationships with animals, more should have been done to motivate this challenge. in chapter one, the origins of anthropocentrism are not fleshed out as they could be. the concept is not situated as arising within a judeo-christian worldview that situates man within a great chain of being between god and the angels on one side, and all other animals on the other.3 this means 2 thomas wells, “the case for ethical warning labels on animal products”, abc religion & ethics (7 january 2014), https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-case-for-ethical-warninglabels-on-animal-products/10099440. 3 see lynn white, jr., “the historical roots of our ecological crisis”, science 155, no. 3767 (1967): 1203–07. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.155.3767.1203. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-case-for-ethical-warning-labels-on-animal-products/10099440 https://www.abc.net.au/religion/the-case-for-ethical-warning-labels-on-animal-products/10099440 https://doi.org/10.1126/science.155.3767.1203 humanimalia 13.2 (2023) 252 | rutledge-prior, review of mummery and rodan that the particular breed of western anthropocentrism that is of concern here is somewhat obscured. in turn, this leads to statements about our culture being anthropocentric, without acknowledgement of whose culture, in particular, this refers to. furthermore, that anthropocentrism is troubling is not a position that is defended in much detail. part of this seems to be because (alongside speciesism) the concept is defined as entailing the view that “only humans and human interests matter” (25). this, however, is only one, maximally restrictive, interpretation of anthropocentrism. the book therefore risks alienating or overlooking those who have anthropocentric and speciesist views, but who do not think only humans, in all instances, have moral worth. the book similarly assumes a restrictively dichotomous distinction between welfare and rights. while important for earlier debates in animal ethics,4 where the question of whether animals could have rights at all was still up for grabs, this is a debate from which the animal rights literature has largely moved away.5 instead, more recent scholarship has focused on how we might grant animals rights in the context of an interconnected and imperfect society, where humans still — for better or worse — rely on the labour and services of animals (and they rely on ours). without getting lost too deeply in these conceptual weeds, the broader picture that the book presents is a sound one. the anthropocentric assumption that animals are, first and foremost, for us — and that their happiness is only, if at all, to be promoted to the extent that this does not conflict with our uses of them — desperately needs to be overturned. as the book suggests, it is not only the promotion of ethical relationships with individual animals that hangs in the balance here, but our capacity to maintain a habitable planet for ourselves and other animals. imagining new human–animal futures in australia is therefore a useful and cross-culturally relevant reminder of the various ways that human and animal lives intersect, and the alternative ways that we can choose to frame these relationships. 4 see, for example, gary francione and robert garner, the animal rights debate: abolition or regulation? (new york: columbia university press, 2010). 5 see, for example: alasdair cochrane, animal rights without liberation (new york: columbia university press, 2012). sen, review of mccracken and goody rewiring humanism anushka sen review of: saskia mccracken and alex goody, eds., beastly modernisms: the figure of the animal in modernist literature and culture. edinburgh: edinburgh university press, 2023. x + 306 pp. 11 illus. (7 in colour). £110.00 (hb) anushka sen is an assistant professor in the english department at loyola university, chicago. email: asen2@luc.edu book review mailto:asen2@luc.edu literary animal studies moves in a perpetual state of verbal play. in this sprawling sphere of portmanteaus and other coinages (from animot to zoopoetics), the 2023 anthology beastly modernisms stands out for its commitment to the term “beastly”. the book’s contents range from the possibilities of human–animal companionship to the shock of feral violence on the human psyche. how does the word “beastly” provide a conceptual thread for this abundance? the editors, saskia mccraken and alex goody, lean on the term’s bifurcated meaning: its ability to imply something crude, debased, and monstrous on the one hand, as well as its colloquial sense of “too much” on the other. for them, the term acquires a “speculative” power. it marks the space where taxonomy gives way to the excesses of the animal (5–6). this clarification enlivens the term beastly beyond a hazy adjectival familiarity. as rachel murray shows in her chapter on the quasi-fantastical jellyfish, animal figures effectively embody the speculative powers that rise in response to an oppressive reality. the jellyfish, with its rippling shock of tentacles, acts as a modernist metaphor for a ruptured but hyperfluid mind which breaks down imposed realities. animals also provoke philosophical speculation, as seen in carrie rohman’s d. h. lawrence-inspired meditation on animals becoming authors through the process of marking flesh. the recurring characteristic of beastliness throughout the collection is in the way it spurs language to strain against its own limits. beastly modernisms follows a conference by the same title, held in glasgow in 2019 and co-organized by saskia mccracken, one of the anthology’s editors. the collection speaks to the effort of delineating a field as precise as modernist animal studies while embracing the horizontal currents realigning modernist scholarship of late. in their introduction, the editors write that virginia woolf is a driving force for the collection, and that her pacifist, feminist, queer politics resonate with modernism’s compulsive interrogation of “man” through the animal (4). this bears out in their choice not to include a chapter on james joyce, who occupies a privileged position in the field. one might feasibly wonder how far woolf strays from the canonicity or overbearing charisma of joyce. however, the editors’ commitment to copyright © 2023 anushka sen this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 429–435. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.17737 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.17737 sen, review of mccracken and goody | 431 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) challenging the modernist canon is perhaps most evident not in the choice of one author over another, but rather in the ways the volume applies modernism’s uncertainty about distinctions between species to modernism’s own boundaries. derek ryan for example, theorizes modernism qua flush as inherently self-referential (23). he finds in virginia woolf’s text a keen awareness that rescuing flush from socalled victorian history was a delicate venture into an ethical future. ryan identifies a legacy of “metamodernism” in contemporary writers such as sigrid nunez who draw from bloomsbury’s archives to fictionalize its animal residents with a canny attunement to exploitation. the implication here is that modernism has a contagious self-consciousness which seeps into its textual interlocutors. this wariness is tangible when texts indulge their playful curiosity about animal icons from history but wrestle with a sincere desire to do these stories justice. some of the most compelling chapters in the anthology combine questions of form with material analysis. the section “beastly traces” conceptualizes the beastly as a mode arising from shifting cultural productions. paul fagan provides such an account of the taxidermic imaginary in anglo-american culture from the 1860s to the 1950s. taxidermy’s power to freeze, revivify, and rearrange various species in the aesthetic marketplace becomes a crucial arena of biopolitical inquiry. as fagan observes this context, he draws both connections and distinctions between genres with clarity. he considers the victorian anthropomorphic approach to taxidermy which staged frequently comical tableaux of animals in human poses and concludes that these fantasies challenge species-logic only up to a limit, ultimately allying with realism’s commodity fetishism. on the other hand, he writes, modernism uses uncanny animacy in taxidermy to expose the mechanisms of power behind simulacra. one of this chapter’s strengths is that it does not seek redemption in twentieth-century modernism. fagan identifies the re-emergence of reified taxidermic tropes in modernists such as hemingway, as well as a genuinely unsettling animacy in earlier writers such as h. g. wells. akin to the beastly in fagan’s chapter, modernism is a mode that needs to be historicized, but is best understood in relation to other modes of production rather than in fixed periods of time. humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 432 | sen, review of mccracken and goody the anthology contains energetic close readings which, at their best, refuse philosophically complacent narratives. the lens of animal studies proves generative for beerendra pandey’s take on staple texts of partition studies (short stories by sadat hasan manto, mulk raj anand, and mohan rakesh). pandey argues that animal presence in these stories force ethical engagement through the shock of role reversals between animals (who act trustingly) and humans (who resort to violence). pandey’s thesis benefits from the nuanced claim that while irony is a powerful force in these works, it never becomes a sublimating comedic technique. paradoxes remain unresolved, and the moments when animals compel an emotional response function as glimmers of hope penetrating the satirical veil. later, caroline hovanec identifies a non-fatalistic preoccupation with death in her chapter on ahmed ali’s twilight in delhi. she evocatively uses “extinction” and “unhoming” to segue from the novel’s melancholy for a dying culture and lifeworld (the mughal-era practice of pigeon-keeping), to contemporary affects around the climate crisis (249–50). her chapter closes with the powerful claim that the novel’s disposition towards lingering in a dusty, twilit solemnity is not hopeless, for a new world order (however fraught) can only emerge from the embers of the current one. in hovanec’s words, “the end is not the end” (261). therein lies her view of ali’s anti-colonialism, and the seeds of an ecological slogan. this essay voices a conviction noticeable across the anthology, that one can develop an ecological sensibility by paying more rather than less attention to animals. animals act as nodes of environmental consciousness in this anthology, where questions about planetary flourishing and the politics of territory intersect. gabriela jarzębowska’s chapter on “species cleansing” (125), translated by eliza rose, analyses the (frequently anti-semitic) propaganda of rat-cleansing in the people’s republic of poland. jarzębowska takes apart various racist techniques of human–animal analogy used in military and sanitation discourse. though some of these rhetorical tools might be familiar (such as animalization of humans or an equally suspect humanization of animals), she evokes a moment of polish nationalist paranoia in all its sen, review of mccracken and goody | 433 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) visceral immediacy. the symbolic “severance” and “eject[ion]” that the rat and adjacent people undergo also require a concrete dismantling of their place in the environment, thus demonstrating that language is embroiled in state apparatus (130). earlier in the anthology, juanjuan wu brings a similar political focus to travel narratives featuring animal companions: namely, florence ayscough’s autobiography of a chinese dog and mary gaunt’s a broken journey. the dogs in both these texts are of chinese origin and display anthropomorphic qualities, although ayscough’s text is set in canada whereas gaunt’s takes place in china. wu argues that ayscough imbues her dog with a legitimate chinese identity, capable of expressing cultural alienation in the west, whereas gaunt projects her own racist anxiety about chinese people onto her deracinated dog. wu’s analysis is crisp and compelling although it would benefit from further discussion of class disparities between the wealthy, cosmopolitan ayscough and the financially precarious gaunt who travels out of compulsion. when gaunt frets about her potential friendlessness upon her dog falling ill, it appears to be no less a sign of her profound isolation than of a “relentlessly self-serving” ownership (60). what would it mean to thoroughly reject possessiveness or myopia about animals while also being skeptical of the power structures enabling gestures of human curiosity or magnanimity? such interpretive dilemmas are perhaps a key feature and not an occasional hurdle of animal studies. while the field once navigated these questions by attempting to access the authentic animal, beastly modernisms suggests a shift towards confronting the animal’s place in a shared world. a recurring theme which highlights the anthology’s conceptual boundaries, is the modernist animal’s capacity to “rewire humanist principles” (202). karen eckersley makes such a claim about leonora carrington’s surrealist transformations of women into creatures. according to eckersley, a feminist surrealism rejects the binary of humanism vs anti-humanism and welcomes an alternative vision of a human–nonhuman continuity. to accept the ideological gains of a spectrum over the binary is enticing, but the question remains: can a rewiring or “disrupt[ion]” (198) of humanism become legible without working through humanism’s legacies? carrington’s deliberate humanimalia 14.1 (2023) 434 | sen, review of mccracken and goody embrace of female/feminist animality is in a sense a subversion of humanism and therefore still in conversation with it. yet, as eckersley demonstrates, these creatural women suggest a radical interspecies hybridity or alliance in line with posthumanism, where the triumph of alterity makes humanism negligible or unrecognizable. it is difficult to mark the moment when a particular literary strategy constitutes a decisive break from humanism. elizabeth curry’s chapter on anita scott coleman tackles some of that ambivalence. coleman’s work on a ranch in new mexico, curry states, was just as significant as her success as a black writer in the early to mid-1900s. curry identifies the adjacency of human and animal life on the ranch as crucial to coleman’s philosophy, which undoes the forced ontological link between black people and beasts and reframes it through “parallelisms” (216). that is to say, coleman’s texts frequently evoke similar conditions of vulnerability or captivity between animals and black people without analogizing their fundamental nature. the “dyadic” (216) relations that curry identifies in coleman allow material links between human and black experiences to surface, but also leaves a space between the two identities. this might seem more timid than an explosion of the (white) human–(black) animal binary would entail. nonetheless, there is something compelling about its restraint. parallelism does not allow the symmetries between animals and black people to be overdetermined. it is in that sense a purely literary strategy that stays open to more creative interpretations of coexistence than tired scripts have allowed. the dangers of the human–animal binary are well known to animal studies but clearly still pervasive in the world. this can lead to a sense of fatigue: what would it take to translate the field’s awareness of this destructive ideology into more urgent, far-reaching terms? alternatively, the persistence of the binary can spark an obsessive hope in the artistic: only when we have successfully reimagined human–animal relationships will change follow. a collection as varied and targeted as beastly modernisms conveys the crucial insight that this task of reimagination is not an endless set of experiments in the hope that one will lead to transcendence. even modernism, as this sen, review of mccracken and goody | 435 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) collection imagines it, does not offer one way out of the dreaded binary. rather, beastly modernisms testifies to the fact that artists who seriously interrogate displacement and disempowerment will find the role of animals crucial to their analyses. the collection thus offers a thematic vision of modernism connected through an investment in the animal’s capacity to embody unsettling forms of vulnerability, estrangement, and intimacy. however, an aesthetic horizon also emerges through beastliness, where some of the most intense affects about being human, animal, or otherwise, frequently shore up in the form of vivid language. as analyses of hegemonic discourse (in or beyond the anthology) show, beastliness can coagulate into stale templates that serve those in power. a modernist imagination then might serve as a reminder to salvage the excess and discontent that animates the beastly. duxbury porton down biological weapons testing at porton down the strategic effacement of nonhuman animals, 1947–1955 catherine duxbury london school of economics humanimalia 14.1 (fall 2023) abstract: this article focuses on the use of nonhuman animals for biological weapons testing by military scientists at porton down defence science and technology laboratory, 1948–1955. after the end of the second world war and the beginning of the cold war, the british state and its allies invested in new military technologies which could ensure their superiority in times of conflict. my analysis reveals the partial workings of the porton down laboratory through its historical use of nonhuman animals. i demonstrate that nonhuman animals were simultaneously effaced and made visible during biological warfare experiments. this effacement and visibility was dependent on anthropocentric notions of animal subjection whereby their use in experiments made them “seen” as resources for use, yet paradoxically elicited their nonexistence as subjects. i extend the notion of “strategic ignorance” to develop a novel concept of “strategic effacement” to demonstrate this contradictory relationship which both impacted scientific “objectivity” and contributed to the continued exploitation of animals in the laboratory. keywords: nonhuman animal experiments; architecture; infrastructure; materialsemiotic entanglements; ignorance; strategic effacement bio: catherine duxbury is a fellow at the london school of economics and political science, and teaches on the first-year interdisciplinary course there, lse100. while not quite being able to believe her luck, she identifies primarily as an educator, but likes to dabble in the arts of academia occasionally where she is inspired by the work of many critical animal and feminist animal studies scholars. over twenty years a vegan and a companion to a whole bunch of furry critters of the dog and cat variety, cathy likes nothing more than going on long walks with her dogs and finishing with a pint in the pub. email: c.duxbury@lse.ac.uk orcid: 0000-0002-6258-3702 copyright © 2023 catherine duxbury this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 347–379. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.12804 mailto:c.duxbury@lse.ac.uk https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6258-3702 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.12804 duxbury , porton down | 349 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) situated on the salisbury plain in southern england, nestled between an area of outstanding natural beauty and the picturesque new forest, lies britain’s most top-secret military establishment, now called porton down defence science and technology laboratory (dstl). created in 1916 as a response to the german use of chemical weapons (mustard gas) during world war i,1 porton down remains britain’s most secretive and controversial military research establishment (see fig. 1). its agenda is to investigate and compile research on warfare technologies to “ensure that the uk’s military and wider public benefit from the latest technical and scientific developments. in the interests of national security much of this work is secret.”2 this top-secret work involves using tens of thousands of nonhuman animals to test the latest military and biomedical weapons. my analysis reveals an aspect of how this secretive establishment operated through its use of nonhuman animals. to explore this, i focus on the material practices of laboratory animal experimentation for biological weapons at porton down between 1947 and 1955 when porton down went under the name of the chemical and biological defence research establishment (cbde). it was in this period that porton down’s biological weapons program was at its peak, and its experimental focus shifted to trials at sea rather than on land. here, i document porton scientists’3 five major sea trials: operations harness, cauldron, ozone, negation, and hesperus. the sea trials exposed thousands of nonhuman animals to the noxious agents anthrax, brucellosis, tularaemia, brucella suis, pasteurella pestis, vaccinia virus, and venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis (vee).4 1 carter, porton down, preface. 2 defence science and technology laboratory, “the truth about porton down: answering the myths and misconceptions”, gov.uk 27 june 2016, https://www.gov.uk/government/ news/the-truth-about-porton-down. 3 i use the generic term “scientists” throughout this article and refer to particular people by name, as they appeared in the archival documents. 4 all these viral agents are zoonotic diseases that can pass between animal species (“animal” to “human” transmission). brucellosis is one of the most common zoonotic diseases worldwide and causes abortion in sheep, goats, cows, and pigs. in humans, it can cause flu-like symptoms to appear. tularaemia is a plague-like disease that, in humans, is potentially severe and can be fatal. pasteurella pestis/yersinia pestis is the bubonic plague virus, https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-truth-about-porton-down https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-truth-about-porton-down figure 1: aerial view of porton down in the early 1950s. photograph courtesy of the imperial war museum. duxbury , porton down | 351 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) considering the use of nonhuman animals for weapons of mass destruction helps us understand how scientific methodologies and political policies concerning weapons of war have permeated the bodies and lives of nonhuman animals who have served as substitutes for human beings.5 the aim is to pay attention to the practices of the porton down scientists and make visible the role nonhuman animals play in the histories of the technoscience of war, and also investigate how the treatment of nonhuman animals was framed and justified by this process at porton down. there is a burgeoning literature about animals in war, their use as beasts of burden, and their exploitation and companionship, with much of the research specifically focusing on the frontline roles of horses and dogs in the two world wars.6 there is also a wealth of literature devoted to the history of animal experimentation, with considerable attention paid to its practice and legal regulation in the nineteenth century.7 this includes the work of harriet ritvo and hilda kean, who have documented both the emergence of scientific testing on animals via the professionalization of the disciplines of physiology and medicine and the rise and impact of the anti-vivisection movement in this era.8 other scholars have focused on women’s role in the anti-vivisection movement and their relationships to the nascent feminist movements of the nineteenth century. however, there is a dearth of work published on the part nonhuman laboratory animals (unintentionally) play in aiding the violent militaristic tendencies of the modern and many mammalians act as reservoirs for the disease, for example, rats, mice, and gerbils. flea bites transmit the disease. vaccinia virus is smallpox, and venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis is a neurotropic virus that causes severe disease in humans and horses. in humans, it causes fever, general malaise, and vomiting. the infection can spread to the central nervous system, causing symptoms such as confusion and seizures. tularaemia, known as “rabbit fever”, produces flu-like symptoms in humans. for more detailed expositions of these viruses as biological weapons, see pappas at al. “brucella as a biological weapon”; quenee et al. “yersinia pestis”; wood et al., “vaccinia virus”; dahal et al., “venezuelan equine encephalitis virus”; and barras and greub, “history of biological warfare”. 5 haraway, primate visions, 2. 6 nocella, et al., animals and war; hediger, animals and war; pearson, “four-legged poilus”; alexander, “war and its bestiality”; russell, war and nature. 7 rupke, vivisection; hampson, “legislation”; bates, anti-vivisection; ryder, victims of science; hamilton, animal welfare. 8 ritvo, animal estate: kean, animal rights; kean “smooth cool men of science”. 352 | duxbury , porton down humanimalia 14.1 (2023) state. here, i contribute to the growing research about animals in war and draw on extensive historical analyses of animal experimentation to frame my discussion. in doing this, i show how the scientific process of laboratory testing produced nonhuman animals as visible and invisible, useful and useless, and productive and non-productive, which enables the routinized suffering and killing of nonhuman animals. writing animal histories is a complex terrain that uses the “pen and ink” of human beings to reveal the hidden lives of animals and their roles in societies, in order, ironically, to decentre the human. hilda kean addresses this issue, saying that “a different starting point” is needed, but that this “might not be the subject matter, animals, per se but the historian’s intentions”. thus, the choices that historians make when (re-)presenting the past lives of nonhuman animals make their research animal-centred. it is not a question, as kean goes on to state, of “‘writ[ing] in’ animals” but of “re-work[ing] given frameworks.”9 reworking normative historical approaches focuses on understanding and analysing the uses of animals in given historical contexts.10 as kean explains, this process of writing animal histories mimics the concerns of early social historians such as e. p. thompson and feminists such as sheila rowbotham, who wrote histories of the working classes and their gendered dimensions despite the lack of material written by the people themselves.11 furthermore, within the animal history paradigm, this article has moved on from the idea of evidencing animal agency to one where the research “use[es] agency as a starting point and map[s] the varied economic, political, social and cultural contexts in which animals are embedded”.12 therefore, the conscious boundaries of this article recognize the importance of animal agency. historian joshua specht argues for this: it seems clear that animals have some form of agency, that is, the ability to shape in meaningful ways the world around 9 kean, “challenges for historians”, s65. 10 fudge, “left-handed blow”, 7. 11 kean, “challenges”, s60. 12 specht, “animal history”, 332. duxbury , porton down | 353 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) them. but instead of cataloguing instances of agency, historians would be better served developing a more nuanced understanding of how autonomous action operates within and is constrained by surrounding structures. if this is true of humans, it is especially true of animals, which are so often at the mercy of human needs. animal historians would be well served to treat agency as their starting point of their analysis and lay aside the jargon of agency. agency should always be the start of the analysis, rather than the conclusion of the argument.13 the archival material used in this article contributes to the crafting of stories told about porton down.14 to read for the animal in biological weapons testing, i had to focus alternatively on specific incidences concerning experimental animals written in the documents provided. i had to pay attention to what postmodernists call “ruptures”15 in the texts to seek out the animal where they had burst forth into existence but where previously they had been made invisible in much chemical and biological warfare research. the strategic effacement of nonhuman others to understand how nonhuman animals were simultaneously rendered invisible as subjects but visible as scientific objects in biological warfare research, i draw on concepts from the sociology of ignorance and philosopher sophia efstathiou’s levinasian notion of “technologies of effacement”. the article engages with and develops ideas concerning non-knowledge (ignorance) and embodied encounters with the other. strategic ignorance anthropologist michael taussig asserted that knowing what not to know is an indispensable way to achieve a great deal of social and 13 specht, “animal history”, 332. 14 see, for example carter, porton down; evans, gassed; hammond and carter, from biological warfare to healthcare; schmidt, “cold war” and “medical ethics”; balmer, “uk biological weapons programme”, “the drift of biological weapons policy”, britain and biological warfare, “killing ‘without the distressing preliminaries’”, secrecy and science. 15 fulbrook, historical theory. 354 | duxbury , porton down humanimalia 14.1 (2023) political power.16 scientific knowledge-making is not often linked to the idea of wilful ignorance. the popular perception of science is one of knowledge-creator, truth-sayer and the great revealer of all things factual. it is rarely seen as a practice which also produces ignorance.17 the scientific production of knowledge is inextricably tied to ignorance, and nonhuman animals of the laboratory are very much a part of this dynamic relationship. for sociologist linsey mcgoey, ignorance is a generative and performative phenomenon that involves the “mobilization of ambiguity, the repudiation of unsettling facts, the realization that knowing the least amount is often the most indispensable tool for managing risks and exonerating oneself from blame in the aftermath of catastrophic events.”18 in certain situations, ignorance can be a beneficial and a calculated attempt to obfuscate vital information—and here it is strategic. for example, in her study of licensing an antibiotic drug linked to kidney failure, mcgoey demonstrates how key actors sought to show who had the least knowledge of the drug’s safety and side effects. this deliberate concealment happened at various stages of the development process where individual concealment and institutional denial of the dispute over the drug’s efficacy and safety were recurring events.19 hence, the value of ignorance for the individual and institution is in its strategic application. many other scholars in ignorance studies have documented its role in scientific practice: how results are generalizable to broader populations, how ignorance can aid in selecting specific research problems and facilitate the defence of the outcomes of experimentation. indeed, brian balmer has successfully applied this concept to the biological warfare policy in mid-twentieth century britain. balmer, the foremost scholar in the history of the british biological weapons research programmes, has noted how strategic ignorance was apparent when scientific advisors and experts to the british government 16 taussig, defacement, 5–6. 17 kourany, “science: for better or worse”, 178. 18 mcgoey, “strategic unknowns”, 1–2. 19 mcgoey, “the logic of strategic ignorance”, 555. duxbury , porton down | 355 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) wanted more funding for biological warfare research. openly admitting to uncertainty about the potential of biological weapons’ destructive capacities helped to pave the way for more significant funding for its research.20 there is, however, an acute lack of focus in the literature on the encounters between humans and nonhuman animals in scientific research regarding strategic ignorance’s role. here, i extend the epistemological groundwork done by sociology of ignorance scholars like mcgoey and balmer to account for the embodied nature of ignorance in the effacement of nonhuman animals in experiments. levinas, the face, and technologies of effacement how do our encounters with the other happen? for french philosopher emmanuel levinas (1906–1995), it is through the human face. the face, however, is never what it is intended to be; instead, it is much more than the physical representation of “self” and is irreducible to the “i”. the face is about our corporeal encounters with the other, a way to disturb us and a means to embrace their inner secret being.21 it is fully rooted in a phenomenology of the body,22 and it becomes a way to view the other’s inner secret life by exceeding our a priori conceptualization of them. the face goes beyond its physical representation, and the whole body can express the face from the flick of a hand to the “curve of the shoulder”.23 philosopher sophia efstathiou draws on levinas’s concept of the face and extends it to ethical encounters between humans and animals. for her, the animal’s “face” refers to the mode by which an animal conveys their “inner secret being”, that may be expressed in the “body, eyes, movements or other sensescapes (voice, touch, smell, etc) but that is not reducible to these.’24 the face is embodied, and recognizing the face identifies the other’s embodiment, 20 balmer, secrecy and science, 73–89. 21 levinas, totality and infinity, 43; 66. 22 waldenfels, “levinas”, 65. 23 levinas, totality and infinity, 66; 262. 24 efstathiou, “meat we don’t greet”, 104. 356 | duxbury , porton down humanimalia 14.1 (2023) subjecthood and status. efstathiou discusses how the infrastructures and resources of the scientific animal testing laboratory act to regulate encounters between humans and animals. in what she calls “technologies of effacement”, efstathiou describes how these facilities help to “block the face” of humans and animals.25 technologies of the laboratory include the built architecture, procedures for entering and exiting the building, protective uniforms and equipment, labelling techniques, and experimental conventions. accordingly, these “technologies” all mediate the encounters between humans and nonhuman animals in the laboratory and act as an impediment to experiencing the other directly, for instance, wearing protective gloves when handling mice. this modifies the tactile encounter with the other and, thus, contributes to their effacement. here, i use the term strategic effacement to account for the purposive eradication of nonhuman animals’ subjecthood in the experiments used to test biological weapons. for example, efstathiou describes an encounter between a research worker and a rat whereby the rat had to be handled and microinjected in a series of experiments. the scientist was upset about the impact these procedures had on the rat, the pain it caused, and the effect on the results of the experiments. consequently, efstathiou describes this encounter as the “communication of perceived duplicitousness” where the research worker communicates what happens during the procedure as a sham: he [the scientist] and the animals first go through these distressing injections, and then he is to “put them in the box” and tell them, in a new (happy, teacherly) voice: “hey, show me what you’ve learned, but don’t let the stress affect you.” the ridicule made of the researcher and his animals, the joke played on them is that they work in a frame expecting them to suffer stress, and pretend it does not affect them.26 this “communication of perceived duplicitousness” happens through the conscious denial of stress by the human, in both the human and 25 efstathiou, “facing animal research”, 140. 26 efstathiou, “facing animal research”, 141–2. emphasis added. duxbury , porton down | 357 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the rat: the scientists must pretend it does not affect them. this is a form of strategic effacement, which recalls mcgoey’s conception of strategic ignorance as a “denial of unsettling facts” by the deliberate suppression of the known manifestation of stress in the rat (and human) and, simultaneously, a negation of the subjecthood of the rat.27 consequently, i take strategic effacement to mean the use of technologies of effacement to maintain and facilitate strategic ignorance in contexts where animal exploitation occurs. porton down scientists were simultaneously facing/effacing nonhuman animals in the process of biological weapons experiments, which instantaneously rendered them visible/invisible. what i mean by the in/visibility of nonhuman animals of the laboratory is akin to michael lynch’s distinction between the “natural” animal and the “analytic” animal. lynch describes the bifurcated construction of nonhuman animals of the laboratory as one that transforms them from “naturalistic” animals to “analytic” ones. the naturalistic animal occurs in the “everyday” interactions between scientists and laboratory animals (feeding them, keeping them healthy, etc). the experimentation process transforms the laboratory’s nonhuman animals into the “analytic animal”. in this manifestation, nonhuman animals become visible or “seen” yet effaced in their subjecthood, as we shall see particularly in the pathological examination of the dead nonhuman body. nonhuman animals of the laboratory become objects—the methodology of science dictating the terms unto which the scientists inscribe the laboratory animals with meaning to communicate their results.28 they are still in/visible, albeit in a strategically placed manner. in what follows, i use the notion of strategic effacement to explore the myriad ways nonhuman animals were used to test biological weapons at porton down in the period from 1947 to 1955. i also reveal how scientists during the cold war actively drew on forms of non-knowledge, uncertainty, and ambiguity, which enabled the ill-treatment and exploitation of nonhuman animals to continue. 27 mcgoey, “strategic unknowns”, 1–2. 28 lynch, “sacrifice”, 267–71. 358 | duxbury , porton down humanimalia 14.1 (2023) biological warfare and the british state the british biological warfare tests in the mid-twentieth century at porton down were among the largest ever. this was despite britain’s ratification of the 1925 geneva protocol, which banned the use of chemical and bacteriological agents as weapons of war. in the protocol, however, biological weapons were marginally affirmed compared to using poisonous gases, which were banned outright.29 the geneva protocol instantiated a ban only on the use of biological weapons but not their research and development. this allowed states like britain to research, develop, and manufacture biological weapons.30 it was not until the 1930s that scientific concern about the dangers of biological warfare (bw) became a serious focus of attention in the corridors of whitehall. in this period, the government created a sub-committee on bacteriological warfare as part of the committee of imperial defence to review policy formulations and military strategies related to biological warfare.31 in october 1940, the government launched a british biological research programme at porton down led by dr paul fildes, a bacteriologist from the medical research council (mrc).32 fildes was ordered to develop a biological bomb that could be used instantaneously if and when somebody attacked the country.33 during the second world war, scientists at porton down designed and produced two vital biological weapons: an anti-personnel anthrax bomb and five million cattle cakes laced with anthrax, which were to be dropped on livestock in germany.34 after the war, the bw programme was expanded, and the bw department at porton down was renamed the microbiological research department (mrd). in the post-war period, the state allowed for the continuation of research into bw in peacetime, and more formalized advisory committees were established to supervise bw research and policy. one 29 schneider, “prohibition of biological weapons”, 179–80. 30 beard, “shortcomings of indeterminacy”, 276–79. 31 hammond and carter, from biological warfare to healthcare, 60 32 carter, porton down, 39–49. 33 balmer, “killing ‘without the distressing preliminaries”, 60. 34 balmer, 60; millet, “antianimal biological weapons”. duxbury , porton down | 359 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) was the biological research advisory board (brab) of the ministry of supply (mos), which provided scientific advice on researchable biological problems concerning weapons development. brab were accountable to the advisory council on scientific research and technical development of the mos and provided technical advice to the chiefs of staff biological weapons subcommittee. this board consisted of experts from various government departments, including people from the ministry of state, the home office and ministry of health, independent scientists, the admiralty, the war office, and air ministry staff.35 this subcommittee worked with the defence research policy committee (drpc) on the strategy and technical aspects of biological warfare research. bw policy became a top priority, and the drpc soon devised a set of objectives for research and development in this area, including research into defensive aspects of war, how to store and produce biological weapons, and a series of defensive measures to protect the population.36 in 1946, dr david henderson replaced fildes as superintendent.37 consequently, the research broadened considerably and ranged from basic laboratory experiments to open-air trials of dangerous pathogens on land and at sea.38 the experiments conducted by porton down scientists involved animals, and they even had a farm, allington farm, which bred and provided animal subjects for the scientists’ experiments.39 these were often guinea pigs, mice, rats, cats, and monkeys.40 regarding the bw trials, dangerous viruses would be released to purposely infect the animals and test their immune response to pathogenic organisms such as the plague virus and anthrax. the experiments were all completed under the aegis of the law, whereby animal experiments were regulated to ensure that “the animals shall not be subjugated to unnecessary suffering” — in a letter to concerned antivivisection societies who had heard about the forthcoming trials 35 millet, “antianimal biological weapons”. 36 balmer, “uk biological weapons programme”, 51. 37 hammond and carter, from biological warfare to healthcare, vii. 38 millet, “antianimal biological weapons”; balmer, britain and biological warfare; “killing ‘without the distressing preliminaries’”. 39 schmidt, secret science, 49. 40 balmer, “uk biological weapons programme”, 52. 360 | duxbury , porton down humanimalia 14.1 (2023) and written to the home office, home office minister g. r. strauss replied that all experiments carried out at porton applied the principles of the cruelty to animals act of 1876.41 the act was a piece of legislation that regulated animal experiments. scientists and the premises that tested on animals had to apply for a licence from the home office to conduct experiments on animals. they also had to prove that their research would advance scientific knowledge and understanding of the investigated topic. the act stressed that no animals in experiments shall experience “unnecessary pain and suffering”.42 the sea trials: material-semiotic infrastructures of strategic effacement from 1948 to 1955, porton down scientists, led by chief scientist john d. morton, conducted a series of sea trials to develop an effective biological bomb. some of these were conducted in britain’s colonies, notably in the caribbean (operation “harness”) and the bahamas (“ozone”, and “negation”), while others, operations “cauldron” and “hesperus”, were conducted off the coast of scotland. it was in 1947 that the uk treasury granted permission to the chiefs of staff to conduct large-scale experiments at sea to test biological warfare agents.43 the first series of experiments, code-named operation “harness”, which took place in antigua, tested bacteriological agents such as anthrax, brucellosis, and tularaemia. later, brucella suis, pasteurella pestis, vaccinia virus and venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis (vee) were added to the repertoire.44 all trials had 41 the national archives [henceforth tna], ho 45/25867, g. r. strauss to anthony nutting, 6 december 1948. 42 duxbury, “property, pain and pastoral power”. 43 balmer, britain and biological warfare. 44 tna, department of defence (defe 5/15): defe 5/15/267, bw trials at sea — operation harness: report by the biological warfare sub-committee, 18 august 1949 (“harness report”); tna, war office wo195/12213, chiefs of staff committee: biological warfare sub-committee, ministry of supply, brab, operation cauldron 1952, scientific report by the microbiological research department, porton and naval report by the naval commander” (“cauldron report”); tna defe 55/256, operation ozone 1954: small-scale experiments with biological agents over water, discussion of results (“ozone results”); tna, defe 55/261, operation negation 1954–1955, scientific report by the microbiological research department and naval report by the naval commander (“negation report”), 3–4. duxbury , porton down | 361 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) specific and standardized infrastructural arrangements to manage the animals, monitor them for disease presence, and enable the scientists to perform detailed post-mortems at sea. for operation harness, the former us military base at parnham sound in antigua was chosen as the experimental site to establish a safe distance from the local population. harness was the first largescale sea trial of bw, and it acted as a preliminary test case for future trials. after the initial testing of non-pathogenic organisms, scientists proceeded with the toxic trials, and the first agent tested was brucella. seventeen trials were completed using brucella, tularaemia and anthrax, tested on guinea pigs, monkeys, and sheep.45 the method was simple: two landing ship tanks were fitted with a series of sampling points, and each had a rubber dinghy attached, which carried an animal. the crew placed sampling points on the water’s surface in an arc formation and then released clouds of biological agents from a bomb or spray device upwind of the animals. the scientists would observe the tests from the designated laboratory ship, hms ben lomond. once complete, infected animals were transferred to one of the landing ship tanks and removed to storage space, and then they sterilized the dinghies and gear. animals were later transferred to an isolation farm onshore, monitored and once deceased, their corpses were eventually cast away into the sea.46 in later trials, morton streamlined the techniques due to harness having certain disadvantages: “it required a large number of men and a great deal of equipment, and accurate control of trial conditions could not be exercised.”47 consequently, for operations cauldron, ozone, negation and hesperus, the floating pontoon containing the animals remained at sea rather than towed away by dinghy, and the infected animals were transferred to hms ben lomond, where the team observed the animals and conducted observations and post-mortems. 45 defe 5/15 “harness report”, 2. 46 defe 5/15 “harness report”, 2. 47 tna, department of defence (defe 5/47) defe 5/47/310, ministry of defence chiefs of staff committee, memorandum — operation cauldron, 1952, summary of scientific report by the biological warfare sub-committee, 7 july, 1953 (“cauldron summary”), 1. 362 | duxbury , porton down humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the number of personnel present was kept to a minimum, and each person was given a series of jobs interlocked with other team members’ roles. the officer in charge of the procedures was commander cowgill of the admiralty, who accordingly made an “invaluable contribution as ‘stage director’”. seven men were on the pontoon during trials; three veterinary surgeons below deck joined the officer, and all men had to wear full protective rig.48 hms ben lomond’s architectural arrangements and experimental protocols are key sites of erasure of nonhuman animal subjecthood. acute demarcation of the physical space into distinct areas for the laboratory ship allowed (non)human animals to be tightly controlled and their movements regulated.49 the ship was divided into two main areas: the “clean hold” and “dirty hold”, with no free movement for animals allowed, and the flow of personnel between the two strictly inhibited. animals would be kept in the “clean hold” until they were required for experiment and then brought back to the “dirty hold” for monitoring and eventual post-mortem (see fig. 2). this spatial infrastructure demonstrates two things: how human–animal relations are structured in the trials and how nonhuman animals become strategically effaced because of the infrastructural arrangements meted by morton, the trials’ designer. the built environment of the trials allows for a specific kind of human–animal interaction, one that efstathiou describes as “scripted”. encounters with nonhuman others are controlled and happen in a distinct way that ensures the animal is not treated as a companion, e.g., by stroking, hugging, or talking to them.50 in other words, protocols of experimental design aid in rendering the animal invisible by standardizing their confinement and treatment. during the trials, animals were kept in cages in clean and dirty holds to create a system of procedures that could ensure scientific validity and replicability of results. this scripted event, however, also proscribed certain behavioural expectations of the scientists towards nonhuman animals.51 48 wo195/12213 “cauldron report”, 6. 49 kirk, care in the cage, 172–73. 50 efstathiou, “facing animal research”, 154. 51 efstathiou, “facing animal research”; birke et al, the sacrifice, 38–39. figure 2: diagram depicting the experimental infrastructure of hms ben lomond. source: tna war office [wo 195] wo195/12213, chiefs of staff committee: biological warfare sub-committee, ministry of supply, brab, operation cauldron 1952, scientific report by the microbiological research department, porton and naval report by the naval commander. 364 | duxbury , porton down humanimalia 14.1 (2023) refining the experimental infrastructure of the floating pontoons after harness shows how the “use of compartments below deck meant that several trials could be done in succession and men and nonhuman animals could remain there during the trials.” the pontoon was nothing more than a “floating box with 24 compartments, 9 of which had to be converted to house diesel generators, pumps and ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ animal stowage, change rooms, etc.”52 here, nonhuman animals became part of the infrastructure, resources to be stowed away until use. they were thus recognized as needed to test dangerous pathogens yet placed in stowage as “stock” until required. as efstathiou recalls in her discussion of the meat industry, the semantic distinction between the “clean” and “dirty” holds for animals raises a paradox: living animals are seen as dirty, and the dead animal (“meat”) signifies their cleanliness, yet the animal in their aliveness as a commodity must still be considered clean for their bodies to be consumed. making the animal edible enables their effacement with technological apparatus that helps workers block the face of nonhuman animals and renders their eradication as sentient beings invisible. in this instance, the division of the clean and dirty holds expedited this effacement by strategically labelling them as not-contaminated, which prevents “an encounter with the animal other, beyond the properties of his [sic] fascia”.53 workers had to be in full protective rig to encounter the infected, and infrastructural flows helped rationalize these encounters and control human movement and contact with nonhuman experimental animals. finding the right tool for the job: the role of specific animals and ignorance in the presentation of results central to testing dangerous pathogens was finding the most suitable nonhuman animals to use as experimental subjects. adele clarke and joan fujimura describe the contingent nature of what is the “right” tool for the scientific problem at hand. this contingency is via the joint articulation of tools (in this instance, objectified experimental animals 52 wo195/12213 “cauldron report”, n.p. 53 efstathiou, “meet we don’t greet”, 107. duxbury , porton down | 365 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) and equipment), roles (of both humans and animals in the trials), and claims (made about pathogen viability). during operation harness, which animals were best to use in conjunction with specific pathogens was noted. in this case, finding the right nonhuman animal of the laboratory (tool) was a “consequence of the articulation process”54 concerning the development of a science of bw testing. this simultaneously demonstrated their visibility as scientific resources but also their effacement. it was reported that harness: [h]as provided information regarding the behaviour of new types of bacterial suspensions, which contain experimental animals, and brought out the value of monkeys in this type of research. it will be unnecessary, in future, to rely on such clumsy animals as sheep in the trials with bacterial clouds.55 “clumsy” sheep and “valuable monkeys” demonstrate a particular kind of human–animal relationship, where the scientists get to know the individual animals and state their preference for using, in this case, the monkeys rather than the sheep. at the same time, this is a way of facing and effacing animals. by projecting anthropocentric characteristics onto sheep, the scientists invite the conclusion that they are fully aware of the animal presence, yet, simultaneously, the animals are demarcated as objects (tools) to be used. although cast as objects to be used for human endeavour, nonhuman animals’ actions also influence the scientists’ assumptions (cf. clarke and fujimura’s “claims”). in this context, vinciane despret states that human–nonhuman animal relations in the laboratory depend on the researcher’s expectations, which can impact results and how humans and animals interact with one another.56 such expectations contributed to the interpretation of the results of operation harness. indeed, the scientists concluded that the experiments were a success despite their “complete failure” or only partial success. this success depended on the experimental animals used: monkeys and guinea pigs, not sheep! scientists from porton 54 clarke and fujimura, “which tools?”, 18. 55 wo195/12213 “cauldron report”, 1. 56 despret, “the body we care for”. 366 | duxbury , porton down humanimalia 14.1 (2023) down validated their work in numerous ways, claiming that the trials: (i) confirm and augment the wartime findings in respect of two agents, (ii) show that a third agent can infect animals in the field, (iii) confirm the toxicity of those three agents is many times greater than that of any chemical agent, (iv) support previous laboratory work which has shown improvement between ten and twenty fold in the effectiveness of one agent as the result of modification.57 the infectivity of nonhuman animals in the field and the expectations of the researchers on the best animals to use for these trials helped the porton scientists justify their work despite their weak results. their justifications were embedded in the coincident facing and effacement of nonhuman animals in the trials, which facilitated strategic ignorance. as michael smithson states, there is a practical value of ignorance in the production of scientific facts.58 this purposive ambiguity of the presentation of the results from operation harness was used to enhance the generalizability of the pathogenic agents being tested with the aid of guinea pigs and monkeys. simultaneously, it was also a deliberate admission of the uncertainty of results—at once proclaiming them a “complete failure” while also, thanks to some nonhuman animals (monkeys), finding a way to claim their usefulness and the need for more tests. this presentation of results helped reframe knowledge about the trials to construct certainty out of this ambiguity. it also helped to convince the government to fund the further trials — and thus continue with largescale nonhuman animal experimentation.59 for the remaining trials, many of the results were also only considered satisfactory at infecting the animals. in cauldron, the trials used brucella suis on guinea pigs and monkeys. these gave “reasonably good answers about the efficacy” of the diseases because the “data supporting this were provided by sampling devices used in the trials and it is satisfactory to note that out of a large number of guinea-pigs exposed, a small bomb filling was capable of infecting nearly 57 defe 5/15 “harness report”, 3. 58 smithson, ignorance and uncertainty, 250. 59 balmer, secrecy and science, 79–82. duxbury , porton down | 367 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) everyone.”60 pasteurella pestis was not as great a success with the experimenters, with the bw sub-committee remarking that the evidence obtained signified “that it is not an agent of striking potentialities”. the percentage infected with plague was 12% of the guinea pigs and 38% of monkeys; with brucella suis, 85% of the guinea pigs and 59% of monkeys. all in all, 36 toxic trials were done using 3,500 guinea pigs and 84 monkeys, all exposed to plague and brucella suis.61 after cauldron and hesperus and at the request of the british prime minister, winston churchill, operation ozone was carried out during february–may 1954, followed by operation negation in 1955 in the bahamas.62 in negation and ozone, vee and vaccina virus were added to the testing repertoire. here, the experiments used aerosol sprays, and scientists examined the impact of ultraviolet light on the toxic agents.63 operation ozone conducted trials in daylight and negation at nightfall.64 the animals used in these studies were primarily guinea pigs and mice, with fertile chicken eggs added to the negation mix.65 in an interesting turn of events, rabbits were also considered but were not used; instead, they became “doted upon pets” of the scientists.66 this paradoxical situating of animal presence illustrates efstathiou’s ideas concerning “added faces”, which may appear in the spaces of the animal testing facility. “added faces” represent “some inner, emotional or moral being that humans and animals have or acquire in the lab” and are not part of the experimental process. for efstathiou, these added faces may be in the form of posters of animals, symbols of nature and wildlife pictures. the idea is to offset the situation’s contrived nature and make it more “comfortable” for the animals and humans.67 for operation negation, the living rab60 defe 5/47/310 “cauldron summary”, n.p. 61 defe 5/47/310 “cauldron summary”, (i). 62 defe 5/47/310 “cauldron summary”, (i). 63 defe 55/256 “ozone results”, 11. 64 defe 55/261 “negation report”, 3-4. 65 defe 55/261 “negation report”, n.p. 66 defe 55/261 “negation report”, 26. 67 efstathiou, “facing animal research”, 156–57. 368 | duxbury , porton down humanimalia 14.1 (2023) bit became an added face, acting as a symbol of domesticity (for the humans at least) and care, indicated by them becoming “doted upon pets”. rabbits provided the scientists with a way to face/render visible the naturalistic animal amidst the strategic effacement afforded to the experimental animals. eighty-four experiments were conducted for operation ozone: twenty-seven with brucella suis, thirty-two with francisella tularensis and eighteen with vee. the rest were “unaccounted for”.68 operation ozone demonstrated that ultraviolet light could rapidly decay the pathogenic organism and decrease the infection rate caused by the diseases when released through an aerosol spray, so “their offensive use in such conditions would lose a great deal of its potential effect”.69 hence, operation negation aimed to test the pathogenic agents in both sunlight and twilight to compare infection rates and decay of the organisms.70 in negation, the results were seen as lacking validity and were particularly “ill-fated” when testing vee.71 however, 880 guinea pigs were used in the experiments and 380 in laboratory tests. the infrastructural arrangements of the trials allowed for the strategic effacement of the nonhuman experimental animals. nonhuman animals became strategically placed actors in the purveying of ignorance; they were placed in the centre of the trials and rendered simultaneously visible and invisible for the trials to continue. human–animal relations were scripted according to protocols that retained their status as resources for use rather than as living, feeling beings. the physical structures of the trials also allowed for this paradoxical simultaneity to occur by the differentiation of animal housing into “dirty” and “clean”, complete with a strict procedure for transporting the animals to and from the test site. the discussion and presentation of results rendered nonhuman animals as essential resources and strategic players in creating certitude out of obscurity. 68 defe 55/261 “negation report”, 12. 69 defe 55/261 “negation report”, 19. 70 defe 55/261 “negation report”, 3. 71 defe 55/261 “negation report”, 13. duxbury , porton down | 369 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) all this reflects the notion of strategic effacement: the ability to acknowledge nonhuman animal presence but deny their existence as subjects through careful calculation of their positioning in both experimental practice and theory. facing the effaced: the “travelling circus” and the dead animal body as i have described, there was a vacillating relationship between the human and nonhuman actors in the sea trials: scientists both faced and effaced nonhuman animals in the process of experimentation. as efstathiou says, “facing animals need not bar killing them”.72 this section analyses the post-mortem examinations of nonhuman experimental animals and argues that this, too, served as part of the strategic effacement promoting the science of biological warfare. this was evident in the written reports of the post-mortem results. yet, the tools and roles assumed by the scientist to conduct the post-mortems contributed to developing a “rational” epistemological interaction with nonhuman others that helped sustain their invisibility as subjects of a life. after exposure to a toxic agent, all animals from the trials were held in the dirty hold of ben lomond for observation. when the results of the assessment of infectivity were calculated, those animals that were not infected were killed immediately; they were deemed useless. those that were infected did, however, have a value — but this was mainly after the scientists had killed them and given a post-mortem examination. each toxic agent took different lengths of time to affect the animals. for those infected with brucella suis, animals were observed for twenty-eight days before being killed, and for those infected with tularaemia, fourteen days.73 then, they were prepared for post-mortem, whereby a series of procedures had to be followed. for guinea pigs and mice, vets and a laboratory assistant entered the dirty hold of the ship and commenced killing the animals one hour before the arrival of the post-mortem team. groups of 100 to 250 mice and 72 efstathiou, “facing animal research”, 149. 73 wo195/12213 “cauldron report”, 37. 370 | duxbury , porton down humanimalia 14.1 (2023) guinea pigs could be euthanized at any one time. the pathology team placed the dead animals on trays, with each tray containing the specific group of animals which were “exposed to the bw agent at a particular point of the layout [pontoon].” a label representing the trial number and exposure point was then attached to each tray. monkeys were killed and prepared similarly but injected with nembutal two to three hours before the post-mortem. a two to four vet party (depending on the number of monkeys required) removed the monkeys from their cages, and then “the animal is held extended so that the abdomen is fairly taught” and returned to the cage until dead. the animals were then checked to see if they had deceased thirty to forty minutes after the nembutal injection.74 the pathologists had to follow procedures strictly, and, again, this reflects two key aspects of effacement espoused by efstathiou: it is a “scripted performance” whereby the task is streamlined and standardized to aid repetition and validate scientific practice. it also engages the staff in a specific relationship with nonhuman animals; the ensuing division of labour between the laboratory workers seeks to abolish the visibility of nonhuman animals’ agency—workers did not have face the other in all their embodied glory. for example, the procedure for killing the monkeys involved picking them up in a way that enabled distance — holding the monkey away from you in an extended manner until their body is rigid. this may be anxiety-inducing for the monkeys, but it helps to maintain strategic effacement of the other that is just about to be killed. strategic, in that it is a calculated display of distance, consciously denying sentient life but at the same time not negating their recalcitrance (recall here efstathiou’s description of “perceived duplicitousness” with the scientist and mice). holding them tight reduces the monkeys’ range of motion and display of agency. doing this helps to “block the animal face”, and they become disembodied.75 it allows for a “business-as-usual” approach whereby the procedures embed and enable denials and neutralization of suffering that routinizes and normalizes animal experimental protocols.76 74 wo195/12213 “cauldron report”,78. 75 efstathiou, “facing animal research”, 154. 76 thiel and south, “criminal ignorance”. duxbury , porton down | 371 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) performing autopsies: the theatrics of strategic effacement once the killing was over, the autopsies used a “mass production approach to enquiry”.77 scientists labelled the animals and transported them from the “dirty hold” in ben lomond to the post-mortem room. the dead animals were passed from one scientist to the next, around a rotating table, in what was described by head scientist morton as the “travelling circus” (see fig. 3): […] (e) the team prepare the pm table, a round revolving stainless steel table. clips and chains are attached, beakers containing acetone or lysol are placed in appropriate positions and instruments prepared. (f ) the recorder marks paper towels with the animals’ numbers (showing trial and point number) and places these ready for (g) the two fixers (vet. staff) who lay out the animal on the numbered towel on the tray in front of them and clip the animal out by its four limbs. each animal is thoroughly wetted with lysol before the table is revolved to bring it in front of the (h) skinner who opens the animal up from pubes to jaw, laying the skin back on each side. the animal is now moved round to the (i) exposer who removes the anterior portion of the thoracic cage, laying bare the heart and lungs, and opens up the abdominal cavity exposing the spleen for the ( j) spleen plater who removes a small portion of the spleen and smears its cut surface on the half of a plate labelled “s”, handed to him by the (k) plate handler who after marking the plate with the animal’s number holds it for the (l) pathologist who removes a portion of the lymphatic gland and smears it over the unmarked half of the plate. (m) the pathologist reports to the recorder on the condition of the spleen, liver, cervical and bronchial glands in this order. a typical positive is plus, a typical negative −, e indicates enlarged, and a abnormal.78 77 operation cauldron 1952, dir. j. d. morton, 47 mins., https://youtu.be/cpa_yce0swg. 78 wo195/12213 “cauldron report” 38. emphasis in original. https://youtu.be/cpa_yce0swg figure 3: the “travelling circus”: rotating postmortem table and vivisected guinea pig. still from the instructional film operation cauldron 1952, directed by j. d. morton. duxbury , porton down | 373 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) the dead animal is first clipped to the table in chains, with an identification number on the paper underneath them. the body is then rotated and passed to the first man, who peels back the animal’s skin. the second man exposes the organs, and the third takes a sample of one organ, depending on the disease they seek. all scientists have ascribed a role like characters in a play; they know their place and part. whether one becomes the “skinner” or the “exposer”, one assumes one’s role with the utmost scientific rationality and neutrality. once the dissection is complete, the animals’ bodies are removed from the table, put in a dustbin, and taken away to be incinerated.79 the procedures imposed in this routinization of mass autopsies help humans block the face of the animal. it allows pathological epistemology to take centre stage over a moral and ethical encounter between humans and animals. the autopsy methodology helped shield the scientists from the idea of animals being sentient, with the allocation of roles strategically helping to render the animals invisible and screening humans from the ultimate paradox of adoring animals (remember the pet rabbits?) and experimenting on them.80 rationalizing effacement: fordist-style scientific labour this scripted encounter between the porton pathologists and the dead animal bodies signifies a more profound meaning related to the conditions of modernity in which the british warfare state was engaged. morton’s “travelling circus” is paradigmatic of the fordist-style assembly line in the mid-twentieth century. initially developed by henry ford in the early twentieth century and influenced by his visit to the chicago stockyards. each part is passed along a line to be assembled by a stationary person with a specific role; for instance, a person working in a ford car factory may attach the wheel, another person further down the line would attach the seats, etc. this automated form of the division of labour speeds up the manufacturing process. still, it also facilitates the masking of distressing activity and amplifies denial of the dead animal body as a sentient 79 wo195/12213 “cauldron report”, 38. 80 this recalls efstathiou’s description of the meat paradox of “loving animals and loving meat”. see efstathiou, “the meet we don’t greet”, 109. 374 | duxbury , porton down humanimalia 14.1 (2023) being. this provided the porton scientists with the conditions of possibility for the “will to ignorance”81 — a process that can also be deadly to human animals, as described by zygmunt bauman in his analysis of the holocaust. the fordist-style rationalization of laboratory work thus helps to structure a moral distance between the embodied animal and the laboratory workers. it created a logic for vivisection, which helped shape an episteme that reinforces the need for state violence — in this case, allowing for the imposition of violence on nonhuman animals’ bodies and the perpetuation of a particular kind of brutality that allowed the british state to have weapons of mass destruction that could wipe out human populations.82 in this instance, the demotion of ethical treatment of nonhuman animals occurs and is delegitimized, as evidenced by the tossing away of their bodies in bins. bauman’s analysis of the holocaust again provides a pertinent example of this censure of morality and the calculated yet wilful effacement of animals in the porton post-mortems. bauman argues that “among other things, [the civilizing process] is a process of divesting the use and deployment of violence from moral calculus, and of emancipating the desiderata of rationality from the interference of ethical norms or moral inhibitions.”83 the elimination of ethical consideration towards the corpses of animals is a form of strategic effacement implicit in the practice of the post-mortems on the bw test animals. at one time, their bodies were very much present in the flesh. however, they were also made un-seeable (cf. lynch’s “analytic animal”) because of the fordist division of labour, which promotes the elision of any ethical responsibility towards the other. the disassembly line of the “travelling circus” enabled the exclusion of nonhuman animals from the moral universe, thus permitting their ill-treatment and reinforcing their status as resources or tools to “get the job done”. 81 linsey mcgoey, “on the will to ignorance”, 213. 82 thiel and south, “criminal ignorance”, 338. 83 bauman, modernity and the holocaust, 32. duxbury , porton down | 375 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) conclusion this article reveals the hidden role nonhuman experimental animals have played in creating biological weapons, and it adds to the burgeoning animal studies literature on animals and war. yet, despite this growing field of research, nonhuman animals of the laboratory have been neglected, and the lives and concerns of experimental animals have received little to no consideration. historically, many animals of war have been revered for their (unwilling) contributions and even labelled as heroes for their efforts.84 however, the historical record falls short when it comes to documenting the lives and deaths of experimental animals in the creation of military hardware such as biological weapons. i have demonstrated the peculiarity and complexity of the human– animal relationship in these series of biological weapons trials. to do this, i extended the concepts of effacement, as developed by sophia efstathiou, and strategic ignorance, as theorized by linsey mcgoey, to posit a novel concept of strategic effacement. strategic effacement is the purposeful elision of nonhuman subjecthood by individuals, organizations, and state institutions. it is a method by which strategic ignorance is mobilized via technologies of effacement. what produces this calculated invisibility of nonhuman bodies is a confluence of factors, namely, the infrastructures and architecture of an animal experimental laboratory, the presentation of the results of the trials and the continual examination / observation of nonhuman bodies at every stage of the research process until, and after, their death. in this case, strategic effacement was applied in the production of bw to be used, if necessary, by the hands of the british state. in the sea trials of 1948–1955, the strategic effacement of animals was undergirded by the infrastructural design of the operations, such as the strict demarcation of space on hms ben lomond. this effacement was also tied to how scientists acknowledged some of the ambiguous outcomes of the trials. in both cases, nonhuman animals 84 see, for instance, the animals in war memorial: https://animalsinwar.org.uk. https://animalsinwar.org.uk 376 | duxbury , porton down humanimalia 14.1 (2023) are present in the flesh but also disappear; they become resources used by the warfare state as a means to an end. in this sense, material-semiotic entanglements of experimental design, scientific practice and discourse coalesced to render consecutively nonhuman animals as invisible. their visibility is precisely the site of their erasure as living beings. for example, in the results of the trials, the nonhuman animal disappears; they become mediators of effect and are strategically employed to create certainty out of ambiguity. i have also demonstrated the paradoxical yet calculated obfuscation of nonhuman actors in the methodologies employed to euthanize and vivisect animal bodies. for example, the ritualistically performed post-mortem signified the visibility of the (analytic) animal body and their eradication as living beings. it also demonstrated a more profound relation of bw testing to the mechanisms of the modern british state, that of human labour fragmentation and the censor of an ethical relationship towards nonhuman animals. the imposition of the fordist (dis)assembly line helped create a fragmented human knowledge and activity and a fragmented animal body. overall, this article has considered the complex social, ethical and political relationships between humans and animals that went into the research at porton down when britain was preparing for a “hot” war with the ussr. it shows how material-semiotic entanglements of scientific theory and practice help render the experimental animal visible as a key research tool. nevertheless, their subjecthood is strategically negated to legitimize animal experimentation and help cement military prowess in warfare uncertainty. acknowledgements i would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on the article. their comments and suggestions were incredibly helpful. i would also like to extend my absolute gratitude to kári driscoll, whose patience and support through the submission process has been amazing. thank you! duxbury , porton down | 377 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) works cited alexander, martin. “war and its bestiality: animals and their fate during the fighting in france, 1940.” rural history 25 (2014): 101–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s0956793313000216. balmer, brian. britain and biological warfare: expert advice and science policy, 1930–65. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2001. balmer, brian. “the drift of biological weapons policy in the uk, 1945–1965.” the journal of strategic studies 20, no. 4 (1997): 115–45. https://doi. org/10.1080/01402399708437701. balmer, brian. “killing ‘without the distressing preliminaries’: scientists’ defence of the british biological warfare programme.” minerva 40, no. 1 (2002): 57–75. https://doi. org/10.1023/a:1015009613250. balmer, brian. secrecy and science: a historical sociology of biological and chemical warfare. farnham: ashgate, 2012. balmer, brian. “the uk biological weapons programme.” in wheelis et al., deadly cultures, 47–83. barras, vincent, and gilbert greub. “history of biological warfare and bioterrorism.” clinical microbiology and infection 20, no. 6 (2014): 485–543. https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-0691.12706. bates, a. w. h. anti-vivisection and the profession of medicine in britain: a social history. london: palgrave macmillan, 2017. bauman, zygmunt. modernity and the holocaust. cambridge: polity, 1992. beard, jack m. “the shortcomings of indeterminacy in arms control regimes: the case of the biological weapons convention.” american journal of international law 101, no. 2 (2007): 271–321. https://doi.org/10.1017/ s0002930000030098. birke, lynda, arnold arluke, and mike michael. the sacrifice: how scientific experiments transform animals and people. west lafayette, in: purdue university press, 2007. bjørkdahl, kristian and tone druglitrø, eds. animal housing and human–animal relations: politics, practices and infrastructures. new york: routledge, 2016. carter, g. b. porton down: 75 years of chemical and biological research. london: hmso publications, 1992. clarke, adele e. and joan h. fujimura. “what tools? which job? why right?” in the right tools for the job: at work in twentieth-century life sciences, edited by clarke and fujimura, 3–46. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1992. dahal, bibha, shih-chao lin, brian d. carey, jonathan l. jacobs, jonathan d. dinman, monique l. van hoek, andre a. adams, and kylene kehn-hall. “egr1 upregulation following venezuelan equine encephalitis virus infection is regulated by erk and perk pathways contributing to cell death.” virology 539 (2020): 121–28. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. virol.2019.10.016. despret, vinciane. “the body we care for: figures of anthropozoo-genesis.” body & society 10, nos. 2–3 (2004): 111–34. https://doi. org/10.1177/1357034x04042938. duxbury, catherine. “property, pain and pastoral power: the advent of animal welfare in the review of the 1876 cruelty to animals act, 1947–1965.” journal for critical animal studies 16, no. 2 (2019). efstathiou, sophia. “facing animal research: levinas and technolgies of effacement.” in face to face with animals: levinas and the animal question, edited by peter atterton and tamra wright, 139–63. albany: state university of new york press, 2019. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0956793313000216 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0956793313000216 https://doi.org/10.1080/01402399708437701 https://doi.org/10.1080/01402399708437701 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1015009613250 https://doi.org/10.1023/a:1015009613250 https://doi.org/10.1111/1469-0691.12706 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0002930000030098 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0002930000030098 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.virol.2019.10.016 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.virol.2019.10.016 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x04042938 https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034x04042938 378 | duxbury , porton down humanimalia 14.1 (2023) efstathiou, sophia. “meat we don’t greet: how ‘sausages’ can save pigs or how effacing livestock makes room for emancipation.” in changing meat cultures: food practices, global capitalism, and the consumption of animals, edited by arve hansen and karen lykke syse, 164–84. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2021. elston, mary ann. “women and antivivisection in victorian england, 1870–1900.” in rupke, vivisection in historical perspective, 259–94. evans, rob. gassed: british chemical warfare experiments on humans at porton down. london: house of stratus, 2000. french, richard d. antivivisection and medical science in victorian society. princeton, nj: princeton university press, 1975. fudge, erica. “a left-handed blow: writing the history of animals.” in representing animals, edited by nigel rothfels, 3–18. bloomington: indiana university press, 2002. fulbrook, mary. historical theory. london: routledge, 2002. gross, matthias, and linsey mcgoey, eds. routledge international handbook of ignorance studies. 2nd ed. london: routledge, 2023. hamilton, susan, ed. animal welfare and anti-vivisection 1870–1910: nineteenth century woman’s mission. 3 vols. london: routledge, 2004. hammond, peter, and graydon carter. from biological warfare to healthcare: porton down 1940–2000. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2002. hampson, judith. “legislation: a practical solution to the vivisection dilemma?” in rupke, vivisection in historical perspective, 314–39. haraway, donna. primate visions: gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. new york: routledge, 1989. hediger, ryan, ed. animals and war: studies of europe and north america. leiden: brill, 2012. kean, hilda. animal rights: political and social change in britain since 1800. london: reaktion books, 1998. kean, hilda. “challenges for historians writing animal–human history: what is really enough?”. anthrozoös 25, sup. 1 (2012): s57–s72. https://doi.org/10.2752/ 175303712x13353430377011. kean, hilda. “the ‘smooth cool men of science’: the feminist and socialist response to vivisection.” the history workshop journal 40 (1995): 16–38 https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/40.1.16. kirk, robert g. w. “care in the cage: materializing moral economies of animal care in the biomedical sciences, c.1945–.” in bjørkdahl and druglitrø, animal housing and human–animal relations, 167–84. kourany, janet a. “science: for better or worse, a source of ignorance as well as knowledge.” in gross and mcgoey, ignorance studies, 178–90. levinas, emmanuel. totality and infinity: an essay on exteriority. translated by alphonso lingis. pittsburgh, pa: duquesne university press, 1969. mcgoey, linsey. “on the will to ignorance in bureaucracy.” economy and society 36, no. 2 (2007): 212–35. https://doi. org/10.1080/03085140701254282. mcgoey, lynsey. “the logic strategic ignorance.” the british journal of sociology 63, no. 3 (2012): 533–76. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.14684446.2012.01424.x. mcgoey, linsey. “strategic unknowns: towards a sociology of ignorance.” economy and society 41, no. 1 (2012): 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2 011.637330. millet, piers. “antianimal biological weapons programs.” in wheelis et al., deadly cultures, 224–35. https://doi.org/10.2752/175303712x13353430377011 https://doi.org/10.2752/175303712x13353430377011 https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/40.1.16 https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140701254282 https://doi.org/10.1080/03085140701254282 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2012.01424.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-4446.2012.01424.x https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2011.637330 https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2011.637330 duxbury , porton down | 379 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) nocella, anthony j., ii, colin salter, and judy k.c. bentley, eds. animals and war: confronting the military-animal industrial complex. landham, md: lexington books, 2014. pappas, georgios, paraskevi panagopoulou, leonidas christou, and nikolaos akritidis. “brucella as a biological weapon.” cellular and molecular life sciences 63 (2006): 2229–36. https://doi. org/10.1007/s00018-006-6311-4. pearson, chris. “‘four-legged poilus’: french army dogs, emotional practices and the creation of militarized human– dog bonds, 1871–1918.” journal of social history 52, no. 3 (2019): 731–60. https:// doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shx090. quenee, lauriane e., claire a. cornelius, nancy a. ciletti, derek elli, and olaf schneewind. “yersinia pestis caf1 variants and the limits of plague vaccine protection.” infection and immunity 76, no. 5 (2008): 2025–36. https://doi.org/10.1128/iai.00105-08. ritvo, harriet. the animal estate: english and other creatures in the victorian age. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, 1987. rupke, nicolaas, ed. vivisection in historical perspective. london: croom helm, 1987. russell, edmund p. war and nature: fighting humans and insects with chemicals from world war i to silent spring. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2001. ryder, richard d. victims of science: the use of animals in research. 2nd ed. london: national anti-vivisection society, 1983. schmidt, ulf. “cold war at porton down: informed consent in britain’s biological and chemical warfare experiments.” cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics 15, no. 4 (2006): 366–80. https:// doi.org/10.1017/s0963180106060488. schmidt, ulf. “medical ethics and human experiments at porton down: informed consent in britain’s biological and chemical warfare experiments.” in schmidt and frewer, history and theory of human experimentation, 283–314. schmidt, ulf. secret science: a century of poison warfare and human experiments. oxford: oxford university press, 2015. schmidt, ulf, and andreas frewer, eds. history and theory of human experimentation: the declaration of helsinki and modern medical ethics. stuttgart: franz steiner verlag, 2007. schneider, jessica k. “the bwc’s prohibiton of bioloigcal weapons: reality or rhetoric?” journal of biosecurity, biosafety and biodefense law 5, no. 1 (2014): 177–97. https://doi.org/10.1515/ jbbbl-2014-0010. shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2009. smithson, michael. ignorance and uncertainty: emerging paradigms. new york: springer-verlag, 1989. taussig, michael. defacement: public secrecy and the labor of the negative. stanford: stanford university press, 1999. thiel, darren, and nigel south. “criminal ignorance, environmental harms and processes of denial.” in gross and mcgoey, ignorance studies, 334–44. waldenfels, bernhard. “levinas and the face of the other.” in the cambridge companion to levinas, edited by simon critchley and robert bernasconi, 63–81. cambridge: cambridge university press, 2002. wheelis, mark, lajos rózsa, and malcolm dando, eds. deadly cultures: biological weapons since 1945. cambridge ma: harvard university press, 2006. wood, joseph p., young w. choi, morgan q. wendling, james v. rogers, and daniel j. chappie. “environmental persistence of vaccinia virus on materials.” letters in applied microbiology 57, no. 5 (2013): 399– 404. https://doi.org/10.1111/lam.12126. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00018-006-6311-4 https://doi.org/10.1007/s00018-006-6311-4 https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shx090 https://doi.org/10.1093/jsh/shx090 https://doi.org/10.1128/iai.00105-08 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0963180106060488 https://doi.org/10.1017/s0963180106060488 https://doi.org/10.1515/jbbbl-2014-0010 https://doi.org/10.1515/jbbbl-2014-0010 https://doi.org/10.1111/lam.12126 _hlk143250527 vaught, review of hartigan copyright © 2024 jeannette vaught this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 342–356. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 recentring the animal in multispecies ethnography jeannette vaught review of: john hartigan, jr., shaving the beasts: wild horses and ritual in spain. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2020. ix + 304 pp. 54 b&w photos. $24.95 (pb). jeannette vaught is a lecturer of liberal studies, women’s and gender studies, and in the honors college at california state university, los angeles. email: jvaught@calstatela.edu book review http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 mailto:jvaught@calstatela.edu i first encountered the research project that grew into this book when it was an early work in progress. the author, john hartigan jr., was a generous mentor during my graduate studies, and in that spirit he invited me along to a seminar discussion and workshop of his project proposal — one that was mutually exciting, in that he was also looking for “horse people” to help him shape his approach to studying the sociality of horses during a festival called a rapa des bestas (“shaving the beasts”). this summertime practice unfolds in the mountains of galicia, wherein several hundred wild-living horses are driven down from the mountains into enclosures, or curros, where the hair from their manes and tails is shaved off and male foals are culled from the herd. after a matter of an afternoon or a matter of days, depending on the town holding the rapa, the shaved horses are released back into the mountains. hartigan had attended this event as an interested spectator the prior summer, and had decided to go on to develop a full ethnographic study of the horses during the following summer’s event. hartigan’s workin-progress presentation included a number of photos of the event he had visited, showing hundreds of horses who normally live very unenclosed lives penned up into a small corral and surrounded by rowdy human spectators. so, seated at a seminar table with a very illustrious and (to me!) intimidating set of senior scholars debating the ins and outs of new forms of multispecies ethnography emerging in the mid-2010s, the only confident footing i had at this moment was grounded in the “horse person” side of me. as a horse person who had spent countless hours with horses since childhood, negotiating power and relationships with them, managing their pain and discomfort in veterinary and other challenging contexts and so on and so forth, some things that were obvious to me in the images of the rapa were not visible to the discussants. my first concern was that it was not immediately clear to me that the acute equine miserableness of this setting was fully visible to the discussants. as neither an ethnographer nor ethologist, i had no epistemological or academic claim to this observation. but looking at the rolling eyes, high heads, open mouths and pressed-in bodies filling the frames of the photos, i wondered about the immediacy of the copyright © 2024 jeannette vaught this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 341–356. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.19104 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.19104 vaught, review of hartigan | 343 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) horses’ experiences inside of the corral and how methodological innovation would work in their favour. if one key purpose of multispecies ethnography is to try to get out from under the primacy of humanism, then what would this study do for horses? looking back on this now, many years later, i can better understand this point of friction. multispecies ethnography is fundamentally connective: as a methodology, it produces a complex and illuminating map of how individual species are always intersecting with intricately entwined webs of life and flows of power. looking up and around at any given moment of study is the point; keeping a broad, rather than super-focused, point of view is in large part what drives the novel insights that arise from this form of inquiry. thus, the tendency not to dwell on the situation in the corral. multispecies ethnography also does not necessarily depend on a deep knowledge of the individual species themselves in question — particularly undomesticated species — in order to clarify key points about their existences that otherwise might not be visible from species-specific points of view. in fact, as hartigan himself notes, “cultural anthropologists are generally loathe to draw on or deploy scientific frameworks” in part because “ethnographers are not disposed to make authoritative knowledge claims” (257–8). multispecies ethnography is trying to get at relationships rather than individuation, dwelling in situatedness and specificity rather than generalizability. as hartigan notes, in some cases this manifests as direct resistance to dominant paradigms, primarily in the sciences, that have systematically avoided, ignored, or even downright rejected relational understandings of human and nonhuman beings. in this way, multispecies ethnography is a profoundly useful ecological approach to uncovering cultures that are asymptotic to human worlds and understanding how culture works beyond the human, sometimes at the intended and even productive expense of ontological species-specific knowledge. but horses, as primarily domesticated and well-known animals, were somewhat complicating this calculus: it seemed risky to undertake this project without attending to existing knowledge about humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 344 | vaught, review of hartigan horses-as-horses. it seemed to me that interpretations of the events shown during the workshop that might be basic to many horse people were at risk of being missed or made slant. the methodological conversations around the table were not quite getting at this gap. if horse people could explain several elements of what was happening in the rapa, then would the conclusions from this project speak only to other ethnographers? would it be able to also provide insights to people whose daily lives are entwined with horses themselves — people whose own lives, and the lives of the horses they relate to, can stand to benefit from the broader ways of thinking and clarity of vision that multispecies ethnography as a whole can provide, but have heretofore on the whole been talked past rather than addressed by the field? ask any day-to-day practical horse person what their thoughts are on multispecies ethnography (and often, to be fair, equine ethology) and you are not likely to get an enthused or well-versed answer. there was no doubt that this project would certainly be able to contribute meaningfully to the growing literature about multispecies ethnographic methods in a way that ethology could not; it would contribute to a deeper cultural understanding of the rapa des bestas than a classic anthropocentric ethnography could. but would it be possible to craft an ethnography that would be able contribute something to our collective understanding of horses that horse people themselves could not? my short, emphatic answer to this question is: yes. in fact, it is this book’s most hard-won achievement. in this text, hartigan wades headlong into a thicket of methodological and practical tensions, and emerges with novel and sometimes troubling insights that are relevant for a range of humans whose lives intersect with horses and nonhumans more broadly: horse people, animal people, human–animal studies researchers, nonhuman animal welfare advocates, ethnographers, and ethologists alike will all find themselves the recipients of important interventions in these pages that have the potential to improve equine lives. readers of hartigan’s prior work will not be surprised to find methodological rigour and ingenuity in these pages. shaving the beasts vaught, review of hartigan | 345 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) is the second book in his “multispecies trilogy”, following care of the species: races of corn and the science of plant biodiversity (2017).1 the trilogy as a whole seeks to expand the development and application of social theory beyond the confines of human society. care of the species is an extended ethnography of botanists and plant breeders in mexico and spain that includes the iconic chapter “how to interview a plant”, in which hartigan posits an innovative “how-to” (and “why-to”) guide for rendering nonhumans as ethnographic subjects. it is a groundbreaking book for thinking through how contemporary ethnographers can productively relate to science, scientific knowledge, and scientific thinking. shaving the beasts picks up a key theme from this plant work. in studying any nonhuman species, he argues in this book’s conclusion, “ethnographers pursuing multispecies subjects” need to decide “how or whether to tap scientific expertise in developing our accounts and analyses of animals” (257). care of the species made the case that ethnographers could and should productively engage, rather than sidestep, scientific epistemologies as part of their work alongside constituting nonhumans as valid ethnographic subjects. in shaving the beasts, hartigan shows this ethos at work when turning his lens towards horses. unlike many plants, horses are a social species, and ethology has a place in understanding that sociality. so not only does hartigan recognize horses as ethnographic subjects, but in focusing on their sociality as the focus of study, he extends the project of developing multispecies social theory by puzzling out techniques for applying social theory to nonhumans. to do so well, he argues, ethnographers should “step out of our disciplinary comfort zone and attempt a far more radical interdisciplinary engagement with ethology” (257). in other words: while the science itself has much to answer for, multispecies ethnographers leave it behind at their peril. the disciplinary tensions between ethology and ethnography occupy a significant portion of the book’s introduction. hartigan 1 the third instalment, social theory for nonhumans, currently exists as a web site hosted by the university of minnesota press. humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 346 | vaught, review of hartigan makes the case that multispecies ethnography can create bridges between the two fields in order to make meaningful conclusions about a single nonhuman species — a goal that heretofore has been much more aligned with scientific practices than ethnographic ones. ethology, as hartigan notes, is deeply rooted in evolutionary theory and has historically been directed towards studying nonhuman sociality so as to shore up species-specific boundaries around “typical” behaviours. this focus on seeking “typical” or “normal” behaviour has meant that events like the rapa des bestas were not constituted as good ethological research opportunities because they were anomalous to how the horses involved typically lived “naturally” on a day-to-day basis (7). meanwhile, while the human social ritual of the rapa would be an obvious site for ethnographers to study, hartigan argues that a traditional ethnographic focus on teasing out the symbolic, economic, and cultural dynamics of the event also misses the opportunity to actually learn something interesting about the horses themselves. hartigan locates the earliest historical records of this ritual’s existence in the 1500s, though it may be even much older than that. for hundreds of years, the gathered horsehair filled mattresses and provided strong binding materials for many household uses, even into the 1960s (1–5). for humans, the event symbolizes many old and new tensions. as the event’s name suggests, both the horses and the people who gather and shave them are identified as “beasts” (bestas) and “beast keepers” (bestieros), which distinguishes them in classed terms from other horse cultures in the region, and moreover distinguishes the horses from other kinds of wildlife (2). this class tension has been reinvigorated by postwar economic shifts. now, rapas are primarily social and tourist events, given that horsehair is no longer a commodity and many villages where the rapas occur are depopulating due to the lack of profitable work. hartigan briefly tracks the shifting meanings of the rapa within this growing precarity of agricultural life in the region: the events provide opportunities for young people who have left their villages for work in urban areas to temporarily return; for agricultural communities to vaught, review of hartigan | 347 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) mark and celebrate old traditions; and for struggling villages to infuse tourist spending into their economies. while acknowledging the historical and cultural ramifications of this larger context, hartigan argues that it is not his intent to pursue further analysis of this particular set of tensions, since those are primarily human concerns. his aim is to leave such human concerns in the background and study how these horses experience the rapa. hartigan’s central research question is “what impact does this ritual have on the social structure of these horses” (7)? this defection from traditional ethnography is part of an extended and imaginative conversation hartigan engages in with clifford geertz, whose essay “deep play: notes on a balinese cockfight” laid the foundations of modern ethnography but simultaneously set up nonhuman beings as fundamentally unknowable (and unimportant) within the larger human dramas that provide the main subject of cultural analysis. among the many bones hartigan picks with geertz across the book, seeing the animals in multispecies events, such as the horses in the rapa, as a “representational screen” rather than rich analytical subjects themselves is rebuked as a deeply rooted shortcoming that multispecies ethnographers should confront rather than reproduce (9). as a corrective, hartigan also engages in a long-form conversation across the text with the sociologist erving goffman. in the book’s introduction, hartigan uses goffman’s critique of social researchers’ overdependence on studying verbal language to frame his adoption of goffman’s concepts of “face” and “civil inattention” as useful for analysing equine behaviours (11). “face”, in particular, provides a critical juncture between the ethological and the ethnographic. hartigan’s application of this social theory concept to his observations of horses across the chapters makes a compelling case for the applicability of social theory to equine relations. he makes similarly convincing use of the concepts of “boundary work” and the “social gaze” to explain why horses are appropriate subjects for these analytical tools. crucially, hartigan explains how ethological knowledge, such as the equine ethogram, provided both a critical base of existing knowledge of equine behaviour to work from and a site of critique that his application of these relational concepts could help humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 348 | vaught, review of hartigan reframe. throughout these observations, hartigan situates the rapa as an ideal site to show the pathways through which ethology and ethnography have been talking past each other — and emphasizes how a new engagement between these methodologies can yield important information about horses and hopefully other social species as well. the implication for multispecies ethnography is that it, too, can contribute meaningfully to important conversations about nonhuman species themselves — not just the relationships between species or between nonhumans and humans. in order to see the horses fully not just as reductively-constructed individuals in a process of evolution as ethology traditionally sees them, or as symbolic representations of human concerns as ethnography traditionally sees them, hartigan hazards the argument that ethology and ethnography won’t just benefit from mutual proximity, but that in order to achieve more nuanced, complex understandings of nonhuman beings than we currently can, these disciplines might actually need each other. in the three main chapters of the book, hartigan walks this walk in the style of an extended field journal that documents his observations and analysis over the span of two weeks spent in galicia. chapter one, “into the field,” records six days that hartigan spent learning field research techniques from two local ethologists. each day’s work ranges across both geographical and methodological territories. hartigan records his own process in learning ethological concepts and research techniques as he and the ethologists drive across various locations where they identify, count, and record specific horses and behaviours. woven into these descriptive passages are extended reflections on how these techniques, and the explanations his teachers give for using them, convey the strengths and blind spots of ethological work. in one episode, hartigan points out his guides’ frustrating refusal to “see sociality” in interactions between horses taking place outside of an ethologically-defined band structure; if the ethologist did not think an observed affiliative gesture was “functional”, then he was resistant to recording or ascribing any meaning to it at all (43). yet he gives his teachers credit for vaught, review of hartigan | 349 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) pursuing research and teaching projects that are working to dismantle other deeply-ingrained biases in the field. most compelling in this chapter is hartigan’s tracing of his own ethological skill-building when learning to observe these horses in their own ranges in the mountains. in analysing what he is being asked to do and the kinds of equine behaviours he is witnessing from his own ethnographic position, hartigan is able to both absorb and reflect on the intermingling of these disciplines — and on what he is seeing from the horses — in concrete and experiential terms. how do ethologists think, what do they see, what do they make of it, and why? what is helpful about their approach, and what is not? when he describes spending hours sitting in the grass attempting to blend in with the gorse watching horses and practicing various techniques of sampling, hartigan admits to intermingling those ethological techniques alongside the lenses of boundary work and civil inattention. the chapter openly discusses the gaps and uncertainties that arise between these two modes of interpreting equine interaction. this style of analysis continues in the second chapter, “bands”, where hartigan leaves the ethologists to spend five days on his own observing groups of horses on the range, ethologically known as bands, and practicing the techniques he had just learned. his first day’s entry documents his time spent primarily among humans, and it fills in much of the recent historical and economic context of the rapa and contemporary concerns about the continued existence of the bestas in the face of rural depopulation and agricultural economic decline. the remaining four days are spent nearly entirely in the respectfully distant company of the bestas themselves, observing the groups of horses who are most likely to be herded down from the mountains for the rapa so as to set up a comparative study where hartigan can document their day-to-day sociality and chart what happens among recognizable groups during the disruptions of the event to come. as the horses react to various situations that arise in the course of each day, he finds many tenets of ethology, such as the concept of “harem maintenance” by stallions, utterly unsupportable (128). throughout the chapter, hartigan takes particular aim at humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 350 | vaught, review of hartigan the gendered assumptions built into ethological concepts and compares them to the observed realities on the ground. for readers, this helps us see how observed behaviours in the bands distinctly contradict the assumed position of privilege stallions occupy in ethological understandings of how bands operate. hartigan parses this discrepancy by pointing out that ethological research is primarily oriented towards documenting the behavior of single individuals; a “band”, in this framing, is interesting insofar as it is a gathering of individuals. this focus allows many aspects of sociality to go unobserved — and thus it becomes ripe for assumptions like individual stallion dominance to become inscribed. through several examples, hartigan shows how an ethnographic approach to studying social relations reveals just how often “ethological terminology […] is burdened by a narrow focus on individuals” (138), and indicates where a more fluid sense of an individual’s positionality within a group might actually yield more accurate ethological data about how groups of horses negotiate space (151). this critique is not to discount his newly gained ethological skills, but rather to ponder if perhaps an ethological / ethnographic account of the bestas is greater than the sum of its parts. he writes, “i am drawn to what i can take from ethology: an attention not to inner thoughts and experiences but to the observable range of interactions that generate sociality through bonds and boundaries, affiliations and agonistic gestures that amount to a continuous performance of group identity through socially situated selves” (153). nevertheless, the impulse in ethology to affix large ranges of observed interactions with stable terminology chafed against the data at times; for example, i was unsatisfied by hartigan’s adherence to the ethological term “bands” to describe the groups of horses he observed. based on just a few days of observations, it appeared to me that “band” was too strict a term for the loose and ever-shifting affiliations of horses under observation. horses were shuffling in and out of different configurations almost constantly, and while it was clear that certain horses had strong bonds and familiarity, “bands” as a term intended to define distinct groups did not effectively capture these ins and outs. vaught, review of hartigan | 351 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) it is now time for the three days of the rapa festival itself to begin the next day, and for hartigan’s observations to shift towards what these horses do under the duress of being driven down the mountains, penned up, shaved, and released. chapter three, “ritual shearing: dissolution and chaos”, recounts hartigan’s participation in the rapa. the chapter begins as the horses are driven by people on foot down from the mountains into a large pasture, or peche, close to town. while this peche confines the bands together, there is still a lot of space for the horses to negotiate how that space is shared. during the course of each of the festival days, the horses are moved from the peche to the curro, a small arena surrounded by stands full of enthusiastic human spectators, and which becomes filled to its very brim with horses. this arena is also the site of the shaving of manes and tails, so for a few hours each afternoon it becomes a whirling chaos of ever-moving equine and human bodies jockeying for space and position. then, the day’s shaving complete, the horses are guided back to the peche, where there are left alone for the overnight hours. hartigan skilfully keeps his, and our, focus on the horses as the festival itself swirls in the background. there are two key stretches of this chapter that are particularly compelling. first is a thread that traces his application of goffman’s concepts of “face” and “civil inattention” to the horses’ behaviours in the curro. using illustrative photos, hartigan deftly and convincingly shows this social theory in action amongst the horses themselves as they try to maintain bodily and social equilibrium in an increasingly destabilized environment. the second is his close attention to how sociality is rebuilt among the horses after it reaches a breaking point on the first day of the rapa. the first afternoon in the curro dissolves into rampant inter-equine violence as their ability to maintain “civil inattention” collapses under the amount of crowding they experience. the “microaggressions” used to maintain space when the horses were in the mountains turn into actual aggressions once that space has been compressed (212). yet by observing the slow and often agonizing process by which the stressed and exhausted horses begin to reconstitute their pre-existing (if always fluctuating, as chapter 2 showed) relationships once humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 352 | vaught, review of hartigan they are back in the peche at night, hartigan is able to see how important and resilient their capacity for sociality really is, and how myths about harems and dominance — whether those myths reside in ethological or cultural housing — utterly miss this key element of equine reality. where ethologists would be wont to say that what can be known of horse experience, or the “really real”, can only be accessed in “natural” settings where humans are not involved, hartigan mounts a thoughtful repudiation. for him, the “‘really real’ of the horses is both legible and fascinating” across the days of the rapa, which reveals their extreme capacity for equine behavioral plasticity rather than ethological fixity (249). by the third day, hartigan reveals, the horses have learned to navigate the minimal space of the curro so adroitly that their ability to perform civil inattention and control their own gestures towards other horses reveals strong efforts at restraint. during these observations, geertz appears as a visitation to hartigan, with whom he imaginatively converses as they sit “together” at the edge of the curro. explaining to geertz and to us how the horses themselves achieve stillness and calm in the curro on this final day — in stunning contrast to the absolute melée of the scene two days before — hartigan rests his case for positioning horses as ethnographic subjects and sociality as an ethological imperative. the book’s brief conclusion summarizes hartigan’s main ethnographic takeaways from his field observations and draws on them to revisit his methodological interventions laid out in the book’s introduction. in these closing pages, hartigan offers a novel bridging framework that he calls “species-local” analysis to attempt to square the ethology / ethnography divide. “when ethologists observe animals,” he notes, “they think and write in terms of ‘species-typical’ behaviors […] that result from evolutionary processes and a species’ interactions with particular environments, and they are largely construed as fixed behavioral dynamics” (253). there is important utility in this approach, but in hartigan’s formulation, in hewing to the “prevailing assumptions” about what a species is and what it does from this fixed position, we blind ourselves to what else is possible — indeed, to what else is actually happening. the term “species-local” is vaught, review of hartigan | 353 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) designed to draw from ethological understandings of species specificity but to give it some, well, give: “the value of a species-local account is that it can call attention to an elasticity, variability, and dynamism in social behavior that would not be evident in naturalistic settings” (253). the “local” part of the term refers to the ability to make valuable observations of a social species, in this case horses, in any context — one can attend to the species-specificity of their experiences without shutting down the opportunity to learn about them as horses when they are interacting with humans or in situations that are mediated by forces, including human forces, that lie beyond their desire or control. hartigan makes the case that this concept can be applied beyond the equine examples he has charted in this project to many other species that have been designated as social species by ethologists. if we are to follow his example successfully, this opens up an exciting range of possibilities for multispecies ethnographers to contribute to an enlarged and hopefully more accurate understanding of cetaceans, primates, birds, and beyond. a thrilling prospect! but though the counsel here for an audience of ethnographers is to not lose sight of species-specific knowledge derived from the sciences when conducting multispecies ethnographic work, it is clearly aligned with ethnography as the discipline with the most benefits to contribute to this larger project. all in all, this book is perhaps more an ethnography of equine ethology as it is an ethologically-informed ethnography of the bestas and the rapa. the amount of evidence hartigan is able to amass in such a short period of time to support his novel insights into equine behaviour is a testament to the solidity of his hypothesis and the usefulness of extending an ethnographer’s skills to nonhuman subjects. yet while hartigan’s observations are extremely thorough and detailed, his sample size is small. he notes that there are over 11,000 horses roaming the mountains of galicia; his own observations concern a tiny sliver of them, just a few hundred at most. likewise, the entire study unfolds over just eleven days — which hartigan himself confesses is barely enough time to even begin reliably recognizing individual horses, let alone getting to know their patterns. someone who has lived with horses and observed their daily habits over humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 354 | vaught, review of hartigan long periods of time — months, years — can pick up innumerable nuances in their actions. hartigan’s observations as a non-horseperson yield admirable progress in recognizing their subtle communications, from ear movements to nose wrinkles; however, it would take a much longer observation period to fully document who was who and chart the possible range of socialities of any of the bestas in the book. the implications of hartigan’s analysis are manifold. hartigan gestures to the oncoming rush of climate emergency as the most urgent impetus for multispecies ethnographers to document the relations we can, now. indeed, one shadowy implication of the text is that, given extremes of planetary temperature and their effects, there will be literally less space on the planet to house us all, making us a kind of analogue of the horses in the curro being pressed ever closer against strangers as our social practices fray. if this is the distressing analogy we are to make, then the text has a hopeful conclusion — first, that at least with this study of horses, it turns out that our own capacity for adapting our sociality to stressful circumstances might be stronger than we think. and secondly, we, as humans who can somewhat govern our responses to whatever version of this analogy the future brings, can learn even more about sociality under duress by learning from other species in an ethnographic context. this looming imperative, while quite valid if not directly invoked, nevertheless undercuts the argument that we should be looking to ethnography as a way to learn more about animals as animals rather than, well, representations for us humans to use as a compass to navigate ourselves through our crises, however urgent and biodiverse they may be. perhaps it is a persistent breeze coming in from his ghostly seatmate geertz in the curro. but really, hartigan does not need this larger context to prove the value of his approach. as a horse person, i found the application of social theory to his observations and analysis of equine behaviours convincing; it reframed and affirmed many observations that were true to experience, and taught me new information that i am glad to know now, as it will affect how i make choices about interactions with horses henceforth. my hope is that this work gets into the hands of practitioners as well vaught, review of hartigan | 355 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) as scholars — into the hands of people for whom social theory has heretofore been an uninteresting and uninviting pursuit. horses and people who care about them can connect to this work from a number of angles and find something about their own knowledge and experience reflected in hartigan’s careful, earnest observations and approachable analysis, particularly in the three main chapters which are written in plain and engaging language. this book has the potential to do a lot of good for horses right now. and ultimately, that was the question i started with many years ago: what’s in it for the horses? if the role of the multispecies ethnographer is to expand our understanding of the species in question not just relationally, but also as such, then there needs to be an ethic not just of epistemological clarity but of potential species benefit as well. this has been a stumbling block for ethologists, whose commitments to “objective” observations in a “natural” environment tend to sidestep any commentary on how to apply knowledge in a way that improves outcomes for horses who live in so-called “unnatural” environments. horse people, though, can really stand to benefit from having clearer “species-typical” and “species-local” understandings. in the careful work of the book’s third chapter, observing the horses perform the gestures of sociality through hartigan’s eyes taught me a good deal about what the horses needed and prioritized. in witnessing how the ritual of the rapa took those necessities away — which is what made me so uncomfortable when first seeing photos of a rapa in the workshop many years ago — his insights from social theory provided direction for understanding equine beings and how to craft positive, clear strategies for supporting their relational needs. hartigan’s findings about equine sociality under duress are widely applicable towards strategizing how we can improve equine lives when we humans make decisions about their care, the spaces they inhabit, and what we ask them to do with us. but i do still wonder, what about the bestas themselves? it seems to me that for this unique and ancient population of horses, the utility of the findings are less clear. hartigan claims that humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 356 | vaught, review of hartigan “ethnographic method has allowed me to avoid reproducing yet another account of representation and instead learn something about the social lives of these horses” (247). yes, emphatically yes — but part of the “really real” for the bestas is the continuation of the rapa, which is itself a representational activity that exists to make meaning for the humans who organize them. what do we do with that aspect of the “really real”? the very existence of the bestas might depend on the continuation of this ritual. this circumstance arguably makes their own experience of the rapa secondary to its representational and symbolic function among humans. the horses and people of galicia, bound together by a contracting and shifting agricultural economy, share an existential concern. for the horses to continue existing, they have to mean something to people, whether to the townspeople themselves or the tourists who are keeping this precarious economy afloat. these are questions that revolve around representational conclusions as much as social ones. in their case at least, the bestas need us to understand not just who they are, but also what they mean — which perhaps is a “species-local” question after all. choudhury, review of effinger copyright © 2025 poulomi choudhury this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2025): 276–285. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 fuzzy boundaries poulomi choudhury review of: elizabeth effinger, taxidermy and the gothic: the horror of still life. anthem studies in gothic literature. london: anthem press, 2024. xliv + 172 pp. £80.00 (hb), £25.00 (ebook) poulomi choudhury is a research ireland-funded phd scholar in the school of english at university college dublin, ireland. email: choudhup@tcd.ie book review http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 mailto:choudhup@tcd.ie elizabeth effinger’s taxidermy and the gothic: the horror of still life is a provocative intervention into gothic and horror studies, material culture, and animal studies. her thesis centres on taxidermy’s uncanny ability to encapsulate what she terms the “stuckness” of life’s horrors: the phenomenological terrors of everyday existence, perverse desires and systemic violence. tracing this collusion between gothic horror and the “taxidermic imaginary” (2) across the long nineteenth century to the contemporary period, effinger posits that taxidermy functions as a “dark mirror” that reflects the “human animal’s dark sides” (xxviii). effinger argues that the gothic’s myriad incarnations — horror, gothic horror, ecogothic — make it an unstable and protean concept, fraught with definitional dilemmas that have long agitated scholars. yet rather than offering a neatly circumscribed new definition, effinger embraces this tension as central to her argument. making the case for the gothic as an impure, messy, and compound concept, effinger recasts the gothic in light of taxidermy as an “affectively charged composite term” (xvi). like taxidermy, in other words, the gothic has fuzzy boundaries. but effinger’s definitions of taxidermy are somewhat more clean-cut. by delimiting her focus to three-dimensional, stuffed, and displayed mounts, she explicitly excludes other kinds of taxidermic practices such as wet preservations, skeletal remains, and animal-derived décor. this conceptual framing, she suggests, helps foreground the particularly unsettling physicality of mounts as a dominant form of taxidermy — their capacity to evoke disgust, desire, and dread. shifting between close and distant readings, taxidermy and the gothic brings taxidermy’s menacing presence to the forefront of gothic horror studies. structured thematically, the book’s four chapters each address a different aspect of taxidermy culture: making, looking, touching and, ultimately, transforming or becoming taxidermy. in the opening chapter, effinger positions walter potter’s two-headed stuffed kitten — a macabre victorian creation that stands apart from his whimsical anthropomorphic dioramas — as a gothic muse for exploring taxidermy’s “darker side” (1). through copyright © 2025 poulomi choudhury this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 15, no. 2 (2025): 275–285. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.22566 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.22566 choudhury, review of effinger | 277 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) close readings of texts such as charles maturin’s melmoth the wanderer (1820) and edward bulwer-lytton’s a strange story (1862), effinger demonstrates how taxidermy’s affective power, particularly its capacity to unsettle boundaries between the animate and inanimate, come to evoke visceral horror and hence continue the gothic’s enduring preoccupations. tracing the “taxidermic imaginary” of the long nineteenth century, effinger complicates prevailing narratives that present the period as wholly comfortable with taxidermy (2). through meticulous archival research, she instead highlights the era’s deeper cultural ambivalences and discomforts surrounding preserved animal bodies. while the expansive scope of this first chapter is a strength, it is not without its risks. effinger consults such a dizzying array of primary materials — literary texts, taxidermy manuals, periodicals, material specimens, and visual art — that her engagements with individual works are necessarily limited. nonetheless, she deftly navigates this corpus, demonstrating how taxidermy materializes gothic anxieties. her analysis of the shared rhetorical strategies between gothic fiction and taxidermy manuals is particularly persuasive. she argues, for instance, that the gothic novel’s disruption of authorial identity is mirrored in nineteenth-century taxidermy manuals, such as those to which naturalist sarah bowdich contributed anonymously. both reflect a fascination with counterfeit constructions, where “bodies, like names, are unstable markers of identity” that cannot be trusted (9). the following two chapters establish the theoretical scaffolding that underpins effinger’s analysis. weaving together levinasian phenomenology and derridean deconstruction (chapter 2) and psychoanalytic theory (chapter 3), effinger interrogates what she calls taxidermy’s ontological dissonance. she positions taxidermy as a materialization of levinas’s il y a — the suffocating anonymity of existence without exit — and suggests that the object’s glassy eyes reflect derrida’s “bottomless gaze” of alterity. dylan trigg’s “nocturnal ontology” further frames taxidermy as a frozen, shadowy presence that traps viewers in the “interminable horror of existence” (48). these humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 278 | choudhury, review of effinger theoretical ideas inform effinger’s artfully composed readings of horror cinema that often reveal unexpected connections. her reading of ana lily amirpour’s the outside (2022), for example, excavates a historical parallel between the protagonist, stacey’s taxidermy hobby and her job as a bank teller. nineteenth-century taxidermists, effinger notes, used mutilated paper currency to construct animal mannequins, crystallizing taxidermy’s counterfeit logic: “it now looks like an ‘animal’ that is no longer an animal made from ‘money’ that is no longer money” (67). stacey’s association with taxidermy’s crisis of stagnation — the existential paralysis of being trapped, of living an empty life — is reinforced through her name’s homologous link to “stasis” and her fear of being socially ostracized. if the encounter with taxidermy suggests the horror of existence, of “violence and violations without end” (48), it is stacey’s counterfeit, hollow interiority and desire for acceptance that drives her to extreme violence, ultimately killing and stuffing her husband. effinger’s reading of the texas chainsaw massacre (1974) places the film within gothic horror’s broader fascination with taxidermy. she draws out how the spatial grotesquery of the swayer family’s homestead animates the film’s atmosphere of dread and bodily violation. the visual substitution of leatherface for the taxidermied wall mounts becomes a key moment in which the film aligns taxidermy with danger and perverse creativity (55). effinger’s analysis works well on these terms and charts the horror of aestheticized violence through the macabre display of specimens on the red-accented wall. however, her reading might have been further enriched by attending to the material conditions of the film’s production. art director robert burns notes that shifts in the 1970s meat industry, particularly its overproduction, enabled him to source real animal corpses from farms which were unable to afford rendering costs.1 this hidden presence of industrial animal death within the film would bolster effinger’s claim that “torture occurs beneath the taxidermy” (57), reinforcing her argument while drawing the suffering of nonhuman animals more explicitly into the frame. 1 see texas chain saw massacre: the shocking truth, directed by david gregory (blue underground/exploited film, 2000). choudhury, review of effinger | 279 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) in her third chapter, effinger explores the “dark libidinal energies” (72) — disgust, fascination, and erotic charge — that cluster around preserved animal bodies. through freud’s notion of “polymorphous perversity”, she foregrounds the unruly desires taxidermy provokes; via lacan’s concept of the “thing”, she positions taxidermy as a libidinal object of the drive: captivating, abject, and resistant to symbolic resolution. this framework underpins effinger’s coinage of “taxiderm-erotics”, a term she uses in order to track taxidermy’s erotic and psychic excess in texts such as psycho (1960), the cabin in the woods (2011), and tell me your secrets (2021). her close reading of psycho is especially compelling. building on her earlier claim that norman bates’s taxidermy-lined parlour literalizes his “private traps” of stasis (53), effinger turns to the uncanny space of norman’s childhood bedroom. there, she reads the juxtaposition of a child’s stuffed toy and a taxidermied owl as staging a continuum between affective comfort and emotional paralysis. drawing on winnicott’s theory of transitional objects — items that mediate early separation from the maternal figure — effinger argues that psycho collapses the distinction between the child’s object of attachment and the adult’s pathological fixation. anticipating criticism for drawing from psychoanalysis, which “some have dismissed as dead, [and] outmoded”, effinger defends her methodology as mirroring the gothic and taxidermy’s resistance to structural and conceptual purity (xxxv). while this ambition is valuable, it relegates nonhuman animals to talismans of human anxiety, depoliticizing the animals’ materiality. this elision is conspicuous in her discussion of the british academy of taxidermy’s valentine’s day workshops, where couples created taxidermied mice in fetishized poses. effinger notes one attendee’s nervous quip that this hobby could spiral into a more grotesque obsession, one where their “house becomes filled with stuffed cadavers” (74). effinger frames this as evidence of taxidermy’s proximity to taboo: “bound (and gagged) with the promise (or threat) of seduction” (75). this focus on psychological unease sidesteps the material realities of taxidermy’s production, namely the objectification, commodification, and killing of animals. as nicole shukin suggests, under biopolitical regimes, animal humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 280 | choudhury, review of effinger life is simultaneously transformed into a semiotic spectacle and reduced to disposable matter. 2 by effacing the capitalist logic that extracts value from animal bodies, effinger risks aestheticizing violence as a mere spectacle without addressing its structural conditions. in doing so, her analysis misses an opportunity to extend the gothic’s preoccupation with abjection and horror to the nonhuman world. throughout the monograph, effinger underscores taxidermy’s associations with terror and horror by highlighting the visceral, breathless response it elicits. this idea crystallizes in the final chapter, where she links taxidermy to the suffocating effects of systemic racism. effinger connects the idea of breathlessness (xxxvii, xli, 69, 114, and passim) not only to the lifelessness of animal remains but also to the anxiety that these remains provoke in humans when confronted with them. this connection is extended to shermaine jones’s conceptualization of “affective asphyxia”, which refers to the expectation that black people must suppress their emotions, rage, fear, and grief when dealing with racism and racial microaggressions (112). drawing on zakiyyah iman jackson’s theorization of bestialization and thingification, where black individuals are systematically dehumanized by being aligned with animals and reduced to an exploitable object, effinger suggests that taxidermy performs a similar manoeuvre to the “black(ened) being’s ontological plasticity” (108). rather than analogizing racialized bodies with the animal-object, effinger carefully navigates the ethical and political risks of collapsing these categories. she builds on jackson’s argument about the profound instability of black flesh to suggest that taxidermy, too, enacts a “nocturnal ontology” that forges an identification with black life and its attendant horrors. to illustrate this, she traces historical entanglements between race and taxidermic practices, highlighting the erased labour of the black taxidermist john edmonstone, who trained darwin, and the grotesque posthumous display of sara baartman. effinger likens zoologist georges cuvier’s obsessive pursuit of baartman’s body to the gothic trope of the fleeing heroine and frames taxidermy as a practice that blurs the line between scientific curiosity and violent objectification. 2 see nicole shukin, animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, 2009). choudhury, review of effinger | 281 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) yet, if taxidermy is a site where mechanisms of racial violence can be read, effinger suggests that its very instability also holds subversive potential. her reading of jordan peele’s get out (2017) exemplifies this tension. she compellingly links the taxidermied deer to the fungibility of black bodies within a neoliberal order, which she identifies in the figure of dean armitage, the patriarch of the family and head of the secret coagula order. armitage represents the fatherly face of neoliberalism, an economic and social system that commodifies black bodies while annihilating their agency. at the same time, the deer mount, which chris, the film’s black protagonist, uses to free himself, gains “renewed life as a weapon” (129), allowing him to reverse his own transmogrification into commodity by exacting his revenge and killing his captor. this final chapter is perhaps the most powerful in the book. here, effinger narrows her focus to only two texts. this allows her close readings to breathe and unfold with theoretical depth and historical nuance. it convincingly demonstrates the potential of reading taxidermy as a dynamic site for interrogating the multiple forms of violence imposed on racialized and nonhuman bodies. one of the central provocations of taxidermy and the gothic is effinger’s claim that gothic scholarship has consistently overlooked the deep entanglement between taxidermy and horror. while taxidermy frequently appears in gothic texts, she argues, it is rarely the object of sustained critical attention, particularly with regard to its grotesque materiality. at the same time, she observes that scholars working within animal studies have become increasingly attentive to taxidermy. yet, they neglect to think about it explicitly in gothic terms. this is the critical gap she seeks to redress. however, the way effinger positions her work in relation to both gothic and animal studies raises certain tensions. one of the more polemical aspects of her argument is her challenge to what she calls “critical taxidermy studies” (cts), which she provocatively dubs the “stuffed progeny of critical animal studies” (143). cts, she claims, encompasses a wide range of scholarship, from steve baker’s botched taxidermy to giovanni aloi’s speculative taxidermy humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 282 | choudhury, review of effinger and susan mchugh and sarah bezan’s literary and visual analyses. these scholars, effinger acknowledges, have been “invaluable in thinking through our more-than-human worlds” (xiv). but she also argues that their work remains tethered to the ethical imperative of critical animal studies (cas), which seeks to reimagine human–animal relations through frameworks of mourning, melancholia, interspecies kinship, and care. effinger contends that cts, despite taking taxidermy seriously, tends to sanitize it and transform it into what she calls a “bloodless” and “furry figure of critique and speculation” (xxi). in her reading, even when these works acknowledge taxidermy’s “negative aesthetics” (xviii), they ultimately disavow its abject horror. for instance, she suggests that mchugh and bezan shift their attention away from the “seediness” of the taxidermist, preferring to find “seeds of resistance” in the figure who avenges the animal’s death (xx). similarly, though aloi aligns speculative taxidermy with morton’s dark ecology — a theory that embraces uncertainty, ugliness, and horror — effinger argues that his case studies lack the visceral horror she sees as taxidermy’s ontological core. her critique seems to hinge on a distinction between the redemptive ethics of cas, which seek to recuperate violence through reparative frameworks, and her own ethics of confrontation, which insists on lingering in taxidermy’s discomforts, perhaps, without resolution. rather than offering an ethical encounter with the animal, effinger positions taxidermy as a gothic object that compels us to confront violence, ambiguity, and stasis in all their discomforting affective force. this approach allows her to foreground taxidermy’s grotesque materiality, but, to me, it also raises important questions about the limits of identification and the risks of detaching taxidermy from the real animal bodies it represents. indeed, one of the issues with effinger’s broad categorization of cts is that it risks flattening the diversity of existing scholarship. many of the works she groups together do register histories of violence and exploitation, albeit through different modes. for example, mchugh draws out affective affinities between humans and animals, while choudhury, review of effinger | 283 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) angela singer’s botched taxidermy, discussed in an interview with aloi, exposes how “the exploitation and destruction of animals and our environment, is in the end all our fault”.3 by collapsing cas and human–animal studies under a single polemical framework, effinger oversimplifies the nuances of a field that has already developed substantive engagement with taxidermy’s abjection and harm, even if through reparative or ethical lenses. effinger also situates her study in relation to recent efforts to introduce nonhuman animals into gothic criticism. she engages with ruth heholt and melissa edmundson’s edited collection gothic animals (2020), identifying the “creature terror” — the uncanny fear generated by encountering the nonhuman other (xxxvii) — as productive for her own project. this focus, however, is symptomatic of a recurring tendency in gothic studies: it privileges the so-called animal within, treating nonhuman animals primarily as conduits for human fears and anxieties. effinger’s alignment with gothic animals overlooks this tension. in fact, timothy baker’s contribution to the same volume explicitly resists such symbolic reductions. he argues that animals in gothic literature can disrupt entrenched anthropocentric and masculinist ideologies, insisting that they be read not merely as reflections of human interiority but as agents that unsettle human exceptionalism itself.4 for effinger, however, it is the affective jolt of recognizing parallelism — what jane desmond, in mchugh and bezan’s configurations issue, calls a “transspecies speculation”5 of becoming the animal — that lies at the heart of gothic horror. while desmond characterizes this encounter as “charming”, effinger reframes it through horror. in gothic contexts, she argues, taxidermy stages the fear of “being disemboweled, of being evacuated, of being stuffed and mounted, rendered frozen, immobile, and placed on 3 see susan mchugh, “taxidermy’s literary biographies”, in animal biography: re-framing animal lives, ed. andré krebber and mieke roscher (cham: palgrave macmillan, 2018), 141–60; and giovanni aloi, “angela singer: animals rights and wrongs”, antennae: the journal of nature in visual culture no. 7 (2008): 17. 4 see timothy c. baker, “companion animals in contemporary scottish women’s gothic”, in gothic animals: uncanny otherness and the animal with-out, ed. ruth heholt and melissa edmundson (cham: palgrave macmillan, 2020), 291–306. 5 jane desmond, “vivacious remains: an afterword on taxidermy’s forms, fictions, facticity, and futures”, configurations 27, no. 2 (2019): 266. https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2019.0015. https://doi.org/10.1353/con.2019.0015 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) 284 | choudhury, review of effinger display, to be alive in death, to be unblinkingly stuck, to be radically transformed, to feel a scream stuck in one’s throat, to be in stasis forever” (xl). what unsettles us, she suggests, is the sensation that we, too, could become mounts. yet this emphasis on the phenomenological dread of becoming a taxidermied animal risks occluding a more urgent question: why is the animal dead to begin with? what conditions of violence, control, or extraction have led to this preserved body? while taxidermy and the gothic offers to contribute to “more-than-human directions in gothic horror” (xxxviii), its reluctance to fully confront the material violence inflicted on nonhuman animals feels like a missed opportunity. as cristy tidwell reminds us, the true horror of taxidermy lies not in metaphorical identification but in the very fact of an animal’s violated body: “i do not need to imagine myself into the animal’s place; it’s bad enough that the animal is in this position.”6 similarly, john simons asserts that “when i see a work of ‘botched taxidermy’ […] i do not see an epistemological problem. i see a dead animal” (183).7 to this, i would add that when i encounter a taxidermied animal in a gothic horror text, i see a dead animal. and i want to ask — why is the animal dead? what structures led to them becoming a mount? and if the scene fills me with dread, what does that say about why i am afraid of being treated like the animal? despite these limitations in explicitly engaging with the material conditions that lead to taxidermy, taxidermy and the gothic is a bold and significant intervention. it reframes taxidermy as a “catachrestic figure” — an anamorphic presence shifting between background and foreground to provoke confrontations with existential dread, sexual repression, and, most convincingly, systemic racism. effinger’s transdisciplinary methodology, which stitches literary analysis, archival studies, film criticism, and theoretical inquiry, reveals taxidermy as a material embodiment of gothic horror’s preoccupation with 6 see christy tidwell, “taxidermy as ecogothic horror: five questions for christy tidwell”, edge effects, 31 october 2024, https://edgeeffects.net/taxidermy/. 7 see john simons’s review of the postmodern animal by steve baker in anthrozoös 15, no. 2 (june 2002): 182–84, https://doi.org/10.2752/089279302786992603. https://edgeeffects.net/taxidermy/ https://doi.org/10.2752/089279302786992603 choudhury, review of effinger | 285 humanimalia 15.2 (2025) violation and stasis. like polly morgan’s harbour (2012), which grafts octopus tentacles onto a fox’s corpse, effinger’s work embraces the gothic’s messiness, challenging scholars to confront the “violent cycles of life” (138). if effinger’s analysis leaves some readers yearning for a more expansive engagement with questions of animal ethics, it is a testament to the relevance of the affective power of horror as a critical lens to do so. as gothic and horror studies evolve to confront anthropocene anxieties, taxidermy and the gothic will endure as an indispensable provocation. _hlk194718779 andrianova, a dino fix a dino fix “linus the vegetarian t. rex” as a picturebook for the anthropocene anastassiya andrianova north dakota state university humanimalia 14.1 (fall 2023) abstract: in this essay, i combine ecofeminism, critical animal studies, and vegan studies to analyse the depictions of dinosaurs in a vegan picturebook, robert neubecker’s linus the vegetarian t. rex. because picturebook dinosaurs, like the titular linus, can mobilize the intense “conceptual interest” in dinosaurs found among young children, i argue that a co-reading of linus can help initiate conversations and facilitate learning about difficult “adult” concepts, such as evolution, extinction, and the anthropocene, in children primarily but not limited to ages four to six. as compared to largely anthropocentric mainstream children’s literature, a vegan picturebook like linus can also intervene in early childhood education before children are socialized into dominant anthroparchal ideologies that normalize the consumption of animals and contribute to global warming; moreover, it can promote positive attitudes toward science and stem (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education. due to its ambiguous and openended messaging, as well as its imaginative approach of enlivening dinosaur fossils at a natural history museum, neubecker’s linus arguably encourages an ethical stance toward living nonhuman animals and thus offers a blueprint for “a picturebook for the anthropocene”: challenging the more obviously reductive instrumentalist depiction of dinosaurs in mainstream children’s literature; raising awareness about the climate crisis by promoting veganism and vegetarianism while also interrogating gendered assumptions about plant-eating; and combating sexist and adultist attitudes toward science education. keywords: anthropocene; children; dinosaurs; interspecies empathy; picturebooks bio: anastassiya andrianova is associate professor of english at north dakota state university in fargo, nd, where she teaches courses in literature and critical theory. she is a literary animal scholar with a background in comparative literature, an ecofeminist, and a vegan, and has published on animal narratology, zoopedagogy, ecospirituality, vegan studies, and anthropomorphism in children’s books. email: anastassiya.andriano@ndsu.edu orcid: 0000-0003-0386-3568 copyright © 2023 anastassiya andrianova this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 14, no. 1 (2023): 249–280. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.13618 mailto:anastassiya.andriano@ndsu.edu https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0386-3568 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.13618 andrianova, a dino fix | 251 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) [m]any adults displace the full impact of climate change to future generations. in contrast to this, children who were born into the 21st century […] are growing up in the context of a different sense of urgency, of a world already out of control. margaret somerville and sarah powell, “researching with children of the anthropocene” but we are not all in the anthropocene together — the poor and the dispossessed, the children and non-human animals are far more in it than others. karen malone, children in the anthropocene who doesn’t love dinosaurs? an entire culture industry fosters and caters to a phenomenon that can rightly be called “a dino obsession”. in the popular imagination, such as the jurassic park franchise, dinosaurs figure as monsters or legendary prehistoric creatures. in children’s media, they are often pictured as anthropomorphic talking animals. take, for example, the titular dinosaur in the late 1980s animated series denver, the last dinosaur, with his signature sunglasses, or baby sinclair in jim henson’s dinosaurs and the amiable purple-coloured t. rex in barney & friends in the early 1990s, all three disneyfied, “culturally-neotenized”,1 and meant to evoke favourable reactions from children through their resemblance to toys (baby is, appropriately, an animatronic puppet while barney is a human in a furry suit). to young children, anthropomorphic dinosaurs in picturebooks can also be loads of fun, as their human-like traits make these animals more “relatable”.2 in this paper, i explore how our cultural obsession with dinosaurs can be used to teach young children about the anthropocene, taking as a case study robert neubecker’s linus the vegetarian t. rex, a children’s picturebook about an anthropomorphic vegetarian tyrannosaurus rex who comes to life at a natural history museum and 1 baker, picturing the beast, 181. 2 young et al., “empathy for animals”, 335. 252 | andrianova, a dino fix humanimalia 14.1 (2023) befriends a human girl. picturebook dinosaurs, like the titular linus, mobilize young children’s “dino obsession”, an intense “conceptual interest” typically found among fourto six-year-olds.3 i propose, then, that a co-reading of linus can help initiate conversations and facilitate learning about difficult “adult” concepts, such as evolution, extinction, and the anthropocene, and also seek out productive, age-appropriate ways to collaboratively address these urgent environmental concerns with children aged four to six. (linus is recommended by the publisher for ages four to eight.) bringing dinosaurs into the discourse of the anthropocene — the current geological epoch characterized by the “growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere”4 — may seem counterintuitive at first. the word “dinosaur” is colloquially associated with being outdated and obsolete. dinosaurs are extinct and can only be empirically studied through body or trace fossils. but they can also be accessed discursively through visual or textual media. more so than living nonhuman animals, dinosaurs confirm steve baker’s claim that, when it comes to animals, the “real” and the “symbolic” are interconnected: “culture does not allow unmediated access to the animals themselves”, with cultural representations mixing “history, culture, public opinion, [and] received ideas.”5 from a scientific perspective, however, dinosaurs are anything but always already dead monsters, even as they defy expectations we might have about living animals. as the last apex predators to perish in the fifth mass extinction, dinosaurs are the logical paradigm to think through evolution, sustainability, and extinction, and also to rewrite the history of the anthropocene less anthropocentrically by reminding humans that, while they may be the current apex predator, they are not the first and likely not the last. katherine hayles describes this as “posthuman terror”, the fear that humanity will join “the dinosaurs as a species that once ruled the earth but is now obsolete”.6 3 alexander et al., “conceptual interests”, 325. 4 crutzen and stoermer, “the ‘anthropocene’”, 17. 5 baker, picturing the beast, 10, 25. 6 hayles, how we became posthuman, 283. andrianova, a dino fix | 253 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) this is a cautionary tale in which humans are simultaneously the culprits in power and the victims powerless in the face of forces larger than they are: global warming, thinning atmosphere, asteroids. it is through this “terror”, too, that we come closest to sharing the dinosaurs’ animality, however culturally mediated or even debatable that animality may be: besides being our distant evolutionary relatives, dinosaurs force us to confront the possibility that we may not survive the sixth mass extinction. to read stories about dinosaurs allegorically, as signifying something else, risks what baker calls “denying the animal”,7 that is, the real existence of the pictured animal. simply put, a dead dinosaur is not unreal or symbolic, and in that death lies buried an animal as well as a bit of ecological wisdom. engaging children in a subject they are passionate about can foster empathy across the species divide and introduce them to other, less familiar concepts, while also promoting pro-social and pro-environmental behaviour.8 linus the vegetarian t. rex is notable for the way that it challenges the more obviously reductive instrumentalist depiction of dinosaurs in mainstream children’s books, where they are often absurdly anthropomorphized and used to teach human lessons to human children, such as how to count or behave. although linus is instrumentalized insofar as his encounter with a human girl is meant to tell a (human) story, the picturebook’s objective transgresses species-chauvinist concerns: by (mis)casting the legendarily ferocious cretaceous-age predator as a child-friendly vegetarian, linus the vegetarian t. rex foregrounds the importance of eco-sustainability present in many, though not all, countercultural vegan children’s books. with the latter, linus also shares a focus on ethical dietary choices raised during mealtimes, though it differs in its more mainstream publication (by an imprint of simon & schuster).9 7 baker, picturing the beast, 136-7. 8 lithoxoidou et al., “developing empathy”; ernst et al., “young children’s empathy”. 9 while most vegan children’s books tend to be published by smaller, independent presses or self-published, like julie hausen’s we all love or kate foster’s vegan nursery rhymes, linus’s publishing pedigree belies the book’s marginalized status: in amazon’s (admittedly not unbiased) best sellers rank, neubecker’s book is at no. 340,249 (no. 993 in children’s dinosaur books). in contrast, marcus pfister’s mainstream hit the rainbow fish sits at no. 331. 254 | andrianova, a dino fix humanimalia 14.1 (2023) by promoting veganism and vegetarianism (henceforth: veg*anism) over environmentally damaging carnivorism, it can also help raise awareness about the evidenced connection between meat consumption and global warming. finally, by pairing the nonhuman animal with a human girl, linus brings into perspective a host of veg*an and ecofeminist concerns, linking “the oppression of women and the domination of nature”10 with gendered perceptions of “the other”: the “gender gap” and historic underrepresentation of women in science11; anti-science prejudice12; the cultural associations around the image of the male scientist and the patriarchal ideologies informing the study of nature; and the denigration of veg*anism through mainstream anti-vegan discourses, which associate it with self-abnegation, restriction, and malnutrition (e.g., “the limpness of ‘lettuce eating’”13), which can further be said to carry gendered and anti-feminist overtones given the western cultural identification of meat-eating with masculinity. accordingly, this paper is organized in four parts: i begin with a summary and analysis of neubecker’s linus, considering in particular the text’s open-ended, ambiguous messaging and its use of whimsical logic and humour; then, i place linus in the context of mainstream children’s literature and culture, homing in on the role of anthropomorphism in the depiction of dinosaurs; third, i consider linus specifically as a vegan picturebook from a theoretical perspective informed by ecofeminism, critical animal studies, and vegan studies; and finally, i argue that the human–animal friendship at the centre of this picturebook challenges gendered and adultist assumptions, not only about veg*anism but also about science and scientists. due to its ambiguity and open-endedness, as well as the imaginative approach combining fossils, dinosaurs, human children, and science / natural history museums with veg*anism, linus may be regarded as a sort of blueprint of a picturebook for the anthropocene, 10 glotfelty and fromm, ecocriticism reader, xxiv. 11 see, e.g., beede et al., “women in stem”; skolnik, “why are girls”. 12 philipp-muller et al., “why are people antiscience”. 13 cole and stewart, our children and other animals, 22. andrianova, a dino fix | 255 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) a text to start an intergenerational child–adult dialogue about nonhuman animal and environmental concerns while, at the same time, promoting veg*anism and stem (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education to and for young girls. the “fix” in the title of this paper is thus also a deliberate pun: on children’s dinosaur “fix”-ation (and the related dinosaur addict’s “fix” to a craving for more dinosaurs); a sorely needed “fix” (solution) to anthropogenic environmental damage; and also, informally, a “fix” (tough situation) that is the climate crisis. granted, children’s books are written, edited, published, and typically selected for purchase and circulation by adults. because of the adults’ role in producing children’s books, they are “inevitably didactic in some way”; in the words of peter hunt, a pioneer in the academic study of children’s literature, “even the most childfriendly [book] is adopting some implicit attitudes”.14 yet while being an “adult” issue, ecological sustainability is also child-centred, particularly for those born in the twenty-first century who are the most vulnerable and deeply impacted. to that end, i include my own experience of co-reading this book with freya, my five-year-old daughter, as a way of encouraging other eco-minded adults to co-learn about the anthropocene with children. aspiring toward the critical lens of what childhood studies advocate john wall terms “childism”, i assume that children like freya are “empowered meaning-making agents”15 capable of co-producing knowledge and valuable insights. i. linus the vegetarian t. rex: summary and analysis weighing about half a kilogram (1 lb), neubecker’s linus the vegetarian t. rex is an ansi letter-sized (8.5″ × 11″) hardcover book, with illustrations by the author rendered in ink on watercolour paper and then digitally coloured. integral to the book’s material haptics, the vibrant images on its glossy, predominantly bleed pages are inviting and stimulating; colours range from tans and greens in the background to the bright blue, yellow, and copper of linus’s plump body 14 hunt, “instruction and delight”, 14. 15 wall, “childism”, 262, 257. figure 1: title page from linus the vegetarian t. rex by robert neubecker. © 2013 by robert neubecker. used by permission of s&s, inc. beach lane books • new york london toronto sydney new delhi robert neubeckerrobert neubecker andrianova, a dino fix | 257 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) and the human protagonist ruth ann’s blood-orange dress, which resonates with the warm orange hues of other friendly animals the two protagonists meet: the herd of iguanodons and ellen, the triceratops, along with her children. the sheets are relatively thin and subject to tearing, making the somewhat unwieldy large book more appropriate for co-reading with an older reader than a typical board book, which is less vulnerable to inexperienced, sticky little fingers. linus shares this paper quality with most vegan children’s books i have consulted, likely because they are meant for kindergarten-age children (or older) who are more socially aware and independent than toddlers, and are therefore more likely to question their own and others’ beliefs and behaviours. the plot is straightforward and can be summarized in a single sentence: it is a story about a fictional vegetarian tyrannosaurus rex who befriends and has lunch with a human girl. linus opens with an image of this child, ruth ann mackenzie, proudly holding up her membership card to the museum of natural history. during her visit to this museum, ruth ann enters the “cretaceous surprises” exhibit, where her favourite dinosaurs come to life. the first thing ruth ann says upon meeting linus, “a gigantic tyrannosaurus rex”, is: “please don’t eat me!” in the illustration accompanying this encounter, linus’s sharp-teethed mouth is gaped open over the girl’s terrified face, her body perched on one foot as though blown away by his forceful breath; the text, meanwhile, announces his friendship and invitation to a shared meal, a notable irony. along with other vegan picturebooks set during mealtimes, linus thus teaches children “how to eat correctly, that is, to put it simply, what to eat and what not to eat or who eats whom”.16 as “powerful socializing events”, shared mealtimes make individual dietary practices visible.17 in the case of veg*anism, the traditional food chain is re-imagined so that predators are no longer presented “as eating subjects” hierarchically superior to “certain animals” who serve “as objects to be eaten”18; hence, experiences meant to reaffirm community membership and a sense 16 daniel, voracious children, 4; cf. andrianova, “friends, not food”. 17 daniel, voracious children, 15. 18 daniel, voracious children, 14–15, quoting psychologist paul rozin. 258 | andrianova, a dino fix humanimalia 14.1 (2023) of belonging can actually expose differences and turn into invitations, or even demands, to justify those differences — something that could be especially stressful for children. in contrast to dan bodenstein and ron robrahn’s steven the vegan, a notable vegan picturebook where the young steven is asked by his classmates to explain why he is a vegan, the burden falls not on the human child but on linus the dinosaur to justify his diet. as it is lunch time, linus asks ruth ann to join him, and his predatorial identity, already mollified through anthropomorphic infantilization (big round eyes, short arms, and stubby feet), is further dismantled by the veg*an reappropriation of the rhetoric of hunting: the vegetarian dinosaur “attacked […] a patch of arugula”; “stalked […] some yummy broccoli”; and “pounced […] on a plump tomato” (my emphasis). when linus greets rather than eats a herd of iguanodons, ruth ann exclaims: “didn’t you want to eat those guys?” linus replies: “i wouldn’t dream of it […] they’re my friends!” the girl is understandably shocked when linus denies his identity as a dinosaur who is “fierce” and “a predator”; he says, instead, that he is “a very popular one!” rather than eating other animals, linus befriends them, thereby inviting ruth ann and, by extension, other children to treat nonhuman animals with equal respect. for those not just veg*an-curious but fully vegan, this would serve as a re-affirmation of their beliefs and practices, however un-“popular” they might otherwise seem. it is only when accosted by a band of velociraptors that linus takes charge, picks up ruth ann, sets her at the top of a tree, and proceeds to “roa[r] and roa[r] and roa[r]”; even then, linus refuses to be characterized as “ferocious”: “‘you’re my hero, linus!’ said ruth ann. ‘nonsense!’ said linus. ‘i’m just me — a very big, very brave, very vegetarian tyrannosaurus rex!’” after this brief encounter with danger, “linus and ruth ann spend the afternoon munching on veggies and chatting about all things cretaceous”, before she finally steps through the curtain, purchases a stuffed t. rex at the museum shop, and sets out on her next adventure. “she had enough time for one more exhibit. but now she wasn’t sure what to expect”, the penultimate page reads, as ruth ann is shown passing by the entomology andrianova, a dino fix | 259 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) exhibit with a glass case full of butterflies, and on to the final illustration with planets and the sign reading “space”, where a small green martian coyly peeks out from behind an exhibition stall. picturebooks typically contain simple texts along with visuals, and pictures are such an integral component of meaning-making that in recent childhood studies the compound form “picturebook” has become preferable. perry nodelman notes that written texts meant for younger readers are commonly believed to “need the pictures to shadow them, to show and tell all that the written words cannot say”.19 moreover, at this age, children are still learning hierarchical valuation and other reading strategies from adults: who is at the centre, who is named, and therefore who is important. especially the younger ones, however, “tend to scan a picture with equal attention to all parts”; “the ability to pick out and focus on the human at the centre is therefore a learned activity”, nodelman argues, “and one that reinforces important cultural assumptions, not just about the relative value of particular objects, but also about the general assumption that objects do indeed have different values and do therefore require different degrees of attention”.20 this prepares the ground for less anthropocentric reading experiences. whereas the text of neubecker’s linus is only 407 words long, it spans a total of 38 pages, not counting the title page. the picturebook’s illustrations feature the titular dinosaur in the centre of the dustjacket and on 29 further pages, with his body spread over two pages nine times, and with three of these iterations in the form of a stuffed animal purchased at the museum giftshop. ruth ann dominates the opening page and appears on twenty other pages, most often alongside linus, who towers over her, as well as on the front inside flap of the dustjacket next to her dinosaur friend. in terms of page numbers and not just size, linus prevails. in the middle fold, for example, his gigantic bluish-green face — with neotenic green eyes and sharp teeth revealing bits of partially-eaten lettuce — occupies close to two-thirds of the visual space; the tiny heads of the two 19 nodelman, the hidden adult, 13. 20 nodelman, “decoding the images”, 73. 260 | andrianova, a dino fix humanimalia 14.1 (2023) velociraptors, peeking out on the left, are barely noticeable in comparison, and ruth ann, while foregrounded and speaking (“you’re supposed to be a predator!”), is also off-set. hermeneutic strategies like these can help foster pro-environmental behaviour by decentring the human and re-focusing the young reader’s attention on the nonhuman muddle comprised of similarly relatable anthropomorphic herbivores (a triceratops family and a herd of iguanodons) and two threatening velociraptors, who sneak up on the pair of friends in a subtle way that encourages the child’s eye to travel from the centre and toward the margins. a child is also likely to question who is more or less important and therefore deserves more or less attention, based on the colour, size, position, and proximity of the human and nonhuman representations. when i co-read linus with my daughter, freya notices a variety of smaller dinosaurs peeking through the high grasses; she compares one of them to the more familiar frog. while she may be focalizing through a fellow human girl, freya is evidently more drawn to the surrounding nonhuman animals. unlike me, she does not pick up on the humorously undermined expert stance taken by ruth ann at the museum: according to the text, “[ruth ann] knew all about the ice age. she knew all about the oceans”; the illustration adds to this a dimension of the know-it-all, whose assumed pose and eagerness to teach others is not welcomed by the adult museumgoers based on their annoyed facial expressions. george bodmer writes that, beyond a mere gloss, pictures are often in “tension” with words, with “the illustration offer[ing] a ‘text’ in itself, which always tells a slightly different story”.21 this is also a “remind[er] that an implied reader is made up of a multitude of selves” and of “different age groups to which the text may simultaneously appeal.”22 further, freya asks about the velociraptors hiding in the bushes; it is only after she points this out that i trace a foreshadowing strategy through the visuals, showing the velociraptors spying on linus and 21 bodmer, “approaching the illustrated text”, 78, 72. 22 knoepflmacher, introduction, 6–7. this makes it challenging for librarians, publishers, and teachers to determine the age level for any given children’s or young adult book. andrianova, a dino fix | 261 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) ruth ann, the bright green sclera of their disembodied eyeballs popping out against the dark grasses, several pages before their heads and the rest of their bodies become visible and the two are “roared” into submission. as an adult with prior knowledge of carnivorous dinosaurs, i assume that the t. rex’s predatorial identity must play some part in the text, so i wait for the parade of veggies and tolerance to transition to something more confrontational; in contrast, in our first few co-readings, freya had almost no prior knowledge of the t. rex, but built anticipation through visual cues while scanning the entire visual canvas without her attention skewing toward the centre, as might that of a fully socialized reader. the same applies to dinosaur extinction. when turning to the page with the reconstructed dinosaur bones in neubecker’s picturebook, freya has asked repeatedly: “why are the dinosaurs (like) skeletons?” at that point we had not yet had an occasion for a serious conversation about death; her first encounter with death was, therefore, at the species level, through a visual encounter with dinosaur bones. shaped by her socioeconomic status as a white child growing up as a vegetarian in the upper midwestern united states, with access to progressive, pro-environmental, science-based education both in and outside the home, freya’s experience is by no means illustrative of all children. but it does resemble the experience of writer kristin poling’s son, whose first encounter with death was similarly mediated by dinosaur skeletons when learning about the fifth mass extinction. poling wonders whether this experience may not become a common one, that of “encounter[ing] the idea of death as a species event, and only later as an individual experience and tragedy”, at least among “precariously privileged” upperand middle-class american children, who are introduced by their parents to the realities of mass extinction and climate change. as questions of extinction and survival push the boundaries of secular parenting, poling recommends turning to science-based picturebooks, such as grandmother fish: a child’s first book of evolution, our family tree: an evolution story, and where do mountains come from, momma?, which are meant to teach children about the anthropocene: specifically, to understand “ourselves as individuals in the context of vast planetary 262 | andrianova, a dino fix humanimalia 14.1 (2023) systems and species identities”; to foster cross-species empathy in children, “not just for cuddly pandas, but for mucky lakes and poisonous frogs”; and then to transform this into action, “help[ing] children become responsible stewards of a threatened planet”.23 the need for an anthropocene education is borne out by our further co-reading. recently, when freya and i turned to the last of the four pages with an erupting volcano in the background, the final image before ruth ann exits the exhibit, freya paused: “but why is the volcano exploding?” rather than supplying an answer, i encouraged her to respond: “why do you think it’s exploding?” “when volcanoes exploded, ash covered the earth and the dinosaurs died. the volcano and also the asteroid. i learned it at school”, she added, “when we learned about dinosaurs. but maybe the volcano erupted and created the land, and the dinosaurs were safe…?” children’s literature can help children work through serious issues, such as suffering and death.24 animal suffering and death are anthropocentric standard fictional devices that are used for didactic and / or aesthetic purposes, such as the wolf’s literal scalding in the three little pigs.25 this is put in perspective by dinosaurs, who are dead and extinct, and whose fossil remains can be transformed into an opportunity to reflect on the precarity of life not just for dinosaurs or humans, but for all living, and especially critically endangered, species. it is important that we never see any bones identified as belonging to linus or the other cretaceans in the exhibit; the closest is linus’s footprint in the mud. dinosaur deaths are not represented; both their enlivenment and oblivion are framed / contained by the exhibit’s curtains. although both the t. rex and triceratops skeletons are featured in the opening pages, along with those of the diplodocus, pterodactyl, and stegosaurus, the iguanodons and velociraptors integral to the plot are missing. the museum reconstructions are disconnected from the enlivened creatures; yet their deaths are still a fossilized fact. it is precisely this tension that freya articulates 23 poling, “how to talk to children”. 24 haynes and murris, picturebooks, 4. 25 andrianova, “anthropomorphism”, 11. andrianova, a dino fix | 263 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) in her wish to rewrite the extinction by turning lava into constructive igneous rock, rather than sun-blocking ash ushering in an ice age. present in four illustrations in linus, the image of the erupting volcano may serve as an opening to a discussion of the volcanoes erupting around us today — or of rising sea levels, melting icecaps, and weather extremes, which might otherwise remain in the proverbial background even as we figuratively and literally embrace our nonhuman companions, as does ruth ann in the final image of the cretacean exhibit. in the vignette taking up two-thirds of the page, linus is shown hugging ruth ann’s small body, both their eyes closed in a moment of intimacy; in the top left corner is the erupting volcano, in the top right — the sun setting above a cave with a curtained door and a sign promising “future surprises”. the caption below reads: “then it was time to say good-bye. ruth ann stepped through the curtain…” freya’s wishful thinking that the volcano not be the cause of dinosaur extinction is far from naïve; it’s a step toward a more holistic ethics of planetary care. indeed, with their special kind of whimsical logic, picturebooks can help demonstrate the critical value of error, humour, and ambiguity, especially when presenting young children with difficult concepts. joanna haynes and karin murris note that picturebooks “bend, stretch, or break the rules, and in this play with conventions, a space between the ‘real’ world and other possible worlds is opened up”; it is humour and play, they write, that “make picturebooks suitable for philosophical enquiry as they make it possible to become self-critical.”26 neubecker misrepresents the carnivorous tyrannosaurus rex as a vegetarian who eats a vegan lunch and is pictured happily chomping on a carrot, thus positing the speculative possibility of animals evolving from meat eating to vegetarianism, as did the falcarius utahensis, “a dinosaur whose ancestors evolved from being meat eaters to vegetarians”, who is mentioned on the dustjacket to neubecker’s picturebook and apparently served as its inspiration.27 26 haynes and murris, picturebooks, 39. 27 in 2015 chilean scientists also discovered the chilesaurus diegosuarezi, an unusual herbivorous theropod (lemonick, “t. rex’s oddball vegetarian cousin”). 264 | andrianova, a dino fix humanimalia 14.1 (2023) by (mis)casting an archetypal carnivore as a plant-eater, neubecker takes on a vast mainstream cultural industry centred on the t. rex — made (in)famous by the genetically recreated meat-eater terrorizing humans in michael crichton’s jurassic park and steven spielberg’s high-grossing blockbuster film (plus sequels!), and although a different mutated species of theropod, also evoked in the giant godzilla of the 1950s. but what if, instead of being bioengineered or reawakened through nuclear radiation, a dinosaur could come to life as animal, rather than monster, through the sheer power of a child’s imagination? linus’s counterfactual identity as a herbivorous dinosaur can serve as a starting point for conversations about environmental sustainability and also an opportunity for children to ignite their critical thinking skills. discussing the differences between images and words in picturebooks, nodelman explains that these differences “both make the information richer and cast doubt on the truthfulness of both of the means which convey it.” an awareness of signs, nodelman argues, is crucial for children’s education: “the more both adults and children realise the degree to which all representations misrepresent the world, the less likely they will be to confuse any particular representation with reality”; the promotion of such questioning is nodelman’s alternative to “repressing [children] into conformity to our own [adult] views.”28 hence, juxtaposing the word “t. rex” with the image of linus chomping on a carrot or affectionately hugging a young girl, the book offers children an opportunity to become more aware of semiotics, ask questions, and learn. linus presents us with a “mixed up world”, to use affrica taylor’s term, or a kind of “matted and entangled” assemblage that simultaneously houses living and dead dinosaurs, organic and manufactured entities, and humans and nonhumans, making space even for vegetarian t. rexes.29 this is further consistent with linus’s overall ambiguous and open-ended messaging. as one reviewer puts it, “children may have a hard time determining what lesson they are to take from 28 nodelman, “decoding the images”, 79–80. 29 taylor, reconfiguring the natures of childhood, 80, 88. andrianova, a dino fix | 265 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) this. are they meant to learn that vegetarianism doesn’t make you a wimp? or that it will win them hordes of adoring friends and fans? or just not to make assumptions?”30 freya finds the book “cool” because it teaches her “that velociraptors are predators”; “what t. rexes look like”, and “what the land looked like”. the picturebook’s merit lies in these multiple meanings, which range from instrumentalist (using animals to teach human children “not to make assumptions”) to biophilic, eco-conscious takeaways — both the explicit endorsement of veg*anism and the visual rhetoric suggestive of impending extinction. ii. anthropomorphic dinosaurs in mainstream children’s literature anthropomorphism, the projection of humanlike traits unto nonhuman entities, is a feature of many children’s books about animals, including vegan children’s books. humans are inclined to think about others in human terms for a number of reasons, including to learn more about unfamiliar others, both real and imaginary; to empathize across species lines, and to feel less lonely and more socially connected.31 literature on animal empathy suggests that, “[w]hether our projections are correct or not, when we see animals as human-like, we have a greater likelihood of considering them worthy of moral consideration and in turn, worthy of protection.”32 but research also suggests that anthropomorphic depictions of animals lead to children acquiring scientifically inaccurate ideas and adopting an anthropocentric worldview.33 although not as anthropocentric as mainstream dinosaur books, linus does draw on the pervasive tradition of anthropomorphizing animals that risks reducing them to metaphors for human concerns. along with two rows of sharp teeth, the bluish-green creature has kind saucer-shaped green eyes, childlike short arms, and stubby feet, 30 “linus the vegetarian t. rex”, kirkus reviews, 8 may 2013, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ book-reviews/robert-neubecker/linus-vegetarian-t-rex/. 31 epley et al., “creating social connection”; epley et al., “when we need a human.” 32 young et al., “empathy for animals”, 335. 33 ganea et al., “do cavies talk?”, 2. https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/robert-neubecker/linus-vegetarian-t-rex/ https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/robert-neubecker/linus-vegetarian-t-rex/ 266 | andrianova, a dino fix humanimalia 14.1 (2023) all exemplifying neotenic traits that make him more relatable to human children. this could, however, be deemed an example of “weak” anthropomorphism as compared to mainstream children’s literature about animals, like marcus pfister’s the rainbow fish, which dramatizes a fish’s self-inflicted descaling presumably to promote sharing.34 in contrast to what victoria simpson and jared piazza call “absurd” anthropomorphism, which invites children to think about “animals as humans”, “weaker” forms of anthropomorphism can help promote animal advocacy by encouraging humans to think about the animal and “not just stay within our own anthropocentric world.”35 in contrast to linus, penny dale’s dinosaur dig! offers an example of “absurd” anthropomorphism where dinosaurs are reimagined as construction workers building a swimming pool in a vibrantly coloured, alliterative, onomatopoeic counting book for children ages two to six.36 how do dinosaurs play with their friends?, one in a series with titles like how do dinosaurs say goodnight? and how do dinosaurs eat their food?, teaches children how to play nicely and share.37 dinosaur kisses traces the life of a young dinosaur as she learns to be more gentle by stomping, chomping, and eating in her attempts at kissing others.38 indeed, an analysis of representative dinosaur picturebooks yields some egregious examples of dinosaurs infantilized (kisses) and depicted “as humans” in dinosaur costumes (dig! and the how do… series). whenever nonhuman animals figure in texts allegorically, as conduits for human messaging, they risk being transformed into what carol adams calls “absent referents”: “they literally disappear as living animals to become meat; they disappear conceptually when as dead animals they are renamed ‘pork’ or ‘bacon’ or ‘hamburger’; and finally, they disappear symbolically when their experiences become metaphors for someone else’s experience.”39 although it may 34 andrianova, “anthropomorphism”, 15. 35 simpson and piazza, “humanising animals”. 36 dale, dinosaur dig! 37 yolen, how do dinosaurs play. 38 stein, dinosaur kisses. this whimsical board book remains a colossal hit with my daughter. 39 adams, “foreword”, xiii. andrianova, a dino fix | 267 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) be too late for the dinosaurs, it is not too late for other living herbivores who find themselves on the plates of children (often unwilling to eat animal flesh and requiring adult coaxing to do so), as well as in various cultural media, giving children cognitively dissonant ideas about eating the very same animals they love.40 these books may and, in the case of my own child, do provide for exciting reading experiences; however, such use of fictional animals as instructional tools for human education also contributes to the normalizing of the same “anthroparchal” mechanisms through which humans dominate, use, and abuse their real-life counterparts,41 further fuelling a cultural amnesia that privileges symbolic animals over the actual nonhumans’ “flesh and blood realities”, which critical animal studies aims to recover.42 “anthroparchy”, a term coined by erika cudworth, refers to the “multiplicities of domination” by which societies dominate and exploit nature to the benefit of humans.43 from a very young age, children become socialized into mainstream meat-eating ideologies that normalize the consumption of animal flesh, secretions, and skins, and add to anthropogenic environmental devastation by upholding adult carnophallogocentrism, the cultural association between masculinity and meat-eating.44 while the instrumentalist approach to animals may seem more obviously objectionable in the case of animals bred for consumption, such as chickens (meat-eating theropods’ distant relatives), the encounter with extinct animals is still an encounter with a nonhuman other, and the same mechanisms arguably apply. according to its dustjacket, linus, too, conveys a human moral: that “no matter what era, being yourself will always be in style.” this is rehearsed by both linus and ruth ann, and so presumably straddles the human / animal divide, but is still, as any such moral, reductive and in tension 40 cole and stewart provide the telling example of burger king’s promotional tie-ins with the film chicken run (2000): children would take home a toy representation of the very same animal whose real counterparts failed to escape the fate that the film’s heroes fought against (our children and other animals, 4). 41 andrianova, “anthropomorphism”, 2. 42 best et al., “critical animal studies”, 4. 43 cudworth, ecofeminist theory, 2, 4. 44 derrida, “‘eating well’”. 268 | andrianova, a dino fix humanimalia 14.1 (2023) with the picturebook’s overall open-endedness. at the same time, one could rightfully ask to what extent the anthropomorphized linus is, at least ambivalently, anthropocentrist, since he can only be narrated in relation to a human girl and is depicted as coming to life by means of a (human) child’s imagination. being reduced to and reified as a cute stuffed toy is not ideal, either. the “central paradox” of anthropocentrism, according to rob boddice, is that the rejection of human exceptionalism ought to entail the rejection of ethical prescription, which would require that humans, should they espouse being “an animal, just like any other”, also give up any ethical authority. “to embrace the anthropocentric means to acknowledge its a priori presence”, boddice contends, adding that humans, including ecologically-minded ones, “all begin their work because they are human, with unique skill sets and marks of distinction, in language, [and] in culture”. yet, anthropocentrism “as chauvinism, or prejudice” is different from anthropocentrism “as a non-optional starting point, a necessary cause.”45 echoing this sentiment, kari weil writes: “it is hubris, if not bêtise, to believe that our thinking can fully escape humanism or that our thinking does not in the end come back to us as humans.”46 linus’s “non-optional starting point” is in his encounter with ruth ann because it is a picturebook for human children, but this anthropocentrism is integral to the book’s non-anthropocentrist objective: unlike the hapless wolf of the three little pigs, this dinosaur does not have to die to teach young readers a lesson; his extinction lies outside the narrated shared experience, but informs the larger story of animal extinction so as to teach biophilic entanglement and mutual precarity. iii. linus against the anthroparchy: dinosaurs and vegan picturebooks early childhood cognitive research has shown that dinosaurs can assist in the conceptual work of initiating conversations about the 45 boddice, “introduction”, 12–13. 46 weil, thinking animals, 150. andrianova, a dino fix | 269 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) anthropocene with young children. the first longitudinal analysis of the prevalence, duration, and intensity of conceptual interests in children confirmed that many children between the ages of four and six develop an intense interest in dinosaurs, which allows them to learn about this conceptual domain while also serving as a confidence booster. “conceptual interests” or interests in “conceptual domains” motivate children to learn “through books (typically read to them by others), digital media, videotapes, and toy models that support them”, which then promotes “fact collecting”.47 while, by age four, boys were more likely than girls to develop and express an interest in a conceptual domain, the rate of the decline of that interest upon entering school was similar in both. such differences may be attributed to the cultural gendering of certain science-related subjects, such as dinosaur models, telescopes, and bug collecting, along with the gendering mechanisms at work in parents’ reporting on their children’s preferred activities. confirming children’s interest in dinosaurs, another study focused on children’s knowledge about dinosaurs as a way to gauge how knowledge is structured and put to use when drawing inferences.48 building on young children’s “dino obsession” could in turn foster empathy towards other species. a study of children aged four to nine suggests that “young children are far less speciesist than adults, at least in the context of dogs and pigs”, and that they “prioritize humans to a far lesser extent than adults.”49 if children do not intuitively “pick out and focus on the human at the centre”,50 and are initially more biophilic, then ages four to nine also seem appropriate for them to learn about science, evolution, and eco-sustainability, as well as the precarity of life for all species, not just familiar domesticated ones. and the best time to do this is in early childhood before the use, slaughter, and consumption of animals is normalized through mainstream children’s literature and culture. 47 alexander et al., “conceptual interests”, 325–26. 48 chi et al., “inferences”, 60–61, 27. 49 wilks et al., “children prioritize humans”, 10. 50 nodelman, “decoding the images”, 73. 270 | andrianova, a dino fix humanimalia 14.1 (2023) as well as promoting prosocial (other-caring) behaviour, empathy has been positively linked with pro-environmental behaviour and a predisposition toward conservation, and it has become a focus of wildlife conservation organizations, like zoos and aquaria.51 recent studies challenge jean piaget’s claim that “children younger than six or seven years cannot ‘decenter’ and therefore behave in an ‘egocentric’ way”; in fact, “the young child can get in the position of another person” and develop empathy for others, both human and nonhuman.52 there is evidence of “empathic action in the form of sharing […] in children as young as a year old”, which means that, cognitively, even very young children can “predict or imagine the experiences or perspectives of animals very different from themselves”; as they develop, moreover, children’s understanding of other animals evolves from “anthropomorphic peers” to more “diverse perspectives”,53 and this can also be rehearsed through role-playing and games.54 more so than mainstream children’s picturebooks, a growing body of vegan children’s literature is currently working to spread the message of eco-sustainability. for example, that’s why we don’t eat animals, a poignant critique of factory farming by prominent children’s writer and illustrator ruby roth, opens with the reminder that “[w]e are all earthlings” and concludes with practical suggestions for more sustainable behaviour, such as “recycle and re-use”.55 the book further links environmentalism to individual consumers’ choices, from what to buy and wear to which groups to join. roth’s vegan cookbook, the help yourself cookbook for kids, similarly links individual choices to larger environmental impacts, teaching readers that “eating plants can help save the world”.56 predominantly targeting audiences of existing or aspiring veg*an children and guardians and often set during mealtimes, when dietary questions and differences are brought to the fore,57 even ve51 ernst et al., “young children’s empathy”, 2–3; young et al., “empathy for animals”, 338. 52 lithoxoidou et al., “developing empathy”, 76. 53 young et al., “empathy for animals”, 332. 54 lithoxoidou et al., “developing empathy”, 81. 55 roth, that’s why we don’t eat animals. 56 roth, help yourself cookbook. 57 andrianova, “friends, not food”. andrianova, a dino fix | 271 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) gan children’s books have limitations, however, including “draw[ing] on already-existing problematic human–other animal relations (such as ‘pet’-keeping or cute style) or anti-vegan discourse (such as the reduction of veganism to an issue of dietary practice)”.58 according to matthew cole and kate stewart, veganism is “a process that synthesizes a value-rational, rather than instrumental-rational, orientation towards other animals with socio-emotional healing and reintegration consequent to the renunciation of violence and exploitation; the renunciation of anthroparchal socialization”; because veganism is perceived as “a threat” to mainstream anthroparchal ideology in the west, it is misrepresented in popular media “as ridiculous, impossible to sustain, pleasure-denying, faddish”.59 the term “vegan”, as the founder of vegan studies laura wright explains, combines vegan identity with vegan practice, and is also created and simultaneously “reconstituted by and within contemporary (non-vegan) media”.60 turning to linus, what initially appears as an error—namely, linus’s identity as a herbivorous theropod—becomes, upon reflection, a serious “threat” to the meat-eating establishment and an imaginative reclamation of the t. rex for the countercultural veg*an child.61 when greeting a herd of iguanodons, ruth ann asks linus why he did not eat them, to which he responds, “i wouldn’t dream of it […] they’re my friends!” the book’s promotion of healthy foods other than meat or dairy through a playful rhetoric of predator / prey can be interpreted as an attempt to make the consumption of veggies attractive to children. when co-reading this part of the book with my paradoxically veggie-averse vegetarian child, freya exclaims, “reading this book makes me want to eat all those veggies!” by staging the human–animal interaction during lunchtime and incorporating the adage found in many other vegan picturebooks that animals 58 cole and stewart, our children and other animals, 160. 59 cole and stewart, our children and other animals, 151. 60 wright, vegan studies, 1–2. 61 not surprisingly, linus is mentioned in several lists of vegan children’s books that promote prosocial, biophilic, and vegan messaging, including chooseveg, world of vegan, and live kindly. 272 | andrianova, a dino fix humanimalia 14.1 (2023) are “friends, not food”, linus similarly evokes the reductive view of veg*anism in mainstream anti-vegan discourses as “an issue of dietary practice”, rather than a holistic ethics of animal empowerment.62 at the same time, however, it disturbs this view by extending veg*anism to include animal relationships / friendships and an awareness of the interconnectedness of diverse species. also pertinent is linus’s well-intentioned but ultimately ambivalent engagement with gendered assumptions around veg*anism, along with its silence regarding the thorny relationship between american environmentalism and capitalism. by putting the face of a “fierce” t. rex on a vegetarian, the picturebook ostensibly challenges gendered perceptions of veg*anism as “weak”, “limp”, and “unhealthy”, particularly for children, in mainstream anti-vegan discourses that locate power in masculinist carnivorism. hence, linus can be said to inspire an ecofeminist combination of gender cum species recalibration to empower both women and animals, delivering on ecofeminism’s “necessarily anti-hierarchical” commitment63 and “the fundamental interconnectedness of all life”.64 yet, while attempting to dispel the cultural association between plant-based diets, gender, and physical weakness, the picturebook simultaneously risks reinforcing those very stereotypes: the apex predator linus is male whereas ellen, the herbivorous triceratops, is female and a mother, pictured surrounded by her eight babies. young readers may compound this by adding their own cultural assumptions, as does my daughter, who immediately genders the ungendered dinosaur skeletons on linus’s fourth and fifth pages: “i like her!” freya says pointing at the triceratops skeleton. “why do you like her?” “because she is not a predator.” “but how do you know it’s a she?” “all the predators are he, and all the dinosaurs who are herbivores are she. the t. rex is a he.” 62 cole and stewart, our children and other animals, 160. 63 gruen, “dismantling oppression”, 80. 64 gaard, “living interconnections”, 1, 2–3. andrianova, a dino fix | 273 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) so, while positing the very real possibility of conversion to veg*anism, linus ends up precariously straddling the line between the culturally dominant image of the male predatorial t. rex and his imaginary, culturally marginalized, plant-eating doppelgänger. further, although the book is framed by the transactional nature of museum stewardship, it is selectively silent about issues of labour, production, and class, communicating the message of liberal environmentalism through a consumer-oriented lens that stops short of challenging the market economy based on the commodification of nature. it opens with ruth ann’s proudly displayed museum membership card and concludes with her purchasing a miniature stuffed version of linus, just seconds after sharing a meal and a hug with his “real” counterpart. she is seen contentedly carrying this reified linus in the final two pages — an iteration of the consumerist dream of purchasing and owning material goods as a path to happiness. just as why no actual currency is exchanged in acquiring the membership or the stuffed toy, other questions remain unanswered: about the (inter)national corporations supplying electricity and other services to the museum, or these corporations’ possible trade entanglements with global petro-dictatorships; about the major museum donors’ potential ties to those same unsustainable organizations and other anti-environmental entities; about the ethical practices involved in the production of the stuffed toys, rocks, bones, and books on sale at the giftshop or of the materials used in manufacturing the dioramas and display cases; about the current labour practices of the museum staff (to whom “special thanks” is given on the copyright page), or more starkly, about the racist colonial history of acquisition and curation at natural history museums; and at the end of the day, about where all the museum waste is being disposed of, for there is no such thing as throwing “away”. unlike roth’s books, which are printed using soy inks onto recycled paper, linus does not appear to be sustainably made; its ebook version would be considered more eco-friendly, if not for the resource-intensive and rapidly obsolescent e-readers required to read them. then there’s the element of class. as much as all humans should have access to natural history as part of their sorely needed evidence-based 274 | andrianova, a dino fix humanimalia 14.1 (2023) science education, museum memberships are typically not free, and such museums tend to be located in big cities, with the museum on linus’s opening page resembling the classical façade of the american museum of natural history in new york city (amnh). along with urbanism, the vegan lifestyle that linus tries to inculcate in ruth ann is associated, in the popular imagination, with white upper-middle class culture and so-called “white veganism”.65 the ease of “hunting” for and accessing fresh food in the book belies the gravity of global food insecurity exacerbated by the effects of climate change on agricultural production. iv. ruth ann, the dinosaur expert and science enthusiast linus’s limitations, i argue, should be weighed against its strengths. it is, undeniably, a feminist picturebook a co-reading of which can help introduce young (pre-)readers to difficult concepts, such as death, evolution, and the anthropocene, and make stem education especially appealing to girls and young women. although smaller in stature than the titular dinosaur, the human featured on the title page of neubecker’s book is important in her own regard. as previously noted, ruth ann is introduced on the first page with her museum card in hand at the bottom of the steps to the museum of natural history. although another child is depicted holding their parent’s hand up the museum steps, she is independent and ostensibly without adult supervision. on the following page, she is shown confidently professing to an audience of museumgoers in front of a woolly mammoth, while another child, uninterested in the exhibited animal, is shown running away with their adult desperately clutching their arm. at the bottom of the same page, ruth ann is now teaching a pair of adults about whales: “she knew all about the ice age”, the caption reads; “she knew all about the oceans.” on the facing page, she is running to the dinosaur exhibit because, the text implies, that is what she “know[s] the most about”. the speech bubbles on the ensuing page confirm her knowledge of dinosaur varieties, ages, and diets. 65 museums are not only urban phenomena; initiatives like the smithsonian institution’s “museum on main street” bring museum exhibitions and educational resources to small towns in rural america. among efforts to challenge “white veganism” and gatekeeping, notable is a. breeze harper’s sistah vegan project. andrianova, a dino fix | 275 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) other picturebooks about dinosaurs, also set in natural history museums, often feature and foreground the human protagonist. harry and the dinosaurs at the museum by ian whybrow, for instance, tells of a boy with a “bucketful of dinosaurs”, who come to life while he completes a surprisingly not-boring school assignment about roman history. hannah ko’s the dinosaur museum describes a class field trip to a dinosaur museum that allows two boys to bond over their shared fear of dinosaurs. davide cali’s a funny thing happened at the museum… is unreliably (and delightfully) narrated by henry, another male child. on the other hand, linus defies gendered associations between dinosaurs and boys by showcasing a friendship between a vegetarian dinosaur and a girl, thereby summoning interrelated ecofeminist and veg*an concerns, including the “gender gap” in the so-called hard sciences which, despite recent social advances, remain male-dominated, and the conservative distrust of evidence-based science and the climate crisis. in her influential essay on the amnh, donna haraway describes the natural history museum as a “visual technology”, underscoring the masculine-gendered dimension of visually experiencing (and dissecting) nature (as an object), which is typically imagined as a “she” and “without technology”; due to how the visual experience in the museum is structured, haraway adds, “one has, willy nilly, the moral status of a young boy undergoing initiation”.66 this certainly applies to the aforementioned boys in harry and the dinosaurs at the museum and a funny thing happened at the museum…. but, of course, nature is also “constructed as a technology through social praxis”67; take, for example, the animatronic t. rex at the popular dinosaurs exhibit in london’s museum of natural history, who stands 4.5m (14.8ft) tall and terrorizes children with his roars. in linus, neubecker creates a visual experience of entering into the kind of “time machine” that haraway describes (the exhibit transporting the visitor from urban “chaos” to a calming “individual 66 haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy”, 52. 67 haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy”, 52. 276 | andrianova, a dino fix humanimalia 14.1 (2023) communion with nature”68), where fossils, rather than taxidermied mammals, reveal the constructedness of nature as technology through human-nonhuman social interaction. but the “eye (i)” is now part of “the spectacle”,69 and ritually communes with nature through a shared meal. this “eye (i)”, moreover, is not a young boy being initiated into a manhood of hunting with a gun / camera, but a young girl who seeks knowledge and is also open to re-evaluating all “[s]he knew”, including that dinosaurs ate “meat! more meat! lots and lots of meat!” to the typically male / masculinist meaning-making agent of phallogocentric western epistemology this poses a transgressive gender-bending revision — in other words, challenging haraway’s “necessarily a boy […] progress[ing] through youth”,70 the normative function of naming, classifying, and controlling animals having been traditionally assigned to (western, white, cis-gender, nondisabled) males, like h. f. osborn, amnh’s president, who named the t. rex “the tyrant lizard king” in 1905 after the first t. rex had been discovered by another man, the fossil hunter barnum brown. linus can be considered alongside a number of recent feminist books which encourage young girls’ curiosity about science. one notable example is linda skeers’s dinosaur lady: the daring discoveries of mary anning, the first paleontologist. recommended for five-to-seven-year-olds, dinosaur lady retells the story of mary anning, whose fossil discoveries shaped the burgeoning science of palaeontology, shattering, as the book claims, “the commonly held belief that the earth was only six thousand years old” and introducing the notion “that a species could become extinct”, all at a time when “[w]omen were not allowed” to join the geological society of london, attend lectures, teach, or take university classes. the “lady” referenced in the title is ironic since anning effectively challenged cultural conceptions about what is or is not “proper” for a “lady”, specifically by discovering dinosaur droppings, “something a lady shouldn’t talk about”, yet a valuable key to ancient creatures’ diets. in its concluding sentence, the picturebook suggestively encourages the young 68 haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy,” 23. 69 haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy”, 52. 70 haraway, “teddy bear patriarchy”, 22. andrianova, a dino fix | 277 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) reader to be as daring with whatever limited means they have: “and she did all that with a homemade hammer, a chisel, and a never-ending quest to fearlessly keep exploring — and learning.”71 although it does not self-inscribe into a feminist revisionist tradition, linus does incorporate some of the same tropes, such as the intelligent, science-savvy young girl who is fearless, daring, and set on sharing her expertise with others, including those perceived to be hierarchically superior (namely, adult males). it also promotes epistemic humility and collaborative learning as the child is forced to grapple with ruth ann’s know-it-all stance about dinosaurs being contested by linus (e.g., that he is not a carnivore, would not eat his “friends”). v. concluding thoughts there is tremendous creative energy in contemporary children’s literature. bridging the momentum of grandmother fish with that of dinosaur lady and linus, children’s books about natural history, extinction, and the anthropocene present an opportunity to re-evaluate anthropocentrism, patronizing attitudes about the “children of the anthropocene”, and sexism in the so-called hard sciences. while still learning interpretive strategies and linguistic codes, children are remarkably intuitive and capable of producing surprising insights, such as my daughter’s counterfactual desire for the erupting volcano not to annihilate the dinosaurs as an opening to a discussion of what humans can do today in the face of environmental crisis. but to empower children in our precarious age of climate crisis, adult mentors need to provide pathways for them to (co-)produce art, knowledge, and meaning beyond writing eco-conscious picturebooks and reading them to and with young (pre-)readers. children can compose their own books or create dinosaurs and their ecosystems out of paper, cardboard, plastic, or play dough. my hope is that engaging them in a subject many are already passionate about (dinos!) can help foster interspecies empathy and lead to children making better decisions with regard to nonhuman others and our shared planetary future. 71 skeers, dinosaur lady. 278 | andrianova, a dino fix humanimalia 14.1 (2023) works cited adams, carol j. foreword to wright, the vegan studies project, xi–xvii. alexander, joyce m., kathy e. johnson, mary e. leibham, and ken kelley. “the development of conceptual interests in young children.” cognitive development 23 (2008): 324–34. https://doi.org/dxtbq8. andrianova, anastassiya. “‘friends, not food’: depictions of animals in vegan picturebooks.” children’s literature association quarterly 48, no. 3 (2022). andrianova, anastassiya. “to read or not to eat: anthropomorphism in children’s books.” society & animals (2021): 1–19. https://doi.org/kp72. baker, steve. picturing the beast: animals, identity, and representation. champaign, il: university of illinois press, 2001 [1993]. beede, david, julian, tiffany, langdon, david, mckittrick, george, khan, beethika, and mark doms. “women in stem: a gender gap to innovation.” esa issue brief #04-11. u.s. department of commerce, economics and statistics administration. august 2011. https:// files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed523766.pdf. best, steve, anthony j. nocella, ii, richard kahn, carol gigliotti, and lisa kemmerer. “introducing critical animal studies.” journal for critical animal studies 5, no. 1 (2007): 4–5. boddice, rob. “introduction: the end of anthropocentrism.” in anthropocentrism: humans, animals, environments, edited by rob boddice, 1–18. leiden: brill, 2011. bodmer, george r. “approaching the illustrated text.” in sadler, teaching children’s literature, 72–79. cali, davide. a funny thing happened at the museum…. illustrated by benjamin chaud. san francisco, ca: chronicle books, 2017. cole, matthew, and kate stewart. our children and other animals: the cultural construction of human–animal relations in childhood. burlington, vt: ashgate, 2014. crutzen, paul j., and eugene f. stoermer. “the ‘anthropocene’.” global change newsletter no. 41 (2000): 17–18. cudworth, erika. developing ecofeminist theory: the complexity of difference. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2005. dale, penny. dinosaur dig! (dinosaurs on the go). london: nosy crow, 2012. daniel, carolyn. voracious children: who eats whom in children’s literature. new york: routledge, 2006. derrida, jacques. “‘eating well,’ or the calculation of the subject: an interview with jacques derrida.” translated by peter connor and avital ronnell. in who comes after the subject?, edited by eduardo cadava, peter connor, and jean-luc nancy, 96–119. london: routledge, 1991. epley, nicholas, scott akalis, adam waytz, and john t. cacioppo. “creating social connection through inferential reproduction: loneliness and perceived agency in gadgets, gods, and greyhounds.” psychological science 19, no. 2 (2008): 114–20. https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02056.x. epley, nicholas, scott akalis, adam waytz, and john t. cacioppo. “when we need a human: motivational determinants of anthropomorphism.” social cognition 28, no. 2 (2008): 143–55. https://doi. org/10.1521/soco.2008.26.2.143. ernst, julie, curran, claire, and leah budnik. “investigating the impact of preschool type on young children’s empathy.” sustainability 14, no. 9320 (2022): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su14159320. https://doi.org/dxtbq8 https://doi.org/kp72 https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed523766.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed523766.pdf https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02056.x https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2008.02056.x https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2008.26.2.143 https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.2008.26.2.143 https://doi.org/10.3390/su14159320 https://doi.org/10.3390/su14159320 andrianova, a dino fix | 279 humanimalia 14.1 (2023) gaard, greta. “living interconnections with animals and nature.” in ecofeminism: women, animals, nature, edited by greta gaard, 1–12. philadelphia, pa: temple university press, 1993. ganea, patricia a., caitlin f. canfield, kadria simons-ghafari, and tommy chou. “do cavies talk? the effect of anthropomorphic pictures on children’s knowledge about animals.” frontiers in psychology 5, no. 283 (2014). https://doi.org/gkcxrg. glotfelty, cheryll, and harold fromm, eds. the ecocriticism reader: landmarks in literary ecology. athens: university of georgia press, 1996. gruen, lori. “dismantling oppression: an analysis of the connection between women and animals.” in ecofeminism: women, animals, nature, edited by greta gaard, 60–90. philadelphia, pa: temple university press, 1993. haraway, donna. “teddy bear patriarchy: taxidermy in the garden of eden, new york city, 1908–1936.” social text, no. 11 (winter, 1984–1985): 20–64. https://doi. org/10.2307/466593. hayles, n. katherine. how we became posthuman: virtual bodies in cybernetics, literature, and informatics. chicago: university of chicago press, 1999. haynes, joanna, and karin murris. picturebooks, pedagogy and philosophy. new york: routledge, 2012. hunt, peter. “instruction and delight.” in children’s literature: approaches and territories, edited by janet maybin and nicola j. watson, 12–26. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan, 2009. knoepflmacher, ulrich c. introduction to sadler, teaching children’s literature, 1–9. ko, hannah. the dinosaur museum. illustrated by srimalie bassani. greensboro, mo: rourke educational media, 2017. lemonick, michael d. “t. rex’s oddball vegetarian cousin discovered.” national geographic, 27 april, 2015. https://www.nationalgeographic. com/culture/article/150427-theropoddinosaur-vegetarian-rex-science. lithoxoidou, loukia s., alexandros d. georgopoulos, anastasia th. dimitriou, and sofia ch. xenitidou. “‘trees have a soul too!’ developing empathy and environmental values in early childhood.” international journal of early childhood environmental education 5, no. 1 (2017): 68–88. https:// files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1158501.pdf. malone, karen. children in the anthropocene: rethinking sustainability and child friendliness in cities. london: palgrave macmillan, 2018. morley, catherine weyerhaeuser. where do mountains come from, momma? missoula, mt: mountain press, 2012. neubecker, robert. linus the vegetarian t. rex. new york: beach lane books, 2013. nodelman, perry. the hidden adult: defining children’s literature. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, 2008. nodelman, perry. “decoding the images: illustration and pictures.” in understanding children’s literature, edited by peter hunt, 69–80. new york: routledge, 1999. peters, lisa westberg. our family tree: an evolution story. illustrated by lauren stringer. boston: clarion books, 2003. philipp-muller, aviva, spike w. s. lee, and richard e. perry. “why are people antiscience, and what can we do about it?” pnas 119, no. 30 (2022): e2120755119. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2120755119. poling, kristin. “how to talk to children about extinction: picture books for the anthropocene.” medium, january 13, 2019. https://medium.com/@kepoling/ how-to-talk-to-children-aboutextinction-picture-books-for-theanthropocene-6a12576edf8a. https://doi.org/gkcxrg https://doi.org/10.2307/466593 https://doi.org/10.2307/466593 https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/150427-theropod-dinosaur-vegetarian-rex-science https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/150427-theropod-dinosaur-vegetarian-rex-science https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/150427-theropod-dinosaur-vegetarian-rex-science https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1158501.pdf https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej1158501.pdf https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2120755119 https://medium.com/@kepoling/how-to-talk-to-children-about-extinction-picture-books-for-the-anthropocene-6a12576edf8a https://medium.com/@kepoling/how-to-talk-to-children-about-extinction-picture-books-for-the-anthropocene-6a12576edf8a https://medium.com/@kepoling/how-to-talk-to-children-about-extinction-picture-books-for-the-anthropocene-6a12576edf8a https://medium.com/@kepoling/how-to-talk-to-children-about-extinction-picture-books-for-the-anthropocene-6a12576edf8a 280 | andrianova, a dino fix humanimalia 14.1 (2023) roth, ruby. that’s why we don’t eat animals: a book about vegans, vegetarians, and all living things. berkeley, ca: north atlantic books, 2009. roth, ruby. the help yourself cookbook for kids: 60 easy plant-based recipes kids can make to stay healthy and save the earth. kansas city, mo: andrews mcmeel, 2016. sadler, glenn edward, ed. teaching children’s literature: issues, pedagogy, resources. new york: the modern language association of america, 1992. simpson, victoria, and jared piazza. “humanising animals: helpful or harmful?” phair society, october 24, 2021. https://phairsociety. org/2021/10/24/humanising-animalshelpful-or-harmful/. skeers, linda. dinosaur lady: the daring discoveries of mary anning, the first paleontologist. illustrated by marta álvarez miguéns. naperville, il: sourcebooks explore, 2020. skolnik, julia. “why are girls and women underrepresented in stem, and what can be done about it?” science & education 24 (2015): 1301–06. https://doi. org/10.1007/s11191-015-9774-6. somerville, margaret, and sarah powell. “researching with children of the anthropocene: a new paradigm?” in educational research in the age of the anthropocene, edited by vicente reyes, jennifer charteris, adele nye, and sofia mavropoulou, 14–35. hershey, pa: igi global, 2019. stein, david ezra. dinosaur kisses. somerville, ma: candlewick, 2014. taylor, affrica. reconfiguring the natures of childhood. london: routledge, 2013. tweet, jonathan. grandmother fish: a child’s first book of evolution. illustrated by karen lewis. new york: feiwel & friends, 2016. wall, john. “from childhood studies to childism: reconstructing the scholarly and social imaginations.” children’s geographies 20, no. 3 (2022): 257–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019 .1668912. weil, kari. thinking animals: why animal studies now? new york: columbia university press, 2012. whybrow, ian. harry and the dinosaurs at the museum. new york: random house books for young readers, 2005. wilks, matti, lucius caviola, guy kahane, and paul bloom. “children prioritize humans over animals less than adults do.” psychological science 32, no. 1 (2020): 27–38. https://doi. org/10.1177/0956797620960398. wright, laura. the vegan studies project: food, animals, and gender in the age of terror. foreword by carol j. adams. athens: university of georgia press, 2015. yolen, jane. how do dinosaurs play with their friends? illustrated by mark teague. new york: the blue sky press, 2006. young, ashley, kathayoon a. khalil, and jim wharton. “empathy for animals: a review of the existing literature.” curator: the museum journal 61, no. 2 (april 2018): 327–43. https://doi. org/10.1111/cura.12257. https://phairsociety.org/2021/10/24/humanising-animals-helpful-or-harmful/ https://phairsociety.org/2021/10/24/humanising-animals-helpful-or-harmful/ https://phairsociety.org/2021/10/24/humanising-animals-helpful-or-harmful/ https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-015-9774-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-015-9774-6 https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1668912 https://doi.org/10.1080/14733285.2019.1668912 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620960398 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797620960398 https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12257 https://doi.org/10.1111/cura.12257 nuttall, review of green disarranging narrative sarah nuttall review of: louise green, fragments from the history of loss: the nature industry and the postcolony. anthroposcene: the slsa book series. university park: pennsylvania state university press, 2020. x + 193 pp. 7 b&w illus. $29.95 (pb), $112.95 (hb). sarah nuttall is professor of literary and cultural studies at wiser at the university of the witwatersrand, south africa email: sarah.nuttall@wits.ac.za book review in this important contribution to critical scholarship on anthropogenic climate change and the pervasive reach and effects of late capitalism, louise green draws centrally on the work of frankfurt school critical theorist theodor w. adorno. famously, adorno’s conceptualization of the culture industry drew culture into the ambit of capitalism, theorizing culture’s diminishing capacity to offer critique and autonomy in the late modern world. in this scenario, green points out, nature retained a residue of utopian promise. although adorno put pressure on nature’s absolute difference with his conception of natural history, green pushes this further, naming the consumption of nature in the capitalocene the nature industry. seeking to undo the abstract and universalizing dimensions of the notion of the anthropocene, green insists on the specificities of the postcolony — a term she draws from achille mbembe’s writing to obstruct the anthropocene’s imperializing claims. she points to mbembe’s insistence on complex temporalities which disavow the forward or linear movement of colonialism and its “posts”, and to his focus on power and violence which produce “fragments of common experience” (19) among african subjects. green centres histories of economic extraction and environmental damage to which the african continent has been subjected. aware as she is of the complex issue of speaking of the continent at large — hence her attraction to fragments of commonality — it remains a tension that much of her book focuses on constellations (another adornian motif) taken from south africa. green argues that we must approach the anthropocene historically in the first instance rather than geologically. this is an important call, and one she unfolds in striking ways across the book, placing the nature industry and the postcolony in analytical constellation. she points to the difficulties of building an analysis that is attuned to the specificities and localities of historical and environmental harm in a time of planetary scale climate crisis. crucial as a historicist methodology is, a latent incommensurability remains, as chakrabarty and others have pointed out, in the face of worlds that are not only copyright © 2024 sarah nuttall this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international licence. humanimalia 14, no. 2 (2024): 321–325. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.18481 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.18481 nuttall, review of green | 323 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) nonhuman but indifferent to human-centred concerns. green follows the work of eric swyngedouw in arguing that it is less the loss of nature than the loss of capitalist life as we know it that seems to be a subtext of many discourses on the anthropocene (55, 59). this leads green to argue that the anthropocene should be viewed less an epoch and more as a historical period. here africa’s ongoing association with nature rather than history carries deep paradoxes and complexities that green is adept at laying open for analysis. one result of the above, green argues, is that it is still possible “to talk about the whole world and not to talk about africa” (73). on the one hand this is, of course, correct: the degree to which euro-america reproduces willful ignorance in relation to the complexity and capacity for deep thought and theoretical imagination on the continent, is astounding. on the other, i would have liked to see more african and africa-based scholarship in green’s bibliography, precisely as the work of undoing the ongoing hegemonies of northern imaginations of africa. i thought the book needed a broader engagement with south and southern african scholarship in cultural studies and critical theoretical analysis (some of which green gestures at but does not independently reference) and which of course is richly analytically and politically complex. this points to a question about what is gained and what is lost, perhaps, by the deep focus on adorno’s work as a methodology, vantage point, politics and even tone and mood. while adorno’s use of constellation as method is important for this book and put to excellent use by green, i often thought that the copious chapter epigraphs and long stretches of extrapolation of other aspects of adorno’s work detracted from green’s arguments which are either capable of standing on their own terms or could have drawn on wider contemporary sources. across the chapters, green draws together historical incidents, artistic projects, consumer choices and cultural phenomena as constellations into which imperial narratives continue to surface. chapter two analyses two exhibits in north american and uk museums: a piece of rainforest from the central african republic and an artificially humanimalia 14.2 (2024) 324 | nuttall, review of green created biome. close readings of these living exhibits reveal how climate crisis is emerging in global imaginations, specifically as an object of nostalgia — and how processes of extraction of african materials and environments are concealed via abstract discourses of its natural worlds. this is followed by a largely conceptual chapter on cultures of consumption and the ways in which commodities manufacture both value and distinction: consumer objects are bracingly read as “charged particles” (69) transmitting status in the circuits of global inequality — and causing planetary environmental unsustainability. chapters four and five offer the strongest interventions in the book. in the first, green puts together a constellation which deliberately “disarranges” (75) historical narratives about diamond mining in south africa. against the smoothness of the finished and polished consumer products that diamonds become, green reclaims the “abrasive” (75) roughness of diamonds as extracted raw materials in order to rub against colonizing histories which appropriate nature as wealth in the colony. using photographic fragments, she analyses the compound system on diamond mining sites which were used to police who could accumulate and own diamonds as natural resources. the site of diamond extraction, she argues, had to be carefully managed so that black diggers were alienated from the natural resource whose abundance had to be concealed, lest it be seen to hold out more egalitarian distribution across race. nature, green shows, is violently contested despite the diamond’s mythification as a rarefied and precious commodity, one from which the point of extraction has to be excised. if a disarranged reading of diamonds points to their predatory extraction by a colonial elite, green’s next focus, equally disarranging, is on predatory animals, specifically wolves. in this constellation, which draws on the tsitsikamma wolf sanctuary in south africa’s eastern cape, truth and reconciliation commission hearings on chemical and biological warfare programmes during apartheid, border war memoirs and a reflection of the nazi cult of the wolf, green reads for the production of nature, specifically wild animals, as an nuttall, review of green | 325 humanimalia 14.2 (2024) ally in war. she explores how the wolves were bread as hybrids with domestic dogs and weaponized as a source of predatory violence against black insurgents in apartheid’s border war. the wolves, she considers, are an anomaly in dominant discourses of environmentalism — neither an appropriation of nature in the postcolony nor disappearing species in the age of extinction. what they point to, rather, is an insistent historical reading — specifically, to fragments of a history of loss with which this book is centrally concerned. the history of weaponization in war they carry with them powerfully haunts the rehabilitation that the sanctuary wishes to provide. attendant on that history, too, is their agential animal capacities: green’s reading of the memoirs by ex-soldiers included in the chapter, draws out the ways in which the wolves remained a law unto themselves, despite human attempts to control and use them. these chapters are where this book is at its best. i found that the turn in the final chapter to private game reserves in south africa as sites of the nature industry and vectors of white masculinity was less of an original and compelling intervention. drawing on adorno’s valuable insight that such places of apparent preservation of nature indicate its loss rather than its recovery, green shows that while private reserves attempt to pit wild africa against modern consumerism, they are full of things: 4×4s, the over-designed lodge, the trophy hunt in which different animals carry different value. green’s analysis across the book at large is sharp, her prose cool and composed, her reach convincingly historical, and this is an important addition to work in the environmental humanities that is situated, analytically nuanced, and compellingly argued. kotsko, review of salzani agamben’s entwicklungsfähigkeit adam kotsko review of: carlo salzani, agamben and the animal. newcastle upon tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2022. xv + 133 pp. £62.99, hb. adam kotsko is assistant professor in the shimer great books school at north central college, naperville, il, usa email: akotsko@noctrl.edu book review if you ask fans of giorgio agamben what their favorite book of his is, i wager that the majority will say the open: man and animal. it feels almost like the archetypal agamben book: erudite and wide-ranging yet accessible, high-stakes yet punctuated with unforgettable examples and set pieces (the poor tick!). and aside from homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life, it is perhaps his most influential book, as it had a huge impact in animal studies and arguably raised the profile of the field among other humanities scholars. at the same time, though, it is a strange outlier in his body of work. though produced during the same period that saw the development of the homo sacer series, the book is not officially enshrined as part of that project. more than that, the book’s key theme, the relationship between human and animal, was seemingly abruptly left aside in his later writings. to the extent that agamben does return to the question of the animal, he most often simply summarizes his basic position from the open — it no longer seems to be a topic of active conceptual development for him. nor, indeed, has it proven to be as agenda-setting for the field of animal studies as it initially appeared to be, as most thinkers find his approach sadly lacking. what happened here? answering that question is the task that carlo salzani sets himself in his short yet ambitious and incisive book, agamben and the animal. he is in many ways the best possible person for the job. the author of the first introduction to agamben’s work in italian, introduzione a giorgio agamben (il melangolo, 2013), he is intimately acquainted with the subtlest nuances and the most forgotten corners of the philosopher’s œuvre. in addition to his definitive book-length treatment, he is the co-editor (with me) of agamben’s philosophical lineage (edinburgh, 2017), an edited volume on the debt agamben owes to his various sources, and author of a number of important essays on the italian philosopher’s work. he has also published several articles in the field of animal studies and displays a firm grasp of the field’s primary debates and theoretical options, which he briefly yet elegantly summarizes at crucial points in his argument. the book can therefore serve as an introduction to agamben’s larger project for animal studies scholars, and an introduction to animal studies for agamben acolytes. copyright © 2022 adam kotsko this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial 4.0 international license. humanimalia 13, no. 1 (2022): 307–313. doi: 10.52537/humanimalia.12398 http://doi.org/10.52537/humanimalia.12398 kotsko, review of salzani | 309 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) salzani’s goals are not merely introductory and expository, however. his book essentially rewrites the open, demonstrating its roots in agamben’s earlier thought and his most important influences (heidegger above all) and bringing it into more direct dialogue with animal studies scholarship. his approach is critical in the full kantian sense, pushing agamben’s account of the relationship between the human and the animal as far as it will go, and thereby revealing its often quite serious limitations while also pointing toward its moments of greatest promise. fittingly enough, his model here is agamben himself, whose “methodological principle […] is to identify in every work its ‘capacity for elaboration’, which feuerbach defined as entwicklungsfähigkeit” (ix). in agamben’s understanding of this intimidating german term, the most important step is to find “what has been left ‘unsaid’ in the original work,” which “marks the true ‘idea’ of a work” that “can be taken in unforeseen (and perhaps undesired) directions by others and thereby transformed into something no longer attributable to the original author” (ix). uncovering that precious kernel of potentiality initially requires uncovering what has been left unsaid in another sense: namely, the underlying presuppositions of the work, which are not argued for but instead simply taken for granted. in the case of the open, those presuppositions are deeply anthropocentric. again and again, salzani shows how agamben uncritically takes up the traditional western dualism between human (or, in agamben’s traditionalist terminology, man) and animal — leading “many other, more engaged, thinkers” to conclude that “he is ultimately of little use for the practical cause of animal liberation” (xii). yet despite fully sharing this critique — and surely documenting it more thoroughly than any previous writer on agamben — salzani believes that “though still firmly rooted in the anthropocentrism of the western tradition, agamben’s work points beyond the limits that he himself is unable or unwilling to cross,” providing tools for “the questioning of a certain orthodoxy in animal ethics and animal studies and to the opening up of different possibilities of thought” (xiii). broadly speaking, the first three chapters focus more on mining agamben’s corpus for the underlying presuppositions of his approach 310 | kotsko, review of salzani humanimalia 13.1 (2022) to animals in the open, while the fourth and fifth are more constructive in the sense of elaborating agamben’s concepts in new directions. the first chapter, “indistinction: beyond human and animal”, makes the case that the question of the animal — and his anthropocentric approach to it — is “pivotal to the comprehension of agamben’s entire philosophical project” (3). the second, “outside of being: potentiality beyond anthropocentrism”, relates the question of the animal to “agamben’s central and distinguishing preoccupation, which is present throughout all of his works”: namely, the concept of potentiality. here again, we learn that the relation of human and animal is crucial to agamben’s approach, as humanity is defined as uniquely a being of potentiality, in contrast with animals that are supposedly locked into the realm of sheer necessity. in both chapters, salzani returns to a moment of apparent contradiction in agamben’s work, centred on the concept of “neoteny”. this term from evolutionary theory refers to the retention of youthful traits into adulthood, which allows for greater adaptability. though agamben repeatedly claims that “neoteny” defines human uniqueness, his central example is actually a species of salamander — in other words, an animal. the next chapter attempts to undermine agamben’s anthropocentrism from another direction, by pointing toward the historicity of the concept of “man” that he takes for granted as an ahistorical essence. all three of these chapters rely on the presupposition of a basic “continuity and consistency throughout the different phases of agamben’s work” (8n11), a position salzani explicitly counterposes to my own insistence on development and change over the course of agamben’s decades-long career. here i am distinctly in the minority among agamben scholars, for whom the remarkable consistency of agamben’s project is often taken to be all but axiomatic. yet these kinds of declarations aside — including a tendency to refer to agamben’s “political” or “biopolitical” turn in scornful scarequotes — salzani’s approach is more nuanced in practice. the claim of continuity seems to serve functionally to give him access to the earlier works as points of reference, which would not be as plausible if agamben had radically revised his thought from the ground kotsko, review of salzani | 311 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) up at some point. where he actually finds agamben’s entwicklungsfähigkeit, however, is in the moments of inconsistency and rupture, which point toward roads not taken. agamben is at his most interesting, in other words, precisely where he is not consistent and continuous, and salzani’s book is at its most interesting in its second half, when it is most focused on those moments. chapter four, “beyond species and person: towards a new ethology”, shows how agamben’s critique of the concept of personhood “can be easily reoriented towards non-anthropocentric goals” (66). sheerly as a work of agamben scholarship, it is perhaps the most impressive of the chapters, even arguably a tour de force, using a short essay from profanations as a lens for rereading his entire body of work. the most exciting and fruitful chapter by far, however, is the last one in the main body of the book, “beyond the open: boredom and shame”. here salzani brings together an analysis of the open’s title concept with a critique of one of agamben’s central claims — namely that “dasein is simply an animal that has learned to become bored” (qtd. on 79) — showing how agamben’s appropriation of both remains as anthropocentric as the heideggerian sources he relies upon, while still pointing beyond the human–animal dualism. as salzani points out in connection with the line just quoted, “this thesis — and in particular its incipit: ‘dasein is simply an animal…’ — could not be less heideggerian” (79). if agamben could have held onto this claim that the human just is an animal, which he made seemingly without recognizing its radicality, he would have realized that the real key to the human–animal relationship is not boredom, but shame. here salzani is making an unexpected connection back to the book that preceded the open, namely remnants of auschwitz, where agamben uses primo levi’s account of the shame prompted in others (both the concentration camp inmates and their rescuers) by the germans’ horrific crimes to argue that shame is constitutive of human subjectivity. here again, agamben is limited by the influence of heidegger, which causes him to analyse shame as a purely individualistic and self-referential mood, even though levi’s example is 312 | kotsko, review of salzani humanimalia 13.1 (2022) centred on feeling shame on behalf of others (in this case the nazis themselves, who are incapable of shame). here salzani shows himself to be a both a scholar’s scholar and a creative reader, digging up an interview in which levi discussed the experience of translating kafka’s the trial into italian and declares, “the famous, much analyzed phrase that seals the book like a tombstone (‘…it was as if the shame of it should outlive him’) does not seem at all enigmatic to me” (qtd. on 96). as salzani points out, “joseph k.’s last words are however preceded by the equally famous exclamation ‘like a dog!’” (97), and this connection to the animal world prompts salzani to claim that a sense of shame at the crimes committed by man against animals “can overcome the presuppositional dualisms of the open and ferry the human over the abyss of ontological and essential differences towards an interspecific being-with-and-for-others, towards another kind of opening that humans themselves urgently need” (99). in other words, by embracing shame as foundational for our relationship with animals, we would be able to thread the needle of acknowledging our unique responsibility for preserving life on earth without setting ourselves apart as ontologically disconnected from animals. this stirring final line fully vindicates salzani’s claim to detect an important entwicklungsfähigkeit in agamben’s thought, pushing it beyond its limits to make a claim that, while contrary to agamben’s own deep presuppositions, he would not have made without his close reading of agamben. along the way to the analysis of shame, salzani also undercuts agamben’s claim that boredom is uniquely human with a meditation on the obvious boredom of animals in a zoo, which ends with this memorable and amusing line: “rather than an animal that has learned to become bored, the human is therefore the animal that has transformed the world (her own and that of other species) into a zoo, and an especially boring one at that” (88). here again, we see him pushing beyond agamben, through agamben — making this chapter a fitting conclusion to the project of the book. kotsko, review of salzani | 313 humanimalia 13.1 (2022) and yet, for some reason, it is not the conclusion. instead, salzani opted to append a critique of agamben’s disastrous interventions into the debate around pandemic prevention measures. these writings are richly deserving of critique, yet this “conclusion” is puzzling and distracting. its connection to the argument of the book is tenuous, and it arguably makes the book feel less complete than it really is. what one expects from a conclusion is of course an attempt to tie together the main threads of the book’s argument and open it toward future research. salzani’s failure to do that is a real missed opportunity, which risks obscuring how much “constructive” work he has already done in the main body of the text and especially in the final main chapter. salzani does make the case that agamben’s pandemic writings are grounded in the same anthropocentrism that mars his account of the human–animal relationship, and i can understand why he might feel obligated to address the elephant in the room in a book that is making the case for agamben’s usefulness to the progressive cause of animal liberation. but salzani had already arguably done enough in the occasional asides addressing agamben’s covid interventions throughout the main body of the book. in any case, it is clear that agamben and the animal is not salzani’s last word on the topic. in the meantime, he has given us a rigorous and informative work that will serve as an indispensable point of reference for agamben readers and animal studies scholars alike.